Autonomia Operaia
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Autonomia Operaia was an Italian extra-parliamentary leftist movement particularly active from 1976 to 1978. It emerged in 1972 not as a party but rather as a place of encounter among various extra-parliamentary and revolutionary left-wing tendencies opposed to reformism. It took an important role in the autonomist movement in the 1970s, aside earlier organisations such as Potere Operaio, created after May 1968, and Lotta Continua.
The autonomist movement gathered itself around the free radio movement, such as Onda Rossa in Rome, Radio Alice in Bologna, Controradio in Firenze, Radio Sherwood in Padova, and other local radios, giving it a diffusion in the whole country.
Autonomia Operaia was divided between a Marxist Leninist tendency and another more anarchist and libertarian tendency.
People such as Oreste Scalzone, Franco Piperno, professor in Calabria University, Toni Negri in Padova or Franco Berardi, aka Bifo, at Radio Alice were the movement's most well-known figures. The movement became particularly active in March 1977, after the police killed in Bologna Francesco Lo Russo, a member of Lotta Continua . This event gave rise to a series of demonstrations in various parts of Italy. Bologna University and Rome La Sapienza University were occupied by students. On orders from Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga the carabinieri surrounded Bologna's university area. This repression met with some international protest, in particular from French philosophers Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who also denounced the Italian Communist Party's (PCI) opposition to the University occupation. The PCI was supporting at this time Eurocommunism and the historic compromise with the Christian Democrats.
On February 17, 1977, Luciano Lama, secretary-general of the CGIL, the trade union closest to the PCI, gave a speech inside the occupied La Sapienza University . During the speech, the autonomi and the CGIL's security organization had a violent clash, that resulted in Lama being chased away. This confrontation prompted the expulsion of the students by the police.
The clash between the PCI and Autonomia reinforced the more radical current within Autonomia. The creative current, which included extravagant components, such as the Indiani Metropolitani movement, found themselves in a minority. Some of the autonomi decided that the time had come to alzare il livello dello scontro (to raise the level of the fight), in other words, to start using firearms.
[edit] Autonomia and armed struggle
Many Autonomi entered clandestinity, reinforcing groups such as the Red Brigades, the Nuclei Armati Proletari (NAP) (a group active mainly in Naples prisons, where many autonomi members had been incarcerated), the Squadre Proletarie di Combattimento, the Proletari Armati per il Comunismo (PAC) , Azione Rivoluzionaria, the Unità Comuniste Combattenti and Prima Linea.
However, most of the movement disbanded. In the beginning of the 1980s, a few of them entered Democrazia Proletaria, a far-left party which in the 70s and 80s ran for local, national and European elections, achieving however little success.
