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Since the 1970s a
topos relating to the economic and political situation
of Italy has enjoyed particular popularity: this has to
do with a laboratory, a field of experimentation for the
most different forces, interests and currents. The
particular diversity of protest forms and
differentiations of the non-parliamentary public sphere
from the late 1960s to the turning point of 1977 seems
to be especially susceptible to sparking romantic
notions with respect to the strength of a "counter-power",
a constitutive movement that does not allow itself to be
coopted by representative structures.
However, in the shadow
of the antagonistic movement, so to speak, a series
of intellectuals soon began to dismantle the "molar"
discourses of mass laborers, of class struggles, of
the integration of the working class
through the workers' statute that was developed in the
wake of the wild battles in autumn 1969, and of other
discourses about possible institutional or non-institutional
goals. On the basis of a strange link between exploring
and accompanying social groups and movements, the proponents
of the so-called "conricerca" soon found themselves
faced with a differentiated image of labor forms that
could not be reduced to identities of class struggle.
This work commenced as early as the 1960s, as Raniero
Panzieri and other authors in the "Quaderni Rossi"
analyzed union strategies, and a group affiliated with
Mario Tronti (to which Toni Negri also belonged) developed
the so-called "operaismo". The "Quaderni
Piacentini" (Bellocchio, Fortini), who took on
a reflection on the political-cultural field, also had
an important function in the transition to the social
movements of the 1970s and the new political subjects
(feminist movement, autonomy, "postoperaismo",
free media, youth movement, ...). The theses on "independent
work" that is not subsumed in the dialectic of
the class struggle, were formulated much later as it
became more and more evident in light of the increasing
precariousness of working situations that the exemplary
law for the protection of workers from 1970 was less
and less capable of reflecting the reality of working
people.
The temptation of a "molar" response to the
progressive deregulation of the labor market is still
there. In 2003, one of the successor parties to the
Communist Party, the Rifondazione Comunista, called
for participation in a referendum demanding an extension
of the efficient protection against dismissal as provided
by the "Statuto del Lavoro".
25% of the registered voters took part in the referendum.
To pass the measure, twice that many people would have
had to go to the polls.
The unions were divided about
taking part in the referendum. This is only one of the
indications that the new conflicts – like the revolts
of the 1970s that were carried primarily by the youth
– cannot be solved through the traditional mechanisms
of negotiation. On the contrary, an antagonism is emerging
through the diverse figures of "new" labor,
the subjects of which reject the representative balance
of interests for various reasons. Over the course of
recent months, "wild" strikes have repeatedly
taken place both in Milan and other cities, in other
words protest strikes that do not follow the rules determined
by the unions. In the case of public transportation
in Milan and other cities of the Lombardy region, such
as Brescia, this had massive consequences, since strikes
in this area are normally "staggered" over
time. The unions are obligated to guarantee at least
limited operations during rush hours. However, some
of the groups organized in basis committees decided
to carry the strikes over into these periods as well.
Strikes that were in part not sanctioned by the union
also occurred with the formerly state-owned airline
Alitalia;
a large-scale out-sourcing of departments had led to
increasingly bad working conditions for the employees
and mass layoffs. In addition, four strikes took place
between January and June 2004 in the area of public
health services, as well as nation-wide protests against
Minister Moretti's
school and university reforms, which propose a deterioration
of employment conditions in addition to a reduction
of supervised periods and a watering down of the curricula.
The atmosphere is seething, and
it is increasingly obvious how fragile a public sphere
is, that is marked by the regulatory measures of the
social state. Manifold studies have described the turn
to a new paradigm of production, which has destroyed
the compensation mechanisms for a (re-) distribution
of produced wealth, as we know them from Fordist-Keynesian
compromise.
Along with the changed production conditions, central
categories such as productivity, employment, the socialization
of risks, etc. have entered into a serious crisis. What
seems to distinguish the protest movements is that precariously
employed people are gradually trying to live their situation
no longer solely as a deficiency in comparison with
those in "guaranteed" employment situations.
The turn in production, the transition to an added value
on the basis of their forms of living, awareness, knowledge
and communication, turns the subjects of communication
(teachers and students, researchers, people working
in the fields of telecommunication, transportation,
creative industries, journalists, translators, ...)
into desired beings and
subjects of desire at the same time. To the same extent
that more and more is expected
of them, that their life is fragmented (flexibility),
that people have to work for less and less money without
any organizational specifications (autonomy, independence)
and entirely without any statutory rights, the question
arises for them, more than for those dependent on wages,
where the boundaries between production and non-production
or reproduction are to be found, where work starts and
where it stops: what is the difference between work
and not-work and consequently, what is the sense of
this distinction?
The drop in productivity
that the Italian economy has seen in recent years is
due, among other things, to the fact that the demand
for labor power comes mostly from small and micro businesses,
which are not able to invest in expensive technologies
or research and development. This could be regarded
as an indication that the largest portion of the increase
in productivity, which has occurred through developments
primarily in the area of information technology, has
gone quite one-sidedly to private companies in recent
years. Outside the realm of regulated labor, which has
to bear the main burden of the socialization of risks
through the model of additional wage costs, a collective
experiment is consequently taking place, which does
not so much serve to "increase efficiency"
as to discipline the forces that are dependent on production.
All the forms and circumstances of work are found within
this "laboratory" that are meanwhile associated
with the term precariousness: limited term contracts,
no right to worker participation in the business, hardly
any pension plan or none at all, no unemployment insurance
and only rudimentary health insurance.
A precariously employed person therefore asks: What
can I want? What should I do?
Keynesianism remains "worth
considering" to the extent that it has uncovered
the symbolic functions of money among the accumulation
mechanisms of industrially, statistically, mathematically
organized products. Its tendency to "liquefy"
the segmentary, rigidified, monetary aspects of money
to set socially effective processes of exchange in motion,
opens up a perspective of the imaginary arrangement
("consume") and the symbolic communication
("institutions, rights") of the real that
is entangled in production. From today's perspective,
a "general theory of income"
would have to be considered, in order to look for strategies
for finding a balance between the experience of an uncertain,
fragmented, limited-term
integration in the production process and an "unlimited"
way of living. In other words, it is a matter of turning
around the deregulation advancing in many areas
of the world of work in terms of place, time and intensity,
first conceptually and then practically. If it is drummed
into us that there is no more security, that we have
to get used to flexibility and mobility, then as the
precariously employed, we counter, "All right then,
and since no one can say with any certainty whether
we are working right now or not, we demand – for all
eventualities – an income! In case of doubt, in favor
of those who are creative! I dream, therefore I work
..."
What is behind this
is naturally more than an attempt to carry on the Situationist
Internationale to its completion. In fact, the production
process constantly makes use of social, collective,
public achievements, goods and forms to create a value
from them. The real question is ultimately the concept
of production itself. It is not only a matter of contesting
the denial of rights associated with integration in
the production process, but also the lack of time periods
for a public sphere grounded in experience.
In this sense, the demand for a basic income remains
in the balance,
in between the possibility of creating free spaces outside
the realm of compulsive employment and the harassment
of the repressive institutions of the social state,
of imagining
an ecologically, socially and economically sustainable
order of production, and the danger of newly becoming
an instrument of the exclusion of groups located outside
the normality defined by the social order on which production
is founded.
Translated
by Aileen Derieg
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