Rebibbia, 26 November 1981
Cher David,
In those years of my political absence incredible things had been happening in the Veneto. A kind of ‘once upon a time’ story, now long past and gone. The story of the boom. In 1959 I returned from my long theoretical journey and came back to socialist militancy and practical political intervention. The differences and the newness of things were a real challenge. The continuous flow of change had created a qualitative leap. As you went round the outlying parts of the main cities, following the main arteries of communication, you entered onto the old B-roads, and there you hit on an endless landscape of cranes, factories, chimneys, billboards. Big lorries all over the place. Was this the Veneto or the Ruhr? As if a big beehive had been broken open and was now exposed to the light of day. I began to know the outlying branch offices of the Communist Party and local camere del lavoro. I was amazed. Contrary to what I had seen some years before and what people had repeatedly told me, those sections of the labour movement were not peasant-minded in their outlook. In fact everywhere I found a working-class composition that was alert and mobile. As if class reality was also a construction site, a work in progress. In particular I found no pathologies of nostalgia, regret for the past and rejection of the coming changes. Indeed these new workers hated the peasant life, which they saw as clammy and dirty, something to be ashamed of, good only for weekend visits (and then only as long as you didn’t have to work there). Instead there was an enthusiastic adjustment to the new demands of struggle, a determination not to end up paying costs that would outweigh the benefits of development. They also had a confidence that they would succeed in this. The major waves of emigration from the Veneto region had already ended by the second half of the 1950s – now what we had was a huge internal circulation of labour power. Like insects in springtime searching for pollen. So, for the second time in my (admittedly brief) experience, I allowed myself to be drawn into the movement of this new Veneto totality, observing its qualities and its labours. It was a nascent state. It had a powerful materiality. Life was changing impetuously. The contradictions were piling up, and if, for the time being, they tended to represent themselves in traditional terms (in the Catholic majority and in the left minority), this was only skin-deep: the representation of the new was embracing everything and was transcribing itself into new symbols of antagonism. The parish priest spoke against ‘development’ from the pulpit and denounced the girls in overalls who used to come out of the factory and sit in his churchyard: it was shameful, he said, girls should not wear trousers. But a few months later you found the same priest in his shirtsleeves trying to understand what was happening as the first little groups and clusters of trade unionisation crept into the square of his churchyard. And you could hardly complain about consumerism here: at that time the proletarian families of the Veneto were reaching income levels not much above the poverty line. Refrigerators and televisions were beginning to pop up between the peeling paint on the walls, the washed-out colours and the yellow damp spots in the low-ceilinged working-class apartments. One by one, those peasant caverns would fall – ye gods, that was progress! Without a sense of glorious ongoing traditions, a fresh wind of class struggle was beginning to blow.
Obviously, cher David, I too was becoming changed by my immersion in this reality. But in a quiet way, because it was not my thinking that was changing, but only its relationship with experience. Representations determined by pre-reflexive conditions. In the Veneto the equilibrium on which the nascent state rested was large scale and paradoxical. Critique was obliged to develop itself in terms of translations of values, and these presented themselves more as development than as a break. So that, already then, one could say Wertkonservativ gegen Strukturkonservativ [value-conservative against structure-conservative]. This slogan of the more recent green revolution – values against structures . . . Could the discontinuity be balanced out? Here it was, but this did not mean that it was any less radical. And this equilibrium derived from the fact that the transformation of the structure of capitalist production and powers was matched by the immediate formation of antagonistic subjects and contractual moments – the decline of the old community did not bring with it, for the moment, an explosion of its contours. My Veneto was living up to its past. I was working there politically, albeit still in limited circles, learning the craft of the trade unionist and agitator – with tranquillity and commitment.
(Isn’t it strange how an enlightenment attitude manages to stay on course even in the face of such major changes in the fabric of society? Much later, faced with the phenomena of postmodernism and with the computerised transformation of the social, I was in some ways to experience similar paths of critique – namely the possibility that the rational tendency of the changes presented itself in a manner compatible with the organic nature of the cultural fabric. When subjects render the transformation effective and retain the contradictions within the project – then, in an organic society they feel that their power is growing within the transformation, even if the latter is managed by the enemy.
Up until the moment of the necessary breakpoint. In these processes utopia fulfils people’s needs without separating itself from their materiality. And that is how things were, back then, in the Veneto. Just as they are now, in so-called postmodernity.)
But at that time everything was singularly Veneto – even though this feeling was to last only for a short while. During that period I often had to travel to Turin, for reasons of study. It was a plunge into an unknown world, wild and terrible. Fellow students and political activist friends guided me through the thickets of this monstrous and chaotic reality. I began to learn about the metropolis. Here the labour market is a fact, not a theoretical representation: a market of human flesh. Here the infinite variety of paths that traverse the Veneto in a spectacle of indescribable entrepreneurial and proletarian vitality, here they are all narrowed down into one single crazy roadway. Only poverty, the most absurd poverty, unfolds in a variety of dirty rivulets – dispersive structures, a licentious disseminating – everything else flows towards the mighty monster. The market as a rational solution? Never was rationality more vulgar. I was living in Porta Nuova and I had friends at Porta Palazzo. A nightmare of a journey. And yet it was the same capitalist project that I had seen growing and spreading in the Veneto. But, whereas in the Veneto it was a soft Dantesque Purgatory – here it was the circles of Hell. In Turin I began to meet people in the labour movement, in the trade unions, in the Communist Party. At the heart of the storm, towered over by an overweening and ungraspable machine.
(I now understood the enormity of this abstraction – ‘the mass relationship’ – as a fundamental element of theory. This enormous concept, rendering itself little by little manoeuvrable, was to remove from us all pessimism of the intellect. Great concepts, conceived of as great tools of collective thinking. But then, in that situation, the mass relationship was unshakable: a bateau ivre [a drunken boat].)
Among these activists you found a desire to break things down and to build anew – but, as they confessed frankly, they had nothing that they could build on, because 1953 represented a defeat from which they had not recovered. The freshness of my hopes and the Germanic clarity of my analysis made me acceptable – albeit perhaps a little pathetic – in that hell. One evening I had an official of the camera del lavoro cry on my shoulder: my theoretical musings had moved him. He thought and thought, in a circular fashion, with dogged alcoholic determination. The logical schema was looking for a verification that it could not find. He broached various opportunistic hypotheses, persuading himself that they could be used tactically – but then he withdrew, scary and muttering. He swore. It seemed like he was trying to climb a mountain of sand. The heaviness of the body aggravated the problems. He recounted episodes, details, and became excited in in his description of the struggles. But he found nostalgia disgusting, ‘I would be a Bordigist if I enjoyed memories!’ He sobbed big sobs – the Barbera had something to do with this – but not with tears, only with his belly. I was overcome by the hardness of the class relation, by the ferocity of social constitution. I tried desperately to understand.
(In certain situations trying to understand is a priceless virtue. Detaching onself by a tiny amount, to be always – only with your brain – a millimetre outside of the extreme urgency of the things into which you are immersed. This is something to hold on to. You’re lucky when you have this ability – otherwise known as education. A kind of ironical qualification of reason – not romantic, not destructive, not mawkish, but critical.)
Turin confirmed, through dramatic images, the German parameters of my theoretical consideration of mature capitalism. Its capacity for extreme articulation, which had already happened in the Veneto, was here developing in a kind of wild puzzle: it was a fullness that was continuously expanding and, as it did so, it left residual holes and pores; in these a new, formless matter precipitated, to re-establish the compactness of the fabric. A seventeenth-century physics. Then this huge figure began to move of its own accord, writhing, stretching, sometimes apparently close to breaking. I confirmed myself in the observation that only this – the rupture, the explosion of this huge mechanical body – is an expression of life. All the utopian determinations of knowledge crash on this breaking point. But they are no longer utopia – rather, they contain the hugeness of the comprehension of a universal phenomenon. The abstract here is the only concrete. But this is not enough: we have to be within this reality. Once again, generosity has a cognitive potentiality. The whole has a sublime force: at the moment when it smashes, it will produce that life and that freedom that, at present, it holds imprisoned. We have to be inside it. The experience of the Veneto, where the articulations of the overall framework of capitalist command were obvious to behold, helped me develop possible analytical readings on the compactness of this monster and on the mobile pathways of command.
The trade union people were not much use for what I was seeking. Even when you could persuade them of the immediacy of action – action that was heroic, hard-fought and blind – they started spouting ideology. You had the usual mutterings – about the Twentieth Congress, about Khrushchev’s ineptness, about Togliatti’s clever trench warfare, about the ambiguity of Nenni – and then came a further distraction: someone suddenly remembers that he attended the Communist Party’s school and pours over you kilos of useless dialectical materialism shit. Steam-age Marxism in a city where rampant Taylorism was the rule. The few factory cadres whom I knew at that time struck me as being mentally unbalanced – completely. What sustained their communist struggle – a fierce, unrelenting, everyday struggle – on issues they did not understand and in a tangle of dynamics they were unable to bring to an antagonistic synthesis, was simply faith. They had no way of connecting with the tens of thousands of workers who were pouring into the factories for the first time. They despised them, but at the same time they were forced to take and use this huge new accumulation of labour power as an Archimedean lever for any eventual overthrow of the system.
As a good historical materialist, I understood just one thing in this bedlam: that theory had to be brought back into this huge melting pot of class recomposition. Solidly inside it, because everything had changed. The southern Italian prostitutes made you understand Turin more than any union official or professor of Marxism. But how were we to move forward? The working class is a body, a productive body: what was the key to its logic and its physics? Out of everything I had learned, the only thing that I was left with, vigorously and realistically, was this unique methodological tool: bringing theory back into practice. That was no small thing. But the German theory was objective to the utmost degree – and left room only for the exasperated subjectivity of the global alternative and for the working-class use of the overthrow. The dialectic of separation was at all times close to extremism. The conditions I was experiencing were not of a nature to permit it. Instead you had to build the theoretical framework from the bottom, recomposing the subjective instances, in the objective dimension of production, of technology, and of restructuring. Theory had to be rebuilt starting from the factory floor up. So now was the time to make contact with the workers.
Easier said than done! Here, in the factory, the difficulties already visible at the level of the trade unions were multiplied: the structures of the (real) working-class movement, of self-determination, of the ‘making’ of the class were nonexistent in the factory. And where they did exist, albeit weakly, they did not provide an adequate basis for an inquiry into the new figure of the working class. The obstacle, once again, was mainly the old working-class militants, who were characterised by their heroic warrior ethic, expressed in Piedmontese dialect, and also by their dusty awareness of their status as skilled workers and by their incomprehension of the present in the face of the emergence of the mass worker. The leap forward in the mechanisation and massification of production had thrown them to one side; it had dissolved the possibility of grasping the bigger picture and the articulations of exploitation. The officine-confino [‘exile departments’] were a real ghetto – a cage violently imposed by the bosses, in which an endangered species now managed to survive. So I was forced into a long roundabout route to arrive at my destination. A long journey that had me bouncing around between the Veneto and Turin, between a vision of the articulations and an analysis of the whole – but the whole is das Mehr als Vergleich des Vergleichs, in other words it’s that part of comparison that is more than comparison – only a practical act would have the possibility of resolving a mass relationship – therefore we had to set up methodological approaches that could match this new system of production and these new potentials of struggle.
Arriving at a suitable methodology. Again, easier said than done! There was not much evidence of an emerging culture of modernisation – what was emerging at that time was precisely that discipline, halfway between economics and industrial sociology, that mixture of management science and administration, which was highly regarded as the magic key to the programming of development. Giolitti, Leonardi, Momigliano . . . was this science, or art, or magicianship of development? It was a hybrid proposition and not at all attractive – to me it seemed less than rigorous and very makeshift. As a theory, it claimed to be socialist (indeed many communists were beginning to use its concepts); but it failed to address the problem of exploitation. Was it a new formulation of reformism? And what if it was? Cher David, I have never had a gut opposition to reformism – I am happy to admit that: I say and I repeat, reformism is sacrosanct and can be an effective programme when understood as a schema for advancing relations between class subjects. Unfortunately, and certainly not through any fault of my own, every time in my political history when I have crossed paths with reformism, it has shown itself only as a policy of repression. So I learned that, when reformism talks of conflict, it is only because it wants to control and reduce it; and, when it speaks of progress, it sees it as a market to be extended. To be a true reformist, one has in fact to be a true revolutionary: reformism is a sociopolitical structure that can only exist as a strong dynamic of class relations in equilibrium – and only as validation of a strong subjective drive. For the rest, reformism was and remained sheer mystification – one of the very many versions of the indecent theory of development sans phrase [without rhetoric] and of its uniform mediation. Formalism of capital. Any approach to the new reality therefore had to avoid the strictures of formalism. Formalism of a fierce industrial reformism. Formalism of an unwarriorlike union reformism. Yes, because at that time, in that desperate situation of the working class, there were people in the union who were trying to make a shift – albeit a very cynical, very pretentious and utterly opportunistic one – towards a perspective of institutionalisation. But more on this anon. Here I just want to make the point that these were the obstacles and limitations that were blocking me as I sought to reengage with the labour movement.
Gradually, however, I began to be no longer a free and isolated wanderer. In the Veneto, in particular between Padua and Venice, a network began to form towards the end of the 1950s around that core of problems; at first it was workers and intellectuals and party activists, but then, gradually, you began to find solid points of reference for debate in local cultural clubs and journals, as well as around grassroots trade unions. Bringing theory into practice and reviving theory on the basis of practice. It was at that time, around 1959, that I embarked on a new reading of Capital. I read and I took notes. I continuously related the scientific gains and the logic of Capital to the everyday experience of class relations. Sometimes I gave talks about various chapters of the first volume of Capital for a group of workers from the big factories in Porto Marghera. It was incredible: the theory of value could be applied to describe the everyday realities of exploitation. The workers were sometimes amazed that what I was reading out was actually written down there. What – it describes exactly what happened to me in the factory today? We began to understand that the dialectic of capital was open in a downward direction, towards the subjects of exploitation, and could be turned upward only as a work of destruction of exploitation. Not the anatomy of capital but the political logic of a relation of power, a revolutionary weapon. Marx. Today, cher David, it is hard for me to talk of Marx in the terms of yesterday – we have moved so far and often ‘beyond Marx’. But I have to try to tell you what Marx represented for me at that time. It was the certainty of a method that gave a foundation for rational behaviours of rebellion: I seemed to have grasped that the possibility of predicting the progress of the command of capital was, in itself, a possibility of blocking its movements, of disarticulating it, of destroying it. Intellectualism? Utopia? No. Knowledge is power. Every worker, within the civil war that is the working day, saw and acted according to this necessary logic – of antagonism. The political problem, the problem of power, thus emerged in a pure form: as a solution to the antagonism – and thus as a tendency in society that brought against power (the power of the bosses and their institutions) the entire accumulation of the needs and hopes of the proletariat. In my case, the communist revolution was never conceived outside of the prospect of liberation: now Marxism revealed itself as a theory of liberation. The communist movement as subject.
Really something damnably innovative had happened in my life, in my experience, and in my brain: I was in a world that had the complex density of an origin – the world of the working class, the proletarian totality that capitalist development had created. God willing, the last product of dialectics. Creating a subject is the end of dialectics, as every parent knows when their children reach the age of majority, freedom, and the practical possibility of realising their imagination. (Anna, my daughter, is seventeen now. Did you know that, David? It’s so strange – but at the same time a very pleasing sensation – to encounter her now as a woman – a living desire, tensions, maturation, this completed adolescence, this maturity. The dialecticians are dogs – it seems to me that they deny me the possibility of loving this great person whom I now have in front of me – no more a daughter, a kitten, an object, a projection, a protection – but a daughter, a lovable woman and a developed rationality. A miracle of transformation that produces desire.) Anyway, as I was saying, in that environment theory no longer had difficulty in matching itself immediately to the practice of the subject. As for myself, the nostalgia for an old-style compact world transferred into the awaited practice of transformation – and into working for that. A reactionary leftover of my upbringing? Oh, come on, let’s not joke. Rebellion does not despise the strong thighs from which the subject is spawned. Now the theoretical practice could run on sure tracks. Of course, at this level, a lot of indistinctness still characterised the immediacy of the picture. Turin was the monster and an unknown terrain. The work I had done, my Wanderjahre spent in research, which seemed to have produced the concreteness of a given approach to theory, now came up against the difficulties and mysteries of a path that was inductive and rooted in the concrete. Was there discomfort? Lamentations and loss of faith? Certainly. But it was not worth the trouble – soon the facts would have told this with a biting capacity for conviction; and, until then, so much the worse for the facts. Theoretical practice had to develop itself, to articulate itself, to make itself accurate – but the tracks on which it could run were in place. That absurd and powerful world of mature capitalism, of the industrial metropolis, of the continuous subsumption of every aspect of life, Turin – was excessively all-embracing. But theory traversed it like an oxyacetylene flame welding steel. Because inside that all-embracing reality – neither above nor below it, but right inside it – ran the permanence and the forward-moving transmutation of antagonism. It was as if I had defined that second nature of which I had heard so much, and as if I knew the physiology of its development. It was as if I had understood the witchcraft of this second nature and now I had the power to exercise a thaumaturgy of liberation from it.
Some evenings, sitting in the hills above Turin and drinking good Barbera, we would look down the valley: the sweetness of the evening, thinning and diffusing the smoke from the big factories, encouraged flights of fancy. We used to fantasise about that class unity that the reformists and bureaucrats had perhaps only allowed us to sniff – but what different things they were for us, the infinite and possible paths for the restructuring of consciousness, and how human and close this explosion was! We had no idea of how the struggle would be concretely conducted, we were only aware of its necessity. But, at this testing point, the power of imagination was articulated and supported by such a lively vein of theory that nothing seemed impossible. ‘The cupiditas [desire] that comes from reason does not know excess.’ Turin, cupiditas. And that is how the fabulous years of the 1960s found us. Cher David, I send you a hug. Goodbye.