File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism.Jul12-Aug17.94, message 51


Date: Wed, 20 Jul 1994 12:07:44 -0500 (CDT)
From: Jonathan Beasley Murray <jbmurray-AT-alpha1.csd.uwm.edu>
Subject: Re: Autonomia (long message!)


I'd second most of Alex's observations, but as I am becoming more and 
more a true proselyte for autonomia, and it is hard to get information 
about the movement, I thought I'd be immodest enough to post part of a 
paper I wrote on Negri and ethics, which includes a sizeable amount of 
context, and introduces some of their theorization, too.  This also helps 
to explain my view on the Gramsci (and thus Laclau/Mouffe) debate.

Feel free to delete:


                   i. operaismo and autonomia

     Toni Negri is the most widely known theorist of so-called
"autonomist" marxism (or autonomia), a diverse movement in 1970s
Italian political and intellectual culture that developed from
1960s Italian "workerism" (or operaismo).  Now that four of his
books have been translated into English, Negri has in effect been
made into the sole representative of an otherwise neglected
theoretical tradition.  That he has achieved this relative
prominence is in large part because of the circumstances
surrounding the autonomists' decline: Negri became notorious for
his alleged role in the kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat
patriarch Aldo Moro in 1978.  Negri was accused of direct
involvement in the kidnapping, imprisoned in 1979, elected to the
Italian Parliament in 1983 and thus subsequently released.  Shortly
afterwards he went into exile in France and was sentenced in
absentia to thirty years for "subversive association."
     The subsequent prominence given to Negri as an individual
theorist (he is the only autonomist who has had book-length texts
translated into English) undoubtedly distorts any interpretation
both of his work, and of the intellectual contexts and milieu from
which it arises.  More generally, outside Italy there has been
very little attention to Italian marxism as a whole and autonomia
(including the operaismo from which it developed) in particular. 
As Yann Moulier puts it in the introduction to Negri's The Politics
of Subversion: 

Knowledge of Italian Marxism in countries to
the north of the Alps is limited in general to
a few words on Gramsci, a writer who is often
quoted but never read, a few words on Della
Volpe whose work is often ransacked without
acknowledgement, and a few words on Colletti,
especially on his work on the history of
thought in philosophy.  (4-5)

Moulier continues by acknowledging that the lack of an anthology of
the major texts of operaismo and autonomia is complicated and
supplemented by "the problem of the aridity or the obscurity of
this form of Marxism which is like no other manifestation we have
known" (5).  Though its fearsome difficulty is, I would suggest,
hardly the foremost reason for the poor dissemination of this
tradition outside Italy, this is not a factor to be taken lightly;
clearly to be arid and obscure by comparison to other marxist
discourses is to be arid and obscure indeed.
     Despite this, however, and without going so far, for example,
as to say with Jim Fleming that Negri's Marx Beyond Marx is "one of
the most crucial documents in European Marxism since . . . well,
since maybe ever" (Marx Beyond Marx vii, Fleming's ellipsis), I
would suggest that autonomia constitutes a significant challenge
not only to the interminable debates within marxist theory itself,
but also to the major paradigms of cultural studies in both Britain
and the US.  In this context, perhaps its most important
theoretical contributions are the following:  First, a
reconceptualization of the nature and roles of civil society and
the State that underlines the importance of the State's management
of civil society (which thus "withers away") in the face of working
class antagonism.  This position can be directly contrasted with
both the Leninist "autonomy of the political" and the essentially
Gramscian position of the (relative) autonomy of the ideological or
hegemonic.  Second, and consequentially, the autonomists posit a
move from critique to what Michael Hardt has termed the subjective
"project" of working class self-valorization to accelerate and
organize this antagonistic force (Hardt 188).  Finally, and
fundamentally, we thus see the autonomist determination to found
analysis in "the working class point of view" and, simultaneously,
to redefine the working class in line with the new character of
post-Fordist relations of production, whereby women, youth, the
unemployed and so on are also structurally part of the working
class in the situation of the real subsumption of society within
capital.

        ii. from Quaderni Rossi to "wages for housework"

     To understand the autonomists' theoretical innovations--and
thus to understand Negri's own conception of the ethical multitude-
-we must briefly examine at least a small portion of the history of
postwar Italy to which they are intimately tied.  Some of the
difficulty the texts present can be ameliorated if returned to the
context of the social movements in what Negri terms "this odd
country of ours" ("I, Toni Negri" 255).
     The precursor of autonomia, operaismo, can be traced back to
the review Quaderni Rossi ("Red Notes"), founded in September 1961
by Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati and Toni Negri. 
This review was only one of the many small, obscure and short-lived
expressions of the left-wing intelligentsia that were current in
the early 1960s; however, as Lumley says of both Quaderni Rossi and
the subsequent Classe Operaia ("Working Class"), "[t]heir role has
retrospectively acquired mythic qualities"  (States of Emergency
37).  These journals formed the nucleus of the first attempts to
theorize and practice left-wing politics outside the Italian
Communist Party (PCI) and its associated union federations,
primarily the Confederazione Generale Italiana dei Lavoratori
(CGIL).  
     Palmiro Togliatti, leader and one of the founders of the PCI,
had consistently "made caution and electoralism the hallmarks of
Communist action... [so that] numerical gains at election were seen
as the principal instrument for shifting the balance of power in
Parliament and thus in the country" (Ginsborg 83).  This reformism
was to some extent grounded in a reading of Gramsci's prison
notebooks that stressed the necessity for a "war of position" to
gain hegemony in civil society rather than any insurrectionary "war
of manoever" to take over the State.  This was a strategy which
later reached its apogee with the "historical compromise" forged by
Enrico Berlinguer between the PCI and the ruling Christian
Democrats in 1973.  
     In line with this political assimilation of the party to the
State apparatus, the CGIL pursued corporatist unionism within the
factories, engaging in a project to gain wage increases tied to
labor productivity.  Importantly, however, during the Italian
"economic miracle" of the late 50s and early 60s, the expansion of
the Northern industrial base (which created some of the largest
concentrations of industrial activity in Western Europe) fueled a
massive series of internal migrations, first from the North-East
and later from the largely rural South, to the "industrial
triangle" of Turin, Milan and Genoa.  Ginsborg estimates that
"between 1955 and 1971, some 9,140,000 Italians were involved in
inter-regional migration" (219).  These new arrivals significantly
altered the composition of the Italian industrial working class
and--in part because they were soon consigned to the bottom of the
blue collar hierarchy, in part because they brought no tradition of
adaptation to Fordist and Taylorist divisions of labor--found it
hard to accept that "the key mechanisms of division and
hierarchical control within the factory were not comprehensively
challenged by the unions" (Lumley 25).
     The intellectuals of Quaderni Rossi were inspired by this
mounting frustration in the factories, which was marked above all
by the Piazza Statuto incident in 1962 when Turin FIAT workers
attacked union offices.  However, they had also been given room to
manoeuver following the crisis of PCI legitimacy after Khruschev's
revelations in 1956 (up until this point Togliatti and the PCI had
been very closely associated with Third International Communism). 
Their point of departure was an analysis of the current political
situation situated resolutely del punto di vista operaio--"from the
working class point of view."  
     This injunction to refuse to view capitalism "from the point
of view of capital" (in the form of managerial communism or
conciliatory unionism) was interpreted variously.  For example, one
move was toward empirical sociology (and projects in oral history)
investigating the condition of the working class.  There was also
a program to re-read Marx (particularly The Grundrisse rather than
Capital) as less the theorist of political economy toiling in the
British Library than the engaged pamphleteer working on a
"practico-political synthesis" of the revolutionary struggle (Marx
Beyond Marx 2).  In association with this, some theorists of
Quaderni Rossi sought to re-theorize capitalism as essentially
reactive, recomposing its law of command in response to working
class struggles such that "the capitalist class, from its birth, is
in fact subordinate to the working class" (Tronti, "The Strategy of
Refusal" 10).  Finally, and consequentially, if the working class
point of view demonstrated that the working class held the
initiative under capitalism, this demanded a new understanding of
the necessary intervention of the State (seen in the first place
along the lines of the Keynesian State) to supplement and ensure
the fragile dominance of capital and to impose the point of view of
capital.
     It is in this context that operaismo demanded the "refusal of
work" as the foremost practical strategy against domination.  In
contrast to the union movement (and to much orthodox socialism more
generally), operaismo rebelled against any Stakhanovite concept of
the dignity of labor.  Reformism could only be what Michael Hardt
terms "bad faith reformism" (181), or the program to demand more of
capital than it could ever give.  This tactic is clearly outlined
in Tronti's "Lenin in England," where it has to be aligned with an
ultimate strategy not of ameliorating the work situation, but of
abolishing it altogether.  In other words, the refusal of work
combined with bad faith reformism produces "the temporary strategy,
of a revolutionary outcome and reformist tactics" (Tronti, "Lenin
in England" 4).
     This perspective fundamentally changes the nature of the
relation of the working class to itself and to its self-definition. 
After all, the working class has traditionally been defined in
terms of its relation to capital--as "a class of labourers, who
live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long
as their labour increases capital" (Marx and Engels 226).  This is
the objective form of the working class, the class as seen from the
point of view of capital extracting surplus value from a reified
labor power.  The standard interpretation is then to state that
whereas this is the state of the working class in itself (ein
sich), what is necessary is the class's realization of itself for
itself (fur sich) through the raising of revolutionary
consciousness.  From the point of view of operaismo, however, the
working class already exists for itself, as is attested to by
sabotage, absenteeism, wildcat strikes and other manifestations,
informal and formal, of the refusal of work and of the demand for
separation from the labor process.  In as much as the working class
moves to realize itself through self-valorization, it is a
liberation from rather than through work which entails the demise
of its own identity as working class.  The working class is
therefore an "impossible" class, not an ontological category but
rather the name given to "a project for the destruction of the
capitalist mode of production" (Negri, Revolution Retrieved 36).
     The refusal of work, then, is the means by which the working
class achieves a complete "destructuration" of the system of value
and the capitalist law of command that it upholds.  This is a
strategy generalizable beyond the industrial labor process itself,
to encompass the totality of socialized labor.  For example, in
terms of the feminist movement, the "wages for housework" campaign
first theorized the use of the wage as a means of division within
society as a whole whereby those allotted the task of reproducing
the means of production were unremunerated to ensure "a
stratification of power between the paid and the non-paid, the root
of the class weakness which movements of the left have only
increased" (Lotta Femminista 262).  This is an example of the "bad
faith reformism" mentioned above, though also predicated upon the
extension of capitalist command over society as a whole as
evidenced in the Keynesian welfare state.  However, alongside this
move to push the contradictions of the system to the limit, there
was also the demand to refuse housework and the work of
reproduction altogether--hence the fight for the divorce and
abortion laws.  Here, as elsewhere, the emphasis was on autonomy--
from the State and, where necessary, from the traditional working
class movement.
     


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