A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #21-25 - A Look at the Transformations of Class Movements (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The referendum defeat of June 9 was widely expected. Skepticism was 
widespread among the very promoters of the consultation. The bungling 
and superficiality of a promoting committee that had delegated the 
success of the consultation to the combination with the referendum on 
the law regarding differentiated autonomy is immediately evident. The 
latter should have (in the minds of the promoters) given the boost to 
the other referendums because it was highly popular especially in the 
central-southern regions, immediately penalized by a law designed to 
favor the rich regions of the north to the detriment of two-thirds of 
the country.
A choice so conditioned by the will of the Consulta and its decisions 
was already a sign of great weakness from the start, just as it was a 
sign of weakness to resort to the referendum institution for questions 
relating to class relations.
The first time it happened, in 1985, for the two-point cut of the then 
still active sliding scale, the referendum largely obtained the quorum 
(at the time the voting percentages always exceeded 90%), but was 
defeated 54 to 46. It is important to remember that Italy was still a 
country where the share of the working-class population was almost 35% 
of the total population, while employed workers in general exceeded 70%. 
Despite these data, the consensus for the recovery of the ill-gotten 
gains was less than half of the voters. This happened on the one hand 
because employed workers also include that share of office workers or in 
any case with higher roles who, in the climate of restoration of the 
1980s, had sided with the upper classes whose worldview they shared and 
who were well aware of the fact that a defeat of the workers would have 
determined an advantage for them. On the other hand, the politicization 
of the referendum did not help the success of the consultation and 
millions of people voted based on the alignment to which they belonged. 
In an era of regression of the left and affirmation of a centrist block 
led by DC-PSI, the referendum was also shot down by the positions of the 
political parties on it. 1985 was also the year of the maximum advance 
of Craxi's PSI and the beginning of a very serious setback of the PCI in 
the administrative elections held a month before the consultation on work.
In the following years, every time the country was called to pronounce 
itself on issues relating to labor relations, the quorum was never 
reached, neither on the right nor on the left.
Work itself has slipped further and further into a corner, thanks to the 
perception of the absolute impossibility of influencing, by workers, the 
restructuring processes underway. Wage work has continued to be the main 
source of sustenance for the population of the country, but wage workers 
have completely disappeared as a subjectivity capable of placing their 
own interests and their own vision of the world in the social arena.
The decision to settle the score with what remains of the Jobs Act by 
referendum was therefore substantially foolish, considering the 
precedents and above all considering the work of destroying the class as 
a political aggregate put into practice in the last forty years at least 
by the same promoters of the referendums.

The concertative practice born right at the turn of the nineties of the 
last century saw the Cgil as the main protagonist; today the union 
itself is paying the price of this choice which, over time, has deprived 
it of any ability to move the conflict and therefore to maintain a 
leading role in the political scenario.
The greatest victories obtained against the restoration of despotic 
entrepreneurial power in companies in these 40 years have come from the 
judges and not from the mobilizations that concertative unionism no 
longer even attempts and which do not have the political space to 
constitute themselves autonomously. Even this fact alone should make us 
think: in the face of the employers' attempt to completely deregulate 
the labor market, the only real trench available to those who work has 
been that offered by a state power such as the judiciary which, in its 
nature as a presumed arbiter of the relationships between powers, has 
struck in recent years the excessive strengthening of the 
entrepreneurial pole.
But how did all this happen?
There were basically three reasons that allowed the collapse of a class 
movement that fifty years ago was among the most advanced in the West.

a) A transformation of the social fabric of the country.

The progressive disengagement of the Italian capitalist class from 
entrepreneurial investment has determined the change in the size and 
capacity to influence the conflict (even if only redistributive) between 
classes in the country by the working classes. The mobilizations of the 
1960s and 1970s were based on a large-scale working-class fabric and a 
condition of full employment. The 1980s still saw a social composition 
in which there was a strong presence of workers from large-scale 
companies, but in a condition of progressive regression and 
restructuring of production, especially in that working-class capital 
constituted by the old industrial triangle between Milan, Genoa and 
Turin. To this regression, which became exponential starting from the 
1990s, when the changed international conditions also allowed Italian 
capital to start the process of outsourcing production, we must add the 
defeat of working-class subjectivity, which is normally dated back to 
the autumn of 1980, at the end of the FIAT battle, but which had been 
slowly prepared over the previous years, at least since the two-year 
period 1975/76 with the first restructuring in the Milan area. Workers' 
work loses its centrality, understood first and foremost as the ability 
to impose its own agenda on the rest of society, and in the following 
decade it is unable to effectively counteract the downward 
transformation process of the industrial structure. The last gasp of the 
old working class composition occurs in 1994, when the pension 
counter-reform mobilizes for the last time the fabric of factories still 
strong in the country. It is a will-o'-the-wisp; the following year a 
reform of identical design with the addition of the postscript that 
provides for saving the pensions of those who have worked for more than 
18 years at the time of its entry into force, passes without any 
opposition whatsoever. The old working class achieves a goal that is 
both corporate and generational, while the new social composition finds 
itself vulnerable and lost, without points of reference and subject to 
an unprecedented wave of precariousness and cancellation of social 
protections. It will take refuge in increasingly individual or at most 
small-group solutions, seeking the tools of survival in the folds of the 
new capitalism. The divorce between the conflicting demands on the 
social terrain and the world of work is taking place; from then until 
today the social movements in the country will be increasingly external 
to the conflict in the workplace and the conflict will increasingly 
distance itself from the workplace, almost as if the two concepts were 
completely foreign to each other.

b) The transformation of the role of trade unionism.
The two-year period 1992/93, with the projection of Cgil-Cisl and Uil in 
the role of participants in the management of the conditions of the 
production process in the country, determines the safeguarding of trade 
union organizations to the detriment of the interests of the working 
classes as a whole, as well as a corporate curvature within the world of 
work. The protests that still occur are often carried out on company 
objectives, at most categorical and without any connection with the rest 
of the workers. On the social level, the abandonment of conflict in 
favor of concertation leads to the exasperation of the process of 
defense of "one's" job and to the internalization of the idea that the 
"enemy" is made up of workers from competing companies. This process 
occurs more easily in a fabric of medium and small businesses, which 
becomes hegemonic and manages to socially impose its own order of 
discourse and to heavily influence political discourse as well.
Trade union corporatism in larger companies and adherence to the 
entrepreneurial narrative in medium and small companies are held 
together and allow for an articulation of discourse that is increasingly 
centered on the individual level and increasingly less socially shared.
Add to this the structuring of a high level of unemployment and the 
simultaneous spread of undeclared work, which has never disappeared over 
time, but has been expanding rapidly since the 1990s. With these 
assumptions, the recognition of working people as a class is lacking, 
and mutual solidarity at any level is also lacking.
Today, in the workplace, union credibility is given by the 
organization's ability to resolve individual or, at most, company 
issues. The failure of grassroots unionism was largely predictable with 
hindsight: it is determined precisely by this state of affairs that 
makes the twentieth-century inter-category, supportive and "us" versus 
"them" union model built on class dynamics untenable; the same members 
who should recognize themselves in it do not feel these class dynamics 
as their own when they do not reject the very concept at its root.
c) Anti-strike regulations and prohibition of conflict.

The construction of a preventive and repressive regulation whose purpose 
is to prevent the country from becoming a theater of strong social 
conflict again was started with the first law against strikes in 1990 
and has continued until now with legislation that increasingly prohibits 
conflict in production sites.
This is a preventive and repressive action, because its purpose is not 
only to hit strike actions and subsequent agitation, but to educate 
workers to avoid moving the conflict inside the workplace, so as to 
completely exclude the production sites from the interference of dissent 
and protest, even if only economic. This process has borne fruit by 
miseducating two entire generations of workers, preventing them from the 
practical learning of the struggle necessary for the construction of any 
mobilization.
However, conflict is natural in human communities, especially within a 
social formation such as capitalism, which tends to polarize society as 
a natural consequence of the inequalities produced by the market. 
However, conflict has inevitably had to change its place of expression. 
Social movements involving workers have occurred on other terrains and 
often with a strong local component. The NoTAV case is eloquent.

In the Susa Valley, during the years of the greatest battle against the 
major work, we have witnessed a continuous deindustrialization and 
desertification of the productive fabric of the area. The loneliness of 
those who found themselves fighting to avoid losing their source of 
income was palpable, even though the same people who fought against 
delocalization were often involved in the movement.
The evidence was even greater at the ILVA in Taranto, where workers were 
divided between the uncritical and corporate defense of the factory and 
the request for radical environmental remediation in connection with the 
inhabitants of the city and the neighborhoods where ILVA is dying.
In both cases, the social conflict took place in the territorial 
dimension, involving people not as workers, but as inhabitants of a 
territory threatened by extractivism. The conflict no longer returned to 
the workplace, but the working classes themselves acted it out of the 
workplace, aware of the extreme difficulty in adopting radical forms of 
conflict that can instead occur in the space of the territory. It is no 
coincidence that the reaction of governments, especially those 
explicitly oriented to the right, was to launch a series of security 
decrees whose purpose is to perform the same function as the legislation 
against strikes on the territory.

The change in the social composition of the country has obviously also 
produced a shift in the construction of identities, both individual and 
collective. Class belonging, taken for granted in times not too long 
ago, completely leaves the narrative with which people - even if 
sociologically belonging to the working classes - identify. The workers' 
narrative, which in the glorious thirty years of European capitalism was 
a symbol of power and of imposing on the rest of society its own vision 
of the world and its own needs, becomes a story of defeat and 
marginality with which it is difficult to identify. On the other hand, 
the many attempts to invent unifying subjects (I am thinking of the 
failed epic of the social worker or the equally phantasmagorical one of 
the cognitariat) either fail or become symbols of a condition from which 
to emancipate oneself as soon as possible, as in the case of the 
narrative on precariousness. In this dismembered and meaningless social 
body, strongly individualistic narratives tending towards personal 
social promotion in direct competition with people who find themselves 
in similar conditions to one's own have an easy hold. The perception of 
a common condition distances itself from the places of production to 
present itself at most as a form of identity based on other myths that 
have little or nothing to do with class. Let us think of national 
belonging whose ghost has fully returned and becomes flesh in 
racializing and excluding devices.

We also had proof of this in the referendum context with the very high 
number of NO votes to the question regarding citizenship, evidently felt 
as a particular benefit that one does not want to share in any way, thus 
making choices of field that travel along the line of documents in 
possession of individual people.
The common conditions of gender, ethnicity or territory, even within 
critical and opposition movements, have become the only factors capable 
of building common identity, action and transformative capacity.
The social terrain today moves on these coordinates and the same union 
action cannot but be involved in this type of transformation.

The referendum result is a further confirmation of the current 
structuring of identities within which we move. Not taking it into 
account, blaming the ill-advised decision of the Cgil or the idiocy of 
the workers of the country is stupid, as well as useless. It is the same 
thing as blaming fate or bad luck.
The real reality is that we find ourselves after the end of a cycle of 
humanity - at least of Western humanity - in which the working-class 
identity was central in determining the mentality, narrative and even 
political activity of people. It was a cycle of extreme importance and 
within which many of us were formed. However, it is over and not from today.
The construction of a class identity that takes into account the many 
other identities that we are crossed and crossed by, first of all that 
of gender but not secondarily that relating to national origins and to 
our condition or not of being racialized and racialized, is precisely a 
construction, not a rediscovery of the myths of the past.
A class is not such when it finds itself in a common sociological 
condition, from which it often only wants to escape, but because it 
finds around its own condition the ability to build an identity that 
aims to collectively overcome its own condition and that can draw 
strength from this within social conflicts.
This is the terrain on which to work and it is not even certain that the 
union form is the most suitable for the transformation of our action.
Let's start from here, with the awareness of the need to overcome the 
limits inherent in our actions, without simple answers and once again 
with the intent of radically transforming the world with the tools that 
we will be able to give ourselves.

Stefano Capello

https://umanitanova.org/uno-sguardo-sulle-trasformazioni-dei-movimenti-di-classe/
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