The left-wing armed struggle in Italy from a critical-historical perspective: the case of study of Prima Linea

ABSTRACT

This article intends to cast new light on the history of the Italian left-wing armed struggle using the research perspectives offered by Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS). The object of the analysis is Prima Linea (Front Line, PL), which in less than 5 years (1976–1981) became the second most important left-wing clandestine organisation of the Italian 1970s. On the one hand, the historical development of the organisation is divided into two distinct phases. On the other hand, three dimensions of the armed activity of PL will be considered, namely, its ideological approaches, its organisational repertoires and the choice of the targets, in order to investigate the origins, meanings and outcomes of certain framing processes related to the concept of political violence. Taking into consideration direct sources of the organisation and the debates within the social movements, this contribution contextualises these conceptualisation processes of political violence by relating them to the surrounding social context and focusing on the role played both by the structural dynamics from above, and by the theories and practices developed within the revolutionary Left. The aim is to de-exceptionalise and historicise the left-wing armed struggle in Italy and to propose a critical explanation of such phenomenon.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• social movements
• political violence
• Italy
• 1970s

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See the research project led by the Istituto Cattaneo in Bologna and the related publications which are nowadays still relevant (Della Porta 1990; Catanzaro 1990).

2. Between 1969 and 1974, starting with the massacre of Piazza Fontana in Milan on 12 December 1969, several neo-Fascist bombings had already shaken the country, causing dozens of victims. In 1970, the involvement of “deviated” state apparatuses started to emerge which aimed to validate an authoritarian political turn. Expressions like strategia della tensione (strategy of tension) and strage di Stato (state massacre) had begun to circulate in the public debate, deeply undermining the confidence in politics among great sectors of the left-wing social movements (Crainz 2003, 363–410; Grispigni 2012b; Alimi, Bosi, and Demetriou 2015).

3. PO came apart in 1973, while LC undertook an institutional path and dissolved itself after the electoral defeat in 1976.

4. The MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano, Italian Social Movement) was the biggest neo-Fascist party, constantly represented in Parliament.

5. FIAT was the largest automotive manufacturer in Italy and the biggest private firm of the country. FIAT was one of the firms which was affected at the highest degree by the working struggle of the 1970s.

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Notes on contributors

Giorgio Del Vecchio

Giorgio Del Vecchio has graduated in contemporary history from the Free University of Berlin in 2017. In 2013, he obtained a BA degree in contemporary history at the University of Pisa. In the context of the Erasmus project, he spent a period of study at the Free University of Berlin between 2013 and 2014, where he later enrolled in 2015. In 2014, he absolved a three-month internship (Erasmus Placement) at the Institute for Contemporary History in Berlin, where he attended several research projects on the history of the German Democratic Republic. Between 2015 and 2016, he has been working as a research assistant at Humboldt University in Berlin. In September 2015, he won the Best Student Paper Award at the Ninth Annual Conference of the Society for Terrorism Research with an article entitled, “Political violence as shared terrain of militancy: Red Brigades, social movements and the discourse on arms in the early Seventies”, which was then published in Behavioural Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, 8 (3), 2016, pp. 212–226. He has written his Master’s thesis on Prima Linea.