The New Old World (60 page)

Four years ago, reflecting bitterly on his country's politics, Giovanni Sartori remarked that Gramsci had been right to distinguish between a war of position and a war of manoeuvre. Great leaders—Churchill or De Gaulle—were such because of their instinct for wars of manoeuvre. In Italy, politicians knew only wars of position. He himself had always thought the title of Ortega's famous book
España invertebrada
would be still more apt for Italy, where the Counter-Reformation had created deep habits of conformism, and continual foreign invasions and conquests had made of the Italians specialists in survival by bending low.
Lacking any elites of mettle, this was a nation without a bone in its body.
⁶²
Sartori was not talking at random. His addressees were the political class he described. By this time, the PCI was gone, Berlusconi was in power and his central objectives were clear: to protect himself and his empire from the law. The
ad personam
measures to secure both, pushed through Parliament, landed on the desk of the president. The Italian presidency is not a purely honorific post. The Quirinale not only nominates the premier, who must be ratified by Parliament, but can withhold approval of ministers, and refuse to sign legislation. In 2003 the incumbent was the former central banker Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, an ornament of the Centre-Left who had headed the final government of the First Republic, served as finance minister under Prodi, and is today a senator for the Democratic Party.

Imperturbably, Ciampi signed exceptional legislation not only to consolidate Berlusconi's grip on television, but to guarantee him permanent immunity from prosecution—an immunity of which Ciampi himself, as president, was also a beneficiary, as he appended his signature to it. Outside the Quirinale, anguished candle-lit appeals in the street begged him not to. But the heirs of Communism raised no objection. Indeed it had been from the ranks of the Centre-Left itself that the first draft of the bill for immunity had come. If there was hand-wringing in the press over the law, the president—constitutionally supposed to be
super partes
, and treated with all due reverence—was not put in question. Only one significant national voice was raised, not plaintively, but scathingly, against Ciampi. It came from Sartori, as a conservative liberal, who publicly asked Ciampi whether he even existed, contemptuously dubbing him a rabbit for his cowardice.

These days, it is a former Communist—Giorgio Napolitano, leader of the most right-wing faction in the PCI after the passing of Amendola—who sits in the Quirinale. By this time the first immunity law had been struck down by the Constitutional Court. But when it was given a new wrapping—after the fashion of Lisbon, one might say—and the substance of the same bill was voted through again by Berlusconi's majority in Parliament, the head of the post-Communist delegation in the Senate, far from
opposing it, explained that the Democratic Party had no objection in principle, though perhaps it should come into force only in the next legislature. Napolitano had no time for such
points d'honneur
, signing the bill into law on the day he received it. Once again, the only voices to denounce this ignominy were liberal or apolitical, Sartori and a handful of free spirits—immediately reproved by the press not only of Democratic, but Rifondazione obedience, for wanting in respect for the head of state. Such is the
sinistra invertebrata
of Italy today.

Powerful historical forces—the end of the Soviet experience; the contraction, or disintegration, of the traditional workingclass; the weakening of the welfare state; the expansion of the videosphere; the decline of parties—have borne hard on the Left everywhere in Europe, leaving none in particularly good shape. The fall of Italian Communism is in that sense part of a wider story, which lies beyond censure. Yet nowhere else has such an imposing heritage been so completely squandered. The party that was outwitted by De Gasperi and Andreotti, failing to purge fascism or split clericalism, was still an expanding mass force of remarkable vitality, whatever its strategic innocence. Its descendants have colluded with Berlusconi, with no shadow of an excuse: fully aware of who he was and what they were doing. There is now an abundant literature of exposure on Berlusconi, both within Italy and without, including at least three first-class studies in English. But it is striking how limp-wristed much of this becomes when it touches on the role of the Centre-Left in helping him clean his slate and entrench his power. The complicity of its presidents in successive bids to put him—and themselves—above the law is no anomaly, but part of a consistent pattern that has seen the heirs of Italian Communism allow him to retain and expand his media empire, in defiance of what was once the law; not lift a finger to deal with his conflicts of interest; spring his right-hand man, and not a few other millionaire criminals, from jail; and repeatedly seek to cut electoral deals with him, at the expense of any democratic principle, to benefit themselves. At the end of all this, they have come away not only as empty-handed as their predecessors, but terminally emptier of mind and conscience.

What, for its part, has happened to the great cathedral of leftwing culture in Italy? It had started to crumble long before, its
foundations undermined with the one-time citadel of the mass party itself. As in Germany, the shift to the right came first in the field of history, with a revaluation of the country's dictatorship between the wars. The first volume of Renzo De Felice's biography of Mussolini, covering his years up to the end of the First World War, was published in 1965. But it was not until the fourth, covering the period from the Great Depression to the invasion of Ethiopia, appeared in 1974—followed a year later by a book-length interview with the American neo-conservative Michael Ledeen, subsequently prominent in the Iran-Contra affair—that this huge enterprise had a major impact in the public sphere, for the first time attracting a barrage of criticism on the left as a rehabilitation of Fascism.
⁶³
By the time his fifth volume came out, in the early eighties, De Felice had become an accepted authority, enjoying ready access to the media—he would increasingly appear on television—and meeting decreasing domestic challenge. Soon he was calling for the end of anti-fascism as an official ideology in Italy, and by the mid-nineties was explaining that the role of the Resistance in what was actually a civil war in the north, in which loyalties to the Republic of Salò had been underestimated, needed to be demystified.
⁶⁴
His eighth and last volume, incomplete at his death, came out in 1997. In total, De Felice devoted 6,500 pages to the life of Mussolini, over three times the length of Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler, and proportionately longer even than Martin Gilbert's authorized life of Churchill: the largest single monument to any leader of the twentieth century.

The scale of the work, poorly written and often arbitrarily constructed, was never matched by its quality. Its strengths lay in De Felice's indefatigable archival research, and his insistence on a few unexceptionable truths, principally that the militants of Fascism as a movement had come in the main from the lower middle class, that Fascism as a system attracted support from businessmen, bureaucrats, and higher social classes generally, and that at its height the regime commanded a wide popular consensus. These findings, none of them particularly original, sat in incoherent company with
claims that Fascism was an offspring of the Enlightenment, that it had nothing to do with Nazism, that its collapse saw the death of the nation, and not least, with a hopelessly indulgent, oversized portrait of Mussolini himself as a great—if flawed—realistic statesman. Intellectually speaking, De Felice had little of the conceptual equipment or breadth of interest of Ernst Nolte, whose first book had preceded him. But his impact was much greater, not only by reason of the sheer weight of his scholarship, or even of the fact—fundamental though this obviously was—that in Germany fascism had been discredited much more absolutely than in Italy, but also because by the end of his career there was so little life left in the official post-war culture he had set out to oppose. Significantly, the most radical demolitions of his edifice came from Mack Smith in England, rather than any Italian historian.
⁶⁵

But if there was no real counterpart to the
Historikerstreit
in Italy, where De Felice could feel he had achieved most of his goals, there was also a less clear-cut shift of intellectual energies at large to the right than in Germany. De Felice's principal successor, Emilio Gentile, has devoted himself to amplifying the familiar theme that the mass politics of the twentieth century were secularized versions of supernatural faith, dividing these into malign brands—communism, nazism, nationalism—comprising fanatical ‘political' religions, and more acceptable forms—notably, American patriotism—that constitute ‘civil' religions: totalitarianism versus democracy in sacred dress. This is a construction that has won more of a following in the Anglosphere than in Italy itself. The same, paradoxically, might be said of the last fruits of
operaismo
on the left. There, the sober spirit of the
enquête ouvrière
had passed away with the premature death of Panzieri in the mid-sixties, and at the impulsion of Tronti and the young—then equally incendiary—literary critic Asor Rosa, its outlook underwent two drastic twists.

From Tronti came the conviction that the working class, far from having to endure successive economic transformations at the hands of capital, was their demiurge, imposing on employers and the state the structural changes of each phase of accumulation. Not in the impersonal economic requirements of profitability from above, but in the driving pressure of class struggles from
below, lay the secret of development. From Asor Rosa came the argument that ‘committed literature' was a populist delusion, for the working class could never hope to benefit from the arts or letters of a modern world in which culture as such was, by definition, irremediably bourgeois. No crude philistinism, or simple-minded Tolstoyanism, followed. Rather, it was only the high modernism of Mann or Proust, Kafka or Svevo, and the radical avant-garde, up to but not beyond Brecht, that mattered as literature—but as so many testimonies, of incomparable formal invention, to the inner contradictions of bourgeois existence, not as a legacy of any use to the world of labour. The gulf between the two could not be bridged by even the best revolutionary intentions of a Mayakovsky: it was constitutive.

To make good literature, socialism has not been essential. To make the revolution, writers will not be essential. The class struggle takes a different path. It has other voices to express itself, make itself understood. And poetry cannot be behind it. For poetry, when it is great, speaks a language in which
things
––the hard things of struggle and daily existence––have already assumed the exclusive value of a symbol, of a gigantic metaphor of the world: and the price, often tragic, of its greatness is that what it says escapes from practice, never to return to it.
⁶⁶

When this was written, its target was the official line of the PCI, and behind it Gramsci, who had believed that the communist movement was the legitimate heir of the highest European culture, from the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment onwards, and that among the problems it needed to solve in Italy was the absence of a national-popular literature. But as the upheavals of the late sixties unfolded, first Tronti and then Asor Rosa decided it made more sense to work within the PCI, where the organized working class was after all to be found, than outside it. In taking this step, Tronti transposed his vision of the primacy of struggles in the factory to the activities of the party in society, radicalizing it into a theory of the autonomy of politics as such from production. Younger than Asor Rosa or Tronti, and the most intellectually ambitious of the trio, Massimo Cacciari completed what they had started, not merely separating culture and economy from revolutionary politics, but proposing a systematic dissociation of all the spheres of modern
life and thought from one another as so many technical domains, each untranslatable into any other. In common was only their crisis, equally visible in turn-of-the-century physics, neo-classical economics, canonical epistemology, liberal politics, not to speak of the division of labour, the operations of the market, the organization of the state. ‘Negative thought' alone had been capable of grasping the depth of this crisis—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger.
⁶⁷
What Hegel had joined, they refused: dialectical synthesis of any kind.

Operaismo
had always been anti-historicist, as it was antihumanist. In Cacciari's
Krisis
(1976), it now found inspiration in a line of nihilist thinkers, of whom Nietzsche was initially the most important for his account of the will to power, whose contemporary incarnation could only be the PCI. But there was to be no irrationalism. What the ‘culture of crisis' called for were new orders and forms of rationality, specific to each practice. So in guiding the party towards its objectives, Weber and Schmitt—not Gramsci—were the indicated counsellors, each a specialist of politics as cold, lucid technique. Intellectually speaking, a more thoroughgoing rejection of the Marxism enshrined in the PCI, steeped in a Hegelian spirit of synthesis, would be difficult to imagine. But politically, the Nietzschean turn of
operaismo
proved perfectly compatible with the official line of the party in the early seventies. For what could the will to power in Italy at the time mean? Clearly, Tronti argued, it was the PCI's vocation to rule the country as the architect of an alliance between organized labour and big capital to modernize economy and society, not unlike the New Deal in America, which he had always admired—a pact of wages and profits against the parasitism of rents.