Socialism and radical democracy, the (forgotten) lessons of Stefano Merli

I receive a small book dedicated to the socialist historian and militant Stephen Merli (1925-1994) whom I somewhat dated more than thirty years ago when we were both teaching in Venice. I would like to talk about it in this article, but I don’t know how to do it. The book is simply entitled “Stefano Merli”, authors Franco Toscani and Attilio Mangano (Documentation Center Pistoia Editrice, pp. 85, euro 10), and contains, in addition to essays-portraits by Toscani and Mangano, also some supplementary pages by Antonio Benci on the profession of historian and Andrea Bellucci on the “invisible proletariat” of yesterday or even today, and on the “dramatic out-of-dateness” or potential topicality of Merli’s historiographical work. The problem is that talking about all this means remembering the 1960s and 1970s, the new working class of the time and the complicated and self-conflicting formation of a new left extraneous and alternative both to the Togliattist cultural unity of the PCI and to the reformist, social democratic experimentation of the PSI. In first place then there was the transformation of capitalism (a term almost never used today) during the Italian “economic miracle” of 1958-63, with the emergence of a factory working class such as there had never been in our country . The situation called for one way or another of re-reading Marx, Engels and Lenin, which thrilled and tormented our new left for nearly two decades.