LC

Yes. In the Democrazia Proletaria list PDUP had three deputies, Avanguardia Operaia two and Lotta Continua one. It was an incredible parliament in which everything was decided through compromise. We had a Christian Democrat government, with a majority that included Communists, Socialists, Republicans, Social Democrats and Liberals. The Communist Party thought that it would be able to influence government decisions and introduce some changes, but the actual result was complete paralysis at official level. The social forces represented by these parties were so much in contradiction with one another that the government lacked any resolve. The bills passed by 95 per cent of parliament were so noxious not because they were reactionary but because they decided nothing. Underneath, the right-wing state machine followed its course quite freely. Thus a parliamentary committee, in which the PCI was represented, was set up to exercise control over the secret services, the army, and so forth. But then, with the help of P-2, the secret services simply organized underground and established links with people who were afraid of the growing role of the Communist Party.

The story took a new turn in 1977 when the tiny terrorist groups expanded into something much larger. The first reaction of the PCI was to say that it was the work of the CIA and the secret services — an attempt to undermine national unity and to keep the Communists out of government. Of course there may well have been some police infiltration, as there always is in such cases, but it is necessary to go back to the original discussions of terrorism at the beginning of the 1970s. The key group then was Potere Operaio, which though very small was probably the most sophisticated politically. Unlike the Marxist-Leninist terrorists, who thought in terms of a strong group taking over the state and then establishing a new society, the Potere Operaio spontaneists believed that capitalism had exhausted all its possibilities and that communism had already matured within existing society. All that was necessary was to lop off the state-capitalist head and communism would be ensured.

In point of fact, it was a small, isolated Marxist-Leninist group with a Catholic background which initiated terrorist activity in the early 1970s: it got together with some old partisans and set itself up as the Gruppidi Azione Partigiana, the name of a wartime resistance organization. In the same years, Potere Operaio started a major debate at a theoretical level which reverberated in many groups. In the event, the New Left chose a completely different strategy, involving mass action, trade union work and participation in elections, and the terrorist perspective was roundly defeated. But when the Communists turned towards National Unity in 1975 and 1976 and the trade unions found themselves paralysed in the face of the growing capitalist crisis, there was a tremendous disillusionment on the left. It was the old story which repeats itself in every country whenever the political parties linked to the trade unions are in government. For many urban youth left out in the cold — the ‘urban Indians’, as they were sometimes called — Christian Democrats and Communists, trade unions and employers’ associations, bosses and workers with job security all formed part of a single enemy. The terrifying new wave of violence, which really picked up speed in 1977, was quite unlike the creative movement of 1968 and had none of its broader appeal.