Version imprimableSeveral generations of comrades have been fortunate enough to know Antonio Moscato through his political, teaching and journalistic work. Three areas which he managed to combine until his physical strength began to wane.
This deeply saddening news reached us just as the CPN of Sinistra Anticapitalista was about to begin. During this meeting, we started to consider together how to organise a tribute to keep alive the memory of Antonio and his clear-sighted revolutionary enthusiasm – a mentor to so many of us.
It will be important, as soon as possible, to recount his life in detail, for it coincided with the very formation of our political current – from the factory gates of Puglia and later Lombardy right through to university lecture theatres. For now, we offer a few threads to follow.
From the years of the GCR (Revoulutionary Communist Groups) to the present day of Sinistra Anticapitalista, he played a fundamental role both in the political education of countless activists within the political organisations we were part of (the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Proletarian Democracy (DP), Communist Refoundation (Rifondazione Comunista).He also educated hundreds of students who attended his lectures on the History of the Labour Movement, Contemporary History and the History of Afro-Asian Countries at the University of Lecce. Until, on the eve of his retirement, the hostility of the academic establishment, led to the abolition of the chair in History of the Workers’ Movement to prevent any of the more than 250 graduates who had studied under him from continuing his research work.
Antonio was born in Rome in 1938. He began his university studies under the guidance of the historian of religions Ambrogio Donini (yes, the ‘Stalinist’ Donini, who was aware of his Trotskyist ‘entrism’ activities), and later under the great anthropologist Vittorio Lanternari, for whom he served as a research assistant at the University of Bari. Of course, his collaboration with Livio Maitan – which began way back in 1957 – obviously had an enormous influence on his intellectual development.
In La Strada percorsa (“The road I have taken” - his autobiography), Livio writes that Moscato was one of the young people who had been drawn to the Fourth International thanks to the ‘unusual talents as a recruiter’ of ‘a young Sicilian intellectual’, Giuseppe Paolo Samonà, who was involved in internal struggles within the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Italian Communist Youth Federation (FGCI). Later he became the founder of the publishing house Samonà e Savelli, which, amongst other things, published the first books written by Antonio. Livio himself recalls that he began a relationship of collaboration and friendship with Antonio that lasted for several decades. The same applies to a large part of the militant membership of our organisation.
Over the years he wrote extensively, playing a key role in coordinating our press. He edited Bandiera Rossa, founded Critica Comunista, wrote for Erre and Anticapitalista, contributed to Liberazione, Limes and Popoff. He managed a website (unfortunately inaccessible for some time now) called Movimento operaio – Antonio Moscato’s page. He had set it up to reorganise the material he had accumulated during his time as a lecturer. He later expanded it to include daily analysis of various political and social issues, with particular attention to the processes of change taking place in post-Soviet Russia, the Middle East and Latin America.
Whilst in Cuba, Moscato had ‘got his hands on’ Guevara’s papers and provided us with a wealth of insights into Che, the ‘Cuban variant’ of twentieth-century socialism and the reality of Latin America. He has a long bibliography that began with studies in the history of religion, traces of which can also be found in more recent works on the intertwining of religion and politics : Zionism and the Jewish Question, Church, Party and the Masses in the Polish Crisis, and Lebanon and Beyond: Islamic Fundamentalism and Other Forms of Fundamentalism. Most of his books, however, are devoted to what he himself termed ‘real socialism’ and its crisis. [1]
24 October 2026
Translated by International Viewpoint from Sinistra Anticapitalista.
