The suffering bodies of migrants fleeing from poverty, war and despair are increasingly bogged down by the rotting marshland of bourgeois politics, the miserable expression of primary needs of survival of a mode of production in the midst of a structural crisis. Over these bodies, the game is played out and once more brings to light the “essence” of such politics: seedy deals with one foreign government or band of adventurers or another to ensure economic and strategic bridgeheads (an example? the relations between Italy and Libya, or Italy and France), barely concealed dynamics of inter-imperialist contrasts with migrants as the bleeding exchange currency (an example? the relations between Germany and Turkey, between the USA and Mexico), squalid cooked deals between nervous bourgeois factions (a field where Italy can boast a long tradition), arm wrestling between one country or another and “Europe”.
And first and foremost an ideological media operation (“Italians First”, so as to keep up with “America First”), aiming to stir up an anti-proletarian spirit in broad strata of the disappointed and embittered petit bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy, supported by mafia and fascist ground troops and the progressive fortification of the State-policeman: operations designed to fence in and control class uprisings that might be set off under pressure from a crisis that no bourgeois government, of whatever political colour, is capable of solving.
Native proletarians, attracted or confused by the sub-human grunting of those in government or itching to get there or return there, or of those who have always been designated to cook up the indigestible and poisonous dish called “racism” for the newspapers and TV chat studios, should be under no illusion. No illusions: facts and words are used to strike at the weakest sectors and those most vulnerable to blackmail, in order to strike at the whole class – the class that they, the native proletarians, willing or not, are part of, independently of any futile petit-bourgeois aspirations and the obstinate illusion of having “guarantees”. Division amongst the rank and file of the proletarian class is the preventive weapon that serves perfectly for present and future repression by Capital and its State: everyone will be put in chains by intensified exploitation and struck at as soon as they dare to raise their heads.
As for the “finer souls”, those who are nurtured by “nostalgic fantasies of the universal brotherhood of peoples, the federal republic of Europe and enduring world peace” (Engels in the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” of 15/2/1849), we can only repeat what has been said and written so many times: their complaints and pious desires, increasingly impregnated with incense and blessed by popes, bishops and more-or-less street priests, do no more than make the stinking marshes more liquid and all-pervasive. Not unless they can abandon the inertia they have been vegetating in for decades and take sides with a class battle against the institutions that represent and defend the ruling class, will they be able to redeem their objective complicity with these repulsive bourgeois politics, an objective complicity that has marked them up to now: “The antagonisms that are released by the relations of bourgeois society must be confronted by fighting them; they cannot be eliminated by means of the imagination” (Marx in the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” of 29/61848). But we strongly doubt that the “finer souls” are capable of understanding all this and acting as a consequence.
Our position has always been clear and we challenge anyone to deny it, as we see before our very eyes today’s obscene reality, anticipating what is in store for tomorrow. The migratory flows are the product of capitalism’s unequal development, first of colonial and then of imperialist penetration in vast areas of the globe, of the structural economic crisis dragging on for decades, of the wars for economic and strategic predominance by the imperialist thieves from east and west and from north and south, and thus of the growing misery and ever-faster proletarianization of enormous masses of people. For these masses, we claim total freedom of movement, without the obligation of papiers, permits, etc; we work for the rebirth of territorial organisms of struggle and defence, open to all proletarians, employed or not, men and women, independently of their origins, language or religion; we proclaim in words, in deeds and in facts the open battle both against the State, which is the stick used by national capital, and against feeble, democratic anti-racism and anti-fascism, which we counter with the theory and practice of internationalism and the urgent need to strengthen and establish the roots of the revolutionary party.
International Communist Party