By our correspondent ONE HUNDRED thousand people demonstrated against the government's austerity policies on 25 September in Rome. Politically the demonstration was dominated by the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC). Such a large demonstration was important for reasserting the voice of the working class in the political crisis which has shaken the country this year.
Until now the political crisis, the exposure of the whole political system dominated since the war by the Christian Democrats as corrupt and mafia-ridden has evolved without the direct intervention of the organised workers movement.
In part this paradox is explained by the defeats inflicted on the workers in recent years; in part by the role habitually played by the trade union bureaucracy and the leaders of the largest working class party, the Party of the Democratic Left EUROPEAN NEWS (PDS) - the right wing of the former Communist Party. Now the political crisis combines with a new wave of anti-working class austerity measures.
This year it has been marked by the emergence of an unprecedented social crisis. There is 11 per unemployment nationally, and in some areas like Calabria and Campagna it is 25 per cent.
Isolation
But there has been no centralised action against unemployment by the union leaderships, hence the isolation of long and hard-fought struggles against redundancy by groups like the Sardinian miners and the steelworkers of Tarente.
The unemployment situation has been worsened by the results of a deal signed on 3 July between the union leaderships, the government and Confindustria, the bosses' organisation, which reduces job security; and the new finance law which drastically reduces state spending on social security and social services, as well as imposing a freeze on big areas of public sector recruitment.
The huge demonstration on 25 september was in effect a first massive protest against these new measures, organised around the demand for a reduction of work time without loss