In “Left! A manifesto” (Einaudi 2023), Aldo Schiavone launches the proposal to “detach…definitively the idea of the left from any idea of socialism, with which every progressive policy had more or less identified itself since birth: an idea which now had the archaic flavor of iron, steam and coal. And, consequently, detach the idea of equality – which, if based on new foundations, maintains all its relevance – from the idea of work (and socialism); and the figure of the citizen from that of the worker. Directly reconnecting, in other words, the left and (new) equality, without going through work and socialism: as has never been done in modernity after the industrial revolution”.
Later, Schiavone writes in-depth pages to show where the equality of our era would differ from that of the past. An equality which on the one hand cannot only concern income, but must extend to the ethical level and to the “whole of humanity”, as required by the technological leap we are experiencing. These are themes he has addressed in other recent contributions, and which deserve attention also in the perspective of starting to talk about (and rethink the) fundamentals in a more concrete and at the same time less extemporaneous way than is usually done. But should we therefore free the new idea of equality “from the ruins of socialism”?
To answer, it becomes inevitable to ask what Schiavone means by socialism. On the one hand, certainly, an idea tailored to the class struggle of twentieth-century factory workers; on the other, ambiguously, the story of the Italian left in the second half of that century.
Capital, says Schiavone, has won its battle for having “dissolved its historical antagonist” by introducing so much new technology into the production processes that it no longer needs large quantities of manual labor to make profits. At the end of a struggle that lasted more than a century, there would be a winner and a loser. Point. This removes from the picture everything that has happened in terms of the transformation of both, the great social democratic compromise, the mutation of a people exhausted by poverty into that of one of the major industrial powers in the world, the articulation of the social classes highlighted (not with the advent of globalization but already since 1973) by Paolo Sylos Labini, the co-presence of significant unemployment in some territorial areas and social segments.
The extreme complexity of this picture, which has not collapsed all together, is still partly standing, and for this very reason awaits adequate analysis after the waves of globalization of finance and technological innovation, corresponds to the poverty of a representation based on the clash between two subjects immobile in time. We who call ourselves Mondoperaio say it. In its seventy-five years of life, only in the very early days did the magazine assume that the world of work ended in the factory. But has he perhaps for this reason weakened his battles for equality? Have the socialists perhaps moderated their reform proposals for this reason (sometimes lost, but often won)?
In this area of the left, equality has for decades been felt as a principle that goes far beyond the working class condition, where dignity and equality are still too often trampled on: think of safety in the workplace. On this crucial point, the socialist movement has rarely been distracted by ideology in its one hundred and thirty year history. Which is also explained by the rich and ancient tradition of humanitarian socialism, which precisely in times of rediscovery of equality extended to the “whole of humanity” finds its profound meaning. If we refer to the analytical level, why then should we consider socialism obsolete in order to extend the idea of equality?
Instead, it makes sense to talk about the “ruins of communism”, first and foremost on an analytical level. We cannot forget the harsh denunciation of the risk of “a politics that takes pride” which is found in the programs of the SPD, to which the heirs of the PCI countered with superb certainties that all collapsed together.
Schiavone’s “manifesto” must therefore be taken seriously in reference to the open problems on the equality front. History, he writes, “has sedimented large structures of inequality in our country, which make it extremely fragile and which are compromising its civil and political life, and the very functioning of republican democracy”. But we need to understand the words, also so as not to project the shadow of past ruins onto the future.