I've never been a communist. But I had many militant friends of the PCI whom I sincerely admired for their cultural and political commitment, even if I never quite understood how one could call oneself a communist in the face of the obvious failures of those regimes.
Claudius Petruccioli – historical exponent of the PCI, and one of the architects of the Bolognina turning point – in 2001 he published a "Rendiconto" which even then did not escape any of the burning issues of Italian communism. The new, updated and enriched edition of "Rendiconto - The Italian left from the PCI to today" (La Nave di Teseo editions), offers convincing answers on three levels: on what, so to speak, anthropological, which concerns the typical characteristics of the communist militant, on the history of a crucial five-year period (from 1989 to 1994) not only for the PCI but for the entire Italian democracy, and finally on the characteristics and contradictions of today's left and in particular of the PD still in the middle of the ford between saving the old communist style and launching a new political construction.
Membership of the PCI, at least from the end of the XNUMXs, was not primarily motivated by ideology and even less by the myth of the October revolution and by the functioning of real socialism, but by the fact that the party was a place of social as well as political life , identification, psychological and existential security. The Italian Communists not only felt they were on the right side of history, but thanks to the life of the party, they distinguished themselves from the petty bourgeois narrow-mindedness and narrow-mindedness. It was a kind of parallel world: those who belonged to it could travel throughout Italy and abroad (at least in the West) always staying within a welcome network, a network of relationships and friendships that united within and distinguished from the outside. I still remember that, in 1980, when I arrived as editor-in-chief of Il Mattino di Napoli, Antonio Bassolino, then Campania regional secretary of the PCI, wanted to meet me early in the morning in a suburban bar because "it's not good - he explained to me - to be seen with a bourgeois journalist".
But this separateness led to closing one's eyes to what was happening in the outside world. It had already been difficult to justify the repression in Hungary in '56 and that in Czechoslovakia in '68. Then there were some chilling reactions of intellectuals close to the party and of many old leaders who had spent part of their youth in the USSR, at the time of the collapse of the Berlin wall which dragged under its rubble all the regimes of the Eastern European countries they held only thanks to the tanks of the Red Army. The director Nanni Loy said, in a conference, that the citizens of East Germany who flocked to the other side “they believe buying a blender is freedom“.
Giancarlo Pajetta was shocked by the events of 1989: his mind refused to accept what had happened. He complained why Piero Fassino had gone to visit the tomb of Imre Nagy in Paris, Hungarian prime minister killed by the communists, and was still defending Ceausescu a few days before the total disintegration of his regime. Alessandro Natta, who had been PCI secretary from Berlinguer's death to 1988, took the wall's collapse as a misfortune and said it was as if Hitler had won.
From these reactions we understand what it means to have been a communist in Italy and the causes of the failure to achieve the turning point given by Achille Occhetto to the PCI after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the shocking events, which put an end to the regimes of Eastern Europe, many saw an opportunity to give birth to a new left, capable of abandoning the old hypocrisies and the classic Togliatti duplicity of the PCI, to open up not only to socialist parties but to other progressive liberal forces, with the intention of offering a real alternative to the more than forty years of Christian Democrat management of power. Others, on the other hand, saw in it a way to turn around by saving the past, safeguarding the existing party organization, retaining the ability to be revolutionaries in words and managers of slices of power in practice.
It was the latter who won, led by Massimo D'Alema who offered a foothold to the management team to perpetuate its power even getting closer to the government area. Hence the prevalence of conservation even in the latest changes, that always considering the party as one's own "company" - definition by Pierluigi Bersani - from which foreign bodies were to be excluded, such as Matteo Renzi who had also been voted several times in the primaries by the vast majority of PD voters. In short, the electoral population was ready for the breakthrough, but it was the leaders who held back the desire for novelty, accusing the new ones (those who could not boast of being communist nobility) of not being on the left. Renzi was seen as an infiltrator, someone who got along with the enemy (and in fact praised Marchionne), someone who wanted to carry out institutional reforms which, according to the traditional left, is equivalent to a coup d'état, a danger to democracy.
Herein lies the Italian problem. The failure of the PCI-PDS-DS-PD sequel in completing the turning point originating from the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the same time the incapacity of Berlusconi's novelty to give life to a truly mass liberal party. In fact, after the collapse of the traditional parties of the First Republic, we should have arrived not only at new political formations, but also at a different constitutional model, based on alternation in government, and on an institutional structure capable of offering citizens a democracy governing, efficient and transparent.
In the five-year period '89-'94, from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Ciampi government, events overlapped that could have led to designing a new future for the whole country. Unfortunately from the ashes of the PCI a different left could not be born, capable of giving a new and original reading of the world reality and therefore of making proposals that are both ideal and concrete and not utopian, such as those of the new man born from the overcoming of the capitalist order. In short, a left capable of understanding that many old ideological tools were no longer needed. That the concept of capitalism no longer tells us anything since there are so many capitalisms, some more political, others more market based. That the Government is not the superstructure of the bosses, but it is the one that directs the game. Other than accusing Renzi of siding with Marchionne! But precisely because the manager who came from America was trying to wake up the sleepy Italian capitalism crouched between the state and Mediobanca, he should have been an ally against the old trade union ideology of Maurizio Landini who defended the whole past.
This remaining anchored to the old "Company" has led to the spread of a deep dissatisfaction with the policy. Citizens cling with the strength of desperation to new and improvised movements. But they are ready to abandon them at the first hint of disappointment. It is clear that excessive electoral mobility signals that there is – as Petruccioli says – a mismatch between political supply and demand. In other words, it is necessary to create political forces capable of offering solutions to fears and credible growth prospects, without taking refuge in the past, without pointing to the right on autarchy and sovereignty, and left on old recipes of statism and welfarism which have already failed in their historical application. Unfortunately we don't see who is able to overcome the daily struggle to get by, to propose a realistic and credible vision of the future around which to mobilize citizens' energies. Could Europe's change of pace with the newfound solidarity and the financial resources made available be the occasion for a political renewal?
