Workerism

Not to be confused with Wokeism.

Workerism is a leftist and largely Italian political theory that emphasizes the importance of or glorifies the working class.^[1] Workerism, or operaismo, was of particular significance in Italian left-wing politics, being largely embraced in Italian political groups ranging from Italian communists to Italian anarchists, and it partially evolved into or influenced autonomismo.

History

Origins

This political and intellectual movement is linked to the particularities of the Italian context in the 1960s. During the 1960s, in the factories of the major industrial cities in the North, a gap gradually developed between the demands of certain workers and the practices of the trade unions. This gap led, in several factories, to a rupture, especially from 1968 onward, and to the emergence of autonomous collectives, such as the Base Unitary Committees (CUB).^[2] Social conflicts further radicalized and were marked, for example, by the events of the "Hot Autumn" of 1969, which saw numerous "wildcat" strikes by workers, that is, outside the control of parties and unions.^[3]

Intellectuals at this time attempted to renew Marxist thought to reflect on workers' struggles. Operaismo was first forged around a journal: the Quaderni Rossi ("Red Notebooks"). The journal mainly brought together intellectuals. Some were members of the PCI, others like Toni Negri were members of the left wing of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).^[2]

The "worker inquiry"

Operaismo developed first from a method: the "worker inquiry" (or "militant sociology") conducted at factory gates in the early 1960s. From there, the young intellectuals grouped around the journals Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia tried to critique socialism and identify a new figure, the "mass worker", far removed from the traditional trade union movement, prone to revolt and, later, to the rejection of the value of work.^[4]

In January 1964, Mario Tronti published a text marking a major theoretical turning point: "Lenin in England". Mario Tronti developed a new conception of Marxism that inverted the relationship between workers' struggles and the development of the means of production. For Tronti, it is not the development of the means of production that determines workers' struggles, but on the contrary, workers' struggles that constitute the driving force of capitalist development.^[2]

From Quaderni Rossi to Classe Operaia

The same year, Mario Tronti and Toni Negri broke with the Quaderni Rossi to create a new journal, Classe Operaia, which advocated intervention in workers' struggles and appeared until 1967. For the operaisti, socialism is only a new form of capitalist development: workers' struggles must instead be oriented toward the constitution of worker power, considered as the immediate construction of communism.^[2]

From network to organizations

The path of entryism into the PCI

Operaismo, until 1969, was a collective laboratory, a kind of informal network formed by intellectuals, trade unionists, and students. During the years of publication of Classe Operaia, there was no question of founding a party or organization. The network actually linked various local groups working on the worker question in different parts of the country. During a meeting held in Florence toward the end of 1966, Tronti, Asor Rosa, and Negri themselves raised the question of the urgency of a political turn. The central theme was the class-party relationship: the class embodies strategy and the party tactics. They concluded that it was time to move to entryism in the unions, and especially in the PCI. Their idea was to form an operaista leadership within the PCI and influence it.^[5]

Thus Tronti, Alberto Asor Rosa, and Massimo Cacciari rejoined the PCI, where they were welcomed as repentants. The PCI was indeed hardly more influenced by the operaisti than by other dissident groups. It can be noted that at the same time, the group of Manifesto (Aldo Natoli, Rossana Rossanda, Luigi Pintor, Magri) was expelled from the Party.^[5]

The libertarian fractions

A libertarian minority, led by Gianfranco Faina, Ricardo d’Este, and other militants from Genoa and Turin, did not accept the choice of entryism. They remained faithful to the original operaista conception, according to which subversive forces must regroup outside the logic of parties and official unions. They found inspiration in council communism, among Spanish anarchists, and in Amadeo Bordiga. In the following years, they shared the libertarian positions of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International, and definitively broke with any claim to "direct" the movement. Another tendency, led by Sergio Bologna, tried to stick to original workerism, returning to inquiry work within Fiat and some factories in Lombardy.^[5]

The new organizations: Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua

In 1969, there was a multiplication of far-left groups and groupuscules all proposing to reproduce in Italy the Bolshevik strategy—in its various versions: Leninist, Trotskyist, Marxist–Leninist, and Maoist—through the creation of a pure and hard party aiming for the seizure of power. The influence of operaista theses on young left militants led to the unification of several groups, whose merger in 1967 gave birth to the organization Potere Operaio, which then gathered about a thousand militants.^[2]

Potere Operaio was founded during the summer of 1967, in the context of a crisis in the student movement. This crisis, according to its founders who spoke from a Marxist-Leninist point of view, stemmed from the fact that student revolts could only make sense if subordinated to "worker hegemony". It was therefore a question, in this perspective, of building a political leadership to channel them in this direction. Toni Negri, the main leader of the new movement, then wanted to build a centralized, "compartmentalized", and vertical party. The new movement attached some importance to theoretical elaboration revolving around an extremist interpretation of original workerism. Subjectivity no longer resided in the class, but in the communist vanguard, that is, in the organization itself. It was therefore necessary to centralize and radicalize "spontaneous antagonisms" to transform them into insurrectional action against the State.^[5]

In September 1969, another operaista organization was born, rival to Potere Operaio: Lotta Continua. Unlike Potere Operaio, Lotta Continua was little inclined toward theory and prioritized activism above all.^[5]

1973: Autonomia Operaia

On March 3 and 4, 1973, twenty-eight autonomous worker collectives met in Bologna in national coordination. The most discussed idea was the constitution of worker autonomy as a political force. This debate caused a crisis within Potere Operaio: Potere Operaio militants divided on the question of armed struggle. Toni Negri wanted to dissolve Potere Operaio into autonomous assemblies and assign the military function to the Red Brigades. In May, the supporters of Toni Negri's line were excluded from Potere Operaio at the Rosolina congress. Grouped around the journal Rosso, they would now organize within the "Worker Political Collectives" of northern Italy, while Potere Operaio self-dissolved.^[2]

It was in this context that the Worker Autonomy (Autonomia Operaia) was created. Unlike Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua, Autonomia was not a centralized organization, nor even really structured. It was rather a set of networks and alliances of specific coordinations.^[2] Autonomy in fact represented an evolution of workerism. It first rejected all forms of class representation, thus trade union organizations, as well as classic forms of mobilization, in favor of direct and unmediated action by the working class. Toni Negri insisted on the refusal of work and attention to the marginal and precarious fringes of the working class, which he called the "socialized worker". But, more than a doctrine, autonomy was characterized by a mode of organization—autonomous groups functioning in direct democracy—and above all forms of action favoring spontaneism and illegality for the direct appropriation of goods, qualified as "social wage": squats, sabotage, "militant antifascism", "self-reduction" of public services, "political markets" (that is, mass thefts in supermarkets), or even "proletarian expropriations". In 1975, the journal Rosso headlined: "The illegality of struggles is a source of law for communism here and now".^[4]

The current represented by Potere Operaio decomposed, while the new Autonomia operaia, led by Toni Negri, who now expressed himself in the journal Rosso, played a growing role. Paradoxically, "worker autonomy" gradually moved away from purely worker demands and increasingly insisted on the virtues of rebellion under the influence of Toni Negri's theory of the "socialized worker". In a certain way, this evolution already announced what the Italian autonomist movement of 1977 and the current of "autonomy of desire" would be.^[4]

Literature

The writer Nanni Balestrini (1935–2019), a founding member of Potere Operaio, played the role of literary herald of workerism. He published in 1971 the novel Vogliamo tutto (We Want Everything) which made operaista theses known to a wide public. The novel tells, in the form of a stream-of-consciousness monologue, the journey of a young operaio-massa ("mass worker", basic concept and "revolutionary subject" of workerism) from a southern village to work at the FIAT factory in Turin, where he becomes politicized during giant strikes.^[6]

Theses

The centrality of the working class

Operaismo is based on the idea that the working class is the driving force of capitalist development. So-called "real socialism" is considered a new form of capitalism. The operaisti advocate the refusal of work, thus of their identity as workers, and—in a typical Hegelian process of Aufhebung—consider this self-destruction as objectively necessary to fight capitalism and produce communism.

For the operaista movement, struggle takes precedence over the analysis of capitalism. The crisis of capitalism can only come from a reversal of the balance of power.^[3] One of the innovations of workerism is also the interpretation of capital as social power and no longer only as private property of the means of production. By intervening directly in production, the State was no longer just the guarantor, but the organizer of exploitation.^[5]

Unlike the official left of the time which insisted on the notion of development, the operaisti affirmed that technique and power are linked. For them, the incorporation of science into the productive process is a key moment of "capitalist despotism" and of the organization of the State. There is an inversion of orthodox Marxism and a critique of sociological ideologies. Thus, for them, the theory of organizations falls under "techniques intended to neutralize workers' struggles". They reject the classic communist conception of the "organic intellectual", because, according to them, this intellectual is much less the organic expression of the working class than of the party alone.^[5]

Another aspect of workerism that departs from classic communism is the elaboration of the concept of "class composition". Just as, in Marx, the organic composition of capital expresses a synthesis between technical composition and value, for the operaisti, class composition emphasizes the link between "objective" technical traits and "subjective" political traits. The synthesis of the two aspects would determine the subversive potential of struggles, and this would allow history to be divided into periods, each characterized by the presence of a "dynamic" figure. Each time, capital responds to a certain class composition with a restructuring to which succeeds a political recomposition of the class, in other words the emergence of a new "dynamic" figure.^[5]

A new revolutionary subject: the operaio-massa

For operaista movements, "internal migration" (of young workers from southern Italy to the industrial centers of the north) represented a new type of "revolutionary worker", the precarious and unskilled operaio-massa. This type was all the more interesting to them as it was generally not controlled by trade union organizations or the Communist Party. It was the new revolutionary subject.^[7]

The operaista theorist Romano Alquati defined the emergence of the mass worker as the concretization of three parallel phenomena: 1) Fordism, that is, mass production and the market revolution; 2) Taylorism, or the scientific organization of work and the assembly line; 3) Keynesianism, in other words large-scale capitalist policies of the welfare state. The set of these measures would express "capital's response to the workers who had undertaken to storm the heavens in the 1920s–1930s".^[5]

Autonomy as strategy

From the theory of the revolutionary subject flows for operaista movements the strategy of worker autonomy. For revolutionary mobilization to have a chance of succeeding, parties (particularly the PCI) must be sidelined. Unions must be bypassed and replaced by "worker committees".

Autonomy constitutes the necessary prerequisite for the overthrow of capitalist power. Autonomous negotiations do not aim for a more favorable solution for workers within the capitalist system, but its destruction. The tactic consists, first, in posing demands unacceptable to power and, second, in sabotaging machines and refusing work. The combativeness regained in struggle must make it possible to unite the entire working class. The third stage of the revolutionary process must be the revolutionary civil war leading to worker power.^[7]

Influence outside Italy

France

In France, there existed a journal Matériaux pour l'intervention (1972–1973), led notably by Yann Moulier-Boutang. In 1974, the group of editors of the periodical founded a new journal, Camarades, also directed by Yann Moulier-Boutang. The group gathered around Camarades brought together several sensitivities: ultra-left militants from the Marxist Left, spontaneist Maoists from the Gauche Prolétarienne, including the Vaincre et Vivre network, and militants inspired by Italian workerism. The journal would be the crucible of autonomy in France. The journal disappeared in 1979.^[8]

A French "Immigrant Collective", close to Potere Operaio, also existed in the early 1970s.^[7]

Germany

A group of students from the University of Hamburg, in rebellion against the SDS, created the "Gruppe Trikont" to mark their support for the "tricontinental struggle against imperialism". The student group transformed in 1970 into Proletarische Front. The new movement quickly divided into different tendencies (anarchists, Maoists, spontaneists, etc.). The most important fraction, in which the future historian Karl Heinz Roth notably militated, sought inspiration from Italian workerism and linked up with Potere Operaio.^[7]

In other German cities, other Marxist groups also moved away from Leninism (represented mainly by the MLPD) and formed "enterprise project groups". Drawing on the experiences of Italian operaista organizations, they sought to develop "possibilities for practical and political interventions in enterprises". Examples include the groups Arbeiterkampf in Cologne, Revolutionärer Kampf in Frankfurt, Arbeitersache in Munich. These groups gathered around the Proletarische Front of Hamburg and Bremen and founded in 1972 a unitary journal, Wir Wollen Alles ("We Want Everything", an explicit reference to the slogan of Lotta Continua Vogliamo tutto).^[9][10]

In 1975, the team of Wir Wollen Alles transformed the journal into Autonomie – Materialien gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft ("Autonomy - Materials against Factory Society"), which appeared irregularly until 1985. Among the editors was the future minister Joschka Fischer.^[9]

Switzerland

In Switzerland, workerism was introduced through the Tessin, where many students attended universities in the major cities of northern Italy. During the years 1967–1969, the Movimento giovanile progressista was born from the contestation of high school and university students. The MGP was a broad, anti-authoritarian movement that took up all the themes of the extraparliamentary left of the time (anti-militarism, opposition to the Vietnam War, school contestation, etc.). It managed to gather up to 500 people at its demonstrations. The leadership of the MGP, led by Gianluigi Galli, gradually took an increasingly radical orientation. In November 1968, the MGP noisily broke its ties with the Ticino Communist Party.^[7][11]

In 1970, student contestation ran out of steam and the MGP tried to relaunch itself on the terrain of factory struggles. It approached Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua, and launched a journal whose name evoked its orientation: Lotta di classe. MGP delegations attended congresses of Italian organizations. The MGP wanted to adapt operaista theses to Switzerland. As for Italian organizations the revolutionary subject was the southern worker come to work in the North, for the MGP the revolutionary subject would be the immigrant worker. The MGP therefore attacked the unions, the "labor peace", and affirmed that "only the refusal of work has revolutionary value". It developed agitation work in the canton's factories and tried to mobilize immigrant workers as well as cross-border workers. Despite a few strikes, the results were very weak.^[7]

In 1972, the MGP definitively abandoned its name to take that of Lotta di classe. The movement tried to change strategy by broadening. It could benefit from the wide network of Ticino students attending universities throughout Switzerland (Ticino has no university) to implant itself in Swiss industrial cities (Geneva, Zurich, Lausanne, Basel, etc.). The monthly Lotta di classe now appeared in three languages. The German edition, Klassenkampf, published in Zurich, printed 15,000 copies. The Zurich headquarters of Lutte de classe acquired the status of International Office of Potere Operaio, and took charge of coordinating operaista movements on a European level.^[7]

As Italian organizations slid toward armed struggle and semi-clandestinity, the Swiss began to be increasingly instrumentalized by them. In September 1971, the "commander" of the military branch of Potere Operaio in Milan tasked Gianluigi Galli with constituting a solidarity network and a refuge zone for Italian militants. The Swiss organization thus began to host militants on the run, hide them, or transit them to other countries. By the end of 1972, the group set up by Galli began to take great importance in logistical support to Italian organizations: it began to supply them with weapons and explosives. Some weapons were bought legally, others stolen from Swiss army depots. Shooting exercises were even organized in isolated valleys.^[7]

At the end of 1973, Lotta di classe self-dissolved at its last congress. The militants rapidly deradicalized. They ceased their illegal activities and refocused on legal solidarity actions with Italian far-left prisoners. In 1976, Galli and another member ran in municipal elections. In April 1981, Galli and five other former members were arrested and sentenced by the Criminal Assize Court of Lugano for the thefts of weapons and explosives committed in 1972–1973.^[7][11]

See also

• Autonomia Operaia
• Labourism
• Raniero Panzieri
• Post-Marxism
• Potere Operaio
• Syndicalism
• Mario Tronti