It is an assumption shared by right-thinking people the world over that the way to life, liberty and happiness lies through a functioning two-party democracy.
So we must share the grief that Italy and the Italian people must feel, from their president Giorgio Napolitano right down to the voter in the street, following the crushing defeat for the Democratic party in Sardinia, and the brave if quixotic decision of its leader, Walter Veltroni, to accept the blame by resigning.
Eighteen months previously, Veltroni had adopted Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can” slogan. In the end, he could not.
“It was an ambitious project that required a strong leadership, but Veltroni was too weak and contradictory to create a viable alternative to Berlusconi,” said Stefano Folli of the business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.
“The party never had an identity, at least not one that Italians understood.”
This, it seems, is true. Somewhere along the way the baby was thrown out with the bath water.
But what a tragedy, and how much every genuine democrat must feel grieved, that a proud prince, what was called the PCI, Partito Comunista Italiano, perhaps the most sophisticated and self aware of any political party in the world — except, perhaps, in the hubris of its belief in its self-evident historical mission — should have miscalculated so badly.
Of course, you might say, a victory for the right is swings and roundabouts in achieving the systemic benefits of alternation and renewal.
And in any case, it is the Italian electorate’s verdict on what’s on offer, it is their right to choose.
There is no place for Bertold Brecht’s irony of “The people have lost the confidence of the government; the government has decided to dissolve the people, and to appoint another one.”
But if so, and there’s also no room for blaming Gramscian “common sense” just as much as there is for pretending there’s such a thing as false consciousness when working people vote for the representatives of the rich and privileged, or, perhaps that’s the trap, to hold that it must be their fault when they vote for someone other than you, it is truly chilling to hear Veltroni acknowledge that Berlusconi, the media mogul-turned politician, has created a “hegemonic” hold on Italy – even if because “with the means at his service he has distorted the system of values and set up a system of ‘no values’ which must be challenged with courage”.
What is more chilling is that, after the shock vote was announced, Altero Matteoli, a National Alliance minister , remarked that the Sardinian vote “sees consolidated the bipolar system with the view of having a European style two-party system”.
Matteoli continues: “Let’s hope that this strong electoral reality allows the PD to reflect on a crushing and humiliating political defeat suffered at the hands of incomprehensible positions geared on an opposition as an end in itself and inconclusive”.
For the chairman of the PDL group at the Senate, Maurizio Gasparri; “Let’s hope Veltroni remains the leader of the PD. This is a certainty of victory for us”.
But the left’s candidate in its stronghold of Sardinia, birthplace of Antonio Gramsci, was a Sard and the incumbent regional president, Renato Soru, a hugely successful businessman, founder of the telecoms and internet giant Tiscali, nevertheless a trusted adherent of the left, was beaten by another Sard, true, but the son of Silvio Berlusconi’s tax adviser! The irony of this, in the same week as British lawyer David Mills was jailed for helping the Italian prime minister and media tycoon evade taxes, is bitter.
Perhaps the most significant but chilling word in all this is “hegemonic”.
It would be difficult to overstress the importance of the root word, hegemony, in understanding the 20th century’s reform versus revolution, social democratic and socialist problematic from a marxist or communist perspective.
Adopted by Gramsci, it signifies the understanding that political power and the capacity to use it reside not in the mere taking of power, whether by a coup or by a parliamentary majority, but by achieving hegemony in state and civil society as a whole; by a political project (a term beloved by New Labour apparatchiks) that resonates intellectually, culturally and even emotionally; and by expressing that project in a range of groups, organisations and movements which have a life of their own but come together to form a political alliance at the ballot box.
This theory, expressed in the idea of the political party as the modern incarnation of Niccolo Machiavelli’s Prince, who would lead Italy to unity and liberty, was articulated by the Partito Comunista Italiano under its brave and memorable logo, the red flag hammer and sickle of the workers and peasants united under the communist star, superimposed on the red, white and green Garibaldi tricolour of the Italian republic declared in 1945 with the end of both the monarchy and fascism.
And, honouring the pact made by Stalin with Churchill and Roosevelt, it was then that the PCI agreed to elaborate what became known as the Italian road to socialism; a catholic stations of the cross to their present dilemma, but one that they had had to live with since the “years of lead” in the 1970s when the return of the revolutionary repressed consciousness disturbed, in the film 1900 and elsewhere, that labour of love to build the Modern Prince, a mass party that expressed and articulated the needs and desires of its adherents and voters and that would win power fair and squarely, through the ballot box, even if its opponents would not adhere to the ideal of “fair play, and may the best man win”.
It was an ideal that Veltroni tried to create (in a postmodern, post-communist Fukiyahama democratic world view) but instead thePCI’s opponent would stoop to every underhand trick and stratagem, right down to secret cabals and shadowy P2 lodges of military officers, politicians, churchmen, and business moguls, dedicated to defeating the communist menace at whatever cost and by whatever means.
Faced by the Catholic church and its political representative, Christian Democracy, and the hostility of the United States and Nato, the PCI that had led the wartime resistance to fascism was cheated in the first decisive test of the ballot box, 1948, and in effect martyred by the cold war. The word “martryred” is not used loosely; Freud says there is an affinity between the army, church and political party.
And faced by excommunication and corruption, the communists persevered in an almost saint-like fashion, with true working class militants standing shoulder to shoulder with aristocrat adherents, like film director Luchino Visconti, and the party’s charismatic leader from Sardinia, Enrico Berlinguer (above), drawing strength from their moral superiority in persisting with democracy despite being tarred with the crimes of stalinism, even when from 1968 onward the party was harshly critical of the Soviet Union’s failings.
By the 1970s the party had such a following that the DC could no longer govern Italy alone, and Berlinguer devised the “compromesso storico” to uphold democracy rather than risk a coup as in Chile.
For British readers, the situation was set out in a book published in 1977, The Italian Road to Socialism, an interview by historian Eric Hobsbawm with Giorgio Napolitano. In true Italian irony, today Napolitano is president of Italy while Hobsawm is 91 and a Companion of Honour, but cannot be allowed to see his MI5 file – presumably because the people who stitched him up are still alive and would be upset to be revealed for the creeps that they are. Rather like that other, secular saint, George Orwell, beloved of the Hitchens brothers.
Combined with the election in 1979 of Margaret Thatcher and the CPGB’s Marxism Today’s debate on the Forward march of labour halted? (a prescient anticipation of the strength and devastating impact of Thatcherism, as the hegemonic version became known after a fierce debate over whether she was a transient phenomenon).
I have an abiding memory of Labour party conferences where Neil Kinnock would listen and take notes while Hobsbawm spoke, and both would sing songs of the Italian resistance.
But today many others formed by reading Antonio Gramsci and studying the Italian road to socialism still dominate left politics, to mention just Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown in particular. MORO
But by 1980, when the PCI was set to attained the dreamed-of sorpasso, the overtaking in percentage of the national vote, the socialists emerged and the DC “swallowed the toad”, the metaphor for doing the unacceptable prominent in The Leopard, of letting them run the government instead. Craxi had emerged.
Gramsci counseled his side to begin a “long march through the institutions,” by which he meant the capture of the cinema, theater, schools, universities, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and courts. It is past time to begin a long march in a new and better direction.
Gramsci saw an important role in the transformation of society for those he called “organic” intellectuals (as opposed to “traditional” intellectuals). “Organic” intellectuals were to be intellectuals belonging to the repressed groups and making an effort to undermine the “hegemony” with the assistance of any “traditional” intellectuals they could persuade to defect from the dominant point of view. They will flourish as the roots of counter-hegemony grow. In other words, Gramsci was recommending recruiting radicalized women, members of minority groups, and others into the fold – affirmative action before that term was coined. Changing the minds of “traditional” intellectuals was particularly valuable, as they were already well positioned within the dominant educational institutions. The “long march through the institutions” – a phrase we also owe to Gramsci – began.
UNREAL — a 1975 publication of the Weatherfreaks has been unearthed which lays out a plan to turn to community “organizers” to bring about socialism in America.
It’s a blueprint for the career that the Obamanation followed, as a way to bring about radical change with “audacity” from within society’s institutions.
Obama is truly like the younger brother of Ayers/Dohrn who has been groomed to take the “long march through the institutions” that the more extreme ’60s radicals talked about once they realized they could not pursue their “revolutionary communism” overnight.
Obama is our worst nightmare, a sanitized radical who doesn’t scare (yet) Middle America even though he is every bit as far-left in his actual beliefs as Ayers/Dohrn/Wright/Khalidi/Pfleger.
Obama is a LIAR AND A FRAUD.
Wake up, America!!!
1 posted on 2 November 2008 06:37:33 GMT by Enchante
The PD could disappear with Mr Veltroni.
Maria Teresa Meli
18 febbraio 2009
In Sardinia last weekend, the incumbent center-left governor, Renato Soru, lost by 9 percentage points to Ugo Cappellacci, the relatively unknown son of Berlusconi’s tax adviser on the island.
EATS – With the overall result no longer in doubt, early forecasts gave the Centre-right 54 seats with 26 going to the Centre-left for a total of 80 regional councillors. The previous assembly had 85 members but the crushing win by Ugo Cappellacci’s coalition failed to trigger the majority premium that would have boosted the number of councillors above the minimum of 80 prescribed by law. In 2004, the Centre-left had 51 seats, thanks to the majority premium, and the opposition had 34.
Yet even in those days, the Left managed to hang on to a few strongholds. At every election. But yesterday’s figures are unequivocal. What a stab to the heart they must be for Fausto Bertinotti, who took up office as leader of the Chamber of Deputies by dedicating his victory “to working women and men”. The Northern League outstripped the Rainbow Left at Valdagno by 30% to 2.1% – in a town where forty years ago rioters pulled down the statue to industrialist Gaetano Marzotto. The League also eclipsed the Left in Schio, with its Lanerossi factories, by 25% to 2.6%, and destroyed it at Arzignano, where the mayor is Centre-left, by 37% to 1.5%. The Left was annihilated in the two blue-collar towns of Chiampo (41% to 0.9%) and San Pietro Mussolino, where the local electorate, largely made up of factory workers and their families, gave Umberto Bossi an amazing 49.8% of the vote and the grouping that somewhat presumptuously calls itself the “only Left” a miserable 0.6%.
Of course, Messrs Bertinotti, Pecoraro and Diliberto could look for crumbs of encouragement in other parts of Italy. History has provided us with some wonderful examples of disasters passed off as blips. How can we forget the immortal words of Christian Democrat Vito Napoli? As his party was swept off the board in the disastrous municipal elections of 1993, he observed: “We have lost Rome, Milan, Naples, Venice and Palermo but there are encouraging signs. I’m referring to our successes at Gerace, Pizzo Calabro and Praia a Mare”. … Never before, however, have we seen an entire political area vanish as if it had been swallowed up by the very earth.
taly’s Democratic Party elects its new leader
[Italica] – Italy’s Democratic Party elected Dario Franceschini as its new leader after Walter Veltroni’s resignation on Tuesday. The former leader of the centre-left biggest opposition party stood down after his candidate lost regional elections in the island of Sardinia. Mr Franceschini, lawyer and also novelist, was elected by 1,047 votes out of 1,258, while his only rival, the former defence minister Arturo Parisi, got just 92 votes. [February 22, 2009 – Italica news from Italy and San Marino]
Voters failed to take even one of the five seriously and as a result there has been an incredible sea change. For the first time in history since the fall of the Fascist dictatorship, Italy’s parliament will not have a single “red” sitting on its benches, from where even the birth of the constitution was greeted by a gaggle of red shirts. “It’s a clear defeat of clear proportions, and that makes it all the more painful”, explained Mr Bertinotti, announcing that his role “ends here”.
Even before the gloomiest predictions could come true, the Left was already, predictably, torn by arguments, jibes, insults, venomous outbursts and accusations of guilt. Needless to say, it was not on the scale of past purges, when Antonio Roasio kept files on party members who had fled to Russia to find out whether they deserved to be taken to the Taganka prison or subjected to the “kista”, the self-confession of errors that was demanded at the Frattocchie party cadre school to bolster the communist spirit. But it will be a long process, fraught with difficulties. T
Decoy lists
Political parties can also abuse the system: in the 2001 Italian elections, the two main coalitions (the House of Freedoms and the Olive Tree) linked many of their constituency candidates to decoy lists (liste civetta) in the proportional parts, under the names Abolizione Scorporo and Paese Nuovo respectively, so that if they won constituencies then they would not reduce the number of proportional seats received by the coalitions. Between them, the two decoy lists won 360 of the 475 constituency seats, more than half of the 630 total number of seats, despite winning a combined total of less than 0.2% of the national proportional part of the vote. In the case of Forza Italia (part of the House of Freedoms), the tactic was so successful that it did not have enough candidates in the proportional part to receive as many seats as it in fact won, missing out on 12 seats.
Decoy lists are not used in most countries using AMS, where most voters vote for candidates from parties with long-standing names.
