hydrarchist writes:

"Italian Operaismo Face to Face"

Enda Brophy

A Report on the ‘Operaismo a Convegno’ Conference, 1–2 June 2002, Rialto Occupato, Rome, Italy

The ‘Operaismo a Convegno’ conference took place
in Rome last summer during what was a transitional
moment in several respects. (1) The ‘movement of
movements’ seemed to be pausing, with its Italian
contingent caught between digesting the lessons of
Genoa and the need to consider objectives and
strategy in view of the European Social Forum which
was due to be held in Florence at the beginning of
November. In the meantime, the escalation of global
violence and rapid geopolitical swerves demanded
at the very least a rethinking of the theoretical and
practical categories that had seemed to suffice until
September 11. Adding to the sense of timeliness was
‘autonomist’ Marxism’s strong resonance outside of
Italy, due to the success of Michael Hardt and Toni
Negri’s Empire and the ability with which other
practitioners of the perspective (in North America and elsewhere) have
documented and translated its explanatory power. (2) Considering this, it was fitting that the legacies and contemporary directions of the diverse and dynamic
political tradition be rediscussed in its country of origin.

As Mariarosa Dalla Costa suggested later, the conference was an exceptionally
rare and special moment if only due to the presence of so many of the
tradition’s better-known figures in one space. Another of the participants,
Marco Berlinguer, echoed her thoughts on the second day, pointing out how
the moment was an ‘unprecedented’ and ‘previously unthinkable’ one. Indeed,
the bitterest of political defeats, the insult of occasionally lengthy prison terms,
and the twenty-plus years that have passed since that tremendously forceful
and creative cycle of struggle that shook Italy between 1968 and 1977 all
contributed to force material wedges between many of those in the tradition.

Operaismo has its roots as a theoretical body in post-war Italian history,
becoming a broadly social force towards the end of the 1960s and gaining
momentum until the end of the following decade. Central to its trajectory
was the growing estrangement of large swathes of the working class from
the institutions, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the major trade unions,
which had been up until that time the traditional reference points for the
Left. Negri, the tradition’s best-known theorist, suggests that operaismo emerged
‘as an attempt to respond to the crisis of the labour movement during the
1950s’. (3) As the decade of social upheaval wore on, the Italian revolutionary
Left grew in numbers and strength, becoming a social force to be reckoned
with. While, as some of the key figures of the period suggest, it is ‘literally
impossible to construct a unitary history of these movements’, (4) by the mid-
1970s, the extraparliamentary Left was able to mobilise groups of 20,000–30,000
on short notice in Milan, and had a strong presence in most Italian cities.(5)
Yet, towards the end of the decade, the movement collapsed due to a series
of factors. The first was state repression, eagerly participated in by the PCI
and ‘legitimated’ by part of the movement’s poorly thought-out adoption of
the ‘theory of the offensive’. The latter came about as an expression of the
inability of this part of the movement to adapt to a rapidly shifting political and economic context, in which older paradigms of revolution were held on
to at the expense of emergent and more creative ways of advancing class
interests. Awave of arrests was carried out in 1979, in which Pietro Calogero,
a Paduan magistrate with links to the PCI, targeted many of workerism’s
leading theorists. Often lengthy prison terms followed, with unsubstantiated
charges being dropped after a number of years. Some autonomists such as
Negri and Franco Berardi (Bifo), forced to escape the country, forged ties with
an emergent current in radical French thought (that, by the late 1970s,
had increasingly turned its attention to Italy), through poststructuralists
such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Ffilix Guattari. Many, such as
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, weathered the purge and took the path of committed
academic life.

Deep differences over key issues of theory and practice have further distanced
some of the protagonists of those years from each other, a process which
had already started by the end of the 1960s as the level of social conflict
in Italy escalated. The conference, therefore, as well as being occasionally
(and unavoidably) sentimental, was also a palpably tense affair at distinct
junctures.

Beyond the exceptionally high participation rate by several generations of
operaisti, however, the ultimate success of the conference was mainly due to
the indefatigable authors of Futuro Anteriore: Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi,
and Gigi Roggero. Working under the guidance of Romano Alquati, their
project, to look back at the rich legacy of operaismo in order to program paths
for contemporary moments of struggle and a parting of ways with capitalism,
seemed in one way or other to have struck a chord with all those present.
Over the seminar’s first day, presentations were made by Romano Alquati,
Mario Tronti, Claudio Greppi, Toni Negri, Giairo Daghini, Paolo Virno, Carlo
Formenti, Eugenia Parise, Marco Bascetta, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Judith Revel,
Enzo Modugno, Benedetto Vecchi, Oreste Scalzone (by videotape), Christian
Marazzi (by videotape), and Mariarosa Dalla Costa.

This two-day conference acted as the culmination of a first stage of public
debates around the book’s handling of the tradition, and the venue for it was
well-chosen. (6) The Rialto Occupato social centre is located in the heart of the
Roman ghetto, and seems to have finally been allowed to operate without
the need for barricades by the local comune. It includes three floors and an
idyllic courtyard that both provided shade from a terribly hot summer weekend
and acted as a backdrop for the first day of the talks. The hundred or so
chairs laid out remained mostly empty for at least an hour after the conference
was supposed to start, allowing those who had arrived early to take a look
at the excellent selection of books displayed by DeriveApprodi and talk.

Of particular interest, for a tradition that has long stressed the vital
importance of understanding working-class composition, was the makeup of
the crowd. While initially there were jokes amongst the participants that the
average age of the attendees was fifty, a strong cohort of younger people
trickled in as Saturday’s presentations began. This, in itself, underscored the
manner in which key themes and contributions stressed by various exponents
of operaismo still percolate in the experience of younger generations dealing
with what is a qualitatively different cycle of struggle. The number of attendees
grew to well over two hundred people at peak times.

The event was organised so that the first day was the province of the
movement’s theoreticians, with the second reserved for presentations and
debate between several militant gruppi di ricerca [research groups] from across
Italy. (7) While most of the first day’s presentations displayed affinities, in that
they were responses to the book, the sheer breadth of ideas unleashed by
workerism’s various exponents over four decades meant that the contributions
lacked a certain thematic cohesiveness.8 Due to this, subjects not given much
coverage in Futuro Anteriore occasionally became central to the conference’s
corpus of ideas.

Gigi Roggero’s thankfully welcomed this in his introduction, highlighting
the occasionally richly diverse trajectories taken by operaismo since its emergence.
While the original experience of Italian workerism may be dead, he reminded
the audience that it remains a ‘living political body’ to which we cannot
remain indifferent. This was, after all, a tradition that, beginning in the late
1950s, had the audacity to construct a new form of revolutionary theory and
practice, to propose a new socio-economic reading which indicated in the
‘mass worker’ a revolutionary subject capable of destabilising Fordist and
Taylorist configurations of production. Breaking decisively with traditional
leftist politics that idealised labour, operaismo advocated its refusal, putting
faith in a working-class desire to act ‘both for itself and for its self-extinction’
as a class. Flowing from these characteristics of the tradition is the ‘anticipatory’
power of the autonomist approach, at once able to comprehend key aspects
of struggles against Fordist capital as well as the latter’s reconfiguration
towards post-Fordist productive arrangements.

Having set the scene for a meeting that ‘probably could not have taken
place even a few years ago’, Roggero outlined the notion of subjectivity.
Central to the book’s thrust (here Alquati’s influence on the authors is felt
most deeply), subjectivity is a ‘contemporary node’ demanding the attention
of any research whose goal involves radical social transformation. Discarding
an understanding of subjectivity as somehow inherently radical, in Futuro
Anteriore the authors take pains to present it as an ‘ambivalent’ force. In this
way subjectivity can be ‘common’ that is, accepting of capitalist power relations,
or it can become a ‘counter-subjectivity’ formed through political intervention.
The notion cuts through a rather onerous list of terms and areas that Roggero
indicated as being open to discussion. These included biopolitics, the mass
worker, the multitude, the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy,
immaterial labour, and a series of others.(9)

Fittingly, it was the group’s mentor, Alquati, who began the series of talks
with a brief discussion centring around the potential benefits he saw as flowing
from the research contained in Futuro Anteriore. These, he suggested, revolved
around whether or not a new community of researchers could be formed that
was international in scope and not divided by pettiness or jealousies.10 This community of researchers would need to promote better, horizontal research
(presumably along the lines of how Futuro Anteriore was produced). After
providing anecdotes on the conditions in which groups such as Quaderni Rossi
and Classe Operaia carried out their forays into social theory, Alquati ended
his discussion with a question: ‘Are there the conditions to begin a new project
in this regard, one that can use communications technology in a more organic
way to achieve such a goal?’ Coming from a figure whose thought has probed
so many vital areas in the development of a methodology for militant research,
it clearly struck a chord with most of the participants.(11)

Mario Tronti’s presentation was longer and more complex. The full richness
of it, as is the case with several other presentations described, cannot be
rendered here. (12) Tronti’s work has significantly characterised the backbone of
operaismo’s thought, to the point where several of the book’s interviewees
refer to themselves as ‘Trontian’ (often as opposed to ‘Negrian’). These
references allude to one of the first and most important splits that characterised
workerism as a developing body of thought. Tronti’s work was central to the
perspective’s formation in making a decisive break with Marxisms that had
sometimes obsessively looked to capital for indications as to how workingclass
emancipation could occur. In Operai e Capitale, (13) Tronti’s partial
reformulation of Marxist theory is inscribed in the title – it is the activity of
the working class that enables capitalist innovation, in that the latter must
appropriate the fruits of this activity. (14) Stemming from this is the preoccupation
characteristic of the overwhelming majority of later autonomist thought: in
order to understand how workers can free themselves from capital, we must
understand the nature and composition of the working class. Where another
split comes, one that ultimately led to the demise of the Classe Operaia journal, is primarily in the articulation of strategy. While Tronti opted to remain within
the Italian Communist Party, thus endorsing an ‘external’ force capable of
promoting worker’s interests from a position of ingrained strength, the
‘Negrians’ followed this line of thought to a different conclusion, tending to
lump trade unions and the Communist Party in with capital. (15)

It was thus with particular attention that the crowd followed his talk, which
he began by noting that he was there primarily to listen. Tronti mused about
his surprise for the renewed interest in operaismo: ‘I would like to understand
the reasons for this, because I honestly cannot see the objective conditions
that might justify a return.’ Despite the misgivings, he praised the effort of
the authors, underlining the pleasure with which he noted Alquati’s ‘good
scholarship’ and the book’s ‘political approach’. While the authors take pains
to point out that theirs is not a historical work, he justly suggested that this
‘work of historical reconstruction is important’, urging us ‘not to underestimate
it. What is lacking from present practical and political theory’, Tronti said, ‘is
the capacity to tie together history and actuality, memory and perspective’.
Operaismo, it should be noted, was not a beginning for him, rather it was a
‘fundamental passage’, an experience, he said, ‘that in many respects was
a fundamental practical failure’. This failure was marked by the limits of a
political culture that were inadequate to the mass worker as a revolutionary
subject, one ultimately unable to fulfil its role as ‘both within and against’.
Thus the question this led up to became one of why Italian workers during
the decade of struggle ‘were unable to develop a force [forza] that could
become power [potenza]’, (16) in order to rival capital’s and to overcome it.

To begin to answer this question, that begged by failed revolutions, one
should avoid making too much of the distinction between the workers’
movement and its official representatives: (17) ‘It is a distinction that at a certain
point I dropped, and one that I believe should be dropped’. Rather, the answer to this question must come in the form of constructing what Tronti referred
to as a ‘unified history’ of the worker, running from the first industrial
revolution to the emergence of what lay beyond the mass worker whose
outlines the autonomists had traced. The history of the worker is one of
‘struggles and organisation . . . not just self-organisation, but organisation
from the exterior, from above’. Referring explicitly to the book’s recuperation
and refinement of Leninist concepts, he made the point that these were exactly
the notions Classe Operaia was working with as they distributed leaflets at
factory gates in the 1960s. Looking back on the twentieth century, Tronti
pointed out that it was not only one of global civil wars, but one of civil wars
amongst social classes. The present-day worker therefore is not only a subject
of capitalist production, but of world politics [politica-mondo]. In a move that
underscored the uniqueness of the day, he pointed out that to have placed
this development of the worker within a global dimension was a great
accomplishment of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Post-1968 however, he continued,
the emerging political culture has tended ‘in an unconsciously subaltern
manner, to destroy every form of polar conflict’. This tendency on the part
of the Left is the first thing that needs to be challenged, as the failures of
autonomist thought were to be found not in its lack of a political culture, but
in a ‘fear of the political’. (18)

Touching on a most delicate subject, Tronti reminded the audience that
there was indeed an attempt to develop a ‘force’ that could rival capital’s, in
this case ‘a bloc of political power with militaristic offshoots’. Understanding
this is part of not averting our eyes from reading a history that makes us
uncomfortable, of coming to terms with the fact that the foundations for some
actions taken in the name of the worker may have only been ideological. He
ended with a few words on the ‘multitude’, indicated as our contemporary
revolutionary subject by Hardt and Negri, pointing out that there is no intrinsic
disposition towards politics within this subject, a factor that demands
countermeasures. If this is the case, while the categories provided by the
authors (‘filites’, ‘militants’ and ‘movements’) were in need of refinement,
then production of alternative filites is a perfectly reasonable and even essential
goal in the enactment of social change.

Next up was Claudio Greppi who, true to his interview in Futuro Anteriore,
began by citing the importance of Tronti’s readings of Marx on the one hand
and Alquati’s research endeavours on the other.19 Picking up one of the themes
of the book (the tension between spontaneity and structure), he characterised
himself as being ‘essentially spontaneist’ back then, admitting that
organisational concerns such as those just elucidated by Tronti rarely concerned
him. ‘While in the 1960s it was clear enough what element was to be dislodged
in order to damage the whole system, today it is not’. Empire (the work would
emerge again and again over the course of the afternoon) can give a context
for the present, Greppi suggested, but it cannot solve this problem. In the
absence of a key for contemporary political intervention, even amidst the
global movement of movements that had just been consolidated in Porto
Alegre, there has emerged a certain ‘ideological’ quality. All that is given
relevance in contemporary critiques of globalised capital is the scarecrows it
erects, he continued, auspicating instead a return to critiques of ideology and
of the capitalist use of science. Greppi concluded by saying that Futuro Anteriore
was a book in which he ‘recognised’ himself, praising the ‘correct’ treatment
of the interviews by the authors.

Of a different tack was Toni Negri’s brief and polemical intervento. ‘I believe
that operaismo is dead’ he began. ‘What I understand from reading Marx,’ he
continued, ‘is that structure and substance go together’. Here, Negri tied the
methodology of conricerca to a specific kind of capitalist structure: ‘Today we
have been lucky enough to experience a passage, and we are intelligent
enough to be able to change method, that passage having occurred’. Granted,
the ambiguities within operaismo were ‘perverse’ in certain respects, and he
conceded that perhaps these needed to be confronted. Pausing, Negri continued
however by describing his present relationship with the body of ideas as one
that is ‘without passion’. Here, Toni echoed a sentiment that surfaced in
several of the presentations, a deep reluctance to re-open and re-evaluate old
categories and debates. In what could only be seen as a direct contradiction
of Tronti’s recipe for the multitude, Negri categorically (and energetically)
denied that the political subject was in need of direction. ‘It rankles me to
hear that the multitude needs an external politics in the same way that the
working class [classe operaia] did’. Its relationship towards politics in general could only be seen as vastly different from that of the mass worker, which
itself had a varied relationship to the political. ‘The working class’, Negri
continued, ‘was the soviet, the working class was the trade union, the working
class was the party’. Yet our contemporary project should be to interrogate
ourselves on the meaning of labour nowadays, he admonished the audience.
To speak of ‘operaismo . . . we must speak in terms of a formidable adventure
that we lived, of something that was absolutely fundamental in allowing us
to interpret and in allowing us to understand a fundamental passage, beyond
which labour, subjectivity, political culture, doing politics become something
else. No comparisons are admissible’.

Amidst a murmuring crowd, Giairo Daghini’s presentation returned to the
fluid nature of operaismo’s analysis, discussing how there were ‘no firm
reference points’ for it back then. In a point that belied Daghini’s formation
as a militant intellectual,20 he discussed labour as the ‘centre of things’ for
the operaisti. Yet, even back then, he recalled, there were signs that work was
in a process of becoming, of breaking free from a certain given form. These
‘fluxes of becoming’, according to Daghini, were evident wherever they looked,
from the Soviet Union to capital itself. ‘It can be said, therefore, that that
which was for an historical period a central subject, the working class, the
bearer of becoming, is now the multiplicity of minorities, of differences and
singularities’.

Paolo Virno’s characteristically sophisticated discussion began by commenting
how diverse an area of thought Italian workerism is. If operaismo were to be
considered a living organism, he quipped, then it would undoubtedly look
‘like Frankenstein’. The body of theory is ‘made up by now of too many
experiments . . . at times even practical experiments too different amongst
each other to refer back to a true family of thought’. When we speak of
operaismo, it becomes a sort of psychological experiment, Virno continued: ‘Is
it not true that when we speak of operaismo today we speak of it in quotes
or in italics?’ This suggests we need to consider alternatives, a new ‘order of
names’, and ‘other words’. His presentation made the vital point that the
defining moment for Italian workerism came in the 1960s, after which
subsequent experiences can only be seen as offshoots. (21) Stressing this, he differentiated between that ‘original’ body of thought and what occurred from
the mid-1980s onwards: ‘that is, the failure, the defeat of the second cycle of
revolution’. Here he was referring to what is a continual point of return for
autonomist (especially that which identifies as ‘post-workerist’) thought: the
notion that the productive shift between Fordism and post-Fordism can be
seen as a revolutionary one, despite the fact that it resulted in a temporary
victory for capital. This ‘second revolution of the past century, after that of
the 1920s’, is, according to Virno, ‘historiographically ascertainable’. Yet what
remains of workerism, despite defeated revolution, is its style, which seeks
always to operate where ‘the contradictions are most extreme . . . where the
paradoxes are least governable, where the weathervane is most deceptive’.
Virno continued by indicating in journals such as Futur Antfirieur and Luogo
Comune helpful attempts to transcend older categories by looking at the new
social co-operation as a basis for understanding constitution. (22) Here, while
moving on from older categories that when uttered immediately seem to
preclude any fruitful discussion, attempts have been made to examine forms
of productive co-operation in which language, communication and knowledge
play decisive parts, in which the so-called ‘general intellect’ referred to by
Marx has ‘become living labour’. The political, in other words, has been justly
re-framed within a new form of productive co-operation. This, in turn,
guarantees that Tronti’s discussion of the intellectual’s role ‘gains a particular
relevance’. While maintaining that their respective notions of ‘the intellectual’
might be different, Virno returned to new forms of co-operation within
capitalism. ‘Would it not be the case’, he ended up by asking, ‘to ascribe
many of our difficulties, even theoretical and practical, to a situation in which
both legitimately and literally . . . one can speak of a communism of capital?’(23)

Of particular relevance to this alleged facet of informational capitalism
were the thematically related and equally incisive discussions by Carlo
Formenti, Franco Berardi (Bifo), and Christian Marazzi. (24) ‘That which remains
alive within Frankenstein has much to do’, Formenti began, ‘with a style’.
This style revolved around twin characteristics, ‘autonomy’ and ‘ambiguity’,
ones he outlined in a series of questions. If the 1970s was indeed a revolution
inasmuch as it involved ‘the suspension of capitalist control’, is it not possible
that capital itself has never recovered from this? The net economy, that distinct
phase of accumulation which he referred to as an ‘economy of desire’, has
doubtless imploded over the last two years. This implosion, as Formenti
suggests in Mercanti di Futuro, was inextricably related to resistance on the
part of a new working class to the planning laid out for it by hyper-capital.
File sharing has continued to be indulged in by millions around the planet
‘not because they are organised or ideologically oriented, but because there
has been a paradigm shift, in the facts rather than the theory, of capitalist
development’. The resulting euphoria around the ‘new economy’ was the
result of an ‘incredible mirage’ experienced by mental workers who lived
this process, that of a ‘communism of the rich in America’. One of the first
conclusions to be drawn from this semi-failure is that, when capitalism is
forced – as Formenti suggests is the case under post-Fordism – to subsume
within itself co-operative forms of social relations that are anathema to it, it
inevitably brings upon itself deep problems in its ability to accumulate. Here,
capital must begin another project of formal subsumption, it must deal with
social autonomy, creativity, desire, communities, and concrete subjects. Breaking
away from both Negri and Hardt’s borderless rendition of power in Empire
and the framework proffered by Tronti, however, Carlo went on to insist that
‘the political’ remained an enemy. Post-September 11, he contextualised the
American shift from a communication economy towards a military one as
fully within the grand tradition of capital’s ability to restructure itself when
faced with resistance. As an antidote, he warned against resurrecting old
foes, but rather proposed that contemporary social movements ought to
take advantage of capital’s ‘folly’. In order to survive, capital must ‘become
necessary’ suggested Formenti, and this was its weak point.(25)

Franco Berardi (Bifo)’s contribution (26) began by outlining the importance of
communication processes to contemporary capitalism as well as to the
movements within and against it, and the consequent necessity to focus on
them as an object of study. As a means for arriving at this conclusion, Bifo
began by discussing how he had never felt comfortable with operaismo as a
moniker for the group’s ideas. This was an expression used by journalists,
perpetually able to extract ‘the inessential’ from social processes. Yet, at the
same time, there ‘is a strong specificity and homogeneity of the experiences’,
which valorised stressing unity over rupture in the perspective. What best
captures this specificity of autonomist thought, according to Berardi is not
the reference to a single, immutable social subject (i.e. the ‘mass worker’),
but rather a ‘method’, that of ‘compositionism’. The theoretical move is an
incisive one, arguably freeing autonomist thinking from the accusation
that it was relevant only during a specific historical period.(27) ‘In that concept,
class composition, composition, combination, there is something that . . . permits
us to emancipate ourselves with respect to a modern political tradition
that locates accomplished subjectivities, that locates relatively identifiable
political blocs . ..’

Following this vindication of compositionism, Bifo suggested that he could
not even begin to ‘pose himself the problem’ of ‘working-class defeat. What
is important is not to win or to lose, what is important is to be impeccable.
In this situation . . . what is in play is an interminable dynamic, a dynamic
that does not conclude itself, that therefore cannot be concluded with a victory
as much as it cannot be concluded in defeat’. In this key, he briefly suggested
that the struggle around the workers’ statute in Italy28 was ‘noble yet impotent’.
The figure of the worker cannot be resurrected amidst the profound
fractalisation of the process of labour, one that accompanied its increasing
cognitisation. In essence, our working time has been splintered into so many
millions of pieces, of microseconds, that there can be no single worker identity
any longer, only a plurality of diverse ones. Picking up on a theme dealt with in La Fabbrica dell’infelicità, Bifo wrapped things up by stating that the crisis
of informational capitalism is to be located primarily in the nervous breakdown
of the modern worker. Unable to keep the dizzying pace imposed by hypercapitalism,
‘psychopathic epidemics’ have begun to break out amongst what
Nick Dyer-Witheford would refer to as its ‘value-subjects’. (29) Considering all
of this, he ended by suggesting that analysing the new institutions of selforganised
work is the direction that needs to be taken by future generations
of researchers.

Christian Marazzi’s contribution, a recorded one, covered similar territory
to that reflected on by Bifo and Formenti. Rather than deny any continuity
between the beginning of workerism and current projects engaged in by
the tradition (as Negri had done), Marazzi suggested that the ‘common
denominator’ of the work of research and political action is a particular
method. Tronti’s vital assertion, that as far as the subjects and processes
to be examined it was ‘class first and then capital’ is, ‘still to this day, a
fundamental assumption of workerism’. From this, a series of lines of research
emerged, such as the emergent analysis of the importance of language,30 the
classic one of labour and its modifications, or the state-form and its crisis.
These paths, while leading to the uncovering of categories such as biopolitics
and the multitude, according to Marazzi still leave unresolved the most
important question, that of the ‘becoming of conflict. The problem’, he
continued, ‘is that the multitude in a certain sense registers, from a sociological
point of view . . . a condition and a state of society more than alluding directly
or even indirectly to forms of conflictual subjectivity’.

Another area Marazzi’s talk confronted was the materiality of workerism’s
own existence as a movement. While having ‘well-identifiable origins’, operaismo
‘was never a movement with its own compactness and its own linearity . . . if
anything it was very important at the point in which it shattered’. With
tremendous insight, Marazzi suggested that feminism was one of the primary
causes for a crisis internal to the tradition, exposing a series of its weaknesses
and forcing it to expand beyond its theoretical limits. What the feminist
tradition brought about was attention, employing a workerist method, to the
thematic of reproduction. ‘This is fundamental’, Marazzi said, suggesting that a closer look at the crisis and transformation induced by the feminist critique
reveal that only after this rupture does the analysis of the subsumption of
life itself engaged in by the workerist perspective become a possibility. In
this sense, he suggested, some of workerism’s discontinuities are more defining
than its continuities.

Finally, implicitly highlighting a subtle change in course from one of Empire’s
dominant strands of analysis, Marazzi claimed that we are presently confronting
a ‘particular form of biopolitics . . . thanatopolitics [thananatopolitica], the politics
of death’. Echoing the dominant theme of his recent book, Capitale & linguaggio,
he underlined the shift on the part of capital in ‘its imperial form’ towards
the annihilation of the other. While biopolitics can and must be seen in its
‘historical dimension’, that is, the intervention of the state in the reproduction
of labour-power, presently biopolitics offers itself ‘as a form of pathological
management, a pathologisation of the very existence of labour-power’. Here,
Marazzi ended an enriching but brief talk by (again implicitly) suggesting
that the validity of Empire and the theoretical framework it offers was now
somewhat compromised by the events of September 11 and the shift between
Clinton and Bush, and that the category of biopolitics itself needed to be
questioned’.

Marco Bascetta considered the question of why there remains a curiosity
around operaismo. Heading in the opposite direction from that of Tronti, he
wondered whether this generalised avoidance of the political was actually a
reason for workerism’s continued relevance, especially with regard to
contemporary movements. If, on a global scale, the continued relevance of
the political was exemplified by the resurgence of fundamentalism, then our
present problem within this scenario is not much different from that confronted
by groups such as Potere Operaio (PO) back in the early 1970s. That is, what
are the forms of organisation to be taken by the ‘movement of movements’?"

Francesca Pozzi’s short talk introduced Eugenia Parise, the first female
speaker of the day. Considering that, by this point, over three hours had
passed, this could definitely be seen as a problem for the conference, an
unfortunately familiar one for the autonomist tradition.31 Here, the domination
of groups such as PO by men during the 1970s was reproduced in a
contemporary context, yet, as we shall see, there were reasons for optimism.
The first of these is Francesca Pozzi’s parallel and ongoing inquiry into the history of Italian feminism, the results of which were the attendance of women
such as Parise at the conference. The second lies in the fact that, despite the
questionable gender dynamics of Italian autonomist thought and practice as
a whole, the strains of feminist thought influenced by it remain a rich resource
from which projects such as Francesca’s can draw. These ‘feminisms’, as she
referred to them, developed primarily during the 1970s, the most ‘autonomist’
articulation of which remains Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s group, Lotta Femminista.
Drawing directly on this legacy, Pozzi correctly pointed out that, if the processes
of social production and reproduction were vital to contemporary capital,
then the role of women in relation to this obviously becomes strategic. ‘Do
we want to turn a capitalist patriarchy into a capitalist matriarchy’, she ended
off by asking, ‘or are we fighting against this capitalism and against this
patriarchy for a new relationship between the genders renewed in a new
difference?’

The matter of gender representation was mentioned explicitly by Parise in
a talk that was exceptionally brief because in her own words she had ‘to go’
and ‘did not have much to say’. While the presentation opened up important
questions (‘. . . when we speak of politics I see we that we research everything
else, and never feminisms’), it let them drop without confronting what could
have resulted in an important discussion. What was most important about
the authors’ project, Parise continued, was building networks of militancy.
For this reason, she supported the book during the Salerno meeting, and
because the interrogation of older traditions might bring to the fore specific
and obvious gender dynamics that plagued the movements of the 1970s. This
was made particularly important due to the fact that, from her limited contact
with the ‘no-global’ movement, she still discerned customs and attitudes that
are ‘old and frustrating ones’. Her last statement betrayed a certain annoyance,
thanking Franci for convincing her to come to Rome. Their shared concern
was that ‘female voices had to be present during seminar, which risked being
a meeting in which the feminine presence . . . the feminine body risked being
torn apart, to disappear in these attempts to re-think workerism as an historical
experience, living or dead as it might be . . .’

If there were a need to fill the gender disparity, however, Mariarosa Dalla
Costa’s presentation certainly did this. The talk, taking up the better part of
an hour and coming complete with a title (‘The Door of the Orchard and of
the Garden’), demonstrated the Marxist-feminist’s famous commitment to
any intellectual project she undertakes. While having been unable to participate
during the ‘conricerca’ phase before the book’s formulation (and thus becoming
one of the CD’s only gaps) due to the conflict between it and her other work,32
Dalla Costa more than made up for this. Her intervento became what the
project had been missing: a long discussion of her personal history, path, and
development, moving from PO (in which she participated from 1967–71),
through Lotta Femminista (LF), to her engagement with an international
community of researchers, to the present focus of her work.33 Identifying
as part of the feminism of autonomist derivation, she mused: ‘Why am I
here after thirty years? The answer is simple. Because this is my home. Here
I was born, here my political formation came about, but above all this is
the experience that I searched for and which gave an answer to my need
to understand and act’.

This said, Dalla Costa enumerated her own areas of inquiry, all of which
are a part of social reproduction. The first is the abuse of hysterectomy as a
devastation of the ‘orchard of reproduction internal to the female body’, and
thus the ‘devastation of the sites of the generation of life and pleasure’.
Secondly, there is the ‘labour of reproduction as a labour of production and
care for life’, which she identified as ‘question remaining unanswered’. Finally
there was that of the earth ‘as orchard and garden of the reproduction external
to bodies, because the earth is not only a source of nourishment, but from
the earth bodies gain spirit, sensations, and the imaginary’.34 In the first of
these areas of study and intervention, Dalla Costa spoke of the related difficulties
of researching such a topic and challenging the medical establishment over
their practices. (35) Here was, therefore, a critique along the lines of what Greppi
had claimed was necessary:

What are in question are the types of science that assault us, the interests
of the medical profession, the further deformations produced in the health
system by the policies of large financial organisms that, in a neoliberal
perspective, reduce ever more to commodities the life of citizens and the
physical and social body that encases it.

While the breadth of Dalla Costa’s presentation cannot be properly treated
here, her reflections on her own path made for fascinating listening. Looking
back on her parting of ways with PO (the male-female relationship within
that milieu, she stated, was not characterised by sufficient ‘dignity’) she
covered the birth of Lotta Femminista’s perspective. ‘We revealed that production
originated fundamentally from two poles, the factory and the house, and that
the woman, exactly because she produced capitalism’s fundamental commodity,
possessed a fundamental lever of social power: she could refuse to produce’.
Dalla Costa offered rich little insights into the materiality of a life’s work,
such as her humorous recounting of LF’s limited means of communication,
or how their movement was in a bitter irony ultimately hampered by a lack
of funds. Tying these into broader historical processes, such as the particular
fate reserved for revolutionary feminist thought in Italy amidst the repression
of dissent during the early 1980s, she closed the account of a chapter of her
life by saying that in neither of the two groups did she experience ‘a single
moment of joy’. All that she remembered was the immense fatigue brought
on by those struggles: ‘what I was missing was something able to move me
in a positive manner, to provoke a strong collective imagination, to reveal
different scenarios’. It is at this point that a series of new social movements –
indigenous rebellions, peasant movements, those of fishermen, those
of populations against dams or deforestation – which all posed the earth
as central in their struggles provided her with what she had been missing.
‘The matter of the earth obligated us to rethink that of reproduction, [the]
reproduction of humanity if we want to think in global terms’. (36) Her talk
finished by suggesting the need to recognise the centrality of these questions
and strengthen relationships with movements engaged on this front.

Judith Revel, who began a wonderfully thoughtful presentation by stating
that she would be disappointed ‘if there were a niche in which only women
were allowed to speak of women’, did not amplify the frustration betrayed
by Pozzi or Parise. This she would return to later, but the first broad thematic
that she outlined was that of ‘passages of continuity and discontinuity’. Here,
Revel highlighted that what had been employed up to that point were actually
two different lexicons: ‘. . . on the one side class, etc, on the other, terms that
are [part of ] another vocabulary’. Referring to the split between those who at a certain point took a poststructuralist turn and those who have remained
more wholly within the Marxist canon, she denied the incompatibility of
these, and yet suggested that at least they ‘should be posed as a problem’.
The problem of language however is not only that of communication or
information, ‘because a community is not enough to make a common language’
and ‘a common language is not enough to make community’. Moving on,
Revel pointed to reproduction as ‘that work of generation, and thus of creation,
of invention, the paradigm of which is the reproduction of children, or female
labour that is not considered as such. Here, while praising Dalla Costa’s focus
on reproduction, she stated that ‘women speaking of women . . . is not far
from men speaking to men, for men and of men’. Speaking of subjectivity,
Revel expressed her interest in its ‘forward’ production rather than the
opposite. (37) This she used to contest the notion of counter-subjectivity ‘because
if one is against then one is against something, and that something, in its
oneness, in its unity, in its visibility, does not exist anymore’. In conclusion,
she returned to conricerca as a method, the importance of which is to be found
in the ‘construction of a language’, the ‘construction of paths’ and the
‘construction of identity’.

With this ended a formidable first day of talks. The second day, while in
some ways equally rich, was most important in that it offered a chance for
various militant research groups to come together and communicate amongst
each other. Opened by Guido Borio’s introduction, this portion of the conference
was geared towards ‘enriching experiences and paths’ of various forms
of research and political intervention. Featuring contributions by Andrea
Fumagalli, Pasquale Vilarda, Marco Berlinguer, Maurizio Bergamaschi, Lorenzo
Calamosca, Antonio Conte, Andrea Russo, Carlos Prieto, Francesco Raparelli,
and Roberto Ciccarelli, it accomplished this satisfactorily. What was perhaps
most remarkable was the cross-section of operaismo’s legacy that it offered,
covering research emerging from the centri sociali, the more radical corners
of Italian academia, from a dialogue with the Partito di Rifondazione
Comunista, and that of independent groups.

The first talk of the day however, completing Saturday’s schedule, was
Oreste Scalzone’s. Delivered by video due to his exile in France, he began by noting that he was speaking to those who were his ‘teachers’. It was his role
during those heady times to translate what he thought were the perspective’s
subversive strengths, ones he initially encountered with Operai e Capitale, with
which he was ‘thunderstruck’. This role was not that of a student though
(since, as he said, he might be defined a ‘bad student’), but of one ‘in charge
of the drills’. That Scalzone was headed towards uncomfortable territory was
only confirmed by his question: ‘Is it not that there is . . . an opaque zone,
one of difficulty and suffering with respect to the discussion of a certain
autonomy of operaismo’s within the sphere of action?’ (38) Some of operaismo’s
founders located their own role within class struggle as a catalytic one at the
time. ‘Within this, we were something like the accumulation [of tactics], as
if around us there were models: on the one hand in a way a classic extraparliamentary
group’ the autonomous assemblies, etc., ‘and then there were
the Red Brigades, the armed groups, later the archipelago of organisational
forms that had autonomy in a wide sense’. One got the feeling from Scalzone’s
talk that he was desperately trying to bring those involved in the conference
back to the materiality of operaismo’s praxis. ‘When one speaks, for example,
of PO . . . at times one has the sensation of a kind of fluid inside the fluid . . . as
if it were a state of mind, an idea; in reality it was a material body, a militant
organism that made, unmade, committed errors, got it right, gambled, lost . . .’.
While lauding Empire and its different sensibility, Scalzone targeted the problem
of creating heroes for a movement, each with their respective pedestals. ‘It
isn’t only a problem of putting together polemical pamphlets, it is the problem
of understanding whether or not it is necessary to give ourselves forms that
are congruent with our discourse, or otherwise say it to ourselves clearly’.
Going back to Tronti, he ended by suggesting that we should not be afraid
of articulating political forms in a different and new way, perhaps along the
lines of revolutionary syndicalism. This would be ‘a vindication located on
the terrain of resistances, of the sabotage of this swallowing up of life and of
the most extreme paradoxes . . . of the capital-state logic of our phase’.

The rest of the day brought with it accounts of several local research
experiences, such as that of the Bologna-based Libera Università Contropiani
discussed by Maurizio Bergamaschi. Taking its cue from Libur (an experience
born within the Rialto Occupato), the research project engages with three
areas: ‘reading in the local the transformations that intervene on a global
plane’, the method of research itself, and the attempt to put different experiences
and subjectivities in Bologna on common ground. Finding expression in a
series of public debates around urban transformation, the self-interrogation
over political categories to which the movement had subjected itself, and the
unresolved theme of work, the project was a good example of locally rooted
experiments in militant research and intervention.

It was Fumagalli (39) who perhaps captured this legacy best, noting that ‘the
first task of a social researcher should be to grasp the continual elements of
transformation, therefore it is never research as an end in itself, it is never
research that has an end. It is a research that is in continual movement, that
generates situations even of contradictions internal to the research process’.

Ultimately, it was this sense of dynamism that marked the ‘Operaismo a
Convegno’ conference. While, at times, the result of bringing together such
a rich and varied legacy was a cacophony of terms, objects of inquiry,
organisational forms, and perspectives, this feature paradoxically became the
conference’s most attractive quality. The stunning diversity within autonomist
Marxism as a body of thought, one that this report has tried with great
difficulty to capture the breadth of, means that those who declare it to be
dead are passing a hasty judgement. At the very least, as we have seen, they
must name the particular offshoot that has withered. If, in turn, debates over
this will doubtless continue, they can only be testament to the fact that far
from being anachronistic, autonomist thought has demonstrated a tremendously
resilient ability to mutate along with the times.