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2022 TourdeForce "Six in the Key of Death" photo promo, taken at the occult Piazza Statuto , Turin

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Gigi Roggero on the Italian operaismo and the movements of the 60s and 70s.

On the 7th of July 1962 the most prominent Italian city-factory, Turin, was the theater of a great workers’ revolt. That morning the Fiom-Cgil and Fim-Cisl (the two main official metalworkers’ unions, the former linked to the Italian Communist Party [Pci], the latter to the social-catholic tradition) called for a strike to support the struggles going on since June at Fiat, the most important Italian auto-factory. There was a great participation. During the afternoon the news spread quickly: Uilm-Uil (the union coming from the republican tradition) and Sida, a “yellow union,” that is, created and supported by the bosses, signed a separated agreement with the Fiat management. In a flash the metalworkers went to Piazza Statuto, a large central square of the city, where there is the office of the Uil. A long confrontation with the police started, rocks were thrown against the union windows, there was an assault to the building, and finally a riot of three days.

In the end, more than 1,000 people were arrested and many injured by the special corps of police, the sadly famous celere. But the revolt of Piazza Statuto will become history very soon, as the symbol of the irruption and collective force of a new figure of labor, the mass worker, that is to say, the workers of the Taylorist factories: unskilled, embedded to the assembly line, and dedicated to a repetitive and alienating activity.

The Pci and Cgil labeled immediately the rioters as thugs, delinquents, and provokers. They accused the struggling workers of being paid by the boss in order to be troublemakers against the democratic bargaining in Fiat. In fact, the thesis was they were false workers. Undoubtedly, this accusation is rooted in the historical paranoid vice of the Left that we can call dietrologia, that is, the search for ulterior and hidden motives behind political events. When there is a revolt organized directly by workers without representation, immediately the traditional Left institutions hypothesize secret causes or even dark plots and conspiracies. As the workers are supposed to be without an autonomous agency, only the party and the union can organize their struggles. But in the Piazza Statuto revolt case, there is something else. In the official communiqué of condemnation of the events, the reason raised by the Pci and Cgil to justify their accusation against the supposed provokers is particularly interesting. The main argument was the rioters were not workers because clearly they did not look like workers: their behaviors, style of clothing, or even the length of their hair were not those of the workers. And they were too young to be factory metalworkers.

This is exactly the point. Beyond dietrologia, the central problem is the complete incomprehension by the traditional labor movement institutions of the powerful emergence of a new class composition, with new subjects, new behaviors, new needs and desires, and new forms of conflict. In other words, they did not understand the formation of a new collective subjectivity. Writing the communiqué, as well as operating in the factory, the party and the union were cognizant of a declining figure of the worker, proud of his or her profession and with a great cult of work. This figure does not disappear in the Taylorist factories either: but from the political standpoint, it was no longer central. Mass worker was the name of the new conflictual subject, central in the rising class composition; and it was the name of the challenge to the traditional labor movement forms of organization.