By killing Aldo Moro, the Red Brigades not only committed a crime, but they managed to dangerously upset (and that is what they wanted) the basic equilibrium of the complex political, social and economic relations which were attempting to guide our country out of the internal and international tensions of those years. If the Red Brigades have been defeated, we owe it also to those who avoided superficial readings of the terrorist messages and organized serious, coherent political, social and operative solutions.


The strategic bases

The Red Brigades’ document which traces the lines along which the kidnapping of Moro will be conducted is called the Resolution of Strategic Direction of February, 1978 (1) .
Changes in the social context, which suggest redefinition of the organization’s previous choices, are analyzed in the text, and topics which had been circulating, for at least three years, within the Red brigades, are summarized (2) although with substantial new additions. The most significant document which precedes the above mentioned is the Resolution of Strategic Direction of April 1975 (compiled after Renato Curcio’s escape from the Casale Monferrato jail) in which (the R.B.) change the analyses and the communication means of the armed organization.
From “self-interviews” (3) , used mainly to divulge information, taken from the “tupamaros” experience, in 1975, the R.B. change to an overall analysis which is able to take the form of an authentic ‘programme’.
The recourse to the solemn instrument of the Resolution, is to emphasize a superior level of strategic and organizational stability: i.e. The R.B. are ready for a role of overall direction, namely, of a Party.
The Resolution of 1975 and the following one of 1978, are not limited to a summary description of the context, but try to analyse the economic situation and how it reflects on the social stratification, on the motivation of the working classes to fight, and on the definition of new methods and areas of intervention.
The 1978 document has many points in common with that of the 1975 document, but contains certain differences.
In the two documents, there is the similar description of a stratified proletariat and emerging social subjects which, although not classifiable (from a Marxist viewpoint) in the working classes, can be part of a revolutionary transformation of the Society.
The analysis on the nature of the political power in the advanced capitalistic society is similar. The hypothesis of the formation of a multi-national imperialist State is already traced in the 1975 Resolution. “ The State assumes the functions, in the economic field, of a large bank at the service of the huge imperialistic multinational groups (…..) it becomes, in other words a specific function of the capitalist growth (…) it becomes the imperialist state of the multinationals” (4) . The question is amply developed in the 1978 Resolution.
The principle, according to which, the target of the R.B. is no longer the factory (the industrial production) or the economic power, but the “heart of the State” is still the same. The question emerges, in the R.B. strategy, before the 1975 document. A leaflet of April 1974 (5) , underlines that the attack on the centre of political decisions becomes necessary when the conflict has undergone losses in efficiency.
In the factories, “the workers’ autonomy is sufficiently strong and organized to maintain a condition of permanent insubordination (……) outside of the factories, it is still too weak to be capable of opposing the counter-revolutionary attacks” (6) . The vulnerability of the working class makes it a must to hit capitalism in the coordination centres and not only in the places of the production of merchandise.
Also in the first Communiqué on the kidnapping of Magistrate Mario Sossi, the question of the attack at the heart of the State comes up: it is necessary to extend “the resistance and the armed initiative to the vital centres of the State” (7) . In the 1975 Resolution and then in that of 1978, the “attack at the heart of the State is the central theme.
The foreseen relations with the movements are different. In the 1975 document there is strong controversy with the Autonomy and the projects for the construction of legal organizations which should support (or direct from the outside) the armed fight.
In the 1975 Resolution, the R.B. refuse to be considered as the military arm of class spontaneity and to conceive the guerrilla growth “as a consequence of the growth of the legal or semi legal area of the so-called autonomy” (8) .
The autonomy area is viewed in 1975 as a political environment which weakens the brigades’ project putting themselves as alternative to the armed fight. (9)
In the 1978 text, there is a contraposition with the legalism which harbours in the autonomy, (10) but what is also seen is an attempt to re-establish a contact with the movements (also those that do not operate in the armed fight) and to foresee a construction process of the fighting communist party which sees the contribution of multiple ideological hypotheses, organization experience and concepts of action.
At last, there is the different definition of the modalities of the fight. In 1975, the situation was not yet considered ripe for an escalation of the guerrilla fight. “Passing to a more advanced phase of military disruption of the State and Regime is premature and, therefore, wrong for two reasons:
1) (…) we are not near the “breaking-point”;
2) the accumulation of revolutionary forces on the terrain of the armed fight (…) is not yet such, (…..) as to permit the passage to a new phase of the war” (11) .
In the 1975 document, the warfare is not yet thought as a guerrilla civil war:“armed propaganda carried out through guerrilla actions indicates a phase of the class war and not, as is believed, a form of the struggle. This phase is followed by the active civil war phase, where the main task of the armed avant-garde will be that of disruption, also militarily, the bureaucratic and military machinery of the State and smash it” (12) .
In 1978, something very near to active warfare (13) can be foreseen. The new fighting techniques assume, in fact, “the fundamental aspect of the active civil war, the annihilation of the imperialist forces. The remote target of the demonstrative war, outlined in 1975, becomes in 1978, an immediate target of active warfare. The task of the organization is, therefore, that of “passing from the so-called ‘demonstrative’ actions to those, which give the combat, an “unequivocal ‘destructive’ significance of the enemy force” (14) .


Deterioration and renewal of conflict

The continuity between the two R.B. Resolutions is the product of a specific social situation. The oil crisis, which started in 1974, foresees, in theory, the collapse of the capitalistic system and a strengthening of the Third World (and of real socialism), in virtue of the availability of raw materials and price control of the main energy source. However, the crisis which weakens the market economy also afflicts the working classes, making its mobilisation always more difficult.
Business enterprises react with a reconversion which reduces employment and therefore, contractual power, the political weight and the aggressiveness of the workers. More generally, a cycle of protest with a strong social significance (in the factories, universities, schools), initiated in 1966, undergoes a rapid decline in 1973 – 1974 (15) .
With the 1975 Resolution, the R.B. acknowledge the end of the spontaneous conflict, of a diffused disobedience in the factory, to favour or stimulate those things to which the first Brigades’ propaganda initiatives and attacks on the symbols of the capitalist power were addressed. The weakening of such “spontaneity” shifts the clash from the factory to the State, from the economic power to political power.
However, there are a few subjective factors which render the 1975 situation incomparable with that of 1978 and which explain the differences between the strategic Resolutions drawn up in those years. In 1978, the crisis of the spontaneous antagonism in the factories is even more accentuated (16) . In the labour world there is not only fear for the employment prospects and for the new strategies of the companies (17) , but a rediscovery of traditional representation instruments can also be seen, witnessed by the new consensus which the Labour Unions enjoy, due to the election successes of the Italian Communist Party (P.C.I.), resulting from the institutional change-over of the “new left” (18) .
The consensus to the P.C.I. and the new strategy of the extra-parliamentary left, show a return, by the workers (at least, those working in the “Ford type” factories) to the faith in politics and in the traditional forms of organization of the interests and values.
In the crisis of the spontaneous antagonism and in the framework of the strengthening of the traditional left and of the stabilization of the new left, an explosion of political clashes occurs, punctuating the entire year of 1977, involving the towns, rather than the factories, and laying the ground for new protagonists, a new management class and new social figures (19) .
Analyzing those years, in the future, a social workman will be spoken of and a new young neglected proletariat which, above all, was not guaranteed by the traditional welfare policies nor by a way of production (based on the factory and on a growing production of merchandise), which appeared already in crisis.
The new conflict increases the urban subversion resulting in ferocious protests of the Labour Unions and of the P.C.I., giving rise to new forms of organizations which fill the social spaces abandoned by the new left. The conflict affects the organizations of the armed struggle.
Prima Linea, (Front Line) which had been founded in Autumn, 1976 (20) , collects support, in 1977, mainly in the North of Italy, from the environment of the young proletariat; the followers enjoyed by the movement can be ascribed to a double level organization: presence in the mass movements, centralized military structure (21) . The proliferation (22) , alongside the PL, of armed organizations and the presence, in the movement, of an unstable borderline between creativity and violence (23) , force the R.B. to think over certain previous attitudes of opposition towards new experiences. In 1975, hard criticism of the unarmed antagonism and of the armed heterodoxy, had developed. In 1978, vice versa, the R.B. feel the need to formulate a strategy capable of involving a constellation of armed groups and of recognizing the role that the metropolitan disobedience can play in a revolution strategy.
Also the passage to the “active war” finds an explanation in the 1977 explosion. With the foreshadow of more ambitious goals and of attacks directed against the centre of the political power, the R.B. want to show their capacity in carrying out initiatives of unquestionably superior quality with respect to spontaneous actions revealed in street violence or with the constitution of an array of small armed groups.
The destructive actions against symbols of public power, the attack at the heart of the State, must revive a declining labour conflict, gathering together, into an effective project, numerous disconnected and non-homogenous avant garde groups.


A “offensive resistance” movement

In the 1978 Resolution, the exacerbation and widening of the armed struggle (24) does not derive from a spontaneous class antagonism, but rather, from a crisis which threatens the working class, which modifies the distinguishing features of modern liberal democratic systems, which puts peace and co-existence in danger, which produces the diffusion of urban clashes, which creates new antagonistic social classes.

Against the recessive effects of over-production, the middle-classes can find a remedy only in the coercive widening of the market, i.e. by recourse to wars which destroy “capital, goods and the labour force” (25) , thereby favouring a renewal of the economic cycle. A war can be curbed only by a proletarian antagonism which is able to produce instability in a capitalist society and to impede the formation of a “compact and united” bourgeoisie background.
The Red Brigades, conscious of the ‘quiet’ of the factory, observe the birth and consolidation of a diffused subversion (26) . “ It does not seem to us improper, at all, to speak of creeping civil war. From official records, in 1977 alone, more than two thousand offensive actions were accomplished and more than three hundred and fifty alone, in the month of January, 1978. The entire affair distributed over fifty provinces and one hundred towns” (27) . The clashes and violence which shake the cities and the proliferation of armed organizations show the birth and consolidation of marshalled conflict. The Proletarian Offensive Movement of Resistance, (MRPO): “area of antagonistic class behaviour created by the worsening economic and political crisis”, “area of the revolutionary forces, groups and nuclei which give a military and political content to their initiatives” (28) .
In defining the new movement, the R.B. do not use triumphant tones, recognising, above all, that the movement lacks unity: “The concept of MRPO does not reflect a flat, homogeneous movement, but rather, an area of conflict” (29) .
The new offensive and resistance movement contains, however, strong potential: it does not allow itself to be restrained by legal positions and “notwithstanding, that it appears, on the surface, to be a conglomeration of uncoordinated “partial movements” or as confused explosions of ‘fighting nuclei’, (more than one hundred in these last months), in reality, it is a unitary, solid and lasting movement. (30)


A new social stratification

To analyse the situation of the working classes, the R.B. find themselves obliged to explain a number of questions which seem to contradict the perspective of a revolutionary transformation. It concerns the behaviour of the working class, which cannot be interpreted only as a result of intimidation.
In this class can be seen a return to the adherence to praxis and values of the unions and of the traditional left. The last episode, where an autonomous conflict was manifested, was the Mirafiori occupation in 1973. In the subsequent months and years, vice versa, a realignment of dependent labour to traditional organizations took place, also due to the birth of new forms of representation straight from the base.
The R.B. do not interpret the new consensus enjoyed by the traditional labour representations as a consequence of the new strategies of the enterprises, (job cuts, increased automation, product decentralization, shifting the investments from manufacture to financial activities), but as the result of a strong modification of the social structure and of the working class. The economic and policy changes of enterprise, permit the collocation on antagonist positions of only a portion of the industrial proletariat.
Some sections of the class are inclined, objectively and subjectively, towards the 1978 Resolution, in favour of the bourgeois alignment. The professional proletariat, which has lost its role and vocation to fight, as a consequence of the automation of production procedures, protects only its own privileges: a relative job security, a less repetitive work, a lower stress incidence, a moderate self-determination of rhythms, a partial freedom of decision . Of the proletariat, only a portion can be recovered for the revolutionary initiative, the remaining part is attracted, vice versa, by the “ideology of labour” (31) .

The only component of the class which is objectively aligned against capitalism is that which composes the worker “mass”. The Document, in this respect, embraces the analysis of the Italian labour movement, attributing to an unqualified proletariat coming from pre-industrial environments and cultures, a vocation of subversion towards the system. The worker mass composes “the most revolutionary social stratum which has contributed and is contributing, in the highest degree, to the development of the class strife in all forms: legal and illegal, from wildcat strikes to sabotage, from factory occupation to the hard punishment of bosses, executives, fascists, until it becomes the central nucleus for the armed struggle for communism” (32) .
In a revolutionary strategy, there can be collocated alongside the worker mass, some sections of manual labour (services sector), a new “precarious labour”, students, women’s labour or, more generally, the area of female liberation, and some sectors from the fringe of society (33) .
As it has been said, it concerns social groups which animate the 1977 movements, which are capable of guiding the struggle into the cities, but which, sometimes, place themselves in conflicting positions towards the proletariat.
The new possible social alignment is not, therefore, unitary and requires unification and organizational work.
In the services area, manual workers distinguish themselves for their combative capacity and can become the best allies of the working class “since they practically live the same conditions though do not produce goods, (for instance, the hospital workers)” (34) .
The reference to the “services sector” is a recognition of those areas of the antagonism capable of animating strife in the public structures.
The Resolution rigorously indicates, however, that the manual labour destined to services, since it does not produce values, is lacking that type of antagonism which, in Marx’s analysis, is a consequence of the specific capitalist production of goods (35) .
Class division is also enhanced by the emergence of a conflict of genus (feminine) which strengthens the proletarian front, but, at the same time, creates some contradictions.
Attention to the specific question of the feminine genus is a tribute to the importance that the women’s movements gained in 1977 and may, also, be the result of some conflicts which are perceptible within the armed struggle organization (36) .
“Regarding the MRPO: its composition is not homogeneous and a political and ideological struggle is present among the different components” (37) .
Environments where a revolutionary ideology could take root are those of the unemployment, the precarious employment, and the social fringe .
The excess of labour favours the capital (appearing like an army salary in reserve which pushes towards the lowering of wages), but it also represents a factor of instability, since it escapes the discipline of the traditional representation.
The Resolution appears attentive to the employment transformations and to latent phenomena in the 1970’s, which will become evident in the 1980’s and 90’s. The Document analyses the students’ role, but above all, underlines the growth of an unstable labour which changes the typical stratification of the industrial society and creates new social classes which are hard to define (38) .
Special attention is given to that part of the reserve industrial army which finds itself in the perspective of “total exclusion” (39) .
A world that gravitates around or at the margin of the labour market and even the outlawed under-proletariat “constituted from the remains of broken-up classes”, can play an role in the revolutionary project.
The Document does not indulge in those speculations on the disrupting role of the deviations (drawn from Foucault and from U.S. sociology and ideology mix of the new left, created in the 1960’s) which had been elaborated by NAP and which will reappear in the R.B.- Guerrilla Party theories, but they can be recalled more simply, in some circumstances, in choices made by the fathers of the revolutionary theories and praxis.
“In 1905 Lenin noted how, in a period of economic and political crisis, social brigandage becomes a specific fighting method of some urban proletarian classes (…) and it is absolutely necessary to transform such forms of fighting into guerrilla actions.” (40) .


The imperialist State of the multinationals

The R.B. (Red Brigades) reach the multinational imperialist State formula and to a foreseen advent of a new type of authoritarianism capable of destroying the participation project of the post Weimar constitutions, starting from the analysis of the economic crisis and of the answers given by the political culture of the more developed countries.
The armed organization perceives that, with the economic crisis and the consequent wear and tear of the social distribution mechanisms of the resources, the political exchange which has favoured the affirmation of democratic consensus, comes to an end.
The R.B. exclude the fact that the economic crisis and the crisis of the “social State”, which began to manifest itself in the 70’s, can find remedies within the boundaries of the democratic system.
According to the R.B., the recession and the consequent impossibility of governing through the present political system, demand that the executive classes identify a new authoritarian method of management of the State.
The information on which the R.B. work is real. The fiscal crisis of the State, the lack of a surplus of resources to be destined to the political exchange, the necessity of selecting the rights of citizenship, the problems of governance - typical of an industrial model which has reached the maximum expansion and is not able to grow further without changing its form - permit some sectors of the political culture to formulate alarming diagnoses (the Trilateral elaborations) on the limitations of democratic management of complex societies.
In some cases the world of the big enterprises, in a state of insecurity, accepts the imperative of directly challenging the management of the State. In reality, the difficulties of democratic governments in the administration of the new political demands regard, above all, the systems defined as “based on consensus” (41) , which impede or slow down the decision process in the matter of allocation of public resources and the selection of needs.
The developed societies of the West resolve, in the course of the 1980’s and in subsequent years, the problem of governance by reinforcing the democratic change-over of governments and enlivening the dialectic between market and the State.
The tendency of business to globalization (a tendency which started in the 1970’s because of the oil crisis and to an overload of production costs in advanced welfare states) is strongly depicted by the R.B. as monopolistic and imperialistic. It is not a question of a physiological widening of markets, but is the expression of powerful multinational enterprises which are interested in trespassing national borders and the prerogatives of other States.
According to the R.B. the peculiarities of the new political system stand in the overcoming and the reciprocal interlacing of both the politics of the New Deal and those authoritarian, as well as, the definition of a new form of power with strong technocratic connotations. The technocracy must be able to resist an overload of political demands from below and make national interests, which could conflict with the interests of the international capitals, prevail.
In the 1900’s tradition, fascism and social-democracy had been two forms of cyclically recurrent governments; “in the imperialist state, instead, the substance of these political forms coexist, giving way to an ‘original regime’ which is neither fascist nor social-democratic, but represents a dialectic overtaking of both” (42) .
According to the 1978 Resolution, the mixture of fascisms and social-democracy creates for the labour ‘aristocracies’ an institutional role of repressive control of the marginal proletariat. To the most favoured sectors of the working classes, a chance is offered to defend some privileged positions, not at the expense of the Capital, but of the deprived social strata. “Today the preferential relations between imperialist bourgeoisie and the revisionists is founded on the identification of the underprivileged proletariat as a variant of which, it is indispensable to have control.” (43)
The instrument which has carried into affect a policy with reformist and coercive aspects, is a new form of State without liaisons with a territory and without national connotations. “The Imperialist State of the Multinationals is the superstructure (….) corresponding to the phase of imperialism of the multinationals. Its essential characters are: training of a politically imperialist personnel; rigid centralization of the State structures under Executive control; reforms and annihilation as integrated forms of the same function: the preventive counter-revolution” (44) .
A politically homogenous personnel, of super-national formation, orients the politics of the capitalist countries and modifies the institutional order from the roots. From a liberal and participating democracy, we pass, therefore, to a technocratic form of power and to a modification of the characteristics of the representative State. The supremacy of the legislative power sanctioned by the advent of the modern liberal-democracy is degraded to executive primacy in public decision.
The political party, as conceived in the European democratic tradition, is modified in the multinational imperialist State: no longer collector of the citizen’s will, but the instrument for collective mobilization.
The acronym and the concept of the Multinational’s Imperialist State have been the object of harsh criticism and powerful mockery. In such a definition, the evidence of the delirious nature of the R.B’s analysis and project, has often been observed.
In all honesty, the R.B, perhaps, just because they observed the official political life and economy absolutely from the outside, give proof of their having precociously understood certain phenomena of the transformation of the industrial society.
The error of the R.B.’s definition is in the fact that the actors of the new super-national system have been considered monsters, in having placed them in a conspiracy conception of history, in a devaluation and under-evaluation of democracy. The horror is in having perpetrated bloody actions, without any legitimacy, whatsoever, in a society and in an order capable of guaranteeing political pluralism i.e. the competition of ideas, programmes, classes.
Some phenomena, roughly condensed in the acronym of SIM (MIS = Multinational Imperialist State) with strong ideological affinities, will become common knowledge in the subsequent decade and will provoke reflection, also in those areas which defined the B.R. reasoning as sheer delirium: the pre-eminence of the executive power, the decision as criterion of simplification of social complexity, the function of technocrats in the management of the public good, the impoverishment of citizens’ rights, the commitment of the large industries in politics, the erosion of sovereignty caused by the diffusion, on a world scale, of political, social and economic problems and by the liberation of the international markets.


The self-renewing D.C.

In the 1978 Resolution, a severe condemnation is pronounced against the entire political alignment. The judgement on P.C.I. (Italian Communist Party) is very severe as it is charged with cooperation in the State Capitalistic strategies, with breaking the unity of the working class, and of urging the repression. Also in the communiqués which accompany Moro’s kidnapping, the attacks on the communist party’s “revisionism” and on its subaltern acceptance of the bourgeois policies, are not missing. In the Communiqué No. 5. the P.C.I. is defined as “anti proletarian police” and the Berlinguer followers are accused of co-responsibility in the repression of the avant-garde revolutionaries. In the Communiqué No. 9, spies and informers “of the Lama and Berlinguer apparatus” are denounced and the “lurid collaboration of Berlinguer’s followers” with the annihilation activity of the proletariat antagonism, are also denounced.
The condemnation of revisionism still accompanies the PCI, but the 1978 Resolution acknowledges the substantial role exercised by the P.C.I. in the eyes of the working class.
The B.R. try to keep alive a kind of dialogue with a social and political base which has been traditionally identified with the party of Gramsci, Togliatti, Longo and Berlinguer (45) . A passage in the 1978 Resolution is significant in this sense. “The identity crisis which the D.C. has been going through, particularly since June 1975, is determined by two concomitant processes: on the one hand, the crisis and restructuring of the world strategy of the Imperialist States and on the other, the request for power by the Italian Proletariat, expressed in various ways by its political components both revisionist and revolutionary” (46) .
As can be noted in the cited excerpt, it is recognized that “revisionism” (i.e. P.C.I.) is still considered among the political expressions of the Italian proletariat and which is capable of manifesting a “request for power”!
The principal enemy, in the 1978 Resolution, is the D.C. (Christian Democratic Party) defined as responsible for the imperialist strategies in Italy.
The disrupting attack on the D.C. represents the main instrument to counteract the Imperialist policies.
The 1978 Resolution and the Communiqués which again take up the themes, contains some modifications to the R.B.’s traditional analysis of the Christian Democracy.
In the previous texts, D.C. was represented as a conservative force voted to the alliance with M.S.I. and as promoter of a classical form of repression. In the 1978 Resolution, the Catholic party appears as a repressive and conservative force, but also as an actor of a renewal of the Italian politics and of an adjustment of the social system to the modernization imposed by international capitalism.
The SIM political peculiarity, as has been previously noted, is placed by the R.B., not in a return to old forms of authoritarianism, but in an overtaking of fascism and social-democracy, in a political scheme capable of joining the repression with the consensus of sectors of the working class.
According to the 1975 Resolution, the executive group of D.C. (Christian Democrats) supports the strategy of imperialism through a total turn to the right. “The Christian Democrat political project, openly supported by Tanassi, Sogno and Almirante, proposes to build around the integralist block of the D.C., a wider and articulated “historical block” which is openly reactionary and counter- revolutionary, functional to the Imperialist State”.
In the 1978 Resolution, it is always stated that the D.C. must be hit as it is an expression of SIM (World Imperialist State) and of the imperialistic interests. However, the analysis of the relations between the catholic party and the imperialistic interests is conducted in new terms. The DC is no longer presented as a conservative force but as a battle ground for innovation.
The DC must be hit because it produces reforms which must render society, politics and economy coherent with the global interests of imperialism. “Central and strategic force of the State imperialist management, in Italy, it is the Democrazia Cristiana. In this way must the severe internal clash, now underway, and the so-called process of "renewal", be interpreted” (47) .
The traditional structure of the DC did not permit the pulling ahead of the social transformation, hence the push for change which is now under way. “In the framework of the strategic unity of the imperialistic states, the major powers at the head of the hierarchical chain request the DC to function as a national political pole of the counter-revolution, but the party, as it is presently organized, is largely inadequate to the task. Therefore, renewal is essential” (48) .


Propaganda and active warfare

According to R.B., the Multinationals Imperialist State is no longer able to operate with the consensus and mediation of the conflicting interests; the only instrument which SIM can make use of is the repression or annihilation of the proletarian organizations. The institutional violence requires a change of strategy in the revolutionary organizations. The function of armed propaganda disappears and, instead, only destructive armed action by the antagonist is proposed. “No longer having a political phase separated from the military one,(…) the only possibility of entering the political ground of conflict is given with the rifle in hand” (49) . Armed propaganda, for the 1978 Resolution, is tied to a phase of expansion of the economic cycle in which the State and Business can adopt reform instruments to curb conflicts, vice versa, “in the ‘war’ phase, (…) the revolutionary civil war practice prevails” (50) .
The Resolution goes over the various steps of the armed struggle in Italy. “At the beginning, from necessity, we operated in small groups and we limited ourselves to small actions (……) Then, with growing forces and the taking root of guerrilla warfare, we passed to more complex actions involving more nuclei, but always limited actions”.
Eventually, the guerrilla “moved on in campaigns, i.e. simultaneously in more poles on the same fighting line” (51) . Furthermore, we passed from “rapid actions (hit and run) to prolonged actions, (Amerio, Sossi, Costa) which have allowed us to develop more trenchant armed propaganda “. In the end, the operations were with “rapid concentration of numerous forces to attack the enemy in small battles” (52) .
The prefigured phase of the Resolution foresees the adoption of new action techniques oriented towards the annihilation of the imperialist forces. “The task of the guerrilla organization is to go from the so-called ‘demonstrative’ actions to those which give to the combat a ‘unequivocal’ significance of‘ ‘destruction’ of the enemy forces (53) .

The Guerrilla must not loose contact with the proletariat and it must operate within the proletarian antagonism.
The R.B. in the 1978 Resolution, try to join two opposing requirements: the one of coordination of an armed struggle of a higher level and superior aggression, and the one of keeping touch with the masses and the social movements.
The two requirements can be reconciled by the constitution of a party which can support, but not oppose social conflicts.
“A dialectic relation must work between them, but not a relation of identity: that is, the thrust comes from the class, as well as, the impulses, the indications, the stimulation, the needs, which the communist avant-garde must gather, centralize, synthesize, render in theory and in stable organizations and at last retake it to the class in the form of a strategic combat line, programme, mass structure of the proletarian power” (54) .
The Party, furthermore, does not and should not identify itself with the R.B.
“The Red Brigades are not the Communist Fighting Party but an armed avant-garde which works within the metropolitan proletariat for its construction (55) .


The pursuit of the movements

From what has been written so far, we can deduce that the communiqués (56) , diffused by the Red Brigades, during Moro’s kidnapping, are sent to a number of addressees: rather than to Institutions, the messages are addressed to a social and political world towards which the Red Brigades feel it necessary to justify their actions. In the course of the 55 days, the organization tries to obtain both an institutional and social legitimacy (57) . The communiqués are not limited to the re-proposal of the contents of the most recent strategic Resolution (even though such Resolution is utilized quite often for the more complex political formulations) but they enter into the matter of what has happened during the kidnapping days and, more than all, try to respond to the objections which come from both the antagonists and from potential fellow companions.
The communiqués N° 2 and 3 try to credit the R.B. as a pluralist organization (capable of appreciating the diffused antagonism) and to dispel the impression of a remote controlled movement which is manoeuvred by mysterious centres.
Underlining its availability to pluralism, the R.B. pay less attention to answering those critics who consider Moro’s kidnapping as a horror, than to the critics who consider it an error capable of feeding reactions and jeopardizing the social opposition. With a series of statements regarding the authenticity and autonomy of its action, the R.B. reply to accusations, formulated during the first days of the kidnapping, that they are in a subordinate position to external powers.
Hypotheses and accusations, which originated, not only from the political institutional forces, but were also creeping within sections of the antagonism (58) .
At the end of Communiqué N° 2, homage is paid to two figures from the base of the antagonism who were killed in the days following the Via Fani massacre. “Honour to comrades Lorenzo Jannucci and Fausto Tinelli assassinated by the killers of the regime” (59) .
The two youths (60) , committed to the newly created social centres, are not remembered by their christian or diminutive names (Fausto or Iaio) as on the posters put up by their companions or in the pages of “Lotta Continua”, but with first and surnames.
This kind of citation is intended to convey to the Movement, which, however, does not appreciate the fact (61) , that also the unarmed antagonism can be placed within the revolutionary strategy and that the two militants from the base of the antagonism merit the same honours as the guerrilla fighter who falls in combat.
In the N° 3 Communiqué they try, in a ritual manner, to respond to criticisms of political adventuring. To this end, a part of 1978 Strategic Resolution is copied. “We are also aware of the fact that the practice of revolutionary violence pushes the enemy to confront it (….) In fact, we propose to flush out the imperialist contra-revolutionary from the sores of society “democratic” (….) It is not we who create the contra-revolution. It is the very form which Imperialism assumes” (62) .
A further message launched during the first phase of Moro’s kidnapping, regards the authenticity of the Brigades’ way of acting. N° 2 Communiqué, which replies to the first criticisms published in the press, from parties, from movements, claims from the Italian proletariat, all of which the R.B. make themselves interpreters. A tactical and strategic patrimony sufficient to carry out the accomplished action. “From the very beginning, our organization has made the principle of Mao its own. ‘To count on your own forces and fight with tenacity’.
To apply this principle, notwithstanding enormous difficulties, for our organization, has been more than the right choice, it has been a natural choice; The Italian proletariat has, in itself, an immense potentiality of revolutionary intelligence, an infinite heritage of technical knowledge and material capacity”.
Aldo Moro’s kidnapping, therefore, is not a remotely controlled action but the fruit of an experience matured in a specific historical social tradition.
The N° 2 Communiqué. furthermore, acknowledges relations with a network of communist combatants active in Europe, but it underlines a strategic and tactical autonomy of the Italian organization, which prevents manipulation or hidden direction. “While we strongly reaffirm our positions on Proletarian Internationalism, we declare that our Organization has learnt how to fight, has been able to build and organize, autonomously, the political and military hierarchies adequate to the tasks which the class war imposes (…..) and it is this that has permitted our Organization to conduct, in the most complete autonomy, the battle for the capture and the trial of Aldo Moro.


A plural armed struggle

N° 1 Communiqué concludes with an appeal for the expansion of the action and the unification of the offensive resistance movement. It is not an appeal that falls on deaf ears. During the 55 days of Moro’s imprisonment (between April 11 and March 8) , notwithstanding a capillary control of the territory, twelve attempts are made against people, ( two fatalities) 8 episodes claimed by the R.B. and 4 episodes attributed to scattered organizations (63) .
In N° 5 Communiqué, the R.B. underline the initiatives taken after the Moro kidnapping and interpret them as a manifestation of social opposition to the politics of Imperialism and as an answer regarding the control measures which accompany the kidnapping investigations. “The attack unleashed by the State in the last week with searches, detentions and indiscriminate arrests, tends to affect not only the avant-garde which are involved in the armed struggle but the entire class movement. Notwithstanding this repressive attack, to which we must add the always more open actions of the anti-proletarian police(….) of the PCI, the workers opposition to SIM and to the collaboration policies of the Berlinguer followers, has grown. In the meantime, the MPRO initiatives continue, as well as those against the hideouts and the men of the D,C,, the Industry Confederation, and the military apparatus” (64) .
Although the action in Via Fani has been appreciated by sectors of the armed movement and among some avant-garde groups in the factories, the authors of the kidnapping know that they have to justify and explain their strategy and their conception of the organization to a vast armed galaxy (65) of suspicious people, inspired with different conceptions of the militant activist, the relations between party and the masses, and the objectives.
A different conception of the armed struggle had been expressed by the Prima Linea (Front Line) which, in a 1977 document, had criticized the R.B.’ monolithic structure. “It is an error to shoot against the spontaneity of the proletarian combat and want to confine this combat to initiatives taken only by the Organization and only following its direction (…) The development of the proletarian combat is a contradictory and collective process: dialogue and close contact among the formations that practice it, are imperative” (66) .
After the kidnapping of the 16th of March and after the R.B. pass sentence on Moro, the Communist Revolutionary Committees release a document in which they declare that the armed struggle originated “from our history, from the history of this movement” and recognize “the tremendous effectiveness” of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping.
The document, however, refuses the concept of the transformation of the guerrilla organization into a “People’s Tribunal”: “It is a question of distinguishing between the communist necessity to resort to forms of violence and coercion and their transformation in standards and regulations”.
The Communist Revolutionary Committees which express sentiments which are present in sectors of a pluralist armed antagonism, propose to the R.B. to come out of the logic of ultimatums and to open “a battle-ground which is practicable and reasonable for all organized formations which, today, take part in the framework of the struggle” (67) .
The R.B. try to keep the passage of dialogue open with the dissenting parties (maintaining a formal level because it must be independent of any decision on the prisoner’s destiny) already present in the armed alignment 55 days after the kidnapping. The R.B. underlines the possible coordination of different initiatives and states that not only a vast gamma of positions can find place in the armed strategy, but initiatives of different intensity can be placed.
The evaluation of the contributions to the common action cannot be limited to measuring the intensity of the fire, nor the compliance to rules which have been established by stronger organizations, nor the adherence to one of the possible interpretations of the Marxist and Leninist message.
The fight must cut into every aspect of the institutional action of the Bourgeois State. “ This role of disruption, propaganda and organization, must be carried out at all levels of the capitalist state oppression and at all levels of the classes composition. There are not, therefore, ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ levels of the struggle. There exist, instead, dispute levels which incise and damage the imperialist project and strategically organize, or not, the proletariat” (68) .


Disruption or mediation

In the Communiqués which had accompanied the kidnapping of the magistrate, Mario Sossi, the problem of the negotiations for exchanging prisoners had emerged immediately.
The first Communiqué diffused by the R.B. after a rough biography of the magistrate, synthesized the reasons for the action: “Mario Sossi will be tried by a revolutionary tribunal” (69) .

The second communiqué was a simply specification: it invited the recipients to distrust the ‘apocrypha’ and gave details on how the R.B.’ documents would be edited (70) . Communiqué N° 3, i.e., the first with a political content, already set out details of the prisoner’s exchange: “Sossi is a political prisoner of the proletariat. As such, any kind of optimism over his unconditional liberation is absolutely unjustified. Many are the comrades who (…) took arms again (….). Some of them died or are now in gaol (….). An absolutely imperative point of the political programme of the R.B. is the release of all our political prisoner comrades” (71) .
The initial Communiqués on the Aldo Moro kidnapping, different from those of the Mario Sossi kidnapping, are entirely dedicated to the strategic analysis, to the constitution of a possible network of alliance in the offensive resistance movement, and to the trial of the Christian Democracy. N° 1 communiqué contains a biographical card of the kidnapped parliament member, re-proposes some political questions from the February 1978 Resolution, states that they intend, with the trial of the Christian Democrat leader, to initiate a trial of the regime. “We must extend and deepen the trial of the regime which, in every part, the avant-garde fighters have already known how to indicate with their combat experience. This is one of the main routes along which it is possible to make the Proletarian Offensive Resistance Movement march and on which it is possible to unleash the attack and create havoc of the imperialist project. Let it be clear then, that with the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and the trial to which he will be submitted by the People’s Tribunal, we do not intend ‘to close the question’ or even less to wave a ‘symbol’, but to develop a watchword against which the entire movement of the Proletariat Offensive Resistance is already measuring itself, rendering it stronger, more mature, more incisive and organized” (72) .
The 2nd Communiqué, other than re-proposing themes contained in the 1978 Resolution, adjourns Aldo Moro’s profile and introduces an analysis about the European perspectives of the revolutionary activity (73) .
N° 3 Communiqué analyses the development of Aldo Moro’s trial and contains a long analysis of the future perspectives of the revolutionary movements.
Only in communiqué N° 4, the problem of negotiations of the prisoner’s exchange appears, but in a very indirect way. The text reports Moro’s ideas relative to a possible exchange of prisoners, but states that this hypothesis does not coincide with the R.B.’ position. It is written in the Communiqué that Moro invites his Party colleagues “to consider his position as a political prisoner in relation to the position of the communist fighter prisoners held in the gaols of the regime; This is his position which, if political realism is not lacking in seeing the class contradictions in Italy today, it is useful to clarify that it is not our position” (74) .
The R.B. confirm that the liberation of the political detainees is a basic point in their programme and intend to pursue any way that can bring about their release, but refuse “as propaganda and instrumental manoeuvres, attempts by the regime to make believe as belonging to us what, on the contrary, it is trying to impose: secret negotiations, mysterious intermediaries, the covering-up of facts. As far as we are concerned, the trial of Aldo Moro will go ahead regularly and it will not be the mystifications of the specialists of anti-guerrilla psychology that will modify the judgement which will be emitted” (75) .
The time taken to handle the problem of the prisoner exchange, during the course of the kidnapping, deserves the formulation of some hypotheses.
A. The reason why the question of the prisoner’s exchange had not been put forward in the first Communiqués was to underline that the action focus is on the ‘kidnapping’ of a politician and the ‘trial’ to which the Organization intends to submit the D.C. Party. To have presented, in the first communiqués, the problem of the prisoners’ exchange would have weakened the “disrupting” effect of the R.B. initiative. The tactic defined in the 1978 Resolution provides, furthermore, that the State disruption shall not be the result of a single action, but the outcome of a protracted procedure. The enemy must be engaged “in prolonged actions that magnify and exasperate all its internal contradictions” after having been attacked “ in surprise battle which become slowly more consistent and which give the proletariat mass a real idea of the growing strength of the guerrilla fight” (76) .
B. In all probability, the R.B. wanted to underline their choice of a new tactic for the prisoners’ liberation. The liberation, in the logic of the R.B. active executive group (i.e. operative and not detained), must not be a technical fact (negotiations or exchange etc.,) but the result of a political action and the outcome of a modification of the power ratios with the state institutions.
The gaol walls can fall only and when the R.B. show that they are able to bend the institutions, to put its weakness into evidence and demonstrate its lack of efficiency.
The problem of political detention is not undervalued by the 1978 Resolution, which devotes a long analysis to the European instruments of coordination of repression, to the policies of prevention introduced in Italy, to the situation of the ‘special’’ prisons. The release from jail is tied to two types of actions. The first is the evasion which, freeing the militant activist, puts the repressive politics of the State into crisis and undermines its legitimacy. The second is the disruption which compels the antagonist power to renounce any kind of repressive pretences. The Sossi kidnapping, during the course of which the R.B. ask for the liberation of 13 political detainees in exchange for the magistrate’s freedom, is considered a typical action of the phase precedent to the active guerrilla warfare phase. The kidnapping of the Genoese magistrate was focused on the exchange aspect, in the new strategy, vice versa, the problem of the negotiation with the antagonist exists, but it is depends on the efficacy of the disruptive actions. The new line of negotiation does not mean “that further adoptable mediations no longer exist, but they are seen in dialectic relations with the necessity to weigh heavily from a military point of view, in order to weigh heavily from a political point of view” (77) .


The reasoning of the State and those
of the individual

Agostino Giovagnoli, at the end of his exhaustive reconstruction of the Moro case, concludes with some observations which deserve reflection.
A. ) Moro was assassinated for the same reasons for which he was kidnapped, “namely, not for what he had really done nor for a real advantage for the Brigades to kidnap and kill him, but for the value they attributed to his death in the struggle against the Imperialist State of the multinationals” (78) .
B. ) During the 55 days, the Red Brigades “behaved in a strongly self-referenced manner, without thorough self-interrogation (….) on the question of totally ignoring humanitarian pleas and the openings offered by the political forces, on the opposition manifested by many of their sympathizers to the killing of Moro and on the growing expectancies, within their own organization, for a different outcome” (79) .
C. ) At the end of those days, the Red Brigades felt defeated, ”not on military grounds, but on moral and political grounds”, The reason for such defeat, according to the Author, did not derive from taking a firm line, but from not taking a particular line of firmness which welded “the defence of the institutions and the rejection of violence” , which did not want to be monolithic, which accepted different approaches to the management of the dramatic event (80) .
These are rigorous conclusions, the outcome of a work which refuses to seek “invisible protagonists” of the event, and has simply analysed the deeds and the production of the “principal protagonists” (81) . The analysis of the Resolution and of the communiqués diffused during the 55 days, indicates the profound significance that the destruction of the symbol of the Multinational State and that of the Christian Democratic Party had for the R.B. strategy.
The moral and political defeat of the R.B. is unanimously affirmed in the memoirs of the authors of the kidnapping.
Giovagnoli’s observations about firmness have the merit of not being presented as declarations of principle, but are the result of an analysis of attitudes, elaborations and lines of conduct of the Red Brigades. The formulation of the kidnapping and the strategy which had inspired it were such as to render a compromise very difficult, that is, a solution which, from the start, obliged the complete acceptation of the requests formulated in the N° 5 Communiqué. It can only be observed that the reasonable firmness with which the political parties responded to the R.B. was quite often the result of uncertainness, rather than strategy.
Among the causes of the ethical and political defeat of R.B., perhaps, one more should be added: the behaviour and the communications of the prisoner.
In the Aldo Moro kidnapping, “the spectacular images were very few” (82) . The kidnapping of Aldo Moro was dominated, as Carlo Marletti observes in his reply to the McLuhan thesis (83) on the drama of violence, not by images, but by written material and by a particular instrument of communication: the victim (84) .
From the above, it is not right to deduce that the letters of Aldo Moro, as was stated during the days of the kidnapping and, subsequently, repeated less and less in critical reflections, were piloted or guided.
It has never been possible to verify from protagonists’ memoirs, nor from trial documents, nor from a large number of reformed terrorists, nor from a textual analysis of the letters, that there was ever a R.B director of the messages or, as has been hazarded, a coordinator/creator of the messages from outside of the Brigades.
It can be excluded that Moro “was a mere pawn in the hands of the Red brigades” (85) .
Moro dominates the communications for two reasons:
a) aspects of his personality which emerge in the very course of the kidnapping: a combative quality united with an uncommon ‘sang-froid’. Moro demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to communicate, an unexpected courage, a clearness of exposition, perhaps, previously impeded by a certain culture of mediation traditional of the political environment. It is a matter of personal qualities which permit him to produce not only precious documents, but to adapt his position in accordance with the changing events. Qualities which are typical and normal in a political leader. The exceptional is in the fact that Moro was able to maintain his coolness and authority in the face of extreme conditions;
b) he does not reason from instinct or simple self-defence, but according to principles which have been elaborated and internalized over a long period of time. It is a matter of the philosophy of a State and its politics with which Moro tries to give a solution to the real tragedy that he is living, but, at the same time, he tries to counteract the organization that has kidnapped him.
Politics, for Moro, is not to be considered as an instrument to create a certain model of society, but as a search for solutions for the specific needs of man.
The State, for Moro, ”has the same value as the human life in the stupendous wealth of its definitions, because it is nothing else but total human life” (86) . The State is not a myth nor can it be considered as a carrier of interests which are different from the interests of the individual man.
The State can have an ethic “provided it has, in itself, all the ethics of life, without superimposing on it, a superior, absurd criterion”. The State must not be considered as “ an incomprehensible superstructure of life” (87) . The State must enforce, at all times, “the law of the individual person, in the exact instant in which it has to resolve its problem of adequacy to the universal” (88) .
Moro legitimizes and protests the negotiations because he believes in a political policy which starts from the needs of the single human being and, in the name of this conception, urges the parties to rid themselves of a State ethic which obscures the specific functions.
In the name of this same conception of human coexistence, Moro faces the Red brigades and opposes the project of constructing the new man, destroying the individual.
In the 55 days, Moro is a leader, trying to furnish orientation, acting according to the imperative that compels the leader to guide those who surround him and those who recognize him.
His effort is not destined to have an immediate result also because the chances are minimal. However, Moro manages to realize what is required of a democratic leader.
On the exclusive grounds of ethics and politics, he produces the defeat, he accelerates the defeat, he exasperates the defeat of an antagonist that denies fundamental principles: listening to others, the competition of ideas, the supremacy of the ‘individual person”.