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
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]
_______________________________________
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