Three books, three different stories told by the protagonists of Italian communism. Alfredo Reichlin, Renzo Foa, Enrico Morando. Together they form a comprehensive view of the political life of the majority party of the Italian left from the war of liberation to the present with its own strengths, weaknesses, mistakes and accountability in national history. They all agree on a conclusion implied. The crisis of the partito erede di quell'esperienza, del Partito Democratico, è da attribuirsi al modo maldestro di fare i conti con la propria esperienza da parte del PCI che, per arrivare alla svolta della Bolognina, aspettò la caduta del Muro di Berlino. Momento ben diverso dalla catartica e coraggiosa Bad Gotesberg, dal nome della cittadina vicino a Bonn, quando la Socialdemocrazia tedesca nel 1959 non si definì più né marxista né comunista. "Io sono uno che con il comunismo si e' bruciato le dita. Dovete credermi quando vi dico che di libertà si può parlare solo nella libertà". Con queste strazianti parole, Herbert Wehner, allora capo dei deputati dell'SPD al parlamento, aveva convinto anche la minoranza più riluttante. Ma al PCI missed this act of courage and has since slipped on political events through countless jerks, twists twisted out of tune and discussions on formulas and labels that affect only the insiders. As evidence, the jumble of elected representatives of the Democratic Party in the European Parliament, where you can see the ladies sitting in almost all parliamentary groups, to offer such a unique reality show.
But could a different way? It was conceivable that the old PCI was able to change skin in the mirror and telling the truth? Morando and Reichlin still think that another way was possible, the original Italian Communist precedence over continuity, that the specific was stronger than the national orthodoxy. Here is the whole tragic mistake even the best from the reformist party of Togliatti. And the limit is in the DNA in the marrow of the lion to return to Calvin, which is intertwined with the vicissitudes of national history, the way in which that country is out of the cold war, that is a road that has just saved the heirs of Stalin in Italian dressing.
Morando, historic leader of the group of the best, senator since 1994, in "reformers and Communists. From PCI to the Democratic Party. The 'best' in Italian politics" (Donzelli, 2010, € 17) is polished in taking the path of same Amendola, the father of all the reformers of the PCI, the limits of the Italian road to socialism. Ironically! After years of dreaming about the moment the possibility of transformation of the Communist Party, once so thanks to the implosion of the Soviet Union, once the story with its strangeness on a silver platter offers a unique opportunity to jump on coach of the winners, the only group that was believed to also equipped with instruments to guide and cultural theorists that stage, you surprise with a minority mentality or "current".
The causes of that appointment was not written in the genetic code of communism Marxism Leninism, also in amendoliana that, while equipping itself with a vision of reality and history of Italy only capacity for political power in comparison with other European sister parties, there remained within the bed of all that tradition and all that it meant. First, Morando and does well to emphasize, the best they could not escape from the logic unit of the party intended as a prius, lay outside the church which was inconceivable truth and individual life. The second block is to be found in the excessive tactics, but also the result of the previous limit, which has always favored the internal logic, the "own position" than other groups and the outside world. The last limit of cultural origin, has meant that the reformers saw the PCI is always how different (and better) than the other reformist historical traditions, than to the liberal socialist, excluding any form of contamination.
In a word, quell'89 missing was the policy. Tangentopoli no more, with the destruction of the PSI, with the elimination dell'ingombrante another, took the urgent need for the whole of the former PCI executive team to really come to terms with its past. The truth was that communism was not reformed in any way, turn it into something else was impossible.
Dell'irriformabilità of communism, the inexistence of any dream "third way" if they made well aware of the late Renzo Foa ("I saw die il comunismo, Marsilio, 15 €, pagg 207) in un percorso simile a tanti altri ex comunisti, da Silone a Koestler. Prima da corrispondente e poi da direttore dell'Unità, dal 1972 al 1992, uno dei figli delle grandi e storiche famiglie della sinistra italiana ha avuto modo di toccare con mano la realtà del comunismo realizzato e la resistenza ad ogni cambiamento, non dovuta ad una qualche volontà nascosta e nefasta, ma a causa di un magma composto da ideologia, concezioni teoriche, istituzioni e pratiche che rendevano la materia più dura della lava e ne rendevano impossibile ogni trasformazione. Foa, già convinto della falsità delle promesse del comunismo, si rende conto dell'inconsistenza dell'ultima speranza con Gorbaciov Perestroika and his dream of discerning between economic freedoms and civil liberties. And that awareness will lead to terms and permanently with the Marxism-Leninism, and the PCI to recognize the nature of that mystifying world built on the systematic distortion of the truth, the continuous shift of opinion concerning the reality, with words never calls aware of the correspondence with the world.
But it would wrong to limit the reality of the PCI only relationship with freedom. The life of a model communist, partisan, director of Unity, director of the federation as Alfredo Reichlin ("The marrow of the lion. Reflections on the Italian crisis, Laterza, € 15) is exemplary. That party - the party par excellence - was also a great school of politics, able to reflect on the Italian society trying to identify trends, movement and power relations between the classes with the central engine of the proletariat, the working class, the masses, as it was then. The daily exercise of reading the concrete phenomena, despite strong ideological bias, was the result of a method of "playing politics" now lost, shared by thousands of executives, managers and even simple militants. "Be careful analysis - Togliatti told us - because 'all wrong if the wrong analysis.' And in fact, from what could move the political initiative se non 'dall'analisi concreta della situazione concreta?' ". A questa lavorio continuo di presenza, di forza di adattamento alle pieghe della realtà si deve la capacità, altrimenti incomprensibile, che lo fece diventare il più forte partito comunista dell'occidente con una forza di attrazione di ceti medi, intellettuali e alto borghesi senza pari nel resto di Europa, senza d'altronde dimenticare il punto di partenze, la necessità di emancipazione del lavoro. "Ho conosciuto i paesi della povertà estrema"; Reichlin fu testimone dello sviluppo economico, vide quella profonda trasformazione antropologica così ben tratteggiata da Pasolini ed è fiero di aver provato un sentimento - quell' "immensa felicità della politica che si fa popolo, che riscrive la storia e ricostruisce la nazione. La Repubblica" - che ormai la sinistra si è dimenticata, ridotta com'è ad una marmellata, frullato di giustizialismo e sete pura di potere.
Date queste premesse, si capisce allora lo sgomento che prova davanti alla situazione attuale della sinistra. La fine del partito, ha comportato la perdita del luogo della politica - "oggi dove si fa una analisi?" si domanda scorato - e quindi la fine della capacità di individuare problemi e soluzioni degne di questo nome – "la sinistra sembra analfabeta". Reichlin è durissimo con il PD e le scorciatoie moralistiche che hanno proposto letture di comodo e insensate sulla recente storia italiana. Berlusconi non is a monster, the PDL is not a party, plastic, Italy is a country divided into friends and enemies, good and bad of each other. The old Communist leader from afar can not believe these jokes which are in the chat said that the dominant republic as forty consociativismo and suffocation of civil society by the 'party politics': the killer of anti-rumor that has opened the way for Berlusconi. " E 'lucid in identifying the foundations of the Italian crisis not only in the context of a political system, but the same shape was born after the Second World War, the creation of material to work saw the so-called constitutional arc and he called for fifty years the way of being with the Italian people. The crisis of the first Republic to Reichlin is short due to sudden rages (other than judges and corruption ", is coming to speak), but a profound upheavals that have completely changed the reality and the identity of the country.
And therein lies the true limit of the analysis of old and passionate fighter. If, in fact, the PCI had expressed a political class that level raised with patience and care, trained to interpret the reality, within certain theoretical frameworks, doctrinaire and ideological well-defined, but also able to communicate with the most advanced bourgeois culture, because he was unable to understand nothing of the times in which it was producing in Italy and around the world? Why national leaders, D'Alema and Veltroni, do not go there, first of all political action took place at a tactical level and within the space of power, while the former mayor of Rome, produces banal halfway between a watered-down radicalism and the myth of Kennedy's ill-digested?
Perhaps then it is appropriate to conclude that the tradition of the left, even in its best part, I refer to liberal social democracy, has finished his course of history in the late seventies of the last century when the welfare state has been completely achieved. Now the policy is called upon to resolve many other challenges that call globalization, migrations, financing of the economy, dematerialization of work, the crisis of nation-state, technological challenges to the natural foundations of the human species. All issues completely unrelated to the theoretical tradition of any kind of socialism (and the old right-wing liberal and secular).
