The following text is based on Jack Fuller, Worker’s Autonomy (Autonomia Operaia), in: International Socialism 8 (Spring 1980).

The ‘autonomous movement’ was a series of locally based collectives, and marked the end of a whole period in worker’s thought and struggle. The concept of a single national organisation was temporarily abandoned. Instead the name “Workers’ Autonomy” was adopted by a growing number of small groups and collectives based around workplaces, geographical areas or particular groups of the population such as the unemployed or students. The universities in particular became an important base for the autonomists, no longer as centres for well educated, middle class, discontented students, but as a huge meeting place for unemployed youth.

Toni Negri was one of key theoretical figure in establishing Autonomia Organizzata (Organized Autonomy), a loosely coordinated network of local organizations throughout Italy. Autonomia was decidedly opposed to the notion of vanguard party and centralized leadership, posing instead the autonomy of local groups. Negri insisted that political organization had continually to pose the problem of centralization and democracy. In past communist revolutions, the centralized party management of power has always at a certain point strangled the proletarian organization of powers, and at that point the revolution has come to an end. In this sense Negri argued for Autonomia to be an anti-party, a decentralized and open network of political organizations.

The revolution is over, but in the end of revolution what wins is a completely reactionary mode of living. And the nostalgia of the poet is really the attempt to reconstruct in this passage, this reactionary desert in which humans have been thrown, to reconstruct those other values, pushing them forward.

Antonio Negri

The development of history occurs through the negation of historical experience which – in turn – negates the one that precedes it.
My work deals with such basic notions as a “Worker” and a “Dissident”. In the contemporary context, both terms seem to lack any actual meaning. Yet, as history teaches us, certain phenomena from the past tend to return and represent another semantic level in the present.

What does it mean today to be a worker or to be a dissident?
Which connection could be established between these two notions?
Is it possible that this historical paradigm reverts?
What is an artist’s role in the comprehension of history and the delineation of historical development?