Why would they have left Lucania to begin with, a world where you relax in the sun, go to the beach, take a tomato from the vine when you’re hungry? There was chronic underemployment in the south. The soil was of poor quality. After grain markets were deregulated, prices plummeted. For rural populations in the Mezzogiorno there was simply no future. At the same time, the Italian postwar economic ‘miracle’ meant there were jobs in the factories of the rapidly industrialising north. Between 1951 and 1971, 9 million people migrated from rural to industrial areas in Italy. They often arrived in the big cities with nothing, and were forced to live in train station waiting rooms or on relatives’ floors, if they had that option. They worked day and evening shifts on building sites or in factories that offered treacherous conditions and long hours.

It had already been two or three weeks since it all started at Fiat. The struggles had begun after the strike for Battipaglia, which to be on the safe side the union at Fiat only held for three hours. The first political rally was on April 11, 1500 workers from the South Presses. It was the first chance Fiat workers had taken to fight against the bosses’ plans, which are to create unemployment and take the people of the south by hunger. To create a massive reserve of young people and force them to work in the factories in the north. Work that became almost a prize, a gift the bosses give us. To make us come and sleep in the stations and pile into one room paying rents that were like highway robbery.

All of these components tie the worker’s wage to production for the boss. The piece rate, for example, is the pay for the number of units the worker produces. So that the worker has to stay on his toes and follow the foremen’s orders, because they determine this variable part of his wage, which is absolutely indispensable to him for living. And this lets the boss maintain political control of the working class. To make the working class accept collaborating in their own exploitation. And this is why, when we ask for increases in our base pay, the bosses and the unions always offer increases in the variable part.

Because the more the bosses pay us this way, the more the worker’s wage is tied to productivity, and the more the bosses’ political control increases. Although with piecework we can get back at the bosses by autolimitation, which is when a worker makes fewer units than he should. When the worker makes more units, the boss gets more in the exchange than he gives back to the worker. But with autolimitation, the small amount of money that the worker misses out on is exchanged for many fewer units for the boss, who therefore loses out more.

[...] For the simple act of going into the factory hell: We want a guaranteed minimum wage of 120,000 lire a month:

Because we need this money to live in this shitty society. Because we no longer want the piece rates to have us by the throat. Because we want to eliminate the divisions between workers invented by the boss. Because we want to be united so we can fight better. Because then we can more easily refuse the boss’s hours. Because more money in base pay means a greater possibility of struggle. [...]

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.

Because it’s us, the proletariat of the south, us mass workers, an enormous mass of workers, the one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand workers of Fiat who have developed capital and its State. It is us who created all the wealth that exists, of which they leave us only the crumbs. We created all this wealth by dying of work at Fiat or dying of hunger in the south. And it is us, the great majority of the proletariat, who don’t want to work and die any more for the development of capital and its State. We can’t keep this crap going any more.

So now we say it’s time to end it, because they don’t know what to do with all this enormous wealth that we produce in the world other than waste it and destroy it. They waste it making thousands of atomic bombs or going to the moon. They destroy fruit, peaches and pears by the ton, because there’s too much and it isn’t worth anything. Because for them everything must have a price, it’s the only thing they care about, products without value can’t exist as far as they’re concerned. It can’t just be for people who don’t have food, according to them. But with all the wealth that exists people don’t need to die of hunger any more, they don’t have to work any more. So we’ll take the wealth, we’ll take everything.

There were red flags on some of the barricades; on one there was a sign that said: Che cosa vogliamo: tutto. People kept coming from all around. You could hear a hollow noise, continuous, the drumbeat of stones rhythmically striking the electricity pylons. They made this sound, hollow, striking, continuous. The police couldn’t surround and search the whole area, full of building sites, workshops, public housing, fields. People kept attacking, the whole population was fighting. Groups reorganised themselves, attacked at one point, scattered, came back to attack somewhere else. But now the thing that moved them more than rage was joy. The joy of finally being strong. Of discovering that your needs, your struggle, were everyone’s needs, everyone’s struggle.

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.