CHAPTER 26
RESTRUCTURING AT FIAT
The spiralling working-class
struggle that has characterised Italian society over
the last six years has produced a crisis of major proportions for Italian
capitalism – the most severe recession since the War. The crisis has not only
affected the method of capitalist reproduction, but has also shaken capital’s
political control over the working class and has weakened the power of the
institutions that mediate the class struggle – the trade unions.
Furthermore, it is a crisis that may be very hard to
resolve, since at its roots lie the main political
outcome of a decade of struggles: the workers’ generalised
refusal of the capitalist organisation of work.
“Chaos,” as the bourgeois press puts it, “has become an endemic feature of
Italian society. The traditional tools of capitalist power are no longer
capable of maintaining social peace.” It is during the crisis, says Marx, that
the relation between classes becomes clarified. It is by the “universality of
its theatre and the intensity of its actions” that the crisis reveals the unresolvable antagonistic relationship between capital and
the working class.
The Italian crisis is first of all a crisis of the
progressive reformist policies which capital, together with the official
working class movement, had attempted to apply, starting with the first
Centre-Left coalition government of 1964. By 1970, following the struggles of
1968-69, it had become apparent that the advanced Keynesian policies promoted
by the Centre-Left coalition (economic planning, incomes policy, collaboration
with the trade unions) could not contain the impact of a united and politically
homogeneous working class struggle. Once again, the autonomous working class
demand for more money and less work, for a wage disengaged from the labour expended, hit the capitalist system’s capacity to
respond positively and to continue to deliver the goods.
As the wage boosts won by the workers in 1968 and 1969
easily exceeded the productivity ceiling, the working class struggle for more
wages ceased to function as an incentive to capitalist development, and became
a threat to capitalist production. Wages could no longer be made to work as
“internal demand” (purchasing power, Keynesian push for development) but, on
the contrary, represented a renewed attack on the stability of the capitalist
system. The basic Keynesian presupposition that class conflict can be
integrated into the strategy of capitalist development revealed once again its
political weakness. Capitalism proved to be incapable of satisfying the
autonomous and collective needs of the politically re-unified working class.
Economic development is secondary to capital’s need to
politically control workers – that is, to maintain a dominant power relation.
Where such control over workers has loosened, it must be restored at once.
Capitalists, politicians, and union executives remind us that there will be no
economic development until the “political preconditions” are there. In other
words, there will be no economic development short of a workers’ defeat.
The fascist bombings of December 1969 were the first
major signal of the repression to come. It was in 1970,
however, that capital’s anti-working class offensive took definite shape, along
the following lines: (1) economic crisis; (2) institutional transformation; and
(3) technological change, and reconversion of the
economy. The sections that follow deal with these three levels
in that order. The role that the official labour
movement has played throughout the crisis is also examined.
1. The economic crisis
Capitalists do not like crises. During crises,
capital’s accumulation slows down and stops. The premise and justification of
capitalist civilisation – economic development – must
give way to the destruction of capital and of real wealth. Left to themselves,
the capitalists would not choose a crisis. The days of crises as a product of
intra-capitalist competition in a vacuum of workers’ activity are over – if
they ever existed.
The economic crisis was imposed on the capitalists by
the working class struggle. During the 1968-70 cycle of struggles, workers had
not only stepped up their mass struggle against work at the point of production
through increased strikes, go-slows, absenteeism and sabotage (all activities
that do not reproduce capital), but had also expressed their determination to
struggle against the capitalist state. Capital was left with a single choice:
to accept the crisis as the new battlefield, to try to take it under control,
and to make it backfire on the workers.
There is one thing we have learned. Crisis is no longer
the catastrophic development of capital’s “social anarchy”, as in the collapse
theory of the Second International. Rather, crisis represents a capitalist
attempt to regain control over the workers’ command over the business cycle.
In Italy in the first months of 1971, industrial
production receded by an average of 3.5%, with a flat -5.1% in the “leading
sectors” – steel, machine tools, and construction. Once again, the traditional
antagonism of the level of wages and the level of employment (as unemployment
goes up, wages are supposed to come down) was exploited. Massive layoffs,
expulsion from the labour force of marginal sectors
(women, old people, and youth), underemployment, decreased work mobility – all
such means have been used to destroy the unity of the working class, to play
off the employed and the unemployed against each other, to separate community
struggles from the struggle at the point of production, to de-compose and to disorganise the mass worker.
Despite these efforts, the wage pressure was sustained
throughout 1971. With productivity virtually stagnant, wage boosts averaged a
fat 16.6%, and cut deep into profit margins. By the end of the year the Bank of
Italy revealed that a 670 billion lira increase in the monetary value of
production was swallowed up by a 1,500 billion lira increase in the total wage
bill. Capital’s income fell by 830 billion lira. There was no capitalist
accumulation in
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Capitalist development depends on current profits as
well as estimates on future profits. When the capitalists see no future, they
do not invest, no matter how “easy” money may be. Beyond a certain point of
deterioration, easy money as such does not get investment moving again. In
spite of the “expansive” fiscal policy pursued by the Bank of Italy, net
investments fell by 17% in 1971. It was and is a political strike on
investments. If capitalist development represents the basis for a working class
offensive, then as far as the capitalists are concerned, the only hope of a
workers’ defeat lies in the economic crisis.
2. Technological change and reconversion
of the economy
Marx saw through technological change very clearly: “It
would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions made since 1830
for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of
the working class.” Since Marx, and in particular since the development of mass
production and the scientific organisation of labour, technological change (called “progress”) has become
a major weapon in the hands of the capitalist class. By manipulating class
composition technologically, capital has learned how to deal directly with the
material existence of the working class as labour
power, as mere commodIty.
In the context of the Italian crisis, the capitalist
strategy to base the overall political attack on a “technological repression”
of the working class had to satisfy two fundamental political needs. First, it
had to strengthem the attack on jobs, for the purpose
of enforcing work on the unemployed. Second, it had to produce major gaps in
the homogeneous texture of a working class which was politically dominated by
the the collective behaviour
of the mass worker: that is, it had to alter the class composition that had
served as the basis for the political re-unification of the working class in 1968-70.
The following measures were attempted: technological
innovations that reduce the number of workers employed (technological
unemployment); demobilisation of entire sectors of
production (such as textiles) and of geographic areas (such as Quarto and La Spezia); decentralisation of
productive structures, so as to eliminate large working class concentrations;
restructuring of the labour process in view of two
major requirements: 1) a wider range of skills and gradings
(an attempt at creating a pro-work ideology of skill in a portion of the
workforce), and 2) widened wage differentials. Once again, the workers’
struggle had forced capital to attempt a technological leap.
Such technological repression, however, was carried out
differently in different productive sectors. In fact, industrial sectors were
to be analysed in terms of the instruments they
provide for regaining control over the working class. From this point of view,
each “sectoral plan” represents a particular
strategy, a particular model of capital’s command over production.
In this respect, the leading sector today is the
chemical industry, which, because of its high vertical and horizontal
concentration and its integration at the international level, has wide margins
of control over the entire cycle of production. Not so for the auto industry.
The replacement of the assembly line in the motor factories has been on the
capitalists’ agenda for quite some time, internationally – ever since the
struggles of 1933-37 in the US unequivocally demonstrated the collective power
of the assembly workers, the mass workers.
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But the “new way of producing cars” is not just round
the corner. FIAT’s Agnelli
has explicitly ruled out the possibility of any major innovation on, or
substitute for, the assembly line, since this would involve at once huge
capital outlays, coupled with a 25% increase in costs. Plainly, the big
multinational FIAT has become incapable of formulating a workable strategy of
containment. At least 360,000 have been “lost” through struggle since 1969.
The ultimate solution in both the auto and chemical
sectors lies in the search for safer areas of investment. Thus,
3. Institutional transformations: the new role of the
state
The political institutions required by a government
which must impose mass repression on the working class cannot be the same as
those of a reformist govern-ment, which would be
based on attempted collaboration with the working class. The 1948 Constitution,
with its focus on the parliamentary life of mediating political parties and its
emphasis on decentralised administrative structures,
could not function as the institutional framework for a capitalist use of the
crisis. The
The first few months of the
Andreotti’s Centre-Right government of
January to May 1972 was the first government to openly do away with
constitutional constraints, and practice large-scale systematic repression. A modernisation, rationalisation
and numerical increase of the police forces; a strengthening of executive
power, tested through mass anti-crime campaigns (against both “political” and
“common” criminals); early elections in May (with the Christian Democrats
promising stability to the capitalists, law and order to the middle classes and
repression for the proletariat); the assassination of the revolutionary
publisher Feltrinelli and the subsequent increase in state
terrorism against the mass vanguards and the revolutionary Left; the hundreds
of comrades in jail – all of these measures expressed the same political programme: namely, subordinating the need to resume
production and economic development to a process of completely restructuring
capitalist command.
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The May 1972 elections reflected the radicalisation of the conflict in the only way the
elections could offer: a parliamentary polarisation
and a growth of votes for the three major opposing parties, the Christian
Democrats (DC), the Fascists (MSI) and the Communist Party (PCI) at the expense
of all other minor parties. The tactical reason for the working class votes
going to the Communist Party should be clear to everyone: the electoral show of
strength of the working class as a compact political body should not be
mistaken for a show of support for the Party’s political programme.
In fact, the government understood the electoral results for what they were – a
show of strength, a threat, and an anticipation – and
it quickly stepped up repression after the elections with an eye to the next
negotiating round of workers’ national agreements (Autumn 1972). The winning
Christian Democrats’ political platform did not provide a strategy for economic
development – it provided a model for controlling the class. And this was
implemented by changing the relationship between trade unions, political
parties, and the state.
The unions were now told explicitly that their
institutional function was to convince the workers to stop fighting – or else
bear the burden of continued recession. A wage ceiling was set as a
precondition for economic recovery, and strike regulation, although not
formally ratified, was accepted in practice by the unions, in the form of both
“self-restraint” and the search for new mediations to prevent strikes. As for parliament,
political parties became organs of the state, and achieving law and order
became a political priority for all.
But the major transformation occurred in the role of
the state itself.
It was the role of the state as a general economic
planner that had come to an end with the crisis. Beginning with the first
Centre-Left coalition of -of-4964**, capital had come to accept the
historic trend towards the re-unification of the working class, and tried to
make use of this working class unity to re-launch economic development. Through
state planning, capital attempted to achieve a general control over the working
class as a whole through the institutions of the democratic state, political
parties, and trade unions. But when the mass consensus of the working class
could not be secured, working class unity became fully subversive in its
impact. Consequently, general planning became impossible, and had to be
replaced by a number of separate sector plans, particular plans covering the
different sectors of industry, in an attempt to tear holes in the homogeneous
texture of the working class.
The impossibility of a general plan and the consequent
crisis of the state’s role as general planner meant that business reclaimed the
economic initiative and set itself up to manage the crisis directly and to
respond to each class situation in a specific manner. The state was left simply
with its commitment to the stability of capitalist power. This meant an obvious
emphasis on the state’s repressive functions – on institutional violence, the
police, the courts, the secret service, and the democratic state’s use of fascism.
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Yet it would be a mistake to interpret such
institutional changes as simply a revival of state non-interference,
laissez-faire, 19th century non-intervention. In fact the state’s emphasis on
mass repression and institutional violence was a means to a very precise and
advanced form of “state intervention”: the political determination of all
market values (prices, wages, “incomes” in general), in order to have economic
values meet political priorities. As “economic laws” ceased to function within
the process of formation and distribution of income, they simply had to give
way to open and direct relations of power. When the laws regulating the price
of labour on the market no longer functioned and
wages outgrew productivity (that is, the price of labour
became disengaged from the amount of labour
expended), the traditional socialist ideology of a “value of labour” collapsed. The price of labour
could be determined only by relations of power, open struggle, and the strength
of organisation.
4. The Communist Party and the question of fascism
Throughout the capitalist crisis, the CP intensified
its campaign to join the government in a coalition cabinet (the well-publicised “Italian Road to Socialism”). Yet, to the extent
that reformism : has been defeated, there has been
little that capital and the Communist Party could offer each other. Capitalism
has no margins for reforms and economic development, and the Communist Party
has been in no position to guarantee control over workers’ behaviour.
But then what has the Party had to offer to the working
class? Only an anachronistic, ideological re-posing of
“reforms” (such as public expenditure and rationalisation
of the “social services”), and a campaign for a democratic struggle against fascism
which would include all the parties that accept parliamentary fair play (with
the single exception of the fascists themselves). In the CP analysis, thé threat of a fascist take-over was to be dispelled by a
popular-front coalition.
A few words of explanation: the CP’s
alarmism notwithstanding, Italy is not presently on the verge of a fascist
takeover. True, after the failure of reformism, capitalist strategy has come to
a political crisis, for it has not indicated a way to utilise
productive forces in a way that is adequate to match the growth and autonomy of
the working class. The fascist solution, however, when applied to the problem
that capitalist strategy must tackle today – containment and utilisation of workers’ struggles at the highest level of socialisation – is only a museum piece. A popular front in defence of bourgeois civil liberties is a rearguard
solution: it is simply a solution for a problem that does not exist.
The problem today is not that there is a possibility of
a fascist takeover; it is, rather, collective capital’s support for fascism,
and democratic state usage of fascism. For capital, fascist thugs are
instruments of direct, physical repression in the unions, on the picket lines,
on the streets. Their existence in the political arena, moreoever,
allows the state to play the role of mediator between “opposing extremisms” – revolution
and reaction.
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But who are the fascists? That is, whose interests do fascist
interests represent today? They express the interests of the most backward
fringes of capital: small business – a social stratum that is doomed to
collapse, haunted by the rising costs of labour, and
that is politically squeezed out of existence by the sharpening class struggle.
The political strength of the fascists, therefore, derives not from the stratum
they represent (a fragile stratum indeed), but from the function they are
called on to fulfil as a weapon of the democratic state,
in the anti-working class offensive.
Under these conditions, to denounce “fascism” and at
the same time to “defend the democratic institutions”, as the CP anti-fascist
campaign seeks to do, is not simply political blindness: it is open collusion
with capital in the attempt to disarm the working class.
5. The trade unions versus the working class struggle
The crisis of reformism has deeply affected the role
played by the unions in the capitalist plan. Years of open, autonomous struggle
have made it clear that the unions cannot guarantee the collaboration of the
working class. In fact, the formal signing of labour
contracts has seldom put an end to industrial struggles. Capital has come to realise that collaboration with the trade unions makes
little sense when it does not ensure the collaboration of the working class.
Furthermore, on certain occasions during the early years of the cycle, the
trade unions, far from exercising control, have been used by the workers as one
means of coordinating their struggle. Clearly the unions in the “Keynesian state”
of the 1960s could fulfil their political function of
mediation and containment only on the condition that they effectively “represented”
the working class – that is, on the condition that they accepted (and mediated)
its spontaneous struggles. Hence, we witnessed a “radicalisation” of the trade unions’ official negotiating
platform in 1968-69, as well as the emergence of a Left wing within the trade
union movement.
Things were different in 1972. In the 1972-3 round of
bargaining, there was no room for concessions. Reformism had failed, and
economic development had come to a standstill. There was only one function left
– for the unions to fulfil open collaboration with
capital in repressing the working class – i.e. the “responsibility” that trade
union leaders demonstrated throughout the negotiations. In the words of one
union boss: “The Hot Autumn must not be repeated. The 1972 contracts must be
negotiated and bargained at a very mild temperature”.
The unions’ strategy focussed
on one major objective: to contain the workers’ struggles through the
paradoxical argument that one must stop striking in order to prevent
anti-strike legislation being brought in. But the history of the last several
months has dispelled any illusions concerning the possibility of trade union
control over the working class.
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Photo: FIAT 1973: The workers march,
demanding an occupation.
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Once again it has been the struggle of the auto and engineering
workers which has functioned as the occasion for the new working class
offensive of Spring 1973. Once again, the situation at
FIAT epitomises the political features of a whole
wave of struggles.
Since the
Together with the cortei
interni, mass absenteeism has become a major new
form of struggle. Once again FIAT workers have led the way with an absenteeism
rate of 28%. This means that each day 30,000 FIAT workers do not go to be
exploited by the capitalist factory; that the average real work-week at FIAT
has been self-reduced by workers to a little over 30 hours. Through their
absenteeism and sick leaves, the 100,000 FIAT at the [ leve ròf negotiation ] is obvious, workers of Turin have re-appropriated
45 billion lira (over £3,000,000) – nine times the net profit that FIAT posted Trade
union officials and foremen to-for 1972 – without work. And absenteeism,
far from being a substitute for other forms of struggle, has been growing
together with other forms of the workers’ revolt – strikes, picket lines,
factory occupations and mass demonstrations.
6. The blockade of Fiat-Mirafiori
On Thursday 29 March, FIAT-Mirafiori
was occupied again. Early in the morning a crowd of 10,000 picketers blocked
all the entrances. To the workers’ slogan “Occupy FIAT – No Truce!”, the unions responded with their own one – “Strike for Two
Hours’”. Inside the occupied factory, workers set up permanent political mass
meetings. FIAT’s first move was to threaten not to
distribute the weekly wage packets and to call the police. On Friday morning
however, wage packets were ready as usual – but for strikers only. “Workers’
Courts” ruled that strikebreakers should not be allowed in to pick up their
wages. In the Carozzerie [Body Plant], the workers
held a kind of “mass trial” of foremen and scabs. By Friday evening, most of
On Monday 2 April, the blockade at Mirafiori
continued. This was not a factory occupation in the traditional sense; the
workers took over the factory not to defend it, nor to run it, but to use it as
an enormous resource of political strength. In the words of one striker:
"If the police had come to the gates, we wouldn't
have attacked them there. We would have drawn them inside the factory, onto our
own ground, where there's no especial organisation,
but where we're always ready to answer violence in the terms we understand… If
the police had come into Mirafiori, the place would
have been out of action for 3 years!"
Picket lines at hundreds of factories throughout the Turin
area guaranteed that if the clash exploded, it would not blow up Corso Traiano, as in 1969, but
would blow up the entire city. Avoiding a battle was a major necessity for
capitalists, unions and government alike. On Monday afternoon it became known
that the bosses and unions had signed the new engineering workers’ national
agreement.
The new national contract was no workers’ victory – for
two reasons. First, it incorporated very little of the workers’ own material
demands. Second, and more important, as a result of bargaining between
capitalists and unions, the contract did not and could not reflect the
political strength and militancy that the working class had expressed
throughout the crisis. The disparity between the political strength of the workers – and the
results that their strength can command
[…]
On Tuesday morning the unions pushed for an end to the
blockade. Trade union officials and foremen together urged the workers to go
back to work, and managed to get a few shops working. But on the whole,
production did not resume. The first back-to-work day was again a day of no
work. At Mirafiori, 60% of the workforce was
“absent”. Thousands of workers resumed picketing and blocking production. At Rivalta, the workers’ assembly expressed the will to
continue their struggle until all the people who had been fired during the
strike were rehired.
This demand for re-hiring the sacked workers may
trigger a new post-contract workers’ offensive in the months ahead. As we are
writing, the situation remains unstable and open.
What is, then, the main political characteristic of
this wave of struggles? It is the way that workers have used the struggle over
the contract as simply a moment in the general confrontation between capital
and the working class. Here we must leam a lesson of
working class strategy: throughout the struggle, workers have left all
bargaining in the hands of the unions, and have shown little interest in the
official negotiating platform, realising that no
union platform can defend the workers from the capitalist attack. They have
concentrated on fighting the capitalists on a more advanced level – that is,
fighting them over the capitalists’ own demands.
Permanent conflict
In fact, the motor-industry and engineering-industry
capitalists, with Agnelli leading the way, came to
the bargaining table with their own explicit demands: an end to “permanent
conflict”; regulation of absenteeism; no reduction in the working week; full utilisation of productive capacity. Precisely these demands
were rejected by the struggle at FIAT. After the contracts were signed, the
“permanent conflict” did not subside, absenteeism was not reduced, discipline
was hardly restored, and production was only resumed with great difficulty.
Signing the contracts did not put an end to the struggles, for the workers’
struggle has been beyond contracts all along.
Hundreds of mass pickets, red flags, and “workers’
courts” at all gates, blockades of finished products, “imprisonment” of
managers, well-organised settlements of accounts with
foremen and security guards – all point to a new leap in the working class
struggle: “Taking power” at FIAT, and in all of Turin, contains an explicit
allusion to the seizure of political power and to the revolutionary programme of the abolition of wage labour.
Says a worker from FIAT-Mirafiori:
“This occupation is different from the one the workers
did in 1920. In 1920 they said let's occupy, but let's work. Let's show
everybody that we can run production ourselves. Things are different today. In
our occupation, the factory is a starting point for the revolutionary organisation of workers – not a place to work.”
[Translated from Potere Operaio…
1973?]
_______________________________________
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