Review: Storming
Heaven
by
Steve Wright
One of the many drawbacks of English being the de facto lingua
franca is that English speakers do not as urgently feel the need to
learn a second language as others. In effect, this can have the
disadvantage of cutting off of entire traditions. Case in point,
Italy. While Gramsci's writings have long been made available in
English, and diluted through the academy, other vastly richer
traditions have been long neglected. The Italian left communists, and
Bordiga in particular, have scarcely any material available in
English; likewise the autonomist tradition. How fortunate then to
have Steve Wright's new book, Storming Heaven, which is the first,
comprehensive, English language book on the development of the
Italian workerist tradition.
Before examining that statement, it is worth pausing for a moment
to consider the word "workerist." In the English language, and
especially because of the influence of Leninism, "workerist" is
simply used a political swear word. In his battles with the
"Economists" in Russia, Lenin used this term for some of his
opponents who he argued merely tailed the existing working class.
More broadly, this tendency has meant an uncritical worshiping of the
working class and excusing its faults. Still, when much of the left
worships uncritically at non-proletarian temples, perhaps this is not
the worst crime.
Is this what is meant in Wright's text? Actually no, in the
Italian context, the meaning of workerism is quite different.
Workerism looks at the working class as central to the idea of
revolution. Storming Heaven then, is both a history of the
development of this tradition and a critical evaluation of its
strengths and weaknesses, including those of the social factory and
the mass worker.
Wright's narrative begins in the 1950's where the Italian
Communist Party (PCI) stood as the largest political formation in
Italy, although through the efforts of the US and Christian
democrats, it was excluded from governmental power. That the PCI was
no threat to capital seems to have been overlooked - after all, it
had provided its service to capital in the post war period by
mobilizing to hold back working class struggles. Throughout the
1950s, the PCI looked to working class participation in the efforts
of reconstructing Italy with the expectation that they would share in
the benefits.
In this climate of accommodation with capital, intellectuals
within both the PCI and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), in greater
and lesser degrees broke from the orthodoxy of their parities in
rejecting aspects of Leninism, and striving toward an authentic
Marxist method of inquiry. A key motivation was the efforts in
workers' research such as the workers inquiry employed by Marx is the
1880s. It is worth here considering the international aspect to this
movement. Danilo Montaldi, of the Quandini Rossi (Red Notes) journal,
was deeply influenced by a diary in the pages of the French journal
Socialisme ou Barbarie by autoworker Daniel Mothe. Prior to Mothe's
diary, S ou B had published a similar document, The American Worker
by the Johnson-Forest tendency
Quandini Rossi was launched in 1961 by Raniero Panzieri, but a
later split in 1964 gave birth to Classe Operaia (Working Class),
beginning in Wright's words "the classic phase of workerism." This
phase was characterized by three central ideas: an emphasis on the
wage struggle, identification of the working class and the immediate
process of production, and the working class as the driving force in
capitalist society.
It has become fashionable to state that class is a disappearing
concept and that the important of the factory worker has declined,
the workerists approached this question is a different way. Mario
Tronti wrote that "the fate of the worker become the fate of society
as a whole" since the factory was only the concentrated form of
social relations within capitalist society. In other words, the
factory model was extended out beyond to the gates, to the idea of
the social factory. But while the autonomists seemed to privilege the
factory worker, if society was a "social factory" it followed that
all struggles were struggles against capital. It is this latter point
that some influenced by this trend were to develop. It also marks a
contrast with the early council communist theorists like Otto
Rühle, who argued that a worker is only a worker at work; at
other times the worker is utterly bourgeois.
Class consciousness therefore, was not seen as something imported
by a Leninist or social democratic organization. Mario Tronti saw
class consciousness, not as the result of individual experience or
even as the cumulative effect but rather as an aggregate where the
whole formed something rather different from the sum of the parts. It
was in struggle that the worker acquired consciousness as a part of
the struggle. Despite, the difference with Rühle, this idea is
common to many of the descendants of the council communist
tradition.
Wright's book ends with the collapse of workerism. The
counter-assault by the Italian state, using the issue of the Red
Brigades as the pretext for increased repression, forced a retreat
and reorganization and end to the mass phase of the autonomist
movement. Which leaves open a broader question: if it is the working
class which drives capital, rather than seeing workers are merely
reacting, where does this leave the movement in periods of
defeat?
Steve Wright's book is valuable on many levels. It provides an
account of a tendency not well known in English. It also critically
addresses the strengths and the weaknesses of this current. In the
current period of new interest in autonomist ideas, Storming Heaven
desires to be widely read.
NF
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