Deindustrialization as People’s History

Some fifteen years ago, just after I finished my PhD and was looking for a job, I was commissioned to conduct interviews with former workers in Porto Marghera, the large industrial area overlooking the Venice lagoon. The research project had been initiated by Cesco Chinello, a former Communist Party leader who, in the 1960s, had turned to the “new left” and had undertaken important historical research on the Venetian labour movement.  By then, the big factories had almost all been closed.

The new project treated the area as a site of “industrial archaeology.” For him, it was urgent to save the memories of the grassroots militants who, in the “glorious” 1970s, had taken part in a formidable cycle of conflicts over the control of working conditions. It was the last generation to have participated in the factory councils and the struggles for occupational health and social reforms, that were at the very centre of Italian Labour History.

It was also, however, the generation that experienced the ruination of deindustrialization. But there were no questions about this in my interview guide. Those who conceptualized the project and developed its framing did not centre deindustrialization even though it led to the political defeat of labour by capital. It was part of a global history of class war “from above,” which had annihilated and silenced workers’ subjectivities.

Oral historians of labour struggles had taught me a trick for interviews: always ask about the first day of work, because that memory capsule often reveals the deep connections between the individual self and the collective sense of belonging. But all my interviewees wanted to talk about was the last day. No one had left their jobs in a “normal” way: they had suddenly become early retirees; or they had become ill from asbestos or chlorine. Perhaps they had been moved to other companies or contracting firms because of restructuring; or they had ended their careers working in demolition and remediation. Nobody left their jobs to a son, as their many of their fathers had done for them. The cross-generational connection was broken. I vividly remember one man crying, and repeatedly telling me that the closing of his factory had been “the worst experience a man can have.” From those interviews, we made a video documentary that today seems completely senseless to me, because it added nothing new to the mainstream narrative of working-class struggles in the 1970s. I would not approach it the same way today.

Shortly after, I started teaching Labour History at the University of Venice, as a precarious lecturer, some colleagues and I thought we could build on the relationships forged by the trade unions to conduct interviews. We even considered ringing some of those workers into our classrooms.  I wanted to talk about the history of Porto Marghera, especially the explosion of resistance against the violence of industrialization. Again, they pushed me out of the way. They wanted us to discuss how the industrial world had ended, not begun, and what they had done to stop it from happening. The resulting dialogue with the students was uneasy. For many young people it seemed like a good thing that these huge polluting and dangerous factories had disappeared.

It was these elderly former workers – who were a little angry and a little nostalgic – that set me on the trail of a “history from below” of deindustrialization that had already begun to be written in other parts of the world. In an essay by Tim Strangleman, I read that “smokestack nostalgia” was also a psychological mechanism in which “knowledge of the past makes a dialectic intervention in debates about the present,” and I encountered the name of Raphael Samuel. I discovered the history of the History Workshop movement in Great Britain and Samuel’s efforts to expand the boundaries of history with the subalterns. In Italy we never had a Ruskin College or a WEA, and only for a brief period did the voice of workers hold the attention of middle-class academics.

The workers who shared their stories in our university classrooms, spaces they never before had access to, were eager not only to talk, but also to research and write. They not only had memories to share, but also documents that they had not left to the unions’ archives because the closures had caused friction and political clashes within their organizations. Some union leaders had simply accepted the inevitability of the relocation of heavy industries. Rank and file trade unionists began to produce popular books on this history, but academic historians largely ignored them. Yet these books were often fascinating. For example, they introduced me to a strange text from 1994, signed by “168 workers.” It was a kind of novel of the struggle against the closure of what was the last tiny aluminum producer, a sector that once employed thousands of workers in Porto Marghera.

Those early courses were my History Workshops in miniature, in which we somewhat clumsily and unintentionally experimented with a form of People’s History by “democratising the act of historical production, broadening the constituency of historical writers, and bringing the experience of the present to bear on the interpretation of the past”, as Samuel wrote in a seminal essay.

Our “history from below,” however, spoke of class solidarity broken by the bargaining over redundancies, of popular cohesion undermined by clashes with environmental groups, of a morality condemned as selfishness, of a sense of personal loss and frustration, but at the same time was questioning what was happening “above” them with left-wing parties, democratic institutions, company policies, and the meaning of work in society.

Together, we began to ask ourselves about the forms and reasons for that transformation, whether it was inevitable, whether it had happened in other places in the world, whether it had been a “just transition”, what legacy it had left. And whether it had any connections with the precariousness of work in the present day, and with the resounding shift to the right of the working class. The rise of right-wing populism had already, in 1985, forced the «History Workshop Journal» into a challenging rethink. Because of deindustrialization – wrote Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones – “the existence of a labour movement, as one of the geological certainties of the landscape, can no longer be taken for granted”. Continuing, he wrote: “At the same time, the success of the right, in Britain as in other capitalist countries, in mobilising popular sentiment, calls into question one of the unarticulated premises of the ‘people’s history’”. The premise was that “popular politics was implicitly radical and democratic”.

Since then, many deindustrialized workers from Porto Marghera have sought me out, bringing folders of documents, autobiographies and photographs. Books, seminars, public walks, dissertations, lunches and friendships have grown out of these meetings. Many projects have not (yet?) come to life, and cooperation with the unions, which are increasingly weak and threatened, has loosened. But my interests in Labour History have completely changed. It is thanks to them that I am in DePOT and I am immensely grateful for that.

Tim Strangleman, “Smokestack Nostalgia”, “Ruin Porn” or Working-Class Obituary. The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation, «International Labor and Working Class History», n. 84 (2013), pp. 23-37

Raphael Samuel (ed. by), People’s history and socialist theory, London : Routledge & Kegan, 1981

Raphael Samuel, Gareth Stedman Jones, Editorial. Ten years after, «History Workshop Journal», vol. 20, issue 1, Autumn 1985, pp. 1-4