Italy: social unrest, but where is it going?

Submitted by cathy n on 14 December, 2013 - 10:57

For five days since Sunday 8 December the whole of Italy has been in the grip of a mounting series of protests loosely united under the banner of "let's close down Italy".

From Liguria in the north to Puglia in the far south every day has witnessed a rash of marches and demonctrations, occupations and sit-ins. Many of the countries principle road networks have ground to a halt under blockages by heavy vehicles and farmers' tractors . This movement - i forconi (the pitch forkers), sparked off the actions in Sicily.

Clashes with the police, especially in the north and Rome are daily occurrences. As the protests have grown in mainland Italy and their social composition deepens, embracing the unemployed, the precariate, students, social centres, ultra-right football supporters, taxi drivers, market stallholders; the initial specific anti-fiscal profile of the Sicilian rural small business-led forces has now assumed a general, if vague, national political dynamic against the government, the Euro and European membership.

The most organised and vocal protagonists of the events have been, and remain, the representatives of the miriade of small business forces in transport, agriculture, commerce, the local artisanal/craft trades etc., in their turn giving way to further social differentiation within, in a kalaidoscope of petit-bourgeois production unique in Western Europe.

The crisis of the markets, the usury of the banks, the increase of taxes to finance the evergrowing public debt, has produced a marked impoverishment and insecurity of these and other strata of this class, along with the thousands employed by them. As the iron grip of austerity freezes consumption and buying power of the mass of the population. Not surprisingly then, that such social and ideological heterogenity of the protest has proven fertile ground for the emergence of the growing forces of the reactionary and fascist currents in the country.
Taking their lead from one of the dominant leaders of the Agricultural Committees of protest, Danilo Calvani, who called for the overthrow of the goverment and its transitional repacement with a "council of the Carabinieri", the vermin of Casa Pound, Forza Nuova etc are to seen everwhere seeking a prominent profile on every front of the action.
It was their presence and views like those of Calvani that led to the putative gesture of "fraternisation" in Turin of the riot squads with the protestors - the same riotsquads resposible for what happened in Genova!.
Nothing could underline the gravity of what is unfolding here more especially when the whole trade unionist establishment -including the leaders of the "radical FIOM- is so silent. This movement highlights both the depth of the economic, social and political crisis, the seething mass anger and frustration of millions, and the utter political passivity of the trade union and working class movement.
Cynically indifferent to the involvement and plight of the mass of ordinary protesters, the unions' only utterances have been to condemn the "violence" of some of the actions, not a word, of course about the thug squads; all the while prostrating themselves even more ignominiously to the preservation of social and national stability and a government pathetically trying to pretend that its all a sideshow.
Once open opponents of the Blairite Renzi, advocate of evermore free market and trade union reform, Susanna Camusso leader of Cgil, the largest working class force in the country, commented underneath the usual rhetorical blether about resisting any move by a future Prime Minister Renzi, that "perhaps the strike is no longer an effective way to conduct a struggle". Music to the ears of the little mayor of Florence, the leaders of industry and the bureaucrats in Brussels who only last week signalled their displeasure at the lack of more radical trade union reform.
Not that any of them have much to complain about from Camusso and her bureaucratic cronies in CISL and UIL! Collectively they have ruthlessly reduced to the lowest common denominator any protests and actions of their members against the onslaught of governments, weaking and dividing at every crucial point any potential for uniting and generalising the many focal points of conflict and crisis within the workplaces and the community.
The sense of demoralisation among the masses of trade unionists and workers is proof of it. While, paradoxical as it may seem, many workers instinctively find them find themselves in sympathy with the current protests, as they had done with the rhetoric of the Grillo moviment, few of them believe in any alternative — as at Grangemouth!
How else to explain the fact that Renzi got the bulk of his overwhelming majority as party leader from workers of CGIL in the so called red areas of Emilia and Tuscany? How else can one understand the rampant victories of the delegates of the "company" unions-CISL and UIL, at the steelworks at Taranto and the Indesit chemical plant sites where these unions have for years criminally collaborated in burying information on the murderous effects of the poison spewed out on the lives of workers and the surrounding neighbourhoods?
The current wave of actions is programmed - in theory - to culminate Wednesday 18 December, symbolically in Rome in a show of strength against the goverment. But such is the organisational and ideological confusion among the leading populist protaginists its outcome remains uncertain, as is the vagueness of the political platform they ostensibly underwrite. The "revolution" touted laughably by the various rag tag and bobtail of the "social centres " involved won't take place. But what is emerging more sharply than before is a more virulent Italian nationalism, a more strident anti-Europeanism with all that it implies for already inflamed race relations, plus a markedly deeper disrtust/rejection of the ideas and values inherent in a trade union and working class based alternative to the current crisis.
The ideological vacuum is relentlessly being filled thus, ironically for the left, in the ranks of collective protests and struggle led by the right . The forces of Italy's extreme Right and neofascism are growingly certain that whatever is to come will see them emerge stronger than ever before. At the moment it looks as if they may be right.
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