My memory of Bruno Trentin. Signed: Cazzola
On 23 August 2007 Bruno Trentin died
On 23 August 2007, Bruno Trentin died following an accident in the mountains from which he had never recovered.
For me, talking about Trentin – with whom I worked both in Fiom and in the CGIL – is tantamount to saying obvious things, as if they were known to everyone, for the importance it has had in the history of the union, the left and the country. It often happens to those who are advanced in years to evoke, as normal and happened the day before yesterday, facts, circumstances, events and personalities in the presence of interlocutors who have never heard of them, for a trivial personal reason.
Bruno cannot be remembered without evoking the hot autumn of 1969 and the historic contract renewal of metalworkers or the battle for trade union unity that saw Fiom, Fim and Uilm among the main protagonists, when today the initials FLM is reproduced on the wall of a building in Corso Trieste in Rome, but the owners, once united according to functional arrangements, live separately in the house.
One cannot remember Trentin without referring to his father Silvio, a supreme jurist of administrative law, belonging to the dozen university professors who refused to swear allegiance to Fascism and were forced to take the path of exile, in his case in France. , where Bruno was born in 1926 and from where he returned to Italy, not yet twenty, to take part in the Resistance in the formations of Justice and Freedom. Trentin was a giant in a world of giants, trade unionists and politicians trained through hard experiences of life and work, study, above all cultural as well as practical reflection.
And it is this aspect of Bruno's life that I intend to place at the center of a farewell that is both regret and pride for having known him, together with the many who – as the poet says – '' corresponded to me '' and who are no longer among us. Bruno Trentin was among the protagonists of a debate that took place within the PCI and the left on the effects of the '' economic miracle ''. The theme was posed by Giorgio Amendola in his report, on May 6, 1961, to the Conference of Communists in the factories and concerned the analysis of the new phase of capitalism in Italy, also in view of the prospect of an opening of the DC to the PSI and the the center-left was born shortly thereafter. The so-called right of the Party was more attentive to the problems of the South and considered the Italian capitalist system inadequate to modernize the country (the theory of '' ragged capitalism ''). This economic analysis also had a political objective: to guide the party to observe the political processes in progress with caution and interest.
'' For the young people of the new left – wrote Giorgio Bocca in the biography of Palmiro Togliatti – from Pietro Ingrao to Lucio Magri, to the trade unionist Bruno Trentin, neocapitalism was a serious matter ''. '' It is not true – they argued – that neocapitalism, and the center-left which is its political expression, are unable to solve some of Italy's fundamental problems '', such as the industrialization of the South, the transformation of agriculture, education reform, modernization of administration and expansion of consumption. From this analysis the left led to the refusal of any collaboration with the new perspectives. With hindsight, we could say that the left overestimated the potential of '' neocapitalism '', but that its analysis was correct and was better able to interpret the changes taking place. Of course, the closing political conclusions he arrived at were questionable – in my opinion – while that of the right was more convincing, albeit starting from a questionable analysis. But it is not my intention to go into summary reconstructions
. I would like to underline the depth of that debate. Today these problems (to which Trentin has dedicated fundamental essays) are no longer posed by anyone, not even the trade unions, whose only goal seems to be to hibernate the existing social structure, to the sound of cig and blocking of layoffs, while waiting , in vain, that everything returns as before.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/senza-categoria/il-mio-ricordo-di-bruno-trentin-firmato-cazzola/ on Sun, 23 Aug 2020 05:01:10 +0000.