Porto Marghera: The Last Firebrands

"Porto Marghera - The last firebrands"

The winter 2006/07 issue of the German Wildcat magazine features a DVD and booklet documenting a historical experience of autonomous workers' organisation in the industrial area around Venice, Italy in the late 60s and early 70s. Unlike most of the more or less academic historical documentations of Italian Operaism, which tend to focus mainly on the leading organisations and figures, in the 2004 documentary the worker-activists themselves talk about their experiences. Wildcat and friends subtitled the documentary in German, English and Polish (the original is in Italian plus French subtitles). Soon there will be an improved version with subtitles also in Slovakian, Turkish, Romanian. In addition they put together a very detailed booklet containing more historical analysis and interviews which will soon be available in English. Amongst others, the following characteristics and problems of this particular phase of class struggle are still important to debate and tackle today: - The workers at Porto Marghera fought for better working conditions and at the same time against the damaging impact of the chemical industry and of work itself. The split between workers defending their health damaging jobs, whilst being deeply critical; and a middle-class moralist green movement did not yet exist. - The workers-activists developed their independent forms of organisation within the actual struggles of the time, reassessing the relationships between the mobilisations of the workers and their own role as active workers, between factory and wider social terrain, between workers' struggles and the new forms of union representations and 'professional' political groups like Potere Operaio, between mass movement, armed insurrectionist groups and state repression. Below we publish the introduction and content list of the booklet. If you want to get hold of the DVD or the English version of the booklet, please get in touch with: redaktion@wildcat-www.de

Porto Marghera - the last firebrands. The title of the documentary has various meanings: the Italian word 'fuoco' means 'fire', and also a 'shoot-out'. In this case, the word also means the flames of the petrochemical works that make the industrial zone visible from miles around. Its future is uncertain. The environmental damage that it has caused cannot be overlooked. The hundreds of deaths from cancer can never be made good. The most polluting parts of the industry have since been outsourced east, but Italy still belongs to the largest PVC producers.

The fire in the industrial wasteland, where the illegal immigrants warm themselves, is a symbol in the film for the new class composition, making an immigration country out of an emigration one.

But the phrase 'the last firebrands' also refers to the heat waves of class struggle that swept across this industrial zone in the 1950s, 60s and 70s; struggles that characterised the area and left a lasting impact upon it. Sometimes history takes a violent leap: in 1968 inexperienced peasants from the countryside were catapulted into the centre of the worldwide revolution. No working class had previously identified the factory as a trigger of fatal diseases and as a destroyer of life, as clearly as they did in this struggle. The union shut out the organisers of the struggles. Those shut out found their own organisational forms. The autonomous assemblies in Porto Marghera in the early 1970s not only co-ordinated the struggles in the factories of the industrial zone, but also squatted houses, formed neighbourhood committees, organised price reductions in the supermarkets and together with thousands of workers burned their electricity bills. The unions and the government could only look on.

On the DVD you can find… the film Porto Marghera - gli ultimi fuochi, created by Manuala Pellarin 2004. It was filmed with funding from the Venetian Province, amongst others. It was first screened in Venice and was going to be screened on Arte (a French / German TV channel), but then nobody wanted to know anything more about the film. We saw it for the first time in January 2005 at a private screening and were excited, because here, speaking in their own words, were the protagonists of the struggles of the 50s to the 70s: the workers. The production company ControCampo was pleased that someone was interested in the film and gave us the rights to it. So we can now give it out as a free addition to Wildcat subscribers. Because we could not afford to buy the rights to use the original music (Johnny Cash), we have completely re-done the film's soundtrack: the only music left of the original are the two songs by Gualtiero Bertelli, who accompanied the struggles with his guitar at the time.

We have subtitled the film in German, English, Polish and Slovakian. The French subtitles were already there. As an addition you can find on the DVD a portrait of Augusto Finzi, in which he give a personal resume of his political activities. Manuela Pellarin made this new cut from the existing material and showed it at the presentation of the 'Augusto Finzi' workers archive. We subtitled it in German and English.

Precarious work, subcontractors, poisoning

The old workers interviewed talk about the situation in the 50s and 60s in the booming industrial zone and how they fought against it. The themes are very relevant today: - Precarious work with four week contracts were the rule in the shipyard - Similarly, subcontractors were very common, employing workers who came from far away, for low wages and worked under bad conditions. The workers from Porto Marghera lead a huge, very militant strike against outsourced companies, demanding direct employment and equal treatment for all workers. - The handling to highly toxic materials does not just belong to the past: The introduction of a new EU wide chemical industry standard, that includes a ban on the usage of toxic material if there is a possible replacement material, is being fought over hard by the Chemical industry and the relevant unions at the moment (Autumn 2006). The film contains various levels alongside each other:

- The history of the workers struggle in the 50s and 60s in the industrial zone

- Environmental damage and disease through the industry

- Discussions of young workers in 2002 about the closure of their department

- The new composition of workers through migration

The hidden history

Three of the workers interviewed were activists with the radical organisation Potere Operaio, who placed their hope in the autonomous organisation of the working class and built up their own structures outside the unions. We have collated material about this on the following pages of this booklet. At the end, we have reprinted an old text of the worker committees of Porto Marghera from 1970. One needs to have a little patience here to get used to the language, even more so because it is [a translation of] an old German translation, which took up the Italian monstrosity of a word, Operaism.

Content of the booklet:

- Intro to the DVD

- Presentation of the workers archives 'Augusto Finzi'

- History of the Porto Marghera industrial zone

- Short chronology of class struggle in the Veneto 1967 – 1981

- The class struggles in Italy 1968 - 1973, a political summary

- Unions versus workers autonomy

- Operaism, an overview on the political development

- About the history of the Potere Operaio (workers power)

- The history of the workers committees in Porto Marghera

- Talk by Italo Sbrogiô, one of the workers-activists, June 2006

- "The workers should take things into their own hands" - Interview with Gianni Sbrogiô, October 2006

- Appendix: The process against Montedison and Enichem; The dioxin cloud over Seveso; The new chemical industry standards and the German unions; 'Struggle is worth it', speech by Gianni Sbrogio, March 2006 - From a meeting about the struggle against asbestos, Padua, March 2006; 'Work refusal', Text of the workers committees in Porto Marghera from 1970; The characters in the film; Glossary

[prol-position news #8 | 4/2007]