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The Journal of Community Informatics       ISSN: 1721-4441

Articles 

Social movement theory and the Italian radical 
community archives: A question of valence? 

The theory and practice of the radical community, and a capacity for 
self-organisation, demonstrates the ability to control the symbols and 
language of society, to define new conventions of meaning, and to 
offer alternative reasons and explanations for action. However, the 
predominant sociological account of Italian social movements of the 
1960s and 1970s censures potentially relevant discursive practices of 
the radical community. This is evidenced by the lack of diversity 
amongst the epistemic sources of Anglo American Social Movement 
Theory (SMT). The assumptions in play in disciplinary thought 
disqualify the practice and theory of radical social movements as a 
credible mode of analysis of the social and political condition. 
Ultimately, this discounts the radical subject as knowledge producer. 
By reflecting on my personal experience of conducting doctoral 
research at three key community archives in Italy I contemplate an 
alternative approach, which considers the valence of these radical 
communities as essentially epistemological and not simply ‘political’, 
or social. 

  !3

Mark Howard

Teaching and Research associate, School of 
Philosophical, historical and International 

Studies, Monash University, Australia 

Corresponding Author.  

mark.howard@monash.edu

Howard, M. (2019). Social movement theory and the Italian radical community archives: A 
question of valence?. The Journal of Community Informatics, 15, 19-XX. 

Date submitted: 2018-03-31. Date accepted: 2018-10-31. 


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Introduction 

I travelled to Italy in 2011 to conduct doctoral research at three key radical community 
archives: The Archives of Primo Moroni (APM) hosted by the Cox 18 social center in 
Milan; the Workers’ Archives of Augusto Finzi (AAF) managed by the Marghera Public 
Library; and The Centre of Documentation in Pistoia (CDP). Prior to these archival 
visits, my inquiry into the nexus of the radical community and politics in Italy for the 
period 1968-78 had primarily leveraged the theory and epistemic systems of Anglo-
American Social Movement Theory (SMT). Consequently, the latter informed my 
habits of attention, with a modernist vision of the intersection of the political institution 
and social conflict guiding my choice of research subjects and materials. I deferred to 
the epistemic evaluations of leading figures in this field, such as Donatella della Porta 
and Sidney Tarrow, whose combined vision of a contemporary “movement society” 
describes a strategy-oriented radical community whose activism is centered on political 
strategy.  1

One afternoon, after finishing my research at the APM, I took time to thumb through 
some counter-cultural magazines in the Cox 18 bookshop. During this time the musings 
of Jacques Rancière (1989) in The Nights of Labour came to mind: “is it possible that 
the quest for the true word compels us to shush so many people? What exactly is the 
meaning of this evasion (...)?” That moment would alter the trajectory of my research. 
Subsequently, my interest in the disciplinary approach of sociology to the discursive 
work of the radical political subject and the holdings of radical community archives has 
been informed by my personal experiences of conducting research at the 
aforementioned archives and my ensuing intellectual engagement with Italian radical 
theory. This is my attempt to redress the disciplinary prejudice I became aware of while 
encountering the social documents of the Italian radical community.  

I argue that the predominant sociological study of Italian social movements of the 1960s 
and 1970s involves a willful exclusion of potentially relevant theoretical practices such 
as those of radical political subject in the analysis of the nexus of the radical community 
and politics. This censure is evidenced by the lack of diversity amongst the sources of 
justification, knowledge, and evidence — epistemic sources – of SMT. Vitally, I assert, 
the choice of materials and subjects (habits of attention) is founded on presumptions of 
testimonial credibility assigned on the basis of the sociological identity that SMT 
affords the radical political subject. Coupled with academic positivism and a 
reductionist approach to the epistemology of testimony, disciplinary thought treats the 
discursive work  of radical social movements (RSMs) (speech acts and written 
communication that develop and articulate ideas of the radical actor) as the material of 
the theorist, an objectification that abstracts the social documents from their context and 
prejudices the response of SMT to the archival work of the Italian radical community. 

  See, for example: Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965-1975, 1
New York, Oxford University Press, 1989. 

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The radical community, discursive work and epistemic agency 

When we put ourselves in contact with a mass movement, in reality we are 
opening a relationship with organisms which are already politically mature. 
So this completely changes the vision which makes the political elite an 
active subject and the mass movement a passive subject: the political elite, a 
kind of stratum endowed with knowledge and, instead, the mass movement, 
a stratum endowed only with wishes, with desires, with tensions and so on. 
(Bologna 1995) 

Before my archival visits in Italy in 2011, I had drawn my research materials almost 
exclusively from the SMT store of documents. Vitally, the SMT habit of attention is 
guided by a modernist vision of a political system progressively improved by the 
presence of social conflict.  Within this image of the contemporary “movement society” 2
the important activity of the radical community is limited to political strategy and social 
interaction. Consequently, I argue, the knowledge work of the Italian radical subject is 
mis/underrepresented amongst the epistemic sources that SMT relies on to navigate 
their field of research. Having initially shared these sources, I was liable to think that 
the important discursive work of RSMs was exhausted within identitarian, rationalist, 
and structuralist aspects of social action. Further, I believed that the political concepts 
and arguments of the Italian radical community 1968-78 were adequately represented 
within, first the ‘official transcripts’ of the Italian State informants (the pentiti); second 
the journals of key social movement organisations such as Potere Operaio (PO/
Workers’ Power) and; third the theoretico-political interventions of historic Marxism 
and neo-Leninism. 

Contra my experience with the epistemic sources of SMT, the expansive collection of 
social documents — the products of the radical subject’s discursive work — at CDP, 
AAF and APM ranged across newspapers, journals, counter-sociology periodicals, 
leaflets, magazines, anthologies, historiographies, interview transcripts, life-histories 
and more. The CDP, unique amongst these archives was established as a “place of 
critical research” in the 1960s, does not represent a specific political tendency.  In 3
contrast AAF, as D’Agostino (2013) relays, presents local histories and gathers 
documents that aim to preserve social and political memory specific to the radical 
community of the Veneto. Finally, the APM is hosted by a Milanese social centre, and 
continues to offer a place of resistance and to fulfil a political purpose; however, the 
diversity of materials addresses the accusation of exclusive habits of attention. 
Certainly, the APM promotes militant publications of the far left, yet the depth and 
breadth of its holdings go some way toward achieving its stated aim to “socialise 
knowledge without establishing power”.  This, I observe, is an attempt to redress the 4

  This is patent, for example, in the research of avowed consensus theorist Sidney Tarrow (1989).2

  http://www.centrodocpistoia.it/index.php?menu=sub2item2&page=storia3

  http://www.inventati.org/apm/index.php?step=introduzione4

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epistemic harm experienced by the radical community, a result, as I explain below, of 
the social identity and location afforded them by traditional knowledges. 

After exploring these archives I left Italy appreciating the radical community’s 
discursive work as an authoritative and credible body of work analysing the nexus of 
politics and the radical subject. Their social documents demonstrate rational authority: 
they generate expertise, offer new theoretical insights, produce arguments and 
questions, and as Casas-Cortes (2008) and her co-authors spotlight, are ‘acts of 
knowing’ potentially equivalent to those of social theorists. While the Italian radical 
community archives may be, in certain instances, integral to the agency of the radical 
community, foregrounding their values (Wright, forthcoming), the social documents 
they hold are not limited to the resources of political practice. In two important aspects, 
the discursive practices of the radical community are, I assert, in line with the standards 
of knowledge creation recognised as legitimate by social epistemologists such as Fuller 
(2012). In particular, the radical communities involved in the production of the social 
documents exhibit the features of an epistemic community: they judge the credibility of 
testimony based on shared schemas of epistemic evaluation; they demonstrate the 
capacity for epistemic agency — the ability to “make sense of one’s 
experiences” (Dotson 2014) and; their documents affect knowledge outside of the 
context of creation. How then are we to explain the censure of the radical community, 
and the absence of its mass communications within the prevailing Anglo-American 
theory of the nexus of politics and the radical community?  

Knowledge practices 

The theory and practice of the radical community, their documents, discursive works, 
and a capacity for self-organisation, demonstrates their ability to control the symbols 
and language of society, to define new conventions of meaning, and to offer alternative 
reasons and explanations for action. Key, as I have argued elsewhere (Howard, 2017), is 
that RSMs exist marginal to the political community, acting outside the established 
standards of behaviour. This has the effect of disrupting social order and the discourses 
that have that order as their object. By conceptualising the nexus of politics and the 
radical community in this way, we imagine a collective actor that generates both 
practical (real life/subjective) and theoretical (discourse/objective) discontinuities which 
are exemplary of radical activity. Their self-aware practices of immediacy achieve real 
life outcomes by directly dealing with the impediments present in the environment. The 
correlate effect of the observation of these practices in the discourse on politics, is an 
undermining of existing schemas of thought, driving theoretical renewal.  A case in 5
point, amongst the self-activity of the contemporary Italian movement sector, is the 
early risers of the workers movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s who intended to 

  My conceptualising of the radical community here is indebted to Deranty and Ross’ introduction in 5
(Deranty and Ross 2012), and Rancière’s elaboration of revolutionary practice in (Rancière 1991).

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“change the relation of the factory workers to the political and industrial systems 
(Howard, 2017).”  

As Castellano (1996) and his co-authors note, the early risers were self-organised and 
took charge of their work environment through direct action. This worker was 
fundamentally different to that elaborated within the traditional or classical theories of 
class antagonism (Cuninghame 2002), and created redundancies and gaps in established 
political thought, notably the Marxist thought of the Italian Communist Party. 
Accompanying the self-activity of the workers, responding to theoretical discontinuity, 
was an emerging and novel theoretical expression of the relation of the worker to the 
state and capital. This theoretical renewal resulted in the intellectual circle that 
crystallised around the seminal journal Quaderni Rossi and were drawn into the social 
conflict. As Bologna (1995) observes amongst his historiographic notes, the coming 
together of the intellectual stratum and the mass movement revealed the latter was 
already endowed with knowledge and the capacity for self-activity.  

Radical communities, when manifest as social movements, are widely recognised to 
generate knowledge of the conditions underlying social and political conflicts (Diani 
and Eyerman 1992). Invariably, however, the Anglo-American study of the radical actor 
grants certain intellectual circles a monopoly over the comprehension of the ‘object’ of 
study, limiting explication to the confines of traditional expert knowledges. The 
outstanding question is why does a discipline, which Zwerman, Steinhoff, and della 
Porta (2000) assure us is attentive to the ‘vicissitudes’ of the entire social movement 
milieu, collapse the Italian social movement sector into the political process, flattening 
the context of the radical community and conflating its innovation and creativity with 
strategic reason and political rationalism? The beginning of an answer, I suggest, is 
available in the confluence of social epistemology and community informatics, and their 
conjuncture with the contemporary methodology of SMT. 

Researchers must continually discriminate between competing sources of evidence, 
knowledge and theoretical justification, argument and counter-argument, selecting what 
we believe to be credible informants and reliable testimony. Typically, as Goldman 
(2011) explains, we utilise methods of evaluation that reflect the social processes, 
institutions and procedures, and interpersonal influences common to our disciplinary 
milieu. Cumulatively, these influences form ‘epistemic systems’ that aim to promote 
truth and, as Goldman continues, embedded within these systems are schemas of 
epistemic evaluation that “affect the epistemic outcomes of its members.” Schemes of 
epistemic evaluation are employed to validate, for example, judgements of expertise. 
Such validation utilises properties of the hearer and informant (such as social location) 
to exclude or promote potential testimony (Goldman 2001; 2011). While conceding that 
knowledge practices are not egalitarian, epistemology attempts to avoid unfair 
discrimination and partisan habits of attention.  Therefore, epistemology is concerned 6

  On this topic, refer to Fricker (2011) and Dotson (2014) 6

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with, among other things, choices of epistemic sources. These choices are ubiquitous in 
research and documentation environments, and are affected by variables such as 
doctrinal attachments, methodological and theoretical commitments, institutional and 
cultural practices, and the social and political context of investigation. As a result, the 
privileging or trivialising of social subjects, research materials, and memory is a 
common concern of applied social epistemology and community informatics. Their 
concerns share territory that covers the objectifying of testimony and its abstraction 
from community contexts; the place of ‘official records/memory’ in research strategies 
and knowledge practices; and the role of the radical community in the presentation of 
social documents in archival situations.  7

Of concern to politically-minded social epistemologists, such as Miranda Fricker 
(2011), is that social identity and location can affect the rational or cognitive authority 
afforded to certain informants. These decisions are often founded upon “societal norms 
of credibility” that reflect existing social hierarchies and power relations (e.g. man/
woman), and involve the legitimising of certain ‘rhetorical spaces’ that generate 
“presumptions of credibility.” Code (2011) explains that these spaces, areas of 
discourse, limit and structure what can be uttered and trusted as testimony and grant 
authority to certain speakers and interpreters, dependent on their positioning within the 
space. The result is considered unfair epistemic discrimination (Fricker 2011), which, 
key to our concerns, can take the form of either exclusion from, or promotion within, a 
community of knowers. Such ‘political standards’ of discrimination, Dotson explains, is 
the unwarranted hindrance to epistemic agency, constraining the “ability to utilise 
persuasively shared epistemic resources (...) in order to participate in knowledge 
production.” The outcomes of unfair discrimination include impediment to effective and 
accurate communication and recognition of the capacity to “make sense of one’s 
experiences” (Dotson 2014). As is discussed below, the Italian radical community 
suffers both forms of harm at the hands of disciplinary thought and interventionist 
intellectuals.  

In the Italian situation, disciplinary thought sweeps aside localised actions and 
discourses of various subgroups within the social movement environment, and treats the 
radical community as the material of the theorist. The rhetorical spaces, schemes of 
evaluation and epistemic sources of SMT have the effect of disqualifying the practice 
and theory of the radical actor as a credible mode of analysis of the social and political 
condition. Crucially, I contend, SMT wilfully excludes relevant theoretical practices in 
the modelling of RSMs based on ‘political standards’ of epistemic evaluation and 
partisan habits of attention. As a discipline, it limits the valence of radical thought to 
that of political strategy, or social interaction, and fails to acknowledge the potential for 
radical action to co-exist with epistemological work. SMT has an intrinsic aversion to 
the intellectual labour of the radical community, and a distrust of the social documents 

  Similar themes are discussed from the perspective of community informatics in Stillman & Johanson 7
2009.

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held in radical community archives, evidenced by its sources. However, as I have 
argued elsewhere (Howard, 2017), to understand the knowledge practices of the radical 
community we must recognise their valence, which is essentially epistemological and 
not simply political, or social.  This is to claim that the radical subject is at least 8
potentially a credible informant, and that we can learn from their theory and practice. 
The radical community, through their actions, verify a common capacity, as Rancière 
highlights, for the invention and demonstration of political concepts, arguments, 
objects, and the like (Baronian, Rosello et al. 2008).  

The valence of the radical community 

During the first half of the twentieth century the study of social movements 
marginalised movement participants based upon the image of the activist as defective 
and collective behaviour as outside of reason (McPhail and Tucker 2003). However, 
during a period of social foment in the 1960s, typified by the rise of left-libertarian 
movements, the dividing line between theorist and activist, intellectual and movement, 
was often blurred. In Italy, innovative forms of practice and theory, alongside collective 
violence, typified a movement sector embodied by a class of movements that railed 
against the standard place of the radical community in politics. The redundancies and 
breaks this social movement sector created in established thought engaged the 
intellectual in a process of theoretical rejuvenation. Against this background, SMT 
began to reconstruct its explanatory framework, disenchanted with aspects of the 
disciplines contemporary inheritance (Eyerman 1989). At the same time, a similar 
process was occurring amongst the radical community and a counter-sociology 
movement in Italy.  

As the polarisation of the political climate faded, theoretical renewal translated most 
prominently into the ascendance of the rational choice frameworks of SMT, the 
Autonomist Marxism of Italian radical thought, and the post-Marxism of European 
social movement theory. SMT also employed the ‘classical agenda’ of research in an 
effort to ‘civilise’, ‘politicise’, or ‘organise’ the radical subject by repatriating them to 
institutional politics. This had the effect of promoting the political valence of the radical 
community, and, as McAdam (2001) and his collaborators state, the overarching intent 
was to repopulate the territory of modern politics with a strategic and reasonable radical 
subject, specifically, one identifiable and explicable within a framework of political 
rationalism. Guided by this agenda, after a period of theoretical upheaval, the discipline 
returned to a more traditional subject/object split, with the sociologists adopting a 
‘disengaged’ and ‘neutral’ position (Diani and Eyerman 1992). The theoretical 
implications of this approach, as discussed by Casas-Cortés, Osterweil, and Powell 
(2008), include, first, objectifying the radical community, which discounts them as 

  Alberto Toscano (2010) discusses the importance of considering the valence of radical communities in 8
his work on fanaticism.

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knowledge producers, and second, a distrust for non-traditional sources of expertise and 
the unique insights available amongst localised and particularised practices. 

In this context, a further crucial factor shaping the re-birth of the Anglo-American study 
of social movements, and its subsequent interaction with radical thought, was the 
summary dismissal of Marxist social theory as a credible epistemic source. The negative 
valence afforded Marxist thought is evident in the hostile post-Marxist approach of 
SMT, which attempts to purge the analysis of contemporary social movements of the 
knowledge and praxis of Marxist radical subjects. Crucially, this effort relies on a 
caricature of Marxism that firstly invokes a monolithic image of historical Marxism and 
then promotes neo-Leninism as representative of Marxist renewal in Italy. Carried 
forward by a superficial encounter with historicist Marxism and the aggressive brand of 
Marxism-Leninism associated with the Italian area of organised violence, SMT affords 
Italian radical thought diminished credibility in the rhetorical space of social movement 
study. Consequently, SMT avoids critically engaging with the Marxist renewal that 
occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, the coarse classificatory net utilised 
to disbar Marxist thought from the status of interlocutor in the Italian situation 
overreaches, capturing the theory and practice of autonomous and self-organised 
collectives that circulate within a political territory typical to Marxist interventionism. 

Effectively, SMT isolates Marxist thought and uses its caricature to quarantine the 
practice and theory of the radical community. The assumptions in play are used in a 
strategic fashion to disqualify certain agents and aggrandise others; however, their 
justification for epistemic discrimination is tenuous. First, Marxist theoretical renewal 
in Italy was driven, as Bologna identifies (Cuninghame and Bologna 1995), by an 
attempt to open a relationship with a radical community already ‘endowed with 
knowledge’ and a capacity of self-organisation. Its ambitions were not Leninist. In 
addition, Autonomous Marxism, a theoretical thread that ran throughout the Italian 
movement sector, was critical of orthodox and historicist Marxism and at its foundation 
it was a sociological investigation of the dynamics of social inequality. Accordingly, its 
status within the rhetorical space of sociology deserves careful consideration. 

Second, the dismissal of the practice and theory of RSMs obscures the conjunction of 
the subjective and objective modes of radicalism, which involves an exchange between 
the movement and the intellectual, discrete, yet intimately entangled layers of the 
radical community. Consequently, thinking on the radical subject that proceeds largely 
unaffected by the specificity of a radically different theory and practice of politics risks, 
as Toscano has illuminated, reduces the thought and action of the radical community to 
an ‘empty philosopheme’ (Toscano 2009) — the emblematic statements and 
pronouncements of leaders and political elite. This reductive approach to the knowledge 
of the radical subject ignores its creativity and efforts to rethink politics itself. 

The contemporary sociological study of the nexus of politics and the radical community 
proclaims, as McPhail and Tucker (2003) note to address the inequity of previous 

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governance based theories of social movements that defended the existing social order 
and normalised the domination of the ruling classes (the men of reason/progress) over 
the lower classes (the crowd, the irrational and desirous masses). However, implicit to 
the persistence of theoretical positivism is the relation of knowledge and ignorance 
(those who know and those who do not know), that underpins knowledge hierarchies of 
unequal societies. The ontological division of society into the ‘two humanities’ of the 
active thinker and their passive medium, the masses (Rancière 2009), that reassured 
Marxist science of its guardianship of knowledge, also shores up the authority of 
disciplinary thought. This approach places the scientist and their account ahead of the 
participant and their expressions (Rancière 2004), creating an intellectual asymmetry 
that promotes the testimonial credibility of the former. As Kristen Ross spotlights, the 
‘new sociology’ energised by the events of 1968 is accused by Rancière, among others, 
of “deriving its authority from the presumed (...) ignorance of its objects of study” (Ross 
1991). Knowledge hierarchies, whether exploited by sociologists, movement leaders, 
and philosophers or similar, assign manual and intellectual labour to certain social 
identities based on schemes of epistemic evaluation. This creates a sense of entitlement 
and grants the strategic reason and political rationalism of certain intellectual circles a 
monopoly over the comprehension of the movement.   9

Rational authority, afforded on the basis of positioning in rhetorical spaces, occludes the 
capacity of those dominated in the existing social order to articulate and organise their 
experience. This hinders the epistemic agency of the radical community and undermines 
the credibility of their document work. The relevance of this assertion for SMT is 
evident in the thinking of della Porta (1992). She states that there is a “lack of scientific 
interest in the publication of “high fidelity” transcripts, without comment or 
interpretation”.  To extract the sociological content ‘hidden’ within the testimony, or to 
provide a scientific account of oral history, requires “the presence of research 
hypotheses and a good background knowledge.” She continues that “even more 
important, sociological concepts and hypothesis are indispensable in selecting material 
and ‘making sense’ of it” della Porta (1992).  The point is clear, della Porta believes that 
the discursive forms of the radical community require further explication, with 
sociological interpretation necessary to redress the ‘vagaries’, ‘aesthetics’ and 
‘distortions’ present in their expressions and social documents (1992; 1995). Effectively, 
the credibility of the testimony of the radical actor is considered a function of the 
sociological employment of research ‘devices’ to counter “characteristic patterns of 
distortion.” (della Porta 1992).  The interpreter or social theorist, and not the speaker, is 
considered key.  

della Porta’s method of intervention, and a general aversion toward the radical 
community’s analysis of their condition, is manifest in her privileging of select 

  Wright (2005) makes an important point when he asks whether we can accept the political elite as a 9
necessary consequence of the radical community without assuming that they must form a “single 
political unit designed to monopolize the broader movement’s ‘strategic reason’?”

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materials and subjects.  First are the ‘official transcripts’ of the pentiti: radical left 
activists who turned state informant and were central to the judicial case brought against 
the radical left.  The Italian State approached political dissidence in the second part of 10
the 1970s through a narrative of political illegality, reducing the radical community, as 
discussed by Moss (1997), to the social identities and locations of criminal, terrorist, 
marginal, or enemy. Such social categories disbarred the radical community from the 
intellectual labour associated with understanding the politics of radical social 
movements. However, the Italian State reintegrated repentant radical activists into the 
interpretive community as informants, part of the judicial interpretation that secured the 
meaning of high-cost activism (Moss 1997).  The transcripts of pentiti interviews hold a 
central place in della Porta’s account of the nexus of politics and the radical community, 
with the reliability of their testimony thought to be enhanced or rehabilitated by the 
judicial situation and subsequent sociological intervention.  

Second, while not exclusive of left-wing media, della Porta’s habits of attention (and 
Tarrow) further mimic those of the Italian State, relying on the theoretical interventions 
of historic Marxist and neo-Leninist intellectuals to explain the Italian radical political 
subject. This promotes social documents that represent the more ‘aggressive’ thread of 
‘high-risk’ activism, associated with groups gathered around journals like Senza Tregua 
and Rosso. Ultimately, having shared numerous epistemic sources with the State’s 
judiciary, della Porta cannot avoid becoming similarly enthralled with certain radical 
organisations and their leaders. 

 The reduction of the radical subject in Italy to the status of citizen solely in the eyes of 
the law afforded the judiciary interpretive privilege in the political and social conflict, 
providing authority to their fixing of the ‘public’ meaning of radicalism.  The State’s 11
interpretive community identified the ‘political dissident’ by associating them with 
terrorism and a Leninist ideology. The prosecution claimed an intellectual ‘Marxist-
Leninist’ vanguard was leading the mass movement and had effectively quietened the 
voice of social movements outside the organisations of the worker. However, these 
‘censored’ social movements themselves thought Leninism, while making lots of noise, 
had little to contribute in the face of the practices of the Movement of ’77. Ultimately, it 
was the State and the armed organisations that afforded the Leninists an important voice 
by verifying their place at the centre of the radical community, a situation that has its 
correlate in SMT, which privileges these ‘experts’ of political violence.  

The strategic radical subject  

SMT’s effort to repatriate the radical subject to western democracy is facilitated by 
employing a theoretical framework that forms around an unchanging nucleus of 
instrumental reason and modern politics, limiting its account of the radical subject to an 

  See: Portelli, 1989.10

  Moss (1997) makes a similar point.11

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exposition on how collective actors do things with strategic resources. This devalues the 
epistemic agency of the radical community, a community arguably irreducible to its 
political strategies and decisions. As Alain Touraine famously argued: “the concept of 
social movement is useful when it helps one to rediscover social actors (…) buried 
beneath either structural Marxist or rationalist theories of strategies and 
decisions” (Touraine 2008), both of which subordinate the radical community to 
programmatic and organised forms of politics. Such relegation is common to 
sociological accounts of social movements, where an organisational intent and 
explanatory purpose expropriates the radical subject from its knowledge of social 
struggle. 

Central to SMT’s explanatory framework is Frame Theory, which is accommodated to 
the extent that it complements a strategy-oriented modelling of the nexus of politics and 
the radical community. As McAdam (2004) discusses at length, this approach 
categorises the discursive work of RSMs as a ‘framing activity’, part of a ‘strategic 
challenge.’ Frames are essentially enabling, that is, they facilitate the ‘problematic 
accomplishment’ of meaning and significance through the “… weaving, (this) blending, 
(this) knitting or stitching together of strands of history (…), beliefs or ideology (…), 
and selected events …” (Snow and Byrd 2007).  The consolidating of a frame of 
reference makes it possible, Best (2003) explains, for individuals to orient themselves, 
and translate (strategically) social, political, and historical conditions into orienting 
meanings: meanings that delineate problems and prescribe specific responses. This 
interpretation, however, conflates acts of knowing with the organising task of ideology, 
and relegates the epistemic agency of the radical subject to an explanatory device of 
sociologists. The radical community’s knowledge of the social and political 
environment is regarded as little more than a coercive construct of movement leaders 
and political experts. 

The social world may be unintelligible and agents’ acts incomprehensible if they are 
inexplicable in some sense as strategic. However, the new struggles in Italy, whether of 
the late 1950s or mid-1970s, were organised, intelligent, imaginative, and driven by an 
independent knowledge of their situation. Strategy oriented approaches to explicating 
the role of radical schemas of thought in politics appear to limit the opportunity for 
radical theory and practice to inform our sociological account of the radical community. 
Much of the discursive work of the radical subject that developed and articulated ideas, 
have become categorised as the ‘resources’ of collective action. SMT’s account of 
activism builds on the presupposition that social agents are guided by instrumental 
reasoning, which, deploying the classical notion of rationality, is focused on the best 
means of achieving a contingent end. This bonds the knowledge practices of the radical 
community to political activism, and disbars it from epistemology. Strategy-oriented 
modelling of the dynamics of radical action concentrates on how collective actors do 
things with the available resources. As such, della Porta asserts, the disruptive, 
disorderly, and innovative activities of marginalised communities are a means to gain 

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voice and achieve visibility through persuasion or coercion, attracting public attention, 
which, when successful, activates the support of organisations within the political arena 
(della Porta 2008). As such, the discursive work and documents of the radical 
community are thought incapable of speech in the rhetorical spaces of the political 
institution. 

However, if we accept radical theory is a factor in the realisation of the radical 
community, then, equally, we must be mindful of what is at stake in radical thought. 
Theoretical representations, political organisation, and frames of reference interweave 
elements of explanation and prescription, analysing the self-activity of the movement 
while advancing abstract political goals. This ‘entanglement of politics and 
epistemology’, as Toscano refers to it in Fanaticism, complicates the separation of 
prescription and political commitment from explanation (Toscano 2010). This is 
problematic for SMT, which at certain theoretical junctures dissolves the knowledge of 
the movement into that of the ‘experts’. As previously mentioned, this risks fusing the 
self-awareness of the radical community with the emblematic statements of the political 
elite or ‘interpreters’, and in the Italian situation this theoretical tendency has welded 
the subjectivity of the movement to caricatures of historical Marxism and a neo-Leninist 
vanguard. This entitles the elite to speak as the representative of the radical community 
and facilitates the facile recovery of the latter’s knowledge within the frameworks of the 
relevant interpretive community, promoted ahead of the knowledge practices of the 
broader radical collective. 

Alberto Melucci, renowned for his work in the field of New Social Movement Theory, 
observes a challenge similar to that witnessed by Toscano. In Challenging Codes 
Melucci (1996) states that the discursive dimension of social movements contains 
elements of knowledge, ideology, and integralism, which must be deconstructed if used 
to theorise the meaning of collective action. Integralism and ideology perform a 
strategic function, organising the plurality of interests within the movement, 
rationalising and representing the actions of the social actor. This strategic function 
overlays the knowledge practices of the radical community, where they struggle against 
the hegemony of social knowledge inscribed in the discourse of dominant interests 
(Melucci 1996). Accordingly, the existing order of society and discourses that have that 
order as their object, have a role in maintaining the intellectual subordination of the 
radical community. However, as previously argued (removed for blind review), the 
nature of the radical subject is to disrupt the hegemony of social knowledge. 
Emancipatory practice breaks from the political and epistemic communities that pacify 
the radical actor and subordinate it to organisation from above, theoretical intervention, 
and the statements of political elite. If we are dismissive of this dimension of the radical 
community and their epistemic agency, falling back upon presumptions of credibility 
formed around social identity and location, our exposition presents an abstract and 
deformed subject. 

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The radical community and access to knowledge 

Melucci claims that the fundamental conflict in contemporary society is over who has 
access to knowledge, which is inequitably distributed, and involves a struggle to 
‘reclaim knowledge’, or more accurately, to refuse “the exclusion from knowledge 
(Melucci 1981).”  As mentioned above, this exclusion against which they struggle is 
explicable as the outcome of rhetorical spaces and the associated presumptions of 
credibility. Therefore, vital to contemporary movements is access to the epistemic 
resources deemed necessary to knowledge practices. A similar exclusion has befallen 
the social documents held in radical community archives at the hand of disciplinary 
thought and other interpretive communities such as the Italian State and the social 
movement organisations of the neo-Leninist intellectuals. These entities twice exclude 
the radical community from the knowledge practices of antagonism. An example is the 
popular portrayal of the counter-cultural movement as “unable to participate in public 
assemblies with sensible speeches” (Torealta 1980). Within this rhetorical space, 
counter-cultural collectives were not granted the rational authority to speak, looked 
upon as merely noise-makers. 

Through my research, I have come to believe that contemplating the nexus of politics 
and the radical community requires more than its evaluation in terms of political 
rationality and organisation. Essentially, it involves questions of the hegemony of social 
knowledge, and requires the recovery of radical thought and deconstructing of 
organisational analyses that reduce radical practice to strategic abstractions. However, 
SMT, through traditional schemas of epistemic evaluation and partisan habits of 
attention, reduces the capacity of the radical community to create new concepts, 
arguments and questions to the instruments of persuasion and coercion, treated similarly 
to proselytising ideologies. Subsequently, SMT fails to engage critically with the theory 
and practice of the radical actor in Italy. Such a failure of engagement is an example of 
the unfair epistemic discrimination on behalf of mainstream sociology, dismissing the 
veracity and value of the knowledge practices of radical communities, especially that of 
the grass-roots participants. This has the consequence of granting SMT rational 
authority and allows the discipline to monopolise the concepts and explanatory 
categories of the nexus of politics and the radical community. Further, the disciplinary 
modelling of the radical actor promotes the abstract thought of movement leaders and 
their efforts to organise and politicise the radical community, escalating the importance 
of the political elite and interventionist intellectuals in radical action. This expropriates 
the wider movement of its knowledge of antagonism, which is significant for at least 
two reasons. First, as Melucci states, one of the most important functions of the radical 
community is the legitimising of alternative knowledge practices and modalities of 
communication. Collective actions, he contends, provide “different ways of addressing 
things and of imagining them (...), beyond those inscribed in the hegemonic codes of 
scientific and technological discourse” (Melucci 1996). 

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Second, Bologna (1995) argues that initially the creativity of the grass roots movement, 
consisting of ‘thousands of comrades’, displayed consciousness and independent 
knowledge. By participating in Italy’s radical social science, the hope of the intellectual 
was to generate theories attentive to the experiences of the worker. The focus was on 
opening a relationship with a movement with its own histories of struggle that endowed 
them with knowledge and the capacity for self-organisation (Cuninghame and Bologna 
1995). However, while the original intent of co-research was to record the creativity and 
innovation of the worker, and to learn from their practice and discourse, in the end the 
intellectuals would alienate the movement of their knowledge, which they would 
‘ideologise ex-post’ (Cuninghame and Bologna 1995).  The resultant mistake was the 12
reimposition of a discourse upon the radical community rather than a comprehending of 
their revolutionary form (Bologna 1980). A consequence of this ‘failed dialectic’ 
between the movement and the intellectual, noted by Castellano (1980), was the 
misrepresentation of the actual movement in the frames of leadership. This 
misrepresentation is compounded when SMT affords the political experts, particularly 
the Leninists, a voice that resounds beyond their actual position in the radical 
community, discounting other far left initiatives. 

Radical archives and knowledge practices 

What has happened to the discursive materials of the Italian radical community, 
discounted as epistemic sources by so much sociological thought? This ‘surplus’ 
crucially finds a place amongst the Italian community archives, alongside privileged 
social subjects, research materials, and memory. Accordingly, I promote an alternative 
approach to archival work favoured by Rancière, who, as Deranty (2010) 
acknowledges, studied the multiplicity of voices and forms of speech “below the 
overbearing discourse of organised Marxism.” This is testament to Rancière’s belief 
that, contra SMT, the reasoning of those subjects dominated within the existing social 
order (discounted as speakers and interpreters in certain rhetorical spaces) is the equal 
of the rationality and logic of the so-called experts and specialists who govern the 
dialogue on the natural order of society (Rancière 1989). Rancière takes seriously the 
perspective of the exploited and their capacity to articulate and organise their 
experience, a theoretical commitment reflected, as Deranty (2012) shows, in his effort 
to relay ‘thought from below’.  

The capacity of the radical community for discourse and reason, on display among the 
social documents held across the Italian radical community archives, questions the 
reasons for their exclusion from intellectual labour, staking a role in knowledge 
practices. In the first instance, we should avoid treating ‘knowledge from below’ as a 
partial epistemological phenomenon that requires an intellectual intervention or further 
explication for understanding to occur. We should acknowledge that the radical 

  This review of co-research also forms part of a previous study on radical thought and critical 12
pedagogy in (removed for blind review).

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community can speak about and organise their experience. This is to recognise their 
epistemic agency, to raise their position in the relevant rhetorical spaces, a position 
partially justified by the myriad of social documents available in the Italian radical 
community archives. Therefore, we must be aware the role of the radical community in 
the presentation of social documents in archival situations, while remaining vigilant to 
avoid the pitfalls of unfair discrimination, partisan attention, and the aggrandising of 
certain histories. 

 Common to all the collections I visited in 2011, is a preservation of memory and 
knowledge practices that continue to contest exclusion from disciplinary areas of 
discourse. This is critical, for I contend that it is important to ensure that those twice 
excluded from the knowledge practices of antagonism in the 1960s and 1970s, do not 
suffer the same fate at places of research and documentation. Certainly these archives 
are discriminatory, but we recognise that epistemology is not egalitarian. What is 
important is that the discrimination is not unfair, and the hope is that instead of 
excluding certain voices from the area of discourse, the archives help elevate those who 
are typically stripped of their rational authority.  

Conclusion 

In the rush to naturalise the radical subject, giving it a social identity, assigning it a 
location and task, and designating its time and place in contemporary society, theories 
of the nexus of politics and the radical community submerge the specificity of 
marginalised groups beneath identitarian, rationalist, and structuralist aspects of social 
action. The endeavour to present the radical actor as a stable empirical category of high 
risk and high cost politics appears motivated by the desire to dignify a theory of 
radicalisation through its subject, what Bologna (2005) refers to as the ‘creation of 
alibis’. However, this approach is prone to false witness where an ideological hegemony 
is observed amongst the diversity, innovation, and creativity of the radical community. 
Such hegemony denies the radical subject rational authority and diminishes its 
epistemic agency, reducing the vicissitudes of the movement sector to the 
epiphenomena of political struggle. The outcome is that the prevailing sociological 
models of the ‘movement society’, which attempt to organise or politicise the radical 
community as a political actor, efface the difference and particularity essential to that 
community. A corollary of this is the underrepresentation of radical thought, and an 
exclusion of the social documents in place at radical community archives. By limiting 
who can speak and what can be said in the rhetorical space of sociology, SMT excuses 
itself, whether deliberately or inadvertently, from engaging with the discursive work of 
the radical community as epistemic sources. 

The creativity and innovation of the Italian radical community of the 1960s and 1970s 
tried to break from the austere and organised forms of political involvement and 
traditions of militant anti-fascism. It is the latter, however, that draws the attention of 
SMT, with such beacons of political violence illuminating the sociological search for 

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the politics of the radical subject in western democracy. What could the prevailing 
sociological accounts of the radical community learn if, instead of focusing on the 
interventionist intellectuals, Marxism-Leninism, political violence, and the 
organisational perspective, they were attentive to the historiographical stream of Italian 
radical thought, the outliers of the movement, counter-sociology, and myriad other 
intellectual figures presented in the community archives? While the former are 
important aspects of the movement, they need contextualising within the dynamics of 
the radicalisation of social movements, and the ongoing interplay to be found there 
between practice and theory. For instance, while the political elite may pose itself, as 
Giovannetti (1980) reflects, “as the relatively stable expression of social antagonism, as 
its memory, as the bearer of social values,” and we cannot understand the movement 
without contemplating their role. Equally, we must realise this group is but one layer.  

While intimately entangled with the movement, at times the instrumentalist projects of 
organising dissent beguiles the theorist and leadership, and in these moments, the theory 
and practice of the movement and the intellectual come apart. It is amongst these 
fragments that we may discover the nascence of new knowledges, arguments, concepts, 
reasons, explanations and the like. The most likely place to uncover the documents of 
such intellectual labour, I contend, are radical community archives, not among 
emblematic statements, theoretical interventions, or disciplinary thought. Rancière 
(2006) tells us, his archival project creates a space where, for example, the workers’ 
words are removed from their usual situation – ‘social stuff’ – and enter into a dialogue 
as the equal of philosophical narrative. In such instances, he continues, differentiating 
between those who have speech and those who have voice, is no longer based on a 
‘principle of discrimination’, where the capability of an individual is tied to their social 
occupation and location. This is an ideal we should have in mind as we engage with the 
documents and discursive work of the radical subject.  

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	Articles
	Social movement theory and the Italian radical community archives: A question of valence?
	Introduction
	The radical community, discursive work and epistemic agency
	Knowledge practices
	The valence of the radical community
	The strategic radical subject
	The radical community and access to knowledge
	Radical archives and knowledge practices
	Conclusion
	References