Anyway, I’m loath to be too critical of Negri, for a variety of reasons, but I think he was always vulnerable – even at the height of the movement – to the charge of assuming that this kind of linkage between street-level activism and the total socialist transformation of reality must exist, then reasoning back from there. You could say that he jumped the gap between ideal and material by idealising his materialism. But what he never did – and never has done – is float free of street level to the point of arguing that the battle could be won within the realm of ideas or within the political sphere. As Perry Anderson pointed out in the LRB recently, Mario Tronti, Alberto Asor Rosa and Massimo Cacciari – leading figures of operaismo and hence forerunners of Autonomia – ended up not only on the inside of the PCI but denying that there was any outside.

So that’s half an answer – the domestication of a bit of Autonomia actually happened, kind of (although Tronti and co made their move long before Autonomia had got going), and I think the results bear out your suspicion of the idealist tendencies of Autonomia. That said, I think a move from within the PCI to embrace (or reappropriate) some of the stuff that was going on in the late 70s would have had a very different dynamic. Above all it would have broadened the range of permissible forms of protest & political participation, and that in itself would have militated against disappearing into a cloud of fluffy pseudo-materialism. For example, imagine that the party in local government had responded to rent strikes by cutting rents as far as the budget would allow and giving tenants’ groups quasi-official status. You end up with slightly more politically engaged (and happier!) tenants, a tenants’ group whose leaders are regarded as dirty sellouts by any local Autonomists, and – perhaps most important for the current argument – a whole new layer of party activists, who bring their own ideas to the party (pun unintended but felicitous).

Good questions – thanks. And I still haven’t got round to the bit about the PCI’s attachment to the will-you-condemn method, and how well that worked for them…

The great perplexity involved in reading Negri comes from the sense that surely his concepts must, sooner or later, enter sublunary orbit, and hover over the terrain of politics, and provide something resembling an actual plan of action. But this is not quite what happens. The problem is not that the framework is abstract. Rather, it is that the system is just too beautiful. When actualities run counter to the theory, they are absorbed, and the theory instantly corrects itself by making flaws into features.

… What makes all of this nearly unbearable for the garden-variety leftist reader—and Negri’s work cannot have much of an audience elsewhere on the continuum of political opinion—is that everything grows exponentially woollier the closer it gets to questions of agency. Who, in the system of Empire, has the means and the motive to change things? And why? And how? (Who in particular, that is, for a category so boundlessly capacious as the Multitude embodies the worst features of utopian, counterculturalist, and populist thought, all at once.)

In other words, might the PCI actually have been worse off, and more compromised in the longer run (given yer basic framework of analysis), if it had bought into these new kinds of action. Obviously, I am being a bit unfair here – that autonomia gave rise to Negri gave rise to this particular kind of fluffy pseudo-materialist analysis is not to prove that this fluffiness was immanent in the whole thing from the beginning. But I think you could make a decent case that it is one highly plausible way in which the movement would have developed if it had become domesticated earlier.

Dude!

Many thanks for an excellent review. One nitpick – could you change “Phil Edward’s” to “Phil Edwards’s”?

On Tarrow – I think the claims about the position I challenge (Tarrow believes that there was one major wave of Italian social movements in the late 1960s etc) should probably be in the past tense; Tarrow hasn’t written about this stuff in the last decade or so, and I don’t know that his position hasn’t changed. The idea of re-analysing his data is a good one, and all I can say is that it didn’t occur to me (the chapter where I do some quant. analysis was the last thing that went in).

What do I think should have happened? Well, you’re right about my starting-point being a bit to the Left of yours. I’m a Marxist, which has to mean thinking that the overthrow of capitalism is at least dreamable – and ultimately I think the late-70s wave should be honoured as a failed revolution. But I wanted to get away from two ways of thinking that I think it’s easy to slip into if you’re on the radical Left. One is “revolution or bust” – you judge changes in the way people live and work according to whether they heighten the level of conflict or make it easier to make revolutionary interventions. In the case of Italy, a strong right-wing Communist Party in the late 70s was quite plainly a force for the preservation of capitalism – but a stronger and more left-wing Communist Party would have been a considerably more effective force for the preservation of capitalism. But it would have expanded the realm of the politically thinkable and the socially permissible, which would have been a massively good thing for Italian society in both the short and the medium term.

The other assumption I wanted to get away from is the betrayal thesis: the idea that individual leaders – and individual decisions by individual leaders – have a determining influence on which way political struggles develop, so a leader who makes the wrong decision can and should be held responsible for the subsequent defeat. What fascinated me about the Communist Party in that period was just how narrow their field of action really was. In Berlinguer they had a leader who was innovative, thoughtful and charismatic, and as a result they ended up taking some really extravagantly awful positions – but the field of possible alternatives wasn’t all that broad. And this was the case, not because of the original sin of constitutional political parties under capitalism, but because of the specific political and cultural evolution of the Communist Party up to that point.

On one hand, a kind of determinism which sees everything that happens under capitalism as an element in the reproduction of capitalism, until the messianic break represented by revolution; on the other, a kind of voluntarism that says that making that break happen depends on having the right people in charge. I’m saying that things could have been a bit different (and a bit different would have been well worth having) – but that that alternative timeline would have been quite hard to get to, and there were good reasons why we didn’t.

If the Italian Communist Party had embraced the bits of the far left that they liked, while isolating the others, it would likely have eased the tensions substantially.

That’s not quite the argument I was making, although it is a difficult one to summarise in a sentence. My point was that the PCI neutralised the earlier movement by adopting (and softening) their tactics while remaining hostile to the movement itself. In the heyday of Autonomia, there was a huge repertoire of new protest tactics, new forms of organisation and new ways of thinking that the PCI could have helped itself to, all the while maintaining that the groups that had actually come up with them were swivel-eyed extremists who couldn’t be trusted. It wouldn’t have been a great outcome for movement activists, but it would have worked for everyone else. Instead, the party drew in its skirts to remove any suggestion of contamination by new ideas – a bad move in itself, cutting off the party from a huge source of renewal – and essentially defined the movement as criminal. It’s not surprising that a large minority repaid the compliment.

autonomia presaged later social movements which emphasized how society could be changed through reshaping individuals’ consumption habits and ways of associating with each other, rather than state takeover

Autonomia was probably the first movement to emphasise both.

More to say, but that’s enough for now. Thanks again for a thought-provoking review.

imho a must see for anyone interested in politics and cinema

Oh for the days in which politicians (or anyone) made speeches which began like that.

Unfortunately we are left with the unctuous whinings of Blair and Brown, which are easily as illogical and incoherent, but a good deal less amusing.

“Reading Capital Politically” is a good primer on what differentiates Autonomist Marxist from its other manifestations, and isolates what the Italian groups & thinkers (Tronti, Negri) thought
from their specific Italian contexts.