BETWEEN 1962 and 1968 the governments of the centre-left had failed to respond to the multiple needs of a rapidly changing Italy. They had done both too little and too much, in the sense that they had talked endlessly of reform but had then left expectations unfulfilled. From 1968 onwards paralysis from above gave way to movement from below. There followed a most extraordinary period of social ferment, the high season of collective action in the history of the Republic. During it the organization of Italian society was challenged at nearly every level. No single moment in Italy equalled in intensity and in revolutionary potential the events of May 1968 in France, but the Italian protest movement was the most profound and long-lasting in Europe. It spread from the schools and universities into the factories, and then out again into society as a whole.
The material bases of the explosion of protest in the Italian universities are to be found in the education reforms of the 1960s. With the introduction in 1962 of compulsory secondary education until the age of fourteen, the number of school students nearly doubled between 1959 and 1969. A mass education system beyond primary school had been created for the first time. It had grave inadequacies – traditional curricula, a shortage of classrooms and textbooks, a lack of teacher training institutions, etc. – but it did open up new horizons for hundreds of thousands of children from the ceti medi and the working classes. Many of them, especially from the middle classes, decided to continue their studies and go on to university. Legislation of the 1960s made this easier: in 1961 access to science faculties was opened to students from technical institutes, and in 1965 entrance to university by examination was abolished. By 1968 the number of university students totalled over 450,000, compared to only 268,000 in 1960. The number of women students had doubled in the same period, but in 1968 still constituted less than a third of the new intake.1
This new generation of university students entered a system which was in an advanced state of malfunction. The last serious reform of the universities had been in 1923; little provision had been made since that date to cope with student numbers that had increased tenfold. By 1968 the three universities of Rome, Naples and Bari had 60,000, 50,000, and 30,000 students respectively, while they had been designed for student populations of little more than 5,000 each.2 There were too few university teachers; worse still, many of them were rarely to be found in the universities. Their obligations amounted only to fifty-two hours of lectures per year, and once they had given these they were free to do what they wanted. Professors who were also doctors, lawyers, architects or politicians were notorious absentees. There were no seminars, no tutorials, and thus almost no staff-student contact. The situation was a little better in the science faculties, but even there most curricula had remained unrevised for years. Most examinations were oral, with a consequent high degree of uncontrolled subjective evaluation. For the Turin students of 1968 oral exams were occasions when ‘a policeman dressed up as a teacher spends five to ten minutes in liquidating the accused with a series of questions’.3
The decision to allow open access to such a grossly inadequate university system amounted simply to planting a time bomb in it. The position of ‘worker-students’, as they were called, was particularly difficult. In Italy there were no state grants for students, with the exception of a few scholarships for the academically outstanding. Well-to-do parents paid for their children while they were at university, but by 1968 more than half the student population was having to work as well as study. Many found part-time jobs in the schools; others were salesmen or baby-sitters, or worked in bars and restaurants. It was often impossible for them to attend lectures at all consistently, and in the absence of any other type of teaching they were reduced to studying textbooks at home. Not surprisingly, the number of these worker-students who then failed their oral exams was very high. Falling an exam did not mean having to leave the university; there was no obligatory time within which a student had to graduate. However, demoralization tended to set in and the number of drop-outs was great. In 1966 81 per cent of those with a secondary school diploma went to university, but only 44 per cent succeeded in graduating. The Italian education system thus operated a particularly subtle form of class-based selection: the university was supposedly open to all, but the odds were heavily stacked against poorer students ever getting a degree.4
Even with a degree there was no guarantee of a job. Italy had always produced too many graduates, but the situation got steadily worse in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Thus many of the aspirations awakened by the half-baked reforms of the 1960s remained unsatisfied. The sons and daughters of the expanding urban middle classes experienced a series of sharp disillusionments. The schools were overcrowded and full of poorly trained teachers, the universities were an obstacle course of formidable dimensions and society as a whole was unable to guarantee high-status jobs to all those who did emerge from the long and distinctly dark tunnel of Italian education.
These were the material bases for revolt, but there were other, ideological ones of equal, if not greater, significance. Many of the school and university students of the mid and late sixties were less than convinced by the values that had become predominant in the Italy of the ‘economic miracle’ – individualism, the all-conquering power of technocracy, the exaltation of the nuclear family. Consumerism, too, seemed an ambiguous blessing to some of the Italian younger generation. The chance to play and listen to rock music, wear different clothes and enjoy freedom of movement was obviously welcome, but a minority was appalled by the sixties’ obsession with the acquisition of commodities. Aldo Marchetti, who was to be one of the first students expelled from the Catholic university in Milan, recounts how for him ‘1968’ began as he listened to the headmaster of his liceo (upper secondary school). The headmaster's optimistic portrayal of the future that awaited his pupils – positions in Italy's modern élite, working in banks, management, science, etc. – contrasted starkly with Marchetti's own half-formed feelings of pessimism and alienation. That generation of liceo students were reading Camus, Sartre, Pavese, Baudelaire; their heroes, if they had any, were rebels and outsiders.5
Their sense of rejection was able to find fertile support in minority developments in both the dominant ideologies of Italy, Catholicism and Marxism. The pontificate of John XXIII had opened the Italian church to a new ferment of ideas and activities. More than ever before, attention was paid to the need for social justice. In 1967, Don Milani, a dissident Catholic priest, published an extraordinary book called Lettera a una professoressa. In it, students from the school of Barbiana, in the village of Vicchio Mugello, north of Florence, documented the class bias of the educational system and the triumph of individualism in the new Italy. The philosophy of Italian education, according to Don Milani's school students, ran as follows: ‘Woe betide him who touches the Individual. The Free Development of the Personality is your supreme conviction. You care nothing for society or its needs… You also know less than us about your fellow men. The lift is a machine for avoiding your neighbours, the car for ignoring people who go by tram, the telephone for not talking face to face and for not going to other people's homes.’6 The book rapidly became a cult text for the student movement.
At the same time a revival of Marxist thinking was taking place. Under the lead of Emilio Panzieri, and then of the journal Quaderni Rossi, new attempts were being made to relate Marxist categories to the rapid material development of Italy. After the events of Piazza Statuto in Turin, changes in the Italian working class became the major object of analysis. The young ‘operaisti’, ‘workerist’ intellectuals, who were responsible for these analyses were for the most part outside the traditional left parties. They were few in number, as were the print runs of their publications, but they were to have a disproportionate influence on the student movement. So too did the little journal Quaderni Piacentini, which acted as a forum for Marxist ideas on economics and politics, culture and society.
These new initiatives, both Catholic and Marxist, were in no way symmetrical in their influence on the students. Nor indeed were they in agreement between them. But taken together, they provided part of an ideological background in which the values of solidarity, collective action and the fight against social injustice were counterposed to the individualism and consumerism of ‘neo-capitalism’.
The year 1968, therefore, was much more than a protest against poor conditions. It was an ethical revolt, a notable attempt to turn the tide against the predominant values of the time. The students, and soon the whole population, had to be prevented from ‘interiorizing’ the values of a capitalist society. As Guido Viale wrote in 1968: ‘The university functions as an instrument of ideological and political manipulation. It aims to instil into the students a spirit of subordination to the powers that be (whoever they may be). It tries to cancel, in the psychological structure of every student, the collective dimension of personal needs. It intends to destroy the possibility of establishing relations with one's neighbour which are other than purely competitive in character.’7
This ethical revolt drew inspiration and political identity from the dramatic and unique international conjuncture of the late 1960s. The Vietnam war changed the way a whole generation of Italians thought about America. The American dream of the 1950s was shattered by the newsreels of the napalming of Vietnamese villages in the 1960s and by the example of peasant resistance to the American war machine. One of the most recurrent slogans of '68 in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, was: ‘create one, two, three, many Vietnams’. For Italian youth of this period the ‘real’ America became another: the anti-war protests on the campuses, the Californian communes and counter-culture, the Black Power movement.
Simultaneously, a new model for the achievement of socialism seemed to have emerged from the experience of the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966–7. In contrast to the hierarchical and centralized Russian version of socialism, which had had its heyday in Italy in the 1940s, the Cultural Revolution was very widely interpreted in Italy as being a spontaneous and anti-authoritarian mass-protest movement. Socialism was to be reinvented from the bottom upwards. Mao had invited Chinese youth to ‘open fire on headquarters’; in Italy, too, the time seemed ripe to initiate a ‘cultural revolution’ from below, against established hierarchies and values.
Finally, events in South America completed the ‘Third World’ inspirations of the student movement. The death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in the autumn of 1967 provided the Italian students, as it did the French and German, with their single greatest hero. But in Italy the teachings of radical South American priests who sought to reconcile Catholicism and Marxism found a very particular resonance. Not by chance, the first revolts in Italian universities were to be in strongly Catholic institutions.
These, then, were the international influences at work on Italian youth in 1967–8. They formed an extraordinarily potent mixture.
Although there had been rumblings of trouble in 1966–7, the real explosion in the Italian universities occurred in the period from the autumn of 1967 (long before the French unrest) until the spring of 1968. In that fateful academic year, the first university to be occupied was that of Trento. Founded in 1962 by Catholic intellectuals on the left of the Christian Democrat Party, Trento was the only university in Italy to have a faculty of social sciences. Its purpose was to train a modern Catholic élite which would analyse and direct the complex processes of transformation that were then under way in Italy. However, in the heady atmosphere of the autumn of 1967, the students rejected totally the role that had been assigned them. Instead, in the course of an uninterrupted series of sit-ins and assemblies, they tried to formulate a Marxist analysis of the role of students in society, couched in terms of the students being carefully modelled and selected products that were to be sold on the intellectual market.8
In mid-November, Trento was followed by an even more Catholic institution – the Catholic university at Milan. This private institution (Trento was a state university) had provided the DC with many of its most notable leaders. Here the original cause of the agitation was an increase in fees but, as everywhere, more global questions soon came to dominate the discussions of the student assembly. In response to this first-ever occupation, the rector called in the police to expel the students by force. After their expulsion, the students expressed ‘indignation, suffering and deeply troubled human, civil and Christian feelings in the face of the authorities' behaviour towards the occupation’.9 There were many expulsions, and the disturbances were to continue for some months.
After Milan, on 27 November 1967, it was the turn of Turin. The occupation of the Faculty of Letters in Palazzo Campana was to set the tone for the many other occupations that were to follow throughout Italy. A unifying feature of them all was to be the rejection of Gui's proposals, as Minister of Education, for university reform. Gui wanted to reintroduce restricted entry and to provide three different types of degree, from a one-year diploma through to the full degree course. These ideas of producing rigid hierarchies among the students ran exactly contrary to the students' own emphasis on equality and on the need to reduce the gap between the worker-students and the others. At Turin, teaching, course content and examining came under concerted attack for the first time.
From December 1967 to February 1968 the movement spread throughout the country, until even the sleepiest universities in the provinces and the South were brought into the fray. So too were some secondary schools, especially in the major urban areas.10 At Turin and Trento students the new tactic of interrupting lectures and forcing professors to confront the issues that were being debated in the student assemblies. Very few of the university teachers were able to cope with this explicit questioning of their authority. In Italy, in contrast to France, no significant part of the teaching body was to side with the students.
The atmosphere of these months, as at all such moments of sudden rebellion, was one of almost magical fraternity. In Milan, in the area around the state university, graffiti appeared everywhere and on everything. Students changed the way they dressed and looked: the men grew their hair and abandoned jackets, ties and sombre-coloured clothes in favour of jeans, beards and red handkerchiefs tied round the neck; the women gave up make-up, dresses and high heels in favour of trousers, jeans, pullovers and boots. In winter everyone wore khaki ‘Eskimo’ jackets and long scarves.11
In February 1968 the movement reached a turning-point with the occupation of the university of Rome. After police had evicted students from the university, the students met at the Piazza di Spagna and decided to try and ‘recapture’ the Faculty of Architecture, which was isolated in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. There the police baton-charged them, but the students replied in kind. Cars and vans were set alight, forty-six policemen ended up in hospital and an unknown number of students were injured. The next day the pictures of the ‘battle of Valle Giulia’ were on the front pages of all the newspapers. ‘Valle Giulia’ was a critical step, because up until that moment the student movement had been relatively pacific. From then on police and students loathed each other, and many of the students adopted the habit of wearing crash-helmets to demonstrations.
The spring of 1968 saw the movement reach its climax and begin to decline. It proved impossible to maintain for long the level of intensity and commitment that had characterized the previous months. In addition, the national elections of May 1968 began to divert attention elsewhere. The movement certainly did not die; there were to be student agitations throughout the 1970s, but they never again achieved the national impact and iconoclastic force of these first few months.
At the heart of the student movement lay an irreverent anti-authoritarianism. No hierarchy, authority or centre of power in Italy, and least of all those of the university and the forces of order, was safe from its ridicule. Eugenio Scalfari, who was later to found the newspaper La Repubblica, recounted in 1969 the infectious nature of this student disrespect. At the Faculty of Letters in Rome,
they told me of their battles with the police, and it was a pitiless account. There were the policemen heavy with sweat and tiredness, weighted down by their gunbelts and their bags full of tear-gas canisters; and circling round and round them were the students, dressed in their light trousers and teeshirts and plimsolls… Recounting all this while continually interrupting one another, they burst out laughing. And I was reminded of all those hours spent in the courtroom [of the SIFAR trial] with those ghost-like judges… and that grotesque parade of generals suspected of plotting against the state and now protected by the state so that they could lie with impunity and conceal the truth. I began to laugh too, and we all started laughing, first ten of us, then twenty, then fifty, until the whole hall in the Faculty of Letters was full of that bitter, unjoyful laughter.12
However, student rejection of authority went much beyond the most obvious targets. For the first time in the history of the Republic the family came under attack. Minority groups amongst the students, following the lead of their counterparts in northern Europe and America (and strongly influenced by R. D. Laing's writings), denounced the inadequacies the nuclear family. Far from loyalty to the family and the furtherance of it being absolute values, the family was attacked as a source of oppression and evil. As Fiorella Farinelli recalled later: ‘By far the best of the graffiti on the walls of my faculty at the university, I remember it absolutely clearly, was this one: “I want to be an orphan.” I agreed with it, I photographed it, I took a poster of it back to my home; it was the slogan I liked most.’13
Few students went this far, but many rejected the narrow loyalties of the family in favour of a greater commitment to their peer group and to collectivist ideals. Parental advice, with its emphasis on all politics being a dirty game, on the importance of getting a degree and making a career, was scornfully rejected. As for the relationship between family and society, the student movement criticized harshly the modern family's closedness, its distrust of the outside world, its predominant values of material enrichment. Luciana Castellina summarized these criticisms in a well-known article of 1974, where she wrote of ‘the exasperated dichotomy between collectivity and family, the latter being conceived of as a lair, a refuge, a system of fortresses where solidarity with one's relatives is the other face of a brutal egoism towards the outside world’.14
Some of the students' strongest disdain was reserved for the traditional forces of the left. The Communist Party was dismissed for the most part as an ‘integrated opposition’, incapable of fighting the system. The PCI's youth movement, the F G CI, made little headway amongst the students, and its representatives were often treated with derision in student assemblies.
If all hierarchies and centres of power were under attack, what was to be put in their place? The movement, of course, had no well-formulated programme, but its underlying principles were clearly discernible. In the first place, direct democracy was, as far as possible, to control the exercise of power. All decisions were to be taken by mass assemblies, and if delegates were elected they were subject to recall as and when the need arose. Students were encouraged to participate directly in decision-making, rather than passively allow their representatives to exercise power on their behalf. The democratic model, therefore, was not that of the Constitution of the Italian Republic, but of the Paris Commune of 1871.
The students tried not only to make political decisions collectively, but also to live their lives in the same way. Communes sprang up in the major cities, though fewer than elsewhere in Europe. It was difficult to find large houses or flats to rent, and in any case many students were forced, for financial reasons, to continue to live with their parents.
The movement was collectivist, but it was also libertarian (and here it differed starkly from Chinese Communism). No central authority was to control individual actions, which were to be allowed as free a rein as possible in the private sphere. Nowhere was this more evident than in sexual relations. The taboos that surrounded sexual intercourse in Italy were systematically broken; sexual liberation became both one of the objectives of the movement and one of its practices.
However, the students' values remained essentially masculine ones. Women experienced considerable ambivalence in their attitudes towards the movement. On the one hand there were the positive elements of new political commitment and an extraordinarily intense sociality; on the other, most women remained subordinate within the movement, unable to express their own needs and desires. Sometimes new oppressions arose in the name of liberation; obligatory sexual liberty was the most notable of these.15
While it would be misleading to give a single label to the movement, it would probably be correct to describe it, in broad terms, as Marxist. Marcuse's One-dimensional Man, Mao's writings, Marx's own early texts were amongst the books that were most widely read at the time. However, the Italian movement, in contrast to the German, did not seriously preoccupy itself with the elaboration of theory. There were exceptions. Pisa's oft-reworked ‘Tesi della Sapienza’ was the most notable example, and in some occupied medical and architecture faculties (notably that of Venice) extended discussions took place on the subjects of alternative medicine and radical town planning.16 For the most part, though, Italian students were concerned to translate consciousness into action, organization and struggle. During the Turin occupation the student commission on Vietnam quickly abandoned a historical and economic analysis of imperialism in favour of duplicating a chronology of the Vietnamese struggle and reproducing a series of documents of the F L N. At Turin, again, in protest against ‘book fetishism’ and ‘those new members of the massed ranks of neo-capitalism who build altars in their homes and call them libraries’,17 the ‘scientific’ commission proceeded to cut some books into five pieces for distribution amongst its members. It was not learning that mattered, but action; not individual possessions and family life, but the pooling of resources and collective action.
Finally, it is worth examining in a little detail student attitudes to violence, especially because of what was to come later. The movement was originally peaceful enough, and its apologists have rightly pointed out that it was police brutality within the universities that eventually provoked a response in kind. However, it would be quite misleading to infer from this that the movement was a pacifist one, forced against its will to adopt a violent stance. Violence was, rather, accepted as inevitable and justifiable, and entered almost unquestioned into the values and actions of the movement. The just violence of the revolutionaries – of Mao, of Che and of the Vietnamese – was opposed to that of the capitalists. ‘Power comes out of the barrel of a gun’; ‘Violence in return for violence’; ‘War no, guerrilla action yes’: these were amongst the most popular slogans of the time.
Robert Lumley has rightly characterized one of the initial reactions to '68 as being moral panic. The Corriere della Sera usually referred to the student activists as ‘Cinesi’ – a term which, as Lumley remarks, ‘conjured up the red menace and the yellow peril in one’.18 The Italian ceti medi as a whole were aghast at the rebellion from within their midst. The press and television intoned endlessly against the students, reproving them for their ‘anarchism’, their lack of respect and their intolerance. Furious battles broke out within families, as sons and daughters rejected their parents' advice and authority, and their very way of living. What made matters worse was that this was not, of course, in any way a purely Italian phenomenon. The European dimensions of the movement recalled the revolutionary waves of 1848–9 and 1918–20. When the French students and workers forced de Gaulle to leave Paris temporarily at the end of May 1968, it looked for a moment as if the whole post-war settlement was being called into question.
For the major force on the Italian left, the Italian Communists, the student movement presented notable problems. The students were clearly anti-capitalist, but they were quite ferociously anti-Communist as well. In June 1968 Giorgio Amendola gave vent to a widespread feeling within the party when he attacked the movement for being irrational and infantile. He called for a ‘battle on two fronts’, against both capitalist power and student extremism. Luigi Longo, as secretary of the party, had taken a rather different line in May. He admitted that the student movement posed ‘a series of problems of tactics and strategy’, but asserted that ‘it has shaken up the political situation and has been largely positive… in undermining the Italian social system’.19
One person, however, closely associated with the PCI, did not spare the students his contempt. On 16 June 1968 Pier Paolo Pasolini published a famous anti-student poem in L'Espresso. It began as follows: ‘Now the journalists of all the world (including / those of the television) / are licking your arses (as one still says in student / slang). Not me, my dears. / You have the faces of spoilt rich brats… / You are cowardly, uncertain, and desperate /… When, the other day, at Villa Giulia you fought / the police, / I can tell you I was on their side. / Because the police are the sons of the poor. / They come from subtopias, in the cities and countryside /…’20
In the same issue, L'Espresso published a round-table discussion on the poem. Pasolini was there, and in response to criticism from other members of the panel, especially from the trade unionist Vittorio Foa, he replied that his poem had been ‘in more than one key at the same time. Thus my ugly verses should be read as if they were dubbed; that is, they are both ironic and anti-ironic.’ Foa replied, 'The poem, once published, has its own momentum, and whoever reads it knows nothing of the interpretative canons of its author. Your poem, Pasolini, is published in a determinate society at a determinate moment; a moment in which youth, in spite of your illusions, is in the gravest difficulty (and I am speaking of both students and young workers). In my opinion everything is being done to isolate the youth movement… In all this concerted action only the voice of the poet was missing… [but] today we are witnessing a revolutionary process, or at least we are aware of its initial but absolutely unmistakable symptoms.’21
Foa was right to emphasize the novelty and subversive potential of the student protests of 1967–8. They had arisen spontaneously, beyond the instigation or control of any of the political parties. In this they differed fundamentally from the great wave of protest of 1945–8; then the PCI had controlled the movement, which for the most part had remained narrowly conformist in ideological terms, with Stalin's Russia as its model. The students of 1968 were broadly Marxist as well, but theirs was a libertarian and iconoclastic reading of historical materialism.
The movement was especially significant because for the first time a substantial section of the Italian ceti medi (for it was from these social groups that the students mostly came) aligned themselves on the left. In the rise of Fascism, the students, as is well known, had played a quite different role as the leaders and supporters of the anti-worker squads. The students of '68 also broke with their own parents, most of whom were not Fascists, but had benefited notably from the ‘economic miracle’ and accepted the values inherent in it. The movement was thus subversive because it challenged directly the model of modernity which had emerged in Italy in the previous years.
The students were certainly not without their faults. They were often presumptuous, arrogant and intolerant. They accepted, all too facilely, the use of violence as a weapon. They did not question, until much later on, the nature of the male values dominant within their movement. Assemblies were often not the models of direct democracy they were supposed to be – speakers holding unpopular views were howled down or were not even allowed to the microphone. It was this that made Habermas, amongst others, fear for a ‘fascism of the left’.22
The students also never managed to harness protest in order to achieve change. The very nature of their critique and of their organization – radical, decentralized, Utopian – militated against them becoming an effective pressure group for reform. The universities, as we have seen, were desperately in need of reform: students required grants, curricula were ripe for change, new universities were needed in a hurry. But all this was too narrow a perspective for a movement that thought in wider terms. It was the system that needed changing, not a part of it.
However, the Italian students were not so Utopian as to believe that they were going to change the world by themselves. Unlike the bulk of the German student movement, which dismissed the working class as irredeemably integrated, and unlike Marcuse, who put the emphasis on marginal groups as the true revolutionaries, the Italian students never thought for a moment that they were the revolutionary class. To their credit they made it clear, almost immediately, that their aspirations to radical change would only make headway if they carried them to the working classes and convinced them of the necessity and viability of their cause. The student movement of 1968, therefore, turned rapidly away from universities, and their possible reform, towards the factories. It was there, they argued, that the decisive battles were to be fought.
The Italian students had more grounds for optimism than many others like them who, at various moments in both Italian and European history, had ‘gone to the people’ in order to achieve profound social change. We have already seen (pp. 250–53) how in 1962 a new phase of tension and radicalism had swept the northern factories and had given rise to the riots of the Piazza Statuto in Turin. The conditions that underlay those events – the rigidity of the northern labour market, the alienation of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers, the anger of the southern immigrants – had not disappeared in the ensuing years between 1962 and 1968. There had been significant changes, but nearly all of them served to increase rather than diminish class conflict.
In the first place migration to the North and Centre from the South had not ceased. Only in 1965–6, as a sort of delayed response to the economic crisis, had there been a sharp decline in the numbers leaving the South. In 1967 net migration from the South to the Centre and North was once again over 120,000 a year (compared to 287,000 in the peak year of 1963). This figure did not fall to less than 100,000 per annum until 1974. The massive new influx put renewed pressure on the structures of the major cities. It also made the process of assimilation that much more difficult; no sooner had the immigrants of 1958–63 found somewhere decent to live than a new wave moved into decrepit inner-city areas like the Corso Garibaldi in Milan and the Via Garibaldi in Turin. One survey of the Corso Garibaldi in 1969 found many flats without lavatories, some without running water, and landlords willing to let for only six months at a time.23
The provenance of this second wave of immigrants differed to a certain extent from that of their predecessors. There was still notable emigration from the poorest rural areas of the South. Piselli, for instance, has shown in her study of the Calabrian hill village of ‘Altopiano’ that it was not until the late sixties that migration to northern Italy reached its height: 147 families left the village for the North between 1959 and 1966, but 270 between 1967 and 1976. However, large numbers of immigrants were also coming from the more developed areas of the South. There is some evidence too from Turin of a minority of workers, attracted by offers of new jobs at FIAT, returning from Germany, Belgium and France.24
Even with the upturn of the economy post-1966, there were clearly not enough jobs to satisfy the expectations of all these immigrants. But the labour market was heavily segmented; this meant that there was still a certain shortage of the kind of labour that the major factories were looking for in 1967–8. FIAT, Pirelli and others wanted young men over twenty-one with a school leaving certificate and some experience of urban conditions. The supply of such labour from Lombardy and Piedmont was drying up, and firms like FIAT for the first time took on a large number of southerners. Priority was given to those returning from northern Europe and to those from the cities and industrial areas of the South. As such, the new cohorts of labour were unlikely to be as deferential as their predecessors.25
One other fact concerning the workforce and the labour market needs to be mentioned. The increase in educational opportunities in the 1960s had had a twofold effect: on the one hand, it had taken increasing numbers of young people out of the factories, thus increasing the rigidity of supply in this sector of the market; on the other, it meant that those who did go into the factories were more literate and more aware than previous generations. The hidebound textbooks of the Italian schools in the 1960s were hardly manuals for militants, but the connection between increased literacy and the agitations of the ‘hot autumn’ is evident.
Within the factories, too, conditions had changed. The major restructuring that followed the crisis of 1964–5 had resulted in increased mechanization and the speeding-up of production lines. The spread of piece-rate working had created further differentials between workers. Foremen had been given greater powers to grant favours and make job allocations. Management control and surveillance was on the increase.26
Finally, there can be little doubt that in the 1960s a profound gap opened up between the union shop-floor organizations, such as they were, and the mass of the operai comuni. At the Borletti factory in Milan the internal commission was composed predominantly of male skilled workers, many of whom had been at the factory since 1945. The majority of the employees were, by contrast, young unskilled women workers, whose complaints about speed-ups, foremen and piece-working found little sympathy from the internal commission. The operai comuni lacked adequate representation. In 1968–9 they responded by taking matters into their own hands.27
The first workers' struggles of 1968 took place not in the major Italian factories but in more peripheral areas, both geographically and in terms of production, and above all in factories where the trade unions were traditionally weak. The most dramatic of these first struggles was at the Marzotto textile factory at Valdagno, in the Venetian hills. The factory dated back to 1836, and the Marzotto family had established there a long tradition of Catholic paternalism. In the 1960s the paternalism continued, but was accompanied by a radical reorganization of production. As in so many other factories, time and motion studies led to faster work rhythms, piece-work bonuses were made less accessible, real wages fell and management threatened some 400 redundancies. The trade unions had never been strong at Marzotto, and workers responded to the decline in their conditions with spontaneous protest action. One night in April 1968 the office containing all the new time-charts was broken into and the charts destroyed. On 19 April a demonstration some 4,000 strong, including a high percentage of women, marched through the town. In the main square they pulled down the statue of Count Gaetano Marzotto, the founder of the textile dynasty. The police responded by making forty-two arrests. In the ensuing furore, it was significant that the town council, overwhelmingly Christian Democrat, took the side of the workers, demanding the release of those arrested and the intervention of the government to re-establish social harmony.28
Valdagno was an isolated case, but was indicative of a new spirit that was sweeping through the central and northern factories in the spring of 1968. In March the trade unions had called for a nationwide strike in support of the demand for higher pensions. The response exceeded all expectations: in Milan alone some 300,000 metalworkers were involved, and white-collar workers joined the protest in significant numbers.29 Day by day, events at home and abroad served to increase workers' self-confidence. The huge general strike in France in May 1968, with its brief demonstration of workers' power, made a profound impression in Italy. So, too, did the student movement. Although working-class opinion was divided, some young workers viewed student anti-authoritarianism with considerable sympathy.30
From the summer of 1968 onwards the student movement itself underwent a profound transformation. As students abandoned the universities and began picketing outside the factory gates, the movement lost its libertarian and spontaneous character. The accent was now on organization and on the need to lay the bases for a new revolutionary party which would wrest workers' loyalties away from the PCI. Here again, events in France played a major role. For many on the Italian far left, it seemed as if a real possibility of revolution had existed in Paris at the end of May 1968; it had been let slip through lack of coordination and the absence of any political leadership other than that of the ultra-cautious French Communist Party. It was important for Italian revolutionaries not to make the same mistake. What was needed was organization, ideology, discipline and revolutionary strategy.
Thus, from the autumn of 1968 onwards, the Italian new left was born, a left that was really not new at all, but as old as the Russian Revolution itself. Leninism, in one form or another, became the dominant model for nearly all the new groupings; the disagreements which had characterized fifty years of international Communism were now repeated on a miniature scale.
A bewildering number of revolutionary groups sprang up in these months. There were the Maoists of Servire il Popolo (‘Serve the People’), with their attention to peasant politics, their fanatical dedication and extreme discipline; Avanguardia Operaia (‘Workers Vanguard’), centred first in Milan, an orthodox Leninist organization, anti-Stalin but pro-Mao; the Movimento Studentesco (‘Student Movement’), with its stronghold at the state university of Milan, theorizing on the central role of the students, sympathetic to Stalinism; Lotta Continua (‘Unceasing Struggle’), libertarian, irreverent and chaotic, the most innovative of the groups; Potere Operaio (‘Workers' Power’), with considerable influence in Turin and Porto Marghera, convinced of its own superiority and of the prime importance of an external vanguard on Leninist lines; last but not least Il Manifesto, a small breakaway group from the left of the Communist Party, mainly intellectuals of some seniority, who were to found a famous and long-lasting daily newspaper of the same title.31
The Italian revolutionary groups, taken together, were the largest new left in Europe. Throughout the period 1968–76, they mobilized many thousands of militants in unceasing and exhausting activity, with the aim of creating a widespread anti-capitalist and revolutionary consciousness among the Italian working class. However, the groups were fatally flawed from their inception. In the first place, they were hopelessly and ferociously divided. Ideology was all. Their newspapers and periodicals were full of complex and mostly unintelligible theoretical analysis, much of which purported to establish the greater correctness of one group's political line over another. United action, let alone unification, was rarely achieved.
Secondly, the groups rapidly became mini-versions of the major political parties, with their own hierarchies (almost entirely male), and strutting ‘leaderini’ (little leaders). Even Lotta Continua was not immune in this respect. Thirdly, they all accepted a dangerously casual attitude towards violence, adopting contemporary South American and Asian liberation struggles as their models, with little reflection on their applicability or likely consequences in the Italian situation. Lastly, and most seriously of all, the groups were convinced of the imminence of revolution in the West, and of the feasibility of generalizing the experience of some northern factories to the whole of Italy. None of them analysed in depth the nature of Italian society in the late 1960s, or the likely obstacles to the spread of revolutionary consciousness. For the Italian revolutionary groups, socialist revolution was around the corner, and they communicated this urgency and short-term perspective to the many young people, both middle and working class, who came to join them. But this was voluntarism run riot, the mistaking of a dream for reality, and the over-estimation of what activism alone could achieve.
All this, though, was far in the future. From the autumn of 1968 to that of 1969 the groups lived a magical moment, as significant numbers of workers were attracted to their ideas. In these months in the major northern factories, the trade unions frequently found that the initiative had passed out of their hands and into those of rank and file committees which had come into being either spontaneously or through the activity of the groups. The mould of Italian working-class politics, and much else besides, looked as if it was breaking apart.
The agitations in this, the most subversive year of recent Italian labour history, were begun by skilled workers rather than operai comuni. They were the workers who had had experience of organizing struggles and who were least likely to be intimidated. But once they had begun a factory agitation, the unskilled and semi-skilled workers very soon took over, and with demands that went far beyond those of the more traditional and skilled sectors.32
It was at the Pirelli Bicocca factory in Milan that the pattern of agitation was set for the coming months. The national contract for workers in the rubber industry came up for renewal in late 1967. At Pirelli some 2,000 new workers had recently been taken on. The trade unions at the factory organized three days of strike action in support of the claim, but settled in February 1968 for very modest increases in wages and practically no improvement in conditions. As a result, in June 1969 a group of blue- and white-collar workers at Pirelli, together with members of Avanguardia Operaia, organized the Comitato Unitario di Base (CUB, united base committee), in order to continue the struggle at factory level. The response to the CUB far exceeded the hopes of its organizers. Semi-skilled workers flocked to its meetings in great numbers, the trade unions and the PCI were denounced for their excessive willingness to compromise, and after many months of fierce struggle in the factory the workers won significant gains. The CUB became the model for other base committees in Milan, and the city's revolutionaries began to talk of creating a situation of dual power, in which the CUBs were the embryos of revolutionary workers' councils.33
Out of the Pirelli struggles and the others that followed there emerged a series of workers' demands which aimed to transform the relationship between labour and capital in Italy. Objectives varied from those immediately concerning workers' conditions, such as the end of piece-work rates and the slowing down of assembly lines, to others which were far more wide-ranging. Workers insisted that pay differentials between white- and blue-collar workers should be reduced, and that the differences between blue-collar workers should be diminished. One of the most frequent demands was that semi-skilled workers should automatically be promoted to a higher category after a certain number of years. The base committees urged workers not to accept more pay for jobs that were dangerous or constituted health hazards, but to fight instead to control conditions and safety regulations in the factories. They also demanded an end to wage ‘cages’, i.e. the paying of different rates for the same job in different parts of the country. A skilled engineering worker in the South, they argued, should be paid the same rates as one in the North. After strikes on this issue in the southern provinces of Latina and Taranto, the solidarity shown by northern workers (many of whom, of course, were of southern origin) was so widespread that the trade union leadership was forced to adopt the demand as their own. A successful national struggle was waged on the issue in 1969.34
Finally, and most subversively, the worker militants of 1968 and 1969 argued that wage increases should no longer be linked to productivity. Wages, to use the terminology of the time, were to become an ‘autonomous factor’, not dependent on company profits or the economic situation. The task of the base assemblies was to make sure that the workers received more pay for less work, and thus that the exploitation of workers diminished.
In order to impose these demands the workers invented a whole series of new forms of coordination and struggle. As with the student movement, mass assemblies became the major vehicles of decision-making; workers were urged to participate in person, and not to delegate to trade union leaders the task of directing the struggle. Strikes were organized in new ways. Traditionally, any strike action had been suspended while negotiations were taking place between management and trade unions. Now it continued, often against the wishes of the trade unions. Wildcat strikes became more frequent, assuming novel forms which provoked maximum disruption of the workplace with minimum cost to the workforce. The ‘hiccup’ strike (a singhiozzo) involved a whole factory alternating brief periods of work with others of strike action; the ‘chess-board’ strike (a scacchiera) meant that different parts of the factory, and sometimes even single workers, struck for short periods at different times, so that at any one moment there were some shops working and others not. The emphasis was always on the decentralization of strike action, with workers taking matters into their own hands and coordinating action from the base upwards.35
All this was possible because of a new-found confidence on the shop-floor which profoundly disconcerted management. In many factories foremen were no longer able to exercise any authority. Militant workers demanded that the most authoritarian foremen should be moved out of their shops. Often foremen and lower management were threatened with physical violence; sometimes they were beaten up outside the factory by groups of workers (the so-called pestaggio di massa).36
Finally, mass picketing outside the gates, often with the aid of students, gave way in the course of 1969 (and even more in 1970) to demonstrations inside the factories themselves. A group of workers would down tools, but instead of walking out of the factory, they would begin to organize inside it. Other groups would quickly join them. Within a short space of time all work had stopped, a procession would form, workers would use old oil cans as makeshift drums, slogans would echo through the factory and the demonstration would head for the managing director's office. Sometimes he would make his escape in time; at others he would be temporarily kidnapped and harangued.37
The climax of these months of spontaneous action came, as so often in Italian labour history, with the events at FIAT in Turin, in the summer of 1969. Throughout May and June, young workers, mainly from the South, ‘selvaggi’ and ‘incazzati’ (‘wild’ and ‘outraged’) as Lotta Continua called them, led a series of strikes for better conditions at the giant FIAT Mirafiori plant. Action was coordinated by a student and worker assembly which met at the end of shifts in a lecture hall at the university's Faculty of Medicine. At the beginning of July, the national trade unions called for a one-day general strike in protest at the high level of rents in Italy (see below, pp. 323–6). The rank and file of the worker–student assembly was not impressed: ‘According to these gentlemen the class struggle takes place only on certain days of the year, as if they were Bank Holidays, and they of course decide when. But we are not going to wait for permission from anyone.’38
On the afternoon of the day of the strike, 3 July 1969, an independent demonstration of several thousand workers, both from Mirafiori and other Turin factories, set out from the gates at Mirafiori. The official trade union slogan for the general strike was ‘no more rent rises’ (‘blocco degli affitti’). However, the demonstration that left from Mirafiori had a slogan all of its own, destined both to earn it immortality and to send a shiver down the collective spine of the Italian business class: ‘Che cosa vogliamo? Tutto!’ (‘What do we want? Everything!’) The march soon clashed with the police. As in the Piazza Statuto seven years earlier, the demonstrators responded in kind, constructing barricades along the Corso Traiano, and fighting running battles with police far into the night. The ‘battle of Corso Traiano’, as it came to be called, was followed by mass assemblies in FIAT and other Turin factories, which involved many thousands of workers and students. Tension in Turin ran very high. In contrast to the events in Paris a year earlier, it seemed as if a real alliance, on a revolutionary basis, was being formed between young workers and students. For Guido Viale, one of the leaders of Lotta Continua, the struggle at FIAT represented ‘something which was profoundly different and more mature than all the other experiences which have so far taken place in Europe’.39 A revolutionary process had begun, and the groups were convinced that the autumn of 1969 would see it develop rapidly.
The actual development of the famous autunno caldo (‘hot autumn’) of 1969 turned out to be quite different from that which the groups had expected. Lotta Continua talked in November of a ‘cultural revolution’ taking place in Italy as well as in China: ‘The workers are slowly liberating themselves. In the factories, they are destroying all constituted authority, they are dismantling the instruments which the bosses use to control and divide them, they are overcoming the taboos which until now have kept them as slaves.’40 However, the groups overestimated the depth of the crisis on at least two counts: anti-capitalist consciousness was nowhere near as widespread as they thought, or at least hoped; nor were the traditional loyalties of the working class to the trade unions and the major left-wing parties so easily to be swept aside.
Indeed, the Italian trade unions, showing a notable ability to adapt to changing conditions, succeeded, to use the terminology of the time, in ‘riding the tiger’ of worker militancy. One of the reasons that they were able to do so was because they managed, with some considerable difficulty, to win a partial autonomy from the control of the political parties. This was true both of the CGIL, and, more surprisingly, of the CISL. In the CGIL leaders like Luciano Lama and Bruno Trentin, while remaining Communists, insisted on having freedom of action in determining trade union responses to events in the factories. Often they went far beyond what the more cautious leadership of the party would have liked. Similarly, the CISL moved away from the tight control of the Christian Democrats. The CIS L's metalworkers' section, the FIM, was to be especially prominent in the agitations of the ‘hot autumn’. The FIM became the home for more than one Catholic revolutionary, and sometimes acted more radically than the FIOM, the CGIL's organization for metalworkers. As one FIOM activist at the Innocenti factory in Milan remarked rather ruefully in 1972: ‘That lot [the FIM] have just discovered the class struggle, whereas we discovered it twenty-five years ago.’41
As the trade unions developed an autonomous response to the events of 1968–9 they also moved closer together. Even the UIL, realizing that it risked extinction by remaining a bosses' union, began to make decisions jointly with its larger brothers. The strategy of the trade unions was straightforward. Although a minority of their leaders and members, especially in the FIM, advocated revolutionary syndicalism, the majority wanted to make the trade unions a vehicle for reform. The new demands and forms of struggle that were emerging from the shop-floor were not to be rejected as extremist. Rather, they were to be channelled into trade union campaigns which would ensure permanent victories for labour. The trade unions were to become more powerful, both on the shop-floor and in national politics. Armed with this new strength, they would then force the procrastinating political class to carry through those major reforms which had been promised but not realized by the centre-left governments.42
The first step of this offensive came with the national mobilization for the renewal of the metalworkers' contract. In the autumn of 1969 nearly one and a half million workers were called out on strike at one time or another. The factory agitations, which previously had been confined to certain parts of the workforce within certain firms, now spread to all the major metalworking factories in Italy. The trade unions espoused the cause of the operai comuni, and the employers were taken aback by the trade unions’ aggression and their willingness to use new forms of struggle.
In December 1969, at the end of the ‘hot autumn’, the new national contract was signed. It represented a significant victory for the trade unions and for the new militancy. Equal wage increases were to be granted to all, the forty-hour week was to be introduced in the course of the following three years, and special concessions were made to apprentices and worker-students. The trade unions also won the right to organize mass assemblies at the workplace. They were to be held within the working day and were to be paid for by the employers, up to a maximum of ten hours in each calendar year. The revolutionary groups denounced the final contract as a ‘sell-out’, but there was no doubt that a new unity had been created around the platform put forward by the metalworkers' unions. The ‘hot autumn’, then, for all its later notoriety, was not a further development of the revolutionary trends of the previous year, but -rather the reassertion of trade union leadership in the factories.43
In 1970 and 1971, the fight for improved working conditions and for greater control at the workplace spread into many other sectors of production. After the metalworkers, it was the turn of chemical and building workers, railwaymen and other sections of organized labour. Agitations spilled out of the major workplaces into the minor ones, and out of industry into the tertiary sector. Many white-collar workers and technicians went on strike for the first time. Public-sector workers – postmen, teachers, hospital workers, civil servants, etc. – also moved on to the offensive. Their objectives were a mixture of corporate self-defence and radical desire for change. They demanded higher wages to maintain the distance between themselves and blue-collar workers, but many of them also fought for greater democracy at their workplaces and for more efficiency in the public services.44
Some far-flung parts of the tertiary sector saw strike action for the first time ever. Shopworkers and hotel workers, mainly women, waged bitter struggles for better conditions and for increased trade union representation. Agitations even spread into bars and shops. Here in the heart of the retail industry employers were at best paternalistic and at worst despotic. Between 1969 and 1971 their power was challenged, albeit in a very patchy way, for the first time. Most remarkably of all, some women doing piece-work at home went on strike against the putting-out system which enslaved them. Their protest was short-lived, however, because the suppliers of raw materials simply moved their operations elsewhere.45
Labour agitations were thus more widespread than at any time since the war. In itself this was disconcerting enough for the employers. Worse still was the fact that peace did not, as it always had in the past, return to the factories once the major national contracts had been signed. Whereas in France the great strike of May had soon given way to the reassertion of managerial power, in Italy the protests went on and on. The summer of 1970 was a low point, but in the autumn the workforces of the major factories moved on to the offensive again. By now the traditional supremacy of national negotiations over plant bargaining had all but disappeared. The initiative had passed firmly to plant level: in each workplace the trade unions pressed hard and with considerable success for the abolition of lower grades, the transitional nature of the third grade, which was that of most semi-skilled workers, and the establishment of the inquadramento unico, the single wage scale for all blue- and white-collar workers.46
Plant bargaining proved effective because the unions responded quickly to workers' demands for greater representation and democracy. The winning of the right of assembly during working hours had been the first step in this direction. In the course of 1970 and 1971, first the CGIL and then the other unions went further and approved the introduction of a radical new system of representation, based on the creation of factory councils. The councils were composed of delegates from every shop or department in the workplace. Delegates were elected in a secret ballot by all the workforce, whether trade union members or not, and were subject to recall at any time. The meetings of the factory council were open to all workers. The duties of the councils, as cited in the statute of one of them (GTE Autelco, Milan, October 1970), were as follows: ‘to coordinate and elaborate in close liaison with the workers all the trade union activity of the factory (company, sectional and individual problems, political education, plant bargaining); to encourage meetings with other factories and other categories of workers to exchange experiences; to take initiatives to help resolve workers' problems in the factory and in society; to contribute, by means of serious debate, to the elaboration of trade union strategy’.47
The councils spread very rapidly. They had many advantages over the old internal commissions: they represented workers' interests more directly, with a greater number of delegates from the workers, and they had more power within the factories and closer links with the trade unions o outside it. The employers' associations resisted their introduction for as long as they could, but were forced gradually to accept the inevitable. Many of the revolutionary groups also opposed the councils, though for very different reasons from the employers. The groups argued that a cap was being put on workers' spontaneity, and that the autonomy of 1968–9 was being replaced by gradual incorporation. The polemics between the groups and the trade unions over this issue were bitter and uncompromising.
However, the tide of trade union success was unstoppable. At their height in 1965, the old internal commissions in the metalworking industry had numbered 1,023, representing 552,148 workers. By 1972 in the same industry there were 4,291 factory councils, representing 1,055,592 workers. At the same time trade union membership increased by leaps and bounds. Combined figures for the CGIL and CISL show membership growing from 4,083,000 in 1968 to 5,399,000 in 1972, and 6,675,000 by 1975. In the public sector, the CGIL had a 15 per cent annual growth rate; to take one dramatic example, there were only 4,000 teachers who were members of the CGIL in 1968, but 90,000 by the beginning of 1975.48
Only in one area, and probably the most crucial, did trade union strategy fail. The unions had hoped to use their new-found strength to force the government to pass those major reforms on issues such as housing, the health service, the tax system, etc., which affected the lives of every worker. Between 1969 and 1971 they launched major campaigns on these issues; while some succeeded, like that on pensions, the majority ended in substantial failure. But perhaps it is best to postpone the discussion of why this was so until the political and economic mediation of the ‘hot autumn’ can be examined as a whole (see below, pp. 326–31).
The period from 1971 to 1973 was one of substantial consolidation. With the economic crisis of 1971, and the growth of inflation (see below, pp. 331–2), the favourable economic conjuncture of 1968–9 was seen to have come to a definite close. The maintenance of real wage levels and the defence of jobs now took pride of place in trade union actions, rather than the attempt to change the organization of production. Attack gave way to defence.49
At the same time, the impulse towards joint action between the three trade union confederations, while remaining strong, fell short of the target of complete reunification. It was supposed that 1972 would be the year when the three confederations dissolved themselves, and 1973 the year of complete unification. Instead, in July 1972, the trade unions signed a pact which gave birth to the federation CGIL–CISL–UIL. The federal formula suited the unions best, because it allowed for close cooperation while continuing to guarantee their individual autonomy. Total unification had in fact been viewed with some apprehension from both right and left: the right feared that it would be swamped by the numerical superiority of the CGIL, the left that there would be a repeat of 1945–7, when the moderates had successfully vetoed all radical proposals within the old united trade union.50
In spite of the general defensive climate of these years, the number of strikes and workplace agitations showed little sign of diminishing. In 1972, nearly four and a half million workers were involved in conflicts at their place of work, and this number rose to 6,133,000 in 1973. Only in 1969 had a greater number of workers been involved in protests.51
The climate of permanent agitation and conflict had both its positive and negative aspects. For tens of thousands of Italian workers the late 1960s and early 1970s was a sort of golden era, when they became aware of the power of collective action, and acquired a new self-confidence. Mario Mosca, one of the founders of the CUB at Pirelli Bicocca, remembers 1968 ‘as the best year of my life. It was the year in which as a worker I felt myself to be a protagonist and the master of my fate. And I continued to have that sensation for the following two years. It was wonderful to be alive.’52 In 1962 Clizia N. had been, as we have seen (p. 224), a very young isolated worker from the South who had been treated in her first days in a Milanese factory as if she was suffering from an infectious disease. But in the late sixties she began to change: ‘I became more of a chatterbox; I began to be able to communicate.’ She joined the CGIL and in 1974, at the age of twenty-nine, she looked back with satisfaction on her experience of the ‘hot autumn’: ‘You get a lot out of going to work in a factory. You learn things directly. Not like a housewife who learns things second hand. She can't have the same experience as a woman who works in a factory where you discuss many things and learn a lot. Small things too; but you manage to understand, to learn…’53
On the other hand, the continuous militancy of these years and the hyperactivity of the most committed workers had very high costs. Domenico Norcia (see p. 221) recalls: ‘I continued to be politically active but with tremendous consequences for my family life… Sometimes I'd come back from meetings at two or three at night; my wife was at the window, waiting for me and crying. This happened often in 1972 and 1973.’54
In addition, workers' agitations in the factories sometimes, though by no means always, culminated in violence against persons. Managers and foremen, as we have seen, were the most obvious targets. However, those who refused to strike were also much at risk. Norcia again recalls one terrible incident at FIAT Mirafiori in the early seventies. The office staff had refused to join a blue-collar strike. A demonstration of some 4,000 workers forced them to leave the offices on pain of physical expulsion. As the office staff finally emerged, they had to run the gauntlet between long lines of jeering workers, who spat at them, kicked them, and humiliated and physically assaulted the terrified women.55
At the end of 1972 the metalworkers' contract came up for renewal again. The employers felt stronger than in 1969 and in the new year broke off negotiations, hoping to divide the unions. Their action produced the opposite effect. The first three months of 1973 saw a great resurgence of workers' militancy, which culminated in March with a symbolic two-day occupation of FIAT Mirafiori. Confindustria quickly returned to the negotiating table. The resulting national metalworkers' contract was a further substantial victory for the trade union movement. The single wage scale for blue- and white-collar workers (inquadramento unico) was agreed to, and a notable reduction took place in the differentials between the highest and lowest point on this new scale. A novel and striking modification in the working week was also successfully negotiated. Metalworkers were henceforth to enjoy 150 hours per year paid study leave, in which courses were to be organized by the trade unions. The 150 hours’ education scheme rapidly spread to other sections of Italian labour. Workers not only studied for higher qualifications, but demanded courses which were extremely varied and markedly political in content. University and school teachers, trade union cadres and workers, came together in an ambitious attempt to realize a minor cultural revolution.56 By the end of 1973, then, it was clear that the counter-cultural force of 1968–9 was far from exhausted, and that in spite of economic recession the workers' movement was more solidly and militantly established than ever before.
In these years, collective action aiming to transform existing social and economic relations spread into nearly every part of Italian life. Everywhere, but especially in the Centre and the North of the country, groups of activists challenged the way in which power was exercised, resources distributed, social classes divided.
For the first time, though not in any systematic way, the modus operandi of the various parts of the state apparatus was brought into question. New groupings amongst state employees attacked entrenched hierarchies and tried to democratize structures and attitudes. Magistratura Democratica (Democratic Magistrates) was probably the most renowned of these new pressure groups within the state. Under its umbrella, young magistrates and judges, strongly influenced by the intellectual climate of '68, tried to reform the antiquated legal system, to diminish the intolerable delays in the administration of justice, to evolve less class-based forms of justice. The ‘pretori d'assalto’ (literally ‘the assault guards of local stipendiary magistrates’, though in English the two terms seem improbably associated) soon achieved considerable renown. As one of them wrote later:
Hardly a day passed when the members of one of the lowest ranks of the judiciary were not in the limelight. They intervened in every sort of area: from pollution to food additives, from building speculation to surveillance in the factories. Their administration of justice was aimed not, as had always previously been the case, at beggars and thieves, pedlars and petty debtors, but at major economic interests and at leading political and administrative figures.57
The revolutionary groups, especially Lotta Continua, also launched initiatives in two previously untouched areas of the state – the army and the prisons. From 1970 onwards Lotta Continua's newspaper contained a regular supplement called Proletari in Divisa (‘Proletarians in Uniform’). It was aimed at the conscripts who formed the majority of the army, and who had to undergo eighteen months' military service of notable futility and deprivation. Proletari in Divisa was distributed clandestinely on a wide scale in the principal barracks of Friuli, Trentino, Alto Adige and Piedmont. Nuclei of activists organized strikes over conditions, and set up liaison committees and political education sessions. They also appeared in uniform and dark glasses at left-wing demonstrations, as symbols of the unity that was hopefully being forged between the proletariat of the factory and that of the army.58
Another regular column in Lotta Continua's newspaper was entitled ‘I dannati della terra’ (‘The damned of the earth’). It contained letters from and information about Italy's appalling prisons. Horrific details emerged of daily life in the prisons: overcrowding, intimidation, lack of exercise, undernourishment and the regular miscarriage of justice were recurring themes. The young criminal, brought up in the shanty towns of Rome and Naples, or on the extreme periphery of Milan and Turin, became for Lotta Continua a potentially revolutionary subject. How far the group gained sympathizers in the prisons is not clear; almost certainly it had less success here than in the barracks.59
However, it was in civil society, not the state, that radical alternatives spread most rapidly: ‘red’ markets, kindergartens, restaurants, surgeries, social clubs, etc., opened (and often shut) one after another. Their aim was to organize social life along quite different lines, which not only challenged the individualism and segmentation of modern urban society, but also superseded the subcultures of the traditional left.60
No social movement was larger than that concerned with housing. Tens of thousands of Italians came together, if only temporarily, in a fierce struggle to gain proper accommodation for themselves and their children, and to establish fair rents on a national scale. The way Italy had modernized – rapid urbanization unaccompanied by town planning or adequate housing programmes – could not produce, at least in the short term, a new model of social integration based on contented urban individualism. Instead it gave birth, in the supercharged atmosphere of the years after 1968, to a widespread rank-and-file movement which claimed adequate housing as an elementary right.
The housing struggles were fought in two different areas of the major cities: on the periphery, where the public authorities IACP and GESCAL (see p. 247) had constructed or were in the process of constructing modern apartment blocks; and in the centre, where decaying popular quarters of the city were under threat from property developers.
On the periphery, major rent strikes took place in Milan, Turin, Rome and Naples. In Milan between 1968 and 1970 an estimated 40 per cent of the 100,000 families living on public housing estates went on partial or total rent strike. Their objectives were twofold: to reduce rents to an acceptable level vis-à-vis income (not more than 10 per cent); and to put pressure on the authorities to provide adequate services (schools, parks, shops, transport, etc.) for estates that were no more than concrete deserts.
One minor but well-documented example of this latter problem was the case of the phantom post office in the new Milanese quarter of Quarto Oggiaro (population of 7,200 in 1959, growing to 80,000 in 1972). Over the years the inhabitants had waited in vain for a post office: in 1964 the local section of the DC had promised to ‘consider’ the problem; in 1967 the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications had assured a DC deputy that plans for the post office were at ‘an advanced stage’, and that building would begin in ‘a relatively short period of time’; in 1968 the provincial director of posts announced that ‘the preliminary stage’ of the necessary paperwork had been completed; in 1970 the regional director of posts announced that various buildings were ‘under consideration for the siting of a post office’; in the same year the local DC talked of the post office at Quarto Oggiaro as ‘a concrete reality’. By September 1973, there was still no post office, concrete or otherwise.61 Such failings could not be attributed to malicious discrimination against the quarter; no one's interests were served by such protracted delay. They were, rather, straightforward evidence of the malfunctioning of the state apparatus, of its incapacity in the absence of radical reform to meet the needs of its citizens.
The leadership on the housing estates was normally divided in two: in Milan, for instance, the Unione Inquilini (‘Tenants’ Union') was a conglomerate that united the revolutionary groups and some elements of the trade unions; SUNIA, on the other hand, was the organization identified with the CGIL and the Communist Party.
On no issue did the two organizations clash more fiercely than on the question of squatting. In all the major Italian cities the revolutionary groups encouraged homeless or poorly housed families to occupy apartment blocks constructed by the public authorities but not yet lived in. Some of these squats assumed massive proportions: in Turin, for instance, in 1974 some six hundred families were involved in the occupation of the new Falchera estate. The PCI denounced the squats because the flats had already been assigned to families high up on the housing authorities' waiting-lists. There was a real risk of a ‘war between the poor’, of physical clashes between those who were squatting in the flats and those to whom they had been officially assigned. The PCI's position had much to commend it, but in the early seventies at least there was little doubt that squatting produced results. Magistrates quite regularly refused to condone police action in evicting and arresting squatters; and the local authorities, precisely in order to avoid fights breaking out, often found squatters permanent accommodation elsewhere.62
In the inner city it was much more difficult for the housing struggles to achieve a satisfactory outcome. Here too, tenants' committees agitated for rent reductions, but their main objectives were an end to evictions, the restructuring of the oldest and most run-down houses, the vetoing of new office-block construction. At the heart of Milan, in the Garibaldi-Isola quarter, a struggle along these lines was waged throughout the seventies. The tenants' aim was to force the local government to intervene. The Milan municipal government, a centre-left coalition, made many vague promises, but the destruction and transformation of the quarter continued inexorably. In the inner city the property speculators' lobby was opposed to any compromise settlements, and it made its weight felt where it mattered most.63
Overall, in spite of the mobilization of large numbers of people and some spectacular local successes, it cannot be said that the struggles made any great impression on the housing problem in Italy. Subjective failings, especially excessive factionalism, certainly played their part. But the principal problem was that agitation was for the most part confined to the public sector, where there was some possibility of gaining concessions from local authorities. However, as we have seen, it was the private sector, not the public, that dominated the building industry in Italy. Data on immigrant housing in fifty-five communes of the Milanese hinterland showed, for instance, that in 1971 only 6.4 per cent were living in public housing, while 33.7 per cent lived with relatives or friends and 43.1 per cent lived in private housing.64 The dominant private sector was a jungle where collective action from the base could be organized only with the greatest difficulty. In such circumstances, the way in which struggle was reflected and mediated through political action became all-important. Only reform at a national level could hope to answer the demand for fair rents, adequate services and decent housing for all.
In May 1968 national elections were held. The results, as usual, changed very little. The DC gained 0.8 per cent, totalling 39.1 per cent of the vote; the PCI gained a little more, 1.6 per cent, and reached 26.9 per cent. The principal loser was the new United Socialist Party (PSU), which totalled only 14.5 per cent, 5.4 per cent less than the former PSI and PSDI. The principal gainer was the PSIUP, the left-wing split off from the PSI. The PSIUP, which gained 4.5 per cent of the vote, seemed the party most in tune with the social ferment of the moment.65
After the elections, as unrest spread to the factories, it became clear that the sleepy, stable Moro governments of the mid-sixties were a thing of the past. The PSU split into its component parts (PSI and PSD I) again. The twelfth congress of the DC in June 1969 was riven by faction. Eight groupings contested the conference; the largest of them, the Dorotei, managed to gain only 38 per cent of the delegates, and in the autumn dissolved themselves.66 The D C was more divided than ever, at precisely the moment when calm and clear-headed leadership was most needed. Between 1968 and 1972 there were a series of short-lived governments, mainly centre-left coalitions. Three of them were presided over by the insipid DC politician Mariano Rumor. All of them testified to the nervousness of the politicians in the face of the crisis, and their inability to find a stable formula for government.
However, beneath this perennial image of governmental crisis, certain changes of attitude can be clearly discerned. Both the DC and the PSI, the major coalition partners, were unwilling to turn their backs on the social ferment, or choose the path of simple inactivity and repression. Emilio Colombo, who was to become Prime Minister in August 1970, expressed these feelings well at the end of the national council of the DC in January 1969: ‘Where have we fallen short? It seems to me that… reforming action has marked time so that the structures of civil society have aged badly and the whole fabric has deteriorated. Social forces have not found suitable channels for the expression of their freedom. That is why pluralism… is actually turning into disorder, with a wave of unrest and sometimes of irrationality.’67 The DC leaders could not remain insensitive to the pressure for change coming from their collateral organizations, principally the ACLI and the much changed CISL. For the PSI too, now that the PSIUP was barking at its heels, a passive presence in government was tantamount to suicide.68
As a result, the period from 1969 onwards saw the politicians mediate collective protest by a sudden increase in reform legislation – patchy, unprogrammatic, insufficient, but distinctly reform. Some of it, to be fair, had been initiated by the centre-left governments of the sixties and only now emerged from the long preparatory tunnel of the state bureaucracy. This was the case with regional government, which was finally introduced in the spring of 1970. Twenty-two years had passed since the provisions for its institution had been written into the Constitution. Fifteen regular regional governments now took their place alongside the five regions which enjoyed a special autonomy (Val d'Aosta, Trentino-Alto Adige, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sicily and Sardinia). Each regional government had its own elected council and enjoyed greater powers than those accorded to the communes and provinces. Each region had the right to legislate on all major issues that affected it – housing, health, social welfare, agriculture, etc. – provided that its laws were consonant with ‘the framework of national legislation’.
In June 1970 the first regional elections were held. There were no major shifts in voting patterns, but the PSI and PSD I, standing separately, recouped a large part of the losses sustained in the 1968 national election. The most important result was that which the centre and right-wing parties had always predicted and feared – the creation of a Red Belt in central Italy, comprising Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and Umbria.
The institution of the regions was certainly a major step. So too was the introduction of the right to hold referenda, which had also been included in the Constitution, but came into being only in May 1970. The new law stipulated that a referendum could be held if 500,000 citizens or five regional councils or one fifth of either House of Parliament requested it. No referendum could propose legislation; it could only exercise the negative power of repealing an existing law.
Taken together, the institution of the regions and of the referendum represented a significant shift towards decentralization and towards the ordinary citizen exercising some minimal control over the decision-making process. However, much remained to be done. The gap between representative democracy and the direct democracy advocated by both workers and students remained very great. The regions had insufficient funds and personnel. Furthermore, they were instituted in isolation, unaccompanied by any wider attempt to eliminate the worst practices of Italian public administration. There was thus nothing to stop the regional governments from becoming new repositories for the abuse of power on an intermediate level between the communes and the national government.69
These two political reforms were accompanied by a number of social ones. After further mass protests over pensions had followed the demonstration of March 1968, the government agreed, in February 1969, to raise considerably the level of pensions for those who had been in regular work. For a person retiring after forty years of work, the new law guaranteed 74 per cent of his or her average annual wage in the five years prior to retirement. This was a significant victory for the trade unions, though it left unresolved the problem of fair and automatic pension provision for those who could not demonstrate any such regular employment.70
Little more than a year later, in May 1970, the Statuto dei Lavoratori (Workers' Charter) became law. Pushed through the Council of Ministers and Parliament with great determination by the Socialist Giacomo Brodolini, the Workers' Charter both reflected and guaranteed the achievements of the ‘hot autumn’. The charter consisted of a series of articles laying down the rights of the worker at his or her place of work: the right of assembly, the right to organize trade unions within the workplace, the right to protection in dangerous jobs, above all the right to appeal to the courts against unfair dismissal. In the early seventies workers made considerable use of the charter, and judges, especially in the lower courts and in the Centre and North of the country, frequently found in their favour. Italy at last had a labour law which was not altogether one-sided in its articles and application.71
The same year, 1970, also saw the culmination of the long struggle to introduce divorce into Italy. The Socialist deputy Loris Fortuna had first introduced his divorce bill in October 1965. It was moderate in content and laid down careful limitations to the right of divorce. None the less, its progress was, predictably, blocked by the Christian Democrats and subject to fierce attack by the church hierarchy. Gradually lay opinion, much helped by the activities of the LID (the Lega Italiana per I'Istituzione del Divorzio), gathered in support of Fortuna's initiative. In 1969 further proposals by the Liberal Antonio Bislini were incorporated into the bill, and the Communists lent their support. Within the Chamber of Deputies the opposition to the new legislation could count only on the votes of the DC and neo-Fascists. In November 1969, with the LID gathered outside the Chamber of Deputies and the Cardinal Vicar of Rome inviting the faithful to pray for preservation from the plague of divorce, the Chamber of Deputies passed the Fortuna–Bislini bill by 325 votes to 283. There was then a delay of one year while the bill was approved, and further modified, by the Senate. It finally returned to the Chamber to become law on 1 December 1970. Lay Italy had won a notable victory.72
No such unequivocal judgement can be passed on the housing reform of October 1971. Once again, housing proved to be a key area where reform foundered on the rocks of entrenched interest and state practice. It is worth taking a little space to try to explain this sequence of events.
In the period 1969–71 the forces pushing for reform in the area of housing and town planning were very much more powerful than at the time of Sullo and the beginning of the centre-left. The principal difference was that the trade union movement had entered the fray. As we have mentioned, the most ambitious part of trade union strategy was the attempt to use the widespread militancy of these years as a lever with which to achieve fundamental reform. This meant that the reformists were no longer a relatively isolated group of politicians as in 1963, but were sustained by a mass movement of considerable proportions.
In November 1969 the trade unions called a one-day general strike on the housing question. It was an enormous success, with hundreds of thousands of workers participating. The unions then began to negotiate directly with the government during 1970 and 1971. Their basic demands were for greatly increased state spending in the public housing sector, the establishment of a fair-rents system for tenants in state-owned housing, and guarantees for the building unions in terms of immediate construction programmes. Negotiations dragged on for many months, interspersed with other regional and provincial strikes called by the unions.
When the law of October 1971 was finally passed, it was given qualified approval by the unions, but in fact met their demands in only a very partial way. The whole system of public housing was simplified and handed over to the local authorities – regional, provincial and communal. Powers were granted to them to expropriate areas necessary for public construction and services, and to pay compensation only at average agricultural prices; large sums of money were assigned for a new public housing programme. However, in practice, and this was the acid test, the law proved impossibly complicated, and there was no overall control over the way in which it was applied (or not applied) in the localities. By January 1974 only 42bn lire had been spent out of the 1,062bn available.73
Why were the reformists unable to guarantee effective public housing reform, even when they were at the height of their influence? It would be wrong to accuse the trade unions of Utopianism. Their demands were directed towards the public, not the private, sector, and were for the sort of spending on public housing which had characterized government intervention in many other European countries. Rather, there was a distinct lack of unison between the trade unions and those political parties interested in reform. The parties, including the PCI, resented the trade unions’ intrusion into a political sphere – that of negotiations at government level – which they considered to be exclusively theirs. Enrico Berlinguer, the new secretary of the PCI, made these reservations explicit in 1971. As a result, the reformist forces, rather than having a single strategy and leadership, were pulled in several different directions.74
In addition, the trade unions were unwilling to link the rank-and-file struggles on housing to their negotiations with the government. The sort of pressure they put on the government was a fairly ritualistic one, consisting of strike action which soon became repetitive and of diminishing potential. The mobilization had no precise objectives on a local level, no forms of action on the housing estates which would have kept the government under constant pressure. The metalworkers' unions proposed such a strategy in February 1971, but the desire for unity at the highest levels of the trade union leadership ruled out action which might have been considered ‘extremist’.75
However important these failings, they were not the whole story. The reform emerged as a botched job principally because those opposed to it used the instruments of the state more successfully than its supporters. First, when the law was going through Parliament, they introduced so many amendments as to make its application very difficult. Secondly, after the law had been passed, the nature of the central bureaucracy and most of local government made implementation difficult and procrastination all too easy. The reformers, by contrast, had little or no statecraft. Their inexperience of government made them unaware of the probable consequences of certain decisions. Above all, behind their opponents' victory lurked the unpalatable fact that it was the state itself that needed reform before all else. However strong the reformist army, the marshes of the Italian state apparatus could be relied upon to slow or stop its forward march.76
The other demands for reform raised by the trade unions, in the fields of health, schools, transport, etc., met with even less success. Various promises were extracted from the governments of the time, but little or nothing came of them.
In the area of fiscal reform, some progress was achieved through the new regime that was introduced in the period 1971–3. For the first time, the principle of progressive income taxation was extended to the whole working population. However, the results made a mockery of the principle proclaimed. While dependent workers had income tax deducted at source, no proper method was introduced of tax collection from the self-employed. From shopkeepers to lawyers, massive tax evasion was the order of the day. As R. Valiani has commented: ‘In Italy, as in other industrial societies, there operates the principle of taxation serving redistributive purposes, but with one notable anomaly: that is, redistribution takes place in the opposite direction to the ideal one, since income tax is concentrated in those sectors with the least ability to pay.’77
In one field alone, that of investment in the South, the demands of the reformers corresponded, at least in part, with the intentions of an important section of the state's élites. The barons of public industry, ever more powerful at a time when the politicians were weak and divided, had chosen the South as their favoured area for investment, and between 1969 and 1973 gave a further notable impetus to that process of industrialization which has already been described for the 1960s (see pp. 230–31). The share of the Mezzogiorno in total national investments passed from 28.1 per cent in 1969 to 33.5 per cent in 1973. In addition, in 1971 the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno announced a further shift towards industrial investment.
Naturally, the mode of investment did not correspond at all precisely to what the unions demanded. Investment continued in large, capital-intensive plants, principally in petrochemicals and steel. In the mid and late seventies both these were to prove disastrous choices vis-à-vis the world economy. The trade unions had demanded instead more varied forms of investment and higher levels of employment. They were not satisfied on either point, but no one could deny the positive, if limited, spin-off for the southern economy deriving from public industry's commitment to it.78
The government's record on reform at this period was amongst the most active in the history of the Republic, a genuine if partial attempt to mediate social protest in a constructive fashion. The same could not be said for the government's economic policies as a whole, nor for the employers' response to the ‘hot autumn’.
In terms of the international economic system, the period after 1969 was characterized by increasing signs of strain. In most advanced capitalist countries over-accumulation and tight labour markets tended to push up wages and threaten profits. The break-up of the Bretton Woods system and the dollar devaluations of the early seventies created a climate of financial uncertainty. The student revolt and the explosion of workers' agitations further sapped business confidence.79
In Italy, the authorities replied to the wave of wage increases at the end of 1969 with moderate deflationary policies. They hoped in this way to produce an economic situation similar to that which had occurred after 1964: the expulsion of excess labour, a rapid readjustment of the balance of forces in the factories, an increase in productivity and a revival of profits.80
Nothing of the sort happened. Deflationary measures served only to discourage further an employing class which had been menaced much more fundamentally than in the period 1961–3. In addition, there were no political signs that the government was firmly behind the employers rather than the working-class movement. In France, as Salvati and Gigliobianco have shown, the decisive victory of the conservative front in the June elections of 1968 had restored business confidence and opened the way for an unparalleled boom in investments.81 In Italy, by contrast, no such political reassurance was forthcoming and the reformism described above seemed to be oriented in the opposite direction.
In these circumstances the employers did not respond in a uniform manner. State industry and large private groups like FIAT and Pirelli maintained high rates of investment, thereby mitigating in part the generally depressed state of the economy. They also sought to come to terms with the new situation in the factories, seeking to strengthen the trade unions as a counterbalance to rank-and-file organization and action. As Giovanni Agnelli told Eugenio Scalfari in November 1972: ‘With profits at zero levels, the crisis will not resolve itself, but may become cancerous, with fatal effects. We have only two choices before us: either direct confrontation to reduce wage levels, or a series of bold and path-breaking initiatives to eliminate the most intolerable examples of waste and inefficiency. It is superfluous to say what our choice will be.’82
Most of the private sector responded in more traditional and negative ways. As wage increases were passed on indiscriminately to prices, inflation began to rise markedly. The flight of capital took on menacing proportions; investments slumped dramatically. Most significantly, Confindustria remained firmly in the hands of those who responded to the situation only with prophecies of doom. In 1972 its president went so far as to accuse the trade unions of ‘subversion of the country's democratic institutions’. Once again, as at the time of the centre-left, the more open-minded or neo-corporatist elements of Italian capital seem to have been swamped by a wave of conservative hysteria. It was to be 1974 before the die-hard elements in Confindustria were replaced.83
In Italy, as in the other Western economies, a mini-boom alleviated matters temporarily in 1972–3. However, in the course of 1973 the Italian situation became critical. The metalworkers' victory meant that real wages showed no signs of decreasing. The flight of capital had intensified. In these circumstances, the authorities decided that they could no longer defend the lira; from February 1973 onwards the Italian currency was allowed to float, and depreciated markedly in the course of the next two years. Imports came to cost very much more, just at the moment when the price of raw materials (and, as we shall see, of oil in particular) was rising very fast. As Gaetano Rasi has written: ‘the devaluation of the lira still appears today not just to have been an unfortunate choice but a mistaken one from the very beginning. The greater severity of Italy's economic recession in 1974–5, when compared to all other Western countries, without doubt has this as its dominant cause.’84 Italy soon had the highest rate of inflation of all the Western economies. Consumers were hit hardest. Widespread uncertainty and instability ensued.
There was one other reply to the ‘hot autumn’, and it was the most insidious of all. On 12 December 1969 a bomb exploded in the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Milan's Piazza Fontana. Sixteen people died, eighty-eight were wounded. Most of the victims were farmers and tradesmen, in from the Lombard plains on a weekly visit to the bank. On the same day two other bombs of the same type went off in Rome, wounding eighteen people.
The police and the Ministry of the Interior immediately announced, with undue haste, that anarchists were responsible. The police then began to round up anarchist suspects; one of them was Pietro Valpreda, a ballet dancer from Rome. He was soon accused, principally on the evidence of a taxi-driver, of being the principal perpetrator of the Milanese massacre. Valpreda was to spend three years in prison awaiting trial, and was only finally cleared of any association with the crime in 1985.85
Worse still was the fate which awaited another anarchist, Giuseppe (Pino) Pinelli. A Milanese railwayman, Pinelli was arrested on the night of the bomb attack, and spent the next forty-eight hours in the police headquarters in Milan. On 15 December, shortly after midnight, he fell to his death from the fourth-floor office of the police commissioner, Luigi Calabresi. In the office at the time were the Carabiniere lieutenant Savino Lo Garano, and the police brigadiers Vito Panessa, Pietro Muccilli, Carlo Mainardi and Giuseppe Caracuta. The official version of Pinelli's death was that he had committed suicide. In a press conference that same night the Milanese police chief, Marcello Guida, announced that Pinelli's alibi had proved false, and that he was ‘gravely implicated in the organization of the massacre’. Six years later the courts ruled, on the contrary, that Pinelli had been innocent of any involvement in the crime. The truth about how he died has never been established.86
Slowly but surely, the police version of anarchist responsibility for the bombings began to disintegrate, and a more alarming explanation began to take its place. Evidence which the police had chosen to ignore pointed not to the anarchists but to a neo-Fascist group based in the Veneto and led by Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura. What was alarming was not that neo-Fascists rather than anarchists were probably responsible for the bombing, but that Giovanni Ventura was in close touch with Guido Giannettini, a colonel in the SID, the Italian secret service. Giannettini, it then emerged, was not only in the SID, but was a fervent supporter of the MSI, the official neo-Fascist party. Nor was he alone. A most disquieting picture began to emerge of extensive contacts between members of the secret services and extreme right-wing groups. Italian public opinion, alerted by some fine investigative journalism, became ever more convinced that a plot was afoot: a series of bomb explosions and other outrages would sow panic and uncertainty, and create the preconditions for an authoritarian regime. This was the strategy of tension. The colonels had employed it successfully in Greece, and it now looked as if neo-Fascists and sections of the secret services were trying to repeat the pattern in Italy.87
At this point, 1970, many sectors of the press and the political opposition called on the government and the President of the Republic, Giuseppe Saragat, to investigate immediately the activities of the secret services. Far from doing so, the highest authorities of the Italian state seemed more interested in a cover-up. On the grounds of national security, the magistrates investigating the bomb explosion in Piazza Fontana were prevented from obtaining access to the secret-service files covering the activities of Giannettini and other officers of the SID. The Corte di Cassazione, Italy's highest court for deciding legal procedures, intervened on no less than three occasions, either to delay the Piazza Fontana trial, or to change its location, or to transfer investigative responsibility from Milan to Rome. The last of these occasions was in 1975, at the precise moment when the Milanese magistrates were interrogating the secret-service chiefs. The trial dragged on interminably. In 1981 Giannettini, Freda and Ventura were sentenced to life imprisonment, but all were later cleared by the Court of Appeal.88
One year after the bomb in the bank of Piazza Fontana, another incident served to confirm the turbulence of the extreme right. During the night of 7–8 December 1970, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, who had commanded blackshirt troops during the Republic of Salò back in 1944–5, attempted a coup d'état. This coup had even more elements of farce in it than had the plans of De Lorenzo. Borghese's only troops were a battalion of forest guards and a group of former members of the parachute regiment, led by the future MSI deputy Sandro Saccucci. Borghese succeeded in occupying the Ministry of the Interior for a few hours, but then withdrew without a shot being fired. The incident was only made public the following March. Borghese was clearly an adventurer without much support, but once again disconcerting evidence accumulated of his links with sections of the army and the secret services. In 1974, after endless delays, no fewer than four generals were accused of complicity in Borghese's attempted coup. One of them was Vito Miceli, the head of the secret service. At the subsequent trial all were acquitted.89
At the end of 1971 Giuseppe Saragat's mandate as President of the Republic expired. His tenancy of the Quirinale had not been a distinguished one, and his attitude to the strategy of tension had been equivocal. The PSD I, Saragat's party, had always been very closely tied to American interests. Many commentators suspected that the President thought along the same lines as the CIA: namely, that the activities of the extreme right would serve the salutary purpose of increasing the demand for strong and moderate government.90
Saragat stood again for election, as the Constitution entitled him to do, but was supported only by his own party (the PSD I), the Liberals and the Republicans. Fanfani was the official DC candidate, while Socialists and Communists supported the Socialist Francesco De Martino. Once again, the country was treated to the protracted spectacle of the political parties’ inability to reach agreement. After the twentieth ballot of the members of both Houses of Parliament, the Christian Democrats came up with a compromise candidate, the Neapolitan lawyer and DC politician, Giovanni Leone. On Christmas Eve, 1971, after twenty-three ballots, Leone became President, but only the support of the MSI gave him the necessary majority.91
Soon afterwards, the new President, in agreement with the majority of the political parties, decided to call elections in 1972, one year ahead of schedule. This was the first time in the history of the Republic that Parliament had not lasted its full five-year term. The reasons for early elections were both old and new. The parties continued to hope that at least part of the electorate would abandon its traditional voting habits and thus finally unblock the Italian political system. The heightened political awareness and the tensions of the post-'68 years increased the hopes of both left and right. In addition, a new problem had arisen to which the political parties of the governing coalition had no easy solution. After the divorce law had been approved by Parliament, various militant Catholic organizations decided to call a referendum on the issue. They swiftly collected the 500,000 necessary signatures, and the referendum was fixed for the spring of 1972.
However, none of the political parties had any great desire for the referendum. The Christian Democrats, in particular, feared isolation from their traditional lay and socialist allies. Only the MSI would line up with them against divorce. The PCI, for its part, was apprehensive that the Catholics still had enough influence in civil society to sweep all before them. A clause in the new referendum law, stipulating that a referendum could not be held if Parliament was dissolved, offered a way out. It seemed preferable to hold elections, delay the referendum by at least a year, and then reconsider the situation.
The general elections of May 1972 did mark a shift in voting patterns, but it was in no way decisive. Any hopes that the left might have had proved illusory. The PCI held steady, with 27.2 per cent of the votes, an increase of 0.3 per cent in comparison with 1968. The PSIUP, however, declined dramatically, dropping from 4.5 per cent in 1968 to 1.9 per cent, and failing to elect a single Member of Parliament. The party did not survive this disaster; its majority joined the PCI, while the minority, renaming itself the PDUP, moved towards the revolutionary groups. One of these, the Manifesto Group, also fielded candidates in 1972, but gained only 0.7 per cent of the votes.
By contrast, there was a distinct if limited move to the right. It seemed as if the strategy of tension had paid off. The Christian Democrats, standing on a centre-right platform, held their own with 38.7 per cent of the vote, dropping only 0.4 per cent. The real victors were the neo-Fascists. Having absorbed the tiny Monarchist Party and renamed themselves MSI – D N (Destra Nazionale), they gained 8.7 per cent of the votes, compared to 4.4 per cent in 1968. Under the leadership of Giorgio Almirante, they had fielded a shrewd mixture of candidates. On the one hand, there were senior figures from the military establishment like De Lorenzo and Admiral Gino Birindelli, who had been the NATO commander in the Mediterranean; on the other, there were agitators like Pino Rauti and Saccucci, more closely tied to traditional Fascist theory and action. The MSI – DN was particularly successful in the South, for reasons that will be discussed below (pp. 337–40). The PLI, hardly surprisingly, lost votes to them, and declined to 3.9 per cent.92
For the Christian Democrats the lessons of the elections were clear enough. For the first time for many years they formed a centre-right government, presided over by Giulio Andreotti. It consisted of the DC, the PLI and the PS The Liberals came into the government for the first time since 1957, and the PSI joined the ranks of the opposition. The DC set about wooing the MSI's electorate. The new government was anti-workerist in stance, and its most notable action was to offer voluntary early retirement, on extraordinarily generous terms, to senior bureaucrats in the civil service.93
However, the shift to the right had not been strong enough either in the country or in Parliament for Andreotti's government to present a stable solution. With the resurgence of the workers' movement in the first months of 1973, Andreotti was forced on to the defensive. The DC, torn by its internal divisions, uncertain how to deal with a worsening economic crisis and a social crisis that seemed unending, veered again towards an alliance with the PSI. Andreotti fell in June 1973, and a new centre-left coalition was formed, presided over by Rumor, and consisting of DC, PSI, PRI and PSDI. The politicians were back to where they had been ten years earlier.
In these years the pattern of social protest and political affiliation in the Mezzogiorno differed radically from that of much of the rest of the country, and it needs examining in its own right. Trade union mobilization and factory agitations had a much more limited impact here than elsewhere. It would be wrong to represent the South as immune from the ‘hot autumn’: there were worker agitations, and the fight against ‘wage cages’ in 1969 saw a high level of mobilization in various factories. But industrial workers, concentrated primarily in petrochemicals, steel, shipbuilding, metalworking and transport, were only a small proportion of the South's population, and many of them were also isolated in the ‘cathedrals in the desert’ which had been constructed in the 1960s. The trade unions made great strides in the early seventies, but the mass of the southern population remained outside their reach and influence.94
Southern society, in fact, had changed drastically under the dual impact of emigration and economic development. The rural interior, especially the latifondo areas, had suffered most from depopulation (see pp. 231–3), so much so that they had become almost entirely marginalized and passive. Here, too, there were exceptions. In December 1968 at Avola, in the province of Siracusa (Sicily), landless labourers demonstrated for pay and conditions equal to those of their counterparts in nearby Lentini. They set up a road-block outside their village, but police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing two of them and seriously wounding four others. Avola became a national scandal, as urban Italy discovered that the old patterns of southern rural protest and brutal repression were still in operation.95
However, the agro-towns and villages of the interior were no longer the centres of collective action that they had been in the 1940s. Some declined irreversibly. Others, as Piselli has shown for ‘Altopiano’ in the hills above Cosenza in Calabria, changed and accommodated. At ‘Altopiano’, migrants first bought up land and then built houses on it, as much as status symbols as places of residence. The class structure became more stratified: no longer was the population of the village divided into the small élite of landowners and the mass of the rural poor. Small proprietors, traders, public officials and the professional classes all became more numerous. Rigid family hierarchies broke down; a collective code of conduct was replaced by a variety of different behaviour patterns. Various forms of state assistance, especially pensions, aided the economic life of the village.96
Even more striking were changes in the coastal areas and major cities. Here, as Rossi-Doria has written, development was ‘chaotic, unstable, precarious, without respect for any order or civic discipline’.97 Small industries, often linked to agriculture, such as tomato-canning factories, offered less than stable prospects of employment. The building trade flourished, but so too did the system of subcontracting (appalti), with the result that few building workers had regular contracts or were protected by safety regulations, and even fewer had trade union representation. A mass of the unemployed or underemployed remained on the extreme fringes of the labour market, exposed to all the inducements and publicity of a consumer society, but without the material means to satisfy many of their basic needs. In the interstices of this vital but chaotic growth, criminal organizations like the Mafia in Sicily and the Camorra in Naples increased their networks of influence and protection. Society was divided against itself. Narrow municipal or corporate or criminal rivalries flourished, leaving little possibility for the sort of solidarities which had typified the ‘hot autumn’. The political class of the South, corrupt and clientelistic, presided contentedly over this spectacularly uneven development.
Between 1969 and 1973, the South was riven by a series of urban protests, nearly all of which reflected the fragmented nature of its society and the precariousness of its modernization. In the spring of 1969 the town of Battipaglia rose in revolt after the threatened closure of local factories. Two people were killed by the police, two hundred injured, and a police station was sacked by the enraged populace.98
The most serious revolt of the period occurred at Reggio Calabria. Promises had been made by various politicians that Reggio would become the seat of the new regional government. However, in the summer of 1970 Catanzaro was chosen instead. The ex-mayor of Reggio, the Christian Democrat Pietro Battaglia, organized a series of strikes and demonstrations, one of which was dispersed with particular brutality by the police. Very soon the situation got out of hand; barricades were erected, the railway station was taken over by demonstrators and all trains between Sicily and the mainland were halted.
The left-wing parties and trade unions, with the exception of PSIUP, called for a stop to what they judged to be an unjustified municipal revolt. However, they were out of touch with the problems and attitudes of the majority of Reggio's population. Behind the protest lay a socio-economic situation of considerable gravity. Not more than five thousand people in the whole of Calabria were employed in large or stable workplaces. In Reggio twelve thousand people lived in squalid shacks, some of which dated back to 1908, the year of a great earthquake there. The retail trade soaked up manpower, but with one shop for every thirty inhabitants there were frequent closures and no security of employment. In these circumstances, the possibilities offered by employment in the public sector were all-important. Reggio, one of the poorest cities in Italy, had to become the seat of regional government. So too, for that matter, did Catanzaro, only marginally less poor.99
The protests at Reggio continued for over a year. For the period July–September 1970 alone, according to official figures, there were nineteen days of general strikes, twelve dynamite explosions, thirty-two road-blocks, fourteen occupations of the railway station, two of the post office, one of the airport and one of the local TV station; there were six assaults on the prefecture and four on the police headquarters (questura); 426 people were charged with public-order offences, three people were killed and more than 200 wounded.100
The left, with the exception of the PSIUP and the revolutionary groups, continued to condemn the protests. The neo-Fascists had no such scruples. Reggio had always voted to the right: it had been strongly monarchist in 1946, and the DC had dominated local politics ever since. The MSI now stepped in where the Christian Democrats no longer dared to tread. The neo-Fascist Ciccio Franco soon became the mob leader of Reggio, and in the 1972 national elections at Reggio, the local MSI candidate gained 21,000 preference votes in the city. In many urban areas of the South, the neo-Fascists came to be recognized as the representatives of the marginalized sectors of society, the champions of the deprived in a society of increasing affluence. At Catania, in the local elections of 1971, the MSI gained 21.5 per cent of votes.101
The government's response to the revolt of Reggio Calabria was to confirm Catanzaro as regional capital, but to allow the regional assembly to meet at Reggio. In order to aid the plight of the Calabrian unemployed, plans were also announced for the building of a giant steel works at Gioia Tauro, up the coast from Reggio. This was to be most spectacular and disastrous of all the ‘cathedrals in the desert’. Part of Gioia's rich agriculture of citrus fruits and olives was destroyed, a major port was constructed in its place, but no steel works was ever built. By the mid-1970s the world steel market had collapsed and there was no point in construction going ahead.
In October 1972 Vincenzo Guerrazzi, whose family came from the province of Reggio Calabria, was one of a thousand Genoese workers from the Ansaldo company who hired a ship and sailed down to take part in a demonstration of solidarity by northern industrial workers with their southern brothers. He and his comrades, some 40,000 in all, marched through Reggio Calabria to the amazement of the local population; some applauded, others jeered. In reality, the two worlds were far apart.102
In drawing up a political balance sheet of the turbulent years 1968–73, two questions stand out. The first concerns the hopes and aspirations of the students and young workers who were the protagonists of the years 1968-9. Their stated aim was to effect a revolutionary transformation in Italian society and politics. Judged by these intentions, their actions resulted, to a great extent, in failure. Why was this so?
The second question refers to reform rather than revolution, and to the later period 1969–73: why was it that the progressive forces in Italian society, with the trade union movement at their forefront, were once again able to achieve only a limited response to their demands for corrective reform?
In answering the first question, it is easy enough to provide a subjective explanation, and to ascribe the failure of revolution to the shortcomings of the revolutionaries themselves. As has already been said, the strategy and actions of the revolutionary groups which emerged in 1968–9 were an inadequate response to the demands for political leadership that were coming from the students' and workers' movements. The groups were sectarian, dominated by Third World models of revolution and unable to draw realistic conclusions from the evidence of Italian society. In many ways they reflected the crisis and fragmentation of the revolutionary movement on a world scale. It was difficult to see this crisis in 1968, with Cuba, Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution at the front of everyone's minds. Ten year later it had become clear enough.
However, the failings of the revolutionaries, manifest though they were, were only part of the answer. In 1972 a group of Pirelli workers who had been active in the factory base committee (CUB) wrote a short account of their struggles. In it they listed the necessary phases by which their fellow workers would be won to revolution: ‘The worker must conceive of himself as a producer and acquire consciousness of his role; he must have a class consciousness and become a communist; he must realize that private property is a dead weight, an encumbrance that needs to be eliminated [emphases theirs].’103
At its simplest level, the problem was that the majority of the Italian working class was unlikely to respond to any of these imperatives. In spite of all the efforts of the militants (and no one could accuse Lotta Continua, for instance, of lack of initiative), the revolutionaries remained small minorities even in the North. Vast sections of Italian society were impervious not only to revolutionary ideology, but even to a modest political awareness. The Garibaldi-Isola quarter in the heart of Milan was, as we have seen, one of the centres of political agitation and housing struggle in these years. Yet a survey of 1971–2 amongst the immigrants of the quarter found that 87 per cent of them had no or very little knowledge of any of the political organizations in the neighbourhood.104
In the major northern factories political consciousness was undoubtedly higher. But even in the Centre and the North many areas and workplaces remained untouched by the social protest of these years: this was true of small-scale factories, of most commercial and artisanal concerns, of the areas of peasant farming, of many of the urban ceti medi.
The revolutionaries, therefore, who thought that the battle of Corso Traiano was the beginning of a process of revolutionary aggregation found instead that it was the highpoint of subversive action. In the years that followed, only relatively small groups of workers, both blue- and white-collar, were prepared to follow their lead. There are many reasons why this should have been so. In the North and Centre of the country, long-standing loyalties to the traditional parties of the left and to the trade unions made it difficult for the revolutionary groups to make progress. The old pre-1967 student organizations could be swept away without any great difficulty; the same was not true of the CGIL or the PCI. Indeed, when the trade unions decided to ‘ride the tiger’ of militancy, it became clear that the political space for the revolutionary groups was limited.
It is also true that the objective conditions of young FIAT workers in 1969 were very different from those of most other parts of the central and northern labour force. A ‘segmentation’ of the labour market had occurred. Labour shortages of certain sorts in the large firms in 1968–9, when combined with the concentration of southern labour in them, gave the workforce of the major northern factories a particular self-confidence and aggression. Elsewhere, especially in the ‘industrialized countryside’ of the Third Italy, a rather different picture emerges: of involvement in family firms, of a less direct conflict between capital and labour, of a labour force that was regional in its origins.105
As for the South, the preconditions for revolt certainly existed. However, as we have seen for the case of Reggio Calabria, the political culture of the urban South, clientelistic and criminal, and the fragmented nature of its society, made it far more likely that protest would find a right-wing rather than a left-wing outlet.
Finally, there is one other hypothesis for why the revolutionary message did not, in the end, achieve a lasting resonance in the Italy of the ‘hot autumn’. The student movement and later the revolutionary groups tried to achieve a cultural revolution in the sense of challenging most of the accepted values and institutions of the society in which they were living. In broad terms, theirs was a revolt against authority, against capitalism, against individualism, against excessive consumerism, against sexual repression, even in part against the family. Their ideals, often expressed in the vaguest of terms, and not always adhered to, were those of social and economic equality, of collective patterns of social life, of direct democracy.
However, ever since the ‘economic miracle’, Italian society as a whole was following a quite different trajectory. As Italy became more urban and more secular, it did not, by and large, move further towards the values which surfaced in 1968, but further away from them. The society that was being formed in the image of the ‘economic miracle’ was one that accentuated atomization and individualism, as well as further strengthening the family unit. Indeed, the family became the basic unit for satisfying needs in contemporary Italy. Italy's modernization, as so many others, was not based on collective responsibility or collective action, but on the opportunities it afforded individual families to transform their lives.
This process was far from complete by 1968. In many ways it had only just begun. It is true that, given the totally unplanned nature of Italy's ‘miracle’, strong imbalances and contradictions had come to the fore. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants, once they arrived in the North, found nowhere decent to live, no adequate schooling for their children, no proper health care. Many of them also had the sort of work, in large or medium-sized factories, which both accentuated their alienation and increased the possibility of collective action.
However, the underlying trends of the period after 1968 were not towards deepening these contradictions but towards their alleviation. Major employers rapidly decentralized production as far as they could so as to fragment the working class and break up the centres of militancy that had emerged in 1968 (see also below, p. 353). Real wages rose significantly, and in spite of inflation were not to decrease for most of the 1970s. Outside the factories, needs were beginning to be met as prosperity increased and family strategies began to pay off. The housing situation was much improved compared to that of the early years of immigration. In 1965 49 per cent of Italian families had had a television, 55 per cent a fridge, and 23 per cent a washing-machine. By 1975 the figures were respectively 92, 94 and 76 per cent.106
These figures have not been quoted in order to provide a crudely materialist explanation of the failures of the generation of ‘68. However, they may form some part of the reason why Corso Traiano proved to be the exception rather than the rule, why rent strikes dwindled away and even why Battipaglia and Reggio Calabria were not, as some militants hoped, the first signs of a generalized southern insurrection.
In this light, the ‘cultural revolution’ of 1968 emerges as an extraordinary but unsuccessful attempt to challenge the predominant values of a rapidly changing society. The movement gained force from the unique international conjuncture of that year; it was aided by the traditions of the Resistance and of working-class militancy; it attracted support because of the dramatic and disorderly way in which Italy was becoming urbanized; but, in the last analysis, it was in direct conflict with the underlying trajectory of Italian modernization.
In May 1968 Rossana Rossanda, one of the leaders of the Manifesto group, wondered ‘if the student revolt is the index of a socialist potential that is maturing under the impact of capitalist development, with its consequent moulding and re-moulding of Italian society’.107 enough suggestion at that particular moment in time. However, with hindsight, it seems possible that the opposite was true: the long-term trends in Italian society were diametrically opposed to the social and political projects of the generation of '68.
This is not to say that ‘68 and its aftermath had no influence on the future development of Italian society. Indeed, Italy's path to modernity was never quite the same again. In a whole number of ways, in attitudes to authority, in the openness of the society, in relationships between the sexes, in the subjective value ascribed to politics, the movement left a lasting mark. It was also true that the spontaneous collective action of these years was the prime mover behind the reforms that did emerge.
Yet these consequences were only in small part those which the participants intended or desired. The core values that they held – anti-capitalist, collectivist and egalitarian – were to be rejected; not suddenly, as in France in June 1968, but protractedly, over the course of more than a decade.
If we turn for a moment to the second question, it seems difficult to explain the limited nature of reform in the years 1968–73. The predominant trends in Italian development did not preclude and in many ways cried out for the sort of rationalization which the reformers were demanding. Needs were being met (if not for everyone, everywhere), but institutions and structures were not being modernized, and nor were the worst excesses of unplanned development being checked or curbed. By 1973 a few steps had been taken along the reformist path, but there was no systematic forward march.
How far were the reformers themselves responsible for this failure? They were certainly not without faults or blind spots. As a movement they were immeasurably stronger than their counterparts in 1963, even though they were without the force of youth, since most young people, on becoming politicized, had posed themselves more global objectives. It is also true that the PCI emerges as the great absentee in these years. Within the CGIL, its militants were mobile and responsive, but as a political party the Communists seemed incapable of taking a lead. Jealous of the new-found trade union strength at a political level, often obsessed by the challenge posed by the revolutionary groups to its hegemony of the left, the PCI too often fell back on well-worn political formulas. The Communists were stuck in an uncomfortable half-way house. They wanted to lead the social movements, but they feared that to do so would alienate the moderate electorate and compromise their chances of entering government. The result was a sort of dignified paralysis.
The Socialists did rather better. The strength of social protest in these years gave them a leverage within the government which they had always lacked in the 1960s. Some of the most important reforms of the period, like the Workers' Charter and the divorce law, were in no small part due to the determined action of Socialist deputies.
As for the trade unions, the great protagonists of these years, there is much to be said in their favour. It was they who introduced the factory councils and delegates into Italian workplaces, and it was they who ensured basic democratic rights for workers, such as that of holding meetings during the working day and freedom of movement for their representatives within the factories. Their espousal of the 150-hour education scheme was an outstanding example of a trade union movement looking beyond narrow economic considerations to a broader, cultural perspective of its role. The Italian trade unions attempted to go even further. Their intervention in favour of structural reform was not successful, but at least they had tried to mobilize millions of Italians for better housing and pensions, investments in the South, etc. All in all, this was an impressive record for a mere five years' activity.
However, even the trade unions had a number of blind spots which were to cost them dear. Their efforts were concentrated almost exclusively on the organized working class, and they failed to move out from the factory into society. Their rigid and ritualistic concept of how people could be mobilized in favour of reform was to weaken considerably the pressure they could exert on government. Finally, and most seriously, they were at a loss in the South. It had been one thing to organize the rural labourers of the agro-towns in the 1940s. It was quite another to attempt an intervention in the complex and divided society of the new urban South. Reggio Calabria revealed how weak the Italian trade unions were in the poorest areas of the country.
Not all the responsibility for the limited nature of their success can be placed upon the reformists themselves. Behind the failure to achieve more lay the central problem of the state. By the early 1970s it had become clearer than ever before that the key to reform in society lay with the prior reform of the state. Yet here, in the interstices of the state, matters were getting worse not better, and the politicians seemed incapable of turning the tide.
In the key period from 1970 onwards the public-sector deficit began to increase with alarming rapidity. Two major reasons lay behind this phenomenon. One was the increasing weight, responsibility and indebtedness of public industry. State industry, as we have seen was already in poor shape by the end of the sixties. Then in 1971 GEPI (Gestione e Partecipazioni Industriali) was founded, to bail out and take over an increasing number of uneconomic private companies. GEPI served an important social function, but lacking a radical overhaul the Partecipazioni Statali became an albatross around the government's neck.108
The second reason for the growing public-sector deficit was the increase in welfare spending, without a corresponding increase in taxation. Pensions were the largest single item here, the direct result of the reform of 1969. Their extra cost could only have been borne if an efficient and progressive system of taxation had been introduced. The fiscal reform of 1971–3 had fallen far short of this objective.109
The bureaucracy was the other major crisis area within the state. The unreformed public administration had acquired a relative autonomy of action which rendered it impervious all too often both to society's needs and to government instruction. The two phenomena of the ‘residui passivi’ and the non-implementation of new laws (see pp. 285–6) continued to characterize administrative action in the 1970s. The fate of the housing law of 1971 was paradigmatic of both these phenomena. The state administration could preserve the status quo, but it could be used in the cause of reform only with the greatest difficulty. Indeed, ordinary measures over which there was no political disagreement could easily be sabotaged either by bureaucratic complexity, or by corruption, or by conflicting authorities operating within the administration. Reform of the state was the most difficult of all tasks because of the vested interests involved. Yet without it, any reform programme seemed bound to flounder.110
In January 1968 an earthquake destroyed a number of villages in the poverty-stricken valley of Belice in north-west Sicily. Over five hundred people were killed and 90,000 rendered homeless. The President of the Republic, Giuseppe Saragat, immediately promised that the government ‘will do everything possible to aid the people made homeless by the earthquake’. Vast sums of money were assigned by Parliament for the reconstruction of the Belice villages. Nine years later, 60,000 people in the valley were still living in the Nissen huts which had been erected immediately after the earthquake. Huge and surreal infrastuctures had been built in the valley – roads that led nowhere, flyovers used only by flocks of sheep, pedestrian walkways with no pedestrians, and so on. Meanwhile, not a single new house had been assigned by the authorities to any of the villagers. The money voted by Parliament had not been spent, or it had been misspent or simply embezzled.111
In December, 1975, Don Antonio Riboldi, the parish priest of Santa Ninfa in the Belice, organized the writing of some seven hundred letters by the primary-school children of the Belice to the Senators and Deputies of the Italian Parliament. One of these was from Giovanna Bellafiore to Giulio Andreotti, the veteran Christian Democrat leader. Andreotti replied on 26 February 1976. It is worth reproducing this correspondence as an end-piece to this chapter, not as a personal indictment of Andreotti, but as an example of how the pervasive torpor of the state had triumphed. For a brief moment, for all their failings, the revolutionary groups had challenged this state of affairs from below: organizations like Magistratura Democratica had been small but significant attempts to launch a radical mobilization within the state apparatus. However, the challenge had faltered, leaving the state unreformed and the politicians apologetic but acquiescent.
Santa Ninfa, 16 February 1976
Dear Honourable Andreotti Giulio,
My name is Giovanna Bellafiore. I am the little girl who wrote to you before Christmas, but you didn't reply, which is not right.
I live in a prefabricated hut which is 24 metres square and has only one room. The rain comes in and leaks on the bed, on the wardrobe and on the plates which have been put in the rack to dry. Perhaps you didn't reply because the problem is too hot for you to handle. I beg you to intervene on our behalf, something which no deputy has so far done. Often there is no electricity and no running water in our huts. You Members of Parliament have comfortable houses to live in, with central heating, and you certainly couldn't understand the type of life which we baraccati have to live, with no space for anything, no room to study or play, or even for the chairs to put round the table. Do you know that when we eat I sit on my Daddy's and Mummy's bed? In fact the table is almost attached to the bed. If you don't believe my letter I invite you to come and sleep and eat in my house for a week.
Why is no one taking an interest in us victims of the earthquake? I beg you not to throw away this letter because I'm still waiting for a reply, and I beg you to discuss the matter in Parliament with the other onorevoli. Yours
Giovanna Bellafiore
Roma, 26 February, 1976
Dear child,
I've received your little letter of 16 February, but I never got the one you said you wrote to me before Christmas. The Belice affair is unfortunately a painful and not easily explicable case of administrative malfunctioning [procedura]. The funds for reconstruction were promptly allocated at the time. Three years later a delegation came to Rome and we learnt that there were difficulties over the regulating plans and other town-planning aspects. In 1972, when I was President of the Council of Ministers, I summoned all the mayors of the Belice and I made sure that all the measures that they requested were adopted.
I know that a group of schoolchildren from Santa Ninfa has recently been to Rome and has been able to explain the situation to the country's highest authorities. I hope that this state of affairs will now be resolved. But perhaps it is a good idea for you to ask the mayor of your village to write to me if there is something which I, as a minister and as a deputy, can do. I share your suffering for the inconvenience of makeshift living conditions which should only have been temporary.
With my greetings I am sending you a doll. My children are grown up by now and buying a toy for you took me back for a moment to the time when they were young.
Affectionately,
Giulio Andreotti112