The old dies and the new struggles to grow. Antonio Gramsci had anticipated the inexorable contradiction that is crushing the left. And which today leads us to reread fundamental passages of his story in the need to find indications and solutions to the drama of his progressive marginalization. Eighty years after the speech in Naples, with which Palmiro Togliatti launched the strategic “Salerno turning point”, inaugurating a dualism between the two cities which, after the tragedy of the war, saw numerous farces in the Democratic Party, a new opportunity arises to look at history without remaining prisoners of the past.
The need to return to that text was felt by the Infiniti Mondi publishing house, directed by Gianfranco Nappi, who brought Togliatti’s document back to the bookstore, basing on it a discussion of which the first act was staged in Naples on the day in which the anniversary of the historic speech at the Modernissimo cinema, in the Neapolitan capital, was remembered on 11 April, with the historian Francesco Barbagallo, and that Antonio Bassolino who still symbolizes the last great season of a cultural and administrative primacy of the Neapolitan left. As always, when we return to the great passages of history, the risk is that of being overwhelmed by the power of a gesture or thought that had a great effect. In this case, while yet another form of self-destruction of the Democratic Party is taking place, in which politics is overshadowed by the subjective limitations of the characters in the field, the comparison between today and yesterday, between those giants and the current dwarfs, becomes almost irresistible. . In Naples the discussion around Togliatti’s speech did not escape this danger, remaining entangled in a rhetorical, and in some ways even uncritical, celebration of that time, without grasping the historical characteristics that made the PCI and its top leader the subjects of a global strategy that had been drawn up by the great hands of the powers that were winning the war. But Togliatti, as that refined intellectual dressed in the ordinary clothes of one of the many management ganglia of the branched third-internationalist network, put his own spin on him, making himself an extraordinary interpreter and carrier.
Let’s get to the text first. As we know, Ercoli, nom de guerre of the secretary of the PCI, obtained authorization from Stalin to return to Italy after the announcement of the armistice on 8 September 1943. He then organized a long and complex journey which led him to wander between Baku, Tehran, Cairo, Algiers, and finally to embark for Italy, where he arrived at the end of March 1944. The issue to be resolved concerns the impasse in which the anti-fascist parties found themselves after the formation of the Badoglio government, paralyzed by the preliminary ruling anti-monarchical and by the refusal of a prevailing party to collaborate with a government that was in any case compromised with the fallen fascist regime. Togliatti cuts the Gordian knot with the sword of a clear and reasoned strategy, agreed with Stalin in person a few days before his departure from Moscow, always in the ways in which one could imagine agreeing, and not simply implementing, a solution with the head of the Kremlin: include the PCI among the constituent forces of the new Italy to circumvent that agreement on the Yalta zones of influence, which assigned our country to the Anglo-Americans, allowing the USSR to maintain its own form of influence in the Mediterranean . The strength of that policy consisted precisely in the complete coincidence with the material interests of the country, and with the objective ambitions of the popular movement which, thanks to the flexibility of the choice promoted by Togliatti, then became a founding part of the subsequent Republic.
Here we can see the still alive aspect of that discourse, which does not concern the mechanical re-proposal of the defense of the popular roots claimed by Togliatti for the new party, but rather the attention to the overall socio-economic and geopolitical scenario. The secretary explains it well in his report to the executives: “The period in which the party could limit itself to being a propaganda party is absolutely over. We must give the people the guidance they need. The party was the most determined in the anti-fascist struggle. Today the character of this struggle is changing. It must examine every problem from the point of view of the nation, of the Italian State. Tasks of the party: to be a mass party, to solve the nation’s problems”.
Further on, the communist leader adds another piece to the mosaic: “The change in character of the Communist Party is linked to a whole series of new facts: existence of Soviet power; failure of the Italian bourgeoisie; change (thanks to the USSR) of the balance of power in international anti-fascist unity”. Here we see the relationship between the social rooting of the party – the working class – and the suggestion of a perspective that remains in the background but which, precisely because of the USSR’s looming on the world scene, is a concrete variable that leads workers to have a legitimate ambition and hope, in the name of which to govern the State.
With this new effort, adds Togliatti, we must be able to carefully read social and global dynamics. It is the matrix that leads the PCI to set aside the anti-monarchist prejudice and to open up to collaboration with Badoglio, putting all Italian politics back into motion. This was exactly the spirit that, thirty years later, led Enrico Berlinguer to develop the strategy of the “historical compromise”, still in a reality in which the social base of the party was that of subordinate producers, and therefore that compromise was also linked to that producers’ pact that allowed the left to interfere in economic-financial choices.
But today? What would Togliatti say when landing in a country where the economic fabric is completely different from the scenario he outlined: there is neither a “socialist homeland” nor a plausible ambition to overthrow capitalism, the factory as the main place for the creation of wealth, the class as a unitary and uniform social body has been shattered. This is the framework in which the left is called to operate in our century. And in which the lack of rigor and a national compass, claimed by Togliatti, leads it, in the face of difficulties, to take refuge in a sterile revival of ancient glories.
The re-edition of the Modernissimo discourse is an opportunity to reflect on a method, and this was the purpose of Infiniti mondo: not to nostalgically celebrate a content of which the slightest trace no longer exists, but rather to refer to a political culture which would help to read the new processes. With Togliatti, beyond Togliatti – argued Lucio Magri at a conference in Milan in the mid-1970s. That invitation should be accepted and used, adapting the toolbox of those who in those years of iron and fire took the opportunity to transform a sect of “professional revolutionaries” into a large national party. And today, thinking about the interests of a country humiliated by a reactionary government and oppressed by the technological domination of monopolistic owners, it would have a great need of that vision and that resolute ability to override traditions and forget myths to navigate the open sea.
Tags: years Salerno turning point
