Workers, students, pensioners – all in the firing line
On 16 November, the new Italian Senator for Life and Prime Minister, Mario Monti, announced his cabinet of ‘technocrats’ to run Italy. This unelected government is made up of heads of banks, companies and the armed forces and is meant to push through harsh austerity measures. In spite of their impeccable credentials for carrying out the dictates of the bankers and capitalists of Europe and heavy buying of Italian bonds by the European Central Bank, the yield did not come down below the critical 7% level. The premium Rome pays over Berlin to borrow reached a near record 528 basis points. Nothing has been solved!
Below we carry an edited version of an Editorial from the latest issue of ‘Resistenze’, the journal of ControCorrente (CWI in Italy), which deals with some of the major questions posed by this semi-dictatorial government. It indicates that as time passes, big battles can erupt over the vicious cuts to jobs, pensions and services that are being imposed.
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Coordinate the resistance in Europe! We want to be the ones who decide, not the European Central Bank and its Commissioners!
Editorial from ‘Resistenze’ (No. 42, November 2011)
Today we have witnessed – and it is not a paradox – the great success of the Euro. And what is the most concrete demonstration of the great success of the Euro? Greece’ which ’has been obliged to give weight to the culture of stability and has itself been transformed’ and therefore provides ’a text-book case’. This is how it was put by Mario Monti on 26 September – by the President of the Council of Ministers which, at the time of writing, is expected to be announced at any moment. In these few words is summed up the ’mission’ of the so-called ’technical government’.
Tens of thousands of redundancies, cuts in pensions and public services in the euphemistic language of the technocracy become ’the culture of stability’. If the so-called technical government is not going to be changed – which does not seem so likely at the moment – it is clear that a veritable hurricane has been unleashed. The responsibility of the left is first of all to explain to people the seriousness of the danger and put forward a defensive strategy against it.
If the aim of Monti and his band of technocrats is ’to do as they do in Greece’ then we also must prepare a mobilisation of the kind that they do in Greece, bearing in mind its limits and the contradictions in the movement there. One of the things to bear in mind is that in Greece more than ten general strikes – the last one of 48 hours – have not managed to stop the offensive of the ECB.
To mobilise against the new semi-dictatorial technocracy under Mario Monti, it is first necessary to say clearly who Mario Monti is and above all what he represents. Monti, apart from being a prominent spokesperson for the biggest business committees of the international bourgeoisie like the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, he is the international adviser of Goldman Sachs, one of the major business banks in the world. In 2010 Goldman was charged by the SEC – the controlling body of the US stock exchange – with deceiving clients by selling a junk derivative, called Abacus 2007 AC1, and making $15 billion profit on their losses. But they did the same with 24 other similar derivatives and in the past helped the Greek government falsify the state accounts with the aim of covering up the real level of debt.
So, to entrust Monti the task of reviving the health of Italy is like sending a collaborator of Moggi [Juventus football team manager, jailed for fraud during the ‘Calciopoli scandal’] to restore the moral propriety of football! If we add to this that Monti was appointed in 1994 by Berlusconi to become European Commissioner and confirmed in ’99 by D’Alema (ex-Prime Minister and leader of the Democratic Party) and that amongst the various consultants of Goldman Sachs figured Prodi (ex-leader of the Centre-Left), Draghi (ex-Chief of Banca d’Italia and now Chief of the ECB) and Gianni Letta (Berlusconi’s right-hand man), we realise how the nomination of Monti corresponds to the famous saying of the writer Gattopardo: ’Everything must change because everything remains the same’.
An opinion poll carried out by the Piepoli Institute says that confidence in Mario Monti as president of the Council of Ministers is at 50%. That means there are about 30 million Italians, among them many workers and young people without any prospects, who can be reached with ideas of how to fight back. Others will be added to them after the next few weeks, when it is revealed what the cure of the eventual new government consists of.
Mario Monti and Silvio Berlusconi
Social climate heating up
For some months now the social climate in Italy has been heating up. There have been outbreaks of social protest against the austerity measures and on a few occasions, such as October 15th, these outbreaks have turned into a major conflagration. (See previous article on Socialistworld.net)
So there does exist a favourable basis for organising resistance, but not yet adequate. To fight off an invasion organisation, strategy and tactics are necessary. On the political plane, this means a political force, methods of struggle and an alternative programme to that of the ECB for getting out of the crisis.
The first consideration, before looking at any economic recipe, because of the ’who’ and the ’how’ in relation to the recipe chosen and applied, that is the question of democracy. When politicians give way to technocrats it means that even a fictitious democracy like that which we have experienced in recent years is too much for the capitalist system.
The announcement of a referendum on the part of the Greek premier, Papandreou, was enough to provoke a retaliation on the part of capitalism’s financial markets which wanted to squash the idea that it could be the Greek people who decided their own fate. The idea of a referendum was promptly withdrawn and Papandreou torpedoed.
Alongside fictitious democracy, fictitious national sovereignty goes into crisis. Italy’s president, Napolitano, a few months ago trumpeted about the fatherland and the 150 years of Italian unity. Today he consigns the fate of the country into the hands of Sarkozy and Merkel. This is even when the latter declared menacingly that, "If the Euro collapses, Europe collapses and we cannot count on another 50 years of peace".
Marxists are internationalists, but they also know that in certain moments in history the defence of the living conditions of workers and other layers of the population are linked to the defence of the “nation” – which in its overwhelming majority consists of the working people and the poor – defending its hard-gained rights against predatory international and national capitalism.
This is the reason why in Ireland, in France and elsewhere, the CWI has supported the slogan of ’No to the Treaty of Lisbon’. For this reason the first point on the agenda today is for European workers to fight to retake control over the big economic choices of their own countries. The way to do this is through fighting for a programme of nationalisation under democratic workers’ control of all major finance and industrial companies so that the use of resources and production of goods can be planned in a thoroughly democratic way.
Governments of elected politicians are being replaced with presumed technical governments in order to send in the IMF and ECB commissioners to dictate what must be done. They demand the dismantling of public services, the INPS (state pensions) and state industry (see the attempts to sell off the Fincantieri (shipbuilding industry)). It will mean burying millions of Italians under the paving stones – employees but also small enterprises, shops and the lower layers of the so-called middle class. It will take away the futures of millions of young people and this time not only those from a working class background.
This is the reason why in Ireland, in France and elsewhere, the CWI has supported the slogan of ’No to the Treaty of Lisbon’. For this reason the first point on the agenda today is for European workers to fight to retake control over the big economic choices of their own countries. The way to do this is through fighting for a programme of nationalisation under democratic workers’ control of all major finance and industrial companies so that the use of resources and production of goods can be planned in a thoroughly democratic way.
If there was a European confederation of trade unions worthy of such a name, this would be the first point in a platform for calling a general strike in every country of Europe against those who want to make us pay for the effects of their misdeeds.
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