Between Marxism and Personalism

When speaking of alienation, utopianism and scientific method, one dominant figure of socialist thinking inevitably stands out, reference to whose political thought might be expected from Olivetti. Indeed, the key part of Olivetti’s institutional scheme is the guarantee of freedom not in a generic socialist State, but in a socialist State which makes reference to Marxist criticism of representative democracy as a form of cultural heritage: ‘Marxism and Christian social movements recognised the inherent failure of the liberal parliamentary system to create a just and human social order, to eliminate, that is, those incontrollable forces which oppose the moral and material rise of the lower classes’. The Federal State of Communities envisioned by Olivetti, ‘starting from the same critical premises of the first, and the acceptance of the same spiritual values of the second’, proposed ‘institutional and economic reform designed to safely guarantee an order for society that would be more equal than that which would result from the pre-existing conflict between opposing forces’.