There is a widespread misunderstanding that the government and big business suppressed the IWW during World War I. They tried. They hurt and hampered, but they did not suppress. The record is a practical subject for study by those who find themselves unpopular with those in power today.

The IWW was used to the lawlessness of "law and order" from its birth in I905. In the summer of l9l9 opposition grew fierce. The IWW faced bullpens and stockades, mass "deportation" of the Bisbee miners to the desert of New Mexico, frequent arrest by immigration authorities of anyone suspected of being a foreigner, and the intervention of federal troops. In September the federal authorities raided the national office and all branch offices, collecting five tons of evidence to use against those it named and convicted on three mass indictments in Chicago, Wichita and Sacramento. In the immediate postwar years the IWW was victimized by what the Undersecretary of Labor called the "deportation delirium," by the general rabid anti-radicalism, by a lynching raid on the lumberworkers' hall in Centralia,, Washington, and subsequent manhunts, and even more by the passage of criminal syndicalism laws in various states and the arrest and trial through l923 of far more members under these state laws than had been tried under the earlier federal enactments. One can find this story detailed in the appropriate chapters of Perlman and Taft, History of Labor in the United States, Vol. IV;in Taft's article on Federal Trials of the IWW, Labor History, Winter, I962; or in Michael Johnson, “The I.W.W. and Wilsonian Democracy," Science § Society, Summer, I964; also in Eldridge Foster Dowell, History of Criminal Syndicalism in the United States; and most readably in KornbIuh's, "Rebel Voices."

During all this repression the IWW grew. Its peak membership was in 1923. It sunk rapidly the following year, not from repression which had eased, but from internal disputes. And it is still in there trying.

The academic fiction that the IWW was crippled by wartime persecution rests on an overestimate of wartime strength. The IWW has never been very large. Its smallness, coupled with the mark it has made on American labor history, shows a handful enrolled in it were more effective than if they had been enrolled elsewhere. Its prewar peak in l9l2, the year of the big Lawrence strike, was an average membership for the year of between eighteen and nineteen thousand. The defeat in Paterson took the last penny it could raise, and the depression that followed almost killed it in 1914. The European war helped it step up a campaign among agricultural workers in 1915, and to branch out into lumber and iron mines the following year, and to grow among copper miners and in the oil fields in l9l7. It tied up copper mining and, in the northwest lumber industry shortly before the September l9l7 raids.

The following calculation of membership from l9l6 through l924 is based on a percapita payment of seven and one half cents per month per member to the general organization. The periods used are those the national office used for cumulative financial statements, usually for the information of a general convention. The average dues-paying membership for any period would have been somewhat higher than that shown because some unions were always behind on percapita, and conventions usually "excused" the non-payment so it was not made up later.

Taft, Labor History, Winter, I962, page fifty-eight gives some figures for the five month period of April, l9l7 to September,1, l9l7, showing dues paid of $75,4l9.75. Since dues were 50¢ per month or $2.50 For the five month period, this figures out to a wartime peak of 30,168. The same source shows 32,000 members initiated in the same five months, but evidently they paid dues only for a month or so, and while adding to RTE revenue did not do much to swell membership. The statement is often made that at this time IWW membership was about 100,000, e.g. in Michael R. Johnson, Science & Society, Summer 1964, p.266: "On Sept.l, l9l7, the IWW possessed between 90,000 and 105,000 paid-up members

However, the purpose of this article is not to show how small the IWW has been, but to show that during this period of repression it actually grew. What gave the IWW this capacity to resist suppression?

Senator Borah spoke about the difficulty of jailing a mere understanding between workingmen. His oft- quoted remark gives part of the answer. The fact that the hardcore members of the IWW “knew what the score was”, and were dedicated to their ideals, must be counted,too. Democracy, organized self-reliance, and local autonomy explain more, and the fact that the employers wanted these men back at work explains still more.

Had the IWW been a highly centralized organization, the September l9l7 raids and the arrest of its officers, staff members, editors, speakers,etc, would likely have knocked it out. They were replaced, so far as they were replaced at all, by men direct from the point of production, who can be assumed to have sensed the feeling of the man on the job somewhat more accurately than their predecessors. Solidarity, the IWW paper, came out October 13, 1917 with a long list of those arrested, but the editor who replaced the jailed Ralph Chaplin had the good judgment to run on the first page the following wire from Philadelphia: “Out last night, Nef will be out today. Rush five thousand dues stamps and two thousand dues books --Doree.” From there on, there was a growing emphasis on the practical, and a discarding of leftish rhetoric, without ever losing sight of such ultimate aims as a new social order.

They proved it is very practical to provide as much local autonomy as the needs for coordinated effort can permit. The return to the woods in September, 1917 illustrates the point. The lumber workers had struck in early July. They were getting hungry, and weary of being run around by town bulls and federal troops and being herded into stockades. They decided to go back to the lumber camps and continue the struggle there. The outstanding demand was for the eight-hour day. Some took whistles with them, blew them at the end of eight hours, walked into camp, and, if they were fired, they switched places with men from other crews playing the same general sort of game, until they had eight hours, showers, better food, and better pay. There was no fixed pattern what to do, each crew used its own best judgment.

Neither repression nor resistance to it was uniform. The greatest efforts to get rid of the IWW came in the lumber, oil, copper and iron mining industries--places where unionism was relatively new. Where the IWW was organized in fields where unionism was more taken for granted, it continued, as on the docks of Philadelphia where it retained job control up to 1925, In the iron mines of the Mesaba Range and Michigan, its 1918 strike was met with a wage increase at the request of the government, to head off the strike. In the oil fields it fared poorest. In copper it was reduced to minority union status, but press accounts of postwar strikes assign it major influence. In the lumber Industry its strength grew, despite Centralia and the subsequent man-hunt, up to the calling of a strike by a "militant minority" against majority judgment in September I923. This radical disrespect for democracy in its ranks precipitated the destructive dissensions of I924 and proved far more harmful than all the efforts at repression and the membership soon recognized this fact.

The variation in resistance to repression should prove helpful in any full scale study of how to avoid getting suppressed. The IWW survived all this to engage in the first strike to unite all coal miners it Colorado (see McClurg in Labor History, Winter, l963); to efforts among the unemployed in the big depression to assure that they would strengthen picket lines instead of breaking them, thus stimulating the first instance of union growth during a depression; major organization efforts in Detroit and Cleveland, with steady job control--and union contracts--in metal working plants in the latter from I934 to I950. Since then its membership has been largely "two-card," with recent welcome input from the young new left, and a current determination to get back to its old specialty of "conditioning the job" under its own banner.

Fred Thompson

Originally appeared in Radical America (September-October 1967)

Originally appeared in Radical America Volume 3, Number 4 (July/August 1969)

The following article was originally published in the French anarchist paper Le Libertaire on September 4, 1952. The first English translation appeared in Radical America vol. IV, no. 6, August 1970. Thanks to Don LaCoss for supplying the article.

No one will deny that capitalist society has entered a period of permanent crisis, which induces it to reassemble its weakened forces and to concentrate, more and more, all political and economic power in the hands of the state, by means of nationalizations. To this concentration of capitalist power, are we going to continue to oppose the scattered forces of the workers? To do so would be to run into definitive defeat. And one of the principal reasons for the present apathy of the working class resides in the interminable series of defeats suffered by the social revolution throughout this century. The working class no longer has confidence in any organization because it has observed them all at work, here and there, and seen that all of them, including the anarchist organizations, have revealed themselves to be incapable of resolving the crisis of capitalism - that is to say, of assuring the triumph of the social revolution. One must not be afraid to say that all of these organizations are outdated and no longer valid. On the contrary, only this very realization - the importance of which should not be reduced by more or less circumstantial considerations, nor by blaming others for the consequences of one's own errors - provides a point of departure from which we can truly prepare ourselves to revise all doctrines (which today share a substantial portion of outdatedness), perhaps resulting in a fundamental ideological unification of the workers' movement in the direction of the social revolution. It goes without saying that I do not by any means dream of a movement whose thought would be monolithic, but a movement unified from within, and in which diverse tendencies could enjoy the most ample freedom to manifest themselves.

On the other hand, it is no less true that action is called for immediately. This action must obey two general principles: first, it must facilitate the ideological regroupment mentioned above; and second, it must cease considering the revolution as the work of future generations for whom we are supposed to make the preparations. We are faced with this dilemma: either the social revolution and a new impetus for humanity, or war and a social decomposition of which the past offers only a few pale examples. History is granting us a breathing space the duration of which we do not know. Let us make use of it to reverse the course of the present degeneration and to bring about the revolution. The present apathy of the working class is only temporary. It indicates, at this time, both the workers' loss of confidence in all organizations, and a certain detachment on their part. It depends on us, as revolutionaries, to draw the lessons, which will enable this detachment to be transformed into active revolt. The energy of the working class asks only to exert itself. Nevertheless, it is necessary to give it not only an end - it has had a presentiment of this for a long time - but also means of attaining this end. If the task of revolutionaries is to bring about a fraternal society, this necessitates, beginning immediately, an organism in which this fraternity can form and develop itself.

At the present time, it is on the factory level that workers' fraternity attains its maximum. Thus, it is there we must act, but not in clamouring for a trade-union which is chimerical today, in the actual conditions of the capitalist world, and which, moreover, could only come forward AGAINST the working class, since the trade unions represent now only different tendencies of capitalism. In fact, a "united front" of the unions could happen only on the eve of the revolution - and would act against the revolution since the major unions would all be equally interested in torpedoing it to assure their own survival in the capitalist state. Henceforth, as integral parts of the capitalist system, they defend this system by defending themselves. The interests of the union are essentially their own and not those of the workers.

Moreover, one of the most powerful obstacles to a workers' regroupment and a revolutionary renaissance is constituted by the apparatus of the union bureaucrats, even in the factory, beginning with the Stalinist apparatus. The enemy of the worker, today, is the union bureaucrat every bit as much as the boss, who without the union bureaucrat, would most of the time be powerless. It is the union bureaucrat who paralyzes workers' action. And thus the first watchword of revolutionaries must be: Out the door with the union bureaucrats!

But the principal enemy consists of Stalinism and its union apparatus, because it is the partisan of state capitalism - that is to say, the complete fusion of the state and unionism. It is therefore the most clear-sighted defender of the capitalist system, since it outlines, for this system, the most stable state conceivable today.

Meanwhile, one should not destroy an existing organization without proposing another in its place, better adapted to the necessities of the revolution. And it is precisely the revolution that has taken t upon itself to show us, each time that it has appeared, the instrument of its choice: the factory committee directly elected by the workers assembled on the shop-floor, and the members of which are revocable at any time. This is the only organization which is able, without alteration, to direct the workers' interests within capitalist society while looking to the social revolution; and which is also able to accomplish this revolution and, once having attained victory, to constitute the base of future society. Its structure is the most democratic conceivable, since it is directly elected in the workplace by all the workers, who control its actions from day to day and are able to recall a member of the committee, or the entire committee, at any time, and choose another. Its creation offers the minimum of risks of degeneration because of the constant and direct control that the workers are able to exercise over their delegates. Furthermore, the constant contact between elected and electors favours a maximum of creative initiative in the hands of the working class, which is thus called upon to take its destiny in its own hands and to directly lead its own struggles. This committee, which authentically represents the will of the workers, is called upon to administer the factory and to organize the workers' defence against the police and the reactionary gangs of Stalinism and traditional capitalism. After the victory of the revolution, it is the factory committee which must indicate to the regional, national and international leaders (these also are directly elected by the workers), the productive capacities of the factory and its needs of raw materials and manpower. Finally, the representatives of each factory would be called to form, on the regional, national and international scale, the new government, distinct from the management of the economy, and whose principal task would be to liquidate the heritage of capitalism and to assure the material and cultural conditions of its own progressive disappearance.

At once economic and political, the factory committee is the revolutionary organism par excellence. That is why even its establishment represents a sort of insurrection against the capitalist state and its trade-union branches, because it assembles all the workers' energies against the capitalist state, and even assumes the latter's economic power. For the same reason one sees it burst forth spontaneously in moments of acute social crisis. But in our epoch of chronic crisis, it is necessary for revolutionaries to passionately defend and advocate this conception starting now if they wish, in the first place, to put an end to the meddling of union bureaucrats in the factories, and to restore to the workers the initiative of their emancipation. Let us therefore destroy the unions in the name of the factory committees, democratically elected by the workers in the plant, and revocable at any time.

Published in Red and Black Notes #20, Autumn 2004, this article has been archived on libcom.org from the Red and Black Notes website.

(Radical America Vol 5, #2 1971)

One finds it exceedingly difficult to introduce a new organization without seizing the opportunity to note that this is a black organization and, unlike all the others, offers a bright new strategy to the quiescent black movement. Black workers, with their important location in US industry and service, have demonstrated the need for a working-class movement within this advanced section of the American proletariat. Without recognizing the importance of black workers, any Leftist group or organization will be doomed to failure.

This introduction is designed to fill in some important gaps in our knowledge of the struggle. It is not a polemic, nor unfolding rhetoric proclaiming condemnations of America's futile attempt to deal with the race problem. Instead, the writer wishes the reader to know about this organization and its crucial importance in the development of a revolutionary movement in America. For far too long the plight of the black worker has been subjugated to the interests of the rulers and of their white working-class associates. What the League brings to the realm of analysis is surely nothing new (Need I remind our readers of Garveyism?), but is something which must be immediately realized­ that the American labor movement is now a memory, and something must be done now about its inability to deal with the problems of black workers.

With the establishment of DRUM (the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) in the Dodge plant at Hamtramck, Michigan in 1968, the white rulers and their infected proletarians got a taste of "a real black thang"! Wildcat strikes and electoral turmoil have characterized the automobile industry since. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers is indeed a timely response to the growing stagnation and alienation many of us now feel- black radicals and their frustrated so-called compatriots. Black labor has seldom been understood, and as Abram Harris remarked nearly half a decade ago: "An estimation of the role the Negro will play in the class struggle is futile if the economic foundation and its psychological superstructure from which issue antipathy or apathy are ignored." (1) The League perfectly understands this - that racism is the result of a two-fold process which involves economic inferiority and its internalization.

What is the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and where did it come from? John Watson gives us the answer in an interview from the Fifth Estate:

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers is a federation of several revolutionary movements which exist in Detroit. It was originally formed to provide a broader base for organization of black workers into revolutionary organizations than was previously provided for when we were organizing on a plant to plant basis. The beginning of the League goes back to the beginning of DRUM, which was its first organization. The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement was formed at the Hamtramck assembly plant of the Chrysler Corporation in the fall of 1967. It developed out of the caucuses of black workers which had formed in the automobile plants to fight increases in productivity and racism in the plant ... With the development of DRUM and the successes we had in terms of organizing and mobilizing the workers at the Hamtramck plant many other black workers throughout the city began to come to us and ask for aid in organizing some sort of group in their plants. As a result, shortly after the formation of DRUM, the Eldon Axle Revolutionary Movement (ELRUM) was born at the Eldon gear and axle plant of the Chrysler Corporation. Also, the Ford Revolutionary Union Movement (FRUM) was formed at the Ford Rouge complex, and we now have two plants within that complex organized. (2)

Centered in the extremely-important auto industry, the League has had an extremely wide and successful impact. It is now expanding its organizing activities to other areas - hospital workers and printers are now being organized, as well as the United Parcel Workers black caucus, which is one of the League's affiliates. Why this sudden turn from community organizing and the organizing of "street brothers and sisters", the black lumpen proletariat? The remarks of John Watson sum up the League's attitude toward this crucial and strategic shift in organizing policy:

Our analysis tells us that the basic power of black people lies at the point of production, that the basic power we have is our power as workers. As workers, as black workers, we have historically been, and are now, essential elements in the American economic sense. Therefore, we have an overall analysis which sees the point of production as the major and primary sector of the society which has to be organized, and that the community should be organized in conjunction with that development. This is probably different from these kinds of analysis which say where it's at is to go out and organize the community and to organize the so-called "brother on the street". It's not that we're opposed to this type of organization but without a more-solid base such as that which the working class represents, this type of organization, that is, community based organization, is generally a pretty long, stretched-out, and futile development. (3)

Community-based organizations throughout Black America have been failures. Stung by that fatal disease known as opportunism, many of these organizations either have dissolved or have been the subject of in-fighting for the pay-off. The ruling class has again demonstrated how it can pick up on anything and subvert it for its own use. It has again demonstrated that integration is a forced tool, and that no black man has the power to join white society without the sanction of the ruling class. (4) This shift is crucial.

For the last fifteen years the black movement has ridden the back of its middle-class leadership, following the white lead while they got the pay-off. The benefits (or bones) resulting from the "Civil Rights Movement" were distributed to the black middle class. In the fields of education, employment, and business, the black nouveau riche have made a small mark. The expansion of the black middle class is the unwritten policy of the white rulers. The black masses, predominantly workers (5), have been totally left out of this progress, and expressed their dissatisfaction by conducting their own "unorganized general strike" in the summers of 1966 and 1967.

The concessions granted to the new black rulers are meager, but they are real enough to raise, for the first time in a long while, the question of class antagonism. The League is responding to developing antagonisms of class in black America. Growing slowly is the black petit bourgeoisie, which consists of two wings: an educated black elite composed of technicians, managers, professionals, and others, and a small "ghetto bourgeoisie" composed of the owners of small ghetto shops and services. The ideology of this class is bourgeois nationalism which can be roughly summed up in the memorable words of Booker T. Washington in his speech before the Atlanta Exposition in 1895: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." (6)

Although this was said almost eighty years ago, it still characterizes the positions of most black nationalists. They see social revolution coming about in the disguise of white philanthropy and concern. To them the question of class struggle is an outmoded European idea which does not conform to their conception of black reality. The struggle lies in the institutional set-ups they can extract from the white paternalists, without ever stopping to think about the interest involved - that of the bourgeois nationalist or the white paternalist. Confusion and chaos have now replaced the moral glue which once held this class together, and there is no doubt that there is a huge gap in black leadership. (7)

With these facts to guide, the League has undertaken a very-difficult task - the organizing and leading of a national movement of black workers. Their local work clearly testifies to their national thrust. By organizing workers in strategic industries, the League plans to create the foundation for a black revolutionary party. Undoubtedly the perils of building a widespread national movement while laying the basis for a revolutionary party are difficult both to envision and to comprehend. But this is certainly one of their ultimate political tasks. The triumph of the downtrodden is inevitable.

The central theoretical concern of the League is the inevitable recognition of the black working class as the vanguard of the social revolution. As Ernie Mkalimoto suggests, the socialist revolutionary movement in the US must consider the black working class as leader.

Thus owing to the national oppression (principally through institutionalized racism as the dominant form of production relations) of black people in the United States, the black proletariat is forced to take on the most dangerous, the most difficult - yet absolutely necessary - productive work in the plants, the most undesirable and strenuous jobs which exist inside the United States today. The demands which it poses ­the elimination of economic exploitation (hence of capitalism) and of institutionalized racism (which thoroughly pervades the plant, not to mention North American society in general), and which allows capitalism to maintain itself, are more basic to the dismantling of US capitalist society than those of the white productive worker, who up to now has been able to defend his "white-skin privilege". That is why we say that any socialist revolution which is to be successful must take the class stand of the vanguard class of this revolution: the black proletariat.

Many white radicals and Iabor leaders will be unable to accept this position expressed by Mkalimoto (8). Why? Because the subtleties of racism have invaded their hearts and minds and prevent them from understanding the obvious. But it is this fundamental question which must be recognized before one begins to overthrow capitalism. Many so-called revolutionaries and others will say: This is a threat to the unity of the working class! This violates Marxism's first principle of international solidarity and all the rest. But with a basic understanding of the history of the black race, they will see how their arguments fail.

The League's basic position is revolutionary nationalism. One cannot forget that there are conservative and Leftist elements among the black nationalist spectrum. The League represents a Left-wing position. For those who are unfamiliar with the developing ideological debate within small black circles, revolutionary nationalism is an important and very complicated position to hold. Ernie Mkalimoto outlines revolutionary nationalism as follows:

A fusion of the most progressive aspects of the contradiction:

Bourgeois Reformism / Bourgeois Nationalism, Revolutionary Black Nationalism snatches the African-American from the puerile stage of Elizabethan drama, restores his sense of balance and direction in the universe, and sends crashing down to earth the clay idol of (Negro/American) emotional duality which has plagued the broad trend of black ideology from slavery to the present. From the activist wing of Bourgeois Reformism it takes the tactic of mass confrontation, struggles on all fronts, and integrates it into the existing order; from Bourgeois Nationalism comes the idea of the necessity for the development of national (revolutionary) culture and of both self-determination and self-reliance, as well as of the black world view which sees the struggle of African-Americans as inseparable from the struggles of all other peoples of color around the globe. The Revolutionary Nationalist views the concept of black nationhood not as any "sacred" unquestionable end in itself, but as a concrete guarantee to insure the dignity and full flowering of every individual of African descent. (9)

Revolutionary nationalism will indeed be difficult for the majority of whites to accept. It begins by taking into account the unusual degree of subjugation black people are forced to accept. It understands the unique feature of psychology and the internalization of economic phenomena. This indeed is timely. For one who does not admit the primacy of race compounded by class oppression refuses to recognize the most-central problem in American society.

The League dispenses with revolutionary rhetoric and commercial suicide, because that allows America to survive. The brother appearing on television and the revolutionary orator do not really contribute to capitalism's downfall; if anything they contribute to its maintenance.

By seizing on these images of blacks finally entering the mainstream, America controls the latent explosiveness present in most black men and black women. This is the current picture - black television, black business, black economic development, black executives - a swallowing of the "Negro revolution" by the imperialist giant.

America has created a grand illusion for most people - and black people are now subject to that illusion. The petit-bourgeois will not be able to succeed as long as it remains dependent on government and private help. The myth of the Negro capitalist is just that; but many of the brothers will not even acknowledge that. The myth of the "black capitalist and Negro market" must be dealt with. (10) There are few really-suggestive works on the problem of the class struggle in Black America. It is hoped that this issue will truly be a starting point for the emergence of a dialogue on this crucial question. The revolutionary nationalists have already begun.

The League is solidly committed to international struggle, but not without modifications. The international capital-versus-Iabor struggle is long ceased. It is now more the struggle of the rich nations versus the poor nations. It is no accident that the former are Europe and the US (with its Eastern satellite, Japan) and the latter are predominantly non - white countries. This is the major contradiction - of the West versus the non-West, and it is this contradiction which assumes the primary significance within the black workers' movement. This chief contradiction was aptly summed up in DuBois's often-quoted dictum:

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. Their international commitment rests on the success or failure of the development of the national movement. This is how internationalism is introduced - by fully realizing the international importance of one's movement. Cuba, China, and Vietnam all testify to that fact, and so will the League.

Undoubtedly the above will confuse many. Yet the common knowledge of black workers is that white labor has left them in the cold. What characterizes the race relations of the American working class is a long history of betrayal and neglect. The fact is simple: Organized labor and the labor movement were instrumental in crushing black labor, A few remembrances would be in order.

The plight of the black slave and his super-exploitation has been skillfully handled in Robert Starobin's Industrial Slavery in the Old South, and I suggest that the interested reader come by a copy of this book. Following Emancipation, the black slave with his newly-acquired freedman's status entered the labor market. He was powerfully met by his poor-white counterpart. The black wretch possessed innumerable skills, and, as one writer noted, the black artisan held "a practical monopoly of the trades" throughout the South. (11) This represents an important chapter in radical history that deserves our full attention. For much of the Nineteenth Century, the black artisan controlled much of Southern Iabor, DuBois notes with his usual clarity the effects of this development:

After Emancipation came suddenly, in the midst of war and social upheaval, the first real economic question was that of the self-protection of freed working men. There were three chief classes of them: the agricultural laborers in the country districts, the house - servants in town and country, and the artisans who were rapidly migrating to town. The Freedmen's Bureau undertook the temporary guardianship of the first class, the second class easily passed from half-free service to half-servile freedom. But the third class, the artisans, met peculiar conditions. They had always been used to working under the guardianship of a master, and even that guardianship of artisans in some cases was but nominal, yet it was of the greatest value for protection. This soon became clear as the Negro freed artisan set up business for himself: If there was a creditor to be sued, he could no longer be sued in the name of an influential white master; if there was a contract to be had, there was no responsible white patron to answer for the good performance of the work. Nevertheless, these differences were not strongly felt at first - the friendly patronage of the former master was often voluntarily given the freedman, and for some years following the war the Negro mechanic still held undisputed sway. (12)

This progress was not lasting. As Northern industry invaded the South, it brought with it the strength of organized labor, The triumph of this organized labor in the South did not match its more-egalitarian works up North. The black artisan was crushed without the usual oratorical hesitation about such things as rights and equality. The labor movement crushed this small class of black artisans, subordinating them to the greedy desires of white labor and to the advantage of the capitalist. This is indeed a sad chapter in the American labor movement's history and one that still needs to be written in full.

By driving the black laborer from the skilled trades, organized labor forced him to become a scab in strikebreaking activities. The resulting friction was ominous of Detroit and Newark in 1967. (13) The black laborer was forced to accept the dual-wage system, menial jobs, and continual confinement within industry. There was little or no chance for upgrading or betterment. He was denied apprenticeships and was forced into separate local unions while his brother stole his livelihood lock and stock. Capitalism brought with it white labor which drove black labor to extinction in the skilled trades. And as black labor was driven from its work, it was also forced to leave home and migrate to the shining North - the land of golden opportunity.

The effects of black urbanization have yet to be understood. But one thing is sure. The coming of blacks to large industrial cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh had important aspects. With the great war of 1914 came the great demand for black labor, Black labor came in herds to wartime industry. This was a timely break for black people. With work came money and the satisfaction of basic needs. Although blacks came in on the bottom and remained there, they did manage to implant themselves in industry and lay the groundwork for the future entrance of more black workers.

The tensions which developed out of the great migrations to the North are a part of a large transition made by Afro-Americans during the Twentieth Century. The shift was mainly from a rural proletariat to an urban industrial work force. This shift was dramatic, racial, intense. Rebellions were found everywhere from Arkansas to Illinois, And the results are not without strategic importance. The industrial shift had paved the way for a wide black revolutionary movement. The Garvey movement was a movement of the black masses - the black industrial, service, and domestic workers, as well as "the brother on the street". Garvey was totally rejected by the black intelligentsia and middle class and depended wholly on the masses for support and sustenance. This was the most-threatening movement the American Republic had ever had to face. (14)

Garveyism was a response to the racial fuel boiling in black people. This rage was in part the result of organized labor's unwillingness to deal with "the Negro problem" and of Jim Crow in the "golden North". Moreover Garveyism elevated black consciousness into realizing itself as independent. Garvey grounded with black people and told them of the imminent dangers of life in America - cultural rape, psychological instability, moral destruction. Garvey shouted "Up You Mighty Race!" because he foresaw the oppression strengthening its hand over black people. He was crushed: hounded, attacked, abused, accused of fraud. The US Government was instrumental in "ridding America of Garvey' while putting out the flames of revolution in Black America.

During this period organized labor was no-less oppressive. Craft unionism and its rise spread the gospel of the black workers' downfall. The AFL's unwritten exclusion policy was commented on by two black writers in 1931:

By refusing to accept apprentices from a class of workers that social tradition has stamped as inferior, or by withholding membership from reputable craftsmen of this class, the union accomplishes two things: It protects its "good" name, and it eliminates a whole class of future competitors. While race prejudice is a very-fundamental fact in the exclusion of the Negro, the desire to restrict competition so as to safeguard job monopoly and control wages is inextricably interwoven with it. (15)

The AFL refused to investigate and prohibit discrimination in its own internationals because it "would" create prejudice instead of breaking it down. (16) The CIO also was guilty of racism, but managed to escape this guilt because of the war-time expansion during its emergence and growth. (17) Following World War n, the black movement turned from institutional gains to "civil rights". It took Malcolm X and a host of other well-known black leaders to point out what so many black people had largely forgotten -that they are still oppressed, and that the only acceptable solution would be black-created and black-led.

The League responds to this oppression with a new and vital vigor, Black workers "entered industry on the lowest rung of the industrial ladder" (18), and that is where they remain. Organized labor has not contributed much to black labor, and the few exceptions like the IWW and the UMW have not been enough to offset the systematic exclusion and assault of black Iabor, The League knows this. It recognizes this fact of betrayal as a fossil. What follows is that something must be done, and the League is doing it. Sense the tone of the following, and remind yourself of history.

We fully understand, after five centuries under this fiendish system and the heinous savages that it serves, namely the white racist owners and operators of the means of destruction. We further understand that there have been previous attempts by our people in this country to throw off this degrading yoke of oppression, which have ended in failure. Throughout our history, black workers, first as slaves and later as pseudo freedmen, have been in the vanguard of potentially-successful revolutionary struggles in all black movements as well as in integrated efforts. As examples of these we cite: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the beautiful Haitian Revolution; the slave revolts led by Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser; the Populist movement and the labor movement of the Thirties in the US. Common to all these movements were two things: their failure and the reason why they failed. These movements failed because they were betrayed from within, or, in the case of the integrated movements, by white leadership exploiting the racist nature of the white workers they led. We, of course, must avoid that pitfall and purge our ranks of any traitors and lackeys that may succeed in penetrating this organization. At this point we loudly proclaim that we have learned our lesson from history and we shall not fail. So it is that we who are the hope of black people and all oppressed people everywhere dedicate ourselves to the cause of black liberation to build the world anew realizing that only a struggle led by black workers can triumph over our powerful reactionary enemy. (19)

The League's purpose is two-fold: to dissolve the bonds of white racist control, and thus, in turn, to relieve oppressed people the world over. It is fitting that the League's motto embodies the challenge: DARE TO STRUGGLE, DARE TO WIN!

As the reader goes through this issue and the important documents and analyses of black workers, I suggest that he remember the incisive comments of Karl Marx:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (20)

Certainly there is no more-fitting way to begin our own self-criticism.

Footnotes
1. Abram L. Harris Junior: "The Negro and Economic Radicalism" in The Modern Quarterly,2, 3 (1924), Page 199.
2. To the Point of Production(Radical Education Project pamphlet, 1970), an interview with John Watson, Page 1.
3. Ibid., Page 3. The interested person might reflect on the import of this organizing shift. The League breaks with all black organization by emphasizing organizing at "the point of production". Community organizing represents a diversity of conflicting interests; for example the New York school conflict of 1968 centers on the antagonism of the black school board elite and conscious concerns of the black masses.
4. The ruling class had the power to integrate existing minorities. The existing minorities are powerless in decisions affecting such basic issues as housing, education, transportation, and employment. All the action by the integrationists takes place with the consent of the white ruling class. For a more-detailed discussion of this important ruling class tactic, the reader is urged to consult Robert L. Allen's important book Black Awakening in Capitalist America(Garden City, New York, 1969). The author was a Guardian correspondent during the birth of the Black Power age, and has some useful incisive analyses.
5. The myth of middle-class expansion has certainly taken its toll. More than 80% of Black America are engaged in some sort of service, industrial, or domestic employment or in the everyday struggle for survival because they are unemployed or underemployed. The "brother on the street", when considered within this framework, becomes not a lumpen proletarian, but an unemployed worker. Although there is a black lump en proletariat, it does not characterize the class reality of black people in America.
6. Booker T. Washington: "The Atlanta Exposition Address", quoted in Eric Perkins and John Higginson's "Black Students: Reformists or Revolutionaries?" in R. Aya and N. Miller: America: System and Revolution(New York, forthcoming). The reader should also consider the documents offered in Bracey, Meier, and Rudwick (editors): Black Nationalism in America(Indianapolis, 1970), relating to bourgeois nationalism and accommodation.
7. The Black Movement has been unable to regain much of the fuel it ignited during the lives of Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X. The leadership vacuum is widespread, resulting in a marked decline in struggle.
8. Ernie Mkalimoto: Revolutionary Nationalism and Class Struggle (Black star Publishing pamphlet, 1970). This pamphlet will soon be available in revised form. It is an extremely-important statement on black ideology, and should be possessed by all persons who consider themselves revolutionary. For more information write to Black star Publishing, 8824 Fenkell, Detroit, Michigan
9. Ibid. This is the most-important definition and refinement of the revolutionary-nationalist position to date.
10. Some fruitful analysis has already begun. Although the economics of racism is a sorely - neglected area, some people are beginning to realize its centrality. See the essay by Harold Baron in this issue and his forthcoming The Web of Urban Racism, and also the fresh analysis brought by economist William K. Tabb, The Political Economy of the Ghetto (New York, 1970).
11 Charles Kelsey: "The Evolution of Negro Labor", The Annals, 31 (1903), Page 57. This article is useful despite its Darwinist bias. The reader should also know of the two important studies conducted by W. E. B. Du Bois : The Negro Artisan and The Negro American Artisan, published in 1902 and 1912 respectively.
12. W. E. B. DuBois and associates: The Negro Artisan(Atlanta
University Press, 1902), Page 23.
13. The great race riots in East Saint Louis in 1917 and Chicago in 1919 underscored many other riots and rebellions. The causes of these events were the same as those of the great rebellions of July 1967 in Newark and Detroit - economic oppression coupled with the failure to meet rising expectations.
14. The work of a young Jamaican brother, Robert Hill, indicates that the Government felt itself threatened by the widespread success of the Garvey movement among the urban poor and unemployed. An essay of his on Garvey in America is soon due in an anthology on Garveyism edited by John H. Clarke. Any radical who refuses to acknowledge the stimulus of Garveyism will be forever learning about the Black Power movement.
15. Sterling D. Spero and Abraham L. Harris: The Black Worker (New York, Columbia University Press, 1931), Page 56.
16. statement of John P. Frey, molders chief, as quoted in Marc Karson and Ronald Radosh: "The AFL and the Negro Worker, 1894 to 1949", in Julius Jacobson (editor): The Negro and the American Labor Movement(New York, 1968), Page 170.
17. Sumner Rosen: "The CIO Era, 1935-1955", in Jacobson, Ope clt., Page 207. Also see Herbert R. Northrup: "Organized Labor and NegroWorkers", Journal of Political Economy, Number 206 (June 1943), and Organized Labor and the Negro(New York, 1944).
18. Lorenzo J. Greene and Carter G. Woodson: The Negro Wage Earner (Washington DC, 1930), Page 322.
19 :constitution of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, 1968.
20. Karl Marx: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon(New York, 1966), Page 15.

It is difficult to judge just when working-class practice at the point of production learned to bypass the union structure in dealing with its problems, and to substitute (in bits and pieces) a new organisational form. It was clear to me, with my year's stay in an auto motor plant (Detroit area, 1968), that the process had been long underway.

What I find crucial to understand is that while sabotage and other forms of independent workers' activity had existed before (certainly in the late nineteenth century and with the Wobbly period), that which exists today is unique in that it follows mass unionism and is a definite response to the obsolescence of that social form. The building of a new form of organization today by workers is the outcome of attempts, here and there, to seize control of various aspects of production. These forms are beyond unionism; they are only secondarily concerned with the process of negotiation, while unionism made that its central point.

Just as the CIO was created as a form of struggle by workers, so, out of necessity, that form is being bypassed and destroyed now, and a new organizational form is being developed in its place. The following, then, is by implication a discussion of the self-differentiation of workers from the form of their own former making. The activities and the new relationships which I record here are glimpses of a new social form we are yet to see full-blown, perhaps American workers' councils.(1)

Planning and counter-planning are terms which flow from actual examples. The most flagrant case in my experience involved the sabotaging of a six-cylinder model. The model, intended as a large, fast "6", was hastily planned by the company, without any interest in the life or the precision of the motor It ran rough with a very sloppy cam. The motor became an issue first with complaints emanating from the motor-test area along with dozens of suggestions for improving the motor and modifying its design (all ignored). From this level, activities eventually arose to counter-plan the production of the motor.

The interest in the motor had grown plant-wide. The general opinion among workers was that certain strategic modifications could be made in the assembly and that workers had suggestions which could well be utilized. This interest was flouted, and the contradictions of planning and producing poor quality, beginning as the stuff of jokes, eventually became a source of anger In several localities of the plant organized acts of sabotage began. They began as acts of mis-assembling or even omitting parts on a larger-than-normal scale so that many motors would not pass inspection. Organization involved various deals between inspection and several assembly areas with mixed feelings and motives among those involved-some determined, some revengeful, some just participating for the fun of it. With an air of excitement, the thing pushed on.

Temporary deals unfolded between inspection and assembly and between assembly and trim, each with planned sabotage. Such things were done as neglecting to weld unmachined spots on motor heads; leaving out gaskets to create a loss of compression; putting in bad or wrong-size spark plugs; leaving bolts loose in the motor assembly; or, for example, assembling the plug wires in the wrong firing order so that the motor appeared to be off balance during inspection. Rejected motors accumulated.

In inspection, the systematic cracking of oil-filter pins, rocker-arm covers, or distributor caps with a blow from a timing wrench allowed the rejection of motors in cases in which no defect had been built in earlier along the line. In some cases, motors were simply rejected for their rough running.

There was a general atmosphere of hassling and arguing for several weeks as foremen and workers haggled over particular motors. The situation was tense, with no admission of sabotage by workers and a cautious fear of escalating it among management personnel. Varying in degrees of intensity, these conflicts continued for several months. In the weeks just preceding a change-over period, a struggle against the V-8s (which will be discussed later) combined with the campaign against the "6s" to create a shortage of motors. At the same time management's headaches were increased by the absolute ultimate in auto-plant disasters - the discovery of a barrage of motors that had to be painstakingly removed from their bodies so that defects that had slipped through could be repaired.

Workers returning from a six-week change-over layoff discovered an interesting outcome of the previous conflict. The entire six-cylinder assembly and inspection operation had been moved away from the V-8s - undoubtedly at great cost to an area at the other end of the plant where new workers were brought in to man it. In the most dramatic way, the necessity of taking the product out of the hands of laborers who insisted on planning the product became overwhelming. There was hardly a doubt in the minds of the men in a plant teeming with discussion about the move for days that the act had countered their activities. A parallel situation arose in the weeks just preceding that year's changeover, when the company attempted to build the last V-8s using parts which had been rejected during the year The hope of management was that the foundry could close early and that there would be minimal waste. The fact, however, was that the motors were running extremely rough; the crankshafts were particularly shoddy; and the pistons had been formerly rejected, mostly because of omitted oil holes or rough surfaces.

The first protest came from the motor-test area, where the motors were being rejected. It was quickly checked, however, by management, which sent down personnel to hound the inspectors and to insist on the acceptance of the motors. It was after this that a series of contacts, initiated by motor-test men, took place between areas during breaks and lunch periods. Planning at these innumerable meetings ultimately led to plant-wide sabotage of the V-8s. As with the six-cylinder motor sabotage, the V-8s were defectively assembled or damaged en route so that they would be rejected. In addition to that, the inspectors agreed to reject something like three out of every four or five motors.

The result was stacks upon stacks of motors awaiting repair, piled up and down the aisles of the plant. This continued at an accelerating pace up to a night when the plant was forced to shut down, losing more than 10 hours of production time. At that point there were so many defective motors piled around the plant that it was almost impossible to move from one area to another.

The work force was sent home in this unusually climactic shutdown, while the inspectors were summoned to the head supervisor's office, where a long interrogation began. Without any confession of foul play from the men, the supervisor was forced into a tortuous display which obviously troubled even his senses, trying to tell the men they should not reject motors which were clearly of poor quality without actually being able to say that. With tongue in cheek, the inspectors thwarted his attempts by asserting again and again that their interests were as one with the company 5 in getting out the best possible product. In both the case of the "6s" and the V-8s, there was an organized struggle for control over the planning of the product of labor; its manifestation through sabotage was only secondarily important. A distinct feature of this struggle is that its focus is not on negotiating a higher price at which wage labour is to be bought, but rather on making the working day more palatable. The use of sabotage in the instances cited above is a means of reaching out for control over one's own work. In the following we can see it extended as a means of controlling one's working "time."

The shutdown is radically different from the strike; its focus is on the actual working day. It is not, as popularly thought, a rare conflict. It is a regular occurrence, and, depending on the time of year, even an hourly occurrence. The time lost from these shutdowns poses a real threat to capital through both increased costs and loss of output. Most of these shutdowns are the result of planned sabotage by workers in certain areas, and often of plantwide organization.

The shutdown is nothing more than a device for controlling the rationalization of time by curtailing overtime planned by management. It is a regular device in the hot summer months. Sabotage is also exerted to shut down the process to gain extra time before lunch and, in some areas, to lengthen group breaks or allow friends to break at the same time. In the especially hot months of June and July, when the temperature rises to 115 degrees in the plant and remains there for hours, such sabotage is used to gain free time to sit with friends in front of a fan or simply away from the machinery.

A plantwide rotating sabotage program was planned in the summer to gain free time. At one meeting workers counted off numbers from ~ to 50 or more. Reportedly similar meetings took place in other areas. Each man took a period of about 20 minutes during the next two weeks, and when his period arrived he did something to sabotage the production process in his area, hopefully shutting down the entire line. No sooner would the management wheel in a crew to repair or correct the problem area than it would go off in another key area. Thus the entire plant usually sat out anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes of each hour for a number of weeks due to either a stopped line or a line passing by with no units on it. The techniques for this sabotage are many and varied, going well beyond my understanding in most areas.

The "sabotage of the rationalization of time" is not some foolery of men. In its own context it appears as nothing more than the forcing of more free time into existence; any worker would tell you as much. Yet as an activity which counteracts capital's prerogative of ordering labour's time, it is a profound organized effort by labor to undermine its own existence as "abstract labour power" The seizing of quantities of time for getting together with friends and the amusement of activities ranging from card games to reading or walking around the plant to see what other areas are doing is an important achievement for laborers. Not only does it demonstrate the feeling that much of the time should be organized by the workers themselves, but it also demonstrates an existing animosity toward the practice of constantly postponing all of one's desires and inclinations so the rational process of production can go on uninterrupted. The frequency of planned shutdowns in production increases as more opposition exists toward such rationalization of the workers' time.
What stands out in all this is the level of cooperative organization of workers in and between areas. While this organization is a reaction to the need for common action in getting the work done, relationships like these also function to carry out sabotage, to make collections, or even to organize games and contests which serve to turn the working day into an enjoyable event. Such was the case in the motor-test area.

The inspectors organized a rod-blowing contest which required the posting of lookouts at the entrances to the shop area and the making of deals with assembly, for example, to neglect the torquing of bolts on rods for a random number of motors so that there would be loose rods. When an inspector stepped up to a motor and felt the telltale knock in the water-pump wheel, he would scream out to clear the shop, the men abandoning their work and running behind boxes and benches. Then he would arc himself away from the stand and ram the throttle up to first 4,000 and then 5,000 rpm. The motor would knock, clank, and finally blur to a cracking halt with the rod blowing through the side of the oil pan and across the shop. The men would rise up from their cover, exploding with cheers, and another point would be chalked on the wall for that inspector This particular contest went on for several weeks, resulting in more than 150 blown motors. No small amount of money was exchanged in bets over the contests.

In another case, what began as a couple of men's squirting each other on a hot day with the hoses on the test stands developed into a standing hose fight in the shop area which lasted several days. Most of the motors were either neglected or simply okayed so that the men were free for the fight, and in many cases they would destroy or dent a unit so that it could be quickly writ ten up. The fight usually involved about 10 or 15 unused hoses, each with the water pressure of a fire hose. With streams of crossfire, shouting, laughing, and running about, there was hardly a man in the mood for doing his job. The shop area was regularly drenched from ceiling to floor, with every man completely soaked. Squirt guns, nozzles, and buckets were soon brought in, and the game took on the proportions of a brawl for hours on end. One man walked around with his wife's shower cap on for a few days to the amusement of the rest of the factory, which wasn't aware of what was happening in the test area.
The turning of the working day into an enjoyable activity becomes more of a necessary event as the loneliness and hardship of constant and rapid production becomes more oppressive. Part of the reality of concrete labour is that it is less and less able to see itself as merely an abstract means to some end, and more and more inclined to see its working day as a time in which the interaction of men should be an interesting and enjoyable thing. In this way the campaign against the six-cylinder motors does not differ from the rod-blowing contest or the hose fight: each is the expression of men who see their work as a practical concrete process and their relations as men as simple and spontaneous, to be structured as they see fit. Whether they should work together at full steam or with intermittent periods of diversity-or even cease working altogether - comes to be more and more a matter for their own decision. The evolution of these attitudes is, needless to say, a constant target for bureaucratic counter-insurgency.(2)

This constant conflict with the bureaucratic rationalization of time is expressed dramatically each day at quitting time. Most workers not on the main assembly line finish work, wash, and are ready to go a full four minutes ahead of the quitting siren. But with 30 or 40 white-shirt foremen on one side of the main aisle and 300 or 400 men on the other side, the men begin, en masse, to imitate the sound of the siren with their mouths, moving and then literally running over the foremen, stampeding for the punch clocks, punching out, and racing out of the plant as the actual siren finally blends into their voices. With a feeling of release after hours of monotonous work, gangs of workers move out from the side aisles into the main aisles, pushing along, shouting, laughing, knocking each other around - heading for the fresh air on the outside. The women sometimes put their arms around the guards at the gates, flirting with them and drawing their attention away from the men who scurry from the plant with distributors, spark plugs, carburetors, even a head here and there under their coats - bursting with laughter as they move out into the cool night. Especially in the summers, the nights come alive at quitting time with the energy of release: the squealing of tires out of the parking lot, racing each other and dragging up and down the streets. Beer in coolers stored in trunks is not uncommon and leads to spontaneous parties, wrestling, brawling, and laughter that spills over into the parks and streets round the factory. There is that simple joy of hearing your voice loudly and clearly for the first time in 10 or 12 hours.

There is planning and counter-planning in the plant because there is clearly a situation of dual power A regular phenomenon in the daily reality of the plant is the substitution of entirely different plans for carrying out particular jobs in place of the rational plans organized by management.

On the very casual level, these substitutions involve, for example, a complete alternative break system of workers whereby they create large chunks of free time for each other on a regular basis. This plan involves a voluntary rotation of alternately working long stretches and taking off long stretches. Jobs are illegally traded of{ and men relieve each other for long periods to accomplish this. The smuggling of men through different areas of the plant to work with friends is yet another regular activity requiring no small amount of organization.

The substitution of alternative systems of executing work has its counterpart in areas of the plant which have become, strictly speaking, off limits to non-workers; they are havens of the plant where men are not subject to external regulation. Usually they are bathrooms, most of which are built next to the ceiling with openings onto the roof. Chaise lounges, lawn chairs, cots, and the like have been smuggled into most of them. Sweepers, who move around the plant, frequently keep tabs on what is called "john time"; the men line up an hour here or there when they can take a turn in the fresh air of the roof or space out on a cot in one of the ripped-out stalls. The "off-limits" character of these areas is solid, as was demonstrated when a foreman, looking for a worker who had illegally arranged to leave his job, went into one of the workers' bathrooms. Reportedly he walked up the stairs into the room, and within seconds was knocked out the door, down the stairs, and onto his back on the floor That particular incident involved two foremen and several workers and ended with the hospitalization of two participants with broken ribs and bruises.

The coexistence of two distinct sets of relations, two modes of work, and two power structures in the plant is evident to the worker who becomes part of any of the main plant areas. But that coexistence is the object of constant turmoil and strife; it is hardly an equilibrium when considered over time. It is a struggle of losing and gaining ground. The attempt to assert an alternative plan of action on the part of workers is a constant threat to management.

During the model changeover mentioned above, the management had scheduled an inventory which was to last six weeks. They held at work more than 50 men who otherwise would have been laid off with 90% of their pay. The immediate reaction to this was the self-organization of workers, who attempted to take the upper hand and finish the inventory in three or four days so they could have the remaining time off. Several men were trained in the elementary use of the counting scales while the hi-lo truck drivers set up an informal school to teach other men to use their vehicles. Others worked directly with experienced stock chasers and were soon running down part numbers and taking inventory of the counted stock. In several other ways the established plan of ranking and job classification was circumvented in order to slice through the required working time.

The response to this was peculiarly harsh. Management forced it to a halt, claiming that the legitimate channels of authority, training, and communication had been violated. Being certified as a truck driver, for example, required that a worker have a certain amount of seniority and complete a company training program. There was a great deal of heated exchange and conflict, but to no avail. Management was really determined to stop the workers from organizing their own work, even when it meant that the work would be finished quicker and, with the men quickly laid off, less would be advanced in wages.

The threat which this unleashing of energy in an alternative plan of action presented to the authority of the bureaucracy was evidently quite great. Management took a stand, and, with only a limited number of men involved in a non-production activity, retained its power to plan that particular event. For six weeks, then, the "rational" plan of work was executed - which meant that the labour force was watched over and directed in an orderly fashion by foremen and various other agents of social control. The work which men want to do together takes four days-at most a six-day week; the work which is forced on them, in the same amount, is monotonously dragged out for six weeks, with all the rational breaks and lunch periods which are deemed necessary for the laborers.

We end, then, more or less on the note on which we began: stressing a new social form of working-class struggle. The few examples here have been a mere glimpse of that form and hardly entitle us to fully comprehend it. But we can see that as a form it is applied to the actual working day itself and to the issues of planning and control which, in my view, make it distinctly post-unionism as a practice. The use of sabotage as a method of struggling for control will increase as this form of struggle develops further, but this is merely the apparatus of movement. A crucial point to focus on is the differentiation of this new form of struggle from its former organization: mass unionism.

Within these new independent forms of workers' organization lies a foundation of social relations at the point of production which can potentially come forward to seize power in a crisis situation and give new direction to the society. I would urge, in closing, that our attention and work be focused on the investigating and reporting of the gradual emergence of this new mode of production out of the old. "Like a thief in the night" it advances relatively unnoticed.

NOTES
1. In this plant more than half the workers were either black or newly arrived Southern whites; that percentage may be as high as 75%. The remainder were mixed; whites of Northern origin, many Italians and Mexicans, and a small Hungarian and Polish segment. The women constituted from 5% to 10% of the work force and were generally black or Southern white. in the actions and organizations of workers which this paper describes, the most operative relationships were between blacks and Southern whites. Despite the prevalence of racist attitudes, which were a regular substance of interaction and even a source of open talk and joking, these two groups functioned together better than any other groups in the plant. Also in the events described women were no less active than men. Finally, there was a definite relationship between age and action. Younger workers were more willing to fight back and risk their positions than older workers. The workers from 18 to 35 were the most militantly antiunion and the most willing to go beyond the established channels in their work actions.

2. The overt expressions of the men themselves about their activity are closely tied to the actual work experience. There is little if any notion that the daily struggle in the plant has anything to do with the state or the society as a whole. Rather it is seen as a struggle waged against an immobile bureaucracy in the company and against the labour establishment so as to improve working conditions. A kind of populist mentality is crucial here, particularly with the Southern whites who showed an immediate dislike for all organizational authority and believe (like a religion) that the only way to get anything done well is to do it themselves.While workers clearly design activity to control the length of the working day, for example, these same men are unaware that the relationships and organization involved could also function to plan and control their own production. Yet it is not so important that workers so often miss the social significance of their activities; the vital point is not their consciousness, but what they actually do. Their activity smashes into the contradictions of productive relations and motivates the evolution of counter-structures in the plant.

First printed in Radical America May-June 1971.

Wildcat I

A most practical cat.

Walking silently on padded feet
Unseen, unheard
Power concentrated
in a compact body

Lean, lithe, less
in appearance
Than the explosive leap,
periodic culmination
of growing power
of growing hunger

Amber, black, mottled, gold.
All colors help to hide
its invisible path

Slowly it climbs and waits
on limb
on cliff
on overhang

All right, Buddy
Let's not get romantic.
Shut her down and let's go
A most practical cat

The Factory Songs of Mr. Toad, Detroit: Bewick/ed, 1994

This article has been archived on libcom.org from the Martin Glaberman archive on the Red and Black Notes website.

Appeared in Radical America Volume 6, Number 2

1
The years from the beginning of the century up to the English general strike of 1926 witness this crucial new feature in class struggle: Whereas deep contradictions between developed and backward areas characterize capitalism at this stage and confine it to national levels of organization, the political autonomy and independence of the working class reach an international level: For the first time, capital is bypassed by the workers at an international level. The first international cycle, roughly 1904 to 1906, is a cycle of mass strikes which at times develops into violent actions and insurrections. In Russia, it starts with the Putilov strike and develops into the 1905 revolution. 1904 is the date of the first Italian general strike. In Germany, the spontaneous Ruhr miners' strike of 1905 on the eight-hour issue and the Amburg general strike of 1906 lead a class wave that overflows into a large network of middle-sized firms. In the US, the miners' strikes of 1901 and 1904 and the foundation of the IWW in 1905 seem to be a premonition of the struggles to come.

2
The second cycle starts with 1911. We see the same class vanguards initiate the struggle: In the US the vanguards are the coal miners of West Virginia, the Harriman railroad workers, and the Lawrence textile workers; in Russia they are the Lena gold miners of 1912; in Germany they are the workers of the 1912 mass strike of the Ruhr. World War I represents the occasion for the widest development of class struggle in the US (1,204 strikes in 1914; 1,593 in 1915; 3,789 in 1916; and 4,450 in 1917 - and the National labour Board sanctions a number of victories: collective bargaining, equal pay for women, guaranteed minimum wage) while laying the groundwork for a third international cycle.

Since the War has produced a boom in precision manufacturing, electrical machinery, optics, and other fields, the class weight of the superskilled workers of these sectors is enormously increased in Germany and elsewhere. They are the workers who form the backbone of the councils in the German revolution, the Soviet Republic in Bavaria, and the Italian factory occupation of 1919. By 1919, the year of the Seattle General Strike, 4,160,000 workers in the US (20.2% of the entire labour force) are mobilized by the struggle. In the international circulation of struggles, Russia, the "weakest link", breaks. The capitalist nightmare comes true : The initiative of the working class establishes a "workers' state". The class that first made its appearance in the political arena in 1848 and that learned the need for political organization from its defeat in the Paris Commune is now moving in an international way. The peculiar commodity, labour power, the passive, fragmented receptacle of factory exploitation, is now behaving as an international political actor, the political working class.

3
The specific political features of these three cycles of struggle lie in the dynamics of their circulation. The struggle starts with class vanguards, and only later does it circulate throughout the class and develop into mass actions. That is, the circulation of struggles follows the structure of the class composition that predominates in these years. That composition consists of a large network of sectors with diverse degrees of development, varying weight in the economy, and different levels of skill and experience. The large cleavages that characterize such a class composition (the dichotomy between a skilled "labour aristocracy" and the mass of the unskilled is one prominent example) necessitates the role of class vanguards as political and organizational pivots. It is through an alliance between the vanguards and the proletarian masses that class cleavages are progressively overcome and mass levels of struggles are reached. That is, the "political re-composition of the working class" is based on its industrial structure, the "material articulation of the labour force (labour power)".

4
The organizational experiments of the working class in these years are by necessity geared to this specific class composition. Such is the case with the Bolshevik model, the Vanguard Party. Its politics of class consciousness "from the outside" must re-compose the entire working class around the demands of its advanced sectors; its "politics of alliances" must bridge the gap between advanced workers and the masses. But such is also the case with the Councils model, whose thrust toward the self-management of production is materially bound to the figure of the skilled worker (that is, the worker with a unique, fixed, subjective relationship to tools and machinery, and with a consequent self identification as "producer"). In Germany in particular, where the machine-tool industry developed exclusively on the basis of the exceptional skill of workers, the Councils express their "managerial" ideology most clearly. It is at such a relatively-high level of professionalization - with a worker/tools relationship characterized by precise skills, control over production techniques, direct involvement with the work plan, and co-operation between execution and planning functions - that workers can identify with their "useful labour" in a program for self-management of the factory. In the heat of the struggle, this program gains the support of productive engineers.

5
With the Councils, "class consciousness" is expressed most clearly as the consciousness of "producers". The Councils do not organize the working class on the basis of a political program of struggles. The Council structure reproduces - by team, shop, and plant - the capitalist organization of labour, and "organizes" workers along their productive role, as labour power, producers. Since the Councils assume the existing organization for the production of capital (a given combination of variable and constant capital, of workers and machines) as the basis for their socialist project, their hypothesis of a workers' democratic-self-management can only pre-figure the workers' management of the production of capital, that is, the workers' management of their very exploitation.

6
Yet, the revolutionary character of all workers' struggles must always be measured in terms of their relationship to the capitalists' project. From this viewpoint, it becomes clear that the organization of the Councils, by reproducing the material articulation of the labour force as it is. Also freezes development at a certain level of the organic composition of capital (the level of fixed, subjective relationship between workers and machines). Therefore, it challenges capital's power to bring about whatever technological leap and re-organization of the labour force it may need. In this sense the Councils remain a revolutionary experience. As for the ideological aspect of the self-management project, the hypothesis of a workers' management of the production of capital, it also becomes clear that "the pre-figuration of a more advanced level of capitalist development was the specific way in which workers refused to yield to the capitalist needs of the time, by trying to provoke the failure of capital's plan and expressing the autonomous working-class need for conquering power". (De Caro) It is in the workers' refusal to be pushed back into a malleable labour force under capitalist rule, and in their demand for power over the productive process (whether in the form of the Councils' "self-management" and freeze over development, or in the Bolsheviks' plan for development under "workers' control") that the fundamental political novelty of these cycles of struggle lies: on an international level, the workers' attempt to divert the direction of economic development, express autonomous goals, and assume political responsibility for managing the entire productive machine.

7
When the capitalists move to counter-attack, they are not prepared to grasp the two main givens of the cycles of struggle : the international dimension of class struggle, and the emergence of labour power as the political working class. Thus while the international unification of the working-class struggle raises the need for an international unification of capital's response, the system of reparations imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty merely seals the inter-capitalist split. While confronted by the international working class, the capitalists can only perceive their national labour powers. The outcome is a strategic separation between their international and domestic responses. Internationally, world revolution appears to the capitalists as coming "from the outside", from the exemplary leadership of the USSR: hence the politics of military isolation of the Revolution in Russia. Domestically, all the capitalists know is the traditional tools of their rule: (1) the violent annihilation of workers' political organizations (the Palmer raids and the destruction of the IWW; Fascism in Italy; bloody suppression of the "Red Army" in the Ruhr, and so forth), which breaks the ground for (2) technological manipulation of the labour force (Taylorism, the "scientific organization of labour") as a means of politically controlling class composition.

8
Taylorism, the "scientific organization of labour", the technological leap of the Twenties serves but one purpose: to destroy the specific articulation of the labour force which was the basis for the political re-composition of the working class during the first two decades of the century (Thesis 3). The introduction of the assembly line cuts through traditional cleavages in the labour force, thus producing a veritable revolution in the composition of the entire working class. The emergence of the mass worker, the human appendage to the assembly line, is the overcoming of the vanguard/mass dichotomy upon which the Bolshevik Party is modeled. The very "aristocracy of labour" that capital created after 1870 in its attempt to control the international circulation of the Paris Commune (the very workers supposedly "bribed" by the eight-hour work day, Saturdays off, and a high level of wages) became one of the pivots of the circulation of struggles in the Teens. Through the assembly line capital launches a direct political attack, in the form of technology, on the skills and the factory model of the Councils' professional workers. This attack brings about the material destruction of that level of organic composition which served as the basis of the self-management project. (The political unity between engineers and workers is also under attack. From Taylorism on, engineers will appear to the workers not as direct producers, but as mere functionaries of the scientific organization of exploitation; and the self-management project, devoid of its original class impact, will reappear as a caricature, the "managerial revolution" to come.)

9
Thus, capital's response to the struggles follows the Nineteenth Century's "technological path to repression": It entails breaking whatever political unification the working class has achieved during a given cycle of struggles, by means of a technological revolution in class composition. Constant manipulation of class composition through continual technological innovations provides a tool for controlling the class "from within" through its existence as mere "labour power". The re-organization of labour is a means to the end of the "political decomposition" of the working class. Since the working class has demanded leadership over the entire society, to push it back into the factory appears as an appropriate political move. Within this strategy, factory and society are to remain divided. The specific form of the labour process in the capitalist factory (that is, the plan) has yet to be imposed on the entire society. Social anarchy is counterposed to the factory plan. The social peace and the growing mass production of the Twenties seem to prove that traditional weapons have been successful again. It will take the Depression to dissipate this belief.

10
With 1929, all the tools of the technological attack on the working class turn against capital. The economic and technological measures for containing the working class in the Twenties (re-conversion of the war economy, continuous technological change, and high productivity of labour) have pushed supply tremendously upward, while demand lags hopelessly behind. Investments decline in a spiral toward the great crash. In a very real sense, 1929 is the workers' revenge. Mass production and the assembly line, far from securing stability, have raised the old contradictions to a higher level. Capital is now paying a price for its faith in Say's law ("supply creates its own demand"), with its separation of output and market, producers and consumers, factory and society, labour power and political class. As such it remains caught in a tragic impasse, between the inadequacy of the economic and technological tools of the past and the lack of new, political ones. It will take Roosevelt-Keynes to produce them.

11
While Hoover resumes the old search for external "international causes", Roosevelt's approach is entirely domestic: a re-distribution of income to sustain the internal demand. Keynesian strategy is already emerging - keeping up demand by allowing wages to rise and by reducing unemployment through public expenditure. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) of 1933 raises wage rates, encourages unionization, and so forth at the same time that it authorizes both massive investment in public works through the PWA and large relief funds. The political break with the past is enormous. In the classical view, the flexibility of wages is the main assumption. Workers' struggles are seen as an outside interference with a self-regulating economy: labour organizations belong with other "institutional factors" that maintain wages "artificially", while it is the State's role to preserve the economy against such artificial interference. In the Keynesian model, the downward rigidity of wages is the main assumption; wages are taken as independent variables. The State becomes the economic subject in charge of planning appropriate redistributions of income to support the "effective demand".

12
Keynes' assumption of the downward rigidity of wages is "the most important discovery of Western Marxism" (Tronti). As wages become an independent variable, the traditional law of the "value of labour" collapses. No "law" but only labour through its own struggles can determine the value of labour. Class antagonism is brought into the heart of production and is taken as the material given on which capital must rebuild its strategy. The NRA is precisely a political maneuver to transform class antagonism from an unpredictable element of risk and instability into a dynamic factor of development. Through its emphasis on the income effect of wages, as opposed to the mere cost effect, the New Deal chooses wages as the mainspring of growth, but within precise limits: Wages must rise harmoniously with profits. The necessary control over wage dynamics requires the institutionalization of class struggle. For workers' struggles inside capital's plan means working class inside capilal's State. Hence the need for the emergence of two new political figures in the Thirties: capital as the new "State-as-Planner" and the working class as organized "labour".

13
The turn toward State-as-Planner is a radical break with all previous policies of State intervention. The NRA regulates the whole of industrial production. The certainty of a capitalist future has been shaken to its roots by the crisis: The NRA "codes", involving the totality of the capitalist class (95% of all industrial employers), guarantee that a future exists. As the depth of the crisis makes the State's function of "correcting mistakes" obsolete, the State must assume the responsibility of direct investment, "net contribution" to purchasing power. The State must expose the myth of "sound finance" and impose budget deficits. It is no longer a juridical figure (the bourgeois government of law); it is an economic agent (the capitalist plan). (All this represents a historical watershed, the beginning of a long political process that will culminate in the "incomes policy", the wage-price guideposts of the New Frontier.) Most important, as the representative of the collective capitalist, the State's main function is the planning of the class struggle itself. Capital's plan for development must establish an institutional hold on the working class.

14
Hence, the need for labour as the political representative of the working class in the capitalist State. But the technological leap of the Twenties has entirely undermined the trade unions, by making their professional structure obsolete: By 1929. the AFL controls only 7% of the industrial labour force. By cutting through the old class composition and producing a massification of the class, Taylorism has only provided the material basis for a political re-composition at a higher level. As long as the mass worker remains unorganized he/she is entirely unpredictable. Thus with "Section 7a" of the NRA and later with the Wagner Act the collective capitalist begins to accept the workers' right to organize and bargain collectively. It will be no smooth process, for while capitalists as a class support the NRA, the individual capitalist will resist its consequences at the level of his own factory. The birth of the CIO will make the victory of a thirty-year-long struggle for mass-production unionism. Capital and the mass worker will now face each other as the State-as-Planner and organized labour.

15
Class struggle, once the mortal enemy of capitalism to be dealt with through bloodshed, now becomes the main-spring of planned economic development. The historical development of labour power as the political working class is acknowledged by capital's plan in this major theoretical breakthrough. What was conceived of as a passive, fragmented object of exploitation and technological manipulation is now accepted as an active, unified political subject. Its needs can no longer be violently repressed; they must be satisfied, to ensure continued economic development. Previously, the working class was perceived as capitals immediate negation and the only way to extract profits was to decrease wages and increase exploitation. Now, the closed interdependence of working class and capital is made clear by the strategy of increasing wages to turn out a profit. Whereas the reduction of the working class to mere labour power was reflected in a strategic split between factory (exploitation) and society (repression) (Thesis 9), capital's political acknowledgment of the working class requires the unifying of society and factory. Capital's plan is outgrowing the factory to include society through a centralized State.

This involves the development of the historical processes leading to the stage of social capital: the subordination of the individual capitalist to the collective capitalist, the subordination of all social relations to production relations, and the reduction of all forms of work to wage labour.

16
The signing of the NRA by the President (June 1933) marks the beginning of a new cycle of struggle. The second half of 1933 witnesses as many strikes as the whole of 1932 with three and a half times as many workers. By June 1934, with sharply reduced unemployment and a 38% growth of the total industrial payroll, the strike wave gathers momentum: 7.2% of the entire labour force (a peak not to be matched until 1937) is mobilized by the struggle. The crucial sectors are being affected - among them steel and auto workers, the West Coast longshoremen, and almost all textile workers, united behind wage, hours, and union recognition demands. 1935 is the year of both the CIO and the Wagner Act. Between the summer of 1935 and the spring of 1937, employment surpasses the 1929 level, from an index of 89.2 to 112.3. In a context of relative price stability, industrial production moves from an index of 85 to 118, and wages move from 69.1 to 110.1. The massification of the working-class struggle and the economic development of capitalist recovery are two sides of the same process: The struggle circulates to small factories and marginal industries while the sit-downs begin at Fire stone, Goodyear. and Goodrich. 1937 is the year of 4,740 strikes, the peak year in the generalization of the mass worker's struggle. In February GM capitulates; in March US Steel recognizes the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and accepts its basic demands: 10% wage increase for a 40-hour week.

17
The crucial aspect of the struggles throughout the New Deal is the general emergence of wages (wages, hours, unionization), the workers' share of the value produced mutually acknowledged by both capitalists and workers as the battlefield for the new stage of class struggle. For capital, wages are a means of sustaining development, while for the workers they represent the weapon that re-launches class offensive. It is precisely this contradictory political nature of wages (the means of workers' "integration" on one hand, and the basis for the class's political re-composition and attack on profit on the other) that causes Roosevelt's failure to ensure steady growth while at the same time maintaining control of the working class. To the threatening massification of struggles, big business responds with an economic recession, a refusal to invest, a "political strike of capital". (B.Rauch: The History of the New Deal)

18
The economic recession of 1937-38 is the first example of capital's use of the crisis as a means of regaining initiative in the class struggle. Inflation, unemployment, and wage cuts are weapons that break the workers' offensive and are means for a new political de-composition of the working class. The political necessity of the economic crisis shows dramatically that the Keynesian model is not sufficient to guarantee stability; only through an act of open violence can capital re-establish its domination over workers. Yet, it is only with the introduction of crises as a means of controlling the class that the Keynesian model can show its true value. While in 1933 the use of class struggle as the propelling element of capitalist development was the only alternative to economic recession, five years later, with the "Roosevelt recession", "crisis" is revealed as the alternative face of "development". Development and crisis become the two poles of one cycle. The "State-as-Crisis" is thus simply a moment of the "State-as-Planner" - planner of crisis as a pre-condition for a new development. From now on, capital's crises will no longer be "natural", uncontrollable events, but the result of a political decision, essential moments of actual "political business cycles". (Kalecki)

19
The political figure which dominates class struggle from the 1930s on is the mass worker. The technological leap of the Twenties has produced both the economic recession of 1929 and the political subject of class struggle in the Thirties (Thesis 8). The "scientific organization" of mass production necessitates a malleable, highly interchangeable labour force, easily movable from one productive sector to another and easily adjustable to each new level of capital's organic composition. By 1926, 43% of the workers at Ford require only one day for their training, while 36% require less than a week. The fragmentation and simplification of the work process undermine the static relationship between worker and job, disconnecting wage labour from "useful labour" entirely. With the mass worker, "abstract labour" reaches its fullest historical development: The intellectual abstraction of Capital is revealed as worker's sensuous activity.

20
From the plant to the university, society, becomes an immense assembly line, where the seeming variety of jobs disguises the actual generalization of the same abstract labour. This is neither the emergence of a "new working class" nor the massification of a classless "middle class", but a new widening of the material articulation of the working class proper. (In this process, however, lies the basis for much ideology. Since all forms of work are subsumed under capital's production, industrial production seems to play less and less of a role, and the factory seems to disappear. Thus, what is in fact an increasing process of proletarianization - the main accumulation of capital being the accumulation of labour power itself - is misrepresented as a process of tertiarization, in which the class dissolves into the abstract "people". Hence the peculiar inversion whereby the notions of "class" and "proletariat" appear as "abstractions", while "the people" becomes concrete.)

21
From the worker's viewpoint, interchangeability, mobility, and massification turn into positive factors. They undermine all divisions by productive role and sector. They provide the material basis for the political re-composition of the entire working class. By destroying the individual worker's pride in his or her skills, they liberate workers as a class from an identification with their role as producers. With the political demand of "more money and less work", the increasing alienation of labour becomes a progressive disengagement of the political struggles of the working class from its economic existence as mere labour power. From the workers' viewpoint, wages cannot be a reward for productivity and work, but are instead the fruits of their struggles. They cannot be a function of capital's need for development, they must be an expression of the autonomous needs of the class. In the heat of the struggle, the true separation between labour power and working class reaches its most threatening revolutionary peak. "It is quite precisely the separation of the working class from itself, from itself as wage labour, and hence from capital. It is the separation of its political strength from its existence as an economic category." (Tronti)

In the last decade a revolutionary movement has emerged world-wide to the Left of the Communist Parties. In Italy that movement has attained a political force, an organizational presence, and a theoretical coherence greater than those of any of its counterparts in the West. Most important is the depth of its break from the reformist program and the mediating practice of the Communist Party, from the classic tradition of the Popular Front.

A new Popular Front was exactly what the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was preparing itself for at the beginning of the '60s. A successful anti-fascist mobilization in 1960 had broken the last Cold War cabinet of the Center-Right, that of Tambroni. Detente offered the prospect of new and expanded trade with Eastern Europe, already beginning with a major Italy-Soviet [?] deal in 1960. And the Left party and trade union organizations had begun to regain strength after the fragmentation and decline of the Cold War. The Communist-Sociallst labor confederation, the CGIL, exhibited new power in the triennial contract negotiations of 1963. Because the option of the Right had been defeated, because the option of the Left promised trade expansion, and because the working class was growing stronger, the PCI expected an opening for itself to Cabinet power.

The Communists’ conclusive argument for their inclusion in the Government was that only the PCI could fulfill Italy's potential for accelerated economic growth. The Communists could mediate not only the international opening to the East but also the domestic revival of Italian working class action. The terms of exchange would be industrial peace in return for guaranteed regular wage increases and modernized state welfare services. Even the “concessions” could be attractive to the most advanced industrialists. Moderate wage increases could be passed along to consumers by oligopoly corporations, but not by smaller companies in competitive industries. The resulting elimination of weaker companies could accelerate the process of industrial concentration necessary for the international goals of corporations like FIAT in auto, Pirelli in rubber, Montedison in chemicals, ENI in petroleum, and Italsider in steel. These firms would in their turn benefit from the increase in state power which an expanded welfare system would require. In the interest of the big capitalists, the state would expand its capacity to invest in economic infrastructure and subsidize the development of the major Italian multinational firms; to co-ordinate the modernization of Italian capitalism despite objections from backward petty-bourgeois interests facing extinction; to transform itself into an effective and useful “state as planner", even "state as boss". With all this gain for Italian big business, the Communist Party saw simultaneous gains for the Italian working class: the elimination of the petty bourgeoisie, the class base of reaction and fascism; and the advance of income and welfare services guaranteed by economic prosperity. `

The revolutionary Left saw that the Communist Party was seeking reforms not as a spur toward revolution, but as a substitute for it. By seeking to involve the working class in the process of capitalist accumulation, the PCI linked the interests of the proletariat to those of the bourgeoisie. It thus became a vehicle for "instrumentalizstion" - Italian equivalent to the American term "co-optation”. How this came about became a key subject of debate. The nascent Maoist tendencies blamed PCI politics on the triumph of "revisionist 1deo1ogy" resulting from 'revisionist misleadership" at the top of the PCI. Rather than this facile explanation, an alternative analysis came from a journal named Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks). It focused on historical changes in the working class itself to account for changes in its political organization.

The Italian Communist Party had built itself during the '40s among skilled workers in the older industrial centers of Italy. These were the most advanced workers of the period both industrially and politically. Through their unions and Left-wing parties, the political objective of the skilled workers was domination of the work process in what was still largely craft production. Assembly-line production developed on a massive scale in Italy only with the investment boom of the '50s and early '60s-—the “economic miracle'. In the most modern and concentrated industries of Ita1y—auto, rubber, chemicals, steel—a new work force was created. This new composition of the Italian working class generated new political forms. Since the early '60s, the locus of industrial insurgency in Italy has shifted from the skilled worker to the "mass worker'; from the unions of the CGIL and parliamentary organizations of the PCI to the “mass vanguards" of the factory and community. The Communist Party has found itself challenged from the Left. A new revolutionary movement has emerged.

The main current of the Italian revolutionary Left has been called “operaisti" ("workerist") to distinguish it from the Trotskyists and Maoists. It has seen itself as the agency of the historic break of "mass vanguards" to the Left of the Communist Party. The journal Quaderni Rossi began in 1961 as a theoretical voice of the new movement it saw emerging. Through the mid-'60s, its ideas were appropriated by the earliest circles of extraparliamentary activists. By 1967 numerous local groups began to appear, generally taking the name "Potere Operaio” (“Workers' Power"). These local groups were in turn both harbingers and catalysts of far larger movements. From the rising of the student movement in 1968, the explosion of the industrial working class in the Hot Autumn of 1969, the insurrection of town after town in the South, and the beginning of a women’s movement, Italian capitalism has been beset by massive, violent, and universal upheaval. Caught up by this mass upsurge, the small local groups expanded, mushroomed in new places, and finally in 1969 united themselves into two major organizations: Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle) and Potere Operaio (Workers' Power). Differences in major struggles, particularly those at the 55,000- worker FIAT Mirafiori plant in Turin, divided the groups chiefly on the basis of the types of demands they advanced. Potere Operaio has distinguished itself by its call for “political wages”: guaranteed income for all as the unifying slogan of socialist agitation. Lotta Continua has attempted to develop unity in struggle through continuous and militant fights for precise objectives in every sector of daily life.

Without minimizing the differences between Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio, certain concepts are shared by this whole current of the Italian revolutionary movement. “Mass vanguards”, defined in the article by Adriano Sofri, are seen as the insurgent groups inside every struggle whose unification is the purpose of the Left. Revolutionary unification occurs only when insurgent groups merge into a common struggle—through mass action, not through delegates. Today in Italy, delegation serves to check mass participation and transfer power from the working class to the agencies of class mediation: Communist Party or reformist union. But the revolutionary movement is going beyond these mediations. It will not permit itself to be used for the modernization of its enemy.

The class struggle is the mainspring of development of every social system. The interest of the ruling class is to make this spring work for the extension and reinforcement of its own power. And so workers' autonomy occurs when the class struggle stops working as the motor of capitalist development. (Adriano Sofri, Comunismo Number 1 by Lotta Continua)

The breakthrough into "workers’ autonomy" happens when the working class fights for more than reformism can possibly concede. "Workers’ autonomy' emerges when the working class fights for income gains beyond and finally detached from productivity gains. “Workers' autonomy" emerges when the working class unites itself, directly and universally, for all its interests in every sphere of life. "Factory, school, and community: The struggle is one.” "Workers' autonomy’ is the goal of revolutionary socialism in Italy!

Reconstruction” and “Economic Growth
After the Second World War, the Italian ruling class, aided by the Marshall Plan, began the reconstruction of a capitalist economy. The parties of the Left, including the Communists, co-operated with them. The revolutionary hopes of the workers who had fought against Fascism were traded for a seat in the Government. All over the country anti-fascist groups, who had been armed since the time of the Resistance and were now preparing to combat the presence of the US, were persuaded to lay down their weapons. Once the threat of armed insurrection was out of the way, the bourgeoisie swiftly ousted the Communists from the Government and set about a program of suppressing working-class organizations. The trade unions, particularly the militant metal workers’ union (FIOM) at Fiat, were broken up. Conditions were now ripe for the exceptional growth of Italian industry, which lasted from 1948 to 1962. During this period, with considerable financial backing from the State, massive investment occurred, especially in export based industries and automobile production. Industry was streamlined, and the most modern methods were introduced into the factories. This growth, far from benefiting the workers, was largely paid for by them through the low wages and lousy living conditions they endured. Since the new industry was highly automated it only very slowly created jobs, and unemployment remained high throughout the period.

The South
This industrial growth was concentrated in the northern cities and was based on a policy of keeping the South poor and underdeveloped. Southern Italy’s position in relation to the North is very much like that of the North to the South in the US, or that of Ireland (North and South) to the UK. Predominantly an area of agricultural work, it has a long history of a client system based on large landowners. Jobs, homes, schools, everything depended on the patronage of the local boss. This system was maintained after 1945, with the difference that control was no longer in the hands of the landlords, but was now in the hands of government officials who handled public money. Agriculture was “rationalized” into larger units and mechanized, and millions of people were driven off the land into the cities, especially Naples and Rome. Between 1950 and 1967, some 17,000,000 Italians, more than a third of the population, moved from one district to another. Although a certain amount of small industry and construction work did come to the South, it was not enough to prevent a massive migration to the North. This constant reserve of labor was exactly what the Italian bosses needed. It helped to keep wages down, even when the demand for workers began to grow.

The year 1962 brought the first halt to this murderous progression. The workers at Fiat came out on strike and demonstrated in the streets of Turin. The demand for workers, caused by the boom of 1959, was beginning to push wages up, while unemployment was falling. Italian bosses began to find it more and more difficult to make the massive profits to which the boom years had accustomed them. Investment began to tail off, and more and more money went abroad or into other more lucrative areas such as property speculation. Now, instead of pushing up productivity by the introduction of new machinery, as they had been doing, they began to put the squeeze on workers to work harder. Speeds on the production lines were pushed up and up, to become the highest in Europe. The years during which their organizations had been smashed gave Italian workers no chance, for the time being, of resisting this process.

Conditions in the Cities
The bosses managed to retain the upper hand, and conditions for the workers grew worse. Unemployment rose once more, and the prices of food, housing, and transportation shot up in an ever-growing inflationary spiral. Life in the cities became unbearable. The growth of Italian capitalism had involved a massive influx of people into the towns. From 1951 to 1961, the four largest urban districts (Milan, Rome, Turin, and Naples) and their outlying districts had a population increase of 2,000,000, two-thirds of the total national increase in population. From 1951 to 1969, the population of Turin and its suburbs alone grew from 868,000 to 1,528,000. The bosses and their State did nothing at all to make this forced migration less painful. Public housing was minute. The main State agency, GESCAL, built only 390,000 apartments between 1949 and 1971- the same number that was built privately in one year. In 1971, GESCAL built 3,254 apartments and had a waiting list of 138,931 families. GESCAL gets its money from the workers and the employers. The workers’ contribution is 0.6% of their wages, and the bosses’ is twice that. A good deal of this money disappears through corruption. The rest is invested either in industry or abroad, and will remain there, since it takes years for GESCAL to get planning permission for its projects. More over, GESCAL usually gets outbid for the little land that becomes available by private developers. Thus workers had to find accommodation where they could. People often had to sleep six to eight to a room, and shanty towns spread around the large cities. When apartments could be found, rents consumed up to 40% of a worker’s wages.

Bosses’ Crisis, Workers’ Struggle
By 1968 the workers were beginning to fight back once more. The incidence of strikes and absenteeism grew rapidly, and in the South there were a number of violent riots. At this time the Italian economy was entering another difficult phase. Competition for markets was increasing between Italian firms and rival firms, especially from the US. In many cases there was direct competition between, say, Fiat and Ford, Pirelli and Firestone, or Italian oil companies and their US equivalents. This process was reflected also in an increasing antagonism between different sectors of Italian capital: between large scale industries, Italian owned and heavily subsidized by the State and small scale industry, relying on or even owned by US companies. The small firms were increasingly faced with either liquidation or absorption into one or another of the larger monopolies.

In 1969 many of the important three-year labor contracts in the metal working industry were due to expire, over 50 of them. Many of the large firms were eager to negotiate new terms and to settle with the unions as peacefully as possible, thereby avoiding large scale disruptions of production. For their part the trade unions and the CP, and their parliamentary spokesmen, were ready to make a deal. They were hoping to strengthen their own position and to have their importance recognized officially. The CP had dreams of once more of entering the Government. They were also worried by the existence of several unofficial workers’ committees and “base committees” which had emerged during the previous year. In exchange for industrial peace they would ask for higher wages and the promise of social reforms. But to ensure their bargaining position they had to mobilize the workers, at least enough to show their strength. And this was their big mistake, because the workers had had enough. They weren’t going to play the game of token gestures.

The “Hot Autumn”
Before the unions could sell them out, the workers were on the move. They soon went far beyond the control of the unions. For instance, when workers at Fiat were called out on a one-day token strike protesting the killing of a Southern worker during the rioting at Battipaglia, they refused to leave the factory, and started to take it over instead. Very quickly people began to develop aims, tactics, and organization which had nothing to do with what the unions were after. They didn’t just want a wage increase; they wanted the abolition of the grading system, equal pay raises for all, and a drastic reduction in work speed. Rather than passively coming out on strike, as the unions wanted them to, they began to organize a struggle inside the factories, with mass meetings on the job, rotating strikes in different sections which brought production to a standstill, marches through factories involving a lot of damage to plants, and direct confrontation with management. New organizations began to take control of the struggle, base committees at Pirelli (Milan) and at the chemical works in Porto Marghera, and the worker-student assembly at Fiat Mirafiori (Turin). Factory newspapers began to appear. Links were established with groups of students, and meetings were held regularly at factory gates.

This explosion inside the factories demonstrated decisively that the “economic partnership” which the bosses and the unions were interested in would not happen. The growing use by Italian firms of assembly-line production techniques had drastically changed the nature of work and the work force. The older, skilled workers, with pride in their work, who had been the backbone of the trade unions and the CP, had no place among a newer generation of workers whose individual skills were unimportant and who didn’t give a damn about the “dignity of labor”. Many of these young workers had come from the South, from agricultural communities with a long history of direct and violent struggle, where the burning down of the local town hall and the occupation of land were common happenings. They were part of a militant tradition, but not part of a trade union tradition. So when the militancy of these workers came into the open, the unions were not able to channel the struggle into demands for higher wages and reforms, as the French unions did in 1968. In the hope of buying peace, the bosses desperately made big concessions on wages. Between 1969 and 1970 wages went up by 23.4% compared with an average annual increase of only 9% over the previous 10 years.

The signing of the contracts was conclu what is ded only a few weeks after 16 people were killed by fascist bombings in the center of Milan. The ruling class was developing two tactics for dealing with the militancy of the workers concessions and reforms on one hand, and open repression on the other. The continuation of the struggle inside the factories and its extension into the communities meant that the ruling class increasingly chose the second option. In the factories militants were sacked or moved into other jobs, fascists were planted to spy on militant workers, and many small firms closed down. At the same time, unemployment and prices rose sharply.

1969-1973: Four Years of Struggle
Since the “Hot Autumn” of 1969, the class struggle in Italy has spread from the factories to every area of people’s lives. The working class has fought against their rotten housing conditions with widespread and prolonged rent strikes and mass occupations of empty flats. People have fought against rising food prices, expensive transportation, inadequate schools and nurseries, and lousy medical facilities. They have begun to create within their communities a new way of life, outside the control of the bosses. What’s more, Italian immigrants have taken the germ of this struggle beyond their national frontiers to other major European cities.

Rents: Throughout the country thousands of tenants have been on rent strikes, some lasting for several years. Tenants’ slogans have been “The only fair rent is no rent!” and “Housing is a right. Why pay rent?” Independent organizations like the Milan Tenants Union make sure that control of the struggle stays in the hands of the tenants themselves.

Occupations of buildings: Hundreds of people have been involved in taking over empty buildings. In Milan, during one series of occupations, 30,000 marched in a revolutionary demonstration through the city. In Taranto 182 families occupied a public-housing project In February 1973. The police came to throw the families out, but were forced to leave when the squatters were joined by hundreds of workers from Italsider, the steel plant, some of whom were squatting themselves.

Food prices: Militant women have picketed supermarkets. In Milan there were clashes with police. In Pisa, people organized a Red Market.

Transportation: In Spinea and Mirano (suburbs of Venice) workers and students stopped all busses from running as part of a campaign against high fares and bad service. They took some of them over and drove them all over the area. In Trento, workers commuting to factories refused to pay fares, saying that their wages were low enough.

Schools: There have been strikes and occupations of primary and secondary schools and universities in every major city. Since the autumn of 1969, when worker-student assemblies were formed, there have been many occasions on which workers and students have fought alongside each other. In the schools, the kids have fought for free books, free transportation, an end to exams, an end to the class bias in education, the opening of schools to the community, and so on.

Health: In Rome a Red Health Center was set up to provide free medical treatment. It became a center for organizing struggles around living and working conditions, the real causes of ill health. Throughout the country, Left-wing doctors have become involved in fighting class based medicine. For example they have given evidence in court cases involving workers whose health has been impaired by factory conditions. Their evidence has been essential in combating the evidence of the bosses’ doctors.

Prisons: Prisoners in many Italian jails have been fighting against their conditions. In prisons in Milan and Naples cells have been set on fire and prisoners have gone onto the roofs with banners. A Red Help organization has been formed to support their struggles from the outside.

Originally published in Radical America 7/2, 1973. Text taken from www.prole.info

The spiralling working class struggle which has characterised Italian society over the last 6 years has produced a crisis of major proportions for Italian capitalism – the most severe recession since the War. The crisis has not only affected the method of capitalist reproduction, but has also shaken capital’s political control over the working class and has weakened the power of the institutions that mediate the class struggle – the trade unions.

Furthermore, it is a crisis that may be very hard to resolve, since at its root lies the main political outcome of a decade of struggles: the workers! generalised refusal of the capitalist organisation of work. ”Chaos”, as the bourgeois press puts it, ”has become an endemic feature of Italian society. The traditional tools of capitalist power are no longer capable of maintaining social peace”. It is during the crisis, says Marx, that the relation between classes becomes clarified. It is by the ”universality of its theatre and the intensity of its actions” that the crisis reveals the unresolvable antagonistic relationship between capital and the working class.

The Italian crisis is first of all a crisis of the progressive reformist policies which capital, together with the official working class movement, had started to apply, starting with the first Centre-Left coalition government of 1964. By 1970, following the struggles of 1968-69 it had become apparent that the advanced Keynesian policies promoted by the Centre-Left coalition (economic planning, incomes policy, collaboration with the trade unions) could not contain the impact of a united and politically homogeneous working class struggle. Once again, the autonomous working class demand for more money and less work, for a wage disengaged from the labour expended, hit the capitalist system’s capacity to respond positively and to continue to deliver the goods.

As the wage boosts won by workers in 1968 and 1969 easily exceeded the productivity ceiling, the working class struggle for more wages ceased to function as an incentive to capitalist development, and became a threat to capitalist production. Wages could no longer be made to work as ”internal demand”, purchasing power, Keynesian push for development, but, on the contrary, represented a renewed attack on the stability of the capitalist system. The basic Keynesian presupposition that class conflict can be integrated into a strategy of capitalist development revealed once again its political weakness. Capitalism proved to be incapable of satisfying the autonomous and collective needs of the politically re-unified working class.

Economic development is second to capital’s need to politically control workers – that is, to maintain a dominant power relation. Where such control over workers has loosened, it must be restored at once. Capitalists, politicians and union executives remind us daily that there will be no economic development until the ”political premises” are there. In other words, there will be no economic development short of a workers’ defeat.

The Fascist bombings of December 1969 were the first major signal of the repression to come. It was in 1970, however, that capital’s anti-working class offensive took definite shape along the following lines:

(1) Economic crisis; (2) Institutional transformation; and (3) Technological change and reconversion of the economy. The sections that follow deal with these three levels in that order. The role that the official working class movement has played throughout the crisis is also examined.

1) The Economic Crisis

Capitalists do not like crises. During crises, capital’s accumulation slows down and stops. The premise and justification of capitalist civilisation – economic development – must give way to the destruction of capital and of real wealth. Left to themselves, the capitalists would not choose a crisis. The days of crises as a product of intracapitalist competition in a vacuum of workers’ activity are over – if they ever in fact existed.

The economic crisis was imposed on the capitalists by the working class struggle. Throughout the 1968-70 cycle of struggles, workers had not only stepped up their mass struggle against work at the point of production through increased strikes, go-slows, absenteeism and sabotage (all activities that do not reproduce capital), but had also expressed their determination to struggle against the capitalist State. Capital was left with a single choice: to accept the crisis as the new battlefield, to try to take it under control, and to make it backfire on the workers.

There is one thing we have learned. Crisis is no longer the catastrophic development of capital’s ”social anarchy”, as in the collapse theory of the Second International. Rather, the crisis represents a capitalist attempt to regain control over the workers’ command of the business cycle.

In the first months of 1971, industrial production receded an average of 3.5%, with a flat minus-5.1% in the ”leading sectors” – steel, machine tools and construction. Once again, the traditional antagonism between levels of wages and levels of unemployment was exploited. Massive layoffs, expulsion from the labour force of marginal sectors (women, old people, and youth), underemployment, decreased labour mobility – all such means have been used to destroy the unity of the working class, to play off the employed and the unemployed against each other, to separate the community struggle from the struggle at the point of production, to de-compose and to dis-organise the mass worker.

Despite these efforts, the wage pressure was sustained throughout 1971. With productivity virtually stagnant, wage boosts averaged a fat 16.6%, and cut deeply into profit margins. By the end of the year, the Bank of Italy revealed that a 670 billion lira increase in the monetary value of production was swallowed by a 1500 billion lira increase in the total wage bill. Capital’s income fell by 830 billion lire. There was no capitalist accumulation in Italy in 1971.

Capitalist development depends on current profits as well as estimates of future profits. When the capitalists see no future, they do not invest, no matter how ”easy” money may be. Beyond a certain point of deterioration easy money as such does not get investment moving again. In spite of the ”expansive” fiscal policy pursued by the Bank of Italy, net investments fell by 17% in 1971. It was and is a political strike on investments. If capitalist development represents the basis for a working class offensive, then as far as the capitalists are concerned, the only hope of a workers’ defeat lies in the economic crisis.

2) Technological Change and Reconversion of the Economy

Marx saw through technological change very clearly:

”It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class”.

Since Marx, and particularly since the development of mass production and the scientific organisation of labour, technological change (called ”progress”) has become a major weapon in the hands of the capitalist class. By actually manipulating class composition technologically, capital has learned how to deal directly with the material existence of the working class as labour power, as mere commodity.

In the context of the Italian crisis, the capitalist strategy to base the overall political attack on a ”technological repression” of the working class had to satisfy two fundamental political needs. First, it had to strengthen the attack on jobs, for the purpose of enforcing work on the unemployed. Second, it had to produce major gaps in the homogeneous texture of a working class politically dominated by the collective behaviour of the mass worker; that is, it had to alter the class composition which had served as the basis for the political reunification of the working class in 1968-70.

The following measures were attempted: technological innovations that reduce the number of employed workers (technological unemployment); demobilisation of entire productive sectors (such as textiles) and of geographical areas (such as La Spezia); decentralisation of productive structures, so as to eliminate large working class concentrations; restructuring of the labour process in view of two major requirements: (1) a wider range of skillgradings (an attempt at creating a pro-work professional ideology in a portion of the labour force), and (2) widened pay differentials. Once again, the workerst struggle had forced capital to attempt a technological leap.

Such technological repression, however, was carried out differently in different sectors of production. In fact, industrial sectors were to be analysed in terms of the instruments they provide for regaining control over the working class. From this point of view, each ”sector plan” represents a particular strategy, a particular model of capital’s command over production.

In this respect, the leading sector today is the chemical industry, which, because of its high vertical and horizontal concentration and its integration at the international level, has wide margins of control over the entire cycle of production. Not so for the auto industry. The replacement of the assembly line in the car factories has been on the capitalistst agenda for quite some time, internationally – since the struggles of 1933-37 in the USA unequivocally demonstrated the collective power of the assembly workers, the mass workers.

But the ”new way of producing the motor car” is not just around the corner. FIAT’s Agnelli has explicitly ruled out the possibility of any major innovations on, or substitutes for, the assembly line, since this would involve at once huge capital outlays, coupled with a 25% cost increase. Plainly, the big multinational FIAT has become incapable of formulating a workable strategy of containment. At least 360,000 cars have been ”lost” since 1969.

The ultimate solution in both the auto and chemical sectors lies in the search for safer areas of investment. Thus, Italy’s South has come to occupy a favoured position in capital’s plan. The new Southern ”poles of development” at Porto Torres and Gela, veritable cathedrals in a desert, testify to a renewed attempt to divide the working class along geographic lines.

3) Institutional Transformations: The New Role of the State

The political institutions required by a Government which must impose mass repression on the working class cannot be the same as the ones of a reformist government, which would be based on attempted collaboration with the working class. The 1948 Constitution, with its focus on the parliamentary life of mediating political parties and its emphasis on decentralised administrative structures, could not function as the institutional framework for a capitalist use of the crisis. The Italian Republic had been founded on the principle of class collaboration in the name of economic development. Such collaboration remained a dream. Economic development has ceased. Each new Government since the fall of Rumorts Government (Summer 1970) was under pressure to carry out a gradual ”emancipation” of the Cabinet from parliamentary parties and procedure, at the same time that it implemented a general strategy for the repression of the working class.

The first few months of the Colombo Government (from Summer 1970 to January 1972) witnessed some uncertainty as to which strategy to employ. Initally Colombo preferred to attack the workers indirectly. A higher sales tax on mass consumer items like petrol, introduced in the Summer of 1970, was the first move of the capitalist offensive. Although a strong measure, it still revealed a major weakness in the capitalist initiative: a certain fear of attacking the workers directly at the point of production, and some hesitation about waging an explicitly political battle. But the continuous industrial struggles of 1971, and the dramatic decline in production that followed, demonstrated that fiscal policy alone would not be enough, that the only way to win in the crisis was direct, open repression.

Andreotti’s Centre-Right Government of January to May 1972 was the first Government to openly do away with constitutional bindings, and practice large-scale systematic repression. A modernisation, rationalisation and numerical increase of the police force; a strengthening of executive power, tested through mass anti-crime campaigns (against both ”political” and ”common” criminals); early elections in May (with the Christian Democrats promising stability to the capitalists, law and order to the middle classes, and repression for the proletariat); the assassination of the revolutionary publisher Feltrinelli and the subsequent increase in State terrorism against the mass vanguards and the revolutionary Left; the hundreds of comrades in jail – all of these measures expressed the same political programme: subordinating the needs to resume production and economic development to a process of completely restructuring capitalist command.

The May 1972 Elections reflected the radicalisation of the conflict in the only way the elections could offer: a parliamentary polarisation and a growth of votes for the three major opposing parties – the Christian Democrats (DC), the Fascist Party (MSI) and the Communist Party (PCI) at the expense of all other minor parties. The tactical reasons for the working class votes going to the Communist Party should be clear to everyone: the electoral show of strength of the working class as a compact political body should not be mistaken for a show of support for the Partyts political programme. In fact, the Government understood the electoral results for what they were -a show of strength, a threat, and an anticipation – and it quickly stepped up repression after the elections with an eye to the next round of wage-bargaining (Autumn 1972). The winning Christian Democratst political platform did not provide a strategy for economic development – it provided a model for controlling the class. And this was implemented by changing the relationship between trade unions, political parties, and the State.

The unions were now told explicitly that their institutional function was to convince the workers to stop fighting – or else bear the burden of continued recession. A wage ceiling was set as a precondition to economic recovery, and strike regulation, though not formally ratified, was accepted in practice by the trade unions, in the form of both ”self discipline” and the search for new mediations to prevent strikes. As for Parliament, political parties became organs of the State, and achieving law and order became a political priority for all. But the major transformation occurred in the role of the State itself.

It was the role of the State as a general economic planner that had to come to an end with the crisis. Beginning with the first Centre Left coalition of 1964, capital had come to accept the historic trend towards the re-unification of the working class, and tried to make use of this working class unity in order to re-launch economic development. Through State planning, capital attempted to achieve a general control over the working class as a whole, through the institutions of the democratic State, political parties, and trade unions. But when the mass consensus of the working class could not be secured, working class unity became fully subversive in its impact. Consequently, general planning became impossible, and had to be replaced by different sectoral plans, particular plans for the different sectors of industry, in an attempt to tear major holes in the homogeneous texture of the working class.

The impossibility of a general plan and the consequent crisis of the State’s role as general planner meant that business reclaimed the economic initiative and set itself up to manage the crisis directly and to respond to each class situation in a specific manner. The State was left simply with its commitment to the stability of capitalist power. This meant an obvious emphasis on the State’s repressive functions – on institutional violence, the police, the courts, the secret services, and the democratic State’s use of Fascism.

Yet it would be a mistake to interpret such institutional changes as simply a revival of State non-interference, laissez-faire, 19th Century non-intervention. In fact the State’s emphasis on mass repression and institutional violence was a means to a very precise and advanced form of ”State intervention”: the political determination of all market values (prices, wages, ”incomes” in general), in order to have economic values meet political priorities. As ”economic laws” ceased to function in the process of formation and distribution of income, they simply had to give way to open and direct relations of power. When the laws regulating the price of labour on the market no longer functioned, and wages outgrew productivity (that is, the price of labour became detached from the labour expended), the traditional socialist ideology of a ”value of labour” collapsed. The
price of labour could be determined only by relations of power, open struggle, and by strength of organisation.

4) The Communist Party and the Question of Fascism

Throughout the capitalist crisis, the PCI intensified its campaign to join the Government in a coalition cabinet (the well-publicised ”Italian road to Socialism”). Yet, to the extent that reformism has been defeated, there has been little that capital and the Communist Party could offer
each other. Capitalism has no margins for reforms and economic development, and the Communist Party has been in no position to guarantee control over workers’ behaviour.

But then what has the Party had to offer to the working class? Only an anachronistic, ideological re-posing of ”reforms” (such as public expenditure, and rationalisation of the ”social services”) and a campaign for a democratic struggle against Fascism which would include all the parties that accept Parliamentary fair play (with the single exception of the Fascists themselves). In the CP analysis, the threat of a Fascist take-over would be dispelled by a popular-front coalition.

A few words of explanation: the CP’s alarmism notwithstanding, Italy is not presently on the verge of a Fascist take-over. True, after the failure of reformism, capitalist strategy has come to a political crisis, for it has not indicated a way to utilise productive forces in a way which is adequate to match the growth and autonomy of the working class. The Fascist solution, however, when applied to the problem that capitalist strategy must tackle today – containment and utilisation of workers’ struggles at the highest level of socialisation – is but a museum piece. A popular front in defence of bourgeois civil liberties is not a rearguard solution: it is simply a solution for a problem that does not exist.

The problem today is not that there is a possibility of a Fascist takeover; it is collective capital’s support of, and the democratic State’s use of, Fascism. For capital Fascist thugs are instruments of direct, physical repression in the unions, on the picket lines, in the streets. Their existence in the political arena, moreover, allows the State to play the role of mediator between ”opposing extremisms” – revolution and reaction.

But who are the Fascists? That is, whose interests do Fascist interests represent today? They express the interests of the most backward fringes of capital: small business – a social stratum that is doomed to collapse, haunted by the rising cost of labour, and that is progressively squeezed out of existence by the sharpening class struggle. The political strength of the Fascists, therefore, derives not from the stratum they represent (a fragile stratum indeed), but from the function they are called on to fulfil as a weapon of the democratic State in the anti-working class offensive.

Under these conditions, to ”denounce Fascism” and at the same time to ”defend the democratic institutions”, as the CP anti-Fascist campaign would, is not simply political blindness; it is open collusion with capital in the attempt to disarm the working class.

5) The Trade Unions Versus the Working Class Struggle

The crisis of reformism has deeply affected the role played by the unions in the capitalist plan. Years of open, autonomous struggle have made it clear that the unions cannot guarantee the collaboration of the working class. In fact, the formal signing of labour contracts has seldom put an end to industrial struggles. Capital has come to realise that collaboration with the trade unions makes little sense when it does not ensure the collaboration of the working class. Furthermore, on certain occasions during the early years of the cycle, the trade unions, far from exercising control, have been used by the workers as one means of coordinating their struggle. Clearly the unions in the ”Keynesian” State of the 1960s could fulfil their political function of mediation and containment only on the condition that they effectively ”represented” the working class – that is, on the condition that they accepted (and mediated) its spontaneous struggles. Hence, we witnessed a ”radicalisation” of the unions’ official platform of demands in 1968-69, as well as the emergence of a Left wing within the trade union movement.

Things were very different by 1972. In the 1972-73 round of bargaining there was no room for concessions. Reformism had failed, and economic development had come to a standstill. There was only one function left for the unions to fulfil: open collaboration with capital in repressing the working class – that is, the ”responsibility” that trade union leaders demonstrated throughout the negotiations. In the words of one union boss: ”The Hot Autumn must not be repeated. The 1972 contracts must be bargained and negotiated at a very mild temperature.”

The unions’ strategy focussed on one major objective: to contain the workers’ struggles through the paradoxical argument that one must stop striking in order to prevent anti-strike legislation. But the history of the last several months has dispelled any illusions concerning the possibility of trade union control over the working class.

Once again it has been the struggle of the auto and metal workers which has functioned as the occasion for the new major working class offensive of Spring 1973. Once again, the situation at FIAT epitomises the political features of a whole wave of struggle.

Since the Turin general strike of September 1972, the struggle has grown out of control in terms of both violence and generalisation. Throughout the Autumn, the FIAT workers stepped up their cortei interni (insidethe-factory militant marches that proceed from shop to shop, busting doors and gates and sweeping away foremen, strike breakers and guards). On January 22nd, the Lancia car workers launched a sit-down, and battled with the police when the latter tried to enter the factory. (One worker was killed by the police). On January 26th, striking students joined picket lines and workerst marches in Milan. (One student was severely injured by the police). On February 2nd, some 20,000 FIAT workers staged a one-day occupation of the FIAT-Mirafiori plant, which triggered a wave of factory occupations in the following months. By February 9th, nearly half a million workers had congregated in Rome for the largest working class demonstration to take ,place since World War II. Their slogans were ”Power to the Workers” and ”Factory, School, Community – Our Struggle is for Power”.

Together with the cortei interni, mass absenteeism has become a major new form of struggle. Once again, FIAT workers have led the way with an absenteeism rate of 28%. This means that each day 30,000 FIAT workers do not go to be exploited by the capitalist factory; that the average real work-week at FIAT has been self-reduced by workers to a little over 30 hours. Through their absenteeism and sick leaves, the 100,000 FIAT workers of Turin have re-appropriated 45 billion lira (over £3,000,000) – nine times the net profit that FIAT posted for 1972 – without work. And absenteeism, far from being a substitute for other forms of struggle, has been growing together with other forms of workerst revolt – strikes, picket lines, factory occupations and mass demonstrations.

6) The Blockade of FIAT-Mirafiori

On Thursday March 29th, FIAT-Mirafiori was occupied again. Early in the morning, a crowd of 10,000 picketers blocked all the entrances. To the workerst slogan ”Occupy FIAT – No Truce”, the unions responded with their own ”Strike for Two Hours”. Inside the occupied factory workers set up permanent political assemblies. FIAT’s first move was to threaten not to distribute the weekly wage packets, and to call the police. Friday morning, however, wage packets were ready as usual – but for strikers only. ”Workers’ Courts” ruled that strike breakers would not be allowed to pick up their wages. In the Body Plant, the workers held a mass trial of foremen and scabs. By Friday evening, most of Turin’s factories were in the hands of workers: cortei, assemblies and occupations started at Lingotto, Bertone, Pininfarina, Spa Stura, Ricambi, Lancia, Carello, Spa Centro, Ferriere, Grandi Motori and others.

On Monday April 2nd the blockade at Mirafiori continued. This was not a factory occupation in the traditional sense. The workers took over the factory, not to defend it, nor to run it, but to use it as an enormous resource of political strength. In the words of a striker:

”If the police had come to the gates, we wouldn’t have attacked them there. We would have drawn them inside the factory, onto our own ground, where there’s no especial organisation, but where we’re always ready to answer violence in the terms we understand…. If the police had come into Mirafiori, the place would have been out of action for three years:”

Picket lines at hundreds of factories throughout the Turin area guaranteed that if the clash exploded, it would not blow up only Corso Traiano, as in 1969, but would blow up the entire city. Avoiding a battle was a major necessity for capitalists, unions and government alike. On Monday afternoon it became known that the bosses and the unions had signed the new engineering workers’ contract.

The new national contract was no workers’ victory, for two reasons: First, it incorporated very little of the workers’ own material demands. Second, and more important, as a result of bargaining between capitalists and unions, the contract did not and could not reflect the political strength and militancy that the working class expressed throughout the crisis. The disparity between the political strength of the workers and the results that their strength can command at the level of bargaining is obvious.

On Tuesday morning the unions pushed for an end to the blockade. Union officials and foremen together urged the workers to go back to work, and managed to get a few shops working. But on the whole, production did not resume. The first back-to-work day was again a day of no production. At Mirafiori, 60% of the workforce was ”absent”. Thousands of workers resumed picketing and blocking production. At Rivalta, the workers’ assembly expressed the will to continue their struggle until all the people who had been fired during the strike were re-hired.

This demand for re-hiring those fired may trigger a new post-contract workers’ offensive in the months ahead. As we are writing, the situation remains unstable and open.

What, then, is the main political characteristic of this wave of struggles? It is the way that workers have used the struggle over the contract as simply a moment in the general confrontation between capital and the working class. Here we must learn a lesson of working class strategy: throughout the struggle the workers have left all bargaining in the hands of the unions, and have shown little interest in the official platform, realising that no union platform can defend the workers from the capitalist attack. They have concentrated on fighting the capitalists on a more advanced level -that is, fighting them over the capitalists’ own demands.

In fact, the motor-industry and metal-industry capitalists, with Agnelli leading the way, came to the bargaining table with their own explicit demands: and end to ”permanent conflict”; regulation of absenteeism; no reduction in the working week; full utilisation of productive capacity. Precisely these demands were rejected by the struggle at FIAT. After the contracts were signed, the ”permanent conflict” did not subside, absenteeism was not reduced, discipline was hardly restored, and production was only resumed with great difficulty. Signing the contract did not put an end to the struggles, for the workers’ struggle has been beyond contracts all along.

Hundreds of mass pickets, red flags and workers’ courts at all gates, blockades of finished products, ”imprisonment” of managers, well-organised settlements of accounts with foremen and guards – all point to a new leap in the working class struggle: ”Taking power” at FIAT, and in all of Turin, contains an explicit allusion to the seizure of political power and to the revolutionary programme of the abolition of wage labour. Says a worker from FIAT-Mirafiori:

”This occupation is different from the one the workers did in 1920. In 1920 they said let’s occupy, but let’s work. Let’s show everybody that we can run production ourselves. Things are different today. In our occupation, the factory is a starting point for the revolutionary organisation of workers – not a place to work!”

Appeared in Radical America Volume 7, Number 2 (March-April 1973)

Why has the problem of the party — understood not simply as the need for organization, but as the need for a general political leadership — not to this point been the subject of systematic discussion among us? In the past, the problem of the party was posed only in terms of the numerical growth of subjectively ”revolutionary” groups. We have clearly rejected this approach; instead, we have opted for direct and ongoing involvement with the reality of class struggle. This was a correct and important option on our part, which has already provided some elements for fruitful discussion.

We reject two types of conception of the party: the first, that which sees the consciousness of the necessity of the party, of an organized political leadership, as sufficient to create the conditions for the development of the party; the second, that which sees revolutionary political leadership, the party, as the linear continuation of a past revolutionary tradition (be it Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) which has been at different times in the past corrupted and regenerated. In this conception, revolutionary strategy is always seen as the ”return” to the ”correct” revolutionary tradition.

For us, the correctness of revolutionary leadership, strategy, and organization derives neither from past revolutionary experience nor from the consciousness that the party is necessary. Their correctness derives, in the final analysis, from their relationship to the masses, and their capacity to be the conscious and general expression of the revolutionary needs of the oppressed masses…

Does this mean that revolutionary leadership develops ”spontaneously” from the masses, and that it coincides with the development of the struggle of the masses itself ? Does it mean we can simply wipe out the distinction between vanguard and masses, and conclude that they should be one and the same thing ? The answer is no. But it is precisely here, in the definition of our concept of ”vanguard”, that the heart of the problem lies.

According to Lenin, revolutionary consciousness is produced by the encounter between the ”economic” struggle of the working class (which in Lenin’s view was inherently trade-unionist and thus always within the capitalist system) and Marxist intellectuals who have broken with their bourgeois class origins and allied themselves with the interests of the working class. Consciousness thus ”comes to” the working class ”from the outside”. And it is the party, the organization of revolutionaries equipped with the tools of Marxist analysis, which embodies the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat.

In passing, we shouldn’t forget the point correctly made by the anti-Leninist tradition : the ”bureaucratic degeneration” which is inherent in the Leninist conception of the relationship between the party and the masses. At the same time, we should never forget that the history of the Bolshevik party is the history of decades of heroic, tenacious, systematic struggle to develop links with the working class and the oppressed masses of Tsarist Russia. The Bolsheviks’ confidence in the masses, and their capacity to link themselves to the masses in circumstances which made the struggle infinitely cruel, can never be denied by anyone who really wants to understand the victory of the October Revolution.

But the Leninist definition cannot provide us today with a solution to the problems we have to confront in advanced capitalist society. The Leninist definition of ”spontaneous” workers’ struggles as inherently trade-unionist and ”economist” leads to the posing of the question of revolutionaries’ relationship to the working class in terms of ideological ”conquest” and of ”the injecting from the outside” of ”political” consciousness. The spontaneous struggle of workers cannot be seen as simply specific, local, trade-unionist struggles of workers in this plant against their bosses in this plant: On the contrary, spontaneous rank-and-file struggles have attained a high level of political contestation of capitalist rationality. This is very clear in the great workers’ struggles in recent years in the advanced capitalist countries (France, May ’68; Italy, since 1968…). It is impossible to reduce these struggles to simply ”economist” demands — as the unions have discovered, and it’s no coincidence that the unions are now trying to put the brakes on these struggles and co-opt them into the trade-union framework. All this should justify neither a metaphysic of workers’ self-organization, nor the reduction of class consciousness to the consciousness of relations of production in the plant. But we have to recognize that consciousness is not ”outside” the masses.

At the same time, we can no longer accept the validity, in advanced capitalist society, of Lenin’s definition of intellectuals (”the cultured representatives of the dominant classes”). This definition cannot accurately fit the profound transformation in the class composition of advanced capitalist societies, as the student movement demonstrated so clearly (unless we want to continue to define the majority of students as ”bourgeois intellectuals” who make the revolution by rejecting their own class). It is true that ”without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement” (Lenin), but it is true in a new sense : Revolutionary theory doesn’t ”penetrate” mass movements from the outside, but develops within mass struggles, as the systematic knowledge of the needs of the masses and as their generalization, in an incessant dialectical process.

Anyone who wants to examine seriously the historical experience of the Leninist model has to come to grips with how the Leninist concept of the vanguard, while it was carried by Lenin and the Bolsheviks with an extraordinary revolutionary tension, later justified the most thoroughgoing arbitrariness in the relationship between the party and the masses. The problem is certainly not located in the absence of an ”institutional”, ”statutory” control of the masses over the party, but is located in the type of mass-party relationship inherent in the Leninist conception itself.

The Leninist conception poses the problem of the mass-party relationship in the following terms : workers’ struggles (inherently ”economic”); ”economic” organization of workers (trade union); party (external ”revolutionary” consciousness) works within the trade unions (the ”transmission belt” for injecting revolutionary consciousness) and thereby controls (or ”represents”) the working class. This conception is totally foreign to us.

The only correct perspective for handling the mass-vanguard relationship starts with the politicization and organization of the masses in order to arrive at the development and unification of a mass vanguard. It’s not just a question of a subjective necessity for democracy at the base, but a question of an objective necessity : Revolution in the advanced capitalist countries is made possible or necessary not by the economic collapse of capitalism, but by the ripening of the political confrontation between capital and the proletariat. This implies changing from the perspective of insurrection to the perspective of protracted (eventually armed) struggle, even in the advanced capitalist countries…

May ’68 in France is a good illustration. Rarely have such idiotic interpretations been heard. They fall into two categories: The first, which correctly emphasizes the spontaneous and political character of the workers’ explosion, draws lessons which justify spontaneist positions (rejection of organizational work and rejection of the need for political leadership). The second, which correctly notes the incapacity of the struggle to move toward the seizure of power, draws the lesson that the absence of a revolutionary party is the key factor. The first interpretation has been proven incorrect by events themselves. The second, interesting because it’s more typical, suggests that to ”seize power”, it would have been enough to simply lead one of the mass workers’ demonstrations to the President’s palace. In this view, the party is seen as an external leadership, operating according to a logic autonomous of the mass struggle, which, in a context of acute social crisis, places itself ”at the head” of a spontaneous movement and points the way to the seizure of power. Conclusion : The mass movement exists, but it has no head; let’s build the party and attach it to the ”body” of the masses.

Our position has been different. The problem in France was not the seizure of power, but power itself. The problem of bourgeois power was raised by very significant, spontaneous mass vanguards (the student movement, particular sections of the working class — workers in the mass-production industries and certain more-technically-qualified strata such as technicians), and not by an external leadership. At the same time, the spontaneous, proletarian struggle of May ’68 discovered in its lack of unification and in its own lack of organization the insurmountable limitations of its political and practical force. In this phase of the struggle, then, the tasks of revolutionaries are the organization and linking up of these mass vanguards, the extension and development of autonomous mass organizations at the base (for example in the plants and other work places, in the schools, and so on), and the bringing together, from the different fronts of struggle, of a revolutionary political leadership to guide and unify the struggle. This is the only way that general political leadership can mature, and a generalized class confrontation can lead to a situation of dual power and the destruction of the bourgeois state. The problem for revolutionaries is not to ”‘place yourself” at the head of the masses, but to be the head of the masses.

I want to submit a new concept for discussion which has a quite concrete importance for our experience as militants in ”Workers’ Power” (in the period preceding the outbreak of mass spontaneous workers’ struggles in Italy): the concept of external vanguard. ”Workers’ Power” is the product of the subjective initiative of a certain number of individuals who, having agreed on a certain political orientation, decided, on this basis, to do ongoing liaison, formation, and organizational work with workers and others.

Then isn’t ”Workers’ Power” an ”external” vanguard? In fact, in many instances, yes; but in principle, the answer is no, precisely because we see ourselves not as the embryo however tiny — of the party, but rather as a group of militants whose objective is to accelerate the conditions necessary for the development of the mass revolutionary organization : a group of militants at the service of the development of forms of consciousness, struggle, and autonomous organization.

The history of our political work — a history with plenty of detours, because of our own subjective shortcomings as well as what only our experience could have taught us —is rich in lessons, but this isn’t the time to go over it. However, there is one central point which would be useful to recall. At a certain point in the development of our work, reflection on forms of base organizations (`base committees”) became collective and assumed decisive importance in our work. But the problem of ”workers’ councils” posed itself to us in a new way, as the extension of the work carried on by militants in ”Workers’ Power” and as the result of our analysis of a certain number of fundamental experiences : the student movement, the May Movement in France, workers’ struggles in Italy, and, in a broader framework, the Cultural Revolution in China and its lessons for revolutionaries in the advanced capitalist countries. These fundamental experiences clarified the two approaches we had oscillated between for a long time : on one hand, identification with the role of ”external” vanguard, with all that implies; on the other hand, the possibility of acting, in and through the development of the mass struggle, as the first form of linkage between the mass vanguards.
What does this distinction mean? To what extent does this terminology correspond to a political reality and not simply to a play on words?

We have established a relationship with workers (I mean the mass of workers in particular struggles, and not individual ”contacts”) based on two closely-related principles :

- rejection of the delegation of powers to the bureaucratic workers’ organizations (trade unions and Communist Party) and proposing of the alternative of autonomous base organizations directly controlled by the workers;

- a political line which begins with the daily problems of the working class (both inside and outside the work place), and gradually situates these problems in the more general context of the anti-imperialist struggle, and so forth.

We could have measured the ”success” of our work either by the development of the creative autonomy of the masses in struggle sal by workers’ transferring to us the delegation of powers they now give the unions and the GP. In the second case, we would have enjoyed the confidence of the masses, but in the worst possible way, because we would have reproduced, with a different political content, the same authoritarian relationship with the masses. In fact we would have become ”the party”, but the same kind of party we want to fight against. This was the inherent danger in what many many workers said to us in a variety of ways : ”Start another union”, ”Why don’t you call a strike?”, ”Why don’t you start an organization?”

It may be true that workers have the ”spirit of organization”, but it would be wise to recall what Rosa Luxemburg said to Lenin : ”Lenin glorifies the educational influence of the factory on the proletariat, which makes it immediately ripe for ‘organization and discipline’. The ‘discipline’ which Lenin had in mind is implanted in the proletariat not only by the factory, but also by the barracks and by modern bureaucratism — in short, by the whole mechanism of the centralized bourgeois state.” We should never forget that during decades of reactionary practice by the unions and the CP, organization was presented to the proletariat only in terms of the vote, of membership cards and blind loyalty to the party apparatus. In these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that the tendency toward external leadership keeps re-appearing among the proletariat itself. The answer to these problems is not the rejection of all organization, but the proposal of a new type of organization. When we say ”It’s not for us to call a strike I ” or ”We have no intention of starting a new union I”, we don’t limit ourselves to a simple refusal of principle. We do much more : We refuse to perpetuate a relationship of passivity; we refuse to allow workers to depend on us to decide something for them. That’s also our answer to the suggestion ”Start a new party.”
If we were to define ourselves in the long term as an ”external” vanguard, then the problem of the formation of the party would become simply a question of quantity. When the local ”influence” of a group is sufficiently developed, and when a sufficient number of politically-homogeneous local groups (also ”external” vanguards) cover the whole country, then we will have the party. It is important to be clear on why we have rejected this approach.

The development of links with a whole series of proletarian groups and the development of the student movement create the conditions for going beyond the provisional role of ”external” vanguard, which, though inevitable at a particular stage in the struggle, should not be considered a permanent necessity. This is why the experience of the student movement in 1967-68 has been decisive in clarifying these questions : It was the first mass struggle with a revolutionary perspective which was not controlled by the trade unions and Left organizations. What do we mean when we talk about a mass struggle 7″ We are obviously referring neither to a ”mass party” such as the Italian Communist Party nor to ”mass organizations” of the trade-union type. When we use the word ”mass”, it is not the numerical size which counts (although it is an important aspect), but rather the qualitative aspect of the struggle : the fact that a struggle develops among a whole class stratum (in this case, students) — defined by its place in the social relationships of capitalist production — on the basis of the conditions specific to that class stratum.

The student movement provided the example of a contestation which, beginning with the specific conditions of a proletarianized class stratum, came to bring into question the whole structure of bourgeois power, thus situating its struggle on the terrain of revolutionary struggle. It’s true that there is a vanguard in the student movement, but its logic is specific : It is a non-institutionalized vanguard which is internal to the mass struggle. In this perspective, such a mass internal vanguard has two problems to confront : (1) avoid becoming detached from the mass struggle, and rather seek to stimulate its development; (2) unite with other revolutionary class strata, particularly workers, to avoid eventual impotency and defeat.

These tasks cannot be accomplished either ”spontaneously or by joining some ”external” vanguard. These tasks of political leadership and organization belong to the vanguards of the mass struggle, which are mass, internal vanguards. These vanguards intervene in struggles outside their own class stratum, not as an ”external” leadership, but as the internal leadership of its own front of struggle. Although this perspective doesn’t provide any ready-made solutions to the specific problems of revolutionary leadership and organization, it does allow us to recognize for the first time in the development of the student movement the verification in practice of the correctness of a revolutionary line. That’s why the political leadership of the student is not ”the Party”, understood as an external revolutionary leadership. The present task of revolutionary political leadership consists not in developing a general revolutionary line, but in promoting the struggle of the masses and its autonomous self-organization.

Now we are seeing the massive development of workers’ and peasants’ struggles in Italy, but they are prisoners of the division and repressive control of the counter-revolutionary parties and trade unions as much as of their own lack of organization. In these circumstances, the task of revolutionaries is not to provide an administrative reference point, a new party, but rather to put themselves at the service of the autonomous organization of the masses. The formation of a general revolutionary leadership and organization must necessarily go through this phase …. After all the theories about the integration of workers in advanced capitalist society, France has given us an idea of what the masses are capable of doing, once liberated even briefly from the repressive yoke of their ”representatives”. At the same time, May ’68 and its aftermath are clear evidence that the imprint of decades of deformations in the workers’ movement can’t be eliminated overnight.

What does all this mean in terms of organization ? First, the rejection of organizational forms which claim from the beginning to be a general political leadership (whether they call themselves party or not), and whose centralization is not the result of the political maturation of a mass struggle but rather the option of a cadre apparatus. Although the term ”central committee” can mean different things in different contexts, it can mean only a totally-unacceptable conception of top-down political leadership in the precise context of the struggle in Italy today.

What are our tasks, then? Briefly, they are to create the opportunities and the means for links and communication among workers; to discover ways to have workers themselves participate in analyzing their own struggles and drawing lessons from them; to support as much unity in struggle as possible; to maximize the aspect of workers’ autonomy in the choice of organizational forms. If we agree that our goal is the growth of mass struggles and their political polarization, we also have to recognize that this can be accomplished only by encouraging, rather than holding back, the autonomy and variety of struggle experiences, while at the same time promoting common discussion and decision-making among the masses about the significance and perspectives of their struggles.

Centralization cannot be a cover stamped on struggles from the outside, but must rather be the progressive result of their theoretical and practical co-ordination, so we can avoid the sort of formalism which makes direct relationships impossible (whether it be the exchange of information or political unity) with different groups, sectors of the movement, and isolated comrades. What is most essential is that the development of an overall revolutionary leadership must take place within the mass struggle, and not in a party external or parallel to the mass struggle.

I want to turn now to two important questions which are usually raised in relation to the problem of revolutionary organization. The first is the problem of repression. It can be asked : If we don’t have a centralized organization, how can we deal with the repression which is bound to come ? At one level, the answer is that the more centralized an organization is, the more it is exposed to repression. A decentralized organization, in the sense of more autonomous groups exercising initiative and responsibility, is the best guarantee against any eventuality. However, at another level, the problem of centralization takes on a different sort of importance when it comes to the question of how we can deal with the class enemy in situations of illegal forms of struggle and armed struggle. Here the argument in favor of centralist positions comes into play : ”The mass line is correct, but there is also the problem of seizing power, and the problem of the direct struggle with the bourgeois state apparatus and its destruction.” It is important to emphasize this argument against certain anti-authoritarian positions which, despite their value, often tend to overlook the specific problem of the struggle against the bourgeois state and the problem of the repressive apparatus of the national and international bourgeoisie. However, in dealing with this aspect of the problem, one general principle must be kept in mind at all times: the indispensable condition for the development of an effective and correct centralization of organization is the whole process of mass struggle and links between mass internal vanguards outlined above.

This brings us to the second question. We often hear in our discussions the position that the criterion of organization is its functionality. This position is the most dangerous of all. Functionality means nothing or everything until it is made clear in relation to what it is functional. For us, organization must be functional in relation to the political maturation of militants, to the growth of consciousness and autonomous organization in mass struggles, and to the idea of workers’ power we are struggling for. For example, there are at least two conceptions we could have of base committees : either as a form of struggle through which the masses develop the capacity to develop and control their own struggle, or as a ”more effective” means of mass mobilization for an external political leadership. The concept of mass vanguard is the only perspective which confronts in practice, not just in party rules, both the problem of the substitution of the party for the masses and the problem of spontaneism as a revolutionary strategy of mass self-organization. We have to ”believe in the masses”, believe in socialism. We have to understand that power is not seized ”on behalf of” the proletariat, but that the proletariat itself has to seize power. The new socialist man and woman will not be born after the smashing of capitalism creates the conditions for this transformation — they will be born during the struggle against capitalism.

Our task today is to build within the mass struggle an organized political leadership, not to ”win” the masses to a pre-existing revolutionary leadership. The ”cadre party”, conceived as an organization of professional militants ideologically united around a programme and a strict, statutory discipline, is not what we’re about.

Appeared in Radical America Volume 7, Number 2 (March-April 1973)

INTRODUCTION
This is the day-to-day account of a struggle carried out by the Alfa Romeo workers from November 1971 to February 1972 on the occasion of contract renewal. The struggles narrated in this document took place in two of the five Alfa Romeo plants in Italy, the Portello and Arese plants, both located in the Milan area. Together, both plants employ 19,000 workers (including office employees), and a new Contract is negotiated every three years. The Portello plant is the older of the two and has few production departments left. Soon most of its operations will be shifted to Arese. The majority of its workers are older people, still bound to trade-unionism by a long tradition of struggle. Arese is the newer plant, still in the process of completion. It houses most of the production departments, and most of its workers are young and without a union tradition. Moreover, 65% of the workers on the assembly lines (as opposed to 25% in the non-production departments) are immigrants from the southern regions of Italy, and this element of the working class has been in the forefront of the struggles since ‘68. For this reason the level of militancy and mass mobilization was greater at the Arese plant.

The document was produced by a group of militants which calls itself “Autonomous Assembly” (AA) which defines itself as “a rank-and file organization, born as a communist cell with the aim of becoming a reference point for all the workers within the plant, and of contributing to the building of the future revolutionary party. The goal of the AA during the four months of struggle was to become a permanent political reference point for all the workers, to take away from the union officials and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) the control of the struggles, and in this way to be in a position to “talk to the masses.”

The value of this document lies in the many faceted nature of the struggle it describes. The workers were fighting against a form of state capitalism, in that Alfa Romeo, although officially classified as a corporation with “state participation”, is in reality completely state owned. This point is important because it explains the pressure felt by the PCI to act “responsibly through FIOM (the PCI and Left-wing Social Democrat metal workers’ union) in view of its possible future participation in a new Center-Left coalition in the Government. It also explains the co-optive strategy adopted by the union officials, their attempts to water down the more radical demands advanced by the workers, and in particular, their determination to turn the councils of shop-floor delegates into channels of control over the ranks. The date of the struggle is of special importance. Taking place less than a year before the renewal of national contracts of 1972, it served as a testing ground for the bosses and the unions to help gauge the level of militancy of the workers and what might be in store during the new wave of struggles only a few months off.

The key objective for the militants at Alfa Romeo was that of mobilizing the workers for an attack against the company’s structure of job classification, to force management to alter it to correspond to the objective process of massification occurring in auto production. It also meant attacking the capitalist rationale underlying the whole system of job classification with its built-in mechanisms of selection based not on the actual expertise of the workers (which in any case is being undermined by the massification process), but rather on the workers’ submission to managerial authority, goals, and values. (As the AA puts it: “You will be ‘selected’ not on the basis of what you know or are able to do, but on the basis of your willingness to lick ass.”)

The militants proposed, therefore, that the six categories which made up the company’s job-classification structure be replaced with four levels of “classification” with automatic passage from one level to another (on the basis of workers’ seniority and consent), under the supervision of the delegates’ council. A similar proposal was advanced for the office employees. These demands, as the document shows, were only partially secured. The notion of “levels” was introduced, and automatic passage from the second to the third level was granted, but with management still firmly in control of the process of “promotion”. However, even if the actual gains were meager, the struggles around this central demand served to mobilize the mass of workers and carry forward the attack against the capitalist ideology of work. Finally, the value of this document lies in showing the concrete forms of struggle which the workers created from day to day, their ability to anticipate the bosses’ and the unions’ next move, and their success in analyzing their struggle in terms of its wider political significance.

NOVEMBER 12 (Friday)
The delegates’ council decided today on six to seven hours of strike for the coming week. There was a struggle between two lines: that of the unions and that of the militant vanguards. The unions wanted to give the executive the power to decide how many hours to strike and in what way. Though this line was rejected, the unions were able to limit the duration of the strikes to six hours. The line taken by the militant vanguards called for at least nine or ten hours and a more incisive way of conducting the strikes, such as picket lines, marches inside the factory, and so on. The union line is founded on the conviction that at present the will to struggle on the part of the working class is at a low ebb: “Reality is what it is; we may as well adjust to it, try not to run ahead of ourselves ... (The unions “firemen” have gotten so used to throwing water on the flames that they now throw it even when there is no fire.) We of the Autonomous Assembly are not much more optimistic, but we feel that if reality is indeed what it is we must first of all try to analyze and understand this state of affairs and then try to change it by pushing for a broader and stronger mobilization.

NOVEMBER 15 (Monday)
Today there’s a one and a half hour strike.

At the Portello plant, a general assembly is held in the cafeteria. An official of the UILM (the Right-wing Social Democrat metal workers union) speaks for over 45 minutes. No one can figure out what he is trying to say, and he is loudly booed. As the workers begin to rule out an official from the FIOM arrives and makes an announcement that explodes in the assembly like a bomb: “The management,” he says, “due to technical difficulties, was unable to complete the paychecks, and as a result, Instead of receiving a regular bi-weekly check, each worker will receive $50.” Immediately a comrade seizes the microphone and yells “Let’s go visit the management.” A procession immediately forms and begins making its way toward the building which houses the executive offices. A group marches into the president’s office shouting “Luraghi, you fascist, you’re the first one on the list!” As the word spreads that the strike will continue, the procession makes its way through each department and office, pulling everybody out. Even the workers who usually scab walk off the job when they find out that instead of their usual paychecks they’ll be getting only $50. Union “firemen” are trying to put out the flames by appealing for a “democratic decision”, but no one is listening. Many departments stay shut all day, and scores of workers go home, including those who arrived for the second shift.

At the Arese plant, another FIOM official brings the news of the reduced paychecks, and all hell breaks loose in the general assembly. Amid shouts and jeers and total bedlam the official tries to explain: “Comrades, this is a calculated move on the company’s part; let’s not accept provocation. I propose that a delegation be formed and sent to....” To Management, he no doubt wanted to say; but we’re already on our way, all of us together en masse. To hell with a delegation! The long procession of workers making their way to the executive offices with raised fists gives me the feeling of being in Saint Petersburg during the October Revolution. About 500 of us crowd around one of the executives stating our demand: “We want the money, all of it now.” In the meantime, under the window outside, an assembly is being held to decide how to carry on the struggle: “Let’s all march to Milan!” “Let’s continue the strike all day!” But once again a union (FIOM) proposal passes: “Let’s be calm, comrades; the struggle won’t end today. Let’s show some good sense....” Moral: The strike ends at 1 pm. Luckily this decision is followed only in part. The upholstery and waxing departments strike for the rest of the day, and many workers, even those from the second shift, sit in front of their machines with arms folded. I have been in the factory many years, but I’ve never seen such good assemblies where everyone feels free to speak and where we’re finally beginning to discuss political situations.

NOVEMBER 16 (Tuesday)
At the Portello plant: Internal processions form, and for the first time a group of office personnel (about a hundred of them) enter all the departments, combing them for scabs. In the engine department some of the workers can’t believe their eyes: “How is it possible?” they say. “Now the office personnel come to pull out the workers!” The strong participation of the office employees is one of the most important features of this struggle: Some of them, who until yesterday would leave the factory for the local cafe, are right here beside us in the plant-wide procession. The slow and painstaking work, person by person, is beginning to yield fruit. The first signs of raised consciousness begin to show; even the office employees and technicians begin to understand that they are exploited: They are starting to rebel against their supervisors and bosses; they refuse to put in overtime. In short, they are discovering the class struggle and looking to the workers’ vanguard for a reference point. Today, when with great excitement they went to pull out the scabs from each department, a technician approached me and said: “You know, until now I only came in here to see the machines; but today I’ve understood that there are men in here too. From now on it will be different for me.”

At the Arese plant, this morning at 6 am, we of the AA passed out a leaflet about the rent strike in a Milan district where a number of Alfa workers live, then, on strike between 9:30 and 10:30. Even though one hour is too brief, we didn’t pass up the chance for an in-plant procession: We marched along together, pulling out all the scabs. At the Computer Center everyone was working: We forced them all out and started discussing the contract proposals, how to carry on the struggle, how the bosses eat up our salaries outside the factory, and how we must respond, namely with rent strikes, neighborhood struggles, and the like, and not by sitting in front of the TV all night like morons, because this is just what the bosses want. The discussion is prolonged because the workers want to voice their criticisms of the way the struggle is being handled, that is, with only one hour of strike at a time.

NOVEMBER 17 (Wednesday)
We found out that a meeting was held last night by management personnel. All of them are really pissed off because they can’t work undisturbed in the factory. Well, we had a meeting too, and decided to form a picket line at the Portello plant until 10 o’clock, and this time the “firemen” could not pull back. The picket line turned out to be really tough. The usual scabs who hang around the entrance are rather pathetic; they just stand there and don’t have the guts to come forward, not even to talk. They form little groups, like bigots outside a church; they whisper, shake their heads, deplore, and so on. But they don’t move; they wait for someone else to cross the picket line for them. As always when a picket line is formed, the comrades use the occasion to discuss political questions, to clear up doubts and encourage those who waver. The results of these discussions aren’t always immediate, but in the long run they leave their mark; you find people beside you in later struggles that you’d never expect.

At the Arese plant, a strike is on from 9:30 to 11 am. There is no picket line, but a massive procession is held. There are more than 3,000 workers, and they make the rounds and clean out the whole factory. Leading the march is a giant banner with the three metal-worker union names (FIOM, FIM, and UILM) and the phrase underneath “the delegates’ council”. Leading is also our Armstrong, a comrade who plays the trumpet and can belt out favorite proletarian songs like The Internationale. Suddenly in the distance we hear a deafening noise: A few comrades have managed to open up some vehicles in the last phase of production and are honking all the horns in unison! For the trade unionists the most important thing is that this “long walk” in the factory be “orderly and responsible,” but the comrades don’t forget that their duty is to drive out the scabs, and at intervals they leave the procession and, forming separate groups, make their way into the departments.

NOVEMBER 19 (Friday)
At the Portello plant, the office workers strike from 3 pm on. They meet together and decide to comb the entire plant for scabs, because “It isn’t right to just go to the same few offices.” A number of offices are already empty because the managers, eyes of the boss, are absent. But scabs are not lacking. Those beginning their strike at 4 pm join the procession. To take the scabs by surprise we climb the stairs quietly, and then we open the door with a start, yelling and whistling in unison. The most common thing shouted, distinctly and with feeling, is “Vultures!” In a few offices, hoping to remain hidden, the employees are in the dark, but one blow from our whistles is enough to scatter them like roaches discovered in the light. They congregate in small groups in front of the main door where two police commissioners are standing. We are all singing the “Ballad of Pinelli” (an anarchist murdered by the police in ‘69) and “Calabresi Assassin” (the police chief accused of killing him).

DECEMBER 5 (Friday)
Yesterday the police attacked the picket line in Milan, and here at Arese the response is slow in coming and inadequate. Today the workers read in the paper that some one at the Portello plant was hit in the face with a police rifle during an attack, and as they enter the plant angered by this news, they see a huge union sign announcing “two hours of strike with a march around the cafeteria”. By now the union has shown clearly that it prefers the in-plant processions to be “just walks” and not “scab hunting,” some tactic! The police are attacking and we’re walking around the cafeteria like asses! At 9 o’clock, when the two-hour strike begins, only two comrades from AA need step out of the procession that more than a hundred workers immediately follow suit and go hunting for scabs in even the smallest and most remote departments in the factory. During the afternoon, a few of us find out that in one of our departments five workers are scabbing. A special issue of Pasquino is prepared identifying the five scabs and promising “Pasquino will strike again!” (Pasquino is a news sheet which appears on the walls all over the plant, in the most unlikely places: the departments, the toilets, the cafeteria, and so on — and always when least expected. No one knows who writes it, but everyone fears it, and in this struggle it has become like the sign of Zorro.) The Pasquino which named the five scabs had a devastating effect: For two hours they were booed and hissed at, and they didn’t even have the guts to walk away; they were overcome with shame.

DECEMBER 9 TO JANUARY 9
As we look over our notes we see that between December 9 and January 9 the struggle remained even but uneventful. Among other things, this month has been full of holidays and the rate of absence in the plant has been very high. During the Christmas holiday, for example, many workers took special leave or sick days. There were days when the plant was operating with only 50% of the employees. The strikes continued at a steady but sluggish pace an hour or an hour and a half almost every day, like a drop in the bucket of the bosses’ profits preventing the re-launching of production, but at the same time demoralizing the workers. A number of workers (and not only we of the AA) have understood that to really resist means to break the plans of the State boss, to prevent ‘Papa” IRI, the State holding company, from doing as it pleases. These workers were by our side as we hunted down the scabs, as we marched in the picket lines, as we held discussions and denounced the political line of the unions and the C P, for whom the workers’ struggle is only a tool to blackmail the Government. For them, doing politics means telling the assholes in power: “You see, this little flame might become a big fire if we weren’t here to control it, so you better give us what we’re asking for.” We in the plants are on to this little game and have had enough of their bullshit; more and more workers begin to understand and organize.

JANUARY 10 (Monday)
Finally we have a breakthrough, like a reawakening after a long slumber. The in-plant processions at the Portello plant this morning were aggressive and combative. With renewed militance the marchers spilled over into the streets surrounding the plant and blocked traffic for miles. Inside the plant the second shift formed an internal procession to prevent overtime work from 5 pm on, and it too blocked incoming traffic at the factory’s Gate Number 3.

At the Arese plant, a general assembly is held at 8:30 am. The union (FIOM) official speaks and proposes the usual two and a half hour strike. The entire company of workers boos and hisses, and he is forced to step down. Then a comrade from AA takes the mike and calls on the workers to join hands and occupy the plant, urging that the situation is ripe for such action. Everyone applauds enthusiastically while the FIOM official tries in vain to regain control of the assembly. A comrade from the PCIs Communist Youth Federation who has co-operated closely with the AA takes the mike and proposes that the highway used to move the finished products from the plant be blocked until 3 pm. The assembly approves unanimously and as the workers begin filing out to plan the action the FIOM official manages to get hold of the mic. Amid the confusion, he starts his oration to the effect that we must stay within certain limits (Which?) not allow certain minorities to take over the struggle, and so on. But by now over half the workers are gone, and when only a fourth of them are left the “fireman (someone who clamps down on working class self-activity)” re-proposes the limited strike action with an in-plant procession. He asks for a show of hands, and about 30 votes “yes”. Without any further ado he declares that the proposal has been accepted and closes the meeting with a historic phrase: “The workers’ assembly is sovereign!”

In the meantime the workers from the second shift are blocking the highway, proving they don’t give a damn about the union’s directives. There are about 3,000 workers, and the line-up of stopped cars extends for many miles. The FIOM official is going around the plant saying that tomorrow we’ll block the factory exits where the products are shipped out. (It’s like saying: “Listen, boss, tomorrow I’m going to steal your cows.” So he has the time to hide them. In fact during the nightmare, cars will be shipped out from the plant.) He is also saying that the night shift should go on strike, while Management is asking in all the departments who wants to work the night shift, emphasizing the overtime pay. This society leaves hundreds of workers at home, while in both big and small plants those who work are forced to put in overtime, work night shifts, and tolerate speed-ups. It’s a society based on profit, and therefore on exploitation. It’s nothing new. But let’s not just cry over it like the unions; let’s get on with demolishing it.

JANUARY 12 (Wednesday)
While at the Arese plant the blocking of all plant exits continues to prevent finished cars from leaving the production areas, at the Portello plant an assembly is called for 9 am in the cafeteria. The level of participation is high, not to say total. There are 2500 to 3,000 workers, and the level of militance is high. As soon as the FIOM official takes the mic, the hissing indicates that the workers want two things: the in-plant procession and the blocking of the highway traffic. The official tries to stall for time, proposing a simple strike until 11 am, but the hissing gets louder. He tries to explain that blocking traffic is a way of giving in to provocation, but they won’t let him go on. Next he proposes a strike until 12, but the assembly shouts that that isn’t long enough. At that point another FIOM official takes the mic and says that the nature of the strike action was decided yesterday by the executive: until 12 pm and with no outside procession, but if the assembly feels it is necessary, a brief march outside the plant can be held.

A huge procession forms, and after cleaning out the whole factory marches out the factory gates on to Viale Scarampo, one of the most deserted streets of Milan. As it moves along, already considerably dampened by the “fire men”, it passes in front of the hospital for the terminally ill, where a funeral procession is forming. At that point the pace of the workers’ march really slows down and looks like part of the funeral. As the procession cuts through a side street, the banner of the delegates’ council which had been leading ends up in the rear. As we reach Via Trevino the police are waiting in a scissor formation. The workers begin chanting “Fascists, sellouts, servants of the boss!” while the scissor breaks in two under the impact of the forward-pressing procession. The police are forced to retreat as the workers continue shouting, while the trade unionists form a cordon to protect the police from the workers! A few punches fly between the more combative elements in the workers’ ranks and the union “firemen” who accuse them of wanting confrontation and acting as provocateurs. (As if the police, parked in front of the factory gates every day, aren’t a permanent provocation.) At any rate, the police get back on their trucks and the procession returns to the plant. Having forced the police to retreat is a major victory. And the unions have shown their true colors: The useless assembly which lasted over one hour, the procession at the rear of the factory, the fear of confrontation with the police as if the workers were the kamikaze attack against the vanguards, the constant appeal to the executive as the only seat of decision making power, the class struggle waged in white gloves, all these are different forms of the same coin, of the same old union tactic. It ignites the struggle just enough to maintain credibility, but is always ready to throw water on it as soon as the pressure from the base threatens to undermine its control of the situation.

JANUARY 14 (Friday)
During the evening we receive news that Frank Atzeni, a comrade from AA, has been suspended indefinitely, and as usual the accusations against him have been brought by a certain Calabritto of the personnel office. Frank is one of the more active and dedicated comrades in the AA, and he has struggled hard in the past few days against the problem of the night shift. As soon as the word starts spreading that he has been suspended, his fellow workers spontaneously put down their tools. Later in the evening, a meeting is held in the office of the FIM (the Christian Democrat metal workers’ union), and a new orientation for the struggle emerges: occupation of the factory.

JANUARY 15 (Saturday)
Even though it is Saturday and we’re not working today, picket lines form from 6 am on at both the Arese and Portello plants to prevent overtime work. At Arese, the 6 am picketers relieve those who have been there throughout the night making sure no finished vehicles leave the production area. Later in the morning we of the AA meet to examine the situation, and we decide to support the occupation proposal because of several new factors:

(1) During the past week the struggle has been more aggressive and incisive. Even though the union has been trying to “put out the fire”, several things have shown the willingness of the workers to fight: the clash with the police, the spontaneous strikes around the problem of the night shift initiated and conducted by the workers themselves, the immediate response to every attempt aimed at dividing the ranks. After two and a half months of struggle, the working class is very definitely off its knees.

(2) The union has had to recognize that it can’t impose light or diluted strikes, and that at this point we must take the bull by the horns. It is significant, for example, that the union (FIOM) official who has always clashed with Frank Atzeni is now openly in favor of the occupation.

(3) The struggle has shifted, now more than ever before, from the level of mere demands (the contract) to a more political level (the repression of “Papa” IRI and the renewed attempt to align those companies having partial State ownership with the Right—wing forces in power).

The occupation of the factory would function as a reference point for other struggles. Sine 1947, there has been no occupations of major plants except in instances where bankruptcy was shutting them down. The union knows that in the face of badly stalled negotiations and the suspension of Frank Atzeni, the working class will act forcefully and autonomously. It therefore decides to take charge of the situation if only to avoid the embarrassment of being sidestepped. In fact, in the afternoon meeting of the executive, when the occupation is formally proposed, the FIOM official immediately comes out in support of it and urges a series of actions such as open dialogues with the democratic parties and other popular forces, meetings with municipal authorities, dialogues with other delegates’ councils and factories, and so on. Any decisions, however, are postponed until tomorrow, when the full factory executive will meet.

JANUARY 16 (Sunday)
The delegation returns from Rome, where the negotiations between the Government, the unions, and the company have been stalled for some time. It explains in an “open” executive meeting that there have been no further negotiations, but only a “series of meetings” which apparently haven’t resolved a thing. The company insists that the proposed automatic passage from category to category would injure the workers in the higher categories, and will only agree to automatic passage from Category 1 to Category 2 in order to eliminate the most glaring cases of discrimination. On this point the company is intransigent. In Rome, therefore, nothing worth mentioning has happened, but the delegation insists that there hasn’t been a breakdown in negotiations, just a “postponement”. What, pray tell, is the difference, with the negotiations “postponed” now for over two months?

The problem remains about what to say and what to do in the factory tomorrow. As soon as the local FIOM official begins to summarize the consensus which emerged from yesterdays executive meeting (occupation of the factory), the regional representative of the FIOM, who is higher up in the hierarchy, says: “The occupation of a factory is a serious thing not to be taken lightly. We can’t just improvise and risk falling into adventurism. We must be disciplined.” (Any discipline, it seems, is the responsibility of the working class.) “If we occupy, many of the workers who do not favor automatic passage will go home. Beware of spontaneism. We have no right to decide.” (False democratism, since when the base push for something in the delegates’ council, they are told that the final decision belongs to the executive.) “We must move gradually. Tomorrow we can begin with an extra few hours of strike, and then we’ll convene the delegates’ council, and after that, other meetings with the democratic parties, telegrams to. . . (etc., etc.).” This is a typical “fireman’s operation” from beginning to end. There is even one official from the FIOM who pretends not to know what the word “occupation” means. According to him, we’re all supposed to remain in the plant and work to show the bosses that we can work without them. Incredible! The local FIOM official who had come out in favor of the occupation does an about—face. The problem for the union is clearly not that of giving a militant outlet to the struggle, but rather that of holding it back so that it doesn’t explode and make a mess. What prevails, then, in the executive, is the idea of having a general assembly tomorrow morning, maybe an all day strike; then, Tuesday, the delegates’ council meeting, then the meetings with other factories with possible demonstrations, then maybe a quick trip to Rome with a lot of fanfare, then a demonstration in front of the mayor’s office, et cetera, et cetera. In short, there is just so much “political tourism.” At this point, however, we must simply wait and see what the workers think of it tomorrow.

JANUARY 19 (Wednesday)
Today, with strikes between 9 and 11 am, several in-plant assemblies have been called for the office personnel at the Portello plant. In one of these, at which I am present, a comrade from AA takes the floor and insists on two themes which we consider crucial: the suspension of Frank Atzenl, and the occupation of the factory. Atzeni must be re-instated, says the comrade, because he has always been in the forefront of the struggles. By striking him the company has struck all of us in the front lines. (Something a line comrade of Frank told me about him comes to mind: “Frank is worth more to us than a good agreement, and not just for reasons of friendship. We know that with him in the plant we’ve won; without him even the best agreement would be a defeat, because we would be more vulnerable: The bosses could strike us too the minute we raise our heads.”) The comrade then touches on the idea of the occupation as a “political moment which unites”. The occupation would help us feel more united and part of the same struggle. It would allow us to discuss general political questions, to meet with militants from other plants and hear about their own struggles firsthand. This assembly with the office personnel was really instructive. It showed that there are many people who are uninformed and never discuss political matters, but who as soon as they begin to form clear ideas, are right there with you in the struggles.

Alfa Romeo strikers march, 21 January, 1972. The placard reads "the Working Class Goes to Heaven", the title of an excellent film about autoworkers' struggles in Italy from 1971.

JANUARY 31 (Monday)
The unions have been systematically downplaying the idea of an occupation, saying that at the most we should have a “symbolic” one which lasts only one day. Meanwhile Frank Atzenl has been re-instated, and this is no doubt a significant retreat for the company and is greeted by the workers as a great victory. This morning the AA distributed a leaflet at both the Portello and Arese plants. It tries to clarify the nature and importance of the proposed occupation, and celebrates the re-instatement of Frank Atzeni.

At the Arese plant the workers are really pissed off when they learn that there will be only one hour of strike to hold the general assembly. The assembly begins at 9 am, and there are tons of participants. When the FIOM official begins to speak you can sense the tension among the workers: The assembly feels like a bomb ready to burst. The official is explaining in minutest detail the negotiations in Rome; he obviously wants the whole hour to go by without giving the workers a chance to take the floor. But after half an hour a restless murmur can be heard which gets louder by the minute, and someone yells out that the meeting should be prolonged till 11. The official agrees, but rather haphazardly and with little conviction in his voice.

The workers insist that the meeting be officially prolonged, and as the official continues repeating himself, stalling for time, a comrade from the AA suddenly jumps up on the platform and yanks the mic away from the trade unionist. The bureaucrats immediately turn down the volume so no one can hear a thing. Hell breaks loose as the workers begin to boo and hiss and yell out insults. Another FIOM official intervenes and tries to throw water on the flames, but almost immediately a few comrades from the AA take the floor and the occupation proposal is accepted by the assembly. It will be discussed again tomorrow in the delegates’ council, but the occupation looks like a sure thing at this point.

Also at the Portello plant the general assembly is very stormy. At 9 am, as I enter the cafeteria, people are bargaining on the table with their silverware, shouting and jeering. Many have read the morning papers and know that the negotiations are still stalled. As soon as the union official starts talking about the Rome negotiations, the assembly explodes and everyone starts yelling “Occupation, occupation!” The official is losing his temper, but tries to regain control of the situation by proposing a regional strike, or even a national one, of all the metal workers, with a train ride to Rome, but the hissing continues, and he finally agrees to an occupation, but “just for one day”. The reaction of the workers, who immediately answer “two, two, three, three…” makes him realize that he’s fast losing his grip on things and losing face besides. He then says that meetings will be held in each department to consider the occupation further, with the results to be made known at the delegates’ council meeting tomorrow. At 10:15, an assembly is held which includes around 200 office workers, among whom are many habitual scabs. An FIOM official reviews the results of the Rome negotiations. A comrade from AA takes the occasion to clarify once again the strategic significance of the occupation: more militant struggle and a completely open factory. At 1:30 people are gathering in front of the cafeteria and talking about the way the meetings went in the departments. All the comrades are elated, on all the separate assemblies, including those of the office personnel; the occupation proposal has been accepted, in many cases unanimously. It seems that the idea has really caught fire, and everyone is discussing it as if it were an accomplished fact. Organizational details are being considered, such as constant vigilance against fascist reprisals, coordination of initiatives inside and outside the plant, and so on. It almost seems like something too big and too good to be true, but if the union tries again tomorrow to pull back it will be completely discredited in the eyes of the workers.

FEBRUARY 2 (Wednesday)
At the Portello plant picket lines are set up from 7 to 10 am. At Arese strikes are on from 2:30 to 4:30. People are talking about the occupation as if it were starting today. Since 7:30 the commission nominated yesterday at the Portello plant has been meeting to study the details of the occupation. As soon as the discussion focuses on the length of the occupation there is immediate polarization: on one hand the bureaucracy of the CP and the unions who fear the difficulties which might arise if the “day of struggle” is prolonged throughout the night, and therefore propose that It run from 7 am to 11 pm; on the other hand the comrades from AA, other comrades, and the FIM, who want the occupation to begin today and end at 9 am the day after tomorrow. The discussion gets rather heated; the FIOM is even afraid of the word “occupation’ and prefers to refer to the event as “a permanent assembly in control of the factory”. When one of the comrades says something about the workers becoming “owners of the factory”, the bureaucrats jump on him with words like “extremist” and “provocateur”.

The FIOM insists that the occupation can’t begin today because it would give the company a pretext for a lockout. In reality, it wants to keep itself within the rules of the Union-boss game; it only trusts top-level negotiations, and does not want to present itself at the bargaining table in Rome tomorrow with the factory already occupied. By 11:30 word arrives that many workers in the departments and offices want to occupy immediately! In many offices, the managers are going around asking the personnel to take holiday time or special leave for tomorrow. They also announce that all services in the plant will be suspended. The commission finally reaches a compromise, and the occupation is scheduled to begin at 9 am tomorrow and last a full 24 hours. At 2:30, an assembly is held at the Arese plant to inform the workers of the decision. The FIOM official chooses his words with such skill that his climb up the union ladder is virtually assured. He says that the decisions of the delegates’ council must be respected (the assembly is no longer sovereign) and that caution must be exercised not to allow lapses into spontaneism, adventurism, extremism, and so on. A comrade tries to interrupt, but the bureaucrats from the CP who are guarding the microphones say “Let him be; he’s the usual extremist; a minority of one.”

At the Arese plant, the FIOM official clarifies to the assembly that we are having not an “occupation” (God forbid!), but rather a “permanent assembly”. Occupation or no occupation, the strong picket lines continue at the point of finished production, the most vulnerable place for the boss. The workers know what they’re doing. In the evening the company advises the union brass that since they have behaved so “responsibly”, tomorrow will be considered a regular work day and everyone will get paid. The game is fully within the rules: “I could kill you if I wanted to, but I’ll only hurt you a little, and in return, boss, you’ll give me a little something.” This is the union, the champion of the march in reverse! It is so good at balancing the accelerator and the brakes that it always finds an “authorized parking” space. Born from the factory vanguards, the idea of the occupation was at first snubbed by the union, then fought against, and finally, because the mass of workers wanted it, approved, but only in order to immobilize it.

FEBRUARY 3-4 (Thursday and Friday)
Portello: There is a general assembly at 9 am, and absolutely everyone is present, even those who have never been on strike before. It is the highest point of the struggle so far. Those participating in the assembly include politicians, trade unionists, and various political groups. There is even the CP, which as usual expresses its solidarity, leaves a $160 check (disgusting!), and splits. Even a representative from the Italian Socialist Party arrives, says a few words, and leaves without even sitting down, a formality like cutting an inaugural ribbon. If this goes on much longer the assembly is going to become a nice little stage on which everyone, from revisionists to bosses, can parade before the workers.

At the gates there are workers who “guard the factory”. In reality, all gates have been shut down except Gate 5, which the workers have blocked with huge metal barrels, and Gate 1, because the union said the executives have to come and go unmolested. The militants decide who enters and who leaves. The bureaucrats from the CP and the FIOM union try to let in only the people and the groups, they approve of, but we do exactly the same. As far as the students are concerned, the CP had tried to limit their participation to only three delegates from the student movement of Milan State University. We forced them, however, to admit three delegates from each factory. The morning is fast coming to an end, and we’re getting fed up with all the big shots that speak and then leave. We propose that the assembly break up into smaller groups which can study specific issues more carefully, and proceed to form a group of about a hundred which sets up its own agenda. A few minutes later, a few bureaucrats arrive and with great alarm announce that all the executives have left the plant (isn’t that what we wanted?), that Alfa had discontinued all services (cafeteria, guards, and so on), and that we must ask all students to leave immediately.

What is really bothering them is that many have by now left the general assembly to join small discussion groups. There is real mass participation on the part of workers and office personnel, and it is really an occupation now that all the executives have abandoned ship and the factory is in the hands of the workers, who are guarding the gates vigilantly to prevent any fascist attacks. Contrary to the bureaucrats’ expectations, everyone has remained in the factory, preferring to participate in group discussions and aware that this new form of struggle is a demonstration of the strength of the working class. After a short break to grab a sandwich, the general assembly and the discussion groups reconvene for the afternoon. On the lower floor of the cafeteria a study group with about a hundred people is formed. Several issues are tackled from the special problems of office personnel to the repression inside and outside the plant to the line of the CP and the current move to the Right by the Government. This was a lesson for the CP and the unions which tried to de-emphasize the political value of the occupation and had brought in only those people they approved of. (In the morning, for example, they had refused to give the floor to a group of militants from “Il Manifesto”.) Around 7 pm the union wants to close the plant to all outsiders, but the decision is made to allow workers from other factories to enter until 10 pm. Many people have gone home for the night, and the few hundred who remain are organizing the roster for guard duty throughout the night. While all the main gates continue to be picketed, inside the plant there is constant surveillance in all the departments, and outside there are groups of militants in cars controlling all people who look suspicious. At one point, two men in a car are stopped and asked for their IDs. They really look suspect, and turn out to be two cops who hang around the area until 5 am. A few of us go to sleep on desks, while others, better organized, have brought their sleeping bags. Even the back seat of a car is fine enough when you’re really sleepy, and we’re all dead tired and very cold. At the gates huge bonfires are burning to keep those outside warm.

Arese: The day of occupation of the factory: The security arrangements are handed over to an FIOM official who is careful not to give us of the AA the red armbands identifying all those involved in keeping order. With or without armbands, we’re on the picket lines. There is a happy atmosphere because the plant is in the hands of the workers, who are singing songs of struggle as they make the rounds in the various departments. Throughout the morning delegations from political parties, municipal governments, other factories, and student groups enter the plant. The cafeteria is not in service, and by 2 pm we’re all starving. Many have left to have lunch at home or at a nearby restaurant, and will return later in the afternoon. The militants from “Red Rescue” bring some wine, and around 2:30 some 3,000 sandwiches arrive, compliments of various neighborhood co-operatives.

One of the most exciting parts of the day was the performance given by Dario Fo’s La Comune, a radical theatre group. The mimic, Vidal, showed the alienation that workers undergo in capitalist society, and did a mimic drama about the demise of the present society. The show was widely understood and enthusiastically applauded by the workers. We sang songs of struggle led by Paul Ciarchi (also of La Comune) until 1:30 am. When revisionism was attacked throughout the evening, you could see the bureaucrats squirming in discomfort. Finally some of us went to sleep and others went to picket the finished-products gate. If asked for a general assessment of today’s occupation, we would have to say that it wasn’t all we had hoped it would be, but at the same time it did contain some very positive things. Above all it was a victory snatched from the unions by the workers at the base, and even in the way it was conducted, the unions were prevented from turning it into a platform for political parties and “big shots”. We were successful in bringing into the plant workers from other factories, students from many schools, and militants from a variety of political groups dealing with the unions from a position of power.

FEBRUARY 12-13 (Saturday and Sunday)
Thursday night a few workers tore out the train tracks running through part of the factory grounds to prevent a train with 250 finished cars from leaving. The union issued a communiqué which was picked up by Saturday charging that forces “external” to the factory were responsible for this “typically fascist” action. It was the union’s way of attacking the workers who insist that the picket against the finished products must continue at all costs because it is the only form of struggle which is hitting the company in the guts. (The dealers, both domestic and foreign, are pressuring for cars.) Already, a few days ago, a contingent of 200 police managed to get eight trucks (carrying about 60 new cars) safely out of the plant gates, and the union said not a word. This evening (Saturday), while we of the AA are in a meeting, a few comrades arrive from Arese and explain that police reinforcements are on their way to the finished products picket area and are planning to help the train get by the picket lines, since the tracks have been repaired. We leave immediately for the Arese plant, where on arrival we find over 1,000 policemen. We’re not sure whether they’ll try to get the train out or whether they’ll use the trucks.

About 1:00 am, 30 trucks appear outside the gates. (At 7 pm about a dozen of them had entered through another gate, and the police themselves had loaded the cars onto them!) We start talking to the truck drivers: “Our struggle,” we say, “is your struggle too. You are exploited just like we are. If you go in, all our sacrifices to maintain the picket of the finished products day and night will go up in smoke. After more than an hour of discussion, they are persuaded, and refuse to enter the gates. A squad of policemen, stationed inside, went to the gates and tried to get rid of a group of comrades who are seated on the ground near the gates. They shout “Rauss just like the Nazis.” They say their job is to ensure respect for the law and the right to work, and that if we don’t move they will drag us away. One of them, who is asked by a comrade if he has the proper authorization, answers that he doesn’t give a damn about authorization, and that they themselves are the only necessary authority. They bellow orders to the truck drivers to come forward, but the drivers don’t move. The officers are foaming with anger as the drivers openly defy them. After 10 minutes they retreat into the plant, closing the gates behind them.

Meanwhile, other comrades arrive after being notified of the emergency situation. (Even a CP senator showed up, but after looking around a few minutes, he left.) A comrade from Quarto Oggiaro had phoned everyone from his home phone, and by some strange coincidence the police blocked all the roads leaving Quarto Oggiaro. His phone was clearly being tapped. But our chief pre-occupation is the train: Now that the tracks are in good repair, it won’t be so easy to stop it. At about 3:30 am all the police take their positions, and after opening the gates they let out 10 trucks carrying about 75 cars. The police are brandishing their rifles and using them to keep back the workers who are pressing forward and yelling “Fascists, fascists!” to the passing truck drivers. A few of the cops look stoned and unsteady, and their faces are angry and full of hate. There are too few of us to resist effectively, but we manage to put it over on the pigs anyway. While a large group of us create an incident to cause commotion and keep the police busy, a smaller group quietly sneak over to an area where the trucks will be passing to leave the grounds. They succeed in damaging nearly all the cars on the last five trucks by throwing stones. The police are really embarrassed, and the truck drivers who had remained outside now realize that it would be impossible to drive out with undamaged cars for the rest of the night. The policemen who escorted the truck drivers out of the factory gates are now clashing with a group of comrades near the exit. They wait for one of the trucks to barely inch forward, and then charge the workers. We return to the drivers to warn them that if they don’t clear out, the responsibility for what might happen will be on their shoulders. After about five minutes they leave, and not long after the police leave also. With 30 trucks and a train, they could have carried off about 500 vehicles. As things turned out, they took out only 75, and more than half of them were damaged. Despite the grand display of police power, out of all proportion to our meager numbers, we managed to win a victory (a) because we were able to persuade the truck drivers to come over to our side, and (b) because the police never thought that we could get so many comrades over to the Arese plant on such short notice.

FEBRUARY 18 (Friday)
Portello: This morning the delegates’ council held a meeting at which the FIOM official explained the text of the agreement finally reached this week in Rome. The “automatic passage” is there, but in name only. Strong limitations are built into it: There are more than four levels, because within the first level there are those who never go on to the second, and within the second and third there are discriminatory criteria between workers, not to mention the fourth level, which retains a coefficient amounting to another level.

For the office employees, there is precious little of what they wanted. The union talks about “areas to be delimited” in connection with passage from the second to the third, perhaps with the help of a special commission which, when translated, as we all know, means: postpone the problem until there is no more mass mobilization, so that the company has a chance to maneuver however and whenever it wishes. The only new thing: a $72 bonus for everyone, including the scabs. The PCI, with a triumphant tone, celebrates the contract by declaring it “a great victory”, but then someone points out that the automatic passage is a farce, that the levels are more than four, and that the office employees have gained nothing. There is an air of general dissatisfaction, but the unions are saying that we can’t go on with the struggle, that the working class is tired, and that therefore the agreement should be accepted as it stands. Even we of the AA know very well that after 150 hours of strike the struggle has come to an end, but we are not afraid to say that the agreement, far from being a great victory, is a bitter disappointment, especially for the office personnel.

FEBRUARY 21 (Monday)
Portello: There is a general assembly in the cafeteria from 10 to 11 am. Everyone is there; workers, office employees, about 3,000 people. The FIM official goes over the main points of the agreement. He goes on and on for over half an hour and soon mumbling and restless whispering can be heard all over the hall. Finally he says: “Now we will vote, a mere formality, but let’s see: Who’s In favor of the agreement?” About 60% raise their hands amid shouts and jeers. People are yelling “Sellouts, clowns…” For a further demonstration of support the union official asks slyly: “Those who favor continuing the struggle raise your hands.” Despite this formulation (many of course object to the agreement but prefer not to continue the strike) about 40% raise their hands. The shouting grows more insistent, but the official declares with a perfectly straight face “The overwhelming majority approves of ending the struggle!” and then makes a quick exit. The shouting and hissing continues as members of the CP brass stand there at a loss for words. They don’t have the courage to engage the workers in conversation as the assembly breaks up into smaller groups to discuss the agreement and the manner in which the assembly was held. Many ask why no separate department meetings were held. Others say that if the automatic passage isn’t reached with this agreement, the struggle will go on and set off a chain of wildcats in every department. These who are talking are not from the ranks of the vanguards, but just ordinary workers from the base. Especially among the office employees dissatisfaction is high, and it will be important to avoid a swing to the right. We’ll have to push hard for autonomous organizing at the level of the base. After the meeting is closed, a group of office employees come over and ask if they can join the AA because they’ve decided not to renew their union membership. We explain that the AA has no formal membership, but that they are welcome to the AA meetings any time.

Translated by Bruno and Judy Ramirez. From Radical America, vol. 7, #2. March-April, 1973.

Text taken from www.prole.info

Libcom note: A PDF of the version of this text published by Rising Free Press in 1974 has been added to the foot of this page. That edition includes additional material.

Translated and edited by Ernest Dowson
Radical America, Vol.7 no.2, March-April 1973

Translator's Preface
Community struggle in Italy has gone beyond the trade-union tradition which limits the class struggle to the fight for higher wages. The Italian working class have recognized that their needs for a freer and happier life cannot be realized by increasing the spending power of individual groups of workers. Any gains made inside the factories have been countered by the bosses' use of inflation and property speculation. Social services (housing, hospitals, schools, and so on) are determined solely by the needs of large firms. In this situation the struggle in the community becomes crucial, and working-class people are forced to discover new forms of self-organization, tactics, and demands.

The rent strikes have developed not as symbolic acts of protest against government policies, but as a direct response to the tyranny of rent. Thousands of families, finding that they can't afford the rent or not being able to see why they should pay it when they are living in run-down tenements or in projects where there are no amenities, fall into arrears and are threatened with eviction. The rent strike binds them together and makes an active weapon out of a series of isolated protests.

The strikes are organized block by block, staircase by staircase, with regular meetings, newsletters, wall newspapers, leaflets, and demonstrations. In the course of the struggle people begin to take control of their project or building - asking themselves why they should pay rent, how much they should pay, if any, and what it should be used for. At the same time they make sure that the rent collector and the police can't carry out their jobs. Anti-eviction squads are set up, and contacts are established with workers in nearby factories who can be brought out immediately. Women play an essential role in the organization of the rent strike. During the day, along with their kids, they guard the project against the police.

Occupations in Italy have been mass collective actions involving hundreds of people. There has never been any question of legal rights, and there have been many violent clashes with the police, with people defending themselves from behind barricades. The buildings taken over have often been modern blocks of apartments left empty by speculators. In some cases the workers building the apartments have joined in the occupation. Control of the apartments and decisions about how the struggle should be fought are in the hands of general meetings. In the course of the struggle new, collective ways of living - day-care centers, communal kitchens, people's health centers - are developed. In this way people begin to live in the buildings in a way which is totally opposed to the idea of isolated, private units for which the architects designed them.

In Italy people have recognized that rent strikes and occupations are part of the same struggle. "A house is a right - don't pay rent!" has been a common slogan for both; and in a number of instances, for example in Milan, the same organizations have been used to build rent strikes and to prepare for occupations. This unified struggle around housing has been the pre-condition of the extension of the fight into other areas, such as transportation, health, and prices.

All these struggles have relied on direct action : "Legal" channels for registering protest or demanding reforms are seen for what they are: delaying tactics used by the ruling class to divide people and buy off their leaders. Appeals to politicians, petitions to Parliament, and the like have been rejected as irrelevant if people are prepared to fight to take now the things that they need. In the modern city the traditional working-class way of life has been increasingly destroyed and replaced by the anonymity of life in the housing project. In the course of their struggles the Italian working class have begun to create for themselves a new identity, a way of life which is more and more outside the control of the bosses. In defining and fighting for their own interests as a class working people have begun to take back everything that has been stolen from them, taking control of their own lives and taking over their cities.

MILAN
Milan is Italy's largest industrial city. In addition to large numbers of medium-size factories, there are several huge industrial plants - OM (trucks), Pirelli (tires), Sit Siemens (electrical goods), Alfa-Romeo (cars). Together with Turin it "attracts" 2,000 workers a month from the South. During the "Hot Autumn" struggles of 1969, these migrant workers were very militant. The most important aspect of these struggles was the lesson they gave people in how to organize on their own behalf and in their own way. At Pirelli, for instance, the fight was organized through the United Base Committee, set up with the support of students. It was this kind of experience which was the pre-condition of the more-general struggles which were to develop outside the factories.

Milan can be divided into four areas :

(a) The city center: banks, businesses, shops, hotels, and luxury apartments.

(b) Old working-class areas from which the workers are being pushed out. These areas are lived in by the traditional Milanese working class, pensioners, small shopkeepers, and post-war migrants from the South. Most of these people are eligible for the municipal-housing waiting list. The housing in these areas is a mixture of early, pre-war municipal housing, and very old privately-owned houses which have no amenities. Private owners - the biggest is Ceschini - collect millions in rent. These old working-class neighborhoods have traditions, history, and local community life which make them very different places to live in from the new working-class neighborhoods. In the older neighborhoods, the struggle over housing has developed around making the old apartments livable, rent reduction, and the fight against eviction of tenants, which landlords are keen to attempt in order to be able to renovate the apartments and sell them off to someone with cash. In other cases landlords take in rents and service charges for years without doing any repairs. They let apartments become so run down that they can get permission to knock them down and build luxury apartments in their place.

(c) Areas of municipal housing where the working classes expelled from the inner-urban area are being rehoused - Quarto Oggiaro, Galaratese, Rodzano, and so on. Also living in these projects are migrant workers with children born in Milan, and a group of scabs - petty-bourgeois, police, civil servants, city guards - put there to spy on militant tenants and break down tenants' solidarity. Municipal-housing areas are the heart of housing struggles in Milan.

(d) Outlying areas: These are places like Bollage, Novate, Desio, Sesto, and Cinisella which have grown up around factories such as Snia, Autobianci, Alfa, Innocenti. They exist only to provide a place for factory workers to sleep. Even here rents are high ($12.50 a week for a one-bedroom apartment, $15.50 a week for a two-bedroom apartment), and there are no schools, hospitals, shops, or public transport. The housing here is either co-operatively owned apartments or shanty-town huts which are usually the only accommodation for recently-arrived Southerners.

The Housing Struggle

Housing struggles in Milan have centered on municipal housing. To get a municipal apartment you have to show that you have a steady job, and the waiting period is at least five years. A year's residence in Milan is also required before you can get on the waiting list. This immediately excludes recently-arrived Southerners, workers whose work is seasonal (for example, construction workers), the under-employed, the unemployed, and the thousands who don't know how to fill in the forms.

In 1964 5% of the families in municipal housing were in rent arrears. By 1971 this had risen to 18%. During this period the housing authorities lost $8,750,000. Ten thousand families received warnings, and there were 750 evictions. At the height of the struggle. 25% of the families in Galaratese were in rent arrears, 45% of those In Quarto Oggiaro, and 50% of those in Rodzano.

The struggle began in 1968. In Quarto Oggiaro, when 30,000 families in municipal housing were faced with a 30% rent increase, a Tenants' Union was created. In that year it made door-to-door contacts and organized public meetings. By June 1968, 700 families were on total rent strike. The Tenants' Union spread the struggle with the demand that rent be no more than 10% of wages. In September 1968 four people were arrested during eviction. Kids attacked police cars, and women blocked steps leading to apartments. The Union expanded, and the brutality of the police made people more angry. In April 1970, 500 police were needed to evict one family.

Rent Strike

On May Day 1970 about 2,000 people demonstrated in the streets of Quarto Oggiaro. This was a positive break with the tradition of "public processions" organized by the political parties and the trade unions. People were coming onto the streets of their own community. The march was an occasion for people to realize their growing strength and unity and to further develop their struggle. It culminated in a mass meeting held in a square in the center of the district, where a large number of people spoke about their experiences:

An elderly woman from the area: "We tenants began our struggle in January 1968. I was one of the first women to stop paying rent. Despite the many difficulties, our struggle has developed. The young people of the area have had a lot of trouble, day and night. But our minds are made up. If anyone goes on rent strike, nobody's going to be able to evict them. Every time the police come we'll be there, all together, in front of the door, to stop them from getting in.

"Not long ago 500 police were sent down from the Viale Romagna - 500 police to throw the family of one poor worker out onto the street. How come, when hundreds of evictions used to be carried out with only one officer there, it now takes a whole army ?

"It's because here in Quarto Oggiaro people have got together to fight. Because here in Quarto Oggiaro there's the Tenants' Union. We're using a new type of weapon to fight against the rising cost of living, against the bosses' exploitation of us in our homes. It's something really effective - a rent strike.

"I'm not speaking now to the young people, to those youths in the area who have been in the forefront of our struggle. I want to say something to the women who live here. Many of them still aren't involved and haven't realized the importance of this strike.

"In the two years and five months that I've been on strike, I've saved a lot of money. I feel healthier. I've had more money to give to the children, to the ones who really need it. I've had some money to give to a few old-age pensioners. I'm not saying all this to give you big ideas about myself. But just think for a minute. Rather than give your money to the bosses, keep it for yourself. Give it to the children. Give it to the workers who are struggling in the factories and who are exploited year in and year out.

"People talk about the Hot Autumn factory contracts. What did the workers gain? Nothing - absolutely nothing! I know what my family's finances are like. If you do the shopping, you see prices rising every day. I'd say we've lost out badly. They can laugh -the clever ones, the reformists, all those male politicians. But we're getting near election time, and we'll give our vote to those who deserve it - and that's none of them!

"Eat sirloin steaks ... don't go handing your hard-earned money over to the thieves in the Viale Romagna!

"After those 500 police came to Quarto Oggiaro our struggle expanded a hundred times. Even the very next day. Anybody who's still paying rent just remember this: You won't get a penny of it back from the authorities. Follow the example of the young people - even if you don't give them responsibilities a lot of the time, seeing as they're so young. They're much tougher and braver than we are, because after 50 years of struggle we can't get the same results we used to.

"Personally. I can say this. Since the time I first went on rent strike things have gone better for me. Long live the working class! And long live the struggle of the tenants!"

A woman worker from Fiar: "After four months of strikes in the factories I was in trouble trying to live on a wage that just wasn't enough. I have three children, all of them very young and dear to me. And I just couldn't afford the rent I was paying to this private landlord. So they had me evicted. I didn't get help from anyone.

"Then I heard there was a flat empty in Quarto Oggiaro, and I decided to squat in it. Now the authorities have told me I'll have to get out in ten days' time. Well, the authorities had better learn this: I love my kids and I'm going to make sure that they've got somewhere to live. And I can show them a thing or two.

"A home is a right, and in the name of that right I've taken one!"

A worker from Quarto Oggiaro: "Comrades, the woman from Fiar who's just spoken... I think the gist of what she said is quite clear. Here in Quarto Oggiaro, there are dozens of families, apart from those on rent strike, who were in need of a home and have started squatting, without crying or begging for it.

"Now, the Council, those public-spirited men, have summoned the families to the Town Hall to tell them they've got to get out in the next 10 days. We haven't come here just to have a march to celebrate May Day. The sister who's just spoken mustn't be driven from her home. Because if we can come here today in such numbers, then the next time there'll be more of us. And we'll place ourselves in front of this house. The police won't kick them out because they won't have the strength to do it.

"Today, May 1st, has been decreed by the middle-class politicians as a day to be celebrated. But for us there's no cause for celebration, because we're still exploited, because they still kick us out of our homes, and because we want a festival that's really ours. All the people here know what I'm trying to say, what festival I'm talking about.

"We're the ones who build the houses. We're the ones who work in the factories. Without the working class there'd be nothing. Who is it who makes the goods? Who is it who does all the work? Who is it who makes it possible for everyone to benefit? Us!

"Houses are ours because we build them and need them, and for that reason we're going to have them !"

A speaker from the Tenants' Union: "In June there will be the elections. Before long all the parliamentary vermin will be putting a show on, even in this area. You'll see them come making a heap of promises, trying to buy our votes! Even though during ordinary times they treat us as second-class citizens and call the police in on us, when our vote is worth as much as Big Boss Pirelli's and they need it to boost their power, lo and behold they arrive here in person. What a nerve these gentlemen have to come here looking for votes! Look them straight in the face and you'll see that they're the same ones who order the evictions and who pretend to be indignant when the evictions actually happen.

"In our area there are hundreds of people who have had rent reductions only because they've jumped on the bandwagon of this or that political party. Do we have to do the same? No! We say that housing is a right, built with our money and sweat. So we're going to continue the rent strike until we've beaten the bosses and the false friends who try to wreck our struggle. The bosses are doing everything in their power to break our will to fight - intimidation, attempted corruption, violence. There's nothing they won't stoop to, to try and regain control. They've even given reductions in rent and rent rebates on houses built after 1963. But not one of these maneuvers has worked. Our struggle is still going strong.

"What the Tenants' Union is aiming at is to link the struggles in the local factories with those in the community. But, though a link-up of this sort would make us unbeatable, it's being obstructed right down the line by the unions. Because they're afraid of losing control over the people - afraid that they won't be able to check the thrust of the exploited to develop their own power.

"To make this clearer, let's look at one very concrete example. In February the Office of the Judiciary, together with the police, took advantage of the absence of one tenant to load his furniture out onto the street. Some local women told several comrades, who then began to mobilize. They went and told the workers in a nearby factory, who immediately downed tools and left the factory to protect this man's right to a house. In the space of an hour all the worker's furniture was put back in place, the door was closed again, and a new padlock was put on, right before the officer's eyes.

"So far, with the exception of the last time, when there were 500 police on the spot, not one eviction has succeeded. Because the people here are mobilized and united. In the morning, when the man from the Office of the Judiciary comes around and most of the workers are at work, the chief role is played by the women and children. Once they slashed the tires of a police car, and the cops had to go home on foot!

"Comrades, let's carry the message of the rent strike into the factories; let's bring together the struggle in the factory and the struggle in the community. In that way we'll be able to realize our strength and our power - people's power!"

Occupations

It now became necessary to see the struggle in Quarto Oggiaro as part of the total working-class struggle, and to extend it to all other aspects of social oppression - prices, health, education, transportation. This led to the picketing of local supermarkets (the UPIM) and the strike of secondary-school kids over the price of books.

The people of Quarto Oggiaro have refused to allow their struggle to be diverted or taken over by political parties or other so-called "representatives" of the working class. The Tenants' Union is a mass organization independent of any party or trade union. The CP, which wanted to send a petition to Parliament, was seen as a joke. What's more, people have recognized that the housing struggle cannot be limited to the struggle of tenants and the rent issue. Relying on their own initiatives, they have brought together people on rent strike, people facing eviction, squatters and homeless families. After a number of isolated squats in Quarto Oggiaro and nearby Galaratese, where 10 families occupied a building in September 1970, people began to prepare, through the Tenants' Union, for the mass occupations which emerged at the beginning of 1971.

On Friday, January 22, 1971, 25 families occupied a modern block of apartments owned and left empty by IACP in Via Mac Mahon. All victims of previous evictions, they had been living in special centers set up for "Homeless Families". At the centers anywhere from 5 to 11 people live, sleep, and cook in one or two rooms. Lavatories consist of cramped cupboards, too small even to stand up in. Vermin and disease are rife. Because local bosses regard people housed at the centers as "unreliable", the rate of unemployment is very high. Those who do have work have to travel miles to get it.

The apartments that the families moved into were supposedly built for working-class people. They cost 14,000,000 lira ($23,330) in cash, or 22,000,000 lira ($36,660) in installments ($5800 down and just under $120 monthly) - obviously way beyond the means of any worker, employed or not.

Once inside the apartments the families began to build barricades, hang out red flags, and string up banners. Across the end of the street was a banner reading "All Power to the People". It wasn't long before groups of journalists arrived on the scene, and long arguments started between them and the squatters. The next morning more families arrived. Collections to buy essentials were organized. Other people set out to gain support in the area, touring it with loudspeaker vans and stopping to hold street-corner meetings.

At 2:30 the police arrived - about 2,000 of them, armed to the teeth. They immediately surrounded the building and began to attack it from the rear, so as not to be seen from the street. They were very vicious. Canisters of tear gas were fired directly at the people squatting. (This is common police practice nowadays.) About 65 people were eventually taken in for questioning, and 25 of them were arrested. Those who remained were offered transportation back to the "Homeless Families" center. This they scornfully refused: "I came on foot and I'll leave on foot."

Outside a big crowd began to gather. People were forming up to march in protest when the police charged again, using still more tear gas. In spite of this the march managed to form up, and people set off through the neighborhood to the local market. Here the families decided to occupy the Social Center in Quarto Oggiaro rather than go back to the "Homeless Families" center. "Let the bosses go and live in the center; we're not going back."

Over the next few weeks the Council offered the families a few houses right away and the rest as soon as possible. The families rejected this sop and stuck together until they were all rehoused. When the people arrested during the eviction came to trial, the courtroom was packed and the "case" against them was laughed out of court.

Via Tibaldi

The occupation at Via Tibaldi was a great step forward. A whole neighborhood was involved in it: factories, schools, housing projects took part in the organizing of the struggle. There was a victory at Via Tibaldi because everyone there was fully aware of the issue: There were 70 immigrant families who had been promised a place by the Council and had to be rehoused.

When the confrontation came, it was clear who was on which side: It was homeless families, workers, and students against the bosses, the unions, the housing officials, and the police. In the six days of violence the people occupied everything - houses, the streets, the town hall, police wagons, and the Architecture Faculty at the University. Thousands of police were mobilized against those involved in the occupations. In one day there were two attempts to evict everyone. The forces of repression attacked with tear gas, clubbing everyone who got in their way. Twice they were beaten back. After the third attempt to shift them, the occupiers agreed to be rehoused temporarily by a charity.

This was a tactical retreat.

The mayor and his mob were forced to give in. Houses were allocated to the families who had squatted and to 140 other families who had been evicted and were "living" in hostels waiting to be rehoused. The alliance of workers, students, and tenants forged before and during "the taking of Via Tibaldi" shows how strong the working class is when it fights together. With this alliance the working class went on the offensive and won a famous victory In June of 1971.

The occupation begins on Tuesday morning. The squatters are nearly all Southerners - workers at Pirelli and other, smaller factories, building workers, and unemployed people. Some of the people have been involved in other struggles: Before this occupation the families from Crescenzago were on rent strike.

The occupation is strengthened by a continual coming and going of workers (many of them from OM, a large factory only 150 yards away), students, and local people who support the action. They offer help, bring useful materials, and work alongside the squatters. The workers engaged in building this block of apartments also are sympathetic. The firm they work for is about to close down.

Because of the two months of organization which had led up to the occupation the whole of Milan knows about it. Aniasi, the mayor, and the officials of the IACP (the State building authority) know about it too. Almost at the same time they both start denying responsibility.

Barricades are built in the streets, particularly by the women and children.

Wednesday. A demonstration is organized to go to Porta Ticinese. It's the Festival of the Naviglio, and people figure Aniasi will be there. The families want to have a few words with him and let him know that they're ready for anything. The march is headed by a banner that reads "Homes Occupied!" There are dozens of red flags. The marchers move off shouting "We want houses NOW!", "Free houses for workers!", and "Long live Communism!" When they reach Porta Ticinese they find that Aniasi has left. So everyone climbs up onto the rostrum and occupies it for a while. Then, with more and more people joining in, they set off back to the apartment building.

Thursday. The families decide that the struggle must become more militant. Twenty or so people go to the Marino Palace, to a meeting of the Council. Once again they refuse to listen. A room in the Town Hall is occupied from 5 pm till midnight. When they get back to the Via Tibaldi there's a meeting of heads of families which decides that the struggle must continue to the bitter end. Nobody so much as mentions the idea of abandoning the building. By now the whole of Milan knows that we are in the Via Tibaldi, and new families continue to arrive. The people who occupied and won the apartments in Mac Mahon come to give us support. There's also a lot of discussion about new forms of struggle. Over the next few days a huge demonstration is organized to show that we have no intention of giving in.

Friday afternoon. Catalano arrives, sent by the Town Hall and IACP. This official has a reputation for cramming workers into shanty towns after having promised them homes. Catalano wants a list of the families involved. He gets it, but he's also tried by a genuine People's Tribunal. People tell him what they think of him - that he's nothing but a lackey of the bosses, a rat and an exploiter. A crowd of workers surround him, shouting: "We're going to have the apartments, and you can get stuffed for the rents!" He was really swaggering when he arrived; but by the time he leaves, several hours later, he's pale and trembling. And he's had to give the squatters some solid commitments.

Saturday. The mobilization continues. In the afternoon another barricade is built in the streets.

Sunday morning;. Two thousand cops arrive to clear out the Via Tibaldi. The Town Hall and the bosses have decided that they have to put down these people who, in six days of struggle, have become a reference point and an organization center for the whole working class of Milan. All the squatters know that they had a right to defend what they had taken and what was rightfully theirs. But it's more a question of building our strength and using it at the right time. On Sunday morning we are still too weak. After long arguments with the police the squatters decide to leave the building and move to the Architecture Faculty of the University, at the invitation of the students.

On Sunday evening 3,000 police arrive to throw everyone out of the Architecture Faculty. They think it will be as easy as it was in the morning. They couldn't be more mistaken. While the police squads take up their positions, a meeting of all the families decides that this time they have to defend themselves, and that they're strong enough to do it. And the cops are going to pay for the eviction from Via Tibaldi.

Once again all the organization comes from the squatting families. Women and children on the upper floors, all the men down below behind the gates, facing the riot squad. At 11 pm the cops charge. But they get their fingers burned. They hadn't expected the fierce and powerful reaction from the people inside the building, or the attack from behind by people who haven't managed to get inside. When they eventually manage to force their way into the building, the police find no one there. Everyone has managed to get out and is regrouping in the streets, ready to carry on the fight. Having run out of tear gas, the riot squad retreats, completely disoriented, charged by the squatters. We lose count of the jeeps demolished by stones. The whole thing lasts until two in the morning.

Monday morning. Members of all the families meet up on the university campus. They are all there. People decide to go along to a meeting of the architecture students. Here, in the afternoon, some of the squatters are chosen to explain the struggle in Via Tibaldi. A proposal is made that closer links be created between the students' struggle and that of the "homeless". On the basis of this proposal the meeting decides that the families should occupy the Architecture Faculty again later that day. As for the Faculty Board, they decide to initiate a permanent seminar on the housing problem with the people from Via Tibaldi who are "experts" on the subject.

At the Architecture Faculty, as always, decisions about how to carry on the struggle are made solely by the assembly of families, which meets twice a day. During one of these meetings a huge demonstration is suggested for the following Saturday. This will help to bring home the meaning of the struggle to those who aren't directly involved. This demonstration is to mobilize 30,000 people!

Wednesday - five o'clock in the morning. The police surround the whole university precinct in three huge circles. Traffic is at a complete standstill. It's a trial of strength. 250 students are arrested, plus a dozen lecturers and even the Dean of the Faculty! The families are carried off once more in police vans. A few hours later, a general assembly held at the Polytechnic is also broken up by the police. Vittoria, the Chief of Police, De Peppo, the General Procurator of the Republic, and Aniasi, the Mayor, think they have finally beaten what was originally no more than a few dozen families, but what became the symbol of Milan's working class. They couldn't have been more mistaken!

Wednesday dinnertime. All the families eat at the canteen of the ACLI (Action Group of Italian Catholic Workers), where they have been given shelter. From now on no one can avoid the struggle in Via Tibaldi. The ruling class are caught in enormous contradictions trying to reconcile the demands which are coming from every direction - from a section of the PSI and local councilors; from the CP and the ACLI, which they'd always thought were under their thumb; from the FIM (one of the metal workers' unions whose members are particularly militant). Some orders are coming from Rome, and others from local employers. The greatest danger is that the struggle will spread. This is what is giving them nightmares. And the families do everything in their power to make it happen - by organizing Saturday's demonstration, by going to the factory gates with placards and leaflets, by sending a delegation to the congress of the ACLI and to the general assembly of the student movement, where they are given a tumultuous reception. And before every action is taken, the assembly of families decides what should be said, what line to take, and what proposals to put forward.

As for Aniasi and Company - their goose is cooked. Catalano, the same messenger boy who'd come so arrogantly to the Via Tibaldi, now hurries to the ACLI with an offer. "Too vague", say the families. "Your words and promises won't be enough to solve the housing problem now. We want an agreement written and signed by Aniasi and the Council." Two hours later the agreement is there!

Before July 31 the Council will allocate 200 apartments, not only to the families from the Via Tibaldi, but also to 140 others in a similar situation. Each family will receive 100,000 lira ($1,665) compensation, plus 15.000 lira ($250) for each member of the family. There's no stipulation of three months' deposit before moving into the apartments. All evictions and all rent arrears are frozen by the Council.

During this fortnight of struggle none of the squatters has ever imagined that the workers' fight about housing would end at Via Tibaldi, nor that the only problem is how to get a new home. This struggle is only a beginning. Now the families want to help organize the struggle against rents, fares, and prices. A lot of work needs to be done circulating information around local factories. For this reason the assembly of families from Via Tibaldi has become permanent, involving people from every district in Milan.

ROME

Rome is one of the first stops on the route which takes people forced off the land in the South on to the industrial cities of the North. Between 1951 and 1969 the population of the city grew by an average of 60,000 a year. There are few regular jobs for these migrants, since apart from service industries and construction most of the work there is clerical and is handed out as a "favor" on the say-so of local politicians. There are 40,000 people unemployed, many of them young people.

Since it is ruling-class policy to make workers move to the industrial jobs in the North, hardly any low-rent municipal housing is built in Rome. There are 100,000 families living in the outlying slums. Construction workers, newly-arrived immigrants, unemployed workers, pensioners; they live either in shanty towns or in apartments shared by several families. Another 62,000 families live in private accommodations, paying rents of between 40,000 and 80,000 lira ($650 to $1300 a month).

The struggle for cheaper housing began in 1969 when people started to occupy luxury apartments in the city center left empty by speculators (Tufello: 125 families; Celio: 225 families; Via Pigafetta: 155 families; Via Prati: 290 families). The struggle soon spread to families living in tenements, who went on rent strikes and developed collective ways of fighting evictions.

Since the people from the shanty towns have nothing to lose, their struggles have often been direct and violent. Before leaving their huts they have often burned them to the ground, determined never to return. In recent struggles construction workers have played an important role. At Via Alboccione construction workers joined 205 families to occupy the houses they had just built.

The Peoples' Clinic - June 1971

In San Basilio, one of Rome's outlying ghetto areas, a movement has been developing of people fighting against their lousy, inhuman living conditions. There are 40,000 people trapped in this slum district. In the past few months about 100 families have been on rent strike. This started as a spontaneous protest, and now it's becoming more organized. A real confrontation is building up with the IACP over exorbitant rents, arrears, and threats of eviction. The rent strike is becoming a major issue for the whole community, with mass meetings, protest marches, and demonstrations.

Last weekend there was a meeting to integrate the results of a large number of staircase meetings. About 800 families have been involved in these meetings, which were organized by the San Basilio Collective, a group of women and workers from the area, along with a number of students.

At this central meeting there was a discussion of new plans of action and ideas which had been put forward by local people. There was very heavy criticism of the lack of medical facilities in the area - no first-aid station and no clinic, with the nearest medical center being the clinic at the hospital in Rome. It was decided to start a fight to set up a clinic and a decent medical center in the area.

On Wednesday, after a deputation had gone to the Council for the nth time and still had not been received, a decision was made to occupy the neighborhood Ises Center. The occupation took place after a meeting and demonstration which had gone right around the neighborhood. The involvement of women, workers, and young people and the support expressed by local residents prevented any action or attempts at intimidation by the police.

The people who took over the Center formed themselves into a permanent assembly which stayed there all night. They sent out an appeal to all Left-wing doctors to get in touch with them. Meanwhile people talked about the inhuman conditions under which they live, which are the cause of many of their illnesses. They realized that if you're going to get rid of sickness you have to do away with exploitation in the factories where people breathe in smog and break their backs on the production lines, and at the construction sites, where people work in rain, dust, and mud. For years now people have been lining up at the health-insurance clinics only to be given the usual pill and then told not to be a pest. They're fed up with taking pills and drugs which do nothing but make drug manufacturers rich. They're tired of doctors and others who live off their illnesses. They're sick and tired of being patched up so that they can carry on working and producing for the boss, then falling ill again and having to go back for further repairs.

People also want decent places to live where typhus and hepatitis aren't rampant because of bad drainage and sewers. And they want enough money to buy decent food. There aren't enough green spaces in the area, and as someone said: "These apartments were built for getting sick in, not for living in." San Basilio wasn't built to cater to people's needs; it was built to satisfy the plans of the bosses. "San Basilio is like FIAT's shanty towns in Turin," said one construction worker. "At least it has the same function - to keep the workers out of the way."

On Sunday there was a huge meeting of all the people in San Basilio, and a festival to inaugurate the "People's Clinic", which is by now fully operational. Eighty workers, women, and young people met with the doctors in the main hall of the center. A long banner was hung up with the slogan which sums up the way people feel: "The only way to get anything is through struggle."

At this meeting the role of the clinic was defined. As one woman said, "This clinic is more than something which responds to the real needs of the people here. It is a first step toward ending our exploitation."

The People's Clinic is run by doctors who lend their services to everyone free of charge, giving out free medicine and medical attention, particularly to the kids who are forced to play in the streets, which are full of broken glass and rubbish. The clinic is also a center for political discussion and for organizing other struggles which are being waged in the area - whether it's the fight against the fascists and the police, or the running of the rent strike and the squatting. The task of the doctors is not just limited to lending their "services", in fact, but extends to participating in all the struggles in the area and to passing on their specialized knowledge so the people can start to control their own health.

San Basilio

San Basilio is a small working-class city outside Rome. A wave of housing struggles began here in April 1971. The local politicians attempted to contain the struggle by channeling it back into safe ways: upcoming elections.

On Tuesday, May 6, the first clash between squatting tenants and politicians erupted. From 9 pm to midnight the local population of San Basilio was mobilized against an election meeting held by the Christian Democrat mayor, Darida. The meeting had been called unexpectedly, without even so much as a poster on the wall. Obviously the idea was to wrap everything up in the space of half an hour. Just a visit, an appearance, and then a quick getaway from this area which could certainly not be expected to be friendly to a unionist who, only a few days before, had shaken hands with the leader of the Fascists, Almirante.

At the time fixed for the meeting there were already 100 to 150 people in the market place. The enormous number of police standing around was a sure sign that the Christian Democrats who were coming to speak were hostile.

So, this is what happened: Under the rostrum, an immense and pompous affair, there were roughly 15 electoral agents. Just behind was everyone else - all the working-class people, women, and young people of the area, as well as a few people from the CP. Groups formed, and people started to talk about the past 20 years of promises...the promises of all the mayors...the promises of this mayor.

People decided to interrupt the speech and get a woman and a worker from the area to speak. At last it got underway. But the Mayor hadn't had the nerve to come. Instead it was Medi, the professor, the one who's been so active in the anti-divorce campaign, the guy that the whole of Italy have had the chance to "admire" on their TV screens as a brilliant commentator on the. space exploits of the Americans.

Right from the start he began spouting a load of bullshit: "How fortunate you are to be living outside the city, in an unpolluted atmosphere." There was an immediate barrage of catcalls and slogans shouted at the top of people's voices. Medi reacted stupidly in front of this group of workers: "You're all barbarians, and the city of Rome will wipe you out.... You've got no brains and can't understand what I'm trying to tell you."

It went on like this for an hour, until 10 pm, with women pressing against the rostrum and the police, in confusion, not knowing how to control dozens of kids who were going round and round the orator in a line, howling into jam jars and making one hell of a din. And the professor? He was still at it, shouting insults: "You're like donkeys...it's easy to see that you've never been to school." This remark was followed by a volley of eggs. Medi turned to the police and demanded that they take control of the situation. The cops put on their gas masks. People retreated. The police threw the first tear gas. The meeting ended. "Rome will sort your lot out, you barbarians; we'll win, don't worry."

People came down from the blocks of flats. By now there were more than a thousand people. The police had remained grouped in the market place and continued to hurl tear gas at the windows and at women. One moment people saw a cop setting off on a bike; the next the reinforcements had arrived. About 40 lorry-loads, more than 700 police in riot gear. Provenza, the Vice-Commissioner of Police, also arrived, to take command of the operation. The area was besieged. The police, foolishly, decided to go into a block of flats and start beating people up. They were met by a continuous and very violent volley of plates, bottles, and anything else that people could lay their hands on.

The police withdrew, and finally left the area. It was a little after midnight. In the market place, people set fire to the rostrum. Groups formed. People worked out who had been arrested and who had been injured. People tried to find out news about those who had been arrested.

Don't Vote - Occupy !

By June 1971, with regional elections only a few days away, all the political parties talked about was "law and order". The CP was making vague promises about housing reforms: something people were very preoccupied with.

After an assembly in San Basilio 20 families decided to occupy a block of flats on Saturday, the 5th. The occupation was a failure, since the flats are privately owned and impossible to defend. The families decided to turn back and wait a few days.

On Wednesday, the 9th, there were occupations at Centocelle and Pietralate. At Centocelle, the police responded immediately: They tried to arrest an isolated comrade.

The squatters reacted immediately, and managed to free him. A police car was smashed up, and another six or seven showed up with their sirens wailing. We woke up the neighborhood with megaphones, denouncing the police's attack. People came out of their houses shouting to the police "This is our area - get the hell out of it!" The police were forced to leave.

Meanwhile, at Pietralate, the occupation had gone off successfully, so we decided to go there and have one large squat. At the beginning there were 70 families. During the night 30 more arrived. The occupation got more organized. Doctors were found. Staircase assemblies were arranged and people were appointed to take charge of each staircase.

During the night our assembly decided that if the police came to evict us, we would all stick together and regroup somewhere else to continue the struggle.

Early in the morning of the 10th the CP officials arrived. At first they tried to persuade us to go back home. (Where to?) Then they turned to insulting us by saying we were gypsies and thieves. In the meantime the police had arrived and surrounded the block. When they entered the courtyard we all came down, trying to stay together. But 12 of us were separated off and threatened with arrest. At this point the women attacked furiously. They started pushing against the police cordons and demanded the immediate release of everyone. It was a great moment. The police didn't know how to react; they were being attacked by women and kids. At first they tried to push them away violently, but in the end they were forced to release everyone. We all shouted and cheered loudly.

At an assembly in the afternoon, people had a go at the CP and all other reformists. We decided to occupy again so that the struggle wouldn't lose its momentum. That evening we occupied in the Magliana district - 70 families and their friends. A police car that got in the way was smashed; the police fired in the air; a police car that came toward us was stoned. At three in the morning the whole area was surrounded by riot police. We held an assembly in the courtyard and decided to march from the houses toward the police lines. This decision was not unanimous. Some of us wanted to stay and defend the flats. In the end we all marched out shouting slogans. People came to the windows. When we got to Via Magliana the police charged. Fighting was violent. There were 60 arrests. Many of us were kept in jail for hours.

After this eviction, we decided to hold meetings in different neighborhoods of the city. Many people decided not to take part in the elections and to make sure the struggle goes on.

THE SOUTH

Since its beginning, Italy's economic development has been uneven - the North growing faster than the South. High unemployment and low wages have forced millions to migrate. During the boom years, 1959 to 1963, almost a million people traveled north. This process has been accelerated by the mechanization of agriculture. Between 1951 and 1970 the number of people working the land fell from 7,200.000 to 3,800,000 - out of a labor force holding nearly constant around 20.000,000. As in other Common Market countries, only the larger farmers prospered.

To stop this migration, the Government set up the "Cassa del Mezzogiorno" (Bank of the South). Initially its function was to provide subsidies to agriculture and help create social infrastructures (houses, roads, schools, hospitals). Its failure to make any significant change led to its role's becoming more and more to provide investment for factories. The factories that were built were all state-owned: Alfa-Romeo in Naples, Italsider (steel) in Taranto and Naples, chemical plants in Bari and Porto Torres on Sardinia. The building of these factories provided the first job for many of the workers coming off the land. But since it takes far fewer workers to run these ultra-modern factories than to build them, unemployment in these Southern cities has risen quickly in recent years and will remain high, since no other industries can develop to complement the few existing factories.

Very little has been done to build enough schools, houses, and hospitals to cope with the growing population of these cities. The working class is controlled by a mixture of overt repression and political corruption, and the only hope of a place to live lies in becoming a member of a political organization. Frustration erupts in angry, violent outbursts - for instance in Battipaglia, where days of rioting followed the closure of a local factory.

Over the past few years there have been a growing number of housing occupations (Salerno: 80 families; Torre del Greco; Messina: 328 families; Carbonia : 130 families). In Syracuse, where houses are usually allocated to the "clients" of local political bosses, people's anger became so great that new tenants had to take possession of their apartments under heavy police protection. Other projects which had been walled up before they were finished had their entrances smashed open by violent demonstrators.

TARANTO

Occupation of GESCAL apartments In December 1970, 200 families occupied apartments belonging to GESCAL (the State housing authority) in the working-class district of Tamburi. They had been living in the slum tenements in Via Lisippo. Police threats and vague promises from the Council had no effect on them. People had gotten it into their heads to take direct action. They took the initiative themselves, going around from tenement to tenement, organizing and bringing people together.

One of the activists said: "We have abandoned all faith in politicians, people who come round every five years asking us to vote for them. They say they'll give us work and homes, but every time they just leave us where we are, in the cold and damp. We hate them all, because they live off our slavery. And they do everything in their power to make sure people don't rebel and take what is rightfully theirs.

"Because we've behaved ourselves, because we've listened to their promises, dozens of children have died in the slums where we live. We have all had illnesses, and we have all suffered. We shall bear these marks within us forever. The people who have our suffering on their consciences will be made to pay dearly - pay the whole price.

"We organized the occupation the evening of December 2. Within a few hours the slums were empty, but the GESCAL apartments were full. Now the apartments are OURS. We haven't got water or electricity yet, but we're already getting water from down in the courtyard, and we're trying to organize the provision of supplies for every apartment. And as far as the electricity is concerned, we'll see about that too.

"Meanwhile, we've begun cleaning the place up. It's never very nice wearing yourself out with this sort of work, but at least it's a bit more satisfying than sweeping out the rat-holes we were living in before. We're happy. We're confident in ourselves and our own strength. We've organized in each building and made links between buildings. We intend to keep these apartments, and we need to organize to keep the police out.

"We've had a couple of meetings every day to talk over any problems, to clarify our ideas, and to decide what has to be done. We're keeping in contact with other people in the area, and trying to spread the word to people in the factories. On Sunday, December 6, we had our first general meeting. This was important because it meant that we could all get together, and we could also talk to workers, women and children, and unemployed people from different parts of the city.

"It wasn't just the people from the slums who organized this occupation. The initiative came from there, but it quickly spread to other parts of the city. The people in the old part of the city - the street cleaners, the fishermen, and the unemployed - were particularly quick to act. Today there's not one apartment left empty in all these buildings. But we know that there are many other buildings empty around here and in other parts of the city. We've got to find out where they are, because the whole city is in ferment, and all the working-class people want to occupy houses."

PALERMO
Red Flags over the IACP-April 1971
The NEZ (Northern Expansion Zone) is an IACP estate about 10 miles outside Palermo. About a thousand families live there, mostly unemployed building workers, clerical workers who occasionally work on the land, and fishermen. These families are mostly earthquake victims from the Western Sicily earthquake disaster of June 1968. They took possession of the houses after they had been requisitioned by the Prefect. Many people simply squatted in them. Of course the IACP regards this occupation as "illegal", and it has started sending out injunctions for the payment of arrears: 30,000 lira ($500) per flat.

On Thursday, March 27, there was an occupation of a block of flats that were still being built. The police came to evict people, but the houses were occupied again, and this time the people stayed there.

Since the building was still not finished, the squatters them selves organized to get the drains working and set up electrical supplies and so on. On Sunday there was a mass meeting to discuss the problem of the injunction. There were 300 people there - mostly women, who are the most active and determined people in this fight. A strike of the whole area was scheduled to begin the next day, and a platform was approved including flats to be provided officially for everyone; cancellation of all arrears of rents; building of roads, schools, and all the amenities which are totally lacking in the area; and self-determination of contributions. The people of the NEZ area don't want to talk in terms of rent, because they don't agree with the idea of paying rent. But they are prepared to provide a small contribution, according to what they can afford, for the building of new homes.

The next day (Monday), beginning at 4:30 in the morning, the whole area was at a standstill. There were pickets on the street corners, as well as a large contingent of police. People gathered in the Central Square, and at 8:30 am a march set off in the direction of Palermo. Women and children rode in cars and trucks, and men walked. Throughout the march the police continually provoked people. The marchers arrived at the IACP offices in Palermo. The police set up a cordon across the road, but the marchers broke through the lines and about 50 demonstrators managed to get into the building. Others got in over the balconies and through windows. Inside the IACP there was a huge commotion: For once the tables were turned on the people who govern our lives.

When the women came into the building all the officials beat a hasty retreat. The President of the IACP appeared, pale and trembling, and agreed to speak to some sort of "delegation". He tried to evade their questions and give nothing away. But the demonstrators decided to occupy the Institute. Meanwhile the people who had stayed outside began to mobilize other people in Palermo. The Base Committee from the shipyards arrived, and also a number of working people from other parts of town.

This struggle became a reference point for everyone. For the bosses and bureaucrats things were getting too hot. Two hours later the President returned and announced that he was going to withdraw the injunctions for rent arrears. For the time being people decided to leave the Institute (by then it was 6 pm), but the struggle for these objectives was to go on.

The most active of all the people were the women - the true militants of this day of struggle and clashes with the police. Among other things, they succeeded in freeing a comrade who had been arrested by the police.

Palermo, 1973
Early this year building workers took over a block of luxury flats they have just finished building. They moved in with their families and other working-class people. Police were called by the local CP administration, but could not gain access to the barricaded block of flats.

NAPLES
The local capitalists have hardly invested in industry, finding it more profitable to make money in real estate and tourism, as well as through Mafia-run industries like prostitution and smuggling. The main sources of employment are various forms of hustling. Children, who are particularly successful at this, play an important role within the economy of the family. Unlike other cities, in which schools are places where kids are accustomed to the discipline of work, in Naples working-class children are systematically discouraged from attending school. In this situation, the struggle to keep a school open takes on a wholly-different dimension: Parents are refusing to allow the system to put their children on the streets.

February 1970. Secondiglio is an Ina Casa housing development on the outskirts of Naples. It's one of the many dormitory suburbs into which the bosses shove all the people they don't want around the city center. Go back 10 years, and it wasn't so bad... at least on the map. But it wasn't long before it became clear that the map was only for show. No one had any intention of making it a reality by making the area a pleasure for people to live in. A dump of a flat was enough - there were no decent streets, no services, no schools, no parks.... (These things aren't profitable for the investors.)

There are about 14,000 people there. About 2,000 of them are people who, having waited 10, 20, or even 30 years in hovels, have now been rehoused in apartments without adequate windows, without water, without drains, without furniture, without light.

The first struggle in Secondiglio was for a primary school. People wanted a prefabricated building to hold a thousand children, and the promise of a proper building before too long. About 40% of the children attending school are at least a year behind the normal. Another 30% are two years behind the normal. About three months after the beginning of the school year at least a tenth of the kids are demoralized and stop coming. And then comes the "motherly" advice of the schoolmistress: "School's not for you. Why don't you get a job?"

The worst crime of all is the way kids are made to believe that school only runs up to the 6th grade (primary) level. Local industry couldn't supply itself with cheap labor otherwise. As a result, 90% of the "educated" have only a primary-school certificate, and 30% are illiterate. What's more, the children are highly vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses. Large numbers of kids have rheumatic fever, heart conditions, bronchial pneumonia, and so on. School is a place to catch diseases - just one more reason for not going.

The kids spend the whole day hanging around the area in a freaked-out state. But they're still not too young to learn how to hustle... so many families have someone in Poggiorale prison or Filangeri juvenile prison.

After nine years of demands, a miniature school was opened. From the outside it looked beautiful, but inside there was no electricity or heating, and the children shivered with cold. They had to go to school wearing hats and scarves. After two weeks the new school was closed, and the kids went back to their old shanty hut of a school. But now there were too many of them, so the school had to be run in two shifts. The results are exactly the same as before. Few kids go to school, there's a high turnover of teachers, and no one studies. No one does anything.

It wasn't long before people had had enough. So they began to organize and prepare for a fight. They held a meeting and organized marches in the neighborhood. The kids came out on strike. They felt that they had to carry the struggle beyond the area. So groups of parents went to the center of Naples, to the Department of Education and to the Town Hall. They shook up the bureaucracy: "We've had enough of rubber stamps and promises. We want the school reopened immediately, with the electricity turned on."

The various officials responsible were really scared...but it still wasn't enough to get them off their backsides and make them finish the building. People realized that they were in for another swindle, and immediately began organizing again.

They cordoned off the school with chains, and a large number of people went to the Town Hall to put pressure on the officials. They forced the authorities to come to the area the next day so they could see for themselves what things were like. The headmaster and the teachers joined in what was going on, though they'd accepted shoddy treatment for years. From now on the school will be run on different lines, because the community is taking direct control over every aspect of its running.

Guido Viale, one of the founders and a national leader of Lotta Continua, was arrested on January 28, 1973 with nine other comrades and charged with attempted murder in connection with clashes the night before in the streets of Turin between revolutionaries and neo-fascists. The police fired at the militants, seriously wounding five, and arrested many others. The arrest of Viale was clearly a police frame-up and was part of a wider repressive design to strike at Lotta Continua and other revolutionary organizations. It came in fact at the end of one of the most intense weeks of workers' and students’ struggles, after the metal workers' contract negotiations had reached an impasse and a new wave of strikes and factory occupations had shaken Turin. The police intention was to curb the influence of the revolutionary movement in these struggles.

Viale and other comrades were released on May 10 for lack of evidence. His release followed a major international campaign of solidarity with the targets of Italian state repression. The voices of the revolutionary Left in Italy cannot be stifled. The following material is excerpted from an interview with Viale conducted immediately prior to his arrest in January.

What are some of the key developments since the 1968-69 workers’ struggles which may have the effect of altering the political organization of the Italian working class?

First of all, there has been a widespread circulation, among various sectors of the working class, of the “struggle against labor" — meaning a radical negation of the capitalist organization of work and life. You may recall that this was one of the main components which characterized the workers’ struggles in 1968-69. At that time its impact was shown primarily among the immigrant, mass production workers in the large plants, and was often much opposed by the specialized workers, upon whom the bosses counted to break the unity of the working class. In the course of the last three years this component of workers' struggle has spread not only in the smaller plants, but also among specialized workers, and is therefore contributing enormously to bridging the gap which has traditionally existed between these two sectors of the working class. It is important to emphasize that such a circulation has also encompassed the South and has contributed to altering drastically the traditional relationship between North and South. Today we cannot talk any more of a highly politicized Northern working class and a depoliticized Southern working class. The politicization of mass-production workers in the Northern industrial centers has been paralleled by the growth of a subversive potential among the proletarian masses who populate the numerous urban centers in the South. It is still difficult to sociologically characterize these masses. But the political contradictions which these people are living is having the effect of unifying the various components of the Southern working class among themselves, and in turn of unifying the latter with the Northern working class, even if the fascists are trying at all costs to keep them divided.

Judging from these new developments of the last three years, would you maintain that the balance of class forces is changing in favor of the working class?

Undoubtedly. We feel that those who draw their conclusions by looking only at the capitalist class end up with a limited and distorted view. It is definitely true that today the bosses are armed, while three years ago they were not. But it is also true that the links of unity within the proletariat have made great leaps ahead and are bringing together more than ever before the Northern and Southern proletariat, old CP workers and new workers, student masses and masses of workers. We therefore maintain that at the present stage the workers' struggle is stronger than during the “Hot Autumn” of 1969.

What role does the Italian Communist Party (CPI) play in this context of changing relations of force among classes?

The place the CPI has in the political alignment of the country has been, and remains, very important, not only on account of its close relationship with the labor unions, but also because the CPI is the party that officially represents the workers’ struggle: it receives most of the working class votes, it exercises an enormous influence on the masses of workers, it has a formidable power of mobilization. (Think of the CPI rally called last September by the Party’s daily paper 'Uniga’, which saw the participation of about half a million people) In the current process of politicization occurring among the masses (and their ensuing move toward the Left) the CPI occupies a crucial role; hence the steady increase in new members during the past months. Now, what matters most for the revolutionary Left is that as the crisis deepens, as the fascistization of the Italian state consolidates itself, the ambiguous and contradictory position of the CPI becomes increasingly apparent. For, if on one hand the CPI aligns itself against the present government and against the capitalist forces, on the other hand it is committed to joining those forces in “control1ing the crisis" in favor of a climate of social peace, and thereby chokes the autonomous thrust of the mass of workers. This difficulty in which the CPI is caught vis-a-vis the ` working class opens many spaces among the CPI ranks. It makes its workers live the contradictions of the revisionist line and increasingly opens space for direction by the revolutionary vanguards. The massive demonstrations of last December 12 commemorating the Piazza Fontana victims of fascist terrorism of 1969 in all major cities of Italy, which was called by the revolutionary Left and which saw a large participation of CPI members, shows how a division has begun to develop within the CPI.

How does the current round of labor negotiations affect the ongoing process of class struggle which you have discussed thus far? What is really at stake in these negotiations?

In our view, what matters is not so much what the workers could gain on a merely contractual plane. What matters is our ability to anticipate the capitalist project, which wants to use this occasion in order to contain the development of the workers' autonomy, and to launch a process of capitalist restructuration which would fall entirely on the working class, not only in material terms (reduction of the level of employment, reduction of real wages) but also politically, since it would have the effect of breaking the unity that the working class has achieved in these last years. The contract recently ratified in the chemical sector has been a clear example of this strategy, which the bosses could impose on the workers thanks to the collaboration of the unions. What therefore becomes a priority for us is to wage a struggle against the power of the State and against its fascistization against the political use of the crisis which—as the past months have shown—manifests itself in the bosses’ attempt to eliminate the workers' vanguards. These objectives require a harsh class struggle, a struggle which is not waged by signing a new contract. This is why for us it is crucial to strengthen the workers' autonomy so that the working class does not allow itself to be sucked in- to the bosses’ system and logic. Massive wage increases, guaranteed wages, total parity between industrial workers and white-collar employees-these are the decisive slogans of workers’ autonomy against the crisis, of workers' ability to direct the struggles of the unemployed, the underemployed, the students, the proletarians in the community against the cost of living. These are not contractual demands, but they use the contracts for the circulation, the organization, the practice of struggle. The generalization of these demands is a basic necessity if we do not want the workers’ struggles to fall into isolation and corporatism, and moreover if the social struggles against the crisis, the unemployment, the cost of living are to grow around a center. This is the ground for our action. (Rome, January 2, 1973)

This pamphlet has been published by the Notting Hill (a working-class district in West London -ed.) Womens Liberation Workshop group. It was written by one of our members and presented as a paper at the National Confer­ence of Women at Manchester March 25-26. 1972. While many of us have minor or major disagreements with the paper. we feel that the discussion which it generated at the conference was of such importance to the future of the movement that it should be widely read and the discussion continue.

The demands at the end of the paper aroused most interest at the conference. and were discussed. added to and modi­fied there. But there may have been some misunderstand­ing about their purpose. They are not a statement of what we want. finally. to have. They are not a plan for an ideal society. and a society based on them would not cease to be oppressive. Ultimately the only demand which is not co­optable is the armed population demanding the end of cap­italism. But we feel that at this moment these demands can be a force against what capital wants and for what we want. They are intended to mobilize women both “inside-and “outside-the women’s liberation movement. They could provide a perspective which would affect decisions about local and national struggles. After discussion and modifi­cation they could become integrated and far-reaching goals which the women’s movement could come to stand for. A vote taken on the final day at Manchester decided that the demands would be raised on the first day of the next conference. Many groups are planning local discussions before that time.

April 8, 1972.

This is perhaps written as an open letter to women attending this Manchester conference. It is impos­sible any longer to sit in the protection of a group and see the potential of the movement squandered. This was hastily written, though it represents many years’ consideration. It is not meant to be the final word, not even of its author.

*****

There are more ways than one in which the women’s movement can be co-opted and be cut off from the possi­bilities of becoming an autonomous and revolutionary polit­ical movement. One is that we will assist capitalism to introduce and integrate women into new facets of its ex­ploitative relations. The FINANCIAL TIMES of March 9, 1971, has made clear to those backward capitalists who have not realised it yet, how useful we can be.

…The thousands of trained girls who come out of the universities every year are desperately anx­ious to escape from the triple trap of teaching, nursing, or shorthand-typing…

Many of these girls are clearly of high ability, and they constitute a pool from which skilled middle management could be drawn. They would be as hard working and conscientious as only a grateful outsider could be. and it is conceivable that, in spite of the equal pay legislation, they might not cost as much as male equivalents, at least in the first instance. We will use such women, in in­creasing numbers, when we realise that they exist and feel able to recognise their qualities. Until then. a good deal of talent that is costing a lot of money to train in our universities will continue to be wasted, and British industry will have failed to see a source of renewed energy and vitality that is before its very eyes.

This use of rebellion, to co-opt the most articulate mi­nority for the purpose of developing capital, with “renewed energy and vitality”, is not new and not confined to women. It is the overriding principle of capitalist development. The ex-colonial world whom the British “educated” to self­government, for example, is ruled by “grateful outsiders”. We need to examine how we are to be “used” closely and carefully if we are to prevent ourselves from organising only to assist capitalism to be less backward and in the process further enslaving ourselves, rather than organising to destroy it which is the only possible process of liberation.

Another, but connected, way of co-option has in some measure already taken place, and its agent has been left organisations. They have effectively convinced many of us that if we wish to move to working class women it must be either through them or, more pervasively, through their definitions of the class, their orientations and their kind of actions. It is as though they have stood blocking an open door. They challenge the validity of an autonomous women’s movement either directly or (by treating women, a spe­cially exploited section of the class, as marginal) indi­rectly. For them the “real” working class is white, male and over thirty. Here racism, male supremacy and age supremacy have a common lineage. They effectively want to make us auxiliary to the “general”-struggle -as if they represented the generalisation of the struggle; as if there could be a generalised struggle without women, without men joining with women for women’s demands.

A major issue on which we have swallowed their orienta­tion and been co-opted to defeat our own movement has been on the question of unionising women.

We are told that we must bring women to what is called a “trade union consciousness”. This phrase is Lenin’s and it comes from a pamphlet called “What is to be done.­In many ways it is a brilliant pamphlet, but it was written in the early days of the Russian movement, in 1902. Lenin learnt from the workers and peasants of Russia in 1905 and 1917 and repudiated a good deal of what he wrote before these two revolutions. Left people do not speak of Lenin’s labor conclusions, and in my view much of what passes for left theory (and practice) today is pre-1902. In 1972 this is a serious charge, and I think it can be proved. They can read Lenin and quote him. But unlike Lenin, they are not able to learn from the actions that workers take.

The most obvious recent action is undoubtedly the min­ers’ strike. I believe many women in the movement have been awoken by this great working class event. Class action shakes all sections of the population in days or weeks when nothing else has moved them for years. We have all had a leap in consciousness as a result of the action of the class. Therefore what we consider possible is expanded. This is the immediate reason for our restlessness. We are not satisfied any more to stand aside and let the world go by. After three years of our movement, Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe and then this strike. We want to do something, but not just anything. We want to build a movement which is at once political and new, one which speaks specifically to the needs of women.

But what has been the basis of this tremendous demon­stration of power of the class? After all, this is not the first big strike in the recent period in Britain. The post­men, the dustmen, the electricity workers and many others have demonstrated in action their will to fight. What dis­tinguished the miners is that they didn’t depend on their unions but on their own self-organisation and methods of struggle. More than once during the strike, the union tried to dictate the terms of struggle. For example, when the union asked workers to man safety crews, or tried to dis­courage them from violent defence of picket lines, or stood in the way of the women organising independently. But the mining community went its own autonomous way. As a re­sult, it won, among other reasons because in this way it won other workers to its cause.

This is not the first attempt at autonomous class action, but it is the first major success. Almost every recent na­tional strike has been lost or at least drawn because work­ers allowed or could not prevent their union from “”leading” it. Pilkington is the most striking case. And we must re­member that 90% of all strikes are unofficial, either in spite of or against the unions.

Now at this point, where workers are beginning to wrest from unions control over their own struggle, we are invited to bring woman into the unions where they will acquire “trade union consciousness”.

What has been the role of trade unions specifically in relation to women?

1. They have helped to maintain unequal rates of pay despite the brave attempts by women (and some men) trade unionists to give this issue priority. As a matter of fact, once unions ask for a percentage wage rise, and not the same rise for all, they not only confirm inequality of wages but further widen the gap between men and women -and of course between men and men too. Ten percent of £10=£11. Ten percent of £20=£22. To them that hath a bit more shall be given a bit more…

They have never organised a struggle for equal pay. In the two great equal pay strikes we know about -and there are plenty we don’t know about-the women acted independently of the unions. During the Leeds seamstresses’ strike the union wrote to the company and told them not to give in to the women. The women had to fight two governors by busting the windows of the union offices.

At Daganham (auto plants -ed.) when the seat cover sewers want out, of course there was no attempt by the union to generalise (that is, bring the men out in support) a strike which took place because the union had turned their backs on the women. The shop stewards, at the crucial meeting with the Minister of Employment and Productivity, renounced upgrading -which was the demand of the women -and settled for a wage rise which was 8% below the average male pay.

2. Grading is the basis for unequal pay where men and women work together. The unions take for granted job cat­egories which have kept women lower paid and will continue to under the equal pay act. Even more, they worry that equal pay for women might “disturb’” the wage differentials among different grades of men. The GUARDIAN of 6 September 1971 quotes Jack Peel, general secretary of the National Union of Dyers, Bleachers and Textile Workers, talking to an employer, one Eric Booth. Eric says, “If we’re not care­ful this could be very expensive for us.” But Jack is more far-seeing. He says, “We could easily upset the men; upset their differentials. The way to avoid this is to go gently along.” The question of equal pay is not only about the double exploitation of women and young people. It is about the way capital has carved up the class into grades and corresponding wage rates so that groups of workers see their interests as different from other groups -for ex­ample, man in relation to woman.

3. They have not tried very hard to get us into unions. The Night Cleaners were in the degrading position of having to embarrass the T & G (Transport and General Workers Union -ed.) publicly in order to get “taken in”. We’re not straightforward like men, you see. We have all these prob­lems of kids and husbands and extreme exploitation. They don’t really want us in the unions, although the dues are useful and we don’t compete for their union jobs.

Yet note: if there are a rash of strikes or sit-ins for equal payor for anything else, the unions will be falling over backwards to bring women in. What else does capital have to control workers when they move? How else can they get us to participate in our own exploitation? Who else would we trust but an organization, a movement, formed by us to unite with other workers? And if we are not depending on unions, who else would we depend on but ourselves and other workers? That would be dangerous ­for unions and government. It would not be surprising if they were at this moment planning campaigns to recruit women in areas where they have been effectively militant, and planning also to come to our movement for help. Who can do their recruiting among women better than other women!

4. But for those of us who are deprived of wages for our work, who are housewives and do not have jobs outside the home, unions don’t know we exist. When capital pays hus­bands they get two workers, not one. The unions are organ­izations which are supposed to protect (some) workers in (some) work institutions. Waged workers have organised unions (not the other way round, by the way -workers organise unions, not union workers) and have organised them to deal with their paid work situation. A housewife’s work situation is the home, and every woman who does paid work (except the rich) also does unpaid work, is also a housewife. Yet when husband and father and brother are taking strike decisions which we have to support, we have no part in deciding the kind of action or the issues on which we fight. We get very little for ourselves -if we win, not even some of the credit. Has anybody pointed out how much every strike of men is dependent on the support of women? The unions ensure that the struggle is segregated and women can participate only as auxiliaries. Remember “Salt of the Earth”? In order for the women to be brought ac­tively into the strike and win it, they had to adjourn the union meeting and have a meeting of the whole community instead. That’s where it’s at, on a national and international level.

5. Until recently the capitalist class with the help of un­ions had convinced men that if they got a rise in pay they got a rise in standard of living. That’s not true, and women always knew it. They give men a pay packet on Friday and take it back from us on Saturday at the shops. We have to organise the struggle for the other side of wages -against inflation -and that can only be done outside the unions, first because they only deal with the money we get and not with what we have immediately to give back; and second because they limit their fight -such as it is -only to that workplace where you get wages for being there, and not where your work involves giving the money back.

It is not simply that they don’t organise the shoppers; it is that the union prevents such organisation, by frag­menting the class into those who have wages and those who don’t. The unemployed, the old, the ill, children and house­wives are wageless. So the unions ignore us and thereby separate us from each other and from the waged. That is, they structurally make a generalised struggle impossible. This is not because they are bureaucratised; this is
. Their functions are to mediate the struggle in industry and keep it separate from struggles elsewhere. Because the most concentrated potential power of the class is at the point of direct production, the unions have convinced the wageless that only at that point can a struggle be waged at all. This is not so, and the most striking example has been the organisation of the Black community. Blacks, like women, cannot limit themselves to a struggle in direct pro­duction. And Blacks, like women, see the function of unions within the class writ large in their attitudes to them. For racism and sexism are not aberrations of an otherwise powerful working class weapon.

You will see by now that I believe in order to have our own politics we must make our own analysis of women and therefore our own analysis of the whole working class struggle. We have been taking so much for granted that happens to be around, and restricting, segregating ourselves to speaking and writing about women, that it looks like we are only supposed to analyse and understand women after others (men) have analysed the class in general–ex­cluding us. This is to be male-dominated in the profoundest sense. Because there is no class in general-which doesn’t include us and all the wageless.

I think that some of us who have refused to relate wom­en’s struggle to the class struggle have done this in self­defense, in order to get away from the left analysis of class which left us out completely (and as I have tried to show, was a barrier to men workers carrying out struggle inde­pendent of unions).

In turn some women have been forced to stay in or join left organisations and suffer continuous humiliation in them in order not to be disconnected from class politics.

Another result of the denial of an autonomous role for the women’s movement has been the women who see them­selves only as supportive, this time of women and not of men. If we support women’s struggles that is a step for­ward, but if we make no independent contribution, we are either unwilling or unable to use and share what the move­ment has caused us to learn. Faced with the elitism of the left, this patronising has seemed to some women the only alternative.

For all these women the autonomous politics of women’s liberation is the only meaningful alternative. Until we cre­ate that, we will continue to snipe at each other, and always as a reaction to what men are doing.

Now the first thing that will pop into the heads of some of us is the benefit to be derived from unions. There is no doubt that certain slave conditions are done away with when a factory is organised, and usually when workers in facto­ries organise, they organise into unions (or against them). It seems the only alternative to slavery. The whole history of the class is bound up with this institution. But it is the way workers get unions formed, organising together and almost always going on strike, that abolishes the slave conditions, not the unions. It is their power that brings the union in and it is their power that abolishes slave condi­tions. The union has become a symbol of this power and has exploited this image and this tradition so as to channel, direct and, where possible, smother the struggle, but the power is the workers’.

Secondly, if you go into a union Q!: a non-union factory or office where both men and women are working, you’ll al­most always see that the men are not as pressed as the women. Their working speed is slower than women’s; they take more time in the cloakroom. to smoke, to breathe. That also has to do, not with unions, but with power: women come into industry less powerful than men, for the obvious reason of their manifold oppression through the patriarchy. But aside from their internalisation of the myth of female incapacity through which this patriarchy is maintained, there is another factor. They have an actual minority status in industry and they are very uncertain not only of their own capacities but of the support they will receive from m en and the unions which are now identified primarily with men.

The very structure of the unions puts women off. All those rules and regulations and having to talk at meetings and having meetings at night when we are putting our chil­dren to bed and washing up, often confirm to us that we are just not up to scratch. We know these feelings well. We formed a movement because of them.

Certainly very few women in jobs or out of them feel the union can represent them as women who have not an eight-­hour but at least a 16-hour day.

But if the power of the unions is the power of the class, and if unions have in essential respects been working against our interests as women and therefore against the working class, then we must organise that power, not those unions. We are in a similar dilemma with the family of the working class. I would like to quote from a forthcoming document which does not analyse women from the point of view of Marxism, but Marxism from the point of view of women (and therefore I believe of men). It comes from the Italian women’s movement! [WOMEN AND THE SUBVERSION OF THE COMMUNITY by Mariarosa Dalla Costa. "'Radical America", Boston, Jan.-Feb. 1972.]

The working class family is the more difficult point to break because it is the support of the worker, but as worker, and for that reason the support of capital. On this family depends the support of the class, the survival of the class – but at the woman’s expense against the class it­self. The woman is the slave of a wage slave, and her slavery ensures the slavery of her man. Like the trade union, the family protects the worker, but also ensures that he and she will never be anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of women of the working class against the family is decisive.

The struggle of the woman in the working class against the unions is so decisive because, like the family, it pro­tects the class at her expense (and not only hers) and at the expense of offensive action. Like the family, we have noth­ing to put in its place but the class acting for itself and women as integral, in fact pivotal to that class.

6. Finally there is the question of women and “unem­ployment”. First of all, we know that only rich women are unemployed -that is, do no work. Whether or not we’re in jobs, most of us work like hell. The only thing is that we are wageless if we don’t formally hire ourselves out to a particular capitalist and just work in our kitchens creating and servicing workers for the capitalist class in general. It is characteristic that the unions and the labour exchanges (i.e. wage slave markets) in Scotland have made a deal not to give jobs to married women. In the explosive situation in Scotland of which the UCS (Upper Clyde Shipyard -ed.) work-in was merely an indication, they -the unions and the government -figure we can be depended upon not to “give trouble”. That is how we have been used all the time, and we have to prove them wrong or fold up. This damn capitalist class and their damn unions must not be able to count on our quiescence any more over anything. They have made this deal over our heads. They will make or have made others. We are expendable.

And when in Scotland we are kept out of the wage-Slave market, it is to keep men from being unemployed just at the moment and in the place where the methods of struggle of Northern Ireland may catch on. This move against wom­en by unions and government is probably as a direct result of the attempt men workers made to take over the employ­ment exchange at the same time as the UCS work-in was going on. That is, some workers thought that an unwork-in was a better idea than a work-in. No need to say where the unions stand on this when they are desperately trying to shove “We want jobs” placards into workers’ hands. You would think it is immoral to be disengaged from exploita­tion. The only thing “wrong” with unemployment is that you don’t get paid.

And this is the heart of the issue. The government, acting in the interests of the capitalist class in general, has cre­ated unemployment in the hope that, instead of fighting for more pay and less work, we will be glad for the crumbs that the master lets fall from his table. So that the “coun­try” can “progress” over our dead and dying minds and bodies. The unions tell us to worry about productivity and exports while the capitalists are busy exporting their cap­ital all over the world, for example to South Africa (and hope, by the way, to export white unemployed workers be­hind it). The unions are trying to lead exactly the kind of struggle that would make Ted Heath (except for the mining community, the Northern Irish Catholic community and the Zimbabwe community) a happy man: they are demanding jobs. It is the threat of closure of the mines that the gov­ernment thought would keep the mining community quiet. Instead the people from the mine areas made clear from their strike that they didn’t consider spending your life in a mine or scrubbing filthy clothes and nursing people with silicosis was an ideal existence. Their strike meant that they were saying: Take your mines and shove them. They refused to beg for the right to be exploited.

But what about these women who have been deprived of the social experience of socialised work and the relative independence of their own pay packet? It is certainly not as simple in their case. I quote again from the Italian doc­ument:

The role of housewife, beyond whose isolation is hidden social labour. must be destroyed. But our alternatives are strictly defined. Up to now. the myth of female incapacity. rooted in this isolated woman dependent on someone else’s wage and therefore shaped by someone else’s conscious­ness, has been broken only by one action: the woman getting her own wage, breaking the back of personal economic dependence, making her own independent experience with the world outside the home, performing social labour in a socialised structure, whether the factory or the office, and initiating there her own forms of social rebellion along with the traditional forms of the class. The advent of the women’s movement is a rejection of this alternative.

Capital itself is seizing upon the same impetus which created a movement -the rejection by mil­lions of women of woman’ s traditional place­ to recompose the work force with increasing num­bers of women. The movement can only develop in opposition to this. It poses by its very existence and must pose with increasing articulation in ac­tion that women refuse the myth of liberation through work.

For we have worked enough. We have chopped bil­lions of tons of cotton, washed billions of dishes, scrubbed billions of floors, typed billions of words, wired billions of radio sets, washed billions of nappies (diapers -ed.), by hand and in machines. Every time they have -let us in-to some tradi­tionally male enclave, it was to find for us a new level of exploitation.

Here again we must make a parallel, different as they are, between underdevelopment in the Third World and underdevelopment in the metropolis ­to be more precise, in the kitchens of the metrop­olis. Capitalist planning proposes to the Third World that it “‘develop”; that in addition to its present agonies, it too suffer the agony of an in­dustrial counter-revolution. Women in the metrop­olis have been offered the same “aid.” But those of us who have gone out of our homes to work be­cause we had to or for extras or for economic independence have warned the rest: inflation has riveted us to this bloody typing pool or to this assembly line, and in that there is no salvation.

We must refuse the development they are offering us. But the struggle of the working woman is not to return to the isolation of the home, appealing as this sometimes may be on Monday morning; any more than the housewife’s struggle is to ex­change being imprisoned in a house for being clinched to desks or machines, appealing as this sometimes may be compared to the loneliness of the 12th storey apartment…

The challenge to the women’s movement is to find modes of struggle which, while they liberate wom­en from the home, at the same time avoid on the one hand a double slavery and on the other prevent another degree of capitalistic control and regi­mentation. This ultimately is the dividing line be­tween reformism and revolutionary politics within the women’s movement.

This is the most dangerous co-option because it is mas­sive, and it was planned some time ago. A confidential re­port on the employment of women and young persons under 18 years (revealed in SOCIALIST WORKER, December 21, 1968) was prepared by the National Joint Advisory Com­mittee, with representatives from the Confederation of British Industries, the nationalised industries, the Ministry of Labour and -guess who? -the TUC (Trades Union Congress -ed.) The report stated:

with the constant introduction of expensive new equipment, shift working will no doubt continue to increase so as to maximise the economic return from capital investment involved and indeed before committing capital to the purchase of such ma­chinery employers want to be assured that shift working will be possible, so as to ensure an ade­quate return.

Can we now understand the equal pay act which gives what they call equal pay on the terms that we work shifts?

The report discussed Section 68 of the Factory Act re­quiring that all women and young persons in a factory have their breaks at the same time. Section 68, it says, ‘”denies to employers the flexibility in arranging the hours of their women and young persons … so essential in present day conditions.” So much for capital’s planlessness, and our peripheral “use” in industry.

Here is where the movement can be made or broken. We can be the modern suffragettes, only more dangerous, since where they invited women to vote and be free, we will be inviting them to achieve freedom through work.

No doubt there are times when we would be failing in our duty if we did not support and even encourage women to de­mand jobs, especially where they are isolated from wom­en’s industries, so that sweat shops are the only places within miles where a woman can earn enough money to cover the inflation and to avoid having to degrade herself by asking her husband for money for tights. But if we limit ourselves to this, if this is our programme and not just a tactic to help mobilize women in particular situations, all we are doing is organising women to be more efficiently and mercilessly exploited.

The question is: what in outline are the alternatives, in organisation and in demands?

First, the level of organisation of women is low. This is the most important reason why women in the movement are impelled to bring women into unions. Here is an institution already functioning and “experienced” -as we are not­which does not have to be built from the ground up. To think in terms of building organisations without traditions (except the traditions of the struggle itself) is to break from other traditions which, among other things, prevented a revolu­tionary women’s movement for centuries. Independent organisation -independent of every section of the establish­ment, is difficult to consider, let alone create, when thou­sands of women are not in motion.

But the picture is not as gloomy as it appears. There have been dozens if not hundreds of equal pay strikes. The Claimants Union (an organisation similar to the welfare rights organizations in the U.S. -ed.) is gaining in strength and has at its core unsupported mothers. And most recently, the women of the mine areas made the first attempt to or­ganise independently. In addition, if we are not blinded by a “trade union consciousness· ourselves, we can see women even in the worst jobs and the most unorganised factories waging their struggle in completely new ways. Here is the DAILY SKETCH, January 18, 1971.

Thousands of girls quit humdrum factory jobs be­ cause they get fed up being treated like ‘”robots”. They complain of monotonous and impersonal bosses. The girls become frustrated because the jobs they do make little demand on their abilities and leave no room for personal satisfaction. These were the main points of a survey by Brad­ford University into why 65 per cent of women quit their jobs in the electronics industry within a few months.

(You see who the universities are working for.)

We are not only victims; we are rebels too. The absen­teeism of women is notorious. Instead of workers control of production, their action is more like workers control of the struggle, to hell with their production.

So that the first barrier to independent organisation, the supposed apathy of women, is not what has been assumed. If we begin to look with women’s eyes, respecting what women do and not measuring them as men do, we will see a wealth of rebellion against and refusal of women’s work and the relationships and roles they generate.

This is not always organised rebellion and refusal. Well then, let’s organise it. The unions don’t; they sit on its head.

There appear to be two levels of demands, the issues which arise on a local level, and the general demands which the movement comes to stand for. In reality our movement has suffered from an unnatural separation between the two. The Four Demands we marched for last year have been on the whole unconnected with individual group activity (in part at least because of the barrenness of those demands).

Our concern must be demands with which the movement articulates in few words the breadth of its rejection of the oppression and exploitation of women. The tension between a local struggle and the stated principles of the movement does not vanish but within each local demand, which mobil­izes women wherever they are, the struggle loses its spo­radic, provincial and disconnected character. The demands must raise possibilities of new kinds and areas of action in each local situation from the beginning, and always keep the fundamental issues before our eyes. There is much more to be said about this, but better to move to the pro­posed demands.

1. WE DEMAND THE RIGHT TO WORK LESS. A shorter work week for all. Why should anybody work more than 20 hours a week? Housewives are hesitant to ask men after a week of at least 40 grinding hours to see after their own children and their own underwear. Yet woman do just that, for themselves and for men. When women are threatened with redundancies, the struggle must be for a shorter work week. (Maybe men will take our lead for a change.)

2.WE DEMAND A GUARANTEED INCOME FOR WOMEN AND FOR MEN WORKING OR NOT WORKING, MARRIED OR NOT. If we raise kids, we have a right to a living wage. The ruling class has glorified motherhood only when there is a pay packet to support it. We work for the capitalist class. Let them pay us, or else we can go to the factories and offices and put our children in their father’s laps. Let’s see if they can make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time. WE DEMAND WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK. All housekeepers are entitled to wages (men too).

3.It is in this context that WE DEMAND CONTROL OF OUR BODIES. If even birth control were free, would that be control? And if we could have free abortions on demand is that control? What about the children we want and can’t afford? We are forced to demand abortion and sterilization as we have been forced to demand jobs. Give us money and give us time, and we’ll be in a better position to control our bodies, our minds and our relationships. Free birth control, free abortions for whoever wants them (including our sis­ters from abroad who are denied this right -sisterhood is international). WE DEMAND THE RIGHT TO HAVE OR NOT TO HAVE CHILDREN.

But childbearing is not the only function of our bodies that capital controls. At work we make them do what they don’t want to do: repeated jerks on an assembly line, con­stant sitting or standing, breathing fumes and dirt. Work is often painful and dangerous. It is always uncomfortable and tiring. After work your body is too numb for you to feel it as something you can enjoy. For this reason it cannot de­velop sexually. Our physical feeling is further destroyed by the limited kinds of sexuality and the shallow relationships this society promotes, and by the scarcity of times and places where we can make love. Our bodies become a tool for production and reproduction and nothing else.

4. WE DEMAND EQUAL PAY FOR ALL. There is a rate for girls and a rate for boys and a rate for women and a rate for men and a rate for “skilled” and a rate for “un­skilled” and a rate in the North and a rate in the South. Whoever works deserves a minimum wage, and that mini­mum must be the rate of the highest grade.

5. WE DEMAND AN END TO PRICE RISES, including tax, rent, food and clothing. There is a battle brewing on hous­ing. As usual, with tenants’ struggles, women are going to be at the heart: they are the ones who will refuse the rent collector when he knocks in a rent strike. But our inter­vention can help guarantee that the women will also lead it, instead of being confined to making the tea in the back of the hall while the men make speeches in front.

6. WE DEMAND FREE COMMUNITY CONTROLLED NUR­SERIES AND CHILD CARE. We are entitled to a social ex­istence without having to take another job out of our homes. Mothers too have a right to work less. Young children as well as women are imprisoned in their homes. But we don’t want them to go to a State institution instead. Children, women and men must be able to learn from each other and break the ghetto existence to which they are each confined. We will then begin to destroy the State’s authority over our children and our possession of them.

In the same way as children are to be wrested from the State, so old people, and the mentally and physically ill must come back to the community’s care. We need time and we need money to destroy the prisons in which our children, our grandparents and our sick people are confined.

How do we organise a struggle around these demands? As I say, the Claimants Union has already begun. But the low level of organisation of women generally means that there is plenty hard work to be done.

We begin by uniting what capital has divided. If men have not yet learnt to support the equal pay fight which we have made, it is because their privileges over us -based on the dubious “privilege” of the wage itself -have blinded them to their class interests. They have always paid dearly for not uniting with us, by being thrown out of jobs to be re­placed by “cheaper” female labour. We may still have to confront not only employers, unions and government but men too when we want equal pay. Equal pay for all may win them over to demanding equal pay also among themselves as well as with us. The battle for parity in auto is the class finding its way to just such a struggle.

We can organize women where they work for wages, where they shop, where they live and work. Women from many industrial estates have shopping areas very near where they shop in their dinner hour. They often live close by. We can begin by leafletting in all three places, aiming to organise for their most pressing .problems which are hours of work, wages. inflation. child care and slavery. Housewives can go to the SS (Social Security -ed.) offices and demand money. as the women and children from the mine areas did - we need not wait for the men to strike, we can ask them to strike to support what we are doing.

lt is possible that women will feel too weak (or we will) to act independently of unions (though our job is to empha­sis their potential strength), and there may be pressure on them from many sources - especially employers - for them to go into unions once they take action. At this point it is far from decisive. If we help get them moving on their demands, even what they can get from the unions will be greater. They gain confidence and experience; we all do, together. We can have strikes against inflation, rent rises, shift work for women and for men. We can offer a social existence to housewives other than another job -we can offer them the struggle itself.

Of course this is much easier said than done, though the situation in this country is changing so rapidly that every day more becomes possible. This is meant to begin a dis­cussion of these possibilities, but on our terms. Nor is this anything like a complete picture of what is taking place in Britain today (or anywhere else), either among workers, or in board rooms, government offices or TUC headquarters. But it is clear to me and to others too I think that the time to make the leap from all that we have learnt in the small group discussions to political activity has come. We must not allow what we know is the female experience to be translated into the se~and politics of “trade union con­sciousness”, which has been presented to us as the only viable alternative. Goodbye to all that. When 20% of the women of a mainly women’s factory don’t turn up for work on Monday, they are many years beyond the trade union struggle, in fact its mortal enemy. They are struggling not only for better conditions in which to be exploited but against exploitation, against work itself. We in the women’s movement should be the last people to believe or act upon the absurd notion that women are incapable of leaping be­yond the oppressive institutions which have trapped men. Because we have been ignored and excluded by these insti­tutions it is precisely us who are in the position to move beyond them. ­

One final point. There is a debate that goes on about most of us being middle class. And we are. As the Notting Hill SHREW put it, to have sisterhood we have to get over the myths that only working class women are oppressed or that only middle class women can know they’re oppressed. Some of us, let’s face it, are only in the movement because cap­italism is very backward and leaves women out of govern­ment and good paying professions. They will eventually dis­cover that capital and the FINANCIAL TIMES have plans for them. But they must not hold the rest of us back.

A hell of a lot of us are fighting capital not because it is backward but because it exists. We are increaSingly aware that the oppression of all women has its roots in the indis­pensable work, in home, in office, in hospital and in factory, that working class women perform for capital, sometimes with low wages, most often without wages. We must get over this gUilt about having wall-to-wall carpeting and a “good” education -as if they ever taught us anything except to think like them and act for them. Guilt doesn’t build a po­litical movement; it inhibits and exhausts it. For guilt be­comes sacrifice and sacrifice becomes either martyrdom or bitterness -or both.

The first step in the process of our liberation at this stage is to make our own independent evaluation of the po­litical situation in this country (and later in the world­ with the help of women in other countries) on the basis of what our guts and people like those in the mining areas have told us, and then act on it. Then the fact that we are middle class will not stand in the way of waging the class struggle, but as we women define it and as only we can wage it­ for the first time in a generalised way. It will take some time, but then Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day.

Originally appeared in Radical America Vol. 7 no. 4-5, 1973

Strike! fills a substantial gap in the history of the American working class and brings to its material a point of view that helps considerably to counteract the almost universally bureaucratic attitudes of labor historians. It is extremely rare to find a historian who does not equate the working class with the organized labor movement, or, even worse, with the leadership of that movement. And when that rare exception is found, it is even rarer to find someone who thinks that the absence of organizational institutions is anything but a sign of weakness.

Brecher brings to his book deep democratic convictions, without which there can be no revolutionary convictions. He also brings a sense of the political and historical importance of working-class struggles that are more often dismissed with the adjective “economic”. The meaning of these struggles clearly derives from the activities of the workers themselves and the ways in which these activities threaten capitalist society. The absence of formal organizations with formal programs is not and cannot be the test of revolutionary significance.

Having said this, however, I want to deal with Brecher’s book critically, to indicate its limitations and weaknesses.

The problem that pervades the whole book is the problem of organization. Strike! is a documented critique of the role of labor organizations of all types and of labor leaders in restraining and limiting the militancy and revolutionary capacity of ordinary workers. That is fine as far as it goes. But it never deals with the question of organization in a fundamental way. Unless you accept a conspiratorial theory of history-that labor organizations are everywhere introduced to restrain and defeat workers-you have to deal with the question of why labor organizations of various types arise. “Arise” is too abstract a word. Labor organizations are created by workers, by ordinary rank-and-file workers. George Rawick noted a few years ago that “The unions did not organize the strikes; the working class in and through the strikes organized the unions.” 1 This was written about the formation of the CIO. The principle, ,however, is true of any stage of the American working class. Brecher documents the same phenomenon in relation to the 1877 strikes and the Knights of Labor. Whether it was the unions or political parties of the pre-Civil War period, the Knights of Labor, the AFL, or the IWW - and no matter what these organizations later became - they were created by ordinary workers.

There is a need to perceive the development of the American working class in terms of contradictions that are more subtle than a simple workers-versus-organizations dichotomy. Workers create organizations – out of needs and possibilities, not out of principles. In the pre-industrial period of the American working class, workers created unions which were essentially local in compass. National unions were not possible, given the level of technology and transportation (although the creation of local unions was a national phenomenon). These unions were organizations of self-defense. The idea of a new society appeared from the very beginning in embryo form. But it could only develop in activity, being shaped by continuing struggles, by victories, and by defeats. It could not develop as an ideology.

The working class is inherently revolutionary. This is not a matter of formal consciousness. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” 2 . It is a matter of developing in practice the capacity to create a new society. That development takes the form, of necessity, of exhausting the possibilities of bourgeois society. That is, workers create organizations of various kinds in order to struggle for whatever seems useful to them. These struggles, whether they take place within the framework of formal organizations or not, win for the working class whatever it is possible to win under capitalism. Whether these victories are wage increases, or free universal compulsory education, or child labor laws, or anything else, they are never granted without struggle. That is, they are never - in the first instance - tricks to deceive the working class.

However, the victories of the working class and their organizations all become transformed. There is a dialectical process at work. So long as the struggle ends short of the socialist revolution, every codification of victory, every kind of organization, becomes absorbed and institutionalized into capitalist society. In a sense the class struggle consists of overturning past victories. This is not simply a theoretical view of past history. It bears a current reality. Unions have exhausted their possibilities in American capitalist society. But that is a one-sided abstraction. What does one say to migrant farm workers, or to hospital workers, or to workers in chicken-processing plants, all of whom earn (or earned) income for full-time work that was well under the poverty level? Is anyone prepared to say that they should wait until the socialist revolution makes bureaucratic unions unnecessary? It seems evident that workers have to go through a certain experience, if only to give themselves a little breathing space, a little elbow room. Not absolutely, not every last worker and work place, but in general.

But there is more involved than an accumulation of experience, of victories and defeats. It is in these struggles that workers develop their capacity to transform society-and they begin by transforming capitalist society. The period that precedes the point at which Brecher begins has some interesting examples. Two of the major labor demands of the period before the Civil War, particularly about the time of Andrew Jackson, were free compulsory education and objective incorporation laws. Both of these demands were won, and won largely, though not entirely, through the efforts of the working class and working-class organizations. Both demands obviously served to strengthen and expand American capitalism, by providing an educational system that trained a working class suitable to capitalism and by breaking away from the earlier, monopolistic forms of incorporation by legislative fiat. What is the significance of these victories for us today, and for the working class? Is it that workers were stupid and tricked and did the work of the bourgeoisie and were co-opted into bourgeois society? Or is it rather that workers showed and developed the capacity to transform society-to whatever extent was objectively possible? To put it another way, did these victories show that socialism is impossible, or did they show that socialism is inevitable?

The problems raised here, or rather the failure to deal with them, leads to some awkward consequences in the last few chapters when Brecher is discussing current possibilities and future perspectives. These are, compounded by a tendency, which is not apparent in the historical sections, to view consciousness in narrowly intellectual terms. For example, Brecher says that “Workers, out of their own weakness, felt the need for strong leaders...” (p.285) That is an interesting phenomenon-that workers should produce their strongest leaders (John L. Lewis, for example) when they are themselves strongest (the period of the creation of the CIO). The strength of the leaders, in fact, derives from the strength of the workers, and has to be viewed both as a creation of the workers and as an antagonist to the workers.

Brecher’s failure to see the duality, the contradiction, within the working class and to see consciousness as activity leads him to reintroduce the idea of working-class backwardness. “From 1969 to 1971,” says Brecher (p.290), “workers, like the rest of the population, developed an overwhelming opposition to the Vietnam war.” But that is only part of the picture, the part that deals with verbalized consciousness. The fact is that well before 1969, ordinary American workers, in the pursuit of their “narrow” class objectives, interfered with and prevented more war production than all of the anti-war demonstrations put together. In strikes at North American Aviation in Missouri, at Olin-Matheisen in Illinois, on the Southern Railway System, and on the Missouri Pacific, workers refused to succumb to patriotic pressure ‘from politicians, union leaders, and business executives and went their own way-not because they were anti-war, but because they put the class struggle first. (It was Lenin who said, along time ago, that “We cannot equate the patriotism of the working class with the patriotism of the bourgeoisie.”)

“All historical writing,” says Brecher (p.ix), “is a matter of selecting a limited number of significant facts from an infinity of others.” It is curious that in discussing the current scene he should use different standards of judgment from those he uses in discussing past history. In describing the past he seeks out the events and the statements that indicate the revolutionary character of the struggles. That obviously does not mean that that was all there was. It does not take into Account the millions of individual incidents of racism, of sexism, of patriotism, of plain ordinary stupidity that workers (like everyone else) are guilty of. Does that result in a distorted picture? Not at all. It is not especially significant that in their day-to-day lives workers are weighted down by what Marx called “all the old crap”. It would be miraculous if it were otherwise. What is significant is the evidence that in periods of struggle workers can break out of that and overcome the limitations that bourgeois society imposes on them.

Why, then, does he revert to the methodology of academic labor historians when he discusses the present? “It is often suggested that today’s renewed labor militance differs from ,that of the past in that today’s strikers are ‘only out for themselves’, rather than seeing their actions as part of a broader struggle. This is often expressed in the phrase that today’s strikers are not ‘socially conscious’. There is considerable truth in this view. (p.281)

I don’t want to exaggerate. Brecher indicates reservations that modify this view. But basically he accepts the charges of racial and sexual division, lack of class consciousness, and so on. It leads him into the trap of economism. To reply to the charge of affluence as a conservative influence, Brecher turns to the Old Left dependence on the inevitable depression. (What depression led to the Hungarian revolution of 1956 or the French revolution of 1968?) What is more serious, he turns to a redefinition of the working class, some of it justified, most of it not justified.

He seems to accept the charge of affluence as a source of conservatism by indicating that only a small part of the working class is affluent-the unionized white male workers. The majority of the working class, he says, is black, female, or young, and is not affluent. That argument simply will not do. First, if you exclude the skilled trades, construction, and the like, the best paid and most-thoroughly-unionized’ areas are the basic and heavy industries. They are so crucial to society, and particularly to revolutionary potential, that they cannot be brushed aside and their place taken by service workers, migrant farm workers, clerical workers, and so on.

But the point is that this is not needed. There are substantial numbers black workers in auto, steel, transportation, and the like. No one believes today that high auto or steel wages water down their militancy (although that was a widespread belief before the 1967 Detroit rebellion).

Why should black workers be immune to the evils of affluence while white workers inevitably succumb? Obviously there is a difference rooted in racial discrimination and oppression. But how deep is that difference? Does the black auto worker with 10 or 20 years’ seniority, making over $5 an hour and working considerable overtime, have an absolute empathy with the unemployed ghetto youngster? Or an absolute antipathy to his white fellow auto worker?

Black workers are likely to be more militant than their white fellow workers. Young workers are likely to be more militant than their older fellow workers (white or black). But these differences are only relative, and simply indicate where the initial sparks tend to come from. Struggles tend to be initiated by the young and the black. That was probably just as true a hundred years ago as today (if you substitute immigrants for blacks). But the rest of the working class tends to follow these more aggressive elements.

Trying to shift the discussion to the so-called new working class, Brecher falls into further distortions. First of all, he equates salaried workers with the working class. Simply because some traditional middle-class occupations have shifted from self-employed to salaried does not make them working-class. The form of payment is an insecure test of class. Objective function in relation to production or the society as a whole would seem to be a better test. It would seem to me that professionally-trained people (such as teachers or social workers) whose basic role is to manipulate others in order to secure the smooth functioning of society are best defined as middle-class. The fact that they are also exploited and alienated and that opposition to bourgeois society appears within their ranks is evidence of the decline of bourgeois society and the ability of revolutionary impulses to appear anywhere. Their objective role remains (even when it is unwilling) social control.

Secondly, Brecher accepts too readily government statistics that seem to indicate the relative decline of blue-collar work. The Government’s own figures, when properly broken down, indicate that the majority of the working class are still blue collar and are likely to remain that way for at least another 10 years.

The problem is that Brecher is not aware of the roots of the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat, and tends, in the last chapters of his book, to fall back on “consciousness” or-what amounts to the same thing - “will” as the basis for a revolutionary perspective. “Only the will to keep in their own hands the power they have taken can protect ordinary people from losing it.” (p.308) That is nonsense, and if it were true the cause would already be lost.

What is the source of the revolutionary capacity of the working class? It is the fact that workers are at the point of production, that their work itself teaches them how to run production, and that the conditions of their work force them to struggle against the existing relations of production, and therefore against capitalist society. The fundamental indicator of revolutionary capacity is not political belief, much less demands and slogans, but rather the capacity to organize production and to defend the new social relations from attack. Brecher’s criticism of the Russian Revolution is totally misplaced. (I disagree with the details of his criticism, but I don’t see the point to raising that discussion in the present context.) What led to the defeat of the Russian Revolution was not Lenin’s evil ways, but the inability of the Russian working class to take control of the means of production and run the society. This inability did not stem from lack of will. If there was lack of will, it was because “will” was obviously not enough. If you compare the Russian Revolution of 1917 with the -Hungarian revolution of 1956, it becomes evident that in all the things that matter in creating a new society the Hungarian workers were far in advance of the Russian. They were not a tiny minority in a vast peasant country; they were literate and had access to and familiarity with the most modern technology and the most advanced means of communication. They took hold of the means of production and began to build a new state and anew society. Nothing in Hungarian society could defeat them. That took an invasion by a foreign power.

Brecher says that “There is a natural tendency for responsibility to re-centralize in the hands of a few individuals, accepted leaders, who then come to do more and more of the movement’s thinking and deciding for it.” (p.307) There is nothing natural about it. And in any case it is not a tendency that will be countered by “will”. The centralization of power is the tendency of the counter-revolution to step in to fill any gaps or lacks that are permitted by the working class. That is to say, there are two “natural” tendencies-that of workers to decentralize and democratize, and that of capital (no matter who speaks in its name) to discipline and centralize. To raise the Stalinist overthrow of the Russian Revolution in the way that Brecher does is to assume that 50 years of history have brought about no changes in capitalist society and in the working classes of the industrial nations.

In this context the American working class are not less advanced than their brothers of 50 or 100 years ago, but more advanced. Better educated, better organized (not by unions, but by production), with the most advanced means of communication available to them, without the loyalty to old established labor parties that still inhibits European workers... American workers-and particularly those in transportation and heavy industry-have the capacity to transform American society. Brecher sees this only dimly, and the result is that in the last chapters of his book he departs from the methodology that sustains and informs most of what he writes. Instead of seeking out the evidence of revolutionary capacity and inherently revolutionary activity, he begins to look for substitutes for it. That is not much help to either history or the working class. Marx and Engels wrote in their earlier days: “Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution. This revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” 3

It is the real, existing, American working class, with all its limitations, that will make the American revolution. But in making that revolution, it will be transformed.

First published in Radical America, vol.7, no.6, November-December 1973.
Republished in Martin Glaberman, The Working Class and Social Change (pamphlet), 1975.
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• 1 George Rawick: Working-Class Self-Activity, Radical America, Vol.3, No.2 (March-April 1969), p.27.
• 2Marx and Engels: The German Ideology (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1968), p.61
• 33. Ibid., p.87.

Original version included 'Just A Matter of Gloves'.

"THE MEXlCAN”

Zala hadn't lived many years in Los Angeles, but had been working in the warehouse longer than any of us. He was a good worker, the best. He didn’t drive his fork lift fast, but he was never behind and he helped us. He had highpiled all our stock in related tiers and knew the sequence by heart. After he began eating lunch with us, and without letting the boss know, he made drawings so that we could find the right stock by ourselves if he was absent or busy elsewhere in the warehouse.

After coffee break one day the boss told him that he would have to give up the forklift job and go back to filling orders with a cut in pay. It turned out that the boss had a brother-in-law who needed a job. It can happen in a non-union shop. And then too, Zala didn’t have citizen’s papers or even an entry permit. He finished the day driving his lift almost recklessly, shuttling back and forth between the piles at top speed. That night as he punched out on the time clock he served notice that he was quitting ”as of now”.

The next day was hell. None of the stock was in its accustomed place. We had to make three times the number of trips up and down an aisle of tiers to fill an order. We were very obviously running, but getting more and more behind all the time. The boss had a fit. When he started yelling at us we all told him that the new driver just didn't have what it took. No one mentioned Zala all day, or the next, or the next. By Friday there was still no improvement.

We came in Monday morning and Zala was on the fork lift, rehired, and everything was piled so that the drawings he had made could be used again. They had paid him overtime to come in the day before and restore order.

RELIEF

Twice each day, as stipulated in the union’s contract with the company, we got twelve minute relief periods - once during the first - and again during the second four hours of the shift. Utility men, in turns, would take over our jobs during these periods. The task was their principal and almost sole function. In every department of the factory the ratio between their number and the amount of men each of them was assigned to relieve was determined by dividing the relief minutes contractually allotted each worker into four hours. One or two workers were deducted from the quantity each utility man was assigned, depending on what portion (determined by time study) of his work day was consumed in travel from worker to worker.

Moments after a shift began the utility man in our department would relieve the man who was the last to be relieved during the first four-hour period of the preceding day. It was the same in all departments. When that man returned the utility man moved several yards down the line to the second man, and so on, in rotation until all had a turn. The system was designed in such a way that the last man returned from his break as the lunch whistle blew.

When production resumed after our forty-two minute lunch period, the process would start anew. But it was begun at a different place on the line in order to supply variety. The next day the second man relieved at the beginning of the previous day’s shift was first, and the man who was third on the first day was second. In eighteen days the cycle was completed and a repetition began the first man was first again. Thus each individual worker got his relief mid-morning or mid-afternoon once every eighteen days.

Once on a swing shift my after-lunch relief turn fell in the last hour before quitting time. Nevertheless, I decided to escape my department for a good portion of my allotted minutes. I calculated that if I hurried I could reach a coke machine in the Trim Department that was a little over one hundred yards and a stairway away. Unlike the vending machine in our department, the Trim Line’s had root beer in it. I planned to begin my return trip immediately after extracting my drink from the machine, but at a more leisurely pace and on a different itinerary. I would consume my drink enroute.

I reached the stairs, and halfway down I paused. From the landing I had a full view of a long section of the Trim Line. Below me the almost-finished products moved steadily along, shiny paint and chrome exteriors completed. The doors of each car were wide open and the interiors empty. The installation of dash panels and frames that hold the upholstered seats was in process. My attention was attracted by a foreman in a white shirt and black tie and two men in suits arguing with one of the line men. He was not working, he had refused to perform his operation on the car passing in front of him. The next man also refused to work on that particular car. Likewise the next man. And so it went, untouched, with the foreman and a growing number of supervisory personnel following and demanding that it be given its scheduled number of parts.

I completed my descent of the stairs, ignored the soft drink machine, and followed the disputed vehicle at a safe distance. Every man confronted by both it and the men in suits (who now numbered almost a dozen) pointed at the center of the car’s floor and made essentially the same statement; “There’s nothing in the union contract and there’s no law that says I have to work in or around that condition." I moved in close enough to look inside, and a glance showed that someone back down the line had been unable to wait and had seriously, mountainously, and successfully relieved himself.

A few more yards and refusals down the line, management realized how senseless it was to continue their demand. The point where the cars were completed and driven away to Inspection was only a short distance ahead, They called several utility men who followed the car to the end of the line and pushed it to one side, but the utility men also refused to conduct the necessary cleanup. One of the supervisors who had left the scene earlier returned with hose and bucket, found a water outlet, connected the hose and directed a hard stream at the target on the car's floor. One of his colleagues ran to the opposite side of the car. He tried to utilize one of the doors as ashield, extended the bucket as far from himself as possible and attempted to make it catch the cause of the dispute.

The hastily organized cleanup crew and sympathizers exited. The man with the bucket at arm’s length led the column. The hose was left behind. The car was eventually taken back to the point on the line where its assembly had been interrupted, and placed on the conveyor. Its completion was then resumed. Loud laughter was audible, but it did not come from any of the participants in the incident at those times when they could be seen. Straight faces were barely maintained when between cars, but once inside the next car the "crackups" took place, again and again.

I ran all the way back to my department by the direct route. I was late, but quieted criticism of my tardiness by arranging to give up the first relief due me on the following day. When the story I had to tell became known, it more than made up for any hardship I had caused the men in my group. It wasn't often that our department had the benefit of an eyewitness report of an important event in another department, an event to be told and retold, several days antidote for monotony. And secretly, we envied the men down in Trim. They had been given an opportunity to make a decision.

Originally appeared in Radical America Volume 8, Number 4 (July-August 1974)