Fighting at the point of consumption

From ‘Open Road’, Issue 2, Spring 1977, Vancouver, BC

Italy’s “self-reduction” movement is a novel and effective way for ordinary people victimized by inflation to fight back at the point of consumption.

According to a recent article in Radical America, Italians have been organizing in factories, neighbourhoods, and housing projects for the specific purpose of refusing to pay price increases in essential services like transportation, electricity, and rent.

In Pinerolo, a small city outside the northern industrial center of Turin, Italian workers head for the bus on a Monday morning only to find that fares have been raised 30 per cent. Like workers anywhere, they complain as they buy their tickets and ride to their jobs in Turin, worried about what the raise will do to already tight budgets,

But unlike workers in most other places, the Pinerolo workers decide to organize resistance. The next Monday some of them have set up a table outside the bus terminal under signs saying, “Refuse the Fare Increase.” They’ve printed their own tickets, which they sell at the old price, and demand the bus company accept them. The company refuses. The workers do not go to work.

After several days, workers in nearby areas organize similar actions until the regional government is forced to suspend the increases and issue lower price guidelines.

This is just one example of the “self-reduction” movement in action. In Italy, as elsewhere, workers’ fights for higher wages have often been negated by higher prices in the market place and in essential services. The “self-reduction” movement is a way to organize against this robbery outside the workplace. Moreover, there are large segments of the population who do not have a “workplace” but are oppressed by the inflated prices. Just the same, a prime example are housewives, and it is these women who are often the backbone of the “self-reduction” movement, sometimes engaging in political activity for the first time.

Some of the oldest self-reduction fights involve tenants organizing to refuse rent increases. In Magliana, a working-class district of Rome, two thousand families cut their rent payments in half for over two years on their own initiative.

Electricity Rates

But the most significant, and potentially far-reaching, self-reduction struggle has occurred over electricity rates. In an effort to resist rapid increases, workers developed Italian new forms of local organization, created links between neighborhood and factory committees, and presented considerable problems for the bureaucratic unions and Communist Party.

In Italy, electricity is provided by ENEL, a state-run corporation mired in perpetual scandal. When ENEL raised household consumption rates several years ago, workers in Turin and Milan became aroused. Their local factory councils agreed to endorse a protest, an important step since it meant the local factory council and union apparatus would be available to help organize the effort. “In most cases,” Bruno Ramirez writes in Radical America, “the mobilization involved setting up ‘self-reduction committees’ whose task was to collect workers’ electricity bills and issue substitute bills, often bearing the stamp of the unions. Workers would then enter the new amount, usually cut by 50 per cent and pay the bill.”

The movement spread throughout the country. Tens of thousands of bills were “self-reduced” in every city. ENEL workers aided the fight when many refused to obey orders to disconnect service. Further solidarity was created by the alliance of neighborhood committees, who were mobilizing their areas and resisting bill collectors.

The local initiative and spontaneous nature of the movement soon brought a familiar response. According to Ramirez, “the CP leadership did not take long to condemn this practice, calling it ‘divisive’ and a ‘provocation’.” Under CP direction, the trade unions gradually entered into negotiations with the government. Their official maneuvers steadily superceded the activity of the factory councils and neighborhood committees.

In spite of this turn around, the “self-reduction” movement promises to turn up again.