The most significant aspect of the whole Marchionne, CEO of Fiat, affair, is no doubt that the workers have voted yes to accept the conditions imposed by him in fact. In Pomigliano this summer by a massive majority, with a faint very narrow majority in Mirafiori in January. In both cases, obviously, it come to my attention that the workers are in trouble because they are forced to suffer extortion by the company management. It is almost impossible not to interpret everything as a change of direction, trend, tension of what until a few years ago it was considered the class tout court par excellence, "the militant proletariat" to say the least ex-sixtyeight. Especially when you consider the amount and quality of the humiliating restrictions introduced, considerably worse working conditions and forms of representation of the base of workers.
The working class has stopped fighting? The working class can no longer be leading the process of emancipation? Neither one nor the other in absolute terms, both in relative terms. The fact is that the fight has to have a perspective of struggle, and to be protagonists of a process of emancipation it is necessary to want to emancipate, particularly believe in chance. It appears to me very apparent that these two features are increasingly absent among all the workers involved today, more and more people (both in terms of subject, and in the number of individuals) and less people, able to speak with autonomy . Given the structural conditions of the relationship between management and production units (the production workers) as they are set for this phase, the level of dependence and subjugation of those who are subordinate is always higher. Those who work are less and less important, who directs and sets the work has more power and capacity of influence.
Loss of rights
Marchionne knows this trend and he is fully recognized in it. High levels of managers has therefore designed a strategy to bring the Italian industrial structure in international going to become productive. To be able to do it he knows that it is essential to redefine the symbols and concepts that have qualified for nearly a century and a half the ratio of industrial labor, and by leaving at the same time give consideration to the collective consciousness, now obsolete, that capital and labor are going through a supposed objective relationship of structural conflict. In the light of new trends in Italy embodied by Marchionne, none of this makes more sense, but it has to understand that time management and production shares are interconnected.
In the vision that is becoming increasingly popular, in fact very much alive for decades and increasingly meandering undisturbed among the various ranks of the production process, regardless of both the white coats and between blue-collar, the production level is an essential part of the company, with all its expressions and its components, living in harmony with diverse features. Workers and managers are differentiated parts of the same corporate body which oversees and tends to harmonize everything submitted through its super manager. Everything is functionalized and targeted to financial efficiency, which reach out to every effort and every choice. So all those who are involved cease to be individuals-people, and become members of the production process that carries out its function, just like any mechanical component of a well-oiled machine.
In the account that follows the hierarchies are no longer such, the exploitation no longer exists, the workers are treated, at best, as manufacturing processes in mass production of ordinary moments and routine parts of the processes that shape the product-goods. The wisdom of individual workers to make, the legacy of the ancient craft knowledge, has all but disappeared, replaced by the more than mechanical drives, who still needed a strong experiential expertise from robotics, by computerization, by computers, by electrical engineering. The worker on the assembly line is comparable to any components for assembly, while its contribution has the same value of a mechanical robotic arm that performs a standard task prepared electronically. For this is like an interchangeable piece. For this worker is no longer needed and can be changed with no problem. Individuals are no longer needed, the workers lose bargaining power and are assessed only as an expense and as a mechanic adaptability.
Hence was born and developed the famous "loss of rights" that many have attempted to regain. Battle in this very difficult phase, which is likely to be abstract because it clashes with an increasingly dominant cultural metamorphosis, linked to the dogmatic view that every moment and aspect of production must be aimed at the good of the company, judged by the managerial category. According to the "supreme" good business sense today, the production worker is compared to that of a bolt or a computerized robotic arm, which by their nature and function, can not have rights. So why should it have the worker, if not for the bare necessities tied to the irrepressible human condition?
In addition to being culturally hegemonic, this philosophy of work is engaged fully in the global dimension of the two key aspects of the capitalist economy in favor, no more productive than the national and financial speculation, which by its nature, in particular, moves to the undisputed over states and bureaucratic state-barriers. The dominant system of economic management has been set in a different way along the various countries of the globe. The treatment and working conditions are very different depending on the states and countries in which they take place, so that is perfectly subsequent decade of fact the old logic of collective bargaining, on which over the decades from the sixties had set the work relations.
The fact that it is logical does not make it right. Indeed! Particularly in a case like this the natural consequence of the choices applied is inversely proportional to its ability to correct applications. While the production system and the market, increasingly global, patios outside of each obsolete state regulation, such contracts may be trapped in the working rules and regulations? Add to this the interchangeability of the anonymous individual workers that I mentioned above, the trading can no longer be filled with the human rights of those who work while they are irrevocably marked by the needs of competition which the company neither can nor wants to escape . It follows that the more you are connected to this wave the more becomes upright unjust, since that logic comes from the prevalence of hegemonic business needs at the expense of the very human needs of his subordinates.
The Italian problem of Marchionne is then a situation to tame domestic production exceeded at the international level, where the current dis / quality of work, in many cases more similar to new forms of slavery, must be linked to new production capacity super-automated. In practice, the man must help the machine to perform the scheduled work, not the other way, abandoning the illusion that the machine can relieve fatigue. In addition, automation, robotics and computerization have greatly reduced the presence of human workers in the production process: to produce much of yesterday, today we need far fewer workers, but unskilled forced to automate, which cost less and work more . So when we say that the plan is not acceptable because FIAT affects the rights acquired through years of struggle, Marchionne says that if his proposal is not accepted he will change in Serbia, or Poland, or in the many other countries where they will make sure that the bridges of gold, up to facilitate the conditions for business and workers will cost much less. For us it is blackmail, but for him it's an investment, that he plans to produce for the company to be competitive internationally, not to provide work to those who need it.
But the world moves fast
It is understandable that in a situation like the classic old struggle for a job and to improve working conditions (better from the point of view of the sweating of course) is unlikely to be a practical and realistic perspective. The world as it is runs fast and can not dwell on issues not relevant to the new powerful. The result is that more and more accepted supine conditions where one is forced, because otherwise the immediate prospect is the loss of labor, the hunger and misery, or, at best, a state of permanent insecurity, which gives existential insecurity by not allowing peaceful ways to manage their lives.
At this stage, the constant element is the fact that historically the labor movement has always considered regressive. Instead of moving and always fight for better conditions and more rights, even revolutionary expropriation up to eliminate the bosses, now we fight not to lose our jobs, however degrading and heavy it could be. The prospect of sending the working class to power, instead of the bourgeoisie, is no longer even conceivable, if not some irrelevant fringe ideologically, more dogmatic than any evidence. If only because there is no longer the bourgeoisie, as well as the working class has disappeared revolutionary mythology. The enemies of those who work are not the masters (small residual group of owners of capital, for a long time are no longer able to influence the fate of the economy), but the speculators, who have enormous power to influence public policy production choices without any obligation to take care. Those working live increasingly precarious state and is fragmented into many different conditions and separate non-permanent, easily mixed with each other. It is virtually impossible to identify an objective common condition that can elevate the entire state of class.
There is also a problem that the original mythology of the revolutionary struggle could not contemplate: the quality of what is produced is not indifferent. It is not in itself and not for those who produce. The logic of the existing commodity product for the market, whose value is given by the ability to accumulate capital, means that it does not matter if you produce weapons and poisons, as well as whether it is torture and kill animals or enslaving children . Over 90% of goods produced in the world today is not free from these aberrations. Behind every production, even the most seemingly innocuous, there are systematically killed, torture, massacres, pollution, and destruction.
Those who work part unconsciously the perpetrator of such an abomination. As products continue to be separated from that helps to do, without posing the problem of what he's doing, continuing to be complicit, albeit unconscious, of the advanced state of deterioration of the local and global?
A struggle becomes effective when it is connected to a framework of genuine emancipation. And today we can not speak of emancipation just simply ask for better working conditions. The emancipation, if it wants to be such, must move away from the plane of making claims claiming power and better conditions, to the transformation plan, which would seek to intervene to change the quality of life, both in the places of production, and in the conduct of lives. A vision of the concrete and real change can not avoid from acting to transform production decisions and to avoid the places where they continue to perpetuate models of capitalism. We begin to think not to be able to participate more to the infamy banquet, but to find ways to directly manage our lives and what we produce.
anno
41 n. 360
Andrea Papi