Great Expectations
By the autumn of 1969 a social movement composed largely of industrial workers, but also embracing other sections of the population, was already in an advanced stage of development. The movement was not new, in that industrial militancy had a history going back over a hundred years in Italy, but it involved workers who were new to industrial organization and action. The mood in the workplaces expressed the feeling that changes were in the air. It accorded with the process of ‘transvaluation’ described by Piven and Cloward, in which social disorganization and the traumas of everyday life are perceived as ‘both wrong and subject to redress’.
The role of the minority of experienced militants within the factories, and of agitators at the gates, has already been discussed in the case of the Pirelli and other struggles. Their success in promoting mobilization and the awakening of traditionally passive sectors like white-collar workers seemed to prove that something could be done about redressing the . wrongs in society. This galvanized activists into feverish propagandizing and organizing. Sections of workers, especially the semi-skilled (operaio comune) of the engineering factories, started to move as a group and to organize themselves. Through the struggles of the Hot Autumn similar experiences to those of Antonio Antonuzzo were lived out by hundreds of thousands of people. Individual awareness of and revolt against injustices fused into a collective movement.
Although the surge of rebellion grew out of the discontents and frustrations of everyday lives, these were not new. It required exceptional times to make them explicit and to give them a shape. The renewal of the engineering workers’ contract in the autumn constituted such an occasion. It involved over a million workers, many of whom had already shown their readiness to strike. In addition, the contracts of petrochemical and building workers were due for renewal, and the rubber sector was still in dispute. The anticipation of a great trial of strength between employers and workers focused national attention. Expectations ran high and gained legitimacy from authoritative definitions of the situation. The minister of labour, Donat Cattin, declared himself for change and against the inequalities symbolized by tax evasion:
By the end of this autumn we shall all be changed people. A system that waves the Italian flag for the workers and the Swiss flag for the industrialists is not a healthy one.
The press likewise predicted momentous events and coined the term ‘Hot Autumn’ which rapidly entered into popular currency. Its usage is of interest in illuminating the way the strike movement was defined from its onset.
24 Ore, the paper closely associated with Milanese industrialists, was the first to speak of the Hot Autumn (autunno caldo) in its issue of 21 August 1969. The idea probably came from references made in the United States to the time of the race riots as ‘the long hot summer’. It was meant to foretell a season of industrial conflict, and the connotations for the readership were certainly meant to be negative. Without undue forcing, this particular metaphor can be seen as part of a genre in which industrial action, demonstrations and riots were described as ‘volcanic explosions’, ‘sicknesses’ and ‘abnormalities’, metaphors which proliferated in the conservative press during subsequent events. However, what is particularly interesting in this context is not these definitions themselves (which are part of the recurrent imagery with which ruling groups define insubordination), but the way in which they were taken over and subverted by the social movement.
Voloshinov writes:
each living ideological sign has two faces like Janus. Any current curse can become a word of praise, any current truth must sound to many other people as the greatest of lies.
The Hot Autumn exemplifies this point. No sooner had it been pronounced than it was taken up by the movement to describe itself. L’Unita’ wrote:
The autumn of the great contract struggles, the autumn that promises to be hot as one of the bosses’ papers wrote today . . . has already begun in Milan.
During the industrial struggles the outbursts of the Corriere della Sera against ‘illegal’ forms of struggles, and laments on the state of the world were quoted with satisfaction by leaflets and papers circulating in the movement. The catastrophism and fears for the survival of civilization served, ironically, to heighten expectations of change.
Turin Events - Southerners Revolt
The workers’ movement of 1968-9 was predominantly northern Italian; it had its centre of gravity in the cities of the industrial triangle. That is not to say that happenings in Porto Marghera or Valdagno were not of great importance in the history of the movement, but they remained isolated. For instance, Venice, the city nearest to Porto Marghera, was a centre of artisanal industry and tourism, with a population which, if anything, resented the very existence of the petrochemical plants. Even in the capital, Rome, the movement was relatively marginal to the life of the city, and had nothing like the impact of the student demonstrations and occupations of the previous year. Further south the movement was weaker still.
In the south there were major struggles as at the steelworks at Bagnoli, an area of Naples, but they were isolated because of the absence of industry or its dispersal into small units, and because of the weakness of the unions and left-wing parties. The structure of social conflict was differently ordered. Pre-industrial forms still had their pertinence. For example, in 1967 at Cutro in Calabria the peasants occupied the land and seized and burnt down the municipal buildings during their fight with the police. In July 1970 the town of Reggio Calabria experienced a major insurrection lasting several days to protest against the transfer of the status of provincial capital. When industrial organization and action did take place, it often faced the possibility of bloody repression rather than conciliation, as happened at Avola and Battipaglia.
The lack of industry in the south meant a lack of jobs, and the necessity of leaving home for the cities of the north - whether in Italy, Germany, or Switzerland. Another option was to enrol in the police or carabinieri in those cities (63 per cent of the guardie della PS, Pubblica Sicurezza, were southerners). One of the consequences of this labour migration was to transfer the traditions of resistance of the southern proletariat to those cities, and by a cruel irony, to bring the migrant worker and the migrant policemen face to face in conflict.
Turin was a major pole of migration in the late sixties because of the expansion of the Fiat car works. In 1967 alone, with the opening of the Rivalta plant, no less than sixty thousand arrived in Turin. It was responsible for employing fifty-six thousand in 1968, but the various components firms and the whole local economy depended on Fiat. The daily national paper La Stampa, printed in Turin, was controlled by the company. In addition Fiat played a major role within the national economy through the control of 72 per cent of the car market, and in its capacity as a major exporter. The migrant worker fitted into this scheme of things as pure labour power; ‘he was squeezed like a lemon in the factory and marginalized in the city.’ A fictional autobiographical account of a Fiat worker’s experiences describes the medical tests and the humiliation of being herded en masse into a room with bloodied cotton strewn on the floor:
it was not a question of choosing you, but a way of inculcating an idea of organization, subordination and discipline.
It was but one of the aspects of the Fordist regime:
On the production line it was not a question of learning anything, but of habituating the muscles. That is, habituating them under pressure to those movements, those speeds . .. movements faster than the heartbeat .. . operations that the muscles and the eye had to do by themselves, instantly, without the need to think at all.
For many years migrant workers in Turin had had to put up with the racist discrimination of landlords, the social difficulties and isolation of the uprooted single man, and savage conditions of exploitation at work. Yet the experience of social dislocation and poverty had tended to reduce the capacity and will to resist, which, as studies have shown, depends on ‘the workers with firmly established networks . . . whilst the newly arrived, whatever their anger, have great difficulty in forming effective organiz- ations.’ It was therefore a necessary precondition to the generalized revolts in the Fiat plants that the ice was broken in spring 1968 by skilled workers, and that a workers’ movement was already in an advanced stage of development. The strikes called in protest at the killings at Avola and Battipaglia, and the union’s campaign of action against the ‘wage zones’, which institutionalized lower rates of pay in the south, related directly to the migrant workers. However, in the case of Fiat, it was the students and political activists who played a more important role than the unions in providing the network of communications (leaflets, factory gate presence, meetings in bars) which enabled workers simply to get to know kindred spirits and to organize. Moreover, the students communicated the idea of the larger movement in society.
In spring 1969 Fiat was hit by what Reyneri describes as ‘a continuous guerrilla offensive’. ‘The demand for regrading whole sections set off a chain reaction so that the interdependence of the productive process operated to the advantage of collective action by workers. Fiat became the locus classicus of ‘permanent conflict’ along with Pirelli. Action stopped completely only for the period of the August holidays. Immediately on return the Mirafiori plant workers, independently of the union, put in a demand for a 1,000 lire pay rise. Fiat suspended seven thousand workers to make them all ‘pay’ for the disruption. The result of the showdown was that the union confederations brought forward the date for action for the renewal of the engineering sector contract. On 25 September fifty thousand engineering workers took part in a national demonstration.
Events at Fiat shook the provincial city of Turin like an earthquake. The student movement had created a cultural and social crisis in middle- class households; the workers’ movement shook the very foundations of the social order." In turn, Italian national life was deeply affected. Above all, the rebellion in its most radical forms expressed a refusal of ‘industrial culture’, of a work discipline that structured life both inside the factory and outside it. Nanni Balestrini writes of this refusal:
The thing which brought us together was our discovery that work was the only enemy, the only sickness .. . the discovery that we all had the same needs and the same necessities.
However, it was not only the Southerners’ rejection of socialization into work discipline, but their adaptation of their own traditions and culture of resistance to the Turin situation that determined the forms of their revolt. Thus, in July 1969 a trade-union demonstration over housing was transformed into riots and street battles with the police. Whilst it would be inaccurate to describe the quasi-insurrectionary action as ‘southern’, nevertheless the rapid resort to violent action and the attacks on the municipal buildings of the ‘red areas’(cintura rossa) were part of a political repertoire more rooted in the south.
Inside the factories the workers’ rebellion expressed a radical antagonism to the factory itself as an institution. In contrast to the Pirelli workers of Milan, the Fiat workers delighted more in disruption than in the autonomous regulation of production. Sabotage was endemic. Such incidents of the conflict have been described as manifestations of ‘political 'primitivism’, and as the first glimmerings of trade unionism. A Fiat worker recalls that during the first internal marches there was an incident in which a worker from the south led his workmates, carrying the head of a rabbit stuck on a pole. The ‘rabbit’ (coniglio) was the ‘scab’. It symbol- ized fear and cowardice, and also unmanliness. Such theatrical mani- festations of mass defiance certainly had little to do with the ‘model’ of ‘modern unionism’. Moreover, in some respects the identification of the principal enemy in the scab or the foreman indicated a lack of what Gramsci called ‘consciousness of the historical identity or exact limits of the adversary’. However, there are gross inadequacies in analyses which dismiss such incidents as expressions of a primitive view of the world.
Approaches which posit an evolutionary development assume a progression from primitive and pre-political forms to modern political forms. Stages of development (often related to the formation of the nation-state or the rise of the market-economy) are said to mark the boundaries between them. Thus, within a Marxist view, utopian socialism and anarchism are stepping stones on the path leading to a scientific politics and party organization. Or, within the perspective of a trade unionist, sabotage and wildcat strikes are often seen as regressive and primitive hangovers from an earlier point in union history. In the postwar period in Italy dominant versions of both Marxism and sociology accepted a model of progress and modernization (hence the endless debates about Italian backwardness). Trade unions, and parties too, competed with one another to appear modern and future-oriented. In other words, much, though not all, of the cultural and ideological perspectives across the political spectrum, were ill-suited to make sense of the strange events in Turin. They were in no way prepared for what took place.
In contrast, there were political and cultural currents, which had grown in influence through the student movement, which welcomed, promoted and theorized primitivism. Or, rather, they maintained that the rebellion in the factories was anti-capitalist. Its very excesses and extremes of behaviour signified a fundamental rejection of the way of life and values of the society of the factory.
In part, this opinion sprang from a revival of revolutionary romanticism. The rebel migrant worker symbolized suffering and resistance. He (it was never a she) was one of Fanon’s ‘damned of the earth’ - outcast, exiled, oppressed and exploited. He embodied images and ideas which reverberated in the post-68 political culture. But these had an added intensity because they connected up with a rich iconography within Italian culture. In particular, the migrant worker pricked the guilty conscience of the north towards the southerner. He brought to mind films like Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers, and images of lonely men with cardboard boxes for suitcases who slept in railway stations. But he was also the fighter, the passionate rebel, and this was the hero who was feted by the young students at the factory gates. It was these positive images which were counterposed to the negative images of suffering and resignation which were associated with Catholic thinking. (Later this positive image appeared in the shape of ‘Gasparazzo’, a humorous but affectionate cartoon-strip in Lotta Continua.
Enthusiasm for the factory rebellion also took more theorized forms. The operaist Marxist intellectuals, many of whom had done their apprenticeship in the Quaderni Rossi, greeted the Fiat workers’ action as the practical correlative of their theories. For them, it was not the migrant worker, but the ‘mass worker’ who was the embodiment of a new class subjectivity. This is worth noting because in the operaist theory the ‘weak link in the capitalist chain’ was where capitalism was most advanced and, seemingly, strongest; namely, in the modern factory and not in the Third World nor in the person of the poor peasant, the marginals and so on, as a more romantic vision would have it. For operaisti the Fiat workers’ resort to violent and disruptive methods was not a sign of backwardness, but of their vanguard role. It showed their refusal of capitalist planning and waged labour.
Above all [Taylorism] has completely and definitively estranged the worker from the content of his work; it has made him understand that the way to freedom lies not in the exaltation of ‘productive labour’, but in the final abolition of waged work.
The demands raised by operaisti and taken up in the worker-student mass meetings during the Hot Autumn expressed a total disregard for normal forms of organization and mediation; the chants ‘we want every- thing’ and ‘we are all delegates’ could make no sense to the trade-union official or the party politician, but they were music to the ears of the operaisti.
It is too simplistic to divide the romantics from the operaisti even though they came from different cultural currents and milieux. It is interesting to observe, rather, that the factory worker himself became a modern hero, and that the mass-production line had a spellbinding fascination for a new generation of intellectuals, students and others whose origins were not working class. Even if much of the language of operaist theory tended to be dry and abstract, it contained moments of poetic intoxication. For example, sabotage was frequently described as an act of joy and liberation. In Lotta Continua, a paper launched during the Hot Autumn, operaist theory and revolutionary romanticism combined in celebrations of rebellion.
The Turin events were of great importance to the development of the workers’ movement because they took place in the heart of Italy’s largest company. In other words, they mattered politically and economically, and gave a sense of power to the movement in the first days of the engineering contract dispute. But the events need in turn to be related to their historical and cultural significance. Since the time of the factory council movement of 1919-20, workers’ struggles at Fiat had been of great symbolic importance for the Italian Communist Party and the CGIL, and for communists of whatever persuasion. A mountain of literature, including, of course, studies in Quaderni Rossi, testifies to the interest not only of organizers, but of historians, sociologists and others in the Fiat case. When, therefore, thousands of Fiat workers defied the directives of unions and parties alike and held mass meetings in conjunction with extremist students, their behaviour resonated throughout the political culture of the Left. It dramatically heightened expectations of radical change. In the words of Nanni Balestrini:
By this point, something had become evident in these meetings; all the workers had the impression that this was a decisive phase in the conflict between us and the bosses .... In fact, frequent use was made of the word ‘revolution’.
The Turin events seemed to show that the workers’ movement represented something far more radical than the unions and parties, and that, if other cities followed suit, the whole peninsula might be ready for revolutionary change.
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