Rebibbia, 16 January 1982
A few days ago, cher David, my mother died. Old Aldina, a sweet Lombard Niobe who had known every kind of pain. We wrote to each other every week, for three years – mother and I – and she urged me – always, but especially while I was in prison – to faith and to testimony. Old Aldina departed with a smile, they tell me, without pain, and went back to that nature that she always loved, into the eternal and ever-renewed cycle of creation. May she rest in peace. The law did not grant me the ancient right to see her before she was buried. I write to you today with tenderness and with pain – and this presence of my mother pushes me to seek for, to grasp, that deep core where life and death are woven together seamlessly and love and violence connect with intensity. In this context, cher David, my letter today is trying to find a detachment that might be the interference of a rich reality – in order to analyse the pain.
Do you remember? 1968 was an outstanding point of that circulation of life and death. The customary optical spectrum of light, as ever; but also a new ray coming from the future. Do you remember those initial feelings of being there, at the heart of that huge story, in the first clash with the police, in the first demonstration of liberation? ‘Burn, baby, burn.’ No, the iconography of those three years, through to 1970, does not sufficiently convey the reality. The parousia [presence] cannot be represented simply as rebellion. Consciousness testified that, if there was a god, he had come down to earth – the irrational of the world could then become, and indeed had become, lessened. Life began to have a pleasant taste. Rebellion is the driving power of innovation, but who can say that a child is no more than the pain of childbirth? Who can end a son’s love in the face of a mother’s death? Rebellion and death are a fecundisation of life and love. With a terrible effort, I am today seeking in myself the truth of this rational assumption. Stop. Stop the tears and the emotion. Stop. Let’s get back to us. Let us try. (It’s a difficult leap. The general valence of pain has a universality that plucks you out, far away . . .)
Can there be (and, if so, with what modalities and what outcomes) a materialist reflection on 1968? The party’s over, they say. The reflection may be bitter. Certainly not for the outcomes that 1968 had produced: those experiences have become seminal essences of our cultural horizon. And not even for the antagonistic development of the movement, as some have hypocritically complained – would it have been possible for the vitality of a historical potential to express itself other than in antagonistic terms? The bitterness is only revealed in my passion, and it comes from the fact of not having been able to enjoy this story. Of course, the relationship between suffering and enjoyment is never linear (we distrust those who, at this juncture, evoke a sweet positiveness and teenage memories) – but common sense has it that the two passions should not accumulate at the ends of a broken arc: in such a case there would be something logically wrong. For me, and for many, 1968 was a contradiction. It was a portentous event – but it was also the trick of Paul on the road to Damascus – it showed us the living god, then pasted him with Hellenistic vices. We were not able to initiate revolutionary will and the potentiality of real processes. There, I told myself ironically, when the subjectivity seemed at its strongest – La Varsovienne at the Odéon, and red and black flags against the Springer skyscraper – there we had un processus sans sujet [a process without a subject]. This was not in fact the case. But it was the case that often the subject was strutting about, external to the mass movement – as if the colour of Aphrodite could be distinguished from the blue of the Aegean. The spontaneity of mass action and its compactness were torn up and scattered here and there, and out of their rags the media made stereotypes of fashion or provocation. We shall have to be more careful the next time! I really don’t find it in me to be ironic today. Lamartine too ended his 1848 with a peroration rather like that: to cite him is not funny, it is actually a bit nasty. And yet . . . (Have you noticed, David, my constant repetition of ‘and yet’? This dialectical aber . . . as if crying and making mistakes could be assigned, with one little word, to fate. But how else to think?)
And yet 1968 was a big thing. We just needed not to confuse it with 1917 or imagine ourselves to be the Chinese characters who appeared in the writings of Edgar Snow. It was enough to grasp plainly what 1968 showed, the thing it was, the working class that was becoming society – or, better, who was destroying the norms of civil society to show itself as the class of the socialised worker and to reinvent antagonism against the state of mature capitalism. In Italy things had gone more or less the same as in the rest of Europe. The insurrection in the universities and the youth revolt had been a massive fact . . . But underlying all this there was a specificity of the Italian situation – namely a lag in capitalist development and social figures who were less clearly defined, but above all the unitary tradition of the struggles we inherited from the Communist Party and the work of bringing together the different movements we had built up in the preceding years. So here the CGT (Confédération générale du travail) could not take us to Grenelle, nor could the German unions repeat the exploits of Noske. Here the new materiality of the social class struggles of the exploited class – continuous, flowing and absorbent – showed itself to be unstoppable.
There is not much that I can tell you about those years – given the limits of these letters and my tiredness today. I’ll just tell you where I was, a few beads of that necklace that I was threading at that time. (My mother used to teach me this game when I was little, as if I were a girl. Thank you, Aldina, for that kindness.) In July 1968, at Porto Marghera, we decided to finish with the trade union and the bosses – we invented that working-class phenomenon that was the general assembly for running the struggle, and we were the first to develop mass action on the basis of the devastating slogan of wage egalitarianism: ‘5,000 lire, equal for all’. The mass pickets, the gigantic roadblocks, the occupation of the railway stations, the marches on Mestre and Venice – when the continuous production cycle stopped in the whole of the Combine and the flame of the last exhaust gas went up to the sky, you could hear from as far as Padua the hymn of joy and the angry power of those 60,000 workers. In October, at Pirelli, on the sidewalks of Viale Sarca – and then an incredible circulation of struggles that assailed the city, gripping it in the same way in which the militant picketing had taken hold in the offices and on the factory floor. From the Cathedral [in Milan] came one of those marches where you have no idea who was in it, down from Cairoli along Portello, then clearing San Babila; and then they take Via Torino, those angry workers from Farmitalia. Behind them came the heavy infantry from Borletti, Siemens, and Pirelli in Via Solari . . . The winter was spent preparing new initiatives – supermarkets at Christmas, night clubs with a populist impulse on New Year’s Eve. Comic and sometimes tragic ruminations of a proletariat that was rightly consumerist. But then spring came again. (In the garden of our old house, in Padova, the roses of spring were more beautiful than anyone else’s: who knows why? Mother did not look after them at all – her pride had moments of enthusiastic and passive contemplation.) Spring: the movement spread to Turin. In that city I had known loneliness and an indistinct anger: now a huge organisation was being born – on a scale fit to deal with you, you damned bosses! On 3 July 1969, after months of upheaval in the factories, the struggle ran from Mirafiori to the Valentino to Nichelino – a ribbon of Molotov cocktails and thousands upon thousands of militants.
A revenge, a dream. A force that you found everywhere, the composition of the movement, in continuous struggle, in a river of magma. The good old Golem, the all-powerful, whose story Aldina had told me, had been formed. Where are you going? Why not answer him with the truth? It is inscribed on your forehead. Nowhere – we want to be here, with the power that comes to us from our having come together as a class, from our having unified the various branches of the proletariat in a tendential project of power. (Folklore: the ball-brains that were setting up new parties – small parties here, small parties there, small parties all over town. Grunf, grunf. Sometimes indeed it all got too much to bear. Get the merchants out of the temple! Come on now, don’t get too angry, Toni, the river washes out the garbage.)
In the meantime Marghera was renewing the struggle. The date of 2 August 1970 was perhaps the highest point of the class struggle in those years. After months of clashes and mutual provocations, people came out of the big factories to support the precarious workers in the maintenance and construction sectors – the clash with the police was very violent – the police fled when a large march of workers, coming together after hours of strike action, moved forward singing the ‘Internationale’. The industrial zone, the railway, and the motorway interchanges were occupied by barricades for several days. The surrounding region, from Chioggia to Noale, from Venice to Dolo, also experienced barricades and clashes. This was a great victory. August befitted Marghera. (There was a slender fig tree in the garden – my mother was big-built and heavy, but in August she would climb up there anyway, to pick those amazing fruits.) But every town had its season.
Stop. Golem. Psalm 139, lines 14–16:
I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.
Mamma, only today do I understand how the prophetic story and rationality could have been conjoined in the political education that you gave me! Stop.
Let’s get back to our story. A massive pivotal moment of workers’ struggles was being built, and of mass vanguards. It held solidly the large metropolitan areas of the North, then stretched in an endless variety of experiences and multiple activities, even to the South. At one point it seemed that the directional arrows of Italy’s domestic mobility of labour were being reversed – and that they were running in a southerly direction, carrying the struggle with them. So it was that, in addition to the city areas of the Centre South, most affected were the great chemical cathedrals – Porto Torres, Gela and Brindisi – and the steel-producing plants of Bagnoli and Taranto. A pivotal moment of workers’ struggles, of mass vanguards that reunited different strata of the proletariat – this was the specific characteristic of that hot season of struggles. What brought about this unity was certainly not the wretched trade union initiatives on harmonisation or on wage stratification or on pensions – it was this incredible circulation of the struggle, of the subjects, and their internal homogeneity on issues of wages and egalitarianism. The pivotal moment of the mass vanguard was now rendered politically effective. Its material and destructuring potentiality now had to be changed into a form of political representation. In both senses, social and political. That is to say, the mass working-class vanguards had to take on the weight of the direct political representation of the entire proletariat, and at the same time had to bring it to life as an effective social counter-power.
(Thinking about my mother again: beyond the mystified forms of the late Risorgimento tradition – Carducci and his Bolognese teachers, Ferrari and Tarozzi – and of the bourgeois emancipation – Rousseau recited from memory – in her teaching she communicated elements of a theory of power that were entirely materialistic. Power was a thing, a force. Money, wellbeing, availability of means. And also hope, desire, and its satisfaction. This hard and realistic conception of power was the other face of false consciousness – of rhetoric enjoyed and of alienation suffered. And yet the self-criticism of the bourgeois generations of the crisis passed on to us a rough but nonetheless effective concept of power. I stripped it bit by bit of its ideological excrescences in order to render it materially. Available for a new use. And all along my old mother had shown it to me, full of the doubts and uncertainty that the self-criticism had brought about.)
It was thus around those social and political objectives that the battle opened within the movement as a whole. The trade union – expelled from factories and reduced to marginality in the first phase – came back in with a clear operation. The assemblies are fine, they said, and the counter-power is fine, but closed within a dimension that is strictly working class. For the time being it was a discourse that was vaguely corporative, and it appealed to some people. We understood it as such then, and we can declare it now. The trade union movement of the factory councils was, first and foremost, an experiment in corporative democracy – first and foremost in the sense that a short while later it became an explicit function of the authoritarian corporativism of the state. In concrete terms, what shedding of tears, what blood, and what seeds of death this operation included, we were to see a little later, when – in the face of the inevitable and expected counterattack by the bosses – the corporative choice, the refusal to socialise the struggles became explicit and repressive and the working class of the big factories found itself compromised as a result.
We, on the other hand, were pushing for a socialisation of the struggles and for the negation of all corporate perspectives according to two broad schemas, which were entirely complementary albeit polemical at the time, as would become clear in the struggles that followed. One proposition was essentially and brutally proletarian – the Prendiamoci la città [Take over the city] of the Lotta Continua comrades. A powerful slogan, full of intuitions about the social subject of the struggle. From MacMahon to San Basilio, it would develop its potential for agitation and organisation in struggles over housing and proletarian needs, and above all it would push for an understanding of antagonism to be extended over the whole of the working day, between the production and the reproduction of labour power as a commodity. On the other hand the comrades of Potere Operaio were developing a proposition related to the ‘social wage’ and founded on an analysis of the social recomposition of the proletariat and of the increase in the quota of tertiary and intellectual labour power as a directly productive component. After so many years, the ‘refusal of work’ descended from the empyrean realm of theoretical abstraction, looked around and, in a useful first guise, posed the problem of the social valorisarion of the new needs and of the new proletarian subjectivity. So discussion then opened on these themes. In our opinion, the pivotal movement of the struggles of the mass vanguards could have organised itself in the factory, but only – really only – on condition that the two tendencies, towards the representation of the entire proletariat (and in particular of the new quality of labour force in the development of social production) and towards the exercise of counter-power, were firmly established in the councils. Otherwise there was only corporatism. This was our opinion – the form could not be distinct from the new content, and the hymns in praise of renewing the trade unions seemed to us hypocritical. Renewal, innovation? There was nothing to invent, everything was implicit in the movement, and you just had to find a way to let it come out, offer it an appropriate language. In this, however, we did not succeed.
We did not succeed, cher David, in making present what had to happen anyway, because it was there – its being was pregnant, just as the sky is full of light. Just as my spirit today is full of pain. We did not manage to anticipate the decade that we had before us. Of course, the theory was trailing behind. The conception of the mass worker, even though it contained all the social determinations of the development of this subject, was in reality misunderstood as referring to the poor measure of ‘working-class centrality’. A measure that repeated Third Internationalist stereotypes and a traditional conception of dictatorship – this betrayal of working-class and proletarian society, this paraphrase of the bourgeois ‘general will’. A measure that, within the framework of the social development of productive forces, would soon inevitably yield to the lure of corporativism. At the height of these discussions we met with Bruno Trentin. Someone asked him if he thought that the trade union movement of factory councils could become the basis of a new working-class party, the bearer of the general proletarian interest. He answered evasively. We met Pierre Carniti, the lion of the FIM [Federazione Italiana Metalmeccanici]: in him a very strong sense of the movement was solidly framed in an institutional conception of the trade union. Whereas the former was controlling a future that he feared, the latter, with furtive and skilful little moves, was trying to put back together a jigsaw puzzle that had been broken apart. Meanwhile we were working with the newly created ‘Manifesto’ group – once again, a busful of left communists of the 1930s, when things were going well, but otherwise former Catholics and Gramscians. On their own, always desperately alone, Rossana and Pintor, a frustrated intellectual generosity that had a taste of the good, of the old style, of hope.
And the struggle goes on, ever onwards. You were overwhelmed by it. I had not been able to tell if the birth of my group Potere Operaio at that stage, had been an explicit policy choice or rather an act that was labour-saving, due to tiredness and therefore the need to make consensual work more profitable. The group as a management structure – as a way of multiplying our intellectual productive forces. Although I had not been able to understand this at first, I soon became convinced of it: the group could not be anything other than this – really just this. Except that some people thought that what they had in their hands was a political organisation – the idiots!
What a mess! How could one reasonably imagine that the world we were all solidly constructing . . . and it was so rich, even too rich – how could one either attempt to represent it in its completeness, or imagine that sectarian differences could cross it and divide it? But this is what happened. Often the dead insinuates itself into forms of life (only the rational defines them and separates them – Aldina, sweet midwifery, strong rational flanks, effectiveness of an intellectual forceps). A cut-price Leninism, built on smug complacency in our intelligence, in our capacity for foresight, a Luciferian intellectual pride – this is what held together the comrades of Potere Operaio. That need not have happened: because they actually were intelligent comrades, good and honest people, perhaps the best people around at that time, and certainly the best of those who are now in prison and in exile. Why, then, overdetermine a style of work that was proving productive? Maybe we were giving the wrong answers to real problems. But the biggest unsolved problem was the organised labour movement, and the temptation was to go for mimesis instead of critical and revolutionary awareness. Which is often a science of pushing to the limit.
However, throughout 1968 and 1969, the contacts with the political parties were continuous. With Luigi Longo, with members of parliament, with the trade union federations. They covered us and procured an amnesty. Gradually, however, the clash became inevitable. Some people, with an opportunistic realism, suggested a sort of mass entrism: let us establish, they said, a dialectic with the official labour movement that engages with all its aspects, leveraging our mass contribution for a renewal of its political line. But how would such a thing be possible, when the movement was prepared to swallow almost nothing of the productivist reformism that was the basis of the ideology of Italian socialism? The break had already happened earlier on. It was recognisable in the impotence of the official labour movement, in its inability to grasp, at one and the same time, the transformations in the social composition of the class and the radical break in communist thought after 1956. Any hypothesis of mass entrism was illusory. We were condemned to an autonomy of the movement, or rather we were preselected for that destiny. 1968 as a refoundation? A lot of people were thinking along such lines. But we were stuck between the opposing tensions of a rebelliousness, which was seeking immediate liberation, and a massive, heavy and continuous displacement of the mass movement. The first wave was short, the second was long. The official labour movement placed itself between the two, proposing the fetish of a mediation, but a mediation that was actually the denial of revolutionary tensions. We were forced to play the awareness of the limit, of dualism. You could not escape this. Any other choice was mystifying. The problem of the party was not immediately resolvable. (Luckily so, we can now say, while we wait to be able to reconstruct both the movement and the liberation.) If you are the prince, you divide: the functionaries of power don’t need classical references to grasp the moment of the break and to exploit the fragility of the surface situation. And they were starting a flanking operation against us. But we’ll talk more about this later.
What more can I tell you, cher David, about 1968? I have something of an internal resistance, an intellectual diffidence, about talking to you about it. Likewise about talking about my mother, and about the mystery of life and – today – of death that she is for me. However, so far I’ve only told you about the problems, the hard and contradictory paths that traversed the great green forest in which we found ourselves – but I have not told you much about the forest as a whole. It is difficult to find the right words because you were continuously aware of the gap between the exceptional scale of the phenomenon you were living and the daily reality within which you were struggling – so that either you developed this whole experience in utopian terms (undefined, in your enthusiasm) or you held to the ground of rationality and were ensnared in it. Being a teenager at the time, you probably did not notice the gap. And just as well: only in that way, by ignoring the efforts of the fathers, could awareness become a higher vital complexion, an offer of possibilities, and only in that way could you march further down this path, much further and more surely than we were able to. But I too am trying to do violence to myself, to make me the son of my self (just as is happening today, on the coffin of Aldina) – and to remove the memory from my being, and the nostalgia, albeit powerful. Because this being, I want to press it forward – death and life, my mother and my children – how hard and bitter this discourse is. And then – you see – you have to accept my schizophrenic tension in talking to you about the entire forest – and the fact that I talk to you about it with adjectives that myth merits. The myth of the mother, of birth. 1968 was a golden age, because in that period individual liberation and the revolution of the masses came together. Because love’s assault on the heavens destroyed the old figure of power and gave to imagination the mark of potentiality of politics. Because millions of exploited workers and intellectuals, everywhere in the world, felt how freedom and dignity were caressing them. Because the struggle paid – rebelling is right – and desire was concrete. I could go on at length, just as I used to tell these things to my insatiable mother – knowing that my discourse would inevitably remain mythical. But myth is revelation. So if we want, as postmodernists, to tease out its meaning, we elicit it at the point where all the contradictions of the relations of production, material and cultural, came to be realised in 1968. In a revolutionary break. The revolution happened: and it become le fond mobile de la science humaine [the moving reserve of human science].1 On the surface power was only scratched, but deep down it was delegitimised, unhinged, and dissolved. The class was, on the surface, traversed by a cyclone of hope, then hit by a wave of repression; deep down, though, it was recomposed and rendered, both by hope and by repression, social, autonomous and powerful. From time to time the elements of the transformation came to light. At those points the forest caught fire and everyone was able to see. But we often shut our eyes and shielded them with our arms, because we – old men – might have our sight damaged by it.
1968 continues to do its work. To some it represents a nightmare, to others a hope. It is a new substance, of which we are made, and no one can pluck it from our nature. No, mother, no one will take it away. Since then, how many self-criticisms, how many suicides, how many attempts to tear off, from the skin, that act of rebellion and collective growth. ‘Peut-être notre ami Glucksmann a raison, lorsqu’il dit que nous nous devons confronter avec le mal, plutôt que nous bercer dans le rève impossible d’un bien commun’ [Maybe our friend Gluckmann is right when he says that we should confront evil rather than comfort ourselves in the impossible dream of a common good].2 But was not 1968, above all, a confrontation with evil? So why this embargo of hope? But is hope really impossible? Death and pain fecundate life and love. The discourse on the possible overflows that on the necessary. And it is only in relation to the latter that the distinction between possible and impossible becomes effectual. I cannot avoid the metaphysical meaning of the Yiddish story: Golem – this artefact of necessity that liberates ever new possibilities. The lower parts of the earth, says the Psalm, are woven and presented to the word that sets in motion the goodness of the body. ‘How precious also are thy thoughts unto me . . . how great is the sum of them!’ my mother, so dear and beautiful. ‘If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.’3 1968 recomposed in a forward direction the ineradicable frontier of the class struggle – the individual subjects are marked by this necessity and by this possibility. In pain I find again a blessing. I send you a strong hug.