At one of the crowded meetings held in 1991 to decide whether or not to change the name of the Italian Communist Party, a comrade posed this question to Pietro Ingrao: ‘After everything that has happened and all that is now taking place, do you still believe the word “communist” can be used to describe the kind of large, democratic mass party that ours has been, and is, and which we want to renew so as to take it into government?’ Ingrao, who had already laid out in full the reasons for his dissent and proposed that an alternative course be taken, replied—not altogether in jest—with Brecht’s famous parable of the tailor of Ulm. This 16th-century German artisan had been obsessed by the idea of building a device that would allow men to fly. One day, convinced he had succeeded, he took his contraption to the Bishop and said: ‘Look, I can fly’. Challenged to prove it, the tailor launched himself into the air from the top of the church roof, and, naturally, ended up in smithereens on the paving stones below. And yet, Brecht’s poem suggests: a few centuries later men did indeed learn to fly.

Ingrao’s reply was not just witty but well-founded. How many centuries, how many bloody struggles, advances and defeats did it take for the capitalist system to reach—in a Western Europe that had initially been more backward and barbaric than other parts of the world—an unprecedented degree of economic efficiency, and for it to acquire new, more open political institutions, a more rational culture? What irreducible contradictions were to mark liberalism over those years, between the solemn ideals—common human nature, freedom of speech and thought, popular sovereignty—and the practices that constantly belied them: slavery, colonial domination, expulsion of peasants from common land, wars of religion? Contradictions whose social reality was legitimated in thought: the idea that freedom could and should only be granted to those who, by virtue of property and culture—even race and colour—were capable of exercising it wisely; and the correlative notion that ownership of goods was an absolute, inviolable right which therefore precluded universal suffrage.

Nor was it just the onset of this historical cycle that was beset by such contradictions: they were reproduced under various forms in its subsequent development, and gradually diminished only by the action of new social subjects, and of forces contesting the reigning system and its ideas. If, then, the real history of capitalist modernity was not one of unambiguous linear progress, but was rather dramatic and costly, why should the process of its supersession be otherwise? This is the lesson that the tailor’s story was meant to convey.

Yet the parable also poses further questions. Can we be sure that if the tailor of Ulm had been crippled rather than killed by his disastrous fall, he would immediately have got to his feet to try again; or that his friends would not have tried to prevent him doing so? And secondly, what actual contribution did he make to the subsequent history of aeronautics? In relation to Communism, such questions are especially pointed and difficult—above all because, at its theoretical formation, it had claimed to be not an inspiring ideal, but part of a historical process already under way, and of a real movement that was changing the existing state of things. Communism therefore always entailed a factual test, a scientific analysis of the present and a realistic prognosis of the future, to prevent it dissolving into myth. But we also need to register a significant difference between the defeats suffered by the bourgeois revolutions in France and England, and the recent collapse suffered by ‘actually existing socialism’—measured not by the number of deaths or recourse to despotism, but by their respective outcomes. The former left an inheritance that, though much more modest than the initial hopes they aroused, is nonetheless immediately apparent; it is difficult, by contrast, to discern the legacy of the latter, and to identify legitimate heirs.

In the years that have passed since the end of the Cold War these questions have not only remained unanswered; they have barely been seriously discussed. Answers have come in a highly superficial, self-interested form: denial or amnesia. A historical experience and theoretical heritage that marked an entire century have thus been consigned, in Marx’s expression, to the ‘gnawing criticism of the mice’—who are, as we know, voracious, and multiply rapidly in the right conditions.

The word ‘communist’ still occurs, of course, in the propaganda of the crudest Right. It survives in the electoral symbols of small European parties, to retain the loyalty of the minority devoted to its memory, or to indicate a generic opposition to capitalism. In other parts of the world, Communist parties continue to rule small countries, aiming mainly to defend their own independence from imperialism, and govern one very large one, where the Party is sustaining an extraordinary economic development that is moving in an entirely different direction. The October Revolution is generally considered a grand illusion—useful, at certain moments and in the eyes of a few; but a disaster when taken as a whole, identified with Stalinism in its most grotesque version, and condemned in any event by its final outcome. Marx has regained a degree of credit as a thinker, for his far-sighted predictions regarding the capitalism of the future; but these have been entirely severed from any ambition to put an end to it. The condemnation of memory is now extending even further, to cover the whole experience of socialism, and from there branching out to the radical components of the bourgeois revolutions and liberation struggles of colonized peoples (which, as we know, could not always be peaceful, even in the land of Gandhi).

In sum, the ‘haunting spectre’ seems finally to have been buried: with honours by some, with undying hatred by others, with indifference by most, because it has nothing more to say to them. Perhaps the most scathing but, in its way, most respectful oration at this final burial was pronounced by Augusto del Noce, one of the finest minds among the Left’s adversaries, when he said that the Communists have both lost and won. They have lost disastrously in their Promethean quest to reverse the course of history, promising men freedom and fraternity even in the absence of God, and in the knowledge that they are mortal. But they have won as a necessary factor in accelerating the globalization of capitalist modernity and its values: materialism, hedonism, individualism, ethical relativism. An intransigent Catholic conservative, del Noce believed he had foreseen this extraordinary heterogenesis of ends, though he would have had little reason to be pleased by it.