Rev Left Radio - The Years of Lead in Italy: Strategy of Tension, Operation Gladio, & the Long 1970s

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Most people, even on the Left, only know fragments of Italy's "Years of Lead." This episode pulls the whole picture into focus: the mass worker upsurge after the boom years, the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing and the death of Giuseppe Pinelli, the rise of the Red Brigades, the kidnapping and execution of Aldo Moro, and the 1980 Bologna massacre. Alyson and Breht trace how far-right stragismo (mass bombings) intersected with far-left clandestinism, and how segments of the deep state, intelligence services, and the Cold War Gladio architecture shaped a strategy of tension that isolated social movements, kept the socialist and communist left from power, and cleared the way for the establishment of neoliberalism in Italy and beyond. Alyson and Breht then discuss what lessons we can learn from this history and if there are any similarities to the contemporary United States.   Clips for this episode are pulled from this YT documentary HERE Check out our episode on the Italian fascist Julius Evola HERE Check out our episode on Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political HERE   ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

What you're hearing now has exploded, Oh Bella Chau, Bella Chiao, Bella Chouhast. What you're hearing now is a song you may be familiar with. Since 2017, Bella Chow has exploded in popularity, mainly due to the Netflix series Money Heist. It sounds innocent enough, a cheery marching song that makes you want to dance. But very few people know the song's dark history.

Originally it began as a song of protest in the late 1800s, sung by northern Italian farmers dissatisfied with their poor working conditions. However, its modern interpretation wouldn't come into being until 1943 when it was adopted by the anti-fascist Italian partisans as their anthem. The lyrics were modified. Instead of singing about mosquitoes and harsh working life, the partisans sung of death and the struggle for freedom against Mussolini and the Nazi occupation. Bella Chow would go on to inspire the partisans to success in liberating Italy in 1945.

It is here with this song that I believe the modern Italian mindset was molded. An idea of struggle, perseverance and liberation would embed itself in the minds of all those in Italy. A sense of pride for the struggle for freedom. However, while these ideas of liberation and struggle were adopted by everyone in Italy, some decided they would adopt one more aspect of the famous song, the idea of violence, the idea of conflict and dying for a cause. It was this that sowed seeds of division in Italy in the following years and would cause them to explode in what would become known simply as Gliani di Pionbo,

the years of lead. So this is Redminus, and I'm Alison, and I'm here with my co-host Brett. And this month, we are going to dive into a very interesting topic that I'm really excited to talk about that I think Brett is also pretty excited to get into at this point, which is the years of lead. So I would imagine most of our listeners have heard this term before and maybe know some of the history of the years of lead. like very high level what the term refers to as a period in Italian history. But I also imagine there are quite a few of our listeners who don't know a lot of the details about it. And so in this episode, we kind of want to get into some of that history and also do some comparative work about what the years of lead were in relation to the United States,

what the situation the U.S. looks like now. And one of the reasons for this is that I think in the kind of ecosystems that we exist in, people make a lot of comparisons between where the U.S. is at this moment and the Italian years of lead. I think the joke that I see on like left Twitter all the time is like the American Years of Lard is the kind of go-to punchline for the comparison. And so I think Brett and I are both interested in this question of whether or not the years of lead are actually comparable to the United States today, what we can learn from the years of lead, what historical analogs exist around it, and also just giving more of a focused history and trying to piece together what happened during this period in Italian history in maybe a more systemic way that doesn't just treat it like a meme

to be referenced. Up front, I want to say that this is going to be an interesting episode because I know my Italian pronunciation is absolute shit. So please forgive me for probably mispronouncing a whole host of Italian figures names. And I also think this episode will be interesting because the years of lead overlaps with quite a lot of conspiracy theories and speculation about the involvement of various intelligence agencies. And so this is going to be a tough one where we're talking both about like established history that people are generally in agreement on, but also the speculative edges of that. And when you get into the years of lead, the lines between those two things become very blurry in a way that I think requires careful, attentive historical analysis that doesn't just

speculate too much, but also doesn't just take things at face value. So I think there will be a bit of a balancing act here. But this is what we're going to be talking about. I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to Brett in a second to get us into the history and set the stage for what the years of lead were. But hopefully this can be a helpful contribution since this is a time period. People are referencing a lot right now. And that I do think there's a somewhat underdeveloped understanding of the left in the U.S. today. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with all of that. And we'll get into if the U.S. right now, it does have some overlap with the years of lead. I think there's a reason why why that term has popped up, particularly on the left, but perhaps across the political

spectrum. But there's more dissimilarities, I think, than there are similarities. But there's also other historical analogs that we've covered on the show. And, you know, many of you will just know with your background knowledge that we can maybe touch on to kind of bring some analog into the situation. But I do think, as Allison said, that the years of lead are often referenced, but not well understood. It is a period of Italian history and Cold War history that is mired in intrigue.

in intrigue and conspiracy. In the Italian context, it is still a history that is fought over that has lots of question marks, has lots of conspiratorial inflection points, and we'll get into some of that. Again, we're going to try to hedge close to what we do know, not to say that there are no conspiracies, but a lot of this stuff is unproven. A lot of these things were never tracked down. Many people disagree on the detail. So when we talk about things like Operation Gladio and the CIA involvement,

it's definitely there, but there are some things that we do know and some things we don't, so we'll clarify that. I actually do want to give a personal shout out to Matt Christman, who I think, honestly, I think that he is most responsible for popularizing the term gladio and years of lead on the contemporary American left. I would venture to say that that was the first time I came across the terminology years ago was him mentioning it. So, you know, shout out to him.

I hope he's still in recovery. from a stroke. I hope he's doing well. But it's just worth saying that. So let's first get into it. The basic timeline here. When we talk about the years of lead in Italy, we are talking primarily about the very late 60s, probably starting in earnest around 68 and going up through about 1980, going into the 80s a bit, but you're talking late 60s in the early 80s, right? And the endpoint and start point are ambiguous. There is no concrete ending date or starting date. It's a, it's a, it's a, a long 70s decade stretching into the 60s and 80s of widespread social upheaval in Italian society with open violence from the far left and the far right and as well as a broader NATO, US, MI6 backdrop

of the Cold War that we have to talk about. So that's the years that it's happening. the material underpinnings of this period of time in Italian society is you got to think first the post-war context. So Italy is aligned under Mussolini with the Nazis in World War II. They are defeated. The Italian society, like much of Europe, the infrastructure is torn up. It is laying in ruins. And we all know about the Marshall Plan where in the U.S. infused Europe, including Italy with billions of dollars to try to rebuild the European economy. But I also want to emphasize

that there was a conditions to this, right? The Marshall Plan was not merely a charitable giving to Europe to help them rebuild. It came with certain concessions you had to make to U.S.-led NATO, and it was really centered around the emergence of the Cold War, containment strategy, and binding a lot of this recovery and aid to this broader U.S. containment strategy. of the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union, et cetera, in the context of the Cold War. So in Italy, you do see this boom in the 60s, this economic boom. You have rapid urbanization, lots of people moving into city centers, rapid proletarianization, lots of rural people becoming, you know, legitimate proper proletarians on factory floors,

building up an Italian economy. And so you have an economic boom. you have a working class that is increasingly organized, lots of unions at this time, lots of leverage amongst labor broadly. But you also have the political and ideological remnants of World War II in which you have the partisans, right, anti-fascists, communists, socialists, having lots of mainstream acceptance in Italian society, right? These are the partisans are the people who tied up.

up Mussolini, right, upside down in that famous imagery, you know, ended the fascist regime of Mussolini in Italy and had subsequent social capital, large social movements. The Italian left, by left, I mean genuine left, socialist, communism, anarchists, they had cultural cachet, they had large blocks of mass support. They were very, very present in the unions. They had a sort of their own culture that was really forged in the partisan years of World War II, that infused sections of Italian society. And so, you know, one of the first and most obvious dissimilarities between the modern U.S. and Italy at this time was broad support for the ideology of socialism and communism. And in fact, Italy had the biggest communist party in Europe. Now, think about

where Italy is, you know, from a broader Western imperialist perspective, where Italy is located geographically. You know, it juts into the Mediterranean, and it is right kind of at the intersection of the eastern block and the Western block. You got to think Yugoslavia just across the Adriatic Sea, a socialist state. You know, the Soviet bloc is beyond that. So Italy is geographically essential for the Cold War, NATO U.S. imperialist-led Western bloc. Geographically, it's central. It has this huge communist party, the biggest communist party in Europe. It's right next door to Yugoslavia.

And so you can see why this area at this time becomes very interesting for not only the far right in Italy, but for these broader Western imperialist NATO-aligned and intelligence agencies that are aligned with NATO, like MI6, like, MI6, like. CIA that are very interested in keeping Italy non-communist. And so that kind of sets, I think, the basic geopolitical and material conditions out of which this turmoil, you know, this tumultuous time in Italian history is going to emerge. But, Alison, what did I miss? What would you like to add to that part of it? No, I mean, I think that captures the really important parts. I mean, And I think, like, the thing to emphasize with the Marshall Plan and the post-war period, which I think you were getting to at the end there, is just how much this was part of the broader U.S. containment strategy, right? The idea of communism developing in Italy was a massive concern post-war for the United States. And I think the other thing that gets brushed over in the West, often when we think about World War II in the Italian context, is the fact that the war in Italy ends in a civil war, right?

after the deposition of Mussolini, Germany invades, the Republic of Salao is founded in northern Italy, and there's a civil war that breaks out between the Kingdom of Italy and the Republic of Salo, in which the Kingdom of Italy's fighters are by and large partisans, right, who again have come out of this anti-fascist, often openly socialist and communist resistance movement within Italy. And so when you get to the end of the war, what you have essentially had is a civil war between fascists and then left, leaning partisan forces. And I think this often gets brushed over that Italy is really in ruins at the end of World War II. The economic conditions are absolutely devastating. And so the Marshall Plan comes in to try to rebuild that economic base within Italy and specifically to convince the populace that there's

no need for them to pursue a socialist path. And again, this concern exists because in a sense, the war ends with an armed communist presence already kind of ready to go. And so I think the containment aspect of it and the whole part of the Marshall Plan are really important to hit on there. And so from the very beginning of post-war development in Italy, anti-communism is kind of built into the entire Western relationship to Italy and really goes to its core. And we see that play out throughout the years of lead as Western influence and anti-communism really becomes central to a lot of the conflicts that take place. And I think, you know, yeah, that's kind of the main historical thing to add.

Pictures taken in Milan and only just released here show the last of the Huns to leave that Italian city. They had quite a send-off too. Milan was in a state of the wildest excitement at about this time for partisans had just killed Mussolini. The bodies of the ex-dictator, his mistress and fellow fascists were left lying in the square, and the enraged Italians took the opportunity of kicking them and flinging rubbish on them. April 28th, 1945 is the day Italy's recent. history begins, the day Benito Mussolini was killed, a date that signalled the end of fascist rule and the beginning of the Italian Republic. Conditions in Italy during this time were

beyond devastating. The Nazi occupation had killed the Italian economy and their retreat followed a brutal scorched earth strategy that left much of Italy's infrastructure almost totally destroyed. Conditions in the eyes of the United States were perfectly set for a communist takeover and so they began a battle for influence. Italy's position between the USSR and the West meant a communist takeover would be absolutely unacceptable to the U.S. And so the Marshall Plan began pouring funds into the country. I just wanted to put on the table as well that we have coming out of the fall of Mussolini's fascist dictatorship. We have the First Republic, which is dominated by this sort of center-left party called Christian democracy. You know,

known as DC. So you've got to think of them as kind of a, yeah, center-left, centrist political party that's kind of dominating the electoral terrain of the First Republic post-Muselini. But you have the PCI, which is the party of Italian communism, which is mass-based, and this will change over time, but at the beginning is kind of kept out of national power, right? So the Christian Democratic stronghold is something that, you know, the West in general wants to kind of keep at play, right? This centrist party that is open to, you know, alignment with NATO and the integration of Western markets into Italy. The church business and, of course, Washington, D.C. are backing the Christian Democrats from the beginning here. So keep them in mind because they will

continue to play an important role in all of the unfoldings afterwards. But they are the center that's trying to hold during this period of social up people. So I think, you know, that is important. And I just also wanted to point out that, you know, the, I was talking about urbanization and proletarianization and economic growth. Italy's economic miracle, the Marshall Plan. The class composition inside these cities are, you know, semi-skilled assembly line workers. They tend to be younger. They're in very crowded cities now because there's this huge urbanization push. They have strained social services. And because of the economic boom, there's rising expectations. So this is also a sort of economic back. drop that is facilitating, you know, militant unionism and left-wing ideology, which is the left-wing ideology is more prominent across the masses, while there is also right-wing ideologies that do have some degree of popular support, but have much more support among the elite. And the main electoral party for the fascist, right, I would say, is called MSI or the Italian social movement. and they are the electoral front for a broadly conceived far-right movement that also, as we'll get into, has these much more violent, terroristic, non-electoral dimensions to it, but have from the very beginning lots of elite support that are very interested in the anti-communism that the reactionary movements are spearheading.

So that's kind of the political outlay as well. Yeah, I think that is really the key thing is that as we move into the years of lead, the unifying, force for all the non-left-wing factions is anti-communism, right? And the Christian Democrats are this interesting group that perhaps softened on that at a certain point, and we see some very interesting contradictions develop that we'll get into when we talk about the kidnapping and execution of Aldamoro. But this anti-communism really acts as the core of kind of the right and the center throughout much of this period. So exactly when you want to say the years of started is a little bit difficult. People will pinpoint different times, but the late 1960s and

early 1970s saw this period called Hot Autumn that Brett referenced, which is this massive strike wave, which occurs across the country. And again, Hot Autumn is really taking place in the context of this rapid industrialization, proletarianization, and just upheaval of Italian society that is occurring during this time period. And what you see in this period is the left-wing forces within the country successfully being able to organize and labor and orchestrate these remarkably large strike waves. And there are terror attacks, which begin pretty early on in this process that some people would trace to the beginning of the years of lead. But the event that I want to dive into a little bit more that I think really becomes one of the big starting points that many people

point to, and that I think really encompasses so much of the conspiratorial and contradictory aspects of the years of lead is the Piazza Fontana bombing, which occurs in 1969. And this is an event that really will kick off a massive escalation in violence. And again, I think really shows what different forces are at play. So broadly, the Piazza Fontana bombing occurred on December 12th, and it was a bomb that was set off at the National Agricultural Bank in Milan. The explosion there killed 17 and many more were wounded. I want to say like 70 plus is what I was. was reading. And there were additional bombs that went off in Rome and Milan. I've seen varying numbers, some noting one or two in Rome and an additional one in Milan, but more of these bombings took place.

And again, these are bombings that are targeting these bank buildings where there are obviously these institutions of finance, but at the same time, there are also civilians that are present. And one of the kind of complicated things that happens in this bombing is that in the investigation into it, the police are really going to focus on the fact that it's a bank as a way of trying to place this on the left. Now, what we know now and what there was pretty good evidence for at the time, is that this attack was actually not carried out by leftists. It was carried out by a neo-fascist group known as Ordin Nuevo or the New Order. And again, there's actually pretty good reason to suspect that they picked financial targets in order to make this look like a leftist attack. And so in the wake of this attack, the Italian police arrested over,

80 people. And they actually did initially cast a fairly wide net. Some of the neo-fascists were arrested in some of the earlier waves, but ultimately were not held accountable for this. And in the wake of this attack, there was pretty intense, um, illegal interrogation of those who had been arrested. And the really kind of famous flashpoint that happens here is with Giuseppe Penelli, who was an anarchist worker who was arrested in the wake of the attack, who was suspected of being one of the bombers, and who died after either falling or being thrown out of the fourth floor window of the police station during what was three days straight of interrogation. An investigation happens in the wake of this, and the police position is that Pinelli was simply exhausted, he fainted,

and he fell off the window, while the left-wing interpretation, of course, is that Penelie was thrown out of the window or killed by the police, and again, ultimately the investigation conducted by the state, sides with the police on this. Commissioner Luisi Calabrese, Luigi Calabrese, who had been involved in this investigation and who had helped to kind of cover things up, according to the left, would ultimately actually be assassinated by left-wing forces in the wake of this three years later. And the Piazza Fontana bombing again becomes this really important moment because it is used to pin, or is pinned on the left as this example of left-wing terrorism.

where civilians were killed, but in reality, it was orchestrated by neo-fascist groups who likely intentionally made it look like a left-wing attack. And we can also see the involvement of the state here trying to pin the left right away, really focusing in on trying to make this look like it was carried out by anarchists. Some of the sources that I looked at also said that there has been recent evidence that intelligence within the Italian state actually helped some of the fascist escape the country in the wake of this. So again, this collaboration between the state and the fascist and the attempt to pin it on the left, I think, becomes a really pivotal moment here. And after the Piazza Fontana bombing, the string of violence that takes place really picks up significantly.

It kicks off an escalation within the years of lead. And in the wake of the attacks, some of the most famous groups of the years of lead form, such as the Red Brigades, which is a communist and socialist organization that actually originally is involved in the kidnapping, sometimes ransoming and sometimes execution of fascists, and which, you know, gains a lot of popularity early on. But there's this huge escalation to the point that by 1971, the number that I saw is there are 681 different terror attacks that occurred in that year alone. And so the escalation in the wake of the Piazza Fontana is huge, and it's really at this point that we begin to transition properly out of just the social unrest of hot autumn into this period of violence and street,

fighting and again kind of complicated political intrigue that we call the years of lead. Absolutely. Now, zooming out a little bit, I just want to say like the ultimate sort of casualty list at the end of the years of lead is about 400 to 500 people dead and thousands injured in these various attacks. Now, the one thing I do want to say here is with this bombing, it is a bombing fundamentally geared towards people, right? Civilians are the are the target here. This is true terrorism where just innocent people going about their lives are murdered. And even though there's an obvious immediate attempt to try to blame it on the left, what you'll see throughout the years of lead is that there are two very distinct strategies.

On the far right, you have repeated bombings of civilian places. These are purposeful attempts to murder innocent people broadly, to either blame it on the left or to create a state of concern and exhaustion whereby their plan is that the population will turn more and more towards a desire for law and order and some sort of authoritarian government to crack down more broadly on the left. But anytime there is an attack on civilians, you know it is from the right in the ears of lead. What did the left-wing violence take? It took the form of targeted assassinations, of business leaders, of political leaders

that are aligned in some way, shape, or form with the right or the anti-communist center or whatever it may be. They are kidnappings, as we'll see in the case of Aldo Moro. There are sabotage attempts, but the left is not engaging in targeting of civilians. And in fact, that gives them, especially during the first half of the years of lead, you know, popular support. It is quite clear to many people that the left is not doing these horrific attacks on, you know, for the sake of murdering people. And so that's something that I just wanted to stress up front and to point it out. So you have this obvious right-wing fascist attack on civilians.

It is blamed on, as Allison said, the left. You have this famous case of Giuseppe Penelli falling out, being pushed almost certainly out of the fourth story window. And the lead investigator, Luigi Calabrese, is involved in the cover-up. I think he has even, you know, tried to some degree, but found not guilty. nobody is nobody is punished for this for this murder the left reacts intensely

three years later Luigi is gunned down in public in a targeted assassination in retaliation for for this murder so who's actually behind it as time goes on and we zoom out historically we see that you know figures like this figure

named Franco Freda comes up a lot in these discussions and he owned a bookstore I forget the guy's first name his last name was Ventura these are two far right um you know basically nostalgic for musilini um they they they have a bookstore in padua and they sell nazi material pro musilini material um fascist esoterica i'm i'm sure like julius evela's book right the tiger was in there at some point um so they run this bookstore out of pattawa and as time goes on they are kind of fingered as the people that were behind this and then

then the broader question of whether or not they have ties to the Italian secret services and this broader network that we'll get into here in a bit, it remains unknown. But one thing I do want to say about the intelligence services, the secret services of Italy, the military even more broadly of Italy at this time, is that they are not what we would consider under government control. Like in modern times, these intelligence apparatuses, the state apparatus, the military, is in Western so-called democracies under civilian control. At this time, coming out of World War II,

these apparatuses are actually more kind of integrated with the broader NATO, European, U.S. led, you know, martial plan conditioned, international apparatus. And so there is direct communication consistently with the West, with the CIA, with intelligence services from other European countries. And so this is not a situation in which there is direct subservience from the intel agencies and the military to the Italian state under the Christian Democrats. There's some of that, but I think it's much more ambiguous than we would often think about it. And broadly, I want to mention right here the idea of the strategy of tension. And I would love to hear Allison just to put this very famous phrase on the table early on.

And I think it's directly related to the Piazza Fontana bombing. but the strategy of tension I heard to summarize in one of the documentaries I was watching is the following. De-stabilize the social order in order to stabilize the political order. So this is a, you know, kind of a, we talked about Carl Schmidt's concept of the political in which he talks about states of exception, which are used to kind of push forward, you know, authoritarian control. He was talking in the Nazi context. But here, this is obviously at play. insofar as there is intelligence services operating here,

Italian deep state apparatuses engaging with the far right to push back the communist threat. You can see why something like the Piazza Fontana bombing is exactly this thing, destabilizing the social order to push people to want an authoritarian law and order-centric government that can then have a state of exception wherein they crack down on the far left and the communist force. And this is directly on the heels of hot autumn, which is millions of workers engaging in strikes, wildcat strikes, factory occupations. Plus, you have students at universities. I mean, this is the late 60s. Think about what's happening in May of 68 in France.

Think about what's happening in Hungary at this time. Think about what's happening in the United States. This is a broad time of upheaval. And, you know, Italy is no different. So we can see the imperialist, anti-communist logic here, why you'd want something like this. And we could see a domestic far-right fascist logic to why you would want something like this. And that's where these things get very, very entangled. But the Piazza Fontana bombing could be seen as probably the symbolic start officially of what is known as the years of lead.

Yeah. I think addressing the strategy attention as well here is kind of worthwhile because, I think, again, like, the Piazza Fontana bombing kicks off this whole period. That is really where people talk about that strategy. And I think one of the things to Russellwood when we talk about the strategy of tension is whether or not, again, this was like a centralized thing being conducted intentionally by intelligence agencies, whether or not this was the ideology of the fascist movement and what they wanted. And I don't want to speculate too much, but I do think something that we could call a strategy of tension, which matches the definition you foot forth,

is exactly what the fascist organizations at the time wanted, at least. I think Franco Freda is this, like, fascinating figure who you referenced, who really is this extremely esoteric fascist. He is often called like a Nazi Maoist because of his weird blend of those two ideologies. And he was extremely, extremely influenced by the work of Ophola. So that he's coming from this more esoteric, traditionalist, mythic violence, this purification school of fascism that comes out of Avala. And if you'll remember, Avola was famously disabled because he walked out during a bombing raid during World War I because he believed

the experience of the violence of a bombing would be spiritually transformative for him. And this really was this kind of idea of violence that existed within Franco Frida as well. Violence as a sort of means or an end in it of itself, but also as a way of conditioning a society and bending it to the will of a fascist organization or future coming fascist state. And so if you look at the figures that were involved in this, I think you can see very clearly that fascists themselves wanted to construct something of a strategy of tension. When I was prepping for this episode, I actually listened to a podcast that was a conversation between like a libertarian turned fascist

and then a novelist fascist about the years of lead, where they talked fairly openly, actually, about Franco Frida and his ideas and the extent to which, yeah, he was really trying to implement something like the strategy of tension. And one of the things that I think was fascinating is one of the two fascists in this conversation, he kept having to clarify, look, I'm not sympathetic to the communists, but the truth is they really weren't killing civilians, as you were saying, Brett. This fascist acknowledged that over and over again and basically said it was the fascists who were pushing the broader killing of civilians, the broader spreading of terror beyond just the realm of

this political conflict between the far right and the far left into a broader terrorization of the social sphere of Italy. And so I think that fits very clearly into their strategy. It was an interesting process listening to kind of contemporary fascists reflect on this and talk about what the fascist strategy had been in the time. I'm all surprised they like recorded that and put that out there because it's a little on the nose and honest. But I think the figures at the time are trying to construct that. The historical question, which we'll get into as we go on, is whether or a strategy of tension was being pushed intentionally by the intelligence agencies, by NATO, by the United States. And that's where things are going to get a bit more complicated. But that this

was the strategy the fascist forces themselves wanted to put into play, I think is fairly unquestionable when we think about this time period. Absolutely. Yeah. And I just want to make two quick points too. Because this happened in the late 60s, 70s and into the 80s, a lot of these people are still alive, including Franco Frida, including as we're going to see, Mario Marietti, or Moretti, who was the leader at the time of the Brigata Rosa or the Red Brigades out of Italy, which we're going to talk about in detail next. A lot of these people are still alive, so it actually is very fascinating to kind of see what happened after the fact. Many of them are out of prison. Many of them are integrated back into social life in Italy on the left and the right.

And so I think that is interesting. And the other thing I wanted to stress is we're not going to cover this too much. It never happened. but one year after the Piazza Fontana bombing, there was an attempted right-wing coup called the Borgazi coup d'etat, which was a failed or really an aborted coup in December, I believe, of 1970. And this was led by the guy named Borgazi, who was like this wartime commander of this basically fascist unit,

this elite fighting unit in Mussolini's army. And so he was seen as like this World War II. two fascist hero in the eyes of many, you know, Italian fascists after the war. And he, so he had that sort of social cloud on the far right and was getting ready to take advantage in precisely the way we've been talking about of the chaos to stage a fascist coup against the Christian Democrats. But at the last moment, it was called off. And again, here's another area of huge intrigue, conspiracy, and mystery. Why was it called off? Many argued that there was a chain of command directly to. American intelligence agencies and the U.S. state more broadly. Nixon did, you know, pay a visit

to Italy at this time. There's obvious engagement with the Italian situation. Again, these things are kind of unproven and mired in shadowy darkness. Nobody really quite knows. But this coup was planned. It was led by Burgazi and at the last minute right before there was an attempt, it was called off. So this is an example, I would say, of the attempt to make good on the strategy of tension and launch a right-wing authoritarian fascist coup using this stuff and the chaos and the upheaval as the pretense. But eventually it was called off. And again, that's that's mired in mystery. So I think that's just worth noting if not going fully into at the moment. Yeah, totally.

Do you want to go ahead and talk about the next sort of big moment that occurs in the year of lead where the Christian Democrats will be a much bigger player? the Aldo Morrow kidnapping. Absolutely. I think this is the inflection point. This is kind of the crescendo in a lot of ways of the years of lead. And it ended with the end of, I mean, I think it began the end of both communism and fascism and Italy. Look at modern Italy right now. And this is a, you know, mainstream. It does have a right wing leader at the moment, but a mainstream European so-called democracy integrated into the broader European Union. and it is not, you know, doesn't have the broad base support for communism that it once had or, you know, even necessarily fascism, although, of course, those strains always exist in societies,

democratic, so-called capitalist societies. So the intervening eight or so years from the Piazza Fontana bombing, this aborted right-wing fascist coup, you have lots of retaliations, you have assassinations, these are the years of lead, right? So these things are happening. And it's kind of coming up to a crescendo here with the kidnapping and ultimately the execution of Aldo Morrow. So who was Morrow? Morrow was the kind of president of the Christian Democrats. But he was a really interesting figure.

He comes out of the anti-fascist movement in World War II. So he has credibility on the broadly conceived left. He, I think at one point was an avowed socialist, moved kind of towards the center, but firmly on the center left. For example, he was in favor of things like a, you know, broad-based universal health care and education programs. He did instantiate some, you know, left-wing social democratic reforms. He was pro-Palestine, which made him an enemy of Israel. And even though he was the president of the Christian Democrats, he was the architect of what would be known as the historic compromise. Now, the historic compromise was this attempt led by Aldo Morrow to integrate what I said earlier, the PCI, the party of communism in Italy, the Italian Communist Party, integrate them with the Christian Democrats in a way as like a negotiated peace between the center-left party and the far-left party.

Now, the far-left party is not the Red Brigades, right? This is a communist party in a lot of ways, but it's also reform-oriented. It was in the process of kind of softening itself for this historic compromise. One of the mechanisms that it chose to do this was an embrace of what was known as Eurocommunism, more of a European integrationist approach to democratic socialism, if you might call it. And that came with a step away from formal integration with the Soviet Union. more broadly in the communist sort of international movement at that time. It was kind of going back to Europe and saying we can exist as a democratic party integrated

within the European sort of society more broadly. And so it was kind of softening its stance, which figures on the harder left saw as, you know, as too much compromise, as class collaborationism, as a break from the revolutionary principles of, of, you know, communism proper. So Aldo Maro is leading this historic compromise trying what in effect would be mainstreaming of a overtly communist party. Whatever you want to say about the PCI and there's many critiques it would get from a more revolutionary minded communist organization or person. They were still a huge, this is what I mean by the biggest communist party in Europe. They have 34% of the vote. They are a mainstay. And now Maro, even though he has,

center left is engaged in this historic compromise seeking to mainstream the PCI by integrating it in a lot of ways with the Christian Democrats. So this made Morrow mini, mini, mini enemies. Now, from the Red Brigade perspective, which we'll get to in a second, you know, that's a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist cell-based organization that is interested in total, you know, dictatorship with the proletariat. So they see this as a dilution of their politics. But importantly, he also has many enemies to his right because this attempt to mainstream communism made him hated by the U.S., you know, by Kissinger, I think even threatened Amaro at one point, saying like if you keep going down this road, like there's going to be consequences. And I don't think he was talking about murdering Morrow or anything, but, you know, that the U.S. would retract support or become more hostile to the Italian government. He was pro-Palestine, which made him a enemy of, of Israel. And so the Soviet Union disliked him because of the things I was just saying about, you know,

integrating the PCI into into Eurocommunism and away from the Soviet Union. So they had enemies on, he had enemies on his left, but also on his right and a lot of very powerful enemies in particular on his right. So he's this elder statement, statesman. He's this architect of the historic compromise. he has lots of popular support amongst wide sections of the electorate. And so this is going to kind of backfire on the Red Brigades in a bit. So anyways, in 1978, Aldo Morrow is getting into his car with his bodyguards, right?

He's getting in the back seat of, I believe, a blue Fiat. You have the driver who's a bodyguard and a bodyguard in the back seat right next to tomorrow and then behind them is a car full of three other bodyguards following closely behind as he makes his way to find a to a government building to finalize and ratify the historic compromise and deal with some other issues. So this is him literally driving to kind of put the finishing touches on what is known as the historic compromise, which I, which I just explained. So he's driving down these narrow Italian roads and all of a sudden a car coming the opposite way stops, blocks him in. Several figures get out. This is Brigato Rosa. This is the Red Brigades. They get out. They

shoot up the car. I think something like 100 bullets, you know, the crime scene forensics later counted 96 or some bullets from, I believe, an automatic or semi-automatic machine gun like pistols. And they kill all the bodyguards. The car behind them full of bodyguards, they all jump out to get their weapons which are in the trunk of the car and they're shot dead in the process of doing that. And the only person that survived and was taken alive was Aldo Morrow, who's now been officially kidnapped by the Red Brigades. And this happens in the middle of March on 1978. Over the next 55 days, there is open negotiations, right? This hits the headlines of Italian press. It's on the front page of Italian newspapers. They thought initially that Aldo Morrow might be dead,

but he's a famous picture taken, and you can look this picture up, of a beleaguered Aldo Morrow sitting in front of a big Red Brigade's flag. And that was the picture that was put on the front page of every Italian newspaper, saying that he's alive and also it was, we now know who took him. And then a series of negotiations occur where in the Red Brigades are trying to exchange Aldo Morrow for 13, I believe, Red Brigade prisoners who had just been. went on trial for some previous attack and were going to prison. And so they were saying that we'll negotiate a trade.

You give us 13 of our fighters back and we'll give you, you know, Aldo Morrow. Those negotiations stalled. Morrow at this time is even writing letters. He wrote over 100 letters to people in the government, like kind of begging them. Please negotiate my release. Negotiate my release. And every single instance in which there might have been some leeway, it was blocked. Even the Pope, you know, Pope centered, obviously, in Italy is a personal friend of Morrow.

Morrow pleads with him to negotiate a release. And the take from these figures in the government is like we don't, we're not going to negotiate with terrorists. We're not going to release these 13 Red Brigade members. We're going to try to get him back by other means. But of course, that doesn't happen. So after 55 days of negotiating and the state basically refusing the demands of the Red Brigades, with the PCI's leadership backing. So the PCI agreed not to negotiate with the Red Brigades.

The Christian Democrats agreed. The goddamn Pope agreed. And so you have the entire kind of state apparatus of Italy saying we're not negotiating with the Red Brigades, kind of forcing the Red Brigades against their will. And Mario Moretti, you know, had a phone call with, uh, with Maro's wife, kind of saying, like, this is your last chance. Like, he's trying to plead to her, like, tell these motherfuckers to just do the compromise. because we actually don't want to execute Morrow,

but we will if you guys are just totally refusing to release our guys. And so, you know, this basically culminates in Morrow's execution, where the Red Brigades publicly, they say they were with great reluctance. They have to carry through the penalty for the crimes that he was convicted of because there was no negotiated release. And so they murder him, 10 bullets in the chest, and they park his body in the trunk of a car, car and they put the car symbolically halfway in between the headquarters of the PCI and the

headquarters of the Christian Democrats as like, you know, he's this historic compromiser trying to bring these two factions together and they park the car right in between the, you know, central, located right in between the two headquarters and tell his family to come pick him up. This explodes many things. It explodes public sympathy in a negative way, right? So this does, I think the core lesson for revolutionary movements is this was a deeply isolating factor for the what you might pejoratively call the adventurous left or more neutrally the clandestine left. Whatever you want to call this cell of political violence, the sympathy for them went way down. And at a previous time, it had been higher for the reasons I mentioned earlier.

but this explodes their their kind of reputation and the broad support for this type of direct arm struggle on the on the left and it also creates what in italy is basically the closest analog i can come up with is a jfk style mystery there's so many conspiracies swirling around this you know the enemies i just told you about that were in the cia that we're in you know the british intelligence services that we're even in Israeli intelligence services, they had every reason to see this through. There's some questions about the president at the time, also knowing that Morrow had certain state secrets, refusing to, you know, it would be convenient for many people on the right if a figure like Aldo Morrow dies. And with him died the historic compromise, right? With him came the end of broad-based sympathy for factions like the Red Brigades.

and it creates sort of political opening for intensified repression, right? The sort of state of emergency or the state of exception that we talked about earlier. And so all these things kind of fall apart. And ultimately, I mean, organized communism ends. I mean, this is not immediate. This is over the next several years. But this is an inflection point that really turned the tide. So the historic compromise falls.

Eventually the Christian Democratic Party would fall out. completely out of politics. Communist. PCI would fall out of politics. Fascism in its organized far right sense would fall out of politics as well. And it opened the way, ultimately, which we'll get into the end of the years of lead, but ultimately into the 80s of the neoliberal restructuring of the Italian economy. A lot of, maybe I'm getting ahead of us with the end of the years of lead. I'll hold back a little bit and we'll talk more about that in the second. But this Aldo Morrow case is central. and is really the inflection point of the years of lead.

And so it's worth it's worth understanding. But again, I want to highlight the fact that there's lots of mysteries and intrigue and conspiracies around what really happened, who was all behind it. And although we talk when we talk of the years of lead, we talk often of the far right being ingratiated with these conspiratorial ties to intelligence agencies and the deep state and all these things, this is an instance where at least in conspiratorial retellings, the red brigades are sometimes indicted as possibly. having connections to shadowy intelligence agencies and carrying out or being infiltrated one way or

another by these agencies because of Maro's enemies on the right and amongst Israel, the U.S., etc. So again, nothing proven, lots of conspiracies, lots of intrigue. But that is the story as it actually happened. And those are the facts as we know them. Would you like to add anything, Allison? Yeah. I mean, I want to talk a little bit more about the conspiracy side just to make concrete what the accusations are and who has made them and then the complications of who those people making them are, right? I think, you know,

you got at it, Brett. The conspiracies around this by and large have to do with Israel and the United States and their opposition. And the two figures that really become important and are cited by those who want to put forth the idea that the moro kidnapping and execution was orchestrated by foreign intelligence are Ferdinando imposumato. Again, I'm so sorry for my Italian pronunciations of names and Giovanni Galloni, who are both judges within the Italian government who had prosecuted the Red Brigades and been involved in some of the after-the-fact investigations. Again, how do you say this? Imposimato really has this quote that gets cited all over the place, where he said that, quote, it must be acknowledged that Israeli Secret Service had perfect knowledge

of the Italian subversive phenomena from its very beginning, engaging in it with constant ideological and material support, end quote. And he definitely implied very strongly that there was a strategy of tension that Israeli intelligence had been involved in it and didn't outright say that Moro's killing was done by Mossad, but more or less gestured in that direction. And then Galoni, this other figure within the judiciary of Italy, in 2007, makes a statement saying that he believes that the evidence points to not all participants within the Morrow assassination and kidnapping, having been members of the Red Brigade.

So there are these figures in the Italian government who are making these statements that lend themselves towards this idea of foreign involvement, which maps very easily, again, onto the contradictions between Morrow's policy and Israeli interests and even American interests to a certain degree. But again, one of the difficulties is that these are figures of the Italian state who probably have their own agenda in trying to make these claims. And so disentangling these things and really unpacking it becomes really hard. I think one of the things that was overwhelming when researching the conspiracies around the Aldomoro assassination is that there have been a lot of tribunals and investigations done by the Italian state that have reached a lot of different conclusions at different times.

And so you can almost cite Italian judges or investigators to back up whatever interpretation of the event you want. And that is one of the things that just makes it very difficult to kind of undo. pack. And so, you know, I am, I think, on the whole, somewhat sympathetic to the conspiratorial reads, but ultimately, when you get into this kidnapping and assassination, when you get into the broader question of the years of lead, it almost just becomes impossible to parse all of these different sources. Again, many of them who are these judges or investigators who you would think would have a high-level credibility, saying these remarkably conflicting things. And so, you know, I would recommend, like, deep diving into the sum, but I will say it kind of just,

makes you feel like you're going crazy because there's all of these contradictory aspects. And it's kind of impossible, I think, for us to put together the definitive answer as to what happened. Absolutely. And that's what makes this a fascinating, but often misunderstood or under understood part of not only Italian history, but world history, post-World War II, Cold War history, communist history in so many ways. Yeah. Where do you want to go next? Do you want to talk about gladio proper because I do think there's obvious proven facts here and then there is still some contested claims and conspiratorial thinking which could be right or wrong again we just don't know but do you think it's it makes sense to go in that direction now or should we go to the bologna

bombing or what uh i think let's just go into gladio and i think the bologna bombing will come up as we talk about the various forces that you know we're floating around with the gladio stuff i can kind of intro what gladio was for us if you want yeah let's do that because that's another thing we hear a lot of Operation Gladio. Maybe you could just lay out in simple terms what exactly that was and what we know about it for sure. Yeah. So Operation Gladiow is another one of these things where it's kind of hard to say, what do we know about it for sure versus what do we know about it in theory. So what we know, I think for sure, is that Operation Gladiow was a, eventually it would be overrun by NATO and the CIA operation to set up what we're called stay behind networks throughout

post-war Europe. So Gladio was really part of this broader concern about communist revolution spreading in Europe after World War II and the influence of the Soviet Union. And so it did establish clandestines stay behind networks whose job it was to prevent this potential communist revolution or in some tellings to prevent a Soviet invasion of Italy or these other countries. Based on the documentation, we know the Italian government officially allowed the establishment of Gladio in Italy and the Minister of Defense may have had some authority over these networks. Again, it's really hard to say what we know and don't know. There's a lot of contestation over how much the CIA versus NATO versus Italy were calling the shots about the networks that were

established there. But we do know that these networks were established in Italy and throughout actually much of Europe. While the Italian state recognized the existence of Gladio in the 1990s, they have continued to exist along with the Americans in NATO generally, that Gladio, was simply just a backup plan to prevent communist revolution or to, you know, prevent a Soviet invasion. But at the same time, neo-fascist actors within the events of the years have led in their trials did multiple times reference Gladiow and were open about collaboration between American and intelligence agencies and the fascist forces in the country. Vincenzo Vinciguerra is one of these Italian fascists who straight up said that the bombs that were used by Ordean

Nuovo were supplied by Gladio itself. So again, you get these fascists that are saying this and that are pointing to this collaboration. And there are multiple documented instances from fascists talking about coup plans that they had that were explicitly run past American intelligence to determine whether or not the U.S. would support or would intervene. And there's a question about whether or not all of this was a part of Gladio as well. So again, it's a pretty difficult thing to figure out what to do with. The existence of these networks is pretty undisputed, but what their role was, who they responded to, whether or not they were involved in some of the terror that was taking place, is where things get more murky. Although, again, the fascist forces by and large have reported working with the intelligence agencies and have named gladios being involved in this. So if we take them at their word, which is a tough thing to do with fascists sometimes, perhaps, then there does seem to be overlap here.

But once you get into gladio, things get extremely murky very quickly, as is the case over and over and over again when we dive into this time period. I don't know if you have any other kind of upfront thoughts about gladio, Brett, but that's my basic. Here's what we know at least introduction. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Obviously, it was a thing. It did happen. It's very clear that, you know, there's elements here that, well, gladio existed for the first part. You know, there were cover-ups.

There was obvious, up until the bombing of Malonia, there was institutional protection for these neo-fascists who were engaged in these broad-based terrorist attacks on civilian populations attempting to blame it on the left. So there's definitely facts here that Gladio existed, that they had connections, that's for sure. The big question is the specific chain of command. Like, was the operatives within Gladiou, were they specifically giving Orrador? to attack these places. In the case of the testimony from Vince Aguera, you know, did they actually provide direct bombs to go and do the thing? That is still kind of mired in mystery.

But let's just zoom out and think about what you already know about the CIA, right? Yeah. Like, you know, in a vacuum you can focus in on Italy and be like, maybe, maybe. But zoom out and think about what was the CIA doing during the entire motherfucking Cold War? You know, this is under, by the way, a large part of the years of lead happening under the Nixon and Kissinger regime. So what is Kissinger doing during the Cold War and during his time in power? Once you zoom out in, and obviously this is a rhetorical question to those people that listen to a show like this, we know exactly what's going on. This is by no means above and beyond what the CIA does.

It actually fits perfectly in line with everything we know about MI6, about Mossad, about CIA. about U.S. Imperial intelligence agencies during this period of time. We know they have an obvious and clear motive. We know why Italy would stick out like a sore thumb for those interested in resisting communism and fighting the Cold War. We know that people with Nazi sympathies were absolutely marshaled to do these things throughout Europe to participate in things like Operation Gladiow. And so we have motive.

We have background knowledge that says what they do and what they've done. And look at what just the contras did in Central and South America under Reagan is like obvious direct ties to like terrorist right wing death squads to suppress union leaders and left wing movements. This is no surprise. So once you zoom out and know everything else that we know about the CIA and these other intelligence agencies in the UK and in Israel and beyond, it's almost no doubt that this stuff was happening. And the the harshest conspiracies about how far this Operation Gladio wants. are at least very, very open as possibilities, you know, when you compare it to everything else that they know. So there's motive.

We know who's in power in the West. We understand what Kissinger was doing around this time. We know that there's these stay behind networks and these cells that were directly responsible for in specific terms resisting Soviet invasion, but this is the Cold War. So in broad terms, resisting communism anywhere and everywhere it emerged. And you have Italy with the largest communist party in Europe with mass support for a communist base where communist ideology was a mainstream ideology in Italy. The partisans were well respected coming out of what they did to Mussolini and toppling the fascist

dictatorship. And so you can see why there is a huge impetus for figures like Kissinger, the CIA, and these other agencies to get directly involved, to team up with the far right, to blame the far left, and to do everything they can to squash communism in Italy and beyond. Yeah. And I think that is ultimately what it comes down to is when you, really start to investigate this, you're not going to get a concrete answer to what exactly happened. But I do think we can piece together a fair amount of what CIA operations throughout

this time period and even CIA operations today look like in order to paint a picture that makes, you know, the more expansive theory of Gladio, I think, relevant. Now, I will say when you get into Gladio, the conspiracies get much broader very quickly. There's a lot of discussion, and maybe we'll actually talk about this a little bit later, about whether or not there's like domestic gladio or something like gladio implemented in the united states and so it quickly snowballs out from just talking about the stay behind networks and what happened in italy and the other european countries where we know for a fact that gladio operated into these broader again speculations and conspiracy theories if you want to be a little more critical about it about gladio as this

broader strategy that's happening in the u.s as well but i do think gladio as something that was intervening into the years of lead is very likely, and it is definitely the interpretation that I would take. You know, we can talk about other actors that were involved as well, but I think, as you said, Brett, it just fits what we know about the CIA and how they have worked. And so even if we do have to enter the speculative realm a little bit there, I think it's one of those things where the speculation is based on fairly good inference about how American intelligence and how NATO has operated in other contexts, right? Yeah, it would be actually wildly unaligned with everything else we know if it didn't happen.

Exactly. So do you want to talk, do you kind of want to wrap up just the years of lead, kind of how it, how it fizzled out, because it did go out with a whimper, not with a bang. It did kind of fade out over the,

you know, throughout the 80s. Lots of people were kind of locked up, you know, the left in particular, many figures on the radical left fled to France in particular, under what is known as the Mineron Doctrine, where as long as left-wing people came over

and kind of denounce some of their more radical, elements they could have safe haven in France. Do you want to, do you kind of want to add anything else to the fizzling out of the years of lead throughout the 80s? Can I detour us real quick just to talk about one more of the gladio aligned groups, the propaganda do? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, please do.

Yeah, so the other group that I wanted to talk about, and man, it is impossible to talk about this without sounding insane. Yeah, it really is fortunate. Once you have Mason's involved, it's like, what the fuck are we talking about? I know, exactly. And that is what's so difficult. But again, this is actually where we are in pretty established history is sort of what's fascinating here. One of the other organizations that I think has to be accounted for when thinking about the interplay of intelligence and everything into the years of lead is the propaganda do, which is P2, Propaganda 2, which was a Masonic Lodge.

So again, I'm already going to sound crazy here. That was run by an anti-communist and fascist Italian businessman named Lichio Jelly or Geli. I'm not sure on the pronunciation. but P2 is a very fascinating figure in this time period because it was closely tied to the Italian far right and to Italian intelligence agencies. During the years of lead, actually the heads of three of Italy's different foreign intelligence agencies were all members of P2. And prominent Italian politicians also ended up being involved in P2. So again, it sounds conspiratorial, although the masons are behind it, but it is just a simple established fact that this Masonic Lodge

became this place for politicians, for intelligence agencies, and for fascists to coalesce together around anti-communism. Eventually, Ritchio Geli would be raided by the police and pretty concrete plans for a coup and plans to reestablish fascism would be found in his house. And P2 is really fascinating because it seems to have had a pretty big impact both domestically and internationally. P2's network appears to have been involved also in the establishment of the Argentinian military dictatorship in 1976 and support for anti-communist paramilitaries in Argentina. Again, this is where the foreign intelligence connection really comes into play. And domestically, Geli was actually, for a long time, suspected to have been one of the

key strategists behind the Bologna massacre, which was a fascist bombing of a central railway station in 1980, which killed 85 people. And Italian courts ultimately concluded in 2020 that he definitely was the person who, planned it. So, you know, there's all of this reason to disbelieve that propaganda do is this other kind of meeting place where intelligence, fascist, business, all of these people are coming together and are involved conspiratorially, essentially, in the years of lead. Again, a commission in 1984 in Italy found that it was very likely that propaganda do had some level coordination with the CIA, but this is where we get into much more vague and broad pictures. But I think one of the things, again,

that is like maddening about wrestling with the years of left. But I think, is the moment that you're like, yeah, there was a fascist Masonic Lodge orchestrating these attacks. You sound like the most insane conspiracy theorist that there is. Literally a smoke-filled room. Yeah, yeah, it really does start to sound quite crackpot. And yet this is fairly established history at this point. And I think, you know, the thing that I have found persuasive when reading about some of this is that perhaps some of these kind of nefarious forces intentionally work through networks like this

because it sounds ridiculous to talk about them, right? That is like one of the speculative ideas that I've heard people throw out. And who knows if that's true or not. But one gets the sense that that could be the case, as this is just this other massive player during this time period that falls, again, into what sounds like insane conspiracy theories, but that I do think is worth recognizing to show the coordination between intelligence, between the business community within Italy and between the fascist movement, both for the domestic and the international spread of anti-communism. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, the connections to Gladiot are not well established, but, you know, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this world war security ecosystem more broadly. And so, gladio is providing this broader context and capacity. And this is kind of the domestic coordination hub of far right and elite based anti-communist, anti-union, um, anti-left broadly, uh, leverage and power. And so it was a thing. It is very cartoonishly conspiratorial, but it absolutely did. exist. And your point about do they use these things because they're notably cartoonish or not

is an interesting question for sure. But we know for a fact that this existed. And it really, it came to a crescendo in, and I think the years of lead in a lot of ways came to a final crescendo in the Bolania bombing, which did kill the most amount of people of any singular attack in the years of lead, right? Yeah. Yeah, I believe it was the most deadly. So yeah, how do you want to, how would you frame how the years of lead fizzled out? Yeah, I mean, so they, you know, it's so boring to talk about all those because it really did just fizzle. The Aldo Moro execution, like you said, massively, massively turned the tide of popular support for the Red Brigades. Against them, there was a fleeing, like you said, of a lot of the far left that happened. Eventually,

there was prosecution of a lot of the far right as well, although, again, in the case of people like Franco Frida because he had been acquitted earlier on of another bombing. They were not able to convict him later on for some of the things he did. A lot of these figures are still alive today. Some are outside of Italy. Some are in Italy. But there really was this fading out of this period of time. After the Bologna bombing, things really do kind of begin to de-escalate. And in addition to this, after the Aldomoro assassination, the just repression from the Italian state towards the left-wing sort of terror networks really increases, such that people are forced to flee. They're forced to give up these activities. And there is this

transitionary period that happens as Italy moves away from this kind of politically heightened situation towards Italian neoliberalism and towards European neoliberalism and European unity more broadly. And so it goes through kind of this transitionary period. Now, I think, you know, the extent to which fascism still exists in Italy, there still is a presence, right? Giorgio Maloney was a member of the MSI in her youth, right? And so there is still this influence, but at the same time, even looking at Maloney, she softened her rhetoric and made it more mainstream in a way that I think shows the transition that occurs during this time period as the Years of Lead really kind of fizzles.

There's not like one exciting moment to point to as the end of the Years of Lead, I think. People flee, people stop doing these kind of activities, the state repression becomes more effective, and quite a few people end up imprisoned. and the years of lead just kind of comes to an end, honestly. I don't know if you have a better telling Brett that that's sort of my read of how it all sort of fizzles out. Yeah, absolutely. There's broad, as you said, economic restructuring. There's deindustrialization, which kind of does in some ways weaken the workers' movement.

There's neoliberalism that spreads across Western economies. After the years of lead, obviously people are, you know, broadly they're just kind of tired of the violence, tired of the chaos. And we see this very often in historical analogs where such things occur. It's like eventually just the well of energy dries up. And then there's these prosecutions. You know, repression gets smarter. More militant factions flee the country to avoid arrest or imprisonment. You know, the mass support obviously dwindles a little bit.

And we enter the neoliberal modern era, the post, you know, the post-World War II, Cold War context kind of just dries up over time. after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we're just in like a new historical era that we're still living in in a lot of ways. And so it does just simply kind of fizzle out, you know. The legacy of the years of lead is unfortunately downplayed. Like the end of World War II before, some argue Italy is headed towards another amnesia regarding it. Something made worse by the fates of those most responsible for the violence. Out of the three founders of the Red Brigades, two are still alive today.

Renato Curcio and Alberto Francescini, both were arrested in 1974 and sentenced to life in prison. However, both were freed soon after. Francescini was freed in 1992 and is currently employed as a social worker in Rome, helping out immigrants, drug addicts, the unemployed and former convicts. He has since attempted to distance himself. from his crimes. Granato Corcio was freed in 1998 and is currently a writer. He has, as of yet, expressed no remorse for his involvement in the Red Brigades.

Mario Moretti, although sentenced to six life sentences, was granted parole in 1997 after just 15 years in prison, which he is currently still serving, allowing him freedom during the day so long as he checks into prison at night. He lives and works in Milan with his wife and daughter. As per the terms of his parole, he has expressed regret for his crimes. However, it's unknown if he truly feels that way, or is just pretending, so as not to violate his parole. From 2004 to 2005, he was allowed to speak to journalism students at the University of

Milan about his time in the Red Brigades and his involvement in Morrow's death. Mario Moretti remains the most ambiguous figure. from the years of lead. As for the other lesser-known left-wing leaders, most fled abroad, mainly to France, as the Mitterrand Doctrine adopted there in 1985, granted amnesty for far-left terrorists who renounced their violent pasts. The far right had less lenient sentences in the end. Those who had not been able to flee abroad were imprisoned, where many of them remain to this day.

That is sort of where it ends up. And again, I mean, I do think like you can see the legacy of it in Italy. You know, there's a discussion of whether or not Italy has forgotten the years of lead. But again, I mean, we're talking about these commissions up into the 2020s investigating what happened during this period. There continues to be this longstanding impact. Again, the current prime minister of Italy comes from a background in the MSI and in these neo-fascist movements. So you can see that going on there. And, you know, obviously a period like this is going to have a massive impact on a country movement.

forward, but the political forces that were involved in it have arguably become pretty irrelevant in Italian politics at this point. And that's sort of where things are kind of odd. Again, some of the politicians who had been involved in propaganda do would end up in Italian politics. Berlusconi is this very famous example. But even by the time Berlusconi is in politics, he's not explicitly representing this such openly brazen, fascist politics. It again has been watered down sort of for the neoliberal era. So there is a continuing influence. but it is transformed moving out of this period, I think. Yeah.

So there's two directions that we can go in here. We can go into lessons that we can learn from this historical era, or we can go into analogs and dealing with the idea of, you know, is the U.S. in its own form of the years of lead or whatever? Which one would you prefer? Let's do the U.S. one. Let's just do that, since people are talking about it. So, yeah, I think in the context of the last several years, we're certainly living in an era of political crisis, of the delegitimization of the broadly conceived center, you know, institutions like the mainstream media, even, you know, people on the right and left are questioning the relationship with Israel, the military industrial complex, the forever wars, you know, financial hardship is descending on more and more Americans, making more and more people question who this economy is even for.

and in that broader material context, which is really the decay and rot of the neoliberal era, we see the rise of these figures like Trump, which is just a quintessential, reactionary populist, pretender to solve the problems when really is just an unleashing of violence and cruelty on the most powerless people while nothing gets solved. Corruption is made worse. All the problems and contradictions are intensified and heightened. I think a lot of people on the MAGA right are now, becoming disillusioned with Trump, largely over the Israel issue, which is so interesting that

that Israel is becoming this inflection point on both the left contradictions with the Democratic Party and the right contradictions with the Republican Party and really leading to these severe splits. And now taking APEC money on both the left and right is a stand in for you being corrupt, for you being bought off. And so I think there's some fascinating developments that are that are going to occur. But what have we seen in the last several years? years that have led to this possibility of an analogy with the years of lead. We've seen political violence. Now, we've seen this also in the 60s and 70s. We had the weather underground. I just had dinner recently with two leaders of the weather underground, which was fascinating

in its own right. You had the Black Liberation Army, which was also engaged in that sort of activity. You had many bombings. You had many political assassinations. You had the assassination of MLK, of Malcolm X, of JFK, of RFK, of RFK, et cetera. And so it's not unprecedented. And so it's not unprecedented. precedented by any means in American history, but we've seen an uptick in, I would say, political violence, but also a broader nihilistic violence, school shootings, church shootings, the shootings and killings of just random civilians for its own sake, which I think hence at a deep rot within our broader social order and society. But we have had interesting, you know, acts of particularly political violence on the left, and this is kind of funny because of the name,

but Luigi Mangione is giving us a little, you know, left-wing drop of the years of lead in the U.S. where there is just a targeted assassination of a health care CEO that profits off the misery and suffering of Americans and became a galvanizing point across the political spectrum, but certainly on the left, where there is a rallying effect around, if not the action, at least the motive that people just intuitively and viscerally understood from their own experiences of being. relentlessly fucked over by the health insurance industry. But also we've had, I think, two attempts on President Trump, obviously the famous one, that hit him right in the ear. And, you know, I think really helped solidify his victory, unfortunately, in 2024.

And we've seen, obviously, Charlie Kirk's murder very recently. And these sort of actions in particular, more than the school shootings and the random acts of nihilistic violence, these things have been kind of hinted at as like are we entering a year years of lead situation here in the u.s there are some obvious differences one there is no mainstream communist ideology there is no broad-based support thus there is no real communist threat to the powers that be right they overhyped the threat from the liberals and the democrats as marxist radicals all this stupid shit that we hear but there's no real organized left-wing workers movement threat or ideological communist threat whatsoever. The figures of the left that are being promoted to power

are social Democrats, right, AOC, Zoran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders to some extent. And so you really lack that desperation, but you do have an accelerationist right. You do have a state that is, that is increasingly losing legitimacy across the spectrum, an elite class in general that is losing legitimacy across the spectrum. And so there is a level of crisis here. I was talking to Allison before we started recording and thought of two like broader mass acts of violence that could be tied in here. That kind of gets swept under the rug.

We had the Nashville truck bomb thing that went off that ended up not, I think, killing anybody. I'm not quite sure about that. But it was kind of very quickly moved on from. And then that weird Vegas shooting where that guy with a shadowy background, you know, killed a bunch of people. And so you could point to these acts as like, is this domestic gladio? Is this the strategy of tension? But then you have to ask the next question, which is, you know, to what end exactly? Because in the wake of none of these events, did we see the U.S. state move to establish an authoritarian law and order shift or anything like that?

We did not see fascist right-wing attempts at a coup. The state is really, it's not as weak and teaching. as it was in Italy at that time, right? It doesn't have the sort of structural weaknesses that some of these other instantiations of political violence might have had. It is bolstered by this huge surveillance state. We saw in the wake of Luigi Mangione's assassination of the health healthcare CEO that this surveillance state kicked in to track him down. Like every camera he walked past, he was identified. And with AI, these are only going to get better and better. So you really have, from the state's perspective, this safety blanket of this techno surveillance state that makes it much, much harder to act in a clandestine way.

Even the weather underground here in the U.S. wasn't facing that level of a surveillance state, which allowed them to literally go underground, live their lives anonymously, take on fake names, you know, to have these clandestine meetups and meetings. That would be just incredibly much harder in today's techno surveillance state. And I think there's a big push on behalf of the techno- oligarchic elite and the state as such to push these things further and further so that they can kind of re-entrench their power in the face of a broadly based sort of legitimacy crisis. So I think there are ultimately more dissimilarities than there are similarities in the contemporary

U.S. state. But that's not to say that there are no similarities, but we lack a lot of the, variables that made the years of lead what it was, I believe. But, Alison, what are your thoughts? Yeah. I mean, I think part of what always bothers me about trying to compare the present moment to the years of lead, and you hinted at this early on, is that I just think the 70s in the U.S. were closer to the years of lead, right? Like, honestly, I think we already had this period of time that was a lot closer with the Black Liberation Army, with the Weather Underground, where you did have these clandestine underground militant organizations that were engaged in violent action. And so

it feels to me like there already was a similar parallel at that period of time. And so that's one of the reasons that I think the comparison can be a bit of a stretch. And I think the other reason is just like, again, it's hard to express the level of constant violence that was going on in the years of lead. That number that I pointed out for 1971, something like 600 separate attacks. Again, not all of them killed people, but these attempted attacks, that is just a higher level of constant violence. than what we see in the United States, even with the prevalence of things like school shootings, which you may or may not want to include in a conversation about whether or not the U.S. is in a comparable spot. So the scale still feels different to me. And I also think, yeah, one of the other big

differences is that in the context of Italy, it was very clear that the strategy of tension being enacted was about trying to create the conditions for a fascist coup. And like you said, it doesn't appear like anything similar to that in the United States as capitalized on that. So that, to me, feels like where there's the tension and the difference. Now, I want to be fair to people who make the comparison, though, because I think that they're probably making a slightly more complicated argument than just saying, look, the U.S. is just like Italy at this time period. I think what you're talking about, Brett, with the level of surveillance that we have,

with the way that the techno oligarchs have built this into the U.S., I think a lot of the people who make this comparison would basically say, yeah, a fascist coup wasn't necessary in the U.S., right? neoliberal capitalism and its integration of tech and surveillance actually was sufficient to build a surveillance state. And whatever strategy of tension might exist in the U.S. is really just about continuing to make the population accept that as an ongoing reality. That's the claim that I hear most often. And, you know, sure, I think that is a possibility and that gets around the critique of, well, there's no obvious fascist coup which has occurred in the United States.

But again, at that point, you're stretching the historical comparison a little bit in a way that almost makes me wonder whether or not the comparison isn't elucidating anymore, but actually gets in the way. The other side of things that I can get into if we want or not is that I think the people who reference this are very interested in kind of the nihilistic violence and this idea that that is part of something comparable to the years of lead. I have a lot of thoughts about whether or not that is, but again, you're already kind of stretching the analogy in some ways that makes it, again to the point where it feels like the comparison is less about bringing clarity to the situation and more about you know trying to force an analogy yeah let me force a few analogies no but if i look out over the the history that we're all familiar with and kind of think of some other interesting moments that that that you know this made me think of immediately jump to mine as the troubles in northern ireland because it's like a kind of a low level domestic upheaval

situation. It's not a formal civil war. It's not in the context of some broader collapse within these societies, but it is this tit for tat back and forth, retaliatory, organized. It wasn't between the far left and the far right. It was between an imperial and imperialized people fighting over territory, and it was split in a way that was not true in Italy along ethno-religious lines, right? You're Irish and you're Catholic or you're English and you're Protestant, and that element was not present, but the low-level civil kind of warfare, that, that I think is a similar instance. And the other, the other obvious instance would be the Red Army faction in West Germany in the same exact sort of time period that was also a Marxist-Leninist cell type organization

engaged in kidnappings and, you know, assassinations of this type. And interestingly, if you want to hear about that, we did do an interview on Girl of History and it's also on Reveleft Radio with Margaret Schiller, who was a main member in the Red Army faction in West Germany, eventually got arrested and was exiled to South America, Uruguay, I believe. And so we got a first person interview with somebody actually engaged in this particular type of revolutionary right-wing cell-based direct action that people can listen to. If I remember, I'll link to it in the show notes of this episode. But, you know, analogies have their limitations.

And the final thing that I would say on this point is that we just have to see it as a uniquely Italian thing. Like it happened in Italy at this time with these converging variables at play. And, you know, analogies are perhaps useful in some instances, but we really should just understand it on its own terms and see it for what it is and put it in the broader ecosystem of our knowledge base when it comes to geopolitics and history, right? Yeah. No, I think ultimately, yeah, there is a lot unique to Italy. And what annoys me about some of the talk of the Year of Blood is the focus on like the conspiratorial aspect, which again, I'm sympathetic to focusing on, but the loss of the material conditions which allowed all that to take place, right? That thing that we talked about at the beginning of the episode, the economic conditions in post-war Italy, the Marshall Plan, the development, the rapid industrialization and proletarianization, these economic material realities that I think for Marxists, we should really be focused in on just as much as the conspiracy part, right? that is just as important. And that often gets dropped off in kind of some of the more, I think, lazy

analogizing between the period. And so, you know, one of the things that I hope we can do is really explain that, like, sure, there is all this political intrigue and conspiratorial side that I do think is worth engaging with. But all of that is occurring in the context of the social transformation of capitalism in Italy and should be understood as a process which is occurring within that economic change that is happening there. And that is where that particularity comes in. And I do sometimes get frustrated that I feel like Marxist's interest in this topic. Don't always give sufficient attention to the economic conditions that play into this. And that I think adds some level of uniqueness to what occurred. Absolutely. And hopefully we, we stressed to that sufficiently. And if nothing else made you in your own head emphasize that aspect of it, because it does often get lost in these discussions. Now we can kind of talk about some basic lessons that we might be able to learn from this period of history. We always want to. kind of take these these periods of history or these texts and extract what we can from them one of the things that stood out to me and you know i think uniquely it's kind of hard to replicate because it really did come out of world war two and the very specific conditions that that you know

sort of incubated but the broad-based kind of left-wing culture in italy you know like the the mainstream communism was a mainstream ideology that you had um militant labor unions, time and time again. You know, and you and I have talked about the aristocracy of labor and, you know, the imperial core and labor unions in the West being privileged, sectors of the working class, and that is all true. But time and time again, you see with successful left-wing movements, successful at all, they're always associated and tied with militant labor in one way or another.

And labor is organized and that is used as a leverage point in these fights that we just do not have in the United States. I mean, hot autumn, which really set off or was the prelude to, you know, the years of lead is a workers movement. You know, it is, it is wildcat strikes. It's, it's factory occupations. These are things that that's where the left's ideology actually can get traction and leverage point in the political economy of society. And that can drive forward our demands. And so that really remains our task in some ways is how do we solve that contradiction? that organized labor within the Imperial Corps and within the United States in particular does kind of feed into this, you know, or does kind of situate itself as this upper echelon of privileged workers in a broader society. There's still plenty of, you know, of class consciousness. I'm in a trade union, right? I know that there is a high level of class consciousness, but there's also just a wide range of ideologies from full on reactionary shit all the way to more left-wing shit. shit and the leadership of these of these unions are just very integrated with the overall

democratic republican party state apparatus and the basic class collaborationism of american society at this point so an independent center of culture and an independent center of power you know particularly in the working class is essential i think you know tenant unions are really getting around perhaps the core contradiction of labor unions in the imperial core and working on different but but perhaps just as effective or at least comparably effective route to independent working class power around a real issue like the housing crisis um but so that's one lesson i take and then the other main lesson is just the the utter limits of uh especially in the american context of political violence as a path anywhere um you know even luigi mangione is

immediately isolated immediately arrested um there's pot there's popular support for him in a lot of ways, but, you know, his life is done and is not connected with any organization or anything like that. It was an act of just visceral adventurism that ultimately, you know, leads nowhere. It might increase discourse around the health care situation. And, you know, I'm not going to say there's zero pros that came out of this act, but ultimately it leads nowhere closer to power and does become a tool for repression. And, you know, the Trump administration tried to make the Charlie Kirk thing into a pretext for crackdown, but it never really took hold, right? He made this this sort of informal announcement that Antifa is now a terrorist organization,

but we've really failed to see anything come to fruition quite yet on that front. So, you know, this idea of using a political moment to create a state of exception and crackdown on the left. It's there in vague form, but not in any real substance. So those are two main lessons that pop up in my head right away, but I'm very interested to hear your thoughts. Yeah, I think the other lesson here, you know, again, assuming we take things relatively at face value, which I think is all we can do when we're trying to do a more technical analysis, I think assuming that there's a lesson about adventurism and revisionism as kind of two sides of the same process of the downfall of Italian communism in this time period that I think is sort of worth wrestling with. one of the things about the years of lead leaving Italian communism as basically an irrelevant political force is that there are two errors, I think, that get committed.

on the one hand, the historic compromise was going to be disastrous for European communism because Eurocommunism that the PCI was trying to, you know, shift to is basically like essentially just a revisionist reformist form of communism that gives up on actual class struggle and that I think is like a fundamental revision of Marxism in a way that makes it no longer revolutionary in its orientation, which is sort of why that was part of the condition for forming the coalition with the Christian Democrats. And so on the one hand in this period, what you see is this pivot by the actual official Communist Party in Italy towards revisionism and towards giving up a more intense form of class struggle. And that meaning that kind of the only place where

that more intense struggle can take place is with a more clandestine independent cell organization like the Red Brigades, which is not necessarily directly accountable to a broader communist movement, which is not necessarily directly accountable to a broader workers movement, even if it has some popular support from that movement, it is still operating in this independent manner. And so by the time that the Moro execution takes place and the Red Brigade loses their popularity, and the PCI loses their popularity, communism has essentially become no longer a force in Italian politics, I think because of both the revisionist impulse and then the adventurous impulse playing off of each other in a way, one opening the door for the

other being the only kind of militant alternative, and then that militant alternative taking actions that are going to be devastating for the communist movement without any accountability to a larger movement. And the end result is this kind of collapse of Italian communism. Now, you know, how much we can learn from that in the U.S. I think is tricky because we don't have something like the PCI, a large organized Italian Communist Party, or a large organized communist party, certainly not an Italian one in the U.S., but we don't have one at all. And I think one of the difficulties then is that in, you know, in the kind of absence that leaves, there can be a tendency towards sort of adventurism within the United States left.

Again, it doesn't take the level of intensity that we see with the Red Brigades, but that impulse can exist there. And so I think, you know, one of the things that I want us to learn is that adventureism and revisionism kind of are part of this reinforcing process that I think can be really devastating for the left. And it's really necessary to try to guard against both of those errors because I think in the years of lead, we see both of them play out and contribute to the collapse of Italian communism as a political force. Yeah. Then the question becomes, you know, how do we thread that needle between, you know, revisionism and adventurism? And, you know, in the U.S. context, I mean, it is the belly of the beast.

It's the imperial core. It is it is so programmed anti-communism into the base sentiments of people that, you know, you know, in a way that wasn't true in other, you know, parts of the world, certainly in this case, where you can't just go out and really win over people by talking about communism, right? It's just, it's just not well understood. It's, it's been turned in. Unlike in Italy, it's now just a buzzword and shorthand that most people internalize as like a tyrannical government overtaking of everything or whatever the fuck.

Even people that would be sent, like, you know, sort of sympathetic to really, I mean, it's core vision for human. which is the transcendence of the stupidities and brutalities of class society and the socialist framework of actually solving our problems in a way that corporate centrism and faux populist right reactionaryism

never ever ever do. I think there's like a genuine well of possible support in this country for policies that could move us in that direction but there is just a hard ideological barrier to even talking about communism. So the question becomes like, well, then what exactly do we do? Like how do we tie ourselves to or how do we create a movement that can simultaneously advance the ball for socialist politics, but which can also ingratiate itself to the masses, right?

Which is absolutely in every single instance of left wing success, it's been tied to the masses. And even in the case of the Italian years of lead, what made the left such a threat that needed to be cracked down on in those ways was it. its mass base of popular support in unions and just in the society more broadly. I did a recent, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, I did a recent little episode on Mamdani and kind of talked about, in some other episodes where I talked about, like, where actually is the American left and right? Where are their, where do their mainstream sentiments actually lie? Both are in conflict with their ostensible representative parties, right?

The left is in conflict with the Democratic Party and the right. There's a civil war on the right that's in conflict. conflict with, you know, the neo-conservative establishment GOP right now. And I would argue and tell me if you disagree with me that broad sentiment on the broadly conceived American left doesn't align with revolutionary Marxism, nor does it align with like neoliberal centristism. It aligns with social democracy or even democratic socialism. And on the right, the constituent base is not Israel first, neo-conservative establishment. nonsense, but is like broadly conceived under this umbrella that they're referring to as America first. Like, you know, put American interest first, stop to forever wars. You know, young people need to be able to form families and have a life and they don't get too deep into the economics of it. And there's lots of reactionary elements. But I think that those two blocks actually represent broad sentiments among the population. And if that's true, maybe you can disagree

with me. But if that's true, what should Marxist and communist positions be with regards to a democratic socialism that might have more access to speak to the needs of the masses in a way that revolutionary communism doesn't, but you don't want to isolate yourself from that movement, but you don't want to fall into revisionism at the same time. I'm just, you know, these are questions I have, not conclusions. Do you have any thoughts on what our relationship to that should be, or if I'm even right in that analysis? No, I mean, I have so many thoughts. I do think there's a broader support developing on the popular left in the U.S. for some sort of social democratic politics, right? I do think

Momdani indicates that. And I do think we need to relate to that by saying more than like mom donnie is a sellout, right? I do think we need to remain critical of the actions that he's taking. I think we should never shut up about keeping Commissioner Schiff on, for example. I think there are a whole bunch of decisions he's made that are already disastrous that the left should criticize. But I do think we should also think about what the popular support ace is there and figure out how to talk to those supporters in such a way that we can figure out what has been tapped into what their interests are and to build from there. Now, here's where I'm going to be like a little bit more ultra-leftist though, unfortunately. And I think where I'm going to like say that the

work is harder than that, maybe. I do think at the end of the day, while we do have to engage with that base and we do have to work with them and we do have to find ways to talk to them, I also don't really think they will necessarily be the base of communism in the United States. And I think the simple fact of the matter is that communism in the United States' base, if it can be developed, will be among some of the poorest and most exploited people in the U.S. And I think that actually one of the things that I have found in practice through organizing is that those people often actually do not have the same level of ideological indoctrination that you would expect. So I'll just make this concrete and this is going to, I think,

kind of suck as of what I think we need to do, but this is kind of where it's at, which is, you know, in tenant organizing, you know, I am involved in Los Angeles Tenant Union, we go into the building and we organize people to fight evictions. We organize people to fight against the harassment, sometimes physical violence from their landlords. And we do so while making it clear about what our politics are. And the thing that I've seen in my time in the union is that the people that we're working with aren't scared to talk about those politics once you've built that connection, once you've integrated into that community and, you know, started to create that struggle. There's this quote in these Times article.

This is an excerpt from Abolish Rent where one of the tenants at the Flower Drive Tenants Association, which is one of our long-running tenants associations, says, quote, communist to me is community, community working together. Common. You have everything in common. That's communism. My dream is that one day not only Flower Drive, but all these tenants unions become communist, end quote. and I will just say within the last month

that there's a building that I've been organizing in for a little while now where we had an explicit conversation about our socialist politics and about the communist groups that have impacted us and all of these things and one of the tenants in that building this working class tenant who we know really well now

because we've been fighting alongside him for quite some time. He said, I don't care about all the bad things I've heard about communism. I don't care about the things people say about socialist because you all tell me that you are socialists and you've been here fighting with us and helping us and trying to stop us from getting kicked out of our homes. So I don't care about the bad stuff that I hear.

And here's the, you know, I think that's a really important moment for seeing that there are parts of the working class, the most poor people facing eviction, facing all of these problems who can be won over. But here's the kind of rub, which is that that's after a year of really tough organizing that the union did in that building. And that is not a quick win. So in my view, yeah, we need to engage with the Momdani moment and all of that. but you also need to be doing what LA Tenants Union organizers are doing, which is eating dinner weekly in these apartment buildings with the poorest people in your city, caught in the most intense economic and class struggles in your city,

building connections, getting to know them, and talking about politics in the context of concrete struggle and organizing. And that's hard, and that's not going to build us a communist movement tomorrow. But I see in the work that is happening here, at least, that the poorest people, the most exploited people in this city, are willing to hear us out about that politics if we actually organize and fight with them and build relationships with them. So in my mind, that's actually the path forward, I think. It's not an easy path, though, kind of a shitty pitch, I think, but that's kind of what I got. Yeah, no, and that resonates a lot with like, you know, my comrades in O'TU here in Omaha had a very, almost the exact same story that you had about a tenant coming to ideological expansion through material organizing.

and be like it was the communist and the socialist that showed up and helped organize, you know, and get my deposit back and help my family. And I've also, from many, actually other tenant organizations, I think Philadelphia Tenant Union had a similar story in a conference years ago. You might have been at that same conference where they talked about that exact thing. So I do think that like you're spot on and like tenant organizing really is this core site of struggle that serious socialists of all sorts should be actively engaged in to build up the mass base. That is absolutely necessary for any further maturation of our politics and our

and our power in this society. And as the conditions of American capitalism get worse and worse, as reactionaries overstep and overstep, more and more opportunities are going to continue, I think, to arise in that way. So that's all important. And building up that, you know, building up that culture, building up educational fronts. These are all important things. It's a long road. It's a long march, if you will, to build up the powers that are even going to be able to have any sort of impact on national politics. But what else are we going to do? You know, like that is, that's our generational burden and obligation. And I think we have made progress even just over our lifetimes. And I think we can continue to make progress. And I think history has a way of creating

these inflection points and these radical opening ups that we can't necessarily perceive at this moment, that we don't know when and how they're going to manifest. But, they will and we have to be ready as much as we can to take advantage of them so there's things to be learned from all of these historical instances but you know there's no silver bullet there's no shortcut it just is hard motherfucking work constantly and dedicating your life to this shit one way or another um and using whatever talents or platforms or abilities you might have to pitch in uh for the struggle um and that that really is where we come back time and time again because it is just the truth of the situation. Yeah. Yeah. And it is hard work. Like I, that's why I said, it's kind of a shitty

pitch, right? But I also think like, again, like if you think that what allowed hot autumn to happen didn't include the hard work of building a powerful labor movement in Italy, then I think you're incorrect, right? That has always been the case. And, you know, part of the issue is that I think in the US, we've built a very good subcultural left, but we haven't built a very good organizational left, right? That's, I think, why a theme on our show has always been, like, you got to actually do stuff with all this theory, right? And so, you know, to the extent that, yes, one of the huge differences is that mass space, well, the solution to getting to that mass base is for us to actually do that difficult work, which again, it's a big ask, but it's, I think, what the task ahead of us is,

and it's the task that all communists before us have set themselves to and dedicated their lives to as well. Yeah, well, well, I think that wraps it up for me. Do you have any final words on this? No, I mean, I just hope this episode is helpful for people. I think, you know, every once in a while we do one of these historical dives that I think is really enjoyable and I like them. So always curious to hear how people feel about that in their feedback to the episode if they like these more history episodes approaches. But yeah, I hope that this is useful for helping understand where we're at today and understanding history as well. All right. With that said, love and solidarity. Talk to you soon.