This work has a certain degree of difficulty and is intended for the serious student, who needs an understanding of repression. It is based on the key documents of the strategic debate within the Italian revolutionary movement as they approached armed confrontation with the State. That was the first stage of urban guerrilla warfare in Italy from 1970-1975, whose primary (although not only) expression was the Red Brigades. While many have heard of that organization, people know little but the name. The entire Italian revolutionary struggle was politically unknown to us save for the subliminal: effects of imperialist media, with all its censorship and untruths.
In general it is our internationalist duty to spread the lessons of all revolutionary movements, to strengthen ourselves as we defeat the isolation that imperialism strains to impose on all of us. Specifically, the struggles of the european metropolis, which take place in the urban-technological society, have special meaning for us. It is not just in Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, and El Salvador that one finds the front-lines of battle.
The experience of forming the Red Brigades is not in our opinion a blueprint or an idealized model to be imitated. Situations within the u.s. Empire, within both oppressor and oppressed nations, differ greatly from the Italy of the 1960s-1970s. Yet the problems, pressures, errors and questions they faced in their formative stage were to some degree true here as well. The questions around beginning the process of revolutionary organization are important, since we, like our Italian comrades know that: "To fight, to be defeated, to fight again, to be defeated again, to fight anew until final victory" is the law of history.
What is essential now is that the Italian experience deepens and re-states questions that we must answer. Not facile answers but a more profound question.
In setting off on the still-unknown path of urban guerrilla warfare, the Red Brigades rejected the non-materialist conception of armed struggle as a voluntary tactic. That is, that armed struggle is supposedly something only done when the movement decides that it is ready to try it. The founding members of the Red Brigades pointed out that in Italy a truly mass revolutionary sentiment was forming, which the State had decided to militarily wipe out. So violent confrontation would take place whether or not the movement was ready or even willing. Nor was the timing completely up to the movement. The only choices were to give up, to suicidally pretend that violent repression wasn't happening, or to leap to the higher stage of revolutionary armed struggle, however hard that leap.
This study begins with two background chapters. The first gives a brief factual overview of Italian society and its political situation in the years being discussed. The second chapter tells the general history of the New Left, from 1960 to the coming together in 1969 of what would become the Red Brigades.
We have no secret sources of information. This study is completely based on publicly available documents, Italian newspaper and magazine accounts, books, and the Italian movement press. We are indebted to the former Information-Documentation Section of Red Aid, whose diligent work made this book possible.
