Forced by the Cold War opposition at national level for 40 years, the party is entrenched in the local government first, then regional, and committees through which the Italian legal process must go, sneaking in government systems at different levels of secondary importance. However, his basic strategy remained fairly stable for years. After 1948, the fruits of liberation were scores. The power went to DC, and the culture at PCI. The Christian Democrats controlled the levers of state power, communism attracted the talents of civil society. The ability of PCI to polarize the Italian intellectual life around them, not only in a small circle of intellectuals, writers and thinkers, but also thanks to a climate general progressive views, had no comparison anywhere in Europe. Or because of the sociology of its ruling class, which was for the most highly educated, unlike the communist parties of France, Germany, United Kingdom or Spain, is due to a relatively tolerant and flexible management of the "battle of ideas' its dominance in this area was the resource that really characterized the Italian communism. But, at a price double, the party was constantly blind.
The measure of the influence of PCI on the world of thought and art was also the result of the degree to which it had assimilated and reproduced the dominant trends in a culture Italian pre-existing and longstanding. It was idealism that had found its most powerful expression, as neither the only nor the most modern in the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, a figure that over the years had acquired in the intellectual life of the country an importance comparable to that of Goethe. It was the historicism of the Cross, whose merits were emphasized by the attention that's devoted Gramsci while in prison, to be generally accepted as the epitome of much of postwar Italian culture to which the presiding PCI directly or indirectly. But behind all this is possible to see even older traditions that recognize the supremacy in the realm of ideas, conceived in politics as a will or knowledge. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the completion of the Risorgimento, Italy never knew a state or aristocracy understood that the whole peninsula and most of the time was subject to various foreign powers often belligerent. The result, for long periods, was to create within the educated elites a sense of unbridgeable gap between the glories of the past and the misery of the present. By Dante on, was born a tradition of intellectuals who felt strongly their vocation to retrieve and transmit the culture of a noble classical antiquity, pervaded by the conviction that the country could be renewed only through deep regenerating action of ideas, of which only they could be the authors, who were acting on a reality which has lapsed. The sphere of culture was indistinguishable from that of power: it was rather a pass to it.
Italian Communism, in large part, inherited this way of thinking. The new form that was given to that national preparedness was inspired by Gramsci and almost shot him faithfully. In this version, the "hegemony" was a cultural and moral power to gain consensus within civil society, as a true foundation of social existence, which ultimately would ensure the peaceful conquest of the stato, l’espressione più esteriore ed apparente della vita collettiva. In quest’ottica, la posizione dominante acquisita dal partito nell’arena intellettuale dimostrava che esso era sulla buona strada per la vittoria politica finale. Questo non era ciò che Gramsci aveva creduto. Rivoluzionario nella Terza Internazionale, egli non aveva mai creduto che il capitale potesse essere spezzato senza la forza delle armi, per quanto fosse importante la necessità di guadagnare il più ampio consenso popolare per poter rovesciare le classi dominanti. Tuttavia si accordava con la visione idealistica della cultura in generale. Inoltre, all’interno della sfera intellettuale stessa, il PCI riprese la propensione umanista delle élite tradizionali, per le quali la filosofia, la storia e la letteratura erano sempre stati gli ambiti più importanti. Nel bagaglio del partito mancavano discipline moderne, come l’economia e la sociologia, e i metodi che avevano cercato di prendere in prestito, nel bene e nel male, dalle scienze naturali. Ottimo finché i suoi concetti si applicavano ai vertici di una gerarchia culturale riverita, molto più debole se si scendeva verso il basso e con gravi conseguenze che sarebbero emerse in seguito.
Quando i due grandi cambiamenti che avrebbero alterato l’ecologia del PCI nell’Italia del dopoguerra colpirono il partito, questo si trovò impreparato. Il primo fu l’arrivo di una cultura di massa fully commercialized, still kind of a world of unimaginable in Togliatti, let alone that of Gramsci. Even at its peak, were obvious limitations of the PCI influence on the cultural scene in general and the Italian left, because the Church occupied a large part of beliefs and popular imagination. Below the level of universities, publishers and production studios or newspapers, where the party's influence was so widespread and different from the direction of the strongholds of the liberal bourgeoisie in the press, there was a flourishing undergrowth of magazines and compliant programs tailored to the voters of DC culture medium-low. From his vantage point tra l’élite culturale, il PCI poteva guardare a questo universo con una condiscendenza tollerante, considerandolo come espressione del legame di un passato clericale la cui importanza era stata a lungo sottolineata da Gramsci. Non pensava certo di esserne minacciato.
L’afflusso di una cultura di massa secolare e totalmente americanizzata era un altro discorso. Colto impreparato, l’apparato del partito e l’intellighenzia formatasi attorno ad esso ne furono sconvolti. Anche se l’impegno critico nell’ambito della cultura più bassa non mancava in Italia – Umberto Eco fu un pioniere – il PCI non riuscì a capirlo. Non venne creato alcun tipo di dialettica creativa able to withstand the attack of the new, transforming relations between the high and low. The case of the cinema, in which Italy had excelled after the war, may be taken as emblematic. There was a change after the generation of great directors - Roberto Rossellini, Visconti, Antonioni - who began their careers during the '40s or early '50s, and we see the last major work in the early 60s. Then there will not be any productive meeting between the avant-garde cinema and popular forms diGodard comparable to that of Fassbinder in France or in Germany, and later, there was only a weak attempt by Nanni Moretti. The result was an enormous gap between the popular sensibility and that of the educated public, leaving the country defenseless against the counter-cultural Berlusconi's television empire, which saturated the popular imagination with a wave of idiocy and gross fantasies - would even call them squalid junk too kind. Unable to confront or to turn the tables for a decade, the PCI tried to resist. The true leader of the party, EnricoBerlinguer, personified the austere contempt for self-indulgence el'infantilismo the new universe based on consumption and material culture. After his death, the transition from total refusal to accept a bit 'too was excited short - WalterVeltroni ended up looking like one of the shining figures of the children's album with which he became known as an annex to distributing copies of Unit when he became director of the newspaper.
If the idealism of the PCI did not allow him to seize the materials market drives and media that turned the free time in Italy, the same lack of economic and sociological sensitivity meant that the party is unable to perceive the decisive changes in the workplace. Already at the end of the 60 pay less attention to these aspects in comparison with the new generation of young radicals who were subsequently generated the phenomenon of all-Italian 'operational' [*], one of the strangest adventures of the European left intellectuals of the time. Unlike PCI, the PSI after the war had an important political figure, RodolfoMorandi, whose Marxism was a generally less idealistic, more attentive to the structure of Italian industry, on which he had led a famous investigation. In the next generation, he found a good successor in the shape of RanieroPanzieri, a militant of the PSI, which, after moving to Turin, he had begun to investigate the condition of the workers in the factories of Fiat, bringing this work to a group of young intellectuals (including which Antonio Negri) in many but not all, members of the youth organizations of the PSI. During the following decade, the work becomes an ever-changing force, generating a series of highly influential journals, even if short-lived - Quaderni Rossi, wild cat, counterparts - which explored the changes in the labor and industrial capital of 'contemporary Italy. The PCI had nothing to show such little attention is paid to these enzymes, although at this stage the most influential of the new theory was a young man just released from its ranks in Rome, MarioTronti. It was an environment whose culture was essentially alien to the party, even openly hostile against Gramsci, accused of spiritualism and populism.
operator influence came not only from surveys or from the ideas of its scholars, but also by their relationship with the advance of new contingents of the working class: young immigrants from the South, who rebelled against low wages and oppressive working conditions in factories in the North - not to mention the Communist-led unions disconcerted by sudden bursts of militancy or unconventional forms of struggle. Having anticipated such agitation gave the work a strong intellectual counter-thrust. But he stopped at the very moment of his original insight, portandolo a romanticizzare la rivolta proletaria concepita come un flusso di magma quasi continuo dalle fondamenta delle fabbriche. Nella metà degli anni ‘70, consapevoli che l’industria italiana stava cambiando ancora una volta e che la militanza operaia era in declino, Negri ed altri ripiegheranno sulla figura del “lavoro sociale” in generale – in pratica chiunque fosse impiegato o disoccupato, ovunque, dal capitale – come precursore dell’imminente rivoluzione. L’astrazione di questo concetto fu un segnale della disperazione e le politiche apocalittiche che l’accompagnarono portarono l’operaismo intervenire nella massificazione della cultura popolare, su un binario morto verso la fine degli anni 70. The PCI, however, having lost the changes of the '60s, he had learned his lesson and did not offer anything better than the industrial sociology. So just when the Italian economy was undergoing a profound change further during the 80s, with the rise of export-oriented small business and the underground economy - the "second Italian miracle" as some called it a bit 'tropposperanzosamente at the time - the party was caught off guard again and this time the blow to his position as representative of the working masses was fatal. Twenty years later, as a part of the victory of Force Italy it would have dramatically highlighted the inability to react in time and other triumphs of the League it would have revealed the inadequacy to respond quickly to market fragmentation of postmodern work.
These were failures of mentality [NdT in French in the text] that went beyond the Marxist party, in addition to the classical sense of the intellectual values \u200b\u200bthat, as had many limitations, in its way was almost always honorable and often admirable. However, there was another side more damaging to the idealism itself, specifically the Italian communism, and as consciously to bear the political consequences. It is a stretch strategy which has not undergone any change since the Liberation and spasms which still continue today. . When he returned from Moscow Togliatti in Salem in the spring of '44, he clarified the party now that there was no attempt to make a socialist revolution in Italy after the expulsion of the Wehrmacht, which could be glimpsed already. The resistance in the north, where the PCI played a central role, could support the Allied armies in the South as the main force in the fight against the Germans, but could not substitute for them and would be the Allied High Command to dictate the terms after the armistice. After decades of repression and exile, il compito del PCI era quello di costruire un partito di massa e di avere un ruolo centrale in un’assemblea eletta per dare delle nuove basi democratiche all’Italia.
Questa era una lettura realistica dell’effettivo rapporto di forze nella Penisola e della determinazione di Washington e di Londra di non permettere nessun attacco al capitale sulla scia della sconfitta tedesca. Una sollevazione popolare nel dopoguerra non era nei piani. Togliatti, tuttavia, andò oltre questo. In Italia, la monarchia che aveva coadiuvato l’ascesa e convissuto tranquillamente col Fascismo, aveva esautorato Mussolini nell’estate del ‘43, timorosa di andare a picco con lui dopo lo sbarco degli Alleati in Sicily. After a short interval, the king fled to the South along with Badoglio, the conqueror of Ethiopia, where the Allies put them at the head of a regional government which had remained unchanged, while the Germans in the north they placed in command of Mussolini's puppet republic Salo. When the war ended, Italy did not receive the same treatment in Germany, namely that of a defeated nation, but was warned by the name "co-belligerent". Once started, the Allies, a coalition government that included the Action Party (left liberal), the Socialists, Communists and Christian Democrats had to confront the legacy of Fascism and the monarchy he had cooperated. The Christian Democrats, aware that his potential voters had remained loyal to the monarchy and recognizing that their natural supporters in the apparatus of state were the tools of routine of Fascism, were determined to ensure that you experience something similar to the de-Nazification occurred in Germany. But they were a minority in the cabinet, where the secular left had more space.
At this juncture the PCI, rather than put on the defensive pressing DC for uncompromising a purge of the state - removing all the collaborators who occupied the highest posts in appearing bureaucracy, justice, army and police - invited her to head the government and did much to undermine the traditional power structure of the scheme. Therefore, in addition to failing to block the DC, Togliatti had done so to become its leader, Degano, head of government, and later sat in agreement with the DC - provoking the anger of the Socialists - to confirm Lateran Treaty, signed by Mussolini and the Vatican. The prefects, judges and police who had worked under the scheme were left to their seats. Even in 1960, 62 out of 64 prefects were the minions of fascism, and so all the 135 heads of state police officers. As for the judges and officers, the courts irreducible acquitted the torturers of the regime and condemned the partisans who had fought against them, retroactively declaring the regular soldiers of the Fascist Republic of Salò, the Resistance and illegal ones - the latter then punishable by summary execution since 1943, the first without any penalty after 1945. These monstrosities were a direct consequence of the actions of PCI. Togliatti himself, as minister of justice, issued an amnesty in June of '46 that will be rehabilitated. A year later, the party was rewarded with his expulsion from the government by Degano, which he no longer needed.
History in postwar Italy was therefore completely different from that of Germany, where there had been a popular resistance. Nazism was destroyed both by the extent of military defeat, that rootlessness Allied occupation continued. In the Federal Republic, fascism could not recover again. In Italy, by contrast, the resistance through an ideology of fascism, anti-patriotic, whose official rhetoric was ubiquitous in the PCI was the undisputed leader and follower, covering the actual continuity of Fascism, both in the body of legislation, both in 'bureaucracy, but also as a creed and political movement openly proclaimed. Refounded with the name of MSI, The Fascist party was soon to occupy the benches of Parliament, and behind the figure of its head, GiorgioAlmirante, was finally accepted even by the ruling class. Extolling Mussolini's racial laws, this person had told his countrymen in 1938 that "racism is the largest and most courageous recognition of herself that Italy had ever done" and in 1944, after Mussolini was airlifted to north by the Germans, that those who had not enlisted in the army of the Republic of Salò had been shot in the back. QuandoAlmirante died in the 80s, the widow of Togliatti was among those who attended the funeral. Today, Gianfranco Fini, his designated heir, is the President of the Chamber of Deputies and the likely successor to Berlusconi as prime minister.
Beyond the easy criticism to this path, what is more damaging in the role played by the CPI is its self-destructive futility. When he had the opportunity to weaken the Christian Democrats with a raging hard-anti-fascism, separating it from the electorate who had supported the reactionary regime, did the opposite, helping DC to consolidate the role of dominant force in the country giving a sponge to history of collaborating with the regime. In this debacle, the behavior of the party had no excuse International. The revolution could be excluded from Italy after the war, but in 1946 the Allies had essentially abandoned the country and were unable to stop a purge of Fascism. The ingenuity of Togliatti, duped by strategically Degano, can not be explained by appealing to foreign interference. But was based on strategic thinking that he had taken from Gramsci, played through the network of the Cross and its predecessors. The pursuit of political power, Gramsci wrote, required two types of strategies, the terms of which he took from the military theory, a war of position and a handle: on the one hand trench warfare od'assedio and other mobilization assault.
The Russian Revolution is an example of the latter, a revolution in the Western world would have taken the first, for a considerable period of time, before moving to the second stage. Just as he had watered down the Gramscian concept of hegemony by making it a simple moment of consensus, basically staring into civil society, in the same way under the leadership of Togliatti, the PCI strategy reduced his conception of politics to a mere war of position, trying to increase the its influence on civil society, as if any kind of war of movement - the ambush, charging sudden, rapid encirclement, the capture of enemies class or status a surprise - it was more necessary in the West. In 1946-47, De Gasperi and his colleagues did not commit the same mistake.
At the 1948 popular enthusiasm following the Liberation was dying. The beginning of the Cold War brought with it the election defeat and had to wait another 20 years before a new wave of political rebellion manifested itself in Italy. And when it came, the generational revolt in the late 60s that brought together students and young workers, lasted longer and had deeper consequences that anywhere else in Europe. With the arrival of the successor of Togliatti, Luigi Longo, somewhat more combative and less diplomatic, PCI did not react in a negative way against the student uprising in France as ilPCF. But he failed even to advance creative proposals, failing both to establish a link with the street culture with which, in the length and breadth dynamically interacted for some time - the past of classical Marxists and Bolsheviks, this graffiti with spray-in is to renew its stock of strategic concepts increasingly stagnant. When an opposition critical of this inaction arose within the party as the group's manifesto - with a more authentically Gramscian and that had a policy of greater intelligence operations outside - the leaders of the PCI expelled them without thinking twice.
Excommunication arrived during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, condemned without appeal by the poster. In this case, alongside innate idealism since its birth, we find the second reason for the continued strategic paralysis of Italian communism. As flexible in other areas, the PCI remained Stalinist both in its internal structures and in its ties with the Soviet state. Desperate because of governomonopartitico un'intorpidita of the Christian Democrats, supporters of the Liberal party - and there were many over the years - had indicated their continued admiration for the sensible moderation of the internal PCI, but it would be exasperated if it would compromise on this clean because of his ties with the USSR and organizational rules that therefrom. In reality, both were structurally linked. From Salerno to turn on, the moderation of the party was compensated for its ties with Moscow, not a contradiction. Just because it could always be challenged because of its suspected relationship to the land of the October Revolution, was overdoing it to continually give evidence of their innocence of any accused of plotting to emulate that too famous modello di cambiamento. La zavorra di una colpa putativa e la ricerca di una rispettabilità liberatoria andavano di pari passo. Il membro del partito più apertamente a destra, il formidabile GiorgioAmendola , ammoniva il partito contro ogni tolleranza nei confronti della rivolta studentesca, mentre si recava regolarmente in Bulgaria per le sue vacanze in famiglia, personificando i meccanismi di questo dualismo.
Incapace di guidare e di sviluppare le rivolte sul finire degli anni ‘60 e dei primi anni ‘70, il PCI si rivolse ancora una volta alla Democrazia Cristiana, con l’illusoria speranza che la DC avesse cambiato il suo modo di fare e che ora fosse disponibile a collaborare col partito al governo the country - Catholicism and Communism combined in a "historic compromise" to defend the Italian democracy against the dangers of subversives and the temptations of consumerism. In proposing this covenant in 1973, shortly after taking the reins of the party, Berlinguer called into question the example of Chile, where Allende had just been overthrown, as a warning about the potential outbreak of a civil war where the left - Communists and Socialists together - never tried to steer the country on the basis of a mere majority arithmetic nell'elettorato. You could not advance more blatantly misleading argument. There was the slightest risk of a civil war in Italy, where even cases of violence that had occurred - the worst case was that of the attack in Piazza Fontana in Milan by the far-right terrorism - had minimal influence on political life of the country as a whole. But as soon as the PCI opened his arms to the DC, the revolutionary groups to the left of the party created by the student revolts sensed the emergence of a monolithic parliamentary group leader, a government without opposition and decided to take direct action against it. The first deadly attacks of the Red Brigades took place the following year.
However, the political system was not in danger. The elections of 1976, in which PCI obtained good results, took place in perfect tranquility. In the wake of the elections, the DC graciously accepted the support of communist governments in the so-called "national solidarity" led by Giulio Andreotti, without changing its policies without giving any ministry and PCI. Was increased repressive legislation, which restricted civil liberties in a free way. Two years later, the Red Brigades kidnapped in Rome as head of the influential DC, Aldo Moro, demanding the release of their prisoners in exchange for his freedom. During his 55 days of imprisonment, fear of being abandoned by their party, Moro wrote to his party colleagues a series increasingly bitter letters, becoming a clear threat to Andreotti in the event of his release. During this crisis, once again showed no PCI or humanity or common sense, condemning any negotiations to secure the release of Moro harder the leadership of the same CD, which was understandably divided.
Moro was promptly abandoned to their fate. Had he been alive, his return would surely split the Christian Democrats and would have probably ended the career of Andreotti. The price of his salvation was irrelevant. The Red Brigades, a small group that objectively do not pose a serious threat ever to Italian democracy, hardly would be strengthened by the release of some of his associates, who were under close surveillance by the police just left prison. The idea that the prestige of the state could not survive such a surrender, or that thousands of new terrorists would have erupted in the wake of the release, was little more than hysteria involved. The Socialists realized it and committed to the negotiations. More papists of the Pope, the communists, having the desire to demonstrate that they were the most solid of all the bulwarks of the state, they sacrificed their lives and saved their revenge in vain. The DC showed no gratitude. Once used, Andreotti - a master of timing, more capable of the same Degasperi - Put them aside. When were the elections of 1979, the PCI lost a half million votes and was again alone. The "historic compromise" had yielded nothing but disillusionment among the voters and the weakening of its base. When the year successivoBerlinguer asked the Fiat workers who are threatened by massive layoffs, to occupy the factories, his appeal is not answered. The last major industrial action which the party was never share was quickly crushed.
Five years later, bitterly reflecting on politics in his country, Giovanni Sartori pointed out that Gramsci was right in distinguishing between a war of position and motion. The great leaders - Churchill or De Gaulle - understood the need to make the war of movement. In Italy, politicians could only conceive of warfare. He himself had always thought that the title of the famous volume diOrtega y Gasset, España Invertebrada, it would be even more suitable for Italy, where the Counter-Reformation had created a deep-rooted habit of conformity and where the continuous foreign invasions and conquests had Italian specialists of a people into submission. Devoid of any elite with the cloth, this was a nation without a plug dorsale.Sartori did not speak at random. Its recipients were members of that class politica che lui stesso aveva descritto. A questo punto, il PCI era scomparso, Berlusconi era al potere e il suo scopo principale era chiaro: proteggere sé stesso e il suo impero dalla legge. Le misure adpersonam per riuscirci, approvate in fretta dalle Camere, arrivarono sulla scrivania del presidente. La presidenza italiana non è una carica totalmente onorifica. Il Quirinale non solo nomina il Presidente del Consiglio, il quale viene successivamente ratificato dal Parlamento, ma può anche bloccare le nomine ministeriali e rifiutarsi di firmare le leggi. Nel 2003 il titolare della carica era l’ex presidente della Banca d’Italia, CarloAzeglio Ciampi, vanto del centro-sinistra che era stato a capo dell’ultimo governo della Prima Repubblica, then Minister of Finance during the first Prodi government, and is now senator for the Democratic Party.
unflappable, Ciampi signed special laws not only to consolidate the grip of Berlusconi on television, but also to ensure immunity from prosecution - an immunity which Ciampi himself, as president, could benefit, and affix his signature. Out of the Quirinale, heartrending appeals by candlelight through the streets begged him not to sign. But the heirs of communism did not raise objections. In fact it was from the ranks of the center-left himself who had come the first draft of the immunity law. If the media had their hands on this cake law, the President - who according to the Constitution was assumed to be impartial and treated with the appropriate reverence - was not questioned. Only a significant national voice rose, not so whiny, but in a caustic, against Ciampi. He came to Sartori, a liberal conservative, who asked whether there was public Ciampi, contemptuously called it "bunny" for his cowardice.
Today is a former communist - Giorgio Napolitano, the head of the far-right faction of PCI after the death of Amendola - which sits at the Quirinale. At the time of his election, the first immunity law had been swept away by Constitutional Court. But when the law furiconfezionata - it must be said, only a change of front-and substance of that legislation was passed again by Berlusconi's majority in parliament, the president of post-communist parliamentary representation in the Senate, far from ' oppose it, he explained that the Democratic Party had no objection in principle, although perhaps it would have been better to apply it in the next legislatura.Napolitano not waste time on such matters of principle, signed into law the same day in which it was submitted. Once again, the only voices that rose up to denounce this ignominy were liberal or apolitical, Sartori and a handful of free spirits - immediately accused of disrespecting the head of state from the left press, not only compliant but even the Democrats in PRC. This is the left invertebrate [in Italian in the text, NdT] today in Italy.
The unstoppable historical junctures - the end of the Soviet experience, the contraction or disintegration of traditional working class, the weakening of social security, the expansion dellavideosfera, the decline of political parties - have exerted enormous pressure left anywhere in Europe, hurting a bit 'all. The fall of Communism is Italian, from this point of view, part of a larger story, which is beyond reproach. However, nowhere was wasted legacy is so important. The party that was beaten by guile and Degasperi Andreotti, who neglected to purge fascism or share with the clericalism, was still a force in the expansion of great vitality, beyond its strategic naivety. His descendants have conspired with Berlusconi, without a shadow of a justification, well aware of who he was and what they were doing. Now there is a considerable amount of evidence that exposes Berlusconi, both in Italy and abroad, including at least three leading research in English. But it 's amazing how all this research become harmless when addressing the role of Berlusconi's center-left in helping to make a clean sweep and to entrench his power. The complicity of its presidents in the series of attempts to put it - and get - above the law is not an anomaly, but part of a consistent pattern that has seen the heirs of the Italian Communist enable it to maintain and expand his media empire in spite of what once was the law, do not lift a finger to deal with his conflict of interest, let out of jail on his right arm and several other criminals millionaires, and repeatedly try to reach agreements with him election, the expenses of any democratic principle, to benefit their themselves.
At the end of all this, not only remained empty-handed as their predecessors, but even permanently deprived of consciousness and policy. And what happened to the great bastion of culture left in Italy? He had already begun to crumble long before, from the base of its foundations undermined along with what was once the fortress of the same mass party. As in Germany, the right shift came first in history, with a revaluation of the dictatorship of the country between the wars. The first volume of the biography of Mussolini by Renzo De Felice, which covers the years until the end of World War I, was published in 1965. But it was not until the fourth volume, which dealt with the period since the Great Depression until the invasion of Ethiopia, published in 1974 - followed a year later by a book-interview alneoconservatore American Michael Ledeen, then figure in the Iran-Contra - that this broad initiative had a very strong impact on public opinion, attracting a flurry of criticism from the left for the rehabilitation of fascism. When the fifth volume came out in the early eighties, De Felice had become accepted authority, who enjoyed easy access to the media - appeared increasingly on television - whose credibility in Italy was not nearly as Mass in doubt. Soon De Felice took the end of anti-fascism as the official ideology in Italy. In the mid-nineties, he explained that the role of resistance in what was really a civil war in the north who had been underestimated the loyalty to the Republic of Salò, needed to be demystified. His eighth and last volume, incomplete at his death, was released in 1997. In total, De Felice 6500 pages dedicated to the life of Mussolini, more than three times the length of Kershaw's biography Hitler diIan proportionately longer and also the authorized biography of the life of Churchill by Martin Gilbert: The largest monument to an individual leader twentieth century.
The quality of this work, badly written and often arbitrarily made, has never been worthy of its vastness. His strengths lie in the indefatigable archival research by De Felice and his insistence on certain truths flawless, especially the militants of fascism as a movement came mostly from a lower middle class, that fascism as a system attracted the support of businessmen, bureaucrats and upper classes in general and at its peak, the regime controlled a vast popular support. These findings, none of them particularly original, are incongruously juxtaposed with statements that Fascism was the heir of the Enlightenment, which had nothing to do with Nazism, that his fall caused the death of the Italian nation, and as if that were not enough, come along with a way out of proportion and totally indulgent, portrait of Mussolini as a great - albeit imperfectly - real statesman. At the intellectual level, De Felice had neither the size nor the conceptual repertoire of interests of Ernst Nolte, whose first book had preceded her. But its effect was much stronger, not only because of the vastness of his erudition, or even the fact - essential for the obvious - that fascism in Germany had been discredited in a far more absolute than in Italy, but also because at the end of his career there was little left of the official culture of the postwar period that he had intended to challenge. It is significant that the most radical dismantling of his thinking came from Danis Mack Smith in England, rather than an Italian historian.
But if there was no real counterpart all'Historikerstreit [¤] in Italy, De Felice, where he felt he had achieved most of its objectives, it was also clear a less marked shift of intellectual energies towards right in Germany. The main successor to De Felice, Emilio Gentile, he has dedicated himself to extend the familiar theme that the policies of mass of the twentieth century were secularized versions of supernatural faith, dividing them into styles evil - communism, Nazism, nationalism - including political religions fanatics and shapes more acceptable, particularly American patriotism, which religions are "civilized": Totalitarianism opposed to democracy adorned with the sacred. This is an interpretation that has won over a following in the United States or in England than in Italy itself. The same is, paradoxically, it could be said of the last fruits of [the text in Italian, NdT] to the left. Beyond the sober spirit of research workers had gone to a better life with the untimely death diPanzieri the mid-sixties and later the impetus of the Tronto and the young - and then too-passionate literary critic Alberto Asor, its prospects suffered two dramatic changes of direction.
Tronti came from the belief that the working class, far from having to endure the economic changes under the influence of the capital, he was the author, by requiring employers to the state and the structural changes of each stage of accumulation. The secret lies not in the development of economic viability nell'impersonale request from above, but the pressure of the class struggle from below. DaAsor Rosa comes the argument that the "committed literature" populist was an illusion, because the working class could not hope to benefit from the arts or letters in a modern world where the culture as such was hopelessly bourgeois, by definition. Follows neither rude nor simple conformity to Tolstoy. Rather, it was only the high modernism of Mann, Proust, Kafka or Svevo, the radical avant-garde, to Brecht, but not beyond, to play a role in literature - but as testimonies of incomparable formal invention of the internal contradictions of ' bourgeois existence, not as a testament of any use to the working world. The abyss fra i due non poteva essere colmato nemmeno dalle migliori intenzioni rivoluzionarie di unMayakovsky: era fondamentale.
” Per la creazione di letteratura di qualità, il socialismo non è stato essenziale. Per fare la rivoluzione, gli scrittori non saranno essenziali. La lotta di classe prende una strada diversa. Ha altre voci per esprimersi, per farsi capire. E la poesia non può sostenerla. Poiché la poesia, quando è eccezionale, parla una lingua nella quale le cose – le cose dure che parlano di lotta e vita quotidiana – hanno già assunto il valore esclusivo di un simbolo, di una metafora gigantesca del mondo: e il prezzo, spesso tragico, della sua grandezza è that what he says escapes the practice, never come back. "
When this was written, the recipient was the official line of PCI, beyond which there was Gramsci, who believed that the communist movement was the legitimate heir to the highest European culture since the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment onwards, and that among the issues to be resolved in Italy there was the lack of a national popular literature. But with the blossoming of the upheaval of the late '60s, first luogoTronti Asor and then decided it would be a lot more sense to work within the PCI - which, after all, would have to find the working class - and not outside it. With this step, Tronti transposed his vision of the supremacy of the struggles in the factory in the activities of the party in society, political radicalization in the theory of the autonomy of the production. Younger Asor or Tronti, intellectually the most ambitious in the trio, Massimo Cacciari then completed what they started, not only by separating the culture and economy of revolutionary politics, but by proposing a systematic dissociation of all spheres of modern life and of thought, separating as many technical fields, each in the other untranslatable. In town there was only their crisis, as seen in the natural order of century, neoclassical economics, the canonical epistemology, liberal politics, not to mention the division of labor, market operations and organization of the state. Only the "negative thinking" was able to grasp the depth of this crisis, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger. Hegel rejected what they had accepted: the dialectical synthesis of any kind.
The PCI, which had always tolerated the theoretical differences until they threatened to disrupt the political, greeted supporters of negative thinking without difficulty - at that time was no longer able to engage critically with ideas so exotic. Sensible prestige which would come to enjoy, in due time he assured them in the political honors which had supported autonomy. Cacciari became a member of PCI, before continuing to make a career as mayor of Venice, where there is now ; Tronti Asor and were then appointed senators. Inevitably, the price of this integration in a party that had fallen so disastrously on the ground of the power that they had chosen, was the disappearance of the operation as consistent model. Twenty years later, the PCI now just a memory, he wrote a melancholy Asor budget of the Italian left, which he and Tronti remained faithful in their own way, and today is the pride of Cacciari Democratic Party, which combines - as befits an admirer of Wittgenstein - technical and mysticism in a policy otherwise very similar to that of New Labour. The intellectual legacy of negative thinking was little more than a barren contemporary cult of specialization and de-politicization, for those who came after.
At the crossroads of the late '60s, Black went in the opposite direction, arguing not for a pact between the modern capital and organized labor under the auspices of the PCI, but a spiral of conflict between the working class and the state, both disorganized - or unemployed - which tend towards armed struggle and war civil. After the crushing of the 'autonomy' of which he was the theoretician, and after his arrest by a magistrate for the Communist falsely accused of having organized the Moro's death, exile in France produced a steady stream of publications, the most significant of which is on Spinoza. Here was the prepared metamorphosis of the worker outside the factory of the late twentieth century, the 'Worker Autonomy ", in eighteenth-century figure of the" multitude "in the essay" Empire, "written conMichael Hardt, appeared in the United States well before in Italy. Ever since she shot to fame, the international impact of Negroes was maggiore della sua influenza nazionale, sebbene esista un seguito di giovani. Lo stesso vale per GiorgioAgamben, un membro recente di questa galassia, che condivide molti punti di riferimento – Heidegger, Benjamin, Schmitt – con Cacciari, ma con un punto di flesso politico separato.
Messe a paragone, le somiglianze dell’operaismo con correnti del gauchisme che fiorì in Francia durante il decennio fra il 1965 e il 1975 sono stupefacenti – soprattutto per la mancanza di qualunque contatto diretto fra essi. Sembra che ci sia stata una concordanza oggettiva che ha portato i pensatori di “Socialisme ou barbarie” [N.d.T. in francese nel testo] lungo le stesse traiettorie dei thinkers "counterparty", a radical operations to an anti-foundational subjectivity-although in the past or Agambet Negri, with their references to Deleuze and Foucault, the current Italian and French were joined together. The contradictory results of the two experiences can be explained mainly by differences in national circumstances. In France, ilPCF offered no inducements and the revolt of May-June 1968 was very brief but spectacular. In Italy, where popular rebellion has lasted much longer, communism was not closed and thinkers were significantly younger, the long shadow even though more work remains confined to the margins.
Recovery of fascism on the right, the disappearance of operaismo left, have repositioned the space center, where the clerical and secular versions of the "juste milieu" according to tradition have coexisted. Paradoxically, the disintegration of the Christian Democrats, which concluded the government of a major part Catholic, rather than reduce the role of religion in public life, it has redistributed more widely than ever throughout the political spectrum. In fact, the voters of DC not only are often divided equally between the center-right and center-left, but they also revealed how the sector of the electorate more strong-willed, making it un fattore decisivo sempre più gradito dai due blocchi in competizione.
Per conquistarli, gli ex capi del PCI, per non parlare degli ex-radicali, si sono superati l’un altro nel mostrare la loro personale sensibilità religiosa, la loro partecipazione alla messa fin dalla più tenera età, la loro vocazione spirituale ed altri requisiti di una politica post-laica. In effetti, ciò che la Chiesa ha perso abbandonando un partito di massa dalla rigorosa obbedienza, l’ha riguadagnato con la diffusione di una più pervasiva, e più discreta, influenza nella società nel suo complesso. Con tale influenza, la Chiesa è scesa a livelli di superstizione dimenticati da molti years: the result of the occupation of the papal throne by diWojtyla, a period in which they were handed over beatifications (798) and sanctification (280) in the five previous centuries put together - the number of miracles required to the sanctification has been halved - and the bizarre cult of Padre Pio - a cappuccino divinely suffering from stigmata in 1918 and author of supernatural feats of any kind - came to the point that the press was able to discuss the most authoritative, in all seriousness, the truth of his triumphs of the above the mundane laws of science.
E 'plausible that a secular culture, came to this degree di compiacenza della fede, sia meno combattiva verso il potere. Sotto la Seconda Repubblica, il parere degli organi centrali della cultura scritta italiana ha raramente deviato dalle opinionineoliberali del periodo. La maggior parte della produzione scritta di questo periodo è indistinguibile da quella che si potrebbe rinvenire sui giornali in stile neo-tabloid in Spagna, Francia, Germania, Inghilterra o altrove. Nessun commentatore che si rispetti si è trattenuto dal richiedere riforme per curare i mali della società, per i quali il rimedio è sempre stato la necessità di una maggiore concorrenza nel settore dei servizi e dell’istruzione, maggiore libertà per il mercato della produzione e del consumo e uno Stato più rigoroso e razionale, with variations that modify only sweeteners to offer to those who receive the necessary adjustments.
This kind of conformity is so universal that it would be unthinkable to expect the editors and journalists Italians showed greater independence. The attitude of the press against the law is another matter. After riding the wave - due to the offensive against corruption launched by the courts - against the political class of the First Republic, the press has instead proved to be very condescending when Berlusconi established himself as the cornerstone of the new order, but merely for the most critical to pro forma, without ever touching the war in the outrance [NdT in French in the text] that would cause him really serious problems to sweep away from the scene.
To do so, his arrows were to be directed not only against Berlusconi himself but also against those judges who have regularly been acquitted, those laws that have made void all the charges against him, the presidential appointments that have granted immunity, and the center-left party has made him an acceptable and even appreciated. None of this could be further from the general tenor of the press in recent years, where the complaints of malpractice are regularly mingled with awe and servility. The anomaly of this situation is also highlighted by the rare exceptions to it. Among these, one stands out above all, the reporter Marco Travaglio, whose relentless complaints, not only crimes but Berlusconi and Previti connivance of the entire system that protects them, not least those of the press itself, have few equals in the world domesticated European journalism in recent years. As is easily imaginable, Travaglio, who sells hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, is a character of the liberal right, expressing himself with a ferocity and freedom of expression, completely unknown to the left. [†]
in Europe - this does not happen, at least not in the same way, in America - the world of media generally reflects more than it creates, the conditions of a culture, the quality of which ultimately depends very much most of the state of its universities. In Italy, notoriously, they have remained backward and lack of funding, many may suffer due to the intricate bureaucracy and baronial domains. The result is a constant haemorrhage of the best minds in the country for employment abroad. Virtually every discipline has been affected, as shown in the list of the top scholars established or residing for long periods of work United States: Luca Cavalli-Sforza in genetics, GiovanniSartori in political science, Franco Modigliani in the economy in the history of Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Arrighi in sociology, Franco Moretti in the literature, and many more names of young people who could be added to them. This is not a diaspora in the strict sense, since almost all have maintained their links with Italy and that many still participate in one way or another to his intellectual life, but their absence has obviously weakened the culture they come from.
If such a price to be paid in light of the circumstances of recent years remains to be seen. In light of all this, the chances are slim. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the size of the reserves which the country can draw on. Just look at Spain, whose modernization is often held up as examples of dall'autocritica some Italians as a model of what for them is a missed opportunity to remind those resources. Although its economic growth was higher, faster transportation systems, political institutions more effective, less widespread organized crime and local development consistency - all real improvements in comparison with Italy - Spain is the comparison a provincial culture, intellectual life with a very more intangible and drag, the relative backwardness which is underlined by the modernity that surrounds it. Despite a country in collapse, the Italian contribution to contemporary literature is ditutt'altra flow.
No country in Europe in fact has recently produced a monument of global knowledge similar to the five books on international history and morphology of the novel published by Moretti and published by Einaudi, a size typical Italian firm, the dimensions of an Anglophone reader can get a sense only in the abridged version printed in part from Princeton, which is parsimonious in spirit and affinity. Nor is it difficult to find esempi di una continua capacità italiana di mettere in discussione all’estero i dogmi ricevuti (in patria). Un esempio di ciò è costituito dal libro “Il filo e le tracce” di CarloGinzburg, per non parlare del suo saggio con la ricostruzione di Dumézil , un’opera mai tentata dagli storici francesi; un altro è il recente libro sulla democrazia dell’emerito classicista Luciano Canfora, libro che è stato censurato dal suo furioso editore in Germania. Un terzo esempio è la demolizione della “giustizia internazionale” da parte dello scienziato politicoDanilo Zolo. Queste tradizioni non muoiono facilmente.
E cosa si può dire dell’opposizione politica, al di là dell’attuale sistema multipartitico? Dalla metà degli anni ‘60 in poi, il comunismo italiano ebbe un’altra corrente, non ufficiale né operaista, che rimase più autenticamente gramsciana di qualunque altra cosa potesse essere offerta o persino tollerata dai dirigenti. Espulso nel 1969, il gruppo del Manifesto centrato intorno a Lucio Magri, RossanaRossanda e Luciana Castellina , andò avanti con la creazione del giornale che porta lo stesso nome ancora oggi, l’unico quotidiano veramente radicale in Europa. Negli anni, proprio questa corrente ha prodotto l’analisi strategica di gran lunga più coerente e incisiva dei problemi che la sinistra e il Paese intero si trovano ad affrontare; diHegel an inheritance, not surprisingly, that provides the most appropriate means with respect to the seduction exercised by Heidegg. Today his teaching lies in its balance, with its three main characters who write memoirs of their experience, each of which will be extremely significant. The first book to appear, the elegant and clear, "Girl of the last century" dellaRossanda, was a national bestseller.
Yet in 2005 their paper was closed at the moment, with the current financial crisis, the newspaper is at risk of disappearing. Micromega, the thick bi-monthly magazine published by the philosopher Paolo Flores d'Arcais, do not run the same risk, as part publishing empire whose flagship publications are the Rome daily La Repubblica and the weekly magazine "L'Espresso". During the Second Republic, Flores has caused her newspaper to become the host of the most unconditional and effective in front of the opposition to Berlusconi in Italy, with a political role in Europe for an intellectual publication of this kind. One year after the victory of center-right in 2001, was launched from here awesome wave of protests against Berlusconi, outside and against the liability of the center-left.
In all of these other two figures have played a central role. One was Nanni Moretti, the most popular Italian actor and director, whose films for more than a decade had shown a critical but often alluring, the phases of the dissolution of the PCI and its ruin. The other central character was the storicoPaul Ginsborg, author of the two most influential stories of postwar Italy, an Englishman who teaches in Florence, not only as a distinguished scholar but now also as a citizen of his adopted country. In the second of his books of history, covering the period 1980 to 1996, and which was published in English under the title "Italy and Its Discontents" [NdT "Italy and its discontents"] (and in this edizione arriva fino al 2001), Ginsborg propone l’ipotesi che, nonostante tutto l’egoismo e l’avidità dello del ceto yuppy, cioè i “ceti rampanti” [N.d.T. in italiano nel testo] che hanno prosperato nel periodo di Craxi, esisteva accanto a questo, nel ceto medio italiano, un gruppo di professionisti più seri, con un elevato senso civico e degli impiegati pubblici (ceti medi riflessivi) che erano capaci di azioni altruistiche e costituivano una fonte potenziale di rinnovamento per la democrazia italiana. Questa idea fu vista con un certo scetticismo quando egli la sviluppò. Tuttavia nel 2002 si rivelò corretta. Infatti era proprio lo strato sociale che egli aveva identificato a fornire il gran numero di people in a strike against Berlusconi of that year.
Yet this is precisely its limitation. The specific procedures that they chose - the demonstrators held hands in a circle turning around public buildings - were quickly named "Girotondo" by the press. With the intent to represent the spirit of peace and protection of the movement, the actual result was to give it the air of a child's play. The center-left parties did little to hide their hostility, not only because I hate to be associated with that movement, but also for fear of political competition. I "girotondini" did not respond with equal hostility. Determined to avoid actions similar to those tumultuous G7 in Genoa and vaguely hoping to team up with trade union leaders associated with the center-left movement is restrained by intensified its offensive against the government, let alone his accomplices opposition and, finally damaged its image from "good guy", nonpotè longer fend for himself.
When "Micromega" courageously and infuriating Veltroni, made another appeal for a mass strike in Piazza Navona last summer against the return of Berlusconi to power, the inherent contradictions of the "girotondini" were afloat, with Moretti and half of the base that is separated from the more radical activists, who this time did not spare Napolitano, the Democratic Party or the Communist PRC. Like the impenetrable verbal circumlocutions of the last days of the First Republic produced as a reaction to the calculated vulgarity of the Northern League, so, on this occasion, the sophistication of much of the rhetoric of "Girotondo" more likely to appeal to the attack, produced its opposite: a flamboyant vulgarity of language and images (the amorous adventures of Berlusconi was a wedding invitation in this respect) by comedians known for their hostility towards the political class, with great embarrassment in place of those who had behaved better, apparently ignoring the majority of the same center-left voters, judging by opinion polls.
Politically speaking, the episode can be considered a miniature version of the polarization of the '70s, when acts apprehensive conciliators from the top, it causes an explosion of anger from below.
In autumn these tensions melt away in the flood of student protests against cuts in education funding and the compression of the educational system, taken from the center-right, and mobilization-more limited - trade unions against the government's economic response to global recession. The concessions won the less important of the scope of these same movements. However, a scheme of tactical withdrawal by Berlusconi temporary increase of popular anger against him is not new. How this will evolve with the worsening economic conditions remains to be seen. With the disappearance of dangerous tools of the carpenter and farmer, the Italian left has taken one after the other symbols from the plant kingdom or age: the rose, oak, olive, daisy rainbow. Without a bit 'of metallurgy, however, does not seem likely to be able to go far.
Perry Anderson , Italy wasted legacy.
article Company culture and religion published Thursday, March 12, 2009 in Britain .
Notes
* The operative word in Italian does not have any negative connotation has in English, workerism, or French, ouvriérisme.
¤ NdT With This term, literally meaning dispute among historians, we define the broad and lively debate that took place in 1986-1987 in West Germany, having as its object the different evaluations of National Socialism and the meaning that it has taken for the Germans of today.
† The smell of money, Elio Veltri and Marco Travaglio (Editori Riuniti, 2001) The disappearance of the facts (Basic Books, 2006), Dirty Hands, Marco Travaglio, Peter Gomez and Gianni Barbacetto ( Chiarelettere, 2007), The Gag, Marco Travaglio, Peter Gomez and Marco Lillo (Chiarelettere, 2008).
