Donatella Di Cesare

David Broder

Capitalist Asphyxia

Immunodemocracy

October By: David Broder Can an angry, disaffected, self-destructive young man find hope and solace at an insane asylum when he doesn’t believe they can possibly exist? It is 1983, and Derek is twenty-one and at war with existence itself. If he is vanquished, he lives. If he is victorious, he dies. October challenges all the life-affirming ideas we have been imbued with by calling into question the notions that life has value and meaning, that love is not selfish, and that the people we are closest to will not harm us. October will resonate with those who feel we are all living our lives in delusion, trusting traditional values, relying on all those beliefs that are created to do nothing more than give us a reason to get out of bed. October is for those who, like its author, David Broder, question everything and trust nothing.

October

During the final years of the Second World War, a decisive change took place in the Italian left, as the Italian Communist Party (PCI) rose from clandestinity and recast itself as a mass, patriotic force committed to building a new democracy. This book explains how this new party came into being. Using Rome as its focus, it explains that the rebirth of the PCI required that it subdue other, dissident strands of communist thinking. During the nine-month German occupation of Rome in 1943-44, dissident communists would create the capital’s largest single resistance formation, the Communist Movement of Italy (MCd’I), which galvanised a social revolt in the capital's borgate slums. Exploring this wartime battle to define the rebirth of Italian communism, the author examines the ways in which a militant minority of communists rooted their activity in the everyday lives of the population under occupation. In particular, this study focuses on the role of draft resistance and the revolt against labour conscription in driving recruitment to partisan bands, and how communist militants sought to mould these recruits through an active effort of political education. Studying the political writing of these dissidents, their autodidact Marxism and the social conditions in which it emerged, this book also sheds light on an often-ignored underground culture in the years that preceded the armed resistance that began in September 1943. Revealing an almost unknown history of dissident communism in Italy, outside of more recognisable traditions like Trotskyism or Bordigism, this book provides an innovative perspective on Italian history. It will be of interest to those researching the broad topics of political and social history, but more specifically, resistance in the Second World War and the post-war European left.

Dissidents in German-Occupied Rome

The Rebirth of Italian Communism, 1943–44

Italy’s political disaster under a microscope There is little that hasn’t gone wrong for Italy in the last three decades. Economic growth has flatlined, infrastructure has crumbled, and out-of-work youth find their futures stuck on hold. These woes have been reflected in the country’s politics, from Silvio Berlusconi’s scandals to the rise of the far right. Many commentators blame Italy’s malaise on cultural ills—pointing to the corruption of public life or a supposedly endemic backwardness. In this reading, Italy has failed to converge with the neoliberal reforms mounted by other European countries, leaving it to trail behind the rest of the world. First They Took Rome offers a different perspective: Italy isn’t failing to keep up with its international peers but farther along the same path of decline they are following. In the 1980s, Italy boasted the West’s strongest Communist Party; today, social solidarity is collapsing, working people feel ever more atomized, and democratic institutions grow increasingly hollow. Studying the rise of forces like Matteo Salvini’s Lega, this book shows how the populist right drew on a deep well of social despair, ignored by the liberal centre. Italy’s recent history is a warning from the future—the story of a collapse of public life that risks spreading across the West.

How the Populist Right Conquered Italy

First They Took Rome

A provocative look at Italy's political disaster from the Cold War to today 67% of Italian 18 to 34 year-olds still live with their parents. Over a third of them are unemployed. Economic growth has been close to nil for over two decades. The Eurozone's third-largest economy, Italy's long-term slide today threatens to blow up the whole European project. The rise to power in summer 2018 of Matteo Salvini's hard-right Lega and the eclectic Five Star Movement has pushed Italy, and the whole continent, into unknown territory. The monstrous forces that now rule Italy emerge from a deep well of despair. What broke apart in Italy over the 1990s and 2000s was not just a once mighty Left but also the very bases of social solidarity. The rise of Silvio Berlusconi, the asset-stripping of the Italian state and the creation of the neoliberal Democratic Party hollowed out Italian public life; and when the crisis hit, Italians were left to fend for themselves. But the change they voted for in 2018 threatens to push the country even deeper into the abyss. The upheavals in Rome epitomize a general crisis of democracy in the West. Examining Italy's history since the end of the Cold War, First We Take Rome looks at the wider significance of the current crisis and its wider political stakes. With clarity and breadth of scope, David Broder examines the recent history and social forces that brought the country to this crisis and the state of oppositional movements working to reestablish Italy's traditions of radicalism.

David Broder

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