FALL 2025
ISSUE 04

₁ Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano (Venetian-Emilian Workers Power) was a political group formed in the early 1960s, comprising workers from Porto Marghera, the petrochemical plant in Ferrara, and other factories in Emilia, along with intellectuals and university students. The group distributed its own newspaper and leaflets relatively regularly in some of the factories in the areas around Marghera, Ferrara, Modena, and Bologna.

₂ The “workerist tactician” descriptor is Steve Wright’s. “Cattivi Maestri: Some Reflections on the Legacy of Guido Bianchini, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, and Primo Moroni,” in Reading Negri: Marxism in the Age of Empire, ed. Pierre Lamarche, Max Rosenkrantz, and David Sherman (Open Court Publishing, 2011), 27.

₃ Ferruccio Gambino, “La svolta bianchiana del giugno 1968,” in Guido Bianchini, Ritratto di un maestro dell’operaismo, ed. Giovanni Giovannelli and Gianni Sbrogiò (DeriveApprodi, 2021).

₄ “La storia del rifiuto del lavoro, Intervista di Andrea Del Mercato,” in Socrate a Porto Marghera: Inchiesta, anticipazioni e metodo militante di Guido Bianchini, ed. Giovanni Giovannelli and Gianni Sbrogiò (DeriveApprodi, 2021).

₅ Translator’s note: The CGIL has been the most important union in Italy since 1945. Traditionally a leftist union, it was linked to the Socialist Party (PSI), the PSIUP, and even more to the PCI. The PCI, historically the most significant communist party in the Western countries, had gathered about 27% of the vote (8.5 million) in 1968. The PSIUP was a split current from the PSI that was founded in 1964.

₆ TN: After participating in the partisan movement, Rossana Rossanda (1924–2020) joined the PCI and was expelled in 1969 upon founding the newspaper il manifesto.

₇ TN: The “battle” of Valle Giulia marked a crucial moment in the Italian student protests, as students clashed violently with police forces outside the Faculty of Architecture. This confrontation at Valle Giulia is often considered the symbolic beginning of the 1968 movement in Italy, highlighting the growing tension between students struggling for educational reforms and Italian authorities. The Valdagno revolt of 1968 exposed the contradictions of the Marzotto model in the Veneto region, where the company had created a paternalistic “company town” complete with housing and social services for workers. Marzotto’s harsh management style ultimately led workers to rebel against the model as a whole. The textile workers at Marzotto were joined by students and other citizens in protesting against mass layoffs and poor working conditions in what became a violent clash with police forces. The Valdagno revolt, which culminated in the toppling of the statue of Gaetano Marzotto, the company’s founder, became a symbol of the growing labor unrest in Italy during the social and political upheaval known as the “Hot Autumn,” which marked a turning point in Italian industrial relations.

₈ TN:  Entryism refers to the strategy, adopted by some far-left groups, of joining larger, more mainstream left-wing organizations or political parties with the aim of influencing their policies from within. This tactic, which gained prominence during the “Hot Autumn,” saw radical activists entering organizations like trade unions and the PCI, seeking to push these bodies towards more revolutionary positions and to recruit members for their own groups. See Gianni Sbrogiò, “Il lungo percorso delle lotte operaie a Porto Marghera.” In Quando il potere è operaio. Autonomia e soggettività politica a Porto Marghera (1960–1980), ed. Devi Sacchetto and Gianni Sbrogiò (Manifestolibri, 2009), particularly pages 26–33.

₉ For a musical document of the moment, listen to the song “Primo d’agosto, Mestre ’68” by Gualtiero Bertelli.

₁₀ TN: The most widely known slogan associated with the Prague Spring is “Socialism with a human face,” which emerged from the reform program of Alexander Dubček, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from January 5, 1968–April 1969.

₁₁ TN: See his autobiographies: Italo Sbrogiò, La fiaba di una città industriale (El Squero, 2016) and Tuberi e pan secco: Itinerario autobiografico sociale, culturale e politico (Poligrafo, 1990). 

₁₂ TN: For brief biographical notes on Finzi in English, see Porto Marghera – The Last Firebrands.

₁₃ TN: Confindustria is the main association representing manufacturing and service companies in Italy, acting as a powerful lobbying group and playing a significant role in Italian industrial relations and economic policy.

₁₄ TN: Alberto Asor Rosa (1933–2022) was a prominent Italian literary critic, political theorist, and academic, known for his significant contributions to Italian Marxist thought and literary history in the 1960s. See Alberto Asor Rosa, The Writer and the People, trans. Matteo Mandarini (Seagull Books, 2021).

₁₅ TN: Massimo Cacciari is a renowned Italian philosopher, politician, and public intellectual, known for his work in aesthetics and political philosophy. He was involved early on with the far-left group Potere Operaio but shifted to mainstream left politics when he joined the PCI in 1969. He later became the mayor of Venice.

₁₆ TN: The Resistance (Resistenza) refers to the Italian resistance movement during World War II, encompassing various anti-fascist groups that fought against the Nazi German occupation of Italy and Mussolini’s collaborationist Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945, playing a crucial role in Italy’s liberation and post-war national identity.

₁₇ TN: The PSI was a major left-wing political party in Italy, founded in 1892, that played a significant role in Italian politics throughout the 20th century, advocating for workers’ rights and social reforms and alternating between alliances with the Communist Party and more centrist positions until its dissolution in 1994 amid corruption scandals.

₁₈ TN: The “productive compromise” refers to the tacit agreement between labor unions, employers, and the state in Italy, where workers accepted increased productivity and labor discipline in exchange for employment, temporarily masking class conflicts but ultimately proving unsustainable. The “historic compromise” was a political strategy proposed in the 1970s by PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer, which aimed to form a grand coalition with the Christian Democracy (DC) party to address Italy’s economic and social crises, marking a significant shift in the PCI’s approach towards collaboration with centrist forces and a greater distancing from Soviet influence.

₁₉ Shortly before, Bianchini recalled the pittance of the 90 lire of piece rate liquidated at the beginning of the spring of 1968 in a factory in Ferrara.

₂₀ Translator’s emphasis. The provocative hyperbole of the PCI’s “soon to be 12 million votes” Bianchini submits to the conference refers to the 12 million votes obtained by DC (against the 8.5 million votes of the PCI) in the parliamentary elections of May 19–20, 1968, about twenty days before the conference. In the subsequent elections of May 7–8, 1972, the PCI secured 9 million votes against the DC’s nearly 13 million.

₂₁ Here Gian Mario Cazzaniga refers to the contemporary movements of the shop-stewards in Great Britain, the Comisiones Obreras in Francoist and post-Francoist Spain, and the factory assemblies during the French May. It is, at any rate, doubtful that the assemblies of the French May were inspired by councilism.

₂₂ TN: Mario Tronti (1931–2023) was a prominent Italian philosopher and political theorist, widely regarded as one of the founders of Operaismo (Italian Workerism) in the 1960s, and known for his influential book Workers and Capital (Verso, 2019). Subsequently, he became a member of the PCI and its central committee. He was a candidate for the PCI in 1987 but was not elected. He later became a member of parliament, first as part of the Democratic Party of the Left (former PCI) and more recently as a candidate of the Democratic Party.

₂₃ TN: Sergio Bologna is an influential Italian historian, political theorist, and activist known for his significant contributions to Operaismo and autonomist Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s, his extensive work on the history of the labor movement and class composition, his analysis of changing labor conditions and precarity, and his ongoing role as a public intellectual and critic of contemporary capitalism. Founded in 1895, the CGT is one of the oldest and largest trade union confederations in France. Historically, it was closely aligned with the French Communist Party, though it has become more independent in recent decades.

₂₄ TN: Established in 1964, the CFDT emerged from a split in the Christian trade-union movement. It is known for its reformist approach.

₂₅ Bianchini, “La storia del rifiuto del lavoro.”

Guido Bianchini was born in 1926 in Verona and entered the partisan movement in the Treviso province in 1943. He joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) immediately after the Second World War, where he began organizing agricultural workers in the Veneto and Emilia-Romagna regions into unions. Between 1961 and 1963 he was part of the formative Quaderni Rossi group and was among the founders of the magazine Classe Operaia in 1964. In 1969, Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano, of which he had been an integral part, would merge into Potere Operaio, becoming a national organization.¹ Upon his exit from that organization in the early 1970s, he did not move seamlessly into the growing autonomist milieu but was led instead toward a reengagement with union politics. Tragically, this did not spare him from a series of arrests, trials, and prison stints following the spectacular dragnet of April 7, 1979 – a fate that befell, in various ways, many of his colleagues at the “red” Institute of Political Science at the University of Padova. 

The setting of Ferruccio Gambino’s reflections on Guido Bianchini is the National Student and Worker Conference held in Venice during June of 1968. Gambino’s notes on the conference provide a window into the sequence of political upheaval often referred to as the country’s “creeping May” [Maggio strisciante]. Occurring before many of the official and unofficial left-wing tendencies in Italy would take shape and mature organizationally, the conference played an important role in cohering the extraparliamentary itinerary around a diverging set of political objectives. Militants were at odds over the question of how best to relate to the explosion of working-class and student action unfolding in Italy. Stark differences in outlook and approach were already on display among them, chiefly between those who sought to re-found a new vanguard party, those who wished to influence the “mainstream” of left-wing political institutions, and those of Potere Operaio’s initiators, who looked instead to the low politics of workers’ frustrated everyday aspirations.

Despite the presence of Toni Negri, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, and Paolo Pompei at the 1968 conference, Bianchini was selected to speak on behalf of Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano. It seems clear that the choice was made not simply to introduce the group’s “line” but to present a whole manner of inquiry and political oration honed in the region’s overlapping and conflictual agricultural and industrial spaces. In his capacity as a pharmaceutical salesman and “workerist tactician,” Bianchini had embedded himself in an area where workers had long been active in contesting the mechanisms of exploitation at the heart of Italy’s so-called “economic miracle” and had spearheaded an early orientation to environmental concerns arising in the interaction between the petrochemical process and agriculture.² At the conference, Bianchini took up the recently launched demand for 120,000 lire a month guaranteed minimum wage for all (about USD 192 in 1968), irrespective of job classification, region, or sector. First formulated by the veneto-emiliano group at Marghera, Bianchini claimed it for the conference, delivering a searing political statement grounded in the urgencies of working-class life, where long hours and insufficient funds were the norm. The wage demand was initially received with raised eyebrows among onlookers and conference attendees, but it would soon land, attaining a mass character, across the regions of northern and central Italy. 

Ferruccio Gambino’s essay, published in a 2021 collection by signal Italian publisher, DeriveApprodi, and translated here, contains a moving tribute to his mentor, comrade, and friend.³ It also serves, in its own way, as a plea for militants to record the critical moments of their own development. It prompts readers to ask, among other things, whether they, too, have taken an ideological wrong turn away from concrete and practical inquiry in debates where issues of fundamental political significance are at stake. These are hard-learned lessons for many involved in class struggle, but, for Bianchini, humility came with an idiosyncratic style and strategic function. His example suggests a method for navigating the key relation between student and worker movements, which we can still learn from today: an openness without guarantees. “To understand the working class, in those years, it was necessary to not be an institution; we accepted walking on the leading wave of not being an institution, of being inside the phenomenology, to describe it, interpret it, to spread it; we didn’t recite the Marxist breviary on Sunday,” Bianchini stated in a 1992 interview.⁴ What he achieved came not through a recursive championing of the strength of one’s own position, but in the testing and retesting of one’s methods in new domains and modifying them in light of new social subjects and realities. 

On June 8, 1968, the two-day meeting in Venice began with the arrival of roughly one hundred activists from several Italian cities. Called by the enlarged general assembly of the architecture faculty, the event fell during a pivotal moment in the debate that was sweeping the Italian left following that May’s events in France and the growing social unrest from Warsaw and Berlin to Chicago and Mexico City. Known and lesser-known figures from emergent extraparliamentary political groups had arrived in Venice, as well as representatives of the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) and the parties of the parliamentary left, namely the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP).⁵ The crowd was predominantly male, and although many women were present, with the sole exception of Rossana Rossanda, they did not deliver speeches.⁶ 

The conference, unlike others of its kind on the left from that period, has remained overshadowed by the important events that occurred in rapid succession in 1967, and even more so in 1968: from the university occupations, including the State University of Milan, Pisa, Trento, Architecture and Ca’ Foscari in Venice, to the clash between Roman students and police in Valle Giulia (March 1, 1968), the workers’ uprising at Marzotto in Valdagno (19 April, 1968), and the rumbling of the French May.⁷ The reestablishment of the Gaullist order in France, the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the worsening international situation filled the front pages of newspapers beginning in late May 1968.

The Venetian conference fell between the French May’s conclusion and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It unnerved, among others, the conservative press, which feared an Italian version of the events in France. While not nearly as dramatic, the situation in Italy at that time was definitely tense. The tacit agreement made by the government and the unions in the early 1950s had already strained under pressure from a strike of Milanese electricians (1960) and even more with the workers’ revolt in Piazza Statuto in Turin (1962). The agreement anticipated a commitment by the government and industry to increase employment in exchange for union moderation on wages. By the early months of 1968, the situation in Italy was in crisis awaiting the renewal of collective bargaining agreements in 1969–70. By the end of the 1960s, internal and international emigration had declined and domestic employment had grown considerably, but the industrial system, now capable of strong gains in productivity, continued to resist wage adjustments. In short, for many years the gap between productivity and wages had generated a tension that was escalating in various industrial centers.

Debate over this gap was not central to the agenda at the Venetian conference. Discussed first was the desired political realignment that would allow the left-wing parties to retake the initiative in Italy. The presence of extraparliamentary groups and members of parliamentary parties inevitably led the conference to debate the choice between the so-called “entryism” of extraparliamentarians into a PCI in need of renewal and, conversely, an extraparliamentary path of struggles for a radically new organization of the left in Italy.⁸ Apparently, the Venetian conference did not loosen the knot, and little about the conference was discussed thereafter. At that time, the movement’s attention was absorbed by the strikes taking place in various manufacturing centers and, in particular, at the Marghera Petrochemical Plant, where a few months earlier Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano had raised the slogan of an equal monthly increase of 5,000 lire for all. This demand was backed by union and extra-union strikes, which subsequently culminated in the occupation of the road and railway junctions by striking workers in Mestre (August 1, 1968).⁹ The 5,000 lire demand proved victorious, even though the increase was staggered over three stages. In the meantime, other factories marked by low wages in the Venetian industrial area began to stir.

During the summer, however, the situation internationally took a hard conservative, if not reactionary, turn. Most of the Italian left had not foreseen this development. While the French government sought to clear all traces of May, Warsaw Pact tanks entering Prague put an end to the brief Czechoslovakian experiment of the “New Course” (January 5–August 21, 1968).¹⁰ In the West, ruling groups used a heavy hand during the demonstrations. In the United States, selective repression in the ghettos proceeded in parallel with the intensification of the war in Vietnam and anti-guerrilla special operations in Latin America. The North Atlantic powers resisted the process of decolonization in Southern Africa, confirming their support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.

At first glance, the Venetian conference looks like a minor episode compared to the events that followed in that period. From the perspective of today’s institutional history, the conference can be brushed aside in a few words: a rally with many voices that produced no concrete results. But is that really the case? Or is it necessary to draw up a balance sheet, beginning by tracing the outline it gives for the conflicts of the following months and years?

In that conference, what emerged clearly from the debate was, on the one hand, the path of entryism in the PCI and the program of Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano. While those who supported an entryist position in the PCI sought to mediate between workers’ interests and those of capital, on August 1, 1968, Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano led the strike and the blockade of the Mestre transport infrastructure, achieving a tangible result in workers’ paychecks. The entryists suffered a second setback with the PCI’s failure to break with Moscow after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had negative repercussions for the very consistency of the PCI itself. Indeed, the waters were troubled in the Italian left-wing parties. In the summer of 1968, a group of communist intellectuals with important positions in the Party moved away from the official line: they initiated a dialogue with the youthful extraparliamentary left and distanced themselves from the PCI’s connection with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, responsible for the Warsaw Pact tanks in Prague. The following year that group founded the magazine il manifesto (June, 1969) and left the PCI (November, 1969). While new extraparliamentary groups emerged, for its part Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano consolidated, gained members in other Italian industrial centers, and became active in schools after the success of the August 1968 strikes.

The Venice conference, therefore, lays the foundations for future long-term tendencies by responding, in various ways, to the pressures and uncertainties of the present. It is significant that many of the participants from the extraparliamentary left encountered each other for the first time at the conference, an occasion that revealed how much these groups were still in a nascent state. Informal contacts began on the morning of June 8, and in the early afternoon the conference opened with the intervention of a group of Marxist-Leninists who, invoking Mao Zedong, intended to launch a new communist party. But interest in the discussion grew when speakers from both the PCI and Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano took the floor.

Proceeding on the basis of my notes, and undoubtedly simplifying, we can say that three orientations soon emerged. They follow, in order of presentation: (1) the line of reconstituting the PCI (now conceived as a renegade party) through the teachings of Mao Zedong; (2) the entryist line that aimed to bring the wave of students into the fold of a renewed PCI; and (3) the workerist line that wanted to change social relations in Italy, starting from the petrified balance of forces between industrial workers and bosses. While the Maoist line of reconstituting the PCI quickly lost the attention of those assembled, it became clear that the collision course between the entryists and the workerists was severe and irreversible. Both groups agreed that the 1969–70 contract expiry would need to redeem the defeat shouldered by the workers in the previous contract renewal in 1966–67. On everything else, the attitudes of the two groups diverged.

The entryists, with a view toward building a left-wing majority that would increasingly influence the center of the parliamentary system, considered the student ferment in their camp as one wing, potentially marching, albeit chaotically, towards the wider political renewal of the PCI. In contrast, the workerists observed that it was necessary to act immediately, seriously considering the expectations of those who work and study, without being intimidated by the opposition of the industrial bloc and the government in the face of demands and calls for change. Furthermore, for the workerists, the trade union and official left were seriously compromised by centrism, as can be seen in the negligible increases and improvements in the three-year contracts signed in 1966–67.

The compromise is even more evident if one looks at the commitment of the unions in 1966–67: “for the entire duration of the contract, to refrain from, and to intervene so as to avoid, actions and claims aimed at modifying, supplementing, and innovating what has been agreed upon at various levels.” This is the “cage” that workers from all sides denounced during the conference, even when pacts between unions and industrialists take the form of the so-called “framework agreement.” Italo Sbrogiò, a leader of petrochemical workers (who left the PCI in 1967 and who was subsequently expelled from the CGIL in 1969 for being a member of Potere Operaio), insisted on this theme, expressing doubts about a possible renewal of the PCI.¹¹ The theme was echoed by Augusto Finzi, one of the young members of Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano, who defined framework agreements as a “forced peace” and a concession of “completely useless” rights.¹² Strikes at contractual deadlines represent bills to be paid by future wages, with an implicit invitation from the General Confederation of Italian Industry (Confindustria) “to pay for your strike hours on credit.”¹³ The attack Finzi unleashed on the union also implicated the PCI, “a party that sells the union.” The clash became glaring, and the tension in the room escalated. Antonio Manotti, a worker at Châtillon and a PCI militant, tried to bring the discussion back to the core elements of the contract: hours, qualifications, production bonus, piecework, and income. However, in closing, he appeared to be in accord with Finzi, stating that too often the union seeks to negotiate over what the employers have already decided to “give away,” since both are engaged in long-term planning.

At the podium, criticisms follow one after the other, both of planning policies (then officially called “economic planning”) and the government’s lack of interest in schools, in harmful workplaces, and in child labor. Then Alberto Asor Rosa intervenes, proposing a process of organization of the student movement and an opening in the parliamentary left to support the coming workers’ struggles.¹⁴ According to Asor Rosa, the student movement is much more widespread in capitalist society than the working class itself and can therefore break out of the ghetto, the cordon sanitaire, established by all other social forces, including the existing party institutions. While proposing an alliance with the parliamentary left, Asor Rosa demonstrates his far-sightedness concerning “existing party institutions,” clearly including those on the left as well.

This is followed by a speech by Massimo Cacciari, who believes that the conference has largely gotten “off topic,” that the existing groups are being superseded, and that with the French May now behind us, it is necessary to think in terms of large numbers. Above all, it is no longer possible to content ourselves with factories, an observation with which many in the room, regardless of which side they are on, agreed.¹⁵

Taking the floor after Cacciari, Guido Bianchini states that he, in fact, wants to run the risk of “going off topic,” observing that “it may happen that the workers outside the factory gate cannot actually find the student movement, because it is not there.” Bianchini intends here to indicate the thinness of student movements outside the large university centers, but perceiving a strong potential for mobilization still latent in secondary and university students in the provincial cities, he does not wish to dramatize the point. On the other hand, the student movement alone cannot make up the work of an absent party, and “once again the party is the problem.” Thus, “the workers fight in the ghettos, they struggle divided. Sometimes their division causes them to even fight against each other, instead of united against the boss.” While in the past we said that “the workers fight and the bureaucrats negotiate.” Now, “the bureaucrats negotiate openly to avoid the fight.” His live “testimony” (as Bianchini calls it, avoiding the more intrusive term “intervention”) on the subject of the working class in Emilia and also in Veneto is striking: it is the fruit of long and patient work that began after the Resistance in the lowest circles of the trade union movement, that of the farm workers between the Brenta and Po rivers.¹⁶ What matters are the connections he maintained with his most trusted party comrades even after his exit from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), particularly with those who knew the local situations and working conditions like the backs of their hands.¹⁷ This included a weaving of activity made up of subtle approaches in Emilia and Veneto, of reading the drab business sections of newspapers, of gathering documentation, down to the patient teaching that Bianchini imparts to young people in helping them decipher their pay stubs. The contacts he carefully made to avoid isolation in the factory, layoffs, and social ostracism, counted for a lot.

Only after having laid the groundwork in this way can we move on to the distribution of leaflets by Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano (printed with Bianchini’s home address) in front of the factory gates. At first many workers had difficulty accepting the leaflets. But then the workers start to take the leaflets and slip them into some crates of goods leaving the factory. In this way, they signal their agreement with what’s written in the leaflets to the workers who will go on to open those crates of goods. This occurs, for example, at the Berco plant in Copparo (Ferrara), as Guido and his lifelong companion and wife, Licia De Marco, will find out. He calls his interviewing, observing, discussing, and organizing “promoting” – it refers not to agitating and propagandizing towards strangers, but instead to a collective capacity to reflect and examine the actual relationships between classes. Bianchini engaged in this activity of “promoting” in areas where the “productive compromise” had masked inequalities, anticipating locally the national policy of the “historic compromise” by the PCI.¹⁸

The wage disparity between large factories and their subsidiaries, camouflaged as independent small factories; the “territorial dissemination” (which Bianchini will call the “diffused factory” and which will later be celebrated in the formula of the “industrial district”); the lack of coordination between factories; and, even more seriously, between factories of the same production cycle, can be beaten: “The workers’ determination to fight for 40 hours while being paid for 48, the guaranteed minimum income, we say 120,000 lire . . . What is the relationship between the workers’ determination to reach the 120,000 guaranteed base wage and the union’s bargaining over piecework?”¹⁹ At stake is political autonomy from the union: horizontal unification of workers, necessary for the “vertical unification of workers, that is, of the relationship between the working class and society.” And finally, his last words seal his testimony: “the struggles of 1969–70, therefore, are a test of appeal; the PCI not seizing the opportunity means being liquidated as a class party, even with its soon-to-be 12 million votes.”²⁰ 

I remember that, after Bianchini’s speech, a good half of those present appeared dismayed. Their dismay is also the legacy of 25 years of wage moderation. Then, during the occupation of the Mestre railway at the beginning of that August, some indignant worker will display his pay slip of 68,000 lire to police ready to charge. The average worker’s wage in industrialized Lombardy was approximately 85,000 lire in 1967. Thus, there is a 35,000 lire gap to cross before reaching 120,000, even in the wealthiest area in Italy. Yet, even if the goal seems far off, those who struggle to make it to the end of the month while working 48 hours a week now demand more money and fewer hours. That goal will be narrowly missed in 1970.

In reality, until Bianchini’s speech, the conference had lacked an explicit statement on the chasm between the membership base and the trade union apparatus around the issue of wages and working hours, a chasm that would soon widen in the strikes of spring 1969, that is, sufficiently in advance of the so-called Hot Autumn. Bianchini built a bridge towards the student movement as well. While the task at hand becomes more demanding, for many young people it is also a source of irresistible attraction. It will not be enough for a few high schools or academic departments in big cities to move. We need a widespread mobilization of students and young people in general, one that addresses the country’s real social conditions, starting from the factory and the school. This is what will occur in large parts of Italy in the following months and years.

Taking the floor after Bianchini, Gian Mario Cazzaniga, representative of the Potere Operaio Toscano group, calls for breaking free from the old structures through struggles, arguing that the experience of the factory councils provides an important legacy for grassroots organization.²¹ Towards the end of his speech Cazzaniga cautioned against “reformist maximalism,” that is, the temptation to obtain more money and reduced working hours without taking into account real relations in the factory and in society. Reformist maximalism lies in the demands for 40 hours of work for 48 hours’ pay and an overall salary of 120,000 lire per month – two slogans that Cazzaniga deems potentially reactionary.

Several subsequent interventions wrestle, to varying degrees, with Bianchini’s testimony. Mario Tronti believes there is a strong affinity between the French May and the Czechoslovakian “New Course” (which will be repressed within two months) due to the antiquatedness and inadequacy of the instruments of power in both countries.²² The workers’ movement does not need students to fight, but a student and youth movement can develop effectively in parallel to the workers’ struggle. On the contract expiry of 1969–70, Tronti sees a mass struggle against the framework agreement as viable, but “clearly not in order to make excessive demands of power.” In her speech, Rossana Rossanda rejects the hypotheses both of the student movement as a social fuse and of the subordination of the movement to the construction of the revolutionary party, instead opting for a movement that reveals a poorly integrated, loose-knit society and that expresses forms of participation capable of opposing restricted entry into the universities and student ghettos. It is necessary to bring the right to education and the generalized wage, issues that are bound to deepen and intensify social conflict, back into the debate.

Sergio Bologna brings to the conference the contribution of his direct experience inside the French May and insists on the new forces of young, unskilled workers, the real protagonists of the factory occupations in France, who bypassed the leadership in the same left-wing union, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT).²³ Their “quantitative” demand of a thousand francs per month was rejected by the official left, which was joined by far-left groups and the other two unions, the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT) and the Force Ouvrière, all champions of the so-called new representatives.²⁴ They are the ones who attack the demands of unskilled youth for strong wage increases as right-wing slogans. Young, unskilled workers are the main ones excluded from the negotiations between the Pompidou government and the unions (Grenelle Agreement, May 27, 1968) but they will still be able to generate conflict, starting from the fight over productivity “in every sense,” as Sergio Bologna reiterates. The consonance of Sergio Bologna’s position with Guido Bianchini’s is clear to all those present.

In a retrospective interview in 1992, Guido Bianchini reaffirmed the slogans that Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano had launched in 1968: “Equal pay for all was successful as a slogan! In the 1970–75 period the unions were overwhelmed; they later called it a wage binge. In reality, wages grew so much they became European.”²⁵