THE RED AND THE BLACK

Terrorism in Contemporary Italy

RICHARD DRAKE

Since 1969 Italy has suffered through the worst epidemic of terrorist violence in the
Western world. The extreme left and the extreme right have been involved in this
violence, which remains a fundamentally mysterious phenomenon. Economic,
political, and psychological theories, as well as theories of conspiracy, all fail to
provide an adequate account of Italian terrorism. The author contends that Italy’s
culture of violence-that is, the long-standing intellectual tradition that seeks to make
violence "photogenic"- has played a critical and generally ignored role in the Italian
terrorism of our time.

Since 1969 Italy has suffered through the worst epidemic of terrorist
violence in the Western world. Statistical estimates of this violence
vary, for the distinction between strictly criminal assaults and
politically motivated assaults is not always clear. Different researchers
have disagreed over the precise number of persons killed and
wounded by Italian terrorists, but, according to the participants at a
recent conference on terrorism, a minimum of 351 deaths and 768
injuries can be directly attributed to terrorist actions in Italy over
the last decade and a half.’
These numbers by themselves might not make a very deep
impression on the average American, whose country has a vastly
larger problem with violence in general than Italy does. For example,
each year there are nearly as many murders in New York City alone
as in the entire Italian peninsula.2 Nevertheless, this American
violence, grotesque as it is, does not possess a notably political
character, and its implications for the survival of the U.S. govern-
ment appear to be distinctly less menacing and immediate than the
implications of Italy’s unique revolutionary violence for that coun-

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article was written with the support of grants from the
American Philosophical Society and the American Council of Learned Societies.

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try’s government. To be sure, the American people have been

victimized by political violence as well. Since the tragic Kennedy and
King murders ofthe 1960s, political assassinations and assassination
attempts have become a regular feature of American life. However, in
none of these deeds has it been possible to uncover decisive evidence
that would prove the existence of any conspiracies to overthrow the
country’s institutions. As far as we can tell, these desolating events
were the work of isolated madmen and fanatics.
It is just the opposite in Italy. The 1119 casualties since 1969 have
been the front-line victims of a revolutionary guerrilla war. Reacting
to the fortunes of this war, Italian leaders more than once in the late
1970s trembled for the future of their country and for the very survival
of its democratic institutions; this was particularly true during the
Moro crisis. In view of the grave threat posed by terrorism in Italy, it
is understandable that Italian political scientists, historians, and
sociologists should have busied themselves in efforts to uncover the
causes and the perpetrators of such a malignant phenomenon. The
published results of these investigations are now beginning to give us
an insight into what happened in Italy during the violent 1970s and

early 1980s, the so-called age of lead (for example, see Galleni,
1981; dalla Chiesa, 1981; Della Porta and Rossi, 1983).
According to the most recent research (Della Porta and Rossi,
1983), four indicators appear to mark the boundaries of Italian
terrorism as a discrete political phenomenon: (1) the number of
attempts to commit politically related violent acts, (2) the number of
these episodes actually resulting in injuries to people, (3) the number
of victims, and (4) the number of terrorist organizations involved.
The first indicator, pertaining to the gross number of terrorist
attempts, reveals three phases or cycles in the Italian terrorism of our
time. First, from 1969 to 1976, the number of terrorist episodes was
more or less constant, with a slight upward tendency (Della Porta and
Rossi, 1983: 4). Then, in 1977, terrorist actions rapidly increased,
and this trend continued in 1978 and 1979. A sharp decline occurred
in 1980, a downward movement that has been accelerating for the
past three years. Still, even after the statistical decline in terrorist acts
the Italian people and the Italian government continued to fear
terrorism as the country’s leading menace.
The reason for this concern is to be found in the statistics for
indicators 2 and 3: the number of episodes resulting in injuries to
people and the number of terrorist victims. The curves on these

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graphs are strikingly different from the graph for indicator 1, although
again we do see a three-cycle progression. From 1969 to 1976 the
number of terrorist episodes ending in injury to people and the
number of victims rose very gradually (Della Porta and Rossi,1983).
A major increase in both categories occurred in 1977, but with
nothing like the dramatic rise that took place for the first indicator-
the raw number of terrorist actions. The key difference between the
first indicator and indicators 2 and 3 is this: Whereas the number of
terrorist episodes declined greatly between 1979 and 1980, the
number of terrorist victims remained constant during these years.
There was a decline in the second and third categories for 1981 and
1982, but not a sharp one (Della Porta and Rossi, 1983). Thus,
despite a statistical decline in terrorist acts, terrorism retains a tena-
cious grip on the Italian people, and it does this by means of highly
publicized kidnappings, kneecappings, and assassinations.
The fourth and final indicator concerns the large number of
terrorist groups operating in Italy, yet another sign that the political
turmoil there is extremely serious. Italy has experienced both right-
wing and left-wing terrorism since 1969, with each extreme engen-
dering numerous violent groups. Once again we see a three-phase
cycle in the murderous activities of these groups (Della Porta and
Rossi, 1983).3
First, from 1969 to 1974 terrorism in Italy was an overwhelmingly
right-wing phenomenon, beginning with the Piazza Fontana massacre
of December 12, 1969, and culminating in the Italicus and Brescia
massacres of 1974-all, most experts contend, part of the neofascist

strategy of tension. From 1975 to 1979, however, right-wing

terrorism yielded the headlines to such left-wing terrorist groups as
the Red Brigades, the Nuclei Armati Proletari, and Prima Linea. The
Bologna train station massacre of August 1980 signaled yet a third
phase, characterized by a resurgence of right-wing terrorism. Since
then both left-wing and right-wing extremists have contributed
heavily to Italy’s toll of political violence.
The most instructive results of the latest research on Italian terrorism
are not to be found in the formal conclusions of these studies,

stimulating as they almost invariably are. The recently published

Della Porta and Rossi (1983) report, &dquo;I terrorismi in Italia trail 1969
e il 1982,&dquo; is especially poignant in this regard. The reader comes to
the end of this lengthy and impressively documented report expecting
to find a synthesis, but finds instead a frank confession of help-

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lessness before the total reality of terrorism in Italy. The authors

themselves recognize that all of their graphs and tables do not even
begin to tell us what we need to know about the subject of their study.
Della Porta and Rossi ( 1983: 44) conclude that more than anything
else we need to integrate the statistical data we now possess with &dquo;a
study of the ideology of the armed groups and [with] the political and
social context in which they were formed and have operated.&dquo; In
other words, someone has to write a history of Italian terrorism and a
sociology of it.
The injunction of Della Porta and Rossi is not easily obeyed. Even
on the factual level, Italian terrorism remains a fundamentally

mysterious phenomenon. The facts of the Piazza Fontana massacre

are still-nearly a decade and a half after the event-uncertain, with
the left and the right accusing each other of conspiracy. The same
assessment holds true for most of the terrorist events in the 1970s and
the 1980s. We do not yet know all the facts behind the Moro murder
or the Bologna train station massacre. What was the role of the right-

wing P2 Masonic order in these years, or of the Italian secret service

agencies, or of foreign secret service agencies, or of the Camorra and
of the Mafia? The debate over Toni Negri’s complicity in left-wing
terrorism has already resulted in the publication of several thick
polemical volumes, as well as a huge number of op-ed pieces, and yet
the enormously complicated 7 Aprile&dquo; trial-now complicated even
further by his election to parliament as a Radical deputy-is far from
over.4 For a while we thought that the testimony of the pentiti
(repentant terrorists), notably Patrizio Peci, Carlo Fioroni, Antonio
Savasta, and Marco Barbone, would make the job of reconstructing
these events easier, but now the validity of this testimony is being
subjected to serious doubt in Italy. Critics of the pentiti-and not just
the defenders of the irriducibili (hard-core terrorists)-ask how
much faith they can place in the testimony of self-confessed
kidnappers and murderers who are now trying to save their skins.s
That is an extremely difficult question, and it can only be answered on
a case-by-case basis. It is likely that many years will pass before

anyone will be able to write a full history of Italian terrorism.

In fact, to follow these stories in the newspapers and to read the
findings of the various parliamentary commissions on terrorism is to
discover the limits of history. Unfortunately, history is not very
useful in explaining its own raw materials while they are being
formed. This is because history means synthesis, that is, the inter-

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pretation of events in context. A historical context

necessarily
implies a situation, a specific background, a definite
concrete
environment in time-what might be called a temporal enclosure-
and this necessary implication makes contemporary history a
contradiction in terms, for the present is open-ended. The most
intelligent and carefully considered thesis regarding a current event is
apt to be invalidated and even made to look preposterous by a totally
unforeseen development. For example, the Red Brigades have
appeared to be finished numerous times since the mid-1970s when
their leader, Renato Curcio, was captured, but the Moro tragedy, the
Dozier kidnapping, the May 1983 shooting of Professor Gino Giugni
in Rome, and, most recently, the February 15, 1984, assassination of
American diplomat Leamon R. Hunt have reminded us in the most
painful way of the continuing, if now greatly diminished, power of
left-wing terrorism in Italian life.
Situated where we are in time, we cannot know the end of this story.
This is an exceptionally important piece of information to be missing,
and its absence condemns all interpretations of terrorism to a highly
tentative, provisional status. Until we know the sum we cannot,
except in a few cases, assign even an approximate value to any of the
parts. We still could be in a position analogous to that of analysts
observing events in Russia during the late winter of 1917. To these
analysts the February Revolution and its aftermath must have
seemed like the most momentous events in Russian history, and they
were, but only the improbable appearance of Lenin in April followed
by the completely unexpected Bolshevik triumph in October pointed
toward the true character of post-tzarist Russia. This comparison is
not meant to be taken literally; I only wish to draw attention to the
frequently forgotten truism to which terrorism, like all things in
history, is subject-the unexpected always happens.
What, then, are we to make of the media celebration in Italy over
the &dquo;defeat of terrorism&dquo;? This rejoicing could turn out to be very
premature. It is true that numerous terrorist organizations have
suffered seemingly decisive military defeats, and the threat of
terrorism to Italy’s political institutions, so real and immediate in the
late 1970s, has clearly abated. There are two additional points to be
made about these defeats, however. First, as George Orwell noted
more than 35 years ago, the most common mistake of political
analysts is to assume that the momentum of the hour will be perpetual,
but the assumption of perpetual motion is no more valid in politics

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than it is in physics. Another resurgence of terrorism in Italy should

not be discounted, particularly on the right, where the damage to such
terrorist organizations as Ordine nero has been comparatively slight.
In August 1983, that group narrowly missed blowing up the Milano-
Palermo express; had this attempt succeeded, as many as a thousand
people might have perished.
Second, and an even greater source of danger than a resurgence of
terrorism in the forms that we have seen, is terrorist activity in new
forms. For instance, the now well-documented connections between
the Red Brigades and Raffaele Cutolo’s Nuova Camorra suggest a
united front of terrorist and criminal activity as an eerie twentieth-
century mutation of Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchist vision. Moreover,
terrorist groups increasingly have been forced to practice banditismo
as a means of survival. Bank robbery and kidnapping for ransom

inevitably create an extrapolitical element in the terrorist ambience

itself, leading to contact with the underworld. It is difficult to foresee
what all the consequences of this contact will be, but in the short term
it has eased the cash-flow problems of some terrorist groups.
Apart from our inability even to write a satisfactory chronicle of
Italy’s recent political violence, the definition of terrorism is itself a
subject of deep controversy, and this conceptual problem is really the
crowning difficulty for those scholars and analysts who have come to
be known as &dquo;terrorologists.&dquo; No definition of terrorism can possibly
cover all the various forms of state and individual or group violence
that have appeared throughout history, but there is a strongly marked
tendency in the media to use this term as a synonym for political
violence and intimidation against legally constituted authority.6 It is
precisely this general perception of the problem that requires the
closest scrutiny. The IRA, the PLO, the ETA, the Baader-Meinhof
Gang, and the Red Brigades all seem to conform to an image of
lawless fanaticism versus blameless or at least well-intentioned
authority. How faithful is this image to the facts?
At issue here is a fundamental moral question: Who has the right
to launch a violent attack against an established order? There is no
clear answer to this question. Most of us, presumably, would agree
that the violent actions of the Red Brigades are morally wrong. Yet
their rationale for terrorism is not different in principle from the
rationale of the partisans in World War II or, for that matter, of the
Minute Men in the American Revolution-that is, the so-called

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legally constituted authority is in fact a ruinous tyranny and therefore

a legitimate object of subversion. As a matter of fact, both the

partisans and the Minute Men were denounced as terrorists or worse

by the established authorities of their day.
Umberto Eco (1982) saves us from the radical pacifist conclusion,
that all violence is in effect one, that the partisans and the Red
Brigades were doing fundamentally the same things. He says, with
great wisdom, that there is always an abyss between men who
undertake violence with obvious relish and those who undertake it, in
his word, malvolentieri, who are dragged into violent action against
their natural inclinations. Still, even with this crucial distinction in
mind, terrorism-more than most things in history-depends on
point of view. There is a measure of truth in the claim that in Italy, as
elsewhere, one man’s terrorist is another man’s political hero, or, put
another way, men of political violence who are defeated go down in
modern history as terrorists, whereas men of political violence who
are victorious become founding fathers and role models for suc-

ceeding generations.
Here we touch the most delicate point of all in any study of
terrorism. Without wishing for a moment to give even the appearance
of condoning terrorism, we cannot ignore the larger question of
human violence, of which terrorism is merely one aspect. Terrorism
is always a response to a perceived evil, and in some instances this
response is unavoidable, as in the case of the Maquis against the
Naz is . Although we prefer to think of the Res istance in other terms, as
a glorious chapter in the history of French patriotism, in fact this

organization was as terroristic as any that we condemn today.

Government officials were killed and state symbols were attacked
then just as they are now, in the name of a higher law. We can deduce
from this that there is an ineluctable human tendency to obscure the
fact of violence that is in all of us and in all systems as well as in all
counter-systems by denouncing the enemy’s violence as terrorism
while either forgetting about our own or disguising it with
euphemisms.
Does this mean that the Italian terrorists of today who go around
kidnapping politicians and killing police officers are automatically to
be classed with the likes of George Washington and Albert Camus?
Of course not. Each episode of human violence must be studied as an
event in history on its own particular terms in concreto, but, corre-

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spondingly, not dismissed with a moralizing wave of the hand as an

act of terrorism, a word that by itself-given human nature and
human history-is often misleading.
We can only begin to understand terrorism when we come to see it
as war by another name; it is, as an individual or group phenomenon,
the war of the weak who lack the resources of the Pentagon and the
Kremlin or-perhaps more accurately-effective access to those
resources. Terrorists may be and often are monsters of psychopathic
violence, devoid of all reason and mercy, but they are not always so,
any more than are the large nation-states that wage conventional war.
Distinctions must be made with the utmost care.
On the basis of what I have said so far, a prudent historian would
keep a safe distance from this vexed and, on the whole, uninviting
topic, but I would like to come back to the recommendation of Della
Porta and Rossi, that we cast our nets wide for answers, however
partial and tentative, to the riddle of Italian terrorism. Much
sleuthing will have to be done before the terrorist acts of the past
fourteen years can be fully understood and interpreted, but Della
Porta and Rossi, along with Sabino Acquaviva and Franco Ferrarotti,
correctly suggest that this inundation of terrorism has a prehistory on
which social scientists can bring their skills to bear. The kind of
cultural analysis these scholars propose will not resolve the practical
questions of Italian terrorism, such as the role of the KGB or of P2,
but these questions cannot be resolved now anyway, at least not with
the kind of documentation historians require.
Acquaviva, a University of Padova sociologist and political
sciences dean when that faculty’s office was bombed by terrorists on
July 9, 1978, stresses the present religious crisis as a vital factor in
Italy’s wave of terrorism. However, he is in fundamental agreement
with Ferrarotti-himself the victim of a severe beating by Autonomia
Operaia students on February 14, 1977-on the need to search for
the roots of Italian violence in Italy’s tormented past? These men
have independently sketched a map of the cultural terrain where, they
assert-with notable differences of opinion-we are likely to find the
origins of terrorism as a peculiarly virulent problem in Italy.8
The cultural thesis of terrorism rests on the following criticism: The
most common explanations of Italian terrorism-the political, the
socio-economic, the conspiratorial, and the psychological-are
inadequate because other countries suffer from poorly functioning
political institutions, from high inflation and unemployment, from
foreign agents, and from the crisis of alienation, but no other

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comparable country in the West suffers from political terrorism to the

extent that Italy does. According to this logic, Italian terrorism
originates not in political, socio-economic, or psychological prob-
lems-much less in the problem of espionage-but rather in certain
reactions of the Italian people to those problems. If all industrialized
peoples are suffering, more or less, from the same general political,
socio-economic, and psychological malaise, as well as from the
manipulative intrigues of foreign powers, then the notoriously savage
character of Italian terrorism cannot be explained by referring to
those problems alone. Also involved in this complicated political
equation is the cumulative cultural heredity of the Italian people,
which has disposed them to respond in the ways they have. The
difference here is crucial, because if the cultural theorists are right,
then the ideological traditions of a country provide the real key to
understanding why political violence on a massive scale is likely to
occur in some cultures, but not in others-a point that Karl
Mannheim ( 1936, 1956) was the first to develop systematically with
his theories regarding the sociology of knowledge.
As with any thesis in history, this one can be carried to misguided
extremes, something of which Ferrarotti and Acquaviva are not
guilty. In the first place, there is a danger of cultural reductionism in
such an analysis, and we cannot forget that the overwhelming
majority of the Italian people, including most intellectuals, have
rejected terrorism as barbaric and evil. Second, the cultural approach
can be misused in such a way that the social dimension is either left
out or given less attention than it deserves. The post-war relocation of
millions of peasants to the city, with its attendant economic, social,
political, educational, and religious dislocations, did create a kind of
terra di nessuno mentality among the so-called emarginati, com-
posed of both lumpenproletarian and lumpenbourgeois elements.9
That profound social transformation of Italy must remain the basic
frame of reference for an understanding of why this terrorism in this
place at this time. An enormous literature is now pouring forth from
Italian presses on what Ferrarotti (1980) calls &dquo;the cultural limbo of
[Italy’s] post-peasant and pre-industrial situation,&dquo; asituationthatis
charged with explosive energies.
Nevertheless, it is Ferrarotti ( 1981 a) in particular who draws our
attention to the long-standing intellectual tradition in Italy that seeks
to make violence, to use his felicitous word, &dquo;photogenic,&dquo; that is, to
justify it and to estheticize it. Ferrarotti ( 1981 a) insists on &dquo;massive
intellectual responsibility&dquo; for the violence that he says is charac-

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teristic of Italian life; yet &dquo;the culture of violence, so alive and

important for the Italian intellectual tradition, points to an area still
completely unexplored and in n eed of interpretation.&dquo; His suggestion
would appear to contain the seeds of the only kind of historical book
that can now be written about Italian terrorism.
Such a study would benefit enormously from Karl Mannheim’s
Essays on the Sociology of Culture ( 1956), a matchless source of
theoretical insight for anyone interested in writing about politically
engaged intellectuals. Mannheim asserts that the intellectual and
political life of an age is influenced not only by the socio-economic
factors so dear to Marxists and by the peculiar problems or
experiences of a given generation, but also by the ideological
possibilities that are feasibly open to a country’s intellectuals and
political leaders, what he calls the &dquo;cake of custom&dquo; and the &dquo;his-
torical milieu&dquo; in a society (Mannheim, 1956: 84). The emotional
response of a people-that is, their spirit-is formed by the whole of
their historical environment.
Thus, while a large complexity of factors bears on the situation of
intellectual and political elites, the history of each country tends to
foreclose some ideological possibilities and to sanction others,
leading to those distinctive modes of thinking and acting that, for the
sake of convenience, we ascribe to national character. In Italy, for
example, unusually potent revolutionary traditions on the left and on
the right, each with a glamorous history compared to that of Italian
liberalism, are in place and available as serious ideological options,
each possessing both the potential for terrorist action and a record of
terrorist action.
The endemic weakness of Italian liberalism has been the essential
ideological precondition for that country’s highly volatile, compar-
atively extremist political and intellectual life, resulting in vigorous
socialist, communist, Catholic, and fascist traditions, each offering
channels for career advancement in the forms of party jobs, teaching
and editorial positions, and networks of literary publications. Unlike
the American system, which is beset by difficulties peculiar to itself,
the radical parties of Italy offer extremists practical incentives. To
explain why this should be so would necessitate writing a history of
the country-and not just for the modern period. A chronic imbalance
in Italy among people, and, and resources together with a long, tragic
history of foreign exploitation and-after the Risorgimento-the
failure of native elites to develop a hegemony by consensus combined

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to produce a culture in which the red and the black have been constant
and, despite their shared anti-liberalism, essentially distinct forces.
They have produced highly influential ideological traditions, each
with a hotheaded fringe liable to erupt in violence during crisis
situations.
It is notoriously hazardous to draw connections between the
political ideas and activities of different centuries. Obviously, as
society changes, its values, ideologies, and habits change too, but
Mannheim persuades us that no country can every fully escape its
own historical character. Thus, while conceding the enormous
differences between contemporary Italy and nineteenth-century
Italy, it remains true that there are historical precedents for the
extraparliamentary left terrorism of today, in the extreme left-wing
Italian tradition of violently resisting the hegemony of the bour-
geoisie. Old tactics and styles of expression yield to new, but the
chiliastic vision of the utopian left has been remarkably constant. As
Nando dalla Chiesa (1981) noted recently in a very influential
article, Italian culture is marked by &dquo;the exceptional diffusion and
abuse of the term revolution.&dquo; This certainly is nothing new in
Italy.
Perhaps Giorgio Bocca (1982) goes too far when, in writing about
the Red Brigades, he argues that &dquo;terrorism does not invent, but redis-
covers, recycles, and readapts that which is already in the womb of
the nation.&dquo; In fact, the phenomenon of Red Brigadism contains
much that is completely without precedent in the history of Italian
terrorism: spectacular efficiency over a long period of time, shocking
cruelty, and skillful manipulation of the mass media, which have
never existed before in
anything like their present form. On the other
hand, while virtually every segment of political opinion in Italy is
anxious to dissociate itself from any responsibility for terrorism,
even the residual responsibility of intellectual influence, it is difficult
to believe that a phenomenon of such violent, bitter, and prolonged
animosity could have arisen in a historical vacuum.
It may or may not be true that Italian terrorists have received
massive assistance from foreign powers; if it is true-and if it can be
documented-then terrorism would acquire an international dimen-
sion that in time might be seen as the crucial element in this story.10
Such conjectures must be included in government policy analysis, but
historians can have no professional use for undocumented theories,
no matter how compelling the circumstantial evidence might be. They

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are forced back onto the only ground where their skills can be

legitimately employed in a study of contemporary terrorism, taking

up the position of analysts who determine the weight of the verifiable
past on the present.
This, as a history of Italian terrorism would show, is by no means
barren ground. What historians find here is a revolutionary tradition
of continuous if unste ady development from the French Revolution to
the present. Buonarroti, Bianco, Bakunin, Marx, and commentators
on Marx too numerous to mention-although we should at least cite
Sorel and Lenin, who had an enormous impact on Italy-all preached
this message of class hatred and class violence. From such theoretical
premises it should not suprise us, as it apparently did the PCI’s
Giorgio Amendola, that a terrorism of the left had arisen in Italy.&dquo;1
The Marxist idea, that force is the midwife of history, is not the whole
of Marxism, but people of action have appropriated that element of
Marx’s thought in order to rationalize their revolutionary deeds.
Although Marx himself vociferously condemned anarchist
terrorism, he could have had few illusions about the need for violence
in re alizing his own communist schemes: the revolutionary overthrow
of capitalism, the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship, and the
forcible expropriation of all private property (see Tucker, 1969:
chap. 5). There is nothing in Marx’s writings to suggest any reluc-
tance on his part to employ whatever violence was necessary to end
the unspeakable evil of capitalism. In fact, his comments on the reign
of terror within the Paris Commune of 1871 reveal what might fairly
be called a mentality of realpolitik on the question of violence. In his
Civil War in France: The Paris Commune (1968), Marx passion-
ately defends the Communards who executed 64 of their hostages,
including the Archbishop of Paris. Marx (1968: 78-79) claims that
these executions were necessary in order to maintain the credibility
of the revolution: &dquo;Was even this last check upon the unscrupulous
ferocity of bourgeois governments-the taking of hostages-to be
made a mere sham of?&dquo; In Marx’s view, violence by the state
warranted a violent response from the people, always provided that
the revolutionary cause of the proletariat would be advanced by such
a response. On this point, much out of favor with the PCI nowadays,
the ideologues of the Red Brigades stake their claim of acting as
Marx’s true heirs. For them the PCI has lost sight of the revolution’s
necessary implications and, therefore, of Marx.

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While the Red Brigadist interpretation of Marxism may not have

much to commend it, Marx is hardly blameless for the confusion that
has arisen among his followers over the issue of revolutionary
violence. As on many other points in his theory of communism, Marx
left a great deal to the imagination on the methods by which the final
holocaust of capitalism is to be provoked and consummated. It has
been possible for highly intelligent Marxists from Sorel to Toni Negri
to conclude that Marxism means-and can mean nothing but-
unremitting warfare against capitalism. It is anybody’s guess where
one draws the line between an acceptably Marxist interpretation of
violence and one that is &dquo;deviationist&dquo;: hence the constant polemics
between &dquo;right&dquo; and &dquo;left&dquo; Marxists over how the dialectic is best
advanced toward its predestined goal of a classless society.
For those Marxists who cannot bring themselves to believe that
Marxism might conceivably offer a fertile field for terrorist activities,
the case of Lenin provides some unwelcome revelations. It is true
that his writings, like those of Marx, abound with highly quotable
strictures against anarchist terrorism, but again-as in the case of his
master-because it had been unproductive, not because it is
inherently wrong. This distinction is extremely important, for
Bolshevism did not completely rule out the usefulness of terrorism in
all situations. Lenin himself came to recognize that there can be no
unconditional restraints on the defense of the proletariat. During the
Russian Revolution of 1905 he counseled that terrorism had to be
avoided whenever possible, but &dquo;under certain conditions all means
become allowable ... arson ... terrorist acts&dquo; (cited by Ulam,
1965: 207). It was during this period that Lenin developed an
unsavory reputation as the theoretical paladin of expropriations-
that is, armed robberies-as a means of financing the revolution
(Ulam, 1965: 236).12 Lenin’s Menshevik opponents in the Russian
Social Democratic Party never let him forget these words and deeds,
although he did gradually disavow his more violent Bolshevik
associates, particularly Leonid Krasin. Still, before 1917 there was a
large element of ambivalence in Lenin’s thinking on terrorist
violence, and after 1917 he did not hesitate to employ prophylactic
terror against counter-revolutionaries, setting precedents that would
culminate in the nightmare world of Stalin’s gulags.
The protean variousness of Marxist-Leninism is reflected in the
history of Italian communism. The notion that only &dquo;senile&dquo;

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Marxists espouse terrorism does shed very much light on this

not
immensely complicated theoretical and practical problem, least of all
for the Italian case.’3 In fact, between Marx and Lenin on the one
hand and contemporary Italian terrorism on the other, there does
exist a group of mediating intellectuals, of self-proclaimed Marxist
provenance, who themselves cannot be shown to have direct links
with the terrorists, but whose ideas and preachments have reinforced
and glamorized the myth of the proletarian revolution, precisely the
kind of revolution that the Red Brigades claim to be sponsoring. A
major theme in Italy’s contemporary left-wing political life, begin-
ning with Raniero Panzieri’s Quaderni rossi in 1961 and continuing
with both Mario Tronti’s Classe operaia and Negri’s Rosso has been
the &dquo;back to Marx and Lenin&dquo; movement, that is, a vehement
rejection of perceived PCI reformism and a dogmatic reaffirmation of
what these men believed to be the core doctrine of Marx and Lenin:
the violent, revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
The case of Toni Negri, a highly controversial figure who is
nevertheless one of the country’s leading authorities on Marxist-
Leninism, casts a lurid light on the problems of contemporary Italian
communism. Part of the reason Negri has been a source of
mortification for the official and now reformist left has to do with this
Marxist’s powerful and on the whole accurate analysis of Marxist-
Leninism as an ideology of violent revolution. In a series of hugely
influential books published during the 1970s, Negri destroyed the
zone of ideological ambiguity in which Italian communists, by and

large, had been content to repose themselves. They were Marxists,

yes, but in the manner of Gramsci, with strong humanist and demo-
cratic inclinations (see especially Negri, 1976, 1978). Negri
scornfully condemned what he called this comforting hodgepodge of
bromides for the benpensanti and urged Marxists to return to Marx
and Lenin-that is, to a revolutionary consciousness. Political
analysts continue to argue about the real meaning and the impact of
Negri’s books and lectures, but he certainly brought the violent
implications of Marxist-Leninism to the surface. These implications,
together with the repeated comments of Marx and Lenin on the
inherently violent nature of the revolution, have always been highly
suggestive to a certain type of fanatical left-wing mind, of which Red
Brigadism is the latest and most ferocious expression in Italy.
The precise relationship between this neo-Marxist tradition, with
overtones and borrowings from other left-wing ideologies as well, and

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Italian terrorism remains one of the country’s major controversies,

but whatever the intentions of its exponents the highly eclectic
extraparliamentary left-by definition a quest for authentic Marxism
outside the corrupting ranks of the PCI-has functioned as the main
theoretical starting point for many of the violent men and women who
seek to overthrow Italian capitalism by armed struggle.
The connections between the extraparliamentary right-wing
terrorism of today with previous forms of right-wing terrorism are not
as clear as the connections between the various incarnations of left-

wing terrorism. This comparative ambiguity on the right is due to the

political triumph of conservative forces throughout much of the
nineteenth century and then again under fascism duringthe ventennio
(1922-1943). Individual or group terrorism, as has been noted, is the
we apon of the weak, of those who have neither recourse to state power
nor any hope of influencing the state (Wilkinson, 1977: preface).’4 It
is precisely this theme of hopelessness that gives left-wing terrorism
its pronounced historical coherence, from Buonarroti to the Red
Brigades.
The Italian right, however, enjoyed a long Indian summer in the
first half ofthe nineteenth century; only with the creation ofthe liberal
state in 1860 did enclaves of traditionally minded Italians begin to
experience the kind of desperation long familiar to the radical left.
For these alienated conservative elites who became the core troops of
reaction, Nietzsche’s ideas (which D’Annunzio popularized in Italy)
offered a brilliant intellectual defense of aristocratic principles
and a most welcome refutation of democracy, socialism, and
communism.I5
Nietzsche’s bellicose critique of modernity can be heard across the
generations of Italy’s revolutionary right-wing intellectuals, including
Julius Evola, Pino Rauti, and Adriano Romualdi-to mention only a
few ofthe influential ideologues for today’s extraparliamentary right.
They singled out Nietzsche as the &dquo;modern&dquo; they most admired, and
even a casual tour in the neo-fascist quarter of Rome known as Prati
&dquo;nero&dquo; reveals the continuing eminence of Nietzschean ideas in
radical right-wing thought. Fascism, for these thinkers, had been a
failed attempt to link aristocratic values with the political and
economic needs of the Italian bourgeoisie. However, they wanted
neo-fascism to be something new: a return to the unalloyed aristo-
cratic tradition of Nietzsche in the desperate, unavoidably violent
search for an alternative to-in one of Evola’s favorite images-the
bankrupt legacy of 1789.

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Again, it would be injudicious to charge the likes of Evola with

conscious and willful involvement in right-wing terrorism, but his
vision of history, particularly in La rivolta contro il mondo moderno
(1934), does provide a rationale for a violent assault on the modern
world.’6 A fringe fascist intellectual during the ventennio, Evola
never formally joined the party, but he emerged from the war as the

guru of radical neo-fascism.17 In numerous books, articles, and

speeches Evola gave a philosophical sanction for the radical right’s
strategy of tension, which was designed to reveal the impotence ofthe
liberal state as a means of protecting Italy from a communist take-
over.

This Evolian line of thinking became a gospel for Pino Rauti’s

Ordine nuovo, which in the mid-1950s broke away from the neo-
fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano on the grounds that official
neo-fascism was too moderate. 18 Beset by internal schisms and under
constant surveillance by the authorities, Ordine nuovo fell victim to a
court order in 1973. Nevertheless, by the following year such
organizations as Ordine nero and Anno zero had taken over where the
ordinovisti had left off, as champions of the violent right in Italian
politics. These groups were overshadowed during the mid- and late
1970s by the Red Brigades, but they did not disappear. They went on
with their work in the shadow of the Red Brigades, even benefiting
from left-wing terrorism because the neo-fascist thesis had always
been that the democratic state would eventually reveal itself to be
incapable of defending society. Mussolini had come to power in the
wake of liberalism’s fiasco in the years following World War I; today
the extreme right lives in the hope that history will repeat itself.
Ordine nero and Anno zero, along with other terrorist organizations
of the extreme right, such as Squadre d’Az ione Mussolini, Giustizieri
d’Italia, and Nuclei armati rivoluzionari, operate on the assumption
that their best chance for victory depends on continued turmoil in
Italy. This is the essence of the tanto peggio tanto meglio (the worse
things are the better things are) mentality of the contemporary
right in Italy.
In conclusion, it appears that a history of Italian terrorism would
have to take a modest form at this point and yet, at the same time, be
inclusive enough to suggest the multiple origins of Italy’s crisis-not
only the social, economic, political, and broadly cultural origins, but
within this last category a clear indication that the red and the black
are real forces in history. Quite independently of each other, though

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 295

with a collateral effect, the unreconstructed elements within these

forces have declared war on Italy’s liberal political institutions and
culture.’9 We cannot make sense of this struggle without possessing a
clear idea of what motivates the revolutionaries-left and right-and
of how they perceive the modern world as a monstrosity, to be
pulverized, not reformed.
Beyond this hazy boundary between the prehistory of terrorism and
its actual full history, it is difficult to see how the historian can
proceed with any confidence, for to answer the truly daunting ques-
tions of how Italian revolutionaries have recruited effective
constituencies and of what, if any, class, generational, regional,
religious, and family factors have motivated thousands of Italians to
terrorize their state and society clearly requires more knowledge than
we possess at the present time. Moreover, it must be granted that the
articulation of a terrorist theory does not automatically produce an
audience for it or even any sympathy for it.2° A complete history of the
Italian terrorism of our time will have to explain the process by which
violent neo-fascism and radical or &dquo;senile&dquo; notions of Marxism were
transmitted from the minds of individual thinkers and groups to wider
circles of politically active terrorists who then became the pro-
tagonists in Italy’s &dquo;age of lead.&dquo; Ideas by themselves, while
important, can only suggest an anterior, if necessary, stage of the
terrorist phenomenon. As Camus noted in The Rebel (1956) revolu-
tion-which necessarily contains a component ofterrorism-always
originates in the ideas of intellectuals, but these abstract thoughts
must be mated with the inordinate violence of passionate fanatics in
order to produce the desired results.

NOTES
1. The conference, held in April 1983, was entitled "Violenza politica e terrorismo
in Italia dal ’69 all ’83." It was sponsored by the region of Emilia Romagna and the
Istituto Carlo Cattaneo.
2. This point has been noted by Italian journalist Rodolfo Brancoli (1980).
3. Here Della Porta and Rossi follow the interpretation of Galleni (1981).
4. See especially De Lutiis (1982) and Bocca (1980). In September 1983 Negri
fled the country; he now resides in Paris.
5. For example, see Eco’s (1983) remarks along this line. Pietro Calogero, the
Padova judge who has based much of his case against Autonomia Operaia on the asser-
tions of the pentiti, has conceded that their testimony is not completely reliable (De

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296

Lutiis, 1982: 109). Ulderico Tobagi, the father of the slain newspaper reporter, Walter
Tobagi, has been a particularly severe critic of Marco Barbone, the superpentito ofthe
Rosso-Tobagi case in Milan (see Vergani, 1983).
6. See Laqueur’s (1977: 7) discussion of the problem surrounding any attempt to
define terrorism "once and for all."
7. Ferrarotti ( 1980: 72ff.) describes this beating.
8. For his major works on terrorism, see Acquaviva (1979a, 1979b) and
Acquaviva and Santuccio (1976). For other views on the same subject, see Ferrarotti
(1980, 1981a, 1981b).
9. On the question of the emarginati, see Catelli (1976). A similar explanatory
model for terrorism is the societa bloccata thesis, which holds that with the end of
Italy’s economic miracle, in the early 1970s, great and invincible frustrations set in,
causing a terrorist explosion. In fact, however, Italian society-far from being
"blocked"-in the 1970s was "in forte movimento"; witness the examples of the
divorce referendum and the elections of 1976. See dalla Chiesa’s (1981) effective
rejoinder to the società bloccata theory.
10. See Sterling (1981) for the best-known example of the conspiracy thesis
regarding international terrorism. Sterling ( 1981: 247) admits that there is little proof
for this thesis, only supposition and logical inference: "Few of the terrorist bands
mentioned in this book can be shown to have had direct links with the Soviet
Union."
11. Amendola criticized Italian Communist Party (PCI) leaders for their failure to
"combat [terrorism] actively enough and with the necessary energy" (see Mussi,
1978). According to Amendola, the party’s reaction was regrettably "insufficient."
12. Ulam (1965: 143) adds that sometimes Lenin appeared to be more a disciple of
Nechaev and Tkachev than of Marx, although he informs us that Marx himself was
very much taken with the terrorist assassins of Alexander II and saw them as the wave
of the future in Russia.
13. This is dalla Chiesa’s (1981: 88) term.
14. As a state phenomenon, terrorism is also a weapon of the weak, in the sense that
a genuinely secure government rules by consensus, not by terror.
15. For D’Annunzio’s role as the advance man for Nietzsche in Italy, see Drake
(1980: chap. 8).
16. La rivolta contro il mondo moderno was reissued in 1969 by Edizioni
Mediterranee (Rome).
17. For Evola’s impact on right-wing culture, see Jesi (1979) and Romualdi (1971).
Sheehan (1981) analyzes Evola’s philosophy.
18. For more on Ordine nuovo, see Gaddi (1974) and Rosenbaum (1975).
19. In the wake of Giorgio Bocca’s controversial best seller, Mussolini socialfas-
cista (1983), in which he accuses Marx of being the padre eterno of Italy’s
revolutionary traditions-left and right-it seems especially important to insist on the
fundamental differences between the red and the black. They are not, as Bocca
suggests, the fraternal twins of Marx. There are some crossed blood lines in these two,
but the pedigree here is much more complicated and less incestuous than readers of
Mussolini socialfascista would be led to believe.
20. Dalla Chiesa (1981: 68) makes this telling point.

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Richard Drake is Associate Professor of History at the University of Montana. He

received his Ph.D. fromUCLA. Among his published works are Byzantium forRome:
The Politics of Nostalgia in Umbertian Italy (1878-1900) (University of North
Carolina Press, 1980, and Rizzoli, forthcoming) and articles on modern Italian
politics and culture.

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