The case for workers' autonomy
On both sides of the Atlantic these ideas reinvigorated the debate on Fordism, mass production and the prospect of the working class-led revolution. By looking at signs of workers autonomy, these transnational radicals recognised that workers had not been integrated passively into the political economy of Fordism -- they were not “alienated” as the sociological literature portrayed them -- but represented the potential source of a revolutionary movement that would overcome capitalism. If only bureaucratic unions and parties would step out of the way…
It is remarkable how ideas about workers' autonomy went against the grain of mainstream thinking on left. In particularly, in Italy, autonomous Marxists were at odd with the philosophical tradition that saw the Party, namely the Communist one, as the key agent of political change.
In this interview, Harry Cleaver comments on difference between the influence of autonomist in the US and in Italy. Here is one excerpt:
"At the theoretical level, while autonomist theory in Italy developed to some degree within, but certainly against, the dominant and well developed theories of Italian communism with its roots in Gramsci, in the U.S. (and in France for that matter) autonomist theory developed against a considerably less sophisticated Trotskyist background. While in both countries the general lines of development were similar, the more sophisticated debates in Italy led to a more thorough rethinking of Marxist theory and the more systematic creation of new theoretical paradigms, e.g. the theory of class composition. It is also true that in the U.S. the Marxist theorists of autonomous struggles were few in number and marginal to their rapid development by blacks, chicanos, students and women. Thus, historically, while we can study the impact of such theory on those struggles, or the way those struggles shaped the development of that theory, the Marxists developing it were never at the heart of the struggles themselves. When we speak of the American New Left we are speaking of something much, much broader and more nebulous than "autonomist Marxism". Most of those deeply involved in the mass movements of the 1960s that continued in the 1970s and 1980s did not consider themselves Marxists of any sort--regardless of how much they might be influenced by Marxist ideas or involved in struggles which made sense in Marxist theory. In fact, one aspect that defined the New Left in the U.S. was its rejection not only of the party politics of the Old Left, but also the bulk of its Marxist theory. In Italy, the omnipresence of the Left and its ideological and organizational influence meant that the development and influence of autonomist theory was much more integral to the development of the class struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and many more activists who thought of themselves and conceptualized their struggles in explicitly Marxist terms. Thus in the Italian "New Left" there emerged the political space of "autonomia" wherein militants developed a range of explicitly Marxist voices to articulate the varieties of struggles which did not fit either the organization or ideas of the Old Left, e.g. the socialists and communists."