The Italian experience: Autonomia

Students asked about "the Italian experience" discussed in Guattari's interview on pages 90--93. This refers to a decade, mostly throughout the 1970s, in which a leftist working class movement started to become powerful. They were inspired by new theories about the new mode of production, the influence of the new economy over our private lives, and the value of _reducing_ work rather than simply demanding jobs. Emphasis was placed upon the workers' ability to create their own values. "Autonomia" is the main name for this movement, which combined theory and practice (praxis). One of the main theorists who participated is Antonio Negri, more recently famous as the author of Empire.

The Autonomist movement was destroyed by rightwing pro-capitalist forces in Italy. A national crisis was created by using terrorism and assassination, which today we know was planned and enacted by rightwing forces but which back then was publicly blamed upon Autonomia. These events are often called "The Years of Lead" referring to bullets, and also "the strategy of tension" referring to the deliberate strategy to defame and destroy the movement by associating them with violence.

12,000 Italian leftists were sent to prison at the climax of this conflict after the killing of their Prime Minister, Aldo Moro. The leftist group The Red Brigades was responsible for this, and Autonomia was simply assumed to be also. In fact, many years later we learned that the assassination of Aldo Moro was an extremely complicated conspiracy involving also rightwing elements and international pressure, including American pressure, to get rid of Aldo Moro since he was becoming more and more socialist.

After that, Antonio Negri was sent to prison as the supposed "mastermind", and then he escaped into exile to Paris, where he wrote a book together with Guattari -- Les nouveaux espaces de liberte (New Spaces of Liberty). The full-length documentary film about Negri and Autonomia and etc. is online here:

http://multitude.tv/component/option,com_seyret/task,videodirectlink/id,105/Itemid,1/

If this link doesn't work for you, ask me for a copy that fits on your computer.
Meanwhile, Autonomia is coming back nowadays in Italy and Greece and Germany and elsewhere, especially around the movement to establish anarchistic "social centers".