Abstract
This article discusses how the issue of precarity has developed into a new catalyst for activism in Italy and demonstrates how this activism is linked to changes in the employment and capitalist manufacturing environment of the 1980s and 1990s. It links events in Italy to the activism of the global anti-neoliberal movement and discusses how various activist movements (the independent Marxist tradition, creative activism, social activism, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT), radical feminist activism) are mobilizing around the issue of precarity. This article focuses specifically on the activist network ‘Precari su Marte’ (Precarious on Mars) which has been active in Turin since 2005. It demonstrates how the theoretical and practical evolution of this network has led to various outcomes, including experimenting with creative forms of political practice at MayDay demonstrations and questioning the boundaries of gender.
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Notes
The PsM collective has also contributed its own videos to the production of the documentary ‘Porca miseria’ (‘Bloody Hell’), by Armando Ceste (Italia, 2006). Other sources of audiovisual material on the movements against precarity are available at http://www.ngvision.org, particularly in the ‘reddito e lavoro’ (‘income and work’) category.
Torino Film Festival, Turin International GLBT Film Festival.
The magazine ‘Il Maleppeggio – Storie di lavori’, published in Rome and devoted to accounts of life and work affected by precarity, but also a new wave of writers who, albeit from very different literary approaches, stimulate a few concepts of ‘neorealism’ through the representation of precarity.
See the political videogames freely available at http://www.molleindustria.it/, made by supporters of the MayDay process and creators of the ‘virtual’ MayDay in 2004 (http://www.euromayday.org/netparade/), or the creation of an album of stick-ons of hyper realistic characters and precarious ‘super heroes’, distributed at the Milan MayDay in 2005, which turned into a collective performance throughout the parade (http://www.chainworkers.org/IMBATTIBILI/).
See ‘eurocentrism’ at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuroMayDay.
Polemic term which refers to an obsession with the strategies of welfare issues and social rights focused on the figure of the worker (who turns out to be adult, male and white).
For a wealth of archive material on critical work on precarity and the right to an income, visit http://www.infoxoa.org/.
Turin is still today the headquarters of the car manufacturer FIAT, whose workers employed in the town over the last thirty years have gone from 150,000 (out of a population of around 1,150,000) to just over 10,000 (out of a current population of around 900,000). Not all of these, however, are effective employees. Many are recruited on the basis of outsourcing contracts.
A term attributed to various autonomous Marxist tendencies, which emerged in Italy in the early 1960s, focused on the value of autonomy in the composition of the class structure in determining the level of the class struggle. Characterized, at the beginning, by group reflections in the magazine ‘Quaderni Rossi’ (‘Red Notebooks’), from communist intellectuals and radical socialists like Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti, it developed into various tendencies in the ensuing years, until it signalled in the 1970s, among other experiences, the so-called political area of ‘Autonomia Operaia’ (‘Workers’ Autonomy’), headed by intellectuals like Toni Negri.
A significant text is Marazzi (1994); but there is greater detail in the magazine ‘Derive Approdi’ (‘Drifts and landing places’), in the early 1990s, and the interventions of activists and intellectuals like Andrea Fumagalli; Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Toni Negri, Aldo Bonomi, Christian Marazzi, Franco Berardi ‘Bifo’.
There are still only a few promoters: the Chainworkers collective, the social centre Bulk, the C.U.B trade union.
For example, Aarrg!, YoMango (Barcelona), CGT restauration rapide (Paris), McWorkers Resistance (Glasgow).
Cooperatives, generally informal, for the acquisition of consumer goods outside normal market circuits, promoting biological products, fair trading, cooperative trading and small local producers.
References
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De Sario, B. ‘Precari su Marte’: an experiment in activism against precarity. Fem Rev 87, 21–39 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400374
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400374