Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920, trans. A. M. Elliott, London: Pluto Press, 1975.
The Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920 is a classic historical study that examines in detail the factory occupations of September 1920, one of the high points of Italy’s Biennio Rosso (1919–1920). Paolo Spriano traces how a struggle by metalworkers over wages and working conditions developed, in response to employers’ attempts at lockouts, into the mass occupation of factories; how the occupations spread from Turin and Milan to numerous industrial centres across the country; and how they grew into a major social movement involving hundreds of thousands of workers.
The most important aspect of the study for the history of workers’ control is that it examines the factory occupations not simply as a form of protest in which production was halted, but as an experience in which workers began to continue production under their own control. In the occupied factories, workers assumed tasks such as guarding entrances, organizing materials and supplies, establishing workers’ commissions, and maintaining production. In the FIAT factories in Turin in particular, factory councils and internal commissions played a central role in organizing production, turning the occupation into a process in which workers’ capacity to manage the factory in practice was put to the test.
Spriano examines this experience together with the postwar factory council movement and the debates on workers’ power associated with Antonio Gramsci and L’Ordine Nuovo. One of the book’s central concerns is how factory councils differed from traditional trade union organization, the attitudes of trade union organizations such as FIOM and CGL towards the council movement, and the tension between workers’ direct organization in the workplace and the authority of trade union structures. The occupations of 1920 thus emerge not only as a conflict between employers and workers, but also as a struggle within the labour movement between different forms of trade union representation, direct workers’ control, and workers’ management.
The book also examines the limits of the de facto workers’ management that emerged in the occupied factories. Although workers were able to maintain production, problems involving raw materials, finance, transportation, distribution, and economic coordination between factories demonstrated that workers’ management established in individual enterprises could not be independent of the broader economic and political structure. From the perspective of Gramsci and the L’Ordine Nuovo circle, the management of factories by workers could therefore become sustainable only if the movement extended beyond the factories and became connected to a broader political and social transformation.
Another major axis of Spriano’s analysis is the “non-intervention” policy of Giovanni Giolitti’s government and the way the occupations came to an end. Concluding that the military evacuation of hundreds of occupied factories could provoke a large-scale confrontation, the government refrained from direct intervention and left the resolution of the conflict to negotiations between the trade unions and employers. As the factory occupations came to an end, certain forms of workers’ control were proposed for institutionalization; an important distinction thus emerged between the de facto workers’ management produced by the movement and a more limited and negotiated form of “workers’ control.”
The Occupation of the Factories is therefore a fundamental source for understanding the relationships between factory occupation, factory councils, workers’ control, and workers’ self-management through a concrete historical experience. Spriano treats the movement of 1920 neither as the beginning of an inevitable revolution nor simply as a failed trade union struggle; by examining together the political and organizational divisions within the labour movement, the strategy of the state, and the position of the employers, he asks whether the period truly constituted a “missed revolutionary opportunity.” The book’s extensive appendices, which include documents from the state, trade unions, and employers, also make it an important reference work for studying both the history of the Italian factory occupations of 1920 and the possibilities and limits of workers’ attempts to establish direct control over production.