Gianfranco Pancino moves through three lives which, in his account, become a single trajectory: political militancy during the years of workers’ struggles and Autonomia, exile — experienced as a painful fracture but also as an opening toward other cultures and perspectives — and finally scientific research, leading to his involvement in HIV/AIDS studies and global health issues. A path marked by a constant demand for justice and a stubborn love for knowledge, which also returns in his reflections on the non-neutrality of science, on the limits of “democratic medicine” revealed during the pandemic, and on the need to root new practices of conflict and care in the territory, such as popular clinics.
At the center of the interview is his book Ricordi a piede libero. L’Autonomia operaia, l’esilio, gli studi sull’HIV (Mimesis), a personal and political autobiography that reconstructs the atmosphere, passions, and contradictions of a season capable of leaving seeds still alive, even in a profoundly changed society. The volume will be presented on Thursday, February 26 at 5:30 p.m. at the Ristorante Etico Strada Facendo, Padua (via Chiesanuova 134). The interview was organized and curated by OpenMemory – Centro Studi e Documentazione Sherwood.
Maurizio Galeazzo
In reading your book, which we could define as a personal, political, and perhaps even collective autobiography, one can identify three distinct narrative periods. The first is that of political militancy, in which the political-collective dimension emerges strongly. The second is that of exile, where the family dimension and the discovery that other ways of living can exist are brought to the forefront. The third is that of scientific research, where the most personal dimension becomes evident, made of determination and passion for research and discovery. In this journey, can one trace the common thread that runs through the entire narrative?
Gianfranco Pancino
The common thread throughout my journey has been the thirst for justice and love of knowledge, which have driven me ever since, as a student in Padua, I took part in the first student demonstrations against the Gui law. Later, my involvement in the workers’ struggles at Porto Marghera, alongside the workers, taught me concretely how a factory works and how a revendicative struggle is built.
With my arrival in Milan and the development of the Autonomia movement, this awareness grew even stronger: the conviction matured that it was possible — and necessary — to change things, to transform society as it was. That movement did not seek only to influence social structures, but also to change people’s daily lives, experimenting with new forms of collective life and profoundly altering the way one saw oneself and the world.
This drive guided all my activities and political militancy, and sustained me in the lives that followed. Exile was a very painful fracture, but it was also an experience that offered me a positive side: stepping outside my worldview — however collective and political — to encounter other cultures, other ways of thinking, and to truly open myself to the world.
Thus I understood that we are not alone and, above all, that Europe is not the center of the world. Finally, in the third phase of my life, I picked up again that thread made of the search for change, social justice, and knowledge, embarking on the path of scientific research. It was an extremely difficult journey, but I managed to enter AIDS research: a deeply committed field that allowed me to confront the issues of what was then called the “Third World” and the major questions of global health.
Maurizio Galeazzo
Across these three periods, what was the driving force behind this almost incessant search, made of continuous industriousness and the ability not to give up, to keep going — as the saying goes — making soup with whatever was available at each moment?
Gianfranco Pancino
I learned that facing life requires several ingredients. The first is determination: you must understand what you want, set a goal, and truly decide to reach it.
The second is trust: trust in yourself and trust in others. This allowed me to always live collectively, to rely on the people around me, starting with my family. Loredana — first partner and then wife — was extraordinarily important, especially during the years in France, helping me rebuild a life, relationships, and a community of comrades. Feeling that others believe in you is fundamental: for this reason, trust in oneself, in others, and in the collective has been decisive for me.
And then there is luck, because in life you need that too. I must say I was lucky: I was not arrested in Italy when they were looking for me and did not find me, I was not extradited, and finally, I managed to “pass the camel through the eye of the needle,” entering scientific research in France. And I made it.
Maurizio Galeazzo
In your book you state that, in the 1970s, we failed to go beyond the party form as the main organizational tool of movements. In light of today’s debate, what is your view on new organizational forms that try to move beyond the dichotomy between horizontality and verticality?
Gianfranco Pancino
I believe one of the main self-criticisms of that period is precisely this: we were unable to identify what the next step beyond the party form could be, which until then had been decisive, at least in Western democracies. At the moment when the party form began to empty itself of content and politics became increasingly autonomous from the electorate, while we proposed other forms of representation, we were not able to define an organization capable of laying the foundations for a new form of representation.
In reality, in the 1970s, what we were trying to do was to develop forms of direct democracy in all areas of social life: in factories, in schools, and even in personal relationships. There were no elected leaders; rather, there were cadres, leaders if you want to call them that, whose ability to lead derived from their personal qualities — intelligence, courage, ability to represent others — and not from any formal investiture.
Autonomia, however, remained essentially a coordination of very different situations, which never found forms of centralization capable of going beyond simple coordination and the organization of struggles.
We set the prairie on fire, we set the country on fire, but without managing to build, brick by brick, a new organizational form.
We spoke of counterpower, yes, but for us counterpower was above all the defense of the gains obtained in individual places: not much more. We did not manage to invent either a new society or a new organization.
In the end, as I also recall in the book, some even came to propose again the need for a party form, more or less Leninist: an evident failure. Since then, this discussion has continued for fifty years without reaching a definitive solution.
Every time a movement tries to give itself solid structures, the same difficulties emerge. I think, for example, of Podemos: it was born from a spontaneous and autonomous movement and tried to transform itself into a representative force capable of confronting society as a whole and power. It built a party that initially developed from the base toward the center. But in its development it was progressively absorbed by the rules of existing democracy, lost its connection with the base, and ended up losing bargaining power. I believe this is one of the best examples to explain current difficulties.
There are many movements, especially in France. The gilets jaunes movement, for example, was an extremely important experience, which even put institutions at risk, to the point of being repressed with absolute ferocity. There too, demands for direct democracy emerged strongly.
Movements continue to arise and disappear, and will continue to do so until this gap between the necessity of conflict and the organization of conflict is resolved. I cannot give you a definitive answer: if I had it, I would have already written the new theoretical book, What Is to Be Done for Our Time. But I can tell you that attempts continue even today.
Personally, I am involved in building a national coordination of popular clinics: I was in Bologna the other day, and the work continues. There is this attempt to build and solidify roots in the territory, and this seems fundamental to me. In this sense, the Venetian political collectives were more successful than other Autonomia experiences: they managed to build real bases in the territory.
Today the task is to do something similar: to form a new political subject within a society deeply fragmented by the new division of labor, coordinating these realities starting from common objectives. I don’t know if we will succeed, but this is the path. The form remains that of direct democracy; what is still missing is understanding how this direct democracy can translate into forms of centralization, and therefore into real bargaining power.
Maurizio Galeazzo
In the book you also discuss the use of violence within social struggles. Can you expand on this thought also in light of recent events, for example what happened in Turin on January 31?
Gianfranco Pancino
I have always understood the use of violence as a tool. The discussion on violence cannot be isolated in the simplistic terms of “violence yes” or “violence no,” also because we live within a profoundly violent system. Violence runs through all social relations: it concerns not only the relationship between the State and the individual, coercion or the police, but also labor relations, study relations, even family relations. Feminists have taught us this clearly: we live in a society in which violence is daily.
This violence, however, is largely the monopoly of the State and is structural to our social model.
For this reason, speaking of violence in the abstract makes no sense. What makes sense is to ask why and when violence may be useful. In my view, the discussion must be limited to its necessity, the historical context, and the concrete occasion.
Violence is useful when it allows objectives to be reached, when it removes real obstacles to a practicable goal.
A frequently cited example, which I find very effective, is that of the Alfa Romeo workers who dismantled the tracks to prevent trains loaded with goods from leaving. Why do it? Because the picket lines no longer held, they were being broken through, and an effective form of sabotage was found. Another example, again in Milan, concerns a cycle of struggles in which Autonomia Operaia and Alfa Romeo workers found themselves facing not only the police but also PCI cadres. At that moment two pylons fell, the power was cut, and the factory stopped. This is “useful” violence, because it allows a concrete objective to be reached. Not by chance, after the unbolting of the tracks, the dispute ended with a workers’ victory.
What we disagreed with, even at the time of Autonomia, was ideological violence, such as the “attack on the heart of the State” practiced by the Red Brigades. In our view, it was a very serious mistake. A symbol can be destroyed, but it will be rebuilt. A person can be killed — except perhaps in exceptional cases like Hitler — but will be replaced. Striking mediating figures to sharpen the conflict, as in the case of the killing of Judge Alessandrini, was, in my opinion, a huge historical error.
There are also explosions of violence, more or less organized, which must still be evaluated case by case. In the case of the gilets jaunes in France, for example, it was a mass violence, shared by the entire movement, and in this sense legitimized and understandable.
In Turin, however, I don’t think that was the case. There, old patterns resurfaced once again. In my view, Turin had seen an enormous victory for the movement emerging in Italy: tens of thousands of people — twenty, thirty, forty thousand — were brought into the streets around just and concrete objectives. In that context, was it really necessary to create a situation of confrontation, once again offering weapons to the government and the right to accelerate the approval of the security decree? I don’t think so.
Giuseppe Cutrì
In the book you also address the theme of the neutrality of science. You said that, once you left university, you had a strong desire to do research and eventually succeeded. However, having always been a social and political fighter, you were certainly already aware of the non-neutrality of science. How did you experience your entry into the world of research? Even when the goals may appear shared, we know well that research funding and directions are often determined by powers not guided by researchers. How did you navigate this contradiction?
Gianfranco Pancino
In reality, I developed this awareness mainly through collective work. In 1969 we formed the Medicine Base Committee, composed of medical students. We were in contact with some physician-professors from the Institute of Occupational Medicine, who informed us — and with whom we discussed at length — about an existing agreement between Montedison, the Porto Marghera petrochemical plant, and the Institute itself, which provided doctors to the company to investigate working conditions.
It was clearly an abnormal situation: a public institute placing itself at the service of a private initiative, precisely while struggles against workplace hazards were emerging. Together we produced a booklet, which we called The Green Booklet, probably one of the first documents, at least from below, to openly denounce the myth of scientific neutrality. And I must say it had some success: the first concrete result was the termination of the agreement with Montedison. This played an important role in the development of struggles at the petrochemical plant against harmful conditions.
As you can see, it was not a purely intellectual realization: I literally entered into that contradiction, in its most evident form.
Of course, this contradiction has much broader horizons, especially when looking at the strategic choices of science. I think, for example, of medicine: diseases that do not directly affect Western countries are systematically neglected compared to others. Or the trend, strongly affirmed in the last twenty years, to limit fundamental research in favor of technological development. It is a very significant dynamic, which makes the problem of scientific neutrality even more evident, because technological choices are closely linked to the development of capital.
Finally, I believe we are now facing a further change. I recently wrote an article in Ahida titled Politics Against Science. With the return of Trump to the presidency of the United States, in my view, capital has directly assumed political leadership. One consequence is an explicit attack on knowledge: technology is used — and indeed big tech openly supports Trump — but knowledge is attacked. Universities, critical knowledge, are attacked head-on.
I believe this represents a new, different phase, which goes beyond the debate on the neutrality of science: here we are facing a true and proper attack on knowledge.
Giuseppe Cutrì
A curiosity: I went to look in the Senate archives and found material concerning you, which you have already mentioned in other interviews: accusations such as being a participant in the Red Brigades, and similar things. What I wonder is this: when one goes “to war,” so to speak, with a counterpart like capital, and one ends up carrying out actions not only against things but also against people, doesn’t one expect that at some point there will be no more rules, that guarantees will collapse? Perhaps one of our mistakes was expecting a certain legal guarantee from the laws, which was then evidently swept away. At the time, did you think about these things or not?
Gianfranco Pancino
You’re right. One of the elements of self-criticism is certainly that we underestimated the power of the State. On the one hand, we saw the weakness of Italian institutions — which are certainly not the French State — and this led us to believe we could build a revolutionary project, that we could lay the foundations of what we then called “counterpower”, not without consequences, but still with wider margins than what later proved possible.
History has taught us one fundamental thing: the boundaries of legality shift according to power relations and relations of force.
We thought that, through our strength and above all through a mass force that was becoming enormous — with hundreds of thousands of people in the streets — we would be able to shift those relations in our favor, and thus make possible the construction of an organization and a revolutionary project. A construction that, moreover, we never really managed to achieve.
In reality, we were wrong. Italy was — and is — a strategic point of primary importance for capital and for the United States. It was therefore evident that they would never allow such an initiative to take shape. As a consequence, we were in fact crushed militarily as well.
Regarding the issue of attacks against individuals, a clarification is needed: what you mention concerns us only partially. In the sense that, at least for most of the autonomy experience, political assassination was rejected.
I’ll add something else, very briefly, because it comes naturally to connect it to what has been happening in the last 12–24 months: artificial intelligence. I think it will exponentially — and with enormous speed — influence everything related to social control and the concentration of power. And I have the impression that there is still a lack of analysis on “what is to be done”.
We have spoken about a time when the possibility of a revolution truly existed, and when perhaps the State did not yet have fully adequate tools to immediately block movements. But today?
Once someone asked me: “Do you think artificial intelligence can develop? How will it develop?”. I replied: artificial intelligence is. It exists, and it is the future. So we must understand how to position ourselves in relation to this reality, especially because today it is in the hands of a very small minority that directs it.
The problem is extremely serious. The hope many of us had at the beginning, when the web developed, was that it could serve the diffusion of knowledge, the circulation of ideas, discussion. In reality, what happened is that a different model prevailed: commercialization, production and imposition of political “truths”, control. And artificial intelligence will make all this even more powerful: it will push it forward exponentially, exponentially.
This is why I believe reflection must be much deeper: to understand whether and how it is possible to oppose this tendency; for example, whether a form of “hacker” movement capable of intervening, modifying, breaking these devices can emerge.
I also invite you to read a very beautiful essay by Giorgio Griziotti that we recently published in Ahida: in my opinion it really offers a series of important insights.
Antonio Pio Lancellotti
In recent years many books have been published on the Sixties and Seventies and, in my view, this also responds to a need within contemporary intellectual production to return to reflecting on that historical phase. Among them, I was particularly struck by Hardt’s book, The Subversive Seventies, because, compared to others, it reads that season within a long period. He speaks of a fracture and insists a great deal on the idea that, starting from the Seventies, a specific subversive subjectivity emerged that then managed, albeit in different forms, to persist over time and space. In light of what you said earlier, especially regarding organizational forms, what do you think are the elements of continuity and what are the ruptures that occur from the Eighties onward?
Gianfranco Pancino
You are absolutely right: we must reason in long periods. In one of my poems I wrote that only history truly allows us to interpret and understand the individual; unfortunately, an individual’s life is too short to fully succeed.
In my opinion, yes, there was a break. A break that does not coincide only with what I would call our military defeat — I deliberately use this term because I do not believe it was a defeat of our ideas. It is not only about 1979, with the global repression and the dismantling of workers’ autonomy, which produced thousands of arrests, people killed and exiled.
There was later a resurgence with the alter-globalization movement, which in turn was brutally repressed in 2001 in Genoa. From there, in my opinion, a real break opened. A break that was not filled by the experience of social centers: experiences undoubtedly widespread and important, but which, in my view, did not significantly affect the overall situation.
That break, in reality, was filled by something else: by berlusconismo, that is, by a process of flattening and erasing our history. As you said, for at least ten years — probably more — many books have been coming out that try to reconstruct that season. Many do so in a historical key; in my book, instead, I tried to reconstruct the atmosphere, the enthusiasm, the passions that animated us.
What I am noticing, even during the book presentations, is that the ideas were not defeated. We planted seeds that are now sprouting in many contexts. I think, for example, of ideas about direct democracy; I think of social relations; I think of feminism, which not only is not dead, but continues to live and take on new forms and new dimensions.
These seeds, therefore, are beginning to sprout again. I find many of our ideas coming back to life.
What cannot return, however, is the reproduction of our experiences exactly as they were. Here it is necessary to invent something else: other forms of struggle, other forms of representation, because society has radically changed. In this sense, I say that the thread has broken.
Once, during a presentation, I spoke of “karst waters”: a stream that went underground and is now slowly resurfacing. But this thread that re-emerges is above all a thread of ideas. On the organizational level, instead, everything must be invented from scratch: new organizational forms, new practices of struggle. In this field, nothing can simply be taken up again; everything must be rethought and rebuilt anew.
Antonio Pio Lancellotti
I would like to return to the question of the neutrality of science and, in particular, to the idea of democratic science, and even more specifically to the idea of democratic medicine. It is a noble concept, with a long history, but after the fracture of Covid it has taken on a new political meaning. I would like to dwell on this and develop the discussion further.
Gianfranco Pancino
Yes, the limits of democratic medicine, as you say, became clearly visible during the pandemic. In that context, its repressive aspects emerged strongly and, in fact, the epidemic was also a laboratory for power, an opportunity to experiment with new forms of coercion.
Even though I was in favor of the vaccine — indeed, I worked directly in that field, so it would have been difficult for me to be against it — and therefore did not identify at all with no-vax positions, it is evident that power used the pandemic to observe how an emergency situation works. The very concept of emergency as a form of governing society was introduced and normalized, presented as inevitable and necessary.
In this sense, the pandemic highlighted the limits of democratic medicine understood as a movement that seeks to negotiate with institutions to improve healthcare and health conditions. When the relationship remains only on this level, the risk is that the logic of emergency and control completely prevails.
This is precisely why I find extremely important — and it is the reason I have been working on it for about a year — the experience of free popular clinics. Popular clinics bring health back into social contradictions, into the material conditions of people’s lives. They seek to build political consensus and political organization starting from real needs, and above all they reconnect the struggle for health with that for wages, housing, and overall living conditions.
Today these experiences are still small, marginal, apparently of little importance. But it is from there, in my view, that we must start again to reframe the discussion. Negotiation with the National Health Service cannot be only a technical or reformist request: it must become a conflict, a capacity to bring the necessity of health from the grassroots back toward institutions, in openly conflictual terms. Only in this way can health once again become a central political terrain, and not simply a function administered from above.