Yesterday my father met with an old colleague of his. They worked together in the metal industry, my father as a sheet metal welder and his friend as an electrician.
What did his friend say to my father?
That of their (approximately) 150 fellow workers, only these two survived past the age of 65.
My father because he was fired relatively early, and his electrician friend because as an electrician he worked inside a protective canopy.
The rest almost all died of cancer because the metal shavings entered their respiratory system and caused cancer.
Back then there were no strong health and safety measures for workers (and now there is a problem, somewhat less so).
Why was my father fired, then, in 1970?
As he has told me, one day they had received a visit from the boss and his son.
The foreman had told the workers that "when the bosses come, you will stand up".
Then my father turned to his dick, saying to him:
"Did you hear? when the boss comes, you'll stand up."
Glory and Honor to the working class!
Death to Bosses!
Ιωάννης Τζανάκος
What Pasolini, (and) my father taught me.
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήMy family was ''built'' in the reformist democratic socialist struggle of the Greek post-war working class.
The ''spiritual father'' of my father and mother was not their parents but a centrist social-democrat son-in-law from Piraeus, a merchant marine engineer, who was interned in a Nazi camp in Austria and survived. He was not a "Kapo" but very young when he was arrested by the Nazis during the German Nazi occupation of Greece, for this reason he survived.
The "new family" of workers, engineers, centrist social democrats and hard anti-rights, had as its principle the dignity but also the Escape from where there is torture and exploitation:
You do not betray your brothers to the place of torture, you are oppose the boss, you fight it, you unionize, you demand here and now pro-labor reforms, but you have the right as a worker or employee to be an INDIVIDUAL, to break all contracts by organizing your escape.
Whenever you can, you go to the cinema, or to parties, and when you come into conflict with the bosses because your health and survival, for you and your loved ones, are at risk, you do not count on immediate survival through the salary and prefer dismissal or resignation, and all will be well. Life is good and ready for adventure and risk, even if you are poor.
An illustrative detail: the children of this extended "mental family" all became communists (uncle's children) or left-wing communists (like me), while never setting foot in an industrial factory (except for me for a few months, but, I not standed it).
The echoes of the ''social democratic worker'' that were our parents, some of them coming from some wild rural "South", made us the younger "communists", but this did not do us any good, nor to the workers in general.
Is it not the fault of "communism" in general, for the fact that it becomes the echo of a working class memory and not a living instrument of the working class, or is it? is this its alienating role? I go back to my family's past and find the individualistic and fearless worker who may be a social democrat or an anarchist, less often a "communist".