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.
In our current research, which we present here in form of a growing zine and library, we 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.
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, including by inspiring a number of working class’ mobilization for healthcare in South America, for instance.
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.
David Harvey remarked that under capitalism, to be healthy is defined simply by the ability to perform labour - this is why people need a doctor’s note to certify that they are sick so they can skip work. However, many do not agree with this narrow definition.
The struggles for health in Italy begun as the political questioning of its opposite – which these movements identified not as sickness nor as fitness, or the capacity to optimally perform work. Rather, political movements begun to focus on the key term nocività – translatable as noxiousness in English.
Noxiousness instead is the property of damaging a living process and to provoke pathologies, both to a singular organism and to an entire ecosystem. A noxious process or substance can have temporary or permanent damaging effects on health; it can move fast or become chronic; it can cause death or “merely” negatively impact the capacity of living beings to reproduce and thrive.
So by focusing on noxiousness - which is produced and not a condition of the individual body, as sickness is - these movements open up the problem of health in a strategic way. They linked the wellbeing of workers, who were exposed to toxicity at work, with that of their living conditions in their neighbourhoods which were destitute and polluted, and with the conditions of domestic labour, and with the impact of capitalist production over the broader environment.
