The Tailor of Ulm by Lucio Magri

Author:Lucio Magri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

PROLOGUE

We need to step back and look again, in the light of ’68, at what had been happening in the PCI immediately before it. First of all, it is not true that the PCI had stood outside the movement, unprepared for its focal issues and therefore lacking the authority to influence it or the capacity to learn something new from its ideas and experiences. There would certainly have been no hot autumn, with all its advanced characteristics, if the labour revival had not occurred in the early 1960s; a comparison with the May wave of factory occupations in France, and with the way in which they ended, is enough to convince us of this.

It is even possible that the student revolt would not have turned left and become so rapidly politicized, nor shown such a keen interest in Marxism, had it not been for the anti-fascist mobilization and constant anti-colonial struggles of those years, and the gradual revival of an unorthodox or at least non-dogmatic Marxism, partly imported from abroad, which had by then found a warm reception in the PCI. On the other hand, that long process of implantation, and the resulting influence within the movement, was not as effective as it might have been – partly by choice, partly through sheer ineptitude and bad luck. When I say ‘by choice’, I am referring to the conclusion of the Eleventh Congress and the needless suppression of dissent. I confess that when I was still a member of the PCI, not too disciplined but harmless enough, and even more after I had been driven out, a tendency to recrimination may sometimes have blinded me to the reasons for things that seemed to me, and were, mistaken. And, when the great victories gave way to a slow decline, the lines from Molière sometimes went through my head: ‘Vous l’avez voulu, vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin, vous l’avez voulu …’

Today is no longer the time for recrimination, and I suspect that its object was anyway not as important as I once thought. But the fact remains, and I recall it to help me understand how things shaped up as they did. The so-called ingraini, or followers of Ingrao, were for a long time accused of overestimating the political and trade union value of the new workers’ struggles, and thus of downplaying the question of alliances with other sectors of society. Three years later, in 1969, such a criticism would have appeared absurd; if anything, the Party made the mistake of not speaking up and establishing a presence of its own in the factory, instead of leaving everything to the unions in the name of their autonomy. The ingraini were also accused of abstract, long-sighted vision, of chasing after new contradictions of neocapitalism, of seeking a different growth model when there were still major areas of backwardness to combat, traditional forces to mobilize, and traditional middle layers to keep from defection. These charges too were disproved by the facts three years later. The real casus belli, as we have seen, remained the question of reforming the Party.

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