Vol. 27 No. 1 · 6 January 2005
pages 31-32 | 2763 words
Messages from the Mafia
Federico Varese
- Berlusconi’s Shadow: Crime, Justice and the Pursuit of Power by David Lane
Allen Lane, 336 pp, £18.99, August 2004, ISBN 0 7139 9787 7
- Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony by Paul Ginsborg
Verso, 189 pp, £16.00, June 2004, ISBN 1 84467 000 7
A short film directed by Pasolini in 1966, La Terra Vista dalla Luna, opens with a caption printed over a fixed image: ‘Seen from the moon, this movie . . . is nothing and has not been created by anybody . . . But since we are on planet earth, it might be better to let you know that it is a fable written by Pier Paolo Pasolini.’ It is a fable about the power of neo-capitalism and consumerism over the minds and actions of its two protagonists. The American way of life had just reached Italy, and Pasolini had witnessed first-hand its homogenising force. He called it the ‘new Fascism’, ‘more insidious, elusive and destructive’ than the historical kind – which had failed completely to unify the country’s various cultures – because it both ‘assimilates and homogenises’. Two foreign observers of Italy, David Lane, the Economist correspondent in Rome, and Paul Ginsborg, who teaches at Florence University, are now also arguing that fascism has returned to the country.
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Letters
Vol. 27 No. 3 · 3 February 2005
From Phil Edwards
Enrico Berlinguer’s 1977 ‘austerity’ programme was not simply a matter of resisting a rising tide of consumerism, as Federico Varese has it (LRB, 6 January). The austerità that Berlinguer and the union leader Luciano Lama urged on Italian Communists combined a wage freeze with a ‘war on waste’ – ‘waste’ specifically included absenteeism, wildcat industrial action and university occupations. Berlinguer and Lama’s principal targets were not apathetic consumers but unruly activists.
In the previous five years, Autonomist Marxists and other radical social movements had carved out a space to the left of the Communist Party, mobilising around slogans such as ‘More pay! Less work!’ With the simultaneous emergence of the youth-based ‘movement of 1977’ and the doctrine of ‘austerity’, this cycle of contention reached its peak. In one emblematic confrontation, Lama was surrounded by demonstrators derisively chanting ‘More work! Less pay!’ The Communist response was marked by intransigent brutality, verbal and on occasion physical. The Party leadership denounced their radical opponents as Fascists, asked for a crackdown by the state and demanded that all waverers rally to the defence of Italian democracy.
The PCI’s scorched-earth tactics brought the cycle of contention to a halt, at the cost of widespread political demobilisation and disenchantment: the Party’s membership fell every year from 1977 until its dissolution in 1991. Despite his communitarian rhetoric, Berlinguer’s actions indirectly fostered the individualistic consumerism of the 1980s – and ultimately the ascent of Berlusconi.
Phil Edwards
University of Manchester
