Shining a light on the black bloc, part 1: Italian autonomism

The young Toni Negri

Starting with Seattle in 1999, there has been controversy over the role of black bloc tactics in major mobilizations. Although I have had plenty to say about it in the past, I never really got to the bottom of where it came from. This is the first in a series of posts that will try to answer that question as well as review the impact it has had on various mass actions, starting with Seattle and ending with recent events in Oakland. While these articles will probably not change the minds of anybody who advocated vandalism or other forms of the “propaganda of the deed”, I do hope that they will give Marxists a better handle on the challenge they face in the mass movement and strengthen their resolve not to adapt to it in the spirit of a weak-kneed “diversity of tactics” liberalism. The stakes are very high indeed in a period of deepening class polarization when the heavy battalions of labor will begin to act in their own interest. Anything that stands in the way of their participation has to be challenged mercilessly.

In today’s post on Italian autonomia and the one that follows on German autonomen movements that invented the black bloc tactic, I will be drawing from Georgy Katsiaficas’s “The Subversion of Politics: European Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life“. This book, along with Steve Wright’s “Storming heaven: class composition and struggle in Italian autonomist Marxism“, are essential reading despite their frequently self-serving character, a function obviously of the authors’ autonomist affinities. Wright and Franco Barchiesi, a South African professor, started a mailing list titled aut-op-sy (Autonomia, Operaismo, and Class Composition) sometime in the 1990s that was shut down in 2004. It was restarted in 2008 and its archives can be read here.

Katsiaficas is virtually rapturous about autonomism although he is at somewhat of a loss on how to define it. To some extent, that is a function of its refusal to define itself:

Indeed, actions speak for most Authonomen, not words, and the sheer volume of decentralized happenings generated by small groups acting on their own initiative prohibits systematic understanding of the totality of the movement, a first step in the dismantling of any system. No single organization can control the direction of actions undertaken from the grass roots.

Unfortunately, Katsiaficas does not bother to address the question of what to do when actions go against the wishes of the broader movement.

I am not sure whether American activists were inspired by what was happening in Europe in this period, but they pretty much followed the same norms when they created “affinity groups”. It is entirely possible that the affinity group model predated autonomism, a research project for some graduate seminar on radical politics it would seem. Starhawk, a website committed to leftist activism of an anarchist/autonomist bent, has a write-up  on affinity groups that would lead one to believe that this form of organization—so to speak—is still going strong:

Organize in clusters! Form a group with your friends! Be loud! Look exciting! Have fun! What is an affinity group?

An affinity group is a group of people who have an affinity for each other, know each others strengths and weaknesses, support each other, and do (or intend to do ) political/campaign work together. Most of us will have had some childhood/formative experience of being part of a group whether informally, as in a group of kids that are the same age and live in the same street, suburb or town, or formally, as in being involved in a sports team. However, affinity groups differ from these for numerous reasons, as explained below, (hierarchy, trust, responsibility to each other etc).

The concept of ‘affinity groups has a long history. They developed as an organising structure during the Spanish Civil war and have been used with amazing success over the last thirty years of feminist, anti-nuclear, environmental and social justice movements around the world. They were first used as a structure for a large scale nonviolent blockade during the 30,000 strong occupation of the Ruhr nuclear power station in Germany in 1969, and then in the United States occupations / blockades of the Seabrook nuclear power station in ’71 when 10,000 were arrested and again many times in the highly successful US anti-nuclear movement during the ’70’s and ’80’s. Their use in sustaining activists through high levels of police repression has been borne out time and again. More recently, they have been used constructively in the mass protest actions in Seattle and Washington.

I hate to sound like an old stick-in-the-mud, but urgings to “be loud”, “look exciting” and “have fun” are lost on me. Now it is true that being 66 has a lot to do with this, but I wasn’t much different when I was 26. I have no objections to others wanting to have fun, just as long as it doesn’t involve vandalism or any other provocation that leads to a police riot.

The term “autonomous” can of course be used in a variety of ways. It can mean autonomy from bourgeois society, including its repressive family institutions, dress codes, and 9-5 drudgery. To become part of the autonomist movement implies cutting yourself off from the mainstream and living a kind of left-bohemian existence—of course with its own particular social pressures.

You really have to wonder how someone over 40 will fit into the autonomist milieu since everything about it suggests that is exclusively the domain of young people without any family or job responsibilities. In my visit to ANC headquarters in exile in Lusaka, Zambia back in early 1990 I was taken by how well integrated men and women in their 70s and 80s were. I strongly believe that this is the kind of revolutionary movement that we need. I of course am not endorsing the ANC’s politics but its willingness to create a big tent for everybody willing to fight on its issues, whatever their age.

Autonomists were affected by the “tune in, turn on, drop out” zeitgeist of the 1970s, no surprise given the mood of the time. A group in Hamburg issued a proclamation in 1982 that said:

The aspiration for autonomy is above all the struggle against political and moral alienation from life and work – against the functionalization of outside interests, against the internalization of the morals of our foes … This aspiration is concretized when houses are squatted to live humanely or not to have to pay high rents, when workers call in sick in order to party because they can’t take the alienation at work, when unemployed people plunder supermarkets … because they don’t agree with absurd demands of unions for more jobs that only integrate people into oppression and exploitation. Everywhere that people begin to sabotage, to change the political, moral and technical structures of domination is a step toward a self-determined life.

Given today’s realities, this sneering at the demand for “more jobs” is about as passé as a Nehru jacket. You can find elements of it in Hardt and Negri’s “Empire”, a book that was capable of being written only in a time of economic expansion. From my review of this best-seller:

What they call “antagonism and autonomy” resides not in trade union struggles, but in a phenomenon they call “refusal to work.” For those of us old enough to have danced to Janis Joplin, this phenomenon would be as familiar as an old pair of bell-bottom jeans. Just to make sure that everybody gets the message, this section includes an epigraph by Jerry Rubin: “The New Left sprang from … Elvis’s gyrating pelvis.”

So what was this “mass refusal of the disciplinary regime, which took a variety of forms” and which “was not only a negative expression but a moment of creation” but “what Nietzsche calls a transvaluation of values”? This mouthful of ungainly academic prose amounts to praise of the following:

• Going to live in Haight-Ashbury.
• College students experimenting with LSD instead of looking for a job.
• “Shiftless” African-American workers moving on “CP” (colored people’s time).

In 1969 Italy went through what was called the “Hot Autumn”, a mass movement that had a lot in common with the revolutionary upsurge in France of May-June 1968. As is the case with the unfolding Occupy movement of today, you saw workers and students joining together in militant protests against capitalist misrule.

Like France, the powerful Communist Party of Italy did everything it could to put the break on the movement, many of whose most determined activists were either hostile to Stalinism at the outset or grew hostile after seeing it in action.

Although Italy, like France, was plagued by warring Trotskyist and Maoist sects, a majority of activists on the far left could be described as “new leftists” who were trying to develop their own approach. One trend was called Operaismo (“workerism” in English) that would eventually morph into the autonomist current proper. Italian “Workerism” did not have the same meaning it had in the American left at the time, where it was applied pejoratively to obscure Marxist-Leninist groups or factions within such groups that viewed all movements outside the point of production as “petty-bourgeois”. In Italy the term had more to do with a particular interpretation of Marx’s writings about class even though in practical politics it did mean focusing on working class struggles. It also meant trying to organize workers outside of the framework of Stalinism, avoiding or even confronting most of the traditional trade union organizations where the CP enjoyed hegemony.

Potere Operaio (Worker’s Power), one of the most important workerist groups, was launched in 1968 by Antonio Negri and others. PO then evolved into Autonomia Operaia (Worker’s Autonomy) in 1973, one of the first autonomist groups in Italy. There is a lot of overlap between the ideologies of both movements, but autonomism broadened the scope beyond the point of production and soon became closely identified with the squats occupied by young radicals throughout Western Europe.

While Autonomia Operaia retained much of Potere Operaio’s orientation to working-class struggles, other campus-based groups in the autonomist camp had much more of a counter-cultural character, especially the Metropolitan Indians, a group that dressed up and put on war-paint like indigenous people in the U.S., a sign of their “autonomy” from bourgeois society. Among their demands were free pot and LSD for anybody who wanted to use them and occupying empty buildings as sites for alternatives to the nuclear family. It was the “sixties”, after all.

In 1973 they stormed a jazz festival in Umbria and harangued the audience with the message that the “weapon of music cannot replace the music of weapons”. Apparently, they had a big fetish over the P38, a pistol made by Walther. (James Bond used the Walther PPK.) Obviously we are dealing with some very humorless people despite their feeble attempts to the contrary.

As was the case in the USA and Japan, European radical politics grew increasingly ultraleft in the 1970s, a function of frustration with the movement’s inability to make a serious dent on class society. Increasingly adventurist tactics, including robberies and bombings, led to stepped up repression by the state. By 1977, things were coming to a head in Italy. A nation-wide student occupation protesting an education “reform” bill prompted the CP to intervene on behalf of the government. On February 17 a two thousand strong detachment of CP trade unionists accompanied CP leader Luciano Lama to the campus of the University of Rome where he intended to deliver a speech against the occupation. Not long after Lama’s talk began, the Metropolitan Indians donned masks and led an assault on Lama and his supporters.  At least fifty people were seriously injured in the fracas. This violent attack gave the government the pretext it needed to launch an assault on the university. Two thousand cops raided the campus and used tear gas and clubbed everybody in sight. Sort of rings a bell, doesn’t it?

In my view it was a serious mistake to prevent Lama from speaking, no matter how repugnant his message. Radical politics has to proceed on the basis of vigorous debate, not fisticuffs. Furthermore, no matter how integrated the CP was in the Italian state, it was necessary to find ways to win the rank and file away from bureaucrats like Lama. This cannot be done by beating him up.

Lenin wrote “Ultraleft Communism: an infantile disorder” to help orient impatient young revolutionaries on how to orient to the SP and Labour Parties, the CP’s of his day. As difficult as it is to maneuver around such a hidebound party, you create more difficulties for yourself by trying to confront it physically. As a sign of the possibilities that existed in this period, a large crowd of CP members chanted for unity in Bologna in 1977 against government repression, something that was only met by contempt by the autonomists as Katsiaficas reports with relish. One doubts that such unity could ever have been possible given the fact that at a conference of the far left that year, some 8000 people “divided and clashed among themselves, smashing chairs over one another’s heads and failing to arrive at any solution,” according to Katsiaficas. If the far left couldn’t unite, how could it ever unite with the CP?

Some activists drew the conclusion that it was time to launch an armed struggle. The Revolutionary Brigades became the best known urban guerrilla group, becoming the counterpart of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof) in Germany and the group of the same name in Japan.

In a landmark legal case, Antonio Negri was found guilty of abetting the Revolutionary Brigades, who had kidnapped and murdered parliamentarian Aldo Moro, and spent four years in prison until his exoneration.

Negri’s defense was that he was merely a theorist working with an autonomist group that had no connection to urban guerrilla warfare or terrorism. While this was true, a close examination of Autonomia Operaia will reveal Metropolitan Indian styled “violence within the movement”. As was the case with the Stalinist movement it so despised, the autonomists frequently relied on physical intimidation against their opponents.

In the 2002 edition of “What Next”, a British journal with Trotskyist leanings, you can find an article by Tobias Abse titled “The Professor in the Balaclava: Toni Negri and Autonomist Politics”  that was written on the occasion of the publication of Hardt-Negri’s “Empire”.

Abse’s portrait of Negri is not very flattering:

[Giorgio] Bocca, an expert on terrorism who interviewed many BR members, many of whom he saw as misguided idealists, had no liking for Negri, whom he subsequently described as “that little university Lucifer” and “a narcissus with a subtle brain”, one of those who use “a powerful memory purely to assist their tricks”, remarking that Negri “knew how to copy well from books that had not yet been translated in Italy”. Bocca has no doubt that Negri, whom he sees as far more influenced by Nietzsche’s and D’Annunzio’s ideas about “the superman” than by Marx, lived out his fantasies, albeit by proxy.

The two concrete instances he gives of Negri inciting others to commit criminal acts on his behalf have a definite ring of truth; they are precisely the sorts of crime one can imagine amoral academics engaging in. Firstly, when Negri lived in Milan, he used to send the young autonomi he regularly received in his house out to the nearest bookshop to steal all the books that interested him. Secondly, and rather more seriously, he asserted his power in Padua University by getting his “reactionary” colleagues kneecapped, and then used to theorise in his usual jargon-ridden style that “the levels of the use of force of counter-power have been exemplified by the punishment of teachers who are particularly zealous in anti-proletarian initiatives: Galante, Santo, etc”.

In a review of Hardt-Negri’s “Empire” in the New York Review of Books, journalist Alexander Stille provides some detail on the kneecapping charge:

Professors and former students at the University of Padua, where Negri taught, describe a reign of terror in which, for about three years, the autonomi, who recognized Negri as their principal leader, took over buildings, disrupted classes, shouted down opposing speakers, set off bombs, humiliated and beat up professors, and intimidated dissenting students. During their so-called Nights of Fire, Autonomia set off bombs in several different places in or around Padua.

The gestures of what Negri called “proletarian self-affirmation” assumed truly grotesque forms: under threat of violence an elderly professor was forced by the autonomi to give an oral examination to a dog. Guido Petter, a psychology professor who had supported the student demonstrations of 1968, was so badly beaten with iron bars that he was taken to a hospital. Oddone Longo, a professor of ancient Greek literature and the dean of the literature department, was also savagely beaten by three autonomi wearing ski masks and wielding metal wrenches.

This attack was particularly cowardly: Longo already suffered from a congenital limp and walked with great difficulty so that he could neither defend himself nor run away. He was able to get his hand over his head so that when they tried to smash his skull, they ended up breaking the bones in his hand instead. Along with his effort to maintain the ordinary meeting of classes in his department, Longo’s principal offense was being a member of the Italian Communist Party—the bête noire of Negri and Autonomia. When I asked Negri about the beatings of professors at his old university, he dismissed them as the work of “a few stupid students,” for which he had no responsibility, and he became annoyed at my bringing them up. But if Negri disagreed with what was going on around him in Padua, he did not object to it at the time.

Just in case anybody is harboring suspicions that the Unrepentant Marxist is stacking the deck against Italian autonomia, I would advise you to read the chapter in Wright’s “Storming the Heavens” titled “The Collapse of Workerism”, and the section titled “The Movement Loses Direction” in particular. He states that by 1977, almost weekly confrontations between activists and cops undermined the movement’s ability to consolidate and extend itself, especially given its determination to define itself as a “youth” movement that had turned its back on the “older generation”.

Autonomist theorist Marco Belotti complained about the: “[t]he perverse spiral of raising the stakes in the direct clash with the repressive apparatuses of the state IN PRACTICE conceded hegemony to the deliriums of the armed struggle ideology [combattentismo].”

Considering Katsiaficas’s embrace of “anti-politics”, Wright’s observations, including another citation from Belotti, are particularly germane:

In this context, the refusal of politics became ‘the exclusive privileging of the “military'” dimension, while ”’revolutionary radicalism” became measurable only in terms of the hardness of the clash with the adversary, whether this be the state or the “deviationist comrade'”. At the same time, in many parts of the movement,

the unconscious/thoughtless [incosapevole] introjection of the thematic of ‘two societies’ turned snobbish, the total exclusion of any relation with the city’s working-class and proletarian fabric. (ibid.)

And finally, this rather devastating charge by Wright against a movement he is known to have championed over the years:

That the majority of autonomist groupings, by their arrogance, had recently squandered enormous opportunities was now also apparent to Scalzone. The ‘micro-factions’ of the Area, he noted in December 1978, had begun to reveal their fundamentally conservative nature earlier that month, when they had chosen to isolate themselves from the demonstrating metalworkers, ‘not all of whom, certainly, were union functionaries’. Amongst other things, this demonstrated that the attempt to apply ‘the classic model of democratic centralism’ within the various segments of the ‘organised’ Area had only generated ‘monsters’.

The combination of autonomist thuggery and Red Brigade terror had a lot to do with the implosion of the Italian left. While the Italian bourgeoisie was ready to carry out a repression even if the left had been far more intelligently organized, this was no excuse for carrying out tactics calculated to drive the average working class person into the arms of the government in the name of “security”.

Revolutionary politics is really a project that is designed to win people to a cause. This involves patient explanation. Once someone develops a revolutionary consciousness, there is little that the state can do to vanquish it. A broken window can easily be replaced, but a revolutionary mind is permanent.