Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism

303 Pages·2017·1.204 MB·English

by  Steve Wright

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Storming Heaven
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Storming Heaven
Class Composition and Struggle
in Italian Autonomist Marxism
SECOND EDITION
Steve Wright
Foreword by Harry Cleaver
Afterword by Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba
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First published 2002; Second edition published 2017 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Steve Wright 2002, 2017
The afterword by Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba first
appeared in the Italian edition of this book, published by Edizioni Alegre,
whom we thank for their permission to reprint it here. The text has been
translated by Steve Wright.
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 9991 1 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 9990 4 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0116 6 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0118 0 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0117 3 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the
country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
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Contents
Foreword by Harry Cleaver vi
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
1. Weathering the 1950s 5
2. Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Enquiry 29
3. Classe Operaia 58
4. New Subjects 82
5. The Creeping May 98
6. Potere Operaio 120
7. Toni Negri and the Operaio Sociale 140
8. The Historiography of the Mass Worker 163
9. The Collapse of Workerism 183
10. Conclusion 208
Postscript: Once More, With Feeling: A Bibliographic Essay 212
Afterword to the Italian Edition by Riccardo Bellofiore and
Massimiliano Tomba 237
Bibliography 249
Index 278
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Foreword
Amplified by a comprehensive new chapter updating research on and
by Italian autonomist Marxists and a critical Afterword by Riccardo
Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba, this second edition of Steve
Wright’s Storming Heaven is even more useful than the original, in two
senses. First, while the earlier edition provided the most comprehen-
sive analysis and understanding available in English of the innovations
of Italian autonomist Marxists in the heyday of operaismo, the added
chapter highlights newly available English translations of old texts, new
Italian assessments of the past and carries the analysis forward, into the
recent past and present, surveying the subsequent directions pursued by
its main theoreticians in the years since. Comprehensive, but condensed
into a single chapter, his survey has the feel of both a bibliographical
essay and a sketch of what could be an entirely new book, were Steve to
decide to delve as deeply into the recent literature that he summarises
as he has done with the essential texts of operaismo. One can only hope.
The second way in which this new edition has a heightened usefulness
is how it facilitates the intellectual and political mining of the autonomist
tradition to inform contemporary decisions about confronting the
present composition of class relations of struggle. Whether examining
past variations and differences, or sketching present debates, by situating
them all within their historical contexts and by showing how these
autonomist theorists and militants harvested, yet winnowed, previous
work, Steve has provided us with examples that show how demanding
that theoretical innovations be based upon the analysis of the material
conditions of class struggle can yield insights into ‘What is to be done
NEXT!’ – which should be the purpose of all militant research, whether
of past or present.
Riccardo and Massimiliano’s Afterword adds their own critical
perspective to Steve’s analysis, highlighting what they see as the strongest
aspects of operaismo, focusing particularly on the work of Tronti and
Panzieri, and its legacies within ‘post-operaismo’, i.e., among those who
have retained central elements of the approach, abandoned others and
innovated in new directions, of whom the best known is Antonio Negri.
In this short text, their treatment is necessarily narrower than Steve’s,
and in the case of Negri, even more critical.
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Foreword . vii
They are severe in their condemnation of what they view as Negri’s
building on the weakest aspects of operaismo. They write that in Negri’s
new formulations ‘it is pointless to seek mediations, or to claim verifi-
cations of reality’. This erroneous path, they claim, has led Negri and
like-minded post-operaisti, to formulate such concepts as the ‘general
intellect’ and ‘immaterial labour’ in ways that ‘lack all meaning’ and led
them beyond any recognisable form of workerism. While both concepts
have been hotly debated, and I share aspects of their critique, their
assertion that Negri et alia have come to embrace such concepts in a
self-referential way, devoid of any analysis of ‘reality’, ignores the detailed
researches on the kinds of labour characterised as ‘immaterial’ published
in the journals Futur Antérieur (1991–92) and Multitudes (2000– ) and
elsewhere. Those researches provided material grounds for theorising the
‘general intellect’ and ‘immaterial labour’, regardless of how one judges
the outcome. In the end, Riccardo and Massimiliano return to the central
preoccupation of the operaisti, ‘the reconstruction of the conditions that
make possible antagonism within and against capital’. If we interpret
‘reconstruction’ to mean a close analysis of ongoing struggles that defy
subsumption by capital, rupture its institutions and create alternatives, I
can only agree.
Although Steve’s new chapter and the Afterword both provide
pointers to further desirable research and organisational efforts, I’d
like to point even further, beyond the focus on developments among
Italian autonomist Marxists, past and present, to related kindred spirits
elsewhere in the world – whose interconnections formed, and still
continue to form, a kind of international kinship network of more or
less like-minded individuals and groups – a network whose mutually
stimulating linkages have been largely unrecognised or forgotten.
In the beginning of his new chapter, Steve tells of the difficulties in
gathering archival materials during a trip to England and Italy in early
1982 in the wake of the crackdown of April 1979 when the Italian state
had used the terrorism of armed groups such as the Brigate Rosse to
justify the arrest and jailing of thousands of its critics, a great many on
trumped up charges.1 Four years earlier, in the summer of 1978, I had
made a similar journey of research and discovery, visiting many of the
1 We can observe just such a pattern of using the terrorism of the few to justify
the repression of the many in Turkey, whose president, Tayyip Erdoğan, has been
jailing thousands and rapidly removing all semblance of democracy and human
rights in that country – a process that has resulted in his government’s efforts
to join the European Union being put on hold and its membership in NATO
questioned. In the case of Italy, despite widespread condemnation, there was no
such official EU response to the April 1979 crackdown and subsequent repression.
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viii . Storming Heaven
same people – in London, Paris, Milan and Padua. Like Steve, I was
on the hunt for the origins of a set of new ideas. In my case, I had first
encountered those ideas while participating in the political project that
generated the journal Zerowork (1975–77), a project heavily influenced
by both operaismo and the Wages for Housework Movement of the time
– a movement born in Italy but which had spread rapidly in Europe
and North America. Also like Steve, by talking to those more familiar
with the history and reading the materials they dumped in my lap, I
discovered many – though by no means all – of the Italian sources Steve
has ferreted out and analysed so carefully in Storming Heaven.
But what struck me forcefully, and still fascinates me, was how in
England, France and Italy I discovered even earlier roots, some in
Europe but also, more surprisingly to me, some back home in the
United States. Steve touches briefly on this international dimension
in his first chapter ‘Weathering the 1950s’ where he mentions the way
Danilo Montaldi, one of the earliest post-WWII Italian Marxists to
begin rethinking class struggle from the point of view of workers, drew
upon contemporary work by those in the American group Correspon-
dence and the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie. For me to have
had to voyage to Europe to discover such North American roots was
nothing short of shocking.
It is true that Martin Glaberman – an important figure in Correspon-
dence and its continuation, Facing Reality – had written a letter to those
of us collaborating on Zerowork reproaching our failure to recognise
or refer to their earlier efforts, which also put autonomous workers’
struggles at the centre of both analysis and politics. But ignorant of that
history, his scolding hadn’t meant a great deal to me. It was not until I
spent hours, first in John Merrington’s study in London, then in archives
in Paris and finally in Bruno Cartosio’s office in Milan and poured over
their collections of materials from the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Facing
Reality, News & Letters and Socialism ou Barbarie – alongside all the
Italian stuff – that the full impact of Martin’s reproach struck home.
The phenomenon, or interrelated phenomena, that those of us working
on Zerowork had failed to recognise had been a trans-Atlantic ferment
in the late 1940s and 1950s in which an independent-minded array of
individuals had ripped themselves away from earlier left preoccupations
with the labour movement and political parties to return to Marx’s
own efforts to understand the materiality of workers’ struggles, e.g., his
close readings of the British factory inspectors’ reports and his Workers’
Enquiry, and through that return to rethink elements of his theory and
the implications for their politics. This return, I discovered, had charac-
terised the work of a wide variety of party dissidents, including C.L.R.
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Foreword . ix
James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Martin Glaberman, and Grace Lee in the
United States, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Daniel Mothe
in France, Danilo Montaldi, Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti in Italy.
In much the same spirit, but with a professional focus on struggles in
the past, were the so-called ‘bottom up’ Marxist historians of the period,
such as Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton.
These individuals not only shared a common focus on the self-activity
of workers but their writings and teaching would inspire a whole new
generation of militants.
The elements for recognising the international character of this
refocusing of research and organising on the self-activity of workers had
all been available by the mid-1970s but scattered about in books and
pamphlets, personal notes and memories of at least two generations of
militants. A few individuals stood at what Alquati called ‘nodal points’ of
this loose network. Grace Lee had personally established links between
Correspondence and Socialisme ou Barbarie through contact with
Castoriadis.2 Bruno Cartosio, in a sense picking up where Mothe and
Montaldi had left off, translated into Italian and published a collection
of Martin Glaberman’s writings.3 In England, John Merrington had
studied at Balliol, Oxford under Christopher Hill, had gone to Italy with
Gramsci in mind and returned with a head (and suitcase) full of Tronti
and Alquati. He and Ed Emery had provided to English militants, such
as those involved in Big Flame, key translations of such Italian materials
in various formats, including those published under the stamp of Red
Notes. Peter Linebaugh, one of the editors of Zerowork, had studied with
Edward Thompson and collaborated with comrades in London to study
John and Ed’s translations.
Ferruccio Gambino’s voyages in the 1960s and 1970s repeatedly
established or repaired communications across borders and across
the North Atlantic. His study of workers’ struggles at British Ford,
translated and published by Red Notes, offered militants on the island a
local example of the kind of analysis Alquati had done on Fiat and his
critique of the French regulation theorists showed how they had inverted
operaismo’s workerist perspective into a capitalist one.4 Paolo Carpigano
and Mario Montano had both studied elements of this history in Rome
before joining the Zerowork collective. So too had Bruno Ramirez, who,
2 Grace Lee Boggs (1998) Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press), p. 65. For a brief account of their collaboration
that includes Castoriadis’ memories see www.zerowork.org/GenesisZ1.html.
3 Bruno Cartosio (1976) ‘Introduzione’ to M. Glaberman, Classe Operaia, imperialism
e rivoluzione negli USA (Turin: Musolini).
4 Th e English translations of both works can be accessed at libcom.org.
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