![]() ![]() Because of Schmitt’s political orientation and trajectory, this concept was sort of taboo, and couldn’t be discussed. Before that moment, this concept had hardly been discussed, and only in the field of political theory, where it had been introduced by Carl Schmitt. You mentioned reform and revolution, these classic debates, so I was wondering if we could work out the historiography a bit, not only regarding reform and revolution but the entire related concept of the European Civil War.ĮT: The idea of a European Civil War is old, but as a historiographical debate this concept appeared much later, in the 1990s. ![]() The outcome is known: the Red Brigades were dismantled by the police and the radical Left collapsed. At the beginning, the Red Brigades were an armed fragment of the radical Left then, particularly after kidnapping Aldo Moro, one of the leaders of Christian Democracy, they dominated the political stage by conducting a kind of private war against the state that paralyzed and weakened any other social and political movement. This was also the context of the rise of Left-wing terrorism. It was a time of great expectations, and I think that this state of mind lasted for the entire decade, in Italy certainly until 1980. ![]() Therefore, this discussion about the “force,” as it was called at that time, was a true debate it was the time of guerilla warfare in Latin America - not in Chile but in Argentina and many other countries. We thought that we had to be prepared for a radical clash, and this clash inevitably meant a military confrontation with power. We thought that we were living a time of revolution, that we had to be prepared for a clash with power, and many events on a global scale legitimated this view: less than two years after Pinochet’s coup, the Vietnamese revolutionaries took power, Francoism fell in Spain in the middle of great social turmoil, in Portugal an authentic revolution overthrew Salazarism, etc. ![]() So, if you like, this was an old debate between reform and revolution that was suddenly put forward on the agenda by a tragic event.īut this lesson of Pinochet’s coup was also related to a different appraisal of the international situation. For us, the historical meaning of the coup was that socialism could not be achieved without a radical break with the state and the army, which is its core. In other words, the discrepancy was clear at that moment: the PCI was oriented towards a coalition with Christian Democracy, while the far Left looked for a radical break with the state and the army. The radical Left had a totally different interpretation of Pinochet’s coup, and the first political campaign in which I participated was called Armi al MIR (“Arms for the MIR”), the revolutionary Left-wing organization that supported Unidad Popular. This was Enrico Berlinguer’s reinterpretation of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, of a Western path to socialism, of the war of position, and a social-democratic or reformist reinterpretation of what Gramsci called the historical bloc. The strategy the PCI drew from this event was the Historic Compromise, a strategy of conquering power and starting a transition to socialism through an alliance not only with Socialists on the Left, which was a minority current with respect to Communism in Italy, but also with Catholics, i.e., a traditionally conservative party. NS: This was in the 70s, so we’re looking at the Historic Compromise, on the one hand, and the Red Brigades on the other.ĮT: If I can mention something autobiographical, I discovered politics and became an activist just after the Chilean coup in September 1973, which had a strong impact on a global scale, particularly on the Left because of the enormous expectations and hopes embodied by Unidad Popular in Chile. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) wasn’t as sectarian as the French Communist Party or even the Communist Party USA at that time, so this didn’t create unbearable tension in my family. I immediately joined the radical Left, so I was to the Left of the Communist Party. I come from one Left-wing oriented family, my father being a Communist mayor in a small city. Tell me about joining the Left.Įnzo Traverso: I was born in Italy in 1957, and so joining the Left as an adolescent wasn’t uncommon at all it was usual for someone belonging to my generation, not only in Italy but also in many other countries during the 70s. Noah Spore: Let’s start at the beginning. On May 18, 2022, Platypus Affiliated Society member Noah Spore interviewed Enzo Traverso, author of Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914–1945 (2007), Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (2017), and Revolution: An Intellectual History (2021). Platypus Review 152 | December 2022-January 2023 ![]()
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