Ours to Master and to Own

This chapter examines and analyzes the historical development of workers’ councils within the Italian factory system during the “Long 1968,” based on two rival models: the factory councils and the autonomous workers’ assemblies. Following the 1969 “Hot Autumn” wildcat strike wave, the autonomous workers’ movement aimed to topple the unions from their hegemonic position, while the three Italian union confederations—CGIL,¹³¹ CISL,¹³² and UIL¹³³—attempted to recover their representative power. Conflicts over wage bargaining were used to destabilize the factory system and the capitalist division of labor, thus creating the conditions for workers’ counterpower in the factory. The factory councils integrated often radically different political positions, but with the shared ultimate objective of restoring the hegemony of the unions as a unitary organizational form while still expressing the will of at least part of the rank and file.

The autonomous workers’ assemblies opposed both the unions and the factory councils in an attempt to propagate workers’ autonomy and the refusal of work as the predominant means of organizing workers in factory struggles. This chapter concludes that both models were too weak to displace union hegemony or to prevent the historical defeat of the Italian factory workers’ movements after the loss of the 1980 Fiat strike, which marked the end of Italy’s “Long 1968”¹³⁴ and coincided with the global rise of post-Fordism and neoliberalism. The chapter also considers the March 1973 militant strike and occupation of Turin’s giant Fiat plant by the Red Bandanas (Fazzoletti Rossi), the militants most representative of the autonomous workers’ movement, dubbed by Antonio Negri (1979) the “Workers’ Party of Mirafiori.”

The new social movement Autonomia Operaia (Workers’ Autonomy), through its practice between 1973 and 1980 of workers’ autonomy and the refusal of work, can be seen as an ultimately post-workerist evolution of operaismo (Italian workerism). The journals Quaderni Rossi¹³⁵ and Classe Operaia were the first to research the autonomous workers’ movement as it developed in the early to mid-1960s and was consolidated during the Hot Autumn of 1969. The struggles of the autonomous workers’ assemblies (assemblee autonome operaie) and their conflictual relationship with the factory councils were at the center of Autonomia’s political project. The autonomist workers saw themselves as a resistance movement against industrial and technological restructuring and its political basis—the “Historic Compromise” between the Italian Communist Party (PCI)¹³⁶ and the Christian Democrats (DC).¹³⁷ Various forms of the refusal of work, wildcat strikes, and industrial sabotage were the autonomous workers’ movement’s main “weapons” in this struggle.

As the autonomist workers’ movement of the “mass worker” (Pozzi and Tommasini 1979)¹³⁹ began to lose ground in large-scale industrial conflicts, Autonomia became more involved in the conflicts of the “socialized worker”¹⁴⁰ in the post-Fordist, “diffused” or “social factory” (Cleaver 2000) that had resulted from the decentralization of the industrial economy. Such socialized workers were diffused throughout a network of mid-sized and small factories, including “black economy”¹⁴¹ sweatshops and “put out” family work—forms that permitted the gradual creation of a nonunionized, precarious, and flexible workforce.

The increasingly hostile relationship in the late 1970s between the autonomous workers’ movement and the PCI (including its associated trade union confederation, CGIL, which has historically adopted a consensual position with the other union confederations connected to the DC and the center-right Republican Party) led to Autonomia’s isolation and criminalization—as suspected terrorist fellow travelers—and finally, repression. This internecine struggle resulted in the disintegration of working-class solidarity within the factories and the expulsion, by management and some unions, of New Left and autonomist activists. Political repression combined with the growing tensions caused by post-Fordist automation, the decentralization of production, and its resultant mass redundancies, culminated in the debacle of the “March of the Forty Thousand” and the defeat of the October 1980 Fiat strike—the event widely accepted as signifying the end of the Italian “Long 1968.”

This huge wave of working-class unrest continued unabated into autumn 1969 and beyond, reaching its peak with the violent occupation of the Mirafiori plant in March 1973 by a new generation of still more militant workers, the Fazzoletti Rossi, who organized autonomously even of the New Left. From then on the effects of technological restructuring and its concomitant spread of worker redundancy, as well as the unions’ recuperation of consensus and control through the factory councils (consigli di fabrica), began to dampen the autonomous workers’ revolt—which nevertheless continued at an exceptionally high level compared to the rest of the industrialized world until the 1980s.

The most important aspect of the Hot Autumn, from the perspective of operaist class composition theory (Cleaver 1991), was the leading role played by mainly nonunionized internal migrant workers from the South, who had once been stigmatized as crumiri (scabs) in the 1950s by the largely PCI-and PSI-affiliated Northern Italian workers.¹⁴³ In addition, the “new working class” of white-collar technicians, scientists, professionals, and office and service personnel, previously excluded from blue-collar union-management deals and also formerly considered scabs by blue-collar workers, played an important part. The operaist theoretician and historian Sergio Bologna, who worked as a technician at Olivetti in the early 1960s, focused much of his research on the struggles of the techno-scientific working-class composition in the 1970s (Cuninghame 2001).

The recently formed New Left groups, based on the 1967–68 student movement, were heavily involved in the Hot Autumn and even more so in its aftermath, particularly Lotta Continua (LC—Continuous Struggle) in Turin and Rome; Potere Operaio (PO—Workers’ Power) in Rome, Milan, and Porto Marghera (part of greater Venice); Avanguardia Operaia (AO—Workers’ Vanguard) in Milan; and PdUP per Il Comunismo, a fragile alliance between the Partido di Unitá Proletaria (PdUP—Proletarian Unity Party) and Il Manifesto, in Rome.¹⁴⁴ The autonomous workers broke from the PCI’s “economistic realism” and the unions’ corporatist demands by chanting “We want everything!” to demand major wage increases—this time delinked from productivity deals—decreases in work rhythms, and the end of piecework and wage differentials between the various grades of blue-collar and white-collar workers. The strikes were organized locally by factory assemblies over which the unions had no control and were coordinated at a city or regional level. Thirteen thousand workers were arrested and thirty-five thousand were dismissed or suspended, but by December 1969 the employers had conceded to their demands (Brodhead 1984).

The 1970 Workers’ Charter (Statuto di Lavoro), as legislated by the Italian government, conceded significant gains and formally recognized workers’ self-organization within the factories by instituting the factory councils and the scala mobile (sliding scale).¹⁴⁵ Nonetheless, the largest outbreak of industrial unrest since the Biennio Rosso¹⁴⁶ of 1919–20 soon spread from the factories to working-class neighborhoods, where the emerging women’s movement as well as student groups (many of whose members came from working-class families) and the New Left organizations became active in the self-organized neighborhood committees (comitati di quartiere).

These committees organized rent and bill strikes, self-reduction (autoriduzione ) of transportation costs, and housing occupations in order to obtain material improvements in working-class living standards autonomously (i.e., independent of union-based, party-based, or any other delegated or mediated form of negotiation with the state or the market). These actions were not carried out in the spirit of reformism or corporativism, as the operaists were accused (somewhat hypocritically) by the unions, but as an attack on capitalism’s capacity to extract surplus value through the monetary and social wage forms (Sacchetto and Sbrogio 2009).

The autonomous workers’ movement aimed to transform the triennial negotiations over national industrial wages and conditions into a major political conflict, and in so doing, remove the unions from their hegemonic position. The Hot Autumn became a struggle against the institutionalized bargaining structures inherent to the postwar Keynesian–Fordist pact and the “golden age of capitalism”: top-down negotiation between unions and management of the price of labor and its use—wages and working conditions—in return for increased productivity and accelerated line speeds (Hobsbawm 1994). The basis for negotiation and compromise was replaced by constant mobilization and uninterrupted contestation. Conflicts over bargaining were used to destabilize the factory system, the capitalist division of labor, and management despotism, thus creating the conditions for workers’ counterpower in the factory (Balestrini and Moroni 1997).

The Hot Autumn created the conditions for the generalized spread of the factory councils throughout the factory system, but it was to be a problematic experience from the start. As stated, the union bureaucracy took umbrage at these directly elected organisms. Furthermore, the councils in the factories where the autonomous workers’ movement was weaker were the object of constant attacks by management, who feared their capacity to coordinate disruptive initiatives.

Although these same workers participated in them, the councils were also criticized by the left wing of the workers’ movement, particularly by the factory militants of Potere Operaio (PO) and Lotta Continua (LC), as well as by the broader autonomous workers’ movement. First, the reintroduction of the delegate principle had the power to weaken the emerging practice of self-organization from below on the shop floor. LC responded to the councils’ first election of delegates with the slogan “We are all delegates !” Second, the councils’ essential subordination to the mediatory role of the unions was noted. The principle on which the autonomous workers’ movement had relaunched its struggles after 1967 was the rigid separation of the autonomous struggle from union negotiation (Lumley 1989; Wright 2002). This permitted the maximum room for the maneuver of actions and the constitution of new organizational and productive forms, without linking the outcomes of workers’ organization to agreements with management or allowing unsatisfactory deals negotiated by the unions to pass.

However, the factory councils reintroduced the link between struggle and negotiation, presenting the right conditions for the restoration of union control over workers’ self-organization. The union bureaucracy provided official recognition and protection for the councils, as well as responsibilities for their delegates “in obvious hopes that the councils will become absorbed by the union apparatus” (Cantarow 1973, 24). Wherever the autonomous workers’ movement seemed to be weakening, the unions attempted to impose their functionaries as delegates on the councils to neutralize their autonomy, as happened at Pirelli in Milan in 1972 (ibid.).

The debate over the factory councils was bitter but inconclusive. The majority of the New Left–linked “vanguard workers” groups participated, considering the councils an important site not only for self-organization but also for gaining a dominant position within the unions (ibid.). In contrast, a section of the autonomous workers’ movement participated from a critical standpoint, hoping to convert the councils into the basis for an “alternative political program”:

The task of the workers’ vanguards during the present time is . . . not only to struggle to transfer real decision-making power to the delegates’ councils, it is also, and above all, the task of beginning to construct with, and within, the councils the first foundations of a new political economy that will inform future demands by the rank-and-file; the first elements of an alternative political program to the one imposed by the bureaucracy. (See Turin Co-ordinamento Politico Operaio [Workers’ Political Coordinating Committee]; cited in Cantarow 1973, 24.)

However, a radical minority remained implacably opposed, determined to build alternative forms of organization in opposition to the unions. An extract from a 1973 document of the Milanese autonomous workers’ movement in the Alfa Romeo, Pirelli, and Sit-Siemens companies stated:

The hypothesis that the [councils] are the instrument for grassroots organization, which the working class has been able to impose as an expression of the growth of its autonomy, is not exact.... Weighing up things since [their] constitution . . . we cannot but observe that the unions have always controlled them. They let them function when [the councils] sanction what has been established according to their line and they block them as soon as grassroots’ needs prevail (Assemblea Autonoma della Pirelli-Alfa Romeo and Comitato di Lotta della Sit Siemens 1973) .¹⁴⁷

Autonomia Operaia’s relationship with council delegates and “factory vanguards” linked to different political cultures and projects was symptomatic of its internal contradiction between movement and political organization:

While the New Left groups oscillated between the refusal of the delegates as union functionaries or even new leaders, and acritical exultation of the factory councils exactly when they were being emptied and enclosed, Autonomia formed collectives, coordinations, etc., which oscillated between the nature of the representative organisms of the struggles (and were there-fore in competition with the councils) and that of organisms linked to a particular project (that of Autonomia) (Borgogno 1997, 44).

Ultimately, the factory councils, while maintaining a structural autonomy from the unions, were absorbed into their decision-making process during the 1970s. They did not become “the embryo of a new, revolutionary union democracy in Italy,” nor the basis for “a single industrial union over which the rank and file will maintain firm control via the councils,” nor a “future working class party,” as Cantarow ( 1973, 24) had anticipated. Their ambiguous nature and sectarian divisiveness weakened their credibility among the mass of factory workers, who despite their growing radicalization and desire for autonomy “still look[ed] to the unions for their economic security” in the absence of a credible alternative (ibid.).

The culturally enriching but politically problematic interaction of the New Left groups with the autonomous workers’, students’, countercultural youth, and women’s social movements combined with repression and the unions’ recuperation of factory struggles to cause their decline, including that of PO. This was to have dire consequences for the autonomous workers’ assemblies, most of which were both integrated locally and coordinated nationally, if loosely, by PO. The process had begun as early as 1970, according to Gambino (1999):

The unions had renounced what they could have done and the moderate governments had introduced a series of economic measures to regain the initiative. It was like an archipelago: some islands of resistance here and there, Porto Marghera, Pirelli, even Fiat, a few factories in Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Naples, and Messina. After the decision by the union confederations [in July 1970] to cancel the general strike, we felt we no longer had interlocutors or openings. We began to see them as accomplices of the Italian system. The trade unions of the PCI and PSI were uninterested in a profound change in the political situation.

The main links between Autonomia and the autonomous workers’ movement were to be found elsewhere. In Rome, the Volsci ¹⁴⁸ organized among the city’s dominant service sector, the “coordinating committee of the autonomous organisms of service workers” (Rosso 1975, 5), bringing together the Policlinic hospital workers, ENEL energy workers, rail and postal workers, RAI television journalists, and Al Italia air crew. In Milan, the remnants of the Gruppo Gramsci¹⁴⁹ and PO worked with the autonomous workers of Sit-Siemens, Alfa Romeo, and Pirelli, and later among the extensive network of post-Fordist small factories in the North known as the indotto (hinterland), coordinating the different assemblies through their CPO. In the Veneto region of northeastern Italy, Autonomia had a particularly strong presence among the petrochemical workers in the shape of the Assemblea Autonoma di Porto Marghera, formed in 1972 and dissolved in 1979 following the April 7 mass arrests (see note 23, this chapter). Sbrogio (2009, 73), a former autonomist participant and former political prisoner, describes how the foundation of this assemblea autonoma was based on the autonomous workers’ movement’s historic parallel struggles against the employers and the unions, the latter seen as the antiworker collaborators of the former, as well as the complex, entwined nature of their relationship with the local factory councils and, indeed, the unions linked to the CGIL:

“Tuesday, March 6, 1973, at the meeting of the Porto Marghera Factory Council, the Autonomous Assembly succeeds in having approved, as a proposal within the contractual struggle, the payment of ENEL¹⁵⁰ electricity bills at 8 lira a kilowatt, the same as companies pay” (Potere Operaio del Lunedi, no. 46, March 25, 1973); this refers to an initiative launched by the ENEL Political Committee in Rome and other autonomous workers’ organisms, which they were trying to generalize nationally (Sbrogio 2009, 134).

Certainly, the relationship between Autonomia and the autonomous workers’ movement was more problematic than it had been with the New Left groups, who had had a more rigidly Leninist belief in “workers’ centrality” and the subordination of the struggles of other sectors of the working class to those at the point of production. This is partly explained by the sociocultural and intergenerational friction between the generally “guaranteed” Fordist “mass workers” and the “socialized workers” (often students involved in deregulated “black work”) of the post-Fordist “diffused factory,” who saw themselves even more exploited as flexible “non-guaranteed” workers. Here, an Autonomia activist from nearby Padua expresses his resentment at the instrumental nature of the relationship between the Veneto political collectives and the Porto Marghera autonomous workers:

They used you, but if someone had a problem, they sent you home. People didn’t eat, they were there every morning to hand out leaflets, do pickets, they really bust themselves, but the organizing was done by the Workers’ Autonomous Assembly. The argument we made was that the organization had to be inclusive, that beyond the strategic argument the complexity was in the fact that we were all in this organization . . . made up of students, workers, [that] it would be better if it called itself an inclusive organization and not one calling itself workers, even if autonomous (Memoria 1974).

The first autonomous workers’ assemblies, of which the Porto Marghera assembly was one of the most important, were constituted in 1973 following the disbanding of PO, the absorption of the factory councils by the unions, and the crisis of the New Left groups, although Bobbio (1988) mentions the earlier creation, in 1971, of the similar Unitary Workers’ Assemblies (UWA—assemblee operaie unitarie) by LC, PO, and other New Left factory militants at Fiat, Pirelli, and Alfa Romeo. The assemblies were created as organizations broad enough to organize all the “factory vanguards” and as a rival to the union-infiltrated factory councils. As well as militants from PO, they also contained members of LC and AO.

However, the experience of the UWA in particular and of the autonomous workers’ assemblies in general was considered a failure by LC and AO, both of which had largely withdrawn from such organizations by 1973. With the dissolution of PO in the same year, the assemblies became the structural base for the new organization, Autonomia Operaia. The main force behind the assemblies was a complex network of workerpolitical activists formed by the struggles of the early 1970s, above all at Fiat in the 1972–73 cycles of strikes and occupations, which produced the unprecedented phenomenon known as the Workers’ Party of Mirafiori (Negri 1979).

In Turin in March 1973 a group of mainly young, autonomously organized workers, some armed and masked with red bandanas, occupied Mirafiori and other Fiat factories for several days following the failure of an all-out strike, violently rejecting any kind of union-management negotiation. Through this occupation the “refusal of work had become a conscious movement” (Balestrini and Moroni, 1997, 435). During the action Mirafiori “took on the air of an impregnable fortress” (ibid.) and the security forces kept their distance. Faced with such a determined show of strength, management soon caved to all the workers’ demands, accepting the imposition of egalitarian measures (ibid). However, the Workers’ Party of Mirafiori did not spread nationally, either within the factories or in civil society, a reflection of the fragility of the autonomous workers’ movement’s loose network of localized organizations compared to the national bureaucracies of the unions and the institutional left.

Despite this peak and then relative setback, the assemblies’ activities continued to link with those of the newly emerging “area of Autonomia,” principally the Student Political Collectives (Colletivi Politici Studenteschi) and the autonomous collectives organized in the working-class districts of the metropolitan centers as part of a vast informal network of conflict in the neighborhoods, schools, and factories. However, the assemblies did not rely on these links for their contact with the outside world, producing their own publications such as Senza Padroni (Without Bosses) at Alfa Romeo, Lavoro Zero (Zero Work) at Porto Marghera, and Mirafiori Rossa (Red Mirafiori) at Fiat. While some of the assemblies, particularly at Alfa Romeo, survived until the 1990s, fusing with the Comitati di Base (rank and file—COBAS) autonomous service- and public-sector workers’ movement of the late 1980s, most closed down as a result of the wave of repression and mass sackings conducted after 1979.

The assemblies failed to overcome internal sectarian divisions, particularly between Autonomia and LC; much of LC leaned increasingly toward the unions and the official left, with the idea of forming a “government of the lefts,” while Autonomia adopted a much harder line. Nor were the assemblies sufficiently trusted—although their platform of demands often received more support among workers than the unions’ did—or consolidated enough to replace the unions and the factory councils as the majority workers’ organization. Consequently, the assemblies were left isolated and open to the accusations by the PCI and CGIL after 1978 of being fellow travelers of the Red Brigades and other armed organizations.

On December 2, 1977, the final rupture came between the unions and some of the factory vanguards attached to the remnants of the more moderate New Left groups on one side, and the assemblies on the other. A major national demonstration had been called in Rome by the FLM (Federazione dei Lavoratori Metalmecanici), the federation of metalworkers and historically the most militant union, in a final attempt to unite factory workers and the movements against the government’s austerity policies. The Milanese “workers’ left,” particularly the autonomous workers of Alfa Romeo, proposed a national meeting on the same day to relaunch the now flagging 1977 Movement and the assemblies.

However, the movements were profoundly divided as to whether to participate in the FLM’s march or express their repudiation of the unions’ collaboration with restructuring through a separate autonomous march. On the day of the march, in an atmosphere of severe tension with thousands of heavily armed police on the streets, the FLM’s stewards prevented any split from the march to the two separate autonomist meetings at the University of Rome, which thus failed to aggregate sufficient forces to make either a success. Meanwhile, two hundred thousand trade unionists marched through Rome, accentuating their strength in contrast to the weakness and isolation of both the autonomous workers’ movement and the remnants of the 1977 Movement.

It was clearly the end of the “factory pact” that hitherto had guaranteed a militant working-class unity of sorts, however diverse and quarrelling. It was also seen as a signal by the Confindustria (the umbrella organization representing the interests of Italian industrialists) that it had the full consent of the official workers’ movement in launching a campaign of political expulsions from the large factories. In February 1978, following the fall of the government of national solidarity, which the PCI had supported, the union federations formally adopted what became known as the “EUR line,” that of corporatist collaboration with government economic policy and the normalization of industrial relations that has since characterized Italian trade unionism.

The “Moro Affair” a few months later led to the isolation and criminalization of Autonomia Operaia and the more radical new social movements, although they had nothing to do with former DC prime minister Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and murder by the Red Brigades.¹⁵² By the end of the decade, the final battles against restructuring were fought with only a residual presence of the autonomist committees and assemblies in the factories, the majority of their militants having been sacked for political reasons or laid off. However, at the height of the 1977 Movement, the potential fusion of the autonomous youth, students’, women’s, and workers’ movements had briefly seemed to promise a revival and revolutionary upturn in factory and workplace struggles.

Following the Moro Affair in 1978, the overall level of repression and fear intensified throughout civil society, causing demobilization and a mass withdrawal into private life on the one hand, and the increasing resort to armed, clandestine, organized violence on the other, leaving a vulnerable minority in open political activity. As political and democratic spaces closed down, a similar process occurred in the workplace. It became much easier for the unions and the official left to smear their opponents in the assemblies and the factory vanguards of the New Left as terrorists or fellow travelers.

Lists of suspected terrorists and sympathizers were drawn up by the unions and passed to management in the same way that the PCI called on the public to denounce anyone who even seemed to be a terrorist. The Red Brigades’ response was to turn on local PCI and union activists in the fac-tories, some of whom were killed or kneecapped. This fratricidal conflict, pitting worker against worker, finally destroyed what remained of the tenuous unity of the factory councils and played straight into the hands of management, who now felt secure enough to take on the most militant autonomous workers, sacking them for political reasons.

Fiat led the way, in late 1979 dismissing sixty-one of the most militant New Left and autonomist activists for “moral behavior not consistent with the well-being of the Company” (Red Notes 1981, 71). The unions reacted sluggishly given that some of the workers were accused of using violence during strikes and because they, like the PCI, were keen to see them expelled. With the initiative in hand, Fiat announced the redundancies of 14,500 workers in September 1980, “the biggest mass sacking in Italian history” (ibid.). A sense of profound outrage filled the working-class districts of Turin, fueling the desperate last stand of the Italian Fordist mass worker, a situation similar to the British miners’ strike of 1984–85. However, the national unions were paralyzed by confusion; as well the PCI had recently ended the “Historic Compromise” pact, no longer useful to the elites, as a state of emergency with all-out repression and criminalization of the extraparliamentary left had taken its place.

The rest of the Italian manufacturing industry quickly followed suit, launching a wave of mass sackings and redundancies, including in 1982 a third of the workforce of Alfa Romeo, one of the bastions of the autonomous workers’ assemblies. Post-Fordist deindustrialization and restructuring compounded the left’s divisions, and a gathering atmosphere of social fear, brought about by the “diffuse guerrilla warfare” (Quadrelli 2008, 85) and draconian state repression known as the “Years of Lead,” ended the hegemony of the mass worker as the central antagonist actor of the 1970s, and with it the Autonomia Operaia movement.

One of the most important shifts since the 1970s has been the creation of a “society of non-work,” one of whose most antagonistic subjects is the reconfiguring of the “socialized worker” as the “autonomous [self-employed] immaterial worker,” central to the information and cyber economies ( Virno and Hardt 1996; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004, 2009). The refusal of work and of poverty now takes the form of “exodus” in all its varieties, including the mass migrations of economic and political refugees from the peripheries to the centers of the globalized economy, rather than mainly static resistance at the point of production.

Italy’s Autonomist Movement

The Hot Autumn and the Factory Councils

The Autonomous Workers’ Assemblies

Repression and Defeat of the Autonomous Workers’ Movements

Conclusions

References