A few historical details

This may be only tangentially relevant, but I couldn't help noticing the inaccuracies/omissions in how the emergence and decline of the autonomist movement in Italy is recounted in the foreword. It mentions the "strategy of tension" and the supposed terroristic activities of groups such as the Red Brigades, but it fails to define what the strategy of tension actually was, or to mention that a lot of the acts of terrorism and violence were actually carried out by neo-fascist groups (sometimes in complicity with the secret services and the mafia), with the purpose of discrediting leftist radicalism and legitimizing repressive actions by the authorities (the most famous of the cases was probably the Piazza Fontana bombing, blamed on anarchists but actually carried out by fascists). The foreword also inaccurately blames the assassination of Aldo Moro on the Red Brigades, which is not an undisputed fact; the Red Brigades had nothing to gain by killing him and it has been alleged that the actual perpetrators were the aforementioned right-wing groups, trying to sabotage a potential coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Communists.

The relevance of these facts may lie in the fact that the revolutionary potential of autonomist resistance is undercut by its vulnerability to (state and non-state) repression. To give some non-Italian examples, autonomist tactics have been widely put into practice throughout Europe in the form of squats and autonomous centres. However, the success of these places of resistance has depended on the benevolence of the state. In the UK, the squatting scene was finished off in the 80s thanks to Maggie Thatcher, but in recent years there has been a crackdown on squats and autonomous centres all over Europe (Berlin, Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Barcelona etc). In Vienna, the EKH autonomous centre was evicted after the building was bought by a neo-Nazi organization.

Similarly, in the context of the information society, the revolutionary potential brought about by new labor relations is undercut by capital's ability to adapt to change and to devise new forms of repression and control.