Italy's corruption crisis needs workers' solutions

Submitted by Matthew on 18 January, 2012 - 12:38

The so-called “united campaign” of Italy’s three main trade union confederations against Prime Minister Mario Monti’s first austerity measures ended as quickly and as farcically as it began in mid-December.

A call for a four-hour strike did not signal determination to build all-out resistance to attacks on pensions and living standards. Rather, it was a pathetic call for “fair play”; a calculated and cynical gesture to allow Monti, the “neutral technocrat”, to make a propaganda exercise, showing the masses that “as we are all in this together, the rich will also be seen to suffer”.

But the turn-out for the strike was massive, indicating deep disquiet among large sections of workers. That was further incentive for Monti to move quickly. “Evasion, corruption, dishonesty is the modern plague of Italy”, he and his ministers declaimed, like a chorus of Savonarolas, as they launched a “new crusade” against those “who steal from all us”, with fraud squads and highly-publicised and selective stunts “uncovering” widespread tax evasion among the business and professional classes.

Long and hard experience of the last 25 years has taught Italian workers that frothy, pious declarations like this have been part and parcel of centre-left and right administrations at the same time as tax evasion has quintupled!

The forced march and global expansion of financial capitalism, the diffusion of information technologies, the insidiously tenacious advance of various forms of flexible labour conditions, plus ever-more closer links between criminal and “legal” capital — all have multiplied enormously the capacity for evasion and corruption by the rich.

The grotesque state of Italy’s finances has dangerously sharpened Europe’s debt crisis and pushed the Italian bourgeoisie to “put its house in order” financially speaking, but the very nature of the capitalist state limits how far they can seriously change things.

Since 2006 there has been a 200% cut in investigations into fiscal fraud and evasion. The uniquely baroque prison house of the Italian bureaucracy ensures a minimal range of investigatory avenues for any executive power. Moreover the state is the legal guarantor and protector of the “fraudulent” economic and financial system, the banks and businesses who get tax revenue as state protection against losses.

The uprooting of tax evasion and corruption would start with the severest penalties for the employment and superexploitation of irregular labour (massive in Italy!). It would include: the regularisation and sharing of work within a comprehensive plan of socially-necessary public projects; detailed and widespread worker-led control to uncover every form of evasion by business. It would mean nationalisation without compensation of businesses which are evading, the abolition of all commercial secrecy, the opening of the books to workers’ examination and control. Also the nationalisation of the banking system under workers’ control as a single democratically-operated public service where investment is guided by social need and not profit.

These are but the outline of perspectives needed in the battles yet to come. So far, with little sign of organised opposition from any section of the workers’ movement or the radical left, the bureaucratic trade union leaders remain in the driving seat, hoping to bluster and bluff their way to a criminal compliance with Monti, even when ironically from within the goverment evidence of widespread corruption is emerging. But workers’ struggles, strikes, occupations against closures, layoffs, attacks upon conditions continue up and down the country... angry, bitter but unbowed.

This, and this alone, in a bleak moment for millions in Italy, must give us hope.

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