Thursday, April 18, 2002

Remora

Washington Post headlines the Italian strike that brought a million people into the street. NYT story about the Italian paralysis...

No, just joking.

Not that there wasn't a general strike -- a magical phrase to the IWW lefties among us -- in Italy. Not that it didn't paralyse Italy. Not that it didn't bring a million people into the street. But a fact like that is much too inconvenient for American papers.

Liberation, yesterday, had the story (which has spilled into the French election, today -- Jospin accusing Chirac of being a French Berlusconi):

Here's what it looks like in French:


Contre le projet de r�forme gouvernemental de l'article 18 du statut des travailleurs, qui r�glemente les licenciements abusifs, plusieurs millions d'Italiens ont r�pondu hier � l'appel � la gr�ve g�n�rale lanc� par les syndicats. Selon les chiffres des trois grandes conf�d�rations italiennes (CGIL, CISL et UIL), plus de 13 millions de personnes ont cess� le travail, le taux de participation atteignant pr�s de 100 % dans certains secteurs.
Paralysie. A Florence, pr�s de 400 000 travailleurs sont descendus dans la rue derri�re le leader de la CGIL, Sergio Cofferati (lire ci-contre), tandis que de nombreux cort�ges ont envahi les rues de Milan (300 000 personnes), Bologne (350 000), Rome (200 000) ou Palerme (100 000).

Translation:
Against the proposed governmental "reform"[ LI Note -- we have grown tired of the abuse of "reform" to mean corrupting the old Keynsian system of protecting the countervailing power of labor by acceeding to the most outrageous demands of capital. So we are putting the scare quotes into play. And if you don't like it, find your own translator] of article 18 of the labor code concerning abusive layoffs, more than a million Italians responded to the appeal for a general strike broadcast by the unions. According to the numbers of the three big unions (CGIL, CISL, and UIL), more than 13 million people stopped working, the level of participation attaining nearly 100% in certain sectors.

Paralysis

In Florence, nearly 400,000 workers descended in the streets behind the leader of the CGIL, Sergio Cofferati, while numerous groups invaded the streets of Milan (300,000 people), Bologna (350,00), Rome (200,000) and Palermo (100,000)

The NYT did have an article on the strike yesterday, and with typical Times hauteur , (the hauteur of the true globalist), surveyed the scene and asked what the fuss was about:


"Though the actual changes he has proposed are considered minor, labor leaders see this as the first step in a government plan to undermine job security. Then, too, Mr. Cofferati, who leads the largest Italian union, is considered a rising star on the left.The unions did succeed well enough that there was no television coverage of today's demonstrations � since journalists, too, were on strike.

Much of the center of Rome became a street carnival as protesters waved huge puppets of Mr. Berlusconi dressed as Napoleon and as the pope. Roberto Benigni, the actor and film maker, told a crowd in the Piazza del Popolo that he would not speak because he, too, was on strike."

Of course, to the Times, Berlusconi's labor law is only common sense. LI searched Gibbons Decline and Fall of the R.E. for a phrase evocative of the neo-liberal attitude in these fair States. Gibbon, he never fails us! Here is his description of the foreign policy, as we'd call it now, of the Roman Empire: "Those princes [of their outer dependencies], whom the ostentation of gratitude or generosity permitted for a while to hold a precarious sceptre, were dismissed from their thrones, as soon as they had per formed their appointed task of fashioning to the yoke the vanquished nations. The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude."

Quite.

Finally, since LI is in a hormonally lefty mood this morning -- there is good news from France, where the Trotskyist candidate, Arlette Languiller, a typist, is getting 10 percent in the polls -- ahead of the Greens and the Commies. Hooray!


This year, she has turned out to be a surprisingly sharp thorn in the side of the left-wing political establishment. Polls show that this retired, Trotskyist typist may get as much as 10 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections set for Sunday.

That could mean third or fourth place in a field of 16 candidates � ahead of both the candidates for the Communist Party and the Greens, the two left-wing parties that have been junior partners in the ruling government coalition for the last five years. The likely winners of the Sunday vote, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, are expected to garner just 18 to 22 percent each."

Apparently Arlette -- as she is known -- has come under the gun, since her numbers rose. The trotskyists have been accused of being cultists. Well, duh. Of course they are cultists. Trotsky's critique of bureaucracy preceeded the irresistable plunge into roccoco parlimentarian excess, factionalism, and distemper that has been the mark of every Trotskyist part every since. Who cares? Arlette isn't going to win -- she is simply going to make the powers that be nervous. That's her job.







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