Have a nice election

And have a nice dictatorship, too...

On 24 and 25 February, a sizeable group of candidates to the senate and the lower house will be trying to have themselves elected by millions of Italians by promising a new government and the best of all possible worlds. And so all the various saviours of the bank accounts and the class-based re-equilibration of capitalist accumulation will stand up and present themselves as the paladins of democracy and national salvation.

It is theatre of the absurd as staged by the Italian bourgeoisie, and it would be comic if we were not in such a tragic situation, with the social butchery being carried out thanks to the freedom-killing, authoritarian measures of the Monti government, cheered on from the wings by two thirds of the parliament. And of course, before him there were the neoliberal policies of Berlusconi and the PD that impoverished millions of workers and pensioners, those who have always been the target of choice for the financial bourgeoisie's class-based policies once they came to power with the rise of the neoliberal phase of capitalism.

But media control and the support that it offers the political clique is necessary to save at least some suggestion of a parliamentary democracy that, although it is still the bourgeoisie's means of dominion over the proletariat, has changed profoundly over the years and is reaching an important turning point in the construction of new, authoritarian management policies being imposed by the wider bourgeoisie.

We are being asked to vote, while workers are excluded from any possibility of democratic participation in the workplace. While farcical bargaining agreements exclude the workers from any form of collective practice. While the destruction of the social state sees the involvement of all areas of power, from the Catholic church through all the various parliamentary parties to the mafias, eager to invest their money. While environmentally devastating works are being carried out on the territory and any citizen who opposes them is repressed by the police forces. Pensioners on the breadline and workers reduced to desperation through redundancy today have no chance of political representation through the normal channels of parliamentary democracy.

In the absence of vigorous social and revolutionary opposition, the lower classes are excluded and unrepresentable by the authoritarianism of capital which only heaps on their backs the social costs of the reconstruction that is in progress. The revival of a communist right and of populism stuffed with good intentions and good sentiments that are being proposed as institutional reference points of forms of resistance, incapable of leaving behind the ambiguity of the seat in parliament and the desire to represent, are unable to offer a real political option. They are merely sad, useless approaches that will do not more than contribute to their role, as long ago written by the capitalist bourgeoisie.

Today more than ever any electoralist approach to the political question is superfluous. The lines drawn on a European level by capitalist power, by the financial bourgeoisie, leave no space for manoeuvre. No parliament today is able to change the class-based, anti-worker policies that are hitting entire populations all over the world. Smooth talkers from the Right and the supposed Left, hell-bent on winning the seats they hold so dearly, are not overly worried about coming up with an alternative to the advancing barbarism. The things that count, the power of money, the power of the Catholic church, the power of the mafias, they are all untouchable pillars of the grand system on which power is based. The growth that all aspire to continues to be the growth in profits and inequality, in the exploitation and impoverishment of the human, material and natural resources of this country, to the benefit of the usual few.

As part of the redefinition of constituent powers that have set out the lines of intervention and of the fall of political and social control in Europe - and the policies of the Monti government are their most authentic expression in the case of Italy - the differences that appear in the distinctions between the parties are just a marketing operation in view of the elections - to each voter his or her own, but keeping the authoritarian and somewhat fascist substance of the new race for accumulation.

The real struggle has been and will be directed against the weaker classes, forced into a situation where it is impossible to respond collectively, still trying to win political space that will never arrive from the seats of parliament, but which once again in history will have develop out of the concrete interests of the exploited.

We must rediscover an autonomous, class-struggle point of view, one which lies outside any compatibility with the system, so that through class struggle we can take back the right for us to imagine a society for us, a communist and libertarian society, and resist the attacks by capital and the siren song of democratic formalism.

Today more than ever it is essential that we once more emphasise the autonomous, class-struggle position of libertarian communists, not giving in to those who would see us as players in a show that does not belong to us, where Monti's manifesto or the moves to balance the State's books are there to remind us how untouchable the general plan laid out by the powers is.

They are powers that need to be undermined at their very foundations, without shortcuts or illusions, by building non-institutional paths for representation and demands beginning with our concrete needs, through class unity, taking back the instruments of combative syndicalism, defending our rights and in particular our right to a decent job, town by town, against the social barbarism and devastation, refusing to pay the costs of poverty and desperation. We must unmask those who call other workers even more coerced than us our enemies, be they here or elsewhere, in Europe or in China, and also all those, be they bosses or workers, who say that we are all in the same boat, the hostages of powers so remote that they cannot be fought.

The crisis cannot be fought by those who created it and by those who take advantage of it. Only the direct involvement of each and every one of us and the capacity to recognize in each single struggle in our neighbourhoods and in our factories, in our schools and in our anti-fascism, a piece of the freer and more just society that we want for all, only this can lead to the real construction of the libertarian alternative. And no amount of electioneering can do that.





National Secretariat

Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici