CHAPTER 16
INTERVIEW WITH THREE FIAT WORKERS
ABOUT 1969
Red Notes: …It was only after the summer of 1969 that people in
Luigi: You mean was it they that broke the lethargy of the
last twenty years here? Yes it was. Of course, there were struggles before this
time, but they were all dominated by the unions. And they were struggles that
came round at fixed intervals, when the unions set them. So every two or three
years, when the contracts were about to expire, we would have the classic sort of
struggle – you know, three days of strikes, all kept within union channels, and
then the bosses’ repression would begin all over again. And the little politicisation achieved during those two or three days
would be blocked for the next three years of bosses’ rule.
The southern immigrants arrive in
But then, in about 1966, the immigrants from the South
began to arrive. And the whole social situation in Turin blew up, what with the
shortage of housing, lightning price increases, the building speculation and so
on. All of a sudden there were 15,000-20,000 people arriving in the city, and
quite apart from the way the prices rocketed, there were not the facilities to
cope with them.
Red Notes: When did the three of you arrive in
Luigi: These two are young. For my part, I’ve been at FIAT
for 20 years. This lot are the new generation who’ve
broken with everything that we’ve become used to.
Toni: I’ve been here for two years. I joined FIAT right at
the time that the struggles started.
Red Notes: When you arrived in
Nino: I’ve been here for a couple of years now. For most of
the time I’ve worked in small places – you know, sweat shops – always inside
Toni: I’d never seen anything like this in all my life.
Because, as you know, I come from
Anyway, down there, even if I only had 50 lire (about
2½ pence) I could always buy myself a
cheese roll or something, looking out of the windows, and saw us But I come up
to Turin, and fuck it, I find I’m paying out 200! It was all crazy to me. Then
I began to pick up on the politics that Lotta Continua were putting forward. At
first, you know, I didn’t really understand too much. I used to read their
leaflets, but only in an informative sort of way, so as to know what they were
saying.
One day, one of the comrades, a student comrade from
Lotta Continua, hunted me out and began talking to me. He really attacked me
because I was still in the union. Before I worked at FIAT I’d worked for a few
months in other little factories, and all that I’d heard was that the unions
were there to defend the workers. Of course, down in
At the beginning, when we were few, we started our
struggles by going round the factory in huge processions that you would think
were never going to end. The corteo. One time there
were three hours of official union strike called. This was about the time that
all the big strikes were happening, in autumn ’69. A few of us got together
with other militants and asked ourselves what we were going to do.
Marching round the factory: kick out the foremen
We decided that the best thing would be to have a corteo – a big
march round the factory, pulling out everyone we could. So there we were, with
the three hour union strike, and the two of us got together with five or six
other comrades, and contacted a few people of Lotta Continua. Then we set off. Just the seven of us. And by the time we got to the Admin
offices where all the staff hang out, there were seven
thousand of us. Bloody beautiful it was. The admin staff
were all looking out of the windows, and saw us down below. They didn’t
know what to do. And the few security guards on the door were terrified.
Beautiful! Now, when the next lot of contract negotiations
come along… well, this year we started with seven and ended up with with seven thousand and end up as seventy thousand, and
that’ll be the end of FIAT. Goodbye Agnelli!
There’s another time that I remember was really fine.
We’d been in and out on strikes for a couple of days, and then we were having
one of those marches inside the factory. And people started saying: “Let’s kick
out the supervisors. They’ve been around giving orders for a hundred years now,
and we’ve had enough.” So we went down and started routing them out. People
were looking at them, laughing and jeering, spitting on them, and they looked
back as if they wanted to kill us, but there wasn’t a thing they could do. They
just didn’t know what was happening! There’s them who’ve worked their arses off to become supervisors, and there we were treating
them like shit.
_________
CARTOON CAPTION: Thinks: “It would be nice to
take part”. Ta-ra!
Ta-ra!
The
Olympics! 'Let's have 'em!’ Ah yes, it would be really nice!
_________
Luigi: It was these young people who began the fight, spontaneously.
And we, logically, found that this was a sort of alternative to the usual union
struggles. An alternative which went along with the contacts
growing at the same time with the students. As you know, from 1967 the
university movement joined up with the struggle of the workers.
Red Notes: What has been the relationship between the
revolutionary workers and the militants from the student movement?
_________
PHOTO: At the Gates of Mirafiori
_________
Luigi; It’s been a sort of team effort really. Them outside and us inside. At the start we would work on
all the antagonisms inside the factory, using them as a lever. For example, say
FIAT hadn’t provided some work-clothes. We would kick up a fuss, and the
students would support us from the outside with loud-hailers, gate meetings,
big posters, leaflets and so on.
Relations with the students: new forms of organisation
Usually what we do is find out the facts of the
situation, write them out in rough form, and give them to the external
militants to print, because they’re good at that sort of thing – and they have
more time than we do, to work right through the night. We hope that later on we
shall begin to do the leaflets ourselves, and already we are starting to do
more of the work – like typing and so on, as well as some of the distribution
outside the gates.
Once upon a time it was the ex-students that held the
leading role in Lotta Continua, and we were the ones that carried out the
programmes. Now we are beginning to take the leadership. There’s a bit of
confusion about this at present, as to whether we should have the leadership of
the organisation, because they still control a lot of the apparatus, like the
national newspaper, the duplicators, the
poster-printing facilities and so on. However, I would say that by now there is
really a joint leadership.
Red Notes: So you can really say that the new wave of struggles
started with the immigrants and the students?
Luigi: Yes. Italian students understood very early on, first
with the Student Movement, and then with the ultra-left groups, that the only
way they could expect to have any life at all was by allying themselves with
the struggles of the workers. So that was how it really all started. Apart from
the very early factory leafleting in isolated areas, like
Now the spontaneous struggles are over. I’m convinced
of it. Now, when the struggles start again, they are going to have to be
struggles for organisation. Last year we were fighting, seven or eight of us at
a time, limited within single shops, all of us at Mirafiori, linked through
Lotta Continua, because we’d had enough of the Unions. But now we’re moving
towards a situation in which we’ll have the factory coordinated shop by shop.
When we decide at a certain point to launch a strike, we’ll start with an
assembly in one shop, say 55 Shop. Then we’ll begin the round-up, setting off
in a corteo
towards, say, the Paint Shop. Before we used to waste two or
three hours getting everyone together. And by that time, as we were
going round collecting the comrades, the anger would melt away. To coordinate
the struggle inside the factory means that when we decide on a corteo it no
longer takes half an hour to get it moving. Every group, every shop moves
together. And when we start, we can come to a certain point where we can decide
what objective we are going to be heading for. We can decide to leave the
factory grounds and tie up with other factories in the area, radicalising the struggle outside the factory, so as to
involve other places.
The role of the union as political control
Red Notes: What has been the role of the unions during these
struggles?
Luigi: The Unions are there to make sure that the workers are
kept inside the system, and have less possibility of beginning to challenge it.
The Unions are the political extensions of sicknesses that exist inside the
government; the “long arm inside the factories” of the political parties. Every
group, every political party has a little hand inside the factory. The
Christian Democrats have CISL, the Communists have the CGIL, the Socialists
have a tendency inside the CGIL, SIDA are the Fascists, UIL is the Social
Democrats, even some Republicans… every one of them has a certain presence
inside the factory to control the situation.
A new project for revolutionary organisation
Now, a lot of workers understand this. However, they
don’t as yet have an alternative. Inside FIAT the unions don’t i count for anything, and everyone’s well aware of where
they stand. But at the moment they are the only organisations with a voice,
they are the only ones who can say anything when it comes to dealing with
management. So what’s really necessary at the moment is that we begin to create
inside the factory, agitational nuclei, or revolutionary committees,
that are strong and so well-rooted among the workers that they are an
alternative to the internal commissions and the shop steward structures that
the unions have set up. Thus we can begin to create a point of reference in the
factory to which the less politicised worker can look, so that they can escape
the control of the unions, can talk together, and can politicise
themselves further. That is exactly what we’re engaged in at the moment – to
form nuclei, to come to some agreement among ourselves, to study and understand
the situation, and to provide a focal point inside the factory. These
agitational nuclei are composed of ordinary workers inside the factory, but the
best of them – the activists. It must be said that these nuclei are being
formed not only from members of Lotta Continua, but also from other workers who
are not members, but who have understood this need, and who come along with us
because of that.
Red Notes: What are your aims with these agitational nuclei
inside the factories?
Luigi: With the nuclei, and with the revolutionary committees,
if we manage to create them, we are trying, not to be another union, but to
provide a political, revolutionary perspective for the workers. We must not
fall into economism, into parochialism. We must not
say: “Look, we must fight for 5 lire more, or for 10 lire more, or to work one
or two hours less.” We are fighting – and of course we are not going to achieve
it tomorrow – for POWER, because the working class without power isn’t worth a
thing. Of course, we won’t dissociate ourselves from the economic struggles,
because for most workers economic struggles are the beginning. However, the
economic struggles must go hand in hand with a revolutionary development of
understanding, of politicisation, of awareness on the
part of the mass of workers. Only in this way can we hope for the taking of
power, because that’s what we’re aiming at. The point is to take the factory,
because it’s the factory that creates value, and it’s us that should have it,
and not them.
I’ve been in this factory for twenty years now, and
I’ve seen people make so many mistakes. All the time fighting for handfuls of
rice, you know. And it’s never done us a scrap of good. But now they are
beginning to understand that it’s no good fighting for scraps,
that the struggle now is to have everything. In the factory, either you
have everything or you have nothing. There can’t be any half measures.
[Interview done in
_______________________________________
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