Oreste Scalzone (born 26 January 1947) is an Italian Marxist intellectual and one of the founders of the

communist Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...

organization

Potere Operaio Potere Operaio ("Workers' Power") was a radical left-wing Italian political group, active between 1967 and 1973. (It shouldn't be confused with "Potere Operaio Pisano" which was one of the components of a competing revolutionary group, Lotta Conti ...

. Scalzone was born in

Terni Terni ( , ; lat, Interamna (Nahars)) is a city in the southern portion of the region of Umbria in central Italy. It is near the border with Lazio. The city is the capital of the province of Terni, located in the plain of the Nera river. It is ...

Umbria it, Umbro (man) it, Umbra (woman) , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = , demographics1_footnotes = , demographics1_title1 = , demographics1_info1 = , ...

. In 1968 he came to know

Franco Piperno Franco Piperno (born 5 January 1943) is a former communist militant from Italy. He is an associate professor of Condensed Matter Physics in the University of Calabria. Biography Piperno was born in Catanzaro. He graduated in physics at the Univ ...

, and on 1 March that year he took part in the clashes against Italian police at Valle Giulia. A few days later his

vertebral column The vertebral column, also known as the backbone or spine, is part of the axial skeleton. The vertebral column is the defining characteristic of a vertebrate in which the notochord (a flexible rod of uniform composition) found in all chordata, ...

was seriously injured by a

desk A desk or bureau is a piece of furniture with a flat table (furniture), table-style work surface used in a school, office, home or the like for academic, professional or domestic activities such as reading (activity), reading, writing, or using ...

thrown from a window by

neofascist Neo-fascism is a post-World War II far-right ideology that includes significant elements of fascism. Neo-fascism usually includes ultranationalism, racial supremacy, populism, authoritarianism, nativism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration se ...

students, mostly belonging to the

Italian Social Movement The Italian Social Movement ( it, Movimento Sociale Italiano, MSI) was a neo-fascist political party in Italy. A far-right party, it presented itself until the 1990s as the defender of Italian fascism's legacy, and later moved towards national ...

, that were occupying the faculty of Law of the University

La Sapienza The Sapienza University of Rome ( it, Sapienza – Università di Roma), also called simply Sapienza or the University of Rome, and formally the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", is a public research university located in Rome, Ita ...

in Rome. About the 1968 movement, he said: With Piperno and

Toni Negri Antonio "Toni" Negri (born 1 August 1933) is an Italian Spinozistic-Marxist sociologist and political philosopher, best known for his co-authorship of ''Empire'' and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political ph ...

, he founded Potere Operaio in 1969. On 7 April 1979, he was arrested, along with Negri, Piperno and others members of the

autonomist Autonomism, also known as autonomist Marxism is an anti-capitalist left-wing political and social movement and theory. As a theoretical system, it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerism (). Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendenci ...

movement, and accused of planning armed attacks and plotting to overthrow the government. In 1981 he managed to flee first to Denmark, then to Paris, where he remained protected from extradition thanks to the

Mitterrand doctrine The Mitterrand doctrine (from French: ''Doctrine Mitterrand'') was a policy established in 1985 by French President François Mitterrand, of the Socialist Party, concerning Italian far-left terrorists who fled to France: those convicted for viole ...

. Scalzone revealed that his escape was helped by actor and friend

Gian Maria Volonté Gian Maria Volonté (9 April 1933 – 6 December 1994) was an Italian actor, including roles in four Spaghetti Western films: Ramón Rojo in Sergio Leone's ''A Fistful of Dollars'' (1964) and El Indio in Leone's '' For a Few Dollars More'' ( ...

. In 1983 he was sentenced to 16 years' jail, reduced to nine in 1989. While in France, Scalzone worked for a political solution to the " Years of Lead" that could lead to an

amnesty Amnesty (from the Ancient Greek ἀμνηστία, ''amnestia'', "forgetfulness, passing over") is defined as "A pardon extended by the government to a group or class of people, usually for a political offense; the act of a sovereign power offici ...

to political refugees and prisoners. In 1998 he briefly and secretly came back to Italy passing through

Corsica Corsica ( , Upper , Southern ; it, Corsica; ; french: Corse ; lij, Còrsega; sc, Còssiga) is an island in the Mediterranean Sea and one of the 18 regions of France. It is the fourth-largest island in the Mediterranean and lies southeast of ...

: a photographic service by the newsmagazine ''

L'Espresso ''L'Espresso'' () is an Italian weekly news magazine. It is one of the two most prominent Italian weeklies; the other is ''Panorama''. Since 2022 it has been published by BFC Media. History and profile One of Italy's foremost newsmagazines, ''l ...

'' later revealed the episode. In 2002 he went on

hunger strike A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance in which participants fast as an act of political protest, or to provoke a feeling of guilt in others, usually with the objective to achieve a specific goal, such as a policy change. Most ...

in protest against the extradition of

Paolo Persichetti Paolo is both a given name and a surname, the Italian form of the name Paul. Notable people with the name include: People with the given name Paolo Art * Paolo Alboni (1671–1734), Italian painter * Paolo Abbate (1884–1973), Italian-American ...

. A 17 January 2007 ruling of the Court of Milan declared his crimes ("subversive association and member of an armed organization") prescribed. He announced he had come back to Italy to "fight, under new conditions, an old battle".

References

External links

Oreste Scalzone blog
1947 births Living people People from Terni Italian communists Autonomism Potere Operaio Libertarian socialists {{italy-politician-stub

See also

References

External links