[FONT=Arial]A memoir and reflection on the life of the Italian Trotskyist...[/FONT] A Journey with Livio Lessons from a Critical Intellectual Lidia Cirillo This article fulfils a promise I made to Livio two days before he died. Sensing that the end was drawing very near, Livio expressed his wish that along with Fausto Bertinotti and Alain Krivine, I would be the person to record my memories of him. The few hasty and general words I uttered at his funeral did not suffice for me to feel I had fulfilled my promise and the task I had to accomplish. So here, I am fulfilling my commitment in a way (I believe) Livio would have appreciated, by explaining the meaning of his lessons and his political work in Italy. [1] Turin, 1973If the first part of my article touches upon my own life, it is because the only things I feel authorised to relate about Livio are the circumstances of our encounter and our journey in common. My outlook on his political work is a very personal one. I don’t go into other matters, such as the distance feminism has put between myself and the current I nevertheless want to feel I still belong to. As for his lessons, needless to say I’ve assimilated them and developed them in my own way. To my mind, the moral of his life story is that history proved Livio Maitan right and politics proved him wrong. As far as I am concerned, this observation does not detract from the figure. On the contrary, it is a way of undertaking a reflection on politics, its limits, its ability to remain an authentic instrument of liberation, and on its long, diffuse crisis. In the Italian left, the crisis of politics was talked about for a while, but then this discussion evaporated without a trace. This is also because there were no subjects who could be really interested in it. As a Trotskyist, Livio devoted his entire life to a critique of politics, criticising the policies of the major political and trade union apparatus of the 20th Century workers’ movement. The cultural instruments on which he relied exclusively (history, political economy, sociology...) did not enable him to extend this criticism to politics as a whole, including the environment in which he had carried out his own political action, the margins. Livio always made a de facto criticism of the historical position in which he had chosen to inhabit. However he was unable to make this systematic, due to his cultural background, his generation and his gender. Paris rally 1969. Left to right: Livio, Charles Micheloux, Henri Weber; Alain Krivine.For everyone, including Livio, choosing to act from the margins during the 20th Century, outside genuine politics to a certain degree, meant sharing the lot of society’s outsiders. It meant an analogous position, working to achieve convergence between intellectuals and masses in the only way they could, sharing in their point of view, but seeing things far more clearly. And yet, the margins are a disreputable place, like the run-down districts where the workers’ movement began to live, to win victories and to spend a season in hell. The working-class vanguards and critical intellectuals who left their place and class of origin rubbed shoulders with thieves, drunkards and prostitutes who were the outcome of unemployment and misery. The disreputable neighbourhoods of politics have their own form of misery, are outsiders in their own way. Of course this political misery is very different from the types that fed petty crime, drove people to drink or threw jobless workers onto the streets. Livio never left those districts, despite his awareness of the risks of knives in the back and artful dodgers of which he encountered many over his life. He never left them, but he never idealised them either. He never sang the "praises of the margins", as in the title of a well-known feminist essay written in the days of the debate about difference. Refusing to idealise the margins meant first of all recognising their misery and not confusing it with virtue. It also meant making every effort to break out of the margins. But not to break out of them alone; to emerge from them alongside the sectors of society still living on the edges. The misery on the margins of the workers’ movement meant sectarianism, an extreme, irresponsible, fragmentation, an inability to really measure up to politics, laziness in thought and effective action alongside neurotic bursts of activism for a month - or a year. I would like to attempt to read Livio’s life and work as a criticism of politics and explain the existence of people like him who give us some reason to hope. Because, if there is any possibility of building a new workers’ movement, it will depend those with the same or very similar historical and political position or positions very similar to Livio’s. Whole thingy: http://www.internationalviewpoint.or...php?rubrique73
