From Berlinguer to Conte: many wishes to the post-communists
Evolution or involution of the post-communist left according to Gianfranco Polillo
From Enrico Berlinguer to Giuseppe Conte the backward leap is sidereal. A little less if you think of Achille Occhetto, Massimo D'Alema or Walter Veltroni. The other secretaries do not want it, but since then the decline, not only electoral, was already evident. Once, in fact, the left was progressive, able to combine this noble "practice" (Antonio Gramsci) with the 50 shades of gray, able to kidnap and fascinate.
He looked to the future. He anticipated tomorrow, hoping to bend that "crooked wood" into a design of geometric power. Mondrian and not Pollock. At the base of the pyramid, the Great Utopia. The revolution at that time suspended, which ranged from the Paris Commune, to the storming of the Winter Palace. Then the "long march" and the hundred Vietnamese of Che Guevara. After that, nothing, if not the tragic figures of Chavez and Maduro: the latest degenerations of that great idea.
In Italy, meanwhile, there was a shift from resistance to the Badogliano compromise. The "north wind" that, in Salerno, stopped blowing. Togliatti and his duplicity, for the good of Italy and the wishes of the Third International. In the party secretariat, Pietro Ingrao and Giorgio Amendola: the opposites of a pincer held together by the iron logic of democratic centralism. Which will survive until Achille Occhetto's secretariat. Without, however, granting full citizenship to reformism. Indeed to "improve" as it was defined, with a hint of contempt, by the managers of Botteghe oscure.
It is not easy to understand when that vision, which in any case wanted to be a forerunner, failed. Probably in the mid-1970s. When two distinct issues met: that of austerity and the entry, even in Italy, after years of tribulation, of color TV. The idea that the crisis of those years, characterized by high inflation and a deep deficit in the balance of payments, could only be overcome by compressing consumption, was first launched by Luciano Lama, then by Enrico Berlinguer.
The idea was to allow a new morality to blossom in the crisis. Built on the sobriety of consumption, but in fact offered as a guarantee to the ruling classes. Trade union and party would have slowed down, to favor that "compromise" that was to put an end to the old "conditio ad exclusendum". In those years, Midas was still far away. The central committee that would have led to the replacement of Antonio De Martino with Bettino Craxi took place in July of 1976. But before a new political line was established, no longer subordinate to the PCI, it took a running-in period. The essay on Proudhon, who opened hostilities, was published in Espresso in 1978.
Same story on color TV, even worse. It had been postponed for years, thanks to an amendment tabled by the left in 1967. A five-year moratorium. At the end of which the PCI, the union, Ugo La Malfa continued their battle against that instrument of the devil, which fed consumerism, when instead it was necessary to invest in social services or in mass consumption. A delay that did not involve only the abandonment of the sector to foreign industry. But the emergence of that prejudice which, in the following years, resulted in a growing hostility against Silvio Berlusconi, even before he decided the great leap in politics.
Was there another way out of the crisis of the 1970s? It was close at hand. It was enough to leverage animal spirits instead of locking them up in austerity enclosure. Were there social conditions? At least in a part of the country, which was ready to bet on the paradigm change – ICT and globalization – which would soon change the world. They were the emerging classes, the innovative professions, especially in the north of the country. That "Milan to drink", according to an advertising spot of the time. Then it became the object of a condemnation without appeal.
It was the new socialist leadership group, breaking the ancient ancillary relationship of submission towards the PCI, to change line. A paradox, if we consider that in the past it was above all the PSI that grappled with the effort of planning and reforms. Despite the mockery of the other members of the left. The idea was no longer to direct, impose, predetermine, but simply to govern change. That is, interacting with a spontaneous process, no longer produced by the presumed omnipotence of politics, but by the spontaneous movement of society.
A Copernican revolution that the PCI did not understand and opposed. A genetic mutation, as Enrico Berlinguer said, to condemn a phenomenon in conflict with the old dirigiste approach. A dispute that from then on admitted only one possible solution: the abjuration of the heretics. And their return, like simple bushes, under the great post-communist oak. As if the world did not continue to change with a greater speed than the theoretical attempts to harness it to impose the desired direction. And all this did not lead to a progressive loss.
It is the drama that continues to affect post-communist leaders even today. Firm, despite the crisis, in the static defense of the existing. The inheritance received as a gift was gradually dispersed. Just look at the polls, as well as the results of many elections. When Goffredo Bettini was the secretary of the Roman Federation, in the mid-1980s, the PCI had 27/28 percent of the vote. And Craxi's PSI is over 14 percent. Today the socialists have practically disappeared, while the PD, in the last elections, did not reach 20 percent.
Votes converged, to a large extent in the 5-star Movement, after the disappointing tests of the governments of the past legislature. But from the latter, at least according to the polls, already thrown to the wind. And here is the persevering in error. Do not follow the path traced by Matteo Renzi, who increasingly hinges on that reformist tradition that has been repeatedly repudiated, but be willing to amalgamate with what remains of the Movement, calling Giuseppe Conte to act as guarantor, with the degrees of the general. In the hope that history can be reversed. Personally, we doubt it. But anyway: best wishes.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/da-berlinguer-a-conte-molti-auguri-ai-post-comunisti/ on Fri, 19 Feb 2021 09:08:39 +0000.