Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Sinistra invertebrata:  http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n05/ande01_.html

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.
Perry Anderson
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I don't bother reading all that red shit. However, I guess that longion may take good care of Massa Ernesto Sotuttoio do Cazzimiento.
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