"The Tribe of Moles" (Part Two)
Sergio Bologna

[This essay continues from here.]

A New Political Cycle of Struggles:The Generalisation of the Political Behaviour of the Mass Worker

But if the identity of the mass worker as political subject was now dead — long live the mass worker! A political cycle of struggles as deeply rooted and powerful as that which led from the mass confrontation of Piazza Statuto (Turin, 1961) to the generalised offensive of the Hot Autumn (1969) — throughout which the mass worker of large-scale industry had acted as the central driving force — could hardly be expected to disappear without a trace! It was bound to set in motion a whole series of secondary effects and irreversible mechanisms, imposing its specific hegemony on the composition of the entire class.In fact there were plenty of signs of this. Besides the network of smaller factories which began to explode one after another, the rest of the labour force at all levels took the cue and began to organise and struggle along the same lines as the workers of the big factories. Apart from the affirmation of a similar model of political-trade union activity, we find parallel forms of collective behaviour and practices of struggle. The hegemony of the workers over salaried employees can be seen in the mass picketing by bank employees, including violent confrontations with the police and scabs (the police were by now being used regularly against pickets); or in the "internal marches" (characteristic form of mobilisation at FIAT) by Government employees at the Ministries. Not to mention certain more specific effects, such as the workers' use of labour tribunals. This began to provide certain levels of the magistracy with a platform to break away from the impasse of a purely juridical-formal battle for respect of labour codes and guarantees against the illegal practices of the judiciary ñ hence the emergence of a new working-class practice in jurisprudence.

Further, the struggle over health and safety at work provided a platform for doctors to break away from the corporate interests of the medical profession: hence the beginning of mass criticism of the medical profession and the medical-pharmaceutical power-bloc, which has been one of the major conquests of working-class hegemony at the institutional level. Class resistance to restructuration and technological innovation in the plants led engineers and technicians also to a critique of the organisation of machinery and plants from a working-class viewpoint. Finally, there was the unification of grading systems for staff and workers (staff status), together with the conquest of the "150 Hours" (workers' paid study-leave) conceded in the engineering workers' contract of 1972 and subsequently generalised. Autonomous and distinct from both professional work-retraining schemes and trade union training courses, this latter victory reimposed a working-class, factory presence in the State schools and universities.

The arrival of the "150 Hours" workers on study-leave in the universities meant a radical change. The effects of freeing entry to the universities became macroscopic. Two new elements threw the old elite and academic forms into crisis: students of proletarian background/students who had been proletarianised, and the worker-students. There was also the generational factor ñ the youth enrolling in universities have behind them a High School movement, both compact and tested in mass activism in the streets. Those arriving from technical and commercial or accountancy schools come from a background of struggles around the relation between education and employment. The mass meeting remains the basis of political formation, but the political structure of the militants comes from the servizio d'ordine (the organisation of stewards, the "shock troops" at demonstrations), and from political organising in the community.

The Newly Defined Role of the University, and the Emergence of the Women's Movement

This new generation of entrants to the University found nothing new or superior in terms of culture and means of political expression, than what had already been conquered in the High Schools, or through activity in political groups. In comparison, the University appeared as a lifeless, squalid, bureaucratic structure, which offered little. The old academic elite, despite the student revolt of 1968, had succeeded in co-opting a new generation of young opportunist teachers. The picturesque arrogance of the older academics was being replaced by a new generation of mercurial and spent individuals. The "New Left" intellectuals of the 1968 vintage, and those formed in the so-called minority groups of the 'sixties, if not openly "sold out", were either at the service of the Trade Union Left, or were practising a dual role of organisational militancy combined with "scientific" academicism. Any possibility of a new culture, a re-evaluation and re-launching of revolutionary theory and creation of new theoretical weapons that the University could offer, were openly discouraged both by the groups and by Left journalism and publishing. Hence the University was taken for what it was: a bureaucratic filter of social mobility and nothing more. The contents of academic culture were not challenged: instead there was a wholesale desertion of lectures and seminars. The struggle against selection of intake, as in 1968, no longer made sense, since the State itself had imposed massification and free entry. Selection now took place at other levels ñ at the level of income and needs: no longer by the vote of academic functionaries, but by the structural inadequacy of services. The impact of the crisis and the rise in the cost of living played the decisive role here.

This account takes us to the end of 1973, and the Oil Crisis, which we take as the conventional date for the opening of the second phase. But before we go on, we must turn to the decisive event which began to transform the conditions of the movement from 1970–71, still in the earlier phase: the birth of the feminist movement. This immediately posed a question of hegemony over the whole social fabric, hence was analogous, in its dimension and its claims, to the hegemony of the mass worker. The specific, autonomous interests of women, organised by women, not only directly challenge family relations of production. they also, by taking an autonomous political form as an independent feminist movement, involved a radical separation from the mediations of the "party system", from Trade Union representation, but also, above all, from the revolutionary Left groups themselves. With women's self-discovery and their claim to control their bodies, their own needs and desires, their subjectivity, we see the beginnings of a new critique of alienated militancy ñ one of the key themes of the movement in the second phase ñ but also, and more fundamentally, the starting point for the general thematic of needs within the movement.

All this remained a latent tendency, however, until the beginning of the acute phase of the crisis in 1974–75. At the institutional level, this coincided with the defeat of the "strategy of tension". Just at the point when the violence of the crisis against the composition of the class reached its apex, the Italian Left ñ including a large part of the extra-parliamentary groups ñ were celebrating their victory at the institutional level, considering their mission practically accomplished!

The Error of Mistaking the Appearance For the Substance tf Power

Here we see in striking form the precipitation of all the contradictions, above all the gap between "politics" and class reality, which marked the "imperfect Togliattian" situation we described above. The attention of the Left was focused on the form of the State: but not the State form as measured or levelled against the autonomy of the working class. Rather, the State form was seen in itself, in its own autonomy, at the formal-political level only. The crisis of the Right-wing strategy of tension was mistakenly seen by the Left as the crisis of the State form. The forced abandonment by the DC Government of its underhand use of Fascist personnel and provocation was mistaken for the crisis of the regime. The temporary virulence of internal battles within the DC and the "separate bodies" of the State (secret services, security etc) was mistaken for a crisis of State command. This was to mistake the appearance for the substance of State power. Meanwhile, the real reconstruction of the "party system" proceeded from below; the form of the State had already penetrated the terrain of the factory, and by now only needed the ideology of the crisis to come out into the open, as a machine directly polarised against the interests of the working class.

Hence there was a temporary crisis at Government level, but combined with gradual "stabilisation" in the factories. The application of tough measures in high places; revelation of scandals, and intimidating Mafia-style behaviour at the highest level, exhibited in public; the corruption of the elite and the bureaucracy crudely exposed for the first time ñ but all in such a way as to demonstrate provocatively the privilege of impunity of the "party system". Ministers, attorney generals, bankers, police chiefs, whose illegal and underhand practices were amply proved and discussed, never suffered any penalty in terms of loss of personal freedom or income. Thus the scandals of the regime (which the imbeciles of Democrazia Proletaria, along with others tied to the bandwagon of the PCI, saw as the "definitive putrefaction of the system") only served in fact as an element of intimidation and hence reinforcement of the State form based on the party system.

Meanwhile "tough measures" were being adopted in the factory! From 1974 onwards, the tempo of factory closures, sackings and layoffs gathered pace, eased by systematic recourse to the cassa integrazione (the State-employer fund to compensate for periods of layoff from work, in crisis-hit industries and sectors). The system of labour-contract legal guarantees, established thanks to the workers' offensive of 1969, was not broken and remained intact. In other words, it was allowed to survive as a juridical-contractual framework. But the reality of "guarantee-ism", which does not depend on written statutes or labour contracts, but on the homogeneity and compactness of class organisation and the political network of class autonomy built in the factories in the preceding years — this was attacked by all means available.

As regards class subjectivity, which is our main focus in this article, a period of silence now sets in (apart from the well-known worsening of the conditions of work) — a silence in which we still find ourselves today. This occurred, in the absence of alternative political structures, with the decline of democratic trade union institutions. In the factory mass meetings, which became more and more infrequent, the workers no longer speak. They suffer in silence the continuous hammering-home of the official trade union line. ("Things could get worse"; "We have to accept the reality of the situation"; "We must tighten our belts, accept certain sacrifices" etc). They close themselves off into an attitude of non-expression of their own needs, and stand by while vanguard militants are intimidated, purged or expelled from the factory with the open complicity — indeed active connivance — of union and party officials. While the purging of militants had previously been a creeping, silent process, with the transition to the second phase it becomes open and demonstrative: the political confrontation with the workers becomes a frontal attack, a determined effort by the "party system" to normalise the behaviour of the workers and their forms of struggle. Seen in this context, the advances made in the sphere of "civil rights" in this new phase must be seen as a diversion ñ although we should not underestimate their effects, in legitimating the women's movement (and hence allowing it to advance on a broader political front) and in precipitating the crisis of the military institutions. Despite these positive aspects, however, there is no doubt that the macroscopic element of the period 1974–76 remains the inability of the workers' struggle to break the equilibrium of the "party system" and destabilise its internal relations.

In this temporary blunting of the political impact of working-class struggle, a considerable role has been played by the decentralised political-administrative structure of regional governments and local authorities. Increasingly they have intervened as mediators and arbitrators in factory confrontations.

A Developing Class Composition:The Role of the Small Factory and the Disseminated Worker

The smaller firms and plants have a special importance, for the class subjectivity and type of struggle that they engender. At this level, of piecemeal blow against counterblow, closures and occupations, it is precisely this war of position that gives rise to the recompositional processes of the working class. It is still difficult to establish, but probably the small factory has provided the best terrain, the "entry hole" through which the mole has started to dig once again. Of course, small factories are not homogeneous among themselves, and in fact exhibit sharp differences and contrasts. For example: differences between low technological levels, antiquated levels of organisation, and big innovative tendencies; between situations of total market paralysis and situations offering possibilities of fresh market penetration; locally-oriented factories, and factories serving only an international market; firms that are totally dependent on the stranglehold of credit, and firms like the co-operatives which are free from bankers' usury; from unionised firms to others (far greater in number) with no trade union organisation; from firms with a labour force which is marginal and underpaid, to those where it is highly paid and skilled; and finally, varying-sized factories where all these elements are combined under one roof. Precisely this level of dis-homogeneity means that the small-to-medium factory worker does not express a majoritarian social reference point for the class, whose demands and forms of struggle can be taken up at the general level of political objectives: furthermore, we cannot expect to see the kind of relationship (as with the large-scale factory) of mass vanguards capable of pulling behind them the whole of the movement. In other words, in this case there is a lack of these political mechanisms that had marked the cycle of struggles of the mass worker. But this does not mean that a general political potential does not exist: here we find instead a set of recompositional mechanisms that start, precisely, from a base of dis-homogeniety.

Let's begin with age: precisely because the small factory tends to use marginal labour-power, the presence of minors and very young people, if not typical, is nevertheless very frequent, and it is from the small factories that perhaps the most solid wing of the movement of proletarian youth has been recruited. At the same time, since the small factories employ a considerable number of women workers, they have also provided a recruiting ground for a sizeable wing of the women's movement, with a particular awareness of the problems of material needs. In addition there is the question of the work force involved in precarious work, work in the home, illegal work etc: the crisis has swept away the dividing partitions between the various "industrial formations" and has created the phenomenon of the "disseminated worker" (which can also be found in other specific epochs in the history of the Italian proletariat). In other words, the conscious dispersion of the labour force within a territorial dimension, in an intermediate condition between formal and real subjection to capital. This is a precise plan, put into operation against the political aggregation of the class. But, leaving aside these structural aspects, the big changes are to be seen in the subjectivity of the workers in the small factory, inasmuch as it is hard for them to apply organisation models and forms of struggle which really only apply in large-scale industry. Here we see the crisis in the trade-unionist style of operating that characterised the struggles of workers in the large factories. The transition whereby labour power becomes working class (a process which is guaranteed in the large factory by the very fact of massification) is a transition that the small-factory worker must win via political processes that are by no means "given". The practice of violence must make up for the lack of numbers and low level of massification. If the roots of direct-action armed workers' groups are to be found, historically, in the old "Stalingrads" of the working class, in political terms they are based on the standards of the small factory.

To sum up: the small factory has played a crucial role. It has provided a material terrain of recomposition for proletarian youth, for the women's movement, and for the struggle against overtime and illegal labour — and it has provided a channel of mediation between the behaviour of the disseminated worker and the behaviour of the workers based in the large industrial concentrations.

However, these positions regarding the small factory must not be taken in an "institutional" sense. In other words, the new class composition that emerges from the second phase has neither an institution to symbolise it, nor is it represented by a majority social figure. This becomes all the more evident if we examine the other large sector of recruitment — the service industries. Here we see familiar patterns repeating themselves. In all capitalist societies in the past 30 years, employment has uniformly stagnated in manufacturing and has increased in the services. However, what is not uniform is the level of wages within the respective service sectors, and the huge differences in levels of organisation and efficiency. Here, however, the problem is one of a particular political conjuncture. Namely: the unclear demarcation between the area of receivers of revenue and the area of services; the launching of the trade unions' reform programme after the Hot Autumn with the intention of diverting workers' pressure on the factory wage onto the indirect wage; the decentralisation of the functions of State administration: all these contribute to making the service sector a focal point for a particular set of political tensions. This becomes explosive when the idea of a right to an income becomes widespread, alongside the emerging political reality of the "new needs".

The Changing Position of Local Authority and Para-State Workers

The dominant fact in this situation is the increasing political pressure on the service sector, on the firms and agencies within that sector, and on the political and administrative institutions. This has built up through a whole range of subjective and structural pressures, all of which require a microscopic analysis. The fact of this pressure is the only element of homogeneity in the situation, because when we look at the levels of organisation, or the levels of organic composition of capital, we find radical differences. On the one hand there are the examples of firms like SIP and ENEL (petrochemicals and electricity). Here we find ourselves in an area of large-scale technological innovation, involving huge expenditure, backed by banks and finance institutions (SIP is far and away the most indebted of all Italian concerns), accompanied by phenomena of violent restructuration. We also find ourselves in one of the heartlands of the working class (St-Siemens, Face Standard, Ansaldo Meccanica, Breda, ex-Pellizzari), and at the same time in an area where sub-contracting has created a large pool of casual labour (forza-lavoro precario) (for example, SIP's travelling work-force). The workers' struggles and forms of organisation in these areas have followed the cycles of the wider class struggle, but the fact that these firms are at the centre of fundamental decisions regarding the so-called "model of development" (eg the question of energy policy) means that the workers' demands tend to slip out of the traditional channels of collective bargaining and into political debate tout court.

The situation is similar as regards the credit institutions. The fact that we are dealing here with workers who are often regarded as a privileged sector of the work force because of their relatively high wages, has not prevented their struggle from spreading to the point where it has found precise points of contact with the political form of the autonomy of the mass worker. In these areas the interlock with overall class composition has also been facilitated by the large numbers of workers from the credit institutions and from the service sector in general who have enrolled in the Universities. The fact that they are employed by interest-producing capital has allowed bank workers to grasp the way in which capital is managing the crisis, and the function of money within the crisis. However, here we still find ourselves within a framework of trade union control of the work force.

The situation alters radically when we look at hospital workers, local authority workers and social service workers. Here control of the work force is exercised directly by the "party-system". Here the "party system" is not able to delegate the basically political choices to "economic interests". It has to take initiatives directly at the level of the organisation of hierarchies and the organisation of work, at the level of cutting jobs and cutting labour costs, but above all in dealing with the growing demand for income and demand for services ñ ie dealing with the new class composition and the emerging system of "needs". This is the first test that the Communist Party has to face in its new role as the ruling party within local authorities. Certain institutions — the hospitals in particular — are exploding for the first time, uncovering conditions of work and wages that disappeared from industry years ago, as well as hierarchical structures that are inconceivable in this "age of egalitarianism". For the hospital workers in particular, CGIL leader Lama has reserved words even harsher than those he used on the students. The "party system" brought in the army to break their struggle. The logical sequence of clientelism — tertiary sector — subversion has been evoked to provide a basis whereby the institutional bloc can oppose the new types of struggles by the workers in the social services.

Transportation Workers,the Small Firm, and Aspects of Decentralisation

The situation is similar in the case of the transport workers, the third big sector feeding into this new class composition. Once again the "party system" and the trade unions function as command over the labour force. The struggles of the railway workers were treated in the same harsh manner as those of the hospital workers, but the fact that the trade union in question has a long (and some would say glorious) historical tradition made it all the more striking, the way this Union was rejected when it tried to take control of the work force and impose the politics of austerity. Whether for good or ill, in the hospitals the autonomous struggle has also sparked a process of unionisation. on the railways, on the other hand, there has been a mass, conscious rejection of CGIL union membership. But here we are dealing with things that are well-known...

Less well-known, but infinitely more explosive, is the situation in road transport. Here we are faced with a mass of waged workers and independent operators equal to twenty Mirafioris rolled into one. The "objective" weight of this work force is frightening, and it is perhaps the only section of the class today whose movements could paralyse the whole capitalist cycle. The strike of tanker drivers in the North-West gave a taste of this: the Communist Party, through the structure of the co-operatives, controls a fair slice of this sector. The tanker drivers' strike gave an indication of the possible levels of violence: 7–8,000 tyres slashed, according to trade union sources, within a very few days.

Here the "party system" (which, by the way, hurried to conclude the contract negotiations, despite the obvious desire of FIAT and the oil companies to provoke deadlock) made widespread use of the spectre of Chile, and once again repeated their operation of political marginalisation of the drivers' demands etc, in the same way as they had done for the railway workers, the hospital workers, and the social service and local authority workers.

Our account so far has left out the large number of workers in each of the above sectors who are employed by contractors and sub-contractors. Their numbers considerably increase the size of the work force that is commanded either directly or indirectly by the "party system" (or, more precisely, by the Christian Democrats or the Communist Party). This network of contract labour brings us right to the heartland's of lavoro nero ñ in other words, that very wide area of waged labour where the system of trade union guarantees is either fragile or non-existent. But is this network only characteristic of the State, local authority and service sectors? Far from it. It is the structure of the firm itself that is now being dissolved, as a means of producing commodities; the firm remains merely as chief clerk, as mere administration of decentralised labour; in fact, the firm dissolves itself as a subject or protagonist of conflict, as an institution of the class struggle. The firm is the fulcrum of the processes of tertiarisation. How can we speak of rigidity of the labour-market outside of this institutional break-up? The chain of infinite decentralisation of production breaks the rigidities of age and sex, of geographical location, of social background etc, and all this is a weighty factor in fusing the new class composition.

This chain of infinite decentralisation is one of the more "progressive" elements of capitalism today; it is a far more powerful weapon of massification than the assembly line. The factory,as an institution that is increasingly "guaranteed" and "protected", was becoming socially and politically isolated. It did not allow entry to young people, to women, to students; it imposed its hierarchies and its compartmentalisation's on the whole of society; it played a normative role as a complete, perfect social form. It has become necessary to encircle and envelop the factory, and this chain of infinite decentralisation offers us the material grounds for doing it.The process of decentralisation has created large numbers of openings into which the women, the young people, the students, the laid-off workers and the redundant workers have inserted themselves, taking on the aspect of waged workers. And in the meantime thousands of waged workers have been flowing out of the factories and into the Universities, taking on the status of students. These are both movements in the area of political demography, because the status of the waged worker and the status of the student have a precise legitimation within the institutional conflict-system in our country. The whole mechanism of the reproduction of classes had the institution of the factory as its bedrock (with the development of a system of trade-union guarantees, a "working-class aristocracy" was supposed to be reproduced in the factory) and the University as an institution of social promotion (where an anti-worker middle class was supposed to be created) ñ but this mechanism has exploded.

The Decentralisation of the Systems of Struggles, The Politics of "Personal Life"

So far we have shown that the system of decentralisation has allowed a "mixed" labour force to be absorbed within the wage relation, and that the processes of tertiarisation of the firm have, in turn, driven thousands of waged workers to become students. Having shown that these drives have conferred a new political legitimation on all those involved, we need not list the thousand-and-one positions that the students have taken up or can take up within the opportunities of wage labour that the system of decentralisation offers. These thousands of student-workers have brought a new political dimension to the condition of waged labour in which they find themselves, and it has proved possible to create a mutual strengthening of isolated struggles, even in situations where trade unionism is weak and where there are few situations of struggle. The University has been used as a focal point. Even this "squalid bureaucratic ante-chamber" has proved capable of becoming something different ñ a meeting point, an aggregation point for a system of struggles that is itself also infinitely decentralised. Meanwhile, after years of waiting, the old mole of the student struggle has also started digging again, on issues like canteens, housing, transport, and finally on course contents, exams, and voting rights. The proletarian (and proletarianised) student sectors were able to fuse themselves with the whole arc of struggles that the crisis was setting in motion.

But our analysis of these structural factors will be ineffective unless we can combine it with an analysis of the huge transformation taking place in the sphere of "personal life". This obviously starts from the breakdown of sexual relations brought on by feminism. It then widens to involve all the problems of controlling one's own body and the structures of perceptions, emotions and desires. This is not just a problem of "youth culture". It has working-class antecedents in the cycle of struggles of 1968–69. The defence of one's own physical integrity against being slaughtered by line-speeds and machinery, against being poisoned by the environment etc, on the one hand is a way of resisting the depreciation of the exchange value of one's labour-power and the deterioration of its use value, but at the same time it is a way of re-appropriating one's own body, for the free enjoyment of bodily needs. Here too there is a homogeneity, not a separation, between the behaviour of the young people, the women and the workers.

The question of drugs now arises. Control of drug usage is being re-appropriated by the institutions of the political cycle. No sooner have young people had a taste of soft drugs, giving them a first-hand taste of how much this society has robbed them of their perceptive potential, than the heroin multinational decides to step in and impose hard drugs. A space of political confrontation opens up, between use value (self-managed, within certain limits) and exchange value of drugs, and this involves organisation and instances of armed self-defence. Nor is the mechanism of the production of new needs the exclusive prerogative of the "liberation movements"... it has its roots in the "We Want Everything" of the Mirafiori workers in the Summer of 1969. The "Italian Utopia" has a solid working-class stamp, which no theorists of an American-style "movement" ñ ghettoised and self-sufficient ñ will be able to erase.

The Crisis of Political Forms, The Meaning of the Area of Autonomy

As we have seen, the re-conquest of "personal life" has also dealt a death-blow to the organisations of the revolutionary Left. But the roots of their organisational breakdown do not lie only in questions of sexual relations, of alienating hierarchies, the denial of subjectivity etc: they lie in precise, documentable errors of political choice, mistaken theories of organisation. For example, the current concept of power, which has been based on the old political cycle (struggle/party/transition/civil war/state power). In other words, a projection into the future, rather than a lived experience within the liberated spaces of the present. This error turns into parody when the groups all troop down into the electoral arena. The rotten institutional forms of politics, eaten away from the inside and abandoned by the more aware elements, become a form of oppression.

However, it would be wrong to theorise on the one hand an irrational society made up of pure behaviours, opposing, on the other, a society structured by logical schema's. What we have are hidden circuits involving particular groups, which then evolve into particular sets of results; there is in fact a conscious practice of the irrational, as a destruction of the bridging elements of language, communication and mediation. In short, any separation between the "post-political" (the area of instinct, of the irrational, the personal and the private) and the political cycle is unacceptable. It is not possible to confine the new subjectivity within the terms of youth counterculture, or to consider it an exclusive prerogative of the women. Current attempts to create an opposition between the liberation movement and the political cycle are false ñ as false as the theory that defines the new class composition as being made up of the unemployed and the marginalised sectors. The reality is that politics as a form has undergone a critique, on the basis of a battle between political lines, and this in turn has allowed the emergence of new organisations, which have been politically legitimated by their presence within those class nuclei outlined above.

The explosion of 1977, with the occupation of University facilities, was a violent confrontation between the State-form and the new political class composition. For a while this new class composition met and based itself in the University, taking it as a material base where different needs, different class segments, social groups, political groups and disseminated groups could come together. The University as an institution became a struggle-base, capable of representing all the various partial programmes of the new class composition.

The new emergence of the women's movement and the youth movement deepens the split with the organisations making up Democrazia Proletaria (Proletarian Democracy), but the real origins of this split are to be found in the political disagreements voiced by the emerging forces of the organised area of autonomy (l'autonomia organizata), in particular the groups representing Rome, the Po Valley and the Milano-Sesto-Bergamo axis. Now, if anything legitimated them as a "leading minority" in the very first phase of the occupation of the faculties, it was their relationship with the new class composition, with the service-sector proletariat in a big tertiary city like Rome, with the network of factory vanguards in the industrial zone between Milan and Bergamo, and with the needs of proletarian students and geographically disseminated workers in the Po Valley. The fact that they understood and had subjectively anticipated mass behaviours that were not locatable in the schema's of the wave of contestation in 1968, nor in those of the Hot Autumn ñ that fact allowed the people of the "organise autonomy" ñ albeit for a brief period ñ to carry forward a programme that matched the developing class composition. The relation between these autonomist fractions and the wider movement was on a par with the relation between the anarchist groups and the masses in the Sorbonne in May '68. The ability to match class composition with the political programme means the ability to practise the art of politics (or, more often, plain good sense), in order to pull together the vanguard and the average, the organisation and the movement.

But instead, with incredible speed, the hoary old questions started coming out: should the organisation, with its programme and its plans, march over the corpse of the movement; should the programme be external to and counterposed to the class composition? The echoes of the clashes in Bologna had hardly died away when everyone whipped out their Lenin masks from behind their backs ñ in particular the Workers' Autonomy tendency (Autonomia Operaia) in the North.

Meanwhile, in the actual struggle, important things were happening. The current interpretations of them (both those of the DP tendency and those of the autonomy tendency) are either wrong, or only half right. Particularly as regards the internal mechanics of the events of Bologna.

The main problem bringing about this split between class composition and the programme is the question of the "combat party" . When some fractions of the "organised autonomy" decide to force the pace on this front (with considerable internal differences between those who base themselves on the need for self-defence, and those who argue for a qualitative advance in organisation), not only does the DP front rebuild itself (Milan provides one example of this), but we also find a widespread and increasing resistance on the part of those "libertarian" elements who do not accept a re-introduction of voluntarist practices.

It was no accident that it fell to fractions of the organised autonomy to lead the first phase of the struggle. Their initial hegemony over the movement derived from their having understood and anticipated the forms of political behaviour that were characteristic of the new class composition; from the ability to read parts of the programme within the masses themselves; in other words, knowing how to present themselves not as a "private" thing, but as a "social" expression, a tendency of a growing movement, rather than a choice wholly confined within the logic of the self-reproduction of a political group. The developing critique of the traditional forms of politics (in particular of the "party form") has sharpened the sensibilities of comrades into an almost neurotic ability to intuit when particular choices and actions function "for all" and when they are only private and personal. Forcing the pace on the question of the "combat party" has set in motion all these mechanisms, and has opened up more contradictions within the movement than it has in the State apparatus! But then this is precisely the point: with this cycle of struggles, the State-form has undergone an evolution. It is perfectly clear that it has been proceeding full-tilt along the road of unifying the "party system" , and that law and order has been the main track along which this process of unification has passed. However, within the "party system" there have been different approaches (or perhaps a division of roles?) on how to proceed with a strengthening of the State-form.

Practical Experiments In A New State-Form

The Christian Democrats have taken the crude line of polishing up existing privileges of the forces of law and order (police laws of arrest etc), as well as introducing new rules and regulations. The effect of this is to confer the whole operation of deterrence onto the repressive apparatus, with the intention that, having dealt with the "autonomists" they will then be able to move against the wider movement of opposition. Certainly the DC has still done this after due consultation with the other parties (ie, respecting the rules of their joint project, and accepting the inevitable delays and discussions arising), but nevertheless the DC still bases itself on the State as an apparatus: a separate machine, a "special body", to be used as a means of repression in given emergency circumstances, and in the meantime it leaves the "daily repression" to the capitalist form of command over the factory and over disseminated labour.

The Communist Party in Bologna, on the other hand, has developed and experimented practically with a more mature State-form, a form which is more in line with mass social-democracy in a period of transition. A State-form in which it is the masses themselves who act as judge and jury, judging who is deviant and who is not, who is productive and who is not, what is socially dangerous and who is not. Now it is to be the factory mass meetings that expel the extremist; the mass tenants' meeting that decides to expel the young hooligan; and the college assembly to expel the "undesirable" student with his pistol and iron bar. Of course, the instances I am thinking of have been extreme cases ñ but the fact that this State-form is being tried out on the "autonomists" as guinea pigs does not lessen the marginalising potential of such a State-form within a framework of developing austerity, of the "politics of sacrifice" and of money being given hand over fist to capitalist enterprises. Once you have the collective acting as judge and jury, then the institutional forms of the law (wigs and robes etc) have only a ratifying function: they take delivery of the hostage, the tumour that has been driven out of the otherwise healthy body. The State-form appears as a kind of immunising process of civil society. This is a huge step forward ñ it is a moment of "socialisation of the State", which would be innovative were it not happening within a framework of a freezing of the class power balance, with a restoration of capitalist control at all levels, and a general amnesty for all the criminals, past and present, belonging to the apparatus of clientelism, corruption and repression. At the level of power-institutions it is undoubtedly a further element contributing to the stickiness of the situation, but at the same time we must understand its "progressive" character. It transcends two aspects of the present State-form: its aspect as a "party system", and its aspect as a bureaucratic-repressive apparatus, both of which are separate from and hostile to civil society. It is an infinitely more advanced form, a form which, among other things, has no need to break up the present institutional apparatus or purge it by substituting more democratic personnel... This State-form does more than that. It overturns the relationship between civil society and the apparatus. It appropriates the qualitative function of the judiciary, and leaves the apparatus with the quantitative translation, in terms of the penalties to be imposed. Henceforth it is civil society, the collectivity, which fixes the norm and formulates the sentence; while the apparatus is left with the technical task of punishment.

All this presents enormous problems for the legitimation of political actions, inasmuch as organisation is obliged to measure itself day by day against the new class composition; and must find its political programme only in the behaviour of the class, and not in some set of statutes; and thus must practise not political clandestinity, but its opposite. Those who practise technical clandestinity generally do not even see this State-form. They continue to relate to the State apparatuses, and by focusing all their attention on them, they then find themselves separated from the mass movement. On the other hand, those who choose political clandestinity ñ ie refuse to seek or create a base for criticism and legitimation of actions ñ not only undergo that same segregation from the mass movement, but are also smashed by the apparatus, because they do not have the defences and the weapons possessed by those in technical clandestinity. Now, while it is true that the PCI has proposed (and in some instances put into effect) this new, more advanced form of the State, as an experiment, in actual fact it has oscillated between this type of "political prevention" of subversive behaviour, and a complete delegation of repression to the State apparatus. In my own opinion, the first option carried far more weight, and in this sense I find tiresome and also incorrect the references that are presently being made to "a new Prague" or "a new Chile". But what we must clarify is the extent to which this proposition of a "social" State-form has met and will meet resistance and refusal at the various levels of the present class composition.

Leaving aside the resistance that it has met even among particular sectors of the judiciary itself (ie in a fraction of the apparatus itself), it has not been allowed to pass at the average level of class composition (I underline average). Not only because it aims to transfer to civil society only some (incidentally, the most odious) prerogatives of the State, and not other more attractive ones (like control of resources, for example). But also because it deludes itself into imagining that it can inject people with an abstract sense of the State, whereas in fact the State that people understand is this State ñ ie a State of given power relations and value systems that the working class started to unhinge in 1969, and which the "party system", with the crisis, has not only succeeded in setting back on its feet, but has also taken over as its own. The State-form is not a juridical principle, nor an abstract norm, but a formation that is historically determinate.

Towards A Mobilisation Of The Entire Mass Of Disseminated Labour

The theory that the University has functioned as a point of aggregation for the movement runs alongside a theory regarding the figure of the unemployed intellectual (or rather the intellectual unemployed), who has been taken, uncritically, as the most representative figure of the movement. The theory is that the exclusion of the intellectual unemployed from the labour market puts them on a par with other marginalised sectors, for whom the intellectual unemployed then act as a voice. I have already stated my complete disagreement with this kind of interpretation. The University was taken by the current class composition as a point of aggregation, more for reasons of the political forms of the struggle (ie for certain levels of violence and power) than for the fact that it is a factory producing unemployed intellectuals; it was taken up because it put an end to this process of the marginalisation of demands, subjective behaviours and organisation. But once again we must go beyond the University, both as a base for the movement and as a point of aggregation, in order to identify the channels that can bring about a mobilisation of the entire mass of disseminated labour ñ ie in order to provide a way into the factory that produces relative surplus value. For this reason I have taken pains to emphasise the question of precarious labour, together with the system of decentralisation of production, and that social area where the protected system of trade union "guarantees" of wages and conditions has entered into crisis. In order to make this transition it is vital that we first reject the "rhetoric of poverty" ñ moral protests on behalf of the poor. Instead, we should once again ask ourselves whether it is possible to think in terms of "mass objectives" of the type which characterised the anti-authoritarianism of 1968 (the FIAT workers' demand for "Grade 2 for all", which led into the egalitarianism of the demands put forward in the Hot Autumn of 1969).

Such a proposal cannot be simply written off as a step backwards in collective bargaining, that would prepare the ground for a new social contract between the Government and the unions. It would be absurd to reject it out of hand, for the simple reason that such new objectives would carry within them the representative weight of the infinite political creativity that has emerged in these past few years. Rather, the bigger problem is how we are going to find the point where such a project can be applied ñ in short, to choose the "new Mirafioris" out of all the various "driving sectors" of the so-called tertiary sector. More specifically, out of those sectors which function as a connecting link between the production of absolute surplus value and the production of relative surplus value ñ like, for example, the cycle of transportation. Moreoever, even in the simple extension of the rigidity of labour (even in its form as a system of trade union guarantee- ism) to lavoro nero, subcontracted work etc, would have the effect of forcing the factory struggle to take a leap forward. In short, we are looking for the social channels whereby we could break the encirclement that is currently under way, and prevent the movement dispersing itself into a thousand decentralised moments of struggle ñ a new, long Purgatory of endemic struggles. We have to find something which can function in the same way as did the strikes over pensions and the strikes over wage-zones did, in relation to the workers' cycle of struggles in 1968-69.

This approach will be branded as "economism" and "collective bargain-ism" by all and sundry. It will be accused of lack of imagination, in putting forward mechanisms that are dead and buried. But let's move gently. The State-form which presents itself today has its origins in the ideology of the crisis and in the austerity programme that this has brought about. The ideology has provided the grounds for establishing the new, tighter relations between the parties. It is the historical basis of the Historic Compromise. It is the justification of the parties' powers of marginalisation. To succeed in overthrowing all this would be no small matter. It would mean not a return to the old conflictual form of the mediations of the party system, but restoring the conflict between the "grass roots" and the new relationship between a socialised State-form and the production of capital. All the more so, since Jimmy Carter's imperialism ñ unlike the obtuse accountants of the IMF ñ has understood that in Italy the system of values and behaviours to which the combination of austerity measures and law and order has to be applied, is stronger than it appears. And therefore it's a good investment to release huge amounts of money (this is Carter's current inclination), and inject huge amounts of "command-money" through the big, private, international banking system. Let us start to turn this command into money-as-money ñ to transform this measure of power-over-others'-labour into power-over-our-own-needs, power over our own spaces of organisation and culture, a driving-spring for the new development of a new class composition. It is time that we take back from the "party system" their residual powers over the reproduction of the classes, so that we can start to determine this reproduction from the base, in such a way as to guarantee the value-systems and the political behaviours that the new class composition has legitimated in the struggles of these past months.