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, Radio Popolare in Milan, 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 known figures. The movement became particularly active in 1977, after the police killing of Lotta Continua member Francesco Lo Russo in Bologna in March. This event causes a series of demonstrations all over Italy. Bologna's university and La Sapienza in Rome were occupied by the student movement. On the orders of the Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga carabinieri in armored vehicles surrounded Bologna's university area. . It was the first time since military Bava Beccaris (1831-1924) that the police forces used such violent means to repress a demonstration. The repression met with international protest, in particular from French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who also opposed the Italian Communist Party's (PCI) criticisms of the student occupation of Bologna's university. The PCI was supporting at this time Eurocommunism and the historic compromise with the Christian Democracy, in other words it had shifted from revolutionary ideas to democratic parliamentary work to change society.
PCI's condemnation of the student movement's activities became visible on the February 17, 1977, when Luciano Lama, secretary of the CGIL, a trade union close to the PCI, gave a speech inside La Sapienza university in Rome, at that moment occupied by the students. During the speech, the autonomi students and the CGIL's security corps had a violent clash, that resulted in Lama being chased away. The confrontation provided the Questura of Rome a pretext for investing by force the university (against universities' long-standing traditions) and ejecting the occupying students.
The PCI's hardline towards the student movement had the only result of radicalizing the autonomi struggle and supporting inside Autonomia Operaia the more radical current. The creative current, which had participated in the ousting of Luciano Lama in La Sapienza, and had created the Indiani Metropolitani movement, became 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 an armed struggle.
[edit] Autonomia and armed struggle
From then on, many Autonomi activists entered clandestinity, reenforcing groups such as the Red Brigades and in particular the Nuclei Armati Proletari (NAP), an organized group inside prison, where many autonomi members had been sentenced to for various illegalism actions. Others groups included the Squadre Proletarie di Combattimento, the Proletari Armati per il Comunismo (PAC) and the better-structured and longer-lived Azione Rivoluzionaria. Others autonomia members constituted the Unità Comuniste Combattenti and Prima Linea
However, the major part of the movement disband itself. In the beginning of the 1980s, a few of them entered the extraparliamentary left movement which was gathering itself in Democrazia Proletaria, a party which later presented itself to the elections.
