CHAPTER
13
by Romano Alquati
translated by Ed Emery
[Paper delivered at the Seminar on Class Composition, at the Centro Giovanni Francovich, in
Postscript by the Author [1975]:
This piece is the text of a paper delivered at a conference at the Centro Francovich in Florence, and then published anonymously in a
limited number of copies that have had a reasonable circulation; it is less
unknown as a text than might have been expected. I am republishing it here
because it offers many substantive elements that can be traced back to previous
research experiences, first at FIAT, then in Quaderni
Rossi, and then in the journal Classe operaia. On balance I would
say that it does not add a lot: I would say that its novelty lies in the fact
that penetrated the question deeply, especially in the first part which deals
with the cycle of production at FIAT. It is one of the rare occasions where
someone has published a fragment of a research into
There is clearly an imbalance between
the two parts of this paper: some aspects (in the first sections) are dealt
with fairly substantially, albeit within the limits imposed by a conference,
whereas the material in the later sections is only sketched, often little more
then section headings. It seems to me that in this text, which starts by taking
the emerging reality of the multinational as an overall level of historical
development of capitalist accumulation, what appears more heavily than in the
other is the lack of analysis of society and of social reproduction, of the
state and the political system.
We move then between wages and profits without grasping the central importance
of rent in the Italian capitalist system, and also without grasping the
importance of financial capital as a mix of rent and profit, of public and
private, of which Fiat, in its relationship with the political system it was
the most important node. The paper also does not see how and why the working
class is tending to its own recomposition on a scale that was different from
that of the 1960s. However, for the little that it contains, my paper sparked a
certain interest. It has been and may still be, a
reference point for those who have taken this kind of research further, into
different sectors and structural nodes. But even on all this, we are seeing the
emergence of new things that are more satisfactory than the work that we were
doing in those years.
____________________________________
CAPITAL AND
CLASS AT FIAT: A MIDPOINT OF THE INTERNATIONAL CYCLE
Pub. Centro G.Francovich, May 1st 1967.
The following is a paper presented by Romano Alquati to
a Seminar on “Production and Territory”, organised at the Architecture Faculty
of Florence University, April 30th – May 1st 1967.
FOREWORD
We use the phrase class
composition as Marx used it, to mean only the original process of constituting
the class.
We use the phrase articulation
of the labour force to encompass all the internal differences, both
horizontal and vertical, within labour power in its capacity as variable
capital, beginning from differences of concrete labour.
We use the phrase class
recomposition to encompass movements of the working class against capital,
but in a framework of the present absence of the tactical strategic leadership
role of the party.
We use the expression political unification, on the other hand, to mean something which
still lies wholly in the future – class movements organised strategically and
tactically by the revolutionary and international party of the working class.
In short, that which is currently lacking.
_______________
Some features of the metalmechanical industry.
A first obvious consideration that helps us to understand the
question of cooperation at FIAT, and how it is conditioned by concrete
labour, is the following: the metalmechanical industry is the only one that
contains within itself both the cycles of production of the means of
production specific to the productive forms of capitalism: on the
one hand it produces the machinery (with a few exceptions, which do not alter
the position, such as the mass production* of tools, equipment, plant
and machinery in the special departments of other productive ectors whose
workers are remunerated according to the trade union contract of those
sectors), and on the other it produces goods intended for consumption. From
this it follows, among other things, that the production cycles of a company in
the metalmechanical sector already feature, within their cooperation, a
very complex combination of the collective labourer, in which the division of
labour has characteristics which generally occur only in the social of
labour. Because it is a cooperation between levels of
the labour force that are different and with distinct functions in the
labour process, such as generally occurs only in the division of labour at the
level of a given society.
Precisely for
this reason the metalmechanical companies can separate out and distribute
various moments of the cycle within the social fabric of production of goods:
as what is known as auxiliary functions, which are located as nodes in
the social fabric of capitalist accumulation. And this also happens even if
they maintain them within their own corporate structure: they always function
as nodes of the overall cycle of accumulation of social capital.
The sectors
of production and the categories of waged labour are generally
distinguished according to the kind of goods that they produce (according to
the kind of needs that the given commodity, according to its use value, tends
to satisfy). This, at least, is the tendency among both employers on the one
hand, and trade unions on the other. However, there are areas of production and
trade-union categories in which a technological criterion still prevails.
What defines a
sector of production in technological terms is the type of technology that
is used in the transformation of its work-object. But the type of technology is
mainly determined by the material of which the work-object is made. The metalworking
[metalmechanical] sector is a technological sector because it is the
sector in which production takes place by working metals with both cold and hot
processing technologies, by shaping them, and by removal of material, as the
manuals teach us.
Most consumer
durable goods are made of metals and metal alloys. The overwhelming part of the means of production (at least until the start of the
process of cyberneticisation) have been made of metal and metal
alloys. This means that that since the early of manufacturing (and later,
despite the growing complexity of companies and production cycles, and despite
the derivation and specialisation of functions) the same type of technology has
been used to manufacture both the means of production and the various consumer
goods.
As a result of
this exceptional characteristic, these two types of production that* allowed
them to maintain within the sector part of the overall process of accumulation
(without going through the market) developed in a more direct interdependence.
And also as a result of this exceptional chacteristic, in the history of
capital the metalmechanical sector has been the sector that had a driving
function within accumulation. And in particular in the
mechanisation of labour. It has been a driving force in the development
of mass* production on a social scale, long before they then became a
key sector as producer of consumer durable goods.
In the
metalmechanical industry therefore aggregates not only the majority of the
working class, but also the vast majority of factory workers. There are
three explanations for this, namely
1) the exceptional complexity and the forms of
cooperation in the sector;
2) massification and concentration;
3) the role as strategic hub of the social fabric of many of
its moments,
From the very
start these elements have functioned as a driving motor for the processes of
industrialisation and mechanisation, and thus as a social driving motor for the
growth of the working class. These features are also the objective terrain
which explains the particular political significance of the struggles of
metalmechanical sector workers. They also explain why this category of workers
has not yet been broken up into sectors defined in terms of commodities
produced.
The
metalmechanical industry still retains this propulsive role because still today
it produces the machinery. But today it plays this function even more
effectively at an international level: (a) in those countries undergoing
so-called “first industrialisation (and therefore starting up machine
industries as part of basic industry); and (b) in those countries in which
industrialisation is already under way, and which are a market for, and
sometimes even seats of production of, metalmechanical products. The metalmechanical
sector in these countries plays the same role of brain and driving motor, of
thrust and control of industrialisation, of growth and socialisation of capital
and, within it, of the labour force, both when, in substantial part, it is
managed by those same countries, and also when, instead, it is telecommanded
by the more advanced capitalist, and also when the machinery is from
these latter.
[…]
From this
point of view, not only is FIAT a typical company in the metalmechanical
sector, but with the recent economic conjuncture of 1964, it comes to the end
of a period of its history that, as we shall see, we can call the period of
advanced mechanisation, precisely because of the propulsive characteristics
of the metalmechanical industry mentioned above.
Characteristics of industries of “aggregation”.
If you exclude
some processes – for instance, sheet metal working, and hot and cold pressings,
and, in a different sense, the integral cycles of iron foundries (processes
which, if we examine the global cycle down to the non-productive consumption,
are only only degrees of processing, which
produce semi-worked goods which enter as raw materials into other labour
processes), precisely because its work object is metallic, the production cycle
of the metal sector is characterised, first of all, by a strong discontinuity.
The materials of its object of labour are rigid; therefore the object of work
grows as a progressive combination, an aggregation of separate parts,
each of which is processed separately in parallel processing cycles, and are
then aggregated into more complex parts, which, in turn, are only component
parts of sub-assemblies which are then mounted or assembled
in such a way that, only at the end, is there conferred onto the commodity the
required use value. Here there is little to add to the analysis that Marx makes
cooperation manufacturing, in which production proceeds by aggregation. We need
only point out the features that the structure of cooperation takes on today:
the main effort of the employer is to render as fluid as possible the cycles of
the aggregation industry, attempting to give them a relative continuity, by
separating, redistributing and bringing together in ever different ways the
four basic types of operation that characterize the industry of aggregation in
the metalmechanical industry: assembly, machining on-line, auxiliary
processing, and tertiary production.
An important
consequence of aggregation industry (where there is a strong presence of
assembly operations) is that it is, among all industries, the one that sees the
greatest fall-out: even more so than electronics, which entails a
maximum of proliferation.
It
proliferates in the first place because of the ease with which (since it is a
discontinuous cycle) production can be a separated by grades of working or
production of simple loose parts, or complexes and sub-assemblies, or
accessories. In other words, the labour processes (generally mechanical and
assembly-line) of separate parts of the same product whose scale determines the
overall cycle.
A different
case, however, is the proliferation linked to the fact that surrounding a
primary cycle there are auxiliary or tertiary industries
depending on the relations proportional to the levels of indirect labour.
The first characteristic
means that the metalmechanical industry is an industry which in itself is a
drive motor of subsequent industrialisations. Ditto the second. And this
explains why today the metalmechanical industry is central to the demands of
the reformists who, also on this side, realise that it is the key to the
industrialisation of areas that are backward in terms of the development of
capitalism, but where there has already been a pre-industrialisation.
The concentration
into the same working environments, or at any rate into territorial areas that
are very limited, in relation to the means of communication, of huge masses of
factory workers, is another characteristic of the machining lines (where there
remain non-mechanisable operations already in the manufacture
of separate parts), of sub-assembly production, and of final assembly. These
masses are directly brought together into the same physical buildings, together
with large nuclei of auxiliary and tertiary workers. This is always a support
for processes of class recomposition (and aid to a subjective unification of
its movements as regards political organisation). So also from the workers'
point of view the metalmechanical industry is the one that sees the most cumulative
effects...
Since its origins FIAT has moved on two paths. The first is the automobile. The leading role played by
automobile production is clear to everyone today and is not disputed. All the
left-wing criticism of the national plan and the Piedmontese
regional plan seeks only to qualify the driving role of the automobile
sector, to which all other developments are subordinated.
But economists
(such as Leonardi) and trade unionists generally
grasp only the aspect of the automobile as a consumer good in the neocapitalist system. We in Quaderni
Rossi have discussed the other aspect: namely the complexity of this
consumer good which, given that it is constituted by a huge number of positions
(in other words aggregations of basic detached parts), is a receptacle for a
large mass of surplus value, which is realised in this consumption.
The motor
vehicle in the history of FIAT is simultaneously a means of production, a
consumer good, and an instrument of war. In all these guises the automobile has
been a key driving sector, because it is the first product of great complexity
that immediately reaches scales of production that are sufficiently high
(thanks to exports, and military procurements) to permit not only the
extraction and realisation of surplus value and a growing accumulation of profit
and power at FIAT, but also, further upstream, to allow a greater development
of series production inside FIAT, and therefore an increasing mechanisation of
labour. This has involved an exceptional development, for
The mechanisation
of automobile production also makes possible the separation and the
simplification of operations of assembly on the assembly line, and the first
specialisations of the work machinery on the line.
This makes
possible, right from the start, what we can define as the transition into
production – in other words the insertion into the factory – of masses of
proletarians coming mainly from the countryside; first from the surrounding
rural areas, then from the region, then from the other regions of northern
Italy, and finally from the South. Since this process, which is still
continuing today, takes place in a continuum of struggles, it is also a transition
to becoming working class of masses of the proletariat.
So the
automobile in its three guises, pulling in mechanisation, combines the new
directly productive labour with growing quantities of indirect productive
labour: auxiliary and tertiary, according to the characteristics of the
metalmechanical sector as outlined above. The process takes place historically
outside the narrow limits of the company, at a social and international
scale. While this specifies the driving role of the automobile,
there emerges from this something very different from the denunciation of the distortion
of consumer goods.
The other path of FIAT’s development has been the "internal combustion engine”. Many historians of capital take the
development of the internal combustion engine (together with the use of
electricity as an energy source) as the defining factor in the so-called second
industrial revolution, .
The internal
combustion engines in turn give a push to industrialisation and the
mechanisation of labour on a social scale, in the first place with the
production of drive machines and the motorisation of machinery, of
different sectors of large-scale industry; secondly with the
motorisation of transport and with the rapid growth of the mechanisation of
transportation labour, to which Marx accords a productive function also
at the level of use value (when this involves operations of transportation of
variable and constant capital within the production process). From the social
point of view, the motorisation of the carriage of goods and labour force
reduces the circulation time and reduces the costs that affect profit levels;
not to mention the ecological and urban transformations arising from the
motorisation of transport as a function of profit.
Since FIAT’s
production of machinery was always rather limited, and likewise the Italian
production of it, FIAT has a further propulsive function in accumulation, on a
social scale; a function that today it exercises more and more against backward
capitalist countries. These countries buy their own transport goods; in
particular lorries and earthmoving machines are
consumed productively by developing countries, as they lay down the
basic infrastructures.
The multi-sectoral structure of FIAT’s cycle
of accumulation. The internal combustion
engine has been produced by FIAT in autonomous forms, as a commodity for
industrial production itself, for the motorisation of machinery: and today also
gas turbines.
But in matters
of means of transport, it had not only motorised the carriage and wagon, but
also the ship, the train, the omnibus, and airplanes, and has generally
embodied the horses used in construction and agriculture (tractors).
This is why
FIAT was born as, and remains, a multi-sectoral company,
because the production of engines makes it possible to create and combine
numbers of commodity sectors that are different from that of the automobile,
and all sectors of the metalmechanical sector for technology.
When other commodity
sectors also arrive at and develop series-production, this permits a whole
internal articulation of the cycles of production of these various goods, with
auxiliary and tertiary functions that often grow in cumulative proportion, with
several cycles of production taken together. This increases the complexity of
cooperation, because the other sectors also extend outside the company and
beyond the national borders.
There is also
associated with an even more extensive circuit of auxiliary and tertiary
labour; there is an increase in the international social incidence of indirect
labour. The latter, on the basis of different sectors of series productions, at
different productive scales and levels of mechanisation, expand also at FIAT.
And as indirect labour grows in importance, first the auxiliary first and then
the tertiary, these features increase their own scales, become mechanised,
massified, concentrated.
Cooperation and the international economic cycle at FIAT in the cycle
that ended with the recent economic conjuncture of 1964
For a
retrospective panorama of cooperation as a socialising of labour as
capital and for the accumulation of capital, it will suffice to examine the
last 15 years. The periodisation of the capitalist face of the coin does not
coincide with that of the working class; it precedes it and is out of phase
with it by a few years, and is the objective ground on which the working class,
having rediscovered a new force of attack, moves into action again with
movements of struggle, seeking a further recomposition at the new levels of
class relations. While for the capitalist face the decade is 1951–61, for the
new workers' struggles it is 1951–66.
The precedence
of the employers’ main initiative is apparent. It is massive in many directions
– at the institutional political level, in relation to the government's
economic policy and also political control, and in relation to the labour
movement, etc. And internationally it is framed in the context of the Cold War
which provides a pretext for an international attack on the left of the labour
movement, and on the Communist Parties, carried out also with innovations used
in an unprecedented fashion for an outright offensive against trade unions and
political organisations. We have described this in various articles in Classe
operaia in recent years. But we have said, in particular, that with this
the FIAT employer was seeking to anticipate and guide the Italian employing
class towards a massive and general defensive response against the workers’
struggles that developed in the post-war period, of the political level, that
reach through the exceptional use that the working class makes of the party
in the factory, also instrumentalising the union in the factory.
Let us now
shift our discussion to FIAT’s technological leap in the 1950s. It is a major
leap, in other words an authentic process of technological innovation,
and not of mere technical innovation, since it concludes a whole long period
which we can certainly trace back to the First World War and, in practice, to
the opening of the new Lingotto plant, and, with the rise of fascism, to the
strong national economic growth of the early 1920s. At that time the employer
responded to the national and international struggles of 1922–23** with a big
leap in the mechanisation of labour and in the subordination of living labour
to accumulated dead labour (a leap that the employers had been planning since
the Settimana Rossa
[Red Week] and the strike of 1915); in the same way there was a further
major leap in tecnological innovation in the 1950s,
characterised by strong development investments in the motor* industry
that followed on a high political level of struggles.
This major
leap at the strictly technological and economic level had been in place for
a long time: in the years 1937-38 there existed in Italy the conditions for a
possible development of a domestic market for motor cars, and FIAT had already
prepared the ground for the overthrow of government’s economic policy, and also
for an indispensable democratisation of the regime. With World War II the
international situation required a conversion of factories for rearmament. The
new plant at Mirafiori (inaugurated during the war, and with a war production
which up until 1942 brought fabulous international profits to FIAT) had been
programmed precisely for the launching of a mass production of utility cars
that could also profit from the domestic market. This was to come about only in
the 1950s, with the famous vetturetta democratica [democratic little car] designed at the Camera
del Lavoro [Chamber of Labour]… and only in the 1950s does Mirafiori truly
enter into a new period, when it initiates the period of mass production
of popular motor cars.
For the FIAT
cycle that meant a sharp rise in the mechanisation of labour. The beginning of
this period is characterised by the introduction of conveyors and automatic
transfers. It is the period of advanced mechanisation. The innovations were
mainly concentrated in FIAT’s own internal workshops where machining work
was done, and where there was the biggest concentration and massification of
the kind of machine workers who had been the mass driving force of the
struggles of the post-war period within the driving industry of the social
employer. The automobile becomes a key driving sector, and, within FIAT,
automobile production came to prevail over other product sectors.
We have
already said that, for the type of structure internal to the metalmechanical
industry and to FIAT, the development of the scale of production and the
mechanisation of the production of automobiles on various lines involved,
depending on the proportional relations between the various productive
functions of the labour force, a strong development of the following elements:
a) the
importation of raw materials by the industries that served FIAT, especially of
steel;
b) a very big
increase in the production of semi-finished and detached parts in small
regional and national companies;
c) a major
increase in the production of accessories and subassemblies in national
supplier industries, which were mostly located in
d) a
proportionately greater increase of internal auxiliary labour at FIAT, but
especially outside, and largely located in the capitalistically most advanced
Western countries;
e) a
proportionately even greater increase in tertiary production work, particularly
project design, inside and outside FIAT, especially in the countries
that were already monopolising tertiary production, particularly the
This framework
indicates clearly the new international structure of the real cycle at FIAT.
The cycle directly managed by FIAT is always only a relatively minor part of
its real cycle.
The external
part is not only provided by the suppliers and sub-suppliers of detached
parts and accessories (which are mainly national). The external part is
constituted: on the one hand by the suppliers and especially by the
sub-suppliers of raw and auxiliary materials which are located mainly (but not
solely) in the capitalistically underdeveloped countries; and on the other hand
by the external supplier and sub-supplier companies of auxiliary and
especially tertiary processes, which are located in the capitalistically most
advanced countries, because only there has a very high increase in production
scales increased mechanisation to the point of making it possible for these
productions to be mechanised and industrialised, with strong cost savings and a
competitiveness that increases proportionally with the world development of
capital. FIAT, therefore, with its direct management (and with its Italian
suppliers and sub-suppliers), covers only the midpoint, as an industry
that is a driving force in the Italian economy, of its real cycle of
accumulation.
If we want to
grasp the international level of FIAT’s operations, we cannot limit ourselves
to the supplier and sub-supplier industries and to FIAT’s pattern of imports;
we also have to look at its exports: the exports of goods and the export of
capital.
The suppliers and sub-suppliers
A) Raw materials. Leaving aside a few
minerals – coal and auxiliary raw materials (for ironworks and the second
melting foundries) – FIAT does not directly import extractive raw materials.
They buy them already transformed by the iron and steel and metallurgical
industries, and largely from the nationalised industries, that proceed with it
in joint costs. The steel industry and the national metallurgy industry,
in turn, imports primary and auxiliary raw materials of which only a limited
proportion comes from the economically under-developed countries (particularly
Africa and Latin America); they also buy from the US, but they also buy a lot
from the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Then there is a whole story of
the CECA*, particularly as regards the high productive consumption of scrap characerising FIAT’s supplier
industries, and also FIAT itself in its ironworks.
Another
material that plays an important part in the motor car is rubber. The
companies that supply FIAT with tyres are well known: Ceat, Pirelli and Michelin. In all of these (and in
descending order) FIAT has major shareholdings. They are all international
companies inasmuch as they import natural rubber from plantations especially in
Asia (as we know, Michelin has plantations in
And together
with the rubber (increasingly synthetic) the automotive production cycle also
involves the use of plastics, which today are obtained in very large
part from processing the residues of petroleum. The suppliers of plastic
materials are closely related to FIAT. They are national and international
companies, and they are those same large groups and petrochemical cartels with
which Fiat is already involved as regards gasoline prices. The role of the
areas of oil extraction in the world is among the best known.
These are the
first and basic auxiliary materials of the real cycle of FIAT at the
international level. They are strategic raw materials. We alrady know how their extractive industries proceed: on the
one hand the international oligopolistic competition, and on the other the
various types of agreements, including military. According to the levels of
development of the areas from which the raw materials are extracted, in
general, these industries insert themselves in very different ways. In the
capitalistically more backward countries they are islands that employ a very
limited local working class, and they do not proliferate: they have no
cumulative effects, especially because the royalties are paid to
parasitic strata, and at very low prices. But in countries at an intermediate
level (especially in the socialist countries, which generally at
this level), also by reason of an unfair competition policy of' AGIP and
ENI, they support a certain proliferation and development of processing
industries and manufacturing.
B) The
suppliers of detached and semi-detached parts. The most simple are located
mostly in the
C) The suppliers of "complexes sub-assemblies" and
"accessories".
These
industries are mostly located in
For this group
of FIAT suppliers in recent years there has developed a major problem of
reorganisation at the international level, which had already begun in the
period that we are dealing with, and which experienced a leap with the
conjuncture.
Already in the
1950s, for these providers there was a very high level of international
integration and dependence, as regards their designs and their machinery, on
capitalistically more advanced levels (and, for example, of the MEC on the USA)
and particularly as regards light electromechanical components, an area in
which an embryonic Italian electronics industry was already emerging in that
period. The diffusive proliferation of these suppliers contributed to the
industrialisation of the outlying areas of the industrial triangle, and even of
nuclei to the south of
D) The auxiliary type suppliers.
Here the
discussion takes something of a leap.
We have said that
is typical of metalmechanical companies produce on a mass scale * a good
part of the machinery, and provide for technical innovation and maintenance
directly and autonomously, realising a close, direct and complex cooperation
between the workers on the assembly lines and those of the auxiliary functions,
in particular of of technical innovations, and the
construction of new machinery. One need hardly say that already we find here
the figure of the technician (who was born in the early period of manufacturing,
and from the first embryonic start of the capitalist division of labour), and
one need hardly say here that, with the growth of accumulation, the growth of auxiliary labour
has been increasingly tightly fused with the productive tertiary work, and thus
not only with the highest levels of processing lines and with the increasing
mechanisation thereof (an auxiliary relationship with direct machine
workers, and, to a minimal extent, also with those involved in assembly
operations). Already at the start this close relationship was possible only at
the international level precisely because it was connected to tertiary
labour and, in particular, to high-level science (understood as applied
research), also for the technologies involving metalworking, only in the
more advanced countries. All the more so that it was a question of applications
at an industrial scale, not the artisanal production of Sputnik and
racing cars! Right from the start FIAT supplied itself with machinery (i.e.
bought labour objectified in machinery, the highly productive auxiliary and
tertiary labour objectivated* in the machinery) from
the most advanced capitalist countries. This tendency has grown, with cyclical
fluctuations, both absolutely and in percentage terms. There has grown above
all the dependence of the auxiliary work on the tertiary labour: the auxiliary
labour as a mediator between the assembly lines and the application of
scientific discoveries.
We know the differences between
an operating machine, a machine tool, a second, third or fourth
machine: these are are functional differences
in the overall structure of cooperation, which are regulated to each other by
the law of proportional relationships between the respective levels of the
working on the primary line (operators), and that of the auxiliary, and that of
the auxiliary of the auxiliary, etc. They are also classified according to the
different levels of the mechanisation of the labour objectified in them: from
universal machines to special ones, to complexes, to transfers, to carousels,
to continuous automatic lines etc. But it is only for the necessity of
proportional relationships that today in certain functions the one is used, and
in other functions the other.* Now the domestic production of machine tools
(that is, the machines that are used to produce operating machines) and of
operative machines has always been weak. At FIAT they are mostly imported. The
company orders relatively simple special automatic or semiautomatic machines
from Italian companies in the sector, which generally are pulverised* at
semi-artisanal level with high costs and low productivity, very low level of
application of applied research, which (with the exception of Olivetti OMO of
S. Bernardo), and* in general they order on commission a fair part of their project-planning
and tertiary work. FIAT gets most of its operating machines made by
specialised companies, particularly in the
Slightly different is the issue of third machines, which
until relatively recently could still be of artisanal production, because at
FIAT the mechanisation of auxiliary functions was relatively low: it was easy
to stay with very low productivity in the artisanal workshops [boite] of auxiliary productions in
E) The tertiary labour suppliers. I have already
outlined the position on this question. FIAT has only a relatively modest
amount of tertiary work within itself; the tertiary sector is mainly
concentrated in the
The tertiary sector jobs has grown
far more than others in the real (international and social) cycle of FIAT. To
better understand the function of the FIAT assembly lines and of their internal
auxiliary productions as a midpoint, we need to survey – briefly – the
distribution and the articulation of FIAT’s markets. There you see how
FIAT mediates between the pre-industrialisation and then the economic
lift-off and industrialisation of certain countries, and the further growing
accumulation, industrialisation and mechanisation of tertiary labour,
especially in the
To the capitalistically underdeveloped countries FIAT exports
objectified labour in the form of:
*
Earthmoving machinery and special equipment; lorries mostly
as capital goods in the construction industry and public works in situations of
pre-industrialisation (and also for military use); plus diesel and gas turbine
engines;
*
Public transportation vehicles for road and rail.
·
*
Some G-91 fighter aircraft;
*
Cars and derivatives;
*
Methods and patents; licenses and procedures.
And living labour, in the form of:
*
Engineers and consultants; some auxiliary-type skilled
workers.
*
Tertiary workers, especially in relation to the
international development of sales offices and customer service.
The developing countries and countries in the
course of industrialisation provide FIAT with its biggest market. Here,
however, more than the exportation of commodities, what is is
realised is the export and transfer of capitals, of labour objectified at all
levels. So not only trucks and tractors related to the building of
infrastructures, passenger transport, automobiles etc, but also (especially to
get round high customs barriers etc) more or less mechanised production lines
of car and tractors. This involves, in most cases, assembly lines for parts
that are made in
It also exports marine engines, gas turbines and the
aforementioned G-91 fighter aircraft.
Here it exports much more living labour – secondary and
tertiary.
The most developed capitalist countries provide the
largest market for FIAT automobiles, in particular the Common Market countries.
But we also have the export of component parts as a result of processes of
international integration, especially as regards the aviation industry. FIAT
produces most of the F-104 aircraft for NATO, and not only for NATO.
Few people know that in Turin FIAT also produces a series of components for the
French Caravelle. For these countries
the balance of living labour in the interchange is clearly to the detriment of
FIAT: there are technicians, especially Americans, who work at FIAT and in its
sub-suppliers, also as a function of the command of capital.
This static cross-section of the capitalist articulation of
the FIAT cycle helps us also to understand the foreign policy (really intermediate)
of FIAT, which has not only always been open in relation to the the socialist countries, but has also been open and
paternalistic with developing countries in whatever sphere of influence. This
international reformism characteristic of social capital, of FIAT’s foreign
policy always also benefits the
The international articulation of labour power
In our discussion we have placed much emphasis on the
international cycle. [In this paper] it is not now possible to examine
directly, in the same degree of detail, the types of labour power that are
unified in cooperation at the various levels, and to open, at least, the
discourse on the movements of this labour power (as articulation of
capital), making use of a set of techniques of the capitalist social
sciences (from ecology and economic geography and macro-urbanistics
to sociology itself, just as they are being unified into a single science
of programmation). However something of this
has already emerged from the points outlined above.
The great technological leap of the 1950s, operating through
a series of movements (both horizontal and vertical), produced an internal articulation of a labour
force reproduced on an enlarged scale and thrust forward according to the
various levels of technological development internal to the cycle of capitalist
accumulation.
In the processes of differentiation into opposing classes of
peasants, in certain areas of Asia, Africa, Latin America and or
In some countries of early industrialisation,
especially those with socialist regimes, FIAT is often one of the main levers
for movements of the labour force that is being drawn into production, giving
rise to a strong cumulative and proliferating expansion. A working class is
formed, consisting mostly of masses of assembly workers and labour processes
that are already considerably mechanised, and this is combined on-site with
auxiliary and tertiary nuclei, according to a model of articulation of labour power that is
similar to what has functioned, and indeed still functions today, in
Indeed
This period also saw the emergence of the steel and petrochemical
“poles of development” in the South, with islands of working class
which, however, gradually linked to the struggles of the proletariat in the
local areas, providing them with a centre.
There was pressure for an industrialisation of transport, for
the slow transformation of ports into factories, and for the development of
urbanisation, which put the construction industry on the path to
industrialisation, etc.
There was also the diffusion, through satellitism,
or direct or indirect proliferation, of manufacturing industries in zones
immediately adjacent to the industrial triangle. There was the further
dissemination and concentration of investment and he
creation of new factories, massively, inside the triangle, and especially in
In
We need only recall only that, due to the presence in Turin
of FIAT as an employer and as a high point of capitalist command (tele-command), there was a growth, concentration and
massification in the higher-level service industries of a mass of tertiary unproductives, whose work is on the threshold of
industrialisation.*
In the more advanced capitalist countries, especially in the
And given that we have returned to the international level,
we also need to open the discussion – at least by outlining a few basic issues
– on the central question (as regards the analysis of movements of labour power
for capital), in other words the valorisation at the international level of
the international accumulation of capital. On the
international production of surplus value by the international working class.
This also requires a theoretical elaboration. For example
(taking into account the different levels of technology, and of productivity),
how do we understand at the international level the relationship between simple
labour and complex, enhanced labour; and in regard to that, how are the
different wage levels posed in real terms in relation to the costs of
production and reproduction of labour power, taking into account collective and
individual skill levels, in the various areas and the particular local markets
of labour.
The differences in levels of development are leveled and unified in the overall process of valorisation.
The various levels of objective labour (even if isolating the local moment of
compulsion to surplus value they determine a different exchange with
living labour that moves them, so that in the most backward locations of
objectification and accumulation it may still appear that it is the workers who
operate the machines and not vice versa), which are not part of a global and
social exchange that is increasingly mediated between living labour and dead
labour integrated internationally which squeeze it out and controls it.
However, this process is controlled by one of its centres, which is that place
to which all the surplus value flows, or at least from which command exerts the
entire control of its flow into a series of decentralised centres of capitalist
command. And from this, and from those, it then flows back as objectified
labour, as accumulated capital, to enhance further the increased mass of living
labour that socially produces relative surplus value.
The international level shows how the concentration of
profit is the concentration of the power, despotism, and command of capital.
It is in this sense that in our case the whole of capital’s
system of command, of the organisation and planning of profit, are tele-commanded from Turin, as a centre of
power that guides technological innovation and directs the bureaucratic
apparatus for controlling the working class in the factory and in society, at
the point where the extraction of surplus value affects* in the real cycle of FIAT,
beyond Italy’s national borders.
So we should highlight not only the manner in which the unpaid
cooperation of the internationally unified working class (whose movements
tend to become socialised at an international level) is multiplied by the
productivity that science accumulates internationally, with the objectivation of the international exchange between the
various parts of living labour, only mediated by machinery; but
especially the process by which capital, unified internationally, uses and controls
as its productive power the social movements of the divided working class,
that is broken up at various levels, even in collective bargaining, and is not
politically organised as such in the vast majority of its movements of
struggle.
A few remarks on the movements of the struggle
against work of "the FIAT working class"
Here the period that concerns us is 1957-66.
We have already said that the great leap conducted by
the FIAT collective emplyer was to prepare a new terrain
on which the working class would then, by resuming its attack with waves of
offensive struggles, attempt to regain at a wider level its political
recomposition. We have also said and repeated that the subjective dimension of
the process of political unification of the class and of the movements
of struggle places on the agenda the issue of tactics, the problem of the
political party of the working class.
In Classe operaia, we have done this analysis as
regards the situation in the FIAT establishments in
A certain political and subjective unification at the
international level was platonically placed on the agenda only in Lenin's time,
with the Third International. Precisely at that time, at the moment of the
October Revolution, a process of recomposition of the working class at
the world level, and of the international proletariat in the scientific sense
of that word, took place and was transmitted precisely through the left of the
labour movement of that time, and particularly through the communist parties.
We all know about the capitalist counter-offensive and the reformist role then
given to the international communist current. However, at the level of the
working class, what is left of the original composition of the movements
of struggle? What is the impact of the large blocks of class that passed
through the experience of the party? Today more than ever we need to try to see
what is the tendency of class recomposition at the international level, and
what are (also at this level) the convergences and homogenisations
of the struggle that, to a certain extent, are identifiable, verifiable, and
are taking place within a relative spontaneity. We then need to pose the
problem of the subjective political unification, of these convergent
movements. It makes no sense to put on trial the working class of the rich
countries, on a charge of having compromised with imperialism, on the backs of
the peasants of the poor countries, and of wallowing in the bed of economic
struggles managed by unions that are necessarily reformist. Rather we have to
pose the problem of the lack of revolutionary parties of the working class, and
of the workers’ international use of the historical parties in the West;
because conversely, locally, the problem of the party is solved in areas in
which the ongoing movements of struggle are those that are related to the broad
movements of proletarianisation under way.
Some people have adopted a subjective approach, seeking to
study and measure the degrees of internationalism of the workers FIAT by
interviewing them. In that light it would be as well to remember that on the
only two occasions in recent times when the labour and democratic movement
symbolically took strike action as a way of showing international solidarity
(for Cuba and Spain), the workers at FIAT suspended working unanimously, and
often for far longer than the symbolic ten minutes that had been called for,
transforming it already into a momentary blockage of production, as indeed was
also done at Finsider in Genoa, where they took
spontaneous strike action throughout the day... And these events especially
showed us how the simple possibility of suspension of work, of a brief “no
to work” that connects us
symbolically to a problem of political initiative that is internationally
understood by the working class, succeeds in mobilising the grassroots cadres and
those whom we call the factory communists with a force not previously seen.
Because democratic solidarity may, suddenly, be overturned by workers from the
inside, once it is obliged to walk, even symbolically, the path of suspension
of work.
Here too it would be useful to take a step backwards in our
discussion, in relation to another process-problem: that of the international
recomposition of the class through its relatively spontaneous
movements of struggle in the capitalistically developed countries. If we study
in quantitative terms the workers' struggles and the struggles of the
proletariat (and of proletarianised peasants) at the
worldwide level, it is obvious that there is a tendential
process of homogenisation under way, going beyond differences in levels
of development at an international level.
Another question is that of their possible objective
convergence in struggle against social capital at the international level: this
is a discussion that has to be had, freeing it from dangers and ingenuousness.
Now, seeing that we are talking about FIAT, another point
that would be worth considering is the way in which company may have an effect
in these movements:
(A) as an effect deriving from the working class nuclei directly
exploited by FIAT in various areas of world capital. To give just one example
we could cite the struggles of the FIAT workers in Argentina, and the role they
have played in the class struggle of the proletariat and movements in that
country which has been key in the struggle against social capital in Latin
America.
(B) as an effect deriving from indications that the
political struggle at FIAT within the working concentration of the industrial
triangle can give to the working class and to the international proletariat
(but through the mediation, here irrepressible, of their subjective
organisations, with the problem of the parties at the various levels, and of
the international communist current), for the the
critical area of international strategy, and, for the future, its decisive
international translation into an international articulation of tactics.
These indications are, more or less, the same as those given
to the subjective forces of the national working class in
So what has been the political level of the struggle at
FIAT, and what have been the relations between class and party in the period
1957-66? Anarcho-syndicalism was strongly present, and played a positive role
for as long as the problem was one of getting the struggles moving – but then
played a very negative role when the struggles went beyond the economic level
and attacked at the political level. The PSI, which is dominated by the left
(and which then transited to PSIUP), was almost more syndicalist
than is now the FIM of the Turin CISL: at any rate it was trying to bypass the
PCI on the working class terrain. The Turin PCI stood firmly by “the Italian way” until the
congress of 1963. What was, in those years, the political role of the communist
cadres and factory communists and the kind of battle that they conducted in the
party and in the union from 1957-58 to the congress of 1963? At the top, the
1963 congress subordinated the CGIL to the PCI in a direct way, and also in
As regards the process of massification and homogenisation
of the movements of the Italian part of the working class, the part which is
concentrated in the industrial triangle, and in particular the part that is
concentrated in the region that is being created around
Precisely for this reason they had a levelling and
homogenising function for the working class and for the many non-productive workers
who have struggled against capital in recent years, a function that has grown
together with the potential for struggles in the economic conjuncture and in
the period of economic recovery. An authentic recomposition, which still remains a focus of the
employers’ response, in their attempts to control it and combat it.
You can see a little more closely at how they are composed,
these movements of struggle in the
However, they were isolated struggles, united only by the
fact of the party issuing protests to the public authorities.
The weak point of the struggle was precisely the
inter-regional zones of rural migration. Slightly more advanced was the
political level of the struggle in the traditional peripheral centres. It was
more advanced in the urban poles with interregional references, into which were
flowing already existing masses. The situation is no different in the lesser
poles, where the new generations of the agricultural proletariat come to be
merged in the factory with the earlier generations who experienced the key
political movements of the post-war period. It was in
There is no need to enter more deeply into this fabric of
the struggle against work and see the hows and whys
of the class-party relationship in these different political levels of the
struggles. What I would like to emphasise, also using for the struggle
against work the terminology of the macro-urban planners, is that while it
is correct to put the articulation of the labour force into the background, it
is wrong to make it disappear completely with an unrealistic subjectivism;
since it weighs and also has an effect on the highest level of political
movements, it is useful to deal with it in order to establish, in a given phase
of the class struggle, how in fact it has made its presence felt; how it has
been by the employers; how it has been used by the workers; how it has, or has
not, been transcended by processes of political unification that pass through
the political level of the factory, so as to arrive at building a
strategic line, at both the national and the international level. Let us not
put the cart before the horse.
The employers' response
currently under way. Now it is the employers who are taking
the initiative (1967)
The collective employer that is FIAT, the political brain of
the Italian employing class, did not wait for the attacking force of the Italian
working class to develop to its full before guiding the entire capitalist bloc
to a massive counter-offensive. They did not even wait for the contract
struggles of 1962. The trends of class recomposition were already detectable in
1961, both within the FIAT and nationwide. When the 1962 strike at FIAT, and
the events of Piazza Statuto, and the big strikes in
all sectors and in the whole country, blew up in the employers’ face, the
employers already had plans in place, and were already moving their troops* to
launch a counteroffensive on a social scale, at all levels. We began to see
this in 1963, with the waning of the economic miracle, and in the interviews in
which Agnelli threatened the first mass layoffs at FIAT, and even more so, when
the first rumours started coming round of a restructuring at RIV. Then came the
conjunctural attack, and we know how that finished
up.
With 1963 at FIAT the initiative goes back to the employers,
and it also returns to the employers at the national level. With 1963 there
opens a period in which the employers’ response unfolds in its entirety. We
should recall that this period is out of phase* with the period of the workers'
offensive. This response was planned over time in an articulated way. Our
interest is to see how it has worked out in the factory.
In the short time, the answer was the economic conjuncture.
The facts are known. We have already described, and repeated, what happened in
production in FIAT during the period of the conjunctural
offensive, and also in the companies that are external to but related to FIAT’s
cycle of production.
No big technological leap, even in the medium term. The
confrontation with the working class is also postponed by reason of the
passivity of the workers. There is a progressive technical upgrading, slightly
pushing forward the mechanisation of the lines. A series of
organisational restructurings, with many relocations and internal transfers of
labour-power, with workers continuously being redistributed. This
serves, on the one hand, to break up the internal organisation of the workers
as non-work and, at the same time, to prepare the ground for successive
mechanisations, which now also begin to involve other parts of the production
cycle, in addition to the metalmechanical processes, (assembly of
sub-assemblies, sheet metal working, painting, and chemical and thermal
operations, etc).
The major innovation is that we begin to see a mechanisation
and reorganisation of auxiliary machining, starting from tooling and going
through to the machining of press moulds. The occasion is the introduction of
the FIAT 850: a car of the conjuncture. This technical updating, aimed at
achieving a greater flexibility on the assembly lines, with separable and
interchangeable stations, is found in all sections of production, including
trucks.
These were above all the years in which Fiat strengthened
its sales network abroad and started to build an international customer support
system, with spare parts shops and service stations being established worldwide.
This coincided with a major reorganisation of the smaller branches and the
In the factory the conjunctural offensive
sets in motion a reopening of profit margins, seeking to tighten and intensify
exploitation. Production increases despite the relative lack of new investment,
but it is the scene of a strong underground struggle over qualitative (and not
only quantitative) aspects of productivity.
It is with 1962 and with the conjunctural
offensive that we began to see the outlines of a planned response in the medium
term. The doubling of production planned for the 1967 was actually already achieved
by 1965. The employers’ plan combines with project planning, and the
programming can be defined precisely as a capitalist response, as an increased
imposition of command by capital, as despotism, and as a further concentration
of political power, founded on new levels of profit at the international level.
This mid-period, imposed by the collective FIAT employer
since 1962, will conclude in the early 1970s, but a series of more precise
tendencies are emerging and will soon impose themselves,
even if they have their roots in the previous period.
If we were to give a label to this period we would call the period
of cyberneticisation of the extortion of surplus value at FIAT.
Electronics, with the first and second generations of
calculators, had already entered FIAT in the 1950s with the great leap.
However it is only now that cybernetics is used by the FIAT employer (at all
levels) in the creation of a new and complex system (the American model) of
capillary control by capital of capital’s centre of command, which is direct,
continuous and on a daily basis, over the entire production cycle of the motor
car. In particular, we see the establishment of an overall and integrated
system for an articulated and programmed dication,
from the centre, of the rhythms of work: this is a huge political fact, which
today already governs large parts of the operations at the Mirafiori plant, and
partly also other sections, such as FIAT-Ricambi.
This process of cyberneticisation is therefore a big
political fact, but by itself it does not yet constitute a technological
breakthrough: it is, however, a preparatory stage! Also because already it
makes possible a centralised cutting of production times at Mirafiori, and
therefore of all the suppliers and sub-supplier industries, which are
programmed in a continuum, according to the needs for feeding the
Mirafiori assembly lines, and generally the sub-assembly groups and final
assembly.
This process of cyberneticisation is almost the
internal face of that growth of despotism represented by capital plan: by
programming. It is no coincidence that the mediating element is the Rivalta
project.
This cyberneticisation should be read in terms of the major
leap that electronics was experiencing internationally, especially in the
In terms of technology, the medium-term programme initiates
and prepares what, in my opinion, may be the next big leap, in
the second half of the 1970s, namely the mechanisation of auxiliary
operations. This would be the outcome of the strong ongoing progress of
automation of machinery, which is already becoming flexible or even universal,
thanks to numerical control. This process is already under way, and it involves
restructurings, concentrations, integrations and mergers at both the national and
international level. These changes are already contributing to a change in the
nature of cooperation in the factory-city of
The mechanisation of auxiliary operations will
reduce, in proportional terms, the numbers of traditional auxiliary
workers, who will partly be re-employed in the auxiliary workshops (boite). There will also be an increase in tertiary
labour within the production cycle of FIAT, and within the companies and
factories that come under its direct management. This will have major consequences
in the articulation of the working class at an international level, and, above
all, at the national level and in the city-region of Turin: it will pose – and
indeed is already posing – the problem of new levels of the struggle, through
which – on the new terrain that the employer is preparing – the working class
can regain a political recomposition.
Since the re-projecting of automobiles, and in general of
all FIAT products, is limited, being regulated internationally by
oligopolistic competition, there will certainly not be an equally strong drive
to mechanisation of the assembly lines. This is true despite the
continuation of the process that has already been under way for some time, of unbundling
and decentralising assembly lines and assembly operations to FIAT factories
overseas, especially to the newly industrialised countries, in the case of
cars, tractors and trucks. Assembly operations will predominate at Mirafiori;
the foundries will all be transferred to Carmagnola.
The mechanical machining involving stripping* of material will go to the
Rivalta factory. Metal-pressing and forges will remain at Mirafiori, along with
chemical and thermal processing. Here there will be a technological upgrading.
Lingotto will soon become a warehouse. The production cycle of trucks will be
reorganised with the expansion of SPA-Stura, which will absorb STIMA. Grandi
Motori will develop large machine tools in Turin, as well as smaller engines,
and turbines (under licence from Mercedes and General Motors); but the larger
engines will be built in the new plant in Trieste, with the participation of
IRI. Aeronautical production will proceed and will grow, in full integration
with international aeronautical production, and probably including the
manufacture of component parts for Concorde.
All these changes are directly part of a reorganisation at
the international level. There are two aspects that we want to emphasise here:
the international integration of capital and territorial redistributions.
We shall not dwell here on the transformations that the
Rivalta plan will entail for all the external operations at FIAT, and
for its suppliers industries.
What is now clear, because it is very advanced at the social
level and at all levels, is the process of international integration. This
began during the period of the economic miracle, but it experienced a leap
during the period of the conjuncture. Everyone realised this with the first
RIV-SKF agreement, and then with the OGE, and then with the international
integration of Elettromeccanica, both light and
heavy, down to the present day, by which time all the supplier and
complementary industries related to FIAT are involved. If you visit the auto
show, you find that even the small factories have their stands, where (with
agreements, concentrations and international mergers) they present specialised
and unified products that are destined for a wider and international market.
Where you used to hear people speaking in Italian dialect, now you hear German,
English and French, or even Russian, and, vice-versa, under German, English or
French labels you find the small businessmen of yesteryear who still speak in
dialect ... But the major developments are yet to come, and as far as production
is concerned these will involve the development of the industries of the
industrial triangle, and a development of tertiary productive functions in the
more “advanced” countries.
In considering this process we need to take into account the
aspect of territorial redistribution of moments and functions of
production.
Here too, today, the international level is the determining
factor. Let us limit ourselves to
As everyone knows,
The Rivalta project, the Pieraccini
plan, and all the regional plans that have been more or less drawn up, show
this to be the case in the longer term.
Development investments will focus (again, and indeed
increasingly) on the industrial triangle, especially around
Finally, if we look at things in the longer term, we see how
the agreement between FIAT and the
In the long run to a certain extent FIAT will develop the
aeronautic sector as an international industry, and will also participate to a
growing extent in the aerospace industry. Already today, from San Marco to the
European FLDO projects etc, FIAT is the company most involved, but what is
likely to come out of this first, is probably an agreement with the
At the end of this period, FIAT will arrive at a saturation
of the domestic market, which will oblige it to pass, for the first time, from a
predominantly expansive type of investments to an intensive type of
investments. However, the future lies with the new markets of
With 1967 a new phase of workers' struggles is beginning at
FIAT. You need to approach things more at the tactical level to say at
least this: that this response of the employer (which is ongoing, and which
comprises the series of processes of planning, such as internal and external
control, in the factory-society relationship, which we have termed the cyberneticisation
of FIAT), already gives a glimpse of a possible new face that will serves
the workers, which already gives an idea of what will be the terrain of a new
struggle. On the one hand you cannot predict this struggle, but on the other we
see that in
Meanwhile certain phenomena begin to occur which weigh
heavily. The FIAT-USSR agreement passes from the design of machinery for Togliattigrad to their construction. This
means an expansion of the auxiliary industries and of the whole machine tools
sector with its associated suppliers. This machinery is produced only in part
within the FIAT; the majority is produced outside, in external factories,
traditional suppliers. This will create a shortage of skilled workers, the likes
of which has never previously been seen, and will give a growing bargaining
power in broad strata of of labour, which, although
they are relatively less non-unionised*, will not fail to get out
of hand (we recall that at the simple trade union level workers at CIMAT
in 1961 had been calling for 'self-management’). It was these
workers who registered the highest percentage of members of the Communist
Party. During the conjuncture the union had enjoyed particular margins of
demands over demands: the special category of monthly workers was
designed precisely for these workers. We need to prevent them from being channeled in here with isolated and privileged concessions
as happened as early as 1961, in the line of the modern trade union, at
FIAT, Olivetti and Michelin. The communist draughtsmen* of Workshop 30, with
their spontaneous struggles in 1960 and 1961, had realised that this was
precisely what they had to reject!
As regards the mass assembly processes, FIAT resumed
recruitment on a scale even more massive than in the past: more than 20,000 new
workers have entered FIAT over a period of twenty months, making up for the conjunctural hiring freeze and re-launching hiring to new
levels, with global growth rates among the highest in its history. Here, the
FIAT-USSR agreement has nothing to do with the matter: masses of immigrants
will resume their flow and will be distributed in the new regional-scale fabric
of the city- factory. Even for this mass that will be imported onto the
assembly lines of large and very large series-production, making its passage to
becoming working class, the contractual conditions will quickly turn to the
best. We shall not speak here of the the sectoral deficiencies, the congestion, the problems of
transportation, schools, town planning and social services, which multiply the
costs of agglomeration and which in recent years have always favoured wage
rise, and never strike-breaking or passivity. On the basis of
this mass onslaught, unionisation saw its already limited possibilities being
reduced still further: the relations between young militants and the PCI and
PSIUP, after the contract struggle, are already deteriorating. In this
situation, we can predict the spread of spontaneous struggles, of the kind that
we glimpsed in 1963-64. In fact an underground struggle at FIAT is already in
progress, and this is shown, in addition to the recent strikes at Ferriere and Materferro (and the
first stoppage in a section of the bodywork department at Rivalta FIAT!), by
elementary facts such as the massive spontaneously organised rejection of overtime
at a time when the employer has a desperate need for overtime! The new
recruits now coming into the FIAT factories are already among the most
combative. The decentralisation in taking place in the Rivalta plant, at the
foot of the mountains, means that several thousand so-called “barott” will enter the factories – among the
most barott that the region has to
offer – but the Milan experience (where these decentralizing phenomena in the
Vendee*, and experiences of regionalisation, have already been happening,
anticipating Turin by ten years) tells us that, in the long run, even the barott become working class, if the climate
is one of struggle, as it has been and as it will probably continue to be.
From this point of view we have to reject and defeat the
kind of pessimism about the class situation that is beginning to creep into the
base of the labour movement, and especially into the Communist Party, in the
brief period of post-contractual reflux. The pessimism is, if anything,
justified in the face of the political leaderships of the workers' parties, the
PCI and PSIUP.
In the first place, in the face of the employer’s plan, the overall
articulation of the employers’ response, and especially in the face of the
tangible signs of a series of positive possibilities that the plan will
inevitably offer for a subsequent, further, workers’ counter-attack on the
strictly political terrain, the labour movement, the workers' parties, found
nothing better to do than to contest, in the various consultative meetings, the
Pieraccini plan and the regional plans, because they
further concentrate those investments. They turned themselves into defenders of
the districts* sacrificed and they cry about this sacrifice. They call for a diffusion
of investments throughout the territory – something that they do not even
know what this means – and this is immediately contradicted by others who are
in favour of a redevelopment of the policy of development poles. In all the
locations of the various regional plans they call for a public control that requalifies the investments,
in terms of a widespread territorial diffusion. And what goes forward is only the protests of the provinces, regions,
districts of exodus. Instead we need to re-launch the political leadership of
the struggle, using as leverage precisely the new capabilities of the advanced
points. Balancing in this perspective the party-factory relationship is also
the maximum contribution you can make to the international class struggle and
to its political unification, working in a strategic area such as Turin.
_______________________________________
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