ITALIAN COMMUNISM: THE OLD & THE NEW

...For several reasons the PCI's declared commitments to pluralism and constitutional government ought not to be lightly dismissed...

...Seize the state in such a society and power will fall into your hands...

...After nearly 20 years of weakness and clandestine life, the era of the Resistance against Nazism was, for the PCI, a constitutive period, in contrast to the French Communists for whom it merely continued popular-front policies...

...The cooperatives already control a significant share of retail trade, have an important role in farming, and are moving into international trade...

...I have argued here that the PCI is not a spruced-up Stalinist party but represents something dramatically new in the historical spectrum of world Communism, and that it is not primarily the economic crisis that is 59 Year dales I emales 1955 56 1960 59 68 1968 61 77 1969 81 1970 65 83 1971 65 87 1972 65 88 1973 66 56 responsible for Communist electoral gains but the government's failure to modernize Italian society...

...There is nothing the State Department would like better than to continue to prop up the DC (with suitable concessions to the left) in the name of a policy of financial stringency and modest social reform...

...What Berlinguer did was simply to provide an ideological umbrella for the diverse programs the PCI had been proposing all along...

...It can be argued that Communist parties intent on disarming the opposition always propose such sensible programs...

...The support of the new middle class is particularly crucial to the PCI's ability to administer the cities and regions it now controls...

...American rigidity could have another effect as well...

...and (c) that the PCI, if it came to power, even as a coalition partner, would attempt to subvert the Italian Constitution and establish some form of regime hostile to democracy and, inter alia, to American interests...

...The party cell has tended to wither while neighborhood sections and municipal and regional organizations flourish...

...But there is another naivete that is perhaps more dangerous: the presence of so deep a consciousness of the past that it would allow historical opportunities to go by...

...Yet, the Chilean coup came fully three months after Berlinguer had launched his first new-line trial balloons, and the economic crisis—which began in 1973 in most countries of the West--had actually started in Italy four 55 years earlier...

...Third, the party's opening-up to diverse social and cultural influences, even at the risk of losing control of the militants' activities and of losing the party's "apartness" from bourgeois society...

...Our assumptions have contributed to the impossibility of serious structural reform ever being carried out in Italy, because we have unfailingly backed a party, the Christian Democracy, which was incapable of translating its strategy of patronage into collective programs of any sort...

...One has the impression that, for the State Department, the real operational definition of a "commitment to democracy" is the PCI's acceptance of American hegemony in Europe and its break with the U.S.S.R...

...The coalition government led by the Christian Democratic party (the DC) has this crucial defect: it perpetuates this imbalance, by governing through a coalition for patronage, instead of developing collective programs that could create a modern bourgeois society...

...How would American policy-makers react to the Communists' entry into a coalition government...

...The alternatives are the PCI's going entirely into opposition (with new elections whose outcome no one could predict) or the fall of the Andreotti government and a speeding up of Communist accession—however modest—into the governing circle...

...As to Italy's anarchic development: it is the irony of Italian history that the country was capitalist before becoming bourgeois and that its political system began to provide extensive social services before organizing a modern civil society...

...There is also a strong possibility that new 58 elections would be followed by the PCI's entry into the government, along with a DC forced to fight as it never fought before for continued control of the economic and political levers of power...

...Throwing a party with a mass following and a vocation for reform into a political ghetto has never been known to further its democratization—on the contrary...

...acceptance of party pluralism in Italy—a// these themes were already advanced under Berlinguer's predecessors, Togliatti and Longo...

...Programmatically, there really is little that is new in Berlinguer's vision of the road to socialism...

...It is here that American policy comes into play...

...If the bases of this growth were production for export, dependence on cheap labor, and a lack of expenditure on services and farming, no matter: the coalition for patronage stepped in when the market failed, propping up sagging sectors, providing venture capital for new undertakings, and fostering the illusion that increased payoffs to client groups could take the place of structural renovation...

...For a few years, especially in the South, it seemed the neoFascists would profit from the DC's problems, but their strategy of tension eventually backfired, and the Communists (e.g., in Naples) ended up with much of their support...

...The historic compromise had two new things to offer: an appeal to sectors of opinion that were increasingly disenchanted with anarchic patterns of economic development and providing an ideological model that would mediate for the dispersed policy initiatives the PCI had long advocated...

...It follows that pumping funds into the ailing DC in the time-tested manner will neither revive that party's fortunes nor give it the policy coherence to carry out essential reforms...

...To claim certainty for such an outcome would be naive...

...In the liberal atmosphere of the postwar period, the integralist element subsided, but interclass solidarity became the basis for the formation of an inclusive social coalition...

...But in the West the bourgeoisie had reserves of strength in the loyalties, associations, and mass culture of civil society...

...But the same could happen if the current stalemate continues, the DC fails to meet the economic and social crisis, and the workers begin to lose patience with Berlinguer's moderate line...

...A radical party combines appeals to the working class with programs of social change, while a bourgeois party attracts propertied groups with programs reflecting their collective interests...

...In vehemently opposing such a step, we appear to have been acting on three assumptions: (a) that the PCI was really no more than a somewhat spruced-up Stalinist party...

...The main reason for this lay in the international situation and in the economy, which--liberated from authoritarian control and aided by growing injections of public funds —was staging a remarkable recovery...

...The mere size of its organization —nearly 2 million members, 37,000 sections, and a host of secondary organizations, many with strong financial bases—would make the PCI difficult to administer as a classical vanguard party...

...the further differentiation of the party's line from that of the Soviet Union...

...Only a meaningful renewal of the Italian state would accomplish this, and so far the DC has shown no capacity to carry that out...

...Such a coalition developed in Italy after 1945, and for three basic reasons: • Historically, the 19th-century risorgitnento had failed to give rise to a political class that would make Italy a modern bourgeois society...

...Third, the party's programs emphasize goals that most democrats could agree upon: reform of the tax structure, nationalized industries and bureaucracy, and, in production, an emphasis on social instead of purely private consumption...

...The result has been an agonizingly slow response to the economic crisis, continued malaise within the DC, and the beginnings of PCI fear that the historic compromise will lead to the disaffection of the party's mass base and a loss of its capacity for movement...

...in the second, the PCI may remain in the government for years as a skillful manager of a bourgeois welfare state...

...When this economic "miracle" exploded in the late 1960s, there was thus little to fall back upon...

...The most important periods in its development were three: • At its birth in 1920-21, the PCI was much weaker than its French and German counterparts...

...Those who run the party today are, for the most part, successful administrators, legislators, and public figures, and most of them believe that Italy can become a socialist society through existing republican institutions...

...The Italian Communist party has now reached so great a level of both internal and programmatic evolution (not to mention its increasingly distant relations with the Soviet Union) that advocates of its further democratization are either foolish or hypocritical to argue for its continued isolation...

...It was, in fact, in 1944, upon his return to Italy not in 1956, the year of the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress—that Togliatti launched the line of the Via Italiana a! Socialismo...

...At its core was the elevation of interclass and interparty alliances from an occasional to a basic strategic commitment, with all that this implied for braking sectarianism and encouraging internal diversity...

...Yet the circumstances of its birth, development, and current strategy leave the possibility that the party will transcend the classical opposition of Marxism and democracy...

...And by emphasizing successful use of Italy's political institutions, the party has placed a premium on the development of political skills...

...And within a year it was faced with Fascist repression at a time when Moscow did its part by purging radicals from inside the party...

...More likely, however, is the emergence of a new form of hybrid economy and social system, with the Communists developing their efficient cooperatives into a new quasipublic sector as a benchmark for private enterprise and for the DC-controlled state sector...

...It thus faces the paradox of having to maintain Communist collaboration to keep itself in power while the PCI faces the dilemma of having to cooperate with the government to be true to its image of a party of national solidarity...

...The costs of an inflated public sector and poorly organized social services, the government's inability to collect adequate taxes, and the collapse of the service sector under the strains of urbanization, all dragged the economy down still further...

...Out of these three critical periods emerged the core of the PC l's strategy, its attempt to be present everywhere in Italian society even in 54 the backward and culturally hostile South— and active in all of its social and political institutions...

...In the first hypothesis, Communist participation would help the non-Communist parties to reestablish their legitimacy...

...The party's support for constitutional forms and political pluralism has been before the public for some time, has become bolder, and is accompanied by concrete commitments to many population groups that could easily bolt should PCI leaders at some future time return to an orthodox line...

...There even is a chance that new elections, like those of June 1976, would strengthen the DC electorally and renew its leadership of a non-Communist coalition...

...Finally, though it is true that the PCI has not yet demonstrated the commitment to democracy that American policy-makers say is required for its inclusion in an Italian government, how many political parties historically have demonstrated a "commitment to democracy" before they exercised political power...

...The Communists face grave risks: they may fail to arrest Italy's decline, thus puncturing the myth of their legendary efficiency—or may succeed so well that they lose their special character as a Leninist party...

...WHAT IS the historic compromise and how does it relate to the PCI's,dramatic successes of the last two years...

...not revolutionary leaders but creative administrators to oust a venal political class and reform a byzantine bureaucracy...

...These pressures left the PCI stripped of much of its proletarian base, haunted by the mass conversions to Fascism of the 1920s, and under the lasting control of its intellectuals...

...This capacity for theory is a major reason why Italian intellectuals find the PCI so comfortable a place and why the party has kept pace with recent changes in capitalist society...

...It is the essence of a coalition for patronage that it has no friends, only clients...

...No longer the sectarian party it was at its birth, nor the paragon of popular-front tactics it became in the 1930s, the PCI is still not, nor is it ever likely to be, a classical social democratic party...

...This would be the most effective way for Italy to insure the working-class support, the efficiency and discipline, and the policy coherence that the Communists could bring to the government...

...For, truly, the attempt to attract organized Catholics into a "grand coalition...

...PCI Programs and Italian Democracy HOW GENUINE are PCI commitments to moderate social reform, political pluralism, and constitutional government...

...To succeed in the West, a Communist party had to have its own political, cultural, and social reserves and must participate actively in everyday politics...

...There are built-in constraints in such a combination of groups against a simple reversal of the party's commitment to respect the rules of the game...

...And this, I submit, no party of patronage has ever done while exercising a monopoly of power guaranteed by the support of an external actor...

...This included recognizing the unique presence of the Catholic Church in Italy...

...Doctrinally, Italian Catholicism, albeit with some delay, was deeply affected by social Christian doctrines emphasizing both interclass solidarity and the "integral" mission of the Church to suffuse society with Christian values...

...But a coalition for patronage appeals instead to a broad range of supporters of left and right with distributive programs that do not address the collective problems of either class or society...

...More radical programs could lead to a collapse of internal and international confidence, leaving Italy only the East to turn to—a prospect the PCI clearly does not relish...

...Yet, the DC's coalition for patronage lasted a remarkably long time, considering its fragile base and its lack of policy coherence...

...The PCI indeed was the party that profited most by the DC's losses, because the economic crisis silhouetted what the Communists had been claiming to offer all along: not socialism but collective programs to replace the distributive policies of the DC...

...But the Socialists were too divided and too irresponsible to do so, and the Social Democrats were too corrupt and identified with American policy...

...These tensions indeed were at the heart of the party's long organizational crisis during the 1960s, expressed in a steady loss of members, stagnation in the South and in the Catholic Veneto, and in the schism of the militant Manifesto group...

...The PCI is obliged to 57 propose programs that sensible democrats would support because these are the only programs that make sense in Italy's present deep economic malaise...

...b) that PCI gains were mainly caused by the economic crisis and could therefore be countered by funneling further economic aid to Italy and to the DC...

...If one thinks of democracy as a political system that gives free reign to individual initiative and makes policy by distributing public resources through a politicized bureaucracy, then it currently abounds in Italy and would be threatened by PCI accession to power...

...Party leaders are also still cagey on the issue of alternation in power under a future socialist system...

...A curious consequence for a policy that aimed at preserving Italian democracy from totalitarianism...

...With the economic collapse, the DC's 56 political formula also began to erode...

...There are serious risks involved in such an eventuality, but there are opportunities as well...

...And the absence of policy coherence in the DC's patronage system alienated even many who had profited from its largesse...

...Coalition strategies have two dimensions: their social and political breadth and their way of mobilizing supporters—through individual benefits or collective programs...

...The June 1976 election showed that the DC could no longer rule without Communist cooperation...

...Politically, after two decades of clandestine activity, the threat of the left forced the DC to develop reformist programs to appeal to peasants, workers, and the middle class...

...But a sense of historic timing on his part was also important...

...Second, active participation in the political institutions that emerged from the Constitution of 1946...

...Though it has never formally renounced the essentials of Leninist internal practice, the PCI is basically a mass, and not a cadre, party...

...It may be so, but although Italy in 1976 is more backward than other Western democracies, its social groups have a capacity for self-defense that was absent in those cases...

...Something other than international forces must have been at work to explain Berlinguer's lightning success...

...The older middle class—artisans, shopkeepers, and clerks—began to divide into a parasitic state bureaucracy that was loyal to whoever was in power and a productive new middle class that could afford to be more independent...

...It was partly coincidence that he came to power just as the DC's coalition for patronage was collapsing...

...Is this merely a rehash of the "people's democracy" that emerged in Eastern Europe after 1945, replete with "competing" party labels...

...But they are more forthcoming on a commitment to pluralism, in the sense of hammering out public policies from the clash of interests among social groups in parliament...

...And no one is talking about a Communist monopoly of power in Italy backed up by the Red Army...

...The PC1 did not emerge from this crisis until 1973, with "the historic compromise" launched by Party Secretary Enrico Berlinguer—a strategy that is still by no means internalized at every level of the party...

...For these reasons, the current equilibrium is highly unstable and—should it last very long—the careful internal coalition that Berlinguer has mustered in and outside the PCI in favor of his historic compromise might well fall apart...

...The CGIL, the party's trade union affiliate, though combative on the shop floor, is now involved in reunification with the Catholic and Social Democratic labor federations...

...the program of modest structural reforms within the framework of a mixed publicprivate economy...

...Historic Compromise or Historical Crisis...

...Few of the militants of the prewar period are left, and most of the Stalinists were expelled after 1956...

...In the power vacuum of 1945, it fell to a more traditional part of the establishment, organized Catholicism, to take up the threads of political power that had been relinquished by the defunct Fascist regime...

...Did the American Jeffersonian Republicans demonstrate it before 1800, the German postwar SPD before 1966...

...Revived in Italy's postwar conditions, Gramsci's dicta had three main implications for PCI strategy: First, the coming to terms with the regional and local loyalties, the associational traditions and mass culture of a fairly advanced Western society...

...But such an outcome would be risky, at best, and we should have no illusions that it would solve Italy's long-standing economic crisis...

...These changes built a tension into PC1 leadership and strategy, between fulfilling its Leninist mission and the new strategic model's need to attract a large and varied following...

...Yet, dependence on the Church and the surviving power of the former Fascist bureaucracy prevented the DC from effectively implementing such programs and so it never became a modern bourgeois party...

...There is a good chance of its emerging, however, from a long-term encounter between the PCI, the non-Communist left, and a Christian Democracy that has shown no inclination to renew itself other than through the threat of losing power...

...While hardly autonomous spirits, even in the 1930s, they would give the PCI a capacity for theory-building later, when parties like the French CP were under the control of pliable militants of mainly working-class extraction...

...As in America under the Jacksonians and in the France of the Third Republic, the allocation of resources to client groups and localities took the place of fashioning policies for collective services...

...The risks to Italian democracy are more difficult to predict...

...There is little doubt that the PCI does not wish to make a radical break with the current social system...

...The leadership encourages more internal debate than is customary in other Communist parties and allows substantial autonomy to local and provincial organizations...

...The Current Crisis & American Policy WHAT OF the future of Italian politics...

...In Italy, collaboration between the Communist, the Catholic, and the non-Communist left Resistance movements was great, having an important imprint on the PCI, even during the harsh years of the Cold War...

...Just as it is an illusion to suppose that only the economic crisis is the source of PCI gains, so it is equally vain to suppose that Italy's anarchic pattern of modernization—the real source of Communist support—could be corrected by the current ruling party unless it radically transformed itself from a party of patronage to a party of program...

...Its monocolore government, led by Giulio Andreotti, depends on the PCI's passive support in order to remain in power...

...Berlinguer's new line came hard upon two international events that helped mobilize party support behind him: the fall of the Allende government in Chile and the explosion of the worldwide economic and energy crisis...

...In recent months, open disagreement has surfaced between PCI leaders and Luciano Lama, the CGIL's general secretary, on the issue of a future incomes policy...

...not popular democracy but the implementation of the Constitution of 1946 in a socialist direction...

...If this were to happen, militant elements in the PCI, spurred on by the restlessness of the working class, would push the party into a harder policy...

...The major dilemma is that the DC lacks the political strength to carry out critical reforms without the direct cooperation of the opposition...

...If the PCI's programs had appeared incoherent at the height of the economic miracle, they now seemed a bare minimum to meet the economic and political crisis of the 1970s...

...A theoretical touchstone was Gramsci's notion of the "war of position...

...It can be argued that beneath its bland and modern exterior, the Communist leadership's devotion to democratic practices is belied by an absence of internal democracy...

...These were far more favorable to Communist participation than those of France, where the Communists were more uneasy with parliamentary politics...

...First, and not to be underestimated in a nation of near universal literacy, there is the public record...

...The new republican institutions thus were transformed into a marketplace for distributive policies...

...I would, however, reason somewhat differently...

...The risk in Italy is not, as it was in Eastern Europe after the war, that the Communists are "insincere" in their commitments, but that so many forces would be threatened by their coming to power that they would be forced into older, harsher models of response...

...Whatever the short-range prospects, the long-range ones are for the PCI to build up its current control of local and regional governments into sufficient national power to join a coalition government within five years...

...In the Italian case, there could be a further consequence: the Fascist right might stage a new recovery...

...But if democracy is defined as the hammering out of a collective purpose from the interplay of individual and group interests and its translation into policy through representative institutions, this is not the kind of democracy we find in Italy today...

...Besides, and more important, the PCI's model of arriving at socialism continues to build on Gramsci's and Togliatti's heritage of creating a constituency for structural reform among peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, the middle class, and the intellectuals...

...The radical student and worker revolts of the late 1960s initially caught the PCI off guard...

...Politically, the PCI would have to deepen its acceptance of pluralism in exchange for a lever on policy and a weakening of American influence over Italian foreign policy...

...It would also commit the PCI to make hard policy choices and to share responsibility for the austerity program that all sectors of Italian opinion agree is necessary...

...As Southern peasants moved North their client ties with the DC were broken, and they became available to whatever party could successfully colonize the proletarian dormitories on the edge of the cities...

...It was not inevitable that the PCI would gain from the dissolution of the DC system...

...The revolution had failed in the West, he argued, because the Communist parties of Western Europe tried to use a strategy, the "war of movement," designed for backward Czarist Russia...

...The real question relates to its commitment to political pluralism and constitutional democracy...

...Second, since 1945, the PCI's leadership has undergone a number of major changes...

...but soon the party sought accommodation with the new forces, bringing a generation of younger leaders up from the ranks and accepting a "strategy of reforms" from organized labor...