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Laboratory Italy The Golden Horde: Revolutionary Italy,
1960-1977 Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni Trans. Richard Braude Seagull Books: Italian List, 2021. ISBN
978 1 8030 9193 8 Reviewed By Howard Slater For many the year 1968 marks a highpoint for
revolutionary agitation in Europe. Waves of protests, sit-ins and
occupations could be witnessed from Paris to Belgrade and over to
Mexico City and Chicago. However, these uprisings that questioned
the rise of a consumption-led capitalism and a growing
technologization of production seemed to fritter out into left wing
folklore. Their lack of longevity, their failures, have been mulled
over in the decades since then and gave rise to various modes of
explanation: from voluntary servitude to the power of a
mediatised-spectacle to manipulate collective perception; from a
critique of the forms and tactics of the classical workers movement
to the psychoanalytically-toned questionings proffered by ‘minority’
groups that opened up notions of difference and desire.
Perhaps the long-lasting failure of ’68 was
the way that it became celebrated by Left and Right. The Left looked
back nostalgically but the Right, seeing this mass wave of protests
as a serious threat to its profiteering consensus began the work of
globalisation, of outsourcing production to low-wage economies that
ended up with a de-industrialisation that hit this country in the
late 70s. So, both Left and Right seemed to freeze ’68 in aspic. It
became the master signifier around which all hopes for a revolution
in continental Europe floundered and around which the search for a
new revolutionary subject began. This was as much a media-effect:
the hierarchical selection of what news to cover, what anniversaries
to celebrate, a kind of essentialising of ’68 that has the effect of
drawing a line under it as the last chance, the ultimate defeat. In
this way the social struggles that occurred in Italy (and let’s not
forget Portugal in 1974) over the decade following ’68 becomes not
so much an element of popular consciousness but an area of
specialised knowledge. Back in the 80s you would be hard pressed to
research into what had only recently occurred in Italy. Those
UK-based groups that reported and discussed events there (such as
Big Flame) had disbanded and their booklets rarely appeared in
circulation. There was one sole book, an anthology of
contemporaneous writings, that arrived on these shores from the USA:
Italy: Autonomia – Post Political Politics (1980) Until the
publication of Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven (2002) which
recounted the story as a workerist history, it was only the efforts
of an Edinburgh based journal Common Sense and the publication of
writings by Toni Negri by the one-man band of Red Notes that offered
routes into coming to grips with a socio-political situation that
contained “the factual and cultural premises of a civil war.” In
short, one could say that what occurred in Italy was akin to what
was happening in Northern Ireland. This book, then, marks something of a
departure from the foregoing in that it is a recounting of the
history written by two protagonists who participated in the
upheavals of those decades.
First published in Italy in the late 80s it is a
collaboration between novelist Nanni Balestrini and bookshop-owner
Primo Moroni. The two of them, having access to an archive that had
been established by Moroni, began to piece together the history of
the period and interspersed their narrative with a choice selection
of contemporaneous texts drawn from journals, flyers, newspapers.
So, this book also figures as an anthology and rather than being a
straight ‘political’ or ‘workerist’ recounting the two authors
include much information and assessment of the counter-cultural
movements in Italy as well as the widespread factory struggles that
mark the period. They chart the rise of popular revolutionary songs
and their dissemination through assemblies and protests, they give
credence to the ‘revolutionary presuppositions’ of youth rebellion
articulated by the urban communes of the beats/hippies and how this
mutated into the proto-Situationist agitations of the Green Wave (a
grouping which has much in common with Alexander Trocchi’s Project
Sigma) who deployed an ironic sardonicism with slogans like those
that appeared on the walls of Paris: “President Johnson invites you
to a free holiday in Vietnam: emotions guaranteed.” This accent on youth struggle not only has
its efficacy in rendering the mood and militancy of the university
occupations that arose and rearose during this period, but it also
indicates the change in sensibility that young people, who
increasingly entered the factories, brought to the industrial
struggle. This brings us to a thumbnail rendition of the initial
history that the two authors recount in this book. Bearing in mind
the fetishism of ’68 in the media, it came as a surprise that a wave
of strikes (veering on a general strike) came to break out in Italy
the following year. This continuation was dubbed the Hot Autumn. In
the early chapters of their book, then, Balestrini and Moroni
describe a legitimation crisis through which we can understand the
term autonomia that is often used to describe the new form of
working-class militancy that arose in Italy. What we had there was a
situation in which the workers and the youth (often one and the
same) had come to mistrust their representatives. Strong shopfloor
unions and an embedded Communist Party (with roots in the Partisans
of post war Italy) came to be unable to deliver on the workers’
demands (over contract negotiations but equally including ‘social’
demands such as asking to be compensated for ‘travel time.’) What
then arose was a working class that increasingly became autonomous
from the unions and the CPI to the degree that it was possible to
speak of an extra parliamentary left. Indeed, the numerical strength
and militancy of the Fiat factory (which crops up throughout this
book) meant that it was given the ironic moniker of the ‘Miafiori
Party.’ Various innovative tactics were employed: wildcat strikes,
chessboard strikes, hiccupping strikes… and leaving the factory to
occupy public squares and link-up with other forms of struggle such
as those over housing. As with the demands to be recompensed for
travel time another demand that the two authors often refer to may
have sent shock waves through the Italian bourgeoisie: the
working-class demand to decouple wages from productivity which would
effectively chisel into the sacrosanct capitalist leverage of
surplus value. In fact, these shockwaves, an unappeasable struggle
of ‘impossible demands’ spreading through Italian society, opened up
another phase which was termed the strategy of tension. The bomb in
Piazza Fontana, blamed on anarchists, was soon unveiled as the work
of Italian fascists in league with the Italian secret services. This
was followed in 1970 by an ‘attempted coup’ that the author’s
describe as being tied up with a right-wing conspiracy involving
members of the armed forces. From here we enter the domain of
‘para-politics’ that have been dramatised (and more widely exposed)
in the crime novels of Leonardo Sciascia. Here are depicted the
existence of a ‘parallel government’ (Propaganda Due),
infiltration of left-wing groups, remote manipulation of terrorists
by puppet masters, alliances between the army, politicians, mafiosi,
masons and industrialists, CIA involvement etc. The author’s do not
go down this route that we, in this country, may recognise in the
‘dirty war’ as practiced in Northern Ireland or in our dim
recollections of God’s Banker being found hanging under Blackfriars
Bridge. This omission is understandable as these
murky waters veer towards conspiracy theories and a byzantine
meshwork of information and counter information and Balestrini and
Moroni are more concerned here with laying out the facts and
apposite commentary that outline the wide-ranging struggles against
what they term “authoritarian democracy” (as witnessed in the state
of emergency brought on by the Reale Law in 1975) as well as
charting the theoretical developments of working class theory that
took place in Italy from the early 60s onwards. The first wave of
these developments (reflected here in the inclusion of texts by Toni
Negri, Sergio Bologna, Raniero Panzieri etc) owe something to
unorthodox readings of Marx that the authors highlight were inspired
by the study of Marx’s newly available Grundrisse with its
pivotal section that was dubbed ‘the fragment on machines’. In
short, these theorists took up what they termed ‘class composition’
which, to paraphrase Balestrini and Moroni, relates to how changes
in the structure of the production system informs working class
consciousness, modes of organisation and resistance. This was a new
concept at the time which didn’t get much traction in this country,
but which led the Italians, who carried out ‘worker inquiries’ in
the factories, to chart the technological changes that industrial
capitalism was making. They noted a change from the ‘mass worker’
(who may retain a modicum of ‘craft’) to the ‘social worker’ (who is
essentially being deskilled into ‘any-job-whatsover.’) In this light
these theorists noted new forms of struggle which in this volume
pivot around the author’s discussion of the ‘refusal of work’, a
rejection of wage labour and the search for other means of living,
other forms of life, other means of relating to one another.
It is this latter, encapsulated in the
popular slogan ‘Reclaim Life’, that marks the tenor of the situation
as it developed in Italy over the 70s and came to a culmination
point in what was termed the Movement of ’77. Before we arrive there
it must be mentioned that Balestrini and Moroni include a chapter
entitled ‘The Revolution in Feminism.’ That this is a separate
chapter tells a tale in itself as women, politicised through
focussing on their emotional experiences through
consciousness-raising groups, came to offer theories of patriarchy
(the ‘original infamy’, the original class division, as Lea Melandri
describes it here) that they found applicable to both the official
organs of state politics and the practices and ways of operating of
the extra-parliamentary left. This questioning of the very forms of
politics, politics as a male dominated sphere, led to what the
authors describe as a mass exodus of women from left organisations
like Lotta Continua. The women were accused of placing too much
“emphasis on intimacy and the individual”, and of a separatism that
was seen by some as fracturing and blunting the wider movement.
However, it must be noted that the legacy of an Italian feminism
that retained a focus on the distinction between Women’s liberation
(revolution against unreformable social structures) and Women’s
emancipation (legal rights enshrined by bourgeois law), perhaps,
with the hindsight brought on by de-industrialisation, outstrips the
more workerist innovations of that period. A prime example is the
Wages for Housework campaign of the mid 70s and the work of
Leopoldina Fortunati (sadly absent from this book) who, via taking
Marxian categories to task, showed the invisible (affective) labour
of women in the domestic sphere as hidden from sight and unpaid for
by capital. Perhaps in contradistinction to the flavour
of the feminist struggle and its opening up of difference and desire
as legitimate political categories, the long lasting effects of the
strategy of tension as well as the Communist Party coming into talks
with the Christian Democrats about playing an appeasing role within
the state (the famous Historical Compromise), led to a situation in
which many militants took up armed struggle and the kidnapping of
factory bosses. Another prime factor here is, with an ongoing and
irresolvable social struggle, the Italian state resorted to tactics
of round-ups, imprisonment in ‘special’ jails and an all-round
harassment of the youth-formed squatted social centres that became
hubs for the relaying of information (including a network of pirate
radio stations) and which ensured that any political upheaval had
its wider counter-cultural ramifications. As the author’s
illustrate, there was, during the 70s, a shared-in “adversary
culture”, a form of what Trocchi termed an Invisible Insurrection in
that the the classical working class were no longer the leading
representative of social unrest that the Party and State could
negotiate with. They describe how it became the norm to attend
demonstrations with firearms and it was this climate that led to the
forming of terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades and Armed
Proletarian Nuclei (which had links to prison struggles.) Many
participants in the Movement of 77 and thereafter, deemed this
development as a serious mistake, an actual fracturing of the wider
movement. The Red Brigades came to be seen as a Leninist vanguard
who turned away from the “mass avant-garde” to take on the State
itself. This reached a culmination in the Moro Affair in which Aldo
Moro, president of the Christian Democrats and overseeing
negotiations with the Communist Party, was kidnapped and held to
ransom not for money but for the issuing of sensitive and
inflammatory political material. The State refused to negotiate
(perhaps, it is mooted, because elements in the state did not want
the PCI anywhere near power) and so Moro was eventually deemed to be
sacrificed by the State and was shot by the Red Brigades. This latter, happening in 1978, is covered by
the last of the anthologised texts in this book by Paolo Virno. This
essay acts as a kind of Afterward to this volume and perhaps shows
that Balestrini and Moroni preferred to concentrate on more positive
aspects of the history they are covering as well as to give space to
‘internal’ criticisms of the Movement of 77 so as to not give the
last word to the counter-revolution. I say this because the
kidnapping and assassination of Moro was surely the springboard to
an even more venomous reaction by the Italian State. Virno notes the
deployment of what was called the Calegero theorem: “the hypothesis
of a single political leadership governing all of the revolutionary
movements, underground or otherwise.”
This ‘theorem’, surely still
operative today in even less nuanced times, led to the infamous mass
arrests of April 7 in which many militants and writers, editors and
commentators found themselves either in jail or fleeing into exile
(including the author of this last text of the book who went on to
speak of the ‘disenchantment’ that marked the decade that followed.) So, Moroni and Balestrini offer up this book
as both a tool mémoire and as a way of charting “the epoch
defining passage from one phase of capitalism to another.” It is in
this way that some speak of Italy as a laboratory for it has since
come to be accepted that this phase was one marked, in the West, by
de-industrialisation. It has often been remarked of autonomia
that it theorised how working-class struggle fed into the
development of capital, that its militancy, its refusal of work, was
a driving force that provoked technological change. This may be a
poison chalice as we only need recall how Fiat led the way with mass
sackings and the robotisation of the production line which ushered
in an era of ‘non-guaranteed’ work. The old industrial working class
with its jobs for life and ‘social wage’ was replaced by the
contractual precarity of neo-liberal capital that to this day eats
into the gains made by the Workers Movement: sick pay, holiday pay,
lengthening of the working day etc. For one commentator from the
A/Traverso collective, reflecting on the mass gathering in Bologna,
this was a case of a missed
opportunity to combat capital on the level of its technological
recomposition, one that required forms of intellectual labour
necessitated by what would become a key marker for the
post-industrial West: the increasingly central productive role of
communications and language, a situation that the authors describe
as “the domain of a semiocracy, the domain of symbol and signs.”
Whilst this is obvious to us today it is also
worth noting that the legacy of the period covered in The Golden
Horde was the foundation upon which many of the authors included
within its covers continued their investigations. Such concepts as
‘immaterial labour’ (services) and ‘affective labour’ (social care)
as well as ‘precariat’ (zero-hour contracts) all emanated from the
study of capital’s technical recomposition and the changes this has
made to the modes of wage labour and surplus value extraction. In
the West it seems that the physical exhaustion of labouring has come
to be matched with the psychical cost of a society that is open for
business 24/7. This is interestingly reflected by Balestrini and
Moroni’s use of the term ‘existential’ which seems like a
placeholder for the transitions that their book highlights. At one
turn this seems to mean a kind of change in cultural consciousness,
an ineffable transformation that operates at an unconscious level,
and at another it seems to be a harbinger of the ‘existential
unease’ that currently marks our society. In this light the only
disappointing aspect of this book is the omission of a prospective
chapter drafted by feminist activist Lea Melandri and radical
psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli and drawn from their journal
L’Erba Voglio. This journal which brought together coverage of
the workers struggles and the feminist struggle, was also exploring
the ‘micropolitical’ domains of radical pedagogy and
anti-psychiatry. This conjunction and its ongoing interaction is
crucial for our times. It is no shame that the authors didn’t have
the benefit of 30 years of hindsight. Their book opens up a
continent. A crack in the continent from which arises an
anterior-future.
Other Works of Interest Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds.)
Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, University of
Minnesota, 2008. Paolo Bona and Sandra Kemp (eds.) Italian
Feminist Thought: A Reader, Blackwell, 1991. Primo Moroni Archive, see
https://www.inventati.org/apm/index.php?step=eng_description
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