CHAPTER 14
SPEECH BY A FIAT WORKER ABOUT 1969
Comrades,
I speak to you as a worker from FIAT-Mirafiori. I want to explain how our struggles started
there, how they developed, and the lessons we feel they hold for all Italian
workers.
Nobody could say that our fight at Mirafiori
developed out of the blue. It was the product of everything that the working
class had learned through the struggles of 1968-69, and at Mirafiori
the way in which all these experiences came together marked an important step
forward in our political growth and understanding.
It's clear that . . . You need organisation
and clear understanding
All this has needed, and will need, organisation.
We have begun to build organisation at two levels – both
inside and outside the factory. There are groups of workers who get together on
the job, and they organise with the students into
intervention groups outside the factory gates. Then there are the
worker-student assemblies that we have been holding every day in a warehouse
near the factory, where we come together to exchange and share news and
information from all the different plants and factories in the FIAT complex.
But these assemblies don’t only work at the level of
coordination. On the one hand we began producing leaflets to tell workers in
other parts of the complex how our struggles were going, and we also began to
take initiatives in deciding what course the struggles would take. In fact it
was in one of these many assemblies that workers and students decided to organise the demonstration for July 3rd of this year,
which, as everybody must know, exploded into a great workers’ battle.
At this point [July 1969] we are now faced with the coming
clash over the renewal of our national agreement, and in the light of this,
over the past few weeks, we have been restoring a strong degree of autonomy to
the worker-student intervention groups at the gates. The aim of this has been
to widen political discussion at a shop-floor level, and to put us all in a
better position to begin to consolidate the organisation
of all workers at all points in all of FIAT’s
factories. When the official union strikes begin, this is going to be crucial.
... It’s clear to us that if you’re going to fight the
employers right to the last ditch, you need organisation, and a clear political understanding of what
you are going to do. It is a struggle that’s going to last for a long time, and
you can’t just improvise it from day to day. But we do not accept that we
should be fed this organisation and this
understanding ready-made by the political groups that come round advertising
themselves, and who are far more interested in strengthening their own organisations than in helping us in our fight. In the last
few months we have seen so many of these groups coming round, particularly when
the struggle’s all over. But we have had nothing to do with them.
It’s for us to create our own organisation
and our own political understanding on the basis of our own experience of
struggle, continuously discussed and examined among ourselves.
... The employers and the unions use national
agreements as a means to keep us down, but we shall transform them into weapons
with which the working class will be able to organise
and fight. We shall use them to develop the revolutionary political organisation of the workers and of all working people, and
we shall do this by consolidating and generalising
the lessons that we have learnt from the struggles of the past year. The
workers have virtually expelled the union from the factory, and have begun to
formulate their own demands, and carry them forward in a fight that is led
entirely by themselves […]
A tactical idea: Minimum cost to us, maximum cost to
them
During the struggles of the last year certain demands
have cropped up repeatedly. We must take these, and use them as our priority to
unify workers throughout
-- Equal wage rises for all, not linked to productivity
or any other employer's standard (like time and motion, incentives, plus
payments, conditions payments etc.)
-- An immediate reduction in working hours, without
loss of wages. Abolition of compulsory overtime.
-- Abolition of the lower gradings
as the first step towards the abolition of all grading divisions.
-- Complete parity with the white collar workers.
The sort of strikes that the union intends to call for
the Autumn are the sort that cost us the most and cost the employers the least
– the sort where the employer has plenty of warning of the strike, and can organise himself so as not to be hit too hard – and the
sort that gives us precious little help to get together and organise
ourselves. But in the strikes at Mirafiori, and
previously at the Pirelli rubber factory in
The general, autonomous organisation
of the working class
This kind of autonomous organisation
already exists in many departments at FIAT, and during the strikes for the
contracts this Autumn we are going to have to spread
it – both to other parts of the plant, and to other factories that it has not
yet reached. For us the watchword is “Fight Inside The
Factory”, because it is only through fighting inside the factory that we shall
be in a position to outlast a prolonged clash with the bosses and the State. We
must put them in the weakest position, where they will have to pay the
highest price, and not us.
Now, the struggles in the Autumn
are going to be hard. Nobody is saying that we shall see the final frontal
clash of the proletariat with the armed forces of capitalism for the conquest
of state power. But over the last year, Italian workers have revealed a certain
revolutionary awareness that their problems are class problems, and that the
only way to solve them is to mount an attack on the system that perpetuates
them, with the aim of destroying capitalism and abolishing all classes. Our
problem now must be to use the struggles over the national agreements this Autumn to translate this general awareness into organisation – the general autonomous organisation
of the Italian working class.
[Translated from La Classe No. 13-14, August 1969]
_______________________________________
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