Steve Wright - Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism

Storming Heaven

Storming Heaven

Class Composition and Struggle
in Italian Autonomist Marxism

Steve Wright

First published 2002 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Steve Wright 2002

The right of Steve Wright to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 1607 9 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 1606 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 8496 4083 1 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1473 5 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7837 1472 8 EPUB eBook

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Wright, Steve, 1958

Storming heaven : class composition and struggle in Italian autonomist marxism / Steve Wright.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0745316077 (hard) ISBN 0745316069 (pbk.)

1. Working classItalyHistory20th century. 2. Labor movementItalyHistory20th century. 3. CommunismItalyHistory20th century. 4. ItalyPolitics and government20th century. I. Title.

HD8481 .W75 2002

335.430945dc21

2001004857

11100908070605040302
1098765 4321

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Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG

Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester

Printed on Demand in the European Union by

CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne, UK

these Parisians, storming heaven ...

Marx to Kugelmann, 12 April 1871

[Our] line has found its theoretical and political, tactical and
strategic verification in the struggle of the FIAT workers in the
renewed working class project of storming heaven.

La Classe, August 1969

Our sabotage organises the proletarian assault on the heavens.
And in the end those damned heavens will no longer be there!
Antonio Negri, Capitalist Domination and Working Class Sabotage,
September 1977

(trans. Red Notes)

Contents

Acknowledgements

This book began life as a doctoral thesis, inspired in large part by Ed Emerys work as translator and archivist. Over the course of its writing I became indebted to a number of people for their assistance: along with Ed himself, I would particularly like to mention my thesis supervisor Alastair Davidson, Vicky Franzinetti, Hilary Partridge and Larry Wright. I also benefited greatly from brief discussions with Ferruccio Gambino, John Merrington, Peppino Ortoleva and Marco Revelli. Jim Asker, Peter Beilharz, Carlo Carli, Pasquale Coppola DAngelo, Richard Curlewis, Chris Healy, David Lockwood, Anna Marino, Sandro Portelli, Pierangelo Rosati (Hobo), Riccardo Schirr and Jeff Soar all provided hard-to-find reference materials. My thesis examiners, Grant Amyot and Donald Sassoon, made constructive comments concerning its possible publication.

That a version of it has indeed finally appeared in print is largely due to the impetus provided by Patrick Cuninghame, John Hutnyk and Gioacchino Toni, combined with the enthusiasm of Anne Beech at Pluto Press. Along the way, I was sustained by the encouragement of the following: Franco Barchiesi, Jon Beasley-Murray, Volker Beyerle, Mike Brown, Verity Burgmann, Harry Cleaver, Steve Cowden, Massimo De Angelis, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Gra, Matt Holden, Sonya Jeffery, Pete Lentini, Bruce Lindsay, Angela Mitropoulos, Gavin Murray, Curtis Price, and Myk Zeitlin. A number of friends in Italy Pino Caputo, Cosimo Scarinzi, Beatrice Stengel and Renato Strumia have again been helpful with sources. Thanks too to John Holloway for help with a last minute citation.

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. Needless to say, all mistakes also remain my own.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Rosa Lorenzon, who has long borne the intrusions of this project with a stoic tolerance and humour. I dedicate this book both to her and to our little rebels Ginevra and Sean.

Introduction

The cusp of the new century has seen something of an upsurge of the anti-statist left in Western countries and beyond, as part of a broader movement against global capital. If much of this resurgence can rightly be claimed by various anarchist tendencies, autonomist Marxism has also encountered renewed interest of late (Dyer-Witheford 1999). Given that the core premises of autonomist Marxism were first developed in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, now is an opportune time to examine their origin and development within the stream of Italian Marxism known popularly as operaismo (literally, workerism).

By the late 1970s, operaismo had come to occupy a central place within the intellectual and political life of the Italian left. While its impact was most apparent in the field of labour historiography, discussions concerning the changing nature of the state and class structure, economic restructuring and appropriate responses to it even philosophical debates on the problem of needs were all stamped with workerisms characteristic imprint (Pescarolo 1979). Nor was its influence confined simply to circles outside the Italian Communist Party (PCI), as the attention then paid to its development by leading party intellectuals some of them former adherents made clear (DAgostini 1978).

None the less, workerisms weight remained greatest within the tumultuous world of Italian revolutionary politics, above all amongst the groups of Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy). As the three major political formations to the left of the PCI plunged into crisis after their disappointing performance in the 1976 national elections, Autonomia began to win a growing audience within what was then the largest far left in the West. When a new movement emerged in and around Italian universities the following year, the autonomists were to be the only organised force accepted within it. With their ascent, workerist politics, marginalised nationally for half a decade, would return with a vengeance.

Curiously, these developments then engendered little interest within the English-speaking left. While the rise of Eurocommunism in the 1970s made Italian politics topical, encouraging the translation both of Communist texts and some of their local Marxist critiques, the efforts of the workerist left were passed over in silence. Little, indeed, of workerist material had at that point been translated at all, and what was available pertaining for the most part to operaismos classical phase during the 1960s gave a somewhat outdated view of its development. It is not surprising, therefore, that on the few occasions when reference was made to workerism in the English language, it was often to a caricature of the Italian tendency.

Despite this, workerist perspectives did succeed in touching some sections of the British and North American left. The advocates of Wages for Housework, whose controversial views were to spark a lively debate amongst feminists (Malos 1980), drew many of their arguments from the writings of the workerist-feminist Maria Rosa Dalla Costa. In a similarly iconoclastic vein, the male editors of Zerowork set about reinterpreting contemporary working-class struggles in the US and abroad from a viewpoint strikingly different to those of other English-speaking Marxists (Midnight Notes 1990). Yet even these endeavours, while worthy of note in their own right, were to contain nuances quite different to those of their Italian counterparts, and could shed only limited light upon