Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomi

Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomi
Steve Wright | 2002-02-20 00:00:00 | Pluto Press | 272 | Popular Economics

Storming Heaven is the first comprehensive survey of Italian autonomist theory, from its origins in the anti-stalinist and workerist left of the 1950s to its heyday twenty years later. Autonomist marxism was a political tendency which privileged themes--self-organisation, construction of identity, grassroots politics, subjects in struggle--which in many ways can be seen as the precursor of today's debates around direct action protest. Emphasising the dynamic nature of class struggle as the distinguishing feature of autonomist thought, Wright explores how its understanding of class politics developed alongside emerging social movements. Offering a critical and historical exploration of the tendency's emergence in postwar Italy, Storming Heaven moves beyond the crisis of traditional analytical frameworks on the left, and assesses the strengths and limitations of autonomist marxism as first developed by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna and others.

Reviews
Excepted from "Operaismo, Autonomia, and the Emergence of New Social Subjects," Perspectives on Anarchist Theory Volume 9 Number (Fall 2005): 59-63:



Turning to Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright we can contextualize historically and socially many of the concepts of autonomist Marxism / operaismo. Wright traces the emergence and development of operaisti thought and practice from the mid-1940s to its dissolution in the late 1970s. His book serves as a corrective by placing Negri's work in the context of the movements he was involved in, and drawing out underappreciated voices. This is especially important as operaisti concepts did not emerge from the work of isolated theorists but from those engaged in the ongoing processes of organizing.



The neglect of many of the voices from operaismo that Wright draws attention to--such as those of Panzieri, Tronti, Alquati and Bologna---is due to the lack of translation of their materials into English. Wright's book is the first and only text in English to provide an overview of the evolution and development of operaismo, a task that it handles quite successfully. While the detailed history reads at some points like an extended version of a "who's arguing with whom" in the radical left, it is important to be able to trace the development of these ideas. It is the setting of Italy's "economic miracle" in the 1950s and the decisions of the Italian Communist Party to emphasize state capitalist development combined with the ideological fallout from the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and massive immigration from southern Italy that created a grouping of workers who were not willing to work within the confines of existing party and union structures. It is these emergent populations and the industrial unrest they fermented that would congeal the figure of the mass worker in the theorization of the operaistis. The figure of mass worker is characterized by labor which is: (1) massified, or the performance of simple repetitive labor; (2) located in the immediate process of production; and (3) individually interchangeable but collectively indispensable to the workings of capital.



Wright brings together the vast array of operaisti practices by looking at their emergence and development in relation to the concept of class composition. He uses class composition as a unifying focal point for the development of the Italian extraparliamentary left, starting with organizations like Potere Operaio to more dispersed forms of organizing grouped together under the network of Autonomia. The idea of class composition describes the effects, circumstances and behaviors resulting from the development of the working class in specific conditions of labor, and the ways in which the subjective experiences of a population shape and relate to their circumstances. For Italian autonomist Marxists theorizing about their situation the concept of class composition was central because it highlighted what Wright describes as: "the importance it placed upon the relationship between the material structure of the working class, and its behavior as a subject autonomous from the dictates of both the labor movement and capital." While earlier operaisti texts focused exclusively on labor within the factory walls, operaismo's theorization of work broadened beyond this narrow view of the factory itself to the unleashing of new forces of antagonism on the streets in 1968 and the Italian "hot autumn" of 1969, during which students and new social forces emerged into popular consciousness.



It is these newly emerging social forces that worked their way into operaisti theories of the social factory. Tronti described the idea of the social factory as: "At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production; the whole of society becomes an articulation of production; in other words, the whole of society exists as a function of the factory and the factory extends its domination over the whole of society." Here, the production of surplus value and its extraction no longer occurs only within the factory walls but is diffused through the social milieu. The diffuse nature of production, as described by a concept like the social factory, meant that the privileged revolutionary position of the industrial working class would be ceded to support for all struggles that intervened in broader social reproduction. This means that various forms of social struggle, from student organizing to feminist movements, are not resistance outside of what could be considered class struggle but are all interventions in reclaiming the common resources and social energies that capital is continually trying to siphon off for its own uses.



Operaisti, morphing their practices in accordance with the changing nature of social and political production, came to argue that the primary objective of organization is to "maintain the continuity of open struggle." This represents a shifting away from the dead ends created by the constraints of orthodox Marxist theorization, as well as socialist and communist party discipline. However, this does not mean that the new concepts developed by operaisti theorists always found their way into practice immediately. Refocusing away from Marxist orthodoxy and workerism in a negative sense (focus on workplace struggle to the neglect of all others) took some years to be worked out effectively. For example, throughout the 1970s, operaisti theorists often embraced the struggles of others (such as feminist campaigns like Wages for Housework) only to the extent that they agreed with and extended arguments of the operaistis. And as the social antagonisms unleashed in the 1970s were beset by factionalization and disagreement, massive state repression in response to such acts as the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades would tear apart the project of operaismo for some time.

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