Workers' Liberty

By Hugh Edwards

More than a thousand foreign migrant workers were forced to flee for their lives before a reactionary mob of would-be pogromists, armed with guns and clubs in the Calabrian town of Rosarno on 7-8 January. A motley collection of local citizenry had taken it upon themselves to "ethnically cleanse" this town of 15,000 people, of its mainly black super-exploited and socially degraded workforce, employed in crop and fruit growing in the surrounding fields and plantations. What sparked these horrific events?

In the background of course is the unrelenting and ever-mounting campaign of racist propaganda, discrimination and legislation prosecuted by Silvio Berlusconi's government.

Other factors in these events come closer to home. Without a trace of irony the mob called for the restoration of "the rule of law" to this mafia-infested town universally recognised as the heart of Italy's most powerful criminal organisation, the N'drangeta. And eighteen months previous the perennially corrupt local government had to be abolished and replaced by an appointed one. Prefect!

But it is hardly news that a good number of the protesters were directly or indirectly linked to the N'drangeta, as it is a significant part of local private business and public administration. What else is going on?

Earlier in the day, on 7 January, a group of workers returning to the "camps" where they were compelled to exist — hovels of indescribable degradation without light, heat, water or elementary sanitation — when they were fired upon by occupants of a passing vehicle, seriously injuring two of them.

On reaching the camps the news inflamed the workers and a 100 or so, blind with anger at this final humiliation in a life centred round 18 hours a day of back-breaking work at two euros an hour, marched into tow demanding action from those in authority.

Ignored, they broke windows, overturned cars, rubbish carts, bollards and aggressively confronted any who challenged them, including the local cops. But no one was seriously hurt!

But the rebellion was enough to give the whole repressive and racist establishment of the Berlusconi government and its media, and every "law and order" mongerer the chance dangerously ratchet up the already fevered racist climate that now threatens to engulf the Italy.

Appropriately it was the execrable minister of the Interior, Roberto Maroni, of the Northern League Party to set both tone and example of how to deal with those who "forget their place".

In a remark worthy of Goebbels he stated that the events, and the inhuman conditions in the camps, demonstrated how the government and the Italians were "too tolerant"!

He ordered that all the workers from the two camps should be forcibly and immediately removed by special police and army units to other southern towns where those without resident permits would be consigned to the special detention centre — concentration camps! — and then kicked out of the country. Simultaneously the vigilante and local action "jacquerie", offering up hossannas to Umberto Bossi and Maroni of the League, were hunting down and beating up any unfortunate migrant worker still to be found in the streets of Rosarno. Within two days all the workers, many owed hundreds of euros in back pay, had either been bussed elsewhere or had walked to the station 20 kilometres away, to return north from where many of them had fled when the racist legislation was passed — laws which “identify immigrants as the chief source of Italy’s economic and social problems.”

In a certain sense Maroni , for once, was telling the truth. He had been the prime mover of that law which made criminals of anyone found without a residence permit, demagogically proclaiming on television that "within a few months Italy would be free of every criminal irregular".Yet in the south of Italy and especially in the agricultural sector of the economy there are many migrant workers — 50,000 in Calabria and many are "irregular".

The government, opposition parties, the employers federations, the trade union confederations, public administrations, magistrates, police and the Catholic church are all aware of it. They are equally aware of the nightmarishly horrible and illegal conditions of semi-slavery of the work and living conditions. Yet hardly ever a cheep out of any of them about these violations of "law and order ".Why? Without these workers this whole sector of the southern economy would find it impossible to compete in the global market of dog eat dog capitalism.

Everyone — the Calabrian mafia, the supermarkets, politicians of all stripes and networks of private and public enterprises in every city and town — has wanted to see the preservation of the migrant worker system. It has been claimed that economic failure and a deepening crisis was behind the mafia's triggering of the events in Rosarno. They wanted to empty the fields!

Whatever the details, the larger picture portrays a scene of economic devastation. Southern Italy is a desert — in the last 15 years two million young people have left; unemployment amongst youth stands at around 25-30%. Calabria is the most impoverished of all regions, where the forces dedicated to the preservation of an economy based on the cheapest manual labour have suffocated every initiative or vision of socio/economic/cultural development not based on the rule of profit, greed and the survival of the most powerful.

The lesson of Rosarno is a stark one. Racism in Italy and the violence that it spawns is, like a spreading cancer, shaping the character of everyday life and work. The growing popularity of the Northern League testifies to this. The way in which the League latter is transforming itself into a resurgent reactionary and racist national force is a cause for extreme alarm.

No one should have any doubts that the preconditions for a reborn fascism are being nourished here in Italy.

The announcement of a general one-day strike by all foreign workers in Italy in the middle of March is a positive sign that resistance is there, and after Rosarno, growing. But the abject surrender of the Italian trade union movement along with the opportunist impotence of the once "radical " left before the effects of the economic crisis is equally alarming. The extent of that opportunism was made visible by the sight of metal-workers from one of Fiat's plants near Napoli carrying the cross in honour of a local patron saint, invoked to intercede with the Fiat bosses to save the plant from closure. It may be that is from Italy's "wretched of the earth" that the first signs of a deep and solid resistance can emerge.