Whatever happened to Italian communism? Lucio Magri’s The Tailor of Ulm

The original subtitle of The Tailor of Ulm, ‘A Possible History of the PCI’, was changed, in the English edition, to ‘Communism in the Twentieth Century’. Despite the fact that Magri himself requested the broader English subtitle, the original is more accurate. Clearly, no one writing about European communism in the twentieth century could ignore what was going on in the Soviet Union, and in what used to be called the international communist movement. And, it should be said, that while Magri has interesting and quite sensible things to say about the Soviet experience, there is little that is not found in more authoritative sources. The focus of The Tailor of Ulm is, quite properly, the Italian Communist Party (PCI). It is worth recalling, two decades after its dissolution, that the PCI emerged from the resistance and collapse of Fascism as an extraordinarily strong social and political phenomenon. It quickly came to dominate the Italian left, both organizationally and electorally, and exerted an exceptional influence on Italian society and culture, thanks to its relative openness and flexibility. From the 1950s until its dissolution in 1991, it was also the largest communist party in the western world. And on the PCI, Magri has a good deal to say, from the perspective of someone who was an acute observer, a theorist and an active intellectual, militant and occasional party leader. It is an interesting, insightful and sometimes fascinating book, but its strongest contribution, not surprisingly, concerns events in which the author was directly involved. Space limitations prevent doing full justice to this book, so I will contextualize and discuss just a few of the most important topics in the hope that this makes the work as a whole more accessible to those with limited knowledge of the events he discusses. I will then conclude with a discussion of the broader theoretical and strategic issues raised at the very end of The Tailor of Ulm, which is only appropriate, since nothing Lucio Magri wrote was meant to be read outside a consideration of real movements and the problems they had to confront