Entering the PSI

When Timpanaro entered the PSI after World War II, it was not in quite the rude health it had been in its heyday (it attained almost a third of the vote at the 1919 general election). But it was still the major leftist party in Italy, narrowly outperforming the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1946 elections. It was also a very different party in terms of political content and conduct compared to what it would be in 1964, when Timpanaro finally left for the newly minted Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP).

Compared to the PCI, there was markedly greater party democracy and freedom of discussion — two things that would become obsessions in Timpanaro’s political imaginary in the years to come. There was less of a degree of compromise with centrist and right parties, and less subservience to the Soviet Union; a bold accent on internationalism; and a principled resistance to imperialism and colonialism, a direct inheritance from the PSI’s stand against the “bourgeois” World War I.

Just as important as this political content were the political demographics of the party. There was still a strong worker presence in the PSI when Timpanaro joined. This would change in the subsequent years and decades as the PCI monopolized working-class representation ever more. But the party Timpanaro joined was not a party of intellectuals; it was a party with active and solid roots in the workers’ movement.

In the late 1940s, the PSI stood at an existential crossroads as it strove internally to work out its relationship with the PCI — which was either a natural ally or rival, depending on whom in the party you asked. Two major currents formed: autonomists, who pushed for greater independence from the communists, and unitarians, who wanted to maintain unity of action with them.

In the 1948 general election, unity of action remained the official PSI policy under then leader Pietro Nenni, who presided over the party in its strategic alliance with the PCI: the Popular Democratic Front. But this alliance gave the autonomist wing of the PSI under Giuseppe Saragat an excuse to break off into the Socialist Party of Italian Workers (PSLI).

If Timpanaro was no blind fan of Nenni, he was even further from the PSI’s right flank as led by the reformist Saragat. But what enabled Timpanaro and his fellow revolutionaries to practice their politics energetically within the PSI for that crucial late ’40s period was the leading role given to Lelio Basso, in whose leftist faction Timpanaro saw himself as a rank-and-file member until Basso led the split of the PSIUP in January 1964. Saragat’s departure in 1947 opened up a crucial space for Basso in the party leadership; he served as party secretary for two years, until the Genoa congress of 1949.

Timpanaro’s faction was thus represented at the highest levels of party leadership for these two golden years; but from 1950 onward, the road started to get bumpier. Basso was a firm opponent of the Stalinism he saw creeping into the PSI, which put him in patchy (at best) favor with the upper echelons of the party over the course of the 1950s. It was under these formative conditions that Timpanaro developed his deep aversion to Stalinism and bureaucratization.

Left Turn

In 1956, the Soviet invasion of Hungary drove a wedge in the core alliance of the old Italian left. The PSI may have picked the right side of history in opposing Soviet actions in 1956 (while the PCI defended them), but this left the PSI open to even more distasteful collaborations to its right. The party’s direction in the late 1950s and early 1960s leaned increasingly toward a coziness with the centrist Catholic party, the Christian Democrats (DC).

Timpanaro’s articles and letters in the late 1950s and early ’60s are full of complaints about this PSI strategy of DC-courting. He was particularly piqued by the suggestions of diluting Marxism in the party to accommodate Catholicism. But there were also other concerns building: the dual threats of encroaching currents, Stalinist on the one hand, social democratic on the other; the party leadership only representing one faction, the Nennians, and the party newspaper, Avanti, only voicing that single perspective; the evacuation of a politics of opposition in favor of a politics of inserting themselves into the mainstream led by the DC; and, finally, the PSI merely supporting the improved living standards of boom-time economic growth.

For Timpanaro’s left faction of the PSI, an internal way forward through the party now seemed blocked. The solution was the tried and tested way of the Italian left: a split. In early 1964, Timpanaro joined a relatively modest exodus of some of the PSI left faction into the new PSIUP, led by Lelio Basso. So began Timpanaro’s most intense decade of militant activity, pivoting around the local maxima of Italian leftist politics that were the years 1968 and 1969.

Timpanaro was quite gloomy about the PSIUP’s prospects at the start. Even by March 1964, however, the situation had begun to improve, with an influx of union heavyweights entering the party. The initial motion of the party was about minimizing distance between leadership and base and keeping all meetings open to all comrades, not just the executive. These issues of party governance — direct democracy, openness, transparency — were the most pressing pieces of housekeeping after the frustrating experience of the PSI.

But there were also a host of other political issues coming through the party agenda in this period: the matter of the new working class and how it should be represented; the struggle for secular state education; and opposition to NATO and active support for anti-imperialist struggles across the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. It was, in fact, the anti-imperialist work that got Timpanaro and other comrades arrested for a demonstration in 1965 against US involvement in Vietnam, as well as the closer-to-home presence of US military bases on the coast between Pisa and Livorno.

The PSIUP started strong and consumed much of Timpanaro’s time. Of course, it was not all homogeneous; intra-PSIUP conflicts were quick to appear. The main structural schism was between the traditionalists and innovators within the party, mapped roughly onto a division between the national leadership and the provincial sections. The national leadership maintained very active political links to the two main traditional left parties, the PCI and PSI.

Timpanaro’s regular complaint here, just as with the PSI, was that this created subservience to, and fear of criticizing, the USSR. Timpanaro roundly identified with the local and provincial chapters of the PSIUP because the politics of the party at that level were much more independent and openly critical of the Soviet Union. In a sense, the “provincial innovator” faction of the PSIUP had natural sympathies with the brewing forces that would come to be known as the New Left.

Sympathetic Criticism

As Luca Bufarale nicely formulates it, Timpanaro’s approach to the emerging forces of 1968 and the New Left — organizations such as Lotta Continua — was one of “sympathetic criticism.” He emphatically disapproved of the voluntarist and idealist strands informing their political discourse, which resulted, for Timpanaro, in a worldview more philosophical than economic-social. This, in turn, spawned an excessive intellectualism and pretentious language that was unintelligible to the average worker.

At the same time, Timpanaro identified a paucity of intellectual discipline in the up-and-coming generation of the New Left: confusing “making a mess” with “making revolution,” but also their ideological menefreghismo — their purposeful “not giving a damn” about live issues in Marxism, and their lack of awareness about their own ideological positioning within the Marxist tradition.

While Timpanaro had his reservations about the rising mess-makers of organizations like Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua, he also shared a lot of their political convictions. Timpanaro was, by temperament, wholly opposed to any kind of authoritarianism, whether in the organs of the bourgeois state like the bureaucracy, the legal system, the army, the school, even the patriarchal family, or in his own backyard, the party itself.

He was also totally opposed to the capitalist leveraging of unequal wages to exploit and divide the workers — another talking point of the New Left in the late 1960s. In fact, the differences, such that there were, between the PSIUP-supporting Timpanaro and the New Left were not so much in political content but in method of struggle and worldview. Timpanaro still saw the party itself as the central vehicle of politics, despite its flaws, and anything beyond it had the tinge of undisciplined chaos about it.

In terms of everyday political action in the late ’60s, however, Timpanaro lived a harmonious existence with the primarily workplace-oriented struggles of the New Left. Timpanaro lived the politics of 1968 and the “hot autumn” of 1969 in his workplace — by then, the Florentine publisher La Nuova Italia. Timpanaro’s status as an average worker gave him true credentials as the “militante di base” (rank-and-file militant) he would later claim as so critical to his political self-definition.

Florence was a center of the Italian publishing industry in this period, and so there were many opportunities for sector-wide organizing. In the early 1970s, Timpanaro teamed up with fellow copy editors such as Vittorio Rossi and Franco Belgrado, taking an active role in organizing strikes and pickets with other workers in Florentine publishing houses. Timpanaro’s workplace provided the real-world context for him to put his PSIUP principles into practice.

A Marxist Unmoored

The year 1972 was particularly brutal for the PSIUP. In the general election of 1968, the PSIUP had garnered considerable electoral support, with around 1.5 million votes. In 1972, they attracted half that. The drastic collapse of support prompted a flight of much of the leadership back into the PCI and PSI — and according to Timpanaro, the pro-PCI positions of that leadership were partly what accounted for the crisis in the first place.

Timpanaro decided to stay in the PSIUP, but some kind of renewal had to happen. In December 1972, the new PSIUP ran together with the Workers’ Political Movement to form the Proletarian Unity Party (PdUP). Timpanaro had a mildly optimistic sense that this new political entity, purged of the strong links to the PCI and PSI that left the PSIUP hamstrung and subordinate, could start properly acting as the anti-PCI gadfly Timpanaro wanted his party to be.

Alas, not much changed. Subservience to the PCI would not necessarily have been such a problem, had the PCI’s politics remotely continued to honor their communist origins. They were, however, drifting ever rightward. Though the PCI, under its new leader Enrico Berlinguer, was abandoning links with the Soviet Union in favor of “Eurocommunism,” this foreign policy realignment was not correlated at all with a left turn at the domestic level.

This was the era of the great “historic compromise,” a naked cooperation between the PCI and DC first proposed by Berlinguer in 1973. Its full political fruit was harvested only in 1976, when the first government of national solidarity was formed — a coalition of the DC and its junior partner, the PCI.

Here truly began the heaviest of the Italian “Years of Lead” (anni di piombo), a period marked by economic crisis, crippling levels of unemployment, and acts of violent resistance on the extreme left (e.g., the kidnapping and assassination of the politician and former prime minister Aldo Moro), with yet worse terrorist atrocities from the neofascist right (e.g., the Bologna railway station bombing of 1980, which killed eighty-five people).

In 1976, the worst was still to come — but Timpanaro had had enough. The historic compromise was a stain on the Italian left, and there was no meaningful opposition to it left in the PdUP. Timpanaro chose to leave the PdUP that year, and with it, the organized party politics of a left he had served dutifully for almost thirty years, never to return again. He was now a Marxist unmoored.

Setting the Record Straight

Timpanaro’s political work in the 1980s and ’90s — his phase of being, as Luca Bufarale calls it, a “socialist and ecologist without a party” — largely took place on a cultural level. He continued to write about politics even if this did not, at first appearance, seem the core subject. In 1984, he wrote a stunning book ostensibly about a very obscure piece of late nineteenth-century literature: the recently discovered unpublished novel of the late-nineteenth-century socialist Edmondo De Amicis, entitled Primo Maggio (May First).

The book is a wonderfully lucid act of Timpanaran “setting the record straight,” getting us to see the serious political content in a book that had instantly been written off as a piece of failed sentimental claptrap from an annoying nationalist and bland school-curriculum-style author. But Timpanaro’s reaching for this topic at such a political moment was no accident. In its evocation and restatement of the fundamentals of Second International–era socialism, this was Timpanaro’s way of reconnecting and refreshing his commitment to his roots.

A beautiful passage of the book reflects on the current fate of the Left through thinking about parallel figures, the roads traveled and not traveled by certain comrades like Lucio Colletti. Colletti, a direct contemporary of Timpanaro, had once been as staunch a Marxist as he, even if they disagreed on certain things. But once Colletti had diagnosed an irredeemable component of G. W. F. Hegel as poisoning Marxism forever, he converted to bourgeois democracy.

For Timpanaro, the philosophical and economic rights and wrongs of Karl Marx — too much Hegel, or the fact that the rate of profit was not falling as predicted — did nothing essential to invalidate Marxism. The essence of Marxism was a deeply felt opposition to an unjust system of profit and exploitation. As long as that system existed, Marxism was the only principled way of responding to its brutality. Il socialismo is a beautiful book because it sees Timpanaro remaking the case for scientific socialism but also, in the process, allowing emotion to keep the flame of Marxism flickering as the light became ever dimmer.

Timpanaro’s explicitly political writings continued alongside such indirectly political ones, right through the ’80s and ’90s. And while this was a period of consolidation and return toward the end of his life, it was also a period of growth and change. The contributions collected in Il verde e il rosso. Scritti militanti, 1966–2000 (The Green and the Red: Militant Writings, 1966–2000) show an increasing focus, from the 1980s onward, on the ecological crisis — the “green” in the volume’s title.

In his book On Materialism, Timpanaro had gravitated toward Frederick Engels’s image of the cooling of the earth after the sun’s explosion to show that Engels was aware of the physical limits that would ultimately impose themselves on the cosmos and the humans within it. Timpanaro and Engels rejected the anthropocentric perspective in favor of the long historical view.

Timpanaro admitted later in life that this image of the end of the world had plagued him and vexed his neurosis long before he encountered it in Engels; even as a child, it kept him up at night. This limit was a material property of the universe, and that was scary enough. But what dawned on Timpanaro in the 1970s and ’80s was that the end of the world was also a property and a logical conclusion of capitalism — and this end of the world would arrive far sooner than the sun’s death.

Nuclear war was one threat; but the more serious one, that which Timpanaro judged more likely to materialize in the not-so-distant future, was the slower self-elimination of the human species through capital’s inherent processes of environmental degradation and resource depletion. The revelation was energizing for an aging Timpanaro because it provided fresh reasoning to overturn capitalism.

Socialists were not just fighting for humankind’s liberation but for its very survival on Earth. The end of the world was stripped of its abstract qualities as a consequence of the universe’s finite nature. Instead, it was given the face of a clear and present enemy, a blameworthy political agent, the same one Timpanaro had been combating his whole life: capital.

Red and Green

Was this, then, a political change? It was closer to a new way of framing the problem, not a shift in substance. The story of “the green and the red” is not one of red to green, a change of color from socialism to a liberal environmentalism that many of Timpanaro’s former comrades, such as Lotta Continua’s Adriano Sofri, would undergo. It is really a story of acquiring green-colored reasoning for the red.

Timpanaro was scathing about vague liberal formulations of the environmental problem, which failed to put that problem squarely at the door of the large polluting corporations and the capitalist system itself. For Timpanaro, there could be no green without the red. The red was the core principle that could not be abandoned. And the environmental crisis had merely underscored another, even more existentially urgent, reason for why that was the case. In other words, the green became, late in Timpanaro’s life, another way of recommitting to the red.

Timpanaro’s active political life spanned the entire second half of the twentieth century. It reached from the high watermark of the post-WWII Italian push for socialism and communism, right up to the post-Soviet world and new neoliberal order of the 1990s. There was, of course, evolution in his positions on various issues in this time.

But the base of his political thought and practice — anti-Stalinism, uncompromising Leninism and sympathy for Leon Trotsky, a constitutional hatred of all forms of authoritarianism in party or society, belief in free debate, a concomitant scorn for the PCI, certitude of the need for a proper scientific materialism in an age of Marxism’s dilution under the influence of other ideological distractions — remained hardy and unshakable throughout.