Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Piero Bernocchi was one of the principal founders of the COBAS (Confederazione dei Comitati di Base), an Italian rank and file workerist organization created in 1987. He was born in 1947 and by 1968 he was already involved in protests in the engineering faculty of his school. He was also the director of Radio Città Futura, which during the 1970s was considered one of the “free radios” not monopolized by the RAI ( Bonini 2001 ). The COBAS originated in the Italian autonomous Marxist movement of the 1960s and 1970s and successfully created a coalition among the various workerist organizations throughout Italy, involving themselves in education, public transportation, and various other public organizations. Piero Bernocchi is the acting spokesperson for the COBAS, and has been interviewed numerous times by the Italian media regarding the use of political violence employed by the COBAS. Bernocchi has repeatedly pointed out that there is a difference between political violence and self-defense, which the working class has had to use in order to protect itself from fascist attacks by the state. In an interview for the newspaper La Repubblica , Bernocchi was asked about Sergio Segio, a convicted member of the Red Brigades. The interviewer attacked Bernocchi on the subject of members of the Brigades being ex-members of autonomous workers’ groups, implying that the violence used by the ... log in or subscribe to read full text