Rediseño de las Estructura de Datos

In the previous chapter, Pasolini served as a critical counterpoint to define the claims made by 1968. I now want to scrutinize the Movement and its legacy.

However, since a comprehensive analysis of such a heterogeneous phenomenon like 1968 is a virtually impossible task for one writing and, let alone, for a single person, I propose to study it by employing three key perspectives. These three interconnected views can also be read as responses to Pasolini’s critique and are grounded in the biopolitical transformation the Movement helped producing through the intensification of the struggle at the level of labor-power. In so doing the Movement gave voice and helped bringing about antagonist subjectivities like students (or the intellectual workers), workers and women. In this chapter, however, I will mainly explore the transformations brought forward by the Students’ and the Workers’ Movement, while leaving for the next chapter the treatment of women and their specific contributions.

The three elements of 1968 I privilege are the following: 1) the origin of the Movement, i.e. the political and social contradictions of the economic growth of post-war Italy that generated its claims and protests; 2) the Movement’s apost-wareness of the capacity of consumer society to assimilate subjectivities and critique as a fundamental part of its politics and practice; 3) the Movement’s struggle to redefine the hierarchical structure of knowledge and power which, on the one hand, promoted the

secularization of Italian society, and on the other, determined a new global and syncretic approach to cultural phenomena. That this attitude was later neutralized and converted into a extremely convenient and profitable mass culture is in fact more the result of a defeat than of the Movement’s own struggle. This parallels the

re-organization of production elaborated by the Factory Councils that was partly used against them in the subsequent Fordist rationalization of production. I will address these questions individually.

Finally, I want to call attention to the centrality of reproduction in 1968 thought and demonstrate how the biopolitical dimension of labor-power was

foregrounded. This will be clear, for instance, in capital’s employment of larger quotas of intellectual work among the new generations and in the practice of refusal of work that produced innovative forms of struggle which aimed at solving the problem of the new social needs that were arising. The literatures that came out of the last cycle of revolts, which has become known as the 1977 Movement are the culmination of this process of intensification of reproduction and what’s more fully display the layout of the biopolitical transformation. I will argue that this is particularly true for the Bolognese side of the movement as in the case of the collective work Alice

disambientata (1978) (Displaced Alice), and the novel Boccalone (1977) (Big Mouth) by Enrico Palandri.

The Historical Political Context

When Pasolini claimed that “the student revolt was born overnight,” he overlooked one fact that the overwhelming majority of historians now agree upon.¹ The long wave of social unrest that exploded in the spring of 1968 and continued in the “hot autumn” of 1969 was not an incidental, spontaneous event, but rather it was deeply rooted in a series of struggles that had begun at least eight years before. These were connected to deep changes at a social, political and cultural level. “The so-called economic miracle was attained on the basis of increases in productivity much greater than increases in wages;” based on internal migration “of labor from the south to the northern cities” it in fact “aggravated social tensions, making existing political

1 Pasolini, Scritti corsari (Milano: Garzanti, 1975), 37. Because of this I agree with Piperno’s remark on the great chance that Pasolini missed for the lack of a true understanding “of the radical symbolic transformation that took place in those years,” thus becoming also the “great missed poet of 1968.”

Franco Piperno, 1968 L’anno che ritorna (Roma: Rizzoli, 2008), 26.

arrangements untenable.”² The Student Movement thus “placed on the agenda the possibility of an effective worker-student alliance the likes of which campus radicals elsewhere could only dream.”³

From a political point of view, the crisis and the first signs of social unrest began at least in July 1960, when the Tambroni government supported by the Fascist Party (MSI, Movimento Sociale Italiano) faced a strong popular opposition that resulted in the killing of protesters in Genoa and Reggio Emilia. The political agreement at a national level paved the way for the Socialist Party to politically support the Christian Democrats in the governing of the country. The entrance of the PSI in the government changed the political geography of Italy, since from World War I, the Socialists had always maintained an autonomous but clear alliance with the PCI.

As a result a new project of modernization of the state and its infrastructures was laid out which challenged directly the same leftist reforms upheld by the PCI. As the Italian industrial production was booming, this economic miracle seemed to satisfy everybody: the Christian Democrats benefited politically from it; the official left as well, although criticizing the forms and the directions of the development, agreed on the need of industrializing and modernizing the country.

The years of the so called “center-left government” had further consequences, since as Sidney Tarrow has noted, “the prospect of joining the government led the PSI to put reforms on its political agenda – education, planning, and pension reform – which later become rallying points for mass protest.”⁴ It is precisely from the high

2 Robert Lumley, States of Emergency. Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso, 1990), 14.

3 Steve Wright, Storming Heaven. Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 89.

4 Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder. Protest and Politics in Italy 1965-1975 (Oxford: Calderon Press, 1989), 53. See also Gian Giacomo Migone, “Il caso Italiano e il contesto internazionale,” La cultura e i luoghi del ’68, Aldo Agosti, Luisa Passerini and Nicola Tranfaglia, eds., (Milano:

FrancoAngeli, 1991), 15-16.

expectations triggered by the new government that the Movement found its first points of unity. Undoubtedly the protest against the reform of education represented the first and most critical of these points of contention.

The baby boom of the post-war years produced a higher demand for instruction that the old educational system could not provide in terms of structures and quality of teaching. The school reform proposed by Minister Luigi Gui was the inadequate response that the centre-left government devised. The reform raised some

expectations, but immediately afterwards, because of delays and the weakness of its proposal frustrated them. As well the effect was to generate a widespread

disappointment that sparked protests.⁵ So if the students’ first claims focused on very practical needs, like classrooms and laboratories, soon enough larger and more fundamental issues were called into question. One concession that the Gui reform made was to allow a student representative to sit on school boards expressing a mere advisory opinion. The hypocritical nature of this acknowledgment “initiated the struggle for student power against the authoritarianism of the baroni,” i.e. the faculty elite.⁶ Soon enough it became clear that this apparent democratization of Italian society, i.e. the liberalization of the access to education, was not simply a concession but responded to particular exigencies of Italian capitalism.

The findings of independent researches studying the connection between school and industrial production disclosed that with the new phase of mass education,

“school in Italy was functional for the choices of capitalist development, that is to say keeping out of the labor market a consistent quota of potential working force in order

5 On the school reform see Serena Sani, La politica scolastica del centro-sinistra (1962-1968) (Perugia:

Morlacchi, 2000); Lumley, 49-59.

6 Rosanna Emma and Marco Rostan, Scuola e mercato del lavoro (Bari: De Donato Editore, 1971), 110.

On the authoritarianism of the Italian school system see Alberto Alberti, Giorgio Bini, Lucio Del Cornò, Gabriele Giannantoni L’autoritarismo nella scuola (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1969); Antonietta Chiama, Jolanda Molinar, Cesare Panciola et. alt., eds., Chi insegna a chi? Cronache della repressione nella scuola (Torino: Einuadi, 1972).

to avoid an explosive pressure on the latter.”⁷ By the beginning of the 1960s, the economic boom of the late 1950s was already deflating. If industrial production increased on average by 10.1% per year and investments by 13.8%, by 1963

employment rates inverted their tendency and started to fall, which created a greater number of unproductive workforce. It was a mass of relatively more educated men and women who could not find employment in the industry and had no jobs.⁸ The service sector and school temporarily absorbed this demographic surplus.

With the Gui reform and the law passed in the subsequent years, the government instituted a series of liberalizations of access to education for larger sectors of the population, while leaving dramatically untouched the material, and financially more burdensome necessities of building new schools and reducing of the student-teacher ratio. For instance, in 1961 the access to university was extended to all high school graduates who pursued five-year diplomas (including vocational

institutions). By 1967 enrollment had doubled, with universities receiving a massive inflow of people who were pursuing degrees in the hope of climbing the social ladder.

Simultaneously, the institutions enforced a strict selectivity producing high rates of school drop outs.⁹ Since the Casati reform (1859) that had unified the

educational systems of the various Italian states (and thus founded the national school system), a strict selectivity, if not discrimination, had been a hallmark of the Italian educational system.¹⁰ But now that Italian society embraced democracy and

recognized in its Constitution the right to education for all citizens, selectivity began to appear more and more contradictory. Students quickly developed a new awareness

7 Emma and Rostan, 69.

8 See Emma and Marco Rostan, 13-58.

9 See Emma and Marco Rostan, 80-83.

10 On the history of the Italian school system see Giuseppo Inzerillo, Storia della politica scolastica in Italia (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1974); Giuseppe Natale, Francesco Paolo Colucci, Antonino Natoli, La scuola in Italia. Dalla legge Casati del 1859 ai decreti delegati (Milano: Mazzotta Editore, 1975).

of the social dynamics behind these rigid standards. In a collective work which

gathered the experience of three years of struggle within the secondary school system, the Student Movement of Milan drew a parallel between the family and the school and their complementary role in society. The family was the primary locus of a “natural selection” in a pre-capitalist state; it tied the individuals to the role in society their parents had and froze social mobility. In a modern state, the school system provided a new and more refined “class selection” that varied “according to the needs of the mode of production.”¹¹ Derived by a purely theoretical reading of Marx, this passage is rather mechanical and misses the needs and goals of the Italian 1960s economy. Still in its generous effort, it points to the widespread realization that the school system was not something dysfunctional, but rather it was functional for the capitalist plan.

The Student Movement of Milan was just one of the various groups born out of 1968. Discussions and divergences between these various groups were common, but ultimately they all drew on an application of Marxist readings to the context of the Italian modernization. Even though the general setting up of the analysis was declared surpassed by the students who wrote it, the so called “Sapienza Theses” codified the idea that the university represented “the mediated expression of a plan organic to capital,” and that the student assembly had sovereign power, “thus refusing the

principle of delegation of authority to any other restricted organism.”¹² These were the two elements that unified the Movement as they were popularized by the Pisan

students in 1967. In a second drafting of the Sapienza Theses, the understanding of the student as work force subordinated to capitalism was heightened. As Steve Wright remarks, the attempts to “grasp the nature of intellectual labor” is one of the most

“distinctive” trait of this later document in that it made clear that “the student was

11 Comitato di Agitazione Studentesco Medio di Milano, Scuola, studenti e proletari (Milano: Edizioni CLUED, 1973), 20.

12 “Le tesi della «Sapienza»,” Il mulino 4-5 (1967): 377-390.

already a proletarian by virtue of a subordinate location within the university division of labor.” In fact, “to the extent that existing stipends became a fully-fledged-wage, she would be transformed from impure social figure on the margins of the valorization process into a fully-fledged wage worker producing surplus-value.”¹³

In a famous essay penned by Mauro Rostagno: “Università come istituto produttivo” (University as a Productive Company), Potere Studentesco (Student Power), which was at odds with the Milan Student Movement, echoed a similar, though more refined position. Quoting the famous economist and friend of Gramsci, Piero Sraffa, Rostagno argued that the university operates as a regular business company carrying out a process of “production of commodities by means of

commodities.” The commodity produced is the student whose principal trait is that he or she is “sold on the labor market either during the productive process (i.e. the study period) as a semi-processed good (i.e. as a student-worker), or at the end of the process as a finished product (i.e. the graduate).”¹⁴ Thus against an apparatus that leaves no escape from the commodification of its own subjects, the Movement can

“only react by organizing an alternative and opposite power.” However, the forms this counter-power has to take up are ultimately left to the students’ “willingness to

struggle” and critique the foundations of the university system.¹⁵ Rostagno’s analysis of education as a self-generating system is symptomatic of the departure from the productivist take of the official left. Drawing attention to the significance of

reproduction over material production, the students recognized the strategic role that education played in modern society.

13 Gian Mario Cazzaniga, “Le tesi della Sapienza,” Università: ipotesi rivoluzionaria, 177 [translation by Wright, 95].

14 Mauro Rostagno, “Università come istituto produttivo,” Università: ipotesi rivoluzionaria (Padova:

Marsilio Editori, 1968), 49, 42.

15 Rostagno, 51.

Further articulating Rostagno’s analysis, Guido Viale, who was active in the Student Movement of the University of Turin and was later a leader of Lotta Continua, wrote in a famous piece titled “Contro l’università” (Against the University), that the ground of the university establishment was authoritarianism in its multifaceted forms.

With authoritarianism Viale did not refer only to the absence of democratic rights for the students, let alone any recognition of their active role in the educational process, but rather to the perfect mechanism that inhibited any critical capacity channeling it into the outlet of “one’s own frustrations,” petty claims and private recriminations.

Thus, Viale maintained that the “collective dimension of criticism” had to be undercut and excluded from the system of production and transmission of knowledge.¹⁶ This lack of a collegial and cooperative exchange was far more paralyzing than the often-addressed question of the updating of pedagogy, curriculum reform, and the

liberalization of the access to higher education. Along with the absence of functioning structures like laboratories and classrooms, it prevented the university from producing what the country needed the most: a critical form of knowledge that could stand up to the challenge of a fast and chaotic modernization.

The pressure of these unresolved contradictions and the clear unwillingness of the political leadership of the country to respond to them fuelled the student protest.

Students did not limit themselves to reformist claims, but attacked the whole structure of the school system and its government. Along with the Università La Sapienza in Rome, the universities of Trento and Pisa were hotbeds of this early cycle of contestations. As a young student coming to study in Pisa from Naples, Cesare Moreno recalls that it was the science students who moved first: “the children of the

16 Guido Viale, “Contro l’ Università,” Università: ipotesi rivoluzionaria, 100. Viale also remembers that “the insistence on the everyday aspects of life within the institutions (dissecting in their tiniest details the forms of oppression in which the relationship between student and culture took shape) was a collective activity.” Qtd. in Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation. Italy, 1968 (Hanover:

Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 82.

post-War years were entering the university, enrolments were increasing but the structures were not adjusting. In December 1966, the first occupation of the Physics department was decided because of internal problems, not because of political reasons.

We were asking for more laboratories, classrooms.”¹⁷ In the fall of 1967 Trento and Palermo were also the site of a series of occupations that reached its climax with the taking of Palazzo Capanna in Turin. When the echoes of the Days of May in France spread over Italy, the Movement gained momentum, coalescing around other global protests like the one against the Vietnam War. Students received vital theoretical inputs also from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, even though it was already in its declining phase. But it was the impressive series of workers strikes of the “hot autumn” of 1968 that fuelled the protest connecting the Movement to the struggles in the factories.

What interests us here, though, is the specific content of the analysis and practice the Italian 1968 brought forward. This leads us to the understanding of the new biopolitical dimension that the Movement brought to the foreground. As I noted earlier, education was the first battleground. The form and content of teaching,

hierarchical transmission of knowledge and the subject matter of that very knowledge were all drastically criticized and brought into question. It was not simply a problem of the backwardness and lack of proper structures; rather what was at stake was what was taught and how it was taught. The whole pedagogical field was politicized, and turned upside down. The agents of this revolution were the students who, despite the heterogeneity of their groups, carried out their plan following a shared route. Like the councils in the 1920s and “the hot autumn,” the assembly represented the

organizational form of their autonomous political practice and because of this

17 Qtd. in Aldo Cazzullo, I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione. 1968-1978: storia di Lotta continua (Milano: Mondadori, 1998), 43.

institutions never refuse to acknowledge them. There were no delegates or

representative body. Formed and run by those who participated in it, the assembly embodied the direct decision-making mechanism of the Movement. The refusal to delegate power meant the definition of “politics as direct intervention into reality, of history as present, that is a collective and autonomous political praxis internal to the institutions (the struggle against the school) whose objectives [were] functional to the growth of the Movement.”¹⁸

The difficulties of such a project were not small. Managing lengthy meetings over time proved troublesome, especially when it concerned assuring everybody of the concrete possibility of having a saying in the decision-making. Women for instance, realized very soon how difficult it was for them to count in the organization without being confined to secretarial roles. As Laura Derossi, a highly respected militant in the Student Movement Turin, recalls “the hardest thing was speaking in the great hall, overflowing with more than five hundred students, and making a speech from the cathedra. Even the men, there weren’t many who could do it.”¹⁹ Furthermore, “the absence of any institutional acknowledgment of forms of authority highlighted the role of charismatic figures,” so that the debate was usually monopolized by the eloquence

The difficulties of such a project were not small. Managing lengthy meetings over time proved troublesome, especially when it concerned assuring everybody of the concrete possibility of having a saying in the decision-making. Women for instance, realized very soon how difficult it was for them to count in the organization without being confined to secretarial roles. As Laura Derossi, a highly respected militant in the Student Movement Turin, recalls “the hardest thing was speaking in the great hall, overflowing with more than five hundred students, and making a speech from the cathedra. Even the men, there weren’t many who could do it.”¹⁹ Furthermore, “the absence of any institutional acknowledgment of forms of authority highlighted the role of charismatic figures,” so that the debate was usually monopolized by the eloquence