Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  I am an intellectual. I have always lived in contact with a reality of which I have always tried to understand the contradictions and the revolutionary tendencies. Now I am before the judges to answer a charge of armed insurrection against the powers of the state. This accusation honours me. Paradoxically. In other words, not because I was working for some kind of impossible insurrection, but because I lived, interpreted and developed an event which was already a given. Probably I am here before this court because nobody wants to take account of that reality, of that insurrection which the working class had brought about and carried out. The events of ’68 were the only insurrection that I have known. People’s spirits changed in those days, those months, those years. You do not wish to accept this truth. As for myself, I have devoted my life to developing the political analysis and the strategy that derived from that reality. Today you are judging me on this account; and it is precisely on this account that I consider myself to be innocent. You accuse me of an event which had already consolidated itself in the spirit of many generations – a revolution in being, of which we should all feel proud. I have tried – I shall always try – to close the gap that has been created between the transformation in people’s consciousness and the possibility of political expression. I have worked at factory gates and in working-class neighbourhoods, I have taught the critique of the bourgeois world in the universities. Certainly, that I have done – and I shall continue to do it: to give political form to the great transformation under way. A transformation that sees thousands and thousands of workers, students and women rebelling against the traditional cruelty of the roles assigned to them in society – and finding joy in their rebellion and in the act of building a new sense of community. When we first started, this was not a feeling that was limited to just a few people: the desire for revolution was hegemonic. And gradually this desire began to expand, and was fed by experiences of community and movement. The students went to the factories – and then, from the factories, following and overturning the growing capitalist socialization of work, the movement crossed over into the social. An insurrectional politics – but it was something more: a politics of transformation; the question was to understand what had happened in the consciousness of the masses in the course of those movements which rendered the revolt circulatory, progressive and expansive. That great transformation was the key to the development and the antagonisms of social consciousness today. You accuse me of having been an ‘evil teacher’; certainly, from your point of view you are right. I taught that revolution is not only possible but also necessary, because people’s consciousnesses had already changed. Gentlemen, this epochal transformation cannot simply be erased from history. Your arrogance is born of a lack of historical understanding and of a deficit of intellect. Insurrection there certainly was. And now we can only continue to work on that terrain. By insurrection I mean the great and sudden transformation of people’s consciousness, that happy hour in which a new time triumphs. Now there are only two possibilities: either to repress this transformation, consolidating the existing mode of production with a violence equal to the depth of the transformation, or to empower the revolutionary strength of the immense productive social proletariat. The first path is simply non-viable – even you must recognize the impossibility of moving against something that has become so solidly sedimented in people’s consciousnesses: repression can only fleetingly affect ontology, it can never annihilate it. In Porto Marghera, Milan and Turin I lived this situation: a revolution in action, a political scenario transforming itself into a horizon of war. Then I saw generation after generation conquering, in full awareness, the pleasure of being active protagonists of this transformation. You have tried to create a desert out of this field of hope – and you call this desert social peace, legality and justice. For a short – very short – time, this might be an option. But do not delude yourselves. The insurrection continues on its way, working on reality. It is now the only seed of any hope – a hope which, albeit poor, is also often very rich. It is the basic groundwork of science. The very first collective experiences of communism are not reversible. It may very well happen that there are betrayals, both individual and collective, and the transformative structures may encounter obstacles which for the moment are insuperable. However, do not think that this will lead to a defeat sufficiently profound as to annul the transformation which has taken place. The history of struggles has produced the ontology of the new need for communism, and this social subject now produces history. Thus this trial of ours is no more than a caricature of justice – it denies the reality of social transformation – only this transformation, only the revolution in people’s consciousnesses and its capacity to be a substantial, real and proper force of the proletariat can today bring about legality and justice. We are in the midst of a clash between forces which are opposed and irreconcilable. We do not understand you, and there is no understanding between you and us. You accuse me of insurrection; you make me responsible for a transformation in being which you feel to be threatening because it is bearing down on you. No – not from above … Rather, it digs. It digs in the consciousness of every one of us, and of your children also … All you can expect from the future is the revenge of this transformation of spirits. You are right to fear history. It does not legitimate you, it destroys you. (G12 Rebibbia – 2 May)

  Folio 39

  You accuse me of having taken part in discussions about armed struggle with Feltrinelli, with Curcio, and with many others. It is true. But this admission on my part is not a recognition of guilt. Guilt about what? There were vanguards who had tasted the flavour of transformation, and of power. They represented more or less traditional ideologies, which were attempting to interpret the desire for revolution – and there were, above all, mass movements which had no intention of giving away the power they had won, but wanted to organize it. Now many paths were opened up in this great debate. Not necessarily complementary. Often contradictory, and often in opposition to each other. In real class struggle division is necessary. My discussion with the forces of armed struggle was always conceived of in terms of division. Political division in order to build and win a correct mass tactics. For myself and my comrades mass tactics has always meant the critical and practical recognition of the truth of the needs and the reality of struggle. This truth is what divided us from the terrorist movement. You, on the other hand, are here to verify the assumptions of the prosecution case: that social subversion and terrorism are one and the same thing. This dreadful equivalence is the main driving force of a repression designed to strike not so much at terrorism, but at the movement – a putrid hypothesis and a swamp for intelligent thinking. Here the truth is replaced by a muscular project made up of police machinations and the fabrications peddled by paid pentiti. It is a disgrace. No, this is not the way it really was; the history of that time was not what you want it to be. The revolution is based on the human, and the passions of the human are many-fold. The fundamental element consisted in the opposing ideas in the conception of the party – between those who wanted it to be made by guns and those who thought that the masses were capable of liberating themselves. You know which front I was fighting on. You know how hard the battle was between these two political lines. And you know about the defeat into which the militarist and terrorist line drove us. Extremism played the game of reaction and repression. The long historical memory, which at that time was still alive within the movement, was of no use to us in warding off the peril. You know all this; but you have turned the truth into an instrument of mystification. You flatten everything, as your way of straitjacketing everything and destroying it. But if practical cynicism may sometimes pay, sadism of the intellect is always made to pay. These unfit judges are thirsty in their throats, and they only want to drink lies. You, my judges, you don’t want to see the truth, because you will be blinded by its light. We throw this truth before you, the truth of a mass movement which has internalized the revolution and is experimenting with the first forms of com
munist life. Ah, is my good judge changing the subject? I too have muscles to reply with. Muscles with teeth, and I do not accept the farcical accusations of the prosecution. The years of 1973 and 1974 were times in which the retreat of the trade union movement, the fear among the institutional forces of the working class that we were about to face a Chile-style coup, and the opportunism of the Historic Compromise, all appeared as a threat. Both of them, hand in hand: the repression and the restructuring of the Works Councils. This was the first great setback to the class struggle. But it also marked a first new apparition of singular and diverse movements on the social terrain. Can all of this really be reduced to a plot organized by a handful of people, to a hopeless bunch of incapables? Do you not know what the masses are? Do you hear the underground noise of their movement? Do you smell the scent of their hopes? Certainly, I did see people trying out their first experiences of armed struggle. They were mistakenly expecting the first critical transition of a ten-year revolutionary movement to translate into a continuous upward linearity of behaviours. They were wrong. Ideology was eating into their brains and gave their determination the quality of madness. Rejecting all that – as my comrades and I did – was certainly not a service rendered to the state. It was a lucid and different perspective on revolution. Yes, certainly, we were reckoning to topple the Palace. But there was a profound difference. So profound that only people who actually lived it can appreciate all its subtleties. I would not expect similar sophistication of detail to enter into the reading of judges. You are not capable of it. No – only the masses are subtle, muscular and intelligent. How solid they are! Like Gothic porticos of cathedrals, infinite fantastical forms, a design unified by the desire of producing a new world: and you judges, you pass through those doors (this masterpiece of art of the masses) in the emptiness of your rituals and the absurdity of your dogma. No to the terrorism of fanatical small groups, and no to the sadism of state justice. Signor presidente, I am not expecting you to understand me. You have been telling the journalists that communication in court has been difficult because of differences of language. Not a bit of it! There are differences – absolute and insuperable – but they are differences of spirit. Defence is an impossibility. All that is possible is to declare the truth of the matter, with absolute lack of illusion. (G12 Rebibbia – 26 May)

  Folio 40

  Outside, the wind of the elections is blowing. I am very tired. Pannella’s see-sawing between electoral abstentionism and voting for Negri is beginning to irritate me. Maybe they are right, maybe they know the iron laws of propaganda and are using paradox as a winning weapon. But basically most of their tactics are based on nothing more than weakness and the fear that they won’t even get a quorum vote – so they are preparing an alibi for themselves. Marco P. assures me that, if they get a quota, my candidacy is assured. We shall see. I am very tired. These games may be intelligent – astute might be a better word – but they tire me. I am not a circus animal. I don’t like doing tricks. A closed horizon suffocates me, but one which is arbitrarily open gives me asthma. I prefer to risk things out in the open, cleanly. The problem is that I am not managing to resolve the problem of the relationship between the trial and the elections. These elections are a great publicity opportunity for the 7 April case – the electoral campaign, although only at its start, is already posing the big themes of preventive imprisonment, of a political resolution for the Years of Lead, and all the rest. Now we need to be capable of puncturing the trial within these electoral times. The comrades are not necessarily sensitive to all this. The trial is a tortuous, knotty interweaving of many things – basically there is no single logical thread which might be grasped and then used to resolve its complexity. Maybe in fact the only viable tactic is to do the opposite – prevent things from unravelling, pull the knot ever tighter, retrace its dimensions, complicate it. And then, in the electoral campaign – as it develops, and if eventually I get elected – suddenly to cut the knot with one fell blow. The technique of the Gordian knot. We are not capable of that, though – we are unprepared. The comrades are full of reservations. And Pannella’s see-sawings do not help. Only Il Manifesto and Rossana are moving effectually, despite all the difficulties which I can imagine being put in their way by the pro-Communist Party tendency. But they too are moving extremely ambiguously. Remember, Toni – if you get out, you owe a lot to everybody, but also to nobody. Everyone will be wanting you as their puppet, everyone will want you for themselves, not as a person, but as a means … Don’t trust anybody. The 7 April battle is ours and nobody else’s. But we have to find a way of reframing the trial in political terms, and of reframing the elections in terms of our trial. And at the same time it is necessary to develop a powerful self-defence, based on a broad discussion of the role of the state and of the magistracy, and of everything that follows from it. This is what I think, and in recent days I have written a few letters on the subject. But I doubt that, in the present state of things, this will succeed. I have the impression that I may perhaps end up being elected – but on the basis of an angry vote of protest and refusal. Not of a positive programme. That’s Marco P.’s playground: his propaganda about abstaining in the elections is really a message to the media inviting people to vote for the Radicals. But the media are poverty-stricken and cynical. The call remains hollow, and this protest and refusal does not translate into programme and political organization. As a result, our trial is the only thing that offers a chance of pushing things in a political direction. It is the only point where I believe we have the possibility of intervening. Our self-defence, in addition to asserting and claiming the contents of the movement, must also be programmatic of movement. The weather is hot in these days. I am literally prostrated by the tasks that await me. I see no value in my getting out of prison, if this does not constitute a new political proposition. I am fully conscious of the negative dialectic of the situation and of the unravelling, even among my friends, of any unitary, positive horizon of proposition. The electoral bloc and the ‘lobby’ which they have formed have interests of different kinds. I am having no success in bringing them together into a discourse about hope. What is to be done? The only thing which is in my power (and one should not bother with things that are in the power of others) is to try to restore political dignity to the trial. I have this feeling of trying to get out of prison, pulling myself out, pulling myself up by my braces. I have such a desire to be free, to do cartwheels on the grass. It’s been four years since I last set foot on grass, I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like. But this election campaign that I’m involved in, why is it not a flower of the field, a conspiracy of nature for liberation? Why is it that – if all goes well – this liberation of mine has to grow in these cracks, in these smatterings of soil, in the cement of this prison? All my friends seem to be scared of the positions I am putting in the trial and of my faith in revolution. This electoral bloc is no more than a bloc of contradictions and reserv ations. I didn’t deserve this last challenge. But will it be the last? Will I gain my freedom? And then what’s going to happen? I am tired. Days of prison and lying low. I am filled with uncertainties. I don’t dream at night; the comrades tell me that I toss and turn in my sleep. I wake early in the morning and I daydream in the warmth of these spring days. I see again the strength and the joy of the movement, and people’s faces fired with collective enthusiasm. In the trial I would like to find a way of expressing this, and a way of winning freedom by cutting decisively through their cheap trickery, their half-hearted supports and their vulgar insinuations. I don’t want them to give me freedom – I want to take it. (G12 Rebibbia – 27/28/29/30 May)

  Folio 41

  The fortieth and forty-first days of hearings. My examination at the hands of the court continues. The line I am arguing is more or less as follows:

  You want to prove the existence of an organization which – by a stroke of genius (for the first time in this trial, because policemen are not noted for strokes of genius) – you have decided to
call the ‘O’. A powerful and adaptable structure, a mafia of the revolution, a Holy Spirit of the struggles. A maxi-organization of minimal dimensions. A Bolshevik party of the 1960s and 1970s. Capable of directing everything. Capable of bending everything to the unity of its insurrectional project. Well, all that is false. And it is precisely this falsity that offers you the possibility of attributing everything to this organization – the worst crimes as well as the smallest ones, the organization, the movement as a whole. If this ‘O’ had actually existed, you would have needed to provide material evidence of its crimes. But, when things are invented and falsified, obviously there is no evidence. So that takes us into the field of ‘moral responsibility’. The only thing that results from your judicial fantasies is repression. What you are claiming is false. Such a conspiracy-oriented organization never existed. There never existed a P38 to sit alongside your P2. You project your methods, your sickness, onto our health, onto our irreducible yearning for life. More than liars, you are in fact mystifiers. You reduce a political reality (which, because we live in a democracy, you cannot strike at) to a mystified reality, which the fascist laws so dear to your heart enable you to persecute. You are right – there really did exist an element which was irreducible and opposed to a republican constitution – a constitution that had been traduced to the point of becoming an amalgam of reactionary forces. Most of all, there really did exist a refusal to accept things as they were, and a rebellion, and a rejection of all this hypocrisy. If you have even a shred of respect for truth left in you, and if – as you claim – you are impartial judges, allow me to tell you what really happened.