Lucio Magri was a unique figure in the European Left— the only significant revolutionary thinker of his time whose thought was inseparable from the course of the mass movements of the decades through which he lived. He was incapable of a theoretical reflection that was not rooted in the real actions, or inactions, of the exploited and oppressed. That was normal in the generation of Gramsci, of the early Lukács and Korsch, who witnessed the Russian Revolution. In the age of the Cold War, when Magri entered politics, it was virtually unknown. The great Marxist intellectuals of the period—Adorno, Sartre, Lefebvre, Althusser, and so many others—developed their ideas in radical disconnexion from any close contact with popular politics. Italian Communism alone permitted, for a season, a classical circuit between original theory and organized practice, within the framework of a mass party. For a decade, Magri took the political opportunity it offered, before the pci dispensed with his loyalty. Did it ever realize what it lost in doing so? One day in Biella, when he was still a young cadre, after they had spent a night together working on a speech to be given by his superior, Enrico Berlinguer—before he became leader of the party—told him: ‘Magri, you have yet to learn that in politics one needs the courage of banality.’ Such was the self-awareness of officialdom, at its most lucid. Magri had another kind of political courage: the kind that Gramsci displayed, in notebooks that were never banal.

Born in 1932, and brought up till 1939 as an only child in the Libyan desert, where his father was a colonel in the Italian air force, Lucio Magri cut a singular figure. In appearance as dazzling as any film star of the period—athletic build; strong jaw; regular features; blonde hair tapering to a widow’s peak; deep-set, blazing blue eyes; wide smile; large, perfect teeth—and in dress of immaculate informality, he was the picture of spectacular good looks and casual elegance. Skilled at chess and poker, and a first-class cook, he had every outward asset of the man of the world, admired by the opposite sex. But there was something too serious and remote, even abstract, in him to fill the role. He lacked the easy conviviality of many Italians. Trenchant rather than urbane, his metallic voice was closer to that of a caustic preceptor than a seducer. His authors were Lermontov, Fitzgerald, Joseph Roth, the Tolstoy of Father Sergius. In a lighter vein, also—here a touch of the dandy came in—P. G. Wodehouse, in whose honour he liked to say that the Savoy, on the one occasion a parliamentary delegation brought him to London, could no longer boil an egg to satisfy Jeeves. These were not the usual tastes of a militant, or functionary, of Italian Communism. The contradiction of Magri’s career and personality is that he was at once more profoundly tied to the social conflicts in his country as the springs of his own thought, yet also more distant in style and character from them, than any of his contemporaries. He had little popular sensibility; low tolerance for commonplaces of any kind; a manner that could be stand-offish, or cutting. But the laws of motion of any radical politics came, and could only come, from the masses, and it was to the strategies at stake in their revolt against the established order that he brought a rare order of analytic intensity and passion.

The condition of this paradox was his experience within the pci. Brought up in a conventional military family, with a brief period of adolescent religious belief, in Bergamo—one of the ‘whitest’ areas of Christian Democracy’s dominance in Italy—he joined one of its youth organizations while still in school, and was active on its left wing, which he quit when its prestigious leader Giuseppe Dossetti was defeated within the party and resigned from it. Together with other young Christian Democrats of the same levy, he then made contact with the pci, working in an independent journal of Communist Catholic opinion, Il Dibattito Politico. At the age of twenty-four he entered the pci. Joining the ranks of communism in the wake of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Party and the Hungarian Revolt, he did so with eyes more open than was common in the inter-war or Resistance generations. Travelling to the Moscow Youth Festival the following year, he was reading Trotsky on the boat to Odessa. His first significant contribution to the party press, in late 1958, was an essay warning against dismissal of Gaullism as a mere regime of reaction or throw-back to the past, rather than a force capable of modernizing French capitalism.footnote¹ In March 1962 the Istituto Gramsci staged an important conference in Rome on ‘Tendencies of Italian Neo-Capitalism’. There Magri argued that Italy as a whole could no longer be regarded as a backward capitalist society, where a democratic revolution—raising no socialist demands—had yet to take place, even if there were regions within it where that was so; rather, it was already experiencing the new contradictions of advanced capitalist society, which required a different strategy from the party.footnote²

A major historical reconstruction of successive conceptions of the revolutionary party marked his entry into the innovative theoretical journal of the pci, Critica Marxista, then edited by a fellow independent spirit, Romano Ledda.footnote³ Soon afterwards, he was transferred from Lombardy to the party headquarters in Rome, working in its mass organizations department under the commanding figure of Giorgio Amendola, the powerful and authoritarian leader of the right wing of Italian communism. A year later, Amendola announced in Rinascita that since neither communist nor social-democratic traditions had succeeded in achieving socialism, the two movements should merge into a new labour party in Italy. A heated debate—in which the most effective reply to Amendola from the left came from Magri—ensued, which the directorate of the pci quickly shut down.footnote⁴ Within months, the conflict rebounded with a nuanced but incisive critique by Magri, in the summer of 1965, of the limitations of the Popular Front experiences of the thirties that were an ideological template for the official line of the party at the time.footnote⁵ Personal relations with Amendola nevertheless remained good until he succeeded in slipping part of a document he had written into a speech given by Longo, the party’s General Secretary. ‘You will not hoodwink your elders again,’ Amendola told him, ‘we are not under bourgeois law here.’ For punishment he was put in cold storage, given no work and ignored. After three months, he told Amendola that at thirty-five he was too young to be a pensioner, and asked for any job to which the party might assign him, as third assistant secretary in the backlands of Sicily or wherever else he might be demoted—getting the blunt reply: ‘No, if we do that you might quickly end up secretary in Palermo. You must learn discipline.’

A year later the Italian 1968 exploded among young workers and students, followed by the still larger French revolt. When Amendola denounced what he saw as the reappearance of the black flag of anarchism, Magri once again wrote the most forceful rejoinder in Rinascita,footnote⁶ and soon afterwards a soberly penetrating critique of the French Communist Party’s role in the upheaval, Considerazioni sui Fatti di Maggio. For a decade he had argued within the pci that capitalism was both modernizing itself in ways the party was ignoring, and in doing so was generating new needs and forces of rebellion against itself, which required a bolder and more radical strategy than any warmed-over version of the politics of the Popular Front. In late 1969 the pci leadership, disconcerted by the continuing turmoil in factories and universities as the Italian ‘hot autumn’ failed to die down, purged the left that had formed around the newly created journal Il Manifesto, when it published an editorial by Magri on Husák’s ‘normalization’ in Czechoslovakia, entitled ‘Prague Is Alone’.

For over a decade, Magri had worked in the control rooms of an organization of over two million members, the largest mass party in Europe, in close contact with, but never part of, its leadership. He was essentially expelled, along with the rest of the Manifesto group—Rossana Rossanda, Luigi Pintor, Aldo Natoli, Massimo Caprara, Luciana Castellina—for criticizing its inability to respond creatively to a mass upsurge that, for the first time since the war, escaped its directives. Exit from the pci was never part of their intention. But they miscalculated by placing their journal with a small printer in Bari, who distributed it not in bookshops—as they had envisaged—but on news-stands, where it promptly sold 50,000 copies, allowing the pci leadership to treat it as a factional broadsheet. The trigger for the purge came from Pravda’s denunciation of the Czech editorial, leading the cupola of the party to fear that if it did not crack down on Il Manifesto, a pro-Soviet tendency in the pci would be fostered by Moscow. But amid the euphoria of the student revolt and the workers’ hot autumn, the group was not dismayed, converting the monthly into a daily in 1971,footnote⁷ running candidates in the national elections of 1972, and co-founding a party with dissident Socialists in 1974, the pdup.

In this move, the Manifesto group came up sharply against its own limits, and the character of the rebellion on whose energies it had counted in making it. None had any real experience of mass organization. Magri had worked in the central apparatus, Rossanda had been in charge of cultural tasks in the party, Pintor was a brilliant journalist. They had a lot to learn. Magri underwent the most drastic transformation, serving as the leader of the pdup for nine years, in Parliament and as General Secretary, criss-crossing the country from one end to the other, organizing branches, addressing meetings, composing reports, holding congresses. But the party never got more than half a million votes, and its hopes of unifying a new left front in Italy foundered on the deep cultural gulf that divided the Manifesto group, for whom the pci, however aberrant its policies—by the mid seventies the party under Berlinguer had embarked on the futile quest for a Historic Compromise with Christian Democracy—remained an irreplaceable experience and reference, and the revolutionary groups that emerged out of the late sixties, most of them uncompromisingly hostile to the party and contemptuous of its legacy. The tensions between generations and sensibilities eventually split the Manifesto group itself, the daily and the party—Rossanda and Pintor; Magri and Castellina—going separate ways. But when the last expression of a mass politics connected to its moment of formation came, with the peace movement of the early eighties—the Italian demonstrations were the largest in Europe—they were united, Magri responding with one of the most lucid political reflections of, and on them, that the movement produced. footnote⁸