For more than five years, starting in 1975, the struggle in Italy rose to the intensity of a civil war. The revolutionary Left not only attacked the State, but set itself up as an alternative "counter-power" within society. The seizure of State power was seen as coming "soon".
Statistics show how all-pervasive urban guerrilla actions were. Ministry of Interior reports set the number of "acts of terrorism" in 1975 at 702, in 1976 at 1,353, and by 1979 at 2,514 (some of these were Fascist, but overwhelmingly the Left). That is, the revolutionary Left was doing armed actions at the rate of five or six per day; these were hit-and-run attacks on carabinieri patrols and barracks, punitive executions of prison wardens and guards who had abused prisoners, knee-cappings of bosses and right-wing government officials, expropriations, torching cars, and bombings of right-wing centers. And such police statistics did not count the full number of popular actions of resistance - sabotage in factories, beating up Fascists and scabs, and so on. In the "popular neighborhoods" the phenomena of "proletarian holidays" involved masses of people. When food money got low, families of workers would march on the local store in a group, take everything they could carry, and leave without paying - shouting "proletarian holiday". The store personnel knew that calling the police would subject them to reprisals. This became so widespread that criminals began doing robberies that way.
A 1978 study on the urban guerrillas prepared by the unhappy Italian Communist Party (PCI) estimated that there were over 10,000 armed militants: "700 to 800 terrorists living clandestinely and approximately 10,000 other individuals who use arms in arson, pillage and other violent actions." The size of the "autonomous area", the active community that sustained the armed struggle, was commonly estimated at 250,000 persons or roughly 1% of the adult population. Sympathizers and those who took a neutral stance were an even greater number. While there were three major organizations - BR, Armed Proletarian Nuclei, and Frontline - many military collectives and temporary action groups representing varying political views and strategies sprang up: Armed Watch, Communist Combat Units, Revolutionary Action, Armed Communist Front, and so on. By October 1978 the Ministry of the Interior had counted some 135 armed Left groups which had done actions.
The public began to recognize the Red Brigades' remarkable style of fighting - very professional, very audacious, always guided by superior intelligence work and preparation. Almost every BR action was.stamped by this "trade-mark" style of fighting. One example was the June 8, 1976 execution of Francesco Coco, who was the equivalent to the Attorney-General in Genoa. Coco was the unrepentant Rightist who blocked the promised release of the October 22nd Group prisoners in exchange for Sossi. This official was also singled out for.his protection of various corrupt business interests. He had refused to prosecute the construction companies whose shoddy work led to the collapse of buildings in a working class district, killing 18 people (he said the deaths "did not constitute a crime"). As one of the most "wanted" men in Italy, Coco was never without guards.
On Tuesday, June 8, 1976, Prosecutor Francesco Coco was returning home for lunch. It was 1:30 pm; most people were already eating lunch and the street was empty. Coco's car drove by a carabinieri trooper guarding his street, some 300 feet from his door. His driver, another carabinieri trooper, remained in the car while Coco and his bodyguard, a plain clothes cop, climbed the long stone steps of the old side-street going up to his doorway. As they were halfway up the steps, three young men came out of an archway and began walking up the steps ahead of them. Suddenly the three men spun around, guns in their hands, and began shooting at point-blank range. Pig Coco and his bodyguard were killed on the spot.
Meanwhile on the street before a BR shielding unit killed the carabinieri trooper sitting in Coco's car. This prevented him from interfering with the main unit's getaway, and for good measure prevented the trooper on foot down the street from using Coco's car to give chase. The BR fighters escaped with cars which other units had parked beforehand right around the corner. The Coco action had originally been set for Friday June 4th, the anniversary of Mara's death, but an irregular schedule on his part had given him four more days of life.
The professional planning and execution of the action caused comment. Even the marksmanship had been near-perfect - five fighters emptied their guns, killing three pigs, and only one bullet had missed. The Italian bourgeois press started conjuring up fantasies of "foreign hit-men" (German R.A.F. or the Russian KGB), since everyone knew that Italians were never that efficient or disciplined!
This professionalism became the known style of the BR. In the Casale prison raid to free Renato Curcio, two workmen in blue coveralls of the State telephone company climbed the nearby electric pole and disconnected the prison's telephone lines - they were BR of course. Months and sometimes years of preparation, including much intelligence work, went into each action. It was standard procedure for shielding units to take over streets, sometimes even blocking them with trucks, to ensure that the main unit wasn't surprised "on the job" by police. The BR had almost no busted operations, and took very few casualties during actions.
The BR structure had a complex division of labor. Their basic unit was a 3-5 person cell, with the usual security filters so that only one person knew how to reach the next higher level. The entire organization was divided into large columns, which were self-reliant and had security insulation from each other. These columns were said to be up to 1,500 persons in size. Columns existed in Turin, Milan, Genoa, Venice, and Rome. Supposedly organizations were being built up to the column level in Naples and Sardinia in the South. There were units active in 60 cities. Within each column there were a number of Brigades, usually specialized for mass work, logistics (safehouses, I.D.s, arms, medical care, etc.), the factory struggle, dealing with the, courts and police, and dealing with the political parties. Specialized services, such as internal document archives or police radio monitoring, were set up in their own safehouses. Some operations, such as printing presses, were set up as dummy small businesses. On a "horizontal" level, all logistics work and all mass work was coordinated by national bodies (mass front and logistics .front). For instance: most BR work was coordinated and controlled "vertically" within columns, going from primary cells up to the political-military commander. But everyone who ran safehouses for the different columns also had their work coordinated nationally by the national logistics front which set general policy in this area for the whole organization. An executive provided overall leadership, while all BR elements were represented on the highest body, the Strategic Directorate, which set the political line.
The Red Brigades were using armed struggle t6 transform Italian society, teaching new norms of behaviour. "Proletarian holidays" and guerrilla actions were connected. Prison guards were not hit at random or in general, for example, but some of the most Fascistic were punished as a lesson; to help convince their colleagues to be more neutral, to be less eager to do the dirty work. In one expropriation the BR unit didn't even bother-with guns - just the "counter-power" it had. One day a well-dressed man appeared at a branch bank and asked to see the manager. Once seated he opened his briefcase and handed the bank manager a BR communique. The dumbfounded manager then got a lecture with details on his personal habits, residence and family. The BR militant then explained that it was less trouble for both sides if the manager just filled the briefcase with money and let him leave. Otherwise, the BR would definitely execute the manager - whom they knew all about. Knowing that the BR kept their word (as Coco discovered), the manager complied. On leaving, the BR militant got a signed letter from the manager giving the exact amount expropriated - BR accounting reviews of unit finances wanted such proof that the amount expropriated and the amount turned in balanced.
The "counter-power" was so strong that for almost four years the State was unable to complete trials for arrested BR members. Trials were postponed over and over. Stating that the trials were a farce, a mere propaganda exercise, the BR asked that they not take place and warned people against helping the State conduct them. Many judges, officials, .attorneys and jurors bowed out. And after Fulvio Croce, the hard-line president of the Turin bar association, was executed by a BR unit on April 25, 1977, everything stopped again. 36 of the 42 members of the jury pool said that they couldn't participate in the BR trial for "health reasons".
By late 1978 the tide of battle had begun to turn. March 16, 1978 the Rome BR column kidnaps DC party president Aldo Moro, twice before Premier, and the next Premier-to-be. Moro is one of the most heavily guarded men in the country, with five armed police guards. All five are killed. On surrounding main streets, trucks driven by BR militants are idling their engines, ready to block the road if police reinforcements appear. All telephone lines in the immediate area have been cut. In a bigger replay of the Sossi operation, Moro is held in a people's prison for 54 days against an exchange of 13 prisoners. The whole country is turned upside down. At the end the State decides it wants Moro, who is writing messages and is increasingly bitter, to be killed, and refuses to deal. The BR execute Moro.
State repression climbed to new highs. Aldo Moro had not been a Fascist or a Fanfani-type Rightist; he had been head of the Moderate wing of the DC - a famous politician whose stature was like a Senator Teddy Kennedy. All the political parties and the varied factions of the State itself united behind the program of repressing the urban guerrillas. In April 1979 the police began raids against Workers' Autonomy, charging that it was the above ground wing of the BR. Contro-Informazione magazine and Red Aid, the invaluable support network for political prisoners, were banned. Within the next several years the revolutionary Left was crushed.' No aboveground organizations or publications survived. Even many who had opposed armed struggle were imprisoned or fled into exile. It became illegal to print BR communiques or political statements, and the editor and reporters of L'Espresso (a big news magazine like Newsweek in the "u.s.a.") were arrested for refusing to go along. 3,000 BR members and 7,000 other Leftists are in the prisons. The story of the State's counter-insurgency drive is an extensive one, and one we cannot go into here.
We would like to briefly talk about "restructuration", imperialism's strategy for "drying up the sea" of people that sustain revolutionary war. As applied to Italy it was a counter-insurgency operation, but also something larger, a re-engineering of a backward human society to better fit into the world system of the multinational corporations. The 1970s saw a tremendous modernization of Italian institutions, with particular reforms in industrial organization, education, women's -equality, regional autonomy, and the full incorporation of revisionism into the system. Every one of these changes absolutely parallel the "restructuration" that went on in the u.s. empire in the late 1960s and 1970s. And just as in the "u.s." in Italy they had an effect on social discontent, particularly within the middle class.
The material basis of "restructuration" is changes in the organization of production, and therefore in class Telations. If we look at FIAT, these changes are dramatic. There was repression of the revolutionary infrastructure on the shop floor. Not only selective arrests, but the wholesale purges, guided by the dossiers compiled by the Fascist spy network, that fired, laid off or transferred away thousands of the most militant workers. The Mirafiori workforce shrank both due to technological production changes and due to sub-contracting more and more production away to Spain, Greece, and the Third World. The "sea" of the factory that sustained (and hid) the revolutionary forces was to some degree dried up.
Many more youth were let into.university education. In a few years in the 1970s, the size of the university system tripled, and liberal reforms took effect. Just as in the "u.s.a." the 1970s saw a wave of bourgeois democratic reforms in Italy. New legislation in 1975-78 adjusted or reworded much of the old patriarchical family laws. "Equality" for women was pushed by the ruling class. Birth control had been legalized in 1971; abortion was legalized (first trimester only) by Law 194 in 1978. This reform primarily benefited women of the privileged classes, since without money, abortion is hard to arrange. Additionally, in many areas the government-funded women's health centers that are the only source of free birth control and abortion are run by the Catholic Church. Consequently many working class and peasant women still resort to illegal abortions. Rape and involuntary marriages are illegal, although killing of women still goes on. In general the old feudal-clerical culture has been pushed back, again, especially for the petty-bourgeoisie in the major cities.
An effort was made to iron out some contradictions within Italy's bureaucratized State. In a 1971 de-centralization, regional governments were granted control over government-funded social services. This was also a pay-off to the revisionist Italian Communist Party, whose job patronage sharply increased in the Central Italian "red belt" where it controlled most of the regional governments. Traditionally, Italian government welfare funding was a subsidy for the Church, which operated the orphanages, hospitals, schools, kindergartens, nursing homes, etc. with public tax money. PCI officials threatened to start public services and replace all the nuns with workers who supported the PCI. Secret negotiations ensued between the Vatican and the PCI. In late 1973 an agreement was reached. In the words of the New York Times (February 3, 1974):
"Last christmas Cardinal Poma in a pastoral letter urged his clergy to 'take part in the life, the tasks and the structures of society'. This was interpreted to mean that the Church wanted priests to co-operate with the Communist-controlled regional and city governments. It is believed that the Communist Party has indicated willingness to let the Church have a relatively free hand in social welfare affairs in exchange for cooperation in other fields."
This detente between the PCI and the Vatican, and between the State and the PCI, brought Italy's largest "Left" party into the ruling structures and ended the historic antagonism. It also strengthened the Vatican's hand in isolating the Catholic Left (anti-Capitalist Catholics were politically active throughout Italy, including many within the BR). Revisionism, which had proven so necessary in opposing guerrilla warfare among the masses, was being funded and nourished by imperialism.
Imperialism's aim in pushing through all these changes has been to end Italy's crisis by transforming Italian society into a full-blown, "advanced" oppressor nation. Today we note that even in Italy, traditionally the poorest of the major imperialist nations, trends are seen similar to those already firmly established in the "u.s.a.", West Germany, Britain and France. There is no need to detail them here, but this "restructuration" is evident in the growing importation of undocumented North Afrikan workers, who even in the impoverished South are becoming the majority of unskilled laborers in construction and other industries. Thus the question confronting the Italian revolutionary struggle, which has never died despite serious setbacks, include questions posed by imperialism for all oppressor nations.
