Italo Calvino’s 1963 novella La Giornata d’Uno Scrutatore (translated into English as The Watcher) is the story of a low-level volunteer with the Partito Comunista Italiano (or PCI) who grows disenchanted with both his organization and the larger structure of parliamentary democracy as he makes a half-hearted attempt to serve as an elections monitor. Assigned to the infamous “Cottolengo Hospital for Incurables,” a Catholic institute run by nuns for the irredeemably disabled and disfigured, the protagonist Amerigo Ormea is assigned by the PCI to contest ballots from residents who lack the capacity to vote for themselves. He is more or less engaged in voter suppression, but not necessarily for unjustifiable reasons: “[E]ver since the vote had become obligatory in the period following the Second World War, hospitals, asylums, and convents had served as great reservoirs of votes for the Christian Democrat part, and at Cottolengo, above all, at each election instances were discovered of idiots being led to vote, or dying old women, or men paralyzed with arteriosclerosis, in any case, people unable to make logical distinctions.” This puts Amerigo in the bad-faith position of suppressing the votes of his society’s most marginalized in the interests of the workers’ party.

With only a small amount of information about the author’s background, it’s hard not to read Calvino himself as the titular watcher who critically examines both the practice of electoral democracy and his own party. Calvino was a member of the PCI for the decade between 1947 and ’57, publishing his resignation after the post-Stalin invasion of of Hungary in 1956. The visible descent of the international communist movement in the fifties into post-Stalin Stalinism disillusioned comrades all over the world, but perhaps nowhere more productively than in Italy. In ’59 when Calvino left Turin for the Americas, Raniero Panzieri was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and moved to Turin, where he would, along with Mario Tronti, develop what would become known as operaismo (workerism), a heterodox current of Marxism that eschewed the official labor movement and its parties. I can find no evidence that the novelist ever met or knew anyone within operaismo, so it is not my real goal to insert Calvino into the historical narrative of the movement, but The Watcher stands on its own as one of the strongest and most developed operaismo critiques I’ve ever read.