The defense of the entire working class requires solidarity in organizing and fighting with its precarious and irregular sections

Four young men, aged between 18 and 29. They were agricultural workers, immigrant laborers, three Afghans and one Pakistani: Ullah Ismat Qiemi, Amin Fazal Khogjani, Waseem Khan, and Safi Iayjad. They were massacred because they rebelled against their exploiters. An execution—public, in broad daylight, brutal—to set an example to all the laborers who work in the fields by the tens of thousands every day, so that they may endure, not fight, not strike, not unionize, in order to obtain a living wage, residency permits, housing, and healthcare.

This horror occurred on Monday, June 1st, in Amendolara (Cosenza), on the western edge of the Metapontino region, a rich agricultural area on the Ionian coast that extends into the province of Matera in Basilicata, borders the province of Cosenza in Calabria to the west, and the province of Taranto in Puglia to the east. It is primarily devoted to the cultivation of fruit trees, especially citrus fruits.

In the torrent of hypocrisy unleashed by the press and bourgeois parties that we are accustomed to witnessing on occasions like this, however, no one could say that it was an unusual and unforeseeable crime.

Four days earlier, in the province of Vicenza, an Indian farm laborer, seriously injured in a three-meter fall on a farm, was abandoned by his owners on the street instead of being taken to the emergency room.

Twenty days earlier, on May 9th, in Taranto, a few kilometers from Amendolara, a Malian farm laborer—Sako Bakari—was killed by a group of racially motivated youths at 5:00 a.m. while on his way to be exploited in the fields.

Two years ago, in June 2024, in the Agro Pontino area of Lazio, in the province of Latina, an Indian Sikh laborer, Satnam Singh, was abandoned in front of his house by his farm owner after a machine severed his arm. He was forced to go to the emergency room and thus avoid legal problems. Due to the delay in getting him to the emergency room, he died the following day.

On June 2, 2018, in San Calogero, in the province of Vibo Valentia (Calabria), Malian laborer Soumaila Sacko, a USB union activist, was shot dead by a farm owner while he was trying to collect sheet metal in an abandoned private lot to use for the shack where he slept in the nearby tent city of San Ferdinando, in Rosarno. Over the years, the tent city has become home to over two thousand laborers who work seasonally in the Gioia Tauro plain, primarily harvesting citrus fruits.

This bloody chain, only a small portion of which we report, is not the product of a "sick capitalism" or individual criminal enterprises, but the very physiology of the capitalist mode of production applied to the land. Gangmastering is not a "feudal remnant" to be eradicated with more bourgeois legality, but the scientific form by which agrarian capital enriches itself, in Calabria as in Punjab, in India and Pakistan, in China or in Mato Grosso in Brazil, etc.

But the most important fact does not concern the death or any other episode expressing the subjugation of the agricultural proletariat in Italy, but rather its revolt on January 7, 2010, in Rosarno. We wrote: "A punch in the face of the polishers of capitalism and its ’progress,’ the strike that broke out in Rosarno is not an episode of a war between races, but between opposing social classes, a typical struggle of seasonal laborers, with the same tumultuous traits of its centuries-old history. On one side, a layer of pure wage-earning proletarians who, like their entire class, have nothing to lose and no homeland; on the other, the landowners, the agrarian capitalists, their State and police, and their armed janissaries, with the fruits that are ripening on the trees" ("Il Partito Comunista" no. 339, January-February 2010).

That revolt terrified not only the local, right-thinking lower middle class, but also the medium and large employers who derive enormous profits from the exploitation of laborers throughout the food supply chain, from the fields to large-scale retail outlets. It certainly worried not only the bourgeoisie but also its democratically-styled political regime, which, with its anti-immigrant laws, beginning with the Bossi-Fini Law (Law 189/2002), placed them in conditions of illegality and constant blackmail to obtain or maintain a residence permit. Since then, those legal provisions have remained in place—in perfect continuity across successive governments—to divide the working class, along with the hatred and prejudice hammered out by the bourgeois media.

This slave-owning legislation is not "right-wing" or "parliamentary racism", but an economic function of the bourgeois ruling class State. The State guarantees the employers a reservoir of blackmailed labor, used as leverage to lower the wages of the entire indigenous proletariat, breaking down its essential class unity.

The Rosarno revolt fueled a process of organizing farm workers within the USB and other grassroots unions, which, however, remains weak.

The CGIL, similar to what happened, for example, in the logistics or textile districts of Prato, has abandoned all organizing efforts for the sake of these workers’ struggle. It offers individual assistance services for residence permits, and the only collective action it undertakes is similar to that of religious charities. The CGIL, too, whenever similar misdeeds occur, "denounces" the "gangmaster system" and "organized crime", and, in bloodless demonstrations, calls for intervention by State institutions as the only practical solution. Four young workers burned in the clutches of paid labor didn’t even warrant the proclamation of a local strike! With this inaction, the largest regime union has merely cemented the division of this section of workers from the rest of the working class.

As punctual as in every tragedy, the CGIL staged its futile parade on June 6th, led by its general secretary accompanied by the secretary of the Democratic Party. A jumble of legalistic rhetoric and crocodile tears. The regime’s union stifles the spontaneous need and instinct for class struggle with sterile interclass moralism and channels it into the dead-end streets of petitions to the very institutions complicit in every horror.

It’s worth noting that the massacre occurred the day before the eightieth anniversary of the Republic. That democracy, to which the regime’s unions appeal to defend farm workers, rather than organize their struggle, hasn’t changed their condition one iota in these decades, for the simple fact that the bourgeois regime is the first to want it to remain so, to protect the sector’s profits, from farms to retail.

Instead, the class struggle among the laborers will lead to violent confrontation with the employers, their irregular and criminal gangs, and the bourgeois State. As has always been the case throughout the history of the labor movement.

The workers’ struggle in the Prato textile district, organized for years by the grassroots union Sudd Cobas, offers an example of organizing a sector of immigrant workers and clashing with employers. Pickets have repeatedly been violently attacked by gangs of company thugs and even by the employers themselves. The Sudd Cobas responded to the small size of the companies by favoring a territorial organization of the union, rather than a company-wide one—in the mistaken tradition of union opportunism—by promoting strikes involving multiple companies, with workers from different factories participating in the pickets. Throughout years of strikes, pickets, and attacks, local democratic institutions have always stood by and watched, while the State, if it intervened, has done so with the police, to defend the companies by clearing the pickets.

The plight of laborers is similar, but made even more difficult by their widespread dispersion and the greater degree of violence the bourgeois State allows employers to use: the gangmasters who killed the laborers in Amendolara will end up in prison, but they are merely the perpetrators of a widespread system of threats and violence. Capitalism needs to exploit cheap immigrant labor for its own profits, after having plundered and generated ever-increasing poverty in vast swathes of the world.

Nothing will change for the agricultural proletariat unless they themselves organize and fight. To achieve this, a class-based union is absolutely necessary, uniting their struggle with that of the rest of the working class, benefiting and strengthening both, since they are, in reality, a single struggle of the same social class. The true defense of the proletariat coincides with the ability to organize and defend its most exploited segment. Until then, we cannot claim to have a genuine class-based union.

This union struggle will not lead to peaceful coexistence between the classes—in the reformist illusion of a finally and truly functioning democracy—but to their head-on clash in the revolutionary outcome. Democracy—the democracy that causes 1,500 deaths a year at work, that finances wars and genocides, that cuts wages, healthcare, and pensions, and to which the regime’s unions appeal—will never change the condition of laborers, or that of the entire wage-earning class. It will be the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat that will sweep away the exploiters, who fuel their social privilege and political domination with the sweat and blood of millions of workers.