The Red Brigades and the Discourse of Violence: Revolution and Restoration by Marco Briziarelli

Author:Marco Briziarelli [Briziarelli, Marco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Italy, Modern, 20th Century, Social History
ISBN: 9781138776920
Google: 8kVengEACAAJ
Goodreads: 19351782
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

4.6 The Dialectics Between Radicalism and the “Historic Compromise”: Towards a Hegemonic Historic Bloc

Gramsci (1971) affirmed that one of the reasons why Risorgimento failed in Italy was the lack of Jacobinism, or the coercive force capable of organizing and uniting the masses. However, historically, force in Italy did not prove to be an unconditional recipe for success. The most negative example marked in the Italian collective memory is Fascism. On the other hand, there had also been occasions in which force and violence, embodied in the presence of a common enemy, united many Italians in Resistenza contingent. In this sense, 1970s Italy provided another example of how political violence can produce dialectical outcomes. In fact, during one of the most dramatic and dangerous moments for Italian democratic life, i.e. the historic presence of the BR, Italy seemed to find a unity under the moral and intellectual leadership of its ruling class and under the Jacobin force produced by fear, anxiety, and a state of emergency.

As in Sartre’s example of the siege of Paris during the French Revolution (1976), the fear caused by political violence made, out of a fractured social organization, a more cohesive society, a “fused group.” In the Italian case, considering the amount of social, political, and moral energy present during the late 1970s, the metaphor of a fusion seems particularly appropriate. That is because in the same metaphor of high-temperature of melting and blending there is also implied another important aspect of the contexts I am trying to describe: a hegemonic moment not so much manufactured by the particular will of a class and its capabilities to create interclass alliances, but rather by the impersonal conjunction of related but distinct situations. It was what Althusser (1998) would describe as an instance of over-determination.

Thus, if the previous lack of hegemony created competing views and competing social praxes opposing the established power, right when voices such as the BR radicalized, therefore potentially creating a deeper fracture in the social fabric, the radical group created the conditions that facilitated the unity of the country. It is not then an accident that when the BR, by capturing, trying, and sentencing to death former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, assumed their victory to be imminent, political and civil society compacted into what Gramsci defines as the “integral state,” a hegemonic historic bloc that combined the consent of civil society and the force of the state.

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