In Conversation with Ferruccio Gambino
In this interview – conducted together with Devi Sacchetto on 3 July 2025 in Padua – Ferruccio Gambino retraces certain political and intellectual experiences that unfolded between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, focusing on the organisation of the three international meetings held by Potere Operaio between August 1970 and October 1971. Drawing on his involvement in the organisation of those meetings, Gambino recounts the web of personal and political relationships that brought innovative elements into workerist analysis: the focus on the autonomous initiative of African-American workers by George Rawick and John Watson; the Marxist feminism of Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James; the anti-colonial initiative of C.L.R. James, a point of reference for a new generation of anti-racist activists in Britain.
Some of these issues were addressed politically at Potere Operaio’s international meetings. Increasingly, the post-war reorganisation of exploitation was underpinned by various forms of migration involving both workers from the European Mediterranean employed as guest workers in central and northern Europe, and workers from the now former colonies who had emigrated to the former imperial metropolises. Racism and migration simultaneously highlighted both similarities and substantial local differences, while the echoes of anti-colonial struggles and Black liberation were also felt in Europe. The figure of the ‘migrant worker’, and the issue they raised, thus became a point of entry for addressing the political problems posed by a scale that exceeded the national scale. The challenge of organisation – even more than fifty years after the attempt described in the interview – remains marked by this complexity: the need to deal with different conditions of life, work and struggle, and to build political connections and transnational communication.
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Between Detroit, London and Padua
Marco Meliti: In previous interviews[1] , you have already mentioned how a significant part of your life has been characterised by frequent commuting, recalling your travels between Milan, Turin and Padua in 1968 and 1969, for academic and political reasons. However, you also mention how, a few years earlier, trains and boats carried you much further afield, to what were more or less long-term stays in the United States or the United Kingdom. Could you tell us about these experiences and the intellectual and political relationships you were able to develop?
Ferruccio Gambino: My interest in England followed my decision to leave the United States by the end of the summer of 1967 at the latest. I had been offered a one-year contract extension at Columbia University in New York, where I had been working since 1966, and in those days, no one had ever turned down such an offer. Eventually, I thought it over and turned it down. In the spring of 1967, I said that I would be leaving in a few months’ time, but hardly anyone believed me. However, within a fairly small circle, word had soon spread that Gambino was a ‘non-communist Marxist’, because of the contacts I had established in the United States, particularly in Detroit with the Facing Reality group. I anticipated that sooner or later this would cause me trouble in the United States.
I came to the conclusion that a change of scenery would be best, and I returned to Italy in September 1967. In the spring of 1968, I went to England, where George Rawick, who taught history in Detroit, had already settled temporarily for a sabbatical year.From the mid-1960s, Rawick had been working on his book on African-American slavery (From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community). The book drew on unpublished and scattered oral interviews with former male and female slaves, recorded and transcribed in the 1930s with federal New Deal funding. In 1967, Rawick decided to travel to England, where there was further bibliographic material from scholars who had worked on slavery in the British Empire and elsewhere. Before leaving for London in April 1967, Rawick came to New York and I put him up for a couple of weeks. Those were perhaps the most intense two weeks of my time in New York, and it was there that we established a solid friendship.
As he was leaving for England, Rawick invited me to join him in London, partly so that he could introduce me to the circle of West Indians who gathered around C.L.R. James and whom he already knew to some extent. In short, the connection between the ‘Italians’ and C.L.R. James came about thanks to George Rawick and Selma James, whilst C.L.R. James and I met for the first time only about two years later, in 1970 in London, when C.L.R. James was returning from Canada where he had been teaching.
At our first meeting, James examined me in a friendly but thorough manner, to understand what I had studied, how I had studied, how I had worked in the countryside until I was 18 and then in Milan after finishing high school. The examination was thorough, partly because C.L.R. James was familiar with country life and the universal distance between the big city and the small village.
At that time, C.L.R. James was already in poor health, largely due to a car accident. Nevertheless, his mind remained sharp and alert. He kept abreast of international affairs, paying particular attention to the West Indies, and specifically to his home islands, Trinidad and Tobago. In London and other English cities, when occasionally invited to speak by the West Indian and African communities, he was glad to accept. I attended some of those debates. They were gatherings of thirty or forty people, all young, many of them students, who held him in great esteem. Some of these students were politically inexperienced, so C.L.R. James was didactic and generous with references to the key points of their history: colonialism, slavery, and the struggles for autonomy and independence. However, C.L.R. James had always shown an interest in European and Italian affairs. He was interested in Italy because of the presence of a mass movement which, following the disasters of fascism, was now firmly oriented towards the left. I recall that by the end of a lecture he gave to a group of students, I believe in 1972, he said: “Watch that country: Italy”.
Politically, James always had good relations with certain figures on the Labour left. They were grateful to him for having exposed the most uncomfortable and concealed aspects of colonial history – not just British colonialism. As a result, he avoided both open clashes with Labour and the formation of a dedicated British anti-colonial political group. In short, C.L.R. James no longer wrote anti-racist leaflets and pamphlets as he had so courageously done in the American South during the Second World War. He wrote critical articles and talks, devoting himself to anti-colonial struggles and the prospects of communities of African origin who had immigrated to Europe from former colonies and colonies.
In 1968, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, my colleague in Padua, asked me to introduce her to Selma James’s London circle during a visit to London. Selma James already had an extraordinary political history by then. A New Yorker and schoolmate of George Rawick, she had worked as a factory worker in the vast industrial landscape that was Los Angeles between 1951 and 1953 and had been active in the Facing Reality group. In Los Angeles, she published her feminist pamphlet A Woman’s Place (Correspondence, 1953), which addressed the issue of global patriarchal—and not merely racist—segregation in original and combative terms.
When C.L.R. James was expelled from the United States as a result of McCarthyism, she did not hesitate to follow him, and in England she demonstrated an extraordinary political sensitivity to British society. Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa thus found themselves on the same wavelength. A friendship developed between them, though it began to fray in the mid-1970s, following the publication of the book The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972), which brought together the two pamphlets, Women and the Subversion of the Community by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and A Woman’s Place by Selma James .
MM: The publication of that book nevertheless bears witness to a period rich in theoretical and political development and organisational experimentation, including at an international level, as was the case with the International Feminist Collective, in which Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James were among the leading figures in the struggle for wages for housework. It seems to me that this was another reason why there was a certain focus on what was happening in Italy during those years.
FG: Certainly, so much so that in 1973 we held a meeting with International Socialism in the north of England, organised by this group, which was also attended by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who had come with me from Italy, and Selma James, who had come from London. The activists from International Socialism were amazed that we, ‘the Italians’, were activists and at the same time taught at universities. The fact is that International Socialism began the meeting by talking about an “Italian School”, a school of thought, addressing us from Potere Operaio, perhaps to give us a gift we had not asked for.
I let them carry on for a while with their “Italian School”, then I raised my hand and said that, as far as Potere Operaio was concerned, there was no such thing as an“Italian School”. The room fell silent. We didn’t identify with a “school”. We were more interested in discussing class structures and the imperial framework that persisted across various continents through a series of advances and setbacks. One of the problems was that when you brought up the imperial dimension, you immediately found yourself invoking a sort of taboo, with the British responding by immediately contrasting it with the sufferings endured by the British proletariat. Conversely, and commendably, British feminists did not fall in line with the men.
MM: The idea of a “so-called Italian school” will nevertheless continue to attract attention across the Channel, for example, that of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. Amongst the materials of a research project on the transformations of the state between 1976 and 1977, one also finds texts by Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, Guido Baldi (alias of Mario Montano) and… Ferruccio Gambino. This was also thanks to the fact that the publication of Operai e Stato (1972) immediately gained an international readership, as Sergio Bologna recalled. As early as the autumn of 1972, the US journal Telos published a review of the book and an English translation of Bologna’s essay (later also translated into German), whilst the English translation of your text on the workers’ struggles at Ford in Britain became the first publication in the English series Red Notes Pamphlets (1976).
FG: The translation of my text is by no means a faithful one. The translator was Ed Emery, who did not ask my permission to publish it and who, as he himself admitted, simplified the English version to make it more appealing. Incidentally, at that time in Italy, little was said about Great Britain; in other words, it was considered a rather uninteresting country. Conversely, Britain was of some interest in Europe because, from the early post-war years, it was a forerunner (along with France) of immigration arriving mainly from the British West Indies, partly through specific recruitment policies. And the British metalworking industry and hospitals relied on this immigration. Ford, moreover, maintained a foothold in the UK because it was interested not only in the domestic car market, but also in those of South Africa and the Netherlands.
Britain was also of some interest because the British National Health Service seemed to be driving a movement in favour of national health systems not only in continental Europe but also in the United States, where, by contrast, the various proposals failed. Unlike in other countries, the establishment of the British National Health Service was intended to alleviate the burden of care work on women.
MM: The very establishment of the British National Health Service was made possible by the recruitment of nurses and, above all, auxiliary service workers from the Caribbean. Regarding the migration patterns of those years, your essay on Ford contains some notable passages on these aspects. I’ll quote one before moving on: “This is how West Indians and Africans, who make up around 20% of Dagenham’s 22,000 workforce, work in the manufacture of separate parts and prepare materials for assembly in South Africa – which, along with the Netherlands, is Ford Britain’s largest car market – where Ford would discriminate against them, as it does in fact discriminate on the basis of skin colour”.
Towards a new revolutionary international
MM: It is not surprising that even outside British academic circles there was a certain interest in this kind of theoretical and political reflection, particularly within the milieu of the British Black Power movement. From the archives of these political groups in London, we know that they read some translations of articles published in Potere Operaio, as well as from the reports published in Potere Operaio (in issues 34, 35 and 36 and in the supplement ‘Towards the organisational conference for a new revolutionary international’ in issue 44), we know of at least three international meetings attended by various European organisations and others. Can you tell us about them?
FG: The first international conference was held in August 1970 in Baroncoli, near Florence. But the year before, some activists had already arrived in Italy from Kiruna, in Sweden—the mining town they are now razing to the ground because they have discovered that the subsoil is rich in minerals. In ’69, the miners of Kiruna had launched a long strike. A delegation from them came to Marghera, together with some German workers, for a meeting coordinated by Augusto Finzi and Italo Sbrogiò, if I remember correctly. They screened a self-produced documentary about their working conditions. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in Italy at the time.
The Baroncoli conference was organised partly by Lapo Berti, who handled relations with the German delegation, and partly by me – I was responsible for bringing John Watson from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. It took place in a farmhouse and lasted two days; I recounted the event in an article for the US film magazine Black Camera[2] . The aim of the meeting was to facilitate dialogue between political groups engaged in factory activism, albeit in very different national contexts. The central figure in Baroncoli was John Watson, who had arrived in Italy after passing through England and discussing matters with some members of the British Black Panther Movement – those who would later form the Race Today Collective. The link between the West Indians in England and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit was the Facing Reality group, namely C.L.R. James, Selma James, Martin Glaberman and George Rawick.
In Florence, there were also comrades from the German section – students and former students – some of whom worked at Opel near Frankfurt, and some of whom were involved in industrial action at the factory. We only narrowly avoided a clash between John Watson and the German comrades. While Watson was explaining the problems facing African Americans, a group of them asked him whether the League of Revolutionary Black Workers spoke to white workers in Detroit – whether it tried “to educate them” in revolutionary consciousness. John Watson grew irritated, and both Lapo Berti and I threw up our hands in dismay. At that point I said, “Hold on, John.” I went over to the German comrades and made it clear that if they framed the issue in pedagogical terms, the whole meeting would collapse. It was better to let John Watson explain what had actually happened during and after the great Detroit uprising of 1967. So the meeting was able to continue, and in the afternoon Watson presented a documentary entitled Finally Got the News (1970).
The meeting lasted a day and a half and proved fruitful. The only person at the conference who was neither German, Italian nor American was ‘Maria’, the pseudonym of a comrade who had arrived from Spain whilst it was still under dictatorship and who worked with the Comisiones Obreras in Barcelona. Maria had arrived at the last minute before the proceedings began and then, as soon as the conference ended, we realised that Maria had already left on her own.
MM: How were the conferences organised? Regarding these agreements you mention, was communication between organisations, or did it happen more through personal relationships?
FG: They were mainly contacts on a personal and political basis: there was a strong mutual trust.
The second conference was held in Zurich in November 1970, and was attended by a number of former students who were working in the car industry in the Frankfurt area. Also present were Swiss comrades who were active in the factories of the Canton of Ticino, and in particular in the mountainous area above Bellinzona, at a foundry called Monteforno, where they had organised a campaign and built a fairly solid and deep-rooted relationship of trust between the workers – the vast majority of whom were immigrants – and Swiss intellectuals. In the 1960s, the foundry’s management had sent a few agents from Ticino to recruit workers in Italy, particularly in Sardinia, and so managed to keep the factory running for a few years with Italian immigrants, until it closed in 1995.
As well as the German comrades and the Italian migrants in Switzerland, there were also a few Austrians, and I believe Daniel Cohn-Bendit was there too, who was best known as one of the leaders of the French May ’68 movement. And then there were us Italians as well, at least seven or eight of us.
MM: The composition of the participants you describe to seems to me to explain why a significant part of the discussion in Zurich was devoted to the issue of emigration. One of the outcomes of this international meeting was, in fact, an initial attempt at international action: a leafleting campaign in several languages (Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese, German and French) on trains carrying emigrants returning home for the Christmas holidays.
This was followed by a final conference, held from 1 to 3 October 1971 in Florence, which I believe is particularly significant for at least two reasons. The first is the question of international organisation, referred to right from the title (‘Towards the organisational conference for a new revolutionary international’), and then because of the broad participation it involved, including not only the political groups and workers already known from previous meetings (activists and workers from the USA, Switzerland, France and Germany), the Israeli Black Panthers, the Irish Republican Army, and at least three participants from England. Alongside the ‘comrade from London’ – the first of the three to speak, as reported in issue 44 of Potere Operaio – there were also a member of the British Black Panther Movement and an ‘Antillean comrade who had immigrated to London’. In his speech, the first speaker recounts the factory struggles and anti-racist struggles of Black people in England, noting that a few days after the Florence congress, the famous trial of the Mangrove 9 was due to begin in London, involving some of his comrades. The West Indian worker then traces the evolution of citizenship and immigration laws in post-war Britain, highlighting how they were part of the same logic of working-class governance that also affected white workers through the so-called ‘anti-strike laws’ (the Industrial Relations Act of 1971).
FG: The comrade from London is probably Ed Emery, who at the time went by the name of Peter Martin and was part of the Big Flame group. In addition to the West Indian worker you mentioned, there was also a Dominican from the Movimiento Popular Dominicano, who expressed a certain distance from factory struggles, as he was only familiar with struggles on plantations. In the Florentine hall, a few Italians shrugged their shoulders: the less perceptive comrades from Potere Operaio immediately brushed him off. At that point, I lost my temper. This comrade had arrived from Santo Domingo and was trying to explain to us how labour relations worked in the Caribbean, in the face of a dictator put in place by US multinationals.
This was the deep incomprehension, on the part of these workerists, regarding everything that had to do with the plight of African Americans, both in the United States and in the Caribbean; they had made no attempt to understand how racism worked and continues to work. Even back then, it wasn’t just African Americans but also Asians, and Indians, Pakistanis and even a few North Africans were beginning to appear in factories and on construction sites. In Detroit, Syrians were a militant component of the UAW, the car workers’ union, and also held important positions there. However, on this occasion there was a young man from the United States who was a member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, but who, apart from the group indoctrination within the League, understood little about industry and wages.
After that, however, the final creaking of the League could be heard, along with the first creakings of Potere Operaio.
[1] Interview of 10 June 2001 in Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘Quaderni rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano, edited by Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi and Gigi Roggero (DeriveApprodi, Rome, 2002); Dylan Davis, ‘The Revolt of Living Labour: An Interview With Ferruccio Gambino’, Viewpoint Magazine, 5 November 2019.
[2] Ferruccio Gambino, ‘Close-Up: Finally Got the News on Another Continent’, Black Camera, An International Film Journal, vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 2024), pp. 93–99.