Catalogue Number
NMLH.2022.134.34
Object Name
Poster
Title
L'ultimo articolo di Nenni per l'almanacco socialista
People
Pietro Nenni
Date
1991
Description
This poster is the 34th in a collection of posters about Pietro Nenni, an Italian socialist politician who was also the national secretary of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and a lifetime Senator since 1970. This poster is titled "Nenni's latest article for the socialist almanac" and features a photocopy of Nenni's original handwritten article, beneath which is a transcript. The transcript reads: " The Socialist Almanac records the salient facts that characterized the year that is going away, 1979, at the end of a decade that was the most difficult of the time from liberation onwards. In fact, the first years of the return to democratic life were equally difficult. But the wind of liberation blew over the country, the wind they called the North, and nothing seemed impossible. In other words, a continuous call to initiative and courage came from below even if the conservation forces they had sought were already in action and in part managed to limit the scope of liberation to the problems of form of the new institutions to the detriment of the contents. social.
But ultimately what was the main problem of post-fascism, namely the direct participation of ever larger sectors of the working people in public life, was fully operative and had within itself, as despite everything it still has, the forces and impulses capable of bearing the weight of reconstruction. The first severe blow to the brakes on the line of development unfortunately came with the socialist split that benefited everyone but certainly not us, served the moderate current of the DC, served the communists albeit only in appearance.
And of course we can talk endlessly about our own mistakes as we can talk about the objective difficulty that the Communist Party encountered in making itself recognized and accepted as a ruling party as part of a strategy of hegemony and Stalin-inspired dictatorship. But it always remains true that only a united left was and is capable of winning the democratic battle.We saw this in the decade of the sixties when to stop the involution of society and institutions, the PSI had to assume alone, and with diminished forces, responsibilities of power with the DC which guaranteed a political truce while blocking the policy of programming. and planning.
The decade of the seventies created problems and needs that could no longer be contained within the framework of the center-left. Hence a fraying in perspectives and action to the threshold we are crossing as we enter the eighties. What is essentially the characteristic of the new year that opens? It is an emergency policy that he picks up the forces necessary to solve the three problems opened in the previous decade: instability of power with governments, including the current one, which have neither the authority nor the ideal and political strength to put themselves at the head of the people; that of economic restructuring currently suffocated by the scourges of inflation and the lack of prospects and programs in the field of work and employment; finally, that of a European reality that even after the election of the first European Parliament remains formal, with an assembly held back by national and sometimes even nationalist ferments.
Here is the passive legacy that 1979 leaves to 1980 with the addition of a self-styled red terrorism which is the same as post-Risorgimento brigandage, state terrorism of proletarian massacres, fascism in its characterization of agrarian revenge. All this in the midst of a European situation which is also unstable and vulnerable and of an Asian revenge that has a point of strength and balance in China, while in Iran and the awakening of Islam it marks a return to the notion of war. holy. The Socialist Party can do a lot in a situation of this kind, placed as it is between a PCI that tries with delay and not without contradictions to get rid of the Leninist, if not Stalinist, attraction of the frontal attack and a Christian Democracy unable to indicate with clarify the limits of his sociologism. But as we enter the eighties it must be clear that time does not work for the left and that we all have little time to avoid the definitive disintegration of a society without principles entrusted to the daily and contradictory improvisations of a spiritless state bourgeoisie of resourcefulness. From this point of view, the 1980s we enter and the decade that opens with it will be decisive. Everything is in question, everything is faced with the alternative of renewing oneself or perishing.
Pietro Nenni" (translated from Italian)
