is an Italian journalist and one of the founding editors of the left-wing daily newspaper, Il Manifesto. A member of the Italian Communist Party from the time Resistance until her expulsion long with other members of the Il Manifesto group in 1969, she has remained an influential figure and analyst. on the Italian left. In English, she is the author of The Comrade from Milan (Verso, 2008), her political memoirs.
The paradox we are experiencing consists in the fact that today the critique of capitalism and the state is produced in real social conflicts, advances through real political subjects, material practices: here we already move in the zone of the “screen,” beyond the categories inherited and taken from the traditional workers’ movement, in the profile of another which is expressed as a need and seen in clips of experience.
The real question is rather: for those who deny the centrality of the working class, where is the epicenter? For the centrality of the working class is not merely “sociological”: it is an image of the centrality of the modes and relations of production with multiple social and ideological formations which intersect and contradict each other. Or further: in a system without an epicenter, where would movement come from?
The crisis, moreover, goes beyond the purely political domain and invests the realm of theory itself. It is a crisis of Marxism, which is experienced by immense masses as an unacknowledged reality. Marxism – not as a body of theoretical or philosophical thought, but as the great idealistic force that was changing the world – is now groaning under the weight of this history.
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