It was in the 1960s that I began to ask myself a number of questions on the paths leading to socialism, and about existing socialism. I reflected not only on what the revolution in Morocco might be, but also on what socialism could be across the world.
The citizenist world is a homogeneous world, populated by individuals who look very much like those of the neoclassical economists: we picture them going to voice their political preferences during referenda just like the economists picture consumers going to the market to voice their preferences, without taking into account the power relations in which they are caught up, or the social antagonisms which shape them.
Lenin’s analysis forces us to consider immigration – the living and working conditions of immigrant workers – starting from the theory of imperialism, outside of which the contemporary forms of immigration remain unintelligible. The concrete knowledge of the causes and effects of immigration is, reciprocally, a guiding thread towards an understanding of imperialism.
If the figure of the worker can no longer be deduced from the forms of collective consciousness of a group (workers’ consciousness) otherwise objectively constituted – the working class – then it is necessary to build a new dispositif of investigation and analysis of the intellectual field of workers.
It was necessary to put in place a practice, capable of determining displacement and at least of alluding to an “offensive” move, beyond the necessarily defensive character of the resistance – why not buy a ship, put it at sea?
The sphere of social reproduction will be central not simply to defining schisms within the movement, but to defining the horizons of the struggle and the multiplication, both possible and preferable, of its sites. The battlefield of social reproduction is one on which we can move beyond the triptych: prices of petrol, buying power, and tax revolt.
I arrived in Turin with my parents in September of ‘68. It was the dawn of what would later become the workers’ ’69: the great absence – as I will argue – in the commemorations of these years, squeezed between the twentieth anniversary of the student struggles and the bicentenary of the French Revolution.
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