ABSTRACT
This idea was most dramatically manifest during the mass mobilisations in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s. ‘Autonomy at the base’ was the core principle of Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) the influential group and magazine that was at the heart of social unrest in Italy during the late 1960s and early 1970s, dissolving itself in 1973 to become part of a broader movement known as Autonomia (Autonomia Operaio) a mass movement involving students and workers (Wright 2002). Autonomia never unified and as a series of fluid organisations and shifting alliances, it refused to separate economics from politics and politics from everyday existence. This approach led ultimately to the idea of refusing waged labour and to the extension of struggle from the factory, where occupations, sabotage and strikes were commonplace, to the cities in which 20,000 buildings were squatted between 1969-1975. As an active political force Autonomia was finally crushed by the Italian state beginning with the ‘April 7th’ arrests in 1979. This began a process leading to the arrest and imprisonment of over fifteen hundred intellectuals and militants within a year, many of whom were held under charges for anti-State activity that were introduced into Italian law under the fascist regime of Mussolini. Notable amongst those arrested were militants and theorists such as Toni Negri and Paolo Virno, both of whom are now prominent in debates concerning resistance to global neoliberal capitalism (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004; Virno 2004).
