In recent days the Collective ex-Gkn issued a statement in ten points on the dispute still ongoing entitled “A long text, but necessary. The real point about the Gkn dispute” ( https://www.facebook.com /coordinamentogknfirenze).
We can distinguish a first part of the communiqué focused on the analysis of the current situation, from a second part more explicitly programmatic. The first highlights the slow but progressive agony underway and the lack of credible prospects. An agony piloted, it is said rightly, but also continuously masked and concealed in order to cheat the cards and de-power, blunt and pacify the initiative of the workers and then put them, at the right time, in front of the done deed.
In the second part the emphasis is placed on the need for the intervention of “public capital”, also apeaking of of “integrated factory”, of “popular control”, of “popular shareholding”. It does not seem that the Collective is simply focusing on an organic public management of the plant. On the other hand, the hypothesis of the search for hypothetical hybrid forms with the involvement of employees in a corporate form appears increasingly defined.
What is certain is that the stage of the romantic explosion of conflict is coming to an end. More and more, behind the so-called “insurgency”, emerges one of the many variants of a line from the “trade union left” that today more than ever is not able to indicate a class path to the ex-Gkn and non-Gkn workers.
As regards, however, the transition to an organic management by the public capital, which however is often recalled by the Collective, not only does it seem today, in the specific of this dispute, largely illusory, But it can only work to break a perspective of unitary class trade-union organization of the proletariat.
The latter class, which today clearly cannot aim, in the sphere of capitalist economic and political domination, at a public management and control of industrial enterprises. This is because in this context, on a generalized scale, this type of management and control can only be the result of a new phase of State Capitalism no longer focused, as it happens today, on the private.
This last phase is in perspective, in the general crisis of imperialism and in the development of the inter-imperialist war and its war economy, more than probabale. In that case, the fascists on duty will prepare it, probably with the full support of sectors of the working class aristocracy and services and residual components of the confederal and alternative unions and, Therefore, certainly not according to the interests of the working class and the popular masses.
With regard to the direction taken so far by the current dispute, a logic emerges that is both corporate and, at least as regards the effective defence of the class interests of the workers, fundamentally illusory.
A programmatic perspective, the one that increasingly is outlining the ex-Gkm Collective, which allows us to glimpse, as the only possible concrete possibility, the transfer of the management of the plant into the hands of a working class aristocracy at the service of market needs, orders, etc. of this or that Capital. Such management as to affirm, as an integral or predominant part of a new proprietary and entrepreneurial configuration, so-called social forms and cooperatives of supersexploitation and precarization. This process can only be abandoned on the street or remove more or less important sectors of workers from the factory. Besides, all this transpires quite clearly when the ex-Gkn Collective speaks of workers’ control and public control over the proposed new property.
There is a difference between the trade union compromises which can be the more or less painful expression of certain balance of power established during the struggle and Instead, the collaborationist and corporative lines as romantically mystified by the radicality of languages, passwords and, sometimes, forms of struggle. Strange as it may seem to the many fans of the struggle of the ex-Gkn Collective who are not at all concerned with discriminating between class union lines and opportunist lines, what matters from the point of view of workers’ interests is the struggle, the organization and construction of an effective class trade union block. It is not up to the workers to climb on the glass to promote baseless hypotheses or to pursue proposals, not always illusory, representative of the interests of the sectors of the workers’ hegemonic aristocracy in the trade union left.
What is therefore necessary from a class point of view is to shift the axis of the struggle for an attempt to escape from the current situation in the direction of the organization of the mobilization and the union unification of other workers’ realities. It is necessary to merge the struggle of the ex-Gkn workers with the initiative of the factory workers, so it is a matter of overcoming the media-drive and movimentists logic, substantially linked to the construction of a diverse reformist movement in fact more than anything else of opinion, that increasingly characterize the line and practice of the Collective.
However, there remains a fundamental question. The whole experience of alternative syndicalism, since the late 1980s, shows that without the formation of an adequate revolutionary political party of the proletariat the same so-called class trade union initiative, self-organized, antagonist or anti-capitalist is destined to degenerate into movimentism, economicism, collaborationism and even today’s flirtations with the fascist government Meloni.
NUOVA EGEMONIA
CONTRIBUTI TEORICO-POLITICI PER LA COSTITUZIONE DEL PARTITO MARXISTA-LENINISTA-MAOISTA 