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CHAPTER 42

 

A REVOLUTIONARY AND COMMUNIST WORKER

 

I am a communist worker, a member of the Red Brigades. The arms found in the house where you captured me belong to my organisation and were entrusted to me. The comrades who were putting me up knew nothing of the contents of my bags, or of my political identity.

 

I am one of the “61” sacked from FIAT. This fact will perhaps embarrass those who have always talked of the isol­ation of the armed struggle in the work­ing class, of the unbridgeable gap between the Fighting Communist Organisations and the mass movement. Here I am, a revolutionary and communist worker. With my fellow workers in the factory I have always fought against the company’s restructuring, against the foremen, and against the attempts by the FIAT multinational to make us proletarians pay the highest price of the crisis.

 

And in July 1979, during the struggle for the renewal of the national agree­ment, we showed Agnelli and his city of Turin what happens when workers escape from the control of the trade unions and the revisionists. In Turin the wind of revolt was blowing — so they closed the negotiations early, worried of bigger troubles to come. But the hopes of Berlinguer and his like vanished into nothing, because after the summer shut­down the struggle inside the factory took off again, with internal marches, cortei, stoppages and pickets. This struggle was all the more decisive because, apart from its objectives, its actions and the forms of violent struggle, it showed clearly that the confrontation was over a fundamental question of power. In other words, a battle over who was to hold command in the factory — the bosses, with the fore­men hierarchy and the stupid slaves of the PCI, or the working class, with its mass strength and its organised  […]

 

It was this powerful working class force — which has hardly begun to dev­elop — which forced Agnelli to sack the “61”: the blitz of judicial charges, accus­ations, arrest warrants against workers. Agnelli was giving the employing class the signal for a counter-attack, giving them new heart, and at the same time giving the unions something to think about. This was what led him to attack that informal network of vanguard militants which has been the political and organ­isational underpinning of the movement of struggle in these past months.

 

 

[Translated from Lotta Continua, 12 April 1980]

 

 

 

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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