The twenty-five-year-old Livio Maitan, born in Venice on 1 April 1923, had joined the Fourth International in 1948. He came from militancy in Italian socialism, reconstituted after fascism, from which he moved to found, with others and others, the revolutionary communist groups , an organization which, after taking the denomination of the Revolutionary Communist League in 1979, dissolved into Proletarian Democracy in 1989, and then merged into the nascent Communist Refoundation Party, a formation within which it lived the last years of political militancy, until his death on September 16, 2004.
A road travelled, to quote the title of the book of his memoirs, published in 2003, in about sixty years of the history of the workers’ movement in Italy and internationally, often or almost always experienced firsthand, in the heart of the mass mobilizations, from from which he obtained ideas for political and theoretical elaboration, controlled by a rigorous method of investigation.
AMONG ITS DESERVES having contributed in a decisive way to the publication of Trotsky’s works in Italy and, more generally, of Marxism with essays and books, in which a happy polemicist pen helps the aptitude for theoretical elaboration, which is not limited to the repetition of the «dogmas » of Marxism, but is exercised instead in an attempt to make it useful for understanding the present, without distorting its foundations. A style of political and theoretical writing that rests on a substrate of culture linked to classical studies, and an innate curiosity and thirst for knowledge that have characterized him since his youth.
Evidence of this is her personal archive full of documents, books and magazines which, thanks to the commitment and expertise of various companions and companions, can now be consulted in Rome – in via Elisabetta Canori Mora, 13 – in the library that bears her first name.
For Livio Maitan there was a long time to do and act politically and a much shorter time of memory, of the need to tell stories and to remember. Political activity, if maintained and carried out with intensity and participation, leaves no space and finds no place to fully think of itself in the form of history as an autobiography.
Only in what would prove to be the final years of his life did the urgency of memory take over, probably driven by the need to draw a biographical balance after years of militancy and by the context in which he found himself living from the 1990s, when the world changed radically from the one in which he had lived and worked consciously for almost fifty years.
TALKING IS ALLOWEDFor this last phase, of the element of disappointment, which often accompanies and stimulates the memory, when a sense of discouragement for the world in which we live prevails? If by phase of disappointment we mean the one in which a man no longer asks himself for anything, he lives with regrets and complaints, then the answer can only be negative.
The active interest in the facts of the world in which he lived was interrupted only by death. Even in the final part of his life he remained clinging to the tormenting relationship between pessimism of reason and optimism of will, already stated in a letter in the distant 1949. How to react, he wondered, to the objective state of demoralization deriving from the disparity existing between the need of a revolutionary organization and the difficulties of building it?
SO HE ANSWERED to the dilemma: «the general need would be to have an organized party. Under the circumstances we are forced to move within a narrower scope. However, it could also be – the astrologer cracks – that not even these reduced tasks could be fulfilled in this phase, but in no way would it justify either a discretionary surrender or a simple demoralization: there would always be something important to do».
At the National Central Library and via streaming
On the centenary of the birth of Livio Maitan at the National Central Library of 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 – in streaming: www.liviomaitan.wordpress.com.
Among the topics addressed: the Italian political events and its role in the construction of the Italian section of the IV International, its international commitment in the Trotskyist movement and the theoretical contribution it has given to the debate of the workers’ movement in over half a century.
Speeches, among others, by Luciana Castellina, Lidia Cirillo, Mauro Buccheri, Gigi Malabarba, Maurizio Acerbo, Fausto Bertinotti, Salvatore Cannavò, Eliana Como, Diego Giachetti, Silverio Corvisieri, Penelope Duncan, Manuel Garì Ramos, Dave Kellaway, Enzo Traverso, Franco Turigliatto.