Rebibbia, 20 December 1981
Cher David,
So then, how did our imagination of the transformation become physical fact? How was it possible to construct a process that would enable us to prefigure, in the singular and in the particular, the great extent and generality of people’s interest in liberation? The theoretical discovery consisted, I believe, in counting not on the continuity but on the discontinuity of the processes. In other words, we had to exclude from the outset any idea that the continuity was linear – we had to exclude any Prometheanism of research, any sense that the result is proportional with its cause and the will commensurate with reason. How did we come to this awareness? And how, furthermore, did a belief in the non-inevitability of communism become a motor that drove increasingly our commitment to research and struggle? In my view, the critical point of the experience was the working-class revolt in Turin in 1962, the clashes in and around Piazza Statuto.
Up until then, the work carried out in Quaderni Rossi had been characterised by great critical and analytical rigour. The analysis of the factory and the analysis of the restructuring of capitalist society – in short, the two faces of neocapitalism, as it was called in those days with a horrible pleonasm (when has capitalism been anything but change, even if not necessarily productive change?) – we began to follow these two aspects through the entire arc of their logic of development. There is no doubt, however, that some activists close to Raniero Panzieri had given this research a very positivistic imprint. As often happens in cases of contamination between positivist methodologies and revolutionary instances, the former – at least initially – tend to get the upper hand. I remember having been personally touched by the compelling logic of the reversal that emerged from the empirical analysis of the increase in the organic composition of capital – studied not at the ethereal and meaningless level of general laws, but in the stamping press department of FIAT-Mirafiori and at Olivetti in Ivrea. At this point, however, Raniero’s genius and restlessness reacted: communism is not inevitable. What came to the fore here was the dogged lucidity and impatience of the research done by Romano Alquati, that extraordinary Louis-Ferdinand Céline of the revolutionary sociology of the factory. Romano objected that, if the research is done with workers and is done as a moment of agitation, the focus shifts immediately to the residues of capitalist logic – in other words, not to the abstract logic of capital but to the capitalist activity of rationalisation: this is the moment of confrontation, and it is ongoing and decisive. ‘The crucial element in the growth of the organic composition of capital is the discontinuity of its relationship – the relationships of exploitation and struggle that constitute it.’1 Synchronic discontinuity of the class relation that constitutes capital, diachronic discontinuity of the class relations that capital tries to rationalise over time. So this is the horizon that we all have to address, these discontinuities of relationships, foregrounding their complete irreversibility. When I reread those debates today, cher David, I’m amazed at our intelligence during those years: on the one hand, a scientific reading of the administration of capital that largely anticipated functionalism and Luhmann; on the other hand, an analysis of the physiological fabric of the struggle that carries you directly to the physics of Serres and Prigogine. So there we had it, that otherwise inconceivable physics of transformation, spreading out before us. But the problem could not be posed solely in terms of intensity, in the daily microphysics of the relations of production – it also had to be present in the great expansion of the social. The precise analysis of the discontinuous links had to be located in terms of historical extension. On the one hand, the factory; on the other, society and history. Only in this way, if we succeeded in grasping the global pulsation of the working-class body, could the wretchedness of factoryism – which was understood by us in a Leninist sense – have been overcome. The foreseen event was, however, in psychological terms, disproportionately small compared to its ontological emergence; the living form is always redundant in relation to the form imagined in thought.
Piazza Statuto was a shock for everyone, but especially for us, even though we had been expecting a violent reaction to the trade unions’ betrayal of the struggle. The basic facts are well known. After several days of strikes in Mirafiori, at SPA-Stura and other factories (all-out strikes, for the first time in years and years of trade union peace and after a long and careful preparation by the vanguards inside the factory), one of the trade unions, the UIL [Unione Italiana del Lavoro], went for a separate agreement with the company. The workers walked out of the factory and tried to attack the office of the scab union. They also protested violently against the FIOM and the leaderships of the other unions, which were trying to calm everyone down and stop the strike from turning violent. In the end, acting on their own, the workers took over the streets – on their own, but maintaining and renewing for a couple of days the composition of the pickets, operating their own system of shift work on the pickets, matched to the shift times in factories – clashing violently with the police and the various peacemongers. After the events in Genoa, at Piazza Statuto the ‘Padova’ battalion lost a fair amount of its reputation as an unbeatable police force. The cobblestones, the rocks, the chains from the parking lots, reminded the proletarian police that the proletarian rebels are the womb from which they had become detached – sometimes proletarian struggle is a subjective choice, a vocation, but for proletarians it is always their destiny. Gramsci, the brother of so many proletarians, reminds us of this insistently – can we perhaps, with Pasolini, scatter his ashes, chatting amicably about policemen – sometimes murderers, always scorned by the great proletarian belly?
The Quaderni Rossi were caught up in all this, willy-nilly. In their intervention they proposed that the struggles should be escalated, so as to prevent any betrayal. ‘The only possible answer now is out-of-hand rejection of this agreement, a heightening of the struggle at all levels, its organisation in an anticapitalist sense, grassroots control of the struggle with the collective worker, without the false problems of top-level unity and of workers assistance to public capitalism.’2 The factory cadres – extremely few – who had some contact with Quaderni Rossi found themselves at the head of this street uprising. What then happened within Quaderni Rossi was a bit comical. A great timidity, a deep uncertainty, contradictions and polemics led to a paralysis. A few wild outbursts. Accusations of anarcho-syndicalism, of extremism and infantilism . . . Boh. A ping-pong of hysterics. The big trade unionists who had initially regarded the Quaderni Rossi sympathetically now withdrew in terror, but not before launching anathemas against them. The young workers who had participated in this experience as a precursor of political intervention and in the hope of creating organisation also withdrew – cursing, but not understanding, naively feeling betrayed. Meanwhile the press launched a witch hunt, hunting down the provocateurs – ‘fascists’, of course, as it was customary to call activists in those days, and continued to be so for a long time to come. ‘Who is paying them?’ Stop. But what had happened in reality? A FIAT workers’ struggle had exploded after about a decade and had moved from the factory floor to the streets. Unexpected. An attack on trade union normality and on the institutional power of the negotiating process, a refusal to be represented by the official labour movement. Unexpected and impermissible. A mass rejection of the dominant ideology of progressive reformism in the relations of production. In short, nothing more or less than the emergence of a discontinuity in the physics of imagination. The reality of daily struggle, the rejection of command geared to exploitation had expressed themselves collectively and globally – the atoms, in their fall, had invented a clinamen [swerve]. Venus had risen from the waters. That sea of workers that poured into the organisational system of the factory every morning, every afternoon, every night, in the inexorability of the shift system, violently directed through a thousand channels like an irrigation system of surplus value, had now found its own logic of identity, which was violent and massified.
But there was more: the vanguard of workers who were leading the struggle and the rejection of the separate agreement reunified all sectors of the proletariat within the metropolis. Within the anti-union revolt there was a direct political representation of the entire people of the metropolis. Everyone was there, in Piazza Statuto – they arrived there as if at a ceremony of purification from the filth of the working-class meat market, and they stayed there as if at a big country festival, without a precise organisation but with a physical identity. A while ago, in one of the special prisons, I was talking with Sante Notarnicola about that festival, in which we had both taken part. He spoke particularly about the ritual significance of that struggle – about the fullness of the renewal that the spectacle of liberatory violence created in the consciousnesses of individual proletarians. If I had been a writer on political matters in the bosses’ employment, I would have brought them here, to observe these extraordinary displacements of mass consciousness, teaching them cynically that, when you are forced to endure them, you have to react radically, eliminating any possibility of their reproduction and imposing exemplary punishments for those who took part. There is no Machiavellian weaponry or Pinkertonian provocation that might not be used in such situations. Schmittian Entscheidung [decision] – boss-class hatred, pure and simple. ‘At this point, in this kingdom, there is no tangible authority except power and the might of the sword.’3 But would a ferocious repression be sufficient? According to the physics of the imagination, no. The structural playing out of the displacement consists in the fact that what was hitherto positive now becomes negative and what was negative becomes positive. The metropolitan market of human flesh – special meat, exclusively for work: even the Piedmontese prostitutes scorn the peasant southerner – is thrown into turmoil. The positivity of the market for capital, in other words the traction it exerts on the well-ordered world of those who are paid wages, is dissolved, demystified, unmasked. On the other hand, working-class negativity – that mysterious productive force that, albeit left to one side, lives and alone determines value – well, this has made its appearance on the stage, once and for all, against the market. Once and for all – at least for those who attended the unveiling ceremony. ‘The poor, the illiterate, the mechanics have turned the world upside down.’4 These were old proletarians from the South who had chosen emigration in preference to the defeat that followed on the land occupation movement; they were young Piedmontese who had grown up with the dream of a partisan rebellion that was ongoing; they were Rocco and his brothers, drifting through the metropolis; they were communists humiliated in 1953 by the violence of Valletta and of the yellow unions; finally, they were us – the generation awakened to politics with the thaw of the labour movement, delicate flowers with strong seeds. Piazza Statuto became an extraordinary symbol.
Then there was a pause – it was summer. People returned to the factories in small groups, as in the preceding years. But we already knew that there had been a huge increase in the amount of waste output. A little newssheet was doing the rounds – Il Gatto selvaggio (The Wild Cat) – which detailed sabotage in the factories. The bosses and the judiciary accused it of condoning crime. Was that true? Perhaps they had more fear of this than we had foresight. The rain of atoms continued. Beyond the first clinamen, towards a second. Solitude had turned into violence; now it had to turn into hope.
We followed the articulations of the violence manifested by the workers’ activity with all the attention that the mode of production deserves. And we discovered that core of thought and revolutionary perspective that only the fact of the working class finding its own path – already strong in its metropolitan dimension – could permit the concrete utopia of communism to affirm: the ‘refusal of work’. Starting there, at the heart of the factory, on the shop floor, from the analysis of the job functions of the individual worker, we analysed the worker’s relation to the machine and its product – a relation that was ambiguous. But if the analysis went a bit deeper and sought to qualify this ambiguity, we found a long series of alternatives: there were elements of indiscipline pure and simple – against and the opposite of the attitudes of the skilled workers (the machine cannot do what I know how to do); but between these extremes, permanently neglected by the frustrated utopia of trade union negotiations, one found the negation of capitalist command – not so much over society, not so much over the totality of production (because indeed these conditions were generally overlooked and regarded as non-negotiable and preexisting), but more over the organisation of work, over the specificity of the elements that made it up: from the fact of coming to the factory at a certain time and of having to reproduce the absurdity of the hours of the working day for the whole duration of one’s life to the fact of having become – in the workplace – an idiotic appendage to a piece of machinery. A short while after that, other slaves of that same exploitation were to write:
Workers don’t go into factories to do research but because they are forced to. Work is not a way of living but the obligation to sell oneself for a living. And it is by struggling against work, against this forced selling of ourselves, that they clash with all the rules of society. And it is by struggling to work less, and no longer to be poisoned at work, that they are also struggling against toxicity at work. Because it is toxic to have to get up every morning to go to work, it is harmful to have to do shift work, and it is harmful to go home with a wage so low that it forces you to return day after day to the factory.5
Wage labour is against humanity. I don’t think I need to return to Volume 1 of Capital or to the Grundrisse to explain what alienated labour is – nor do I need to stress what the Taylorisation of the workplace has done to deepen this desperate situation. The quid novi [something new] in our analysis was not the mournful restatement of this proletarian misery. Something else was in play: first, to grasp the unificatory elements in the refusal that this condition brought about; and, second, to grasp the communist quality of that refusal. In other words every worker’s behaviour in the face of the machine was, naturally, one of refusal. Only artificially could the worker be forced to the norm. But this violent enforcement produced an immediate effect: the worker generalised the refusal in violent forms – on those same dimensions of massification that the norm of command produced. This happened through an extraordinary symbiosis of positive and negative behaviours, both subjective and objective. The smallest, most unnoticeable defect – a nut that was not properly tightened, or paint that was a bit streaky – meant a waste product emerging at the end of the production line. The collapse of the working hours system and the rampant absenteeism destroyed the composition of the workteams. The mobility used by the bosses – whether calculatedly or by trial and error – in order to break up the lines that were producing too much waste and the changes in workteams made necessary by the high degree of absenteeism became a great resource for the circulation of information. And there was the other aspect, equally important – namely what was revealed when, faced with disorder and chaos on the assembly lines, foremen, engineers and so on arrived trying to restore order and regularity – or to study innovations that might simplify the production line and functionally modify the labour process. Now, any change was usually the exact opposite of what had been done in the act of sabotage – whether the operation had been deliberate or not. Innovation by way of sabotage. So who was doing the inventing – the saboteur or the engineer? The worker asked himself – if the machine is a product of necessity, on what is its necessity based, if not on my struggle? That struggles are a way to produce innovation is a commonplace, among reactionaries as much as among social reformists. ‘The machine runs to places where there is struggle.’6 But to say that the refusal of work was the necessary and exclusive factor of innovation, of the progress of productivity – this was a truth of communism. And they say that communism is utopian!
The refusal of work, cher David, became and remains a creative point of communist thinking for this reason: because it is an immediate synthesis of struggle and innovation, of life and productivity. It is the potency of the negative. Obviously, of that which the bosses call negative – inasmuch as it is a denial of their rationality. But their rationality is the expropriation of the innovative capacity, of the productive force, of the working class; it is command over the working day. Whereas the rationality of the working class is to increase the productivity of labour. For the benefit of all. Within a social organisation that permits its development and thus offers wealth and happiness to all. The measure of the struggle is thus born from the refusal of work, and then it extends positively in the social programming of equality and of the development of productive forces. From the factory to the social, from Mirafiori to Piazza Statuto. And vice versa – to rebuild within the factory nuclei, together with the sabotage, the collective potency of the expansion and unification of social struggles.
How much time has passed since then! Today the struggle, constructing itself in the social, encircles and penetrates the plant. The sequences of struggles have become further massified and socialised, as has the subject who sustains them. Only trade union corporatism remained firmly attached to the factory – and not in all cases . . . not even those dinosaurs could manage that! But then, finding this point of strength (call it sabotage if you like) and grabbing it in that huge social chaos of the workshops and assembly lines at FIAT – this was a great laying of a foundation. When I heard bourgeois sociologists talk about the factory, it was something that I really did not recognise: their abstract theorems, their Olivettian mystifications, their rationalistic illusions made me chuckle. I chuckled because, above all, they were only capable of perverse effects. The factory was struggle, it was a huge and confused army, which produced to order and to deadlines that were entirely massified – Kutuzov rather than Napoleon. And this army could become a people of free partisan bands. I spent whole years seeing the analyses of my comrades find continuous verifications – whereas those of the bourgeoisie fantasised means of control that had absolutely no effect on the growth of the collective paths of the refusal of work. Invisible to power, and clandestine in relation to command. But, in a huge process of recomposition of the proletariat, we were marching forward. The metropolis was all around: we went to the gates, crossing this territory whose ugliness and ecological disaster revealed it to be hostile. But behind every new barbarous emergence you saw running a thread of recomposition, of reunification between people who were forced into waged work, rebellious against power and full of desire for liberation. ‘The voice of the Kingdom of Christ will come first and foremost from those who are part of the multitude, those same people who are so contemptible in the eyes of the spirits possessed by the Antichrist, and of the clergy.’7 The journey was long, we thought. In thinking that, we ourselves made the mistake of considering the future as a continuum. No, the journey was not long: it was discontinuous. The space in which we were moving was a frontier, a Wild West – on multiple tracks, in many directions, tout azimut. It was a modern Odysseus: as the geographer Eratosthenes put it, fixing a route is impossible because only the person who stitches the skin of the wind knows that. As Piazza Statuto had shown us, we had lived the sudden pulsations of the working-class body, the irreversibility of the paths it had taken, the expansion of its desire for revolution. And also the defeats.
Defeats – but never defeat. The red thread of the science of revolution, the hope of liberation – for sure these were good compasses in this traversing of space. Piazza Statuto shows the workerist how irreversible and all-encircling passion is – from the factory floor to society, from utopia to science. So the solitude of man, articulating itself on the sabotage of the producer, finds the invention of communism. I had the paradigm, this new paradigm that plucked me out of the normal science of the official labour movement – this, cher David, is how I experienced things, and I was excited by the fact of using this paradigm both as a scientific lever and as a practical tool. It was a fever, a passion. It was the same as when, cher David, many years later (but having become young again), we followed the struggles of Lorraine in 1977–8: once again it was people from the Veneto and immigrants from the South who, alongside us, in Longwy, were planning disasters for the bosses. Ciao, compagno mio bello ...
PS Cher David, in my recent letters I have talked about Raniero. About a pedagogical relationship. About his love and the seductiveness of the man. But still in abstract terms. I cannot do better than that. It happens that I maintain, or undergo, relationships at the pedagogical level – I avoid talking specifically of either of them, the disciple or the teacher. Evading the tangle of emotions, sensations, upheavals and enthusiasms. I establish and satisfy relationships that are full of sensuality in purely conventional terms. How unjust all this is! How much sensuality political pedagogy contains! Here, in my narrative, there are no passions, betrayals and abandonments – and this is wrong, because the abstraction of concepts does not remove from politics the concreteness of cupiditas [desire]. And, for a voyeur, you and I, as well as Raniero and I, might seem to have been locked into a homosexual relationship that we hypocritically do not recognise. Maybe it’s true. But it’s not completely true. Because vulgar voyeurs spy in private and in all their grumbling inconsistency; but between us we – and I enjoyably on other occasions – had that aufklärische Erziehung, that relationship of communist education, which unfolds sensuality in a relationship that is universal, schizophrenic, collective and joyous. It is the private element that renders the experience prurient – but concepts can be full of a free sensuality. I try again and again to write about this complexity of political relations. I can’t do it. But I believe that enlightened education also has to pose unresolved problems. This certainly means that some of my arguments are rather dull. But . . . Take writing: it is a limit – perhaps it is a world that precisely this conquered, mature concept of eros shows to be preterite, old, outdated. Eros calls on life to build forms of expression that are denser and more complex. As regards my poverty of expression: could it not perhaps indicate a deficit (historically clear-cut) of narrative in the form of writing? Of the impossibility, not of expressing eros through writing, but of saying it collectively, publicly, wholeheartedly, as something that concerns all of us? Interchangeable and full and concrete in its collective relation? The end of the Gutenberg galaxy? Books teach us only after the experience has become a given. Books become less and less useful, less and less . . . Allusions, traces. But then why do I write?