Ilaria Favretto’s fascinating book analyses the forms and evolution of workers’ protest in Italy from 1945 to the ‘post-1980s’ period. It focuses particularly on tactics of struggle and the culture underpinning them, seeking to uncover their historical origins – which sometimes reach back to preindustrial repertoires of protest – as well as the transnational influences that shaped them. Favretto draws on an extraordinarily wide range of sources, one of the book’s many strengths: from quantitative data and interviews to oral testimonies and cultural productions such as songs, films and paintings, as well as archival material. Clearly the outcome of extensive research, the work is monumental in scope and undoubtedly destined to become an essential point of reference for scholars of the Italian labour movement. The book’s exclusive focus on factory workers, and its consequent decision to leave peasants and miners largely outside the analysis, may be seen as one of the study’s limitations.
Despite its title, the book begins with the strikes of March 1943, the first significant resurgence of protest after years of Fascism, during which dissent had been repressed and effectively extinguished. Workers in northern Italian factories had to relearn the practices and even the vocabulary of protest – what, after all, did it mean to go on strike? – under the guidance of older workers who had experienced the pre-Fascist period. The book then moves swiftly to the postwar years, when the task of teaching workers forms of protest was taken on by the major trade unions – the amount of space devoted to the Catholic Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (Italian Confederation of Trades Unions) is notable and somewhat unusual – their affiliated organisations and the mass parties. This amounted to a process of political and cultural education. One criticism of this section is that it says relatively little about the evolution of Italian trade unionism from the unitary Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (Italian General Confederation of Labour), which brought together the principal political currents until 1948, to three separate confederations. In particular, the book does not fully explore how this institutional and political fragmentation altered the unions’ methods, priorities and relationship with workers.
Chapter 2 examines what have been described in Italian as gli anni duri (the hard years) of the 1950s, a period particularly unfavourable to workers because of the almost complete reassertion of managerial authority and factory hierarchies. Deprived of more conventional means of collective action, workers were often driven to adopt unofficial forms of workplace resistance that bordered on everyday rebellion, including jokes, pranks, sabotage and even theft. Although frequently condemned even by the trade unions, Favretto argues that these practices offer important insights into ‘the mental landscape, culture and moral sensibilities of the workers’ (p. 57).
Chapter 3 analyses the resurgence of trade unionism from the early 1960s, encouraged by improved economic conditions and a more favourable political climate. Strikes once again became a normal feature of industrial relations, while workers experimented with new forms of action, including intermittent and rotating strikes. These tactics also responded to the intensified exploitation associated with the increasing adoption of Taylorism in Italian factories.
Chapter 4 adopts a more explicitly anthropological perspective, showing how forms of industrial action in the 1960s and 1970s – such as internal factory marches and punitive expeditions against particularly unpopular foremen – drew on older traditions of popular and communal justice. Favretto in particular analyses the charivari, or rough music, suggesting that workplace protest adapted inherited rituals of collective punishment and public humiliation to the modern industrial setting.
Chapter 5 continues the exploration of protest repertoires in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on forms of action such as sit-ins, roadblocks and occupations. It also considers possible international influences, including the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the American counterculture and hippie movement, and French Catholic syndicalism. In doing so, the chapter highlights the transnational circulation of protest practices.
Chapter 6 focuses on the ‘refusal of work’ that became relevant among a new generation of workers in the 1970s. Within the factory, it found expression in absenteeism and sabotage; beyond it, in rent strikes, the self-reduction of prices and fares, and the outright appropriation of goods. These practices, which may in some respects be seen as anticipating the consumerist hedonism of the 1980s, bewildered both trade unions and older workers. The latter remained attached to a socialist conception of work as a duty and as an essential contribution to society.
Chapter 7 is entirely devoted to one of the most traditional practices of the labour movement: the march. It examines the ‘carnivalesque turn’ taken by demonstrations, especially from the late 1960s, when they became increasingly colourful, noisy and irreverent, departing from their traditional solemnity. The chapter also considers the silent march, showing how this apparently restrained form of protest could serve as a powerful political instrument and was sometimes adopted by anti-union forces.
As Chapter 8 demonstrates, female emancipation and unionisation in factories were far from linear and, in some respects, remained incomplete for social and cultural reasons. A principal obstacle was the patriarchal culture shared by employers, trade unions and male workers.
Deindustrialisation and the progressive de-politicisation of Italian society during the 1980s weakened the industrial working class, which gradually lost its status as a distinct political category. Trade unions had become too weak to mobilise workers in prolonged strikes. As Chapter 9 shows, protest consequently became more individualised, while media spectacle compensated for the absence of genuine collective strength. New forms of action included hunger strikes and highly visible protests in which workers endangered their lives by climbing tall buildings or construction cranes.
The book’s conclusion invites readers to reject any fatalistic narrative of the ‘end of an era’. Forms of protest are no longer what they once were, but neither have they ever remained static: they have continually evolved in response to changing social, economic and political circumstances. As long as industrial relations exist, conflict and protest will persist in one form or another. In Italy, the long cycle of social struggles beginning with the advent of democracy contributed to the social and political education of millions of workers. Italian democracy, therefore, cannot be fully understood without examining the industrial conflicts that were central to its development.
