While I am sympathetic to the views of the Italian workerists, I think that it is important to recognize that trade unions operate both as a constitutive force and a mediating form of representation.
That is to say, that organizing creates a new set of social relations within the workplace and makes modes of solidarity in that workplace conscious and organized. These can become routinized, but they do represent a different relation of power. Just sitting down and talking with most union workers about their workplace vs. unorganized workers really brings this out. The main problem is that the AFL-CIO hasn't really recognized that the labor peace of the 1950's has been called off by capital a long time ago and refuses to use its resources to match the militancy of capital.
I think that a lot of labor militancy of Italy can only be understood in the context of the level of trade union consciousness.
In effect, the mode of organization had been pushed as far as it could go and workers started looking for new for new modes of organization to make new demands....
robert wood
> Put another way: I keep thinking of something Mario Tronti said in
> his essay "Lenin in England" -- "The capitalist class does not exist
> independently of its formal political institutions," but the working
> class "exists independently of the institutionalised levels of its
> organisation." Which is another way of saying that the working class
> needs organization, not representation. Once capital has saddled the
> working class with representatives, it wins. Unions may have once
> been a useful organizational form, but it seems to me that now their
> sole function is representative.
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