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Rating: A story of Democrazia Proletaria, or, in case there is a need to explain, both the DP party and that strange experiment of the same name that, in one way or another, tried to bring together under one roof the good things that existed to the left of the PCI in the seventies and eighties. Maybe the timing was wrong, maybe the minds were always quick to divide into a thousand microcurrents, but who knows, today perhaps a party like this could aspire to much better results than the meager (and already victorious in themselves) 2% to which it was accustomed for twenty years.
Let's be clear, in Italy being leftist and not identifying with either the "bourgeois" PSI or the "workerist" PCI was heresy. Other secular leftist formations that still referred to socialist values counted for nothing, just good for propping up some staggering DC government when needed. Born at the end of the seventies, DP would have the merit of carrying forward a series of issues, in a purely opinion-party style, that perhaps are more relevant today than at the time, ahead of their time: civil rights, pacifism, environmentalism, and international issues. If the PCI, which nonetheless viewed any movement to its left with disdain, was too rigid, bigoted, and moralistic, and too caught up in historical or less historical compromises, that cumbersome universe full of symbols and sickles and hammers to its left wanted nothing to do with staying still. From the Sixties and the Student Movement would arise an infinity of often ephemeral experiences, yet always vital, constantly undecided between "movement" and "party", and you had to be really blind not to realize that something new was coming, that the "traditional parties" to a part of a generation were beginning to smell musty and there was a need for more pickets and leaflets and fewer dealings with Vatican emissaries.
To provide the complete list of all those groups would be a Herculean task, with formations often having a very short lifespan and often spent doing "left-wing criticism" of someone else, possibly within the party itself. One above all to be remembered is Il Manifesto, those ugly heretics who, in the full '68, dared to be with heart and mind closer to Beijing and the Little Red Book than to Moscow and some dusty five-year plan. Thrown out of the PCI on charges of factionalism and promptly disavowed by l'Unità, they would become protagonists of those years as well, thanks to a daily newspaper which, cash problems permitting, is still in print today. Despite its small and almost clandestine size, DP managed to be not only the small megaphone of great themes, but often speaking into the megaphone were also great personalities, such as Foa, Capanna, Russo Spena, without forgetting the much-discussed candidacy of Paolo Villaggio in the '87 elections. Looking at the party symbol, a classic sickle and hammer in the background and a clenched fist in the foreground, you wouldn't think so, but DP managed to be truly a cross-sectional force, able to garner sympathies both among the dissatisfied of the PCI and among the "dissenting Catholics", those progressive Catholics who wanted nothing to do with staying under the cross shield, between the rediscovery of the Gospel and Liberation Theology. It would be impossible not to remember a figure like Peppino Impastato and his commitment against the Mafia "mountain of shit".
The eighties deal the final blow, with elections not going as hoped and splits, with that demoproletarian environmentalist spirit later embodied by formations like the Greens. '91 is the death knell, at Botteghe Oscure they change their corporate identity, a group of "dissidents" doesn't agree and they all merge into that other adventure that would become Rifondazione Comunista, a whole other story. Perhaps in the "golden days" even its own militants did not realize it, but truly the story of DP and in general all of the super left of the time often takes on the traits of an epic tale, between clashes, disagreements, splits, a project as big as often unrealizable, eternally crushed between Washington and Moscow, between State and BR.
Matteo Pucciarelli manages to tell the story of Democrazia Proletaria well, without nostalgia or undue praise, with a dry style and drawing on a good amount of testimonies from those who lived those years firsthand. Certainly, a fascinating work and an opportunity not only to reflect on the role of the "radical left" in Italy today but also to remember how a whole series of issues and battles come from a long way back.
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