is a militant in the Hobo collective, is part of the editorial board of Commonware, and is an autonomous researcher. Among his various books and essays, he is author of The Production of Living Knowledge (Temple University Press, 2011), Futuro anteriore and Gli operaisti (DeriveApprodi, 2002 and 2005), Elogio della militanza and Il treno contro la Storia (DeriveApprodi, 2016 and 2017). This interview makes up the appendix to his most recent book, L’operaismo politico italiano: Genealogia, storia, metodo (DeriveApprodi, 2019).
The operaist inversion must be understood in light of the irreducible partiality of the viewpoint: first the class, then capital. Capital is not the subject of History, it is not that which does and undoes, that which determines development and the conditions for its own overcoming. Rather, history is non-teleological, and at its center is class struggle, its power of refusal and its autonomy.
In this article we focus on what stands between the logic of capital and the way the struggles ended. We analyze, that is, the very process of conflict, in order to understand its composition and its dynamics of subjectivation, to understand the genealogy of the present and the various possibilities which acted in it, and to think about wealth, limits, and unresolved problems.
We’re living in a revolutionary situation. We could reformulate the classical definition in the following terms: the ruling elites of the global capital cannot live as in the past; the workers, the precarious, the students, the poor, the living knowledge refuse to live as in the past. In the global crisis, the transnational struggles – from the North Africa insurrections to the acampadas in Spain or Syntagma Square, from the Chilean university movement to Occupy and the Québec uprising – are composed by the convergence of a downgrading middle class and a proletariat whose poverty is directly proportional to its productivity. In this context, the university is a key site.
Viewpoint Magazine