The hometown of Matteo Fiorito and Arturo Giovannitti

Ripabottoni, the home town of Matteo Fiorito and Arturo Giovannitti

The Author’s maternal grandfather immigrated to Canada from Ribobottoni, a small hilltop town in the Abruzzi-Molise region in 1890, a decade before Arturo Giovannitti (Industrial Workers of the World) emigrated from the same small town to the United States.  It was a time when ‘globalism’ referred not to corporate commerce but to Il Proletario (also the name of the newspaper Giovanitti was editor of).  It was a time when new ideas of freedom and governance were clashing with the established order.  It was a time when the establishment did their best to cast social activists as ‘evil’ people and ‘framed’ activist leaders for crimes they did not commit (e.g. Giovannitti and Ettor, Sacco and Vanzetti).  History and ‘the authorities’ later acknowledged some of these injustices  (e.g. the State of Massachussetts proclaimed in 1977, fifty years after their execution, that Sacco and Vanzetti had been ‘unfairly tried and convicted’). What has not been ‘owned up to’ is the darkness unfairly cast upon ‘anarchy’ and ‘sabotage’, words that emerged in a far less ‘sinister’ context than they became ‘overprinted’ with, a dark overprinting that continues to taint them today.  For those who seek to understand the frames of reference for these terms as they existed at that time, this essay may be of interest.

‘Sabotage’ derived from the french expression ‘travailler a coups de sabots’, ‘to work slowly and clumsily as if wearing wooden clogs’.  It derived from the logic of ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ which suggested, to the worker, the parallelism ‘a less-than-fair-days work for a less-than-fair-day’s pay’, rather than ‘a fair day’s work for a less-than-fair-day’s pay’ as was often the employer’s ‘equation’.  That is, if the pay was not fair then worker moved about in the manner of one of the ‘three stooges’, a country simpleton whose wooden clogs greatly constrained his mobility.   Giovannitti underscores this in his introduction to Emile Pouget’s essay ‘Sabotage’; (more…)