A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #10-26 - Utopias and Authoritarianism in the Decade 1968-1977 (Final Part) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Paper presented at the Carrara Conference (October 11-12, 2025) on the 
80th Anniversary of the FAI ---- The '77 Movement ---- Reviving the 
antagonistic and revolutionary imagination would be the countercultural 
elements developed especially in libertarian circles, which gave rise 
first to youth clubs and social centers, then to forms of workers' 
autonomy, and finally to the great '77 movement, which would represent a 
further moment of social rupture, but with characteristics completely 
different from those of '68.

It is no longer the '68 of students demanding a different curriculum, a 
different transmission of knowledge, a different school organization, 
and so on-a movement essentially proactive in its revolutionary 
protest-but a radically alternative movement that seeks total rupture, a 
movement that grasps the reasons for the defeat of the previous movement 
in electoral drift and institutional misery and that denounces the 
progressive revival of the demands of '68 by a power capable of 
reinventing itself and integrating modernism into the most unscrupulous 
party formations, such as Bettino Craxi's Socialist Party.

The first signs of this began with the protests at the Parco Lambro 
festival in Milan in the summer of 1976, where the plight of the youth 
of the time emerged in all its dimensions, forced into a life of great 
existential misery, between precarious and underpaid jobs, an 
increasingly inadequate and distant school system, escape into heroin, a 
"free" time filled with boredom, alienation, and social emptiness. 
Family and school were no longer capable of containing a mass of young 
people politicized and shaped by the previous cycle of struggles, even 
within party and ideological frameworks now experiencing a credibility 
crisis.

An initial response came from the first circles forming around the 
gathering places of this proletarian youth on the outskirts of cities. 
They launched the practice of self-organization in clubs, festivals, 
moments of self-awareness, occupations, and metropolitan patrols, to 
regain control of their own destiny and to launch their own challenge to 
the cities and the existing order.

In Milan, in December 1976, an assembly of two thousand young people 
decided to boycott the premiere at the Teatro della Scala-a traditional 
rendezvous for the wealthy Milanese bourgeoisie and the dominant 
political circles-with several marches that intended to converge in the 
city center. This was followed by the militarization of the city and a 
harsh police attack on the demonstrations. Twenty-one people were injured.

At the same time, following measures by the Ministry of Education aimed 
at dismantling the liberalization of curricula achieved in 1968, the 
first university occupations began: Palermo, Turin, Pisa, Naples, Rome, 
then Milan, Bari, Bologna, Genoa, and Cagliari.

In Rome, the situation quickly became tense, with fascists attempting to 
storm the university campus on February 1, 1977, shooting as they fled, 
shooting a literature student, Guido Bellachioma, in the back of the 
head. While an anti-fascist demonstration was being called by the 
unions, a student march left the university to attack the MSI 
headquarters on Via Sommacampagna, which was set ablaze. On the way 
back, a shootout between plainclothes police and protesters left three 
people injured. The PCI took advantage of the situation to attack the 
movement, and the CGIL called a demonstration at Rome's Sapienza 
University, led by its general secretary, Luciano Lama, to regain 
control of the situation. It was the spark that set the prairie ablaze: 
the student mobilization was so strong that it provoked a reaction from 
the union security service, resulting in clashes and Lama's flight from 
the university, an event of enormous symbolic and political impact.

The movement grew stronger, school occupations multiplied, and social 
tension grew, culminating in lively demonstrations such as the one in 
Rome on March 5, 1977, harshly opposed by the police, or the 
particularly well-attended and determined one on March 11 in Bologna 
following the murder of Francesco Lorusso by a Carabiniere. The death of 
this Lotta Continua student, particularly active in the movement, 
triggered a series of protests by the movement itself: in Rome, Milan, 
Bologna, and other cities. In Rome, the following day, during the 
movement's national demonstration, fierce clashes erupted, an armory was 
attacked, and guns and Molotov cocktails appeared in several places. In 
Bologna, the armored vehicles of the Carabinieri appear, a preview of 
the harsh repression that will follow and which - Along with the intense 
debate that would engulf the movement following differing assessments of 
recent events, with their accompanying widespread illegality, more or 
less armed, it would contribute to the development of divisions and 
rifts that would heavily influence subsequent developments.

The movement's most creative components, feminists and libertarians, 
gradually distanced themselves from the projects of the so-called 
"workers' autonomy" movement, especially its militarist components.

Lorusso was not the only one killed in 1977. He was followed by: a 
police officer, Passamonti, who was shot in a shooting in response to 
the university eviction in Rome; eighteen-year-old student Giorgiana 
Masi, who was struck in the back by a bullet fired by a plainclothes 
officer during a radical demonstration commemorating the victory of the 
divorce referendum; and Brigadier Custrà in Milan, who was shot in the 
head during an autonomist march. The clash with fascists intensified, as 
they repeatedly attacked left-wing militants in Rome, killing Lotta 
Continua militant Walter Rossi. In response, in Turin, Molotov cocktails 
were thrown at the "Angelo Azzurro" bar, considered a fascist hangout, 
killing unemployed chemical engineer Roberto de Crescenzio. Fascist 
gunshots wounded four more left-wing militants in Rome and killed 
Benedetto Petrone of the Italian Communist Youth Federation in Bari.

More than two thousand attacks, of varying magnitude, were reported 
throughout the year.

The state responded by tightening repressive laws, primarily the 
infamous Reale law, which increased preventive detention and legalized 
the use of firearms by police in all circumstances.

A conference, initially proposed by a group of French intellectuals 
concerned about the state of civil liberties in Italy, aims to address 
this deterioration. The event is scheduled for September in Bologna, a 
city that has seen armored vehicles in the streets. Attendance is 
enormous; approximately one hundred thousand young people from across 
Italy are meeting for three days to find answers and a future for a 
movement crushed between mounting repression, an increasingly 
exclusionary social situation, and a comprehensive restructuring of the 
world of work thanks to the introduction of new technologies that are 
reviving the debate on the "refusal of work." But the conference instead 
becomes a stage where obsolete organizational models and ideologies are 
revived, where the remnants of the small parties born in the wake of '68 
(Avanguardia Operaia, Lotta Continua, Movimento dei Lavoratori per il 
Socialismo) are expelled, and where Autonomia Operaia is proposing the 
political leadership of the movement. The procession that concluded the 
three-day event, large, imposing, yet impotent, effectively brought to a 
close a period of great, unfulfilled hopes.

In reality, the '77 movement was not truly representative of the Italian 
social situation, but rather of pockets that were certainly significant, 
particularly present in certain geographic areas, but essentially a 
minority. The movement failed to permeate Italian society, failing to 
ensure that the need for revolution became a widely shared element among 
large segments of the population, who instead remained aligned with the 
traditional left-wing parties and unions-a left that became a state by 
siding with the historic compromise and the declaration of loyalty to 
NATO, in favor of corporate restructuring and the strengthening of the 
state.

Deprived of a dialogue with the broader social context, incapable of 
finding new paths capable of providing a positive outcome to the ongoing 
crisis, the movement-or at least a large portion of it-was left with 
nothing but a process of radicalization that took on very marked 
characteristics.

The Armed Struggle

The further the PCI "became a state," with its politics of sacrifice and 
alliance with the DC, the party of bad governance and corruption, the 
more the movement's intolerance grew, or at least among what remained of 
it. With the space for effective union action closed, given the union's 
alignment with the policy of compromise, most people seemed left with no 
choice but to engage in armed struggle, even if it wasn't a case of 
spiraling into heroin addiction (in 1978, there were 60,000 to 70,000 
heroin addicts, compared to 10,000 the previous year). From the early 
months of 1978, there was a constant crescendo of groups and armed actions.

We were witnessing an escalation that saw the Red Brigades as one of the 
main points of reference in the desire to transform social conflict into 
civil war, despite their diverse analyses and proposals. But many other 
collectives and groups, such as Prima Linea, Comunisti Combattenti, 
Proletari Armati, Azione Rivoluzionaria, and so on, emerged, sometimes 
in competition with one another, increasingly disconnected from the real 
dynamics of the working masses. The 1979 murder by the Red Brigades of a 
union delegate in Genoa, Guido Rossa, linked to his alleged denunciation 
of the group, effectively triggered an irreparable rift between the 
traditional working class and the Red Brigades' plan to bring it into 
armed conflict with the institutions.

In reality, there was no real possibility of a revolutionary war because 
the conditions for a truly revolutionary process were not in place. But 
the purely repressive responses of those in power gave further respite 
to those who believed that armed struggle was the decisive factor. 
Starting in 1978, an escalation began, culminating in the kidnapping and 
murder of DC president Aldo Moro and a steady stream of crippling and 
murders of magistrates, journalists, teachers, and so on. This 
ultimately resulted in a resurgence of all forms of social conflict, 
caught between accusations of collusion with Red Brigades terrorism and 
reformist apathy.

For example, in the early months of 1978, after considerable effort, an 
independent strike was organized in a series of factories where 
collectives operating in major Milanese manufacturing 
facilities-Italtel, Motta Alemagna, Magneti Marelli, Pirelli-had done 
significant networking and dialogue. But the independent strike took 
place on the very day of Aldo Moro's kidnapping. As soon as they took to 
the streets, news of Moro's kidnapping reached them. Police armored 
vehicles quickly arrived, and uncertainty about what to do became 
palpable. The union immediately called a protest strike, effectively 
covering up the self-organized strike. It was then clear that the level 
of conflict triggered by Moro's kidnapping was such that it was forcing 
the movements to make a radical and irreversible choice.

Following Moro's kidnapping, a repressive pall fell over all protests, 
with shadowing and surveillance. A high school teacher in Milan, at a 
student assembly, dared to say that, after all, Moro wasn't the saint 
they were trying to portray him as, but a member of a wing of the 
Christian Democrats, one of the main figures responsible for the 
anti-grassroots and repressive policies underway in the country. Her 
case received widespread media coverage and was used to call everyone to 
order in defense of the Republic "born from the Resistance."

The claim "neither with the State nor with the Red Brigades," advanced 
by sectors that did not identify with the militarism of the armed 
groups, but did not intend to side with police repression, was harshly 
criminalized: the right to free opinion was fundamentally called into 
question.

With the operation of April 7, 1979, carried out by the judiciary 
against those identified as the leaders of the '77 movement, the 
repression took a new leap forward, attempting to link the most 
"frontier" expression of the movement, the Organized Workers' Autonomy, 
to the clandestine armed groups, with the construction of a theorem 
named after the magistrate who conceived it, Calogero. This theorem 
essentially brings together forms of street protest, the pickets held by 
self-organized groups of workers, those who drew guns in marches, and 
armed gangs: a broad theorem that identifies a single subversive plan 
against the Republic "born from the Resistance." It targets many 
political figures and activists, such as Toni Negri, Ferrari Bravo, 
Oreste Scalzone, Emilio Vesce, Franco Piperno, and others, linked to 
past militancy in Potere Operaio, along with dozens of lesser-known 
militants. This operation, which lands these figures in prison and 
initiates trials that end with heavy sentences, many of which escape by 
fleeing abroad, effectively represents the liquidation of what remained 
of the '77 movement.

For their part, the armed groups, following the laws on dissociation and 
repentance, the growing isolation from traditional sectors of reference, 
the weakening of the movements' political capacity, and a loss of 
meaning in their actions, reduced to a succession of senseless murders, 
entered a profound crisis, culminating in their dissolution.

With the climate of historic compromise waning, Bettino Craxi's 
Socialist Party emerged as the government, ushering in a new era: that 
of Milan's "da bere" (the Milan of the nightlife).

Massimo Varengo

https://umanitanova.org/utopie-e-autoritarismi-nel-decennio-1968-1977-ultima-parte/
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