Leading Italian revolutionary socialist Livio Maitan died in Rome on September 16, at the age of 81.
Livio was born in Venice on April 1, 1923. He graduated in classics from the University of Padua. He became politically active in the socialist resistance to the Nazi occupation of Italy during World War II. Forced into exile in Switzerland, he spent time in internment camps at the end of the war. He was subsequently a leading member of the Italian Socialist Youth.
In 1947, Livio joined the Italian Trotskyist movement of which he remained a leading member all his life. He was one of a small group of comrades, along with Ernest Mandel and Pierre Frank, who led the Trotskyist Fourth International during the difficult years of the 1950s and early 1960s. First elected in 1951, he remained a member of the Fourth International's leadership, re-elected at each congress, until his death.
His generation were the cadres who carried the ideas of revolutionary Marxism through the difficult post-war years, during the high-point of Stalinism and the long capitalist boom, but who were gradually able to link up with a broader layer of new young activists in the mid-late 1960s.
Livio was actively involved in the huge worker-student upsurge in Italy between 1969 and 1976, and universally seen as someone who had played a key role in training numerous leaders of the Italian revolutionary left, whether inside the Fourth International or outside.
In the 1970s he also lectured on the economy of underdevelopment in the School of Sociology at the University of Rome. He translated and introduced almost all the Italian editions of Leon Trotsky's writings.
1n 1989, the Italian Fourth Internationalists organised around the journal Bandiera Rossa joined Democrazia Proletaria, and with DP participated in 1991 in the foundation of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (Party of Communist Refoundation, PRC). He was elected to the leadership of Rifondazione at each successive congress from 1991 until 2002.
Until recently, despite age and illness, he maintained his participation in all the leadership bodies of the Fourth International. A football fanatic, he played weekly until into his 70s.
In his recently published La Strada Percosa (The Road Taken), Livio argued strongly against the view that the defeats of socialism in the 20th century were "inevitable" and equally strongly for the view that the possibility of socialism remains open.
There is a long list of his publications in Italian. Translated works include his 1976 book on the Chinese Cultural Revolution and a long text on the history of the Italian Communist Party, published by the Amsterdam-based International Institute of Research and Education in English and French. He wrote also for the journals of the Italian Fourth Internationalists (Bandiera Rossa), of Rifondazione (Liberazione) and of the Fourth International, Inprecor and International Viewpoint.
He was finishing a history of the Fourth International at the time of his death.
The PRC published a final "Ciao Livio" in the shape of a poster pasted up throughout Rome. Hundreds visited his coffin in the party headquarters on September 19 and thousands more attended the final funeral ceremony held the following day.
Liberazione published several pages of messages and memories in tribute to Livio.
[From International Viewpoint <http://www.internationalviewpoint.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, September 29, 2004.
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