The media spieled out its own version creating the following personages:

1.       The hippy like Indian “heads”: ripe for recuperation.

2.       The intellectual always ripe for recuperation.

3.       The autonomist brandishing a P.38 pistol: non-recuperable, bad, to be eliminated.

   One must point out that the movement was more deeply rooted than the institutions had been led to believe and it would provide a lot more to chew on before it would permit itself to be dressed in stage costume.  

   In the days that followed people continued to meet in other places like the Economics Dept and student residences. The amount of graffiti appearing on walls increased, as did the ironical sending up of institutions. On February 23rd a large, peaceful demo playfully wound its way around Rome. The Indians daubed S. Carvieri in green paint.   

 The number of universities that henceforth were occupied were many. Apart from Rome and Bologna there were Florence and Perugia and then Naples, Bari, Sassari, Cagliari and Palermo.  

  The movement’s fulcrum was in central Italy, backed up by southern Italy. It was in these places that the weight of unemployment was most keenly felt and where the concept of class was far less determined by the capitalist nexus. The refusal of work was interpreted along the lines of there was no work and it seemed impossible for there to be any. There was the endemic refusal by the state to import from the north a productive capitalist structure, dismissing the social benefits to be had from drawing people into wage labour. Two tendencies were present in this refusal of work. On the one hand there was a progressive desire to overcome a poverty stricken human condition. And, on the other there was a specific feeling, typical of a pre-industrial society which boiled down to demanding a system of state support (the case of the Neopolitan proletariat).   

  A signal was awaited from Milan and the industrial triangle i.e. from those sectors of the proletariat most directly involved in the productive process. But the movement in Milan brought to its knees by years of groupusculism produced nothing more than militantism and sectarianism. Even the young proletarian circles had been engulfed by these sectarian games. It was not by chance that some of the people who had produced “Insurrezione”, calling also for a spreading of the movement across the entire territory moved immediately to Rome. In Milan, throughout the whole of 1977 there came nothing other than a discourse of death - an increasingly extreme confrontation of representation cut-off from the productive reality of the north.    

 At the end of February, on the 26th and 27th to be precise, the first national assembly was held in Rome in the Economics Dept. The attack on the reformist and militaristic tendency flared into the open once more. It was a violent attack - giving rise to misunderstanding and confusion.

     The following is from “La Rivoluzione”(No.11): “The Rome Assembly”:

    “Minoritarism is defeated, prepare for revolution immediately. Rome, February 26/27th 15,OOO revolutionaries, expressions of situations where the movement is already on the offensive, from the movement of the unemployed in Naples to the displaced persons of Bari, to the Metropolitan Indians, to the Mao-Dadaists in Bologna, to the workers’ coordinations in Milan ….. It is crystal clear to those whose vision isn’t clouded that in the assembly groups don’t confront and oppose one another. Rather, in their respective positions, a socially based mass movement is evident, capable of bringing about, with the overthrow of capitalist power, a successful programme of total transformation.

     It is crystal clear reformism and the party of small business are out of the running. Their presence already constitutes a provocation and the Berlinguists’ (Berlinguer was then leader of the PCI – (TN) denounced and scattered have been driven out because it is necessary to put a wounded animal out of its misery.

    It is crystal clear that Adup and Autonomia Operaia are revolting lice, a mite unsure whether to take up residence on the back of social democracy or the movement.

    It is crystal clear that destroying lice is an elementary hygienic precaution.  

    It is crystal clear lice and fascists have come to Rome to cause trouble but everywhere they came up against the kind of response a mass movement of the proletariat manifests.

     Within the movement no coercion is necessary. Whoever has not grasped this, who holds problems can be resolved with the aid of shock troops and through the display of macho force, has remained bogged down in the most wretched minoritarism. Making a great deal of fuss, it is a leftover on the verge of extinction. The behaviour of sectors of Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy) - the organised part with a capital A - comporting themselves on military style parades, acting in a violent, aggressive way with comrades, young people and women observes the logic of coalitions. It indicates a profound inability to grasp the newness contained in the movement. But the worst thing is by now imposing a minoritist and organisational logic, whether of a militarist or workers stamp, they risk forcing on the movement a centrist position alien to it.

  Inspite of the militarist pressure exerted by these sectors the Rome assembly came out victorious and unitary. The Metropolitan Indians rejected manipulation by the wretched palefaces of the Pdup (jacket, tie, cashmere sweater), the motion was carried by thousands of cries of approval, and the concluding feeling was one of decision, convinced the movement would not falter.

   The restoration of the paranoiac stage of politics with all its aggressive armoury, voluntarism and repression threatens to crush and deny reality, that which exists, the revolt born from the transformation of everyday life and the break with the mechanisms of constraint.

  But what is obscene floats to the surface once more and the corpses of the institutions and the paranoiacs of militantism carry away the phrasemongers”.

  The motion adopted by the assembly was in reality a bit weak, because at that point, the bulk of the forces present had been wasted by internal battles. The motion claimed all the street confrontations that had taken place up to then (including the ones in the Piazza Independencia) as part and parcel of the movement and proposed “mobilizing for a direct link-up with factories, quarters and schools in order to re-launch the struggle for full employment, a reduction in the working week, a wage increase and to oppose restructuration. It was decided to send a mass delegation (in practise anyone who wanted to go) to the FLM (Federazione Lavoratori Metal Mecanica) meeting, which was to be held in Florence the following week.

    Really it boiled down to things many had taken for granted already. They had hoped the assembly would provide a point of departure in determining on a revolutionary strategy however minimal. The necessity of re-affirming it put the accent on the degree of disinformation and the vanity of enclosing each space and political group within a predetermined trajectory.

   What did emerge was a general lack of preparation tending to favour isolated concrete acts undertaken often as an end in themselves and as the only practicable revolutionary terrain.

   Preparations were laid for the days of revolt. Over and above the discussions the movement simmered, feeling an ever stronger need to re-appropriate public space to encounter the city. But repression restricted it to a generalised anger. Revolt was imminent. Everyone needed to stick together to reoccupy the university campus to be in a position to say more. But events supervened narrowing the space for creation and reflection.

   On February 28th two pupils from the “Mamiani” school were wounded one seriously, by a fascist who was not properly identified. In the light of events that followed, in particular the most important, the fascist could also have been a state agent - however to ascertain if this was the case was henceforth impossible.

     The “Mamiani” school was one of the schools where the movement was at its strongest. It was a bourgeois school, the most bourgeois in Rome. Inspite of the fact the FGGl (young communists) had, at least by the end of the year, some 100 members and activists out of a total of 2000 pupils, the movement had taken root there, creating a situation of permanent agitation, as in many other school, which no one could stand aside from. Playful forms of self-management and assemblies were organised which made it impossible for the functionaries of the little scholastic parliaments to continue with any kind of activity. Teachers who glorified in '68 were openly challenged being, in fact, the most ferocious champions of social democratic normalisation.

    There spread throughout Rome’s schools a capillary movement, which was total and in same respects infantile but which assuredly desired to challenge and attack “left” culture as recuperated by the spectacle of the party game.

    The “Mamiani” school was a focal point within this framework being a school for the children of the enlightened bourgeoisie - a school for tomorrow’s leaders of recuperation (the same state of affairs as today in fact).

   The demonstrations in response to the attack were however monopolised by the anti-fascists of the PCI and the groups.

   Come the end of February, there was no getting away from the fact, the movement of opposition in the schools was a broadly based phenomena. The schools that were occupied and self-managed numbered more than 20, which is over half the high schools in Rome.

    On March 1st the Humanities Dept was re-opened. But on March 4th a further repressive provocation struck the movement. Fabrizio Panzieri, a comrade belonging to the movement accused of killing a fascist during a  street battle two years earlier, was condemned to nine years in prison. Thus the judicial practise of “moral responsibility” was commenced which today has been amply exploited by our repressive judicial apparatus.

   There had been trouble in the court on that same evening. The demo of school students called for the following morning passed without incident. But by the afternoon many people had gathered in the university. But the police refused to allow the demonstration to leave the university perimeter because it had been banned. In the university whilst some were debating what to do, very violent confrontations broke out in the San Lorenzo quarter adjacent to the university, which then started to spread toward the centre. This time guns were repeatedly used, shots ringing out from every direction - it was no longer a question of an isolated incident. Some police cars were hit and a small car set alight. Two carabinieri suffered gunshot wounds. In the centre of Rome from the Largo Argentina to the Trastivere trouble erupted. Practically everywhere attacks took place - on a bank, a police station in the Piazza Farnese, the Ministry of Justice and in the Via Avenula. Lastly, a gun shop was attacked, the same one that had been looted a week earlier. Barricades made from burning cars were impossible to count.

       On the following day the rector ordered the university to be closed remaining garrisoned by the police.

    It was March 7th and in Florence the national conference of the FLM (the engineering union), which the movement had been invited to take part, was held. But throughout the two days of the conference the situation of incommunicability between the movement and the workers became accentuated. It reached the point where the movement questioned the idea of a union even - not just its controlling function - a thing which was in fact central to the workers’ delegates who subsequently held an assembly in the Lirico in Milan disclaiming the official position reached by the tri-partite union meeting. It was not a matter of weakness or incapacity but sprang from the fact that the demands put forward by the movement as immediately realisable were regarded by the employed working class as utopian and unrealisable. Translated into practise, the refusal of work became unemployment rendering survival impossible as a consequence. In the class more directly involved in the productive process there was not, in short, that apocalyptic sense of the end of time which pervaded the movement, becoming the dominant spirit in the days immediately after.

                                 A national demonstration was fixed for March 12th in Rome.

    But on March 11th a revolt broke out in Bologna. The bourgeois newspapers straightaway stated that this revolt, which lasted for two days, had involved thousands upon thousands of comrades, townsfolk and proletarians. It had been provoked by some 50 autonomists who had not been properly identified but who refused to allow a meeting of the Comunione e Liberazione (a Christian Democrat youth organisation) to go ahead in the university.

   However, there was no getting away from the fact that an extremely determined struggle had been waged by the Bolognese proletariat. The Comunione e Liberazione holed up in the university by the comrades asked the rector, Rizzoli, for help. It was he who brought in the police and carabinieri. The movement immediately organised a protest demonstration. According to those taking part in this little demo a small detachment of carabinieri began firing blindly at the comrades who instantly fled. But someone amongst them did not. He was Pier Francesco Lorusso, killed by a bullet in the back. Lorenzo Tramontini was the carabiniero responsible.

   It was the spark that set Bologna alight. Radio Alice immediately informed the comrades about what had happened. A demonstration wasn’t even called. The anger of the Bolognese proletariat, though poorly supported and hemmed in, exploded into furious revolt. 

   The university quarter of Bologna, right at the heart of the historical centre became for two days a liberated zone from where attacks were launched against all the symbols of bourgeois peace and quiet and local social democratic power - shops, banks, gun shops, the station - nothing was exempt from the anger of the proletariat.

    It was a genuine, authentic revolt even if it never remotely took on the features of a revolutionary situation because it was the expression of a minority of the proletariat, no matter their number and determination. In any case, it really shook the institutions, particularly the PCI because Bologna was the jewel in the crown of its social democratic project. So much so that in order to safeguard it, armoured vehicles were sent in at 6 am on the morning of March 13th to remove the barricades. Throughout that entire day battles kept breaking out only to spend themselves before the military detachments, which were to be a permanent fixture in Bologna until the September Congress. Radio Alice which had sought constantly to supply counter-information and to rally people was closed down by a police raid and the editors arrested or obliged to go on the run like all the most active elements in the movement in Bologna.

   On the morning of March 12th many people had arrived in Rome from all over Italy.

   On the morning of March 12th many people - too many people! - had arrived in Rome from all over Italy. The national demonstration of school students set for March 11th had been transformed into a national demonstration against state repression and murder - like that of Lo Russo’s. By early afternoon an enormous crowd of comrades had gathered in the Piazza Esedra. The predominant feeling in the hearts of the 100,000 people gathered there had an apocalyptical touch to it - the ultimate expression of rage and anger. This was reinforced by the city’s appearance like as if it was under siege: shops were closed, no pedestrians about only detachments of police and carabinieri in riot gear.

   The clearest political judgement passed on this day was given on the same evening by all those comrades who weren’t merely seeking in the movement a spectacular flare up, but an action oriented continually toward the creation of a genuinely revolutionary situation which they consciously felt to be a long way off.

    Such a large concentration in Rome emptied all the other Italian cities of the vanguard of struggle (where the conditions existed that could foment rebellion) and created the situation of a pitched battle against the armed force of the institutions, which even though tired out after journeying through the night was well equipped and trained. In fact the entire effort was concentrated on Rome, which militarily was unfavourable because it had been occupied in a particularly highly trained manner. Thus the chance was lost to extend the struggle to the entire peninsula where demonstrations on a much smaller scale took place instead.

    If one had to make a show of force Rome was probably the right place to do it in, in so far as it is the institutional centre of a well-organised powerful movement. However, it remains true that tackling the institutions through all out confrontation on a military terrain was a tactic doomed to defeat. It was not a matter of storming a Winter Palace, henceforth stripped bare, but of organizing a capillary action to circumvent all attempts at normalisation. And, further, to bring into the movement all those proletarian strata, which were still having doubts about the social democratic programme.

     To storm the Montecitorio or the Palazzo Chiga was a mad idea not only because from a military point of view it was impossible to pull off but also, because even if it were to come about, we would be right back to square one. The need, in other words, was to work out really revolutionary ideas. The absence of any communication with the working class was a problem that was deeply felt by the movement and, after the March days, in an even more acute form.

“La Rivoluzione” dated March 19^th, 1977 wrote: “The Movement and Power” 

    “Faced with the bosses attack on living and working conditions and on organisation there is no other way.    

  Bourgeois power is aiming at one thing - to get workers on their knees, cut wages, stamp on the indexing of wages and increase exploitation savagely.    

  If it succeeds in destroying the student movement and the unemployed movement, it will succeed in destroying insurrection. After that it will be the turn of factory workers. It is therefore necessary to engage in struggle immediately and to collate all the information coming from the barricades that tens of thousands of young students and the unemployed alongside advanced workers have erected in Bologna, Milan and Rome.   

 To prevent the movement from being massacred there is no other way except to carry the fight into proletarian quarters.   

 To block the path of Cossiga’s fascism, the armed violence of special units and counter revolutionary terror, there is no other way but to carry the fight into proletarian quarters.  

 Let us work out a programme on which to construct power: the force is not lacking to impose an increase in the workforce, plant by plant, quarter by quarter; the force is there to reduce overtime and speed-ups. The force is there to occupy the 100s’ of 1000s’ of empty houses while 100s’ of 1000s’ of proletarians don't have a place to live. The force is there. Comrade workers, there is no other way. Comrade workers for hell’s sake let’s unite in struggle". 

   With the benefit of hindsight we could say the force would have been there if the comrade workers had come along. And on March 12th in Rome instead of force the movement expressed its emotion, spontaneously deciding to openly confront. It was not therefore a pre-ordained decision but it did reflect badly on the capacity of groups of comrades who had analysed the situation more clearly. Over the preceding days they had created a broadly based revolutionary consciousness going beyond a rebellism of street confrontation which would only incline the movement towards a mad destructive militarism as had already been observed in the national assembly held in February.    

 So 100,000 people had assembled in the Piazza Esedra in Rome. Trembling with rage they were packed against the railings of the metro yard facing the police drawn up several lines deep in the Via Nazionale. Rome the beautiful was deserted, the sky was overcast, the shops closed and in the streets there was not a soul to be seen. It seemed the street had been cleared so the battle could take place without doing too much damage.   

  Towards 5 o’clock the demonstration moved off. Even the Indians with their painted faces, displayed under their cheerful make-up, signs of anger. Even they, like over half the other demonstrators, carried under their coats molotovs, bricks, stones and some had guns.  

   The demonstration moved forward slowly, unpunctuated by slogans no one in the Via Cavour would hear. It began to rain. The stewards, to coordinate action attempted to pass around an instruction to block the historic centre, in order to repeat on a larger scale what had already happened in Bologna (where the effectiveness of the police was greatly reduced because they were from Rome).   

  The front of the demonstration crossed the Piazza Venezia and arrived at the Piazza Argentina. The Corso Vittoria had been blocked off by a detachment of very well equipped carabinieri. Then, at that moment, whilst the front of the demonstration tried to pass word back about the barrier to those behind, the attack broke out in a predictable, disconnected manner. One, perhaps two, projectiles were thrown at the police guarding the headquarters of the Christian Democrats in the Piazza del Gesu. In a split second all hell was let loose. The long procession splintered into several fragments. Some sought to save comrades who weren’t organised for a street battle, letting them cross the river to reach a quieter spot .At the same time, others confronting the armed deployment of police and carabinieri created a wall of fire.   

 To describe the guerrilla events that took place that day, which the press described as “Black Saturday” may appear superfluous. But it is useful for measuring the range of confrontation which in spite of the insanity shall always remain a moment not easily forgotten.   

 After the attack in Piazza del Gesu, a few dozen comrades tossed molotovs through the Ministry of Justice. The carabinieri, barricaded behind the gates let go with a murderous volley. To cover the comrades’ retreat a bus was set alight. Despite everything, many were quite seriously wounded by the carabinieri. These casual ties and many others throughout the day were cared for at home; going to a hospital would have meant getting arrested. The official total included only 4 or 5 comrades amongst the wounded - whilst amongst the cops it was a dozen. But the reality was quite the opposite.   

  The attack on the Ministry of Justice was immediately succeeded by an assault on another gun shop at Ponte Sisto. A group of comrades tore down the metal grill and burst into the shop. But the confusion and rage did not give this gesture, a valid one given the circumstances, an organisational strength, which might have led to a better-armed defense of the movement’s destructive acts. The group, which led the attack on the armoury was not homogenous, it had come together at random in front of the gun shop. It was therefore a totally spontaneous action. The arms were dished out like sweets and in fact the majority were abandoned on the riverbank where the police picked them up the next day. The same thing happened a few hours later when the Casciani gun shop was attacked in the Piazza Cairoli.   

  Attacks continued to take place everywhere in the centre of Rome until well into the night – shops, banks, police stations, offices of multinationals. Proletarian anger didn’t spare anything, acting in a tempestuous, yearning manner hoping for an impossible and unforgettable revolutionary day.  

  The mass of people, dispersed and fragmented to the point that not even the most organised group succeeded in reforming, plunged into diffuse guerrilla actions creating spontaneously a nucleus which proceeded to attack a shop, a bank, a police station etc, splitting up immediately once the action was over. But the urban guerrilla plan was not realised. The movement had intended to put this plan into operation when it had occupied one or more districts in the historic core managing them as liberated areas. From this bastion attacks were to be launched on the sites of the institutions themselves.  

    Even if this project was not pure madness, the opportunity to extend it to the entire country was lost because it was a show of weakness not of strength, as appearances might have seemed.

   In CASK, the Metropolitan Indian paper, was the following:

    “I attacked the gun shop at which I had carefully taken aim as we charged. Away with the false, away with the new. A flash, teargas, a bang? Bang they were shooting. Bang, bang you were firing but I couldn’t see you behind all those faces. Shit, but its heavy, a really heavy thing to have to run away. Get rid of it, asshole, get rid of it. Away with the false, away with the new. Splash - straight into the Tiber. Leave it there for another time which will never come - this was not the right moment. I’d been afraid".

    However, it did allow institutionalised repression more room for manoeuvre, to split comrades up and to isolate and repress nuclei of revolt. Above all the so-called proletarian and/or workerist parties who drew a vanguardist, militarist conclusion from this experience, preparing the terrain for the spectacle of terror, glimpsed already in the demonstration in Milan with the attack on the Assolombarda.

   On March 14th the funeral of Lorusso took place. Hemmed in by armoured vehicles, 5000 comrades attended it in Bologna.

   After the days of revolt the movement, bedevilled by arrests and a repression without precedent, suffered a brief setback. This left the terrain open to small terrorist acts against the black economy, sweat shops and the like. But, above all, it allowed the press to get all het-up over the actions of the major terrorist organisation. On March 12^th, a police inspector, Ciotta, who sympathised with Lotta Continua was killed in Turin.

   On March l6th, Rome University reopened. In the assemblies, which were held, the groupuscules were to display once more their institutionalized fixation. At the same time many comrades got all raffled-up in dull discussions like those about examination requirements. In the assembly held on March 22nd to prepare for the tripartite general strike (i.e. the 3 trade union confederations) agreed for the next day, a fight broke out between those who no longer wished to put up with the farce of “dialogue” (who were in the majority) and those who intended instead to persist with the groupuscule line.

  On March 23rd, the counter-demonstration held by the movement succeeded in attracting a varied cross section but there weren’t as many as previously. There were a lot of truisms but little conviction - it did look as if the previous 10 days of confrontation had tired a lot of people out.

    Despite the fact the university had meantime been occupied by the police, confrontation continued to break out. It was “The Red Barons” themselves who were to incur the costs - Lucio Coletti, Albertor, Asor Rosa and others - were mercilessly ridiculed but weren’t physically harmed. However, these incidents were enough for the rector to justify closing the university for the nth time. It was a preventative measure to avert renewed attempts to reassemble. The movement had to remain physically split up. It was basically the same tactic that the PCI had adopted when faced with the school students. Continuing to occupy schools and less heavily targeted by repression, the students found themselves at the centre of the movement. The FCGI (young communists) succeeded in convening false assemblies, announced as belonging to the movement, which were controlled by its militants. The intention was to get suitable motions and resolutions passed in order to split the real opposition.

      On April 1st the university was reopened. In the assemblies, which were immediately held in the Humanities Dept, a platform was approved comprising the following demands:

1)     The police to vacate the university.

2)     Depts to remain open from 8 in the morning until 10 at night, weekends  included. 

3)     Courses of 150 hours duration to be officially recognized.

4)     The 27 to be guaranteed.

5)     Freedom of choice on examination subjects.

6)     Evening university courses for workers.

7)     University teachers to clock-on.

8)     Teachers to be refused royal ties on photocopies and a fund for expensive  books to be set up.

       But in April sensational terrorist acts were to multiply (the kidnapping of Costa and De Martino, the assassination of the fascist Bubak in Germany). Given prominence in the media they were to be the focus of attention.

     At the same time, repression continued apace; on April 15th the Government passed the Malfatti reform as if nothing had happened. On April 16th school students protested, the only ones still allowed to do so. There were more than 30,000 but they had to reckon on the attempts at recuperation by the FGCI and the groupuscules. The struggle was fought out by way of slogans and in the end it was all too obvious people were seeking a breathing space through the school students movement to co-opt protest into official channels.

    However, it was the movement, which, on the contrary, recovered its breath. In Bologna, once the armoured vehicles had been withdrawn, several Depts were reoccupied. But a difficult moment came next day in Rome when confrontation broke out afresh. On the morning of April 21st many comrades gathered outside in the Minerva quadrangle in the university to confine the demands formulated by the movement on April 1st. First among these was the demand the police withdraw from the university. The members participating had fallen slightly even though the determination to struggle was always very much alive. What’s more despite having endured hard battles the movement was as sound as ever. It continued to proclaim the university a liberated, free space to be appropriated in order to have a physical space in which to organize actions and ideas - a space that allowed individuals and groups of individuals to gather together to confront one another. Otherwise they would remain isolated in their own private spheres or by the sectarian logic of the groupuscules. It was a requirement each was mindful of and which had formed the basis of the mass confrontations, which had taken place up to then.

    The assembly organised a march around the university campus. It furnished a new pretext for Roberti, the rector, to order the police to once more evacuate the university. The evacuation took place relatively calmly. The comrades present at the university were not in the least bit organised to mount a confrontation. They left without offering any resistance. But after a brief period, around 3 in the afternoon, the comrades had once more regrouped in the adjacent popular quarter of San Lorenzo where some of the more organised autonomous groups were located. They, in their turn attacked the university citadel, or rather the police detachments that were holding it. Immediately a front was established in the access roads leading from San Lorenzo to the university, which was not more than some 100 metres away. The police reacted by firing blindly and taking aim at body height (on the walls of the Via dei Sardi the holes left remain a testament to that day). The comrades reacted by hurling molotovs from behind barricades of buses creating a wall of fire to prevent a furious police assault from claiming further victims. But the armed force of the institutions did not let up, sending in a squad of police cadets firing at will in the direction of San Lorenzo. The comrades overwhelmed by the hail of bullets, this time responded by taking aim at the police. 3 cadets fell to the ground, one of them was dead, another gravely wounded.

      Attempting to defend itself the movement had killed a cop. He was a proletarian just like the proletarian comrades killed by the state. Ordered to butcher he had been butchered on the contrary. The movement did not have any sacrificial lambs; it was not directed by generals locked away in sanitized rooms. The movement expressed the desires and anger of each one of its participants and each one laboured and suffered just so long as proletarians like Settimo Passamonti, a police cadet were exploited and manipulated all on account of their proletarian status.

    It seems an obvious reflection but in April 1977 it wasn’t even remotely taken into consideration and the movement harboured in itself a lot that was questionable. The logic of division was established.

     In the assembly held in the Architecture School immediately following the confrontation the groupuscules and the militants clashed indulging in a party political game playing the majority of the comrades were totally estranged from. They were playing reactions game finally, which, on the following day was unleashed in all its forms.

    It remains necessary however, to give some consideration to this episode, which up to now has been described and analysed only for self-serving ends. Either that, or, in the majority of cases forgotten about.

     The police cadet Passamonti had been killed as an act of defence by the movement. It had not been part of a pre-ordained strategy. No one in the movement of '77 believed that Lo Russo had been killed in order to precipitate revolt (we can leave this sort of speculation to the Red Brigades). In the same way, no one in the movement wished to kill a cop to raise the tempo of combattivity (it was already too high for its own good). The fact is this last incident signalled the beginning of an action/re-action spiral which was wholly unfavourable to the movement. But like now, at that moment one could not pose the question whether the person who had killed Passamonti had acted advisedly or ill advisedly. Because, unlike the bullet that killed Lo Russo, which had been fired by the state, the shooting in Rome had not been the act of a bunch of fanatics but of an opposition movement in its entirety. Everyone shouldered the responsibility now; there was no shifting the responsibility onto others. But that was scarcely what happened the following day.

    In fact, drawing sustenance from this incident, a concentrated reaction without let up was loosed. In the 20 or so schools occupied in Rome, the FUGCI and groups let fly with an anti-autonomy hysteria. The comrades belonging to the movement couldn’t muster the strength to reply. Defying public opinion the few who defended the movement risked being lynched. The quality newspapers like “ Il Messaggero” printed terrorist editorials like “it’s necessary to isolate them”. Amidst the general applause of all the institutions and their information channels, the Minister of the Interior, Cossiga, declared, “the State will respond with armed force”. In Rome, police H.Q. banned all demonstrations until May 31st.

     But in San Lorenzo, the proletarian quarter, which was most involved with the revolt, the conflict with the PCI became very violent. More than half the militants and cadres of the local communist party quit to join the autonomous collectives.

    On April 25th, liberation day, the PCI asked that it be allowed to stage a demonstration in contravention of the banning order. The authorisation to do so arrived two days after.

     On the same day, the university senate had decided to reopen the university on May 2nd.

     Meanwhile, the spectacle of terror continued, which the newspapers gave particular prominence too. In Turin, the Red Brigades killed Croce, a barrister and president of the bar. In Rome, the head of the Law Dept, Rosario Nicolo, was kidnapped and held to ransom.

      In Bologna, where a meeting of the movement was to be held on April 29th / 30th, the university was closed and the town garrisoned. The implicit aim was to make sure the meeting was a failure. Many comrades from Bologna were in prison or on the run. It was a trying moment and in the course of the meeting, which was poorly attended, the weakness of the movement was obvious. The analyses on offer there, even if they were not totally wrong, were based on unreal presuppositions.

    Even the group Zut/Atraverso, which had brought out “Rivoluzione” and which, during the days of revolt, had expressed a high degree of lucidity, indulged in overestimation. Confusion and the disjuncture between the movement and reality increased.

In Zut/Atraverso: “From Lyric to Epic (avoiding the tragic)” there appeared the following:

 “After the trouble in March, the Italian situation was revealed in all its dramatic intensity to revolutionaries. There is no doubt this time about it, we are in a revolutionary situation - it is not just a phrase. What do you mean by that? We are going through a moment of historical rupture in the course of which the entire basis of existence for the masses, of the masses, of the relationship between people and between classes, is transformed. In the impenetrable web of everyday life, in the tension of desire, in material needs, in the form of life, in the conditions of production and reproduction – what’s specified in the Winter/Spring of 1976/’77 is an extraordinary large nucleus. No one can pretend not to see it nor believe anything will remain the same”.

     That revolution can come about as a result of acts carried out by a marginalised minority of the population, however combative, is an illusion. Not that the French bourgeoisie or the Russian working class that carried out the greatest revolutions of modern times were a majority of the population. They were a minority but they were central to production even though in a minority. The Italian marginals who made up the ’77 movement were in fact excluded from the process of production and therefore as a result, without any influence on capitalist development. This does not mean they did not express a real situation of struggle and opposition. Only that, however much the movement was committed to creating a revolutionary situation, the support of living labour as the revolutionary subject – even if not the only one – becomes necessary to the movement. It was this premise, which the movement had radically inverted. As postulated by the movement of marginals the aim was to encircle the socially productive structures, thereby causing a rupture. However, the existing historical conditions were far from creating a rupture of this order.

      In the assembly in Bologna this distance became tangible. The loudest voices were those of the militarists and the one fact emphasised by the bourgeois press as solidarity with terrorism voiced by some sectors of organised autonomy from northern Italy.

    On May 1^st in Rome during the official national demonstration, the movement clashed with union stewards. Counting on the dissatisfaction of the Lirico delegates and the workers from the south, especially from Italsider in Bagnola, the aim was to foment a division in the ranks. Though in a minority, comrades from autonomous collectives clashed with the stewards, then were charged by the police. At the same time, workers from Bagnola attempted to rush the speakers’ platform. However, it passed off without an echo and it was all over in a few minutes.

    It was the beginning of the minority phase of the movement, which after the tragic May Days was no longer to find the strength to construct a revolutionary project.

     In fact it was during the month of May that the repression thrown against comrades reached South American proportions without there being the pretext for it.

     At the beginning of the month the DC (Christian Democrats) launched a campaign to reintroduce police detention for 48 hours, while at the judicial and informational level the idea of a plot was hatched. Judge Catalonalti (PCI ) in Bologna issued his first interrogation orders imputing the March revolt to certain comrades. The newspapers repeated this claim putting the revolt down to a plan worked out in advance by organized autonomy groups. 

    In this climate of a witch hunt an attempt was made in Rome on May 12th to hold a peaceful demonstration to celebrate the victory of the referendum on divorce in 1974. The police order banning all demonstrations in Rome from April 22nd was still in force. The demonstration on May 12th that had been organized by the Radical Party had been conceived as a festive occasion. A stand had been erected in the Piazza Navona on which musical groups could perform. It was an occasion on which comrades could meet up in the face of police terror. There was also the possibility on this neutral occasion of resuming a majority discussion discourse.

    But on this occasion with deliberate premeditation the state organised a day of terror. On this day open war on every form of opposition announced a few days previously by Cossiga was expressed in all its brutality. Unfortunately, this time there were no armed comrades ready to defend the main body of comrades. At a point when the weaknesses were two fold - at the level of ideas and organisation - the movement was attacked frontally. May 12th was to actually resemble, in form but not in content, a demonstration in Chile the previous year.

    Just after midday the police began by laying about the radical deputies (Mino Puto his face all swollen up rose to speak in Parliament that same evening). Then the attacks on the comrades began, who, unaware of what was happening were approaching the Piazza. They were all completely unarmed. The comrades withdrew concentrating in the area between the Campo di Fiori and Trastevere. Fighting broke out.

    The police brought up their special squads. With the premeditated aim of killing people, plain-clothes police started firing at random. The comrades responded by hurling stones. Raising the flags from the pavements a weapon was to be had, the only one from the onset of the fighting.

    Institutional repression took on the guise of a mad hysteria. At Trastevere even traffic cops armed with guns fired without warning on isolated groups of comrades. It was only later in the evening that a few molotovs succeeded in restoring a modicum of self-defence to the movement. But late in the evening the armed hand of the institutions by chance succeeded in claiming its first victim. Giorgiana Masi was assassinated by the police, shot in the back while attempting to run. So ended a day of police violence. One death was enough to serve as an example.

     The events of May 12th were the maximum expression of the scale of confrontation a power intolerant of all opposition was determined on. It was a tangible expression of state determination to suppress all dissent at a critical moment in the restructuring of the productive models of capitalism. The fact that even traffic police started shooting like crazy was an indication of the hysteria attendant on pursuing such an objective.

    On the following day, having decided once more to go on the offensive, there was a certain resurgence of the movement. But the killing of Giorgiana didn’t precipitate anything remotely comparable to the days in March, which Lorusso’s killing had detonated. It was clear that the movement had lost its mass characteristics, reduced to being the expression of opposing groupuscules. The mass defrauded of all opportunity for debate and active participation dwindled steadily.

     It was at this point that the small groups belonging to organized autonomy took on an importance. In Rome their behaviour had been impeccable when it concerned all our comrades, but elsewhere they had openly favoured a militaristic ideology approximating ever more closely to the Stalinism of the Red Brigades.

    Thus, what one had on May 13th in Rome were workers’ autonomy groups and collectives who had at this juncture made contact, to mount a counter-offensive. This time a series of small-scale combative neighbourhood demos was decided on. Up to a point the lesson of March 12th had been learnt but it was too late because it was now in a minority phase. Heavy fighting broke out and shots were fired in many city neighbourhoods - Garbatello, Prati, Montesacro, Appio. Unfortunately, they were short-lived, lasting a few hours. In Garbatello, a popular quarter, inspite of some support from the people who handed bottles and petrol to the comrades, finding a force at hand that stressed confrontation proved unsuccessful. The scale of repression reached dizzy heights. The police used guns, including machine guns, against the comrades on countless occasions, quickly becoming a standard fixture.

     The comrades resisting this situation were ever fewer in number. Even if the potential for struggle remained undiminished, there was a lot of fear around. Many were either wounded, had been arrested or gone underground.

     On May l4th, the police savagely attacked a peaceful sit-in by feminists on the spot where Giorgiana had been killed. The protagonists were certain sectors of organised autonomy. The victims, other than Custra, a cop killed for no reason, were some young comrades who, seized with an infatuation for armed struggle, allowed themselves to be photographed  at the scene of the crime just as if it were a film.

     There was a vast difference both formally and substantially between the assassination of Passamonti in Rome and that of Custra in Milan. The first had been killed as an act of defence, the second by a bunch of fanatics who were tail-ending the mass movement basically aspiring towards the setting up of an armed avant-garde organisation.

     However, it is essential to point out the latter was expressive of the Milanese situation where for several years terrorism had already been operating. As a result, all mass action, a counterweight to the Stalinist shock tactics of groupuscules, had been sold short.

     Still other incidents were to characterise May in Rome. On the one hand fights with fascists broke out once more in outlying districts, in particular in north Rome. Once highlighted they diverted the movement from its real objectives. On the other hand, from the assemblies held in the university it was impossible to hide from the conclusion the movement was now extremely weak. As a result the movement decided to forego any further street confrontations. The leftovers of groupusculisrn started to recompose as ill-concealed groups within the movement.

     At the end of May the ban on demonstrations in Rome was lifted and the movement organized other actions in the ever-alive hope of discovering new arenas.

      During summer and especially in September the scene changed radically. But it amounted to a substantially different phase, which will be examined in another text.

      Here we end this description. It is followed by a chronology to make the reading easier.

Chronological Summary

	Spring 1975:       Confrontation in Milan, Florence and Rome. 4 dead.
	June    1975:      Communist Party wins regional elections.
	Sept. 28th 1975: Expropriation of shops in the Via del Corso. Repression is organised by the    groups.
	Oct   1975:         National assembly of workers’ autonomy (Autonomia Operaia) in Rome.
	June 1976:         The Communist Party continues to advance in elections. The tri-partite union block   inaugurates the “social contract” at the EUR Congress.
	July 1976:           Parco Lambro.
	Nov. 1976:          Auto-reductions at cinemas in Milan.
	Dec 1976:            Auto-reductions at cinemas in Rome result in confrontations.
	Jan. 19 77:          Humanities Dept occupied in Rome.
	Jan. 1st 1977:      Fascist attack on Humanities Dept in Rome.
	Feb. 2nd. 1977:    Exchange of fire in the Piazza Indipendenza.
	Feb. 5th 1977:      Rome University is completely occupied.
	Feb. 17th 1977:     Lama is chased out of Rome University. The university is closed.
	Feb. 5th. 1977:     National assembly of the movement in Rome
	March 5th 1977:     A violent confrontation breaks out in Rome protesting against the sentence passed  on Fabrizio Panzieri.
	March 11th. 1977:   Bologna. Francesco Lorusso is killed by the police. On the same day the comrades revolt, an unbelievable confrontation, a semi-insurrectional situation.
	March 12th. 1977:   100,000 demonstrate in Rome. The City is laid waste with fire and sword.
	April 12th. 1977:     In Rome, Passamonti, a cop, is killed.
	May 12th. 1977:      Giorgiana Masi is killed by police in Rome. May 13th.1977: Further confrontations in Rome.
	May 14th, 1977:      A high-ranking police officer, Custra, is killed in Milan.

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A slice of an Assembly and some interventions by the Metropolitan Indians.

           What do you want to talk about they ask her. “Sexuality”, she breathes, “about my sexuality”. Desperately gripping the mic Rebecca with eye-catching fear dare hardly speak. “Comrades ….I’ve had relationships with men and also with women comrades – that is I mean – I’ve also had  lesbian relationships and it’s always been very beautiful….and one time I had a relationship with a gay boy who had never been with a girl……..for me there only  exists comradely sexuality and sexuality is also to look a person in the eye and also to look at a flower because when I look at a flower I lose myself – this is what I wanted and I’ve never succeeded in saying it”. She stops shouting, leaves the microphone and hugs the first person she finds, laughs loudly, her words losing themselves amidst strained, anxious faces and then finally “the great petite-bourgeois taboo” breaks out in libertarian applause. In the assembly on sexuality in the occupied economics and business study building, young men and women, gays and drug addicts, frichettari, autonomists, Indians and militants of Lotta Continua participate in a heterogeneous and contradictory universe. “I believe in people, I believe in emotions” said Rebecca again and her interjection expresses better than any political discourse, the desire for liberation and love, a condition of anguish and solitude, the need to escape from the ghetto of marginalisation that is at the origin of the movement of these youths who have defined themselves with desperate irony, Metropolitan Indians.  

       Outside in the hall the Prevestino tribe have organised “a happening of war and festivity” as Fulvio and Theo call it, their faces painted like savages, empty beer cans in their hands, beating time on an overturned dustbin. Stefano and others are dancing in a circle. The only stall is selling frascati beer not ideological journals. “Wine Store, Wine Store” said a slogan: “Mineral water is only an illusion, the only way is the bottle” turning inside out one of the ultra-leftist preferred phrases: “The historic compromise is only an illusion, the only way is revolution”. In another room a dozen or so youths are beating on a bench. Someone comes up asking for a moment’s silence while he reads a communiqué against “Cossiga’s blue meanies” but provokes another slogan: “You are scum Cossiga look how many we are”.

        It’s eight in the evening, 400 youths are standing around. I’m hungry shouts one. “Expropriate, expropriate” the others reply. Slowly they break up returning to their tribes in the villages. After a council of war -“if we are not blue meanies then we are palefaces”- the ones from Prevestino accept our invitation to have a bite to eat.

       Waiting for the number 30 tram, the Indians hold a pow wow between themselves. They decide that, “tonight Indians no auto-reduction. We shall pay the fare but we will make an intervention”. The half-empty tram arrives. The Indians get in shouting among themselves……………………Nello is the chief comedian. “I’m hungry,” he says with an imploring voice. “Hooligan, hooligan” his comrades echo back at him. Nello lies down in the gangway at the feet of the curious passengers. The others are standing pretending to push and shove. “5,000 hours for 35 lira this is the contract we want to pave the way for,” said Theo turning intentionally on a passenger reading a book who looks like a worker. An old woman gets on the tram and the Indians kindly give her a seat, which she takes with an embarrassed smile. “More shacks, less housing” the Indians shout wildly and provocatively while the tram conductor smiles and the worker shakes his head perplexed. Nello, tall, lanky, looking unreal with war paint on his thin face, winks: “But really what do these youths want, they are tramps, wretches and though you may not know it even drug addicts”…. “It’s my fault, it’s my fault, it’s my greatest fault” chant the Indians beating their chests, eyes cast to the ground.  

      Meanwhile, the tram has arrived at Travestere. Nello gets up and calls the tribe together. Then with a sly smile he turns to the passengers, “if we have disturbed you, excuse us. But to talk to you is the only way of getting to know us”.  

       Mario is in the habitual haunt of the Prevestino Indians. Pasta costs 1500 lira, you eat off a proper napkin, and the proprietor is a comrade. The Indians have removed their paint, unfastened the red ribbons that bound their hair and having washed off all the trappings and ingenuous arrogance and, appearing now before a pizza, become what they really are: the sub-proletariat of Rome. It’s a sad metamorphosis that unfolds before our very eyes. Also the accent has changed from that of “man of the people” to the bastardised thick, coarse Romanesque of the ghetto. “I was an illegitimate kid, used t’ut wok in Inman, then I worked in a car saleroom. They gave me 50 thousand lira without any health insurance, no taxes, no insurance said another guy also called Nello, an eighteen year old from Prevestino…… “Only now with a job, I realise there is a possibility of discussing your problems with others, the possibility of being gay without being grabbed by the neck as the PCI does, marginalising the fricchettori and heroin addicts. So with Metropolitan Indians it’s even fashionable to escape through drugs. We campaigned against heroin – the PCI and PSI have nothing to do with ‘em, they chase ‘em out. Before I went along with the Met’ Indians I was in Lotta Continua but I felt oppressed as an individual. I lacked creativity you see”.  

           Stefano is sitting next to him. He is also 18 and has had some experience of the FUGCI (Communist youth). “For a while I worked on the “Unita” festival but they kicked me out pretty quickly because certain things went on. For them the prime necessities were just eating and sleeping but pizzas cost me a lot as well not just the cinema and theatre. They did me for this, so I went along with the Indians which are the only groups trying to make a revolution. After the Lama affair the PCI accused us of being the new fascism but it’s not true because we are only unemployed, simply proletarians looking for work”.  

         Giampero is in his third year studying literature. He is sitting at the other side of the table. “I am a worker’s son and to keep myself I am a morning porter. At the coop you give them a cut, as they want half your wage. Most of the jobs though go to the party’s canvassers. My old man and woman belong to the PCI but they also live in a repressive situation even if my family is left wing. My mother suffers from my father’s repression even if it isn’t that harsh. My father repressed my mother because in the neighbourhood where he lived a woman is a woman and must submit. She wanted to be left wing but woe betides anyone who entered his castle. My father is the kind of person who wouldn’t allow anything to be discussed even though he’s been a card carrying member of the PCI for 30 years.”  

     The Metropolitan Indians appeared very recently. One heard about them at the end of November 1976 when a manifesto signed with a tomahawk called for “circles of young people” to come together. In turn circles appeared at the end of last summer in nearly all the sub-proletarian districts of Rome, in Tor Pignatori, Prevestino, Alberone, Monte Sacro and Tufello. They appeared up to a point because of the wave of news and experience of auto-reductions coming from Milan but more because of the need to escape from the desperate situation of isolation and ghettoisation in districts of Rome. “I lived in Prevestino,” said Mario, “and in Prevestino there is nothing, nowhere to meet, not a bar, no cultural events, not one moment of joy, nothing. The neighbourhood is ruled over by the PCI and the youths of FUGCI who come up with the usual things, a film by Eisenstein once in a while telling us to re-appropriate culture and a “Unita” festival good only for singing some shit, dreadful shit, then back into their holes again, everything over for them. We don’t want this. We want to reclaim our lives, which in our district are miserable, mad, and unhappy. The neighbourhood denies life and society denies life and then the PCI comes up to you proposing a film and some sacrifices”.  

       Even if Rome University has suffered some explosive moments the phenomena of the Metropolitan Indians comes out of the experience of the neighbourhood and for the greatest part they are made up of sub-proletarians who aren’t even students and who aren’t potentially unemployed people but simply are real, actual unemployed people. “We went to the university”, Mario said, “by way of a species of spontaneous migration because the university is the only liberated space, the only free zone, the only point of reference. But that’s not because we have much to do with bourgeois students of the 1968 variety who demand the right to study. For us, the right to life comes first”.  

      Some students of the ’68 variety arrive. They sit at our table. They are similar to the youths of ’68 not only because they are bourgeois and children of good families but because they suffer, today as then, from a profound sense of inferiority. Then because of the working class, for people who had a history and a definite role. Today, because of the sub-proletariat who are unemployed who more than ever they have, have the right to feel marginalised.   

     It is a marked contrast, a difference underlined in the way they dress, how they move, how they speak, two worlds apart, separated by origins and social strata but united by a couple of common spectres: unemployment and the lack of a future. There is Maria, 23 years of age and studying architecture. She has a house that’s hers and she invites everyone around even the Indians who not only don’t have a house, they don’t even have a neighbourhood. There is Bruno, 25 years old, a student of literature, the only one in the assembled company to play out even physically the role of the intellectual whilst the others are unemployed and look it. Perhaps it will happen to him but no one would say it. There is Chiara, 23 years of age, also studying literature. She has read Nietzsche and the Existentialists and thus arrived by an intellectual route. To the Indians she is a snob.  

       In Maria’s house a group is formed comprising a little of everything. PDUP, Autonomia Operaia, Lotta Continua, the collectivi. “To be an Indian,” said Massimo, 21 years of age and a militant of Lotta Continua, “is to choose a compartment not a political line. Meaning to conceive politics as joy, liberation, fantasy, meaning to quit finally the mystique of a militant made of iron who no longer lives, no longer expresses himself, who is cooped up in a structure that’s so rigid that ideas no longer come to him. These people, these old militants well, we actually really cannot call them militants”.  

        “And for this reason” continues Domenico, 21 years old and a student of medicine, “I have never belonged to any organisation. Even if it is useful, an organisation ends up being like a mother. To say I belong to Avanguardia Operaia is to look for an illusory security, to cling onto apron strings, to have an identity. Because politics up to now signified renouncing one’s personality, forgetting one’s real needs love, sex, interpersonal relationships”.  

       So to reclaim life has become the slogan of the Metropolitan Indians. “To really succeed, said Fulvio “we have chosen the path of irony which in a world as serious as this is deadly. But above all we have upset the boundaries of any relations with the political: previously one left the public to arrive at the private, at least one searched to do so. But it is not a method that has produced much, leading people to paranoia, to schizophrenia. So today we are seeking to change ourselves because only in this way can we succeed in changing the people around us… and reality. The communists accuse us of wanting everything immediately but the truth is, we’ve never had anything”.  

     “It really is ridiculous,” maintains Bruno, “to accuse us of making irony the basis of our politics. For us irony is only an instrument, a means of recovering creativity, which up to now has been suffocated, the ideal way of demonstrating our refusal to be integrated, of annulling it. There is a great deal of confusion over this: the arena of creativity is not a ghetto in which there are some undergraduates, whilst politics is the work of others. Shouting at Lama, “sacrifice, sacrifice or “work more, pay less” is ironical but has a precise political significance” . 

        “ The clashes with Lama and the confrontation with the PCI has unleashed all sorts of attacks against the Metropolitan Indians: a new fascism is mentioned, a parallel “squadrismo”. In reality we are not prejudiced against the unions and the Communist Party. That is not our counter-stance. But it becomes so when, by this route, normalisation proceeds. So amongst us unemployed and marginals no mediation is possible with the line the unions take. The unions are against us when they defend the employed juxtaposing them to the unemployed, big business juxtaposed to small businesses. The unions are against us the moment they renounce struggling to reduce the working day and accept overtime”.  

       “And on the matter of violence” said Massimo, “there has been a lot of confusion. We aren’t clockwork oranges. I don’t think I’m a theoretician of violence. However when I’m pushed about, I use it and I reply to violence. So it’s clear then on that Thursday we did not attack workers but a mass of party bureaucrats. So much so that workers who were in the university had rolled up their banners and hadn’t attacked us”.  

           Dawn is breaking. Fulvio falls asleep over his un-tuned guitar. Theo already very tired takes a spoonful of something from a big copper pot. Stefano knocks the bottom out of matchbox. Massimo says, “I dare say that after a week it will be all over and the movement will be institutionalised and reabsorbed. But these last few days have been a tremendous experience. And we want to believe in this because the alternative is going back to the neighbourhood and dying there”.

              (An article in "L'Europeo"… and the date is lost!)

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 (For further articles on Italy see the following) 

	Memories of a Metropolitan Indian
	Critique of Italy '77
	Puzz in Mid-1970s Italy
	Italy in 1977