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| Pasolini a Venezia nel 1968 (foto Biennale ASAC) |
As a life-long Communist Party of Italy (PCI) member, Pasolini's Marxist positions politically may have been farther left than the student movement of the 1960s. However, in his poem called "The PCI to the young generation" [Il PCI ai giovani], he appeared to criticize the protestors and side with the police in the lines:
When yesterday at Valle Guilia you came to blows with the policemen I sympathized with the policemen! Because the policemen are the children of the poor
However, in other examinations of the poem, it is not believable that Pasolini sided with the right-wing or the police actions themselves... he seemed to be making note of the self-contradictory nature of the current struggle, which featured the students:
You have daddy’s boy faces You were born with silver spoons in your mouths.
However Pasolini is also fairly clear:
We obviously are in agreement against the police institution But blame the higher authority, and see! The young policemen that you for sacred hooliganism (tradition of elected Risorgimento) of spoiled children, you have beaten, belong to the other social class. The Jacobin takes the point of view that "critics, especially on the Right, can pull random quotes not only to diminish an author but also to exploit him for their own reasons — something that conservatives in Italy and abroad have been doing to Antonio Gramsci for decades."
Sources:
Remembering Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jacobin (1 Jun 2018)
Translation of Il PCI ai giovani (source)
The PCI to the Young People It’s sad. The polemic against the PCI had to be made during the first half of the past decade. You’re late, kids. And it doesn’t matter if you had not been born yet… Now the journalists of the world (including those on televisions) kiss (as I believe one still says in the university language) your asses. Not me, friends. You have daddy’s boy faces You were born with silver spoons in your mouths. Good pedigrees, does not lie. You all have the same naughty look. You are fearful, uncertain, desperate (great) but you also know how to be assertive, blackmailers, and self-assured: petty bourgeois characteristic, friends. When yesterday at Valle Guilia you came to blows with the policemen I sympathized with the policemen! Because the policemen are the children of the poor They come from the suburbs, rural or urban. As for me, I know very well their way of been kids and teenagers, the precious thousand liras, the father, remained a kid as well, because of poverty, which does not give authority. The mother callous as a porter, or tender for some illness, as a bird; the many siblings, the hut between the gardens with red sage (in lands of others, parceled); the low on sewers, or the apartments in the large tenements, etc. etc. And then, look at them: dressed like clowns, with the rough fabric that has a rancid stench Worst of all, naturally, the psychological state in which they are reduced (for about forty lire per month): no more smiling, no more friendship with the world, separated, excluded (in an exclusion that has no equal) humiliated by the loss of human qualities in exchange for those of a policeman (being hated makes you hate). They are twenty years old, your age, dears. We obviously are in agreement against the police institution But blame the higher authority, and see! The young policemen that you for sacred hooliganism (tradition of elected Risorgimento) of spoiled children, you have beaten, belong to the other social class. At Valle Giulia, yesterday, there was a fragment of class struggle: and you, friends (although in the the right) were the rich ones, while the policemen (who were in the wrong) were the poor ones. Great victory is, therefore, yours! In these cases, we should give flowers to the policemen, friends.
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