The Rooster of San Michele: Generations, movements, and a shared ground for meeting (?)

I.

 

In the 1870-set film San Michele Had a Rooster, the anarchist internationalist Giulio Manieri leads a handful of comrades into a failed uprising in Umbria—the mountainous heart of central Italy, between Tuscany and Rome. He is sentenced to death, the sentence is commuted to life, and Manieri spends ten years in solitary confinement—surviving by holding dialogues with himself, staging political debates inside his cell.

 

When he is finally transferred, he encounters a new generation of revolutionaries—Marxists. He speaks to them with his old fervor. They look at him like a fossil. Unable to bear rejection by “his own,” Manieri takes his own life.

 

The film is, according to Morando Morandini—the Italian critic whose dictionary Il Morandini is considered a “Bible for cinephiles”—“a fascinating allegory about the clash between two ways of understanding revolution.” But it is something else too: an allegory about what happens when generations meet inside the spaces of struggle—and one cannot recognize the other.

 

This text begins there: at that moment of non-recognition. And it asks: what does “generation” mean inside movements? How do they meet—or fail to meet—those who have been struggling for decades and those who entered the struggle yesterday?

 

II.

 

To answer, we need a few tools. From the 1960s onward, sociology has developed a field devoted specifically to the study of social movements—why they erupt, how they organize, what they achieve or fail to achieve. Scholars in this field have devoted extensive attention to a central question: collective identity—that is, how a group of people comes to feel and act as a “we.”

 

Alberto Melucci, an Italian sociologist and one of the most important movement scholars from the 1980s until his early death in 2001 (Challenging Codes, 1996), defined collective identity as “an interactive and shared definition produced by several actors.” What does that mean in practice? That the “we” is not given—it does not exist beforehand and then simply get “discovered.” Rather, it is formed through ongoing interaction: through discussions, conflicts, compromises, shared experience. Every time a group debates what it wants to achieve, by what means, who is “in” and who is “out,” it shapes, at the same time, its own identity. Identity is a process, not a state.

 

Nancy Whittier studied how the radical feminist movement in Ohio evolved from the 1960s to the 1990s (Feminist Generations, 1995). What she found was decisive: activists who entered the movement at different moments—even if only a few years apart—often held radically different understandings of what feminism meant. And those understandings tend to remain stable over time, even when practices change. The crucial variable, then, is not chronological age but the moment of entry into the struggle: what you found when you arrived, what the political climate was, what questions felt urgent.

 

And here Walter Benjamin enters. In the Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), written a few months before he died by suicide while crossing a border pursued by the Nazis, there is a sentence that concerns us directly: “Each generation that preceded us has been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.” What does that mean? That the new generation does not merely inherit tools of struggle—it inherits a debt. The defeated of the past, the forgotten, those who fought without living to see the fruit, “demand” something from those who come next. The power is “weak” because it guarantees nothing—but it exists.

 

For Benjamin, anyone who wants to understand history must read it “against the grain”—refusing the victors’ narrative, retrieving the voices that were silenced, giving time back to what was pushed to the margins.

 

So we arrive at a central issue: the meeting of different generations inside social movements is at once a question of identity (who we are together), a question of memory (what we carry from the past), and a question of recognition (whether we see the other as “one of us”).

 

III.

 

Makis Pappoulias—a veteran of the 1960s, a member of EDA (2) , and a close friend of the murdered Sotiris Petrulas—once told me a story.

 

A group of young men from Mani (3), seventeen or eighteen years old, in the late 1950s, wanted to escape the post–Civil War atmosphere—especially harsh in Mani, where right-wing paramilitary gangs had run rampant. (The Petrulas family itself had lost 31 members between 1943 and 1950—and was forced to flee to Athens in 1946 to survive.) These youths wanted to “disappear” into the anonymity of the capital. They had heard about the “exiles”—communists who had passed through Makronisos and Gyaros (4) , mythical figures.

 

When they finally met them? Their clothes were old-fashioned. They thought them “uneducated.” They could not recognize in these people—who had endured torture, exile, years of isolation—the “fighter” they had imagined.

 

Recognition does not come automatically. Cultural codes act as filters that can freeze an encounter before it even begins.

 

IV.

 

Social Waste, on their latest album, have a track titled “The Priesthoods of Orthodoxy”—and they raise another issue, from the opposite angle. They don’t sing about the young who can’t recognize the old. They sing about the “fathers”—those who use their experience and prestige inside grassroots collectives and organizations to impose their line.

 

(And they are usually men—which is not incidental. The question of generation is intertwined with gendered divisions: who takes the floor in the assembly, who is treated as a “theorist,” who takes on the invisible labor of care and organization.)

 

They speak of “priesthoods of orthodoxy” that settle into movement spaces. The pattern, of course, exceeds any single milieu: it concerns every collective that describes itself as horizontal and ends up reproducing hierarchies. They speak of the “masters of ceremony” in assemblies—those who know when to speak, how to phrase things, how to close a discussion. Those whose presence weighs more than their voice. The critique is clear: experience, instead of becoming a shared resource, becomes a lever of power.

 

Approaches in social movement studies give language to this dynamic. Melucci described collective identity as a field of continuous negotiation over goals, means, and the terrain of action. The crucial point is that in this negotiation, resources are distributed unevenly. And experience is a resource—one of the most important. Knowing “how things get done,” remembering previous struggles (what worked, what failed, who could be trusted), possessing networks of relationships—these all give power to whoever holds them. They can function in emancipatory ways: shared, transmitted, made common property. But they can also be monopolized—used for exclusion, turned into a way of keeping younger people at arm’s length.

 

V.

 

But let’s return to the question of generation. What is a “generation” inside movements?

 

Karl Mannheim, as early as 1928, theorized the “generation location”: a generation’s consciousness is shaped by major historical events experienced in youth. Mere chronological simultaneity is not enough; it requires active involvement in events that leave a mark. In other words: a generation is not defined by when you were born, but by what politicized you.

 

If we start, say, from Greece’s Metapolitefsi (the post-1974 transition to democracy): the layers are multiple. The 1980s, with major strikes. The 1990s, with student mobilizations and the anti-war movement. The anti-globalization movement in the 2000s—Genoa, social forums. The student struggles of 2006–2007. December 2008—the uprising that marked an entire generation. The squares of 2011 and the movements against austerity. The killing of Zak (5)  and the politicization around gendered and state violence. Tempi (6).

 

Each moment produced different political subjects, with different understandings, repertoires of action, aesthetics. (There is an argument that the North Face jacket became “movement fashion” after the 2008 uprising—after sporting-goods stores were looted and such jackets were distributed among the insurgents. That detail shows how aesthetics are tied to the moment of politicization.) This is not a linear succession; it is layers that coexist, shape each other, and sometimes clash.

 

Dimitris Papanikolopoulos, with collaborators, in the book Millennials in the Street (2023), attempts to map this complexity. The book examines the generation politicized during the crisis decade—a generation that fits within a transnational pattern. As digital natives, millennials tend toward horizontal, decentralized, non-hierarchical organizational forms. Their politicization begins under conditions of expanded precarity and deep distrust toward the political system. At the same time, that same precarity creates a pull toward individuation: when stable support structures do not exist, each person is forced to “get by” alone. Collectivity, then, coexists with individualism—and that tension is visible in many movement environments.

 

The book poses a crucial question that touches our subject directly: how does a generation that grew up with precarity and disappointment toward traditional political forms confront the structures it inherited from earlier generations? How does it negotiate a relationship to an experience that is not its own?

 

And then comes Gen Z—the children of “polycrises.” The most unmapped generation: those politicizing now, with their own codes.

 

VI.

 

The discussion of generations brings us to a practical issue. A friend recently offered a diagnosis: “The best minds right now are outside collectives.” People who could contribute remain outside. Not out of indifference, nor necessarily out of a retreat into private life (that, too, happens), but because existing structures don’t have room for them—or because their lives don’t fit the way those structures have learned to operate.

 

What does that mean? Someone may work mornings, care for parents or children. But it’s not only that. Needs themselves may have shifted—there may be a search for something different: more meaningful time with people you love, tenderness you want to give and receive, a life not exhausted by struggle but spacious enough to include the chosen care of those close to you. And yet, movement spaces often act as if you must choose: either you are fully in, or you are out.

 

So the critical question becomes: how do we create spaces that allow different intensities of participation? How do we recognize that life has multiple dimensions—children, parents who need care, beloved friends, a body that gets tired—and still the person remains a political subject, not “half” but whole?

 

VII.

 

What would it mean, then, to create a shared ground for meeting?

 

For the older generation, something concrete—and terribly difficult: to step back. To listen to the new subject. That is the correct line—historically, politically. Each generation, Benjamin wrote, has a duty to “redeem” the generations before it. But redemption does not happen when the older generations clutch the space as property.

 

Stepping back, however, is an art. It is a change of role: to renounce the role you had, to find a new one. And that requires something we rarely name: mourning. Mourning for what you were, for the position you held, for the recognition you learned to expect. This is especially true for men—who often grow up believing the first word is their right.

 

Movement scholars have studied how political commitment is transmitted from one generation to the next—how older activists can function as “bridges” to younger ones, transferring knowledge and practices. Research points to something demanding: transmission requires conscious work on both sides, and often stumbles on the inability to find a common language.

 

To renounce the role you had means accepting that your experience does not automatically grant you the first word. That what you learned is precious when it is offered, not when it is imposed. That the role of “keeper of memory”—the one who keeps the memory of struggles alive, who can say “we tried this; here’s what happened,” who offers feedback without demanding obedience—is different from the role of “leader.” And often more important.

 

VIII.

 

But the difficulty is not one-sided.

 

It is just as hard for the new generation to recognize that experience is not automatically “boomerism.” That there is knowledge acquired through struggle—knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, knowledge of traps, knowledge of mistakes that need not be repeated.

 

And here a less “romantic” truth emerges: horizontal processes are not neutral. They have a cost. And the cost is not always distributed equally. An assembly that starts “whenever we gather” and ends at dawn; a process that demands long, continuous presence in order to have a voice; a culture that confuses commitment with exhaustion—these act as filters. They can push out the older person who cannot physically sustain long intensity. The person who works in the morning. The parent. The caregiver. The one who cannot live politically with a nocturnal rhythm as a condition of belonging. Even the person who doesn’t smoke or drink and feels that informal sociability—“real inclusion”—always happens elsewhere: in the cigarette break, at the bar, afterward.

 

There is a classic debate in political theory—between, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, who believed democratic discussion could be “pure,” based only on the force of the better argument, and critical voices such as Chantal Mouffe or Iris Marion Young, who reminded us of something uncomfortable: every discussion happens in a particular setting, with particular rules—and those rules are never neutral. Who knows how to speak “properly”? Who has learned to formulate arguments in a way that is recognized as valid? Who feels comfortable taking the floor?

 

Something similar happens with “horizontality” in collectives. When it becomes an absolute demand—when everyone must be present for everything, participate in everything, endure everything—then a new hierarchy is born. Not of experience or theory, but of stamina and availability.

 

Who can stay awake until 3 a.m.? Who has no one to care for in the morning? Who can physically withstand long assemblies? Who has arranged their life such that they can always be present? These people gain voice—not because they are right, but because they simply managed to remain in the room. A “tyranny of participation,” where the measure of the political becomes physical presence.

 

In practice, this means small but decisive shifts: assemblies with clear start and end times; shorter duration; breaking into working groups; rotating roles without burnout; minutes and summaries for those who couldn’t be there; the possibility of meaningful participation without having to be present at every meeting. A politics of collectivity that integrates a politics of care—not as a moral add-on, but as a condition of possibility for keeping people in.

 

IX.

 

There’s something we talk about among friends: the joy of inventing the wheel—and the fatigue of watching others reinvent it.

 

For the new generation, discovering an idea, a tactic, a way of organizing is exhilarating. The feeling that “we’ve got it,” that “this is new,” that “we’re doing it differently” is a driving force. The literature on learning within movements shows that movement actors learn by doing—through trial and error, through practice. Discovery is part of the process, not merely its result.

 

For those who have been involved in organizing for years, though, repetition can be exhausting. A study with long-term organizers in Canada (I can’t remember which one; I’ll update it) found it is often discouraging to see “the same disagreements, discussions, and tactics recycled because of a lack of intergenerational dialogue.” Instead of movements learning from previous experiences and moving forward, they can become trapped in endless debates about the “right way to make a revolution.” The loss of accumulated knowledge—because transmission fails—keeps movements back.

 

And yet here a difficult truth hides: repetition is not only failure. The new generation does not build exactly the same wheel; it builds it in new conditions, with new materials, for new roads. As Laurence Cox has written, learning within movements is a moral necessity: learning only when you and your movement go through something yourselves is a recipe for prolonged suffering. But the alternative is not passive acceptance of older knowledge; it is its active negotiation.

 

So the question is not how we eliminate repetition—impossible, and perhaps undesirable. The question is how the older generation can offer its experience without killing the joy of discovery. How it can say “there’s a trap here” without saying “you don’t know.” How someone becomes a guardian of memory without becoming an obstacle to movement.

 

Francesca Polletta showed in Freedom Is an Endless Meeting (2002) that radical democracy in U.S. movements means different things in different periods—and that each generation builds its own practices partly as a response to earlier failures. “Negative memory”—memory of what went wrong—shapes a new generation as much as positive memory does. For that dynamic to work, it requires contact and dialogue, not indifference.

 

X.

 

Giulio Manieri did not kill himself because the young Marxists were right and he was wrong. He killed himself because there was no space for meeting. Conflict became rejection, and rejection became disappearance.

 

Collectives are not only mechanisms for outward-facing political action. They are also places where people find meaning, recognition, community. Collective identity, Melucci reminds us, includes an emotional dimension—the feeling of belonging. When spaces grow narrow for certain ages or experiences, the result is not only a loss of knowledge; it is a loss of people.

 

And the loss of people is always a political defeat.

 

Manieri died alone in a boat in the Venetian lagoon. We don’t have to follow him.

 

 

Footnote

 

(1) Sotiris Petrulas was murdered on 21 July 1965, during the “July Events” (Iouliana)—the period of mass demonstrations that followed the political crisis of the “Apostasia,” when the king refused to accept Georgios Papandreou as prime minister. He was 23 years old, a student, and a leading member of the Lambrakis Youth.

(2) EDA, the United Democratic Left—the main legal parliamentary formation of the Greek left during the 1950s–60s, operating in the shadow of post–Civil War repression.

(3) Mani is a region in southern Greece where the post–Civil War period was marked by intense political violence and repression; references to “paramilitaries remind readers that left-wing organizing often occurred under surveillance, intimidation, and social punishment.

(4) Makronisos and Gyaros were Greek prison/exile islands used to detain and “re-educate” political dissidents, especially leftists, across multiple decades of the 20th century.

(5) Zak” refers to Zak Kostopoulos (also known as Zackie Oh), whose killing in 2018 became a flashpoint for debates around LGBTQ violence, vigilantism, policing, and media framing.

(6) Tempi” refers to the 2023 Greek train disaster near Tempi and the mass protests that followed, widely framed as anger at state failure, privatization, and impunity.

 

 

Texts of inspiration

 

Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge University Press, 1996)

 

Nancy Whittier, Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s Movement (Temple University Press, 1995)

 

Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations” (1928), in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge

 

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

 

Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

 

Laurence Cox & Alf Gunvald Nilsen, We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Pluto Press, 2014)

 

Dimitris Papanikolopoulos et al., Millennials in the Street (Savvalas, 2023)

 

Paolo & Vittorio Taviani, San Michele Had a Rooster (1972)

 

Social Waste, “Hierateia” (2024)

 

Text: Aktaioros Samano_