In a lucid article appeared on January 15th’s edition of la Repubblica, the second largest Italian newspaper, sociologist Luciano Gallino analyzed the strategies employed by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to limit trade unions’ power. As Gallino points out, Berlusconi ‘and the classes supporting him’ represents Unions as ‘a pre-modern residual’, a ‘demodé institution’, an ‘obstacle to country’s modernization’, an ‘enemy of freedom’ who is ‘opposed to the new powerful course now followed by the world’. Gallino doesn’t fail to notice, with regret, how much this ideology has been shared by that part of the Left who surrendered to ‘the ideology of modernization’.

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