The attack on immigrant workers is an attack on the entire working class. The response must be solid without ethnic divisions!

Leaflet given out on the occasion of the “Day Without Immigrants: 24 Hours Without Us”

The Rosarno Revolt in Calabria briefly brought into the media spotlight the inhuman working and living conditions of the great majority of immigrant workers. Moreover the crisis of the system of production is pushing an ever wider layers of the working class, of whatever nationality, below the poverty line. In this context it is disastrous that inter-ethnic violence between the various groups of the exploited, divided by skin colour but facing the very same common social conditions; i.e. excluded from control of the means of production and always more frequently left without any means of subsistence, after being laid off and discarded like a piece of useless machinery.

For this reasons whilst we believe it is right to denounce the conditions of hyper-exploitation and oppression of the migrant proletariat we also believe its necessary to call on all wage workers *to struggle*, whether local or immigrant. On the other hand we need to be clear that even amongst the immigrants there are exploiters, corporals, and little bosses who live as parasites on the sweat of the workers on a par with the national bourgeoisie. Exploiters and exploited, whatever their ethnic origins, have opposing material interests!

The policy of the ruling class, the bosses and the politicians of every institution instead tends at every point to deepen the divisions within the working class because it is clear that their power increases the more we are divided. The points system for permission to remain, recently introduced in Italy, serves only to increase the conditions of uncertainty and the possibility of blackmail of immigrant workers, thus worsening the conditions of all workers. If the lives of the immigrant proletariat today already depend totally on the bosses and their agents, as well as the various criminal elements who speculate by selling real or assumed work contracts at unbelievable prices, tomorrow this uncertainty will further increase. The conditions of disposable labour, used now and thrown away tomorrow, is now to widespread, thanks to the various agreements made between the bosses, the unions, and the government, and has now become the norm for the immigrant workers with devastating human costs.

The aim of international capital to push wages below their value, that is below what is necessary in order to live, brings about a constant lowering of wages of all sectors of wage labour, because today the reference point for all bosses is the wages of the poorest and most exploited strata of the world proletariat. All this is the result of the world economic crisis which is forcing the bosses to increase exploitation in order to sustain industrial profits and a monstrous financial speculation. The crisis has narrowed the bourgeoisie’s room for manoeuvre. Besides the bestial increase in exploitation of the weakest sectors of the proletariat, in other words, immigrants, the young and women, this leads to the ever more frequent transformation of inter-imperialist tensions into wars, hypocritically disguised as humanitarian interventions or in defence of civilisation and religion.

All this is facilitated by racism - nourished by an obsessive and shameful campaign in all the means of (dis)information - which also poisons large sections of the proletariat who have lost, or have never had, their class identity, and this is even more the case with class consciousness. A racism sustained by the life of physical and moral brutalisation typical of any society founded on exploitation and oppression, which for the migrant proletariat means an even greater exploitation and oppression, is stirred up by the most reactionary and lousy sections of the bourgeoisie but is useful to the bourgeoisie as a whole.

We can and must struggle against the bosses, their government and their racist, reactionary and anti-working laws because greater exploitation for the migrant proletariat means greater exploitation for all. Only a working class united on the terrain of real anti-capitalist struggle, not on that of the union manoeuvres that are always defeated can do it, beyond and against all false religious, ethnic and linguistic divisions. Only a revolutionary party on an international scale free from any political leftovers of Stalinism and opportunism can show the way out of this dreadful society.

No to all the anti-immigration laws of the bourgeois government! No to racism and exploitation!

For the revival of class struggle and the international party of the proletariat!

Immigrant and Italian workers: same class, same struggle!