As a counterpoint to this historical amnesia, conformism, and seclusion, Gambino offers an important corrective: a serious consideration of working conditions irreducibly requires workers themselves, who possess the capacity to modify this terrain (or irrevocably alter it), as much as they are shaped or subordinated by it.
What even the repression in Italy could not cancel was how seriously the so-called “workerists” took the whole dimension of human activity. That was an aspect of what made the extraparliamentary left in Italy different. It already contained, at least in embryo, the claims about who has produced what, who commands what, and who destroys what.
What would it mean to implement a Green New Deal? The question is not, what balance of forces would we need (as though we were playing some kind of board game). Not, what policies would we need – we already have truck-loads of plans and proposals. But what would the result of a Green New Deal be?
As we have seen written on the walls these days, “they will never again have the comfort of our silence,” because we are not willing to back to occupying that place of private silence, of silent submission. In that sense the broken glass, of real estate or the metrobus, etc. do not have, in any way, the same value as our lives. The meaning that we are putting up for debate here is the value of life.
Not even a year into the Bolsonaro experience, it is still early to try to map the country’s varied fronts of resistance. But what follows provides at least some initial elements, touching on education, political scandal, the labor movement, feminist and black liberation fronts, state repression, tactical and strategic debates on the Left, the overweening legacy of the PT, and the meaning of fires in the Amazon.
A lot of people involved in the different CUTE committees were involved in the 2012 student strike and from that experience we drew some critiques that led to new forms of organizing in the student movement. One of them was the critique of centralization that led to creating autonomous committees, which are the CUTE. One of the principles that led to this movement is that of political autonomy, to try to achieve this as much as we can.
There has not been a counter-revolution, there has been a process of advance for the Right, but with popular resistance. And it’s interesting that there is a new generation. Those who struggle now have processed the experience of the progressive cycle. We will see how they translate this politically, we don’t know. But the generation that produced the earlier cycle did it without experience, arising out of pure neoliberalism. Now, the new generation is leading this process.
The feminist movement, especially as connected to popular feminism and popular economies, thus shows that we cannot delegate to capital – through the tool of the wage – recognition of who are workers. That is why we say, “All Women Are Workers” (#TrabajadorasSomosTodas). Now, that statement does not operate as a blanket that covers up and homogenizes an abstract class identity, but rather it functions because it reveals the multiplicity of what labor means from a feminist point of view, with all of its hierarchies and all of its struggles.
“At every node in this global chain, the technical and the political are intimately entangled. Declaring by fiat that decarbonization is unlikely or impossible amounts to an avoidance of the complex, historic, world-making tasks ahead of us.”
The incoherence, heterogeneity, non-contemporaneity, contradictoriness and “bizarre” historical sedimentation that Gramsci once discerned in the phenomena of subaltern folklore is now spread across the social field, and pathological disorganization and disorientation is by no means the sad monopoly of the dominated.
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