Nanni Moretti
La Cosa

The so-called "fall of communism" and its impact on Italian politics have been understood only partially, and in some cases with considerable delay, by the politicians themselves, political theorists, and, at times, contemporary historians, failing to provide an impartial judgment on this incident, still recent and alive in everyone's consciousness, and still today a source of deep divisions in our society.

However, it is certain that the events related to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it, the bloc identified with Comecon, during the period '83-'91 have impacted the history of the Republic perhaps more significantly than in other parts of the West, considering the enormous popular following of the PCI throughout the post-war period, and especially during Enrico Berlinguer's secretariat.

It's no surprise, then, that the confusion of the left between the second half of the '80s and the early '90s was captured more incisively by a filmmaker not (yet directly) involved in politics like Nanni Moretti, as opposed to intellectuals organically tied to the system from a Gramscian perspective, who, in the film "Palombella Rossa" and especially in the documentary reviewed here, represents, now in fictional form now in real form, the disorientation of much of the Italian working class that voted communist in the wake of losing their bases and references.

The question around which our director's documentary revolves, to which is also attached in this edition a documentary by a Belgian filmmaker filmed in Berlinguer's Italy in the '80s, is that of the fate of the PCI, and in turn, it can be examined from various mutually integrated perspectives.

To change its name and substance in the name of something new and different, breaking with the traditional division of the left into maximalists, reformists, socialists, social democrats, proletarians, movimentalists, revolutionaries, extra-parliamentarians, anarcho-insurrectionists, pro-Westerns, neutralists, Maoists, post-Maoists, social communists, Castroists, Guevarists, libertarians, moralists, Catholic communists?

To remain anchored in their divisions and certainties, convinced that marching divided and striking united was still possible: but striking what, after the fall of the communist bloc and the apparently total affirmation of the Western capitalist system and the values of wealth, freedom even at the cost of inequalities, which, from the perspective of historians like Francis Fukuyama, even implied the "end of history"?

To admit their defeat and join a new socialist entity, grafting onto the carnation of the then-powerful Craxi, against whom nonetheless weighed the anathema raised a few years earlier by the last symbol of Italian communism - the mentioned Berlinguer - at the moment he posed the famous "moral question" concerning the implicit superiority of the left not so much over the rest of the parliamentary spectrum (which was assumed), but over their direct socialist competitors?

Questions obviously not easy to answer in those turbulent years, in which the characteristics of this new political entity, consciously separated from its communist roots defeated by history but not yet mature enough to carry out an authentic "parricide" of the likes of Gramsci, Togliatti, Ingrao, Berlinguer, were well expressed by Moretti with reference to the uncertain term "The thing": almost suggesting, as a seasoned man of shows, that the new entity had something necessarily alien from the experiences, needs, and probably the expectations of its electoral body.

Something that would not have been accepted with serenity, neither by the voters nor, especially, by the intermediate and managerial cadres of a Party that had structured and organized itself, in the consciousness and habits of its members, as a kind of parastatal organization, and as a sort of reification of the expectations of almost millenarian palingenesis of that part of Italian society that did not recognize itself in Catholic values or was disappointed by their implementation by ecclesiastical hierarchies.

In this documentary, it is thus captured how the birth of PDS-DS and, finally, drawing from the discussion, today's PD was not the gradual product of the maturing consciousness of the party's management cadres, but was an opportunity and a chance, probably wasted, to the extent that there was no conscious and especially voluntary break with tradition, no proper reflection on the false promises of communist messianism, no courageous redefinition of a new political offering, old consociative formulas with the electorate and ideologies of Catholic-Democratic origin were chewed again.

All this at the evident cost of being constantly defeated in subsequent elections, except for the sporadic successes of the coalitions led by Romano Prodi, who appeared on the political scene initially on the emotional wave of the fall of the first Berlusconi government, without the genuine trust of communist or post-communist cadres tied to old power logics ('96-'98), and later as a guarantor of the unity of a heterogeneous coalition penalized by an unfavorable electoral law ('06-'08).

Moretti does not tell us what the Italian left has lacked from the late '80s until today, limiting himself to a silent question: is it still possible to say something leftist, based on values such as freedom, market, capital, environment, production needs, social services, equality, fair taxation, differences, inclusivity, diversity, family, protection of individual rights, decentralization, rediscovery of the central role of the State.

These are the cornerstones of a thought that, rediscovering new dreams and goals, can still give a lot to Italy.