PROLETARIANS BOYCOT ELECTIONS IN PALERMO

An unprecedented protest in our country and probably in all the imperialist countries took place in Palermo, the 10th of May. About one thousand workers, unemployed and students crossed the downtown carrying two banners "no job no vote, no rights no votes" and "the job is a right, the unemployment is your profit". Under the leadership of PCm, the "SLAI cobas for the class union" organized the protest. It was an exciting march, very noisy, with combative slogans. Demonstrating people did not accepted to follow the usual path along the downtown streets.

When the policemen told to proceed was impossible, because of an election meeting of Rutelli (the centre-left candidate prime minister), workers answered they will "participate" to the meeting. They arrived few hundreds meters far from Massimo square, challenging the blockade of the police cars and the front line of cops with anti-riots equipment. They did not stop and after they had a counter-meeting, gathering many other people that were not participating to the protest, they went on toward the symbol building of the government and the bourgeois state, the Prefettura. Along the way, they mockingly tore the maxi-posters of both the electoral fronts.

Then, they fronted a new big blockade of policemen threatening "we had orders to not let you pass!". A big bonfire of electoral certificates ended the protest, the highest expression of the class struggle in Italy during this electoral process.

This protest was the advanced point of the campaign for the proletarian boycott, which has seen a number of struggles we organized in various towns; specially in the south of Italy. It has been the political expression of those social struggles during the electoral process that had their epicentre in the hard struggles, with clashes, of the unemployed, the precarious workers and LSU (socially useful workers) in Naples. The bourgeois, opportunist and false revolutionary press kept silence on this protest. It is more than natural and very eloquent.

We have demonstrated that the proletarian boycott is possible, starting from the real consciousness levels of the masses. We opened a way that is a strategic indication and acting praxis. We did all this advancing in the construction in Italy of the Maoist Communist Party, in the campaign for the New Begin, thanks to the consequently proletarian mass line, to a leadership that is forging itself in the fire of the class struggle and in close linkage with the masses.

May 2001.
PCm