Interview with Rainer Ganahl

RG: Talk about your experience – how did you learn about Marx? Where did you learn about Marx?

AN: I learnt about him in my house. My dad, who I never met because he died when I was two, was a revolutionary socialist during the time of fascism. He founded the communist party.

RG: Really?

AN: Yes, then my mom burnt all his books. She burnt all the so called “dissident books” we had in the house

RG: Because of the fascist government, right?

AN: Yes, she was scared after my dad’s death

RG: How did he die?

AN: He suffered from an illness that spread during the war, the First World War, in 1870, I believe, no, 1896. He fought in the First World War and died of an illness he caught during the war. But he was an anti-fascist, a communist, and he did not live well. My dad died in 1936, I was born in 1933, so two years, two and a half years. So I learned about Marx in my house, his name was repeated over and over again when I was young. And then I went back to Marx years later. I became Communist before being Marxist. In fact I became Communist in Israel in a Kibbutz when I went in 1953, 1954 when I was thirty years old.

RG: Back to your father. Did he know Gramsci?

AN: No, well actually, he knew him, well my father, I know only what I was told of him. My dad was the secretary of the Young Socialist Federation in 1922, of Bologna. And that led to the foundation of the Communist party in 1921 in Livorno and so he certainly knew Gramsci, but Gramsci was nothing I heard of in my house. Gramsci came afterward in the history of the Communist Party.

RG: We were talking about your father and the party. Was your mother involved as well?

AN: No, my mother was the opposite way. My mother was not interested in politics. She considered politics something that spoiled our family and that would… it was really funny when I wanted to study philosophy, my mother was really upset. I was really good in math and my mother wanted me to take math or physics at any cost and actually we came to a kind of compromise and I took agriculture because it was a naturalistic subject matter, but could be liked to a more poetic side. In fact I studied it for 6 months and I switched to philosophy and she was totally against it because she said that philosophy would get me closer to politics and that politics would ruin my life. Because she foresaw it already, she thought it was destiny, in my political and philosophical DNA, that would ruin me and she was partly right, I have to admit it, I can say it today. It didn’t ruin my life but it was difficult, I’ve had a difficult life and then…

RG: Israel

AN: In Israel I became communist, in an extreme-left-wing kibbutz.

RG: Of immigrants?

AN: Of Jewish communist immigrants who came from Egypt, France and are the generation of 1952, 1953—people coming after the Shoah, completely connected to it. And the Egyptians at the head of the camp spoke French. I mean, they spoke Arabic and French. They all went to French school and were connected to the Egyptian communist party and the Arab communist tradition.

RG: This Arab communist tradition is completely unknown.

AN: Yes, very nice people, and the kibbutz I lived in for one year belongs to the MAPAL, as it was then called, it was an extremist left-wing party, communist but not Stalinist and the way of life in that camp was completely communist. There were not even families, a very radical communism.

RG: But also very ideologist, based on ideologies?

AN: Of course. The left-wing Zionism is based on this.

RG: Did you sit down at night and have discussions?

AN: At night, in the morning, when we weren’t working we were talking. There you are forced to talk all the time. And they were all discussions about this, really extremist and wide. We need to remember that the idea of Israel originated from the Soviets. A hypothesis that Israel might break the French and British imperialistic dominance in their colonies in the Middle East, on the oil. Israel would not have been founded without the direct investment of Israeli communism, well it is actually the MAPAL that is a non-Stalinist communist party, not related to the USSR – it’s a very extremist experience of creating communities in an extreme way.

RG: Marx was used as a basis, a text.

AN: No, the richness of communism is not only Marx, it is mainly these experiences and the experience of Lotta Continua. So then I went back to Italy later on, and for some years I took care of my philosophical studies, my college studies and in 1958 I became a professor and after they made that legal I started doing politics. I spent .. after I got back from Israel, I graduated in 1956, in 1958 I was an independent teacher and then I started doing politics. In a precise way in Italy.

RG: How many years in Israel?

AN: One year in Israel RG: One year, did you speak Hebrew?

AN: No, I studied it but I never spoke it.

RG: French?

AN: French and English. By then I spoke English very well, better than now. English was… well, I also studied in England in the ‘50s and I started going to England when I was young, during high school I would spend my summers in England and so I learnt English. We were kind of forced to study it.

RG: So, the war in 1933 in Italy. What was your experience of the war?

AN: A tragedy. An absolute tragedy because my brothers were good students in a fascist school. The Risorgimentale nationalism was still very strong. Communism in families, socialism in families was something hidden, completely prohibited. The experience was tragic. My eldest brother died in the war, he was eighteen, he was called to fight in Yugoslavia, the former Yugoslavia.

AN: Together or against Germany?

AN: Together, with Italy. In 1943, before September 8 when the alliance was still in force. There were no partisans then. My sister was in a deep crisis. At that point we had a partisan in the house who got married to my sister. He escaped at the end of 1943, here is a communist in my house, who is my brother-in-law, the man who married my sister, still living now, who was a partisan after September 8th, a soldier who became a partisan in the Trentino valleys.

RG: You were too young, right?

AN: I was ten, I started to understand. But there were constant US bombings, so that is how I experienced history. A brother fallen in war, so a fascist hero, on the other side my sister as a big intellectual, she became very important in the science world in Italy and abroad, who lived it…

RG: Which field?

AN: Physiology, psychology. She was linked to the European school, Wien, as it usually happens in Veneto, we were in Padua. And then we fled to the countryside around Padua. My mom was a widow and a teacher. We lived in misery because with a teacher’s salary my mother paid for the education of 2 children and I was young, and I went to college too, so we were extremely poor. We did not eat so often. We ate cheese.

RG: And this happened in Padua, right?

AN: In Padua, in the surroundings.

RG: Were there any Jews?

AN: No, there were no Jews there and then we lived very poorly. Going back to my adulthood. I learnt about Marxism after 1958, when I was a professor I became a member of the Italian Socialist party which is an alley of the communist party in Padua. It has the majority in the electorate. The Socialist party was an extreme left wing party, non reformist. It was called conformist, liked to the cominform – cominformist. I joined the party as coninformist, which was a socialist party. It does not accept the discipline of the International hymn. So we can have the advantage of being radical like the communists but without being Stalinist. We have a quite definite inside method. I joined with all my high school mates, it’s a generation trend. Everybody does it. In my class we were fourteen, fifteen very selected students and we were all college students, ¾ of those became left extremists. Some of them became ministers, they all made careers.

RG: Couldn’t they help you with your new ideas?

AN: Well, there was a clash. Things were not that easy. There were clashes with them too.

RG: A thing that me and my generation never considered was joining a political party. How was it in your time?

AN: Joining a party was something quite natural. We, my schoolmates and I, all joined Catholic groups, even if our families were mainly non-religious. We joined the Catholic group when we were still students, at the end of the 40s. Because we need to keep in mind that there was a refusal for any party dogmatism - the idea of socialism and communism were not clear ideas then. We need to remember the confusion of life outside the big cities. This is something linked to the local. Not only is the language confused, but also the experiences expressed in the language are extremely confusing. I needed to throw myself into a totally Communist experience in Israel to find a logical coherence, a coherence of thought. There are many things that I was able to theorize about only later on, thirty, forty years later, the relationship between brain and body, passion and rationalism. I had to go through Spinoza and the experience of my adulthood. In fact it was very difficult then to find the proper words to express my feelings. For example, in 1951, I believe, or at the beginning of 1952, me and four, five friends of Padua went and worked with Danilo Dolci in Sicily, who was a peculiar man. He organized peasants in Sicily against Mafia. And we were completely unaware of the issues he would cause. The Mafia was stopping the building of a dyke that would modify the river path into a valley, making it available for cultivation. But these people wanted to be paid for the water, and the peasants could not pay and they did not get water so we went and tried to build the dyke ourselves. At that point the police came to send us away. That was my first clash with state authority, in Sicily in 1951, when we had this strange experience in Trappeto, close to Partinico, between Palermo and Trapani, in Mafia reigned territory.

RG: So the mafia worked together with the police.

AN: Yes, the same people. And it was fun. These things are very difficult to explain, a group of intellectuals from the countryside who chose to join a party. My friends were very clever, I was not as much, but they were and I became the secretary of the federation. It was in 1958, 1959, and I was the secretary of the Federation of the Italian Socialist party, so I was twenty five. I could have become a member of parliament, but I didn’t. We went with Quaderni rossi (red notebooks), it was a magazine from Turin, it made surveys. It was called Inchiesta Operaia (survey for workers) and we went and saw what was really going on in the factories. On the other side we had the Communist party, the unions and the socialist party which told us what the workers did, but we were suspicious, we did not understand the situation well, especially after 1956. In 1953 the unions were beaten, a very bad loss for them and we started to build worker power in the factories.

RG: In the 1950s?

AN: This process starts in 1956 with the big crisis of the 20th congress of the Soviet communist party, with Krushow, when people started to realize that Stalin was devious and that his Communism was a very burocratic one. We still remained communist but we didn’t want to have anything to do with it, we wanted to rebuild. So that’s when I learnt about Marxism, I had to learn Marx. On one side I woke up at 5:00 AM, 5:30 AM and went in front of the factories and talked to the workers.

RG: Did you go inside the factories or only in front of them?

AN: We were in front of them. And I studied Marx at the same time. I started studying it at the end of the 1950s. I was already a communist, I was active in the party and only then I started studying Marx.

RG: Did you take notes during your polls?

AN: No, no notes. We used to talk and then we prepared leaflets. We wrote these leaflets and distributed them and told these workers: look, this is your situation. And the workers would sign them, we were only writing what the workers said and that’s what we did. It was the beginning of a very nice period. I was lucky enough to be hired as a professor. In 1963 I was a fulltime college professor, which meant a lot of power then, before 1968. So in 1963 I was a professor of philosophy of public law in Padua, in this big university, one of the biggest universities in Italy. So I was hired fulltime as a professor and was very young, I was thirty and had a lot of power. But I kept on waking up at 5:00 AM in the morning and I would leave at 8:30 Porto Marghera, these big chemical factories where I read Marx with the workers. Then I would leave, wear my tie and go to the university to be an ordinary professor.

RG: Let’s talk about this experience

AN: It was a fabulous experience, also because I got married at that time. I had kids and I also had a very bourgeois life, because I had a big social life, but deep inside my real passion was to learn, because it was a matter of knowledge. I believe I never did these things for love of others. I believe knowing the passions of other men is right and just, rationally adequate, especially those passions which bring men together as a community. It doesn’t have to do with abstract equity or justice, it’s about allowing these people to express these passions, these feelings, the passion for justice, the fact that justice becomes something real. So we went in front of the factories in the morning and talked to these comrades. There was a group of these comrades who became very serious, very important. They were representatives of the factories, they were elected in factories with six to ten thousand workers. If you go to Venice you see this line of factories on one side. Right there we were at ease.

RG: How did these workers react?

AN: Keep in mind that we would go back to Marghera at night and have meetings with the workers. In the morning we would make a proposal, at night we would get an answer. So we decided the inside controversies every day. In a way we replaced the unions and the party itself. I was the secretary of the provincial Federation of the Socialist Party, in Padua, so I could have become a deputy, could have chosen to make a political career at that time. But I dropt it, in 1961, 1962, I joined this group, Quaderni Rossi, which was a magazine which analyzed life in the factories right there. They operated in Turin, there was another group in Milan, one in Rome and we were in Venice, Marghera. Our group was really important and it still exists like the group in Seattle. Well, in Europe people who came from that experience are from Veneto. They are everywhere. The other day the head of the security service who escorted Marcos in the City of Mexico was a comrade from Padua, one of the leaders. This is wonderful, this endless continuity. We did a lot of work in Veneto molding very interesting and peculiar characters, very smart people, from university professors to a lot of people who got involved in strange activities. That’s when I started writing books too. One is on German historicism, Dittei, Meineke. My first book was published by Feltrinelli. My first thesis was on German historicism, Dittei, Trotch, Weber and Meineke. I published my first thesis in 1958 and then I worked on my second thesis in Paris as well because I started working in a school in Paris, Ulm. I did my second thesis on the young Hegel. After that I worked on this big project which allowed me to become a fulltime professor and I wrote about the Kantian jurors between 1789 and 1802. Then I translated Hegel’s first writings on the philosophy of law of 1802 and the system of ethics of 1802, 1803, that means the writings before Jenen. Thanks to all these writings I was hired fulltime as a professor. After that I didn’t write anything else except some articles until 1967, 1968.

RG: Were you mainly working on Marx?

AN: Yes, I worked on Marx and I became Marxist

RG: And the university did not know that, right?

AN: No, they didn’t.

RG: How did the university react to this change?

AN: Well, the academy was peculiar, it was probably the most revolutionary in Italy. And I was on the law faculty, not philosophy, so it was even worse. So I remember they still liked me because, nonetheless, I was anti-soviet, and there was this Anti-Stalinist game, but it did not really matter. If Stalin had been a bourgeois, as he really was, they would have been happy. They were taking a cold war position and you can’t imagine on what a scale. I had to pass through a corridor to leave the faculty of Philosophy of law, and at 12:30, 1:00 pm I would leave and have lunch. There would normally be a group of old professors gathered. One was Professor Carraro who was one of the founders of the Christian Democratic party, an important man, who was also the president of the Anti-Mafia committee. He was the one who denied the existence of the Mafia through a committee for three, four years in Parliament.

RG: Was he involved in it?

AN: No

RG: How did he do it then?

AN: Well, just like the CIA and the USA denied the existence of the Mafia in Italy, saying it only existed in the States, because the mafia is a political force which belongs to the power system. Then there was the biggest Italian minister who gave the verdicts at the State court. Well, I don’t remember his name. There was a big expert in penal law, Trabucchi and I had to pass through them all. It was a sacrifice for me. They would get quiet and one of them would ask me “Negri, what do you thing about what happened yesterday?” And I had to be very ironic to avoid making myself look ridiculous. And I was able to do it, and I am proud of it, I did it for almost two years. Then I chose to work on Saturdays, Sundays, because I liked it better, nobody was around. At that point a bomb was put in the institute.

AN: A real one?

RG: Yes, the Police put a bomb. It was at the beginning of 1969 and it was the same person who put it in Piazza Fontana, Milan. He was a Paduan Fascist. Luckily nobody died in Padua, but in Milan there were sixteen, seventeen casualties.

RG: How did your students react after you presented a Marxist thesis. Did they expect something else from you?

AN: Students didn’t expect anything else. My students would grow with me. I was lucky to be part of a development towards the movement of 1968, a movement that I didn’t create, I was experiencing it, I was in it. Don’t forget Cuba in 1968, and in Veneto we had the creation of the first Marxist-Leninist group of European young communists who lived in Prague and experienced the movement of international young communists. They knew the Chinese tradition and brought in 1966, 1967 the so-called Cultural Revolution, an endless revolution, and so on. Moreover we were in touch with factory workers. We were not only university students and intellectuals, we were in touch with that reality. So with the 1968 revolution throughout Europe we had no problem dealing with all of these thesis and theories. We were there, and not only did we want to be in touch with the workers, we were them, in a way. There were thousands of workers who already agreed with us, and when they saw other students going to them, they accepted them, that was really exciting.

RG: Another phenomenon than in France, right?

AN: Of course, different than France and Germany. In fact, the movement of 1968 in Italy lasted for ten years, until 1979, until April 7th, 1979.

RG: What happened then?

AN: Me and fifty other people were arrested.

AN: They organized this arrest and left the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigade) alone, we were movers of the masses, while the Brigate Rosse were a terrorist group and they accused us of being brain of a class action in the universities, in the factories and the armed organization. In other words, they accused us of being the intellectual unit in the middle, the interface of the 2 groups, the armed organization and the mass action in university and factories. This was the accusation and we were arrested.

RG: And these people from Brigate Rosse who planted bombs.

AN: They never used bombs. They always shot at people, fascist are the ones who used bombs in Italy. Every time there was a bomb attack, it was the fascists, sometimes the anarchists, but we had nothing to do with Anarchism. There were comrades like people from the Brigate Rosse with radical ideals who need to be condemned, but it was never about terrorist attacks.

RG: Did you know anybody from school or university who joined the Brigate Rosse?

AN: No, out of a total of two hundred, two hundred fifty Brigate Rosse members, none were in my class. If I think about my acquaintances or groups I had political discussions with, there might be ten. It was a mass movement and there were no direct consequences. There’s a big process, a social process with different ideas. What happened was you would go in the street and strike and when you found yourself in front of the police, they would fire at you. So the reaction to this all was, as the movement was really strong, that next time they would shoot first because if one comrade was killed by the Police the last time, the next time it is a policeman who dies before one comrade. This was the logic at that time and it was a mass movement. In Italy, since about 1975, there were shootings at every strike. Afterwards, the police started following people who had been seen shooting at strikes and they had to go into hiding. They would unite and started thinking that they could achieve power only through secret revolutionary struggles and so on. This is how the phenomenon of Brigate Rosse started. Well, actually they started operation in 1972, 1973, but it was only afterwards that they became important, right at the time when they began to shelter whoever fought in a radical way against the system in the streets. But this phenomenon is not like the Roter Arme Fraktion. The Roter Arme Fraktion has always been a minority group and they are people who get together and do that and recruit radical people here and there. The German situation was strange, there was a border involved, there was always East-Germany, so you could run away. The situation in Italy was completely different. The Brigate Rosse is a natural phenomenon and for that reason …and what is really strange is that nobody, no one was able to connect the Brigate Rosse to the East, the soviet service, not even Palestinians.

RG: Not even to the Germans?

AN: Well, yes, very casual contacts. The fact is that it is a phenomenon completely linked to the class struggle, to workers movements, to the link between students and workers created at that time., an insurrection movement in our country on the wave of a long term resistance in Italy.

RG: A kind of resistance against the Police?

AN: Yes, against the Police and the politics of the Communist Party. Since the beginning of the 1970s the communist party decided to betray the ideals of the 1968 revolution in favor of gaining entrance into the government, the so-called historical compromise. The Communists had to enter into the government so they had to take a different line, a more central one. So they anticipated what happened after 1989.

RG: When they changed the name of the party, right?

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