Rebibbia, 3 March 1982
Cher David,
So was this a point where one could get the measure of a new political practice – or perhaps of its defeat? The opportunity was certain – but so too was the defeat. Of course, I worry about presenting the thing in terms that are overstated and somewhat contrived: in fact, when you look at these events from prison, they seem to accelerate the closer you get to the point where the prison gates close and time shuts down. However, the sense of a turning point comes not so much from a posteriori reflections on this historical ephemeral reality that is prison as from the ontological thickness of the class composition.
The period between 1976 and 1977 provided an opportunity to re-establish a mass political method for an independent workers’ movement in Italy. Beyond that point, in the medium term, the possibility of relaunching the project and the process remains an unknown. Almost twenty years of preparation and formation of a leadership group, twenty years of penetration among the masses, of correct analysis and correct definition of tactics, and now comes the ‘showdown’. In our particular case, the experience has been bitter. All the more bitter as the crisis of the movement’s project was due to forces emanating from within – it was due to the explosion of the terrorist variable. An old story: anarchists and communists. Until anarchism is defeated, communism cannot become a party – this was true at the end of in the last century, it was true in the 1920s, and it remained true in the 1970s – all the more so because here the problem did not have a rigid party dimension but was posed within the broader practices of movement. This is the ‘American’ problem of the organisation of subversion and of communism today: Lenin in New York . . . In short, the unpredictable variable is as modern as the new problem. Terrorism is the anarchism of postmodernism – the old anarchism loses its artisanal quality and its libertarian theatricality, which evoke a kind of belle époque nostalgia. Bulletproof vests took the place of dynamite – on the one side Bonnot, on the other Viscardi and Savasta – the propaganda of the deed gave way to the paranoia of a mass-media society. The difference between their respective ethical fantasies is equally violent: efficiency versus utopia, and also the act of informing versus martyrdom. Dostoevsky is really obsolete here. I’ll write about this again later. But there is a further element that needs to be borne in mind, not so much to console ourselves and lessen our sense of defeat as to remind ourselves – in spite of everything – of the usefulness of having grasped that opportunity. The fact is that, the movement having been assailed and defeated by a crisis that was internal (and only internal), the conclusion of that season of struggles did not reinforce the existing system – on the contrary, it deepened the structural limits of its possibilities for integration and restoration.
That said, cher David, my thoughts are going back to the period when we were discussing all these things – already with a sharp awareness of being within a process of institutional disintegration that was unstoppable and within an emergence of movement that, albeit intensifying its social composition, was terribly fragile in its political composition. This was the heyday of the Historic Compromise. What was being built was a legislative framework and a feudalisation of offices that, with due efficacy, were supposed to be the means of effecting the dictatorship of the two major parties. A kind of grosse Koalition [grand coalition] – the mystified product of a parliamentary centre of gravity supposed to resolve, in a demagogy of unanimity, the problem of the constitutional crisis. This was the crowning moment of the policy, the only policy, that had been pursued by the Communist Party since the end of the Second World War. But all this was so old-fashioned, so tatty! A kind of Prussian reformism, a socialism à la Lassalle, with rhythms that reminded you of the goose step – a strong forward thrust of the leg and then a dragging of the foot: stiffness and slowness intended to give an illusion of motion. A weary expectation that people would go along with it and identify with it, but for whom? Never had the Critique of the Gotha Programme been more appropriate than in the face of that orgy of talk of a ‘fair wage’, of an equo canone [‘fair rent’], of Jeremy Bentham, and so on. It was an attempt to harness administratively, to castrate politically, and (ultimate achievement) to activate democratically the great movement of participation that had developed at the end of the 1960s. Rise up, Lazarus! Go back to being what you once were! But the theological reading of the miracle univocally contradicts this exegesis: Lazarus really was dead. If now he has life, it is a new life – so how could they hope to capture this new life through a dead appeal? Reformism had no attraction, the cards were down, the talk of economic development had no bite on the new class composition. The problem of the proletarian subject was that of an alternative set of values and ways of life. The face of the Historic Compromise looked bureaucratic, grotesque, waxy yellow. A reformism of sergeants. Una risata vi sepellirà [A laugh will bury you]. But how to get them into line, these workers in sneakers, these ‘unpunished’ feminists, this young intellectual labour power that projects its mobility on the arc of imagination? Remember the slogans. Tremate, tremate, le streghe son tornate [Tremble tremble, the witches are back]; Zangherì, Zangherà ride tutta la città [Zangheri, Zangherà, the whole city is laughing at you]. The political establishment structures were ill suited for absorbing the new. Cautious openings were not enough. The division ran deep and the centrifugal forces were multiplying. Aristotelians versus untorelli [plague carriers]. Reading the social context as a unified whole and trying to normalise it was impossible. The dominion– sabotage function was the only effectual norm – because the regime’s plans appeared immediately as dominion, and the proletarian behaviours, in their immediacy, were sabotage. The social relationship was shot through with antagonism, and the possibility of an equilibrium of participation was halting – difficult, if not impossible: if I ask for a social wage I sabotage the resumption of accumulation; if, on the other hand, accumulation lifts off again, then unemployment and poverty grow – and so the waltz goes on. Easy appeals to sacrifice did not sit well with these people. The immediate, Reaganesque vulgarity of such things offended them from the outset. So, provoked by that vulgar solicitation, by the total inappropriateness of the appeal to virtue, the movement flared up again. Lama nel Tibet. [‘Lamas belong in Tibet.’] Lama non l’ama nessuon. [‘Lama, nobody loves him.’]1 Thereby revealing an incredible social compactness, an impressive extension and uniformity of behaviours, as well as political weakness and a fragmented, jagged multiplicity of objectives and demands. A blast of demands was launched at a leadership that attempted, in fact demanded, a reduction in complexity and a procedural regulation of social demands. The radicalisation of the conflict was a foregone conclusion. And the ‘turbulent environment’ of the metropolis was its theatre.
Cher David, I don’t want to sing you the praises of this wild situation. But it is certainly the case that this is how it was on both fronts. The economic repression was strong, but so was the revolt. An immediately selective repression began striking at the key groups that were carrying forward the resistance and the counterattack, trying to isolate them socially – taking up corporative demands and crushing generalist demands, introducing a kind of large-scale commodification of command with rewards for political obedience and penalties for disobedience. I don’t know how they do these things in the socialist countries, but I have the impression that things there were somewhat analogous. The governance of the metropolitan areas was being modernised urgently and with great effort, and they attempted to control the ‘turbulent theatre’ in terms of a coercive prefiguring of the labour market, of its various flows and stakes. But all this was beyond its power – because this proletarian subject that had emerged on the one hand dissolved the working day (which production and Power had assumed as a given), and on the other it upset the basket of goods, the set of needs against which capital and government measure their action. The state became the central place of class struggle. Repressive practices and subversive practices crossed all spatial boundaries. Deterritorialisation. The connection between law and order, social control and company profits was immediately grasped and interpreted on the proletarian front as a unitary and hostile schema – hostile because, as the Marxist theoretician says, quoting the texts of the Trilateral Commission that were then all the rage, ‘capital tries to limit the transfer of practices of the liberal–democratic state to the sphere of capitalist production, and instead favours the reverse process: the transfer of practices of capitalist production to the liberal–democratic state’. And, insofar as it is the enemy, this connection must be overturned, retraced, and socially sabotaged. If everything has become political, the proletarian subject lays claim to a kind of power of veto over the political arena of the metropolis. In the same way that it is exercised by the organised group of corporative interests? More or less – damned bosses, why not us? – but without any instrument that is not, on the proletarian horizon, pure and simple mass action. In short, the metropolitan theatre is a chaotische multitudo [chaotic multitude]. The ‘making’ of the new proletarian composition disrupts all traditional references, overturns every cognitive parameter. This picture repeats the extraordinary difficulties and the extraordinary adventures of a different period as recounted by E. P. Thompson – that unique British student of Defoe.
But in the cruel underdevelopment of the Italic autonomy of the political, on the Machiavellian terrain of the law – funny or tragic, I’ll leave it to you to decide – this is what was unleashed on us, cher David. For example, the journalists and the scholars of social matters battened onto this reality like piranhas – they carved up the movement in accord with the prescriptions of Power, and in this abattoir, like ferocious vultures, they sectioned out the cut that was to be put before the public. Not to be recovered, not to be understood, because in fact – as the art of butchering teaches us – the cut was part of the horse – and here the repression was implicit in the method. A McLuhan-style syllogism of the mass-media. They were propagandising either the ghetto or its alternative – the only alternative that Power left to the process of subjective identification of the new social composition. Great processes of commodification were set in motion, of having as opposed to being: the market for hard drugs grew, and poison and anxiety insinuated themselves everywhere. ‘Slump city.’ Why should the commodity initiative not be consistent with state repression? You could even hear minstrels of the regime’s high culture adding their bit: lamenting in elevated tones the resurgent diciannovismo.2 Sacrifici sacrifici, più lavoro meno salario [Sacrifices, sacrifices, more work less pay]. Poor idiots! Sbirro maledetto te l’accendiamo noi la fiamma sul berretto [You damned cop – we’ll put a match to the flame on your cap]. Stop.
It has never surprised me that this cultural insensibility, this tone of provocation, should have come particularly (albeit with some exceptions) from the corporation of historians – a category of academics that, in Italy, deserves to be studied in the unique conditions of its local reproduction and its political provincialism. In love with that shameful past they study, they participate in and are predestined to fall for flattery. Spadolini. Such historians are gravediggers; they do not trust humanity and its unforeseeable trajectories. Evenimential history is pure and simple garbage. Stirring up shit with a juridical rod. Whereas doing, which is forming the world on the unknown time that has not yet occurred, the metaphysical risk of the existing, of potentiality, only this can be the object of thought.
Well, we were now traversing this new segment of being that was being built. Which masses of men were building. Which the metropolitan proletariat, the social worker, were making. The hiatus between production and history was closing. The metropolitan outings of groups such as the Nights of Fire, as also the strategies of punks and various tribes of skinheads, were first and foremost a reappropriation of knowledge on the part of a collective subject. And the new producer had the same dimension as that on which his action was operating: a whole world – of knowledge, of passion. Here – precisely at the point where these dimensions of the emergence of new proletariat were given – the ultimate paradox was becoming clear: that the maximum of antagonism represented the maximum of positivity. A sameness of opposites? No. Rather, in real terms, a maximum of separation, a liquidation of all homology in a radically alternative mode of existence. In Bologna, Rome and Milan this was a time of big marches – but their violence was not homologous, equal and opposite to the violence set in motion by the forces of repression. It was something else. Of course, those demonstrations were full of militarism and ferocious slogans. But it was a tragic game, a mass catharsis. The symbol of power was taken up in order to be exorcised. The balaclava helmets, the P38s, the raised Winchesters represented a certain liberation of people’s thinking. (But, some will object, they were also used to kill. Cynically one could answer by comparing the numbers of the dead on both sides. But it is not the sameness that counts – it is the difference – and this (and only this) does not absolve the killings – indeed, cher David, it only makes you weep all the more.) In the demonstrations, in the struggle, the project was one of peace, of community, of production. A new generation was moving with passion along the road to communism. The word povertà [poverty] took on a new connotation – a new real figure among the many that we had materially defined. ‘Poverty’ perhaps, this time. Poverty at the highest level, as the highest problem.
I do not know whether when these phenomena catch our eye is the only time we can talk of coming close to the going beyond, to being beyond prehistory. It amuses me to take on the paradox of the Nazi professor and of his last adventure in dialectics – when Dasein, the determination, the here, the Da, the ‘this’ (and the more the merrier) can only qualify the being-for-death. Well, let us reverse this paradox – it deserves nothing else – why on earth should the meaning of the crisis of being within being, of the collapse of the universal, have anything to do with the proletarian? Lukács, in his anti-Sein und Zeit, had proposed, in the metaphor of Leninism, this reversal – which we now had the chance to see being enacted in the reality of the movement. For the movement, there is no nostalgia for the universal – the determination is therefore not something scandalous but living existence. The determination is posed, here and now, with such fullness and is charged with such imagination and hope that no negativity is given. Determination is to be beyond the negative. So that our task is not the dialectical task of grasping the particularity in order to lead it to the negativity of the universal word – but that of getting ourselves ‘taken’ by this particular, by its implicit and positive richness. But ‘getting taken’ is not an operation that involves less intelligence and work than the act of ‘taking’ – on the contrary, given that it is an action internal to being, it requires adequate techniques, continuous capacities for proposition and invention – it requires a mobilisation of liberty in its contact with being. The processes of self-valorisation that strata of the metropolitan proletariat are beginning to put into action and that are becoming immediately visible are here commensurate with the enormous amount of antagonism in whose form they are constituted – they are simply its paraphrase.
Then we said: the multiplicity of these processes, the plurality of their tensions and of the possible and present contradictions are removed from the superficiality on which they express themselves and brought to an internal Vergleichung [comparison], ontological and political – which is an equalising and a concrete idea of the becoming of value. The diversity and richness of the objectives that the communities were beginning to set themselves on the ground, and as a programme of their own social reproduction, had to be grasped within a framework of convergent development. Later we said: let us focus on the problem of production – on the relationship between material production and immaterial production (tertiary, informatics, and so on), which, with all its ambivalences, was becoming central in society at that time. I don’t think that these big themes we were addressing then – that of self-valorisation and antagonism, that of the multiplicity of proletarian subjects, that of the complexity of the values pursued, and finally the problem of immaterial production and of its hegemony as a new mode of production – as I say, I don’t believe that the emergence of these themes has been undervalued. The effort of a conscious appropriation of this terrain of problems, the destruction of the ‘idols’ that stood in the way of our perceiving it, were actually pushed to the maximum. So what was there in this force of the social composition of the proletariat, in its impetuous thrust, that blocked the possibility of consolidation?
I don’t know the answer. On the other hand I don’t think that anyone can set themselves up as teachers in situations where only practice and determination are in command. I can assume things that are out of place or out of balance, structural discrepancies, and so on – but really it seems to me an opportunism of political reason to resort to tired old fables like those of dualism and ‘stages’ of development at a time when we have signalled – on several occasions, and not accidentally – maximum accelerations towards high points of transformational behaviour. There is something else. It is probably to be found in the continued underlying existence of a disturbed and disturbing sense of totality – and to be identified in the difficulty of filling out the theoretical category materially, to the point of negating the fraudulent nature of all transcendental identity. The subject is now the multitude of the different. Bourgeois civil wars have always expressed themselves in religious wars, for the restoration of orthodoxy: Bürgerkrieg um den absoluten Text [bourgeois war against the absolute text]. No, no, the proletarian is very different – the sabotage determines a finiteness, analysis seeks determination. The tension towards the absolute, on the other hand, is a syphilis – a monkey on the shoulder. The refounding of the revolutionary movement fails where theory remains separated from transformative practice, and potenza from production, and liberty from liberation. We needed to go deeper, not to rest content with this sudden and premature flowering. But, as we know, when a warm day breaks the chill of winter, few peasants are able to resist: thinking themselves clever, they sow seeds that the frost will destroy. On the other hand it is foolish to grasp in this only subjective errors – the subjective errors are part of the composition. Escher, Magritte and Thom: the overturning is a pattern in geometry, the formless form. Here the thing is serious, because the error is inherent in the figure of being and consists in attributing to it a finality, no matter how understood. Finality of being: or negation of particularity, automatism of compensation, end of responsibility. A philosophy of positivism, on the other hand, affirms the Dasein, negating it as the foundation of dialectics, negating it as the base of any being-for-the-other. If thought and action do not bend on this particular fulcrum of being, on its rigid and exclusive determination, on this overthrow, which is being inasmuch as it refers to nothing if not its potenza – which is nothing but itself – in short, if all this does not happen, then production and revolution do not arrive at that beginning that both founds and legitimates them. Production set against the revolution, revolution set against production are the last theistic horizon – or rather polytheistic; and anyway barbaric and pagan – that human prehistory knows. In 1977 these stereotypes ended up dominating the scene, the god of production against the god of revolution. Apollo versus Dionysus. Carli, Pandolfi and Cossiga versus the armed groups engaged in social sabotage. Equivalents. A pathetic batrachomyomachia [battle of mice and frogs]. God is in fact both production and revolution. This is the only possible terrain for refounding. Yesterday, cher David, we did not succeed; tomorrow we shall.
And today? Today we are experiencing perhaps the height of the tragedy of the ethical, which was introduced into collective existence in those years – a period honoured only by mechanical repetition, and not by the light that difference generates in dazzling form through repetition. However, I do not want to dwell on this any longer: the suffering of rational comprehension is strong. Instead, what might one add to the passion of that time? What did those days mean for us? Perhaps the biggest thing we derived from them was the education of feelings. Because what we were unable to bring about collectively, we often succeeded in achieving in small groups. The chiaroscuro could not be stronger: the concomitant aspect of the struggle was tenderness. But it was an ontological tenderness – a tenderness of being that opens, a dry tenderness, not some romantic mish-mash. And in people’s minds the path of revolution was solid, the feelings were as rich as the tension of desire. We were no longer embarrassed to talk about love, because we experienced love as a constitutive potency. And each of us, in that genealogical passage of the collective, selected out being in its positive particularity, in oneself and in others. The revolutionary project became a wellspring. We were for ourselves, not for anything else, and the totality we believed in was the existent – and only that: life against death.
By the time we became aware of the political weakness of this renaissance, when we realised that the time of our liberation would be wiped out by the capitalist measure of the time of death – while, dressed in red, this death call was stalking through the movement – by that time we were too far down that ontological path to draw up a tactic, a defence. There is a tragedy that is linked to life – and it is that of knowing yourself to be so very far from death per se that you cast aside the idea of death in se and shun with horror the capitalist measure of exploitation. But this has now a logical foundation that derives from the total incommensurability of the ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’. You suffered the tragedy, and the awareness of its enactment was a source of dignity. Thus we found ourselves living and dancing and singing a struggle that was a developing potentiality; we were playing a scene of the great reconstruction of true worldly being. Has the show been cancelled for the time being? I don’t think so. Being does not tolerate censorship. Prison is ephemeral, ontology is sacred. And the developments of that time expressed themselves in the unstoppable and age-old passion of the person who walks – still now, and forever – forward. I am thinking of you tonight. I shall continue chatting with you, cher David, about our philosophy and our hope. Goodbye for now . . .