The Strange Death of Marxism

ANALYZING THE Italian municipal elections in the spring of 1999, longtime Italian political analyst Ernesto Galli della Loggia explained in the Milanese daily Corriere della Sera that voters were defying journalistic expectations. The working class was not voting for the Left in the numbers that had been predicted, whereas the Communists and other leftist parties were attracting a constituency consisting of gay, ecological, multicultural, and feminist activists and, more generally, of unmarried professionals.We are led to conclude that both “unconventional lifestyles” and distaste for an older European morality were  characteristic of the changing Italian Left.