I look around myself in amazement. Is this really the spirit of the century? Is this really the creative Marxism in which we live? Nothing reveals the immense historical positivity of workers’ self-valorisation more completely than sabotage, this continual activity of the sniper, the saboteur, the absentee, the deviant, the criminal that I find myself living. I immediately feel the warmth of the workers’ and proletarian community again every time I don the ski mask. This solitude of mine is creative and this separateness of mine is the only real collectivity I know. Nor does the happiness of the result escape me: every act of destruction and sabotage redounds upon me as a sign of class fellowship. Nor does the probably risk disturb me: on the contrary, it fills me with feverish emotion, like waiting for a lover. Nor does the suffering of the adversary affect me: proletarian justice has the very same productive force of self-valorisation and the very same faculty of logical conviction. All this happens because we are in the majority – not the sad one that is measured at some time in every decade among adults who put on the regulation student uniform and return to school, but a qualitative and quantitative majority of social productive labour.
…
We cannot imagine anything more completely determinate and laden with content than the workers’ violence. Historical materialism defines the necessity of violence in history: we, for our part, charge it with an everyday quality arising out of the class struggle. We consider violence to be a function legitimated by the escalation of the relation of force within the crisis and by the richness of the contents of proletarian self-valorisation.
Antonio Negri,
Memory is a field of battle, with stories and characters, twists of narrative and climaxes, tragedies and comedies, being the subjects of political struggle.
The Italian State and the many governments of the country since the late 1970s, the security services, political parties, corporate media, and the like, have systematically tried to reduce the whole the long Italian Autonomia movement(s) to the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978. What is then ignored, with the clear intention of erasure, is the extraordinary endeavour to overcome, even overthrow, capitalism, in what was the most radical anti-capitalist political-social movement of post-WWII Europe.
The essay we share below, by Franco Piperno, possesses the great virtue of reading the leftist terrorism of the period not as a moral failure, but as the political consequence of both social changes in capitalist social relations in Italy and as the political failure of the country’s left.
Franco Piperno began his political militancy in the Italian Communist Youth Federation of the PCI. Later in Rome he was an activist in the 1968 movement and in the summer 1969 he took part in the demonstration against Fiat in Turin. In the late 1969, with Oreste Scalzone and Toni Negri, he was one of the founders of the far-left organisation Potere Operaio, and later he was a member of Autonomia Operaia. He also led the wing of Potere Operaio called Lavoro Illegale (“Illegal Work”). With Toni Negri, Oreste Scalzone and others, he was charged for the publication of subversive magazines in 1979 but he escaped the capture. In 1980 he was absolved, but one year later he was condemned to ten years of imprisonment in another trial for insurrectional activity and participation to the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. In particular, he was accused of having acted as a negotiator (through one of the kidnappers, Valerio Morucci) between the Italian Socialist Party and the terrorists who were allegedly detaining Moro. Documents left by the journalist Mino Pecorelli after his murder also hinted at an involvement of Piperno in the kidnapping. Piperno then lived in exile for several years, first in France thanks to the Mitterrand doctrine and then in Canada, where he also obtained a position at the University of Montreal. Most of the charges were later dropped, and the sentence was reduced to four years. Piperno returned to Italy from Canada in 1990 and became active locally in his hometown, Cosenza, creating the cultural association Ciroma. In January 1996 his car was hit by four handgun bullets. In May 1996 Piperno became a member of the local council of the city of Cosenza. (Wikipedia)
From Terrorism to Guerrilla Warfare
Franco Piperno
In the last ten years we have witnessed a quiet upheaval “in the mode of producing wealth.” The productive process exploits nature as a resource rather than redistributing surplus work and consequently reducing working time. To say it in other words, the different forms of social production are no longer organically connected by the law of value. This consequence is of great importance since it involves not only social issues but also labour co-operation. In this context a new proletarian subject is born, who is the producer of wealth but is no longer perceived in terms of productive or unproductive work. Thus, the class composition of the proletariat is changed. In particular, the technological intelligentsia (which could be roughly defined as “non-worker labour”) takes on a central position in the production of social wealth. However, we are not talking about the proletarianisation of the middle class. The “non-worker labourer,” by acting not as part of a residual class but as a material subject at this new mode of production, carries with him behaviour, cultural references, and ideologies which cannot be reduced to the historical precedents of workers’ struggles.
The change in composition of the proletariat implies a new “spontaneity” that appeared for the first time in 1968. This new spontaneity has its own characteristic relationship to social wealth. In fact, social wealth is enjoyed as use value, in the sense that this appropriation equals its “enjoyment.” Therefore, production stops being an a priori human characteristic or a moral necessity. Production is investigated and re-dimensioned as the production of “humanly enjoyable” wealth. Here are some of the typical manifestations of this new spontaneity: absenteeism as mass sabotage against the work ethic; shoplifting in supermarkets as an individual re-appropriation of objects, the enjoyment of which has been hindered by monetary mediation; employment simply as a source of income; a “generous availability” in relation to those moments of social activity in which “work and need coincide”; the many different forms of rebellion in which a radical and sometimes violent social malaise is expanded in the “anonymity of daily life.” These types of behaviour break any relationship between participation in production and the amount of salary received, between working time and the number of objects required for our existence. It is self-evident that, these activities being behaviour (and not harmless ideas), their manifestation requires the practice of illegality as a necessary condition for existence.
Beneath this behaviour we find a culture that despite the evident naiveté and obvious failures cannot be easily liquidated as false consciousness. Although this culture feeds on alienation and misery, it also holds great promise in that it contains a promise of overcoming, immediately and materially, both alienation and misery. From this derives the Issue of immediate fulfilment of body needs, of individual “difference and uniqueness.” We presume to have reached the age of fulfilment through the concrete enjoyment of available wealth, since we can now convert “objective wealth into wealth of the subjects.” Prolonging the condition of misery is simply an arbitrary outcome, which is technically and socially unexplainable and unjustifiable.
On the other hand, we are not only faced with the urgency of new needs which are pressing for fulfilment within an old world incapable of providing for them. Even the morphology of the modern State changes. We witness the failure of the “economy as structure” or, more precisely, the disappearance of any economic rule, which implies the establishment of an autonomous political power for the ‘control and use of the fruits of social co-operation. In this framework is found the inter-corporate war over the allocation of social surplus through monetary means. The new corporate state is consequently revealing its incapacity to provide materially and coherently for the general interest as distinguished from the rapacious demands of corporations. At the same time, even the institutions of representative democracy are emptied of any decision-making strength and survive as a costly ideological apparatus which records and supports operations ripened elsewhere. Political apparatus produces its own results without rules other than the rule of force – and this means that “politics is war in a different form.”
In this context, those social needs that cannot be fulfilled by the corporate system because they cannot be treated as commodities, tend to impose themselves by escaping political mediation and by becoming, with no moral reservation, the motivation for warfare. Such a new spontaneity has been perfected in a real sense primarily among women and youth, both employed and unemployed. The State can only exist as a bureaucratic apparatus, superfluous on one hand, and hostile and foreign on the other, appearing to proletarian youth as authoritarian. In this case the term authoritarian does not mean the “limitation of traditional individual liberties,” but rather implies that the State imposes and legalizes an arbitrary schism between people and social wealth, between objective wealth and the enjoyment of it, between existing and possible wealth.
The Workers’ Movement is not only incapable of translating this new spontaneity into political terms, but is even unable to recognize it and make contact with it. The reason for this incapacity is other than the presumed “betrayal of leadership.” The Workers’ Movement is in fact a political experience that has exhausted itself over other social issues, other morphologies of the productive process, and another spontaneity. In other words, it was extinguished in a different historical era, in which starvation was the main theme of the division of labour and the consequent need of individual self-realization. It is for this reason that the Workers’ Movement is out-dated when it fights profit as the source of wealth whereas the entrepreneurial form has gone bankrupt out of an excess of development; when it fights for a national independence whereas there is no longer a national market; when it promotes manual work in an era of automation; when it preaches sacrifice whereas people practice consumption as freedom in daily life. The tragedy of the Workers’ Movement is its outdated rhetoric. In the end this proud Initiative, so-called “worker becoming the State”, is only a residue of the social legitimization of the modern corporate State. At the same time another Workers’ Movement is emerging from other needs and forms of struggles. This other Movement not only is becoming autonomous vis-à-vis the first one, but it is also antagonistic to and openly fighting the first one.
The facts being these, the existence of a Movement which practices armed violence in order to pursue its own objectives is somewhat obvious, just like a natural phenomenon. One should be surprised at the opposite. Inside the armed movement, the presence of the Red Brigades is characterized in relation to other armed groups by a practical discourse on “effectiveness.” This means not only the coherent and effective use of terrorism (meant according to revolutionary tradition as an instrument of intimidation rather than the material destruction of the enemy), but also the attempt to legitimize the existence of its military organization as an indispensable device in the struggle for social emancipation. The BR’s demand for the recognition of their status as fighters is born here. Perhaps formal, but it is certainly “reasonable.”
Having thus fixed the terms of the discussion, we can now face the central political question: the relationship between armed violence and the Movement, or between terrorism and the emergence of the above mentioned, new spontaneity. It is worthwhile, however, to rephrase the question in a “clear and distinct” fashion. We have to investigate (both as “given” and as “possible”) the relationship between terrorism and the new spontaneity in order to verify the interrelation between the two phenomena. More correctly, we have to discover the possible link through which the new spontaneity can avail itself of the effect of terrorism and, in general, of the armed struggle in its realization as a dally practical emancipatory process. The resolution of this problem holds a “chain of solutions” for other issues like recomposition or destructuring of the State, expropriation or strengthening of mass struggle. In short, by answering the first question we can understand terrorism. Obviously we cannot answer through biblical “universal meanings” such as the “sacredness of human life,” “homicidal fury of the terrorists,” “the plot of the super-powers against Eurocommunism,” and so on, which are not verifiable.
In the empirical investigation we have to refer to specific episodes. In the early Seventies, the great factory struggles showed that the supervisors lacked any technical productive meaning. In fact, the boss has no real function of co-ordination in the productive system. Instead his task is to separate the workers from the authority above them. He is an agent of the evaluating process which is extraneous to the process of production, since all the productive acts are made with the workers’ co-operation outside the supervisor’s function of control and the work cycle. Following this “mass discovery” the intimidation of bosses began and was accompanied occasionally by their assassination. This is now history, which however, gives us some clues to the possible link between Movement and terrorism. Mass struggle can isolate those articulations of power which are devoid of technical foundation and therefore lack the consensus within the productive fabric. (Their existence can only be explained as an arbitrary imposition, as an effect of force by the enemy; their extinction is a problem of material destruction). The network of control over workers’ behaviour is eroded today, at least in the large factories. We even have an “acceptable proof” of this phenomenon in the effective labour time, which is significantly less than what is expected from the contract, even when all the time spent to sustain the union liturgy is included: official strikes, demonstrations, the speeches of the authorities, and so on.
Let us now examine some of the facts related to Moro’s kidnapping. First of all we have to make a marginal but not irrelevant observation: there is no substantial difference between Moro’s kidnapping and the terrorist acts against the bosses. They constitute the same path for the mass struggle: from the factory to political power. Needless to say, the new spontaneity is the element that has affected this development, but it is the success reached in the attacks upon the dally life of the masses that has made it a necessary path. Besides, isn’t it true that a State fetishism is present in the Italian Communist Party, a fetishism which has been manifested as hysteria among some of the party’s leaders? Terrorism, too, has gone from the control of the factory to social control. Such a critical analysis shows the premises of Moro’s kidnapping.
In relation to the power that limits the processes of emancipation and forbids, especially for youth, the “endless enjoyment of social wealth,” terrorism works in reverse by forbidding the power to forbid. There is a possibility of growth for the Movement within the new open territory. Certainly, we cannot yet outline all the results of such a terrorist act. However, there is enough evidence for everyone to see that the State does not emerge stronger and more legitimate after Moro’s kidnapping, but rather more impotent and more ferocious.
The corporate State has immediately perceived the subversive aspect, the threat to the social fabric inherent in Moro’s kidnapping. But Instead of “sticking to the facts” and analyzing them adequately, doubting the legitimacy of its own existence, it has preferred to consider the Red Brigades as bloodthirsty beasts escaped from their cages. The reduction of terrorism to an issue of public order and of moral hygiene has emptied repressive behaviour of meaningfulness and made it ridiculous. It is as if an elephant were chasing a mosquito through the narrow Roman streets – passers-by beware! It was at once a tragic and an exhilarating spectacle. In the meantime the high priests of the regime flooded the press and the air-waves with a call to first principles. In tears they launched humanitarian appeals, and solemnly they proclaimed the absolute value of human life. It was a declamatory diarrhoea which did not stop them from using Moro’s blood, with cynical hypocrisy, to dodge that squaring of accounts which now weighs upon the “upright lives” of the leaders of the regime.
It is not too difficult to understand that the Red Brigades wanted to show with Moro’s kidnapping how the high priests of the regime, who are adept at the rites of the Modern State, are neither untouchable, nor unimpeachable. “The infinite power of the State” rests in fact on the clay feet of the “subjects” passivity.
Furthermore, the Red Brigades, once they apprehended Moro, had intended to pursue another aim (the release of some political prisoners) which would have materially reinforced the organization and would have somewhat legitimized their existence as a military organization breaking the State’s monopoly on armed violence. But the kidnapping of a “real personality” like Moro implied the immediate neutralization of his security guards. Once inside the war machine of kidnapping, the death of the five security guards was an inevitable step. The interface in fact was carried out on the firing line.
However, after the State’s refusal not only to exchange, but even to bargain, the execution of Moro became another inevitable step; otherwise all future bargaining power would have been lost together with the BR’s organizational credibility.
In a sequence of inevitable steps, we have had a very singular action. With Moro’s corpse the brigades seemed to contribute to the new political balance which, for a couple of months, the system of parties and syndicates tried to achieve, exorcising the more dangerous and thorny possibility: to have to accommodate a physically alive but politically “foul” Moro, a “ticking bomb” as far as the central government was concerned. Then what are the mistakes that redefined the meaning of Moro’s kidnapping?
Firstly, with the very use of kidnapping, blackmailing: a recurrent use in terrorist practice, but already inadequate today since the phenomenon has acquired such power that it required the adoption of real forms of guerrilla warfare. Secondly, to have made such a great show of power for such a minimal objective, which not only was an almost private matter but also quite an unrealistic one: the release of some political prisoners.
Within this imbalance between the destabilizing effectiveness of the intelligent use of military rules and the inept political management of the achieved effects, we have witnessed those spectacular and ambiguous elements represented in the final act: the ingenious and mocking return of Moro’s corpse to the proximity of the Ruling Party’s headquarters. In a sort of boomerang effect, the BR have been branded with the label of “impotent ferocity,” as happens to all those who cause useless deaths.
The debate over the Moro affair has put to the test the “culture of the left” as dominant ideology. Its structural incapacity to discover the causes that underlie and constantly regenerate terrorist practice has emerged. The Red Brigades - lucid “dispensers of death” – have been exposed as puppets of the puppet masters, powerful but obviously secret, or at best the receptacle for past errors of the communist movement; but in any case, as alien to and enemies of the process of social emancipation.
Some, like Scalfari[1] curious heirs of the “distinguished Croceans”[2] – have gone even farther: they have expelled the brigades from the human species genetically and consider them maddened wolves – in other words, materialization of evil as infantile category. Everyone knows that a pack of wolves would barely be able to terrorize a remote agricultural community; whereas a complex and ailing society like ours, capable of tolerating with resigned passivity the meaningless ferocity that punctuates the anonymity of daily life, would have quickly minced and digested any damage inflicted by a statistically cruel and bizarre behaviour.
But there is more: the culture of the left, resorting to the superstitious use of a-historical and ossified categories (“life,” “civil coexistence,” “eternal values,” “humanity”) has revealed its own spasmodic need to endure, the physiological rejection of self-criticism, and hatred for events that threaten those minute virtues on which a whole political class has built its scanty fortune in this post-war period. Let us think, for example, of the question – raised in various quarters of the “means of struggle” as measure of the true nature of armed violence. This somewhat unexpected reversal – of the traditional cult of the end has been replaced and there presently rages on a sort of idolatry of the means – this reversal reveals, in the intolerance peculiar to it, a foolish ideological scheme: to remove and exorcise what is new in order to sanctify the means, the political choices, and the “vulgar and self-satisfied” way of life of the red bourgeoisie.
Thus, all that talk about life that we have heard, as bewildered spectators, in the weeks of the Moro affair, smells irremediably of rhetoric and death. The proof of this comes from the very comrades of Lotta Continua who, involved with unwarranted generosity in an unprecedented priestly mission, have rediscovered very recently the sacredness of life qua biological life – and they retreat with more moral horror before the eventuality of “giving or receiving” – experienced as a catastrophe for the human essence. In reality, human life is not merely a biological miracle. It thrives as a network of social relations; and, in the case of the “agents of domination,” it comprises a power sufficient for creating and/or interdicting the life of other men. Thus it can happen – and this is the scandal that the death of a man results in freedom and life for others. This is a “banal piece of evidence,” difficult to accept as a fact; it determines the behaviour of all of us in the face of death as daily event. In fact, the inequality that gives hierarchy to the life of men obviously confers various weights to their deaths. Such is the way of the world. And to pretend that “the rules” are different, that “humanity has already been realized,” is an expression of sheer “desiderata” when it is not a vulgar ideological lie. And since it is plain today that the future will be inhuman, decency requires that everyone choose his wounded and his dead, that he mourn the latter and cure – if he can – the former.
Often critics have called into question the inconsistency between the political programs of the armed factions and their indubitable operational capacity, which, as in the case of the BR, has attained effects so powerful as to be without precedent. But this divergence between intention and power of action is not, in fact, a real limitation. The truly novel characteristic of Italian terrorism is that “it does not need a program in order to affirm itself.” It does not have, despite all things, a social model to offer us. In fact, if we make a distinction between the ideology of the terrorists, which procreates theoretically muddled documents, often hallucinatory, and the chain of events that the terrorist acts produce, the result is as follows: the plan controlling terrorist practice and causing its success is suitable as military strategy, that is, it is designed for the material destruction of the enemy (the State in all its articulations) according to the rules of military intelligence.
This strategy does not need a political program (understood as a design for the forms of production and for the power in the society to be created) since it lives inside the “use-value movement” which we have mentioned earlier, and in fact constitutes one of its most extreme articulations.
The critical consciousness of the possibility of seizing, here and now, social wealth that has been arbitrarily denied, penetrates to youth as common sense. Therefore this consciousness is able not only to replace the traditional political program, but also to become an immediate way of life which establishes itself by its own actions. In other words, if this new spontaneity, based on the use-value movement, is seen as a multiplicity of perceptions, units of behaviour, and individuals, then terrorism is not outside the movement, but rather one of its functions. Specifically, this function is to destroy the power of the State, since this power prevents the emergence and the realization of the diverse ideas and concrete needs which form the Movement itself.
It is self-evident that this Inter-functional relationship between new spontaneity and terrorism is not an eternal given. It depends upon the modes and the timing according to which terrorism and spontaneity are developed. In particular, it indicates that the situation is at a crossroads.
The Moro affair has marked, for many reasons, the highest point and, at the same time, the limits of terrorism. Now terrorism is forced to make a choice. On the one hand, it may crystallize and perfect itself as a separate populist practice with self-determined forms, timing, and objectives, by, for example, insisting obsessively on the theme of the release of prisoners. In this case, as has already happened elsewhere, the political phenomenon of violence will end up in the category of the case study of social malaise in the age of late capitalism; and thus it will be interpreted as one of the prices to be paid for the survival of the status quo. On the other hand, it may move toward forms of real guerrilla action, and it may consciously set down its roots within the new spontaneity.
However, this transition implies a profound re-structuring of the military organization, whose capacity to last and to extend itself is attributed to “social complicity,” instead of to the self-sufficiency of the organization itself. It is obvious that such a successful change will imply an increment in the offensive capacity of the armed struggle.
In the short run, that is in the next few months, this taking root will certainly not occur on the level of behaviour: here the difference between the rich and immediate living of the young and the military, rigid, inhuman abstraction of terrorism is irreducible. Vice-versa, the con-joining, as subjective operation, could take place through the objectives that the Movement has promulgated in these years: in the first place, that key idea “less time for work, everyone working.” It should be kept in mind, however, that to emphasize intelligently some of the mass objectives and to practice them would mean to discharge on them the indubitable power of the armed struggle.
On the other hand, the new social behaviour, confined to a “molecular” Impact (rather than “spectacular”) with terrorism, would come out profoundly modified and strengthened. The menacing quality of “subversion of existing order” that the new spontaneity carries and conceals in itself would prevail; a quality that – to impose itself – needs to achieve success and to withdraw from the atmosphere – between allowable marginality and harmless dissent – that today limits it and vexes it as a heart condition would.
One cannot in fact forget that the “expropriation of the struggle” and of the mass initiative happens wherever the Movement clashes with obstacles which it cannot remove with appropriate actions; satisfied with the consciousness of its legitimacy, the Movement does not organize itself in order to impose this legitimacy. In the end, its tension is evaporated in an empty “obligation to repeat,” which is only the beginning of future passivity and impotence.
Precisely for this reason, the conjunction of the frightening beauty of March 12, 1977 in the Roman streets[3] with the geometric power displayed in Moro’s kidnapping becomes the narrow door through which the subversive process in Italy can either grow or die.
To sum up, we can state that the “serendipitous uniqueness” of the Italian situation consists precisely in the circumstances described earlier. Presently in a state of tumultuous expansion among youth is a way of life based on need, that is, on use-value. This development is accompanied by, in a relationship not devoid of tension and hostility, the definition of a political being which raises in military terms the question of the break-up of the State machinery. As a consequence, in Italy, the social practice, of use-value is charged with offensive significance and demands a mutation in the mode of production, whereas in other countries the same practice, perhaps wider and richer, lives a virtual, interstitial, and somewhat transient life side by side with the capitalist society and its State.
The new corporate State is not capable, at least for the time being, of accommodating the new behaviour through any mediation or management of its dynamics. The regime is therefore forced to confront head to head the new spontaneity (which it rejects even as pure datum by denying its existence) while it attempts to destroy it, wishing to respond only in terms of interdiction and death.
In reality, this operation of death and restoration must be based immediately on the social network, represented politically by the Italian Communist Party. However, the process of State institutionalization of this party (with the simultaneous wilting of its reformist-progressive role into impotence) may unleash the social contradictions within it, contradictions which Toglliatti’s machine had succeeded in suppressing and managing. The costs of such a process are so great as to be – perhaps – unacceptable. The Italian Communist Party risks breaking the branch on which it sits.
As everyone can see, “great is the disorder beneath the heavens, and for that reason the situation bodes well.”
[1] Eugenio Scalfari: Director of La Republica, a center-left dally paper.
[2] Benedetto Croce: literary philosopher at the beginning of the 20th century.
[3] On March 11, 1977, a Bolognese student, Francesco LoRusso, was killed by the police. On March 12, more than 100,000 people demonstrated in Rome. They attacked the seat of the DC, broke open an arsenal, and fought with the police throughout the city.
Italy: Autonomia (11) – Franco Piperno
I look around myself in amazement. Is this really the spirit of the century? Is this really the creative Marxism in which we live? Nothing reveals the immense historical positivity of workers’ self-valorisation more completely than sabotage, this continual activity of the sniper, the saboteur, the absentee, the deviant, the criminal that I find myself living. I immediately feel the warmth of the workers’ and proletarian community again every time I don the ski mask. This solitude of mine is creative and this separateness of mine is the only real collectivity I know. Nor does the happiness of the result escape me: every act of destruction and sabotage redounds upon me as a sign of class fellowship. Nor does the probably risk disturb me: on the contrary, it fills me with feverish emotion, like waiting for a lover. Nor does the suffering of the adversary affect me: proletarian justice has the very same productive force of self-valorisation and the very same faculty of logical conviction. All this happens because we are in the majority – not the sad one that is measured at some time in every decade among adults who put on the regulation student uniform and return to school, but a qualitative and quantitative majority of social productive labour.
…
We cannot imagine anything more completely determinate and laden with content than the workers’ violence. Historical materialism defines the necessity of violence in history: we, for our part, charge it with an everyday quality arising out of the class struggle. We consider violence to be a function legitimated by the escalation of the relation of force within the crisis and by the richness of the contents of proletarian self-valorisation.
Antonio Negri,
Memory is a field of battle, with stories and characters, twists of narrative and climaxes, tragedies and comedies, being the subjects of political struggle.
The Italian State and the many governments of the country since the late 1970s, the security services, political parties, corporate media, and the like, have systematically tried to reduce the whole the long Italian Autonomia movement(s) to the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978. What is then ignored, with the clear intention of erasure, is the extraordinary endeavour to overcome, even overthrow, capitalism, in what was the most radical anti-capitalist political-social movement of post-WWII Europe.
The essay we share below, by Franco Piperno, possesses the great virtue of reading the leftist terrorism of the period not as a moral failure, but as the political consequence of both social changes in capitalist social relations in Italy and as the political failure of the country’s left.
Franco Piperno began his political militancy in the Italian Communist Youth Federation of the PCI. Later in Rome he was an activist in the 1968 movement and in the summer 1969 he took part in the demonstration against Fiat in Turin. In the late 1969, with Oreste Scalzone and Toni Negri, he was one of the founders of the far-left organisation Potere Operaio, and later he was a member of Autonomia Operaia. He also led the wing of Potere Operaio called Lavoro Illegale (“Illegal Work”). With Toni Negri, Oreste Scalzone and others, he was charged for the publication of subversive magazines in 1979 but he escaped the capture. In 1980 he was absolved, but one year later he was condemned to ten years of imprisonment in another trial for insurrectional activity and participation to the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. In particular, he was accused of having acted as a negotiator (through one of the kidnappers, Valerio Morucci) between the Italian Socialist Party and the terrorists who were allegedly detaining Moro. Documents left by the journalist Mino Pecorelli after his murder also hinted at an involvement of Piperno in the kidnapping. Piperno then lived in exile for several years, first in France thanks to the Mitterrand doctrine and then in Canada, where he also obtained a position at the University of Montreal. Most of the charges were later dropped, and the sentence was reduced to four years. Piperno returned to Italy from Canada in 1990 and became active locally in his hometown, Cosenza, creating the cultural association Ciroma. In January 1996 his car was hit by four handgun bullets. In May 1996 Piperno became a member of the local council of the city of Cosenza. (Wikipedia)
From Terrorism to Guerrilla Warfare
Franco Piperno
In the last ten years we have witnessed a quiet upheaval “in the mode of producing wealth.” The productive process exploits nature as a resource rather than redistributing surplus work and consequently reducing working time. To say it in other words, the different forms of social production are no longer organically connected by the law of value. This consequence is of great importance since it involves not only social issues but also labour co-operation. In this context a new proletarian subject is born, who is the producer of wealth but is no longer perceived in terms of productive or unproductive work. Thus, the class composition of the proletariat is changed. In particular, the technological intelligentsia (which could be roughly defined as “non-worker labour”) takes on a central position in the production of social wealth. However, we are not talking about the proletarianisation of the middle class. The “non-worker labourer,” by acting not as part of a residual class but as a material subject at this new mode of production, carries with him behaviour, cultural references, and ideologies which cannot be reduced to the historical precedents of workers’ struggles.
The change in composition of the proletariat implies a new “spontaneity” that appeared for the first time in 1968. This new spontaneity has its own characteristic relationship to social wealth. In fact, social wealth is enjoyed as use value, in the sense that this appropriation equals its “enjoyment.” Therefore, production stops being an a priori human characteristic or a moral necessity. Production is investigated and re-dimensioned as the production of “humanly enjoyable” wealth. Here are some of the typical manifestations of this new spontaneity: absenteeism as mass sabotage against the work ethic; shoplifting in supermarkets as an individual re-appropriation of objects, the enjoyment of which has been hindered by monetary mediation; employment simply as a source of income; a “generous availability” in relation to those moments of social activity in which “work and need coincide”; the many different forms of rebellion in which a radical and sometimes violent social malaise is expanded in the “anonymity of daily life.” These types of behaviour break any relationship between participation in production and the amount of salary received, between working time and the number of objects required for our existence. It is self-evident that, these activities being behaviour (and not harmless ideas), their manifestation requires the practice of illegality as a necessary condition for existence.
Beneath this behaviour we find a culture that despite the evident naiveté and obvious failures cannot be easily liquidated as false consciousness. Although this culture feeds on alienation and misery, it also holds great promise in that it contains a promise of overcoming, immediately and materially, both alienation and misery. From this derives the Issue of immediate fulfilment of body needs, of individual “difference and uniqueness.” We presume to have reached the age of fulfilment through the concrete enjoyment of available wealth, since we can now convert “objective wealth into wealth of the subjects.” Prolonging the condition of misery is simply an arbitrary outcome, which is technically and socially unexplainable and unjustifiable.
On the other hand, we are not only faced with the urgency of new needs which are pressing for fulfilment within an old world incapable of providing for them. Even the morphology of the modern State changes. We witness the failure of the “economy as structure” or, more precisely, the disappearance of any economic rule, which implies the establishment of an autonomous political power for the ‘control and use of the fruits of social co-operation. In this framework is found the inter-corporate war over the allocation of social surplus through monetary means. The new corporate state is consequently revealing its incapacity to provide materially and coherently for the general interest as distinguished from the rapacious demands of corporations. At the same time, even the institutions of representative democracy are emptied of any decision-making strength and survive as a costly ideological apparatus which records and supports operations ripened elsewhere. Political apparatus produces its own results without rules other than the rule of force – and this means that “politics is war in a different form.”
In this context, those social needs that cannot be fulfilled by the corporate system because they cannot be treated as commodities, tend to impose themselves by escaping political mediation and by becoming, with no moral reservation, the motivation for warfare. Such a new spontaneity has been perfected in a real sense primarily among women and youth, both employed and unemployed. The State can only exist as a bureaucratic apparatus, superfluous on one hand, and hostile and foreign on the other, appearing to proletarian youth as authoritarian. In this case the term authoritarian does not mean the “limitation of traditional individual liberties,” but rather implies that the State imposes and legalizes an arbitrary schism between people and social wealth, between objective wealth and the enjoyment of it, between existing and possible wealth.
The Workers’ Movement is not only incapable of translating this new spontaneity into political terms, but is even unable to recognize it and make contact with it. The reason for this incapacity is other than the presumed “betrayal of leadership.” The Workers’ Movement is in fact a political experience that has exhausted itself over other social issues, other morphologies of the productive process, and another spontaneity. In other words, it was extinguished in a different historical era, in which starvation was the main theme of the division of labour and the consequent need of individual self-realization. It is for this reason that the Workers’ Movement is out-dated when it fights profit as the source of wealth whereas the entrepreneurial form has gone bankrupt out of an excess of development; when it fights for a national independence whereas there is no longer a national market; when it promotes manual work in an era of automation; when it preaches sacrifice whereas people practice consumption as freedom in daily life. The tragedy of the Workers’ Movement is its outdated rhetoric. In the end this proud Initiative, so-called “worker becoming the State”, is only a residue of the social legitimization of the modern corporate State. At the same time another Workers’ Movement is emerging from other needs and forms of struggles. This other Movement not only is becoming autonomous vis-à-vis the first one, but it is also antagonistic to and openly fighting the first one.
The facts being these, the existence of a Movement which practices armed violence in order to pursue its own objectives is somewhat obvious, just like a natural phenomenon. One should be surprised at the opposite. Inside the armed movement, the presence of the Red Brigades is characterized in relation to other armed groups by a practical discourse on “effectiveness.” This means not only the coherent and effective use of terrorism (meant according to revolutionary tradition as an instrument of intimidation rather than the material destruction of the enemy), but also the attempt to legitimize the existence of its military organization as an indispensable device in the struggle for social emancipation. The BR’s demand for the recognition of their status as fighters is born here. Perhaps formal, but it is certainly “reasonable.”
Having thus fixed the terms of the discussion, we can now face the central political question: the relationship between armed violence and the Movement, or between terrorism and the emergence of the above mentioned, new spontaneity. It is worthwhile, however, to rephrase the question in a “clear and distinct” fashion. We have to investigate (both as “given” and as “possible”) the relationship between terrorism and the new spontaneity in order to verify the interrelation between the two phenomena. More correctly, we have to discover the possible link through which the new spontaneity can avail itself of the effect of terrorism and, in general, of the armed struggle in its realization as a dally practical emancipatory process. The resolution of this problem holds a “chain of solutions” for other issues like recomposition or destructuring of the State, expropriation or strengthening of mass struggle. In short, by answering the first question we can understand terrorism. Obviously we cannot answer through biblical “universal meanings” such as the “sacredness of human life,” “homicidal fury of the terrorists,” “the plot of the super-powers against Eurocommunism,” and so on, which are not verifiable.
In the empirical investigation we have to refer to specific episodes. In the early Seventies, the great factory struggles showed that the supervisors lacked any technical productive meaning. In fact, the boss has no real function of co-ordination in the productive system. Instead his task is to separate the workers from the authority above them. He is an agent of the evaluating process which is extraneous to the process of production, since all the productive acts are made with the workers’ co-operation outside the supervisor’s function of control and the work cycle. Following this “mass discovery” the intimidation of bosses began and was accompanied occasionally by their assassination. This is now history, which however, gives us some clues to the possible link between Movement and terrorism. Mass struggle can isolate those articulations of power which are devoid of technical foundation and therefore lack the consensus within the productive fabric. (Their existence can only be explained as an arbitrary imposition, as an effect of force by the enemy; their extinction is a problem of material destruction). The network of control over workers’ behaviour is eroded today, at least in the large factories. We even have an “acceptable proof” of this phenomenon in the effective labour time, which is significantly less than what is expected from the contract, even when all the time spent to sustain the union liturgy is included: official strikes, demonstrations, the speeches of the authorities, and so on.
Let us now examine some of the facts related to Moro’s kidnapping. First of all we have to make a marginal but not irrelevant observation: there is no substantial difference between Moro’s kidnapping and the terrorist acts against the bosses. They constitute the same path for the mass struggle: from the factory to political power. Needless to say, the new spontaneity is the element that has affected this development, but it is the success reached in the attacks upon the dally life of the masses that has made it a necessary path. Besides, isn’t it true that a State fetishism is present in the Italian Communist Party, a fetishism which has been manifested as hysteria among some of the party’s leaders? Terrorism, too, has gone from the control of the factory to social control. Such a critical analysis shows the premises of Moro’s kidnapping.
In relation to the power that limits the processes of emancipation and forbids, especially for youth, the “endless enjoyment of social wealth,” terrorism works in reverse by forbidding the power to forbid. There is a possibility of growth for the Movement within the new open territory. Certainly, we cannot yet outline all the results of such a terrorist act. However, there is enough evidence for everyone to see that the State does not emerge stronger and more legitimate after Moro’s kidnapping, but rather more impotent and more ferocious.
The corporate State has immediately perceived the subversive aspect, the threat to the social fabric inherent in Moro’s kidnapping. But Instead of “sticking to the facts” and analyzing them adequately, doubting the legitimacy of its own existence, it has preferred to consider the Red Brigades as bloodthirsty beasts escaped from their cages. The reduction of terrorism to an issue of public order and of moral hygiene has emptied repressive behaviour of meaningfulness and made it ridiculous. It is as if an elephant were chasing a mosquito through the narrow Roman streets – passers-by beware! It was at once a tragic and an exhilarating spectacle. In the meantime the high priests of the regime flooded the press and the air-waves with a call to first principles. In tears they launched humanitarian appeals, and solemnly they proclaimed the absolute value of human life. It was a declamatory diarrhoea which did not stop them from using Moro’s blood, with cynical hypocrisy, to dodge that squaring of accounts which now weighs upon the “upright lives” of the leaders of the regime.
It is not too difficult to understand that the Red Brigades wanted to show with Moro’s kidnapping how the high priests of the regime, who are adept at the rites of the Modern State, are neither untouchable, nor unimpeachable. “The infinite power of the State” rests in fact on the clay feet of the “subjects” passivity.
Furthermore, the Red Brigades, once they apprehended Moro, had intended to pursue another aim (the release of some political prisoners) which would have materially reinforced the organization and would have somewhat legitimized their existence as a military organization breaking the State’s monopoly on armed violence. But the kidnapping of a “real personality” like Moro implied the immediate neutralization of his security guards. Once inside the war machine of kidnapping, the death of the five security guards was an inevitable step. The interface in fact was carried out on the firing line.
However, after the State’s refusal not only to exchange, but even to bargain, the execution of Moro became another inevitable step; otherwise all future bargaining power would have been lost together with the BR’s organizational credibility.
In a sequence of inevitable steps, we have had a very singular action. With Moro’s corpse the brigades seemed to contribute to the new political balance which, for a couple of months, the system of parties and syndicates tried to achieve, exorcising the more dangerous and thorny possibility: to have to accommodate a physically alive but politically “foul” Moro, a “ticking bomb” as far as the central government was concerned. Then what are the mistakes that redefined the meaning of Moro’s kidnapping?
Firstly, with the very use of kidnapping, blackmailing: a recurrent use in terrorist practice, but already inadequate today since the phenomenon has acquired such power that it required the adoption of real forms of guerrilla warfare. Secondly, to have made such a great show of power for such a minimal objective, which not only was an almost private matter but also quite an unrealistic one: the release of some political prisoners.
Within this imbalance between the destabilizing effectiveness of the intelligent use of military rules and the inept political management of the achieved effects, we have witnessed those spectacular and ambiguous elements represented in the final act: the ingenious and mocking return of Moro’s corpse to the proximity of the Ruling Party’s headquarters. In a sort of boomerang effect, the BR have been branded with the label of “impotent ferocity,” as happens to all those who cause useless deaths.
The debate over the Moro affair has put to the test the “culture of the left” as dominant ideology. Its structural incapacity to discover the causes that underlie and constantly regenerate terrorist practice has emerged. The Red Brigades - lucid “dispensers of death” – have been exposed as puppets of the puppet masters, powerful but obviously secret, or at best the receptacle for past errors of the communist movement; but in any case, as alien to and enemies of the process of social emancipation.
Some, like Scalfari[1] curious heirs of the “distinguished Croceans”[2] – have gone even farther: they have expelled the brigades from the human species genetically and consider them maddened wolves – in other words, materialization of evil as infantile category. Everyone knows that a pack of wolves would barely be able to terrorize a remote agricultural community; whereas a complex and ailing society like ours, capable of tolerating with resigned passivity the meaningless ferocity that punctuates the anonymity of daily life, would have quickly minced and digested any damage inflicted by a statistically cruel and bizarre behaviour.
But there is more: the culture of the left, resorting to the superstitious use of a-historical and ossified categories (“life,” “civil coexistence,” “eternal values,” “humanity”) has revealed its own spasmodic need to endure, the physiological rejection of self-criticism, and hatred for events that threaten those minute virtues on which a whole political class has built its scanty fortune in this post-war period. Let us think, for example, of the question – raised in various quarters of the “means of struggle” as measure of the true nature of armed violence. This somewhat unexpected reversal – of the traditional cult of the end has been replaced and there presently rages on a sort of idolatry of the means – this reversal reveals, in the intolerance peculiar to it, a foolish ideological scheme: to remove and exorcise what is new in order to sanctify the means, the political choices, and the “vulgar and self-satisfied” way of life of the red bourgeoisie.
Thus, all that talk about life that we have heard, as bewildered spectators, in the weeks of the Moro affair, smells irremediably of rhetoric and death. The proof of this comes from the very comrades of Lotta Continua who, involved with unwarranted generosity in an unprecedented priestly mission, have rediscovered very recently the sacredness of life qua biological life – and they retreat with more moral horror before the eventuality of “giving or receiving” – experienced as a catastrophe for the human essence. In reality, human life is not merely a biological miracle. It thrives as a network of social relations; and, in the case of the “agents of domination,” it comprises a power sufficient for creating and/or interdicting the life of other men. Thus it can happen – and this is the scandal that the death of a man results in freedom and life for others. This is a “banal piece of evidence,” difficult to accept as a fact; it determines the behaviour of all of us in the face of death as daily event. In fact, the inequality that gives hierarchy to the life of men obviously confers various weights to their deaths. Such is the way of the world. And to pretend that “the rules” are different, that “humanity has already been realized,” is an expression of sheer “desiderata” when it is not a vulgar ideological lie. And since it is plain today that the future will be inhuman, decency requires that everyone choose his wounded and his dead, that he mourn the latter and cure – if he can – the former.
Often critics have called into question the inconsistency between the political programs of the armed factions and their indubitable operational capacity, which, as in the case of the BR, has attained effects so powerful as to be without precedent. But this divergence between intention and power of action is not, in fact, a real limitation. The truly novel characteristic of Italian terrorism is that “it does not need a program in order to affirm itself.” It does not have, despite all things, a social model to offer us. In fact, if we make a distinction between the ideology of the terrorists, which procreates theoretically muddled documents, often hallucinatory, and the chain of events that the terrorist acts produce, the result is as follows: the plan controlling terrorist practice and causing its success is suitable as military strategy, that is, it is designed for the material destruction of the enemy (the State in all its articulations) according to the rules of military intelligence.
This strategy does not need a political program (understood as a design for the forms of production and for the power in the society to be created) since it lives inside the “use-value movement” which we have mentioned earlier, and in fact constitutes one of its most extreme articulations.
The critical consciousness of the possibility of seizing, here and now, social wealth that has been arbitrarily denied, penetrates to youth as common sense. Therefore this consciousness is able not only to replace the traditional political program, but also to become an immediate way of life which establishes itself by its own actions. In other words, if this new spontaneity, based on the use-value movement, is seen as a multiplicity of perceptions, units of behaviour, and individuals, then terrorism is not outside the movement, but rather one of its functions. Specifically, this function is to destroy the power of the State, since this power prevents the emergence and the realization of the diverse ideas and concrete needs which form the Movement itself.
It is self-evident that this Inter-functional relationship between new spontaneity and terrorism is not an eternal given. It depends upon the modes and the timing according to which terrorism and spontaneity are developed. In particular, it indicates that the situation is at a crossroads.
The Moro affair has marked, for many reasons, the highest point and, at the same time, the limits of terrorism. Now terrorism is forced to make a choice. On the one hand, it may crystallize and perfect itself as a separate populist practice with self-determined forms, timing, and objectives, by, for example, insisting obsessively on the theme of the release of prisoners. In this case, as has already happened elsewhere, the political phenomenon of violence will end up in the category of the case study of social malaise in the age of late capitalism; and thus it will be interpreted as one of the prices to be paid for the survival of the status quo. On the other hand, it may move toward forms of real guerrilla action, and it may consciously set down its roots within the new spontaneity.
However, this transition implies a profound re-structuring of the military organization, whose capacity to last and to extend itself is attributed to “social complicity,” instead of to the self-sufficiency of the organization itself. It is obvious that such a successful change will imply an increment in the offensive capacity of the armed struggle.
In the short run, that is in the next few months, this taking root will certainly not occur on the level of behaviour: here the difference between the rich and immediate living of the young and the military, rigid, inhuman abstraction of terrorism is irreducible. Vice-versa, the con-joining, as subjective operation, could take place through the objectives that the Movement has promulgated in these years: in the first place, that key idea “less time for work, everyone working.” It should be kept in mind, however, that to emphasize intelligently some of the mass objectives and to practice them would mean to discharge on them the indubitable power of the armed struggle.
On the other hand, the new social behaviour, confined to a “molecular” Impact (rather than “spectacular”) with terrorism, would come out profoundly modified and strengthened. The menacing quality of “subversion of existing order” that the new spontaneity carries and conceals in itself would prevail; a quality that – to impose itself – needs to achieve success and to withdraw from the atmosphere – between allowable marginality and harmless dissent – that today limits it and vexes it as a heart condition would.
One cannot in fact forget that the “expropriation of the struggle” and of the mass initiative happens wherever the Movement clashes with obstacles which it cannot remove with appropriate actions; satisfied with the consciousness of its legitimacy, the Movement does not organize itself in order to impose this legitimacy. In the end, its tension is evaporated in an empty “obligation to repeat,” which is only the beginning of future passivity and impotence.
Precisely for this reason, the conjunction of the frightening beauty of March 12, 1977 in the Roman streets[3] with the geometric power displayed in Moro’s kidnapping becomes the narrow door through which the subversive process in Italy can either grow or die.
To sum up, we can state that the “serendipitous uniqueness” of the Italian situation consists precisely in the circumstances described earlier. Presently in a state of tumultuous expansion among youth is a way of life based on need, that is, on use-value. This development is accompanied by, in a relationship not devoid of tension and hostility, the definition of a political being which raises in military terms the question of the break-up of the State machinery. As a consequence, in Italy, the social practice, of use-value is charged with offensive significance and demands a mutation in the mode of production, whereas in other countries the same practice, perhaps wider and richer, lives a virtual, interstitial, and somewhat transient life side by side with the capitalist society and its State.
The new corporate State is not capable, at least for the time being, of accommodating the new behaviour through any mediation or management of its dynamics. The regime is therefore forced to confront head to head the new spontaneity (which it rejects even as pure datum by denying its existence) while it attempts to destroy it, wishing to respond only in terms of interdiction and death.
In reality, this operation of death and restoration must be based immediately on the social network, represented politically by the Italian Communist Party. However, the process of State institutionalization of this party (with the simultaneous wilting of its reformist-progressive role into impotence) may unleash the social contradictions within it, contradictions which Toglliatti’s machine had succeeded in suppressing and managing. The costs of such a process are so great as to be – perhaps – unacceptable. The Italian Communist Party risks breaking the branch on which it sits.
As everyone can see, “great is the disorder beneath the heavens, and for that reason the situation bodes well.”
(From Italy: Autonomia – Post Political Politics, semiotext(e), Intervention Series #1, 1980)
[1] Eugenio Scalfari: Director of La Republica, a center-left dally paper.
[2] Benedetto Croce: literary philosopher at the beginning of the 20th century.
[3] On March 11, 1977, a Bolognese student, Francesco LoRusso, was killed by the police. On March 12, more than 100,000 people demonstrated in Rome. They attacked the seat of the DC, broke open an arsenal, and fought with the police throughout the city.
Further Readings:
Italy: Autonomia (1),
Italy: Autonomia (2),
Italy: Autonomia (3),
Italy: Autonomia (4) – Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Italy: Autonomia (5) – “Bifo” and Radio Alice
Italy, Autonomia (6) – Raniero Panzieri
Italy: Autonomia (7) – Mario Tronti
Italy: Autonomia (8) – Mario Tronti
Italy: Autonomia (9) – Antonio Negri
Italy: Autonomia (10) – Sergio Bologna
Italy: Autonomia (11) – Franco Piperno
Italy: Autonomia (12) – Oreste Scalzone
Autonomia (13) – Paolo Virno
Italy: Autonomia (14) – Félix Guattari
Italy: Autuonomia (15) – Feminism
Italy: Autonomia (16) – Feminism: Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James
Italy: Autonomia (17) – Feminism: Leopoldina Fortunati
Italy: Autonomia (18) – Feminism: Silvia Federici
Italy: Autonomia (19) – Feminism: Carla Lonzi
Italy: Autonomia (20) – Porto Marghera: the last firebrands