Amon, let’s move poster

Ah, looking for nostalgia? Thus, a neighbor of a “widespread” hotel on the outskirts of Censei (Palermo) responds to a comrade from the north who has lost his way, as an almost ritual annual appointment is made for those who have passed through the previous FGCI. Cinisi Because it is the city of Peppino Impastato, the bulk of the participants this year – exactly 90 – are actually from the island that hosts us in the 2023 edition, many who joined communist militancy, young, at the beginning of the eighties, and others, the elderly, who passed from Fgci, not a few to enter the Pdup-Manifesto. Again, however, again, in the extraordinary decade of peace.

Almost everyone happens And we are getting to know each other because, precisely on this island, in Comiso, we have for years faced police batons and water cannons together while trying to prevent the construction of a NATO base where cruise missiles were to be installed. The first rule that opened a new season: it was no longer just the front that divided Europe during the Cold War, it was that of the North-South confrontation that opened up dramatically.
“Nostalgia” as defined by the neighbor? No, it’s not just about “amarcord”. There is also this, of course, if one considers that the militancy of those years absorbed a whole life. But the reason for the gatherings is another: What do we do with our memory today?

I’m abnormal, because I started my militia at FGCI almost 40 years ago, in ’47, and then it lasted for 15 years, which is a very long time given the fact that I was the director of its new weekly generation, a job that also requires some craft. But since 1968 and the Manifesto, among other advantages, also gave me rejuvenation for twenty years, with Fgci, I also found myself in the glorious season of peace, of Pio La Torre, of Berlinguer who had a decisive turn to the left, which was most predictably Selection by the FGCI in those years, at the time when Marco Fumagalli, Pietro Folina and Gianni Coperlo were secretary, not by chance always present at these current assemblies (not Coperlo, this time because, as he wrote us with repeated regretful letters, he participated in Electoral campaign for his city (Trieste, for the regional elections of Friuli Venezia Giulia).

As always, by the way It no longer allows me to save if I don’t write right away, I took notes on everything. I didn’t think to write about them, but now that I’m looking at them a few days later, I thought it might be useful to communicate with them the many readers of Bayan il, who were in those years with the FGCI, before, during or after they crossed from the inside or from the outside. Later, all upset by the dissolution of PCI, today – as a comrade from Ustica says – «colored sparks flashed in the air, exploded with the same fire, as in rockets at the end of the year». Moreover, we vowed at the meeting not to make it an object of nostalgia, but how to use our memory. First of all, by saving it, because the archive does not exist initially. But then it is enacted, and released in so many forms that the political interest of the youngest is embodied. It was very important to convey a not so great experience despite what it has produced so far.

I can’t report Everything, just sentences of notes. I can’t even tell you who was there, if not the names of some, for a closer personal relationship: Marisa Nikshi, for example, or Gloria Poffo. or the comrades from Naples, Ilaria, Pepe Napolitano and Gianfranco Nappi who is doing a really great job with the magazine “Infinity Mundi”; Or the many still active in Arci (and the new boss, Walter Massa was also present, who gave a report on the Tom Bennettolo Foundation being built, conceived as an open space of memory, even for those who in this organization did not work.

And of course Claudio Riolo, who narrates that he joined Fgci in 1966, his abandonment of Il Manifesto with his schoolmates, the children of almost the entire leadership group of PCI, Macaluso, Colaianni, Cipolla, etc. And then, much more difficult to say, because of the white hair, whose face I can trace, is no longer the name.

Everyone’s concern is not to lock themselves in the golden cage of a beautiful memory that is not only political, but of a society we still feel alive if it is true that we are all very happy to meet again. Where are each of us today? Nobody asks the other, it seems superfluous, someone says,

Italian left So popular, many speak rather of new associations, not the dilemmas of the Democratic Party that it was decided not to discuss and so Schlein’s word was never spoken. The question is: what to do to restore abstention from political commitment? Someone says: “If Meloni wins, it’s our fault.” “In the digital age,” says another, “the in-person encounter is already a movement against the grain.” Marco Fumagalli says: “What united us in the 1980s was pacifism, which was born out of fear of installing Pershing cruise missiles (USA) and SS-20 missiles (Russian) all over Europe. Today, the concern that war will actually break out is still greater. Maybe we need to start here. But we also have to understand that young people see many things differently than we do: for example, at work, they are more interested in understanding when and how new technologies will make it possible to recover immovable life ». Almost the same thing that the other national secretary, Pietro Folina, said in conclusion. He, too, insists on changing our times, how much, even Covid, has changed us. Because forced imprisonment made us reflect, and better understand the contradictions (to the point of blowing up families, he adds, self-deprecatingly, but it seems sad to me, as it alludes to his recent separation).

finally someone “I support the Fumagalli Folena Castellina movement,” he says, gathering a broad opinion. For all of us especially insisted on the danger of being enclosed in an association built on memory and not on the obligation to sow, to work with the new generation and to bring our memory there, in the new organizational forms in which they make politics today. Subtracting the same conclusion as the last meeting of the Manifesto-Pdup which took place back in Rimini last November, this Cinisi threaded discussion.

I am, you know I am Optimist, I think we are starting to move again, “Amunì” as the writing on the shirt that was produced for the occasion in Sicilian says (thanks to the wonderful organization of Lidia Liotta) and that everyone wears.