Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  16

  The defeat of the movement of ’77 began with the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro in March–May 1978. In a kind of tragic parody of the way the official Left had operated in the mid-1970s, the Red Brigades similarly pursued their own separate ‘political breakthrough’ at the expense of currents of resistance in society at large.

  The ‘culture’ of the Red Brigades – with its people’s courts, prisons, prisoners and trials, and its practice of the ‘armed fraction’, totally within the logic of an autonomy of the political, were played against the new subjects of social antagonism as much as against the institutions and the state.

  With the Moro operation the unity of the movement was definitively broken. A twilight zone of drifting began, which was characterized by frontal attacks launched by the autonomy on the Red Brigades and by the withdrawal of large sectors of youth and the proletariat from political struggle. The ‘emergency’, so loudly proclaimed by the state and by the PCI, was lashing out in the dark or, rather, tended to select its victims from among people known as ‘subversives’ and in the public view, who were used as scapegoats in a generalized witch-hunt. In the circumstances, the autonomy found itself facing a violent attack, beginning with a purge in the factories of the north. Thus the ‘autonomous collectives’ in factories were lambasted as pro-terrorist by the trade unions and by the PCI, and were weeded out and denounced. And when, in the very days of the Moro kidnap, the autonomists were launching a struggle at Alfa Romeo against working on Saturdays, they were branded by the historical Left in a militaristic, demonizing, ‘anti-terrorist’ campaign. Thus began the process of expulsion from the factories of the new generation of vanguard militants – a process which reached its climax with the mass sackings of sixty-one key militants at FIAT in the autumn of 1979.

  17

  After the Moro operation, in the desolate landscape of a militarized civil society, the state and the Red Brigades faced each other like opposite reflections in the same mirror.

  The Red Brigades rapidly went down that irreversible path whereby the armed struggle became ‘terrorism’ in the true sense of the word. Their campaign of annihilation began. Police, judges, magistrates, factory managers, trade unionists were killed only on account of their ‘function’ – as the pentiti have subsequently revealed.

  Moreover, the wave of arrests [rastrellamenti] against the movement of autonomy, in ’79, eliminated the only political network which was in a position to fight against the logic of terrorism. Thus, between ’79 and ’81, the Red Brigades were for the first time able to recruit militants not only from the minor ‘combatant organizations’, but also directly from a scarcely politicized youth, whose discontent and anger were now deprived of any political and programmatic mediation.

  18

  As a mass phenomenon, the pentiti are only the other side, equally militaristic and equally horrible, of the terrorist coin.

  The phenomenon of pentitismo [system of remission for state informers, set up by law in December 1979] is an extreme version of terrorism, its pavlovian ‘conditioned reflex’, the ultimate proof of its total abstraction and alienation from the fabric of the movement. The incompatibility between the ‘armed struggle’ and the new social subject is revealed in a distorted, horrendous way by these acts of verbal merchandizing.

  Pentitismo is a ‘logic of annihilation’ of the whole judicial framework, an indiscriminate vendetta, a celebration of the absence of historical memory – precisely when it sets in operation, in a perverse and manipulated way, an individual ‘memory’. The pentiti are false even when they tell the ‘truth’. They unify what is divided, they abolish real motivations and context, they recall effects without causes, they establish hypothetical links, they interpret according to various theorems. Pentitismo is terrorism introjected into the institutions. There will be no post-terrorism without a parallel overcoming of the culture of pentimento.

  19

  The sharp, definitive defeat of the political organizations of the movement, at the end of the ’70s, in no sense coincided with a defeat of the new political and productive subject, who has made his ‘general test’ in the eruption of ’77.

  This new social subject has carried out a long march in the workplace, in the organization of social knowledge, in the ‘alternative economy’, in local services and administrative apparatuses. This subject has proliferated by keeping close to the ground and avoiding any direct political confrontation, manoeuvering between the underground ghetto and institutional deals, between separateness and co-management. Although under pressure and often forced into passivity, this underground movement today constitutes – even more than in the past – the unresolved core of the Italian crisis.

  The rearticulation of the working day; the pressure on public spending; the questions of protection of the environment and choice of technologies; the crisis of the party system; and the problem of finding new constitutional formulae of government – behind all these questions, the density of the mass subject, with her multiple demands for income, freedom and peace, remains intact.

  20

  Now, after the Historic Compromise and in the post-terrorist situation, the same question of ’77 returns on the agenda: how to open spaces of mediation, which can allow the movements to express themselves and grow.

  Struggles and political mediation; and negotiation at the institutional level. This prospect, here as well as in Germany, is rendered both possible and necessary not by the timidity and backwardness of the social conflict, but by the extreme maturity of its contents.

  We have to pick up and develop the thread of ’77 against the militarism of the state and against any tendency to relaunch the ‘armed struggle’ (there is no ‘good’ version of it, no alternative to the practices in Third International style á la Red Brigades: all versions end by being antithetical to the new movements). A productive force [potenza], both individual and collective, is placed outside of and against wage labour. The state is going to have to take this phenomenon into account, including in its administrative and econometric calculations. This potenza can be at one and the same time separate, antagonistic, and capable of seeking and finding its own mediations.

  Folio 22

  ‘Do you remember revolution?’ Personally I have no difficulty in remembering it, and in keeping alive my hopes for it. But all this makes me so angry! Why? The tainted consciousness of the intellectuals, the ‘nit-picking’ of the far Left, the opportunism of the socialists, the hatred from the communists – all of this loads: the word – with suspicion, the concept – with contempt. In the trial today Luciano spoke in defence of revolution – with that lucid, impassioned and spiritually detached intelligence of his. The judges – Santiapichi and Abbate – responded provocatively, fed as they are by their conviction that they are in the right, by a sense of their role, by a mad presumption of good faith. The problem is perhaps banal: it lies in the fact that these Roman magistrates, in their isolation, really no longer know what we are talking about. Their class origins are rooted in the thin soil of the bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie, or in the arrogance of the agrarian bourgeoisie. Their culture does not extend beyond a regurgitated Croceanism. They are nervous of the new culture they see lining up before them. They respond to statements of reason with a preoccupied and foul-smelling belch of arrogance. There really is no way of discussing with them. The distance between our languages is the distance between simplicity and cynicism – our cool simplicity and their oily cynicism. This is what is not understood by the critics of our ‘Do You Remember Revolution?’ They don’t understand that the clash, which is not beyond but right inside the struggle itself and inside the radical separation between autonomy and terrorism, has been a clash between two cultures: on the one hand the simplicity of needs; on the other, the world of politics. For the world of politics you can read state and terrorism – two sides of the same coin, monstrous figures of political alienation. On that clash, on that separation, you then have the people saying �
�Yes, but …’. Enough! Come and listen to Luciano in court and you will understand the full enormity of this provocation, this bastardization, this falsification. It is on this terrain that all the misunderstandings accumulate. We, for example, refer to ourselves as being ‘dissociated’ – but power has tried to taint this word by making it equivalent to ‘pentito’ or ‘spy’. Power understands that behind our dissociation from terrorism lies a call for revolution and behind our reassertion of our identity, which is irreducible to that of terrorism, lies a continuous desire for communism. Lucio, with some force and with a measure of hysteria, puts all this out in the open again. And the response is provocation; what comes back is stupidity and vulgarity. They are unable to understand what is being talked about. They understand that it is about something inimical to them, which they are incapable of absorbing. You’re good, Lucio – in the way you have established a high profile for this political battle, which we absolutely have to sustain. And win? That’s another problem – we all know that today it is impossible to win. (G12 Rebibbia – 7–8 April)

  Folio 23

  I spend the day reading fresh transcripts of witness statements. Today the statements of the latest wave of pentiti arrived. Bettini, Virzo, Marocco, Coniglio. They are terrible in their dogged acceptance of the theorems and in their cold repetition of what has been dictated to them by the public prosecutors. They try to lend credibility to the prosecution’s most fantastical fabrications. But this is not the problem – we shall be able to destroy the material content of these allegations in court. The problem is rather the one raised by this generation of pentiti. Why? Why this haemorrhage? One thing is certain in this whole debate: the pentito is a character who breaks with group loyalty and with the values that constitute his group, and he makes this break not so much at the moral level (which would be completely irrelevant, or at least secondary in terms of juridical effects), as at the juridical level. He has to accuse if he is to be valued as a pentito. And the more people he accuses, the more people he sends to the gallows, the closer he comes to his own freedom. Thus the fact of being a pentito becomes essentially a kind of barter. Today I am trying to make the effort, in my own mind, to overcome the contempt, the disgust and the infinite moral repulsion that all this awakens in me and to understand it, if possible, sine ira et studio. So there are two actors in this reduction of law to a bartering operation: on the one hand the judge and the juridical system, and, on the other, the pentito and the system of regulation of social loyalty. It seems to me that the juridical practice of pentimento obeys the conditions of balance of the social market only if it is considered as a relationship between the judge and the pentito, not if it is evaluated as one between the juridical system and the social system. To explain what I mean: it seems to me obvious that barter is taking the place of the rule of law [diritto] (which was once abstract, general and so on), and that this is happening increasingly and to such an extent that it is becoming the operational principle of the juridical system, albeit in the more sophisticated forms of contract, exchange and negotiation. This is how corporate entities react nowadays: their rigidities are such that a regulating mode can only be constructed through temporary sets of standards and conventions of barter. From this point of view, the phenomenon of pentimento/barter is one that fits this flat society, where there can be no transcendence of law, but only juridical procedures of transaction. However, we have here an explosive contradiction, because this way of proceeding, of barter through individualization, negates the substantial purpose of a postmodern contractual system of law. Such purposes come to be identified through the need of regulating the relationship between rigidities that are collective. The new contractual system of law has collective means and purposes; it is another name for social collective regulation. In the legislation on pentimento, on the other hand, the rules of the new system of law become banalized and reduced to individual acts of trading. Instead of a legal interplay of powers and counter-powers, we have what is effectively a practice of selling indulgences. Juridical reformism gives itself away by introducing norms for individual favours, and the judges who apply these norms thus place themselves on a terrain of fraud – in relation to the dynamism and the new teleology of their own system of rules. Sine ira et studio: in consequence, the indecency of the pentitismo-based and bandit-style system of crimes and penalties resides essentially in the gap between the new normativity, of a collective contract and regulation, and old, individualistic mercantile contents. As a system it is doubly barbaric, because on the one hand it destroys the old system of law, which could engage directly with individuals insofar as its normativity was general and abstract; on the other, it destroys the possibility of building a new system of law on a base of rules that match the circumstances, of administrative proceduralization, of engagement of the individual – but only in the relationship between collective entities. In this sense the juridical system contradicts or, even worse, sets itself up against the system of social loyalties. In doing this, the judge who constructs the pentito (in the sense of landing him with this juridical label and of recognizing him as such) is also carrying out an immoral operation, insofar as he frees him from those bonds of group loyalty which the law should, on the contrary, assume to be the foundation of its strength during the present phase of transformation. That said, it should be added that the judges have a field day: like drug dealers, they are performing an act of immorality – but it’s clear that the drug-addict wants it. And that brings us to the subjective problem of the pentimento. Why this haemorrhage of pentiti? For the moment, just one point. In almost all cases, the pentito (assuming that he is not just some small-time turncoat) belongs to the fringes of the movement. His participation in the political group was determined more by an evaluation concerning the efficacy of its fire-power and the relevance of his action for the conquest of power than by his adherence to a collective project of transformation. In other words, in the great majority of cases, the terrorist/pentito is part of the traditional political family – and not of the new breed of revolutionary subjects. The cynicism of the pentito is homologous with that of the judges and with that of the politicians who made the laws. So why this haemorrhage of pentiti? It is not the fruit of the defeat of terrorism – it is the fruit of the victory of terrorism over the autonomous and communist wings and sectors of the movement. It is the fruit of the hegemony of terrorism, after 7 April 1979, over the whole movement. The homicidal infamy of terrorism had finally to be crowned with this judicial infamy – and on those moral and judicial homologies become the symbol of the entire moral and cultural system of power in Italy. On the other hand, this is just what one would expect: that corruption, dissolution and decadence should give each other a deformed reflection in this infamy. (G12 Rebibbia – 9 April)

  Folio 24

  When I think of my accusers – Santiapichi and Abbate, performing on stage in front of what is virtually a professional jury (it has already done the Moro case) and in front of Marini, seated as he is on the public prosecutor’s dais – I can’t avoid feeling a certain sympathy for them. Functional mediocrity of the magistracy – a poor level of culture, with strong old-style Italian resonances (Croce) and a smattering of reforming modernization (English law – sic!); a moderate level of politicization, with touches of sympathy for the national unanimity of the Historic Compromise and with the after-effects of a history of corruption (Severino and the mafia charges from which he managed to extract himself); a touch of paranoia (Abbate and his use of the pencil: it reminds you of Humphrey Bogart playing with the marbles, rhythmic and obsessive, in his performance as the commander in The Caine Mutiny); a strong degree of exhibitionism; administrative coldness and bureaucratic excess; extreme ritualization, offset by posturing attitudes and the occasional sly joke – and so on. However, this is not what elicits my sympathy; rather it is the lack of freedom and of intelligence. Everything always so predictable; never any unexpected behaviour. Their legitimacy, however, is not determined by the mediocrity
of their culture and intelligence – rather their legitimacy derives entirely from the machine. They are appendages of the machine – I feel sorry for them on this account. But at the same time they scare me with the inertia they represent, the inertia they must represent. I cannot forget that their apparent (and somewhat relative) having nothing to do with prison, with its sufferings and with the preventive detention that we have endured, with torture and chains and prison escorts, is indeed only in appearance. In reality they are part of the whole package – and the denial they often display in dealing with it (and the irritation, sometimes even the contempt) does nothing to diminish but actually accentuates the fact of their central role in the machine. Their bad conscience does not negate this relationship but deepens it. I am struck and terrified by the sense of irresponsibility towards the real that these premisses determine. I repeat: all the more so as they are people of bad conscience. Bad conscience generates resentment. In my silent contemplation of them I find nothing to awaken feelings of trust. The more they feel guilty about their subordination to this machine, the more they load that guilt onto us. Good sense as a corrective? But what room is there for it within a machine which has already programmed life imprisonment for us? No, the heaviness, the absolute negativity of this trial situation can only be resolved by some kind of driving force that can break the inertia. They are powerless to break with it, even if they wanted to. And we ourselves can only break it through our ethical resistance and through the heroism of our understanding – by surviving, constructing our community and demystifying the machine. And then? And then? (G12 – Rebibbia – 10 April)