Roman diary

Andrea Benincasa, [1476] Atlante di carte marine. Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms. lat. 81, f. d-5v-6r http://www.e-codices.ch/it/bge/lat0081/d-5v-6r/0

Le rotte che abbiamo navigato non erano certo le più brevi nè le più sicure ma viaggiavamo senza un portolano. […] Pure così siamo arrivati in porto: uno qualsiasi, non quello che ci eravamo immaginati. Aurora Panzica

The routes we have navigated were certainly not the shortest nor the safest but we travelled without a portolan […] Yet we still made it to port: a haphazard one, not the one we had imagined.

One time, around midway on my usual path leading down from Via Ludovisi, where the Swiss Institute in Rome is located, to the Casa Internazionale delle Donne in Trastevere, I got slightly sidetracked and the walk took on a seemingly spiritual turn. Travelling through Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, I first crossed the Largo dei Chiavari then Via del Paradiso: calvary and paradise, a small city block apart. Better yet, between the two streets was the store Stravaganze Romane. How fortunate to get lost in this city. It had delivered, almost ready-made, the plot for a new text: what separated the quintessence of suffering from the arrival in paradise was indulging in Rome’s many extravagances.

Turns out my translation of chiavari had been off; the subsequent correction proceeded to shipwreck my pretense of a script. “Calvary” in plural form should have given it away. Though the term is permitted as a metaphor for the prolonged and painful ordeals we all experience, there is only one Calvàrio and it refers to the place of the crucifixion. The same logic holds for the Botteghe Oscure; a toponym that, despite its plural form, referred to the address of an organization of which there could only be one: the Partito Comunista Italiano.

As former activist Letizia Paolozzi wrote recently on the occasion of the party’s centenary, that name was the bearer of “a project of transformation [along with] thousands of fragments of life.” With the name-change in 1992 – to the vague, if not dubious moniker of Partito Democratico della Sinistra [Democratic Party of the Left] –, the transformation project was thrown overboard. Crucially, writes Paolozzi, the “identity of millions of people” that had been a part of it was also “denied” in the process, their “feelings, ideas, discussions” having been trampled upon (See, Una Femminista e il Pci: un raconto [A feminist and the PCI: a chronicle] at https://www.donnealtri.it).

As for my text idea, it had some life in it yet. According to the Treccani, a chiavaro (the regional form for chiavàio) was someone entrusted with the keys to a shop, a warehouse, or the treasury. So it was not the calvary that opened up the doors to paradise; holding the keys to the treasury did. Romans could dispense with my irony, it seemed.

***

An archive and library I consulted frequently in the months I was in Rome is Archivia, one of the most extensive documentation centers for the women’s movement in Italy. It was established in 2003 together with the Casa Internationale delle Donne at Via della Lungara, 19 – named for its considerable Tiber-flanking length (770m). The actual entrance to the documentation center is, however, on a side street, i.e., at Via della Penitenza.

According to the Enciclopedia Cattolica (1948, v. 9, p. 1106), penitenza (penitence) is “a sacrament instituted by Christ” whose observation – “in connection to an ecclesiastical judgement” – has the power to “remit sins.” The term has its roots in the Ancient Greek notion of “metanoia” (μετάνοια), meaning a change of judgment or view. Crucially, Greeks and Christians saw the extent of self-transformation in very different terms. In Christian doctrine, it is a process of reconciliation with God that implies the sinner’s “total conversion,” that is, the “complete transformation… of the way of thinking, acting and living” (p. 1105).

In Greek antiquity, on the other hand, the “change of opinion or decision, the alteration in mood or feeling… may be for the bad as well as the good.” Moreover, “the reference is always to an individual instance of change of judgment or remorse.” Hence, for the Greeks, “μετάνοια never suggests an alteration in the total moral attitude, a profound change in life’s direction, a conversion which affects the whole of conduct.” (See: μετανοέω/μετάνοια, Theological dictionary of the New Testament, 1964–, p. 5)

The link between changing viewpoint and adopting a new attitude towards life, between self-transformation and transformation of the world, was a central problem for Italian feminism throughout the 1970s. It was an issue that the preceding explosion of rebellion, the 1968 moment, had fundamentally failed to address. Reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of those events (see Uguaglianza/differenza, la rottura politica del femminismo [2018] at https://www.centroriformastato.it), Maria Luisa Boccia stressed that while the young female protagonists of the student uprising would make up “the numerically most relevant component of feminism in the early 1970s”, it does not follow that ’68 was “the political and cultural origin of feminism.” The relationship between the two phenomena is marked, in fact, by a dynamic of both overlap and repulsion. “In the decisive early phase of the university occupation,” Boccia recounts, “there was an intertwining between life and politics that swept away the pre-existing forms, instruments, and meanings associated with both terms.” For women, in particular, this “active, not sudden, removal of difference was obviously crucial.”

However, Boccia argues, this collective gesture of “clearing the terrain” swept away difference to such an extent that it ultimately “mystified equality.” The shift to “more traditional concepts and practices of politics” that followed ended up “leaving existential politics in the background.” Young female participants in the movement started to realize that the “power logic” – and accompanying notion of a necessary “frontal attack to the system” – that post-1968 organizations converged to “overwhelmed the invention of another kind of politics, another way to think and practice it.” For these actors, then, if 1968 was a question, feminism was their attempt at a response. A response that, in turn, was itself formulated as a lingering doubt: “who am I as woman?”.

***

Even if she belonged to a different generation than the protagonists of the student rebellion, with her seminal Sputiamo su Hegel [Let’s spit on Hegel – 1970], Carla Lonzi (1931-1982) was intervening in a social arena that the events of 1968 had helped to shape. Lonzi argued that men “have always searched for life’s meaning beyond and against life itself,” whereas for women, “life and the meaning of life constantly overlap.” Hence her conclusion that “women are immanence, men transcendence” and that “men have had to negate her”— i.e., femininity as immanence — “to kickstart the course of history.” Yet, as Lonzi stresses, contrary to what “the male, the genius, the visionary” believe, “the fate of the world is not to always move forward”:

The unexpected fate of the world lies in restarting the pathway to trail it with the woman as subject. Let us recognize in ourselves the capacity to make out of this instant a total transformation of life. […] We deny the myth of the new man as an absurdity. The concept of power is the element of continuity in male thought and, hence, of every final solution. The concept of women’s subordination follows it like a shadow. Every prophecy based on these premises is false. […] The goal does not exist; the present does. We are the dark past of the world; we realize the present (Sputiamo su Hegel/La Donna Clitoridea e la Donna Vaginale e Altri Scritti, Milano: Rivolta Femminile, 1974, pp. 60-61).

Lonzi’s ‘total transformation of life’ did not aim to reconcile the individual with a higher order of things they had been out of tune with, as in the Christian practice of penitence, but equated the act of fundamentally changing one’s life to a radical form of being in (and re-fashioning) the present. During my subsequent research in Italy, I was surprised to find an echo of this formulation in an article by Adriana Seroni (1922-1984), a figure that, with the exception of their shared birthplace in Florence, had little in common with Carla Lonzi. Seroni was a PCI ‘lifer’, who had joined the party in 1944 — alongside many partisan women—steadily rising through its ranks until she took charge of its women’s section in 1968. A decade later, having played a key mediating role between her party and the challenge directed to it by feminist collectives, Seroni gave a definition of feminism that highlighted the overarching nature of the phenomenon and its impact beyond the movement sphere:

Either feminism identifies itself tout court with the groups that self-define as feminist … or it refers itself to an infinitely more vast and diversified reality; to a revolt of consciousness that encompasses large masses of women and which, even if departing from different take-off points and searching for different possibilities of solutions, aims to call into question women’s entire manner of being and leading their lives (hence, of men as well). (in La questione femminile in Italia: 1970-1977, Ed. Riuniti, 1977, p. 274).

For an activist that would never expressly call herself a feminist, Seroni displays a surprising grasp of the movement’s significance and goals. She had seen many women comrades incorporate feminist ideas and adhere to feminist collectives. The practice of double militancy– i.e., simultaneous activism in the party and the collective – became if not widely accepted, at least tolerated in the PCI under her watch.

Nevertheless, her last remark – anche, quindi dell’uomo – remains the most surprising in this plural and, perhaps, still valid attempt at a definition of feminism. It took me back to the event that put my life on a different course a few years ago — my divorce — and to the first feminist reading that followed it, recommended by a friend who had known me and my ex-partner; the first thing I should do, Edna said, was read bell hooks’ The will to change:

It is true that masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change.

***

That shift in life was quick to impact my research, which gained a new orientation. While working on an important strand of the communist movement in the 1970s, so-called ‘Eurocommunism,’ and how its roots and many of its most enthusiastic followers were actually in Latin America, I learned there was more than a chronological coincidence between that phenomenon and the global feminist upsurge of the same decade. In the case of Italy, at least, the communist and feminist movements had in many ways ‘intertwined’ during the 1970s. I would later learn that had been the case elsewhere, too (Spain and Brazil, to name just the two other cases I’ve engaged with). Shifting the focus of my research to the relationship of communists and feminists led me to realize, however, that relatively little had been written on communist women, whether by (the mostly male) historians of communism, or even by historians of the women’s movement. Because communist women are often considered as “not really” feminists (or at most as suspect ones) they have been mostly left out of the movement’s story. I had, in other terms, found a (mostly) overlooked constellation of 1970s political and social struggle whose protagonists were only eager to reflect on nowadays.

With it also came a renewed set of written sources and their archives, eventually leading me to Rome’s Via della Penitenza. It also brought a certain apprehension. Ever since this shift in research focus, I had been expecting some form of confrontation from female colleagues, archivists or oral history sources as to what business I had with this subject. But it never came; neither in interviews and talks with former PCI and left-feminist militants, nor in exchanges with the small (and very generous) community of researchers dedicated to the topic. I have been met, at most, with curiosity as to what had brought me to this research subject. This text is, in fact, the first attempt to openly articulate its place in my own trajectory.

***

The single vague allusion to my gender in the context of this research was instead a humorous – though consequential – one. I was working at Archivia when Giovanna Olivieri, the main archivist, noticed I had taken off my shoes while examining some sources and remarked I “must be really feeling right at home.” I was indeed. The archives of the women’s movement I have worked in are incredibly welcoming spaces. Olivieri added that I would not get away with it in other Italian libraries. For some reason, my lax manners took her back to her experiences as a student in a particularly strict Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze in the 1980s, where she had assisted a more senior researcher on a survey of the origin of Corsican toponyms. Her main sources had been portolans (portolani), a term that was new to me. Giovanna gave me an overview of what they consisted of, i.e., navigational aids widely used in the medieval Mediterranean. Digging deeper, I learned the portolan provided a fertile vantage point on my research.

According to Evelyn Edson’s The World Map, 1300-1492 (Baltimore, 2007), portolans were, in essence, “sailing directions, ancestors of the pilot books still used today” (p. 37). They appeared “some time before 1300” and built “on a substantial experience of sea travel”(42). Indeed, as a product of accumulated practice, they had considerable accuracy, even by current standards. As primarily written works that stood alone or accompanied the first medieval sea charts, they were structured differently than modern maps. Portolans provided, namely, not only the “distance between different points on the coast and directions to follow from one place to another,” but also included “navigational information such as prevailing winds, freshwater supplies, hazards, and landmarks” (37).

A typical portolan included descriptions of “landmarks visible from the sea, such as towers, churches, and mountains,” but also “warnings of shoals and reefs, descriptions of sea currents, and landing conditions” (39). In other words, they charted reference points and hazards that were readily identifiable when coming ashore and others that were not.

Over the last two years, I have surveyed how representatives of two major twentieth-century movements, communism and feminism, attempted to approach each other’s shores and landmasses. If there were conflicts (and even shipwrecks), joint struggles and successful alliances also occurred. Some actors even began inhabiting and transiting both spaces. In attempting to write a history encompassing these various instances, I realized that while the lexicon of divergence in contemporary discourse has become rich and variegated over the last few decades—a welcome development— our vocabulary of convergence has evolved little since the 1970s and 1980s. (What terms can we mobilize, besides “intersectionality” and going “beyond the fragments”?) The goals of my research, then, closely mirror those of a portolan: without erasing difference, how can we chart paths towards common struggle again? What can we learn from those actors that, in the different circumstances of seas past, changed course and found a way to safely approach the coastline of islands not their own, arriving where perhaps they did not expect?

Started in the second half of 2021, finished in São Paulo in March 2022.

1.

In the unpublished work known as the 1857 Introduction (MEW 13: 615-641), Marx opens his consideration on method by stressing how, by beginning their analyzes with the figures of the ‘isolated hunter or fisherman’, political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo still stood ‘with both feet on the shoulders’ of what he termed ‘the eighteenth-century prophets’ (615). The reference to religion is deliberate. It evokes the parallel Marx had drawn in the Poverty of philosophy between the bourgeois standpoint on feudal society and Christian theologians’ relationship to other forms of belief. If, to the latter, ‘every religion, other than their own, is a fabrication of man’, whereas theirs ‘is a revelation from God’, to the former ‘there was once a history, but there isn’t one anymore’ (eine Geschichte [hat es] gegeben, aber es gibt keine mehr, MEW 4: 139).

It follows that, in the teachings of economists – i.e., Marx’s modern-day prophets –, the ‘eighteenth-century individual’ does not emerge as the combined ‘product… of the dissolution of feudal societal forms’ and of ‘the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century’; this socially produced individual ‘hovers’, rather, ‘as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past’. In other words: ‘Not as a historic result but as history’s point of departure’ (MEW 13: 615 – my stress). Crucially, Marx argued that the bourgeois standpoint on political economy did not arise solely from the gestures of a) projecting back that which first had to be borne historically and b) self-identifying with its realization. He stressed a further operation, namely, c) naturalization. That is, modern economists’ elevation (or hypostatization) of the eighteenth-century individual from prophane inhabitant of a concrete social reality to the status of ‘natural individual appropriate to their notion of human nature’; as such, ‘not historically engendered, but posited by nature’ (615). Marx concludes with the assertion that this illusion ‘has been common to each new epoch to this day’ (615-16).

2.

If that is so, is there an illusion appropriate to and bred by our own times? Not quite. Though the present might show a knack for hatching minor chimeras and boast new devices to propagate them, the uncomfortable fact is no epochal transition separates Marx’s 1850s from our 2020s. If that is so, then that master illusion should not have substantially transfigured either. In other words, if the present epoch is governed by a capitalist societal formation that, despite many relevant mutations, remains unaltered in its foundations with regards to the one Marx dedicated a lifetime of study and critique to, so it must be with our illusions. The eighteenth-century variant Marx had sought to dispel might well possess a new physiognomy; its inner-workings, however, should have remained unchanged.

The contemporary survival of a mode of naturalization Marx had attributed to bourgeois political economists’ ‘peculiar method of procedure’ suggests this is indeed the case; more specifically, their penchant for arranging institutions into one of ‘only two kinds’, i.e., ‘artificial and natural’ (MEW 4: 139). ‘Artificial’ stands here for things constructed, hence both fickle and hollow, while ‘natural’ represents that which is genuine, eternal and, above all, static. Nothing could be further from Marx’s own concept of nature; indeed, his thought disputes and seeks to overcome the nature-society dualism altogether (but that’s another story).

3.

If these definitions (and the binary itself) seem decidedly archaic, one discipline, contemporary history, has raised them to the status of living fossils. Modern-day historians, especially those dealing with the recent past, show a decidedly eighteenth-century propensity to put things into either an ‘artificial’ or a ‘natural’ box. The meaning of ‘natural’ remains largely unchanged; it corresponds, namely, to those deeper traits and propensities of being human, which had supposedly lay in waiting until capitalism provided a societal form fit for their realization. The role of the ‘artificial’ has also endured: to provide natural’s suitable foil.

Yet, the range of historical experience deemed ‘artificial’ went through a key enlargement in the twentieth century. That is, once the Russian Revolution of 1917 heralded the first lasting experience of a post-capitalist societal form. From that point onwards, it was no longer merely feudal (or, more broadly, pre-capitalist) society that stood as the inauthentic counterpart to a capitalist social order presumed to be more reflective of human nature; the mantle of artificiality began to envelop the historical attempts to surpass the latter as well, i.e., socialist societies. If this practice had already been widespread during the Cold War, state socialism’s collapse or significant transmutation as of 1989-1991, followed in most cases by a cataclysmic capitalist restauration, played a key role in cementing into common sense the aura of artificiality that had been attributed to it from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

4.

That very metaphor was, in fact, an embodiment of this gesture of (de)naturalization. It was not employed to denounce the East-West partition of Europe as a product of oppression or the like, but rather to smuggle in the message of the contrived nature of this border-setting act; that is, it worked less through the allusion to the cold and rigid materiality of the barrier, then to the theatrical gesture of a curtain being drawn. A similar logic was responsible for the conversion of the Berlin Wall to the quintessence of ‘real-existing’ socialism: every country has borders; this one, however, was drawn by someone to keep people in. It embodied ideologically-driven arbitrariness rather than the negation of freedom as such. A more far-reaching critique was never intended. Given the attachment of its propagators to the Western establishment, the ‘official’ outcry directed at the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall throughout the Cold War was not (nor could it have been) targeted at the existence of borders as such, or of border walls for that matter. Their recent apotheosis in Europe and the United States constitutes no incoherence in this regard.

Yet, to come back to the crux of Marx’s critique, the manner in which a previous historical formation is approached and explained, and especially the way its deficiencies are devised, show an intimate connection to the overall self-understanding (and the dominant ideological constructs) of a given societal form. My argument is that this assessment can be extended to the confrontation with a competing social system, as was the case of state socialism. In this sense, both ‘neoclassical’ and later ‘neoliberal’ bourgeois economics were, to a significant extent, responding to the seismic shifts of 1917 and 1989, respectively, in clinging to and refining the anachronism of the ‘isolated individual’. As for the historical scholarship entrusted with state socialism’s postmortem, it hinged its analysis on the natural/artificial binary instead. The problematic result was that, instead of portraying men and women in socialist societies as the simultaneous ‘authors and actors of their own dramas’ (MEW 4: 135), with all the contradictions this entails, mainstream historical accounts of the post-1989 era chose to depict them as partakers of a senseless if elaborate sham (in German: Schwindel, also meaning fraud or scam).

A sham, because the crucial presupposition of such accounts is that the artificiality of socialist societies was embodied not only in their made-up, inauthentic quality as such, but also in how poorly hidden the strings of the ostensible puppet show were. Hence, the depth of the fakeness is compounded by the suggestion that every member of those societies, except its most fanatic defenders, and every visitor from outside, except the true believers, was completely aware of it at all times.

5.

This enlargement of the historical topography of the ‘artificial’ to encompass twentieth-century socialist experiments carries consequences on many levels. For starters, it marks – knowingly or not – a doubling down on the status of the capitalist social order as ‘natural hence eternal’ (MEW 4: 140, my stress); whether this is declared or merely suggested is of secondary importance, as I will argue below; yet, besides such ‘indirect apologetics’ (G. Lukács) of the status quo by means of a Whig interpretation of history updated for the ‘American age’, the notion of state socialism (or ‘historical communism’) as primarily ‘fake’ carries a range of interpretative and epistemological ramifications as well.

It means, for instance, that the prevailing attitude attributed to ordinary people living under socialism by their (mostly West European or US-based) chroniclers is that of hypocrisy. Hence the historian’s primary task to unmask the fakeness, that is, the glaring inconsistency between discourse and practice, between slogans and life ‘as it really was’; in short, the imperative to repeatedly remind the reader how these societies fell short of the ideals they proclaimed to be founded upon. This is, obviously, no illegitimate knowledge goal in itself; only that this analytical modus is insistently present in communism studies, while only playing a minor role in depictions of the Western powers during the Cold War and beyond. As a result, irrespective of whether the USSR, Yugoslavia, East Germany or China make up the object of analysis, some wrinkles notwithstanding, the unwritten goal of the approach in question is more or less the same, namely, to demonstrate these societies came to embody the very opposite of what they claimed to be, that they were unequal, stunted and suffocating; above all, however, that they were ‘doomed from the word go’ (Darko Suvin), i.e., that they could not have been successful. This element rounds up the ‘fakeness’ paradigm in the form of an axiom; a mask of artificiality must drop at some point.

The collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s emerges, in this sense, as the self-evident conclusion that endlessly reinforces the premises above. Socialism’s precipitous fall – and even the bloody nationalist conflicts that came in its wake – cannot but emerge as the irruption of suppressed realities held in place by the fragile combination of top-down arbitrariness and hypocrisy as overarching societal mood.

6.

The paradigm does stumble when it comes to explaining China’s development in the last few decades. By assigning the latter the status of an ‘authoritarian state capitalism’ it is possible, however, to blame its failings on the ruling party (or other socialist remnants), and trace back almost every positive development to a bourgeoning capitalist economy well connected to the global markets (though the efficiency of one-party rule has seduced some in the West). Once again, COVID-19 complicates this binary picture, considering the capacity of Chinese authorities (and citizens) to keep the pandemic in check and the Global North’s utter failure to do so. The rising tide of Sinophobia this year as an insidious and premeditated ‘save face’ for the West’s authorities demonstrates, however, the extent to which the attribution of fakeness is nuance and evidence-proof: China’s successes in the context of the pandemic are a result of repression and repression alone; thus, the mechanisms of power responsible for successfully keeping the virus at bay can only be identical with the ones at work in the initial suppression of information regarding the virus’ existence in late 2019.

In this regard, recent anti-China agitation in Western countries harkens back to an attitude towards the ‘socialist other’ structured by the artificial/natural binary. As was the case during the Cold War, the adversary’s faults are illuminated from the standpoint of one’s own presupposed accomplishments and overall superiority. Then as now, the comparison is neither straightforward nor comprehensive, considering it matter-of-factly elides the ‘Third World’. For if the mantle of fakeness applies generically to every socialist society, from Cuba to Vietnam, their benchmark is, crucially, not capitalist society in general. It is, rather, one particular set of images – or projections – of it. In other words, what is naturalized in the contrast with socialism is not capitalism as such, but a certain image of the affluent West, in a spectrum going from a rosy picture of its Fordist/Welfare State representatives to more ‘free market’ varieties, i.e., from Sweden to Switzerland, and downright mythical iterations of the United States of times past.

7.

This ‘natural cum eternal’ West does not need to be (and seldom is) openly articulated in studies of twentieth-century communism; the West is present rather as a silent norm. In other words, by stressing the artificiality of the rival social system, operators of the fakeness paradigm underwrite, in the same breath, the perennial status of the societal form they presuppose and assume as natural. Just as in the treatises of political economy that Marx subjected to critique, however, this requires historical scholarship to naturalize not only an image of bourgeois society, but also a conception of individual that is adequate to it.

This helps to explain why individualism, competitiveness, nationalism, racism etc. emerge in narratives of socialist fakeness as history’s veritable prime movers. That is, as historical factors which might well be lamented, but whose existence need not be explained. The naturalization of these tendencies also means they appear (quite spontaneously) as somehow more humanly plausible than solidarity, internationalism, fraternity/sorority and the struggle for equality. If the latter make an appearance as drivers of historical subjects in the context of socialism at all, they do so as either subterfuge or imposition, i.e., the two modi of fakeness.

8.

This is not, I must stress, a question of the historian’s particular assessment of, for instance, individualist tendencies as either superior (or more prevalent) to those of community and solidarity. What is decisive, rather, is the suggestion that the former are genuine, the latter contrived. In other words, the dividing line for such attributions is not drawn on the basis of value judgements, but along the natural/artificial binary.

In that sense, when confronted with fascism as a historical phenomenon, these scholars can and do condemn it for many crimes, attributing the mass movement and its leaders with innumerable faults; being hypocritical and insincere, however, are not among them. In other words, fascists are not accused of not believing what they say, nor are ordinary Germans or Italians in the 1920s and 1930s accused of ‘not really being fascists/nazis’. Hence, despite its advocates’ convergence with a time-honored and ever recurrent effort to condemn fascists and communists in unison, the fakeness paradigm falls short in this regard; its own premises dictate that, whereas communism is a pure manifestation of artificiality, fascism must reflect, at least to some degree, genuine human drivers. Hence, if it construes communism as sham, it cannot help but portray fascism as destiny.

9.

The same analytical dead-ends dictate the interpretative failure of this conception of history regarding the present times. Through recourse to the artificial/natural binary, the fakeness paradigm produced an effective critique of socialism that doubled as a subtle ratification of capitalism; yet, to do so, it had to demote social change and revolution to theatrics and, in fact, equate ‘changeability’ itself with frailty. And because it is structured along a binary, even if capitalism may be superficially framed as the dynamic and innovative counterpart to stunted socialism, its naturalization as a societal form presupposes articulating it as fundamentally static.

Put differently, in the framework of the fakeness paradigm, capitalism emerges as the first historical formation that changes, but only to turn into itself, again and again. As for socialism, its greatest weakness (which doubles as the perennial argument against its comeback as a political project) is that ‘it did not work’, i.e., that it ‘ended’. From this vantage point, the historical merges with the artificial and renders transience a mere birth-defect. In contrast, permanence and resilience are construed as defining properties of the societal form that is natural(ized), i.e., the capitalist mode of production.

While this framework fit well with the mood of self-congratulatory euphoria that accompanied Western liberal capitalism’s victory in the Cold War and the onset of ‘globalization’, it has proven a poor set of lenses to confront the crises and processes of change that, especially since the late-2000s, have fractured that societal model’s claim of finality and inevitability. The events of the 1990s in both the former socialist and ‘third’ worlds had, it must be said, made readily clear what kind of upheaval was to be expected once unfettered capitalism was allowed to rupture the social fabric of entire countries in search of the ‘isolated individual’ of economics manuals. It took, however, the crisis of 2008 to bring these realities home, introducing the specter of mutability back into the triumphant West; adding to these woes, climate change has raised the prospect that ‘Western liberal capitalism’ has to change, and in no small degree, so as to avert environmental catastrophe.

10.

If the theses raised in this essay have any validity, then the combined imperatives of rehabilitating change as a fundamental social praxis and restoring the status of objective possibility to an alternative social order are both bound to stumble on the schematic accounts of the last, great attempt to transcend the capitalist system (and, of course, on many other obstacles). In other words, there is much more at stake in how the drama of twentieth-century communism is interpreted than the latter's assignment to the ‘dustbin of history’ might suggest.

This is visible in the contemporary restating of the artificial/natural binary; most evidently, in the critique of the Western establishment itself and its institutions as ‘fake’, its charges against state socialism now employed against it, most notably by actors from the far-right spectrum. Yet the binary truly reaches its paroxysm in the notion of the Anthropocene. With it, the cycle approached in this essay sees its completion, considering the category draws the mantle of fakeness over human sociability as such. With the utter artificialization of humanity, it consummates the naturalization of nature, raising the prospect that only the cataclysmic purge of the former can effect the ‘restoration’ of the latter.

11.

Both from the standpoint of historiography and of emancipatory social praxis, then, the same question emerges: what changes when the history of communism is written from the standpoint of a possible socialism and the environmental crisis is faced through the concrete articulation of that capitalism-transcending alternative?

Carouge GE, 11 January 2021.

by Victor Strazzeri

When I move to a new city, a curious rite of passage tells me when I have finally settled in: I stop taking the names of places in their literal sense. In other words, it is when my brain stops decoding terminal stations and street signs as a signifier for something, rather than somewhere. At this point, I also stop creating expectations about a neighborhood, through the impressions evoked by its name (“Eaux-vives”) or chime (“Testaccio”), and start, instead, to associate the name with the experiences I had there. With my native São Paulo, my place of arrival into the world, and from where I will forever depart, this moment, the city too well known to me, was an impossibility. That’s unfortunate, because one can, for instance, take the metro there and disembark at Paraíso (“paradise”) or, stay in the blue-line train for three stops longer, and get off at Liberdade (“freedom”). Instead, school ruined paradise by being there, and freedom came to taste like Sukiyaki.

In our hometowns, this transmutation of places’ meanings coincides, rather, with losing the literalness of a child’s eyes. A “Jardim X” is not a garden, a “Granja Y” and a “Chácara Z” are neither farms nor ranches (at least not anymore), we learn. In São Paulo children can, however, still feast on toponyms in Tupi-Guarani – a family of indigenous languages that gave us words like Ibirapuera (a park), Anhamgabaú (a valley) or Jaraguá (the city’s highest point), shaping their meaning according to their magical sound. For, at no point during our schooling do we learn to interpret them, nor do we learn what ancestral reason, or more recent pretext – a version of the language was taken up by colonizers as well – led to their adoption. We learn to read Portuguese, but not Brazil.

The place I departed from, to come to Rome, was Geneva. Because I had arrived there only six months before, the names of places still startled me with their literalness. There was, for instance, the “OMS”(in English, WHO) bus line. Seeing it stop at traffic lights, pick up passengers and depart once more made me think of how people arrive at this seemingly omnipresent institution from somewhere in the morning, and where they depart to again later in the day; it made the human realities behind the OMS both palpable and fragile – a far cry from the all-powerful entity some make it out to be. Then there’s Line 11: Bout-du-monde. The entire time it felt like an impending destination. This being 2020, visiting the park with that peculiar name did nothing to change this.

***

I came to Rome to understand the trajectories of two movements that shaped Italy in the 1970s: communism and feminism. More significantly, to inquire about the stations (or chapters) of their forgotten encounter, both fertile and tense. This story continued into the 1980s, the ending of which coincided with a historical terminus for the communist tradition (and for left-wing contestation more generally), considering that the Italian Communist Party (PCI), once a fixed point of postwar Italian politics, dissolved in 1991.

In its heyday, PCI leadership was often referred to by the address of its Roman headquarters, the Botteghe Oscure or, more playfully, “Bottegone”. In the 2010s, the building was acquired by the Associazone Bancaria Italiana, Italy’s union of bankers; it is now a supermarket. In July this year, another real-estate transaction helped put distance between the past and present of that road; the far-right party La Lega decided to move its headquarters to the building directly across the old “Bottegone”, from where, it is said, the CIA used to spy on the then most powerful communist party in the “West” (La Stampa – 08/07/2020).

If the Via delle Botteghe Oscure encapsulates the stark tones of before and after in the history of communism in Italy, the history of feminism in this country, and in Rome in particular, is a tale of many addresses. Below is a listing of the various feminist organizations active in the city in 1978 : L'almanacco: luoghi, nomi, incontri, fatti, lavoro in corso del movimento femminista italiano dal 1972, Roma: Edizioni delle donne, 1978, p. 176.

The list was not complete: feminism was a “lavoro in corso”, a work-in-progress, hence the authors’ decision to leave blank lines for subsequent additions. This contrast between diffusion and centralism, dynamism and rigidity helped put communism and feminism in separate compartments of the historical narrative as well. Indeed, besides the “years of lead” – a reference to the political and state violence of the period – the Italian 1970s are known mainly as the “years of the movements”; foremost amongst them was the women’s movement, which hit Italian society tsunami-like, en route to a series of achievements over the course of the decade. Yet this was also the last peak of relevance for communist politics in Italy, symbolized by the Berlinguer-led PCI.

A closer look at this historical constellation shows, in fact, these were not parallel or mutually exclusive trends, but that communist and feminist politics were intertwined in important ways from the mid-1970s into the late-1980s in Italy (and elsewhere). Many feminist women entered the PCI, even more of them were part of the UDI (Unione donne italiane), the mass organization of communist and socialist women, which became increasingly militant in those years. Reconstructing this attempt to fuse a communist and a feminist identity, through archival material, visual sources and interviews, constitutes my project as a resident in Rome. This is a story of ‘intersectionality’, in the sense that both class and gender politics were integral parts of the trajectories and everyday praxis of women activists; often, this combination played out on the terrain of a further political vector (and locus for the utopia of both communists and feminists) of the time: Third World solidarity. More on this in my next contribution.

Vila Maraini – Roma, 7 November 2020