When Italy’s hot autumn turned cold

The Red Brigades is published by Bloomsbury

Italy’s “Hot Autumn” was one of the most sustained and militant movements during the global revolts around 1967-8 and beyond. In some ways it went even further and deeper than the great events in France.

Italian workers and the oppressed launched waves of strikes and neighbourhood resistance while students were for many months in open uprising over education issues and much more.

Neighbourhoods were aflame with housing struggles and battles over social resources.

A new and insurgent women’s liberation movement challenged the state, the Catholic church—and sections of the traditional left.

Workplace resistance was central—and was at a pitch that terrified the bosses. Aldo Ravelli, one of the head brokers at Milan’s stock exchange, admitted, “Those were the years in which I tested out how long it would take me to escape to Switzerland. I set out from my house in Varese and got to the frontier on foot.”

In this book, The Red Brigades, John Foot describes how workers’ actions were “noisy, boisterous, occasionally joyful, undisciplined, angry and often violent.
“Demonstrations of the factory floor, heralded by the banging of drums, whistles and the smashing of metal on metal would arrive from nowhere and shut down work. Administrative blocks were besieged and invaded.”

The movement was eventually hurled back, but the memory remains.

A worker involved in the recent Italian mass strikes over Palestine said they hoped it may be “the beginning of a hot autumn”.

John Foot has written powerfully on Italian history, including a searing denunciation of Benito Mussolini and the rise of 1920s fascism. Here he analyses the Red Brigades’s “armed struggle” organisation.

Its activists shot to global prominence in March 1978 when they kidnapped former prime minister Aldo Moro, held him for almost two months, and then killed him before dumping his body in the centre of Rome.

Foot explicitly “humanises” the Red Brigades’s victims and shows that they were not all the ogres of the ruling class that were supposed to be the targets.

But our main critique of such groups is political. The Red Brigades shared the elitist basis of reformism—don’t fight for your own liberation because someone from above—an MP, a comrade with a gun—will do it for you.

Your job is to be disciplined, support your leaders, knock on doors at election time or give shelter to the guerilla on the run. Although superficially different, both traditions are contemptuous of the self-emancipation of the working class where people direct their own battles.

The Red Brigades gave an excuse to the—already repressive—state to crack down on all the left. Later generations recognised the danger. At the start of this century a strong anti-capitalist movement swept Italy. In 2001, Luca Casarini, a leading spokesperson of Ya Basta!—a movement that was rooted in the 1970s autonomists that sometimes supported the Red Brigades—spoke out against the “armed struggle” method.

“To accept the logic of military clashes would be political suicide. Our movement cannot match their military power. We would be crushed,” he said.

The great weakness of Foot’s book is that it suggests that in some ways the Red Brigades flowed from the great combativity of workers that went “outside the mainstream”.

He writes that the Red Brigades activists “took the violence out of the factory onto the streets”.

In one way they were a warped form of that feeling. But they were in truth an expression of the defeats of the movement, its failure to create a genuine revolutionary left to challenge the union bureaucrats and the reformism of the very mainstream Italian Communist Party.

The Red Brigades are not an argument for “moderation” or reconstructing the collapsing centre. The lesson is to build better revolutionary parties.

• The Red Brigades: The Terrorists Who Brought Italy To Its Knees by John Foot, available from Bookmarks, £25