Date: Sun, 07 Jul 1996 08:52:08 +1000
From: sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright)
Subject: Living in the Heart of the Beast - Italy's Social Centres


"Living in the Heart of the Beast - Italy's Social Centres", _Rabelais_
(May 1995)

Steve Wright

        This May 1st, as with each May 1st since 1986, Forte Prenestino in
Rome will host the 'Festival of Non-Labour'. Through music, videos,
theatre, good food, and debate, its occupants will celebrate not only the
coming of Spring, but the ongoing efforts of people like themselves to
challenge and overturn the rhythms of capital and the state.

        Forte Prenestino is an enormous edifice flung across eight hectares
of land on the south-eastern edge of Rome, not far from the Viale Palmiro
Togliatti. As its name suggests, the Forte had originally been built a
century ago as a military base. In the sixties it had been abandoned, left
to stand empty like so many of Italy's publicly-owned buildings in this
time of property speculation and public corruption.

        Despite a recent wave of gentrification, the nearby suburb of
Centocelle is still best known for its high levels of unemployment and
heroin addiction. When a group of mostly young people from the
neighbourhood decided to occupy the Forte on May Day nine years ago, they
were inspired not by the legacy of Togliatti - a famous Italian communist
leader who had effortlessly blended stalinism and social democracy - but by
a determination to establish and extend a radical, self-managed alternative
to the marginalisation which life on the city fringes held out to them.

        'All of a sudden, we were inside, "running" the place - we who had
never managed anything except our unemployment, our homelessness', they
would later comment wryly. 'Many people are convinced that the Forte is run
by just a handful of people, a management committee that makes decisions in
the name of and on behalf of everyone else. Such people simply can't
conceive - whether for reasons of ideology or cynicism - that a
micro-society of equal persons can survive and prosper...'

        Today Forte Prenestino plays an important role in its local
community. It houses an exhibition gallery, practice rooms for bands, space
for theatrical performances, a dark room, gymnasium, and 'tea salon'.
African dance classes are held on Tuesday nights, yoga on Mondays and
Wednesdays, a gym class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are regular film
nights, courses on design and sculpture, a documentation centre. Outside
Rome, the Forte is probably best known for its music label, which
distributes the work of local rap and reggae bands. It also produces the
journal Nessuna Dipendenza, which not only documents the Forte's
activities, but engages in discussion and debate concerning projects
against capital and the state both in Italy and beyond.

        Forte Prenestino is only one of about fourteen 'Occupied
Self-Managed Social Centres' (CSOA) in Rome. There are about hundred or so
CSOA elsewhere in Italy - the precise number is impossible to determine, as
any given week over the last five years has brought news of a new site or
two established, or an old one evicted. Their origins go back to the mid
seventies, a time when the extra-parliamantary left played an important
part in Italian youth culture. Even then, the CSOA were often established
in reaction to the growing conservatism and authoritarianism of such
groups, whether these be the little parties formed after the Hot Autumn of
1969, or the apparently more radical collectives known as Autonomia Operaia
(Workers Autonomy).

        By the end of the decade, the organised far left had largely been
pulverised, caught between extensive State repression on the one hand, and
a flight into private life or terrorism on the other. Within the country's
workplaces, a decade-long battle for control over working conditions came
to an end in the same period, with the massive 1980 lay-offs at FIAT
flagging an impending victory for managerial prerogative throughout Italy
as a whole.

        The CSOA that survived the chaos of those years eked out much of
their existence during the early and mid eighties as little bastions of an
'alternative lifestyle'. 'Transgressive' identities - from those associated
with punk music, to more traditional anarchist or autonomist politics -
played a central role in holding many of the remaining social centres
together, in the face of an Italy where opportunism, fear and cynicism
apparently reigned supreme across the emotive landscape.

        A revival of social conflict from the late eighties onwards has
helped to confound many of the glib arguments that class war in Italy is
pass=E8, or that all possible futures have been reduced to a choice between
'Export or death'. Beginning in 1987 amongst school teachers and railway
staff, a growing dissatisfaction with the inability of existing unions to
defend pay and working conditions has spread to other sections of the
workforce, creating a small but lively current of rank and file groups and
'alternative' unions pledged to fostering direct action and
self-organisation in the workplace. Unrest within the student population of
Italy's schools and universities has brought a similar cycle of mass action
since 1990, with occupations 'under self-management' a frequent occurence
of late.

        Much of this activity in the workplace and school has fed into the
revival of the social centres during the nineties. As dozens of abandoned
buildings have been seized up and down the Italian peninsula, the social
and political identity of the CSOA has become richer, more complex. Here
are brief descriptions of three of the newer social centres, taken from an
account published in 1994:

'PIRATERIA DI PORTA is the most recent of the Roman CSOA, and the first to
be established in the city centre. Born in December 1993, it is housed in a
large warehouse near the Porta Portese Sunday market. With an emphasis upon
youth concerns, it offers many activities for children: films, dance
classes, martial arts. In February 1994 it was shut down by the police,
only to be immediately re-opened by the occupiers.

'OFFICINA 99 can be found in a former garage in the working class suburbs
of eastern Naples. It was first occupied in December 1990 by members of
that year's mass student movement (popularly known as Pantera - the
Panther) but immediately evicted by the authorities. It was reoccupied on
May 1st, 1991, when 500 students and unemployed people marched from the
university and took the site over. It is the most active social centre in
the region, offering a meeting place not only for younger people, but also
for workplace rank and file groups and the local unemployed movement. Its
strength lies in its activity within the surrounding community,
particularly over the questions of jobs and the fight for a guaranteed
income. The first floor of Officina 99 offers a lovely view of Vesuvius,
and was used by the filmmaker Gabriele Salvatores (director of
Mediterraneo) as a location for his film Sud. The social centre has also
spawned the popular political rap group 99 Posse.

'BAROCCHIO is a spin-off from another of Turin's CSOA - El Paso - with
which its members continue to work. It was occupied in October 1992, on the
initiative of a local anarchist group. Both a social centre and a living
space, Barocchio is best known for its music scene. For reasons of space,
its annual film festivals have been transferred to El Paso.'

        While two computer networks - the European Counter Network, and
CyberNet - play an important role in keeping the social centres in touch
with each other, the CSOAs' biggest risk continues to be that of closure
>from the rest of society. This problem has expressed itself in a variety of
forms: amongst the most immediate, the difficulties involved in drawing the
thousands who regularly attend concerts and other public activities within
each centre into the daily work carried out by the dozens (often hundreds)
of 'regulars'. Beyond this, there is also the challenge of communicating
with, and learning from, social protagonists outside the social centres'
'natural' constituency of urban youth. Interestingly enough, some of the
more important initiatives taken by many CSOA in recent years have involved
alliance-building in their local community and cities: around questions
such as housing, jobs, racism, the lack of parkland in many urban
landscapes.

        Recently, a sympathetic observer of the CSOA from within an older
generation of Italy's radical left stressed the importance of the social
centres as practical examples of direct democracy in action. 'This doesn't
necessarily mean', Bruno Cartosio went on to say, 'taking the social
centres as a model, but rather of seeing, in their structure - in their
very existence - an example not only of a necessity, but also of an
opportunity from which to begin anew any overall political project'. Primo
Moroni, another veteran of the sixties and seventies, and unofficial
chronicler of Milan's radical scene, disagrees. Whilst conceding that 'a
formidable transformation' is presently underway within the CSOA, he has
expressed some concern that the social centres remain 'zones of defence',
the product of 'a generation which has decided to prolong its adolescence
ad infinitum'. Perhaps he is right. Or could it be that, in an age when
'almost everyone lives in a state of terror at the possibility that they
might awake to themselves' (Vaneigem), a self-conscious prolonging of
adolescence might yet have its merits?


Sources:

____    'Stretti tra il tempo...', _Nessuna Dipendenza _ 3, (1 May 1993).
____    'Uscita dal ghetto, esodo verso il centro',  _Klinamen _ 4, (May 1993).
=46. Borrelli, 'La societ=E0 dei lavori nell'era del postfordismo',  _il
manifesto _, (21 March 1995).
=46. Borrelli, 'Un agor=E0 tra i banchi di libri e riviste',  _il manifesto _,
(28 March 1995).
C. Branzaglia et al.,  _Posse italiane: Centri sociali, underground
musicale e cultura giovanile degli anni '90 in Italia _ Tosca, Florence,
(1992).
M. Giannetti, 'Cento centri in movimento', in F. Adinolfi et al.,
_Comunit=E0 virtuali: I centro sociali in Italia _ Manifestolibri, Rome,
(1994).
Sandrone '"Il cavallo non vuole bevere!"', _ Riff Raff _ 2, (March 1994).
R. Vaneigem, 'Basic Banalities (II)', in K. Knabb (ed.)  _Situationist
International Anthology _ Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, (1981).


Addendum:

News from the Italian social centres is regularly e-mailed from the
European Counter Network to the xchange bbs, a Melbourne-based node of the
local 'anet' anarchist computer network. If you have a modem, you can dial
xchange directly on 03-9388-0018. If you would like to receive the regular
electronic newsbulletin of translated Italian material edited by xchange
and the Padua node of the ECN, contact pmargin-AT-xchange.apana.org.au

___________________________________________
http://www.monash.edu.au/arts/ces/sw.html
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html
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