For complicated reasons, rooted in the extraordinary stresses of the 1940s and late 1930s, crisis-Marxism has also infected Trotskyism. We have to get rid of that infection in order to get rid of the bureaucratic conception of the revolutionary party that goes along with crisis-Marxism, and to reinstate an idea of the revolutionary party as helping to develop the subversive logic of workers' struggles by informing them with the systematised memory of past struggles.
In the 1960s the autonomists' approach arose from dissatisfaction with a bureaucratised Italian labour movement. Many of the core activists of that movement had been formed in the Resistance of the 1940s. The twenty-year-old radicals of the 1940s were now 40 years old, and had been trained in disappointment for 15 years or more. The autonomists looked "beneath" them to the young workers in the huge new factories in northern Italy.
A similar attention to "murmuring among the proletariat" inaudible or incomprehensible to older trade unionists is advisable today. In Britain 57% of trade unionists are over 40 years old (Labour Market Trends, July 2002, p.349). Among trade union reps and activists the proportion over 40 must be even higher.
The trade unionist who is 45 today was 20 when Thatcher took office in 1979 and trade-union membership started declining from its peak; 26 when the miners were defeated in 1985. He or she was attracted to trade unionism by the strong, confident trade-union movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but has since been trained in resisting decline, limiting damage, and dealing with individual grievances, rather than collective self-liberation.
A new radical generation is emerging, slowly and piecemeal. When it will start to shake the factories and offices, we do not know. Its dynamics will not be the same as those of the young workers in the huge new factories of northern Italy in 1968, who were almost all men, mostly from peasant families in southern Italy; nor the same as those of the older trade unionists "above" it. We will need to look closely and sensitively to what the autonomists (adapting Marx's concept "composition of capital") call the "class composition".
In some autonomist writing, however, the idea of workers' initiatives shaping capitalist development is stretched so far that it buries any close attention to class composition and the development of struggle beneath general enthusiasm for all "autonomous" rebellion.