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Beck, Chris Aronson; Emiliana, Reggie; Morris, Lee; Patterson, Ollie. Strike One to Educate One Hundred. The rise of the Red Brigades in Italy in the 1960s-1970s. Chicago: Cooperative Publications, 1986. Republished online by the “rhizzone” web forum 2018-2019. pp. 132. Free. ISBN-13 9781894946988 for the AK Press edition.
Reviewed by:
Genovefa
genovefa.neocities.org
Of the various Communist formations active during Italy’s postwar Years of Lead, the Red Brigades were among the most secretive, fearless, and militant. An article published in the bourgeois journal Counter-Terrorist Trends and Analyses describes the Brigades as driven by “violent socio-revolutionary ideology”, as a “palpable threat”, while reflecting on the democratic practices and integrity that “legitimized the movement among the people”. The authors of Strike One hoped to rectify a dearth of literature which examined the history of this flashpoint of Communist struggle in Europe. They sought to do so from a proletarian perspective, with close attention paid to the sentiments of the workers, and to often let the Brigades speak for themselves.
The authors retelling of events is geared to substantiate several claims made about the context and character of the organization: that the Italian government was already using violence against the workers, and so the armed struggle was a matter of self defense, and of protecting the concessions and powers already won by the working masses; that the guerillas, their political base, and those ambivalent to them all existed in proportions viable for a successful, popular movement; that the Brigades were professional, humane, and exact in their actions against enemy persons and property; and that the organization was successful in preventing infiltration both absolutely and relative to other formations, while maintaining a political line among the most threatening to the capitalist state. The book will digress to polemicize against the impotency and ideological confusion of other formations such as Trotskyist group Worker’s Struggle (Lotta Operaia) and the leading Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista Italiano or PCI).
With straightforward, accessible, and effective prose, the text achieves these goals while fitting the audience intended. This is the authoritative text on the Red Brigades in online Marxist discussion, but as of yet has had a critical flaw - it is almost entirely uncited, written essentially as a memoir and without adhering to any notions of historiographic rigour. In this review I will buttress the narrative account of events with a thorough investigation of sources to evaluate the validity of historical narratives as told by the authors.
The introduction outlines the merits, motivations, and goals of the book. Of note to our investigation is the confident assertion that “[t]his study is completely based on publicly available documents”, (p. 3) of which this investigation will include detailed bibliography and links for free download.
The first chapter offers an introduction to Italy highlighting differences between that country and the US empire. Among the most acute contradictions in Italian society is its uneven development along a severe geographic divide: the North is “urbanized, highly industrial, relatively prosperous”, and the South regarded as a third-world country, one which is highly rural and based in peasant agriculture, and which had “[s]muggling and other Mafia activities” employ a significant proportion of its urban population in regional capital Naples. That city is stated as seeing 40% unemployment (p. 4). 1991 unemployment 42.7%. Broadly, Italy is said to have living conditions which put it in the poorer of the imperialist countries, with per-capita incomes lower than Japan, and working conditions more relaxed in some regards.
A brief covering of pre-Fascist history touches on the plantation economy of ancient Rome and the “period of political dismemberment lasting 1400 years” which followed. An ineffective and shoddy bourgeois nation state governed Italy through the late 19th century, and into the misery of the First World War. After the war, the working class and peasant movements would make themselves known. Southern peasants with socialist leadership expropriated landlords and the Church in 1920, and the next year “the Northern proletariat struck in a wave of factory take-overs” (p.5-6); forming factory councils as so many revolutionary workers did worldwide. Fascist “strongman of Europe” Benito Mussolini is charged with inflicting 20 years of suffering on the people of Italy. American and British occupation, far from a relief, was disastrous.
“The US-British occupation refused to provide either food or medical care in the middle of a famine. Some observers at the time estimated that as many as one-third of all the women in Naples had been forced into prostitution for the Allied soldiers.” (p.6)
Following the war, nearly 200,000 red partisans would be dismissed by the PCI. Governance by worker’s councils and people’s courts, which “executed 20,000 fascists” in the North (p. 6) would give way to the “”bureaucratic mess” that was the Italian state. Italian bourgeois culture is described as exceptionally backward, elitism and misogyny as “customary”. Acts of extreme patriarchal violence such as the killing of spouses and daughters were codified law. The second chapter finishes with a summary of political parties.
Next is the authors’ account of the lead-up to the formation of the Brigades, described in terms of the trend of Italian politics becoming increasingly bellicose and the inspiration of the Third World national liberation movements on the vanguard of the youth. “Armed struggle became the main issue debated,” and the BR’s line is that the armed struggle was already ongoing as “imperialists began to use not only the police, but also fascist paramilitary groups to break up the 1960s movements” (p. 10). The “Italian Miracle” is acknowledged, but the reader is warned against taking it as a happy ending; consumer society flourished in a “semi-Amerikan” North dependent on the proletarian exodus from the backward and poor South. A brief overview of the status and positions of the trade unions quickly centres on the Fiat plant in Turin, the beating heart of Italian communism. Elections for shop stewards from the ‘40s through the ‘60s saw the PCI fall from substantial power to near irrelevance, which “really meant that they had lost the confidence of the vanguard of the class” (p. 11).
The BR would be born in this hotbed of working class struggle, and specifically in “Barriera di Milano […] a closely packed slum where 80,000 working class people always voted for communist or socialist politicians” (p. 11). Barriera di Milano was a “red neighbourhood” home to Communist-aligned “community officials, coffee shops, and sports clubs”. Communist partisans Sante Notarnicola, Piero Cavallero, and Danielo Crepaldi were furious with the PCI for disbanding their forces after the defeat of Germany; they formed a plan to stockpile arms in order to equip and train young comrades.
In setting off on the still-unknown path of urban guerrilla warfare, the Red Brigades rejected the non-materialist conception of armed struggle as a voluntary tactic. That is, that armed struggle is supposedly something only done when the movement decides that it is ready to try it. The founding members of the Red Brigades pointed out that in Italy a truly mass revolutionary sentiment was forming, which the State had decided to militarily wipe out. So violent confrontation would take place whether or not the movement was ready or even willing. Nor was the timing completely up to the movement. The only choices were to give up, to suicidally pretend that violent repression wasn't happening, or to leap to the higher stage of revolutionary armed struggle, however hard that leap.
From page 3 of the pdf.