Steve Wright - What are militants?
Steve Wright's Storming Heaven remains one of the most influential English-language engagements with the theory and history of Italian Autonomist Marxism, a tendency that operated within and against organized labor and the party-form in Italy beginning in the 1960s. When it was released nearly twenty years ago (2002), 9/11’s world-historical impacts were just beginning to be felt, and the transformation of the world’s media landscape had only recently gotten underway. In the book, Wright provides an overview of “workerism” by examining the thought of a select number of the tendency’s main intellectual figures, including Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti and Sergio Bologna. These thinkers wanted to more directly engage a latent antagonism between workers and militants, an antagonism over the very horizon of political desire. The desire for worker control of society’s productive infrastructures and of the social product was seen by the autonomists as anemic. Instead they sought to confront the capitalist value-form as it is embedded in the finest pores and capillaries of lived existence. In practice this meant extending their analyses from theorizing the shop-floor in isolation, to understanding the role of capitalism in transforming humanity on the level of subjectivity in the streets, at home, in schools, and beyond. To that end, their analysis began from an expanded conception of the worker which included unwaged workers, students, and others who were often excluded from traditional conceptions of the “working class.” But the theorists involved would perpetually struggle to reconcile their social positions in relation to an expanded conception of the working class. As Wright carefully charts, the productive antagonism between workers and theorists is a thread that runs throughout the history of workerism.
In his new book, The Weight of the Printed Word: Text, Context, and Militancy in Operaismo Wright returns to the same historical period but with a different body of material and a new set of aims. Whereas Storming Heaven offered an historical overview of a theoretical tendency through the lens of individual thinkers, his new work analyzes the collective intellectual production of the workerist tendency as found in texts of shared or unknown authorship. Wright examines these deindividuated textual forms, the “expression and communication” of the Italian Autonomist tendency, with at least four explicit aims. First, to better understand “why and how specific documentary forms were created and used within the setting of particular struggles or campaigns.” Second, to see how these texts can illuminate the “practice of workerist militants.” Third, to provide a corrective to prior accounts of the historical period that overemphasize the contributions of individual theorists. And finally, to take a preliminary stab at outlining a “materialist and historical critique of document work within radical social movements.”
https://illwill.com/what-are-militants
