With the FIOM on October 16
The speed with which the bosses and the government are pushing through their authoritarian reforms, destroying the collective bargaining system for Italy's metalworkers (and dumping thousands of public-sector teachers on short-term contracts) is confirmation of capital's will to completely re-organize social relationships in such a way as to cause a sharp worsening of conditions for the proletariat and the lower classes in the future. Rights won over decades of social struggle are being cancelled. The solidarity that arises from nationally-agreed wage levels and levels of collective bargaining is being replaced with a system of differentiation and the complete casualization of people's lives, producing even more social atomization which in turn leads to total submission to the political powers (the State) and the needs of the bosses (Capitalism).
For this reason, we will be supporting and participating in the demonstrations called by the FIOM on 16th October as we consider it to be an important occasion for everyone to demonstrate their OPPOSITION, to boost levels of class consciousness, to oppose the neoliberal policies of the increasingly greedy bosses and a political oligarchy that is increasingly in difficulty.
The disasters provoked by the economic policies of the government are clear for all to see, as is the increasing poverty resulting from the European Union's economic policies, particularly in those countries with the greatest public debts (Greece, Portugal, Ireland), where millions of workers are fighting.
General strikes have become almost a monthly occurrence, but in Italy the CISL, UIL and other corporative trade unions are backing the decisions of the industrialists and the government, accomplices to this social regression. And for this they are being rewarded with the political stamp of approval and bureaucratic recognition through the creation and expansion of bilateral bodies.
The various positions being taken on this occasion, both from the CGIL leadership and from sectors of grasssroots unionism, share the objective of underlining the autonomy and independence that the FIOM has been building for several years now through factory struggles and democratic methods in the workplace.
The path of resistance that the FIOM has mapped out places class initiative and unity in prime position, in order to stress interests and points of view that are different to those of Capital and its servants - the interests of the workers. And it is from this perspective that we anarchist communists, and indeed all class-struggle anarchists, can find fertile ground for our ideas, affirm our unyielding struggle against Capital and governments, to develop that conflictual form of syndicalism and forms of workers' self-organization that can lead us out of today's misery.
Labour Commission
Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici5 October 2010
