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There and back again:
mapping the pathways within autonomist Marxism
by Steve Wright
How to interpret the contours of autonomist
Marxism over the past quarter century? Before 1979, any discussion of the topic
would necessarily have centred upon the Italian experience. And yet by the
early eighties, with the previously close bonds between labour process,
movement and theory seemingly broken, the project that had come to be known
within Italy as operaismo (workerism)
looked to be smashed ‘into pieces’.[i]
As a consequence, whatever could still be called Italian ‘autonomist Marxism’
appeared at that point to be, outside the work of a few isolated individuals,
largely a matter of historical curiosity. As Valerio Evangelista later
recalled, by that time
all the best militants were
in jail or on the run, we found ourselves with hardly any theorists … there
were few comrades left, the young people who earlier had been with us in
consistent numbers (if not all of them) distanced themselves. The response to
such a situation was the social centres – but in the sense of their negative
side, of an almost natural tendency, where the social centre became an oasis, a
ghetto, even if that wasn’t true in every case.[ii]
A decade later, however, the picture had changed
significantly within Italy. The preparedness of many social centres to come out
of their shells and engage with other social forces was matched by a growing
intellectual curiosity amongst new generations of young activists: in part for
the practices and ways of seeing that emanated from the operaista experience, but even more so for the work of some of that
movement’s survivors. By the beginning of the present decade, this interest in
the writings of Italian theorists commonly labelled as autonomist – first and
foremost, Antonio Negri, but also Paolo Virno and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi – had
become evident in the English-speaking world as well, whether on the streets
with the so-called ‘anti-global’ movement, or at the sales counters with the
publishing success of Empire. To put
it in Enda Brophy’s words, the resurgence of interest in the work of some
former participants in operaismo may
well pay testimony
to the fact that far from
being anachronistic, autonomist thought has demonstrated a tremendously
resilient ability to mutate along with the times.[iii]
The purpose of this paper, then, is to provide some
leads for those interested in exploring in detail what has happened within
‘autonomist Marxism’ since the defeats of the Italian movement at the end of
the seventies. As will be seen, any such discussion will oblige us to cast our
gaze far beyond the Italian context. As countless writers have indicated,[iv]
‘autonomist Marxism’ has never been a purely Italian phenomenon, and its
international diffusion is one of the most distinctive aspects of its
development since 1979. Of course, the notion that this exercise can be carried
out in sufficient detail within the confines of a single paper is absurd.
Nonetheless, it may be possible at least to engage in some sort of preliminary
reconnoitres, survey the broad lay of the land, poke around in a few nooks and
crannies, and from all this compose questions worthy of those braver souls
prepared to accept this challenge.
But first a few cautions concerning labels. If some
of us who have puzzled over the question tend to equate Italian ‘autonomist
Marxism’ with many of the threads stemming from operaismo, it’s also worth remembering that a) this label is not
typically embraced within such strands; b) these threads hold quite divergent
views as to the relationship between their current work and the workerism of
the sixties and seventies. Berardi, for example, prefers to speak of
‘compositionism’[v]
(referring to the method of reading class composition), while Negri is emphatic
that fundamentally new forms of social relations demand a break with conceptual
frameworks developed in a different era, starting with operaismo itself. If we turn to the person who first coined the
term ‘autonomist Marxism’ – Harry Cleaver – we find that his own usage implies
something broader than operaismo and
its aftermath:
What gives
meaning to the concept of ‘autonomist Marxism’ as a particular tradition is the
fact that we can identify, within the larger Marxist tradition, a variety of
movements, politics and thinkers who have emphasized the autonomous power of
workers – autonomous from capital, from their official organizations (e.g. the
trade unions, the political parties) and, indeed, the power of particular
groups of workers to act autonomously from other groups (e.g. women from men).
By ‘autonomy’ I mean the ability of workers to define their own interests and
to struggle for them – to go beyond mere reaction to exploitation, or to
self-defined ‘leadership’ and to take the offensive in ways that shape the
class struggle and define the future.[vi]
If nothing else, then, perhaps the term
‘autonomist Marxism’ itself deserves to be reviewed as part of the process of
making sense of what has come after 1979: does it help to explain the processes
under review, or might they indicate its very limitations?
For that matter, how cohesive was Italian workerism
itself, even in its heyday? The extensive primary research carried out since
the late nineties by Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi and Gigi Roggero bears out
their characterisation of operaismo
as ‘neither a homogenous doctrinaire corpus, nor a unitary political subject’,
but rather ‘multiple pathways with their roots in a common theoretical matrix’.[vii]
All the same, certain core elements can be identified. Speaking at a moment
when the tendency had seemingly reached
its nadir, Sergio Bologna offered the following thoughts on this ‘common
theoretical matrix’:
I believe above all that operaismo was an exaltation – sometimes
uncritical – of the working class, but also a great exaltation of power. Operaismo was born, not by chance, with Operai e capitale. It’s not clear which
was greater: the paean to the working class, or that
to the capitalist capacity of subsuming this working class from the point of
view of its components. So it was not by chance that many of its
theorists later became theorists of the State, and today are only theorists of
governability. And I don’t believe that we can call the latter traitors,
because this eulogy of capital’s power [potenza]
is a risk within operaismo, which
later became the eulogy of the power of the political as such, of the autonomy
of the political. This is an extremely coherent consequence, I believe. It is
not some leap, a moment of transformation: in my opinion, it is a logical
consequence.[viii]
Nor did this dichotomy disappear with the embrace by
Tronti and others of the Italian Communist Party. Berardi has shown in some
detail the manner in which these two spirits played themselves out within
Potere Operaio,[ix]
while Bologna would conclude in the mid seventies that a permanent
contradiction existed between political organisation and class autonomy.[x]
And if some of those who embraced the project of class autonomy in this period
would place the emphasis upon the party, others, like Yann Moulier Boutang, saw
things somewhat differently: ‘Naturally what I liked about the invisible party
of Mirafiori was not the party but rather the invisibility’.[xi]
Ironically, one of the strongest affinities binding
those who have shared in the tradition of operaismo
is precisely a contempt for traditions – particularly ‘revolutionary
traditions’. After all, it was a commonplace within the workerist literature of
the sixties and seventies to exalt the discontinuities and leaps both in
struggles and in ‘working class science’, in organisational projects no less
than theoretical developments. To put this in the words of Tronti’s
classic text Operai e capitale, all
great discoveries—‘ideas of simple men which seem madness to the scientists’ –
have been made by ‘dangerous leaps’, by breaking ‘the thread of continuity’.[xii]
As with the relationship between autonomy and power,
however, this notion of discontinuities could be taken in quite different
directions: at one extreme, perhaps, there was Negri’s argument in the early
eighties celebrating ‘Communist transition [as] absence of memory’[xiii]
(and the abandonment of the dialectic as a useful explanatory tool of social
antagonism), at the other Peppino Ortoleva’s insistence a few years earlier, in
reference to class antagonism in the United States, that
the hegemony of capitalist
culture, and its version of American history, does not translate into a tabula rasa of the ‘collective memory’
of the American working class. A store of working class traditions remains, but
it is the patrimony not of the American proletariat as a whole, but
rather—disarticulated and sectionalised—of individual groups of workers, of
rank-and-file union experiences etc.[xiv]
In trying to make sense of all this, before 1979 and
after, it will be impossible to survey the terrain properly without constant
reference to the work on operaismo by
Borio, Pozzi and Roggero, published in 2002. Their book Futuro Anteriore provides a rich (and at times provocative)
overview of the themes addressed in the interviews, while its associated CD-ROM
of nearly sixty interviews is the richest single documentary source to date of
reflections from participants in the operaista
experience. Here is how Sergio Bologna made sense of that project:
It was a strange event and it
surprised all of us, considering that amongst us there were people who had not
spoken nor had any personal relations with one another on any level for years
and years, so divergent were our individual paths. One day in 2000, without
denying their past, though critical of their experiences, they agreed to
recognise themselves in a common tradition.[xv]
What follows, then, will draw not only on materials
produced across the arc of time from 1980 to 2005, but also some of the
reflections captured in the fieldwork of Borio, Pozzi and Roggero. Along the
way, it will illustrate a point made in Enda Brophy’s excellent survey of ‘operaisti after operaismo’, Recounting an important conference held in Rome in
2002, called in part for the launch of Futuro
Anteriore, he reminds us that for all the talk of a ‘common tradition’
after 1979,
Deep differences over key
issues of theory and practice have further distanced some of the protagonists
of those years from each other, a process which had already started by the end
of the 1960s as the level of social conflict in Italy escalated.[xvi]
Maps
How to map this fallout from the operaismo of the sixties and seventies? A number of different
approaches spring to mind here: maps constructed in terms of tendencies, or of projects,
or of categories. As regards the first approach, Chris Wright has produced a
very interesting chart of ‘different tendencies within libertarian Marxism’,
which is useful in situating autonomist Marxism against a broader political and
intellectual history [Figure 1]. Originally designed to accompany an online
text archive, the stress is placed upon ‘track[ing] unique contributions in
theory and practice’, while acknowledging that ‘these are not perfect matches
and the relations are in fact much more complex’. Wright’s map differentiates
between ‘Operaismo (1960-72)’, ‘Autonomia (1972-80)’, and ‘Autonomist Marxism’,
while indicating the influence upon each of other currents, such as the
Johnson-Forest Tendency. Turning to an accompanying discussion document,
however, it becomes clearer just how complex some of the relationships have
been. Take relations within the English-speaking world between ‘open Marxism’
and autonomist Marxism, something we will return to below. As Wright himself
indicates,
Depending on who
one talks to, Open Marxism includes autonomist Marxism or autonomist Marxism
includes Open Marxism, though the separation over the importance of Hegel and
the question of dialectic seems to provide a basic grounds for differentiating
the two tendencies.[xvii]
Another limit in organising a map in this manner is
apparent when we seek some correlation between ‘tendencies’ on the one hand,
and individuals or collectivities on the other. For example, where might we
situate Primo Moroni – a quintessential ‘libertarian marxist’ – within such a
diagram? For rather than move from tendency to tendency over time, as more than
a few have done in their political education, Moroni’s work was long infused by
what he himself once called ‘this indefinable area that stretches from the
bordighists to the proto-situationists, the councillists, to the
internationalists, the anarchists, to the anarcho-communists, the libertarian
communists’.[xviii]
All of which brings us to my original starting point:
a map that Primo Moroni drew up sometime in the late eighties [Figure 2].
Moroni had something of a flair for the visual representation of information:
those who have seen his maps charting the placement and displacement of
movement spaces in Milan will already be familiar with his handiwork.[xix]
The ‘map’ to which I refer here, however, is different: it seeks to show the
connections between the major expressions of revolutionary media in Italy for
the thirty years that followed the workers’ uprising in Hungary. In doing so,
it aims to tell a story across time about space: not so much geographical space
— although that too is hinted at, in part — but rather that kind of ‘space’
that spawned talk of an ‘area’ of autonomy.
Let’s look at Moroni’s map for a moment. For those
who have seen them, it recalls a number of other cartographical efforts: one,
back in an issue of L’Espresso from
around 1969, that seeks to chart all the tendencies that passed through or near
the student movement of that time. A similar diagram illustrates the Red Notes
(1979) volume Working Class Autonomy and
the Crisis, where the names of leading militants are added to the jumble of
political organisations and publications that attempted to challenge the
hegemony of the Italian Communist party (PCI) during the seventies. Moroni’s
map, by contrast, is both more austere in its presentation and more intricate
in its detail. As it shows clearly, if the broad array of journals established
in the sixties rarely lasted more than three or four years, they spawned a lush
outburst of publications in the seventies – although in many cases, not before
an interregnum when party-building projects predominated within the Italian far
left. And as the forest of arrows highlight, the cross-fertilisation between
many of these projects was continuous and often ‘virtuous’ (i.e. the arrows do
not by any means represent only a parting of ways within particular circles,
but in some cases connections through joint projects or even overlapping
membership).
A careful examination of Moroni’s map suggests a
number of other things worthy of note. The first, which is perhaps not so
obvious to begin with, concerns the three broad columns that flow down the page
[Figure 3]. Looked at more carefully, it becomes possible to discern, on the
left of the chart, projects associated in some way with the libertarian and/or
counter-cultural sensibilities within the Italian radical left: from the
situationists and Collegamenti on the
one hand, to Re Nudo and Radio Alice-A/traverso on the other. Another column
on the right records projects whose lineage can be traced (bearing in mind the
significant breaks involved in each stage) from the PCI through to Il manifesto
and then the Roman autonomists (and the trontians of Laboratorio Politico make an appearance here for good measure). In
the middle column there is ‘the central trunk’ of operaismo, passing from Quaderni
Rossi and Classe Operaia, via Potere Operaio, to a host of autonomist
publications such as Rosso, as well
as Primo Maggio and other enterprises
(many of which were linked in some way to Moroni’s bookshop Calusca).
The second point is that, to Moroni’s mind at least,
the most important expressions of revolutionary media in Italy by the mid
eighties – those difficult years characterised earlier by Evangelista – were
largely on the broadcasting front. There are some notable exceptions, but all
the same it is radio stations such as Onda Rossa and Radio Proletaria in Rome,
Sherwood in Padova and Onda d’Urto in Brescia that are to the fore. Worthy of
note too are ‘radical metropolitan events’ associated with punk, a movement
with whose exponents Moroni would develop an extraordinary affinity during
these years.
Why labour the point over this map? One reason is
that it may be worth considering what can be learned by attempting to extend
Moroni’s map forward twenty years, into our own decade. Any such effort would
need to address the radical media that became so important by the nineties: not
simply the Internet, but also the new generation of publications that
circulated at that time, alongside the networks of electronic bulletin boards
(often associated with individual social centres) that interpenetrated with
those journals. A very partial mapping of the early nineties would note
publications like Luogo Comune, Klinamen, Riff Raff in Padua (but also the journal of the same name – but not
content! – in Turin), Altreragioni,
the workplace-oriented Incompatibili,
alongside the likes of Virus in Turin
and Zeronetwork in the Veneto, both
of which attempted to make accessible, to those not online, debates and
reflections circulating in the European Counter Network and other electronic
forums. Some old stalwarts would also be there, such as Collegamenti and, for the first part of the decade, Autonomia (Padua). Last but not least,
this flowering on the media front was also fuelled by a new engagement between
a younger generation of activists and participants from movements of earlier
decades. Whereas in the eighties, as Sandro Mezzadra recalled, it was ‘rather
difficult’ to establish links with such people – ‘a bit because many of them
were in prison or out of the country, a bit because the others (at least in my
experience) were not particularly disposed’[xx] – now the
social centres and other movement spaces hosted a range of seminars that
enabled just such encounters.[xxi]
At the same time, it may be that a different kind of
mapping is needed. It could be entertaining to try and trace the trajectories
of individuals – then again, it might be more useful to attempt to map out the
development of particular categories and concepts. So here is a different kind
of map, which tries to represent the evolution of categories over time since
the eighties [Figure 4]. The terms should be familiar enough: they represent
some of the key categories used in efforts by certain writers touched by the
workerist experience to understand the nature of social subjectivity over the
past generation or so. The dominant term for the past decade or more within
this framework is, of course, multitude. As can be seen, other key concepts
connect it back to a category popularised by Negri and others in the seventies
– operaio sociale. And while they
continue to be used, and are of interest in their own right, terms such as mass
intellectuality and general intellect can also be seen as bridges from operaio sociale to multitude: especially
in the late eighties and early nineties, when movements such as the Pantera
within higher education prompted some circles to engage in new reflections
concerning the nature of intellectual labour.
There is unlikely to be great controversy in an
exercise like this – these terms are now familiar to many English-language
readers. The real point I want to make here is different: what picture emerges
when we attempt to broaden the parameters of discussion, and try to encompass
all those ways of seeing that have been touched in some important way by operaismo and its fallout, bearing in
mind that in doing so, we are obliged to reach well beyond Italy itself?
If we attempt this, the picture before us is rather
different [Figure 5]. Indeed, surveying the literature over the past 25 years,
one uncovers a whole panoply of social figures. In the next section I’d like to
explore each of these in turn, since they can tell us a lot about developments
on this front since 1980 or so. For now we can note that whatever else, most
are recognisable as class figures. In its earliest use, perhaps, multitude
might have been more ambiguous in this sense – but there were always exponents
of the term who have insisted on its class nature (for example, the editors of DeriveApprodi), while Negri has also
been emphatic in recent years in arguing that multitude is a class category.
We could draw a similar conceptual map to represent
different understandings since the seventies of Power, with terms like Empire,
Warfare State, Integrated World Capitalism, Planetary Work Machine, cognitive
capitalism, postfordism or New Enclosures, alongside old favourites like
imperialism, capital and the state. And we could sketch out a third map that
looks at the processes that characterise the relationship between capital and
class (or Potere and potenza if you prefer): older terms like
self-valorisation, self-determination, restructuring, the refusal of work;
newer terms like exodus, strange loops, cooperation, common, guaranteed income,
and non-state public sphere.
Still, it’s the pathways that are the most intriguing
things to explore: the various threads of argument, with all their twists and
turns: the intersections, the echoes, and the silences that resonate between
both these threads, and the movements and events they seek to comprehend. The
next part of this paper, then, will review some of this material, conscious –
as stated at the beginning – that much remains to be done before we can
properly understand the wealth as well as limitations of the various threads
that have descended from operaismo’s
collapse a generation ago.
After 1980
There are worse ways of following some of these pathways
than by examining in turn at each of the social figures displayed in the last
map. The first – easy to overlook, since many have long considered it as much a
dead dog as Hegel – is mass worker. Here some of the most fascinating work was
carried out in the aftermath of the FIAT defeat, often by editors of the
journal Primo Maggio, culminating
with Marco Revelli’s magisterial history of Lavorare
in FIAT.[xxii]
But can the mass worker be dismissed as a subject of purely historical
interest? Guido Bianchini once pointed out that ‘The end of development in one
place is development elsewhere’, and the past twenty years have certainly seen
‘mass workers’ place their stamp upon a range of once ‘peripheral’ social
formations, from Korea to South Africa.[xxiii]
Another important exploration of class composition
after 1980, again spearheaded by some members of Primo Maggio, concerned workers in the transportation sector, and
the journal’s work in this area can be seen as anticipating significant cycles
of struggle that continue into the present day.[xxiv] While Primo Maggio would finally close its
doors in the late eighties, Bologna has continued with research into working
class history, with studies of the German workers and Nazism, and the
development of class composition in Italy. As always with historical research
conducted by exponents of the ‘school of class composition’, contemporary
political concerns were never far away.[xxv] But to
Bologna’s mind, much of his most important labour-related research has
addressed a social subject quite removed from those examined by operaismo in its glory days: the
self-employed worker, whose numbers in Italy were increasing markedly in the
early nineties. As he put it at one of the public meetings called to discuss
the research of Borio, Pozzi and Roggero,
Self-employed labour, to go back to a theme dear to my heart, is
no longer capable of that conflict of which operaismo
conceived: that is, of workplace conflict [conflitto
sindacale] as conflict par excellence.
Not because it is not so disposed subjectively, but because the structure of
the relations of production has changed. So a pedigree workerist [l’operaista doc] would cancel
self-employed labour from the list of subjects, and treat it as the multitude’s
swamp and Vendée.[xxvi]
In the mid eighties, many Italian ‘pedigree
workerists’ took heart from the COBAS phenomenon, wherein networks of
unofficial rank-and-file groupings primarily based in the public sector (first
and foremost, railway staff and teachers) challenged both their employers, and
the traditional role of unions in representing employees’ interests within the
wage relation. While articles on the COBAS can be found across the ex-workerist
and left libertarian press of the time, it was in those journals with a particular
focus upon the paid workplace – Collegamenti,
and later Incompatibili – that the
most space was devoted to the new groupings, along with the so-called
alternative unions which came in their wake in the nineties. With similar
movements appearing in France and Spain, the question of such workers’
struggles against restructuring – their potentialities for extension into the
private sector, the corporatist temptations which they faced – meant that the
circumstances of public sector employees were often to the fore within concrete
class composition analyses carried out in the years that spanned the mid
eighties to the early nineties.[xxvii]
As Paolo Virno has argued, the experiences of the
‘Movement of ’77’ left a vast range of questions unanswered, questions which
would resurface again from the eighties around discussions of social conflict
in a time of so-called ‘post-fordism’.[xxviii] In terms
of the meaning of political recomposition, such questions included matters of
representation and organisation; in terms of changes within class composition,
they included the growing importance for capitalist accumulation of labour
processes apparently outside the fordist workplace regimes that had engendered
the mass worker. One of these key concepts raised in and around 1977, only to
make a significant resurgence in the last decade, is that of precarity. The
matter continued to concern the likes of Collegamenti
and Primo Maggio into the early
eighties, where the focus was often upon short term work projects provided for
government authorities.[xxix]
In terms of a continued practical reference point for this concept within
Italy, the struggles of precarious workers wove themselves in and out of a
number of broader social conflicts as the eighties progressed, starting with
the education sector. By the mid nineties, ‘precarity’ had become a theme taken
up by a section of the social centres movement (an early manifestation of the
Tute Bianche was as activists around casualised working conditions) with whom a
younger generation of workerist-influenced theorists were engaged.[xxx]
The exploration of casual workers’ experiences was
also a central theme for a German circle that took up class composition
analysis in the eighties.[xxxi]
As some of them later explained to John Holloway,
In the beginning
of the 1980s the cycle of factory worker struggles was over, but for many young
people it was inconceivable to adjust to wage labour and to work away at a job
until reaching pension age. Additionally, we ourselves refused to strive
individually through a professional career for a better place in the capitalist
hierarchy. Out of this grew the practice of jobbing: to do any old shitty job
for a short time, in order then to have time for ourselves, for political
struggle and for pleasure. In formal terms, we worked under conditions that
would later be characterised by the sociologists as ‘precarious’ in the sense
of being vulnerable to one-sided measures by capital. But it was even easier
then to use the regulations of labour law and the welfare state for our own
needs.[xxxii]
As the
editors of Wildcat went on to detail,
their initial stance shifted significantly as the decade advanced. In the
middle of the eighties, however, a former member of the journal Zerowork could be heard arguing that a
critical engagement with the informal economy might also provide a ‘basis for
social autonomy’. In contrast, Sergio Bologna’s comments at a 1984 Canadian
conference on operaismo and autonomia characterised the notion of
‘precarious labour as self-liberation’ as no more than a passing phase, doomed
to extinction with the shakeout of the informal economy itself.[xxxiii]
As is well known, circumstances surrounding casual or
precarious work would be rather different by the late nineties, when a younger
generation connected to Wildcat developed
links with small groups elsewhere in Europe (e.g. Precari Nati in Italy) and
initiated a workers’ enquiry into the condition of call centre workers.[xxxiv]
While their efforts would provoke controversy in some quarters,[xxxv]
they can also be seen as an important spur to a new – and welcome – round of
enquiry and co-research undertaken in recent years across a number of European
countries.[xxxvi] In terms of movements, work around precarity
has likewise been fundamental to the networks that have made such a success of
EuroMayDay of late. Then again, as Angela Mitropoulos has argued in a recent
issue of Mute, if precarious labour
has in fact been the norm rather than the exception during the capital
relation’s history, then perhaps in certain cases ‘the
recent rise of precarity is actually its discovery among those who had not
expected it’, given their blindness to longstanding hierarchies within waged
and unwaged labour. [xxxvii]
In the seventies, migrant worker was almost another
way of saying mass worker within the operaista
lexicon, and a number of studies on the subject appeared in the Materiali
Marxisti book series and elsewhere.[xxxviii] As Yann
Moulier Boutang makes clear, however, even during workerism’s heyday, the
differing circumstances between Italy and elsewhere paid short shrift to any
attempt to transpose insights mechanically from one social formation to the
other, particularly in terms of understanding what migration might mean for the
process of class recomposition:
I have not yet spoken of an
encounter that was decisive for me: that with the comrades of immigation. In
fact the question of immigration interested our Italian comrades, especially
those of P[otere] O[peraio]. However Italian immigration was interesting as a
mode of propagation, but it was not the theoretical problem of immigration as a
fracture [spaccatura] within class
composition, as a real problem of the latter. I remember that it was difficult
to explain to our comrades at FIAT or to Romano Alquati that having 22
nationalities is not the same thing as having one Italian working class: even
if there were Italians from the South, it was something different. And when 300
Tunisians were hired at FIAT in ’73, I remember perfectly that I said to
Alquati, to Toni and to others that this phenomenon needed to be watched
closely, because it was very important. That they did not was, I think, a great
error …[xxxix]
Moulier Boutang’s own work, as is known, has placed
migration at the centre of its reflections. And in Italy itself, particularly since
the beginning of the nineties, there have been a number of important studies of
migrant workers and migration, beginning with writers connected to the journal Altreragioni.[xl] In terms of
the emergence of an identifiable postoperaista
sensibility, an attentiveness towards migration has dovetailed with political
work around migrants and detainees in Europe. For Sandro Mezzadra, it was an
encounter with the research of Moulier Boutang, alongside his own political
work in Genoa, that brought home an understanding of migrants as active agents,
rather than simply passive victims at the mercy of their circumstances.[xli]
According to Mezzadra, then, the circumstances of migrant workers can be seen
as emblematic within contemporary class composition, so long as one avoids
reductionist temptations:
We cannot get rid of
‘generalizing’ concepts precisely because we are aware of their limits, which
are the limits of a commonality which cannot be stressed at the expenses of the
plurality of peculiar subject positions which defines the composition of living
labor. In this way we can talk for example of migrant labor as a subjective
figure which shows an element of commonality which is shared by the whole of
contemporary living labor (that is, a general attitude to mobility and
flexibility, the subjective counterpart of the ‘flexible regime of
accumulation’ described for instance by David Harvey), without for this reason
on the one hand sacrificing the subjective and objective peculiarity of the
experience of mobility by migrants, and without on the other hand forgetting
the radical diversity of migrants’ experience itself. [xlii]
Thus far the social subjects explored have each had a
certain sectoral specificity, for the all the claims that might be made on their
behalf in terms of commonality. Before turning to the category multitude, I
want to address two other concepts that others with an operaista past have engendered in their efforts to construct a more
global reading of class composition today. The first of these is the
hyper-proletariat, a term coined by Romano Alquati. Long a subterranean
influence within the social centres in Turin, Alquati’s writings have continued
to appear, largely through small publishing houses, across the eighties and
nineties.[xliii]
Alongside detailed reflections upon the techniques of co-research, his work has
advanced a distinctly original approach to class analysis, the origins of which
can be traced back to his ruminations in the seventies on the
proletarianisation of intellectual labour. For Alquati, hyper-proletariat must
be understood as ‘a great meta-class’ that today is instantiated in a panoply
of moments. So many moments, in fact, that it seems to have disappeared, at
least within the self-awareness of its members, who perceive themselves instead
as part of ‘an enormous multitude’ made up of seemingly diverse (and sometimes
counterposed) interests. Encompassing the unemployed and many of the formally
self-employed, the hyper-proletarians, according to Alquati, currently endure
circumstances wherein they ‘admire, exalt, copy, fetishise means (and
technologies and machines in particular), even in work. They are convinced that
means are more capable than they are. They are mistaken’. [xliv] For Alquati, nothing
less than a ‘hyper-communism’ is needed to achieve ‘the suppression of the
hyperproletariat, even as multitude’ …[xlv]
Franco Berardi’s notion of the cognitariat has
certain points of convergence with Alquati’s work, especially in the attention
paid to the subsumption of intellectual capacities to capital, as well as its
curiosity as to what that subsumption might mean for the psyche. But like other
postoperaista approaches, many of the
most important premises informing Berardi’s outlook are quite alien to
Alquati’s efforts to maintain, come what may, a particular reading of marxian
categories such as value. Evolving from earlier reflections upon ‘the virtual class, that is the cycle of
globalised mental labour’,[xlvi]
Berardi’s is an optimistic view that sees possibilities for the self-organisation
of ‘cognitive labour’ in the wake of the dotcom crash and global opposition to
the current war in Iraq. His cognitariat is narrower, however, than the
multitude: perhaps it is the ‘online’ facet of that immaterial labour described
by Lazzarato and others. At the same time, Berardi’s analysis is far from being
a celebration of so-called ‘virtual’ culture. As he argued in a 2002 interview,
The idea of the
cognitariat, and of the ‘cognitarian’ as a member of the cognitariat, is
connected to the idea that during the last years, perhaps the last decade, we
lost touch with our body – with our social body, and our physical, erotic body.
Net culture and all the new forms of digital production and new media have
erased our relationship with our social body. But at the time of social and
economic crises we are forced to take account of the fact that we do have a
body, that in fact we do have a social and a physical body. Cognitarians are
the workers of the virtual production. There is a moment when they can become
aware of the fact that they are not purely virtual, they are not purely
economic, that they also are physical bodies.[xlvii]
It would take a separate essay to explore the
category multitude, which is unquestionably the best known of all the terms touched
upon so far. The central role of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in formulating
and popularising the term is unquestionable. Along with its counterpart Empire,
multitude has been adopted as an explanatory tool by a range of influential
circles within anti-capitalist movements both in Europe, and far beyond. Not
surprisingly, and again like Empire, it has also been the subject of
considerable controversy: not only in the eyes of those left currents that
continue to see the world through the lens of marxist-leninist orthodoxies, but
also for many in what might be termed the libertarian and antagonistic lefts.
These debates are well-known, and the literature on the subject is already
extensive. What is more relevant for the discussion here are the sometimes
complex, yet discernible bonds that link multitude to a number of earlier
categories, from operaio sociale to
mass intellectuality. In trying to unravel that lineage, the reader begins to
discern a number of debates in both Italy and beyond, involving not only Hardt
and Negri, but also the likes of Paolo Virno, and many of the authors who have
been associated in some way with the journal DeriveApprodi. With Virno, for example, we find nuances that
resonate differently to some of those central to Hardt and Negri’s work:
amongst other things, we are directed to think about what Arianna Bove and Erik
Empson have called ‘the dark side of the multitude’.[xlviii] And it
would be remiss not to mention at this point Nick Dyer-Witheford’s rereading of
the categories multitude, general intellect and immaterial labour through the
prism of Marx’s concept of species being, which has also been advanced by
engagement with the work of Hardt and Negri.[xlix]
The last category concerning social subjectivity may
well be the least known of those under discussion, at least within Italy itself
(although some forums, such as Altreragioni,
have provided space for arguments emanating from this camp). Since the late
seventies, alongside workerist feminists such Maria Rosa Dalla Costa[l]
and Silvia Federici, and in the light of mass struggles over reproduction and
land, Americans associated first with Zerowork
and then Midnight Notes have offered
an original reading of class composition that, in positing the centrality of
unwaged work (whether in the home or in subsistence farming) has paid
particular attention to struggles over debt, energy, and enclosures.[li]
It also involved a critique of those positions within Zerowork that, like postoperaismo
in later times, argued that capital had somehow slipped loose from the yoke of
value relations. If anything, the unexpected arrival of the Zapatistas on the
global scene has only further stimulated work around these perspectives, which
can now be found online at websites such as The
Commoner. As George Caffentzis explained to the Greek circle TPTG,
Once you saw that
the unwaged sector of the working class is really the foundation of the
accumulation process then a new priority inevitably develops … Introducing
unwaged workers is not a matter of a contest over who is of ‘more or less
importance’ or of who is more or less exploited, but of having a better
understanding of what keeps capitalism alive. Once you bring into focus the
largely unwaged part of the reproduction cycle of labor power, then your
politics change dramatically. You immediately have to deal with divisions and
hierarchies that are often neglected by working class movements and are even
engineered into working class organizations. One merely has to glance at the
scandalous history of working class racism and sexism to get the point.[lii]
So there you have it: a whole gamut of social
figures, many of which overlap in content while often differing in emphasis.
Which raises another question: is all of this primarily about the search for a
privileged layer within class composition, one that can assert its hegemony
over the class as a whole? Monty Neill and other members of Midnight Notes have been emphatic on
this score: if much of the operaismo
of the sixties and seventies entailed efforts ‘in analyzing
or searching out class vanguards’, ‘to do a
class composition analysis’ today means ‘not to locate a new vanguard, but to
help the many class sectors come together’ in ‘the class struggle to cease to
be proletarian’.[liii] One useful exercise, therefore, would be to interrogate
the various accounts of the social subjects above from this perspective.
Another would be to explore the contemporary meaning of the old workerist
category of ‘cycle of struggles’ and its relationship to ‘development’. Can an
ongoing dialectic still be posited between the two, as some world systems
theorists have done? Or has the bond connecting them snapped forever? In either
case, what are the implications for a project of social autonomy aimed at
escaping the capital relation altogether, rather than surviving within it as
amenably as possible?
Only connect
‘Only connect’, opening up
channels of communication internationally, this is at least as urgently on the
Italian agenda in the 1980s as it was in the early 1960s – in spite of a new
dimension of massive arrests , authoritarian threats, and attempts to atomize
collective interests.[liv]
With these words, Ferruccio Gambino closed his brief
1981 account of Italian links to other revolutionary experiences since the days
of Socialisme ou barbarie and Correspondence. And if thanks to this
and other texts, we now know something about such links, a lot more work needs
to be done in tracing the role of those individuals like Gambino, Ed Emery,
Harry Cleaver and John Merrington who – before and after 1979 – provided
gateways through which reflections upon theory and practice could pass in and
out of the English-speaking world.[lv]
If interesting work was undertaken in a number of
other countries by operaismo-influenced
writers during the seventies, these tended nonetheless to be overshadowed by
developments within Italy itself. That situation changed after 1979. While much
translation was undertaken of certain Italian materials in the early eighties –
in many cases inseparable from solidarity work with those authors in prison –
one of the consequences of repression from 7 April onwards was a heightened
geographical expansion in theoretical reflection and research marked by some
kind of operaista perspective. In
part this stemmed from the diaspora of intellectuals in exile: above all to
France, but also elsewhere in Europe or the Americas. But it was also the case
that the reverses suffered by exponents of autonomist Marxism within Italy also
drew attention – to those who still cared – to the work of their compatriots in
other places.
France, of course,
assumed a pre-eminent role early on as a centre for the unfolding theoretical
aftermath of operaismo, especially with
the sustained engagement between Negri and Deleuze and Guattari. By the end of
the eighties, the French connection would be taken to a new level with the
founding of the journal Futur antérieur, which also involved an engagement with others (such as Jean-Michel
Vincent) whose background lay in French trotskyism.[lvi] Other enterprises
attempted in exile proved less fruitful, recounts Alisa Del Re, ‘due to the
differences we had interiorized at the end of the Seventies’.[lvii]
In the Britain of the
late eighties and early nineties, there were resonances with the so-called
‘open Marxism’ of John Holloway, Werner Bonefeld and others, some of whose
theorists, like those of Collegamenti,
made explicit reference to earlier council communist traditions. Within Italy
in the early eighties, the journal Metropoli
can be seen with hindsight as something of a precursor of postoperaismo, bringing together figures whose paths had often been
quite separate in the times of Autonomia organizzata. Prison too proved a space
that sometimes enabled new intellectual and personal bonds, closing
pre-existing distances based upon political alignment or age, forging
friendships between the likes of Sergio Bianchi and Luciano Ferrari Bravo that
would have their own significance in the years to come.
Growing access to the Internet complicated the
picture still further a decade later. By then, we can also see efforts to bring
understandings of autonomist Marxism developed elsewhere to bear upon the
Italian scene. Here is how Massimo De Angelis recalls the early days of the
journal Vis-à-vis:
I thought that, just as the
impact of operaismo and Italian
Marxism represented a breath of fresh air for American Marxism, opening it to
the thematics of subjectivity, reproposing in Italy a series of works from
American autonomist Marxism (which was sensitive and open to a series of
thematics left in the margins by us) could in return contribute positively to
going beyond musty old diatribes and rigid political and theoretical attitudes.[lviii]
Whether that particular exercise proved successful
remains a matter of debate. One the other hand, as Enda Brophy has pointed out,
for more than a decade there has been an engagement between certain English-language
writers in communication studies, and some Italian theorists identified with postoperaismo. Perhaps the emblematic
text here on the English-language side is Nick Dyer-Witheford’s Cybermarx, published in 1999.[lix]
From the Italian side, Franco Berardi – whose own reflections frequently
percolate into English via media activist channels intrigued with his work in
Telestreet and elsewhere – has demonstrated a similar interest in
Dyer-Witheford’s writings. Less well known amongst English-language readers,
yet of great relevance in this regard, is Christian Marazzi’s work on the place
of language in contemporary production, collective identity and conflict.[lx]
If the threads of autonomist Marxism had become even
more diffuse by the nineties, there were nonetheless some forums which served
as points of encounter. Without question the most successful of these has been
the journal (and now publishing house) Derive
Approdi, which has become the important crossroads for encounters between
different viewpoints from the many strands stemming from operaismo – and the place of a certain contamination and dialogue
between them and other experiences. In recent times Derive Approdi has extended its gaze beyond Italy, to examine
social conflicts across the globe in the wake of the ‘movement of movements’. The
new interest within the academy for Negri's work has also opened a certain
space for a new generation of writers/translators/commentators, including
Arianna Bove, Timothy Murphy, Alberto Toscano, Matteo Mandarini and Damiano
Palano.[lxi]
In their account of operaismo, Borio, Pozzi and Roggero argue that at its peak, the
tendency established a mechanism through which the ideas of a small band of
theorists were transmitted, via a diffuse layer of cadres, to a broad mass
movement.[lxii]
Whatever the accuracy of their assertions, no-one could seriously advance such
claims about the relationship between the theoretical strands of Italian
autonomist Marxism and the movements that have emerged since the eighties. All
the same, certain linkages can sometimes be traced, especially since the
nineties. But while the differences amongst certain autonomist marxist
frameworks during the nineties paralleled in part differences within the
revived Italian movement itself, anyone with personal experience of such
matters can say how imperfect such parallels could sometimes be. To take two
examples at random: by the mid nineties a growing affinity could be detected
between Antonio Negri and the political formation descended from the dominant
autonomist faction in the Veneto twenty years before. On one fundamental level,
however, that of self-defined political identity, important contrasts could
still be seen, with Negri continuing to claim the mantle of communism, while
the circles around Radio Sherwood and the ‘rete autonoma del nord-est’
explicitly abandoned that label. In a similar way, the journal Vis-à-vis then published
materials for the most part of a distinctly left libertarian stamp, yet the
political tendency with which the majority of its editors were associated –
Autonomia di Classe – was rather broader in its composition, shading into
neo-leninist positions at odds with the situationist and councillist resonances
within the journal itself.
Finally, it mustn’t be thought that many of the
connections being established or re-established after 1979 were only the work
of threads emanating from the central trunk of operaismo. In the eighties, Collegamenti
translated materials not only from Wildcat
in Germany, but also Processed World
in the US. Alongside the importance it assigned to struggles in Africa, Midnight Notes on the East Coast
expressed an early interest in the Swiss autonomist movement, and the book Bolo’Bolo, by a Swiss editor of the
journal, found a certain resonance with Processed
World on the West Coast. And in Britain, one of the most consistent
interlocutors with operaismo and its
aftermath has been the editorial collective of Aufheben, a journal whose sensibilities are informed by left
communism as much as anything else.
Wrapping things up for
now
My answer is, ‘it depends’…[lxiii]
I’d like to end on a provocative note: first with
some thoughts about the varying understandings of a few other key terms and
texts, then with some comments taken from the interviews carried out for Futuro Anteriore. There are a number of
points of references that, whatever the passage of years, remain as crucial
markers for understanding what has happened in so-called autonomist Marxism
since 1979. Let’s start with Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’, which first made
its appearance in Italian in the pages of Quaderni
Rossi. Here, it’s hard to resist asserting the following: ‘Tell me your
views on the “Fragment on Machines”, and I’ll tell you your views on everything
else’. Many of us are familiar with the different postoperaista treatments of this text – above all that provided by
Paolo Virno, which dovetails with his reading of Marx’s category ‘communism of
capital’[lxiv]
– and can discern easily enough the political consequences that stem from those
interpretations. But there are other, lesser known readings that also deserve
consideration. Some may be aware of Alquati’s continued insistence that the key
consequence of Marx’s line of argument in this section of the Grundrisse is that capital can not
escape socially necessary labour time’s function at the heart of its own
valorisation.[lxv]
But what can we make of his assertion, back in 1977, that
Above all Marx is not
speaking here of the future, but of the capitalist system of his time, of the factory
as it already functioned then. He is not speaking in fact of the end of
capitalist valorisation, but of a passage within the real subsumption of the
textile industry towards the middle of the nineteenth century.[lxvi]
Another theme worthy of exploration is the borrowing
from other social theories by strands emerging from the wreckage of operaismo. Some of this ground has been
well-covered, particularly in terms of engagement with French theory (but how
many commentators reach back before 1979 to examine in detail the French connection to ‘mao-dadaism’ in Bologna?).
Other terrain is less well-known. For example: how did the category of
post-fordism become a fundamental explanatory device for so many of the
ex-workerist strands after 1979? Unlike the debate within the English-speaking
left (much of it in the academy, especially in and around the world of radical
geography),[lxvii]
where those who adopted this term as a useful explanatory tool often saw
postfordism as a positive development for workers, former workerists in Europe
have tended to embrace the category, which imbuing it with largely negative
connotations. [lxviii] Only Ferruccio Gambino,
to my knowledge, has explicitly rejected the term as ‘a rather blunt
instrument’. Where others see the ‘smooth world’ of Empire, he sees a growing
regionalisation of capitalist blocs within which a diversity of strategies are
deployed to secure the subordination of ‘the labour factor’:
not the
transition to a post-Fordist model, but a continuous recombination of old and
new elements of domination in order to decompose labour power politically
within a newly flexibilised system of production.[lxix]
This paper takes its title from Tolkien – for family
reasons I have been subjected in recent times almost endlessly to the cinematic
version of his trilogy. But the sense of return it tries to suggest is rather
different to that of Frodo. It is a sensibility
evoked by Mario Dalmaviva, one of the many participants in the operaista adventure who deserve to be
better known outside Italy. This is how he characterised the state of things
when interviewed for the Futuro Anteriore
project back in February 2001:
In my opinion
there was a great social revolution in Italy. It didn’t become a political revolution
as we had wanted, and yet it happened, and it prompted a ferocious reaction
from the other side [controparte]
that’s continued up until the present day. They won, but not only don’t they
know where they’re going, they don’t even know where they are. The problem is
that we don’t know either.[lxx]
The second comment is from Alisa Del Re, one of the
few female voices within what has always been a largely male enterprise,[lxxi]
and whose interview for Futuro Anteriore
is the first to be published in English. A workerist feminist whose political
and theoretical work charted its own distinctive course from the seventies, Del
Re was also amongst those imprisoned as part of the notorious ‘7 April case’.
Looking back over the past 25 years or so, she has this to say:
Today, when I
hear of the feminisation of labour, affective labour or immaterial labour, I
laugh: it feels like they are joking because we used to say these things every
day in the ‘70s, when we imagined that there is a form of labour that is
neither accountable nor measured and yet is what makes us reproduce the
labour-power and allows for material production to take place, something
without which material production is impossible. The fact that, when it was
emerging, the movement never made these issues its own allowed the capitalist
productive structure a great advantage that we are now chasing after, because
all current debates on immaterial labour and, I insist, affectivity (Toni calls
it precisely that, as well as ‘affection’) in production, are things that
capital has already made operative. In this there is another issue that women
have long debated and that in my view could correct from a theoretical
standpoint this analysis of immaterial production: this is the issue of the
body. This is not to say: ‘we have a body that we have to take care of because
we have to be healthy, we are not happy with our body and so on’. Capital has
already talked about this. Our argument is rather that production is certainly
immaterial, but this cannot come into reality independently of bodies.[lxxii]
The final word goes to Paolo Virno. Reflecting upon
the early nineties, when Luogo Comune
and Futur
antérieur developed different, yet in part complementary, social analyses –
analyses dissected with typical aplomb by Ferrari Bravo[lxxiii] – he
identified certain important limits of certain participants in the early postoperaista project:
Its attention was always
directed more to understanding, for better or worse, some guiding lights,
rather than truly facing up to the processes of class recomposition, with their
ambiguity and character which, far from given, was often blocked.[lxxiv]
In a subsequent interview with Borio, Pozzi and
Roggero, Virno suggests that since Seattle, there has been a growing ‘representation
and self-identification’ of those layers of social labour-power closest to the
movements against global capital: ‘mass intellectual labour, linguistic labour,
precarious labour’, albeit often in an ‘ethical-symbolic’ sense. Noting that
such layers have ‘exploded’ the chain of class figures traditionally identified
by operaismo (professional worker,
mass worker etc.), he draws us back to:
one of the most interesting
questions of the whole workerist tradition, even if it is rarely thematised as
such: the form of struggle was the lynchpin [soglia] connecting the class’s technical composition and political
composition, it lies at the heart of the various theories of organization. So
the problem is how the movement can turn to the terrain of the relations of
production and therefore how – on the level of migrations, of intellectual
property, of the social working day – it can damage and bring down the
adversary.[lxxv]
The book Empire
famously presents the contemporary world system as one in which power is decentred
– an assertion that has, of late, been subjected to increased questioning.[lxxvi]
Whatever the truth of the matter, the time has come to examine the various
threads stemming from operaismo in a
similarly decentred way. Above all, this will mean judging each on its own
merits as a contribution to comprehending contemporary global power relations
as a whole – not simply those entailing ‘some guiding lights’ – and so in terms
of how each such thread can best contribute to the collective project of
‘damag[ing] and bringing down the adversary’.
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Appendix
Figure 1:
Chris Wright’s ‘Tendency Map’
Figure 2:
Moroni’s ‘Essential lines in the birth and development of the extra-systemic
area of class autonomy’
Figure 3:
Moroni’s ‘Essential lines in the birth and development of the extra-systemic
area of class autonomy’
Figure 4: ‘Some key concepts in social
subjectivity, 1976-2006’
Figure 5:
‘A broader view of some key concepts in social subjectivity, 1967-2006’
Endnotes
[i] Costanzo Preve, 1984.
[ii] Valerio Evangelista, 2000, p.18.
[iii] Enda Brophy, 2004, p. 297.
[iv] See for example, Sylvere Lotringer & Christian Marazzi, 1980, and many
of the interviews conducted for Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi
& Gigi Roggero, .
[v] Franco Berardi, 1998, pp. 147-53.
[vi] Massimo De Angelis, 1993.
[vii] Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi & Gigi Roggero, 2005, pp. 34-5.
[viii] Sergio Bologna, 1986, pp. 461-2.
[ix] Franco Berardi, 1998, pp. 118-22.
[x] Sergio Bologna, 1978, pp. 29, 39.
[xi] Yann Moulier Boutang, 2001, p. 7.
[xii] Mario Tronti, 1971, p.12.
[xiii] Antonio Negri, 1981, p. 52.
[xiv] Peppino Ortoleva, 1975, p. 52.
[xv] Sergio Bologna, 2003, p. 104.
[xvi] Enda Brophy, 2004, p. 279.
[xvii] Chris Wright, n.d.
[xviii] In Cevro-Vukovic, 1976, p. 33.
[xix] Primo Moroni, 1996.
[xx] Sandro Mezzadra, 2001, p. 7.
[xxi] Sandro Mezzadra, 2001, p.7. Two typical examples of such seminars are
Sergio Bologna et al., 1993, and Pino Tripodi (ed.), 1996.
[xxii] Marco Revelli, 1989.
[xxiii] On Bianchini, see Lauso Zagato’s interview in Guido Borio,
Francesca Pozzi & Gigi Roggero, , p. 334. On
the ongoing struggles of the mass worker within the world system, see Beverly
Silver, 2003.
[xxiv] For a recent consideration of the continued strategic importance of such
workers, see Beverly Silver, 2003.
[xxv] See, for example, the preface to the second edition of Sergio Bologna,
1996.
[xxvi] In Ferruccio Gambino et al., 2002, p. 5.
[xxvii] There is an enormous amount of literature relevant to this topic. For one
overview of the broader issues as they stood in the early nineties, see G.
Soriano, 1992.
[xxviii] Paolo Virno, 2004, Part 4.
[xxix] See Cosimo Scarinzi 1982-3, 1983.
[xxx] Seethe work of Andrea Fumagalli concerning guaranteed income – e.g
Fumagalli, 1998.
[xxxi] See, for example, the article by a predecessor of Wildcat – Karlsruher Stadzeitung, 1984.
[xxxii] Wildcat, 1997.
[xxxiii] Phillip Mattera, 1985, p. 129; Bologna’s comments can be found in Bifo et
al., 1986, pp. 227-8.
[xxxiv] Kolinko, 2002.
[xxxv] See Aufheben, 2004.
[xxxvi] Apart from a number of articles in Posse,
see also Francesco Brancaccio, et al., 2005.
[xxxvii] Angela Mitropoulos, 2005.
[xxxviii] See for example Alessandro Serafini et al., 1974; Luciano Ferrari Bravo
(ed.), 1975; Karl Heinz Roth, 1976.
[xxxix] Yann Moulier Boutang, 2001, p. 3. He adds: ‘to my mind, even if it is
naturally easy to revise history, still everything that followed, this
radicalisation of the white working class, including the CUBs, then the Brigate
Rosse and the other armed groups, happened, when the invisible party was no
longer such within the class composition, because it had already dissolved into
various situations, and the bosses had a plan to decompose everything
completely, to defeat it. I don’t remember how many immigrant workers there
were at the time, but certainly in the FIAT defeat of ’80, they were already an
important variable in the territory. It’s a shame, because we truly could have
organised things and changed this dynamic a bit’.
[xl] See for example Ferruccio Gambino, 2003; Devi Sachetto, 2004.
[xli] Sandro Mezzadra, 2001, p. 11.
[xlii] Sandro Mezzadra, 2005, p. 2. See also Brett Neilson & Sandro Mezzadra,
2003, and
[xliii] For example, see Romano Alquati, 1994.
[xliv] Romano Alquati, 1997, pp. 89, 86.
[xlv] Romano Alquati, n.d., p. 14.
[xlvi] Franco Berardi, 1998, p. 189.
[xlvii] Franco Berardi, 2002.
[xlviii] Paolo Virno, 2004; Arianna Bove & Erik Empson, 2002.
[xlix] Nick Dyer-Witheford, 2005.
[l] Maria Rosa Dalla Costa, 2002.
[li] Alongside the efforts of Midnight Notes, we can also note the work carried
out since the late seventies by Harry Cleaver, covering a range of topics from
the politics of debt to engagement with the Zapatistas. A useful overview can
be found in the preface to the second edition of his Reading Capital Politically – Harry Cleaver, 2000.
[lii] In TPTG, 2001.
[liii] See ‘Part V. Class Composition and Developing a
New Working Class Strategy’, in Monty Neill et al., 1996.
[liv] Ferruccio Gambino, 1986, p. 198.
[lv] See Harry Cleaver, 2001; Peter Linebaugh, 1997; Sergio Bologna, 2003;
Ferruccio Gambino, 2001.
[lvi] See Antonio Negri, 2005. More recently, the website of the French-language
publication Multitudes has hosted a
variety of materials that continue and extend some of the work of Futur
antérieur, while making increasing
numbers of texts available in English.
[lvii] Alisa Del Re, 2000.
[lviii] Massimo De Angelis, 2001, p. 4.
[lix] Nick Dyer-Witheford, 1999, Chapter 9.
[lx] See Christian Marazzi, 1994, and Christian Marazzi, 2002.
[lxi] Amongst other things, Bove is a mainstay of the excellent 'generation
online' website/archive', Murphy has introduced a number of Negri's texts into
English, Palano and Toscano have written some important commentaries on
operaismo and postoperaismo, while Mandarini's most recent project has been the
English edition of Antonio Negri, 2003..
[lxii] In terms of the first groups, Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi
& Gigi Roggero, 2002, p. 40, speak of ‘that restricted number of subjects
with an effective autonomy of research and capacity for political proposition’.
Elsewhere Borio has spoken more bluntly of ‘a few people
who could be counted on the fingers of one hand’ – see Carlo Cuccomarino et
al., 2002.
[lxiii] Romano Alquati, 1993, p. 1.
[lxiv] Paolo Virno, 2004, pp. 110-1.
[lxv] Romano Alquati 1997, p. 174.
[lxvi] Romano Alquati 1977, p. 45.
[lxvii] See the essays collected in Ash Amin (ed.), 2001.
[lxviii] Cristina Tajani & Gigi Roggero, 2005, pp. 153-4, have provided a very
useful summary of what, in the postoperaista
debate, is seen as the key features of the transition to postfordism:
·‘the passage from a productive system based upon large
vertically integrated production units to a territorially diffuse system of
production, with reticularly articulated small units;
·‘the growing weight of formally self-employed and
independent labour, with the accentuation of various forms of flexibility,
parallel to the progressive reduction of employed labour and growing
casualisation of jobs;
·‘the more general tendency towards the multiplication
of employment regimes, even within situations of analogous work or equivalent
job roles;
·‘the increased requirement in the production process
(including within large factories) for cognitive, relational, linguistic,
communicative and other faculties (including those called ‘immaterial’);
·‘the refurbished importance of the IT revolution, as
instrument and paradigm of networked production;
·‘the
structural permanence of quotients of employed labour deployed in the lowliest,
most degrading jobs, often undertaken by male and female migrant workers in
particularly oppressive conditions.’
[lxix] Ferruccio Gambino, 1996.
[lxx] Mario Dalmaviva, 2000, p. 12.
[lxxi] Of the 58 individuals interviewed for Futuro
Anteriore, five were women – probably a reasonable reflection of gender
balance within operaismo’s trajectory
(although it must be said that not all of those interviewed, male or female,
considered themselves to have been operaisti).
[lxxii] Alisa Del Re, 2000.
[lxxiii] See Luciano Ferrari Bravo, 1996.
[lxxiv] Paolo Virno, 2001, p. 16.
[lxxv] In Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi & Gigi Roggero, , p. 323. Unlike most other interviews in that book, this passage seems
additional to the transcripts collected in the CD-ROM accompanying Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi & Gigi Roggero, 2002.