A Thousand Little Machines

This is the introduction to A Thousand Little Machines: A/traverso and the Movement of ’77, the first book published by Agit Press. The book contains the recollections of the autonomist militant, philosopher, and media theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi on autonomia and the tumultuous events of ’77, told through the pages of A/traverso, the Bolognese movement sheet he produced with others between 1975 and 1981.

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In January 2023 we paid a visit to our friend, the autonomist militant and philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi at his home in Bologna. His flat, which he shares with his partner, Claudia, is testament to more than six decades of creative and intellectual endeavor; it is part studio, part laboratory, and part archive, furnished with a collection of Franco’s own paintings and striking visual experiments. A collage by his friend, the poet and militant Nanni Balestrini, occupies a central wall space, overlooking newspaper cuttings, magazines, journals, books, and correspondence that demonstrate the couple’s shared commitment to radical inquiry and militant possibility.

Over coffee we swapped stories and discussed recent political developments, before poring over the final designs for a book—Disertate—that Franco had recently completed, the thesis of which, we were told, is an extension of the logic underpinning the great proletarian refusal of work that had once found an organized expression in—and against—the technical and social composition of the Italian working class.1 Nowadays, Franco suggested, new forms of refusal are emerging that indicate desertions from the world as it is currently ordered—new movements arising in response to global transformations in social and technical composition that accompanied the neoliberal assault, the arrival of an integrated world capitalism, and the digital information economy.

However, these new refusals are also responses to a set of interrelated crises for which there appear to be no easy or off-the-shelf solutions. From coordinated birth strikes in South Korea against femicide and patriarchy, to the networked withdrawal of China’s youth from the labor process entirely (in the form of the tang ping, or “lie down,” movement), modes of desertion are proliferating everywhere—and are as much a symptom of our present malaise as they may be tentative propositions. Coinciding with a wave of youth-led strikes for climate justice, the Black Lives Matter movement, and mobilizations against the ongoing genocide in Palestine, these new formations point toward a realignment predicated on a refusal of capitalism’s inherent drive toward annihilation, and in favor of new forms of radical coexistence. Everywhere people long to desert the world as it is currently constituted, but how such an exodus could be coordinated remains unwritten.

As we spoke, it was noted that in the anglophone world, there is a deficit of knowledge relating to the ideas that underscored Italy’s historic autonomia (autonomy, or “self-ruled”) movement, characterized as this was by a mass refusal of work among Italy’s youth, and novel experiments with ways of living and communicating that fell outside those proposed by capitalist society, the traditional left, and its associated trade unions. Despite a scarcity of English-language material pertaining to this moment, we are pleased to note the recent translation of The Golden Horde (2023) by Richard Braude, which now joins Robert Lumley’s States of Emergency (1990), Sergio Bologna’s Tribe of Moles (1997), and Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven (2017) as the primary English-language resources that have so far made it to print. For a more thorough overview of the political tendencies constituting autonomia, we direct readers toward these texts. We are also happy to note a forthcoming book by Steve Wright and Jacopo Galimberti addressing autonomia and the movement of ’77, which we are certain will do much to redress this lacuna.

In response to this observation, Franco gifted us a USB stick containing his writing related to autonomia and the movement of ’77, alongside digitized copies of A/traverso, the militant “movement sheet” he and others produced between 1975 and 1981. These texts, which were written at the time and in subsequent decades, contain Franco’s thoughts, observations, and recollections on a movement powered by experiments in communication, in particular the printed word. Despite his insistence that he is not a historian (and nor, it should be said, are we), and neither was he interested in hagiography or “historical reenactment” as he saw it, we were presented with these texts to translate and reproduce as we saw fit.

What we present in A Thousand Little Machines is a partial account of autonomia and the movement of ’77 told through the production of A/traverso and other movement sheets, which we hope will do much to capture the spirit of the creative insurgency that shook Italian society at the close of the seventies. It is hoped that the presentation of these essays, alongside archival material, will sharpen comprehension of the diverse coordinates that constituted autonomia’s nexus, as much as they may reopen questions regarding the utility of print production for militants today. Several of the essays gifted to us have already been published in various Italian outlets, and some rough translations may have made their way into the anglo blogosphere. However, in homage to the cut-and-paste ethos of A/traverso, these original essays have been carved up and remixed to produce a narrative of Franco’s experiences of ’77. That is, in as much as one narrative could ever explain a broad multi-tendency movement, and in recognition that history can never be reduced to the recollections of one individual.

As we were travelling in Bologna with comrades from Notes from Below—a contemporary English-language journal dedicated to worker writing and workplace inquiry—a conversation was sparked as to how militants in Britain, influenced by operaismo (workerism), should relate to the movement of autonomia that was seen to follow it. It was decided we would republish these texts in order to tease at the continuities, distinctions, and chasms that existed between operaismo and autonomia.

As noted by Patrick Cuninghame, “autonomia” is a somewhat ambiguous label, referring as it does to two interconnected yet somewhat distinct phenomena:

On the one hand, Autonomia Operaia (AO, Workers’ Autonomy, also known as Autonomia Organizzata, Organised Autonomy), as the name implies, was a direct descendent of the operaist tradition, stemming from the seminal Quaderni Rossi (QR, Red Notebooks) journal of the early 1960s … Autonomia Operaia emerged as a less structured network of local factory and social collectives in the mid-1970s … Conversely and confusingly, autonomia also refers to “diffused” or “creative” autonomia, the “autonomy of the social” represented by the mass of mainly countercultural youth, students, unemployed and semi-employed young people, radical feminists, gay men and lesbians, street artists and those disaffected former members of the New Left “groups” who were increasingly critical of dogmatic Marxism, known as “cani sciolti” (stray dogs).2

As such, a specific origin for autonomia is hard to place, let alone attribute to one group. Nonetheless, it is generally accepted that the movement (in its broadest sense) emerged during the early 1970s among a burgeoning substrata of Italian youth, informed by the aesthetics and concerns of the hippy counterculture, a growing rejection of workplace discipline, the sensibilities of feminist, anti-colonial, and gay liberation movements, a revitalized anti-fascism, new experiments with collective living, and the recent experiences of joint student-worker organizing at the close of the sixties.

In particular, 1969’s “Hot Autumn” bore witness to an intensification of open class conflict across Italian society. It started in student protests and occupations on university campuses, and then spilled over (with the help of joint student-worker committees) into the North’s large factory districts. Driven in part by young workers and internal migrants from Italy’s South, who no longer had any attachment to the authority the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) and its associated trade unions held over the factories, this new “autonomous” wave of worker-led action levelled a host of demands, starting with calls for better pay and conditions, and growing to include full workers’ control.

Many of these demands stood in stark contrast to the strategy of the PCI, which was still effectively committed to a project of national economic revitalization and a slow social-democratic march through the institutions. Action in the factories took many forms, ranging from wildcat strikes, internal factory demonstrations, “checkerboard strikes”—where different shifts or sections took turns walking out or slowing down—and in some cases industrial sabotage and physical intimidation. Demonstrations in support of these struggles brought tens of thousands into the streets, where wider political connections would be made, seeing the movement’s demands expand to include a host of concerns external to the factory, best summed up in the slogan “Vogliamo tutto” (We want everything) that was taken up everywhere.

While the revolts of the Hot Autumn would escape the confines of the factory floor, subsequent struggles inside the factories would be met by the PCI in a strategy aimed squarely at neutralizing the new militancy of the workers, facilitated by the Party’s embedded control of both the factory committees and the trade unions. As such, the PCI engaged in subsequent waves of worker action, even adopting the new tactics of the movement, while simultaneously rejecting its outward political militancy. The accommodation of militant tactics into the PCI’s repertoire hollowed out the capacity of the new worker-student alliance to dictate the political direction and demands of these struggles. Combined with a wave of restructuring across much of the North’s industrial factories, this cycle of struggle would be brought to a close by the beginning of the 1970s.

If the factories of Northern Italy had provided the locus around which an antagonistic worker militancy had erupted at the close of the sixties (in which operaismo gained an empirical and organizational influence), their restructuring at the beginning of the seventies created a new generation of workers with an intermittent and precarious relationship to work. The residual infrastructure established by militants to support struggles in society, coinciding with the recent factory revolts, would prove particularly invaluable, providing spaces in which the new movement would begin to meet and congregate, in particular the social centers belonging to the likes of Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle).

The organizational forms and theoretical innovations that flourished during the Hot Autumn would prove instructive for autonomia’s subsequent development, establishing methods of decision-making and common languages, orienting responses, and identifying new terrains of struggle. In particular, Italy’s student movement played a pivotal role in laying the groundwork for what was to come. Firstly, through the introduction of new organizational structures, specifically the “movement-wide assemblies”—large democratic forums that decided, organized, and planned action. Their introduction would go some way toward undermine the traditional bodies of student politics, replacing their authoritarian and vertical structures (ostensibly mirroring the structures found in the trade-union movement) with a diffused and horizontal collectivity open to students, workers, and other marginalized sectors of society.

Secondly, the theoretical insights and analysis of operaismo were adopted, in particular its insistence on the “workers’ point of view” and class-compositional frameworks. Utilizing these concepts in the influential Pisan Thesis (1967), students upended the traditional understanding of the role of the university in society, reformulating it as “the site of production of qualified labor,” which recast students as labor power in the process of its qualification.3 The growing influence of these perspectives across the student movement reorientated its activity away from educational institutions and toward discussions of worker-student unity, which became the main locus of its activity in the buildup to the events of ’69.4

As such, and despite operaismo’s rather minoritarian position, its influence cannot be understated. In the months following the Hot Autumn, and in recognition of a growing wave of struggles that fell outside of the confines of the factory (most notably a wave of rent strikes and housing occupations), the recently established operaist group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power), with the support of militants within the student movement, took up the popular slogan “From the factory to society,” alongside new demands for a flat-rate “social wage” that quickly gained currency among shop floor militants and in wider society. While workers had wrestled to separate their wages from production in struggles over the introduction of piece work rates in the early sixties, the new demand for a guaranteed social wage seemed to sum up a strategy aimed squarely at separating wages from labor itself, thus “asserting the reproduction of proletarian need over the requirements of capital.”5

This demand heralded a reorientation for many militants, who now focused their attention on the mass of the proletariat, replacing the previously held prioritization of factory workers. This would see operaismo develop two distinct camps: the “factory-ists”—those who would continue to prioritize workers at the point of production—and those now oriented towards the struggles of the worker in wider society. By the early seventies the “refusal of work,” evident in the mass absenteeism of young workers who ostensibly refused to accept the discipline of a life inside the factory, would become incorporated into the cultural and theoretical output of the movement more broadly. This new youth lifestyle emerged in the context of

ten years of class struggle. The point of arrival for the student struggle that began in ‘68 and for the workers struggle of ’69. It is a moment at which all the fundamental contradictions accumulate and explode, provoking a profound crisis for State control over society, for party control over the masses of youth.6

The lifestyles attached to the new movement were promoted in magazines like Re Nudo (a popular countercultural magazine with a class-struggle perspective), helping to cement the coordinates around which the new “Proletarian Youth Circles” would establish their programs, based on “the right to luxury,” self-defense against fascist threats, and the need to be together and “hang out.”7

As the decade progressed, new youth cultures would also enter into the mix, compounding the generation gap seen to exist between old party comrades and their children. This dynamic was perhaps best exemplified in the behavior and attitudes of the Metropolitan Indians who, informed by a makeshift anarchism and greatly indebted to the aesthetics of the hippy counterculture, appropriated the face paint and headdress associated with North America’s Plains Indians, which they wore at demonstrations, street happenings and festivals. Their primary activity was squatting premises in order to create the “free space” for the new youth movement to perform music, host artistic events, and debate politics. The Metropolitan Indians were also notable for their championing of free love, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and commune living, which further challenged the so-called “bourgeois” norms of their parents.

Informed by an indifference to party politics and by the tactics and militancy of organized student-worker action, this growing counterculture would begin to engage in a program of activity aimed at the immediate satisfaction of its needs, positing prefigurative glimpses of a society external to capitalism’s dominion. Addressing rising youth unemployment and prohibitive rents, a huge expansion of squatting was undertaken, providing space for new modes of social organization. Actions such as auto-reduction (mass looting, the refusal to pay market price for goods and services) were justified as the immediate seizure of use values unmediated by capitalist exchange. For many autonomists, these bold experiments were emblematic of an unmediated and insurgent communism, reflected in the Marx of the German Ideology: “Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premise.”8

If operaismo had grown out of an apparent crisis of strategy and direction within the PCI and the Partito Socialista Italiano, those constituting autonomia’s broad social movement would see their numbers expand when several operaisti groups formally dissolved—an outcome of their own crises in the early seventies, in particular their perceived inability to accommodate the concerns and critiques of the burgeoning feminist movement, and in recognition of the new and antagonistic subjectivities the movement contained. This influx of militants into the growing “diffused area of autonomia” would see the theoretical coordinates of operaismo become further inculcated into the counterculture’s discourse. The operaisti analyzed the movement with reference to their own logics, casting those within it as indistinct from the “socialized worker” put forward in the social-factory thesis, constituted as the movement was by a growing archipelago of intellectuals, workers, unemployed youth, and left-wing groups oriented toward a combative extension of self-managed class struggle. Incorporating the feminist “turn towards the personal,” autonomia would support struggles against the patriarchal family unit, heteronormativity, and other oppressive social dominations. This emphasis seemed to further distance the autonomists from a left whose priorities still seemed firmly attached to the factory-worker subject.

As the decade progressed, Italy witnessed an intensification and growth in self-organized struggle informed by these coordinates that would find its zenith in the events surrounding March ’77, when the student movement (and the youth movement more generally) signaled a decisive break with the productionist logics of the PCI. In the first essay in this book, “Two Memories of ’77,” Franco makes the case that the year heralded a radical break—a fin de siècle, or a point of caesura between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The neoliberal turn, the advent of global production, and the integration of information technology that the seventies would give rise to arguably catalyzed an erosion of the mass-worker subject that once provided the traditional base for Europe’s socialist parties. While many militants recognized these emerging trends, the legacy of 1917 cast a particularly long shadow over the political imagination of the revolutionary left, many of whom were unable to shake off the logics and organizational practices belonging to the past.

To break this perceived organizational and political impasse, autonomia’s creative wing would develop experiments in new ways of communicating its ideas and prophetic concerns. Free radio became an important anchor through which a diffused and deterritorialized collectivity would be coordinated, reporting on the disparate struggles of students, workers, and youth to provide a frame within which the movement’s different subjectivities could recognize moments of commonality. Most notable of these stations was Bologna’s Radio Alice, which adopted an “open mic” platform, encouraging listeners to participate in the creation of content through phone-ins and live discussions. This was a relatively novel development for Italian radio, which had until this point prioritized the uni-directional dissemination of information. These call-ins would furnish the movement with information regarding housing, happenings, and the movements of the police during demonstrations—most notably during the intense riots of February and March 1977.

The creative wing of autonomia was also composed of hundreds of movement sheets circulating throughout Italy in the seventies, acting as “little machines” to produce political subjectivity by reflecting and manufacturing the ideas of the movement they were produced for. These publications created a set of shared values, aesthetics, and languages among their diffused readerships. This book is a partial snapshot of autonomia told through the pages of A/traverso, one of many such movement sheets which would mark a stylistic and linguistic break with the printed material of more orthodox left groups in Italy. A/traverso would consciously incorporate ideas belonging to Dada and the early avant-garde, while also presenting “Mao-Dadaism” to signal their commitment to the radical potential of art and literature for the masses.9 Taking inspiration from the poetry and visual experiments of Mayakovsky and the cut-and-paste methods of William Burroughs, A/traverso would create new and experimental forms of communication while introducing concepts lifted directly from French post-structuralism into movement parlance—in particular ideas belonging to Michel Foucault and Felix Guatarri, whose influence would play a significant role in the development of Franco’s later thinking. Irony and subversion became A/traverso’s raison d’etre, deploying provocative jokes and imagery to destabilize the communicative flows of bourgeois society’s power and offering hyperbolic, bombastic, and satirical critiques that would help to compose movement discourse and action. The aesthetic and creative influences of A/traverso are explored further by Nick Thoburn in his interview with Franco, “The Transversal Publishing of A/traverso.”

Extending the metaphor of the “little machine” (a term we adapt from Deleuze and Guattari), we can see how movement sheets were constitutive of autonomia in another sense: their production and distribution are as fundamental to the history of the movement as their content. In an essay in the book entitled “The Ultimate Revolt,” Franco demonstrates how offset lithography underscored Italy’s radical print explosion during the seventies. Though offset had been used in the printing industry since the 1890s as a means to transfer photographic images into newspapers, by the 1950s the process had been expanded to also transfer text in a move that was seen to undermine the organized power of unionized printers trained on the then dominant letterpress. Prior to this, those wishing to produce a small run of newspapers were reliant on a typesetter to arrange their copy and images for them. Letterpress printing, which in Europe had been a mainstay of newspaper production for nearly two centuries, was a highly skilled profession, one that required a finely tuned mix of manual dexterity, physical endurance, and literacy. Typesetters—who were often printers too—would lay out the copy they received using tiny metal stamps, each carrying a letter of the alphabet, that would be arranged backwards inside frames (known as a base), producing the texts’ negative image. Ink would then be laid over bases, before being pressed onto paper to create a final positive image. As such, militants required access to a sympathetic typesetter to lay out their published materials for them, and the process—by virtue of the skill involved—was often costly and aesthetically restrictive. This is not to say there is not a tradition of revolutionary and cooperative printing using letterpress. For a thorough overview of these histories, see Kathy E. Ferguson’s Letterpress Revolution (2023).

Offset lithography, however, required no formal training for copy to be laid out, and as such was decidedly faster, lending itself to a movement that needed to communicate its ideas swiftly. Individuals or groups could lay out images and texts onto paper using whatever medium they had at hand, be that colored pens, oil paints, or photos torn from magazines. These pages would be taken to a print shop, where a photographic image of the page was taken. Photographic film stores images as a negative, and through a process of chemical alchemy, negatives would be transferred onto a metal plate. Once furnished with a careful mix of ink, oils, and water, the desired positive image was printed. As no formal training was required to set out copy, offset was a more participatory and creative way to lay out newspapers, and had the benefit of being decidedly cheaper than its alternatives.

Free from the aesthetic restrictions and cost associated with other print technologies, hundreds of radical newsheets, hastily arranged in bedrooms, cafés, or occupations, would flood Italian society, each operating as a tiny machine to produce radical subjectivity. Arguments and discussions would often accompany their production, and these debates acted to sharpen the political positions of those who produced them. Sympathetic printers would lead those who created movement sheets to radical bookshops and other distribution nodes. The circulation of movement sheets would bring their creators into contact with the wider movement, constituted as it was by bookshops, discussion groups, occupations, and demonstrations. These contacts, and the movement sheets that travelled between them, created the thick social bonds on which autonomia was built. In effect the printed word, to paraphrase Lenin, acted as the scaffolding around which the movement itself was constituted. In “Stop the Presses,” the final essay in the collection, Ryan Duffy and Dante Philp further explore the utility of the printed word for political group-formation today, suggesting that a reconsideration of print production’s materiality may help to reverse the often siloed, individuated, and fragmented affects associated with digital information technology.

The creative phenomena of the movement sheet was not specific to Italy alone. In Britain and the US, the alternative press, informed by the growing psychedelic pop culture, in opposition to the war in Vietnam, and powered by offset and mimeographic printing would circulate through the “Underground Press Syndicate,” constituting a transnational “alternative society” at the close of the 1960s. This international network laid the ground for A/traverso and the later Xerox zine revolution that accompanied the arrival of punk rock a few years later—powered as this was by photocopiers exiting the confines of the corporate office and becoming readily available to the mass of youth via newsagents, schools, and libraries.

Though we focus on events relating to Italy in this book, we suggest 1977 also signals a global generational moment.10 In Britain, cities, towns, and suburbs would see the emergence of punk rock—a diffused assault on the cultural values of preceding generations—play out against the winter of discontent. Anarcho-punk sought to take the Sex Pistols’ clarion call “Anarchy in the UK” seriously, even if the Pistols themselves did not, and the zine culture that surrounded it played a critical role in cohering an antagonistic counterculture predicated on squatting, direct action, and cultural production that holds many striking similarities with autonomia—in particular its outward rejection of wage labor. A/traverso predated some of the key aesthetic tropes of punk by several years, adopting a decidedly “scratchy” cut-and-paste style that speaks to the informal, immediate, and collaborative processes that offset technology facilitated. Like offset before it, Xerox required no formal training to lay out an image, and came with the added benefit of requiring no formal training to print either. Above all, Xerox was cheap—cheap enough for someone reliant on pocket money alone to make hundreds of copies.

While the values, aesthetics, and innovations associated with punk rock would eventually be recuperated into the bourgeois recording industry, the creative, political, and social rebellion of the Italian context would be met by a wave of state repression aimed squarely at halting its expansion. In Franco’s final essay for this collection, “The Anticipation of ‘89,” he reflects on the movement of ’77, proposing that those who constituted its diffuse and creative wing preempted the collapse of faith in state socialism that accompanied the breakdown of the Soviet empire a little over a decade later. The movement of ’77 desired less state and more social freedom, less work and more joy, and recognized Third Internationalism—wedded to the development of productive forces in both its reformist and Stalinist variants—to be antithetical to the realization of that desire. Moreover, the movement conceived of itself as explicitly post-worker, rejecting the work ethic that had founded the cultural history of the twentieth-century communist movement. This essay is the clearest indictment of the distinctions that existed within autonomia: between those who developed new languages and strategies reflecting emerging subjectivities, and those perceived to cling to the factory-worker subject, previous modes of analysis, and ideological certainty.

What stands for the cultural memory of ’77 in the anglophone world is codified with images of violent repression and street conflict, somewhat indistinguishable from the images of brigatist terror and the so-called “years of lead.” We hope, through the presentation of the texts that follow, to resuscitate the memory of the creative, exuberant, and joyful rebellion that also took place during those years—experiments in self-valorization11 that presented new, albeit unfulfilled, strategies for capitalism’s overcoming, most notably the mass desertion from wage labor.