Italy

A SINISTER WEB A Right-Wing Conspiracy in Italy 33 Years Ago? by Alfred Consiglio It was the kind of news the Italians call a bombshell. Settegiorni magazine reported on 16 April, 1972 that the Defence Ministry had been obliged to dismiss the command of the 3rd Army, stationed on the Eastern border. The formal grounds were “economic and organizational considerations”. Actually, it had come to light that there existed in the 3rd Army “right-wing elements attempting to form an activist nucleus for further action” with a view to “putting democracy in the freezer”. At first it had seemed, the...

Cath Fletcher looks at two recent studies of Italy’s Prime Minister, and assesses the direction of Italian politics. It’s very easy to make fun of Silvio Berlusconi. There’s his early career as a cruise-ship crooner (and recent release of a CD), the holiday snaps of his white bandana (to hide the hair transplant, it transpired), and the face-lift (or il lifting as it’s known in Italy). Then there was the time he told a German MEP he should take a movie role as a concentration camp guard. And the Spectator interview with Boris Johnson, when Berlusconi confided that, in fact: “Mussolini did not...

"It is difficult to think of another intellectual who has had such a real and visible effect on the political climate of their country since the war" said Perry Anderson in his 1988 essay on Norberto Bobbio, the Italian democratic socialist and political philosopher who died on 9 January. Bobbio was a liberal socialist, part of an Italian tradition of radical liberalism represented most notably by the great Piero Gobetti, murdered by Mussolini's fascists in 1926, but also Carlo Roselli, Guido Calogero and Aldo Capitini. From 1942 Bobbio was involved in the radical liberal Partito d'Azione. He...

A postscript to my review of Steve Wright's Storming Heaven and my article on Autonomist Marxism . Other material on this site: Review of Negri and Hardt's "Empire" Autonomism, workerism, and Trotskyism in Italy ; Review of Steve Wright's book on the history of autonomism in the 1960s and 70s . On other sites: A compact summary of autonomism, in the form of an interview with the American autonomist Harry Cleaver by Massimo De Angelis: www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/facstaff/Cleaver/InterviewwithHarryCleaver… . Other texts, including the historic ones like Mario Tronti's "Lenin in England"...

Martin Thomas reviews Storming Heaven: class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, by Steve Wright. Pluto Press. "Autonomist" Marxism is influential in the new anti-capitalist generation. Quite what it means is hard to tell from its best-selling books, like Toni Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire , or even the practice of its avowed partisans, like Italy's Disobedienti. Steve Wright's book Storming Heaven: class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (Pluto Press) - readable, critical, but sympathetic - is much more down to earth, tracing the origins of...

By Lucy Clement Italy’s “moderate” trade unions have scuppered an attempt to extend employment rights to workers in small businesses. A massive campaign by Rifondazione Comunista and the left-wing trade union CGIL succeeded in forcing a referendum on the extension of Article 18 of Italy’s labour law — which protects workers from unfair dismissal. But despite an 87% vote in favour of the proposition, the reform will not go ahead because less than 50% of the electorate voted. The turnout was 25.7% — largely a result of a campaign by the major political parties, backed by the unions CISL and UIL...

Ciao Floods of East Europeans... leave Britain Plus ça change... Comrade racist? Yes, we have bananas Ciao For three weeks they drifted in the Mediterranean because no European country was willing to take them in. Then the 37 men - reportedly Sundanese refugees - made it… to the safety of an Italian concrete shed surrounded by barbed wire. They were brought to land by a German aid agency in their own boat. Originally the Italian authorities had refused to receive the ship, arguing that it ought to have docked at its first port of call, Malta. Under pressure, the Italians caved in. But on their...

Mass protests against jailings By Olivier Delbeke Rome, Florence and Naples saw large demonstrations on Saturday 16 November against the police swoop which arrested 20 activists after the European Social Forum in Florence and the huge anti-war demonstration on 9 November in the same city. Despite a lot of scaremongering in advance by Italy's right wing government, there was no violence at the Forum or the demonstration. Police kept away from the demonstration, and it was efficiently stewarded by activists from Rifondazione (the Party of Communist Refoundation) and the CGIL union federation...