Emilio MENTASTI - The Magneti Marelli Workers Committee - The “Red Guard” tells its story (Milan, 1975-78)

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The Magneti Marelli Workers

Committee

Emilio Mentasti

ISBN 978-1-57027-363-6

Cover design by Haduhi Szukis

Interior design by Margaret Killjoy

Released by Minor Compositions 2020

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

Distributed by Autonomedia

PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station

Brooklyn, NY 11211

www.autonomedia.org

Contents

To those who died at work

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 twentieth century (roughly from 1968 to 1977). The flow of texts started with material translated and distributed by political activists sympathetic to what was happening in Italy. The Red Notes pamphlets (1974 onwards) were the first 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), 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.

More recently, references to the 1970s Italian movement and the political ideas which informed it and were produced by it broadly speaking, the Marxist theoretical and practical current known as Operaismo

All this has made available much useful material about political theory and some of the more inspiring activities carried on outside workplaces proletarian 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 movement, the womens 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 to. It was possible to read about the arbitrary mass arrests and imprisonment and the absurd trumped up terrorism charges that forced many people (including the famous Toni Negri) 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. It was the process of relocation, decentralisation and automation of workplaces that proved so hard for workers to resist. Much harder to resist, in fact, than false accusations of being leaders of the Red Brigades, even if direct state repression certainly played a role in the suppression of particular workers committees, including the one at Magneti Marelli, as is described in this book.

So, apart from a desire to set the historical record straight, why do we want to dig up the story of the Magneti Marelli workers? After all, both the technology of production and the organisation of labour processes have changed a lot in the last 40 years. Why do we think that the struggles at Magneti Marelli have anything to teach us today?

For a start, however much technology changes and lifestyles of workers outside the workplace may change, the tendency for capital to recreate the factory in new sectors of the economy does not go away. The despotic command of the assembly line, whether a classical one in a car factory or a modern electronics factory (Foxconn!), or a slightly modified one in an Amazon warehouse, or a more virtual one imposed by just-in-time production and global supply chains, doesnt change that much. Likewise, the figure of the hated foreman (even though they might now be called a team leader and not be a man) is as real as ever. And it is in the factory (in the widest sense) that the class contradictions are at their most stark and where there is the greatest potential for collective resistance on the part of the wage-labouring class. Nor have the immediate things that the workers fought against changed: the inhuman pace of work, wages that dont keep pace with inflation, wage hierarchies that set workers against each other

The struggle of workers against the despotism of the factory is nothing new, nor is it particularly unusual, even in a period of relative social peace like the one we experience today. But workers struggle and