The article focuses on the history of autonomous social movements in post-war Italy, whose activity was to a large extent contemporaneous with the infamous “years of lead”. In chronological sequence, the article moves from the birth of operaismo and the autonomous workers’ movement through the beginnings of the students’ movement and operaist feminism, and finishes with the history of the radical autonomous movements of the 1970s. This history is reconstructed from the perspective of contemporary Italian political philosophy, which developed mostly on the basis of concepts and ideas produced earlier by the autonomous movements and on their experiences. This perspective, which treats the subjective practices of resistance as the starting point of any theoretical analysis, makes it possible to look at the history of reaction to the autonomous social movements and their brutal suppression as the roots of the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1980s and 1990s.
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