Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [124]
Several factors contributed to these years of industrial militancy. The flood of eight million migrants from the backward south was imperfectly assimilated into insalubrious northern slums, doing mindless unskilled tasks for low pay in factories where skilled workers received much higher rewards. They were also not assimilated into trades unions which were dominated by pragmatic-minded skilled workers and attached to the major political parties. The consumer boom that screamed from every advertising hoarding made a mockery of life in overcrowded, sub-standard housing within sprawling working-class suburbs. While the Italians can make almost anything look beautiful, they failed with their slums. Then came the radical students, turning up at the factory gates in political sects such as Workers’ Power, Workers’ Vanguard and Unceasing Struggle and encouraging workers to organise themselves on an autonomous basis outside existing trades unions which were disparaged as ‘firemen’ putting out industrial conflagrations on behalf of the bosses, a slur that served to drag the socialist unions further leftwards. Independently of the students, radical workers had begun to organise cell-like structures within the factories. One of the future leaders of the Red Brigades, a telecommunications engineer called Mario Moretti, worked in a large Siemens factory in Milan. Born into a Communist-supporting family in a seaside town in Marche, Moretti hated the cold, grey anonymity of Milan, and rapidly grasped the realities of class struggle in the factories, especially since his technological education had only made him a better class of factory hand in an era of automation. From the student movement he and his comrades copied the confusion of grassroots democracy with interminable mass meetings. He was fascinated by the students’ command of language, their slogans and their ‘fantasy’. So much so that he and other workers began to dabble in communal housing, partly to save money, but also to share childcare - he and his wife had a boy called Marcello - in order to devote more time to activism.9
What commenced with demands for the equalisation of wage differentials between skilled and unskilled or between men and women escalated into calls to decouple wages from productivity, profitability and the well-being of the economy as a whole. The lexicon of industrial conflict expanded to include the ‘hiccup’ strike, or the abrupt alternation of work and stoppages, or the ‘chessboard’ strike in which an individual workshop would down tools so as to paralyse an entire factory. Strikers marched around occupied factories wearing red scarves and balaclavas, singing the golden oldies of the wartime partisan movement. A further escalation came with sabotage, including cutting off power to machinery or blocking access roads and railways. The responses of employers invariably made things worse rather than better. They transferred militants to work in the noxious paint shops, hired scabs, summoned the riot police or, finally, closed entire factories to relocate production abroad. The habit of occupying a factory rather than leaving it, so as to discuss and vote interminably, revealed the influence of students. Their counter-cultural influence was also evident in the expansion of worker demands to include housing, rents and pensions.
As with the student left’s domination of the universities, bullying and coercion were evident, even though former Red Brigadists do not like to recall this climate of oppression. While few cared if the occasional local drug dealer was beaten up, righteous violence was also used