Livio Maitan (1923/2023), looking to the future

Twenty-five-year-old Livio Metane, born in Venice on April 1, 1923, had joined the Fourth International in 1948. He came from a militancy in Italian socialism, reconfigured after fascism, from which he moved to found, with others and others, groups Revolutionary Communist, an organization that, after taking the name of the Revolutionary Communist League in 1979, dissolved into Proletarian Democracy in 1989, then merged into the emerging Communist Re-establishment Party, a formation in which it lived the last years of political rule. Until his death on September 16, 2004. A path followed, in the words of the title of the book of his memoirs, published in 2003, in some sixty years of the history of the labor movement in Italy and internationally, often or almost always. with direct experience, at the heart of mass mobilization, from which he obtained ideas for political and theoretical expansion, controlled by a rigorous research method.

among her dues Having contributed in a decisive manner to the dissemination in Italy of Trotsky’s work and, more generally, of Marxism, with articles and books, the happy polemical pen helps prepare for theoretical expansion, which is not merely repeated in Marxist ‘doctrines’, but is instead practiced in an effort to make them useful To understand the present, without distorting its foundations.A style of political and theoretical writing resting on a cultural substrate linked to classical studies, an innate curiosity and a thirst for knowledge that characterizes him from a young age.The proof of this is her personal archive full of documents, books and journals that can now, thanks to the commitment and experience of various comrades and comrades, be consulted to her in Rome — via Elisabetta Canori Mora, 13 — in the bookstore that bears her name (www.liviomaitan.wordpress.com).

For Livio Maitan, there was a long time to do and act politically and a much shorter time for memory, the need to tell stories and to remember. If political activity is maintained and carried out with intensity and participation, it leaves no space and finds no place to reflect on itself more fully in the form of history as autobiography. Only in the last years of his life did the urgency of memory take hold, perhaps prompted by the need to draw an autobiographical balance after years of fighting and the context in which he found himself living from the nineties, when the world changed radically from the one in which he had lived and worked consciously for nearly fifty years.

Talking is allowedFor this last stage, of the element of disillusionment, which so often accompanies and stimulates memory, when there is a despondency of the world in which we live? If by the stage of disappointment we mean that in which the man no longer asks himself about anything, he lives on remorse and lamentation, then the answer can only be in the negative. Active interest in the realities of the world in which he lived was interrupted only by death. Even in the latter part of his life he clung to the tortured relation between the pessimism of the mind and the optimism of the will, as already expressed in a letter in 1949. How, he wondered, would you react to the objective state of frustration caused by the disparity that existed between the need for a revolutionary organization and the difficulties of building it?

So he answered To the dilemma: «The general need for an organized party. Under these conditions, we are forced to move within a narrower range. It may also be, however, – mine cracked – that even these abbreviated tasks cannot be realized at this point, but they will in no way justify either discretionary surrender or simple frustration: there will always be something important to do».

At the National Central Library and via streaming

On the centenary of the birth of Livio Maitan in the National Central Library in Rome, viale Castro Pretorio, from 9:30 to 18:30 today there is an international conference organized by the Livio Maitan Library, with the support of Sinistra Anticapitalista – with streaming: www.liviomaitan.wordpress.com. Among the topics covered: the Italian political events and their role in building the Italian section of the Fourth International, their international commitment to the Trotskyist movement and the theoretical contribution they made to the discussion of the labor movement in more than half a year. a century. Speeches, among others, by Luciana Castellina, Lydia Cirillo, Mauro Boccherei, Gigi Malabarba, Maurizio Accrobo, Fausto Bertinotti, Salvatore Canavu, Eliana Como, Diego Giachetti, Silverio Corviseri, Penelope Duncan, Manuel Garro Ramos, Devers Killaway, Torrigliato .