Introduction
This article focuses on the reception of Yugoslavia’s model of self-management in Italy between the 1950s and 1970s. This case study illustrates the transnational circulation of models of ‘industrial democracy’ in Cold War Europe. Such models covered a broad spectrum of meanings. They included trade union action comprising collective bargaining, and different forms of workers’ participation in the management of enterprises, from workers’ self-management to co-determination.Footnote 1 Indeed, the case of the Yugoslav–Italian exchanges illustrated here developed against a backdrop of transnational relations – involving Eastern and Western European political parties, trade unions, intellectuals and international organisations (the International Labour Organisation in primis) – that formed an informal ‘pan-European’ space of cooperation concerning models of industrial democracy that transcended the Cold War divide.
Yugoslavia and Italy belonged to different ‘fields’ of the Cold War. The first was a socialist country – albeit non-aligned – led by a single Communist party, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez Komunista Jugoslavije; SKJ).Footnote 2 The second belonged to the so-called Western capitalist camp, as a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in 1949 and a participant in the European integration process since the early 1950s.Footnote 3 In the early Cold War years, relations between Rome and Belgrade were affected by the territorial dispute over Trieste, which the two countries solved de facto through the London Memorandum of Understanding of 1954. This paved the way for a broad web of connections in multiple areas, from trade to direct investments and cultural exchange.Footnote 4 However, bilateral relations developed against a backdrop of, at times, tense diplomatic relations and mutual suspicions that persisted until the signing of the Osimo Treaty in 1975, which formally closed the border dispute and cemented bilateral relations until the violent dissolution of the Yugoslav federation in 1991.Footnote 5
Literature on Yugoslav–Italian relations has traditionally focused on bilateral relations at the governmental level, with few notable exceptions concerning culture and local diplomacy initiatives.Footnote 6 Less studied are exchanges between non-state actors such as political parties, trade unions, experts and academics concerning models and practices of work organisation in enterprises and the relationship between capital and workforce,Footnote 7 despite growing scholarly attention to the internationalisation of the Yugoslav model of self-management, especially in the French context.Footnote 8 The focus on the circulation of participatory models in enterprises is not, however, just another piece of a bilateral relationship between Rome and Belgrade. Conversely, between the 1960s and 1970s the circulation of self-management ideas emerged from an international debate that developed in Western Europe concerning working conditions, production methods, and the place, agency, and participation of workers in enterprises. Within this framework, ‘third way’ models alternative to the leading economic paradigms of the post-1945 era, namely liberal capitalism and socialist collectivism, were debated and conceptualised. The question of industrial democracy involved actors at all levels – from the intellectual, economic, social and political spheres – forming a transnational constellation of ‘third way’ projects and ideas that emerged cyclically between the 1950s and the 1970s, up to their dawning with the ‘neoliberal turn’ of the 1980s.Footnote 9 What this constellation had in common was the search for solutions to the question of workers’ alienation and the struggle against the domination of both the state – in collectivist systems – and the market – in capitalist systems – over the workers.
The argument of this article is that Italy’s industrial democracy practices were influenced by Yugoslavia’s self-management system – which represented the first European instance of a socialist alternative to Soviet-style collectivismFootnote 10 – well beyond the theoretical sphere. In the Italian case, the tangible result of this ‘third way’ influence was the adoption of the Workers’ Statute (Statuto dei Lavoratori) of 1970 (Law n. 300, 20 May 1970), Italy’s first systematic law on industrial relations, which addressed, among other things, the question of workers’ representation in enterprises. The Statuto developed out of a short-lived yet intense Yugoslav-inspired season of industrial democracy debates that profoundly affected the evolution of industrial relations in Italy between the 1960s and 1970s.
This article shows that the Italian debate about self-management cannot be simply considered an ‘illusory’ idea or a theoretical speculation – or even, as Pierre Rosanvallon argued regarding the French case, a ‘meteor’Footnote 11 – nor was it a sudden by-product of a liminal period marked by the end of the economic boom and the apparent crisis of capitalism, which also included admiration for even more radical models, such as the ‘Maoist’ one.Footnote 12 Conversely, the self-management question reflected the search for alternative models of industrial democracy that embraced a broad spectrum of political and cultural actors who tried to adapt the radical principles of Yugoslav self-management – namely the social property of the means of production and workers’ direct participation in the management of enterprises – to Italy’s capitalist economy. The influence of Yugoslavia’s self-management in Italy was certainly indirect – as I argue in the conclusion. Yet the intensity of the political and cultural exchanges concerning the Yugoslav model and its transnational character deserve to be studied as an instance of circulation of industrial management practices that were not based on a straightforward exportation of ‘Western models’ to the ‘East’, but vice versa.Footnote 13 The very idea of ‘circulation’ that is adopted in this article underlines the idea that a ‘third way’ milieu – largely based on Christian and Socialist backgrounds – embraced Yugoslav and Italian political parties, trade unions and intellectuals.Footnote 14 This Christian and Socialist background was not a specificity of Italy: in Western Europe, it also encompassed other political and trade union contexts, from the French to West German and Dutch ones, to that of the European Community.Footnote 15
This article is based on multi-archival research drawing on a wide range of sources, including the Archives of Yugoslavia (Arhiv Jugoslavije), the archives of the Lelio and Lisli Basso Foundation and the archives of the Pietro Nenni Foundation – in particular the personal fond of labour lawyer Gino Giugni, one of the ‘putative fathers’ of the Statuto dei Lavoratori. The Italian perspective is also enriched by newly available primary sources from the historical archives of the Italian Christian Workers’ Associations (Associazioni Cristiane Lavoratori Italiani; ACLI), a trade union movement of Christian inspiration that fostered the debate on industrial democracy in Italy during the turn of the 1960s.
The Early Reception of the Yugoslav Model in the 1950s
The Yugoslav model of self-management posited the social property of the means of production and the direct participation of workers – through the institute of ‘work councils’ – in the management of enterprises.Footnote 16 It was gradually set up in the early 1950s, as an alternative to the centralised model of Soviet communism after Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform) in 1948.Footnote 17 As such, it represented a ‘third way of its own’ in the then bipolar order. The launch of this ‘socialist alternative’ was received with opportunism in the Western camp. Tito was ‘kept afloat’ through financial and military means, and his challenge to Stalin was saluted as a first fissure in the homogeneity of the Soviet bloc.Footnote 18 In Western Europe, the new experiment was primarily observed and studied in France. French anti-communist progressive intellectuals linked to the tradition of the libertarian left (inspired by Proudhon), as well as French trade unions of Christian inspiration that were primarily concerned with the Yugoslav experiment, raised the question of decentralisation, federalism and workers’ participation, in contrast to the centralist tenets of Soviet-style Marxism Leninism.Footnote 19
In Italy, the reception of the Yugoslav ‘experiment’ was colder than in France due to internal reasons. The early 1950s were indeed marked by the escalation of the territorial confrontation between Rome and Belgrade over the so-called Free Territory of Trieste (FTT) envisaged by the Peace Treaty with Italy of February 1947. The non-implementation of the FTT due to emerging contrasts between the superpowers had led to a precarious situation of confrontation between Rome and Belgrade, which in autumn 1953 risked turning into a military escalation.Footnote 20 Political tensions also characterised relations between the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička Partija Jugoslavije; KPJ) – renamed SKJ in 1952 – and Italy’s main leftist parties, namely the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano; PCI) and Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano; PSI). Both the PCI and PSI took an anti-Tito stance during the Tito–Stalin split of 1948. The KPJ would react by financing a pro-Yugoslavian Italian party – named Independent Socialist Union (Unione Socialista Indipendente) – as part of a broader anti-Stalinist propaganda campaign in Western Europe.Footnote 21 This party – led by former PCI members Aldo Cucchi and Valdo Magnani – would be a short-lived experience marked by poor electoral results – mainly due to the polarisation of Italy’s political spectrum. And yet, this represented the first instance of a pro-Tito leftist political organisation in Italy, which lasted until the mid-1950s.Footnote 22
The room for political/academic debate on Yugoslavia’s internal system in the early 1950s was accordingly limited. Moreover, the model of industrial relations advocated by the Yugoslav leadership appeared anachronistic in the Italian economic system, marked as it was by constant economic expansion – the so-called Italian boom of the 1950s – and full employment, which seemed to stem social conflict.Footnote 23
In fact, the very question of workers’ participation in the management of enterprises – whose ‘Gramscian’ roots went back to instances of ‘factory councils’ in occupied factories during the ‘red biennium’ of 1919–20Footnote 24 – had revived in the Italian political debate after the end of the Second World War. This question was originally discussed during the works of Italy’s constitutional assembly. Art. 46 of the 1948 Italian constitution provided that: ‘For the purposes of economic and social enhancement of workers and consistently with the requirements of production, the Republic shall recognise the rights of workers to collaborate in the management of enterprises, in the forms and within the limits established by law’.
This article reflected some of the guiding principles of the new Republican constitution, namely the protection of work in all its ‘forms and applications’, and the protection of the ‘inviolable rights of the person, both as an individual and in the social groups where human personality is expressed’ (Art. 2). Within this framework, the notion of ‘social groups’ also included the enterprise. By extending co-management rights to workers, the latter could contribute to better addressing the social dimension of their work.Footnote 25 The notion of ‘collaboration’ was the outcome of a mediation between the organicist tenets of social-Catholicism inspired by the anti-liberal tradition of French ‘communitarian personalism’Footnote 26 and by the ‘participation principle’ supported by trade unionist, and member of PCI, Giuseppe Di Vittorio. Finally, Art. 46 echoed the more radical stance of the secretary of PSI between 1945–6, Rodolfo Morandi, who in the immediate post-war years had supported the formation of ‘management councils’ (Consigli di gestione) in enterprises. By the end of 1946, more than 500 Consigli were established in Northern Italy as groups of workers’ self-organisation supported by Italy’s unitarian trade union – led by a tripartite Communist, Socialist and Christian-Democratic leadership – named Italian General Confederation of Labour (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro; CGIL). In the biennium 1946–7, they worked as ‘interlocutors’ of the management for a consensual running of the enterprise.Footnote 27
However, the statement of principle included in Art. 46 remained as such. In 1947, the PCI and PSI were ousted from the government coalition in a context of ideological polarisation of Italian politics after the first political elections of April 1948, which reflected the dynamics of the emerging Cold War.Footnote 28 This polarisation also manifested in the Italian trade unions and in the experience of the Consigli di gestione. By the mid-1950s, in a context of ‘Guerra fredda sindacale’ (a trade union ‘Cold War’),Footnote 29 the experience of Consigli di gestione was practically over.Footnote 30
However, this did not mean the definitive marginalisation of the questions of workers’ participation in Italy. Yugoslavia’s ‘model’ contributed to this revival. Relations between Rome and Belgrade were indeed normalised in 1954 after the signing of the above-mentioned London Memorandum of Understanding, which resolved de facto – though not de jure – the ‘Trieste’ question.Footnote 31 This normalisation coincided with the destalinisation process inaugurated by the Soviet leadership after the death of Stalin in 1953. The two dynamics spurred an intense debate among Italy’s progressive forces on the possibility of national ways to socialism that included the consideration of the Yugoslav alternative. At this stage, however, this debate was still academic rather than political. The first systematic review published in Italy on Yugoslavia’s internal system was issued in 1955 by the journal Il Ponte.Footnote 32 This journal was linked to the political-cultural movement Popular Unity (Unità Popolare; UP), which aimed at being the fulcrum of Italy’s ‘third way’ movements. This minority movement called for the detachment of the PSI from the PCI and looked for new practices of democratic socialism abroad, including in Yugoslavia. UP was influenced by the journal Esprit, founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier, a leading personalist philosopher of Christian inspiration who since the early 1930s had advocated a ‘third way’ between social collectivism and liberal capitalism. In the post-war years, these ideas would influence both the Italian and French left.Footnote 33 The Christian inspiration of self-management should not be surprising, as this concept was inspired by the ideas of de-centralisation and subsidiarity that had been traditional tenets of social-Catholicism since the late nineteenth centuryFootnote 34. The long-term transnational circulation of these principles – particularly across Italy, France and Yugoslavia – was also influenced by the theoretical father of Slovenian Christian Socialism, Andrej Gosar, who in the inter-war period had advocated the notion of workers’ self-management.Footnote 35 Indeed, the main ideologue of Yugoslavia’s self-management, Edvard Kardelj, would return to read Gosar to find the Yugoslav path to building socialism.Footnote 36 Starting in 1954, UP intensified relations with the Yugoslav leadership, leading to the participation of some of the major representatives of the SKJ – including Kardelj – in the above-mentioned special issue of Il Ponte.Footnote 37
After this publication, Yugoslavia’s self-management system started to echo into the PSI’s official periodical, Mondoperaio. This was one of the consequences of the Soviet intervention in Poland and Hungary in 1956, which had spurred an intense debate within the Italian – and Western European – left about the external imposition of the Soviet model, increasing the already mounting fracture between the PSI and the PCI. Against this background, Mondoperaio hosted the first major post-war intellectual debate in Italy on the question of ‘workers’ control’ (controllo operaio) in 1958.Footnote 38 Some of the intellectuals who contributed to this debate – in primis the co-director of Mondoperaio, Renato Panzieri – would later represent the ‘non-orthodox’ Marxist left during the 1960s, which criticised both the PSI and the PCI for their non-revolutionary policy.Footnote 39 The Italian context reflected a period of political ferment in the Western European Left in search for anti-statist models, which would later influence discussions on ‘participatory democracy’ in the framework of ‘1968’.Footnote 40 The Mondoperaio articles echoed the anti-collectivist stance of the politician responsible for the economic matters of the PSI, Riccardo Lombardi,Footnote 41 and revived the question of workers’ participation in enterprises as the key element of a class struggle against dominating capitalist forces in Italy. In this context, the Yugoslav ‘model’ featured as a tangible example of workers’ participation. It was not by chance that the PSI secretary, Pietro Nenni, paid an official visit to Belgrade in December 1959: in this circumstance he delivered an interview to the Yugoslav newspaper Politika, in which he declared that: ‘The principles of workers’ self-management and the Yugoslav experience of this problem … have great importance for the world workers’ movement and can be applied in other countries, as well as in the capitalist countries of Western Europe.’Footnote 42 It must be noted that Nenni was speaking as a leader of an opposition party, which tried to challenge its former ally – the PCI – on the ground of industrial democracy.
Indeed, the attitude of the PCI on this matter was much more prudent, due to the Italian communists’ traditional links with Moscow.Footnote 43 However, the short-lived Yugoslav–Soviet rapprochement between 1955 and 1956 – which led to the ambiguous ‘legitimation’ of national roads to Communism by the new Soviet leadershipFootnote 44 – led to the development of an internal reflection about the question of workers’ participation in enterprises. In this framework, the Party’s cultural institute – Istituto Gramsci – organised a conference in April 1957 devoted to the ‘Powers and Functions of Workers’ Councils in Factories: The Yugoslav Experience’, which involved leading members of the SKJ as well as of Yugoslav trade unionists.Footnote 45 Central in the papers delivered in Rome by the Yugoslav guests were the long-term historical roots of Yugoslavia’s self-management system. As argued by Ašer Deleon – a member of the Central Council of the Confederation of Trade Unions of Yugoslavia (Savez Sindikata Jugoslavije; SSJ), Yugoslavia had put to the fore a question that had emerged since the Paris Commune, and that had re-appeared during the Weimar Republic, Italy’s ‘red biennium’, the Spanish Civil War and the more recent events in Hungary and Poland. The Yugoslav representative therefore showed that the historical roots of self-management transcended the post-1945 ‘East–West’ divide.Footnote 46
The influence of self-management ideas on the Communist party leadership was, however, limited, due to the following deterioration of relations between the SKJ and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.Footnote 47 Accordingly, the seminar organised by the Istituto Gramsci remained an isolated experience.Footnote 48 While this event only included Italian and Yugoslav participants, the initiative of the Istituto reflected a contemporary interest of leftist parties and trade unions throughout Western Europe in Yugoslavia’s self-management, which the SKJ and the SSJ contributed to spreading.Footnote 49 For instance, Deleon’s works were widely published in Belgrade by the Central Council of the SSJ to promote the Yugoslav system abroad.Footnote 50 As part of this propaganda, the first Congress devoted to the system of self-management, entitled ‘Congress of Workers’ Councils of Yugoslavia’, was held in Belgrade in June 1957. Yugoslav archives report the participation of 71 foreign attendees, including representatives of trade unions and political parties from Western Europe (French Communist Party; French General Confederation of Work; French Confederation of Christian Workers; British Labour Party; British Trade Union Congress), Eastern Europe (Polish United Workers’ Party; All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions of the Soviet Union; the Councils of Trade Unions of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania; the Free German Trade Union Federation) and European neutral countries (Swiss Socialist Party; Council of Trade Unions of Finland).Footnote 51 The Italian delegation included representatives of the PCI, PSI, CGIL and Italian Labour Union (Unione italiana del lavoro; UIL). Two representatives of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) – C.R. Wynne Roberts (Economic Division) and J. Vanek (Labour Management Relations Division) – also attended this Congress.Footnote 52 They would later develop systematic research on Yugoslavia’s system that would result in the first comprehensive study on Yugoslav self-management published by the ILO in 1962.Footnote 53
The Centre-Left Coalition, the PSI, and the ‘Yugoslav Connection’, 1963–9
In Italy, it was the beginning of the centre-left coalition between the Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana; DC) and the PSI in December 1963 that revived the debate on industrial democracy.Footnote 54 Although the entry of the PSI into governing positions did not mean any acceleration of reforms in the industrial relations domain, this question started to enter the broader transnational debate about social reforms. Within this framework, the Yugoslav model exerted a theoretical influence. Indeed, the beginning of the centre-left formula had led to an overall improvement of relations between Italy and Yugoslavia, which culminated in the official visit by Italy’s Prime Minister Aldo Moro to Belgrade in November 1965. But it must be noted that this visit was anticipated by a less-studied mission by the secretary of the PSI, Francesco De Martino, to Belgrade in June 1964. During this high-level contact between the PSI and SKJ leaderships, De Martino repeated Nenni’s claims about the innovative character of the self-management system.Footnote 55 De Martino’s mission was soon followed in December 1964 by a visit of a delegation of the PSI to Belgrade, to attend the Eighth Congress of the SKJ,Footnote 56 which famously marked the adoption of an extensive programme of market-oriented reforms.Footnote 57 The PSI delegation was headed by the vice-secretary of the PSI, Giacomo Brodolini, a former trade unionist of the CGIL and, six years later, one of the ‘putative fathers’ of Italy’s ‘Workers’ Statute’. During his visit, Brodolini stated that Italian socialists and Yugoslav communists shared a common engagement in the ‘progress of their people towards socialism, each according to the path that the reality and history of their country assigns them’. According to the correspondent of the PSI’s newspaper, Avanti!, he also highlighted what Italian socialists believed was valid of the Yugoslav experience, namely ‘the rejection of prefabricated schemes and dogmas, the commitment to creative research, the assiduous effort to adapt the tools and methods of planning to the indications emerging from the aspirations of the masses and the critical consideration to which you unscrupulously submit your past orientations’.Footnote 58
Brodolini was indeed looking for new methods of workers’ participation, to respond to expanding conflict in the sphere of industrial relations.Footnote 59 A few months before – in May 1964 – the Ministry of Labour had launched a committee of experts to study a future ‘Workers’ Statute’, whose first draft – dated 1965 – included workers’ right to exert union activities in enterprises.Footnote 60 This expert committee involved an Italian labour lawyer of socialist background, Gino Giugni, then a professor of law at the University of Bari and a leading expert of labour relations, who since the mid-1950s had been following international debates on industrial relations and workers’ participation in Western Europe and the United States.Footnote 61
Gino Giugni was aware of the relevance of the Yugoslav case in such international debates. Between 25 May and 3 June 1964 – that is, in the very weeks when he had started to work in the expert committee on the future Workers’ Statute – he visited Skopje (in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia) to participate in a meeting of Yugoslav–Italian jurists on the topic: ‘The protection of man in labour relations’.Footnote 62 The head of the Italian delegation was the lawyer and under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, Arialdo Banfi, who also belonged to the PSI.
It was therefore the PSI that kept the debate on ‘workers’ participation’ alive in a moment of growing social ferment in Italy. In the mid-1960s, Yugoslavia’s self-management was regarded by Italian socialists as an example of industrial relations that questioned the lack of mechanisms of workers’ organisation and participation in the Italian system. This was the very reason why since the mid-1960s the Yugoslav model was studied and debated in France,Footnote 63 with echoes that reached reformist movements in the Soviet camp, as shown by the references to self-management in the Czechoslovak ‘experiment’ of the mid- and late 1960s.Footnote 64 Indeed, by the late 1960s, international networks on workers’ participation had continued to develop, involving politicians and trade unionists from Eastern European socialist regimes and from Western European, Northern and Southern European countries. At its 167th session in 1966, the International Labour Conference adopted a resolution on Workers’ Participation in Undertakings, which called for a review of participation mechanisms in enterprises in member states.Footnote 65 To give effect to this resolution, a technical meeting ‘On Rights of Trade Union Representatives and Participation of Workers in Decisions within Undertakings’ was organised in Geneva.Footnote 66 Participating in this meeting were eighteen experts from fifteen countries, representing the Employers’ and Workers’ groups of ILO’s governing body, and from university and government circles. In these debates, the Yugoslav model featured prominently, as a ‘typical example of a nation-wide system of workers’ management which has been in operation for a number of years in all undertakings throughout a country’.Footnote 67
The follow-up to the technical meeting in Geneva was an ILO-sponsored ‘International Seminar on Workers’ Participation in Decisions within Undertakings’ that took place in Belgrade, upon the invitation of the Yugoslav government, on 2–11 December 1969. Encompassing representatives from Eastern and Western Europe, and beyond, this seminar confirmed Yugoslavia as a reference point for industrial relations debates that crossed Cold War divides.Footnote 68 The ILO’s involvement had created a European space of debate on management questions in which the Italian and Yugoslav exchanges of the late 1960s must be contextualised.
Social Upheaval and Industrial Democracy: The ACLI and the ‘Yugoslav’ Inspiration of Italy’s Workers’ Statute
The turning point for the Western reception of the Yugoslav model was the social and economic crisis of the late 1960s. Italy, as most European countries – in both the capitalist ‘West’ and the socialist ‘East’ – was affected by a mounting wave of social and political unrest.Footnote 69 This context of radical transformations offered fertile grounds for the revival of ‘alternative’ projects of power management.Footnote 70
In Italy, political parties and trade unions were involved in the question of industrial democracy and workers’ participation with renewed impetus. In fact, during the industrial disputes of 1968 and 1969, spontaneous and fragmentary forms of workers’ representation – the so-called work councils – had emerged and spread throughout the country. They advocated increased participation in the management of enterprises, challenging the leadership of the major trade unions, the governing parties of the centre-left coalition – in particular the DC and the socialists – and the PCI as well. The governmental response to the social unrest included a reform agenda that aimed to improve the legislation on industrial relations.Footnote 71 At the core of this initiative was Giacomo Brodolini, whose final (and posthumous) achievement was the adoption of the Statuto dei Lavoratori.Footnote 72 The adoption of the Statuto was indeed the last step of the previously mentioned debate on the question of industrial democracy and workers’ organisation in enterprises.
In December 1968 Brodolini was appointed minister of labour and social security in a centre-left government. Under the leadership of Brodolini, the question of workers’ participation reached a central position in the Italian government’s agenda. A ministerial consultative Commission for the Workers’ Statute was formed upon Brodolini’s initiative in January 1969 under the chairmanship of Giugni.Footnote 73 The DC was also involved in this process. One of the party’s several correnti (factions), Forze Nuove, advocated a progressive policy to address the then mounting social conflict. The leader of this corrente was Carlo Donat-Cattin, who succeeded Brodolini as minister of labour and social security after the latter’s premature death due to lung cancer in July 1969 – at the age of 49 – completing the parliamentary path for the adoption of the Statuto.
The ‘Workers’ Statute’ provided for certain rules establishing a legal basis for industrial relations in enterprises, to be based on the ‘freedom’ and ‘dignity’ of workers. The aim of the law was, firstly, to protect employees from ‘unfair dismissal’ (Art. 18) and, secondly, to legalise union activity on the shopfloor by trade union representatives in each production unit (Art. 19). Workers could form assemblies (Art. 20), hold referenda on matters related to trade union activities (Art. 21) and display posters and communications (Art. 25) to develop union activities. What was innovative in this statute was that it promoted the presence of workers’ democratic organisation in enterprises and, at the same time, established limits and conditions to the employer’s managerial authority. For the first time, Italy’s republican legislation regulated the question of workers’ democratic rights in enterprises, leading to tangible changes in workplace dynamics.
The continuity between Brodolini and Donat-Cattin was the manifestation of a convergence of ideas that had the ACLI – the Christian Associations of Italian Workers – as a common political ‘incubator’.Footnote 74 ACLI was a sui generis actor in the Italian political and trade union scene. It was one of the largest Catholic movements in Italy. Acting beyond the trade union and party frameworks, throughout the 1950s and 1960s it had emerged as a transversal movement organised through a capillary network of local associations. Since its founding in 1944, the ACLI had interpreted their social role as being ‘collateral’ to that of the DC, but during the 1960s under the presidency of Livio Labor (1961–9) they had gradually abandoned the principle of ‘collateralism’.Footnote 75 This was part of a broader phenomenon of the evolution of Catholic movements in Italy.Footnote 76 Labor initiated a gradual progressive turn of the ACLI towards the left by enhancing the relationship between the Association, PSI and the Christian-oriented Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions (Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori; CISL).
Livio Labor left the presidency of ACLI in June 1969 to establish the Association of Political Culture (Associazione di Cultura Politica; ACPOL), a political movement that advocated a ‘socialist alternative’ of Christian inspiration, which was joined by former members of the PSI, including Lombardi. During his mandate, Labor promoted close contacts with the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (Confédération française démocratique du travail; CFDT),Footnote 77 a lay union of Christian inspiration (yet secularised) that was established in 1964 after a secession within the French Confederation of Christian Workers (Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens; CFTC).Footnote 78 ACLI and CFDT shared a common view about the need for social change in the name of the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, workers’ participation, the fight against ‘alienation’ and self-management,Footnote 79 which had meanwhile become a ‘passion’ also among the leaders of the Italian Federation of Metalworkers (Federazione Italiana Metalmeccanici; FIM)-CISL.Footnote 80
After the conclusion of Labor’s presidency, the ACLI enhanced their progressive turn under the presidency of Emilio Gabaglio (1969–72). Gabaglio was a close collaborator of Labor’s during the latter’s presidency. After his appointment as ACLI president, he actively strove to impress an anti-capitalist stance upon his organisation, towards the goal of a ‘new society’ based on self-management bases. As he argued in early June 1970 during a meeting of ACLI’s youth meeting: ‘self-management would be the tool to realise a ‘counterproject’ of workers’ movement and to change society’.Footnote 81 Between 23 and 28 June 1970, Gabaglio visited Yugoslavia to meet representatives of the SSJ.Footnote 82 On this occasion, he released an interview to the SSJ journal Rad (Work) in which he claimed that Italy’s trade unions should unite and act as agents for change in Italy through profound social reforms.Footnote 83 During the interview, he also repeated the validity of the Yugoslav experience, despite obvious differences in social systems between Yugoslavia and Italy:
Self-management is a very significant achievement; a phenomenon we are following with the deepest sympathy. In Italy, we are used to supporting the indispensability of a change, under conditions of full freedom, of the economic-social system of neo-capitalism. Our action is imposed in the affirmation of workers’ participation; in Yugoslavia we are witnessing an interesting testimony in this regard.Footnote 84
In August 1970, during a national meeting at Vallombrosa (near Florence), entitled ‘Workers’ movement, capitalism, democracy’, Gabaglio announced the so-called ‘socialist hypothesis’ of the ACLI.Footnote 85 The self-management discourse promoted by the ACLI echoed the contemporary rhetoric of the French CFDT, with which Gabaglio had intensified bilateral contacts.Footnote 86 Indeed, during the same time, the CFDT had started its public campaign for a socialisme autogestionnaire. Footnote 87 The ACLI represented a platform for discussions on the question of workers’ participation that included the main promoters of the Statuto dei lavoratori, including BrodoliniFootnote 88 – who regularly and actively participated in the ACLI’s events on industrial democracy – and Donat-Cattin. Even the president of the Italian Senate’s Committee that drafted the final version of the Statuto, Vittorio Pozzar, was a senator of the DC since 1968 and, previously, a long-term militant of the ACLI. Therefore, between 1969 and 1972 the Christian and socialist-oriented ACLI worked simultaneously as a promoter of self-management ideas of Yugoslav and French inspiration, and as the ‘incubator’ of projects on the Workers’ Statute.
Beyond the Statuto: The End of the Christian-Socialist Axis and the Limits of ‘Self-Management’ Ideas
The circulation of the ‘self-management’ debate in Italy between 1970 and 1971 was fostered by Yugoslavia’s propaganda. Both the SKJ and the SSJ were actively engaged in promoting self-management abroad. Indeed, in parallel to the organisation of the above-mentioned ILO-sponsored seminar in Belgrade, the Sixth Congress of the SSJ (26–9 June 1968) had adopted a resolution about the organisation of a second Congress of Yugoslav self-managers (after the first Congress held in 1957) with the participation of all social forces.Footnote 89 The practical organisation of this ‘second’ Congress started in July 1969 when an ad hoc ‘Convening and preparatory committee’ was established. Dušan Petrović, president of the SSJ, was appointed head of this committee.Footnote 90 The organisation of the Congress developed at a critical juncture in Yugoslav history, marked by the wave of student protests of 1968, accelerated market-oriented reforms, consequent internal debates on the direction of the latter and the mounting question of nationalist trends within the Federation, particularly in the Socialist Republic of Croatia.Footnote 91 To relaunch self-management as Yugoslavia’s ideological ‘polar star’, the Party leadership hugely invested in the preparation of informational material abroad on self-management, including the publication of books, journal articles and even video-documentaries and photo exhibitions.Footnote 92
The ‘Second Congress of Yugoslav Self-Managers’ was held in Sarajevo on 5–8 May 1971.Footnote 93 The participation of international guests across Europe, North and Latin America, Africa and Asia was impressive, with more than 150 foreign guests attending the conference.Footnote 94 These included delegates of political parties, trade unions, universities and research centres from European Socialist countries (Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland), the European Economic Community (EEC) (Italy, France, West Germany, the Benelux countries, also including one official of the European Commission dealing with social affairs, Raymond RiffletFootnote 95), the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) (Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway) and neutral countries (Finland, Ireland, Switzerland), as well as representatives of the World Confederation of Labour (Brussels) and the World Federation of Trade Unions (Prague). Therefore, although this Congress was not crafted as a ‘pan-European’ event, the debates on workers’ participation had consolidated into a ‘European’ phenomenon that transcended the ideological barriers and alignments of the Cold War and included the very Christian, Socialist and Social-Democratic forces that in Western Europe (in primis France, Italy and West Germany, where a major debate on workers’ co-determination was also developing)Footnote 96 were looking for the expansion of workplace democracy practices. De facto, foreign guests in Sarajevo formed a transnational ‘epistemic community’ that looked for alternative models in industry management that, however, should be compatible with each national context.Footnote 97
As far as Italy was concerned, the Sarajevo Congress was attended by representatives of trade unions (CGIL and CISL), trade union movements (ACLI), and research centres (the Gramsci Institute and Institute for Research and Documentation on Eastern Europe in Trieste). It was also attended by representatives of Italian political parties: DC, Unified Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Unificato; PSU), PCI, Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (Partito Socialista di Unità Proletaria; PSIUP) and Workers’ Political Movement (Movimento Politico dei Lavoratori; MPL).
Foreign guests did not attend the Congress as passive recipients of the Yugoslav model, but rather to participate in what then represented the largest transnational forum on workplace democracy. In this forum, delegates debated how to address the question of workers’ representation in each specific national context. Unsurprisingly, comments and declarations by Italian representatives – echoing similar judgements from their colleagues from the EEC, EFTA and neutral countriesFootnote 98 – underlined that any radical model of self-management would not be practicable. As stated by the representatives of the CISL during a roundtable devoted to the trends of workers’ participation, which took place in Sarajevo on 10 and 11 May 1971, gathering trade unions from 50 countries:
We do not intend to judge the experiences of other countries, in which [economic and regulatory claims] certainly represent the fruit of a long struggle conducted within a different political and institutional framework. Therefore, given today’s Italian scenario, it seems justified to us that most of the Italian trade unionism rejects the institutional forms of participation in the management of companies which involve more responsibility than real power.Footnote 99
The observations of the CISL representative echoed similar statements by the CGIL delegate in Sarajevo, Pio Galli, who had appeared perplexed about the role of trade unions in industrial systems envisaging the participation of workers in the management of enterprises.Footnote 100
This scepticism reflected the very interpretation of ‘industrial democracy’ that had emerged during the debates concerning the Statuto. By envisaging the constitution of union-led ‘work councils’ in enterprises, the Statuto had de facto turned the calls for workers’ direct control and self-management into a system of union mediation that was compatible with Italy’s union law and preserved the private property of the means of production. Indeed, trade unions believed that the natural conflict of interests inherent in any undertaking made every form of cooperation within the structure of the enterprise – in both the public and private sectors – unreal and hazardous. Therefore, they aimed at the ‘external’ control of industrial management, rather than at their participation in management. Their attitude was due to the need to safeguard their raison d’être in industrial relations, keeping firm control of workers’ movements after the ‘spontaneous’ phase of 1968–9.Footnote 101
This point of view was also shared by the PCI, whose leadership abstained from direct influence on the trade unions during the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969. This attitude was continued after Enrico Berlinguer became the Party’s secretary in 1972. In various meetings between SKJ and PCI representatives in the early 1970s, the PCI stressed the limits of the self-management discourse in Italy – which seemed to question the role of trade unions – and the radicalisation of Italy’s worker’s movements, which challenged the unity of the working class.Footnote 102 From the viewpoint of the SKJ, this attitude corresponded to the party’s attempt to promote political dialogue with the DC.Footnote 103 One additional factor may explain the PCI’s moderate stance on the self-management question: the PCI wondered about the direction of Yugoslavia faced with nationalist tensions that seemed to weaken to federal state, as shown, for instance, by the repression of the ‘Croatian spring’ in late 1971.Footnote 104
Moreover, political elections in May 1972 sanctified the crisis of the centre-left formula, with the establishment of a centrist government led by Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti. This ‘centrist’ turn – accompanied by the electoral rise of the extreme right-wing Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano; MSI) – led to the political marginalisation of the very forces that had supported the Statuto, namely the PSI and ACLI. Among the parties that participated in the political elections of May 1972 was Livio Labor’s MPL, a Christian-socialist platform that earned a notably poor result (0.36 per cent). At the same time, Gabaglio’s leadership of the ACLI was questioned: his left-wing turn was overtly opposed by Vatican hierarchies, which led to his gradual isolation within the ACLI and his resignation from the presidency in December 1972.Footnote 105
After 1972, self-management networks between Yugoslavia and Italy took the form of intellectual exchanges involving the political heirs of the UP’s libertarian tradition. This was particularly the case of Lelio Basso, a member of the PSIUP (a socialist minority branch that in the 1960s had criticised the PSI’s alliance with the DC),Footnote 106 who was one of the leading promoters of the circulation of self-management ideas in Italy during the early 1970s, and who was recognised as such by the Yugoslav leadership.Footnote 107 Basso was in close contact with the promoters of the Korčula summer school – a major annual gathering of scholars and students on philosophy and sociology founded in 1962 by two critical Marxist philosophers, Rudi Supek and Milan Kangrga.Footnote 108 At the same time, the spread of self-management ideas was favoured by the translation of several books devoted to self-management by YugoslavFootnote 109 and French scholarsFootnote 110 – which reflected the huge self-management debate spurred by the CFDT – and by the publication of volumes on Yugoslavia’s self-management by Italian scholars.Footnote 111
Self-Management as a Matter of Party Identity
After their gradual marginalisation in 1972, Italian debates on workers’ participation resumed around the mid-1970s. This revival was linked to the trade unions’ attempt to overcome the conflictual logic envisaged by the Statuto – namely the ‘external’ control of work councils – through the expansion of their right of information concerning management plans in enterprises, in a context marked by growing unemployment and industrial transformation due to energy crises, increasing inflation and rapid technological change.Footnote 112
The self-management discourse became a matter of party identity for both the PSI and the PCI.Footnote 113 Italian socialists had to look for renewed ideological foundations to recover from the crisis of electoral consensus that had marked both the 1972 and 1976 elections. To do so, the new party secretary, Bettino Craxi, echoed the libertarian tradition of Proudhon, to craft a socialist ‘alternative’ to both the DC and the PCI.Footnote 114 In this context, socialist intellectuals developed an intense debate on the future of industrial democracyFootnote 115 that, unlike Brodolini’s previous realistic stances, included systematic references to self-management practices at all levels, from local government to ‘neighbourhood councils’ and schools.Footnote 116 Giugni himself had noted during a seminar on industrial democracy in 1976:
Self-management, undoubtedly, is a verbal formula that . . . has ambiguous and polyvalent meanings, nor, reading its strongest proponents, who are our French comrades, do we gain definitive clarity, because we can see that they understand self-management as a little of everything. But, certainly, it is an idea-force with a considerable charge, and which, in its polyvalent meanings, means a great deal, first and foremost in terms of exclusion, because it is a definitive abandonment of a statist vision of socialism, particularly in the economic sector. And then because it has adequate elasticity to encompass a whole range of different forms of social control over the economy.Footnote 117
This political ‘ferment’ reflected a parallel debate on industrial relations at the European Community level that developed in the mid-1970s, leading to the European Commission’s proposal of a directive on information and consultation of employees in multinational companies (the so-called Vredeling directive of 1980).Footnote 118
As for the PCI, after the failure of the ‘historical compromise’ formula with the DC, Italian communists reinforced direct links with the Yugoslav leadership to challenge the PSI on the ground of industrial democracy.Footnote 119 Meanwhile, this evolution was in line with the PCI’s Eurocommunist stance. The Fifteenth Congress of the PCI in 1979 marked a new political programme in search of a ‘third way’ that clearly referred to the Yugoslav tradition. Indeed, this process had been initiated in 1978, when party relations between the SKJ and the PCI had steadily intensified.Footnote 120 They included visits, research activities and publications on the issue of self-management that involved the Istituto Gramsci and the Centre for the Theory and Practice of Self-Management in Ljubljana.Footnote 121 But unlike the late 1960s, the revived debate on self-management was a matter of theoretical speculation and academic research, which was to last well into the 1980s.Footnote 122
Overall, the appropriation of the self-management discourse by the PCI and PSI intellectuals meant its slow political decline. After 1979, Berlinguer’s PCI was gradually yet steadily marginalised into an effective opposition, without the possibility of affecting Italian legislation on industrial relations. Conversely, Craxi’s PSI adopted a ‘reformist’ agenda that gained increasing electoral success, up to the appointment of the Socialist leader as head of government in 1983. By that time, the socialist agenda had evolved towards new economic paradigms aimed at financial stability and the fight against inflation, liberalisation and privatisation, paving the way to the market turn of the 1980s.Footnote 123
In France, a similar phenomenon happened: self-management ideas slowly disappeared as the Socialist party gradually shifted towards anti-inflationary and stability measures.Footnote 124 This was part of a broader trajectory of neoliberal transformation of industrial relations in Western Europe based on the principles of deregulation and derogation from institutional constraints, which meant a radical turn from the regulatory and participatory principles that had developed during the golden decade of ‘industrial democracy’ (mid-1960s to mid-1970s).Footnote 125 Against this background, Yugoslavia lost its propaganda role, affected as it was by profound internal cleavages that, after the death of its historical leader, Josip Broz ‘Tito’, in 1980, led the country towards a dramatic internal crisis. By the mid-1980s, Yugoslavia had definitively lost its leadership role as a ‘socialist alternative’Footnote 126 and was primarily regarded by Italian political authorities, including Prime Minister Bettino Craxi (1983–7), as a foreign policy partner.Footnote 127
The decline of self-management ideas was linked to a broader phenomenon that encompassed Italy and France: the marginalisation of ‘third way’ approaches of socialist and Christian inspiration from national platforms and governing leaderships.Footnote 128 While for Italy and France this meant a turn to austerity and European-scale integration according to a logic of market liberalisation, for Yugoslavia this meant increasing republican autonomy – a by-product of the expansion of self-management at all levels after the mid-1970s – and, finally, nationalism and federal collapse.
Conclusions
This article has explored the influence of Yugoslavia’s self-management model on the evolution of Italy’s industrial democracy debates and practices between the 1950s and 1970s. This influence developed against the backdrop of a pan-European space of cooperation that transcended the ideological divides of the Cold War era—a ‘European’ space in which Italian and Yugoslav political parties, trade unions, scholars and intellectuals moved. One leading force in this process was the constellation of ‘third way’ political and trade unionist forces that linked Italy and Yugoslavia in a common search for expanding forms of workplace democracy.
As shown in this article, the first exchange of self-management ideas in Italy developed out of minority socialist groups of Christian inspiration. Their ideas later consolidated within the social ferment of the early 1960s. The PSI – which had launched a solid relationship with the SKJ after its entry into Italy’s governing coalition in December 1963 – was among the promoters of a renewed debate on the democratisation of industrial relations. This Italian debate emerged in parallel with a mounting international debate on workers’ participation that developed within the framework of ILO in the early 1960s and was influenced by Yugoslavia’s propaganda efforts.
But it was the social upheaval of 1968–9 that radically shifted this question, with the self-management discourse being broadly discussed across Western and Eastern Europe – as shown by the ILO-sponsored ‘International Seminar on Workers’ Participation in Decisions within Undertakings’ that was held in Belgrade in December 1969 and was attended by dozens of politicians and trade unionists from Eastern European socialist regimes, as well as from Western European, neutral and non-aligned countries. In the Italian case, this debate was enhanced by the ACLI, which was the main ‘incubator’ of discussion of self-management ideas under the presidencies of Livio Labor and, more particularly, Emilio Gabaglio. Since 1969, the ACLI became a trait-d’union between the PSI (in particular, the minister of labour and social security, Giacomo Brodolini) and left-wing Christian-Democrats. The main outcome of this ‘self-management season’ – influenced by the Yugoslav model, which was repeatedly hailed by Gabaglio as a living experience of industrial democracy – was Italy’s Workers’ Statute of May 1970, which included mechanisms of union-based representation at firm level. In fact, this was not a passive replication of Yugoslavia’s self-management practice, as the question of social property of the means of production was never part of the Italian debate on industrial relations. What was innovative of the Statuto was that it legalised union activity on the shopfloor in each production unit. At the same time, workers could set up assemblies to discuss work-related matters. Rather than participation, these were forms of ‘external control’. But still, this was a way to channel and address social conflict by extending democratic rights to workers in enterprises. In other words, external control was a form of ‘negative’ participation – as it served to react to management decisions. This was a radical innovation in the field of industrial relations in Italy that developed out of a Yugoslav-inspired debate on self-management that crossed Italy’s leading parties and trade unions.
This was an instance of westward circulation of industrial relation models. Indeed, by the early 1970s, Yugoslavia’s propaganda had reached its apex. In 1971, the SSJ and SKJ convened the ‘Second Congress of Yugoslav Self-Managers’ in Sarajevo, involving dozens of foreign observers from all over the world. Although this Congress was not crafted as a ‘pan-European’ event, the participation of delegates of political parties, trade unions, universities and research centres from Eastern European socialist countries, and members of the EEC, the EFTA and neutral countries, shows that the debates on workers’ participation had consolidated into a ‘European’ phenomenon that transcended the ideological alignments of the Cold War.
However, the ‘third way’ axis among the PSI, the DC and the ACLI declined after the political elections of 1972, which created a centrist turn in Italian politics and confined self-management to the sphere of speculative debates. Only in the middle of the decade would the self-management discourse gradually re-emerge, in a new context of crisis marked by energy shocks and the rise of inflation and unemployment. An identity question concerned the leading parties of Italy’s left: the PCI and the PSI. The PCI used the ‘self-management’ question to shape a new ‘third way’ identity after the end of the ‘historical compromise’. The PSI re-discovered the libertarian and anti-Stalinist tradition of self-management under the new leadership of Bettino Craxi. But this was a short-lived and instrumental revival. The PCI would indeed be constrained to the opposition, whereas Craxi’s PSI would soon replace the self-management discourse with a new stress on the market, the fight against inflation and financial stability. The late 1970s meant the decline of ‘third way’ networks linking Yugoslavia and Italy and, with them, the discourse on ‘industrial democracy’ and collective practices. It is not by chance that the decline of these forces was not a bilateral matter but rather a broader ‘European’ process linked to the sweeping advance of the neoliberal paradigm – that rejected regulated forms of workplace democracy – in the above-mentioned European space of cooperation.
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Thomas David, Pierre Eichenberger, Sandrine Kott and Angela Romano for extensive comments around various drafts of this work. Helpful comments were also received from Duccio Basosi and are gratefully acknowledged. Lastly, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their detailed and helpful feedback.
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