THE FUTURE AT OUR BACKS: "AUTONOMIA" AND AUTONOMOUS SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
IN 1970S ITALY (REVISED VERSION)

The Future At Our Backs: Autonomia and Autonomous Social Movements in 1970s Italy

by Patrick Cuninghame
(School of Social Science, Middlesex University)

(Paper for the Association for the Study of Southern Europe and the Balkans [ASSEB]
Seminars on Southern Europe and the Balkans, 8 December  1998)

Introduction

The Italian new social movement of the mid to late 1970s, Autonomia (Autonomy), also known
as Autonomia Operaia (Workers= Autonomy), represents a key collective actor in the history
of late 20th century European protest and social conflict. Firstly, there is its role in the highly
conflictual and relatively rapid transformation of Italy from a recently industrialised nation to a
>post-fordist=, post-industrial society from the mid 1970s onwards; a process which is still
very much ongoing with the gradual emergence of a Second Republic, within the broader
context of European integration, from the political instability, regional imbalances and
corruption scandals of the First Republic. Secondly, there is the light the experience of
Autonomia has thrown on the question of the changing nature of collective identity, political
organisation and social contestation  in urbanised, advanced capitalist societies.

Since the 1960s collective action has moved decisively away from being the expression of
social conflict between supposedly homogenous social blocks based on clearly delineated and
ideologised social class identities (the proletariat and bourgeoisie of classical Marxism) with
the political party as the privileged site of socio-political organisation.  Instead it has moved
towards the heterogeneous sector of  the new social movements, comprised of the new social
or >decentred= subjects of women, students, non-unionised and often casualised workers,
unemployed youth, homosexuals, environmentalists and other so-called socially and politically
>marginal= elements, whose identities and ideologies appear to be constantly shifting and
whose principal form of contestation has been the single issue campaign, usually organised
as a decentralised network. I will argue that Autonomia, while sharing many of these
characteristics, was unique as a European new social movement in that it combined several
>single issue campaigns= (anti-nuclear, students and workers rights, access to cultural
spaces, anti-fascism) under the umbrella of one heterogeneous and localist movement that
was united only in its identification with the theory and practice of autonomy from the State,
institutional political parties and trade unions or any form of political, social and cultural
mediation between the interests of capital and those of the social actors of which it was
composed. Or rather, that the most radical sectors of these social movements identified with
each other and against the State through the theory and practice of political autonomy.

2. New social movement theories and Italian social movements
In testing these hypotheses, I intend to critique the prevalent approach of social movement
theorists towards Italian new social movements in general and Autonomia in particular.
Sydney Tarrow (1989) adopted a primarily quantitative approach based on the interpretation of
data from a single >newspaper of record= through which he identified a cycle of protest and
social conflict from 1968 to 1973, which ended with the disintegration of the main social
movement organisations - Potere Operaio (PO/Workers= Power), Lotta Continua (LC/Fight
On) and Avanguardia Operaia (AO/Workers= Vanguard) into institutionalisation or clandestine
organised political violence as a result of demobilisation brought on by various state strategies
of repression and political co-option. Such a reliance on a single source of data  (the liberal
national daily newspaper Il Corriere della Sera), which itself was an actor in the social conflicts
and not simply a neutral observer of events, leads him to ignore or minimise the emergence of
a new cycle of social conflict in the mid 1970s which peaked with the >1977 Movement=, a
rupture if anything more radical and certainly more violent than that of 1968.

Alberto Melucci (1977, 1989) views the new social movements essentially as defensive social
phenomena, seeking to preserve ways of life and sets of values placed under threat by the
exigencies of a revitalised capitalism, with culture, the body and communication as the
principal arenas of contestation. Melucci seems to concur with the Italian Communist Party
(PCI) intellectual Alberto Asor Rosa, whose thesis in his work on the 1977 Movement, " Le
Due Societá" (The Two Societies), states that the new social movements of the >area of
Autonomia= represented an >irreducible marginalisation= of certain new social groupings,
particularly the unemployed youth of the urban periphery. However, such a viewpoint on new
social movements is in danger of depoliticising and decontextualising what was historically a
profound moment of rupture within modern Italian society and of presenting these movements
as substantially empty of creativity and innovation with nothing more than violence, criminality
and deviance to fall back on before a systematic state response. The >Two Societies=
approach, also ties in with certain strands of Post-Marxism, such as Andre Gorz (1989), in
recognising the division of the working class in the advanced capitalist nations between a
precarious >underclass= with few rights and no guarantees, and a guaranteed but shrinking
sector still tied to the trade unions and the social democratic parties (a division which became
evident in the mid 1970s). It fails to address both the nature of marginality and the use of this
notion to delegitimise and generally minimise the significance of the most radical of the new
social movements.

Robert Lumley (1990), adopts a hybrid cultural studies-semiotics approach, based on the
works of Raymond Williams and Umberto Eco, with strong references to the French
postmodernists and Italian >weak thought= exponents, such as Gianni Vattimo. Using
Raymond Williams= systemisation for cultural phenomena, he divides the social movements
into two main categories: >emergent=, such as the students and women's movements; and
>residual=, for example the factory workers movements and the Marxist 'groups'. Ultimately,
his thesis concurs with that of Melucci in that the new social movements are cultural rather
than political phenomena and herein essentially lies their 'newness' and their significance.

Other researchers of Italian social movements such as Donatella della Porta (1996) and David
Moss (1989) have focused, like Tarrow, on Autonomia as fundamentally a terrorist
phenomenon comparable with both Italian and German clandestine structures such as the
Red Brigades and the Rote Arme Fraktion, and have chosen to ignore or minimise those
cultural, social and historical aspects not directly related to the issues of political violence,
deviance or subversion.

3. Working Hypotheses
One of the central characteristics and practices of the new social movements that separate
them from the spheres of institutionalised or >revolutionary vanguard= party politics is that of
>autonomy=. This essentially Enlightenment notion originally applied to the sovereignty of the
individual within the collectivity in modern European  thought, but has come to refer to a series
of both collective and individual practices, needs and desires characteristic of the social actors
within the new social movements. In the collective sense it signifies the need of different
groups of actors to protect and advance their own agendas without being subsumed by the
demands of a wider collectivity, whether it be civil society, the working class, or indeed by
other social movements. One of the foremost practitioners of autonomy has been the
women=s movement, the meeting of whose needs had historically been postponed by >the
revolutionary party= until after the conquest of state power and the establishment of socialism,
the issue of gender firmly subordinated to that of class.

In the political sense and particularly in the Italian context, autonomy meant the need of an
emergent social composition of the deskilled, massified, Southern migrant factory workers of
the 1960s to form self-managed, horizontal, organisations that would be independent from the
social democratic parties and trade unions tied to the Fordist-Keynsian post-1945 social pact
which principally benefited the established, >historic= industrial working class of the North.
Starting from this point of rupture, the desire of this >mass worker= (as the operaista
[workerist] intellectuals associated  with Autonomia defined the >class composition= of the
Italian industrial working class of the late 1960s) for autonomy, also from the perceived
drudgery and danger of factory work (hence the widely diffused practice of the >refusal of
work=), quickly spread outside the factory walls to their immediate communities, and then
through the intervention of student activists to the broader social terrain, becoming the core
practice of the new social movements of the 1970s. The mainly Marxist-Leninist groups of the
New Left that emerged from the revolts of 1968-69 were unable to confront  the growing
political and economic crisis following the Oil Crisis of 1973. Undermined more by the
succesful co-optive transformation of the factory workers assemblies into  shop-steward's
committees where the unions were able to gradually re-establish their hegemony, than by the
'Strategy of Tension', the State's allegedly terroristic response to the 'Hot Autumn' of 1969, the
groups dissolved themselves. Some of their individual members returned to the fold of the
historic left, others took the path of radical reformism and helped to found 'Democrazia
Proletaria' (DP/Proletarian Democracy). Most found themselves in autonomous localised
collectives, deprived of a national co-ordinating structure and a 'party line' but conversely more
involved in the immediate struggles of the 'social territory'. What the investigative journalist
Giorgio Bocca, described as the 'archipelago of Autonomia' had begun to emerge by 1975. As
factory-based conflict diminished under the impact of technological restructuring but
neighbourhood, student  and  'marginalised youth' contestations intensified in the mid-1970s,
this 'autonomia operaia' (workers= autonomy), evolved into the broader phenomenon of
'autonomia'. It signified a desire for and an attempted practice of independence from both the
capitalist political economy and from the Nation State as the ultimate site of political power,
mainly through often illegal forms of expropriation, self-management and >counter-power=.

Although the emphasis was always on the collective, autonomy was also seen as an individual
demand and practice: the diversity of the needs of the individual could not be subordinated to
the voluntarism of party discipline nor to the romantic leftist myth of heroic self-sacrifice. This
autonomy of the individual within the immediate collectivity of a social movement and the
broader collectivity of civil society appeared to find its apposite political expression in the
direct, participative democracy of the assembly and the refusal of delegation or any form of
representative, institutionalised democracy

4. Main themes of research
The five main themes or conceptual frameworks identified as being key to an understanding
of the political, social, cultural, theoretical and historical significance of Autonomia and the
Italian autonomous social movements of the 1970s are: work and its >refusal=, models of
political organisation, counter-cultures and the >refusal of politics=, the uses of illegality and
political violence, and alternative visions of future societies.

 i) Work and its >refusal=:
The >refusal of work= was a central practice and belief of the activists and intellectuals of
Autonomia. Starting from its origins among the autonomous workers organisations in the large
industrial plants of northern Italy in the late 1960s, this shifted during the course of the 1970s
into a generalised refusal by youth to enter the factory or workplace as part of the search for
an alternative society based on pleasure and the expropriation of >secondary= cultural needs
more than >primary= physical ones. (The influence of Agnes Heller=s >Theory of Needs= on
the Italian autonomists theory and political praxis was evident.) However, this refusal of work
was recuperated within the factory through post-Fordist restructuring which led to the re-
emergence of the problem of mass unemployment and intensified divisions within the working
classes. At the same time the social movements which adopted this practice found
themselves increasingly marginalised from one of the central loci of political interaction, the
large-scale factory, many being forced into precarious, deregulated labour at the apparent
margins of the productive process. However, some Autonomist intellectuals claimed that in
fact a new type of intellectual operaio sociale (socialised worker), had substituted the manual
>mass worker= of the factories as both more central to the needs of post-Fordist capitalism
and potentially far more antagonistic to its project of technological restructuring and economic
austerity. With the defeat and demobilisation of the new social movements by the end of the
1970s, a critique began to emerge within Autonomia of this absolute refusal of work, and of its
potential to be recuperated within a process of mechanisation and flexibilisation in the
workplace, wherein the workers= knowledge of labour-saving >tricks= was expropriated as
part of Toyotism=s >just in time/total quality= model of factory production.



ii) Models of political organisation:
The concept of >autonomy= was key to the various models of political organisation within
Autonomia. These included the more tightly organised workplace and university collectives
associated with the Autonomia Operaia Organizata (organised workers= autonomy) tendency
which attempted to form a national network with eventual aspirations to becoming a
revolutionary political party on the Marxist-Leninist vanguard model, able to directly challenge
the political and cultural hegemony of the PCI and the trade unions within the Italian working
class. However, this tendency=s attempt to impose its apparently outmoded organisational
model on the rest of the heterogeneous spectrum of the >1977 Movement= was fiercely
resisted by the more fluid and localised structures of what was known as >the diffused
autonomy of the social=, namely those movements, such as women, homosexuals and
alternative media activists, who effectively refused the concept of political organisation itself
and were often characterised by an emphasis on cultural interventions. A further political form
came at the end of the cycle with the emergence of the myriad of small semi-clandestine
groups of >armed autonomy= who attempted to differentiate themselves from the clandestine
paramilitary cellular structures of the Red Brigades by combining open political agitational
activities with clandestine >armed actions=, more often against >things= (i.e.industrial
sabotage) than people. Most of these 'armed groups', however, collapsed under the weight of
their own internal contradictions, seeking to be part of the >autonomy of the social= while
engaging in an >armed struggle= whose politico-military logic of frontal opposition against the
State was alien to the experiences and needs of the new social subjects themselves. In the
midst of the concomitant crisis of Autonomia they were quickly disbanded by the State or had
dissolved themselves into the larger terrorist groups by the early 1980s.

iii) Counter-Cultures and the >Refusal of Politics=:
Perhaps the most original and lasting contribution from Autonomia to Italian collective action
came in this field. A large part of the movement, known as autonomia creativa (creative
autonomy) centred around the >free radio stations= such as Bologna=s Radio Alice, the
>Metropolitan Indians= and a galaxy of artistic collectives and small independent publishers,
placed experimentation in linguistic codes ( What Umberto Eco called 'italo-indiano') and the
immediate satisfaction of cultural needs at the centre of their actions. They not only sought
autonomy from the stifling conformity of traditional >bourgeois= culture, but also rejected the
work-oriented and organisation-obsessed culture of the New Left and of >organised
autonomy=, while seeking to create a >post-political= politics based on perpetual
experimentation in political language and art and the direct expropriation of cultural needs.
This apparently most >marginalised= part of the movement, in some ways comparable to the
British punk movement, was the first to melt away with the recrudescence of violence and
repression in the late 1970s. However, their 'counter culture' resembles most closely that of
the 'new social subjects' who compose the Italian and European new social movements of the
1980s and 1990s.

iv) Illegality and political violence:
Autonomia has been characterised in the Italian popular imagination as a violent, if not
terroristic movement. Extreme forms of violence were regularly used in demonstrations and
>militant antifascism=, including the use of firearms, although this was heavily criticised within
the movement, particularly by women and those who wished to clearly demarcate their
political philosophy and practice from the terrorist organisations. However, the violence used
on demonstrations was more symbolic than paramilitary, and the movement generally
maintained a distance from the clandestine terrorist organisations such as the Red Brigades
whose violence it considered >elitist=, politically counter-productive and entirely within the
logic of the >autonomy of the political= as expounded by the PCI  intellectuals in its obsession
with >state power= and its dismissal of the social movements. Illegality, however, was
widespread throughout all sections of the movement, involving such collective acts as mass
>proletarian (or free) shopping=, the autoriduzione (self-reduction) of every social charge
possible from bus fares to restaurant bills, and the first squatting of >social centres=. This was
due partially to a traditional far Left rejection of >bourgeois capitalist law and order= and the
State=s >monopoly on violence=, partially as a challenge to the >legalism= and neo-
parliamentarianism of much of the New Left, and much to a diffuse belief in the right to satisfy
human physical and cultural needs autonomously from waged labour and the capitalist
economy.

v)  Alternative Visions of Future Societies:
Autonomia was accused by both the New Left and the Historic Left of being both >anti-
communist= and >nihilist=, facing the PCI as its >absolute enemy= without a political
programme or a vision of a future post-capitalist society towards which it was prepared to
campaign politically in the long-term as well as revolt in the short. The historical Marxist-
Leninist notion of revolution as putsch or >seizure of power= was rejected for the same
reason as the PCI=s parliamentary road to socialism, in that >power= itself and its physical
eminence, the centralised democratic Nation-State were seen as undesirable and
unnecessary for the revolutionary transcendence of capitalism and the construction of a post-
capitalist or >communist= society. For the same reason, none of the revolutionary socialist
models such as Che and Fidel=s Cuba, Mao=s China and Ho Chi Minh=s Vietnam which had
inspired the student-worker revolts of 1968, let alone the grim functionalism of  Eastern
European real socialism were aspired to. Nor indeed was an ideological, anarchistic rejection
of the state tout court considered adequate. Instead, a highly eclectic ideology, based as
much on French situationism and post-structuralism as well as Italian operaismo (workerism)
and Autonomist Marxism, envisaged the gradual emergence from the bottom upwards of a
network of autonomous spaces, liberated from the capitalist laws of value, including factories,
schools, university faculties, hospitals, squatted social centres, neighbourhoods and
eventually whole communities, in which differences of identity within the working class would
be valorised over any false notion of unity imposed from above. This would have led to the
organic creation of a pluralistic and directly democratic post-capitalist society. Although
Autonomia=s political project never got beyond its earliest phase, it remained sufficiently
attractive and apparently relevant to the perceived needs of much of Western Europe=s
radicalised youth , compared to other political alternatives, such as social democracy,
Trotskyism or traditional anarchism, to influence the various squatter and radical ecologist
social movements of the 1980s and the 1990s upsurge of the centri sociali (squatted social
centre) movement in Italy.


5. Conclusion
While similar urban social movements have existed throughout urban advanced capitalist
societies, Autonomia, in its various spatial and discursive articulations, can be said to
represent one of the most massified and radical ruptures both between the Historic Left of
hierarchical political parties (both reformist and revolutionary) and trade unions, and the  New
'New Left' of extra-parliamentary, horizontally organised, new social movements and social
movement organisations. It encapsulated the conflict between the libertarian practices and
needs of a new generation of social actors and the gathering drive by the State and political
parties of Right, Left and Centre towards austerity and the reimposition of labour discipline
and social peace in an attempt to resolve deeply embedded economic and political crises from
which the >new generations= felt  themselves totally detached. Thus, my principal working
hypothesis is that the loosely interconnected groups and collectives known as Autonomia in
Italy in the 1970s represented, at that time, a new form of >post-political= politics which
problematicised a series of social relations involving the State, political parties, the new social
movements and the needs, desires, discourses and practices of the new social subjects.
Caught in a rapidly diminishing no-man's land between the terrorism of the Red Brigades and
draconian repressive measures which effectively branded those to the left of the PCI as
'fianchegiatori' (terrorist fellow travellers), the project of autonomy attempted by significant
sectors of the post-industrial working class was squeezed out of existence from the end of
1970s. Most of the >new social subjects= had already turned to the new forms of individualism
and consumerism that became embedded in the 1980s, not to mention Western Europe's
worst heroin epidemic. However, autonomy as both individual and collective praxis has
remained the prevailing characteristic of the new social movements of the radical Left of the
1980s and 1990s, from the 'ecowarriors' of Europe to the Zapatista indigenous peoples of
Chiapas in Mexico. Autonomist Marxism may be one of the few Leftist ideologies not only to
have survived the Fall of the Berlin Wall, but to have been strengthened and vindicated by the
collapse of 'real socialism' and the downfall of orthodox Marxism.


5. Selected bibliography

Adam, B.D. (1993) >Post-Marxism and the New Social Movements=, in Revue Canadienne
de Sociologie et d=Anthropologie / The Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology, Vol.
30, No. 3: 316-336.

A.Asor Rosa: Le Due Societ<, Turin, 1977.

Balestrini, N. (1987) Gli Invisibili. Milan: Bompiani.

N.Balestrini & P.Moroni: L'Orda D'Oro: 1968-1977, Milan, 1988 & 1997.

Bocca, G. (1980) Il caso 7 aprile: Toni Negri e la grande inquisizione. Milan.

S.Bologna: La Tribd delle Talpe, Milan, 1978.

Buechler, S.M. (1995) >New Social Movement Theories=, The Sociological Quarterly 36, 3:
441-464.

Castells, M. (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture - The Power of
Identity (Vol.II). Oxford:Blackwell.

Catanzaro, R. (ed.) (1990) Ideologie, movimenti, terrorismi. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Cleaver, H. (1979) Reading Capital Politically. Brighton: The Harvester Press.

della Porta, D. (1992) >Life Histories in the Analysis of Social Movement Activists=, pp. 168-
193 in Diani, M. & R. Eyerman (eds.), Studying Collective Action. London: Sage.

___________ (1995) Social movements, political violence & the state: a comparative analysis
of  Italy & Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

M.Foucault: Discipline and Punish, New York, 1979.

P.Ginsborg: A History of Contemporary Italy - Society and Politics 1943-1988, London, 1990.

A.Gorz: Farewell To The Working Class: An Essay On Post-Industrial Socialism, Paris, 1980.

Grispigni, M. (1997) Il Settantasette. Milan: Il Saggiatore.

Habermas, J. (1981) >New Social Movements=, Telos 49: 33-7.

Hunt, L. (1984) >Charles Tilly=s Collective Action=, in Skocpol, T. (ed.) Vision and Method in
Historical Sociology.

Lange, P. and Tarrow,  S. (eds.) (1980) Italy in Transition. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

R.Lumley: States of Emergency - Cultures of Revolt in Italy 1968-1978, London, 1990.

May, T. (1997) Social Research: Issues, Methods and Process. Buckingham: Open University
Press.

Melucci, A. (1977) Sistema Politico, Partiti e Movimenti Sociali. Milan: Feltrinelli.

_________ (1989) Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in
Contemporary Society. Edited by Keane, J. & Mier, P. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press.

Montaldi, D. (1971) Militanti politici di base. Turin: Einaudi.

Negri, A. (1979) Dall=Operaio Massa all=Operaio Sociale: Intervista sull=Operaismo. Milan:
Multhipla Edizioni.

_______ (1988) Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings 1967-83. London: Red Notes.

Garzanti.Papadakis, E. (1989) >Interventions in New Social Movements=, in Gubrium, J.F. &
Silverman, D. (eds.) The Politics of Field Research: Sociology Beyond Enlightenment.
London: Sage.

Passerini, L. (ed.) (1978) Storia orale. Vita quotidiana e cultura materiale delle classi
subalterni. Torino: Rosenburg and Sellier.

Silverman, D. (1993) Interpreting Qualitative Data. London: Sage.

Tarrow, S. (1989) Democracy and Disorder: Protest And Politics In Italy, 1965-75. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.

Tilly, C. (1978) From Mobilization to Revolution. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Touraine, A. (1981) The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements.New
York:Cambridge University  Press.

_________  (1988) The Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Post-Industrial
Society.Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press.

Various authors (1997) Una Sparatoria Tranquilla: Per Una Storia Orale del >77. Rome:
Odradek.

P.Virno & M.Hardt: Radical Thought in Italy - A Potential Politics, Minnesota, 1996.

London, 8 December 1998.

Comments to:
Patrick Cuninghame
School of Social Science,
Middlesex University,
Queensway,
Enfield,
Middlesex EN3 4SF.
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]








%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%