For the Recomposition of Social Labour - Dan Krasivyj

Riff Raff 2 (March 1994)

translated by Steve Wright in March 1996

The 'boundless' reappropriation of time, space and territory

The acceleration of the passage from Italy's first to its second republic implies the need for revolutionary subjectivity and class autonomy to redefine profoundly their strategic perspectives, their role, their forms of organisation and political action. While the complexity of the political scenario and the very fragmentation of the figures of social labour make it extremely difficult to construct a strategic, radically innovating alternative, the crisis simultaneously opens spaces and possibilities for new horizons of political practice and research. The State machine is being redefined at great speed: the political and social context is moving rapidly towards a 'bi-polar' system and the logic of two camps.

What independent political space and autonomy remains for constructing a global alternative to the new forms of command and to the mechanisms of labour exploitation? How to escape being crushed between welfare-statist neo-frontism and the social right in all its variants?

The present, explosive phase is the fruit of a long process of capitalist restructuring. Since at least the middle of the seventies, this has operated directly upon the levels of class composition, intervening in the relationship between production and reproduction, in the socialisation and circulation of struggles. So, while the maximum social extension of labour and production has developed within the context of flexible accumulation and the supercession of fordism, capital has re-woven its network of power. Corporatist division and the stratification of the various figures of social labour have impeded the recompositional potentialities which the struggles of the sixties and seventies had prefigured at their peak.

The regime of post-fordist flexible accumulation, productive decentralisation, the diffusion throughout all capitalist countries of sub-contracting or part-time work, together with technological innovation, the computerisation of production networks and the appropriation of general knowledge are processes that presuppose the destruction of the old class composition and the rigidity of the mass worker. It's no coincidence that the philosophy of neo-liberalism, the apology for the free market and possessive individualism, the revival of the Schumpeterian myth of the creative entrepreneur are the capitalist mystifications most adequate to the task of masking the new forms of domination across the whole arc of social labour and production.

These considerations allow us to establish some points:

* It's necessary to reconstruct class subjectivity starting precisely from the changed characteristics of social labour and the indissoluble nexus between production and reproduction.

* Redefining and radically renovating the forms of political action: the crisis and contradictions in which the social 'left' finds itself caught also stem from the asymmetry and dissonance [scarto] that still persist between these structural changes and old organisational schemas.

The complexity of the capitalist social formation under real subsumption

In the first place, a central figure within production, one capable of being the overall and hegemonic reference point, does not exist today. This does not mean, as some postmodernist tendencies think, that the factory worker has disappeared; rather, she has been reduced to one part of what Marx called combined social labour and productive cooperation. It's important to emphasise the complexity of the capitalist social formation under real subsumption: today very different systems of labour and exploitation coexist within the same space. The extraction of relative surpl us value, a high organic composition of capital and technological innovation can all be found side by side with the absolute lengthening of the working day. Alongside Silicon Valley there are instances of small-scale, patriarchal family-based production; Taiwanese or South East Asian models of sweatshop labour are imported to Los Angeles and New York!

So as typically fordist moments of production continue to exist within post-fordism... the very figure of 'mass intellectuality' as a productive force must be differentiated into the various roles and hierarchies of which it is composed.

While it is necessary to identify the fundamental tendency - the direction taken by economic and political changes - we must never forget the broad articulation and productive diversification of capitalist modernisation. The present context is one of large-scale fragmentation and differentiation. The interpenetration of production and reproduction, the development of ephemeral consumer goods, fashion, advertising, the generation of images, the cultural industry... all of these processes are linked to a fundamental necessity for capitalism: to accelerate circulation, capital's turnover time, to a maximum. This is that 'twinkling of an eye', 'the cancellation of space through time' within the world market of which Marx once spoke. It is a genuine revolution of time-space paradigms: apart from the enormous acceleration of social life and mobility, there is also a continuous anticipation of the future in the present, to the point of provoking a sense of history's end, an eternal present in which all epochs, all histories and experiences - the dimensions of life, past and future - are consumed in 'productive circulation'. Everything becomes reproducible, consumable, a market product - a perpetual cycle, a machine that destroys all difference.

The postmodern: twixt market, consumption, and the fragmentation of the subject...

Some of the more acute interpreters of postmodern society, such as Lyotard, have cultivated this transformation. The end of grand narratives and of universalistic ideologies; contingency, transience, 'the dissolution of the subject in a plurality of linguistic games', the network of small communities and difference; aestheticising theories, the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment, whether as an individual or as a member of a group (or a gang, for that matter); the renunciation of any general level of change or revolution in favour of the exaltation of individual revolt and momentary instances of freedom: these are all real phenomena present on the surface of contempoary society. Behind them, often, the shadow of nihilism and the destruction of all meaning can be detected. The dichotomy between global and local, between universal and particular, identity and difference, individual and collectivity, are all increasingly marked.

It's clear that all these phenomena, amply recounted by postmodern culture in all its variants, 'left' and 'right', are closely linked to the new dimension of consumption and the market. Ambiguity and equivocation of categories are the reflex of a society in transition, and of the rupture of productive and social paradigms. But is it possible, starting from this configuration, to reconstruct a general project of liberation which has meaning and worth for the majority of humanity? Communist identity; the pursuit of a new universality, of new 'social bills of rights'; the struggle against injustice and exploitation at a global level - all of these questions must measure themselves on this terrain.

The multiplicity of networks - be they social, productive, cultural, communicative or whatever - can and must be imbued by some essential notions: equality, solidarity, cooperation, the free association in which the development of the individual is the condition for the development of all (and vica-versa).

In the absence of central figures, centrality consists precisely in the political-social project of liberation: of space, time, independent territorial areas, counterpower, the reappropriation of administration and the management of wealth. Ultimately, constituent power is incarnated - beneath the surface of the market and the triumph of the ephemeral - in the creative force of living labour and in the social dimension of cooperation.

It's on this basis that the forces of a new social organisation of collective life must be sought and experimented with. There are no 'new frontiers' in the sense of virgin territory - whether physical or virtual - to be discovered and occupied; nor is there the possibility of escape. Under real subsumption all space is occupied: the possibility of liberation and the ferocity of domination coexist in every little 'cell' of the world economy.

The rupture of power and the foundation of freedom: against 'two-stage' theories

The problem of power - which is not merely a senseless, spectacular, empty abstraction - can in no way be avoided. Power has a systematic, efficacious territoriality that is functional and normative over all the articulations of social life. The opening of spaces wherein a new sense of human community can be constructed, where new social relations and a different conception of labour can be established, presupposes the rupture of power relations, their disarticulation, class conflict. Self-determination is essential, determinate [fondante], but it signifies a struggle for independence against 'the absolute sovereign'. Hannah Arendt's thought is suggestive here: a new beginning, an extraordinary, unforeseen and unforeseeable event that establishes a new free community in the void of time, repetition and routine. Freedom, in other words, means being already free. Freedom comes prior to liberation. But is this possible? Certainly, all the great revolutions of European modernity have seen the two moments separated: struggle and the liberation from power, so as to then found the free community. We know the results: machines of liberation became new machines of oppression. But doesn't the concept of freedom as prior and self-constituting [si fonda su se stesso] simply separate the two moments once again, albeit in an inverted, speculative form? Mightn't this be a version of the myths of the 'frontier' and 'wide open plains' found in the 'nice' American revolution, a politics counterposed to the tumultuous plebeans and sans-culottes of the Parisian streets?

Within this antithesis of political thought, perhaps it is possible to imagine a process of social revolution in which liberation and the constitution of liberty, the struggle against power and the establishment of a community of free individuals - the destruction of the old and the creation of the new - are inseparable, marching side by side simultaneously!

The 'one' and the 'many': an old problem for new solutions...

We have tried to delineate some problems concerning a possible recomposition of the various [diverse] figures of social labour: from this a broader picture emerges, one which requires the fusion, in a new form, of specificity and universality, of differences and identity, of unity and multiplicity. No artificial synthesis is possible any longer, no mechanical and abstract 'unity' or 'external consciousness'. The legacy of Enlightenment bourgeois thought - but also that of the Third International - has bequeathed a concept of universality as homogenisation, negation of concrete individuals, their annulment into something homogenous, median, abstract. Capitalist and socialist equality is a mask that hides real social and class inequalities. Here the general will or general interest are mystifications of power, as Marx had already shown with such effect in his critiques of 'equal right'. With all the more reason, an approach different to these categories is strategic for the problem of recomposition. Two risks must be avoided: on the one hand an abstract, mechanical universality superimposed upon the real movements - a formal and fetishistic concept of unity; on the other, a particular that is closed inu pon itself, a local and specific that is isolated, contingent, flattened under its own sectionalism, incapable of developing an open political project able continually to relate and exchange with others. The dialectic between the two moments - between the general, universal features of the class struggle and its specific (local, territorial) dimension - can never be closed. In this sense, common practice and identity of the movement have always been the fruit of a continuous process of research, verification, construction - a process that should never be discounted, fixated, codified or given a priori. The concept of 'social network', as the connective structure of the various articulations of antagonistic activity, better represents new possibilities of the revolutionary subject's social recomposition. In fact the networks allow the reciprocal empowerment [potenziamento] and a general expansion of the strategic and politically central objectives in the various phases of the class struggle. The struggles of workers, the social proletariat, and students in recent years have often remained closed within sectional limits, failing to transform themselves into general projects of liberation. This is a terrain on which capital wins, continually anticipating and reabsorbing the class' movements. Every moment of struggle, in isolation and on its own terms, is easily encircled, neutralised, circumscribed. The logic of the ghetto, of enclosures and barriers designates the map of capitalist command over social productive labour as a whole. But if this is the problem, it means that the privileged terrain of class recomposition today is the territory, in which the nexes between production and reproduction, the relation between space, work time and living time, are all tightly bound together.

Nedd Ludd and Captain Swing... time, space and mobility

This isn't a novelty: the control of space and the struggle for the reappropriation of time have always been the fundamental terrain of the class struggle. Back in the time of the Luddite revolt and the struggles in the English countryside, two figures haunted the nightmares of the bourgeoisie: Nedd Ludd and Captain Swing. It was thought that they ventured unseen throughout the land, fomenting revolt and rebellion everywhere. In reality it was the power that workers exercised over production through sabotage and machine breaking, the peasant struggles' control of space, the very mobility of proletarians that constituted the great fear of the bourgeois class! (David Harvey writes in his book Crisis of Modernity: 'Whoever controls space can always control the politics of place even if - and this is an important aspect - one must first control some specific space...') Space-time-mobility are the central coordinates around which it is possible to recompose the various fractions of social labour-power. They designate a possible territorial dimension of the administration of wealth, production and the goals to which they are directed, of the administration and management of collective resources, of 'the common good'.

Time: struggle for the reduction of the social working day, to liberate living time, creativity and collective freedom against wage slavery. For the universal reappropriation of income, goods, and services, uncoupled from capitalist relation of exploitation.

Space: construction of a new 'political space', an extra-institutional public sphere within which can emerge a common action, interest and identity amongst social strata, in all their differences. The creation of an autonomous and public political space is the fundamental condition for the network of counterpowers to recognise itself in a strong project of transforming the city, territory, life. Against politics, understood as the administrative and bureaucratic machine of command and oppression, for the reappropriation of the political as direct and universal citizenship.

Mobility: While this is central to the capitalist organisation of production and the international labour market, it can also be overturned into a potent weapon of proletarian struggle and recomposition. The flows of labour, the movement between different geographical regions within the universal market, the multiplicity of relations, the speed of international communication: all of these already imply the rupture of frontiers, including from the point of view of class antagonism. This allows us to clarify better the concept of 'territorial dimension', understood as an unconfined, open territory, shot through with the fluxes of communication and the mobility of social and communicative relations. A territory in which there is no place for racism, discrimination, the 'ethnic community'. Finally, a territory which does not at all coincide with the geographical, political and administrative subdivisions of constituted power, whether national or local.

It's time for a revolutionary encounter with the thematics of federalism, but without accepting the 'juridicial-constitutional' form of federalism, much less the Lega Nord's grotesque caricature. Rather, this means developing an anti-State movement, social and territorial self-organisation, self-government and direct democracy, in a context of cooperation from below and solidarity.

Autonomy networked and social self-organisation

We have tried to delineate some possible lines of research, of experimentation, of political practice.

The possibility of redesigning the fabric of social recomposition lies in the boundless reappropriation of space, time and territory; in the rupture of all closed systems, whether local or national; in the nexus between production and reproduction. This is an open and constantly changing scenario, in which political activity must again become adequate to social transformations and the new class composition: discovering once again, in an innovative and radical form, the political passion for communism as a project of universal liberation, for freedom, equality, the autonomy of living labour, an end to the global contradiction between wealth and widespread poverty. It means constructing, within the crisis, our autonomous, theoretical, practical, projectual political space. There are no alternatives to this: the movements of workers and students, of community groups and social centres increasingly run the risk of being forced into the logic of two camps, 'left' and 'right'. Such a position remains subordinate to a defence of the welfare State which lacks any memory of its genesis and significance - a mechanical and 'natural' identification between the State and the public realm. In the process, the notion that the State and wage labour are here to stay, insuperable, is once again sanctified: the natural order of things is re-established, the State and exploitation posited as inescapable. If, on the one hand ,the defence of the living standards and rights conquered by the mass of workers is fundamental, on the other hand it is both possible and necessary to imagine and construct a non-State public sphere: the reappropriation from below of the common good, an extension of collective rights, a new charter of universal citizenship. Health, education, quality of life, income, social wealth for all: these are the indispensable material basis for a concept of public life freed from Statist bureaucratic oppression, and grounded instead in radical democracy.

'Social Republic'! That was the cry of the Parisian workers during the 1848 Revolution. 'Soviet Republic', 'Council Republic': these are the great innovations from the highpoints of revolutionary history. Republic, and not State! : the Commune's democratic administration from below, against the repressive, bureaucratic, political machine of the State.

Is it possible today to prefigure the new soviets of post-fordist social labour - to produce, in modern form, the sense and significance of the Commune? What subjectivity is adequate to this goal, what constituent power is appropriate to oppose constituted power and the 'natural' order of things? It is upon these nodes that the possibility of the autonomous social left's emergence from its current impasse and defensive [resistenziale] stance must be grounded.

'Autonomy networked'. A problem of method

Autonomy networked is, in the first place, the conquest of a method that destroys and surpasses any form of self-representation and political-organisational crystallisation, starting with ourselves and our own experience. It means 'putting everything up for grabs' [rimettersi in gioco] on the social plane, opening communication and relations between differences, the expansion and growth of a rich, articulated, plural subjectivity, against every closure or the sterile, empty, mechanical repetition of old formulae and rituals. In this regard:

* The survival of organisational and political schemas beyond their historical time and context in a determinate material basis and class composition always carries the serious risk of a purely ideological identity separated from reality and the changes within it. 'The social revolution does not take its poetry from the past, but only from the future... It must free itself from all superstitions concerning the past... lest the tradition of all past generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living', as Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire.

* The 'revolution in permanence' does not only mean the continual reopening of processes of liberation and struggle, whatever the discontinuity of different historical phases, but also, simultaneously, the transformation of subjectivity itself, beyond the threshholds conquered, beyond sclerotic schemas and every 'political elite'. As a great revolutionary figure, Mao Zedong, once taught: destroy the old so as to construct the new!

So too with the most significant passages of the class struggle in the sixties and seventies: from the experience of Quaderni Rossi, which broke with the sclerotic marxism of the Third International and Togliatti's national-popular ideology, in order to discover and invent forms of political action and struggle adequate to the new working class subject; up to the birth of Autonomia Operaia in the seventies from the crisis, dissolution and rupture with the logic of the left 'groups'. Autonomy networked is this passage today in the face both of the complexity of social production, and the multiple and differentiated figures that run through it, in the face of the need for the 'differences' to relate to each other in common projects of liberation.

In this sense memory ceases to be a fetishistic, codified void, a dead language, and can be rediscovered instead as one's identity, because we find ourselves acting, struggling, constructing paths of liberation within a new phase and a new form! In the same way, the memory of Emiliano Zapata, beyond every institutional codification and ideological celebration, has burrowed underground amongst the generations of Mexican peasants and indigeneous peoples, to emerge as a potent element of identification in the actuality of social conflict, in the modernity of the revolution of the poor against the new international order.

Autonomy networked, as a methodology of transformative action, and the concept of memory as identity, have become, for us, fundamental moments of passage to a new phase of antagonism.

Autonomy networked: a problem of substance

But autonomy networked is not only method; it is also the substance of self-organisation, the only form today in which it is possible to construct a relation of communication and connection between different realities and subjects, for the development of real social autonomies and the conquest of common perspectives and objectives. A real dialectic, that constantly verifies points of view, projects, hypotheses, proposals. A real and virtual 'piazza', where communist subjectivity can measure itself, continually redefining its own direction [progettualita'] and the 'network of counterpowers', finding central moments of strength and initiative.

Social self-organisation is the strategic perspective, the material horizon within which the autonomous subjective networks can recognise themselves in a new identity. It is a practice of transformation, rather than a form of 'representation'. An open identity, in continual development; articulate, plural, potentialised [potenziata] and enriched by the constant dialectic between the differences that compose it, in which thought, action and subjectivity are always the product of collective cooperation and intelligence, rather than of the metaphysical, pure, transcendental (or party-clique) subject bequeathed to us by the philosophical-political tradition of modernity.

Social self-organisation: global alternative to the capitalist system...

The forms of self-organisation born in recent years - those in public and private sector workplaces, the student collectives, the social centres organised on a territorial basis, the circuit of antagonistic communication - allude, even if in a contradictory and discontinuous manner, to the concept of social self-organisation as a global and radical alternative to the capitalist system. Historical development and a correct materialist methodology teach us never to conceive of processes as linear and automatic. What exists potentially, as an aspiration in broad social strata, won't be realised 'spontaneously' or automatically. It's clear, for us, that subjective initiative remains fundamental here, as it is with political struggle within the class, the conquest of new thresholds of action, the identification of central and unifying objectives: the reduction of the social working day, the struggle against wage labour and the redefinition of the very concept of labour (of its form and utility), social income, quality of life. Social self-organisation can't be identified with any of its specific moments taken in isolation; much less does it represent the mechanical sum of its parts. Rather, it is a perspective of the recomposition of social labour-power, around a project of collective liberation based upon free association and cooperation. It redefines the territory, the management and administration of wealth, the social purposes of production outside and against capital, beyond all the geographical and political confines fixed by the constituted power.

The reduction of necessary labour time to a minimum, the liberation of mass creativity, the formation of the social individual (in the sense that Marx characterised it) - these aren't utopias, but rather real possibilities within the contradictions of late capitalism. Contradictions that are frightening and devastating: between the increasingly social character of production and its private appropriation, between the wealth of empires and the extension of mass poverty, between the North and South of the world economy, and within the capitalist metropoles themselves.

What is more actual than communism, the real community based upon equality, the redistribution of wealth, the development from below of solidarity and cooperation?

What is more realistic than the rupture with the State political machine, with its corruption, the mystifications and illusions of 'representative democracies', the arrogance of tyrannies old and new?

Social self-organisation opens an alternative, it defines the sense of our activity, it frees a space for subversion from below, for the reappropriation of politics, production, wealth. The red thread that runs through all the struggles of recent years, from the factory to the territory and the university, is a strong demand for direct democracy, for self-management, for a radical critique of the mechanisms of institutional representation.

It is within the crisis of representative bourgeois democracy, of the party system, of the great trade union corporations, that the network of new organisms of struggle and resistance is developing.

The COBAS in the schools, in the public sector, and in some of the large factories; the social centres and the university collectives; a myriad of independent groups and associations spread across the territory - can these become the embryos of a new mass 'sovietism'?

Difficulties and contradictions

Let's not hide the limits, the difficulties, the contradictions: social self-organisation, direct democracy, self-government are for now only strategic and ideal perspectives. The fusion of the economic, social and political into a single concept of 'universal citizenship', of social income and liberation from wage labour, is a terrain that has yet to be constructed, invented, discovered. Within the self-organised sectors, old encrustations continue to block the potential for recomposition. There is a tendency often towards sectional closure, towards the demands 'particular' to each sector. In some cases, even, there are echoes of old practices and outlooks, such as the ideology of 'workers' centrality' (which obviously has nothing to do with workers' fundamental struggles in defence of their own living conditions).

The separation between the political and the economic continues to turn in upon itself, generating new forms of unionism, with all the associated risks of delegation and bureaucratisation. The economic struggle should be left to the workers - and the political? Clearly this is a subaltern position in which, as always, the political becomes the monopoly of the spokespeople or professional apparatchiks of the parliamentary and institutional left. Nothing is more foreign to the development of the proletariat's political, social and projectual autonomy.

The slogan of 'defending labour and employment' has still not been disarticulated with force by a radical critique of wage slavery, the form of production, and its social utility. Indeed, there's a long list of questions and theoretical-political issues that remain unresolved. The passage from 'resistance' to an offensive strugle with its own goals and proposals is always problematic, implying as it does ruptures and discontinuities.

In any case, it is only from this existing material basis - one which has already expressed itself in very high moments of struggle and recomposition, such as the demonstration in Rome of 25 September, and the experience of the Leoncavallo social centre - that a radically innovative social project can develop. An antagonistic mass subjectivity that, in the struggle against power, establishes the presuppositions of a new public and collective sphere: 'the germs of a new society born within the shell of the old...'.

* The Rome demonstration of 25 September, beyond its institutional representations, has seen the 'people' of the left in the streets. Above all, though, it has seen the sectors and forms of self-organisation as a first expression of a diffuse antagonistic subjectivity, and the penetration into broad working class and proletarian strata of central slogans: reduction of the working day, guaranteed income, socially useful labour. On this horizon it's possible both to reconstruct a social fabric and a bill of rights around which the disaggregated figures of social labour can be recomposed, around which the false dichotomy between employed and unemployed, labour and non-labour can be challenged. For a new citizenship and a new sense of community.

* The experience of Leoncavallo at Milan has rapidly brought to light some central nodes of the general political phase: the power of the Lega right within the metropoles, the logic of 'two camps', the independent role of the autonomous social left.

The Leoncavallo case has proved explosive for the contradictions within the power apparatus; for those within the passage from the first to second republic; for the contradictions between central power and the new hegemonic, regionally and locally-based bourgeois force in the north; for those between the new right and the institutional left. In this context, a determinant role has been played by the media and mass communication, which has clearly contributed to the construction of a public imaginary around 'the social centres question'. Leoncavallo has become the barometer [l'ago della bilancia] of the equilibria and clash of power far beyond Milan, prefiguring aspects with which we all, here and now, must come to terms with. But this is only a limited and partial reading. The other side of the coin concerns the history and function of the social centres. Spreading across all of Italy during the eighties, as moments of social aggregation and resistance, today they constitute - from north to south - an enormously important network of territorial recomposition. The massification of self-organised demonstrations is often guaranteed by the social centres. Their role in terms of initiatives of struggle in the various cities is important in determining daily conflictuality, the opening of campaigns, the development of counterpower. They are a subjective force, always performing a balancing act between the ghetto and marginality on the one hand, and the possibility of reappropriating territory, spaces for freedom and self-determined living time on the other. The Leoncavallo affair has made this reality visible and public not only in Milan; it has opened horizons and potentialities from which new projects can spring. The media campaign is not only the fruit of power interests; it is also the result of a relationship determined through conflict. From the ghetto to the construction of a political project, capable of being a point of reference for social and territorial self-organisation in its entirety. During the high points of the Milanese affair, the multiple forms of the social left and class autonomy began to re-aggregate, constructing new organisms alternative to the polarisation between 'right' and 'left', to neo-frontist conceptions, to the logic of the intergruppi *. The city-wide committees ['consulte' cittadine] are the expression of these processes, which attempt to give life to new constituent forms of social political activity. The risk of the ghetto, of failing to become a strong and autonomous political subject able to construct a global project for the city and the quality of life, is still there. Despite this, Leoncavallo and the reality of the social centres throughout Italy have shown the possibility of constructing a common political space, within which new forms of mass organisation can be invented and experimented with.

* [Translator's Note - During the seventies, the 'intergruppi' were bodies which, in bringing together activists of the various New Left groups working in a particular campaign or locality, tended to reproduce in miniature the tensions and rivalries of competing, self-defined 'vanguards'.]