There’s been a bit of discussion on the autopsy email list about an interview with Paolo Virno that appeared in Grey Room. In it Virno says the following -
The decisive experience of my youth was the revolutionary
struggle in a developed capitalist country. I insist: developed. A country, that
is, in which physical survival was guaranteed, consumption relatively high,
with by that time widespread scholastic instruction. I did not participate in
an uprising against misery or dictatorship but in a radical conflict aiming at
abolishing that modern form of barbarism: wage labor. We were not “thirdworldist”
but “Americanist.” Fighting at Fiat of Turin, we were thinking of
Detroit, not Cuba or Algiers. Only where capitalist development has reached
its height is there a question of the anticapitalist revolution.
This is a sensibility present throughout operaismo from what I can tell. On the one hand, the reformulation of the idea of the weak links in capital is good - the weak link is where the working class is strongest - but it’s limited by too narrow criteria for seeing the class’s strength. Again, deriving the political from the technical composition. The very retaining of a weak link is of course problematic as well.
Tronti also makes disparaging remarks about third worldism. I’m not particularly invested either way, but am more curious about what was winding these folks up about it. I figure it’s an issue or they wouldn’t have mentioned it. I wonder what Italian Maoists or other third worldists were up to around the same time. Is the tension one of organizational conflict/competition? Or something else?
To some degree, the turn to marginalized groups (the emarginati), part of the figure of the social(ized) worker that was the theoretical precursor to the multitude and The Poor in Negri and others’, is somewhat similar to a version of thirdwordlism that sees there being an internal third world (’every country has a first and a third world in it’ is one way I’ve heard this phrased) and takes this third world inside the first as the most important sector - the place where there’s one of those weak links. I wonder if that’s connected to any of this “we’re not third worldists!” thing. That wouldn’t hold for Tronti, though, as his remarks that I’m thinking of pre-date that turn and I don’t know that he was on board with it anyway.
you know we agree on this. i was pretty sympathetic to negri when he said, “we weren’t looking to the third world because we were too busy making a revolution.” but this horseshit by virno is way worse: we’re not LOOKING TO the third world because our theory of objective class composition means that we must LOOK TO the U.S.
it almost makes me sympathetic to the dismissive Telos intro to Tronti, which basically says that looking to Detroit is bullshit.
and pretty strange to claim that Italy counted as “developed.” tronti’s tortured attempts to show Italy’s revolutionary nature hinged on a totally different claim, that it was sort of semi-peripheral (also the fascist claim), and that the in-between could be a radical position.
is virno always this wrong?
Comment by geo — June 10, 2006 @ 8:00 pm
Virno’s usually quite good, though he does make some weird claims now and again. This is the most obviously wrongheaded thing I’ve heard him to say. I also think it’s something he and Negri share. At a minimum, the attempt to make a revolution where they were at also involved producing a theory that it couldn’t happen in any location that was substantially different. In a sense, then, this bad theory here is not so much of a mistake as something like sweat or lactic acid leftover after exertion. The mistake is taking that as something that is useful or required for future activities.
I think the Telos intro, as I think you do also based on the “almost” in your comment, is more like a mirror image of this perspective - an assumption in advance about where anything worthwhile can happen. That leads to at best inadequate theory.
Worse yet, though, is that, if acted on consistently in practical and organizational matters, the “can’t happen” leads to combating or at best neglecting that which is taken to be impossible. This is part of where my reservations over the periodization of hegemonic class figures comes from: the attempt to find a hegemonic figure at the level of theory has as its practical corrollary (sp?) the attempt to produce a hegemonic figure, with all of the pernicious crap that involves.
Your comments on Tronti’s claims about revolutionary Italy are really interesting, as that seems to be something more resonant with a third worldist position, or at least not as directly opposed. A tension in Tronti, maybe.
Comment by Nate — June 10, 2006 @ 8:23 pm
definitely a tension in tronti, especially since in the same text he almost makes the claim that revolution can happen anywhere and that there can be no privileged locus.
Comment by geo — June 10, 2006 @ 9:17 pm
There’s a good study of Italian maoism by Roberto Niccolai - “Quando la Cina era vicina” - La rivoluzione culturale e la sinistra extraparlamentare italiana negli anni ‘60 e ‘70 - and an accompanying book that contains the interviews associated with it. Niccolai interviews people across a range of left groups who were influenced in some way by maoism (defined as something broader than marxism-leninism), and the only leninist group not represented is precisely Potere Operaio … There are lots of ways in which sections of PO were contiguous to maoism - positive references pop up even in Sergio Bologna’s writings at different points of time (and he edited a pamphlet series called Linea di massa in the late sixties).
I’m also fascinated by Negri’s flirtations in the seventies with certain ML circles in Italy - eg that around the poet Francesco Leonetti.
I think the implications that you raise for what this means in terms of reading political composition are important to tease out. The same sort of arguments revolve around reactions to the Zapatistas.
Comment by Steve — June 11, 2006 @ 9:42 am
Thanks for that Steve, I’ll have a look. I have a vague recollection of someone, maybe you, telling me that Tronti called Panzieri a Maoist, or vice versa… Does that ring any bells?
Comment by Nate — June 11, 2006 @ 8:26 pm
i actually appreciated Virno’s comments for the exact reason that Geo disparages them. By claiming to look toward america, he is making a claim about the specificity of so-called “developed” states/economies which shares similar features and shared trajectories.
In Cuba and China for instance, different things were going on, economic and social experiments of a different kind. To insist on the third-world perspective, I want to claim that we were doing something different (not that they are not interlinked in important ways -but nontheless different).
I am recently looking at a biography of Ho Chi Min who struggled (i think its the best way to put it) with a different set of conditions -a situation that both European and American comrades misunderstood in very fundamental ways. Perhaps it is better to see the specifics of the struggle sometimes rather than to insist on similarities.
By braketing the features of struggles in factories in Detroit and Turin, perhaps that leaves space to investigate what happened in Asia (or Africa and South America) during the 50’s - 80’s.
Additional note- perhaps following this, it might also be best to see “Maoism” as a fundamentally European phenomenon, one that self-conceptualizes the “third world” in their own (often productive) way -leaving “Mao Tse Dong thought” as a seperate phenomenon and path.
Comment by Tzuchien — June 12, 2006 @ 7:17 am
No, Nate, I don’t recall saying that - which doesn’t mean I didn’t, although it would surprise me.
Quaderni Rossi showed a growing interest in China after Panzieri’s death - and he may well have gone there himself, I can’t remember.
Comment by Steve — June 12, 2006 @ 12:09 pm
Tzuchien,
I don’t get what you’re saying. Do you mean to say that you like that Virno sort of leaves other/different places to sort of sort themselves out? That’s fair enough, but the “the highest point of economic development is the site for revolution” doesn’t really do that. It subordinates the rest of the world to those points. It’s actually just like the sort of third-worldism that says “nothing can happen outside of the third world.” That type of legislating move is in the spirit of the worst determinist marxism, and simply wrong.
Steve, I’ll have to see if I can find the reference.
Comment by Nate — June 12, 2006 @ 5:17 pm
yes nate you’re right about Virno, but I think the general point I was making is still right? right?
Comment by Tzuchien — June 13, 2006 @ 4:35 am
sorry little bit of textual quibble when he says:
“Only where capitalist development has reached
its height is there a question of the anticapitalist revolution. This setup has
allowed us to read Marx without “Marxism”—to read Marx, putting him in
direct contact with the most radical social fights…”
I read him as talking about the specific kind of struggle that happens in the context of a developed capitalist society.
but still, i’m not sure he’s saying what you are attributing to him, that he means something like: only in developed countries is revolution (whatever that might mean) possible. Clearly it was going on in Cuba and China and such -but it takes different form in Detroit. Is this what he means? honest question
Comment by Tzuchien — June 13, 2006 @ 4:45 am
As I read the quote that’s not what he means. He’s saying a revolution against capitalism, one that might overcome capitalism and replace it with communism, can only happen at the highest developed point of capitalism. Hence the attention paid to Detroit and not the Third World.
I think it makes sense for folk involved in organizing autoworkers at large plants in Italy to have paid attention to Detroit. (I think the Detroit autoworker and other experiences are worth paying attention to generally - the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, for instance, were really amazing and raise a number of usefual questions and provide some good examples). But that can be done without any claims like Virno’s - claims that Detroit’s the most advanced point in capitalist production, and claims that this kind of point is the privileged location in which a revolutionary (vanguard) subject will emerge.
Virno’s inverting at least one version of the Tronti position, which is that the place where capitalism is weakest is the place where the working class is strongest. I like that position if read as tremendously subjectivist - we win where we’re strong, not where they’re weak. That’s not what Virno’s saying, though. Tronti’s point, the good part of it, is that the struggle of the working class is the starting point. Virno’s starting point here is a prior condition from which to identify more and less important class sectors. He’s saying the most advanced location in objective terms will be the site for the most advanced subject. To me this is part of the operaist attempt to locate a hegemonic or potentially or emergent hegemonic subject who unites the rest of the class (or, who the class should unite behind). The bad idea implied here is that the economic or the technical determines the political, it’s a very old fashioned marxist stagism, however heterodox in other ways.
This is, I think, a tension in Tronti as well, though I can’t substantiate w/out first revisiting - finishing - Operai e Capitale. I’d like to hear what Steve thinks on this in relation to Tronti. The piece Steve alluded to before re: the Zapatistas, vanguardism, and class composition, is here, if you’re interested - http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/monty5.html
That piece in turn references a piece by Romano Alquati (a summary of which is online in English here - http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/networka.html - I’d love to get a copy in Italian).
Comment by Nate — June 13, 2006 @ 2:42 pm
Steve, I figured out what I was remembering. Misremembering, actually. It’s an old post from autopsy, where you were saying someone else’s claims about Mao and China as important to Panzieri weren’t true. I’d conflated that with a remark you made that Alquati called Panzieri a trot.
http://marx.econ.utah.edu/archives/aut-op-sy/2003m10/msg00099.htm
Sorry to mis-attribute.
best,
Nate
Comment by Nate — June 13, 2006 @ 3:11 pm