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Italy :

Against the suspension of wages to workers who did not get vaccinated!!!

Against the social despotism introduced by the government!!!

Against the collaborationism of the class-collaborationist unions that kowtow to the government and the bosses!!!

 

 

The decree law of 21 September, signed by President Mattarella and published in the Official Gazette, suspends the payment of wages and salaries to all employees, both public and private, who did not want to be vaccinated and therefore cannot show their so-called green pass. According to this decree, employers are obliged to check whether their employees have the green pass and to hand over to the prefect documents relating to any violation, for which the prefect can impose a fine of between 600 and 1 500 euros on the employee! In addition to not being paid, these workers are also subject to heavy fines. This is the cruelest measure that Italy, the only country in the world, has introduced against workers!

Inside the factories and offices, a real police state is thus being established, with all bosses big and small participating. What do the trade union leaders do in this situation? Throughout all this time they have never opposed any measure that weakened workers' rights; they have cancelled workers' meetings and continued to sabotage workers' struggles when they spontaneously broke out, preferring to "negotiate" at the expense of workers at comfortable negotiating tables; they have pushed for any measure that defended the needs of the enterprise and its competitiveness; never organized real struggles against workplace accidents and deaths, limiting themselves to bemoaning the lack of safety measures in the workplace and pleading for the intervention of the "authorities" to punish those responsible for such misconduct; they left the laid-off and unemployed to their fate and contributed to the spread of precarization, thus opening the real paths for illegal work and illegal employment; finally, pretending to defend "jobs", they agreed with the government and the employers' associations on the attack on wages of workers who do not want to be vaccinated!

The concentrated attack of bosses,  government and  collaborationist unions on the living and working conditions of the proletariat requires a vigorous reaction of the whole proletariat, because this attack is not only aimed at those today "unvaccinated", but opens a period of preventive repression by which the bourgeois power wants to subordinate the proletariat even more to the demands of capitalist profit.

The near future will be a time full of conflicts between the different bourgeoisies, because the markets are becoming ever tighter because there are so many competitors. Each bourgeoisie tends to defend its national interests against the bourgeoisies of all other countries, and in order to defend them effectively in a world where competition is getting tougher, each bourgeoisie needs to extract as much surplus value as possible from wage labor. Every bourgeoisie knows that this extraordinary pressure on the existential conditions of the proletarian masses forces them to react, to fight, to revolt, even violently, because their lives and the lives of their families are at stake. It therefore uses all the means necessary to subordinate the proletarian masses to its interests; means which are supposedly democratic and peaceful, but which mask the real class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

The Sars-CoV-2 epidemic, which the world bourgeoisie – so determined to defend the economies of their enterprises and states – deliberately allowed to spread across the planet, turning it into a pandemic that could have been effectively contained and suppressed by the advanced means of modern science from its inception, was an opportunity for every bourgeoisie to impose and plan for much stricter social control than has ever been seen since the end of the Second World Imperialist War. It is no coincidence that the measures taken, from curfews to lockdowns to an intense media campaign spreading fear of an "invisible" enemy such as the new coronavirus (which was in fact already known and on which the big chemical-pharmaceutical multinationals were already carrying out research and tests in preparation for the production of billions of doses once vaccination campaigns were launched everywhere), went – under the pretext of a health emergency – in the desired direction: to subordinate the entire population, and especially the proletariat, to the dictates of today's bourgeois governments and to prepare them for the dictates of tomorrow.

Alongside the gigantic profits that the big multinational pharmaceutical companies have pocketed and continue to pocket, and therefore alongside the purely economic interest of the capitalists in the health sector, there is also the political interest of the bourgeois ruling class in preparing the proletariat for the much heavier sacrifices that the next world economic and financial crisis and the future crisis of war will bring. The richest capitalist countries, while crushing the populations of the weakest countries in conditions of growing poverty and suffering, can at this stage afford to spend billions to meet the most urgent needs of the great mass of the proletariat, whether employed or unemployed, and at the same time to subject it to a vaccination campaign that serves not only to increase the profits of the big pharmaceutical companies, but also serves as a tool to subjugate it to the dictates of the government: today under the pretext of fighting the "invisible" enemy Covid-19, tomorrow in a war waged for a new imperialist division of the world against a very visible enemy. The mutual competition in which native proletarians are systematically pitted against immigrant proletarians, older proletarians against younger proletarians, more educated and specialized proletarians against proletarians without special specialization, male proletarians against female proletarians, the employed against the unemployed, the proletarians of the North against the proletarians of the South, is a competition that extends even to the sphere of the health care of vaccinated and unvaccinated proletarians!

The battle that the proletarians must wage is therefore against mutual competition at any level, because this only plays into the hands of the capitalists and politicians who defend their interests and weakens the proletariat even more in the face of all the restrictive measures that the bourgeois political power is taking and will take under the pretext of economic crisis, of the healthcare or environmental emergency or of terrorism, just as it has done in the past when it invokes the values of "democratic civilization", which the same bourgeois power tramples on every time its interests are challenged by competition with other imperialist countries.

Regarding the vaccination campaign, in which Italy has been a leader among Western countries since 2014, with the aim of vaccinating 100% of the population in the event of an expected major epidemic, the government has taken one step at a time. Initially, before the vaccines were available, which the big pharmaceutical companies had been working on since the first coronavirus outbreak in 2003, the government moved to restrictions, closures, red zones, lockdowns and the current "obligation" of proletarians to work in areas defined as crucial for the national economy and for the lives of the population (with all the classic shortcomings of public healthcare: lack of hospitals, personal protective equipment, lung ventilators, hygienic workplace conditions, etc. ), the creation of statistical methods for measuring the infected, the hospitalized and the dead, which were manipulated on purpose because they had to support the campaign of general fear that the bourgeoisie expected to combine with a large-scale vaccination campaign once the vaccines were ready.

All government activity has been focused on the vaccination campaign while denigrating and completely ignoring the local health service and all medical operations available for immediate curative intervention at the first sign of an epidemic. They have overwhelmed emergency rooms, hospitals (whose numbers have been greatly reduced in recent years) and nursing homes with Covid-19 patients rather than strengthen the network of local physicians and continue to research blood plasma-based treatments or pharmaceutical products that already exist and have produced effective results; they have delayed further treatment for all other serious diseases (as if dying of cancer is better than dying of Covid! ) and gave "priority" to Covid patients, knowing full well that cramming Covid patients into hospitals and nursing homes would facilitate the spread of the disease, not its cure. And all voices, not just those of virologists, immunologists and scientists, who expressed doubts, were silenced, labeled fake news, vilified and subjected to public ridicule. It is a well-known fact that for a whole year, all the media, and especially television, every time they provided data on the vaccinated, they spoke of 'immune', while the same virologists - themselves promoters of the vaccination campaign - never went so far as to claim that the current vaccination guaranteed immunity. It is clear that the aim of bourgeois propaganda has been, on the one hand, to frighten the majority of the population into getting vaccinated as a matter of urgency (Draghi's famous statement: If you don't get vaccinated, you will die!) and, on the other, to claim that vaccination equals immunity. When they began to announce the need for a third dose... and while many doctors claimed that the virus would not disappear quickly but would circulate for years to come, the word immunity disappeared from the tongue of television journalism. Meanwhile, since the vaccination campaign did not proceed according to the timetable set by the government, due to the reluctance of a large part of the population, frightened precisely by the possible fatal infection of the virus, but equally frightened by the harmful and fatal consequences of the anti-covid vaccines (Pfizer and Astra-Zeneca are high on the blacklist), the government systematically prolonged the state of emergency by increasing restrictive measures, up to the point of introducing a mandatory so-called “green pass” – i.e. vaccination – for all 23 million Italian workers and blackmailed all those who were not vaccinated and did not want to be vaccinated by deciding to suspend their wages until they had the green pass. It is precisely this further blackmail that the workers must fight against, a blackmail that is intended to sharpen the competition between them. On the other hand, bourgeois science is unable to prove that vaccination will conquer coronavirus. On the contrary, it speaks of the need for a third dose and continuous booster vaccinations in the years to come…

The cunning of the Italian government is to declare a "state of emergency" in the context of a full-blown Sars-Cov-2 pandemic. In such cases, the state has a choice: Adopt a law on compulsory vaccination for the entire population and, in such a case, assume all responsibility for cases where the consequences of vaccination are detrimental or even fatal for the vaccinated; or, as has happened, to issue a series of decrees which, one after the other, add a whole series of measures formally aimed at tackling the spread of the epidemic, letting every citizen have the "free choice" to be vaccinated or not, but in practice obliging him to be vaccinated if he does not want to remain a prisoner in his own house or without a wage!

In practice, this is a disguised obligation to vaccinate that places all responsibility on the individual worker, who is fined heavily in addition to having their wages suspended if not getting vaccinated.

There are billions of viruses, says bourgeois science, especially in the world of wild animals. Some of them are exclusively human, such as smallpox and polio, and there are also those that can make the species leap from wild animal to human, and are increasingly being transmitted through animals in intensive farms and markets, where there is an almost complete lack of hygiene, which are, after all, the hallmarks of capitalist society. Farms in which, as many reports have shown, animals are also crammed together and treated like meat and money machines, in unsanitary conditions. In addition, air, soil and water pollution and uncontrolled deforestation create an environment that is extremely conducive to the spread of viruses - facilitated by very frequent air travel around the world - which become all the more deadly the more they are given the opportunity to come into contact with masses of people with weakened immune systems and who are already suffering from other respiratory or heart diseases. On the other hand, it is no coincidence that the average age of deaths from Covid-19 in industrialized countries is 80 years for men and 85 years for women, with more than 64% of the deceased having been diagnosed with three or more previous illnesses!

The proletarians, if they want to effectively oppose not only this attack on their immediate conditions of existence, but also the repressive policies of bourgeois power and the whole range of political and trade union forces that support it, must go beyond the question of so-called "individual free choice", which in reality turns out to be a huge mockery.

The proletarians must fight against the criminal suspension of wages if not vaccinated, and the proletarians who have been vaccinated must also take part in this struggle and thus overcome the extra competition which the bourgeoisie is constantly stirring up among the proletarians.

We reiterate that the bourgeoisie's goal is to complete vaccination cycles for the entire population despite the harmful consequences of Covid vaccines and the transformation of the population into guinea pigs for pharmaceutical experiments, is - and this is most important for the bourgeoisie - to subject the proletariat (in a good way for those who get vaccinated, in a bad way for everyone else) to the dictates of bourgeois power and to suppress all those who do not want to become pawns in the hands of the bosses and political forces.

The bourgeoisie doesn't care about prevention! It capitalizes on disasters, calamities, catastrophes and uses these emergencies to further grind the proletariat under wage slavery!

 

For class solidarity among proletarians, whether they are vaccinated or not!

Against blackmailing by non-payments of wages to those who do not show their green card!

Against the repression of proletarians who rebel against attacks on their living and working conditions!

For a class struggle independent of any bourgeois and collaborationist apparatus!

 

 

International Communist Party

October, 1st 2021

www.pcint.org

 

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