Rossana Rossanda is dead, she founded the manifesto

Born on April 23, 1924, in Pula, Istria, into a middle-class family whose well-being had been compromised by the crisis of 1929, she had lived for six years in Venice, along with her sister Marina (named Mimma, who was less aged three years and died in 2006), with an aunt, then settled with his parents in Milan, where he enrolled at university. And here, in the tragic days after the 1943 armistice, she had asked her teacher Antonio Banfi (a philosopher close to the PCI, whose son Rodolfo she would later marry) for political directions, who had introduced her to the partisan struggle. After the war, Rossana Rossanda graduated in 1946 and found her first job in the Hoepli encyclopedia, then quit and devoted herself with increasing intensity to party work. The sectional meetings, the first rallies in the province and in the suburbs, a trip to the USSR in 1949. The conviction, which matured then and was never abandoned, that the PCI had very serious limits, but was the only one that innervated the protest and the hope, to give consciousness to masses that had never had it.

In the early 1950s, he was assigned a task that was perfect for his talents: to revitalize the House of Culture as the center of progressive intellectual activity in Milan. It was an undoubted success, as energies that went far beyond the communist circle were united in their initiatives: characters like Giorgio Strehler, Cesare Musatti, Piero Calamandrei, Franco Fortini, just to name a few. Then the fateful 1956, with Nikita Khrushchev’s secret report on Stalin’s crimes and above all the asphyxia of the Hungarian revolution. In her beautiful and bitter autobiographical book, but also full of ironic notations, The Girl of the Last Century (Einaudi, 2005), Rossana Rossanda reported that she was stunned to see a photo with two smiling workers in Budapest in front of the corpse of a hanged man. . It was terrible for her to discover that the Communists could be hated so much by the popular classes: those days – she remembered – I had gray hair, that’s right, I was thirty-two years old. However, it was not enough to break her political beliefs. In fact, the decline of Stalinism offered more space to those, like her, who had never endured its crudest aspects. In 1962 Rossana Rossanda was called to Rome to direct the cultural sector of the party and the following year she was elected deputy. It may have been the take-off into a high-level career, but instead there was a growing divergence, accelerated by the death of Palmiro Togliatti in 1964. Rossana Rossanda’s innovative attempts were met with perplexity, sometimes harshly rejected, her thesis that the conditions for a radical change in society did not comply with the prudent line of the PCI.

Since the XI Congress of the party (1966) the communist left was defeated and marginalized, but the most combative part, of which it was a part along with Luigi Pintor, Aldo Natoli, Lucio Magri, Luciana Castellina, decided not to demobilize, especially because later 1968 came to console their hopes. In the essay The Year of the Students (De Donato, 1968) Rossana Rossanda argued that youth protest could act as a trigger for a deeper social explosion. Meanwhile, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, cautiously condemned by the PCI, made the continuation of a still weakened link with Moscow untenable in their eyes. In June 1969 Rossana Rossanda and the others in her group began to publish the magazine Il Manifesto with considerable sales success, whose line was clearly an alternative to the official PCI, which at the time did not tolerate organized currents (called fractions) . The reprobates were disqualified in November of the same year. But they were not discouraged, on the contrary in 1971 they transformed the manifesto into a newspaper. They thought that Italy was going in a revolutionary direction and they were very wrong, but the longevity of their initiative shows their formidable journalistic skills. From the columns of the manifesto, about which his new colleague KS Karol (a naturalized French Polish journalist, died in 2014) also wrote, Rossana Rossanda established herself as a heretical voice of the Marxist left. She caused a sensation in 1978 with an article in which she recognized the trademark of the Stalinist family album in the language of Aldo Moro’s kidnappers. And then she edited, together with Carla Mosca, the book Interview with the Red Brigades (Anabasi, 1994; later Mondadori) with the terrorist leader Mario Moretti. He had no difficulty in recognizing the leftist matrix of the BR and was always very severe, from a guarantor position, with those who uncritically supported the investigating magistracy. His close dialogue with feminists was also very interesting, for which he recognized the reasons, while still believing that the decisive problem in our time was the overcoming of capitalism.

Obviously Rossana Rossanda had received very negatively the metamorphosis of the ICP initiated by Achille Occhetto. In addition, she had also progressively separated herself from the drafting of the manifesto, of which for a long time she was a reference figure, a kind of older sister. She reproached her students for having repudiated the centrality of the class conflict: the break with the newspaper occurred in September 2012.

Communism was wrong. But he was not mistaken, it was the synthesis of his historical judgment, corroborated by a pessimistic analysis of the present: There has never been so much inequality in history, he declared in 2013. On the other hand, he already felt for many years that the defeat of his Las ideas could not be remedied in foreseeable times, so much so that already in November 1976 he had ironically proposed this plaque for her grave: Dear colleagues, she chose to make the revolution instead of the university, but the result was not seen, she does not rest in peace .