A Brief History of Autonomia Operia

Struggle, withdrawal, alienation, sabotage, lines of flight from the capitalist system of domination. Autonomy is the independence of social time from the temporality of capitalism.

– Franco "Bifo" Berardi

Autonomist Marxism was first developed in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, originating from Operaismo [lit. workerism], a core tenet of the Italian Left, and labour movement, which had been principally developed by Raniero Panzieri, who was considered the founder of the movement. The term “workerism” was originally viewed as derogatory term applied to radical perspectives and movements that blindly fetishized the industrial working class.

However, workerism in Italy had very different connotations, as it used to describe emerging radical groups, including not only Workers' Power but also segments of Workers' Autonomy [Autonomia Operaia], fronted by Antonio “Toni” Negri and The Struggle Goes On [Lotta Continua], Adriano Sofri, led by that insisted “upon the independence or autonomy of the working class in relation to the ongoing development of capital and indeed the priority of the working class's composition and action in determining the form and direction of that development.” (Negri, 2005).

To explore this movement, we must first discuss Panzieri's early intellectual development in relation to the Italian Marxist movement at the time. Neither encompassing idealism nor historicism, many of his writings of the early 1940s were committed to the advancement of an “authentically Marxist culture in Italy, were sometimes marred by a certain intolerance towards thinkers deemed renegades by Stalinism.” (Wright, 2017: 16). It was from this point, we can understand that from Raniero Panzieri’s perspective that the task of Marxism, was to “restore Marxism to its natural terrain, which is that of permanent critique”.

Panzieri’s involvement with the Italian Left was devoid of involvement from the institutional control of party leadership and bureaucrats. This was further intensified by Panzieri’s expulsion from the Italian Socialist Party, for his opposition to forming a government with the Italian Christian Democratic Party. After his expulsion he had decidedly moved to Turin, in order to start Quademi Rossi (Red Notebooks), an Italian political journal spearheaded by himself, as well as many others, such as Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Antonio Negri, and Danilo Montaldi.

This journal came to be known as one of the primary sources of Autonomist Marxism in Italy. The first issue of Panzieri's journal appeared in the second half of 1961, making a big splash within the Italian labour movement. Within a matter of weeks, Red Notebooks exhausted its first initial run of its journals, as Red Notebooks had excited interest amongst “politicians of the left, union officials, workplace activists as well as rank-and-file party members.” (Wright, 2017: 16) The journal enjoyed its success influencing the Italian labour movement at the time, greatly swaying its direction going forward. However, Quademi Rossi itself was not without its problems, as the journal suddenly “suffered an unexpected blow, from Panzieri's death, in October 1964, which it never fully recovered from.” (Wright, 2017: 33)

The Hot Autumn

Several years after Panzieri’s death, a wave of social conflicts began to bubble. This would peak around 1969, with the event known as the 'Hot Autumn', Italy’s “was a 'creeping May', and if its Movimento Studentesco (Student Movement) (MS) had then only recently emerged from beneath the shadow of the official student organisations” (Wright, 2017: 89).

This was unprecedented, students and workers, hand in hand joined together against capitalist machine in Northern Italy, it is estimated 440 hours of strikes, nonstop within the region. “It was observed that the relation between the autonomist factions and the wider student movement was similar to the relation between the anarchist groups and the masses in the Sorbonne in May '68.” (Lotringer and Marazzi, 2007: 56). This was a watershed moment for the labour movement at the time, as organisation between the students and workers had begun to be permeated throughout the major universities centres within in Italy. Much of this organisation was devoid of party structure and was mostly spontaneous, as Movimento Studentesco (Student Movement) had swelled to mass proportions in only a few localities during 1967, and it was the experiences in these cities were Turin and Trento.

This new kind of revolutionary organisation was part of the new formulation of the working class:

For us today the articulation of organization is posited not within the contradictions of development, but within the antagonism between the proletariat constituted as a unified class and the desperate vitality of the law of value over and against it. The articulation of organization takes place through the alternating rhythm of mass pressure' aimed at appropriation, and vanguard assault against the intelligent actions of the enterprise. Not for work, not over the wage, but against work: this constitutes the positive articulation of the new revolutionary organization (Negri, 2005: 35)

Most of the “pure” workerists remained in North-eastern Italy, while many involved in the student movement formed Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano (POv-e), who differed their Venetian counterparts, “Whilst most students came from bourgeois families, the MS represented an attempt 'to negate their own class origin in order to be a revolutionary class'.” (Wright, 2017: 98). It was during this POv-e's primary interest sought to be consummated in the environs of the factory, where, they had claimed that capital's plan “is most organised, and from whence it draws its strength.” (Wright, 2017: 98). This is a direct reference to the concept of the Social Factory by Mario Tronti in which was originally written in Red Notebooks.

The concept was used by Tronti to analyse how capitalist social relations had expanded outside the sphere of production to that of society as a whole, in Factory and Society (1962). As Tronti explains, “The more that capitalist development advances, that is, the more the production of relative surplus value penetrates and extends, the more that the circle-circuit production-distribution-exchange-consumption is necessarily closed […] At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation is transformed into a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society is turned into an articulation of production, that is, the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society.” (Tronti, 1962)

However, POv-e later reneged on student interests, in order to promote the workers' struggles, which in practice, this 'unity' meant the 'working- class use' of the MS as a channel of communication against the bosses and, where necessary, union leaders as well (Wright, 2017: 99).

Creeping May

In December 1967, a number of prominent intellectuals associated operaismo had met to discuss the nature of international class struggle during the interwar period. The venue was University of Padua, where Antonio Negri assumed the Chair of State Doctrine. Following the demise of Classe Operaia's demise, mass worker and the wage became prominent themes for workerism. It was until the Padua conference this class figure “remained somewhat indistinct.” (Wright, 2017: 107).

To define the mass worker, Negri explains that:

The mass worker's relatively undifferentiated technical and behavioural composition (in comparison with the professional worker) arose from her/his experience of unskilled factory labour on a mass scale and the welfare state's safety net of public services. This composition expressed itself politically through the negotiation-oriented national unions, which emphasized the struggle for higher wages at the expense of struggles for workers' control of production, and the reformist left parties, which emphasized electoral participation and inter-party alliance in government instead of popular revolution, that came to dominate working-class action in the industrialized capitalist countries (Negri, 2005)

The mass worker had become relevant during the sixties, as throughout that time there was a growing homogenisation of labour within many of Italy's large and medium-sized industrial sectors during the late 1960s acted to reinforce that compactness encouraged by the spread of mass production techniques.  The original system of grading work by skill also began to assume new connotations: having once served in part to defend the wages and conditions of skilled workers, its original rationale had been increasingly undermined from the 1950s onwards, by the fragmentation of work tasks intrinsic to mechanisation.

It was through this capitalist restructure of the economy which was used recuperate and diffuse the wage demands, “the varied and combined modality of working-class action is respected in every moment of the restructuration of capital: from the actions of the mass worker, and from those of the “social” worker, arise effects that are then matched, in the sense of a radical destructuring of the enemy power.” (Lotringer and Marazzi, 2007: 70). Many workers had rebelled during the Creeping May, “guerrilla warfare in the factory” was what many referred to this as, during late June, the dispute saw a dozen stoppages before its climax, in early August, with a demonstration in which thousands of chemical workers converged upon the neighbouring town of Mestre, effectively isolating it from the rest of the Veneto (Wright, 2017: 113).