Claudio Pavone, historian of a divided Italy (1920-2016)

Before his death on 29 November Claudio Pavone brought out the last of some two dozen books, a personal account of his 1963 visit to the Soviet Union.  He came to Moscow to pursue his archival work, but also to see a socialist country at a moment of apparent reform. When a colleague asked if his desire to see Lenin’s tomb owed to some Communist affiliation, the Italian historian explained that he was not a party man but an ‘independent leftist’. His Russian collaborator struggled to understand: how could one place oneself on the Left, but not be in the Communist Party?

Pavone was never a ‘Party historian’ or even a member of the two-million strong Italian Communist Party (PCI), but he was nonetheless a political person whose works on Fascism and the Italian Resistance also made a decisive political impact. His own involvement in the anti-fascist struggle in his early twenties was followed by a career producing among the very most important contributions to Resistance history. This was particularly true of his 1991 study A Civil War (now available in English), which offered a penetrating analysis of the intersecting class, civil and national wars shaping the struggles of 1943–45.

‘Progressive’ British patriotism: a tradition without history

The weeks and months after Brexit have seen many a Newsnight camera panning across boarded windows, pound shop high streets and mothballed factories. The decline of the great manufacturing and extractive industries of the last century has left a hole in Britain’s economic landscape, and the once solidly Labour-voting communities built around these workplaces have themselves also waned. In 2015 UKIP surged across Northern England and South Wales, coming second in over a hundred seats, a trend only confirmed by the result on 23 June. Collective identification with ‘class’ politics – even in the sense of a residual or cultural loyalty to the unions and Labour – is not what it was.

Seeking to block the exodus, numerous prominent Labour figures have arrived on the cunning idea of trying to redefine UKIP’s own favoured territory – the politics of ‘patriotism’ – in terms more advantageous to the Left. This began even with the party’s fight against the BNP, as expressed in Gordon Brown’s appropriation of the slogan ‘British Jobs for British Workers’. We saw the same under Ed Miliband with Party grandee John Cruddas’s ‘Blue Labour’ project, seeking an idea of ‘working-class community’ that could resonate with voters ‘with concerns about immigration’ (up to and including English Defence League members…). At a minoritarian level the idea of a vaguely Gramsci-inflected ‘left populism’ today excites the Trotsam and jetsam of what was once the far Left.

taking back control? the decline of democratic power, the new populism and the Left

A piece on what it might mean to ‘take back control’ when the traditional levers of democratic power are increasingly ineffective

The most striking aspect of socialist responses to the EU referendum is the political Left’s separation from the working class. Most socialist reactions can largely be characterised in terms of either disdain for the result or else the attempt to recast voters’ motives in terms more suiting the Left’s own sensibilities. In this sense the referendum also highlighted a broader decline in the ideas of social progress central to the labour movement since its emergence two hundred years ago. There is malaise and discontent, but rather less a sense of empowerment or even rebellion.

The decline of the idea of organising labour for progressive social change is connected to shifts in the working class’s place in developed Western societies. Globalisation, financialisation and the opening up of a vast workforce in ex-socialist countries have combined radically to reduce the strategic power of the working class in states like the UK. Not only is capital less dependent on the labour of specific groups of workers – with the effect that unions or strike action have ever less bearing on capital accumulation, outside of a few logistics or transport sectors – but declining nation-states are less able to protect populations from the general flows of the world economy.

The huge Leave vote in the very poorest parts of England is one indirect reflection of this shift. The demand to ‘take back control’ reflects not only antipathy toward immigration (very real though that is, for cultural as well as economic reasons) but also a sense of national decline and the weakening of what were once the levers of popular-democratic sovereignty. In a loose sense this vote thus reflects a broader cry for ‘democracy’ or ‘control’ also expressed in such radically different phenomena around Europe as Syriza, Podemos, Italy’s Five Star Movement, the Front National, etc.

The contradiction is that the rising demand for ‘control’ – in Britain centred on opposition to the distant EU bureaucracy – goes hand-in-hand with the historic decline of the nation-state, not least the old European powers now bobbing on the waters of global finance. Of course this is far from a decline of nationalism. In fact, these phenomena are probably best understood as a kind of backlash against the decline of the political forms that developed in the twentieth-century West. The replacement of old centre-Left and Right parties by populist movements claiming they will put an end to establishment corruption or restore a dilapidated democracy represents a largely inchoate response to social malaise, lacking in any positive political vision of its own.

This is not to deny that the shift away from traditional parties has taken a broad variety of forms, and has at least some potential to be channelled in different directions. Podemos is not UKIP and the Five Star Movement is not Syriza. These somewhat catch-all parties tend to transcend traditional political allegiances, yet also reflect their own ruling classes’ place in the European order, historic questions of national identity, as well as the pressure exerted by social movements in their respective countries.  They are also unremarkable for their internal democracy: even those left-wing movements spurred on by the square occupations of 2011 today seem shaped by a logic of passively ‘supporting’ charismatic leaders more than collective decision-making.

Amidst this disarray it is certainly true that the Left has to own’the crisis of representation, and not leave it up to the hard Right to exploit anti-élite sentiment or the demand for democracy. With the decline of the communities around which the old centre-Left and Right parties were built, or even the lasting cultural attachment to past political identities, the terrain is opened up to competition among new forces. Amidst such a crisis, one of the most dangerous pressures on the Left is a merely defensive stance, lining up with neoliberalised centrists to block the populist Right: a response to our own weakness that also risks perpetuating this latter’s claim to be the true anti-establishment alternative.

Even so, it seems that just as the populist Right feeds on mythology rather than practical solutions – witness the surfeit of ‘optimism’ and national ‘pride’ over specific economic policies in the pronouncements of Brexit leaders – the Left has also done little to consider what exactly building democracy might look like, beyond a rejection of the institutional status quo. The complacent naivety of Alexis Tsipras’s referendum stunt twelve months ago was a particularly alarming manifestation of this problem, and yet not the only one. Like Italy’s Five Star Movement our own pro-Brexit Left was gleeful about establishment chaos yet short of specific alternatives of its own. Often it seems our project has a surfeit of ‘tearing down the old world’ over building collective empowerment : particularly dangerous in a period of great turmoil.

Indeed, in a context of liberal decline it is far easier for the Right to whip up a blind nativist populism than for we of the Left to organise our own ‘return to the past’.  We are far from the days of muscular unionism when English workers could turn off the lights by shutting down mines or docks, and from the era when Labour governments could build up nationalised manufacturing industries. The rise of service sector employment relative to others simply reflects the fact that work not performed face-to-face (e.g. nursing, bar service, personal care…) is typically most cheaply and efficiently imported from low-wage economies abroad, unless it is particularly high-skilled. In this sense migration is merely the poorer cousin of the far wider shift in Western economies over recent decades: outsourcing.

The kind of culture that sustained the UK labour movement at its peak fifty years ago stands far from today’s popular expectations or aspirations. The strong unions of decades past effectively relied on a solidarity based on stasis, with capital and labour rooted to specific geographic sites serving as the industrial fulcrums of class struggle. Communities formed around mines and factories where one generation after another toiled, handing down both workplace skills and traditions of struggle, in turn creating favourable conditions for class identification and solidarity: most signally the ‘little Moscows’ from Rhondda to Turin or Boulogne-Billancourt. Indeed, the devastation of ex-mining towns since the 1980s – on 23 June some of the heaviest Leave outposts – is a tragic example of what happens when such communities are pulled apart.

Yet even beyond capital’s ever-greater ease in displacing such centres of labour, it seems hard to believe we could or would even want to create similar conditions today. Outside of public services, the relatively smaller and more mobile workplaces replacing mining and manufacturing hardly offer a basis for such organisation.  Moreover, with the extension of individual autonomy in so many other spheres of life (from sexual liberation to geographic mobility or even the possibility of permanently re-fashioning one’s identity online) such a class identity rooted in family, community and the multi-generational workplace is vanishing. This was, indeed, an identity politics, and today it has been outpaced by a much wider array of more fragmentary, personalised, and – as they say – intersectional ones.

Indeed, at a more general level we can say that automation and outsourcing are reducing the space of ‘routine’ jobs in advanced Western economies, in favour of ones based on communication and information. Immaterial labour is the wave of the future, its radical disconnect from the old working-class communities indirectly but nonetheless clearly reflected in the referendum divide between ‘left behind’ areas and liberal metropolitan centres.

Yet the rising industries are constitutively precarious and ephemeral, with the rise of freelancing and the online distribution of piecework such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Not only have the specific historic bases of trade-union and Labour organisation died away, but they have been replaced with employment sectors lacking any similar rootedness. The million or more working in call centres are not about to set up brass bands: not just because this relatively young workforce don’t like the old tunes, but because their lack of identification with their job as a ‘career’ weakens the purpose of workplace-based organisation.

In this context, the Left has to think about how it can control and push back the power of capital in the age of globalisation, without resorting to the utopian-restorationist idea of returning to the kind of economy England had in the 1960s or 1970s. In a sense the increasing interest in Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a response to this same demand, aspiring to impose a decent minimum ‘floor’ for living standards unbound from any connection to seeking employment. Certainly whatever the difficulties of its practical implementation, we can understand the desire for stability this represents, as against the simple abandonment of the workless to poverty.

However, I would like to propose a variation on this measure, more fully responding to the challenge of outsourcing and the gap between work prospects and the personal autonomy we now enjoy in so many areas of our lives. At the same time, this is also an orientation that draws on some of the original aims of the labour movement. For since its origins the Left has stood not only for better wages, shorter hours or stabler working conditions, or still less for mere ‘anger’ against particular institutions or politicians, but also what might loosely be called ‘self-improvement’: centrally including the movement for working class-self education. A basic income allows for survival; education is the key to fully realising one’s human, creative capacities.

From the nineteenth century ‘self-improvement’ was among the key ideals and focuses of labour organisation, the desire for democratic power going hand-in-hand with the ‘downtrodden’ seeking to raise their sights to the world around them. Faced with either no formal education system or one narrowly oriented to producing obedient industrial workers, the early trade union movement and socialist parties were a wellspring of evening classes, reading groups and cultural associations, allowing even those of the humblest backgrounds to master science and knowledge and speak down to their social ‘betters’. This was nothing less than the realisation of the unfulfilled ideals of the Enlightenment. If limited by the ideological biases and shortcomings of the organisations concerned, it was nonetheless a powerful force for social mobility and working-class pride.

Such activities were particularly famously promoted by two of the great mass parties influenced by Marxism, namely the pre-World War I German Social Democrats (SPD), and the post-1945 Italian Communist Party (PCI). Both excluded from governmental office, these parties unable to take state power instead built up civil society institutions of their own, islands of working-class power outside of the state. Reformist parties able to reach power (including the SPD themselves in the 1920s, after the advent of universal suffrage and an egalitarian voting system) did also maintain such internal structures, though as these parties merged into the state they tended instead to focus on expanding school education.

What we as a society have largely lost is the ideal that education is not a period at the start of one’s life followed by decades of work, but an ongoing process of self-improvement or self-discovery. Yet it is senseless to have an education system premised on teenagers gambling on their future life prospects and then committing to a five-decade career – particularly in an economic situation where the shifts in the knowledges relevant to the economy (or even to culture in the broadest sense) operate far more rapidly than human lifetimes. The model of primary and secondary education is suited to the low-skilled routine work of the turn of the twentieth century, not ones where the control and manipulation of information is king.

This poses two distinct tasks for the Left, both of which respond to the crisis of democracy and the increasing atomisation of our society, and point a way ahead beyond a merely populist  rallying of discontent. Firstly, the creation and development of projects of working-class political education. While of course their literal ‘form’ will not be the same as the old mass parties, and could certainly improve on the SPD or PCI’s level of critical inquiry or openness, this is essential to overcoming the current passive, atomised and electoralist atmosphere of even the best left-populist parties like Syriza and Podemos. ‘Spontaneist’ processes or enthusiasm for fiery leaders are poor alternatives to building an informed activist base, for the same reasons as social media has atomised more than genuinely ‘democratised’ political discourse.

Secondly, to make demands on the state focused on the right to free adult education, and the provision of the time and means for its fulfilment. This could be something like a Universal Basic Income but also integrating fully paid time away from either working or jobhunting, and extended across all age categories. The prevalence of the 40-hour week being in any case mainly a cultural legacy of factory production (times in which it was more economically efficient to aggregate large numbers of workers all day in the same place) working time could be radically reduced as we reorient to a higher-skilled and lower-work economy.

Faced with the power of globalised capital and the decline of community attachment, workplace organisation is declining as a means of working-class power. People feel ever less control over their lives, and the demand for self-determination – filtered through the prisms of nationalism and reactionary nostalgia – is overwhelming liberal politics, ever less able to guarantee people gradual growth or improvement from one generation to the next. In this context a politics focused on greater educational rights and greater free time is a way of restoring personal dignity, creating a broader basis for democratic decision-making, and pushing back the atomisation of our society.

The Italian media and Jo Cox

The shock at Westminster over the murder of Jo Cox MP did not long avert speculation on its political fallout. Nonetheless, few openly sought to politicise what had happened. As the Times aptly notes ‘Most MPs went out of their way to avoid highlighting Mrs Cox’s enthusiasm for Britain remaining in the EU out of respect and fear of being accused of politicising the incident’. The media followed suit: no UK paper mentioned Brexit or Cox’s stance on it in their headlines.

At most, certain comment pieces have called for more ‘respectful’ public debate. Polly Toynbee was on the extreme end of things in saying this was the result of the ‘anti-establishment mood’; in an unusually considered piece the Spectator‘s Alex Massie argued that the easy mudslinging of the Brexit campaign, and more specifically the stigmatisation of migrants, has whipped up the atmosphere in which even a ‘lone nutter’ would be more likely to shoot and stab.

However, such caution has been much more absent from foreign media. Indeed, unbound by the need for dignity or subtlety, French and particularly Italian press leapt on the EU link to the murder. Doubtless this partly owes to the fact the ‘European’ angle is of more interest to these foreign readers than the ins-and-outs of Thomas Mair’s mental health.

But it was also a reflection of what British papers and politicians couldn’t say directly.

In Paris Le Monde‘s headline emphasised the death of ‘A convinced pro-European‘; and the link was even more sharply drawn in Italian media. Il Tempo headlined: ‘Brexit bloodied: now the first victim‘. Typical was La Repubblica, Italy’s best-selling daily, whose title reads ‘Brexit, the referendum bloodied: a woman symbol of Labour killed’. 

Similarly La Stampa ran with ‘London, the referendum bloodied’ along with two front-page columns ‘The lies that foment hatred’ and ‘When hatred of foreigners strikes’. Il Libero went with ‘Killed because she backed the EU’; the centre-right Corriere della Sera led with ‘The anti-Brexit campaign bloodied’ and a column ‘The poison of hatred’ (directly next to a box on the danger of Brexit to the stability of the eurozone); and Il Fatto Quotidiano with ‘The vote bloodied: pro-Europe MP killed’.

Perhaps crassest of all was the reaction of Il Manifesto, a self-declared communist paper, with its curious title ‘Union Jo’:

I mention this ‘Union Jo’ headline not because it conforms to my prejudice about Italians’ incapacity for wordplay. Rather because of the editors’ decision directly to associate the reference to Cox with the imagery of the EU itself. The words appear above a photo of empty seats in the European Parliament with UK flags.

The message is almost as if the European Union had itself been attacked, and the flags on the empty seats symbolise it having ‘fallen silent’. Yet the editors are mistaken. It is UKIP members who put UK flags at their seats in the Parliament; far from a poignant European tribute to Jo Cox, what appears in the photo is a British proclamation of wanting to leave the EU.

Such a desire directly to make the killing about Brexit may in any case seem strange given that almost no referendum voters will read the Italian papers. Certainly this has something to do with the simplification inherent to covering foreign news for a different ‘national’ audience. And for some the Cox murder will mainly be of interest for its effect on the currency exchanges. But in a way these editors were also doing what Polly Toynbee did in her piece, also with a view to their own, Italian context.

That is, the papers bundled together the need to resist ‘hatred’, the defence of the European Union, and the sheer horror at the killing, as a kind of tribute to liberal politics itself. Notably these papers all skimmed over Mair’s far-Right and neo-Nazi links: but unlike the British press, did so precisely in order to connect his actions to anti-Europeanism in general.

Clearly an event like this – or more specifically, the reduction of such an event to an ‘EU besieged’ narrative – is an opportunity for such media to ‘virtue-signal’. They can at once express outrage and use the horror to give themselves and their preferred institutions an aura of dignity. Having never been humanitarian-minded in its coverage of the migrant crisis, Il Corriere now leads on ‘the poison of hatred’ that killed Cox. But this is a ‘hatred’ which, through its attachment to Brexit, is safely projected a thousand miles overseas.

Perhaps, indeed, those seeking to associate the terrorist atrocity with Brexit will have their wish. It has certainly already taken the momentum out of the campaign, and may well alter the result. Some are celebrating already, and not only in the City of London. As Il Giornale, owned by Silvio Berlusconi, so bluntly put it in its headline “Three pistol shots against a woman save Europe”.

A partisan occasion: 25 April in Italy

A piece on the Italian Communist Party’s shaping of Resistance memory, and the banalisation of ‘Resistance values’

Italy’s 25 April bank holiday marks the anniversary of the country’s liberation from Fascism. That day in 1945, anti-fascist partisan units freed the Northern industrial centres of Milan and Turin from the grip of Hitler and Mussolini’s remaining loyalists, after Allied forces had swept through the country. Just three days later, in a humiliating epitaph to the twenty-year régime, partisans captured and executed the Duce and his entourage, hanging them upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.

Marking the partisans’ victory over both German occupation and Italian Fascism, 25 April is a ‘patriotic’ holiday that honours the deeds of an armed minority. The festival was first celebrated in 1946, as the parties of the National Liberation Committee (CLN)  from Christian Democrats to Socialists and Communists sought to identify themselves with ‘universal’ values of freedom, democracy and national unity. Tellingly, ‘Liberation Day’ would be celebrated on the day that the CLN for upper Italy declared its power, not the date of the Allies’ final liberation of Italian territory.

Should an advocate of eugenics be allowed to run a publicly-funded school?

Toby Young is a prominent Conservative columnist and co-founder of the West London Free School. As well as touting himself as a Tory candidate in the run-up to the last General Election, he has written for Party websites in support of Tory education ‘reforms’, and is so much a fan of Boris Johnson that he’s even bet Nigella Lawson £15,000 that the London mayor will be Conservative leader by 2018.

Much like Johnson, Toby Young promotes his views in the guise of the ‘pillock’; forever half-joking and openly advertising his propensity to gaffe, as a kind of cover for likely outlandish or offensive statements. This evasive character was amply on show in his ‘memoir’ How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

However, given his media voice, Young’s political opinions are neither private nor funny. They are even less amusing when we consider his role in running a ‘free school’ – the Tory-promoted scheme handing control of publicly funded schools from local authorities to private individuals. And still less so when we consider his miserabilist views of what makes for ‘intelligence’ or ‘socio-economic success’.

trump, and the toxic appeal to ‘anti-fascism’

To brand someone a ‘fascist’ is to invite a rarely rewarding debate over definitions. Indeed, if even Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler had no common theory for what they were doing, it is puzzling to hear the category ‘fascism’ extended to Ba’athism, ISIS or, indeed, the rise of Donald Trump’s white nationalist movement.

Not only are these examples not all united by classically fascist themes of national rebirth, economic corporatism or armed expansionism, but nor are these themes the sole preserve of fascists. We never seem to discuss it, but even good-old British liberalism had its millions of dead and its concentration camps. But in media-political discourse the use of ‘fascist’ normally means little but a ‘bully’ who doesn’t respect the rules; and its use often tells us more about the person making the accusation, than the intended target.

Yes, do tear down the statues of Winston Churchill

Today’s Daily Telegraph brings news of the Oxford Union’s debate over removing the statue of Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes. A non-binding vote held at the end of proceedings saw a victory for the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign, which has highlighted the institutional racism within the university as well as its colonial past.

One of the speakers opposed to such a move, theology professor Nigel Biggar, apparently argued that by the same logic ‘If Rhodes must fall, so must Churchill, whose views on empire and race were similar’. If Biggar’s intention was to prove the supposedly absurd logic of ‘rewriting history’, perhaps his argument ought instead be adopted as a new campaign slogan.

Home for Christmas: a Bandiera Rossa partisan action, 21 December 1943

Bandiera Rossa was the largest Resistance movement in Rome during Nazi rule, September 1943 to June 1944. In his memoir I tigrotti di Bandiera Rossa, ‘Dantin’ Pepe (a member of the group, so colourfully named in homage to the 1790s French revolutionary George Danton) recalls a daring partisan action that ended in a merrier Christmas for the benighted population of the occupied Italian capital.

Taking over a train headed for Germany by force, Pepe, his fellow Bandiera Rossa organiser Rosa Soviet and their comrades saved some two hundred Romans from deportation. This was one of few successful attempts to save the young men sent from Italy to Germany to work in that country’s war industries, many of them never to return.

Pepe’s account itself displays the lusty, boastful tones of an autodidact working-class communist proud in his comrades’ work, as well as the revolutionary movement’s stress on the possibility of winning Wehrmacht conscripts to their cause. A later part of the same memoir laments the German soldiers who had to be killed in order to pull off the action.

A heretic, not a splitter

An article for Jacobin on Pietro Ingrao, 1915-2015

The late Italian communist Pietro Ingrao was damned with faint praise, as the usual political-class tributes to a “Father of the Republic” streamed in after his September death. President Sergio Mattarella, himself of Christian-Democratic background, commented that Ingrao’s “passion was a piece of national heritage, his inner freedom an example to the younger generation.”

Though no one could doubt Ingrao’s importance as a leading light of postwar Italian democracy, including his service as first Italian Communist Party (PCI) president of the Chamber of Deputies from 1976–79, his true legacy lies elsewhere.