WHAT HAPPENS BEYOND DEMOCRACY? Italy's postmodern politics
by ANTONIO NEGRI *
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A year ago the Genoa demonstrations against the G8 summit shocked Italy: they upset the plans of Sylvio Berlusconi, who had thought, with the overthrow of the traditional left, that he had carte blanche. By bringing people on to the streets, the victory of the right has raised hopes about the possibilities of re-founding the left and rebuilding the republic.
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After Silvio Berlusconi's victory in the Italian elections of 2001 it was obvious that the left had been routed. It had lost seats - and confidence. Social democracy was reaching its limits, and the reformist turn of the ex-great Communist party of Italy was foundering in defeat. The components of the centre left were squabbling among each other under Berlusconi's fierce gaze.
Then came Genoa and July 2001. Armed with plastic swords and cardboard shields, the anti-globalisation movement set off to the G8 summit. This was a new gathering of political and social forces, bringing together the far left autonomia movement (the tute bianche, so-called because they wear white overalls to demos) and Catholic groups with experience of working in the community. Both of these - each present in large numbers and each with a history of militant activity - attracted other demonstrators behind them.
In social terms the "multitude" (1) at Genoa were the first full representation of the new layer of precarious workers in social labour produced by the revolution of post-Fordism. When they first came on to the streets they were not fully aware of their power, but they knew that they owed nothing to the ruling right - and even less to the centre left that had been defeated because it had contributed to breaking working-class resistance to neo-liberalism (as well as stupidly participating in the creation of new proletarians). They were also aware that new poverty was being created - within intellectual and immaterial labour, a key area where signs of emancipation have started to emerge.
Genoa was a huge shock. For the first time in Italian history the police acted with no restraint, using techniques of low intensity warfare similar to those used by the Israelis. Carlo Giuliani, a young demonstrator, was killed by a bullet fired in his face by a policeman, just the same age as Giuliani; 24 hours later, in the night, 100 sleeping demonstrators were attacked and injured by overexcited police.
The social democratic left had not taken part in the preparations for the Genoa demonstration and did not know how to react, even when faced by the horror of what happened. And, to its shame, the parliamentary opposition was no better, being fearful and half paralysed, incapable of protesting in the face of the perversion of democratic process that Berlusconi's government has perpetrated.
All this explains why we have a new scenario in Italy. Grassroots militants, intellectuals, teachers and women are publicly voicing their discontent about the lack of substance in the left leadership and its inability to lead. This has been called the movimento dei girotondi, the ring-a-roses movement. It is not contesting social democracy as such but rather the inertia and vacuity of the left leadership. It expresses itself through public meetings involving well-known leftwing intellectuals (2).
This movement of dissenting intellectuals has coincided with a development of other social movements in Italy. There has been a proliferation of demonstrations on the streets. On 10 November 2001, as a response to the attacks of 11 September, the right attempted to organise a march "in solidarity with the American flag" - in support of the US decision to initiate long-term global war. Hundreds of thousands of counter-demonstrators took to the streets to oppose the march and to express their desire for peace.
Immigrants also staged marches - in Rome and elsewhere - against the Bossi-Fini law (3), which proposed that the rights of immigrants (particularly their residence permits) should be tied to regular jobs. This shows the hypocrisy of a country that is Europe's number one in illegal labour, and of the violence of its government. Immigrant resistance has been so strong that this year the first "colour strikes" were staged in key industries in northern Italy.
Another front of resistance has been the campaign against the imposition of Berlusconi's school reform programme: hundreds of thousands of students and teachers protested in the streets over several weeks. Since the summer of 2001 we have seen continuous struggles against everything from war to the impact of neo-liberalism in Italian society. Genoa provided the foundation for this movement and still serves as a reference for it.
Also after Genoa, and on the margins of this multitude of struggles, we again began to see action by the trade unions. The unions had been profoundly disorientated by Berlusconi's election victory. While some of the fringe elements - for instance the engineering workers of the Italian General Federation of Workers (FIOM-CGIL) and several teaching unions - had supported the anti-globalisation initiatives, the leadership of the big unions was in the same state of disarray as the Democratici di Sinistra (DS, Democrats of the Left), particularly since it had been accustomed to an easy time in exchange for support for centre left governments.
Two provocations
The inertia of the big union leadership was radically shaken in two ways. First, the response of the social democratic left to electoral defeat was to try to regroup via a shift to the right. At the DS congress in Pesaro in November 2001 this led to a fierce clash with the CGIL trade union. The ex-Communist party leadership was perceived as a political elite with no scruples in its determination to hang on to power - a combination of cynicism and Blairism. But this is not a choice open to the CGIL: it knows that young workers feel far closer to the demonstrators at Genoa than to the old-style corporatism of the left. So the union feels obliged to oppose the centre left drift to neo-liberalism.
Then there was the arrogance of the Berlusconi government in its push to abolish Article 18 of the statuto dei lavoratori (workers' charter), which says that people cannot be sacked without "good reason". Although this has generally been a dead letter, it is now acquiring symbolism.
These two provocations brought the trade union leadership on to the terrain occupied by the autonomous movements, the Genoans and the girotondi activists; this fed into the anti-war movement and the movements against school reform and discrimination against immigrants. A march by three million people on 23 March capped a process that had begun in Genoa. A formidable movement is in the process of recomposing itself, contesting not only the current government but also - above all - the opposition parties. The aim is to rebuild a left worthy of the name. This movement, now representing about 20% of the Italian electorate, is obviously complex. It has to choose between possible scenarios.
The first is the option of maintaining the present Blairist leadership of the centre left, the option supported by the media. This would lead inevitably to a growth in trade union struggles, and probably also to violent resistance. But it is possible - and this is the second scenario - that despite its internal divisions the present CGIL leadership might find ways to combine with elements of radical Catholicism to rebuild a decent social democratic left with a chance of electoral success in the foreseeable future.
This scenario finds some favour on the left. It would have the advantage of marginalising the post-communists who, since the 1970s, have been actively involved in repressing social movements, muzzling the trade unions, making parliamentary representation more bureaucratic and contributing to the present reactionary shift, thereby betraying the communist tradition. But I believe that we need to be very careful. The worrying part is not the probity or coherence of the CGIL leadership but its cultural deficit - a culture best described as "workerist". It still fantasises a governing project based on the old idea that the working class can still have "hegemonic" values (in the Gramscian sense).
Unfortunately the world is no longer made that way. Most of the new movements consider that any attempt to rebuild a left has to be based on new sectors: the working class - but also "precarious" workers and the poor. Industrial workers and intellectual workers. White men and also women and immigrants.
This brings us to the third scenario, as advanced by the anti-globalisation movement, now the strongest component of the left. This would involve rebuilding the left around a welfare state programme, with a guaranteed income, universal citizenship, freedom of migration, and a new definition of common goods that would then be defended and promoted in terms of ecology, production and what we call the "biopolitical".
This new programme, for a more advanced stage of the communist revolution, is now firmly lodged in the political awareness of substantial numbers of citizens and militants of the new left. It is a programme for "absolute democracy" as Spinoza would have said, and as Marx would have wished: a republic based on the broadest possible cooperation between citizens, and on the development of common goods.
These are the terms in which we can really talk about freedom for all. The alternative would be an abandonment of the ballot box and a frustrated exodus from politics.
In Italy we now need an open and deep-rooted debate between the components of this new movement and those of the trade union left. Both sides must first get rid of the present social democratic leadership. They must break the dead weight of bureaucracy that still acts to stifle the social movements. They will have to mobilise people around a new opposition to the globalised world market. They will also have to win back to politics the 20% of voters whose abstention is a form of passive resistance to electoral politics, and involve them in participation. These people could be a powerful force for transformation.
I should stress the importance of administrative participation and of "associationism". These involve a complete re-think of the very concept of politics, conceived not as representative but as expressive, and also of the concept of militancy. It is important that we make them a reality.
After 23 March this growth of movements and struggles appeared to lose some of its political intensity. This uncertainty was apparent when, faced with a trade union call for a general strike on 16 April 2002, the anti-globalisation movement also called for a "generalised strike", but did not identify the forms that this should take. Where people acted on the slogan, it resulted in small demonstrations which, unlike what happens when factory workers go on strike, had no real impact on the powers that be. Precarious workers, flexible workers, mobile workers and what we call "social" workers were not able to hit where it hurts. This meant a loss of confidence and a temptation to return to the old methods of representation of the CGIL.
This is a temptation to be avoided. The problem is not leaders, but a political line and a renewal of hope. The problem is that social democracy has exhausted its historic mission. In all big political meetings you now hear people saying that we must refound the movement outside the social democratic tradition, by building unity between factory workers and other workers and the excluded, and by recognising that the social "precariat" and the intellectual forces of production are now predominant politically.
But what is being expressed, in pockets of activity all over Italy, is an intense and intelligent desire to discover forms of social struggle giving organisational expression to the new unity being created on the streets. People are now thinking of ways to organise strikes within what we call immaterial labour; to communicate struggles by using the internet; and to take apart capitalism's command of the metropolis. This is the way -the only way - that the left can be rebuilt.
Italy is the best example in Europe of a situation in which a failure of the social democratic left has been followed by an effective act of resistance. We have experienced a leap in consciousness. It is hard to define, but what it tells us is that the multitudes no longer need social democracy to struggle and change the world. The talk in Italy is of a "movement of movements", seeking out new forms of political expression at the theoretical level and in grassroots struggles. The project is to set in place new systems of hegemony. The Italian laboratory has begun its work.
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* Co-author, with Michael Hardt, of Empire, Harvard, 2000
Read also Language of the left.
(1) Definitions of the political terminology used in this article can be found in Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London 2000, and Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings of Toni Negri, Red Notes, London 1988. See also on the Geocities.
(2) For example an impassioned outburst by film director Nanni Moretti at a public meeting organised by the centre left in Piazza Navona, Rome, in February 2002 served to catalyse a whole segment of the broad left. People went and organised human chains around public institutions under threat from Berlusconi's reforms - the headquarters of RAI (the Italian broadcasting corporation), lawcourts, etc.
(3) Umberto Bossi is the leader of the xenophobic and secessionist Lega Nord (Northern League). Gianfranco Fini heads the Alleanza Nazionale (formerly the Italian Social Movement - MSI), which since the mid-1990s has transformed itself into a party of the liberal right. Bossi and Fini are both members of the Berlusconi government.
Translated by Ed Emery
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