A Letter from Italy: from Reform to Adventure
Mancini, Federico
From Reform to Adventure REBELLION in the Italian universities was already detectable in 1966. The crucible of the student movement, however, was the month-long occupation of the Turin...
...The price the movement is paying for last winter's blunder is very high...
...The Communist party, for one, knows all this perfectly well...
...All this, however, was bound to take time...
...But Sir Herbert was an avowed anarchist: namely, as any Marxist would tell you, a petty-bourgeois radical day-dreamer...
...In Italy one becomes a tenured professor (a "baron") through cooptation by one's peers...
...9 His first reaction is a critique of the university in strictly liberal terms...
...Third, its reaction to the developments in the Iron Curtain countries...
...Normally sedate social groups, such as white-collar employees, higher government officials, school teachers, resident physicians in hospitals, began to display an unprecedented aggressiveness in their demands for better working conditions...
...3) The summer of 1968 was spent in analyses of the French May, in attempts at establishing contacts with fellow movements abroad (especially the Germans, whom the Italian students admire for their superiority in matters of theory) and, above all, in the 3 Rieser's proposal was outlined in an article ("Strategia del potere studentesco") published in the leftliberal weekly L'Astrolabio, March 31 and April 7, 1968...
...It is a tangle of contradictions, failures and successes...
...The student movement—or, more precisely, the non-Communist part of it, is a characteristically bourgeois movement...
...This self-appointed Jacobin elite already shows all the symptoms of bureaucratic degeneration...
...in organizing the slum dwellers of the large cities, and so forth...
...9 This description may appear to be a caricature: it is, actually, exceedingly sober...
...It was an ominous sign...
...It did not approve of the February–March wave of occupations and, when the police broke into the campuses, its protests were mild and mixed with reproaches about student "vandalism...
...the contrary is true...
...These sects have always expended considerable energy in internecine wrangles but, until a few months ago, have also managed to patch up their differences and rally dissenters to the general line...
...Of course, there is no assurance that the present calm will last...
...For this, the "autonomous space" conquered in May was no longer sufficient...
...The occupiers have already been ordered by the bailiff to leave, and the bailiff is usually soon followed by the police...
...Prior to the 1967-68 academic year the Italian campuses were dominated by four associations: UGI (predominantly Communist), INTESA (Christian Democratic), AGI (Liberal), FUAN (neo-Fascist...
...A good point made by Dr...
...In Rome they found five students asleep, no students in Bologna, and everywhere garbage, anti-Communist writings, broken furnishings and, oddly enough, a number of clogged toilets...
...At least in its Italian version, I wrote, the New Left might be the legatee not of the Old Left, but of the Older Left, the philosophes and particularly Rousseau...
...it would be the tangible incarnation of Evil...
...Indeed, the above-below relation remained by and large untouched...
...In the Italian student movement, however, the Trotskyites have played aminor role...
...But this attempt, naive or impractical though it might have been, ran into a wall, which allowed no room for future student initiative...
...it belongs to the city of Milan whose urban development plan provided for its demolition...
...The movement actually had but one real chance: to force upon the PCI a process of revolutionary hardening, that is, to stir up such unrest among the masses as to convince the Communist leaders that, by pursuing their previous strategy, they would have lost a considerable slice of their following...
...government into taking such measures as would help streamline the system...
...On this score, however, he is undoubtedlyright...
...Considering the experience and the organizational strength of the two movements, the possibilities of the student movement were infinitesimal...
...First, in the society immediately emerged...
...Having realized, however, that a frenzy of adult backlash was building up, particularly in the lower class, the C P drastically reversed its course...
...For this analysis, two facts matter: (a) during the last few years the issues which the PCI has most agitated have been decentralization of the legislative power, pension reform, hospital reform, town planning, high-school reform...
...It was occupied on November 28, 1968, by students lodgedin the university dormitories with the argument that the latter were inadequate (an unquestionabletruth) and, at any rate, amounted to `cultural andsexual ghettos" (a half truth...
...480 ff...
...Hence, the proposal to set up "study groups": these, despite the many catchwords in which they were couched, basically amounted to a new, nonauthoritarian way of studying together things more relevant...
...The battle for "autonomous space" took place during the Easter holidays and ended in May after a number of "stiff" occupations...
...Probably, on balance, the liabilities outweigh the assets...
...An even more significant departure from the careless spontaneity of old is the progressive transformation of an open and constantly changing leadership into a semipermanent steering committee...
...The charter is now republished in Documenti della rivolta studentesca, Bari: Laterza, 1968, pp...
...Against the portrait that the radicals drew— a center entrusted by the capitalist system with the task of training its future slaves—it might have put forward a different image: a center of free inquiry and criticism, whose aims should be realized in a climate of political neutrality...
...The causes of the nation's present malaise and recurrent crises have been pointed out a thousand times: a parliament apparently unable to legislate, an inept central and local bureaucracy, a judiciary still thinking of Italy as a basically agrarian society, the most expensive and least efficient social security system in the Common Market area, a shameful health and welfare system, a wretched school system— in brief, a decrepit social structure that does not allow a more equitable distribution of the benefits accruing from the tremendous economic and technical progress of the last decade...
...2 Cf...
...Until then most militants had thought that in revolutionizing the universities they were touching the jugular vein of the system...
...It was a dramatic decision, even for people much toughened by a year of conflict and hard bargaining...
...Last year, it already seemed clear that, despite Marxist jargon, the Italian student movement had little in common with socialism...
...The Italian problem, therefore, is to create efficient institutions, not to deny them...
...To achieve this goal, the student movement demanded a "restructuring" of courses: no more lectures delivered ex cathedra or teacher-dominated seminars but egalitarian "study groups" where professors, now called "experts," would cooperate with the students in approaching the subject matter (any subject matter) from more "relevant" angles and, above all, in debunking the myth of the neutrality of science (any science) . The study groups were conceived as models of a nongovernmental university and, for their most daring advocates, a nongovernmental society.4 These notions, which resemble the schemes of a pragmatic anarchist like Paul Goodman, were often expressed in Che Guevara's phrase: "Society as a whole will have to be a gigantic school...
...In the autumn of 1968 they vigorously supported the highschool insurrection and in January 1969 they harshly attacked the police for shooting at the students who—in what should probably be regarded as their most futile action —had thrown tomatoes at the customers of a plush nightclub in that Italian Miami Beach, Viareggio...
...The Trotskyites are divided into two movements, respectively affiliated to the Posadas and the MaitanFourth International...
...But if the reform bill is not enacted or undergoes a further emasculation, a very different development is to be expected...
...Surely not those— a huge majority—who turned down the students' offer (at that time offers were not always accompanied by threats and it was 4 The "study groups" were first theorized in the Carta rivendicativa di Torino, a document produced during the occupation of Turin University, which has for the Italian student movement much the same value as the Port Huron Statement for the American SDS...
...In broad outline, its development falls into three phases: the last months of 1967, spring and autumn of 1968, and the winter of 1969...
...This "objectively prerevolutionary situation" could be helped to blow up through a few "voluntarist pushes," in their words, through some lotta leggera urban (light urban struggle...
...But even this struggle, for all its harshness and the anger it revealed, is not founded on a "class" analysis of the university and the system that supports it...
...in the West there was a balanced relation between state and civil society and when thestate trembled, the robust structure of the civil make serious work impossible...
...Against the alienation he suffers, the student advances such characteristic "bourgeois" values as the right to resist indoctrination (why should we law students be taught that legal science must be insulated against the intrusion of value judgments and social facts...
...The crucible of the student movement, however, was the month-long occupation of the Turin campus in November 1967...
...But what was to be done with the universities...
...The third distinctive feature of the Italian student movement has been its remarkable ability to map out and implement a common strategy for the major campuses...
...The student movement needed bases in which its commandos could prepare their expeditions into the cities and seek shelter afterwards: it needed its Sierra Maestra or—an even more alluring reference—its Yenan...
...The university might have taken up the student challenge by working to reform itself...
...At first glance, this attitude seems outrageous and contradictory...
...The government finally moved...
...In June, having secured their rear, the students of Turin, Milan, Trento, Padua, Bologna, Pisa, and Rome were ready to start their long-planned "operation working class...
...Of course, this has been made easier by the highly centralized nature of the Italian university system: the rector of Palermo will respond to a student challenge in much the same fashion as his colleague of Milan, because both are responding to the same ministerial circular...
...Today, this seems even more evident...
...Or the university might have counterattacked...
...It persuaded the student leadership that the university could be neither relied on nor exploited...
...5 On the one side, a section should be left to the academic authorities for routine activities (courses, examinations, etc...
...Nor could FEDERICO MANCINI they be captured...
...But it also served a practical purpose...
...At the outset Communists and extremists managed to coexist in the student movement, though with some difficulty...
...12 Second, the character of its literature, which is basically sociological (sociology, the bourgeois science...
...In folklore (attire, hair style, rhetoric, songs etc...
...The charismatic leaders were all self-styled Maoists, but the Communists made up the bulk of the inter mediate echelons and were no less belligerent than the others...
...The implication in extremist quarters, of course, was that the time of the "war of attrition" had come to an end in the whole West and especially inItaly...
...Bourgeois movements, too, have tried to involve the working class in their own enterprises...
...When they put forward a claim, they made it clear that it was nonnegotiable...
...But the men 'In Italy there are at least five groups of Maoistinspiration: the League of the Marxist-Leninists, the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party of Italy, two Communist parties of Italy (Marxist-Leninist), and the Union of the Italian Communists (MarxistLeninist...
...ITALY: FROM REFORM TO ADVENTURE On the other side, students found opposition —not of ideas—but of ossified structures (the univeristies) and of other institutions more violent (the police) or obtuse (the judiciary...
...from that, as a rule patient and robust, of worker actions, when they are carried out under the leadership of the Communist party or the Communist-orientated trade unions...
...But, granted that the student movement has been lucky in not having to deal with a Hayakawa here and a Perkins there, the primary reason for its success in coordi FEDERICO MANCINI nating activities at various universities has been its own internal cohesion...
...See his "Dalla rivoluzione culturale alla lotta di classe," Contropiano, I, 3, 1968, pp...
...S S o FAR narrative, now interpretation...
...Obvious cases in point are Mazzini, Arturo Labriola, Gaetano Salvemini and, more recently, Carlo Rosselli and Piero Gobetti, Gramsci's liberal friend who saw in the automobile workers of Turin the emerging aristocracy of modern Italy.8 Let us forget the words and consider the deeds...
...The contention of the radicals that the role assigned to Italy in the international division of labor is to import patents and export brains would be confirmed...
...Reminiscent of the factory councils (consigli di fabbrica) the young Gramsci had advocated in 1920, these workers' meetings invented or rediscovered tough forms of struggle—slowdowns, sit-ins, "staggered" walkouts, short and repeated (or "hiccup") stoppages...
...Consequently, the Communists beat their breasts in self-criticism for not having immediately understood the "deep roots" of the student revolt and stated that the latter had opened "a new front in class warfare" (which wasn't quite the same thing as saying that students were part of the working class, but came pretty close to it...
...Classrooms being the only places where new proselytes could be made, it was imperative for the militants to change the conditions of classroom work in order to insert the preaching of their gospel and legitimate it...
...Which, in turn, had a number of consequences...
...Two Sicilian farmhands were killed by the police during a labor dispute and the emotions aroused in the public were violent...
...at that stage, when only a few student chieftains really knew their own mind, efforts might have yielded fruit...
...Its leaders realized that the campus war and the spontaneous stepping up of class struggle in the nation at large were a gift of providence in two respects...
...253 ff...
...The universities had to be seized and kept under absolute control...
...One after the other, the delegates at the Bologna Communist Congress censured the "adventurism" of the student vanguards...
...13 The hotel had been closed for two years...
...But this period of relative inactivity did not last long: a new tumultuous phase was beginning in Italy...
...To be a spectator means to be a traitor...
...the American free universities, the German kritische Universitdt...
...T T HE STRENGTH AND THE PRESTIGE of the Italian student movement appear to be, at this moment, at an all-time low...
...The reason is clear enough...
...As Gramsci would have said, Italian society had grown "gelatinous" enough for a resolute vanguard ITALY: FROM REFORM TO ADVENTURE to storm it.6 If it could be brought home to the Communist bureaucrats that power was within reach, even they might awaken from their 25-year long sleep...
...In the jargon of the revolutionary sects, the notion of "red line" implies that of "black line," where "black" stands for ugly, devious, nocturnal...
...In reality, it simply proves that the student radicals don't care about socialism...
...The state was merelya frontline dugout behind which there spread asolid network of strongholds and pillboxes" (Note sul Machiavelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1949, p. 68...
...It is precisely these facts—the interest of the PCI in the rationalization of the system and its ability to represent the dissatisfied segment of the electorate—that makes the position of the student movement hopeless...
...The crucial question is whether and how the reform bill is enacted...
...But is there a more exalting experience for a liberal liege lord than seeing his power recognized, nay legitimized also from below...
...Surely, they could not be left alone, for there the movement found its strength, its "masses" (not an ironical expression: Italian students number about 600,000...
...today, on many campuses, they have proceeded to a formal rupture...
...May I refer the reader to the so-called Brooks Report on the state of scientific research in Italy, published in 1967 under the auspices of OECD, and to L'Universitd come impresa, by G. Martinoli, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1968...
...In January 1969 they acquired a sinister, anti-intellectual, even fascistic dimension: "When class warfare becomes acute, culture is of no use...
...They "dont want to run the pigsty" with the professors, lest they be coopted and corrupted...
...While the German SDS has sometimes laid claim to Drittelparitat arrangements and some SDS people sit on student-faculty committees, though with the purpose that Lenin assigned to Communists in bourgeois parliaments,2 the Italian students oppose codetermination...
...and clearly eschews historiceconomic analyses in the Marxist tradition...
...Student assemblies are still held and lip service is paid to the sovereign authority of the direct voice of the people, but such assemblies have proved time-consuming and unwieldy...
...Hence, more and more emphasis is laid on a new form of organization, the "grass-roots committees" (comitati di base), which are small and geared to specific problems and obviously more effective...
...1) The first phase was characterized by a harsh critique of the university as an authoritarian "class" institution, but also by a determination to make use of it...
...Therefore, a proposal was made by Vittorio Rieser—possibly the movement's cleverest strategist—to break the universities in two parts...
...Cynical shrugs, condescending conversation, or vindictive indignation at "those cranks" were the reactions of most Italian faculty members...
...Conflicts broke out on policy, which were less furious but far more serious than the mostly theoretic wrangles of old...
...It would be a disgrace and, in the long run, a tragedy...
...2) The blame lay on Academe as a whole...
...Thus, while it demands "structural" or "strategic" reforms—reforms not assimilable by the system and hence potentially subversive—it concretely goads the 1 4 It was probably with reference to these "models" that the new deputy secretary general of the PCI, Enrico Berlinguer, asked at the Bologna Congressthe following rhetorical question: "What profit canbe found in discussing Republics and Principalitieswhich have never been seen or known to exist in reality...
...The student-movement leaders did not conceal their revolutionary intentions...
...Any project can be adorned with suitable quotations from Marx, Lenin, or the most recent patron saint of the movement, Rosa Luxemburg...
...The current movement, movimento studentesco, is referred to throughout the article as the(Italian) student movement...
...Hundreds of thousands of highschool students supported demands for freedom of assembly in the schools...
...in fact, they did not materialize...
...How many are the professors who look back in anger to the "study-groups period...
...freedom of assembly and association (why are our requests for classrooms for political meetings usually rejected...
...I hazard the guess that the students and the metalworkers of Prague would agree...
...Yet those who do not feel—no, not sympathetic to that mess, that toilsome and bloody human venture but just—involved in it, have no right to count themselves socialists...
...Then, toward the beginning of this year, the Communist "university sections," which had always been regarded as part and parcel of the movement, appeared to seek the status of autonomous units...
...Those were the days...
...The government reform bill, a far-from-daring piece of legislation which grants the students a Drittelparitat in the 15 The first lines of the most popular song were: "Johnson boia, Johnson boia, gib le mani dal Vietnam" (Johnson, you hangman, hands off Vietnam...
...Very much in the style of Gramsci and Togliatti, the question was a quotation from Machiavelli: and, as usually, a felicitous one...
...The movement's last fortress, the Commercio Hotel in Milan, still holds out, but its days appear numbered...
...Being referred to as an "expert" was for the leftist professor not unlike the pleasure Count Honore Riqueti de Mirabeau must have experienced when addressed as citoyen: in the study group it was he who did most of the talking and the replies of the radical students were still very much within the rules of the old game...
...T T HE ABOVE INTERPRETATION suggests that the Italian student movement is bound not to attain its long-range goal...
...One should not attach an excessive importance to words, even when they sound convincing...
...What kind of lawyers do they want us to become...
...Campus" and "college life" are meaningless terms in Italian universities where, except for a usually squalid cafeteria, students have no place to get together...
...In the East the state was everything and the civil society was primordial andgelatinous...
...Arnold Beichman, "Letter from Columbia," Encounter, May 1969, p. 15...
...It was bedlam, but the uproar remained largely confined to the campuses...
...This is not to deny the radical character of its protest...
...In time, they thought, the dross (the inordinate politicizing, the lack of interest in cool research) would be jettisoned...
...To wield academic (baronial) power one must enjoy their confidence...
...Not that the Italian Communists have any fondness for chienlit: like their French comrades or, for that matter, General de Gaulle, they hate the sight of it...
...They all entered lists of candidatesfor the election of student representative bodies whose main functions were to carry out cultural, recreational, and welfare activities...
...The truth at last dawned upon the students leaders: there would be no revolution in Italy in the foreseeable future...
...Martinoliwhom the student movement's militants describe as a despicable reformist—is that Italian universities survive only because less than one-third of the registered students attend classes (though, theoretically, they are obliged to attend...
...By hook or crook, "socialism" is there too: between the Elbe and the Ussuri...
...They were no longer useful...
...The leftradicals of the student movement will boycott the election of student delegates and stir up riots wherever they can, but they will suffer a definite retrenchment...
...Apparently, its strategists had mistaken nationwide disturbances for an imminent revolution and had concluded that the advent of the revolution might be speeded up by turning the nation's major universities into "red bases...
...First the chemical industry near Venice, later the tire industry in Turin and Milan, and the sugar refineries of Ferrara were upset by a powerful wave of strikes, often of the wildcat variety...
...in other words, they had to be destroyed as centers of teaching and research...
...At the end of March the police broke into the occupied universities, with a tremendous deployment of men and weapons...
...But in Italy we had practically none of this...
...in helping the workers on picket lines...
...and the black-line fellows are no longer comrades but renegades...
...The new tactics consisted in keeping the universities occupied as long as possible and, during the brief lulls between occupations, in making demands which, if accepted by the faculties (and they often were), would 6 Here is Gramsci's famous—and, in the days I am referring to, widely quoted–passage: "llici [Lenin, in Gramsci's prison vocabulary], it seemsto me, realized that the war of movement victoriously conducted in the East in 1917 did not suit theconditions of the West, where only a war of attrition was possible...
...students qua students will never be part of the working class, and their protest is bound to be superstructural, that is, at bottom, vain or inadequate...
...15 the two groups were so similar as to make it impossible for an outsider to tell them apart...
...Second, the PCI felt that it might capitalize on the creeping chaos, the chienlit rampant which the students were spreading throughout the country...
...Moreover, under such circumstances, the movement would certainly regain the support, though itself tactical, of the Communist party: and past events have shown how explosive this mixture can be...
...Nowhere has "direct democracy" been so uncompromisingly espoused as in Italy, though its original purism now seems in decline...
...In other words, they will be reduced to the status of a small and not particularly fascinating extra-parliamentary opposition, whose main function will be to train the leaders of the future Italian United Revolutionary party, if indeed the groupuscules of the extreme left ever coalesce to form such a party...
...But a little chienlit would enable the party, if it managed to have it stopped at the right time, to present itself as the guarantor of social peace, thus enhancing its prestige...
...FEDERICO MANCINI nam, 14 may be amusing but is also shallow...
...11 Herbert Read, "Pragmatic Anarchism," Encounter, January 1968, p. 61...
...search for ways to form a student-worker alliance...
...First, these events would force the parties in power (Christian Democrats, Socialists, Republicans) to draft far-reaching measures, and especially a university reform bill—that is, to tackle a number of burning problems which were bound to make mischief among ITALY: FROM REFORM TO ADVENTURE them and inside each of them...
...It would have required patience, political skill, and some knowledge of adolescent psychology...
...Besides, its leaders were not yet certain about their ability to mobilize a large enough number of recruits, or about the measure of the authorities' tolerance...
...at any rate, a far less important one than in France...
...First of all, the "style" of its protest, which is impulsive, nervous, some say epileptic...
...In November and December the crisis became acute...
...Oddly enough, the tune was that of the refrain of "John Brown's Body...
...It is equally easy to coin slogans with a Guevarist or a palaeo-Bolshevist ring, and to write articles explaining why and how one should love Chairman Mao, particularly when the authors operate in a cultural context (the Italian intelligentsia) which has been imbued with Marxist ideology for half a century...
...Whereas the French C P was compelled by circumstances to commit itself right away on the issue of student extremism, the Italian C P was so lucky as to have time to reflect...
...When the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, they accepted without turning a hair the Chinese view that the whole incident amounted to a rift between two revisionist cliques...
...Less loftily, the study groups were also supposed to provide activists with an opportunity to influence the inchoate mass...
...most universities were forced to accept an arrangement under which students were entitled to refuse failing marks and take the same examination, month after month, until they passed...
...Thus, the Bologna Faculty of Liberal Arts was requested to suppress the written test in Italian...
...First of all, there is a flat refusal to participate in university decision-making...
...Not even the courtrooms, where left-wing and right-wing judges engaged in incredible brawls, escaped the contagion of contestazione...
...In the history of the student movement, this was a major turning point...
...the right to inquire beyond the unreasonably stiff limits of the studies program (why should we students of government be offered but one course in Afro-Asian institutions, and none on Latin America...
...The workers' decisions often bypassed or ran counter to union policy...
...But also in the far more important sense, despite the movement's self-image, its traits fall into a familiar bourgeois pattern...
...b) their remarkable electoral gains in May 1968 prove that in doing so the Communists have correctly interpreted the character and the direction of the protest spreading in Italian society...
...but the liberal professors hoped that, while theory remained revolutionary, practice could be steered along reformist lines...
...Its inbred authoritarianism and irrelevance would continuously beget frustration and dissent...
...By far the most vital among them is theUnion, which is slightly less sectarian and moreloosely organized...
...on the other, an "autonomous space" should be created to be controlled by the students for such initiatives as political meetings, workshops, and "anti-courses...
...Professor Asor Rosa, however, admits that the movement might be or become a "problematic ally" of the working class...
...If all students went to class, their very weight would causethe staircases and the floors of our universities to collapse...
...In spite of the Roman graffito, the university will never be the students' FIAT...
...The hard core of the movement is composed of Communists who find themselves at the extreme left of their party, Anarchists, Trotskyites, Maoists of various persuasions,s and members of Potere operaio (Worker Power), a group with aspirations resembling those of the old revolutionary syndicalists...
...at any rate, very different 10 This is precisely the conclusion reached in anessay on the student movement by one of the mostperspicacious Marxist scholars in Italy, the literarycritic Alberto Asor Rosa...
...7 See Federico Mancini, "The Italian Student Movement," AA UP Bulletin, December 1968, pp...
...let us go back to the trajectory of the movement and try to break through the screen of its own rationalizations...
...It radicalized many students who still hesitated at all-out confrontation...
...The "autonomous space" would ensure the pressence of the movement in the university and enable it to reap what the enemy had sown: in other words, it would be the movement's sanctuary...
...The students embarked on an anti-institutional struggle (Dutschke's "long march") that manifested itself first as a refusal of, later as an all-out assault on, the institutions, above all the university...
...The old graffiti were turgid, bombastic, at times sophomoric, but one could smile while reading them—or feel sympathetic...
...431 f. FEDERICO MANCINI obvious sense that its militants are of bourgeois extraction (only 13 percent of the Italian students have a lower-class background and these are very scantily represented in the rank and file of the movement, let alone its leadership...
...In other words, no revolution is in sight, no "new-left"-inspired mass movement is likely to take root...
...A couple of weeks ago, I saw in Bologna a dazibao (Italianized Chinese for "handwritten poster") calling a meeting of the "red-line comrades" for the next morning...
...Such delusions were soon exposed, but for once it is not the students who should be blamed for the liberals' defeat...
...New slogans appeared...
...When Jan Palach burned himself, they remained unperturbed...
...10 This appraisal, of course, will not be shared by people like Herbert Read, who wrote that, since institutions in the modern world "legalise tyranny and spread its invisible tentacles into every cell of life," it is at their breakdown that one should primarily aim...
...Future economic exploitation is anticipated in the university which is, indeed, often compared to a factory (a graffito at the Liberal Arts Faculty in Rome reads: "FIAT is our university, the university is our FIAT...
...In order to revolutionize the universities, they had to get out of them—and, in the words of Rudi Dutschke, embark on "a long march through the institutions...
...It brought grist to the mill of the fringe (left-Maoists and operaisti) who had been contending that the movement's only chance of survival was in an alliance with the revolutionary agents par excellence: the industrial workers in the north, the landless peasants in the south...
...Nor should one overrate the students' insistence on the leading role of the working class and their almost obsessive wooing of the working man...
...If the government manages to promulgate it by the start of the next academic year, the situation will not greatly differ from that of France after the coming into force of the Faure loi d'orientation...
...Why this is happening is not a question to be discussed here...
...On this system, see my piece "Student Power in Italy," to be published shortly by the American Journal of Comparative Law...
...A Political History, Montreal, Canada: Casalini, 1964, pp...
...Among the Communist leaders, the rightist Amendola is by far the least sympathetic toward the student movement, and whatever he writes about it has to be accepted with reservation...
...The whole country seemed to be in a frenzy...
...49 f. viathan and a Juggernaut: a huge, clumsy and crushing monster which represses him, atomizes him, stuffs him with an enormous amount of irrelevant information and eventually flings him—a badly-packaged marketable product—into the world of business, the civil service, or the professions...
...But it does not technically exploit them, it does not extract from them any surplus value...
...The despondency of the younger professors would reach a climax and support already strong inclinations to seek shelter in private research centers and foreign seats of learning...
...The study groups were given up...
...The university may be hell, it may stifle the students, deprive them of their power of self-determination and emancipation...
...Do the men who in government and the opposition command the allegiance of the Italians realize what is at stake...
...freedom of speech (why are questions in class frowned upon by most professors...
...The moderate or reform-minded groups which are beginning to fill the present power vacuum in the student body would collapse and the student movement could easily capitalize on the students' rage...
...The universities, which have practically not functioned for two years, would become impossible places to live and work in...
...The Communists will lay aside their largely verbal bias against codetermination, form some front organization and enter lists of candidates for the new mixed student-faculty committees...
...and the facilities of the university can be turned to account with a view to producing new values, to laying the cultural foundations of the coming revolution...
...FEDERICO MANCINI university decision-making bodies, has been drafted and laid before the Senate...
...The university appears to the student both as a Le 8 On Piero Gobetti, whose writings are unfortunately little known outside of Italy, see Guiseppe Mammarella, Italy after Fascism...
...On May Day, the Unionists wereable to bring out at least 10,000 people to parade in all the major cities...
...Indeed, must all revolutionary critiques of the capitalist system be Marxistinspired and Marxist-orientated...
...As a matter of fact, on the front of the Commercio Hotel in Milan, which the students occupied last November and still keep under control, 13 a huge inscription appeared: "Down with Palach...
...Students meet "on the job," in the classrooms...
...The professors' university would play the role of a Gegenvolk...
...During the sit-ins of the late winter, the two factions clearly pursued diverging policies...
...They took no interest in the Prague spring...
...The moral tension of the militants, rather than their adhesion to the Leninist doctrine of "democratic centralism," and especially the undiscriminating character of police busts have contributed to this extraordinary achievement...
...The student movement understood in practice Lenin's critique of Blanquism...
...A brilliant scholar, who counts himself a fellow traveler of the movement and had just finished a thousand-page book on the use of analogy in philosophy and science, told me without flinching that the burning of the Alexandrian library by Amr Ibn al-As was the first example of a successful cultural revolution...
...from that moment on, they knew this was not true...
...The Italian revolutionary students have no sympathy whatever for the Yugoslav experiment...
...the junior faculty in their conflict with the tenured professors), so as to weaken the government coalition...
...the substance (more vivid seminars and fewer drab lecture courses, more contact between teachers and students) would stick...
...August 1969 Besides, running the pigsty together implies the election of representatives, and disavowal of the principle of representation is a second trait of the Italian student movement...
...A number of marginal elements confirm the irredeemably nonsocialist nature of the student movement...
...Besides, many a progressive member of the faculty felt that by agreeing to join the study groups they were contributing to a self-regeneration of the university, of whose wretched conditions they were agonizingly aware...
...they entangled energies needed elsewhere: in winning over the high-school children (high schools were an obvious first choice among the "outside" institutions to be attacked...
...The Communists, of course, would be able to profit from such differences by playing one faction against another, or taking up the cause of underprivileged groups (e.g...
...Rieser's scheme obviously echoed foreign experiences: e.g...
...ITALY: FROM REFORM TO ADVENTURE easy to show some backbone), nor the very few who agreed to participate in the experiment...
...Italy has a long tradition of such movements...
...From Reform to Adventure REBELLION in the Italian universities was already detectable in 1966...
...And why should the subject of this course be confined to the legal systems of a few "safe" Afro-Asian countries...
...The reverse took place: it was the Communists who turned the student revolt to advantage by beating the young radicals at their own game...
...On April 11 the hotel was assailed by a fascist squad equippedwith Molotov cocktails, but the attack was repulsed...
...Actually, the excitement of the latter— mostly liberals—was boundless...
...To say, as they do, that socialism has nothing in common with the systems of Eastern Europe and to point to their models of the just society by rhythmically chanting, Gina - Cuba - Corea - Viet 12 See Giorgio Amendola, "La crisi della societhitaliana e it Partito comunista," Critica marxista, VII, 2, 1969, p. 46...
...Now, many militants are in jail, others—the Communists —are hastily abandoning ship, and most rankandfile students no longer respond to the old slogans...
...From Turin the rebellion spread throughout the country, making a clean sweep of the old party-controlled organizations.' Soon its unique traits began to take shape...
...Today, a rather lugubrious order reigns again in the groves of Italian Academe...
...we had none of the soulsearching of the French professors after May or of American professors after Columbia...
...Rape your Alma Mater...
...Grievances that at the outset had been fundamentally cultural became political...
...the government seemed at a loss for solutions, and the Communist party—the Great Sphinx of Italian politics—was about to hold a congress that everybody expected to be crucial...
...T T HE STRATEGY of the Italian student movement has varied with circumstances...
...Presently, the hotel accommodates about 100 people, half of whomare students and the rest an assortment of workingmen and foreigners, especially Arabs...
...It must have been at this point that the leaders of the student movement decided to cross the Rubicon...
...One reason they fight the governmentsponsored university reform bill is that it aims to "cage" them by student participation in university governing bodies...
...it has brought emancipation to some, slavery to others...
Vol. 16 • September 1969 • No. 5
