Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the late 1960s, European mass social movements had achieved a remarkable moral victory over the ruling state and corporate establishment through street demonstrations, strikes and factory seizures, student occupations, and random dissent. To a large extent, resistance to state policies of repression against workers and students was through civil disobedience and protest within the confines of the rule of law. While the social movements had shaken society in Italy, Germany, and throughout Europe and achieved modest reforms, the more extensive goals of reforming or transforming the state and corporate apparatus did not come to fruition. Concomitantly, the institutional left parties and unions that putatively represented the working class remained stodgy bureaucratic organizations, frequently incapable of transforming their bureaucracies into mass-based militant organizations. As the left moved closer to the political establishment and accepted major compromises with the capitalist states, the despondent social movements in Italy and elsewhere broke with the establishment to form independent revolutionary organizations, seeking to radicalize the organizations representing workers or to build their own institutions of class solidarity. In the 1970s, in the wake of continued state violence, the political landscape in Italy shifted dramatically with the emergence of a radical left ... log in or subscribe to read full text