Autonomies

… we have no choice but to be the children of ’77 …

From Blackout ((Poetry and Politics)) (30/03/2019) …

1977: The Year That Is Never Commemorated

Claire Fontaine

“It’s not enough to denounce the lies of the power, we need to denounce and break also the truths of the power. When the power tells the truth and it pretends that it’s something natural, we must denounce what is inhuman and absurd in this order of reality, which is reproduced, reflected and consolidated by the order of speech. We must unveil the delirious aspect of the power.

Let’s pretend to be in the place of the power, let’s speak with its voice, let’s emit signals as if we were the power with its tone of voice. But they are fake signals. Let’s produce fake information that unveils what power hides, information capable of producing a revolt against the force of the speech of the power.”

—A/traverso, February 1976

The Italian movement of 1977 is an event that nobody commemorates, although—and probably because— it contains the germs of our actual present; the desires and contradictions that emerged back then are profoundly contemporary, to the degree that the protagonists of that movement are still persecuted and can’t be forgiven: some of them are currently under arrest and no amnesty has been approved in their favor. Others get extradited to be jailed.

One could even talk about the survival of ’77 in a Warburgian sense and observe that the images and energies from that time have partly migrated within ours and somehow haunt it.

The memory of these years is a sensible territory; having been the theater of conflicts that are still raging inside society’s body, ’77 is a difficult space for deploying critical distance and trying to interpret the facts.

Anarchist truth cannot and must not become the monopoly of one individual or committee; nor can it depend on the decisions of real or fictitious majorities. All that is necessary — and sufficient — is for everyone to have and to exercise the widest freedom of criticism and for each one of us to maintain their own ideas and choose for themselves their own comrades. In the last resort the facts will decide who was right.

Errico Malatesta

Italy’s Autonomia movement(s) of the 1960s and 70s, against the background of a rapidly changing society brought on by what some would call Italy’s earlier “economic miracle” – mass, economically driven internal migration from the poorer, rural south to the industrialising north; increasingly decentralised or post-Fordist industrial organisation as the national economy is “internationalised” and “consumer focused”; the “democratisation” of access to post-secondary education; the decomposition and re-composition of older family structures; the weakening of the institutional and cultural weight of the Catholic Church; and so on -, sought in a variety of different ways to theorise and put into practice the need for new organisational forms to contest capitalist social relations, forms that were both responsive to working class (re)configurations and interests, and capable of surpassing the political sclerosis of the Italian Communist Party/the PCI in the struggle against capital.

If the Italian movement(s) of the time were not unique in confronting these issues, as they were common to much of the “long May of ’68” in France and elsewhere, in Italy, they were brought to a head with much greater intensity and in ways that still resonate.

The “organisational question” of the working class may seem to be a specifically “Marxist” concern, but anarchists and other “leftist” political traditions have also addressed the matter, and this throughout there history. If the “communist or Leninist party form” entered upon a terminal crisis in ’68, anarchism was no less interpolated by the same social transformations. What advantage anarchists had in this matter, if any, was that the debate for them was almost as old as anarchism itself.

We share below a second essay in our series dedicated to Italy’s Autonomia, this time with a focus on the “organisational question”.