Dave Kellaway just back from Italy, gives us this update on the current situation 16
While on a visit to Italy late last year, two images on television particularly struck me. One was the now-notorious image of the new minister Elsa Fornero breaking down in tears while announcing the cuts to pensions in the government's austerity package. The other was of a steelworker from the Italsider plant in Taranto in southern Italy reacting to the news that he would have to work for several more years just as he was preparing to take his retirement in the following month. He fought back real tears and anger. Fornero expressed the hypocrisy of a government that is supposedly 'saving Italy' but in reality is removing historic benefits and rights won by working people following victory over the fascists in 1945 and later in the 1969 hot autumn. This government is saving Italy for the interests of national and European capital.
Conversations with friends and relatives around the salt cod and panettone amplified just how bad things are getting. Everyone is worried about their kids getting any sort of permanent job and avoiding a new emigration. Nobody knows how they will manage to keep healthy working until 67 or even 68. Small family shops are going under all the time. The evening piazza is uncannily quiet by Italian standards - people are just not spending
What are the key points of Monti's first austerity package, voted through with the support of both Berlusconi's centre-right Popolo della Libertà (PDL) and Bersani's centre-left Partito Democratico (PD)? • further extensions to the pension age, up to 68 for some categories • a freeze on pension payments above 1400 euros a month • re-introduction of a tax on the first home and upward revaluation of taxable house • cuts in company taxes • further marketisation and privatisation of public services • another two years freeze on public sector pay • promises to 'reform' the labour market to weaken workers' rights.
Estimates by the government INPS (National Institute for Social Insurance) pensions and social security department show that up to 8 million workers are unemployed, in subsidised lay-offs (cassa integrazione), forcibly redeployed or in short-term contracts. Led by Time magazine's businessman of the year, Fiat's Sergio Marchionne, the Italian bosses are seizing the moment to go on the offensive. Marchionne is having some success in preventing the more militant metalworkers union, the FIOM, from
egitimately representing workers ir
legotiations and in tearing up nationa contracts.
Monti's government is eminently political, despite the media presentation of it as 'technocratic'. It exists because the PDL and the PD both support and vote for it. Ideologically it is very useful for the Italian (and European) bosses that some people see this government as a break with the dire mess of Berlusconi and that in some way Monti and company come from outside of the political caste. In the last few years there has been righteous anger about the luxuries and privileges of the politicians. Indeed I lost count of the number of times I have heard ordinary people spitting out details of outrageous privileges - first class travel, extravagant pensions after one term, cheap meals, even free hair cuts. It makes our duck houses sound like small beer. So people who don't look like they have been at the public trough look a little more attractive. Of course, what the press and TV are not publicising is the links between Monti and other ministers and Goldman Sachs or other banks. They have called in the very people who bankrupted us in the first place. The government benefits at the moment from a compliant press and TV. La Repubblica, a centre-left newspaper, for example, has gone from energetic campaigner against Berlusconi to cheerleader for the national government.
The supine position of the PD may result in the rightwing parties' recovering support - particularly if there is no effective social fightback or leadership by forces to its left. Berlusconi formally supports Monti but is careful to talk about the dangers of too many taxes. Although he may not front any future return to power, his money and influence through the media may still be very important. His former allies in the Lega Nord, led by Umberto Bossi, are taking a hard line against the government, denouncing its undemocratic nature, defending pensions and threatening that its mayors will refuse to hand over any extra property taxes to the Roman government. They even staged an angry demonstration inside the senate replete with banners, insults and scuffles. Of course this is mostly demagogy since the Lega were recently in government implementing similar austerity policies. Ironically, the right, who would have probably lost elections this year, may now It is always possible that there will be social struggles in the unions and/or further explosions on the streets, as we saw on 15 October in Rome. The crucial question is whether there will be sufficient mass mobilisations to stop or significantly modify the government's austerity plans. be saved to fight again on better terrain next year. There is also a left-of-centre opposition led by Antonio Di Pietro's Italy of Values party (Italia dei Valori, IdV) which has called for elections. They hope to pick up some centrist voters disillusioned with the PD line.
The PD's capitulation is only the latest version of support for national unity governments so cherished by its predecessors in the Italian Communist Party. However, even within its own logic it is a risky strategy, whatever happens to this government. If it survives and manages the capitalist crisis effectively, the PD could lose out to third-pole parties (i.e. the extreme centre of Casini, Rutelli and Co.) which can more naturally be identified with the ideology of a national unity 'technocratic' government. If things go badly for Monti, then the PD could suffer even more, given its full support for him. Indeed, even Bersani's timid defence of labour laws such as Article 18 on unjustified sackings has provoked the more rightist PD MPs to openly argue for a so-called modern approach to such issues, in other words to weaken such laws. Those who consider themselves on the left in his party and many ordinary activists are clearly unhappy with the line.
Public sector strikes and demonstrations took place in December but did not express a higher level mobilisation than in previous actions. The main trade union leadership is opposing certain aspects of
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the austerity measures but is not prepared to lead a clear assault on the overall package. The FIOM is the only trade union associated with more radical initiatives defending negotiating rights or calling for
Unfortunately, those class struggle forces remaining from the break-up of Rifondazione following its annihilation at the last elections are not all united in a common front to develop an alternative leadership to the PD in the labour movement. Nicola (Nichi) Vendola's SEL (Socialism, Ecolology and Liberty) party has been wrong-footed by the change in government because its focus had been fighting the PD in the centre-left primaries for candidates. The primaries have been delayed. Vendola wants to compete with the PD but is inevitably locked in electoral coalition with them. At the same time the national unity government makes it more likely Bersani will look to the centre rather than to his left for any alliance. Paolo Ferrero's PRC (his faction inherited the Rifondazione brand) is opposed to the government but still looks to electoral deals with the PD to protect its local and The unelected economist Mario Monti sets up Italy's techno government regional councillors. In any case, it is not an easy time for the left since national and local governments are reducing advertising and official subsidies for political daily newspapers. Liberazione (Rifondazione's paper) is almost certainly closing down and there is a big question mark over the future of the daily II Manifesto.
Comrades from Sinistra Critica (Italian section of the Fourth International) and others are trying to bring together all those forces that want to focus on the debt issue as one way of rebuilding an opposition. A meeting of 600 activists on the 17 December organised by the No Debt movement reiterated its overall platform of five demands: 1) Don't pay the debt; 2) Cut military spending and end all military interventions; 3) Justice and rights for working people (about contracts, defending wages, creating jobs.); 4) Public property and services as a basis for a new model of development; and 5) Revolutionising democratic structures. The appeal is supported by over 1500 activists, including Fausto Bertinotti, Salvatore Cannavo', Massimo Carlotto, Giulietto Chiesa, Giorgio Cremaschi, Loretta
17 Napoleoni, Giovanni Russo Spena and Gianni Vattimo.
The conference also called for: • setting up No Debt committees • campaigning for a referendum on the economic or social policies imposed by European bodies • making the 21 January 'No Debt' day a challenge to the prevailing narrative on this question • organisation of a national demonstration in Milan following the strikes and demonstrations of the Confederazione del Comitati di Base (Cobas) on 27 January and the FIOM on the 11 February -organised through a national network of assemblies of all forces supporting it • support for Europe-wide actions.
Certainly this needs to become an even broader initiative, but it does confront the key political and economic issues. The radical left and struggling trade unionists have to find ways of reaching out and working with the large numbers of angry people willing to take action who are disillusioned with all political structures including those inhabited by the left as a whole. Thousands of young people are involved in the community centri sociali or are fans of the radical comedian Beppe Grillo and his web- and street-based initiatives A number of economists at Turin and Rome universities have also called for Monti to adopt more Keynesian measures, so there is potential for challenging the government. It is always possible that there will be social struggles in the unions and/or further explosions on the streets, as we saw on 15 October in Rome. The crucial question is whether there will be sufficient mass mobilisations to stop or significantly modify the government's austerity plans. The government has not succeeded in reducing the 500-point spread between German bond interest rates and Italy's nor the 6%-plus interest the government has to offer in order to borrow to finance existing debt. It is already in a double-dip recession, as figures for the third quarter of 2011 show. Further bouts of financial instability could impact on the political situation. Capital will require more austerity to restore its desired rate of profit. The centre is not holding; either a left-progressive movement will impose itself or an even more vicious right-wing government will finish the job.