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.

(end of part 1)


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