Newsgroup: it.politica.sinistra
Titolo: "An invertebrate left"

Perry Anderson sulla London Review of Books a proposito della sinistra
italiana
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n05/ande01_.html
An Invertebrate Left
Perry Anderson on Italy's Squandered Heritage
The Italian left was once the largest and most impressive popular movement
for social change in Western Europe. Comprising two mass parties, each with
its own history and culture, and each committed not to ameliorating but to
overcoming capitalism, the postwar alliance between Socialists and
Communists, the PSI and PCI, did not survive the boom of the 1950s. In 1963,
Pietro Nenni took the Socialists into government for the first time as
junior partners of the Christian Democrats, on a path that would ultimately
lead to Bettino Craxi, leaving Italian Communism in unchallenged command of
opposition to the Christian Democrat regime. From the beginning, the PCI had
been organisationally and ideologically the stronger of the two, with a
wider mass base - more than two million members by the mid-1950s, extending
from peasants in the South through artisans and teachers in the middle of
the country to industrial workers in the North. It also had a richer
intellectual heritage, in Gramsci's newly published Prison Notebooks, whose
significance was immediately recognised well beyond the party. At its
height, the PCI could draw on an extraordinary range of social and moral
energies, combining both deeper popular roots and broader intellectual
influence than any other force in the country.
Confined by the Cold War to forty years of national opposition, the party
entrenched itself in local and later regional administrations, and in the
parliamentary commissions through which Italian legislation must pass,
becoming entwined with the ruling order at many secondary levels. But its
underlying strategy remained more or less stable throughout. After 1948, the
spoils of the Liberation were divided. Power fell to the DC; culture to the
PCI. Christian Democracy controlled the levers of the state, Communism
attracted the talents of civil society. The PCI's ability to polarise
Italian intellectual life around itself, not only in a broad arc of
scholars, writers, thinkers and artists but a general climate of progressive
opinion, was without parallel elsewhere in Europe. Thanks in part to the
sociology of its leadership, which unlike that of the French, German,
British or Spanish Communist Parties, was for the most part highly educated,
and in part to a relatively tolerant and flexible handling of the 'battle of
ideas', its dominion in this sphere was the really distinctive asset of
Italian Communism. But it came at a twofold price to which the party
remained persistently blind.
For the extent of the PCI's influence across the world of thought and art
was also a function of the degree to which it assimilated and reproduced the
dominant strain in a pre-existent Italian culture of long standing. This was
the idealism which had found its most powerful, though by no means unique
modern expression in the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, a figure who over
the years had acquired an almost Goethe-like position in the intellectual
life of the country. It was Croce's historicist system, its prestige
underwritten by the attention given it in prison by Gramsci, that became
naturalised as the circumambient ether of a great deal of the postwar
Italian culture over which the PCI, directly or indirectly, presided. But
behind it lay much older traditions that accorded pre-eminence to the realm
of ideas, conceived as will or understanding, in politics. Between the fall
of the Roman Empire and the completion of the Risorgimento, Italy never knew
a peninsular state or aristocracy, and most of the time was subject to an
array of conflicting foreign powers. The result, for long stretches, was to
create an overwhelming sense of the gap between past glory and present
misery among its educated elites. From Dante onwards, there developed a
tradition of intellectuals with a strong sense of their calling to recover
and transmit the high culture of classical antiquity, and imbued with the
conviction that the country could be put to rights only by the impress of
revivifying ideas, of which only they could be the artificers, on fallen
realities. Culture was not a sphere distinct from power: it was to be the
passport to it.
In good measure, Italian Communism inherited this habit of mind. The novel
form it gave to a national predisposition was drawn from, if not faithful
to, Gramsci. In this version, 'hegemony' was a cultural and moral ascendancy
to be won consensually within civil society, as the real foundation of
social existence, which could eventually assure peaceful possession of the
state, a more external and superficial expression of collective life. On
this view, the commanding position the party had won in the intellectual
arena showed it was on track to ultimate political victory. This was not
what Gramsci had believed. A revolutionary of the Third International, he
had never thought capital could be broken without force of arms, however
important the need to win the widest popular consent for the overthrow of
the ruling order. But it fitted the idealist cast of the culture at large.
Within the intellectual sphere itself, moreover, the PCI reproduced the
humanist bias of the traditional elites, for whom philosophy, history and
literature had always been the fields of choice. Missing from the party's
portfolio were the more modern disciplines of economics and sociology, and
the methods they had attempted to borrow, for better or worse, from the
natural sciences. Formidable though its positions looked at the heights of a
hallowed cultural hierarchy, it was weaker lower down, with serious
consequences in due course.
For when the two great changes that would alter the ecology of the PCI in
postwar Italy hit the party, it was quite unprepared. The first was the
arrival of a fully commercialised mass culture, of a kind still unimaginable
in the world of Togliatti, let alone of Gramsci. Even in its heyday, there
had been certain obvious limits to the influence of the PCI, and more
generally of the Italian left, in the cultural scene, since the Church
occupied such a large space in popular belief and imagination. Below the
level of the universities, publishers, studios or journals in which the
mouvance of the party was so widespread, and distinct from the strongholds
of the liberal bourgeois establishment in the press, an undergrowth of
conformist magazines or shows tailored to the middle or lowbrow tastes of DC
voters had always flourished. From its vantage-points in the elite culture,
the PCI could view this universe with tolerant condescension, as expressions
of the legacy of a clerical past whose importance Gramsci had long stressed.
It was not threatened by it.
The inrush of a completely secular, fully Americanised mass culture was
another matter. Caught unprepared, the party's apparatus and the
intelligentsia that had formed around it were knocked sideways. Although
critical engagement with pulp was not lacking in Italy - Umberto Eco was a
pioneer - the PCI failed to connect. No creative dialectic, capable of
resisting the blows of the new by transforming relations between the high
and low, materialised. The case of the cinema, where Italy had above all
excelled after the war, can be taken as emblematic. There was no relay of
the generation of great directors - Rossellini, Visconti, Antonioni - who
had made their debut in the 1940s or early 1950s, and whose last important
works cluster in the early 1960s. Missing thereafter was any combustible
crossing of avant-garde with popular forms to compare with Godard in France
or Fassbinder in Germany; later on, only the weak brew of Nanni Moretti. The
result was a gap so large between educated and popular sensibilities that
the country was left more or less defenceless against the cultural
counter-revolution of Berlusconi's television empire, saturating the popular
imaginary with a tidal wave of the crassest idiocies and fantasies - schlock
so wretched the very term would be too kind for them. Unable to confront or
turn the change, for a decade the PCI sought to resist it. The party's last
real leader, Enrico Berlinguer, personified austere contempt for the
self-indulgence and infantilism of the new universe of cultural and material
consumption. After he had gone, the step from unbending refusal to gushing
capitulation was a short one - Walter Veltroni coming to resemble a beaming
picture-card out of the schoolboys' albums he made his name distributing
with copies of Unità, when he became editor of the paper.
If the PCI's idealism disabled it from grasping the material drives of the
market and media that transformed leisure in Italy, the same lack of
economic or sociological antennae prevented it from detecting no less
decisive changes in the workplace. Already by the turn of the 1960s, it was
paying less attention to these than the levy of young radicals who would go
on to produce the peculiarly Italian phenomenon of operaismo, one of the
strangest intellectual adventures of the European left of the period.[*]
Unlike the PCI, the postwar PSI had possessed at least one major figure,
Rodolfo Morandi, whose Marxism was of a less idealist cast, focused on the
structures of Italian industry, of which he was the author of a famous
study. In the next generation, he found a gifted successor in Raniero
Panzieri, a PSI militant who, having shifted to Turin, started to
investigate the condition of factory workers in the Fiat plants, gathering
round his enterprise a group of younger intellectuals, many (Antonio Negri
among them) but not all originally from Socialist youth organisations. Over
the next decade, operaismo developed into a protean force, throwing up a
succession of seminal, if short-lived journals - Quaderni rossi, Classe
operaia, Gatto selvaggio, Contropiano - exploring the transformations of
labour and industrial capital in contemporary Italy. The PCI had nothing
comparable to show, and paid scant attention to this ebullition, even though
at this stage the most influential of the new theorists was a youngster from
its own ranks in Rome, Mario Tronti. This was a milieu whose culture was
essentially foreign to the party, indeed declaratively hostile to Gramsci,
taxed with spiritualism and populism.
The impact of operaismo came not just from the inquiries or ideas of its
thinkers, but their connection with the upsurge of new contingents of the
working class: young immigrants from the South, rebelling against low wages
and oppressive conditions in Northern factories - not to speak of
Communist-led unions disconcerted by spontaneous outbreaks of militancy or
unexpected forms of struggle. To have anticipated this turbulence gave
operaismo a powerful intellectual headwind. But it also fixated it on the
moment of its original insight, leading to a romanticisation of proletarian
revolt as a more or less continuous flow of lava from the factory floor. By
the mid-1970s, aware that Italian industry was changing once again, and
workshop militancy was in decline, Negri and others would fall back on the
figure of 'social labour' in general - virtually anyone employed, or
unemployed, wherever, by capital - as the bearer of immanent revolution. The
abstraction of this notion was a sign of desperation, and the apocalyptic
politics that accompanied it took this wing of operaismo into a dead end by
the late 1970s. The PCI, however, after missing the mutation of the 1960s,
had not learned from it, and offered nothing better by way of an industrial
sociology. So it was that when the Italian economy underwent further,
critical changes in the 1980s, with the rise of small export firms and a
black economy - the 'second Italian miracle', as it was hopefully referred
to at the time - the party was unprepared again, and this time the blow to
its standing as the political representative of the collective labourer
proved fatal. Twenty years later, just as the triumph of Forza Italia would
dramatise its failure to react in time to intervene in the massification of
popular culture, so the victories of the Northern League would reveal its
inability to respond in time to the fragmentation of postmodern labour.
These were deficits of a mentalité with deeper sources than the party's
Marxism, a classical sense of intellectual values that for all its
limitations was in its own fashion rarely less than honourable, often
admirable. There was another and more damaging side to the same idealism,
however, that was specific to Italian Communism, and for which it bore
conscious political responsibility. This was a strategic reflex that never
really altered from the Liberation onwards, and whose after-twitches
continue today. When Togliatti returned from Moscow to Salerno in spring
1944, he made it clear to his party that there could be no attempt at making
a socialist revolution in Italy on the heels of the expulsion of the
Wehrmacht, already foreseeable. The Resistance in the North, in which the
PCI was playing a leading role, could supplement but not substit-ute the
Anglo-American armies in the South as the main force to drive the Germans
out of the country, and it was the Allied High Command that would call the
shots once peace was restored. After twenty years of repression and exile,
the task of the PCI was to build a mass party and play a central role in an
elected assembly to put Italy on a new democratic basis.
This was a realistic reading of the balance of forces in the peninsula, and
of the determination of Washington and London not to permit any assault on
capital in the wake of German defeat. A postwar insurrection was not on the
agenda. Togliatti, however, went much further than this. In Italy, the
monarchy which helped install, and then comfortably cohabited with Fascism,
had ousted Mussolini in the summer of 1943, fearful of going down with him
after the Allies landed in Sicily. After a brief interval, the king fled
with Badoglio, the conqueror of Ethiopia, to the South, where the Allies put
them atop an unaltered regional administration, while in the North the
Germans set up Mussolini at the head of a puppet regime in Salò. When the
war came to an end, Italy was thus not treated like Germany, as a defeated
power, but as a chastened 'co-belligerent'. Once the Allied troops were
gone, a coalition government, comprising the left-liberal Partito d'Azione,
Socialists, Communists and Christian Democrats was faced with the legacy of
Fascism, and the monarchy that had collaborated with it. The Christian
Democrats, aware that their potential voters remained loyal to the monarchy,
and recognising that their natural supports in the state apparatus had been
the routine instruments of Fascism, were resolved to prevent anything
comparable to German de-Nazification. But they were in a minority in the
cabinet, where the secular left held more posts.
At this juncture the PCI, instead of putting the DC on the defensive by
pressing for an uncompromising purge of the state - cleaning out all senior
collaborationist officials in the bureaucracy, judiciary, army and police -
invited it to head the government, and lifted scarcely a finger to dismantle
the traditional apparatus of Mussolini's rule. So far from isolating
Christian Democracy, Togliatti manoeuvred to put its leader, De Gasperi, at
the head of the government, and then joined with the DC - to the indignation
of the Socialists - in confirming the Lateran Pacts that Mussolini had
sealed with the Vatican. The prefects, judges and policemen who had served
the Duce were left virtually untouched. As late as 1960, 62 out of 64
prefects had been minions of Fascism, and all 135 of the country's police
chiefs. As for judges and officers, the unreconstructed courts acquitted the
torturers of the regime and convicted the partisans who had fought against
them, retrospectively declaring combatants of the Fascist Republic of Salò
legitimate belligerents, and those of the Resistance illegitimate - the
latter hence liable to summary execution after 1943, without penal sanctions
for the former after 1945. These enormities were a direct consequence of the
actions of the PCI. It was Togliatti himself who, as minister of justice,
promulgated in June 1946 the amnesty that enabled them. A year later, the
party was rewarded with an unceremonious ejection from the government by De
Gasperi, who no longer had need of it.
The postwar history of Italy was thus to be entirely unlike that of Germany,
where there had been no popular Resistance. Nazism was destroyed by both the
extremity of military defeat, and the uprooting of the subsequent Allied
occupations. In the Federal Republic, Fascism could never raise its head
again. In Italy, by contrast, the Resistance bequeathed an ideology of -
patriotic - anti-Fascism, whose ubiquitous official rhetoric, in which the
PCI took the lead, covered the actual continuities of Fascism, both as an
inherited apparatus of laws and officials, and as an openly proclaimed creed
and movement. Reconstituted as the MSI, the Fascist party was soon sitting
in Parliament again, and eventually received into the establishment under
its leader, Giorgio Almirante. Exalting Mussolini's anti-semitic laws, this
figure had told his compatriots in 1938 that 'racism is the vastest and
bravest re-cognition of itself that Italy has ever attempted,' and in 1944,
after Mussolini had been airlifted north by the Germans, that if they did
not enlist as fighters for the Republic of Salò, they would be shot in the
back. When Almirante died in the 1980s, Togliatti's widow was among the
mourners at the funeral. Today Gianfranco Fini, his appointed heir, is
speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, and probable successor to Berlusconi as
prime minister.
Beyond the obvious reproaches to this trajectory, what is most damning in
the PCI's part in it is its self-destructive futility. When it had a chance
to weaken Christian Democracy by sinking the sword of an intransigent
anti-Fascism into its flanks, to cut it away from the reactionary
constituencies that had sustained Mussolini's regime, it did just the
opposite, helping the DC to establish itself as the dominant force in the
country, by passing a lenifying sponge across collaboration with the regime.
In so doing, it simply consolidated the conservative bloc under clerical
command that would shut it out of power till its dying day. In this debacle,
the party's conduct was without international excuse. Revolution may have
been ruled out in postwar Italy, but by 1946 the Allies had essentially left
the country, and were in no position to halt a lustration of Fascism.
Togliatti's naivety in being so completely outmanoeuvred by De Gasperi had
little to do with external influences. It was rooted in a strategic
conception he had derived from Gramsci, interpreted through the gauze of
Croce and his forebears. The pursuit of political power, Gramsci had
written, required two kinds of strategy, whose terms he took from military
theory, a war of position and a war of manoeuvre: trench or siege warfare,
as against mobile assault. The Russian Revolution had exemplified the
second; a revolution in the West would, for a considerable period, require
the former, before eventually passing over to the latter. Just as it had
diluted Gramsci's notion of hegemony simply to its consensual moment, fixing
it essentially in civil society, so under Togliatti the PCI reduced his
conception of political strategy to a war of position only, the slow
acquisition of influence in civil society, as if no war of manoeuvre - the
ambush, sudden charge, rapidly wheeling attack, catching class enemies or
the state by surprise - were any longer needed in the West. In 1946-47, De
Gasperi and his colleagues did not make the same mistake.
By 1948 the popular élan of Liberation was broken. The onset of the Cold War
brought electoral defeat and it was twenty years before another wave of
political insurgency crested in Italy. When it came, the generational
rebellion of the late 1960s, embracing both students and young workers, went
deeper and lasted longer than anywhere else in Europe. Under Togliatti's
successor, Luigi Longo, somewhat more of a fighter and less of a diplomat,
the PCI did not react as negatively to the youth revolt as the PCF in
France. But nor did it respond creatively, failing either to connect with a
culture of the streets in which high and low - the classics of the Marxist
and Bolshevik past, the graffiti of the spray-can present - for a time
interacted dynamically, or to renew its increasingly stationary stock of
strategic concepts. When critical opposition to its inertia emerged within
the party in the shape of the Manifesto group - more genuinely Gramscian in
outlook, and of much greater political intelligence than the operaisti
outside it - the PCI leadership lost no time in expelling it.
The excommunication came over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which
the Manifesto condemned without reservation. Here, alongside the native
idealism of its formation, lay the second reason for the continuing
strategic paralysis of Italian Communism. However flexible in other
respects, the PCI remained Stalinist in both its internal structures and its
external ties to the Soviet state. Despairing of one-party rule by a torpid
Christian Democracy, liberal well-wishers of the party - of which there were
to be many over the years - would time and again express admiration for the
PCI's sensible domestic moderation, yet exasperation that it should
compromise this otherwise excellent record by its links to the USSR and the
organisational norms that followed from it. In reality, the two were
structurally interrelated. From Salerno onwards, the party's moderation was
a compensation for its relations with Moscow, not a contradiction of them.
Just because it could always be taxed with a suspect kinship to the land of
the October Revolution, it had to over-prove its innocence of any wish to
emulate that all too famous model of change. The burden of an imputed guilt
and the quest for an exonerating respectability went hand in hand. The 
party's
most outspoken right-winger, the formidable Giorgio Amendola, warning it
against any toleration of the student revolt, while regularly repairing to
Bulgaria for his family holidays, personified the mechanisms of this
dualism.
Incapable of assuming or developing the revolts of the late 1960s and early
1970s, the PCI turned instead once again towards Christian Democracy, in the
wistful hope that the DC had changed its ways and would now be prepared to
collaborate with it in governing the country - Catholicism and Communism
uniting in a 'historic compromise' to defend Italian democracy against the
dangers of subversion and the temptations of consumerism. Proposing this
pact in 1973 soon after he became the new leader of the party, Berlinguer
invoked the example of Chile, where Allende had just been overthrown, as a
warning of the civil war that risked breaking out, were the left -
Communists and Socialists combined - ever to try to rule the country on the
basis of a mere arithmetical majority of the electorate. Few arguments could
have been more obviously specious. There was not the faintest prospect of
civil war in Italy, where even such outbreaks of violence as had occurred -
the bomb planted by right-wing terrorists in the Piazza Fontana in Milan in
1969 was the worst case - had little incidence on the political life of the
country as a whole. But once the PCI had moved to embrace the DC, the
revolutionary groups to the left of it that had sprung out of the youth
rebellion foresaw the emergence of a monolithic parliamentary establishment,
government without opposition, and shifted towards direct action against it.
The first lethal attacks by the Red Brigades began the following year.
But the political system was in no danger. The elections of 1976, in which
the PCI did well, were perfectly tranquil. In their wake, the DC graciously
accepted Communist support for governments of so-called 'national 
solidarity'
under Giulio Andreotti, without altering its policies or conceding any
ministries to the PCI. Repressive legislation, gratuitously curbing civil
liberties, was stepped up. Two years later, the Red Brigades seized the DC's
most influential leader, Aldo Moro, in Rome, demanding the release of its
prisoners in exchange for freeing him. During his 55 days of captivity,
fearing he would be abandoned by his own party, Moro wrote increasingly
bitter letters to his colleagues, posing a clear threat to Andreotti were he
to be at large. In this crisis, once again the PCI showed neither humanity
nor common sense, denouncing any negotiations to secure Moro's release more
vehemently than the DC leadership itself, which was understandably torn.
Moro was duly left to his fate. Had he been allowed to live, his return
would certainly have split Christian Democracy and probably ended 
Andreotti's
career. The price of saving him was negligible. The Red Brigades, a tiny
group that in any objective sense was never a significant threat to Italian
democracy, could hardly have been strengthened by the release of a few of
its members, who would have been under continuous police surveillance the
moment they walked out of jail. The notion that the prestige of the state
could not survive such a surrender, or that thousands of new terrorists
would have sprung up in its wake, was little more than interested hysteria.
The Socialists realised this, and argued for negotiations. Plus royalistes
que le roi, the Communists, in their anxiety to prove that they were the
firmest of all bulwarks of the state, sacrificed a life and saved their
nemesis in vain. The DC showed no gratitude. Once he had used them,
Andreotti - a greater master of timing than De Gasperi himself - reduced
them. When elections came in 1979, the PCI lost a million and half votes,
and was out in the cold again. The 'historic compromise' had yielded it
nothing, other than the disillusionment of its voters and a weakening of its
base. When in the following year Berlinguer called on Fiat workers,
threatened with mass dismissals, to occupy their plants, his appeal fell on
deaf ears. The last big industrial action in which the party would ever
engage was rapidly crushed.
Five years ago, reflecting bitterly on his country's politics, Giovanni
Sartori remarked that Gramsci had been right to distinguish between a war of
position and a war of manoeuvre. Great leaders - Churchill or De Gaulle -
understood the need for wars of manoeuvre. In Italy, politicians knew only
wars of position. He himself had always thought the title of Ortega y 
Gasset's
famous book España Invertebrada would be still more apt for Italy, where the
Counter-Reformation had created deep habits of conformism, and continual
foreign invasions and conquests had made the Italians specialists in
survival by bending low. Lacking any elites of mettle, this was a nation
without a bone in its body. Sartori was not talking at random. His
addressees were the political class he described. By this time, the PCI was
gone, Berlusconi was in power and his central objectives were clear: to
protect himself and his empire from the law. The ad personam measures to
secure both, pushed through Parliament, landed on the desk of the president.
The Italian presidency is not a purely honorific post. The Quirinale not
only nominates the premier, who must be ratified by Parliament, but can also
withhold approval of ministers, and refuse to sign legislation. In 2003 the
incumbent was the former central banker Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, an ornament of
the centre-left who had headed the final government of the First Republic,
served as finance minister under Prodi, and is today a senator for the
Democratic Party.
Imperturbably, Ciampi signed exceptional legislation not only to consolidate
Berlusconi's grip on television, but to guarantee him immunity from
prosecution - an immunity of which Ciampi himself, as president, was also a
beneficiary, as he appended his signature to it. Outside the Quirinale,
anguished candle-lit appeals in the street begged him not to. But the heirs
of Communism raised no objection. Indeed it had been from the ranks of the
centre-left itself that the first draft of the bill for immunity had come.
If there was hand-wringing in the press over the law, the president -
constitutionally supposed to be super partes, and treated with all due
reverence - was not put in question. Only one significant national voice was
raised, not plaintively, but scathingly, against Ciampi. It came from
Sartori, a conservative liberal, who publicly asked Ciampi if he even
existed, contemptuously dubbing him a rabbit for his cowardice.
These days, it is a former Communist - Giorgio Napolitano, leader of the
most right-wing faction in the PCI after the death of Amendola - who sits in
the Quirinale. By the time he was elected, the first immunity law had been
struck down by the Constitutional Court. But when it was given a new
wrapping - after the fashion of Lisbon, one might say - and the substance of
the same bill was voted through again by Berlusconi's majority in
Parliament, the head of the post-Communist delegation in the Senate, far
from opposing it, explained that the Democratic Party had no objection in
principle, though perhaps it should come into force only in the next
legislature. Napolitano had no time for such points d'honneur, signing it
into law on the day he received it. Once again, the only voices to denounce
this ignominy were liberal or apolitical, Sartori and a handful of free
spirits - immediately reproved in the press not only of Democratic, but
Rifondazione obedience, for wanting in respect for the head of state. Such
is the sinistra invertebrata of Italy today.
Powerful historical forces - the end of the Soviet experience; the
contraction, or disintegration, of the traditional working class; the
weakening of the welfare state; the expansion of the videosphere; the
decline of parties - have borne hard on the left everywhere in Europe,
leaving none in particularly good shape. The fall of Italian Communism is in
that sense part of a wider story, which lies beyond censure. Yet nowhere
else has such an imposing heritage been so completely squandered. The party
that was outwitted by De Gasperi and Andreotti, that failed to purge Fascism
or split clericalism, was still an expanding force of remarkable vitality,
whatever its strategic innocence. Its descendants have colluded with
Berlusconi, with no shadow of an excuse, fully aware of who he was and what
they were doing. There is now an abundant literature of exposure on
Berlusconi, both inside and outside Italy, including at least three
first-class studies in English. But it is striking how limp-wristed much of
this becomes when it touches on the role of the centre-left in helping him
clean his slate and entrench his power. The complicity of its presidents in
successive bids to put him - and themselves - above the law is no anomaly,
but part of a consistent pattern that has seen the heirs of Italian
Communism allowing him to retain and expand his media empire, in defiance of
what was once the law; not lifting a finger to deal with his conflicts of
interest; springing his right-hand man, and not a few other millionaire
criminals, from jail; and repeatedly seeking to cut electoral deals with
him, at the expense of any democratic principle, to benefit themselves. At
the end of all this, they have come away not only as empty-handed as their
predecessors, but terminally emptier of mind and conscience.
What, for its part, has happened to the great cathedral of left-wing culture
in Italy? It had started to crumble long before, its foundations undermined
with the one-time citadel of the mass party itself. As in Germany, the shift
to the right initially came in the field of history, with a revaluation of
the country's dictatorship between the wars. The first volume of Renzo De
Felice's biography of Mussolini, covering the years up to the end of the
First World War, was published in 1965. But it was not until the fourth,
covering the period from the Great Depression to the invasion of Ethiopia,
appeared in 1974 - followed a year later by a book-length interview with the
American neoconservative Michael Ledeen, subsequently prominent in the
Iran-Contra affair - that this huge enterprise had a major impact in the
public sphere, attracting a barrage of criticism on the left as a
rehabilitation of Fascism. By the time his fifth volume came out, in the
early 1980s, De Felice had become an accepted authority, enjoying ready
access to the media - he would increasingly appear on television - and
meeting decreasing domestic challenge. Soon he was calling for the end of
anti-Fascism as an official ideology in Italy. By the mid-1990s he was
explaining that the role of the Resistance in what was actually a civil war
in the North, in which loyalties to the Republic of Salò had been
underestimated, needed to be demystified. His eighth and last volume,
incomplete at his death, came out in 1997. In total, De Felice devoted 6500
pages to the life of Mussolini, more than three times the length of Ian
Kershaw's biography of Hitler, and proportionately longer even than Martin
Gilbert's authorised life of Churchill: the largest single monument to any
leader of the 20th century.
The scale of the work, poorly written and often arbitrarily constructed, was
never matched by its quality. Its strengths lay in De Felice's indefatigable
archival research, and his insistence on a few unexceptionable truths,
principally that the militants of Fascism as a movement had come in the main
from the lower middle class, that Fascism as a system attracted support from
businessmen, bureaucrats, and the higher social classes generally, and that
at its height the regime commanded a wide popular consensus. These findings,
none of them particularly original, sat in incoherent company with claims
that Fascism was an offspring of the Enlightenment, that it had nothing to
with Nazism, that its collapse saw the death of the Italian nation, and not
least, with a hopelessly indulgent, oversized portrait of Mussolini himself
as a great - if flawed - realistic statesman. Intellectually speaking, De
Felice had little of the conceptual equipment or breadth of interest of
Ernst Nolte, whose first book had preceded his. But his impact was much
greater, not only by reason of the sheer weight of his scholarship, or even
of the fact - fundamental though this obviously was - that in Germany
Fascism had been discredited much more absolutely than in Italy, but also
because by the end of his career there was so little life left in the
official postwar culture he had set out to oppose. Significantly, the most
radical demolitions of his edifice came from Denis Mack Smith in England,
rather than any Italian historian.
But if there was no real counterpart to the Historikerstreit in Italy, where
De Felice could feel he had achieved most of his goals, there was also a
less clear-cut shift of intellectual energies at large to the right than in
Germany. De Felice's principal successor, Emilio Gentile, has devoted
himself to amplifying the familiar theme that the mass politics of the 20th
century were secularised versions of supernatural faith, dividing these into
malign brands - Communism, Nazism, nationalism - comprising fanatical
'political' religions, and more acceptable forms, notably American
patriotism, that constitute 'civil' religions: totalitarianism versus
democracy in sacred dress. This is a construction that has won more of a
following in the US or UK than in Italy itself. The same, paradoxically,
might be said of the last fruits of operaismo on the left. There, the sober
spirit of the enquête ouvrière had passed away with the premature death of
Panzieri in the mid-1960s, and at the impulsion of Tronti and the young -
then equally incendiary - literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa, its outlook
underwent two drastic twists.
From Tronti came the conviction that the working class, far from having to
endure successive economic transformations at the hands of capital, was
their demiurge, imposing on employers and the state the structural changes
of each phase of accumulation. The secret of development lay not in the
impersonal economic requirements of profitability from above, but in the
driving pressure of class struggles from below. From Asor Rosa came the
argument that 'committed literature' was a populist delusion, for the
working class could never hope to benefit from the arts or letters of a
modern world in which culture as such was, by definition, irremediably
bourgeois. No crude philistinism, or simple-minded Tolstoyanism, followed.
Rather, it was only the High Modernism of Mann or Proust, Kafka or Svevo,
and the radical avant-garde, up to but not beyond Brecht, that mattered as
literature - but as so many testimonies, of incomparable formal invention,
to the inner contradictions of bourgeois existence, not as a legacy of any
use to the world of labour. The gulf between the two could not be bridged by
even the best revolutionary intentions of a Mayakovsky: it was constitutive.
  To make good literature, socialism has not been essential. To make the
revolution, writers will not be essential. The class struggle takes a
different path. It has other voices to express itself, make itself
understood. And poetry cannot be behind it. For poetry, when it is great,
speaks a language in which things - the hard things of struggle and daily
existence - have already assumed the exclusive value of a symbol, of a
gigantic metaphor of the world: and the price, often tragic, of its
greatness is that what it says escapes from practice, never to return to it.
When this was written, its target was the official line of the PCI, and
behind it Gramsci, who had believed that the Communist movement was the
legitimate heir of the highest European culture, from the Renaissance,
Reformation and Enlightenment onwards, and that among the problems it needed
to solve in Italy was the absence of a national popular literature. But as
the upheavals of the late 1960s unfolded, first Tronti and then Asor Rosa
decided it made more sense to work within the PCI, where the organised
working class was after all to be found, than outside it. In taking this
step, Tronti transposed his vision of the primacy of struggles in the
factory to the activities of the party in society, radicalising it into a
theory of the autonomy of politics from production. Younger than Asor Rosa
or Tronti, and the most intellectually ambitious of the trio, Massimo
Cacciari then completed what they had started, not merely separating culture
and economy from revolutionary politics, but proposing a systematic
dissociation of all the spheres of modern life and thought from each other
as so many technical domains, each untranslatable into any other. In common
was only their crisis, equally visible in turn-of-the-century physics,
neoclassical economics, canonical epistemology, liberal politics, not to
speak of the division of labour, the operations of the market and the
organisation of the state. 'Negative thought' alone had been capable of
grasping the depth of this crisis - Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein,
Heidegger. What Hegel had joined, they refused: dialectical synthesis of any
kind.
Operaismo had always been anti-historicist, it was also anti-humanist. In
Cacciari's Krisis (1976), it now found inspiration in a line of nihilist
thinkers, of whom Nietzsche was initially the most important for his account
of the will to power, whose contemporary incarnation could only be the PCI.
But there was to be no irrationalism. What the 'culture of crisis' called
for was new orders and forms of rationality, specific to each practice. So
in guiding the party towards its objectives, Weber and Schmitt - not
Gramsci - were the indicated counsellors, each a specialist of politics as
cold, lucid technique. Intellectually speaking, a more thorough-going
rejection of the Marxism enshrined in the PCI, steeped in a Hegelian spirit
of synthesis, would be difficult to imagine. But politically, the
Nietzschean turn of operaismo proved perfectly compatible with the official
line of the party in the early 1970s. For what could the will to power in
Italy at the time mean? The answer, Tronti argued, was clear: it was the 
PCI's
vocation to rule the country as the architect of an alliance between
organised labour and big capital to modernise economy and society, not
unlike the New Deal in America, which he had always admired - a pact of
wages and profits against the parasitism of rents.
The PCI, which had always been tolerant of theoretical differences so long
as they did not threaten political disturbance, accommodated the advocates
of negative thought without difficulty - by this time it was no longer
capable of engaging critically with such exotic outcrops anyway. Sensible of
the prestige these were coming to enjoy, in due course it assured them
honours in the political sphere whose autonomy they had upheld. Cacciari
became a deputy for the PCI, before going on to make a career as mayor of
Venice, where he now sits; Tronti and Asor Rosa were eventually made
senators. Inevitably, the price of such integration into a party that so
conspicuously failed on the terrain of power they had appointed for it, was
the fade-out of operaismo as a coherent paradigm. Twenty years later, the
PCI now only a memory, Asor Rosa would compose a melancholy balance sheet of
the Italian left, to which he and Tronti have remained in their own fashion
faithful, while Cacciari today is an ornament of the right of the Democratic
Party, combining - not unfittingly for an admirer of Wittgenstein -
mysticism and technicism in a politics otherwise much like that of New
Labour. The intellectual legacy of negative thought was little more than an
arid cult of specialisation, and concomitant depoliticisation, in those who
came after.
At the crossroads of the late 1960s, Negri went in the opposite direction,
advocating not a compact for modernity between capital and organised labour
under the aegis of the PCI, but an escalation of conflict between
unorganised - or unemployed - labour and the state, towards armed struggle
and civil war. After the crushing of the Autonomia of which he had been the
theorist, and his arrest by a Communist magistrate on trumped-up charges of
masterminding the death of Moro, exile in France produced a steady stream of
publications, the most notable on Spinoza. Here was prepared the
metamorphosis of the non-factory worker of the late 20th-century Autonomia
Operaia into the 17th-century figure of the 'multitude' in Empire, written
with Michael Hardt, and appearing in the United States well before it saw
print in Italy. Since its fame, Negri's international impact has been larger
than his national influence, though a younger following exists. The same
holds true of Giorgio Agamben, a latecomer to the constellation, sharing
many reference points - Heidegger, Benjamin, Schmitt - with Cacciari, but
with a political inflection poles apart.
Viewed comparatively, the similarities of operaismo to strands in the
gauchisme that flowered in France in the decade from the mid-1960s to the
mid-1970s are striking - all the more so for the lack of any direct contact
between them. It seems to have been an objective concordance that took
thinkers around Socialisme ou barbarie along much the same path as those
around Contropiano, from a radical workerism to an anti-foundational
subjectivism - although in the later Negri or Agamben, with their debts to
Deleuze or Foucault, French and Italian currents flowed directly into each
other. The contrasting outcome of the two experiences is largely to be
explained by differences of national situation. In France, the PCF offered
no temptations, and the revolt of May-June 1968 was as brief as it was
spectacular. In Italy, where the popular rebellion lasted much longer,
Communism was less closed, and the thinkers were significantly younger, the
after-life of operaismo remains greater, if confined to the margins.
Retrieval of Fascism on the right, eclipse of workerism on the left, have
relocated the space of the centre, in which secular and clerical versions of
the juste milieu have traditionally coexisted. There, paradoxically, the
break-up of Christian Democracy, ending the rule of an overtly Catholic
political party, rather than diminishing the role of religion in public
life, has redistributed it more widely than ever before across the political
spectrum. For DC voters have not only often divided evenly between
centre-right and centre-left, but have also proved the most volatile single
sector of the electorate, making them a 'swing factor' all the more eagerly
prized by the contending blocs. In pursuit of them, former leaders of the
PCI, not to speak of ex-Radicals, have fallen over each other to explain
their private religious sensibility, attendance at mass from an early age,
hidden spiritual vocation, and other requisites for a post-secular politics.
In effect, what the Church has lost with the passing of a mass party of
strict obedience, it has gained with the diffusion of a more pervasive, if
lower temperature influence in society as a whole. With this has gone a
descent into levels of superstition not seen in many years: the fruit of
Wojtyla's occupancy of the papal throne, when more beatifications were
pronounced (798) and saints made (280) than in the previous five centuries
put together, the number of miracles necessary for sanctification was
halved, and the grotesque cult of Padre Pio - a Capuchin divinely visited by
stigmata in 1918, author of any number of supernatural feats - took off, to
a point where the mainstream press can in all seriousness debate the
veracity of his triumphs over mere laws of science.
A secular culture capable of this degree of complaisance to belief is
unlikely to be more combative towards power. Under the Second Republic,
opinion in the central organs of Italian print culture has rarely deviated
from the neoliberal doxa of the period. Most of its output in this period
was indistinguishable from what could be found in the neo-tabloid papers of
Spain, France, Germany, England or elsewhere. No self-respecting commentator
failed to call for reforms to cure society's ills, for which the remedy was
always the need for more competition in services and education, more freedom
for the market in production and consumption, and a more disciplined and
streamlined state, variations turning only on the sweeteners to be offered
to those on the receiving end of the necessary adjustments. Conformity of
this kind has been so universal that it would have been unreasonable to have
expected Italian columnists and journalists to show more independence of
mind. The attitude of the press towards to the law is another matter. At the
forefront - after the magistrates had launched their attack on its
corruption - of the hue and cry against the political class of the First
Republic, the press has proved remarkably submissive since Berlusconi
established himself as a centrepiece of the new order, limiting itself for
the most part to pro forma criticisms, without a hint of the guerre à 
l'outrance
that could really have damaged him or driven him from the scene.
For that, its fire would have had to be directed not just against Berlusconi
himself, but also against the judges who regularly acquitted him, the
statute of limitations that voided charges against him, the presidencies
that assured him immunity, and the centre-left parties that made him into an
accepted, indeed valued interlocutor. Nothing could have been further from
the general tenor of the press in these years, where complaints of
malpractice are regularly tinged with fear and servility. The feebleness of
this record is highlighted by the rare exceptions to it. Of these, one above
all stands out, the reporter Marco Travaglio, whose implacable indictments
not just of the criminalities of Berlusconi or Previti, but of the entire
system of connivances that has protected them, not least those of the press
itself, have few parallels in the tame world of European journalism in these
years. Not unexpectedly, Travaglio, whose books have sold in the hundreds of
thousands, is a figure of the liberal right, expressing himself with a
ferocity and freedom of tone all but unknown on the left.[?]
In Europe - this is not true, at least in the same way, of America - the
world of the media as a rule reflects more than it creates the condition of
a culture, whose quality ultimately depends much more on the state of its
universities. In Italy, notoriously, these have remained archaic and
underfunded, many departments sumps of bureaucratic intrigue and baronial
patronage. The result has been a steady loss of the country's best minds to
positions abroad. Virtually every discipline has been affected, as the
roster of leading scholars either based or working for long stretches in the
United States shows: Luca Cavalli-Sforza in genetics, Giovanni Sartori in
political science, Franco Modigliani in economics, Carlo Ginzburg in
history, Giovanni Arrighi in sociology, Franco Moretti in literature, to
whom younger names might be added. Not a diaspora in a strong sense, since
nearly all have maintained their links to Italy, most still participating in
one way or another in its intellectual life, their absence has nevertheless
obviously weakened the culture that produced them.
Whether any comparable levies are likely to arise out of the circumstances
of recent years remains to be seen. On the face of it, the chances would
seem slim. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the depth of the
reserves on which the country can draw. A glance at Spain, whose
modernisation is now often held up by self-critical Italians as a model of
what they have missed, is a reminder of them. Although its economic growth
has been higher, transport systems faster, political institutions more
functional, organised crime less widespread, and regional development more
even - all real gains over Italy - Spain remains by comparison a provincial
culture, with a much thinner and more derivative intellectual life, whose
relative backwardness is underlined by the modernities surrounding it. For
all the disrepair of the country, the Italian contribution to contemporary
letters is of a different order. No country in Europe, indeed, has recently
produced a monument of global scholarship to equal the five volumes on the
international history and morphology of the novel edited by Moretti, and
published by Einaudi - an enterprise of peculiarly Italian magnificence, of
whose scale the Anglophone reader gets only a glimpse in the hand-me-down
version, parsimonious in sympathy and spirit, issued by Princeton. Nor is it
difficult to find examples of a continuing Italian capacity to shake
received paradigms abroad. Ginzburg's 'Clues', not to speak of his essay
reconstructing Dumézil, attempted by no French historian, would be one case;
the distinguished classicist Luciano Canfora's recent book on democracy,
censored by its outraged publisher in Germany, would be another; the
political scientist Danilo Zolo's demolition of 'international justice' a
third. Such traditions do not die easily.
What, beyond the existing cross-party establishment, of political
opposition? From the mid-1960s onwards, Italian Communism had another
strand, neither official nor operaista, that remained more authentically
Gramscian than anything its leadership could offer, or ultimately tolerate.
Expelled in 1969, the Manifesto group around Lucio Magri, Rossana Rossanda
and Luciana Castellina went on to create the newspaper of that name that
continues to this day, the one genuinely radical daily in Europe. Over the
years, it was this current that produced by far the most coherent and
incisive strategic analysis of the problems facing the left, and the country
as a whole - descent from Hegel, not surprisingly, supplying better
equipment for the task than fascination with Heidegger. Today its legacy is
in the balance, its three leading figures composing memorials of their
experience, each of which will be significant. The first to appear, 
Rossanda's
crisply elegant Ragazza del secolo scorso, has been a national bestseller.
But in 2005 their journal was closed, and the daily is now, amid the credit
crunch, at risk of disappearing. MicroMega, the thick bimonthly edited by
the philosopher Paolo Flores d'Arcais, is in no such danger, as part of the
publishing empire whose showpieces are the Roman daily La repubblica and the
weekly news magazine L'espresso. Under the Second Republic, Flores has made
his journal the organiser of the most uncompromising and effective front of
hostility to Berlusconi in Italy, playing a political role unique in the EU
for an intellectual publication of this kind. A year after the victory of
the centre-right in 2001, it was from here that a wave of impressive mass
protests against Berlusconi was launched, outside and against the passivity
of the centre-left.
In these, two other figures played a central part. One was Nanni Moretti,
the country's most popular actor/film director, whose cinema had for over a
decade tracked in critical, if often winsome fashion the dissolution of the
PCI and its fall-out. The other was the historian Paul Ginsborg, author of
the two most commanding histories of postwar Italy, an Englishman teaching
at Florence distinguished not only as a scholar but now as a citizen in his
adoptive country. In the second of his histories, covering the period from
1980 to 1996, published in English as Italy and Its Discontents (and in this
edition reaching as late as 2001), Ginsborg put forward the hypothesis that,
for all the egoism and greed of its yuppy stratum - the ceti rampanti that
flourished under Craxi - there existed alongside it in the Italian middle
class a sector of more thoughtful, civic-minded professionals and public
employees (ceti medi riflessivi) who were capable of altruistic actions, and
formed a potential source of renewal for Italian democracy. The proposal met
with some scepticism when he developed it. But in 2002 it came true. For it
was the layer he had identified that essentially provided the troops for the
demonstrations against Berlusconi of that year.
Therein, however, also lay their limitation. The distinctive form they
took - demonstrators holding hands round public buildings - was quickly
dubbed girotondi in the press, or 'ring-a-ring-o'-roses'. Intended to
symbolise the peaceful, defensive spirit of the movement, the result was to
give it too easily the air of a children's game. The centre-left parties,
not only disliking the reproach to themselves, but fearing political
competition, did little to conceal their hostility. The girotondini did not
respond in kind. Resolved to avoid any tempestuous actions of the kind that
had met the G7 in Genoa, and vainly hoping for an alliance with trade-union
leaders in hock to the centre-left, the movement was inhibited from mounting
any tougher offensive against the government, let alone its accomplices in
the opposition, and eventually undone by its bon enfant self-image, could
not sustain itself.
When, to the fury of Veltroni, MicroMega courageously called for another
mass demonstration against Berlusconi's return to power in the Piazza Navona
last summer, the underlying contradictions of the girotondini burst into the
open, Moretti and half the platform dissociating themselves from the more
radical speakers, who this time did not spare Napolitano, the PD or the
Rifondazione Comunista. Just as the impenetrable circumlocutions of the
latter-day First Republic produced in reaction the calculated crudities of
the Northern League, so on this occasion the prissiness of much of the
rhetoric of the girotondi, more given to pleading than savaging, detonated
its opposite, a flamboyant coarseness of image and idiom - Berlusconi's
bedroom boasts virtually inviting this - from comedians famous for detesting
the political class, to the acute embarrassment of the better-behaved in the
square but apparently not, judging by the opinion polls, to most of the
centre-left electorate itself. Politically speaking, the episode could be
read as a micro-version of the polarisation of the 1970s, anxious
propitiations from above once again provoking angry explosions from below.
In the autumn, such tensions dissolved in the torrent of student protests
against the cuts in educational funding, and compression of schooling, voted
through by the centre-right, and - a more limited - union mobilisation
against the government's economic response to global recession. The
concessions gained are of less significance than the scale of the movements
themselves. But a pattern of tactical retreats by Berlusconi and temporary
surges of popular anger against him is not new. How this might alter as
economic conditions worsen remains to be seen. Putting behind it the
dangerous tools of the carpenter and the farmer, the Italian left has
adopted one symbol after another from the vegetable kingdom, or thin air -
the rose, the oak, the olive, the daisy, the rainbow. Without some glint of
metallurgy, it seems unlikely to make much headway.
Notes
* The Italian term is without the anti-intellectual connotation of workerism
in English, or ouvriérisme in French.
? L'odore dei soldi, by Marco Travaglio and Elio Veltri (Editori Riuniti,
2001); La scomparsa dei fatti (Il Saggiatore, 2006); Mani sporche, by Marco
Travaglio, Gianni Barbacetto and Peter Gomez (Chiarelettere, 914 pp.,
?19.60, 2007, 978 88 6190 002 8); Il bavaglio, by Marco Travaglio, Peter
Gomez and Marco Lillo (Chiarelettere, 240 pp., ?12, 2008, 978 88 6190 062
2).
Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA.


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