Which Berlinguer loves Schlein? – Startmag

It is difficult to interpret Schlein’s intentions in the decision to reproduce the extreme close-up (actually the eyes) of the late Enrico Berlinguer on the PD membership card. If we exclude the celebratory intent of the birthday (if desired, the 100th anniversary of Matteotti’s death could have been commemorated) all that remains is to acknowledge that the PD secretariat intended to send a signal to the people of the PD. Which is normal, but in this case it’s less so: what signal?

Does the card recall Berlinguer who claimed to feel “safer under the umbrella of NATO”? It could be consistent with Schlein’s positions on the war in Ukraine, but then it should be reiterated to avoid misunderstandings.

Because there was also a Berlinguer who wanted to draw a ditch with respect to the reformist left, forcing the CGIL to break with the other unions on the 1984 Valentine’s Day agreement (and dragging it into a badly lost posthumous referendum). There was the intransigent Berlinguer on the Moro case, who contributed (for reasons never fully clarified) to sentencing him to death. There was the Berlinguer of the historical compromise, who postulated the agreement between the DC and the PCI as intrinsic to a mythical “third way” which in any case excluded the reformist political forces, PSI in the first place. There was Berlinguer who, during the historic Fiat dispute of 1980, called for the “live broadcast” of the negotiations, thus making it clear how little trust he had in the unions. But also Berlinguer was capable of taking charge of a difficult situation in the country, supporting a Government of National Unity; only to withdraw when the situation became truly dramatic (Moro kidnapping). There was the “austere” Berlinguer who, like a Dominican friar, condemned consumerism and didn’t want color TV. Finally, there was the moralizing Berlinguer, who drew a line between the PCI on one side and the others (corrupts, thieves, etc.) and opened the way to the war against politics and the judicial massacre that put an end to the First Republic, without the country having gained the slightest improvement from such moralism.

A multitasking character, Berlinguer, capable of saying that the October Revolution had “exhausted its driving force” but consequently not willing to come to terms with who was right between Gramsci and Turati, between Leninism and social democracy, so not even to consider joining the Socialist International and to invent, as a replacement, a pyrotechnic “Eurocommunism”, an aesthetic and inconsistent makeshift, which is now barely remembered but which still today carries the cultural and ideological consequences of a knot that Berlinguer could have untied 40 years ago, introducing the PCI fully into the reformist socialist movement, which was, moreover, largely hegemonic in Europe at the time: he preferred to keep close to his old comrades who “wouldn’t understand” and, indeed, make war on the PSI and Craxi in the name of a longed-for third way, not between capitalism and socialism but even between Leninism and social democracy: an objective never even glimpsed because it does not exist in nature.

But let’s go back to the beginning: what does good Enrico mean on the PD card? Which of the facets mentioned above does it correspond to? All of them would be answered by a knowledgeable leader of the PCI (a practically extinct race) convinced of the need for the Party to speak to different cultures and sensitivities and to know how to represent them, without prejudice, of course, to cultural hegemony.

But perhaps Comrade Schlein is not so shrewd and calculating, so I suspect that, in all sincerity, the Berlinguer that Elly intends to hold up as an example is that of the last manifestation mentioned above: the one who pursues a goal with nobility and dedication fantastic, never found in nature, but which satisfies the multiplicity of ideal drives, moral needs, individual rights that the “people of the Democratic Party” would express. An objective so universally desirable that it can be declined at will without making particular calculations with reality.

I don’t know how much you would describe the path you have in mind in this way, but beyond the terminology, this is what your choices reveal. The center of gravity of the Democratic Party’s political action is now on individual and civil rights, on a somewhat operetta-like anti-fascism, on an international policy that is a little too silent, on the feudalism of the RAI, on a cloying show of spades and spite with the Government for issues of the size of the Planck unit, forgotten as soon as the controversy is exhausted. The problems of economic, industrial and labor policy are blurred in the background, sometimes prophetically evoked but concretely delegated to the CGIL whose initiatives the Democratic Party always automatically shares without even the pretense of a debate.

But for that reason it was not necessary to bother Berlinguer: the rainbow or the face of Schlein herself was enough. If Berlinguer served to please what still remains of the PCI in the Democratic Party (which not by chance has recovered the vestiges of Bersani and D’Alema) it was necessary to deal with those in the Democratic Party who were not previously communists: Berlinguer himself, as an inventor of the Historical Compromise, he would not have been happy about it…

On the other hand, “oportet ut scandalia eveniant”: the next few months will tell us if Elly has managed to Schleinize the Democratic Party or if the Party will have shredded her.

And as always in Italy, the reformists will observe from the stands…