Anyway, the first and substantial split suffered by the R.B. at the end of 1975, on the part of Alunni, Pelli and Susanna Ronconi was ascribed, by those leaving, to the inability of the organization to be aware of the new phenomena that the social galaxy was passing through and to its difficulty of relating to the new political groups. This
was the leitmotif of every internal breakdown: from the Morucci and Faranda group, after the outcome of the Moro kidnapping, up to the defection of the “Walter Alasia” Milanese column and of the “Fronte Carceri” (Prison Front) of Senzani.
The historic nucleus of the R.B. – represented, above all, by Curcio and Franceschini – was, in a sense, aware of the danger of the organization and the armed struggle, in general, precipitating into a self-referential role of mere representation of the social conflict: in the management of the kidnapping of Judge Sossi, of Genoa, the two R.B. leaders still tried to keep relations open between the Left and the movements, avoiding the traumatic consequences of the kidnapping, but after the spring of 1976, the components of the entire historic nucleus were arrested, losing for ever their own directive role – not, however, the symbolic one – to which they finally became slaves; destined to act as loudspeakers, subsequently claiming the actions of the changed political line of the organization.
The new executive committee, the highest decision-making body of the R.B. – Moretti, Micaletto, Bonisoli, Azzolini and Maria Carla Brioschi – thought that the difficulty of relating to the social conflict and the new movements depended on an insufficient number of previous offensive actions by R.B. militants, which were no longer adequate to the new levels of conflict between the classes. From this the choice to “raise the sights” was taken with the first action of “annihilation” carried out in June of 1976: the assassination, at Genoa, of the Attorney of the Republic, Coco, and his escort.
So, in the spring of that year, a singular short circuit in the relations between the R.B. and the movements began: on the one side, the actions of the R.B. militants, always more spectacular and bloody, caught the mass movements off their guard, the crisis of the social opposition was understood by the B.R. executive as the natural exhaustion of a cycle of spontaneous struggle and as the birth of a movement that hinted at an active civil war. This contradiction – symptom of schizophrenic politics – reached its maximum level with the ’77 movement and with the kidnapping of Moro.
That movement of ’77 represented a heterogeneous season, full of protests undertaken by the universities – of Rome and Bologna – with high points of radicalization verified after the death of La Russo (11th March, 1977) and of Giorgiana Masi (12th March, 1977). In the conference against the repression of Bologna – promoted also by noted French intellectuals such as Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault – the prestige of the B.R. for the first time, came to assume remarkable characteristics and the line of the armed struggle, in its variations of avant guarde and diffused guerrilla warfare, became dominant, defeating the impulses of the spontaneous movement members and neo-anarchists operating within that movement: “Indiani Metropolitana” (Subway Indians), Radio Alice, etc.
The executive group of the R.B. was divided on the analysis of that social phenomenon: Moretti and the majority still held that the mass spontaneity had reached the apex without having faced the strategic knot of the clash with the State. The imprisoned historic nucleus – above all, Fraceschini – was able, on the contrary, to read in the events of that spring, the possibility of constituting real bodies of mass revolutionaries directed by the R.B. and also the suitability of same to remodel the offensive action of the organization.
Therefore, while the historic nucleus thought that the transition to “fighting party” was all political and was gambling with the relations with the mass movements, the executive committee, judging the level of awareness of the proletariat masses insufficient and a revolutionary break within the worker members of the PCI was still possible, directed the line of attack to the “heart of the State”, aiming at the top of the Christian Democrat Party and at the historic compromise project, seeking to dislocate this institutional invention: to go ahead, however, and quickly.
The Moro kidnapping – unanimously considered as the maximum expression of the R.B’s military capacity – was planned and developed, therefore, within a very pessimistic political vision on the transitional phase that the antagonistic movements were experiencing and was connected to the old perspective of provoking in the rank and file of the PCI, an impulse of revolutionary conscience against the executives of that party, held to be in agreement with the Christian Democratic Party: the theoretical structure was irretrievably ruined with the political mismanagement of the kidnapping, revealing the total inadequacy of the capacity of the R.B. Executive and provoking, after the assassination of Moro, a significant split within the Roman column.
The ‘original sin’ of the R.B. in relations with the antagonist movements of the 70’s lies, therefore, in a late-Leninist and hyper-class conception that cultivated the illusion of the existence of a revolutionary space at the base level of the PCI.
They were unable to read the significance of the deep transformation provoked by the industrial phase of post Fordism, the end of the centrality of the working class of the large factories in the productive process.
The historic nucleus although totally within this logic up to 1976, had sought a political ground for the resolution of this contradiction between the avant-garde and the masses. The group connected to Mario Moretti – if possible, even more supportive of the workers, maintained, instead, that only military offensive was able to back the inadequate level of conscience of the working class. The executive management of the R.B, originated and formed in the “hot autumn” of 1969, was to live the decline of the rising curve of the cycle of worker struggle with a general sense of impotence. In any case, the sole reference point of movement obsessively sought by the Red Brigades for the total of their long operative period, was that hard core represented by the rank and file militants, forged from the factory clashes, above all in the Fiat and the Milanese industries. In this sense, also from the organizational point of view, in the predisposition of the composition of the columns and brigades, the organization remained totally glued to the experience of the 20th Century: its image emerges as a faded re-proposition of the theories of the Third International, centred on the relation of identity between the communist parties and working classes.
From this viewpoint, the R.B. represented the extreme Left organization which was the most impermeable to the thematics and the libertarian drive of 1968.
The social origin and the political formation of the founding group of the R.B. organization are, once again, revealing factors: the large majority of the young people which, in the very early 70’s, created and gave substance to the project of the armed struggle came from the working class or the proletariat. The military core, and those with more political experience, came from Reggio Emilia, from the school of the PCI. It was represented by a nucleus which was more sensitive to the thematics of the “Betrayed Resistance” than to the values of the Sixty Eight protest.
The same Curcio was a very particular intellectual, for family reasons, uprooted from the lower middle class context in which, in a very precarious and detached way, he had lived his university years: The “Università Critica” group which, at the Sociology Faculty of Trento, saw the political beginning of Curcio, as well as Margherita Cagol and Giorgio Semeria, was basically quite separate from the Trentino students’ movement, retiring into an activity of study and silent reflection on Marxism-Leninism, in a kind of school cadre.
The transfer to Milan of the entire group constituted a precise and emblematic choice: the revolutionary subject was not the students of Trento, but the Milanese workers of Pirelli and Sit. Siemens: - contexts where it had become necessary to be present.
For almost the entire R.B. history the “regular” militants, that is, the clandestine executive management, were chosen, with fanatic preference, from the ambit of the avant-garde of the factory, symptom of a constant diffidence regarding those militants coming from other experiences: student movements, extra-parliamentary groups etc., It was a diffidence “of class”, corollary of a negative judgement of ’68 and, above all, on the leadership generated from that historical situation.
In the years of Stalinism the militants of the Third International had to present a personal curriculum, which was then object of investigation into social provenance, not only personal, but also parents and relatives: The R.B. although not taking things to these lengths had always cultivated a mythological vision of the factory worker, considering itself as a “Worker Party”; constituted - as did, to a certain extent, also the Prima Linea (Front Line) – a structure of cadre, i.e. of professional revolutionary militants, which, at least in intention, were considered to express the highest levels of conscience of the worker movement.
This avant-garde, after going underground, lived, in a highly intense way, a total “separateness” from the movements and the masses, within which they had begun their existential and political parabola.
The overall judgement by these revolutionary cadres on the militants remaining within the movements was never, therefore, positive: according to the cadres, it was a question of comrades who were not yet able to ‘take the revolutionary leap to openly confront the State and break the cage of democratic legality’. Here, was also a psychological difficulty in the approach to the militants of the movement and a mental reserve regarding the real subversive willingness of same, an incapacity, perhaps, also held to be genetic: a judgement which, in reality, expressed extreme narcissism.
From the voluminous and equally boring R.B. journalism, it is clearly understandable how the sole effective attempt to interact with a mass movement on the part of the organization was undertaken in 1977 by the Roman column which was more motivated by the spontaneous movement and was less “Bolshevik”. From that specific area, particularly after the violent protest against Lama at the University of Rome, tens and tens of militants joined the organization and went to constitute the operative base and support to the “spring campaign” of 1978. As already mentioned, the R.B. were to pay a high price due to the confused and frantic management of the Moro case: the excessive as much as uncommon level of conflict proposed contributed to further weaken the movement of ’77, already in decline – resting within the Roman column, all the contradictions between avant-garde and the mass, which had remained unresolved after the decision to “bring the attack to the heart of the State”.
From the summer of 1978 to the “defeat” of 1982, the R.B. capitalized on the crisis of the antagonist movements in quantitative terms, starting up numerous recruitments of militants of the Autonomia left without organizational points of reference and political prospects. In those years the R.B., but also the Prima Linea, drained the spontaneous movements in the name of an ephemeral design of organizational reinforcement: without having, however, the capacity to lucidly analyse medium-term political prospects.
In the context of the symbolic end of the cycle of worker struggles begun in 1969, that march of the 40 thousand against the occupation of the Fiat was underestimated and remained without response. In any case, the Turin column had been almost annihilated by the collaboration with justice of Patrizio Peci. At the precise time when the R.B could have employed their military structure in synergy with the worker movement, opposing the social counter offensive of the employers, instead, they revealed a strategic and political incapacity and a substantial extraneousness to the dynamics of the working class.


The Roman column and the Movement
of ’77: The Moro action

The Roman column, although pre-existent to the Moro kidnapping, had been organized a short time before, in 1976: the contacts cultivated two years previously between the Milanese brigades and Roman elements had remained unfruitful. In that period in Rome, informal structures of the armed struggle were already operating, such as the F.A.C. of Morucci, as well as groups already oriented towards the armed struggle, like the Co.co.ce., of Seghetti.
This group although obviously having the same objective as the organization, had always assumed particular characteristics concerning both the origins and the organization. The protocol relative to recruitment had always been of an individual character, but with that adhesion of entire parts of the movement which had abandoned the Roman Autonomia, the prevalence of the only hypothesis considered credible and practical was realized: the armed struggle regulated by the R.B. The consequence was the disappearance of the groups capable only of maintaining a continuative propaganda, alternated with very few actions.
The R.B., originating between Milan and Turin, had formed the first revolutionary cadre from among the avant-garde of the Pirelli, Sit. Siemens and Fiat factories. Up to 1977, no political-military action had ever been made beyond the Val Padana. The organization, however, was very well aware that the nerve centres of the political power were to be found in the capital. It was necessary then to set up a logistics structure in Rome, which would be adequate to sustain the “attack at the heart of the State. The first attempts in this sense were made by Franceschini, in 1974, because the organization had cultivated the idea – before the Sossi kidnapping –of carrying out an action against the Honourable Andreotti.

In 1976, after the arrests that had progressively decimated the historical nucleus, the Roman project was revived on the initiative of Mario Moretti and Maria Carla Brioschi, authors of a structure of a local column suitable to serve as a logistics background to the actions. The possibility of intervening in the Roman revolutionary movement was not contemplated. The militants, who “descended” from the North to Rome, only needed safe lodgings and a limited network of support. While these preparations were being made, the Roman antagonist movement – as in the rest of Italy – imploded due to the concomitant end of the extra-parliamentary groups, and the rise of the first organized forms of the armed struggle.
In Rome, the political geography of the extra-parliamentary Left had been marked by the very strong presence of the Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) which, since the initial university experience, extended to and became rooted in the peripheral and working class areas of the city. The controversial end of this group – the Franco Piperno nucleus with the newspaper, “Il Potere Operaio del Lunedi” had survived –produced a series of strongly rooted area committees on political positions which were near to violence, especially and above all, in the area of militant anti-fascism.
Almost contemporaneously, some militants connected to Valerio Morucci, - nationally in charge of the policing of the Potere Operaio – had, as already mentioned, equipped themselves with clandestine structures and armaments.
The R.B., therefore, in their “march on Rome” found themselves facing an unexpected and motley situation which ended in the modification of original projects and forced the organization onto grounds of confrontation with the movement – from many aspects uncommon and not in the sentiments of the original experience. For the first time, it was not the R.B. that had “to stimulate” the movement to take the road of the armed struggle, but it was the various mass organizations that wanted to have dialectical interaction with the political-military experience coming from the North.
With much difficulty the organization was able to interpret the logic and dynamics of the Roman movement, born in the university assemblies and in the heated inter-group meetings of the working class districts of the city. Besides, after his escape from the Treviso prison, January ’77, Prospero Gallinari became head of the Roman
column. He was a militant of the R.B. old guard and, therefore, was no expert with regard to the enucleation of forms of mediation. In this chaotic political-organizational situation, the movement of ’77 exploded at Rome. In fact, the movement, in the context of the total crisis of the extra-parliamentary Left, placed the R.B. as the sole political reference point for thousands of young militants. Some area committees – like the communist one of Centocelle – passed, bag and baggage, to the armed struggle. They had an organizational structure and, above all, a still incomplete and altogether inadequate level of political direction. Many rules of compartmentalization of the R.B. - sacred and extremely rigid for the first years, in the North – fell to pieces or became impossible to apply.
The new Roman militants although invested with a new task, remained, however, tied to movement thematics. For them, the appeal of the masses and the street clashes was, often, much stronger and cogent than the rules of the clandestine condition: in fact, many well-known names of the column had participated as protagonists of the violent protest against Luciano Lama at the Rome University. Even proper expeditions of militants of the organization were organized against the repression at the Bologna Conference.
There were not only violations of the rules of the clandestinity in that column: below the surface a different strategic approach to political-military intervention took root. The traditional R.B. line of “attack at the heart of the State”, even though evocative, seemed to many militants insufficient and impossible to apply to the whole of the movement. The neophytes, all of them coming from experiences of “widespread” militancy, had not cultivated, unlike the worker militants of the North, the myth of the class struggle and felt the excessive rigidity of the R.B. ideology.
For a certain period –from ’76 to ’78 – the conflict remained in its initial state, but could not fail to emerge shatteringly with the Moro case – above all, after the dramatic outcome of the kidnapping. The consequent split of the Morucci-Feranda group although numerically irrelevant, assumed a very strong political significance for the R.B. The same precise and subtle distinctions on the overall strategy, elaborated by the break-away group, were taken up by the Walter Alasia Milanese
column and, in part, by the Guerrilla Party. Also the historical nucleus, even though defending the organization from the inside of a prison, continued to be very dubious over the militarist line carried ahead by Moretti, finding themselves having to undergo, in the same position of Morucci and Faranda, the painful defection of Alfredo Buonavista, one of the founders of the Red Brigades at Turin, who disassociated himself in the prison of Paliano, in 1980.
The effective end of the Roman column will be a series of expiry dates prompted by the continual harvest of arrests subsequent to 1982, and of the consequent collaboration with justice, but the political defeat of that experience remains, however, grounded in the spring of 1978, in the so-called “spring campaign”.
The capitalization of the R.B. organization and the consensus acquired were realized, however, only at the level of the militants: not at a general level. And they carry a paradox: the intuition of this fact and of the consequent danger, were perceived, it should be stressed, by the imprisoned historical nucleus which, in the period of the first guerrilla trial at Turin – commenced on the 17th May, 1976 and adjourned until May, 1977, and which concerned also the facts of the Sossi kidnapping – had already recognized in that recent consensus the absence, at the top of the organization, of instruments of mediation directed to dialectical interaction with the new troop.
The Moro kidnapping was a consequence of this kind of impotence. Only the historical nucleus, in that 1977, had hypothesized the elaboration and proposition, also in legal form, of struggle and negotiation with the State, in order to stop the armed struggle and give birth to a political formation of the type that had historically originated from the Basque ETA formations. It was, in particular, Franceschini who sensed the ambivalence of that success, perceiving the enormous difficulty represented by those signals reaching them from outside the prison, coming from the Bologna assemblies and from the streets, where only the militants’ proposal had prevailed: he realized that to that growth should have been accompanied the analysis of the problem of the creation of a new political proposal.
With the kidnapping of the Honourable Moro that latent contradiction, foreseen only in prison and which had remained unexpressed, could not fail to explode within the Roman column. The consequence of this status provoked the dominance of the military political line, leading to the fatal kidnapping, as well as to a multiplication of homicidal actions, but also to the progressive disintegration of all the other columns.
Therefore, in the passage from combatant organization to combatant communist party - PCC – can be identified the breaking point of the R.B. political scheme. Conversely, the split provoked by the attitude of Morucci, during the kidnapping, was the litmus paper test of a return to a debate on the movement, insofar as Morucci was put to one side for having advanced the same criticisms made, in the past, to the R.B. organization by Potere Operaio, saying that the R.B. was detached from the territorial realities and questioned the permanency of the worker as the central figure of the struggle. The R.B. couple, Morucci-Feranda had, however, continued to cultivate relations with the most representative exponents of the Roman Autonomia, ignoring the ban on R.B. members to relate to subjects of other organizations or to who had been part, in recent years, of a movement. This very association with members of the Autonomia, however, resulted suitable in leading the armed party to the possibility of comprehending the terms of the debate underway within the semi-legal area. The attitude of this last political intelligence – which thought of a party that would coagulate mass experience of the 70’s, and those of the armed struggle – during the course of the Moro kidnapping wanted to demonstrate that the R.B. had been able to carry out only part of a project and, on that account, to consider the assassination of the statesman an error. However, it observed the kidnapping, not in an antagonist manner, calculating the negotiations useful: a position which did not lie within the executive committee, but within the column. Moretti, who knew about the management of the negotiation contacts, gave it no important, authorizing only the contents of Morucci’s requests to the Christian Democracy.
In reality, the bad management of the kidnapping and the fact that the action represented the maximum result that the R.B. organization could express, determined the tendency of the return of the effortss of Morucci towards the movement and the attempt to create another organization with contents similar to those of the Autonomia Operaia: we are at the chronological end of the historical Red Brigades which, conventionally, is collocated in 1982, on the wave of the negative effects of the Dozier kidnapping and of the subsequent fall of the Roman Column.


The strategic retreat.The 1st and 2nd Positions
The so-called Movement of the Movements

The surviving executives of the R.B. nucleus, Balzarani and Lo Bianco launched, in that spring, the watchword of the “strategic retreat”, evoking the “long march” of Mao Zedong, who, in the last century moved the People’s Liberation Army from the south to the north of China to escape the encirclement of the Nationalist Army troops.
As a consequence, principally within the bounds of the controversial debates between the expatriated fugitives in France, the R.B. divided into the 1st and 2nd Positions.
The 1st Position considered the “strategic retreat” as a moment to accumulate strength and logistic consolidation as the precursor to the “attack at the heart of the State”: therefore, the general political line, which was considered correct, was not modified, but meantime, was limited to facing a defensive phase.
Instead, the militants who shared the theory of the so-called 2nd Position, elaborated after the Dozier kidnapping, maintained that the recent defeats were ascribable to profound strategic errors and, therefore, it would be necessary to correct the political line of the organization
The central support of the strategy, according to these militants, must be concentrated on the propaganda within the masses, with the proposition of practicable military actions by the antagonist movement: the 2nd Position was posed, therefore, as a return to the phase of the “armed propaganda”: a concept which implicitly signified that the most resounding actions of the brigades’ cycle had constituted the future breakaways. Almost all of the 2nd Position militants abandoned the R.B., choosing personal solutions or other movements.
Up to 1989, a fragment of the organization represented by Ravalli and Cappelli, originating from the Tuscan revolutionary regional committee – the CRR – survived, also militarily, in the Tuscan-Lazio zone, carrying out significant attacks like the assassinations of Conti and Ruffilli (February, 1986 and April, 1988). This group was decimated by a Carabiniere investigation.
Inside prison dialectical debates on the prospects of the armed struggle continued with groups on the outside who intended to relate themselves with the historical experience of the Red Brigades.
At Rome, in particular, the fighting communist nuclei began to operate – the NCC – very soon they were able to reconstruct a well-trained and determined group, fortified by ramifications in Tuscany and Lazio to the point that they were able to organize the attacks on D’Antona (May, 1999) and Biagi (March, 2002)
This “new R.B.” modelled themselves on the classic themes of the historical R.B. – the attack at the heart of the State and of the 1st Position: with the arrest of Desdemona Lioce and the killing of Mario Galesi, the brief parabola of the criminal structure was extinguished, thanks to a brilliant and tenacious investigation by the Digos (Special operations and general investigations division) of Rome.
After the demonstrations at the international summits of Seattle and Genoa, that motley group which questioned the modality of the “globalization” was defined the “movement of movements”: a new thing alluding to the egalitarian and not summit oriented character of an experience which, still today, represents the results of various conceptions and sensitivities. The analogues with the movements of ’68 and ’77 are merely formal: at the time, it concerned generational phenomena of broad
spectrum, which questioned the profound structure of social issues. Today, we are in the presence of parcelled-out and dispersed experiences, which find an unstable unity of action in extemporary moments connected to great international events.
Still: while the insurgents of the 60’s and 70’s, questioned or disputed all the organizations of the society – from class-system aspects to cultural ones – the “movement of the movements” tends to oppose or denounce the more resounding consequences of globalization: such as the disproportionate distribution of resources, the “permanent war”; the environmental question; also in local dimensions (the fight against the construction of the TAV [high velocity train] in the Susa Valley; the fight against polluted waste disposal etc.,…)
In the last thirty years, therefore, great events have completely re-designed the Utopian horizon of the Left.
The end of the “real socialism”, the trailing off of the revolutionary fights of the Third World – today, in a certain way, sublimate of the Islamic Fundamentalism – the industrial transformations which have marginalized the traditional working class, have deprived the protest movements of a visible and realistic perspective.
The most well-known slogan of the No Global movement was, during the demonstrations against the G8 summit in Genoa, “another world is possible”. The obvious suggestion of these words cannot hide the indefiniteness of the strategic prospective, by now released from any hypothesis of revolutionary palingenesis and intended, if anything, to render the life on the planet of less-fortunate populations, more “bearable”.
In Italy, this anti-globalization movement was grafted, in part and for an initial period, from a pre-existent current, that of the social centres: the experience of Leoncavallo goes back to 1982, and it is to be considered residual of the defeated movement.
The galaxy – in many respects indistinct – of these structures, until the facts of Genoa, comprised three specific, and often contrasting, “placards”:
a) the area of class autonomy;
b) the area of the autonomy of the possible
c) the area of widespread autonomy
In the accepted meaning of “class autonomy” could be included all of the social centres that put antagonism toward the bourgeois State at the centre of their actions, but also within this particular area the differentiations were many, above all, of an ideological kind: from the anarchism of the Turin centres to the Marxism-Leninism of the Paduan “Gramigna”.
The area of “autonomy of the possible” – majority – comprised and, still today, includes the social centres of the North-East which, although being the direct heirs of the Autonomia Operaia of the 70’s, mainly Paduan, have chosen a strategy which, in someway, interacts with the Institutions, also if it does not renounce antagonism and conflict.
With regard to the area of “widespread autonomy”, it included a series of specific movements, such as: the anti-racist network; the Lilliput network, of Catholic origin, the environmentalist. Over time, this large fragment of movement has come always nearer to the hard line communist party resulting from the antagonist area, in the strictest sense of the word.