Italian Movements of the 60s and 70 - Reading Groups - History of Social Movements (2012)

1. The Student Movement: 1968-
1978: Introduction
• Came to represent new forms of rebellion
• Peculiar: arose in a period of relative
growth and prosperity
• Students were the first to organize en-masse
• Students became a social subject

2. Crisis of the old organizations
• Education controlled by governments and
parties
• Not taking account of the opinions of the
students
• Too much paternalism
• Students wanted to assert their own idenitity
and needs
• Older form of representation: unable to
react on student activism

3. Crisis of the old organizations:
The first generation
• First student activist groups still connected
to main political parties
• The most radical of those was UGI. Linked
to PCI.
• Still electorial policies within the student
organizations.
– Reflecting parliamental mentality

4. Crisis of the old organizations:
The changing character
• 1960-63 strikes: First signs of change
within the movement.
– Students take part in demonstrations
– They start to occupy university buildings
• Mobilization against the Gui bill
– This bill proposed to limit student intake
– Establish 3 types of diplomas

5. Crisis of the old organizations:
the changing character
• The architecture faculties especially lively
centers of activism
• Study groups were formed
– Criticized courses and learning methods
• Education became perceived as a process
rather than product

6. Crisis of the old organizations:
1967: beginning of a new movement
• Opposition to goverment  50 day
occupation in Milan
• An environment of debate and collective
work
• New forms of decision-making: General
assemblies rather than elected-
representatives

7. Crisis of the old organizations
• In Pisa, resistance against government’s
reform:
– Disrupting a conference of university heads
– Occupations
– Clash with the police
• New theories about student politics: The
Pisan Theses

8. Crisis of the old organizations:
The Pisan approach: Marxism and the
student movement
• An operaist analysis to the student situation
• Transformation to planned capitalism requires:
– Qualified labor-power
– Advanced technological production
• Therefore: studenst are not a priviliged elite
anymore; they are members of the working
class.
• Common enemy of students and workers:
capitalism and the state

9. Crisis of the old organizations:
The Pisan approach
• Strong appeal on dissident socialists and
communists
• Militant refusal of parliamentarism and
reformism
• Associating student politics with workers
struggle

10. Student identity and the politics
of violence
• 1968: Student agitation grows to national
proportions
– Against the Gui bill
– A wave of occupations begins
• Students start to clash with the police:
– Students begin to fight back
– Use of violence as a means

11. Use of Violence: The Battle of
Valle Giulia, Rome 1968
• A turning point for the student movement

12. Use of Violence
• Also clashes in Milan
• The students were severly beaten and
terrorized
• Police became the hated enemy
– Legitimate to use force against

13. Reactions from the establishment
• Center-Left government wanted
compromise
– Demanded the release of those arrested
• The Conservatives and the right:
– Favored use of force to put down disorders
• As a consequence more police crackdown,
injuries and death
– Pacifism was now pronounced dead

14. Use of Violence
• Students start militarize:
– Learn to make Molotovs
– Spread the idea of violent armed struggle
• Reflected in their slogans and songs
– Most famous song becomes La Violenza

15. How was violence justified
within the movement?
• It made it easy to distinguish friends from
foes: a demacration line
• It had a therapeutic shock effect:
– It distanced students from bourgeois values
– Notions of legality were overcome
• It created solidarity
• Created commitment to the group
• It was group power in action

16. Politics of student dress:
changing culture
• Lifestyle and apprearence became at one with anti-
bourgeois and anti-institutional ideas
• Appearence for expressive purposes
• In 1967: still clean shaven and with jackets and
ties
• In 1968: cuban styled beards; no jackets; military
look; clenched fists
• Desire to express a political self-image

17. Before and after

18. From Operaismo to atunomoist
Marxism: Intro
• Operaismo (workersim): Marxist approach
focused on rank and file struggels
– Against the politics and opportunism of
dominant Marxist-Leninist left
– Still in the realm of workers struggle
• Autonomia:
– Workerist analysis of class struggle apllied to
social groups outside of the workplace

19. Operaismo and autonomist
Marxism: Classical workersim
• Origins of operaismo: research of workers
behavior in 1950s
• To research of workers own needs and problems
• Core features of operaismo:
– Identification of working class with the immediate process of
production
– Wage struggle as a key terrain of political conflict
– Working class is the driving force within capitalist society
– Against traditional party, parliament and union bureaucracy
– No distinction between political and economic struggles

20. Classical workersim
• Introduction of the concept of the Mass
Worker:
– Relatively simple labor
– Placed in the hearth of the process of
production
– Not tied to the process of production

21. Workerism beyond workers
• Production process itself is not neutral
• It is a process of domination: despotism
• Social Factory: Factory as locus of power
extended to the wider society
– Thus resistance outside the factory can be a
moment of class struggle

22. Autonomia emerges
• Loose network of groupings influenced by
operaist theories
• Many young people join the network
• Emphasis on the localized and personal struggle
rather than class-wide struggle
• Negri: mass worker is replaced by socialized
worker:
– Capital socializes labor beyond the immediate process
of production
– The extension of the concept of laborer grows

23. Autonomia emerges
• New social groups as collective subjects of
social change
– Women
– Students
– Peasants
• They all belong to the workig class, so their
actions contribute to anti-capitalism

24. Autonomia and students
• Classical operaism: student struggle must
be subordinated to workers struggle
• But students were important for:
– Theorizing the proletarization of intellectual
labor
– Link workers and students both
organizationally and in terms of demands

25. Autonomia: “the will is enough!”
• Thus for autonomia, the classical operaist idea of
workers class and struggle must expand
• Include new social groups
• Emphasize the local and individual struggle above
class wide
• The will to destruction enough to count as anti-
capitalist strugle rather than material determinants
like of class composition

26. Some criticism
• Operaists: still too Leninist in organizational
aspect
• Autonomia: lack of organization
• Autonomia: in the end reverted to vanguardism
• The fragmented and individualized forms of
resistance are a sign of the historic weakness of
the class
• Focus on plurality of autonomous struggles can
lead to abandonment of revolution as totality