We Want Everything Read online

  Now this myth of Fiat was ending. I’d seen that a job at Fiat was the same as a construction job, the same as washing dishes. And I’d discovered that there was no difference between a construction worker and a metalworker, between a metalworker and a porter, between a porter and a student. The rules the teachers applied in those technical schools and the rules the bosses applied in all the factories where I had been were the same. So this posed a great problem for me. That is, I thought, what do I do now? What do I do, what do I have to do?

  I hadn’t stolen yet, I’d never had a gun. I’d never been friendly with the so-called low-life. At least I would have had an outlet, whether for feeling pissed-off, for my dissatisfaction, or for my needs, my material life. I wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer, a professional. So it wasn’t as if I could say, OK, I’ll become a thief or a freelancer. I was really nothing; I couldn’t do a thing.

  Yet I had this desire to live, to do something. Because I was young and blood was coursing through my veins. The pressure was pretty high, in other words. I wanted to do something. I was ready for anything. But it was clear that for me anything no longer meant worker. This was already a dirty word. It meant almost nothing to me. It meant to keep living the shitty life I had lived up to that moment. What did I care about work, which I had never liked and had never cared about? And what was I supposed to make of work if it didn’t even bring me enough money to get by comfortably? Now I understood everything, I had experimented with all the possible ways of living. First I wanted to be inside, then I understood that inside the system I would always have to pay. For whatever kind of life, there was always a price to pay.

  Whatever you want to do, if you want to buy a car or a suit, you have to work extra, you have to do overtime. You can’t have a coffee or go to the movies. In a system, a world where the scope is only to work and produce goods. Anything you want to get from this system you have to put back. But really, physically, from yourself. I’d understood this. So the only way to get everything, to satisfy your needs and desires without destroying yourself, was to destroy this system of work for the bosses as it functioned. And above all to destroy it here at Fiat, in this huge factory, with so many workers. This is capital’s weak link, because if Fiat stops, everything else goes into crisis, everything blows up.

  I got to the bar and found lots of comrades waiting for me. We all embraced, celebrating what we’d done. All Mirafiori had stopped, even the 500 lines. Production had stopped completely on the second shift. Even though the union had shut down the struggle in Maintenance, with laughable results. One by one the others arrived, the students arrived, other workers I had never seen who had been in the struggle arrived. Everyone spoke and it was decided that the strike should continue tomorrow.

  Even the workers from the big automatic lathes wanted to try to strike the next day. They decide that workers from the second shift would wait in the factory for workers from the third shift, and the third shift would wait for the first. They say they want to march in the factory to shut down other workshops. Workers from the Mechanical lines want to strike for the whole shift. There is a long discussion. It’s decided to let the strike go ahead for the first shift tomorrow, from 7.30 until 11. The demands: refusal of the schedules, refusal of categories, large wage increases, the same for everyone. We want less work and more money, we write in large print on the leaflet that is made to hand out tomorrow at the gates.

  And I finally had the satisfaction of discovering that the things I had thought for years, the whole time I’d worked, the things that I believed only I thought, everyone thought, and that we were really all the same. What difference was there between me and another worker? What difference could there be? Maybe he was heavier, taller or shorter, wore a different coloured suit, or I don’t know what.

  But the thing that wasn’t different was our will, our logic, our discovery that work is the only enemy, the only sickness. It was the hate that we all felt for work and the bosses who made us do it. That’s why we were all so pissed off, that’s why when we weren’t on strike we were all on sick leave, to escape that prison where they took away our freedom and our strength, day after day. I finally saw that what I had thought on my own for a long time was what everyone thought and said. And I saw that my own struggle against work was a struggle we could all have together and win.

  Sometimes you don’t understand each other and you don’t agree because one person is used to thinking one way and someone else in a different way. One person like a Christian, another like a lumpenproletarian, another like a bourgeois. But in the end, in the fact of having been in a struggle together, we were able to speak the same language, to find that we all had the same needs. And these needs made us all equal in the struggle, because we all had to struggle for the same things. The meeting was fantastic, it stirred us up. Everyone recounted what had happened on the line. Because nobody could know everything that happened in that factory, where there are twenty thousand workers just in the body plant.

  As if anyone could know everything that happened. The supervisors, the workers, what they said, what they did during the struggle. Recounting everything like this, we discovered a series of things. The organisation was being created, the comrades said, it’s the one thing we needed to win the struggles. And as soon as a comrade spoke about what had happened on his line, how he had convinced the others to take part in a march, in the strike, in a meeting; as he explained these things, right away I found this comrade, who I had never even seen before, familiar. He became like someone I had always known. He became like a brother, I don’t know how to say it. He became a comrade. You discover, here’s a comrade, someone who has done the same things as me. And the only way to understand that we all think in the same way is to do the same things.

  At the end of the meeting a leaflet was worked out, and how to carry on the action the next day. The comrades advised me not to go into the factory because they would arrest me. They even said I shouldn’t go home because the police might come, and a comrade took me to stay at his place. And I really liked this, because it was the help we all offered each other in the struggle, it was our organisation. And in fact the next day I phoned my sister and she said the police had been there that evening looking for me. My mother wrote to me from home saying the Carabinieri were asking after me in Salerno. They went to my sister’s house three or four more times.

  Fiat had filed a complaint for injuries to the guard. I went to the doctor at the insurance agency and got him to give me a medical certificate for ten days because I had a scratch the guard had given me. I put myself on sick leave. Then after a week I went to get paid out, unannounced. Because I still had my Fiat ID card I could get into the factory. And as I get to my work station, on the line, my supervisor comes up to me with two guards and says: You have to come with me to the office.

  I look at my line, where I was standing. There wasn’t a single comrade, not one; I was alone. And I didn’t know whether to put my hands up, what the fuck to do, I had no idea. I go to the office, and they make me wait there for the colonel, the Engineer. And while I’m waiting, I take the Fiat ID card from my pocket and put it right in the middle of the Engineer’s desk. Because it was the Fiat ID card that they wanted, to stop me coming into the factory. After a moment the Engineer comes in and says: Ah, that’s exactly what I wanted, you understand. I’m sitting there, spread out on a sofa, but he doesn’t say a thing.

  Another guard comes in, a huge gorilla, and goes: What are you doing sitting there? Huh. I’m sitting down because I’m tired. You have to get up. I don’t feel like standing up, if you want, get me up yourself. You think you’re strong, he goes, coming towards me. I don’t think I’m anything, it’s just I don’t feel like it, it’s a pain in the arse. Anyway, he says, you’re lucky I wasn’t outside the other night. If I’d been there I would have given you something. I know, you would have killed me, but you weren’t there, so calm down. It was a fascist-type provocation, to get me into a fight, so they could give it
to me and then report me, call the police and finally put me away.

  I didn’t fall for it, because in there I would have really copped it, they would have killed me. I signed the papers that they brought, my resignation and all that crap. And when I went out there were twenty, actually twenty, guards outside the door to the office expecting a brawl. They escort me to the locker room, I get my things, and they escort me right out of the place. A month later I went to the building where the insurance agency was with the slip to get my money. As for the complaint they filed against me, I never heard what became of it. There must have been some kind of amnesty or something.

  In the morning I woke up at the house of the comrade where I’d gone to stay, then we went to the student’s place. There was a meeting there with a load of comrades. The leaflet that had been mimeographed during the night was handed out and we went down to the factory. Big groups of people formed and the comrades who were going in said even they were being stopped. The workers who were going in already knew what the aims of our struggle were, the struggle for equal things for everyone that had been carried on up to then. The workers didn’t value the work they did at all, they didn’t feel like they were second or third category, they all felt the same, exploited. For the first time workers were fighting to all get the same pay. To have the right to the same working conditions as the clerical workers. Equal pay rises for everyone, the same category for everyone: they were excited by these things, which united them.

  And that’s how it was then, every day. Early in the morning we went to hand out leaflets at the gates, or the weekly newspaper of the struggle, which was called La Classe. There were all these leaflets and these newspapers from the struggle. Then you slept for a while, then you went back to the gates at one-thirty or two to hand out leaflets when the second shift went in. And you waited for the first shift to come out, for meetings with the guys from the first shift. You went again in the evening around eleven to wait for the workers from the second shift to come out and you got together with them, you had meetings. The gates of Mirafiori were like a street market in those days. Everyone was there, unionists, PCI, Marxist-Leninist kids from the Unione20 dressed in red, police dressed in green, all competing with the hawkers who waited for the workers with fruit and vegetables, T-shirts and transistor radios. Everyone promoting their goods.

  In truth the PCI, which hadn’t been in the struggle, only came after July 3 to explain that the proletarians who had been beaten were just irresponsible, mercenary provocateurs. They were the same workers who the bourgeois courts later convicted. They came to explain that struggles decided and carried out by the workers autonomously were dangerous because they allow the bosses to resort to repression. They came to accuse us of being no more than little groups who were estranged from the factory, but they didn’t explain how such miserable little groups could carry on a struggle as long and as powerful as the struggle of those months.

  Unionists, PCI bureaucrats, fake Marxist-Leninists, cops and fascists all have one characteristic in common. They have a total fear of the workers’ struggle, of the workers’ ability to tell the bosses and the bosses’ servants to go to hell and to organise their struggle autonomously, in the factory and outside the factory. We made them a leaflet that finished like this: Someone once said that even whales have lice. The class struggle is a whale, and cops, Party and union bureaucrats, fascists and fake revolutionaries are its lice.

  Friday May 30: Whereas yesterday the strike was started by a few workers who organised a march, today 90 per cent of the 500 line workers refused to work. The strike lasts the whole shift and all production is stopped. The workers from the line make signs and organise a march. The workshop supervisor asks the workers how long they are staying on strike. The workers reply: until we put things right. A member of the internal commission rebukes the workers for paying more attention to the students than the union. He invites them to return to work at 10.30, saying that a meeting to discuss the workers’ claims is in progress.

  The maintenance workers struck for the whole night shift, and in the morning they marched to the 500 line. The painting cages have stopped. On the second shift a worker from the 124 line is elected to negotiate the claims, which are: schedule, promotion to second category after 6 months, money. Today even the older workers were convinced and joined in the strike. A supervisor asked for the names of the strikers. The internal commission comes by, saying that Fiat is only prepared to negotiate if the strike ends.

  In fact this strike caught the union waiting for the scheduled strikes. It meant to impose its fight for delegates on the lines in the slack period. It was only after two or three days of autonomous action and agitation that the union managed to regain some ground and declare its official strike.

  News that in Grandi Motori a workshop of 400 workers has stopped. In the testing workshop at Spa Stura 400 workers stopped spontaneously. There had already been two stop works 15 days ago. At Mirafiori workshops the lathe operators have called a strike for Tuesday from 8 until 10. There have been spontaneous stop works in workshop 24. Rumours spread by the union have created divisions between the workers who support the students and those who support the union. A worker gives the news that at Fiat in Cordoba, Argentina, the workers went out on strike and the police opened fire, killing some of them. There were big clashes.

  On Sunday June 1 and Monday June 2 there were meetings of workers and students all day. Tuesday 3 there’s a strike for two hours at the lines. The 124 and 125 lines have run out of parts. Spray painting is halted for eight hours. The 124 preparation has been short of parts for eight days. One worker was saying that because the presses had stopped, Fiat was using spare parts that should have been sent to Germany to keep the lines going. Strikes on the 600 and 850 lines. Strike in workshop 55. No delegate elected. In preparation they went on strike, even though it wasn’t official. The workers didn’t understand the motivation for the union’s strike. They don’t care about the struggle for the line delegate. They call their own strikes in their own meetings for their own aims. They use the strikes called by the union to prolong them. When they’re not on strike they limit production.

  News from the gates on how the struggle is going. The Foundries have gone, completely out of the union’s control. Workshop 2 stopped for 8 hours. The main objective — higher wages. The workers no longer trust any outside agent. They’re claiming a rise of 200 lire and hour on the base wage. Grandi Motori workshop, via Cuneo, one section on strike since Thursday over categories and wages. Management offered 7 lire and second category. Workshop 13, Presses, 4-hour strike called by the union. A delegate was elected. There was a heated discussion. The delegate told the union officials they were a bunch of sell-outs. Gate 20, 800 workers stop work for 2 hours. Gate 13, autolimitation of production continues. Autolimitation of production is the worker’s response to the line delegate, say the workers.

  Gate 8, the strike continues. There are enough parts for 4 or 5 days. The unions push for work to start again. Workshop 53, strike succeeds. Delegate elected. The union tries to divide the workers, proposing control over work rates and refusing to fight for wages and categories. The bosses try to make up time. Before the line ran at 1 minute 50. Then at 1 minute 40. After the stop work it went down to 1 minute flat. The boss always controls the rate. Workshop 58, categories, work rates, pay. These are the objectives. The piecework delegate isn’t worth anything. We’ll reduce the rates ourselves.

  All the struggles were planned in meetings at the gates when the first and second shifts came out. At the early meetings of workers and students only Mirafiori workers came. But then, gradually, as the struggle spread to other factories, to Spa Stura, to Lingotto, to Rivalta and so on, workers started coming from these other Fiat factories, too. And this fact really increased the chance of carrying the struggle forward, because every worker, every comrade contributed his own experiences and ideas. How to stop things, how to run marches, what our objectives should be and so on. What’s bes
t to block in the factory to hold things up with the least effort.

  You need to say this, for example you need to ask for a one hundred and fifty lire raise on the base pay and reduction of work rates, second category for everyone and that kind of thing. For example the guys who take the finished cars off the end of the line and drive them across the yards and onto the transporters. They said: They don’t pay us as drivers, which is second category. They pay us as warehouse hands, that is as third category, which is ten thousand lire less. Even though we have internal and external driver’s licenses. So what do we do: instead of driving the cars we push them off the line, four of us. That’s how we obstruct the lines, they have to stop, that way we stop everything.

  The comrades came up with a load of ideas about how to take the struggle forward. In the meetings it was asked whether things had stopped inside, in the departments, in the various workshops. How the leaflet went, if any comrades had been suspended, if there had been any repressive measures. That is, whether they’d suspended comrades who’d taken part in the struggle or transferred them, that kind of thing. And according to how the mood of the struggle in the different workshops was, according to what information there was, we made a leaflet for the following day. If all the comrades who came out assured us that you could stop the next day, a strike was called for the next day with some objective.

  The struggle went on for more than two months, a brutally spontaneous struggle. There wasn’t a day when some section, some workshop, wasn’t shut down. Every week, more or less, all of Fiat was shut down. They really were days of continual struggle. In fact the masthead of the leaflets that were made was Lotta Continua,21 and really, at Fiat in Torino in those months there was a continuous struggle. We wanted to prevent work at any cost, we didn’t want to work any more. We tried to send production into crisis for good. To bring the bosses to their knees and force them to come down and negotiate with us. We were fighting a battle to the end.