Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Folio 80

  Here in Gualtieri, close to Reggio Emilia, I held a meeting on the Po. In the midst of so many people. A world that is strong and openhearted, a world that I have known for a lifetime. The Po flows as powerfully as ever, here and in the neighbouring region where my mother lived, some thirty-odd kilometres away. A countryside where the horizon is uninterrupted by any kind of border, or by any blockage of the view. No hills here, everything completely flat, and the Po flows like a lord. Mother earth – this place where the history of peasant struggles connects seamlessly with a sense of freedom that only the infinity of the horizon can interpret. Here I smelt the smells and heard the voices and saw the colours of my childhood. In the meeting I spoke about the difference between this history and the institutions of the Italian state, between these horizons of freedom and the squalid regime which dishonours it by dominating it. I spoke calmly, but with great determination. There were many people at the meeting – very dear comrades. I felt at home. And I felt as if, once again, everything was possible – our dreams of liberty and justice – and the possibility of taking these things, with the strength that struggles give us. With this mass potency that the river represents. The village is architecturally delicious, an example of Renaissance perfection. I feel really good in such a place! And how it feeds openhearted imaginings and hard behaviours of struggle! I think of the birth of socialism, of how people found their feet, uncertainly at first, but then with growing confidence, along these same winding banks of the Po, as they spoke of revolution. A revolution which grew throughout the duration of this century, overcoming the counterattack of the bosses, and of fascism, and of capitalist reconstruction. The waters of the Po run fast. And this image of the river’s potency must be part of the awareness of the people who work around it: this strength does not abate. It is from the river that you learn the purificatory and invincible function of mass struggles. The work of maintaining the river banks and the irrigation systems which these lands have known for centuries. In people’s eyes, and in their smiles, and in the movements of the young, and in their dances, and their communal singing, I find so many recollections of my youth – I remember my mother dancing on the threshing floor. I’ve been followed here by the usual bunch of little provocateurs (the father of poor Alceste Campanile, who shouts ‘Murderer’ at me and is drowned in the laughter of the people at the meeting), and a couple of journalistic hacks. I am so completely serene – even though I am dead with exhaustion – that I barely notice their pointless pinpricks. I look at paintings by Ligabue, who spent his own desperate life as a free man around these parts. Here it makes sense to attack the state, the cliques of the political parties, those of the magistracy – because this is a frame of mind handed down through generations. People are naturally communist, and it is as a communist that they welcome me and draw me into their affections. I feel good here. And so many people here. I touched Earth again. Once again I can see those possibilities of mass struggle which political reason demands and which repression cannot have destroyed, either here or elsewhere. (Gualtieri – 28 August).

  Folio 81

  I have returned to Rome, to this parliamentary cesspit. After the day of yesterday spent in Gualtieri, I understand even less why I should continue to be here, to conduct this impossible struggle. And yet something is moving. By now we have an enormous documentation on the strikes and struggles of the prisoners – enough to push towards the solution of various problems (preventive detention, prison conditions, the call for new codes, application of the 1975 law on penal conditions, etc.). So they have started, just as they had promised. The forms of struggle are completely new and original. Peaceful struggles. And one has the impression that they have been conducted with great tactical wisdom – they are not allowing themselves to be trapped in unwinnable confrontations. We have here mass struggles led from the base. News is arriving from prisons all over Italy. I am receiving a load of letters from prisons, from friends and from people unknown to me. I read and read, all day long. And I answer the letters. I have to function as a relay of this struggle, in relation to Parliament. I shall do it, in the very short amount of time still remaining to me. I feel that something can be done. But I am still amazed by the disproportion between the huge quantity of hope for justice which sustains these struggles – and the scary rigidity and the crude, uncaring response at parliamentary level. Those in power do not deserve these struggles, which we, the prisoners, have built with such democracy and correct tactics. But it’s good to go ahead like this, because this fighting educates us and makes us stronger. It offers a way out of the alternative of shipwreck or desperation, which are the only options offered us by those in power. I have no difficulty in imagining the course that the struggle has taken, the obstacles, the clashes, the discussions, the decisions. And the nerviness and the tiredness which, in prison, colours each and every one of these movements – not to mention the loss of confidence, which so easily overtakes you. But I also imagine the warmth of those movements, and the popular wisdom they contain – and that act of liberation that is created for each person when they decide, in the course of communal discussions, to make the choice for struggle. The objectives are undoubtedly reformist – they really are the least that could be demanded. But it is important nonetheless – and indeed revolutionary – to indicate this trajectory of the mass struggle, and to involve everybody, personally, in decision-making. It is an enormous sign of the maturity of the people in prison, and probably also a sign of changes in their composition. Nowadays the whole of society is filtered through prison. And yet this force, this generosity, this democracy will be disappointed. Why this incredible distance? Here in Parliament prison is seen as a place of prevention and a terroristic exemplification of punishment, which capitalist countries necessarily have to offer. There really is no possible contact between this conception and the desire for liberty. I try to understand what can be gained out of all of this – in fact it is almost nothing. This country of ours needs a revolution. It needs one on the basis of a transformation of consciousness which has already taken place, at the broadest mass level. It needs an expansion of this root-and-branch change [catastrofe] in needs and desires, which has already taken place. Today the Ministry of Justice appears as an archaic monster of wickedness by comparison with the prisoners’ groups and the mass meetings being organized in the prisons. How are we to move within this reality, which has now reached such a degree of scission? (Rome – 29 August)

  Folio 82

  In the morning I met with the chancellor [il Guardasigilli], to discuss with him the conference that the comrades want to organize in Rebibbia on the theme of alternatives to imprisonment. The discussion immediately shifted to ways of bringing an end to the state of emergency, and then to the communist project of the abolition of prisons. An intelligent man, with a sense of spiritual freedom and a deep irony – a man who is tired and disenchanted. One can be reactionary even through being simply realistic. He is not a cynic. The conference will happen, … yes, no, if, … we’ll see, … the minister is difficult, … there’s a security problem, and so on. It is devilishly hot today. I return to working on interviews and on the media. I have a long discussion with Gad. The movement and its history. He reproaches me for not having intervened in time to block the disastrous line the struggles were taking. But it wasn’t like that, I reply. The problem was the internal disproportion, the unboundedness of the strength of the movement, which made it so that the radical change in the conception of needs and desires and the urgency of appropriation ran up against the poverty of organizational means. We, on our own – too much on our own – did our best to intervene in this conjuncture. The fault of many others who had experienced the movement – a fault which was serious and historically marked in fire – was that they attacked the consequences of this disproportion but did not address themselves to the actual problem, trying to find ways to resolve it directly. This was the mistake that led to practically all the leadership groups in the move
ment breaking apart. Including the leadership group of Lotta Continua – even before that of Potere Operaio [‘Workers’ Power’], preceding it chronologically. That the problem was profound is illustrated by what happened afterwards – the Years of Lead and the thousands of comrades who were caught up in the repression. And the present demonstrates it more than anything else: the lack of fibre [atonia] of this society and the fragmentation of interests, the impossibility of getting a whole picture of them. Just now I was looking at the endnotes in the Censis report – which offer a Greek-style lamentation over all these things, always supposing that they are not a hypocritical justification for the electoral defeat of the major political parties. As for myself, I certainly have no illusion that everything can be resolved by a wave of some magic wand. But how are we to move forward? There is only one way: by deepening the logic of our history and reproposing the original problem, which we left unresolved. A continuity is possible for us – it is not a continuity of what they are accusing us of, but of what actually happened in the movement, the things you don’t see unless you actually want to see them – and which are, quite rightly, hidden from our accusers. We have to study and organize the content of the radical change which our generation has lived and which can in no sense be cancelled out. Is this conception substantialist or non-substantialist, rationalist or irrationalist? I really do not know. I am not interested in defining reductive categories, but in grasping the sense of complexity of things. And the complexity consists in this – that there was a revolution, and that it was inscribed in people’s consciousnesses and posed certain central and fundamental problems. And it was prevented and repressed at the point at which it was engaged in this transition – in the transition to organization. But it has remained in people’s spirit and it manifests itself in their unhappiness and anguish, because it was not able to find expression in constitution. For sure, it is difficult and hard. I’m seeing Rossana today. We are discussing the idea of starting a research project on northern Italy – on class composition, to be precise. I don’t know whether research work like this can actually be done. What class, dear Rossana? The class which is being disaggregated is being disaggregated, and that’s that. Then there’s the other class, the one which moved through the period of radical change and moves itself only for revolution. This one is intent on detachment and alternative ways of life. I do not know when it will express itself. I have the impression that it is extending infinite numbers of threads and constituting a new web of being. How is this to be grasped? Sarcastically, I almost find myself saying: through travel. At this point I have an increasing detestation for what I see around me – even the intelligence, even the honest self-questioning about where we went wrong. We didn’t go wrong, except insofar as we did not ask ourselves the question. We should have lived this incredible tragedy of ours even more to the limit, knowing that this is what it was – and that only by imposing on ourselves a profound asceticism could we have succeeded in interpreting an event which was too enormous to be capable of being contained within our language. The primary inscription of our being is communist revolution.

  PS Kafka, Wedding Preparations in the Country. ‘The first sign of the beginning of knowledge is the desire to die. This life seems unbearable, alien, inaccessible. There is no longer shame in wanting to die. One is asked to leave the old cell which is hated in order to transfer oneself into a new cell which we shall learn to hate. A shred of faith continues, however, to make you think that, during the transfer, the big man will happen to be coming down the corridor, and he will say: “Don’t put that one back in prison, he’s coming with me …”’ (Rome – 30 August)

  Folio 83

  Interviews again, and work on the media. My endless refrain: ‘Parliament is the only armed gang of which I have ever been a member’ – highlighting Parliament’s distance from the real problems of the country and the fact that it is a perverse image of the state. My words are not much appreciated. But, while the press attacks me in its customary ranting style – I am referring to the press of the likes of Cavallari and Scalfari, of the P2 and FIAT – there is not a single member of Parliament who dares to reproach me. Why is that? Because, obviously, I could answer easily, showing how absent and distant Parliament is from people’s real everyday lives. But also because there’s a certain shamefacedness among the younger parliamentarians – at least among those whose faces have not yet become frozen into the customary, chilling grimace of cynicism. However, dealing with the problems is what protects me, what keeps me in the saddle even after these two months of freedom, what enables me to maintain a high profile both in defence and in the attack on the perversion of the institutions. Now [we have] the problem of the great struggle going on in the in prisons. The movement continues to grow, the forms of struggle continue to be extremely peaceful. There has not been a single incident yet. Good – they won’t manage to set in motion the usual provocations, which give them an excuse for repression. But here, in Parliament, not a word. I talk to the radicals – they tell me that it’s very hard for them. The only people who are moving – with their splendid generosity – are the comrades of Democrazia Proletaria. A handful of true Catholics and people from the independent Left are also beginning to discuss the problem. For them – as befits the administrative (and only incidentally political) persons which they are, to perfection – it will take a long time to weigh the arguments and to propose, discuss and quibble over the complexities of the problem. And meanwhile the movement moves ahead. For the rest, nothing. And yet, I keep telling myself, here we are witnessing a generalization of the experiences of San Vittore and Rebibbia in 1982, a generalization which is almost a typical representation of a qualitative leap of consciousness in the social composition of the prisoners: how is it that people who claim to be the country’s representatives are failing to notice this extraordinary process? On the other hand, I know that the military and civil prison authorities have certainly registered all this: this development of the struggles reveals in a grandiose manner the modification, which is now definitively in place in prisons, in the relationship between the prisoners and those who hold them in prison. Furthermore, the problem of prison is now a fundamental intersection point of modern consciousness, almost a paradoxical slice of society and of its problems. How can they not notice all this? How can a Parliament be so external, so empty of understanding? So lacking in response? The situation scares me. Is there too much ambiguity around? It is certainly the case that, if Parliament is tone-deaf, the social is deaf. However, this does not seem to me to be a sufficient justification. What is the social, in the face of this Parliament? Is it still a force which, in all its differences, is capable of making its voice heard? No, most certainly not. Here we no longer have channels of general communication. There is only the invasion which a few corporations make, every once in a while, into the spaces of the political, bringing some of their servants to guarantee their expression in politics. Fragmentation and segmentation. At this point I feel almost nostalgic for the old notion of general will, of the autonomy and force of the political. However, the illusion lasts only for a moment; I am mindful that this nostalgia borders on fascism. No. The only way is for the prisoners to express themselves, to express and impose their problem with force. There is no longer any mediation of the political in relation to society. Parliament is a clandestine gang. The comrades in prison, on the other hand, have begun to walk along the only line that is correct: the abolition, elimination, end of prison. (‘Don’t let yourself be taken again’ is the word from all the comrades who write to me from within the prison movement – escape is the only form in which we can today conceive of the abolition of prison, in the face of a ruling class that is so inept.) (Rome – 31 August)