ORGANIZED SPONTANEITY: CLASS STRUGGLE, WORKERS' AUTONOMY, AND SOVIETS IN ITALY

Abstract

The worker councils have a long history. During the twentieth century they became a political alternative with regard to the organizational forms based on the party and the union. In the 1960s and the 1970s in Italy there was a great and diffused rising of workers' self-organization. It has been the expression of the workers' autonomy (autonomia operaia) and the struggles of a new figure of the labor—the mass worker (operaio massa). In the operaismo theory and praxis the workers' autonomy was not the simple reproposition of the traditional topics of the workers' council movement, that is to say, the claim for a politics from below or the exaltation of the class spontaneity. Instead, it was the expression of a new relationship between organization and spontaneity, or an organized spontaneity. The Leninist approach in the relationship between party and soviet was re-elaborated: strategy belongs to the class, tactic to the party. This was based on the new class composition—that is—the conflictual correlation between the capitalistic hierarchy of the workforce and the processes of subjectivation and struggle within and against the production relationships. The article analyzes these theoretical questions based on the experiences of workers' self-organization within the class struggle in Italy in the 1960s and the 1970s. Finally, it tries to rethink these topics nowadays, in the transformations of the living labor composition: is it possible to think the worker councils as the construction of autonomous workers' institutions?

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