Back to the 50s. L’umanità alla prova dello sgretolamento della società salariale

This contribution offers a critical overview of the contemporary crisis of the wage-based society through the case of the workers’ struggle at the former GKN factory in Florence. Moving beyond economistic readings of labor conflict, it frames the wage question within a broader field of symbolic and material power, in line with classic analyses of the transformations of wage labor, as pointed out by Robert Castel in "Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale" (1995), and with more recent reflections on structural inequality, such as Giacomo Gabbuti’s "Non è giusta. L’Italia delle disuguaglianze" (2025). Drawing on the collective reflection developed in "Questo lavoro non è vita. La lotta di classe nel XXI secolo – Il caso GKN" (Salvetti, Collettivo di Fabbrica ex-GKN and Scancarello 2024), the article interprets the conflict as a confrontation between two antagonistic cultural formations: a collective «we», grounded in practices of solidarity and convergence, and an impersonal «they», expressing the hegemonic order of capital through individualization and depoliticization. Particular attention is paid to the reconfiguration of temporality: while capitalist rationality subsumes life under the imperatives of labor and consumption, collective struggle reclaims time as a terrain of resistance. In this respect, the analysis resonates with broader reflections on contemporary processes of individuation and the erosion of social bonds, as discussed by Denis Merklen in "Le dinamiche contemporanee dell’individuazione" (2025). The GKN case thus emerges as a site of cultural production where alternative imaginaries of work, value, and community are elaborated, prefiguring forms of social organization beyond wage labor.