We Want Everything Page 16
To escape this crisis, which in the course of the 1970s threatened to bring the whole country to a standstill, thanks to the entanglement of the workers’ struggle with that of the students and of civil society, the capitalist response made use of tools analogous to those used half a century earlier. In the first place, violent repression entrusted to the police and the judiciary, with the arrest and sentencing of thousands in the workers’ vanguard. At the same time, waves of redundancies, taking advantage of the oil shock of 1973. And finally the technological leap, with the disappearance of the assembly line and the robotisation of the factory, which revolutionises the composition of the worker. Apart from a restricted elite of specialised technicians, labour becomes further deskilled and diminished. The flexible worker is born, casualised, without entitlements (holidays, sick leave, pensions, redundancy provisions), hired for a fixed period or part-time, often off the books, generally by those small firms that now do most of the actual work for bigger corporations. The technological investment is amply compensated for by the drastic reduction in personnel, to whom the costs and obligations of a salaried employee do not apply, and by their scant ability to organise in the factory.
This restructuring, thanks to the globalisation of markets, is accompanied by the transfer of entire productive processes to countries in the third world, with minimum wages and nonexistent union protection. But even if all of this allowed capital to achieve positive outcomes in the ’90s, the profound economic crisis that is rocking it today seems to show that it was only a temporary relief. Capital only appeared to have won a victory; it has triggered a process that leads unavoidably to a confrontation with the underlying issue, expressed clearly 30 years ago in the struggles of the mass worker with the slogan ‘refusal of work’. It is an epochal question, that of the end of dependent labour, the form of coerced labour that for a little more than two centuries allowed the birth and growth of industrial civilisation in the west.
More and more the automation of production, and also the possibility in general of trusting almost every type of work and activity to machines and computers, requires a laughably small quantity of human labour power. Therefore why shouldn’t everyone profit from the wealth produced by machines and from the time freed from labour? Today, absurdly, work that is no longer necessary continues to be imposed because only through this is it possible to conceive of the distribution of money, allowing the continuation of the cycle of production and consumption and the accumulation of capital.
But it is already a cycle that is slowing; overproduction and the collapse of consumption due to the spread of unemployment and poverty are driving an irreversible crisis, which capitalism frantically tries to save itself from with criminal games of financial speculation. The prospect of the destruction of whole generations, of whole countries, of the planet itself because of the senseless exploitation of its resources—this is the spectacle in which we are assisting today, the spectacle of a perverse voracity to concentrate immense wealth in the hands of just a few and to leave in its wake poverty and the wreckage of a world that could be rich and happy.
But a new era is waiting for humanity, when it will be freed from the blackmail and the suffering of a forced labour that is already unnecessary and the enslavement to money, which prevent the free conduct of activity according to the aptitudes and desires of each and steal and degrade from the rhythm of life, at the same time that there is the real possibility of widespread and general wellbeing. This was the meaning, and could again be the meaning today and in the future, of that old rallying cry: Vogliamo tutto!
2013
Notes
1.Cassa del Mezzogiorno A government program established in 1950 to stimulate economic development in southern Italy, mainly by the construction of infrastructure such as bridges, dams, roads and irrigation projects. It also provided tax advantages and credit subsidies to encourage investment. Historians say that up to a third of the money was squandered, and many of the fund’s beneficiaries were large northern companies given subsidies to build automated factories that employed relatively few workers.
2.Mirafiori FIAT’s headquarters in Torino, still the largest factory in Italy. The 2-million-square-metre plant employed more than 50,000 workers at its height.
3.Battipaglia A town near Salerno in Campania. In 1969 two people were killed during an uprising by almost half the town’s population against plans to close the local tobacco and sugar plants.
4.Reggio A general strike in Reggio Calabria in July 1970 over the decision to make Catanzaro the regional capital lead to five days of street violence. The government sent 5,000 armed police and carabinieri. Blockades of road and rail links to the city continued for several months, causing considerable economic disruption in the south. Reggio’s port was blocked, leaving ships idle in the Straits of Messina, and Italy’s main north-south autostrada was cut. The uprising, largely condemned by the left, was taken over by activists from the neofascist MSI, and was put down in February 1971.
5.Raccomandazione A word by the right person in someone’s ear was often the only way to secure a job in Italy, regardless of qualifications. It continues to be a problem.
6.Camera del lavoro The equivalent of Trades Hall, a regional centre for the unions.
7.Poveri ma belli Dino Risi’s 1957 film A Girl in a Bikini
8.Quartiere Zingone A small industrial community on the outskirts of Milan built by a financier, Renzo Zingone, in the 1960s.
9.Lucania The old Italian name for Basilicata, parts of Calabria and parts of Puglia.
10.Motta Buondí A type of packaged sweet snack.
11.AVIS Associazione Voluntari Italiani Sangue, Italy’s blood bank.
12.Qualunquista Someone who is politically apathetic; not interested in politics; also someone driven by self-interest, an individualist.
13.Me stai cacando ’o cazzo You’re giving me the shits (literally, “You’re shitting on my dick”)
14.MALF La mutua aziendale Fiat, Fiat’s health plan.
15.INAM l’Istituto nazionale per l’assicurazione contro le malattie, Italy’s national health insurance scheme.
16.Via Roma One of Turin’s main streets.
17.Potere operaio ‘Workers power’; a number of the groups active around Fiat at that time used this name.
18.Gigi Riva Riva, a footballer who played from 1961 to 1976, is still the Italian national team’s leading goal scorer. He captained Cagliari to its only Serie A championship in 1969–70 — they were the first team from south of Rome to win.
19.Avola In December 1968, landless labourers in the town of Avola, Sicily demonstrated for similar pay and conditions to labourers in nearby Lentini. Police opened fire on a roadblock the labourers had set up outside the town, killing two demonstrators and wounding four.
20.Unione l’Unione Communisti Italiani, a maoist political group founded in Rome in 1968 and dissolved in 1978.
21.Lotta Continua After the successes of the summer, the name Lotta Continua was adopted by part of the assembly for their project to establish an Italy-wide extraparliamentary revolutionary leftist group.
22.Unione Industriale The employer and industry association.
23.PSIUP Partito Socialista Italiano di Unitá Proletaria The left-wing PSIUP splintered from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) after the PSI entered the Moro coalition government in 1963. About one third of the PSI’s left wing joined the PSIUP, as well as a large number of activists from left-wing trade unions.
24.Action squads A reference to the squadre d’azione, paramilitary gangs active during the Fascist era.
25.Cinesi Chinese, used as shorthand in the Italian media to describe the new generation of revolutionaries who were opposed to the official left parties and unions.
26.Bersaglieri Literally ‘marksmen’, mobile light-infantry units of the Italian army known for jogging rather than marching on parade.
>