Oppose the European Union

Document passed at the 76th FdCA Council of Delegates

"Saving" Greece has allowed the EU to accelerate its concentration of power into the hands of European political and financial institutions in order to give the continent's businesses back the competitiveness it needs so that it will not fall victim in the global war for access to and control over the world's markets. This can be seen in the creation of an EU "super-auditor", whose tasks will include executive control and direction over the balance of accounts and budgets of the various member States. [Italiano]

---

76th FdCA Council of Delegates

Fano, 19 September 2010

Oppose the European Union

The EU creates its wealth by destroying the rights and freedoms of the European working classes

"Saving" Greece has allowed the EU to accelerate its concentration of power into the hands of European political and financial institutions in order to give the continent's businesses back the competitiveness it needs so that it will not fall victim in the global war for access to and control over the world's markets. This can be seen in the creation of an EU "super-auditor" [1], whose tasks will include executive control and direction over the balance of accounts and budgets of the various member States.

The reduction of labour costs, the reduction of public spending, the subordination of research to the interests of economic competition: these are the three things that must be done. Without argument, with no variables or autonomy conceded to national States, other than the mandate to destroy the Welfare State wherever it exists and stop it from developing where it does not.

They are trying to get out of the crisis by doing the same things that caused it in the first place, continuing to do what the European Bank has been doing for five years now: monetary rigour, increasing productivity and wage moderation.

Current labour legislation provides too many guarantees to workers, so they will simply change it. Choosing what to do with our free time, when to work, when to rest and when to retire is being taken out of our control. The rhythm of our lives is increasingly dictated by capitalism, which tells us when and what to produce, where and how to be exploited, slowly absorbing all our time, preparing for work, looking for work, working to keep our work.

They expect millions of workers from the class of the wage slaves and the exploited to transform themselves into millions of vagrant, casual vendors of manpower, be it manual or intellectual, for the private sector or the public sector, people who earn something intermittently, entitled to rights but always more and more "compliant", entitled to their obligatory freedoms.

There must be no more classes. There must be no more reasons to struggle or organize. All autonomy must be destroyed, all resistance criminalized, all social unrest bridled, together with all strikes.

In every European country there are economists, legislators and unionists busy with this social and cultural destruction.

And yet this financial terror emanating from Brussels and spreading all over Europe is ably tempered with regular reports of good news on the crisis front. Germany breaking through the 3% growth barrier only serves to heap more blame on those vagabonds, the workers of Greece, Spain and Italy. How often do we hear that Germany's shortfall is twice that of Italy and that it is "growing" by exporting to... Europe!

Dividing the workers may be an old trick of capital's, but it still works, to the point of making us think that all these exceptions to national labour agreements are actually a good thing, and not a bloody swindle! As in the case of Italy, at FIAT under Sergio Marchionne and the CISL and UIL, who are increasingly changing from bargaining unions to market unions, working pro-actively to defend a single company or market sector on a national level.

Will the EU's financial terrorism convince European and immigrant workers and their trade union organizations that it is in their interests to make one exception after another to collective employment agreements to the point where they are written out of a country's statute books, thereby giving up everything that the workers' movement has won in this continent since the days of the First International in 1864 through long and difficult struggles against liberal, fascist, social-democratic and neo-liberal bosses?

We don't think so.

The response can be seen in the struggles and resistance to government measures in Greece and France, Ireland and Poland, Spain and Italy, Hungary and Romania, struggles which demonstrate that the European working class is not tame, prostrate or willing to allow itself to be led once more into slavery.

A new class unity can be built. But we will have to foresee and avoid the individual appetites fed by single exceptions to collective agreements, to oppose special cases, to oppose racist reactions and divisions from those who would see immigrant workers sacrificed, to fight the siren call of wealth on a local level, attracting investment to a particular area even if it would be unproductive and a source of pollution in the long term (the YIMBY syndrome).

What is needed is a huge effort by class-struggle politics, so that the mass organizations of revolutionary syndicalism, the political organizations of the class-struggle anarchist movement, the revolutionary, anti-authoritarian and libertarian left can work together and promote, support and feed social and economic resistance in the workplace and in neighbourhoods, with material and cultural opposition to the capitalist attack on our rights, our jobs, our environment, our lives as women and men who live and work in Europe.

This is what anarchist communists in Italy and throughout Europe are working towards, by supporting and participating in the struggles, strikes and mobilizations that will be taking place all over Europe this autumn.

Against the cuts in our social, labour and environmental rights!

Against public deficit reduction policies!

For the redistribution of wealth, for the self-management of social and economic wealth!

For freedom, equality and social justice!

Council of Delegates
FEDERAZIONE DEI COMUNISTI ANARCHICI

Fano, 19 September 2010

Note:
1. Known as the "European Semester", the process will begin in January 2011. See http://www.neurope.eu/articles/Strict-economic-rules/102556.php and http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/articles/euro/documents/2010-05-12-com%282010%29250_final.pdf