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If They Bury Us, We Will Be Seeds
Anne Enith Cooper

by Anne Enith Cooper
Anne Enith Cooper
+ posts

 

The October sky blazed blue and the sun shone on a sea of canvas pagodas in a factory car park. Over 700 people sat between banners that read: stop speculation, stop the genocide and stop arming Israel. An exhibition of Palestinian art hung from the fences. A stall offering Working Class Beer stood opposite the factory’s main gate – there was also decent red wine at the bar. This was Italy after all. Tuscany, to be precise, where for the past three years a remarkable story has been unfolding: that of Italy’s longest industrial occupation evolving into a plan for a green transition.

Those gathered at this international assembly at the former GKN factory in Florence were popular shareholders; from the local area, other parts of Italy and Europe – including a 30-strong contingent of British trade unionists, activists, and students, organised by the film collective Reel News. We arrived at an uncertain time: the workers’ industrial plan had matured, over €1million raised through the sale of popular shares – yet without public intervention, and after over three years of a demanding occupation, the workers were wondering if they could they go on.

In 2021 GKN, which had produced parts for Jaguar and Lamborghini, was bought out by Melrose Industries who immediately announced redundancies, then, it was sold to one Francesco Borgomeo, former financial advisor to Melrose. When Borgomeo failed to deliver green jobs he had promised the workers set up a legal team and began to draft a visionary industrial plan to produce solar panels and cargo bikes with the slogan insorgiamo – we rise up. Over the next few years their solidarity activity for other struggles built a convergence of social and climate movements drawing in over 100 000 people from the region. They set up an ethical bank, worked with universities to research the technology needed for transition and drafted legal documents for the Tuscany authorities to facilitate a worker-led cooperative to return to the region the jobs that were destroyed.

On the evening of the first day of the assembly we gathered again under a waxing moon throwing light on another enormous banner hung high above a former reception centre. It displayed the words Collectivo Di Fabbica – Factory Collective and Lavortorio GKN Firenze – Laboratory of GKN Florence. The word “laboratory” is well chosen as the former GKN workers envision their struggle as a testing ground for just transition elsewhere.

Image credit: Cargo bikes by Phil Rowen, RMT

 

Speakers from Germany, the Basque Country and the UK joined the former GKN workers in a panel discussion with contributions from the RMT London Transport Political Officer, a Basque trade union representative from the threatened firm Stellantis, (formerly Chrysler), and a German climate activist from Wir Fahren Zusammen – We Travel Together. The young activist described how their group in Cologne had worked with bus workers to build a campaign for fair travel which spread to seventy cities, culminating in a joint strike of bus workers and Fridays for Future.

The following day the assembly was attended by Greta Thunberg who delivered a message of support and solidarity emphasising, “workers must not be left behind in the phase-out of sectors dependent on fossil fuels.” Popular shareholders voted to ratify the industrial plan and agreed to postpone the decision on whether to continue the occupation until after the regional government had met to discuss public intervention to enable the cooperative. The date of a hybrid event the following month to take this crucial decision was announced with a defiant statement, “it will be celebration or rage, bringing everything together. We will be a socially integrated factory or the seeds of future socially integrated factories.”

Bringing everything together is something they are good at. Culture is deeply woven into their struggle: they have integrated live music events and organised festivals of working-class literature – the most recent attended by five thousand people who heard actor Valerio Mastandrea read from Harold Pinter’s Trouble in the Works. The line, “the workers don’t like the products” resonated with the audience.

 

Over the weekend I reflected if the old world collapses, we’ll need to get the foundations of the new in place now – or face the kind of barbarism Octavia Butler depicts in The Parable of the Sower: a brutal society, wracked by climate change, subject to a far-right coup with sex slavery, debt bondage and vast homelessness. I am aware of community projects building the new within the old, giving me a sense that a quiet revolution is underway. This experience showed me how this can also manifest in industry. Had the former GKN workers not taken this path they too might have gone the way of Tata Steel at Port Talbot with mass redundancies and devastating regional consequences. Their vision for the socially integrated factory doesn’t just sow seeds of resistance against asset-stripping capital, but those of a new society and economy through its strategy of convergence.

A month later, popular shareholders reconvened to decide the future of the struggle: pagodas were transported to the city centre, music rang in the square, flares lit the sky red. The assembly resolved to continue the occupation concluding, “One day, perhaps, we will fall. Not today. And if they bury us, we will be seeds.”  The following day they declared, “In Piazza Poggi there was a whole thing; not just assembly, not only community you find yourself in, not just a narrative, not just a concert. It has been all that. A complex hybrid for a complex situation. Yet at the same time, the situation is absolutely simple.”

 

It is that simple. Production for profits — or for people and planet.

 

ANNE ENITH COOPER is a poet, writer and activist. She is the founder of The Way of Words: from the page to the stage, the author of the poetry pamphlet Touched, editor of the anthologies And Then There Was Light and Out is the Word and co-creator, editor and contributor to 306: Living under the Shadow of Regeneration. She is the Poetry Editor at The Rebel Library and a member of Poets for the Planet and NAWE.

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