The Promise that Never Was: A Critique of Post-1968 European Autonomous Left Mithilesh Kumar Researcher, Western Sidney

y University, Australia

Preface It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. The Fifth Arvind Memorial Seminar is happening at a time when it is now more than ever clear that we are living through a phase in world-history where there is a tectonic shift in politics both at the global and the national level. This shift can be seen at the level of workers struggle as well as popular uprisings all over the world. There is a situation of conflict, nay war, in Europe; there are lessons still to be learnt and strategy and tactics still to be forged in the aftermath of the Arab Spring; there is the constantly changing geopolitics in the aftermath of the global recession; and there is a renewed challenge of separating populism from revolutionary politics. As one comrade pointed out we are living through the days when the question what is to be done? is back on the agenda. Having said that, it is also clear and history has taught us in no uncertain terms that when revolutionary politics and the forces that guide that politics commit errors and are not prepared, ideologically and politically, to take advantage of revolutionary, even radical, situations the price paid is heavy. We only have to look back at the decade of the 1960s to realize that history gives one shot at delivering the promises of the revolution and if that is missed the period which follows is one of disintegration, ideological confusion and in some cases political degeneration. All that is left is a caricature of what could have been. Since, we are concerned here with developments after the decade of the 1960s it would be nice if we look back at it briefly. The 1950s was called The Golden Years by the historian Eric J Hobsbawam. The Marshall Plan, the postwar rebuilding, the Keynesian

and its variants all meant that a system (the capitalist system that is) which always looked just a crisis away from being completely wiped out never had it so good. In the former colonies like India the heady concoction of all forms of Socialism from Nehruvian to Lohiaite were busy putting their head together to take the path of decolonization. There already was a Red Star Over China under the leadership of Mao Zedong. Dien Bien Phu meant that colonial powers are not insurmountable. The war and the anticolonial struggle had weakened them to a considerable degree. Fascism had been defeated and the anonymous soldier of the Red Army putting the Communist Flag on what was the remains of the Third Reich was to be one of the most defining images of the Twentieth Century. It appeared, or many were led to believe, that the world had left the nightmares of the first half of Twentieth Century behind them and now can go on building their nations and work for global peace. And suddenly it exploded. The world was turned upside down again. From the tea plantations of Naxalbari, to the rice fields of Vietnam, to the FIAT factory in Italy, Renault in France and on the Streets of New York. It was the time of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Flower Power. It was also the time of strident Civil Rights Movement. The New was again clashing with the Old and things were never so vibrant and it seemed finally the heavens would be stormed again, what had left been unfinished would be completed and that nothing could go wrong now. As it happened things did go wrong and quite seriously. And if we want to make sense of what is happening today we have to make sense of what happened then because in a number of ways we are the product of those time but we also have to critique that time, to learn from it and not to commit the same errors. As Marx remarked in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Introduction

This paper is a result of an unease which I have been feeling for a long time now since I worked as a research assistant in one of the big unions in Australia and developments that I have witnessed here in India in last year during my fieldwork here. It is a nobrainer to say that with the movement of capital also at the same time creates a movement (migration) of the workers. However, in the contemporary reorganization and the modus operandi of capital it is capital which flows relatively smoothly but the workers face increasing obstruction in theirs. Along with this proliferation of borders for the workers there is another line of thinking typically associated with Saskia Sassen which sees in the movement of transnational capital and workers a new form of politics and citizenship emerging where transnational form of activism which can be associated with workers struggle, Human Rights activism, environmental activism and so on is celebrated uncritically and without an analysis of how these transnational activism is trying hard to establish a hegemony over radical and revolutionary struggles by either trying to co-opt them or institutionalize them. One of the methods by which this is being done is through the trade unions of the developed countries. What is now known as Post-Fordism saw the movement of manufacturing industries from the developed countries to the Third World countries where labour was cheap and with nation-states willing to act as junior partners by providing the transnational corporations with infrastructures like Special Economic Zones (SEZs), tax breaks and so on and so forth. It has long been understood that in this zones and corridors there is barely any compliance with whatever existing labour laws that exists. We have seen glimpses of strident workers movement of which Maruti and Honda in Gurgaon are just two examples. But we also have seen some new players emerging in this cast which were hitherto absent in any workers movement which has preceded them. These actors range from NGOs masquerading as unions, activists of major unions from the developed countries, labour activists of all shades of left tracing their origins in various movements across the world. The most interesting aspect of this phenomenon is how these actors collaborate with some revolutionary organizations. The rhetoric used is eerily similar in each case. Autonomy of the workers movement, community of workers, some have even try to theorize the recent struggles as a kind of occupy movement. The question is not why these actors have suddenly sprouted (although it is an important question) but a more important one is what is it in the theory and practice of revolutionary politics of organizations and parties which makes them align with such

actors. In a more abstract sense, the question can be put in this manner: How and why some politics which look phenomenologically as a radical movement is actually a disguise for revisionist politics? Where should we locate such deviations? It is with these preliminary questions that I want to examine the operaist movement and its offshoot the Autonomist movement. The choice is a deliberate but also a strategic one as we are finding an increasing reverberation of the very same rhetoric here in the movement and the question has moved beyond its prevalence in the ivory tower of academia to the rough and tumble of workers politics, the question of the vanguard and the historic role of the proletariat as envisaged by Marx.

The Background There are several strands of left politics that emerged in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, especially after the death of Stalin and the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Soviet Union where Khruschev spread his canard. Most of these strands are the subject of investigation and criticism in the papers presented in this seminar. This paper will focus on the Italian Operaist movement and its offshoots as it is widely gaining currency and has now established itself as a major heterodoxy of Marxism. People like Negri, Tronti, Bologna, and Panzieri have gained a cult status and even though there have been criticisms their originality has been widely acknowledged. We will investigate their originality and the deviation from the methods and philosophy of Marxism to achieve that originality. But before we do that it is essential we recount the background in which operaism developed. The period of 1950s saw two distinct yet parallel developments in Italian Marxism. The emergence of Togliatti from the PCI is a major event. There was a widespread belief when Togliatti came back from exile in 1944 that the PCI was going to carry out the socialist revolution in Italy. However, nothing was farther away from the mind of PCI. In fact, Togliatti twisted the concept of National-Popular as given by Gramsci and came up with the concept of people in a way Khruschev will much later. He bypassed the question of socialist revolution and reduced it to constitutionalism. Here is what he has to say about the Italian nation and what it needed at that point in time: because we are Italians, and above everything we pose the good of

our country, the good of Italy, the freedom and independence of Italy that we want to see saved and reconquered. He goes on to add: We have to move 'with extreme prudence on the economic terrain, subordinating the struggle for economic changes to the quest for large-scale political objectives, such as the Constituent Assembly and the Constitution'. Togliatti. On his return from the Soviet Union he made it clear that: 'today the problem facing Italian workers is not that of doing what was done in Russia'; on the contrary, what was needed was a resumption of economic growth within the framework of private ownership so as to ensure the construction of a 'strong democracy'. Togliatti urged working-class participation in such a project of reconstruction, envisioning recovery 'on the basis of low costs of production, a high productivity of labour and high wages', in the belief that the effective demand of the 'popular masses', rather than the unfettered expansion of free market forces proposed by liberal thinkers, would serve as the chief spur to economic expansion. In short, what is clear from Togliattis assertion that he was trying to come up with an Italian version of the Keynesian welfare state. As one worker of FIAT recounted: the PCI militants inside the factory set themselves the political task of producing to save the national economy, and the workers were left without a party. As it turned out the class consciousness and the concept and the need of a Leninist Party was much clearer to the workers than their vanguard. Combine this with the consolidation of Christian Democratic Party and massive US aid the working class of Italy was left groping in the dark. And then the historical betrayal of Khruschev came that wreaked havoc in the European Communist movement. In my opinion, it is quite simplistic to assume that the European Communist Party were so nave to believe everything that Khruschev had to say about Stalin, the personality cult and the bureaucratic degeneration. As is clear from the utterances of Togliatti before 1956 the rot in the European Communist Parties had set in much before. They had given up the arduous task of analysing the Stalin period dialectically and taken the path of social

democracy and strident nationalism much before the tumultuous event. Even before the 20th Congress the Warsaw Pact was signed and there were some people in the PCI who could sense that things were changing quite quickly after the death of Stalin and this was followed by the secret speech of Khruschev and then the invasion of Hungary. Togliatti seized the opportunity to tell the Italian workers about the dangers of bureaucratic degeneration in the USSR and denounced the movement in Hungary and implicitly supporting the invasion. This was also the time that Togliatti formally committed the party to Italian road to Socialism. The 8th Party Congress of the PCI saw Togliatti remove the supporters of Stalin who viewed Khruschevite revisionism with a great degree of suspicion.

The other major party of the Left, the PSI had a chequered history in this period as well. During the Popular Front period it had a close relationship with the PCI through the slogan of unity of action. The party immediately after the Second World War was taken up by the rhetoric of autonomy which actually was a cover for various factions within the party. For some it represented aspirations to the mantle of 'revolutionary' party let fall by the moderate Communists; for others, it meant the construction of a mass social democratic party along British or German lines. In early 1947, midst the growing climate of the Cold War, the Socialist Party's reformist wing split away on an explicitly anti-Communist platform, a section of the party's left in tow; months later, the left parties were expelled from the government. After the split and the decline of the centre-wing within the party it came to identify itself as close to the Soviet Union. Thus, the 1956 came as an annus horrriblis for the party and created an ideological confusion within the party which culminated in a coalition with the Christian Democrats in the 1960s. It was to be the precursor of the Historic Compromise between the Christian Democrats and the PCI in the 1970s.

However, there was to emerge a figure from this confusion from within the PSI who laid the theoretical (it is too presumptuous to call it philosophy) foundation of Opeaismo. He was Raniero Panzieri. The most interesting thing about Panzieris theoretical approach is the fact that although he advocated going back to Marx in order to purge the bourgeois thought that had crept within the communist movement the terrain in which he located it was the very esoteric category of culture. He affirmed in 1957 that:

The fundamental task was 'to restore Marxism to its natural terrain, which is that of permanent critique', something which could only be accomplished by freeing it 'from the control of party leaderships and party directions': Only in this way - that is, only through the refusal of party-specificity [partitarieta} , and the affirmation of its unity above and beyond political alignments - can Marxist culture rediscover its true function.

He also asserted that the Organic Intellectual of the working class has now become organic only to the party. In 1957 he was appointed the co-director of the PSI organ Mondo Operaio which he used as a vehicle to propagate his theories. It is from this period on that we can see some of the widely used concepts of the movement coming in relief. Panzieri while still holding the official line of the PSI, the Italian Road of Socialism and the use of constitutional method he came up with the proposition that the labour movement required to be renovated from below and in forms of total democracy. For this to occur new institutions were needed, ones which must find their roots in the economic sphere, 'the real source of power'. Then the 'democratic road' would not become 'either a belated adherence to reformism, or simply a cover for a dogmatic conception of socialism'. Examining the experience of the historic left, Panzieri was particularly scathing in his criticism of the 'absurd identity between working class and party' consolidated by the experience of Stalinism. Against this, he argued, the collapse of Communist dogma made possible the reaffirmation - 'in all its vigour' - of 'the principle of class action as the autonomy of the exploited and oppressed classes in struggle for their liberation. Panzieri was not against the concept of the party per se but his bid to unshackle the party from bureaucratic degeneration fell into a position of Menshevism at best and liquidationism at worst. Whilst he acknowledged that the PSI's surrender to social democracy was a genuine risk, he did not believe that the party should simply be left to fall into revisionist hands. Panzieri sought to show instead that, 'of the party one can affirm with Marx: it is an educator which must be educated'. The recent experience of the historic left had seen the collapse of that 'necessary dialectical relation' between class and political vanguard and its replacement by 'the conception of the leading party, of the party which is the unique depository of revolutionary truth, of the partystate'. Still, Panzieri was confident that the questioning provoked by the events

of 1956 would return the historic left to the correct path. This they identified with Morandi's original, anti-Stalinist vision of the relation between party and class, wherein: the revolutionary autonomy of the proletariat becomes realised in the creation from below, before and after the conquest of power, of institutions of socialist democracy, and in the party's return to its function as the instrument of the class movement's political formation. This was an inversion of the Leninist principle of the Party and an ahistorical reading of Marx who did not yet had to confront the problem of the Party in the era of Imperialism as Lenin had to. This also raises the problem of method which was to inflict Panzieri and subsequently the operaists and their offshoots and heterodoxies. Here one must do justice to Panzieri and acknowledge his role in pointing out the distance between the PSI, PCI and the workers struggle. In 1959 Panzieri wrote: If the crisis of the organisations - parties and union - lies in the growing difference between them and the real movement of the class, between the objective conditions of struggle and the ideology and policy of the parties, then the problem can be confronted only by starting from the conditions, structures and movement of the rank-and-file. Here analysis becomes complete only through participation in struggles. However, the method that the group led by Panzieri adopted was a mistake that would haunt Marxist theory and practice in Europe and indeed around the globe for years to come and is continuing even now. The method that they adopted was of Sociology and co-research. Mario Tronti would go on to say that; The weapons for proletarian revolts have always been taken from the bosses' arsenals. The problem is not that the results obtained by bourgeois academic disciplines cannot be interpreted in a Marxist vein. In fact, it has always been so and it is hardly any novelty. The problem is when this relationship is inverted. There is a fundamental difference between Marxism and Sociology. And the difference is as much in method as it lies in philosophy. Marxisms method is dialectical materialism while Sociology is fraught with dangers of empiricism and textuality. In addition to that, this move from Marxism to Sociology is also, in the last analysis, reduces the problem of philosophy and practice to that of methodology which in fact what Sociology is. As an aside, it must be emphasized there is a difference between using empirical detail and being an empiricist. The problem was compounded by use of individual stories and interviews as a tool for coming up with the notion of the

desire of the working class. While individual stories and interviews can give an idea about the nature of working condition inside a factory the emphasis on individual has a clear and present danger of falling in the trap of behaviouralism which actually operaism always suffered. This Sociological method was taken to be the deliverance of all kinds of mechanistic interpretations of Marxism. This is what Danilo Montaldi had to say about the power of sociology: the sociological method of interpretation is fundamentally foreign, even opposed, to the culture of reformism and Stalinism, which is based upon a fatalistic conception of progress and on the premise of a revolution from above

Against a Marxism-Leninism 'of citations', Montaldi believed that certain sociological techniques could help in the development of revolutionary theory, which 'must be constructed from below in praxis and social analysis'. I dont think its even necessary to elaborate upon this thoroughly revisionist critique of Stalinism.

As important Panzieri was for the development of the initial ideas that were to become the foundation of operaismo it was with Mario Tronti and his contributions in quaderno rossi that what is now known as operaismo became full blown. Trontis first important contribution to qaderno rossi was titled 'La fabbrica e la societa', and was an attempt at 'Marxian purification of Marxism'. The central purpose of his piece was to delineate the enormous changes that the generalisation of relative surplus value in the form of social capital had wrought within capitalist society. The emblematic case was that of midnineteenth-century Britain, where individual capitals had found themselves forced, both by 'the collective capitalist, with the violent intervention of the state', and the struggle of the working class, to shorten the length of the working day. As Marx had demonstrated in the first volume of Capital, the response of British industrial capital had been to intensify the extraction of surplus value through 'decomposing and recomposing' the ratio between living and dead labour. This revolution in production techniques had greatly encouraged the development and eventual predominance of large-scale machine-based industry. Apart from prompting parallels with Italy's own postwar burst of industrial expansion, Marx's account of the arrival of the 'specifically' capitalist mode of production raised important questions as to the relationship between class struggle, development and forms of exploitation. The lesson to be drawn from the British

example, Tronti argued, was that the pressure of labour-power is capable of forcing capital to modify its own internal composition, intervening within capital as essential component of capitalist development. Such a dialectic had continued after the introduction of a 'normal' working day. If working-class pressure forced 'the incessant development of the productive forces' upon capital, this process simultaneously entailed 'the incessant development of the greatest productive force, the working class as revolutionary class'. Here, too, capital faced the necessity of reorganising production, since 'it is only within labour that [capital] can disintegrate the collective worker in order to then integrate the individual worker'. Even if successful, however, each attack upon labour ultimately displaced the class antagonism to a higher, more socialised level, so that 'production relations become increasingly identified with the social relation of the factory, and the latter acquires an increasingly direct political content'. Tracing the dimensions of this process of capitalist socialisation was Tronti's second aim in 'La fabbrica e la societa'. According to Tronti, however, the advent of largescale industry had seen the factory not only stand over society, but absorb it completely: When capital has conquered all the territories external to capitalist production proper, it begins its process of internal colonisation; indeed, only when the circle of bourgeois society - production, distribution, exchange, consumption - finally closes can one begin to talk of capitalist development proper ... At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society becomes an articulation of production; in other words, the whole of society exists as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over the whole of society. It is on this basis that the machine of the political state tends ever-increasingly to become one with the figure of the collective capitalist, becoming increasingly the property of the capitalist mode of production and thus a function of the capitalist. The process of capitalist society's unitary recomposition, a process imposed by the specific developments of its production, can no longer tolerate a political terrain that is even formally independent of the network of social relations.

While the subsumption of all social relations to capital brought with it the generalisation of the wage relation, the advancing proletarianisation of new social layers assumed a mystified form. 'When all of society is reduced to a factory, the factory - as such - seems to disappear', and with it 'labour-power itself as commodity'. This was only one of the topsy-turvy effects bound up with what Tronti called the social factory. No less important was the manner in which the state's assumption of the role of collective capitalist took the semblance of 'the possible autonomy of the political terrain from economic relations. In Volume III of Capital, Marx had explained such obfuscations as inherent to the capital relation, and indicated as one of the functions of science the reduction of 'the visible, and merely apparent movement to the actual inner movement'. For Tronti this stripping away of phenomenal forms could only be achieved by examining 'the state from the point of view of society, society from the point of view of the factory, the factory from the point of view of the workers'. The path to capital's demise was the final element developed in Tronti's essay. 'The machinery of the bourgeois state', he stated in conclusion, 'must today be smashed within the capitalist factory'. In the essay's most difficult passage, Tronti dwelt at length upon the political implications which arose from the twofold nature of labour under capitalism, which Marx himself had considered to be 'the whole secret of the critical conception'. It was mistaken, Tronti held, to picture the working class as a force which defeated capital from the outside, when in fact the commodity labour-power constituted 'the truly active side of capital, the natural site of every capitalist dynamic'. To bring class rule to an end, the working class must discover itself materially as part of capital, if it wants to counterpose all of capital to itself; it must recognise itself as a particular aspect of capital, if it wants to be the latter's general antagonist. The collective worker counterposes itself not only to the machine as constant capital, but to labour-power itself, as variable capital. It must reach the point of having total capital - and thus also itself as part of capital - as its enemy. Labour must see labour-power, as commodity, as its own enemy ... [so as] ... to decompose capital's intimate nature into the potentially antagonistic parts which organically compose it.

This analysis has one fundamental problem. That problem is its understanding of the state apparatus. It is alright to come up with an original theory of factory as society and vice-versa which can be a cocktail of Marxism and a bourgeois academic discipline. However, what needs to be explained amongst all this sound and fury is has it in anyway changed the fact that a state is an apparatus through which one class suppresses the other class. In this case, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. Another question is whether the state, this dictatorship views the problem of ruling over the working class as one based on a firm driven microeconomic approach. If history has taught us anything it is that the state and the ruling class are aware of the dangers that an organized working class struggle is the biggest threat it faces. Coming up with a theory and a practice based on factory based struggle is in fact playing into the hands of the state. A struggle concentrated in one factory howsoever big is easier to break as was evident in Italy then and as it is evident now.

With Tronti's journal began the classical phase of workerism's development. For all the different nuances within it, certain core features developed by Classe Operaia (Working Class) served to unite all its exponents: the identification of the working class with the labour subsumed to the immediate process of production; an emphasis upon the wage struggle as a key terrain of political conflict; the insistence that the working class was the driving force within capitalist society. The new group was strongest in Rome and the Veneto, where defection from Quaderni Rossi had been almost total; elsewhere the situation proved less fortunate, with splits in Milan, Turin and Genoa. Of all the components of Classe Operaia, only the Venetians were able to combine a certain numerical weight with what was then considered strategic location. The essay by Tronti appeared in January of the following year as the editorial of Classe Operaia's first issue. In it the most scandalous novelty of the new workerist ideology the reversal of primacy between capital and labour - was clearly set out for the first time. Seeking to uncover 'the laws of development of the working class' so as to advance the cause of proletarian dictatorship, Tronti admitted: We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head ... and start again from the

beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. The current international restructuring of capital, he argued, could only be understood as a response to the movement of the working class, which today had become 'a social mass', possessing 'the same collective attitudes, the same basic practices, and the same unified political growth'. This homogenisation coincided with 'a period of in-between in working-class history', with workers both estranged from the existing labour movement - 'through which class consciousness usually expresses itself' - and lacking an adequate instrument with which to replace it. While the revolutionary process was 'assured', its progress would be quicker and easier if a section of the old movement could again play a leading role. Thus the task facing revolutionaries was to construct a new political outlook able to grasp 'the total viewpoint of the working class', carrying Lenin's political project of the seizure of power into the maturity of capitalist development analysed by Marx. The problem with such an analysis of capital, workers and party is that for all its break with the mainstream PCI the formulation does not make any difference between political and economic struggle. In fact, what it does is to blur the theoretical and practical difference of political and economic struggle. Tronti never gave up on the the concept of the party. His autonomy of the political is, in fact, draws on the Leninist concept of party but the party itself was conceptualized in an idealist fashion. This has to do with the very subjective interpretation of the working class point of view itself. As Tronti wrote for calling of a non-objective social science which makes no pretence of objectivity. This would resonate in the academic gallery today and is a complete break form dialectical materialism and couched itself in sociological ontology. The concept of class composition in fact makes it ever clearer that workerism has subsumed itself in the method of sociology and instead of looking at the working class as a subject it started to study the individual subjectivity of the worker. The technical class composition was understood as the various forms of behaviour which arise when particular forms of labour-power are inserted in specific-processes of production. One can make the claim that this formulation has dangers of making the workers struggle a struggle for use-value. In fact, the whole concept of degradation of work is a requiem for lost skills of workers. The problem is not technology the problem is capitalist mode of production. Workerism pointed out the relationship between dead labour and living

labour but forgot to take into account the political relationship between living labour and living labour. This subjectivity which emerged from the sociological analysis of work took on a dimension which negated work and production itself. Tronti made it clear that working class must recognized itself as political power and negate itself as a productive force. This was a rather ingenuous but fruitless understanding the contradiction between the productive forces and the production relations and the resolution of that contradiction. The recent academic world and one of the fallouts of the occupy movement is the celebration of Right to be Lazy. The entire edifice of Trontis thinking consciously negated political economy. In his bid to show the autonomy of the worker he went to the other extreme of overlooking the law of motion of capital. For Tronti, capital's development was best understood as a series of political cycles that did not, in any immediate manner, coincide with its 'economic' rhythms: Capitalist development runs along a chain of conjuncture. We say that each link of this chain will offer the occasion for an open conflict, for a direct struggle, an act of force, and that the chain will break not where capital is weakest, but where the working class is strongest. In my understanding this formulation of the weak link theory is false. It negates one the analysis of economic crisis of capitalism, second the problem of respective strengths of capital and the working class is presented in a form of tautology. The strength of the working class is based on the organization of the party. In the Leninist sense the weak link depended on a whole range of political and economic issues. There was a contradiction between the czarist feudalism and the rising bourgeoisie, the Russian expansionism and the nations of their right to self-determination, and capital and working class. This dialectical tension was understood in a simplistic manner. In the way party was envisioned there was no less confusion on what Lenin meant by the vanguard and his assertion that the working class ideology has to be injected from the outside. This was taken as if the ideology is pushed down the throat of the working class and that there is no organic relation between the working class and its party. Tronti fused the mass and the party and his conception was closer to the Menshevik version of the party even if he did not realize.

There no longer exists, for the class, a politics-outside, external to its own mass location in the advanced capitalist class. This must resonate with the ideology that it is the working class which itself find a way and that the party has to just stand by the side. To do justice to Tronti, however, one has to say that he never gave up on the Party as an imperative. Things would change with another superstar Toni Negri. The insurrection program that Negri propounded sounds more like Narodnik than communist. This is how he develops the dialectical use of antagonism: Violence has lost all intrinsic, natural rationale (naturalness being always a product of historic forces), and all relation with any project that could be deemed progressive. If anything, the enterprise from of violence is precisely the opposite: it is an irrational form within which an exchange value is imposed on social relations in which the conditions of the exchange relation no longer exist. It is the intelligent form of this irrationality, simultaneously desperate in its content and rational in its effectiveness. Later on in front of the judges Negri makes it even clearer that for him armed struggle meant a conscious rejection of the party. In fact, he first rejects the Leninist vanguard party and then arrive at the concept of general insurrection. For him the two are incompatible. He makes it amply clear that he has always expressed the deepest, widest, reasoned rejection of any form of armed struggle that involves clandestine vanguard activity and the militarization of the Movement. The most important trend that Negri is associated with is the Autonomia. Autonomia had first crystallised as a distinctive political entity in March 1973, when a few hundred militants from around the country gathered in Bologna to take some provisional steps towards a new national organisation of the revolutionary left (Comitati Autonomi Operai. A number of those assembled in Bologna were members of the Negri wing of Potere Operaio. The words of the conference's introductory report neatly summed up the strategic orientation. In today's situation of crisis, it argued, 'The only path possible is that of attack. Furthermore, such an offensive could only base itself upon those class needs that the artificial ideological divisions introduced by both the historic and new left tended to obscure. To articulate such needs, organisation was to be rooted directly in factories and neighbourhoods, in bodies capable both of promoting struggles

managed directly by the class itself, and of restoring to the latter that 'awareness of proletarian power which the traditional organisations have destroyed'. Reconstituted as the Collettivi Politici Operai (Workers' Political Collectives), the group of Negri was to produce the most profound self-critique of any of the Leninist currents which entered Autonomia. In the words of the December 1973 issue of its paper Rosso, what was now needed was nothing short of a new form of political practice, one which broke with the 'logic' of far left groups and the parochial language of political 'experts', who know the ABC and even the L and the M - of Marxism-Leninism, without being able to speak concretely about ourselves and our experiences.

Rather than a politics which dealt with an abstract worker, 'male, adult, normal, unburdened by feelings and emotions; rational, a democrat or revolutionary, always ready to attend meetings on the history and tendencies of capitalism' , Rosso sought a new perspective which examined questions of sexual and emotional domination, of the nature of the family and the marginalisation of those deemed 'abnormal', through which 'the slavery of the factory and life imposed by capital manifest themselves'. This was now a clear departure from the Marxist-Leninist path and the final rupture from Marxist revolutionary politics. The further development of Negris thought, the concept of immaterial labour, multitude and several others have to be traced in these assertions.

Conclusion Now, we come back to where we started from. The influence of Autonomia, Operaism and currents of the same sort has been widespread here in India. So, we have seen and heard people coming up with ideas where party has to be a tail end of the working class instead of providing a conscious leadership. The transition or the leap that they take from the classes and the masses and their willingness to learn see them forming strange alliances with reactionary elements. However, one of the problems of the left movement in India is that they have to invoke Marxism-Leninism in order to gain legitimacy and when all has been said and done one has to ask them that despite their original thinking on almost every aspect of Marxism have we decisively moved away from the world-historic moment where the dictatorship of the proletariat, the

question of the Bolshevik party and the question of the state is redundant. If not, can we not then infer that their seduction with the new comes at the cost of dialectics. And less said about the NGOs the better. But we do see a change in modus operandi of the NGOs. They are now coming in the garb of Marxist-Leninists but armed with the concept and lots of emotions about some esoteric community. The question to them remains the same. And its no strange coincidence that the two find themselves on the same side.