"We will be everything". With this challenging slogan, the third edition
of the working class literature festival opened from 4 to 6 April, inthe parking lot of the former GKN factory in Campi Bisenzio, near
Florence. After two years in which for one reason or another I was
unable to go, I finally took part in what is a unique festival of its
kind in Italy and perhaps even internationally. Unique because it brings
together a publishing house, Edizioni Alegre, and a group of workers,
the GKN collective: worlds that tend to look at each other from a
distance, often with a poorly concealed sense of pedantry on the part of
both. And that instead have at least the starting economic condition in
common, with the workers who, thanks to the struggles of the past
decades, still enjoy a series of guarantees that those who work in the
cultural sector can only dream of. Upon arrival, the class pride that
can be felt is impressive. I don't know how else to say it, in these
three years the constant work of the festival has managed to provide
first an interpretative map of the world, thanks also to the support of
the magazine Jacobin (a sign that the primary task of magazines remains
that), and then, indeed, the story of the condition of exploitation that
unites so many. Now the next step, at least for me, is to get out of the
cage of self-narration and contaminate genres and themes. The intuition
in this sense of Alberto Prunetti, the artistic director of the
festival, was to borrow the Anglo-Saxon definition of working class, the
working class, and not to translate it exclusively or to make it
coincide, as had been done until now in Italy, with the working class.
Not because workers no longer exist - that is a cliché good only for
liberals and the bourgeoisie - but because work has become "workerized",
in the sense that beyond the plasticized narratives that are made about
certain sectors (tourism, culture, social issues) there remain
starvation wages, the erosion of primary rights, the encroachment of
work into everyday life. On these bases, therefore, a fundamental
reconstruction of the identity of the imagination has been triggered,
because to fight together we must first of all know each other. There is
an episode that occurred within the festival that seemed particularly
emblematic to me in this sense. At least two thousand people followed,
immersed in an incredible silence, the reading of the Taranto actor and
director Michele Riondino of the book Malesangue, written by the Ilva
worker Raffaele Cataldi. Riondino in turn is the son of an Ilva worker
and rightly, like many (including myself), has chosen not to follow his
father's path. But he has come to terms with that history. Italy is full
of children of workers who later became bourgeois or who in any case
forgot those roots, convinced that progress meant abandoning the
villages because the best is in the metropolis, ashamed of having
studied at the industrial or professional school and not having attended
high school, chasing the ephemeral wealth of well-being never had during
childhood and adolescence. Instead, it is from awareness that the
struggle begins. The working class literature festival unites all this
by linking literary issues to union disputes. In this edition, for
example, each literary meeting was followed by the testimony of a
struggle, in a definitive moment in an evocative way "the elephant in
the room": from the Cobas of Prato who unionize Bangladeshi and Chinese
workers to Redacta, the association that tells the bitter life of those
who work in publishing; from the feminist struggle of Nonunadimeno to
the environmentalist one of the Stati generali del clima. A convergence,
to use the word most used in the festival, which takes place in an
emblematic place, because places are also important: in a peripheral
industrial area, surrounded by non-places such as a shopping center and
an airport, inside a factory that until a few years ago produced axle
shafts for the automotive industry and since July 9, 2021 - the day in
which 422 employees of GKN in Campo Bisenzio were fired via an email -
is empty. But alive, crossed first by a permanent occupation and then,
precisely, by the festival that tries to build an alternative from here,
a socially integrated factory, as it is defined. And which stands
without sponsors but only thanks to the small and numerous subscriptions
of the crowdfunding. More than 500 supporters this year, and in an era
in which it is difficult to collect subscriptions for any event, this is
a fact to take into account. Indeed, speaking of demonstrations, on
Saturday afternoon a march with over 5,000 people took place, from the
former factory to the center of Campi Bisenzio along the Tuscan
countryside, which saw the workers of the GKn collective as
protagonists, in permanent protest for almost 1,400 days: continuously
fighting, never defeated even if the day before the start of the
festival they received the letters of the third collective dismissal
procedure, after the previous two (in 2021 and 2023) had been annulled
by the court for anti-union conduct, even if they have been without a
salary and without redundancy payments for 15 months. "Even if we lose,
no one gives up" said at a certain point Alberto Prunetti, who was the
son of a worker killed by asbestos, then a waiter in England, now writes
for Feltrinelli. English: "For too many years they have defeated us in
the imagination, they have colonized the language. It is no longer a
question of involving people only by handing out flyers or organizing
demonstrations, but of infecting the world with our words. To use a
well-known quote: with the words of the master you will never be able to
dismantle the master's house. The truth is that we are surrounded by
misery, and when we tell stories of escape they are never those of the
masters, who run away like rabbits. Instead of producing, the masters
spend money to close". In short, as you can understand, the festival has
a clear Marxist imprint and would be very useful for an anarchist
integration or, at least, greater contamination. The fact remains that
in those three days the books were practically sold like hotcakes,
almost three thousand texts sold. In my opinion, one of the central
elements of the festival is ultimately the return of the desire to make
workers and laborers talk, starting from work and therefore from
exploitation which unfortunately, I say this as an anti-worker, is the
central pivot that binds all generations. Particularly noteworthy,
finally, is the ability of the working class festival to bring the
conflict between books, no longer just to narrate it but to live it.
"The Italian book supply chain is full of exploitation, and also of
class conflict as recently seen with the strike of the Feltrinelli
booksellers" wrote Giulio Calella, one of the founders of Edizioni
Alegre. A concept also reiterated in the final press release of the
festival, where we read that "the construction of an imaginary working
class is fundamental for the struggle of the subaltern classes and to
build an alternative to the warmongering and anti-ecological drift of
the economy". Or, to put it another way, because self-narration is the
first step towards self-determination.
ANDREA TURCO
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten