Any seasoned shop steward knows that when management installs a new digital tracking system to monitor bathroom breaks and line speeds, the workers will figure out a way to beat it within forty-eight hours. You stick a wedge in the sensor, you swap badges with the lad on the forklift, or, in the case of 74-year-old former Red Brigades militant Leonardo Bertulazzi, you stuff your ankle monitor into a tube of pork and rappel down five stories into the Buenos Aires night. The news out of Argentina on Wednesday did not just detail a daring jailbreak by an aging revolutionary; it provided working people everywhere a rare, bitter laugh at the expense of an international security apparatus that spends billions to corral human beings while the world burns around them.
Bertulazzi had been holed up under house arrest, awaiting extradition to Italy to serve out a decades-old 27-year sentence handed down in absentia in 1987. For the suits in Rome and Buenos Aires, his capture was supposed to be a polished trophy for reaction. Consider the players involved: on one side of the Atlantic, you have Giorgia Meloni’s government, whose ideological lineage traces directly back to the very neo-fascist movements that flooded Italy’s streets with terror during the Years of Lead; on the other, Javier Milei’s regime, currently taking a chainsaw to the Argentine working class, auctioning off state assets, and crushing street protests with tear gas. Two right-wing darlings coordinated their police files to drag a septuagenarian into a cage, and instead, they got left holding an empty harness and a cured sausage.
To understand the Italian state’s endless, vindictive obsession with the Red Brigades, you have to peel back the bourgeois press’s sterile language about abstract terrorism and look at the shop floors of northern Italy in the late 1960s and 1970s. The revolt did not fall from the sky. It exploded out of the hellish assembly lines of Fiat’s Mirafiori plant, out of chemical factories where workers choked on fumes while bosses pocketed historic profits, and out of a political system thoroughly infested by NATO’s Operation Gladio and unpunished black-shirt reactionaries. While the armed struggle pursued by groups like the Brigades eventually isolated itself from the broad mass of workers who were building genuine workplace democracy—a strategic dead end that many on the left rightly criticized—the state’s violence was always about liquidating the threat of working-class power. Capital does not hate militants because they break laws; capital hates militants because they refuse to bow before the altar of private property.
Antonio Gramsci famously wrote from his fascist prison cell that the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Today, those morbid symptoms wear the tailored suits of IMF technocrats and the swagger of far-right prime ministers. The ruling class never runs out of resources when it comes to settling scores with enemies of the state from forty years ago. They will track down an exiled leftist to the ends of the earth. Yet, when an industrial boss cuts corners on ventilation and kills three machinists on the night shift, he gets a slap-on-the-wrist fine and a seat on the regional chamber of commerce. When financial speculators engineer a housing collapse that throws millions onto the pavement, they receive government bailouts and low-interest loans. The law is a spider’s web that catches the gnats and lets the hornets break through.
There is a profound, almost poetic lesson in how Bertulazzi made his exit. Capital invests trillions in surveillance technology—drones, algorithmic predictive policing, electronic cuffs, biometric databases—promising an inescapable digital panopticon to manage surplus populations and pacify labor unrest. It is the same managerial obsession that treats dockers and warehouse pickers like battery-farmed poultry. And yet, this high-tech dragnet was undone by high-school physics and an improvised decoy made of processed meat. It reminds us of a fundamental truth that every boss tries to make his workforce forget: no system of control is absolute. Systems are built, maintained, and operated by human hands, which means they are riddled with the cracks of human complacency and systemic incompetence.
Wherever Bertulazzi is right now, nursing the rope burn on his 74-year-old hands, he has managed to demonstrate that the state’s absolute authority is largely theater. Milei’s security ministry is throwing tantrums, Italian prosecutors are red-faced, and the bourgeois commentators are demanding inquiries into how an old man outmaneuvered their electronic shackles. But down here on the ground floor, among the people who actually have to clock in, sweat, and take orders from bullies every day of the week, the takeaway is much simpler. The bosses’ walls look mighty thick until someone takes a length of rope and climbs right out the window.