CHAPTER 28.1
REVIEWING THE EXPERIENCE OF ITALY IN THE 1970S
by Toni Negri
In Italy, the 1970s actually began in
1967-68 and ended in 1983. In 1967-68, as in all the developed countries, the
student movement took to the barricades. However, the breadth and impact of
this part of the movement was not as extensive as in other European countries:
in Italy, the student May '68 was not a particularly significant moment.
But the same cannot be said when one
takes in the broader picture: in effect, the movement opened a breach in the
system of power, and into this breach was swallowed, in successive waves, the
social movement that developed in protest against a system which was
increasingly falling behind in modernising
capitalism, and was repressing the democratic potential inherited from the
anti-fascist struggle and the Resistance.
What happened then was that, after the
students, other social protagonists emerged to make their mark on the political
scene. For example, 1969 was the year of the factory working class, with new
Factory Councils emerging [consigli di fabbrica], an egalitarian
movement fighting for equal wage rises for all, and a deregulation of capitalist
policy towards the labour market. This phase of
struggle was crowned by the achievement of the Statuto
dei Lavoratori ["workers'
statute"]. Immediately after this came the legalisation
of divorce, the implementation of regional decentralisation,
the recognition of conscientious objection as a valid social stance, and large
numbers of legislative innovations which "unfroze" the old post-war
society. In other words, there were a variety of institutional responses to the
continuous unfolding of struggles not only of students, or only of factory
workers that had been opened by 1968.
The "strategy of tension"
In around 1973-74, the framework begins
to change. Up until that point, the relationship between the social movements
and the "Left" as a totality had, despite passing difficulties, been
essentially dialectical. After the Oil Crisis of 1973 and the first capitalist
counter-offensives, things changed. The Italian parliamentary Left broke off
dialogue with the new social forces, and the majority component of that Left,
the Italian Communist Party (PCI), proposed a "Historic Compromise" {compromesso storico) with its
long-time adversaries, the Christian Democrats (DC).
Now, it is worth remembering that the
Italian political system of that time was characterised
(for reasons related to Italy's position within the "Cold War"
scenario as an "imperfect two-party system" [bipartitismo
imperfetto]. In other words, in the normal run of
parliamentary life there was a convention that the PCI was to be excluded: whatever
gains it may have made in electoral terms, the party of Enrico
Berlinguer [1] was excluded from power, and that
power was conceived as remaining in the hands of the Christian Democracy,
ostensibly a bastion of Western values. However, despite this institutional
constraint, the DC and the PCI had contrived to create a system of power which
made possible a degree of equilibrium, and which offered a chance of moderating
social conflicts when they broke out. Thus, alongside this "imperfect
two-party system" we had what was called at the time an "imperfect
co-associationism" [co-associativismo
imperfetto].
At the start of the 1970s, building on
the base of a growing electoral power which it was acquiring from the
development of these social movements, the PCI decided that it was time for it
to play a bigger role in the parliamentary majority. From now on it presented
itself not merely as a "party of struggle", but as a "party of
struggle and government'. From 1973-4 onwards, Parliament appeared to be operating
on this basis with a degree of unanimity. In 1978 the PCI went so far as to
offer active support to the new government. And in so doing, it was to step
down from the last remaining controlling functions which were assigned to it
under the "imperfect two-party system", as the political
representative of the opposition. The "co-associationism"
became "perfect".
The four years from 1974 to 1978 saw a
progressive tightening of the alliance between the DC and the PCI: this
alliance extended outwards from government and parliament to the whole system
of power, from the central administration out to the periphery, to the trade
unions, to the running of communications and the media and even, remarkably, to
the police. However, at the same time Italy's broadly-based social struggles
were becoming more intense, and the social movements broke definitively with
all forms of institutional representation. We should not forget that these were
battles of enormous extent and massive intensity.
Beyond the simple exercise of that
"counter-power" which they had embodied since 1968, the social
movements were also nurtured by the consequences of Italy's monetary deflation
policies and by the industrial restructuring through which an initial but
definitive "emergence from Fordism" was
taking place, in terms of Italy's systems of manufacture and production. As it
happened, the "Historic Compromise" was built around precisely these
"austerity policies" against which the social protest movements were
being organised.
Thus, when the repression repression
by the employers in the factories, and repression by the police in society as a
whole, making use of a whole new range of laws stepped over the line and went
beyond the bounds of democracy, the resistance in turn began to arm itself. The
Red Brigades, for instance, initially emerged from among workers in the large
factories in the North, which had been subjected to savage restructuring; [2]
and it was in these same factories, or in the communities associated with them,
that practices of "proletarian justice", sometimes at the mass level
and sometimes clandestine, began to appear.
A further independent and
over-determined variable should be added to this interweaving of social and
political components, which from this point onwards was continuously being
crossed and re-crossed by an uninterrupted series of working-class struggles
and manifestations of urban violence. This new element was the direct
provocation for which I would argue that the only appropriate term is
"terrorism" on the part of the state organs charged with
maintaining NATO interests before, during and after the Historic
Compromise".
After the Milan bombing of 1969,
terrorist operations by these state apparatuses continued, year after year, and
included the bombing of demonstrations and public meetings, and the bombing of
trains and stations which culminated in the appalling Bologna bombing in 1980.
[3] (To date not one of the perpetrators or organisers
of these massacres has been imprisoned.) Criminal actions of this kind
obviously added fuel to the fires of a Resistance which was only fighting for
the right to self-expression, and had the means to do so.
In 1977, the movement experienced a
major flare-up in Bologna, a city which was a showcase for the Communist
Party's municipal policies. At the end of a demonstration yet another Left-wing
militant was killed by the police. Rioting broke out. The Communist mayor and
the "Historic Compromise" government sent armoured
cars to sweep away the barricades. In that same period, the national secretary
of the Communist CGIL trade union was chased off the campus of the University
of Rome, after violent clashes, by a mass student movement which by then had
extended to include the urban proletariat.
In Milan, Turin, Naples and Padova there were huge marches during which, more and more
frequently, armed extremist groupings began to appear. They let it be known
that they saw themselves as valid components of the movement. Among the working
class and the urban proletarian movements the resistance against restructuring
was growing irresistibly, within a climate of massive resentment towards what
people saw as betrayal by the official Left. By this time Italy was virtually
in a state of civil war. None of the actors were any longer in control, and
this was a tragedy that was to end in defeat. For everybody.
The first to be defeated were the
social movements. Having cut themselves off totally from the representatives of
the traditional Left, which proved incapable of either providing adequate
political forms for the expression of counter-power, or of controlling it, the
social movements were thus dragged into the abyss of an extremism that was
becoming increasingly blind and violent. The kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro
[4] was the beginning of the end for a movement which, in advancing its
military objectives, had lost the ability to assess the political consequences
of its actions. Caught in the grip of this crisis, the political process which
had created a substantial social stratum of hundreds of thousands of activists
and militants, was soon to be dissolved by a
repression that was massive and powerful.
The political forces which embodied the
"Historic Compromise" were also searching for a way out the social
isolation in which they now found themselves, but they did it by opting for
policies of repression pure and simple. They won, but it turned out to be a
Pyrrhic victory. We had the introduction of special police, special prisons,
special courts and trials, and special emergency measures imposed by the
government: what was effectively a state of emergency ended by reshaping and
adding to the isolation of the constitutional structure of a political system
that had already been butchered by the previous realities of "imperfect bipartitism".
All this had dramatic consquences. The first to suffer was the PCI. In the years
that followed, it came to be at the mercy of the Right, and experienced a
continuous decline in its electoral support. At the same time it failed to
re-establish any kind of contact with the social movements, which by then had
become politically marginalised. The Communist Party
was to become something which in its original glorious history it had never
previously been: a bureaucratic grouping, cut off from society, and locked into
the machinery of power. The Christian Democrat party, for its part, lost its
central constitutional position during the course of these developments. It
became inward-looking, concentrating on maintaining its local power bases, and
it was no longer capable of providing the means for an understanding of the
social and productive landscape from within which the crisis had been created.
1983 gave Italy the government of the [Socialist] Bettino Craxi,
and it was their great distinction to have transformed the isolation of the
political classes into a massive machinery of corruption and degradation of
society and the state. The 1970s had come to an end.
It is worth asking whether the 1970s
could have created different outcomes, within the political situation and the
political system of the time.
The answer is yes, but only on one
condition: if there had been at that moment a mode of political representation
capable of absorbing the consequences of the very profound social transformations
that the movements were imposing. No such thing existed at the time, and
subsequently the problem was not posed.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the radical restructuring of the framework of Italy's parliamentary and
political life, the only impulses towards constitutional change that have
emerged in Italy (which, incidentally, have proved to be unrealisable,
as is confirmed by the constitutional reform project outlined by the Bicameral
Commission) [5] have focussed on the upper echelons
(on changes in the presidential system) and, consequently, on the setting-up of
increasingly efficient and centralised instruments of
pre-emption, mediation and repression. There have been no proposals for new
forms of political representation, or of new channels for substantive
democracy. As for the activity of the government, given the present realities
of the Second Republic, it has been concerned essentially with neutralising social conflict and ensuring the compatibility
of Italy's system with the "world market".
The defeat of the movement of the 1970s
a defeat which was both political (as in other European countries) and
military (in the case of Italy) has not even remorely
opened the way for a democratic renewal. It is appropriate for those who were
involved in those movements to bemoan their own tactical naivety, and despair
of their strategic illusions, but they nevertheless have the right to observe
that the problem that we represented still exists. Today, more than ever, Italy
needs to rediscover the democratic values that were being experimented with in
those years.
________________________
NOTES:
Toni Negri was one of the historic leadership of the
Italian revolutionary group "Potere Operaio". At the time of writing this article he was
serving a prison sentence in Rebibbia prison, Rome.
After fourteen years of exile in Paris, he took a decision which led to his
giving himself up to the Italian authorities on 1 July 1997. His decision was a
campaigning attempt to close a chapter in his own personal "judicial
history" and that of other far- Left militants who were also currently in
exile. Negri was originally sentenced to thirty years
imprisonment for "armed insurrection against the state", and also to
four and a half years for being "morally responsible" for the clashes
that were taking place between revolutionary activists and the police in Milan
between 1973 and 1977. Theoretically, when remission and his time on remand
were taken into account, he still had more than four years to serve. There had
been a well-argued Italian campaign calling for indulto
[remission of sentences] for these revolutionary Leftists, but thus far
Parliament had been unwilling to vote it through. Meanwhile, as of late July
1998, Negri was given permission to work outside the
prison on day-release. In this article he recapped the political experience of
the 1970s in Italy.
1. Enrico Berlinguer followed Palmiro Togliatti and Luigi Longo
to become the third General Secretary of the PCI in the post-war period. After
General Pinochet's coup d'ιtat in Chile, he put
forward the notion of the "Historic Compromise" (1973) and, within
Europe, created a "Eurocommunist" line that
countered that of Moscow.
2. The Brigate Rosse ["Red
Brigades"] were, like Prima Linea ["Front
Line", 1976-80], armed organisations of the far
Left. Operating at a more general political level were organisations
such as Lotta Continue ["Fight On", 1969-76],
Potere Operaio ["Workers'
Power", 1969-73], Autonomia Operaia
["Workers' Autonomy"] etc.
3. The explosion of
a bomb at the Agricultural Bank in Piazza Fontana, Milan, on 12 December 1969
(with 16 dead and 98 wounded) marked the start of the "strategy of
tension" which was to culminate in the bombing of Bologna central station
on 2 August 1980 (85 dead and 200 wounded). In both these cases, as the legal
authorities subsequently confirmed, the authors of this blind terrorism had
been the far Right. According to statistics from the Italian Ministry of the
Interior, 67.55% of violence ("affrays, guerrilla actions and destruction
of property") committed in Italy between 1969 and 1980 were attributable
to the far Right, 26.5% to the far Left, and 5.95% to others.
4. At the moment of
his kidnapping on 16 March 1978, Aldo Moro, the president of the Christian Democrat
party, was negotiating with Enrico Berlinguer on possible ways of bringing the PCI more fully
into government.
5. The aim of the
Bicameral Commission, under the presidency of Massimo D'Alema,
the head of the Party of Left Democracy (ex-PCI), was to open negotiations for
a constitutional reform project which would lead, among other things, to
universal suffrage elections for the presidency of the republic, and changes in
Italy's electoral system. Its work was terminated in May 1998, after a U-turn
by Forza Italia's Silvio
Berlusconi, who at one time had endorsed the project.
[The notes for this
article are edited from Le Monde diplomatique,
where this translation was originally published.]