Description
Book SynopsisThe Golden Horde is a definitive work on the Italian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ’70s. An anthology of texts and fragments woven together with an original commentary,
The Golden Horde widens our understanding of the full complexity and richness of radical thought and practice in Italy during the 1960s and ’70s. The book covers the generational turbulence of Italy’s postwar period, the transformations of Italian capitalism, the new analyses by worker-focused intellectuals, the student movement of 1968, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the extra-parliamentary groups of the early 1970s, the Red Brigades, the formation of a radical women’s movement, the development of Autonomia, and the build-up to the watershed moment of the spontaneous political movement of 1977. Far from being merely a handbook of political history,
The Golden Horde also sheds light on two decades of Italian culture, including the newspapers, songs, journals, festivals, comics, and philosophy that these movements produced. The book features writings by Sergio Bologna, Umberto Eco, Elvio Fachinelli, Lea Melandri, Danilo Montaldi, Toni Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Franco Piperno, Rossana Rossanda, Paolo Virno, and others, as well as an in-depth introduction by translator Richard Braude outlining the work’s composition and development.
Trade Review"This classic book, now translated into English, uses eyewitness accounts from those decades to trace uprisings of workers and students in Italy, a country where the extreme left was particularly strong...This sprawling book vividly portrays the chaos, confusion, and contradictions of those years." * Foreign Affairs *
"The Golden Horde figures as an anthology and rather than being a straight ‘political’ or ‘workerist’ recounting the two authors include much information and assessment of the counter-cultural movements in Italy as well as the widespread factory struggles that mark the period . . . Moroni and Balestrini offer up this book as both a tool
mémoire and as a way of charting 'the epoch defining passage from one phase of capitalism to another.'" * Penniless Press Magazine *
Table of ContentsTranslator?’s Introduction (2020)
Preface to the Second Edition (1997) by Primo Moroni
Editor’s Note (1997) by Sergio Bianchi
Preface to the First Edition (1988) by Primo Moroni and Nanni Balestrini
1. In the Beginning There Were the Cities, the Youth, the Workers
2. The 1960s: The Generation of Existential Revolt
3. The Birth of the Mass Worker and the Break-Up of the Communist Movement2
4. From the Classroom to Anti-Authoritarianism
5. The Explosion of ’68
6. 1969: The Hot Autumn
7. The Extra-Parliamentary Groups
8.. Armed Struggle and Workers’ Autonomy
9.. The Revolution in Feminism
10. The Movement of ’77
11. Communication, Culture, Intellectuals
12. Forward! How? And Where To?
Appendix
Diehards of the State by Rossana Rossanda
Bibliography
