Amplified by a comprehensive new chapter updating research on and by Italian autonomist Marxists and a critical Afterword by Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba, this second edition of Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven is even more useful than the original, in two senses. First, while the earlier edition provided the most comprehensive analysis and understanding available in English of the innovations of Italian autonomist Marxists in the heyday of operaismo, the added chapter highlights newly available English translations of old texts, new Italian assessments of the past and carries the analysis forward, into the recent past and present, surveying the subsequent directions pursued by its main theoreticians in the years since. Comprehensive, but condensed into a single chapter, his survey has the feel of both a bibliographical essay and a sketch of what could be an entirely new book, were Steve to decide to delve as deeply into the recent literature that he summarises as he has done with the essential texts of operaismo. One can only hope.
The second way in which this new edition has a heightened usefulness is how it facilitates the intellectual and political mining of the autonomist tradition to inform contemporary decisions about confronting the present composition of class relations of struggle. Whether examining past variations and differences, or sketching present debates, by situating them all within their historical contexts and by showing how these autonomist theorists and militants harvested, yet winnowed, previous work, Steve has provided us with examples that show how demanding that theoretical innovations be based upon the analysis of the material conditions of class struggle can yield insights into ‘What is to be done NEXT!’ – which should be the purpose of all militant research, whether of past or present.
Riccardo and Massimiliano’s Afterword adds their own critical perspective to Steve’s analysis, highlighting what they see as the strongest aspects of operaismo, focusing particularly on the work of Tronti and Panzieri, and its legacies within ‘post-operaismo’, i.e., among those who have retained central elements of the approach, abandoned others and innovated in new directions, of whom the best known is Antonio Negri. In this short text, their treatment is necessarily narrower than Steve’s, and in the case of Negri, even more critical.
They are severe in their condemnation of what they view as Negri’s building on the weakest aspects of operaismo. They write that in Negri’s new formulations ‘it is pointless to seek mediations, or to claim verifications of reality’. This erroneous path, they claim, has led Negri and like-minded post-operaisti, to formulate such concepts as the ‘general intellect’ and ‘immaterial labour’ in ways that ‘lack all meaning’ and led them beyond any recognisable form of workerism. While both concepts have been hotly debated, and I share aspects of their critique, their assertion that Negri et alia have come to embrace such concepts in a self-referential way, devoid of any analysis of ‘reality’, ignores the detailed researches on the kinds of labour characterised as ‘immaterial’ published in the journals Futur Antérieur (1991–92) and Multitudes (2000– ) and elsewhere. Those researches provided material grounds for theorising the ‘general intellect’ and ‘immaterial labour’, regardless of how one judges the outcome. In the end, Riccardo and Massimiliano return to the central preoccupation of the operaisti, ‘the reconstruction of the conditions that make possible antagonism within and against capital’. If we interpret ‘reconstruction’ to mean a close analysis of ongoing struggles that defy subsumption by capital, rupture its institutions and create alternatives, I can only agree.
Although Steve’s new chapter and the Afterword both provide pointers to further desirable research and organisational efforts, I’d like to point even further, beyond the focus on developments among Italian autonomist Marxists, past and present, to related kindred spirits elsewhere in the world – whose interconnections formed, and still continue to form, a kind of international kinship network of more or less like-minded individuals and groups – a network whose mutually stimulating linkages have been largely unrecognised or forgotten.
In the beginning of his new chapter, Steve tells of the difficulties in gathering archival materials during a trip to England and Italy in early 1982 in the wake of the crackdown of April 1979 when the Italian state had used the terrorism of armed groups such as the Brigate Rosse to justify the arrest and jailing of thousands of its critics, a great many on trumped up charges.1 Four years earlier, in the summer of 1978, I had made a similar journey of research and discovery, visiting many of the same people – in London, Paris, Milan and Padua. Like Steve, I was on the hunt for the origins of a set of new ideas. In my case, I had first encountered those ideas while participating in the political project that generated the journal Zerowork (1975–77), a project heavily influenced by both operaismo and the Wages for Housework Movement of the time – a movement born in Italy but which had spread rapidly in Europe and North America. Also like Steve, by talking to those more familiar with the history and reading the materials they dumped in my lap, I discovered many – though by no means all – of the Italian sources Steve has ferreted out and analysed so carefully in Storming Heaven.
But what struck me forcefully, and still fascinates me, was how in England, France and Italy I discovered even earlier roots, some in Europe but also, more surprisingly to me, some back home in the United States. Steve touches briefly on this international dimension in his first chapter ‘Weathering the 1950s’ where he mentions the way Danilo Montaldi, one of the earliest post-WWII Italian Marxists to begin rethinking class struggle from the point of view of workers, drew upon contemporary work by those in the American group Correspondence and the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie. For me to have had to voyage to Europe to discover such North American roots was nothing short of shocking.
It is true that Martin Glaberman – an important figure in Correspondence and its continuation, Facing Reality – had written a letter to those of us collaborating on Zerowork reproaching our failure to recognise or refer to their earlier efforts, which also put autonomous workers’ struggles at the centre of both analysis and politics. But ignorant of that history, his scolding hadn’t meant a great deal to me. It was not until I spent hours, first in John Merrington’s study in London, then in archives in Paris and finally in Bruno Cartosio’s office in Milan and poured over their collections of materials from the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Facing Reality, News & Letters and Socialism ou Barbarie – alongside all the Italian stuff – that the full impact of Martin’s reproach struck home.
The phenomenon, or interrelated phenomena, that those of us working on Zerowork had failed to recognise had been a trans-Atlantic ferment in the late 1940s and 1950s in which an independent-minded array of individuals had ripped themselves away from earlier left preoccupations with the labour movement and political parties to return to Marx’s own efforts to understand the materiality of workers’ struggles, e.g., his close readings of the British factory inspectors’ reports and his Workers’ Enquiry, and through that return to rethink elements of his theory and the implications for their politics. This return, I discovered, had characterised the work of a wide variety of party dissidents, including C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Martin Glaberman, and Grace Lee in the United States, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Daniel Mothe in France, Danilo Montaldi, Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti in Italy. In much the same spirit, but with a professional focus on struggles in the past, were the so-called ‘bottom up’ Marxist historians of the period, such as Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton. These individuals not only shared a common focus on the self-activity of workers but their writings and teaching would inspire a whole new generation of militants.
The elements for recognising the international character of this refocusing of research and organising on the self-activity of workers had all been available by the mid-1970s but scattered about in books and pamphlets, personal notes and memories of at least two generations of militants. A few individuals stood at what Alquati called ‘nodal points’ of this loose network. Grace Lee had personally established links between Correspondence and Socialisme ou Barbarie through contact with Castoriadis.2 Bruno Cartosio, in a sense picking up where Mothe and Montaldi had left off, translated into Italian and published a collection of Martin Glaberman’s writings.3 In England, John Merrington had studied at Balliol, Oxford under Christopher Hill, had gone to Italy with Gramsci in mind and returned with a head (and suitcase) full of Tronti and Alquati. He and Ed Emery had provided to English militants, such as those involved in Big Flame, key translations of such Italian materials in various formats, including those published under the stamp of Red Notes. Peter Linebaugh, one of the editors of Zerowork, had studied with Edward Thompson and collaborated with comrades in London to study John and Ed’s translations.
Ferruccio Gambino’s voyages in the 1960s and 1970s repeatedly established or repaired communications across borders and across the North Atlantic. His study of workers’ struggles at British Ford, translated and published by Red Notes, offered militants on the island a local example of the kind of analysis Alquati had done on Fiat and his critique of the French regulation theorists showed how they had inverted operaismo’s workerist perspective into a capitalist one.4 Paolo Carpigano and Mario Montano had both studied elements of this history in Rome before joining the Zerowork collective. So too had Bruno Ramirez, who, having settled in Canada, had observed the influence of Correspondence and Facing Reality in that country and helped spread the ideas of the operaisti, influencing groups such as the New Tendency and the Toronto Struggle against Work Collective.5 In Paris, Yann Moulier-Boutang had translated and circulated operaisti ideas in Matériaux pour l’intervention and Comarades: revue militante dans l’autonomie.6 And, of course, major figures in the Wages for Housework Campaign, such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici and Selma James, were all familiar with developments in Italy. Selma’s experience reached all the way back to Correspondence and her marriage to C.L.R. James, while Mariarosa’s writings arose from participation in Potere Operaio, but dissatisfaction with its limited analysis of unwaged work.7 While a few of the above individuals, who were best situated, provided partial verbal accounts, and a handful of brief notes, none had constructed a comprehensive narrative of the evolution of either these ideas or of the network of those sharing them through the decades of the 1950s–1970s. As has so often been the case with militants, down through the ages, they were more preoccupied with developing and spreading the ideas and organising around them than in reconstructing their history. Thus, my voyage in 1978 and Steve’s in 1982.
The outgrowth of my discoveries was a distilled, brief summary of what I saw as the main innovations of this network, both theoretical and political, included in the introduction to my book Reading Capital Politically (1979). The outgrowth of Steve’s efforts was his dissertation, recrafted into Storming Heaven (2002) that provided a much more thorough, and more focused analysis of the emergence and development of operaismo in Italy. Although I had learned to read Italian in order to access and understand the operaisti writings, I was delighted and excited to discover how Steve was turning his much better command of the language, both written and spoken, to the task of a more comprehensive analysis than I had been able to carry out. Many of us, preoccupied with other projects but inspired by the past and unfolding, innovative work of Italian autonomist Marxists, are grateful for his ongoing work on this subject. That work has made him a key figure in the ongoing evolution of the international kinship network described above.
Harry Cleaver
Austin, Texas
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1 We can observe just such a pattern of using the terrorism of the few to justify the repression of the many in Turkey, whose president, Tayyip Erdoğan, has been jailing thousands and rapidly removing all semblance of democracy and human rights in that country – a process that has resulted in his government’s efforts to join the European Union being put on hold and its membership in NATO questioned. In the case of Italy, despite widespread condemnation, there was no such official EU response to the April 1979 crackdown and subsequent repression.
2 Grace Lee Boggs (1998) Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 65. For a brief account of their collaboration that includes Castoriadis’ memories see www.zerowork.org/GenesisZ1.html.
3 Bruno Cartosio (1976) ‘Introduzione’ to M. Glaberman, Classe Operaia, imperialism e rivoluzione negli USA (Turin: Musolini).
4 The English translations of both works can be accessed at libcom.org.
5 At long last, an analysis of the historical experience of these autonomist groups has been provided by John Huot, one of the participants. See, John Huot, ‘Autonomist Marxism and Workplace Organizing in Canada in the 1970s’ Upping the Anti, No. 18, August 2016. Accessed online at http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/18-autonomist-marxism.
6 One example: Matériaux pour l’intervention, Les ouvriers contra l’etat et refus du travail, 1973.
7 See Mariarosa’s setting-the-record-straight statement on ‘Women and the Subversion of the Community’ and her cooperation with Selma James, written in response to assertions by James in Sex Race and Class, The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).