On July 3, the State responded and "won" (as company management emphasized), clearing, with the help of its police force, the two-week-long picket line, defended by the Sudd Cobas union. The picket line had begun on June 20, after the Acca company in Seano (Prato) announced it was closing down, putting 100 jobs at risk. Fifteen workers and three union representatives were literally forcibly dragged to the police station for identification and subsequently released.

Acca is a major logistics hub for fast fashion in the Prato district, distributing throughout Europe on behalf of 80 small and medium-sized workshops and brands. It is currently under judicial administration for tax and customs fraud, resulting in assets worth €71 million being seized.

But the 100 jobs to be cut arise exclusively from the company’s need to relocate operations to warehouses where workers can continue to be kept in slave-like conditions, away from a militant and unionized workforce.

This latest worker mobilization is the culmination of years of struggle, and victories, in the textile district: represented by their union, Sudd Cobas, they have never stopped fighting for better living conditions, against exploitation, low wages, 12-hour workdays, 7 days a week, irregular contracts, and gangmastering.

But these have also been years of intimidation, retaliation, and physical violence from employers and their gangmasters. On June 23, a 45-year-old worker on a picket line was hit by a van.

Faced with all this, today the State intervenes with force, against the last and most exploited, so that goods produced with blood and exploitation continue to circulate, for the profit of the capitalists, demonstrating once again that it is not an impartial apparatus above classes, but a machine for the defense of profit, property and the exploitation of the working class.

The fact that Italian and immigrant workers are fighting side by side in Prato, and that the company in question (like others in the sector) is owned by a Chinese, not an Italian, capitalist, demonstrates that, beyond the right-wing demagogy about "remigration" and the left-wing one about "integration", for the bourgeoisie of all stripes, nationality and ethnicity matter little, only the defense of their interests.

For the international ruling class, the equally international working class, both local and foreign, must stay in its place. They are allowed to demonstrate, but only in a harmless manner that does not jeopardize the laws of capitalism and profit. This is the democratic and constitutional deception that is being fully demonstrated today.

It’s a script that’s been repeated over and over again. We shouldn’t have expected the current government’s "fascist drift", which only serves the bourgeois left and the regime’s unions to restore their virginity, but has always tolerated and endorsed policies of exploitation.

As soon as the working class raises its head and organizes for better living conditions, democracy gives way to fascism. There is nothing "unconstitutional" about this, as liberals and democrats, supporters of an "ethical" capitalist economy, claim. But it does legitimize the current inhuman economy, the limitation of the freedom to strike—provided for by Article 40 of the Constitution—and the use of repression to protect sacred property and the free movement of goods.

The bourgeois left is complicit with the right in manipulating the State, which defends capitalism. Its constitutions legitimize and soften it. They will never safeguard the rights of workers, both Italian and foreign.

The only path open to workers is to extend the strikes, in an organized manner, united beyond the company and across multiple sectors, over an ever-expanding territory and with increasingly combative unions, led by the authentic revolutionary communist party, which does not persuade workers to give in with legalistic and electoral pretexts.

It’s a social war, a war of the entire working class. The workers’ struggle in Prato must be brought together with that of other companies and sectors—the laborers, metalworkers, logistics workers, the unemployed and those with precarious employment, etc.

This can only be achieved by rebuilding a truly united class-based union, against the betrayal of the large confederal unions, which not only hold back the spread of struggles but also help the employers and the State sabotage them.

The path to this goal today is to fight for the unity of action of combative unionism, the grassroots unions, and between these and the conflict-ridden areas within the CGIL: a practical unity that paves the way for organizational unity.