1. A 40-YEAR-LONG FILM ---- I have not seen Segre's latest film "la
grande ambizione" dedicated to the figure of Enrico Belinguer (until1978) and, not being used to talking about things I do not know, this
article will deal with this film in a completely generic way.
As a trigger for a broader reflection. ---- However, since Segre's work
has rekindled a fairly lively discussion (as much as a discussion of
this kind can be), I believe it is useful to talk, as I was saying, not
so much about the film (with respect to which everyone has the right to
have their own opinion) but about the context in which to place the
periodicals Berlinguer-Renaissance.
So, let's immediately clear the field of misunderstandings, both we, who
have criticized even heavily (but always from a political point of view)
the choices of the Berlinguerian PCI, and those who, instead, have
considered such choices to be shared, now belong to the past.
It would be truly ridiculous and out of place to resume today the
diatribes of 50 years ago. Diatribes, among other things, that a good
part of Italian citizens not only have not experienced, but of which
they would not even have the faintest idea of what they were.
Therefore, it seems evident to me, it is appropriate to act and write
with greater aplomb than when the events of those years directly
affected us and were part of our experience and our distant youth.
However, this will certainly not prevent harshness and intense
criticism, indeed, the distance should allow us to also touch the places
and gods of sacred history.
So let's start from the context.
Since the PCI, with a decision taken by a ruling class (at the time)
young, ambitious and unscrupulous, decided that its "historical" hour
was over, at every step in which this descent into the underworld of
neoliberalism fell without a parachute (and without even touching social
democracy - i.e. PDS-DS-PD) The mystical cult of Berlinguer proliferated
in an increasingly metaphysical way.
It might seem like a paradox and perhaps it is, but if we look at it
from the historical perspective of the PCI it is not even that surprising.
2. THE BERLINGUER "BRAND"
For example, and here I open a not very brief aside, there has been a
great discussion in the past months, on social media, both on the
old-timers and the trendier ones, regarding the new membership card that
the PD wanted to dedicate to Enrico Berlinguer. To the arrows of
"betrayal" have been added interesting political analyses and jokes,
some funny others very serious and sullen.
Frankly, it seems to me that much of the discussion has not taken one
fact into account. The one depicted in the effigy *has nothing to do
with Berlinguer, the real one, who lived and died in 1984.
That Berlinguer was a man of the 20th century, a communist, certainly
very followed by his own people of reference, but above all he was a
professional politician, shrewd, prepared, and not a kind of secular
"Saint Francis". A man placed in his time, within the contradictions of
that historical period, within the even harsh clashes both in the party
and in society.
The one on the membership card is instead a brand. A photo that recalls
a phrase (and a phase) completely extrapolated from the context (but the
context is now a definitively lost battle).
A character about whom it is not necessary to know anything except the
urban legends with a mystical background of his "death" almost with the
smell of sanctity and devoid of any political connotation.
A brand used perhaps to reactivate old glories (but now they are few and
in the process of natural extinction) through that mechanism of
difficult psychological interpretation, for which it is more useful to
quote De Andrè "abort the lifeguard's son and then look at him with
sweetness".
An identity call like the photos of Che Guevara in the bedrooms of
teenagers.
Which Berlinguer then is the one who is constantly celebrated in that
strange journey?
3 IN "ODORE DI SANTITÀ"
It is significant that of the long, articulated political life of
Berlinguer we now remember only 2 or 3 sentences detached from the
context of an interview and then his death, almost as a destiny
inscribed in a path of penitence.
Despite the very extensive bibliography, the very articulated thoughts
and actions of one of the last political leaders in the strict sense,
here remains only a kind of trivializing and offensive martyrology,
which removes a historical figure from his complex dimension, and
therefore places him in the hyperuranion of quasi-sanctity.
When we talk about historical revisionism, rather than thinking of Nolte
or De Felice, we should also remember these mass media phenomena that
carve out characters who never existed (as happened, for example, with
Gaber) and that deliver to the memory of the "next generations" (whom we
seem to "care" so much) real historical falsifications.
Like those who raise a statue of Moro with Unità under his arm. A
molasses as indigestible as it is consolatory of an unreal world
4. A MAN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
This post-modern Berlinguer is first and foremost an offense to the
political figure himself, who was anything but a kind of naive fool
surrounded by bad guys. It never worked like this, let alone if it could
work in the terrible world, but literally immersed in politics, of the
last century.
"He joined the PCI leadership group when he was young" Pajetta is said
to have said and the phrase is revealing both of an era in which the
political battle did not make allowances or saints and, above all, of
how Berlinguer was seen in reality.
Berlinguer's PCI was a party that failed to grasp the structural changes
that Italian society was experiencing.
Above all, and for a communist party this is not exactly a small thing,
it did not see the economic transformations of the second half of the 1970s.
Too busy trying to find a government position, he did not grasp the
enormous consequences on society of a system that was changing course
and where finance and liberalism were regaining positions that seemed
definitively overcome just a few decades earlier.
It is worth remembering, for example, that the birth of a daily
newspaper like Repubblica, not by chance in 1976, whose founders were
the first to understand (and, indeed, were the main propagators of the
new ideology) that it was necessary to intervene on hegemony - in order
to overcome the class struggle - proposing interclassist solutions and
declaring the class struggle overcome, was a fundamental piece in this
bosses' "reconquest".
Meanwhile, the PCI dreamed of impossible historical compromises, not
only as a deeply politicized reading of the Chilean coup, but as a
positioning that preceded, and by far, the killing of Allende. An idea
of a democracy at the top in which the two mass parties organized society.
The consequence, quite intuitive and perhaps intended, was the
marginalization and then the criminalization of entire social areas,
which, if they do not represent the majority, were certainly a
significant minority that they preferred to lose.
An active minority like all those who, since there has been a thing
called "left", manage to transfer the struggles and demands into society.
Then, as was quite evident, Moro's DC, not another blessed evangelical,
but a shrewd politician and, even more importantly, above all
anti-communist, put the PCI in a corner.
Not only was the PCI not allowed to enter the government (there was not
a single minister who was not only a communist but not even remotely
from the area in the list drawn up by Moro, making even Zaccagnini
angry) but, with Moro in the hands of the BR (who probably knew even
less about politics), the Communist Party, pushed by the bourgeois
newspapers and, above all, by Scalfari's Repubblica, became the
standard-bearer of firmness, to demonstrate that it was reliable, that
it was ready to govern. Obviously, Moro in the coffin, that PCI was no
longer needed. The DC was safe and the Craxi PSI was coming at full
speed, with which it governed for years, leaving Berlinguer alone in
front of the factories. Well, I don't know if Segre's film will be able
to at least address these historical crossroads. But it's time to talk
about these events as we talk about history. They belong to the past,
but that doesn't mean, and above all, NOT because of this, that we can
continue to tell stories without any relationship with reality. It is
said that young people do not know history. But if we continue to tell
it this way, perhaps it is really better that they do not even study it.
Obviously, today, faced with the decades-long destruction of every
socialist proposal and the overcoming of capital, a figure like
Berlinguer stands out as (which he certainly was) the last great
communist leader. And from these latitudes even the historical
compromise no longer seems the disgrace that it seemed to us at the
time. Also because that was still a meeting, yes at the top, but of two
different parties and certainly not the completely post-political idea
of the reunion in a single political entity of realities with completely
different visions and histories.
And then because in those years, again, the parties were truly mass
organizations and therefore the context in which the leaders and
political structures operated, even if criticizable (as is normal for
every political reality) was completely different from the current
panorama that we could certainly define as kleptocratic and antidemocratic.
It is not the case here to reconstruct historical paths that would
require studies of enormous complexity.
We do not know whether the disappearance of the left in Italy is due to
the pro-government decline that the PCI took in the mid-1970s or to the
generation of 40-year-olds who demolished everything, gripped by an
iconoclastic fury that we could define as reactionary "Jacobinism", or
whether it is actually the result of all this plus many other things,
not all verifiable, measurable and rational.
Of course, the Berlinguer that the PD continues to exalt did not have
any traits that could even bring him closer to a reality that for
decades has jumped every obstacle, and, in the wake of a liberal
tradition out of time, continues to place itself above all in defense of
civil rights without social rights, fully inserted in an Atlanticist
context (with respect to which many Christian Democrats of the past
would appear today as radicals) and in support of NATO's direct or proxy
wars. Not to mention the deafening silence on the genocide in Gaza.
I do not think that the flesh-and-blood Berlinguer would find himself
very comfortable in that group. However, however much he may have been a
political adversary of ours (and I repeat, political) in those years, he
remained a communist (with all the defects and merits of this definition).
It would be good if those who have chosen another path put an end to
that fortieth anniversary funeral that has been celebrated for 40 years.
Also because, if you look closely, that coffin is now empty.
Andrea Bellucci
Minimal bibliography
The bibliography on Berlinguer is very extensive, but we could start
from the agile work
- Giuseppe Fiori, "Vita di Enrico Berlinguer", Laterza, 1989.
On the historical compromise
- Enrico Berlinguer, "Per un nuovo grande compromiso storico",
Castelvecchi, 2014.
On the Moro kidnapping, the most interesting work, but blocked due to
the seizure of material by the judiciary from the authors, is:
- Marco Clementi (edited by) "Brigate rosse. Dalle fattori alla
«campagna di primavera»", Deriveapprodi, 2017
https://www.ucadi.org/2024/11/23/berlinguer-immaginato
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten