When I participated in an occupation in 1994, the project was to find a space for a different kind of sociality in a provincial city that was difficult to live in, rigidly divided as it was between the bourgeois city centre and the illegality - occasionally violent and mafia-inspired - of large parts of the periphery.  This space of alternate sociality, at least at the time, was intended not only as a space of aggregation for those excluded from these dominant formations, but for the exploration, even tendentially, of a social experiment that could cut across highly different and complex classes and social subjectivities, a living laboratory of styles of communication, counter-information, and local politics, with the closest possible links to the university and the world of new metropolitan intellectuality.  

In Italy, the “institutions” of the state and capital are not so homogenous - at least with respect to the question asked, they are highly differentiated between themselves, and rarely can one speak of fields that are coextensive.  Certainly it was this way in the past, when it was the movement that counter-posed itself to the state. Yet it was a different movement back then, that had much different theoretical roots and objectives that no one in Italy is re-proposing today.  In the South, too, the relationship between capital and the state remains to be analyzed.  From my position, the institutions were taken a bit by surprise - between 1993 and 1997, there was an incredible flowering of occupations and self-organization. Never in my city had such a thing been experienced.

There was formed a relationship of solidarity with the parties of the left (Partito di Rifondazione Comunista and the Verdi, with whom subsequently there were enacted some specific short term political alliances). The press took note of what was happening, and the movement was able to use it (many of those involved in the occupation had developed media experience since the times of the “pantera” student movement in late 1989 and 1990).  I cannot deny however, at least as far as my memories of it go, the politically marginal nature of this aggregation, which only with great difficulty found cohesion between the different groups, beyond the urgent problems generated by the pursuit of economic survival and of the organization of structures which impeded a longer-term development of the project.

It’s certainly a project enacted by at a group level, deriving from an analysis of a situation that is determined and circumscribed temporally, and that depends on the experience, the political imaginary and the history of the group itself. I would add that occupying a social centre and, above all, defending it, necessitates a capacity for permanent mobilization.  This means that a certain military force for self-defense against violent evictions, assaults by organized crime in the neighbourhood, or from the fascists, is required.  There is, therefore, the need for a steward’s organization [servizio d’ordine] of some kind, and this cannot be conjured up in a matter of days. This can happen in a situation where there are the right prerequisites for maintaining control of the territory, knowing how to behave in certain situations, and creating a protective barrier: knowledge of the neighborhood, the people, the histories, the adversaries.  Militants are threatened daily in cities.  The struggle is one of individual physical survival before that of the social centre.

It is because of this that I say that a steward’s organization is not something that can be conjured up in a day – groups in the South, but also in the larger cities in the centre-north, need time to form themselves in order to confront the daily war on the street, a street upon which one can easily be lost. This is one of the reasons for the terribly high mortality rates of the centri sociali.  It isn’t possible to find people committed to carrying on street warfare for the rest of their lives.

For the historically established centri, which have a more solid base having already gone through these difficulties and being able to count on a lasting local presence, it is a different story.  But the experience of the SC as “militant” and “antifascist”, in other words the one you’re interested in, has been exhausted.  This is above all for one reason: the “militant” that animated it is finished. This social role, which was to constitute a movement external to and antagonistic towards the protected social swathes of the traditional worker’s movement (in industrial cities such as Torino or Milan, and in the Veneto and Emilia Romagna regions), or the Italian Communist Party that was besieged in large cities like Rome.  In other words, the militant that animated the “movement of ‘77” and remained the ideal type for the entire social centre experience, even if it was only an approximation with respect to reality. The “social worker” does not exist any longer, at least in the version given by Toni Negri in his interview on operaismo in 1978 and then reproposed in his Futuro Anteriore book of 1990.

This militant organized the security force in his group, let’s say he was like Erri De Luca, who in the early seventies was responsible for the steward’s organizations for Lotta Continua and is today a very well-known writer.  He was a professional organizer. I will avoid the theory of expropriation, of the assault on private property, of the occupation of the city, of the interruption of the city’s circuit of monetary exchange, all notions that belonged to the theory of the social worker, but which gave way to the figure of the social centre militant who was essentially conservative, barricaded within his small, miserable fortress, obedient to a kind of “neo-tribal” organization (as described by Primo Moroni, someone who studied the Italian movements with the acutest of intelligences after having lived these movements from inside).

The passage from the social worker to the “social centreite” was a cultural regression therefore, as well as a political one.  It was the fruit of repression, but also of the fact that the steward’s organizations of the various groups in the seventies gradually turned into what would become the armed organizations of the latter half of the decade.  This brought repression onto everyone, even those who hadn’t chosen armed struggle but who still, along the lines of the social worker, pursued a strategy of existential, territorial and economic reappropriation.

But what remains today? What is left after the social centre “militant” has disappeared? The situation is far more complex.  First of all it must be pointed out that the function of the centri sociali has mutated radically.  Today the successful ones are integrated into the metropolitan society of the spectacle.  In a certain way they function as a business, the work carried out inside is like a cooperative that organizes events and offers them to the public for a certain price in order to finance themselves but also in order to stay within the market.  Let’s say that work has entered the weak and self-referential world of the social centres.  The problem of Capital (in its spectacular form) is posed, and for this reason it forces militants to encounter the harsh reality of post-Fordist labour. Today a militant cannot be a “professional” organizer because their own individual biography is disintegrated into discontinuous and scarcely coordinated segments, just like the work she carries out in the centro sociale, but also as in the rest of the city (like working in a club, organizing concerts, etc).

In social centres in Italy today there is the brutal, violent experience of rapidly enacted, quickly consumed, and on-demand relationships prefigured and supported by the new labour law. One works to put on projects, to put on “events”, one senses the availability of a circuit that offers these, it is all over very quickly, all that’s needed is to put on a “night” – the payment is immediate and then one starts with a tabula rasa once again. Because of this it is obvious that there is no chance for the militant to perceive oneself as a political subject, and beyond this there is no way that this kind of labour (of which, I repeat, the social centre is just one example) can be condensed into class antagonism, into some kind of action.  This subject can be a receptor, the catalyst of an “event” such as a demo in support of a “campaign”, but nothing more “dense” or “material” than this.

There is a gaping chasm between this form of activism and the social worker, as there is with the old social centre militant. The new militant, unlike the old and banal iconography of the social worker that has been completely devalued, does not pass his time fighting on the street, keeping capital under attack, but rather seeks an understanding with local institutions, gives in to a kind of paleo-capitalist organization. Antagonism becomes a kind of “wardrobe” to fish from when putting together “events”, something that is coherent with this new identity that is integrated with the “scenario” of the urban spectacle.  From this there could potentially emerge a critique of the society of the spectacle, one that is obviously critical of post-Fordist labour, of post-Fordist labour law, one that presents a demand for a social wage.  But all of this is a long ways away.

For this reason I believe that the centro sociale is no longer a form of struggle to pursue both in itself and for itself. Its function can be important from the point of view of financing, but politically it is by this point secondary, it can function only in a network of subjects that labours in a self-coordinating fashion. It is animated by many levels, through many different people and activities.  In another context the centro sociale could be absolutely flexible, volatile, an impermanent organization, and the activity of the movement would no longer have its center in the “centro sociale”, which ought to be used only in some cases, precisely because it is by this point difficult to keep alive, it costs too much, there is a need for too many people, there is a huge stress associated with defending it.

In short I’m describing the ideology of the social centre, marked by the ideology of spontaneity, of the “libertarian” ideology of the antagonism against the state so as to live in a world “without the state”, perhaps even proclaiming a “return to nature”, a tribal one to be precise, where there are only nomads that move through the metropolis, armed one against the other, certainly free of capital (but how?), but obsessed with the need for survival. The contiguity of this ideology with a certain anarchist offshoot of liberalism (like that of Robert Nozick) has been noted by many, but not examined.

I believe it ought to undergo some scrutiny. Spontaneity is certainly fundamental.  The occupation of centri sociali is a spontaneous gesture of insubordination against the real order of urban and social metropolitan institutions. Adopting the position of spontaneity against the state, of the “natural” model of life against the “statist” one becomes part of the social centre identity, which occasionally is connected to technological superfluities (such as no copyright movements, hacking, etc), and occasionally with tribal or group belongings.  The call to spontaneity finds in virtuality as it does in identity, in the ideology of telematic immediacy as in the group belonging against the state, notable kinds of integration.  We should be careful however: the ideology of spontaneity does not necessarily constitute an anti-state, but rather a society “outside” of the state. The cultivated spontaneist has French anthropological models or, something that annoys me, the Deluze and Guattari of A Thousand Plateaus, etc, as reference points. The spontaneist in the know studies the Frankfurt School, the protest Marcuse, the use of technology in order to achieve a union between primary and secondary natures, the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic, the psychic and the physical.  The “spontaneist” in other words, wants to live outside and against the state, in a republic of self-sufficient autonomous communities, likely in the countryside, outside of the metropolises, but even within them.  He lives his alienation as separation, as identity, a flag to rally around. This ideology, one that is quite widespread in Italy, connects with quite sophisticated themes and important philosophers the reception of whom, in Italy, was in my opinion shamefaced.  There has been formed an editorial market, “currents of thought” that claim this “sorelo-nietzschiean” legacy of spontaneism, to be adopted against capital.  I don’t want to be polemical with people I don’t know and whose intellectual and political path I am not interested in, but only to point out that the spontaneist “militant” of the social centre is the incarnation of this ideology of spontaneism.  His maxim is: “everything now and right away”, which is very similar to another cry “everything and free.”  Surrealism and fancy.  Watch out for that which is claimed to always be easy, for those who claim that all that is needed exists in nature already, we just need to take it.  To answer your question: the contingency that sees a group occupy a centro sociale is elevated to necessity, the constitutive factor of an experience of “antagonism” which finds in spontaneism and ideology its culmination.  

Without a doubt, at least in the manner in which we’ve known them to exist since the nineties, they are a transitory form of struggle.  The way in which one lives in a social centre is, outside of certain moments of struggle and extremely acute conflict with institutions and police forces, very difficult, hard, occasionally merciless, in my view not overly gratifying. I think social centres have remained in the middle: neither a transitory form of struggle nor a prefiguring of a new way of living.  At least in their older,   “militant” incarnation they never resolved the question.  Today, they are very different - large businesses that organize events, mass aggregation - they are managed quite professionally, in a way that is very integrated with the institutional fabric of citizenship. They function perfectly, changing the types of commercial offering every season. I go there often - above all in Rome there are places like the Brancaleone that in the winter put on quite interesting things, they appear to be more or less underground places that have aspirations falling between acting as an artistic vanguard and being a night club.  But I think it is like this in other places in Italy and Europe.  I think that the experience of the centri sociali offered a response to the crisis that occurred between 1993 and 1994 in the big Italian cities (let’s say Milan and Rome) - exactly at the point that the practice was spreading to the south by choosing to become a part, as a specialized pole therein, of the organization of the integrated society of the spectacle whilst certainly not resolving any of its ambiguities.  The centri offered some spaces or services to groups in need of it: information booths, arts groups that couldn’t find space in the city, but also and above all they organized self-run businesses, an interesting form of self-organized entrepreneurship which is deserving of study.  It has nothing to do with an alternative way of life or with the struggle against capital, I believe.  More like a way to create self-sufficiency for some groups which represent themselves politically by offering a service to the antagonistic and militant community, that social strata of marginality and economic exclusion which expands ever more in the Italian cities, beginning at the end of the seventies.  The nature of this type of service rendered ought to be discussed more profoundly.  Traditionally the centri sociali have opened themselves to the “social”, to the neighborhood, offering minor services like information booths for immigrants or a nursery for children, or Italian lessons for immigrant workers - services that are by their nature transitory, tied to single volunteers who perhaps do it as a profession in specialized cooperatives.  The constitutive limit of the centri sociali is that of an idea of labour that is tied to volunteering, to self-exploitation, to the fanciful notion of providing total assistance for subjects who slip through the cracks of public assistance.  A laudable project, but one cannot hide that there is a worrying double-bind inherent in it: a critique of work and a revolt against work, a fundamental point of every culture antagonistic to capital, cannot accept these assumptions, which in Italy have a precise social connotation.  They represent a sensibility marked by Christian charity of assistance as an act of love (gratuity is part of the idea of a gift through which there is communicated the absoluteness of a love that cannot admit from the interlocutor either trade or exchange), a spirit which animates realities that are marginal within Italian Catholicism, with most of the tendency all aimed towards a moderate politics, bent towards the conservation of the historical bloc which has always dominated Italian politics as a whole.  Appealing to this spirit is perhaps laudable for well-thinking people, and is certainly laudable on an ethical level for believers in this idea of love.  Those who instead study and live working over historical materialism, for those who know a philosopher such as Spinoza, or Nietzsche, not to speak of Marx, cannot but criticize the humanitarianism underlying the ideology of volunteering.  A critique of the alienation of work, a critique of capital and of work subsumed under capital, cannot ignore the fact that this spirit, if elevated to a social rather than individual level, becomes functional to practices of exploitation.  In this way we observe a grotesque contradiction of a militant and a social centre that struggle for liberation of and from work and then voluntarily submit to practices that lie somewhere between self-exploitation and slavery.  The fundamental contradiction that social centres, at least the “militant” ones, have fallen prey to, is therefore the following: the new form of life beyond and against capital is based on self-exploitation, volunteering, a life that depends absolutely on money and on all of the circuits of exploitation because it cannot produce anything if not free assistance as the proof of absolute love.

A few years ago there was a debate on the left around this question, I remember a book by Marco Revelli, Oltre Il Novecento.  I think it is an exceptional piece of work.  The work of militancy, which Revelli harshly criticizes, just as Georges Bataille does in his work on sovereignty, considering its birth out of the sacrificial logic typical of a particular season in international communism, that of Stalinism, finds regeneration in the volunteer work, in the “third sector”, in the work of social assistance, in the feminization of labour.  Interesting and useful practices, but ones that reflect perfectly the contradiction of which I spoke earlier.  Those on the front of the critique and the struggle against capital must understand that these discourses can only reveal false consciousness: how can a counter-society be born that is based on the free provision of care, of love, of the interweaving of the social that is free of money, but obsessed with daily survival due to the fact that it is constitutively external to every circuit of production?  The theory of the non-profit sector has been devastating for the left.  Historically, it was formulated exactly during the period, let’s say between 1996 and 2000, the years of the “centre-left” government of Romano Prodi and Massimo D’Alema, in which legislation concerning “atypical” work was introduced, a very diffuse practice in America, but one that here has had socially devastating effects.  The most recent figures produced by ISTAT [Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, the Italian Agency for Social Statistics] suggest that those who fall under the rubric of “atypical” workers in Italy are now more than 6 million, that is, more than a third of the Italian working population!  Between 1998 and 2002 six million positions were created that in reality do not exist – they’re virtual, they predominantly oscillate between the no longer and the not yet.  And this doesn’t even consider the impact that Berlusconi’s reform of the labour market will have.

What happened was that the debate on a guaranteed income was born (or reborn if one considers that it has been discussed at least since the beginning of the nineties).  I believe this is a possible exit route, but let’s get to the heart of the question: how might this happen?  Who can force the Italian political establishment to protect six million precarious workers with a guaranteed income?  It might seem like a strange question, but this is exactly the matter at hand.  I don’t believe that the centri sociali have the capacity to pose this question to themselves, nor do they have the capacity to give themselves an answer that is executive, political.  It is not their history, nor is it their debate.  Even if I look at them with benevolence I can’t agree with those who would assign to them a “vanguard” role in the movement.  It is not like that, and from what I can see they would not go far.  In the 1990s the centri did other things, they worked on the battle over public opinion, on “campaigns” as a certain kind of imported reformism refers to them now - campaigns against GMO food or the WTO, or against prohibitionism, or even around immigration.  It is in these activities that they ought to be assessed. All interesting, but ones that do not even graze the social composition of the militants in the social centres, who are for the most part “atypical” workers.  This is the contradiction.  It has been discussed for years, but the reality of the social centres (assuming that one could offer a unitary image out of a universe that is so ample and one that is transforming itself so quickly), does not seen to be able to offer ways out of this contradiction, nor to be able to use it politically.  This is the passage of class struggle, in which the political use of contradiction was possible in the struggle against Capital, in the struggle for life.  It is clear that the new labouring subject does not perceive itself as “class”, cannot give itself stable representation like that of worker’s movement, banking instead on individualism and egotism, pre-political passions that are useful for the struggle for survival, essential to resisting the furious, inflexible, and unending aggression of the politics of the neoliberal labour market.  Is the struggle for life useful to the struggle against Capital? The former is able to avail itself of institutional tools for negotiation, mediation, but is it able to do the same for political clashes?  One thing is certain: new labour is fragmented, and the old (somewhat workerist) idea of locking it inside social centres (or the chambers of work and non-work, as was stated in a White Overalls manifesto from a distant 1995) in order to give it political representation is a demand that is somewhat ridiculous, fanciful, devoid of a meaningful foundation.  The political use of contradiction, the only way to struggle against capital, remains far off.  Yet it cannot be invoked by critical knowledge [sapere].

I can say that the social subject that animated the centri sociali, which at first was the protagonist of the “Pantera” movement between 1989 and 1990, has transformed itself.  I believe it is an interesting, albeit inconspicuous, subject of social transformation in general. Our political problem, in Italy, is the following: this subject refuses forms of political representation, confronts work and the problematics it offers on an individual level, and suffers the aggression of neoliberal policy without responding collectively, but by instead searching for other paths of resistance.  We are used to perceiving politics as demonstration, contestation, demand, conflict.  All of this seems to me to be distant from this subject, of which I myself am a part.  What happened to this social subject? What happened to all those people across Italy who occupied universities over ten years ago? They are cognitive workers, specific intellectuals, social researchers, cooperative workers.  Others, like us, work in Italian and European universities.  We are autonomous workers, as Sergio Bologna says, we are precarious and atypical workers, we live at the margins of the organization of the social reproduction of capital.  These workers live an ambivalence: they use social sciences with a view to counter-subjectivation but they work on research commissioned by large multinationals.  And it is this way too with those who work in universities, albeit with completely different labour conditions.  And what are the political capacities this subject possesses? This is a delicate point: From 1990 to 1995-96 there was the great wave of the social centre movement and many, without fault, described it in terms of continuity with the Pantera movement.  But then what happened?  In my opinion this subject revealed its lack of political preparation and its cultural insufficiency.  It is very difficult to offer representation for this subject.  The idea that some offered of Genoa as its first mass demonstration is interesting to me.  It’s thanks to Genoa that we can retrospectively put together an historical and genealogical reconstruction which goes from the Pantera and passes through the movements contesting the law.  It seems like a shift, and in fact we are here discussing the birth of new movements.  Only I propose a critique of a political order: As you will remember after Genoa everybody discussed a “return to the local” [ritorno al territorio].  I believe this is a useful expression, almost a Marxian citation, that of putting one’s feet back on the ground after such a spectacular orgy.  The only problem is this subject rarely attempted this working at the level of the local, even if this “local,” which really is the society as a whole, is the place where it is produced and reproduces itself.

What do I mean by this? Two things: political synthesis in Italy nowadays occurs outside the politics carried out by parties.  And that these syntheses, where they really occur, are rarely representative of a more general order of politics. This is an obvious contradiction and one that marks the political level of an entire generation. And it is not an easy one to resolve, one that is internal to the ambivalence discussed earlier where knowledges for the counter-acting and the counter-formation of political subjectivities alternative to capital’s order, where they exist, are used with a certain efficacy in the circuit of the reproduction of social capital itself.  In other words, this is a contradiction which this emerging movement hasn’t matured the necessary strength and lucidity to surpass yet.  Is this a deficiency in the project? In political culture? In an idea for the possible transformation of society?  All of this and more.  What is missing for me is an idea of politics, of a form of political action that is independent of forms of representation, an action in other words that faces the primary contradiction of the decades of our historical conjuncture head-on.

I don’t see any connection between these struggles.  Rather, I would like to know what struggles are engaged in by “anarchists,” or “feminists,” or “marxists,” or “autonomists”.  I don’t think that in a centro sociale one relates to others in this manner. It is rather personal acquaintances, group histories that furnish the criteria for an internal dialectic.  Nothing to do with the heroic claim to a political identity which does not exist.  In the centri that I knew there was never posed, to oneself or to others, the problem of political identity, if anything there was a claim to a generic “antagonism”. One of the effects of the new kind of social centres, those of the integrated society of the spectacle, which I personally see in strategic and political terms rather than moralistic ones, is that there has been a complete neutralization of political debate beyond that of physically protecting the space itself against the threat of an eventual violent eviction (as always occurs in these experiences).  The fetishistic attachment to the locale, frequently a miserable one, at the margins of civilization, taken from ancient industrial zones that have been in disuse for decades, which completely replaces the search for experimentation, each insertion into new movements (when these exist) that is not completely opportunistic. This is a grave error, a deeply grave one. My group, which during those years participated in the occupations of the university, of the social centre, always defined itself as operaista or post-operaista.  Most of us work in the university, in schools, in publishing houses, in communication, in other words we are subjects of the new knowledge economy, that spread in Italy at the beginning of the nineties, are the first generation of a kind of labour that in the US has been widespread for decades.  I believe that it is necessary to deepen our understanding of the relationship between forms of political organization and the transformations of capital, and the post-operaista grid, despite the blindness of some of its theoretical points and despite some of its inadequate and fanciful political proposals, can allow us to cobble together a debate that is up to this task.  I speak of our internal debate.  Our idea was born of the reflection in the individual biographies of Italian militants which today testify to the fact that in order to guarantee some kind of protection to the metropolitan underclass of the excluded, the precarious, the intermittent workers, in other words all that are external to the Welfare State and will never be a part of it, there is a need to expand the confines of political space which at one time was circumscribed by a centro sociale and condemned to dissolution.  The volatility, the ephemeral nature that this political subject represents is the theoretical drama we are living and to which we cannot offer a solution.   Many comrades exalt the mobility of the new labouring subject, its freedom to change territory, work, profession, and they associate this freedom with the demand for a guaranteed income so as to be able to live with a baseline economic foundation.  Interesting, but one cannot fail to recognize that there exists a contradiction, apart from the fact that the way in which the movement will win a battle over income, one that is more a perhaps ineffective battle over public opinion, remains to be demonstrated. […]