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content/factor/WorkHealthEnvironment.md

@@ -34,6 +34,28 @@ These four noxiousness factors made discussing health conditions easier. The cla
 
 We explored more in detail the technique used to first produce this pamphlet **here**.
 
+Another key document to understand the intertwining of the politics for work, health and environment of the itme was *Against Noxiousness*, a political communiqué written in 1971 by the group Comitato Politico degli Operai di Porto Marghera, a political collective where renown autonomist thinkers such as Maria Rosa Dalla Costa and Toni Negri begun their militancy. The activities of this group and the context of Porto Marghera, which is the site of a petrol-chemical plant near Venice, have been the focus of some recent research by Lorenzo Feltrin and Devi Sacchetto, which maked some of this history available in the English language. 
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+What makes *Against Noxiousness* a generative document for our contemproary reflections is how it performed another key intervention in the politics of translation around health, positing that healthy conditions can never be the by-product of inherently toxic and unjust capitalist relations of production. The paper opens with the following sentences: 
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+>It is necessary to immediately distinguish between a form of noxiousness as it is traditionally understood, linked to the working environment (toxic substances, fumes, dust, noise, etc.) from the one more widely linked to the capitalist organisation of work. 
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+And the document coontinues with the following analysis and demands:
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+>To correctly pose the theme of noxiousness today […] ultimately means to pose the question of power in its articulation. The only non-rhetorical way of posing and solving this problem is to place it on the organizational ground. In fact, we say that noxiousness must be opposed as it is noxiousness "of work": and therefore [we demand] a reduction in working hours for everyone and not just for "toxic" departments, an increase in wages, regulatory equality, free transport…
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+!(Comitato Politico degli Operai di Porto Marghera, 28 February 1971. The paper was first presented at the Congress of the Workers of Veneto, Cinema Marconi, Mestre. My translation)[].
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+So, in this document we can see the leap from the problem of noxiousness at work to the one of the noxiousness of work under capitalism. Thus the group pushed for a radical strategy of refusal of labour, as under capitalism, work is destined to remain inherently toxic. In their reflections, the Porto Marghera group also rejected capitalist technologies as harmful to health and reclaimed the right to collectively determine not only the conditions under which one gets to work, but crucially also the very goals of production, which should be justified by its benefits to society (and not profit) and conducted so as to not harm the environment. 
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+The group were in this sense also critical of the trade unions and the communist party's efforts to promote the public health system and the participation of workers’ council in determining health and safety conditions, as they saw these measures as too easily coopeted into weak reformism.
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+# The 4th Noxiousness Factor: the Mental Load
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+*The Work Environment* first produced at FIAT and *Against Noxiousness* of Porto Marghera agreed in identifying one mid-term tendency with which I would like to conclude.
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+In the language of *The Work Environment*, this was the idea that while the first 3 factors of noxiousness were going to be mitigated by tendencies within capitalism itself, the 4th factor pertaining to mental wellbeing was going to get worse.
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