Storming Heaven - Class Composition And Struggle In Italian Autonomist Marxism - Steve Wright

STORMING HEAVEN - CLASS COMPOSITION AND STRUGGLE IN ITALIAN AUTONOMIST MARXISM - STEVE WRIGHT

Whenever you want to talk about class composition and struggle in Italian autonomist Marxism, where do you go? After all, it's not the typical subject of conversation to indulge in after rocking-up at your local pub on an evening; not unless you live in a Harry Enfield comedy sketch, that is, and you're an intellectual scaffolder. But never mind. At least we can always think about it and read up on it with books such as Storming Heaven by Steve Wright, before swapping our dreams for reality and thus sparking the revolution...

Italians do it better, as they say, and whilst that's not necessarily true there's certainly some evidence to suggest they do it more interestingly, particularly when it comes to radicalism of the political kind. Names that immediately come to mind include Antonio Gramsci, Errico Malatesta, Alfredo Bonanno, Silvia Federici, Luigi Galleani, and Antonio Negri.

Antonio Negri was a political philosopher and one of the founder members of Potere Operaio, the Left-wing political group active in Italy during the late Sixties and early Seventies. By the mid-Seventies, the core members of the group, including Negri, had aligned themselves with Autonomia Operaia, the Far-Left movement that operated beyond the bounds of the Unions and the then-prevailing Italian Communist Party. This whole period in Italy, going right up to the late 1980s was known as the Years of Lead - as in lead bullets, marked by often violent struggles between militant Fascist and Far-Left groups and the Italian State.

One of the most prominent groups at that time was the Red Brigades, made-known to a generation of English kids through the endorsement of them by Joe Strummer of The Clash, and his sporting of a t-shirt emblazoned with their emblem. Contrary to how they're perceived nowadays, The Red Brigades were actually well-respected by some on the Italian Left for their audacious actions involving the kidnapping of politicians and magistrates, the holding of them for short periods and then the releasing of them unharmed. Everything changed, however, with their kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the former centre-Left prime minister of Italy.

Moro's murder instigated a massive State backlash against thousands of people aligned with the Italian Far-Left, with even tanks being brought out onto the streets. Moro's murder was the Italian Far-Left's suicide.

Negri was falsely accused of being the leader of the Red Brigades and though these charges were dropped, he was still sentenced to 30 years in prison for being 'morally responsible' for the violence of political activists during the Sixties and Seventies, and for instigating insurrection against the Italian State.

Negri's genius was in the way he understood how the composition of the working class was in flux, and that rather than positing the centre of gravity of working class struggle within the factory, he extended it to encompass the so-called 'social factory'. This meant that not only could 'working class' be defined as the waged industrial proletariat but it could also now include unwaged workers such as housewives, students and peasants, whose labour was all essential for the reproduction of capital.

Moreover, Negri also identified the question of the refusal to work and subsequently the refusal to be exploited. For sure, there was such a thing as the 'dignity of labour' but it was never going to be found in exploitation and in the way that most work was simply a tool to reap profit for an already rich minority.

From an English perspective, what Negri was talking about became clear during the miners' strike of 1984-85 when the National Union of Miners failed to secure the backing of not only the Trades Union Congress but also the then-Labour Party leadership. Support came instead, however, from a variety of other quarters that included local Labour Party activists and various Left-wing groups along with anarchists, gay and lesbian groups, womens' groups, student groups and peace groups. This was a rainbow coalition manifesting and organising  organically, stepping-up to act where the official Labour Party was failing. This was - in England, at least - the first flowering of the vision that Negri foresaw.

Around the same time as the miners' strike, that same coalition manifested itself in a series of demonstrations held in the heart of the financial district of the City of London. Under the banner 'Stop The City', the links between Third World debt and starvation, the arms industry, animal liberation, and capitalism as a whole were brought to light and challenged directly on the streets.

In its footsteps a few years later, Reclaim The Streets set off down the same path with at one point the same coalition coming to the support of striking Liverpool dockers. From street parties and the locking down of city centres throughout the UK, the financial district of the City of London was then once again targeted only this time round causing millions of pounds of damage to the financial institutions based there.

Later that same year in Seattle, Chairman Mao's 'Let a thousand flowers bloom' quote came true when activists and trade unions from around the world gathered to protest against the meeting of the World Trade Organization and the economic policies they were there to espouse. This was then followed shortly by the same rainbow coalition gathering in Genoa to protest the G8 Summit being held there.

Negri's vision had circumnavigated the world and returned home to him in Italy only to be met, unfortunately, by the same State control, State power, and State violence that was there in the Seventies. The circle remained unbroken.

This is the crux of what Steve Wright's book - Storming Heaven - is about and the reason for reading it. Not only is it a lesson in history but also a lesson from history. 

'To speak still in the old terms, after the experience of 1977, is to be dead', Antonio Negri is quoted as saying, and there's a truth in that. The world is in perpetual motion and how it's run and how its affairs are conducted is but a series of processes. Systems, social relations and economic philosophies such as Marxism, capitalism and neo-liberalism are not cast in stone and in the history of the world are all mere blips that can be profound for one moment but then irrelevant the next. The understanding of them is subjective and open to interpretation of course, but it's in the 'understanding' that the importance lies.

Arguably, even more important are the words of Karl Marx as inscribed upon his grave in Hyde Park Cemetery: 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.' 

The Autonomia Operaia of Italy in the 1970s and Steve Wright's book Storming Heaven are lessons in both.

John Serpico