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New Forms of Worker Organization
The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism
By Immanuel Ness PM Press
Copyright © 2014 the individual contributors
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-956-9
CHAPTER 1
Operaismo Revisited: Italy's State-Capitalist Assault on Workers and the Rise of COBAs
Steven Manicastri
Historically, the defeats of workers' movements vastly outnumber their victories. The proletariat, nonetheless, has repeatedly stood up to the overwhelming forces of capital and reinitiated its struggle to create an alternative to capitalism. In a time when political institutions and parties are continuously used to repress both proletarian class consciousness and the possibilities for emancipation, the phrase "voting for the lesser of two evils" is regularly invoked throughout the world and now considered the form of liberal democratic politics in the early twenty-first century. While it is not my intention to demonize the social democratic and liberal parties, it is important to note that the ineffectiveness of reformist parties provided the inspiration for the founding of the workers' movement called operaismo. In a world shrouded by a politics of opportunism and cynicism, the Italian history of operaismo has become a viable alternative for an inspirited politics for workers' movements across the globe.
Operaismo, known variously also as autonomist Marxism or workerism, began in Italy during the 1960s as a theoretical and political offshoot of Marxism, formulated by a group of intellectuals seeking a new approach to social action. The movement seemed completely defeated by the 1980s, largely because, in the words of novelist Valerio Evangelisti, the majority of the militants and theorists were either in jail or in exile due to state repression. Despite the movement's defeat, the idea of operaism — of an autonomous workers' movement unaffiliated with a political party or a union — managed to retain a sizable following. This enabled the creation in the late 1980s of the Comitati di Base, now Confederazione dei Comitati di Base — COBAs (subsequently referred to as Cobas), a rank-and-file workers' institution that has fought for workers excluded from, or otherwise unaffiliated with, the mainstream Italian unions: the left-wing Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), the Catholic-influenced Confederazione Italiana dei Sindacati dei Lavoratori (CISL), and the socialist Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL).
In recent years the Cobas have proved very capable at organizing mass movements among workers and students, for example, in protesting Prime Minister Mario Monti's labor reforms intended to appease the EU's demands to rein in Italy's debt. The Cobas pride themselves on being independent of institutions and political parties, as they view a position in government, whether regional or federal, or with a union as incompatible with being solely dedicated to the "betterment of living and working conditions of all workers, from the public sector to the weakest and most marginalized social groups." This independence has often led to criticism from the mainstream political parties or unions that Cobas are taking away constituents or disrupting solidarity among strikes and demonstrations organized by the major unions. These same accusations were made in the years surrounding "Hot Autumn" (1969) by the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and PSI (Italian Socialist Party) against the various workerist groups that sprang up in that period of intense protest activity. The independence maintained by the Cobas is admittedly both a liability and a strength, but much more so the latter; workers' movements in bourgeois democracies where traditional unions are in decline would do well to consider adapting this model in order to create a much-needed labor party as an alternative to the "lesser of two evils."
Autonomia in Italy
To examine the recent activity of the Cobas, it is first necessary to trace the roots of the organization as well as to delve into the rich history of the Italian operaist movements of the 1960s and '70s, which rivaled their counterparts in France and Germany. The political climate of the time was described as follows: "The social revolution ... posed a fundamental challenge to the Italian political class. The country was richer than ever before, but in the wake of the 'miracle' ... came a series of major social problems which demanded immediate political response." The "miracle" refers to the economic boom after World War II, which positioned Italy as one of the leading capitalist countries of the world. Politically, the country was led by a parliamentary majority of centrist parties — the Democrazia Cristiana (DC) and a handful of satellite parties, including Partito Liberale, Partito Repubblicano, and Partito Socialdemocratico. A government crisis erupted in 1960, when the MSI, a neofascist party, decided to hold its congress in Genoa, a city praised for its participation in the Resistance against fascism. This provoked a revolt among the Genoan population, to which Prime Minister Fernando Tambroni responded by permitting the police to shoot insurrectionists in "emergency situations," and the police were eager to oblige. Although the DC did not openly support the MSI, it did have covert connections to the neofascists, which may have informed Tambroni's decision. Consequently, the CGIL declared a general strike and Italy was thrust into chaos, forcing the DC to remove Tambroni from office.
This event prompted the DC to realize it needed to "open the door to the left," as the DC leaders Amintore Fanfani and Aldo Moro were fond of saying. It is at this crucial moment that the history of operaismo truly begins. Despite some ideological affinity between the MSI and the DC, the DC realized it could not govern with an openly fascist party. Moro's plan to include the PSI in a center-left alliance served to integrate the PSI but to isolate the PCI. U.S. president John F. Kennedy's special assistant, Arthur Schlesinger, encouraged Kennedy to show support for such an alliance with the aim of taming the PSI while also of robbing the PCI of its most valuable allies. Not all Socialists were in favor of this alliance, but they could not stop it, and the PSI entered the coalition government in 1963. The PSI's moderate section, led by Pietro Nenni, had major support for forming the alliance with the DC. Naively, Nenni thought that the PSI could keep itself independent of pressure from the DC and that, unlike its German Socialist Party counterpart the SPD, it would not forsake Marxism for social democracy. Along with what his ally Riccardo Lombardi called "revolutionary reformism," Nenni believed the structure of capitalism could be transformed from within to create a socialist society. The disappointed radical members of the PSI split off to form the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP), a smaller, autonomous socialist party.
The PCI did not fare any better despite the fact it was the largest communist party functioning in a Western country during the Cold War. It was viewed ominously by conservatives for its success, yet it was by no means as radical an institution as the descriptor "communist" implied. "The longer the party remained becalmed in the alternatively placid waters of the Republic, the more likely it was to be slowly transformed by the experience rather than itself initiate a process of socialist transformation." This was, in fact, the major divide within the PCI, as its right wing, led by Giorgio Amendola and Giorgio Napolitano, was more than willing to use reforms as a means to achieve Togliatti's "Italian road to socialism." (It should be noted that Napolitano is, as of this writing, serving as president of the Republic.) Amendola and Napolitano viewed the "opening to the left" as a failure, not because they sought for the PCI to structurally move toward a socialist economy, but because they believed they would achieve more reforms if they united with the PSI to form one party. On the left wing of the PCI, Pietro Ingrao assessed the first center-left government as a complete failure, not because corrective reforms were not passed but because he justly feared that the working class would be integrated into the system "by means of progressive neo-capitalist policies," in a similar fashion to the argument made in Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man.16 Ingrao's judgment would prove correct as the PCI often undermined workers' movements when they needed its support most, in the interest of becoming a "respectable" political party.
Not everyone in the PCI was willing to view the party as a lost cause. Mario Tronti, a PCI member and one of the founders of operaismo, hoped that the PCI could be changed to more effectively represent the working class. Reflecting on operaismo in a speech at the 2006 Historical Materialism conference, Tronti described it as "an experience that tried to unite the thinking and practice of politics." In other words, it sought to adhere to Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, in which he called for political action and not simply philosophical rumination. Operaismo sought to fulfill Gramsci's original conception of the Communist Party, which was to engage in a philosophy of praxis. Operaismo was to become a movement that interacted directly with workers in the factories. The worker "would be the central figure" and "the refusal of work became a lethal weapon against capital."
In 1961 Raniero Panzieri, a left-wing leader of the PSI who was very critical of the party's position on creating a center-left government with the DC, founded a journal called Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks). It gathered "a group of young intellectuals, workers, and technical employees and started an investigation into the living and labor conditions of the working class in and around Turin." Quaderni Rossi would be fundamental in creating the theoretical basis for the workerist movements, bringing together intellectual figures such as the Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, and other researchers including Romano Alquati and Guido Bianchini. The journal would go onto uncover Marx's lesser-known work, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Foundationsof the Critique of Political Economy), and as Adelino Zanini observes, workerism as a movement would base its theoretical approach not on Capital but on the Grundrisse itself. The main problem with using the Grundrisse as the theoretical framework for a movement was that Marx himself, in his later works, corrected his theory regarding the accumulation of wealth, which initially positioned labor as a living subject, rather than as a living object. In the Grundrisse, labor's subjectivity does not imply its reification in the manner asserted by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness; instead, it implies, somewhat ambiguously, that since labor is a living subject not objectified by the means of production, it has the ability to control those means of production. In Capital the worker is turned into an object because that is the only way for capitalism to rationalize his or her existence — by rendering the worker an abstraction — whereas in the Grundrisse Marx conceives of labor as subjective, thus implying that the bourgeoisie's control of labor is limited by the desires and actions of the proletariat, who are no longer an objective piece of the equation.
It is apparent why Marx corrected this aspect of his analysis, for if the worker had always wielded such a strong influence upon the bourgeoisie, the proletariat as a class would not be exploited. Yet it was not completely untrue that the worker could influence the rate of production under Fordism. By basing their approach on ways to influence the rate of production, workers found alternative means of resistance in addition to the strike, which still remained the primary means of struggle. What is crucial to this distinction, however, is that by emphasizing their strength as a revolutionary class rather than their powerlessness, workers opened the door for new tactics that were less dramatic than a strike but still just as effective at slowing production down to a crawl. "As it is the only holder of living labour, the working class manifests 'absolute' or separate interest, a unilateral synthesis, the only one which is, historically, thinkable." The possibility of reading Marx in a different light led Negri to create what Jason Read has called a "philosophy of praxis through a new practice of philosophy," meaning that this new approach attempted to close the divide separating politics from economics and metaphysics from politics. It is this duality found in labor that prompted Tronti to view the working-class movement from a completely different perspective: "We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the working class."
With the theoretical groundwork laid in the Quaderni Rossi and, upon that journal's disintegration, in other operaist publications such as Classe Operaia (Working Class), and Potere Operaio (Worker Power), autonomist Marxism proved particularly effective in the years surrounding the Hot Autumn of 1969.
The Hot Autumn (Autunno Caldo) was a tumultuous period for the young Italian republic, during which the working class made considerable gains in the workplace and pushed the center-left government as far as it could go. One of the major, lasting outcomes was the alliance between students and workers — Italian students, unlike their counterparts in Germany, were never dismissive of the working class as "irredeemably integrated." This alliance would be largely dismissed and frowned upon by the political parties but was embraced by the autonomous workers' movement. Tronti would continue his support for the PCI, stating that only through a political party could the working class hope to "consolidate and multiply" its power. His continuing hope was to radicalize the party, but he was unwilling to split the party in order to do so. Negri, on the other hand, viewed the Hot Autumn as "a revolutionary rupture" and focused his attention on the autonomist publication Potere Operaio, as well as the movement wing of the same name.
In 1967, in the lead-up to the Hot Autumn, POv-e (Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano), an operaist group in northern Italy, organized a strike in Porto Marghera against the Petrolchimico plant. Workers were frustrated with the regional union's inability to create and implement safeguards against hazardous working conditions. Although the strike only involved five hundred employees out of thirty thousand, the union, CGIL, was forced to act on their behalf. The strike's demographics reflected one of the main characteristics of operaist actions, which tended to include young adults in their twenties to their early thirties at most.
POv-e again forced the CGIL at the Petrolchimico plant to intervene when the time came to negotiate bonuses. The workerists called for a flat 5,000-lire increase, uniting the majority of the factory's workers in action. They used tactics such as numerous stoppages occurring on alternate days for maximum impact, as well as mass picketing to prevent workers who still wanted to work from entering the factory. Their most successful tactic was threatening to reduce the skeleton crew necessary to oversee the plant, which forced a lockout. Even though POv-e gained major support through these actions, in the end it was powerless to stop the CGIL from making a deal with the company to award percentage raises based on job category, rather than the flat increase the workers had demanded. The CGIL's action clearly marked it as an unreliable ally and as an established "tool of capital," thus eliminating any ambiguity as to whether the unions could be used to promote the workerist agenda. By the time of the French uprisings against De Gaulle's government in May-June 1968, operaismo as a movement had become more self-assured as well as more organized in confronting management, the unions, and the political parties. In the meantime the PCI had attempted to integrate the student movement (MS) but, by 1969, whatever radicalism was left within the party had been eliminated, ending the short-lived relationship between the PCI and the MS and uniting the MS with the various operaist movements.
The Comitato Unitario di Base (unitary base committee, CUB) now Confederazione dei Comitati di Base, a precursor to the Cobas, was a rank-and-file organization created in 1968 in Milan. At the Pirelli factory, young, less-skilled workers were tasked with increasing the rate of production despite a lack of staff. The factory-level CUB united the new workers with older, militant unionists who had all but given up on the unions as a means for ameliorating their working conditions. The CUB would successfully introduce the "go slow" tactic, in which workers slowed down production to the minimum required, preventing both management and the unions from forcing them to produce any faster. This tactic spread across Milan, used in actions at the Borletti plant and others, and quietly it would spread throughout Italy. Crucially, the success of the CUB paved the way for a series of workerist strikes at the FIAT Mirafiori plant in Turin.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Forms of Worker Organization by Immanuel Ness. Copyright © 2014 the individual contributors. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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