Italy in the late 1970s: Mass party Leninism, Radio Alice and Mao Dada

Initially the Maoists didn't really see culture as a problem and as we said at the beginning of Chinese Takeaway they had very conservative cultural values preferring to listen to Beethoven than rock 'n' roll. Their liking for the visual arts was limited to some Stalinist social realism oblivious of the great experiment of Russian art in the first quarter of the 20th century. But such ridiculous identifications were like pissing into a hurricane, they had to change. And change they did but without any clear break.

The attempt to bridge the gap between art and politics in the same moment retaining Leninist ideology appeared with Mao Dada which after a brief flowering in France immediately after 1968 with Mao Spontex (i.e. the mass market product Spontex floor cleaner was used as an effective weapon to attack avant-garde paintings on gallery walls) found renewed vigour in Italy in the agitation and assembly movement of 1977.

The phenomenon of Mao Dadaism in Italy must be seen in relation to a long line of quasi theoretical re-interpretation commenced by Tronti etc in the Quaderni Rossi (related to the regular hooligan riots taking place there on Saturday nights in the early 1960s) and through to the activities of the Potere Operaio (Workers Power) group which disbanded in 1973. Through a shift in emphasis an anarcho-Maoism then spread throughout Italy, which in no sense fully subverted the seemingly defunct Potere Operaio. The praxis of a mass party Leninism functioning from the base up which was the distinctive contribution of Mao Tse Tung to Leninist practises changed its name and mask. Largely it was forced to do so because its social base had become the vast marginal movement embracing the unemployed, the underemployed, the super-exploited women, students, school kids etc. trapped in the black economy who existing without the crushing mediation of worker representations had proved to be capable of acting directly for themselves. A changed class composition affecting mass party Leninism created the conditions whereby the icon of Mao was semi-decapitated and bogus 'autonomy' became the latest manipulative stick and carrot in the political jungle.

From Potere Operaio to Autonomia Operaia

The Radio Alice experiment, which was basically of Mao Dadaist inspiration, identified itself with the recuperation of autonomous activities - its theoretical wing - the A/traverso collective being an affinity organization of Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy). Franco Beradi (Bifo) who attained a brief super stardom following the riots and the official closing of Radio Alice in the Italian spring of 1977 had the following to say in his book Heaven has at last come to Earth (Le Ciel est Enfin Tomber sur la Terre, Seuil 1978) ......

"The crisis of Potere Operaio in 1973 was the sign of a marginalization of the revolutionary line within the movement itself and of a growing distance between the place where the movement is situated and the representations given to it in the political framework."

There after Autonomia Operaia chose the road of a 'mass' vanguardism getting rid of some of the baggage of vanguardism (the head office, the central committee etc) and played on the authentic desire for decentralization e.g. Autonomia Romana - the paper for the Rome area). It is hardly surprizing therefore that some of Bifo's views parallel those of Autonomia Operaia, in particular his views of Maoism encapsulating Autonomia's "refusal of work" which he sees in a scarcely credible manner as operating in China!! ....

"Between communism at work in the liberation of labour time and (social democratic) state capital the contradiction explodes and is recomposed continually only to explode again and resurface afresh because workers autonomy and capitalist development propel each other even if the communism of autonomy represents the permanent crisis of the political domination of capital"..... "It is Mao Tse Tung who has demonstrated the practical possibilities of these two poles living together and in contradiction. On the one side the movement of the masses, the autonomy of proletarians who appropriate knowledge, power, life and on the other a development of production tending to the formal suppression of work, to the reduction of necessary labour. The equation Stalino / Leninist between socialist order and class movement has been broken in the China of the Cultural Revolution, never putting stability in command, never pretending that order could reduce to itself the richness of existence set free dissociating itself continually from its own realizations and attacking continually the order constituted"....

Apart from these asides (scarcely plausible after reading Cajo Brendel, Rene Vienet, Simon Leys, Joao Bernardo and the early 70s Minus group in Hong Kong) – what can you say? It's stupid.

Mao Dada displayed an irreverent side, which did not exclude the Great Helmsman from being the object of lighthearted word play if not sarcasm hardly befitting the austere figure of Mao himself. Mao Dada is a bizarre phenomenon. Between the mock and not so mock-heroics of La Gauche Proletarienne and the occasionally clever lampoons of Mao Dada there are obvious differences. For a start there is an absence of militantism which characterized earlier phases of Western Maoism (a fixation on building barricades, cop bashing etc. ..... "militant is militaristic... militantism is the site of the separation between politics and life; it is a voluntarist ersatz of the subject" (this was broadcast over Radio Alice). In Mao Dada there is a greater revulsion against the party line though one would not be wrong in seeing in it the final form taken by the vanguard party either. (C.f. Autonomia's and Bifo's remarks on the Maoist state which he sees as in contradiction with the existence of communism). In fact looked at more carefully Bifo's abstractions are amazingly paradoxical - the base is tending towards 'communism' yet the state is continually abolishing its pre-suppositions throwing everything into the social whirlpool over and over again. Obviously there is no ready parallel at all between Mao Dada and Mao's China. One is left wondering why they are Maoists in the first place and if there is any comparison it is with the post 'Maoism' of the survivors of La Gauche Proletarienne and the spawning of the Nouveaux Philosopes. No wonder ace despair artiste Bernard Henri-Levy was so quick off the mark defending the Italian insurgents in 1977 (or rather defending his own reputation) against the possibilities of an Italian Communist party Gulag as some of what took place in that eventful year had a common origin in old style Maoism. Within this complex process of disintegrating dogma something of the old lie still hasn't budged. The difference between the playfulness of Mao Dada and the despair of Le Dantec is merely one of degree. Reeling under the hammer blows they still continue to cling to something of Mao. Even someone with a mild acquaintance with China, knows that Mao Dada would not be permitted there and the cost of amusing anybody publicly with Mao's name (e.g. like in one Radio Alice broadcast) would have to be a dash one night across the frontier separating mainland China from Hong Kong or face certain imprisonment.

Much has been made of Radio Alice in Bologna in the late 1970s in Italy and elsewhere and its existence followed by its startling demise influenced the mushrooming of private 'radical' radio stations throughout Europe. Although there had been purely commercial pirate radio stations throughout the 1960s such as Radio Caroline in the UK, which changed the face of pop music though nothing else, the first radical venture historically was Radio Renescenca during the uprising in Portugal between 1974-76 and the far leftist Italian group Lotta Continua (the Struggle Continues) often propagandised over its airwaves in innovative ways and possibly was even instrumental in putting Che Guevara lyrics to Bob Dylan tunes. However the Italian state was not so lenient and brought a legal test case against a radio station called Onde Rosse (Red Airways), which illegally took to the air in July 1975. It didn't work out as the state planned and in almost a fluke precedent, such expropriation by the state was, in an unprecedented ruling, declared unconstitutional. This had immediate consequences with radio and TV stations mushrooming throughout Italy.

This form of communication has virtually taken over from the counter culture underground newspaper of the late 1960s. It also makes sense in the present pinched economic climate of today as outlay on fixed capital is small, producing the news is virtually free and with a simple switch of a knob it costs nothing to the consumer on the receiving end. Moreover the call box communication can overcome some of the spectacular reification of a passive audience, which a newspaper demands. It is rather more interactive. Radio Alice, it seems, became slowly aware of the historical inevitable: the obsolescence of the written word (irony of ironies writing this!). The symbol of the station was taken from a Fra Angelico painting of an angel throwing a book on a fire; in short something of the world which Artaud ("all writing is pigshit") and Zarathustra ("the free man speaks directly, he does not write") envisaged but with a far greater depth than generally was to be mustered on Radio Alice. Nonetheless, some of Mayakovsky's comments on the written word as the language of repression were read out on this radio station and hovering in the general background was a general consensus that a spontaneous letting go through direct speech is more to the point than even the best written text can ever capture. (Perhaps a subversive laughing flow, something more like the unrecorded free form jazz in its 1950s-60s heydays and not the rubbish dished up today). In practice though Alice was more devious and the Bologna radio station also sucked into its orbit a lot of dubious professional spielers. Even ace bullshitter Marshall Mcluhan was allotted a slot proclaiming in an interview with a journalist from L'Espresso that the March riots of 1977 had everything to do with the TV age quite forgetting more earthly facts like the brutal presence of the police backed up by a hideous Italian Communist party.

The A/traverso collective chose Radio Alice's name because the city was like the original Alice in Wonderland – a place where everything was not what it seemed. But in some ways Alice had already fallen through a sieve. The inspiration was not so much from Lewis Carroll as Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit':

"Go ask Alice, I think she'll know
when logic and proportion
are falling'n so be dead
and the white knight is talking backward
and the Red Queen's off her head."

A movement of recuperation losing its recuperative power? Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane were all too aware of the radical tendencies of the late 1960s having been clued-in by English ex situationist Charlie Radcliffe tuning the critique of art to pop music which changed nothing of substance.

Though Radio Alice set out with the intention of demystifying the news media (refusing professionalism etc) just a glance at some comments in Bifo's aforementioned book cobbled together from articles etc. covering a period from 1975 to 1977 is enough to make one wonder was Radio Alice all it was cracked up to be in that miserable eulogizing born of leftist myths? Here for example are some of Bifo's comments on Mao Dadaism taken from the February edition of A/traverso 1977 and included in 'his' book....

"For the movement we know this at least....

I. Dadaism wanted to overcome the separation between language and revolution, art and life. It remained an intention because it wasn't in the proletarian movement and because the proletarian movement wasn't in Dada. Because the overthrowing of class relations and cultural and anthropological transformation did not intermingle at the heart itself of the life and materiability of workers needs.

II. Maoism indicated to us a course for organization; no longer as representative of the avant-garde subject but as the capacity to synthesize the needs and tendencies in the material reality of the behaviour of the masses and to translate them in terms of a terrain of intervention, to prepare again this synthesis to all. From the masses to the masses. Yes but how?"

The Mao Dadaism of Radio Alice and a professor's response........

The Behaviour of a Smart Ass. Bifo versus a reverberating Umberto Eco: "Here's a cop, there's an Eco"

Certainly the proclamations of Mao Dada prior to the Spring riots of 1977 had the effect of bringing Deleuze and Guatttari from France to the now celebrated city of Bologna to protest against the menace of a western gulag (Guattari was subsequently to write an introduction to the French edition of Bifo's Alice e il Diavolo - Alice and the Devil) Though it is not within our competence to discuss whether the Oedipus Complex is a structure or a praxis suffice to note two points in relation to Deleuze and Guattari's garbled book Anti-Oedipus in the early 1970s:

1. In stating that that the Oedipus Complex was something imposed on the colonized world the movement of its "undoing" or "restructuring" (the enormous crises of the family) was displaced overseas leading to a further arid identification with nationalist Third World struggles. (Bifo in Alice e il Diavolo speaks of "the imperialism of Oedipus" - ugh) and the "desiring machine" yields to the mechanism of anti-imperialist guilt via neo-Dadism.

2. The profuse references in the book Anti-Oedipus from this bullshitting pair of jokers temporarily resuscitated the corpse of the artistic avant-garde project giving it a renewed ease of pretentious life. This meant art had to be mulled over again from re-reading DH Lawrence (meaning the novel is revived and the burning question of the novel as a now defunct historical form on purpose dips over the horizon) to organizing 'decoding' (what else?) light shows within the precincts of Vincennes University!

Umberto Eco, Prof of the DAMS Dept (Music / Theatre / Cinema / etc) at Bologna University participating in a joint conference alongside the Italian Minister of telecommunications Vitorrino Colombo and held by the newspaper L'Espresso had the following to say on 'Free Radio' ...

"It is ingenious to consider that finally this system is objective, however contaminated by a mysterious mass spontaneity it is also the effect of a choice that has at bottom an ideology. What choice? That of a group that wants to express their own political positions through a form of journalism that involves the listener more. Let's not pretend that this is perfect journalism."
(A Mouthful of Fresh Air, L'Espresso, 17th April 1977).

In short, the usual rubbish coming from a high up intellectual cadre, moreover a Communist party hack that supported the closing down of Radio Alice.

Umberto Eco had the misfortune to end up despised and mistrusted by everyone from the Christian Democrats to part of the Italian Communist party, from "The Movement" to the Mao Dadaists plus "The French". Trying to balance on an impossible tightrope he serves as an example of what happens to people in his position. One cannot help but think "The French", Guattari in particular, were saved this embarrassment thanks wholly to the present docility of French students! Perhaps one day they will have cause to eat their words and remember before it is too late that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Lashing out in every direction because he is being 'got at' from every direction, Eco pays the ultimate price of his role as intellectual consultant on the latest trends and too fond of seeing his photograph in L'Espresso plus the considerable perks that come with the job. L'Europeo knows it too with a bitchy reference to Eco in connection with the response of Italian intellectuals to the Nouvelles Philosophes... "Even the more acute like Umberto Eco (who usually travels by plane) are armed with a bulldozer to shift the ground from under them" (12th August 1977). But such is the informal power of individuals like Eco that such things are whispered not crudely spoken out loud. It's, as Hegel believed, the state is secure only if the ethics of public office and the myth of bureaucratic sacrifice and disinterest still persists.

Playing the gallery Eco tried to exude the atmosphere of fairness determined not to descend to the level of his more downtrodden opponents. To some degree this posing worked and in the March/ April issue of A/traverso 1977 on the closure of Radio Alice Bifo even praised Eco! Then in the April 10th issue of L'Espresso, Eco wrote an article entitled, 'A New Language: Indo-Italian' which instead of making reference to the fact four weeks previously Bologna had been the scene of a massive confrontation preferred instead to point up avant-garde parallels. ("John Cage and Stockhausen turn up again in a fusion of rock and Indian music; the walls of the town resemble more and more a painting by Cy Twombly"). On the 24th of April, Bifo wanted for incitement to cause a riot replied and this time getting with the aggro... "Institutional intellectuals have made a step backwards (or even two) terrified at seeing their dreams of rupture materialise. In Eco's article everything could be led back to the little abstract games between Norm and Violation. Behaviour and contemporary messages according to him are not interpreted within the code of normality but require a new code of interpretation. It is to forget that under this violation of the norm and this transformation of gestures and language there is a collective subject practise which produces the behaviour and signs capable of breaking the codes of interpretation." (Shit: the language!) Bifo's "polymorphous transversalism" versus Eco's weary, deflecting nihilism. We would suggest: six of one and half a dozen of the other!

There are two ways of looking at the Umberto Eco / Radio Alice relationship. Either they are genuinely naive as far as Eco is concerned given the conflict that had to develop as two different structures collided (vis Bifo's eventual attachment to Bologna University) or they wanted to be similar. The slighting remarks are very slight. ("A policeman here is an Eco there" – Alice e il Diavolo) is about the heaviest. Otherwise the dissidents constantly tended to seek Eco's help after Radio Alice was closed down. In all probability the number of arrest warrants issued helped to throw the Radio Alice collective into Eco's arms who by then had gained a notorious reputation throughout Italy and across the frontier in France, for his unwillingness to condemn the closing down of the radio station. It was not the profundity of his critique that was at issue so much as his cold feet though he clearly would have preferred the former. Merely consider Eco's public apology for his behaviour after the elapse of some four months in L'Espresso (31st July 1977) and the manner in which he ingratiated himself with the student body ("I very well know") while attempting to guarantee his status as a sage councilor!

In spite of appearances to the contrary the fault with this is its separation of theoretical activity from the masses. They too have to be informed lacking the capacity for theoretical reflection. Achieving theoretical and practical unity may not be easy but to set out today with even a half formed notion that the 'masses' are not capable of thought is worthless. Unfortunately there is no inside account of Radio Alice - of those telling details which indicate so much.

One could continue to pile on the agony. In Bifo's comments on Dadaism there is the assumption that it was a project to be taken to the masses which failed because Dadaism was not of the masses. Being part of the masses - the modern day marginals - those "without protection" (Communist party boss, Berlinguer's Gli Untorelli - the plague bearers) can do it where Dada failed. However, it was never that simple. Between Dada's cultural negativism and that of the masses there was an odd rapport, which defied delineation. What the Dadaists understood mainly and too often in the head, the masses throughout the 20th century grasped on a 'philistine' level that culture had been expropriated. (Though on the terrain of destruction Dada had an odd timeless quality - more of a social attitude than an artistic movement). Beyond the superficial resemblance of mass activity to Dadaist subversion, Dada remains an elite project carried out by an elite corps of cultured individuals forming a vanguard of destruction..... which now must be democratized down over and which indeed is beginning to happen

The social composition of Mao Dada indeed had something of that – rather more proletarian and therefore heading in the right direction. However, some (if not all) of the editorial team of Radio Alice was drawn from the lecturers of the DAMS Dept of Bologna University. In a sense Alice became a continuation of a DAMS seminar into a university of the airwaves. And though the class position of these participants ten years on had changed (as many at the time emphasized and was seized upon by journalists) there still remained a residual vanguardism, which eventually for instance, provided an alibi for Bifo when he became a lecturer at Bologna University extolling the ideology that the class nature of the university had changed. Bullshit! Undoubtedly under that fink sociology professor, Umberto Eco, the DAMS Department encouraged this kind of mish-mash of half lie and half truth where the Maoist Cultural Revolution had been freed from the rural connotation it had possessed in China and was applied more generally. These Depts. on the level of the university reflected (and still reflect) the disintegration of a hierarchical coding of fine and applied arts, the crumbling of this division lending to them in the late 1960s-70s an attractive aura of hip recuperation. Hardly surprizing then that there was a Mao Dadaist cell belonging to the DAMS Dept, which played its cultural role out to a T. transforming a huge assembly - potentially the democratic organ for proletarian insurrection - into a happening (Feb 8th 1977). All of this was in marked contrast to the activities of the Metropolitan Indians in the year of 1977 whom hailing from heavy proletarian quarters (e.g. Previstino and Tor Pignatora in Rome etc) who intervened subversively with laughing irony in everyday life managing largely to avoid the recuperation of avant-garde theatre and intellectualism though some were to fall for the terrorist trap in the years to come.

Through Mao Dada, the whole of modern subversion prefigured in avant-garde art was shorn of its radical trajectory and placed in the perspective of mass party Leninism. As Sergio Bologna said in "Class composition and the theory of the party at the origin of the workers' council movement".....

"Maoist thought has gone further by conceiving of the class as the party, the party as the majority of the people, the party as social majority and by moving the ground of insurrection from the brief and Bolshevikh coup d'etat to long range war. With Maoism, insurrection has become a spontaenist term."

When Bifo was able to praise "President Mao's.... principal form of all organizational work: receive ideas put out by the masses, systematize them, then propound them again to the masses" he was thus able in the same article published in A/traverso (Feb 1977) to incorporate individuals from the 19th and 20th century artistic avant-garde into the Maoist framework....

"But Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Khlebnikov, Artaud had been some moments of the eruption of the lived and of the irreducibility of the body in language; delirium with them was the moment of the emergence of the subject to the text."

This polyglot bringing into the fold - subversion=Maoism in all its 'breadth' also has its counterpart in contemporary consumerism. The Radio Alice collective liked to think of itself as the Beatles' Sergeant Peppers sleeve album come alive. However the suppression of Radio Alice encouraged by the Italian Communist party because it was an invaluable information service during the spring 1977 riots meant that avant-garde culture could take on a subversive aura again in a country notorious for its suppression of theory. The Italian Communist party plays a major role in this suppression having in the past called Freud a cop, Orwell a pimp etc. and further added glory to its name in 1977 by painting out the often highly amusing and pertinent revolutionary wall slogans in Bologna - all for the benefit of the tourist industry! In reality however Radio Alice shared many of the contradictions of the old underground newspapers. At its worst Alice was a pot pourri of left structuralism - a denuded situationist critique which overlaps with the fallout from structuralism- plus hippy music and a kind of yippie-cum-watered down New York Motherfucker ideology. (After all the solemn debates about 'signs' and the 'signified' you wonder if the real question isn't about the signers and the signed on!)

What happened in Bologna and at other cultural events throughout Italy (e.g. the Dorco Lambro pop festival in Milan in 1975) tended to strengthen radical illusions about culture which latter day Maoism makes so much of. So one is in the unenviable position of flicking through Alice e il Diavolo as the book of the revolution noting the records - Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the books - 'March of the Hobbits', etc. together with fulsome praise for The Yellow Submarine and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Music which had not only been laughed at as the voice of golden protest by merry business people like the National Lampoon in the USA but had been superceded on the level of the artistic commodity by the new populist superstars of punk in the UK and the USA. (Although to be fair the Puzz collective in Italy had mildly criticized rock 'n' roll in 19074-75 neatly saying.... "There's something happening and you don't know what it is do you Mr. Dylan") In Radio Alice pop music and the old avant-garde mystique (now gone forever) were welded and celebrated together - the pretensions of Cornelius Cardew's, 'The Sounds of Chairman Mao' ... Ed Saunders edition of Fuck You – "a magazine of the arts, of fucking" .... "Tuli Kupferberg author of 1001 ways of Living without Working, New York 1965 - a total assault on culture, two poets who chose rock 'n' roll chaos". All this indeed ten years after Saunders, The Fugs and Kupferberg had been well ridiculed by revolutionaries (The Motherfuckers plus ourselves) in New York City.

The thought occurs - is it some kind of joke? – as this subversion in its naiveté is reminiscent of some of the silliest examples of the counter culture of the late 1960s. Radio Alice gave back credence to radicalism in pop music ten years after the greatness of Beck or Hendrix had faded. The musical situationism of punk / new wave was not to put that radicalism back together again in spite of its early self-illusions to the contrary. From the first take off, the energy was wrenched from itself by the capitalist structures in music which inevitably proved stronger, even though punk's nihilism when bared, pointed to the imminent demise of rock 'n' roll and the urgent necessity to destroy music and its roll of ripping off authentic life as part of revolutionary critique. Although the assembly movement of 1977 was radical in its aspiration in Italy (the need to "re-take life again") ironically it was partially pacified later by the 'new' avant-garde rock commodity imports. It was a short and terrible step from "never work"/ "consume more, live less" and the quality of life to Peter Tosh and Ian Dury concerts in the same arenas as the free discussion of the assemblies had taken place.

Maoism and New Wave music

So far only one new wave band has sounded off about China. The following is a verse from Pere Ubu's 'Chinese Radiation' which also found resonance in Italy.

"Be the Red Guard,

Be the New World.

He'll wear his grey cap

She'll wave her red book

He'll tell her it reminds me of the future.

IT'S ONE WAY

Then they'll sing."

Pere Ubu's dumb yap explanation of his pro-Chinoise sentiments is scarcely credible for a so-called nihilist punk band. It should be quite obvious said David Thomas, lead Ubu figure of the band,

"that China has the most modern social system – there's a starkness, a pleasing, necessary starkness. The ideal of the Chinese system is concerned with purity and discipline, which are naturally the only two things that any person should be concerned with when he's thinking of any new world.....There's some degree of....illusion involved, but any system which provides an illusion as strong as the Chinese system must own the future."

(Oh No!) In fact for all the New Wave's commercial flaunting of the decay of all values, Pere Ubu's reaction was no different to the reaction of an audience composed of professionals, semi-professionals and ex-professional drop outs nearly all involved in one way or another with community work, who viewed the London showing of The Generator Factory. The reactions to the Chinese films showed the extent to which China provided a crutch in a world in which seemingly time-honoured values were becoming decrepit and disintegrating. They applauded the return to original bourgeois asceticism (anti-smoking, anti drink) for the destroyed ideals of bourgeois asceticism which capitalism had inevitably to modify through pressure from the working class with the decrease in the length of the working day and certain sectors of capital that profit from the consumption of the working class. This audience was able to accept party control of pleasure without a murmur. Moreover this party control of alcohol and other pleasures was really more akin to the era of temperance and prohibition than to the West of today. When it was remarked to one starry-eyed viewer of the Peking Proletarian Opera that there wasn't really anything to choose between this and Kung Fu, he looked as though he was choking on his chop suey.

To assume that culture per se or the examples cited here are revolutionary is to put the ball back into Eco's and Asor Rosa's court who accused the Mao Dadaists of idealism, as subconsciously subscribing to the view that ideas make history. It also helped Dario Fo get his bag of theatrical tricks together again. From then though the outlook began to look grim with Eco rubbishing the marginals as petite bourgeois though he hadn't the gall to push things on that level as the Italian Communist party did with their characterisation of marginals as potential fascists. Generally though just look how weary the comments became, how old the terms of the debate! The Bolshevikhs as necessary spark, of organised power liberating the creativity of the masses etc!