Descriptions of the italian social centres are incredibly lacking in english. This is easily the best text that I've found, and unsurprisingly it was written by Steve Wright, elsewhere author of the essential "Storming Heaven, Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism".

‘A Love Born of Hate’


Autonomist Rap in Italy

Steve Wright
In less than a decade, home-grown rap has carved out its own space
within Italy’s music scene. Emerging at the end of the 1980s from the
local squatting movement and riding the crest of nation-wide university
occupations shortly thereafter, Italian rap has since gone on to win a wide
audience throughout the country. Today its influence is also apparent within
the mainstream of Italy’s pop industry, with prominent performers such as
Jovanotti doffing their caps not only to those first rap posses, but also to the
political movement of ‘self managed, occupied social centres’ (CSOAs)
which produced them (European Counter Network, 1998).

While it has recently found its first English-language chronicler in
Tony Mitchell (1996), Italian rap merits greater attention than it has hitherto
received, above all from those seeking to abolish ‘the present state of things’
(Marx and Engels, 1976: 49). What follows is a critical look at two such
militant rap groups, Assalti Frontali and 99 Posse. Nurtured within the
squatting scene, both bands are now finding that their popularity stretches
far beyond it – a circumstance which signals problems as well as possibilities.
For this reason, I argue that an exploration of the lyrics and other
pronouncements of these music groups offers a privileged vector from which
to address some of the tensions between cultural labour and political commitment
which currently hold sway within Italy’s social centres movement.

Searching for Roots


One thing is certain: this anthology [of Italian rap] exists not as a result of my
records, but instead owes much to that whole movement of groups born in the
‘social centres’, with thanks also due to the independent labels that believed
in this sound . . . (Jovanotti, 1996: 6)

I can’t return to my village empty-handed (‘Gocce di Sole’) (Militant A, 1997:
162)

Both 99 Posse and Assalti Frontali were founded by individuals with already
established identities in Italian autonomist circles. The front man for 99
Posse – Luca Persico, better known as O’ Zulu’, who lists his hobby as
collecting charge sheets (‘one sentence of four months and five trials in
progress’) – became politically active at 14 (Bisca99Posse, 1996: 83, 59).
Assalti Frontali’s front man, Militant A – another Luca, born like O’ Zulu’
at the end of the 1960s – was involved from a similarly precocious age with
‘the Volsci’, the dominant tendency within the Roman autonomist scene of
the late 1970s and early 1980s (Del Bello, 1997). The name 99 Posse itself
evokes one of Naples’s best known squatted spaces, Officina 99; the band’s
first big hit, ‘Curre curre guaglio’ (Run Boy Run), celebrates the birth of that
social centre at the beginning of the decade. Elio Manzo of the band Bisca,
which fused with 99 Posse for a time during the mid-1990s, recalls his first
encounter with the latter at a Officina 99 benefit concert for imprisoned comrades,
one of whom was Persico (Bisca99Posse, 1996: 27). For their part,
Assalti Frontali are an outgrowth of the Onda Rossa Posse, a group formed
within the orbit of what was for many years the Volsci’s radio station (Radio
Onda Rossa, 1998), and are likewise closely associated with a social centre:
in their case Forte Prenestino, in Rome’s east.

Little has been written to date in English about the Italian social
centres, yet the Italian rap scene is incomprehensible without some understanding
of them. Hailed occasionally in the local press as laboratories of
cultural innovation, more commonly as dens of iniquity and subversion, the
CSOAs have become the focus of considerable public and media attention
within Italy over the past decade. From a few dozen spaces grouped at the
beginning of the 1980s around the remnants of earlier radical circles, the
centres have spread across Italy in the course of the 1990s, so that a recent
‘unofficial’ tally lists more than 130 of them all told (Tactical Media Crew,
1997), of which close to one-third are concentrated in Rome and Milan.
Keeping track of the exact number from week to week is near to impossible;
since most are the product of illegal squatting, one month may bring an eviction
here, the next a new occupation somewhere else (Gianetti, 1994;
Dazieri, 1996). As to their activities, the programme at Forte Prenestino
shows what is possible in some of the larger centres. Apart from a documentation
centre and meeting rooms for political campaigning, there is an
exhibition gallery, practice rooms for bands, space for theatrical performances,
a dark room, gymnasium and ‘tea salon’. The weekly schedule of the
early 1990s saw African dance classes on Tuesday nights, yoga on Mondays
and Wednesdays, and a gym class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Regular film
nights were also held, along with courses on design and sculpture (CSOA
Forte Prenestino, 1993a: 28).

Given its volatility, it is hardly surprising that the movement’s direction
and purpose have long been hotly debated. Some within it see the
occupied spaces as a means above all ‘to satisfy their own needs and desires’
(CRIC, 1996: 21), others as one contribution to a broader undermining of
the existing social order through the development of ‘segments of life, of
time, of space, that function according to criteria antagonistic to those of
capitalist society, based as this is upon the commodity and its spectacular
domination’ (CSOA Forte Prenestino, 1993b: 18). It is tempting to characterize
such alternative emphases as the consequence of long-standing differences
within Italy’s broader ‘antagonistic’ movement between anarchist or
autonomist strands. Such a judgement would be facile, however, for this
tension runs through many centres no less than between them. Nor are
formal political labels necessarily helpful. While many centres identify
themselves as either anarchist or autonomist, it is clear that each term has
multiple (and sometimes conflicting meanings), and that some CSOAs are
run by mixed groups, or else refuse such labels altogether (Mauro and Luca,
1994).

The diffusion of social centres up and down the country – their
numbers have doubled since a similar tally was made at the end of the 1980s
(Strumia, 1990: 25) – began with the peninsula-wide occupations which
greeted the demolition (and subsequent reconstruction) of Milan’s Leoncavallo
centre in mid-1989, and was then spurred on a few months later by the
university movement known as the Pantera, which gave many students their
first taste of self-managing an occupied space (Arcidiacono et al., 1995). But
it is the centres’ long-standing, almost symbiotic association with Italy’s
alternative music scene which has most sustained the interest of a wider
audience. This has led some working in the academy to characterize the
centres’ main constituency as:

. . . a post-political generation which replaces the ossified language of politics
with music; it is a music which homogenizes the space, the desires, the
values, by offering an opportunity to be together, to consume or play music
together, while not engaging in wage labor. The Beastie Boys’ song, ‘You’ve
got to fight for your right to party’, well encapsulates the importance that the
issue of free(ing) time from work has for the Cs. (Viano and Binetti, 1996: 245)

Is this merely rhetoric? Certainly many in the movement share the goal of
one Roman centre in challenging ‘the classic schizophrenia between political
activity and life’ (Infoshop CSOA Forte Prenestino, 1996: 96). Others
have argued that such a stance simply tries to paper over the gulf which separates
the centres’ ‘politicos’ from their ‘counter-cultural’ types; while the
creative tension between a project against (the constituted order in all its
facets) and one for (new social relations in the here and now) has often been
productive for all concerned, this divide has now become such that it threatens
paralysis whenever the movement seeks a unity beyond the mere
defence of its spaces (Cappello, 1996, 1998; Zaccaria, 1997: 215–19). What
is not in dispute is that the appeal of the CSOA is restricted primarily to the
world of youth. For some, this is proof of the movement’s vitality; for others, including the movement’s so-called ‘uncle’, the late Primo Moroni, it is
symptomatic of the Peter Pan syndrome of ‘a generation which has decided
to prolong its adolescence ad infinitum’ (Borrelli, 1995).

Two major research projects of the 1990s have attempted, with the collaboration
of some CSOAs in Milan (Consorzio Aaster, 1996) and Rome
(Senzamedia, 1997), to flesh out the portrait of those who frequent the
centres. With a thousand or so respondents drawn from two of Milan’s better
known squats, Leoncavallo and Cox18, the Consorzio Aaster study offered
the following snapshot: the great majority of those surveyed were under 30;
more than two-thirds were male, and more than half lived with their parents.
A third were students (with a third of these also engaged in paid work), a
little under one-third were employees, one in six were self-employed, and
the remaining sixth were divided fairly evenly between job-seekers and
those engaged in intermittent paid work. About 10 percent had university
qualifications. Those women surveyed were more likely to have spent some
time at university (48 percent), and to be ‘quasi-employed’ (either studentworkers,
unemployed, first job-seekers or casual workers). Most had come
into contact with the centres through friendship circles, and while onequarter
to one-third rated political or social commitment as an important
drawcard, the most common response emphasized ‘sociality’, along with the
attraction of music and other cultural activities. Finally, the researchers
noted that nearly one-quarter of those surveyed lived outside the region of
Lombardy – ‘an indicator’ as they put it, ‘of the intense territorial connections
established between the centres during important initiatives’ (in this
case, a campaign against the existing drug laws) (Consorzio Aaster, 1996:
23–31, 30–3, 39–43, 44).

Youth = rebellion = CSOA? Not everyone within the movement seems
happy with this string of reductions, yet all, for now, remain caught within
its bind. La Strada, located in Rome’s south-west, has set itself the task of
winning a presence across all age groups within ‘the popular forces’, by
abandoning:

. . . the youth-centred logic of dance rebellion, of rebellion as spectacle . . .
for us the social centre is everyone’s place, where rap and the mazurka have
the same space and the same dignity. (Smeriglio, 1995: 60)

How successful La Strada has been in this enterprise is not clear; but as
even one of its members concedes, for now the occupied spaces are primarily
bulwarks for and of young people in the marginalized fringes of Italy’s cities
(Smeriglio, 1995: 63).

Some musicians associated with the Roman movement have argued
that ‘those who frequent the CSOAs come to hear the concert; they are not
very interested in the social centre as such’ (Nano, 1997: 12); a sense that
many come simply to consume cheap beer and smoke dope without fear of
harassment is equally common (Philopat, 1996: 101; Senzamedia, 1997). On
the other hand, there seems little doubt about the intensity of feeling the
centres can evoke amongst those directly involved in their management.
Militant A’s 1997 book Storie di assalti frontali is, amongst other things, a
tale of lost innocence, of the defence of political committment in the face of
continued disappointments, above all at the hands of ostensible comrades.
But in trying to recapture his sensibilities at the time of the first Assalti
Frontali release, he writes:

‘I can’t return to my village empty-handed’ is a phrase that synthesized the
state of mind within which the Assalti Frontali project was born. I took it as
a moral commitment. A tribute. A canticle addressed to the people of the
social centres, the only humanity that interested me amongst our Country’s
new generations. It sought to demonstrate the difference, to bring enemies to
their knees, to illuminate the wealth of the movement. Some said: ‘Ah, but
you’ll always remain in the ghetto.’ I smiled because I saw nothing negative
in that word. For me the village had an incalculable value. The treasure. What
was morally better? Artistically superior? (Militant A, 1997: 70)

Communicating Antagonistically?

Reconciling music and politics has been one of my dreams since I was little.
(Meg, in Cornacchia and Giove, 1997)

Certainly no other art form possesses such immediacy. Music has an unrivalled
capacity for historical memory and content. (Sergio Maglietta of
Bisca, in FA, 1994)

What matters, believe me, is communicating – Sud Sound System, ‘Fuecu’.
(Pacoda, 1996: 9)

It was punk that first shaped the musical sensibilities of the early social
centres. At the start of the 1980s, Italian punks (or punx, as the more overtly
political styled themselves) played a major role in the establishment and
maintenance of a number of Italy’s most important squatted spaces, above
all in Milan (Scarinzi and Trau’, 1984; Bramante, 1996; CS Cox 18 and
Calusca City Lights, 1996: 109–19). Most tellingly, Italian punk inverted the
nihilism commonly associated with the phrase ‘No Future’: rather than a cry
of despair, this became an injunction to ‘invent the present’ (Ibba, 1995: 86;
Moroni, 1996: 41–2). By the middle of the decade, the punk scene had swept
in and through the Milan movement’s flagship, Leoncavallo, turning the
place upside down with concerts of 5,000 fans:

Until then the centre had had good relations with the neighbourhood; in practice
it was like a little cultural circle. So it wasn’t ready for such a massive
crowd and it was completely lacking any sort of security. You can imagine the
chaos in a punk concert: everyone jumping, stage-diving, pogo-ing. At Leo,
to give you an idea, the walls were all white, the posts pink, the senior citizens’
bar all beautifully painted. Not even a mural in sight. At the end of that
concert, there wasn’t one white space left on those walls. But Leoncavallo also
began to think a bit more grandly after that concert . . . (Ibba, 1995: 85).

By the late 1980s, many of the social centres had become home to a
variety of musical forms marginalized by the pop mainstream: not only punk,
but industrial music, hardcore and reggae could be heard within their walls
(Pacoda, 1996: 9; Nano, 1997). According to the band Sud Sound System,
the centres were ‘the only spaces practical and possible for street music’; all
the same, they have added, ‘introducing rap into the hardcore circuit was
not easy’ (Solaro, 1992: 64). In part, rap’s ascent benefited from the changing
times themselves, slowly winning over more of the ‘punkeratti’ (Solaro,
1992: 64–5) within the CSOAs as punk itself ran out of steam (Bramante,
1996: 209–10). Crucially, rap seemed a musical form particularly conducive
to the movement’s gradual emergence by the decade’s end from the siege
mentality of years past. The essential ingredients which privileged Italian
rap within this new orientation have already been spelt out clearly by
Pacoda: its emphasis upon communicating with others; its legitimation as an
emanation of black American ghetto culture, long a source of fascination for
the Italian far left; the ease, as with punk, with which ‘anyone’ could perform
it; and finally, its ability to reclaim ‘the hypnotic and liberatory function of
dance’ from the crassly commercial world of discos (Fumo LHP et al., 1992:
539; Pacoda, 1996: 9–11).

Militant A has described Public Enemy’s ‘Rebel Without a Pause’,
which he helped broadcast at Radio Onda Rossa in 1987, as ‘the most powerful
piece I’d ever heard in my life, an adrenalin rush’ (Militant A, 1997: 27).
For him, the distinctiveness of rap lies in it being:

. . . spoken word, it’s narrative. It tells me of the miseries of the ghetto, of
dealing, of gang wars; it speaks to me of revolt, of your changing direction, of
having fun, of the power of rhythm. It tells me why we have been so much in
silence.

With the world in and around the social centres as their reference point,
Militant A and his friends rejected the fashion – then common within the
small Italian rap scene of the late 1980s – of performing in English (Militant
A, 1997: 28). In Onda Rossa Posse’s lyrics, which were amongst the first
to be written in Italian, this unshakeable belief in the purity of rap, of its
unrivalled capacity for unmediated communication, is obvious: ‘I say what
I see I invent nothing’ (‘Batti il tuo tempo’); ‘Rap street poetry / rhymes
rhythm they leave they strike because they tell the truth’ (‘Categorie a
rischio’) (Militant A, 1997: 129, 131). This sentiment sits uncomfortably at
times alongside the occasional self-conscious use of English language
expressions – for example, the line ‘e ora prova a fermaci sucker’ [and now
try and stop us sucker] from ‘Quello che siamo’. On the other hand, it also
helps to explain the profound contempt expressed for the overtly commercial
Italian rap groups which emerged after 1992. This is not simply a matter
of leftist snobbishness, but a rejection of the way in which such groups were
seen to trivialize the potency of rap as a form of communication (Assalti
Frontali, 1993: 13; Militant A, 1997: 136).

For his part, Tony Mitchell has likened the ‘anger and militant eloquence’
of Onda Rossa Posse and the first Assalti Frontali album to ‘the
hard-core style of Public Enemy and NWA’. Going further, he suggests that
such groups ‘no doubt have more appeal to the 1968 generation of political
militants than to the youth of the nineties’ (Mitchell, 1996: 152). This conclusion
seems, if anything, rather forced. It is true enough that the antagonistic
movement of the 1990s has approached the question of political
violence rather differently to many of the activists formed over the course of
Italy’s ‘creeping May’ of 1968–78, for whom, as Oreste Scalzone once noted,
‘on the “if” [of armed struggle] there were no doubts’ (Wright, 1988: 266,
1998). At the same time, anyone who has seen footage of the running street
battles which closed the 20,000 strong national CSOA demonstration of 10
September 1994 would be hard pressed to assert that politically motivated
violence is completely alien to the culture of those youth who move within
the social centres’ orbit (Collettivo video Leoncavallo, 1995). Instead, a tactical,
pragmatic astuteness seems to have replaced that premeditated, moral
embrace of physical confrontation which characterized many within those
earlier generations of Italian radicals: a difference epitomized, in the words
of one observer of the 1994 demonstration, by ‘the absolute absence of molotovs
in the clashes’ (Ceccon, 1994: 34).

Is the rap of Assalti Frontali and 99 Posse Marxist? Militant A has
written that in his first encounter with the Grundrisse and Capital, both were
abandoned almost immediately. He further confesses that one of his youthful
interventions concerning workplace restructuring was so confused that
‘anyone with a smattering of economics could have demolished it’. If he
would later return to Marx whilst completing an economics degree, one
senses that ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ is not normally
close to hand when he is seeking inspiration for verse (Militant A, 1997:
12–13). In the end, it would be more appropriate to talk here of an autonomist
– or better, an antagonistic – rap, one possible path to a space where
left Marxisms might find common ground with social anarchisms in opposition
to capital relation and state form alike. In this space, emphasis is placed
upon the potential and actuality of self-organized conflict within and against
‘the present state of things’, understood as relations of power. In the words
of the Neapolitan group:

Bisca99Posse is a group of communists and this is so not because the individual
musicians participate in 10–100–1000 assemblies, demonstrations . . .
or because it plays at cost in the social centres, but because in every single
instance of its own existence, it creates contradictions and prospers from
them, it plays the role of cultural agitator and social adhesive and, above all,
because it makes of its own experiences, its own passages, its own victories
and defeats a collective legacy, a historical memory and contractual power for
all, and not only itself. (Bisca99Posse, 1996: 13)

The posse as political vanguard? Passages such as these (‘historical memory
and contractual power for all’) can and have been construed in that manner.
In the words of some Turin city council officials, for example:
The predominant activity in the Centres is music. . . . For these genres (rap,
ragamuffin, heavy metal), the Centres have become the principal site for
creation and expression, even the physical place where groups and ‘posses’
are born and prosper, automatically becoming the official voice of the Centres
themselves. (quoted in Enrico and Marco, 1995: 147)

On the other hand, this view has been widely ridiculed by many within the
social centre movement itself, with two Modena activists offering the
example of 99 Posse as their counterclaim:

In fact the 99 Posse are neither the controllers, nor are they controlled by the
Centre. The fact that they continue to maintain an organic bond [collegamento
vivo] with the Social Centre is a consequence of the wealth and complexity of
the Neapolitan experience. If we want to say that the antagonistic cultural
messages produced by Officina 99 (but also by the more vast area of the antagonistic
movement) are also conveyed to a wider public through the lyrics of
99 Posse, we are saying a different truth. But there is no bureaucratic link
between the two realities such that one is the official voice of the other; what
instead is involved is a ‘relationship of living and prolific interchange’ that is
almost incomprehensible for an institutional reality. (Enrico and Marco, 1995:
148).

One point Mitchell (1996: 161) scores against the earliest phase of
militant Italian rap concerns its lack of irony, and certainly the tone of
Bisca99Posse’s political self-definition offers an elegant illustration of this.
To respond that neither of the two bands’ major cultural reference points –
American rap and the Italian autonomist movement – are best remembered
for their strengths in this field is a poor defence. How do more recent recordings
by 99 Posse and Assalti Frontali stand up in this regard?

The year 1996 saw both bands release major albums, following an
immersion in the politics of music distribution for the Romans, and a variety
of undertakings with Bisca for 99 Posse. While Conflitto and Cerco Tiempo
reaffirm the significance to each group of the spoken, ‘committed’ word, the
differences between them are equally striking. With a significantly different
line up from before, it was Assalti Frontali whose sound had changed the
most, offering a relentless style of delivery fuelled by the playing of fellow
Romans Brutopop. Back in 1990, the release of ‘Batti il tuo tempo’ had been
greeted with cries that ‘this is not hip hop’ (Militant A, 1997: 40); Conflitto,
recorded with Don Zientara, blessed with some intriguing samples (including
backing vocals snatched from an old Neil Young album) and evocative
in certain ways of the guitar-driven style of Rage Against the Machine, has
been described by Gianmarco Bachi as ‘livid and spectral hip-hop, rap
mottled by metallic guitars, waves of noise, blasts of hardcore’ (Pacoda,
1996: 57). As for lyrical content, the album echoes Pacoda’s argument that
Italian rap, unlike the 1960s radical hymns of a Paolo Pietrangeli, offers ‘a
decisive return to the everyday’ (Pacoda, 1996: 7). But it does this with a
distinctive twist, for this ‘everyday’ of soliloquies – conducted, perhaps,
whilst pacing the streets of Rome – is that of the young militant who ‘would
have preferred a revolution’, and ‘for the moment’, must make do ‘in movement
for the movement’ (‘In movimento’) (Militant A, 1997: 171).

Conflitto is in many ways a grimmer album than the 1992 release Terra
di nessuno (No Man’s Land). Grimmer not simply in its arrangements, but in
the embattled mood which permeates so many of its songs. Recorded after
Berlusconi’s 1994 election victory – ‘not my defeat . . . yet still I felt rockbottom’
(Militant A, 1997: 103) – gave fascists and Northern separatists
alike a government podium from which to ferment hatred against immigrants,
Conflitto savages the new concern for everything and everyone to be
put back ‘in its place’:

Yes I know it’s not your fault / you’re not a racist / you’re a realist / you’re noone
/ anonymous / in the panic / nameless / an Italian / an Italian in his Nation.
(‘Fascisti in doppiopetto’) (Militant A, 1997: 177)

Behind all this, however, lie not only ‘fascists in double-breasted suits’, but
‘conflict’. As one interviewer has noted (Di Donna 1996: 6–7), the word is a
recurrent theme in the album’s lyrics:

I don’t know if I’d know how to live in peace / only continual conflict / between
ways of life / points a way out / . . . / conflict is the gist. (‘Conflitto’) (Militant
A, 1997: 174)

how many times must I be humiliated / in order to understand the importance
of conflicts / a loser’s mindset / destroys all sense of proportion [literally: leads
to a night where all cats are grey]. (‘Devo avere una casa per andare in giro
per il mondo’) (Militant A, 1997: 168)

I have my time / I use my time / I accelerate conflict. (‘Dispersi nel caos’)
(Militant A, 1997: 170)

With its ragamuffin fusion of reggae and rap, 99 Posse’s style has
always been more playful musically and lyrically than that of the Roman
ensemble, and this is as true for Cerco Tiempo as for anything before it. While
Persico has since expressed disappointment with some of the arrangements
on the CD (Cornacchia and Giove, 1997), the three tracks which open it are
consistent with the best of their work to date. Like much of the stronger
material on Conflitto, these pieces are also apparently introspective in
nature. Sung in dialect at a measured pace, the opening track, ‘Si tuu’, proffers
an intertwining of personal anger and class hatred which, in feeding
upon each other, threaten to destroy all perspective. Ultimately, it is love –
the love of a lover (‘it’s you’) – which restores a sense of balance: not supplanting
hate, but giving it new focus and restoring meaning. ‘It’s pointless
raging at life if you don’t know how to love’, Persico sings in the final verse,
adding elsewhere:

I struggled and hated in order to defend my values, but hatred and violence
become disquieting when you lose sight of the love that generated them. Street
clashes, being beaten with billy clubs, the daily injustices, the tapped phone,
the cops, the raids, evictions, had turned me into a potential serial killer, had
robbed me of the capacity to be positive: always against, never for. It was
music that pulled me out of this vortex . . . (Bisca99Posse, 1996: 59)

The most powerful piece on the album is ‘Non c’e’ tempo’ (‘There Isn’t
Time’). It too proceeds at a stately tempo, as Meg sings – in Italian – of
‘dreams and passions’ transformed ‘into metric units’ by the tyranny of
capital. Persico responds in dialect: ‘in jail you can have as much time as
you like’. The chorus allows Meg to state her immediate goal: ‘a little more
control over what I’m living / it’s the present that slips through my hands /
but I won’t let it or at least I’m trying.’ This song, then, is about the daily
efforts to claw back some space and time ‘of one’s own’. On occasion such
moments may even contain, in the words of C.L.R. James, ‘the future in the
present’: in any case, as Meg concludes, ‘I don’t know if I’m awake, asleep
or in a dream / but the only thing I know is that tonight belongs to me’.

The setting for ‘Pecche’’, the last of these three songs, is one of the
most private of times: ‘when I want my bed and nothing more / when I’m
alone’; when, as Persico’s vocal adds mischieviously, there is neither ‘posse
nor O’ Zulu’’. At this moment, when certain roles are said to be cast aside,
and with no audience to play to, ‘the only thing I want to say is why’. As the
liner notes make clear, ‘Pecche’’ is directed against those – above all on the
far left – who remain unshakeable in their ‘correct views on everything’
(Kolakowski, 1974):

I don’t trust those who always have the right answer to every question. I doubt
certainties. I refuse the role that they try to attribute to me of revolutionary
‘guru’. I hate pride. I know I’m in the right only when I’m wondering if I’m
wrong.

Against the dogmas of the true believers, then, uncertainty must be
clasped to the heart of one’s political identity. Militant A puts it similarly in
Storie di assalti frontali when he talks of his need ‘to flee’ in the face of ‘the
blind faith’ of ‘[t]he sect of Marxist-Leninists with their vanguard party which
will lead the masses to the new dawn’ (Militant A, 1997: 86). Elsewhere he
cites the advice of the sexagenerian Sante Notarnicola, a former ‘political
bandit’ whose poems have been an important reference point for a number
of Roman posses:

A final thing. One day he spoke to me of his life before prison and told me
with a smile to watch out: ‘Never fall into myths, never . . . I ruined my life
following a myth that was mistaken.’ (Militant A, 1997: 31)

Both albums, therefore, offer a dimension of irony too often absent from
past work. But this is not the playfulness of 1977, when an earlier generation
taunted defenders of the historic compromise and working-class austerity
with cries of ‘Less money, more work’. Rather it is inward-directed,
concerning the challenges facing those who seek to maintain their commitment
in uncertain times. Take Assalti Frontali’s song ‘Verso la grande mareggiata’.
Much slower than other tracks on Conflitto, it builds at almost a
leisurely pace only to recede, wave-like, again and again. It is about ways
to pass time whilst awaiting ‘the great coastal storm’, and once again the ‘c’
word is in evidence:

I’m navigating in the asphalt that burns beneath my feet / I love / the city /
its human charm / in continual conflict a delirium. (Militant A, 1997: 173)

The author doesn’t pretend to grasp fully the meaning of this delirium,
however, just that ‘something is happening / in the chaos’. Should that longawaited
torrential wave catch him ‘lost in a trip’, perhaps a surfboard can be
improvised from his desk: in the meantime, the important thing is to know
how to bide one’s time:

towards the great coastal storm / the road is long / and almost all uphill / early
morning / absolute calm / I have a base with deep roots / and my selfdiscipline
/ today the wind is blowing. (Militant A, 1997: 174)


Beyond the Village

At a certain point we discovered that many more people were coming to our
concerts and that many of them no longer spoke the language of the people
from before. Many had seen us on television. . . . This posed the problem of
whether we fucked them off, or tried to speak with them too. And since our
parents always taught us that if someone comes to your house, you let them
speak, you offer them something to eat. . . . Around 25,000 more people came
to the tour, and with whom we needed to speak. They really came from other
cultures: some were even carabinieri. Well . . . if there’s nothing to talk about
with a carabiniere, with many of the others there is. (Persico, in Cornacchia
and Giove, 1997)

In recent years, Assalti Frontali and 99 Posse have each found new audiences
beyond the CSOAs. Their efforts to deal with the implications of this
success have raised further questions in turn: concerning established practices
within the movement regarding the production and distribution of their
music, and relations with other political forces, beginning with the institutional
left.

For both bands, ‘communicating antagonistically’ has not simply been
about content, but also process. Indeed, the practice of autoproduzione (literally
‘self-production’: do-it-yourself, DIY) has long been inseparable from
the CSOAs. A central ethos of earlier anarcho-punk in Britain (Aufheben,
1995) and Italy (Moroni, 1996: 41–2) alike, involving fanzines as much (or
more) than recordings, a DIY approach to the production and distribution of
rap music in Italy was entirely in keeping with the broader squatting movement’s
watchwords of self-management and direct action. For 99 Posse, DIY
has been understood not only as artistic control of their ‘product’, but the
encouragement of up-and-coming bands through the establishment of a
small recording label. For Assalti Frontali it would mean the construction
in the early 1990s of a recording studio at CSOA Forte Prenestino, as well
as an alliance of bands (the ‘Cordata’) committed to playing, recording and
distributing their music through the networks provided by the social centres.
In each case, the intention was clear – to avoid the fate of rock music:

Rock made a promise that it didn’t know how to keep. It wanted to be a universal
language and instead it became a vehicle for the merchandise of the
record industry. (Sergio Maglietta of Bisca, in FA, 1994)

Surveying the British scene of the 1980s, the Aufheben collective
(1995: 6) has argued that, for all its emphasis upon autonomy and DIY, punk
‘lacked an explicit critique of the commodity-form’. That said, punk as a
movement never claimed as one of its goals the destruction of the capital
relation. For some tendencies within the Italian CSOAs of the 1990s, on the
other hand, the path out of the capital relation is said to lie precisely through
DIY (Wright, 1995). For members of the Brancaleone social centre in Rome,
for example, the marginalization of many highly educated young people from
regular paid work offers a window of opportunity looking out upon a new
form of democratically organized work. Engaged primarily in the production
of cultural services and artefacts (concerts, compact discs, magazines, Tshirts),
they have argued that the low pay and rudimentary working environment
in which they find themselves is a reasonable trade-off for the
collective control they are able to exercise over their labour. In this way, they
insist, they are turning the uncertainties of ‘post-Fordist labour’ to their own
advantage, fusing political commitment and personal creativity into a form
of ‘self-managed’ non-typical work which anticipates an alternative economy
outside the logic of profit and accumulation (CSA Brancaleone, 1994).

Critics of these and similar projects have suggested that such experiments,
eked out as they are on the margins of the official economy, are less
a strategy to supplant capital than exercises in self-exploitation (Nutarelli,
1995). The popularity within many CSOAs of ‘social enterprises’ as vehicles
of change – a popularity that has led some ‘progressive’ local governments
to seek to tame the movement by encouraging their diffusion (Moroni et al.,
1995) – is doubly curious given that a critique of the commodity-form has
long been part of the Italian radical left’s broader legacy. Stefano Cappello
brings the debate back to earth by pointing out that:

. . . [t]he CS, from their birth, have always produced commodities, both
material and immaterial: from the production of sociality, to musical and theatrical
events, up to the first attempts at editions of records, videos, etc. . . .

adding that in the 1990s these activities have come to assume a centrality
‘previously unknown’ within the CSOAs (Cappello, 1996: 103). Accepting
that the centres need money to survive, it is the self-delusion of the ‘social
enterprise’ camp which most concerns him:

To declare oneself to be outside the logic of the market as the pure enunciation
of an abstract potentiality facilitates the reproduction – in miniature – of
that same logic. (Cappello, 1996: 103)

Self-production has been equally embraced by many of those sceptical
about the prospects of an ‘alternative economy’. Arguing that no time in
this society exists free from capital, an unsigned 1993 article in the Forte
Prenestino magazine Nessuna Dipendenza suggests that self-production
must be understood as a process whose ultimate goal – ‘the free expression
of individual creativity’ – can only be constructed by challenging ‘official
commodified circuits dedicated to the profit of the few . . . [f]or this reason
we have always thought that self-management is the first form of selfproduction:
the self-production of a path of liberation’ (CSOA Forte
Prenestino, 1993b: 18).

‘One of our objectives in the present period is precisely that of
strengthening the project of self-production’, Assalti Frontali had declared
the same year, in the previous issue of the same journal. Even then, however,
differences with others in the CSOAs concerning the production and marketing
of music were evident, with the band choosing to register their first
CD with the SIAE, a body which regulates the distribution of broadcasting
royalties in Italy. Their reasoning – that since someone would pocket this
money, better it be those committed to redistributing it within the movement
– did not impress everyone within the social centres (Assalti Frontali, 1993:
12–13). Dismissing as ‘pure’ and ‘romantic’ those who counselled no performances
or media contact outside the movement, the group took a break
from touring to concentrate on its Cordata project (Militant A, 1997: 90).

The reasons for the Cordata’s failure are not clear. Militant A simply
writes that, suffering from exhaustion, they ‘shut up shop’, while admitting
that the prospect of ‘a new discussion on self-production made me nauseous’
(Militant A, 1997: 109). The weight of opinion within the social centres was
still an unquestionably important reference point for the group, however; not
long before, according to the director Gabriele Salvatores, ‘an assembly of
two and a half thousand people’ had been held at Forte Prenestino, to decide
whether the band should provide music for his film Sud. When the inevitable
soundtrack CD was later compiled, Assalti Frontali would refuse to participate,
since the label was that of a multinational, Sony (Ibba, 1995: 158).

By 1996 Militant A’s reservations about the efficacy of existing distribution
networks within the social centres movement had deepened into a
critique directed less at the political desirability of self-production than its
poor practical realization by all concerned, including Assalti Frontali itself.
Notwithstanding healthy sales of CDs and concert tickets, he complained,
the band could not make a living from its work. Beyond continual difficulties
concerning the movement and reimbursement of stock, the biggest problem
was attitudinal, the belief that:

. . . a self-produced work, in refusing normal commercial values, has no economic
value. . . . This is the same reasoning of many users of the social centres
who slyly think that entry to initiatives is a right to be had gratis . . . [who] are
prepared to spend 50,000 lire for dinner at a restaurant, or twice that to get
high on a Saturday night, but feel robbed if they’re asked to pay 5,000 lire [to
enter a social centre]. (Militant A, 1996: 106)

In a shrewd move replicated by other ‘militant’ bands such as AK47
and e Zezi Gruppo Operaio, Assalti Frontali arranged for Conflitto to be distributed
through newstands for 12,000 lire by the left daily il manifesto.
Despite sales of 25,000, this too was judged a financial failure by the band,
whose members, according to Militant A, continued to live in debt. When
the group announced in early 1997 that it had signed with a major, it sparked
a controversy analogous to that within the English-speaking anarchist scene
after British band Chumbawamba entered into contract with a music multinational
(Militant A, 1997: 120–3).

By contrast, 99 Posse seems less concerned with the politics of CD
distribution than those of performance, and its members were quite prepared
to supply music for the Sud soundtrack album. Concentrating on reaching
the widest audience possible, they had signed a pressing and distribution
deal with a major which granted them, ‘at little more than the industrial
price, an unlimited number of copies to be distributed in the circuits of selfmanagement’
(Bisca99Posse, 1996: 19). If concerts represent ‘from the
political point of view . . . the strongest moment of communication and interaction
with people’, the band felt caught nonetheless between its commitment
to play within the CSOAs, where it was paid only for expenses, and its
interest in playing commercial venues, where some sort of income could be
made (Bisca99Posse, 1996: 21). More recently, 99 Posse has performed to
very large crowds as support act for Jovanotti, a singer long considered a
lightweight of commercial pop but proof, in Persico’s eyes, ‘that a person can
change’ both politically and artistically (Cornacchia and Giove, 1997).

Instead of a Conclusion

No certainties no truth. (‘Pecche’’) (99 Posse)

Ideas and even principles can change; it’s dreams to which you must remain
faithful. (Militant A, 1996: 30)

The social centres have long been one of the more dynamic sectors of the
Italian left. Yet dynamism tends to bring unforeseen consequences. The
second half of the 1990s has signalled the less than comfortable discovery
that, like the universe itself, the movement’s expansion may only have
increased the distance between its constituent parts. For Persico:

Everything has changed: some things are better, most are worse, in the sense
that those [centres] which have succeeded in growing have paid a very high
price, and don’t enjoy either the approval or the collaboration of the others.
(quoted in Cornacchia and Giove, 1997)

One of the biggest turns in recent years has been the preparedness of a
number of CSOAs to work alongside Rifondazione Comunista (PRC), the
smaller of the two parties which emerged from the dissolution of the old
Communist Party (PCI). For some this is a necessary defence against the
new social right of the Lega Nord; for others it represents a failure of imagination,
even betrayal (Cappello, 1998). Whatever the case, neither 99 Posse
nor Assalti Frontali have been immune from this shift in perspective. Back
in the early 1990s, one of the Neapolitan group’s best known songs was
‘Rafaniello’, which compared the local federation of the PRC to a radish: red
on the outside, white on the inside. Asked about ‘Rafaniello’ late in 1997,
one band member stated that:

We don’t disown the song, but we don’t play it any more, because our public
has grown and it risks sending an equivocal signal.
Who do you vote for?
Rifondazione. (Giordano, 1997: 26)

A similar change is evident for Militant A. Questioned by the same reporter,
he admitted that he felt ‘no cultural bond’ with Cossutta, the leader of the
PRC’s pro-Soviet wing, ‘nor perhaps a political one’. Still, he continued:

I vote for Rifondazione, after years of not voting, because Bertinotti above all
has tried to carry our voice too into government circles. (Giordano, 1997: 21)

A closer look suggests that other, generational shifts are also at work
within the social centres movement, shifts which further complicate such
growing differences. What happens, for example, when particular cohorts of
activists within a youth-centred movement begin to age?

For a certain period the CS represented, for most people I know, the place
that resolved their problems. But as they grew older, their problems weren’t
resolved; rather, the CS became one problem more. If you arrive at a level of
incompatability with the CS either you change it, or you leave. Those who
changed it have paid the price of contradictions, however they still have it;
those who haven’t changed live moments of great difficulty. (Persico, quoted
in Cornacchia and Giove, 1997)

Militant A has been blunter in his conclusions: the difficulties in ensuring
that the self-management of the CSOA remains a collective undertaking
have been exacerbated, he believes, with the emergence of the latest levy of
recruits, polarized between:

. . . those completely ignorant of even the most elementary bases of revolutionary
subjectivity (an ignorance so total as to be almost comic) . . . [yet]
very well-disposed and open to dialogue . . . [and] those hyper-ideologues,
who are instead the most closed and obtuse, and who are continuing the
vendettas of the 1970s into the 1990s. (Militant A, 1997: 106)

The Italian social centres movement’s current stasis – insights into
which can be found in the work of both 99 Posse and Assalti Frontali –
cannot last indefinitely. If Militant A is right, the return of a ghetto mentality,
if understandable back in the climate of the 1980s, will likely prove as
disastrous as the centres’ possible normalization as ‘social enterprises’. It is
also conceivable that, in an increasingly fragmented and casualized society,
where struggles continue to be ‘dispersed into chaos’, the movement may
simply disintegrate as such. For now, at least:

The CSA are an important place of possible communication, proliferation and
visibility for an antagonistic point of view; they are one of the few spaces in
an ever more fragmented society where different subjects, which otherwise
remain segregated in their respective specificities and places of belonging,
can socialize and interact politically. (Zaccaria, 1997: 234)

As one of their most potent cultural exports to the rest of Italian society,
indigenous rap represents the limit case of the centres’ ability to communicate
with other ‘popular forces’. The CSOAs’ capacity not only to provide
that ‘same space’ and ‘same dignity’ for ‘rap and the mazurka’ alike
(Smeriglio, 1995: 63), but to risk contamination from without in the very
process of advancing social self-organization, may well determine the movement’s
broader relevance or otherwise as it enters the new millenium.

Note


All translations from Italian are my own. I am grateful to the following friends for
their assistance in the gathering of materials: Franco Barchiesi, Luc Pac, Pierangelo
‘Hobo’ Rosati, and (above all) Beatrice Stengel. Thanks too to John Hutnyk, Peter
Lentini and Sanjay Sharma for their comments on an earlier version, and to Rosa
Lorenzon for double-checking my translation of lyrics. Not to mention my anonymous
referees. I must also acknowledge the financial support of the Australian
Research Council.