Almost 35 years have passed since the brutal repression of the Italian autonomist movement by a Catholic-Communist monster-state but its capacity to provoke the wrath of ideologists across the political spectrum is as palpable as ever. The playful tactics and rhetoric of the new European protest movements, particularly their unified rejection of a homogeneous identity, demonstrate just how enduring the influence of this adventurous insurrection continues to be for those taking up the fight for real democracy. The bemused tutting of decrepit centre-left parties across the continent is music to these movements’ ears. Socialism is dead in the water, libertarianism is increasingly seen as anything but and the question of how to reconcile individual freedom with a desire for collective ownership is a one that, as the original movement knew, can only be answered from below.

With this context in mind the release of The Last Night is not just the unveiling of a long-awaited book but an event through which a British audience finally comes face-to-face with this long subterranean tradition of intellectual experiments and unsettled grievances. Finally, autonomist thought is breaking out of the UK blog scene. The legendary Franco Berardi’s dramatic introduction frames the publication in precisely such macroscopic terms: ‘I witnessed the vanishing of modernity, I underwent it and I tried to interpret it. Thus, I read Federico Campagna’s work as a map of the shifts (often microscopic, barely perceptible) of sensibility from the sphere of modernity to that of precocity.’ With such a respectable endorsement, Campagna - whose background in Milanese street poetry, radical philosophy and media activism are affirmation enough of his autonomist credentials - is set to become the Anglophone world’s most direct link with the movement of ‘77.

Given its emergence at such a germane moment, as shadow ministers in the Labour Party pledge to be ‘tougher than the Tories’, it is a real disappointment that The Last Night doesn’t come close to conveying the subtlety and dynamism of Campagna’s excellent essays for web journal Through Europe. The awkward opening passages establish an abrupt and millenarian tone, forging a relationship between author and the reader that is brash and uncomfortably self-aggrandising (though refreshingly distanced from the impenetrable Marxist abstractions of a previous generation). His words are fantastical and egotistical, the firelight ramblings of a balladeer on some deserted beach, where society is but dust in the wind and politics a forgotten nightmare. Kafkaesque hallucinations of ‘a million ants on the keyboard of one, immense metropolitan organ’ melt into a stout composite of medieval war metaphors: ‘flags were taken down the masts and set alight.’ Zarathustra’s ghost applauds from the sidelines but never lingers long enough to join the fray.

Once it finds its rhythm, this conspiratorial aesthetic functions as a fitting enough ode to the intellectual bankruptcy of a society which has lost its imagination or appetite for resistance. It is the argument behind the whirlwind, however, that is more troubling. The death of God, Campagna suggests uncontroversially, has raised a dilemma for a ruling class struggling to re-affirm its power. Art, science and money have all been proposed to fill this void, but each has failed. So far so good. His next move, however, is nothing short of a logical bellyflop. In the context of late capitalism, he continues, the most successful substitute has been the phenomenon of work itself: ‘the seal of a new alliance with all that is divine, which would be able to bind once again the whole of humanity to a new and eternal submission.’ The language is shamelessly eschatological, entirely over the top in the context of the existential and secular crisis of liberal democracy. In today’s world what force, centralised or decentralised, could possibly be responsible for this?

I for one don’t see anyone holding the strings. Work discourse in the UK has doubtlessly entered a moment of intense moralising, but in actual terms, if only due to the logic of capitalism itself, this is likely to be short-lived. ‘Work-life-balance’ is increasingly offered as the mantra of liberal guilt (to be taken with a pinch of salt) and it is only a matter of time before somebody finds a way to make money from a widespread desire to ‘opt out’ from aspects of middle class London society, where work culture is at its most childish and neurotic. The real task is surely to fight against the slave-like treatment of those at the very bottom of society, from the outsourced cleaners and caterers of public services, to unpaid interns and jobseekers. Such figures hardly get a mention in the fantasy of cosmic bondage imagined by Campagna. The theme of universal manipulation is the core thesis, and he sticks to it in a stronger and less palatable form later in the book, with little time to think about real people. It soon gets absurd. By halfway through, labour has ceased its metaphysical role in the capitalist world-system and has become the a priori condition of all practices of worship: ‘Although its traditional mask has vanished from sight, what has been revealed underneath is the steel-hard structure of [religion’s] essence.’

It is difficult to see this as anything other than naïve and dogmatic. How could any individual legitimately begin to talk about the essential qualities of a phenomenon that has shaped global civilisation? Religion, while often indicative of a central legitimising authority, is, for many, simply about silence, reflection and even, in the case of Dostoevsky, autonomy itself. I find it difficult to imagine people praying to their blackberries and pagers in times of distress or seeking redemption through a late night PowerPoint session. This second ‘meaning’ goes entirely without mention in The Last Night. The very phrase ‘essence’ of religion is philosophically questionable from both a linguistic and ethical point of view and could additionally be critiqued anthropologically as indicating a centre that is largely European and Christian. I assume, against this open definition, that Campagna is not talking here about Islam or Hinduism and I can’t even begin to imagine what the Brazillian Kayapo would think of all this. Even if Campagna is granted this monologic concession, and he is assumed as having abstracted from an Anglican-Catholic hybrid of some sort, the term is still stretched to cover too wide a radius. In the terms expressed here, Jam-sandwich-Jesuits of provincial Irish churches can be normatively conflated - through the work ethic - with Saint Francis of Assisi, the Spanish Inquisition and the infamous Westborough Baptist Church. There are many criticisms to be made of work and of religion, but this line of equivalence simply doesn’t hold up.

The book achieves a more confident rhythm when Campagna moves away from this flawed structuralist critique, and its hyperbolic synthesising project, and explores in positive terms the philosophical proposals of squandering and adventure. The message owes much to Foucault, concerning itself predominantly with ethical questions and the importance of transgression: ‘it is exactly from the understanding of the limits of our lives and of our enjoyment of them, that radical atheism can begin its action.’ This is not a denial of the need to construct temporary and open modes of organisation and discussion but rather, like the activists with the first wave of autonomia, an argument for the primacy of individual liberation in seizing control of arbitrary constraints. For Campagna, freedom begins by taking control of one’s own limits through recognition of the desires of another. In an optimistic passage regarding the potential of the post-alpha generation he brands us ‘happy orphans of the moral codes of dominant abstractions’ and cites the pleasures of friendship, daydreaming and a liberalised sex culture as real-world examples of how an ethics of action can function as part of a rational but non-systematic attitude to living. This move away from dogma towards a more reflexive and daring life is a key philosophical task for any form of democracy and is described beautifully: ‘Like the pristine whiteness of revealed bones, every adventure terminates with a happy ending.’

Nonetheless, as in the treatment of religion, Campagna’s refusal to contextualise his radical worldview in a time and place severely hinders this message. Statements such as ‘the discourse over Work is now more obsessive then ever’, while true in certain spheres, are banded around in a manner typical of the most vacuous tabloid commentary. No actual evidence is given to support this particular conviction, and he relies on the ambiguity of the word ‘discourse’ to fudge his way through. This section is, in short, an anarchist take on a Daily Mail column. There are several, slightly trollish, responses that could be made. Emile Zola’s 1885 description of labour as ‘an all devouring beast’ in a novel about characters obsessed by work as the condition for basic sustenance comes immediately to mind as a retort. Or how about Russian Stakhanovism? The notions of actively overachieving and ‘going beyond the limits of the body’ that were imposed upon a homogenised workforce by Soviet propaganda in the 1930s, and which was reinforced by public medal ceremonies? The bloodstained marble of the Moscow underground, its golden biceps and pitchforks, remain as a living testament to the violence of this obsessive vision of collective labour.

Work is not only deterritorialised, but treated as an essentially homogeneous activity. Most often this is manifest through an unacknowledged focus on a central London media class: ‘Most of us, in all likelihood, can roughly be classified as part of the impoverished middle class. We are not banned from the job-market, but our jobs are mind-numbing, or physically numbing, exercises of patience and degradation.’ As an anarchist, Campagna should know better than to make claims about mass culture through a collective noun. Who is this ‘we’? Probably not low-income migrant workers or City slickers (in fact, two demonstrably large demographics). Likewise, the possibility that some people might actually enjoy their work - and some people do - is cast aside without mention. Throughout the book Campagna’s own life seems inevitably to be the starting point of his analytical abstractions. There is nothing wrong with this per se, indeed it makes a great basis for talking about everyday subversion, but I am sceptical of how relevant his arguments are to understanding work culture in Wolverhamptom or Stoke on Trent. For an individualist, Campagna’s tendency to speak for, and not just about, others is remarkably pronounced. This is a significant failing.

There are important and urgent arguments to be made against contemporary labour practices and self-interested trade union managers who, instead of fighting for full employment and fewer hours, limit themselves to haggling for pay increases and tackling lay-offs. Workers are exhausted in myriad ways and, particularly for those on precarious contracts, have few places to turn. To waste a high-profile opportunity to initiate this discussion in favour of an Apollonian tract about bones and fossils, however, seems decadent and egotistical (two criticisms he shrugs off without much care at the book’s close). First as tragedy, then as farce. While the embers of Campagna’s argument burn incandescently in a world of workfare and zero hours contracts, his proposed escape route is severely limited by a surfeit of gratuitous insults, mechanical sneers and cruel stereotypes. The end product is less a Renaissance for the autonomist movement than a depressing confirmation of why it failed in the first place.

Jamie Mackay is a writer and translator based in Italy. He is a contributor to VICE, the New Statesman, and Il Manifesto among others, and author of The Invention of Sicily, which is forthcoming from Verso.

Tweet

Find a Local Independent Bookshop from which to Purchase this Book

Please enter a postcode or a city in the UK