Autonomist Leninists (2004)

Book Review from the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Storming Heaven. Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomous Marxism. Steve Wright. Pluto Press.

“Autonomist Marxism”, what is that? If you can plough through the first hundred pages of the rather abstruse views of some tortured Italian intellectuals, this book will help you discover that it is, or was in Italy in the 1970s, a variety of Leninism rather than Marxism. Its members regarded themselves as a vanguard of intellectuals seeking to relate to the “working class” and to help them in their struggles, but who were trying to work out exactly who the working class were.

   

Starting out from the “workerist” (“operaismo”, their own description) position that the working class were the manual workers in big factories, some of them eventually reached the conclusion that the working class were everybody forced to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary (though still apparently not including themselves). Unfortunately, this correct conclusion was tied to the view that the immediate enemy of the working class was the state as the collective capitalist and that the “class struggle” was therefore a violent struggle against the state.

   

Some took this literally and went in for bombings and shootings. Naturally, the state fought back and a number of them ended up in jail, including some the state didn’t realise were only posturing. Their theory of the state also led them to mistakenly see the way to working class emancipation as being not the abolition of the wages system, i.e. of the buying and selling of labour power and of buying and selling generally, but instead that everybody should be paid a “social” or “political wage”, a variant of the “citizen’s income” advocated by the Green Party and various currency cranks in Britain. Hardly Marx’s view.

   

This said, some interesting, though highly controversial, ideas did emerge from all this. For instance, that the technology and productive methods introduced under capitalism are not just neutral but adapted to facilitate the exploitation of the working class and so cannot simply be used unchanged in socialism; that all workers, including housewives, contributed, collectively, to the production of surplus value so that any distinction between “productive” and “non-productive” workers was impossible; and – what is the distinguishing feature of those, mainly outside Italy these days who call themselves “autonomist Marxists” – that “so-called economic laws had to be rediscovered as political forces, behind which lay the motor of working-class struggle” (p. 84).

   

To deny that there are any objective economic laws of capitalism is of course to go too far, even though working-class struggle is an essential element in, for instance, determining the level of wages. It is in fact to open the way to reformism, to the view that these can be overcome within capitalism if enough political pressure is applied, whether by parliamentary action or, as advocated by the Italian Autonomists, industrial or violent action.

Adam Buick