From the White Overalls (Tute Bianche) to the Book Bloc

It seems a cen­tury has gone by since the polit­ical sea­son of the Tute Bianche (White Over­alls), but it was only a little over ten years ago. Ten years in which much has happened. Des­pite the his­tor­ical shifts that have taken place in these past ten years, rebel­li­ous stu­dents in Rome and in Lon­don last autumn endorsed the exper­i­ence of con­flict inven­ted by the Tute Bianche: shields and hel­mets for body pro­tec­tion; viol­a­tion of the red zones and of the headquar­ters of insti­tu­tional polit­ical power, bar­ri­caded behind their edi­fices, with no demo­cratic rela­tion­ship with society.

Such prac­tices weren’t merely an imit­a­tion of the pre­vi­ous exper­i­ences of con­flict, but in fact gave a whole new read­ing to them, an abso­lutely ori­ginal one and a very effect­ive one: shields were replaced by the book– shields, armour dis­play­ing the point that know­ledge has become the means of phys­ical pro­tec­tion for those protest­ing against the dis­man­tle­ment of the pub­lic uni­ver­sity, against job insec­ur­ity and unem­ploy­ment. There are many more dif­fer­ences mark­ing this new inter­pret­a­tion of the con­flict. Let’s con­tinue in order.

1. Tute Bianche: the prac­tice of con­flict and communication

White over­alls (typ­ical work clothes) where used for the first time in Italy in Septem­ber 1994, dur­ing a viol­ent demon­stra­tion staged by social centre act­iv­ists in Milan. Social centres con­cen­trated their effort in Milan, oppos­ing the evac­u­ation of the his­tor­ical social centre Leon­cavallo: 10,000 mil­it­ants cornered the muni­cipal admin­is­tra­tion, the police, the power play­ers in the city and re-​conquered the self-​managed area, the present site of the social centre.

But it was only years later, begin­ning in 1998, that the Tute Bianche became a polit­ical move­ment. The move­ment took shape in Rome, look­ing to the protests of the French unem­ployed. The choice of the gar­ment, the white over­alls, was a very pre­cise one: com­pared to the blue over­alls (tra­di­tion­ally the gar­ment of the work­ing class), white over­alls are the sym­bol of the youth work­force, mostly pre­cari­ous, work­ing on short term labour con­tracts, without rights or guar­an­tees, excluded from the Ford­ism Social Con­tract which includes per­man­ent labour con­tracts, paid hol­i­days and sick and mater­nity leave and social secur­ity pay­ment. A work­force with aver­age qual­i­fic­a­tions, the res­ult of mass school­ing which took place after ’68. These are the dis­tinct­ive traits of the style in which the actions of the Tute Bianche were car­ried out and of their polit­ical agenda: blitzes with a high com­mu­nic­a­tion impact (the occu­pa­tion of polit­ical and eco­nom­ical headquar­ters, uni­lat­eral price reduc­tion of tick­ets to museums, cinemas, pub­lic trans­port, irrup­tions into live tele­vi­sion pro­grams), which imposed vis­ib­il­ity on what is invis­ible (job insec­ur­ity), demand­ing social secur­ity bene­fits not related to job per­form­ance, the right to edu­ca­tion and mobil­ity. The Tute Bianche estab­lished a strong link between the prac­tice of con­flict and the prac­tice of com­mu­nic­a­tion, identi­fy­ing in the main stream media the battle ground for con­flict, in the belief that even rad­ical con­flict must define a pos­it­ive ten­sion with consensus.

Begin­ning in 1999 the white over­alls made their appear­ance in street demon­stra­tions. Along with the use of hel­mets and shields, white over­alls became the sym­bol of a broader move­ment, involving most of the Italian social centres. A move­ment which inter­preted new forms of civil dis­obedi­ence. The aim of the Tute Bianche move­ment remained the same, to give vis­ib­il­ity to the invis­ible, but the focus shif­ted to other issues: the deten­tion centres for migrants, the war –it was the time of the war in Kosovo. The back­ground of the inde­pend­ent move­ment which dis­tin­guishes the social centres blen­ded with the Anglo-​Saxon theme of civil dis­obedi­ence, and this mix was exem­pli­fied in the street marches: with the use of hel­mets and shields for pro­tec­tion the Tute Bianche viol­ated the red zones, dis­obey­ing laws con­sidered unjust, those on the deten­tion of illegal migrants as well as on mil­it­ary intervention.

With the Seattle upris­ing of Novem­ber 30, 1999 and the sur­fa­cing of alter– glob­al­iz­a­tion move­ments, we wit­nessed yet another change: the prac­tice of civil dis­obedi­ence and the viol­a­tion of the red zone was tar­geted on the inter­na­tional sum­mits of the world powers, from OECD and the World Bank, the Inter­na­tional Mon­et­ary Fund to the G8, insti­tu­tional powers which are con­sidered ille­git­im­ate, author­it­arian and anti-​democratic. The great fin­an­cial insti­tu­tions in fact imposed on national states eco­nomic policies which restric­ted wel­fare and social rights, and, on enter­prises, downs­iz­ing and salary squeezes. The peak of this new phase was reached dur­ing the anti-​G8 protests in Genoa: the Tute Bianche move­ment decided to do without the sym­bol of its iden­tity, the white over­alls, but nev­er­the­less attemp­ted to viol­ate the red zone. The repres­sion in response was without pre­ced­ent, the Ber­lusconi gov­ern­ment, backed by the arrog­ance of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, declared war on the alter– glob­al­iz­a­tion move­ment: Carlo Giuliani was killed, hun­dreds of pro­test­ers were tor­tured inside the Diaz school build­ing and the Bolzaneto police sta­tion. The prac­tice of civil dis­obedi­ence suffered a sig­ni­fic­ant set­back but the move­ment decided to roll out the con­flict in other social areas (job insec­ur­ity, migration/​citizenship, the com­mon good), other than chal­len­ging the sum­mits of inter­na­tional powers: this was the begin­ning of the move­ment of the “Disobedients”.

2. From the “Onda” move­ment to the “Book Bloc”: the Italian stu­dent protest

The Onda (Wave) stu­dent move­ment broke on the scene back in Septem­ber 2008, dur­ing the cru­cial phase of the global fin­an­cial crisis. In Septem­ber the his­toric US invest­ment bank Leh­man Brother, failed, while Fan­nie Mae and Fred­die Mac, the bank­ing giants man­aging half of the U.S’s mort­gage loans, were nation­al­ized. The subprime mort­gage crisis led to the clamp­down on credit, the cent­ral banks (from the Fed­eral Reserve to the Cent­ral European Bank) injec­ted mar­ket liquid­ity, drain­ing the pub­lic cof­fers. The response to the crisis meant an exor­bit­ant increase in pub­lic debt and a huge shift of resources to the banks. It was in this grim set­ting that Italian stu­dents broke their silence, tak­ing to the streets to boldly shout out: “We won’t pay for the crisis!”

The Onda how­ever came as an answer to the Italian polit­ical crisis. In the spring of 2008 Ber­lusconi was again elec­ted to lead a gov­ern­ment. The gov­ern­ment he formed through a vile pact with the North­ern League, an Italian xeno­phobic polit­ical party, went to work to deal with fin­an­cial col­lapse with these pre­cise rem­ed­ies: cuts to the wel­fare, and most of all, slash­ing fin­an­cial resources for pub­lic edu­ca­tion, schools and uni­ver­sit­ies, for cul­ture, art, and enter­tain­ment. “You can’t eat cul­ture” was the motto of the Min­is­ter for Eco­nomy, Giulio Tremonti, while the Min­is­ter for Wel­fare, Maur­izio Sac­coni, reminded newly uni­ver­sity gradu­ates that that they must get used to humble and manual jobs. This was a dir­ect attack on intel­li­gence which dis­tin­guished the Italian answer to the sys­temic crisis of capitalism.

Schools took the ini­ti­at­ive to fight back: for the first time chil­dren, along­side their teach­ers and par­ents played a lead­ing role in over night occu­pa­tions. The fight was against the abol­i­tion of full-​time school­ing, the re-​introduction of the single teacher per class, the pious mor­al­iz­a­tion –the com­puls­ory school smock uni­form. Soon after the lower schools acted, uni­ver­sity stu­dents began their protest. Rome and the city’s Uni­ver­sity, La Sapi­enza, was the centre of the protest which quickly fanned out to agit­a­tion and occu­pa­tions in dozens of other uni­ver­sit­ies across the coun­try. Pre­vail­ing over this more tra­di­tional form of protest, occu­pa­tion, were wild­cat demon­stra­tions. Stu­dents poured out of their classrooms and cam­puses in oceanic waves to occupy the streets and block them, para­lyz­ing the city and the rail­way traffic in massive demon­stra­tions, invad­ing rail­way sta­tions, crowding the tracks. A gen­er­a­tion with no future, con­demned to uncer­tainty (in their work, their affec­tions, their lives), began, in 2008, to break silence and to dis­cover strength through exper­i­ence on the streets. This col­lect­ive voice and body defined a new form of strike action: the met­ro­pol­itan strike, the strike of who have no right to strike. By para­lyz­ing the city, in fact, silence can be broken, and dis­sid­ence is shared, it becomes gen­eral. Like­wise pro­duc­tion, which flows through the city, the people, the goods, is blocked. The slo­gan chanted by the stu­dents was clear: “If you block our future we’ll block the city!”. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of stu­dents –on Octo­ber 30 there were one mil­lion stu­dents and teach­ers demon­strat­ing in the streets and in the squares– for two months under­mined Berlusconi’s pop­ular­ity and threatened the sta­bil­ity of his government.

From the occu­pied uni­ver­sit­ies to the city, from the city to the fest­ive atmo­sphere in the occu­pied uni­ver­sit­ies, places of cul­tural exper­i­ment­a­tion. Dur­ing the months of the Onda move­ment self-​training prac­tices flour­ished: sem­inars, free uni­ver­sit­ies, inde­pend­ent research labor­at­or­ies, pro­jects for grass­root change of the pub­lic uni­ver­sity, the statue of dis­cip­lines and know­ledge. The move­ment was well aware that the defence of the pub­lic uni­ver­sity meant the inven­tion of a new uni­ver­sity. On the one hand pub­lic fund­ing is essen­tial, but at the same time, the elim­in­a­tion of divi­sions between dis­cip­lines and cri­ti­cism of know­ledge and driv­ing out feudal power plays, typ­ical of the Italian uni­ver­sity, are just as import­ant. Where the gov­ern­ment attacked the move­ment describ­ing it as con­ser­vat­ive and nos­tal­gic, the move­ment made clear the innov­at­ive aspects without tak­ing a single step back in defend­ing the pub­lic nature of edu­ca­tion, in pub­lic schools and in the university.

The Onda move­ment, even though extraordin­ary in strength and extent, could not win. The autumn protests had no effect on the budget bill, fast tracked through par­lia­ment that sum­mer. Stu­dents were undoubtedly afflic­ted by a strong sense of isol­a­tion: no mat­ter how high the con­sensus tipped towards them, no other social sec­tor was mobil­ized and the gen­eral strike called for by the Cgil, the main Italian trade union organ­iz­a­tion, towards the end of autumn was late and weak. Mean­while, the Min­is­ter for Edu­ca­tion took time to write the reform bill. Hav­ing starved the beast, as Reagan would put it, the ques­tion was its sur­vival, even in hard­ship. In the autumn of 2009 Mari­as­tella Gelmini, the Min­is­ter for Edu­ca­tion, intro­duced the bill for reform­ing edu­ca­tion. It wasn’t so much a reform, as much as a com­pen­dium of meas­ures to imple­ment the cuts: research was dealt a severe blow, gov­ernance was re-​designed along author­it­arian guidelines, the entry of private sec­tor, banks and other enter­prises, to the uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tion boards was encour­aged., the right to edu­ca­tion was abol­ished, replaced by stu­dent hon­our loans.

In 2010, while the bill was being dis­cussed and voted in Par­lia­ment, the stu­dent protest move­ment broke out again. This time, the move­ment was quick to estab­lish an import­ant link with the work­ing class protests and with other sec­tors of soci­ety being strangled by the crisis, begin­ning with the migrants. While the gov­ern­ment was intent on def­in­itely des­troy­ing the pub­lic uni­ver­sity, Fiat was try­ing to abol­ish the national work con­tract and the rights won by the class struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. In Octo­ber the first vir­tu­ous bond was forged among stu­dents, labour work­ers, tem­por­ary employ­ees in intel­lec­tual and enter­tain­ment areas as well as social centres and envir­on­mental organ­iz­a­tions. In Novem­ber the stu­dent move­ment took charge of the protest with unpre­ced­en­ted strength. At the same time as the extaordin­ary days of Lon­don, stu­dents made for­ays into the Sen­ate cham­ber for the first time in the his­tory of the Italian repub­lic and besieged the Cham­ber of Depu­ties and both houses of par­lia­ment for days while occupy­ing the rooftops of fac­ulties, monu­ments and block­ing the rail­ways and the streets. There was an unpre­ced­en­ted escal­a­tion in the con­flict, which reached its peak Decem­ber 14 dur­ing a massive demon­stra­tion in Rome against the Ber­lusconi gov­ern­ment. An estim­ated 100,000 pro­test­ers, stu­dents and tem­por­ary work­ers, besieged the headquar­ters of power for hours, clash­ing sev­eral times with the police. A gen­er­a­tion with no future, that shouted out dur­ing the Onda move­ment in 2008, finally unleashed its anger. The anger over job uncer­tainty and unem­ploy­ment and over the growth of poverty they are being sub­ject to. From Rome to Lon­don the battle is for pub­lic edu­ca­tion and against European aus­ter­ity policies, the very policies that sub­sid­ized banks with pub­lic funds dur­ing the crisis, while slash­ing wel­fare to bal­ance budgets.

Dur­ing these excep­tional days the Book Block made its appear­ance. The prac­tice of hold­ing up shiels in the demon­stra­tions was not a for­tu­it­ous one: aimed to break the ban and chal­lenge the gov­ern­ment until the edu­ca­tion reform bill was with­drawn. Each shield was a book, a clas­sic, a lit­er­ary must: Pet­ronius, Boc­cac­cio, Deleuze, Spinoza, Mor­ante, Miller, Machiavelli, the Italian Con­sti­tu­tion, and so on. Books to oppose the viol­ence of the gov­ern­ment and the police force, for body pro­tec­tion of those not will­ing to give up their future, for those who believe that know­ledge is always an expres­sion of free­dom. With the book-​shields stu­dents conquered the wider public’s atten­tion and an unpre­ced­en­ted con­sensus. Whereas the Tute Bianche move­ment used shields to sym­bol­ize its iden­tity, here the use of the shields was dif­fer­ent: the protest tac­tics var­ied, from occu­pa­tion of rooftops to rail­way sta­tions, fac­ulty build­ings and streets, and the shields were brought out, serving as pro­tec­tion against the police when neces­sary. The book-​shields have an extremely sig­ni­fic­ant sym­bolic value, but do not spe­cific­ally refer to any par­tic­u­lar iden­tity. The stu­dent protest fol­lowed in the path pion­eered by the Tute Bianche move­ment, with spe­cial atten­tion to the link between prac­tices of con­flict and com­mu­nic­a­tion, but spoke of some­thing dif­fer­ent: a lead­ing player as a new social sub­ject, the youth work­force on tem­por­ary labour con­tracts, totally pit­ted against two-​dimensional polit­ics. The fact that Book Blocks rap­idly spanned across the national bor­ders and made their appear­ance in Lon­don dis­plays the trans­versal, poly­phonic and plur­al­istic aspect of their nature. Every­one can choose his or her own book, every­one can make his or her own shield, every­one can recount his or her own per­sonal rebellion.

3. Europe, the Medi­ter­ranean, the insurrection

What do Lon­don, Rome Tunis and Cairo have in com­mon? What are the factors shared by the insur­rec­tions which were sparked last autumn and are con­tinu­ing? In the first place, the social sub­jects involved: stu­dents, new gradu­ates, short-​term con­tract work­ers. The newly qual­i­fied work­forces with no future and no rights, excluded from the social pact. The new poor, if we are able to give a mater­ial rather than a moral mean­ing to the concept of poverty. Poverty today is defined by the dis­tance between the know­ledge and the skills acquired and real life and work con­di­tions: “I study hard, yet noth­ing lies ahead”, “Des­pite many years of hard work I’m poorer than my par­ents”, “I make do with jobs that have noth­ing to do with what I stud­ied for”. These are the words echo­ing through the minds of mil­lions of young Europeans, North Afric­ans and Egyp­tians. A shared con­di­tion of being down­graded is what is spark­ing the protests unset­tling Europe and the Medi­ter­ranean regions.

Secondly, the forms of protest. Insur­rec­tions and upris­ings, the demand of rights and resources against the crisis and its rem­ed­ies. Like­wise, insur­rec­tions are impos­ing demo­cracy and fight­ing the para­sitic powers of the state and fin­ance. The link between the claim for demo­cracy, class demands and demands for redis­tri­bu­tion of wealth is not acci­dental. We live in a time in which cap­it­al­ism is rad­ic­ally sep­ar­ated from the expres­sion of lib­eral demo­cracy, we only have to turn to China to grasp this. Where man­power takes over the skills and the func­tions of the cap­ital (Marx would say “fixed cap­ital” or machinery) cap­ital needs to limit indi­vidual free­dom by main­tain­ing uncer­tainty. Where cap­ital becomes profit and fin­ance, no medi­ation can suf­fice and polit­ics must merely admin­is­ter what is already in place and its inev­it­ab­il­ity. The upris­ings that have flooded the European and Medi­ter­ranean scene can do noth­ing other than speak in a new lan­guage, one which is both anti-​capitalist and democratic.

This is the tran­script of the sem­inar “From Tute Bianche to the Book Bloc: the Italian move­ment and the com­ing European insur­rec­tion”. Trans­lated and pub­lished at through europe [italian ver­sion]

By Francesco Raparelli, PhD stu­dent in Polit­ical Philo­sophy – UniRiot​.org editor

This entry was posted on 3 September 2012 at 6:11 am and is filed under Critical Legal, Radical Politics, The Political. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.