Elly Schlein and the eternal clash between civil society and the apparatuses

The dream of Paolo Flores d’Arcais, the last Trotskyist, the theoretical and practical maximum of that entryism which was to lead first to the newborn Democratic Party of the Left of Achille Occhetto, and then to all its subsequent mutations, the famous “outsiders”, the exponents of “civil society”, the representatives of the “party that does not exist”, as they used to say at the time, it was finally realized. But in the way the strangest dreams can come true, with that taste for paradox that the unconscious releases only in sleep or in neurosis. The paradox could not be more jarring, at the end of a thirty-year dispute between supporters of openness to civil society and defenders of the primacy of politics, between movementists and party members, assembly members and apparatchiks. Thirty-year dispute, if not fifty years, considering how its most distant roots sink even into the diatribes of 1968 (it is also true that 1968 in Italy never ended), in the struggles of the time between parties and movements for hegemony on the squares , for the conquest of student representations in the school councils, in the universities, in the congresses of the goliardic Union. The paradox lies in the fact that the roles, as always happens in Italian politics, if only one has the time and patience to observe it long enough, have once again completely reversed.