Version imprimableUnlike many who are celebrating we are not indifferent to the manner in which Berlusconi fell or over who will succeed him.
Likewise we are not singing the praises of president Napolitano. He helped bring down Berlusconi in response to the demands of capital and the European political leadership. They considered Berlusconi and his government incapable of carrying through the austerity programme and the destruction of social services that are the “only response” to the crisis across Europe.
Nor can we forget that the austerity programme now bears the name of Mario Monti, the man who forbade any state aid, to promote the interests of big banks and to ensure the deregulation of the financial system. This is the same Mario Monti who used the rightwing newspaper Corriere della sera to praise the reactionary “reforms” of Gelmini and Marchionne. Can anyone on the left seriously think this man represents anything “better”?
There isn’t an “after”. What we have is a present with a government that is hostile to the interests of working people. Its only programme is new and crushing economic and financial measures against the working class major privatisations of the public sector to meet the demands of European capital.
It’s a government which is selling the old ideology that we can only get out of the crisis with ever greater attacks on welfare, wages and pensions than those we’ve had for the last twenty years.
For workers, people in insecure employment, youth and migrants there is only one possible choice – immediate and determined opposition to the Monti-Napolitano government. We have to construct the arguments and the forms of organisation needed to resist the plans they have for us. We have to build a network that poses the questions about the social and political alternatives, obliging the people who caused the crisis to pay for it.
The state institutions don’t offer any shortcuts. The only democratic path has to be immediate elections and a contest between political programmes that try to learn from what has happened in the last four years – with an anti-capitalist left that refuses any “national unity” or “technical” compromise and organises political and social opposition.
We invite everyone to build the widest possible unity of those who reject the Monti government in favour of a left exit from the crisis. We will take part in it.
Esecutivo nazionale Sinistra Critica
