Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Folio 20

  Very strange and horrible images characterize the world on the outside – all very postmodern. From today’s newspapers: Reagan is talking of setting up gigantic laser umbrellas to protect the United States … In the Persian Gulf, during the course of the dirty Iran–Iraq war, there have been bombings of coastal oil wells, which resulted in an ecological disaster, and the sea is full of oil … These events de-nature the world. The enormity of it all is terrifying. And yet there is no difference from the de-naturing produced by an event like the 7 April trial, in the horrible systemic machinations that have created it and continue to feed it. It is a devastation of consciousnesses which is accompanied by a blunting of the sense of justice. The extreme character of the infamy and cruelty generates indifference. We live the indifference of others, of everyone. Thus the scenario becomes completely flat. The trial is certainly overdetermined by a political will, the trial is certainly qualified within a rigid transcendency of relations of power – but this is not enough to specify the real singularity it has. Its paradoxical singularity consists in the fact that the catastrophic diminution of justice which it represents is not perceived as a radical change for the worse, but as normality. An Arctic night – without seasons, without transformations. A world without light. (G12 Rebibbia – 3 April)

  Folio 21

  There is a ferocious attack on us in the Roman pages of L’Unità. A whole page of insults and reactionary opinions about how social peace is threatened by the very existence of the 7 April trial. Today, once again, there is alarming news of the possible closure of Il Manifesto, the only newspaper to have given our case front-page treatment. And today comes the news that, because they are centralized and operate at the national level, the radical radio stations are to be closed, by authority of the ministry. Then they talk about combating monopoly! This and other news is enough for me to characterize the dead superficiality of this wretched country of ours, in a scenario which recalls the unanimous consensuses of 1936 – the moment of triumph of a scabrous regime of illiberality. A party (which likes to call itself communist) is engaged, as if this were a battle of life or death, in the construction of repressive, fevered notions and fantasies within which to bring about its own political legitimation – and on the other hand the few voices that are still free – such as Il Manifesto and the radical radio stations – are being throttled. Why is it that the end of a republic, of the great passions which contributed to its formation and of the great struggles which bedecked its development has to offer a spectacle of such a fearsome inversion and distortion of values? The process of decay has certainly been continuous in recent years – progressively, corruption has undermined all values and every institution, and the repression of liberty has touched every sector and all social subjects. But why does this advance of the sickness not find, finally, at least some small hiccup of self-awareness and urgency of renewal? The sick body passively accepts its metastases and accepts to be reproduced in them. Those of us who are suffering in person the extreme consequences of this disaggregation would almost have cause to be cynically and sarcastically amused. But that’s not the way it is, because our lives are on the line here. Life, life, life. (G12 Rebibbia – 5 April)

  PS The article that follows was written up by Paolo V. on the basis of a collective discussion. It was published in Il Manifesto, 20 and 22 February 1983.

  Do You Remember Revolution?

  [Original text signed by Lucio Castellano, Arrigo Cavallina, Giustino Cortiana, Mario Dalmaviva, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, Chicco Funaro, Toni Negri, Paolo Pozzi, Franco Tommei, Emilio Vesce and Paolo Virno. Rebibbia Prison, Rome, January 1983]

  Looking back once again to re-examine, with intellect and memory, the movement of the 1970s, we are certain of at least one thing. The history of the revolutionary movement, first of the extra-parliamentary opposition and then of the autonomy [autonomia], was not a history of marginals, fringe eccentricity or sectarian hallucinations from some underground ghetto. We think that it is justified to claim that this history (part of which has now become the subject of our trial) is inextricably woven into the history of the country, into the decisive changes and into the break-points that have characterized it.

  Holding firmly to this point of view (which might seem banal, but which is bold and even provocative in these times we inhabit), we want to propose a historical–political bloc of theses on the past decade, which go beyond our own immediate defence concerns in the trial. The considerations that follow, often in the form of simply posing problems, are not addressed to the judges – who thus far have only been interested in the merchandizing of pentiti – but to all those who have been involved in the struggles of these years. To the comrades of ’68, to those of ’77; to those intellectuals who have ‘dissented’ (as we now say), judging rebellion to be rational. So that they may intervene in their turn to break the vicious circle of memory distortion and conformity. We think that the time has come for a realistic reappraisal of the historical truth of the 1970s. Against the pentiti we need truth. After and against the pentiti we need political judgement. An overall assumption of responsibility is today both possible and necessary. This is one of the functional steps towards the full affirmation of ‘post-terrorism’ as a dimension proper to the confrontation between the new movements and the institutions.

  That we have nothing in common with terrorism is obvious. That we have been ‘subversive’ is equally obvious. Between these two truths lies the key issue at stake in our trials. But nothing can be taken for granted. The determination of the judges to equate subversion with terrorism is known to all, and it is intense. We shall conduct our defence battle with appropriate technical and political means. But it would be wrong for this reconstruction of the ’70s to take place only in the courtroom of the Foro Italico. There needs to be a frank and wider debate in the movement, in parallel with the trial, among the social subjects who have been the real protagonists of the ‘great transformation’. Among other things, or above all, this is a vitally necessary condition if we are to speak adequately of the tensions facing us in the ’80s.

  1

  The specific characteristic of the ‘Italian ’68’ was a combination of innovative and explosive social phenomena – in many ways typical of situations of mature industrialization – and the classic paradigm of communist political revolution.

  The radical critique of wage labour, its refusal on a mass scale, was the main content of the movement of mass struggles, the matrix of a strong and lasting antagonism, the ‘substance of things hoped for’. This gave food to the contestation of roles and hierarchies; to the struggle for wage egalitarianism; to the attack on the organization of social knowledge; to qualitative demands for changes in everyday life – in short, to the general striving towards concrete forms of freedom.

  In other countries of the capitalist West (Germany and the USA for example), these same forces of transformation were developed in the form of molecular changes in social relations, without directly and immediately posing the problem of political power, of an alternative running of the state. In France and Italy, owing to institutional rigidities and to a very simplified way of regulating conflicts, the question of state power and of its ‘seizure’ immediately becomes central.

  In Italy especially, despite the fact that in many ways ’68 marked a sharp break with the labourist and state socialist traditions of the historical working-class movement, the classical political models of communism still found a real space in the new movements. The extreme polarization of the class confrontation and the lack of any real political mediation or adequate response at an institutional level (on the one hand, the ‘internal com missions’, and on the other, before the emergence of local bodies, an overcentralized structure) create a situation where the demand for a higher income and new spaces for freedom go hand in hand with the classic Leninist question of ‘smashing the state machine’.

  2

  Between 1968 and the early 1970s the problem of finding
a political outcome for the mass struggles was on the agenda of the entire Left, both old and new.

  The Italian Communist Party [PCI] and the unions on the one hand, the extra-parliamentary groups on the other were counting on a drastic change in the balance of power, one which would carry through and consolidate the change in the relations of force that had already occurred in the factories and in the labour market. Regarding the nature and the quality of this political solution – generally held to be both decisive and necessary – there was a long and tortuous battle for hegemony within the Left.

  The revolutionary groups, which had a majority presence in the schools and in the universities and also had roots in the factories and in the service industries, realized that the recent movement for social transformation coincided with a marked breakdown of the framework of legality that had hitherto existed. They emphasized this aspect of the situation, in order to prevent any institutional recovery of profit margins and capitalist command. The extension of the struggles to the entire metropolitan territory and the building of forms of counter-power were seen as necessary steps in resisting the blackmail of the economic crisis. The PCI and the unions, on the other hand, realized that ’68 would lead naturally to the break-up of the centre-left government and to ‘structural reforms’. A new ‘framework of compatibility’ and a more complex and articulated institutional mediation would, in their view, guarantee a kind of working-class protagonism in the relaunching of economic growth.

  The most bitter polemics and divisions took place between the extra-parliamentary organizations and the historic Left. At the same time, however, the battles of ideas for defining the outcome of the movement also traversed these two political arenas horizontally. One need only recall, for instance, the Amendola [PCI right wing] criticism of the Turin FLM and against the ‘new unionism’ of the movement. Or the different – and often very different – interpretations which the components of the unitary trade union made of the nascent ‘zone councils’. At the same time, within the far Left, there were the differences between the workerist current and the Marxist–Leninist organizations.

  However, as we have said, these divisions of orientation revolved around a single basic problem: how to translate into terms of political power the upheaval in social relations that had developed in the period after ’68.

  3

  In the early 1970s the extra-parliamentary Left imposed the problem of the use of force, of violence, in terms that were completely coherent with the classical communist tradition: in other words considering it to be one of the means necessary for any attack on the terrain of power.

  There was no fetishism of the use of violence. On the contrary, it was strictly subordinated to the advancement of the mass movement. At the same time there was a clear acceptance of its relevance. The dense fabric of mass conflicts throughout society undeniably posed the question of political power in clearly discontinuous terms: it had a specific, non-linear character. After the violent clashes in Avola, Corso Traiano [in Turin] and Battipaglia, the ‘state monopoly on the use of force’ appeared as an unavoidable obstacle, which had to be systematically confronted.

  Thus, from a programmatic perspective, the violent breaking of the law was conceived of in offensive terms, as the manifestation of a new counter-power. Slogans such as ‘Take over the City’ or ‘Insurrection’ captured this perspective, which was seen as being inescapable, if not immediate.

  On the other hand, from a concrete perspective, organization in terms of illegality was a modest enough affair, with exclusively defensive and contingent goals: the defence of pickets, of housing occupations, of demonstrations; security measures intended to prevent possible right-wing reaction (which was no longer excluded as a possibility after Piazza Fontana [bombing provocation in Milan, December 1969]).

  In short, there was a theory of attack and rupture, developed out of the intermeshing between communist culture and the ‘new political subject’ who emerged after ’68; but its practical manifestations were minimal. It remains nevertheless a fact that, after the ‘Red Years’ of ’68–9, for thousands of militants – including rank-and-file trade union cadres – getting equipped for the ‘illegal’ domain, for instance by debating in public the forms and timings of the confrontation with the repressive structures of the state, was completely a matter of commonsense discourse.

  4

  In those years the role of the first clandestine armed organizations – the GAP, and the Red Brigader [BR] – was completely marginal and extraneous to the general thematics of the movement.

  Clandestine organization, the obsessive appeal to the partisan tradition [of the Resistance], the reference to the ‘skilled’ worker – these had absolutely nothing in common with the organization of violence on the part of class vanguards and revolutionary groups.

  The GAP, taking as its reference point the old anti-fascist resistance and the Com munist Party tradition of ‘dual level’ organizing (mass and clandestine), which dated back to the ’50s, was proposing the adoption of preventive measures against what it saw as the imminent threat of a fascist coup. On the other hand, all throughout this early phase, the BR – which were formed from a confluence of Marxist –Leninists from Trento, ex-Communist Party members from Milan and ex-Communist Youth Federation personnel from Emilia – looked for support and contacts among the PCI rank and file, and not in the revolutionary movement. Anti-fascism and ‘armed struggle in support of reforms’ was how they labeled their operations.

  Paradoxically, it was precisely the adoption, on the part of the communist vanguard, of a perspective on struggle which still included illegality and violence that gave an absolute and unbridgeable character to the gap between this perspective and the strategic option of clandestinity and ‘armed struggle’. The sporadic contacts that existed between the groupuscules and the first armed organizations did not lessen but actually confirmed the irreconcilability of culture and political line between them.