1977 Bologna to San Francisco Dario Melossi

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1977 Bologna to San Francisco

Dario Melossi

I

T WAS

INDEED

A

PLE SURE

TO BE

P RT

OF THE

SEMIN R HELD

BY

TONY

AN D

JON TH N

in the Fall of 2012 in B erkeley. It was a way — nd what way — to go back in

time to when I first arrived in Berkeley in the Fall of

1977.

As for all migran ts,

there were "push" and "pull" factors involved in such a move (even if certainly much

less dramatic than for so many of them ). I remember the September of 197 7 as a

momentous time for me, but also for the Italian and more generally the European

social and political life. At the beginning of the month, I had put my trusted Lam-

bretta scooter on

a

boat from Cenoa to Barcelona, where on September 9 -12 ,19 7 7 ,

I participated in the fifth meeting of the European Group for the Study of Deviance

and Social Control under the very appropriate theme title "The State and Social

Co ntro l." I do not recall much about the contents of the meeting , but I do certainly

remem ber that back then Spain, and C atalonia even more, was in the throes of the

transition from Fran co's d ictatorship to becoming one of the most innovadve and

culturally interesting places in Europe. Every night at 11 on the Ramblas — almost

in a ritual that, I thou ght, followed the habit of dining quite late—confrontations

would take place between young C atalans and the Guardia Civil. Then,

on

Septem-

ber 11, on the day of the historic anniversary of the Diada Nacional de C atalunya,

which had been banned under Franco since 19 39 , a memorable rally or perhaps I

should say innumerable rallies took place, asking for Catalonia's autonomy, and

millions of people filled every street and every square of the Catalan capital. One

could hear only the calm and rhythmic chanting of the huge crowds and the songs

sung by Lluis Llach from hundreds of loudspeakers. No noise of cars or buses

anywhere in the city because there were none, only people marching everywh ere.

Then, back in Bolog na, on September 22 -2 4 , the "Convention against Repres-

sion" took place, where the likes of Felix Guattari famously participated. On the

previous 11th of M arch , the police had killed the student Francesco L orusso during

a street demonstration and three days of student quasi-insurrection had followed.

*

DARIO MELOSSI

(email: [email protected]) is professor of criminology in the School of Law

of the LIniversity of Bologna . After receiving his PhD in sociology from the University of California,

Santa Ba rbara, he was assistant and thereafter associate professor at the tJniversity of California, Da vis,

from 1986 to 1 9 9 3. He is the author of

The Prison and the Factory

(1977, together with Massimo

Pavarini),

The State of Social Control {\99Q ,

and

Controlling Crime, Controlling Society: Thinking

About Crime in Europe and America (2008), plus various edited books, chapters, and articles. He is

editor of

Studi sulla questione criminate

and editor-in-chief of

Punishment and Society.

His current



7977,

ologna to San Francisco 33

at the end of which the police had surrounded the huge university area of Bologna

with light tanks and had basically proclaimed a sort of state of siege in the city.

The Convention against Repression had been called as a way to respond to that,

but especially to reflect about what needed to be done. I personally had no idea

what should be done. I did not recognize myself in any of the parties involved.

The Italian Communist Party was obviously perseverating in its lasting tradition

of failing to communicate with or understand the students; I was even less drawn

to the groups that were then drifting toward some kind of armed struggle, which

I thought to be somewhat childish and destined to be played out in games run by

the worst reactionary forces. There was not much room left in the middle. So I

was very happy to have the chance, in the next few days, to catch a plane to San

Francisco, having won a one-year fellowship to study and conduct research in the

United States. I also had an inkling, or perhaps foresight, that the enormous dif-

ficulties facing the Italian and European Left had som ething to do with the victory

of an Am erican culture that— through films and music —had become hegemonic

even within the staunchest of the European left radical groups. I was fascinated,

therefore, to find out more about that culture.

In a left-wing journal that I had found in Amsterdam, Kapitalistate—which I

would then discover was also produced in Berkeley—I came across a short article

by Herman Schwendinger (1973) that told the story of the Berkeley Schoo] of

Criminology. The magazine was old and the article did not reflect the most recent

developments within the School. W hen I wrote to the Schw endingers, they sadly

informed me that the School had been closed and that they themselves were tem-

porarily at the University of Nevada— on their way,

believe, to New Paltz in New

orkBut they £ilso told me that the only radical criminologist w ho had tenure , Paul

Tak agi, was still on cam pus, at Tolman H all, in the School of Education. I wrote to

Pau] and he was there at the airport waiting for m e. I had never been to the United

States before. I was basically quite provincial and unsophisticated in relation to

the world, and I can never sufficiently thank Pau] and his late wife, the wonderful

Mary Ann, for introducing me to American life from a very distinct perspective,

that of the Asian American com munity of the Bay Area.

Those conversations w ith Paul and Mary Ann constituted my first introduction

to issues of migration and, especially, ethnicity. As I had the chance to mention

recently (Melossi 201 3), the Italy that I was temporarily leaving at the time was a

place totally dominated by c lass strugg le, a kind of internecine civil war of Italians

against Italians—not a novelty in the history of the place —in which the dimen-

sions of migration and ethnicity (and the accompanying reality of racism) were

completely absent, or so it seemed. In 1977 Italians were no longer emigrating to

Germany or Switzerland. In fact, following the so-called oil crisis of 1973 , which

would then appear as a major turning point in the socioeconomic and political his-



34 DARIO MELOSSI

to Italy. And no new imm igrants were com ing to Italy either, though that process

would begin only a few years later.

In my book The Prison and the Factory, published in Italy the year I left for

the United States, I had claimed that the origins of a modern system of punish-

ment based on the punitive use of detention were connected to the emergence of

a m od em system of production based in the factory. The common roots of the

two institutions could be found in a sort of penal m anufacture — the workhouse

(Melossi and Pavarini 1977). In my analysis I drew on M arx's concept of original

or prim itive accumulation in the first volume of

Capital 1^61).

In those pages

Marx referred to the (forced) transformation of peasants into proletarians as a

primitive accumulation of the living part of capital, i.e., labor. At that time,

I failed to see in those passages that Marx was referring also to migratory move-

ments. And this was because I looked at everything through the lenses of Italy,

where no migratory m ovement was in sight—to the point that upon attending Santa

Barbara for my PhD in sociology two years later, the numerous cou rses offered in

the sociology of migration held no interest for me.

I also failed to appreciate the close connection between three factors: the strength

of the Italian working class in the 1970s, which was part, and at the peak, of an

international cycle of struggle that had started in the United S tates, and especially

in the Bay Area, in the 1960s (when Mario Savio had proclaimed in his speech that

we have to put our bodies upon the gears and upon the wh eels of

the

machine );

the deep crisis of the 1970s, discussed at the time as a fiscal crisis of the state

(O 'Co nn or 1973) or crisis of legitimation (Haberm as 1973); and the start of the

huge migration processes in the 1980s (the second big wave of globalization, as

some call it, the first one being from 1900 to the 1929 crash and cu lmina ting in the

roaring twen ties ). I could not see, in other words, the deep connection between the

strength of the Fordist working

class,

from Turin to Detroit; the following dramatic

crisis of industrial production that would become commonplace in the American

rustbelt ; and, finally, the introduction of

an

entirely new working class in all the

strongholds of capitalism, made up of both internal and external migrants. Ex-

ternal , as the La tinos in the US and the Africans, Asians, and Eastern Europeans in

Southern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s; intern al, as the Southern Italians who

had just begun to reside in the Quartiere Pilastro of Bologna, still under construc-

tion in the early 1970s, where some of my dearest friends w ere selling copies of the

left-wing radical magazine Lotta continua. Internal,

also,

as the Southern African

Am ericans who had moved to the Bay Area during World War II— a story told here

by Jonathan Sim on— and w hose sons and daughters would become the founders of

the Black Panther Party, an organization held in high esteem by the Italian radical

groups of the time. Lotta Continua even tried to replicate the Panthers' breakfast

program for ch ildren, in Naples if I remember correctly.

It was with real emotion, then, that during the seminar we had the chance to



¡977 Bologna to San Francisco 35

Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins. Later, back in Italy, I dusted off my old copy

of Davis's

Autobiography

(1974) and was enthralled by her narrative skills and

her reconstruction of a period that had been so crucial for me and so many of my

generation. There were other crucial links that tied our realities together. Beyond

the social and economic con ditions , there were cultural references such as Angela's

moving homage to her

mentor

Herbert M arcuse, and her brief m ention of participat-

ing as a young philosopher, encouraged by the African American political leader

Stokely Carmichael, in the "Dialectics of Liberation" congress that took place in

July of 1967 in London at the Roundhouse (Chalk Farm). This was a venue for

some of the most celebrated rock acts of the time , which for two weeks hosted the

most intense discussion of revolutionary prospects (Cooper 1968). I still remember

Daniele D oglio in the hallways of my high school in Bologna, back from England

with his trusted guitar, telling us about the events in London and the extraordinary

songs of this new guy. Bob Dylan

When I was in Berke ley, between 1977 and 1980 1 collaborated intensely with

Crime and Social Justice

as it was called at the time. In particular, I worked on

translating and introducing the American public to the oeuvre of Georg Rusche,

the various articles that he had w ritten, and then , of course, Punishment and ocial

Structure

later finished by Otto Kirchheimer (Rusche and K irchheimer 1939). We

slowly started to realize that instead of the new revolutionary world we had dreamt

of, we were finding ourselves on the brim of a brutal capitalist

revanche

experi-

enced in California before anywhere else. Here, Ronald Reagan's brutality toward

the Berkeley students (and the faculty) was just a taste of what would be in store

for everybody else once he m anaged to becom e president and try to roll time back

to before the New Deal, to those "roaring" twenties that have in common with the

first decade of the new millennium the distinction of having reached the highest

level of social inequality ever. Today we again find ourselves at a turning point in

the (long) cycle, in a global crisis that is deeper than in the 1970s and competing

with the 1930s in terms of intensity. A major difference today seems to be the ut-

ter want of that hope for radical change that in different ways had animated the

previous two crises. This is a further reason to have seminars like the one taught

by Tony and Jonathan last Fall. I think that all who attended felt a shared need for

a place in which to explore and investigate what is happening to us—all of us—in

California,

Italy,

Asia, or anywhere, in a way that will allow us to reclaim our abil-

ity to give some sense and some hope to the world we live in.

R F R N S

Cooper. David (ed.)

1968 The Dialectics of Liberation. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Davis, Angela



36 D R IO ME L O S S I

Habermas, Jürgen

1973 Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon.

Marx, Karl

1867 Capital. Volume I. New York: International Publishers 1967.

Melossi, Dario

2013 People on the Move: From the Countryside to the Factory/Prison. In The Bor-

ders of

Punishment:

Migration, Citizenship, and Social Exclusion, edited by Katja

Franko Aas and Mary Bosworth, pp. 273-90. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Melossi, Dario and Massimo Pavarini

1977 The Prison and the Factoiy. London. W?icm\\\a.n \9 \.

O'Connor, James

1973 The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Rusche, Georg and Otto Kirchheimer

1939 Punishment and Social Structure. New Brunswick (NJ): Transaction Publishers

2003 (new edition, with an introduction by Dario Melossi).

Schwendinger, Herman

1973 Radical Criminology. /(rapítófcfaíe 1:39.



C o p y r i g h t o f S o c i a l J u s t i c e i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f S o c i a l J u s t i c e a n d i t s c o n t e n t m a y n o t b e c o p i e d

o r e m a i l e d t o m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s e x p r e s s

w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l a r t i c l e s f o r i n d i v i d u a l u s e .

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1977 Bologna to San Francisco Dario Melossi

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