Somewhere Between Buffalo and Big Flame: A Forgotten Conference

In November 1971, a conference in Buffalo organized by the journal Telos brought together student militants, aspiring revolutionaries, and renowned intellectuals. Held at SUNY-Buffalo, a “campus in revolt” that was “practically on fire” at the time, in Silvia Federici’s words, the conference unfolded in the heat of the Vietnam solidarity movement and surging rank-and-file worker activity across the world.1 An opportunity for competing and crisscrossed political tendencies to articulate their grand strategies and interrogate the (international) conjuncture, the three-day affair saw members of groups as diverse as the Chicago Surrealist Group, Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle, one of Italy’s major extra-parliamentary Marxist organizations), the New American Movement, and News and Letters to engage in polemics on spontaneity and organization with figures like Harold Cruse, Andre Gorz, Murray Bookchin, and Herbert Marcuse—the latter “plied … with questions on topics ranging from science to yoga.”2

Based on the recollections of participants, a predictably comradely but combative atmosphere emerged across the conference, even if it was evidently not successful in facilitating an immediate political resolution between opposing factions, nor in cohering these disparate groups into some general agreement.3 Bruno Ramirez, for one, expressed ambivalence to his comrades in Italy: While the conference was free of the “clichés so abundant in New Left discourses of a few years back,” it had also served as a “seismograph” that “fairly accurately reflected the state of reflux and organizational fragmentation in which the American radical left currently finds itself.” Furthermore, “organizational individualism,” he continued, had isolated participating groups from meaningful dialogue.4 Rather than gauging the conference according to an unclear rubric of success (paper presentations pending revolution), it might be more rewarding to read it through its afterlives. For example, Bookchin’s contribution, “Spontaneity and Organization,” would live on in circulation and be republished by various platforms in the following years, including the British left-libertarian network Solidarity in 1975; the Chicago Surrealists were able to cement their relationship with New Left éminence grise Herbert Marcuse; and as demonstrated by Lotta Continua’s talk at the conference—included in this issue of e-flux journal—a swathe of militants and intellectuals were able to hear firsthand of the insurgent energy exploding across Italy’s cities and neighborhoods.

Situating the conference’s legacy within an increasingly studied stream of contact and contamination between Italian, North American, and European militants clarifies how those networks were fostered and developed. Indeed, while canonical texts like Ria Stone and Paul Romano’s The American Worker (1947) had made their mark within “Italy’s dissident Marxist circles” since the late 1950s, the early 1970s brought a new cycle of internationalist circulation of ideas and experiences back into North America—primarily calibrated to the subterranean logics of worker and community self-activity—through the pages of journals and newsletters like Telos, Radical America, Canada’s New Tendency, and Zerowork.5 As Jim Kaplan would marvel in Radical America two years later, the Italian context “attained a political force, an organizational presence, and a theoretical coherence greater than those of any of its counterparts in the West.”6

Attuned to the intellectual foment of the broad operaist, feminist, and extra-parliamentary networks that had risen in the previous decade and erupted in the wake of Italy’s famed “Hot Autumn” of 1969, a sequence of texts in these journals would bind militants across the Atlantic into a dialogue over the emerging shape of social conflict and the challenges of revolutionary organization amidst ever-shifting terrains of capitalist production and militant antagonism. By seeking out global patterns and local divergences in capital’s contortions, the participants in this dialogue forged a nexus of transnational militancy through which projects of comparative analysis and, potentially, coordination could arise. Louise Toupin has mapped how the conference and subsequent dialogue contributed to the emergence of the Wages For Housework campaign, which embedded itself in cities across the globe, reworking debates over the “hidden face of wage society” and spurring the mass contestation of the many faces of gendered exploitation.7 Niccola Pizzolatto has also documented how these uneven global synchronicities generated certain parallel orientations (if not political vocabularies) between militant formations in centers like Detroit and Turin. Both motor cities became laboratories not only of industrial and social management in a moment of destabilized Fordist transition, but also of novel political activity and shared theoretical interrogation in the midst of widespread wildcat worker struggles, led predominantly by Black workers in the US and Southern migrants in Italy.8

Organising for Revolution, “Documents from the Italian Revolutionary Movement,” no. 1, Big Flame. Source: archive.leftove.rs.

Lotta Continua’s contribution to the conference offers a particularly striking example of how these networks of print and polemic came to life across the Atlantic. Delivered by two members of the group—listed as Gianni Safri (likely a typo of Gianni Sofri) and Franco Capprotti—the talk, with its urgent tone, reflects the dynamics of describing rapidly mutating campaigns to international audiences.9 Sofri and Capprotti’s discussion, which they styled as a general introduction to Lotta Continua and its efforts to root itself within the conflagrating Italian working class, centered on a major problematic of international revolutionary solidarity: the perennial difficulty of translating revolutionary paradigms from region to region, and era to era. How, they ask, can the teachings of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Mao aid them in finding their bearings in a period of deepened class conflict, or guide them to remain within these struggles, given that these protagonists date from decades-old contexts? If theories are valid only to the degree that they relate to definite “praxis” in given situations, then what prospects are there for learning lessons from past struggles? This difficulty would have doubtless agonized some of the American audience members, listening excitedly about the unrest in Italy and watching their own revolutionary movements fragment—much as we today look longingly at insurrections in other countries and ask why “we” fail to take such initiative. Reports from an accelerating succession of upheavals—from the renters’ and student revolts in Spain and France, to the shock electoral mobilizations in Serbia and Brazil—have prompted a similar wave of studied envy by those of us in relatively subdued atmospheres elsewhere.

The participants in this conference were certainly not the only ones grappling with such anxieties. For Salar Mohandesi, this period was characterized by “resonating revolutions” erupting across the globe, emanating from both anti-colonial struggles and imperial metropoles, all striving to express the triumphant force of the Vietnamese struggle, among others, within their own political vernaculars.10 Much of this required creative abstraction, and occasionally questionable appropriations (think of Italy’s storied “Metropolitan Indians” for example). But whether it was American students reading the Vietnam Courier or feminists developing new practices of political base building, a series of debates on the proper means for “bringing Vietnam home” had been unleashed across the West, in universities and factories alike. For our two members of Lotta Continua, such extrapolations from previous, and ongoing, revolutionary cycles were relevant primarily for their ability to conjure new means of framing the explosion of squats, public-housing occupations, and rent strikes then rolling across their country:

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.11

The translation of these Maoist “red bases” into the Italian context would require a metaphoric shift and a reimagining that ultimately found its concrete expression in the rallying cry of their program, Prendiamoci la Città (Take Over the City).12 In this movement, the task at hand was to extend the struggles from the factories “to every aspect of the lives of the proletariat,” waging class war across “the entire social fabric whenever exploitation was practiced.”13

Take Over the Cities

Prendiamoci la Città became a framework to confront spiraling inflation, decaying social services, and a counterrevolution waged by capital against the mitigated labor victories of the late 1960s. Neil Gray’s recent extensive reconstruction of the spatial politics underpinning the movement demonstrates precisely what was at stake. As Gray shows, the dual process of postwar industrialization and urbanization in Italy, fueled by mass internal migration and “rural exodus,” had generated bleak housing conditions and an unruly populace seeking to contest them. In a period in which capital was turning toward investment in land, housing, and the built environment, in many instances the working class asserted not a straightforward, reformist “right to the city” but rather “re-appropriat[ed] … the wealth their labor had produced without reward.”14 Proletarians expropriated mediated social goods, seizing the necessities of shared life and placing them beyond the control of state and capital. This was achieved neither through “adventurist” minoritarian scheming nor party-mandated reform, but through the accumulating forces of proletarian self-governance, altering the fundamental relation between spheres of circulation and (re)production. Building workers occupied the houses they had constructed alongside local families; health clinics were seized and run by their users; women and other subjects in the social factory shoplifted en masse and repriced utilities. This was to be no “happy island in the sea of shit of capitalism,” carefully balanced between the whims of legal regimes and municipal budgets, but a confrontational strategy that identified success as expanding strongholds of non-commodification on the neighborhood and national levels.15

This movement was, of course, just one flow in the “creeping rhythm” of militant activity that constituted that over-spilling epoch.16 Positioned alongside other tendencies like Lotta Femminista—which worked toward a more feminist-inflected comprehension of, and struggle around, the divisions of waged labor, housework, and care—Lotta Continua’s imperative must be treated with caution, given the program’s quick fragmentation and highly uneven organizational relationship to the actual shape of on-the-ground activity it aimed to correspond with. We see in Capprotti and Sofri’s Buffalo contribution, however, a bid to raise the stakes of international correspondence and a revealing attempt to grapple with an adequate vocabulary, and periodization, from within their own moment of intense transition.

Igniting a Big Flame

Four days after the conference in Buffalo, a group of six young activists gathered in Liverpool to debate a “Discussion Paper on Organization.” Calling itself “Big Flame,” the group was a rather inchoate formation that had arisen following an effort to produce a rank-and-file newspaper for the local Merseyside area and its intensifying factory disputes. Big Flame came together to diagnose the limits of its interventions thus far, and deemed it urgent to evolve into a full-fledged revolutionary organization (if not a party) that could “facilitate the self-development of the working class.” Drawing on generalized post-’68 energies and a shared critique of Britain’s swarm of “vanguardist” tendencies, the group’s approach toward “inquiry” and “organizing” was unique within the non-electoral left.17 Big Flame survived until 1984, when it collapsed into the Labour Party, but its projects and campaigns have seen a significant uptick of interest in Britain in recent years.18 As we learn in the recently published and long-awaited monograph Big Flame: Building Movements, New Politics, the meeting they convened in November 1971 was shaped in part by an “injection of political energy and ideological clarity” provided by Marcello Dall’Aglio, a member of Lotta Continua who had recently migrated from Bologna.19 The language and ethos of Lotta Continua not only helped diagnose the groups’ emerging aspirations and situate themselves in a transnational tradition anew; they also provided a means for dialogue with the new currents of feminist and anti-racist politics blossoming across the country.

Five Months of Struggle: Ford, Big Flame. Source: archive.leftove.rs.

Big Flame might not have grown to the size of Lotta Continua, with never more than two hundred card-carrying members (and many more indeterminately positioned supporters), but by taking research trips abroad and hosting visiting comrades, they absorbed lessons and inspiration from their Italian counterparts. They applied these in their own approach to a form of community activity that could effectively intersect with workplace struggles. Grappling with the eternal specter of “external” political intervention, Big Flame’s aspiration was to immerse itself long-term in their chosen sites of activity by using a “base group” organizing strategy. They aimed to “sink their roots” into the lived spaces and struggles of factory workers and working-class families, such as in the major disputes raging at the Ford plants in Halewood and Dagenham, and in a yearlong rent strike in the large Tower Hill estate.20 

When Sofri and Caprotti’s Buffalo paper eventually appeared as a 1972 pamphlet, Organising for Revolution, it would circulate in a network increasingly familiar with the tensions enveloping Italy’s industrial North. Published by Lotta Continua’s London office—nestled in the now impossibly expensive haunts of South Kensington—as the first in a series of “Documents from the Italian Revolutionary Movement,” it was closely preceded by Big Flame’s own pamphlet Italy 1969–70, and was soon followed by compilations like Rising Free Collective’s Take Over the City in 1974, Falling Wall Press’s translations from Wages For Housework, and Ed Emery’s expansive Red Notes platform. This flurry of international translation and commentary worked on a principle of open and continual exchange, transposing communiques across borders to rapidly re-mediate disputes in new environments. As the introduction to a later pamphlet published by Rising Free, Organising for Workers’ Power by Gianni’s brother Adriano Sofri, would neatly summarize: “This is a page-for-page reproduction of a Canadian translation of a French version of the Italian original. The revolution is worldwide.”21

We Won’t Pay: Women’s Struggle on Tower Hill, Big Flame. Source: archive.leftove.rs.

By 1976, the presence of Lotta Continua would be felt in an altogether different manner, as the collection Fighting for Feminism—published by Big Flame’s Women’s Commission and drawn from translated letters to Lotta Continua’s newspaper—served as one means for an aligned formation to reflect on and digest the notorious events of December 6, 1975. On this day, members of Lotta Continua violently disrupted a women-only march for abortion rights, one of the main factors for the organization’s dissolution less than a year later. For Big Flame, an organization for which revolutionary feminism was a guiding commitment in its break from the stasis of the British institutional left, the pamphlet’s stark admission that women composed the majority of rank-and-file workers in Lotta Continua but were excluded from leadership positions, or that organizing efforts around abortion campaigns had been regularly sidelined, forced a sober reflection on Big Flame’s own trajectory.

 We (Still) Want Everything

The dense, knotted morass of newspapers, pamphlets, bulletins, and discussion papers that emerged from the movements of the 1960s and ’70s heightened international relays, always pointing to new possibilities. What often appeared as “ruptural media”—produced in an inescapable, hurried fidelity to the energy of a picket, occupation, or riot—now serves as the evidence through which we can undertake our own retrospective “document work” to reinhabit the arc of these movements and their attempts to articulate, and intensify, the upheavals around them.22 Republishing Sofri and Caprotti’s text is not an exercise in hagiography or archival indulgence. The challenge of translating modes of struggle, and practices of analysis, between eras remains invariant, and a small, faded pamphlet extracted from the bountiful collection of London’s MayDay Rooms archive is most valuable precisely when there exists the collectivities to realize, refute, and rework its content.

Paper-clipped to the archival copy is a tentative note asking interested readers to get in contact for further discussion of “practically?” taking heed of Sofri and Caprotti’s reflections. Within months, however, Lotta Continua had largely abandoned the Take Over the City program, attempting to sublate its elements into a policy of “overall conflict,” as it continued to receive criticism that it, like many other groups, was merely substituting itself for the working class, embracing a certain Leninism that was always lurking in the margins.23 Within a year of the national group’s dissolution in 1976, the cyclones of autonomia would cast much of these previous projects to the wind, as an “infinite political creativity” unleashed whole new worlds of insubordinate activity.24 From 1976 onward, Big Flame’s base group model also began to fade, as individual life courses moved in new directions, activists became isolated, and relationships to the official trade union movement shifted. By 1981, militants in London were, only somewhat sardonically, already reflecting that “whatever your ‘category’ it’s been possible to find a model in Italy,” concerned as they were that a sincere fascination with these transmissions from abroad might have become yet another obstructive fetish for a disoriented radical milieu.25 Across the next decade, as waves of restructuring and deindustrialization dispersed former working-class strongholds, concerns began to move elsewhere, the commanding shouts once heard so loudly dissipated, and other voices began to speak.

Although participants in this period have cautioned against so easily recuperating their practices to our own moment, each generation since has undertaken popular, cyclical returns to their efforts, in search of schemas of thought and action. For every perceived crisis of militancy that enthralls us in moments of organizational collapse and reconstitution, for each experiment in going beyond Marx(ism), this (non)tradition and its “partisan methodology” have suggested one means of stabilizing ourselves in the conjuncture.26 Through a steadily growing inventory of books, theses, and republications, we can identify one vibrant intergenerational means of what Hannah Proctor has labelled “inheriting ruins.”27 Grounded in both the intimacy of shared conversations between participants of movements past and present, and the aleatory happenstance of digital encounters and off-the-cuff translations, this “Italian experience” continues to reverberate, temporally out of joint but always ready to be revived and rewritten.

At present, fascist street violence, bolstered by the brutality of state-facilitated displacements and capital’s insistence on accumulative obliteration, provides political reaction with a spatial expression. At the same time, the hopeful draw of social democratic promises, of cities renewed and democratized, is finding its own international repetitions—although the prospects and limits of such a project, profoundly circumscribed by long-term stagnation and well-resourced repression, remain to be seen. The practices of mass, self-directed expropriation that provided vital coordinates to the above tendencies will no doubt continue to take on new forms, as the shocks of disrupted supply chains and carbon capitalism price themselves into the costs of social reproduction, suggesting an alternative course for the conquest of our cities from below. The rapid deployment of blockades, occupations, and strikes, not least in the global coordination of movements against the machinery orchestrating the genocide in Palestine, sits too in a dynamic with the expanding means of sustained, grassroots inquiry into both the local and planetary infrastructures of work and capitalism, each time possibly facilitating a leap and convergence of methods from one struggle to another. To follow Sofri and Caprotti, and innumerable others, in remaining alive to the remaking of class and its conflicts, we too, then, must continue turning our ears toward the emerging compositions contesting these catastrophes.