The Magneti Marelli Workers Committee – the “Red Guard” Tells Its Story
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Te Magneti Marelli Workers Committee Te “Red Guard” Tells Its Story (Milan, 1975-78) Emilio Mentasti Te Magneti Marelli Workers Committee – Te “Red Guard” Tells Its Story (Milan, 1975-78) Emilio Mentasti ISBN 978-1-57027-363-6 Cover design by Haduhi Szukis Interior design by Margaret Killjoy Released by Minor Compositions 2021 Colchester / New York / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] Distributed by Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.autonomedia.org [email protected] To those who died at work Contents Introduction to the English edition ...................5 Preface to the French edition .......................11 Introduction ....................................15 Magneti Marelli .................................21 Between the World Wars ...................................22 From World War II to the mid-eighties.........................26 Struggles in the factory, 1945-1972 ..................33 Employment and the evolution of worker composition..............36 Labour confict at Magneti Marelli Crescenzago..................40 Te story of the Workers’ Committee.................79 Piece work .............................................81 Egalitarianism ..........................................92 Te workforce..........................................100 Te Workers Committee and Senza tregua .....................104 Corporate restructuring...................................108 “Drive the delegates out of the ‘bosses’ palace’!” ..................113 Te “April Days” .......................................118 Te struggle spreads to other workplaces . .126 Political layofs.........................................129 Te expulsion..........................................140 Te verdict of 15 July ....................................146 Repression and restructuring ...............................157 Birth of the Autonomous Workers Coordination of Milan ..........163 “Against the union-government-Confndustria social pact” .........168 Te end of the movement .................................182 Introduction to the English edition Ever since the 1970s there has been a steady trickle of information into the English-speaking world about the working class movement in Italy during its most intense phase in the whole of the second half of the twen- tieth century (roughly from 1968 to 1977). Te fow of texts started with material translated and distributed by political activists sympathetic to what was happening in Italy. Te Red Notes pamphlets (1974 onwards) were the frst indication that many non-Italian speakers in the UK had of what was going on. Other translated texts sometimes appeared – for example, the group around the Rising Free bookshop in north London published the pamphlet “Take Over the City” (largely a reprint of an article of the same name by Lotta Continua)1 in 1974, or thereabouts. Te political group Big Flame was to a large extent infuenced by the Italian movement2 (particularly by the organisa- 1 Available on the libcom site: https://libcom.org/tags/rising-free 2 Indeed, an Italian member of Lotta Continua moved to England and joined Big Flame whilst doing a BSc in Mathematics at Liverpool University. See the blog by ex-BF mem- bers: https://bigfameuk.wordpress.com/tag/italy/ – 5 – Te Red Guard tion Lotta Continua), and sometimes published texts produced by the move- ment3, along with news about Italy. In the US, the bi-monthly magazine Radical America (founded in 1967 by some members of Students for a Democratic Society) contained quite a few very informative articles about Italy, between 1971 and 1976 .4 More recently, references to the 1970s Italian movement and the politi- cal ideas which informed it and were produced by it – broadly speaking, the Marxist theoretical and practical current known as “Operaismo”5 – have be- come common, in fact fashionable, in academia, and even in novels.6 All this has made available much useful material about political theory and some of the more inspiring activities carried on outside workplaces – “proletar- ian shopping” etc. It has also brought a certain obsession with armed groups, often divorced from any context of who carried out acts of armed violence and what their relationship was to the wider class struggle. Despite all this, though, very few accounts have been made available of what Italian workers in large workplaces actually did. How they organised themselves, what their concrete relationship was with initiatives taken outside workplaces (around housing, self-organised price reduction, the student move- ment, the women’s movement…), what their real relationship was with the unions, the political parties, student activists, armed groups… From the late 1970s onwards, information also started to become available about the vicious state repression that comrades in Italy were being subjected 3 For example, they produced a pamphlet containing English translations of material pre- pared for the January 1975 Congress of Lotta Continua. 4 See the online archive: https://library.brown.edu/cds/radicalamerica/shelf.html Relevant issues are: vol 5, #5 (Sept-Oct 1971); vol 6, #3 (May-June 1972); vol 7, #2 (March-April 1973); vol 10, #4 (July-Aug 1976); vol 10, #6 (Nov-Dec 1976); vol 11, #6 & vol 12, #1 (double issue, Nov 1977-Feb 1978); vol 12, #5 (Sept-Oct 1978); vol 14, #4 (July-Aug 1980) and vol 18, #5 (Sept-Oct 1984). 5 Te literal translation of this word is “workerism,” but it must not be confused in any way with the English concept of “workerism” (meaning the doctrine that the class struggle only happens in workplaces), often espoused by trade-unionist Trotskyists, or the French word “ou- vrierisme” (the populist glorifcation of the “ordinary worker”), often espoused by Stalinists! 6 Te novelist Rachel Kushner published a book (Te Flamethrowers, 2013) about char- acters in the US art scene of the 1970s set against the backdrop of car factory strikes and Red Brigade assassinations in Italy. Likewise, the novels of Nanni Balestrini have become available in English. Tis includes the famous We want everything, frst published in 1971, a fctionalised account of the class struggle written from the point of view of a pro- letarian everyman migrated from the South of Italy to work in the factories of the North. – 6 – Introduction to the English edition to.7 It was possible to read about the arbitrary mass arrests and imprisonment and the absurd trumped up terrorism charges that forced many people into exile. But much less has been written about the real policies of “repression” which brought an end to the movement – the restructuring of the economy, partly carried out precisely to break up big concentrations of militant workers and (as in other industrialised countries) to subject wage labourers in general to the discipline of mass unemployment.