This is certainly one of the most important texts to emerge from the disintegration of Italian communism and the communist universe. This concerned an artisan of Ulm who in convinced himself that he had built a flying machine, and who crashed to his death as a result.
Brecht's moral is that in spite of the tailor's disaster, flight was nevertheless achieved three centuries later; consequently Ingrao remained optimistic in the long term even as the party sank. But did the tailor, Magri inquires, make any contribution to the history of aeronautics? In other words, has twentieth-century communism made any significant contribution to Marx's vision of humanity's leap from necessity to freedom?
First published in , the volume was Magri's summing-up of his experiences as a communist activist and the lessons of the PCI's postwar career until its effective dissolution into the Party of Democratic Socialism in Two years after its publication he died by assisted suicide, aged seventy-nine. Having joined the party in the mids from a left-wing Catholic youth movement, Magri had always been a controversial figure.
He took up a stance on the left of the PCI, and was expelled from the party in as one of the founders of the newspaper Il Manifesto and the group of dissident party members which formed around it. In the early s he rejoined the party, after it dropped its parliamentary understanding with the Christian Democrats. Following the PCI's dissolution he was for a time active in Rifondazione Comunista, until becoming disillusioned with that also.
The great virtue of Magri's account and analysis it that it is not written to condemn or justify, but to explain and generate understanding. Though convinced that the PCI for most of this period was on a fundamentally wrong course, he explains soberly and fairly the rationale behind the party leadership's approach, and shows awareness of the constraints with which it was faced.
