Messages from the Mafia

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