Abstract
A commoner's Bildungsroman, this article narrates the intellectual development of a radically rooted intellectual, through reflections on dominant explanatory frameworks, evoking through that journey, the real-life personal and conceptual implications of the pursuit of understanding the world, and the desire to change it. Introduction: searching for roses, music, and adventure In 1969, the year of factory and students' explosions in Italy, I was nine years old. I became teenager in the 1970s, a decade of intense mass movements of struggles and social creativity that involved youth, workers, women producing house occupations, social centres, free radios, experiences of self-organization in high schools, universities, factories, collectives, and self- organized abortion clinics. I could not understand it all but struggle made sense, and even more so the feeling of freedom, dignity, and autonomy that many of these struggles communicated to me, as a young and nao ¨ve boy striv- ing for more than the bread and butter rationale I was accustomed to in my family: I also needed roses, music and a sense of adventure towards new horizons. After 1979 and the heavy-handed repression following the anti- terrorist laws that crushed large sections of social movements, and after the seed of heroin was implanted into youth circles killing many and taking out of action many more, the party was finished. For me, it was as if in the moment you manage to get onto the dance floor and begin to understand how to dance, the music stops, and the lights are turned off. The party was over, and it was transferred to other scenes: in front of the TV, with the explo- sion of private channels in the hands of Berlusconi, into disco clubs, into the beginning of precarious lives in time of economic austerity and financial boom ... and into reading and discussion groups.
Highlights
In 1969, the year of factory and students explosions in Italy, I was nine years old
Marx and Marxism was my preferred subject the intricacies of what I later discovered was not its “economic” theory, the theory of crisis, of the falling rate of profit, of exploitation
I got an overdose of economics, the science of our enslavement, the science that considers natural and obvious what instead it contributes to produce through its policy implications: isolated, atomised individuals with budget constraints, maximising their “utility” and giving a fuck about the rest of humanity starting from their neighbourhoods and ending with the planet
Summary
In 1969, the year of factory and students explosions in Italy, I was nine years old. I became teenager in the 1970s, a decade of intense mass movements of struggles and social creativity that involved youth, workers, women producing house occupations, social centres, free radios, experiences of selforganization in high schools, universities, factories, women collectives and self organised abortion clinics. While capital always try to enclose existing commons to expands the scale of accumulation, the working class (including the unwaged!) were always struggling through commons (a point I made clearly in my Beginning of History), i.e. through some form of sharing resources (time in the first place, and all other resources that any social movement always require).
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