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The Not So Eternal City
Angry and witty in equal measure, a blistering native account of Rome’s fate at the hands of avaricious developers, insensate priests, neo-liberal ex-communists and stupefied tourists: corruption, dilapidation, fossilization, Disneyfication and—now, above all—cementification of Europe’s oldest capital.
Parting Words
The editor of Italy’s leading monthly of the Left explains, in a balance-sheet of the opening years of the century, why the journal is closing. As the Italian opposition gears up for resuming power next year, tactical manoeuvre replaces substantive debate, and ethical repentance disavows solidarity with political resistance. Electoralism and neo-Quakerism in the land of Garibaldi and Gramsci.
The Patrimonial Ambitions of Silvio B
Leading historian of contemporary Italy, and animator of civil resistance to Berlusconi, Paul Ginsborg offers a profile of the media magnate as political ruler, and the project he represents for the future of Italian society. The contradictions of the current regime of the Right, and the chances of a broad opposition to it.
A Sense of the Left
“Norberto Bobbio’s book on the Right and Left marks a significant moment in the author’s long and distinguished career as a political thinker. Published during the Italian electoral campaign of 1994, Destra e Sinistrais one of his most topical and personal writings, whose popular success in Italy is . . .” read more
The Left’s Advance in Italy
“The Left’s victory in the Italian general election on the 21 April is likely to have a large impact on popular consciousness. It has revived a sense of collective hope and once more made concrete that fading but never totally obliterated belief that change is possible. This is . . .” read more
The Resistible Rise of the Italian Right
“In the last few years Italian political events have attracted the attention of many in Europe who have been particularly impressed by two startling occurrences: the successful manipulation of the masses by the media, especially television, and the entrance of a neo-fascist party into government. Very few, however, . . .” read more
The Crisis of Government in Italy
“In the last few years Italy has undergone an unusually profound and open political crisis, which is still very far from having settled down into a largely accepted, or even moderately viable, political arrangement. The crisis had been building for a long time, but broke—this is the conventional . . .” read more
The Modern Women’s Movement in Italy
“Modern Italian feminism established itself in the early 1970s, expanding with remarkable strength and radicalism from its middle-class base to become a popular mobilization with an extensive network of activists throughout the organized labour movement. By the end of the decade, however, feminism was in decline; and the . . .” read more
The Travail of Italian Communism
“If ‘The Triumph of the Leopard’ (nlr 199) had been written by a member of Rifondazione Comunista—by an Italian Communist who hadn’t yet recovered from the shock of the pci’s death and its resurrection as the pds—a reader could understand (and possibly forgive) the onesidedness . . .” read more
The Affinities of Norberto Bobbio
“In early 1848, within a few weeks of each other, two antithetical texts were published in London, on the eve of European revolution. One was The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The other was Principles of Political Economy, by John Stuart Mill. The former famously . . .” read more
A Reply to Gundle
“In Italy history repeats itself: a general election has been called one year early to avoid a referendum whose result might shake the political and economic establishment represented by the dc, iri and Confindustria. In 1987 nuclear power has taken on the importance of divorce in . . .” read more
The PCI and the Historic Compromise
“Few on the left will disagree with the view that the turn taken by events in Italy in recent years is deeply depressing. Capitalism is unquestionably more stable today than at any time since the boom years of the late 1950s, and the social and cultural upheavals of . . .” read more
The PCI Congress
“The 17th Congress of the Italian Communist Party was held in Florence between 9 and 13 April, in the midst of Reagan’s first round of sabre-rattling against Libya and his authorization of a new nuclear test in Nevada. Since, as we shall see, the main peculiarity of the . . .” read more
Judging the PCI
“We make our own history but never under conditions of our own choosing. Political parties are normally to a greater or lesser extent reflections of socioeconomic realities, even if occasionally, as in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, they have been known to have lost contact with any reality outside their . . .” read more
From Man of Honour to Entrepreneur: The Evolution of the Mafia
“The conclusion reached by sociological research on the subject of the mafia can probably be said to consist in the claim that the mafia—in the commonly accepted meaning of the term—does not exist: ‘. . . most people, particularly those outside Italy, have a fairly precise image of . . .” read more
Our Debt to Sraffa
“Italian Communists are joined to Sraffa by an ineradicable political and human debt of gratitude. It is hard for us even to grasp his full significance for Gramsci: the role he played during Gramsci’s long years in fascist jails is a priceless and crucial element in our own . . .” read more
The Italian Road to Socialism
“We may distinguish, schematically, three ‘models’ of the road to socialism, three types of strategy for transition. The first is the Leninist, or ‘classical’ model, on Which the revolutionary left bases itself. The growth and intensification of capitalist contradictions heighten working-class combativity and increase class consciousness until these . . .” read more
The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci
“Today, no Marxist thinker after the classical epoch is so universally respected in the West as Antonio Gramsci. Nor is any term so freely or diversely invoked on the Left as that of hegemony, to which he gave currency. Gramsci’s reputation, still local and marginal outside his native . . .” read more
Paradoxes of the Italian Political Crisis
“It is still too early to say whether the regional elections of 15 June 1975 marked the beginning of a new stage in the post-war history of Italy. What is, however, certain is that they left all the main actors in the country’s political life with their backs . . .” read more
The Impasse of Italian Capitalism
“In the years immediately following the Italian surrender, from 1943 to 1948, us and British imperialism exerted their greatest efforts to restabilize bourgeois society in Italy and to crush the revolutionary movement that had arisen in the anti-fascist struggle. The Italian ruling class emerged intact if battered . . .” read more
Italian Communism in the Sixties
“The last few weeks have seen a new wave of resignations and expulsions from the Italian Communist Party. Attempts by the pci leadership to brand the ‘scissionist manoeuvres of Il Manifesto’ as the cause of these phenomena need hardly be taken seriously. We have made no efforts . . .” read more
Introduction to Magri
“Lucio Magri’s article on Italian Communism in the sixties, published in Il Manifesto in late 1970, is for a number of reasons of considerable international significance. The Manifesto group was excluded from the pci in June 1969 for their systematic criticisms of its policies from the left: . . .” read more
Antonio Gramsci and the Italian Revolution
“One of the most dramatic, yet shadowy, events touched upon by Guiseppe Fiori in his Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary is the disagreement between Gramsci on the one hand and Togliatti and the Italian Communist Party on the other, after the political ‘turn’ brought about by the . . .” read more
The School Movement in Rome
“On the third of December 1968, forty thousand school students marched through the streets of Rome. While they went up Via Nazionale, one of the main streets of the city, the bourgeois ladies out shopping and the clerks in the offices above stared at them apprehensively.” read more
Introduction to Gramsci 1919-1920
“The impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and the aftermath of the First World War transformed Western and Eastern Europe after 1918 into a storm-zone of unrest that has never since been equalled. A wave of political and industrial insurgency unfurled across the continent: this was the time of . . .” read more
Structural Reform in Italy--Theory and Practice
“This fiftieth issue of New Left Review opens with a critique, by Perry Anderson, of the structures of bourgeois culture in Britain. The task of forging a revolutionary and internationalist political culture in this country has always been a central preoccupation of the Review. This involves attacking the . . .” read more
In Search of an Educational Principle
“In the elementary school, there used to be two elements in the educational formation of the children. They were taught the rudiments of natural science, and the idea of civic rights and duties. Science was intended to introduce the child to the societas rerum, the world of things, . . .” read more
Introduction to Gramsci
“Antonio Gramsci’s essay on education, which we print below, was written in prison in 1926. We publish it, not out oj piety, but as a contribution to socialist discussion of education. For Gramsci’s preoccupations in this text coincide significantly with many problems which are still at the centre . . .” read more
The Italian Presidential Elections
“Christmas, usually a political dead season, was enlivened in Italy by the election of a new president. Indeed, on Christmas Day itself, deputies, senators, regional representatives, ex-presidents, etc, trooped into the Palazzo Montecitorio—368 to say ‘I abstain’ and another 100 to drop a blank paper into the urn. . . .” read more
The Centre-Left Moves Right
“Fanfani’s first Centre-Left Government of 1962 promised considerable reforms as a quid pro quo for the extra-governmental support of the psi—nationalization of electricity (this was actually achieved, though in an utterly non-socialist fashion), regional autonomy, and agrarian reform. The present Moro-Nenni government came into being with more . . .” read more