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There is a revealing moment in ‘Asbestos’, the book that Alberto Prunetti dedicates to reconstructing the working life of his father Renato, a worker specialized in the steel and metallurgies of his country, who traveled from north to south and from west to east for decades , from the buoyant 1960s after the Italian economic miracle to the late 1980s, when the world sponsored by the Chicago School, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the murderers of the idea of society began to show their fierce inequalities, those that even today, thirty years later, feed the ideology of the most conspicuous ideologues of ultraliberalism as manna.
That revealing moment happens when Alberto, born with the 1973 oil crisis and who proclaims himself part of that “cognitive precariat” who must put his workforce, in this case writing and translation, at the service of very long days of commitment In order to barely make it to the end of the month, he reflects on the moment when the working class did not realize that capital had risen from the table of social peace and coffee for all, taking with it the lion’s share and leaving the worker the mortgage of a future in ruins that would end up being paid by their descendants, the same people who today wonder in what line of this history everything went wrong so that the university and traveled children of the workers born in the 40s and 50s of the last century they lived much worse than parents who barely went to school, never crossed the borders of their country and never knew other interests than football, television and alcoholic distillates.
This question, which is not trivial or rhetorical, imposes the consideration of ‘Asbestos’ as a much more complex text than a fictionalized report about the relationship between workplace accidents and economic rapacity and suggests its connection with the best portraitists of the profit dictatorship in affluent societies, from John Berger to Mike Davis, through Günter Wallraff or Luciano Bianciardi, whom Prunetti certainly pays tribute to in ‘Asbestos’. And this continuity is what allows us to read this chronicle of a death announced as a not at all innocent episode not only of the mental disintegration of the workers’ struggle, but also of the constancy with which the powers have managed to buy the complicit silence of the protagonists of this The bloodless disarmament that has been and continues to be the reconversion of the urban and peasant proletariat into a very mediocre and de-ideologized middle class, brutalized with placebos and destined to be diluted without noise in the umpteenth social catastrophe of the century underway, wrecks of a shipwreck that, In an Italian key, it has taken place in Busalla, Piombino or Piancastagnaio, but that the Asturian reader will be able to translate without problem the many corpses of the working-class tradition that still today seek among us the way to receive a burial, if not heroic, at least honorable.
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