Magazine / History / The Year 1968 / Analysis | 26/03/2008

"We demand the impossible”

The long 1968 movement in Italy lasted into the early 80s. The "Hot Autumn"
of student and workers' protests laid the foundation stone for a radical
modernisation of the country.

The student protest movement of 1968 in Italy lasted some time. After its explosive reawakening in 1977, it gradually degenerated into the tragic era of terrorism. This "extended" '68 movement came to an end in the early 1980s, fading out amidst a social phase of reaction marked by the return to the reassuring world of "private" interest.

Policemen in the area around the palace of justice near the Vatican in April 1968
Photo: AP

It was time for modern youth to come to terms with a more realistic fulfilment of market-driven needs, eschewing the ideas of their fathers who had cried "we demand the impossible!" End result: conformity adapted to the objective reasons of a triumphant capitalism which appeared to promise wealth and social status to the most dynamic and ambitious (the era of Bettino Craxi).

In a certain sense, the movement would end up anti-'68. And perhaps the most striking feature in all of this would be the rise to power – from politics to economy, from university to public administration – of countless '68 activists who only a few years earlier had marched behind the flag in the battle against the capitalist "system", denounced as the most oppressive and perverse form of power.

Was the 1968 movement a failure?

Might it not be fair to say that the Italian movement of the sixties plotted against itself? That its fate, paradoxically, was that of converting the revolutionary momentum of its golden yet fatal year, 1968, into a counter-revolution? That it was basically a failure? Though partially true, the argument is essentially flawed because it is a historical fact that Italy would never be the same again after this.

The old rural Italy, like its urban counterpart where great strides towards industrialisation had been made (the so-called "economic miracle"), would bear the marks. Decisive and irreversible changes took place in many ways similar to the effects of other large-scale social revolutions in history.

Fight against the "middle-class” model

The leading role was played by students, who in Italy, though, were largely children of a working class or even peasant background who had been denied access to higher education for centuries. At last they were questioning established class barriers, making use of the very same channels of modernisation created by neo-capitalism. What was taking place was a shift from the old idea of elitist education, from the "keepers of knowledge" to education for the masses. It was in this context that this student force with its entirely new social makeup prepared to do battle with the outdated bourgeois model, protesting against the authoritarianism of the academic establishment. Along the way, the whole "system" would come under attack.

Through the dynamics of the relationships (often conflicting) between "fathers" and "sons", the movement spread from the campus to the whole society, claiming a utopia of collective freedom from all oppression. Not that Italy was any different from the rest of the world in this, but the Italian situation did highlight some specific kinds of oppression which students felt were caused by democracy unfulfilled, by the power of the clergy and the "betrayal" of the anti-fascist values of the Italian Resistance.

Criticism of present and past

The student movement in Italy was actually ahead of its time. It arose in 1964, at about the same time as movements in the United States were beginning to take shape and just prior to the events of May 1968 in France itself. As well as students, young, inexperienced often temporary lecturers and assistants all played decisive roles.

At the same time an energetic female component took to the field: women, the many women who, applying for further study, were effectively reinventing feminism, taking over from what in Italy had traditionally been an elitist, middle and upper middle class privilege. Every single aspect of society was radically questioned in the feverish argument between young and old, amidst public trials and radical revisionism. Each and every facet of life was pounded by a wave of delegitimisation, of overwhelming criticism of the present (the detested "system"!) and the past (the hypocritical certainties and assurances from the repertory of rules and ideas belonging to the dominant agents of the "consensus").

Protests from left-wing and right-wing camps

Police storm the law faculty building at Rome University to bring the embittered battles between left and right-wing demonstrators to an end; Copyright: picture allianceThe protests were guided by both left and right-wing factions. On the left, the attack on the "system" did not spare the Italian Communist Party, the PCI, accused of Stalinism and blind obedience to the Soviet Union, giving rise to anti-soviet movements "beyond the PCI", which turned admiringly to the experiences of the "cultural revolution" in China and to Fidel Castro, and the legend of Che Guevara. On the right, a subversive youth movement accused the official neo-fascist party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI) of adopting a pro-American and 'anti-national' line. It was obvious then that left and right, anti-fascists and fascists, would fuel the clashes between the two youth movements who were on increasingly poor terms with their respective establishments, one against the other, in university, school and the street.

Thus there were two youth movements. The left (largely grown in and around the two large left wing parties, the PCI and the Italian Socialist Party, PSI) far outnumbered the right and thus held the field in the university with their various action groups and activists such as Potere Operaio, Manifesto, Servire il popolo, Cristiani per il socialismo and Lotta Continua: Maoists, Trotskyists, Guevarists, "Third Worldists" and so on.

Part of a global youth movement

One peculiarity of the sixties movement in Italy was the underhand involvement of dark subversive forces manoeuvred by the so-called "deviated intelligence services", conspiring within the faceless seats of hidden power (parallel, and often overlapping the official services of the republic) to destabilise Italy and prepare the ground for a "coup d'état", as the Greek colonels did, should the feared communists look like gaining control of the government. But of course the student movements were unaware. Like the rest of Europe they were dedicated to building a new collective mentality with its values of authentic, natural living set against the authoritarianism, perfidy, bourgeois mediocrity, hypocrisy, bigotry and "betrayal" of their elders.

Once they had joined the international haze of a sort of "globalisation of youth" (spreading from the student campuses of the America of Berkeley, of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to the Europe of the May 1968 protests), they expressed new styles and new languages strengthening the recent mood of the beat generation. Thus they become the major players of a collective action towards a "cultural revolution". And it was on this terrain that they achieved a remarkable success felt by the whole of Italian society in terms of civil rights (divorce, abortion, equal opportunities, sexual freedom, and so on).

Failure of the anti-capitalist revolution

Where they failed completely, however, was in their attempts at an anti-capitalist political revolution. Conditions at the time were not favourable. The working class itself was already feeling the effects of the huge transformation sweeping through western society towards a "post-modern", de-industrialised society. In Italy too, while the radicals of the youth movements were pressing for an anti-capitalist rebirth, the workers themselves – as Max Horkheimer noted in Germany – in reality sought merely to gain higher wages and access to the opulent society of consumerism. And it was the progress of "post-modern" society – aided by the fast-approaching "electronic-digital revolution" that was destined to interrupt the lengthy progress of the "industrial revolution" – that would cause the new generation to break drastically with the past.

What those few radical activists, both on the left and on the right, did not realise, entrenched as they were in the utopia of the "revolution" (communist) or the "revolt" (fascist), was that they were heading along the tragic road of terrorism from which there was no return, one against the other, though both manipulated in various ways.

Unusable material from an old world

But the real history left little room for a utopia. Soon, those that played an active part in the sixties movement would have no "values" left to leave the next generation with any credibility. Somewhat overwhelmed by the myth of the "new" and of the future, post-sixties youth would tend to reduce the whole past, and the very history that had produced its ideologies, to stuff of the old world, to be mercilessly discarded.

The traditional passage of values from generation to generation would cease, with the young being increasingly reluctant to accept the values of their elders. Once this occurred, even the tendency to criticise or question those values would diminish. Elders simply ceased to be important! Rather than call them into question, the new generation would prefer to ignore them. From that point onwards, any so-called "values" would be sought in the virtual market-place of the future.