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

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

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

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

Gyrochronology and its usage for main sequence cool star ages

The construction of all age indicators consists of certain basic steps which lead to the identification of the properties desirable for stellar age indicators. Prior age indicators for main sequence field stars possess only some of these properties. The measured rotation periods of cool stars are particularly useful in this respect because they have well-defined dependencies that allow stellar ages to be determined with ~20% errors. This method, called gyrochronology, is explained informally in this talk, shown to have the desired properties, compared to prior methods, and used to derive ages for samples of main sequence field stars.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, presented at IAU258, Ages of Star

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