[ Italy needs a coalition — not a coalition of anti-fascist
forces, but rather a coalition for anti-fascism. ]
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“WE ARE AT THE BEGINNING OF A NEW PHASE”  
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Roberto Morea interviews Fausto Bertinotti
July 11, 2023
Transform! Europe
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_ Italy needs a coalition — not a coalition of anti-fascist forces,
but rather a coalition for anti-fascism. _

Fausto Bertinotti, Source: Fabio Pozzebon/ABr (CC 3.0)

 

THE FORMER LEADER OF THE COMMUNIST REFOUNDATION PARTY (1994–2006)
AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES (2006–2008) ANALYSES
THE EVOLUTION OF ANTI-FASCISM AND THE LEFT, AND WHAT HE SEES AS THE
DELIBERATE STRATEGY OF MELONI´S GOVERNMENT TO DESTROY ANTI-FASCIST
ROOTS AND WEAKEN THE CONSTITUTION IN ITALY.

_ROBERTO MOREA_ : THANK YOU, FAUSTO, FOR AGREEING TO CHAT WITH US. I
WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS ANTI-FASCISM WITH YOU. ON 25 APRIL, WE HAD THE
ANNIVERSARY OF ITALY’S LIBERATION FROM NAZI-FASCISM, WHICH BROUGHT
SEVERAL CONTROVERSIES STIRRED UP BY COMMENTS MADE FIRST BY PRESIDENT
OF THE SENATE IGNAZIO LA RUSSA (FROM THE FRATELLI D’ITALIA PARTY LED
BY GIORGIA MELONI) THEN BY SEVERAL GOVERNMENT MEMBERS. THESE REPEATED
STATEMENTS PROMPT US TO REFLECT ANEW ON THE PHASE WE ARE LIVING
THROUGH AT THE MOMENT. DO YOU THINK THAT THIS PHASE — IN ITALY AND
IN EUROPE — HAS ANYTHING TO TELL US IN TERMS OF A NEW FASCISM, A NEW
IDEA OF THE REACTIONARY RIGHT, EVEN IF IT TAKES DIFFERENT FORMS IN
VARIOUS COUNTRIES?

_FAUSTO BERTINOTTI:_ Thank you for the invitation, you are welcome
anytime. I would like to start with two preliminary observations. The
first is that in Italy the Republic has never been able to fully
settle accounts with fascism. By that, I mean that, under various
conditions and in different cycles of Italian history, the antithesis
between fascism and anti-fascism could emerge again, albeit in
ever-changing ways.

Anti-fascist culture has been through many ups and downs. It has, at
times, enjoyed an absolutely overwhelming hegemony, also because of
its rebirths — as in the early 1960s, and as in the long cycle
opened up by 1968 and 1969, that is, in moments when it resisted
attempts to erase or manipulate it — when it resisted attempts to
reduce anti-fascism to nothing more than an ancient, historical
memory. But what we are seeing today is another turning point.

For brevity’s sake, I will not mention all the episodes that came
before. But, just to convey the idea that anti-fascist hegemony has
never been won forever, I would like to mention the 1960 anti-fascist
revolt against the choice by Fernando Tambroni’s
Christian-Democratic government to allow the congress of the Movimento
Sociale Italiano (the party of the veterans of the
Nazi-collaborationist Salò Republic) to take place in Genoa, a city
awarded a gold medal of the Resistance. That decision led to a revolt
that prompted a new generation to take to the streets to demonstrate
under the banner of the new resistance. A famous slogan of the protest
was _“Ora e sempre resistenza”_ (“Now and always
resistance”) as is written on the plaque on Galimberti Piazza in
Cuneo, a city square named after Duccio Galimberti, the most important
figure of the Resistance in Piedmont. Yet, those events from 1960
happened after a period when anti-fascism had been put aside. One
important song for the history of my generation was the one Fausto
Amodei wrote as a tribute for the people who died in Reggio Emilia
(five Communist workers who were killed during an anti-fascist protest
under the 1960 Tambroni government). It sings of those who had already
forgotten about Duccio Galimberti. So, we start from those who had
forgotten about Galimberti and we arrive at the uprising that
prevented the congress of the Movimento Sociale Italiano from taking
place.

Their strategy is to demolish anti-fascism as the only civil religion
in this country — which, because it is deeply rooted, can always be
reborn anew.

I tell you this to point to how the fascist/anti-fascist competition
started again over and over. And this now happening again, yet this
time on totally unprecedented territory. Why unprecedented? I will not
discuss the global picture at global scale, which we should certainly
also pay attention to, but focus on the domestic one.

There are two facts that tell us we are AT THE END OF A LONG CYCLE
OPENED UP IN POSTWAR ITALY AND AT THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ONE. The
first is the existence of this right-wing government: it is not some
more or less camouflaged Right, a little bit right-wing, a little bit
populist, a little bit liberal — no. This government is fully and
entirely right-wing. The second fact is, for the first time since the
war, the absence of a class-based political Left, which is to say an
anti-capitalist Left, one that comes from the workers’ movement.

These two facts are characteristic of the new phase. The government is
right-wing for many reasons, but we can cite at least three. The
first, because it carries forward a structurally neoliberal economic
policy; the second because of the return of its corporatist elements,
in defence of its own clients, and the third, in my opinion
fundamental for the right-wing government, is the great ideological
offensive it is waging. For this Right, it’s not enough to have the
ideology that has been dominant up till now— that of the market that
says, “you will have no God but me”, summed up by the “TINA”
motto, “there is no alternative”. This is not enough: building on
this capitalist domination, it wants to carry out a cultural operation
that establishes an element of its own conservative-reactionary
approach as a permanent one.

What is this element? THE RIGHT TODAY IN GOVERNMENT WANTS TO REMOVE
THE POLITICAL CULTURE THAT CAN OPPOSE ITS ATTEMPT, a culture which
draws on one of this country’s great histories — which is to say,
anti-fascism. So, what is so to be feared about anti-fascism? Yes, the
memory, of course. But also, much more than the memory, the system of
values, the one which is transmitted by the Constitution, but whose
future survival is not guaranteed. In fact, quite like anti-fascism,
the Constitution in Italy is not set once and for all, but is itself
the stake of the battle. There are countries, like Italy, in which,
once the constitution is written, the problem arises of how it can be
implemented. Yet in any case it represents by itself a democratic
achievement — one that has to be kept alive on the terrain of the
fight against inequality, on the terrain of the dignity of labour, on
that of the rights of the person, of the diversity of the human
persona, on the theme of the welcoming (of migrants), on the theme of
solidarity, for public schools, for peace.

In all these areas, THE ACHIEVEMENT REPRESENTED BY THE CONSTITUTION
APPEARS AS A BURDEN TO THE RIGHT. And the Right has decided to get
rid of this burden. I should be clear, and emphasise that this is not
the return of fascism. This Right does not think about doing the
impossible. But it thinks about what is unfortunately possible, namely
the defeat of anti-fascism, the erasure of anti-fascism from the
present, concrete history of the country. It uses all means to this
end. One is government policies. In my opinion, it seeks a specific
position on this issue, which is what we have repeatedly
called _afascismo_ — “neither fascism nor anti-fascism”. This
is the water in which it swims to prevent having to answer the
question: “but are you anti-fascists?” “You, Prime Minister,
you, government, are you anti-fascist in accordance with the implicit
requirements in the republican Constitution?

To avoid answering the question if it is itself anti-fascist, the
Italian government invented the "afascismo".

To avoid answering to this question THEY HAVE CONSTRUCTED A SPACE
WHICH WE CAN CALL _AFASCISMO_. To protect the government from the
question that is impossible for them to handle — “declare yourself
anti-fascist” — they mount this operation to make an underhand
attack on anti-fascism. So, even the Prime Minister, not some random
party militant, can deny the anti-fascist character of the martyrs of
the Nazi-fascist massacre of partisans, political prisoners and Jews
at the Fosse Ardeatine, calling them “Italians”. With a blatant
hypocrisy — because, of course, as she says the victims were
Italians. But there is also the little problem that the accomplices of
the men who killed them were also Italians. The Prime Minister gave
her followers the go-ahead, and so they followed. So, we have the
president of the Senate — regardless of the fact that he is holds
the second highest office of the State, who could be called upon to
replace the president of the Republic! — says the obscene things he
said about Via Rasella, that is, attacking an act of partisan combat,
thanks to which the commander-in-chief of the American, Allied forces
said “this is how Italians earned the honour of being combatants”.

So, WE ARE NOT JUST TALKING ABOUT ISOLATED OUTBURSTS, for they are
part of a strategy whose objective is precisely that of demolishing
the only civil religion in this country — anti-fascism — which,
because it is deeply rooted, can always be reborn, can always go
underwater and then re-emerge because it is bound up with the history
and identity of the Italian people. So, they are proposing a tough
fight. But I am very happy with the demonstrations of this past 25
April, which grew in comparison to previous years. It is as if a part
of the Italian people had seen that this fight had resumed and decided
to take sides. This is a very encouraging development. It needs to be
nurtured with systematic political work, thinking of both the great
mass movements and the individual initiatives that are flowering in
civil society — in the form of schools, educational activities,
initiatives on the history of this country, or to put anti-fascist
cultures back into circulation, whether that means songs, literature,
or occasions for debates.

For the clash between fascism and anti-fascism is underway again. IT
IS A CLASH IN WHICH FASCISM IS NOT ITSELF IN THE FIELD, BUT HAS BEEN
REPLACED BY THIS PATTERN THAT I HAVE TRIED TO DESCRIBE, WHICH IS
TASKED WITH DEFEATING ANTI-FASCISM, something that could not be done
by a revival of fascism, clearly. Hence, the Right has chosen a
terrain that it considers more suited to its purposes, and it is up to
us to thwart them now.

We need courageous actions, even if they are symbolic — and the
symbolic element is extremely important today. For example, since
Ignazio La Russa (Fratelli d’Italia) is president of the Senate, why
do you not, you a democratic and anti-fascist senator, walk out —
showing that you do not accept La Russa to represent the entire
assembly? His repeated transgression of the anti-fascist boundaries
demands, in my opinion, that democratic parliamentarians reject his
legitimacy as president of the Senate.

_MOREA: _LOOKING AT THE POLITICAL RESPONSE, DO YOU THINK IS IT
POSSIBLE TO CREATE A NEW ANTI-FASCIST FRONT IN ITALY?

_BERTINOTTI: _No, I think it is not possible. A “front” requires
an alliance of forces. The anti-fascist front, in the distant past,
meant the alliance of predominantly left-wing parties, even if not
only left-wing ones, who had perhaps hitherto been in conflict but
joined together in the name of fighting the common enemy. For example,
in Italy we can look to the example of Ferruccio Parri’s first
government (June-December 1945), because it was an alliance of
grassroots forces representing the people. They joined together, thus
determining the conditions for a visible, concrete, manifest unity of
the people. But who today could represent the alliance of the people?

So, in my opinion the pyramid must be overturned. I do not know if you
can call it a front, perhaps a coalition — NOT A _COALITION
OF _ANTI-FASCIST FORCES, BUT RATHER _A COALITION
FOR _ANTI-FASCISM. There has to be this process that I tried to
describe earlier, made of initiatives, of studies, of idea generation,
of a revival and a rebirth of anti-fascist thought. It has to be
nurtured, both by drawing on history and by bringing the Constitution
into the present. That also means investigating what is alive and what
is dead — not of anti-fascism, which is still alive — but of
anti-fascism as enshrined in the Constitution, and of the Constitution
itself as effectively transposed into the concrete reality of the
country. In short, a living anti-fascism that is also part of the
social, economic, political and cultural fight. That has to be a
dialectical process, because — far be it from me to imagine there
are any automatic mechanisms — I think there has to be a rebirth of
anti-fascism, rather than bringing together a front of forces.

_MOREA:_ CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING SIMILAR HAPPENING AT THE EUROPEAN
LEVEL?

_BERTINOTTI: _Understanding the European level demands a structured,
organic reflection of its own. There are lots of moving parts on the
institutional-political front. There is a world crisis that the wars
bring to the surface, but it can also be read on all kinds of
different terrains. We can sum it up as a “systematic instability”
of all relations — be they economic, cultural, social, national, or
supranational. We can also call it an ungovernability of the world.

As we know, this is brought about precisely by this type of global
financial capitalism we are now facing. But it also has a specific
political content, think for example of the strategic clash between
China and the United States of America. It is as if this wedge were
being driven into the living body of the entire world, upsetting all
the balances and giving rise to nationalisms and super-nationalisms
that fuel wars but also all kinds of tensions. This disordered world
has totally disproved the predictions made by the champions of
globalisation. Instead of a globalised capitalist order, we see its
march into disorder. This goes as far as shattering the semblance of a
united Europe.

IN JUST A FEW MONTHS THE LANDSCAPE HAS CHANGED VASTLY. After a
despairing period of austerity, Europe had seemed to show promising
signs in the wake of the Covid emergency. It apparently rediscovered
the possibility of an expansive intervention — it would be too much
to call it a Keynesian one, but undoubtedly it marked some distancing
from the austerity cycle. While this, obviously, remained within an
order based on the primacy of the market, it seemed to move —
hypothetically — towards a counter-cyclical stance.

But the most recent crisis has shattered this. France and Germany, who
are the two locomotives of actually-existing Europe — the Europe of
Maastricht and the Europe of governments, the inter-governmental
Europe — have decided to move along their own path. I don't know
where this will take us.

In the meantime, new events have happened that I think are of truly
gigantic importance. Revolt, in the full sense, has come back onto the
stage. The dominant thesis had been that with this social composition
of labour and capital, labour conflict is unviable, for all the
reasons that sociologists have explained to us a million times. Yet,
see what happened. Social and labour struggles are turning London
upside down so much that Britain had to invent a new term for its
exceptional Christmas of struggles, its “strikemas”. Then you go
to France and see eleven, twelve general strikes. To explain why it
hasn’t spread to Italy, too, well, we would need a whole conference
to discuss that. Nevertheless, the revolt is back on stage. Because in
Lisbon there is a huge mobilisation on the issue of rising housing
prices, and Paris has been invaded, as I said, by ten or twelve
general strikes. Every week, Paris has been subjected to sometimes
bitter, violent struggles.

So, the heights of Europe are in crisis. Europe is struggling a lot
even to take immediate steps, as we have seen recently, even on this
mounting issue of a European intervention to redesign the stability
pact — they are not able to come to an agreement. There is the risk
that if they do not find an agreement, they will return in some way to
the austerity cycle — or something close. This would mean putting a
brake on the phase of expansion and active policies. And while that is
happening, revolt is back centre-stage. I think that is what we should
concern ourselves with. I don’t have any suggestions to offer. But
let’s say, if I had to, I would say “you know what? For once, let
us concern ourselves a little less with them, and a bit more with
ourselves”.

_Roberto Morea, a member of transform! italia
[[link removed]], is an long-timee Italian activist in
the realm of Commons. He works as the facilitator of the Commons
Working Group at transform! europe. Previously, from 2007 to 2008, he
held the position of Councillor for Social Services in Rome's first
municipality. In 2014, he was among the promoters of the European
list L‘Altra Europa con Tsipras._

_Fausto Bertinotti was the leader of the Communist Refoundation Party
(Partito della Rifondazione Comunista) from 1994 to 2006 and the
President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies from 2006 to 2008._

_transform! europe is a network of 39 European organisations from 23
countries, active in the field of political education and critical
scientific analysis, and is the recognised political foundation
corresponding to the Party of the European Left (EL).  This
cooperative project of independent non-profit organisations,
institutes, foundations, and individuals intends to use its work in
contributing to peaceful relations among peoples and a transformation
of the present world._

* Italy
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* Giorgia Meloni
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* Fascism
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* Anti-Fascism
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* neo-liberalism
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