[The dissolution of the PCI was a great loss for it had been
characterized by the vitality of an open mass party that operated as a
collective intellectual.] [[link removed]]

REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF THE PARTITO COMMUNISTA ITALIANO (PCI)
 
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Nicola Benvenuti
November 10, 2021
Stansbury Forum
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_ The dissolution of the PCI was a great loss for it had been
characterized by the vitality of an open mass party that operated as a
collective intellectual. _

PCI 1970s campaign poster, Credit: PCI – vota comunista, David M.
Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

 

NOTE: FROM PETER OLNEY, CO-EDITOR, STANSBURY FORUM:

IN THE FALL OF 1971 I JOINED AN ITALIAN RUGBY CLUB IN FLORENCE, ITALY.
ONE OF MY SMARTEST AND TOUGHEST TEAMMATES WAS NICOLA BENVENUTI. HE AND
I BECAME FRIENDS. HE WENT ON TO BECOME A HISTORIAN AND A MEMBER OF THE
ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY (PCI). HE SERVED ON THE CITY COUNCIL OF
FLORENCE AND WAS COUNCIL PRESIDENT FOR A TERM. THE STANSBURY FORUM IS
PLEASED TO PRESENT HIS REFLECTIONS ON THE PCI AND ITS IMPACT ON
ITALIAN SOCIETY.

Upon the 100th anniversary of the PCI's founding and the
30th anniversary of its dissolution

The Partito Communista Italiano (PCI) as the largest communist party
in Western Europe still arouses interest even if it cannot be said
that much remains of that experience. The reasons for this perhaps go
beyond the responsibility of the PCI, given that a similar crisis of
ideas and political effectiveness today concerns the left as a whole
or even the political system that emerged from the postwar period.
Here we only want to emphasize some crucial aspects of the PCI’s
politics in the period of its greatest success after liberation and
until its dissolution in 1991. 

The post-war political economic system has certainly changed. Towards
the mid-seventies, what has been called the “social democratic
compromise” ended. This was a period in which the virtuous cycle of
investment in productivity in the context of regulated capitalism and
a mixed economy allowed wage increases and fueled the construction of
welfare states, modeling in Europe advanced democracies governed by
social democratic parties. It was replaced by a liberalism which,
cloaked in the promises of economic growth through deregulation, or
the minimization of state intervention in the economy, favored social
recomposition by reducing the power of the working class, and weakened
workers’ organizations rendering left-wing politics less
attractive. 

The politics of the PCI has roots in the reflections of Antonio
Gramsci (Party Secretary until his arrest in 1926) on the causes of
the defeat of the labor movement and the advent of fascism, even if
his theoretical influence was minimal until Togliatti published the
“Prison Notebooks” after WW II.  After Togliatti’s return to
Italy in 1943, he elaborated a political program centered on the
project of a “new party”, a mass party (not a class party in the
Leninist sense), which operates in the context of parliamentary
democracy, and builds broader political alliances than the United
Front with the socialists, and indeed explicitly turns to the DC, a
party of Italian Catholics, to carry out “structural reforms”. The
democratic parliamentary choice was mandatory in the context of the
anti-Nazi alliance throughout Europe and took the form of the
participation of the communist parties in popular front governments
not only in Italy. The PCI was therefore part of the Italian
government and contributed to the Constituent Assembly which produced
the Republican Constitution, until the Party’s exclusion after the
start of the Cold War. In the Eastern European countries occupied by
Soviet troops popular front governments were replaced by the
authoritarian centralist model of the USSR.

After the revelation of the crimes of Stalinism at the XX Congress of
the CPSU (1956), Togliatti (who never agreed with Khrushchev’s mode
of deStalinization) took the opportunity to claim the end of the role
of the USSR and PCUS(Partito Communista della Unione Sovietica –
Soviet Communist Party) as the “_STATE AND THE LEADING PARTY”_ of
the communist movement. He declared the autonomy of the PCI which
supported an “Italian way” to socialism. Following the riots
against Soviet domination of Poland and the invasion of Hungary by
Soviet troops and the divisions this caused in the PCI, Togliatti
continued to focus on the capacity for self-reform of the communist
system and the importance of communist internationalism. He
accentuated the hierarchical and centralized structure of the PCI,
with a clear limit on internal confrontations: thus, delaying the
analysis of the nature and contradictions of socialism and eliminating
an essential node for the construction of a revolutionary politics in
the West. However, even shortly before his death, by re-proposing the
principle of unity in diversity in reference to the clash between the
USSR and China in international communism, Togliatti kept the
democratic political project open, reminding Khrushchev in the Yalta
memorial[1] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftn1] that the
fundamental aspiration of communists is “The maximization of
freedom”: 1917 remains an “epochal” historical fact, a turning
point in history, but – in fact – a historical fact. 

Meanwhile, the Italian economic boom of the 1950s, although
intrinsically fragile because it was still largely based on low wages
and the pressure of unemployment, had an extraordinary impact on the
social composition and customs of the country. Industry and services
became the main forms of occupation and there was a large internal
migratory flow from largely agricultural southern Italy to the
industrial north. An attitude that situated the trade union battle
mainly in the defense of the workplace was replaced by dynamic
bargaining over salary in the context of growing employment and
technological innovation. This gave rise to a new profile of the
worker, which Tronti called the “mass worker”[2]
[//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftn2].The centrality of the
workers’ struggle emerged as an engine of social change, counter to
the vision that the trade union struggle was subordinate to the
political project (the transmission belt theory)[3]
[//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftn3]. The group around the
“heretical” magazine Quaderni Rossi, (Panzieri, Tronti), like the
trade unionists Trentin and Garavini (PCI)5 or Foa (PSI)[4]
[//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftn4], underlined the
potential of worker’s struggle to confront the new mode of
capitalist accumulation which in turn confronts the problem of power
in the factory and in society. 

The contrast of the modernity and backwardness of Italian
capitalism[5]
[//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftn5] and  the effects of
the workers ‘struggles, opened up a polemic on the left between an
interpretation with spontaneist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas based on
workers’ subjectivity (ideas that in the 70s fed the cultures to the
left of the PCI ), and the position of many in the PCI who, worried
about fueling sectoral corporatism, emphasized the unifying role
of  the  general societal interest achieved by a policy of
“structural reforms”.[6]
[//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftn6]

With the crisis of centrist governments and the electoral decline of
the Christian Democrats (DC), the DC Secretary Aldo Moro had opened
the door to a center-left politic, that is to the participation of the
socialists (PSI) in the government. The socialists, now operating far
from any “frontist” hypothesis, had defined a political project
based on the intervention of the state as a market regulator through
the central role of public industry and economic planning policy. Soon
the right of the DC showed that it was able to block the reformist
push of the PSI, highlighting for the left the need to increase the
pressure. In October 1964, Giorgio Amendola published in
“Rinascita”[7] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftn7] an
article with a significant title: “The time has come to reshuffle
the cards”, in which he judged both the social democratic and the
communist models to have historically failed. He invited the PCI to
make a clear criticism of Soviet communism and proposed the
reunification of the left parties in Italy (PSI, PSDI, PCI). At the
time the article was considered a “provocation” typical of the
character of Amendola, and dropped, but in fact it went to the root of
the political problems that the PCI and the left would have to face in
the years to come. 

When in the second half of the 1960s the German Social Democratic
party (SPD) launched Ostpolitik, the Italian communists undertook to
support it, playing a mediating role with the communist bloc. In the
East, détente and the intensification of commercial and cultural
relations between the countries of the two blocs strengthened the
currents of reform, clashing with the difficulties of the Eastern
economic system in sustaining mass consumption. When in
Czechoslovakia, Dubcek’s “spring” legitimized forms of the
private market, the USSR invaded the country (1968) and stopped the
experiment. The repression of “Prague Spring”, a self-reform
project that had raised great hopes, provoked the open dissent of many
Communist Parties in Western countries and above all of the Italian
party, expressed with particular force at the Moscow Conference in
June 1969 by Enrico Berlinguer, deputy secretary of the PCI. The
dissent, however, was not taken to its extreme consequences. In 1969,
after the 11th Congress which saw the moderate current of Amendola
prevail over the left-wing of Ingrao, leftists gathered around the
newly founded review “Il Manifesto”, were expelled from the
PCI. Adherents of Il Manifesto considered the PCI policy towards the
Soviet Union too timid. They also differed on the issue of the
development model of Italian capitalism and the interpretation of the
workers’ struggles of the 1960s. 

Taking into account the social and cultural changes in the country of
an anti-bureaucratic and libertarian nature, the PCI of Berlinguer,
Secretary since 1973, was able to integrate the communist project with
an opening to the student movement of ’68 and an acceptance of civil
reforms, such as the right to divorce and abortion. Furthermore,
Berlinguer altered the condemnation of the European Economic Community
as the political equivalent of NATO, whose defensive role he would
accept, expressing the need to overcome the bipolar division of the
world. 

The relationship established with the German Social Democrat Willy
Brandt in favor of detente was followed by consultations and exchanges
of information, mostly informal and unofficial, on issues of domestic
and international politics. The PCI played a bridging role with the
communist world, but soon the contact points with social democracy
were enriched by a renewed commitment of the Socialist International,
and in partcular of the German and Swedish, on the issues of
international collaboration between the developed and underdeveloped
countries. The origins of the austerity policy that characterized
Berlinguer’s approach in subsequent years can be found in the need
to review the terms of trade between developed and underdeveloped
countries. The PCI’s international politics were above all directed
against American imperialsm and support of the struggle for the
liberation of Vietnam was an essential component of communist
ideology. With the defeat of the Americans in Vietnam (1975), the end
of the colonel’s dictatorship in Greece (1974) and the end of
Franco’s fascist Spain (1975) it seemed that a fresh wind was
blowing.

This took shape as a political direction, later identified as
Eurocommunism, which involved the PCI, the French and Spanish, and
partly English, Communist parties. Due to disagreements between
socialists and communists in France and the political disappearance of
the Partido Communista de Espana (PCE) in 1977 with the end of
Franco’s dictatorship, that political project remained an
aspiration. After the failure of the historical compromise in Italy,
and the assassination of Moro, Berlinguer, in 1982 posited
Eurocommunism as a “third way” between capitalism and communism. 

Togliatti’s strategy had been relaunched by PCI Secretary Berlinguer
after the coup d’état in Chile (9/11/73) which put an end to the
socialist government of Salvador Allende. Berlinguer concluded that in
countries with parliamentary democracy the united left
could NOT come to power through the conquest of 51% of the electoral
votes. Rather to prevent violent reactions from the opposing classes
and imperialism, as happened in Chile, it was necessary to widen the
borders of the progressive front aiming “not at an alternative left
but to a democratic alternative “; in Italy, through a” historic
compromise “with the Catholic party (DC). 

In the midst of the 1977-78 terrorist wave, the PCI had the
opportunity to apply the policy of “historic compromise” with the
DC. The PCI emerged victorious in the 1975 referendum on divorce and
the administrative elections. In the following year’s political
elections the Party reached 34.37% of the votes in the Chamber of
Deputies. These victories highlighted the fact that the safeguarding
of legality and democracy could not take place without or against the
PCI. The secretary of the DC, Aldo Moro, was convinced of this, and
therefore intended to bring the communists into the government. The
PCI therefore became part of the majority, of “national
solidarity”, with the DC government and was strongly committed to
defending republican democracy against terrorism on the right and
left.  The kidnapping and assasination of Aldo Moro on March 16,
1978, prompted the DC to end the political alliance and drive the PCI
into the opposition. Berlinguer tried to revive the politics of the
left-wing alternative, but with little enthusiasm from the PSI[8]
[//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftn8], because the left-wing
alternative would have made the socialists, already reduced to 6% of
the electorate, politically irrelevant. The new secretary of the PSI,
Craxi, instead aimed to overturn the balance of power in the Italian
left and offered political support to the DC for a government without
the Communists. The policy of “national solidarity” had
failed AND not by chance. The American Secretary of State Kissinger
was against the participation of the PCI in the government and even
the main European governments (including Schmidt’s Social Democratic
government in Germany) were negative towards the PCI’s partipation
in government.

At the end of the 1970s, the PCI’s situation was problematic. A
Second Cold War (installation of missiles in Europe, invasion of
Afghanistan by the USSR) had begun. The adoption of Martial Law in
Poland, against Solidarnosc, forced the PCI into a new condemnation of
Soviet policy which Berlinguer expressed as a failure of the
“propulsive thrust of the October revolution” (1981). 

However, the PCI was unable to put in place any alternative strategy
that would capitalize on the links established with progressive
European forces, while the distancing from the politics of the USSR
paradoxically weakened the international role of the PCI. Hence the
emergence in the 1980s of ecumenical or moralistic tones, embodied in
the attack on working class power:

* Firings at Fiat

* The cutting of the wage escalator – desired by the Craxi
government, but with the consent of the trade unions 

* The politics of austerity, a central theme in the debate on the new
world order for rebalancing the economic relations between developed
countries and developing countries 

* The spread of the state’s tenure by the parties: the exclusion of
the PCI, as the largest opposition force and thus the absence of an
alternative to the DC, gave the DC and its allies a monopoly in the
management of the state and resulted in corruption and inefficiency in
public administration.

However the unresolved problems of the ideology of the PCI were not
solved:

* The meaning of Soviet communism and the relationship with European
socialism:

*  The claim of “communist diversity”(Stalin’s term) that
characterized the self awareness of the militants, hindered the PCI
from clearly occupying the space of Social Democracy (Craxi did his
part vetoing the entry of the PCI into the European Socialist Party
(PSE), the parliamnetary aggregation of the socialist parties in the
European Parliament.

Therefore the PCI was condemned to growing political inconsistency
resulting in loss of links also with their traditional social base,
although that loss was hidden by the national recognition of the
political and moral integrity of the party’s leadership.

Upon the death of Berlinguer on November 6, 1984 there was a great
emotional outpouring in the country, but the weakness of PCI politics
manifested itself openly. In 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the new secretary of the PCI, Achille Occhetto, announced that he
wanted to take a new political direction, one that foreshadowed the
end of the Communist Party and the birth of a new Italian left party
(Bolognina turn)[9] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftn9] At
the XX Party Congress, in February 1991, the PCI was dissolved and the
Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) was formed, but with no clear
poltical direction. 

It is clear that the PCI’s standing in the international scene
resided, for better or for worse, precisely in the relationship with
the USSR and the communist movement, and this explains a lot of the
hesitation of the party leadership to sever relations with the Soviet
Union (Beyond the extreme concern about the destabilizing effects such
a break could have had on the party base). The fact is that the PCI,
as a major Communist Party of the West and a critical conscience of
communism, enjoyed a wide range of maneuverability albeit full of
stresses and expectations.  When the Party could no longer
capitalize on the political credibility conferred on it by the Soviet
leadership (unfortunately a little studied theme), the PCI lost a lot
of its international credibility, even with third-world countries.
What direction could  an opposition party offer from a country that
played  a secondary role in international events? 

All things considered the dissolution of the PCI was a great loss. The
PCI was certainly characterized by the vitality of an open mass party
that operated as a collective intellectual. It situated itself as a
political  center for sharing political line debated
among  political leaders, trade unionists, workers, technicians,
researchers and university professors and a myriad of territorial and
professional organizations. And at the same time the Party was capable
of advancing a pedagogy of civil responsibility that activated the
participation of the masses in political life. This is the model that
is missing today on the Italian scene.

…

[1] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftnref1] Yalta Memorial
was written by Togliatti a few days before his unexpected death in
Yalta, in Crimea (August 1964) and was written in preparation for a
meeting with Khrushchev

[2] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftnref2] Tronti along
with Renato Panzieri founded the “workerist” Marxist journal,
Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) and wrote an important book, Workers
and Capital

[3] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftnref3] The idea that
the trade unions led by Party member would dutifully transmit the
political project of the Party to the trade union members

5  Bruno Trentin was general Secretary of the largest Italian trade
union federation the CGIL and a member of the PCI until its
dissolution in 1991. Sergio Garavani was a leader of the metalworkers
federation FIOM and also a prominent PCI leader.

[4] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftnref4] Vittorio Foa
was a prominent leader of the CGIL labor federation and the Italian
Socialist Party.

[5] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftnref5] Expressed in
the contrast between the development of the industrial north and the
backwardness of the agricultural south to which was added in the
context of the economic boom the persistence of backward and
authoritarian labor relations, which accentuated differences in
productive sectors and geographical areas.

[6] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftnref6] Structural
reforms were intended as reforms able to effectively reunite the
interests off the popular masses with objectives of social progress,
Structural was the term used to distinguish such reforms from social
democratic reformism.

[7] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftnref7] Theoretical
magazine of PCI

[8] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftnref8] Partito
Socialista Italiano – The Italian Community Party was formed in 1921
by members of the Second International PSI

[9] [//75D62D4B-71BA-423A-BB34-7A6F3AAB0522#_ftnref9] On November 12,
1989 Achille Occhetto then General Secretary of the PCI announced at
Bolognina (a section of Bologna) his intention to lead a change in the
name and direction of the PCI

_Nicola Benvenuti is an Italian political historian who resides in
Florence_

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