1977, Bologna to San Francisco

Dario Melossi*

T WAS INDEED A PLEASURE TO BE PART OF THE SEMINAR HELD BY TONY AND JONATHAN

in the Fall of 2012 in Berkeley. It was a way and what way! to go back in
time to when I first arrived in Berkeley in the Fall of 1977. As for all migrants,
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 1977 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 Lambretta scooter on a boat from Cenoa to Barcelona, where on September 9-12,1977,
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
Control." I do not recall much about the contents of the meeting, but I do certainly
remember that back then Spain, and Catalonia even more, was in the throes of the
transition from Franco's dictatorship 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 thought, followed the habit of dining quite lateconfrontations
would take place between young Catalans and the Guardia Civil. Then, on September 11, on the day of the historic anniversary of the Diada Nacional de Catalunya,
which had been banned under Franco since 1939, 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 everywhere.
Then, back in Bologna, on September 22-24, the "Convention against Repression" took place, where the likes of Felix Guattari famously participated. On the
previous 11th of March, the police had killed the student Francesco Lorusso during
a street demonstration and three days of student quasi-insurrection had followed.
* DARIO MELOSSI (email: dario.melossi@unibo.it) 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 Barbara, he was assistant and thereafter associate professor at the tJniversity of California, Davis,
from 1986 to 1993. 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
research concerns the process of construction of deviance and social control within the European
Union, especially with regard to migration processes.

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Social Justice Vol. 40, Nos. 1-2

7977, Bologna 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 difficulties facing the Italian and European Left had something to do with the victory
of an American "culture" thatthrough 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, Kapitalistatewhich I
would then discover was also produced in BerkeleyI 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. When I wrote to the Schwendingers, they sadly
informed me that the School had been closed and that they themselves were temporarily at the University of Nevadaon their way, I believe, to New Paltz in New
York. But they ilso told me that the only radical criminologist who had tenure, Paul
Takagi, was still on campus, at Tolman Hall, in the School of Education. I wrote to
Pau] and he was there at the airport waiting for me. 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 community of the Bay Area.
Those conversations with Paul and Mary Ann constituted my first introduction
to issues of migration and, especially, ethnicity. As I had the chance to mention
recently (Melossi 2013), the Italy that I was temporarily leaving at the time was a
place totally dominated by class struggle, a kind of internecine civil war of Italians
against Italiansnot a novelty in the history of the place in which the dimensions 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 history of the West, those governments were encouraging Italian migrants to return

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DARIO MELOSSI

to Italy. And no new immigrants were coming 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 punishment based on the punitive use of detention were connected to the emergence of
a "modem" system of production based in the factory. The common roots of the
two institutions could be found in a sort of "penal manufacture"the workhouse
(Melossi and Pavarini 1977). In my analysis I drew on Marx's concept of "original"
or "primitive" 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 movements. And this was because I looked at everything through the lenses of Italy,
where no migratory movement was in sightto the point that upon attending Santa
Barbara for my PhD in sociology two years later, the numerous courses 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 States, 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 wheels" of "the machine");
the deep crisis of the 1970s, discussed at the time as a "fiscal crisis of the state"
(O'Connor 1973) or "crisis of legitimation" (Habermas 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 culminating in the
"roaring twenties"). 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. "External ," as the Latinos in the US and the Africans, Asians, and Eastern Europeans in
Southern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s; "internal," as the Southern Italians who
had just begun to reside in the Quartiere Pilastro of Bologna, still under construction in the early 1970s, where some of my dearest friends were selling copies of the
left-wing radical magazine Lotta continua. "Internal," also, as the Southern African
Americans who had moved to the Bay Area during World War IIa story told here
by Jonathan Simonand whose 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 children, in Naples if I remember correctly.
It was with real emotion, then, that during the seminar we had the chance to
listen to, talk to, and even get acquainted with true icons of those years such as

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 conditions, there were cultural references such as Angela's
moving homage to her mentor, Herbert Marcuse, and her brief mention of participating 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 Doglio 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 Berkeley, 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 written, and then, of course, Punishment and Social
Structure, later finished by Otto Kirchheimer (Rusche and Kirchheimer 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, experienced 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 managed to become 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 utter 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 usall of usin
California, Italy, Asia, or anywhere, in a way that will allow us to reclaim our ability to give some sense and some hope to the world we live in.

REFERENCES
Cooper. David (ed.)
1968
The Dialectics of Liberation. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Davis, Angela
1974
An Autobiography. New York: Random House.

36

DARIO MELOSSI

Habermas, Jrgen
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 Borders 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."/(raptfcfae 1:39.

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