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(p53) AUTONOMY WILL TRIUMPH!

In large pat it was these tendencies and not the violence of the struggles that made the young people of ’77 incomprehensible to the traditional elements of the workers’ movement. – Paolo Virno, “Do You Remember Counter-revolution”

Genoa is sacked by masked-bodied reayas, a new squat opens, workers threaten to blow up their factory, a suburb explodes, its inhabitants attack police stations and the nearest lines of communication, the end of a protest turns nasty, a field of transgenic corn is mowed down during the night. Whatever discourse describes these acts-Marxist-Leninist, reformist, Islamist, anarchist, socialist, ecologist, or stupidly critical-they are events of the Imaginary Party. It matters little if the discourses are fit from the first capital letter to the last period to the mould of meaning of Western metaphysics, for from the start these acts speak a different language.

For us, the aim is of course to combine with the event as gesture the event as language. This is what Autonomia Operaia achieved in Italy in the 1970s. Autonomia was never one movement, even if THEY (p54) described it at the time as “the Movement.” Autonomia’s space was the plane of consistency where a large number of singular destinies flowed together, intersected, aggregated, and dis/aggregated. Bringing these destinies together under the term “Autonomia” serves purely as a signifying device, a misleading convention. The big misunderstanding here is that autonomy wasn’t the predicate demanded by subjects-what dreary, democratic drivel if the whole thing had been about demanding one’s autonomy as a subject-but by becomings [devenirs]. Autonomia thus has innumerable birthdates, is but a succession of opening acts, like so many acts of secession. It is, therefore, workers’ autonomy, the autonomy of the unions’ rank and file, of the rank and file that ransacked the headquarters of a moderate union at Piazza Statuto in Turin in 1962. But it is also workers’ autonomy with regard to their role as workers: the refusal to work, sabotage, wildcat strikes, absenteeism, their declared estrangement from the conditions of their exploitation, from the capitalist whole. It is women’s autonomy: the refusal of domestic work, the refusal to silently and submissively reproduce the masculine workforce, self-consciousness, making themselves heard, put­ting an end to pointless affective intercourse; women’s autonomy, therefore, from their role as women and from patriarchal civilization. It is the autonomy of young people, of the unemployed, of (p56) the marginal, who refuse their role as outcasts, who are no longer willing to keep their mouths shut, who impose themselves on the political scene, demand a guaranteed income, create an armed struggle in order to be paid to sit on their asses. But it is also the autonomy of militants from the figure of the militant, from the partinini, and from the logic of the groupuscule, from a conception of action always deferred-deferred until later in existence. Contrary to what the sociologizing half­wits-always hungry for profitable reductions­ may lead one to believe, the remarkable fact here is not the affirmation of “new subjects,” whether political, social, or productive, young people, women, the unemployed, or homosexuals, but rather their violent, practical, active desubjectivation, the rejection and betrayal of the role that has been assigned to them as subjects. What the different becomings of Autonomia have in common is their call for a movement of separation from society, from the whole. This secession is not the assertion of a static difference, of an essential alterity, a new entry on the balance sheet of identities managed by Empire, but a flight, a line of flight. At the time, separation was written Separ/azione.

The movement of internal desertion, of brutal subtraction, of ever-renewed flight, this chronic irreducibility to the world of domination – this is (p56) what Empire fears. “The only way to develop our culture and to live our lives, as far as we are concerned, is by being absent,” proclaimed the Maoist-Dadaist fanzine Zut in its October 76 issue. That we could become absent to its provocations, indifferent to its values, that we might not respond to its stimuli­ that is the permanent nightmare of cybernetic domination, “to which power responds by criminalizing all foreign behavior and one’s rejection of capital” (Vogliamo Tutto 10, summer ’76). Autonomy therefore means: desertion, deserting family, deserting the office, deserting school, deserting all supervision, deserting men’s, women’s, and the citizen’s roles, deserting all the shitty relations in which THEY believe us to be held-endless desertion. With every new direction that we give to our movement, the essential thing is to increase our power [puissance], to always follow the line of increasing power in order to strengthen the force of our deterritorialization, to make sure that THEY won’t be stopping us anytime soon. In all this, what we have most to fear, what we have most to betray, is all those who are watching us, who are tracking us, following us from afar, thinking of one way or another to capitalize the energy expended by our flight: all the managers, all the maniacs reterritorialization. Some are on the side of Empire, of course: the trend-setters feeding on the cadaver of our inventions, the hip capitalists, and other dismal scum. But some can (p57) also be found on our side. In 1970s Italy they were the Operaists, the great unifiers of Autonomia Organizzata, which succeeded in “bureaucratizing the concept of ‘autonomy’ itself” (Neglazione, 1976). They will always try to make ONE movement out of our movements in order to speak in its name, indulging in their favorite game: political ventriloquism. In the 1960s and 1970s the Operaists thus spent all their time repatriating in the terms and behavior of the workers’ movement what in fact outstripped them on all sides. Taking as their starting point the ethical estrangement from work expressing itself overwhelmingly among workers recently emigrated from southern Italy, they theorized workers’ autonomy – against the unions and the bureaucrats of the classical workers’ movement-whose spontaneous meta-bureaucrats they were hoping to become; and this, without having to climb the hierarchical ladder of a classical union: a meta­syndicalism. Hence treatment they reserved for the plebian elements of the working class, their refusal to allow the workers to become something other than workers, their obliviousness to the fact that the autonomy asserting itself wasn’t workers‘ autonomy but autonomy from the worker identity. They subsequently treated “women,” “the unemployed,” “young people,” “the marginal,” in short, “the autonomous,” all in the same way. Incapable of any familiarity with themselves let alone with (p58) any world, they desperately sought to transform a plane of consistency, the space of Autonomia, into an organization – a combatant organization, if possible – that would make them the last-chance interlocutors of a moribund power. Naturally, we owe the most remarkable and most popular travesty of the Movement of ’77 to an Operaist theoretician, Asor Rosa: the so-called “theory of two societies.” According to him, we were supposed to have witnessed a dash between two societies, that of workers with job security, on the one hand, and, on the other, that of workers without (young people, precarious workers, the unemployed, the marginal, etc.). Even if the theory has the virtue of breaking with the very thing that every socialism and, therefore, every left look to preserve (even if it takes a massacre to do it), namely, the fiction of society’s ultimate unity, it neglects (1) that the “first society” no longer exists, having already begun a process of continuous implosion; (2) that the Imaginary Party, which is being constructed as the ethical fabric following the implosion, is in no way one, in any case, in no way capable of being unified into a new isolable whole: a second society. This is exactly the move that Negri now atavistically reproduces when he calls a singular multitude something whose essence is, in his own words, a multiplicity. The theoretical con game will never be as            pathetic as its underlying goal, which is to pass oneself off (p59) as the organic intellectual of a new spectacularly unified subject.

For the Operaists autonomy was, therefore, part and parcel an autonomy of class, an autonomy of a new social subject. Over the twenty years of Operaist activity this axiom was maintained thanks to the convenient notion of class composition. As circumstances and short-sighted political calculations dictated, this or that new sociological category would be included in “class composition,” and, on the pretext of a study of labor, one would reasonably change sides. When the workers got tired of fighting, the death of the “mass-worker” would be decreed and his role of global insurgent would be replaced with that of the “social worker,” that is, with more or less anyone. Eventually we would end up discovering revolutionary virtues at Benetton, in the little Berlusconian entrepreneurs of the Italian North-East (cf. Des entreprises pas comme les autres) and even, if need be, in the Northern League.

Throughout “creeping” May autonomy was nothing more than this incoercible movement of flight, this staccato of ruptures, in particular ruptures with the workers’ movement. Even Negri acknowledges as much: “The bitter polemic that opened in ’68 between the revolutionary movement and the official (p60) workers’ movement turned into an irreversible rupture in ’77,” he says in L’Orda d’Oro. Operaism, the outmoded because avant-garde consciousness of the Movement, would never tire of reapproriating this rupture, of interpreting it in terms of the workers’ movement. In Operaism, just like i n the practices of the BR, we find less an attack on capitalism than a covetous struggle with the leadership of the most powerful communist party in the West, the PCI, a struggle whose prize was power OVER the workers. “We could only talk politics by way of Leninism. As long as a different class composition wasn’t in the offing, we found ourselves in a situation that many innovators have found themselves in: that of having to explain the new with an old language,” Negri complains in an interview from 1980. It was therefore under cover of orthodox Marxism, under the protection of a rhetorical fidelity to the workers’ movement, that the false consciousness of the movement came of age. There were voices, like those of Gatti Selvaggi, that spoke out against this sleight of hand: “We are against the ‘myth’ of the working class because it is first of all harmful to the working class. Operaism and populism only serve the millennial aim of using the ‘masses’ as a pawn in the dirty games of power” (no. 1, December 1974). But the fraud was too flagrant not to work. And, in fact, it worked.

Given the fundamental provincialism of French opposition movements, what happened thirty years ago in Italy isn’t just historical anecdote; on the contrary: we still haven’t addressed the problems the Italian autonomists faced at the time. Given the circumstances, the move from struggles over places of work to struggles over territory; the recomposition of the ethical fabric on the basis of secession; the reappropriation of the means to live, to struggle, and to communicate among ourselves form a horizon that remains unreachable as long as the existential prerequisite of separ/azione goes unacknowledged. Separ/azione means: we have nothing to do with this world. We have nothing to say to it nor anything to make it understand. Our acts of destruction, of sabotage: we have no reason to follow them up with an explanation duly guided by human Reason. We are not working for a better, alternative world to come, but in virtue of what we have already con­ firmed through experimentation, in virtue of the radical irreconcilability between Empire and this experimentation, of which war is a part. And when, in response to this massive critique, reasonable people, legislators, technocrats, those in power ask, “But what do you really want?” our response is, “We aren’t citizens. We will never adopt your point of view of the whole, your management point of view. We refuse to play the game, that is it. It is not our job to tell you which sauce to cook us with.” The (p62) main source of the paralysis from which we must break free is the utopia of the human community, the perspective of a final, universal reconciliation. Even Negri, at the time of Domination and Sabotage, took this step, the step outside socialism: “I don’t see the history of class consciousness as Lukacs does, as a fated, integral recomposition, but rather as a moment of intensively implanting myself in my own separation. I am other, other is the movement of collective praxis of which I am a part. I participate in an other workers’ movement. Of course I know how much criticism speaking this way may provoke from the point of view of the Marxist tradition. I have the impression, as far as I am concerned, of holding myself at the extreme signifying limit of a political discourse on class. […] I therefore have to accept radical difference as the methodical condition of subversion, of the project of proletarian self-valorization. And my relationship with the historical totality? With the totality of the system? Here we get to the second consequence of the assertion: my relationship with the totality of capitalist development, with the totality of historical development, is secure only through the force of destructuration determined by the movement, through the total sabotage of the history of capital undertaken by the movement. […] I define myself by separating myself from the totality, and I define the totality as other than myself, as a network (p63) extending over the continuity of historical sabotage undertaken by the class.” Naturally, there is no more an “other workers’ movement” than there is a “second society.” On the other hand, there are the incisive becomings of the Imaginary Party, and their autonomy.

(p65) LIVING-AND-STRUGGLING

The most yielding thing in the world will overcome the most rigid – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

The first campaign against Empire failed. The RAF’S attack on the “imperialist system,” the BR’S on the SIM (Stato Imperialista delle Multinazionali), and so many other guerrilla groups have been easily suppressed. The failure was not one of this or that militant organization, of this or that “revolutionary subject,” but the failure of a conception of war, of a conception of war that could not be reproduced beyond the sphere of organizations because it itself was already a reproduction. With the exception of certain RAF texts or the Movement 2 June, most documents from the “armed struggle” are written in this ossified, used­up, borrowed language that one way or another smells of Third International kitsch. As if the point was to dissuade anyone from joining.

After twenty years of counterrevolution, the second act in the anti-imperialist struggle has now begun. Until now, the collapse of the socialist bloc and the social­ democratic conversion of the last remnants of the workers’ movement have definitively freed our party (p66) from any of the socialist inclinations it still may have had. Indeed, the obsolescence of the old conceptions of struggle first became obvious with the disappearance of the struggle itself, then with the “anti-globalization movement” of today, with the higher-order parody of former militant practices.

The return of war requires a new conception of warfare. We must invent a form of war such that the defeat of Empire no longer obliges suicide, but rather to recognize ourselves as living, as more and more ALIVE.

Our starting point is not fundamentally different from that of the RAF when it observes: “the system has taken up all of the free time people had. To their physical exploitation in the factory is now added the exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams […] through mass consumption and the mass media. […] The system has managed, in the metropolises, to drag the masses so far down into its own dirt that they seem to have largely lost any sense of the oppressive and exploitative nature of their situation […]. So that for a car, a pair of jeans, life insurance, and a loan, they will easily accept any outrage on the part of the system. In fact, they can no longer imagine or wish for anything beyond a car, a vacation, and a tiled bathroom.” The unique thing about Empire is that it has expanded its colonization over the whole of existence and over all that exists. It is not only that (p67) Capital has enlarged its human base, but it has also deepened the moorings of its jurisdiction. Better still, on the basis of a final disintegration of society and its subjects, Empire now intends to recreate an ethical fabric, of which the hipsters, with their modular neighborhoods, their modular media, codes, food, and ideas, are both the guinea pigs and the avant-garde. And this is why, from the East Village to Oberkampf by way of Prenzlauer Berg, the hip phenomenon has so quickly had such worldwide reach.

It is on this total terrain, the ethical terrain of forms­ of-life,  that the war against Empire is currently being played out. It is a war of annihilation. Contrary to the thinking of the BR, for whom the explicit purpose of the Moro kidnapping was the armed party’s recognition by the state, Empire is not the enemy. Empire is no more than the hostile environment opposing us at every turn. We are engaged in a struggle over the recomposition of an ethical fabric. This recomposition can be seen throughout the territory, in the process of progressive hipification of formerly secessionist sites, in the uninterrupted extension of chains of apparatuses. Here the classical, abstract conception of war, one culminating in a total confrontation in which war would finally reunite with its essence, is obsolete. War can no longer be discounted as an isolable moment of our existence, a moment of decisive confrontation; from now on our very existence, every aspect of it, is war.

(p68) That means that the first movement of this war is reappropriation. Reappropriation of the means of living­-and-struggling. Reappropriation, therefore, of space: the squat, the occupation or communization of private spaces. Reappropriation of the common: the constitution of autonomous languages, syntaxes, means of communication, of an autonomous culture – stripping the transmission of experience from the hands of the state. Reappropriation of violence: the communization of combat techniques, the formation of self­ defense forces, arms. Finally, reappropriation of basic survival: the distribution of medical power-knowledge, of theft and expropriation techniques, the progressive organization of an autonomous supply network.

Empire is well-armed to fight the two types of secession it recognizes: secession “from above” through golden ghettos-the secession, for example, of global finance from the “real economy” or of the imperial hyperbourgeoisie from the rest of the biopolitical fabric-and secession “from below” through “no-go areas”-housing projects, inner cities, and shanty­towns. Whenever one or the other threatens its meta-stable equilibrium, Empire need only play one against the other: the civilized modernity of the trendy against the retrograde barbarism of the poor, or the demands for social cohesion and equality against the inveterate egotism of the rich. “One aims to impart political coherence to a social and spatial entity in order (p69) to avoid all risk of secession by territories inhabited either by those excluded from the socio-economic network or by the winners of the global economic dynamic. […] Avoiding all forms of secession means finding the means to reconcile the demands of the new social class and the demands of those excluded from the economic network whose spatial concentration is such that it induces deviant behavior.” These are the theories peddled by the advisers of Empire-in this case, Cynthia Ghorra-Gobin in Ies Etats-Unis entre local et mondial. That said, Empire is powerless to prevent the exodus, the secession, we are working towards precisely because the latter’s territory is not only physical, but total. Sharing a technique, the turn of a phrase, a certain configuration of space suffices to activate our plane of consistency. Therein lies our strength: in a secession that cannot be recorded on the maps of Empire, because it is a secession neither from above nor from below, but a secession through the middle.

What we are simply getting at here is the constitution of war machines. By war machines should be under­ stood a certain coincidence between living and struggling, a coincidence that is never given without simultaneously requiring its construction. Because each time one of these terms ends up separated, however it happens, from the other, the war machine degenerates, derails. If the moment of living is unilateralized, it becomes a ghetto. Proofs of this are the (p70) grim quagmires of the “alternative,” whose specific task is to market the Same in the guise of difference. Most occupied social centers in Germany, Italy, or Spain clearly show how simulated exteriority from Empire provides a precious tool in capitalist valorization. “The ghetto, the apologia of ‘difference,’ the privilege accorded to moral and introspective questions, the tendency to form a separate society that forgoes attacks on the capitalist machine, on the ‘social factory’- couldn’t all this be a result of the approximate and rhapsodic ‘theories’ of Valcarenghi [head of the countercultural publication Re Nudo] and company? And isn’t it strange that they call us a ‘subculture’ just as all their flowery; nonviolent crap has started to be undermined?” The Senza Tregua autonomists were writing this already in 1976. On the other hand, if the moment of struggle is hypostatized, the war machine degenerates into an army. All militant formations, all terrible communities are war machines that have survived their own extinction in this pet­ rified form. The introduction to the collection of Autonomia texts Il diritto all’odio [The Right to Hate] published in 1977 already pointed to this excess of the war machine with regard to its acts of war: “Tracing the chronology of this hybrid and, in many regards, contradictory subject that materialized in the sphere of Autonomia, I find myself reducing the movement to a sum of events whereas the reality of its becoming­-war-machine asserted itself only in the transformation (p71) that the subject effectuated concentrically around each moment of effective confrontation.”

There is no war machine except in movement, even hindered, even imperceptible movement, in movement following its propensity for increasing power. Movement insures that the power struggles traversing it never settle into power relations. We can win our war, that is, our war will continue, increase our power, provided that the confrontation is always subordinated to our positivity: never strike beyond one’s positivity, such is the vital principle of every war machine. Each space conquered from Empire, from its hostile environment, must correspond to our capacity to fill it, to configure it, to inhabit it. Nothing is worse than a victory one doesn’t know what to do with. In essence, then, ours will be a silent war; it will be evasive, avoid direct confrontation, declare little. In so doing it will impose its own temporality. Just as we are identified we will give the notice to disperse, never allowing ourselves to be suppressed, already reuniting in some unsuspected place. The location makes no difference since every local attack is henceforth an attack against Empire – that is the only worthwhile lesson to come out from the Zapatista farce. The important thing is never to lose the initiative, never let a hostile temporality impose itself. And above all: never forget that our strike capacity is linked to how well-armed we are only by virtue of our constitutive positivity.

Continue reading chapters 9 and 10 here.