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Interlude 2: Lotta Continua: the Dilemmas of a Revolutionary Group Between the Hot Autumn and the Restoration of Capitalism

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Interlude 2: Lotta Continua: the Dilemmas of a Revolutionary Group Between the Hot Autumn and the Restoration of Capitalism Interlude 2: Lotta Continua: The Dilemmas of a Revolutionary Group Between the Hot Autumn and the Restoration of Capitalism The revolutionary group “Lotta continua”, founded in Turin, the city of the Fiat company, in the middle of Italy’s “hot autumn”, brought together students and workers. In its short and tumultuous existence (1969–1976), the group experienced all the dilemmas that anti-capitalist movements have historically faced: the boundaries of the revolutionary subject (the contours of the working class and its relationship with the sub-proletariat), the problematic alliance between class and gender, the issue of organization (avant-garde vs. masses), the relation with the insti- tutional sphere and the use of violence (the institutional and fascist as well as the revolutionary). Lotta continua’s shifts, at times even U- turns, reflected its efforts to calibrate the struggle against capital and the role that the group was called on to play in relation to a moment of acute social conflict which nonetheless foreshadowed an unprecedented counter-offensive on the part of capital. In the period 1967–1968, student movement rose to public attention also in Italy. After students staged occupations and struggles on university campuses and in high school classrooms, they shifted their attention to the working class, leafleting factories on a regular basis. This was the outset of what has been described as “The biggest, most prolonged strike wave in history” (Bambery 2019) or “Italy’s ‘long May’”, as well as “quite easily the most radical, interesting, and, in the end, violent of all the world’s ‘1968s’” (Foot 2003, 8). The “battle of Corso Traiano” marked a turning point. Named after the avenue running through a working-class neighbourhood of Turin, this 108 INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS … one-day strike for housing reform organized by the trade unions on 3 July 1969 erupted into heated riots, with locals residents defending students and workers from the nearby Mirafiori Fiat factory against vicious police repression. This clash was a run-up to the largest mass mobilization of workers in Italian history, primarily taking place in the country’s industrialized North but eventually spreading to other areas as well, including the severely underdeveloped South. Referred to as the “Hot Autumn”, this wave of struggle gained worldwide attention. It is not by chance that 1969 was also the year in which the first of a series of bombings took place (in Piazza Fontana, Milan) targeting common civilians (including children) on the country’s streets and trains: it also represented the advent of the “strategy of tension”, a backlash orchestrated by the so-called deviated intelligence agencies in collusion with neofascist groups that sought to imbue the population with a climate of fear so it would turn to the state for protection. The epicentre of this “Hot Autumn” was Mirafiori. At the time, the factory was Europe’s largest car manufacturing facility in terms of workforce (50,000 employees). It was there, and specifically out of the student-worker assembly held regularly in the factory in those months, that “Lotta continua” (Continuous Struggle) was born. Of the multiple revolutionary groups that emerged in Italy at the end of the 1960s, Lotta Continua is unique in having experienced both the broader clash with the system and electoral competition in its seven years of life, to finally implode on the occasion of its second, and last, national congress. The group found itself grappling with all of the issues that the mili- tant intellectuals profiled so far had placed at the centre of their analyses: Landauer’s idea that socialism must be built here and now, and not only in the factory; Kollontai’s warning not to relegate women’s emancipa- tion, and the larger moral and sexual revolution, to the position of a secondary effect of class struggle; Mattick’s certainty that nothing good can be expected of the official organizations representing the workers’ movement and that, on the contrary, class struggle must target such orga- nizations as well; and finally, Panzieri’s celebration of the revolutionary autonomy of the proletariat. The strategic choices made by Lotta continua, along with its repeated course-changes, did not simply stem from the “provisional” character of its leading members’ working style or, conversely, opportunism on their part. Rather, these choices appear to be the result of a constant tension INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS … 109 between an often-fideistic investment in the thaumaturgical power of struggles (by workers but also other groups) and an awareness of the need for an organization that directs these struggles towards the goal of a more general clash with the bourgeoisie. Many movements faced this same dilemma, but in the case of Lotta Continua it was exacerbated by a particular conjunction of historical factors: namely, the fact that the group was poised on the ridge between the peak of social conflict and the beginning of the capitalist counter-offensive. The oscillation also derives from the fact that the group raised the bar in terms of both theoretical insight and political activity, so much so that it represents the most significant of the extra-parliamentary leftist groups that developed in the late 1960s for its ability to both mobilize and at the same time to analyse Italian and international capitalism of the time. Lotta Continua’s evolution set it on a path distinct from the classical schemes of Marxism but yet not univocal. It reflects the expansion of the category of revolutionary subject, an expansion that went hand in hand with the unceasing reformulation of the role of the avant-garde and the relationship between leading figures and the masses (in short, the question of organization). The outcomes of the anti-capitalist struggle— which in the whirlwind pace of those years’ events were tallied on a nearly daily basis—and the role Lotta continua ought to play in those struggles gave rise to positions on the relationship between the masses and avant- gardes, on the one hand, and between the movement and institutions, on the other. These positions were destined in turn to change over time, often taking abrupt turns that confused many militants (in part because they were often handed down from above and not accompanied by a collective reflection on previous strategies). In contrast, the group’s thinking on the issue of force appears more stable. Nevertheless, in the wake of the state and neofascist violence char- acterizing that period, Lotta’s position shifted from supporting defensive violence to promoting avant-garde violence, and this shift gave rise to misunderstandings and lacerations. At the same time, it remained faithful to the principle that coercive actions against the enemies of the prole- tariat must maintain a grassroots character if they are to deserve the label of revolutionaries; hence the condemnation of the solipsism displayed by the Red Brigades. 110 INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS … The following sections are dedicated to these issues: the revolutionary subject, organization, relations with institutions, and violence. The Revolutionary Subject On 1 November 1969, the first issue of a newspaper was published in Milan. Taking the title of the joint worker-student leaflets that had been distributed for months in front of Mirafiori, it heralded the consolidation of a national organization: The idea of this newspaper is to identify the links connecting workers’ struggles with those of students, technicians, and proletarians in general, in a revolutionary perspective. By now there is a widespread need felt among the masses for an instrument through which to intervene more generally in the class struggle, one which represents an element of continuity and overall political maturity in the alternating phases of struggle. (Editorial Board 1969, 3) 1 The group that was forming brought together multiple different currents: that of the student movement (from Turin, but also from Trento, Pavia and the Catholic University of Milan) and the Pisan group “Potere Operaio” (Workers Power, established between 1966 and 1967 and, like Lotta Continua, out of the encounter between university students and factory workers), from which Lotta continua drew analyses of Turin-based workerism. Adriano Sofri, one of the founders of LC, nurtured not only intellectual admiration for Panzieri but also personal empathy for his morality and sobriety. When encountering factory-floor struggles, the specifically student- linked issues were shortly relegated to the background, even to the point of being stigmatized as “studentism”; however, the claims-making plat- form which prevailed in this case was not that of the traditional workers’ movement but rather the disruptive subjectivity of mass workers, young and often immigrants from the South. Relegated to performing repeti- tive tasks in the factory and abandoned to urban blight in the dormitories where they slept, they felt totally detached from the mediating logic of the trade unions and reformist parties, and not at all represented by them. In this regard, it is quite understandable how Lotta Continua ended up representing an unprecedented breeding ground for the politicization of 1 For the first few years of publication, the articles were not signed by specific authors. INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS … 111 subjects who up to that point had been effectively excluded from public space: these new workers and then, beginning at the end of 1970, a varied sub-proletariat as well. The group decided to act within this mixed popu- lation under the slogan “Prendiamoci la città” (Let’s take over the city) in an effort to unite the proletarian struggles in the North with the uprisings in the South. Although the workers’ struggles did not die out after Italy’s Hot Autumn, they did begin to be reabsorbed by the unions.
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