1977 is not a faded date in the archives of legal history and movements: it is a living warning. Back then, judge Pietro Calogero’s theorem sought to weld, with an inquisitorial pen, Autonomia Operaia to the Red Brigades. An operation that swept up intellectuals, workers, militants, and among those arrested, together with professor Toni Negri and Franco Piperno — with whom I later shared a lifetime of struggles for social justice and civil liberties — there was also myself, Luciano Vasapollo. In those cells there were no “hidden chiefs of terrorism”, but brotherly comrades, friends who had grown up sharing the bread of our homes, our mothers’ affection, the unrepeatable weave of families and lives. Infamous accusations, ideological constructs, destined to dissolve into nothingness: but not before producing wounds, exiles, escapes, demonization, stigma. April 7, 1979 — the apex of that accusatory framework — eventually crumbled, leaving a trial stripped of its founding thesis. Nothing was proven, nothing confirmed, everything politically steered.
Today history repeats itself, but with new names, new squares, new targets. No longer Autonomia Operaia, but the solidarity movement with the Palestinian people. A solidarity that dares to call colonialism a crime, war on civilians genocide, apartheid occupation. And so, like in 77, the guilty party is sought before the evidence, the ideological link before the act, the “political theorem” before the investigation. The difference is that this time we are not talking about a few thousand militants: we are talking about millions of people who have taken to the streets, openly, faces uncovered, in the name of an international law that is not an option but a binding obligation, in the name of a decolonization that is not a threat but a promise. To criminalize the solidary today means walking the same slope: forging incompatibles to recast them as potential terrorists, “internal enemies”, subjects to surveil, intimidate, repress. While Leonardo spa, a state-owned company, is allowed to supply lethal weapons to Israel, Ukraine and to the Anglo-Arab-American coalition that for a decade has been massacring Yemen, guilty of seeking sovereignty outside feudal dominion.
The security rhetoric now advancing in Italy aims to draw a perimeter of compatibility, where solidarity is accepted only if decorative, never if transformative, never if it indicts imperialism. It is the same logic that in Turin struck Askatasuna, that across the country strikes social centers, that now points the finger at anyone who refuses postcard solidarity. If this continues, prison will no longer be a place of exception: it will become the dormitory of criminalized solidarity. And then I will again find myself in a cell, not only with my union or university comrades, but with those who for decades have practiced true solidarity: Salvatore Izzo, cardinal Zuppi, the Pope, Unicef, Caritas, Sant’Egidio. Paradoxes? No. Consequences. Because in this climate, aiding oppressed peoples makes you a suspect, opposing colonization a threat, dreaming liberation a danger.
The Hannoun theorem and the fear of incompatible dissent
There is a powerful symbolic echo that through the years has embodied the fate of peoples criminalized by power: the sentence attributed to Crazy Horse, the Sioux chief, when he said that the aim of repressive theorems is not only to strike, but to isolate, divide, erase the identity of those who resist. Because a theorem does not merely label someone “guilty”: it builds a wasteland around the accused, a political, ideological, even social isolation, so that the criminalized appears exactly as power desires, not as they are.
In the 1970s the strategic goal was to uproot any chance that a breaking movement might exist to the left of the PCI. Not a terrorist movement — real subversion was always the terrorism of the state or fascist terrorism — but a movement with subversive forms, yes: and I claim the highest meaning of the word “subversive”, which means revolutionary, radical, aimed at deep transformation of social and productive relations.
The so-called “April 7 theorem” was a definition I never liked, because it did not strike Autonomia alone: it struck the very idea that subjects, comrades, collectives, organizations could exist unaligned to the revisionism and betrayal of the institutional left. They were not, as Berlinguer’s PCI said, “fascists disguised in red”, but the voice of a revolutionary drive the system could not tolerate.
It was no accident that the magistracy most deeply engaged in that repression was close to the PCI, embodied by figures like Calogero and prosecutors who acted as the operational arm of a strategy born elsewhere: in political power, in security apparatuses, police, intelligence services, later shaped in inquisitorial courts, prosecutors’ offices, prisons, total institutions of repression.
Today I see the same pattern in the case of Mohammad Hannoun and the Palestinian activists arrested. It is the theorem of imperial dominion, using every instrument to neutralize incompatible dissent, dissent that refuses the limits imposed by Zionist and imperial compatibilities of constituted powers, the European Union, NATO, subordinate governments. If dissent remains verbal, symbolic, harmless, never challenging power’s architecture, it is tolerated, even praised by media. We saw it: at the first demonstration called by USB, Rete dei Comunisti, Cambiare Rotta, Potere al Popolo, television commentators — even Mentana — acknowledged its relevance, almost in a calculated opening to pull those forces back into the system’s perimeter. But when those same organizations declared open support for peoples’ self-determination, for concrete resistance, for a non-sterilized Palestinian cause, the tone flipped: from “good” to “dangerous”, from “social movement” to “possible accomplices of terrorism”.
Why? Because the theorem activates when power fears that beyond the institutional left, even the “radical” left inside Campo Largo, a non-homologated front might re-emerge. A front not limited to solidarity dinners, but speaking clear truths: that Maduro’s Venezuela is not a dictatorship, but a participatory democracy; that Cuban CDRs are not authoritarian cells, but forms of people’s democracy; that ALBA — Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua — along with Vietnam or China, still represent hypotheses of sovereignty and socialism outside Western systemic order; that community-based socialism is not folklore but a real political model; that Palestinian resistance is not abstraction but a fight for land and dignity no empire can accept.
Dare this, and you become “incompatible”, and power does not seek proof: it seeks isolation. And so MPs of the same institutional progressive sphere begin to say “I didn’t know him”, “I wasn’t in the collective”, “I only showed solidarity at dinner”, just like in the 1970s when fear of repression forced disavowal even of what was public, legal, in plain sight.
The implicit message is clear: you may dissent as long as you do not propose a real alternative to power. If you do, you become a target. And the Hannoun case is not an isolated fact, but an international political operation: criminalize, isolate, discipline, drive the left to fear its own shadow, abandon the words “resistance” and “self-determination” to stay within admissible boundaries.
To accept this frame, even only in language, is to hand yourself to the theorem. And we, who want to change the world, cannot allow it.
Hoka Hey. Not a death motto but a vow of presence: the dignity of honoring every moment of life, as taught by the great Lakota chief Crazy Horse, the leader who never bowed to empire. If it is a good day to die, then it must be a good day to fight, dream, cross the horizon and win it. A battle to reach the horizon, a horizon to strengthen socialism, Palestine’s self-determination, all peoples fighting decolonization. A good day to die, yes, but only to finally live without conditions, without hesitation, here and now: live liberation to make history, live socialism to make future.
If not now, when? A good day to die, to finally live, without ifs or buts, here and now. Socialism.
Luciano Vasapollo
In the photo: at the University of Calabria, remembering Franco Piperno last January. The speech of Luciano Vasapollo, then dean of economics at Rome’s La Sapienza, where he founded the School of Marxist Decolonial Economics, also a political activist born in Potere Operaio with the Centocellaros, recognizing Piperno as a life mentor before a political one, along paths that later diverged though bound by deep mutual esteem and friendship. “Piperno — Vasapollo said, recalling the epic of a generation of revolutionaries grown in Rome, later told with Luigi Rosati in the book Centocellaros — taught us much. In life there are road-comrades, those you cross stages with: Franco was this to me, since we were teenagers, as we kept meeting and talking. Comrades, we shared ever more experiences, in class-based unions, revolutionary politics, academic engagement. I feel tied to Franco not only for Potere Operaio but for the academic path, class struggle defending exploited workers, Gramscian culture. We also shared calabresità. I am from Arena, Calabria, so there is common root. Still — we were just saying in the car during the trip — what ties us most is Franco’s powerful morality and ethics.”
