Subaltern Composition: On the Unrealized 1970 Gela Insurrection

In 1970, at a congress in Rome of the extra-parliamentary Marxist organization Potere Operaio (workers’ power), it was decided that several members would head south to Sicily to agitate with workers at a petrochemical plant. I argue that this is a generative example for considering the postwar reception of Antonio Gramsci’s writing by revolutionaries outside official party frameworks and for thinking through the Southern Question today. Furthermore, it invites us to reconsider how the notion of subalternity is deployed in some contemporary critical theory. I apply operaismo’s key notion of “class composition” to the Southern Question, proposing the term “subaltern composition.” If, as Mario Tronti famously demonstrated in Workers and Capital, the “bible” of operaismo, that there is no class without class struggle, then I ask here: is there a subaltern subject without subaltern struggle?