(From the Patreon Archives) From Operaismo to Autonomy: Italian Radical Thought with P.H. Higgins

This episode was released patreon's only in 2021.  Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri stand as towering figures in the forgotten history of Italian radical Marxism. Their theoretical frameworks - operaismo and autonomia - emerged from the unique contradictions of post-war Italy: a strong Communist Party trapped in parliamentary politics while workers sought more direct forms of resistance.

What made these movements revolutionary wasn't just their militancy but their methodological breakthrough. Rather than lecturing workers about theory, intellectuals like Raniero Panzieri entered factories to listen and learn through "co-research." From this engagement came Tronti's profound insight: contrary to orthodox Marxism, workers' struggles drive capitalist development, not vice versa. Capital constantly recomposes itself in response to labor's resistance - a perspective that brilliantly anticipated neoliberalism's fragmentation of the working class decades before it became obvious to others.

The movements diverged when Tronti returned to parliamentary politics while Negri pursued increasingly militant autonomia, arguing that capitalism had shifted from development to pure control, requiring immediate resistance rather than long-term organization. This split reflected broader tensions within radical movements worldwide: reform versus revolution, patience versus urgency, institutions versus direct action. Their theoretical extensions were equally significant - connecting factory struggles to unwaged domestic labor and laying groundwork for social reproduction theory.

Whether you're interested in Italian political history, Marxist theory, or the roots of contemporary social movements, this discussion illuminates how these forgotten radical thinkers anticipated our present predicaments with uncanny accuracy. Their legacy reminds us that revolutionary theory emerges not from abstract philosophizing but from genuine engagement with workers' lived experiences.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:35 Introduction to Italian Post-Togliatti Communism
• 15:39 Understanding Operaismo and Autonomia
• 30:58 The PCI's Parliamentary Dilemma
• 44:05 Tronti's Revolutionary Worker Theory
• 1:02:23 Class Composition vs. Class Consciousness
• 1:21:59 Volume 2 and the Centrality of Labor
• 1:37:12 Negri's Break with Tronti

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:48

Hello Varn here, and this is a special episode released from the Patreon. I am taking a bit off from the podcast due to health reasons. I should be returning soon. There is still new stuff being released on the YouTube channel and whatnot probably by the time you hear this, but I wanted to make sure that we had a steady stream of content and to give you a taste of what was behind the paywall. Have a great day.

Speaker 2: 1:19

This particular episode was recorded shortly after the death of Mario Tranti of radical thoughts and maybe one day, former people and you were a right replacement on Pop the Left, which I officially return to tonight after we're done with this interview, although I'm not sure if I'll be at my air tomorrow. But yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:49

So we'll see, and today we're going to talk about the legacy of Apariz and Mo and Autonomia and the debate between Mario Tranti and Antonio Naguerri, um and you know, the forgotten better parts of Italian communism in general. I think I mean like there's uh, there's been, there's been for years. I thought there was not enough focus on Bordiga and early Italian communism, and now I think, like I know, that Nagiri's popularity in the late 90s, early aughts, is probably why there was so much of a focus on autonomy for a while, but now it's almost like that didn't happen. So let's talk about it First. For people who are complete noobs to the world of post-Tagliati Italian communism, what is operismo and autonomia?

Speaker 3: 2:58

All right. So operismo and autonomia are. Autonomia is a movement that comes kind of after operismo proper depends on wibbly wobbly terminology and periodizations. But basically in the italian situation after world war ii, italy sees a bit of a political crisis because workers have a very strong involvement with the communist party in the resistance and parts of north italy even have kind of periods of factory seizure and stuff because capitalists and fascist collaborators are fleeing uh, as the us uh army is advancing, liberation is happening, and so after world war ii the communist party is very, very popular but it kind of knows that it can't quite take power, the in a revolutionary sense, because it's like, well, the us is here and like um, and they're really afraid of becoming ostracized and blocked out of parliamentary power, and also the infrastructure of italy is absolutely destroyed and it's already not that much of an industrialized country. It's like still heavenly agrarian, there's still peasant bases uh, all over, especially in the south. So the takes up a heavy focus on kind of a pseudo like populist kind of approach and it becomes very involved in trying to have a parliamentary presence in Italian politics and it also has a very strong involvement with the CGI L, which is one of the three major uh confederacies for unions. It's confederacy in the sense of like, how the afl-cio is like an, the national. You know it's a national body for many different unions, that all of different sectors that operate together, um. So this is kind of the situation.

Speaker 3: 5:04

What's happening is, and then, even though so so the pci gets to have heavy involvement in parliament, it's trying to organize a widespread of workers into enjoying the benefits of being a party member, but it also can't really seize power. And because of the necessities of trying to be in parliament and economic growth, the pci has this awkward thing where they kind of they kind of frame themselves as, like the workers need to band together and make demands in order to spur economic development, like it is good that italy be industrialized, that economic planning take place, um, so that workers can get higher wages. But it's kind, you know, that's a pretty contradictory thing if you're claiming to be a communist party. And they're also caught in this thing where they they have this awkward relationship to the USSR because they're pretty much USSR sympathetic, but Togliatti insists that Italy doesn't need the Leninist revolution. It can have the Italian road to communism, which is basically parliamentarian. So that's kind of the situation that's going on with the PCI.

Speaker 3: 6:20

And then there's the PSI, which is the Socialist Party and at this point, for the most part it's subsidiary to the Communist Party. The leadership is trying to figure out. There's different factions in it. There's one guy who basically tries to bolshevize the entire thing. There's other factions that want it to become like more, almost like left com luxembourgis. There's other ones that want it to be more like a, a, j, a slightly more like we're going to be the democratic, like social democratic party, except we're not the actual social democratic party because that's another party. Um so, but in general, that's kind of what's going on.

Speaker 3: 6:56

Aparismo is a reaction to, in the simplest terms, it's a reaction to this way that the pci and to some degree the psi have kind of had to buy into this argument for economic development. It's a reaction to what they see as like the Fordism of contemporary industrial society in Italy. And what they do is they say that they kind of take the position that the PCI and the CGI the main union, radical union don't have a very good awareness of what is actually going on in the industrial sectors that they claim are necessary for the Italian economy and they don't have an understanding of the actual condition, workplace conditions and composition of the working class in contemporary society, especially as in the 60s there was a big move of new workers out of the south of Italy, which is still again very agrarian, into the northern industrializing cities which have places like Fiat, stuff like that. And I think it's important to realize again, like with the agrarian stuff, like in the sixties, you still have peasants in Italy. There are like social studies where they're going around and talking about like and the, the peasantry in like South Italy you can find studies where the they're talking about like these peasants. If you ask them what their conception of like the national Italian state is, they go oh, it steals from us, that's all it exists to do. Like they have no interest in Italian nationalism or anything like that. They're very regionalized and they still and it shouldn't be romanticized Like. If you read these studies, they also talk about like if a foreigner comes into like these peasant like territories, they consider it totally within their right to like exploit you. That is just like their god-given natural duty is. Like they can just exploit foreigners who like enter into like their region and stuff um, but these workers are moving into these cities and they have no interest in the kind of developed the developments in the pci to try and be like we're going to like negotiate with the managers and and stuff. They're just like. We're going to like negotiate with the managers and stuff, they're just like no, we're not like why would we do that? So they're very much more, they're much more hostile and directly involved.

Speaker 3: 9:22

So that operismo originally the kind of starting point, comes from a guy called the, a loose collection of people mainly noted around this guy called Raniero Penziere, who comes from the PSI, who's from the Socialist Party actually, and basically with the Hungarian crisis, the PCI and the PSI are kind of in a weird spot because again with the PCI, they kind of have plausible deniability because of the whole Italian road thing. So they're like oh, we, we're kind of different, like we don't need to be like lumped in with that. They also support the crushing of the Hungarian revolt in 1956. And then the PSI is kind of thrown into chaos because again there is one wing of it that the left wing of it was pushing for like really hard bolshevization. That was actually almost more ml, um and stuff, uh. So panzeri is interested in trying to figure out, maybe they needed.

Speaker 3: 10:27

Maybe the real question for him is he saying he has kind of two faces to his thought that are very important. One is that the workers have a particular kind of autonomy that is due to the fact that the workplace is the productive center through which value comes. Um, like you know, they are as workers, they they invest labor power and they valorize and, and the entire economic system of capitalism is built around that. And it's a contradictory, it's a point of contradiction. An involvement in the workplace that is also contradictory in the sense that they come to know the workplace and have some awareness of it, but it's also not in their control. And then, two, the other point that he makes is he sees a new kind of planning system that is integrated into capitalism as a whole because of Fordism after World War II and basically Keynesianism, uh, which is kind of, like you know, there's an implicit like guys, maybe planning doesn't just equal socialism, um, so that's kind of where operismo starts, uh, and and panziari kind of falls out of the graces of the psi, although he stays tied to it, and he starts a review or a journal called I can't remember the Italian name, but it's called Red Notes or Red Notebooks, and that's where you get.

Speaker 3: 12:05

Negri also comes to PSI. I think he was actually in the Christian Democrats earlier. Yeah, you get Tronti, I think Alquadi is in it. You get all these figures that are all pretty much asking the question of like. What are the actual workplace conditions going on in Ford's production in these heavily industrializing cities and what do the workers actually think? Because it doesn't appear that the parties and the unions are really able to do that much to understand these conditions right now. And it should be noted that, like the unions at this time, the communist unions the way they operate is they have collective bargaining at a national level for each union. That's it. That's the Italian name of the journal, red notes, red notebooks. So you know they don't have bargaining at the level of each factory or site, so the workers don't really get to be involved in confrontations in that way. So there's like a strong union, but it's not really something that's giving individual factory workers, like at their local plants, all that much power. And in fact the Communist Party, like, fought against the idea of like localized things, because they wanted it to be state, they wanted it to be at the level of like, because they thought it gave them more strength for basically parliamentary maneuvering, to have it at the national level. Rights are basically parliamentary maneuvering, to have it at the national level.

Speaker 3: 13:39

Um, and the thing about operismo, is it the first period that's proper? Operismo is roughly probably like 1959, 1960 I can't remember exactly when cardini ross started. Let me pull up, I have a thing here. Okay, so 1961 about, and then it goes to about 1967 or 68, which is when you see kind of a break.

Speaker 3: 14:14

Tranti is one of the major figures. He writes a book in 1967 called workers in capital, um, which was released fairly recently, uh, translated by david broder, and uh, that becomes pretty influential. Um, but a lot of it is stuff that's already been read in quadrini rossi. And then in 1968 there's a journal that's like him and it has Tony Negri and that is called Quad Contra Piano, which literally means counter plan, and this goes. This journal actually goes until 1973. But Negri leaves after the second issue. But Negri leaves after the second issue and this is around this time, negri, who is from the PC, or Toronti, who is from the PCI, you know, he's kind of been trying during his operismo years to be this kind of extra parliamentary antagonist to the PCI, in the sense of pushing them to be more militant, pushing them to be more involved in the direct working process, listening to workers.

Speaker 3: 15:16

And it should be noted that one of the major things with Operismo was that these were intellectuals who basically thought we need to go into the factories and talk with people. Like they're very big on workers. I can't remember what the term is for it, but, like you know, producing workers reports, like they call it, co-research. So there, and what's interesting is they, they at least frame themselves as not trying to be telling the workers what to do. It's almost entirely supposed to be a like receiving thing, like we're going to receive insight from the workers, then use that in turn to make like propagandistic materials that will like resonate with what they say they want to hear and like learn about and stuff. Can I?

Speaker 2: 16:06

pause.

Speaker 3: 16:07

Oh what.

Speaker 2: 16:09

I just want to ask you like. Like, we're a lot and I want to tease some stuff out.

Speaker 3: 16:14

Yeah, yeah, it's very yeah broad to like get into what these things are.

Speaker 2: 16:19

So I think one thing our listeners should really take a lesson from is the weird position that the PCI got itself into. One Italy is kind of unique in that it had a long history of mercantile proto-capitalism and capitalism, but it also was way underdeveloped for even for europe, way later than a lot of the rest. Yeah of europe to the. The pci maintained the old united front second international stance about engaging in elections but never forming unity governments with bourgeois parties um well, they were also explicitly blocked from the 1948 election, right like they were not allowed to be.

Speaker 3: 17:22

I mean, constitutionally they could be in a government, but the the government that actually got elected in 1948 was not having them involved, and that was an explicit move. You know, the us was involved in shoveling millions of dollars and making sure that the pci had no place, even though they had a sizable parliamentary uh force so, yeah, they had they.

Speaker 2: 17:48

They had 20% of the parliament and 34% of the vote in 1947. However, what I find interesting is Togliatti's focusing on the parliamentary way, like we can be Bolshevik but we're going to go the electoral route for obvious, you know, kind of obvious reasons. I find fascinating because it actually dovetails perfectly with what Adam Pirojski would predict would happen in that bind, which is, you have to push for national development, to to kind of build up your base and also to maintain a certain popular you know, popularity with your workers. But it's also going to alienate a lot of the workers themselves because you're not leading to individual site-based reforms. And I also find it interesting I didn't know this that the PCI had maintained the national union bargaining, because national union bargaining and whatnot have begun under the fascist.

Speaker 2: 18:57

Actually the whole national union movement. And national union bargaining is a weird, is something that is consistent with certain interpretations of Bolshevik policy. It's not like, but it is a weird holdover from from fascist Italy too. So that would put them in a particularly precarious position, right, like, if you see this at like, how unpopular they might actually be with elements of the working class because of that, and also like they're going to be strategically able to be like the largest opposition party, but they're like, even if they have been allowed fair election.

Speaker 3: 19:41

Under those circumstances, it's highly unlikely that they could have ever been able to achieve enough of priority to run a government yeah so you know and that that's one of the things that you see happen is actually they kind of start to realize that they'll never have enough.

Speaker 3: 19:59

I mean, they do put forward, like you know, plans and stuff and occasionally they have some stuff that is actually, um, you know, like sounds like it could have been a pretty good like workers plan that had a lot of like infrastructure building for like public services and like actually nationalize like the electric, the electricity, like plants and stuff. But they kind of realized that they can't, really they're never going to get anything through national, so what that? What happens is a lot of their like rhetoric and like attempts to involve workers and stuff gets just pointed at ussr support, anti-nuclear weapons protests, anti early nato and um the european common market. They start just protesting. That which you know like it basically just becomes a we can show that we're a sizable communist party in the european um the west european states and were they larger than france I I know that france and italy are both the most prominent ones.

Speaker 3: 21:04

I don't know the specific numbers of which was actually larger, um I don't know off the top of my head either.

Speaker 2: 21:09

I'd actually wondered, wonder that, and then I would also like are they a larger portion of the? Because the population of France is probably larger than the population of Italy too. So there's a couple of factors I'd have to consider there. But just to get into teasing out the weird scenario, there's an interesting question here. I don't know this, but was part of this related to spheres of influence debates.

Speaker 3: 21:37

Could be. I am still honestly like the amount of research I've been doing on this. I I've been doing notes mainly on revolutionary movements in Italy and Germany and I literally went back and started with the first international and then I like jumped ahead and started reading stuff on this for this discussion and I still mainly got caught up in just reading about stuff up through like red notes in 1950 to 1960. So, like I have it's been a very sizable research project that is still midway through and international I have it's been a very sizable research project that is still midway through and international, like global scale politics is just not something that I've gotten into yet all that much in terms of like definitively what this relationship to the USSR was and as well as that. So I don't really know exactly how much that kind of stuff would would be playing out. I mean I do I can't say definitively after world war ii, at least through 1948.

Speaker 2: 22:39

The us has a sizable interest in presence in determining how italy is going to be structured, um, and and making sure that its parliament is not going to be dominated by communist parties, right, um and it does also seem that that, uh, some of the, some of the developmentalist stuff that that mirrors perfectly in france, and that wasn't just because of the us, it's also because of pressers from khrushchev, um, I guess, towards detente to, you know, to uh, have it all within a, a formally democratic sphere, even though I don't think, I don't think they, I don't think they technically, you know, invoke anything like the italian version of democratic socialism until the 1970s, um, but okay, back to Operasimo, which you were getting us into.

Speaker 2: 23:31

So, so, basically, this, this becomes a concern to deal more with bottom up stuff, with the workers and taking workers inputs. And you know I, you know which, also just from a strategic like, even from a strategic electoral point, if you want to increase your popularity with us, you know, with the, have to deliver things they actually want. Beyond, you know their national level representatives and the, you know the national unions or whatever, so that that seems like a kind of natural development. Why was it so radicalizing, like in, and how is it different?

Speaker 3: 24:11

and, um, also like what, it seems to take a different stance towards internationalism than the pci does too, um, so, yeah, well, I think part of it is like because, like many other movements at this time, the way that they frame the relationship of the worker is a fundamental contradiction in the workplace is like tied to this kind of greater like philosophical question about like revolutionary subjectivity, um, and and it kind of, you know, like, once you start talking about the worker in the workplace as this like fundamental obstacle to capitalist production, it ties into this idea that, like you need to kind of activate the working class like interventions and attacks on capital more directly.

Speaker 3: 25:05

Now I think that one thing that I should like put as a major like asterisk is operismo. Uh, you know I'm not someone who speaks italian great tragedy for this conversation, because I can only rely on english resources. The one of the problems with studying stuff like operas and autonomia is it has developed a pretty sizable kind of mythology around it and it's very hard to say that definitively like how much influence they actually had on like the 1968 events in italy and even like the 70s and hot autumn, aside from like, yes, there were specific cells of like up to 100 people who proclaimed that they were part of autonomia and were like maybe involved in like terrorist activity.

Speaker 2: 25:55

Um, this is true for for both, uh, the icp and italy too, you know, the international communist party of bordiga, and in the same time period and I think it's myth is even more recent, yeah, um, but I also, if you look at like I don't want to totally poop on, poop on trotskyism, but american trotskyism gets over, focused on in the same way like it was.

Speaker 3: 26:19

It was a big movement, but it was never as big as uh, the, the, the, the, uh, the spa or the cp, usa and the 40s and the 50s, like you know well and and I mean there's more recently, like people who claim, I think that the the more honest way because I actually like a lot of, especially the early operismo, like theorists and respect what they were trying to do and I think that they actually do have a really good grasp on really clear problems um, and I think that it's more honest to kind of just be like this was a loose collection of research interests that hit on some real things and did have, uh and did inspire like social movements in a real way.

Speaker 3: 27:15

I think that they might have had more influence on things like the student movement, uh, and and certain sections of feminism in italy, but but they did have an impact, uh, I. And now there's kind of more of a tendency when people talk about being like an autonomous Marxist, they kind of say like they say how there is like a loose configuration of these research interests that you can kind of locate a crux of, you know, socialism or Barbary from France, which there was like an actual correspondence between them, and like Italian people and then some of those like Trotskyist figures, ex trotskyist kind of figures, like clr james and the bogs so the marxist, the marxist humanist in the uh clr james rooted on the sky tradition, as opposed to like the marxist humanism of like khrushchev, right, like so, yeah, so, but all these are.

Speaker 2: 28:12

it's interesting to me because one of the things that I was fascinated when I started really studying up Rezno and Autonomia is like it ends up mirroring both a lot of Trotskyism and post-Trotskyist positions, vaguely flirts with some even some left-comm positions, vaguely flirts with some even some left-comm positions, but there's already a left-comm tradition pretty well established in in italy. So it's, you know, you would. Just, if you think about the neat like, if you think about convergent evolutions, there's already something filling that role there. Yeah, um, so there is um, but it does seem outsizely due on students and then its relationship to the historical pci and like I don't know, the fact that these people were technically Stalinist and Marxist Leninist in the beginning is totally lost.

Speaker 3: 29:10

Like you know, when you look up autonomy and now autonomous Marxism, you're like libertarian socialism, you know, it's like Marxism with post-structural, anarchist characteristics, marxism with post-structural anarchist characteristics, you know, yeah, that's definitely in part, I think, due to, you know, negri, antonio Negri being kind of like the predominant guy that like popularized it and mythologized it with Michael Hart. Right, particularly in English, particularly in English.

Speaker 3: 29:42

Particularly in English, and I mean the thing is that to some degree it is like it does, especially when it becomes not operismo but autonomia. It does get this weird, you know it has this weird proto-communizer tendency to it. But it's also, like you know, it's like france 68ers where it's like we're quoting lenin and mao all the time, um, and I think that. But I think that's true, it's it. It tends to be something that people get into initially thinking that you know you get these descriptions where it's almost like autonomous marxism is when you have like anarchist practice with Marxist theory or something.

Speaker 3: 30:25

You're like they're platformist or something, and it's like, yeah, and it's like, if you read, like red notebooks, their starting point is like Lenin, like Lenin in 1917, is like everything that they try to frame around, like their theory of revolutionary action. And going back to one of the points you made about, why is it so like, why does it have a tendency towards militant militancy? Is that this, specifically with Mario Tronti, like his major intervention that he makes, which is a pretty brilliant one? Like, even if you think that in the end he's wrong? I know Charlie post has criticized this tendency, this idea a pretty brilliant one, even if you think that in the end he's wrong. I know Charlie Post has criticized this tendency, this idea, a lot. But Dorothy takes Volume 2 very seriously, volume 2 of Capital very seriously, and that's one of the cool things about autonomy. In general, they take Volume 2 of all the volumes, as super centrally important. It goes to everybody's Volume 1 fetish.

Speaker 2: 31:24

All the volumes is like super centrally important. So everybody's volume one fetish yeah. Like me, who focused on volume three, like their volume two, yeah, although I also think about the other tendency that use volume two and that was delusions, yeah. So that is worrisome, but go ahead.

Speaker 3: 31:40

Well, negri does get into, like deluseuze-Quattari thought. When he's in France he literally co-writes a book with Quattari.

Speaker 2: 31:47

But um Well, quattari, yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 3: 31:51

Thornti takes Volume 2, and one of the interesting things about Volume 2 is Volume 2 actually emphasizes even more, I think, than Volume 1, like the whole, like the whole centrality of the emergence of free labor and the development into wages because of that development.

Speaker 3: 32:12

And Tronti basically says that the entire development of capitalism is labor develops in a certain way first and becomes an organized form first, and capital reacts so like the decomposition through, you know, enclosure and stuff like that produces free laborers that develop certain interests and become like a social mass that then property owners have to deal with. So property owners then collect, start to collectively respond by instantiating the wage, like form slowly that develops through the instance of free wage labor being a thing first and trunty like says like this is the pattern that follows through capitalist development, like and and negri holds with this to some extent too, where he says like 1917, the development of keynesian and keynesianism and fordism. For for negri is like 1917 is the thing that creates the idea of the working class as a political actor. Like definitively, suddenly even like initially the, the bourgeoisie and the, the social capitalists, um, which is, you know, and again a volume two term which just means like the abstract interests of capitalists. Acting as capitalists basically is like how?

Speaker 3: 33:42

yeah, capital in the abstract as opposed to like individual entrepreneurial whatever um, and basically you know they say at first they think that their main enemy is just the ussr, it's like this one like national bloc, but then they realize, oh shit, because regardless of what the ussr is, it has like 1917 instantiates. There is a working class everywhere. The working class has some sort of political interest. Now that has been expressed and it has like consolidated in a way and the collective capitalist in each nation state has to respond and like deal with that in a way that they haven't before.

Speaker 2: 34:24

And they see.

Speaker 3: 34:25

Keynesianism as doing this.

Speaker 2: 34:27

Right, they see Keynesianism, they kind of also see MMT, like Fordism. You know, I get a lot of my, a lot of my periodizations of, of, of contemporary capitalism outside of you know, classical capital, from weirdly actually like people like, uh, philip Mirowski, who are not Marxist, and then from autonomy, uh, and Marxist humanists, because they give you. They give you reasons why, um, fordism exists in the, in the social compact, after Fordism exists, and then why neoliberalism develops as a response to that, both as a political and economic project, what it also does. On my call, some people who focus on Volume 3 is a lot of people who focus solely on Volume 3 may take the idea that capital is a revolutionary subject itself, whatever. That, not even the capital's class, just capital, and that, um, you know, the business cycle and the crisis cycle of the longer business cycle, right, like is actually the only thing driving history and removes working class um agency from the picture almost entirely.

Speaker 2: 35:42

And I think that happens concurrently in a bunch of different um political theories like, arguably, alt-sarianism is heads in that direction to communization theory. Um, and their belief of the, you know, of the impossibility of the working class to work this way, also comes out of this, so there's a lot of different ways it can go um and um. You know I I so this piece, so people know why we're talking about this. So much is like you're doing this research for a bunch of essays that we might be writing a book together on um hopefully it.

Speaker 3: 36:21

I uh, I've already, you know, expressed that I almost bit off more than I can chew, which is a tendency with me, Like back when I was like I'm going to write a book on the history of time and then I was like never got out of business, like never got out of like ancient Mesopotamia accounting. I was like, oh, this is fascinating.

Speaker 2: 36:40

I was like oh, this is fascinating. I once said I was going to write an article of every about every communist theory, about why the workers, the prediction of the workers movements of the 19 of the of the 1890s didn't happen.

Speaker 3: 36:59

And then I realized like this is four books, like just just. Yeah, it's a, it's a strong tradition we find ourselves in. Yeah, right.

Speaker 2: 37:06

My favorite is you know, um, I thought you know I gotten from hal draper that marx had originally wanted to do capital in in, uh, six volumes, right, even going into the capitalist theory of fate, which I wish we had a full articulation of marx's view of the capitalist theory of fate, which I wish we had a full articulation of marx's view of the capitalist theory of fate. Just just saying that's kind of an important lack, um, when he talks about the problems with state socialism, which marx does talk about a lot during the first international, um, uh, but um, yeah, capital, capital, capital is what like three volumes, but yeah, capital, capital, capital is what like three volumes shorter than it's supposed to be, because he realized it was pretty much impossible to cover everything he wanted to cover.

Speaker 3: 37:52

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think there are letters where he says that he abandons, like you know, that old draft but it's still shorter than it's supposed to be.

Speaker 2: 38:01

Right, it's after the. It's still shorter than it's supposed to be. Right, it's after the. It's after the um, the completion of volume one. And he had to be forced to publish volume one by ingles to make money because he was, you know, for a variety of reasons, um. What I say for it was he wasn't really talking into it, um, because he wanted to wait till all six volumes were done to publish any of them. And, you know it, it took 30 years to get what we got, and two volumes two and three, are unfinished. That's part of why they're dry. So let's get back, though. We're getting to. We're talking about what they're pulling. This interesting thing that Tronte is pulling, like Tronte's form of workerism has literally been the only form of workerism that I've ever found appealing.

Speaker 3: 38:51

All the other forms of workerism have basically felt to me like, you know, cultural stuff or like well, I think it should be for people you know listening, like operismo in italian is usually translated as workerism, like operis, like operisti is like workers, um, it doesn't have like the negative context exactly that it now has, like it's not. I mean, I mean, this is kind of one of the fascinating things. Is that it?

Speaker 3: 39:24

it has this weird division because, you know, in some ways like mario 20 and workers and capital, it is a little bit like overly centralized on the idea of like the factory worker, like literally the factory worker um, right, it gets into the end notes problem of the over-fetishization of the industrial worker as the image of the collective laborer or whatever, which is in part, but I mean it's fascinating because it's about, like the factory worker, but it's also specifically this idea of what is sometimes called class composition, called class composition, so instead of like they don't really have, I mean they talk about like class consciousness, but really what they're interested in is class composition because again, it's like capital reconfigures labor in contradictory and strange hierarchical ways to do it so like they actually are cognizant of like it's not like everyone is out, like they're being the same factory worker on the assembly line, like they say there's this weird division between kind of the old labor, aristocratic, like, like specialized workers who know how to run the factory.

Speaker 3: 40:29

There's these de-skilled workers that are the product of the recomposition of labor under Fordism, social factory, which is because of keynesian fortis, like planning and the attempt to position industrial development as antithesis to crises, that like society as a whole gets like structured around, like the operation of productive development. Right, and that's why that's why you get this split, though that is like kind of at the heart of what happens with Negri, which is it has obvious reasons to then say that like Other social movements that aren't the proper workers are part of this cycle and struggle right because they say everyone is involved in the development of society along the lines of the factory, is involved in the development of society along the lines of the factory. You know people who do household labor and stuff are going out and purchasing goods and things to maintain the social reproduction of the workers for the factory. Goods are produced en masse along the social plan so any attempt to disrupt it is like part of revolutionary activity.

Speaker 2: 41:40

Because you're disrupting social. I mean, this is the beginnings of something like social reproduction theory.

Speaker 2: 41:45

Um, I mean there's a reason why, like a lot of feminists pick up on this, and it's also solid. It is solid volume two scholarship, though, because volume two is when I realized that marx does not think that you just have to be a direct commodity producing labor to be part of either the proletariat or the working class, that anyone dependent on the general wage fund that services the general reproduction of the circuit of capital is part of the working class, and that is made clear in volume two yeah, like that's not at all obvious in volume one.

Speaker 3: 42:20

And I think it's interesting to note that, like Tronte in Work Just in Capital, he's not really making this explicit. This is like. Again, his book is influential because it's picked up by these other movements who then like start trying to apply it in these other ways. To apply it in these other ways and with the like household labor thing, I think that the way that it kind of initially is read, even by um oh gosh, I cannot remember her name but like the women in the version of not federici there's the one other one um, like women in the subversion of community or something like that, um, yeah, but like her version of it when, like when she and this is something that harry cleaver does too he's like modern yeah, um uh, maria rosa della costa della costa, that's it.

Speaker 3: 43:16

Um, when they talk about, like women being involved in the production of value and household labor, the initial reading, I think, is actually quite consistent with like 20 and maybe consistent with volume two, which is that what they're saying like, because like again, one of the things that when fronty is talking about like they're reacting to the workers.

Speaker 3: 43:42

Part of this is he also points out that you know, value and wages is determined in part through like what the social expectation of the standard of living is and like in general, how much you need to pay to get labor to come and work for you and like this relates when you read like the social reproduction circuit, it's like you read. Like the social reproduction circuit, it's like you know the product that the centers that make consumptive goods have to receive enough value from from the working class and from the bourgeoisie in wages and in surplus value to be like able to reproduce itself and that has to then flow back into the productive sector and stuff. So tronty makes this argument that like the reason that the like, the fight for wages is super important is because it can kind of burst beyond proper like value relationships If you end up getting higher wages than is, like you know, actually profitable and productive for the capitalist sectors. And so part of the idea is that, like social reproduction social reproduction from the standpoint of household labor is like.

Speaker 3: 44:52

Household labor is a way of diminishing the amount of wage necessary for like the worker themselves, because there's this amount of like reproduction that is just kind of taken out of capitalist accounting. Um, so like what the argument is is just that you have to understand that the labor that goes into household work is a way of producing value, like from the perspective of the capitalist as a whole, it saves them value, right? Um, it's not that like they are producing work that is like accounted as value in the whole, like economy per se, um, like in the sense of like valorization of commodities or to put it in simpler classic uh marxist terminology um.

Speaker 2: 45:42

It reduces socially necessary labor time like like if you think about um like household, household labor reduce, like like is unpaid labor that you don't have to, you know, account for, thus reducing in your accounting social, necessary labor time.

Speaker 2: 46:03

It goes in everything. It's still necessary, someone's doing it. Um, that's also like why there was a big I think there was a big push by capitalists to both create a market for, but also to offset the need for a lot of family labor by automation. That's like it creates it. One creates a uh, you know it's a great market, it's a new market, right um to create a new commodity in which, where the initial profits are going to be super high and as prices you'll get drive down, they get lower. But also it's also helping them by um eventually reduce, like enabling um enabling them to use women to lower their wage through wage competition and stuff like that. So like there's there is this way in which you know this social reproduction is super important across the board. And what I think is interesting about Tranti and also a lot of the Italian autonomous Marxist feminist, is they realize this and actually articulate it, even though it's already kind of implicit in capital.

Speaker 3: 47:30

I think you know capital, I think like I, like I can, I can make all these arguments with pure appeals to just, uh, categories and capitals, volume one and two, like. I think it gets, I think, misapplied and misread because I partially choose the term that like, because they still use the term productive labor. That gets confused with the idea that the argument is that this is valorizing, like for the immediate, you know, process of production of commodities and stuff. But a lot of this original stuff is not claiming that. It's actually quite insightful because it recognizes and I think that recognizing like that inside of like this plays into how the amount of value valorization applies through the wage, like is socially constituted in part by class struggle over wages and by partitioning portions of labor that are unwaged, unwaged, you know, like that plays a big role in how that is like constituted or like, like, like. That's the main argument which is actually quite insightful and quite useful, um, but but it's like I think that, ironically, if you start making claims that it's all just productive labor in the valorizing sense, you actually lose what is strategically and tactically important about that insight to some extent, um, and I think it's terminologically, just kind of a facet, in part because of the term, like they still use the term like productive laborer, um, or like reproductive laborer or something like that. Uh, and I think this kind of leads into one of the general problems that this tendency encounters early on.

Speaker 3: 49:06

So in 1968, 69, mario Tronti, negri and a couple others are in Contra Piana, which is Counterplan, and at this point Red Notebooks is also disbanded because panzeri and tranti I I don't know as much about the red notebooks split. I think it's mainly that, uh, there's a series of like strikes and stuff and I think panzeri considers it sort of a dead end and a failure and tranti and others think that it's the start of something and they kind of like go their separate ways and Raniero Parenziari dies and is like 40. He dies really young. So then they start, you know, toronti writes his book, which includes articles and new stuff, and they start Contrapiana.

Speaker 3: 49:57

At this point the main split that Negri leaves is because Tronti is still kind of trying to be the loyal opposition in the PCI and he goes and he starts going into the PCI again and I mean, like Tronti is still a senator today in Italy. I think he's still a senator. He's still alive. They don't have the PCI anymore, they have something that's called like the democratic party or something um, and he kind of has this. You know, within and against theory of like you can have, you can have the institution, you can be in the institutions and intentionally have your position be one of a calling for antagonism and fighting for the workers to revolt at the sites of, you know, involvement.

Speaker 2: 50:52

So it's the workers' version of the Ackerman plan.

Speaker 3: 50:55

Yeah, sort of. And so Negri has this kind of. You know Negri still wants to try and see if the PCI can be involved in a more militant antagonistic like nope, extra parliamentarian all the way. You know, we're not going to be involved in the institutions themselves because we need to fight the institutions. And this is kind of the split where Mario Tronti in his retrospectives basically says operasmo ends here.

Speaker 3: 51:40

Perspectives basically says operismo ends here he does not care about really trying to claim operismo exists past like 1967, um, and so if you want to like periodize this, you might want to call this autonomia instead, because negri has a movement called like uh, uh, operista autonomy or something like that. Uh, like workers autonomy, basically, and negri negri actually notes that the like fordest period ends by the 70s and what he says is that they've gone from a situation of like the planning state that attempts to replace or subdue crisis via development and Keynesian spending. So capitalism is trying to just crush any attempt of mass workers' development in general. They realized that with Fordism, keynesianism, they built a mass body of workers that are all in specific areas and with the crisis state, they just constantly intervene and change everything so that that doesn't happen anymore.

Speaker 2: 53:01

They just constantly intervene and change everything so that that doesn't happen anymore. Which to realize that in the 70s is highly insightful. I mean because most people don't realize that until they study neoliberalism from the viewpoint of like the aughts I mean like you know so they're aware of it as it is happening. So they're aware of it as it is happening and before neoliberalism starts really reconfiguring politically, even in the US under Carter or at the end of the 70s Labor Administration in Britain, on through until it gets put on hyperdrive and a badger For them to see that in the 70s, in the early 70s, is highly insightful, um the less inspired out the.

Speaker 3: 53:47

The part that has been mythologized but I think is actually what lands them in the particularly bad tactical decisions, is that negri basically takes this. Negri continually, from this point on, emphasizes this idea that it's all just about control. From this point on, it's all about the capitalist enterprise state. He literally uses it in enterprise-state, it's just going to intervene at direct control of workers at all periods, at all times. And he basically says at this point mass, you know, development like mass, slow, like hegemonic development is off the table.

Speaker 3: 54:35

So it's the intensity of the revolt that matters more than anything else. Like you, the intensity of struggle against stuff in the immediate moment supersedes any attempt at long-term, like you know, building march through the institutions, building up anything, um. And he starts to sound really early on kind of like a communizer because he talks a lot about, like you know, seizure, like at this point, because everything is like through a process of control. The most radical thing is when people go and seize stuff and they take it for themselves and for their, their self-valorization of their, their consumptive abilities, and they realize that they're revolutionary subjects. And you know he's like, it becomes very like you know, this kind of sketchy militancy and it becomes less about. He basically abandons this earlier idea of like the worker at the point of production as someone, as something interior to capital because, like for Tronte, it's very, very important that you realize like and this is where, like, the anti-work portion of it comes, cause even Tronte talks about like the worker has to struggle against their own role as labor power. Right.

Speaker 3: 55:58

Like that is a division in the existence of being a worker that has to be struggled like against. And for Tronti, like that is why the workplace and like the productive centers are important. But for Negri, like it becomes this idea that seems a lot more like what you see, where it's like these outsiders of capitalist society, you know, like there's going to be these groups of people that are no longer see themselves as part of capitalist society, that amass into like the subaltern movements.

Speaker 2: 56:31

You know these subalterns, like social movements, through the cracks and stuff I think we need to mention how much real subsumption, like you know which, by the way, is a analogy drawn off of removed section of capital, volume, one applied to the entirety of society starts getting negri more and more into basically post-structural, like non-marxist modes of thinking in response to neoliberalism. He does seem to be different than Foucault and even Deleuze, who kind of and Deleuze here specifically, not just Deleuze and Guattaro together who seem to flirt with neoliberalism's de-terrorizations and blah-de-blah to make it good. I mean because you know it's like when Deleuze, right before I mean not Deleuze, it's like when deluse, right before I mean not not to lose, when foucault, right before he dies, starts talking about, you know the the uh, anti-systemic nature of neoliberalism, almost positively, are deludes inspiring both left and right accelerationism. Actually, um, because of capitalism's deteriorating tendency in this crisis period. Right, yeah, like so. I see that with nigri, but unlike the french, he doesn't ever formally say he's abandoning marxism yeah, even today with his weird stuff.

Speaker 3: 57:56

With heart, he likes to make a lot of appeals to marx, um, and probably still does to lenin too. I don't know about as much, but um, I haven't read as much of negri's like more recent stuff. I find it weird and harder to read um, and he's already pretty hard to read in his early stuff. But um, I mean because basically negri lands in hot water. After, in the hot, you know, autumn, there's a point where the brigade rossi, like the red brigades, which is like this small, you know hyper militant group, kidnaps the senator, holds him for ransom and then kills him. Negri goes to prison and is tied to it. I think, from what I can tell, it is kind of considered, you know he was more or less framed, his like yeah, it's one of those things.

Speaker 2: 58:46

The red brigades is very thin, it's it's a complicated thing of.

Speaker 3: 58:53

In general, it is considered, yes, like they were cracking down on him, as, like this intellectual figure yeah, I'll do more. Oh, is the person that gets kidnapped and killed? Who's, uh, the prime minister and um?

Speaker 3: 59:06

weirdly, an alex jones associate was probably part of the people who, yeah, um yeah, there's a whole other side to this story which is involved, like you know, operation gladio and shit which, right, you actually have to like go through like rigorously to figure out stuff because there's so much conspiracy theory around it.

Speaker 3: 59:26

Um, but uh, I'm hoping to eventually get into that in my studies.

Speaker 3: 59:32

It's still kind of, uh, I only have like loose fuzzy threads of it, but, um, from my understanding, yes, like negri is mostly, it's mostly just an excuse to put him in prison, though he doesn't help himself by having explicit calls to violence and not, he does have some ties to movements like this, like these little cells, like through his associations, and like this like these little cells, like through his associations, um, and uh, potentially some like loose connections to it. And also, I mean, like the thing about nickry is he's actually his early work, he actually again, he is actually like a very insightful person about certain developments, but also, like his followers went and like kneecapped people that were like rivals to him in like his university and shit like quite literally. So like he's also kind of a thug like, and also it would be like embarrassing because he looks like a total dweeb, like he's not intimidating at all, like at it, but um, so, anyway, he flees to france under the dron doctrine and starts hanging out with post-structuralist and it all goes downhill from there.

Speaker 3: 1:00:51

But um I was going to say like with, uh, the whole, like capitalist subject stuff and marks beyond marks, which is, his lectures on the grundersa, which happens in this period while he's at the University of France.

Speaker 3: 1:01:05

I find them both infuriating and insightful yeah they're infuriating and insightful and he basically posits this weird like there's two subjects of capitalism there's capital as subject and workers as subject, which is actually kind of consistent in a way with like workerist theory up to that point. Just they don't explicitly do that because they basically hold that, like they don't go full in saying that like capitalism, like capital, one through three is the um, the red brigades are somewhat similar to the Red Army Faction in certain ways, but like it wouldn't be entirely appropriate to say they're like the same.

Speaker 2: 1:01:52

No, the Red Army Faction has more ties to like explicit Maoism and stuff than the Red Brigades do.

Speaker 3: 1:01:57

Yeah, I mean 70s Italian politics is insane. You have like explicitly people calling themselves like fascist Maoists. And there's another organization called Prima Linea, like Frontline, and they're like way more explicitly terrorist than even the Red Brigades are, like they were like scoffing at the Red Greats. They're like you're kidnapping people, you just kill them, like that's all you should do is just like assassinate people left and right, um, but uh, the uh yeah, at this point, like like, like the, the workers from like start one. They haven't been um fully, uh, lukashian they. They clearly have read lukash, but they don't take like the full, like marxist viewpoint is just the working class.

Speaker 3: 1:02:42

They have this more, you know, dialectical view of like capital actually takes, like the capitalist perspective first breaks it down through the introduction of the worker as a subject in capital, which they see as like the thing that the capitalists like to them, capitalist ideology is basically not thinking about the worker as anything, or when they do think about the worker, they think of it as something that can be smoothed over, as in Keynesianism, through this idea of development that papers over the actual role of labor exploitation and the wage in that development and its relationship to crises and its relationship to crises.

Speaker 3: 1:03:25

Um, so they have this idea that, like, capital is the perspective of the worker, insofar as capital is a book for workers to develop a scientific perspective, and that it also, like, involves their exploitation as a major factor of explaining what's going on. Um, but they don't take it from the perspective of, like everything in capital is, like, written out as the perspective of the worker. You know, like that workers, like you know that they don't take that kind of like viewpoint and they don't take the idea that, again, like the idea of class composition is that, like, being a worker is actually quite contradictory and diffuse and rearranged in many different ways. Um, but yeah, by this time, I don't know, I I've read that negri, eventually negri actually takes, like, the law of value very seriously through most of his earlier work on keynesianism. I've read that, by the time, he does empire with heart, which is the main.

Speaker 3: 1:04:22

He does not, yeah, but that is the time that he, um, by the time that he's introduced to most english-speaking, in that that work in audiences and that work he basically again like, because he has this theory of like, it's all becoming about control. He basically says capitalism through like digital event, like digital technology and stuff, has reached a point where it doesn't care about value anymore, it's just about direct control of, like, the population. It's not even about control like in terms of work anymore it's, no, it's just about political control sense of control.

Speaker 3: 1:04:58

Um, so yeah, the like law of value and stuff doesn't really matter to him anymore. And I wouldn't say this is really class either.

Speaker 2: 1:05:07

Because like that's when you get into like empire and the multitudes, because you, basically I mean that that book I read in high school because it was a number one bestseller on left, on left reading list, at a time when, like you know Trotsky and like Naomi Klein you know early Naomi Klein like no logo are the dominant I'm not Trotsky, chomsky are the dominant. Like there's hardly any like even post-structuralist stuff is not popular in the way that the Empire was. That book was on the New York Times bestseller list. That should strike you as weird. But what I found fascinating about it is not only does I find early Nagiri, even middle-period Nagiri, because that's really what we're talking about, when I encounter him like Marx, beyond Marx or the labor of dionysus even, which is like 1994, um, I find that at least comprehensible.

Speaker 2: 1:06:06

Like communization is in terms of marxist categories, yeah, by the time you get to to empire multitude, I feel like I'm getting populism, global populism against global elites, phrased in a very obtuse way so that you can't realize that it's basically just like outsider populism, the sub. I'll turn all rise together. We can, you know, mass line, but not even as a workers. Like it's.

Speaker 2: 1:06:35

It's very, you know, like everybody against the center yeah, you know in a very obtuse way, but it made a lot of sense to people after the battle for Seattle and, like the anti-globalization movement, Right, yeah, it's very tied to like anti-globalization stuff.

Speaker 3: 1:06:53

Like one of the things about operismo is that the post operismoists, even the ones that are, I think, are much better than Negri. Like one of the big things that they focus on is the idea that like they they kind of say because some of the some of the smarter post operoperationalists, when they've written like retrospectives and like contemporary developments, they say one of the the advantages we had was that because we had this idea of recomposition of labor and reaction of state and capital to labor's like own form that leads to conflict. Inherently is that we were able to see the kind of decline of the mass labor movement and think about it seriously. And that's true. Like a lot of the people that do work on this now are very interested in like precarious labor, labor that takes forms that looks like it's self-employed but it's not. It's still entirely dependent on like big companies. You know people that work from home, people that do that, uh that kind of stuff, like commission laborers, um, and they tie this very seriously to like debt economies, uh advancements in in technology, obviously, and some of it is pretty good, but even some of the better ones.

Speaker 3: 1:08:23

They tend to do this thing where they like to make appeals to. They make the first appeal to Operational understood that the actual labor force is constantly being recomposed in new ways. They ignore the fact that this also was constantly implying that the labor force always just gets stronger and more revolutionary every time. Like that was what they thought. Like that it would just always get stronger each time that capital like recomposed it because it would get socialized. Um, oops, yeah, they just that that was like a huge part of it. Then they talk about like because we have this interest in this, it is a useful research program for looking at like contemporary decomposed recompositions of labor that are not like, that are not socialized.

Speaker 3: 1:09:14

Then they like to say how radical and and inspiring operismo was in the 60s and 70s and how militant it was, in order to basically cover up that most of their programs and solutions right now are quite boring, and I don't mean even boring in the sense that they're bad or wrong, but it usually appeals to things like you know, like I was reading one from like ser Bologna, who was like one of the big guys in this, like in Operismo, like he's one of the OGs and he say he's, he does this, and then he just like today there is the unemployment.

Speaker 3: 1:09:48

You like the freelancers union in the US and they help freelancers get insurance and I was like you know I've worked from home. I was like on the freelancer union newsletter from home. I was like on the freelancer union newsletter I've looked at like their insurance, like their insurance plans are not like revolutionary by any means. I was like you can talk about how good it is that people are looking at this and like trying to make organizational structures for work that is not like socialized forgest factory work, without talking about how you had terrorist cells in the 60s and 70s as your main like inspiring point and in fact there was some terrorist sales with an insurance plan, though yeah, um, um.

Speaker 3: 1:10:37

In fact there's a. I remember watching this documentary that I found on youtube. I don't remember what it's called, but it's basically about negri um and it goes through like the the hot autumn and and it kind of over glory, glorifies it. You know, it makes it sound like like oh, it was like amazing.

Speaker 2: 1:10:53

You know, students were going out with rifles and shit, and like when you actually read, like some of the stuff that was going on, it's it is not as glamorous as they make it sound, but but like it sounds for, like most of the stuff from like 68, 69, 70, 71, like you hear, like I mean, I remember thinking that like may, may 68 was all but a civil war, and then I was like nobody, there wasn't even a shot fired, like well, in italy it was bad like it was my.

Speaker 3: 1:11:25

My point is like it was radical, but I I also think it was radical in ways that it was a lot of people not knowing what they were doing and how bad like violence could actually be. Um, especially because a lot of those radical cells that were engaged in violence were explicitly picking up like high school, like age, like people to like do stuff, um, but like. But the documentary like makes it sound like you know, like super inspiring and crazy. And then it gets to the point where it starts talking about like negri's re-emergence as a popular figure in the 90s and it's showing like little cells of people in no, like middle of nowhere, going to convenience stores and like handing out 20 bills to people. And you know, being like the social wage will free us, like free money for people and like you know, and I'm like wow, that's like like, why are you like connecting these two things as if it's fucking inspiring in some way?

Speaker 3: 1:12:24

it's totally not it's weird for people who thought keynesianism was a trap to basically get into that yeah, I mean that's a, that's one of the other classic, uh contradictions in operasmo is because of their, because they hit on how complicated you know the need for kind of this anti-workerist workerism they. And because they identify the, the wage as this, like independent variable. That is super important because you can make demands for the wage that totally blows up social reproduction If you can get it high enough like they start arguing for like social wage stuff, which basically sounds like an early kind of UBI thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:13:11

It sounds like UBI and maybe a little bit of like a less wonkish MMT.

Speaker 3: 1:13:19

Um, but the I mean like the idea for them is like more along the lines of like you should go out and petition for a thousand dollars a day, like like they actually are trying to make it that like you get the wage demand so high that it just explodes anything that the capitalists can possibly offer to antagonize stuff.

Speaker 2: 1:13:43

I do like basically social wage, social union, militancy across sectors, and we're demanding insane things like I want $1,000 a day and a pony.

Speaker 3: 1:13:59

Yeah, like it's a general dollars a day and a pony yeah, like it's.

Speaker 3: 1:14:01

And I mean this is right until I get it and this is it's a one of the weaknesses in operasmo in general is that they're never, they tend not to be super clear, but they think that, like the revolutionary break is, even though they become more and more convinced that there's going to be, like this super definitive. You know, in like insurrectionary, like, there's a quote literally in one of uh, negri's like 70s writings where he says something like we need to stop thinking the insurrection is the last step, it's the first step, or something like that. Um, but they're never really quite clear like what, like what actually is going to happen, like what they think will like really occur. But I think it's also again, like you have to take in the context of at least with like trunty, even though he's in this group of people that are acting outside of the official pci, like and and I mean again also early operismo, before it becomes autonomy. Likeia is really the point where it becomes like militant cells that like call themselves groups and go and do things. Operismo is really much more of a like collective research project and it has people from the pci, psi, independent scholars, like it's just a loose configuration of people doing research together, really like that's what it is, um, so you have to take him into consideration. That, like, part of trunty's reason for going into the bci again is that he's like we still have like 20 of parliament and a huge union like the cgil was not, regardless of its many like problems, especially, I mean, at this point they start being like, okay, we're not going to just do national bargaining. Um, you know, like he had reason to think like we should be antagonizing for this institution to be more radical. Um, like you know that that was part of the reason why they thought that these demands could be like important and and again, like, even though they're, I'm trying to be cautious because they are over mythologized there.

Speaker 3: 1:16:07

There's actually a really good quote in um, this book I was reading by a woman who was an, a union activist and who who? Um, she basically went to the party she worked in, uh, an electrical engineer factory where it was mostly women. It was, or there was a large population of it that was women and they were struggling with, you know, basically too much like over overpaced, over outputted assembly line work and stuff. You know people are getting health problems from doing the work, people are fainting. They can't, you know, take care of their home life and stuff.

Speaker 3: 1:16:52

And the party union basically just did a standard petition for higher wages and she went to the party office and was like we need to be fighting against what.

Speaker 3: 1:17:04

We need to be fighting for shorter hours, slower output, like tables, like like we can't just ask for higher unions because you have no higher wages, because you have no idea what the actual conditions are, and like what is harming people. And in her, in her account, basically what the party people said is you sound like those quaderni rossi people, you sound like the red notebooks people go away. And she was like well, I left I had no idea who these people were, but I wanted to go find out who they were because apparently they were talking about what these conditions were and our situation. So I think that it is like again like there was resonance here with things and even though they were like talking about crazy higher wages, they were also interested in things like that, that like um, the idea of things just like health conditions as a, as a strong period for slowing down work output and stuff was a a significant part of their interest in in in work.

Speaker 2: 1:18:08

Um, well, um, how does tranti respond to nagiri's later turn? Like you know, that would be. That'll be our final question for today and of course, you'll be back to talk more about stuff. Italian, as you have read more, even other kinds of dissonant communisms in Italy responded to this yeah, somebody, somebody was like fascist Maoism, whoa, and I'm like Nazbo. Nazbo Maoism is like not even particularly hard to understand. They both talk about proletarian Nate, like like Mussolini loved talking about proletarian nations and stuff.

Speaker 3: 1:18:58

So yeah, the the, the guy that proclaimed himself a fascist Maoist you can find him on Wikipedia. I don't remember his name exactly, but uh, yeah, he. I think he actually did like some major bombings or something and he had like an actual little, like you know, terrorist cell. Like I said, the years of letter are legitimately insane in terms of, like, what people are doing and right organizing and um yeah italy doesn't play like.

Speaker 2: 1:19:24

Like the american days of rage are people bombing stuff and not killing anybody. That is not how it goes down in italy yeah, it's, uh, yeah, we have one question that you might be able to answer, and if you you can't, we'll do research and answer it on one of your future appearances here on VarmBlog.

Speaker 3: 1:19:48

I'm not super familiar with this, or at least I don't recognize it from the Italian terminology. I don't know if that's a term for like what I mentioned, with the southern workers who go migrate north and are kind of you know, I think that's like Italian regionalism, especially at this point, like they are almost more racist, like they basically have racism internal to like Italian, like Southern people. They're like oh, you're like dark skinned and weird and we don't like you and you're like a hick.

Speaker 2: 1:20:37

I was trying to explain that to like a few people, so I don't like you and you're like a hit. Yeah, and you know um I was trying to explain that to like, so I don't know if that's the the right term or not, um the league of denarte is like basically saying sicily is basically africa, um, and stuff like that, like weird internal racism, um. Another good question we might does Italian mafia get involved in less insurrection? Or our military unions or anything like that?

Speaker 3: 1:21:02

They, they suppress them on like the um in Sicily especially, there's a lot of shit that goes down with the mafia, um, but they, from what I know, they were mostly opposed to a lot of the leftist stuff that went on. Yeah, um, that's again not uh like again I mentioned briefly, like the uh operation gladio is this weird mix of like us military support that's left over after World War II, nato like secret armament groups intervening in both left, like secretly propagating left-wing and right-wing militancy to try and like get them to attack one another and justify state intervention, the Pope's involved, the mafia's involved, like it's a mess alex jones associates are involved.

Speaker 2: 1:22:05

Um, which is I mean seriously. It's part of why it has such a conspiracy theory. Cred is there are people who were working for the us government who have made hay out of their involvement in the conspiracy theory crowd itself. So it's very hard to sort it all out.

Speaker 3: 1:22:21

Oh, okay. So Mason says Mason Kerr says they were marginal figures that were supposed to merge with an increasingly impoverished student movement. I haven't encountered much about that, honestly, but I'll be. I'll be interested in seeing if it comes up in more of the research I'm doing.

Speaker 2: 1:22:37

Do you know about Richard Drake? Because I don't know much about this guy.

Speaker 3: 1:22:41

So he's not been in any of my reading so far.

Speaker 2: 1:22:45

I'll put him on my list of my incredibly longer reading list of things to read, both historical and oh, he wrote okay, I, I do want to.

Speaker 3: 1:22:56

He has a book called the revolutionary mystique and terrorism in contemporary italy. Um, and I've been reading a fair amount of alexander de grand, who has this book, the italian left in the 20th century that focuses on the general history of the pci and psi. He also has italian fascism, which is one of the standard like, if you just want a good rundown of like italian fascism books, um, and he mentions that the work of drake. I've wanted to get that book on terrorism in italy but I haven't gotten to it yet. Um, and uh, I, one of the things I was going to say that I think is interesting is that I, even though they don't deal with it as directly as might be great, I think that workerism even though at the earliest point it's talking about literally factory workers, it kind of points to how their idea of the worker is also political, like it involves the fact that people are organized and the class is recomposed in a way that is already political.

Speaker 2: 1:24:04

Right. So they understand the class in itself and the class for self-distinction that Marxists tend to go back and forth wildly, and other forms of Western Marxism.

Speaker 3: 1:24:15

You know as to which one they think is important, and I think operasmo knows both are important and cannot be separated from each other yeah, and I think that it is one of the reasons why its relationship to things like the student movement and the feminist movement, like these were also just like autonomously, like powerful movements that were emerging because of like real social just conditions like it wasn't operasmo inspired them or something, and I think that it like the more that I just read about, uh, workers movements in general, the more I think it's important to realize how, like, how complex it is trying to think about its relationship to other movements and even though I even though I remain skeptical of like populist solutions that are just like, aren't they're all just the same fighting against the big enemy that is vague and we'll all just get along Like, I think that it does reveal something about like relating things back to the capitalist framework and trying to like understand the political identity of work is part of what lets them relate to other social movements without just being populist in a way.

Speaker 3: 1:25:32

Beepo is an autonomous. I believe he's involved in what is called radio Alice in the seventies, which is like this weird independent pirate radio kind of project that has a bunch of weird stuff. I don't know a whole lot about him otherwise, because most of the stuff you can get by him in English is post-op or his most stuff. That is not that impressive.

Speaker 2: 1:25:53

A lot of it's like quasi-anarchist stuff, a little bit of post-structuralism, a little bit of Paul Barillo Bifo quasi-anarchist stuff, a little bit of post-structuralism, a little bit of paul barilo, a lot of like bfo's, kind of all over the place when I, when I've read his english, his english stuff, his public library or whatever he does have a relationship to like some of the negri strains and like the 70s and things.

Speaker 3: 1:26:10

Um, I will say interesting thing I I can go through some of the books I have. Uh, I literally pre-ordered tomorrow the Italian list, which is like a line of books in translation out of Seagull Books, which I think is also through University of Chicago. They're releasing a book called the Golden Horde which is by nanny belastrani, who is most well known for his novels. He wrote like we want it all and stuff which is basically about like an account of the um, like 70s movements and stuff, and it's basically a big old collection of of of essays and commentaries and things on like the popular culture of the time, um, from the 60s through the 70s, as sergio valone, umberto echo, uh, tony negri panzeri, rosanna rosanda Rossanda.

Speaker 3: 1:27:19

It has a ton of Italian figures in it. So it's literally becoming available for order tomorrow. People might want to check it out. It's expensive though. It's like 40 bucks. Some other stuff I already mentioned. I think it's always good to read stuff on the labor movement in general and the political situation in general before just going to autonomism, because otherwise you won't know what they're responding to.

Speaker 2: 1:27:44

Yeah, what the texts, what the context are. I find that people reading theory out of context is destructive a lot of the time. So um.

Speaker 3: 1:27:52

So again, I mentioned alexander de gran's italian left in the 20th century. It basically just goes, goes like this is the Communist Party and the Socialist Party from their foundation up to whenever it was published, I don't remember. It's not like the most riveting read, but it's presented very clearly. One thing that is makes it it's easier to read, in part because he doesn't drop a lot of references, but that's infuriating to me as a researcher. He just he does the bibliographic essay at the end and I'm like no, I want to know this, I want to know what you're citing when you put the statistic in Another book that I've been reading that I love so far is Visions of Emancipation the Italian workers movement since 1945. Far is visions of emancipation, uh, the italian workers movement since 1945. Like in the first 10 pages it explains like the union structure of italy, um, like from 1945 up through like the 80s, which is when it was published. Um, it goes through just like a lot of great information on, you know, just statistics, wage levels, who was involved in what, what the party policies and thinking was um like, and it's actually like very easy to read. Uh, so it's like it's super useful for context of just like what the workers were doing, before you even take into consideration what the autonomists are thinking about as like a small sect of theorists.

Speaker 3: 1:29:22

The other ones States of Emergency, cultures of Revolt from 1968 to 1978. This is you can get through Verso. It's actually been around for a long time. I don't see it referenced a lot. It's pretty good. It's more of a cultural history but it goes into like the thing. It goes more into like the student movements, the feminist movements, the social movements from which the 60s and 70s periods of revolt like emerged and what the social conditions were like and how people were reacting to it. It's got like a lot of fun, little like like the political cartoons and stuff from the time. So it's a useful companion for that, I found it, and it goes into the mythology, mythologizing of violence from this period too, which is definitely like a very useful kind of thing to have.

Speaker 3: 1:30:16

And then the classic one in terms of history is probably storming heaven by steve wright. The main thing to be cautious with this one is steve wright basically promotes autonomous marxism, um, in the tradition of harry cleaver. So it does play into some of the mythologizing, I think, but it does have actually, I think a not indecent um kind of balance sheet of the pros and cons and the postscript. It has a postscript. If you get the second edition it comes with an an afterward by a couple of guys uh, ricardo bella fiori and massimiliano tomba, who were both, I believe, involved in workerism. And the afterward is, I think, just like almost worth the price of admission because it's them talking about the book in reference to their own experiences of operismo and what they think the insufficiencies of it were.

Speaker 3: 1:31:13

And it's got some great tony negri bashing in it like they really lay into just like the problems and especially they lay into the idea that class recomposition always just means that the class gets more socialized and more radical and also how that plays into not being able to deal with what that means in the face of the working class not appearing appearing very unified as workers. You know any political sense. Um, they really go into a good breakdown of like that problem. Um, so it's a pretty good book. Um, for Pronti you could get uh, workers and capital full book in English. It's from Verso. Uh, david Broder is a good guy.

Speaker 2: 1:32:00

Uh, I've interviewed him before um I've argued with him on the internet.

Speaker 3: 1:32:06

He um, he's a good guy, though, actually sincerely, yeah, I, I will say, jacobin's stuff on italy tends to be better than their stuff on the us. From what? Oh yeah?

Speaker 2: 1:32:16

I have.

Speaker 3: 1:32:16

I have noticed actually that their stuff on it it tends to be better than their stuff on latin america too, frankly but and he also, david broder, has an article that's on catalyst about operasmo and what he thinks the insufficiencies of the focus on militancy is um without looking at like the actual, like party and political relations that it was responding to. Um and it's one of the articles that catalyst has online for free. So if you just look up, like david broderick, uh catalyst, you should be able to read it. Um he also got me my uh copy of uh the book for free, which saved me a couple hundred dollars, so what to say that border book is uh I don't know.

Speaker 3: 1:32:59

They get the haymarket version, yeah, which is still gonna be like 50 bucks, but if you want to read more, more tronty uh. Viewpoint magazine has also translated some of his stuff.

Speaker 2: 1:33:12

There's a couple of uh good books on tronty too.

Speaker 3: 1:33:15

I have another one hold on um you guys translated stuff yeah yeah, they've translated his like really early stuff which is mainly talking about de la vulpa um and his critiques of gram she or specifically the togliati like pci officialized version of gram she um oh, the weapon of organization, um oh yeah, that's that. That one I haven't read yet. That's like a collection of lectures, essays and stuff. One of the things about Thronti is I don't know a whole lot about what he actually did in his position as senator and what he holds for. I know that recently he's kind of shit.

Speaker 2: 1:33:54

Yeah, he apparently was unseated in 2018.

Speaker 3: 1:33:58

Yeah, he was supporting. There's some guy that's like now in charge in Italy and basically ran on a whole, you know like overcoming left and right by just appeals to kind of like populism, of like we will find the issues that matter to people Like Podemos and whatnot, almost.

Speaker 3: 1:34:17

But it was one of the like Podemos and whatnot like almost, but it was one of the and like Twente wrote this thing about like using theory, like he just name dropped a ton of like theory to talk about you know, like how this was a great opportunity and stuff and it was just like oh, come on, dude, like it's.

Speaker 3: 1:34:39

Actually some of the stuff broder has written on jacobin most recently is about this guy that recently gained political power and it's um, the the government now under mario draghi, um, it's, yeah, it's, it's kind of embarrassing, um, but but uh, with your final question, honestly I don't know that tronty has ever really responded to negri that much. In his later writing he definitely develops, you know, he, he doubles down on the pci, he remains involved in politics his whole lifetime and, uh, he develops an idea of the autonomy of the political.

Speaker 2: 1:35:24

I haven't gotten into that as much it seems like uh, his his autonomy of political would uh be straight in the face of of um of negri's, like real subsumption as applied to the political sphere.

Speaker 3: 1:35:39

Yeah, and it's almost. I know that some people have related that part of Tranti's autonomy, the political, reads a little bit like some Althusserian stuff and there is like a very slight like ships passing in the night situation with them. But the and and, like you know, like the connection to de la volta and uh coletti, are also people who read, uh read against hegelian marxism and read capital as this like definitive, like attack on hegelianism.

Speaker 2: 1:36:17

frankly, I think they do it in a way that's more interesting than altus air de la volta is way more to me interesting as a figure, particularly because I mean similar to actually altus air, because I'll start off as a galleon too, but like, particularly de la volta's like initial um philosophy comes straight out of giovanni gentile, like you know, the hegelian philosopher of fascism, and he reacts against that into gramscism and then reacts against gramscism into like something that leads toronti into things like operismo.

Speaker 3: 1:36:50

I just know that as a vague outline and I've known about volpa for a long time because of my fascination with you know all the crazy generativeness that was um the italian 19 teens and then the italian 1970s and like that weird, like so many of the world's political ideas have come out of that but, um, I do think it's very funny that out this because althusser, like references della volpa and colletti in part because, like colletti actually writes like the preface to like a lot of the collections of the early young marks, like when that comes out, but he thinks, he somehow thinks that they are like gramscians and I'm like dude, you have no idea what they're doing here. Then, like you, right I don't know.

Speaker 3: 1:37:39

I don't know if it's just because he sees they're in the pci and de la volte. De la volte, like, is always like loyal to the tagliati and party, even though he's critiquing them. Colletti eventually gets disenfranchised when he comes out like neocon, um, but I'm just like like out of search, like these guys are grimeshians and I'm like what? No, that that's the entire point of what they're doing. It's like trying to oppose that um, but yeah, it's, it's a. It's a weird convoluted history, uh, of relationships yeah, particularly once team france gets involved.

Speaker 2: 1:38:16

Just gonna say yeah my, uh, my anti-Francophone bias comes out yet again, except for our boy. Baudu, which I'm sure. And I don't always hate Baudu, but yeah, baudu is a, he's at least kind of fun. He's a crazy red platonist, but but he's at least fun, yeah, um, and occasionally says insightful things, I think sometimes just out of boredom or something, but in general, uh, team france, team france and team italy when they get together, that's how fascism was born. Just saying so like.

Speaker 3: 1:39:02

So real yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:39:07

Like you got to be careful. When those two things, when France and Italy get together, it's like when the US and the UK get together or something. It's just not good. So on that note we'll end here. I thought I'd thank you for your time. I learned a lot and I know a lot about Italian communism and so in fact I've been reading Tranti, kind of just to get a feel for for it, and I definitely was reading, you know, the worker's book, as I like to call it, and it's it felt so different from the, from the latent negri, that I read like in college and I was like what you know, like even Marx Beyond Marx didn't read like this. So I found it very interesting and helpful but also somewhat limiting. And you know, what I find interesting is, basically it would make sense that viewpoint would pick it up right, because you know viewpoint and labor notes and all that do come out of that same workers inquiry tradition yeah, um, it's.

Speaker 3: 1:40:12

Yeah, viewpoint viewpoint magazine has some good stuff. They also have translations from another guy called romano aquati, who he was kind of the main workers inquiry guy for a long time, like he was the. He was doing a lot of stuff in fiat and all of eddie factories and he kind of prefigured like the idea of like class composition instead of class consciousness. Um, so it's good to read those two, but yeah, viewpoint viewpoint. I'm always actually kind of impressed with their output, but I'm also like confused.

Speaker 2: 1:40:43

Yeah, I'm impressed with it too, but I'm like, so you're alt-Syrian anarcho-workerist.

Speaker 3: 1:40:49

Yeah, okay. They're a little too over-theorized sometimes for my taste.

Speaker 2: 1:40:56

I remember reading, uh, asad hotter's book on identity and like his please for universalism, and I was like, well, why are you using fuko to get to this? Like there are easier ways to get your point across. Um, but, yeah, uh, just so you guys know, ph and I work together on a lot of stuff. Increasingly, um, ph has me on radical thoughts as a specialist on the weird people you can't find other specialists for. Yeah, um, and I'm not always actually a specialist, I've just read a lot of shit, particularly on the radical stuff, stuff I read that in college. It was all the rage when I was in grad school. Um, uh, let's see. Um, but you also work with me on Former People, where we don't talk about politics, at least not directly talk about art and shit we've recorded two episodes.

Speaker 2: 1:41:48

They'll eventually come out.

Speaker 2: 1:41:49

I'm trying to make sure we have enough that if I have to go on break for I don't know six months or, like our third person who's vital to our enterprise, shallon has to I don't know defend her dissertation or write it or something that we can, we can just keep the flow going. Even we're not recording. So that's why we're holding off releasing them. We're not hoarding them, but you guys will get more ph. Um, ph will probably be a semi-regular here on Varm Blog, since we are talking about my next book project, because I don't write books by myself unless they're poetry. I'll be one of those people.

Speaker 2: 1:42:28

We'll probably be with PH on these issues and applying them to contemporary society, just like the book I'm writing with Shalom Buntine on Lash Misinterpretations of lash, the limits of lash and applying it to the contemporary left. Um, and I actually was fascinated because how much this stuff rhymes and I never thought it would. I would not think that the uh, that the Italian stuff would rhyme at all with what lash was writing about in the United States, but it actually kind of does. It's good stuff. With that note, I'm going to let you guys go. Ph hang out for a second with me in the room. Bye, you guys don't know what we're talking about.