Living the dream

Carlo Marx Meets Mario Tse Tung

by Nicholas Farrell

Italian communists always wanted a revolution in Italy, but I do not think that this is quite what they had in mind: A Chinese man has just bought the bar at their party headquarters in the city of Forlì in the “red” Romagna region where I live.

Attached to the party’s headquarters, the bar is called the Carlo Marx, and the name is written in huge red letters on an enormous white billboard above the terrace outside.

Will the new owners, hailing as they do from the world’s most powerful remaining communist country, change the name to the Mario Tse Tung?

Will they construct suicide nets like those erected around Foxconn’s factory in China to deter the bar’s depressed clients from throwing themselves off the roof? Or maybe banners that warn, “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow”?

Until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Italy’s Communist Party—the Partito comunista italiana (Pci)—became proportionally the largest in the capitalist world after World War II and Italy’s second-most-powerful party, polling about one-third of the vote in its 1970s heyday.

“You try to explain that communism and fascism have much more in common with each other than either does with freedom and democracy, but you waste your time. Their faith blinds them to the facts.”

Allegedly bankrolled by the Soviet Union, it never quite managed to get control at the national level but dominated local government in regions such as Romagna and neighboring Tuscany. One of the more bizarre consequences of this is that I often come across Italians named Vladimiro, Yuri, or Comunardo.

The party headquarters where the Carlo Marx is located was where Forlì’s rank-and-file local communists came to drink, play cards, and remind each other that all property is theft unless the Pci owns it.

When Soviet communism collapsed, the Pci did not. It simply changed its name a few times. Currently it is called the Partito democratico and is still in power at the regional level.

As someone who believes that communism means tyranny, not liberty, and who was once described fairly accurately by the Corriere della Sera newspaper as an “anarchico thatcheriano” (Thatcherite anarchist), communism never appealed to me. Your average lefty around here brands anyone that disagrees with them as “un fascista.”

You try to explain that communism and fascism have much more in common with each other than either does with freedom and democracy, but you waste your time. Their faith blinds them to the facts. The only other possible reason to have gone to the Carlo Marx would have been in search of women. But I learned long ago that it is not only hard-left politics that lack sex appeal; so do hard-left women.

It was with such thoughts buzzing about my brain that I parked my Land Rover Defender alongside the bar one morning last week and strolled across the terrace outside, underneath the enormous Carlo Marx sign, and up the steps leading inside.

The old owners are a local couple, Giuliano, 57, and his girlfriend, Silvia, 45. They still had a couple of days left at the wheel. After three years, they could not wait to get the hell out. Too much stress. No profit, only debts. They were not even ex-communists, let alone communists. They did not like communists, who never spent any money and expected everything for free. And they disliked the euro even more, which they blamed on the communists. “We only get through 13 or 14 kilos of coffee a week in here,” said Giuliano. “It’s not human.” Referring to the Carlo Marx billboard, Silvia exclaimed: “As for quel cazzo di scritta(that fucking sign), it just puts people off coming here.”

What, then, of the Chinese? “The people who come here will not accept the cinesi (Chinese),” said Giulio. “Politics has got nothing to do with it. What do the cinesi know about the italiani?”

There were virtually no clients in the bar to ask. Maybe they were already on strike to protest the Chinese takeover. 

A Chinese man arrived—the new owner. His grasp of Italian was limited, but he was bursting with enthusiasm. We sat down at a table on the terrace shaded by an umbrella in the sweltering heat. On the table was a copy of L’Unità, the communist newspaper founded in 1924 by Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Like many things in Italy, L’Unità  survives only thanks to hefty state subsidies.

He picked up the newspaper and with my pen drew on it a small hammer and sickle and next to it the number 91. “Ninety-one years,” he said. What? “Me,” he replied. I didn’t understand. Something to do with China and communism and the Carlo Marx, no doubt.

His name is Cuimin Wang and he comes from a city called Zhejiang. He is 49 and left China when he was 27. I asked why he left. “Children, three, close restaurant, two!” I finally understood that he meant China permits only one child and he had three. So as punishment the state closed his two restaurants and he decided to leave China. The Carlo Marx would make money, he said, because “Me open 24 hour a day, if customer here, me open. Cheap. Cappuccino, brioche, 1.50 euro, not 2.50 euro. And takeaway, tutto, with scooter!”

Mr. Wang did not strike me as being a communist at all. I asked if he believed in God but he did not understand. So I put my hands together as if in prayer and looked up at the scorching sky. “Yes!” he replied and as he did, he made slashing motions with his right hand up and down and across his chest. At first I thought it was some kind of kung fu throat-slashing gesture.

“Islam, Allah?” I asked.

“No!”

“Christian?”

“Yes!”

Ah, so it was a cross he had been drawing on his chest. Well, his Italian communist clients won’t like that, either. They far prefer Muslims to Christians.

At last I spotted a customer—Costantino, 46, who works in a bank. What did he think of the bar’s takeover by people who came from a real communist country? “The Americans are much more communist than the Chinese,” he said. “They have respect for the working man. And they have nationalized loads of things to save them from bankruptcy.”

What I find incredible is that a Chinese man such as Mr. Wang, who can still hardly speak Italian after 22 years here, can find work and make money in Italy whereas millions of Italians cannot.

Later, still puzzled by Mr. Wang’s hammer-and-sickle doodle on the newspaper and those 91 years, I subtracted 91 from 2012, arriving at 1921. I tapped “China 1921” into my computer. It turns out that 1921 was the year that the Communist Party of China was founded—the same year that Italy’s Communist Party was born.