What Is Left of the (Italian) Left? Roberto Pedretti (Milan) oday the left finds itself in the landscape, similar to a tidal wave that has Tdangerous but extraordinary submerged almost all the political forces condition of being called to reinvent and of the 20th century, in particular the left, rethink its role, to open, and experiment both in its multifarious forms, from the with, new spaces of possibilities. As Slavoj most reformist to the most radical one.5 Zizek writes in the long introduction The outcome of the last general elections to a selection of Lenin‘s writings, this in Italy (4 March 2018) produced a means working through past historical political landscape that confirms a events – in particular failures – to re/ process that – apart from a few exceptions produce the coordinates of the left’s – seems to be global and systemic. project of emancipation.1 This should recover from the past and adapt to he crisis of the Italian and European 6 the present the historical purpose of Tleft is partly the outcome of the the left with the aim of breaking with intellectual and political difficulty of forms of subaltern thinking that have confronting the historical changes and hindered the redefinition of the political social transformations of the last decades. space in the context of the global It has produced a subordinate position economic and social transformations. towards the hegemony of the neoliberal consensus, which has prevented the left n his last book “La lunga eclissi. from evaluating the social and cultural IPassato e presente del dramma della effects this consensus has on its traditional sinistra”,2 Achille Occhetto - the last constituency and the emerging new PCI3 secretary and first secretary of social subjects. According to Paolo Flores PDS4, a national party born after the fall d‘Arcais, the hegemony of neoliberal of the Berlin wall in 1989 - writes that thought and practices has been realised we are facing an unrecognisable political to some extent because the left betrayed Page 65 Hard Times 103 (1/2019) What Is Left of the (Italian) Left? its mandate by accepting as inevitable the last 50 years, defines as the rise of the economic-financial paradigm imposed self-declared common man in power. by the forces of capitalism. Thus, the European left has become complicit in a ccording to Tronti, in the first years system that tolerated reformist political Aafter the end of the Second World activism only as long as it was willing War, the democratic political system, to stay within a well-defined ideological based on great mass parties like the PCI horizon with the goal of co-opting the (Italian Communist Party) and the DC left’s constituencies.7 If we interpret the (Christian Democracy), was able to get 9 crisis of the left within this framework, it rid of the Uomo Qualunque movement must be read as the product of a process within a short time thanks to the ability of social and economic transformation to represent, despite strong ideological starting in the 1970s. As stated by the differences, the needs of the subaltern philosopher Massimo Cacciari, we are classes and to shape the processes of a 10 facing an epochal transition, which general modernisation of Italian society. requires re-thinking and re-reading key It was only after the fall of fascism and words such as left, democracy, people, the adoption of the new institutional and values.8 Calling things by their real system based on the 1948 Constitution, name and remodelling their meaning that a pluralist approach was adopted; is the indispensable precondition for this provided forms of decentralised articulating a new project for the left. participation through the formation of democratic political institutions at Back to the Future the regional, provincial, and municipal level, based on a stable party system and ince the birth of fascism, Italy a strictly proportional electoral system.11 Shas often been labelled a political test case, a laboratory anticipating fter the great workers‘ struggles political tendencies and transformations Acycle of the 1960s and 1970s, the elsewhere. In this perspective, we have emancipatory and modernising function to consider the birth of Forza Italia of the left seemed to decline due to its and ‘Berlusconism’ at the beginning of inability to understand the profound the 1990s, a successful political project processes of social reorganisation rhetorically based on redeeming the brought on by the transformation of power of the self-made man and taunting capitalism As Hardt and Negri underline, professional politicians. Today this in the last fifty years the primary site of anomaly reappears in the form of what production has shifted from the factory the philosopher Mario Tronti, a leading to society. Automation, information protagonist of the political debate of the technology and financialisation conjured Page 66 Hard Times 103 (1/2019) Roberto Pedretti to create new social relations and new by the crisis of the Fordist mode of subjectivities.12 The political cultures production, the gradual financialisation inspired by the communist and socialist of capital and the globalisation of the tradition – as well as the popular Catholic markets. This transformation changed one – played a diminishing role as centres the social structure of the country of ideological aggregation and identity and led to a gradual weakening of building, giving way to accentuated the cultural and social fabric on forms of individualism linked to the which the left had built its success. new forms of consumption and the transformation of the labour market.13 he inability to fully understand Tthe structural changes was evident ntil then, the strongest communist in strategic choices made by the main Uparty of the western world had party of the left, the PCI: between 1973 been the main driving force of the social and 1979 it passed from the so-called and civil transformation of the country, ‘historical compromise’ (an agreement a force which ruled in several regions of government with the DC) to the of the nation and most of the main proposal of a ‘democratic alternative’ metropolitan areas, imposing a specific (re-proposing an alliance with the form of cultural and ideological hegemony socialist area). Moreover, the attempt that distinguished it profoundly from its to imagine a ‘third way’, a nebulous brotherly parties. TheCommunist Party proposal that aimed to overcome both and its allies usually gained around 40 the European model of social democracy to 45 per cent of the votes and managed and Soviet socialism, was an additional to build a consensus that transcended supplement to this political deadlock.14 class boundaries and integrated vast Some historical events are still sectors of the middle classes and the indicative of this difficulty in grasping entrepreneurial class. The electoral peak the depth of these structural changes. of the Italian left coincided with the general elections of June 1976, when the n the midst of a long and fierce labour whole of the Italian left gathered about Idispute in FIAT, the success of the so- 46 to 47 per cent of the votes with the called ‘march of the forty thousand’, a Communist Party at about 35 per cent. public protest organised by white-collar workers and managerial cadres of the t is one of the paradoxes of history automotive industry in Turin in October Ithat the difficulties of the Italian 1980, symbolically marked the end of left began at that very moment. The an era and the beginning of a process of left failed to understand the structural marginalisation of the workers unions. economic transformation driven At the time, few observers understood Page 67 Hard Times 103 (1/2019) What Is Left of the (Italian) Left? the historical range of this defeat and cultural transformations determined the fact that it was the harbinger of largely by the new models of labour the profound restructuring process of market organisation were imposing their industrial and trade union relations effects on the part of society traditionally as well as the start of restructuring linked to the left. The appearance and programmes of the production apparatus spread of new models of industrial that would eventually lead to the end production and organisation of work, of the traditional Fordist factory.15 defined as ‘molecular capitalism’, ‘family capitalism’ or the ‘people of the VAT ID few years later, in 1985, a numbers’17, led to the emergence of new A referendum initiated by the PCI social subjectivities that the left failed and the CGIL, the largest workers to understand and then to intercept.18 union, against cutting the so-called ‘scala mobile’ (a state controlled he incubation of the crisis mechanism to automatically update the Tof the left exploded in all its salaries to the inflation rate), was clearly virulence in 2008 and caused what defeated, which further signalled both Tronti defines as the mutation of the the fracture within the left on this and left political élite, a mutation that other issues related to economic and is retrospectively understood and industrial policies and the unexpected explained by Massimo D‘Alema19 in a change of feeling in a large part of long critical reflection. He claims that public opinion on industrial relations 16 [...] the liberal-socialist vision has proved and development. The decline of the to be largely illusory and that reformism Italian left and its main protagonist, the has been crushed between the weight PCI, was also symbolically represented of the global economy and the markets in the dramatic death in 1984 of and the limited possibility of action of political institutions that have remained the party’s secretary general, Enrico largely national.20 Berlinguer. Suffering from a stroke at a rally in Padua during the election gain Tronti‘s reflection recalls campaign for the European Parliament, Ahow the failure to grasp he died a few days later.