The Chinese Revolution in the City of St Francis of Paola

Maoism, beyond the easy ironies about the season when the Little Red Book was a fetish for many young Italians of the extra-parliamentary left - 'Servire il popolo' would end up being mispronounced as 'Servire il pollo' -, was the incarnation of Marxism-Leninism closest to the peasant reality of the South because of its rural nature. In the documentary, one hears Lo Giudice compare the role of the activists, the young intellectuals, to that of the seeds needed to make the soil formed by the people bloom. Aphorisms were appropriate for Maoism. Some are still famous: 'Revolution is not a gala dinner', 'It doesn't matter what colour the cat is, as long as it catches the mouse' (taken from Confucius).

Nailed to its historical destiny as an inert and agitated mass, therefore invaded by superstition or abuse, according to Ernesto De Martino's reading, the people of the South, the Calabrian people in particular, were therefore seen as potential incubators of revolution. Episodic but clamorous rebellions, such as the Reggio Calabria uprisings in 1970, turned the spotlight on realities otherwise forgotten or seen only as areas of atavisms, emigration and depopulation. To tell the truth, the Reggio Calabria uprisings, which culminated with the armoured cars on the seafront, the likes of which had not been seen since the Second World War, were ridden by Ciccio Franco's Social Movement, to the cry of 'Boia chi molla', with Oriana Fallaci interviewing the now fugitive right-wing political leader. Enzo Lo Giudice would be among the few if not the only communist allowed to speak to the crowd during those unrepeatable months.

Having abandoned his militancy, which had also put a strain on his family, with his teacher wife bearing the financial burden, as the 1980s of the ebb, disengagement and rampantism approached, Lo Giudice took up the profession of lawyer while maintaining an idealistic drive and continuing to consider justice as a function of social justice. Without a more just society, i.e. one closer to the needs of the least, any reform of justice, as well as of the school or other pillars of the republican order, will be in vain and purely formal.

Forget the Little Red Book: realising the Constitution would already be a revolutionary achievement.

After moving to Milan, we see him involved in cases concerning company law, but also in the defence of terrorists, of 'comrades in error'. In the 1990s, the tumultuous years of Tangentopoli (bribery and corruption), notoriety arrived with his appointment as Bettino Craxi's lawyer, but also a professional commitment that was difficult for an outside observer to reconcile with the Maoist militancy of his origins. "... ah, say hello to that communist father of yours," Bettino told his son Salvatore. "The last communist on earth. Only he and I are left to have read The Capital. And to have understood it. Me in one sense, the right one, him in the other. Goodbye!"

Craxi had long distanced himself from Marxism, considering the conquest of power to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat unacceptable. This abjuration was necessary in order to detach himself from the shadow of the PCI and become a protagonist of the Pentapartite season. Enzo Lo Giudice, at least in the youthful years of Maoist militancy, saw things decidedly differently. 'Mani pulite' will bring everything down like a house of cards. Bollate. We owe to the combination of Craxi and Lo Giudice the expression 'clockwork justice' and to the lawyer the criticism of the forcing of the law that occurred in those years of emergency and upheaval.

Looking at things from the top of the horse, as they say in China, the inability to address the issue of illegal public financing in a comprehensive and political manner, as Craxi called for - too late, however -, the exponential multiplication of lawsuits and the role of the mass media in broadcasting them, has indeed destroyed the First Republic and the partyocracy, but also eroded trust in politics, Lo Giudice and Kostner observe. This is demonstrated by the rise of populist movements, the spread of abstentionism - between 1992 and 2022 turnout fell from 88 to 60 per cent -, the transformation of parties into American-style electoral committees, the loss of a sense of community and the spread of social individualism that makes the years when effigies of Mao alternated with those of St Francis in the alleyways of Paola incomprehensible and even enviable in some respects. We do not know if, as he said, there are deaths as light as a feather and others as heavy as Mount Tai, but there are deaths that represent the disappearance of the memory of entire worlds. That of Enzo Lo Giudice with his Maoist Calabria is among them.

Salvatore Lo Giudice and Francesco Kostner, The Last Communist, Luigi Pellegrini Editore, pp. 263, euro 18