The Italian Centri Sociali Occupati e Autogestiti (Occupied Self-Organized Social Centres) movement, inspired by the autonomist marxist movement but also informed by anarchism, is a network of hundreds of occupied spaces across the Italian peninsula that has existed since the 1970s. These abandoned urban spaces are turned into radical community centres, housing recording studios, movie theatres, libraries, darkrooms, radio stations and television stations and host meetings, concerts, and innumerable other activities. Although particular political philosophies vary greatly from centre to centre, they generally avoid institutional politics in favour of direct action.
Anarchism
Autonomous Marxism
Social Centre Autonomous Network
Street Television Movement
The social centres in Italy emerged during the seventies as an outgrowth of movements based around the core issues of housing availability and affordability. While the first social centres that can be referred to as such emerged in the mid-seventies, they were connected to sustained unrest around housing that began with the wider cycle of struggle that shook Italy from 1968 onwards. The "Hot Autumn" of 1969 began with a wave of factory strikes, but struggles spread outwards from the factory to society at large. Local rank and file unionists, connected with autonomist groups (often organized as Comitati di Lotta Per la Casa, or Committees for the Housing Struggle), helped prevent the eviction of and disconnection of services to working families in these neighbourhoods. Alongside this locals began to engage in "self-reduction", a practice in which large parts of working class neighbourhoods paid only a portion of their rising utilities bills and transportation costs.
Milan was a key city in the development of the first social centres, primarily
because the housing unrest was so advanced there. Local groups, citing the lack
of the most basic services in their neighbourhoods, began to occupy spaces in
order to turn them into spaces that could both serve the community’s needs
and act as a space in which political organizing of all kinds could take place.
The social centre was a new form of social struggle that broke away from the
preceding, factory-based ones in a rather distinct manner. Their early history
is certainly influenced by the Circoli di Proletariato Giovanile (Proletarian
Youth Circles). Between 1975 and 76 fifty-two of these groups spring up in Milan,
dotting the outskirts of the city. The groups, that were a peripheral part of
the second phase of the autonomist movement (in which Potere Operaio broke up
into an archipelago of autonomous groups across Italy, often referred to as
“Autonomia diffusa”) rooted themselves and their political action
in their neighbourhoods. They were composed predominantly of very young militants,
and focused on new themes: the devastation being wreaked by heroin amongst the
working classes and illegal labour (which they fought by organizing squads of
people to go and hand out flyers outside of illegal sweatshops where dangerous
working conditions were the norm).
Primo Moroni, one of Italy's best historians of the radical left, makes an important
distinction between the tactics engaged in by the proletarian youth circles
and the older autonomist formations. Whereas the latter had headquarters in
downtown Milan, intentionally rivaling those of the official political groups
they sought to contrast (including the communist party and the labour unions),
it was almost as if the former chose not to engage on that level at all. They
created meeting spaces in their own neighbourhoods, and dealt with problems
locally and at a base level:
"Occupying these areas becomes therefore an attempt to turn them into a
space for the territorial coordination of the most different needs, from the
Tenant's Committee [Comitato Inquilini], to the right to housing but also of
the self-reduction of rents, of electricity bills, of phone bills. There is
an attempt to make all that there is across the territory fit into these spaces,
and if it does, as for example in the centro sociale Fabbrikone in the southern
part [of Milan], the workers of the Alfa Romeo autonomous assembly, it becomes
a space for the 'worker-tenant coordination of southern Milan'. This radically
changes the relationship between the militant, the worker, the proletarian,
the citizen. Whereas earlier every group had their own headquarters, which tended
to be towards the center of the city, now the structures become as if liberalized,
horizontally spaced out across the territory and in need of places where they
can meet and know one another."
After the political repression of the end of the seventies and throughout the
eighties, most social centres, especially the few that have been on the scene
for more than a quarter-century, have had a cyclical history of tear gas-soaked
evictions and re-occupations. The Leoncavallo social centre in Milan has been
forcefully evicted several times since it was occupied. The last time it was
evicted, in 1989, the police action turned into a spark that ignited a series
of occupations in solidarity right across the peninsula. The occupation of spaces
spread across Italy during the 1990s, and to this day between 100 and 200 (the
number keeps changing) of them at least are active.
Isole Nella Rete
Emerging out of the social centres, collects “presences” on the
net. The following page contains links to many of the most important social
centre websites.
http://www.ecn.org/presenze/
Disobbedienti
A direct descendant of the extra-parliamentary groups of the seventies, the
Disobedients have a strong presence in Social Centres across Italy.
http://www.disobbedienti.org
Centro Sociale Leoncavallo
One of the oldest and better-known Italian social centres, the Leoncavallo has
moved several times since the seventies but remains in operation.
http://www.leoncavallo.org/envo/
Officina 99
The best-known Neapolitan social centre
http://www.officina99.org/
Naomi Klein's article on
the social centres: "Three Coins in a Centri Sociali":
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0607-05.htm
Lotta Continua’s “Take
Over the City” (1973, translated and edited by Ernest Dowson)
http://geocities.com/cordobakaf/lotta.html
Bruno Ramirez: “The
Working-Class Struggle Against the Crisis: Self-Reduction Of Prices in Italy”
(1975)
http://geocities.com/cordobakaf/self_reduction.html