The Environmental Question, Employment, and Development in Italy's Left, 1945-1990

Abstract

Postwar Italy's political organisations' attitude towards environmental issues is closely correlated to how the country transformed from a merely agrarian society to one of the world's richest industrial actors as well as to how its governments managed development. In view of the role of the social-Communist opposition in shaping the country's cultural and social features we are persuaded that a better understanding of that process has to pass through an analysis of how the representatives of the workers' movement approached the environmental question and the Italian model of development: an approach that was deeply influenced by a political vision favouring industrialisation, employment, and production. 2 After World War II (WWII), and despite being entrenched in a framework deeply marked by the Cold War, the social-Communist left became an important political actor positing itself as a force of renewal and vouching for an alternative developmental model opposed to that outlined by laissez-faire capitalism. Of course, its behaviour changed over time according to the country's economic situation. For instance, since the postwar reconstruction-from the 'economic miracle' and youth contestation until the energy crisis of the 1970s and the free-trade policies of the following decade-the Italian left faced several complex environmental problems. This complexity, together with the length of the historical period considered, has not facilitated a simple historical narrative. Nevertheless, we wish to offer here a preliminary survey of the main issues at stake in the Italian left's environmentalism. It is therefore useful to clarify a few points. The first one concerns the definition of the term 'left' as it is used in this essay: even if there are some references to socialist politicians or to documents produced by the social-Communist union, Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), the essay is based mainly on sources referring to or produced by the Italian Communist Party (PCI). The latter is this article's main object of analysis as it is the predominant organization of the Italian workers' movement, which has enacted a sort of cultural and political hegemony over other sectors of the Italian left. Secondly, we wish to explain the expression 'environmental question', which some may consider void of significance because of the wide spectrum of issues it is used to define today, which include pollution, nature conservation, urban sustainability, or illegal whaling. The environmental issues we address in this essay are specifically those which we believe have the greatest connections to PCI's role as the major representative of Italy's workers' movement, to employment, and

Labour and the ecological crisis: The eco-modernist dilemma in western Marxism(s) (1970s-2000s)

“…During its 1971 cadres' school in Frattocchie (notably, one year before the ecological crisis was officially declared by the Club of Rome), the PCI had held its first national meeting on the theme "Man (sic), nature, society," where party executive Giovanni Berlinguer 5 had admitted the need to update Marxist orthodoxy in order to take into account the concept of natural limits. He had compared ecology to socialist planning and emphasized the need for the party to consider the environment a working-class priority (Graf Von Hardenberg and Pelizzari, 2008). A few years later, the public intellectual and PCI representative Laura Conti published her Che cos'é l'ecologia.…”