Dear PCI, they want to erase you: those who remember you as an "anti-system party" will never understand you
Paradoxes
Polemic with Sergio Fabbrini who presents his thesis to us from the columns of the “Sole”: Togliatti's party, which wrote the Constitution and built the system, was in reality, like the MSI, an anti-system party
It has been decades since such an ephemeral treatise on the memory of the regretted PCI had been read. Engaged in praise of the “ important results of the government of the radical right” , Sergio Fabbrini in the “Sole 24 Ore ” took the opportunity to rummage through the old junk. And he fished out an old piece of iron, which had fallen into disrepute in the most rigorous political studies: the PCI, like the MSI , as an “anti-system party ”, according to the famous formula coined by Sartori.
In his research on the adaptation and transformation of the Italian communists, Sidney Tarrow had however concluded that "from an analytical point of view, the distinction between parties of the system and anti-system parties has lost all usefulness". Even Robert D. Putnam , probing the ideology of the ruling group, recommended getting rid of the image of the PCI as an alienated subject. Similar " conceptual categories - he wrote - are no longer useful ", since the communist leaders, given their conspicuous originality of identity, " cannot be located at any point of the orthodox spectrum that goes from Bolshevism to social democracy ". The effective institutional role played by the Togliatti giraffe in the consolidation of the republic required, as also suggested by the constitutionalist Fulco Lanchester, to throw away an "ideological-demonological" approach. With the arbitrary scheme that considered it an "anti-system" body, the democratic credentials of the PCI were questioned in a completely preconceived way. Fabbrini does not hesitate to resort to such a shaky hermeneutic now, reeling off hypotheses worthy of a school of suspicion to unmask " the ambiguities of communist culture".
Naturally, always in support of the current " coherence of the Italian government", he spends himself with absolute dedication to demonstrate how the PCI was " eccentric with respect to the Western system" . The discovery is one of those sensational ones: while in Botteghe Oscure the accomplices of the Cossack enemy operated, in Colle Oppio a patrol of future statesmen suited to the West in terms of civilization was educated. Not only would these people not look out of place among the ranks of the Popolari in Strasbourg, but, precisely thanks to the skills acquired in power, with Meloni "Italy is not on the margins of the European balance ". Outside of balance (of logic, in this case) the columnist instead trips up, when he asserts that Gramsci 's heirs had to end up in the corner as an unfair group " despite the fact that the PCI had contributed to the drafting of the Constitution". In short, according to Fabbrini's non-Aristotelian logic, an actor who builds the system – since he signs the Fundamental Charter as the central protagonist – deserves to be counted as the antagonist of the system itself.
Referring to meta-values, exceeding the 1948 text and therefore the fruit of nothing other than private beliefs promoted to a “system” , Fabbrini accuses the left of having nurtured an unpardonable critical instance towards capitalism. Almost as if any challenge to property relations were prohibited, the political scientist rejoices at the change of direction with which fortunately “anti-capitalism has been progressively reworked (acknowledging that a variety of capitalisms exists)”. The republic was not built by the fourth party, that of the business owners and their bodies that are happy to act as judges ready to sanction “ anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, anti-Europeanism” . It is impossible to erase from republican history the political ideologies of mass parties, which are largely foreign to the sacred cult of capital.
According to the editorialist of the “Sole”, the indelible flaw that made the PCI an anti-system entity is that it expressed “a culture that had long refused to recognize the connection between market economy and political freedoms, which had continued to interpret the latter as bourgeois freedoms” . In reality, it is Fabbrini himself, with the phrase just quoted, who postulates the “bourgeois” character of the rules and competitive procedures (“ political freedoms ”) when he establishes their organic connection (“ connection ”) with the capitalist social formation ( “market economy ”). The censor, who exalts the pedagogical significance of the “ criticism, even the harshest, of communist ambiguity”, grants, in his kindness, that in the PCI after an interminable apprenticeship “ anti-liberalism has been progressively mitigated (by adopting the constitutional culture of rights)” . As if the most liberal and guarantor provision of the Constitution, number 13 (“ Personal freedom is inviolable” ), had not been drafted by a father of the Republic, an exile who had the habit of pouring an unmistakable green ink onto the sheets. He was nicknamed “the Best”.
l'Unità
