Rebibbia, 7 January 1982
Cher David,
Christmas and the New Year are past and gone. This is the third time I spend the festivities in prison. Sheltered from the madness of the world? If only . . . However, this time was better than the others. Better than the end of 1979, when I was in the special prison at Palmi, among enemies. Better than the end of 1980, when the revolt in Trani was sprung on me and I spent New Year with broken ribs and a broken head – I was one of the lucky ones in that slaughterhouse! Now, New Year 1982, among friends and in fraternal solidarity. I shall write to you later about these prison events, in another letter. Now the New Year puts me back into circuits of imagination. New Year 1968: the wires of this story hum and tinkle sharply, like telephone wires in the wind in the old days. We had been through an exciting time. In August we had a baby – and Virgilio had a son, too – both were born in that August of 1967, when the comrades had led the first great autonomous mass struggle at the Petrolchimico plant. Leadership of the struggle, forms, objectives, method of negotiation – they ran all this by themselves, with finesse, these barbarian autonomists. Before becoming a subject of analysis, the nascent collective state is a new subject, a birth in fact, a displacement, a strategy. Attempting to understand in a dynamic sense, in a Marxian comprehension of practice. Yet that New Year was the most restless one I’ve ever lived. From all over Europe came signals of struggle. In Berlin the policeman Kurras had killed Benno Ohnesorg – an unarmed student with no sense of his impending death. In Nanterre there was a growing contagion of German anarchist banners. A savage anomaly, with young people and of young people, was traversing the world. My wife Paola and I had been on holiday to Madrid. There we met people coming over from Cuba – frenetically active, alert, intense. (How much fragility there was in those professional revolutionaries – their third-worldism was as intellectualistic as their understanding of the class struggle in Europe was devoid of material supports – but these limits were understandable at the time: the first was driven by passion, the second was idealistic. Nobility and dedication rather than ignorance. I sensed, however, the lurking danger that the lack of realism might turn into cynicism.) So at that time there was joy in our hearts. But what restlessness of reason, too! The birth of our child – in that Porto Marghera August – absorbed all my thoughts. One’s expectation of the event does not lessen the surprise. A small Hercules who already in the cradle was struggling against the serpent.
At Marghera the struggle had begun, as we used to say in those days, in articulated form, led by the vinyl chloride production departments – autonomous decisions of workers over three shifts and in four workteams. When one department stopped, another would take over, then another, then another, and so on – this was planning completely from below. A war machine of working-class freedom – Mille Plateaux – mobile, flowing, lively, constructive, strong, rational, intuitive, agile, intelligent, expansive. The workers from the warehouses and maintenance, the only ones who could move around the big area of a petrochemical plant – nomadic trajectories on bicycles – they were the ones who communicated the struggle. Then other departments began. That was May and June. In July the unions stepped in and tried to stop the struggle – then came negotiations, postponement until September, and the summer holidays. But in a continuous-cycle factory it’s only the trade union officials who take holidays. On 17 August all the departments in struggle unified their action and blocked the factory. We called for strike action, we formed picket lines, we organised assemblies. Rubbing their eyes at this rude awakening, a few trade union officials arrived in dribs and drabs to view the new working-class legitimacy. Gradually the employer gave in – on wages and on many issues regarding the organisation of work. It was a victory. The prestige of the committee was sky-high. Now it was September, and we could relax a bit – watching our unruly children as they rocked between cradle and bath and mother’s breast.
Then the demands began to pile up: struggle pays. More and more meetings were being organised. From other factories in the Combine messages arrived, telling of similar experiences: Azotati, Leghe Leggere, Acsa, Sava Nuova. A territorial network of proletarian initiative was being established. In the surrounding villages, in the parishes, in the bars, the stories of struggle immediately became epic; and they were contagious. What for many of us had involved the construction of collective consciousness over a period of many years, here, in the working-class collectivity, was now exploding with immediacy. Just as a stone thrown into water makes concentric ripples, so we were seeing a growing relationship between the workers’ committee and the informal organisation of struggle, both in the factories and in the surrounding areas. We were spreading out in Veneto style – good solid chats, paciole, good drinking sessions. How I love you, my old Bavaria! The fried fish of Chioggia and the chicken of Treviso are tastier than anywhere. But what restlessness! The struggle was moving ahead, it was growing with the force of a rising tide – but then . . . then what?
There was another circumstance surprised us: the willingness of the younger generations of intellectuals and students to engage with the factory and with working-class power. You saw a whole lot of young people at the factory gates. With them began again the Virgilian pedagogy of the masses. The reactions of the official labour movement were increasingly harsh and insolent – they were forever asking us: ‘Who is paying you?’ Now and then it all ended in fights. They didn’t try it with me: they invited me for discussions – to the camera del lavoro, then to the federation. Once again I found crudeness, and a certain streak of Levantine cunning: I was enjoying myself. In the squares of Venice, between Dorsoduro, Canareggio and the Giudecca people were now talking about the struggles – it was exciting, this new grafting of the new onto the old, and it even began to have a slight influence on the intellectual strata of the big institutions. We were feeling rather pleased with ourselves. But then what?
Each of our meetings gave a further stimulus to struggle, but they gave no answer to the problems of perspective. That winter brought an incredible tension to the struggle. I was tired. Virgil was destroyed. In fact, for the period we were living and the medium term of our politics, Virgil and I and many comrades had not thought about anything but this mass practice, which today the Polish writer Kuron calls ‘a self-limiting revolution’. The dimensions within which the struggle presented itself escaped us. Meanwhile other comrades were beginning to emerge as mass leaders. One of them was punished by being transferred elsewhere in the company. Hard to respond to that; a lot of impotent rage. A growing state of restlessness, and then the problem of what to do next, and the expansion of the movement. An urgent need to generalise the struggles. Local contacts were resumed with officials at the camera del lavoro and with the official labour movement, both locally and nationally, to discuss this issue. It immediately became clear that all of us had an interest in the generalisation of struggles, particularly those in the chemical sector: we, in extending the movement, they, in keeping it controlled in an area large enough to bring them gratification – namely by encircling the vanguards of Porto Marghera. The first clashes in the committees: we give them those struggles on a plate, those dogs. They generalised the struggles in order to take them out of the hands of working-class autonomy. There was good reason to be worried about this. In fact, only a crazy hope could have predicted what would happen. On the horizon was not just a high tide; it was a flood, a storm. Nobody could hope to control the rising tide – only Caliban, who was an element of that nature, would have enjoyed the joy of this storm. But how to develop this fury and this urgency into consciousness? We were shaken by restlessness – far from being clear, the picture was blustery. And meanwhile the stormy seas were rising.
In the universities of Venice and Padua we saw a growing number of autonomous activist committees. The old culture, protected by its lifeless niceties, could not hold. Its operators would often claim that the inputs of protest and the demands for renewal were simply behaviours of irrationality. The output was repressive – culturally, politically and legally. The honour lost at that time has never since been redeemed. They did not realise that a new intellectual workforce was demanding from the education system methods and routes of collective and conscious reconstruction of knowledge – strategies that could be socially productive and valorising from within the social self-determination of the subjects. Culture is not a mirror of reality – a past that repeats itself – but a thousand mirrors, and a thousand angles of refraction that the subjects constitute into a technique for reconstructing the world. To the demand for a creative and collective mediation of knowledge, the profs responded by behaving like men of power. Much good may it do them: let the dead bury the dead. The cultural revolution thus makes itself – and rightly so – independent of the institutional channels, indeed takes them as its enemy – and turns to working-class autonomy in order to achieve its consolidation. We imposed a hard style of work onto the committees of students and intellectuals: in the morning, at the factory gates; then to the university, to the meetings, to the printing of leaflets, to the workshops for militants. A hard style of work, but not self-obsessed: the experiences of liberation were mixed with those of the class struggle – the working-class anthems were Beatles songs. Then there were the senile ones, the bores, the fanatics, the hysterical ones, the romantics – every movement brings a weight of passive elements in its trail. I have always called them (and shall continue to do so) the grunfs. But the richness of things was enormous. And the unrest did not abate; rather it multiplied. I feared like the plague the heroic indistinction I sensed around me – I wanted determination. That concrete determination that I found in the course of working-class struggle eluded me in the complexity of the movement. Sometimes I sensed the growth of elements of contradiction within that indistinct relationship and, above all, alongside the increasing difficulties, the manifestation of elements of cynicism and manipulation in our style of work – old habits and the no less dangerous behaviours of professional revolutionaries who were false and treacherous. Once again, the grunfs. Hey, no! Ours was not a movement of alliances between different class strata, it was not a chromosome of the party, or even an external vanguard – ours was a forward recomposition of the proletariat.
I’m reading Moses Finley, the scholar of classical Greece: when the Greek territory was entirely occupied and Hercules came down from wild Thrace to the compact expanse of the marble-like Aegean, human beings leapt beyond the limits of the human as it had been understood up to that point, and this leap forward was a modification of their own nature, a discovery and a maximal extension of the truth that is in the people themselves. The occupied nature was a microcosm and the interiority of the subject was a macrocosm. On the border arose a new subject without borders. Ulysses. The materiality of the process had to be defended in its unity, which had been won, and in its new subjectivity. All our work was about to take the test of fire. But how do you go beyond the test? The dimensions of the political weighed on us. We were alone – in the Veneto, and in a few other parts of Italy – and then what? How were we to connect these scattered elements, these fragments of hegemony?
Cher David, I’m telling you about a precious experiment. To us it felt like a test tube experiment, and our fears that the glass might shatter were justified, albeit perhaps a little hysterical. But you, who with precocious maturity acquired some experience of full-on struggles in those years, you may be wondering: isn’t what you are saying now contradictory with what you said earlier? How is it that you all felt that you were on your own, you who had just had a Europe-wide experience and a fascinating apprenticeship in impacting the concrete? Did you not feel the growing chorus of European struggles? How could you be – in that given conjuncture – so short-sighted? Now I can answer you: we were not, in fact – but our behaviour was discreet and guarded, as the first and pure experiences of a constitutive practice of an initial genealogy of revolution always are. The potentiality saved us, that potenza that is not afraid of installing itself at the limits of being. As the comrades of Solidarnos´c´ say today, ‘what we are doing is at the same time both impossible and necessary’. So you will have to allow me the unease, this existential feeling of the unknown, this inner pendulum between hope and unknowing.
And now the picture opens out again. Young Hercules has strangled the serpent in the cradle. It was an impressive scenario: the struggle was spreading everywhere. Sunday afternoon: all the matches, minute by minute – day after day. Fortunately we had managed to avoid connecting the birth and the generalisation of our discourse and of our political activity to anything negative – by refusing the ambiguous and compromising offers of the trade union officials. Today, looking at us in prison, an organic evolutionist – one who sees himself as being a little pessimistic, a little wise, but in any event victorious – could still reproach us for this. But how could such doubts touch our innocence? Believe me, cher David, I am not taking innocence as a hostage, or as a cover. Really not. That innocence was the catastrophic sign of the innovation we had produced. And it was necessary in order for the dislocation to happen and to follow a subjective thread, because of the paralysing dilemma that was posed by our circumstances: either accentuation of our isolation or regression into the murky generality of political party representation. It was necessary, in other words, in order for this dilemma (a perennial problem of the communist left) to be cut away on the indigenous track we were following. In short, the movement was present everywhere – and we had avoided the ‘all round alibi’ typical of bourgeois political behaviour. You old, perverse, heteronomous Rousseau, how far you are from our political passion – which despises the cold abstractness of the general will, its latent Stalinism, its mystifying dialectic. No, we had not chosen the totalising and empty alibi and the void of representation as against the potenza of the singular rooting.
So – there we were on that New Year’s Eve of 1968, in the middle of these choices and of the logical and theoretical projections that extended from them. In play was the entire nexus of problems related to a healthy practice of the political Beruf [vocation]. So let’s talk about it again, cher David, to remove any cause of restlessness. From restlessness comes uncertainty, and at that time a large quantity of uncertainty was threatening to paralyse me. As regards the little that involved me directly and depended on me for what was collectively decided about it, I had the sense that the future was presenting itself as a fierce tearing away – yes, implanted in loyalty to our action and to the subversive innocence of the project, but in such a way as to upset any continuity in our lives. Just as the lover hesitates in the face of the violence of penetration, which nonetheless completes and heightens his desire, so I followed individually and uncertainly the phantasms of imagination as they entered into the future. There are of course those who will argue, with old rhetoric and weary cynicism, that these problems are appropriate for the collective agitator. I really do not think so: in the communist community it is the principle of responsibility that lies at the basis of social living and project – and not some transcendent legitimacy. How, then, can you make responsibility live through uncertainty? How can you mobilise a wholesome will across a risky range of collective alternatives?
Effectively, then, the choice was determined and supported by the power of the collective in movement, which reduced the complexity of the situation and provided an ethical guarantee of the choice. (Today the philosophers of Verantwortung [responsibility] have, from within the German context, created an ideal model of this situation. Community versus consensus versus responsibility. But theirs is a formalism pure and simple. A philosophy of those who control the mass media, which downgrades community into consensus. Formal or institutional sequences; transcendentalism instead of transcendence; and what changes? These are itineraries that are privative of responsibility. It’s just a little game of impoverishment and of mystification of reality.) The solution of responsibility, in its subjective aspects, comes from other and more encompassing conditions. It arises from the recognition that we are collective beings before being alone, that we cannot conceive of ourselves in solitude – just as we cannot be born in solitude. What founds critical intelligence and the will to project is an act of love, and it empowers them and makes them answerable. Only in this way can uncertainty and its sister, unease, be resolved. But there arose a second problem, and it was not raised by the non-institutionality and fragility of the logical schema that the collective action, albeit powerful, was exhibiting. It was good to recognise oneself in it; it was good, this snatching of oneself upwards out of solitude, and the denunciation and overcoming of its empty abstractness – but who guarantees for whom, in the collective? This Prometheanism that was being developed by the collective subject, might it not reveal itself as pure narcissism – and debase itself into a dialectic of a thousand mirrors, deluding itself that it was the real movement? It was in fact on this passage that the tearing was strongest. But here we also have history recomposing itself, and it is a love that is no longer a pre-reflexive act – but an adjectivisation, a predication, a story of many subjects. It is a present ever renewed, a density never resolved, a potentiality of being. Determination: this word is magical – there is no being, there is only the being there, in the here and now; there is only this complexion of the collective; there is our new composition. The fluidity of the emergence, the noninstitutionality of the process, are inevitably scary: the determinations have to consolidate themselves into composition.
So here was what could resolve my uncertainty and guarantee that the mirror with a thousand angles would not create a collective illusion: the refractions, if controlled, could indeed be reduced to strategies – paths, subjective trajectories, known and understood. Commitment is born as a moral act, and then translates into a cognitive task and into an action of transformation, into an ethical– political project. So let’s take another long look at everything, that’s what I was telling myself on that New Year’s Eve. And I had to start from the small–big problems that I had before me. The labour movement: was it ethically right and rationally correct to push for it to be broken? An ‘other’ movement had emerged: it had no need of icons to bow to or of the beacons of socialism, with its magnificent and progressive futures languishing somewhere on the horizon. These had given us nothing. We had had to take everything for ourselves, even a glorious part of that tradition: a paradoxical form of continuity and of memory. The potenza of breaking, of separation, had grown and had organised itself into a development of unprecedented struggles. Kill the father? The clash became inevitable, because the principle of certainty that presented itself in the practice of the new working-class movement drew its strength from the responsibility of the subjects, from their actions, by the very form in which they constituted themselves into the collective. Kill the father to love the brother. Choose your poor brother instead of your rich father. Turn the parable of the prodigal son on its head, while maintaining its evangelical overtones. The mechanisms of formation and circulation of struggle were signs of the truth of the movement that they constituted. There was no difference between the movement and its objectives, because the objectives of the workers – wages and the attack on how the working day was organised – were establishing themselves in the movement and developing compactly and simultaneously into a discourse, theory and practice of liberation. Once again, from the factory to the social. From the working class to the class of social producers. From the struggle for emancipation to the struggle for liberation. Why, given these determinations and these certainties, avoid the risk of going ahead? And then, was it really a risk? Can you call it risk, the bursting into new life of a potent being? Only the melancholy of the individual can declare it. But when he intuits the collective, he himself, the hunchback of Recanati, my great poet, puts grudgingness aside and raises the desperate broom flower again – a sign of unity against inimical nature:
. . . and since he thinks,
What is the simple truth,
Mankind has been united, organized
Against her from the first,
He sees all men as allies of each other,
And he accepts them all
With true affection, giving
The prompt assistance he expects from them
In all the varying danger and the troubles
Their common war gives rise to.1
Here we ourselves move entirely from the collective. Life, the given life of a particular subject whom only the collective sustains and for whose needs only it provides – not the indeterminacy of any old romantic Leben. Life stretched across a bitter border, which has to be traversed and conquered – a distinct materiality of interests – not the indefiniteness of any old nature: this was, both in form and in content, what we were pursuing. Why, then, not lead the project to a determination? To be frank, there was not much talk of philosophy in collectives and committees at that time. There was much talk of politics, about how to destructure it in order to free oneself from it, about how to substitute a positive mode of expression for the relentless pattern of negativity that it was producing. Authoritarianism, total institutions, Molochs of the political and of the system: the critique, although it was tempted by the global opposition and by the misdeeds of a mirroring dialectic, was traversed by the deepening of the individual fields and by determined and centrifugal destructurings – the expansion of the critical dimensions did not confuse the picture but produced an irreversibility of trajectories. Marcuse supporting Basaglia. We talked above all about concrete tactics – a method and its articulations, to make the collective grow – a reconstructive surgery to recompose the subjects in the project. Perhaps, given the ontological scale of the innovation, a real and actual biological engineering.
I am rereading what I’ve written, cher David. How hard it is to explain all this! How to tell someone who was born with 1968 how 1968 was constructed, at the time and subsequently? The literature of the bourgeoisie presents it to us as an irrational event, a great emotion of the (slightly stupid) psychology of the masses – Le Bon and his foolish stories reborn.2 Otherwise a product of modernisation – what trouble, that modernisation! Otherwise, again – and here we have the progressives to suggest it – a worldwide circulation of struggles: a circulation without an engine! While 1968 – like everything constructed by human beings who are liberating themselves – was the powerful limit of a hard and continuous production of elements of potentiality, of small conquests, of minute radical transformations. The accumulation of innumerable chunks of movement – from all over the world. Each little piece is an engine, a dynamic and a transcription – genetic acids. Until the soul of the world, recompacting the infinite variety of the drives of liberation that compose it, displaces itself. Listen to Spinoza: ‘For since being able to exist is power, it follows that the more reality belongs to the nature of a thing, the more powers it has, of itself, to exist.’3 In this dislocation the new humans burst forth – and everything that is not filtered by them becomes, from that moment, reactionary and enemy. And so, cher David, you who are already born to culture and politics as a new man: I am explaining to you the mechanism of your conception. Now you can see it, and you can understand the countless acts of love and of project that have given you this irreducibly new identity. As for us, we feel the uncertainties of those times as variants of a criterion of truth that we were constructing: if the truth is built, it is very human to tremble between the before and the after. (Blip blop, blap, why so much comical pedagogical pathos and this slightly prophetic spirit? An ironic tootle of the flute to discharge the tension, a student wisecrack – a chance comment by one of your children, devastating in its ingenuousness . . . Just what would be needed, as it has always been in the real world of this story. But to what effect? Paradoxically, that of raising the aim. Always. Like a bunch of tragic actors – who in the grotesque and sarcasm of a dinner after the show create a new play. Is the play of the world also capable of this low and generous knowledge? Yes – and it flows into prophesy.) Ciao, my dear brother . . .