In Italy, militancy is mainly concentrated in large university cities, which, however, demographically, socially and culturally are minoritarian. Some collectives are beginning to ask how to intervene within different contexts, have you wondered what might be useful paths in this regard? Or should we hope for an autonomous development of militancy in these contexts?
This condition is common not just in Italy but across many countries. At the same time, we also have a tendency to read this problem in registers drawn from the past, treating it much the same way that the New Left did sixty or so years ago. But a lot of things have also changed in that time. For example, you say that large university cities are the minority and, while I understand what you mean, the largest universities are generally in the largest cities, and today they are also often among the largest employers in those cities. And, compared to fifty years ago, many of these jobs are low-wage, high-demand positions. I’m not sure what the conditions of work are in Italy, but in the US, for example, the bulk of university classes today are taught by adjuncts or grad students being paid less than your average factory worker. Meanwhile, universities today are vast real estate schemes that help to anchor local property markets. They also serve as sites of advanced R&D for military-industrial interests. If a militant strike among academic workers shuts down the premiere research university in a given city, this will therefore have a substantial economic impact. Moreover, as higher education has generalized across the population, more students today come from lower-class backgrounds. More are therefore working low-wage jobs outside the university, commuting back to working-class neighborhoods, and of course suffering under immense debt. So these are, in every way, major sites of class conflict in and of themselves. We have to abandon that old idea from the New Left that these are “bourgeois” strata or even “professionals” that somehow aren’t part of the larger proletarian class and therefore need to enter into that class from outside. In all but the most elite institutions, that simply is no longer true.
But there is always a problem of insularity, whether you’re talking about the university versus society, different industrial sectors, or even different occupations within the same sector. Most class organizing emerges first in the form of specific subsistence struggles, which focus on the immediate terms of survival: how much are you getting paid, how much does your rent cost, is your job likely to kill you, are the police likely to kill you, etc. But these issues are also often contradictory, since they are simultaneously specific (i.e., this group of workers making specific wage demands relative to this workplace) and also general, resonating with larger segments of the class (i.e., everyone’s wages are too low). On top of this, struggles tend to trigger larger conflicts that then take on added meanings and gain their own momentum, becoming important expressions of class conflict in and of themselves—and thereby completely exceeding their initial subsistence concerns. We see these contradictions then play out in tactical tensions...
There are plenty of historical examples of how this has been done in the past. But it’s a fundamentally practical question, which means that it’s very sensitive to the local problems you are facing. You can’t just transplant these models from history into the present because they were inseparable from their environment. If you try, you end up with a dead, empty husk: the various sects that think of themselves as “parties” and “unions” today, for example. Meanwhile, basic structural shifts in employment and geodemographics have obviously changed the coordinates such that it no longer makes sense to try to build a peasant army today, for example, even if the historic experience of revolutionary organizing among peasants still offers useful lessons. So, we really have to respond to your core question by breaking it down and sharpening it into a series of more pointed ones: what exactly are these collectives who hope to escape the university trying to do, and where are they attempting to go? Similarly, what do they conceive of as “militancy” and how is it measured? And, on top of this, we’d then need to understand more of the specific social conditions involved.
Obviously, it helps to build breadth beyond one’s immediate surroundings. But there’s also a tendency to disregard our own experiences of class and the various subsistence struggles that we face day-to-day, imagining that the “real” struggle is located elsewhere, among some special demographic that is somehow closer to a pure proletarian condition. People then attempt to self-flagellate, denying their own existence and instead seeking out this “pure” experience of class or playacting at a more fanciful image of “militancy.” In reality, we all experience different aspects of proletarian existence. We can fight against it from multiple positions, so long as, in the process, we are also exceeding those positions...
And that’s because the whole “marketplace of ideas” model where we go and “communicate” our politics and try to get people to agree with us is ass-backwards. This is the problem with all those people who think the failure of the uprisings of the 2010s was that they chose to adhere to principles of “horizontalism” and “leaderlessness.” No one chose this, of course, and plenty of people were there arguing for the opposite—and, in fact, the “worker’s party” was tried in Greece (SYRIZA), in Spain (Podemos), in the US (Sanders), and in the UK (Corbyn), and it systematically failed as well, for remarkably similar reasons. Ultimately, the point is that political ideas aren’t adopted through skillful argumentation. They’re inscribed into us in our physical life. You can argue all day with someone that the police aren’t “part of the 99%” and no matter how reasonable you are, how much evidence you offer, they will still not believe you. But if they go out and get bonked on the head just once by a police baton, they are suddenly a convert. It is, quite literally, a political baptism—with all the religious shock that this entails. Ideas don’t enter the mind through the ears, they enter through open wounds, through joints burning after endless shifts of dead-end jobs, through feet blistered by long days on the picket line, through hands torn open by some machine, arms coated in grease scars, the lining of lungs filled with teargas. One consequence of this is that, insofar as we “communicate” our political ideas, we do so largely through action in the moment of the revolt.
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