Sergio Bologna, as one of the leading intellectuals of the Italian “operaism” (workerism) Marxist current, has maintained a sympathetic but critical stance towards the social movements of autonomous workers, self-organised students, radical feminists and counter-cultural youth that made up Autonomia in the 1970s. His essay on the 1977 Movement (in which Autonomia was one of the main protagonists), “The Tribe of Moles,” provides one of the most complete analyses of the social, political and economic origins and composition of one of Italy’s most important mass political and social movements, the roots of the present widespread network of centri sociali (squatted social centres) and free radio stations.
Today the process of constituting class independence is first and foremost a process of separation. … I am emphasising this forced separation in order to clarify the overall meaninglessness of a capitalist world within which I find myself constituted in non-independent form, in the form of exploitation. I thus refuse to accept the recompositional dialectic of capital; I affirm in sectarian manner my own separateness, my own independence, the differentness of my consitution. As H.J.Krahl understood (in his book Constitution and Class Consciousness -a book which, with the passing of the years, becomes increasingly important), the totality of class consciousness is first and foremost an intensive condition, a process of intensification of class self-identity as a productive being, which destroys the relationship with the totality of the capitalist system.
Antonio Negri
The breadth, depth, intensity and longevity of Antonio Negri’s intellectual and living engagement with revolutionary, anti-capitalist politics is impossible to capture or summarise in a single, website post. We limit ourselves to sharing an essay entitled Domination and Sabotage that he wrote after the emergence of the “Movement of ’77” in Italy.
We follow this with the documentary film of 2004 dedicated to Negri, by Alexandra Weltz and Andreas Pichler: Antonio Negri: a revolt that never ends.
Workers’ struggles determine the course of capitalist development; but capitalist development will use those struggles for its own ends if no organized revolutionary process opens up, capable of changing that balance of forces.
Mario Tronti
In an eloquent, incisive and auto-biographical text, Mario Tronti looks back at the development of Italian operaismo during the 1950s/60s.
While most political forms and traditions of the European left cross-pollinated freely across national boundaries, the Italian operaismo of the 1960s was largely a sui generis experience in its time. Credited with a significant intellectual impact at home—transforming Italian sociology, through its project of worker inquiries, and yielding a heady if evanescent crop of theoretical journals: Quaderni rossi, Classe operaia, Angelus Novus, Contropiano—it had less immediate reverberation abroad than the larger current around Il Manifesto, whose cultural breadth and political consistency was of a different order. A condition for operaismo’s existence was the dramatic industrial expansion of the 1950s, within a culture already deeply coloured by two mass workers’ parties, each with its own lively intellectual life. The Italian Communist Party had some two million members, while the Socialist Party of the post-war decades was far to the left of Cold War social democracy; both were revitalized by the thaw that followed Khrushchev’s secret speech. Operaismo would be characterized by an implacable hostility to the diluted Gramscianism of the PCI’s ‘national-popular’ outlook (‘the Resistance as a second Risorgimento’), and by an engagement with anti-historicist, scientific methodologies. Early operaista thinkers sprang principally from the left of the PSI, whose watchword of ‘autonomy’—originally with a ‘for-itself’ connotation—remained a key term. A seminal figure, Raniero Panzieri (1921–64) edited the PSI’s theoretical journal Mondo operaio from 1957 to 59; marginalized by the Nenni leadership, he went to work for Einaudi in Turin. Launching Quaderni rossi there in 1961, Panzieri could draw on like-minded thinkers around Luciano Della Mea in Milan, Antonio Negri and Massimo Cacciari in the Veneto and Mario Tronti in Rome. Born into a working-class Communist family in Rome in 1931, Tronti had joined the PCI in the early 1950s, while studying philosophy at the University of Rome. Breaking with Quaderni rossi in 1964, he went on to edit Classe operaia, returning to the PCI in 1967 to pursue the operaista project within its ranks and developing a concept of the ‘autonomy of the political’. In this issue, we publish an edited extract from Tronti’s memoir of the movement, Noi operaisti, published by Derive Approdi in 2009. At once polemical and personal, it offers an illuminating contrast of the springtime of 56 and hot autumnn of 69, and draws a sharp distinction between classical operaismo and its distant echo, autonomism, which persisted on the counter-cultural margins of Europe’s cities from the late 70s, to emerge in more hygienic form in Hardt and Negri’s Empire at the turn of the century.
It is wrong to define present day society as “industrial civilisation”. The “industry” of that definition is, in fact, merely a means. The truth of modern society is that it is the civilisation of labour. Furthermore, a capitalist society can never be anything but this. And, in the course of its historical development, it can even take on the form of “socialism”. So…. not industrial society (that is, the society of capital) but the society of industrial labour, and thus the society of workers’ labour. It is capitalist society seen from this point of view that we must find the courage to fight. What are workers doing when they struggle against their employers? Are they not, above all else, saying “No” to the transformation of labour power into labour? Are they not, more than anything, refusing to receive work from the capitalist?
Mario Tronti
It would be hard to underestimate the importance and the sophistication of Mario Tronti’s elaboration of operaismo. Tronti’s operaismo was able to propose a modern analysis of class relations and above all refocus attention of the subjective factor, claiming the central political role of the working class. His ideas found an echo in 1966, with the publication of Operai e capitale [Workers and Capital], a book which would exercise a notable influence on Italy’s Autonomia movement(s) in the years that followed.
An active member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the 1950s, he was, with Raniero Panzieri, amongst the founders of the Quaderni Rossi [Red Notebooks] review from which he split in 1963 to found the Classe Operaia [Working Class] review. This evolving journey progressively distanced him from the PCI, without ever formally leaving, and engaged him in the radical experiences of operaismo. Such experience, considered by many to be the matrix of Italian Autonomist Marxism in the 1960s, was characterised by challenging the roles of the traditional organisations of the workers’ movement (the unions and the parties) and the direct engagement, without intermediaries, with the working class itself and to the struggles in the factories. (Wikipedia)
We share two texts by Tronti: a selection from his work Operai e Capitale, and in a second post, a later reflection on Italian operaismo.
The question, long debated, of how to connect and harmonize demands and partial, immediate struggles, with general ends, is resolved precisely in affirming the continuity of struggles and of their nature. In effect this connection and this harmonization are impossible, and are an ideological mess, as long as there is still the idea that there is a realm of socialism, a for the time unknowable mystery, that will appear one day as a miraculous dawn to achieve the dreams of man. The ideal of socialism is indeed an ideal that contrasts profoundly and without the possibility of accommodation with capitalist society, but it is an ideal that needs to be made alive day by day, won moment by moment in struggles; that arises and develops insofar as every struggle serves to mature and advance institutions that emerge from below, the nature of which is exactly already the affirmation of socialism.
Raniero Panzieri
The Italian Autonomia movement(s) originate, in part, in the theoretical and practical work that would come to be known as operaismo or workerism, work that placed the working class at the centre of economic, social and political life, in opposition to different forms of “representationalism”: political party, labour union, technical-administrative experts and the like.
Operaismo would slowly metamorphose and grow into the broader Autonomia in the 1970s, and regardless of the differences between the many organisational expressions of both, the latter would be unimaginable without the former.
Within the tradition of operaismo, we begin with an essay – a statement of theses – by Raniero Panzieri.
Panzieri was a member of the Italian Socialist Party and in 1953, he joined the Party’s central committee. In 1957, he became the co-director of the theoretical review Mondo operaio [Workers World], a period in which he also translated Karl Marx’s Capital into Italian.
At the 1959 congress of the Italian Socialist Party, he opposed the creation of a governmental accord with the Italian Christian Democratic Party. This led to his expulsion from the party.
Later, in Turin, he forged links with several groups of militant trade unionists, socialists and dissident communists. Influenced by the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie he founded the Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) review, together with Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati and Danilo Montaldi.
In the industrial revolt of the piazza Statuto in 1962 in Turin, Panzieri saw the emergence of the central role of the factory and the (factory) worker in the constitution of capitalist social relations. The first editions of the review, which aimed at exploring the real life of the factory and the relationship of the workers to production, had a profound impact in the sphere of workplace struggles, as they departed from the habitual positions of the socialists and communists in this area. (Wikipedia)
Radio Alice was an Italian Pirate radio broadcasting from Bologna at the end of the 1970s. It started transmitting on 9 February 1976 using an ex-military transmitter on a frequency of 100.6 MHz. The station was closed by the carabinieri on 12 March 1977. Radio Alice then re-opened again for two years and became politically aligned with the autonomism movement. After closure, the frequency was then given by the state to Radio Radicale. Radio Alice’s output covered a myriad of subjects: labor protests, poetry, yoga lessons, political analysis, love declarations, cooking recipes, Jefferson Airplane, Area or Beethoven music. Participants in the station included Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Maurizio Torrealta, Filippo Scòzzari and Paolo Ricci. In 2002 some former staff members participated in the founding of Orfeo TV, the first Telestreet pirate TV. (Mediateletipos)
An interview with Franco Berardi on Radio Alice, a free radio station in Bologna from 1973-1977.
Radio Alice was a free radio station in Bologna from 1973-1977. Rather than attempting to objectify events in the world, they set out to create a flow of sounds, information, messages and poetry, silences and abuse. Like the manifestations of Dada, transmissions were seen as immediate cultural subversions.
Bifo, who worked on Radio Alice was interviewed by Carlos Ordonez at the recent conference on Autonomy (’After Marx, April’) in London. The interview was conducted in English.
The autonomia movement in Italy during the seventies emerged from the new proletariat of disaffected and unemployed youth, workers and intellectuals creating a radical opposition to institutional politics.
‘Autonomy has no frontiers. It is a way of eluding the imperatives of production, the verticality of institutions, the traps of political representation, the virus of power. In biology an autonomous organism is an element that functions independently of other parts. Political autonomy is the desire to allow differences to deepen at the base without trying to synthesize them from above,to stress similar attitudes without imposing a general line, to all parts to co-exist side and side in their singularity.’
Sylvere Lotringer ‘The Return of Politics’ ‘Autonomia’ issue of Semiotext(e)
Franco Berardi, alias “Bifo”, was one of the main figures of the Movement of 77 in Bologna. He was arrested at that time under the charge of “subversive association”. Bifo was asked to write the following presentation, by the editors of the Semiotext(e) collection Italy: Autonomia, on the context in which the Movement developed and the problems it had to confront up to, and after, the April 7, 1979, arrests.
On April 7, twenty-two militants and intellectuals from Padua, Rome, Milano and Torino were arrested. What they have in common is their participation, until 1973, in the group Workers’ Power (Potere Operaio) which then dissolved and became an element in the movement of Autonomia. They were arrested on the charge of leading the Red Brigades, the strongest of terrorist organizations in Italy. And in particular, they are accused of directing the kidnapping and execution of Aldo Moro, head of the governing Christian Democratic party. There are no grounds and no proof whatsoever for these charges. And practically everyone in Italy who has read a newspaper knows it. It is not only false that the militants of Autonomy and the intellectuals arrested on April 7 directed the Red Brigades, but, in fact, the political and theoretical lines of the Red Brigades diverge drastically from those of the individuals arrested. Essentially what is clear in all this operation is that the prosecution— and thus its sponsoring agency, the government— has decided to make this group of intellectuals pay for the last 10 years of mass revolutionary struggle in Italy. The government thinks it can succeed, and that the balance of power may be shifted decisively to its advantage. But we can make no sense at all of the actions taken by the government during these past months if we do not understand at least some things about the political situation in Italy, and about the Italian revolutionary movement:
FIRST: The crisis of Capitalism and of the Italian State subsequent to the workers’ struggle during the Sixties.
SECOND: The Historical Compromise, an attempt to get beyond this crisis and to defeat the revolutionary movement.
THIRD: The novelty of the revolutionary movement for Autonomy with respect to the historical Socialist and Marxist Workers’ Movement; its theoretical originality and its political praxis, as seen in 1977.
FOURTH: The problem of the civil war, and of the Red Brigades.
The experience of the revolutionary movement in Italy, from 1968 to 1979, is unquestionably the richest and the most meaningful within the capitalist West. To comprehend the novel elements that this experience contains we have to look at the theoretical and organizational currents that come to a head in Potere Operaio — until 1973— and are then dispersed and articulated in various organizational forms within “Workers’ Autonomy” (Autonomia Operaia).
“It’s not enough to denounce the lies of the power, we need to denounce and break also the truths of the power. When the power tells the truth and it pretends that it’s something natural, we must denounce what is inhuman and absurd in this order of reality, which is reproduced, reflected and consolidated by the order of speech. We must unveil the delirious aspect of the power.
Let’s pretend to be in the place of the power, let’s speak with its voice, let’s emit signals as if we were the power with its tone of voice. But they are fake signals. Let’s produce fake information that unveils what power hides, information capable of producing a revolt against the force of the speech of the power.”
—A/traverso, February 1976
The Italian movement of 1977 is an event that nobody commemorates, although—and probably because— it contains the germs of our actual present; the desires and contradictions that emerged back then are profoundly contemporary, to the degree that the protagonists of that movement are still persecuted and can’t be forgiven: some of them are currently under arrest and no amnesty has been approved in their favor. Others get extradited to be jailed.
One could even talk about the survival of ’77 in a Warburgian sense and observe that the images and energies from that time have partly migrated within ours and somehow haunt it.
The memory of these years is a sensible territory; having been the theater of conflicts that are still raging inside society’s body, ’77 is a difficult space for deploying critical distance and trying to interpret the facts.
Anarchist truth cannot and must not become the monopoly of one individual or committee; nor can it depend on the decisions of real or fictitious majorities. All that is necessary — and sufficient — is for everyone to have and to exercise the widest freedom of criticism and for each one of us to maintain their own ideas and choose for themselves their own comrades. In the last resort the facts will decide who was right.
Italy’s Autonomia movement(s) of the 1960s and 70s, against the background of a rapidly changing society brought on by what some would call Italy’s earlier “economic miracle” – mass, economically driven internal migration from the poorer, rural south to the industrialising north; increasingly decentralised or post-Fordist industrial organisation as the national economy is “internationalised” and “consumer focused”; the “democratisation” of access to post-secondary education; the decomposition and re-composition of older family structures; the weakening of the institutional and cultural weight of the Catholic Church; and so on -, sought in a variety of different ways to theorise and put into practice the need for new organisational forms to contest capitalist social relations, forms that were both responsive to working class (re)configurations and interests, and capable of surpassing the political sclerosis of the Italian Communist Party/the PCI in the struggle against capital.
If the Italian movement(s) of the time were not unique in confronting these issues, as they were common to much of the “long May of ’68” in France and elsewhere, in Italy, they were brought to a head with much greater intensity and in ways that still resonate.
The “organisational question” of the working class may seem to be a specifically “Marxist” concern, but anarchists and other “leftist” political traditions have also addressed the matter, and this throughout there history. If the “communist or Leninist party form” entered upon a terminal crisis in ’68, anarchism was no less interpolated by the same social transformations. What advantage anarchists had in this matter, if any, was that the debate for them was almost as old as anarchism itself.
We share below a second essay in our series dedicated to Italy’s Autonomia, this time with a focus on the “organisational question”.
… the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure. The finest meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into’ which men are born – or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.
… And these are historical questions. If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships their ideas, and their institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.
These words are from the “Preface” of E.P. Thompson’s 1963 classic essay, The Making of the English Working Class and they offer, still, a lens through which to read anything describable as working class consciousness and any “radical” politics emergent from it. The mistake, for Thompson, is to reify the working class, to imagine it as a sort of thing from which its proper class consciousness can be inferred, failing which, its “true” representatives can reveal and guide it.
Italy: Autonomia (10) – Sergio Bologna
Sergio Bologna, as one of the leading intellectuals of the Italian “operaism” (workerism) Marxist current, has maintained a sympathetic but critical stance towards the social movements of autonomous workers, self-organised students, radical feminists and counter-cultural youth that made up Autonomia in the 1970s. His essay on the 1977 Movement (in which Autonomia was one of the main protagonists), “The Tribe of Moles,” provides one of the most complete analyses of the social, political and economic origins and composition of one of Italy’s most important mass political and social movements, the roots of the present widespread network of centri sociali (squatted social centres) and free radio stations.
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