Anyone seen Porto Marghera – The Last Firebrands?

A film about petrochemical workers who took matters into their own hands in the giant industrial zone engulfing Venice. The mass refusal of literally toxic work forced hours on the job down at the same time as driving wages up. The labour hierarchy that sets white collar against blue, permanent against casual, was attacked by workers insisting on the maximum for everyone. The battle in the factory was linked to working-class life outside through direct appropriation of basic social needs (electricity, housing, food).

More clearly than any before them, the Porto Marghera workers identified the factory as the trigger of fatal diseases and destroyer of life. They remained on the offensive against the concerted hostility of unions, multinational employers and state from the late 1960s until well into the '70s. As part of an international wave of struggle, their actions contributed to a global accumulation crisis, provoking the capitalist counter-attack which has never ceased since then.

Unlike most more or less academic accounts of Italian Operaismo, which tend to focus on high-profile groups and individual leaders, Porto Marghera – gli ultimi fuochi (Manuela Pellarin, Italy, 2004) documents autonomous worker organization from the point of view of the worker-activists themselves, who talk about their experiences in the film. Many aspects and problems of this phase of class struggle are of immediate relevance today. For example:

* The Porto Marghera workers fought for better conditions within their work and at the same time against the damaging impact the chemical industry and of work itself. They defended their health-damaging jobs, yet did so from a deeply critical perspective, at a time when a middle-class moralizing green movement did not exist.
* They developed independent organizational forms within the existing struggles of the time. This meant reassessing the relationships between:
o the workers' mobilizations and their own role as active workers
o the factory and the wider social terrain
o workers' struggles, new forms of union representation and 'professional' political groups like Potere Operaio
o mass movement, armed insurrectionist groups and state repression.