Transnational radicals: Labour dissent and political activism in detroit and Turin (1950-970)

Abstract

This article investigates the entangled histories of radicals in Detroit and Turin who challenged capitalism in ways that departed from orthodox Marxism. Starting from the 1950s, small but influential groups of labour radicals, such as Correspondence in Detroit and Quaderni Rossi in Turin, circulated ideas that questioned the Fordist system in a drastic way. These radicals saw the car factories as laboratories for a possible autonomist working-class activity that could take over industrial production and overhaul the societal system. They criticized the usefulness of the unions and urged workers to develop their own forms of collective organization. These links were rekindled during the intense working-class mobilization of the late 1960s, when younger radicals would also engage in a dialogue across national boundaries that influenced each other's interpretation of the local context. These transnational connections, well-known to contemporaries but ignored by historians, show how American events and debates were influenced by, and impinged on, distant countries, and how local activists imagined their political identity as encompassing struggles occurring elsewhere. © 2011 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis.