Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Grispigni 1977

I arrived in Italy expecting a form of traumatised omerta surrounding the anni settanta, encouraged by a ruling class desperate to erase the memory of a time when other possibilities existed (akin to Reagan, Thatcher and Sarkozys desire to "undo" the 60's in their respective countries.) But on the contrary, the public memory of the time is strong and there is a stream of books on the various topics relating to the experience of the 70s.

My Italian is functional enough to be able to start wading through some of these.



An important text is Marco Grispigni's "1977", published in 1997 for the 20th anniversary of the famous student/youth revolt of 1977. Grispigni is an historian, archivist and writer as well as an ex-77er and is accepted as an authority on the era.

"1977" ironically starts at the end of the July 1976 elections where the Italian Communist Party nearly became the biggest political party in the Chamber of Deputies. Soon after, the PCI entered into the period of the "Compromesso Storico" where PCI abstained from voting, allowing the Christian Democrat government to pass austerity and law and order measures dealing with economic and political crisis.

Grispigni, and most other historians, see this as the point where the mass of students, young and precarious workers and other marginalised groups made a final split from the PCI, leading to the clashes with the State and the PCI that characterised 1977. The book gives a conventional narrative of the course of events over the year detailing the general slide of the movement towards violence but also deals with issues such as the cultural composition of the movement, its relationship to wider "politics" and the relationship of the various parts of the movement to each other (Operaists vs "creatives" etc.)

It's an account that sees the experience of "1977" as a cultural revolution or cultural refusal rather than as representing new forms of politics or political organisation, nor does it go too deeply into issues of class composition or the breakdown of the Keynesian social pact that the crisis represented. However, its one of the best, brief Italian language introductions to the era.

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