Romano Alquati passed away on the 3rd of April this year in Turin, at the age of 75. He was a prominent exponent of workerist thought, a systematic intelligence who operated outside conventional schemas and who was recognised as one of the most refined scholars of subjectivity and class composition.

Romano’s political experience stemmed from that minoritarian but important component of ‘barefoot researchers’ of the fifties. While continuing to operate in a critical way within the workers’ movement (the unions in particular), they broke profoundly with the institutional representatives of that movement, along with all national roads to socialism. At the same time they remained distinct, for generational reasons as much as anything else, from the ‘historic’ anti-stalinist opposition, anticipating that extraordinary rupture that would mature fully only with 1968. Romano Alquati was nurtured within a cultural setting that sought a Marxism freed of incrustations, able to investigate and engage with the working class for what it was, rather than what it was meant to be according to the canons of the Communist party ‘church’, a Marxism efficaciously interbred with the critical rereading of sociology and empathetic to a phenomenological approach to subjectivity. Romano was formed politically in Cremona, a city in the Po valley at the crossroads between the experiences of struggle of the agricultural proletariat, and the tumultuous industrialisation of Italy’s economic boom. There he worked with his friend Renato Rozzi and the ‘heretical’ communist Danilo Montaldi, under whose influence Romano engaged in his first experiences of militant research.

It was in this context that, at 25 years of age, Romano moved to the ‘city-factory’ of Turin, where he participated actively with Raniero Panzieri in the editorial committee of Quaderni Rossi, a journal crucial for the formation of the new left. In 1963 he moved on, together with Mario Tronti and Toni Negri, to the experience of Classe Operaia, true birthplace of what would come to be known as operaismo. Classe Operaia was closely tied to a new working class figure, those ‘new forces’ of the mass worker potentially antagonistic to neo-capitalism and quite distinct in behaviours and mindsets from the old workers’ movement. In the process, fundamental analytical categories such as class composition were elaborated, along with an approach of study/intervention through the method of co-research.

Co-research, which emerged in the early sixties as militant fieldwork with workers at FIAT Mirafiori and other factories in Piedmont (Olivetti, Lancia), is both an activity of enquiry and a knowledge process, entailing a reciprocal transformation in the identity of the researcher and what began to be called workers’ subjectivity. As a practice of intervention it placed the militant researcher on the same level as the subject of the enquiry, annulling the separate figure of the ‘vanguard’ so dear to the logic of the left. In doing so, it reformulated horizontally the relationship between theory, praxis and organisation. It was a practice that could not be formalised in a method, one that made it possible to read, even in periods of passivity, signs of impending conflict, the informal organisation and constituent ambivalences that lay in the gap between the class’ technical composition (the objective articulation of labour-power) and its political composition. Not by chance, these enquiries played an active role in the new cycle of working class conflict that opened in Turin with the revolt of Piazza Statuto (July 1962), anticipating in turn Italy’s decade-long ‘1968’.

Romano Alquati possessed an extreme capacity to grasp moments of rupture, to the point of overriding all political or organisational sensibilities. This meant that, already by the early seventies, he was looking beyond that period, marked as it was by the high tide of the mass worker’s struggles. Instead, he sought to identify, in the processes of the industrialisation of human activity as such (evident in incipient tertiarisation), the re-dislocation of capitalist subsumption from the factory towards ‘the social sphere’. His studies of The Middle Class University and Intellectual Proletariat date from this time, laying the basis for subsequent research concerning education, communication and mass intellectuality, of services as a product of capital, and the general question of the commodified reproduction of living-human-capacity. This work addressed the end of one cycle of class composition, and the rise of a phase of capitalism that required a move beyond workerist readings. Alquati’s thought confronted the need to elaborate new instruments – in part through a constant if isolated dialogue with great sociologists such as Touraine and Bauman (in particular, in the latter’s writings on liquid modernity) – at the height of what he would term hyper-industrialisation: in other words, the unfolding effective subsumption of the whole of human experience to social reproduction. The key node was again that of ambivalence: knowledges and activities can be bent to the autonomy of subjects, or else they may be expropriated within the codification of capital’s formalised technical-scientific language. The question then becomes that of identifying the conditions under which hyper-proletarians, socialised by the flexible techno-machines of capitalist production and reproduction, can open themselves to an emancipatory praxis.

In the eighties these themes were addressed within militant seminars that used the mass university as a possible place for the collective production of critical knowledge – formative years for those who would become his pupils. But if the irreversible destruction of those places in the nineties, the enormous gulf from an official left deaf to the changes around them, and the loss of contact with his old workerist comrades, all signalled Romano’s isolation, none of this stopped him from exploring new questions in his final unpublished, self-questioning and explorative texts, which will certainly be his most dense and complex legacy.

The final farewell for Romano Alquati took place on the 7th of April in the garden of the Askatasuna social centre in Turin, where he was fittingly remembered with his own words: ‘to be stubbornly revolutionary when there are no revolutions is neither amusing nor enviable. In the late fifties we felt ourselves to be at the beginning of something … open to the future’. Even in his final, far from easy years, Romano never succumbed to nostalgia.

Turin, 18th April, 2010

*Text translated by Steve Wright

Bibliography

R. Alquati, Sindacato e partito, Stampatori Università, Torino, 1974.

R. Alquati, Sulla Fiat e altri scritti, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1975.

R. Alquati, L'Università e la formazione l'incorporamento del sapere sociale nel lavoro vivo, in Aut Aut, Firenze, luglio-agosto 1976, n. 154.

R. Alquati - N. Negri - A. Sormano, Università di ceto medio e proletariato intellettuale, Stampatori, Torino, 1978.

R. Alquati, G. Lodi, Donna, famiglia, servizi nel territorio della provincia di Cremona, Amministrazione provinciale di Cremona, 1981.

R. Alquati, Dispense di sociologia industriale, Il Segnalibro, Torino, 1986-1992, 4 vol.

R. Alquati, Sul comunicare, Il Segnalibro, Torino, 1993.

R. Alquati, Sacre icone, Calusca Edizioni, Padova, 1993.

R. Alquati, Per fare conricerca, Velleità Alternative, Torino, 1993.

R. Alquati, Cultura, Formazione e Ricerca. Industrializzazione di produzione immateriale, Velleità Alternative, Torino, 1994.

R. Alquati - M. Pentenero - J.L. Wessberg, Sul virtuale, Velleità Alternative, Torino, 1994.

R. Alquati, Camminando per realizzare un sogno comune, Velleità Alternative, Torino, 1994.

R. Alquati, Lavoro e attività. Per una analisi della schiavitù neomoderna, Manifestolibri, Roma, 1997.

Unpublished texts

R. Alquati, Nella società industriale d'oggi, working paper non pubblicato, Torino, 2000/2003.

R. Alquati, Sulla riproduzione della capacità umana vivente oggi, working paper non pubblicato, Torino, 2001/2003.