Storming Heaven

Steve Wright

Description

Storming Heaven is the only book which looks at Italian workerist theory and practice, from its origins in the anti-Stalinist left of the 1950s to its heyday twenty years later. It focuses on the theme of workerism, or 'operaismo', which includes the refusal of work, class self-organisation, mass illegality and the extension of revolutionary agency, of of which are still practiced today by workers across the world.



Emphasising the dynamic nature of class struggle as the distinguishing feature of workerist thought, Storming Heaven reveals how this form of radical politics developed alongside emerging social movements to great effect. It assesses the strengths and limitations of workerism as first developed by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna and others.



This edition includes a new chapter looking at the debates around operaismo and Autonomia since the book originally appeared in 2002, and is updated with a new foreword and afterword.
Foreword by Harry Cleaver

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Weathering the 1950s

2. Quaderni Rossi and the Workers' Enquiry

3. Classe Operaia

4. New Subjects

5. The Creeping May

6. Potere Operaio

7. Toni Negri and the Operaio Sociale

8. The Historiography of the Mass Worker

9. The Collapse of Workerism

10. Conclusion

Postscript: Once More, With Feeling: A Bibliographic Essay

Afterword to the Italian Edition by Riccardo Bellofiore & Massimiliano Tomba

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Economic Disparity
• Social Classes
• Political Ideologies
• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Operaísmo
• Clase (informática)
• Communism
• Laborer
• Workerism
• Hot Autumn
• Antonio Negri
• Autonomy
• 20th century
• Social class
• Leninism
• Italy
• My Last Duchess
• Class
• Communisme
• Labour
• Toni Negri

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786801173
• Langue: English

Extrait

Storming Heaven
Storming Heaven
Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism
SECOND EDITION
Steve Wright
Foreword by Harry Cleaver Afterword by Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba
First published 2002; Second edition published 2017 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Steve Wright 2002, 2017
The afterword by Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba first appeared in the Italian edition of this book, published by Edizioni Alegre, whom we thank for their permission to reprint it here. The text has been translated by Steve Wright.
The right of Steve Wright to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 9991 1 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 9990 4 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7868 0116 6 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0118 0 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0117 3 EPUB eBook



This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Foreword by Harry Cleaver
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Weathering the 1950s
2. Quaderni Rossi and the Workers Enquiry
3. Classe Operaia
4. New Subjects
5. The Creeping May
6. Potere Operaio
7. Toni Negri and the Operaio Sociale
8. The Historiography of the Mass Worker
9. The Collapse of Workerism
10. Conclusion
Postscript: Once More, With Feeling: A Bibliographic Essay
Afterword to the Italian Edition by Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Amplified by a comprehensive new chapter updating research on and by Italian autonomist Marxists and a critical Afterword by Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba, this second edition of Steve Wright s Storming Heaven is even more useful than the original, in two senses. First, while the earlier edition provided the most comprehensive analysis and understanding available in English of the innovations of Italian autonomist Marxists in the heyday of operaismo , the added chapter highlights newly available English translations of old texts, new Italian assessments of the past and carries the analysis forward, into the recent past and present, surveying the subsequent directions pursued by its main theoreticians in the years since. Comprehensive, but condensed into a single chapter, his survey has the feel of both a bibliographical essay and a sketch of what could be an entirely new book, were Steve to decide to delve as deeply into the recent literature that he summarises as he has done with the essential texts of operaismo . One can only hope.
The second way in which this new edition has a heightened usefulness is how it facilitates the intellectual and political mining of the autonomist tradition to inform contemporary decisions about confronting the present composition of class relations of struggle. Whether examining past variations and differences, or sketching present debates, by situating them all within their historical contexts and by showing how these autonomist theorists and militants harvested, yet winnowed, previous work, Steve has provided us with examples that show how demanding that theoretical innovations be based upon the analysis of the material conditions of class struggle can yield insights into What is to be done NEXT! - which should be the purpose of all militant research, whether of past or present.
Riccardo and Massimiliano s Afterword adds their own critical perspective to Steve s analysis, highlighting what they see as the strongest aspects of operaismo , focusing particularly on the work of Tronti and Panzieri, and its legacies within post-operaismo , i.e., among those who have retained central elements of the approach, abandoned others and innovated in new directions, of whom the best known is Antonio Negri. In this short text, their treatment is necessarily narrower than Steve s, and in the case of Negri, even more critical.
They are severe in their condemnation of what they view as Negri s building on the weakest aspects of operaismo . They write that in Negri s new formulations it is pointless to seek mediations, or to claim verifications of reality . This erroneous path, they claim, has led Negri and like-minded post-operaisti , to formulate such concepts as the general intellect and immaterial labour in ways that lack all meaning and led them beyond any recognisable form of workerism. While both concepts have been hotly debated, and I share aspects of their critique, their assertion that Negri et alia have come to embrace such concepts in a self-referential way, devoid of any analysis of reality , ignores the detailed researches on the kinds of labour characterised as immaterial published in the journals Futur Ant rieur (1991-92) and Multitudes (2000- ) and elsewhere. Those researches provided material grounds for theorising the general intellect and immaterial labour , regardless of how one judges the outcome. In the end, Riccardo and Massimiliano return to the central preoccupation of the operaisti , the reconstruction of the conditions that make possible antagonism within and against capital . If we interpret reconstruction to mean a close analysis of ongoing struggles that defy subsumption by capital, rupture its institutions and create alternatives, I can only agree.
Although Steve s new chapter and the Afterword both provide pointers to further desirable research and organisational efforts, I d like to point even further, beyond the focus on developments among Italian autonomist Marxists, past and present, to related kindred spirits elsewhere in the world - whose interconnections formed, and still continue to form, a kind of international kinship network of more or less like-minded individuals and groups - a network whose mutually stimulating linkages have been largely unrecognised or forgotten.
In the beginning of his new chapter, Steve tells of the difficulties in gathering archival materials during a trip to England and Italy in early 1982 in the wake of the crackdown of April 1979 when the Italian state had used the terrorism of armed groups such as the Brigate Rosse to justify the arrest and jailing of thousands of its critics, a great many on trumped up charges. 1 Four years earlier, in the summer of 1978, I had made a similar journey of research and discovery, visiting many of the same people - in London, Paris, Milan and Padua. Like Steve, I was on the hunt for the origins of a set of new ideas. In my case, I had first encountered those ideas while participating in the political project that generated the journal Zerowork (1975-77), a project heavily influenced by both operaismo and the Wages for Housework Movement of the time - a movement born in Italy but which had spread rapidly in Europe and North America. Also like Steve, by talking to those more familiar with the history and reading the materials they dumped in my lap, I discovered many - though by no means all - of the Italian sources Steve has ferreted out and analysed so carefully in Storming Heaven .
But what struck me forcefully, and still fascinates me, was how in England, France and Italy I discovered even earlier roots, some in Europe but also, more surprisingly to me, some back home in the United States. Steve touches briefly on this international dimension in his first chapter Weathering the 1950s where he mentions the way Danilo Montaldi, one of the earliest post-WWII Italian Marxists to begin rethinking class struggle from the point of view of workers, drew upon contemporary work by those in the American group Correspondence and the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie. For me to have had to voyage to Europe to discover such North American roots was nothing short of shocking.
It is true that Martin Glaberman - an important figure in Correspondence and its continuation, Facing Reality - had written a letter to those of us collaborating on Zerowork reproaching our failure to recognise or refer to their earlier efforts, which also put autonomous workers struggles at the centre of both analysis and politics. But ignorant of that history, his scolding hadn t meant a great deal to me. It was not until I spent hours, first in John Merrington s study in London, then in archives in Paris and finally in Bruno Cartosio s office in Milan and poured over their collections of materials from the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Facing Reality, News Letters and Socialism ou Barbarie - alongside all the Italian stuff - that the full impact of Martin s reproach struck home.
The phenomenon, or interrelated phenomena, that those of us working on Zerowork had failed to recognise had been a trans-Atlantic ferment in the late 1940s and 1950s in which an independent-minded array of individuals had ripped themselves away from earlier left preoccupations with the labour movement and political parties to return to Marx s own efforts to understand the materiality of workers struggles, e.g., his close readings of the British factory inspectors reports and his Workers Enquiry, and through that return to rethink elements of his theory and the implications for their politics. This return, I discovered, had characterised the work of a wide variety of party dissidents, including C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Martin Glaberman, and Grace Lee in the United States, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Daniel Mothe in France, Danilo Montaldi, Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti in Italy. In much the same spirit, but with a professional focus on struggles in the past, were the so-called bottom up Marxist his