Right wing politics & trade unionism in Italy: three contradictions and one-way forward

Abstract

The Italian Right has always maintained a very ambivalent and contradictory relationship with the labour movement. We venture to identify three key axes around which this contradictory relationship has evolved over time. We concede that some of its recent electoral successes are also a result of a drift to the right affecting significant sections of working class voters, including some unionised voters (that however are statistically more resilient to populism). But we suggest that these tensions will inevitably explode, offering a golden opportunity to progressive forces that should not go amiss. The ‘productivist’ axis In terms of its fundamental class interests, the Right (both the Old and the New Right) has traditionally supported and facilitated those productivist interests that typically favoured capital accumulation at the expenses of redistribution, even when paying lip-service to the latter for the ‘populist’ purposes of shaping a homogenous (but not necessarily ‘equal’) national demos. To that extent the Right often courted the labour masses with the view of co-opting them within a supposedly ‘superior national interest’, linked to economic performance and production. This particular approach sat at the centre of Fascist ‘corporatism’ (1926-1944), and characterised much of the ideological trajectory of the Italian centre right in post-fascist Italy, especially during the Cold War. This often meant that established and dominant right wing parties would invest substantial resources and political capital in their respective workers’ organisation and labour movements, in an attempt to gain a hegemonic control of the latter. Catholic and Christian Democracy dominated (at least until 1969) CISL, which was for much of the second half of the 20th Century a well resourced, largely bona fide, mass organisation, though arguably never capable of challenging CGIL (the Partito Comunista Italiano and Partito Socialista Italiano linked union) as the central player in Italian industrial relations. The ‘business interest’ axis However, a second contradiction has been harder to reconcile. At various points in the course of the 20th Century, and more markedly around the turn of the 21st Century, the notion of national interest started to align more visibly and markedly with the interest of the enterprise, the interest of capital itself. When at various points in Italy’s political history, political parties and movements (typically on the right of the political spectrum) embraced this particular vision of the national interest, then they have genuinely struggled to maintain deep and meaningful links with the labour movement. So, for instance, even though the Movimento Sociale Italiano (and its successor Alleanza Nazionale, and more recently Fratelli d’Italia) and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia did at times express the ambition to either co-opt preexisting unions (such as, respectively, CISNAL/UGL and CISL and UIL) or even move, as in the case of the Northern League, onto establishing autonomous union movements and structures (such as Sin. Pa.), these strategies never really took off. Even at the peak of its hegemonic role in Italian politics, neither Berlusconi, nor Fini or Bossi/Salvini, managed to exert a genuine hegemonic influence on Italy’s bona fine unions or organised labour as a whole. The ‘populist’ axis It is however the third contradiction that has traditionally proved to be both the Achilles’ heel and, concomitantly, the secret weapon in the arsenal of the Italian Right, especially the one of the more populist and reactionary kind. A defining trait of populism is, to state the obvious, the establishment of a direct link, an unmediated channel of communication, between the populist politician and ‘the people’. That homogenous (but, in reality, artificially homogenised) demos defined by the very fact that ‘the leader’ - or perhaps the demagogue speaks to it directly. Whereas the leader does not speak to the ‘others’, that are therefore not part of the demos defined and controlled by the demagogue. Populists disdain free media, precisely because they act as an intermediary channel, and often a filter, for their message to their ‘people’. They prefer direct channels such as domesticated media or, better, social media that they own or control directly. In that sense Berlusconi is particularly well resourced, owning a media empire; and Matteo Salvini’s rapport with all sorts of social media is second to none, at least this...