CARC takes on racism and anti-immigration repression in Italy Part 1

Excerpts from:Party of the Committees to Support Resistance – for Communism (CARC) - Italy1. The struggle against racism and fascism in ItalyThe criminal attack against migrant workers in Rosarno, in Italian region Calabria, has been known all over Europe.It demonstrates what our Party is saying for months, that Italy is a fore front of racist and fascist war the European bourgeoisie is carrying out against migrants. The Italian State make people drowned in the Mediterranean sea, had made their boats sink, is organizing and supporting economically and politically in many Italian cities fascist and racist groups who have representatives in the bourgeois institutions and who did attacks against migrants, so as against gay people, workers, leftist young people and communists’ seats and so on, and acts together with the criminal organizations as it does in Rosarno. They are the criminal organizations that killed six African people in Castel Volturno in Campania in September 2009, by gangsters with carabinieri’s uniforms .So as Italy is a forefront of this bourgeoisie’s war, it is a forefront of the resistance by the people’s masses and by the communists.On January 2009, in Rome, tens thousands of migrant people marched in a demonstration of more than a hundred thousand people in support of Gaza Palestinians attacked by Zionists, one of the many demonstrations that leftist, anti-imperialist, antifascist and antiracist forces and the people’s masses by themselves are been able to organize in the latest years independently from revisionists forces.On July 2009, an antifascist and antiracist squad started from the National Feast of the Association for Proletarian Solidarity for demonstrating against a fascist and racist “patrol” in Massa (Tuscany), and against the fascist and racist “security package”, the laws promulgated by the Berlusconi’s gang against migrants. The comrades were attacked by the police and by the fascists, three of them arrested, among them Alessandro della Malva, secretary of the CARC Party Tuscan Federation, member of the National Direction of CARC. The arrested were liberated after a hard struggle by people supporting them, demonstrating in front of the police stations, blocking the railway stations at Massa and in Naples. The minister Maroni, member of the racist Lega Nord, was compelled to modify the racist measures aimed to organize anti-migrant patrols.On 11 October 2009 in Pistoia (Tuscany), 20 people who were having a meeting for organizing antifascist and antiracist activities in Tuscany were seized by the police and held in the police station all night long, with the false charge to have participated in an antifascist raid against a fascist seat near there. Three of them were arrested, and one of them, Alessandro della Malva, kept in jail where he is still today, with no right ever to communicate by mail with people outside and mainly with his Party, in rigorous imprisonment. Many demonstrations and initiatives of solidarity for him have been carried out, involving hundreds and thousands of people, relatives, friends, comrades, remembering us the images we got of the solidarity for the political prisoners we see, for example, in Turkey.On 16 October, another great demonstration against racism and fascism, with ten thousands of people, was held in Rome, this one too self organized by leftist, anti-imperialist, antifascist and antiracist forces.We ask the international antiracist, antifascist and communist movement to pay attention to what the imperialist bourgeoisie is testing in Italy, that is how to promote the reactionary mobilization of the popular masses. We also ask to the movement to support strongly the resistance the popular masses, the antiracist, antifascist and communist forces are carrying out against these that we call “fascism testing” by the bourgeoisie.The comrades of ATIK (Confederation of Workers from Turkey in Europe) have made a statement about Rosarno facts.Their statement is important. It answers to the call we sent already in the summer, asking the antiracist, antifascist and communist movement, and mainly the European one, to take care how what was happening in Italy, both about bourgeoisie’s war against migrants and about the struggle against this war, that is a kind of war itself, part of the protracted revolutionary people’s war applied according to the particular laws to be applied in the imperialist countries.We have some remarks to make about the statement. Below we reproduce the document and indicate the remarks. Our comments are in italic.

2. ATIK statement

The hysteric aggression against migrants in Italy-Rosarno is ‘modern slavery racism’!

The aggression against migrants in Rosarno is not “hysteric”. It is a planned operation, organized by the local criminal organizations connected with the State forces of repression, a part of a national strategy carried out by the extreme right of the imperialist bourgeoisie, of whom Berlusconi’s gang is representative. The tactic to make acting before the illegal forces (fascist or criminal gangs) and then the legal ones (the carabinieri, the police) as a rearguard is the old one tested firstly by Italian Fascism in the Twenties of the past century.
Rosarno fact are not “modern slavery racism”. The migrants are not slaves. They are integral and important part of the Italian working class. Some of them were workers of Northern Italy factories fired because of the crisis. All of them were workers of the agricultural sector in Southern Italy.
Workers may be treated worse than slaves, but anyway they are not property of somebody, they are free men and women, even if this means that they are free to die because they lack means of subsistence. Workers are a higher kind of laborers than slaves, and this is not a matter of words, but of what political action we are going to carry out with them and for them.

In South Italy, in the Calabria region in Rosarno, new attacks occurred against semi-legal or illegal migrants that are brought into the region for seasonal agricultural work.
The original source of the conflicts in the town has been the violent measurements against the migrant worker’s legitimate mass action by the Rosarno police and carabinieri teams, after the racist-fascist-mafia circles had injured two migrants with firearms. Migrants are moving to protest against the inhumane treatments, humiliations, discrimination and racist aggression of the past months in Rosario. With their legitimate upraising, they have presented a new example of the tradition of civil courage.
It is said that hundreds of migrants were injured during the joint attacks by the mafia circles and the police. The international ruling media is reflecting the issues distorted and is instigating racism by doing so. Migrants have been complaining in the past periods that ‘protection fees’ have been forced upon them by the notorious mafia organization of the Calabria region ‘ Ndrangheta’ resulting in a second exploitation. After these events hundreds of migrants were made subject to sudden and forced deportation without any legality to base this on, they were placed into homes in Bari and Brindisi that not even had a hygienic infrastructure. Thousands of migrants and refugees whom lives are at risk have the intention to flee the region with their own recourses.
The Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni is supporting the hysterical aggressive attacks of the mafia- police collective against illegal migrants, by stating ‘The incidents in Rosarno have shown the necessity for harder method in the struggle against illegal migration and migrant criminality’.
Against this, the progressive, democratic Italian public opinion and the left opposition have expressed a correct political analysis by stating that ‘the essential problem is not the migrants (legal or illegal) but the exploitive, mafia, racist and fascist-minded power struggle’.
Ten thousands of migrant workers are being put to work as slaves in the Calabria region, in Rosano, on the fruit fields, working under bad, unhealthy and precarious conditions. Even the refugee board of the UN, the UNCHR and the Italian unions has been criticizing these inhumane conditions for many years.
Since the period of Mussolini, Calabria is known as a province where racist, fascist-minded and the mafia are very strong, is actually economically an agricultural and domestic tourism region. The demand for maximum profit and superiority on competition through the exploitation of cheap, non-skilled, precarious migrant labour is the common goal of the small businesses, large farmers and the capitalists.
e-mail: resistenza@carc.it – website: http://www.carc.it/