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 and political 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 
utonomia' 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.



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