AUT: Autonomia and Autonomous Social Movements (reformatted) (part1)

[Patrick Gun_Cuninghame <P.Gun-Cuninghame@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Future At Our Backs: Autonomia and Autonomous Social Movements in
1970s Italy

by Patrick Cuninghame
(School of Social Science, Middlesex University)

(Paper for the Association for the Study of Southern Europe and the
Balkans [ASSEB] Seminars on Southern Europe and the Balkans, 8
December  1998)

Introduction	

The Italian new social movement of the mid to late 1970s, Autonomia
(Autonomy), also known as Autonomia Operaia (Workers' Autonomy),
represents a key collective actor in the history of late 20th century
European protest and social conflict. Firstly, there is its role in
the highly conflictual and relatively rapid transformation of Italy
from a recently industrialised nation to a post-fordist,
post-industrial society from the mid 1970s onwards; a process which is
still very much ongoing with the gradual emergence of a Second
Republic, within the broader context of European integration, from the
political instability, regional imbalances and corruption scandals of
the First Republic. Secondly, there is the light the experience of
Autonomia has thrown on the question of the changing nature of
collective identity, political organisation and social contestation
in urbanised, advanced capitalist societies.

Since the 1960s collective action has moved decisively away from being
the expression of social conflict between supposedly homogenous social
blocks based on clearly delineated and ideologised social class
identities (the proletariat and bourgeoisie of classical Marxism) with
the political party as the privileged site of socio-political
organisation.  Instead it has moved towards the heterogeneous sector
of  the new social movements, comprised of the new social or
'decentred' subjects of women, students, non-unionised and often
casualised workers, unemployed youth, homosexuals, environmentalists
and other so-called socially and politically 'marginal' elements,
whose identities and ideologies appear to be constantly shifting and
whose principal form of contestation has been the single issue
campaign, usually organised as a decentralised network. I will argue
that Autonomia, while sharing many of these characteristics, was
unique as a European new social movement in that it combined several
single issue campaigns (anti-nuclear, students and workers rights,
access to cultural and political spaces, anti-fascism) under the
umbrella of one heterogeneous and localist movement that was united
only in its identification with the theory and practice of autonomy
from the State, institutional political parties and trade unions or
any form of political, social and cultural mediation between the
interests of capital and those of the social actors of which it was
composed. Or rather, that the most radical sectors of these social
movements identified with each other and against the State through the
theory and practice of political autonomy.

2. New social movement theories and Italian social movements
In testing these hypotheses, I intend to critique the prevalent
approach of social movement theorists towards Italian new social
movements in general and Autonomia in particular. Sydney Tarrow (1989)
adopted a primarily quantitative approach based on the interpretation
of data from a single 'newspaper of record' through which he
identified a cycle of protest and social conflict from 1968 to 1973,
which ended with the disintegration of the main social movement
organisations - Potere Operaio (PO/Workers' Power), Lotta Continua
(LC/Fight On) and Avanguardia Operaia (AO/Workers' Vanguard) into
institutionalisation or clandestine organised political violence as a
result of demobilisation brought on by various state strategies of
repression and political co-option. Such a reliance on a single source
of data  (the liberal national daily newspaper Il Corriere della
Sera), which itself was an actor in the social conflicts and not
simply a neutral observer of events, leads him to ignore or minimise
the emergence of a new cycle of social conflict in the mid 1970s which
peaked with the '1977 Movement', a rupture if anything more radical
and certainly more violent than that of 1968.

Alberto Melucci (1977, 1989) views the new social movements
essentially as defensive social phenomena, seeking to preserve ways of
life and sets of values placed under threat by the exigencies of a
revitalised capitalism, with culture, the body and communication as
the principal arenas of contestation. Melucci seems to concur with the
Italian Communist Party (PCI) intellectual Alberto Asor Rosa, whose
thesis in his work on the 1977 Movement, " Le Due Societ=E1" (The Two
Societies), states that the new social movements of the 'area of
Autonomia' represented an 'irreducible marginalisation' of certain new
social groupings, particularly the unemployed youth of the urban
periphery. However, such a viewpoint on new social movements is in
danger of depoliticising and decontextualising what was historically a
profound moment of rupture within modern Italian society and of
presenting these movements as substantially empty of creativity and
innovation with nothing more than violence, criminality and deviance
to fall back on before a systematic state response. The 'Two
Societies' approach, also ties in with certain strands of
Post-Marxism, such as Andre Gorz (1989), in recognising the division
of the working class in the advanced capitalist nations between a
precarious 'underclass' with few rights and no guarantees, and a
guaranteed but shrinking sector still tied to the trade unions and the
social democratic parties (a division which became evident in the mid
1970s). It fails to address both the nature of marginality and the use
of this notion to delegitimise and generally minimise the significance
of the most radical of the new social movements.

Robert Lumley (1990), adopts a hybrid cultural studies-semiotics
approach, based on the works of Raymond Williams and Umberto Eco, with
strong references to the French postmodernists and Italian 'weak
thought' exponents, such as Gianni Vattimo. Using Raymond Williams'
systemisation for cultural phenomena, he divides the social movements
into two main categories: 'emergent', such as the students and women's
movements; and 'residual', for example the factory workers movements
and the Marxist 'groups'. Ultimately, his thesis concurs with that of
Melucci in that the new social movements are cultural rather than
political phenomena and herein essentially lies their 'newness' and
their significance.

Other researchers of Italian social movements such as Donatella della
Porta (1996) and David Moss (1989) have focused, like Tarrow, on
Autonomia as fundamentally a terrorist phenomenon comparable with both
Italian and German clandestine structures such as the Red Brigades and
the Rote Arme Fraktion, and have chosen to ignore or minimise those
cultural, social and historical aspects not directly related to the
issues of political violence, deviance or subversion.

3. Working Hypotheses
One of the central characteristics and practices of the new social
movements that separate them from the spheres of institutionalised or
'revolutionary vanguard' party politics is that of 'autonomy'. This
essentially Enlightenment notion originally applied to the sovereignty
of the individual within the collectivity in modern European  thought,
but has come to refer to a series of both collective and individual
practices, needs and desires characteristic of the social actors
within the new social movements. In the collective sense it signifies
the need of different groups of actors to protect and advance their
own agendas without being subsumed by the demands of a wider
collectivity, whether it be civil society, the working class, or
indeed by other social movements. One of the foremost practitioners of
autonomy has been the women's movement, the meeting of whose needs had
historically been postponed by 'the revolutionary party' until after
the conquest of state power and the establishment of socialism, the
issue of gender firmly subordinated to that of class.

In the political sense and particularly in the Italian context,
autonomy meant the need of an emergent social composition of the
deskilled, massified, Southern migrant factory workers of the 1960s to
form self-managed, horizontal, organisations that would be independent
from the social democratic parties and trade unions tied to the
Fordist-Keynsian post-1945 social pact which principally benefited the
established, 'historic' industrial working class of the North.
Starting from this point of rupture, the desire of this 'mass worker'
(as the operaista [workerist] intellectuals associated  with Autonomia
defined the 'class composition' of the Italian industrial working
class of the late 1960s) for autonomy, also from the perceived
drudgery and danger of factory work (hence the widely diffused
practice of the 'refusal of work'), quickly spread outside the factory
walls to their immediate communities, and then through the
intervention of student activists to the broader social terrain,
becoming the core practice of the new social movements of the 1970s.
The mainly Marxist-Leninist groups of the New Left that emerged from
the revolts of 1968-69 were unable to confront the growing political
and economic crisis following the Oil Crisis of 1973. Undermined more
by the succesful co-optive transformation of the factory workers
assemblies into  shop-steward's committees where the unions were able
to gradually re-establish their hegemony, than by the 'Strategy of
Tension', the State's allegedly terroristic response to the 'Hot
Autumn' of 1969, the groups dissolved themselves. Some of their
individual members returned to the fold of the historic left, others
took the path of radical reformism and helped to found 'Democrazia
Proletaria' (DP/Proletarian Democracy). Most found themselves in
autonomous localised collectives, deprived of a national co-ordinating
structure and a 'party line' but conversely more involved in the
immediate struggles of the 'social territory'. What the investigative
journalist Giorgio Bocca, described as the 'archipelago of Autonomia'
had begun to emerge by 1975. As factory-based conflict diminished
under the impact of technological restructuring but neighbourhood,
student  and  'marginalised youth' contestations intensified in the
mid-1970s, this 'autonomia operaia' (workers=3D autonomy), evolved into
the broader phenomenon of 'autonomia'. It signified a desire for and
an attempted practice of independence from both the capitalist
political economy and from the Nation State as the ultimate site of
political power, mainly through often illegal forms of expropriation,
self-management and 'counter-power'.

Although the emphasis was always on the collective, autonomy was also
seen as an individual demand and practice: the diversity of the needs
of the individual could not be subordinated to the voluntarism of
party discipline nor to the romantic leftist myth of heroic
self-sacrifice. This autonomy of the individual within the immediate
collectivity of a social movement and the broader collectivity of
civil society appeared to find its apposite political expression in
the direct, participative democracy of the assembly and the refusal of
delegation or any form of representative, institutionalised democracy.



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