Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Diary of an Escape

  For Paola

  Diary of an Escape

  Antonio Negri

  Translated by Ed Emery

  polity

  Published in French as L’Italie rouge et noire, 1985 and in Italian as Diario di un’evasione, 1986. Copyright © Antonio Negri, 1985. This translation copyright © Polity Press, 2010.

  This English edition © Polity Press, 2010

  Polity Press

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  ISBN: 978-0-7456-8179-5

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Index by Ed Emery

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  Contents

  Abbreviations

  Author’s Introduction

  1 The Trial (24 February to 24 May 1983)

  2 Self-Defence in Court (25 May to 8 July 1983)

  3 In Parliament (9 July to 18 September 1983)

  4 Freedom (19 September to 30 November 1983)

  Appendix: quotations and translated phrases

  Index

  Abbreviations

  API The ‘beer’ – Red Brigaders in Trané prison

  BR Brigate Rosse/The Red Brigades (Marxist–Leninist militant group founded in 1970 and broken up in 1980)

  CSM Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura/The Superior Council of Magistracy (self-governing constitutional body in civil and criminal matters)

  DIGOS Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali/ The Division of General Investigations and Special Operations (law enforcement agency charged with the investigation of organized crime and terrorism)

  FLM Federazione Lavoratori Metalmeccanici/Metalworkers’ Union (trade union federation formed in 1973)

  GAP Gruppi di Azione Partigiana/Partisan Action Groups (Italian terrorist group founded by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in 1970)

  OCC organizzazioni comuniste combattenti/communist combatant organizations

  OS ouvrier spécialisé

  OVRA Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo/The Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Antifascism (Mussolini’s secret police, founded in 1927)

  PCI Partito Comunista Italiano/The Italian Communist Party (founded in 1921, outlawed during the Fascist regime and re-founded in 1943)

  PdUP Partito di Unità Proletaria/The Proletarian Unity Party (party of the extreme Left, founded in 1972)

  UCC Unione dei Comunisti Combattenti/The Union of Combatant Communists, or Red Brigades–UCC (one of the two factions into which the Red Brigades split in 1984)

  UNURI Unione Nazionale Universitaria Rappresentativa Italiana/ The Italian National Representative Union of Universities (organ representing Italian students, 1948–68)

  Author’s Introduction

  As the dates show, this diary was finished about two years ago. Immediately, a major Italian publishing house asked me if they could publish it. The publishing house was in receivership at the time, which meant that an independent editor had space to distance himself from the cowardliness of the majority. However, the publisher had hardly emerged from receivership when the new owners cancelled my contract. And, as if that was not enough, they also began attacking me and slandering me through the publisher’s own daily and weekly newspapers. Since then things have gone from bad to worse, to the point where I had the pleasure of reading in Corriere della Sera a few weeks ago that, in the name of freedom of the press, my books should not be published at all! It does not surprise me to see journalists rallying to the cause of censorship, given that, in the name of defending the institutions, they are already prepared to be the servants of new fascist entities, lodges and corporations. I am proud of having obliged them to censor me, these same people who not so many years ago thought that they had succeeded in burying me beneath kilometres of lead, and who had accused me of being the assassin of the Republic – and then, when I was found to be innocent, reported the fact in a couple of column inches and forgot about it. Like hypocritical dogs who shit on the pavement and then make to bury it with a couple of paw strokes. At that point a major French publisher broke this united front of silence and dishonour and went ahead and published the volume. I thank him, and here I would also like to thank the people who, amid extraordinary difficulties and with great generosity, are now publishing this diary in Italian. They are showing once again that chez nous, that liberty which is detested and crushed by the state and by the big institutions, is nurtured and defended and given a high social value by ever-new figures and ever more intelligent subjects.

  I wrote this diary to tell the truth about what was happening to me. Four years of preventive imprisonment, followed by election to Parliament and then by the experience, made in corpore vili [‘on a body of no value’] – my own, in this instance – of the cruelty of the special laws and of the ‘truth’ of the pentiti [members of armed organizations who ‘recant’, collaborate with the authorities and receive state protection and/or a reduced sentence in return. Gradually two themes became central: my lack of any kind of confidence in the magistracy and the political class; and my declaration of innocence, hence my right to escape. I was (and am) literally pursued by a group of magistrates (supported by a compact set of political ‘lobbies’) who have interpreted in reactionary forms the struggle of the institutions against terrorism. This interpretation has removed the right to justice, has very seriously poisoned the democratic political system, and has constructed brothels of corporative infamy within the state. So much for the general picture. As regards my own personal position, a few basic facts will suffice to show the extent to which I have fallen prey to the system’s madness. I have been accused, and must defend myself, in six separate trials, which have since become eighteen, bearing in mind the three levels involved in each trial; and now, six years after my arrest, only one and a half have been carried through. That leaves me (for the next twenty years, I imagine) with sixteen and a half trials in which I have to defend myself, find the money to pay lawyers, mobilize journalists and so on.

  As for the political class: from Right to Left without exception, including what remains of the far Left – which had been backtracking politically to the point of indecency – it has accepted this degradation of the law without batting an eyelid. At least this has been the case for a long time. Now, in the course of the past two years – and particularly in recent months – there has been something of a reawakening, so that many of the accusations which I, as an innocent man and as an elected member of Parliament, bring here against these magistrates, political cliques and journalistic mafias have acquired resonance today through statements made by certain authoritative representatives of the state. Obviously this fact gives me a degree of pleasure – and it prom
pts me to confess (comforted by those declarations) that, if I had many doubts when I made my escape from Italy (as my diary confirms), today, when I think back, I can only thank the heavens for having inspired me to do so. If at that time I was in doubt, today I consider myself the subject of a miracle for not having let those doubts stand in the way of my escape.

  An escape which has been a symbol of truth and liberty. No, ‘our only claim to eternity will not be the contents of our police files’, nor the ravings of Calogero and his like, nor the malevolence and cynical determination of the lodges! It will not be possible for the ruling class to cancel out the memory of our revolution, as they did on other occasions in Italy – for instance when, after 1870, they resorted to ferocious repression against the social movement of the revolutionary peasantry to destroy the movement for radical transformation which had traversed the Risorgimento; when they dissolved, through wars and fascism, the practice of working-class counter-power, which had accompanied the industrial revolution; or when they used restructuring, state massacres and emergency laws to crush the struggles which the exploited had opposed to the new and fierce rules of mature capitalism. No, you will not manage to cancel the memory of the 1960s and 1970s by applying the label ‘terrorism’. We are not ‘terrorists’, just as our fathers were not ‘deserters’ or our grandfathers ‘bandits’. We are stubborn people – who want, and who continue to want, from generation to generation, a radical transformation of society and a thoroughgoing political revolution. This is the reason why I published, and am now republishing, this diary – then in French, now in Italian. Because on this basis my feeling of innocence and the demand for justice which have jointly guided my action (and which are continually renewed and fed by the memory of the heroic and very sweet period of development of communist autonomy) now drive me to propose, with coherence, that I should return to Italy. Returning so as to confirm my freedom, just as they drove me to escape in order to preserve that freedom. Returning to Italy so as to resume the communist political struggle. Directly, immediately.

  Because, in the first place, the precarious political equilibrium which was established in Italy around the defeat of terrorism has shown its limits: the ability to defeat terrorism was not accompanied by the intelligence needed to dissolve the reasons for it, or to recover its radical albeit ingenuous motivations. Because, secondly, not only have we seen a complete paralysis in the transformation and political modernization of the country, but we have also seen a barbarizing of its civil structures – a barbarizing paradoxically brought about by the extension of emergency laws and by the ways in which the parties have made use of these laws against each other. I do not criticize only the emergency laws; what I criticize also is their extraordinary extension, and the fact that they have become a huge disfigurement of law and of the rules of simple human cohabitation. All these uglinesses can only be cancelled by a programme of renewal which, in a democracy, sees the social subjects who were formed in the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s becoming protagonists again. Returning to protagonism. The hope of a return is thus articulated with the claim which, for all the mistakes made, my generation can broadly make: that of being the only ones who tried to give body to the reform of culture, to the modification of the democratic institutions and to the development of liberty. The only generation in the forty years since the end of the Second World War. Today we are in a position to talk about a return. A return of the exiles to their country, a return of the prisoners to their families, a return of the generation of social struggles to democratic political life. We have to talk about this return, because the country needs us and needs our will and capacity for transformation. It needs our culture, the fact of our differentness.

  As for us, it does us no good to be scornful of the generation of the Resistance and of the period of antifascism which preceded us. Gradually, over the course of time, that generation has completely abdicated all commitment to transformation. It rebuilt the country after the war – rebuilt it so well that it gave us a country which was almost the same as it was during the years of fascism. No dynamic response was given to the enormous modification of the economic and cultural base that the struggle of the world proletariat had brought about. We have a political constitution which, contradictorily, combines both feebleness and rigidity. We have a political class which is clinging onto power – a rotting ivy on structures that are disintegrating. So a return is not only a desire for us; it is also a necessity for the country. Our struggle has in fact been the genealogy – certainly not of the present, but – of the possible future of our country. We have no intention of ending up in a situation where, in Milan Kundera’s words, our only claim to posterity will be the contents of our police files. Our defeat has been only one episode, and not even among the most important ones, in the struggle which, in the world and in Italy, has been developing for a century for the appropriation of the enormous productive forces that development has created. Our generation is the only one to have a political culture which is matched to the enormity of this technological revolution, and one with a productivity and an invention-power to match. Thus the notion of return derives its political strength from the ontological force of a radical change that has already taken place in people’s consciousnesses. We do not need memory in order to be able to declare it. We do not need anything other than the fact of our existing, of our being present – of our return.

  I feel that all this is near. And I feel that in the whole of Europe – and maybe even a bit further afield – many things are changing. Finally, it should be said that ours is a return which bears the scars of transformation. How much time have we spent working on this, how much suffering have we undergone – and yet this return appears so bright that I have no pain at the thought of that past; the only pain which I have now is the restlessness of a wait which, as of today, I hope will be very brief.

  1

  The Trial

  24 February to 24 May 1983: Folios 1–37

  Folio 1

  24 February. Thursday. Morning wake-up call at 6.30. I am very tense. For four years I have been waiting for this fateful – is that the word? – day. I am already tired as I come to wakefulness. The sky is dark, but you can see that it is a cold crystalline blue, as often happens in Rome at this time of year. We come down to the disgusting narrow little cells. We wait. I read the graffiti on the walls. The body searches begin. Then we’re chained together, four at a time, and we’re loaded into the vans. The helicopter arrives. Buzzing overhead. A barking of military-style orders. Swarms of motorcycle police. We wait in the trucks. A joke or two among the comrades. Then our very noisy convoy moves off. Roads blocked off, guns pointing everywhere, one truck with a soldier in a kind of armoured turret, ready to shoot. Continuous stream of radio babble, the kind of thing you hear in the movies: ‘Panther calling Eagle … Swan replying …’ We’ve left the quiet of prison behind us. Now we’re caught in the trappings of war. We stretch to peer out of the windows of our van. People look alarmed as we pass. Green grass along the outlying roads where they’re taking us. Then, finally, the bunker, the infamous Foro Italico. Again we wait. By 10.30 a.m. we are in court. It’s taken four hours to get here. Is it going to be like this every time? I’m done for. We enter the specially built cages in the courtroom, with the cameras and TV crews homing in on us. ‘Cheese, cheese.’ Do you know what it’s like to have spent a year, a month, even a day, in prison? ‘Cheese, cheese.’

  Enter the judges. The repressive machine seems to thrive on this concocted routine. The stage-setting is antiquated, and the spectacle of force does nothing to remove the sense of anachronism. The machine, however, enjoys its airs and graces. Silence – apart from the continuing click, click of the cameras. ‘Cheese, cheese.’ No, this court is a useless add-on. This trial is already a foregone conclusion for the institutions. Why carry on the pretence? How can there be any hope of finding justice in this trial, prejudiced as it is by four years of preventive detention? The cameras click and the film
cameras whir. ‘Cheese, cheese.’ It’s hard to take in everything that’s going on. Right at the back of this huge armed encampment we can see friends, relations and comrades. I’m terribly short-sighted, so the comrades point people out to me: ‘Look, there’s X, and there’s Y …’. An equation with too many unknowns. However, in this feverish excitement I pretend that I too can see. Greetings, emotion. Santiapichi, the judge, starts. Giuliano, my lawyer, also starts. They exchange formalities, which seem like mafia signals. The problem this morning is how we are going to get out of a particularly absurd situation: today, apart from being on trial in Rome, I am also supposed to be on trial in Milan. The formality of their exchanges does nothing to conceal the fierce irrationality of the whole proceedings.

  The court adjourns. We go down to the cells. We wait there for hours and hours. The machine grinds away, the handcuffs cut into your wrists, the court decides …

  You might wonder how the court can make a decision in a situation like this. But it will decide, that’s for sure. It has to decide. And thus the decision will conclude this imbalanced – I would say incoherent and ferocious – trial dialectics. So we won’t go to Milan – we’ll stay in Rome? We’ll see tomorrow. Ah, mysterious decisionism [decisionismo], what a vulgar situation you have fallen into! We return to prison, physically exhausted. I experience a strange and horrible happiness at being back in my cell. I throw myself onto my bed. I want to sleep. The other comrades ask how it went. Finally I take a book, in the hope of getting off to sleep. Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction. I can’t sleep. My mind is caught up in the plot of the story. Rousseau as a Hölderlinian hero – but this trial of ours, is it not in reality a persecution of the ‘beautiful soul’ of the movement? Enough! Thought cannot stoop to concern itself with this trial. Reaching out, I pick up another book from the floor, the first that comes to hand. It is an issue of the German journal Alternative, the latest to arrive and also the last of the series. The comrades are saying ‘1968 is finished’. Alternative ran for more than ten years as a sourcebook within the movement. Now the story has come to an end, gentlemen, and another story is starting.