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https://viewpointmag.com/2014/09/09/seven-theses-on-workers-control-1958/
This text was published in February 1958 in issue 2 of Mondo Operaio [Workers World], signed Raniero Panzieri
and Lucio Libertini. Panzieri, after having been excluded from the leadership of the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) in
1956, became co-editor with Nenni (de facto editor) of the review, transforming it into an extraordinary laboratory
of research. This essay forms part of the research carried out by Panzieri from a libertarian perspective and from
the left of the double crisis of the workers movement; on the one hand the invasion of Hungary in 1956, and on the
other the defeat of FIOM [metalworkers union] in the big Turin factories, starting with Fiat. This text, which
represents a point of synthesis of a series of Panzieris elaborations on the theme of workers control, opened a
passionate debate on the left, as much in the columns of Mondo Operaio as in those of Avanti and Unit. (Paolo
Ferrero, Raniero Panzieri: un uomo di frontiera, Milan: Editions Punto Rosso, 2006.)
The demand for workers control of the factories is at the center of the democratic and peaceful road to socialism.
The following theses mean to provide an initial, provisional direction for a wide debate that gathers not only the
contributions of politicians and specialists but also and above all the experience of the workers movement, which
are the only conclusive verification of the elaboration of socialist thought.
successive phases, one distinct from the other. It is sufficient, to understand the nature of this error, to reflect on
some historical examples. When, at the beginning of the last century, technical progress (invention of the
mechanical loom and the steam engine) brought about a qualitative leap in production (industrial revolution) which
remained in force, the old forms of production [remained] alongside the new; and in the more economically
evolved countries the political struggle had therefore a rather complex character. On one side there was the
resistance to the feudal survivals, on the other side the affirmation of the industrial bourgeoisie; and finally, at the
same time, the appearance of a new class, the industrial proletariat. In Russia, at the end of the first revolutionary
wave (February 1917), after the collapse of the Tsarist autocracy and the monstrous capitalist-feudal system, one
part of the Marxist workers movement, falling into the same error, maintained that the Russian proletariat had to
join forces with the bourgeoisie to realize the necessary second stage (bourgeois democracy) of the revolution.
As is known, this thesis was defeated by Lenin and the majority of the Russian workers movement; in the total
collapse of the old system the only real protagonist remained the proletariat, and its problem was not therefore that
of creating the typical institutions of the bourgeoisie, but of constructing the institutions of its democracy, of
socialist democracy. In China between 1924 and 1928, there was the prevalence in the communist party of those
who erroneously wanted to commit the class movement to unconditionally supporting the Kuomintang of Chiang
Kai-shek, helping it to realize, after the collapse of the Manchu dynasty and the feudal system, the second stage
(bourgeois democracy): they did not account for the inexistence of a Chinese bourgeoisie capable of establishing
itself as a national class, or for the fact that the immense masses of peasants of this country could struggle only
for the cause of their own emancipation, and not in pursuit of abstract and incomprehensible schemes.
These considerations do not lead by any means to exalting an intellectualist revolutionary voluntarism (to
affirming, that is, that the revolution can be the fruit of an act of will of a vanguard group), but only to clarifying as,
first of all, every political force, rather than chasing prefabricated models, must become aware of its own reality,
the always complex and specific field within which it moves. It is social democracy in all its forms which, to cover
up its opportunism and justify it ideologically, systematically mixes up the cards on the table and reduces every
position consistent with the revolutionary left to that of an intellectualist voluntarism. The historical essence of the
social-democratic experience consists moreover in this: in the assigning, with the pretext of the struggle against
maximalism, to the proletariat the task of supporting the bourgeoisie or even of replacing it in the construction of
bourgeois democracy: and by that very fact it denies the tasks and the revolutionary autonomy of the proletariat,
and finishes by assigning to it the position of a subaltern force.
In todays Italian society the fundamental factor is constituted by the fact that the bourgeoisie has never been, is
not, can never be a national class; a class thus capable (as happened in England and France) of guaranteeing,
albeit in a certain period of time, the development of national society, in its whole. The Italian bourgeoisie arose on
a corporate and parasitical basis, namely:
through the formation of individual industrial sectors that did not constitute a national market, but survived
on the exploitation of a market of a quasi-colonial kind (the South)
by means of the permanent recourse to the protection and active support of the State
with the alliance with the remains of feudalism (agrarian bloc of the South)
Fascism was the inflamed expression of this contradictory equilibrium, and of the domination, in this form, of the
bourgeoisie: it, also through the massive intervention of the totalitarian State in favor of bankrupt private industry
(IRI) [Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, fascist bailout in 1933], promoted to the maximum the transformation
of determinate industrial sectors into powerful monopolistic structures (Fiat, Montecatini, Edison, etc.). After the
collapse of fascism the monopolies found, in the intensification of the relations with American big industry and in
the subordination to it, the continuation of their old anti-national policy (Italian big industry is always, in one way or
another, cartelized with big international monopolies; one of the cases in which these links have appeared with
great evidence was when Fiat, Edison, and Montecatini supported in Italy the campaign for the international oil
cartel; and in general the Atlanticism of the parties of the center-right is the expression of links of subordination that
we have indicated. The Marshall Plan, expression of American imperialism, was accepted by Italian monopolies
before the political parties). Thus is established a situation in which next to the monopolistic areas there coexist
large areas of deep depression and backwardness, (many zones in the mountains and hills, the Po delta and,
more generally, the South and the islands); the distance between social stratum and social stratum [ceto sociale],
between region and region, increases enormously; the traditional imbalances of industrial production grow; the
monopolistic bottlenecks tighten (the limitations and distortions, that is, that the power and politics of monopolies
oppose the full and balanced development of the productive forces); there is mass unemployment that becomes a
permanent element of our economy; the traditional terms of the greatest problem of our socioeconomic structure
(the Southern question) are reproduced in an aggravated fashion.
However, it would be a great error to reaffirm the existence of these facts to conceal, as has been done in recent
years, the new elements. There is no doubt that, starting above all with 1951-52, in some sectors Italian capitalism
was able to take advantage of the favorable international conjuncture and the considerable economic progress:
there was thus a phase of expansion (rapid growth of production, growth of income, rapid accumulation of capital
and intense boost in fixed capital) that nevertheless, unfolding under the control of the monopolies, remained
restricted to their area, and even provoked the aggravation of the fundamental imbalances of the Italian economy.
The contradictory situation, dominated by large areas of depression and the crisis we have described, is not going
to improve but worsen, whether because of a possible reversal of the international conjuncture, or a probable
growth of technological unemployment, or the negative effects of the Common Market, or finally because the
characteristics of the internal Italian market (its narrow-mindedness, its poverty) dont provide an adequate area to
merge with productive capacity and technological maturity, which is further maturing in the monopolistic area.
An analysis of this type does not aim and does not serve naturally to valorize the prospect of a catastrophic crisis
of capitalism; and moreover a polemic on the terrain of prophecies, and in these terms, would serve only to
paralyze and sterilize the action of the class movement. What follows from this analysis is the existence of certain
real conditions and the identification of the tendency of development implicit in them; and the conclusion that
within the boundaries of these conditions and of this tendency the workers movement must act.
In light of these considerations the following theses appear therefore quite abstract and unreal (specifically today
in Italy): a) the class movement must substantially limit itself to giving support to the capitalist class (or
determinate bourgeois groups) in the construction of a regime of completed bourgeois democracy; b) the class
movement must essentially substitute itself for the capitalist class and assume in its own right the task of
constructing a regime of completed bourgeois democracy.
Instead the contradictions that sharply tear apart Italian society, the weight that the monopolies have acquired and
continually tend more to assume, the contradictions between technological development and the capitalist
relations of production, the weakness of the bourgeoisie as a national class, lead the workers movement to take
on tasks of a different nature; to struggle at the same time for reforms with a bourgeois content and for reforms
with a socialist content. On the political level this signifies that the leading force of democratic development in Italy
is the working class and under its direction can be realized the only efficient system of alliance, with the
intellectuals, with the peasants, with the groups of small and medium bourgeois producers. It is this system of
alliances and this kind of leadership that correspond to the real perspective.
the exclusive (or even just the only significant or characteristic) instrument of the peaceful transition to socialism in
Parliament, empty the very notion of the democratic and peaceful road of any real substance. In this way they
revive instead the old bourgeois mystifications that present the bourgeois representative State not as it is, as a
class State, but as a State above classes; where the Parliament is only the place for the ratification and
registration of the relations of force between classes, which develop and are determined outside of it, and the
economy remains the sphere in which real relations are produced and is the real source of power.
It is right on the other hand to affirm that the use of the parliamentary institutions is also one of most important
tasks laid out for the class movement, and that these very institutions can be transformed (by the pressure
exercised from below by the workers movement through its new institutions) from the representative seat of
merely political, formal leadership, to the expression of substantial political and economic rights at the same time.
if the organs of political power in the bourgeois State have always remained the executive committee of
the capitalist class, today we are nevertheless observing an even bigger interpenetration than in the past
between the State and the monopolies: whether because the monopoly, according to its internal logic, is led
to assume an always greater direct control, or because the economic operations of the monopoly (and in
this regard laissez-faire illusions are by now collapsing) demand in increasing ways the aid and friendly
intervention of the State. Precisely because, then, the authorities of the economy extend their direct political
functions (and behind the facade of the Rule of law increase the real and direct functions of the class
State), the workers movement is learning the lessons of its adversary, must always shift further its center of
struggle onto the terrain of real and designated power. And, for the same reason, the struggle of the class
movement for control cannot exhaust itself within the limits of a single firm, but must be connected and
extended in all sectors, on all productive fronts. To conceive of the workers control as something that could
be restricted to a single firm does not only mean limiting the demand of control, but emptying it of its real
meaning, and causing it to break down on the corporate level;
there is finally a last new condition that is at the roots of the demand for the workers control. The
development of modern capitalism, on the one hand, and on the other, the development of the socialist
forces in the world and the difficult problematic of power, which imposes itself forcefully in the countries in
which the class movement has already made its revolution, indicate the importance today of defending and
guaranteeing the revolutionary autonomy of the proletariat, whether against the new forms of reformism, or
against the bureaucratization of power, that is to say, against reformist bureaucratization and against the
conceptions of leaders (party-leader, State-leader).
The defense, in this situation, of the revolutionary autonomy of the proletariat, manifests itself in the creation from
below, before and after the conquest of power, of institutions of socialist democracy, and in the return of the party
to its function as instrument of the political formation of the class movement (instrument, that is, not of a
paternalistic leader, from above, but of encouraging and supporting the organizations in which the unity of the
class is articulated). The importance now of the autonomy of the Socialist Party in Italy is precisely in this: certainly
not in how much it advances or forecasts the scission of the class movement, not in opposing one leader to
another leader, but in the guarantee of the autonomy of the entire workers movement from any external,
bureaucratic, and paternalistic direction.
Affirming this definitely does not mean that the question of power, the essential condition for the construction of
socialism, has been forgotten: but the socialist nature of power is exactly determined by the base of workers
democracy on which it rests, and that cannot be improvised in the aftermath of the revolutionary leap in the
relations of production. This is the only serious method, not reformist, of opposing the prospect of bureaucratic
socialism (Stalinism).
5. The meaning of class unity is the question of the connection between partial
struggles and general ends.
The demand for workers control, the problems it raises, the theoretical preparation connected to it implies
necessarily the unity of the masses, and the refusal of every rigid party conception that reduces the very thesis of
control to a wretched parody. There is no workers control without unity of action of all laborers in the same firm, in
the same sector, in the entire productive front: a unity that is not mythological or purely an adornment to the
propaganda of a party, but a reality that is implemented from below, with laborers becoming conscious of their
function in the productive process, and the simultaneous creation of unitary institutions of a new power. It is
therefore to reject, in this context, the reduction of the struggles of laborers to a pure instrument of reinforcement
of a party or of its more or less clandestine strategy. The question, long debated, of how to connect and
harmonize demands and partial, immediate struggles, with general ends, is resolved precisely in affirming the
continuity of struggles and of their nature. In effect this connection and this harmonization are impossible, and are
an ideological mess, as long as there is still the idea that there is a realm of socialism, a for the time unknowable
mystery, that will appear one day as a miraculous dawn to achieve the dreams of man. The ideal of socialism is
indeed an ideal that contrasts profoundly and without the possibility of accommodation with capitalist society, but it
is an ideal that needs to be made alive day by day, won moment by moment in struggles; that arises and develops
insofar as every struggle serves to mature and advance institutions that emerge from below, the nature of which is
Therefore every utopian anticipation must be banned, while it must be emphasized that the forms of control must
not be determined by a committee of specialists, but rise up only from the concrete experience of laborers. In this
sense three points must already be mentioned that come from certain workers sectors. The first of them concerns
the Conferences of production [Conferenze di produzione] as a concrete form from which it can launch a
movement for control. The second refers on the other hand to the demand that the question of control be placed at
the center of the general struggle for the recapture of contractual power and the freedom of workers in the
factories, and thus for instance, that it be manifested in elected Commissions that would control employment and
prevent discrimination. The third, while it emphasizes the needs of linking between various firms, poses the
problem of participation in representative territorial democracy to the elaboration of productive programs.
These are very useful points, resulting already from basic experience, to which certainly others will be added:
each one of these will be further and more deeply discussed, bearing in mind that the scope of application and of
study is primarily the factory, and the best test is the unitary struggle.
Translated by Asad Haider. The translator would like to thank Andrea Righi and Salar Mohandesi for checking
the draft.