Neocapitalismo e cultura marxista. Il dibattito italiano degli anni Sessanta = Neocapitalism and Marxist Culture. The Italian Debate of the Sixties

Abstract

Between the 1950s and 1960s a new development process emerged in the Western world with suddenly transformed the productive organization, concurring, consequently, to shape the social and political sphere itself. Focusing mainly in Italy, a country that boasted a strong Marxist cultural heritage, we observe that the historical left organizations faced with great difficultly the affirmation of the new economic, political, cultural and social phenomenon. Yet, the political environment of Italian Marxism immediately provided to analyse the peculiarities of the new productive organization, with was highly automated, initiating significant moments of collective reflection (seminars, theoretical debates published on the main cultural instruments of the left parties). Furthermore, in the first half of the 1960s the first theoretical-political experiences of Italian neo-Marxism were born, contributing to the circulation of a profitable critical production, updating the Marxian work in the new developments of Western capitalism, and effectively earning the appellative of Italiana Thoughts. The theoretical confrontation of the Italian Marxist intellectuals was broad and at times very ferocious who discussed the new phenomena that arose with neo-capitalism, such as technology applied to the production process, the factory-society dialect and the totalitarian character of «Fordism», the new worker subjectivity, trying to make Marxian Science dialogue with modern Social Sciences. One of the most troubled issues in Italian Marxist culture turns out to be a problematic division between the immediate conquest of social well-being, therefore through articulated bargaining, thus focusing on the redistribution of the immense wealth derived from the «economic miracle» of the Neo-capitalism of the 1960s, or the conquest of the real emancipatory function of technological development, the conscious management of production by the subjectivity of the workers.