Paper presented at the Carrara Conference (October 11-12, 2025) on the 80th Anniversary of the FAI ---- The '77 Movement ---- Reviving the antagonistic and revolutionary imagination would be the countercultural elements developed especially in libertarian circles, which gave rise first to youth clubs and social centers, then to forms of workers' autonomy, and finally to the great '77 movement, which would represent a further moment of social rupture, but with characteristics completely different from those of '68.
It is no longer the '68 of students demanding a different curriculum, a different transmission of knowledge, a different school organization, and so on-a movement essentially proactive in its revolutionary protest-but a radically alternative movement that seeks total rupture, a movement that grasps the reasons for the defeat of the previous movement in electoral drift and institutional misery and that denounces the progressive revival of the demands of '68 by a power capable of reinventing itself and integrating modernism into the most unscrupulous party formations, such as Bettino Craxi's Socialist Party.
The first signs of this began with the protests at the Parco Lambro festival in Milan in the summer of 1976, where the plight of the youth of the time emerged in all its dimensions, forced into a life of great existential misery, between precarious and underpaid jobs, an increasingly inadequate and distant school system, escape into heroin, a "free" time filled with boredom, alienation, and social emptiness. Family and school were no longer capable of containing a mass of young people politicized and shaped by the previous cycle of struggles, even within party and ideological frameworks now experiencing a credibility crisis.
An initial response came from the first circles forming around the gathering places of this proletarian youth on the outskirts of cities. They launched the practice of self-organization in clubs, festivals, moments of self-awareness, occupations, and metropolitan patrols, to regain control of their own destiny and to launch their own challenge to the cities and the existing order.
In Milan, in December 1976, an assembly of two thousand young people decided to boycott the premiere at the Teatro della Scala-a traditional rendezvous for the wealthy Milanese bourgeoisie and the dominant political circles-with several marches that intended to converge in the city center. This was followed by the militarization of the city and a harsh police attack on the demonstrations. Twenty-one people were injured.
At the same time, following measures by the Ministry of Education aimed at dismantling the liberalization of curricula achieved in 1968, the first university occupations began: Palermo, Turin, Pisa, Naples, Rome, then Milan, Bari, Bologna, Genoa, and Cagliari.
In Rome, the situation quickly became tense, with fascists attempting to storm the university campus on February 1, 1977, shooting as they fled, shooting a literature student, Guido Bellachioma, in the back of the head. While an anti-fascist demonstration was being called by the unions, a student march left the university to attack the MSI headquarters on Via Sommacampagna, which was set ablaze. On the way back, a shootout between plainclothes police and protesters left three people injured. The PCI took advantage of the situation to attack the movement, and the CGIL called a demonstration at Rome's Sapienza University, led by its general secretary, Luciano Lama, to regain control of the situation. It was the spark that set the prairie ablaze: the student mobilization was so strong that it provoked a reaction from the union security service, resulting in clashes and Lama's flight from the university, an event of enormous symbolic and political impact.
The movement grew stronger, school occupations multiplied, and social tension grew, culminating in lively demonstrations such as the one in Rome on March 5, 1977, harshly opposed by the police, or the particularly well-attended and determined one on March 11 in Bologna following the murder of Francesco Lorusso by a Carabiniere. The death of this Lotta Continua student, particularly active in the movement, triggered a series of protests by the movement itself: in Rome, Milan, Bologna, and other cities. In Rome, the following day, during the movement's national demonstration, fierce clashes erupted, an armory was attacked, and guns and Molotov cocktails appeared in several places. In Bologna, the armored vehicles of the Carabinieri appear, a preview of the harsh repression that will follow and which - Along with the intense debate that would engulf the movement following differing assessments of recent events, with their accompanying widespread illegality, more or less armed, it would contribute to the development of divisions and rifts that would heavily influence subsequent developments.
The movement's most creative components, feminists and libertarians, gradually distanced themselves from the projects of the so-called "workers' autonomy" movement, especially its militarist components.
Lorusso was not the only one killed in 1977. He was followed by: a police officer, Passamonti, who was shot in a shooting in response to the university eviction in Rome; eighteen-year-old student Giorgiana Masi, who was struck in the back by a bullet fired by a plainclothes officer during a radical demonstration commemorating the victory of the divorce referendum; and Brigadier Custrà in Milan, who was shot in the head during an autonomist march. The clash with fascists intensified, as they repeatedly attacked left-wing militants in Rome, killing Lotta Continua militant Walter Rossi. In response, in Turin, Molotov cocktails were thrown at the "Angelo Azzurro" bar, considered a fascist hangout, killing unemployed chemical engineer Roberto de Crescenzio. Fascist gunshots wounded four more left-wing militants in Rome and killed Benedetto Petrone of the Italian Communist Youth Federation in Bari.
More than two thousand attacks, of varying magnitude, were reported throughout the year.
The state responded by tightening repressive laws, primarily the infamous Reale law, which increased preventive detention and legalized the use of firearms by police in all circumstances.
A conference, initially proposed by a group of French intellectuals concerned about the state of civil liberties in Italy, aims to address this deterioration. The event is scheduled for September in Bologna, a city that has seen armored vehicles in the streets. Attendance is enormous; approximately one hundred thousand young people from across Italy are meeting for three days to find answers and a future for a movement crushed between mounting repression, an increasingly exclusionary social situation, and a comprehensive restructuring of the world of work thanks to the introduction of new technologies that are reviving the debate on the "refusal of work." But the conference instead becomes a stage where obsolete organizational models and ideologies are revived, where the remnants of the small parties born in the wake of '68 (Avanguardia Operaia, Lotta Continua, Movimento dei Lavoratori per il Socialismo) are expelled, and where Autonomia Operaia is proposing the political leadership of the movement. The procession that concluded the three-day event, large, imposing, yet impotent, effectively brought to a close a period of great, unfulfilled hopes.
In reality, the '77 movement was not truly representative of the Italian social situation, but rather of pockets that were certainly significant, particularly present in certain geographic areas, but essentially a minority. The movement failed to permeate Italian society, failing to ensure that the need for revolution became a widely shared element among large segments of the population, who instead remained aligned with the traditional left-wing parties and unions-a left that became a state by siding with the historic compromise and the declaration of loyalty to NATO, in favor of corporate restructuring and the strengthening of the state.
Deprived of a dialogue with the broader social context, incapable of finding new paths capable of providing a positive outcome to the ongoing crisis, the movement-or at least a large portion of it-was left with nothing but a process of radicalization that took on very marked characteristics.
The Armed Struggle
The further the PCI "became a state," with its politics of sacrifice and alliance with the DC, the party of bad governance and corruption, the more the movement's intolerance grew, or at least among what remained of it. With the space for effective union action closed, given the union's alignment with the policy of compromise, most people seemed left with no choice but to engage in armed struggle, even if it wasn't a case of spiraling into heroin addiction (in 1978, there were 60,000 to 70,000 heroin addicts, compared to 10,000 the previous year). From the early months of 1978, there was a constant crescendo of groups and armed actions.
We were witnessing an escalation that saw the Red Brigades as one of the main points of reference in the desire to transform social conflict into civil war, despite their diverse analyses and proposals. But many other collectives and groups, such as Prima Linea, Comunisti Combattenti, Proletari Armati, Azione Rivoluzionaria, and so on, emerged, sometimes in competition with one another, increasingly disconnected from the real dynamics of the working masses. The 1979 murder by the Red Brigades of a union delegate in Genoa, Guido Rossa, linked to his alleged denunciation of the group, effectively triggered an irreparable rift between the traditional working class and the Red Brigades' plan to bring it into armed conflict with the institutions.
In reality, there was no real possibility of a revolutionary war because the conditions for a truly revolutionary process were not in place. But the purely repressive responses of those in power gave further respite to those who believed that armed struggle was the decisive factor. Starting in 1978, an escalation began, culminating in the kidnapping and murder of DC president Aldo Moro and a steady stream of crippling and murders of magistrates, journalists, teachers, and so on. This ultimately resulted in a resurgence of all forms of social conflict, caught between accusations of collusion with Red Brigades terrorism and reformist apathy.
For example, in the early months of 1978, after considerable effort, an independent strike was organized in a series of factories where collectives operating in major Milanese manufacturing facilities-Italtel, Motta Alemagna, Magneti Marelli, Pirelli-had done significant networking and dialogue. But the independent strike took place on the very day of Aldo Moro's kidnapping. As soon as they took to the streets, news of Moro's kidnapping reached them. Police armored vehicles quickly arrived, and uncertainty about what to do became palpable. The union immediately called a protest strike, effectively covering up the self-organized strike. It was then clear that the level of conflict triggered by Moro's kidnapping was such that it was forcing the movements to make a radical and irreversible choice.
Following Moro's kidnapping, a repressive pall fell over all protests, with shadowing and surveillance. A high school teacher in Milan, at a student assembly, dared to say that, after all, Moro wasn't the saint they were trying to portray him as, but a member of a wing of the Christian Democrats, one of the main figures responsible for the anti-grassroots and repressive policies underway in the country. Her case received widespread media coverage and was used to call everyone to order in defense of the Republic "born from the Resistance."
The claim "neither with the State nor with the Red Brigades," advanced by sectors that did not identify with the militarism of the armed groups, but did not intend to side with police repression, was harshly criminalized: the right to free opinion was fundamentally called into question.
With the operation of April 7, 1979, carried out by the judiciary against those identified as the leaders of the '77 movement, the repression took a new leap forward, attempting to link the most "frontier" expression of the movement, the Organized Workers' Autonomy, to the clandestine armed groups, with the construction of a theorem named after the magistrate who conceived it, Calogero. This theorem essentially brings together forms of street protest, the pickets held by self-organized groups of workers, those who drew guns in marches, and armed gangs: a broad theorem that identifies a single subversive plan against the Republic "born from the Resistance." It targets many political figures and activists, such as Toni Negri, Ferrari Bravo, Oreste Scalzone, Emilio Vesce, Franco Piperno, and others, linked to past militancy in Potere Operaio, along with dozens of lesser-known militants. This operation, which lands these figures in prison and initiates trials that end with heavy sentences, many of which escape by fleeing abroad, effectively represents the liquidation of what remained of the '77 movement.
For their part, the armed groups, following the laws on dissociation and repentance, the growing isolation from traditional sectors of reference, the weakening of the movements' political capacity, and a loss of meaning in their actions, reduced to a succession of senseless murders, entered a profound crisis, culminating in their dissolution.
With the climate of historic compromise waning, Bettino Craxi's Socialist Party emerged as the government, ushering in a new era: that of Milan's "da bere" (the Milan of the nightlife).
Massimo Varengo
https://umanitanova.org/utopie-e-autoritarismi-nel-decennio-1968-1977-ultima-parte/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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