Obstructions in Italian Communist Party (PCI) 1945-1955
Italy provides a rich text for the study of party system- the struggle between the democratic, socialist and the communist block has been fraught with controversies and power struggle to control the political sphere of Italy. However, aside from the external competition that the other parties provides, there are also internal conflicts within the parties. These are particularly true in Italy following the Second World War. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) for its part has several issues to address: the changing landscape of Italian politics, the debate on the communist front, the internal struggle of the leaders in the basic tenet of the party and the competition offered by the other parties in gaining political control of the country.
This essay evaluates the problems, issues and obstacles faced by the Italian Communist Party immediately after the Second World War II or specifically between the period 1945-1955. It is in this period where the political turmoil in Italy extends beyond party competition but also the re-examination of the thrusts of the parties and their relevance for the people.
The Italian Communist Party (PCI)
The Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) or Italian Communist Party emerged as Partito Comunista d’Italia or Communist Party of Italy from a secession by the Leninist comunisti puri tendency from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) during that body’s congress on 21 January 1921 at Livorno. Amedeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci led the split. In 1926 the party was outlawed by the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini and reestablished in 1944 by Palmiro Togliatti with the current name. The party gained considerable electoral success during the following years and occasionally supplied external support to center-left governments, never joining directly.
The Italian Communist Party is a major left-wing party in Italy. Illegal during the Fascist period, its Resistance activities helped to transform it into a mass movement after 1945 and the second largest party in the country (Uriwn, 1996). Under tripartism it served in government 1945-47. After moving into opposition, it attempted to use its control of the trade union movement to bring about a Communist revolution (Uriwn, 1996). The strategy failed in 1948 and it gradually shifted ground to portray itself as a democratic opposition party, developing the notion of polycentrism (a forerunner of Eurocommunism ) to justify the propriety of ‘an Italian road to socialism’. Its vote increased in every election from 1946 to 1976 when it announced the historic compromise, a willingness to collaborate with the leading Christian Democratic Party (DC) in government (Uriwn, 1996).
A mass organization supported by flanking associations and the Italian Socialist Party, the PCI aimed at outpolling Italy’s largest party, the Christian Democrats, and at replacing it as the country’s largest governing party. Following Gramsci’s teachings, the PCI did not abandon the “revolutionary myth” but constantly revised and reformulated it according to changing historical and political circumstances.
Obstacles in PCI The obstacles in the PCI has been caused by two factors: the external environment and the internal dynamics of the party. In terms of the external factors, Fascism creates the biggest blow to the leaders of the PIC. In terms of its internal dynamics, it has to face the changing thrusts of the party and the subsequent factions within the party.
External Factors
The aftermath of World War II and the changing landscape of the communist thinkers and proponents affected the PCI in several ways. Italy at the end of World War II the country verged on total economic collapse. During the fascist interlude, a generation of Italians had come to political maturity with little knowledge of and no experience with republican institutions. In Italian politics immediately after the war, disorientation reigned (LaPalombara, 1978). Major parties that existed in the 1920s quickly reemerged, along with some new ones- one of them is the Italian Commumist party or the PCI. Not only did these parties represent ideological extremes but, in the arena of political rhetoric at least, they began to compete for ideological space, thus giving rise to what some have called a party system of “polarized pluralism (Sartori, 1976).” That, while the Communists (PCI) would not be expected to become a part of government, they would nevertheless be accorded considerable influence within it.
In the face of Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, its leaders sought mainly to preserve the credibility of the PCI (Spotts and Wieser, 1986). Prior to this period of de-stalinization, the PCI’s association with the “fatherland of socialism” was, among other things, a means of financial support and a strong connection with a superpower who’s arch nemesis was the United States–a superpower supporter of the Christian Democrats (Pasquino, 1980).
Thus, the Italian Communist Party, began to abandon fundamental positions of Marxism as early as 1956. In the wake of Khrushchev’s speech, the Italians wanted to put distance between themselves and Stalin, and find a perspective and an image more acceptable to Italian society. The Italian Communist Party supported the repression of the Hungarian Uprising, but in 1968 they did not hesitate to condemn the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They soon became convinced that the road to success lay through bourgeois respectability. Untroubled by its inability to win over the youth being radicalised by the events of the 1960s, the Italian Communist Party remained confident that so long as it fared well in elections to the Chamber of Deputies, it had nothing to fear from its left flank.
Internal Factors
The internal factors affecting the PCI had been the factions within- its leaders had proposed diverging strategists, the thrust of the party and the sectors it targets. These controversies fueled the problems already provided for by the PCI’s external environment.
Italian Communists consider the mobility of workers as necessary and are prepared to organize it and support it through state intervention (Libertini, 1978). But the mobility of the workers must take place from one place of work to another and not from employment to unemployment. In April 1944, armed with this interpretation of fascism, Togliatti made a critical move–a radical change in the PCI had not occurred since its formation in 1921 (Spotts and Wieser, 1986) –known as the svolta di Salerno. It was both an invitation for the masses and a firm establishment of the PCI as a legitimate, national political party concerned with the general interests of the people (Gray, 1980; Pasquino, 1980). PCI became a part of cultural and political infrastructure of the state (De Grand, 1989).
Almost immediately upon returning to Italy in 1944 Togliatti established the PCI as a national party with the svolta di Salerno and the Partito Nuovo. However, just three years after joining a coalition government the PCI was expelled. Despite this huge setback (Gray, 1980; Pasquino, 1980). The PCI believed the alliance was the only way to defeat fascism (De Grand, 1989).
A second directive of the svolta di Salerno was establishing the nature of the Partito Nuovo (Urban, 1986). With the Partito Nuovo Togliatti sought to publicly establish the PCI as not just a party for the working class, but for the masses. At the PCI’s Fifth Congress convention a new set of statutes was set. Membership would not be determined by race, gender, religion, or ideological convictions. In fact, the only requirement was that those who joined accept the party’s political platform (Gray, 1980).
The experience of Fascism left the Italian Communist Left dispersed, in exile abroad, in prisons, in internal exile to the Italian islands and forced underground. forward constantly changing opportunistic tactics dictated by the Moscow center. The Communist Party of Italy was formed late. Only after a bitter and protracted struggle had taken place between the Italian Left and Italian Social Democracy were the first steps taken to form the PCI. So by 1921, when these militants were finally able to form the Communist Party of Italy, the revolutionary wave had passed. The name of the new Italian party was the Communist Party of Italy (Partito comunista d’Italia). This was to indicate that the Italian party was merely a part of one single international revolutionary party. It signified the origins and struggle that created the Italian party, which was formed around the central issue of adherence to the Communist International. Not until the counterrevolutionaries assumed total control of the party, largely undertaken in the name of “bolshevization”, did they change the name of the party to the Italian Communist Party. This was not a matter of semantics but of the nationalist and bourgeois perspective of the counterrevolutionaries that took power within the Italian party and within the Comintern as a whole.
When the split between the Bordigists and the rest of the Italian Communist Left occurred in 1952, it was accompanied by a sense of betrayal on the part of those who had struggled, in the face of Fascism, Stalinism and imperialist war, to bring the party into being. This split was not simply between two individuals. It had its basis in differences over the theory and tactics of the party in regards to parliaments, unions, the role of revolutionaries in relation to national liberation movements, the role of the party in relation to the class and questions around party organization. While Bordiga, and those that followed him, sought a return to the positions of the Italian Left back in the early 1920s, the group that remained within the PCInt around Battaglia comunista refused to abandon the theoretical gains made from their own political experiences. When Left Communists speak of “Bordigists” they generally mean those people who left in 1952 to join with Bordiga in forming his International Communist Party. Those who did not go and join Bordiga’s party do not consider themselves Bordigist, nor did they consider themselves his “followers”. The political successors and splits of this party that Bordiga formed in 1952 are the ones generally called “Bordigist”. The experience of the Italian Communist Left cannot be simplified into one of subordination and domination by Bordiga or any single theorist or leader and this is precisely what makes them a little harder to pin down than some other political tendencies. Labels such as “Bordigist”, or “neo-Bordigist” or “ultra-leninist” do not describe the nature of the tendency as much as obscure it in the absence of an analysis.
Analysis
For the Italian Communist Left the worker’s councils were organizations that could only grow in the course of class struggle and revolution. Worker’s councils were, and are seen as the form of rule by and for the proletariat whose task is to establish an order that disenfranchises and destroys the capitalists as a class. The councils function as the revolutionary party too must function, on the proletarian basis of elected and immediately revocable delegates (larger bodies electing smaller bodies, democratic centralism).
As permanent institutions within capitalism they could only become like trade unions. The councils were seen as the measure of the militancy and combativeness of the class. They regarded the collapse of the councils as another sign of the passing of the revolutionary wave. The Italian Communist Left did not create a fetish out of Workers’ Councils. Rather they regarded them as having their context and relevance within revolutionary struggle. Outside of the context of a revolutionary upheaval workers’ councils can only become like trade unions either being absorbed or crushed by the bourgeoisie. Groups that come out of the Italian Communist Left generally see a revolutionary party of proletarians organized on an international scale and in the forefront of the struggles of the revolutionary working class as necessary for the overthrow of the capitalism.
Some things need to be mentioned in regards to understanding the position taken by the Italian Communist Left regarding democracy, worker’s councils and revolutionary organization. Democracy was the historical form with which the bourgeoisie allowed Fascism to take power and crush the working class. The democracy of worker’s councils, of the proletariat in its struggle, is not something that was ever treated contemptuously by the Italian Left.
The paramount position of Gramsci’s thought allowed many Communist intellectuals to affirm that electoral methods had been respected by the Italian Communist Party and that with its victory Italy’s parliamentary democracy would be modified only by giving the PCI new significance. Because it aimed at implementing idealistic values such as social justice, and because its support rested on both northern workers and southern peasants, Gramscism has been interpreted as the challenge of idealism to the capitalist order.
The strength of the theoretical outlook of the Italian Communist Left lay in their materialist analysis of events as they evolved in respect to their experiences in struggle under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. This analysis did not remain static in the sense of attempting to hold an unvarying analysis of events in the face of imperialist war and counterrevolution. That their development took place in the context of the growth of fascism followed by Second World War, through the worst period of the counterrevolution, makes their experience particularly instructive for those seeking to understand the development of capitalism into the present period.
Obviously the PCI aimed not so much at a change of government as at the introduction of a completely new system. This explains why Italian democracy was regulated by a so-called conventio ad excludendum, a pact between the Western-oriented parties to keep the PCI, an antisystem organization, out of government and away from power, lest it move Italy out of the Western sphere (DiScala, 1996). Not only was the PCI the strongest Western Communist party, in terms of strategy and political culture it was also the most open, the most ductile, and the closest to European social democracy (Pellicani, 1996). Admittedly the PCI had always proudly proclaimed its “diversity” and the fact that it could not be likened to any other party because of its internal organization (democratic centralism) and long-term goals (end of capitalism, formation of a “new type” of democracy, etc). But, at the same time, it presented itself as an energetic “people’s tribune”, whose ideal was to enhance democracy rather than eliminate it. Under Palmiro Togliatti, the typical ingredients of the revolutionary and reformist traditions were very cleverly mixed. Unfortunately, this ideological revision was not taken to its logical extreme. Anticapitalism and distrust of liberal democracy continued to be the basic ingredients of the Communist political culture.
References
De Grand, A. (1989). The Italian left in the twentieth century: A history of the socialist and communist parties. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
DiScala, Spencer. (1996) Italian Socialism: Between Politics and History. University of Massachusetts Press.
Gray, L. (1980). From Gramsci to Togliatti: The Partito Nuovo and the mass basis of Italian communism. In S. Serfaty & L. Gray (Eds.), The Italian Communist Party yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.
LaPalombara, Joseph. (1978) The Italian Communist Party and Changing Italian Society. In Austin Ranney and Giovanni Sartori Eurocommunism: The Italian Case American Enterprise Institute.
Libertini, Lucio. (1978) The Problem of the PCI. In Austin Ranney and Giovanni Sartori Eurocommunism: The Italian Case American Enterprise Institute.
Pasquino, G. (1980). From Togliatti to the Compromesso Storico: A party with a governmental vocation. In S. Serfaty & L. Gray (Eds.), The Italian Communist Party yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.
Pellicani, L. (1996) Socialists and communists. In DiScala, Spencer’s Italian Socialism: Between Politics and History. University of Massachusetts Press.
Sartori, Giovanni. (1976) Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1976), chap. 6.
Spotts, F., & Wieser, T. (1986). Italy: A different democracy. Cambridge University Press.
Urban, J.B. (1986). Moscow and the Italian Communist Party: From Togliatti to Berlinguer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Uriwn, Derek. (1996) A Dictionary of European History and Politics, 1945-1995
Book by Derek W. Urwin; Pearson UK.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment