The Politics of Incivility: Autonomia and Tiqqun

Who, after all, still speaks of "society" other than the citizens of Empire, who have come or rather huddled together against the self-evidence of Empire's final implosion, against the ontological obviousness of civil war?

—Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War

Italy's Creeping May

The summer and fall of 1969 in Italy's northern industrial cities witnessed intense confrontations between capital and labor, most exemplarily at the Fiat factory in Mirafiori on the outskirts of Turin.¹ These struggles were novel insofar as they took place largely outside the direction of the unions and the classical institutions of the workers' movement. Moreover, they focused their antagonistic force on severing the link between demands for higher wages and levels of productivity—a correlation enforced by the unions. This recast the wage as an "independent variable," no longer understood as the price of labor-power but as what came to be called, within the movement, a political price to be extracted from capital in exchange for a provisional social stability. Separating wages from productivity represented a decisive break with the social pact drawn up in Italy between labor and capital after World War II, a pact that made the structurally antagonistic forces of labor and capital into partners sharing the fruits of the so-called postwar "economic miracle." De-linking wages from productivity transformed the wage from an objective mediation between capital and labor into an index of worker "needs" that would be unilaterally asserted by the class itself. This made the wage into the lever of destabilization, and wage demands into an affirmation of "worker power [potere operaio]."

The Italian state responded to this worker assault by depressing the value of wages through monetary policy (artificially induced inflation) and by expanding the class struggle onto the urban terrain and into the sphere of social reproduction. It did so by unilaterally raising the costs of public housing, transportation, and utilities. The urban proletariat countered in turn with new tactics and forms of struggle, so-called "auto-reductions," which referred to the organization, at the local and neighborhood level, of unilateral price reductions for these same public services. Whereas the struggles inside the factory were devoted to the establishment of a "political" price for wages, the struggles outside the factory walls—in the sphere of social reproduction, in the "city"—attempted to extract political prices for those commodities and services necessary for the reproduction of the working class. The tactic of auto-reduction, initially deployed in the sphere of worker needs (housing, utilities, transportation) gradually expanded or drifted into what we can call spaces of desire (cultural events, cinema, concerts). The implementation of auto-reductions by the urban proletariat in the early 1970s coincided with the emergence of "proletarian youth circles" (particularly in Milan) whose social base was composed not of the waged working class but of urban youth and the unemployed. These youth circles and the larger social layer they moved within practiced forms of illegality such as the occupation of squats, the organized gate-crashing of cultural events, and the systematic looting of supermarkets and stores. These forms of diffuse illegality converged and were synthesized under the slogan "Let's take the city!," which identified the city at large as a site of antagonism, while insisting upon the direct appropriation ("take") of urban space.

The emergence of the "Autonomia" movement can be identified, in a first glance, with the increasingly widespread deployment of this tactic in Italian cities, a proliferation of actions that echoed each other without ever cohering into a unified struggle. The form of these actions, whose reverberation was sometimes characterized by the actors themselves as part of a "diffuse guerilla war" (easily reproducible actions undertaken spontaneously, with no strategic coordination), were themselves the symptom of a more profound shift in the composition of the urban working class, whose layers now included elements traditionally outside the classical Marxist definition of productive labor: students, the unemployed, and women. It would be from these layers that the Autonomia movement would draw its strength. The emergence of the Autonomia in the middle of this creeping May—around...