Rebibbia, 26 December 1981
Cher David,
I want to tell you about the year Togliatti died. I’m talking about 1964, but in a sense I could be talking about any of the years between 1962 and 1967, because they were lived as a continuity in the deepening of the new theoretical practice. But the death of Togliatti is too important an event to pass over. Togliatti left an ambiguous legacy as regards method – and he also left a great party that was on the defensive in the face of capitalist reformism and developments on the international front. Togliatti represented a kind of universal ‘third way’ – you never knew if this was a way of getting around problems or a problem that remained unsolved. From this point of view Togliatti’s funeral provided a snapshot of a generation of schizoid and frustrated intellectuals. Renato Guttuso [the painter] unconsciously succeeded in showing it, portraying his ideology, not the truth of art. But the funeral was also, and above all, the expression of an untamable proletariat – and it showed the extent to which communism, that century-long hope, was alive in people’s consciences! Millions of proletarians saluted with clenched fists, and the mourning was inseparable from pride. At that time it was impossible not to feel both the present and the longer-term action of this symbol. In our memories he did not yet represent betrayal. So the emotion of the moment translated into restlessness, and this sad and dignified proletarian festival became an incitement to renew the strength and historic density of this mass. The tasks of the new generation were thus clear: they had to create a break in the theoretical practice of the proletariat, so as to renew its revolutionary potential. A new tactics for an old strategy: and new political personnel – but we could not forget, and we did not want to forget, that we were there – in those masses and within that tradition.
I went to Togliatti’s funeral with militant workers from the Vetrocoke plant at Porto Marghera – older workers with whom, the previous year, we had set up one of the most hard-fought and costly wildcat strikes ever seen in Italian industry: the molten glass spilled out over the gears, and it took them weeks to chip it all away. The plant manager came to see what was happening. They grabbed him and passed him, hand over hand, right up to the mouth of the furnace: his managerial arrogance gave way and he shat himself, and only then was the furnace door shut – the manager stank too much – among the laughter of men who were half-naked and drunk with the heat, those divine beings who fed this volcano with the finest crystals. (The manager was later made Knight of Labour.) Alongside us were some communist workers from the Petrolchimico plant – the initial core of the future Potere Operaio of Porto Marghera – who in the previous year had organised the first lightning mass strike at what was then a very young factory. When the machinery of a continuous flow production process stopped, the comrades understood their own strength. (David, do you have any idea what it means to block the continuous production cycle of a petrochemical plant? It’s like a huge body that is dying. The mechanical fixity of relations that were previously flowing, the fatal predetermination, hundreds of millions of dollars of fixed capital per employee – all of that goes into short circuit. The heart comes last – first come the arteries, veins, liver, and kidneys . . . Now we have this man-made anatomy in our grip, and we can either feed or block its physiology – but in any event we can exercise power over them! This recognition is an extraordinary acquisition of class consciousness. Our ignorance alone allows us to be commanded and exploited – the boss is the embodiment of our lack of dignity. The alternative – just the knowledge that an alternative is possible – is a priceless gift.) So they, the comrades at Petrolchimico, sensed the possibility of a new beginning. Indeed: maybe we had already started. There was much that was sacred and powerful on that day in Rome. That is how they experienced the situation, both the older workers from Vetrocoke and the young ones from Petrolchimico.
It was on our return from Togliatti’s funeral that we began to distribute joint political leaflets in all the factories in Marghera, moving beyond the fragmentation of the small factory intervention groups. These were political leaflets that played on two sides of the capitalist development plan – the reformist face and the working-class face, that of command and that of wages – pitting the one against the other, pressing wage demands as a way of destabilising the political equilibrium of command. The discourse was explicit. In our view the younger Togliatti would have been happy with our strategic cunning; you could have laid money on it. And the Togliattian approach found a continuity in the practice of the ‘workerists’. There was no aspect of the wage or of the organisation of labour that we were not able, with duplicity and working-class astuteness, to resolve within our paradoxical reading of the topos of ‘limits to development’ – the limits of ‘their’ development, that of the bosses. ‘Workers’ autonomy against the plan’, that was the slogan. In 1964 the boom was also running out of steam in psychological terms; in material terms, we were seeing the beginnings of that historical downturn of the level of investment that has not picked up since. Not that we had foreseen it with clarity, of course. But we had understood clearly that, in the hysterical specificity of Italian-style development, there would inevitably be a contradictory relationship between economic crisis and political crisis – that the whole structure could only stand up if there was economic development, and that there was no force capable of managing the economic crisis. So that was the understanding on which we had to move – that potential asymmetry was a weak point where we could strike. And within this ongoing action we could build organisation. On the one hand, the use of a kind of wage Keynesianism, a reformism of the real wage, passing through the immediacy of working-class needs and interpreted as a tool of destabilisation; on the other, a realist view of the Italian state’s inability to mediate the economic crisis and the major changes in class relationships that prefigured that crisis. Throughout those years we firmly believed that, once a solid level of crises had been established and those moments of organisation had been built, the official labour movement would align itself with the revolutionary process. It would have had no choice. What a terrible mistake! What naivety and short-sightedness on our part – not to have understood that the K factor was not a possible strength but a congenital weakness of the labour movement!
Yet not even today can I manage a smile when I think back to that period – sharp as doves, that was our watchword. Never in the history of the labour movement had the truth been exposed more forcefully, more rigorously, and so forthrightly: a message to the bosses – we want money, and we shall lead you to ruin. And as for the unions, the new functionaries of social capital, we were the precursors of the working-class slogan that was later to emerge with Solidarnos´c´: we will win because the lie cannot last. Short is the path of words in working-class struggle, and profound are their effects. In this game, once again, there were just two players – servants and bosses, proletarians and capitalists – eliminating the third term – mediation and the political. We talked straight – da cristiani, as we say in the Veneto – as we were reviving the Hobbesian geometry of the ‘market society’. We often quarrelled among ourselves, as happens in all vanguard episodes of the labour movement and of the renewal of its nascent state. But we had learned from the refusal of ideology and from the working-class discipline of speaking clearly, so our quarrels never resulted in irreparable breaks or breakdowns in our common cause. In any event, the logic of our association for communist agitation was reaffirmed. When one aggregation was blocked, another would begin. Later, in more recent times, this metamorphosis and this process of growth by division, this ‘go forth and multiply’ that lay at the origins of our practice – because I think that ours was a practice strongly and radically characterised by theory – were so overvalued as to be seen as deliberate decisions taken in order to perpetrate crimes: dividing in order to set up plots, secret intrigues, infiltrations, and so on . . . How disgusting these suspicions were! Grunf stuff. We were never infected by the behaviours of defeat and resentment, the dead nucleus of the Trotskyist atom. What later happened – and what continued to happen, all the time – was the opposite of what our enemies insinuated: we divided in order to swarm everywhere, so as to apply our theoretical practice to the complexity of the situations in which we were involved. Sharp as doves. What was developing from that time onwards was a kind of Franciscanism – a living of the class struggle in its immediate conditions, in the richness of its poverty, bringing it to politics. In relation to the class struggle, what politics meant was what poetics is for poetry: a reflection on concrete action and on its effectual results.
Cher David, if, now, I think about myself in that period, I find a big change in that old character whom I have described hitherto. I always carried my political vocation with me: but the fact is that I had always lived a certain dualism of theoretical and practical experience, so that I always had to reread the latter between the intellectualistic twin poles of sociology and utopia. Now this dualism was over. Precisely as I was concluding a theoretical trajectory that led me implicitly to adhere to the productive conclusions of European philosophy – enough of descriptions, we want only deconstructions; enough Aufhebung, we just want destructuration, assez d’idéologie, we want the concrete – these conclusions seemed to me to be supported by a collective subject. A collective subject that was not only what political analysis proposed as an empirical reference point, but also the mobile internal product of all thinking about destructuration of the enemy horizon, the continuous reappearance of a multiple activity of resistance and destruction wherever command signalled its logical emergence. That collective subject was not a principle but rather the force capable of breaking all command, all mastery and logos of capital. A collective subject as a horizon that was epistemological before being historical. Was this a remake of the proletariat inherited from classical German philosophy? Not at all, because this subject that was being built was subordinated to the same law of destructuration that we were applying to the enemy. The strategies that pervaded the real also pervaded the subject. So: wiles and stratagems. Thus it was a historic gamble – only the result could justify it; communism is not inevitable. What we were bringing to the construction of the working-class political was not a metaphysics but a technique, full of irony and hope. That horizon of destructuration could only be closed, of course, in relation to a signifying subject – but this subject, which we could qualify as collective and communist, was not a given. It built itself during the course of destructuration. It could not be given either as relic of the past or as a prefiguration of the future – but only as a continuous work of – simultaneously – destruction of the enemy and construction of itself. As a tension that passed through this destructured time. All final cause had to be dissolved; its discrediting was for us total. Here is Bacon: ‘The research into Final Causes, like a virgin dedicated to God, is barren and produces nothing.’1 Later, reading and rereading Derrida and Bataille and early Foucault, I found myself thinking of them as big brothers who, in the abstruse regions of thought – like lucid meteorological sensors – were grasping pieces of the reality that we were living. And so it happened, cher David, that, in the name of a destructuring practice, we were able in the major journals of those years, from Quaderni rossi to Classe operaia and Contropiano, to analyse the crisis of instrumental reason, and we were able in our books, from Tronti’s Operai e capitale to my essays in Forma stato, to bring into a critical synthesis the motifs of a working-class structuralism, and on the other hand an absolute rationalism of the collective subject. Wise as doves in practice, angels of destruction and hope in theory. We had little time in those days to theorise about ourselves – so why not do it now, when we have infinite years of imprisonment hanging over us? There was nothing juvenile in our experience, nothing experimental – even if everything was young and experimental. Rather we were an outcome of the working-class revolution in industry, a point of self-consciousness of the class of the future. We were – and we are even more so today – the only generation of revolutionary intellectuals produced by the working class in the period after the second great imperialist war. (Of course, there will be some who will have a good laugh at this: intellectuals produced by the working class! I don’t want to push this risky claim to the point of having to defend it. But then to have believed in this is no less risky than never to have asked oneself about the relationship between intellectuals and the working class – and it is certainly less comical than to have disowned it.) And let this stand as a mark of our dignity. However, the period of commemorations had not yet begun, and Giordano Bruno had not yet been led anew to the stake.
So let us return, cher David, to our own history in those days. How many stories I could tell you! But I prefer to tell you about my Virgil. He guided me through the difficulties of my journey into the entrails of the great machine – it was no accident that he was a control engineer in a chemical plant – and he steered me through it in a way worthy of Virgil himself, the poet of the Aeneid and the teacher of Dante. All around that machine – namely the Petrolchimico plant in Porto Marghera – that great nodal point, sometimes starry and throbbing, sometimes monstrous and poisonous – there spread the territory of the working class – the neighbourhoods, the towns, the bars, the parish rooms, the party offices. And here the picture changed by comparison with the factory, because in the factory we were deconstructing the organisation of labour within the continuity of a bosses’ command that we could not think of breaking except in some imagined future. In the territory surrounding the factory, on the other hand, the bosses were violently destructuring the organised proletarian community; but here the community was resisting and organising, and only in some imagined future could the bosses think of winning. Unlike in Turin – the great metropolis – in Marghera and throughout the whole industrial region where we were beginning to operate, from Schio to Pordenone to Trieste, from Thiene to Padua, from Conegliano to Monfalcone, the relationship between factory and working-class society, between capitalist structure and antagonistic subject, resisted the internal tendency towards an extreme mechanical dissolution. My Virgil led me to an understanding of the territorial networks that constituted the composition of the workforce in the factory. So that, gradually, the relationship between the factory and society went beyond the fuzziness of mere theoretical definitions, and also beyond the great historical longing for an assault on the heavens, as had happened in Turin: it became viable in precise terms of struggle. ‘Sabotage the plan on all fronts.’ On the buses, which were the embodiment of territorial mobility, the mass subject could be followed and recomposed, reversing the trajectories and the directions of the spatial processes of exploitation. Our first intervention was in the area of the Brenta, where thirty thousand proletarians were packed into factories – making shoes, breathing in the benzene until they become addicted to it (and then, after this vile apprenticeship, going on to promotion and a right to the poisoned air of the Petrolchimico plant: higher wages for the same amount of poison – a step up!). Then we began to operate more around Venice. And then in the zone of the Piave, which was effectively a watershed between Marghera and the swampland of industries that extended from Treviso to Friuli. And then we headed south from Padua, to the Montedison plant in Ferrara, in Emilia, where the exploitation was co-managed by the official labour movement.
At each of these nodes of agitation and organisation we met and clashed with the suffocating structure of the trade union and party bureaucracies. Struggles, small and large, followed one after the other during those years. Every strike was a clash with both the bosses and the trade unions. Mr Bloom: ‘I can’t stand pigs at table.’2 Virgil, who had had some experience of demons, camouflaged himself well – in the characteristic style of a chemical industry worker: he had something of the sulphurous cunning of those beings. (But my Virgil was not like the Virgil of the famous engravings by Doré – a thin, dry figure, elusive in the shadows of engravings, not easy to distinguish from the devils. This worker-Virgil was a bit prematurely bald, and he was tubby, affectionate, argumentative, lively, and sometimes sarcastic – a plump demon. One would have said he was Irish, were it not that he was from Chirignago . . . no, there was no mistaking him for Mephistopheles.) This is the birthplace of much of our linguistic arsenal: it was born out of a semantic overturning and an empirical specification of the misleading abstract names that the union was giving things. Leftist jargon? Maybe. But it was working-class usage of trade union language – and its overturning. Chomskian genealogies and grammars of demystification. Autonomy: was that not what the unions were calling for? There was so much – too much – talk of trade union autonomy. Did they want it or did they not? But it is clear that there is true autonomy and false autonomy, as my Virgil explained, having armed himself with an incisive Enlightenment logic. Der Doppelcharakter der Gewerkschaften, Fetischismus der Gewerkschaft [The dual nature of trade unions, fetishism of the trade union]. Only real autonomy is to our advantage. The autonomy that the union talks about, does it put anything in our pockets? No, it does not. So what kind of autonomy is it? Those union people are just hacks. ‘The triangle of the economic plan: employers, government, union.’ ‘One single struggle – against the reformists in the party and against the bosses in the factory.’ So let’s roll up our sleeves and set about making a real autonomy ourselves. When you find that the totality in which we are inserted has no foundations, what meaning can words have any more? Anything that does not further our class interest is just ideology. Let us bring words back to their meanings, Virgil added. Let us place them in a given cognitive field – the process of bringing new life into the world is a practical operation. Virgil was pushing us to a concrete dramatisation of the word, of the materialistic destruction of all its ambiguity – in other words, he was inciting us to dissolve all idealistic univocality. This genealogy was thus a radical operation: it could not limit itself to effecting a kind of striptease on the trade union’s rhetoric; it had to reformulate the subject theoretically and reshape it physically, outside of any dialectic.
Virgil expressed his project neither in Augustan Latin nor in Florentine Italian, but in the dialect of the Veneto. Maybe the extraordinary importance of the experience we were going through also derived from that fact. Dialect is a useful reminder of the characteristics of industrial development in the Veneto in that period: the Veneto is not a metropolis, so – unlike what has happened in the big cities, with the churning effects of immigration – it maintains an identifiable proletarian substrate that is still structured, stable, and directly translatable into a new subjectivity. Furthermore, by that time the Veneto had become one of the major industrial areas of Europe, and the confrontation was taking place at the highest levels of the composition of capital. An averageness thus applies to all aspects of the experiment – a good situation, a favourable opportunity. So at this point Virgil becomes an alchemist and pushes ahead to the experientia crucis [decisive experiment], to that experimental transition that creates a reaction in all the items selected and assembled. Years and years of daily political work, thousands upon thousands of leaflets, the extensive range of organisational experiences – everything was boiled down and reconcentrated. Paracelsus redivivus.
Genealogy has to produce difference. I was overwhelmed by the density of the reference material of this new philosophy of ours, cher David – and never did I honour humanity more than when I found myself among these strong men, who were focusing on the will of one great violence, the accumulation of poverty, suffering and falsehoods they had endured. Virgil insisted on the need to intensify, to push, to provoke the clash. There was no need – the outcome was already building itself. We had a huge mass movement that was about to speak. ‘Mass intervention.’ ‘Against the swindle contacts.’ ‘Now let’s move against the contracts.’ ‘Piecework = Exploitation.’ ‘Enough.’ ‘No to the Framework Agreement.’ ‘Let’s go beyond the contract.’ ‘Let’s strike first.’ ‘Hit the bosses before they hit us.’ Those were some of the slogans that the leftist newspapers of the period were scattering around, in hundreds of thousands of copies. But it was important not to end up in isolation, to identify other experiences of movement that had been started and were moving in this direction, and to reunite the scattered elements of theoretical practice. So we were moving continuously from meeting to meeting, and from strike to strike. And difficulties did not scare us.
What did scare us was the sectarianism: residues of a clapped-out Italiot ideology that, at that time, was beginning to wallow in Marxism–Leninism. Grunf, grunf. What a pain that was! And then the fashionable third-worldism of the time – Virgil was the only one who pretended to be interested in it, forgetting that he could perform his role as guide in Hell and in Purgatory; but in Paradise – in ideological and artificial Paradises – really not! He sent me off to meetings of the most varied and useless committees. ‘Victory to the Vietcong.’ What a bore. Grunf, grunf.
We used to meet, and often on Friday evenings, when the afternoon shift came out of the factory, we would go to a big bar where we would discuss revolutionary theory . . . And the wine flowed by the gallon. Because communism could not be abject misery – and only if we regained for ourselves the productive potential of the working class, only then could we think of those peoples with black or yellow faces and empty stomachs. What united us in brotherhood was strength, not pity. The Vietcong soldiers are winning – yes, because they are putting up a strong fight. Internationalism is not a holy relic, it is a task. Third-worldist language was part of that totality of distorted meanings that we had to dissolve. A hypocrisy that had to be fought if we were to get back to real values. Struggles only win if they constitute the materiality of the subject. What could come from abstract solidarity, if not the confirmation and the exaltation of the windbag virtues that swindlers have always proclaimed? So let us take aim, comrades – with all the force of which we are capable, with all the necessary caution, and with all the hope we can muster – on our target – and on the cycle of struggles that will have to open. Our analysis requires it. A match, now, just one match for this dry prairie. Either the communist revolution moves where the working class is strongest, or it does not happen. The night of the Veneto, sweet as the passion of its people, is so soft as to give a semblance of reality even to the dreams of these Pantagruelian drunkards. But was all this really an illusion? I send you a big hug, dear friend . . .