Late Italian Party leader's last article: Prioritisisng business over the coronavirus deaths!
Written by: Domenico Savio on 23 March 2020
It is with deep sadness that we have learned of the death of the Secretary General of the Communist Party of Italy Marxist-Leninist Domenico Savio. Comrade Savio passed away after a long illness, but worked until the last. The proof of this is his last document, written on February 27, on the Coronavirus.
Just a month ago, on the day of his 80th birthday he presented in the Party headquarters the first two volumes of his work "A life for communism".
Comrade Savio followed the work of the CPA (M-L) and requested translations of various articles on a regular basis.
Out of respect for Comrade Savio and because of the great interest Australians have in the Covid-19 crisis in Italy, we publish below his February 27 article. Some details have changed since it was written: all schools were closed on March 9 until April 3; the country was placed on lockdown the following day; People flying into Italy are subject to temperature screening at Italy's major airports, and the country has suspended flights from China and Taiwan; on March 22 all nonessential factories were closed. Nevertheless, the essential elements of Comrade Savio’s analysis remain valid.
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Prioritising business over the coronavirus deaths!
By Domenico Savio
Secretary-General of P.C.I.M-L.
The coronavirus plague is spreading throughout the world, affecting all states and peoples, spreading death and exasperation to humanity. As the first outbreaks in China unfolded, the countries on the various continents should have sealed their borders to prevent the virus from coming from outside, only excluding supplies of food and health with the necessary preventive controls. On the other hand, science says that illness does not spread through the air, nor the wind, but from person to person. Of course, domestic production would continue its activity. If Italy had done so today, it would not have been hit by a dangerous and worrying epidemic.
We believe that the individual nations with their domestic productions and stocks could have lived well for a long time, waiting for China to defeat the spread of the 2020 plague, as China is doing. We are now faced with the paradox that while that country is emerging from the drama, with a very high number of dead and infected, all the other peoples, some more and some less who today and who tomorrow, are involved and dragged into the justified despair of the masses.
Now we are faced with the paradox that while that country is coming out of the drama, with a very high number of dead and infected, all other peoples are more or less involved and dragged into the justified despair of the popular masses.
Why weren't the borders closed in time to prevent evil from being brought in from the outside? Because this is the way governments have wanted to do it, enslaved as they are to the interests of multinational corporations, with the masses of working people and intellectuals paying a high price with infected people and deaths. The production of companies relocated abroad to make more profits, world trade and the holdings in the stock exchanges of big business and speculative finance have been preferred to defending the public health of peoples.
Italy, with its current capitalist government PD-M5S-LeU-IV, has painstakingly aligned itself with the directives of European economic and financial imperialism represented and defended by the European Union Commission, in cahoots with American and Chinese imperialism. And so there are open borders, initially also air links from China, which deliver tourism for our national holiday capitalism, from Europe and elsewhere in the world, because the economy of capitalist profits must not slow down or stop.
Internally, to date, the government has been engaged, and still is and will be, in allowing holiday-makers from the regions affected by the virus to travel for tourism, while it is actively blocking any regional or local initiative that seeks to limit the damage to the respective territories with preventive restrictions on the influx of tourists from outside and on institutional and social activities. In short, all of this is in the service of the system of employers' profits that takes precedence over public health and the well-being of the population.
Since the beginning of this epidemic (they say that we cannot yet speak of a pandemic, but at least let us know after how many victims we can talk about a pandemic), the government and governors of the regions, assisted by the media subservient to the capitalist press-radio-television-web system, are constantly committed to minimizing the extent and damage of this plague, and call for peace because everything is under control and the national health service is adequate for all eventualities, while the infected extend to the entire national territory and the deaths increase. At the same time, in the territories, we see deficiencies in medical and paramedical structures and personnel.
We are outraged by the commentators of the press and television who are totally subservient to the prescriptions of power, renouncing any ethical and professional autonomy. They even go so far as to make themselves the spokesmen of the thesis that "it is mainly those in their eighties and beyond, already suffering from other pathologies, who die of coronavirus", almost as if these deaths were not equal to those of a younger age. How nonchalantly inhuman and disrespectfull! We are witnessing the hallucinations of a system that gives more importance to stock market fluctuations than to the deaths of the epidemic, because there is no newspaper or television broadcast that does not talk about the market trend and the stock exchanges of capitalist businessmen.
What can be done where the situation has deteriorated and before it can completely get out of hand with national and regional political power? The Italian Marxist-Leninist Communist Party is asking the government, also in view of the fact that the virus is spreading rapidly throughout Europe and elsewhere, to close the external borders of Italy, albeit with enormous delay, allowing only food and health supplies until the storm has passed. The government and the regions are being asked to immediately equip the health facilities in the territories with beds, staff and various medical equipment and to implement all necessary preventive measures, with controls and closures of access from other locations, to safeguard the not yet infected areas of the national territory.
We know that we will not be listened to, because the power of industrialists, large retailers, the European and world markets, finance and stock exchanges and holiday capitalism is far more powerful than we are, but we speak first and foremost to the women and men who will read us, to the people and especially to the working class and the working and popular masses so that by their social behaviour they will favour and support the P.C.I.M.L., that is, the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Socialist Revolution in Italy. This is the only way to free us from the slavery of capitalist power and to build a new society, where the defence of life, dignified and pleasant, comes before employers’ profits, and where life is worthy of being lived by future generations: so that they do not have to suffer our tragic evils of today.
Forio (Metropolitan City of Naples), 27 February 2020.
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