18.12.2014
Resisting Renzi’s attacks
Workers booed members of the centre-left PD off the platform during the rallies that followed last week’s 24-hour strike. Toby Abse reports
The December 12 general strike - called by the largest trade union confederation, the leftwing CGIL, and the third largest and traditionally very moderate UIL trade union confederation1 - had a huge impact. This reflected the degree of anger amongst the trade union rank and file at the neoliberal attacks on the working class mounted by the Partito Democratico prime minister Matteo Renzi.
Whilst the protest was also directed at the latest austerity budget and the freeze on public-sector pay, the main focus was on the Jobs Act, which aims to remove the protection from arbitrary dismissal of workers on permanent contracts in workplaces employing at least 15 people. This protection was enshrined in article 18 of the workers’ statute of 1970 - the last remaining gain of the upsurge that reached its height in the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969.
Despite the refusal of the second largest trade union confederation, the Catholic CISL, to participate alongside the other main confederations, somewhere between 60%2 and 70%3 of the Italian workforce joined the strike. The decision by CGIL leader Susanna Camusso to postpone it by a week from its original December 5 date in order to get the UIL on board - which some on the left saw as a climbdown reducing the pressure on the PD parliamentarians at the time of crucial votes on the Jobs Act - seems to have been justified by the level of involvement which may not have been obtained if the CGIL had gone it alone. The CGIL’s tactics meant that it was the less combative CISL, not the more militant CGIL, which was left isolated, allowing Camusso to sarcastically condemn the CISL’s craven conduct from the platform at the 70,000-strong Turin rally. She said of its absence: “We are sorry, but we didn’t think the country needs resignation.” UIL leader Carmelo Barbagallo, not a man known for his militancy, was pushed leftwards by mounting pressure from below, proclaiming from the platform of the 40,000 Rome rally: “Today we are halting Italy to make her start again in the right direction. We will create a new resistance”4 - a rousing statement singled out for attack by rightwing columnist Dario Di Vico in the Corriere della Sera.5
The strike went far beyond mass absences from workplaces. Despite the cold weather many workers had no desire to stay at home or just use the Friday strike to have a long weekend.6 One and a half million people were involved in the demonstrations - these crowds were largely made up of trade unionists, but also drew in students, casualised workers and the unemployed. Italy’s transport system was completely disrupted - 50% of trains were cancelled and hundreds of flights from Italian airports never left the ground. There was a comparable impact on bus services and the metro in Italy’s major cities like Rome and Milan.
The marches were peaceful - unlike some of the smaller, parallel demonstrations organised by students, squatters and the autonomist-led centri sociali. But the slogans adopted were often very confrontational. The demonstrations in both Bologna and Milan were dominated by hundreds of red balloons with the face of prime minister Renzi and the caption, “The monster of Florence”7 - a reference to one of Italy’s particularly vicious serial killers, who operated in Florence and its periphery between 1974 and 1985. Perhaps unsurprisingly the PD was furious - it demanded “respect for the victims”. Chants of “Renzi, Renzi, vaffanculo!” (Renzi, Renzi, fuck off!) were heard in many cities and balloons of the premier featuring a huge Pinocchio nose - in effect branding the premier a compulsive liar - were frequent on the Rome march.
Onslaught on Renzi
Camusso very deliberately wore a flame-red coat on the platform of the Turin rally - consciously responding to a recent stunt by Renzi, who had worn a red jumper at a meeting of the PD’s youth movement in marked contrast to his trademark white shirt (worn without a jacket - attire designed to give the impression of youth and frantic activity). Camusso not only wanted to indicate that the CGIL is a red trade union, proud of its socialist and communist traditions, something which the press picked up on,8 but issued yet another verbal challenge to Renzi: “In a normal country the workers are listened to, the government must choose between conflict and dialogue. We will not stop.” Maurizio Landini, the leader of the FIOM union, which has already held a number of regional strikes against the Jobs Act,9 echoed these sentiments at the Genoa rally, saying: “We are not stopping - the struggle continues.”
But Camusso’s verbal onslaught on Renzi went much further than any other mainstream speaker. She claimed: “The Jobs Act contains rules from the 1920s.” The choice of this decade rather than the 1950s - the peak of cold war anti-communist discrimination against the CGIL - was a deliberate reference to fascist attacks on free trade unions, implicitly associating Renzi and his former ‘official communist’-dominated PD with classical fascism rather than just hard-line Christian Democracy.
Despite her undoubted hostility to Renzi, Camusso had in fact played a role in defusing the possibility of frontal confrontation between the organised working class and the state over the legality of strikes in the transport sector, which probably had the most impact on the day. Maurizio Lupi, the transport minister, a member of the Nuovo Centro Destra (NCD, New Centre Right) rather than the PD, had tried to ban the transport workers from striking at all.10 Camusso, realising the explosive effect of such a ban after this year’s ‘hot autumn’ of strikes and demonstrations wrote a letter to president Giorgio Napolitano expressing her grave concerns. This letter was delivered to Napolitano less than 24 hours before the strike. The 89-year-old Napolitano, despite his support for Renzi’s measures, had sufficient experience of Italian industrial relations over many decades to realise the foolishness of Renzi’s over-zealous NCD subordinate and, anxious to avoid any prospect of mass arrests of striking railway workers, rapidly contacted Renzi, who was on an official visit to Turkey, to get the ban rescinded.
There were in fact some violent incidents on the day, but, despite the claims of the Corriere della Serra columnist referred to earlier, they were not the result of activity by the UIL, the CGIL or even the CGIL’s most militant affiliate, FIOM. They came in the form of clashes between the police and a squatters’ movement engaged in a housing occupation in Rome, which left 10 injured and led to two arrests. In addition Milan saw a punch-up between the police and a breakaway march of students and supporters of the centri sociali. Turin also witnessed scuffles between the police and an autonomist march, in which four were injured and nine arrested. In Bologna students protesting against a visit to the university by public administration minister Marianna Madia were subjected to a violent charge by truncheon-wielding policemen.
Needless to say, Corriere columnist Dario Di Vico sought to blame 11 police injuries in Milan and two in Turin on FIOM’s “design to construct a political trade union force of real opposition”. But he made no reference to such police brutality in Bologna, despite the prominent appearance of video evidence on La Repubblica’s website.
Crisis
Somewhat more interesting than these rather routine clashes between the police, on the one hand, and the autonomists and their allies, on the other, was the hostile reception that leading PD veteran Massimo D’Alema met when he mingled with marching strikers in Bari. The former prime minister, although far from well-disposed to Renzi - who saw D’Alema as the prime candidate for ‘scrapping’ at the time of his generational attack on the PD old guard (especially the ex-communist apparatchiks amongst them) - met with a hostile response. “Buffoon”, “Sellout”, “You are pigs” and “Give us your pension”11 were amongst the insults hurled at him. This was followed by some demonstrators throwing earth from a flowerbed at the increasingly fearful politician, who did not know what was going to happen next.
D’Alema subsequently stated:
Italy is living through a dramatic social and economic crisis. It has been regressing for seven years in terms of GDP - we have gone backwards a bit. This is why the sentiment of rage towards the parties and towards politics in general is comprehensible. On the other hand, we have seen at the recent regional elections that a fall in participation is a signal of profound detachment from politics.
Reasonable as this general analysis was, D’Alema then claimed that the attack on him had come from the UGI - the small, rightwing trade union confederation with neo-fascist roots that had given its backing to the CGIL-UIL general strike. In fact the leader of the hard-line Trotskyist Alternativa Comunista12, Michele Rizzi, said: “It was us who heckled D’Alema, the ally of bankers and multinationals.” The CGIL secretary in Bari, Pino Gesmundo, disassociated the local supporters of the confederation from the clash, calling it “an ugly episode”.
Other anti-Renzi figures within the PD participated in the marches in other localities without meeting such hostility. Stefano Fassina, Gianni Cuperlo and Alfredo D’Attore joined the Rome march, whilst Pippo Civati showed support for the CGIL in Milan and Tea Albini did the same in Florence. Nonetheless, some prominent PD figures who had backed the million-strong march in October have made their peace with Renzi and voted for the Jobs Act in parliament.
Tensions
Despite continuing tensions within the PD - at least as much about Renzi’s efforts to change electoral law and abolish the Senate as about the Jobs Act - the only dissident who seems likely to split from the PD is Civati, who played a leading role at a conference the next day, involving representative of Nichi Vendola’s Sinistra Ecologia e Libertá (SEL - Left Ecology and Freedom), the Lista Tsipras (the radical left cartel that fought the May 2014 European elections) and the more radical elements within the CGIL.
It is too early to say what will come of this - a slightly expanded SEL incorporating Civati and a few of his close allies or something rather wider that is more able to relate to the widespread working class discontent with the PD clearly visible over the last two or three months. Given the internal problems of Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle - there has been a steady stream of expulsions of parliamentarians who have quarrelled with Grillo - the apparent decline of Forza Italia and Silvio Berlusconi himself, it is possible that popular discontent with Renzi may take a leftwing direction in electoral politics.
But we need to be aware of the recent somewhat unexpected revival of the Lega Nord under Matteo Salvini - now closer to Marine Le Pen and Vladimir Putin13 than to the fading Berlusconi. Salvini’s attacks on migrants, the euro and the European Union itself have on occasions been linked to demagogic support for working class demands on issues like pensions14.
Notes
1. The UIL was associated during the cold war years with the now defunct Social Democratic (PSDI) and Republican (PRI) parties. It has always been stronger in the public sector, particularly the civil service, than in private industry. It is reasonable to assume that it was discontent amongst this group - subjected to pay freezes and redundancies in recent years, as part of the austerity drive that started under Mario Monti - that led its leadership to break with its class-collaborationist traditions on this occasion.
2. According to the centre-left daily, La Repubblica.
3. According to the centre-right daily, Corriere della Sera. Whilst the higher figure given by the more rightwing daily may conceivably have been part of an attack on the disruption caused by trade union militancy, on the face of it I would be inclined to think it more accurate, as it would have no great sympathy for the action.
4. This was an obvious reference to the Italian anti-fascist Resistance of 1943-45.
5. See Corriere della Serra December 13.
6. There had been a certain amount of mockery from rightwing or pro-government quarters about the original December 5 strike date, since the following Monday was a holiday for many workers.
7. Renzi, prior to gaining the PD leadership, was the mayor of Florence. Whilst he actually comes from a smaller town in the Florentine province, he is often referred to as a Florentine.
9. See my earlier article about the so-called ‘social strike’: ‘Strikes, smoke bombs and tear gas’ Weekly Worker November 20.
10. There are in fact legal limitations on the length and timing of industrial action by groups such as bus drivers, but Lupi’s ban would have taken this much further and may well have been unconstitutional.
11. D’Alema receives a colossal parliamentary pension, whilst workers’ pensions were severely curtailed by the Monti government, which D’Alema backed, in 2012.
12. This small grouping - stronger in Puglia, the region of which Bari is the capital, than anywhere else - is made up of former supporters of Marco Ferrando, who broke with him before the 2006 general election, claiming he was too moderate. Ferrando’s Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori is generally regarded as rather extreme and sectarian.
13. Salvini has visited Russia and there are rumours that Putin is offering him funds.
14. The Lega is collecting signatures in an effort to get a referendum on the repeal of Fornero’s pension law. It ought to be remembered that pension cuts were the ostensible reason for the Lega bringing down the first Berlusconi government at the end of 1994.