Diary of an Escape Read online

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  In 1973–4 the political context within which the movement had developed for years began to disintegrate. Within a short period of time there were multiple ruptures of continuity in the movement, changes of political perspectives and behaviours, and changes in the very conditions of social conflict itself. These abrupt changes were due to a number of concomitant and interacting factors. The first was the PCI’s change of policy towards the closure of political space at the international level, which it now saw as necessitating an immediate and urgent ‘political breakthrough’ of the given situation.

  This led to a split, which became increasingly deep, within a line-up of political and social forces that had up to this time, in spite of internal differences, shared the common goal of finding, after ’68, an alternative terrain of power, which would reflect the radical content of the mass struggles and their transformative content. A part of the Left (the PCI and their trade union confederation) now began to draw closer to the possibility of government and became opposed to wide sectors of the movement.

  The extra-parliamentary oppositions now had to redefine themselves in relation to the PCI’s ‘[Historic] Compromise’. This redefinition led to a crisis and a progressive loss of identity for the groups. In fact the struggle for hegemony on the part of the Left, which had to some extent justified the existence of [revolutionary] ‘groups’, now seemed to have been resolved unilaterally, in a way that shut down and separated alternative perspectives and put an end to dialectics. From now on, the old question of ‘finding a political breakthrough’, an alternative management of the state, was to be identified with the moderating politics of the PCI. Those extra-parliamentary organizations that still followed this perspective were forced to try to go along with the PCI and to influence the outcome of the ‘[Historic] Compromise’, setting up its extremist version (we recall the presentation of ‘revolutionary’ lists in the 1975 administrative [local] elections and in the 1976 political [national] elections). Other groups found instead that they had reached the limits of their own experience. Sooner or later they found no alternative but to dissolve themselves.

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  Secondly, as a result of the [union–employer] contracts of ’73–4, the central figure behind the struggles – the assembly-line worker of the major factories, the mass worker – began to lose his offensive role for class recomposition. The restructuration of large-scale enterprises was beginning to take its toll.

  The increasing use of lay-offs [cassa integrazione] and the first, partial changes in technology and work organization fundamentally altered the modes of production and blunted the thrust of preceding forms of struggle, including the mass strike. The homogeneity of the shop floor and its capacity to exercise power on the overall process of production were undercut by new machinery, systems of control, and the restructuring of the working day. The representative functions of the new ‘Factory Councils’, and hence the dialectic between left and right within them, had a paralysing effect on the unity and autonomy which had underlain the preceding struggles.

  Not that the power of the line worker (the ‘mass worker’) was weakened by any reserve army or competition from the unemployed in the traditional sense. The point is that industrial reconversion tended towards investment in sectors outside the sphere of mass production. This brought other sectors of labour-power, which had been relatively marginal – such as women, youths, highly educated new strata and so on – to a central position in social production as a whole. These new strata had less history of organization behind them. Increasingly now the terrain of confrontation was shifting towards the overall mechanisms of the labour market, with public expenditure, with the reproduction of the proletariat and of young people, and in general with the distribution of incomes which are independent from remuneration for work.

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  In the third place, a change occurred along the internal dimension of the subjectivity of the movement, of its ‘culture’ and horizon of development. In a nutshell: a rejection was taking place of the entire tradition of the working-class movement, of the very idea of ‘seizing power’ with the classic goal of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, of residual fantasies about ‘the real socialism’ [in eastern Europe], and of any project of management.

  As for the links that had existed within the post-’68 movement between new qualitative goals and the old model of communist revolution, these were now totally broken. Power was now seen as an alien and inimical force, something to defend oneself against, but not something worth ‘conquering’ or ‘taking over’ – rather worth reducing and keeping at a distance. The key to this new outlook was the affirmation of the movement itself as an alternative society, as a richness of communication, of free productive capacities, of forms of life. To conquer and to control its own ‘spaces’ – this is becoming the dominant form of practice for the new ‘social subjects’, for whom wage labour is no longer the principal terrain of socialization but pure and simple ‘episode’, contingency and non-value.

  The feminist movement, with its practices of community and separatism, with its critique of politics and power, with its deep mistrust of any institutional and ‘general’ representation of needs and desires, and with its love of differences, is emblematic for this new phase. It provided the inspiration, whether explicitly or not, for the new movements of the proletarian youth of the mid-’70s. The referendum on divorce [1974] is a very important indication of this tendency towards the ‘autonomy of the social’.

  From this point on, it becomes impossible to speak of a ‘family album’ – be it even a family in crisis! The new mass subjectivity is totally alien to the official labour movement. Their respective languages and objectives no longer have any common ground. The very category of ‘extremism’ no longer explains anything; it merely confuses things. One can only be an ‘extremist’ in relation to something similar; but it is precisely this ‘similarity’ that is disappearing fast. Those who look for continuity, who care for a ‘family album’ can only turn to the separate and sectarian existence of the Marxist–Leninist ‘combatant organizations’.

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  All these three factors in the turning point which occurred between ’73 and ’75, but especially the last one, contributed to the birth of ‘the workers’ autonomy’ [‘l’autonomia operaia’].

  The autonomy is formed against the project of the [Historic] ‘Compromise’, in response to the crisis and failure of the groups, apart from ‘workerism’, interacting conflictually with the restructuring of production. But above all it expresses the new subjectivity, the richness of its multiple differences, its being a stranger to formal politics and to the mechanisms of political representation. It does not seek a ‘political breakthrough’ but embodies a concrete and articulated exercise of power within society.

  In this sense, localism is one of the defining characteristics of the autonomous experience. Rejecting any prospect of a possible alternative running of the state meant that there could be no centralized leadership of the movement. Each regional area of the autonomy follows its own concrete particularities of class composition, without seeing them as a limitation, but as its raison d’être. It is therefore practically impossible to reconstruct a unitary history of the autonomia movements between Rome and Milan, or between the Veneto and the south.

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  From ’74 to ’76, the practice of mass illegality and violence becomes more intensified and diffuse. But this phenomenon, unknown in the preceding period, has no overall ‘anti-state’ objective behind it. It is not a preparation for any ‘revolutionary’ rupture. This is the main point. In a metropolis, violence develops as a function of the need for an immediate satisfaction of needs, the conquest of ‘spaces’ that could be autonomously controlled – and largely in response to cuts in public spending.

  In ’74 the self-reduction of transport fares, organized by the unions in Turin, relaunched mass illegality, already experimented with, particularly during rent strikes. From now on, al
most everywhere, and in relation to the whole range of public services, this special form of guaranteed income was widely put into practice. While the unions had intended this self-reduction to be a symbolic gesture, the movement transformed it into a generalized, material form of struggle.

  But, more than self-reduction, it was above all the occupation of housing in San Basilio [Rome], in October 1974 that marked a turning point: a high level of spontaneous ‘militarization’ by the proletariat as a defensive mass response to bloody police aggression. A further step for the movement was the big Milan demonstrations in the spring of 1975, following the killings of Varalli and Zibecchi by fascists and policemen. Violent street confrontations were the point of departure for a whole series of struggles against the government’s economic ‘austerity’ measures – the first steps in the so-called ‘politics of sacrifice’. Throughout ’75 and ’76 we experienced the transition – in many ways ‘classic’ in the history of welfare struggles – from self-reduction to appropriation; from a defensive behaviour in the face of continuous increases in prices and bills to an offensive practice of the collective satisfaction of needs, which aims to overturn the mechanisms of the crisis.

  Appropriation – the best example of which was the night of the New York blackout – concerns all aspects of metropolitan life: free ‘political shopping’ and occupation of premises for free associative activities; the ‘serene habit’ of the young proletariat of not paying for the ticket at the cinema or concert; overtime bans; the lengthening of rest periods in factories. Above all, it represents the appropriation of ‘life time’, liberation from the constraints of factory command and a search for a new community.

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  By the mid-1970s, two distinct tendencies towards the extensive reproduction of violence had become apparent. These may be approximately defined as two different paths in the ‘militarization of the movement’. The first path was the movement of outright resistance to the restructuring of production in the large and medium-sized enterprises.

  Here the protagonists were numerous worker militants, formed politically in the period 1968–73, who were determined to defend at all costs the material basis on which their contractual strength had depended. Restructuring was lived as a political catastrophe. Above all, those factory militants who were most involved in the experience of the factory councils tended to identify restructuring with defeat; this was confirmed by repeated union sell-outs on work conditions. To preserve the factory as it was, in order to maintain a favourable relation of forces – this was the core of their position.

  It was around this set of problems and among the personnel of this political/trade union base that the Red Brigades – [in their second phase] from ’74– 75 – found support and were able to take root.

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  The second area of illegality, in many ways diametrically opposed to the first, was made up of those ‘social subjects’ who were the result of restructuring, of decentralization of production and of mobility; an absence of guarantees, of precarious part-time work, of fragmented forms of income and of the immediate impact of the overall territorial and social organization of capitalist command.

  This new proletarian figure, emerging from the process of restructuring, violently confronted local governments and the administration of income transfers and fought for the self-determination of the working day. This second type of illegality, which we can more or less identify with the autonomous movement, was never an organic project. It was distinguished by the total fit between the form of struggle chosen and the attainment of its given objectives. This involved the absence of separate ‘structures’ or ‘functions’ specialized in the use of force.

  Unless we accept ‘Pasolinism’ as an ultimate category of sociological understanding, it is impossible to deny that the diffuse violence of the movement in these years was a necessary process of self-identification and affirmation of a new and powerful productive subject, born out of the decline of the centrality of the factory and exposed to the massive pressure of the economic crisis.

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  The movement that exploded in ’77, in its essentials, expressed this new class composition and was by no means a phenomenon of marginalized strata.

  The ‘second society’ [Asor Rosa, PCI cultural spokesperson], this new class composition was already becoming a ‘first society’ from the point of view of its productive capacity, its technical–scientific intelligence and its advanced forms of social cooperation. The new social subjects reflected or anticipated in their struggles the growing identity between new productive processes and activities of communication – in short, the new reality of the computerized factory and the advanced tertiary sector.

  The movement [of ’77] was itself a richly productive force, independent and antagonistic. The critique of wage labour now took an affirmative direction, creatively asserting itself in the form of ‘self-organized entrepreneurship’ and in the partial running from below the mechanisms of the welfare system. This ‘second society’, which was centre stage in ’77, was ‘asym metrical’ in its relation to state power. No longer was there a frontal confrontation; rather there was a sidestepping or, in practical terms, a search for spaces of freedom and income in which the movement could consolidate and grow. This ‘asymmetrical’ state was a precious fact, and one which testified to the solidity of the social processes underlying it. But it needed time. Time and mediation. Time and negotiation.

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  However, the restoring operation of the Historic Compromise denied time or space to the movement and re-proposed a symmetrical relation of opposition between the struggles and the state.

  The movement found itself subjected to a frightening process of acceleration, blocked in its potential articulation, in a total absence of margins of mediation. This was quite different from the process in other European countries, most obviously in the case of Germany, where the repressive operation was accompanied by forms of bargaining with the mass movements, and hence did not directly attack their reproduction. In the [Italian] ‘Historic Compromise’, the repressive net was cast exceedingly widely; legitimacy was denied to any forces developing outside of, and opposed to, the new corporative regulation of conflict. The repressive intention in Italy developed a generality that was aimed directly against spontaneous social forces. Thus it happened that the systematic adoption of political–military provisions by the government reintroduced ‘exogenously’ the necessity of general political struggle, often purely and simply as a ‘struggle for survival’, while it marginalized and ghettoized the emancipatory practices of the movement and its dense positivity at the level of quality of life and of the direct satisfaction of needs.

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  The organized autonomy movement [autonomia] found itself caught between ghettoization and direct confrontation with the state. Its ‘schizophrenia’ and its subsequent defeat can be traced to the attempt to close this space by securing a relationship between the rich social network of the movement on the one hand and, on the other, its own need to confront the state.

  Within the space of a few months, this attempt proved to be quite impossible and failed on both fronts. The unprecedented acceleration of ’77 caused the organized autonomy slowly to lose contact with those social subjects who pulled out of traditional political struggle and followed their own various solutions – at times ‘individualist’, at times of ‘co-management’ – in order to work less, live better, and maintain their own spaces for freely creative production. this same ‘acceleration’ led the autonomous organizations to break off relations with those militaristic drives which, being present within the autonomy movement itself, soon became a separate tendency pushing for the formation of armed organizations. At that point the autonomy movement discounted all the political weaknesses of its own political–cultural model, concentrating on the linear growth of the movement, on its continual expansion and radicalization. Struggles were often read by the autonomy as a negation of all political mediation rather than as a b
asis upon which political mediation could operate. Immediate antagonism was counterposed to any dialogue, any ‘negotiation’ and any ‘use’ of the institutions.

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  From the end of 1977 and throughout 1978 there was a growth and multiplication of formations operating at a specifically military level, while the crisis of the organized autonomy became more acute.

  Many saw in the equation ‘political struggle = armed struggle’ the only adequate response to the trap in which the movement had been caught by the politics of the Historic Compromise. In a first phase – in a scenario repeated many times – numbers of militants within the movement made the so-called ‘leap’ from endemic violence to armed struggle, yet conceived of this choice and its heavy obligations as an ‘articulation’ of the movement’s struggles, as the creation of a kind of ‘servicing structure’. But a form of organization specifically geared to armed action revealed itself to be structurally lacking in homogeneity with the practices of the movement. Sooner or later, it could only go its own separate way. Thus the numerous ‘combatant organizations’ that proliferated in the period 1977–8 ended up either resembling the model of the Red Brigades, which they had initially rejected, or even joining them. The Red Brigades, as the historic guerrilla formation engaged in a ‘war against the state’ which was totally separated from the dynamic of the movement, ended by growing ‘parasitically’, in the wake of the defeat of the mass struggles.

  In Rome especially, at the end of ’77, the Red Brigades made a large-scale recruitment from the ranks of the movement, which was in deep crisis. During that year the autonomy had come up against all its own limitations, opposing state militarism with radical replays of street confrontations, which produced a dispersion of the movement’s potential instead of consolidating it. The repressive straitjacket, and the real errors of the autonomists in Rome and some other areas, opened the way for the expansion of the Red Brigades. This organization, which had criticized harshly the struggles of 1977, was now, paradoxically, gathering remarkable fruits in terms of reinforcing its organization.