Fifty Years of Our History. LC and CL

That Strange ’76
Utopia and Presence

1976. The end of Lotta Continua, the new beginning of Communion and Liberation. Adriano Sofri shares his judgment on an era, reacting to Fr Giussani’s letter to the Pope. “I came to know of
you very late. My relationship with Fr Giussani? As when you know a person is relevant for you.”


edited by Luigi Amicone

Don Bosco Penitentiary, Pisa, Italy. A conversation with Adriano Sofri, the former leader of the extreme left-wing group, Lotta Continua. Today, he is a writer, journalist and intellectual whose legal plight has had repercussions throughout Europe. Sofri will be 62 on August 1st, he has been in prison since January 1997, and has another 15 years of a sentence to serve, unless he receives a presidential pardon, requested by many people at all levels of society. He seems to be in good shape. We can imagine what a struggle it has been to stay this way, lively, clinging even to the exterior forms that signify humanity.

I saw Giussani’s letter, the fiftieth anniversary of CL, what can I say? I came to know of you very late; I have always been very slow to catch on. I remember there were those of us who recommended paying attention to CL much earlier on (I am speaking of the seventies). And I remember the annoyance of the others who saw this attention as a Milanese madness. What is interesting is that as early as then, some considered CL a phenomenon parallel to Lotta Continua; not an enemy to be tackled and eliminated, but a similar phenomenon, at least in its aspect of human community and its independence from the constituted authorities.

When exactly did CL come onto your horizon?
The moment when I came face to face personally and, sad to say, dramatically with the reality of CL was the tragedy in Bologna, the death of Francesco Lorusso (Lorusso was killed on March 11, 1977, at the age of 25 during a fight with the police following the attempted attack by 300 militants of Autonomia and Lotta Continua on an assembly organized by CL on the premises of Bologna University. In 1970 alone this caused hundreds of violent attacks on persons and premises belonging to our Movement). By that time, Lotta Continua was already disbanded, and I myself had retired from all political militancy. It was a time when things were coming to a head, although those like me, who had left the scene, believed that things were sorting themselves out, moving towards dialogue and change. Such a terrible episode was really traumatic, one of those things that makes you say, it’s a terrible shame! There was no justification. Through the whole of 1977, things got worse instead of better.

In 1977, though, the daily paper Lotta Continua was still being published, whereas you had disbanded the organization the year before. Why did you disband it?
The ideology and even the political program were the habit we had worn up to then. In my case, things came to a head suddenly in 1975. I am really stupid and reacted to the crisis by increasing the dose of what I should have left behind. I tried to make one last bet before admitting the game was all over, and sometimes this is a tragic move (the Red Brigades had long come to an end when they still went on killing and killing each other so as to avoid admitting defeat). In my case, a series of events had taken place that had blown to pieces the Manichean idea of a world reduced to class conflict. I am thinking of the case of Circeo (in October 1975, two girls were kidnapped, brutalized, and one of them brutally killed by a group of upper class youngsters), where we reacted by saying, this is sexual violence, just like soccer hooliganism, with the high class Parioli boys–in other words, with the scheme that explained that horrible act in terms of our political identity card. And Pasolini said that the political scheme was totally mistaken, that it was an anthropological question, that by now they are all like that. So, in public, we said that Pasolini was a friend of ours and in private that he was our worst enemy, “because he wanted to rob the proletariat of its own identity alternative to that of the bourgeoisie which they had conquered with so much pain and effort. Then Pasolini ended up being killed” (November 2, 1975, killed by a young hoodlum, Giuseppe Pelosi, called “Pino the Frog”), not by a member of the Parioli fascist gang, but by a frog of the Tiburtino, and I was so vile–because of too much responsibility as happens to leaders, those who have to decide for the others–as to react to these things trying to distance ourselves from them as a very grave threat, increasing the dose, that is to say, saying that Pasolini had understood nothing, that we had to react, and so on. Then, as I am stupid and vile, but only up to a point, I decided there and then that it was over, and there I was wrong–still because of this sense of responsibility from which it is difficult to free oneself, also because at the time Lotta Continua was not small; it got few votes but it was widespread, I mean tens and tens of thousands of youngsters–to let another year pass before leaving it for good. Anyway, the fact that resolved everything for me happened in December 1975. There was a women’s protest march and a group of organizers from the Roman Lotta Continua charged this procession because they could not bear the fact that there were only women marching. It was a sign of how an initial parabola of liberation turned over into a cult of the forces of organization. From that time to the Rimini Congress in November 1976, when I dissolved LC, almost a year went by. I have never forgiven myself for that year, because it is like the interval between the end of a love and the certification of its end; it’s mortal sin. Sure, one can stay together even without loving each other any more, and without loving the world with whom you are fighting any more, but you have to say so, you have to admit it. I didn’t do this and so from 1975 to 1976 I lived a whole year in sin.

It is interesting to note that the crisis and the end of LC coincides with the crisis and a new start in CL, namely, with the irruption of Father Giussani who showed us we were at the crossroads between “presence and utopia”. You, founder of LC, where did you restart after closing Lotta Continua and formally renouncing the Marxist-Manichean ideology, that looked at the world as a class struggle?
I restarted from myself. This is probably the strongest resemblance between you and us, between CL and LC. The best thing, and the worst trap. The true nature of Lotta Continua, and the real point of difference from the other groups lies in a rather more intense human vocation. This causes a desire for mimicry which becomes a quality: a capacity to identify with others. This is the true mark of LC: you go to picket a factory, and you feel you are a worker; you occupy houses in protest, and you think of yourself as a proletarian, or as a housewife in Voghera, or a Turkish immigrant in Germany. In short, a true adventure in relating with the others. This total self-giving at the service of everyone reappears in one of the episodes that ended our history, namely in Alex Langer’s death. (He was another leader of LC, from South Tyrol, who promoted the environmental movement, then an MP in the European Parliament for the Green List. He committed suicide in the summer of ’95). He was a victim of this aspiration to make oneself everything to everyone, an aspiration that can only destroy you. This mimicry, then, which I vindicate as the most beautiful and attractive aspect of LC, at a certain point becomes something you do just out of habit, a form of alienation, and a matter of theatrical talent. You ask me: Where is Sofri going? He is out looking for himself.

In that same fall of 1976 we found ourselves restarting from presence alone. So we went back into schools and universities, ready to fight with our bare hands, so to speak. We turned our backs on our ideological and political–albeit Christian–projects and started off decisively by basing our presence in the environments on the announcement of Christ present in the historic company which is the Church, who had reached us through the Movement, that is, through the person of Fr Giussani.
CL achieves a very solid faith and a very strong common, yet personal, identity, based on Fr Giussani as a mobile teacher. He is not a teacher of the written word, to be consulted like Mao’s Red Book. This for me is the most striking characteristic in Fr Giussani: he is extremely agile, he grasps every opportunity to say things that are never ossified, never dogmatized; they cannot be taught in a party school, because he places encounter, and even beauty, in the front row. Certain aspects of CL are disconcerting from the public point of view. CL is able to plunge into human affairs without any life vest, and it gives me the idea of a faith that is lived in an extraordinary way: far from being detached from action in the world, it has room for intense activity and a tranquillity that is enviable. Thus, from the public point of view, CL can give the impression of either shady unscrupulousness or enviable tranquillity. All of this, in my opinion, is exemplified in the Rimini Meeting.

You spoke of Fr Giussani. What is your relationship with him?
It has become so fleshless, it is as if we were both non-existent; and then, we do not meet. Yet it is so long lasting, albeit intermittent and left to chance, so solid, so profit-free and gratuitous, and nothing could damage it. I feel a true, mighty liking for him. I don’t need him and he doesn’t need me, so to speak. So, I think I need him.
Biography
Adriano Sofri was born August 1, 1942. In 1968, he was one of the main exponents of the youth protests in Italy. The following years saw the rise of extremist movements and groups that accused the Italian Communist Party (the strongest and most numerous Communist party in Western Europe during the Cold War period, 1945-1989) of not being sufficiently left-wing. Sofri founded and became the charismatic head of Lotta Continua, the extra-parliamentary movement of the left, and of the movement’s daily newspaper of the same name. Sofri himself dissolved the movement officially in November 1976. At that time, a good number of militant members of LC went over to swell the ranks of terrorist groups like the Red Brigades and “Prima Linea.”
Since January 1997, Adriano Sofri has been in detention in a Penitentiary in Pisa, where he continues his activity as an intellectual, writer, and collaborator of the main Italian newspapers (amongst others, the left-wing daily, La Repubblica, and the pro-Berlusconi weekly, Panorama), despite the fact that he is serving a 22-year prison sentence. He was accused, along with two other former militants of Lotta Continua, of ordering the homicide of a police commissar in Milan on May 17, 1972. The commissar, Luigi Calabresi, had been the object of a violent press campaign by Lotta Continua in 1970-1971.
Together with his alleged accomplices, Bompressi and Pietrostefani, Sofri was first arrested in 1988, sixteen years after the incident, on the strength of the evidence given by Salvatore Marino, a former member of Lotta Continua in those years, turned prosecution witness. Marino claims to have been the driver of the car used in the homicide, and maintains that the actual murder was committed by Bompressi, acting on the orders of Sofri and Pietrostefani.
After an infinite number of trials and discussions, in which the defence was always on the losing side, Sofri was found guilty and he gave himself up voluntarily at the Pisa Penitentiary. After seven years in detention, the former leader of Lotta Continua still protests his innocence, and refuses to petition the President of the Republic for pardon--, in other words, to take the initiative in seeking the only provision that would secure him his freedom. However, on Sofri’s behalf, many of his old companions in Lotta Continua have gone on petitioning for a Presidential pardon, or, as an alternative, an ad hoc legal provision that would allow his liberation. Italian public opinion appears to be neatly divided between those who think him innocent and those who think him guilty. The fact is that the case has long crossed the Italian borders, and has taken on the appearance of a sort of “Dreyfus Case.” The author of the interview presented here is a personal friend of Adriano Sofri. They met for the first time in 1997, when Amicone–, member of the Fraternity of CL, journalist, and editor of the Weekly Tempi–, went to see Sofri at his home near Florence, the day before his incarceration. It was the beginning of a long friendship, still alive today.