Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 19:54:37 +1000
From: sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright)
Subject: (eng) on the Bologna conference documents


Thanks, Arcangelo, for supplying the preliminary documents from the recent
conference in Bologna. They are quite intriguing, and seem to suggest a
certain influence from Marco Melotti and other editors of _Vis-a-Vis_
(hardly surprising, given that journal is based in Bologna).

While I don't have time to translate the documents into English, I can
quickly summarise some of the central arguments. These, in no particular
order, include the following:

* 'Capital's "permanent restructuring" has had a devastating, annihilating
effect upon the class struggle.  In strictly political terms, the
exhaustion of the contradiction between East and West, the liquidation of
the State capitalist sub-systems, and the reunification of the capitalist
market's "geo-political" dimensions  have brusquely  reshaped 'popular' and
class struggles in the peripheries of the world,  from Asia  and Africa to
Latin America. In economic terms, the recomposition of the world market and
the globalization of the conditions of production and exchange have
dislocated all the nodes within the capital/labour contradiction, giving
life to a system of command in which the rupture of any single link of the
imperialist chain is either impossible, or else readily mended. In Europe
the "post-89" impact of workers resistance with the new conditions of the
reunified world market, with the new structures of imperialist command, has
had different, spiazzanti [?] outcomes, designating a new context that goes
well beyond the outcomes of the mass worker's defeat back in the seventies.
. .'

* the present class composition in Italy is one divided between
'traditional' sectors (the old mass worker of manufacturing, and public
sector employees) and newer layers based in the 'advanced tertiary sector'
and hi-tech endeavours, many of whom are engaged in precarious and
casualised work. This class composition is further shot through by ethnic
and other hierarchies. Neither of its two major fragments has been able to
defend its direct wage, let alone the social wage; indeed, for the former,
some of the components of the social wage (pensions, housing) seem beyond
reach.

* as important as the experience of workers self-organisation has been in
Italy, the COBAS and similar bodies have so far proved incapable of
resolving 'the central node of political subjectivity' - that is, 'the
problem of the existence and positioning  of communist subjectivity within
the class struggle'.

* while the collapse of the Berlin wall has dealt a serious blow to
'official', stalinist communism, libertarian communist strands such as
autonomia have had their own problems in recent years. In the Italian case,
the legacy of repression during the eighties has left the autonomist
movement divided between 'an "old" political class (precious because it is
the bearer of instruments) and very "new" social subjectivities (extremely
precious, but totally headless)'.

* the Italian autonomist movement needs to reassert and rethink its
identity, in the face of efforts by others on the left (sections of
Rifondazione and _il manifesto_ above all) to reduce it to a social
phenomenon ('the fine young people of the social centres') excised  of its
political connotations (as a revolutionary, communist heresy);

* the proposal - popular in many social centres and sections of
Rifondazione - for 'socially useful labour' within the voluntary,
'non-profit' sector does not offer any means of dissolving the domination
of capital;

* there is an urgent need for a national forum within which the various
'sectional and territorial' fragments of the autonomist movement can
explore the current's broad direction, perspectives and priorities;

* a serious and effective revolutionary politics must address the
transnational dimension of domination and struggle. In their different
ways, recent events in both Chiapas and France have much to teach here.




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