I think you are thinking of this article on Emilia-Romagna. Yoshie
***** In Bologna, Small Is Beautiful
The cooperative economics of Italy's Emilia-Romagna holds a lesson for the U.S.
By Robert Fitch
...To see that there are other options, you have to travel to the richest city in Italy: Bologna -- Communist Bologna (six years ago the Italian Communist Party renamed itself the Democratic Party of the Left, or P.D.S.). Polls confirm it as the favorite city of all Italians. The historic center, with its soaring medieval towers, Renaissance palazzos and Baroque porticoes, is among the best-preserved in Italy. And perhaps even more remarkable, working-class Bolognese continue to live there. Since the anti-Fascist resistance came down from the hills and took power fifty years ago, Bologna and the surrounding Emilia-Romagna region have been transformed into a working left-wing model of a future Italy, an alternative to the alliance of media mogul Silvio Berlusconi and neo-Fascist Gianfranco Fini [see Daniel Singer's editorial, "Italy's Olive Tree," this week]. Here is a place where the left came to power and didn't make a mess.
Emilia-Romagna begins just south of Milan. Emilians live in the ancient cities of the Po Valley: Ferrara, Parma, Modena, Piacenza and, of course, Bologna. Neighboring Romagna stretches east along the Adriatic from the working-class resort city of Rimini to Ravenna, the former capital of Byzantine emperors. Emilia-Romagna is a region of small companies and high wages; of Communist administrators and intense local democracy....
The Emilian model, however, shows that there's more to life than what's been dreamed of in our cold war philosophies. Local cooperation and the ability to produce for highly competitive international markets needn't be mutually exclusive -- the two can blend like oil and vinegar. There are more than 60,000 workers employed in some 1,800 "red" Emilian co-ops. But co-ops haven't prevented the region from increasing its share of international exports. Emilia-Romagna's small and medium-sized companies -- both craft-based and high-tech -- compete internationally, and work cooperatively within industrial districts that have produced the fastest growth of any region in the country. Unemployment, at just 4.7 percent, is even lower than the jobless rate in Lombardy and Piedmont, Northern Italy's corporate heartland. Emilia-Romagna was once a desperately impoverished agricultural area. Now the region ranks second among Italy's twenty regions in median per capita income. And it stands tenth among the 122 regions in the entire European Community.
What about political life under a Communist regime?...Not just once, but consistently over the past twenty years, Emilia-Romagna has led in the responsiveness of its bureaucracy; the scope of its public services and the efficiency with which they're delivered; and -- not surprisingly given its performance -- in popularity. Just look at the election results since the war. What party anywhere -- not just in Italy -- has been returned to office regularly, in free elections, for fifty years? And with increasing electoral margins: from 34 percent in 1945 to the 57 percent won by Governor Pier Luigi Bersani in the 1995 spring regional elections -- the second-highest share won by any of the twenty governors in Italy.
The success of the Emilian model challenges the political dualisms of the U.S. left. For us, political power and left principles are mutually exclusive. So the point is to stay away from mass politics. Stay fragmented; focus on single issues; just write about how bad everything is; organize only in emergency coalitions to defend the status quo you just finished denouncing yesterday. Yet the pillars of the Emilian model rest on principles that aren't so different from those that have helped define the U.S. left since the sixties -- participatory democracy and industrial democracy. Somehow this experiment got off the ground. And while it may have lost some momentum, it doesn't seem to have crashed. What's gotten the Emilian model this far?
The answer is political action. Some observers lament the decline of the old Bolognese political passions. Yet even in the mid-nineties Bologna's political participation is off any scale Americans are used to. In 1994, when Berlusconi tried to cut back the welfare state, demonstrations broke out in cities all across Italy. More than a million people protested in Rome. In Bologna 250,000 turned out. A demo of comparable size to Bo's in New York City would have to rally 5 million protesters. But far more inhumane cuts in the city budget never produced more than 20,000 demonstrators. It's not that we feel so much less compassion and outrage than the Bolognese, it's that we lack a complex and powerful political structure to engage and express our feelings.
Look for the office of the P.D.S. in the Bologna telephone book and there are eighty-five separate listings. These are overwhelmingly neighborhood organizations. As University of Illinois professor Raffaella Nanetti has shown, Bologna's citywide planning successes in preservation, housing and child care have been made possible by these active, volunteer, decentralized organizations with real local power.
But leadership matters too. To meet the top local party officials, you are escorted up a marble balustrade staircase in one of Bologna's most sumptuous palaces -- the Palazzo Marescotti Brazzetti. There the blue-jeaned, mustachioed party secretary, Sergio Sabattini, discourses on the benefits of municipal socialism under a stunning Baroque fresco. The palazzo, occupying a full block along the famous Via Barbieri, has been declared a "house of the people," but the people you meet in the beautifully appointed and electronically up-to-date offices -- L'Unità, the party newspaper, and the Istituto Gramsci have their headquarters here too -- are mainly party workers.
Recently, the city turned over many government functions to local nonprofits, including care of AIDS patients. "The Keynesian phase in Emilia-Romagna is over," says Sabattini. Progressive regional government can't be a matter, he explains, of creating a giant public sector that taxes the industrial monopolies to drain off income to provide jobs and welfare. There are no monopolies to tax. The left, instead, has the more complicated task of promoting the creativity of a region capable of competing on a world scale because tens of thousands of small companies cooperate intelligently on a local level.
The government provides what Bolognese economist Sebastiano Brusco calls "real services" -- not just those that make up for market failures, like unemployment compensation and welfare, but services that enable people to work. Emilia-Romagna's female participation in the labor force is the highest in Italy. In part this is because there is a century-old Emilian tradition of women working outside the home, but it is also the result of a strong, independent female workers' movement for adequate daycare. (Today in Modena, about two-thirds of children are in nursery school, as opposed to 4 percent in Naples.)
The beneficiaries of "real services" are people working in small and medium enterprises. In the United States, we usually think of small businesses not only as firms that pay low wages but as especially hostile to any government intervention. Neither is true in Emilia-Romagna. With only 3.9 million people, the region has an amazing 68,000 manufacturing enterprises. (New York State, by contrast, has 18 million people and about 26,000 manufacturing enterprises.) No invisible hand provides Emilian firms with financing, daycare, urban planning, technical assistance, research institutes and specialized laboratories. Small companies can't be expected to devote much capital to research and development. They can't even afford to hire marketing consultants. The regional government arranges for these services -- chiefly by contracting with nonprofit economic research agencies like the internationally respected NOMISMA.
...In exchange for Italy's highest benefits and wages, workers are flexible: They move easily among firms. Similarly, skills and marketing information travel easily among local suppliers....
Emilia-Romagna's small manufacturing companies don't require tariff protection to survive. Roughly half of the regional agricultural and industrial output is exported, chiefly in the form of machinery -- $14 billion worth. But innovative agricultural products also swell the export total. Worldwide, the region's best-known brand name may be Parmalatta -- milk from Parma that doesn't need to be refrigerated and has a shelf life of around six months. Sales are $1.7 billion worldwide.
It's not enough, though, to create exports. To avoid the formation of a U.S.-style urban underclass and the contrast between low-paid service workers and comparatively highly paid workers in manufacturing, government must help all workers share in the prosperity. In Emilia-Romagna that means a government that supports militant trade unionism. "You know the McDonald's across the street from Il Nettuno?" asks Sabattini. "The guy who holds that franchise is an Italian-American. He came here in the eighties thinking he was going to run that place American-style -- with low wages. It was a hard struggle, but we disabused him of that illusion. Now he pays his McDonald's workers the scale earned by every other worker represented by the Commercial Workers Union." It's a wage scale three times what their Manhattan fast-food counterparts earn.
But why don't Emilian firms simply leave to avoid the region's high wages? One reason is that a significant minority are producer co-ops; the point of self-management is to stick around to insure that you receive the value you produce. But more important, Emilia-Romagna has created a whole economy that, while not formally cooperative, is based on small and medium-sized enterprises that do depend on one another....
The more you examine the cooperative, interdependent Emilian model, the less resemblance it has to other "industrial districts" U.S. economists try to compare it to. Relations between companies in Emilia-Romagna are nothing like those in Veneto, a conservative Catholic region to the north. Income is high and enterprise is small in Veneto. But the aim of Veneto's small-business owners is to emulate local firms like Benetton, now a multinational giant that maintains profitability by contracting out manufacturing to cheap overseas labor. Nor is there any of Silicon Valley's chronic entrepreneurialism, where big firms splinter into new start-ups by former employees who peel off with key ideas and contracts, who in turn get sideswiped by trusted employees who themselves split off with valued customers.
But then, why should Emilia-Romagna's industrial culture resemble Veneto's or Silicon Valley's? Power in Silicon Valley was never wrested from Fascists by a Communist-led resistance movement. Nor was Veneto ever isolated from the rest of the country by a central government that sought to undermine its local leadership by withholding loans and credits. The resistance in Emilia-Romagna drew in nearly everyone: the farm laborers and the professionals, the workers and the artisan owners of the region's myriad small factories. It was the only region in Italy where workers actually seized the big factories from their owners. The resistance, however, consciously sought to play down class differences. Fascism had come to power, C.P. chief Palmiro Togliatti argued, in part because the left scared the small-business owners into Mussolini's arms with its empty threats to seize power and its total lack of a transitional program that defended small business against banks, landlords and big business.
With the rapid departure of Allied forces, Togliatti was faced with a historic choice: Either seize power in Northern Italy, like Tito in nearby Trieste, or join a national governing coalition with the Christian Democrats as a very junior partner. Togliatti chose Rome. Resistance fighters from Emilia-Romagna set about transforming themselves into urban activists. Not only did they face a centralized Christian Democratic regime soon to become world famous for its corruption, clientism and bureaucratic indifference but the governing philosophy of the national Communist Party upheld the values of political centralism and economic concentration. Without these outside pressures, the unique resistance culture would have probably dissipated in Emilia-Romagna as it did everywhere else. Instead it was preserved and transformed into a go-it-alone, "us versus them" spirit that helps explain much of the novelty and persistence of the Emilian adaptation -- and also its isolation....
...What Emilia-Romagna shows is that people may not always be able to choose their leaders, but they can never avoid choosing their political culture. People either opt for solidarity and participation or they choose indifference and clientism. The left here must stop counting its failures like rosary beads and grasp the possibilities of the present. We see where mass political disorganization leads -- to the South Bronx -- and where solidarity and mass political organization can lead -- to Bologna.
Robert Fitch is working on Digital Delusions, to be published by Common Courage next year.
<http://www.thenation.com/1996/issue/960513/0513fitc.htm> *****