Azim Parker, Infomail 1239, December 18, 2023
“You laugh so as not to cry” is a very popular phrase in Italy. The line between tragedy and farce has sometimes been very, very thin in the country’s history. Just think of the twenty years of the Berlusconi government which, between a joke and an international embarrassment, also found the time to massacre the demonstrators against the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001.
The first year of Meloni’s government confirms this grotesque tendency. In this first year alone, we have been able to watch all sorts of pathetic spectacles, including the Prime Minister’s separation from her partner – a racist and misogynistic pseudo-journalist – via Facebook, an embarrassing prank call at the expense of Giorgia Meloni that ridiculed the government in front of the whole world, an absurd fight against harmless CBD cannabis, and much more. The problem is that the working class had to pay an incredibly high price to witness this spectacle.
An unprecedented attack on the working class and the poor
In the history of the Republic, there has certainly never been such a sharp deterioration in the living conditions of the poorer classes. Italy is the country with the largest decline in real wages among the major OECD economies. By the end of 2022, they had fallen by 7% compared to the pre-pandemic period. This decline continued in the first quarter of 2023, with a drop of 7.5% – all in the context of a fundamentally ailing economy.
Although there has indeed been some recovery in growth after the pandemic – in 2022 GDP actually grew by 3.7% – the rise in commodity prices due to the war in Ukraine, the recession in Germany – Italy’s main economic partner – the reintroduction of the Stability Pact and the constant increase in interest rates are weighing on public coffers and public debt like a millstone. As a result, the first year of the Meloni government has essentially been marked by unprecedented aggressiveness towards Italian workers.
Arms
The first victims of the government’s criminal policies were the unemployed and the poorest sections of the population, who were informed by SMS that they had lost their basic income, the so-called “citizens’ money”. This transfer, introduced in 2019 at the instigation of the Five Star Movement, was itself an extremely demagogic and certainly problematic measure, which certainly did not “abolish” poverty, as the then Minister Di Maio explained when it was introduced, but for a time it was both the only means of survival for many poor people and a barrier against the over-exploitation of many precarious workers, especially in the tourism and catering sectors, which have rightly begun to reject the undignified working conditions at starvation wages in the face of an alternative.
It is no coincidence that this measure met with strong resistance from small businesses at the time. Behind their social-chauvinist whining about “the bums who live at the expense of the state” was only their frustration that they could no longer blackmail anyone with starvation wages.
Labour law
However, all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. The labour law, cynically enacted on 1 May 2023, is a veritable declaration of war. It ranges from the extension of fixed-term contracts, the most common form of precarious work in Italy, to the reduction of the tax scissors, a measure heavily promoted by the State, but which in reality is an insult to all Italian wage earners. In order to reduce the gap between net and gross wages, the government has actually allocated 4.1 billion euros.
This means that Italian workers will receive an increase in net salary of 50 to 100 euros! An amount that is completely meaningless in the face of inflation. Of course, this measure does not go hand in hand with an increase in wages. It is no coincidence that Confindustria – the Italian General Confederation of Industry – was very satisfied and gladly accepted this further gift. The greatest irony, however, is that these funds are borne by the public debt, the same workers who are already facing significant cuts in pensions and public health to “make the math work”. In real terms, therefore, the burden on companies is reduced, while the wage earners lose what they seem to receive through social cuts.
Health care
The public health system is one of the battlegrounds where the government has been particularly devastating. In the last 10 years, 111 hospitals have been closed in Italy and 37,000 beds have been cut. The shortage of medical and nursing staff has now become structural in nature in outpatient clinics and hospitals. All this is happening at a time when access to universities is limited and complicated selection procedures, characterised by nepotism and disorganisation, make it even more difficult to recruit and train new staff.
The collective agreement for nurses has not been renewed for three years. The Meloni government has offered a 4% salary increase, which would be half of the value of salaries lost due to inflation! Meanwhile, the last budget law cut another €2 billion in funding from the entire health system, all for the pleasure of private healthcare. Not only does it see an increase in its profits, but it also receives lavish subsidies from the very state that is ruining the public health system.
The government’s reactionary rhetoric on the issue of the family has been reflected in the increase in VAT on baby food and diapers. According to the government, it is necessary to give birth to children for the good of the nation against the “ethnic substitution” of migrants – this was actually said by the Minister of Agriculture! However, the fact that the families cannot feed these children is irrelevant. Not to forget that the election promise to abolish the mineral oil tax was, of course, quickly broken.
The slaughter of migrants continues…
The Italian proletariat is not the only target. In the last year, the government has also taken a particularly vehement stance against migrants, who have always been a declared target of these racists. And they also want to curb the rise in discontent due to the unfulfilled election promises. Already during the election campaign, one of the government’s best-known demands was that of a “naval blockade” of Italy, an ultra-reactionary and ultimately unrealisable measure that served to stir up and capitalise on the existing racist sentiment among the population.
Of course, the impracticability of the naval blockade did not prevent Giorgia Meloni and her accomplices from pursuing equally criminal policies towards migrants.
First, the agreement with the government of Tunisian torture president Saied, who undertook to detain departing immigrants in his camps in exchange for payment, an agreement similar to the one already in place with Libya. After the failure of negotiations with Saied, Meloni flew to Albania to negotiate in secret with Prime Minister Rama on the creation of detention camps for migrants in exchange for Italy’s help to admit Albania to the EU. Simply disgusting!
In the meantime, the government has pledged to hinder the activities of NGOs as much as possible by forcing ships to take refugees to ports far from the rescue site and de facto asking them to ignore possible multiple rescue requests. Domestically, Meloni has pledged to build new centres for administrative detention — the notorious CPR (return centres) — that actually resemble real prisons where migrants wait to be deported. The stated aim of these shameful policies, as with other European governments, regardless of their political affiliation, is to block entry. In fact, this is a shameful justification. In the face of hunger, violence and deprivation of liberty, there is nothing that can stop people from seeking a better life elsewhere. All the efforts of governments to prevent this from happening only serve to increase the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people. Only the struggle against racism, imperialism and for a socialist order can finally bring them justice and free humanity from this tragedy.
The deafening silence of the Opposition and the trade unions
Particularly disgraceful in view of this situation is the behaviour of the main trade unions – CGIL, CISL, UIL. Our report on the resistance of the trade unions to the Meloni government could end here. In one year of government, the country’s main trade union organisations, especially the CGIL, have been conspicuous by their disarming lethargy. Until October 2023, not a single demonstration against the government had been organised, even symbolically.
On the contrary, the general secretary of the CGIL, Landini, was kind enough to invite Giorgia Meloni to give a speech at the trade union congress in March. After a purely ritual demonstration in Rome in October, in which workers pressed the union bureaucracy with the call for a general strike, Landini was forced to call a strike in November. A strike that was organised regionally on three different days –in the north, centre and south of Italy. This decision, now standard practice for the CGIL, is obviously aimed at mitigating the effects of the work stoppage as much as possible and making it as harmless as possible. Despite this, the government, especially Transport Minister Salvini, took the opportunity to continue attacking the union and workers, declaring that the strike was illegal as it violated citizens’ right to mobility and therefore had to be lifted.
This would have been a great opportunity to trigger a real mobilisation against the government around the defence of the right to strike. A mobilisation that would certainly have given the already dissatisfied Italian proletariat a concrete perspective of struggle and would have put the government in difficulty. However, Landini considered it more correct to reduce the duration of the strike to 4 hours on public transport, making the mobilisation de facto an empty ritual. In the meantime, the government is sleeping soundly, and Salvini can boast on social networks that he has got the unions under control.
Unfortunately, this first year of government has been anything but positive for the grassroots unions as well. The various unions have essentially competed with each other by carrying out mini-strikes in an uncoordinated and ultimately competitive manner, with the sole aim of taking away each other’s members. Overcoming this sectarian mentality therefore remains an essential task for Italian revolutionaries.
The balance of the first year of the Meloni government is therefore dramatic. On the one hand, there is the need for the bourgeoisie and its political representation, regardless of its internal contradictions, to protect its profits and status quo at the expense of the proletariat. On the other hand, we are witnessing the eternal repetition of the reformist left, both in politics and in the trade unions. The latter are a victim of their own opportunism and lack of prospects beyond the narrow confines of capitalism, which forces them to mechanically repeat the same formulas and rituals, even if this definitively condemns them to political oblivion.
In this situation, what is needed is a united front of all wage-earners and oppressed against the attacks of the right-wing government and capital, both at the workplace and trade union level as well as at the political level. At the same time, the crisis of leadership of the working class makes it clear that a revolutionary party is needed as a political alternative to the theatre of bourgeois politics and the right.