LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

including especially the powerful Communist Party-led General Confederation of Labor (CGT), continuously badgered the workers into making concrete—and “reasonable”—demands that were then partially granted by the various plant managers. At the same time, French president General Charles de Gaulle made it publicly clear that a continuation of the strikes would result in a military occupation of the country, with deliberate, if unstated, echoes of the bloody repression that crushed the Paris Commune of 1871. Fear combined with partial victory to undermine the revolutionary potential of the May–June events, and by the end of summer there was little evidence to remind visitors of the uprising that had just concluded. Nonetheless, among Marxist radicals in North America, the broad importance of the general strike was considered reminiscent of the Petrograd experience of 1905, while the actions of the trade union bureaucracies reinforced left-wing skepticism of the official labor movement.

A little more than a year after the French general strike ended, the Italian industrial working class rose up in a widespread rebellion known as the Hot Autumn.93 When a number of major union contracts came up for renewal simultaneously in the fall of 1969, the collaboration between the company bosses and the union bureaucrats was plain to see. At the same time, the Italian government was in the beginning stages of a lengthy campaign to foment fascist paramilitary violence against leftists and working-class militants. For instance, the left charged that clandestine organizations of the far right with ties to the Italian state were responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in and around Milan over the course of 1969. But in contrast to the French situation, where partial concessions and the fear of repression had helped pacify the workers, major Italian factories like Fiat and Pirelli were in large part staffed by internal migrants from southern Italy, whose agrarian backgrounds included extensive experience with direct action and sometimes violent confrontation, but only limited previous interaction with trade unions. As a result, maneuvering by union officials failed to impress the rank and file, while incidents of fascist terror to a great extent only reinforced the militancy of the working class.

The Hot Autumn featured a number of factory occupations, and ultimately resulted in enormous concessions from management, including an average wage increase of almost 25 percent. More importantly, however, the Italian events highlighted the role of a type of permanent organization of workers outside the trade unions. The two most important of these organizations were Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) and Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle). Both groups attempted to intervene as conscious revolutionaries in the wide range of working-class struggles typified by the Hot Autumn, but did so neither as representatives of a vanguard party nor as partisans of the traditional labor unions. In the process they built networks of factory committees on a city-wide and even regional basis. This new form of organization was paralleled by the development of new theories of revolution based on the experiences of Italian workers in struggle. These theories were grouped under the general heading of operaismo, or “workerism.”94 The key theoretical innovation to come out of the Italian context was “autonomy,” meaning the autonomy of the working class not only from capital, but also from its “official” representatives in the unions and from its would-be vanguards in the Leninist left. In the North American context, most of the New Communist Movement took inspiration from the Hot Autumn’s factory occupations, while ignoring or rejecting its organizational and theoretical innovations.95 For STO, however, these elements were to prove decisive in the creation of a novel approach to workplace organizing.

Closer to home, the trajectory of the various Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs) and later the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit was perhaps even more inspiring than the Italian and French events, even though it was much smaller in its impact and even more fragile in its outcomes. The inspiring aspect of the Detroit experience was precisely in its location: Detroit was a) in the United States rather than in Europe, and b) largely black in a country where all recent radical movements had either emerged from the black community or else in response to movements within the black community. The radicals who subsequently formed the League had in fact established direct contact with many of the Italian radicals in the winter before the Hot Autumn, when John Watson, who was later to serve on the League’s Executive Committee, traveled to Rome for a conference on anti-imperialism.96 As was noted in Chapter One, Detroit was hardly unique in producing militant rank and file labor struggles, but the sophistication of the LRBW gave the city enough national prominence on the left that, decades later, Noel Ignatiev could still speak of the “Petrograd-Detroit industrial proletariat” as the model for STO’s initial forays into workplace organizing.97

      * * *

      Having recognized the importance of Detroit, and of the general wave of wildcat strikes and other workplace struggle of the late sixties and early seventies, the question remained, how to explain them? Why was the labor peace of the post-World War II era eroding so quickly? For much of the Marxist left, the answer lay in a combination of Leninist dogma and romantic admiration for the black liberation movement. For the Sojourner Truth Organization, however, the reasons were more complex, and provided the key to a proper revolutionary strategy.

In attempting to understand the seemingly spontaneous militancy of industrial workers as the sixties progressed, STO and in particular Don Hamerquist turned to the theories of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci.98 Gramsci was a gifted organizer and thinker who was active in Marxist politics in Italy throughout most of his relatively short life. After the Russian Revolution he helped create the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), and partly as a result, he was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926, where he remained until his death in 1937 at age forty-six. While confined, he wrote regularly, and produced a series of works, known collectively as The Prison Notebooks, that went unpublished until long after his death. Here, Gramsci developed his signature contribution to revolutionary theory, the idea of “hegemony.” In general terms, hegemony describes the hold that bourgeois consciousness exerts over the worldview of all who live under capitalism. That is, the parameters of a capitalist economy—wage labor, exploitation, and so forth—are seen as permanent and unchangeable, impervious to challenge by the working class or by anybody else. On one level, this was simply a reformulation of Marx’s famous dictum that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”99 Nonetheless, Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony represented a significant innovation in Marxist theory, because it provided a basis for understanding the continued survival of capitalism while simultaneously opening a path to its overthrow. If bourgeois hegemony could be challenged, then the willingness of workers to accept partial concessions would give way to a generalized revolutionary consciousness and struggle. For Hamerquist, hegemony helped describe the contradictory experience of working-class life in the United States, which he reformulated as “dual consciousness.”100 According to this framework, “The working class as it exists under capitalism has two conceptions of the world. One is essentially capitalist. It accepts private property as necessary; sees competitiveness, acquisitiveness, and selfishness as basic characteristics of ‘human nature’; and does not challenge the notions of right, justice, and freedom which serve to maintain the dominance of the capitalist class.”101 In contrast, proletarian consciousness presaged the potential for a new organization of society, communism. According to Toward a Revolutionary Party, one of STO’s earliest pamphlets, “The second factor determining the content of working-class ideology is the potential of that class to become a ruling class. This potential is manifested in, and demonstrated by, ideas and actions which run counter to the capitalist conception of the world. As has been said, these ideas and actions become mass phenomena during periods of sharp struggle...often being articulated as the explicit basis of the struggle.”102

Скачать книгу