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 politics had more or less identified since its inception: an idea which by now had the archaic flavor of iron, steam and coal. And, consequently, to detach the idea of equality – which, if based on new foundations, retains all its relevance – from the idea of work (and of socialism); and the figure of the citizen from that of the worker. In other words, directly rejoining left and (new) equality, without going through work and socialism: as has never been done in modernity after the industrial revolution”.
Further on, Schiavone writes in-depth pages to show where the equality of our age 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 human”, 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 resuming talking about (and rethinking) 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 based on the class struggle of workers in 20th-century factories; 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. In short, at the end of a struggle that lasted more than a century, there would have been a winner and a loser. Point. Thus everything that has happened in terms of transformation of one and the other is removed from the picture, the great social-democratic compromise, the mutation of a people exhausted by poverty into that of one of the major industrial powers of the world, the articulation of social classes highlighted (not with the advent of globalization but already since 1973) by Paolo Sylos Labini, the simultaneous presence of substantial unemployment in some territorial areas and social segments.
The extreme complexity of this picture, which has not collapsed all at once, is still partly standing, and precisely for this reason awaits adequate analyzes 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 say so who are called Mondoperaio. In its seventy-five years of life, only in the very beginning did the magazine assume that the world of work exhausted itself in the factory. But has it perhaps for this reason attenuated its battles for equality? Did the socialists moderate their reform proposals for this reason (sometimes lost, but not infrequently won)?
In this ambit of the left equality has for decades been felt as a principle that goes far beyond the condition of the worker, where however dignity and equality are still too often trampled on: think of safety in the workplace. On this crucial point, the socialist movement has rarely let itself be distracted by ideology in its 130-year history. This is also explained by the rich and ancient tradition of humanitarian socialism, which precisely in times of rediscovery of an equality extended to “the whole of humanity” finds its profound meaning. If we refer to the analytical level, why then should we consider socialism as outdated in order to extend the idea of equality?
Instead, it makes sense to speak of the “ruins of communism”, above all on an analytical level. We cannot forget the harsh denunciation of the risk of “a policy that takes pride” which is found in the programs of the SPD, to which the heirs of the PCI opposed superb certainties which yes collapsed all together.
Schiavone’s “manifesto” must therefore be taken seriously in reference to the open problems on the equality front. History, he writes, “has deposited great 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 in order not to project the shadow of past ruins onto the future.
Caesar Pinelli