All left-wing movements are unhappy. Between re-founding, disarray and clichés

All Western left-wing parties are unhappy, and they are so in exactly the same way. Reading their manifestos – or rather, the collection of their proclamations – we find the very same slogans, identical in Spain as in France, in Germany, in Brazil, even in the United States, not to mention Italy. Yet perhaps the truly recurring word is ‘Rifondazione’, with a capital ‘R’ because it is more than a project; it is a philosophical idea, the result of a synthesis between different, indeed opposing, elements. In Italy, it is linked to the now faded memory of Fausto Bertinotti, who also wanted to ‘refound’ the seats of Montecitorio, the highest of which he had occupied from 2006 to 2008. Today it has a very different value (or ‘significance’, to use the expression so dear to the Left). Whether or not it is a ‘caciocavallo’ hanging in the air, history will tell – to borrow the words of the much-quoted yet forgotten Don Benedetto (Croce, of course). It is striking to find ‘Rifondazione’ as the number one target in the restless souls sweeping through the French Socialist Party – souls that have always been divided and which only François Mitterrand managed to hold together. We find it in Sánchez’s Socialist Workers’ Party, ‘Pedrito el drito’, who is going for broke with the snap elections. As for the German party, the founding father of all the world’s social democracies, it is ruminating – as is customary in the homeland of modern philosophy – on the good old days, those of Willy Brandt or even the moderate Helmut Schmidt. It is less obvious to find a ‘Rifondazione’ across the Atlantic, amidst the sermons of Grandad Bernie (the honourable Senator Sanders), now surrounded by a crowd of grandchildren. What is striking, however, is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, who cut his teeth as a metalworker before coming to power and then returning to it on two further occasions: today he admits defeat in the first round of the presidential election – not just his own, but that of the left – and is calling for a ‘refundação’.

Everyone invokes it, everyone desires it, each in their own way. In our handbook of clichés, therefore, we are turning the rule on its head (since that is what everyone does everywhere these days anyway), starting with the very word that is most frequently used and abused. Then we will get back on track.

‘REFOUNDATION’, but it’s better in the plural. How many refoundations have we heard of and how many have we seen since the left (again, better in the plural) was called into question by history? Let us begin with the legendary SPD congress at Bad Godesberg in November 1959: the German Social Democratic Party abandoned Marxism, broadened its base from the working class to the whole population, reaffirmed its Atlanticist stance and presented itself as ready to form a government (which would happen ten years later under Brandt). Italy’s equivalent of Bad Godesberg coincided with the Rome Congress at the Midas Hotel, which elected Bettino Craxi as secretary of the Socialist Party in 1976. For the Italian Communist Party (PCI), we had to wait until the Bolognina Congress on 12 November 1989, three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In France in May ’68, rather than a refoundation, what was called for was a palingenesis, bringing imagination to power. The Communist Party of the time, which monopolised opposition to Gaullism, refused to reform itself; its secretary, Georges Marchais, reluctantly accepted the Eurocommunism proposed by his Italian comrades led by Enrico Berlinguer, whilst Santiago Carrillo – in a Spain that had only just awakened from forty years of Francoism – managed the transition alongside Adolfo Suárez’s centrists. It was Felipe González who re-founded the Spanish Socialists, aligning them with Craxi. Returning to Lula, even his former radicalism has given way to social reformism, for example by opening up to public-private partnerships and accepting the International Monetary Fund’s prescriptions. But that was not enough. The left has been shaken above all from outside, by globalisation, and has had to choose: one way or the other. The same is happening today with the rise of the right. But if, in the past, ‘re-founding’ meant moving towards the centre of the political spectrum, convinced that in the era of the new robber barons ‘liberalism is left-wing’ (as in the manifesto by Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi), where should we take it today, now that the centre no longer exists? We have no answer to this difficult question. In the age of artificial intelligence, you can try all you like to re-found the party.

EQUITY. Or equality? At one time, even those who were communists – such as Massimo D’Alema – had begun to read John Rawls (and, frankly, it is not an easy read). According to the American philosopher, inequalities are inevitable in every society (a statement that causes outrage on the left), but they can be justified if they meet two specific conditions. The first requires that everyone has the same opportunities for access (and here we are in the realm of liberal progressivism), whilst the second stipulates that inequalities are acceptable only if they benefit the less privileged members of society (and an entire generation of reformists has latched onto this).

Justice as equity is becoming a paradigm for left-wing forces looking towards the centre. Even if a debate as abstract as ‘the sex of angels’ is unfolding around that ‘only if’. Meanwhile, at the extremes, a conception of equality in terms of end points – not just starting points – is spreading, uniting left-wing and right-wing populism. Added to the latter is an idea of freedom as licence. The balance point, painstakingly sought to resolve conflicts in a pluralist – and not merely democratic – society, is thus shattered. This is the phase we are currently experiencing, both intellectually and politically.

FASCISMS. We should start using the plural again. There is a ‘left of yesteryear’ which, faced with Trump’s ravings, the AfD’s goose-step, Marine Le Pen’s blazing flame, and the former social-radical right’s entry into Palazzo Chigi, evokes the period immediately after the First World War. Back then, the crisis of liberalism paved the way for Nazi-fascism, which found widespread support in America – both in the South and the North. Is something similar happening now? Some invoke a ‘New Resistance’ (perhaps forgetting that this was the slogan of the Red Brigades). But there is also a more sophisticated strand that looks to techno-fascism, or rather techno-totalitarianism. Democracy is now useless and therefore dangerous, says Peter Thiel. The swaggering Elon Musk raises his right arm high. The new elite is training the highly sophisticated AI machine as an ‘imitation game’ with a clear political agenda. Donald Trump is a puppet in their hands, a fat Dr Balanzone, a detestable Sior Todero Brontolon. He will fall; in the meantime, he will have made his puppeteers more powerful (and richer) than ever.

These, then, are the new enemies to be fought. But how, by what means and with what ideas? The left has, in various ways, crucified artificial intelligence – not its creators, but the technology itself, rather than the humans who control it. This Luddite misstep prevents any economic or political response. The attack on ‘calculemus’, as Isaiah Berlin called it – that is, on scientific rationality – lies at the heart of what he termed ‘the confused revolt’ (today we would call it neo-populism). Forget about a ‘refoundation’; we need to go back to the Frattocchie.

GLOBALISATION. Once opposed, it is now lamented. The left, which had first opposed it and then jumped on the bandwagon, is now kicking itself, now that it has become the bane of the new right. The ‘No Global’ movement was at its height in the late 1990s and believed it had been proven right when the great financial crisis of 2008 broke out; it was then outmanoeuvred by the right, which criticises globalisation not so much for inequalities as for the loss of an identity that, in its view, is tied to the local, ethnic and national spheres. ‘Global’ is a Kantian dream, much like perpetual peace. The ‘flat world’ is laughable, yet it provokes rejection; Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ is derided even before it is understood (hands up anyone who has reflected on the second part of his book, the section devoted to Nietzsche’s ‘last man’). Now that it is Trump who is closing the doors, other previously overlooked freedoms are being rediscovered, such as freedom of navigation; now that tariffs are rampant, it is acknowledged that free trade has brought progress – and not just to Third World countries and the much-hated China. Italy, Germany and, ultimately, the whole of Europe have thrived and improved the standard of living of their inhabitants by selling their ‘beautiful things that the world loves’ far and wide. If the United States returns to isolationism as in the nineteenth century, if the MAGA ideology prevails, for us Europeans it will be even worse than the imperial impulses that cloud the judgement of old Donald and his courtiers. Even amidst a forest of ‘buts’ and exceptions, there are growing numbers on the left who realise this, though not enough to change course.

INTEGRATION: the remedy for ‘ethnic replacement’ – the left’s pet cause – and the answer to remigration. Yet it is a sound principle fuelled by unsound policies. Integration depends on employment, and for the most part, immigrants – starting with those who have entered legally – fill the gaps left by Italians. The foundries of Veneto, the tomato fields, the kiwi greenhouses, carers, cleaning services, pizzerias – and the list goes on: Italy has a record number of unfilled jobs and young people who are neither working nor studying. The right-wing doesn’t mention it; the left-wing fails to draw the necessary conclusions. The first is that to integrate through work and then move forward in life, one must know the country’s language alongside other languages. When it comes to English and French, most immigrants outperform Italians, but this is not enough, as is obvious. Yet an uproar ensues – with rights and freedoms being bandied about – when the government proposes to tighten up the timeframe and methods for learning Italian. The measure may well need revising, but the objective is perfectly sound. It would be honest if someone on the left were to admit this. In Italy, more so than in other countries, the influx of non-European immigrants (and even European ones, if we consider Romanians, Poles or Albanians) has not been accompanied by adequate social and infrastructural policies. It could be said that this has not been sufficient even in Sweden, where you cannot take up employment unless you know Swedish – taught at the government’s expense, which also provides initial accommodation – not to mention France. This is true, but Italy has once again relied on its ‘lucky star’ to prevent tensions, protests and riots from erupting so far, as they have elsewhere. Responsibility for this perpetual reliance on Italian-style ‘spontaneism’ lies with all governments – left and right, moderates and radicals alike. Here too, admitting this would be a step towards the truth.

WORK. Never enough and always poorly paid. This is only partly true. It is true that basic wages are, on average, lower than in other industrialised countries, but not for everyone. It is, however, absolutely false to say that there is a shortage of jobs. They have not decreased; on the contrary, they have increased since 2017 – when the Renzi government, through the Jobs Act, abolished Article 18 of the Workers’ Statute – following the end of the pandemic. The left-wing parties split at the time; today, none of them has the courage to take credit for this success, as the Melloni government is doing instead. The Italian left is not only the sole prisoner of this pessimistic rhetoric, but has gone even further in its whingeing, which fails to take account of what has happened during these years of intense transformation. And even less so of what will happen once artificial intelligence has entered offices, laboratories, hospitals and factories. The issue will no longer be simply a question of more or less work – because jobs in the service sector will multiply – but above all what kind of work, what tasks, what skills, and what levels of knowledge and operational capability will be required. This affects the whole of society, from primary school onwards. Even those on the right are tearing their hair out over the loss of the ‘old world’, yet once in power in Italy they hung up their combat boots and helmets (not thrown in the bin, mind you). This populist rhetoric makes headlines and features on television, but it does not reflect the reality of a world of work that is far more complex and sophisticated than it is portrayed. Those who go to work are aware of this, and when it comes down to it—including at the ballot box—they do not give credence to the Savonarolas. The left should have embraced the new way of things long ago, including in the world of work; today, they may well have missed the boat.

FREEDOM. But collective freedom. It is one of the sore points for the left, even for those who have rejected Marxism and totalitarian communism. Individual freedom, a fundamental human right, takes a back seat, and with it the right to property, enshrined in Italy’s Constitution. One rarely hears it said that both must be protected, and almost no reference is ever made to property. When the united left led by Mitterrand came to power in France, the Rothschild bank was expropriated (they would return to the scene many years later). It was 1981, not 1881. Self-criticism—which is not a French virtue—did in fact take place, as Mitterrand himself subsequently made a U-turn; nevertheless, a fundamental ambiguity remained, a shadow that today looms over the French student protests, the housing movement in Spain, and the very political platform on which Zohran Mamdani won in New York. Thus, individual freedom—called into question by the right in the name of security and curtailed by Trump’s policies (but note that we must go back to 2001, to the post-9/11 era and the National Security Act, to understand the nature and extent of a theoretical and practical regression unprecedented in the United States in peacetime)—is also being challenged at its very roots by the left that calls itself socialist.

MILLENARISM. Socialism or barbarism? It was Rosa Luxemburg who coined this slogan, which has accompanied the radical left for over a century. For the first term, see the entry on socialism; barbarism accompanies the rhetoric of the left. The greater the difficulties, the more reality spirals out of control, the higher the black wave rises, the more disruptive technologies become, and the more the barbarians break down the doors, conquer the ancient strongholds, destroy ideas and enslave mankind. A rational and level-headed mind might reply: neither one nor the other; neither socialism nor barbarism. Such a response, however, would be met with abuse; it would become the running joke about those who are perpetually sitting on the fence. No, the Apocalypse is upon us; one need only read the newspapers. ‘We don’t go out much in the evening, not even when it’s a holiday / And there are those who’ve placed sandbags by the window,’ sang Lucio Dalla. Television says it’ll be three Christmases in one, but who believes that? We must go further, the left argues: the old, modest, pragmatic solutions aren’t enough. But further where? And again: we must reach out to the people to whom the ‘ZTL left’ – the radical chic – do not speak. Reach out how, to which people? Like the Russian Narodniks, like Dostoevsky’s demons?

WEALTH. And poverty. There is an anecdote that has become iconic (an adjective that is all too often overused, but in this case truly apt). When the Portuguese leader Otelo de Carvalho (the man who placed carnations in the barrels of rifles and, in 1976, brought down Salazar’s already battered dictatorship) met Olof Palme at a meeting of the Socialist International, he asked him for a political and social solution: how does one combat wealth? The charismatic Swede, then Prime Minister, replied: ‘I don’t know; I’ve spent my whole life fighting poverty.’ Today, however, the fight against wealth is the most widely used slogan, second only to ‘Rifondazione’. And it goes beyond the traditional economic and social policies of the liberal-socialist left – those that used the welfare state as a tool for redistributing income and living standards. So not just through taxation, but through universal healthcare, open access to universities, discounts on trains and buses, social housing and so on. Money is once again seen as the devil’s dung, even if earned honestly. And yet, even Thomas Piketty’s seminal work shows that this reformism – considered too moderate – spread prosperity as never before and narrowed the gap between rich and poor. After the ‘Glorious Thirty’ – as the post-war economic miracle is known in France – has the gap widened once more, and is that reformism no longer enough? The global market and the technological tsunami (with almost uninterrupted waves from the personal computers of the 1980s through to artificial intelligence, via the internet) have changed many of the rules of the game. But it is one thing to strive to invent new rules; it is quite another to refuse to play the game at all.

SECURITY. Yes, but social security. It has become a mantra: the left has left security in the hands of the right. True. For the left, security is not enhanced by bans, by the police, nor solely by work and prosperity; if anything, it is enhanced by a shared sense of conscience and shared life experiences. The Church says so too – how can one disagree? However, no one can deny that the other side of security is not being attacked, robbed, raped, harassed or prevented from going about one’s daily life in peace. The military or policing dimension is neither reducible to the social dimension nor does it supersede it; rather, it represents its necessary complement. It goes hand in hand with justice, which is not merely fairness but respect for personal freedom in every respect. It goes hand in hand with the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour, to express one’s point of view, and to live one’s life as one chooses. In short, it is about the peaceful coexistence of diverse individuals within a pluralist society. Is this notion of security not part of left-wing culture? Ask the metalworkers who organised the ‘security service’, sometimes pitted against the police – particularly the much-hated riot police – to defend the right to demonstrate and to protect their own interests and rights. Was this the ‘old Left’? Certainly, but a Left that had not concealed its common sense for fear of being seen as lacking in it.

SOCIALISM. A revival? We have all been struck and surprised by the return of this word, which for decades was considered taboo, albeit for different reasons. All the more so because it has re-emerged in force (intellectually robust, even if a minority in electoral terms) in the United States. We must go back to the turn of the 20th century to find American socialism emerging amongst unionised workers, modelled on British Labourism born of the trade unions. It made its presence felt right up until the 1930s, and many consider F.D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to have been influenced by socialist rhetoric (a view also held on the right) rather than by liberal progressivism. The welfare state itself – the banner of all left-wing movements on both sides of the Atlantic – is the result, on the one hand, of the Prussian welfare state and, on the other, of the British liberalism of William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes. Socialists embraced it, but only after renouncing revolution, including that waged at the ballot box. In the United States, as in Europe, socialism is an ideological appeal, not a political project, let alone an economic one. Rent controls and social housing, as well as the health reform that inspired the Italian system, were already on the agenda of the Beveridge Report drafted in 1942 whilst Hitler was bombing London.

TAXES. A wealth tax? No, thank you. It was a liberal like Luigi Einaudi who first introduced the wealth tax, but that was in 1945. It was a moderate like Mario Monti who imposed a wealth tax on property, but Italy was in the midst of a sovereign debt crisis. This is an emergency measure, a shock that is sometimes inevitable and effective (as in the case of the Monti government). The tax on large fortunes introduced by the French left has brought no benefit whatsoever to either public finances or income distribution (the facts speak for themselves on this point). As for the wealthy – and there are far more of them in France than here – they didn’t even notice it. So, what sort of wealth tax do the Italian left-wing parties want to adopt? We shall find out from their election manifesto, which, in the common understanding, is supposed to cement the broad coalition (‘the programme comes first’ is the mantra recited with religious monotony by all the contenders lined up against one another)? It is a debate that sidesteps the real issue: the reform of the tax system, promised by Giorgia Meloni (it was in her manifesto, proving that in Italy, on the left as on the right, manifestos are just voices in the wilderness). The dividing line has always been between proportional taxation (on the right) and progressive taxation (on the left). Let us forget for the moment that even the progressive system was introduced by a Christian Democrat such as Ezio Vanoni and reformed by a Republican (certainly not of the left) such as Bruno Visentini. Today, however, progressivity seems to be ensured only by a scale of tax rates that ends up weighing not on the poorest (who are exempt) nor on the richest (who are able to evade or at least offset the tax burden), but on the middle class, thus driving them into the arms of a right-wing party that may be bumbling when put to the test, but which at least makes one thing clear. Thus, the banner of the flat tax as a safeguard for middle-income earners has been left to the Lega; a tax which, when properly applied, can become progressive in retrospect (as demonstrated by the economist Nicola Rossi) and, when poorly applied as is happening today, encourages tax evasion and avoidance.

UNITY. It is the phoenix of the left: for over a century, they have done nothing but split. First because of the maximalists, then the Bolsheviks; and again: communists against socialists, reformists against revolutionaries, and anarchists against everyone, as in the Spanish Civil War. We must be careful not to lump too many different things together, agreed, but the cauldron has been bubbling since the very beginning. Anyone familiar with the history of socialism will recall the Gotha Congress, held in Wilhelmine Germany in 1875, which united two factions to form the first nucleus of the SPD, the Social Democratic Party.

That troublemaker Karl Marx did not merely criticise the programme, but set against it the dictatorship of the proletariat as the first stage of the revolution and of communism. If only he’d never said it. Perhaps he himself did not even know where his arguments would lead, as is also demonstrated by his later writings and his disagreement with his friend, comrade and patron Friedrich Engels, who published the Critique of the Gotha Programme only in 1891, eight years after Marx’s death, partly so as not to break with the SPD, the first solid workers’ party which was achieving significant political results. Marx and Engels were divided too, even if this was a posthumous revelation. Ours is a journey spanning over a century, one that compels us to say: ‘I seek unity, which is as dear as those who lay down their lives for it know well’. May the great poet forgive us.