‘‘A Laughter That Will Bury You All’’: Irony as Protest and Language as Struggle in the Italian 1977 Movement1

2009-05-03T22:39:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Gun Cuninghame

Summary:
Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the Italian ‘‘1977 Movement’’ in
its conflict with the grey, humourless political system was its use of irony to ridicule
its opponents. Irony was central to the identity of the movement and its cultural and
political break with the institutional old and vanguardist new lefts. Its use,
particularly by the ‘‘Metropolitan Indians’’, the transversalists and other ‘‘creatives’’,
marked a social revolt by mainly marginalized young people, who invented a new
political counter-culture based on linguistic experimentation in circumstances far
from the optimism of 1968. The paper, based directly on primary sources from the
movement and on interviews with former participants, reassesses a movement
usually characterized as ‘‘violent’’ by Italianist social history. It concludes that the
movement’s ‘‘ironic praxis’’ contributed to a fundamental change in Italian society
in the late seventies and has influenced the political style of contemporary
alterglobalist and anti-capitalist movements.

‘‘The revolution is over. We have won.’’ (Zut/A/traverso, Bologna, June
1977)2

This article was first published in the International Review of Social History [quarterly of the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis/International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Holland], No. 52, 2007, pp. 153–168. It is based on a paper, ‘‘The End of Politics: The 1977 Movement in Italy’’, presented
at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, London, in November
1997; and also on ch. 6, ‘‘Youth Counter-Cultures and Antagonist Communication: ‘Creative
Autonomia’ and the 1977 Movement’’, of my unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Autonomia: Movement
of Refusal: Social Movements and Conflict in Italy in the 1970s (Middlesex University, 2002). I
am indebted to Enrico Palandri and Ferruccio Gambino for sharing their experiences with me
and for providing valuable insights through in-depth interviews. I thank Franco Berardi, Bob
Lumley, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Autonomedia for providing permission to quote. The
illustrations used are taken from web sites that do not claim copyright. I also thank Laura
Corradi, Gavin Grindon, Alejandro Suero and Steve Wright for their comments, corrections and
additional sources. Finally, all translations of quotations from Italian and Spanish texts are mine,
as are any errors.

1. Circoli proletari giovanili di Milano (eds) Sara´ un risotto che vi seppellira´ (Milan, 1977). Title
of collected ephemera of Proletarian Youth Circles movement and a word play on the old
anarchist slogan, converted into ‘‘It will be a risotto that will bury you all’’.
2. ‘‘La rivoluzione e` finita, abbiamo vinto’’, ironic headline in one of the main newspapers of the
‘‘creative’’ wing of the Seventy-Seven Movement; quoted in Francesco Berardi, Dell’Innocenza.
1977: l’anno della premonizione (Verona, 1997), p. 50.

INTRODUCTION

The 1977 Movement (known as settantasette – ‘‘Seventy-Seven’’ – in Italy)
marked the end of Italy’s ‘‘long sixty-eight’’, which had lasted for a decade,
as compared to a few weeks in France and elsewhere. While the
iconoclastic punk movement screamed ‘‘No future’’ in Britain, perhaps
the main weapon of the revolt of ‘‘Year Nine’’3 against the austere,
humourless, bureaucratic authoritarianism of the Italian Communist Party
(ICP), and its ‘‘Historical Compromise’’4 with the corrupt Christian
Democrat regime, was its caustic irony and satirical wit. This was
particularly the case with the ‘‘Metropolitan Indians’’ (indiani metropolitani):
largely non-violent demonstrators who used face paint and
headdresses to signify their break from the ‘‘seriousness’’ of politics and
emphasize the theatrical and ludic aspects of protest.
This article aims to outline the rationale behind the ‘‘creative’’ wing of
Seventy-Seven and its ‘‘scream’’ against official politics of whatever hue
and anything within the Left, both Old and New, that smacked of
dullness, self-importance, dogmatism and hypocrisy. It will show how
humour in its historically most political form, irony, was central to the
identity of the movement and its fundamental cultural, as much as
political, break with both the institutional Old Left (ICP and Socialist
Party) and the vanguardist New Left of 1968 origin.
This was the linguistic, artistic, cultural and, ultimately, despite its ‘‘antipolitical’’
ethos, political revolution of the ‘‘Second Society’’5: students,
unemployed youth, precarious workers, and other ‘‘marginals’’ excluded
from the twilight of the Keynesian-Fordist pact and forced to reinvent a
new political praxis in very different circumstances from the optimism of
1968. Often wittily ironic, sometimes aggressively sarcastic, always
disparaging, Seventy-Seven’s use of creative humour also had devastating
political consequences. Such was the case of the expulsion of Luciano
Lama, an ICP leader and head of the CGIL6 trade unions, who along with
his bodyguards and several hundred press-ganged trade unionists, was

3. In Sette anni di desiderio: cronache 1977–1983 (Milan, 1985 [1983]), Umberto Eco gives this
name to the 1977 Movement. ‘‘Year One’’ was 1968, the historical break between the Old and
New Lefts.
4. Following the 1973 coup d’e´tat in Chile, the ICP’s leadership concluded that the
parliamentary road to socialism was closed. Enrico Berlinguer, the ICP’s party secretary,
devised the Historic Compromise strategy to increase electoral support among the middle
classes. The severe crisis of the seventies caused the Christian Democrats and ICP to agree on the
need to restabilize the Italian state and organize social consensus for economic austerity
measures.
5. A theory outlined by Alberto Asor Rosa in Le due societa´ (Turin, 1977). See section on ‘‘Two
Societies’’ for further analysis.
6. Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (Italian General Confederation of Labour), the
largest of the three union confederations and close to the ICP and the Italian Socialist Party.

unceremoniously driven out of Rome University, after attempting forcibly
to end an occupation: an historical turning point that marked the definitive
end of the ICP and the New Left’s mutual tolerance and the rupture of any
possible ‘‘Left unity’’ in that country.7

This article will examine the how and why behind an extraordinary
panoply of slogans, graffiti, chants, zines, happenings, street theatre, and
free radio stations. Bologna’s ‘‘creative Autonomia’’ [Autonomy] also
produced ‘‘Mao-Dadism’’, the melding of the Maoism of the Cultural
Revolution with the Dadaism of interwar artistic nihilism. Another
current was ‘‘transversalism’’: the attempt by the A/Traverso magazine
collective to deconstruct autonomia,8 operaismo (workerism),9 and the
Left in general. While Mao-Dadaism and transversalism took themselves
more seriously, they shared with the Metropolitan Indians’ ironic slogans
the same subversive intent to ‘‘turn the world upside down’’ by playfully
undermining the linguistic and cultural norms of both capitalism and
socialism. The article concludes by tracing links between Seventy-Seven’s
celebration of humour as political event and the sometimes theatrical
praxis of contemporary alter-globalist and anti-capitalist movements.

‘‘A STRANGE MOVEMENT OF STRANGE STUDENTS’’10

The mass movement that emerged in Rome and Bologna, in particular, in
February–April 1977 was categorized by the ICP intellectual and
moderate workerist, Asor Rosa, as the ‘‘Second Society’’: a nomadic
amalgam of university and secondary school students, unemployed and
counter-cultural youth, feminists, homosexuals, artists, and unaffiliated
ex-New Left activists known as cani sciolti (stray dogs), plus autonomia
and the remnants of the New Left parties11. The countercultural
and anti-political components that had been prominent in the 1968
movements returned to the fore to challenge the neo-Leninist and

7. I thank Alejandro Suero for sharing with me his idea that such events are more important in
‘‘epoch-making’’ than repression, the latter usually taken as marking the end of a cycle of social
movement mobilization and therefore of a specific epoch.
8. A social movement produced by the disintegration of the New Left groups in the mid-1970s
and a general disaffection among young activists with the party form. See Steve Wright, Storming
Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London, 2002) and my
unpublished Ph.D. thesis.
9. Italian operaismo was born in the late 1950s and emphasized workers’ autonomous selforganization,
while criticizing trade-union-based ‘‘workerism’’. For a definitive history of
operaismo, see Wright, Storming Heaven.
10. L. Manconi and M. Sinibaldi, ‘‘Uno strano movimento di strani studenti’’, Ombre Rosse, 20
(1977), pp. 28–n/a.
11. Lotta Continua [Continuous Struggle], Avanguardia Operaia [Workers’ Vanguard], Il
Manifesto (now a national daily newspaper), Potere Operaio [Workers’ Power] plus a galaxy of
smaller groups.

workerist premises of organized Autonomia through the ironic communicative
action of the Metropolitan Indians and the linguistic transversalism
of ‘‘creative autonomia’’.

However, unlike 1968, there was no workers’ movement in tandem or
potential allies in the institutional Left. Its ‘‘Historic Compromise’’ with
the Christian Democrats had led the ICP from a position of relative
neutrality in 1968 to open hostility towards the more radical 1977
Movement. The movement perceived the ICP’s leaders as even more rigid
than the political Right in their insistence on austerity and repressive
measures to pacify the severe crisis of the mid-1970s, including the highly
unpopular plans to restructure the universities which sparked off Seventy-
Seven. Despite its social-democratic shift towards Eurocommunism, the
ICP retained its ‘‘Stalinist soul’’, took a conservative stance on the divorce
and abortion referendums and seemed unable to appreciate the significance
of the new social movements.12 The rupture with the party system was
complete and only one side could emerge intact from such an uncompro-

12. Antonio Negri, ‘‘Between ‘Historic Compromise’ and Terrorism: Reviewing the Experience
of Italy in the 1970s’’, Le Monde Diplomatique (English edn, trans. Ed Emery), September
(1998); http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/1998/09/11negri, (accessed April 2001).

mising confrontation, as Ferruccio Gambino, a sociologist and former
Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power)13 militant, states:

Basically they were strangers in their own land. When they turned their heads it
was not like in Corso Traiano [major riot in a working-class district of Turin] in
1969, when there were 5,000 workers behind the students. This time there were
no workers. That makes a difference and I think they paid very dearly for that. It
was a much more difficult situation than in 1969.14

Whereas 1968 saw an explosion of antagonist movements, behaviours,
and mentalities that spread throughout Italian, and indeed global society,
synchronizing with a profound process of social, economic, and cultural
crisis and change, 1977, as the culmination of that process, represented its
implosion and dispersion throughout society in an individualized rather
than collective form. The outburst of political, social, and cultural
innovation and creativity represented by Seventy-Seven ultimately fell
into a void of repression and terrorism, its actors unable to maintain the
tremendous momentum of February and March. Autonomia, as a post-
New Left mass entity, was the only overtly political movement in Seventy-
Seven. However, organized autonomia’s attempts to hegemonize the
movement and to ‘‘raise the level of conflict’’ with the state caused a
permanent internal dispute, whose divisive effects contributed to the
movement’s crisis and premature demise. Revisionist post-Marxist sociological
accounts have emphasized Seventy-Seven’s violent, self-destructive
tendencies, while minimizing its creative, humorous characteristics15.
Sympathetic radical, Marxist, and autonomist accounts have stressed its
innovatory contribution to the evolution of contemporary Italian,
European, and now global social movements, given the strong Italian
influence within alterglobalism.16

RUPTURE WITH THE ICP

However, the most important difference between the movements of 1968
and 1977 was without doubt the very different relations between the social

13. An operaismo-influenced group which pushed for the alliance between the libertarian 1968
students’ movement and the autonomous workers movement of the 1969 ‘‘Hot Autumn’’ strikewave.
Many of its militants and intellectuals later became involved in autonomia and Seventy-
Seven.
14. Interview with Ferruccio Gambino, June 1999 (Padua).
15. Donatella Della Porta, Movimenti collettivi e sistema politico in Italia 1960–1995 (Rome,
1996); Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978
(London, 1990); Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age
(Cambridge, 1996).
16. Berardi, Dell’innocenza; Marco Grispigni, Il Settantasette: Un manuale per capire, un saggio
per riflettere (Milan, 1997); George Katsiaficas The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous
Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1997).

movements and their historical mediator with the state, the ICP, which
had been the main beneficiary, in terms of votes, from the upsurge of the
social movements after 1968, almost overtaking the Christian Democrats
in the 1976 national elections. It was not hard to predict the conflict
between Seventy-Seven and the ICP, but its ferocity, particularly the
incident with Lama, the CGIL leader, at Rome University on 17 February
took most by surprise.

The movement exploded exactly in those parts of the social terrain
considered to be securely occupied by the ICP, namely the universities and
‘‘Red Bologna’’, the capital of Emilia-Romagna, the main region of the
‘‘Red Belt’’ of northern central Italy and the ICP’s showpiece for its local
government strategy of cooperation with the small and medium scale
industry of the so-called ‘‘Third Italy’’.17 A generally contemptuous
attitude led to the disastrous miscalculations that brought about Lama’s
misconceived attempt forcibly to ‘‘normalize’’ the university and end the
occupation. His accompanying group of about 300 ICP and
CGIL militants was too small and divided. Many factory workers left as

17. So termed to contrast it with the historical divide between the ‘‘two Italies’’ of the developed,
industrialized north and the underdeveloped, agricultural south.

soon as they realized they were not confronting ‘‘fascists’’ as they had
previously been informed.

The Metropolitan Indians drowned out Lama’s harangue with their
mocking chants, provoking a violent reaction:

In the large open area of the campus where he was to speak, Lama found another
platform already rigged up, with a dummy of himself on it (complete with his
famous pipe). There was a big red cutout of a Valentine’s heart, with a slogan
punning his name – ‘‘Nessuno L’Ama’’ [Lama Nobody [:::] or Nobody Loves
Him]. Around this platform there was a band of Metropolitan Indians.
As Lama started to speak, they began to chant ‘‘Sacrifices, Sacrifices, We Want
Sacrifices!’’ (a parody of the State’s economic policy upheld by the Communist
Party). ‘‘Build us More Churches and Fewer Houses!’’ (Italy has more churches
than any other European country, and a chronic housing shortage). ‘‘We demand
to work harder and earn less!’’ [:::]. The irony aggravated the humourless
heavies.18

Then came the more violent anger of the autonomi who responded with a
hail of stones to the aggression of Lama’s minders who had attacked the
Metropolitan Indians with fire extinguishers. Lama and his entourage were
pushed out of the campus and the truck with his loudspeaker system was
smashed up. Both sides taunted each other with shouts of ‘‘fascists’’, a
deadly insult for an Italian leftist. Others broke down and wept,
overwhelmed by the historic significance of the moment: the Rubicon
had been crossed and the Italian Left was now irredeemably split. The
damage done was irreversible and the split between the ICP and the
movement had become an unbridgeable abyss, locking both into an
increasingly bitter confrontation, particularly after Renato Zangheri, the
ICP mayor of Bologna, defended the killing of a student activist by riot
police on 11 March.

THE ‘‘TWO SOCIETIES’’

The shock of Lama’s humiliating expulsion forced the ICP’s intellectuals
to analyse seriously a movement that until then they had only derided or
ignored. The counter-attack was led by the ICP’s Asor Rosa in a series of
articles in L ‘Unita´ ,19 in which he outlined his theory of the ‘‘two
societies’’: a ‘‘first society’’ composed of ‘‘guaranteed’’ social strata,
attached to the unions and political parties, whose interests were considered
to be synonymous with those of the Historic Compromise; and a
‘‘second society’’ composed of ‘‘non-guaranteed’’ marginalized social
subjects, particularly the young unemployed and underemployed trapped

18. Anon., ‘‘Lama Sabachthani’’, in Italy: Autonomia. Post-Political Politics (New York, 1980),
pp. 100–101, 101.
19. The ICP’s national daily newspaper.

in unregulated black-market jobs, with whom an institutional dialogue
over the ‘‘politics of austerity’’ implemented since 1973 to help the
economy out of its worst postwar crisis was necessary if all but impossible.

The interests of the ‘‘first society’’ were represented by the national party
system and the unions, while the irreducibly marginalized ‘‘second
society’’ self-organized locally in autonomous antagonist movements.
This was also due to the failure of the historical workers’ organizations to
represent the non-guaranteed sectors, particularly youth, who were
unprotected by labour laws and exploited in the growing sector of black
market sweatshops.

Asor Rosa’s theory was the first recognition of the movement’s social
complexity and cultural novelty. It recognized the limits of a social
democratic strategy of ‘‘normalization’’, differing from the conspiracytheory-
type analysis which typified the ICP’s attempt to understand those
movements, armed or otherwise, to its left. However, his theory remained
flawed, contradictorily accusing the movement of being both ‘‘hedonistically
apolitical’’ and ‘‘politically anti-communist’’. It expressed no
appreciation of the movement’s attack on politics itself, one of its most
novel characteristics, nor of the impending crisis in the Fordist productive
model, based on the ‘‘pact between producers’’. The ‘‘first society’’, in fact,
was also destined for defeat and the erosion and removal of its guarantees
in the aftermath of the collapse of the 1980 FIAT strike. Asor Rosa
attempted to make the new conflicts conform to an older model based on
historical class divisions; a frequent mistake in Marxist analyses of new
social movements.

METROPOLITAN INDIANS

Seventy-Seven surprised the New as much as the Old Left with its break
with the generation and politics of 1968, as the punks did with hippie
values in Britain. They mocked the ageing ‘‘sixty-eighters’’ almost as
harshly as the Old Left bureaucrats, calling them ‘‘zombies’’. The countercultural
youth who had been on the fringes of the 1968–1973 protest cycle
became central to the new cycle of the mid to late nineteen seventies.
However in Italy, as opposed to the UK punk scene, there was an unlikely
mixing of Marx and the metropolitan underground:

They tended to coalesce [:::] for some periods [but] they were also separated. I
belonged to an area where they touched each other. I wasneither a pure hippy
nor a pure Marxist. We were in between. [:::] On the other hand, there was Re
Nudo [underground magazine] and others who wouldn’t want to hear about
politics [:::]. I wasn’t ever in [RN], they were a bit too hippyish for my liking [:::]
for instance, I obviously did take drugs [:::] but I never thought that would make
an alterative world, whereas [RN] was very much into changing your diet [:::]. It
was almost a religious order [:::].20

20. Interview with Enrico Palandri, June 1999 (London).

The self-description of ‘‘autonomy’’ was adopted as a blanket term to
cover the ‘‘new politics’’, both ‘‘creative’’ and ‘‘organized’’. In Italy, youth
subculture was linked to the political subculture of autonomia, ‘‘alternative’’
practices being politicized and made oppositional. Between 1975
and 1979 urban youth entered the political scene as the protagonist in new
forms of urban conflict, its identity having been transformed by the
student-worker politics of 1968–1973. This identity was not perceived
exclusively in terms of youth experience, but more of the situation of the
modern metropolis. Thus, youth became coterminous with exclusion,
marginality, and deviance, and was treated by sociologists (except for
Alberto Melucci) and institutions alike as a ‘‘social problem’’. This false
image was appropriated and parodied by the Metropolitan Indians who
mocked ‘‘Western civilization’’ and its values, seeing unemployment as an
opportunity for self-development rather than a personal crisis or social
problem.21

The Metropolitan Indians were the most visible counter-cultural force
within Seventy-Seven. In Milan they emerged from a mixing of the
experience of the Proletarian Youth Clubs (PYC) with ‘‘Mao-Dadaism’’,
the ‘‘drug culture’’, group sex and ‘‘transversalist’’ linguistic experimentation,
particularly the use of sarcastic and ironic slogans to ridicule all forms
of organized politics, including organized autonomia. Mao-Dadism
defined itself as a hybrid by-product of both the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, when ‘‘art [:::] became daily life’’, and the Dadaist rejection of
‘‘the separation between art and daily life’’.22 This turn to Dada by
‘‘creative autonomia’’ and its historical link to the surrealist/situationist
project need to be reconsidered, in the sense that it was the surrealists,
rather than the Dadaists, who rejected the separation between art and daily
life. Their consideration of ‘‘the surreal’’ as a revolutionary project led
them to communism in the 1930s, while the Dadaists tended to remain
aloof from organized politics. This surrealist project, which continued
with the situationists, then had Dada superimposed back onto it in the late
1960s by various European counter-cultural groups. They linked Dada to
anarchism and adopted irony, play and theatricality ‘‘as political values,
and as a new way of making autonomous space. [This] was articulated by
these groups [:::] by using the language of Dada.’’23 Thus Mao-Dadism was
part of a general European counter-cultural reinvention of Dadaism in the
1960s and 1970s.

The Metropolitan Indians’s main contribution to Seventy-Seven was
the combination of linguistic experimentation and Situationist

21. Lumley, States of Emergency.
22. R. Scordino and DeriveApprodi (eds), ‘77: L’anno della grande rivolta (Rome, 1997, CD),
no page numbers.
23. Gavin Grindon, e-mail, 19 December 2006. I thank Gavin for this and other insights on the
relation between Dadaism and counter-cultural movements in contemporary European history.

detournement 24 in its leaflets, demonstration slogans, and police-taunting
gestures. They used mocking humour and what the semiologist
Umberto Eco called ‘‘Italo-indian’’25 to attack total institutions and the
patriarchal family. As part of the ‘‘meeting of the People of Men’’ they
proposed ‘‘the immediate practice at the territorial level of militant
antifamily patrols to tear away young men and especially young women
from patriarchal tyranny’’.26 They made surrealistic demands which

24. ‘‘[A] term deriving from the Situationists [which] describes the reassemblage of elements
torn out of their original context in order to make a subversive political statement’’; Nick Dyer-
Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism
(Urbana, IL, 1999), n. 60, p.187. The Situationist International was a neo-Marxist movement
which emerged from the post-surrealist milieu and was a key influence on the French May 1968
revolts with its analysis of advanced capitalism as a ‘‘society of spectacle’’ based on consumerism
and the mass media.
25. ‘‘C’e´ un altra lingua, l’italo-indiano’’, L’Espresso, no. 14, (1977); republished in Umberto
Eco, Sette anni di desiderio (Milan, 1983), and in Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni, L’orda
d’oro: 1968–1977. La grande ondata rivoluzionaria e creativa, politica ed esistenziale (Milan,
1997 [1988]); trans. Micaela Bogazzi and republ. as ‘‘Hay otro idioma, el italo-indiano’’, in
Balestrini and Moroni, La horda de oro (1968–1977). La gran ola revolucionaria y creativa,
polı´tica y existencial (Madrid, 2006), pp. 610–614.
26. Anon., ‘‘Gli indiani metropolitani’’, 3 March 1977 (leaflet); 68–77 gruppi e movimenti si
raccontano, http://www.zzz.it/ago/settesette/volantinill–2Q.htm, (accessed April 2001).

parodied the political practice of ‘‘demanding’’, asking for the

‘‘demolition of the Patriotic Altar,27 and its substitution with all forms of vegetation
[and] animals [:::] and the alternative use of Hercules aircraft as a service to
transport young people for free to Machu Pichu (Peru) for the sun party’’.28

However, not all of ‘‘creative autonomia’’ agreed with their somewhat
ritualistic use of irony: ‘‘The game of reversal is impassioning the Rome
movement; once the trick is discovered the game is easy’’.29 Even so, ‘‘the
trick is old, in France it has a precise linguistic expression – detournement
– and it has long been used by the exponents of the historical vanguard [:::]
precursors could be found among the great English writers of the
eighteenth century’’.30 Nevertheless, the power of irony as a linguistic
weapon was recognized, as were its limitations:

What interests us is the sense of bitterness that irony leaves us with, its flattening
action. Irony opens spaces, it unhinges, it reveals what cannot be hidden anymore
[:::]. Irony lacks flesh and blood, it is only partially a practice of liberation, as
partial as is violence and its organization.31

Finally, irony is a frustrating ‘‘language that marks the space between our
desires and the difficulty of their realization’’.32

The Metropolitan Indians also combined ironic wordplay with
theatricality on demonstrations as a self-deprecatory refusal of ‘‘serious
militancy’’, deliberately provoking the more earnest militants with their
‘‘effrontery of inventing and intoning slogans with a megaphone in the
middle of an assembly [:::] and hilarious routines such as marching in
indian file while intoning the word ‘Oask?!’ [the name of their zine, an
anagram of Kaos]’’.33 Significantly, these bizarre slogans, were ‘‘quickly
assimilated by the whole Movement’’, demonstrating the power of irony
as a protest form throughout Seventy-Seven.34 The ‘‘Indians’’ proved,
however, to be more of an ephemeral moment than a lasting tendency,
dissolving back into the movement or simply leaving, after the intensification
of state repression following the insurrectionary violence of the 12
March demonstrations in Rome and Bologna. They ‘‘did not recognize
[themselves] in mass aggregations, [they] liked to invent language-

27. A large marble monument in central Rome, built during fascism, also known derisively as
the ‘‘typewriter’’ due to its unusual shape.
28. Anon., ‘‘Gli indiani metropolitani’’.
29. Anon., Zut, 1977; 68–77 gruppi e movimenti si raccontano, http://www.zzz.it/ago/
autonomia/ironia.htm, (accessed April 2001).
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Anon., Historias Trastornadas, II, ‘‘Indiani Metropolitani’’, http://www.lisergia.net/interferencias/
purgantepublicitario/indiani.html, (accessed September 2006).
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.

behaviour and to look for another space in which to elaborate [their]
poetic of intervention. Already in OASK?! they had signed off as the
‘‘Metropolitan Indians in dis/aggregation’’.35

RADIO ALICE AND ‘‘TRANSVERSALISM’’

Transversalism, named after Bologna’s A/Traverso magazine, was another
example of the central role of language in the 1977 Movement. It attempted
to undermine language’s socially controlling norms through the use of
Lewis Carroll’s ‘‘non-sense’’ and other forms of ‘‘interruption’’ to create a
new kind of communication, more suited to the needs of the Seventy-
Seven generation. It influenced the explosion in the independent production
of leaflets, posters, bulletins, newspapers, journals and zines that was
Seventy-Seven’s most lasting material legacy, along with the chants,
slogans, and discussions in endless assemblies in schools, university
faculties, and ‘‘occupied social centres’’. Transversalism was theorized
within the major social themes but outside the constraints of worn-out
ideological categories, such as the ‘‘proletariat’’ and the ‘‘middle class’’. As
feminism had already done, it opposed every ideological system. The
‘‘everyday’’ was to be lived as a ‘‘revolutionary moment’’ in all its
components, necessitating the constant deployment of inventiveness and
creativity. Hence the ironic use of language, the ‘‘non-sense’’, the claims to
the right to travel for free (with counterfeited train tickets), the right to free
cinema, and the theory of technical-scientific intelligence that led to
strangely haphazard traffic lights and free international calls from
telephone booths.36

The urban youth movement, like the women’s movement, had a wide
repertoire of resources and skills to mobilize. The mushrooming of ‘‘free
radio’’ stations (radio libere) in the main cities in the mid-1970s made them
the sounding board and cultural laboratory of the movements. Through
phone-ins, ordinary people’s rich store of experiences addressed the real
problems of everyday life that were ignored by the mainstream media. The
use of ‘‘non-sense’’, to go through the ‘‘looking glass’’ of reality, helped to
mirror the outside world. However, most radio stations closed down more
through lack of skills and funds than police action. There was a failure to
articulate and develop autonomous practices, although the present
extensive network of free radio stations is thriving, if in a less experimental
format.37

Radio Alice was founded by former Potere Operaio militants and began
broadcasting in 1974 as the first ‘‘free radio station’’. It broke all the norms

35. Scordino and DeriveApprodi, ‘77.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.

of communication, something never done before by the Italian Left. The
writer and academic Enrico Palandri, then a student militant and poet,
describes his involvement in the radio:

When I came to Bologna in 1975 very soon I began to work with Radio Alice. At
first I did a programme with some friends on poetry late at night. [:::] meeting
these people who were slightly older than us, who had been in the ‘68 movement
and had set up the radio. [:::] [During the rioting following the killing of a student
in March] there were a lot of phone-ins and we all listened. The police broke in
and closed the radio. This was reported live because the people in the radio were
very clever. They hid the microphones and left the lines open. After that there
were numerous arrests.38

Seventy-Seven’s evident capacity for cultural innovation and experimentation
lay in its use of new languages and forms of antagonist
communication, the latter defined as the expression of real behaviours, not
abstract reflections to be proposed as a separate product from the
struggles. The free radio stations, most famously Radio Alice, and to a
lesser extent the more ‘‘political’’ Radio Sherwood in Padua and Radio
Onda Rossa in Rome, became the sites not just of a localized dissemination
of counter-information and subversive ideas, through the cronisti a gettone
(telephone kiosk reporters) and phone-ins, but also the locus for continual
linguistic experimentation through the use of transversalism, Mao-
Dadaism, non-sense and a mixture of false and real news under the slogan:
‘‘Let’s spread false news that produce real events’’.39 The most infamous
prank was the false edition of La Repubblica (a centre-left national daily
newspaper), produced by Il Male, a satirical magazine. Its front page
splash featured the improbable ‘‘arrest’’ of Ugo Tognazzi, a popular comic
actor, as the grande vecchio (godfather) behind the Red Brigades, so
ridiculing the press’s obsession with terrorist conspiracy theories.
The magazine A/traverso, linked to Radio Alice, first appeared in
Bologna in 1975 as a supplement to Rosso, then the main publication of
organized autonomia. However, the growing ideological divisions between
‘‘creative’’ and ‘‘organized’’ autonomia soon led to a parting of the
ways. It attempted to be an organ of continuous and open research on the
general problems of language, the private sphere, and of intelligence in
confrontation with power by going beyond the rigid ideological schemes
of political organizations, but also beyond the prevalent debates on the
crisis of militancy and the emergence of ‘‘secondary needs’’.40 It was born,
not by chance, in Bologna, where the model of ‘‘actually existing

38. Interview with Enrico Palandri, June 1999 (London).
39. The slogan ‘‘Diffundiamo notizie false che producono eventi veri’’ described a widespread
practice among the ‘‘free radio’’ stations.
40. Agnes Heller’s La teoria dei bisogni in Marx (Milan, 1974) was an influential text within
Seventy-Seven, as were the works of the post-structuralists Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari.

socialism’’ presented by the ‘‘Red Junta’’ of the ICP and ISP proved
unattractive to much of that city’s youth. The movement revolutionized
language with conscious research, retrieving the printing methods of the
underground culture. By using newspaper clippings, handwriting, and
typewritten white paper, it created a new printing format that allowed
flexible imagination to go beyond previous typographic schemes.41
The intellectual most intrigued by, and as a sociologist at Bologna
University, one of the most informed about, the transversalist discourse
and praxis was Umberto Eco. He identified a fundamental switch in the
semiotic strategies of the new social movements from the moral
seriousness of the Marxist-Leninists to the irony of the students and
counter-cultural youth. The inherited wisdom of the Old and New Lefts
was turned on its head (‘‘More churches, less houses!’’) and was used to
torment the ICP. Eco claimed that the ‘‘new generations’’ were ‘‘living a
[:::]multiplicity of languages of the ‘avant guard’ in their daily lives’’.42 The
most interesting aspect for him was that ‘‘this language of the divided
subject, this proliferation of apparently uncoded messages, is understood
and practised to perfection by those who until today were extraneous to
high culture’’.43 In contrast, the linguistic experts of ‘‘high culture’’ were
only able to understand the ‘‘language of the divided subject’’ when it was
spoken in a laboratory and could not understand it ‘‘when spoken by the
masses’’.44 Eco’s analysis helps to explain why the irony and experimental
language of the ‘‘creatives’’ not only exasperated officialdom and the Old
Left, but also caused major rifts within the movement itself between the
‘‘creatives’’ and the ‘‘politicos’’, a fault line that can still be found in
contemporary anti-capitalist movements.

CONCLUSION

Seventy-Seven marked the end of the 1968 historical, cultural and political
cycle and the beginning of a new one, which, arguably, continued in Italy
during the 1980s and 1990s, above all through the centri sociali (squatted
social centres) movement. The movement’s long-term significance has
come to be seen as primarily socio-cultural, with its dominant characteristics
of counter-cultural and linguistic innovation, particularly in communicational
forms. Through the use of irony, detournement, sarcasm,
parody, satire, mockery, puns, and anagrams, antagonistic political
humour disoriented ‘‘the fundamental laws of human language [:::]
subverting the discipline of their valorization’’45. However, the intense

41. Scordino and Derive Approdi, ‘77.
42. Eco, ‘‘Hay otro idioma, el italo-indiano’’, p. 612.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Maurizio Torealta, ‘‘Painted Politics’’, in Italy: Autonomia, pp. 102–107, 104.

political mockery deployed by the Metropolitan Indians, the movement’s
most visible if relatively short-lived counter-cultural tendency, was not
exclusively reserved for the political system and the institutional Left. The
more self-importantly ‘‘serious’’ sections of Seventy-Seven, generally those
more closely related to the vanguardist traditions of the New Left, were
also made the butt of movement in-jokes, so hampering and disarming
their attempts to gain ‘‘hegemony’’ over the movement.
The Metropolitan Indians and the transversalists of Radio Alice were
not the first to use irony as provocation, Dadaism or linguistic
experimentation as political action. Some preceding groups included the
Situationist International, the Provos in Amsterdam, Kommune 1 in
Germany, Black Mask in New York, and in Britain King Mob, who,
dressed as Santa Claus, went into a department store on Christmas 1968
and began handing items from the shelves to children as ‘‘presents’’. These
were later confiscated by the police while Santa was arrested.46 These
groups used individual actions and stunts to gain publicity for political
reasons, while the ‘‘creatives’’ of Seventy-Seven were a mass phenomenon
and part of a broader social movement, whose repertoire also included
armed violence, but whose over-riding characteristic was its desire to both
express itself through and play with words in a politically subversive
fashion. In this sense the ‘‘post-political’’ 1977 Movement broke with the
more ‘‘political’’ movement cycle of the 1960s and 1970s and presaged the
rise of the media-dominated ‘‘information society’’ in the eighties.
Thirty years have passed since the 1977 Movement changed the face of
Italian movement politics, before being stigmatized by the media, isolated
by the party system and criminalized and repressed by the state. Much of
the contemporary global anti-capitalist movement also relies on various
forms of humour and play, rather than the ideological browbeating of
vanguardism, let alone organized violence, to make their points. The use of
intense theatricality, camp mockery and ironic provocation is now
collectively organized as the ‘‘pink and silver’’ block of the alterglobalist
movement, whose most notable exponents are the pink fairies of Tactical
Frivolity, given to tickling riot police men with their feather dusters.
Today’s humour is probably gentler than the biting irony of the
Metropolitan Indians, capable of provoking the violence of outraged
ICP militants or a charge by the riot police, but the message is the same:
language is the site of political struggle and the derisory laughter born of
irony is one of the most potent weapons a social movement has,
humiliating the ‘‘powerful’’ and inspiring the ‘‘powerless’’.

46. Gavin Grindon, e-mail.

AUTONOMY-AUTONOMIAS-AUTONOMISMO

‘‘A Laughter That Will Bury You All’’: Irony as Protest and Language as Struggle in the Italian 1977 Movement1