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Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism
The only comprehensive survey of Italian autonomist theory, Storming Heaven explores its origins in the anti-Stalinist left of the 1950s and traces it through its glory days twenty years later. Emphasizing the dynamic nature of class composition and struggle as the distinguishing feature of autonomist thought, Steve Wright documents how class politics developed alongside emerging social movements. A critical and historical exploration of autonomist Marxism in postwar Italy, Storming Heaven moves beyond traditional analytical frameworks and instead assesses the strengths and limitations of the theory and how it foreshadowed many of contemporary European social struggles, such as the refusal of work, self-organization, openness to non-militarized political violence, mass illegality, and the extension of revolutionary agency. This updated edition also offers a substantial new afterword looking at the recent debates around operaismo and autonomia in Italy.
304 pages, Paperback
First published February 20, 2002
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380 people want to read
About the author
Steve Wright
106 books15 followersSteve Wright, a playful and innately curious soul, enjoyed an eleven-year professional football career with the Cowboys, Colts, and Raiders, yet these years did not define him.
Driven by his entrepreneurial instincts, he created an innovative misting company, Cloudburst, that cooled professional sports, the US military, NASA, and the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics.
His motto to leave people, places, and things better than he found them also led to his work on behalf of Globall Giving to provide gently used sports equipment to over a million children across thirty-five countries and counting.
Forever a lover of adventure, Steve joined the cast of Survivor for thirty-one days of starvation where he embraced the jungle of Nicaragua and emerged more passionate about life. His journey of continuous growth includes an unparalleled passion for physical and mental fitness which he practices and shares with his community in Malibu, California.
Steve now brings his voice to the public debate on healthy masculinity and more broadly humanity through his memoir, Aggressively Human, inspiring others to embrace empathy and kindness as a complement, not a challenge, to aggression.
Driven by his entrepreneurial instincts, he created an innovative misting company, Cloudburst, that cooled professional sports, the US military, NASA, and the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics.
His motto to leave people, places, and things better than he found them also led to his work on behalf of Globall Giving to provide gently used sports equipment to over a million children across thirty-five countries and counting.
Forever a lover of adventure, Steve joined the cast of Survivor for thirty-one days of starvation where he embraced the jungle of Nicaragua and emerged more passionate about life. His journey of continuous growth includes an unparalleled passion for physical and mental fitness which he practices and shares with his community in Malibu, California.
Steve now brings his voice to the public debate on healthy masculinity and more broadly humanity through his memoir, Aggressively Human, inspiring others to embrace empathy and kindness as a complement, not a challenge, to aggression.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 17, 2018
A solid intellectual/social history of the Italian strand of post-WW2 Marxism known as 'workerism', or operaismo - as well as related 'post-operaist' groups - up until the late 1970s. Worth reading if you are curious about the origins of many contemporary arguments made by the milieu of (post)Autonomist theorists and activists, regarding: class (re)composition; the 'social' or 'immaterial' worker; and the centrality of 'the wage' as an analytical and political category.
Operaismo originated in the writings of Raniero Panzieri, a dissident PSI (Italian Socialist Party) intellectual dissatisfied with the main reformists trends in the Stalinist PCI and his own party, and who sought to rejuvenate Italian revolutionary Marxism through an engagement with the lived reality of the 'mass worker': the new generation of young proletarians transplanted from the Mezzogiorno to the factories and cities of the north, and the novel methods of class struggle they forged there in the face of the rigidity of the mainstream labour movement. Contributing to the elaboration of 'operaismo' as a distinct theoretical and analytical strand - above all through a novel reading of Volume 1 of Capital (and later, the Grundrisse) that sought to 'subjectify' Marx's categories in terms of working class resistance; and an empirical analysis of the new large factories that relied on the method of the "worker's inquiry" which involved workers and researchers in a cooperative investigative project - were key figures such as Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Toni Negri, along with an entire wave of leftist intellectuals and activists drawn to the workerists' critique of the typically idealist and dogmatic Marxism of the PCI (and Italian Trotskyism). Alongside this political and theoretical work, an innovative school of workerist historiography was launched, which Wright covers in a useful chapter.
As the 'mass worker' became the catalyst of a series of vicious class struggles in Italy through the late '60s - culminating in the large-scale strikes of the 'Hot Autumn' or Autunno Caldo of 1969/70 - the arguments of the workerists appeared to be bearing fruit, in particular their insistence that resistance to capitalist labour regimes (and the demand for better pay) in the factories was itself a 'political' and not merely 'economic' act as the vulgar-Gramscians of the PCI had suggested. As this wave of working class 'autonomous' activity (alongside the explosion of student activism in 1968/69) crested and receded over the early 70s, however - and its networks of rank-and-file militants were marginalised or re-incorporated into the traditional union structures - the workerists reached something of a dead-end politically and theoretically. Its various formal organisations - Potere Operaio, Lotta Continua, and the nascent Autonomist sub-cultures in large working-class cities - entered into stagnation, crisis, and eventual disbandment over the course of the '70s, while former theorists of workerism like Toni Negri in the face of these defeats proceeded to adopt an almost totally-dematerialised conception of politics (laying the grounds for his eventual incorporation of and into the swamp of post-structuralist French radical-academic Theory). Tendentiously linked to the Moro kidnapping/murder carried out by the terrorist group Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) in 1978, the leading cadres of Autonomism were arrested en masse and subjected to various show trials on trumped-up charges over the following period - the final death knell for the movement as a national force.
This narrative history is interesting and comprehensive, though I feel at times there is a lack of clear criticism (outside of the author's straightforward critique of the semi-deranged Negri) of certain aspects of workerist theory. The ones that I would state plainly are: 1) Tronti's one-sided misreading of Volume 1, which valorises worker resistance over inter-capitalist competition as the mechanism for the increase of relative vs absolute surplus value in production; 2) an Italian provinicalism/parochialism that tended to read a whole series of universal changes in the post-WWII capitalist economic and political order as the product of some unique Italian sonderweg; 3) the lack of a clear theorisation of capitalist crisis, the limits of Keynesianism, and the complex link between ideas and materiality (or, crisis and revolution) - with workerists and post-workerists tending almost universally to short-circuit this chain in one direction or another. A lot of this could have been solved by a serious engagement with renovations of Marxism being carried out by dissident Marxian traditions outside of Italy (including Trotskyists!) during this period.
The book's real charm however lies in its afterword*, written for the new edition by two contemporary Italian academics who draw inspiration from classical operaismo. It comprehensively dismantles various intellectual distortions its categories have been subjected to by Negri in his 'post-autonomist' (more accurately, post-Marxist) phase of writings, much of which were highly influential within the 'alter-globalisation' movement of the late 90s and early 2000s. They also conclude with some helpful musings on what remains valid in the original inspiration and analytic tools pioneered by Italian operaismo.
* available in full here: https://libcom.org/library/italian-wo...
Operaismo originated in the writings of Raniero Panzieri, a dissident PSI (Italian Socialist Party) intellectual dissatisfied with the main reformists trends in the Stalinist PCI and his own party, and who sought to rejuvenate Italian revolutionary Marxism through an engagement with the lived reality of the 'mass worker': the new generation of young proletarians transplanted from the Mezzogiorno to the factories and cities of the north, and the novel methods of class struggle they forged there in the face of the rigidity of the mainstream labour movement. Contributing to the elaboration of 'operaismo' as a distinct theoretical and analytical strand - above all through a novel reading of Volume 1 of Capital (and later, the Grundrisse) that sought to 'subjectify' Marx's categories in terms of working class resistance; and an empirical analysis of the new large factories that relied on the method of the "worker's inquiry" which involved workers and researchers in a cooperative investigative project - were key figures such as Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Toni Negri, along with an entire wave of leftist intellectuals and activists drawn to the workerists' critique of the typically idealist and dogmatic Marxism of the PCI (and Italian Trotskyism). Alongside this political and theoretical work, an innovative school of workerist historiography was launched, which Wright covers in a useful chapter.
As the 'mass worker' became the catalyst of a series of vicious class struggles in Italy through the late '60s - culminating in the large-scale strikes of the 'Hot Autumn' or Autunno Caldo of 1969/70 - the arguments of the workerists appeared to be bearing fruit, in particular their insistence that resistance to capitalist labour regimes (and the demand for better pay) in the factories was itself a 'political' and not merely 'economic' act as the vulgar-Gramscians of the PCI had suggested. As this wave of working class 'autonomous' activity (alongside the explosion of student activism in 1968/69) crested and receded over the early 70s, however - and its networks of rank-and-file militants were marginalised or re-incorporated into the traditional union structures - the workerists reached something of a dead-end politically and theoretically. Its various formal organisations - Potere Operaio, Lotta Continua, and the nascent Autonomist sub-cultures in large working-class cities - entered into stagnation, crisis, and eventual disbandment over the course of the '70s, while former theorists of workerism like Toni Negri in the face of these defeats proceeded to adopt an almost totally-dematerialised conception of politics (laying the grounds for his eventual incorporation of and into the swamp of post-structuralist French radical-academic Theory). Tendentiously linked to the Moro kidnapping/murder carried out by the terrorist group Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) in 1978, the leading cadres of Autonomism were arrested en masse and subjected to various show trials on trumped-up charges over the following period - the final death knell for the movement as a national force.
This narrative history is interesting and comprehensive, though I feel at times there is a lack of clear criticism (outside of the author's straightforward critique of the semi-deranged Negri) of certain aspects of workerist theory. The ones that I would state plainly are: 1) Tronti's one-sided misreading of Volume 1, which valorises worker resistance over inter-capitalist competition as the mechanism for the increase of relative vs absolute surplus value in production; 2) an Italian provinicalism/parochialism that tended to read a whole series of universal changes in the post-WWII capitalist economic and political order as the product of some unique Italian sonderweg; 3) the lack of a clear theorisation of capitalist crisis, the limits of Keynesianism, and the complex link between ideas and materiality (or, crisis and revolution) - with workerists and post-workerists tending almost universally to short-circuit this chain in one direction or another. A lot of this could have been solved by a serious engagement with renovations of Marxism being carried out by dissident Marxian traditions outside of Italy (including Trotskyists!) during this period.
The book's real charm however lies in its afterword*, written for the new edition by two contemporary Italian academics who draw inspiration from classical operaismo. It comprehensively dismantles various intellectual distortions its categories have been subjected to by Negri in his 'post-autonomist' (more accurately, post-Marxist) phase of writings, much of which were highly influential within the 'alter-globalisation' movement of the late 90s and early 2000s. They also conclude with some helpful musings on what remains valid in the original inspiration and analytic tools pioneered by Italian operaismo.
* available in full here: https://libcom.org/library/italian-wo...
September 19, 2023
i wish i had read this in 2011 lol. at the time in the midst of my most strident "pro theory" / "anti history" phase, Wright's work appeared as extraneous to what i most wanted to learn from the Italians. that was a stupid and mistaken insight, not least because Wright's book is a decidedly *intellectual* history (it seems like The Golden Horde is the history history I need to read next). Storming Heaven is mostly just a reading of the journal debates, to the point that it barely references or explains some of the key events that beset the Italian left. that makes it an ultra compelling text for academics, one which particularly shines in showing the context in which certain workerist or autonomist concepts emerged, what problems they sought to address, and their shortcomings (usually as debated by others). on the other hand, i can imagine this would be quite dry for one looking for more immediate politics, and it can get a bit "blocky" summarizing article after article. i would finally also say that the title focus on "autonomism" must have been a publisher decision, as the book focuses more, I think, on the earlier workerist / operaismo tradition than the spiraling disaster that would eventually characterize autonomia. and then beyond the historical events which could have been more assertively inserted into the narrative, there are some significant gaps in Wright's account which a lot of scholars have noted (deeper perspectives on the feminist movement and the detroit/turin connection, and internationalism/anti-imperialism for instance) and on which some interesting work is coming out soon, i think. all that said, i found this to be an incredibly fruitful companion to Tronti, and it led me to a number of otherwise esoteric texts that actually shine in comparison.
January 8, 2018
Built from Wright's dissertation and the academic contempt for readability is here, making it all rather sluggish. Thankfully, it's packed with theoretical clarity and good judgement -- a solid bit of intellectual history. (If you're looking to understand the workerist current politically, it's a lot less useful and remains difficult to piece together here I found -- Wright is more invested in the theoretical trajectories and considering the lack of translations, nothing wrong with that).
April 14, 2008
This book is a good concise history of the workerist intellectual trend. It has a nice historiography of the mass worker. I felt this book did not shy away from the faults and problems within autonomist theory. I only wished for a better conclusion and a brief summary of the situation of Italian workers in the last 25 years.
August 16, 2022
Steve Wright has taken on a truly humongous and complicated task in writing this book, which he pulled off almost perfectly. This book goes through the history, practice and thought of operaismo (AKA political workerism), and its related successor, Autonomist Marxism, and does so in great detail and a well-structured manner. In doing this, Wright brings together a ridiculous number of sources, some so obscure that one wonders even how he even located them. This text is a must-read for anyone interested in these ideas and the history of their associated movements in Italy, and it cannot be understated how important it has been for the continued interest in operaismo by those in the Anglophone world.
January 10, 2018
wow, this is incredible
March 6, 2017
This is a must-read book for anybody who is interested in the origins and development of autonomist marxist politics in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, and its many trials and tribulations.
This book is very abstract and academic (a bit too much for my liking), and the primary focus is on the way key autonomist theorists developed and changed their ideas in the context of Italian politics and the rise and fall of various social/political movements. There was enough description of the latter to understand the general context of the theories that were analyzed, but its easy to get confused if you aren't already familiar with modern Italian history.
This book is very abstract and academic (a bit too much for my liking), and the primary focus is on the way key autonomist theorists developed and changed their ideas in the context of Italian politics and the rise and fall of various social/political movements. There was enough description of the latter to understand the general context of the theories that were analyzed, but its easy to get confused if you aren't already familiar with modern Italian history.
April 10, 2013
I'm pretty sure I read this in April.
March 19, 2015
Well worth reading. I have the libcom download on my computer, I'm taking my time reading it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews