Rebibbia, 28 January 1982
Cher David,
On 17 August 1971 Nixon de-linked the dollar from gold. From that point on a dollar was a dollar, and that was that. The dollar becomes the phantasm of my will, the capricious harsh reality of my power. Every relative parameter of the certainty of values was thus dissolved. A Schopenhauer for the multinationals. With it the residual and pathetic illusions of socialism disappeared, too – and also the possibility of trade unionism – in other words the project of connecting and reconnecting the wage and the conditions of reproduction to criteria defined by progress, by development and by value – the bosses were smacking you in the face with this truth of theirs, crudely but realistically. They prepared new conditions for controlling the market, in particular the labour market, and they wanted the dissolution of the class composition that had been built by the struggles. In the 1970s we watched the development of all the consequences that necessarily followed from that decision: forced and functional divisions of the labour market, both domestically and internationally, rampant mobility, regressive programmes, monetary policies to match . . . That which had been undermined and partly destroyed by the ten-year cycle of struggles, in other words the orderly development of exploitation – was now taken up and theorised by international capital as a possible space for predetermining a new phase of accumulation and rampant restructuring worldwide. Kissinger seemed to us at that moment the romantic genius of reaction, a Metternich lovingly cultivated in the garden of memory and reflowering – Novalis: reaction learns everything from the revolution – the global cycle of struggles had passed its peak, hence reaction could begin to put to good use the lessons learned and, as a result, the articulation of exploitation had to be restored along the lines of defeated struggles – a new dissemination of geographical expressions of imperialist command. Do you remember that, David? We were seized by a strong emotion. From then on everything was clear and had to be so. But it is true that the violent symbol of the transformation of a state of affairs into normative will contains a traumatic effect, when the person taking the action is the enemy and you know that their initiative draws strength from the fact of imposing an overall anticipation, a terrain that the enemy now knows and we no longer know. In any case, we were entering into an age of overdeterminations – physical and savage – a breakdown of development that dislocated every horizon. ‘Civill Warre’, in the words of good old Hobbes. A company of wolves. And hawks, bulls and pigs. In Italy there had already been attempts to drive the movement into retreat, using the old police methods of Fouché, and Bonaparte the Small – in the bombings of Piazza Fontana. Soon we were to discover that even police and provocations suffer from the structural laws of history and must come to terms with the present level of class composition. Piazza Fontana: a fascist tool, a Turkish deterrent, unworthy of a culture that had renounced the little old world envisioned by Rumor – the scholar of Fogazzaro with the sweaty hands. And anyway it was ineffective in the face of that class of the socialised worker and intellectual operator, which was beginning to develop in Italy too. So it all went wrong. The massacre covered the state in mud and hatred. It took several years for their methods of provocation to reach levels adequate to their purpose. That point was only reached on 7 April 1979: for a new working class, a new repression, social theorems, exacerbation of the mystifying functions of the mass media.
But, while their ability to overdetermine the reaction against the struggles in a terrorist fashion was limited, the initiative of economic and social restructuring was strong. As we saw, between our national political class and the national sections of multinational capital there still existed a divide, altogether in favour of the latter – only in the 1970s did this gap between repression and restructuring begin to be overcome, the one becoming internal to the other. The real counterattack hit directly at the relations of production and at the labour process. For this operation Nixon’s August was a blast on the trumpet. From the point of view of analysis there could be no doubt: all the signs indicated that we were entering a phase in which, far from trying to programme – or at least to guarantee – the balance of relations between the classes in development, the capitalist part sought to act politically so as to dismantle the front of the struggles, wielding their sabres wildly in the fray and thereby trying to open lines of penetration and division, of entry into the body of the proletariat. To regain rights over the permeability and porosity of proletarian society. The Keynesian state, the state as planner, which for a certain period (starting at least with the Great Depression of the 1930s) had constituted the regulative idea and the grid of prudent capitalist development, were annulled in their reformist values. Against the independent variability of the economic and political movements of the proletariat, the collective bosses (and with some delay, but also with much good will, also their state) resolutely took the path of capitalist use of the crisis, articulating disequilibrium and repression. This action was intended to break up the combative agglomerations of the mass worker, to destroy their vanguards, and above all to block the circuits of social massification of the struggles.
In fact, cher David, as any humble political scientist knows, this process is normal in the acute phases of class struggle, as soon as the crisis – so much feared by us – comes into the open – the crisis of the relationship between proletarian insurgency and its political expression. ‘I have seen in this revolution a circular motion,’ as Hobbes noted.1 So now we were in the low phase. And yet there was something there, something radical and original, which prevented this operation from being given the epithet of ‘classic’: this lay in the fact that the operation of restoration and restructuring was not aimed at bringing about a new equilibrium. It did not see itself as an articulation of the movement of the law of value, but rather it rested entirely on the timely validation of political command. Here is Franz Rosenzweig:
cutting the Gordian knot between past and future that the people itself has not been able to resolve, the state extirpates contradiction from the world and in every moment places it outside the world – to be clear: each time, only for that moment. The state thus holds back, at every moment, the river of the life of the world in order to make it an unmoving water – this river that never ceases to negate itself at every instant, to throw itself into the ocean of eternity, but of which the state makes – in every instant – an eternity.2
Washington’s August smelt of sulphur and war. Absolute and irrational abstraction of the jetzt Zeit [present time]. Command took the place of science. We said: the crisis of the state as planner and the production of commodities by means of command; and the rise of the crisis state. Today, at a distance of more than a decade, we understand the theoretical intelligence of the foresight. And what came afterwards simply confirmed it. Both internally and externally, both in national economies and in multinational economies – value/profit is not formed in the orderliness of circulation but it too has become wild, a leopard moving between shrublands and savannas. From that moment political economy went into disarray, like a stuntman, between shades of fiction and simple acrobatic skills. Conversely, the critique of political economy had then to become a critique of command.
And this, cher David, brings us to the list of the hard labours of practice. The critique of capitalist command: what did that mean? There were some, even then, and thereafter repeatedly, who took this theoretical definition as a springboard for a logical step from ‘weapons of critique’ to ‘critique by means of weapons’ – to its urgency and its immediacy. ‘Ce n’est que du folklore,’ you object, ‘glissons, donc.’ Mais . . . [This is only folklore, let’s pass. But . . .] But . . . in a movement that was as rich, as complex and powerful as the Italian movement, nothing can be underestimated. Here the kidnappers of [French Renault executive] Robert Nogrette do not transform themselves overnight into nouveaux pbilosophes, nor do the admirers of Mao become allies of Deng – here we had anger, a rootedness, a class pride. Of course, whatever the theoretical–practical dress that the decision for armed struggle wears – and it might also be (essentially it was) derived from the official movement and from its Bibles – what we had was behaviours and connotations that were extremist and anarchic, and one could simply have written them off as extraneous and parasitic. That would not have been very sensible, however, not even in the abstract. And it was certainly not possible chez nous. The important thing was to understand its genesis, the lift-off point, which, despite everything, was not purely ideological. Marxism–Leninism, Che Guevarism, whatever soup you like, go ahead and add it; but in the end the origin was practico-theoretical, it is the definition of the impossibility of political action organised around the parameters of the law of value. The perception of the step forward that had been taken in capitalist practice went hand in hand with the political protest, the restlessness, sometimes the fury that, especially in the more politicised layers of the proletarian vanguard of the preceding years, emerged in the light of the relative blockage of struggles and of the blurring of the immediacy of perspectives that had characterised the early 1970s.
I would like to dig a bit deeper in order to arrive at the essence of this somersault of reason – it seems to me that it comes out of a kind of game of mirrors, where the fury and the refusal reflect the image of reality and multiply it a thousand times in a glassy and image-filled theatrum, giving to the image virtues that are theurgic, transformative and magical. The armed struggle stems from a natural magic of the frustrated spirit that tries to develop the fury into terror, to potentialise the frustration in a historic orgasm. The armed struggle – the scourge of God – does not remove the reality – it accepts the provocation of capitalist overdetermination as such, with unmoving and paranoid fidelity. With that, however, the reality remains, independent of the fury and of the game of mirrors; and also as the origin of all this. And the crisis of value remains, with its charge of irrationality. The material origin of the decision to take up armed struggle is not therefore cancelled out by the falsity of the game.
It was necessary, however, to avoid being dragged in – into that theatrum. Outside of the environment in which ‘the flower of the armed struggle blossomed’ the debate was harsh and did not centre explicitly on that problem, but, rather more generally, on how to deal with the situation created by an acceleration of capitalist restructuring ‘by means of command’. There was a clash between two positions – the ‘offensive’ option and the ‘autonomy’ option. That’s what they were called in those days – we can laugh at those abstract stereotypes, but not too much, because from each of them there derived very long theoretical and practical trajectories. With false detachment I would say today that the former was a spatial theory, the second a time theory. In the sense that the supporters of the former position were saying as follows: only a forcing, as vanguard, of the spaces of struggle would enable the growth of autonomy; but the second thesis proclaimed that only the times of autonomous mass proletarian self-organisation could trigger the offensive. I don’t like to take these little pieces of history and political debate too seriously – and yet, if you take a drop of water, it can reflect the sun. If you break it, you will have two suns. The proposal of the offensive was my nemesis. I have never particularly loved translations, and this was a bad translation. From the German, from the Hungarian, from the defeat of those revolutions of the 1920s. Lukács and Korsch seemed to me, in this context, really mistreated. And even Lenin I felt to be inappropriate in this debate, and the quotations that came thick and fast were completely ineffectual. There were historical and theoretical elements that drove me to polemic, but the reasoning was reduced essentially to this: I did not think that the proletarian subject had, as in the 1920s, an inheritance – the great Russian revolution – to spend (or even to squander), or a model to repeat, or the same subject to exalt, or the same opponent to beat (had we not continually recognised this? were we not born from the identification of this discontinuity?). Rather it seemed to me fundamental to aim at a new accumulation of proletarian strength, beginning from the new conditions of struggle, and especially from the shift in composition that had taken place in the very nature of the proletariat in the preceding years.
It was therefore the path of diffuse autonomy, of rootedness, of an intelligent resistance operating at various levels – that had to be traversed. Certainly a hard path, because it could concede little to the extremist thrusts of many of the revolutionary fractions in the factories – but at the same time it had to keep a strong relationship with them as essential forces for the development of the programme of organisation. In this context new problems began to arise, such as the appropriation of the objective in the factory struggles and the active defence of these processes of appropriation. The same problems that, for at least a decade, American workers had been raising on the objective basis of the transformation of labour processes – the factory was now a ‘contested terrain’ where the development of the mode of production represented a balance of power negotiated and decided upon day by day. (Philosophers speak of this world as a structure of possibilities – there are endless possibilities in the continuous reconsolidation of the productive forces – their continued openness. It is not true that production is a machine – the cycle is broken by the possibilities – production is, itself, an application of imagination, a time and place of possibilities. Production is the contested terrain of capital, the compacted terrain of imagination, and the area for the subjects’ struggles of appropriation.)
Once again at the Petrolchimico plant, that gigantic laboratory of vanguard experiences, there was an attempt at mass struggle on the slogan of an ‘appropriation of the reduction of working hours’. In other words people came into the factory and left it according to a pre-arranged programme of shifts that unilaterally reduced the number of working hours from 38 to 35, thus leaving three hours empty of production on each shift. In response to this struggle, the employer would have had to bring in additional workteams, which he did not have, so this would have meant hiring new workers. So the workers were taking back time, and the lack of production was the responsibility of the employer. The struggle was not successful, but it was a significant new step in assembly line practice. Happy are the times when the political confrontation between various positions can be carried out in these big mass experiments! This meant maintaining theory at the level of industry and denying it any artisanal or minoritarian valence – factors that were present in the hysteric repetition of the Bolshevik motifs of the theory of offensive. Things went ahead anyway, between misunderstandings and crafty accommodations, between uncontainable subjectivist impulses and important moments of reflection. But the contradiction could not be contained: first bits of stray shrapnel started firing off, and then gradually the core exploded. The political groups, given that they were born around 1968, were characterised by an enthusiastic and indistinct fusion of offensive and autonomy. The melting of the glue released elements of spontaneous synthesis. So that was how Potere Operaio fell apart, and also Lotta Continua and the other groups – although some of them spent years in the process of disintegration.
However, the core of the thing was not in this dissolving. Certain disenchanted persons frankly wanted this solution. The real problem was that of substance, of innovation, of the liquidation of tradition. No mourning for the death of the small political groups, as mimesis or germination of the official labour movement. Let’s rather leave working-class science free in the development of the programme (always re-posed as a problem and, in our case, never resolved), of a nondialectical reversal of the negative, of an affirmation of the positive, of the refusal of the mystifying function of dialectics. Let me explain. With fierce insistence, the theoretical–practical history of the labour movement – although not able to imagine a value that is not the one reclaimed from the masters, although unable to offer an alternative to capitalist development – develops this identity of contents in a homology of organisational forms. In this case, the labour movement links resistance to organisation and identifies phases of internal consolidation in the moments of ebb of the struggle. The labour movement is Hegelian: it recognises itself as a servant; and, as a servant, it organises itself in relation to a master. In terms of both content and form. Will it emerge from this dialectic being worthy of the master? Althusser has always suspected this, and sometimes he has boldly stated as much – before going crazy with it. The function of general representation is determined at this point – a general representation of the interest in development (in times of crisis: we are better capitalists than they are!), and of organisation: in this case too, when the spontaneity decreases, when the crisis of the struggle is a given, organisation takes its place. Organisation is born as a substitutive will, as compensation – as a tension on the negative, of the negative.
Consciousness, Bewusstsein = consciousness of the negative. Materialism: my good old Jürgen rebelled against it. Is it not perhaps here that the cynicism and the mystificatory wheeler-dealing of the labour movement have their birthplace? In this claim of the independence of consciousness, of organisation and of the political, which is the breaking of every basic condensation of the multitudo? But has it not already become a contradictio in adiecto [contradiction between parts of an argument] when someone moves in the social composition of class? And in the face of the explicit drive towards values alternative to capitalist development? Organisation cannot be an exasperation of resistance, the dialectical insurgency of the servant against the master. Organisation and programme cannot be a homology of the positive and the negative. It is clear that the problem resists both moralism and the pathetic: what is in play here is the singular determination of class politics, the tearing that it must operate in relation to the bourgeois theory of command. For me, the clear formulation of this problem was in those years a stormy emotion, like getting a car back on the road after a terrifying skid, after a spin . . . It seemed to me that a rich set of theoretical and practical virtues had been for a while dispersed – stupidly, if not malevolently. It was not so. This masochism of the negative and of the constraint to traditional politics could be, and in part had been, avoided. My comrades and I felt that it was possible to make a new beginning without turning back.
But, we asked ourselves immediately (objectifying the eventual objection), would we not find ourselves paradoxically forced again, precisely by the capitalist breaking of the links of values, by the crisis induced at each articulation of the social, to re-establish the independence of the political and to exclude definitively the hypothesis of the social constitution of communism? We have realistically to grasp the capitalist capacity to dissolve the connections of value – added the critics – the only possibility we have is that of forming the opposite. We have the opportunity – let us arm ourselves with appropriate techniques and deal with the long and dangerous journey through the desert: the assumptions of the ‘autonomy of social class’ are misplaced, and they are indecent! But no, we retorted: the capitalist breaking of the possible universe of the law of value brings about the accentuation of antagonistic polarities at the social level. As a result, mediations, whether trade unionist or representative, were no longer a given: not because of an overstated Leninism or because of the cynicism of the independence of the political (terrorism was born directly from this), but rather on the terrain of the formation of counter-powers, of a theory of war that would assume its subjects in the new social composition, antagonistic and irreducible, and would develop them constitutionally. Once again, only a paradox represented the real: the explicit and realistic assumption of the theory of war was the only key that made it possible to avoid the blind alleys of armed struggle or of political party depotentialisation of the new and very rich composition of the class.
(Some time ago I reread Hans Kelsen, Socialism and the State, written in 1923 if I’m not mistaken. It is useful and fascinating to understand how this apologist of the ‘polyhedric practicability’ of the state is inclined to read, especially in times of crisis, the contractual relations, relations of force contracted between classes, not in purely quantitative terms, but in a context that is qualitative, juridical in nature, with constitutional potentiality! Only war founds the equilibrium – and also that quantity of the law that makes survival possible. In recent days I have been reading Branko Horvat, Political Economy of Socialism, and once again I find, in the crisis of real socialism, the same quest for a dualistic and contractually progressive foundation of law and planning.)
Inside the theoretical practice we had been living, the situation of the class struggle had matured to the point of making possible this determination, which is positive. And finally not dialectical. Hobbes again – or Calhoun: ‘not contract but compact’ (according to Michele, my cell-mate next door, who is in love with the old reactionary from Carolina and is lucid in constitutional theory as only those who possess the logical parameters of American realism can be).
Cher David, to say that those discussions in the early 1970s showed the diagram of intentions and the lucidity of expression of what I am expressing here would be a lie. Everything was complicated by a confused imaginary, by immediate commitments, by a solidarity that was assumed to be intact, and by even more elementary motives. In reality, all discussion took place in a climate that had the violence of a worn-out marital relationship: the presupposition of love was hypocritical, the atmosphere was vaguely murderous. It is certain, however, that our discussions were not entirely brain-fevered and that our decisions were not idle. A method of work and a mass style of working led us to argue things out in assemblies, in the streets and in the factories. It was impossible to avoid the richness of the undertaking and the effort it involved. It was not the first time that I participated in a mass debate of this magnitude – but it was the first time that the debate was occurring within the new composition of the class, which had emerged in the course of the 1960s: a magma, but one full of plots, tattoos, and codes.
And of absences: that is, the official labour movement. Here the foolish and suicidal presumption of the stabilising effect of the reflux, the arrogant reaffirmation of continuity in the face of the transformation of class composition brought about a bureaucratic politics of small steps for the reabsorption of deviance and for the restoration of tradition. Just as Pantagruel stretches out, hoping that, when the flood waters recede, the frogs will jump into his mouth, so too the party of the Prince! But an error of theory meant that there would be no feast – the new composition was not a swamp with frogs, but living and overflowing water. Cher David, I have to confess: at that time I nurtured hopes of a miracle – namely the conversion of the labour movement! But this was only imputable to my defect of hatred and to the wantonness of my character. And also to another of my shortcomings: I am not able to change my opinions. When things were obvious, why were they not happening? Why are large institutions subject to the evil that Cacania3 propagated – the impenetrable confidence of their own reproduction? So, after a while, believing that things had run out of steam and were superficially guaranteed, the bureaucrats lost all hesitation and fiercely began to arm themselves again with arrogance and abuse. Setting up, against the movement, the revenge of the Historic Compromise – which they thought was a small thing, whereas in fact it was unbearable. With deathly determination they prepared to announce the Italic repetition of a Chile-style solution and to preach – as a means of avoiding it – Lenten sacrifices after what they had portrayed as a carnivalesque orgy! Imagination is dead! Mercy, Jesus, have mercy! It ended up with the PCI, far from cynically dominating the situation, as its preceptors thought, becoming itself a twig in the storm that was raised by upsetting the law of value. Kitsch and its rhetoric are amusing when we witness such misadventures – and the opportunities were not lacking. Don’t you think, David, that the kitsch of 1977 was in fact cheaply invented precisely by Berlinguer and Co.? By Franco Rodano and his many advisors? The party of councils and councillors, the baroque of the variations on the theme of the Prince, moralism and formalism, a fiction. The kitsch of 1977 was an adequate response to the kitsch of the Historic Compromise, the madness of an improvised culture of administration – and then everything came together: that 1977 summer in Rome, dope-smoking, and the politics of the Prince discovered their deep and comical kinship.
But there wasn’t much room for comedy for us at that time – the enemy continued to show himself with two faces, a capitalist face representing a power that had exceeded itself and was going wild, and a petty bourgeois face, of a reformism that was timid and intent on avoiding conflict. In those early years of the 1970s the problem was to work on the concrete, following the trail of new subjects who, tired of their old political and trade union representatives, had come out of their lair. The problem was how to follow these subjects like divine hunters – how to recognise in their faces, as soon as they came into view, our grown humanity. Autonomy against offensive, weapons of mass criticism against the critique by means of weapons, a war theory for a proletarian constitution. We had to hold on to our diversity and grasp in the massification of the proletarian movement the concrete emergence of those behaviours of war in which the transition to communism appears as consciousness, both individual and collective – and this happens only there. It was only this consciousness that would make it possible to organise the transition to constitution – the Civill Warre – into a process of liberation.
Cher David, you are a Cartesian functionary in the French administration and you have those refined arts of analysis and criticism, of description and belief, which come with an education in the great Parisian schools – but not even you, cher David, would ever be able to explain to the judges of Italian courts, brainwashed as they are by the kitsch of the Historic Compromise, that today, when they sit in judgement over us and over an entire generation on the things of which I have spoken so far, they should enter into and discriminate between these different positions. 1973 – Rosolina, the dissolution of Potere Operaio: such were the conversations. However, a big ironic kiss ...
PS I have just reread this letter. Forgive me, David, for the highs and lows of my account. Putting side by side the world story of the dollar and the kitsch of the incipient Historic Compromise is some undertaking, and even a poet would be hard put to do it justice. Such a disproportion makes it impossible to write. Yet that was how we lived at that time: like being in a game of sudden accelerations and decelerations, like on a spaceship that was going into orbit – so of course the big story was disproportionate and irreducible to the particular over which it nevertheless loomed. All sense of relation seemed to have collapsed. The traditional theory, the great classical synthesis, allowed the use of modular functions, in both the large and the small. But what was Nixon’s 17 August, if not a theoretical and practical event that brought about the breaking of every possible model? So writing should become a self-sufficient parameter – and it is not so. Nor is my writing, as it obscurely tries to seek out what is strong in life and from that point to pursue the various traverses of a world divided. I shed light on my personal theoretical story and on events that affected me, in the hope of arriving at a general set of meanings. How might this be possible? Nothing guarantees it for us. Sometimes it happens. The compasses are going crazy. Let us seek. All that remains is the solid point of support: writing, on the other hand, becomes confused between these difficulties. What remains then as a document is chaos, disproportion, disease, the strain of those contradictions. And the event that all of this brought about. Civill Warre: it took a while to understand the dimensions of it. Goodbye for now.