Presentation

Abstract

Raniero Panzieri (1921-1964) was a Marxist intellectual and activist, whose figure is relevant for several reasons. Unlike most Italian communists of his time, he was not part of the PCI, organized around the national-popular ideology of collaborationism and the “mythology of the guiding state”, according to an expression by Panzieri himself. He did participate in the left wing of the PSI, which gradually placed him on the sidelines and excluded him, thus rejecting his attempt to revive a class policy for the party. His formation was not Crocian-Gramscian, that is, he was not idealist and historicist – he was not an academic, except for a brief period in Sicily, from 1948 to 1951, at the invitation of Galvano Della Volpe, one of the most original Italian Marxists of the post -war, he was also eccentric in relation to the dominant orientation in the PCI, because he was foreign to Gramscism. But, in Sicily, Panzieri had his first and instructive experience of mass movements, working among the organizers of peasant struggles for the occupation of uncultivated land.