Dossier: The economic and health emergency, the workers, our political activity

In this dossier (pp. 3-31) we present a synthesis of the collective evaluations and political intervention carried out by our organization during the spring 2020 lockdown and in the immediately following months.
Here you can find two kinds of materials.

On the one hand, there are texts showing our work towards workers or trade union initiatives we took part in. They begin with a flyer distributed at the start of the lockdown, and end with another text spread in June 2020. The first one summarizes our analysis of causes and consequences of the health emergency and our indications on the struggle response that, in March 2020, the working class should have given. The second one take a stock of the spring situation and identified in June 2020, in a coherent manner, the social and political conditions to stem a second "pandemic wave" and its effects on workers.
Between the two leaflets you can find letters and documents relating to some initiatives aimed at preventing that bosses and government would make the emergency costs fall on workers' skin.
An important moment of this unfortunately minority opposition, was the Lombardia region metalworkers' strike of the 25 March 2020, which almost passed unnoticed by media and many "left observers".
On the other hand, the dossier also contains some introductions to the internal meetings which, although online, we continued to carry out on a regular basis during the lockdown.
An "internal work" that also served to give oxygen to the trade union and political initiatives that, in the same period, we were trying to support.
These documents deal with some of the themes highlighted by the epidemic; themes that will go beyond the contingency and will mark the social-political clash in the immediate future: the remote work, the school digital restructuring, the social and political affairs polarization in the United States and its effects on the international situation.
Outside the dossier, other internal materials slightly later, which are connected to some international issues: 5G and the Huawei-TSMC-Taiwan affair.
A crucial and neglected aspect of the COVID-19 affair is the health and economic emergency in the South of the world. We postpone his analysis to the next issue. By now we will consider just two points that may help to "read" the here proposed materials and to build a bridge between them and the political national and international situation in the coming months.
 

Covid-crisis and European Union

The first point concerns the promise that the European Union and the Italian government make to italian and european workers. To understand its meaning, it is useful to
quickly rebuild what happened in Europe since spring 2020.
Following the health emergency, the European Union and the big capitalism of the european countries suffered six setbacks, linked to each other.
1) The semi-paralysis of the economy triggered by the health emergency - which also concerned the industry core sectors such as the automotive one - has slowed down and partially suspended the extraction and realization mechanism of the surplus value. A significant share of its lifeblood has been missing from capitalist accumulation.
Although it's true that some companies (those of e-commerce, information technology, telecommunications) have grossed huge extra-profits, the average profit has dropped quickly and sharply. In fact, industrial production decreased on average by 10% (more than in the 2008-2011 crisis) and automotive production fell by 45% (the worst figure in the last 45 years).
2) The extensive European and world supply chains made possible in recent decades to decrease the production prices of consumer goods. This had made possible to contract the necessary part of the working day and expand the one stolen by the bosses. These production chains have now been disrupted and made unsafe.
3) The bulk of world growth is concentrated in Asia, where important market shares are held by European companies. These have now been undermined by Chinese companies, quicker to recover from the falling of February-March 2020 (1) and no longer technologically distant from European ones. In particular, they have reached levels similar to the italian and Eastern Europe companies, a true industrial background for the Franco-German heart.
4) Europe's infrastructural and technological delay has now become unsustainable, especially in some areas of the European industrial platform such as the Padanian one. And the European leaders have been denouncing this for years.
5) At the same time, the weight of businesses and households loans held in the European banks and coffers, which are difficult to recover, worsened (especially for banks in less solid countries such as Italy).
6) Finally, the health and economic emergency has clouded the image of the "European system" as the "hill of the world" in relation to the Afro-Asian peoples: how can European civilization continue to stand as a beacon of economic progress for Africa and Asia, if it fails to defend its populations from Covid-19? If it has to accept aid and medical missions from Cuba and China? if after summer 2020 it has back in emergency, while China has, for the moment, found a way to eliminate the danger even in absence of the vaccine?
A living proletarian movement, even a small one, would have been able to take advantage of this own goal by the European bourgeoisie. It could have imposed measures capable of making less unhealthy the existance conditions in bourgeois society. It could have used this occasion to shake the traditional confidence of the workers mass in the ability of the European "ruling classes" (the pro-European and sovereignist one) to know how to maneuver the economic-social boat in the all interest.
Unfortunately, this did not happen. Also because of this, the European bourgeoisies, coordinated by Macron and Merkel, have managed to implement a policy that for the moment has been able to slow down the emergency and accelerate the process of European unification. They managed to overcome the thousand obstacles that over the years have hindered their path, including the particularistic bourgeois resistance in Italy and the insufficient organicity of their technological, infrastructural and scientific apparatus, still dependent on US multinationals.

 

Europe in action
 

The Franco-German and European Union response was articulated in three directions.
A)It first tried to prevent the economy from sliding into productive-financial crack and social crisis: it suspended the stability pact and permit to national governments, with the coverage of the € 750 billion of the ECB's PEPP, to breach the deficit ceilings to finance companies in difficulty, to offer guarantees to banks affected by the mortgage repayments moratorium and to allocate meager social safety nets for workers.
B) At the same time, the European Union took advantage of the emergency to accelerate the technological-productive restructuring and the political-military centralization that had already begun (which is also at the heart of the program presented by von der Leyen at the end of 2019). For this objective, it has allocated a total of 1300 billion euros for the strengthening of the health system (MES, 240 billion), for industrial modernization projects (EIB, 200 billion, and Next Generation Eu, 750 billion) and for social narcotization measures (Sure, 81 billion), that will serve to make the working class accept the economic consequences that will fall right on it.
Doing this, the European Union decided for the first time to (partially) finance this colossal Keynesian plan with the issuance of securities guaranteed directly by the EU.Furthermore, the central interventions of Brussels went hand in hand with two other "industrial rearmament" plans (a whole program!) in Paris and Berlin, 100 and 200 billion euros respectively.Programs that concern in particular the electric car, telecommunications, artificial intelligence and cloud services.(2)
The European summit of 1-2 October 2020 made the meaning of this plan even clearer than the initial program of von der Leyen did. It is necessary to give Europe something it does not have today: strategic autonomy in electronics, in information technology, in the supply of rare earths, in vital industrial chains. Without this, every European country, including Germany, is destined to lose the privileged position it holds in the world system of the capitalist economy.
There is no complete tactical convergence between Macron and Merkel; but both, and with them the stronger fractions of the European bourgeoisie, want to accompany this "industrial rearmament" with the strengthening of the military and geopolitical autonomy of Europe. Macron would even be willingto separate from NATO and he aspire to conquer full European control, to the detriment of his US ally, the Middle East, Africa and large areas of Latin America. Merkel instead wants to extend the penetration of German companies in Asia, in China and the Far East first of all;and this involves an inevitable collaboration with the United States (3).
C) The third direction of European Union intervention has directly concerned Italy. Among the main objectives that of preventing the breakdown of the weakest link in the European chain, namely Italy. The largest shares of the MES (37 out of 240), of the SURE (27 out of 81) and ofthe Next Generation Eu (209 out of 750) have been and are reserved for Italy. For two main reasons:
- to prevent Italy from plunging into economic, social and geopolitical chaos, leaving the way open for Trumpian maneuvers by the United States and also for China's projection towards the West, along the multiple roads of the New Silk Road.
- to make it overcome its historical weaknesses (the small size of companies, bureaucratic inefficiency, the backwardness of infrastructures in the digital field), to the advantage of strengthening the European industrial and financial system.
To save the European Union, to save France and Germany - the bourgeois must have thought in Paris and Berlin - we must save Italy.As the memory of the experience of the Second World War teaches: Europe, then under the government of Hitler and his allies scattered in Paris, Rome, Budapest, Madrid, Copenhagen, was invaded by the Yankee "liberators" from the southern flank, openedin Italy with the landing in Sicily.
The "only" condition placed by the European Union in exchange for this "generous" help, was to supervise the funds allocation and the management of projects. This has aroused the growing annoyance of one of the social bases of the political forces both of the government and the opposition, the one made up of small owners, industrialists linked to public tenders, feather merchants, patronage wagons, freelancers, hoteliers, night clubs owners.
That same social base we saw occupy the General States parterre convened by Conte and the Cinquestelle (almost secretly from the PD) in the summer of 2020 for a first discussion about the projects to be presented to the European Union; the same one that keep the bench in the allocation of the 5 "decreti ristori"(for an amount of 55 billion euros); the one that sees in Eurobonds a cow to be milked as in the good Christian Democratic days; the one who, in order to take a breath of fresh air, is also ready to negotiate with apparently better disposed foreign sponsors, thinking then of being able to pass the costs of the operation onto Italian and immigrant workers.
Germany and the stronger fractions of the northern European capital fear that, with the political configuration today existing in Italy, the funds transferred to Italy through Eurobonds will be used to resurrect as such the economic and social apparatus hitten by the health emergency and not to modernize and integrate it into a more centralized platform at the European level, as is in the interest of the German capitalists, the European collective capital and the individual European-national bourgeois groups, including the Italian one.
This is the real knot of the bourgeois political conflict in Europe, which could lead to fractures or instability of no small account in Italy: what destination will the funds that arrive in the hands of the leaders of the Italian state have? Will they serve to artificially keep alive an economic apparatus, with a corresponding social incarnation, which even before the epidemic was unable to keep pace as a link in the European capitalist system? Will they be used to provide heavy financing to the business and professional system, harnessed by the bureaucratic apparatus and which for years has been blocking the relaunch of national and European capital? Or will the hundreds billions of euros at stake be used for targeted investments, will they be used to make the state apparatus and infrastructure more efficient and rational?Will they serve to reduce the middle-petty bourgeois strata size, that keep afloat or thrive thanks to the protected national market greenhouse and that hold in their hands a portion of the national wealth that is excessive in relation to their social function andthe need to increaseresources destined for investments towards 4.0?
The pro-European wing of the Italian institutional leaders, personified by the minister of the economy Gualtieri and the president of the republic Mattarella, is counting on the supervision of Brussels to finally corner and discipline the bourgeois and sub-bourgeois coterie who now represent aball and chain for a stronger European integration of the “bel paese”.
For the implementation of their program they also count in the reorganization of the Italian financial and industrial capital caused by the mergers that took place in 2020: IntesaSanPaolo has incorporated Ubibanca and its investment and credit network in companies in the industrial area of Bergamo and Brescia; the digital payments section of IntesaSanPaolo, Nexi, merged with Sia, the corresponding network controlled by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti; Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and IntesaSanPaolo participated in the purchase of Borsa Italia, sold by the London Stock Exchange, by the network of exchanges of the French-speaking Euronext area; Tim, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, Enel and Fastweb are setting up a company to unify and complete the country's already started sections of optical cabling in a single project (called AccessCO); Del Vecchio and the consortium of Italian industrialists he represents have increased their stake in Mediobanca to shift the balance of the financial center towards an organized agglomeration of one of the strengths of the Italian capitalist network, that of the "pocket multinationals"; FCA is married to the French group PSA...
These financial and industrial operations, although significant at a national level, remain small compared to those undertaken in other Western countries. They partly depend on the intervention of US investment funds (such as KKR, partner of AccessCO, and the giant BlackRock, major shareholder of IntesaSanPaolo and Unicredit) and are not, at the moment, perfectly in line with the technological programs started in France and Germany (for example in the cloud sector and in the IT sector, in which the Italian government has chosen to rely on collaboration with Microsoft and Google).In short, it seems that the kings of Italian industry and finance themselves are more concerned with looking after their individual interests, playing cunningly on the double European French-German and American table. In both cases, the long-term effect will be to remain effectively subordinate. A real pro-European bourgeois party should also discipline the social protagonists of its program, the centers of the great Italian capital!
This structural weakness, the vast petty-middle bourgeois parasitic slime and the ectoplasmic political staff seated in government armchairs are causing paralysis in the implementation of the pro-European plans. This could lead the Italian pro-European and European institutional leaders to attempt, after the replacement of Trump by Biden in the White House, a change of government also in Italy. In that case the ball could pass to an emergency executive capable of containing the petty-bourgeois feeder fattened by the Count-2 and skipping the party mediation, already largely marginalized by the Conte-2 government itself (through its dcpm, its " national rebirth plans "and its formal transfer of decisions from the hands of ministers to those of the task forces). If this operation does not succeed, the quotation, even among workers, of the sovereignist stock could return to rise, whose program towards workers and immigrants, if needed, was well illustrated by Trump during 2020.

 

The promise made to workers by the EU and the Italian government

The program of the Italian government and the European Union is presented to the workers in an attractive way.It promises to revive the economy through the transition to an environmentally compatible production system, to enhance health protection and to offer greater "social and territorial inclusion".There is not only propaganda smoke in these declamations.
The "green transition" is the bright label of a productive restructuring, anything but green, which has at its center the race to 5G, a new generation robotics, the "artificial intelligence", autonomous Clouds from those of Big Tech Usa.
The unification of Europe and the maintenance of its leading role in the partition of the planetary proletariat's working fruits can only be based on the possession of the technologies that will be the basis of industry and the art of war in the coming decades.the article we dedicate to 5G reveals that the effects on workers of this industrial revolution are anything but reassuring.
In the health field, the economic and institutional representatives of the European collective capitalist interest have realized, against the short-sighted views of the capitalists of the so-called austere countries, that it is not convenient to save 50 by containing health costs, asthe "forzitaliota" juntas and sovereignst-Lega of Lombardy did in the last 25 years, if this exposes the" European System" to ten times greater damage in economic terms and, above all, to incalculable risks on the social and geopolitical level.Therefore, it is better to strengthen local health services and the equipment of medical materials, obviously within the limits dictated by the constraints of the competitiveness of the "Italy Company" and "Europe company".
Also the reference to "social and territorial inclusion" refers to something concrete: the emergency of 2020 and the hints of a strike promoted by some groups of workers in the major European industrial concentrations (Po Valley, region of Paris, Bavaria and Westphalia) remindedto the shrewdest European bourgeoisies that they have a giant at home, the one made up of the 50 million industrial proletarians of Europe, without whose collaboration it is not possible to manage the productive transformation at stake and the relevant world dispute.This giant has tobe bought.With promises, words, flattery, but also with some real concessions, in terms of income and welfare.
The workers of Italy are giving credit to this offer.This does not mean that the temptation to follow the sovereignist middle-petty bourgeois ruckus (also weakened by the results of the US presidential elections) is extinguished.It is ready to make a comeback ifMerkel-Macron-von der Leyen's bet fails. But at the moment, the expectation towards the lifeboat provided by Europe is holding the scene.This miraculous hope is mixed with two other feelings: on the one hand, the anesthetization brought about among private sectorworkers by the layoff blocking and the granting of a wageguarantee fund recognized by the government;on the other hand, the fear of ending up in the cauldron of unemployment and insecurity.
We experienced this mixture of feelings in autumn 2020, when we were, for example, among the promoters of the initiative (unfortunately not successful) of an assembly of trade union delegates of the major services and industry companies of Rome and its province.We talk about it in the dossier on p.27. This state of mind, which could find in the hope of seeing its conditions improve with the businesses relaunch promised by European funding a further boost to passivity, does not promise anything good. Cause it does not open the eyes on the responsibilities of the government towards the "second" and the possible future waves of the pandemic.
Because it leads us to face the upcoming restructuring of factories and offices from an unfavorable position (remote work is just a piece). Because it leaves the proletarians defenseless facing the possible turn to the right of the middle classes, which, even if helped by the 5 "ristori" of the Count-2, will be affected in their privileges by the epochal restructuring that is coming and will try to retaliate against the workers. Because it hides the international framework in which this situation fits, in which Europe, alone or alongside the United States, will try to drag the workers of Europe into new crusades for the domination of the planet, with respect to which those "ex “Yugoslavia and Iraq will pale.
However great the trade union and political difficulties of the working class are at the moment, it does not lack the potential strength to oppose this fate and to react to it.The same health emergency showed it.We thus address the second issue that we intend to deal in this dossier presentation.It turns out who is essential.
After decades in which university professors, television presenters, managers have explained that we are now in a post-industrial society that draws its lifeblood from "communication", from advertising flows, from financial and stock market artifices, from show business and other "Intangible" idiocies, here is that a microscopic virus and the lockdown bring out another truth.
Suddenly it turns out that it is not the designers, influencers and starred chefs who are essential to this society. They are not even the "visionary" intellectuals and architects.They are not the good-looking scions that come out from the Luiss university andfromthe financial engineering masters. They are not the soccer's champions, the avant-garde advertisers, the supermodels, the coolest designers.All these "beautiful and bright" stars can safely cease their work, society goes on anyway.
What is essential are other and not at all glittering social figures.They are the workers, those who toil, sweat and risk their health and life any given day of any given year.
Suddenly, we "remember" how essential health workers are, sent into disarray without protection, forced to pay a high price in terms of human lives and transformed in spite of themselves into another potential infection vehicle. Suddenly the shop assistants and the cashiers of food supermarkets, which must remain open during the lockdown, "acquire" importance.
Suddenly, Amazon's porters and transporters become fundamental, and during the "lockdown" they have to work at the robots pace installed in their warehouses and more than usual.Suddenly professors and teachers, IT workers and even obscure white-collar sectors become important: it is true that many of them can also work at home, remotely, but the fact remains that they must continue to work, since it has been discovered that theirwork is essential, otherwise the wheels of the social gear do not turn as they should.
But above all it comes to light (even if they try to hide it in every way) that it is above all the industrial and transport workers that are fundamental. That, coronavirus or non-coronavirus, the millions of proletarians who crowd the numerous (and often unhealthy) factories and industrial warehouses that swarm in this "post-industrial" society must continue to produce. But beware: not only those who work in the food or pharmaceutical supply chains, but also those who produce cars, ships, boats, computers, bricks, furniture, televisions, cosmetics, clothes and so on and so forth. They must continue to produce because it is above all from them, from their exploitation, that capital draws its lifeblood. It is from there that the whole of the middle class sucks like a vampire the blood with which it also maintains its squalid court of "cultured servants" and "sparkling dancers".From there and from the hands of the laborers, immigrants from Asia,the Middle East and Eastern Europe, who, invisible to the talk-shows, collect vegetables, fruit, cereals (in Puglia, in the Pontina area, in the Po Valley,in Baveria, in Trentino) which feed the population.Those same laborersof which the landowners and their political representatives complain about the lack at the beginning of summer 2020. Those who have eyes to see have been able to realize who is the real social subject who, with his work, runs the shack bourgeois, who turnsits gears, which, by virtue of this, has the potential strength to impose its needs and to assert the interest of collective health protection over those of profit.
It was enough that in March 2020 this objective force hinted at making its voice heard in the face of the government's intention to send it to the slaughterhouse, completely excluding it from the anti-covid measures just launched with the "I stay at home" decree, so that the Italian government extended the "closure" also to some industrial sectors and introduced (on paper) some health protection measures in the workplace, in order to prevent a hypothetical expansion of mobilizations.
This truth has returned to the surface, but in the negative, after the summer of 2020. The criminal policy of the government was able to unfold freely (with the known effects of the "second wave") also because the spring protests were not developedfor the purpose to impose on the government, with the struggle and mobilization in the streets, the necessary minimum anti-covid measures in transport, in local health clinics, in hospitals and in schools.
In this (unfortunately easily predictable) regression of the proletarian response, the difficulty of organizing a network, although minimal, of connection between the main European countries also weighed. But also on this front, during the emergency, an element emerged that should make us reflect. The dense network of relationships between companies in various countries and the presence in the final consumer goods of parts produced in many different countries; the difficulty of German car companies to continue producing without parts arriving from Lombardia or Emilia-Romagna; the concern of workers in companies of other European countries to safeguard social interests, similar to those they were worrying about and mobilizing workers in Italy; the existence of these international production chains at the basis of the capitalist production and circulation process. All of these things indicate that, on a potential level, workers have the power to assert their common interests if they seek to overcome the national, racial and religious barriers that now separate them and pitting them against each other.
We believe that, despite the limited experiences they relate, the materials presented in this dossier can favor the balance of the 2020 emergency and, with it, the political equipping to face the anti-proletarian offensive in progress.

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Notes
(1) In February 2020, the Chinese government allocated $ 164 billion for health care costs and food and wage subsidies. The central bank has injected 400 billion dollars into the monetary circuit and reduced the amounts that banks have to keep on deposit for security reasons by 80 billion dollars. Thanks to the efficient intervention (bourgeois in all respects) of the central government to circumscribe and then defuse the epidemic outbreak in Wuhan, the production machine outside the Hubei had returned to its pre-crisis levels as early as the beginning of March 2020. Across the region and especially in Wuhan, the heart of the most hitten area, the recovery became almost complete the following month. Already on March 28, 2020, after an interruption of over a month, the regular freight train left Wuhan for the German logistics-industrial center of Duisburg. At this point, the Chinese government launched an infrastructure development plan for 1000 billion dollars, aimed at strengthening the technological modernization programs already started (see the articles published in the "Che Fare" no. 87) and then strengthened in the XIV five-year plan launched in October 2020.

(2) The French industrial recovery plan allocates 30 billion to the so-called ecological transition (new railway network, promotion of the hydrogen engine and the nuclear fission and fusion chain, renovation of buildings), 30 billion to industrial competitiveness (tax relief in favor of technological modernization , funding for the development of new technologies, reconfiguration of production chains within politically safe perimeters) and 30 billion for "social cohesion" (health, training of young people and retraining of workers affected by industrial restructuring processes). In presenting the plan, Economy Minister Le Maire declared that "industry is our culture" and more prosaically Prime Minister Casteux spoke of "industrial rearmament" (Il Sole24 Ore, 4 September 2020).

(3) See for example "Il Sole24 Ore" 6 December 2020.

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