+++
title = "Maddening Rhythms"
has_factors = ["americandepartment.md", "faintinginjections.md", "whoarethesewomen.md", "radiogabinetto.md", "stillnotrobots.md"]
aliases = ["/zine"]
+++


# Maddening Rhythms: Healthcare struggles at the intersection of technology, environment and refusal of work

![](static/images/piu_macchina.png)


## The story from which we started: Lebole, c. 1964

In 1964, the all-female workforce of the apparel manufacturer Lebole in Arezzo, Tuscany, were among the first ones in Italy to experience the transformation of their workflow according to the teachings of MTM (Methods-Time Measurement), a new methodology for analysing and organizing chainwork imported from the USA.  In the span of less than a decade, these women, many of whom were accomplished tailors before entering the factory, went from a semi-artisanal organization of labour, to a progressively more fragmented and repetitive segmentation of tasks, to a fully scripted repetitive performance with maddening rhythms.  With the introduction of the MTM method, their movements were measured and minutiously analysed by a team of experts, who then "choreographed" the execution of each motion in a new, time-saving manner. In short, the workers were expected to behave like ROBOTS. 

The impact of the new MTM method on the health conditions of the Leboline (this was the nickname of the workers) was enourmous. Many experienced faintings, nervous breakdowns and other symptoms of exhaustion, conditions which the factory doctors tried to cure with cycles of "vitamin" injections. One of these women also chose to take her own life, many were forced to take frequest sick leaves. 

The confrontation with the technical violence of MTM also led the Leboline to become an incredibly active force in the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy. They not only rejected the new technical violence of the method, insisting on slower rhythms and more frequent breaks, they also fought with (and within) workers' unions and communist party for the recognition of their specific labour as women, engaging in battles for municipal kindergartens, for instance. 

![](static/images/Lebole.jpg)

At the beginning of the 1960s, as political organizing was forbidden during working hours, the Leboline begun their political organizing as they could, invented a number of cunning ways to coordinate amongst themselves, in via endless word of mouth outside the factory gates, on the bus to work, and during the very few moments of rest. Crucially, important messages were communicated in a relay during bathroom visits, a practice named "Radio Gabinetto" (Radio Toilet). They also revamped the use of the contrafacta technique, modifying the lyrics of traditional but also popular hit songs of the time  to convey their political messages while singing at work and at the rallies. 

By developing in their own form of musical production, Lebole's workers intervened into the maddening rhythms that marked their experience in the factory, to compose other, more poetic, playful, counter-hegemonic rhythms and political horizons, as well as to "compose" themselves as an iconic posse within the political struggles that marked the Italian "long 1968". 

Finding their own voice and fighting for keeping it was more than a metaphor for the Leboline: with bitter irony, amongst the many health-related struggles these women carried on, one was against the indiscriminate use of formaldehyde, a compound used to augment the firmness of clothes, but which has a harmfull impact on the troath and vocal chords. 


## Luigi Firrao 

We first encountered the story of the Lebole workers and the impact that MTM had on their lives and health conditions during our research residency at the archive of Fondazione ISEC in Sesto San Giovanni, near Milan. Their story was "told" to by Luigi Firrao, who followed it meticulously for a number of years. Firrao had a number of interviews with the Leboline, where he chatted with them about their experiences, as well as recording the powerful lyrics of their political choruses. He then wrote several newspaper articles denouncing the hidden violence of the new management techniques which were silently creeping in Italian factories since the early 1960s. Firrao also left us an exceptional collection of newspaper cut-outs, articles, and reportages on the theme of MTM and its impact on the life of the workers. 

Luigi Firrao was born in Rome in 1927 and died in 1975. In 1944, he joined the partisan Partito d’Azione and in 1946 became a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Between 1948 and 1953, the PCI sent him to Viterbo to organize the struggles of agricultural workers, activities which led to his arrest and multiple convictions. 

He was then hired by Misal, a company that manufactured machine tools. Within Misal, despite his political ideas, he managed to make a remarkable career and assume a managerial position. During the 1960s, Firrao became interested in various issues related to his role as manager, and in particular the subject of work organization and, in parallel, the subject of working conditions in industry.

Together with Giulia D’Angelo, his life partner since 1962, he carried out research on popular culture, collaborating with the "Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano", with Nuova Scena, Nanni Ricordi, Gianni Bosio, Dario Fo and Franca Rame. In 1963-64, Luigi and his wife collaborated with ARCI (a national network of recreational workers clubs) to organize “comizi cantati” (political speeches that were sung rather than talked) and in Rome they set up a Sicilian storytellers show with Ignazio Buttitta, Otello Profazio, Vito Santangelo and Ciccio Busacca. In 1965, Luigi and Giulia organized the first Italian political cabaret, "l'Armadio", based in Rome in via La Spezia, in the San Giovanni district.

In 1969, after publicly taking position in favor of the student movement, he was expelled from the party and joined the "Manifesto" movement with his wife. From the years 1968-69 until his death, together with Giulia, he dealt with the capitalist organization of labor, interviewing numerous male and female workers. Firrao then organized a series of lectures on the subject at the University of Rome.

The text above is a modified translation of [*Luigi Firrao, un uomo dai molti talenti nelle carte del suo archivio*](https://archivio.fondazioneisec.it/percorsi/luigi-firrao-un-uomo-poliedrico-nelle-carte-del-suo-archivio), by Alberto De Cristofaro.

## About Maddening Rhythms Zine

Maddening Rhythms is the name we gave to the experimental publication you are holding between your hands or reading on your screen. It is a growing, mutating zine that accompanies our research exploring the links between healthcare, environmental and work-related struggles from an Italian standpoint. The title we chose for this zine is our English translation of the one of a newspaper article - RITMI DA PAZZIA - which denounced how in the factory workers are subjected to a constant accelleration in the name of profit. These rhythms are maddening in the sense that were making people furious and push them to organize for change, while at the same time they also provoked many to experience negative mental health conditions. As we shall see, burnouts, depression and psychosis were widespread experiences linked with chain work. The story of Lebole workers' and their resistance to the MTM method became for us a red thread to be able to navigate the intricacies of these epochal changes in governance, technologies and methods of exploitation, as well as changes in the subjects, places, and modes of doing politics.

The zine comes complete with its own library of resources, some of which are documents taken from the Luigi Firrao archive at Fondazione ISEC, which we are making available here for the first time in digital form. In its digital version, Maddening Rhythms runs on Sandpoints, a still-in-development digital platform for collective writing, learning, and experimental publishing. This free software tool allows readers to easily copy onto a USB drive a single folder that contains the whole website, alongside a PDF library of all included references, and to read it offline in a browser or move it to another server. Furthermore, in situations that call for paper, it is possible to automatically export the publication into a PDF that is ready for on-demand print. The use of Sandpoints is a small step in embedding our work in a more susteinable technopolitical infrastructure, specifically relevant here perhaps, as we are critically discussing the evolution of  exploitation via technologically-driven processes.

Maddening Rhythms is organized around 5 'factors', each centering one aspect of the Leboline's experiences and struggles and using it to introduce a broader reflection. We believe that reactivating some of the stories, techniques and imaginaries that came out of the struggles for health that took place in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s can be a useful exercise in our present days, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 syndemic, an event with a death poll that could have been, in large part, preventable. Connecting with the struggles that first obtained a public healthcare system might help us sharpen our demands for the future. 


## Italian Healthcare struggles

The aftermath of WWII saw a number of struggles for health to become recognised as a common good. Many people fought for health practices to be supported via the public sector, and for care to be made available universally and for free at the point of use (that is, paid for through general taxation).

Some of these struggles were more successful, other were less so, but whenever change came about it was not a top-down decision, but a result of complex mobilizations that often created transversal connections between those affected, organizers and professionals.

We focus on Italy not only because it is our context of origin, but also because during the decades 1960s and 1970s, it was an extremely lively political laboratory that became significant beyond its own context.

Italy in these decades was subjected to a fast industrialization that deeply altered the life and work patterns of many. Assembly line work, organised according to the principles of scientific management, was brutal, dangerous, poisonous and mentally alienating. It should come as no surprise therefore that the struggles for health were largely working class struggles, addressing simultaneously question related to conditions of labour at the workplace, environmental degradation, gender roles in the home and the desirability of technological innovation. 

In the aftermath of the decade-long neoliberal crisis of care and the more recent pandemic, many political imaginaries related to the protection of collective health rely on mutual aid and solidarity networks. Many of the initiatives that want care to be more accessible and inclusive are set up as self-organzised practices. Many activists and organizers are loudly critical of public healthcare provisions which are perceived as negligent and over-bureaucratic at best, incompetent and punitive at worst. 

Looking back at the Italian struggles for health of the 1960s and 1970s is a relevant tasks today as this history reminds us of a different possibility in orienting our political imaginaries. Rather than presenting autonomous and self-organzied practices as the opposite of languishing public infrastructures, they remind us that these very different alignment of forces is possible, as these  struggles led to the creation of a public health care system in 1978. 

The pressure for creating such public health care system was born from an unprecedented alliance between left political forces, advanced experiences renewing medical practice, radical health activism, struggles by trade unions, workers’ groups, student and feminist movements. The 1978 reform was a universal, public, free health service, offering a wide range of provision outside the market, largely modelled on the British NHS and reflecting the definition of health spelt out by the WHO in 1946.

Abandoning the tradition of a corporatist health system with its limited coverage of separate professional groups, Italy’s reform introduced a public and universal health service, financed through general taxation, freely available to all.

The link between the self-organized struggles and the new public system becomes apparent in the way it was designed in its original conception (albeit soon corrupted by a series of reactionary modification to the law).  In several areas – mental health, occupational health, women’s health, drug treatments - new knowledge on illness prevention, new practices of service delivery and innovative institutional arrangements emerged, with a strong emphasis on territorial services addressing together health and social needs. The movements' legacy was palpable in the integrated vision of health – physical and psychic, individual and collective, linked to the community and the territory – that emerged. The struggles were clear in their proposal: a new, less hierarchical type of doctor-patient relationship was needed; healthcare should be linked to territories and, as much as possible, conducted in participatory manner; preventive approaches, rather than curing, were central in this vision. This political strategy viewed health as combining a collective dimension and an individual condition; collective struggles were therefore needed to address the economic and social roots of disease and public health problems. This approach was paralleled by the feminist movement in addressing women’s health issues, including the important experiments in self-organized health clinics. As Giulio Maccacaro had argued in 1976, the strategy was a bottom-up “politicization of medicine”, challenging the way industrial capitalism was exploiting workers and undermining health and social conditions in the country.


## Who we are

Maddalena Fragnito and Valeria Graziano collaborated for the first time on the research [Rebelling with Care. Exploring open technologies for commoning healthcare](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p1lYRdjZd0MsRJCMewelfdk9hnGGGz4E/view) (2019). A year later they were co-writing of the syllabus of [Pirate Care](https://pirate.care) (2019) and [Flatten the curve, grow the care!](https://syllabus.pirate.care/topic/coronanotes/), a project born with the outbreak of the pandemic (2020). With to the support of Memory of the World, in 2021 they collaborated for the digitization of the books series [Medicina e potere](http://medicinapotere.memoryoftheworld.org/#) (Medicine and Power), edited in the '70s by Giulio Maccacaro for the publisher Feltrinelli. Currently, they share the artist residence Matrice Lavoro (curated by Base Milano and the ISEC Foundation), which allowed them to dig into the archives in search for the forgotten stories related to workers' struggles for health in Italy (2022).


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