Letters from Inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser
Regular price
€28.50
A01=Maria Antonietta Macciocchi
Author_Maria Antonietta Macciocchi
Category=JPFC
Category=JPFF
Category=QDTS
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9781786632364
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jan 1973
- Publisher: Verso Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
When Letters from inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser was first published in English in 1973, the Italian Communist Party was one of the most influential in the world. With its two million members, it was the most powerful in Western Europe; over a quarter of the Italian electorate voted for it.
This book is a day-to-day record by the party candidate for a grimly poor district of Naples. Having joined the party as a young girl during the Resistance and been a militant ever since, the author saw her candidacy as an opportunity 'to make concrete analysis of a concrete situation' - to bring to bear on the critical social situation of her constituents the sum total of her past experience, both practical and theoretical. This inevitably led her to study and to question the activity of her party and its relation with the Italian masses, and to experience at first hand the abyss between the tense and explosive reality of the oppressed but resilient Naples sub-proletariat, and the dictates and platitudes of parliamentary politics.
Throughout the period of her candidacy, during which she found herself forced constantly to question her own political identity as well, the author set down her experiences and reflections in the letters to the French philosopher Louis Althusser which form the bulk of this book. In addition, it contains Althusser's letters to her in which he offers his advice on how to make her campaign into a genuine political intervention, relating her practice to his theory, and vice versa. In the appendix are printed the main contributions to the heated debate in the Italian Communist Party press following the book's original publication in Italy.
This book is a day-to-day record by the party candidate for a grimly poor district of Naples. Having joined the party as a young girl during the Resistance and been a militant ever since, the author saw her candidacy as an opportunity 'to make concrete analysis of a concrete situation' - to bring to bear on the critical social situation of her constituents the sum total of her past experience, both practical and theoretical. This inevitably led her to study and to question the activity of her party and its relation with the Italian masses, and to experience at first hand the abyss between the tense and explosive reality of the oppressed but resilient Naples sub-proletariat, and the dictates and platitudes of parliamentary politics.
Throughout the period of her candidacy, during which she found herself forced constantly to question her own political identity as well, the author set down her experiences and reflections in the letters to the French philosopher Louis Althusser which form the bulk of this book. In addition, it contains Althusser's letters to her in which he offers his advice on how to make her campaign into a genuine political intervention, relating her practice to his theory, and vice versa. In the appendix are printed the main contributions to the heated debate in the Italian Communist Party press following the book's original publication in Italy.
Maria Antonietta Macciocchi worked in the underground for the Italian Communist Party from 1942 until the liberation of Rome in 1944, subsequently moving to the South as Party Political organizer in Salerno and Naples. From 1950 to 1956 she worked on Communist party periodicals as an editorial director, joining Unità as a special correspondent, publishing a series of articles from Iran, the Near East, China and Algeria. From 1962 to 1968 she was the Unità correspondent in Paris. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1968, she remained there until 1972. In 1970 she went to China and wrote up her account of her visit in Daily Life in Revolutionary China.
