Daily Inspiration Quote by Dario Fo

Fo’s socialism isn’t a party platform; it’s a stubborn human impulse that keeps resurfacing wherever power gets too comfortable. By saying “inside man,” he yanks the idea out of the cold storage of doctrine and puts it back where his theater always located politics: in appetite, fear, solidarity, jealousy, hunger. The line is a provocation aimed at the tidy story that socialism began with Marx and ended with the 20th century’s disasters. Fo refuses both the origin myth and the obituary.

The Middle Ages reference matters because it’s strategically inconvenient. Italian communes weren’t utopias, but they were real experiments in civic self-rule, guild power, and mutual obligation that predate industrial capitalism. Fo uses that history like a stage prop: a reminder that collective organization is older than the modern left, and that “socialism” can name an instinct for shared protection long before it became a -ism with commissars and manifestos.

There’s also a sly rhetorical judo move here. If socialism is “inside,” then the usual anticommunist critique - that it’s foreign, imported, imposed - loses bite. Fo, a satirist shaped by fascism, the postwar Italian left, and years of scandalizing the respectable, is signaling that the fight isn’t over language but over memory: who gets to define the past, and therefore what futures are permitted. “You can’t say it is finished” is less prediction than refusal: a performer’s insistence that the audience doesn’t get to leave the theater early.