The Organizer (1963)
Monicelli’s comic examination of nineteenth-century labor politics under New Left conditions
Country: Italy
Director: Mario Monicelli
Time: 2 hours and 6 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription)
What It Evokes: Labor organizing, Gramsci(?), the 1960s New Left
In summer 1962, 67,000 Fiat workers took part in a walkout in solidarity with striking metalworkers in Turin. An early bastion of Italian industrialism, Turin had emerged Italy's automotive manufacturing hub in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1961, a 90-day Michelin factory strike in the same city had ended in violence and limited gains for the French manufacturer’s employees. Early in 1962, Lancia automotive workers had staged a labor action demanding additional vacation. By June 1962, the Fiat walkout had become a strike. In response, Fiat union bosses, concerned with an influx of economic migrants from Southern Italy, negotiated an agreement with company management without consulting rank-and-file members, accepting terms almost universally recognized (by workers) as unfavorable (to workers). In turn, Fiat employees surrounded union headquarters in the city’s Piazza Statuto and engaged in three days of street battles before police shut down the protests and workers returned to factories.1 It was a deeply ambivalent result, but would help lay the groundwork for later mass strikes that occurred throughout Italy between 1968 and 1970.
One year after the Fiat strike, Mario Monicelli made The Organizer, a dramatic comedy centering on early trade union activity in Turin during the “late 1800s.”2 Released in Italian as “The Comrades,” the film centers on a group of textile factory workers who, after a workplace maiming, organize a committee and haphazardly negotiate with their bosses to reduce their 14-hour workday by one hour in order to limit injuries caused by fatigue. Initially rebuffed, they struggle to overcome various collective action issues until the film’s titular hero, Professor Sinigaglia, appears. A former high school teacher and inveterate labor organizer (currently on the lam from police for labor organizing in Genoa), Sinigaglia helps build worker solidarity and coordinate a large-scale strike.
Part-time rascal and full-time agitator, Professor Sinigaglia, played against type by Marcello Mastroianni, remains an outsider—a stooped and genteel intellectual amidst hardy laborers—who earns the trust of his comrades by demonstrating his own dedication to their cause. His myopia (literal and figurative and continually underscored) remains both his greatest asset and greatest weakness, as well as a source of continual comic relief. Much like the Fiat strike, his organizing results remain deeply ambiguous. In the face of ever-more draconian responses from “capital” and the state, Turin’s textile workers forge new forms of solidarity and begin shifting the conceptions, norms, and beliefs required to win both legitimation and workplace benefits. That being said, the state can still shoot into crowds.
Though the film’s subject matter would appear tailor made for neo-realist treatment, the film’s director, Mario Monicelli, came to fame as a progenitor of the commedia all'italiana—an umbrella term for internationally popular Italian comedies of the 1950s and 1960s that tended to focus on lower-class schemers and employed humor to attack traditional taboos and mores in Italian society. In touching on serious issues relevant to contemporary Italian politics, Monicelli turned his preferred genre’s tropes and conventions to advantage, underscoring the frailties and strengths and camaraderie of his protagonists through humor, while resisting the teleological framings towards which the subject matter lends itself.
Though set in the late nineteenth century—itself a time of dramatic labor action across Europe—the film engaged strands of New Left thought emergent in the 1960s. In particular, certain film critics have tended to espy the thought of Antonio Gramsci lurking beneath The Organizer’s surface. (Gramsci co-founded the Italian Communist Party. His incisive prison writings on revolutionary politics came to general prominence in the 1960s long after his 1937 death in Mussolini’s prisons at the age of 46.) Part of a generation grappling with the absence of revolution outside Russia following events in 1917, Gramsci re-deployed the Greek term hegemony to articulate a vision of presiding cultural conditions (“cultural hegemony”) through which dominant classes promoted and maintained society’s ideas, beliefs, practices, norms, and customs in order to forge systems of valuation amenable to preserving the social structures necessary for capitalistic modes of production. In turn, the promulgation of these cultural values relied upon “traditional intellectuals” who both naturalized and rendered ineffable highly contingent and novel social configurations. In opposition to these traditional intellectuals, Gramsci envisioned “organic intellectuals” originating from the working classes and capable of articulating a set of persuasive principles (the “war of position”) that would build consensus towards direct political action (the “war of maneuver”). (Gramsci had actually worked in Turin on the newspaper L'Ordine Nuovo in the hopes of bringing forms of “intellectualism” to the city’s workers.)3
If one squints, one can certainly find affinities between Gramsci’s conception of an “organic intellectual” and Professor Sinigaglia—though the analogy only goes so far. Perhaps more productively, invoking Gramsci highlights the context within which The Organizer was made and emphasizes the re-discovery of certain thinkers in the 1960s who would go on to become central inspirations for the New Left’s politics (the term itself dates from 1965). In addition to Gramsci, the writings of Rosa Luxembourg and György Lukacs were being re-published and translated into new languages during these years. (Each had fallen into neglect in a world where Communist Parties and their satellites managed orthodoxy and its attendant reading lists.) Happily for those losing faith in the Soviet project, these writers had disagreed with various Leninist principles and had never held power—a universal salve for political thinkers. This re-valuation coincided with the “re-discovery” of the younger (more humanistic) Karl Marx, whose early writings had engaged with Hegelian historicism and freedom in ways distinct from the later Capital, which showcased a more “scientific” Marx long embraced by Marxist-Leninist parties worldwide.4
The Organizer benefits from understanding this context, less because it embodies the particular vision of any of these thinkers than because it presents the productive union of intellectuals capable of formulating organizing objectives and laborers whose collective determination and sacrifice generate better working conditions. In turn, this marriage would itself be instrumental to alliances between the university and the factory in the 1960s. (Obviously, the productive relationship between thinkers and the working class can be traced to the birth of labor organizing. Indeed, the precise nature of those interactions generated some of the most robust debates across various Internationals.) As a result, The Organizer's focus on the alliance between intellectuals and labor would anticipate some of the 1960s most dramatic events, though perhaps not predict the variable nature of their (still very contested) outcomes. In turn, Monicelli’s ability to draw out the humanity in his characters through humor, while taking seriously the very real issues that dogged nineteenth-century workers as they attempted to fight for concessions from parsimonious and unsympathetic bosses, constructs a deeply optimistic picture of progress hard won through labor struggle, alongside its enormous costs: Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.5
Go Down The Rabbit Hole:
Mario Monicelli — Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958)
Mario Monicelli — The Great War (1959)
The particular issues with the new contract centered around the treatment of unskilled laborers on shop floors, jobs that had come under threat by both automation and northward migration. I found much of the strike’s history recounted here.
Though the exact year is not specified, it takes place sometime after 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War removed French troops from Rome and enabled the total unification of the Italian peninsula.
Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, SPN: 9–10
For those super into the intellectual battles of 1960s Western European thought, Louis Althusser’s dogged determination to erect a stark division between the works of a young Marx and a mature, “scientific” Marx constituted a primary reaction to this “re-discovery.”
Apparently this was not actually coined by Gramsci, but by the French playwright Romain Rolland. “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal” and all that.