Consiglio di lettura per la sinistra, nell’anno nuovo. Works di Trevisan

Barbara Carnevali

Consiglio di lettura per la sinistra, nell’anno nuovo. Works di Trevisan

Abstract

The editorial reflects on the crisis of the left, highlighting its failure to represent the poor, historically its core base. It recommends Works by Vitaliano Trevisan, a raw “working autobiography” portraying Italy’s new proletariat, comparable to Trump’s U.S. electorate. Trevisan vividly depicts exploited workers—marked by contradictions, misogyny, and racism—without romanticizing poverty. His brutally honest narrative exposes a violent and contradictory world that must be understood for meaningful societal change.

This dissertation examines the "social factory" as it developed conceptually within postwar Italian Autonomist Marxism. This concept is defined historically as an outgrowth of the critique of political economy that accompanied a rethinking of Marxism in postwar Italian working class political thought through the experience of Quaderni Rossi, which culminated in the theoretical and practical work of Potere Operaio, with fragments in the area of Autonomia. Historically, this dissertation locates the "social factory" as derivative of two figures: Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti, as well as two subsidiary movements that were articulated, separately, by Antonio Negri and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Conceptually, the "social factory" is understood in two differing modes: as the result of capitalist accumulation and, the other, as the consequence of the increasing tertiarization of economic life. Both are problematic and unresolved within Italian workerist thought; Negri and Dalla Costa contribute to the discussion of a "social factory" critique of political economy in terms of extending the conceptualization of class and the understanding of social relations within advanced, post-Fordist capitalism. The idea of the "social factory" is understood historically to signify the relationship between capital and class, to understand the role of capital as an element of command within a particular, historical mode of production. In this regard, the development of operaismo is delineated in terms of the critique of political economy and its secondary concept: class composition. The history of a rather rich and varied political orientation constitutes the substantive matter of this work, with the conceptual apparatus forming the definitive characteristics of a distinct political movement: operaismo. In short, the "social factory" is explained historically through its articulation in v Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaio, the student movement, the "hot autumn," Potere Operaio, and Autonomia. Between the early-1960s and the mid 1970s Italy was the country of class conflict. This dissertation tells a story of that historical moment as understood through the development of its main concept, the "social factory," as a critique of political economy. vi Acknowledgements In the course of a dissertation there are many people that deserve recognition. First and foremost is the late Marshall Berman. He was the first person I spoke to of this work and he gave me a characteristic and practical piece of advice: "would you rather do research at 42 nd and 5 th or live in Italy for consecutive summers?" The iconic citizen of New York City instructed me to go abroad, to Italy, to enjoy my dissertation experience. Thank you. My adviser Jack Jacobs: always a mentor-supportive, challenging, and enlightening; steadfast and encouraging. This work bears the imprint of both of their influences. To Joan Tronto, thank you for being part of the proposal defense and for supporting the initial development of this work. To the staff at Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who assisted my archival researchparticularly David Bidussa, Loretta Lanzi, Massimiliano Tarantino, and Alfredo Puttini-thank you for welcoming me with open arms and for patiently dealing with my particular demands. To the staff at the Biblioteca Centrale at Palazzo Sormani, thank you for the endless days of microfiche tape and assistance in periodical research. To the staff at Libreria Calusca a.k.a. Cox 18-while I lived in Porto Ticinese, thank you for the introduction to your rich historical and cultural archives, preserved in the face of state terror. Thanks to the Centro Sociale Leoncavallo-for the informal conversations over dinner, the personal connections, and intellectual dialogue that "liberated spaces" offer (and many others who nourished my spirit as a foreigner investigating Italian history and politics). I would like to thank the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for its material support, particularly the staff in the Mina Rees Library's Inter-Library Loan office who found and retreated the bulk of my initial secondary sources, but also to the administration who thought my work of enough interest to award me funding to conduct research and to write. Second to them is the staff at the New York Public Library's "Schwarzman Building" and "Science, Industry, and Business Library." Studying Italian political thought and history in New York City would have proved impossible without these institutions. I would like to individually acknowledge Professors Frances Fox Piven and Mary Gibson: the latter, for her commitment to students of Italian history and ideas; the former, for her unceasing support for students interested in working class studies and the social movements that they create. Lastly, thanks to my immediate family. Mom, thank you for your unquestioning support. Thanks to Rabab Elfiky for her support and encouragement at the culmination of this work. In a general sense, this work was made possible by the rich history of working class peoples who vii struggle, and have struggled, to attain a better life for themselves, outside the boundaries of the wageslavery offered to them by capital. I'm proud to have written this for my father. Thanks dad for being union and talking about your work-life. I have undoubtedly overlooked many people who in myriad ways contributed to this work (especially my professors from URI who, in my undergraduate years, were remarkable). To the Italians who constitute this history, I've tried my best to represent what I know of your struggles honestly and without discrimination. Yet, in standard fashion, all the errors within are my own. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Working class politics from the Resistance to the Economic Miracle 12 CHAPTER 2: The crisis of 1956 and the birth of Autonomist Marxism: Raniero Panzieri and the origins of Quaderni Rossi 57 CHAPTER 3: The "social factory" and socialist revolution in the theoretical and political work of Quaderni Rossi 96 CHAPTER 4: Classe Operaia: The primacy of working class struggle and the organization of revolution CHAPTER 5: Students and revolutionary class politics: capitalist planning, the scholastic system, and student revolt CHAPTER 6: The "social factory" and workers' liberation from work: the "hot autumn" and working class revolution CHAPTER 7: The "social factory" and the question of "worker centrality" CONCLUSION WORKS CITED CHAPTER 1 WORKING CLASS POLITICS FROM THE RESISTANCE TO THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE …[it is] the principle of authority which must perforce be respected… Now the concept of workers' control threatens that principle of authority; it is the superior who must control the inferior, never the inferior who controls the superior.-Angelo Costa, Confindustria The committees of liberation are the authority of the people, the only legitimate and the only guardians of the interests and liberty of the people: they are as such the true foundation and the incoercible force of the new democracy.-Rodolfo Morandi, Italian Socialist Party …when we speak of the new party we intend, before everything else, a party which is capable of translating in its politics, in its organization, and in its daily activity, those profound changes that have occurred in the position of the working class with respect to the problems of the national life.-Palmiro Togliatti, Italian Communist Party 10 The Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity existed from 1943-1947. During the 25 th Congress in January 1947 Giuseppe Saragat led a "right-wing" or social democratic faction that split the Psiup between his newly created Italian Socialist Workers' Party (PSLI) and the "leftwing" worker-centered politics of Nenni, Morandi, and Lelio Basso which formed the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) [Di Scala 1988, 47-65]. While the call to Marxism is becoming for the most part (from right to left) a cover for an ideological emptiness without precedent, and Leninism as an occasion to make citations, revolutionary theory needs to be constructed from the base, in praxis and in social analysis.-Danilo Montaldi, "Sociology of a Congress" CLASSE OPERAIA: THE PRIMACY OF WORKING CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE ORGANIZATION OF REVOLUTION 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 struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital's own reproduction must be tuned.-Mario Tronti, Lenin in England The political work of the class consists today essentially in keeping alive in the practice of every workers' struggle the strategic proposal of the conquest of power through the revolution. The organization and the revolution coincide in the same strategic moment. The organization is the revolution. To organize signifies tying together, in the struggle, the mass organizations internal to the factory, at a national and international level, unifying the struggle in time and in space-Padua Autonomia Operaia To realize an economically and politically stable society, with the active collaboration of the working class, is the legitimate dream of intelligent bourgeois politicians: if such a dream represents the highest plan of a communist party, more than a million workers strong, the conflict between a reformist strategy and revolutionary tactics becomes inevitable-Rita di Leo, Operai e Pci

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