What Are Militants?

Our time is the time of militants. -Danilo Montoldi¹ The truth of theory lies in commitment.  -Raniero Panzieri² 

Members of a self-defined anti-capitalist movement’s ceto politico or "political stratum" are recruited from a variety of social backgrounds, play a range of roles, and are designated in different ways.³ While the size and weight of this stratum have fluctuated with the vagaries of conflict within capitalist social relations, its generation and reproduction has nonetheless been intrinsic to those very social relations. In the period under consideration here, "militant" was the most common term used to denote an individual member of the Italian left’s ceto politico, although "activist" and "cadre" were also used: sometimes as synonyms, other times not.⁴ Amongst the accoutrements associated with their role, the membership card of an organization typically held considerable importance.⁵ Even in its absence, what bound together the components of this stratum from the subjective point of view was a vocation, a calling: "making of politics a life choice."⁶ As Negri put it,                   

It is difficult to convey what life as a militant meant not only for twenty-year-old workers and students but also for a man of thirty, thirty-five. Not only did it demand a total commitment in terms of time, a risky and exciting adventure, it also demanded an effort of self-transformation, in terms of rationality, affect, theory and politics. There was the work of agitation: understanding what had transpired, translating it into common language, disseminating judgement on the events, and all this in a continuum of news and testimonies and group reflection, receiving and bringing back knowledge and decisions.⁷

Montaldi once wrote of those militants he interviewed in the 1960s that they “often see politics as ‘something dirty’,” while adding that “for all [of them], politics is something that requires commitment as a group as well as an individual.”⁸ This shared undertaking was to be instantiated by “organizing the collective capacity to act” lying latent within the broader movement.⁹ The quest to identify such potentiality, searching for “the grand in the minute” that might gesture towards a shared project able to spring forth from within – yet also reach beyond – the here-and-now, meant that militants were typically “somewhat ‘outside’, outside the daily behavior of others, and often ‘set apart’ [un isolato].”¹⁰ In the words of Augusto Illuminati, “for the revolutionary, the present is charged with the future,” while for Gigi Roggero, revolutionaries “act within and against history; they do not follow the spirit of the times, but rather assault it.”¹¹ 

What has frequently divided militants, both between and within their rival groupings, are disagreements as to how that task of “organizing the collective capacity to act” might best be realised. At the same time, according to Montaldi, seeing as these individuals “are a part of the class that is disposed towards organizing the whole,” it followed that even in the absence of shared organizational identities such militants “represent ‘the party’ within the class.”¹² All told, the relation between class, movement and militants has always been a complex one: in the words of the Askatasuna Social Centre in Turin, 

Militants form themselves in movements, and movements form and select militants. This is a spiral process that is not given once and for always, but one that must be continually cultivated, nourished and strengthened.¹³        

As Gerd-Rainer Horn has made clear, this reciprocity between militants and movements was never so acute, nor the level of engagement so intense, as during the decade or so that followed the (global) events of 1968.¹⁴ This was true above all for Italy where, as Negri has indicated, a distinctive feature of the local radical ceto politico in this period lay in its ability to reproduce itself in a sustained and extended manner:

[T]he absolutely exceptional thing, above all in comparison to other European movements, is continuity, and this can be explained only if we address that period of formation. The continuity, this movement that produces a ’68 that lasts for ten years, can arise only because there is already a wealth of cadre, a social consistency in the movement that permits reproduction. There is a political subject that reproduces itself and has the capacity to do so, and capacity means a whole bundle of things. This isn’t a movement that arises on the basis of four intelligent people, it’s a movement that has the capacity to reproduce itself in terms of money, the production of propaganda materials, of formation and information, from leaflets to radio, therefore.¹⁵

To the extent that a movement generates its own institutions, the ceto politico provides the milieu from which their staff can be drawn. In movements that do not (or no longer) seek to overturn the dominant social relations, the ceto politico typically subordinates its organizing role to that of representing particular interests, whether within the formal political arena or on the industrial front or through the various special interest groups that frequently populate the public sphere. In this context, competition over access to resources predicated upon that representative function – what Weber once termed living ‘off’ politics as opposed to living ‘for’ politics – can be every bit as fierce as any ideological tussle.¹⁶ In movements that on the contrary aim to contest the constituted order, the ceto politico’s role is as indispensable as it is laden with ambiguity:

[I]n considering the movement, we can’t forget that it is also a specific social layer, a ceto politico (to use that horrible term) that posits itself as the relatively stable expression of social antagonism, as its memory, as the bearer of social values expressed by class behaviors. Although the movement, in this second sense, is something different from the class movement proper, one can’t understand the latter by overlooking the former. The political practices, the analytical and organizational instruments of the movement’s ceto politico play a notable role in the general evolution of struggles.

The movement’s ceto politico oscillates between its various roles, therefore, in a manner that is hard to unravel. It can pose itself simultaneously or alternatively as a minority agent for class self-organization, or as a simple appendage to traditional organizations and rules; as a movement of self-awareness, or as the bureaucratic and authoritarian direction of struggles.¹⁷ 

When, as would be the case in the era of ‘realized socialism’, a party’s rise to power proves to be at the expense of class autonomy, the collective body of militants will also be destroyed in the process: either literally, through the purges inherent to such regimes, or else by its mutation into something alien, as one component of a new dominant class. For as Franco Milanesi has argued forcefully, 

practical work stops at the point where power begins...the militant can stay in a party and make it an instrument of force and transformation, but there is no longer a place for him or her in a party that has become a state.¹⁸

The reality that members of an anti-capitalist movement’s ceto politico may have quite disparate social origins has inspired a number of lively, even divisive debates over the last century or so.¹⁹ Throughout all the twists and turns of those polemics, a constant reference point has remained the strategic importance of individuals who have become militants not only due to some sense of vocation, but also as a result of their subjective experiences as proletarians. A key instance in the mid-1960s of this ceto operaio, as some Italian revolutionaries would later call this social layer within the working class, was the phenomenon that Alquati then termed ‘factory communists.’ These were cadres who continued to organize workplace struggles, even as many of them chose to abandon the Partito Comunista Italiano (pci).²⁰ Indeed, the ceto operaio within Italy’s workplaces would be massively extended as a consequence of the heightened class conflict that marked the end of the decade – leading, as Alberto Magnaghi once noted, to

The construction in three years, from ’67 to ’69, of a workers’ ceto politico that went from a few old-timers in the factory commissions to around one hundred thousand worker cadres, able throughout Italy to re-govern a production cycle and to speak of political programs.²¹

Anticipating this “new muster of the Italian working class’ revolutionary militants” in the pages of Classe Operaia, Alquati had argued in 1965 that recent struggles had seen ‘an important modification in the figure of the working class militant’:

It is important to address this new figure of the militant, clarifying its ambiguities, its transitory characteristics, its dangers, but also the wholly positive function in the current situation of the new militants. These must be considered as part of the working class, seeing as: they are definable precisely on the basis of actions that unfold within workers’ struggles; they already express, at a potentially subjective level, the action of creation, connection and discovery of the mechanisms of the unification and selection of movements of workers’ struggle. Therefore the content of this new figure of the militant is not merely ‘organizational’: it entails a capacity that expresses itself in relation to workers’ struggle.. these militants are an unknown and uncontrollable force. If they remain isolated, they will ebb [rifluiscono], and it will be a long time before the tide turns again. If organized, they can provide the first step towards a new leap in the political struggle.²² 

Throughout the history of twentieth-century anti-capitalist movements, the relationship between those militants formed directly within clashes in the factory or community and the radical ceto politico as a whole has proved a difficult and even vexing one. Writing in the 1990s, Alquati insists that the term ‘militants’ not be confused with, for example, ‘the members of the sects and of the historic organizations as such’. Instead, they should be defined by what they ‘did and how they operated, rather than by their location’, and so be best understood as ‘the nerve center of so-called subjective class forces’.²³ Addressing the question from a different angle, Negri has pointed out that Augusto Finzi and others amongst the first generation of autonomist industry militants had been guided in their political engagement by an assessment of their immediate circumstances within a given class composition, rather than in response to the direction of some external political organization:                   

Whereas in the parties or groups a cadre was a militant who maintained contact with the party structure and officiated the interpretation of the political line in the name of the center, in Autonomia a cadre was normally a worker who, along with their workmates [compagni], expressed the political line from below, from within the workplace.²⁴

Things would become more complex as time went on, and new groupings sprang up within Autonomia that did indeed, in certain important ways, more resemble the traditional political sects of the far left.²⁵ What happened in such circumstances when the goals and aspirations of the ceto operaio threatened to diverge from those of the ceto politico as a whole?²⁶ In the specific case of Italy in the late 1970s, questions like this would lead Sergio Bologna to warn that the “workerist political class” within Autonomia Operaia had to bear responsibility for “reproducing leadership elites that are elites of revolutionary bourgeois, of having suffocated — like their illustrious predecessors — the working class direction of organization and the movement.”²⁷ A few years later, Bologna would take this line of argument still further, noting the post-1968 “formation — through the struggles in the universities — of a ceto politico that identified with its own function of revolutionary vanguard and aspired, according to a model oft-repeated in history, to assume the command, the political direction of the class movements,” before wondering whether “the failure of that ceto politico must be considered a stroke of luck or a misfortune for the Italian working class, the loss of a precious social ally or the eclipse of a dangerous new boss.”²⁸

[In t]he constitution and development of the workerist component of this ceto politico, and its encounter with the ceto operaio of the 1960s and 1970s — a process that was further entangled, like all radical currents at the time, with a wider mood of social unrest and revolt dominated by youth²⁹ — ...documents would once again play an indispensable role. Briefly examining a piece of early 1980s satire may prove useful. A snapshot of the ‘Trontian amongst the thorns,’ published in the mainstream weekly L’Espresso as a sidebar to a feature article on Mario Tronti, provides one outline of the sundry ways in which a workerist political militant might seek to influence the world around him.³⁰ Smitten with Tronti’s essays back in his teenage years, this individual had subsequently been inspired to collect, “not without some effort, the complete runs of Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, which he studied with religious application.” Soon he could be heard irritating other members of his Communist youth cell through a series of “crazed interventions, all ‘wages’ and ‘mass worker,’ paralyzing them every so often with a ‘political class composition’ that he casts off as if it was nothing.” Somewhat diffident before the student movement of the late 1960s, he found himself re-energized by the Hot Autumn of 1969, during which “he cyclostyled all 300 pages of Operai e capitale and distributed them, at a militant price, outside the university entrance.”³¹ Atonement for a brief interlude in Potere Operaio was granted after “a letter of penitence and abjuration” secured his readmission to the PCI, where he continued to circulate Tronti’s pronouncements in cyclostyled form: everything from the pamphlet Autonomia del politico, up to and including “Mario’s conversations.” At last count, “he is studying the seventeenth century. If he is still cyclostyling, now it is ‘Mario’s’ lessons at the University of Siena. He awaits the latest essays with trepidation. His future is uncertain.”

The humor may be laid on rather thickly, but none of that obscures the absolutely central place of documents for this portrait of one workerist’s political engagement and identity. More generally, we can note that with three daily newspapers, more than a dozen publishing houses, and hundreds of periodicals both regular and irregular to draw upon, members of the ceto politico within Italy’s far left relied heavily upon the printed word in their efforts to communicate amongst themselves and with others.³² To quote a former leader of Avanguardia Operaia,               

It was a period not only of radicalization leftwards, but also the formation of tens of thousands of political and movement cadres. It was probably one of the happiest times for the Italian left as a whole: that type of cadres, of militants, was the best that the Italian left had produced (even compared to other moments in history), in terms of quality, collective sense of participation, democratic ethos [democratismo] and civility in relations — all things that were then being extinguished within the PCI... There was a great quantity then of newspapers big and small, reviews, pamphlets, books: a great quantity of publishing firms small, medium and big – including some really important ones: think of Feltrinelli, which produced loads of materials. There was just an embarrassment of choices. Bear in mind that the organizations of the New Left were strongly militant, comrades were active in terms of political action, party meetings, propaganda initiatives; they participated in political-theoretical education; they bought the party publication; if they read it, they discussed it, and naturally they also bought other things: books, newspapers. They didn’t just read things from their own party, so we can say that their knowledge was rather broad. They read everything, within reason.³³ 

It is on the nature of these things that were created and read by the ceto politico that [the present book is focused.] 

Excerpted with permission from Steve Wright, The Weight of the Printed Word - Text, Context, and Militancy in Operaismo, out now in Brill’s "Historical Materialism" series.

Images: Tano D'Amico