Disobbedienti, Ciao

Hydrarchist

Vol 1 #29, Winter/Spring 2005

No formal announcement certified the end of the Disobbedienti (Disobedients) in Italy, but the once-dominant extraparliamentary network’s demise scarcely seems in dispute. What originated as the tute bianche (White Overalls or WO) alliance between groups in the Veneto, Rome and Milan in 1998, encompassing satellite groups in other cities, is now in full decomposition as its constituent elements abandon the logo and reassume identities related to their everyday, territorial reality. The consequences are manifested both in a reshuffling of the relationships between the movements and the political parties and a plurality of campaigns as the focus of struggle. But first some background and explanation.

The widespread riots and fierce police repression that accompanied the G8 in Genoa dealt a mortal blow to the model of controlled conflict and hybridisation with other political forces that had constituted the WO project since 1998. A language of heightened confrontation was adopted prior to the G8, but the scale of state reprisals found them unprepared. Afterwards, there was a failure to assess what had really happened, as each group attempted to distance itself from responsibility. But repression can also produce unity, and transregional ties were galvanised between some of the fractious inheritors of Autonomia Operaia (where a strong Rome-Padua axis can be traced to the late-’60s), the youth section of Rifondazione Comunista (RC – an offshoot of the old Communist Party and still a major force on the reformist left) and the Greens around a platform of ‘social disobedience’. Thus occurred an apparently seamless transition from White Overalls to Disobedients, presented as a laboratory for experimentation with new political forms rather than a proposition for any type of unitary organisation. Nonetheless, the new network suffered numerous defections due to exhaustion and unhappiness with the way in which Genoa had been managed and from a sense that the open and experimental spirit which fuelled the WO had now disappeared. From this point onward, the Disobedients would be perceived as a force threatening to hegemonise and erode the autonomy of other groups. Their national nature, media presence and involvement with political parties made them easy to cast as imperialist and overbearing.

Apart from a shared hostility towards the suffocating and disciplinary pressures of the Communist Party, there have always been radical differences within the autonomist left as to the attitude to assume towards elections. From 1976, some ‘extraparliamentary’ groups ran candidates on the list of Democrazia Proletaria (absorbed by RC in 1992). Participation was justified as a means to construct counter-power and extend the dynamic of conflictuality to these institutions. Others assumed an abstentionist position, rejected mediation and advocated social autonomy – the daily unfolding of material conflict in perpetual antagonism to politics, understood as an institutionalised management of social conflict.

Relations with the parties vary according to local factors, which in Italy can never be underestimated. In the Veneto (Padua, Venice), acute hostility towards the Communist Party tradition, combined with the evisceration of concentrations of labour in the factories – the Veneto’s restructured economic form based on small-scale networked production has made it a textbook example of post-Fordism – and the importance of environmentalism, have made the Greens the post-autonomists’ political vehicle of choice. Being a ‘salon’ party with neither tradition nor consolidated grassroots, the Greens are less resistant to new ideas, more malleable to internal reconfiguration. This relationship has allowed the translation of the autonomists’ strong territorial presence into an increased political visibility and thus provided a greater margin for action. There are concrete benefits as well: the stability of occupied spaces, the ability to create structures within which its militants can survive materially, and legitimation through a role in local government.

Meanwhile, in Rome, the chaotic urgency of the metropolis produces self-organised re-appropriation for the resolution of basic needs, especially housing. RC remains an important force in the city and contains significant pro-movement elements. Here, the Disobedients have reformed around ACTION (Agency for Social Rights), driven by activists from the social centre, Corto Circuito, which, through a series of occupations, has won accommodation for more than a thousand people and earned considerable respect. Since 1997, they have also elected city and district councillors as independents on the list of RC, a relationship which extends their capacity to negotiate over housing and provides protection from otherwise certain police prosecution. In both Rome and the Veneto, work with migrants, for housing and papers, has been central in recent years; this extends to libertarians and activists of all stripes, and has been an area in which intervention at an institutional level is both useful and inevitable.

Fracture

Tensions over the relationship with political parties came to a head in the Disobedients during the European elections in June. Whilst the Veneto section supported the candidacy of the Greens’ Bettin, the Romans ran a popular candidate on the list of RC, Nunzio D’Erme, famous for having dumped several bags of manure in front of Berlusconi’s Roman residence. Polling better than expected, he was their fifth highest vote winner nationally. RC’s share of the vote gave them five seats to distribute, but D’Erme was passed over in favour of Niki Vendola from the South, where the RC are currently enjoying considerable growth. Given that a candidate from the Northeast was given a seat with a far smaller number of votes, this was understandably viewed as betrayal, and evidence of a cynicism toward the movements to which it had professed an openness since the mid-’90s. This crisis polarised existing divisions within the Disobedients, and political bloodletting on a local level led to a reversion to local identities and a retreat from hybridisation. RC are now openly in cahoots with the government-in-waiting of Romano Prodi, whose Grand Democratic Alliance will challenge and probably defeat Berlusconi at the next election. Consequently, the radical left needs to reposition itself with respect to the future power structure, both to get what they need and to retain a clear oppositional profile.

Nonetheless, some type of relationship with the political system remains unavoidable, even if unformalised or unwitting. How one conceives the purpose of representation will fashion the terms on which it occurs. One vision explicitly legitimises local politics as a space in which to establish a counterweight to the deterritorialising tendency of globalised production and a stage for practical demonstrations of counter-government. Here, parallels are made with Zapatista autonomous communities, which, transposed to Italy, has meant involvement at a municipal level and the election of councillors. Elsewhere, Antonio Negri recently set out criteria for the relationship with party politics in general, insisting on the absolute primacy of the social movement over political parties whose legitimation resides solely in their capacity to serve, resource and open up political space for extra-political activity.[1] Accordingly, party alliances are justified, provided that the relationship is not one of subalternity (whereby parties exploit social movements so as to rebuild their diminishing base), but one of ‘navigational’ authority, in which party direction derives from demands expressed externally. Handily enough, this functions as both a justification for the past as well as a programme for the future, and an argument for keeping RC at arm’s length.

In the meantime, the rapid rise to prominence of social precarity as a political flashpoint has seen an influx of former Disobedients (now re-branded as ‘Invisibles’ and ‘Global’) into the organisation of the May Day parade in Milan.[2] A derivative network named PreCog – precarious and cognitive workers – has taken shape in the last year, popularising the cult of San Precario – the mythopoetical patron saint of dispossessed, but combative, subjects – with the intention of rejuvenating the popular imagination in a fight for new social rights. As a network, PreCog contains many sensibilities external to the former Disobedients, including a ‘Neurogreen’ tendency (environmentalist and libertarian with a focus on imposing pressure at local and European level) which sees in the Green Party a vehicle for more flexible political opposition and a global environmentalist sensibility proper to the problems of advanced capitalism. Meanwhile, the social autonomy perspective within PreCog and ‘National Network for a Guaranteed Income’ – which continues to prioritise the diffuse conflictuality of the ‘precariat’ and its ability to configure the social balance of forces – is also in a process of growth and re-composition.[3] In spite of these heterogeneous approaches, the outline of a shared trajectory emerged around the question of income, encompassing the national demonstration for a guaranteed income on 6 November 2004 and next year’s May Day parades.

The Precariat Strikes Back!

The simmering tension between parties and movements came to a head during the November demonstration. Under the playful acronym GAP – Grand Alliance of the Precarious, a parody of Prodi’s Grand Democratic Alliance – workplace committees, from Alitalia to care workers, grassroots trade unions and social centres of every hue converged for direct actions of re-appropriation to protest the increasing cost of living, and demand access to wealth via a street parade through the city centre. ‘Autoreduction’ is an Italian term for imposing a discount ‘from below’, and it was planned to perform one in a suburban supermarket. Having neutralised police attention through cunning use of the subway system, the protestors eventually arrived in Pietralata, immortalised in Pasolini’s films Theorem and Accatone, where a shopping centre owned by Berlusconi is handily located by the train station. Once inside, 700 participants filled their trolleys with goods and blocked the cash registers, chanting ‘Everything costs too much!’ Negotiation began with management for a discount of 70 percent for everyone in the store, but, in the meantime, many people simply walked out with their trolleys and began distributing goods to families and pensioners, drinking wine and sharing sweets. This gesture was initially met with incredulity, but soon the party was in full swing. Meanwhile, the electronics and clothing departments upstairs were by now in the grip of frenzy; computers, phones, DVD players and flat screen monitors made their way out of the door. At this point, many ‘ordinary shoppers’ had succumbed to repressed desire and started to help themselves. Faced with a plainly uncontrollable situation, the small number of police present were powerless. Later that day, it had been planned to distribute copied DVDs inside the Feltrinelli book and entertainment chain as a symbolic rejection of the copyright laws that limit access to culture and knowledge. Echoes of the morning, however, were too strong; as the demonstration passed by, 200 people entered, filled their arms with books and charged back out into the street into the parade of 25,000 people made up of workers’ committees, migrants, grassroots trade unionists, house occupants and students, and a hundred other shades of precarity.

Predictably, the media and political class have embarked on a hysterical condemnation of these actions, and have attempted to impute responsibility to the Disobedients, who, as recounted above, scarcely exist. Arrests and a ‘zero tolerance’ policy have been promised. Notwithstanding the brouhaha, commentators have had to acknowledge both a widespread sympathy for what happened and the emergence of the precariat as a problem henceforth at the centre, rather than the margins, of society.[4] Individual MPs from both the Greens and the RC have even expressed support, but the parties have officially distanced themselves from the acts, widening the schism between the movement and orthodox forms of representation. RC’s current fixation with consensus, and its terror at any taint of illegality which could be depicted as being violent, makes constructive cooperation nigh on impossible. But, no violence was involved and the action was performed without any attempt to conceal participants’ identities, a fact for which participants will pay a heavy legal price.

Amidst all this, however, GAP has maintained a tortured silence, torn between the need to respond whilst in the public eye and the unresolved distrust of collective representation. Journalists have filled this void by nominating former Disobedients as the voice of the precarious. This unhelpful personalisation derives from their use of ‘spokespeople’ – in fact leaders – that monopolised media coverage of the ‘no global’ period. Such distorted representations allow the action to be pigeonholed as belonging to prefabricated media constructions – ‘autonomists’, ‘Disobedients’, ‘inheritors of ’77’ – cast as alien to people’s everyday experience of contradiction within their living conditions, inhibiting any broader social identification.[5]

A renewed realism as to the acute difficulties faced in everyday life underlies the emphasis on precarity. Spiralling rents, an increased cost of living and poor social/labour mobility – not to mention the apocalyptic turmoil worldwide – are generating a pervasive sense of uncertainty about the future. In the absence of a substantial social welfare buffer, this focus enables a narration of needs and desires in the first person and facilitates a rupture with discourses of the ‘no global’ period which often lapsed into a jaded Third Worldism, in which the ‘serious’ problems were often exoticised or abstracted as somebody else’s, somewhere else.

Social movements in Italy function best when external factors oblige cooperation and marginalise intra-movement rivalry, yet an inability to coldly appraise the efficiency of discarded strategies threatens to nullify the benefits of experience. The Gordian knots of representation, relations with the institutions and internal and network democracy are not going away. With a centre-left government on the horizon, and the fertile ground for reactionary demagogy this promises, the challenge will be to maintain abrasive contestation, autonomous from the party system, without being relegated to the margins, where the only dividend is unceasing police attention.

Footnote 1:

Antonio Negri, 'Contro il pensiero molle dell'organizzazione', Posse, Nuovoi Animali Politici, Manifesto Libri, April 2004.

Footnote 2:

http://www.globalproject.info/, http://www.euromayday.org

Footnote 3:

See http://www.incontrotempo.org/

Footnote 4:

For a good introduction to the politics and cartography of precarity, see Green Pepper's issue devoted to the theme at http://cia.squat.net/gp/greenpepper.htm

Footnote 5:

Hierarchical political action remains prevalent in Italy, a fact that is often missed.