Industrial output in Italy fell 17.4 per cent in 2009. As a result, the official unemployment rate has reached 8.3 percent in January. But that was before Italy’s car giant Fiat laid off 30,000 people for two weeks. Further closures are forecast. Read more...

The present upsurge began in mid-September when the largest union grouping, the CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro), called out a million workers in a one-day general strike. Read more...

Workers and youth in Italy are fighting back against attacks launched by Silvio Berlusconi's government, which won a landslide election victory in February. In mid-September one million workers supported a one-day general strike called by the largest union grouping, the Confederazione generale del lavoro (Cgil) Read more...

The richest man in Italy, corrupt right wing media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, won a resounding victory in the Italian elections on 13-14 April - a mere two years after having been swept from power. Read more...

We express our total solidarity with the hunger strikers of COBAS, fighting for the democratic rights of workers in the private sector to hold meetings in work time and to join the trade union of their choice. Read more...

Fascism came to power in Italy at the point when the real revolutionary period in Italy between 1920 and 1922 (the “biennio rosso”) had begun to wane. Under the centrist leadership of Antonio Gramsci and Amedeo Bordiga, Italian workers had not forged an alliance with the peasants and land workers and were unable to take the post-war factory occupations and control of production beyond the point of dual power. Read more...

The sudden death of Romano Prodi’s centre-left government, caused by left wing senators abstaining on a vote to endorse Italian support for the war in Afghanistan, and its just as rapid resurrection exposes the lack of principle not only of Rifondazione Comunista, but the Fourth International. Dave Stockton looks back at a remarkable week in politics. Read more...

While a large proportion of the protest marched in the name of pacifism rather than of anti-imperialism, this is another blow against the Prodi government and the political interests it defends. The leaders of the radical left parties inside the government coalition tried to minimize the significance of this demo and pretend to be at home on the streets of Vicenza. Thus Oliviero Diliberto of PDCI (a split from Rifondazione Comunista) considered that this demo would be a “stimulus” for the government to correct its wrong decision. Read more...