12.05.2016
Struggle and postmodern
Toby Abse reviews: Andrea Hajek, 'Negotiating memories of protest in western Europe: the case of Italy', Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp220, £53
This book has a very misleading title. It cannot be treated as a serious attempt to discuss memories of protest in western Europe as a whole, even if it makes some reference, largely in its earlier chapters, to Germany, France and Great Britain1 in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nor can it be seen as a detailed study of “the case of Italy” - even if there is some, at times simplistic, discussion of the different ways in which the 1968-80 period is remembered in Italy “within official and vernacular memory communities” (p53). The bulk of the text (pp63-176) is devoted to the Bolognese events of March 1977 and their aftermath, particularly in the form of a ‘divided memory’ of these events.
To some extent this incongruous and slightly pretentious title is probably the result of advice from the Andrea Hajek’s publishers or their editors - her original 2011 PhD thesis, on which the book was based, had the rather more accurate title: Narrating the trauma of the ‘Anni di Piombo’: the negotiation of a public memory of the 1977 student protests in Bologna (1977-2007)2. Nonetheless, the title is indicative of the vast distance between the author’s extremely academic approach and the life and violent death of the political activist, Francesco Lorusso (October 7 1952-March 11 1977), around which the memories discussed in the more specific chapters of the book revolve.
The book is part of a series - the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies - that now includes at least a couple of dozen titles and reflects a new academic genre of “memory studies” with its own theoretical jargon. However, one might nonetheless have expected it to tell us a bit more about Lorusso and to provide us with a more accurate picture of the revolutionary organisation, Lotta Continua, of which he was a member. Lotta Continua’s protest against what Hajek cryptically calls “the Catholic student organisation, Communion and Liberation” (p64),3 led to him being shot dead by the policeman, Massimo Tramontani. Tramontani was, needless to say, allowed to escape legal punishment by the Bologna public prosecutor, despite efforts by both the courageous examining magistrate, Bruno Catalanotti, and Lorusso’s parents to have him tried for manslaughter.
In the course of the book we are told that Lorusso was a medical student, that he had a brother and that his father had been “an army colonel” (p81) at the time of Francesco’s death in 1977. But we are told very little else about any member of the Lorusso family apart from their understandable involvement in a justice campaign for three or four decades. Hajek says her book is
not concerned with establishing the truth behind Francesco Lorusso’s death nor does it aim at (re)telling the history of the movement of 77. This is why I opened this book with an account of how I got involved in this project: that is, the assertion that a 30-year-old incident still mattered so much, even to people who weren’t even born in 19774 (p172).
According to Hajek’s account in the introduction, she first became aware of that incident in 2004, when a friend pointed out “a plaque recalling the violent death of a certain Francesco Lorusso” (p1). So far as you can deduce from the text of this book, there is no political commitment behind her choice of subject matter - she is a feminist, heavily influenced by post-modernism, but in no sense a Marxist. This deduction is reinforced by the totally bizarre mistranslation of the Italian word compagni as ‘companions’ on almost every one of the dozens of occasions when it appears in this book - there are only a handful when Hajek translates it, correctly, as ‘comrades’.5 Hajek, who was awarded her MA by the University of Utrecht in 2007 for a thesis connected with Italian music and popular culture, herself falls into the category of “people who weren’t even born in 1977”.
At the risk of falling into the trap of what Hajek somewhat pejoratively calls “possessive memory”6 (and becoming somewhat anecdotal), I will point out that I first became aware of Francesco Lorusso’s violent death back in 1978 when I read Italy 1977-78: ‘living with an earthquake’, a Red Notes pamphlet published in London7 and made a passing reference to Lorusso’s killing in my 1985 New Left Review article, ‘Judging the PCI’. Therefore, I may have had rather different expectations concerning the provision of empirical detail about Lorusso and his fate, when I started reading this book, than those practitioners or students of ‘memory studies’ who are, perhaps, its target readership.
However, even from a purely academic point of view, the confusion and inaccuracy in this book about the organisation of which Lorusso was a member - Lotta Continua - has to be severely criticised. Alarm bells started ringing for me when I found it was always translated here as ‘Continuous Battle’ in contrast to all other Anglophone texts I have ever read, which either translate it as ‘Continuous Struggle’ or, more rarely, ‘The Struggle Continues’.
But there was much worse to come. On p61, immediately after discussing the dissolution of Potere Operaio in 1973, Hajek claims that “in the same period the second major extra-parliamentary group of the 1970s (LC) also broke up”, whilst on p125 she goes to the opposite extreme, claiming: “In the years following the events of March, the remnants of the Movement of 77 split up into various groups, mostly Lotta Continua (LC), AO8 and the Workers’ Movement for Socialism (Movimento Lavoratori per il Socialismo).” Therefore, at one point in this book it is being claimed that LC dissolved in 1973 and at another that it still existed as a substantial nationwide organisation in 1978 or later. It is noteworthy that nowhere in the text, the hundreds of end-notes or the extensive 15-page bibliography is there even a single reference to the two full-length histories of the organisation - Luigi Bobbio’s Lotta Continua: storia di un organizzazione rivoluzionario (Rome 1979) and Aldo Cazzullo’s I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione 1968-1978: storia critica di Lotta Continua (1998). Both books had a second edition published before Hajek wrote either her 2011 thesis or her 2013 book. So any diligent researcher would have tracked down one or both of them.
The generally accepted view, put forward by this duo and other authors, is that LC was dissolved by its leader, Adriano Sofri (who, astonishingly does not appear in Hajek’s index), at its Rimini congress in 1976. The daily newspaper Lotta Continua continued to be published until at least 1980 by a group of journalists aligned with Sofri and increasingly closer to the politics of the petty bourgeois libertarians of Marco Pannella’s Partito Radicale9 than those of the historic LC, which had been a soft or ‘sponti’ Maoist group. As far as one can tell from Hajek’s account (pp127-29), a cohesive group of Bolognese LC members published material commemorating Lorusso around the time of the first and second anniversaries of his death in March 1978 and March 1979 in Lotta Continua and in a separate pamphlet, published as a supplement to the paper in 1978 with the title Parliamo di Francesco.10 It remains a mystery as to whether this Bolognese group had any connection with a small national organisation called Lotta Continua per il Comunismo, which rejected Sofri’s rather sudden and authoritarian dissolution of the original LC.11
Hajek’s book does make some interesting and useful points about the often very different ways in which Lorusso’s death was or is remembered - by his family, by his former LC comrades, by the autonomists (both the veterans of 1977 and a younger generation imbued with what Hajek rather affectionately calls “progressive nostalgia”), by the Partito Comunista Italiano (and its successor organisations), by the university that summoned the police who killed him and by various other political actors. However, it is sad to see the life and violent death - through a police bullet in the back - of a revolutionary militant buried in a mass of often unhelpful, postmodern jargon.
Toby Abse
Notes
1. Hajek writes: “... if we exclude the Troubles in Northern Ireland” (p28) - which she to a large extent does, despite brief references to Bloody Sunday scattered through the book - so that her use of ‘Great Britain’ rather than ‘United Kingdom’ is a conscious one. In the German case she frequently conflates West Germany with Germany as a whole; East Germany is barely mentioned.
2. Anni di Piombo (‘Years of Lead’ - ie, bullets) is a description of the Italian 1970s adopted by the right and most establishment commentators. Even if one were to categorise the decade purely in terms of political violence and terrorism, which strikes me as a bit one-sided, this label blots out the indiscriminate bombings with large-scale civilian casualties carried out by the neo-fascists in 1969, 1974 and 1980.
3. Typically there is no discussion in this book of Communion and Liberation’s reactionary political role in the 1970s or its subsequent growth into a powerful and frequently corrupt political and economic actor under the patronage of Wojtyla, the Christian Democrats and Forza Italia.
4. As somebody who was involved in the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Battle of Lewisham in 2007 and is currently involved in ongoing plans to mark the 40th next year, I think Hajek’s comment is more revealing about herself than about those who continue to remember Lorusso.
5. Compagno - or the female form, compagna - can mean ‘companion’ in the sense of a sexual or romantic partner, but it never crops up in this sense in Hajek’s book.
6. Hajek engages in a tirade against “the possessive memory of the 1968 and 1977 generation” (pp50-51). It is not clear whether the relatively small number of people who gave her interviews about 1977 in Bologna was a consequence of her disdain for “possessive memory” or whether she adopted this view as a result of her lack of success in employing an oral-history methodology in the treatment of her chosen topic.
7. The Red Notes collective emerged out of Big Flame and at this stage, like Big Flame a little earlier, regarded Lotta Continua as their sister organisation in Italy; it was only later that some of those involved, most notably Ed Emery, gravitated towards Toni Negri and autonomism.
8. Hajek uses AO as an abbreviation for Autonomia Operaia, not Avanguardia Operaia, another major far-left group of the 1970s, and the largest component of the membership organisation created in 1978 out of some of the surviving groups that were originally part of a 1976 electoral cartel - Democrazia Proletaria. Since there is no reference to Avanguardia Operaia anywhere in this book, she may well be blissfully unaware of any potential ambiguity in the use of these shared initials in relation to the Italian far left in the 1970s.
9. At this stage the Partito Radicale, which had played a major role during the referendums on divorce and abortion, could have been seen as criticising the PCI from the left. I personally witnessed its participation in a Florence demonstration against nuclear power, which also involved supporters of both Lotta Continua per il Comunismo and Autonomia Operaia, in 1980. By the early 1990s Pannella had aligned them with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, and, despite subsequent twists and turns, they cannot now be categorised as on the radical left.
10. Hajek claims that “the supplement attempts to create an image of Lorusso as an ‘ordinary guy’, with whom a wider public may identify, and hence to create a more ‘shareable’ public memory of Lorusso, which is disconnected from his ideological ideals” (p129) - which seems a very cynical view of his friends and comrades. She appears to have more sympathy with the way the autonomists took over his memory for their own ends.
11. When I asked Hajek about this at her presentation of this book (which at that stage I had not read and had only very recently heard of) at a London University Institute of Historical Research seminar in January 2016, her response suggested that she had never heard of Lotta Continua per il Comunismo. Some internet sources claim that LCC survived for more than a decade and dissolved into Rifondazione Comunista after 1991, but I know that the Pisa branch had certainly ceased to have a public existence some years earlier.