ILVA: Nationalization as a solution?

With the continuing tragedy that is the ILVA [1] affair, there are more and more frequent calls for nationalization as an answer to the arrogance and imperiousness of the Riva [2] family, a radical, class-struggle response whereby expropriation would save the day and, literally, both production and the environment. Just like when there used to be talk of nationalizing the banks. Pity it's not actually like that. [Italiano]

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ILVA: Nationalization as a solution?

With the continuing tragedy that is the ILVA [1] affair, there are more and more frequent calls for nationalization as an answer to the arrogance and imperiousness of the Riva [2] family, a radical, class-struggle response whereby expropriation would save the day and, literally, both production and the environment. Just like when there used to be talk of nationalizing the banks. Pity it's not actually like that.

Those who invoke the State as guarantor of the community pretend not to see that as far as the ILVA question is concerned (and not just that) the role of the State as guarantor has already been exercised in full, both during the past nationalization, when the bases were laid for today's disaster, both in the trials for pollution and in the thefts and other sleaze we know about, and in the phase of the Riva ownership, even more so today. And we know well which side the State is on: the State has always continued to carry out its basic role as guarantor of world finance and its "contracts", its role as custodian of capital's ownership with all that entails, having long since abandoned any pretence of acting as a neutral "third party" or seeking to include the workers.

But the question is more general and it is worthwhile examining it.

Anyone who knows the history of the workers' movement knows that collectivizations have had grafted on to them the clash between the political organization (party) and the resistance organization (union), above all in the hottest moments of the class war (except for disappearing completely in post-revolutionary societies where the union only exists formally, the party becomes the state and workers' bodies disappear).

But even then the choice has always been between control by the workers over the production processes, and thus on the mode of capitalist production even up to its radical transformation, or statalization, which controls factories and workplaces in general in their name.

On the one hand, the direct involvement of the workers, of the other the State for which the workers are, at best, subjects to "educate".

When in 1910 the Labour Party in Britain (sole example in history of a political party directly created by the union, and which remains effectively in the hands of the union) proposed the nationalization of the coalmines, the miners in South Wales and the union that organized them responded with a long strike, in which the workers responded politically by distributing a pamphlet against nationalization and the union policies that were described as orthodox:

"the state is as much an enemy as the bosses, the workers must be able to take over control of their industry and manage it with a complete system of workers' control".

> The situation now is much different. Decades of manoeuvres to push the workers out of the decision-making processes, blocking any sort of direct intervention, using everything, including division, the impotence of union organizations, blackmail, driving to exasperation point the contradiction between environment and work, driving the workers of the North hit by the lock-out against those of the South, while pieces of the State battle it out over their heads.

But the only way that the workers have to escape all this can only lie along the path of increased direct involvement by the workers themselves: no request for protection to a State which is an accomplice to the disaster, no concessions and no subjection to Riva and his henchmen in the factories, but occupy the 7 closed factories, self-organizing in order to start up production again, while at the same time denouncing the insufficiencies and guilt regarding environmental and work safety omissions, building and "moving" from a position of worker strength and unity, from Piedmont to Apulia.

And also, looking for and obtaining an active solidarity network for protection and sharing in the community, on the part of all those who have for some time been involved in building forms of economic and social alternatives. Solidarity which will not fail to appear and which cannot fail to appear.

Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici

22 September 2013


Notes:

1. ILVA was a State-controlled steel firm which was sold to Riva Acciaio in 1995. It has 6 plants in various part of Italy, but is based in Taranto. The Taranto mill has been at the centre of a long-standing inquest into environmental pollution and is currently under emergency administration.
2. The Riva Group - owner of ILVA - is the 3rd-largest steel producer in Europe.