The New Old World (58 page)

Beneath this crust of privilege, one in four Italians lives in poverty. Spending on education, falling in the budget since 1990, accounts for a mere 4.6 per cent of GDP (Denmark: 8.4 per cent). Only half of the population has any kind of postcompulsory schooling, nearly twenty points below the European average. No more than a fifth of twenty-year-olds enter higher education, and three-fifths of those drop out. The number of hospital beds per inhabitant has dwindled by a third under the new Republic, and is now about half that in Germany or France. In the courts, criminal justice takes an average of four years to reach a final verdict, time that is taken into account in the statute of limitations, voiding up to a fifth of cases. In civil suits, the average time for a bankruptcy hearing to be completed is eight years and eight months. In late 2007 two septuagenarian pensioners, trying to bring a case against the Social Security Institute, were told they could get an audience in 2020. As for equality before the law, an Albanian immigrant charged with trying to steal a cow in his homeland spent more days in an Italian prison than one of the mega-crooks of the food industry, Sergio Cragnotti, who destroyed the savings of thousands of his fellow citizens. Politicians were treated still better than tycoons: Berlusconi's right-hand man Cesare Previti, convicted of corrupting judges after hearings that lasted for nine years, and sentenced to six years imprisonment, spent all of five days in jail before being released to perform community service.
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The material infrastructures of the country are in no better shape than its public institutions. Harbours: the seven major ports of Italy, put together, handle less container traffic than Rotterdam. Motorways: half the mileage in Spain. High-speed trains: less than a third of the tracks in France. Overall rail network: thirteen kilometres longer than in 1920. Airlines: Alitalia—23 long-range passenger jets to 134 for Lufthansa. All contributing to the dismal economic record of the last decade, when GDP has grown at the slowest pace anywhere in the EU, and labour productivity has barely improved: just 1 per cent between 2001 and 2006. Per capita income—still increasing at a modest 2 per cent a year between 1980 and 1995—has been virtually stationary since 2000. The gap in living standards between north and south has widened. Criminal organizations are active in more than four hundred communes of the Mezzogiorno, inhabited by some thirteen million Italians, where one in three local businessmen report widespread rackets. Labour force participation is the lowest in Western Europe, and that of women rock-bottom: thirty points below Denmark, twenty points below the US, ten points below the Czech Republic. Nor does exclusion from production mean high levels of reproduction, where the net rate is negative—0.6 or just 1.3 births per woman, projecting a fall in the population from 58 to 47 million by mid-century. Already the elderly above the age of sixty outnumber the young between eighteen and twenty-four by nearly three to one. The average voter is now forty-seven.
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Redeeming this desolation has, to all intents and purposes, been just one improvement, in job creation. Unemployment, which stood at 12 per cent in the mid-nineties, has dropped to 6 per cent today. But most of this work—half of all the new posts in 2006—involves short-term contracts, and much of it is precarious employment in the informal economy.
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No counteracting dynamism has resulted. In the formula of the Neapolitan sociologist Enrico Pugliese, Italy has gone from growth without jobs in the last years of the First Republic to jobs without growth under the Second, blocking productivity gains. The predominance of small to medium firms—some 4.5
million, or a quarter of the total number in the whole of the pre-enlargement EU—has cramped expenditure on research, tethering exports to traditional lines of strength in apparel, shoes and the like, where competition from low-cost Asian producers is now most intense. High-tech exports are half the European average, and foreign investment is famously low, deterred not only by fear of extortion and maladminstration, but also by the still close defences of Italian big business, whose holding companies and banks are typically controlled by shareholder pacts between a few powerful interlocking insiders.
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In the past, this model flourished with a flexible exchange rate, adjusting to external challenges with competitive devaluations, and tolerating relatively high rates of domestic inflation and deficitary finance. With Italy's entry into European monetary union, the Second Republic put an end to it. Budgets were retrenched to meet the Maastricht criteria, inflation was curbed, and depreciation of the currency ceased to be possible. But no alternative model materialized. The macro-economic regime had changed, but the structure of production did not. The result was to worsen the conditions for recovery. Growth was not liberated, but asphyxiated. Export shares have fallen, and the public debt, third largest in the world, has remained stubbornly above 100 per cent of GDP, mocking the provisions of Maastricht. When the Second Republic started, Italy still enjoyed the second highest GDP per capita of the big EU states, measured in purchasing power parity, after Germany—a standard of living in real terms above that of France or Britain. Today it has fallen below an EU average now weighed down by the relative poverty of the East European states, and is close to being overtaken by Greece.
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Within this panorama of national decay, one area of ruins has a poignancy all its own. The Italian Left was once the largest and most impressive popular movement for social change in Western Europe. Comprising two mass parties, each with their own history and culture, and both committed not to ameliorating but
to overcoming capitalism, the post-war alliance between the PSI and PCI did not survive the boom of the fifties. In 1963 Nenni took the Socialists for the first time into government as junior partners of the Christian Democrats, on a path that would in time lead to Craxi, leaving Italian Communism in unchallenged command of opposition to the DC regime in place since 1948. From the beginning, the PCI was organizationally and ideologically the stronger of the two, with a wider mass base—over two million members by the mid-fifties, extending from peasants in the south through artisans and teachers in the centre to industrial workers in the north. It also had a richer intellectual heritage, in Gramsci's newly published
Prison Notebooks
, whose significance was immediately recognized well beyond the party. At its height, the PCI could draw on an extraordinary range of social and moral energies, combining both deeper popular roots and broader intellectual influence than any other force in the country.

Confined by the Cold War to forty years of national opposition, the party entrenched itself in local and later regional administrations, and the parliamentary commissions through which Italian legislation must pass, becoming entwined with the ruling order at many secondary levels. But its underlying strategy remained more or less stable throughout. After 1948, the spoils of the Liberation were divided. Power fell to the DC; culture to the PCI. Christian Democracy controlled the levers of the state, Communism attracted the talents of civil society. The PCI's ability to polarize Italian intellectual life around itself, not only in a broad arc of scholars, writers, thinkers, artists—it is enough to recall that, among many others, Pavese, Calvino, Pasolini, Visconti, Pontecorvo, Nono were all at one time or another members or sympathizers of the party—but a general climate of progressive opinion, was without parallel elsewhere in Europe. Owed in part to the sociology of its leadership, which, unlike that of the French, German, British or Spanish Communist parties, was for the most part highly educated, and in part to a relatively tolerant and flexible handling of the ‘battle of ideas', its dominion in this sphere was the really distinctive asset of Italian Communism. But it came at a two-fold price to which the party remained persistently blind.

For the extent of the PCI's influence across the world of thought and art was also a function of the degree to which it assimilated and reproduced the dominant strain in a pre-existent
Italian culture of long standing.
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This was the idealism which had found its most powerful, though by no means unique, modern expression in the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, a figure who over the years had acquired an almost Goethe-like position in the intellectual life of the country. It was Croce's historicist system, its prestige underwritten by the attention given it in prison by Gramsci, that became naturalized as the circumambient ether of a great deal of the post-war Italian culture over which the PCI, directly or indirectly, presided.
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But behind it lay much older traditions that accorded pre-eminence to the realm of ideas, conceived as will or understanding, in politics. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the completion of the Risorgimento, Italy never knew a peninsular state or aristocracy, and most of the time was subject to an array of conflicting foreign powers. The result, for long stretches, was to create an overwhelming sense of the gap between past glory and present misery among its educated elites. From Dante onwards, there developed a tradition of intellectuals with an acute sense of their calling to recover and transmit the high culture of classical antiquity, and imbued with the conviction that the country could be put to rights only by the impress of revivifying ideas, of which only they could be the artificers, on fallen realities.
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Culture was not a sphere distinct from power: it was to be the passport to it.

In good measure, Italian Communism inherited this habit of mind. The novel form it gave to a national predisposition was drawn from, if not faithful to, Gramsci. In this version, ‘hegemony' was a cultural and moral ascendancy to be won consensually within civil society, as the real foundation of social existence, that would eventually assure peaceful possession of the state, a more external and superficial expression of collective life. The commanding position the party had won in the intellectual arena thus showed it was on track to ultimate political victory. This was not what Gramsci, a revolutionary of the Third International who had never thought capital could be broken without force of arms—however important the need to win the widest popular
consent for the overthrow of the ruling order—had believed. But it fitted the idealist cast of the culture at large like a glove. Within the intellectual sphere itself, moreover, the PCI reproduced the humanist bias of the traditional elites, for whom philosophy, history and literature had always been the fields of choice. Missing from the party's portfolio were the more modern disciplines of economics and sociology, and the methods they had attempted to borrow, for better or worse, from the natural sciences. Formidable though its positions looked at the heights of a hallowed cultural hierarchy, it was weaker lower down, with serious consequences for it in due course.

For when the two great changes that would alter the ecology of the PCI in post-war Italy hit the party, it was quite unprepared for either. The first was the arrival of a fully commercialized mass culture, of a kind still unimaginable in the world of Togliatti, let alone of Gramsci. Even in its heyday, there had been certain obvious limits to the influence of the PCI, and more generally of the Italian Left, in the cultural scene, since the Church occupied such a large space in popular belief and imagination. Below the level of the universities, publishers, studios or journals in which the
mouvance
of the party was so widespread, and quite distinct from the strongholds of a liberal bourgeois establishment in the press, an undergrowth of conformist magazines or shows tailored to the middle- or low-brow tastes of DC voters had always flourished. From its vantage-points in the elite culture, the PCI could view this universe with tolerant condescension, as expressions of an unenlightened if salient legacy of the clerical past whose importance Gramsci had long stressed. The party was not threatened by it.

The inrush of a completely secular, Americanized mass culture was another matter. Caught unprepared, the party's apparatus—and the intelligentsia that had formed around it—were knocked sideways. Although critical engagement with pulp was not lacking in Italy—Umberto Eco was a pioneer
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—the PCI failed to connect. No creative dialectic, capable of resisting the blows of the new by transforming relations between the high and low, materialized. The case of the cinema, where Italy had above all excelled after
the war, can be taken as emblematic. There was no relay of the generation of great directors—Rossellini, Visconti, Antonioni—who had made their debut in the forties and early fifties, and whose last important works cluster in the early sixties: no combustible crossing of avant-garde with popular forms to compare with Godard in France or Fassbinder in Germany; later, only the weak brew of Nanni Moretti.
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The result was a gap so large between educated and popular sensibilities that the country was left more or less defenceless against the cultural counter-revolution of Berlusconi's television empire, saturating the popular imaginary with a tidal wave of the crassest idiocies and fantasies—schlock so wretched the very term would be too kind for them. Unable to confront or turn the change, for a decade the PCI sought to resist it. The party's last real leader, Berlinguer, personified austere contempt for the self-indulgence and infantilism of the new universe of cultural and material consumption; after he had gone, the step from unbending refusal to gushing capitulation was a short one—Veltroni coming to resemble a beaming picture-card out of the schoolboy albums he made his name distributing with copies of
Unità,
when he became its editor.

If the PCI's idealism disabled it from grasping the material drives of the market and media which transformed leisure in Italy, the same lack of economic or sociological antennae blinded it to no less decisive changes in the workplace. Already by the turn of the sixties, it was showing less attention to these than the levy of young radicals who would go on to produce the peculiarly Italian phenomenon of
operaismo
, one of the most eruptive and strangest intellectual adventures of the European Left of the period. Unlike the PCI, the post-war PSI had possessed at least one major figure, Rodolfo Morandi, whose Marxism was of a less idealist cast, focussed on the structures of Italian industry, on which he was the author of famous study. In the next generation, he found a gifted successor in Raniero Panzieri, a PSI militant who, having shifted to Turin, started to investigate the condition of factory workers in the Fiat plants, gathering round his enterprise a group of younger intellectuals, many
(Antonio Negri among them) but not all coming originally from Socialist youth organizations.
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Over the next decade,
operaismo
took shape as a protean force, throwing up a succession of seminal, if short-lived journals—
Quaderni rossi
,
Classe operaia
,
Gatto selvaggio
,
Contropiano
—exploring the metamorphoses of labour and industrial capital in contemporary Italy. The PCI had nothing comparable to show, and paid scant attention to this ebullition, even though at this stage the most influential of the new theorists was a youngster from its own ranks in Rome, Mario Tronti. This was a milieu whose culture was essentially foreign to the party, indeed declaratively hostile to Gramsci, taxed with spiritualism and populism.