What's Left in Italy?

2013-03-04 · first published in Left Unity · 176 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to leftunity.org”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did.

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March 3, 2013. Tobias Abse reveals the reactionary nature of Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement and the tragic fragmentation of the Italian Left. From Left Unity Blog . The Italian general election of 24-25 February 2013 has been a political earthquake or, to adopt Beppe Grillo’s own vocabulary, a political tsunami. We can all agree that it represented a massive popular rejection of the 13 months of unremitting austerity – in particular the attacks on pensions and job security – implemented by the technocratic government of former European Commissioner and economics professor, Mario Monti. Monti’s ‘centrist’ coalition in reality represented that consistently neo-liberal section of the Italian right that met with the approval of German chancellor Angela Merkel and the German Christian Democrats (and the European People’s Party in Strasbourg), the European Central Bank, Bill Emmott and other journalists on the influential Economistmagazine, the widely-read and quoted Financial Times and the ‘markets’ in general. In this election it took about 10% of the Italian popular vote (10.6% in the Chamber of Deputies, 9.1% for the Senate).