CHAPTER 52
THE FACTORY WORKERS OF TURIN AND THE
OTHERS
Marco Revelli
An analysis
of the historic five week strike of FIAT workers in Turin against mass layoffs,
which was defeated, and which marked the end of an era for organised labour in
Italy.
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PREFACE by Bob Lumley: This article
originally appeared under the title “The Factory Workers of Turin and the Others”, in Primo Maggio No. 14 (Winter 1980/81). It
was written in the immediate aftermath of what has since proved to be the
historic defeat of the five week strike against mass redundancy at the FIAT
plant in Turin during October 1980. Central to the outcome of this struggle was
the impact of a demonstration by some 20,000 middle managers, foremen and
moderate workers under the slogan “Work is defended by working”. Up to that
point the strike had seemed solid. It had been called by the FLM (the
engineering workers section of the three union confederations) with the
overwhelming support of shop-floor delegates and with all three confederation
secretaries pledging total support. Berlinguer, the Communist Party General
Secretary, had also visited Turin in support, and the news from the striking
shipyard workers in Poland had led to the call “Do as in Gdansk – Occupy!” But
immediately after being faced with middle management's unprecedented show of
support for the company both union and party leaderships surrendered the
struggle. The confederation secretaries went over the heads of the FLM and concluded
an agreement with FIAT that both accepted the redundancies and allowed the
company to fire whomsoever it chose.
As Italy's largest private
manufacturing concern, FIAT has always acted as a barometer not only of the
fortunes of the economy but also to a large extent of trends in the struggle
between capital and labour in Italian industry as a whole. And since the events
of autumn 1980 the list of major industrial companies declaring, and succeeding
in achieving, massive lay-offs and redundancies has been virtually a roll call
of the commanding heights of Italian manufacturing. Alfa Romeo, which laid off a third of its workforce at the beginning of 1982,
is but the most recent example of an enterprise following FIAT's robust
assertion of “management's right to manage” and restructure on its own terms.
In Italy, as in the UK, manufacturing, and particularly engineering, employment
has sharply declined in the last two years and productivity among the remaining
workforce has equally sharply increased; at FIAT it has risen by 20% since the
beginning of 1981.
Revelli's analysis does not
deal with the tactics or direct consequences of the strike – rather he
addresses a more general question: “Have we reached a turning point, the end of
a certain working class culture and identity in the face of a qualitative, and historical alteration in the relations of
production?” In other words, does the new management offensive amount to a
modern version of Fordism in which the “mass worker” will now suffer the same
fate as the craftsman? In explaining the FIAT defeat Revelli stresses the way
in which the introduction of new technologies – carefully pursued by management
during a period of apparent defensiveness during the 1970s – has transformed
the labour process. As editor of Primo Maggio he writes from within the “operaismo”
tradition that has developed on Panzieri's insights into capital's use of
machinery in attaining the real subsumption of labour power. [1] Some may feel
that this account lacks an analysis of the world outside the sphere of
production and that it is too narrowly wedded to a vision that assumes the
primacy of the relations of production (in the narrow sense of relations within
the factory) in determining social and political behaviour. However, Revelli's
analysis is not mechanistic and he introduces several concepts new to the “operaist”
tradition which allow greater space for subjectivity (stressing generational
differences among the strikers, for example). Questions of subjectivity and
culture are more fully explored in relation to the shopfloor workforce than the
middle layers, whose actions are explained entirely in terms of their political
and economic subordination to FIAT. Nevertheless, Revelli makes extremely
important points in relation to those he dubs 'the others'. In particular, he
suggests that – in the climate of planned insecurity promoted by capital – the
middle layers will be increasingly inclined to offer loyalty in exchange for security;
and that, in its own wider interests, capital may hold back from technological
innovation that could eradicate many such jobs.
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“This is not just a battle – this is a war". That
was the opinion of the older workers on the picket lines. “You can afford to
lose a battle, you can lose a particular contract
struggle – but not this time". This was FIAT's settling of accounts after
ten years of workers’ hegemony in the factories. What was
at stake was the workers’ working conditions at FIAT – and not only FIAT – for
the coming 10 years.
That “war” was lost. And lost badly.
Now comes the dismal job of weighing up what happened
– how it happened, why it happened, and how long it will last. Is FIAT once
again going to become the “sleeping giant” that it was all through the 1950s,
weighing like lead on the class situation in Italy? or
will it prove capable of reconstructing in the factories a working class
resistance and staying-power, a new 1962? Or have we reached a turning point,
the end of a certain working-class culture and identity in the face of a
qualitative, and historical, change in the relations of production?
Defeat was already in the air
The first impact of the events of that anguish-filled
Friday 17 October was overwhelming; it was like a bad film about 8 September
1943 [trans. note: when the king and his government abandoned Rome to the
Nazis], with organisation falling apart, generals fleeing, and the soldiers
paying the price. The workers entered the factory in silence, subdued, whilst
not far off, some hundreds of them tried, in desperation, to storm the local
lead offices of the Engineering Union, the Quinta Lega.
Previously there had been the morning of the 15th,
when, after a night of tense expectation, there had been scenes recalling
“civil war”, with the grey, colourless mass of white collar workers, middle
management and foremen stretching out along Corso Unione Sovietica, in
confrontation with the colourful line-up of the workers’ pickets outside the
factory – and between the two, the dark line of the carabinieri, and a tension
in the air… And on the 16th, a terribly sad and leaden day, the mass meetings
were a suffering and a mockery.
But defeat had been in the air right from the start. We
should have been ready for it. I had lived through 35 days of the struggle
unsure of myself, wavering and impotent. I hadn’t managed to write a word. I
felt – and was proved right – that the affair was going to end badly, that it
had been lost from the word go, and this was also the feeling, basically, of
those thousands of comrades who threw their hearts and souls into this
struggle. But at the same time I could hardly avoid being inspired by the moral
strength that was being expressed – with an obstinacy that matched the desperation
of the situation – by the workers of Turin as they tried to round off their own
political cycle with their heads held high.
Such a strength, I told
myself, cannot simply be erased – it must leave its mark.
Anybody who has followed events at FIAT closely over
the past five years – the class dynamic, the transformations of technology and
social composition of the factories, the changes in workers’ subjectivity – knows
that this little army entrenched in the factories of FIAT-Mirafiori, Rivalta
and Lingotto, resisting Agnelli’s offensive, had already ceased to be an
emerging social force, a dynamic grouping, as had been the case at the end of
the 1960s. By now it was reduced more to a “political class”, a “political
culture”, without any real material base rooted in the relations of production.
It was clear that in fact FIAT had begun to win this “war” a long time before
open hostilities began – right back in 1973-4 when, with the agreement of all
parties (shop stewards, trade unions and political parties) they had launched
their first intensive cycle of technological innovation aimed at increasing the
productivity of labour, at reducing the workers’ powers of control over the
cycle of production, and at breaking up and dispersing the rigidity of that class
composition. FIAT’s strategy played the twin cards of decentralisation of
production, and financial manoeuvres.
A paradoxical situation was created at FIAT in that
period. On the one hand, a kind of production-truce reigned in the factories,
bearing all the hallmarks of considerable workers’ power (job timings were
laxer, workers had greater freedom of movement and greater amounts of free time
in the factory, and foremen had less disciplinary power – in short the
situation which is now known as the “ungovernability of the factory”). But at
the same time, FIAT was going ahead with the most radical and systematic
technological attack on workers’ power that has been seen in the last 30 years.
Temporary advantage to the working class
FIAT seemed prepared to write off their resulting lack
of competitiveness in the car market in that period (from 1975 to 1979 they
seemed hardly interested in fighting for an increased market share), and they
made up their losses via financial speculation (particularly by manoeuvres in
the exchange markets). And in the meantime they put a tremendous effort into a
deep-seated modification of their fixed capital, via “labour-saving” machinery
and innovations designed to cut down the “socially necessary labour time” in
the production of commodities. In these years the factory seemed in a state of
semi-activity; workers could “work up the line”, women workers could do their
knitting, and young workers could “roam around” among the robots that were
being run in, and the transfer machinery that was already obsolete. This was a
very particular and contingent situation, which gave rise both to the aspects
of workers’ behaviour that aroused the public’s interest (via FIAT’s propaganda
machine), and to the forms of behaviour of the “new” workforce, so different
from the older workforce.
This low-key factory operation was the result of a
number of factors. First, a result of the restructuring itself: obviously,
while work goes on with the replacement of whole segments of the cycle of production,
overall production is not going to run 100%. Second, increasing the potential
output of one section does not necessarily match with the capacities of the
factory as a whole: therefore physical imbalances of production occur. Third,
there was still a residual working class power in the factory, which imposed a
working-class “capitalisation” of the technological innovation, and thus was
able to turn it to function in the interests of increased free time rather than
the production of commodities. For some time we had been talking of
“politically necessary labour time” – which was far higher than “socially
necessary labour time”; but we added that, very soon, once capital had finished
its cycle of restructuring, it would then attempt to find new ways of combining
its renewed fixed capital with its politically redefined variable capital in
ways that would be favourable to capital, in order to match potential
productivity with real production output.
Workers’ reactions to a major offensive
That was also the period when you could see a
progressive detachment of the political vanguards from the trade union
organisations, as regards the real processes of transformation taking place in
the factory. For almost 5 years the union was on a sort of retainer-fee, no longer
matching the real balance of power between capital and labour-power within the
process of production. This was a period in which FIAT was used by the
employers more as a means for the enlarged reproduction of political mediation
(and social consensus) rather than as a means of production of commodities, and
it was clear that the union was able to survive, as a shadow, a fetishistic
form of a hypostatized “workers’ power”. But it was also clear that, as the
class composition which had made up the material and social base of that model
of the union broke up, so the moment was approaching in which the boss aimed to
settle a few scores.
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PICTURE – CARTOON]
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And, of course, FIAT moved to this settlement of scores
at a moment favourable to itself – when they held all the best cards: a
government which was in a state of disarray (between Cossiga and Forlani);
tensions at the economic level (the question of devaluation, and the agreement
between Nissan and Alfa Romeo); tricky balancings going on within the Communist
Party (between Napoletano and Berlinguer), and between the Communist Party and
the Left; the restructuring taking place in the means of mass communication – the
new law on the financing of newspapers, etc; an international situation which
was “critical”; and, above all, the moment of the most extreme decomposition
and fragmentation of the class, and the separation between the political
behaviour of the class and its functioning within production.
The result was that when FIAT decided to strike their
blow, the political leadership in the factory – that broad span of militants
who had been formed politically in the struggles of the last ten years, that
“vanguard” which was now tight and compact in the face of FIAT’s frontal attack
– found itself completely wrong-footed in relation to the new reality of the
production process. These vanguards were thrown; they found themselves in a
state of disarray and disaggregation by virtue of the technological
reorganisation, outflanked by the redefinition of political relationships in
the plant. All they had left was to try, now, to defend themselves in a
last-ditch stand against the “direction of history”; because in reality, those
tens of thousands of comrades grouped around the factory gates were defending
nothing more or less than their (and our) “culture” – that mixture of values
and life-rules, of memories and certainties that had made up the soul and the
identity of the workers’ movement for the past 50 years, and which was now tending
to be dissolved and marginalised by the new advance in technology, by the
transformation of the social relations of production, by the new form of the
“political” – in short, by “progress”.
Perhaps the ambiguity of our own position derives from
this ambiguous relationship with “progress”. Because we knew all this, and yet
despite the sense of inevitability of events, despite our understanding of the
frightening structural weakness of this struggle (its tragic “paradoxical”
nature), we maintained right to the end a desperate hope that the affair might
turn out somehow different, if we willed it strongly enough. And this attitude
was held at a mass level.
Perhaps because it was partially detached from its
root-soil in the world of production, because it was the expression and
synthesis of a “culture”, the battle of this “heroic minority” allowed its own
principally ethical character to emerge. On the one hand stood FIAT, determined
to intervene directly within the cultural composition of the working class,
right down to questions of morality; on the other hand, the workers, the most
conscious among them, determined to defend their own identity, their own class
“tradition”. At stake was what I call the transition from an “ethic of
solidarity''’ – the characteristic of working class morality over the past
decade, with the prevalence of the collective point of view, together with an
egalitarianism and a solidarity within people’s individual behaviour – to an
“ethic of survival'', of competitive individualism, which expresses the
perverse logic of the market during periods of crisis: this competition between
individuals, far from ensuring an optimised development, in fact becomes a “war
of all against the rest”. An ethic which is larded with Darwinism – a kind of
“productivist” Darwinism – as we have seen, in the systematic rooting-out of
“weak”, handicapped and “unsuitable” sections of the workforce (including
women) – and a paternalistic authoritarianism (workers are encouraged to
compete with each other in order to remain in management’s good books, and this
reaches levels of virtual self-mutilation, in the sense of workers being scared
to go sick.
We also see an atomisation, whereby each individual
worker stands alone in the face of the company, and planned insecurity,
resulting from the redundancy techniques employed. Perhaps we have been too
involved in denouncing the political nature of this operation (the sacking of
trade union militants, the sacking of insubordinate elements in the plant), and
have under-emphasised the pre-political aspect, the vicious “productivism” and
its implications at the level of the employers’ “conception of the world” and
of industrialist philosophy: virtually 70% of those sacked have been “worn-out
labour power” – men who have been worn out by their years spent in the factory,
and who are now treated as scrap.
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We should have shouted from the roof-tops the fact
that, after FIAT had signed on their 10,000 new starters in the past few years
(fresh flesh to feed to their machines), they proceeded to sack over 15,000
older workers as part of their project of advanced rationalisation of their
“human raw materials”, under which physiological (and more or less “biological”)
efficiency was to be a crucial aspect of a worker’s compatibility within the
new composition of capital. This was the real scandal, and was understood as
such by the majority of workers. The most elementary respect for human rights
was being thrown aside by FIAT management. In the name of dry calculations of
efficiency, whole lives spent in the factory were being cast aside with a
stroke of the pen.
The people of the picket lines
From the start this battle was clearly a matter of
global totalisations, like any battle in which matters of principle are at
stake. On the picket lines, two opposing “worlds of morality” confronted each
other.
On the other hand, there were the “gate people” – the
10-15,000 men and women who, with courage and determination, lived, hoped and
suffered every moment of those 35 days, bringing about a transformation in
themselves and in the areas surrounding the factory: here, for a brief moment,
they had constructed an “alternative society”, a “world-turned-upside-down”,
with its own laws and symbols, languages and structures. The composition of
this world was bizarre and improbable: it comprised a sort of compressed
sandwich of each of the generations of workers that have come into the factory
in the past 30 years, constructed in a sort of pyramid structure which summed
up the whole gamut of political class composition.
At their head stood the workers from the 1950s – grey-haired,
and imbued with a “resistance culture” that was formed in the hard years of the
1950s. They directed and organised the picket lines. They had undeniable
political hegemony. Theirs was the language, the heritage of experience that
allowed them to take a hard line, to organise themselves into a “war of
position”. The struggle is perhaps one way of regaining your youth…
Next came the “mass worker” of the 1960s – a broad and
effective operational structure, but politically fragile, uneasy in a terrain
not of its own choosing. These workers provided the most solid links with the
fabric of proletarian life in the city: via the intricate network of family
relationships, via an extended network of channels, the news of the struggle
reaches out to the population of the city. On Saturday and Sunday thousands of
women and children, and family relations, besiege the Mirafiori plant, and take
in its reality, and light fires around it on the picket lines. And you hear
many different dialects...
Finally, at the bottom of the pyramid, are the “young
ones”, the new starters. They are many, and active; but subordinate. The worker
with curly hair and an ear-ring, the metropolitan worker who, a year ago, was
so active during the road-blocks, has been forced to set aside his language,
his ideology of mobility, his culture of casual working. He has to take on the
viewpoint of the “others” – the older workers, the hard-liners, the ’46
generation who can remember the Resistance and the attempt on Togliatti’s life.
This acceptance is the condition for their staying in the struggle, and it’s
taken in good part. But when it is the employers who attack you, who imposes “their” concept of mobility, “their” concept of
casual working, even the most radical “refusal of the factory” becomes
transformed into a “work ethic”.
Faced with this heterogeneous yet compact human
totality, we have been forced to admit the schematic nature of our analyses,
which sliced up the various strata of the workforce into “skilled workers”,
“mass workers”, “social workers”, “diffuse workers” etc, without grasping the
thousand subtle threads that interweave the fabric of the working class, which
communicate the experience and language of the old, skilled sections to the raw
young immigrant (transmitting a heritage of experience that has never been
entirely subdued), or which permit the young metropolitan proletariat to go
“beyond” work precisely because, in fact, the area behind the front line is
well defended by a working class strength that has been moulded and formed in
work…
Turning the factory world topsy-turvy
And at the same time we had to recognise how temporary
and fragile was this unity which had been brought about by elements outside the
material composition of the class – wholly and solely by the employer’s attack.
We had to recognise how this unity was deaf to the colourful, articulate social
language of the producing-class [soggetti di produzione]: the richness
and variety of viewpoints, which had been seen clearly one year previously in
the road-blocks of 1979, with its chaotic melée of voices, of women, young
people, old people, their differences, their specificity... all this was
levelled, became uniform, here, in this hard political language, in the
homogeneity of this last stand... From out of this gelled, restricted
composition, coiled and closed in on itself, no political autonomy emerged (nor
could it have emerged), no capacity for political initiative independent of the
all-absorbing terrain of negotiations, and no network of a mass leadership
capable, in real terms, of acting on their own initiative.
Instead there emerged, with a force that was
frightening, a radical instance at the level of ideas, an intransigent ethical
stand, a rigorous existential commitment, virtually a challenge to their own
political weakness.
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In September 1920, Piero Gobetti [1] wrote, in a letter
from Turin: “Here we are in a state of revolution. I follow with sympathy the
efforts of the workers, who really are building a new order... I feel that,
gradually, the air is clearing and the ground being laid for the biggest battle
of the century. And in that event my place will be on the side of those who
have shown the greatest religious spirit, the greatest spirit of
sacrifice..."
It seems incredible, but anyone who looked at the 1980
picket lines, not with the hasty glance of so many passing news-reporters, but
“from within”, experienced once again, at sixty years’ distance, that same,
embarrassing sense of respect in the face of a working class “religion”, which
is also and at the same time a dignity and sense of history, an ethical rigour
and finalism, an autonomy and awareness of the value of one’s own life, of
one’s own non-indifference, of one’s “expendability”. The strait-jacketed,
serialised, massified worker of the workplace was expressing here, on the
doorstep of the factory, his own autonomous individuality – a subjective
dimension nonetheless still immanent to objectivised labour – making the “work
ethic” subordinate to a radical instance of transcendence of the present state
of things. The workers were reclaiming their image as “producers”, against an
employer who wanted to deny it, and, precisely for this reason, they were
liberating its individualising instance, that instance which is subversive of
the standardised order of the production cycle; they were turning topsy-turvy
the world of factory values and hierarchies, the world of norms and powers.
“What are you going to tell the kids tonight?”
The march of the moderates: they came like sheep
“What will you tell your grandchildren in 20 years
time?” they shouted at the foremen, at the scabs who were scrabbling over the
perimeter wall. And it was not just words – it was a real antithesis, a total
antithesis, of style, of custom, between those who believed that they could
transcend their own present, deliberately “expending” themselves, and those who
adhered to the most banal order of things; once again, to use a phrase of
Castells, “between those who want to change life, and those who want to
re-establish this dull noise of a traffic that is regulated on the basis of a
daily rhythm of things which take place without actually happening”.
The rebellious individuality of the pickets found
itself face to face with the mass of 20,000 foremen, middle management, white
collar workers and the occasional blue collar worker. These were a social
aggregate, defined in terms of their role in production, defined to the point
where they virtually identify with work, with the “materiality of work”, with
the very inert, raw material of production.
They came down like sheep, uniform and grey like the
walls of a factory, with the dull noise of rolling pebbles, of muted
whisperings, of dragging footsteps, the sort of noise that comes from a waiting
crowd, or from a funeral... they slowly filled the centre of the city... no
symbols, no colour, no banners... They were a piece of the factory, transferred
into the city, a subjective expression of labour without subjectivity.
And yet they were the victors, the prime movers of the
battle. Because the miraculous has happened: the “man of no qualities”, the
atomised, serialised, homogenised factor of production par excellence had
formed into an aggregate, had taken on a collective dimension, a vitality of
his own. He had mobilised. This was the first time in Italy – and perhaps also
in Europe – that capital had directly organised an anti-working-class mass,
unified at the level of support for management, and cemented via an ideology of
work. Here we are not talking about that mass of petty bourgeois whom Gramsci
describes in “The Monkey People”, nor of the humanistic middle bourgeoisie that
Salvatorelli described in his “National-Fascism” as the social base of the
nascent reactionary dictatorships. This newly-composed human and political
reality which has come to the forefront in the Savoyan heart of Turin bears
more similarity to the “middle technical class” whose anti-workerism G. Ansaldo
had described in the 1920s, and whom Musil had savaged: men “who never talk of
anything other than their job… men who, if they talk of anything else, talk of
it in a special way, stiff and external, with no correlation, swallowing it no
further than their epiglotts… men tightly tied to their drawing tables, lovers
of their own profession… But if you suggest to them that they apply the
boldness of their thoughts to themselves, instead of to their machines, it
would be like asking them to use a hammer in the same way as a murderer would
use it; [men] accustomed to resolving their own problems via the slide rule,
which is a little symbol which they carry in their waistcoat pocket, a hard,
white line across their hearts.”
This, then, was not a matter of some social stratum
external to the relations and the apparatus of production, marginal and
therefore crushed between the opposing forces of capital and labour – like the
small urban bourgeoisie who gathered in the streets in the 1920s and 1930s.
This was rather a direct part of that apparatus, a significant component of the
technical organisation of its cycle of production, which was rediscovering its
identity precisely in its function within production.
In part it was the command structure of the factory:
that social area which has distanced itself from manual labour, and whose
“skill’ content consists of the ability to exercise “domination”; people who
can present themselves as indispensable to the ability to organise production,
and who can take pleasure in the exercise of a power which, albeit delegated,
has wide powers of discretion. (“These people aren’t after the ‘right to work’,
but the right to make us work”, as one worker put it, during a demonstration).
This social area gathers around itself a huge, inert stratum of office workers,
for whom the division of manual and intellectual labour has meant only their
emancipation from the materiality of work; for them work has become abstract to
a high degree; it has been reduced to mere acceptance of dependence and
hierarchical inferiority.
In fact, the “organisational principle” of the way they
were mobilised was precisely, the “hierarchy”. Their means of communication
(being so “modem” and “private”, it could hardly be otherwise) was the
telephone. Rather than moving in the usual “cordon” pattern of workers’
demonstrations – the rectilinear lines – this demonstration moved along as a
series of circular areas. It was apparently confusion, but in fact reproduced
ordered chains of hierarchy: the organisational schemas of the office and the
shop floor. At the centre was the office or section foreman; then, in
decreasing levels of power, the other workers, as the outer rings of the circle
– the deputy foremen, the blue-eyed workers, the end-points of a long series of
links, bonds, pressures and loyalties.
Deep structural processes of change
At the ethical level there is no doubt: those 20,000 represented
the “synthesis of our antithesis”. They are characterised by an uncertain
rejection of history as “responsibility”; a mechanical belief in hierarchy as a
biological fact; a philosophy of “large inertias” which confines subjectivity
within the realm of detail. A materialistic and non-dialectical conception of
the world allows them to see themselves as the silent, secular wing of a
destiny that is sculpted in the unchangeable laws of the universe (i.e. the
technical requirements of the economy, or, rather, of company profitability).
“There are economic laws which, when broken, have brought about wars,
revolutions and catastrophe”, proclaimed Luigi Arisio, [2] outlining the basis
elements of this new technocratic credo which reduces history to nature and
ethics to technique; this dogma of compatibility and this cult of inert
averageness from which they draw a collective strength which is inversely proportional
to their lack of individual autonomy.
But what do they represent at the political level? What
has been the mechanism that has created this social aggregate? What is it
called?
They have been defined as a “component of the labour
movement”, a symptom of its break-up; the reasons for their mobilisation have
been sought in the forms of struggle adopted by the workers – in particular the
“hard-line picketing”. It is certainly true that the motive for their
unleashing has to be sought within the events of this 35-day confrontation. But
the basic reasons for this process of activisation and aggregation of the
“factory tertiary sector”, this “command structure”, have to be sought far
beyond contingent factors; their roots are to be found in the very deep
structural processes that have developed in recent years at the level of the
technological and social organisation of the labour cycle.
The technological assault on white collar workers
The incorporation of electronic technology and the use
of computers has been particularly widespread in the
auto sector in the past 5 years, transferring part of the functions of command
and control from men to machines. This has tended to render increasingly
obsolete and worn-out the old figure of the “foreman”. The foreman had a
central role under Taylorism, where the mechanical rigidity of the productive
apparatus (the long assembly line) required a violent constraint capable of
incorporating the varied, unshaped and individualised mass of living labour
within the static uniformity of fixed capital. But with the emergence of a new
philosophy of production (certainly more “soft”, more flexible, but nonetheless
insidious) the foreman has seen his centrality slowly diminishing.
In the new organisation of production, dominated by
electronics, the “intelligent machine” is able to recognise the “differentness”
(both of product and producer), and is able to reduce this to a mere symbol,
and incorporate it and make it functional to the cycle, thereby stripping the
foreman of his traditional function as an authority capable of guaranteeing
productive normality. Nowadays the worker who slows down production on the
assembly line no longer paralyses the entire factory cycle, no longer makes it
impossible for the sections upstream and downstream to continue working; he is
simply bypassed, outflanked and “nullified” within a system that is no longer
linear. Furthermore, it has become virtually impossible for a labour force that
is clearly marginalised in relation to the principle lines of the production
cycle, to block the unstoppable productive rhythm of the Robogate.
The other aspect of the monitored assembly line relates
to the chain of command. On this line each work station has a computer terminal
designed to register when an operation is completed, and transmit this to the
central computer, which then decides, in real time, and synchronises all the
interventions necessary (technical stoppages, replacement of tools, material
supplies etc). This tends to strip the previous factory hierarchy of that
remaining “professional” component which had survived in the Taylorist factory
– namely transmitting information and taking decisions.
[...]
From this derives, on the one hand, the need for new
forms of legitimation of the hierarchy, external to the pure logic of
production (and thus purely “political” in nature), and at the same time, the
reproduction at the psychological and behavioural level of a widespread
insecurity. And it was probably precisely this sense of widespread insecurity,
linked to a more or less conscious awareness of the crisis of their own role
(obvious among the foreman strata, but also present among the white collar
workers, where mechanisation and automation are going to have a far more
dramatic effect than among manual workers), which was the determining factor in
activating them; and in this regard, the forms of manual workers’ struggles
have probably had a simple catalysing effect.
Contrary to the manual working class (which, faced with
the erosion of their own identity due to technological innovation, have thus
far responded via forms of conflict), this extended “technostructure” has
reacted by playing on “one big family” rather than on negotiation. They have
proposed to management a sort of surrender treaty, whereby they would offer
loyalty in exchange for security. This is the deeper meaning of their street demonstration
on October 14th: a frightened mass sees its own role being eliminated, sees its
jobs being threatened; it offers management an alliance, a political support in
the confrontation with the workers, and hopes to achieve, in exchange for this
total loyalty, a respect for its own status; it hopes that management will
decide not to carry to its logical extremes the process of rationalisation.
An offer of a temporary alliance
Now, on the other hand, a renewed role for the
“foreman” figure can only pass via its re-legitimation (principally political,
rather than merely technical) by the employer (with a consequent re-manning of
command, which is now posed as mere exhibition of power); and on the other, the
“respect” of the white collar mass implies the employer recognising a relative
“rigidity” of this sector of labour-power, now absorbed – within the
environment of a factory that has been restructured along lines of flexibility
– into the ranks of a “politically protected area”…
If this offer of an alliance is accepted by the
management (and there is nothing to show that it won’t be), it would probably
mean a slowing-down of the process of technological innovation and restructuring
which, if carried to extremes, would by now have been due to strike at this
“tertiary” sector. It is possible that we shall see a decision not to speed-up,
rationalise and make functional to development, this sector which, in many
respects, has become elephantine; and thus the non-application of criteria of
efficiency and productivity among non-manual workers; and the slowing-down of
the application of widespread labour-saving technologies compared with the past
5 years. This would probably necessitate the shortfall in the reduction of
costs being offloaded onto living labour; therefore productivity and material-saving
would possibly be sought – in a tradition by now familiar at FIAT – via a
super-exploitation, pure and simple, of the manual work-force.
It is in this sense that the “grey movement” that has,
for the first time, shown itself in the streets of Turin during these last few
days, is materially and structurally anti-worker.
Marco Revelli
Notes
This article was translated by
Red Notes with the intention of including it in a forthcoming book – 'The Book
of FIAT' – which contains extensive material on FIAT workers' struggles from
1900 to the present. The book has a substantial section on the 1980 redundancy
struggle.
1. See “The capitalist use of machinery:
Marx versus the objectivists”, and “Surplus value and planning: notes on the
reading of Capital”. [REFERENCE? ]
2. Piero Gobetti was a radical
Liberal supporter of the workers' council movement in the 1920s. He was clubbed
to death by fascists in 1925.
3. Luigi Arisio was the self
appointed leader of the “silent majority” of FIAT managers and moderates that
marched through Turin on 14 October 1980.
[Originally published in Capital and Class,
No. 16, Spring 1982]
[Text retrieved from http://geocities.com/cordobakaf ]
_______________________________________
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