New production regimes, new forms of waged and unwaged work, new
struggles: a new class composition. As always, changes to the composition
of the working class demand a debate about the meaning of revolutionary
politics - of what, in these different circumstances, it actually means to
abolish the capital relation and its state. This article is a preliminary
survey of current reflections upon guaranteed income and related issues
within the Italian far left, and in particular amongst Italy's autonomists.
Their discussion is of importance both for what it says in its own right,
and because it stems from a section of the revolutionary left which
continues to be little known or understood in the English-speaking world.
In the late seventies, the autonomist movement dominated revolutionary
politics in Italy. While most of its largest components shared a common
reference point in the brand of Italian marxism known as operaismo
(literally, 'workerism'),1 autonomia as a whole was then a whirling
kaleidoscope of ideologically diverse local collectives and regionally
based political groups, united more by their refusal to work within the
traditional structures of the labour movement than by any commonly agreed
upon strategy. Despite its apparent collapse following a wave of mass
arrests during the early eighties, a 'new' autonomia has since re-emerged
as a small but lively current within a broader movement for the
'self-organisation' of community and workplace. As such, it has a real
presence, along with anarchist politics, within Italy's extensive network
of radical community squats (the 'self-managed, occupied' social centres) -
and, to a lesser degree, within the world of industrial dissent, which
presently groups tens of thousands of waged workers in a bewildering array
of rank and file committees and 'alternative, self-managed' unions. In what
follows, I hope to show that Italian autonomist reflections upon the
'guaranteed income' and 'a non-state public sphere', for all their
ambiguities and oversights, offer a useful sounding board for those in the
English-speaking world equally committed to finding some practical means of
moving beyond capital and the state.
Guaranteed Income in the Seventies
The notion of a guaranteed income has long held an honoured place
within Italian autonomist discourse. In the years immediately following the
worker and student unrest of 1968 and 1969, the 'social' or 'political'
wage was a central theme for Potere Operaio, a workerist group which would
later supply many of autonomia's most prominent figures. Central to Potere
Operaio's understanding of modern class conflict was the notion of a
struggle within the immediate process of production which, in challenging
the hierarchies of skill and command to be found there, sought to uncouple
income from productivity. This refusal of work, exemplified by the
practices of the mass worker found on the assembly line of FIAT and other
large corporations, expresses and organises itself 'positively' in the struggle to appropriate
an ever greater slice of social wealth: at this point, the struggle for the
'social wage' (equal for all and tied to workers' material needs, rather
than to the productivity of the bosses) is something qualitatively, totally
different from negotiating the wage as recompense for work performed (La
Classe 1969: 35).
A 'social' wage was also demanded for those outside the traditional realms
of paid work. Since, for Potere Operaio, capitalist society was now a
social factory subject to the dictates of accumulation, a 'political' wage
was necessary for all those with nothing to sell but their ability to work.
In a country where the official safety net privileged workers in the larger
factories, the political wage was more than a simple compensation for
unpaid labour; forcing further apart the disjuncture between pay and
productivity, it could only exacerbate the crisis of capital. Apart from
students and the unemployed, women as houseworkers were also seen as prime
candidates for a guaranteed wage, sparking a controversy that would last
for years within and around the feminist movement in Italy and elsewhere
(Malos 1980).
Inspired in part by mass campaigns to 'self-reduce' the rising cost
of social services and to seize various means of consumption and
reproduction (Balestrini 1989), the dominant currents within the autonomia
of the mid to late seventies (the self-styled 'organised' autonomists)
staked everything on their ability to give political cover and
representation to such instances of direct appropriation. Indeed, one of
Toni Negri's first attempts to decipher the forms of social conflict found
within what he termed the new 'social proletariat' would explicitly
reformulate the question of the wage in terms of the 'direct appropriation
of the productive forces of social wealth' in the spheres of both
production and reproduction (Negri 1976: 51). Bending the mass unrest of
that time to the leninist notions of political struggle which most of
'organised' autonomia then espoused proved a greater challenge, however,
and its hegemony over radical practice in Italy began to slip away even
before the mass arrests of 1979 and 1980 devastated its membership (Wright:
Chapter 9).
The subsequent destruction of the autonomist current formed part of
a broader project of normalisation which, if judged by the relative social
peace of the early eighties, proved remarkably successful. The past eight
years, however, have brought with them a revival of social conflict in
Italy. Less spectacular in form than those of the past, this cycle of
struggles has nonetheless continued to unfold, spreading out from state-run
schools, railways and universities into private sector workplaces. To the
surprise of many - not least those formed in an earlier phase of
revolutionary politics - this cycle has also breathed new life into the
collectives of autonomia, with the influx of younger activists imparting a
distinctly libertarian stamp to much of the movement. It is within this
very different context, then, that talk of guaranteed income has returned
to Italy.
Beyond Gorz? Guaranteed Income as Reappropriation
Over the last decade or so, much of left debate over guaranteed
income has revolved around the work of Andre Gorz. Reviewing the latter's
Farewell to the Working Class back in 1984, the American autonomist journal
Midnight Notes would insist that Gorz's plans for a new realm of productive
activity constituted outside the parameters of wage labour simply obscured
a project aimed at 'forestall[ing] struggles around the refusal of work and
install[ing] the left as the managers of the working class'. Far from
bringing freedom, his designs would only mean more unpaid work, a parody of
communism in the form of self-managed poverty. By contrast, Midnight Notes
offered a vision of a new society - the result of struggles which had
assaulted the wage relation from within as well as without - where
"Everyone takes it pretty easy and begins spending some of their spare time
thinking up how to build safe machines that can do the work people still
do, and inventing new drugs, sex positions and crossword puzzles made up of
the names of famous marxist ideologists" (Midnight Notes 1984: 16).
Given this hostile reception, it is curious to discover that recent
discussions amongst the autonomists of Italy's north-east have been rather
circumspect in their dealings with Gorz. For example, a piece written for a
regional conference held in March of this year argues that, while Gorz's
image of a sector of 'alternative' production should not be taken
literally, his vision, despite its 'Proudhonian and backward' aspects,
remains suggestive - 'offering, like all prefigurative activities, some
elements of truth' (Various Authors 1995). And in what is perhaps the most
detailed autonomist assessment of guaranteed income to date, Carlo Palermo
has sketched out a position which, in the name of going beyond Gorz's
Critique Of Economic Reason, seeks nonetheless to build upon aspects of
that work. Whilst rejecting Gorz's inability to see past existing forms of
technique and the division of labour, Palermo praises him for insisting
that the question of income be tackled hand in hand with the 'progressive
but radical' reduction of labour time (Palermo 1994: 38). Gorz's biggest
failing, he argues, is that in the absence of any real sense of how to
implement it, his project remains trapped within terms set by capital.
Designed to straddle an unwaged world of 'autonomous activity' and a waged
sphere of 'necessity', Gorz's version of a guaranteed income ultimately
offers no means with which finally to break the dominance of the wage
relation (Palermo 1994: 40).
Surveying a range of schemes whose proponents, unlike Gorz, have no
interest in challenging the hegemony of wage labour, Palermo indicates the
ways in which their understandings of a guaranteed income are designed
either to perpetuate or to exacerbate hierarchies found in and around the
labour market. Like him, Massimo De Angelis has argued that, in order to
serve as a means to challenge the capital relation, a guaranteed income
must be linked to an attack upon the length of the working day. Just as
many proposals 'to separate access to income from the labour market' are in
fact designed 'to make the latter function effectively' (De Angelis 1994:
30), so any plan to reduce labour time which accepts existing social
relations as given will only entail a 'redistribution of misery'. This, De
Angelis holds, is the real meaning of the slogan - so popular within the
mainstream European left - of 'Working Less so that Everyone can Work':
"It must be emphasised that we don't want to work less so that everyone can
work, for the simple reason that in one way or another (in production or in
reproduction, in full-time work as in casual work) we are all already
working for capital. What we want is the power to all work less, and much
less, whilst simultaneously destroying the hierarchy of the labour market".
Linking a guaranteed income to the reduction of the working day, he
concludes, would provide an effective means of circulating struggles
between those that capital seeks to divide: the employed and the
unemployed, full-time staff and those in part-time or casual employ (De
Angelis 1994: 32).
According to Palermo, the following points offer the beginnings of
a 'radical reformist program' against wage labour and 'beyond Gorz':
1) the guaranteed income must be tied not to the 'right/duty' to perform
wage labour, as Gorz would have it, but rather to the right/duty to perform
socially necessary labour;
2) 'the liberation of free time' must involve a reappropriation of
administrative functions which challenges and goes beyond both the forms
and political personnel of today's representative democracy;
3) not only must 1) entail 'an ecologically sensitive, generalised and
egalitarian reduction of labour time', it must also involve the free
distibution of a whole series of services and use values, from housing and
schooling to health;
4) 'the guarantee and development of these use values and services must
take precedence over the social goals of production, and thus become the
motor of a process of reappropriation of the welfare state's institutions
and services, based upon the expansion of self-managed social labour and
cooperation';
5) rather than remain confined to Italy's richest regions, this citizenship
income 'package' must be posed in broader - and ultimately global - terms
(Palermo 1994: 40).
Before following through some of the themes raised by Palermo, it is
worthwhile dwelling briefly upon the place within his schema of a very
traditional left demand, namely the 'right/duty to work'. Those familiar
only with English-language autonomist writings may think its presence here
strange, to say the least. Still, as Sergio Bologna pointed out years ago,
there have always been some within the Italian autonomist movement -
amongst them Negri himself - who have at different times expressed unease
with certain readings of the 'refusal of work' (Bologna 1976: 26). Indeed,
according to one of Negri's close associates, "The refusal of work (lavoro) was never the refusal of labour (lavoro) as
such; it was never directed against productivity, creativity or
inventiveness. Rather it was the refusal of a specific relation between
capital and labour" (Hardt 1993: 114).
Against this, one could ask whether 'labour as such' has ever actually
existed - except, perhaps, in the form of class domination, as abstract
labour. If arguments such as Hardt's seem premised upon the sort of
socialist (as opposed to communist) sensibilities that Italian workerism
has so often rejected, they can also be seen creeping into the Paduan
conference text cited earlier. On the other hand, the editors of the
Milan-based journal Klinamen continue to reject any critique of wage labour
that is not simultaneously a critique of 'labour tout court' (Klinamen
1992: 56). The stance taken by De Angelis is similar, and almost identical
in its use of language: 'Liberation from labour is instrumental to
liberation tout court' (De Angelis 1994: 35).
Apart from print-based media, this debate as to the meaning of the
'refusal of work' is currently being argued out in a number of Italy's
radical computer networks, chief amongst them the European Counter Network
(ECN) and the CyberNet. One brief but telling exchange earlier this year
concerned the fate of an older female employee in a lottery office 'whose
smile and "'ca 'bbona furtuna"', recounted the Sandman, 'had always made my
day'. Now, he discovered, she had been dismissed, allegedly because she had
been unable to learn how to operate the new machines (Sandman 1995). As the
discussion over this anecdote swung back and forth, Hobo of the Padua ECN
chimed in to disagree with those advocating the line of 'Working Less so
that Everyone can Work', adding: 'I wouldn't want to demand that the woman
be reinstated, but rather that she have a comfortable life' (Hobo 1995).
In the end, if 'The refusal to work is the determination to do
something else' (Lindsay 1995: 36), then here we are faced with
understandings of that 'something else' which remain poles apart - and, to
date, largely unreconciled. If a certain ground for agreement continues to
exist amongst Italy's autonomists, it lies in the much broader perspective
set out in Palermo's program, which links the demand for guaranteed income
to the goal of the reappropriation and self-management of social services,
as one step towards the reduction of necessary labour and the dismantling
of the capital relation and its state. One of the most interesting aspects
of this discussion is the insistence that a guaranteed income must from its
inception be actualised in part as use values. According to Palermo, an
income defined in purely monetary terms would remain - consistent with the
bureaucratic logic of the traditional welfare state - a form of
socialisation hierarchically controlled by the latter. As a right it would
be in continual jeopardy, both in terms of its monetary value and its
unconditional character.
On the other hand, he argues, a guaranteed income based upon the free
distribution of selected social services could provide a starting point
from which to build for the further extension of a self-managed sector
within which need supplanted the logic of profit (Palermo 1994: 34).
Within more traditional sections of Italy's left, echoes of this
line of thinking can be found in Marco Revelli's talk of the need to
reappropriate the functions of the welfare state 'from below'. Since it is
now both 'useless to the bosses [and] alienating to workers', Revelli
believes that a political strategy based upon an unconditional defence of
the welfare state would be 'suicidal'. Its current crisis can only lead to
two outcomes: either towards a social 'free-for-all' such as can be found
in the United States, where each must fend as best they can, or else
towards 'a more mature "sociality"' based upon mutual aid. Many examples of
the latter, he points out, already exist in Italy: above all, the thousands
of cooperatives and mutual societies which provide health care and other
social benefits to their members (Revelli 1993a: 26). What is required,
therefore, is a project that in 'socialising without statifying' is able to
expand this area of welfare from below, and 'to reconstruct those
autonomies that the inevitably bureaucratic apparatuses of the parties,
unions and state have dispersed...' (Revelli 1993b: 16).
This questioning of statism within the mainstream Italian left - a
process, it must be said, still largely confined to its formerly 'new left'
fringes - has been greeted with a certain cautious interest in some local
libertarian circles. Thus, in a pamphlet on new forms of workers'
self-organisation, the anarchist theorist Cosimo Scarinzi has argued that
"if linked to a clear project of the labour movement's destatification, to
an effective initiative against fiscal pressure, the growth and
coordination of structures of mutual aid could become one of the driving
axes of rank and file unionism" (Scarinzi 1993a: 22).
Unlike Palermo, however, Revelli is not calling for the free distribution
of the services such forms of mutual aid provide. Indeed, as one writer for
the Padua-based autonomist journal Riff Raff has pointed out, Revelli's
scheme, rather than 'emptying out' the state, would lead to a form of
co-existence between state and mutual aid sector wherein workers were taxed
twice over. By contrast, Roberto Ulargiu's preferred medium term scenario
is one in which, as a consequence of restructuring, the collection point of
taxation has been shifted 'downwards' to local and regional authorities.
Given this premise, the self-organised movements would then seek to impose
the free distribution of particular social services upon those bodies, with
the latter in turn claiming renumeration from the central authority (R. U.
1993: 59-60).
A New Public Space? A New Class Composition?
The notion of a self-managed space challenging the subordination of
need to accumulation has become closely bound up in recent Italian
discussion with two other questions: the possibility of a new public space
formed outside the state, and the dimensions and characteristics assumed by
the new class composition thrown up by the crisis of what, for want of a
better term, continues to be called 'fordism'. One of the first documents
to pose the question in this way was drafted by the editorial board of
Luogo Comune, a number of whose members had been leading intellectual
figures of the old autonomia (and in some cases, amongst those arrested in
1979 or thereafter).2 Written in 1992, 'For an extraparliamentary
democracy' used the opportunity of Italy's constitutional crisis to reject
both the defenders of the old regime and those new political forces (from
the the Lega Nord to the nouveaux riches around Berlusconi) vying for a
'second' republic. Insisting that 'the current institutional crisis has its
roots... in the crisis of the society of labour', it pointed its finger
directly at the displacement from centre stage of that 'citizen-worker' who
had underpinned the postwar social compact (Luogo Comune 1992: 49). With
restructuring and 'mass defection' now combining to break the link between
producer and citizen, the defence of democracy tout court today coincides, like it or not, with
the construction of, and experimentation with, non-representative
democracy. Everything else is petulant chatter (Luogo Comune 1992: 51).
Faced with the statist - and increasingly statified - nature of the
left parties and unions, Luogo Comune's editors argued that this new public
space must be sought outside the traditional political sphere: in the
social centres, in the new 'alternative' unions, in local groups working
around immigration, housing, and the environment. In the last few years,
the notion of a new public space has struck a chord within a growing number
of circles within Italy's autonomist and libertarian left. Apart from an
important 1994 conference (Padovan et al. 1995), it has spawned a number of
regional projects, such as the attempt in Padua to establish a city-wide
consulta (council) open to a range of social forces, including some beyond
the traditional boundaries of left dissent (Klinamen 1993). Along the way,
as one means towards constructing a lingua franca with such forces, the
Paduan autonomists have discovered the vocabulary of radical democracy as
citizenship. 'By democracy', they have written, 'we understand the direct
popular control of a society's structures by its citizens' - the latter
being defined as all inhabitants, whether they hold 'legal' citizenship or
not (La Comune 1993: 2). Looked at in more strategic terms, the network of
'non-representative democracy' represented by this new public space has
been theorised by some autonomists as a counter-power that anticipates the
eventual emergence of revolutionary soviets (Krasivyj 1993: 111).
If 'the society of labour' based upon fordist mass production is
said to be in crisis, what new class composition has begun to emerge in its
stead? The proliferation of self-organisation amongst school teachers in
the late eighties (above all, the rank and file committees known as the
COBAS), followed by the university student movement of 1990, have inspired
some Italian marxists of late to talk of a nascent 'mass intellectuality'
which, they claim, has supplanted in strategic importance that mass worker
formed within the fordist deal (Bernocchi 1993). Sharply criticised in
quarters which continue to emphasise the importance of industrial workers
(M. Melotti, R. Sbardella & M. Antignani 1990), this thesis presently holds
sway within circles broadly connected with Luogo Comune and its successor
Derive Approdi. While some equate 'mass intellectuality' with the
massification of intellectual labour, and thus tie it to particular social
strata, others see it as a dimension common to contemporary labour power in
all its articulations:
"This form of productive activity is not limited only to more highly-skilled
workers; we are talking of a use value of labour-power today, and, more
generally, of the form of activity of every productive subject within
post-industrial society" (Lazzarato 1994: 6).
In an attempt to legitimise this line of argument, reference is frequently
made to the Grundrisse - a tome long cherished within Italian autonomist
culture - and to Marx's ruminations therein upon the emergence of 'general
intellect' as a social subject. Mass intellectuality, it is thus claimed,
is the form assumed by social subjectivity in an age where accumulation
depends more and more upon 'immaterial' labour (Virno 1993; Lazzarato
1994).
More recently, the notion of mass intellectuality has again been
challenged within the Italian far left. Writing in Riff Raff - a journal
whose editorial collective would by 1994 divide over this very issue -
Umberto Plinsky has called for more caution in the term's use. Whilst
concuring that it 'grasps a real tendency of capitalist development', he
has expressed concern that 'it appears to lack, for the moment, any
convincing synthesis in material terms' (Plinsky 1994: 82). From outside
autonomia, Cosimo Scarinzi is more skeptical still, questioning the very
idea that 'a particular technical composition of employed workers' might
lay claim to a privileged role within the broader process of social
self-organisation (Scarinzi 1993b: 27). Equally contentious are the
political consequences drawn by many of those who uphold mass
intellectuality as the central defining feature of an allegedly
'post-fordist' class composition.
Voice or Exit?
When reviewing 'For an extraparliamentary democracy', the editors
of Klinamen had criticised the document as a piece caught between the
strategems of 'exodus or counter-power' (Klinamen 1992: 56). Already, back
in the first issue of Luogo Comune, Andrea Colombo had begun to speculate
upon the theme of 'exodus' as a viable path out of the capital relation.
Rejecting as failures both the 'storming of the Winter Palace' and the
'long march through the institutions', Colombo cited the black nationalism
of the American sixties and seventies as a model of social change more
worthy of emulation:
"from Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X to Bob Marley, the myth of a return to
Africa... was consciously used to change circumstances without [anyone]
shifting one millimetre in space" (Colombo 1990: 62).
Since that time, other writers associated with Luogo Comune have taken up
and expanded the theme of exodus, understood as escape to an alternative
lifestyle outside the domain of capital. In a passage inspired by Hannah
Arendt, Paolo Virno has asked whether the possibility of exodus might not
in some way be bound up with that of 'the miraculous' - a property
previously reserved by the likes of Hobbes and Schmitt for the sovereign
power - as one moment in the path towards a new radical democracy
constituted outside the state (Virno 1993: 23). Elsewhere, Lucio Castellano
has identified another historical precedent for the exodus, this being the
flight last century of many European proletarians to the US, and then again
westwards 'far from the factories of the East coast bourgeoisie'
(Castellano 1993: 14).3
This is not the first time that the heretical call for an 'opting
out' of the capital relation has appeared within the autonomist camp. A
decade ago, Philip Mattera concluded his survey of informal work in the
modern underground economy by suggesting that it might 'yet provide the
basis for social autonomy' (Mattera 1985: 129). In the nineties, the form
of flight from the capital relation most commonly held up by the exponents
of 'exodus' is that of so-called 'autonomous labour': what in English goes
by the name of self-employment. According to Maurizio Lazzarato,
"Wage labour and direct subjugation (to organisation) are no longer the
principal form of the contractual relationship between capitalist and
worker; a polymorphous self-employed autonomous work emerges as the
dominant form, a kind of "intellectual worker" who is himself an
entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is constantly shifting and
within networks that are changeable in time and space" (Lazzarato 1994:
13-4).
A more obviously social approach to the goal of an alternative
economy outside capital's sway can be found within Italy's hundred or so
social centres. Spaces for political aggregation and the self-management of
free time, many increasingly define themselves as sites of
'self-production'. Primarily engaged in the production of cultural
artifacts - from publications to music (Adinolfi 1994) - and drawing upon
the rich fanzine traditions of punk, their enterprises have been
characterised by Benedetto Vecchi as 'high points of capitalist
development' based upon 'knowledge, science and communicative action'. They
are also, he continues in a now familiar refrain,
"the most contradictory phenomenon of a possible exodus of labour power from
capitalist society, through the constitution of a public sphere that
contemplates the synthesis between developed social cooperation and
political initiative" (Vecchi 1994: 14).
Perhaps the strongest call for 'the creation of economic circuits protected
from the logic of profit' has come from the Roman social centre
Brancaleone. Even they concede, however, that their proposal runs the
constant risk of collapsing into 'self-exploitation': to their mind, this
must be weighed up against the wealth of experience which comes from
participation in a self-managed enterprise (CSA Brancaleone 1994: 105). An
anonymous writer in Nessuna Dipendenza, the journal of Rome's most famous
social centre, is more prudent in their reflections. Reasoning that, 'if
the true antithesis of labour time is the time of free creative activity',
there may well be space for self-managed experiments in the here and now,
they also recognise the dangers inherent within projects which, whilst
perhaps improving the 'quality of life' of those taking part, fail 'to
contaminate civil society' as a whole (CSOA Forte Prenestino 1993: 19; an
interesting local discussion of these themes can be found in Iain 1995).
This ambivalence is not confined to Nessuna Dipendenza. When the
journal Klinamen speaks of exodus, it does so in a sense quite different to
Luogo Comune. Gathering together a number of pieces concerned with
community alliance-building for its fourth issue, Klinamen's editors have
advocated an exodus that goes forth 'Out of the ghetto,... towards the
centre' (Klinamen 1993: 45). Back in the late seventies, Negri had likewise
criticised those who sought to detach the project of constructing a new
world from that of confronting the old; he too had spoken scornfully of
'the party of the ghetto', although aspects of his writings from the early
eighties talk somewhat ambiguously of 'separating' from capital (Negri
1979: 23-5; cf Negri 1980). Today, Negri considers the disjuncture between
'a productive exodus' from capital and 'the processes of the extinction of
constituted power' to be a fundamental feature of contemporary capitalism.
Furthermore, he is explicit in his view that the new 'constituent power'
must ultimately confront the state, before the latter destroys itself - and
humanity with it (Hardt & Negri 1994: 311). Negri seems unusual in this
respect amongst those who advocate exodus; more typical is the position of
Virno who, whilst naming 'radical Disobedience' and 'the Right to
Resistance' as two facets of 'the new alliance between Intellect and
Action', is equally insistent that 'social conflicts manifest themselves
not only and not so much as protest than as defection... Nothing is less
passive than escape' (Virno 1993: 23, 16).
Positions such as these have led many autonomists to reject the
discourse on 'exodus' outright. According to Plinksy, any attempt to
establish a genuinely social form of self-organisation dedicated to need
over profit cannot postpone forever an encounter with the established order
- an encounter which talk of 'dropping out' from the capital relation seems
designed to forestall (Plinsky 1994: 81). The most extended critique,
however, comes from the pages of the Roman journal Invarianti, where Luca
Nutarelli has linked the theme of exodus to a well-established tradition
within left culture stretching back to Proudhon and other
'schizo-socialists'. There he shows that a whole range of schemes which
purport to offer a means to live outside capital and the wage relation,
whether they be nineteenth century labour exchanges, modern day welfare
scams or the perennial quest self-employment, are themselves predicated
upon the existence of capital, wage labour and state (Nutarelli 1995: 25).
Conclusion
All of these speculations about a possible escape route from
capitalism have taken us a long way from our original starting point. What
practical possibilities, then, do the debates reviewed above hold out for
the project of social transformation in Italy today? For the time being, at
least, probably very little. Whether the fiscal revolt led by the populist
and racist Lega Nord does indeed shift the locus of tax collection
'downwards', and so open up space for local campaigns over social services,
is a moot point - as is, at present, the ability of either the social
centres or the 'self-organised' workers and alternative unions to carry
such campaigns into the class as a whole. The latest phase of mobilisation
within workplaces, while real enough, continues to fall short of 'a unitary
and rank and file movement able to invert the tendency to defer before the
union leaderships' (d'Errico et al. 1995: 6). In any case, the central
debate in Italian offices and factories has most recently concerned an
altogether different form of guaranteed income - the pension (Botti &
Miglino 1995). As for the social centres, many of those who run them feel
caught between a growing interest in 'self-production', and the ongoing
difficulties of securing the active participation of their 'consumers' in
broader political projects; they too are entering a new phase which, if
potentially rewarding, nonetheless remains uncertain (Borrelli 1995; Moroni
1995).
There are other limits to the discourses discussed above. Perhaps
the most evident of these is that, with the exception of De Angelis, there
is little said in all the talk of guaranteed income about gender relations
- a matter without which no serious understanding of class composition is
possible (Cleaver 1992). On the few occasions where gender is explored at
length, as in Alisa Del Re's fascinating look at the welfare state (1994),
the contributions made are still too infrequently taken up within the main
flow of debate. This is all the more disturbing given that any serious
project aimed at reducing the paid working week will be anything but
egalitarian unless it also confronts the profoundly gendered realm of
unwaged work (Marazzi 1994).
Then there is the question of class composition itself. However
intriguing the notion might appear, talk of a 'mass intellectuality'
remains contentious, to say the least. If the term has a certain suggestive
ring to it, similar to that played by operaio sociale (socialised worker)
within the autonomist debates of the late seventies, it continues to be
more schematic than substantive in its explanatory power. At best it may
offer some insight into the forms that class struggle has assumed in newer
labour processes such as software design (Cleaver 1995b: 167); at worst, it
stands as yet another instance where the (supposed) reality of one layer
becomes confused with the politically and culturally diverse experiences
which characterise contemporary class composition as a whole.
Finally, there is the matter of the 'exodus'. This, as we have
seen, has been presented in two forms: self-employment, and a more
explicitly collective project of an alternative economy based upon
self-production. But can individuals really escape subordination to capital
through self-employment? As the fieldwork of Sergio Bologna and others have
indicated, the burgeoning phenomenon of self-employment is a complex one in
Italy today, and the relevant data partial by nature. At the same time, it
does seem a touch implausible, judging by what is known, to suggest that
the degree of autonomy heralded by Lazzarato is in any way typical. Indeed,
given the structural dependence of so many self-employed upon a single
client - often, a large firm to whose production rhythms they are beholden
- it is somewhat forced to suggest that such workers have loosed the bonds
of the capital relation. If anything, their circumstances evoke those of
earlier workers who, whilst retaining control of their tools, were
nonetheless formally subordinate to capital. As a consequence, it may prove
more useful to characterise many of today's self-employed as 'de-waged
labour power', if not perhaps, as Bologna would equally insist, 'the new
mass worker of the network-firm' (Bologna 1992: 17). As for the sort of
social identity emerging from this path, the picture that Primo Moroni has
painted of the growing numbers of self-employed in Milan is a bleak one:
"A vast process of self-valorisation and 'desalarisation' which, instead of
producing social cooperation outside the hierarchical domination of the
enterprise (as some would have wished), produces new egoisms and separate,
intolerant individualities" (Moroni 1992: 45).
Apart from anything else, the ongoing polemic over dropping out of
the wage relation indicates that a minority within Italian radical circles
have become leery of any frontal assault against the state. Some have
suggested that this stance is both proof of its exponents' reformism, and a
direct consequence of their earlier 'disassociation' (Ghignoni 1995: 176).
Given the personal costs associated with the movement's defeat in the early
eighties, such wariness of confrontation is perfectly understandable. More
to the point, though, is this question: if self-employment offers so little
hope, can the collective forms of 'opting out' espoused by some within the
social centres be generalised? And can this really be accomplished, as the
American anarchist writer Hakim Bey suggests, in a manner invisible to
capital's gaze?
"How can I live a comfortable (even luxurious) life free of all interactions
and transactions with CommodityWorld? If we took all the energy the
Leftists put into 'demos', and all the energy the Libertarians put into
playing futile little 3rd-party games, and if we redirected all that power
into the construction of a real underground economy, we would already have
accomplished 'the Revolution' long ago" (Bey 1993).
As far as I can see, it's doubtful whether such a strategy would actually
engender instances of social autonomy; if anything, it evokes a life more
akin to that of rats which, in eking out an existence between the walls,
survive on what they can scavenge.4 Here, the arguments of Midnight Notes a
propos the flight of individuals from South and East towards the perceived
benefits of wage labour in the metropoles, seem equally relevant to those
seeking within the West and North to flee from waged work:
"if they do not create places against capital at the termini of their
trajectory, they will find themselves, like the pirates of the Caribbean,
continually displaced and eventually exhausted and exterminated" (Midnight
Notes 1990: 9).
A recent paper by Harry Cleaver reiterates this point. Discussing Laura
Miller's reflections upon gender relations and the American frontier myth
(Miller 1995), he argues that capital's relentless drive to 'colonise' all
facets of human creativity continually engenders resistance, including
efforts to 'break away' from its grasp. While these moments offer valuable
opportunities to experiment with new, non-exploitative social
relationships, they too will be crushed or incorporated unless their
creativity is directed against 'the larger capitalist system' (Cleaver
1995a).
Recognising that no space can presently exist beyond capital's
reach means working towards a 'deepening of contradictions and conflict'
(Plinsky 1994: 81) in a manner that is conducive to mass self-organisation.
In this respect, further debate over the autonomist discussion of
guaranteed income might offer one possible way to explore the question of
class self-activity within the sphere of social relations as a whole.
Whether this approach has some chance of success in circumstances where
'opting out' might well appear to many as a far more plausible alternative
must, in the end, await 'the closest study of the diverse directions [that]
different subjectivities may pursue' within the present state of things
(Cleaver 1992: 17).
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Notes
* An earlier version of this paper was presented to 'Socialism Beyond
the Market', the 25th Annual Conference of Socialist Economists held 7-9
July 1995 in Newcastle upon Tyne. Thanks to Massimo De Angelis for
comments, including his reiteration of the (non)meaning of 'labour as
such'.
1. 'For operaismo, the only valid starting point for any theory which
sought to be revolutionary lay in the analysis of working class behaviour
in the most advanced sectors of the economy. More than anything else, it
was to be this quest to discover the "political laws of motion" of the
commodity labour-power which came to mark workerism out from the rest of
the Italian left of the sixties and seventies. At its best, the discourse
on class composition would attempt to explain class behaviour in terms long
submerged within marxism, beginning with that struggle against the twin
tyrannies of economic rationality and the division of labour; at its worst,
operaismo would substitute its own philosophy of history for that of Marx's
epigones, abandoning the confrontation with working class experience in all
its contradictory reality to extol instead a mythical Class in its
Autonomy. At first inextricably linked, by the seventies these rational and
irrational moments of its discourse had, under the pressure of practical
necessities, separated into quite distinct tendencies, although not
sufficiently so as to avoid workerism's political and theoretical collapse
at decade's end' (Wright 1988: 3-4).
2. Just to complicate things further, here, as in the debate
concerning the possibility of an 'exodus' from the capital relation, the
various positions expoused are further underpinned by an apparently
unrelated but lingering controversy, which concerns stances taken during
the period of mass arrests back in the eighties. At that time, after a
number of years in prison awaiting trial, a circle of prominent autonomists
including Toni Negri and Paolo Virno formally 'disassociated' themselves
from the armed struggle carried forward by the Brigate Rosse and similar
groups. From their point of view, this was merely a logical consequence of
the serious political and cultural differences which had long divided the
dominant currents within autonomia from the terrorist organisations; for
many other autonomists - including some of the Brigate Rosse's most
trenchant critics - 'disassociation' represented an opening to the state
made at the expense of other political prisoners, or even a distancing from
revolutionary politics altogether. One of the few available
English-language accounts of disassociation can be found in Ruggiero
(1993).
3. That Castellano would choose this saga to illustrate his point
already hints at some of the problems underlying the myth of exodus as a
means to social autonomy. As both Miller (1995) and Cleaver (1995a) have
shown, the particular form which this flight to the Western frontier
assumed not only failed to avoid eventual colonisation by the wage
relation, but was intimately bound up with the displacement of indigenous
peoples - peoples from whom the homesteaders might have learnt something
about the dangers inherent in seeking 'to own' some land of 'one's own'.
4. I discovered Nutarelli's essay only after completing the first
version of this paper. I was intrigued to find a similar metaphor in his
critique of exodus: that of the mice 'at play' forced to scurry for cover
upon the (capitalist) cat's return. He further suggests that
self-production is at best a form of playing with the crumbs which have
fallen from the master's table, and that one should avoid 'confusing the
instrument of antagonistic communication with the objective of antagonism'
- (1995: 36).
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