Yesterday was a sad day in an increasingly sad Turin not because of the rain which, given the times and the pollution, is a blessing but because of the air that was blowing and is blowing in the city. The traditional May 1st demonstration organized by the unions was more like a funeral procession to accompany the deceased worker on his last journey than the great deserved celebration of past years. The strong working aristocracy that was the soul of Turin’s industrial culture no longer exists, there are almost no workers anymore. The trade union leaders of the major trade union confederations also stayed away from Turin. The procession, colored only by the umbrellas, largely made up of pensioners and employees mostly of public bodies (the municipality of Turin has become the largest employer in Turin with its 13,000 employees), seemed like a demonstration of veterans, with the mayor and the standard banners of the municipality and other institutions.
At the back of the procession the so-called antagonists, “social” centers, anarchists, etc. Where the rhetoric has served to cover the havoc of the last few years of the car industry and its related industries and the culprits of this deindustrialization havoc. The old Fiat Transversal Party (PTF), consolidated in recent times in the “Turin System”, hovered over the procession up to the traditional stage in Piazza S. Carlo. It is worth remembering how the rigorously inter-party PTF, massively present in the Turin city council, in Parliament, in the institutions and supported by the newspapers of the Agnelli-Elkann family, was in fact the prop of the Elkann strategy of selling Fiat-Fca to the French Peugeot, with the consequent desertification of the automotive industry in Turin. A prop that became very evident when Fiat-FCA moved its registered office to Holland, depriving Turin, Piedmont and Italy of an important taxable amount corresponding to a few points of GDP. For what was only the beginning of the end of the car industry in Italy, there were no strikes or mobilizations and/or concrete positions taken in the Turin city council, where the hangover from the Olympics and the “gratitude” for the Lawyer, who had favored them, silenced the few cassandras who predicted what would happen next.
Mirafiori is almost entirely at a standstill, the Maserati plant in Grugliasco is dismantled, the other factories are left gasping, the workers remain on layoffs and almost all of them are encouraged, with one hundred thousand euros in severance pay, to leave. With Stellantis blackmailing the government: no incentives, no production. The acquiescence to the plan of the bosses of the auto industry was not without consequences for the Turin ruling class. The strengthening of new powers in the city and in the region have given rise to a complex mechanism for political and economic management and domination. The so-called Turin System which allows professors of the Polytechnic to become mayors, mayors to become bankers, politicians or their protégés to be appointed members of Piedmontese banking foundations, appointments in institutions, on the boards of directors of subsidiaries, in museums, even in the most small and insignificant associations. This power complex, whose existence was even denied in the past, on the occasion of the new appointments, which he appreciated, at the S. Paolo Foundation, was even recently exalted by the mayor of Turin as a demonstration of the efficiency and goodness of the Turin System . Once upon a time, Turin’s efficiency was measured by the growth of its productive system, the number and quality of its companies and its workers. May 1st was not the workers’ day, mostly young high school graduates and graduates, children of workers and the proletarianized middle class, who in their thousands have fled Turin over the years because there was no work for them, unless underpaid, so much so that he cannot afford to start a family. It was not the celebration of a city where only the number of elderly people is increasing and the number of newborns is decreasing, more than elsewhere. A city where its political class is more passionate about reporting on the diatribes in the board of directors and management of the CRT Foundation than about the immense problems of an exhausted city that deserves imagination and administrative verve, unfortunately far from the horizon. The May 1st parade was the snapshot of a cultural decline as well.
The old glorious working class culture, a fundamental part of the political content of the left that once was, has given way to that of the so-called antagonists, of the pampered social centers that take it upon themselves to do the dirty work that the bourgeois left of the ZTL no longer wants to do. These arrived with their procession trucks, moved the barriers and positioned themselves under the union stage, about a hundred climbed onto the stage to harangue the poor, cold workers and pensioners with their pro-Palestine slogans. Once upon a time they would have been stopped and brought into line by the legendary union Order Service. But that too was retired and demobilized. How they demobilized the trade unionists and politicians present who, according to them, “to avoid unrest” graciously gave up the stage to these characters who don’t even remotely resemble workers. As happened a few weeks ago to the fearful Academic Senate of the University of Turin which, due to the irruption of similar pro-Palestinian groups, was forced to interrupt the session and then to adhere to the imposed request of non-collaboration with Israeli universities. These episodes give us a glimpse of what Turin’s future path will be, it’s a shame that the sun(s) is setting.
