SI Cobas coordinator of Novara, Adil Belakdim, murdered while on the picket line of the strike – a collective crime of the bosses and the Draghi government

We publish the press statement of Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency abount the killing of comrade Adil Belakhdim:

This morning, during the strike at Lidl in Biandrate, a truck driver forced the picket of the striking workers, overwhelming and crushing Adil Belakdim, the coordinator SI Cobas of Novara, under the wheels of the truck.
The behavior of the truck driver was criminal, as was that of the truck driver who overwhelmed Abd Elsalam Ahmed Eldanf, a worker of the Usb, years ago in Piacenza, in very similar circumstances.

It would be too easy, however, to blame an individual for this murder.

The killing of Adil Belakdim is a collective crime that directly involves the bosses of logistics, with FedEx at the head, the entire boss, the Draghi government.

This killing calls into question the bosses of logistics because, with FedEx at his head in the role that was of the Fiat / FCA of Marchionne, they appear willing to launch a frontal attack on that immigrant logistics proletariat that in a cycle of struggles that lasted a decade, of which SI Cobas was a protagonist in the front row, was able to inflict important blows (although not definitive) to the mafia system of contracts and sub-contracts, conquering levels of wages, hours, freedom of organization in the workplace for a long time denied, respect for their dignity – a mafia system, which is the weapon through which multinational companies super-exploit worker labor (not only in logistics, think of Fincantieri, world record holder in the use of sub-contracts), imposing levels of precariousness, of intensity of work, of hours, so devastating that within 10-15 years they wear out and break the muscles and bodies of many workers, for wages that were often, until yesterday, below the subsistence levels.

These bosses, with the US FedEx in the lead, which have been working for some time to build and put into action their private squads against workers’ strikes, have blood on its hands.

But it is not just about the mastery of logistics.

Behind the growing bosses’ aggression that generated this crime, there is the whole capitalist class, with Bonomi’s Confindustria at its head, which, sensing the possibility of a “recovery”, that is, a recovery of the accumulation of profits, does not intend to bear any obstacle in its way. Capitalists are in a hurry, a cursed haste, they push with bestial fury on the acceleration pedal of trucks, assembly lines, computers, all sorts of operations in the production and circulation of goods. Profit, the sole purpose for which the masters of every notch and managers of every skin color live, is made up of moments of time stolen from the working class, and every single moment is precious for this class of vampires thirsty for the vital energy of the proletarians and proletarians.

Why was Luana D’Orazio (*) crushed in Prato by a warper? Now it is official: the owners of the factory had tampered with the electrical panel and the mechanical part of the machinery to make it go faster; they cared nothing that was working at the dangerous machine an apprentice, and she could leave there, together with her youth of 22 years, her dreams. The one and only thing that mattered to them was the maximum speed of the machine because that was the measure of the speed of making profits. And in this, as in the rest, for example in the violation of the most elementary rules regarding apprenticeship, they were, they are a perfect embodiment of the capitalist class – which is absolutely indifferent to the “unfortunate chance” of producing every year, in the world, 2 millions of deaths from “accidents” at work and occupational diseases – plus the murder of hundreds of union activists.

To call into question only the bosses, however, is too little, incredibly little.

Because to protect and legitimize this climate of brutal exploitation of labor and violent aggression to workers’ struggles, to the avant-gardes of struggle, and Adil was exactly this – a real vanguard of struggle, it has been in recent months the Draghi government, the government of the worst anti-worker scoundrels in circulation. For months the police and carabinieri have been hammering against the SI Cobas pickets. For months, police officers, magistrates, toady journalists, under the shrewd direction of the government, have resorted to every means, first of all physical violence and disinformation combined, to try to crush the struggle of the FedEx porters fired in Piacenza. With this behavior, the executive urges the employers to do their part directly, as well understood the Amerikan FedEx, the very Italian Zampieri and Fincantieri (a few days ago in Ancona there was the wounding of a young Bengali worker by a foreman because he made a wrong operation and was going “too slow”), the Chinese masters of Texprint, and so on. And when you say government, you say: state, because the executive is the main operational institution of the state. That state which for the very large part of the workers, and a large number of comrades, still remains, unfortunately, an entity “above the parties”, or at least a less capitalist entity than the capitalists.

Obviously, this is not just an Italian trend – the continuation of increasingly deep crises in the last twenty years by global capitalism, gives a global character both to the intensification of the exploitation of labor, and to the intensification of authoritarian processes, and to the “state of exception” which increasingly resembles to a police state – as we see day after day, in the pandemic and outside the pandemic.

If we do not react to this trend with the maximum of energy, concentration of forces, spirit and class organization, from now on it will be not only with the usual maneuvers of division and diversion, but also with iron clubs, sticks, the brick blows in the head, the tear gas, the arrests and the murders that the bosses / government axis will move to stop the inevitable awakening of the working class. We must do everything possible to stop this course in the bud, and in any case equip ourselves to fight it with the appropriate forms of workers’ self-defense because this is certainly not a passing phenomenon.

The tragic end of our comrade Adil gives a particular meaning and strength to today’s strike, for the first time (in a long time) a strike that involves almost all of the “grassroots” trade unionism. It gives a particular meaning and strength to tomorrow’s demonstration in Rome, called against layoffs, against repression, against the Draghi government. It gives a sign of further urgency to the preparation of a great general strike that marks the beginning of a proletarian recovery far beyond the logistics alone.

The immigrant logistic proletarians have given, in an entire decade of sometimes memorable battles, an example of class combativeness and pride, which is time to be picked up by the most lively and conscious part of the autochtonous proletariat. In these hours, it is a good sign that in many parts, in the “grassroots” trade unionism, there is talk of giving this employer-state escalation “a response of a determined and unitary general struggle”. Another good sign is that something is also moving within the CGIL; that the comrades of the opposition in the CGIL of the Elettrolux of Susegana immediately called a strike in solidarity with the struggling logistics workers, and in mourning for the death of Adil. But we cannot be satisfied with these first signs – we must aim at the mass of proletarians and proletarians, unionized and non-unionized, sure that their present silence contradictorily contains, together with fear, mistrust, and even resignation, an anger, a suffocated desire for reaction, which can suddenly become irrepressible due to thequantity and brutality of humiliations and harassment suffered.

We comrades of the Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency who for years have insisted on the need to work on the constitution of an anti-capitalist struggle front capable of speaking to the proletariat as a whole, confident that the stagnation of the struggles is not forever, we can only see positively the dynamics that led to this strike day and tomorrow’s demonstration in Rome. But this dynamic will have to take further impetus, and overwhelm particularisms, opportunisms, winks or compromises with bourgeois institutional forces, minoritarist attitudes, sedimented by years of recoil of struggles and growing (and theorized) mistrust in the class, to regain a vision of the class conflict, an integral revolutionary perspective that is able to cope with the attack that is being brought to us, here and on the international scale.

June 18

Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency


(*) Luana D’Orazio: 22-year-old worker in a textile company in Montemurlo, Tuscany, was the victim of an “accident”: she was trapped in the gears of the machine she was working on – and for which she had not had a complete training; the investigation verified that the safety systems of the machine had been deactivated.

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