Deciphering Harm. Naming the Issue in Italian Healthcare Struggles During the ‘60s and ‘70s

Apstrakt

During the 1960s and 1970s, Italian workers’ movements brought together concerns for wellbeing, environmental justice, critiques of automation, and the refusal of work into a radical vision for healthcare. This chapter examines three significant case studies that highlight how workers, activists, and trade unionists developed strategies to transform lived experiences into collective narratives. The first case explores Ivar Oddone’s use of the “doppelgänger method,” first developed with FIAT workers, a technique that facilitated the transformation of personal, somatic experiences into a collective diagnostic tool for collective political action. The second example focuses on how activists in the healthcare movement politicized the concept of toxicity. By developing a vocabulary around “noxiousness,” they highlighted the inseparability of workplace health issues from broader capitalist structures. Whereas toxicity often refers to chemical exposure or measurable contaminants, nocività named a wider field of embodied, collective, and systemic harms, connecting factory fumes to domestic labour, community health, and environmental degradation and framing capitalism itself as an adverse factor to health. Finally, the article considers the resistance of the “Leboline” workers to the new Methods-Time Measurement (MTM) chainwork management at the Lebole textile factory in Arezzo. The all- female workforce opposed these new rhythms, which introduced an unsustainable work pace causing severe mental exhaustion and adverse health repercussions. These examples highlight the Italian movements’ diverse practices of translation and naming as a means to expose and contest the multifaceted nature of exploitation, and their commitment to a proliferation of commitments as the articulation of an emancipatory politics of health. These Italian struggles also illuminate the broader questions of how health can be politicized today amid planetary crises, where the practice of naming harms determines not only what counts as a problem but also what kinds of political responses can be pursued.