The Perplexities of Italian Communism

...Dozza, the popular mayor of Bologna...

...I did not trust my ears: the red union secretary acting as ally of the landowners...

...The agent was a pleasant, modest man, a professional craftsman only loosely linked to capitalist interests...

...Cosimo could hardly afford such luxuries on his monthly salary of less than 75 dollars...

...But only on concrete questions, on which common targets are advisable...

...But he also proved himself a realist...

...The fatalistic and superstitious mountain peasant of Carlo Levi's books has no idea of rebelling against the landlord or official who torments him...

...They looked for scapegoats...

...exclaimed the enemy press...

...A leader of the ACLI, the Catholic union federation, put it to me this way: "Yes, we are ready for a dialogue with the Communists...

...The annual expenditure of the Botteghe Os cure (the ominously named Street of the Dark Stores on which the party headquarters are located) has been calculated at 12 to 13 billion lire (about 20 million dollars...

...Some crossed themselves, others raised their fist...

...By the time Scelba, the Catholic Minister of the Interior, broke this red terror, it had already largely achieved its aim: the establishment of a Communist enclave in the midst of a democratic Italy...

...A few minor cuts have been made for reasons of space...

...Toleration is celebrated as the first of virtues in discussions with the Italian Communists these days...

...he lived more modestly than his proteges...

...Three fifths of the harvest if the land was already tilled...

...At six in the morning Cosimo took me into the fields on his Lambretta...

...but the mill needs only 4,500 workers...

...The bloody beginnings of this Communist power are long forgotten today...

...Pope John became, of course, a great favorite with the Communists...

...Communist functionaries in high office are excellent administrators in a thoroughly conservative manner, e.g...

...Was it right that a man who had turned a piece of barren land into a vineyard by dozens of years of hard work should still have to give, year after year, almost half of its yield-45%—to a landlord who doesn't invest a penny...

...And he added: "The union does not support unreasonable demands...

...Its logical consequence was "the Italian road to Socialism," and with it a justification of all the national, not to say nationalist, Communist groups which now try to find their "own road to Socialism...

...four-fifths if you planted is yourself...

...It is a historical fact that revolutions almost never arise from the depths of misery...

...What admirable discipline, they thought, must prevail in the party if such an important decision can be kept secret for a month in a country so given to gossip...

...And yet, a touch of envy lay concealed in this indignation...

...It is a well-organized clique of special interests, bolstered by a position of considerable social and economic power...

...To be sure, the Italian Communists could not act as strongly as Tito, whom Togliatti condemned as a heretic in unison with the other Communist leaders at the time of his break with Moscow...

...virtues and vices that their party is the most charming—and most dangerous— Communist organization in Europe...

...It pushes efficiency so far as to service all its building sites from a central cement mixer...

...but actually he lived with them in the kind of tacit agreement that so often prevails among competitors and is founded on a desire to make as much profit as possible without a struggle...

...In the affluent society ideological questions become less important, especially for the younger generation...

...but it was so unclear that no peasant could hope to use it to secure his rights against his landlord's lawyer...

...Two-thirds of these, it is said, go to the party treasury...

...This increase in Communist votes is all the more remarkable as the party membership has been steadily shrinking...

...During my visit to the red co-operatives I was trying to be diplomatic and leave delicate questions for a later occasion...

...The government trading corporations from Warsaw to Peking do their Italian business mostly through red firms, whose profits indirectly subsidize the Italian C.P.—not to mention the money which Italian private or semi-government corporations, anxious to outbid their competitors for East bloc business, silently permit to flow in the same direction...

...The life of a foreign worker is not enviable and most are only too willing to return to Italy as soon as they can...

...ly on edge...

...realized that the publication of Longi's letter had been a tactical mistake...

...It rises by some further 5 billion in election years...

...He delivered the press, reserved one- or two-fifths for his landlord as the case might be, and waited for him to go to court...

...For among Communists, too, iron discipline co-exists with good old Italian sloppiness...

...The courting of the left-wing Catholics by the Communists is also, surely, a tactical maneuver...

...A good Marxist takes no risk when he joins with a Catholic...

...They stood and talked in small groups and formed a curiously loose mass...

...But we must not, of course, rule out the possibility that this maneuver will get out of control and in time will become a psychological reality, a true democratization...

...there is the poor soil, and perhaps also the more irrational temper of the people...

...Their chairman spoke well of them: they would rather reinvest their profits than spend them...

...but they all shine in the aura of spiritual glory which transfigures the party...

...III I gained a totally different impression from a visit to a new steel mill of the Italsider, one of the proudest development projects of the Mezzogiorno, located in the port city of Tarento...

...This co-operative is both more capitalist and more socialist than a Soviet kolkhoz...

...Cosimo listened for a while...

...To be sure, they interpreted the word "enemy" rather broadly and liquidated, together with the Germans, many Italians who might later endanger their power...

...Even if they have thrown their old ideology overboard, their failure to produce a new one is all the more alarming...

...What is at stake is not so much the 85 progressive Christian Democratic deputies...

...The problem of socialist co-operatives," he stated, "is the same here as elsewhere: People do not work hard enough because of a lack of incentives...

...Togliatti was a brilliant mind, and his party has attracted the celebrities of art and literature even more strongly than its French sister party...

...Since there has been no genuine ideological revision, I do not believe in the democratization of Communism...

...And, indeed, Socialist-Communist co-operation has continued in many provincial and municipal governments, despite Nenni's alliance with the Christian Democrats...

...But despite of all this—or, rather, because of it—the Italian C.P...

...Thus they told me, with a great show of indignation, of a young worker who had recently dropped dead in his home without any visible illness—obviously from over-exertion under inhuman working conditions...

...I found a similar mentality in a giant building co-operative which occupies a vast area near the harbor of Ravenna...

...Lenin defined it as a hostile power which had to be destroyed and replaced by something completely new, the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...They are almost all former braccianti (day laborers) who acquired their land in a more or less legal way...

...the painter Guttuso (whose fascist past does not prevent him from sitting on the party's Central Com . mittee), the sculptor Manzu (whom John XXIII commissioned to do the "Door of Death" of Saint Peter's, explaining that Communists were also children of God...

...Cofor's chairman is, indeed, a curious kind of baker...

...And so we were right in the middle of a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of collective organizations...

...Unlike their Russian colleagues, the members own no gardens around their country cottages...

...During our trip we came across a violently gesticulating group of men, with the tenant and the landlord's agent the protagonists...

...Cosimo, the union secretary, explained to me that all these peasants had for decades been working a piece of land under contract to the landowner...

...For, in the last few years, the Communists have suffered similar, considerable defeats in the big factories of the Italian North, as in the Turin Fiat works...

...Mechanization enables them to save the expense of outside labor and to increase production...

...Rather, the spark of impatience bursts into flame only when a nascent economic development offers new hopes...

...But in the evening, when the lengthening shadows brought coolness, the piazza was filled with men, peasants with serious, furrowed faces and toil-worn hands...

...Not all of these are party members...

...The Communist secretary Cosimo stepped in here with this advice: "If the landlord does not give you your share, take it...

...Of course, the discrepancy between the prosperous North and the backward South remains enormous...

...IV It may seem strange at first that the red co-operatives do not try to put their social creed into practice by lowering their prices for the benefit of the consumer—as is done, for example, by the Swiss "social capitalist" Gottlieb Duttweiler in his Migros chain stores...

...Even if the Communists' offer of friendship is sincerely meant, only small splinter groups of the parties which they court are so far ready to accept it...

...He wanted to strike a peaceful bargain with his adversary: sixty to forty...

...Most of the inhabitants had driven their brightly painted carts in the morning to the vineyards, which stretch for many kilometers along the plain and the gentle hills...

...The Communism of this enclave has little to do with ideology...

...He lacks the physical strength and the intellectual concept of a different system...

...nor is there that uneasy constraint with which the Stalinists—and some of their successors—slide over uncomfortable realities...

...But, unexpectedly, Longi's letter boomeranged...

...You have to get up early if you want to see the sharecroppers of Manduria drive out to their work...

...Only about a quarter of this amount is supplied by membership dues and subscriptions to the party press...

...The people of Italy feel the same way, as proved by the steady postwar increase in the Communist vote...

...No German Dunker could show me so proudly his clean cowsheds with the herd of 500 handsome cattle, or the harvesting machines in his fields as the chairman of the peasant co-operative of Mezzano, which has 1,500 members...

...The "established" Communists of the Romagna-Emilia have hardly anything in common with their "Chinese" comrades of Apulia...

...Now it so happens that the Italian Communists include a downright affluent social group, which in no way expects the party to lift them out of a state of misery...

...I found a TV set and a refrigerator in the home of many a man who looked poverty-stricken...

...I spent a few days in Manduria, a clean and pretty country town, whose narrow, crooked streets run between whitewashed houses...

...They prefer to live in the city and bicycle to their fields every morning, like workers going to a factory...

...Still, the emigration of the young industrial proletariat from the South has acted as a kind of political safety valve...

...They farm 2,500 hectars (some 6,000 acres) of their own and of leased land, and grow cereals, sugar beets, fruit and vegetables...

...He explained that political interference by the Communists had made it impossible for him, as a unionist, to defend the interests of his fellow workers...

...I was told of the case of a Communist mayor, whom his comrades accused of injuring the party because he did not have his new-born son baptized...

...The forms of Catholi• cism—perhaps more than its true religious content—are so intimately connected with Italian life that no mass party would dare to defy them...

...Even if only the highest officials were in on the secret, there were about a hundred of them, and none of them gave it away...

...They are peasants, but with the mentality of workers: the land is only a means of production to them...

...But the Italian Communists acted all the more decisively after Stalin's death, when Togliatti coined the concept of "polycentrism," after which Moscow no longer was the Mecca of world Communism...

...The feudal misgovernment which has ruthlessly exploited the Mezzogiorno for centuries is not alone responsible...

...Their courting of the Socialists seems, at first sight, more reasonable, since Nenni's breaking of his long alliance with the Communists and his participation in the government seem to have had disappointing results...

...may have been able to pursue a policy independent of Moscow at such an early date is that it possesses a strong financial basis of its own, which makes direct Soviet subsidies, if not superfluous, at least not vital...

...the archeologist Bianchi Bandinelli, etc...

...Again, it is significant that their systematic organization work in the South has so far been crowned with little suc cess...

...They did not expect such an interpretation because the secret change of leadership had actually not taken place...

...True, the chairman of the building co-operative spoke to me vaguely of "breaking the monopoly of capitalist outfits...

...Today 26% of all Italians vote Communist, while the chief anti-Communist party, the Christian Democrats, has managed to hold on to 38...

...He was by no means a raving demagogue: a quiet man of forty, with curly hair and a good baritone voice...

...The Communist unionists whom I visited in Tarento were obvious...

...But if the end so cynically justifies the means, if Togliatti could repress his liberal criticism for years and mouth the most absurd Stalinist lies, then who can guarantee that the present liberalism was not just as cynically invented as a party line to catch gullible democrats and pave the way for a Communist seizure of power...

...Their gross annual turnover is estimated at 100 billion lire (about 63 million dollars) and their net profits at 10 billion...

...but the functionary who accompanied me talked right away about awkward matters...

...Even if the accusations of my informants were correct and the resignation of the chairman was really a camouflaged and welltimed move by the management, still, the sudden switch in the workers' vote indicates a disillusionment that must stem from deeper causes...

...The man who harvested the grapes sat at the long handle of the wine press...

...offices of the little Apulian town of Alberobello I found, in addition to many publications on the art of love, not only books by anti-Communist writers like Koestler and Camus but also, in a position of honor, the latest work of Silone, Emergency Exit, an emphatic rejection of Communism...

...There is in this a touch of Latin cultural snobbery— they feel as immeasurably superior to the "barbarians" of the East as the French bourgeois feel to the "barbarians" of America...

...A mass party with both a membership of 1.8 million and the discipline of an esoteric secret society represents a truly frightening power...

...V One reason the Italian C.P...

...The real reason behind their rage was perhaps that the Communist union federation, the FIOM, had just suffered a crushing defeat by their Catholic competitors, in the elections to the Labor Commission, although only a few months earlier it had won the elections and named a Communist chairman of the Commission...

...We can find the true way only through discussion and therefore we are not afraid of it...

...The tenants fertilized it and planted it with vines, all at their own expense...

...In the province of Ravenna 80,000 members are organized in 225 red co-operatives, mostly agricultural ones...

...When it was finished they stayed in Tarento...

...Those who in the past have made such masterly use of tactics of deception cannot be so easily trusted...

...Even quite "liberal" Italian Communists still excuse this treason by explaining that, in those days, the "socialist world" was threat ened by the American atomic monopoly and could be saved only by absolute solidarity...

...In a book exhibit at the C.P...

...Even if the landlords defended themselves with the aid of their lawyers, it was of little use while this revolutionary mood stirred Manduria...

...The subject was anything but esoteric: the rights of the worker at his place of work...

...From there it sends back part of its wages to support families at home...

...The whole area between Rimini and Modena, the Romagna-Emilia, became the reddest provinces of Italy's famous "Red Belt" primarily because of the German occupation in World War II...

...Instead of fighting Catholicism the Communists have always tried to achieve a symbiosis with it...

...Its cadres form an elite that loves power for power's sake and its fellow-travelers either inherited their sympathies from their fathers or acquired them for opportunistic reasons...

...The city is now plagued by more unemployed than ever before...

...they form militant groups in the factories, offer legal aid, conduct social activities and organize adult education classes...

...Methods which are sinful when employed by capitalists become virtuous when practiced by the red co-operatives...

...There can be no dialogue on matters of principle...

...In the union office the action was already being prepared: the tenants were queuing up to sign printed notices to terminate their contracts...

...has put to its own advantage many instinctive loyalties tied to these religious forms...

...but, incredible as it may sound, they couldn't find any...

...All day long the piazza, picturesquely framed by churches and palaces, lay empty under the brilliant sun...

...Discontent, nostalgia, and anger against an economic system that forces youth to migrate may push the Mezzogiorno towards a revolution...

...Today the Communists look for allies in two different directions...

...To this day the Communist citadels are to be found in the prosperous North and not in the South...

...The tenant shouted, and insisted on 80 percent...

...the film directors Antonioni, Pasolini, and Rosi...

...That Togliatti's resignation was kept secret for months may seem trivial beside the fact that he had hewed to the Soviet line for years, while harboring quite different thoughts...

...They earn the legal rate for all farm labor with a bonus of 60 lire (10 cents) per hour and work a seven-hour day...

...11 More rapidly effective than these long-range plans is the pull of the industrial North and of foreign countries: Southern surplus labor emigrates to Milan and Turin, to Switzerland and the Ruhr...

...A second important source of income is from the camouflaged Communist corporations which trade with the countries of the Eastern bloc...

...The purpose of this revelation was hagiographic: the average party member was to learn that its late chief had been so devoted to the movement that its welfare worried him even in his last hours on this earth...

...but hunger has practically vanished as a subversive force...

...To remedy this injustice the parliament in Rome had passed a law...

...To break out of the vicious circle of isolation and fruitless opposition to which the government of the "opening to the Left" has confined them, they stretch out their hands simultaneously to the Socialists and the leftwing Catholics...

...There already exists a Catholic group, led by the former mayor of Florence, La Pira, which asks for a "dialogue with the Communists...

...The largest of them, bearing the harmless name of International Import and Export Corporation, has its seat in Milan...

...What contempt for the most elementary principles of democracy...

...Practicing and faithful Catholics are to be found even among leading Communists...

...For a long time, the Communist party was the only one in Italy to take cultural problems seriously, so that the intellectuals willingly fell under its spell —men like the writers Elio Vittorini and Carlo Levi (who let himself be elected Senator by Communist votes as an independent candidate...

...It remains to be seen how long a mass party like the Italian C.P...

...It is because they partake of all the Italian *This article has been translated, with permission, from the French magazine Preuves...

...the rest must come from other sources...

...For Catholicism, not so much in its content as in its temper, is a creed of salvation and, as such, is closer to the Leninist eschatology than is Social Democracy, which is rationalist and this-worldly...

...Several months before he was mortally stricken in a Soviet sanitarium Togliatti informed his then deputy of the rapid worsening of his health and made him the new party leader...

...On the contrary, the C.P...

...When John XXIII modified the militant condemnation of Communism by his predecessor, it was enough to ensure a striking increase of the Communist vote in the next elections...

...This is the view of Ignazio Silone, who told me: "When you question Communists on the simplest of definitions, you face them with a dilemma...

...There are no longer any official theses to parrot...

...For all their political foxiness, the Italian Communists were honestly puzzled by the sneering admiration of their enemies...

...Moreover, this has happened at the very moment of a lull in the "economic miracle," when a strong hand at the helm is especially needed...

...A man was distributing leaflets for the Communist Chamber of Labor...

...For example, the definition of the state...

...There is a solid political reason behind this Communist "will to profit...

...Their attacks against the "capitalist exploiters" of Italsider were ridiculously exaggerated...

...When the cat proclaims its conversion to vegetarianism it will be long before the mice believe it...

...While Nenni's party is considering a merger with the Saragat Socialists, it faces a secession of a Left wing...

...If we fight them, as the dorotei (right-wing Christian Democrats) do, in purely defensive actions founded on our faith, then we will surely lose...

...His deputy, another Communist, also resigned, and the Catholic minority on the Commission followed suit...

...he told me this without any false pathos and I could not but take his idealism seriously...

...The ideological range of the government parties is so great that their opposing tendencies cancel each other out and condemn the cabinet to immobilism...

...The Italian Communists, unlike the secularist Italian Socialists and Republicans and unlike their own prophet Lenin, have never attacked or despised religion as "opium for the people...

...The red co-operatives of this region originally had little to do with Communism...

...The Communists had the nerve to change leaders without whispering a word to their followers...

...The steady rise of prices and of the cost of living may well be beyond the government's control...

...They grew up in a republican and socialist spirit...

...Against all expectation I got along with him quite well...

...rather, the Communists would like to win over the Catholic worker and peasant masses which have hitherto denied their votes to the atheist Communists for religious reasons...

...Marx seems proved wrong here: the banner-bearers of the revolution are not the advanced workers of industrialized countries but the backward peasant masses...

...Today the Italian Communists freely concede that, after World War II, the Russians were the worst enemies of Communism, because they forced their neo-byzantinism upon the parties of Eastern Europe and of the West...

...For him, union work was a struggle for the poor, for social justice...

...These dealt, of course, with the problem that concerned them all: a new distribution of the grape harvest...

...A high party official explained to me that a few weeks after Togliatti wrote the letter he felt well enough to resume his leadership...

...Nowhere did I find a poverty as alarming as in India or rural Mexico...

...The Communists have in practice rejected this definition, without daring to accept its opposite, formulated by Kautsky, who defined the state as a democratic order with many levels and with several separate powers, each of which can be administered independently in collaboration with other parties...

...Its alleged liberalization is, in the first place, a matter of tactics or perhaps not even of that, but only a try-out tactics...

...They were trying to incite the mezzadri, the sharecroppers, against their landlords...

...It occupies twice the area of the old city and is highly automated...

...A young priest led a discussion in the workers' club of Aprilia, a small town in Latium, which I attended...

...He is a doctor of law who proudly showed me the rising production curve of his enterprise on a wall diagram...

...if we let the Communists lure us into it, they will simply use us for propaganda purposes...

...It was here that the toughest and bloodiest partisan war was waged against the Nazis—and it was led by the Communists...

...It is a point on which both party and co-operatives prefer to remain silent, so that one can only make estimates...

...The last two great Communist revolutions happened in China and Cuba, while Communist influence in the industrial areas of Turin and Milan declines or remains stationary...

...He held it until his death in August 1964...

...One of the most important of these are the red co-operatives...

...A conservative Church, allied with landlords by the grace of God, still keeps the unruly spirits under its spell...

...18,000 workers had streamed there from all over Italy to build the mill...

...Usually the land had been a stony waste...

...This new fashion of liberalism fits the Italian Communists so well that one almost forgets to ask them how they managed to wear the Stalinist strait-jacket all through the bad years...

...but the voters still blame those in office, including the Socialists...

...But the Communists have the bad luck that their potential allies take their ideology much more seriously than they do themselves...

...The earnings of Romagna-Emilia co-operatives are an important source of revenue for the party treasury in Rome...

...And I came across the panettone (cookies) of the baking co-operative Cofor in the remote villages of Apulia...

...after all, he believes that the religious superstructure will one day vanish from this earth...

...New elections had to be called because the said chairman, Pietro Aducci, had offered his resignation in a sensational letter to his colleagues...

...The social reforms demanded by the Communists are justified and necessary," they told me, "and this gives them strength...

...Even at the price of sacrificing one's intellect...

...VI What would be the element of unity if the thesis of Pietro Ingrao, the Communist parliamentary leader, and Mario Alicata, editor-in-chief of Unita, triumphs and the left-wing Catholics are chosen as partners in a new alliance...

...It is the emigrants, the young, the competent, the thoughtful workers who, despite the good wages they earn abroad, succumb to the lure of the Communist party, When they return home, they will form dangerous cadres, While I was visiting Apulia, Communist organizers were active in the Tarento-Brindisi-Lecce triangle...

...His incipient corpulence was not due to a dolce vita...

...Today the Italian government tries to bridge the abyss between industrial North and agricultural South by intensive social and economic measures: the South consumes an average of at least 40% of all ministerial budgets...

...Just as the faithful have for many centuries kissed the statue of Saint Peter to partake of its charisma, so did hundreds of thousands kiss the coffin in which the dead Togliatti was lying in state...

...This automation has proved to be, at least temporarily, a gift of the Danaids for Tarento...

...Outside, the party sections were marching under flags almost indistinguishable in shape and imagery from the flags carried by religious processions...

...The same trend can be noted in other Western European countries...

...the publishers Feltrinelli and Einaudi...

...Dogmatism is death," the local party chief, a young doctor, explained in answer to my questioning look...

...can muddle along without having any clear idea of basic political concepts...

...But for the left-wing Catholic, his faith is the foundation which alone gives life order and meaning...

...I travelled by car in the footsteps of Carlo Levi through the mountains of Lucania, whose misery he has so movingly described in Christ Stopped at Eboli...

...The young men of the ACLI fight Communism with its own methods...

...then he intervened, sharply and definitely: "You know quite well that your land was tilled and that you can claim only sixty...

...We must ourselves achieve the reforms which the Communists advocate because this propaganda drives the masses into their party...

...When the Communists in the Italian Parliament voted after the war to renew the Lateran Pacts and thus make unconstitutional a progressive institution like divorce, they did not do it from religious conviction but for purely tactical reasons —because the Italian woman regularly goes to mass and is grateful to the Church for tying her flighty mate to her for life...