It was all too easy to see how fragile the younger generation’s rebellion was; unlike us, they were not against “reactionary forces” but the whole architecture of the capitalist system. Our slogan [that of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), of which she was at this point still a member] was “The right to study,” and the youth attacked the school system as a site where consensus was built; our slogan was “The right to work,” and they wanted an end to wage labor; we wanted a fairer distribution of goods and services, and they couldn’t have cared less about consumer goods. The world had suddenly appeared to them as it really was, as anyone who had even had a whiff of Marx knew it was. They were the first wave of protesters to challenge the idea of progressivism.

We should have been pleased about this. True, they knew little about past class struggles and how far they could go before the balance of power turned against them. But if we who had far too much experience of the long haul didn’t tell them, who would? They would have listened if we had stood with them, alongside them, taken their side. Our presence or absence changed the scenario. I knew this for certain; you didn’t have to look very far; you only had to read Antonio Gramsci, whom the party evoked only when it suited them.

The truth that I still grappled with was that we no longer understood the issues that had once been ours; we had internalized a paralyzing knee-jerk desire for order after the fifties, when we were neither in nor out of the center-left. You began a campaign of struggle with a clear and limited objective (we were still capable of this) or not at all; you played by the rules not only so that you didn’t frighten others but because the communists were the most upright citizens of all: dedicated to study, work and family. Our credo was the very opposite of the 1968 slogans denouncing the regulatory function of the present social order.  . . .