Reviewing the experience of Italy in the 1970s, by Antonio Negri (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, September 1998)
June 2026
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> September 1998
Between ‘historic compromise’ and terrorism
Reviewing the experience of Italy in the 1970s
Toni Negri was one of the historic leadership of the Italian revolutionary group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) and is currently serving a prison sentence in Rebibbia prison, Rome. Negri gave himself up on 1 July 1997 after 14 years’ exile in Paris in a bid to close a chapter in his own personal "judicial history" and that of other far-left militants still in exile. Originally sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment for "armed insurrection against the state" and to four and a half years for "moral responsibility" for the clashes between revolutionary activists and police in Milan between 1973 and 1977, he theoretically still has over four years to serve. Waiting for a general remission (indulto) from the Italian parliament which has not as yet materialised, he was authorised to work on day-release at the end of July. In the following article, he recalls the political experience of the 1970s in Italy
by<br>Antonio Negri
Reviewing the experience of Italy in the 1970s<br>↑
To speak of what the 1970s represented in Italy’s political<br>history is to speak also of the present. In part, because the<br>consequences of the repressive policies of those years are still very<br>much with us. The Special Laws have not been repealed, at least 200<br>people are still in prison and about the same number are living their<br>lives in exile (1). Also, because the disintegration of the post-war<br>political system, shattered to pieces by the fall of the Berlin Wall,<br>had reached intolerable limits. But above all, because the social<br>(and psychological) traumas of that decade have still not been healed<br>or distanced.
The 1970s are still with us in the sense that they posed for Italy<br>the problem of how to arrive at models of democratic representation<br>in a context in which the social modes of production are being<br>transformed. This is a central problem for advanced capitalist<br>societies and it has still not been resolved. In Italy, the way in<br>which that problem presented itself took a distinctly tragic<br>turn.
All the political forces that were involved in this drama were, in<br>the end, defeated. Two writers have done more than anyone else to<br>describe the roots of this tragedy: Leonardo Sciascia (2) and Rossana<br>Rossanda (3). Sciascia was an able chronicler of events and revealed<br>to the world the labyrinthine inner workings of the crisis; Rossanda,<br>maintaining her political commitment throughout, reported every day<br>on the desperate powerlessness of the protagonists to reach any kind<br>of solution.
In Italy, the 1970s actually began in 1967-68 and ended in 1983.<br>In 1967-68, as in all the developed countries, the student movement<br>took to the barricades. However, the breadth and impact of this part<br>of the movement was not as extensive as in other European countries:<br>in Italy, the student May 1968 was not a particularly significant<br>moment.
But the same cannot be said of the broader picture: in effect, the<br>movement opened a breach in the system of power, and into this breach<br>was swallowed, in successive waves, the social movement that<br>developed in protest against a system which was increasingly falling<br>behind in modernising capitalism, and was repressing the democratic<br>potential inherited from the anti-fascist struggle and the<br>Resistance.
What happened then was that, after the students, other social<br>protagonists emerged to make their mark on the political scene. For<br>example, 1969 was the year of the factory working class, with new<br>Factory Councils (consigli di fabbrica) emerging, an<br>egalitarian movement fighting for equal wage rises for all, and a<br>deregulation of capitalist policy towards the labour market. This<br>phase of struggle was crowned by the achievement of the statuto<br>dei lavoratori ("workers’ statute"). Immediately after this, came<br>the legalisation of divorce, the implementation of regional<br>decentralisation, the recognition of conscientious objection and<br>large numbers of legislative innovations which "unfroze" the old<br>post-war society. In other words, there were a variety of<br>institutional responses to the continuous unfolding of struggles -<br>not only of students or factory workers - that had been opened by<br>1968.
The "strategy of tension"
In around 1973-74, the framework began to change. Up till that<br>point, the relationship between the social movements and the "left"<br>as a totality had, despite passing difficulties, been essentially<br>dialectical. After the oil crisis of 1973 and the first capitalist<br>counter-offensives, things changed. The Italian parliamentary...