Potere operaio

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Demonstration by Potere Operaio

Potere Operaio (German workers power , abbreviated PotOp) was an organization of the extra-parliamentary left in Italy . PotOp was created during the workers' struggles of the so-called hot autumn in 1969 and disbanded in June 1973. The members included Antonio Negri , Sergio Bologna , Massimo Cacciari , Oreste Scalzone , Franco Piperno and Valerio Morucci .

prehistory

Potere Operaio was actually a battle cry of the extra-parliamentary left in Italy , which was mainly used by operaist groups. Operaist leaflets have been published under this name again and again since 1962. The first Potere Operaio group was formed around Toni Negri, Massimo Cacciari and Luciano Ferrari-Bravo in Porto Marghera (1963/64). Since 1966 Potere Operaio groups have also been founded in other Italian cities, such as Turin , Perugia and, above all, Pisa .
The Lotta Femminista group, for example, campaigned for paid housework among women.

These groups were initially not organized at the national level. Considerations to unite the different groups did not produce any result. Almost all of these groups, however, categorically refused to work with the trade unions and the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Instead, the aim was to organize workers' struggles autonomously.

Origin: The hot autumn in Turin

In 1969 there were labor disputes that reached a hitherto undreamt-of quality: Supported by all three unions and supported by the protest experiences of the students, the workers achieved a total of over 300 million strike hours and thus achieved wage increases of 18.3% (1970) and a further 9.8% and 9% in the two following years. The struggles mainly focused on the Fiat group in Turin, where numerous prominent representatives of the New Left also took part in the labor struggles. Within this worker and student avant-garde , there was a dispute over the form of organization and strategic direction. During the summer of 1969, two trends prevailed. The organizations Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio emerged as centers of these trends :

  • Lotta Continua was in the tradition of Il Potere Operaio di Pisa . The activists relied primarily on the spontaneous and creative energy of the “revolutionary masses”. The aim was to build stable, nationwide structures that should coordinate the content and projects of the movement. LC saw itself as part of the movement and not as an external avant-garde. Adriano Sofri , Guido Viale and Luigi Bobbio were among the founders of Lotta Continua . The strongholds of LC were Turin and Tuscany . In 1976 LC broke up as an organization. The magazine of the same name, which has been published since November 1969, was published until 1982.
  • Potere Operaio was composed mainly of representatives of the Roman student movement, Potere Operaio di Porto Marghera and the weekly La Classe , which was published in Turin since May 1, 1969. The main aim of La Classe was to provide information about the labor disputes in Turin. At the same time, however, the establishment of a nationwide organization was demanded, which was then implemented with the establishment of Potere Operaio in September 1969. PotOp sought to build a party based on the Bolshevik - Leninist model. The group saw itself as an intellectual avant-garde that should lead and discipline the movement. PotOp was thus much more centralized and more elitist than LC.

The development of Potere Operaio 1970–73

In autumn 1969 the first issue of Potere Operaio came out. Francesco Tolin , who had already carried out this function for the operaist magazines Classe Operaia and Contropiano , acted as editor .
The first PotOp organizing conference was held in Florence in January 1970 . Only here did PotOp get organizational contours; Alberto Magnaghi was elected first secretary (Italian segretario nazionale ). After this congress, offices began to be opened in various cities. Stronghold was Rome , where Piperno and Scalzone in 1968 leader was the student movement. Another focus was the north-east of Italy, especially Padua and Venice / Porto Marghera. However, it never succeeded in establishing itself in the important industrial cities of the north. In Turin LC prevailed, while in Milan the Leninist- oriented group Avanguardia operaia (German worker avant-garde ) and the student movement of the Statale around Mario Capanna had the greatest influence.

The group's political work consisted primarily of agitating in factories and working-class neighborhoods and convincing workers of the need for a proletarian revolution. The need for a revolutionary party based on the Leninist model was emphasized. In terms of content, PotOp was primarily concerned with the fight against capitalist wage labor: "It is not true that we are free in this society. We are only free to get up every morning and go to work. Those who do not work eat nothing! Is that Freedom? There is one thing that stands in the way of our freedom: work. " PotOp thus tied in with a central thesis of early operaism, which was primarily developed by Mario Tronti .

The use of violence and the problem of illegality have been discussed within the group since 1970. This discussion then also shaped the third organizational conference (September 24-26, 1971 in Rome). There, Francesco Pardi made the proposal to go underground together. This suggestion was rejected. However, most activists agreed that a revolution could only be achieved through an armed uprising (Italian: insurrezione armata ). In preparation for this uprising, a small militant core for illegal work was founded, which was called Lavoro Illegale (abbreviated LI) according to its task . LI received a politico-military dual leadership: Oreste Scalzone became the political leader, the later Red Brigade activist Valerio Morucci was given military responsibility. For segretario nazionale Piperno was chosen.

The political organization (PotOp) had had an armed arm (LI) since 1971. Toni Negri spoke out against the establishment of this clandestine structure, who in turn pleaded for a militarization of the masses. Negri and Piperno also had different ideas about the form of organization: While the idea of ​​building a party was mainly represented by Piperno, Toni Negri also pleaded for a more open structure and autonomous forms of action on this point.

The end of Potere Operaio

Apart from the Red Brigades, PotOp was considered to be the most radical group of the extra-parliamentary left in Italy and was accordingly isolated. In order to break this isolation, a merger with Il Manifesto was sought, but this did not materialize. Due to the isolation and the unsuccessfulness PotOp got into a crisis in 1972 at the latest. In addition, there was an ongoing financial crisis following the death of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli's main financier (March 15, 1972).

On April 16, 1973, a serious incident occurred in the Roman district of Primavalle : two of his sons died in a fire in the house of an MSI activist. From the beginning there was little doubt that the fire had been started by some PotOp activists. Accordingly, this exacerbated PotOp's internal crisis and many activists left the organization as a result.

As a consequence of this ongoing crisis, at the fourth and last Congress of PotOp in Rosolina (May 31 to June 3, 1973) the resolution was finally resolved. Negri had already advocated the "end of the groups" in advance because they had been overtaken by reality through the labor disputes of 1972/73. The workers have reached a new level of grassroots organization. Groups like Lotta Continua or Potere Operaio had become superfluous in Negri's opinion. The background to this was that in March 1973, Fiat workers kept the Fiat-Mirafiori factory occupied for a few days, massively hindering the delivery. This occupation was organized by the workers themselves and against the express will of the unions. As early as March 1973, at a congress in Bologna, the movement of the Autonomia Operaia (dt. Workers' Autonomy ) was launched, in which many former PotOp activists, including Piperno and Scalzone, got involved. Others (e.g. Valerio Morucci or Adriana Faranda ) later joined the Red Brigades . The magazine Potere Operaio was published until December 1973.

literature

  • Toni Negri, Crisis of the Plan State, Communism and Revolutionary Organization . Merve IMD 33, 1973 (PO, September 25, 1971)
  • Franco Berardi , La nefasta utopia di Potere operaio. Lavoro tecnica movimento nel laboratorio politico del Sessantotto italiano , Castelvecchi, Rome 1998.
  • Giorgo Bocca, Il caso April 7th. Toni Negri e la grande inquisizione , Feltrinelli, Milan 1980.
  • Luca Castellano (ed.), Aut. Op. La storia ei documenti: da Potere operaio all'Autonomia organizzata , Savelli, Milan 1980.
  • Aldo Grandi (ed.), Insurrezione armata. Per la prima volta parlano i protagonisti di Potere operaio , Rizzoli BUR, Milan 2005.
  • Aldo Grandi, La generazione degli anni perduti: storie di Potere Operaio , Einaudi, Milan 2003.
  • Valerio Morucci, La peggio gioventù. Una vita nella lotta armata , Rizzoli, Milan 2004.
  • Giampaolo Pansa, L'utopia armata. Come è nato il terrorismo in Italia: Dal delitto Calabresi all'omicidio Tobagi. Sperling & Kupfer, Milan 2006. pp. 11–74
  • Potere Operaio, Alle Avanguardie per il partito. Bozza di documento politico, elaborata dalla Segreteria Nazionale di PO e proposta alla discussione dei militanti , Milan 1970.
  • Oreste Scalzone, Biennio rosso '68 -'69. Figure e passaggi di una stagione rivoluzionaria , Sugarco, Milan 1988.
  • Wright, Steve, storm the skies. A history of theory of operaism , Association A, Berlin 2005.
  • Jobst C. Knigge, Feltrinelli - His Path to Terrorism , Humboldt University Berlin 2010 (open access).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the history and positions of Il Potere Operaio di Pisa : Roberto Massari (ed.), Adriano Sofri, il '68 e il Potere operaio pisano , Bolsena 1998. Cf. also: Jan Kurz, Die Universität auf der Piazza. Origin of the disintegration of the student movement in Italy 1966–1968 , Cologne 2001. S. 300ff .; Aldo Cazzullo : I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione. Storia crtica di Lotta Continua 1968–1978 , Milan 2006. pp. 39ff.
  2. ^ Paul Ginsborg , A History of Contemporary Italy. Society and Politics 1943–1988, New York 2003. Page 309ff .; Friederike Hausmann, A Brief History of Italy from 1943 to the Post-Berlusconi Era , Berlin 2006. Page 81f.
  3. ↑ The most important articles from La Classe are printed in: Lucio Castellano (ed.), Aut.Op. La storia ei documenti: Da Potere operaio all'Autonomia organizzata. Savelli, Milan 1980. pp. 25ff .; see. also: Elena Petricola, I diritti degli esclusi nelle lotte degli anni settanta. Lotta Continua. Edizioni Associate, Rome 2002. pp. 39ff.
  4. ↑ In detail on the contrast PotOp vs. LC: Giuseppe Carlo Marino, Biographia del Sessantotto. Utopia, conquiste, sbandamenti . Bompiani, Milan 2004. p. 368ff.
  5. ↑ On November 24, 1969, he was arrested on charges of calling for an uprising against the state. Compare Potere Operaio, Contro la repressione stato-capitale liberiamo Tolin e gli altri compagni , in: Potere Operaio 10 (November 27, 1969) p. 2.
  6. ^ Potere Operaio, Alle Avanguardie per il partito. Bozza di documento politico, elaborata dalla Segreteria Nazionale di PO e proposta alla discussione dei militanti , Milan 1970. pp. 25f.
  7. ↑ Mario Tronti, Marx, forza-lavoro, classe operaia , in: Ders. Operai e Capitale , Turin 1977. (first 1966; German title: Marx, Arbeitskraft, Arbeiterklasse .) Pp. 259–263.
  8. ^ Francesco Pardi, in: Aldo Grandi, Insurrezione armata. Per la prima volta parlano i protagonisti di Potere operaio , Rizzoli BUR, Milan 2005. pp. 279-285. (here p. 283f.)
  9. ↑ Aldo Grandi: To LI: Francesco Bellosi in armata Insurrezione. Per la prima volta parlano i protagonisti di Potere operaio , Rizzoli BUR, Milan 2005. pp. 22-52. (especially p. 31ff.); Valerio Morucci, La peggio gioventù. Una vita nella lotta armata , Rizzoli, Milan 2004. pp. 82ff .; Giampaolo Pansa, L'utopia armata. Come è nato il terrorismo in Italia: Dal delitto Calabresi all'omicidio Tobagi. Sperling & Kupfer , Milan 2006. p. 26ff.
  10. ↑ See Luca Telese, Cuori Neri. Dal rogo di Primavalle alla morte di Ramelli. 21 delitti dimenticati degli anni di piombo , Milan 2008. pp. 63-119; Pino Casamassima: Il libro nero delle Brigate Rosse: Gli episodi e le azioni della più nota organizzazione armata dagli “anni di piombo” fino ai nostri giorni. Newton Compton, Rome 2007. pp. 328ff .; Aldo Grandi, Insurrezione armata. Per la prima volta parlano i protagonisti di Potere operaio , Rizzoli BUR, Milan 2005. pp. 145ff.
  11. ↑ See above all the essays by Toni Negri: Un passo avanti, due indietro: la fine dei gruppi and Articolazioni organizzative e organizzazione complessiva: il partito di Mirafiori , both printed in Sergio Bianchi / Lanfranco Caminiti (eds.), Gli autonomi. Le storie, le lotte, le teorie , Derive Approdi, Rome 2007. (Vol. 2) pp. 74-84.
  12. ↑ In detail: Trikont-Verlag (ed.), Fiat: Workers produce the crisis / counter-power as a form of combat , Trikont, Munich 1974.