Defeated but not vanquished: democracy, work and unions after the referendum

What remains after the referendums on work and citizenship? Much more than what one might deduce by following the discussion that is going for the most in the media. Truly disappointing with a few exceptions. The discussion is almost exclusively about whether or not the referendum has strengthened the so-called broad field on the left or whether it was an own goal that has further strengthened Meloni and her allies. Many are calling for a showdown in the Democratic Party, emphasizing the statements of some of its politically irrelevant exponents. The essential thing escapes the discussion, that is, the relationship between the referendum outcome and the objectives it proposed and, at the same time, the meaning that the referendum campaign represented in its unfolding for the main proposing organization and for all the activism and militancy networks involved in the territory. What did it mean then for the thousands and thousands of delegates, activists, new militants involved in an extraordinary experience?

Let's start with the objectives. To restore centrality to free and dignified work by building a first real reversal of the trend in terms of rights and protections, going in the opposite direction to the wrong laws of the last thirty years that have involved almost all political forces, and to do so by focusing on democratic participation. Therefore, at the same time, to restore centrality to the issue of democracy, in the historical phase of greatest crisis as the data from all electoral appointments have shown for years. The merit of the CGIL is to have grasped the close relationship between the two things. If those who need to work to live - to use the words of its general secretary - feel marginalized and irrelevant, they will progressively lose faith in the possibility of seeing the situation change through normal parliamentary dialectics, and will lose faith in democratic participation itself.

The referendum called these subjects to decide firsthand about their present and their future. Voting became a way to rebel against the current state of affairs. Discussing, as everyone does, its effects on the political spectrum, reveals once again what the referendum wanted to question, the self-referentiality of politics, the attitude that is to take sides on problems more for what they mean for one's own spectrum, rather than for the advances or setbacks they mark for people's lives and work. There is no doubt that if the objective of the referendum was to repeal the "crazy laws" on work, which have so many different fathers, on the right and on the left, the objective was not achieved. But if the commitment to free and dignified work, the fight against precariousness and racism, is the fundamental mission of the union, the referendum must be seen for what it represents in this journey, and for what it represents in the history of the CGIL, which was its main promoter. And so the fact that almost 15 million people went to vote, despite the active boycott of those who govern us (and high institutional figures), the very poor media coverage of the event, without forgetting the rejection (with an evident bipartisan political flavor) of the referendum on differentiated autonomy, in a period in which all elections struggle to exceed 50% (of voters), is a huge fact. So certainly defeated but absolutely not defeated.

Just like the fact that in hundreds of assemblies, in workplaces but also in contexts normally further from the traditional action of the union, from parishes to widespread associations and volunteering in small towns, the Cgil spoke to tens of thousands of people, and discussed work, its safety, its dignity, as a founding value of constitutional democracy itself. And the Cgil surpassed itself, finally trying to create, in practice, that street union that it had committed to be in its last congresses. The ability to rebuild a new sense of community and militancy starting from the territory was not at all a given. In many contexts this has happened and in materialising it has clearly demonstrated that building a network internally and building a network externally are the true amplifier of the organised strength of the union, what makes representation more effective and makes achieving objectives seem within reach. Even when they are very difficult.

For this reason, the enthusiasm of those who animated the referendum campaign (which certainly corresponded to a fair disappointment) is the enthusiasm of those who contributed to building a politics from the bottom up starting from the needs of work. A huge thing in a country that comes from forty years of delegitimization of organized labor and rhetoric of "good" flexibility that has meant, as everyone now recognizes, precariousness, low wages, loss of dignity and value. The significant participation in the vote of women and young people, one of the data highlighted already in the first hours after the closing of the polls, says a lot because more than anyone else they have suffered the effects of these policies. The referendum, despite not having achieved the quorum, has finally opened that road, together with the awareness of the irreplaceable role of the union in building an alternative to the current state of affairs. Rather than evaluating the referendum to reason about the state of health of the possible alternative government coalition to the right, it would be right for the union to reason about how it is necessary to change to be up to this challenge, to try to represent in a unified way an increasingly fragmented world of work. Knowing that this would also be the greatest contribution that the Cgil can give to the political left itself, because social transformation, overcoming fragmentation, loneliness, individualism, is the basic condition for political change.

From this point of view, we should begin to examine the data, not only on the basis of necessarily partial surveys but through more in-depth work that will be essential to look deeply into this unrepeatable experience at least in the short term. We can start from what we have seen. In many cities, the most positive ones came from the suburbs, often from the areas where there was the greatest abstentionism in the elections of recent years. A wall has begun to break down, the one that had relegated political debate to the urban centers, to the areas of the more educated and well-off middle class. But, according to the impression of many people present at the polls and previously engaged in the referendum campaign (but confirmed by the polls), there was a poor turnout from the central age group, which is that of stable workers, the traditional strong point of the union and where the bulk of its members are still concentrated today. The watchword of solidarity towards the weakest, the sensible reasoning that precariousness and subcontracting, the same marginalization of immigrants at the basis of much of the black market work and at rock-bottom prices to which companies resort without any constraints, are at the basis of the same contraction of wages for all, have only partially warmed the hearts of permanently employed workers. Many of whom even consider outsourcing to contracting firms, often made up of foreign workers, a fact that has guaranteed the economic stability of their companies and the stability of their work. The difficulty in voting participation encountered in much of the South that lives from its own specific and unresolved crisis intertwined with that of the country but also in territories where the settlement of work is strong represent, equally, big questions.

Challenging questions are therefore being asked that the CGIL will be called upon to answer in the coming months and years. We are following the path of these questions and the inevitable reflection they provoke. Axel Honneth in his latest valuable contribution – The sovereign worker, work and democratic citizenship – delves into the relationship between democratic theory and the role of work: “one of the greatest defects of almost all theories of democracy – he writes – is to persist in forgetting that the subjects that make up the sovereign they loudly invoke are always, for the most part, people who work”. It is of great interest to read in the preface to the Italian edition a tribute to the political thought of Bruno Trentin and of the CGIL in particular when he writes that in democratic societies, work relationships are dignified as well as democratized internally so that every worker can conceive themselves as members of a self-determining community, paraphrasing Trentin himself.

For the democratic culture of our country this was a fundamental conquest that has a precise root. The self-emancipation of work even before Trentin was part of the political culture of Giuseppe Di Vittorio who marked the history of the Italian trade union and of the CGIL in particular. Starting from our Constitutional Charter. How many Constitutions are founded on work? Why is ours absolutely unique? For one essential reason: without the contribution of workers our country would never have redeemed itself from fascism and would never have freed itself from Nazi occupation. The strikes of 1943 and 1944 legitimized the workers to write the Constitution while the ruling classes were widely compromised with the regime and would never have had the right to write a single line of the Charter. The intrinsic relationship between work and democracy is therefore more evident in our country. But this inseparable binomial in the Charter lives only in the materiality of social relations. The democratic crisis begins with the capitalist restructuring of the second half of the Seventies which will have as its objective, not by chance, the trade union in its most democratic and participatory form.

And here we come to a knot, for us, never truly untied. How, that is, there was a lack of true collective reflection both in the union and in the parties heirs to the tradition of representing the workers' movement on what happened from that time through the 1980s and 1990s and how this lack affected the difficulties of the entire union in building a new strategic dimension, in the face of the combined mechanisms of monetarism and the restructuring of the capitalist system. The defeat of the industrial union of the 1970s, that is, of the strongest union in the world, decisive in the construction of material democracy and therefore of the application of the Constitution is also, precisely, the defeat of a union strongly characterized by democracy. The union of councils. Bruno Trentin, who was the architect of that union together with the entire Flm, reflected in 1994, at the end of his mandate as general secretary of the CGIL, lucidly in the preface to the book interview by Pio Galli on the Fiat dispute, a watershed in the history of our country. Pio Galli was general secretary of the Fiom in 1980.

They try to re-propose a debate aware that much of that history had been removed. And in the removal the union's ability to correctly situate itself in the transformation of the capitalist system had failed. For them (and for us) the idea that entry into the room of the buttons, that is, the government of the country, was the true way to govern the transformations of capitalism, which had always been strong in the PCI, had a great influence on the choices of the CGIL starting from the turning point of the Eur. We do not know if the union's strategy in the economic crises of the Seventies, as Trentin says, if accompanied by a planning capacity, could have been resolved in something more "than a mere availability to wage moderation detached from the strong demand for democracy and power that was present in many social struggles" .

Today we can only say one thing with certainty: the lack of reflection on the real reasons for that defeat, the difficulty in understanding that it was not so much a question of post-Taylorism (or not only) but of the structuring of capitalism into networks and supply chains (accelerated in the following years by digitalization processes) has prevented for years from reflecting on which form of union action was truly most adequate to represent the fragmented work of the new exploitation.

*Di Vittorio Foundation

END OF PART ONE (CONTINUED)