CARRY THE ATTACK TO THE HEART OF THE STATE
The BR's release of Sossi took everyone by surprise. It was generally admitted that the BR had made the police look foolish and won a political victory showing their strength and the State's weakness. Even the right-wing magazine Il Tempo was forced to admit that while the police had had an easy time putting away October 22nd because it had been riddled with informers, the BR had taken over GAP's Genoese base but had eliminated its infiltrators, denying the police reliable intelligence sources.
After his release, Sossi behaved very strangely. His intense paranoia about the State's intentions toward him led him to take elaborate precautions to avoid the police until he had made contact with two lawyers and a doctor who were trusted friends of his. One of the lawyers commented, "maybe he wanted me there to shield him from a bullet, I thought about that later and it still makes my legs tremble". From the medical doctor Sossi got a certificate attesting to his sanity. Later, after he finally surfaced, Sossi insisted on having four finance ministry policemen, who were old friends, as bodyguards. He travelled with them in a blue Alfetta belonging to the finance ministry and they always went out of their way to lose the police cars assigned to tail them.
In his first public statements he spoke with respect of the BR: "No one forced me to write messages, I was the one who asked if I could do it. I was never coerced through violence to say things that were important to the BR. In other words I was not mistreated or tortured... At the end, relations between me and the two brigadisti were if not cordial, at least civil. On one thing we were absolutely in agreement, the independence of the judiciary is a utopia... this the BR already knew. I came to understand it in those 35 days."
Sossi continued the attacks he had made on interior minister Taviani, Catalano and Coco while a prisoner of the BR, removing any question that his prison messages attacking them had been made only under duress. Coco tried to dismiss Sossi as being temporarily insane.
Meanwhile Coco, who had publicly promised to free the 8 October 22nd prisoners after Sossi was freed, maneuvered to avoid keeping his word hoping that the higher court of Cassation would annul the decree of the Genoa court of appeals. Coco also gave his own unique "legal" interpretation of the Genoa court order to free the 8 October 22nd prisoners: "the order for decarceration cannot be executed because the modalities of the exchange have not been respected. Sossi is physically free but not spiritually".
The refusal of the State to honor its word kicked off a public debate. On balance, most bourgeois opinion opposed Coco's intransigence. The revisionist Paese Sera supported Coco but even Giorgio Galli, a prominent Social Democratic intellectual, wrote a scathing attack on Coco and the hardliners in the State:
"This is the State that legally frees Mafiosi and keeps its citizens in jail for 8 years without proving their guilt; which to avoid giving in to blackmail allowed those who served it faithfully to be killed (the five police victims of Alessandria prison in addition to the two prisoners); and which would rather let Mario Sossi be killed to avoid negotiating with the mysterious BR, who have, nevertheless, leveled accusations at the minister of interior Taviani, at chief prosecutor Coco (who obstructed as best he could the investigators of the oil industry) and at the chief of the political office of the Genoa police department, Doctor Catalano, accusations of which the least that can be said is that they leave public opinion disoriented." With Sossi's release, the BR scored an additional means to prolong and deepen the split within the State and ideological establishment. In an internal document, the BR summarized the political results of their decision to release Sossi.
EXCERPT FROM BR DOCUMENT
With the concession of provisional liberty to the 8 from October 22nd, the judiciary has taken an autonomous position of being open to negotiation to save Sossi's life. The political powers, and in particular, the government solidly (from the DC to the PCI) expresses a clear refusal to negotiate and is prepared to sacrifice Sossi's life. This attitude clearly has implications that go beyond this specific case touching on a basic question: the relationship between the judiciary and the political powers.
The intention is, in fact, to base the plan for NeoGaullist restructuration on the subordination of the judiciary to the directives of the political powers...with the Sossi campaign we were setting ourselves the basic objective of making clear the deepening of the political contradictions within and between the various organs of the state apparatus. Through this campaign it was our intention to highlight the content of the NeoGaullist plan.
The demand for the liberation of the political prisoners was advanced therefore with two goals:
– to push the contradictions within the State to their extreme;
– to establish a path toward the solution of this problem.
BOTH THESE GOALS HAVE BEEN ACHIEVED.(1)
The bourgeois press and the Left press, including that of much of the extra-parliamentary New Left, showed remarkable unity in their political line toward the BR after the Sossi action. Both emphasized the "criminal". character of the BR, and concern-trolled that their actions were only helping the fascists. This newfound unity was partly strategic and partly tactical. Strategically, it was a choice by the ruling class to look for allies on the Left to put down the armed struggle more effectively. Tactically, Il Manifesto and Lotta Continua (New Left), L'Unita and L'Avanti (Old Left), and La Stampa, Il Corriere della Sera and Il Messagero (main bourgeois press) had all campaigned together for a NO vote on the divorce referendum. In addition, the bourgeois press did not hide this de facto unity but rather boasted about it. Arrigo Levi in La Stampa, FIAT's newspaper, commented:
" 'It is time that the country is informed and reassured that justice will see full light... that the organs of the State act with the maximum energy to prevent and root out the new criminal activities'... these are the words of the honorable Berlinguer [PCI chief-Ed].... It seems to us that they correctly express the anger of one who wants to defend this republic..."
In the May 4, 1974 issue of La Stampa, Andrea Barbato commented:
"Every so often it is possible to share the same opinion expressed by an extremist movement, that put forward yesterday by Lotta Continua. That group has three hypotheses:
- that the Red Brigades are being manipulated for reactionary ends;
- that they irresponsibly ignore the link between their actions and the divorce referendum;
- finally that their incorrect analysis leads them to aim for a defeat of the NO vote according to the old maxim 'the worse things get the better it is'
"We don't know which of these three hypotheses is the most correct: in the end they are all similar. Whoever uses terror as a political weapon can only find themselves at ease in a totalitarian State..."
At this point, within the bourgeois press, only L'Espresso and Panorama magazines were giving the public factual information on the BR. And Panorama could not really be trusted either, since it had made a secret deal with SID (the Italian secret service) to help them penetrate the Brigades in exchange for exclusive inside tips and rights to future captured BR documents.
One of the major themes developed during this period by the Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading newspaper, in its propaganda war against the Brigades was that the people behind the BR were highly cultured, highly intelligent, but maniacally alienated people. The attempt was to psychologize the political. The Corriere, to this end, published endless interviews with academic "experts" in the fields of sociology, psychology, linguistics, philology, etc., to "prove" their thesis.
One of the few exceptions among Italian intellectuals was the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia (a PCI member of the Sicilian regional parliament) who wrote about the BR in L'Espresso:
EXCERPT FROM SICILIAN LEFTIST WRITER LEONARDO SCASCIA'S ARTICLE ABOUT BR IN L'ESPRESSO
...According to revolutionary orthodoxy, there is no doubt that the action of the BR in the Sossi case was absolutely unexceptionable both as to its timing as well as its effects. If a revolutionary movement does not know how to infiltrate and widen the cracks offered to it by the society, the regime and the state which it is fighting; if it does not know how to act in such a way that the contradictions internal to that society, that regime and that state are sharpened and explode, one fails to understand why and in what sense one can call oneself a revolutionary. And yet in the nominally revolutionary sector of our country the action of the BR has been understood and explained in many ways, except the most obvious one: that is, as the method to prepare for or begin to make a revolution, The most benevolent interpretation was that it was infantile extremism in a sense that does not seem to me to be what Lenin meant...
Is not the failure to recognize the BR action as a revolutionary one a symptom of the changed relationship between the proletarian and revolutionary classes, as they are today represented and represent themselves, and Power, and the State? Is it still possible to speak of revolution if the revolutionary gesture is feared in the very ranks of the forces which should generate it – not only because of the counterrevolutionary gestures which might easily and disproportionately answer it, but also because the gesture itself is seen as intrinsically counterrevolutionary? Is this not something to think about, to reflect on?
Reprinted below are the reactions of various groups of the extra-parliamentary Left to the Sossi operation. The Italian anarchist movement was generally positive, while also emphasizing their political disagreements with the BR. They violently attacked the rest of the Left for their opportunism.
The anarchist paper Umanita' Nova sums up the political effects of the Sossi action:
EXCERPTS FROM ANARCHIST "UMANITA' NOVA" ARTICLES ON SOSSI ACTION
1. Experience teaches that violent, clandestine struggle has the right to exist if it is placed in an already conscious political context... Right now, with the smugness of triumphalists...the Italian people...is a long way...from having developed a revolutionary consciousness.
If this is the correct analysis, we ask ourselves whether the BR really believe that a symbolic action is enough to reverse this trend...
These are our basic objections. Don't ask us to condemn them however...
We will not unite...our voice with the general and highly suspect outcry against the Sossi kidnapping. Nor are we concerned about the risks to the country's institutions, which we don't believe in, and whose fate leaves us indifferent. Reprinted from Umanita' Nova, May 4, 1974
2. The State above all comes out of this in pieces. Incapable of conducting serious investigations, it could only invade Genoa and the entire surrounding region with several thousand police and carabinieri who, in combat gear and with machine guns in hand put that city under a state of siege that lasted without interruption for 35 days. Sossi was not found, the ridiculous stage spectacle was a complete failure, and if it served any purpose at all it was probably to bring down the hatred of the population not on the Red Brigades but on the police and the carabinieri. The State also failed miserably in another area which is one of its specialties: infiltration and spying. The thousands of informers which the SID, the finance police, the carabinieri and the police, etc. have at their disposal were not able to produce the slightest result...
But the State was not the only institution involved in this shipwreck: what is to be said of the political parties, of our parliamentary Left, extra and ex, of our unions, all of them united in their "horror against this unheard of provocation"? The spectacle is distressing: no attempt at a serious, argued analysis, no interpretation of the facts in the light of the principles they claim to uphold. On the contrary the opinion (if you can call it that) expressed was dull, opportunistic and without imagination. Provocation, "who gains by it," fascists, strategy of tension, using the referendum as a tool for their own ends, and then, after the referendum was passed, using something else as a tool for their own ends. What meanness of spirit, but above all what extreme poverty of ideas in people whose followers number in the millions! We are not, in principle in agreement with the strategy of the Red Brigades. We know well that the day on which the smashing of all Power is in discussion, we and they will not be on the same side (just as we were not in the Ukraine, in Spain and so on).. But we do not mean by this to unite with the chorus of laments which have accompanied this action.
- Umanita' Nova, June 1, 1974
The anarchist magazine A put their fingers on the absurdity of so many "Marxist-Leninist" organizations having heart attacks at the first signs of illegal and violent struggle:
EXCERPT FROM ANARCHIST MAGAZINE "A" CRITICIZING
IDEA THAT BR ARE FASCISTS WHO PUSH "STRATEGY OF TENSION"
Fighting street demonstrations, even wildcat strikes; every extra-institutional political action increases tension, But is the purpose of revolutionaries to lessen tensions? It is funny that we anarchists must defend a group of Marxist-Leninists from their own brethren. At this rate everything illegal will be a provocation. And we would also say the revolution is, roughly speaking, illegal.
- "A", June 1974
Of particular importance are the positions taken by Workers' Autonomy toward the BR. This was the movement the Brigades themselves came out of. Many different viewpoints emerged from this movement because of its politically amorphous character. Some of them revealed a hurried reading of the BR documents, for instance, in mistakenly attributing the theory of building an armed wing separate from the political party to the BR (which was the exact opposite of their position).
- From the Policlinico Collective and ENEL Political Committee (Rome)
POLICLINICO COLLECTIVE AND ENEL POLITICAL COMMITTEE (ROME)
Everybody is talking about "autonomy" thanks also to the BR. We thank the BR and the referendum for having cleared up where real workers autonomy stands today, which is a political force and not just something spontaneous capable at most of pushing union demands in the factory further to the left. This is the type of clarity that the comrades of the BR have been able to create within the so-called extra-parliamentary left with regard to the ability to be a political force consistent with proletarian needs.
- Rosso #11, June 1974
EXCERPT FROM CONTRO-INFORMAZIONE
(From an interview with a worker from Porto Marghera, a member of the "workers autonomy" current): "While the Sossi case has heightened a whole series of contradictions, there was a failure to tie it in with the immediate day to day situation of the Genoese working class... The real danger is not NeoGaullism but a social-democracy with machine-guns, where the union completely assumes the role of a state institution."
(Letter from a militant of the revolutionary Left): "Don't the comrades of the BR think they should have explained in a deeper and more complete way the motives that led them to choose the political period of the fight for the referendum... The comrades of the BR have spoken of explosive documents on the various illegal trafficking and various crimes committed by big and small pigs. Wasn't a great opportunity lost by not documenting these crimes in a precise and timely fashion?
- Contro-Informazione #3-4, July 1974.
EXCERPT FROM RIVOLTA DI CLASSE
That the Brigades are red there is no doubt, they are the focus of all the attacks of the whole bourgeois democratic system... The Sossi kidnapping has meant this, putting the proletariat on guard against a State which despite its stealing of the symbols of the World War H Resistance, has remained emphatically fascist in its structure and its actions; it has presented a warning against any adventures damaging to the workers movement.
- Rivolta di classe, June 28, 1974
EXCERPT FROM ROSSO
The Red Brigades and their "violent" actions force the Left to take positions with regard to violence, to come out in the open. As far as we're concerned this is good. For too many would-be revolutionaries a few weeks of gold chained detention by a judge have been enough to make them forget the detention of the working class in the factories, deaths on the job, the dead from the blows of the police, the assaults and the fascist bombs, and make a complete retreat to "democratic" politics in the form of condemning the BR. What we don't like, however, is violence which is also clandestine from the masses. Our disagreement is completely and only political: there is no NeoGaullist coup to confront; the enemy to be crushed is the party of labor which ties together bourgeoisie and reformists.
The theory of the armed wing of the party beyond and outside the practice and the political leadership on the part of organized workers autonomy is an impotent perspective in the face of the demand for organization which the activity of the class and the vanguard express today. It is ineffective to put forward the perspective of the use of revolutionary violence on anything other than a mass level, such as became possible this year at FIAT and at the height of other struggles.
- Rosso #11, June 1974
The Red Brigades emerged from the Sossi campaign with the image of "gentlemen bandits" who paralyzed the entire State without spilling blood.
* * * * * * *
May 28th, 1974, only five days after Sossi's release, a time bomb hidden in a plastic garbage bag exploded in the middle of an anti-fascist rally in Brescia, an industrial city 60 miles north of Milan. Eight people were killed and 92 wounded. The Black Order, an underground fascist organization active in the Milan-Brescia area, had already been under inquiry. had been underway at that time. The Brescia massacre, the first bombing of a peaceful public meeting in Italy since World War II, touched off violent nationwide demonstrations and physical attacks on fascists and fascist headquarters by the revolutionary Left.
Three weeks after the Brescia massacre on June 17, 1974, two fascists were found dead in the Padova MSI fascist party headquarters. The next day Paese Sera printed a message signed by the BR which took responsibility it, explaining that the two fascists had been accidentally killed while resisting the BR unit raiding the MSI party offices. This became widely known on the Left as an "Accident on the Job":
BR MESSAGE, JUNE 18, 1974 THE PADOVA "ACCIDENT ON THE JOB" INCIDENT
On Monday June 17, 1974 an armed unit of the Red Brigades occupied the provincial headquarters of the MSI (the fascist political party – ed.) in Padova on Via Zabarella. The two fascists present having violently resisted were executed.
The Padova MSI is the forge from which anti-proletarian groups and personalities have emerged in these last years. Freda and Fachisi learned their trade as assassins there and the leaders of this federation (Luci, Switch, Marinoni) have directed the fascist conspiracies from the massacre of Piazza Fontana on. Their most recent crime was the Brescia massacre.
Christian Democracy and Taviani wanted this massacre so that they could resolve the sharp contradictions opened up within their ranks by the clear defeat of the referendum and the "Sossi case." And more generally to relaunch the NeoGaullist plan with "special laws" to maintain public order. The eight comrades murdered in Brescia cannot be wiped out of the consciousness of the proletariat with the wipe of a sponge. Their death represents a decisive stage in the class war, both because for the first time the Christian Democratic powers have through their fascist hired assassins unleashed savage terrorism directly against the working class and its organizations, and also because after Brescia the revolutionary forces are justified in responding to fascist barbarity with the armed justice of the proletariat.
Those who continue to struggle against fascism seeing it as an autonomous political force which can be defeated in isolation without involving the State which produces it are off the target. Those who do not move against the fascists using the excuse that they are "only servants" are completely off-base.
We must oppose the counter-revolutionary plan which aims at encircling and defeating the working class with an armed revolutionary initiative against the State and its armed detachments. An armed revolutionary initiative which is organized starting from the factories. The headquarters of the MSI are no longer inviolate fascist fortresses! No fascist can any longer consider themselves safe! No fascist crime will go unpunished! Carry the attack to the heart of the State! Armed struggle for communism!
Tuesday, June 18, 1974
Red Brigades (2)
There was some confusion about the exact circumstances of this raid. And there was some question even among Leftists sympathetic to the BR about the authenticity of the message. In any case, circumstantial evidence indicated that the raid may actually have been carried out by an independent armed collective close to the BR and that it was not an action planned by or approved by the strategic leadership of the BR itself. The action did not fit into the BR strategy initiated in January 1974 of focusing on the struggle against the Christian Democratic "white shirt" fascists. The BR however never repudiated the message or the action itself.
The Workers' Autonomy magazine Contro-Informazione also commented on the Padova incident. Reprinted below are excerpts from the Contro-Informazione article:
"CONTRO-INFORMAZIONE" ON THE PADOVA INCIDENT
As far as leftwing opinion is concerned it was disconcerted: believing the BR were responsible meant destroying a cherished image, it meant admitting that the BR were also capable of interrupting their "gentlemanly tradition" with armed violence... There were even those who hypothesized the BR overcome by a militarist line: alongside the colonels sprout the samurai... Only a few put forward the only hypothesis that seems acceptable: that the BR communique was aimed at avoiding the unleashing of a red witchhunt. The BR, submitting themselves to an inevitably untender general judgment, have admitted their responsibility for what happened in the MSI headquarters. Neither an acceptable challenge to public opinion and to the consensus of the Left "vanguards," nor an underestimation of the historic situation, but the recognition of what we hold was a mistake. This appears to be the case from a careful reading of the communique: admit your mistakes... To those who thought it possible to go on forever with innocuous, friendly armed propaganda actions a la early Tupamaros, the BR have answered that when you act for real incidents always wait in ambush. Despite all this the BR have not tried to transform an action whose purpose was not to execute the fascists into a new political direction.
- Contro-Informazione #3/4, July 15, 1974
Whatever the true facts of the Padova raid were, it changed the BR's image, and they inevitably lost sympathy in liberal quarters.
Summer of '74, the State went on the counter-attack against the BR underground and extra-parliamentary Left. By combining repressions, they attempted to link the entire Left to the armed struggle in the minds of the public. There were many police raids, many stop-and-frisks of Leftists, and there were many arrests.
During this period, SID finally managed to infiltrate the Red Brigades in a clever operation using Father Girotto, an ex-convict turned Franciscan monk and a long-time CIA agent. Girotto, also known as "Frate Mitra" ("Father Machinegun") and "Frate Leone" ("Father Lion") had been very active in the Catholic Left in Italy in the 1960's. Growing suspicions that he was a police agent led his bosses to move him. He spent the next 4 years (October 1969 to November 1973) in Latin America masquerading as a "revolutionary priest-guerrilla fighter" in Bolivia and Chile, working for the CIA. Girotto had infiltrated the Bolivian revolutionary underground organization MIR for the CIA. He was instrumental in the destruction of that organization, the capture of a top MIR leader, the assassination of revolutionary Monica Erte in La Paz whom he had worked closely with for a long time, and the death and imprisonment of many other comrades. Later Girotto had turned up in Chile during the last days of the Leftist Allende regime in the Summer of 1973, and continued his deadly work as a police infiltrator in the Chilean revolutionary movement. By the time Girotto left Chile for Italy in November 1973 he had been completely exposed as an agent by the Bolivian and Chilean comrades. This was not, however, known in Italy.
On returning to Italy, he used his old contacts in the Catholic Left from 1969 and a carefully orchestrated media campaign by the Italian secret service, SID, to re-establish his revolutionary credentials as a Latin American "guerrilla fighter" in exile. In magazine articles and TV talk shows Girotto expressed his desire to help the BR. He spent the period from December 1973 to July 1974 attempting to infiltrate the BR without much success. In August of 1974 he was able to finally make face to face contact with BR leaders Curcio and Franceschini. Girotto, according to his own testimony, held two meetings with Curcio in August and a third one on September 8, 1974, all in the Piedmontese countryside outside Turin at a small town called Pinerolo. The September 8th meeting turned into a police trap in which Curcio and Franceschini were captured by the carabinieri.
Although the carabinieri and the press crowed over their "brilliant" triumph in trapping the two BR leaders, the police operation was really a partial failure. According to an article in Contro-Informazione #5/6, 1975 written by comrades of Red Aid, the actual goal of the carabinieri operation had been to ambush and kill both Curcio and Franceschini, rather than take them alive.
At the beginning of September, while SID was busy priming their trap for the BR leadership, General Miceli, the head of SID, was arrested. SID's role in helping the extreme Right to prepare a fascist military coup to take over the government was exposed in the press. Miceli's arrest apparently forced SID's hand. They needed favorable publicity and they had to spring their trap against the BR prematurely.
In an interview with Curcio published in L'Espresso in 1975, Curcio explained what happened:
EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH CURCIO
During that period (September - Ed. note) the men of General Della Chiesa's counter-insurgency force, using a guide and exploiting an error of judgment on my part had brought to culmination an infiltration maneuver which led to the trap and the arrest.
But beyond a simple police operation there was another plan: a plan to point to the danger of the Left to justify a fascist preventive counter-coup. And secondarily, to propose a plan to counter the attacks on the fascist plots which were becoming more and more consistent. SID (military intelligence – ed.) was heavily implicated in these dark affairs and it was necessary to distract attention from them. The BR entered into this design insofar as they could be pictured as the emerging armed tip of a many-sided iceberg, present not only in the big factories of the North, in the cultural world, in the judicial apparatus, in the most quoted newspapers, in the armed forces and even in the ministries of interior and defense. After the Sossi operation the idea-force which the BR represented had become dangerous because it was attracting consensus and sympathy in ever larger strata of vanguards and the movement. Thus the counter-insurgency force had to strike urgently and noisily to demonstrate that this organization was not invincible, to dirty the organization's image with low tricks, and to anticipate its probable autumn initiatives.(3)
The September 22, 1974 issue of L'Espresso carried a BR message denouncing Girotto's role in helping the police capture of Curcio and Franceschini. Its text:
BR MESSAGE DENOUNCING GIROTTO'S SPYING ACTIVITY
Comrades, on Sunday September 8, comrades Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini fell into the hands of SID. The communications which SID issued and the manipulations of the Press induce us to state certain facts: the capture of Curcio and Franceschini did not occur, in the most absolute sense, as a result of a betrayal by or defection of members of our organization, much less by the work of infiltrators. But neither can it be credited to the much bandied about investigative skills of the Turinese Carabinieri and police, who were never able to follow the movements of the two comrades.
Their capture occurred following an ambush set for them through Silvano Girotto, better known as "Father Leone," who exploiting his fame as a supposed revolutionary, artfully built up in Latin America, sells his infamous work of provocation to counter-insurgency services of imperialism.
But even if the powers succeed in striking one of our militants with a "brilliant operation" they will not succeed in neutralizing the political force of our strategic proposal: armed struggle for communism.
Comrades, if the bourgeoisie uses massacres in public meetings and on trains, unleashes the police more and more against proletarians, relies on international counter-insurgency forces, this is not proof of strength, but shows their fear and inability to resolve the crisis of Power which, today, more than ever, is the crisis of its hegemony over the proletariat.
To the demand for power which arises from the struggles of the proletariat our own servants of USA imperialism respond with bombs, police, and unemployment.
The movement has only one way to respond: organize itself on the terrain of armed struggle to carry the battle to the heart of the State.
Red Brigades (4)
A month later a veteran Communist ex-partisan Giovanni Lazagna, a PCI member, was arrested by the police and accused of being a member of the BR. Lazagna had been skillfully set up by Father Girotto, who had met with him in mid-1974, and later claimed that Lazagna had been the one who had finally put him in touch with Curcio in August of 1974. With Lazagna's arrest and frame-up as a BR member, the hard-line faction within the State had its story to implicate the entire Left in the armed struggle, including the PCI.
In BR's shadow, the PCI mounted a major political campaign to convince the ruling class they could not survive the revolutionary threat without a political alliance with their party. Therefore the frame-up of Lazagna and SID's overall activities must be seen as part of this sharp struggle within the ruling class, over whether or not to accept the PCI's proposal, and allow them into a new Center-Left coalition government. Incidentally, during this same period then-u.s. Secretary of State Kissinger and Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin of "Israel" met and publicly expressed their alarm at the fact that Italy was about to "go Communist". Kissinger went out of his way to denounce the idea of an alliance between the PCI and the Christian Democrats. This marked the beginning of a concerted campaign by u.s. imperialism and its closest allies within the Italian ruling class, the Agnelli family, owners of FIAT auto company, to block the PCI from entering the government.
More raids rained down. In addition to Lazagna's arrest, police discovered a number of BR safehouses, and with them, BR documents. During one raid against a safehouse in Robbiano di Mediglia, a shoot-out wounded one BR member, and led to the death of a carabinieri marshal. The State counter-offensive was mounting.
In jail, the BR prisoners behaved with dignity and followed traditional Communist discipline. They refused to answer any questions, and appealed to the Geneva Convention as prisoners "of a war that has been declared by the bourgeoisie" (from the statement to the court by Roberto Ognibene before being sentenced to 28 years in jail).
The BR continued the struggle from the jails. In a letter to comrades of the revolutionary Left, BR member Paolo Ferrari wrote: "The jails have always been a revolutionary terrain. Therefore I certainly will not fail to be at my place of battle, strengthened by the political experience I've gained in jail."
Renato Curcio wrote to Mara's sister, Milena Cagol, from prison:
"What happened to me is not a misfortune but an inevitable stage in the life of every man who in this society fights for freedom. I am not the first nor the most unfortunate... prison for Communists has never been a tragedy. See, Milena, a great fighter for freedom, the Afro-american Eldridge Cleaver, once said that the revolutionary is a condemned man; if he is not able to come to terms with the prospect of prison and death, then he absolutely does not have the right to challenge, or confront, or contest the system. I have come to terms with these prospects and I am no longer afraid. You must try to understand me and accept all this, because perhaps there will be worse moments. But you must be serene because at the end of this war a new society will come."
Other BR members showed their open contempt for their jailers. Franceschini slapped the "Leftist" judge Caselli who tried to question him without a lawyer present. Franceschini also refused to take part in a trial "without any evidence, in which a guilty verdict has already been decided on", He declared in writing to the judges: "I'm not interested in answering your slanders, it would mean accepting your evil logic. Besides, I don't have to explain to your 'distinguished excellences' why I'm a Communist fighter."
Curcio produced two important documents in jail. The first was in interview form:
CURCIO'S INTERVIEW IN PRISON AT CASALE MONFERRATO
DECEMBER 1974
Q: Has the plan for a military coup been postponed?
A: The Moro government cannot hope to resolve the power struggle taking place in the country. The macabre counter-revolutionary trend which has been uncoiling since 1969 has only been disturbed, but not liquidated in these last months. After all, this counter-revolutionary trend could not be eliminated because in fact, it is part of the deep crisis that the capitalist countries are going through and is a response to their need to maintain the existing political shape of the Western bourgeois democratic system. In particular, in Italy the crisis-recession-restructuration cycle cannot be managed with ordinary administrative political instruments.
The crisis of the State, of the majority political party and of the economic development model are now such that they require a "historic break" rather than a compromise.
The situation is evolving toward a breaking point beyond which the rules of the game are no longer valid for anyone. Or else they will have to be made valid for everyone.
I do not believe that the pessimism of many intellectuals nor the revisionists' proposal for a compromise are justified.
The conditions and forces exist to transform this crisis into a "historic turn toward socialism." But it is necessary to prepare the proletarian masses in all ways for the new tasks, or to put it another way, for the inevitable confrontation with the plans and forces of the national and imperialist counter-revolution.
Socialism is not inevitable, but what is inevitable is that the entire Left will be required to define itself in relation to this confrontation.
Q: There are those who maintain that the BR experience has suffered a perhaps decisive blow with the arrest of a certain number of comrades. In other words, what is left of the BR?
A: It is true that the arrest of several comrades has caused certain sects on the Left to heave a sigh of relief. These sects, no longer knowing how to justify their parasitic and subordinate position, have not hesitated to make themselves accomplices of the counter-revolution in an all-out attack on the young guerrilla experience.
It is also true that these people's disappointment will be as great as their sigh of relief.
The arrest of several comrades does not mean the defeat of the need for class war. Nor of the need for its organization by the proletariat. This is demonstrated by the continuation of offensive activities; for example the two recent armed takeovers of the spy nests of SIDA at Mirafiore and Rivalta.(5)
Guerrilla war is now an objective reality of the Italian and European Situation, a political requirement for the proletarian vanguards. Its development can be delayed but it cannot be stopped.
Vanguards exist in all areas of concentration of the class that, having gone beyond the stage of protest, have adopted the thesis – sustained by the BR – that in Western Europe the current inapplicability of the classical insurrectionary strategy does not mean renouncing class war but instead means its development in the form of urban guerrilla warfare.
The movement "groups," the various forces of the Left, must understand, regardless of even important differences of opinion, that the weakening of the BR experience is not in the interest of the Left movement.
The attack on the levels of clandestine and armed organization, the attempt to relegate the fighting units to the pre-political sphere of criminal marginality, are only signs of the bourgeoisie's need to destroy every political basis of organization of proletarian violence, to annihilate every antagonistic insurgency, to progressively limit every form of struggle and finally to channel and control the clash between classes.
It seems to me that this is too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of some polemical whim or some tactical need.
Q: L'Unita writes: "There are some who have theorized armed action with hatred for and in struggle against the communists." What do you think?
A: It is a phrase said maybe for effect, but it is meaningless. In the meantime it establishes an improper identity between the communists and the PCI. Then it counter-poses "armed action" to the communists. Finally it presumes a hatred toward the "PCI-communists."
Let's see if we can unravel this mess.
First: Communism is more than a party, it is a conception of the world. In this sense, even in Italy there are many communists who are not members of the PCI (and some members of the PCI whom it is hard to think of as communists).
Second: some Italian revolutionary communists do not share the strategic line of compromise and have chosen to fight for the different perspective of a historic turn toward socialism.
Third: This does not mean or presuppose any "hatred," rather a political struggle between two divergent strategies. Not, I repeat, hatred, not insults, but a political struggle because, whether Mr. Berlinguer likes it or not, the forces that have theorized the passage to urban guerrilla war as the specific historical form of class war today are an integral part of the Left movement.
Q: In Florence and Bologna, just to mention the most notorious incidents, there have been episodes of "criminality" which some define as "common," others as political. Deluded? Desperate? Guerrillas?
A: I don't share the opinion of those who liquidate the question by calling it "aberrational provocative madness." There is nothing provocative, aberrational or crazy about what those comrades did. There were instead some errors of political structure and military technique. To transform these defeats, these errors into a small victory, we must identify the political lesson that comes out of those events so that errors, as an accumulation of experience, also become part of the positive inheritance of the Left movement.
One lesson – which is after all the confirmation of a thesis always sustained by the BR – is this: Class war does not mean "taking up the gun" but interpreting in organizational and political-military terms the antagonism raging in the great industrial and urban centers beneath the pacifist and egalitarian crust of the official Left.
Because I believe Mahler is right when he maintains that with respect to reality European comrades have an idyllic image of capitalism and as a result the methods of anticapitalist struggle they theorize are also idyllic. While actually this idyllic reality doesn't exist – from which is born the contradiction, the political space and the social base of the revolutionary tendency.
Q: In other words, what are the boundaries between "common crime" and robbery for political ends?
A: As Bertolt Brecht puts this kind of question in the mouth of one of his characters: "Who is the real criminal, he who founds a bank or he who robs a bank?" For well-to-do people the answer is predictable: those who rob banks are common criminals; those who found them are respectable gentlemen!
Expropriation stands outside this dialectic of misery. In other words, it cannot be defined as "robbery for political purposes."
As paradoxical as it may seem, expropriation is not determined by the subsistence needs of the guerrilla organization which carries it out, but rather by the effective offensive capacity which it has reached. The more solid the organization, all the more incisive its expropriation activity.
For this reason, it is said that expropriation is a strategic (not tactical) component of every guerrilla war. Even in an initial phase, it is already practiced as a tax the revolutionary movement imposes on the bourgeoisie; while, at the conclusion of the process, it will assume the form of a general expropriation of all property which is used as a basis for building exploitative, parasitical and oppressive relations.
Expropriations are objective expressions of revolutionary morality and legality, which under "normal" conditions emerge with clarity also in the form they are realized.
Q: The fact remains that within the working class the majority or at least many do not share the choice of going over to the armed struggle.
A: The working class is not a myth. The wisdom of the "conditioned proletariat," whose consciousness is manipulated and expropriated, cannot be used as evidence. It is a teleguided, teledirected proletariat. Or if you prefer, in more traditional Marxist terms, "a class of itself, but not for itself."
Today, the message which the armed vanguards spread is aimed at and can be understood primarily by the vanguard proletarian strata who do not need predigested suggestions to define their own real interests. The deepening of the crisis and the development of the class war will place the conditioned proletarians face to face with the reality of their class interest. Then their judgment will be genuine.(6)
The second document Curcio wrote while in prison was a letter written on the occasion of the death in prison of the RAF militant Holger Meins. Excerpts from this letter:
CURCIO LETTER FROM JAIL ON OCCASION OF THE DEATH OF RED ARMY FRACTION (RAF) MILITANT HOLGER MEINS
The RAF has raised a political question: proletarian revolution in an urban-technological society... On the one hand, the RAF has forced the German bourgeoisie to reveal its ferociously counter-revolutionary nature without any reticence. On the other hand, it has taken on the function of strategic politico-military nucleus of the resistance movement and of the point of concentration for the scattered revolutionary forces.... No one has ever made a revolution in a highly industrialized, highly urbanized technological society... The RAF militants... fighting in the heart of the metropolis, where few thought it still possible to do so, have put the paralyzing mechanism in crisis: this is the historic breakthrough they have achieved and it is their first and most important victory. This is why the German counter-revolution's openly confessed, obsessive goal is to wipe out the RAF... The counter-revolution in West Germany expresses better than other places the essence of imperialist, technological fascism... The RAF has opposed all this and not only with the arms of criticism...it has had, in other words, that intellectual, political and military courage that, unfortunately, many lack and have lacked.
It has "dirtied its hands" by taking up arms; but it is as if, more than a revolver, a great mirror of truth it has been placed before the German bourgeoisie and its voluble, frustrated "intelligence"; a mirror which reflects the chilling outlines of a new fascism… Among the worst comments that have appeared in the readable press of our country there is a more or less explicit common denominator. It is the following thesis: the RAF has attempted an impossible and isolated political leap in the heart of European Capitalism. Theirs has been the recital of a clash between a few isolated extremists and the state. The seeming obviousness of these arguments hides their substantial falseness. Those who sustain them in good faith must admit to not having understood a very important question: a revolutionary mass line is only built around revolutionary war and revolutionary war is never a "natural" spontaneous product of the class struggle but the conscious plan and intervention in history of a fighting party...
In my opinion, the most important limitation of the RAF...is the structure of its political-military relation to the State on the one hand and its political-organizational relation to the German worker and revolutionary movement on the other. A tactical and organizational limitation... Then there is the question of political-organizational relationship with the movement. In substance the criticism advanced is this: the RAF has begun to build its organization on lines external to the movement. Absent from its work has been any indication, even embryonic, of the road to follow for the construction of a non-delegated and popular proletarian power. Does this mean, perhaps, that, for the RAF, the "worker question" is not posed? That at the root of its choices there is an irremediable pessimism about the revolutionary potential of the German industrial proletariat? Does the RAF, perhaps, want social revolution without the working class?
I do not believe that the tactical choice of the RAF, in the first stages of its guerrilla war, to carry out actions to strengthen themselves logistically and to attack on the limited terrain of the counter-revolution means the refusal to confront the worker question. Their choices must be judged against a German situation undoubtedly very different from the Italian and French one. It is a fact that the "potential consciousness" of the West German industrial proletariat today does not go beyond the defense of its immediate cash interests.
By indicating the principal contradiction to be the counter-revolution directly organized by the State, the RAF certainly does not deal with all remaining real needs – but then it does not pretend to do so.
The battle the RAF is fighting inside and outside the German prisons is not only heroic, but is exceptionally important to the revolutionary forces of the whole European continent. It is our duty to support it with every means. The strengthening or the weakening of the revolutionary war in Europe depends on its outcome.
It is necessary that the idea that Berlin and Stuttgart are closer to Rome or Milan than Frascati or Vigevano become familiar to us.
In the European metropolis, the counter-revolution assumes a specific shape which is different only in intensity and form, not essence. Thus the resistance must be continental and begin in the great centers of oppression and exploitation, because these are the crucibles of metropolitan fascism and the points from which it radiates. Metropolitan fascism is the answer which the European ruling classes, teleguided by the USA, are preparing to give to the demand for power which is at the root of the "movements" of "communist forces" which are emerging in the various countries.
William Colby, the infamous director of the CIA, speaking of the situation in Europe said recently: Certainly we do not say "it doesn't matter if the communists share power."
The political face of Europe is changing. The Yalta agreements are more and more unstable. The need to work out a new compromise is inevitable and will be painful. The alternatives are not an autonomous and neutral 9-nation Europe or a Europe servile to the USA. The contradiction is internal to each country. It is called socialism. It is called communism.
This is the main trend. The counter-trend is the new fascism. In the middle there is the slow but irreversible crumbling away of what is left of the "Western democratic system"... Italy is the weak link of the "Western democratic system." West Germany is its strongest.
Therefore, while in Italy the tasks of the armed vanguards are by now posed within the context of an open struggle between the proletarian movement and a dying regime, in West Germany it is still a matter of wearing out the brain, to open up the contradictions in the "Strong State," and to involve a growing number of proletarian vanguards in the perspective of class war by means of a careful stage of armed propaganda.
It seems to me that a single continental strategy must be the basis for the actions of the different organizations that are fighting the last war in Europe: the war for communism.
- Letter from Casale prison (7)
During the second half of 1974, many new armed groups emerged, carrying out a series of armed actions and sabotage. Some of these actions were very effective such as the fire at the Face—Standard(8) factory, which caused 8 billion lire worth of damage ($10 million), an action claimed by a group calling itself Without Truce for Communism. Other actions were unsuccessful with tragic results, such as the police ambush and murder of NAP (Armed Proletarian Nuclei) leaders Luca Mantini and Sergio Romeo during an attempted expropriation, and the fire-fight at Argelato in which Bruno Valli was killed.
On December 11, 1974, the BR carried out two simultaneous raids on the SIDA FIAT company union headquarters in both the Mirafiori and Rivalta FIAT plants. These raids effectively squelched police rumors that the BR were dead now that Curcio and Franceschini were in jail. During these raids a new slogan was launched: "BUILD ARMED CLANDESTINE CELLS."
* * * * * * *
The most important BR action of this period was, however, the liberation of Curcio from Casale minimum security prison by a small BR commando unit led by Mara Cagol, on February 18, 1975. The success of the BR prison raid led to new infighting between the various Italian police agencies over who was to blame for Curcio's escape.
The BR message issued after the raid contained a violent attack on the DC. The text of the BR message:
BR MESSAGE AFTER LIBERATION OF CURCIO
On February 18 an armed unit of the Red Brigades attacked and occupied the Casale Monferrato prison liberating Comrade Renato Curcio.
This action is part of the war of resistance to the growing counter-revolutionary forces which today are carrying out a "white coup," following the instructions of the imperialist superbosses Ford and Kissinger. These forces, using the smokescreen of "democratic" anti-fascism, are trying to make people believe that the big danger is the revival of traditional fascism. By this means they blackmail the Left while they put into effect modernized fascism. We have reached the point, in other words, where the dramatic threat to bourgeois hegemony over the proletariat triggers the terroristic use of the entire repressive apparatus of the state.
This is demonstrated by the campaign for law and order skillfully organized by the DC in the last few months. There are two basic features to this counter-revolutionary campaign:
1) the attempt to reduce the labor movement and the left to neo-corporative functions, 2) the practice of annihilating every point of resistance by military means.
The crisis of the regime is not moving toward a catastrophic dissolution of bourgeois democratic institutions in a coup, but on the contrary – the element of dissolution is the nationalistic and militaristic reorganization of the entire State apparatus from within. The terrain of resistance to the Counter-revolution thus becomes the principal terrain for the development of the workers struggle.
The workers movement, in fact, is faced by the problem of transforming its political hegemony, which today it clearly exercises in all fields, into an effective use of power. It must, in other words, place on the order of the day the need for a historic break with the DC and the defeat of the strategy of the "historic compromise." It must place the question of power: the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the order of the day.
The task of the revolutionary vanguard today is, to fight white putschism in all its manifestations, beginning in the factories; at the same time to defeat the armed repression of the state and the neo-corporatism of the trade unions.
The liberation of political prisoners is part of this program.
Let us liberate and organize all the revolutionary forces for resistance to the white coup. Armed struggle for communism.
Red Brigades(9)
In general the Left could not believe that the BR were capable of carrying out the prison raid. Avanguardia Operaia (Workers' Vanguard) and L'Unita insisted that the secret police (SID) itself had freed Curcio. L'Unita actually spun out an imaginative fairy tale about Curcio the spy from early youth, with ties to the fascist terrorist group Ordine Nuovo, the CIA, SID, KYP, and even to the now dissolved OAS (the French settler fascist organization of the 1950's Algerian war period). This was a new low for revisionism, in peddling what it knew to be lies and fantasies to slander revolutionaries. Even Continuous Struggle (Lotta Continua) protested this, saying only those who believed in the myth of the all-powerful State could have a problem in believing that Curcio's liberation was genuine.
Amidst heated discussions and recriminations the police searched for Curcio but without success. Almost overnight Curcio became a media star appearing on the cover of four weekly magazines in the space of one week.
Barely eight days later on February 26, with the police hunt for Curcio at its height, the BR struck another blow in their struggle against "white shirt fascism". They raided the offices of the IDI, the Institute of Italian Managers, leaving behind a message explaining their action. Below is the text of the BR message:
BR MESSAGE FEB. 28, 1975 ON IDI RAID
On Wednesday, Feb. 26 an armed unit of the Red Brigades occupied and searched the headquarters of the IDI foundation (Institute of Italian Managers) on Via Charavalle 2.
This foundation, tied to the managers' associations, contributes to their training and specialization in the politics of exploitation and repression of the working class.
Comrades, by the restructuration of the factories, the firings, the layoffs the bosses seek to restore their rule and destroy the organization and struggle of the workers movement.
The restoration of hegemony and control by the bosses also takes the form of retraining of managers and the restoration of their "authority," which our struggles over these years have thrown into deep crisis. For this reason while on the one hand management carries out anti-working class maneuvers in the factories, while it decrees layoffs for thousands of workers, while it denounces and fires the worker vanguards, while it restructures the factory along anti-working class lines, on the other hand management seeks to cover up its real role, to pass itself off as just another category of employees and build itself an image of neutrality. In substance the managers try to hide their true role as the bosses' command structure and the planners of the anti-working class assault behind so called purely technical and neutral functions, unconnected to relations of exploitation.
In reality these maneuvers are an attempt to block the workers' struggle against the factory command structure, to restore the hegemony and control of the bosses to a new level, and to wipe out the conquests and the points of power of the workers.
In this situation the redefinition of the role of the managers is part of the strategy of the reactionary forces. It is part of the creeping armed coup which these reactionary forces are carrying out in the country by means of the economic crisis, the militarization of the popular neighborhoods, the jailing of the revolutionary vanguards, to break the resistance of the workers and crush their struggle.
We have to respond to this reactionary offensive by organizing armed resistance units in the factories and the whole national territory. STRIKE THE ENEMIES OF THE WORKING CLASS! ORGANIZE ARMED CLANDESTINE UNITS EVERYWHERE! ARMED STRUGGLE FOR COMMUNISM!
Milan, Feb. 28, 1975
Red Brigades (10)
After Curcio's liberation, reprisals against BR prisoners grew. In response, the BR authorized its members in jail to publicly proclaim their BR identity to avoid individual isolated struggles with the prison authorities. This also made it easier for the BR to struggle for a unified political trial of the whole organization rather than individual trials. The BR, in a document dated April 11, 1975 explained the situation facing their members in prison and outlined their strategic response:
BR MESSAGE APRIL 11, 1975
The prisons
Many militants today are shut up in the regime's prisons under the same general accusation: Red Brigades. The comrades of the BR, to neutralize the maneuvers of the State against the comrades unjustly jailed and not part of the organization, have been authorized to publicly assume their proper political identity.
The treatment of our comrades in the prisons has gone through two phases: before the assault on the Casale prison, and after the assault.
Before: our militants were dispersed throughout the various peripheral judiciary jails for the purpose of stopping them from carrying out political activity among the imprisoned masses of the major institutions.
The desire was to formally avoid, in other words, a German-type isolation that would have given rise to a movement of struggle damaging to the regime by the imprisoned comrades.
In the outlying prisons each of our militants has been subjected to a regime of "special surveillance." This happened to Curcio, at Novara as well as Casale.
If, despite this, he was liberated it is because the liberation unit carried out a scientific plan, concentrating sufficient and well-trained combat forces. After our militants were transferred to "penal institutions" (Porto Azzurro, Saluzzo, etc.) and despite this they remain for all purposes "waiting for judgment." This means that the judgment has already been carried out without the need for a trial. In addition very serious provocations were staged against some militants while others were subjected to an unjustified regime of total isolation.
We must believe that these measures, obviously persecutional, are willed by the Minister of police and justice (so-called) rather than just the usual general and the usual prosecutor. Reprisal? In answer to reprisal, reprisal!
The trials
The militants of the BR refuse and will refuse every attempt to break up the whole of the political initiative of the organization into a thousand separate episodes, which taken out of their context are presented to public opinion as "common crimes", "criminal acts". The purpose of the regime is to divide our comrades from one another to weigh them and judge them separately. We do not accept this method of proceeding.... Therefore there must be one trial. No comrade, captured or not, has greater or smaller responsibilities in the face of the class enemy because each has placed, according to the instructions of the organization, their membership card in the great mosaic of the proletarian revolution.
The liberation of the political prisoner comrades is an irrevocable point of our program. Nothing will go unpunished! Build proletarian power! Armed struggle for communism! (11)
In April 1975, the BR published their fourth and most comprehensive theoretical document: The Resolution of the Strategic Leadership. The document covered six major questions. The first of these was Italy's social and economic crisis. In this section, the BR saw the crisis of Italian capitalism centering on three problems: overproduction, the rise in the cost of raw materials (oil), and the fall in the average rate of profit.
The BR analysis concluded that "in the economic field the State takes on the functions of a large bank serving the large multinational imperialist groups.... The State becomes the direct expression of the big multinational imperialist groups at the national level.... The State becomes, in other words, a specific function of Capitalistic development in the phase of imperialism of the multinationals, it becomes: IMPERIALIST STATE OF THE MULTINATIONALS; that is, the attempt is to follow the German-american model in Italy too." The other questions covered by the document were: the right-wing political strategy of the Christian Democrats as put forward by its party leader Amintore Fanfani; the "corporative pact", or social truce, between the classes proposed by Agnelli, the head of FIAT, which the BR saw as complementing rather than contradicting Fanfani's right-wing strategy; the PCI strategy of the "historic compromise"; the BR strategy of attacking the heart of the State; and urban guerrilla war and the autonomous assemblies, probably the section with the most important political implications for the Italian revolutionary movement. The partial text of Resolution is reprinted below:
BR RESOLUTION OF THE STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP, APRIL 1975 (Partial Text)
The sharp fall in the average rate of profit produces a sizable reduction of the labor force used in relation to the total population. All this produces and will produce definite changes in the fabric of social classes which can be outlined as follows. With respect to the total population there will be:
a) a continuous reduction of regularly employed wage earners
b) an increase in the reserve army of the unemployed, that is, of irregularly employed wage earners;
c) an increase of "marginalized" (that part of the population which will be definitely expelled from the capitalist production process).
With respect to class behavior we can thus theorize:
a) regularly employed wage earners: one section reflects the immediate consciousness of defense of their living conditions. They form the material base of reformism. Another section, and they are the most productive strata (the assembly line worker), develops a revolutionary consciousness of the need to abolish wage labor.
b) marginalized: are used by consumer society as wageless consumers. "Criminality" is born from this contradiction. The "economic" use of criminality by capitalism consists in the fact it contributes to the destruction of goods which is necessary for the continuation of the cycle. To be clear: it would be very easy to build theft-proof autos, but this is not in the interests of FIAT. One section of marginalized workers, on an immediate level, reflects bourgeois consciousness: extreme individualism, aspirations for ever larger consumption. Another section reflects the revolutionary consciousness of the need to abolish their marginalized condition, from which also the recognition of the need to abolish society based on wage labor.
c) reserve army: the levels of consciousness are determined by the intertwining of the levels of consciousness to be found among regularly employed wage earners and marginalized workers...
Christian-Democratic political plan
If the years 1970-74 were characterized by strong contradictions within the bourgeoisie (for example the clash between Montedison and FIAT), contradictions which split the structure of the state, the parties and the unions vertically, the current period seems to be characterized by a period of "truce" among the various Italian capitalist groups: that is, in the face of the sharpening crisis, the various capitalist groups have closed ranks...
Truce does not, however, mean the end of contradictions within the bourgeois front, it simply means the momentary freezing of these contradictions...
In any case, it would be an error to think that the contradictions which divide the bourgeois front are antagonistic ones. They are simply tactical variations of the same plan: the construction of the Imperialist State of the Multinationals...:
The political plan of the DC, whose most authoritative interpreter at this moment is Fanfani (ex-Premier – ed.), aims to make the DC the driving force of this plan of the imperialist state.
By putting itself forth at every moment as the manager of the "truce" achieved, the DC seeks to be the element of continuous dialectical mediation between the interests of the various capitalist groups...
It is clear, however, that this process will not take place peacefully, but will take on more and more the characteristics of a "civil war"...
More specifically, the Christian Democratic political plan, also openly supported by Tanassi, Sogno and Almirante, is to use the Integralist bloc in the DC as the foundation for building a bigger, more highly organized, openly reactionary and counterrevolutionary "historic bloc" in support of the Imperialist State...
In this regard, the question of "public order" and the war on "political criminality" are symbolic. These campaigns are aimed at the preventive militarization of the national territory and the class struggle more than at gaining votes. Alternately they serve the purpose of recreating a mass public opinion which will permit the reorganization and concentration of all the powers of the State with a view to conducting a counter-revolutionary civil war...
What the DC wants is an open struggle between the revolutionary and progressive forces and the counter-revolutionary "historic bloc"... It proposes to guarantee to the owners of the imperialist multinationals:
1) reinforcement of the structures and staff of the military both to better integrate it into NATO planning and to create specialized anti-guerrilla units against internal subversion;
2) the creation of a "government judiciary" and the stiffening of penal provisions relating to those parts of the law that deal specifically with class war, from laws on possession of weapons, preventive detention, to police stop-and-frisk, internal exile, and exemplary sentences for revolutionary militants;
3) the adoption of "preventive" measures such as the stepped-up military security of the big cities, the institutions and for most exposed men of the government.
More generally, precisely to carry out these goals with the minimum number of contradictions, they aim at a specific constitutional reform, the direct election of the president of the republic and a definite increase in the powers of the executive: in brief, their goal is the so-called "Presidential Republic."
Reorganize the State to defeat the workers movement on the terrain of civil war: this is the essence of the Christian Democratic political project.
Corporative pact
The attempt to build corporative ties between the managerial class of the regime and the union organizations of the workers is more critical to the formation of the Imperialist State than is realized.
Agnelli, (the owner and Chairman of FIAT – ed.) in his role as spokesperson of the entire owners class, had anticipated this in his first speech as president of the Confindustria(12), when he argued for the necessity to "arrive at a social pact which thirty years after April 1945, would redefine the national objectives of the Italian people for the 80's and 90's..."
What interests us is that the "social pact" is being justified not as an "anti-recession" measure, that is, a tactical agreement, but as an essential necessity for advanced industrial society and therefore as a plan for social stabilization in the 1980's!
The entrapment operation that this presupposes can be defined: organic incorporation of the working class within capital and within the State. It follows the logic that the working class to save itself, must save the boss; to save the boss, it must save the State; to save the State it must take on the economic costs of reconversion of production and the sacrifices of imperialist restructuration. It is a pitiful logic and is only worth considering because it is being advanced by the union and "Communist Party" leaderships.
The historic compromise
There is no understanding within the official Left of the deep political and structural changes which the DC and the Confindustria are carrying out within the overall imperialist counter-revolution.
Above all, the PCI demonstrates its inability to put forward an alternative class strategy. The line confirmed by the 14th Congress of the PCI is a clear example.
The "strategy" of the historic compromise is based on a lack of understanding of two critical questions: the warmongering character of imperialism, and the reactionary and imperialist character of the DC.
Berlinguer, this third-rate Kautsky, claims the policies of "coexistence" and "cooperation" to be a world-wide trend, even discovering confirmations of this in the behavior of the USA, and goes so far as to predict "a system of cooperation and integration so vast as to progressively go beyond the logic of imperialism and capitalism and to encompass the most varied aspects of the economic and social development of entire humanity."
For Berlinguer, there is no antagonism between imperialism, social-imperialism and revolution, but only contradictions that are finding "peaceful" and "civil" solutions.
Reality contradicts him.
The general trend in the world today is that which the Chinese comrades indicate: revolution.
Western Imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism are more and more in open contradiction with each other, and the popular liberation wars are achieving new victories. This is the case in Vietnam, in Cambodia, or, for that matter, in Portugal...
...The historic compromise does not correspond to class political needs, but more narrowly to opportunistic advantages for an aristocratic section of the working class which achieves a few miserable gains from the reinforcement of the imperialist system.
The PCI today violently opposes the revolutionary movement and the class forces from which this movement draw strength and sustenance.
For this reason the revisionist designs will certainly be defeated. Nevertheless, one must not underestimate the ambivalent role which, over the short haul, the line of "historic compromise" plays within the crisis of the regime. – on one hand, it constitutes a powerful element of the regime's political crisis; it instills terror and accelerated contradictions in the most conservative and reactionary centers; on the other hand, it keeps the country from being ungovernable, and this blocks the development of the class war.
Because this means that, while the conservative or reactionary sectors, preoccupied with the turn of events, plan and feed fuel to strategies of openly counter-revolutionary repression, large sectors of the workers and popular movement remain captured in the paralyzing trap of the line of "the compromise." This line by freezing class forces, retards and blocks the growth of the masses' consciousness of the need for war, and this precisely at a time when the situation is highly favorable for the revolutionary forces.
The BR's Line: the assault on the heart of the State
Within this general framework of plans and contradictions our line remains to unify and raise every partial expression of proletarian antagonism in a convergent assault on the "heart of the State."
Its starting point is the all-too obvious consideration that it is the Imperialist State...that imposes the overall plan for restructuration...and that, therefore, there is no revolutionary struggle outside the relation of the working class to the State.
The intermediate goal is the collapse and definitive crisis of the Christian Democratic regime, the necessary premise for a "historic turn" toward communism.
Therefore, the main task of revolutionary action in this period is the maximum political disruption of the regime as much as the State. The maximum possible development of political contradictions, in other words, between and within the institutions; between the various tactical plans for the solution of the crisis and internally within each of them.
The transition to a more advanced phase of military disruption of the State and the regime is premature: and therefore mistaken for two reasons:
1) the political crisis of the regime is very advanced, but we are still not close to the "point of collapse";
2) while the accumulation of revolutionary forces on the terrain of armed struggle has greatly accelerated in the last two years, its expansion throughout the national territory and its political and military maturity is not such as to permit the passage to a new phase of the war.
The destruction of the enemy and the political and military mobilization of the popular forces must go hand in hand. The strengthening of proletarian power is, in other words, condition and premise of the passage to the more advanced phase of military disruption of the enemy regime and the state.
Urban Guerrilla Warfare and the autonomous assemblies
Urban guerrilla warfare plays a decisive role in the political disruption of the regime and the state. It strikes the enemy directly and smooths the road for the resistance movement.
It is around armed guerrilla warfare that the resistance movement and the area of autonomy is built and linked together and not vice versa.
To enlarge this area thus means, in the first place, to develop the organization of guerrilla warfare, its political capacity and its firepower.
All those positions which see the growth of guerrilla warfare as a result of the development of the legal or semi-legal area of the so-called "autonomy" are mistaken.
It is best to be clear on this point. Within what is defined as "the area of autonomy" many very different positions and strata are piled together. Some, who define their position within the class struggle in a "subjective" way, consider themselves part of this area more to impose on it needs and problems extraneous to it, that is "to win it over to the terrain of politics" rather than to encourage its strategic, tactical and organizational definition along progressively revolutionary lines. In our judgment the whole question must be approached beginning with the class stratum which more than any other experienced the intensification of exploitation as a result of capitalistic and imperialistic restructuration plans...
The workers! "autonomous assemblies" in the factories are not the vanguard of this class stratum... When these assemblies arose they constituted a decisive factor in the process of overcoming "groupism," but today they themselves run the risk of ending up in the blind alley of that same political approach.
What leaves them open to this danger is the "fetishism of legality": the inability to escape from the false dichotomy between "legality" and "illegality." In other words, the autonomous assemblies are not able to pose the question of organization based on real political needs and thus end up restricting these needs to the limits of the type of legal organization they have created for themselves.
They cut the foot to make it fit the shoe!
Some of them, more conscious of this contradiction, reach the point of admitting the need for dual organizational and thus repropose the theory of the legal party and its illegal "armed wing," of the old, failed 3rd Internationalist logic.
But, in this new situation, on pain of extinction of their revolutionary role, they must make a dialectical leap if they want to hold onto the basic assumption of organizing the antagonism of the "objectively" revolutionary stratum on the terrain of class war.
Outside this perspective there is nothing but to be a permanent minority or to be subservient to revisionism.
Urban guerrilla warfare organizes the strategic nucleus of the class movement, not its "armed wing."
In urban guerrilla warfare there is no contradiction between thinking and acting militarily and putting politics first. It carries out its revolutionary initiative according to a political-military mass line.
Mass line for guerrilla warfare does not mean, as some interpret it, "organize the mass movement on the terrain of armed struggle," or at least it does not mean this right now.
In the immediate future, the main aspect. of the question remains the building of the Fighting Party as the real interpreter of the political and military needs of the "objectively" revolutionary class stratum, and the development of fighting organizations on a class-wide level on the various fronts of the revolutionary war.
This is not a small difference. It is worth spelling it out because it contains a disagreement on the organizational question which is not secondary.
The substance of the disagreement is that the first thesis degrades the organization of the "movement" to the point of dissolving it; at the same time that it is blown up to reach mythical proportions; the second thesis conceives of organization and movement as distinctly separate realities in perpetual dialectic with each other.
The Fighting Party is a party of fighting cadres. It is thus an advanced, armed detachment of the working class and therefore both distinct from and organic part of the class.
The movement is a complex, heterogeneous reality in which many different levels of consciousness coexist and compete with each other. It is unthinkable and, above all, impossible to "organize" this multiplicity of levels of consciousness on "the terrain of armed struggle." Be it because this terrain, while it is strategic, is not the main one; be it because the nucleus which builds the Fighting Party, that is the BR, certainly has not achieved the political, military and organizational skills needed for this purpose.
It is not a matter of "organizing the mass movement on the terrain of armed struggle" but of rooting the organization of the armed struggle and the political consciousness of its historical necessity in the class movement.
This remains the main goal of the Fighting Party under construction in this period.
For all the reasons we: have discussed, the level of conflict proper to this period remains that of armed propaganda.
The principal aims of armed propaganda action are three:
– create the maximum possible number of political contradictions within the enemy ranks, that is dismember it, make it non-functional;
– clear a path for the resistance movement using as yet unknown, but no less essential, methods of struggle;
– organize the advanced class stratum into the party and into class-wide fighting organizations on the various fronts of the war.
Armed propaganda achieved by guerrilla action is a phase of the class war and not, as some hold, a "form of struggle." This phase is followed by the phase of open civil war, in which the main task of the armed vanguard will be to dismember and destroy through armed struggle the bureaucratic and military machine of the state. (13)
The verbal attack on the ruling Christian Democratic party contained in the February 20 BR message, issued after Curcio's liberation, and in the April theoretical document, was put into practice on May 15, 1975, in a series of spectacular actions carried out in three different cities. In Mestre, a DC headquarters was raided. In Turin, nine autos belonging to "yellow" company unionists were burned. But the biggest action took place in Milan, in a raid against the headquarters of Democratic Initiative, a right-wing group closely tied to the Christian Democratic leader Massimo De Carolis (a leader of the "silent majority"). This raid was the first BR "knee-capping".
The BR document issued after the action also included a postscript denying any organizational ties between the BR and the NAP (Armed Proletarian Nuclei – a primarily Southern proletarian and lumpenproletarian armed organization born in 1974), but expressing Communist solidarity with them. The NAP had been in the news a lot recently because of their kidnapping of Judge Di Gennaro, and Di Gennaro had spread false rumors about the presumed operational ties between the BR and NAP. The text of the BR message issued May 15, 1975 is reprinted below:
MAY 15, 1975 BR MESSAGE AFTER RAID
ON INITIATIVA DEMOCRATICA HEADQUARTERS IN MILAN
An armed unit of the Red Brigades has searched and destroyed the Christian Democratic nest, on Via Monte di Pieta 15, headquarters of Iniziativa Democratica, a group of anti-communist provocateurs, better known as the "De Carolis gang."
The Christian Democracy is the main political leader of the plan for imperialist reorganization of the state. It is the center of unity for the grouping of reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces which united Fanfani to Tanassi, Sogno Pacciardi, Almirante and the terrorist groups.
THE DC IS THE MAIN ENEMY OF THE MOMENT: it is the organic party of the bourgeoisie, the ruling classes and imperialism. It is the political and organizational center of reaction and terrorism. It is the motor force of the overall counter-revolution and the driving force of modern fascism: imperialist fascism. We must not let ourselves be fooled by its "professions of democratic and anti-fascist faith" which from time to time come from some of the leaders of this party. These professions are made because they respond to the tactical need to keep alive the dialectic between "fascism" and "anti-fascism" which permits the DC to collect votes, making people believe that, as opposed to the "fascist" danger, "reformed democracy," that is, the imperialist state, is better. The problem of the revolutionary vanguards is to make this whole game clear, striking at hidden nests, connections, connivances and plans. The DC is not only a party, but the dark soul of a regime which for 30 years has oppressed the popular and laboring masses of the country. It does not make common sense to declare in words the need to defeat the regime and in fact propose a historic compromise with the DC. It makes even less sense chattering about how to reform it.
THE DC MUST BE LIQUIDATED, BEATEN AND DISPERSED. The undoing of the regime must drag down this filthy party and all its leaders; as happened in 1945 with the fascist regime and Mussolini's party. Liquidation of the DC and its regime is the indispensable premise for reaching a real "historic turning-point" in our country. This is the main task of the movement. Iniziativa Democratica is a reactionary, counter-revolutionary center closely linked to the political and economic structures of the Milanese metropolis. The men of this center, which, according to its leader Massimo De Carolis, today represent "the most important force in the citywide and regional DC and the numerically strongest group in the city council" are all openly and nakedly compromised with the most sinister reaction...
In these days the De Carolis gang is in its lair preparing for an electoral campaign aimed "at bringing Milanese votes to the DC and particularly to the most trust-worthy candidates of the party." With this action we have anticipated the judgment that proletarians make of him, his associates and his foul party. But this is only an appetizer. The rest he can collect directly in the proletarian areas if he tries to set even one foot there. The special laws for public order desired by the Christian Democracy encourage the use of arms against "political criminality." We have, for once, followed this advice, shooting in the legs one of the most convinced supporters of these liberticide laws.
Certainly he deserved more, but in these matters there is no hurry. We can quickly raise our aim and also single out the real "criminals"!
CARRY THE ATTACK TO THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC LAIRS, CENTERS OF POLITICAL AND COMMON CRIME, REACTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION.
May 15, 1975
RED BRIGADES
We specify that no organizational or operative ties exist between the Armed Proletarian Nuclei (NAP) and the Red Brigades. Long live the struggle of the Armed Proletarian Nuclei! (14)
Once again, the response of both the left and the right-wing press to the De Carolis action was very similar: the action was a fascist conspiracy timed to influence upcoming elections. A new variation on this old and tired theme was advanced however. Allegedly, Amerio had kidnapped himself, Labate had shaved himself, and De Carolis had shot himself! All kinds of crimes were attributed to the BR, and Curcio was sighted everywhere.
Following the same pattern of provocations carried out in West Germany against the RAF lawyers, intimidations and provocations were also carried out against the lawyers of BR militants. The police repeatedly raided the offices of BR lawyer Costa, and notices warning of criminal indictment were sent to two other leftist defense lawyers. A large, 2-pound plastique bomb was set off in the offices of one defense lawyer and attacks and threats were made by the carabinieri, the judiciary, and the reactionary press against some bourgeois newspapers, above all L'Espresso, which were still printing BR communiques. For the first time since the fall of fascism virtually the entire editorial staff of a publication – Contro-Informazione – was either jailed or incriminated. One judge, Di Vincenzo, was accused of being a BR sympathizer by carabinieri General Della Chiesa, the head of the new "anti-terrorist" unit formed in the Summer of 1974.
* * * * * * *
On June 4, 1975 during a search for Chianti wine magnate Vittorio Gancia, kidnapped a few days earlier, a carabinieri patrol surprised Mara Cagol and other BR comrades in a farmhouse near Acqui. A brief firefight broke out in which Mara was badly wounded, captured, and then executed on the spot by the carabinieri. At first Mara's identity was not known by police but BR quickly acknowledged that the Gancia kidnapping was their operation and that the woman comrade killed at Acqui was Mara. On June 5, 1975, the BR published a brief message honoring the fallen Mara, who had been the political-military commander of the Turin BR column formed in early 1974 and co-founder of the BR. The full text of the BR message:
BR MESSAGE ON THE DEATH OF "MARA"
To the comrades of the organization, to sincerely revolutionary forces, to all proletarians. MARGHERITA CAGOL, "MARA," communist leader and member of the executive committee of the Red Brigades, has fallen in combat. Her life and her death are an example that no fighter for liberty can ever forget. Founder of our organization, "MARA" gave an inestimable contribution of intelligence, self-denial and humanity to the birth and growth of workers autonomy and the armed struggle for communism. Political-military commander of a column, "MARA" was able to victoriously lead several of the most important operations of the organization.
The liberation of one of our commanders from the prison at Casale Monferrato speaks for all of them. We cannot permit ourselves to shed tears over our dead, but must learn from them the lesson of loyalty, consistency, courage and heroism!
War, in the last analysis, decides the question of power: revolutionary class war. And this war has a price: a high price certainly, but not so high as to make us prefer the slavery of wage labor, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in its fascist or social-democratic variants. It is not the vote that decides the question of power; freedom is not conquered with a ballot. Let all sincere revolutionaries honor the memory of "MARA," reflecting on the political teaching which she was able to give through her choice, her work, her life. That a thousand arms may reach out to grasp her rifle! We, as a last salute, say to her: "Mara, a flower has bloomed, and the Red Brigades will continue to cultivate this flower of freedom until the final victory!"
ARMED STRUGGLE FOR COMMUNISM
June 5, 1975
RED BRIGADES (15)
Il Manifesto, in what was perhaps a first for them, defended "Mara" against charges that she had been a criminal or a KGB agent. Lotta Continua treated her as a militant revolutionary who had fallen in battle and should be honored even though they had disagreed with her over strategy. Lotta Continua in their June 8, 1975 issue wrote:
"We read with disgust the words of open exultation or pietistic deploring – and even racist: a fragile woman, petty bourgeois, caught up in the destiny of her man – that are dedicated to the death of Margherita Cagol. We read with respect, but with an even firmer political dissent, the words with which her comrades saluted her, words which speak of heroism and of victory."
In their internal bulletin, Armed Struggle for Communism, the BR noted that the first women revolutionaries to fall in the current struggle were "the new witches", whose meaning must be denied by the imperialists:
...The revolutionary movement has lost two militants, Margherita Cagol, "Mara" and Anna Maria Mantini. Mara was one of the "oldest" militants of the Red Brigades. Her commitment to the organization was one of a total militance which she made the priority in her interests... Anna Maria, who the NAP describe as an exceptional comrade, was one of the founders of the October 29th group. We have witnessed dismay and amazement (and not only among the bourgeois) at the killing of two women. But the amazement displayed over the role that these two comrades played in the armed struggle is simply amazement that two women had chosen to do what many comrades do not even dare think about. To be amazed because two women comrades had an active role in the class war, were political subjects, is simply to be amazed that women can be anything other than more or less left-wing sexual objects. Dismay at the new image of woman as a rebel subject: the new witches... The state naturally cannot permit itself the luxury of finding dangerous symbols above all when the corpses are of the female sex. Thus Maria becomes Mrs. Curcio in the press, a department store dummy without a brain who followed her man for the sake of love (as is expected of every woman)... And then there is Anna Maria whom everybody has described as a mild girl dominated by her older brother. No sooner does a woman demand not only economic autonomy and the right to choose one's own kind of life, but also she recognizes herself as part of the exploited class and begins a class struggle, then the state settles accounts with a bullet in her face...(16)
Those deaths and the first losses of BR safe houses and units produced extravagant claims from the police and the bourgeois press that the BR were dying, mortally wounded. The pro-Moscow newspaper L'Unita hoped in print that "this incredible story of the Red Brigades finally is coming to an end", But the servants of imperialism were to be surprised. For even as they wrote, the BR and other armed organizations were starting a large-scale attack on the State that brought Italy to years of near civil war. We close abruptly here. The full story of the first generation of revolutionary war in Italy is still waiting to be told. It has been our intention to explain its beginning.
The End
FOOTNOTES
(1) Bruno Caccia, op. cit.
(2) Paese Sera, June 19, 1974.
(3) L'Espresso, #1, 1975.
(4) L'Espresso, #38, September 22, 1974.
(5) The two big auto plants at Turin.
(6) L'Espresso, #1, 1975.
(7) ABC, #9, March 6, 1975; Rosso, #15, March/April 1975.
(8) Italian subsidiary of u.s. multinational ITT.
(9) Brigate Rosse, Rivoluzione della direzione strategica, in Gente magazine, #40, October 6, 1975; L'Espresso, #41, October 12, 1975.
(10) Corriere d'informazione, February 27, 1975.
(11) L'Espresso, #21, May 25, 1975.
(12)The association of industrialists.
(13) Brigate Rosse, Risoluzione..., op. cit.
(14) Corriere della Sera, May 16, 1975.
(15) Corriere della Sera, June 7, 1975.
(16) Armed Struggle for Communism, 1975.
