Rebibbia, 8 December 1981
Cher David,
July 1960 was a decisive experience, and one that was so pregnant with consequences for many – indeed very many – of my political generation! I really don’t know how best to explain to you what happened. Cause: an attempt to shift the axis of government to the right; a fascist provocation in Genoa, a city with a strong working-class tradition; a violent police response in Emilia; the deaths of workers and communists in the streets; a wind of revolt that for the first time affected the new layers of the proletariat – of that social subject that had been forming in the processes of restructuring during the preceding years. Effect: demonstrations in the streets; mass action all over Italy; the Tambroni government falls; and that brings to an end the big period of calm that had followed the defeat of the working class in the early 1950s. These are the bare facts. But they are also history – the emergence of a great mass movement. The truth was on the surface in this case. It seems miraculous that a reality made up of facets of an infinite variety, with such complexity of behaviours, and even with contradictions and divergent trajectories, can finally produce a unitary representation; but this was indeed what happened. It was the first time that I saw the break develop itself in terms that were so global, so outside of even the semblance of any ideological sign – and I saw it constitute itself into a fistful of hate and class revolt that were both rational and matched to the scale of the political task at hand. It was during that phase that there began to be talk among us of ‘mass vanguards’ – a concept that, as you know, cher David, would have a long history as a direct forerunner of the political hypothesis of the ‘class subject’. The mass vanguard as the personification of the most advanced political interest of the working-class movement. A class subject as a conscious and fully developed figure of proletarian strata brought to maturity by the struggle.
But let us return to those days, to that history. A large number of elements were in play. As I said, simplifying a little: the will of the masses was substantially homogeneous; the differences were to be found mainly in the political leadership. In the previous winter, big demonstrations and workers’ struggles had fired people’s spirits and had shown that the reactionary stability of the political centre could not hold. Realising that this was the case, both the socialists and the communists began arguing for strike action. But, when it came to defining the modalities of that action, we sensed a split between the socialists, who took more extremist positions, and the communists, who took the more cautious positions. Togliatti advised everyone to stay calm and quiet – so we were told by the honourable secretary of the communist federation of Padua when he returned from attending funerals in Reggio Emilia. Who would have expected a different recommendation! Tactical caution becomes vulgar and banal when it is repeated too often. The institutional effect of the July movement was enormous: not only did it sweep out Tambroni, it also shifted the axis of any possible legitimacy definitively towards the centre-left and in favour of reform, both on the workers’ side and on the capitalist side. It was not until the start of the years of tough reaction – the second half of the 1970s, the years of ‘national solidarity’ – that we would move backwards in comparison to what we had in 1960. So 1960 marked a lengthy historical breakpoint. And it was here that the differences of opinion about how to carry the struggle forward affected the objectives of the confrontation. Nenni was ready for government there and then. Togliatti wanted a leftward shift of the political axis, but he feared that such a shift would favour the socialists and might end up creating a new structure that excluded the communists. So he prevaricated and manoeuvred the timings of the operation. These disagreements developed before the effects of the formidable unity that had matured in the struggles and at the mass level became apparent.
But, at the level of the province and from within the struggle, the ins and outs of formal politics were entirely secondary, in the sense that we, the generation that had entered into the labour movement in those years, understood that what was coming out of the struggle was above all the emergence of the subject and the new composition of the mass vanguard. If we ever were anarcho-syndicalists, it was then. What a leap forward in our awareness! And yet (you see, cher David, the maturity and the independence that the spontaneity of the movement was already expressing?) there was not one among us – the many comrades who started living together the great adventure of those years – there was not one to press in extremist terms for an immediate deepening of the struggle. The fall of Tambroni was considered objective enough in itself. A beginning. In one of the meetings an old partisan showed the butt of a submachine gun from under his coat – a moment of astonishment, and then a brief political discussion concluded the show. (Guns are a normal thing in the history of the working-class movement. Guns, and their appearance, often represent a beginning. A new beginning? Here the old partisan came across to us as a symbol of the old – the revenging father, the avenger. Comical, in fact. That was also a period of rhetoric, with talk of a ‘new Resistance’. But the partisan’s gun seemed to us antiquated from the standpoint of both theory and practice. Because, while it is true that in the working-class movement there are always guns, it is also true that they don’t pass down by way of inheritance. Never. Whoever wants them has to go and get them. That’s the way it is. At that time it was the Algerians who were teaching us – no longer, pathetically the old partisans. At most you might tolerate listening to the stories of the GAP [Gruppi di Azione Patriottica] resistance . . .)
So that was a beginning. At the time I was involved in a public meeting – a big one, for those days – in a town square somewhere near Padua. As usual, the priest was ringing the church bells to disrupt the meeting – big bells, famous throughout the area for their workmanship and power to drown out our makeshift sound systems. And then the news came: Tambroni had fallen. I announced this news from the back of the truck, and a roar of joy went up, so great that for a moment it seemed that the bells were actually ringing to celebrate our joy, our victory. The priest immediately stopped his bell-ringing. And there you had thousands and thousands of people laughing, shouting, and making fun of the class enemy – our own local one, and the one in Rome. It was a great party.
Precisely here – with the certainty of instinct – the extremism of objectives was set aside. There was something more important and fearsome that those days had revealed and made explicit to all of us: the possibility and the urgency of the reconstruction of the revolutionary mass movement. Around this problem, in a very short time, there emerged a whole set of breaks and innovations. This is a date of birth: July 1960. But of what? There were many proposals. The immediate assessment that a single generation had achieved great collective means that were appropriate for the class, together with the recognition of the winning nature of mass violence, translated into a choice of battlefields and a decision for action in the shorter term. Whereas the official labour movement took July 1960 as indicating the possibility of a long march through institutions and the trade unions took 1960 as a confirmation of the possibility of a dynamic and reformist insertion into the system, we, on the other hand – that is, many, very many comrades, both singly and in groups, even without yet knowing each other, without knowing one from the other – were looking for ways of rebuilding the movement. The revolution in production that was taking place had built a new class composition – it was realistic to think of turning composition into consciousness and subjective will. But how? Who knows, what does it matter? There are laws that govern the collective practice of which we are part: in approaching them we have to start from ourselves. As I go through life, I have found myself many times in historical relationships that have opened new pathways in real and necessary terms. In this particular case it was evident that the recognition of this major and renewed social unity of the proletariat had to be followed by choices of action that simultaneously affirmed and negated, and in any case prioritised the subjective centrality and the development of that unity. Was this a displacement? Was it an innovative pulsation of the great animal body of the proletariat? Whatever the case, a renewed theoretical practice had led me to discover and embrace a new class reality. I was aware of how solid it was, but I was caught up in the complexity of the relationships and therefore liable to end up dissipating my energies. But now July confirmed this reality and broke apart and articulated its complexity, negating its indifference. It was the kind of breakpoint that identifies the subject.
Then the tension melted way: the young people in stripey T-shirts swapped the political headlines for the beach. It seemed that the rule of the media had been reaffirmed. For a short while everything went quiet. But many people were left with the bitter taste of an opportunity lost. Furthermore, the songs of revolt, the photos of the crouching sniper killing the communist worker, the big demonstrations, the physical clashes, the massive strikes – all this fixed itself in the collective imagination of a generation. Once you’ve lifted the veil from Isis, the vision remains unforgettably in your mind’s eye. And if, as a good materialist, you consider the vision only as an indication to be verified – then you give it a go.
Raniero Panzieri was the first total materialist whom I met in my life. He liked to try and try again. As a good materialist, he knew that artisanal work is often a rich prefiguration of industrial work. There was something Baconian about him, a materialism that was fresh and light-hearted as well as aggressive and well ordered, an irony about the lack of rigour that was the best legacy of Gramscianism – along with an irony about the lack of concrete experience, which was a first-rate weapon against the timorous, pallid Togliattian elites. Raniero taught the generation of July 1960 how to identify – and therefore how you could develop a critique of – the many idols that prevented the official labour movement from becoming a real movement of the working class. There was something about him that I found exciting: his uncertainty – which meant a humility in the face of reality that, if supported by rigour, is the only human grid of a correct revolutionary methodology. Optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect: he was a good example of this maxim. A radicalism of reason and a respect for life, for diversity, for plurality.
With 1960 the strangest bands of Marxist heretics started arriving in Italy. It seemed to me that the only ones among them who had the dignity of an intellectual radicalism of great historical proportions were the people from Socialisme ou Barbarie. Raniero found them congenial. We avidly read their first articulated critiques of social capital, and we picked up the first allusions to the ‘refusal of work’. After July 1960 I spent a few months on a trip to the USSR for heroic apparatchiks who had been battle-hardened in that struggle. I had never understood whether that ou between socialisme and barbarie meant to indicate choice or equivalence between the two terms. My retour de l’USSR resulted in my opting for the explanatory meaning, which creates an equivalence: Socialisme est barbarie. This arose out of my instinctive – and on that occasion traumatic – rejection of the vulgarity of socialised capital. Only Raniero explained to me, with the prudence and attention of a great teacher, what it meant to go beyond this ill-considered point of view. To go beyond betrayed hopes and demystified illusion. He put it in positive terms:
The process of renewal in which the labour movement is engaged manifests itself on the one hand as a restitution of Marxist method to its original terms and as a reaffirmation of some basic principles of socialism, and on the other as a growing awareness of a new development of reality, as a dissolution of the dogmatic crystallisation of strategy, and therefore as a qualitative enrichment of that method and of its results. For this reason the affirmation of the current process as a breakpoint is the only way to affirm the historical continuity of the movement.
Raniero taught me to reject the philosophy of resentment always and everywhere. What was in play here was not a question of betrayal: real socialism was planned capitalism, a law and a grid of the same process of development of exploitation. Looking back today, I have to recognise that Raniero played a crucial role in my intellectual and ethical development: he forced what I was, the yearnings for truth that I had inside me, to become political, to develop as a practice of collective action, to recognise themselves as action always geared to the genealogy of revolution.
Thus there were two workers’ movements: the official one and the real one. The first developed its ideology and practice merely as an alternative management of capitalist society: planning instead of exploitation; capitalist reformism; and/or socialism instead of capital. The second struggled against exploitation. All of us found it easy to argue for the distinction: we had before us July 1960 and the obvious split between the institutional project of the official labour movement and, on the other hand, the tenseness of the attempt at working-class self-determination. It was here that Raniero inserted his own proposal for a method: to rebuild working-class knowledge of the production of exploitation and of its destruction – starting from the shop floor. Grasping the irreducibility of the working-class presence in the capitalist organisation of production; denouncing the technocratic mania of any project of planned production for socialist monkeys; following autonomous dynamics in the real movement of working-class production and destroying capital’s appropriation of them. This was good fuel for my brain. The preconditions, the driving motor, already existed; but here the political analysis was expanded by means of an effective method; the dynamism of the project was supported in real terms by evident historical contingencies – the continuity of a weapon, a unity of collective theory and desires. A continuous thread extended from the factory to society; it was represented by capitalist command, but it could be traced – and used in alternative ways – from the working-class point of view. Raniero taught the proper use of the dichotomous model, rescuing it from baleful catastrophist and insurrectionist interpretations. There were two roads that could be followed: one was that of a continuous technological restructuring of the organisation for exploitation, between factory and society – and that was the viewpoint of capital; the other, reversing the optic, followed the continuous recomposition of the proletariat, through struggles, between factory and society. Both lines of research, however, focused on and took strength from emphasising the basic experience of capitalist development: from the cell of exploitation represented by the factory. A scientific method that moved from simple to complex was thus proposed and developed with rigour. Das Kapital ceased to be a sacred text and became an operational schema.
This brings us to the beginnings of Quaderni Rossi. This journal was not some kind of rare flower blooming in a desert. In that period Quaderni Rossi provided a focal point for discussion of the scientific and political problems of the new generation of revolutionaries.
The reconstruction of a strategy of the labour movement, which we see so clearly reproposing itself urgently today, is not a spontaneous process. The fact that we see it determines our tasks of today, tasks that are really new. The characteristics of the material figure of the collective worker are not simply hidden in the womb of capital (for all its becoming itself collective and self-aware in its own way). They are anticipated in struggles, and it is there that their unifying and revolutionary potential grows. It is not from capitalist planning that the (new) possibilities of revolution are born, but from the working-class anticipation/ overturning of the fundamental elements of ‘capitalist planning’.*
On the one hand, then, Quaderni Rossi represented both the figure and the radicalisation of a first Marxist usage of sociological tools – and this path was also being followed by a fair proportion of the younger trade-union left, or at least of that section which, prompted by the presentiment of a new phase of struggle, was addressing problems of institutional modernisation. The break would come later, although some of its terms were already implicit in the reductive judgements expressed regarding July 1960. But in immediate terms the context provided by Quaderni Rossi was unifying and set the pace of things. At the same time, Quaderni Rossi was a central hub in the refounding of a revolutionary way of doing politics.
I would say that, for everyone, including myself, the combination between the sense of this huge revival of the mass movement and the definition of a new analytical method of research and organisation served a little as a means of freeing us from a romantic and rebellious anticapitalism. (But of confirming both anticapitalism and rebellion. Rationality was the new wine – more rationality equals more freedom – the relationship was direct and linear – rationality was the form of a life that was liberating itself. The theorists of formal and functional rationality were dogs. Raniero, they say that you and I and many other comrades were evil teachers. Myself, perhaps yes, but you – you are a genuine DOC [d’origine controllata] Socrates, not watered down with Platonism: Antonio Labriola has spoken with philological penetration of that love that sensuously defines Socratic reasoning, and you, with passion, have shown it in action.) So the task was to find the explosive connection between factory and society, but to refind it as a unity that could be articulated through scientific pathways – long but reliable in evidencing the antinomies of capitalist development. So, cher David, this was an incredible growth in maturity for all of us. The scattered threads of people’s various discourses came together: the interest in the new technologies and in restructuring, the critique of reformism and of the political system – but above all a vocation, armed with scientific instruments that seemed to us matched to the task, for a militancy capable of rebuilding, on the basis of the new and given class composition, a revolutionary perspective. But what exactly was the communist revolution? In those days there was no doubt about the answer: the seizure of power by the working class. And what to do with power after that? Socialise the means of production and establish a state of equals. And with what tools? Through a soviet-style organising of the proletariat, through the action of the party vanguard, within a project of abolition of the state. And so on.
Among the texts that did not feature in our exclusive focus on, and usage of, Marxian thought was Lenin’s State and Revolution. But our attention started to turn more and more precisely and continuously to the analysis of these questions. The critique of Stalinism was conducted in positive terms – themes of self-management and critique of bureaucracy, and the analysis of the instruments and institutions of working-class democracy, became central. There were, it is true, huge gaps at the level of a proper analysis of the institutions. In fact in our experience we ran up against reformism and its disarming effects each time we took for granted what was simply science in the eyes of the bourgeoisie (our academic teachers, or grand culture, and the like): sociology, economics, the analysis of concrete reality, planification, socialism. The scientific tools were in the hands of the bosses. Overturn them and reinvent them: our lack at the level of institutional analysis could be made up for by working the other way round – by research from the bottom up. How was it possible, working against reformism, to carry into concrete reality, and in ways that were not romantic and ideological, the necessity of transformation, and of destruction, of the present state of things? How might it be possible to set in motion knowledge processes that embodied class love and class hate, and science and practice? We were rather passionate in our commitment to finding positive answers to these questions. Obviously I cannot forget the simple-mindedness and the sheer quantity of nonsense that were often perpetrated on our side. But Raniero was there to impose a strict rigour. We went to our meetings like timid students. The essential thing was to move along a road that made no concessions either to the official culture or to the cynicism of exploitation (even when the latter came from the socialist side) and that was renewed in the culture of communist revolutionaries. Panzieri addressed critically the unresolved drama and the failure of his generation and restated them as a problem for the next generation – showing the limits of the old and the hopes for the new. The impasse of having to choose between reformism and catastrophism could be overcome. Raniero posed the problem of the past with one foot in the future.
Without the lucky conjunction between the political emotionality of July 1960 and the new method of analysis and intervention, now on its way to becoming hegemonic, the history of the Italian workers’ movement in the years that followed would certainly have been different. And our impulse to move in that direction did not derive solely from that historical moment of happiness that we had lived. For the first time we were reconstructing, as a grounding, as a horizon of possibilities, the totality of that great revolutionary adventure that, from China to Cuba, was traversing the third world. And alongside it, with much greater attention – inspired partly by a reexamination of Algeria, that incredibly rich crossroads between the third world and the first – we were following the workers’ struggles that were beginning to re-emerge in Europe: the Belgian miners, the strikes in Lorraine, the endemic strikes and wildcat actions in Britain. Meanwhile in Turin there was a continuous and growing development of struggles. Elements of politics – demands for power – were visible everywhere, but they were blocked by the official party lines. There is, in the construction of each generation of revolutionary militants, a point of internal equilibrium – a kind of toolbag that everyone will carry around, whatever their future experiences. In my opinion this point of equilibrium, this determined potentiality, was formed precisely then – in the events that took place around July 1960. This was true for my generation – even though I was somewhat older. It also applied to me, to my life and my destiny.
(But was it only to me? No, really not. In prison I watched, from close up, a man dying – a comrade from those years, Gianfranco from Genova, a brother from way back – no matter the political distance. We carried on our backs that same bag of tools and that great love for humanity and for liberation. With a smile that you would expect, Gianfranco, I’m smoking a Gauloise in your memory.)
It was sometimes difficult to get on with Raniero. (Good old Gianfranco knew something about this.) As a fine intellectual, Raniero fascinated me; as a politician of long experience, he intimidated me. His intellectual restlessness sometimes affected his judgements of that pure reality, of that concrete reality that he was always spelling out for me in theoretical terms. And this puzzled me, because I was neither an intellectual of that standing nor a political professional, but just a young provincial philosopher who was looking to this new practice to provide an outlet and the happiness of a pristine desire. Maybe my faith in the real, in the things that had to be done, was a little stupid, but I felt that there was a broad and genuine practice to support my stance. And also theoretical. Thus I found myself in sympathy with the militant community that was beginning to form up. Raniero was not. He confessed: ‘I see all the roads blocked, the “return to the private” gives me the shivers, and the possibility of ending up in some small sect terrifies me.’ He hid from himself the fact that the historical context of militancy had changed completely. We were in a sea, a beautiful sea, and we were learning to swim, to resolve metaphysics and politics in a single act of mass love. But what was the point of talking about that?
Nowadays it is important that we remember Raniero, that little great demiurge of my generation, that classical teacher of communist militancy. And while I’m on the subject, it was precisely in those years that the terminological and political distinction between ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ became, for us, primary and continuous: a new and essential conceptual restoration of Marxism. Socialism was for the reorganisation of work, communism was for the liberation of and from work. This distinction, too, was due to Raniero, but his biographers fail to mention it. I remind people of it, as he would have wished, with a touch of irony: it is true, his intelligence was greater than his will. Cher David, this is a problem – and one that affects many people. It would have been so good if you could have met him. But the fact of liking him created big problems – because the inflexibility of his analytical reason and of his ethics, the force of his intellectual style – all this fed on itself. It was a war machine, powerful and manoeuvrable, with perfectly rational mechanisms and gears – and a kind of circularity – and a jealous defence of this independence of judgement of his, which sometimes deprived itself of the hermeneutic pleasure, the pleasure of making reason the handmaid of the movement. And also of the joy of listening. (A great musician deaf? This is not a paradox – or, if it is, it has been concretely solved. Rational and ethical inflexibility can mysteriously – but no less effectually – join together with body and love. How I wish that this might also be possible in writing!)
Goodbye for now, David. I send you a kiss, with the sadness of these memories and of these foggy days – and with affection, as ever . . .