Pietro Ingrao, "Masse e potere"

Synopsis

This collection of essays by Pietro Ingrao, even when it touches distant themes, such as the beginning of the anti-fascist republic, has its eye turned to the present. The "Italian case" that arouses the attention and curiosity of many observers, including foreigners, is examined not as an "anomaly" or "delay" with respect to Western political and social regimes, but as a maturation ground for general problems, related to the growth of mass democracy in a modern industrial society.

The break with the past, operated by the Resistance, has changed the social balance, determining new "institutions" in civil society and in the State: and in this troubled development of the organization and consciousness of the great masses - analyzed in the writings contained in the first part of the volume - the author sees the decisive fact that has undermined the economic "model" and the Christian Democratic monopoly regime that prevailed at the end of the 1940s.

In a series of essays - the second part of the volume - then an insistent question arises about the meaning and scope of the social struggles of the sixties, about the roads through which the new people's democracy, indicated in the Constitution, can bring about the transition towards a new social regime. These questions refer to the new intertwining between economy and state: parties, trade unions, public apparatuses are examined as “faces” of an increasingly socialized productive progress. Therefore, the reform of the state is seen as a fundamental point of a new economy, which sees its "productivity" enriched by an appropriation of politics by the great masses of the people.

Pietro Ingrao

Pietro Ingrao was born in 1915 in Lenola (Latina). Graduated in law and in literature, he participates in the clandestine anti-fascist struggle and in the Resistance. Journalist, from 1947 to 1957 he was director of the Unit in Rome, since 1948 a member of the PCI in parliament. On 5 July 1976 he was elected president of the Chamber of Deputies. Strongly opposed to the dissolution of the PCI, he however initially joined the PDS (Democratic Party of the Left) leaving it shortly after, ending his uninterrupted career as a deputy in 1992. He died in Rome in 2015.