Aldo Garosci

Aldo Garòsci (13 October 1907 – 3 January 2000) was an Italian historian, socialist, anti-fascist activist-politician and, in his later professional career, a leading political journalist-commentator.

Provenance and early life Aldo Garòsci was born at Meana di Susa, a small mountain town overlooking the Susa Valley, roughly equidistant between Turin, to the east, and the mountain pass across into Savoy, to the west. Aldo was his father's third son. Antonio Garosci (1861–1941) was not originally from Piedmont. He had been born in Sanremo down by the coast. Antonio Garosci worked as a businessman-entrepreneur in the agri-foods sector. Despite having arrived as outsiders, by the time of Aldo's birth, the Garosci family were well networked in the valley. His mother, born Alessandra Sampò (1879–1938) was significantly younger than her husband. She had been born at Bene Vagienna (Cuneo), another small mountain town, located in the extreme south of Piedmont. Alessandra Sampò had grown up in a family of middle class intellectuals. Her sister Nelda was married to the noted medievalist Giorgio Falco, whom she had met at the University of Turin.

In 1929/30 Garòsci also teamed up with Mario Andreis to produce, briefly, an underground newspaper, "Voci d'officina", inspired by Gobettian ideas and pursuing the mission of Il Baretti, a periodical political magazine founded by Gobetti back in 1924 which, following several years of intensifying government harassment had finally been closed down in 1928. Another important member of the little group of activists operating alongside Garòsci was Carlo Dionisotti, a political soulmate who twenty years later would emigrate to England, becoming a professor of Italian literature first at Oxford and then at London. Garosci and Dionisotti had been good friends since their time at school together. Among the others involved, those who became particular friends included Franco Venturi, Carlo Levi and, above all, the man to whom the others looked for inspiration and direction, Carlo Rosselli. but such backing was necessarily accompanied by appropriately pertinent criticism. Indeed, it was only after the movement proved receptive to the insistence which Garòsci advanced on behalf of Turin - and in which he was supported by Levi - on the need to incorporate critiques of traditional socialism and liberalism in the underlying philosophy of the "Giellisti" along with a focus on the importance of the working class as a revolutionary force, that he himself became one of the most strident backers of the Rosselli line.

It was also during his time in Paris that Garòsci teamed up with (Blanche) Madeleine Bride: they now shared their lives till Garòsci's political exile came to an end. There were also a number of new friendships that now became life-long with his fellow political activists who became, after 1945, prominent members of Italy's post-war political and journalistic establishment, including Alberto Cianca, Fernando Schiavetti, Paolo Battino Vittorelli and, most importantly, Leo Valiani. It was with Valiani and the friend of his school years, Franco Venturi, that he became particularly close, not just in terms of personal friendship but also as enduring intellectual soulmates. The battalion enjoyed early success in August 1936, as part of the army that defeated the Francoists at Monte Pelado. But Garòsci was forced by a wound received at Huesca, during the battle to abandon the military front, and escape across the Pyrenees mountains to France. After this he became a tireless warrior in the parallel propaganda war through his contributions to the movement's weekly publication, Giustizia e Libertà. In the decades that followed, it became clear that those impassioned journalistic contributions were themselves only the introduction to his part in propagating, during the ensuing decades, the legendary and heroic character of the antifascist intervention in the Spanish War. The entire Spanish experience does indeed seem to have represented a decisive juncture in Garòsci's life, and a never to be repeated point of existential commitment to causes in which his belief was seemingly total. The model provided by the "Catalan Revolution" in particular, with its peculiar elements of spontaneity and self-government, became a paradigm which he would continue to reference for many years. Garòsci took on the leadership of the "Giellisti", together with Alberto Cianca, Fernando Schiavetti, Emilio Lussu and Silvio Trentin, all trying, without very much success, to continue along the path Carlo Rosselli had set. That meant attempting to unite the antifascist revolutionary forces, which in turn involved trying to establish dialogue with "proletarian parties". In a decade of intensifying political polarisation, and after his participation in a civil war in which the contribution of Soviet proxies sometimes seemed to be driven more by Stalin's paranoid determination to confront a Trotskyite conspiracy than by any shared interest in defeating fascism, Garòsci's own deep-seated suspicion of communist-authoritarianism precluded meaningful co-operation with parties of the political left, however.

New York The journey to New York was far from direct. After fleeing to southern France, Garòsci travelled in a group of around fourteen Italian antifascist activist comrades via Marseille, Algiers and Casablanca. There were long waits in north Africa. Almost certainly, their escape was only possible because of a succession of heroic and skilful interventions at a bureaucratic and logistical level by Emilio Lussu and Varian Fry. They arrived in New York in August 1941. During their time in New York Aldo Garòsci and Madeleine Bride were married between August 1941 and June 1943. The marriage seems to have ended in an amicable annulment when Garòsci returned to Italy to participate in the fighting there.

At the same time Garòsci took time to spell out, in a series of articles in the publication Quaderni Italiani (loosely, "Italian Notebooks") published by his fellow New York-based "Giellista", Bruno Zevi, what he would later identify as his own "personal Utopia", and which he himself described as an update, in the light of his experiences in 1930s France, of the Gobettian perspective he had picked up as a student in Turin. The centrality of "autonomy" dates back to these, both in its collective dimension concerning the freedom of the socially responsible to organise and manage their own lives, and in terms of the ability of the individual to determine elements of his or her own existence. This was completed and contextualised through his conception of differentiation, postulating a societal model according to which the different spheres (economic, political, cultural, spiritual) were expressly separated and separately ordered, each according to its own independently derived sets of principals. In this model, which was probably influenced by Croce's "theory of distinctions", Garòsci brings together his reflections on totalitarianism, with its "tendency to centralize and bureaucratize", and those on a liberal-socialist society, in his contribution to Quaderni Italiani of 1944 (vol.4), drawing on ideas he had formulated with Valiani and Franco Venturi during the later 1930s, and then further developed while living in New York. Finally, the antitotalitarian model adumbrated here, which should have encompassed all the possible political alternatives for a future society, stems directly from Rosselli's proposal for a single party of the proletariat.

Journalism During the 1930s Garòsci had fallen into political journalism on behalf of the "Giellisti", principally through regular contributions to the movement's weekly newspaper. During the later 1940s he returned to political journalism. Between 1947 and 1949 he took charge at L’Italia socialista, an independent daily newspaper that had grown out of L'Italia libera, which had been discontinued following the PdA's electoral demise. This in effect meant taking the place of his old friend Carlo Levi who had been editor-in-chief at L'Italia libera during 1945/46. Another of his more popular books was Gli intellettuali e la guerra di Spagna ("The Intellectuals and the Spanish War"), published in 1959, which was based on a series of his conversation-interviews broadcast on RAI Radio 3.

It could be objected that the "second hand" nature of these books, based as they were on earlier works presented the other media, somehow diminished their impact their authority. The same criticism can be made of his books San Marino. Mito e storiografia tra i libertini e il Carducci (loosely, "San Marino: Myth and Historiography between libertines and Carducci", published in 1967) and Pensiero politico e storiografia moderna ("Political thinking and modern historiography", published in 1954).

Public impact during the 1950s and 1960s His profile as a popular historian and prolific political commentator and the important role he had played in the struggle against fascism came together to make Aldo Garòsci an important figure in public dialogue during the first three decades of the Italian republic. Having originally been politicised as a Turin law student during the post-democratic aftermath of Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922, Garòsci never moved away from a conception of political reality predicated on a deep and intricate inter-relationship between intellectual activity and political activism across society. He applied this insight in a range of situations and contexts, while generally remaining outside (though not ignoring) organised party politics.

During the 1950s Garòsci served as a member of the EFM ruling committee, although his role was evidently a largely passive one. He was very much more active, at least during the later 1950s and early 1960s, in his support of Spanish anti-Francoists, both those in exile and those involved in the dangerous business of opposition inside Spain. He was a leading member of the "Italian Committee for the freedom of the Spanish People" ("Comitato italiano per la libertà del popolo spagnolo"). In those early years, the Italian communists played an important role in the organisation. After the split with them the organisation was reconstituted as the "Italian Committee for a Democratic Spain" ("Comitato italiano per la Spagna democratica"), thereby drawing attention to the implicitly anti-democratic threat represented by the Italian Communist Party, which at that time was believed to be strongly influenced from Moscow. These anti-Francoist entities were relatively short-lived and very loosely organised, which makes it hard to determine with much clarity how much they did or how effective it was. There was an intense acceptance of the need to raise international awareness, at a time when the Spanish government had been remarkably successful in isolating Spain politically and economically from the rest of Europe. Conferences were organised, signatures were collected and appeals were launched, all designed to provide material support for internal opponents of the larger of the two Iberian dictatorships.

Final years and intensifying anti-communism During the later 1960s Aldo Garòsci withdrew progressively from much of his public activism. He nevertheless emerged in 1966 to promote a manifesto of intellectuals in favour of political unification among socialist parties. That year he joined the more broadly based Unified Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Unificato; PSU), a merger of the PSDI and PSI, which subsequently separated again following disappointing results at the 1968 general election. Garosci returned to the PSDI, and in 1969 became editorial director at L'Umanità, the party's daily newspaper. Changes in the political composition of the paper's management team forced his resignation in 1972.

Since the 1920s Garòsci had made no secret of his misgivings concerning the democratic and liberal credentials of the Italian Communist Party. The 1968 student protests, to which he was always hostile, triggered a hardening of his approach. Stalinist developments in tyranny, most of which he had experienced from the distanced perspective of exile in Paris and then New York, had triggered incomprehension and mistrust across the political left in western Europe as knowledge of the purges and the camps had seeped across to the west. The clandestine elements of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of 1939 became apparent only slowly, but there could be nothing clandestine about the Soviet take-over in central Europe after 1945. Elsewhere in western Europe, notably in West Germany, such awareness served to marginalise communism, but the PCI continued to win between 20% and 34% of the popular vote in general elections through the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Throughout the period, disagreement and unclarity persisted over the extent to which the PCI should be viewed as no more than a shameless proxy for still unfulfilled Soviet imperial ambitions, and how far it should be applauded for the relative efficiency and absence of flagrant corruption evident in many non-communist controlled municipal councils. During the 1970s Garòsci emerged as an uncompromising battling anti-communist, lining up with liberal-conservative elements in the process. His contributions began to appear in Indro Montanelli's Il Giornale. More rarely he even lined up with Edgardo Sogno's "difesa democratica", which a decade or two earlier he would surely have condemned as "monarchist". By the 1980s, anti-communism had become the focus of his public agenda.

Aldo Garòsci died in Rome on 3 January 2000 at the age of 92, having progressively withdrawn from the various commitments to which he would, as a younger man, have devoted his energies. It was, in the words of one source, "a long old-age".