analysing italian political violence as a sequence of communicative acts: the red brigades 1970-1982

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ANALYSING ITALIAN POLITICAL VIOLENCE AS A SEQUENCE OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTS: TheRed Brigades 1970-1982Author(s): David MossSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, No. 13 (May1983), pp. 84-111Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23169269 .

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SOCIAL ANALYSIS No. 13, May 1983

ANALYSING ITALIAN POLITICAL VIOLENCE AS A SEQUENCE OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTS: The Red Brigades 1970-1982

David Moss

1. Introduction

During the past decade the intended and unintended consequences of acts of

violence have reached far into Italy's political and institutional life. The protracted sequel to a single act — the bomb set off in a bank in Milan on December 12, 1969 — could serve as a macabre case-study of those effects as their traces have

periodically sprung into and faded from public view: political use of the confusion between violences of different ideological inspiration, collusion with some

practitioners of violence and incompetence to apprehend others on the part of

agencies responsible for the defence of the existing order, open conflict within and between police forces and magistrature, acquittal of all defendants on grounds of

insufficient proof as the present (but still not judicially definitive) culmination of a dozen years' investigation and polemics. In the meantime, levels of political violence rose steadily; clandestine organisations showed an underestimated

capacity to bind members to a choice assumed to be emotionally and cognitively unlivable; and exhortations to recognise the need to live with a now endemic

violence became increasingly frequent. Since 1980, however, this apparently irresistible escalation has been halted and reversed, perhaps unexpectedly quickly and effectively. By the time of writing (February 1983) the volume of violence had fallen for the first time below the level of 1969, and many of the groups responsible had either disappeared or broken up into more or less hostile factions: the arrests, confessions and recantations of many militants were generated by, and further

contributed to, wide-spread disaffection from the projects entailing the systematic use of violence. At the risk of adding to the long list of premature pronouncements to the effect that Italian political violence has been eliminated, it is apparent that an immediate recrudescence of such violence — at least in the forms hitherto dominant — is unlikely.

Despite the evident institutional ramifications of such enduring and extensive

violence, the causal and hermeneutic connections between acts of violence and their

contexts have not been much clarified by analysis. Indeed they have been made

harder rather than easier to grasp by the description of what is to be explained

simply as an undifferentiated "terrorism". Apart from the much-discussed general

problem in the label's use — whether a term regularly used by the powerful to

discredit dissent in their own currency of violence can be usefully adopted for

academic analysis, or whether the fastidious avoidance of the term and its

connotations is an ultimately incoherent claim to value neutrality — there are

specific disadvantages in describing all recent Italian political violence

indiscriminately as "terrorism". First, differences in the aims, ideas, characteristic

actions, organisational forms and institutional penetration of the groups practising violence are obliterated, and changes on any one of these dimensions within single

groups are neglected: analysis is thus deprived of an array of factors which might

help to explain the variations among groups in survival and in political salience.

Further, an exclusive focus on the attempt to find a single cause for a misleadingly

84



umíied set oí phenomena is encouraged; and attention is directed away from the

occurrence and forms of violence at different points on the political spectrum, which may require local rather than general explanations.1 Second, the term

"terrorism" implies a single unmediated psychological mechanism by which violence gains its effects. Yet different aspects of the total act of violence may have

quite distinct effects on the various audiences reached by news of the act, and it

might be that none of the most consequential reactions among these audiences can

be accurately ascribed to "terror". Moreover, the persistence in Italy of high levels

of political violence without either the feared collapse of regime or even a shift in electoral support to the parties of the Right points to the need to investigate the

process of translation of individual reaction into collective action in particular

political contexts rather than to take reaction and its consequences as intrinsically linked.

Third, the analysis of "terrorism", in Italy and elsewhere, has generally been

confined solely to the practitioners of violence and has almost entirely ignored the

nature of responses made by their antagonists. When responses are discussed, attention is usually restricted to what governments ought to do rather than to what

the full range of representatives of the different collectivities affected actually have

done.2 But not only are the politically violent likely to take account of reactions to

their own actions and of strategies to eliminate them altogether (why assume that

political violence is a wholly self-exciting system?) but also what is broadly conceived of as "the problem of terrorism" in fact includes the difficulty of making effective, politically acceptable responses and indeed of identifying the phenomenon to which response is being made. The meaning of violence is partly constituted by the interpretations of its principal targets. In societies such as Italy, where political violence has seemed nearly endemic, reactions deserve particular attention.

Kather than expand these criticisms 1 shall seek to evade them. I shall sketch a

model for the analysis of some aspects of Italian political violence which treats its acts as utterances in a sequence of communicative acts performed by members of

clandestine groups and their opponents. Analysis is however restricted to the least

poorly documented and most politically consequential group, the Red Brigades

(BR), and to the Christian Democrat party (DC), Communist Party (PCI) and the trade unions of metal workers (primarily the FLM): a full account would not only include other actors (the magistrature, mass media, smaller political parties, individual unions) but also describe the variations in responses according to local context. Such attention to a more extensive range of social, political and historical features is here mostly sacrificed to the broad delineation of an analytical model. To focus on the communicative dimensions of violence is to take seriously the Red

Brigades' reiterated claim that their actions are intended as "armed propaganda" designed to illustrate new possibilities of political action, secure some form of political recognition for the group and provoke effects among opponents which will contribute to their own projects.3 By the systematic use of violence conveying

rejection of the current rules of political order, the Red Brigades establish a frame

for communication between themselves and the political defenders of that order, whose actions and inactions cannot avoid interpretation as responses, direct or

indirect, to the (sequence of) acts of violence. The resultant pattern of

:ommunicative exchanges differs from ordinary conversation or political dialogue; 3r rather, it displays elements in the logical potential of ordinary communication ¡vhich in benign forms may underlie humour and paradox but which, incorporated nto prolonged and inescapable social exchanges, may also come to generate the

pathologies of interaction, seen to an extreme degree in schizophrenia, described by 3ateson and Watzlawick.4 Indeed, the structure of Bateson's double bind model

¡5



could provide formal entena for comparing the interactional patterns and political effects of contemporary 'terrorisms' more adequately than the usual but

sociologically rather unwieldy distinctions between "nationalist", "marxist" and "neofascist" variants; and its principal features — the impossibility of escape from the communicative field, the constraints exercised by the presence of distinct

audiences, the contradictory ingredients in a single message, and the consequent difficulties in formulating a rational and effective response — can be readily identified in the recent Italian context. First, the Red Brigades' opponents have no

exit option, no opportunity simply to refuse to notice acts of violence and thus to

escape the communicative frame, although recently some attempt to limit public

knowledge of the group's acts has been made; while, on the other hand, for

members of the Red Brigades the only exit may be death.5 Second, every communicative act is simultaneously and publicly addressed to, or can be

overheard by, multiple audiences whose conventional understandings of violence

may seriously constrain the intended and actual meaning of each act: it is therefore analytically necessary to examine the position both of the Red Brigades and their

opponents with respect to significant audiences.6 Institutionalised political actors

must pay attention to the beliefs of their own members and the electorate in order to

preserve their own placé in the political arena, and they therefore attempt to

maintain or alter those conventions in the light of their own distinct political objectives as well as their understanding of how the general interest embodied in the

existing rules can best be defended (section 2). Third, each communicative act by the Red Brigades combines inherently contradictory modes of communication —

violence and (mostly written) texts — simultaneously denying and affirming in practice the rules governing political activity. Among the Red Brigades' opponents the difficulties of agreeing on a single intentional description of these acts, and therefore on an appropriate response, are exacerbated, while the Red Brigades themselves are steadily driven into making statements about their own identity as

an end in itself (section 3). In fact, during the last decade, and not wholly by design, the group has built up an organisational structure which creates the possibility of direct address to its opponents, entailing interpretation of any response as a form of

political recognition (section 4); increasing emphasis has been given to communicative acts to secure that recognition — an objective which is not only self

contradictory insofar as recognition is sought from an audience whose own

legitimate existence is unrecognised, as in Hegel's analysis of the master-slave

dialectic, but has led to division within the group and therefore to the weakening of the very identity being pursued (section 5). Finally, faced with the necessity to respond to a project carried forward in part by self-contradictory means, the

opponents of the Red Brigades are placed in the difficult position of being required to respond, yet at the risk that the forms of rational response available to them may

unintentionally contribute to the reproduction of the phenomenon to be eliminated

(section 6). At each stage in the analysis of the exchanges between actors struggling on both sides to define the position from which they utter their communicative acts

and to disqualify or revise the self-definitions offered by others, a more general

problem is raised: once clandestine political violence has taken root, is its

elimination a state that can only be brought about essentially as a by-product of

action devoted to a different goal? In what ways may attempts to confront that

violence directly through political (though not police) action, coerced or

uncoerced, actually threaten to reinforce it? Further, how far does the continuing

activity of the Red Brigades actually serve to weaken those political forces capable of generating the kind of transformations which would have the effect of

eliminating violence, albeit as a by-product?7

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2. Classifying Violence

Western societies differ considerably in the extent of the overlaps

acknowledged between the categories "politics" and "violence". In this respect "liberal democracy" is as insufficiently discriminatory a label for the political context as "terrorism" is for forms of violence. The hybrid category "political violence" may be entertained, in varying shape and detail, in legal codes, political ideologies and mass beliefs, so that groups such as the Red Brigades wishing to use

violence as a mode of political communication must work in an already highly interpreted context. Consistency across those domains is unlikely, and substantial

disagreement may exist within each domain as to whether a particular action

should count as a member of the category. Legal codes contain significant accretions from historical periods which reflect contrasting views on the nature and

classification of violence8; the symbols, topoi and narratives of political rhetorics

may offer conflicting interpretations of acts of violence; and each society accommodates groups whose beliefs may fall somewhere on the continuum

between the extreme identification of all violence as indifferently criminal because

illegal and all violence as political because implicitly critical of the existing order.

The understandings spread across such more or less formalised discursive domains

make up the conventions by which acts of violence are classified in relation to

orthodox political action and given or refused political meaning: they constitute

resources to be exploited in communicative acts as well as obstacles to intended

uptake both for the Red Brigades and their opponents. Because they lie close to the

central myths and practices of Italian politics, they mark out some of the positions from which responses to the Red Brigades must be made.

The very creation of new rules of political action in Italy since the mid

nineteenth century has been connected to acts of violence. The establishment of

successive political frameworks — Liberal, Fascist, Republican — is associated in

historical and mythological narratives with the enterprise of small armed

minorities: Garibaldi and the Thousand, the March on Rome, the Resistance — a

sequence which offers elements to render more plausible the seriousness of the

threat to political stability posed by tiny groups of military officers or the Red Brigades. The major political parties differ according to the way in which their current traditions represent the connections between the present set of rules (the 1948 Constitution) and the preceding violence (the Resistance). The Christian Democrat party probably places least emphasis on the link since, despite significant individual and local contributions to the Resistance, the party and Church were

generally ambivalent about the justification and the degree of violence to be used

against the Fascist regime: the Resistance is mostly depicted as an unpleasant, if

unavoidable, historical event about which mixed judgements on the motivations, actions and achievements of participants are possible. By contrast, the Communist

Party represents the Resistance as causally linked to the Constitution so that the

working-class and its political representatives (as the main protagonists of 1943-5) demonstrate their special role in defence of Republican democracy, prove their

readiness to transcend class interests in defence of the nation and therefore establish

their equal right to govern Italy: the Resistance receives particular discursive

prominence in PCI rhetoric when, as in the mid-1970s, strategy favoured a revived

collaboration of 1943-7 between catholics, socialists and communists, significant local power had been achieved and victory for the party in national elections

seemed only a matter of time.9 As a polysémie symbol the Resistance can find a

place in different narratives, creating some tension within the PCI between the

orthodox view of the Resistance as a model of political collaboration and an

interpretation of it as an incomplete event, a social and political transformation

87



aborted precisely by the dead weight of that collaboration or (in its strongest

variant) by the premature renunciation of violence. In all versions, however,

representation of the Resistance in national ceremony and political tradition

establishes a context of political meaning for acts of violence in which the use of

violence becomes constructive and narrowly calculable: the unintended

consequences and least acceptable episodes have all but disappeared. What

nevertheless remain acts of violence are embedded in a vocabulary and imagery of

political legitimacy, deprived over time of reference to the complexities of the workings of violence in any social context and transmitted to generations without

direct experience of those complexities.

Alongside the ambiguously construable relation between violence and the

formal rules governing legitimate political activity, the central institutions of the

polity itself contain parties believed by substantial numbers of Italians to be

prepared to abrogate those rules by violence. The neo-fascist party (MSI) is

considered sufficiently dangerous by a majority of electors to require dissolution; the PCI (now joined by former extra-parliamentary groups) is regarded by a

smaller, probably declining, proportion of electors as equally suspect; and in recent

years the opposition of the DC to violence has come to seem less firm insofar as the

party is believed to tolerate violence which will directly or indirectly help to maintain its own position.10 So, while expressed individual readiness to use

violence for political ends or to sympathise with such methods remains very small, almost any act of violence in the public realm can be interpreted, more or less

plausibly, as part of whichever party political strategy appears to benefit most

from, or to be least damaged by, the act." Given the importance of party images and identities as electoral resources in the extreme multi-party Italian system, the

validity of the chains of inference leading from legitimate political parties to direct

or indirect responsibility for violence offers wide scope for political conflict. It

becomes more critical as the identities of both major parties, expressed in terms of

their relations to each other, have shifted bet wen 1970-1982: the PCI has moved

from opposition to the DC to the "historic compromise" strategy (interpretable as

directed either to provoking the decline and radical change of the DC or to

reinforcing its role to contain any rightwards shift as a reaction to PCI advance) embodied in the agreements of 1977-78 and then back towards opposition in 1979 80. For its part the DC has been uncertain where the post-1976 limits of its opposition to the PCI could, or should, be publicly staked out and how far the

political advantages of playing down ideological differences in order to replay with the PCI the collaborative trasformismo of the 1960s with the Socialists could outweigh the residual appeal, or future revival, of anti-communism. Both parties therefore develop their own classificatory schemes to identify and advertise the

meaning of the Red Brigades' and other groups' actions and to justify the responses

they are prepared to support. The DC has constructed its account of violence around the distinction between

"opposite extremisms" (opposti estremismi), a phrase coined early in the 1970s and

used throughout the decade.13 The account justifies a privileged relationship in

theory and practice between the DC and the institutions of parliamentary democracy

— the party "condemned to permanent government", in Moro's phrase — in terms of its "centrality" with respect to the threat to stability posed by the radical ideologies of Left and Right: attack on the existing order and attack on the DC as an actor within that order are elided, and confirmation that the principal

target of the Red Brigades is in fact the DC is straightforwardly provided by the Red Brigades' declarations and the frequency of attacks on its offices and

personnel.14 Political violence is held to be a direct product of ideology, so that all recourse to violence illustrates the potential danger within the ideology or

88



ideologies by which it is justified. No matter how strongly the PCI may affirm its

rejection of violence, the very existence of violent groups proclaiming themselves

Marxist-Leninist is, from the DC standpoint, an endorsement of the suspicion with

which all adherents to that tradition must be regarded. More directly, the PCI is to

be condemned for its refusal to abjure Leninism convincingly since, apart from

encouraging the survival of a community of believers among whom the Red

Brigades may find support, the continuing use of the language of Leninism may

actually reinforce the Red Brigades' belief that it can eventually win away party

supporters to a more authentically revolutionary interpretation of the shared

dogma: the unintended, but real, consequences of the refusal to renounce Leninism

unambiguously are claimed to be the major obstacle preventing full political collaboration with the PCI.15 In the DC classificatory scheme, therefore, all

important distinctions between violences lie at the ideological level: there is an

essential continuity among all forms of violence attributable to those who share an

ideology. The political meaning of the Red Brigades' actions is to be located in their own account of their aims.

For the PCI, however, a sharp distinction is to be made between acts of

violence performed by organised clandestine groups and violent acts acknowledged to have occurred in the course of mass demonstrations or industrial conflict.16 The

latter are contingent excesses of leftwing politics; the former are part of a direct

attack on the Left which is therefore the Red Brigades' primary target. Until 1978

the PCI classified all clandestinely organised violence as a single "strategy of

tension", orchestrated by the extreme Right, intent on overturning the successes

gained by working-class mobilisation in the Hot Autumn and using mystificatory

signatures like the 'Red' Brigades to confuse the Left and publicly weaken its claim

to legitimacy. Deliberate acts of violence were anti-democratic in form and effect

and were therefore primarily opposed to the progressive realisation of the

principles enshrined in the Constitution which were the particular achievement of

the working class in the Resistance. Some room for doubt was left on the lesser

question of whether the members of Red Brigades were themselves neo-fascists or

simply cyphers who had been given the opportunity to carry out acts planned by the

Right and whose psychology was fragile enough to allow the expressive pleasure of

action for action's sake to override any thought for the consequences. That

classification fitted the PCI's project of the "historic compromise" since it constructed a single encircling neofascist enemy of the Republic, identical to the

enemy of 1943-5, against whom the broad national collaboration of the Resistance

should be revived. By 1978 the plausibility of the classification had been greatly weakened by the persistent failure to find links between the Red Brigades and the

Right, by the leftwing life-histories of the group's arrested members and by the

appearance in 1977 under the umbrella of Autonomía Opérala of loosely-organised

leftwing violence, often practised openly, which could in no sense be described as

neofascist. In addition, the Red Brigades were acknowledged to have achieved

some minimal consensus among ex-partisans and in the factories which had been

the strongholds of working class mobilisation since 1969.17 Recognition for the first

time of an explicit distinction between the clandestine violence of Right and Left, while it did not alter the conviction that the principal objective remained the legal Left, entailed a change in the PCI's conception of necessary responses. Neofascist

violence could be combatted as before by the determined defence of the state, from

which all staff and organisations tolerant of violence were to be eliminated. The

violence of the Left required positive intervention by the legitimate non-violent Left

—pedagogic activity to convince the working class of the objective damage to its

own interests through the use of violence and therefore of the necessity to refuse all

support to its practitioners. The same activity would provide a public

89



demonstration of the party's own rejection of all forms of violence for political ends

and its firm intention to eliminate them. To protect its own political identity the PCI has been drawn into increasing production of communicative acts directed not

only at its political opponents and the electorate, but also at the same working-class audience addressed by the Red Brigades. A terrain of direct conflict over that

audience's allegiance has thus been created, although as I shall show in the final

section, it is a terrain on which the methods by which conflict should be prosecuted and the criteria for publicly demonstrable success or failure remain unclear.

The contrast between DC and PCI classifications of violence can be seen as

different resolutions of the problem of locating the dominant meaning carried by a

clandestine group's actions. Consistent with its view of violence as a product of

ideology, the DC has taken the Red Brigades' professions of intention at face value and has insisted that the attack on the party, given its special role as guarantor of

the rules of democracy, must be read as an attack on these democratic rules. The

PCI, however, interpreting all clandestine violence as necessarily an attack on the

place of one actor (itself) within the rules, dismisses as tactical camouflage any statement that suggests otherwise: intentional violence, far from being explicable in

terms of the Red Brigades' declarations, actually deprives those declarations of any

meaning since no one seriously committed to those goals could have recourse to it.

Because the major parties ascribe different meaning to clandestine violence, any consensual metacommunicative reading of the Red Brigades' actions is rendered

impossible: every attempt to provide one becomes a further communicative act

within the political arena which is likely to fuel existing ideological conflicts over

party identities. The public contours of political violence are therefore traced around a wide range of conflicts over the construction, revision and demolition of

the meanings of communicative acts and over the conditions for their successful

transmission.

3. Communicating Through Acts of Violence

Each Red Brigades' act of "armed propaganda" makes use of two

communicative channels, violence and texts. This is in itself not unusual.

Simultaneous use of two channels is typical of most linguistic communication:

spoken or written utterances are accompanied by paralinguistic or prosodie features that can drastically change their total meaning, as when a smile or grimace will alter the way in which conventional words of greeting are to be taken.

The channels used by the Red Brigades are distinct in theory and practice. Each carries different inherent limits to the range of speech acts that can be

accomplished, as well as contingent empirical restrictions on the production and

circulation of messages. They are also employed separately: purely instrumental

actions such as bank robberies to finance the group resemble ordinary criminal

actions and are rarely accompanied by texts, while the Red Brigades'

documents are regularly published in the media controlled by the extreme Left

independently of any violence. As a clandestine group the Red Brigades need to

establish connections between the messages uttered in each channel as elements in

single sequences and to bind both sequences together to create a new set of

conventions through which the group's identity and strategy can be understood.

The elaboration of a language of political communication is itself an activity which

may have consequences in its own right.18

Violence as a mode of address has well-known practical shortcomings, apart of

course from the moral objections bracketed here. It is a highly resistant medium, in

Clausewitz' phrase, notoriously hard for its users to retain under control and

commonly subject to friction between intended and actual results. Responses in

90



kind by legitimate authorities in industrial societies are immensely more powerful,

communicatively and instrumental^, than the resources available to groups such

as the Red Brigades and, in the extreme case of a coup d'état or extensive

militarisation of society, may extinguish altogether any further use of that

communicative channel (and many others as well). The use of violence is often

taken not as the intentional pursuit of rationally desirable objectives, but as a

symptom of the madness or irrationality of its practitioners or of the plight of a

social or economic category. In neither case need the detailed content of the act be

considered seriously. A similar neglect of content may stem from the submergence of any cognitive appraisal in the emotions attached to the experience of violence,

especially among those close enough to the act itself to be perhaps the only audience

able to discern a cognitive component. Many communicative shortcomings can be

attributed to the very limited syntax of violence; and the uncertain effects of

violence are in part due to its inability to transmit messages with any precision,

aggravated by further restrictions on communicative potential imposed by lack of

knowledge, physical strength or access with respect to available techniques or

targets. In any act of violence the basic vehicles of meaning are the identity of the

victim or the target, and the timing, location and form of the act. The Red Brigades must construct paradigmatic contrasts and syntagmatic relations from among this

narrow set of discriminable elements, exploiting or avoiding existing meanings attached to types of violence and creating recognisable conventions to perform successful ilíocutionary acts. Addressed to opponents, the principal illocutionary acts expressible through violence amount to the warning or threatening of

individuals or other members of the victim's professional or political category: the uptake of such acts (to retain J.L. Austin's terminology) can be facilitated by the appropriation of techniques of violence from other domains, so that the practice of

hamstringing animals as a warning to their owners can be translated into the

'kneecapping' of human victims and the punishment of wartime collaborators by

shaving off their hair can be used on rightwing trade unionists. Addressed to the

audiences which the Red Brigades claim to represent or hope to recruit from, the

choice of victim may signify that present conflicts are not being prosecuted

sufficiently seriously. Likewise, selection of a target from a hitherto unscathed

social category may convey the demand for a shift in the boundaries of conflict,

presenting as direct enemies the members of a category up till then regarded as

neutral or insignificant. Key dates from the political lexicon of the Left and formally demarcated periods of conflict (referenda and election campaigns, wage negotiations) have been used by the Red Brigades for their most complex actions. Their aim has been to upset the taken-for-granted character of existing forms of

commemoration or conflict and to weaken the allegiance to those forms by

ïmphasising their conventional character through juxtaposition with a possible alternative. Recognition of conventionality can of course occur without that

alternative exercising any wide attraction before itself becoming rapidly conventionalised.19

hor a clandestine group seeking recognition as a strategic actor the indexical

features in any act of violence are particularly crucial since they convey to other

actors information about the group which is not otherwise obtainable. Deliberate

attention to indexical elements distinguishes the Red Brigades from other

practitioners of violence whose ideology of violence as immediate liberation makes the authors their own principal audience or who, like the neofascists responsible for

the 1969 bombs, seek to obliterate all traces of their own agency. The geographical Dr institutional location of each act can be used to point to the local presence of Red

Brigades' members or sympathisers and to the group's ability to penetrate its

¿1



opponents' defences; certain techniques of violence such as the use of dynamite must be eschewed because of association with the extreme right20; and a particular

weapon may be used in order to identify unequivocally the responsibility of a single

group. The range and detail of forms of violence (injury, kidnapping, murder) can

be manipulated to illustrate the hierarchy of relative importance which the Red

Brigades attribute to particular categories of opponents at any time. So any rupture of the (temporary) limits placed on forms of violence is likely to change the force of

subsequent episodes, as when the murder of Moro in 1978 established for the first

time the readiness of the Red Brigades to kill their hostages if demands were not

met, thus altering the significance of all further kidnappings. Steady expansion in

the vocabulary of forms, details and outcomes of violence entails that each actual

use of violence, taken as an element in a sequence, can to some extent be preserved from redundancy and loss of meaning and be more readily seen as a strategic exercise of choice, the product of an intention responsive to changes in political and

social contexts. To compel other actors to scrutinise their acts of violence for the

embodied intention is for the Red Brigades to obtain recognition that their

signature names a group sufficiently cohesive to have an intention — the first stage in establishing a communicative position and in securing uptake among audiences

for their own meanings; Further, the emergence from the repeated use of violence of

conventions for the expression of intention in that communicative medium creates

the possibility for others to demonstrate their adhesion to the Red Brigades'

projects.

Recognition of an intention would scarcely be possible without the production and diffusion of texts. The Red Brigades' texts are primarily inscribed in writing but

include telephone calls, photographs, banners and, most recently, vidéocassettes;

and they vary in length and complexity from single sentence claims of responsibility

for actions to analyses of specific issues or organisations to full-scale political tracts. The research on which they are based, and the work of composition and

diffusion, represent full-time activities for some Red Brigades' members: they are

likely to be important features in the psychology of a clandestine existence, to be

taken into account when examining the maintenance or change of members'

beliefs.21 Texts acknowledging responsibility for actions over the Red Brigades'

signature convert otherwise unrelated episodes of violence into the elements of a

political strategy, so that their production and diffusion must be a necessary part of

constructing an identity. Their primary role in explaining and justifying the acts of violence they accompany and in suggesting future targets can only be performed if

the source of act and text can be shown to be identical and if interlopers can be

prevented from appropriating the signature "Red Brigades". As clandestine

authors, however, their only way to claim or deny responsibility for a text is by

production of another, in principle equally suspect, text, so that no means of

definitive metacommunication exists outside the elements placed in the texts,

which are themselves vulnerable to interpretation as just another embedded

illocutionary act.22 In actions where certainty in attributing texts to a single source

is especially crucial (as in the kidnappings where the action is narrated through

texts), authenticity can be established technically through use of an identifiable

typewriter, but this gambit is not feasible for ordinary, widely dispersed actions.23

As the number of Red Brigades' actions rose from 4 in 1970 to 106 in 1978, so the

need increased for 'theoretical' or strategic documents from which the texts

explaining individual actions could demonstrate their common origin through the

quotation, cross-referencing and elaboration of key terms, slogans, stylistic

features and pieces of analysis. In building up an archive of texts, a whole

vocabulary of political description is constructed and exploited. Its elements are

taken from the Left, the principal audience to which the Red Brigades' texts are

92



addressed, and therefore establish a medium for communication, friendly or

hostile, with the habitual users of that vocabulary. While the basis for direct

communicative exchanges is laid, so too is the means by which the separateness of

the Red Brigades can be more clearly defined.

Combining utterances in both channels to generate the rules and content of

communicative acts has strongly influenced their practical use. The Red Brigades' attempt to secure the conventions for meaningful production may become an end in

itself so that the two parts of the single sequence of communicative acts become

increasingly self-referential: specific acts of violence reinforce the seriousness of the

intentions set out in preceding texts and display the power of the group to reach its

stated targets. Acts of violence can also be used to provoke reactions which appear to confirm the Red Brigades' analysis of the political constraints which led them to use violence. This familiar confrontational tactic is a form of self-fulfilling act akin to a performative utterance insofar as it strives to bring about the existence of the

conditions specified in the text by which the action is itself justified.24 To be effective in this way, even if it only implies the 'truth' of some statements uttered by the Red Brigades and may have its greatest effects in reinforcing the allegiance of group members and encouraging potential recruits to join, requires that the

audiences which are directly or indirectly addressed offer a response. Clearly, the

DC, as dominant governing party and direct target of violence, cannot evade a

response. But the audiences on the Left, themselves largely exempt from direct

violence by the Red Brigades,25 are also drawn into responses by the need to combat

the group's attempt to legitimate its actions with reference to a partly shared

vocabulary. Insofar as many of the same terms are used by the legal Left as the

ideological armature of its own non-violent identity, then, in order to evade charges of indirect complicity or guilt by association and to preserve the meaning of its own lexicon, the Left is compelled to contest, by its own communicative acts, any use of

its terminology which suggests that it could be legitimately used to license

violence.26 Too rapid a withdrawal from the use of the contaminated terms would

leave open the possibility that the Red Brigades might draw some support from the communities on the Left where commitment to that vocabulary was strong and

might thus be able to establish themselves as representatives of those communities.

Yet to argue with the Red Brigades over the meaning of terms and the criteria of

their correct application is also to be compelled to maintain an audience in which

the Red Brigades themselves are at least the object of continuing discussion.

4. Constructing a Political Identity

During the past decade the Red Brigades have given increasing attention to the

definition and maintenance of their organisation and to its explicit recognition as a

'revolutionary' political actor. Organisational survival has been emphasised as a

victory in its own right, alongside defence against what they perceive as the primary objective of their opponents, viz. the destruction of the Red Brigades' political

identity.27 Pursuit of those goals makes the Red Brigades exceptional among practitioners of violence. If the minimal premise for acknowledgement of an identity is the public claiming of responsibility for acts of violence, then the relative lack of concern to achieve it is shown by the fact that only one in five (2620 ex

13058) acts of political violence were actually claimed between 1969-1981. While the Left was more concerned to claim its actions than the Right, authoring 54% of

the 3906 actions attributed to it as against the Right's 16% of its 3039 actions, the quantitatively dominant role in violence was played by a large number of small

groups, probably better described as action-sets, bringing individuals together to :ommit a few actions before dissolution. 90% (469 ex 519) of leftwing groups

n



claimed responsibility for only 1-5 acts, and in 93% of cases the signature only

appeared in a single year. If, as seems likely, many different signatures concealed

the same set of individuals, then the authors were not concerned to establish a

public continuity of existence, but to present a mosaic of widely-diffused, small

scale violence. Among groups intent on achieving a recognisable longevity only the

Red Brigades have been successful. Their signature has appeared in every year since 1970 and has authored nearly one-quarter (469 ex 2117, up until the end of 1981) of all acts of violence claimed by the Left, four times as many as any other single

signature: no other group on either Left or Right has survived for more than a few

years. The public awareness of continuity is reinforced by the narrow geographical focus of the Red Brigades' actions: although their signature has appeared in 32

provinces since 1970 (which is more than double the range of the next most active

leftwing group, Prima Lined), slightly more than four-fifths of all actions have been

concentrated in the four provinces (mainly the cities themselves) of Turin, Milan, Rome and Genoa. Since 1980 Naples has become an additional centre of activity, the scene of 6 murders of politicians and policemen and the longest kidnapping.28

Recognition of identity is scarcely more determinate a notion than 'identity' itself since, in addition to contests over the relative importance of each of the

multiple criteria by which social and political identities are assessed, the line

separating mere acknowledgement of existence from explicit recognition may be

drawn in very different places.29 Individual and collective actors invited to confer

recognition are likely to disagree about the significance of single attributes,

assuming their presence proven, and about the implications of their own actions for

the recognition of the claimant. At the least, the conditions for recognition of an

identity lie in the public representation of an internally cohesive, bounded

organisation, while acknowledgement of that identity as "political" can be secured

through public demonstration of wide mass support (or the support of the majority of occupants of a key social category) or through explicit conferral by existing

legitimate actors of rights of representation and negotiation on public matters. By the choice of violence and clandestinity the Red Brigades forfeit the possibility of

large-scale public expressions of support and are restricted to seeking forms of

acknowledgement from the representatives of legal political organisations. In

broadening their political objectives, they seek publicly to establish and utilise conventions for communication with legitimate actors so that this visible access can

be transformed into a focus for allegiance among social groups which feel that some

of their interests are not adequately represented in the public domain. Thus, it is

hoped, a minimum of support, active or passive, can be generated in certain limited

social contexts. The gradual move towards establishing direct channels of

communication beyond areas of potential support on the Left can be traced

through three phases — 1970-75, 1976-79, 1980 until the present. But it has rested on changes in both organisational structure and membership which, while

facilitating new patterns of communication, have also undermined the conditions essential to the public representation of a single Red Brigades' identity.

In the first phase, 1970-75, the Red Brigades were almost alone in practising

systematic clandestine violence on the Left, carrying out three-quarters of all

actions and concentrating mainly on the destruction of individuals' property

(automobiles in particular) and kidnappings. Readiness to use violence as an

explicit part of political strategy was proclaimed as the major discriminant between themselves and the many other groups on the extra-parliamentary Left which

discussed violence endlessly but were not prepared to embark on its systematic

use.30 The Red Brigades declared their refusal to indulge in "sterile ideological debate" with the PCI and those groups, insisting on the need to avoid "ideological sectarianism". Texts were kept brief and uncomplicated, stressing the common

94



immediate struggle against the recrudescence of Fascism and couched in the

vocabulary and symbolism of the Resistance. Actions were primarily intended to

secure a local impact: they were directed against neofascist party activists and

unionists, and the Red Brigades were prepared to acknowledge acts against similar

targets done by others over their own signature.31 Materials obtained from the

interrogations carried out during four of the five kidnappings of 1972-74 contained details of the use of neofascists by factory management against working-class

mobilisation, and the transcripts were widely circulated for the general information

and benefit of the Left. By the end of 1975, however, most of the early members had

been arrested and their clandestine bases discovered.

The second phase, 1976-79, was characterised by the near-submergence of the

Red Brigades in the violence of the extreme Left, so that recourse to violence alone

could no longer serve as a sufficient diacritic of identity. The group was responsible for only one in five claimed actions (one in ten of all actions attributable to the Left) in this period, and in 1979 there were no fewer than 216 other signatures on the

Left.32 With the first premeditated murder in 1976 the forms of violence adopted by the Red Brigades became more serious, emphasising their distance in strategy and

tactics between themselves and the PCI and the unions. At the same time a closer

relationship was sought with the archipelago of extra-parliamentary and factory

groups under the label Autonomía Operaia as well as with other armed groups: links were probably facilitated by the common past which those individuals recruited to the various groups practising violence had shared in Potere Operaio, dissolved in 1973, and in Lotta Continua, which had largely disintegrated as a political organisation in the wake of electoral failure and the Rimini conference in 1976. Direct address to the area of Autonomía, treated at length for the first time in

1975, is reflected in the increasingly elaborate language of the Red Brigades' texts.

The unifying idiom of the Resistance was largely abandoned (it was in any case

being widely used by the PCI in those years to legitimate its claims to a place in local and national government and could therefore scarcely serve as a vocabulary of self

definition for a group intent on violence against representatives of the state and on

verbal attacks against the institutional Left). It was replaced by an increasingly arcane political lexicon and set of neologisms to accompany a basic Marxist

Leninist terminology, even though the resulting ideological bricolage, intended to

establish a common universe of political discourse with Autonomía Operaia, was

sharply criticised by Autonomía's leaders for its incoherence.33 Nevertheless, the

texts received wide circulation and discussion in the broadsheets and journals linked to 'the movement' of 1977 and on the radio stations which had been set up after the relaxation of restrictions on broadcasting in 1975. This phase was largely concluded by the disappearance of Autonomía following the arrests of its most

prominent leaders and militants in the areas of strongest support, Rome and the

Veneto region, during 1979. Other groups on the extra-parliamentary Left came to

dissociate themselves more clearly from the use or tolerance of violence and refused

to address, or to be addressed by, the Red Brigades as political interlocutors.3"

The third phase, from 1980 until the present, has been characterised by a sharp fall in the overall level of political violence and by the return of the Red Brigades to

a dominant position among leftwing practitioners of violence. Reviving in

particular the practice of kidnapping (Moro had been the only victim between 1975

and 1980), the Red Brigades accounted for 20 out of the 25 episodes of murder,

kidnapping and wounding carried out by leftwing groups in 1981 and for roughly the same proportion of actions in 1982. These attacks no longer correspond,

however, to a single communicative strategy for the achievement of political

identity: since late 1980 the group itself has been divided into at least two major (and perhaps some minor) factions, holding different views on the relative

95



importance of the audiences to which their acts of violence should primarily be

directed. In addition, the many arrests of members and discovery of bases has

sharpened conflict between the two factions over which communicative strategy should have prior claim on the shrinking resources. The emergence of factions

within the Red Brigades is a direct consequence of the measures taken to ensure

survival and protect a single identity. For the insistence on rigorous clandestinity has enabled the Red Brigades to outlast other groups, such as Prima Linea, whose

militants attempted to combine violence with open political activity and were therefore more vulnerable to police action and to the effects of the confessions of

arrested members. As such organisations were dismantled, along with the residual

project of the Autonomía area, their former members and sympathisers have

provided recruits for the Red Brigades; while to some extent replacing arrested

members, this recruitment has also brought into the group individuals with very different political experiences, both amongst one another and between themselves

and the original members of the Red Brigades. Communications over strategy, addressed in the previous phase to other groups on the Left, have now been

imported into the Red Brigades themselves and constitute the material for

increasingly public and entrenched disagreements: the divisions are marked by the

choice of distinctive signatures within the Red Brigades rubric, open dissent from the outcomes of particular actions and the exchange not only of voluminous

'theoretical' documents but also accusations and threats. One faction, based

primarily in the North, has persisted with the effort to gain members and support from the industrial working class and insists on the continuity of the Red Brigades' identity. The other faction, active principally in Rome and Naples, has privileged the strategy of attempting to secure a direct confrontation with legitimate political

organisations and to intervene in the relations among them: its concern with

political recognition is symbolised by its own rebaptism in 1981 as the party of guerilla action, explicitly intended to mark a break with the Red Brigades' past.35 The very possibility of this strategy, and indirectly therefore of conflict within the Red Brigades, has been facilitated by changes in the internal organisation of the group over the past decade.

The Red Brigades have traced their organisational structure to principles set

out in 1975 which mark a clear break with earlier years.36 The group's formal

existence began in Milan in 1970 more or less as a conspiracy of equals, some of whom had in fact had close ties to an egalitarian commune formed largely by white

collar workers from a Sit-Siemens factory. Despite the definitive choice of clandestinity in 1972 the group's boundaries were sufficiently permeable to allow

both the exit of dissenting members and successful infiltration by the police, resulting in the capture of the most prominent members. A more hermetic structure

was therefore proposed to improve security and accommodate new recruits within

a complex hierarchical division of labour, although there remains some doubt

about the extent to which the formal structure and task separation have actually been realised in practice. The principal membership distinction is between

"regulars" (full-time clandestine militants whose names are known to the police) and "irregulars" (members whose adhesion to the group is clandestine and who live

and work under their own names) who are combined in the following structure:

'brigades', the basic unit of 1-5 members in a factory or other institution, mainly

irregulars whose task is to furnish information on potential targets, distribute Red

Brigades' documents and sound out likely recruits; 'columns', regulars who are

responsible for organising acts of violence in a given area; 'fronts', responsible for

coordinating separate proposals for action from each column; the 'executive', with

4-5 members, conducting political analyses and directing the most complex actions;

and the 'strategic direction', with 14-16 members drawn from every lower

96



organisational level, authoring the series of major ideological resolutions which

began to appear in 1975 and which supplemented the more informal 'self

interviews'. From the evidence produced in recent trials, it seems that actual

violence was only carried out by a small group of regulars who relied for

information and logistic support on a penumbra of irregulars who did not

themselves perform acts of violence. Appreciation of the differentiated task structure of the Red Brigades might inhibit any misleading search for a single psychological disposition to violence among all members.37

The institutional location of Red Brigades' members — the arenas of action,

speaking positions, linked by the group's communicative structure — has

undergone a single significant extension since 1970. The principal area of continuing presence has remained the set of northern factories, discussed below, where the choice of targets, the distribution of texts showing detailed knowledge of

plant organisation and the occupations of arrested members clearly indicate nuclei

of Red Brigades irregulars. Indeed, the reproduction in texts of restricted

information on details of investment policy, the state of negotiations between

management and unions and changes in work processes can sometimes suggest even more precisely within the factory where support for the Red Brigades can be

found. The selection of victims from other institutions (police, magistrates, journalists), whose habits and precise occupational tasks may be known only to a

few colleagues, and the publication of details suggesting a close knowledge of the

victim's organisation can be used to create the same belief; but such details can also

be intended to deceive, to make the group appear more extensive than it is, when

they are in fact obtained from sources which are publicly available.38 No doubt

some of the less easily explicable targets and the admitted errors are the results of

breakdown in deception.

Apart írom the factory the only other institution which has now come to contain a known concentration of Red Brigades' members is the prison, in

particular the set of maximum security prisons established in 1977 for those

suspected or convicted of political violence.39 Intended to provide a level of security then rarely found in the Italian prison system and to separate members of the Red

Brigades and other groups from the ordinary criminal population where they might find recruits, the concentration of the politically violent in maximum security jails has had two consequences. First, continuing allegiance to the Red Brigades of

imprisoned members is reinforced by the collective surveillance that incarceration in a single jail, and often the single wing of a jail, permits. Opportunities for membership to lapse on capture or for collaboration with police and magistrature, in accordance with the recent legal measures to encourage exit which I discuss in the

final section, are made very difficult by the proximity of other members with a proven readiness to murder known or suspected defectors. The prolonged

kidnapping and murder in 1981 of the brother of an ex-member who had

collaborated with the magistrature, followed by a second murder and a series of

attacks on fellow-prisoners believed to have given information to the police, was a

public communication of the extent of the Red Brigades' determination to protect their organisation. Also, where the Red Brigades constitute the dominant group in

any jail, they may be able to encourage or coerce the allegiance of suspected or

convicted members of other groups, especially where these have virtually ceased to

;xist (the Nuclei Armati Proletari, Prima Linea and other smaller groups) and to

draw them into acts of violence within jails: prisoners who are not and do not want

:o become members or allies of the Red Brigades may find it extremely hard to

dissociate themselves publicly from the actions of the group.40 The second

xmsequence is to identify a set of accessible, no longer clandestine, continuing nembers of the Red Brigades, sufficiently numerous and solidary to address and be

)7



addressed publicly by other members outside (with whom hidden or open contacts

are maintained) and to be approached by representatives of political parties who

have direct or indirect access to jails: they can therefore serve as mediators in

communicative exchanges between (factions of) their organisation and legitimate

political actors.41 The kidnapping of a magistrate, D'Urso, in December 1980 illustrated the potential of the new communicative structure to link the actions of the Red Brigades inside and outside jail and to create the possibility of transactions with political parties or other institutional groups. The episode also demonstrated the scope for the Red Brigades' communications to reach, impose public reception on and divide actors in the central arenas of parliament and press.42 It was followed

in 1981 by the kidnapping of a Neapolitan politician, released in return for a ransom after clandestine negotiations which appear to have included

representatives of the Christian Democrat party, the secret services, the camorra

and those members of the Red Brigades in jail who had formerly been involved in

ordinary criminal activities in Naples.43 Both kidnappings were organised by the faction of the Red Brigades which gives highest priority to actions directly involving the major political parties: the strategy in each case of calling on

differently-placed sections of the group to express opinions on the outcome, and of

imposing the publication of the opinions on the national press as a condition of the

hostage's release, was intended precisely to display the continuing identity of those

sections and to show that membership of the Red Brigades did not lapse on arrest.

Thus, by maintaining their organisation and its internal and external contacts, the Red Brigades have to some extent converted the reconstruction forced by arrests

into the basis for a more extensive network of communicative acts. But the very

opportunity to coerce legitimate political actors into negotiations and concessions

has simultaneously and necessarily sharpened the conflict within the Red Brigades themselves over the strategy to be adopted in pursuit of a political identity —

whether the kind of demands and actions from which demonstrable concessions

can be gained should constitute the most important area of activity and whether the

consequences of aiming at explicitly political goals may not hinder the success of communicative acts in factories by confusing the kind of recognition sought by the

group. The resulting factional conflict itself weakens the claim that the Red

Brigades' signature stands for an organisation which possesses a single political identity and which has the capacity to exploit to the full the possible advantages of the expanded communicative structure.

5. Representing Conflict

Like the importance attached to organisational survival, the Red Brigades'

projects have had a strongly defensive character from the outset. In its earliest

phase the group represented its actions as the necessary form of resistance to the

neofascist violence already unleashed by the dominant classes against working class mobilisation and to the advance of the extreme Right in the 1972 elections. By

1975 that offensive had receded, to be replaced by what the Red Brigades termed the "social counter-revolution" against the working class, embodied in the "historic

compromise" strategy of the PCI in the political arena and by the resumption of control over the workforce by trade unions in the factory. To create a role for

themselves as opponents of the "counter-revolution", the Red Brigades have sought

to make good two claims: first, that the traditional organisations of the Left are

neither representative of working-class interests nor capable of defending them;

second, that the Red Brigades are able to compel opponents into accepting their

demands and to divide ("disarticulate") the principal agents of the supposedly united political and industrial offensive against the working class. The Red

98



Brigades communicative acts have therefore been designed to set off, immediately or eventually, consequences which could be interpreted as establishing the 'truth' of

their statements about their opponents, the Left and their own role. It is within

those very limited horizons, rather than in any demonstrable contributions to the

construction of a communist society, that the criteria for success or failure of group actions are generated and where members or likely recruits can find the rationality of their allegiance.

i ne Kea brigades' attacks on îactory personnel and property have been largely restricted to a handful of Italy's major firms: Fiat and Singer (Turin), Pirelli, Sit Siemens, Alfa-Romeo and Magneti-Marelli (Milan), Ansaldo and Italsider (Genoa). They account for four-fifths of all the injuries, kidnappings and murders of factory employees by the Red Brigades and nearly one-third (29%) of all the

group's victims.44 The size, industrial importance and place in recent labour history of those firms have made them key symbolic indicators of national economic

performance and the state of class relations (however unrepresentative they may

actually be in an economy where small traditional enterprises play a major role), so

that the occurrence and consequences of violence there, and the immediate local

responses, have greater communicative power to reach distant audiences than similar acts elsewhere. Likewise, the interpretations and reactions among the

workforces in those factories have particular weight in determining what

significance to give to violence and how seriously it is to be taken — in short, in conferring meaning on "terrorism". The recent history of industrial relations in the

large factories has also shown how the application of the Workers Statute of 1970 and the substantial alteration in the balance of power at shopfloor level have left areas of conflict and ambiguity in interest representation which the Red Brigades have endeavoured to exploit. The cycle of working-class mobilisation between

1969-1972 established trade unions for the first time as direct participants in the processes of conflict regulation at plant level, alongside groups of early shopfloor activists dissatisfied with the insufficiently radical outcome of organised action promised by the Hot Autumn. In gaining access to the machinery of conflict resolution in the new institution of the factory councils, however, the unions have added to their difficulties as the site of increasingly incompatible pressures. They have been compelled to select and aggregate the explicit demands of many differently-situated categories of workers and departments, so that the process of selection has become immediately visible to those (groups of) workers whose narrow 'associative' objectives may have to be sacrificed in favour of a general class' interest; they must legitimate to management their new role as

representatives of the workforce in day-to-day bargaining; the demand for some form of unification of the three major confederations imposes constraints on the Freedom of action of individual unions or federations of unions; and the alignment af the major ties of each confederation to political parties with different goals has to be combined with the establishment of a common front as active interlocutors of

representatives of management and the government on matters of broad social and îconomic policy. Conflict between these pressures may be felt more or less acutely it different levels of union structure and intervention and at different times.

Nevertheless, hampered also by the economic recession and worsening inemployment after 1973, the unions have been prevented from achieving a clear

dentity within any of the systems of rules in which they now operate; and they have jeen led to emphasise symbolic action to affirm their legitimacy, power and

epresentativeness rather than to demonstrate it directly through instrumentally ffective action.45 The Red Brigades have intervened in this context in two ways, -irst, they have consistently chosen their targets from categories directly esponsible for the maintenance of workforce discipline and the regulation of



conflict in the factory: personnel staff, managerial negotiators with factory

councils, supervisors and department managers. Because of their institutional

roles, the victims are likely to be more widely known, either personally or by name,

to the workforce than senior but more remote personnel. The impact of each attack

is therefore heightened within the restricted factory context, symbolising the readiness for a generalised violent attack on factory authority and rendering other

members of the victim's category either readier to make concessions to the

workforce or more rigid in resisting demands. The Red Brigades can represent either response as a success for themselves, the former as a confirmation of the

advantages to be won through the use of violence on behalf of the class they claim to

represent and the latter as a demonstration of union ineffectiveness to combat

managerial policy. It becomes exceedingly hard for management and unions to

resist unilateral reactions which as communicative acts appear to confirm the

assertions of the Red Brigades and thus convert their actions into performative utterances: joint reaction offers a simulacrum of evidence for the charge that the

unions are now ready to act alongside capital against the working-class . Second,

because of the relatively new rules for the regulation of conflict in factories and the

uncertainties of union identity, the contiguity of the Red Brigades' vocabulary to

the union lexicon (and, recently, the appropriation of exact past or present

demands) weakens the role of unions as interlocutors of management by suggesting

that support for the Red Brigades is not opposed with sufficient vigour by the

unions, or that union representatives may even be in sympathy with them.46 At the

same time, any attempt by the management to circumscribe more narrowly the

unions' rights to advance demands is to confirm the Red Brigades' contention that

the existing union organisation is no longer effective in defending the interests of

the working class.

Whereas Red Brigades' members and sympathisers in factories are placed within a clear set of immediate conflicts in which they can intervene directly, they

occupy no comparable political or institutional niche for the "attack on the heart of

the state" initiated with the kidnapping of a magistrate in 1974. The wounding and murder of policemen and prison guards, magistrates and politicians can serve as

acts of revenge or indicate the group's knowledge and ability to attack opponents with impunity.47 But although such actions may generate serious conflicts within

and between the categories under attack, especially over responsibilities for the very

existence of violence and for adequate protection against it, they cannot serve to

represent the Red Brigades publicly as the positive bearers of wider interests. The

increasing isolation on the Left has made the task of depicting their own efficacy in the political arena more urgent for the Red Brigades: a terrain with a resource at

stake must be found so that antagonism can be transformed into conflict,

permitting public representation of a relationship and reciprocal strategising that

outright wounding and murder cannot convey. The only occasions for direct

conflict have been the trials of Red Brigades' members and the kidnappings carried out by the group.

Both occasions constitute highly ritualised frames for conflict, with established procedures, sequences of action and limited possible outcomes. Apart

from the adoption of the terminology of "interrogation", "verdict" and "sentence"

for their treatment of hostages, the Red Brigades have emphasised the formal

symmetry of the occasions by staging their kidnappings since 1978 to coincide with their members' trials. Each frame is designed to close with an exactly contrasting

performative utterance, the trials ending with the verdict's formal transformation

of Red Brigades' members into convicted criminals, the kidnappings with the de

facto recognition of the group as an interlocutor of legitimate political parties. In the trial of their early leaders in Turin between 1976-78, a model for later imitation,

100



the Red Brigades attempted to frustrate their reclassification as criminals by

rendering the ordinary judicial procedures so hard to observe — by their own

obstructions and violence and by utilising disagreements in the legal profession over the constitutional status of their right to refuse all legal assistance — that it was

widely doubted whether the conditions necessary (i.e. the "felicity conditions") for the performative verdict had been fulfilled.48 The rejection of defence lawyers also

stands as a symbol for the rejection of all forms of mediation between the Red

Brigades and their opponents, of which the kidnappings are intended to provide a positive example. While kidnappings have been a form of violence used by the

group from the beginning, their elaboration into a technique seeking to divide their

opponents and attempting to create conventions for access to political actors is

recent and illustrates the shift into increasingly self-referential concerns. The

earliest episodes (1972-73) were all concluded by the collaboration of the victim

whose readiness to respond to questions was sufficient condition for his release; the

two kidnappings of 1974-78 established the principle of an exchange as a mode of closure, though its particular form (the release of the hostage against the freeing of

imprisoned members of the Red Brigades or other groups) presented too many

constitutional, legal and political problems to be achieved; but the kidnappings concluded in 1981 deliberately made transactions possible by stating conditions

which were neither unconstitutional nor limited to a private advantage for the Red

Brigades, but rather had already been advanced by legitimate actors and accepted

by the government — the closure of a notoriously harsh maximum security prison, the requisition and allocation of dwellings in Naples for the victims of the 1980 earthquake, and the return to fulltime production of workers from the Alfa-Romeo

plant who had been temporarily laid off.49 These demands, which the Red Brigades further insisted on having published in the national press, constituted resources for

ordinary political negotiation and exchange. They placed the government in the

paradoxical position of being unable to make a response which did not either

contribute to divisions among legitimate actors or illustrate the Red Brigades'

political efficacy, both of which seemed to validate the group's assertions about its

role and powers. The immediate issue was whether or how the government and

political parties should acknowledge receipt of the Red Brigades' demands. To have

imposed a blackout on all news and details of the kidnappings, so that demands

simply would not become publicly known and therefore need acknowledgement, risked confirming the Red Brigades' assertion that the media were directly under political control (thus accounting for their hostility to the group's analyses and

actions) and creating a precedent for use on different kinds of occasion. It also

raised the possibility that the government or other actors might use the freedom

from immediate public responsibility to negotiate with the Red Brigades through the group's representatives in prison. Pressure to negotiate through the

communicative channels available has in any case been growing in recent years, in

part because of the failure to obtain Moro's release by refusing negotiations and in

part due to the increasing political weight of the Socialist and Radical parties, both favouring the safe return of the hostage as a primary objective. For the PCI, however, any direct communication or favouring of indirect communication

between political parties and the Red Brigades implies a de facto concession of political recognition, establishing a convention for the political use of kidnappings for increasingly extensive transactions. In this view, the consequence of any direct

communication with the Red Brigades can only be to encourage them in their major

goal — the attack on and erosion of support for the Left — by allowing them to

present themselves as an effective focus of allegiance with a channel of access to

public resources. The implications of setting up any direct contact with the Red Brigades thus take on different significance according to the different party

101



readings of the group's hierarchy of objectives.

Whether or not the government (or any other legitimate actor) communicates

directly with the Red Brigades, the paradox of response remains. If the government

openly and deliberately continues with the resolution of the issues, said to be under

way before the Red Brigades made their explicit demands, then it cannot easily

avoid public interpretation, or suspicion, of having forced the solutions more

rapidly through a notoriously dilatory politico-administrative system because of the pressure of violence. If, on the other hand, all further action is suspended in

order to escape this reading, then conflict may be generated between the parties which originally supported the measures and the government which appears readier to react to the threat of violence than to respect its agreements with its

legitimate parliamentary allies or opponents. Either response offers support for the

Red Brigades' claim to be an effective agent in the forwarding of specific class

interests and in provoking conflict and disarray among the orthodox political

bearers of the "counter-revolution" who would oppose those interests. Within the

belief about the existence of this intentional 'counter-revolution', the

representation of Red Brigades' efficacy through responses elicited from opponents

gives similar acts of violence a cognitive structure strongly reminiscent of the nature

of magic in its reinterpretation by Tambiah as a set of illocutionary acts with

performative aims.50 But while each rite may have strengthened the commitment of

some members of the group and encouraged the minimal recruitment needed to

make up for arrests, its plausibility may, ironically, have been instrumental in

reinforcing the divisions which have occurred since 1980. In fact, a strategy of

advancing demands satisfiable within the existing rules of political exchange, thus of acting as a kind of armed pressure group, generates an identity very different

from the 'revolutionary' role for the recognition of which those demands were

originally designed. Dissent within the group over the desirability of aiming at, or

appearing to achieve, that kind of identity then favours scissions: these in turn

weaken the organisational solidarity and carefully delineated position which

constitute the conditions for uttering communicative acts and which those same

acts are intended to convey to opponents and potential recruits.

6. Responding to Violence

Beyond the responses enforced on terrains chosen by the Red Brigades, the

government, PCI and unions (in particular the four federations of metalworkers

which organise the workforce in the major factories under Red Brigades' attack) have also devised their own forms of action to eliminate political violence. As direct or indirect addressees, intent on being seen to act in defence of public order and to

reinforce political identities and mobilising capacity, they have been drawn into the

exchanges set off by communicative acts of violence, even if only to reiterate

publicly the refusal to take any special action and to rely on the ordinary agencies

which deal with crime. Some types of response, such as the reorganisation of police

forces or union plans for factory vigilance, depend for their efficacy on not being

widely publicised. Others are explicitly communicative acts addressed

simultaneously to various audiences — to the politically violent in the hope of

discouraging further use of violence, to the particular categories of the victims of

violence as a public declaration of solidarity, to party or union members as a

reiteration of the leadership's analyses and policies, and finally to the electorate at

large as an expression of readiness to act in defence of general interests. All

responses must conform to existing laws or, where the introduction of new laws or

clauses themselves constitutes a response, to the Constitution: apparent breaches

have provoked serious disagreements among the opponents of violence, grounded

in the different degrees of reluctance to accept the paradox that rules of political

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action may have to be preserved by actions which flout them, thus lending force to

the Red Brigades' contention that their opponents do not consider themselves

bound by the rules they insist on others observing.51 The responses I shall consider

in fact represent only the most significant set from among the huge volume of

publicly diffused, variously authored comments, analyses and exhortations which

are intended, more or less directly, to influence beliefs about political violence and

to support particular kinds of action or inaction: the objective is, of course, all

political violence and not merely the activities of the Red Brigades. The government's initiatives, inspired by the DC and supported by the PCI,

have been made in two directions: to increase the range of powers of state agencies

(police and magistrature) to deal with political violence and to establish "terrorism" as a legal category which carries specific penalties and permits communications and

exchanges between "terrorist" organisations and the State. The two moves, the

attempts to reinforce the primary defenders of the present rules and to isolate the

politically violent with the aim of reincorporating them within those rules, are

embodied in the four laws of 1975, 1978, 1980 and 19 82.52 The police have been given greater powers to pursue and detain suspects, and a change, generally thought to be a relaxation, has been made in the processes of accountability in their use of

firearms. By communicating its readiness to extend the police's freedom to respond to violence, the government has symbolically demonstrated its solidarity with a

major category of victims rather than either seriously restricting civil rights or creating effective new techniques of intervention.53 Heavier penalties have been

introduced, to be applied either automatically or at magistrates' discretion, against

attempts to reconstitute fascist organisations and against those who use violence

for the purposes of "terrorism". The term, however, remains undefined,

particularly in relation to types of participation in different forms of violence, although a suspect whose actions may fall into the category risks up to ten years in

preventive custody, considerably heavier penalties than for an identical action

without "terrorist" intent, and incarceration in a maximum security prison or internal exile {confino). The absence of explicit definitions for the kinds of violence which count as "terrorism" and the difficulties of establishing clear criteria for

membership of the groups and action-sets using violence has in practice allowed

very considerable discretion to individual magistrates in their use of the category and has encouraged suspicions that the lacunae in legal precision have been made

up by the adoption of criteria which serve immediate political interests. The arrest and delay in bringing to trial of the leaders of Autonomía Operaia accused of

collaboration with the Red Brigades has raised urgently the problems of the

classification of forms of violence and the relationship between speech, action and

legal responsibility in politics.54 The creation of the legal category "terrorist" has served to provide an identity

from within which convictable members of clandestine groups can take advantage of the opportunity for exit first introduced by the government in 1980 and refined in

1982. According to the provisions of the 1982 law — valid initially only for 120 days and applicable only to crimes committed before January 31, 1982 —information on the organisation of and participation in acts of violence could be exchanged for a

reduction in sentence, calibrated according to the value of the information in

preventing further violence. Two broad categories of "repentant terrorist" were

created: those who admitted their own guilt but refused to betray others (dissociati) and those who were prepared to put everything they knew at the disposal of the

magistrature (collaboratorf).55 The specific terms of exchange established by the

law gave particular advantage to those who had committed the most serious

actions, who were generally organisers rather than marginal participants and

whose knowledge therefore placed them in the strongest position to negotiate an

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exchange. The government thus fixed a terrain of direct conflict between the state

and clandestine groups over the allegiance of the latter's members. Identity, and the

prevention or encouragement of the shift from "political prisoner" to "terrorist"

became a resource at stake, as individuals were provided with the opportunity to

accept public redefinition and thereby proclaim their exit from clandestine groups and from any further role in communicative exchanges. The state has been

extremely successful in this sphere, dismantling entire clandestine groups and

several columns of the Red Brigades, since, with few exceptions, the law has been

liberally applied by the magistrature.56 Indeed, since 1981 the trials have come to

provide an arena for the public representation of identities claimed by defendants

according to the extent of their exchanges with the state and the accompanying motivations. Distinctions between degrees of "repentance" have been embodied in

the division of the dock into separate, insulated, sections for the several categories of defendant. In addition, as the emergence of factions within the Red Brigades has become clearer, the same separations have been exploited to proclaim the

adherence of defendants to a particular faction: presence in one or another of the

"cages" (of which there may be up to seven in any one trial) is a public indication of the alliances and allegiances within the group. Most trials now begin with conflict between the judges and the Red Brigades over the allocation of members to specific

cages and over demands by individuals to be admitted to the cage of a particular

faction, which itself may or may not accept their allegiance. The previous attempts

by the Red Brigades to render the trial and its verdict problematic have thus been

replaced by conflict over the internal classification of members and by public proclamation, through the documents distributed by each faction, of the nature

and history of their specific identities.57 Nevertheless, notwithstanding the initial success of the government in encouraging the renunciation of political violence, the

consequences both of concentrating the politically violent in maximum security jails and of ending the direct exchanges with the state leave open the question whether the success of the legal response will in fact be definitive.

In addition to supporting government legislation, largely directed to those

who have already committed acts of violence, the PCI and trade unions have

responded by mobilising their resources in the arenas where members of the Red

Brigades and other groups are known to be present. In Turin, where the PCI's

dominant role in local politics since 1975 has placed opportunities to sponsor public action under the party's direct control and where the repeated attacks carried

out by the Red Brigades at Fiat plants threaten the role of the unions, responses to

violence have been especially numerous and articulate. Apart from conveying their

rejection of violence to as wide an audience as possible, the actions of

representatives of the Left have had two objectives. First, means have been

organised by which the population can express its opposition to the use of violence

and demonstrate its solidarity with the victims of violence. Second, the unions (and particularly the FLM in the Fiat Mirafiori plant) have sought to convince the workforce that its enemy's enemy is not a friend but another enemy —that the Red

Brigades' attacks on management and on the political opponents of the Left do not

represent an alternative, or supplementary, means to achieving the Left's general

goals, but in fact destroy the very possibility of moving towards those goals. By organising acts which publicly demonstrate such convictions, the intention is to communicate to the Red Brigades that their own class referent is strongly opposed to the use of violence and refuses the Red Brigades' claim to representation of

working-class interests.

The forms of action adopted to carry those messages offer a deliberate contrast

to the actions of clandestine groups — mass demonstrations, assemblies in schools

and factories, and circulation of petitions for individual and collective signature,

104



such as that launched on February 23, 1978, to communicate public solidarity with

anyone selected for jury service in the twice-interrupted trial of the Red Brigades'

leadership. In the factories the FLM has organised meetings for the representatives of unions, magistrature and police to address the workforce on the consequences of

violence and has made use of the principal demonstrative instrument at its disposal, the strike, in immediate response to acts of violence inside and outside the

workplace.58 Nevertheless, such forms of action, while they may convey views and

establish a sense of solidarity among participants, have been acknowledged as

inadequate. They have no obvious, direct effect on the levels of violence and while

solidarity can be a useful by-product of actions devoted to other ends, it cannot be

pursued successfully as an end in its own right. A decline in participation is an inevitable consequence of the responses themselves coming to resemble the ritual

repetitiveness of the acts of violence being opposed.59 Falling participation may however allow an exactly opposite reading to that intended, since it suggests the

indifference — or, worse, even the tolerance — of sections of the working class

towards the use of violence, which might confirm the views of the Red Brigades either as essentially contiguous to the legitimate Left or as an effective competitor with the Left for political allegiance. Further, the repeated use of strikes as symbolic communications may weaken their instrumental effectiveness on the terrain of

ordinary industrial conflict since the workforce may be increasingly reluctant to

maintain a high level of mobilisation for any of the various objectives. As a consequence the PCI and FLM have been led to include features with

direct instrumental potential into their communicative acts, in particular by the

distribution in 1979-1980 in the factories and neighbourhoods of Turin of questionnaires containing (amongst statements on violence and other questions) invitations to respondents to provide, anonymously, details on the movements or

activities of fellow-workers and neighbours which might indicate their involvement in political violence. Despite the guarantees offered for the evaluation of precise indications before transmission to the magistrature or police, the initiative

provoked serious conflict among political parties and unions on the legal status and

political advisability of opening up a communicative channel which might also serve to convey responses entirely motivated by private enmities or based on no

evidence. This line of action also raised the alarming prospect of outcomes which

would converge with some of the goals ascribed to the Red Brigades and other

groups: viz, generating (i) mutual suspicion within the workforce which would weaken expressions of public solidarity and mobilisation against violence, as well

as (ii) fears of being judged and reported a "terrorist" which would discourage active individual intervention in ordinary industrial or political conflict. Such collective reluctance to press ordinary political or industrial demands with

sufficient vigour, as a consequence of the actions taken by the PCI and FLM

themselves to eliminate violence, might actually generate the conservatism and

collaboration with opponents that constitute the very grounds for the Red

Brigades' opposition to the legitimate Left. In the event, however, whether because

of dissent from the specific invitation or a general reluctance either to respond to

questionnaires or to continue with apparently ineffective forms of action, the

response rate to the questionnaires was extremely low and the usable details on

possible individual involvement in violence nearly negligible.60 In subsequent use of questionnaires on a national scale in late 1981, the PCI in fact dropped both the

request for details of specific suspicions and the direct encouragement to report them.

Appreciation of Italian political violence as a particular kind of complex communicative structure, in which both the Red Brigades and their opponents are intent on establishing identities from positions which have shifted considerably

105



between 1970-1982, raises questions demanding further urgent consideration.

Given the paradoxical consequences of some forms of direct responses to violence,

can intentional actions be devised which evade the risk of unintended contribution

to the projects which they seek to eliminate? In what ways can the responses to

violence overcome one type of irrational action — the pursuit of goals (solidarity is a case in point) which can only be the outcome of actions devoted to other ends and

may actually be frustrated by explicit avowal as a goal? Or, if the political contribution to the elimination of violence is to pursue policies which will eliminate violence as a by-product, then — within the very general schemes for improving

society — what are the immediate objectives which are likely to have that effect?

NOTES

I am especially grateful to Gian Mario Bravo, Dario Di Vico, Franco Ferraresi, Chiara Ottaviano, Ettore Santi and Marino Regini for discussions and different kinds of assistance with research. I have

also benefitted considerably from the intellectual pressure and interest of my colleague David Saunders, and from the editorial comments of Michael Roberts. Funds for research were generously provided by Griffith University and the School of Humanities Research Committee.

1. De Luna (1978), for example, suggests that the recurrence of organised rightwing violence can be

partly explained in terms of the changing relationship between the neofascist MSI and the DC.

2. See e.g. Wilkinson (1977). In spite of the promising title, Bell (1978) scarcely discusses Italian

responses. Dahrendorf (1979:113) has observed that differences in national responses constitute the

aspect of contemporary European violence most in need of explanation: a first step towards their

analysis has recently been made in Lodge (1981). 3. For the Red Brigades' description of actions of "armed propaganda", see Soccorso Rosso ( 1976:83, 266, 278) and the retrospective assessment of the decade in Brigate Rosse (1980:270). 4. Watzlawick et. al. (1967): Bateson 1972: part II). Bateson explicitly asserts the continuity between

schizophrenic and 'normal' communication (p. 193). 5. Expansion in the options for members of the Red Brigades and other groups since 1980 is discussed

below (pp. 102-04). The attempt to organise a publicity black-out in 1980 is discussed in Jannuzzi et al.

(1980). 6. The therapeutic treatment of schizophrenic patients shows how the existence of real and imaginary audiences, which make what are perceived to be incompatible demands, is a principal feature of the

communicational pathology, although they may also represent a mechanism of release from it (Bateson 1972:168. 197). 7. The general problems of the limits of intentional actions and responses to irrational actions are

acutely and suggestively analysed in a series of articles by J. Elster (e.g. 1981). 8. Italy's penal code, dating from 1930, juxtaposes measures inserted to check political opposition to

the Fascist regime alongside clauses introduced after 1945 to prevent reconstitution of fascist

organisations and to define violence directed to that end as a special category. The recent creation of

"terrorism" as a legal category is discussed in section 6 below. 9. For local examples of the DC and PCI interpretations of the Resistance, see Pridham (1981:33-36, 44. 73) and Kertzer ( 1980:157-162). Pridham notes that incoming PCI administrations in Tuscan towns

in 1975 began to sponsor publications of local histories of the Resistance. Inthesame period. 1973-1978, the thirtieth anniversaries of events between the beginnings of the Resistance and the entry into force of

the Constitution provided highly visible occasions for the PCI to celebrate the links.

10. Fabris (1977:91) gives the results of an April 1976 survey of attitudes to the MSI; Sani(1976; 1980) discusses attitudes to the MSI and PCI; Pasquino (1979: 626) records the decline since 1967 in the

proportion of electors who believe that the DC is opposed to violence. In general it is uncertain how the

term "violence" has been taken by the respondents in the different surveys: in particular it is not clear

how much of the perceived illegitimacy of the PCI has been based on the party's alleged links with

violence nor how far this association has been weakened since the surveys were carried out in the early and mid-1970s. 11. Sani (1980:312) reports a 1975 survey in which 1.5% approved of violence to people as a political

activity, 0.4% claimed they would be prepared to use such violence themselves and 0.3% said they had

actually done so: questions concerning damage to property produced nearly identical responses. The

106



results of another survey, published in La Discussione 26.5.1980, p. 4, revealed that 8% were "partly favourable" to the use of violence, 1.8% reckoned it could not be eliminated and 0.5% that it was

necessary. 12. See Di Palma (1977:219-253) on the diacritic role of party images and ideologies in Italian politics. 13. The following two paragraphs are based on material largely culled from the official party journals La Discussione (DC) and Rinascita (PCI). Different factions and individuals may place their emphases in different places, but there is sufficient homogeneity within each party to speak of single classifications of violence. 14. 22 of the 29 politicians killed or injured since 1969 belonged to the DC: 19 of the 22 attacks were carried out by the Red Brigades (Galleni 1981: 64, 87). See also B. Zaccagnini, "Perché vogliono distruggerci", La Discussione, 7.5.1979, p. 1. 15. G. Galloni's speech to an assembly of DC representatives, published in II Popolo, 30.3.1978. The Socialist Party has also insisted on the connections between Leninism and the strategy of the BR (e.g. L'Avanti 7.1.1981). 16. The distinction between acts of violence and violent acts is taken from Harris (1980:13-16) who

argues that a violent act is an act which need not necessarily have been performed or been associated with violence (demonstration, march), whereas an act of violence involves violence by definition

(assassination). 17. Bertini et al. (1978:22, 38), where the break in PCI classifications is described in some detail. 18. The Red Brigades have discussed in several places the obstacles to successful communication: see the documents reprinted in Soccorso Rosso ( 1976:85), Barbato ( 1980:223) and Brigate Rosse ( 1980:278). 19. April 18, symbolising the establishment of the DC's political dominance in its 1948 election victory, has been used for the kidnapping of a magistrate in 1974 and the release of the 'false' communique announcing Moro's death in 1978; December 12, sign of the origin of the "strategy of tension" in the 1969

bombs, was selected for the kidnapping of another magistrate in 1980; the juxtaposition of the Red

Brigades' kidnappings and trials of the group's members is discussed in section 5 below. 20. Soccorso Rosso (1976:85). 21. For first person accounts of the time spent by full-time members of clandestine groups in reading and preparing materials to facilitate and justify actions, see Marconi (1980:152-3), La Discussione, 25.6.1979, p. 15, and Giorgio (1981:40-41). The role of the composition of texts has been overlooked because of the attention paid to their explicit content — regarded as self-evidently feeble and incoherent in their political analyses and justifications of violence. 22. Recent organisational changes which provide a partially alternative metacommunicative channel will be discussed in the next section. 23. This technique was used in both the Sossi and Moro kidnappings (Soccorso Rosso 1976:196; Bocca 1978:36). At some points ambiguity in the authorship of texts may itself be deliberately exploited (Moss 1981). 24. Graham (!977:ch.III) reworks J.L. Austin's analysis of performative utterances. A relevant

example of how a statement uttered in a particular way can bring about the truth of its own content is the case of the boy who suddenly bawls into the ear of the unsuspecting teacher carrying a delicate balance "You've dropped it!" so that the equipment is indeed dropped (ibid: 70). The dangers of responding to the Red Brigades' acts by declaring "We are at war with them", thus establishing the Red Brigades' own

justifications for their use of violence, are emphasised in the editorial of La Civilth Callolica (1980) n.3117, May 3, p. 211. The Red Brigades' use and abuse of performative utterances is discussed in

particular cases below (pp. 100-102). 25. In only three cases, two in Genoa and one in Naples, have the Red Brigades wounded or murdered members of the PCI. In the Genoa cases, one (Castellano) was probably a victim because of his

managerial role, the other (Rossa) because of his public testimony against a Red Brigades' suspect. The

episode in Naples (involving the alderman responsible for municipal housing and urban development) took place during the kidnapping of a DC politician (Cirillo) who was directly concerned with the allocation of dwellings to families made homeless by the 1980 earthquake: the victim was clearly chosen because of the otherwise unavailable information he could provide — to be used by the BR in the "trial" of Cirillo — before being shot. The group has explicitly rejected the use of violence against "revisionists" (cf. communiqué no. 3, June 15, 1981, in the Sandrucci kidnapping). 26. Skinner (1974, 1979) has drawn attention to the disputes provoked by the strategy of attempting to

legitimate new or hitherto illegitimate actions by reference to an accepted moral or political vocabulary. 27. BR documents reprinted in Bocca (1978:66-69) and Papa (1979:235-236, 252). Explicit concern with the maintenance of political identity seems to date from early 1978: for a recent statement see the document of 24.5.1982, reprinted in IIBollettino del Coordinamemo dei Comitaticontro la Repressione (Dec. 1982) n.5, p. 60. 28. The statistics on political violence are taken from Galleni (1981: 175-197, 211-279) updated to include 1981 from Direzione del PCI: Sezione Problemi dello Stato: Attentati e Violenze in Italia net 1981 (Rome: 1982). Galleni's figure for all acts of violence includes damage to people and property in urban riots or revolts (e.g. Reggio Calabria 1970-1); clearly, there is also room for doubt in the attribution of unsigned acts of violence to Left or Right by police and magistrature. Barbato (1980)

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provides brief details on many actions between 1969-1979.

29. Holzner (1978) is a very useful approach to social identity. 30. In 1970 Loi ta Continua advocated various types of action subsequently carried out by the Red

Brigades (Bobbio 1979:80-1). 31. Soccorso Rosso (1976:87, 254). 32. Galleni (1981:176). 33. See the comments by A. Negri on the Red Brigades' "ideological trasformismo", cit. in Bocca

( 1980:142). The vocabulary shared by the BR with A utonomia and its predecessor groups appears to be an important piece of circumstantial evidence for the charges of direct collaboration with the BR against Autonomía's leaders (see Qualegiustizia 1981, no. 51; 228-292). That this collaboration is a fact, and evidence of a single strategic design behind all leftwing violence, is asserted by Ventura (1980). The trial of the autonomi arrested on April 7 and Dec. 21 1979, in which similar assertions will be examined,

began in Rome on Feb. 24, 1983.

34. See, for example, the explicit discussions of violence by leaders of the extraparliamentary Left in

Deaglio et al. (1978) and Marconi (1979). 35. The first important indication of the split came with the simultaneous publication in December 1981 of two "theoretical" documents, each purporting to emanate from the principal decision-making level; confirmation came with the exchange of hostile leaflets during the Dozier kidnapping in the same month. A premonition of dissent over strategy had already occurred in the minor, but public, scission of

July 1979 ( Controinf ormazione, 1979, n. 16, supplemento contains the texts of accusation and counter

accusation); and, according to some former members of the group, the Walter Alasia column in Milan had more or less declared its independence at the two summit meetings of Red Brigades' leaders in 1980. For recent statements of position by both factions, see II Bollettino del Coordinamento dei Comitali contro la Repressione 1982, n.6, pp. 55-68. 36. In Bocca (1978:108), citing a document reprinted in Barbato (1980:218-227). The following details on organisation after 1975 are taken from the description given by P. Peci, a former Red Brigades' member, to the magistrature and published in Lotta Continua, 7.5.1980, pp. 5-20. 37. How the division of labour worked out in practice in the different columns affects the penal responsibilities of members and is presently under examination in a number of trials. It also raises difficult questions about the extent and nature of participation which is regarded as sufficient to constitute "membership". The legal position of doctors and lawyers who have had professional dealings with clandestine militants has come in for particular scrutiny. For further discussion see G. Spazzali, "II

gioco e le cándele", Controinf ormazione, April 1981; 1-4. 38. The Minister of Justice pointed out that the detailed knowledge of his ministry demonstrated by the Red Brigades in their kidnapping and "interrogation" of a magistrate in 1980 could be found in a volume already on sale (Jannuzzi et al. 1981:368). 39. In November 1981 there were circa 1100 members or suspected members of clandestine groups in the dozen maximum security jails: 364 belor %ed or were thought to belong to the Red Brigades, 239 to Prima Linea and 122 to Autonomía (La Rep <bblica 5.1.1982, p. 4, citing the Prime Minister's report on the activity of the secret services). By Nov. 1! 32 the figure had risen to 1837, of which 1357 belonged to the Left and 480 to the Right: a further 353 274 on the Left and 79 on the Right) were wanted by the

police [La Repubblica, 4.12.1982, p.15). 40. For an example of dissociation, see th declaration by Negri and others on the riot in Trani jail which was led by the Red Brigades in December 1980 as an accompaniment to the D'Urso kidnapping then in progress (Jannuzzi et al. 1981: 290). The act of public dissociation was specifically prompted by a

magistrate's decision to charge 79 prisoners of different political persuasion, including Negri and his

fellow-signatories, with actual participation in the management of the kidnapping. 41. The prison reform law of 26.7.1975 no. 354, art. 67, empowered parliamentary and regional deputies to visit jails without further authorisation, although both the extent of their inspections and contacts with prisoners are narrowly defined. Normal contacts with kin, friends and lawyers, though hampered by the remoteness of many maximum security jails, are also maintained. For the attempt to establish contact with Moro's kidnappers through the access to the Red Brigades' members in jail by their lawyer, see Guiso (1979). Texts authored in jail have been regularly published by

Controinf ormazione and, since 1981, by the Bollettino del Coordinamento dei Comitati contro la

Repressione which provides information on the names and carceral destinations of those arrested, as

well as indications whether they have collaborated with the magistrature. 42. The details of the kidnapping, as interpreted by the principal political protagonists, can be found

in Jannuzzi et al. (1981) and Intini (1981). 43. Confirmation of both the fact and the extent of negotiations only appeared in 1982 provoking a

number of resignations and dismissals. Full details are presently being uncovered in a judicial enquiry. 44. Figures from Galleni (1981: 88-89, 184-85). Details of specific actions are given and discussed in

Cavallini (1978). 45. On problems of identity and the symbolic character of recent union action, see Pizzorno

(1980:240), Rusconi and Scamuzzi (1981:97) and Manghi (1977:23-46). For the background to

industrial relations and conflict in some of the firms where the Red Brigades are present, see Pizzorno et

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al. (1974-1978), especially Vol. III (Reyneri), vol. IV (Regalia) and Vol. VI (Regini). 46. Red Brigades' use of union language and demands is documented in the analysis by the UIL of the

group's actions and texts at the Alfa-Romeo factory at Arese ('Una cronología commentata sul terrorismo all Alfa', UIL cyclo. July-Sept. 1981). Among the arrests of 1980-2 were shopfloor representa tives (delegatti) of the various unions in several factories, including Alfa-Romeo. 47. These targets account for 48% (76 ex 146) of all deliberate woundings, murders and ritual

kidnappings carried out by the Red Brigades between 1970-1982 (Galleni 1981:184-6; supplemented by figures for murders and kidnappings in 1981 in La Repubblica 13.1.1982, p. 5). 48. The principal juridical issues are discussed by Papa (1979). A participant observer's account by another defence lawyer is also valuable (B. Guidetti Serra, "Il ruolo dell'awoçato attraverso la cronaca di un processo", Quaderni Piacentini (1978), no. 67-8, pp. 49-74; no. 69, pp. 49-68). The term "felicity condition" is used in speech-act theory, following J.L. Austin's initial discussion, to indicate any requirement (linguistic or social) for the valid accomplishment of a performative speech act. 49. These demands come, respectively, from the D'Urso, Cirillo and Sandrucci kidnappings. 50. Tambiah (1973: 218-224): see also Ahern (1979). The Red Brigades'concern with symbols, and the

problems of political rationality raised by their actions, suggest further comparisons with magic as a sub

category of ritual, to be explored at greater length elsewhere. 51. For discussion of the constitutionality of particular measures, see Bevere (1980). The lack of

specificity at relevant points in the Constitution leaves open whether and to what extent its articles have been violated. 52. The first three are reproduced in Bevere (1980). The 1975 and 1980 laws were submitted to referenda in 1978 and 1981 respectively: in both cases the majorities in favour of retention were

substantial. For the details of the 1982 law, see note 55 below. 53. Pulitano (1981:81). 54. See the references in note 33 above. Autonomia's leaders are being tried both on general charges (armed insurrection, organisation of or participation in an armed group) and for their role in specific illegal actions. The most serious charges carry a sentence of life imprisonment. 55. Law no. 304 of May 29, 1982 ("Measures for the defence of the constitutional order") was

prorogued by decree for a further 120 days on Oct. 1 1982: its provisions therefore lapsed on Jan. 31, 1983. In addition to reductions in sentence, the law contained clauses facilitating release on parole and

permitting the revocation of any benefits secured by false or deliberately incomplete information. The earlier measures (contained in article 4 of law no. 15, Feb. 6, 1980) were less precise and of narrower

scope; they are given a legal commentary by Chelazzi (1981) who reproduces the Parliamentary discussion of their likely advantages and disadvantages. 56. According to figures released by the Ministry of Justice, 389 members of clandestine groups (Left and Right) had made some kind of exchange with the state under the laws of 1980 and 1982:78 had opted for full collaboration involving the most serious actions of the past decade, 177 had chosen "dissociation" and the remaining 134 had confessed but only been able to provide information on minor

episodes (La Repubblica 30/31.1.1983, p. 15). Although more precise figures are not available, it is

agreed that leftwing groups have been much more vulnerable to these exchanges than the Right and that within the Left the Red Brigades' members have been rather less ready to confess than the members of other groups. 57. The trial in Rome between April 1982 and January 1983 of the local column of the Red Brigades (responsible for a series of murders including that of Aldo Moro) ¡Illustrates the group's concern with classification and reclassification, particularly in view of the extensive publicity the court proceedings received. 58. From late 1976 till the end of 1978 more than 1430 assemblies and demonstrations were organised in Piedmont, under the aegis of municipal and provincial administrations (650), partisans' associations

(350), schools (80) and factories (350): the 1978 petition collected more than 300,000 signatures. See

Consiglio Regionale del Piemonte ( 1979:16) in which details of local violence and political responses can be found. 59. For discussion by unionists of the falling participation rate and ritual character of strikes, see

Rassegna Sindacale (1980) XXVI n. 4, p. 18; n. 18, p. 33; n. 36, pp. 45-46. The controversy over the reactions at Fiat Mirafiori to the murder of a journalist, Casalegno, in November 1977 is reprinted in

Consiglio Regionale del Piemonte (1979:106-115). 60. At Fiat the response rate was 2.5% from a workforce, including white-collar workers, of 62,968: no one offered information on individuals (II Consiglione (1980), no. 13, July, supplement, pp. 1-4). In Turin 12,700 (4%) replies were received from 300,000 copies distributed: 35 indications were passed on to the magistrature (Nuova Società, 27.10.1979, p. 14).

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1979 "The Problem of Efficacy: Strong and Weak Illocutionary Acts", Man n.s., 14, 1: 1-17.

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analysing italian political violence as a sequence of communicative acts: the red brigades 1970-1982

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