The antinomies of Fordism

This is a reflection on Bruno Settis' Fordismi. Storia politica della produzione di massa (2016), a detailed and illuminating exploration of the discourses and practices that accompanied the ascent of mass production from the margins to the core of capitalist society

I Terroni in Città: revisiting southern migrants militancy in Turin's hot autumn

This article proposes a revision of the predominant view of southern Italians during the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969 in Turin, one of the most remarkable moments of working-class mobilisation in modern European history. The representation of southern Italians as ‘primitive rebels’ and ‘spontaneous’ radicals has its roots in an earlier notion of southerners as social deviants and has obscured a much more complex historical reality. This image, endorsed by historians and popularised in fictional accounts, contradicts contemporary evidence which points to southerners’ singular mix of radicalism and conservatism, resistance and integration

A new revolutionary practice: operaisti and the 'refusal of work' in 1970's Italy

The social protest that engulfed Italy in the 1970s found a theoretical analysis in the work of the operaisti. Through a series of concepts, they outlined a new revolutionary practice that aimed to return to a more authentic reading of Marxism. This article focuses on the notion of ‘refusal of work’ and the ancillary concept of ‘appropriation’ and examines how these theoretical tools emerged out of radical protest in factories and were put forward by the operaisti as a central plank of a revolutionary strategy for the working clas

Revolution in a comic strip: Gasparazzo and the identity of southern migrants in Turin, 1969-1975

Between 1969 and 1975, in Turin, a social movement with migrants from southern Italy as its protagonists addressed the issues of working conditions in the automobile plants, and housing and living standards in the city's overcrowded working-class neighbourhoods. Southern migrants, from different regions and speaking sometimes mutually incomprehensible dialects, forged a collective identity as Meridionali – “southerners” – and claimed recognition as fully fledged citizens of Turin's industrial society. This identity-building was captured in the making through the satirical cartoons featuring Gasparazzo, the character of a southern worker at FIAT who struggled daily with the alienation of work, the arrogance of supervisors, the repression enforced by the police, and, back in the south, the backwardness of the social system. Although the publication of Gasparazzo ended abruptly in 1972 the qualities of the cartoon character continued to resonate in succeeding years. As militancy waned and the social movement started to crumble, Gasparazzo came to symbolize the nostalgic model of a working-class hero rather than any actual southerner in the plant

The IWW in Turin: ‘Militant history’, workers’ struggle and the crisis of Fordism in 1970s Italy

In 1970s Italy, the historical trajectory, tactics and goals of the International Workers of the World (IWW)—the American radical labour union active between 1905 and 1924—rose to renown, and references to the Wobblies appeared frequently in essays, journal articles, books and in contemporary debates of Italy’s own radical movement. The 1970s were, according to labour activist and historian Peppino Ortoleva, ‘probably the most famous episode of the American labour movement in Italy’. Why was the history of the IWW so appealing to the Italian radical movement of the 1970s? In what political and social context were the Italians interrogating that history? What were its lessons for Italian working class activism? And what were the transnational connections that made it possible for the Italians to ‘love’ the Wobblies? This articles tries to answer these questions with specific reference to the historical context of the workers’ struggle at FIAT in Turin, both because of its importance in the history of the Italian labour and radical movement and because most of the actors behind the Italian reading of the IWW had cut their teeth in the workers’ strikes of Turin of the late 1960s and followed closely the company restructurings of the 1970s

Amanda Ciafone. Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation. [Book review]

Through the in-depth study of a single organization, the Coca-Cola Company, Amanda Ciafone uncovers and explains some fundamental dynamics in the evolution of capitalism in the last hundred years. Less in the business of producing drinks than in the one of orchestrating the franchising of bottling production across the world, the Coca-Cola Company exemplifies, writes Ciafone, key characteristics that we have learned to identify with contemporary global capitalism, such as the commodification of culture, the financialization of the portfolio of activities, and the commercialization of knowledge

Tactics of refusal: idioms of protest and political subjectivities in Italy's "1968 years"

This is article is part of the forum on 1968 of the American Historical Review. The article is an historical and political assessment of the diverse social movements that comprises the Italian 1968, their legacy and the country's relationship to the divisive collective memory of that period

Harvests of shame: enduring unfree labour in twentieth century United States, 1933-1964

This article reframes the discussion on vulnerable and exploited agricultural labour in twentieth-century United States using the overarching category of unfree labour. In order to do so, it bridges two usually distinct historiographies by linking the phenomenon of ‘peonage’ during the New Deal, with the one of immigrant contract labour southern Florida, under the H2 visa. Archival research on the practices at the US Sugar Corporation in southern Florida exemplifies this link. This article draws on federal archives, government proceedings, papers of political activists and legal and labour scholarship to argue: firstly, that unfree labour has been an enduring feature of agricultural labour relations at regional level during the twentieth century, through both a transmission and a transformation of practice that had their origin in the control of black emancipated labour; secondly, that the introduction of guest workers under the H2 and Bracero programme meant a modernization in the practices of unfree labour, pivoting on the lack of citizenship rights, racial discrimination, debt at home, and threat of deportation; and, finally, that the failure to recognise forms of legal and economic deprivation and coercion as unfree labour has hurt the ability of the United States to enforce protection of human rights at home