Week 4: Armed struggle in Italy

In lieu of a blog post, here's a couple of quotes from my book (not in the MMU library, unfortunately, but if anyone's interested I may be able to dig out an electronic copy). Communists, cycles of protests, people playing with bombs - as far as extremism goes, it's all there.

On 12 December 1969, a bomb ... exploded in Milan, in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana, causing 16 deaths. The initial investigation was led by the police officer in charge of monitoring the local radical Left, Luigi Calabresi; his investigation focused on a local anarchist group. While being interrogated, the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli fell, or was pushed, from the fourth-floor window of Calabresi’s office. On the Left, Piazza Fontana was immediately (and, as it turned out, correctly) labelled a state massacre; the bombing, the death of Pinelli and the subsequent repression were widely believed to form part of the Right’s preparations for a coup

The actions of the [leftist] ‘armed struggle’ groups were mainly directed against property rather than people; all violence against the person was directed against individuals, and most was non-lethal; and targets were invariably selected for political or strategic reasons, albeit with varying degrees of accuracy. Interviewed by a former member of the BR [Red Brigades] in 1997, former Minister of the Interior Francesco Cossiga went so far as to deny that the BR had been terrorists: ‘Terrorists plant bombs in cinemas. This was something else: your forms of action were precisely those of the partisan war’

in 1973 the BR would commit itself to ‘the war against fascism which is not only the fascism of [neo-fascist] black shirts but the fascism of ... Christian Democrat white shirts [and] the resistance inside the factories’ ... the BR exploited the emotional appeal of the Resistance even as they reconceptualised it.

"Austerity, by definition, means restrictions on certain availabilities to which we have become accustomed . . . But we are deeply convinced that to replace certain habits of life with others that are more exacting and not extravagant, can lead not to a worsening in the quality of life, but to substantial improvement, to growth in the ‘humanity’ of life" (Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer recommending pay cuts, January 1977)

Speaking from the back of a lorry, surrounded by union stewards, [Communist union leader] Lama was faced by an absurd and vicious parody: a dummy mounted on a set of library steps, surrounded by Metropolitan Indians and bearing a pink cardboard heart with the message ‘Nessuno Lama’ (‘Nobody loves him’). Chanting ironic slogans such as ‘More work, less pay!’ and ‘Poverty to the workers!’, the Indians pelted the stewards with water and paint. Lama exhorted his audience to save the university from the autonomist provocateurs: "We must fight and defeat fascism, reactionary temptations, subversive provocations, every form of violence and every irrational temptation. Breaking windows and smashing up university buildings ... only damages the students’ cause. The workers’ movement ... also fought against fascism by jealously defending the factories, preventing them from being destroyed". After his address the stewards counter-attacked, destroying the Indians’ dummy. The fighting escalated ... by the end of the day the autonomists had driven the Communists out and withdrawn, after which the campus was evacuated and surrounded by police

[For the Communists] what was unacceptable about the movements was that they used violence; what was unacceptable about the violence of the movements was that it was carried out by the movements. The Party’s critique of ‘violence’ and ‘intolerance’ can be understood as a form of scapegoating, loading the movements (and the Autonomists, above all) with all that was unruly and troubling about physical force tactics while associating the Party itself with ‘firmness’ and ‘discipline’.  

By 1979, the activists of the second cycle had been comprehensively excluded from the workplace, from working-class communities and from the streets; there was almost no one left standing, apart from the BR. As a result, significant numbers of activists moved on to the terrain which the BR had prepared. It was the ideological and physical exclusion of a strong movement, rather than the absorption of a movement in decline, which gave a brief period of mass support to armed struggle tactics, as well as helping the more organised armed groups to gain an extended lease of life.

The hostility of the Communists towards the armed groups and the remnants of Autonomia reached its peak in April 1979. On 7 April the Communist-aligned judge Pietro Calogero issued a warrant for the arrest of [twelve] autonomists, who were accused of involvement with the BR. According to the ‘Calogero theorem’, the BR, the smaller armed groups and the area of Autonomia made up a single subversive organisation, operating on overt and clandestine levels. Successive waves of arrests, and a series of qualifications to Calogero’s highly coloured model, followed in June, July and December 1979

For the most committed activists of the armed groups, the closure forced by Calogero seems, like the 1977 closure of engagement with the mass movements, to have prompted a renewed commitment to yet more confrontational repertoires. ... the years after 1979 saw some of the worst excesses of the ‘years of lead’, with a dwindling number of groups carrying out more violent actions.

One final quote, from the novel The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini. The narrator's friend has visited him in prison, where he's awaiting trial for membership of an armed group (he's not guilty, but he refuses to denounce people he regarded as his friends).

I said to him I ask myself sometimes now it’s all over I ask myself what did it all mean our whole story all the things we did what did we get from all the things we did he said I don’t believe it matters that it’s all over I believe what matters is that we did what we did and that we think it was the right thing to do that’s the only thing that matters I believe

Week 3: The Left from the English Revolution to the Situationist International

It’s coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It’s coming from the feel
that this ain’t exactly real,
or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It’s coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don’t pretend to understand at all.
It’s coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

What's this about - how can it possibly make sense to say that democracy is coming to the U.S.A.? And what does it have to do with the history of left-wing extremism?

Glad you asked.

The word 'left' - and related words like 'radical' - started to be used in politics in the eighteenth century, the period of the French Revolution and the American declaration of independence. What these words meant, back then, had to do with being in favour of democracy: if you were on the Left, you weren't happy with monarchy, aristocracy, hierarchy, tradition and so on. If you wanted democracy you were on the Left; if you thought that somebody else wanted too much democracy, you'd say they were on the radical Left.

In the mid-nineteenth century what Marx called "the question of property" began to be at the centre of political debate. The question was not whether citizens should be politically equal (that battle was in the process of being won) but whether they should be materially equal. For Marx this was related to the question of class power, and class struggle. Perhaps foreshortening the historical process slightly, Marx envisaged the confrontation between workers and bosses (proletariat and bourgeoisie) ending in the revolutionary victory of the workers, just as the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy had ended in a bourgeois victory.

These are often seen as two very different political battles, but I would argue - as Ralph Miliband argued, and Alexis de Tocqueville before him - that the "question of property" was also the question of democracy: what the workers of Marx's time were demanding was, precisely, the right to manage their own work and their own livelihood, rather than being dependent on capitalists and subordinate to them. The battle of democracy had been won on one front; it shifted to another.

The record of socialism and Communism in the twentieth century was, it has to be said, mixed. On one hand, we can't deny that the defeat of the Nazi regime was very largely the achievement of Stalin's Red Army. On the other, if you had the choice you wouldn't want to be in Stalin's Red Army, or a citizen of Stalin's USSR for that matter. The total collapse of Communism as an economic and political system after 1989 told its own story: nobody believed in the system - or had done for some time - and they didn't believe in it because it didn't work. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Communism was to hold up the possibility of an alternative. For many years, governments in the West felt that they needed to make some concession to demands for workers' rights and socialised welfare, because the alternative might be an upheaval that could take their country into the Communist orbit. The rise of neo-liberalism coincides quite closely with the disappearance of the Communist bloc; I don't think it's a coincidence.

Be that as it may, throughout the 20th century the Communist bloc seemed to be - and claimed to be - the socialist alternative to capitalism, and it didn't look too inviting. Perhaps it was this perceived blockage to the left which led to the emergence of a third version of the Left: a Left which stressed individual freedom and creativity, which celebrated disrespect for authority and demanded the right to re-create everyday life. And this new Left - inventive, intransigent, confrontational, sometimes comical, sometimes alarming - did what the socialist Left had never achieved (at least in one country), immobilising France in a wildcat general strike and bringing it to the brink of revolution.

Perhaps more importantly, the tactics and ideas and attitude of this mid-20th-century Left - the creativity, the disrespect, the intransigence - have contributed some major innovations to the language of the mainstream Left, and they continue to do so. The Situationist approach to politics was echoed by Occupy: like the Situationists, the Occupy movement demanded the right to democratise the present moment, transforming everyday life into revolutionary festivity.

Can we fit this very different form of leftism into the same framework as the earlier ones? I htink we can. The English revolutionaries of 1649, the American revolutionaries of 1776 and the French revolutionaries of 1789 wanted political democracy, abolishing aristocratic rule. The revolutionaries of 1848, 1917, 1949 wanted economic democracy, abolishing the rule of capital.The Situationists in 1968 and Occupy in 2011-12 wanted democracy in an even more far-reaching form, abolishing all forms of unaccountable authority. It's a continuing story, and it hasn't ended yet.

Next week we'll be looking at how a similar movement played out in Italy, and - unhappily - how parts of the movement drifted into the blind alley of terrorism.

Play us out, Leonard:

From the church where the outcasts can hide
from the Masque where the blood is dignified
like the fingers on your hand
like an hourglass of sand
we can separate but not divide.
And I know your baby’s missing
but we sighted her today,
she was cleaning her machine-gun,
she was waving her beret:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Week 2: Extremism and social movements

This week we looked at the opposition between 'extreme' and 'moderate' or 'mainstream' political groups, and at the way that extreme ideas and forms of action can become mainstream. This involved using some concepts from the sociology of social movements.

The life cycle of a social movement goes something like this. A social movement forms in response to system blockage; it uses innovative tactics and puts forward new frames. It then keeps up the pressure until some of those new frames and tactics get adopted by mainstream forces. The movement's supporters see that they've got at least some of what they wanted, and the movement subsides.

In a bit more detail:

1. Social movements are broad groups united by a cultural identity, opposition to the status quo and autonomy from the political sphere
2. Movements form in response to system blockage: i.e. they can't get what they want through legitimate political routes (think women agitating for the vote 100 years ago)
3. Movements use new and innovative tactics: new ways of protesting and getting noticed
4. They put forward new and modified frames: ways of 'framing' issues so as to make the movement's position more persuasive. (A movement to liberalise the drug laws might 'frame' cannabis as a less dangerous drug than alcohol.)
5. They then keeps pushing (while the political mainstream pushes back) until...
6. Some of the new frames and tactics get adopted, usually in the form of political reforms
7. The movements then subside as people see no reason to support them any more

There are three really important points here, which can easily be overlooked. Firstly, while the movement is on the rise, it will attract both support and opposition. In particular, it will be opposed by the parties and institutions of the political mainstream - and the way that they will oppose it is to label it as extremist, unacceptable, criminal, violent etc. 'Extreme' is a position on the political spectrum; it's also a label applied by mainstream parties to discredit their rivals.

Secondly, towards the end of the life of the movement its innovations get adopted by the mainstream - but only some of them. Some of them are rejected - and labelled as unacceptably extreme, violent etc. As Charles Tilly said, before strike action was legal in the USA it took a far wider range of forms than it did after it was legalised: legalising strikes meant legalising a certain way of taking strike action, and criminalising all the rest.

Thirdly, stages 6 and 7 above represent a positive outcome, but this isn't the only way a social movement can come to an end. (This model was developed by Sidney Tarrow, and in his version it only included positive outcomes. However, later work - some of it by me - has shown that negative outcomes are also possible.) A negative outcome is what happens when all of the movement's innovations are rejected, and the movement is repressed out of existence. In this situation, everything the social movement had to offer has effectively been dismissed and labelled as 'extreme'. In hindsight, this creates the impression that the social movement was unacceptably extreme, and that its new tactics and frames never could have been adopted. The repression of a movement gives future historians a job of archaeology, digging out the more hopeful possibilities from beneath the dismissive labels that were applied to them.

The other key point about negative outcomes for social movements is that they may be more likely to prompt disappointed activists to resort to violence. The turn to violence may be one more tactical innovation - an innovation that is chosen when all the non-violent tactical possibilities seem to have been removed.