In 1964, the all female workforce of the apparel manufacturer Lebole (Arezzo) were among the first one in Italy to experience the transformation of their way of working according to the teachings of the MTM (Motion Time Measurement) Method imported from the US. In the span of less than a decade, these women, many of them accomplished tailors before entering the factory, went from a semi-artisanal organization of labour, to a progressively more fragmented and repetitive segmentation of tasks. With the introduction of the MTM method, their movements, measured and minutiously analysed , became fully "choreographed", the execution of each motion meticulously scripted - in short, they were ordered to behave like ROBOTS.
The impact of this new way of working for the psycho-somatic health of the Leboline (this was the nickname of the workers) was enourmous. Many experienced faintings, nervous breakdowns and other symptoms of exhaustion, which the factory doctors would try to cure with cycles of "vitamin" injections. One of these women also chose to take her own life.
But the confrontation with new kinds of technical violence also led the Leboline to become an incredibly active force in the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy. They not only fought with and within workers' unions and communist party for better working conditions as part of national mobilizations, but also engaged in battles for social reproduction (pushing for municipal kindergartens, for instance) and for a radical transforming of the psychic and physical healthcare of workers.
At the beginning of the 1960s, political organizing was forbidden during working hours, while breaks from work were short and few. So the Leboline invented a number of ways to communicate and coordinate: important messages were passed on in a relay during bathroom visits, a practice named "Radio Gabinetto" (Radio Toilet). The lyrics of traditional and popular hit songs of the time were re-written to convey news and political messages. These songs would then be sung at work and during demonstrations.
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 their many health-related struggles, one was against the indiscriminate use of formaldehyde, a compound used augment the firmness of clothes, but which has a harmfull impact on the troath and vocal chords.
# About Maddening Rhythms: Healthcare struggles at the intersection of technology, environment and refusal of work
In our research, which we present here in form of a growing zine and a related library of resources(some of which, from the Luigi Firrao archive at ISEC Foundation, we are making available here for the first time in digital form), we retrace Lebole's story
focused on one of such struggles for health that took place in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. We believe that reactivating some of the stories, techniques and imaginaries that came out of it 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.
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, rather than via a single payer model).
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.
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.
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.
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 the co-writing of the syllabus of [Pirate Care](https://pirate.care) (2019) and then of [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).
