Mouvement Communiste and Unicode WildCat Present:
THE SUSPENDED YEARS
Movements and Political Journeys in Porto Marghera
Manuela Pellarin, 2009,
49 min. In Italian with English subs.
Sunday 28 October at 7.30 pm.
Pullens Centre, 184 Crampton street, Elephant and Castle, London SE17 3AE
The film will be preceded with an introduction by the translator into French of a book ('Workers’ Power in Porto Marghera') and an open discussion.
The 'Suspended Years' is concerned
with the intense series of workers’ struggles which took place in and around
the chemical production plants of Porto Marghera (close to Venice)
in north eastern Italy,
starting in the mid-1960s up until the late 1970s. The Porto Marghera workers
became one of the emblematic figures of the whole experience of “workers
autonomy” in Italy
in this period, alongside the Fiat workers. They were part of a movement which
began in the factories but which rapidly spread far beyond the factory walls,
to encompass and question the whole of social life under capitalism.
A previous film produced
about the Porto Marghera workers by the same director was “The last firebrands”
(“Die Jetzten Feuer”) distributed by the German group Wildcat.
The film consists of a
series of interviews with participants in these momentous events,
including
workers in the plants, students from Venice and Padua, and activists
involved in such things as “self-reduction” in supermarkets… The
interviews were made between 2004 and 2008.
A bit of background
The people interviewed
in this film are describing an experience of workers autonomy in Italy between
1968 and 1980, that of the Workers Committee of Montedison in Porto Marghera
(1968-1972), which was closely related to that of other workers committees in
the region, including those of Chatillon, and AMMI. Starting in November 1972, these committees transformed
themselves into a Workers Assembly, which regrouped many other committees in
the Venetia region, but it was the Workers’
Committee of Montedison which remained the real point of reference for all the
committees of the province.
The committee was born
in a big chemical plant which at the time employed 3000 labourers and 1000
technicians. It was formed from young militant workers in the plant, some of
whom had been activists in the union and the CP and others who were completely new
to politics. The questions that they asked themselves about their condition in
the factory led them to establish contact with people from the group Potere
Operaio, who had been handing out their leaflets at the gates of the factory
since the winter of 1965-66. Many workers in the plant became involved in
Potere Operaio, and some of the interviews in the film are directly concerned
with the relationship between the workers inside the plant and the students and
intellectuals who have a more “external” relation to workers’ struggles.
All this organisation
and agitation began to have a profound impact during 1968. In July of that year
there was a strike for better pay and conditions launched by the committee
which would become known throughout Italy when, on 1 August, a strikers’
demonstration blockaded the Mestre train station and fought with the police.
Like all expressions of
workers autonomy at this time, there were certain demands within workplaces
which everybody put forwards - uniform increases of wages, reduction of wage
differentials between different categories of workers, equalisation of benefits
between workers and white-collar employees, reduction of the pace of work, breaking
the division between directly employed and subcontracted workers, etc. And the
same methods of struggle were always advocated - organisation into assemblies
at the workshop and the factory level, marches through the factory to spread
and enforce strikes, the refusal of delegation, etc. But they also intervened
outside the factory around various issues – transport (refusing to pay fares),
housing (occupations, forcing down rent), reducing electricity bills, and the
cost of living in general (against price increases in bakeries and
supermarkets).
But the struggles of
Porto Marghera also had their own specificities. A particularly important
factor was the presence of highly skilled technicians who understood the
production process. This was combined with a “workers’ enquiry” that the
committee had consciously carried out so as to understand the functioning of
the plant and how workers could exploit its weak points. As a result of this,
the workers could completely shut down the plant during a strike, even though
the bosses had told them it was impossible. Just to make sure that we get the
importance of this, a worker explains it twice in the film!
Something else which was
specific to Porto Marghera (although not that
specific) is the “noxiousness” of their work in the chemical factory
(particularly in the vinyl chloride section) and their refusal to accept it, by
adopting the principle that “if our working environment is
toxic we’ll try to be there as little as
possible” and making the boss pay for the treatment which they had to
have.
They went on to critique the consequences of production on the
surrounding
region and so are perhaps the first “ecologists” to refuse the deadly
aspect of
capital and to call into question wage labour itself. As the film points
out at the end, many worker activists died relatively young as a result
of cancers caused by exposure to substances such as vinyl chloride
monomer.
The title?
The title – Gli anni sospesi - is taken from the
name of a conference which was held in Porto Marghera in 2007 entitled “The
1970s – the suspended years”. But why “suspended”?
Well, perhaps we can say
that the period of intense struggle that was the 1970s can be seen as “suspended”
in time and space, separate from what came before and after, waiting for something
new ahead but not yet in focus or determined… Perhaps.
The film was originally
intended to be distributed as a DVD with the book Quando il potere è operaio
- Autonomia e soggettività politica a Porto Marghera (1960-1980) [“When power is the worker
- Autonomy and
political
subjectivity in
Porto Marghera (1960-1980)"], Rome, Manifestolibri, 2009. The book was recently published
in French as Pouvoir ouvrier à Porto
Marghera - du Comité d’usine à l’Assemblée de territoire (Vénétie – 1960-80)
[“Workers’ Power in Porto Marghera – from the Factory Committee to the
Territorial Assembly (Venetia – 1960-80)”], Editions Les Nuits Rouges, 2012.
However, the film stands
perfectly well on its own, both as a historical document about the workers’
movement in Italy and as a discussion around the more global themes of the
relationship between struggles inside and outside workplaces, between militant
workers and “external activists” and even “ecological” questions of shutting
down poisonous and environmentally destructive workplaces…
Some useful links:
And why not take a look
at the “operaismo” section of libcom?:
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