How Rossana Rossanda Joined the Left
Socialist organizers should think more about how people actually join the socialist movement. Here’s one story about how that happens — drawn from a different time and place, but still relevant.
We all have our origin stories about how we joined the socialist left.
For me, after spending most of the 2000s interested in socialism but still wedded to liberal politics, I made my break in the second half of college. I read voraciously, went to demonstrations, walked picket lines, and sought out socialist organization.
For many who are part of the first wave of the new generation of DSA, the story goes something like this: They spent 2015 and 2016 drawn to the campaign of Bernie Sanders and voted for Vermont’s socialist senator. They went to some Black Lives Matter demonstrations. They read Jacobin. They listened to Chapo Trap House. They followed left Twitter. And then when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in November 2016 (almost eight years ago now!) the dam broke. They became organized socialists. They joined and built strike solidarity campaigns, they helped campaign for democratic socialist candidates, they organized big DSA meetings, and some got union jobs to organize in the workplace.
With these stories in mind I read the account of Rossana Rossanda’s politicization, which she tells in the early part of her fascinating memoir, The Comrade From Milan (2010), with a lot of interest. Rossanda was active in the Italian resistance against fascism and a leading member of the Italian Communist Party. In 1969, she was expelled for supporting new student movements and for opposing the Soviet Union’s decision to crush the democratic socialist experiment in Czechoslovakia the year before. Rossanda went on to help found il manifesto, an important left-wing newspaper in Italy.
Rossanda — who was in her late teens as World War II slowly became a daily reality in Italy in 1942 and 1943 — initially tried to retreat into her own studies and shut out the conflict. “I spent 1940 and 1941 stubbornly determined to concede as little as possible to outside constraints — it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same, eat whatever, sleep wherever… There was a war, so what?”
But Rossanda’s carefully constructed indifference began to fall apart as the war became a real part of her life. Friends of friends went off to fight. News about the Axis defeat in Africa shook her belief that the war would remain a distant problem. Her family survived a bombing but lost their home. In 1943, Mussolini’s state collapsed, and he formed a new fascist puppet regime in the north that was controlled by the Nazis, the “Republic of Salò.”
The turn to naked control by the Nazis and the shattering of the illusion that the fascist regime was invincible pushed Rossanda and many like her to join the resistance. Rossanda and her friends began to take a keen interest in the partisans in the mountains, trying to learn how to join. “We could no longer wait. Even putting an end to something required action.”
Rossanda’s opening came when she learned that her professor, the philosopher Antonio Banfi, was a communist. Rossanda rushed to Banfi during a break between exams. She found Banfi leaning against a radiator and confronted him: “Someone told me that you’re a communist.”
After a quick inspection, Banfi concluded Rossanda meant well, though the question was much more dangerous than she realized at the time. “What are you looking for?,” Rossanda remembered him asking. She talked about resistance leaflets she had read but not understood. Banfi crossed the room, pulled paper from his desk, and scrolled down a short list: “Harold Laski, Freedom in the Modern State and Harold Laski, Democracy in Crisis; K. Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and K. Marx, Class Struggles in France From 1848 to 1850.” Plus a few more. Banfi handed her the list and told her: “Read these books and when you have read them come back and see me.”
Rossanda rushed to the library and found a sympathetic librarian who directed her to an unmarked card drawer where she found many of the books on Banfi’s list. For two days, Rossanda remembers reading without rest, devouring the philosopher’s recommendations. “I became feverish… I made connections, I reconnected things, words, silences, events I had brushed up against but had been willfully blind to… I stripped away layers of ignorance.”
Finished with the reading, Rossanda rushed back to Banfi. “I’ve done the reading… What do I do?” Banfi told Rossanda to meet a middle-aged teacher who lived in Como and was expecting to hear from Rossanda. Rossanda reported to her. “You will be called Miranda.” Then, for the next year and a half, Rossanda took orders from the Como teacher. She started by taking care of the sister of a partisan who had been captured and was being rescued. Her tasks became more complicated from there.
What I like about Rossanda’s story is the way it captures that feeling of epiphany many of us have when we break with apathy and indifference, or a bad prior politicization, and embrace socialist politics. “Feverish” is how I felt at the end of college as I read — without much of a plan but with a real drive — Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and others.
Rossanda’s story is beautiful too because of how it captures both the catalyst for, and all three elements of, politicization. The late-war period in Italy radicalized a generation of young people. That was the catalyst/context, the essential objective ingredient that can multiply with the other elements to politicize people. And then from people like Banfi that generation got ideas. So critical, no political life is possible without ideas about what’s wrong and what can be better. And from characters like the Como teacher they got organization and action: they were placed into a network delivering direction and tasks to cadre across the Republic of Salò. That was Rossanda’s path into the left.