The expropriation struggle of Italian metalworkers

"Is it true that the Italian metalworking industry cannot afford to pay higher wages?" This is the question that sparked one of the most bitter and exciting struggles in Italy between metalworkers and ironmasters, organized on both sides.

This struggle, whose developments attracted the attention of the international labor movement, led employers to declare a general lockout. But the workers did not give in; they seized the metalworking factories in almost all industrial centers.

In some establishments, managers, engineers, and other intellectuals were held captive; in others, some of the technical staff voluntarily collaborated with manual workers in the operation of the establishments.

Certain facts demonstrate that not only does the organized working class attach essential importance to the events that unfold day after day, but that the struggle for the top management of establishments also meets with sincere sympathy from a large part of the scientific, artistic, and political world.

On the other side of the barricade, the union of major industrialists, which includes all branches of industry, has proclaimed its complete solidarity with the metalworkers and sounded the alarm about the dangers that labor unrest poses to Italy's capitalists.

What interests us here, above all, is the movement's potential for success. In this regard, we should perhaps not harbor too many illusions.

Inevitably, the shortage of intellectual workers of all categories—managers, engineers, chemists, accountants—is being felt acutely; and the "discipline" maintained by the workers within the establishments cannot compensate, from a production standpoint, the lack of competent technical and commercial management and practical experience in the organization of industry and the management of establishments.

Workers, according to reports in the Italian mainstream press, are facing two major difficulties: a shortage of raw materials and a lack of money.

It is obvious that it is the bosses who control the supply of raw materials and money. But even if organized workers were to receive effective help in these two areas—for example, through support from the state or local authorities— it is not only inexperience in sourcing raw and secondary materials on the domestic or international market, nor only the search for outlets in the four corners of the world, it is inexperience in all areas of production that must necessarily hinder the workers' operation of the establishments like a heavy ball and chain. And even if a sufficient number of extremely competent and experienced individuals were to lend their support to the organized workers, — even in that case, the danger would remain that international capitalism, all the high finance of both worlds, would rise up against them, making it impossible to continue production normally. Credit would be cut off, raw materials would stop being shipped, railroads would create obstacles, blows to the stock market in the form of reckless speculation encouraged by a press sold out to capital—workers' organizations could only sink, in the end, under countless obstacles.

That is why we have always believed that only an international social and economic revolution could enable organized workers to definitively take control of production.

Conditions would certainly be different if Italian metalworkers had had representatives on the boards of directors of all the major factories in the country for the past ten or twenty years. Keeping abreast of the general progress of their own establishments, informed by the technicians of their own organization, the staff of large metallurgical factories would not only be able to more easily dispense with the current technical directors, but many of the latter would also be more easily won over to the workers' cause and would willingly abandon their capitalist masters. It would also be much easier, in this case, to find the working capital necessary to continue business.

In any case, the takeover of metalworking factories by Italian workers nonetheless marked the beginning of an effective social revolution, acting as a counterbalance, in history, to the takeover of nature and industry by private capitalists. The movement is of a completely different interest for the emancipation of the working classes than any political revolution consisting in the replacement of a so-called "socialist" parliamentary government with a so-called "bourgeois" government.

It is impossible to say with any certainty, considering all the factors at play, how the current social conflict will develop in Italy. However, it seems reasonable to assume that something will remain of the new economic power that metalworkers wield in large factories and workshops. This will probably take the form of some right of worker control, initially won through violent struggle, then consolidated and enshrined in some law that the workers will have the task of developing over the years through tenacious labor and faith in the communist ideal.

And that will be the beginning of the effective social revolution we mentioned earlier, which has been the dream of our best days.

At the beginning of the 16th century, the reformer Ulrich von Hutten said, "Minds are awakening, it is a joy to live!"

It may soon be that we will say the same thing about the post-war period we are currently experiencing.