The Agony of Italian Socialism

...Headed by Aldo Moro of the Christian Democrats, an astute politician with his own problem of dissident party factions, its program and composition were negotiated, not in the high style of the forum, but in the low style of the market place...

...In the parties, a small but articulate group of statesmen—Fanfani in the left wing of the Christian Democrats, La Malfa of the Republicans, Saragat of the Social Democrats—wearied of parliamentary immobilism...

...He tried to pick up the threads of the argument from neo-capitalism —the theoretical basis of the new intransigent left—yet also to weave from them the material of government...

...embassy, was continually frustrated by parliamentary "snipers" in its own ranks...

...But this too ended when the DC's charismatic leader, Alcide De Gaspari, died in 1953...

...Representatives of the country's two major ideological camps—the Catholic and the Marxist —sit face-to-face in working collaboration...

...Talk of a schism on the left began to circulate, but where would the dissidents secede to...

...With the outbreak of the cold war and the country's subservience to the for eign policies of the Atlantic Alliance, the Christian Democrats (DC) gained more-or-less complete control...

...The party had led the massive occupation of the factories of 1920...

...The Communists, nourished from Moscow and commanding an organization hardened by years of clandestine activity, gave a powerful revolutionary thrust to the Resistance movement...

...There was little to justify Nenni's dream of a "historical encounter...

...What can justify its existence in a country with a Social Democratic Party, an apparently still vital Socialist Party and the strongest Communist Party in Western Europe...

...And what of the Nenni Socialists...

...In foreign policy, the provisions, negotiated during the tragic week of Kennedy's death, are least coherent of all, leaving the country loyally paddling the Atlantic current and promising vaguely to "study" the multilateral force...

...The transformations of the next five or ten years in Italian society will be conducted by neo-capitalism, which has the capacity to give partial answers to the immediate problems of the working class, but with the condition—and this is the point—of sacrificing its more pro...

...It became clear that there was no alternative for the Christian Democrats but an eventual encounter with the Socialists, the country's third largest party...

...Lombardi, who grew up in the hard school of Milanese labor politics and cherishes a vision of the Socialists once more at the vanguard of the working class, strove to destroy the growing conviction that joining the government and holding the party together were incompatible...

...One thing leads to another," wrote Palmiro Togliatti, discussing the government's weak platform commitments...

...The President of the Republic, Antonio Segni, used all his influence to sabotage it, and forced Moro to assign most of the Christian Democratic portfolios to conservative parliamentarians...

...The party, retaining its 40-50 per cent of the electorate largely by demagogic anti-Communist electoral techniques and the support of the Church and the U.S...

...The PSIUP is a new party with an old theme...

...But Lombardi was unable to implement his speech with concrete political action that could weld the dissident factions together...

...It was in exile that a Unity of Action pact was signed with the Communists for the future liberation of Italy...

...At the same time, the false polarization of Italian politics began to diminish...

...Aside from a sentimental attachment to workingclass unity, the Sinistra or Left of the PSI was profoundly conscious of the dangers of sitting at capitalism's table...

...The theoreticians of the PSIUP are going through a crucial period of deciding where they have seceded to...

...of the working class becoming accustomed to picking up healthy leftovers from the table of welfare capitalism, but never gaining the power to make decisions...

...One-third of the Socialist membership followed them out...

...The PSI Congress was held in Rome last October in an atmosphere of tension and uncertainty...

...This was the interpretation of the PSI left wing, which denounced the party's first venture into coalition politics as "a most clamorous failure...

...The Autonomists, Lombardi's supporters included, united behind Nenni's platform and it was approved by 57% of the delegates...

...In a plain attempt at reconciliation, he denied that his faction condemned a priori the formula of a center-left government...

...Its program, prefaced by a vision of justice and coming out strongly for structural economic planning, was reduced by the Christian Democrats to a series of pork-barrel compromises in individual sectors of the economy...

...This is a government whose program makes concessions to the left in economic and urban planning, and vows to initiate the regional decentralization foreseen in the Constitution of 1947...

...al problems are immense: it possesses office space only in those provinces where it was in the majority in the PSI and it is a party, at present, without any of the "normal" sources of Italian party finance...

...From positions often more intransigent than those of the Communists themselves, the majority of the Socialists moved to an acceptance of structural reform within the capitalist system as the basis for arriving at Socialism, and to a partial acceptance of membership in the Western military bloc...

...The logic of the situation continued to evolve, Within the DC, Fanfani, backed by a shaky coalition of leftoriented factions, had gained power...

...Only with the launching of Italy's "economic miracle" and the equally miraculous pontificate of John XXIII, could a dialogue begin between Marxists and Catholics...

...The Socialists, encouraged by Fanfani's willingness to set up a planning commission and to nationalize the vital electrical industry, did not enter the government but supported it on domestic issues and abstained on foreign policy votes...

...At the same time, a large minority, faithful to the revolutionary tradition of the party, resisted the innovations of Nenni's Autonomists...

...And it can be safely predicted that one of the "things" he had in mind was an increment of one million Communist votes in the next election...

...but the ideas of Sorel and Bakunin, as well as roots in the agricultural proletariat of the Po Valley, lent the PSI an intransigent character...

...The Sinistra hardened once more, but too late to swing the party away from its decision to enter the government...

...The Communists, while they judged the schism impolitic, reacted with guarded neutrality, refusing to enroll recent exiles from the PSI...

...and poignant, as he recalled, "All of the possibilities wasted...

...The result was the "trial" centrosinistra of February, 1962, consisting of Christian Democrats, Republicans and Social Democrats...

...228 found needs of liberty and human dignity...

...Without his prestige, a series of Christian Democratic governments rose and fell, contributing to the chronic instability of the political system...

...For the left-wing leaders of the PSI, this was not enough...

...The Fanfani government resigned after the national elections of June, 1963...

...They called for a new beginning...

...If the new party tried to find political space on its left, the Communists, the real sophisticates of Italian politics, would react violently...

...The reaction of the Congress was electric, and talk of a reconciliation filled the lobbies...

...One of the most interesting parties in Western Europe, and one of the most tragic, the PSI grew out of the intellectual ferment of the late 19th century that spawned much of European Socialism...

...all of the things that you could have done, but which, for an infinite number of reasons, you didn't do, and you replaced with the intoxicating vision of things more lovely and more radical, but impossible...

...Attempts to govern with the minor parties of the center-left (the Social Democrats and Republicans) or the right (the Liberals) were equally artificial: too many disparate interests had to be satisfied...

...Entering the debate amid great excitement, Lombardi dramatically attempted to weld the two factions together...

...11 But in the late Stalin years, the al liance with the CP became a liability...

...In the new governmental negotiations of last June, they en visioned a transitional centro-sinistra which would make few concessions to the Socialists...

...Though Nenni was still anxious to do business, a group of influential Socialists, led by the brilliant and unpredictable Riccardo Lombardi, refused to support him, and the negotiations collapsed...

...Wounded and reeling, the PSI is poised on the razor's edge...

...Italy's still-deprived masses might grow impatient with the Socialist Party's continued inability to gain power, but would they not, the Sinistra argued, be profoundly repelled b) the prospect of a working-class party doling out the small change of reformism...

...More than anything, the PSIUP suffers from a lack of political breathing space...

...The present demands of atomic weapons do not correspond to military needs, but are substantially the expression of a neo-capitalist logic which cannot balance its economic development without the device of military spending...

...While most of the Socialist parties of Europe were undergoing a process of social-democratization, the PSI retained a powerful revolutionary rhetoric...

...The war over, the party's treasury empty and the ranks of its able leadership thinned, there was little else to do...

...The PSI's great danger is accepting the ripe political plums Italian politics offers to parties in power, and becoming a party of clienteles without a stubborn and precious vision of social justice...

...But is this a government with the power to renew a very old and ailing society...

...Its organization...

...its offices were burned and its activists massacred by roaming fascist squadre in 1920-22...

...The Socialists can participate in the government in a partial and compromising way, and at the same time remain in opposition in the civil society .. . The note was paradoxical...

...IV The noble experiment, the vision which Nenni fought for at great personal expense, is a patchwork of equivications...

...They denounced the party's "capitulation" and seceded to form the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP), an ironic name for still another splinter...

...I11 The intra-party debate erupted in the summer months, the Autonomists declaring the need for a "tactical" alliance with the DC and the Sinistra openly talking of schism...

...The centro-sinistra cabinet was created by a process of elimination...

...The result was the "caretaker" government of Giovanni Leone, which would manage the store until the Socialist Congress of October could decide the party's position...

...and the Socialists followed...

...The Socialist Party had a long and valiant democratic tradition, but its primacy on the left had been usurped by the Communists, and without independence of action, its vote would dwindle and its glorious army never fight a battle...

...it was far more likely that the Socialists had picked up the "floating vote" of the center from the Christian Democrats and lost many of its militants to the Communists...

...At best, the government represented an orientation program designed to accustom the country to a Marxist party in the antechamber of a Catholic society...

...The real surprise of the Congress was the moderate, almost amiable tone of the leader of the Sinistra, Tullio Vecchietti...

...The secession of the PSI's rightwing in 1947 so weakened it that partial dependence upon the Communists became total...

...The Socialists failed to obtain a radical plank for the sick agricultural sector...

...Centro-sinistra was on everybody's mind, but the reactionary elements within the Christian Democrats, blaming the Fanfani experiment for their electoral losses, were not in an expansive mood...

...A note attributed to him in August held that all the parties involved in the experience of centro-sinistra should reserve their specific and autonomous functions in all sectors of the civil society...

...The Christian Democrats lost heavily, the Socialists slightly, and the Communist vote rose from 21% to 247 of the electorate...

...It has all the trappings of a historic encounter, but its most overt effect to date has been to seriously wound the Socialist Party...

...The two wings of the PSI crystallized into organized factions...

...The party's leaders were conscious of pitfalls: the specters of "revisionists" like Leon Blum and Saragat were dour warnings...

...Nenni, aged but striking, opened the session with a report at once momentous and poignant: momentous, as he said: "The extraordinary nature of this Congress is that its decisions are destined to operate immediately...

...a coalition of center and left with a platform of social reform and political regeneration...

...The Communists, while welcoming dissent from Nenni's "revisionism," were not eager to absorb the left wing of the PSI: their own ideological travels had taken them to the right of many of the Socialists dissidents...

...Nenni, ceding his secretaryship but still in control of the party, remains cloistered impotently in the Council of Ministers...

...Our choice rests in these terms: Either to completely abandon the process of transformation to the forces of neo-capitalism, or to insert the working class into the process so as to contest the developmental model of neo-capitalism...

...In the meantime, they can make political hay denouncing every concession the Socialists in the government make to bourgeois reformism and to foreign policy atlantismo...

...Its long-term dangers for Italian Socialism are probably greater than its short-term advantages...

...The break with the Communists, begun in 1953, was completed after the Khrushchev revelations in 1956...

...and its leaders were the first to be forced into exile by the fascists...

...After three weeks of solid bargaining, the centrosinistra regime was formed...

...As long as the cold war had worn the fearsome aspect of armed confrontation, and as long as Italy's weak economic position made it a ward of the United States, the Right and the Left were mutually exclusive armed camps...

...Three successive congresses allowed Nenni, now the architect of party autonomy, to approach cautiously the positions of the center-left...

...Probably the lost DC votes had not gone directly to the Communists...

...And can it justify the sacrifices the PSI has made for it...

...He warned, however, of the danger of a "flight ahead" into a coalition which was only a cloaked tactical maneuver of the DC...

...For varied reasons, the country's three most prominent supporters of the concept of centro-sinistra—Fanfani, La Malfa and Lombardi—declined to enter the government...

...He extended the neo-capitalism argument into foreign policy, asking that the PSI "insert" itself into NATO to "turn today's ferments to the ends of peace...

...Lombardi, whose vision of Socialism remains the party's great hope, is stonily silent after the failure of his attempt to integrate the party...

...The Italian Socialist Party (PSI), after seventy almost unbroken years of political opposition, is now an organic part of the new government in Rome...

...Thus, the PSI is sorely tried by its first excursion into centro-sinistra...

...In the early postwar years, Italy was governed by a bizarre coalition of Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats, which could not outlast the initial period of national reconstruction...

...But they also were conscious of history slipping by...

...Even as it assured old-line Socialists that the PSI was not about to tumble into a bourgeois bear hug, it threw the staid elements of the Italian right into a fever...

...He made the telling point that, without a basic theoretical differentiation from garden-variety of reformism, the party would neither strike a solid bargaining position with the Christian Democrats nor carry its mass support along with it...

...proletarian unity that would eventually bring together the entire left, including the Communists, in a great movement...

...The Socialists' venerable leader, Pietro Nenni, is Vice-President of the Council of Ministers, and four other Socialists sit at his side...