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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