In November 1971 student militants, revolutionaries, and intellectuals gathered for the Second Telos International Conference at SUNY-Buffalo. Alongside figures like Harold Cruse, Andre Gorz, Murray Bookchin, and Herbert Marcuse, two of the presenters were young members of the recently founded Italian extra-parliamentary Marxist group Lotta Continua. The following year, their remarks appeared as a pamphlet titled Organising for Revolution, published by Lotta Continua’s London office. The pamphlet was brought to our attention by Dante Philp, who found it in London's radical archive and meeting place MayDay Rooms. In this issue of e-flux journal, we republish their remarks in their entirety, alongside an essay by Philp that contextualizes the historical moment and militant milieus in which it was received and traveled. Today, as we watch internationalist networks form to contest intensifying militarism, extraction, and genocide, perhaps Lotta Continua's presentation can offer inspiration for building our movements.
—Editors
***
Dear Comrades:
The Italian comrades of Lotta Continua thank the organizers of this conference for their invitation to us, and they have asked us to bring the brotherly greetings of our organization to all of you present here—movements, groups, magazines, and revolutionary organizations. We have been asked to contribute to the discussion of the problem of revolutionary organization, and have accepted. Normally, when this problem is brought up in discussion, it still revolves around old debates held long ago between Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and other Marxist theorists, some being inclined to accept Lenin’s theory, some that of Luxemburg, some saying that they were both right in certain respects, while others discover still another theorist who would be better than Lenin or Luxemburg i.e., perhaps Mao. Our speech will be on different level, however. This does not mean that in our opinion there is nothing more to be learned from Lenin or Luxemburg. On the contrary, it simply means that we intend to present here a contribution of our own experience.
This seems to be the correct way for us to participate in this discussion; first of all, because we consider that the praxis in a specific situation constitutes the only possible measure of the validity of any theory; and secondly, because we think that the problem of organization cannot be reduced to a simple theoretical problem or even a technical-administrative one, but rather must always be seen in strict relationship to a determinate class situation and to a certain political program. In other words, the question of “how to organize” depends strictly on another question, “Why organize, and under what conditions?”
We think it is useful before entering into the discussion to recall very briefly some basic facts of the Italian situation. The period immediately following the war was dominated by “reconstruction,” realized with the more or less explicit collaboration of the leftist political parties and with the disarmament of the revolutionary organizations in the factories, which had grown in the War of Resistance against fascism and Nazism. After some major outbreaks, the anticapitalist drive between 1943 and 1947 was progressively exhausted and the Italian bourgeoises could begin the process of reconstruction, and also a certain rationalization of the productive apparatus, with relative calm.
Then in 1962, on the occasion of certain important contract expiration dates, the workers’ struggle was reopened—the Fiat workers went out in mass strikes and demonstrated in the streets and squares. At this time, the socialists had already entered government, and the Communist Party and the unions adopted a passive attitude, accepted a separate agreement at Fiat, and permitted the struggle to subside gradually. But this renewal of the workers’ combativeness put the capitalists on guard. The crisis of ‘63–’64 was an undertaking deliberately decided and planned by them in order to give a more rational order to the productive apparatus by concentrating or closing a number of small plants, and, above all, in order to intensify exploitation, increase unemployment, and checkmate the workers’ combativeness. The workers’ offensive recommenced in ‘67–’68 in the big factories of Milan, Turin, and in the Venetian regions. In this same period there were the first explosions of anger among the southern proletariat: that is, among that mass of underemployed and unemployed proletarians, all potential emigrants, who are characteristic of that area of internal underdevelopment, the South of Italy.
The year 1968 was also the year of the big anti-imperialist marches for Vietnam, of the French May, and of the growth of the student movement which, later, fulfilled a very important role in the renewal of proletarian fights. In the spring of ‘69, a few months before the expiration of the national contract of the metal workers, the struggle at Fiat started all over again. Here, for the first time, a mass vanguard emerged and consolidated autonomously, expressing in the struggle those aims and means which later became characteristic of what is generally known as the “Hot Autumn” of 1969. Fierce battles took place continually in the factories and in the streets; there were new forms of struggle, very hard and determined and spontaneously organized by the workers, such as sudden stops in work, marches inside the factories, destruction of assembly lines, capture of factory authorities, and violent fights with the police, in the streets. The signing of the new contract took place in the oppressive and intimidating atmosphere created by the right-wing groups with the slaughter in Milan in December 1969.
The Hot Autumn, however, did not turn out to be just a mere letting off of steam by the workers. In all the factories, beginning with Fiat, new autonomous vanguards have emerged, which have directed the struggle in its toughest fights and have become conscious of their role and their class interests. They are now working to create an organization and to start a struggle against the attempt to bring social peace back into the factories and to restore the normality of exploitation. After the signing of contracts, however, normality did not return to the factories; productivity also did not return; and a new struggle exploded in a completely autonomous form, in a strike at Fiat in July of 1970—a fight to the finish, from which unions were completely excluded. During the brief period between ‘69 and ‘70, the Communist Party had been gradually worming itself into the majority in government. In other words, the Communists meant to give the bourgeoisie the guarantee of control over the workers’ fights; and, in exchange, the bourgeoisie was to effect a number of reforms (in schools, housing, health, etc.), meant to renew the most old-fashioned and backward structures of the Italian state, thus favoring the more advanced capitalist sections and curbing the workers’ struggle. But the bombs of Milan were the first symptom of a different option, and this became more and more evident in following spring.
At this time, the bourgeoisie was convinced that the Communist Party was no longer able to control the workers’ fights or to guarantee the peaceful resumption of production (this could be seen even more clearly in the events during the following spring). On the other hand, even if the prospect of reforms is not able to stop the workers’ fights altogether, it does contribute to undermining and throwing off balance that delicate equilibrium between old and new, between development and underdevelopment, between parasitic classes and imperialistic groups on which the power structure of the Italian bourgeoisie is founded. Since they have seen that the workers do not accept a truce and a renewal of production, the bourgeoisie have rallied their forces, have chosen the path of repression and of open warfare, and have reconstructed their own front, moving it to the right. They resort to all means in order to bring back order and productivity to the factories, and do not hesitate to resort to the political utilization of an economic crisis that the very combativeness of the workers has helped bring about, to the repression of political vanguards by police and courts which is becoming increasingly severe, and to the open use of fascists and of campaigns against violence.
Later on more will be said about this situation and about what seem to be our most immediate tasks at hand. I will now try to show how the activity of Lotta Continua fits into the picture.
Lotta Continua started practically during the summer of ’69, when very intensive political work was started at the gates of Fiat by a group of militants of the student movement of Turin and of Potere Operaio of Pisa (a movement which had been operating for several years, composed mainly of comrades who had come out of the Communist Party). (The workers at Fiat were already conducting a very determined fight on their own). Later on, and side by side with the development of the class struggle, other groups agreeing with Lotta Continua’s positions started to operate, gradually establishing connections between each other in the principal Italian cities. At present, Lotta Continua has almost two hundred offices throughout Italy. It publishes a weekly paper—biweekly in periods of financial difficulty—which was started two years ago. Lotta Continua is trying—for specific political reasons which will be stated later—to launch a daily newspaper to be distributed in the South of Italy. Lotta Continua has held two national conventions; at the second, which took place in Bologna last July, six thousand militants were present, most of them proletarians. Reports and speeches from these two conventions have been published in two issues of the journal Communismo—which, unfortunately, are not yet translated from the Italian. (Here we touch on a trivial problem which is really very serious and is somehow connected to the problem of organization. We attribute great importance to an international exchange of communications and experiences, but unfortunately there are also linguistic difficulties. While we do not want to offend anyone present, there nonetheless exists a linguistic imperialism. For very precise historic reasons, if something is written in English or French, it is much more probable that it will be read around the world than if it were written in Italian, for example. In Italy there is an Italian edition of Monthly Review—a fact which we are very happy about, since it teaches us a lot of things. A bit of everything is translated in this publication—from Black Panther anthologies to those of “La Cause du Peuple.” It is much more difficult for us. We have thought about it often, but our forces up to now have not allowed us to distribute English translations of those documents which we consider most important. Of course, we have many comrades who speak perfect English, but usually they are too busy with other tasks to translate. This fact is one of our very concrete organizational limits. We would appreciate anyone helping us out. For example, we are very grateful to Andre Gorz for having published some of our documents, if only in a temporary outline form, in Les Temps Modernes.)
The statistics quoted earlier on the number of offices, the newspaper, etc., do not pretend to be our calling card; if they were, we would have a purely quantitative and administrative idea of the growth of an organization, and we would be neglecting a fundamental thing: that the problem of an organization cannot be determined from the capacity to be inside the class struggle and of waging it as a subject—to involve the masses in the analysis of their own conditions, the individuation of their own interests, the elaboration of a communistic political perspective, and the transformation of their method of living and thinking.
Many people say, quoting Lenin, “No revolution without a revolutionary party,” and “Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary movement.” Until recently, many people also told us those things in a reproachful tone: Now they do it much less. These comrades forgot that the correct theory—as systematic knowledge of the needs of the masses and their generalization—is born from the class struggle and grows in this struggle. These comrades did nothing else but say that an even balance is needed (but what really does “even” signify?) between theory and practice. However, they did not even achieve this. It seemed to us that things were a bit more complicated, and that political action means making choices. We chose to be inside the struggle which the masses were waging.
Today, nothing, or almost nothing, remains of the theoretical debates which animated our leftist journals some years ago. But the experience of the class struggles which have occurred during the past three years constitutes a precious heritage and an irreplaceable and necessary basis for the growth of a theory. It is up to us today to make this theory explicit, to clarify it and to complete it in its details. We now have a strong skeleton, and are now filling it with nerves, muscles, and flesh. What counts most is that, thanks to the class struggle, theoretical elaboration now has precise points of reference. (The same holds for the problem of organization.) Many comrades have debated the problem on the level of, so to speak, theory. Many comrades have founded revolutionary parties. The struggles of ’69 were sufficient to clear all those things. Our choice was totally different. We have tried to organize our forces, rather than to discuss organization. In this attitude there was no yielding to spontaneity, but only the consciousness that the problem of organization could not be separated, as we have already said, from the level attained by the class struggle, from our forces or from our political program. We have never thought of organization as a priori, or as spontaneous growth. We simply think that from time to time, the class struggle poses duties to the subjective, conscious initiative of the revolutionary militants: precise and unavoidable organizational duties. In the beginning of our activity and for a long time since, we have put consolidation and continuity of basic organizations in the factories in first place, and there linked them to each other. In the second phase, without abandoning the factories, we thought it necessary to take the struggle outside the factories as well, to the entire social fabric whenever exploitation was practiced. As anti-capitalist consciousness increased among the mass vanguard, the necessity for general political campaigns arose parallel to it, such as the one against the murderers of the anarchist Pinelli, or the one we are presently engage in against “Fanfascismo”—i.e., against the possibility of the election of Fanfani as president of the republic. Thus, the organization grew and developed structure (functional, but not bureaucratic) parallel to the growth of the level of the struggles, our forces, and our political program. We never established a party. We believe that there is never a moment when it is possible to say: “Here: Now we have a party.” However, it has been more than a year since we launched the slogan “Act as a party.” It seems to us that a continuous and correct relationship with the masses constitutes the only possible guarantee that we will not fall back into the faults that the history of the international workers’ movement presents to us. Otherwise, to quote Luxemburg, it is not enough. There are precise indications in each phase of the class struggle which the vanguard must gather up to make the masses complete another step towards taking power. The party is not founded by an official act but is built gradually, parallel to the vanguard capacity that gives it a communistic political direction.
The way in which Lotta Continua was born and has developed confirms this basic hypothesis towards which we have always aspired. Lotta Continua did not grow out of a division in the revisionist workers’ movement, nor did it come about by the co-optation of individuals or groups of comrades. Rather, it was born out of the autonomous vanguard initiative which matured in the mass struggles of 1969–70. For this reason, our organization and our political program have grown gradually, little by little, as the development of the class struggle and our presence within it created the conditions for the formulation of more general hypotheses and led to our own assignment to the wider tasks of political direction.
Initially, the problem was to encourage the manifestation of workers’ autonomy, to encourage the progressive consciousness of a growing number of workers of their alienation from wage slavery and their determination to fight against the entire capitalist organization of work. Later the problem of extending the struggle against the bosses into the entire community became of primary importance: This is the thinking behind our political program which we launched last year with the slogan “Take over the city.”
All this does not mean, however, that we should no longer consider that the main struggle takes place inside the factories. On the contrary, we believe that the existence of the struggles of the working class inside the factories is the necessary condition for the development of the movement outside the factories as well. This is because it is inside the factories in the first place that it is possible to create the conditions for the unity of the working class and for the leadership of workers over the other proletarians, since workers are those who can express the highest degree of antagonism against the structure of capitalism as a whole.
Losing the struggle inside the factories means losing the social struggles as well: It means being unable to impose the workers’ leadership on the rest of the proletariat. In fact, we do not want to abandon the struggle within the factories, but to extend the struggle to every aspect of the lives of the proletariat. Only in this way is it possible to accomplish the first phase of the process which leads to taking power. To formulate some strategic hypotheses on the development of the revolutionary process, analysis is needed. We cannot limit ourselves to studying preceding historical models of taking power, such as the Bolshevik or Chinese ones, because these models are bound to specific historical, geographic situations and cannot be mechanically transferred into our situation. For example, the kind of strategy and organization which Lenin elaborated and directed were the best possible strategy and organization in Russia in 1917. But it is absolutely utopian to think that a sudden insurrection, even when carefully prepared, might succeed in an advanced capitalist country today. The repressive political-military system of modern capitalism would stifle the insurrection very quickly. Of course, it would be wrong to deny the value of isolated insurrections or of a period of insurrection following a long revolutionary process. But it would be an even greater error to count on the method of insurrection for taking power today. Moreover, we do not believe that the building of a communist consciousness or communist thought can be separated from the problem of taking power; the building of communism is not something that comes after taking power, but something which accompanies it, since taking power is understood as a long process, as a long-lasting armed struggle. But even if we accept from the Chinese model the idea that revolution is a long process during which the taking of power and the building of communist consciousness is prepared, on the other hand we believe that this model’s specific political instruments cannot be produced again in capitalist countries. The Chinese model is based is the conquest and subsequent defense of red bases, liberated areas in a geographic sense in which a different society can be built and from which it is possible to begin enlarging the liberated area. In our case, this strategy cannot work. Founding a Red Army and going to the mountains would not make sense in Italy, since, among other things, no one lives in the mountains any longer. The bosses would simply leave us alone there, since we would not be causing anyone any trouble. In our case, the problem of red bases must be posed in a non-geographic way. We might say that a factory or a neighborhood where the proletarians have concretely matured their own revolutionary consciousness is a Red base; this consciousness is the capacity to politically direct themselves autonomously in their fights and struggles, and to defend themselves and their political initiatives even if the costs of the struggle increase. For us, red bases are a factory, a neighborhood, or a school in which proletarians have matured their unity, their class consciousness, and their strength to such a degree that the power of the bosses is reduced to the point where they cannot exercise it except by the open, brutal military occupation of the place, since any other kind of political, ideological, or even economic control would meet with the organized strength of the proletarians.
At this point, for the proletarians, the problem of self-defense is the same as the problem of destroying the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state and of imperialism. It is important to see that, for us, these red bases do not mean building alternative institutions: well-lit schools, comfortable hospitals, etc., which would constitute a sort of happy island in the sea of shit of capitalism and would easily be integrated into its system of mediations. Proletarians must simply reappropriate every aspect of their daily lives, taking it away from the bosses: from schooling to housing, from the problem of rising prices to the relationship between sexes and between young and old, from the problem of information to the overcoming of health problems. Proletarians must be able to take the precise initiatives and defend them with force if necessary. In other words, our idea of red bases is incompatible with the idea of alternative institutions, and is not conceived on a reformistic basis. We are interested in the strength and organization which proletarians can achieve, not in the attainment of false, partial goals. Only in this way can the red bases accomplish their function: to be the support behind the lines in the fight to take power and in installing a proletarian dictatorship. These red bases, these districts behind the lines without which proletarian violence remains an individual, sterile effort, cannot be recognized in forms which workers’ autonomy has assumed up until now. It is too small for the proletarians to feel that they should defend it with their arms and their hands. It is too weak to resist the attacks which the rulers will launch against it, using all the power they have in this society. It is too limited with respect to the proletarian components which the revolution must be able to involve in order to be able to win. During these years, the masses have achieved the first stages of the revolutionary process, but this does not mean that insurrection and the taking of power are on the agenda today. The armed struggle against the bourgeois state will take place when the unity, the consciousness, and the strength of proletarians are developed to such an extent that success will be assured. The “long-lasting process” on which we insist so much is not simply a chronological idea but something broader and more precise. On the one hand, it means a mass base and the transformation of man during the revolutionary process; on the other, it means being able to prevail militarily—to this problem of fundamental importance, the insurrectional/adventurist theories and the reformist/gradualist theories did not give a realistic and satisfactory answer.
In what we have said up to now lies the meaning of our political program: “Let us take the city!”
This is one thing that is important to define precisely. None of the aspects of our political program are completely new or have been completely neglected in our previous activity. Right from the beginning, we have given major emphasis to those aspects of the workers’ struggles that offered indications of how to extend and generalize it in all the rest of the proletariat and in all sectors of social life. Our work among office workers and students has always assumed, as a fundamental point of reference, the workers’ struggle for an egalitarian and anti-hierarchical movement. Our intervention in Southern Italy—to which we give extreme importance today—was begun by the immigrant workers who, returning to their towns of origin, used their own experiences as a unifying factor between workers’ struggles in the North against exploitation/production and proletarian struggles in the South against unemployment and emigration. Even our organizing in the army (we have printed a bulletin entitled “Proletari in divisa”—“Proletarians in Uniform”), just like our work in the prisons, has grown out of the will to develop organizations and struggles in all those areas where proletarians are oppressed and exploited.
The tasks before us today are as follows:
1) The first task is to build mass organizations everywhere possible, in the factories, schools, and communities in which many proletarians will be able to recognize themselves. These organizations are not formal structures, councils, permanent committees, etc., but are the whole of all those workers of a factory, students of a school, or proletarians of a neighborhood who agree on fundamental issues (for example, they are against revisionists and unions). Again, what counts is not the institutional “organization of the masses,” but instead the capacity of those within the organization to discuss their own needs and interests and to struggle in an autonomous and conscious fashion for these interests. Making the correct political program prevail in the mass organizations is the duty of the organized vanguard, that is, the communist militants who always put the general interest of the entire proletariat first. But since no vanguard exists outside of a very close relationship with the masses, the line which divides the vanguard organization from the mass organization is in no way final, but tends to move ever forward; more and more, as the autonomy of the proletariat increases, what had been the exclusive goal of the vanguard becomes the general heritage of the masses. It will be up to the masses to make the revolution.
2) The second task is to further our knowledge of the classes of which our work until now has only furnished us with the first essential elements (Lotta Continua has published a document on this). We maintain that the tendency to focus more clearly on the division between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has been obscured by the political decision of the bourgeois power structure to try and divide the exploited. It is necessary to recompose the unity of the exploited, to distinguish friends from enemies, to analyze the economic situation of the classes and their attitude vis-à-vis the revolution, to make it possible for the revolutionary vanguard to become a constant reference point for all the exploited. Only in this manner can we correctly pose the problem of establishing alliance. We know that it is of paramount importance to divide the division into all kinds of groups which the bosses have been able to introduce into it. This can be done only by means of a correct and precise class analysis, the indication of ever more pertinent objectives, and continual proletarian hegemony. The problem of establishing alliances does not appear in terms of an alliance with revisionist parties of the bourgeoisie, but rather in terms of the disintegration of the bourgeois front and the recomposition, around the proletariat, of these groups which subjective or objective reasoning makes the enemies of imperialism or capitalism. Without precise proletarian hegemony, any proposition of alliances signifies the acceptance of the point of view of the bourgeoisie and degeneration into parliamentarianism and reformism.
3) The third task is to expose the enemy’s internal contradictions, to slow down the propagation of fascism in our country by means of general political campaigns such as the one we are completely committed to concerning the murder of the anarchist Pinelli by the police, and the one against the election of Fanfani to the presidency of the republic. Such campaigns also help to enlarge general political vanguard consciousness and to furnish precise reference points and occasions for the maturation of the struggles which develop daily in factories, in workers’ neighborhoods, in schools and in the streets.
4) The fourth task is to build a revolutionary alternative in the South, channeling the protest of the exploited masses, who mean to assert their right to live, towards a revolutionary uprising. Doing this means rescuing from a fascist leadership episodes of spontaneous revolt such as that of Reggio Calabria, which everyone has heard about. It means depriving the capitalists of the possibility of setting up the South’s underdevelopment against the development of the North, the mass of oppressed southern proletarians, unemployed and desperate, against the workers’ struggle in Milan and Turin. This is why on the present political stage we give so much importance to our newspaper in the South. It is an undertaking we hope to be able to carry out before the end of next spring, if we manage to overcome the endless financial and bureaucratic obstacles sat before us by the bourgeois power apparatus: an apparatus which the Mafia cooperates with brazenly, for the benefit and glory of capitalism, with Agnelli and the big corporations of the North.
We have talked much about our political line, and perhaps too little of organization. I could have drawn up an organization chart, told you we have a national executive in the North and one for the South, plus a national committee (in all of these, proletarians are the majority and their presence has a decisive weight; there is in effect a rotation of office, which is also revocable at any time). I could have told you of the many problems we face in running our organization, among others the problem of relationships between intellectuals and proletarians, between men and women, the problem of criticism and self-criticism, of full-time professional militants, of internal political debate, and of centralization. Our experience of all these problems is summarized in a paper we have published. We are conscious of their complexity and are making an effort to approach them realistically, keeping in mind the concrete situations and taking care to avoid the temptations of moralism and psychologism.
One thing I particularly wish to stress here is that there does not exist a purely theoretical or purely bureaucratic and administrative way of approaching and solving the problem of revolutionary organization. I wish to emphasize that the problem of an organization is closely connected to the ability of revolutionaries to be inside the masses, to grow together with them, to draw from their own practice correct strategic premises, to always be able to respond to the duties which the development of the class struggle poses each time. Today, for instance, in the face of waves of repression and the process of fascistization which is happening in Italy, our organization must gear up to survive in secret, when it will eventually be outlawed.
I would like to talk briefly about some questions which militants of other countries often ask our comrades. The first is: For what reason, in a situation in which repression is advancing steadily and conditions are moving clearly towards a political uprising of the French type, do so many groups continue to exist in Italy with no unification taking place between them? Doesn’t this slow down the revolutionary process? Isn’t it a weakness of the revolutionary movement? We answer that we believe in the kind of unity that comes directly out of workers’ struggles, which is built differently in the mass movement: This is the only condition that would give the process of unification clarity and homogeneity on goals and analysis and on general political choices. This is why we refuse to reduce the process of unification to a simple agreement amongst a few revolutionary militants; and therefore we call the comrades of different revolutionary groups to confront themselves with the specific choices on we are willing to collaborate with them.
Another question we have been asked very often, especially in the United States, concerns the Italian Communist Party and our relationship with it. We suppose this is because there is much interest and respect in the United States for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and its strength. Well, our relationship with it is definitely bad. The unionists and bureaucrats of the PCI are bothered by the fact that we take our leaflets to the factories, and they try to boycott and obstruct us in every possible way. In any case, this shouldn’t surprise anyone, since the PCI is a big revisionist party which has chosen the parliamentary way and collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Revisionism, for us, is not merely a theoretical program. It does not mean to revise the theories of Marx, which not only can but must be done by a serious Marxist, but instead it means the use of Marxism by a certain part of the bourgeois, which is less and less proletarian. As another example, the PCI is based on enormous communist cooperatives which are no different from a regular corporation, and on a complex of political and economic contacts with bourgeois state power. For all these reasons, although we do not see the PCI as our principal enemy, we often attack this party and its directors, although we must say that there are many revolutionary comrades at its base. Also, we vigorously attack the unions, not because we think they have sold out or because we think they should follow a different political line, but simply because we believe that unions in a society such as ours function only to grant to the bourgeoisie the collaboration of workers with the capitalistic organization of work. We do not want to found a new trade union because we do not believe that workers’ struggles in today’s Europe are trade unionist: Instead, we believe that they are directly anti-capitalist, and thus, we think that any distinction between economic and political struggle no longer has any reason to exist.