CHAPTER 13.1
THE
FACTORY-SOCIETY RELATIONSHIP AS A HISTORICAL CATEGORY
by Sergio Bologna
The editorial collective of La Classe
have drawn up a “Questionnaire on Perspectives for Marxist Research in Italy”.
This questionnaire is addressed to various organisations and journals in Italy
involved with militant research and debate. Its purpose is to seek an “overall
assessment of the present situation of Marxism in Italy... an assessment of the
extent to which methods and contents of research have been influenced by the
mass struggles (in particular of the period 1968-70), as well as how they are
likely to be affected by the recently-won ‘150 hours’ demand.”
The notes which follow were originally intended to preface a
discussion of the history of the working class in the auto sector, a discussion
which Primo Maggio is intending to pursue.
They have been rewritten in order to provide a partial reply to the questions
posed by La Classe – partial because they
limit themselves to questions arising out of the history of FIAT.
Looking at our own history, we could start with the year
1960. In that year, for the first time since 1945, there was talk of bringing the
working-class movement into the arena of government – bringing it into the
management of society. Despite the defeats of the 1950s, the PCI had a fairly
self-satisfied view of itself as the only party that had anticipated Khruschev's about-turn, and as a party that represented a
broad spectrum of opinions and political alliances, and which was open – in
fact very open – at the cultural level. This openness was the factor that
enabled many “non-organic” intellectuals to link in with the Party's cultural policies.
The Party's influence spread into the film industry, into publishing, into the
art world, and into the academic establishment: this was the rich reward of its
policy of openness.
Perhaps the most important results were achieved in the
field of historiography. Gramsci's work provided a
rich source of historiographical inspiration, as well
as a perfectly-formed historical method. His ability to inspire others
outstripped even the important influence of Croce in this field. Furthermore,
non-Communist Party historical research was also Gramscian
to the core when it came to a critique of the Party's cultural history and the
history of the Party itself. We (and some of the editors of La Classe in particular) all remember the “debate on the
historiography of Stalinism”, which presumed to criticise the methodology of
communist-oriented historians, accusing them of apologetics – whereas in fact
apologetics is hardly a fair charge to level against the PCI-oriented
historians, especially when you compare them with the French and East Germans.
It was not so much apologetics, or the cult of the personality, which
constituted the blockage (for all that they were “orthodox”, the East German
historians, for example, had undertaken research into the capitalist structures
of post-World War I Germany which were far from unimportant), but rather the
particular, intelligent, flexible and suggestive interpretation of Italian
history which had been provided by Gramsci, and which
was part and parcel of the political line elaborated by the PCI. For this
reason any notion of a “disciplinary detachment” would have been illusory – any
cultural battle which was not at the same time a battle for a new organisation
would have been seen as time wasted. The feeling was that if, perhaps, we
proved capable of achieving something at the level of political organisation, then maybe afterwards we could have attempted a new
interpretation of history. And that was the way it happened.
Let us take the keystone of the Gramscian
method, the concept of “hegemony” – ie the
relationship between the political class and the social base of which it is
both the expression and at the same time the transcendence – inasmuch as the
hegemonic political class never reflects merely the same surface covered by its
social base, but a broader and more articulated surface. Let us examine the
workings of this concept of “hegemony” on two themes that are dear to us –
namely, Italian revolutionary syndicalism and Americanism.
Gramsci said of Italian revolutionary
syndicalism that it is the “instinctive, elementary, primitive – but healthy –
reaction of the working class against the formation of a power bloc with the
bourgeoisie, and for an alliance with the peasantry, and, above all, with the
peasantry of the South. In a certain sense, syndicalism is a weak attempt by
the southern peasantry, represented through their most advanced intellectuals,
to take on the leadership of the proletariat.” [Note 1] On Americanism, he
says: “Americanism, in its most complete form, requires a necessary
precondition (with which the Americans who have dealt with this problem have
not concerned themselves, because in America it exists 'naturally'): this
precondition might be termed 'a rational demographic composition', and consists
in the following: that they do not have the problem of numbers of classes with
no essential function within the productive world – i.e. classes that are
absolutely parasitical.” And he concludes: “Hegemony is born from within the
factory, and for it to exercise itself it requires only a minimal number of
professional political and ideological intermediaries.” [Note 2]
Thus we have two separate levels – the societas
rerum [the society of things; of what is not
subject to human will] and the societas hominum [the society of men; of what is subject to
human will]. Even though, for Gramsci, history is the
history of the relationships between these two, for Gramscian
historiography it is the societas rerum that prevails – in other words, the history of political
institutions and political ideologies as a separate body. These latter-day Gramscians consider it pointless to examine, first, how the
capitalist mode of production transforms relations between people into
relations between things, in order then to be able to begin constructing the
slow, laborious, difficult path (a path which only the working class can
travel, as well as, indirectly, those intellectuals who take the working class
as their reference point) that will restore a new relationship between human
beings – in other words, a balance-of-power relationship between classes. Every
attempt at Marxist historical research has to contain both of these two moments
– how the societas hominum
is transformed into the societas rerum and vice-versa. From society,
to the factory, to class conflict. And in that sense, the only societas hominum is
that which is constructed by the organisation of working-class violence – all
else is a mere appendage of the relations of production – be it society, or
parties, or institutions – subordinated to capital.
It was not easy to escape from the grip, from the
methodological attraction, of Gramsci's “hegemony”,
but it was nonetheless necessary to make that break – to break with that band
of historians who were divided between those who devoted more pages and those
who devoted less pages to the “society of things” – while all the time leaving
those “things” – i.e. “economic factors” – as separate from men, confined
within “ghetto” chapters where the odd figure, index or table served to remind
the distracted reader that the professor was now talking of “economics” and was
arguing a position of “historical materialism”.
The most radical solution was to reduce the two levels to
one single level – in other words, to eliminate the very bases of the concept
of hegemony. Perhaps the most radical statement in this regard was made by Tronti, writing in Quaderni
Rossi:
“At the highest level of capitalist development, the social
relation becomes a moment of the relation of production; the whole of society
becomes an articulation of production. In other words, the whole of society
exists as a function of the factory, and the factory extends its exclusive
domination over the whole of society. It is on this basis that the machinery of
the political state tends increasingly to become one and the same with the
figure of the collective capitalist, becomes increasingly the property of the
capitalist mode of production and thus a function of the capitalist. The
process of composition of capitalist society as a unified whole, a process
imposed by the specific developmental course of capitalist production, no
longer tolerates the existence of a political terrain which is even formally
independent of the network of social relations.” [Note 3].
Quaderni Rossi had hurled the concept
of hegemony under the stamping presses of FIAT-Mirafiori.
A large part of the practical and theoretical discoveries that were to be made
subsequently – but also of the political and scientific limitations – can be
traced back to this sentence of Tronti's. These
discoveries were reached via a long march through labour-power in all its
articulations, in order to achieve an unprecedented level of class recomposition – in short, the events of 1968. Students,
technicians, marginalised proletarians, the unemployed and non-organic
intellectuals were all brought under the command of the working class of the
large factories. There were no alternatives to that class analysis. Those who
rejected it – either because they were still tied to the old cliches (peasants, petty bourgeois students, lumpen-proletarians etc) or because they were too steeped
in Third International sociologism – could offer no
alternative perspective. But once the problem of organisation had been posed in
these new terms, a formally independent terrain of politics absolutely had to
be found. This was not a problem of gradualism (from the factory struggle to
society; from the wage struggle to the struggle for power; from the struggle
against the organisation of work to the destruction of the hierarchy). It was
something radically different, precisely because at that time it was absolutely
necessary to find a way of responding to the State's provocation. How was it
possible to identify the “state machine” with the “collective capitalist” after
the events of 12 December 1969? [Note 3a] Everybody had their own answers, drawing out of their old armouries the formulas
which best seemed to fit the case: the promptest replies were provided by those
who had the rustiest weapons.
1970 saw the beginning of the Golden Age of ultra-Leninism –
the second childhood of the Resistance. At the level of theory and organisation
it was a case of two steps forward and two steps back. But at the level of
historiography – to return to our theme – there is no doubt that this was the
best possible climate to allow the old guard of the PCI to clear the various
lumps in their respective throats, in producing that autobiographical output
which has perhaps been the most valid and genuine contribution from official
quarters to the history of the working-class movement.
So, in 1962, Tronti's premises and
the work of La Classe had not generated
notable consequences within the historical disciplines. But something had
happened which was perhaps of greater importance: any process of renewal of the
working-class movement, any strategic break with the old political
organisations, and any reconstruction of a working-class historiography had now
been tied firmly to the workers of FIAT and to the factory-society relationship
[rapporto città-fabbrica]
of which Turin is an expression. And thus, in a certain sense, we returned to
the problem of continuity with the work of Gramsci.
Turin and FIAT were the exemplification of that absorption of the political terrain
within the direct relations of production. It was the place, in Gramsci's words, “where hegemony is born directly from the factory, and, for it to exercise itself, needs only a
minimal number of professional political and ideological intermediaries”; it
was the only “Americanised” place in Italy, the only place with a “rational
demographic composition”.
Is it perhaps here that we should seek the roots of that
dismissive attitude towards formal levels of organisation, that belief that the
party was already wholly contained within the class – so that all that was
needed was a suitably worded leaflet in order to bring it into existence? Perhaps. But it was certainly this that gave rise to the
necessity of postulating organisation as a “separate” sphere, external to the
relation of production itself – here I have in mind those who advanced the
“autonomy of the political” in order to explain the scissor-movement within
which the multinationals move in relation to Christian Democracy, or who
proposed an “optimism of the will” to make up for a theory of organisation
based on total subjectivism, which explicitly excludes any mass terrain other
than that of pure “servicing”.
However, what interests us for the moment is to draw some
methodological conclusions at the level of historiography. This way of seeing
the whole of society as an articulation of production, this rejection of any
notion of a political terrain that was autonomous from social relationships,
led to the elimination of political historiography (or the history of political
parties) as a discipline-unto-itself, and also meant that people began to see
economic history as the basic building-block for a general history of society.
It came to the point where the old “history of the labour process” approach was
seen as a more valid instrument than the whole tradition of historiography
which saw the working-class movement in terms of its political institutions.
The first to bear the brunt of this attitude were the
history of anti-Fascism and the histories of the Resistance: these came to be
seen as essentially vacuous and servile. The real problem to be examined was
how and why the anti-fascist political class of the post-War period made itself
available as a transitional enabling factor to guarantee social production and
to ensure the continuity of the relations of exploitation. [...]
When we spoke of Quaderni
Rossi, we said that its concept of the factory was so totalitarian as to
absorb all other levels of politics. What we did not say was that there remained
another aspect, or rather another object which came under analysis and also
under working-class attack – namely the state as collective capitalist. Within
this perspective a reassessment of the debate about fascism became imperative.
By this point, research into the links and complicities between high finance
and the ruling hierarchies – who paid whom and who was or was not compromised –
in short, the identification of the members of that oligarchy – was no longer
functional, in the sense that the purges had already been over for a good while
(if they had ever begun). Instead what was needed was to go to the roots of
fascism as a moment of the socialisation of the capitalist relations of
production. Early research done in this area, both centred on quantitative
assessments of development and on the critique of the ideology of corporatism,
succeeded gradually in breaking down the old myth about the capitalist
backwardness of fascism. They also broke down the image of fascism as both
cause and perpetuator of stagnation. Italian society under fascism was seen to
have had a far greater homogeneity with the overall fabric of the capitalist
world market, and in particular with the more advanced industrialised
countries. How was it possible to attempt a characterisation of the collective
capitalist state without going right to the roots of its theories and its means
of operation? This explains the interest shown in Keynes and Alfredo Rocco, Hjalmar Schacht and Roosevelt.
But there was another, perhaps more important, point, which
had to do with the analysis of monopoly. 1961 had seen the publication in Italy
of Hilferding's Finance Capital, which made it
possible for people to examine the origins of the Comintern
debate on the nature of monopoly. From Hilferding
to Lenin and from Lenin to Dimitrov. Monopoly and fascism as the inseparable terms of an alliance of the
most reactionary section of the bourgeoisie with the agrarian classes and the
state bureaucracy. Thus the roots of stagnation were to be sought in the
parasitic sector of the capitalist class – in Finanzkapital,
that tight web of positions* of income, of commercial origin, of agrarian
origin (nonetheless tied to the banks) which, together with the
savings-inclined petty bourgeoisie, had formed a “law and order” bloc
characterised by immobilism, which had blocked the
process of the wider reproduction of labour-power. This provided an objective
convergence of defensive interests among the “producer” sectors of society –
i.e. “pure capital, workers and employers, backed by groups of radicals and
liberals – in other words, that section of the free-trade bourgeoisie that was
being suffocated under monopoly.
While this schema might have worked when applied to Edison
or SNIA (and thus seemed to correspond with the development of autarchy), it
was already insufficient for those industrial sectors which had gone into
crisis (naval, shipbuilding, steel) and over which the IRI had assumed control.
And no more did it function for FIAT. Perhaps it is only today – now that the
dollar crisis has forced us to re-examine the question of money in Marx (in our
enthusiasm to examine money in Keynes we had forgotten to examine the function
of money in Capital) – that we are able to return to the debate on
credit and the crisis, on the necessary connection between “the availability of
others' capital, and thus of other's labour” which is proper to the credit
system, and the political function of the state in supporting single
capitalists in crisis, restoring them to the social function which, as agents
of capital, they fulfil in the extraction of overall surplus value. The role of
IRI thus comes to be seen no longer as an emergency subsidy in a situation of
upheaval due to international crisis; and thus the “privatisation” of IRI was
no longer a betrayal of its original aims and a backward step in relation to
capital's project of socialisation; rather, IRI becomes a branch of the state
which re-invests the individual capitalist with the function of command that –
for a multiplicity of reasons – he has lost. In exchange for nothing, when all
is said and done; in exchange for a rate of interest! Within all this the
aspect of concentration becomes secondary. It is no longer the most politically
relevant aspect, but a secondary technical phenomenon of restructuration.
Nor, by the same token, should a similar relationship between state credit and
industry be considered as anomalous or deviant in relation to the normal
functioning of capital: rather, it is precisely that relationship which Marx
describes in the chapters on credit in Book Three of Capital.
On the one hand, our first attempts at the organisational
level, from 1964 onwards, brought us up against the problems of the economic
conjuncture and the recession, with monetary manoeuvres (and thus, once again,
with credit); on the other, the struggles in the American ghettoes had just
undermined in practical terms a large part of historical materialist sociology
– in particular the notions of the poor, of the sub-proletariat, and of women,
in relation to those of the worker of the large factory which someone in an
off-the-cuff remark had christened the mass-worker. Here was another notion of
the factory-city, of “society as a factory”, another notion of “Americanism”:
through violence, the ghettoes were imposing their own hegemony on the factory.
What's more, for all that we tried to apply the model to Italian immigrants
from the South, this particular division of society, based on the colour of your
skin, was a specifically American law of exploitation. In addition, 1964 was
also the year of Berkeley, and the start of American bombings of North Vietnam:
the start of that great awakening of the white radical movement which, in 1967,
was to fuse with the student movement in Europe. Where were we to put them,
these students? Damn! All our shelves of historical and sociological categories
were thrown into turmoil. A disaster! And then, in our own ranks, we also had
people maintaining that the Vietnam War was a war of peasants and was therefore
a struggle for capitalist development! Without understanding the difference
between a peasant pure and simple and a peasant under arms, and without
foreseeing (although we can hardly blame them for this) that those self-same
peasants were about to bring about a crisis in the world monetary system.
Historiography, along with all the other academic disciplines, closed its eyes
and pretended not to see or hear. And yet very quickly, particularly after the
Chinese cultural revolution, there was a strong desire
for a liberation, for some alternative within our “discipline”. This was the
period of the creation of a double cultural market – the official market and
the “movement” market. This proved useful to the publishing industry, because
it was in crisis at the time, and was able to diversify its production in order
to cover both of them.
At the level of militant historiography, Del Carria's Proletari Senza Rivoluzione succeeded
in fulfilling this task, filling this gap. But it generated no follow-on. Who
knows why? Perhaps because, as we said at the start, historiography only comes
“after”, comes only at the conclusion of a process of organisation.
And in fact 1968-69 saw a whole new batch of political
activists. Once again the centrality of FIAT was on the agenda, as was the
“Americanism” of Turin, and the whole movement seemed to have been brought
under the command of the workers of No. 54 Shop at FIAT-Mirafiori.
In 1962 the business of writing the history of the communist movement had been
taken in hand by what was very much a minority grouping; but in 1969 this minoritarian grouping was able to fuse with the mass
movement, and once again the key interpretational points were class composition
and the notion of the mass worker. In certain respects this corresponded to
what Gramsci, in the passage cited above, called
“rational demographic composition”, but for us class composition meant
something quite other than simply the structure of the workforce and its
stratification by job definitions, skill levels or income. This wholly
sociological and trade unionist interpretation was quite different to what we
understood by class composition – for us class composition meant the synthesis
of the struggle experiences, the subjective attitudes, the ideological
sedimentations and the spontaneous behaviours of a particular class aggregate.
Defining factors such as qualifications, skill-levels, age, place of origin (ie all the so-called “objective” elements) were certainly
included within the notion of class composition, but did not constitute its
substance. All this was to have an important influence in defining our
organisational programme and style of work, but it would be wrong to say – as
some people still claim – that there was therefore a determining relationship
between class composition and organisation, whereby the political programme
became subordinate to class composition.
Within class composition we had identified the mass-worker
as the vanguard level, as the driving force. Since there were many
post-communist elements in this debate, and since it was justified with rather
makeshift, schematic analyses that divided the twentieth century between the
phase of the skilled engineering worker (seen as ideologised
and Third Internationalist) and the phase of the mobile mass worker (seen as
pagan and consumerist), and since I myself have some responsibilities in that
regard, it would perhaps be useful to return to the beginning and to follow the
question down the very simple path that is provided by the history of the auto
industry, and the history of FIAT in particular. Therefore the compilation that
follows is very much a preliminary synopsis, to lay the groundwork. However,
before going on to the chronology, there are a few points that I would like to
make (and for the reasons outlined cited above it should be clear that I am not
trying to “demolish” Gramsci, particularly inasmuch
as, in Americanism and Fordism, he deals with
political questions that are very pertinent to our times.
*****
To begin with, a close examination of Taylorism
(see the following article, “Dates from the History of FIAT”) requires us to
separate the development of the scientific organisation of labour from the
question of the massification of the large-scale
factory. By the end of his life, Taylor had re-organised only medium-sized
industries in the USA, but had, for example, already met Renault, who obtained
from him his new systems for cutting sheet steel and the procedures for
producing fast steels; Agnelli wanted to “Taylorise” his workers in 1919, was prevented by the
occupation of his factories, but then went ahead as soon as the danger was
past, after April 1921. Can one therefore argue that the large-scale European
automobile industry accepted Taylor's systems before the large American
factories, where there was a stronger resistance by “working class corporativism”? The problem for US capital was easily
stated: the barrier represented by the skills of the engineering workers, the
only ones who understood their tools and who by that time were better at
“soldiering” than actually working, and who had strong links to their union
(the more corporatist the workforce, the stronger the union connection). This
barrier could only be overcome by expropriating them of their knowledge and
skill, and by destroying all traces of the union. The instruction book, and hierarchical promotion, were the two main weapons
used. This was a barrier placed between the capitalist and constant capital:
the employer seeks to regain the secrets of the machinery in order to be able
to coordinate it, make it uniform, and lead it into complex cooperation. The note of psychology that Marx introduces when talking of cooperation
were taken up by Taylor when he spoke of “soldiering”.
So, the breaking of this barrier is a highly significant
historical fact – it is precisely the root of the Taylorist
system. But the kind of workers that Taylor was seeking to select did not at
all have the same characteristics as the image that we give to the mass worker.
Taylor's ideal workers would be attached to the factory, but not to one single
job; would work willingly (“in my system there is no place for those who are
able to work, but unwilling”); would already have accepted the “mental
revolution”; and would allow themselves to be increasingly exploited. Taylor's
factory is not a conflictual factory – there is no
place for strikes or for forms of workers' organisation. Taylor's worker enters
the factory as a labourer, and twenty years later may emerge from it as a white
collar worker. And in fact the mobile worker is precisely the form of worker
that Taylor seeks to purge out of his system – as an inferior race of worker.
Thus there is a clear elitist intention in his programme: the substitution of one
“labour aristocracy” with another. This corresponds to the phase in which
machinery was set into continuous production, in a system of large-scale series
production in which incentives were calculated on the basis of the average
productivity of the section or department. But this stage lasted for a good
twenty years – the years corresponding to the period of fascism in Europe. The
aspect of biological selection of workers was understood perfectly by Gramsci; the establishment of standard bio-physical characteristics
would be the first step towards systematic interventions in working-class
life-styles – both as regards the control of alcoholism (prohibition) and as
regards sexuality: libertine and polygamous morality was appropriate to people
who had free time during the day, but not to people who worked in factories:
“In America, the rationalisation of work and prohibitionism are undoubtedly linked: the inquiries by
industrialists into the personal life of workers, the inspection services being
created in some firms in order to control the 'morality' of workers are a
necessity of the new method of work... Taylor is expressing with brutal
frankness the aim of American society: develop in the worker the maximum extent
of machine-like automatic behaviours; breaking the old psycho-social nexus of
skilled work which demanded a certain active participation of intelligence,
imagination and initiative by the worker, and reducing productive operations
only to their physical and machine-like aspects.” [Americanism
and Fordism, p. XX].
In short, it was a matter of overcoming one phase of transition in order to
arrive at another “via the creation of a new psycho-social nexus of a kind
different to those which precede it, and undoubtedly superior. Inescapably, a
process of forced selection will take place; a part of the old working class
will be ruthlessly eliminated from the world of work, and perhaps from the
world tout court.” (ibid.)
Gramsci does not say indicate to
what extent America's productive democracy might have been the forerunner of
Nazism's racist project of Aryanisation – or
vice-versa – because he had not been in a position to witness the full
unfolding of Nazism. With hindsight we can say that, if one accepts this line
of analysis, the process of massification of labour
power in the USA took place via two processes of racial selection – the first
being practised on the elite of white workers, and the other practised on the
blacks. It is here that one has to deal with the question of the use of high
wages as a means of persuasion, which was a possibility for as long as the US
maintained its monopoly of technology. The high wages were introduced in order
to tie the workforce to the factory and prevent excessive levels of turnover.
But the most salient fact – as outlined by Gramsci –
was that many workers rejected the high wages because they were not willing to
allow themselves to be super-exploited. “Ford industry requires a discrimination, a level of qualification in its workers
which other industries do not yet require, a new kind of qualification, a form
of consumption of labour-power and a quantity of labour-power consumed at the
same time which are exhausting and oppressive, and which the wage is not able
to recompense for all people.” [ibid. p. XX]
Now, it is not accidental that on two crucial occasions in the history of FIAT
– in the years that we are covering – the management had to introduce special
measures in order to stop workers leaving their jobs. Thus, both in 1916 and in
1931 (at the height of the war, and at the height of the Depression), in an
“underdeveloped” country, people were rejecting “FIAT wages” because they were
not prepared to kill themselves for work. Taylorism's
project of racial selectivity needed time for it to be successful; but the
needs of the large-scale auto factory were more specific and pressing. In their
case, however, the elitist formula no longer functioned. The only
value-measurement for the mass worker is his resistance to overwork.* Thus the
mass worker comes into existence within the large auto factory as soon as
large-scale series production begins; in the beginning he exists as an
auxiliary stratum within the production process, and then gradually climbs the
ladder until finally he becomes the centre of the production process. Thus the
history of this particular worker-race which was to have been the mass worker, is internal to the auto cycle of production, and
from here extended into the other fields of production. Resistance to overwork
means the overcoming of any consensual and ideological mediation, and makes any
“mental revolution” superfluous.
The problem of ideology would thus be solved, were it not
for one small detail: the fact that Taylor's systems were supported by the
working-class movement in Europe and in the Soviet state – i.e. by the various
heirs of the Second International viewpoint that had seen capitalism
essentially as a waste of productive forces, and saw one of socialism's
objectives as the elimination of waste. In this regard, Gramsci
attributes to Trotsky the responsibility for this support – something which he
saw as one of the deviations of the Soviet state. “The tendency of Leon Davidovich... consisted in the 'too' resolute (and thus not
rationalised) desire to grant supremacy in national life to industry and
industrial methods, to accelerate, via external coercive means, discipline and
order in production; to match national habits to the necessities of work.”
Transferring the responsibility to Trotsky is one way of evading the question,
even if it is true that, in 1926, a number of the older workers' nuclei were in
agreement with Trotsky's position. The defence of the power of the old
Bolshevik vanguards amounted to a desire to command socialist labour. However,
industrialisation took place under a different aspect,* with the mass of youth
comprising the new party membership.* and with those who had been expelled from
the countryside. Trotsky's defeat (even Gramsci
admits it implicitly) reveals the extent of workers' resistance to excessive
demands for productivity – the refusal of the younger generations to place
themselves immediately under the threefold surveillance of the army, the trade
union, and the older workers. However, what Trotsky expressed better than any
other is the “forced” character of industrialisation, the necessity” of
socialist labour.
However, this elitist ideology had a certain hold on the
stratum of workers who had made up the body of the workers' council movement. Agnelli himself, in the period of fascism, sought to co-opt
these councilist elements within the ranks of his
“select”. On occasion he even managed to play them off against the
non-specialised workers, as in 1924. And in 1930, at the time of the struggle
against the Bedaux system, these cadres chose
passivity as the means* to distance themselves from the mass of “fascist”
youth, to such an extent as to bring on themselves disciplinary measures from
the Party. The leader of this struggle was an individualist ex-anarchist named Malusardi.
How else can we explain the tenacity of residual
anti-egalitarian sentiment within the communist trade unions? How can we
explain the continuity between Buozzi and Trentin? The question of ideology and the mass worker is
not therefore a question simply resolved by saying that physical resistance
replaced consent.* It is the Third Internationalist variant of the craft worker
who perpetuates his behaviours even when new technology and changes in the
production process have swept away this social figure. Thus an ideological
pressure operates upon the mass worker, a pressure which derives not from the
employers, but from within the working-class tradition itself. This might also
explain the persistence of forms of payment by incentive that
have been entirely superseded by the technological process: whereas at
Ford piecework has never existed, in FIAT it continues right up to the present
day.
But how long can this internal factory division continue?
How much of it depends on the reduction of every other social condition to the
relation of direct production? How on earth did we talk of the mass worker for
all that period in which we faced a tendentially
full-employment society, and how is it that we talk of the mass worker less and
less as the crisis begins to tear apart the labour market? Here too America
provides us with lessons. From the struggles in the ghettoes, to the planning
of unemployment; from the struggles of women to the planning of the family – we
think it is important to begin this debate with a review of the book Regulating
the Poor, where we discover that it is also possible to operate a selection
process among the poor (among other things, by controlling their sexual lives
in the same way as Gramsci describes the controlled
sexual lives of Ford workers). The temporary and changeable relationship with
work experienced by the mass worker thus becomes a privileged condition in
comparison with those who are destined to remain poor and only poor.
However, the relation between the city and the factory [il rapporto
città-fabbrica] also changes, and the management
of assistance takes on a specific autonomy in relation to the management of the
direct wage – an autonomy of local power in relation to the dictatorship of the
“company”. In fact the centre of proletarian subordination shifts from the
factory to the ghetto. Juvenile work – and child labour – are
replaced by the youth gang; the exploitation of the woman textile-factory
worker is replaced by the isolation of the “unsupported mother”. Thus we have
continued to depict Turin as “American” while all the time America was turning
into something else, and our “Americanism”, far from being an advanced
position, merely reflected a backwardness of white culture, whether bourgeois
or proletarian.
However, this white culture, by virtue of the singular
convergence of various contributions, has at least succeeded in tracing fairly
organically the history of Turin/FIAT, a history which in a certain sense has
been “pruned off” from the general history of Italy, or the history of Italian
industrialisation or of the Italian working class. The fact remains that,
thanks to the work of Spriano, Abrate
and Castronovo, and through the systematic labours of
the Rivista di Storia Contemporanea [Review
of Contemporary History] (using methods deriving from the Quaderni
Rossi tradition) we now have a fairly complete picture of class
relationships in the contemporary era – a picture, however, which is in danger
of becoming increasingly “provincial”. The fact that FIAT, as its response to
the class attack of 1969-71, is fleeing from Turin and taking on a structure
articulated over the whole national territory, and the (perhaps even more
important) fact of the “decline of auto” as a mode of production and
consumption – these facts strip a lot of the “militant” weight from historical
analyses still based on the old FIAT-Turin, factory-city relationship. For this
reason we would argue that the new form assumed by FIAT has led to a rapid
ageing of a whole historiographic tradition. It is for
this reason that we have decided to publish the article by Bronzino,
Germanetto and Guidi. [Ref.]
But now let us shift locations by a few miles. Take Milan,
for example. There exists not one single attempt at synthesis, no single
“pilot” research project, on this very important pole of class activity, on
this city's brief but crucial* history, on even one single employer. Nothing at all. And what is worse is the lack of any basic
set of hypotheses from which we can work – whereas for Turin-FIAT the basic
hypothesis is more or less the same for all historians of whatever school. The
only things that can be said are negative things: there is no doubt that to
reduce all social relations to the factory relation would lead to deformations,
not so much because of the multiplicity of economic sectors functioning in
Milan (including the service and tertiary sectors) but because of the nature of
the overall relationship between factory and territory. In all the struggles of
the Milanese working class there clearly exists a
double programme – to fuse the working-class front (at the level of industrial
sectors, of trades, of homogeneous factories) with the disseminated worker,
with the people, with the whole territory. And the use of violence at a
territorial level is all the more felt, the weaker
(socially) the bloc of production is in se and per se.
One of Primo Maggio's intentions is to begin to break
the conspiracy of silence surrounding the struggles of the working class in
Milan. But one thing we should say straight away: we need an alternative
operating notion to Gramsci's “rational demographic
composition” – but we will not be going (to use the definition offered in
Americanism and Fordism) to seek that alternative in
Naples (i.e. popular Naples, as opposed to working-class Detroit). This,
though, seems to have been the choice of those who want to replace the factory
with “the community”, making a transition from workerism
to populism, confusing modern poverty with its pre-capitalist forms. Nor will
we be going to seek an alternative to “factory hegemony” in offices or data
processing centres (the big temptation of a white-collar history of Milan). For
the moment we shall be going to look for it within the writings of Marx.
Finally (a point to which we will have to return, and on which we would welcome
an opinion from La Classe), we are moving
within a perspective of general historiography, within a perspective of a majoritarian proposition that will be capable of winning
(as has been the case in the proposition of the “factory-society”). We are not
interested in a perspective of “other history” or “small history” as outlined
so suggestively by Bermani in his introduction to Guerrilla
Pages (the history of the Moscatelli partisan
formations). Militant historiography does not mean underground historiography,
even if the alternative behaviours of white youth – of the white mass worker –
may take on the role of principal subject.
22 May 1991
Translated from Primo Maggio No. ?]
_______________________________________
Translated by
Ed Emery
Extracted from: THE BOOK OF FIAT: Insurrection, insubordination, occupation and revolutionary
politics at the FIAT motor company – 1907-1982
Published:
Red Notes / May Day Rooms
First
published in 2020