The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century by Lucio Magri (review)

Swimming against the stream, Lucio Magri joined the Communist Party of Italy (pci) in 1956 and rose quite rapidly through the ranks until the expulsion of his Il Manifesto group in 1970 sent him into the revolutionary left for more than a decade (an evidently painful interlude about which he says little more than that he allowed himself to be deluded by extremism). Returning in the 1980s, he resisted Achille Occhetto’s successful liquidationist project that saw the pci re-launched in 1991 as the Democratic Party of the left, its historic connection to the Communist tradition of Gramsci, Togliatti, and Berlinguer severed. Magri helped form Communist Refoundation (rc), but abandoned it in 2004 to become a “living private archive, in storage.” (17) The Tailor of Ulm, published in 2009 and now republished in English, is the fruit of Magri’s research and experience.

The book’s title was unwittingly bequeathed to Magri by the doyen of the pci left, Pietro Ingrao, who in the debate on the party’s future recalled Brecht’s poem, or parable, about a 16th-century tailor who plummeted to his death from a church tower after being challenged to prove his claim to have invented a flying machine:

The bells ring out in praise That man is not a bird It was a wicked, foolish lie, Mankind will never fly, Said the Bishop to the People.

Brecht appears to give the Bishop of Ulm a last triumphal word, but for Ingrao the moral was that the tailor was not wrong, just ahead of his time. Magri, asking Ingrao if “the tailor’s bold attempt” had made any contribution to the history of aeronautics, rejected keeping the party going simply as “an inspiring ideal.” Communism had always claimed to be “part of a historical process already under way, of a real movement that was changing the existing state of things; it had therefore implied constant factual verification, scientific analysis of the present and realistic prognosis of the future, in order to avoid dissolving into myth.” (2) The Tailor of Ulm is a long rumination on whether it had been that sort of party and whether it should remain, in one form or another, part of that critical process. Ending the book with a reprint of an article he wrote in 1987, which suggested that a much reformed mass party engaged in a constantly recreated dialectical relationship with the new social movements could help them achieve an “autonomous subjectivit y” through resistance to globalized capitalism, Magri optimistically answers yes. Any residual optimism, however, seems to have disappeared in November 2011, when Magri travelled to Switzerland and implemented the “assisted death” he had apparently been planning since the death of his wife in 2009. He had just seen Giorgio Napolitano – an erstwhile pci comrade now ascended to president of the republic – invite one globalized capitalist (US-trained economist Mario Monti) to replace another (Silvio Berlusconi) with an administration of unelected Eurocrats.

The core of the book is an account of the pci’s failure to achieve the “Italian Road to Socialism” adumbrated by Togliatti in 1944 and finalized by him in his 8th party congress speech in December 1956, an overtly reformist path of “progressive democracy” that would be a “third way” between social-democratic parliamentarism and Leninist insurrection (the dream of the “Big Day”). The pci would build a broad constellation of democratic forces, lead and mould them in industrial and democratic struggles, and over an indeterminate period systematically wrest more and more positions of economic and political power from the ruling class to the point where a “peaceful conquest and democratic management of state power” – socialism – would become possible. (134) He tells a familiar story of how, from start to finish, the pci deluded itself about the reformist instincts of Christian Democracy (dc), refrained from using its authority among the working class to pressure dc into admitting Communists into government or conceding the structural reforms needed to shift the balance of...