Evanescence

Abstract

Despite the reversals, the BR remained convinced, as they put it in the Strategic Resolution of October 1980, that capitalism was a ‘dying dinosaur’; ‘its agony will be long, the blows of its tail tremendous. But the revolution will kill it’.¹ The emergence from the movement of ‘revolutionary organisms of the masses’ would be critical. These bodies, as the BR described them in another document from this period, ‘The Twenty Final Theses’, were to be political-military organisms through which the masses themselves (and not just an avant-garde) were to fight the police, the ‘masters’, and so on, ‘on the terrain of the armed struggle’.² The principal tactical objective of the revolutionary effort had to be the construction of these organisms. On this point, Curcio, Franceschini et al., the authors of the theses, took a slap at Moretti, asserting that a misunderstanding had occurred inside the Organization over the concept of annihilation. Speaking with cold detachment, the brigatisti wrote that in each act of annihilation, the political message had to be ‘limpid’ and the target selected with the maximum of ‘political rigor’ and the minimum of ‘excesses’. Undoubtedly, Curcio and the others had in mind the killing of the worker, Guido Rossa, which had clearly not been ‘limpid’.