The bubble bursts

At last, the umpteenth proposals for pension reform have arrived! We were so looking forward to it. Already several years ago, long before Berlusconi's victory at the polls, in one of our "Quaderni di Alternativa Libertaria" series of pamphlets dedicated to pension reform (La bolla e la gobba - Previdenza, TFR e menzogne varie) [The bubble and the hump - social insurance, severance pay and miscellaneous other lies - tr.], we laid out the possibility of further pension reform which even then was on the horizon and which has not failed to arrive.

But I am not interested now in revealing for the hundredth time the lies and the hypocrisy with which the "experts" try to justify yet another inevitable "reform". It is more interesting to look and see how the various actors in this play have behaved - and so far they have all been playing their hearts out! Berlusconi, absolutely in line with the media-obsessed, totalitarian style of his regime, announced the reforms contemporaneously on all the national TV channels, in yet another demonstration of what he means by the word "dialogue" - you lot shut up and listen while I'm talking!

After a somewhat timid, embarrassed clearing of the throat, the Left Democrats stated, through the voice of their secretary and in front of their favourite audience these days (Confindustria - the industrial employers' federation), that the reforms were, how shall we put it, not too bad after all and of course absolutely essential, though it would have been better to introduce them a little more gradually, as if to say... if we'd been in power, we'd at least have brought the vaseline. Not content with that, our heroes then proceeded to plaster the entire country with posters addressed to the "workers", upon which was emblazoned a slogan which sums it all up, really: "with the workers of today, for the workers of tomorrow". The workers of tomorrow being (if these reforms get through) the self same ones as today... In other words, a nice way of saying "You'll all be dead before you get anywhere near your pensions, anyway".

Rifondazione Comunista said nothing (perhaps they were too busy playing political games with the above-mentioned gentlemen). The union bureaucracies of the CGIL-CISL-UIL trio offered up their little 4-hour strikette (as if 5 years of your life were worth 4 hours of strike!), while the CUB and USI instead chose the path of isolationism - best not to mix with certain people... (mind you, as far as the bureaucracies are concerned, it's hard to blame them, but what about the workers who came out on the 24th October? Was it more than they could take to stand with them? Wouldn't it have been better to do what had been done before and have separate demonstrations with separate platforms, but all on the same day?).

And what about the workers? Only a united mass mobilization has a chance of stopping yet another attack on our living conditions. To think that things would have gone better with a centre-left government is just wishful thinking. To think that the union bureaucracies are not just looking after their own interests against the interests of the workers, we are just illuding ourselves.

We are stubborn. We will never tire of repeating what have always been our watchwords: self-management, self-organization, direct action. The emancipation of the workers will be accomplished by the workers themselves, or not at all!

S. Parodi

from Alternativa Libertaria Nov.03
News-sheet of the Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici