Replace "Al-Qaeda" with "Red Brigades", "Communism" with "Islam(ism)", "Italy" with "the West", and the current anti-terror globaloney is deja vu all over again....
This document was written in the early-80s. The tone is somewhat optimistic, as the BR had not yet fallen apart at that time as a result of their internal divisions and heavy repression. Even though the text is old, it's a good history lesson for North American leftists. - ATS
--
The Brigate Rosse: Politics Of Protracted War In The Imperialist
Metropolis
Basic Facts About The BR
The Red Brigades are not an armed collective, but the main Marxist-Leninist organization in Italy. They swim in the sea of proletarian unrest and share with other revolutionaries a base of support that is in the many thousands. Their leading position is valid not only on the scales of organization and influence, but also in the central reality that their strategic leadership has been proven in practice. They view their struggle as comprising the first stage of a protracted war, in which the central focus is the building of an armed communist party.
The BR has won significant victories, suffered important losses, and built and fought courageously for over fourteen years. During seasons of mass offensives against Italian capitalism as well as seasons of counter-blows and retreats. All around them during these years virtually all other revolutionary groupings have fallen to state repression, fragmented hopelessly from inner political confusions, or given up and drifted person-by-person back out of struggle or to reformism. The BR almost alone has endured and carried the struggle forward. This is a reality that its revisionist critics on this side of the Atlantic cannot face.
The impression is often given that the Red Brigades are a bourgeois student grouping similar to the U.S. Weather Underground. While the BR was born in the 1960's university and youth ferment in northern Italy, they bear no similarity to the Weather Underground. Not in class composition, not in strength and not in political line. The Brigades have an organic relationship to the Italian proletariat. Even from the beginning many of their members were from the working classes. More to the point, the BR is an integral stage in the long tradition of proletarian struggle in Italy.
An example is Alberto Franceschini, (now imprisoned), who is
one of the leading BR cadre and who represents the third
generation of his family to pick up the gun. Franceschini's
grandmother was an organizer of a militant peasant league in
1922. His grandfather was arrested and spent many years of his life in fascist prisons, before finally breaking out and joining the armed underground as a fighter (at age 59).
Carlos Franceschini, Alberto's father, was sent by the Nazis to Auschwitz concentration camp for being a communist. He too escaped, made his way back to their home region, and became an intelligence cadre in the Partisan Action Squads. After World War Two he went to work for the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). Now retired, he says: "I have lived as a proletarian and I want to die as a proletarian. I have done my work, I have given what I could give. Above all, I have given my son." This is the Red tradition that the Brigades represent.
Of the seven BR cadre known to the police as of September 1976 who came from the Southern city of Reggio Emilia (Franceschini's home town), four are from proletarian families, two from the petty bourgeoisie, and one from the peasantry. While three of them became university students, the other four were a plumber, a winery worker, a factory worker, and a salesman for a rubber cement distributor. One, Tonio Parou, was the most respected union shop steward in his plant. So even though the BR was born of the young revolutionary intelligentsia, they came from all classes and many were workers.
All serious evaluations of the Brigades deal with the BR's
wide network of support as well. While the BR does not reveal details of its organizational strength (and we ourselves have, of course, no way to directly measure these matters), it might be useful to review the commonly used public estimations on this. In the wake of the BR's Aldo Moro kidnapping (he was the Italian President-to-be and the single most powerful bourgeois politician) in 1978 the New York Times reported:
"The hard core of the Red Brigades consists of 400 to 500
full-time members who are on the payroll of the organization. Their salary is 250,000 lire (about $400) a month, the minimum wage of an Italian worker...
"Above ground, a second group of up to 1,000 Brigatisti live a seemingly normal existence as respected members of Italian society. Specialists in the government, press and diplomatic
community who have attempted to piece together a picture of how the terrorists operate generally believe that the above-ground members of the Red Brigades are men and women in their 30's and early 40's whose ties to the organization date back to the student revolution of the late 1960's and early 70's, and who have since made their mark in life and have reached positions of responsibility in government ministries, the police, the large
nationalized and private industries and the political parties...
"Among the new recruits, specialists say, have been a good
many workers in the large industries in the Milan and Turin area
- Italy's most prosperous and most advanced region. This is
thought to be highly important - and ominous."
Public estimates of the revolutionary left's active base
were uniformly large by the late 70's. Professor Sabino Acquaviva
of Padua (one of the militant student centres), a researcher on
political violence, put the size of the illegal left underground
at 4,000-8,000 cadre and the size of the active support base at
200,000-300,000. In a major New York Times Magazine story in
1981, the conservative U.S. journalist Claire Sterling (who has
obvious ties to the C.I.A.) writes of Italy's "so-called Second
Society of hundreds of thousands of law-abiding citizens offering
the terrorists acceptance and protection."
The question is not whether these estimates are numerically
accurate. This is not primary for us. Rather they show how all
observers have been impressed with the dimension of the BR's
organizational base. Even if, in the current season, repression
has disrupted and partially imposed a stillness, this doesn't
change the important fact that masses of people voluntarily made
a choice for communism.
It is an open secret that the BR has an underground among
the older "Stalinist" trade-unionists of the revisionist PCI
(Communist Party of Italy). These tough veterans of the docks and
steel mills, particularly in industrial Turin and Genoa, oppose
the revisionist sell-out of their party's revolutionary
tradition. Many bitterly condemn the 1945 disarming of their
partisan guerrilla units by the PCI leadership as the derailing
of revolution. In Genoa a 49-year-old worker at Italsider steel
works was caught secretly passing out BR leaflets by a
revisionist PCI union officer, who not only informed to the
police but testified against his co-worker in court. This
collaborator, Guido Rossa, was later executed by the BR.
[snip]
burn.ucsd.edu |
