Challenging Global Capitalism

Labor Migration, Radical Struggle, and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin

N. Pizzolato

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137311702
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Detroit and Turin were both sites of significant political and social upheaval. This comparative and transnational study examines the political and theoretical developments that emerged in these two "motor cities" among activist workers and political militants during these decades.

1

Introduction

In the United States and in Italy, and worldwide, Detroit and Turin are known as the “Motor City” and la città dell’auto respectively—two metropolises that have developed around the manufactured product that best symbolized modernity: the automobile. As so high a proportion of all the cars produced in the course of the twentieth century was made in these two cities, they have retained this reputation well after the bulk of the automotive industry had actually abandoned them. General Motors (GM), Chrysler, Ford, and FIAT—the major companies that historically characterized the two “Motor Cities”—are now global corporations that spread their operations across several continents, even though they maintain links with their original headquarters.

The latest economic recession has shaken automakers worldwide, compelling them to restructure and downsize (yet again) and to seek a fresh infusion of cash from governments and investors. In April 2009, Turin and Detroit figured prominently in business news as FIAT’s CEO Sergio Marchionne sealed an important deal with Chrysler: the Italian company would become a leading stakeholder and in exchange would furnish the iconic but moribund Detroit firm with fuel-efficient and lower-emission technology. Chrysler had filed for bankruptcy and this agreement was part of complex rescue package negotiated between the Obama administration, the United Automobile Workers (UAW), and the company’s major creditors. American business analysts doubted the viability of the partnership, describing it as a “gamble.” “Would Detroit Sound Any Better in Italian?” quipped the New York Times, reporting an analyst’s opinion that “it will be enormously difficult to make it truly functional. It’s a moon shot.”¹

On the other side of the Atlantic, FIAT’s Italian workers were skeptical too. While the CEOs and the US Department of Treasury were negotiating the agreement and Marchionne was placing a failed bid to acquire GM’s European venture Opel, 15 thousand FIAT workers from all over the Peninsula traveled to Turin to express their concern about the proposed merger, which, they said, would cause a further reduction in the workforce and the closing of the Italian, now marginal plants, “We know that when there’s a merger, workers always lose,” declared one autoworker.² The protest escalated in tension when a dissident faction bundled a union leader off the stage, claiming that unions were “selling workers out” to the company.³ The protesters—union members and dissenters alike—reminded observers that Turin, just like Detroit, was at a crossroads, and that any global strategy of development should be assessed for its consequences at the local level.

Business analysts may be surprised to discover how closely interwoven the automotive industries of Detroit and Turin were and are, but historians should not be. Positioned at the core of the automobile industry, they have both been hailed as prototype Fordist cities throughout the twentieth century. Though not always synchronized, their histories have often proceeded in parallel, producing similar patterns of industrial growth, urban development, and industrial conflict. In both cities, the automobile industry informed the economic, social, and spatial dimensions of the urban space. It was each city’s largest single employer, and the fortunes of a subcontracting network of small and medium supplying companies relied upon those of the automakers. The hegemony of the automobile manufactures over Detroit and Turin was unparalleled in the United States or Europe respectively. However, the high concentration of manufacturing employment led to dependence, and the destiny of these metropolises became bound to the fortunes and whims of a small handful of corporations.

The central contention of this book is that analyzing the parallel, sometimes tangled, histories of Detroit and Turin provides us with a fresh look at the way Fordism—a transnational process—shaped urban change and social protest in two historically contrasting places. In particular, the book investigates how social movements responded to the urban crises engendered by automobile manufacturers’ practices of expansion, recruitment, and restructuring. By Fordism, I mean not only the technological paradigm that dominated the most advanced industries of that period, the automobile industry among them, but also a system of regulation of the economy (as defined by the theorists of the régulation school).⁴ In the 1930s, while writing “Americanism and Fordism” from his prison cell, Gramsci predicted that Fordism would become the paradigm of development of the core industrial capitalist societies, but the model came into full realization only in the postwar period.⁵ It was a model that, as well as proposing a certain technical solution for mass production, provided the social institutions and the economic incentives to sustain mass consumption. Collective bargaining, the minimum wage, and the welfare state, differently organized across Western Europe and the United States, provided a social wage that expanded internal demand as the economy grew. The state took on institutional powers to influence redistribution; corporations had to constantly innovate and concentrate to maintain high productivity and had to be enlightened enough to accept the system of redistribution; organized labor had to cooperate by maintaining the discipline of the labor force, whose reliable performance was the most important component of the productivity effort.⁶

Through its agglomeration of manufacturing in sprawling urban concentrations, Fordism created within the core states of the world economy large peripheral or semi-peripheral areas, characterized by unemployment, low wages, and “backward” social organization. The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno both fitted this description. In both Italy and the United States, there were many economic and social factors that drove workers to leave home and settle in the industrial centers of the north. In the United States, in rural areas across the South and in the Appalachian region, machines replaced farmhands as subsistence farming yielded to commercial agriculture. The coal industry underwent a similar conversion when it introduced new machinery during a period of slackening demand for coal. These transformations created an employment crisis that induced southerners to look to the northern manufacturing industry for salvation. It was African Americans who suffered the most from this process of economic change, as an entrenched pattern of discrimination denied them the meager opportunities that the region afforded the whites. They eagerly escaped the pervasive system of racial segregation that mocked their rights as citizens and offended their dignity as human beings. This trend continued during the 1950s and in the early 1960s. In fact, although the South was slowly and unevenly changing, the social and political effects of “Jim Crow,” in the light of the “massive resistance” to the civil rights movement, continued to be a significant push factor for African Americans.

In Italy, the questione meridionale, the southern question, surfaced immediately after Italian unification in 1861 when a large gap in social and economic development between the southern and northern halves of Italy was evident. For decades afterwards, the problem remained unsolved, and it worsened as the north (the northwest in particular) developed a strong manufacturing base and the south stalled in a backward rural economy. Agrarian reforms in the 1950s failed to implement an efficient redistribution of land. Even subsequent government policy, always tainted with patronage, to subsidize industrial investments in the region achieved little in terms of employment, since only capital-intensive industries accepted the move to the south. These industrial complexes came to be known as “cathedrals in the desert,” since they were surrounded by desolate rural villages and contributed little or nothing to the development of the region. A parliamentary commission established in 1951 to investigate poverty ascertained that a quarter of Italian households fell into the “poor” category, but a majority of them, some 50.2 percent were located in the south. The most wretched living conditions were in Calabria, where the average income was only 30 percent of that of Piedmont.

Migration from south to north reached a peak in the 1940s and 1950s in Detroit, and in the 1950s and 1960s in Turin. These relocations involved the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of men and women, many of them unaccustomed to life in an industrialized metropolis. In Italy, three million workers left the Mezzogiorno during the 1950s and the 1960s. This mass exodus reached a peak during 1958–1963, due to the high rate of economic growth in northern Italy at that time. In the United States, between 1940 and 1960, more than 5 million people abandoned the American South, of whom 3 million were African Americans. The latter, thus, joined the hundreds of thousands who had left the South a generation earlier, during the first Great Migration. By 1966, only 55 percent of blacks lived below the Mason-Dixon line.⁷

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the radical social and industrial conflict ravaging the fabric of Turin and Detroit manifested the problem of a workforce alienated from both the production process and the established system of industrial relations. Nor was conflict restricted to the workplace, since the unrestrained urban growth had created volatile situations, especially in the neighborhoods and housing projects inhabited by the recent and not-so-recent immigrants. Lack of adequate housing and social services, as well as the racial (in Detroit) and regional (in Turin) divisions between newcomers and established residents exacerbated tensions that exploded in civil disturbances and radical political activism in the communities as well as in the factories.

From 1967 to 1973, Detroit witnessed a wave of radical political activism, most prominently associated with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, but which continued even after its demise in 1971. The protest began at Chrysler’s flagship plant Dodge Main in the wake of the destructive urban riot of July 1967. The “rebellion,” as radicals called it, precipitated a challenge in the car factories to the existing power structure, which, argued the strikers, pitted management and union bureaucracy against rank-and-file workers, and in particular against the African Americans who performed the most demanding tasks on the production lines. The strikes at times saw the participation of thousands of black workers—precise numbers are lacking, but the protest succeeded in halting production and incurring the wrath of both the company and the union. As the struggle spread into other factories, the leaders of the League decided to mobilize protest in the community as well, by taking control of a student paper with a large distribution, by creating their own printing shop and publishing house, and by staging marches and demonstrations in the business district. They soon found themselves under a multipronged conservative and liberal attack, but while individual members of the League were ousted from the factories and the union halls, rank-and-file dissent, increasingly interracial, continued to manifest itself in the plants, most notably through the activity of the United National Caucus (UNC), until the economic downturn sealed the fate of the protest.

In Turin, the period of mobilization lasted from 1969 to 1975. In 1969, Meridionali, as southern migrants were called, initiated a wave of spontaneous strikes centered on FIAT’s factories. This episode was soon dubbed the autunno caldo, or ‘‘hot autumn,’’ the period of the greatest mobilization of workers in Italian history, which paved the way for structural reforms of society. Southerners transformed the workplace by resisting the imposition of the Fordist production process, or by embracing it, but interpreting it in terms of their own cultural parameters. Union politics changed as the Meridionali brought their own agenda to labor relations and demanded a place and a voice in the system of industrial relations. In some cases, migrants espoused radical tactics and ideologies to advance their demands. Lotta Continua, “The struggle goes on,” was the most popular radical group in Turin. Similar to the League, it denounced the unions—even the Communist Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL)—as ineffective in challenging the manufacturers’ drive to introduce an ever-increasing pace of work and called for an “autonomous” organization of the working class. As in the case of Detroit, protesters made a loud noise to vent their anger, rhythmically beating machinery during demonstration, or using aggressive slogans on their placards and uncompromising language in their publications. While unions gradually embraced some of the rank-and-file demands, such as an egalitarian wage increase across the board, radical groups took their protest to the neighborhoods, where they organized for the reduction of house rents and bus and train fares, and for better schools and social services. When some militants went underground, and formed armed groups, they lost touch with the ordinary rank-and-file workers in the factories, who, by 1975, were more likely to protest through absenteeism than by striking.

The stories of working-class radicalism in Detroit and Turin have been extensively chronicled by activists, participants, and scholars. The picture that emerges from these accounts is informative in many respects, but offers no clue as to the reasons why a wave of working-class social protest, both inside and outside the factory, should have arisen almost simultaneously in several Western countries. In fact, while the 1968 student movement is generally acknowledged as an international phenomenon, the workers’ movement is mainly analyzed from a local or national viewpoint. Through a comparative and transnational perspective, this book explores instead the interconnectedness of these stories.

In the past decades, historians have often criticized American exceptionalism—the notion that the development of the United States has been differently shaped by the unique combination of social and geographical factors—as ahistorical and inaccurate.⁸ However, the idea of an exceptional process of class formation in the United States is not fully discredited yet, as it remain a commonplace trope in the discussion on American labor on the media. It also regularly returns in one form or another in the academic debate.⁹ This book suggests that the different outcomes of workers’ struggle in an American and a southern European city did not originate in the exceptional character of the American working-class or society, but in the choices of unions, manufacturers, radicals activists, and workers themselves in a context of similar production technology. Race, in particular, has proven to be one of the most intractable components of the argument for exceptionalism. Racial discrimination was an integral element of the social structure of the United States; it often constituted a barrier to class solidarity and it powerfully affected the tactics of the labor movement. However, the recognition of the distinctive role of race should not stifle historians’ engagement with the comparative and transnational dimension of the history of the American working-class. To do so would be to miss the opportunity to investigate how this factor shaped forms of political expression of American protest movements akin to others in faraway countries were race not in the political agenda. It is worth reminding here the surprise of Detroit black radical John Watson to discover, when he first traveled to Italy in 1968, that the Italian working-class was fragmented as the American one, even though along different fault lines.¹⁰ The historian who traces the story of working-class protest beyond the boundaries of the American nation might experience a similar astonishment.

During its gestation, this book has been instead inspired by the call of historians such as David Thelen, Ian Tyrell, Thomas Bender, Donna Gabaccia, Daniel Rodgers, and others, who have demonstrated the importance of the interplay of local events with global developments. “Transnational” history, they argue, by enlarging the framework in which we analyze peculiar American events, enriches the way we understand them. In 2000, the Organization of American Historians’ “La Pietra Report” invited scholars “to contextualize the United States on a global scale” and proposed a research and pedagogic agenda not constrained by the politically defined boundaries of the nation: the influence of American activities does not stop at the national borders and American society is not sealed from the impact of faraway events.¹¹ In 2005 and 2008, a cohort of labor historians including Marcel Van Der Linden, Rick Halpern, Neville Kirk, Prabhu Mohapatra, and others, convened in two international workshops and embraced the idea that the history of the working class, shaped as it is by international flows of migration, capital movement, and industrial relocation, would particularly benefit from a transnational and global approach, especially if multidirectional, that is, encompassing the perspective of scholars working outside the American academia.¹² This discussion has greatly influenced the way in which I looked at social movements in Detroit and Turin.

This book contributes to the burgeoning field of transnational history by integrating into its methodology a comparative approach. The comparative method in American history reached its peak in the 1980s, when historians such as George Fredrickson, Peter Kolchin, and Raymond Grew applied it to the study of large historical processes and social phenomena such as slavery or white supremacy. Since then, it has often been criticized for its limits. In the 1990s, the Young Turks of transnational history argued that comparative history validated the implicit distortion of the national framework in historical inquiry. For instance, it reiterated the importance of the nation-state by making it the ultimate unit of comparison, in a moment when globalization showed the interpenetration of national historical experiences. “Comparisons,” argues Micol Seigel, “requir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Series Editor Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1  Introduction
• 2  The Making and Unmaking of Fordism
• 3  The “American Model” in Turin
• 4  The Cities of Discontent
• 5  A Global Struggle in a Local Context
• 6  Conclusion: Two Different Paths
• Notes
• Index