Oreste Scalzone was a leading figure of the Potere Operaio group in Italy, active in the late ’60s early ’70s. In 2016, the Lundimatin collective organised a series of short interviews with him that covered the “rise and fall” of the country’s Autonomia movement(s). The result is a wonderfully lucid, passionate and self-critical reflection on the events (the days, as he calls them) that marked the period.
The interviews are conducted in French, but their extraordinary value leads us to post them here for those who are unfamiliar with Scalzone and the period.
77 was not like 68. 68 was a dissenting protest, 77 was radically alternative. For this reason, the “official” version presents 68 as the good guy and 77 as the bad guy; in fact, 68 was salvaged while 77 was wiped out. For this reason, 77 can never, unlike 68, be an easy object of celebration.
Nanni Balestrini, Primo Moroni, L’orda d’oro
The news of an insurrectionary situation in Italy, a situation which lasted more than ten years and which ONE could only bring to an end by arresting more than 4,000 people in one night, threatened on several occasions to reach France in the 70’s.
First came the wildcat strikes of the Hot Autumn (1969) which the Empire defeated with the Piazza Fontana bombing. The French, among whom “the working class seizes from the fragile hands of the students the red flag of the proletarian revolution”, only to sign the Grenelle agreements, could not then believe that a movement starting from the universities could have matured to the point of reaching the factories. With all the bitterness of their abstract relationship to the working class, they felt stung; their May would have tarnished. So they gave the Italian situation the name of “slow, crawling May”.
TIQQUN 2, Ceci n’est pas un programme, 2001
It is a known fact that history is written by the victors. It is no coincidence that we know nothing, or almost nothing, in France, of what took place for more than a decade on the other side of the Alps: the birth of a mass insurrectional movement and its crushing.
Italy in the 1970s was above all an explosion of all the classic forms of politics. In his excellent book Autonomie!, Marcello Tari designates an “impure communism, which brings together Marx and antipsychiatry, the Paris Commune and the American counter-culture, Dadaism and insurrectionalism, operaismo and feminism”. Autonomy was a mass refusal movement among the youth; a rejection of the state and capitalism as much as of the unions and the parliamentary left; a refusal of representation, work and the distribution of subjectivities. It was a low-intensity civil war as well as a decade of political, affective and revolutionary experimentation.
Oreste Scalzone was, among other things, one of the leaders of Potere Operaio, an organisation born in 1969. Three political axioms are privileged: the refusal of work, the construction of a party of insurrection and permanent conflictuality. Scalzone’s political career earned him the honors of the Italian courts, which arrested him in 1979 in order to prosecute him for terrorist subversive association and “attempted armed insurrection against the power of the State”. He managed to flee Italy and take refuge in France.
Lundimatin has chosen to ask Mr. Scalzone to do the impossible: tell ten years in ten dates at the rate of ten minutes per date. A necessarily incomplete narrative, a battle against time. As you will see over the episodes, the winner was not the watch.
Italy: Autonomia (12) – Oreste Scalzone
Oreste Scalzone was a leading figure of the Potere Operaio group in Italy, active in the late ’60s early ’70s. In 2016, the Lundimatin collective organised a series of short interviews with him that covered the “rise and fall” of the country’s Autonomia movement(s). The result is a wonderfully lucid, passionate and self-critical reflection on the events (the days, as he calls them) that marked the period.
The interviews are conducted in French, but their extraordinary value leads us to post them here for those who are unfamiliar with Scalzone and the period.
77 was not like 68. 68 was a dissenting protest, 77 was radically alternative. For this reason, the “official” version presents 68 as the good guy and 77 as the bad guy; in fact, 68 was salvaged while 77 was wiped out. For this reason, 77 can never, unlike 68, be an easy object of celebration.
Nanni Balestrini, Primo Moroni, L’orda d’oro
The news of an insurrectionary situation in Italy, a situation which lasted more than ten years and which ONE could only bring to an end by arresting more than 4,000 people in one night, threatened on several occasions to reach France in the 70’s.
First came the wildcat strikes of the Hot Autumn (1969) which the Empire defeated with the Piazza Fontana bombing. The French, among whom “the working class seizes from the fragile hands of the students the red flag of the proletarian revolution”, only to sign the Grenelle agreements, could not then believe that a movement starting from the universities could have matured to the point of reaching the factories. With all the bitterness of their abstract relationship to the working class, they felt stung; their May would have tarnished. So they gave the Italian situation the name of “slow, crawling May”.
TIQQUN 2, Ceci n’est pas un programme, 2001
It is a known fact that history is written by the victors. It is no coincidence that we know nothing, or almost nothing, in France, of what took place for more than a decade on the other side of the Alps: the birth of a mass insurrectional movement and its crushing.
Italy in the 1970s was above all an explosion of all the classic forms of politics. In his excellent book Autonomie!, Marcello Tari designates an “impure communism, which brings together Marx and antipsychiatry, the Paris Commune and the American counter-culture, Dadaism and insurrectionalism, operaismo and feminism”. Autonomy was a mass refusal movement among the youth; a rejection of the state and capitalism as much as of the unions and the parliamentary left; a refusal of representation, work and the distribution of subjectivities. It was a low-intensity civil war as well as a decade of political, affective and revolutionary experimentation.
Oreste Scalzone was, among other things, one of the leaders of Potere Operaio, an organisation born in 1969. Three political axioms are privileged: the refusal of work, the construction of a party of insurrection and permanent conflictuality. Scalzone’s political career earned him the honors of the Italian courts, which arrested him in 1979 in order to prosecute him for terrorist subversive association and “attempted armed insurrection against the power of the State”. He managed to flee Italy and take refuge in France.
Lundimatin has chosen to ask Mr. Scalzone to do the impossible: tell ten years in ten dates at the rate of ten minutes per date. A necessarily incomplete narrative, a battle against time. As you will see over the episodes, the winner was not the watch.
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