Early in January, riots broke loose in Rosarno, a village in Southern Italy, after a few immigrant fruit-pickers, mainly from Africa, were shot at in the night by a group of probably hired gunmen – a night of guerrilla by exasperated and exploited proletarians. The day after, in vigilante-fashion (infiltration and provocation on part of the local Mafia-like organization, the ‘ndrangheta, was widely rumoured), Rosarno good citizens assaulted the immigrant community, and demanded its removal. Police arrived, and the fruit-pickers were rounded up and deported. The following article appeared on the pages of our Italian newspaper, Il programma comunista, n.1/2010.

Long live the proletarians of Rosarno!

Fleeing from misery, war, oppression and all the rest of colonialism’s fine heritage, as well as imperialist present, crammed like animals onto the longboats of the human flesh merchants, the survivors of an odyssey by land and sea, processed by the concentration camps of the “reception centres” (!), more or less unofficially (more often than not with promises of regular work never to be kept) sent off to any place or any economic sector in need of cheap labour to promote the business interests of the owners, businessmen, bosses and mini-bosses, contractors, “foremen”, pimps, drug dealers, greater and lesser extortionists of legal and illegal plus value (the varied world of capital), exploited in the fields at 20 euros a day for 15-16 hours of work three-four days a week, forced to sleep in stinking sheds, abandoned factories, revolting hovels… And as well as all that, the  butt of the crudest racism coming from youths in search of excitement, from a rabble that is itself the victim of the same exploitation but incapable of grasping it, from the rabid petit-bourgeois who feels trapped but is too stupid (or media-drugged) to understand why, from ceaseless and growing state oppression and persecution by bands of what more or less amount to mercenaries…This is an X-ray of the conditions of Rosarno’s immigrant proletarians (as, yesterday, of Villa Literno’s, and as always, anywhere in the world – in Italy, France, England, the United States...).
After being shot at by some scoundrel or other, they rebelled against the constant persecution and demonstrated that “if we must die, let it not be  like hogs, hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.” They fought back instinctively; they overstepped the limits of that disgusting, suffocating legality that pretends everything’s just fine until the pot boils over; they didn’t climb onto factory rooftops or factory chimneys to make themselves visible to public opinion but went out onto the streets; yes, they revolted, angrily, ferociously, indifferent to the supreme (and castrating) laws of democracy and non-violence. As the oppressed always have done and always will do, when they have reached the limits of what they can put up with.
All hell was let loose in the bel paese of capital: and the good citizens, respectful of law and order, turned into fascist squads in their “hunt for the nigger”. The outcome was evident in this situation: the forces of law and order moved in, questions were asked in Parliament, a surprise raid was made and there were expulsion orders issued.  This is no surprise:  law and order, whoever they are imposed by (the State with its cops, its priests and its politicians; right-thinking citizens who, instead of the blazing crosses of the Klu Klux Klan, exhibit the severed heads of calves…), are on the side of the bosses and of capital, that varied world mentioned earlier.
Infiltrated by the “‘ndrangheta”? Provocation? Artificially-fuelled exasperation? This is of no interest to us. The power of capital has always made use of any band, legal or illegal, to exert its pressure on the proletariat (in the practical, physical sense, in the flesh) and first and foremost on its weakest, most isolated elements – those most exposed to blackmail. Capitalism always divides in order to command, creates reserves of proletariats on which to wreck its hatred and its resent, to point to as “the enemy in our own home” – the Irish in England during the industrial revolution, the black former slaves and their descendents in that cradle of democracy that is the United States of America… Capitalism has always exploited ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious origins to oppress the proletariat and set them one against the other, to avoid their different sectors joining together in a single battlefront capable of  blowing up once and for all, under the revolutionary guidance of the communists, this filthy world of wheelers and dealers, profiteers, exploiters and  all sorts of rabble. What the sociologists, in their antiseptic terms, call “ethnic  replacement” has always worked like this: in the United States (which, as the most powerful form of imperialism, is the mirror in which we can recognize ourselves) after the Irish proletariat in the mid-eighteen hundreds came the turn of the Italian proletarians, then of the Jewish and the Chinese and the Mexicans and the Puerto Ricans, right up to today – in the same economic sectors and often in the space of only a few weeks: away with one lot (with gunshots and kicks up the backside) and in with another (ready for more gunshots and kicks up the backside)…  In Rosarno and the surrounding areas something similar has happened: the crisis is hitting the country, too, not only the cities, and so the labour-force, kept in conditions of semi-slavery, is reduced and re-shaped (as well as being terrorized, which is always just as well!), by any means possible: explosions in the night, the “indignation of the townspeople”, the “anger of the people”, the Home Secretary Maroni, and the cops.  After the “niggers” it appears that it will be the Rumanians (the “devils” of some months previously), because the mandarins still have to be picked and, at 20 euros a day, the right-thinking citizens are careful to have nothing to do with this… Briefly, the immigrant proletarians (clandestine or not) have been fired and others will be brought in, still more vulnerable to blackmail and even more inhuman conditions. The “native” proletariat should think carefully about this, because it is the same fate that will be reserved for them when the time comes – with determination, rapidly and without social buffers - to get rid of excess labour on a market undergoing a crisis of over production. The factories in Pomigliano d’Arco, Termini Imerese, Porto Vesme and all the other places where rips are appearing in the fabric of capitalist production, are not so far away from the fields of Rosarno, Villa Literno, Castel Volturno...
The proletarians of Rosarno have shouted it aloud: the problems are the same, it is urgent for the response to be the same – a united proletarian front, the unyielding defence of living and working conditions, awareness that in the régime of capital life cannot be worth living, the will to fight this régime until it is destroyed.  And above all, so that all this does not boil down to empty words, the recognition that there is an urgent need to establish the roots of the international communist party and extend its growth.