Thanks to the initiative of Luigi Covatta and the work of the offices of the Library and the Historical Archive of the Senate, the entire Mondoperaio collection from 1948 to 2020 has been reproduced online and is now freely available. On 13 December, the online archive was presented to the Senate by historians such as Piero Craveri and Giovanni Scirocco, columnists such as Paolo Franchi and philosophers such as Mario Tronti, as well as Gennaro Acquaviva, Ugo Intini and Riccardo Nencini. Scirocco’s report is published in this issue and others will follow.
The online availability of the magazine is not only good news. It is a national event, especially since the life of Mondoperaio corresponds exactly to that of the Republic. Also for this reason its pages are presented above all as a historical document of extraordinary interest. This also applies to the first decade, in which the alignment of the socialists in the bloc of the Popular Front continues to inspire the cultural setting of the magazine. After the events in Hungary and the Venice Congress of the PSI, everything changes: Mondoperaio will then become that meeting place between “left” (Panzieri, Libertini, Foa) and “right” (Giolitti, Lombardi, Guiducci, Arfè) revisionists ), in which “what could have been a Tower of Babel instead gave life to a happy mestizo” (L.Covatta, Preface to G.Scirocco, A magazine for socialism. “Workers’ World” (1957-1969)Carocci, 2019).
All this was possible because the demand for realistic analyzes of Italian society and the economy that went beyond ideological schematisms was very high at the time, and fueled processes of critical revision which, in addition to the official politics of the left, directly invested traditional social customs and roles. It is no coincidence that writers, urban planners, and more broadly intellectuals also write in the magazine, e Mondoperaio is among the magazines featured in the “Il Mondo” conference held at the Eliseo Theater in 1961the greatest expression of the wind of modernization that was beginning to blow in the country.
From the second half of the 1950s, the magazine ultimately appears to us much closer than a simple historical document could be. The realistic reading of political and social facts is the one that still inspires us, and the issues it speaks of are still very open, with all the necessary mutations: starting with a surprising 1958 article on the impact of technological innovations on employment relationships.
This sense of closeness is further accentuated for many of us, if only for generational reasons, in the second golden age, marked by the direction of Federico Coen (1973-1984) and retraced by Coen himself and by Paolo Borioni in The cassandras of MondoperaioMarsilio, 1999. Where inspiration and requests for change remain those of the early 1960s, albeit with a shift of attention to the questions of democracy and institutional reform addressed in well-known contributions by Norberto Bobbio and Giuliano Amato.
I realize that I have thus sketched out a research programme, perhaps even more than one. What is certain is that we are dealing with an open-cast mine, which anyone who is interested (and there are many) can freely draw upon. For our part, we will solicit with appropriate initiatives the studies capable of restoring the fortunes and also the difficulties of a magazine which, beyond the dimension of a party bulletin, became that laboratory of ideas and proposals aimed at the Italian civil growth that many now recognize them.
The intention is anything but celebratory. We simply try to answer a question of understanding our present, also through the study of our past. The question is widespread, but our means of answering it have always been meager. The online archive is the tool we needed.