20.11.2014
Strikes, smoke bombs and tear gas
Toby Abse reports on the latest union action and the autonomists’ social strike
The strikes and demonstrations all over Italy on Friday November 14 clearly indicated that the rather predictable capitulation of most of the left wing of the centre-left Partito Democratico (PD) to a grudging acceptance of prime minister Matteo Renzi’s “Jobs Act”1 has had very little effect on the strength and militancy of the grassroots movement against austerity.
The next few weeks will see further action by the trade unions, at least by those affiliated to the biggest and most leftwing of the major confederations, the CGIL. November 21 will see a strike by all members of the CGIL’s most radical affiliate, the engineering workers’ union, FIOM, in the central and southern regions, accompanied by a mass demonstration in Naples. This is the logical corollary of FIOM’s November 14 strike in the northern regions, when there was a mass demonstration in Milan.
The CGIL as a whole has called an eight-hour general strike for December 8 to protest against both the Jobs Act and the draft budget. After the failure of Renzi’s government to make any sudden and unexpected concessions on pay in a meeting with public-sector union leaders on November 17, the CGIL also intends to call a nationwide one-day public-sector strike and there is some possibility that the UIL, the third largest trade union confederation, but traditionally the strongest amongst public employees, will also participate, even if the Catholic confederation, the CISL, has so far refused to engage in joint strike action with the CGIL. The CISL had shown some willingness in recent weeks to participate in joint campaigns and mass demonstrations in defence of public-sector workers, which Susanna Camusso, the CGIL general secretary, had hoped might lead to the involvement of both the CISL and UIL in united action, at least in the public sector.
The events of November 14 were the result of a deliberate coincidence between the FIOM strike and action by a coalition of breakaway unions of a semi-syndicalist type - most notably Cobas, but also others that have attracted students, unemployed and casualised workers. To describe this combined effort as a joint action would be a bit inaccurate - FIOM is always very careful to keep some distance from the wilder elements close to autonomism, which on occasions can be drawn into counterproductive and often aimless violence on the streets; whilst some of the more ideological autonomists are hostile to all mainstream unions, even FIOM.2 Nonetheless, since the Cobas-led coalition had first decided on their ‘social strike’ - which had broader targets than just the budget and the Jobs Act, including privatisations, casualisation, health and education issues - back in September, whilst FIOM named the day for its one-day strike in the northern regions much more recently, it is quite clear that in practice FIOM was giving indirect support to the Cobas-led upsurge.
The ‘social strike’ was by no means the first essentially political ‘general strike’ called by Cobas and other ‘base unions’,3 but coordination with the CGIL or its affiliates has been very rare. Such ‘general strikes’ around political or social, rather than specific economic, demands have been essentially symbolic actions, since they have had very little impact on production. Most of their practical impact has arisen from associated street processions involving students, unemployed and others outside the workforce and quite often giving rise to widely reported clashes with the police.
Rioting
Therefore, the coincidence of the 80,000-strong Milanese march led by FIOM4 - ending in a rally at which not only FIOM leader Maurizio Landini, but also Susanna Camusso, spoke - with the activities by Cobas and its allies was rather unusual. Whilst FIOM’s strike in the northern factories does not seem to have given rise to any incident on the picket lines and all commentators have remarked on the entirely peaceful nature of the huge Milanese trade union march, many of the demonstrations called by Cobas and its allies ended in scuffles with the police. Arguably the willingness of mainstream trade union leaders like Landini and Camusso to be associated - at least in media coverage, even if not in reality on the ground - with the unpredictable behaviour of Cobas and the even more extreme - autonomist and anarchist - supporters of the ‘social strike’, is a clear indication of their extreme anger against the anti-working class policies of the Renzi government.
Rioting in Milan, Turin, Pisa, Padua, Naples, Rome and elsewhere was widely reported and will doubtless be blamed on the trade union leaders - if not by Renzi, then certainly by his more enthusiastic fans on the PD’s neoliberal wing, who tried to put a negative spin even on the entirely peaceful million-strong demonstration in Rome on October 25. Whilst Camusso and Landini, until very recently political adversaries, have put behind them their quite bitter disputes at the July 2014 congress of the CGIL, the more moderate PD ultra-loyalist elements on the CGIL’s right wing are not happy with Camusso’s new course, asking, “What do we do after the 5th?”5 Fabrizio Solari has expressed his doubts in the CGIL’s secretariat, with some backing from Franco Martini.
As I indicated in my article about the million-strong demonstration,6 Carla Cantone, the leader of the CGIL’s strong pensioners’ section, is also unhappy with the new radical oppositional stance, despite her anger at Renzi. Landini’s radical rhetoric at the Milan rally - “We will not stop, we will go forward until they change their positions. We have the force and intelligence to do it. We are not joking” - had Camusso’s backing, but is not welcomed by all sections of the CGIL bureaucracy, since it means that the confederation is pursuing a path that will bring it into confrontation with both the PD, of which most of its officials are members, and the other, more moderate trade union confederations - the CISL and UIL.
The ‘social strike’ had a massive impact - the Corriere della Sera claimed there were protests in 25 cities, whilst La Repubblica estimated there were demonstrations in 60 cities. Regardless of the precise figures - La Repubblica claimed 100,000 for Italy as a whole, with 15,000 in Rome, 10,000 in Naples and 5000 in Turin - there is no dispute that tens of thousands of workers, school students, university students and unemployed took to the streets. Outside Milan, they did so largely in response to a call by Cobas and its radical allies, even if FIOM had some input into the protests in Turin and Genoa.
The most serious violence occurred in Padua, the traditional stronghold of the autonomists, where Toni Negri used to teach at the university in the 1960s and 1970s. The scuffles broke out when about 500 young people - many with their faces covered by helmets or balaclavas (the traditional uniform of the hard-core autonomists) - sought to break through a police cordon to reach the nearby PD offices. Presumably, given their attire, the intention was to vandalise it rather than just chanting a few anti-Renzi slogans. This particular scuffle obtained national prominence, since Marco Cali, the head of the Padua flying squad, was amongst the five policemen injured in the scuffles. The PD and CGIL joined the rightwing president of the Venetian region in condemning the demonstrators, whilst the autonomists of the Centro Sociale Pedro equally predictably blamed “the aggression of the flying squad against the right to strike”.7
However, it would be wrong to see events in the rest of Italy as such a dispiriting re-enactment of 1977 - autonomists against the trade unions, paramilitary tendencies and so forth - even in cases where clashes with the police occurred. Two PD offices were targeted in Genoa, but the demonstrators confined themselves to throwing eggs - whilst some students were responsible for similar action at the new city-centre PD office, the incident at the PD’s Sampierdarena headquarters seems to have been the work of FIOM members who felt the PD had turned its back on the class it once represented. Some industrial sabotage occurred at the control centre of the AMT, Genoa’s transport company, where an occupation of the management office had been going on for a week as a result of redundancy threats. A group broke away from the main march, entered the control centre, tampered with the wires and brought the city’s entire tram system to a halt.
These Genoese incidents need to be seen in the context both of popular anger over recent floods,8 for which the mayor and other local officials were blamed, and a much more serious industrial dispute over the privatisation of the city’s transport system that occurred a couple of years ago.
Despite the peaceful character of the main march in Milan, there were various clashes involving the more radical supporters of the ‘social strike’. Some of these occurred near the stock exchange - an obvious symbolic target for anti-capitalists - where smoke bombs were thrown, but the main incidents occurred as a result of students attempting to disrupt a meeting taking place at the Archbishop’s Palace - the students threw smoke bombs and were met with tear gas from the police.
In some other places the incidents were essentially symbolic and carnivalesque - stunts rather than attempts to provoke serious clashes with the police. In Rome the ministry of finance and the German embassy9 were targeted mainly with eggs and red paint, although some smoke bombs were thrown. Some activists got into the Policlinico Umberto I - one of Rome’s main hospitals - to put up banners proclaiming “Salute bene comune” (‘Health is a public good’) and banners were also raised on the scaffolding surrounding the Colosseum against the privatisation of public services and in favour of some sacked bus drivers l
Notes
1. A small minority has continued to oppose Renzi’s attack on article 18 of the workers’ statute of 1970, which provided some degree of protection against arbitrary dismissal for those in workplaces employing 15 or more workers. The most prominent of the intransigent opponents, Pippo Civati and Stefano Fassina, participated in the FIOM march in Milan on November 14. However, many other leading members of the PD’s left have settled for some very minor modifications: promises have been made that it would still be possible to obtain reinstatement in some circumstances for those unjustly dismissed on disciplinary grounds. Cesare Damiano, a former FIOM official and currently a leading PD parliamentarian, who initially opposed Renzi’s counter-reform, now claims: “We have made a good agreement and it ought to be defended.” Renzi’s coalition partners in the Nuovo Centro Destra (New Centre-Right) have objected to the limited concessions made to quell the PD dissenters, so it is not clear if this agreement will be implemented. It ought to be stressed that the soft-left party, Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà (SEL), is continuing to oppose Renzi’s bill. Its leader, Nichi Vendola, and Giorgio Airaudo, an SEL parliamentarian who had previously played a leading role in FIOM, both participated in FIOM’s march in Milan.
2. Unfortunately the November 14 demonstrations were spoilt by some manifestations of this kind of hostility. In Bergamo a group of ‘antagonists’, as autonomists and anarchists often describe themselves in Italy, attempted to attack a CGIL office (see La Repubblica November 15 2014).
3. Cobas is the oldest of these, first appearing in the 1980s, and has traditionally had its greatest support amongst transport workers and school teachers, so that, even if it has never had majority support amongst either of these groups, any strike it might call in these sectors would have a noticeable effect and might on occasions win some concrete results for the workers concerned. There is a whole galaxy of similar unions, with all the splits, fusions and name changes characteristic of small, radical left groupings. At one stage supporters of the Fourth International seemed to have some influence within Sincobas, a rival to Cobas, while Cobas’s most well known spokesman, Piero Bernocchi, is from the autonomist tradition, even if this veteran activist is less extreme and sectarian than many of that persuasion.
4. This estimate by FIOM was reported in the centre-right daily Corriere della Sera on November 15; the centre-left La Repubblica on November 15 claimed a total of 50,000 had protested in Milan, mostly as part of the FIOM demonstration - although this figure also included the paper’s estimate for the smaller, more radical marches in the city.
5. Referring to the general strike scheduled for December 5 2014.
6. ‘Marching in defence of article 18’ Weekly Worker October 30 2014.
7. La Repubblica November 15 2014.
8. Yet more floods have occurred in the city since the ‘social strike’. Insufficiently regulated building in this low-lying port city over the last few decades means that there is inadequate drainage from local rivers. Legal disputes between rival companies making bids for remedial public works have meant that the issue remains unresolved, as infrastructure improvements have been blocked.
9. The long-running dispute between the Terni steelworkers and the German firm, Krupp-Thyssen, provides a partial explanation, although Angela Merkel’s role as the champion of austerity within the euro zone may also have contributed to anti-German feeling.