Italy: The sour smell of success
“The Economic miracle turns sour” was the headline of a recent Financial Times survey on Italy. Italian industry has come down with a bump from the “boom” of the last ten years.
Low cost-structures, the result of large-scale State takeover of industries, exploitation of previously untapped natural resources and plentiful supplies of cheap and unmilitant labour, allowed Italy to compete very favourably on international markets in the ’50s and ’60s. She benefited particularly from the Common Market removal of tariff barriers. However, rising costs and the appearance of cheaper competitors like Japan and South Korea have slowed down considerably her rate of economic growth, and brought other problems in their wake.
True Italy is no longer placed, as she was in the first years after the second World War, alongside Spain, Greece and Portugal as one of Western Europe’s backward countries. She is the tenth manufacturing nation in the world. But as an advanced capitalist country, Italy now suffers from all the same internal contradictions as her older, capitalist neighbours.
In industry short-time and redundancies are already becoming commonplace. Even during the boom period unemployment never fell below half a million. Now, together with prices, it is rising steeply. Rapid industrial advance, first without the Common Market and then inside it has clearly done nothing to solve working-class problems. Capitalist expansion is not a working-class issue. The benefits of it go largely to the ruling class. Decisions taken on such matters as nationalisation or the Common Market depend on ruling class interests. Their effects for good or bad on the working-class are quite marginal and quite incidental.
In Italy the worst signs of the anarchy of production for profit can be seen in the fields of housing, public transport, health and education. There has been no development in social services to match the rapid changeover since the war from a largely agricultural to a highly industrialised economy. When people flocked from the land into the industrial centres of Northern Italy to become wage workers, they found themselves the victims of uncontrolled building speculation, insufficient transport facilities, a primitive health structure and a hopelessly outdated and inefficient education system. Immigrants from the South (who formed the majority of the new wage slaves) were the worst hit. They were the least able to defend themselves from the conditions they found. Job rivalry with native northerners caused widespread discrimination of an almost racial character. Furthermore as the North prospered, the mainly agricultural South tended to decline relatively. Despite piecemeal attempts at establishing industry in the South, it is generally recognised that the gap in living standards between North and South is still actually on the increase.
Another point worth mentioning is the unlimited sacrifice of environmental to economic interests during the last twenty years. Rapid industrialisation has made Italy an ecological horror story. Eighty-five per cent of its coastline is at pollution danger level and the smog in Milan and Turin (caused largely by the massive increase in car population) is as bad as in Tokyo. The possible decline of the very lucrative tourist industry is just one small indication of the unplannability of capitalism.
Social protest lay dormant in the first part of Italy’s period of high economic growth. In the last five years, however, accumulated working-class grievances have come home to roost. The trade unions have not only concerned themselves with wage bargaining, but have also backed social reforms. Demands supported by strike action have been made for better and lower cost housing (there is a large “surplus” of accommodation on lease at £50 a month and over) and for improvements in the health services. Archaic educational structures have caused tremendous upheavals in Italy’s schools and universities. Furthermore spontaneous riots, especially in the impoverished South, have been touched off by the unemployment situation and by administrative inertia over local reforms.
The Italian Communist Party (PCI), opportunist as all so-called “communist” parties anywhere and here far stronger than elsewhere in Western Europe, has become the reforming party par excellence — while out of power that is. It is a past master at using working-class grievances and demands for reform to attract support. Kept out of “centre-right” and “centre-left” coalitions since 1947, the PCI, with up to 29 per cent of the national vote, would dearly love to have a respectable place in the Italian government. It points to the inefficiency and stop-gap nature of present and previous administrations, but fails to say how its own inclusion would lead to greater stability.
It is, in fact, quite true to say that Italian coalition governments, the caretakers of the Italian capitalist class, have spent most of their time in power since the war bickering and squabbling amongst themselves. They have proved most inefficient administrators of capitalism. The heavy strains and stresses which go hand in hand with commercial society everywhere have been vastly increased by the wheeling and dealing of the “political gangsters” at Rome. It will come as no surprise if in the near future the PCI, already in control of certain regions under Italy’s recent decentralisation programme, realises its dream of having a share in a Western capitalist government. A powerful weapon on its side is the Italian Social Movement (MSI); the strongest avowedly Fascist party in advanced Western Europe.
In reality capitalism’s deficiencies are to be explained by reference not to political incompetence but to the basic conflict of interests that exists in capitalism between employer and employee. The employer is all the time pushed by competitive market forces to produce as cheaply as possible. If he is to stay in business therefore, he must keep his costs down, which means getting as much work as possible out of his employee for the lowest possible wages. The worker, on the other hand, strives, as he must, to keep up his living standards and better his working conditions as much as he is able.
In Italy, as elsewhere, the mass of workers have never yet actually questioned the right of their employers to exploit them for wages. They limit themselves to bargaining for higher wages, using the threat or the weapon of strike action. Moreover, in recent years not only the traditional sectors have used these tactics to defend their interests. Doctors, civil servants and teachers now engage in traditionally working-class actions. The high peak of unrest was the end of 1969, when long-term collective contracts for six million workers were due for renewal. Prolonged strikes were followed by wage increases and improved fringe benefits. But this was not, as indeed it could not be, the end of the story. Since that time strikes have been endemic in Italian society. They will continue to be so. They are an unpleasant necessity of capitalism, but of course no lasting answer to basic working-class problems.
Street politics is the domain of rival groups of thugs calling themselves Maoists (or even “Socialists”) and Fascists. Pitched street battles between left, right and forces of “law and order” are what often faces the inhabitants of the big Italian cities. Apart from the political confusion this spreads among the working-class, it helps to create an atmosphere of fear and tension in which the majority of people would welcome undemocratic government action to outlaw political groups considered “extremist”. Too late then to cry wolf and fascism from the rooftops.
It is truly tragic that the many young people in these groups look no further than eastern state capitalist dictatorships for a solution to the problems of life under western capitalism. However, they do realise that the society in which they live is not run in working-class interests. That in itself is a step forward. We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain point to the fallacy of their ‘solution’, restate the immediate and pressing need for a world of free access and look forward to the day when a genuine Socialist Party is set up in Italy with the same aims and principles as the Companion Parties of Socialism.
H.K.M.