ITALIAN COMMUNISTS & THE GRAMSCIAN TRADITION
Adamson, Walter L.
These [Social Democratic] parties have lost power in Britain and risk losing it in Germany; indeed, they have lost ground more or less everywhere and, in several countries ... suffer from...
...to imagine it on any of the Eastern-bloc models is, for them, a sham...
...Questioned as to what they meant, the Gramscians of the left could always fall back on the politics of the Turin workers' councils of 1919-20...
...This two-sided experience made a deep and lasting impact on its collective outlook...
...The failure of Western revolutions after the war, he argued, was connected to their tendency to ape the Bolshevik model...
...Neither claims Swedish or German social democracy as a model, but both offer nothing, even by way of hints, as to the difference between their outlooks and social democrats elsewhere...
...Socialism, argues Napolitano, may well mean extensive use of market mechanisms, roughly in the manner, one gathers, of the social democratic regimes that postWorld War II Europe has already witnessed...
...All this changed with Togliatti's denunciation of the Soviet party after its Twentieth Congress in 1956...
...We read only that Communists struggle for "far-reaching" reforms and that they hold fast to "the goals of transformation...
...Socialism, for the Gramscians of the right, and above all for their leading economic spokesman Giorgio Napolitano, does not mean nationalization of all the major industries and centralized planning on the Eastern model...
...Amendola's approach, he declares, "can only produce bewilderment and disheartenment...
...Given the bankruptcy of East European "socialism," to take anything other than some form of social democracy as a starting point would indicate not only a false sense of the possible but also of the desirable...
...Thus he is driven to affirm, at least with passing references and vague hints, some of what the left Gramscians have always advocated...
...Like the Gramsci of those years, they insist in principle on a strong counterhegemonic thrust through institutions— workers' councils, cooperatives, cultural associations— in which new political and cultural modes can be actively spawned and nurtured...
...This shows that in and by themselves, the Social Democratic parties are not even capable of providing an effective dike against conservative and reactionary comebacks, let alone of building solutions that move in the direction of socialism...
...And yet here in Italy, we have .. . people...
...His politics, I am suggesting, are bound up in the same contradictory movement that Gramsci's were, however great the differences in their respective historic milieus...
...The second innovation is perhaps even more surprising...
...Gramsci saw the latter dimension as dominant in the short term...
...To imagine 231 democracy solely as a network of workers' councils is, for them, utopian...
...In the last years before his death in June 1980, Amendola argued that current union policies of pushing for index-linked wages that fuel inflation and of failing to stop increasing violence in the workplace could lead to the bankruptcy of Italy and force the PCI to fall back on a pro-Soviet and ultimately totalitarian position...
...A proper strategy here would necessarily be predicated on a slow wearing-down of those superstructures...
...the other would emerge as significant only very much later, after a long period of cultural and political incubation...
...While leftist charges of "selling out to social democracy" could be answered by noting that the late Gramsci himself had recognized the utopianism of a return to 1919, it was obvious that a fuller defense of the PCI's electoral strategy was required...
...WITH BERLINGUER'S now dominant faction we have, I think, a more complicated story...
...Deprived of all the easy answers that a pro-Soviet policy allowed, the party split along left/right lines...
...We are left, they say, with the institutions we have, and we must make them serve socialist ends, even if today they do not...
...suffer from internal divisions and cleavages...
...Berlinguer's politics, then, are an uneasy oscillation between pragmatic accommodation to difficult economic circumstances and visions of longrun "goals of transformation," which, while vague, seem to be genuinely held...
...a strategy and tactics altogether more complex and long-term...
...Berlinguer's embrace of Napolitano's ideas about market socialism and his rejection of extensive nationalization and centralized planning are hardly suggestive of anything more left-leaning than social democracy...
...WITHIN THIS BROAD, tension-filled, and temporally vague perspective, we may distinguish two major tendencies...
...The contemporary "Gramscians of the left," on the other hand, are those like Pietro Ingrao and Bruno Trentin, as well as the leaders of parties to the left of the PCI, like Lucio Magri, whose politics remain significantly informed by the 1919-20 experience...
...During the first three decades of Palmiro Togliatti's tenure as chairman, the need for a defensive strategy was so readily evident that questions about the PCI's program seldom required hard answers...
...The answer, I think, depends on making a basic distinction within this admittedly very crude category I have been using: the Gramscians of the right...
...Yet as his replies to Amendola's call for workingclass belt-tightening and "sacrifices" make clear, a Communist party without some sort of larger ideological vision is bound to lose popular support...
...The first was to turn necessity into a virtue by arguing that parliamentary democracy and the multiparty system it presupposes are not merely "bourgeois" contrivances, or cloaks for bourgeois domination, but integral aspects of all democracies, socialist as well as capitalist...
...Gradually, over the past two decades, the Gramscians of the right have developed such a defense by means of two fundamental and, I think, quite surprising innovations, in view of what communism has generally meant in this century...
...Amendola and Lama have disagreed on how this ought to be done...
...Should we conclude, then, as many have, that the PCI, except for its most ardent left Gramscians, has become a party of social democrats...
...In the present, post-1973 period, its problems are acute and its viability is deeply in question...
...I would designate as "Gramscians of the right" those, like the late Giorgio Amendola, who insist on broad-based electoral and ruling coalitions as the major avenue open for the formation of alliances among all sectors of the popular masses, and who stress the need for the social and economic stabilization of Italy prior to "reforms" of any sort...
...But both focus all their attention on breadandbutter politics...
...I would also suggest that Berlinguer's dilemma is like the one that confronts all sensible elements of the Western left today...
...For while one reads, for example, about the importance of Italian participation in the European Economic Community, about the "major moments" in recent "parliamentary life," "the youth question," and "welfare and pension policy," nowhere does one find any discussion of such traditional Communist policies as the nationalization of industry, centralized economic planning, or a "dictatorship of the proletariat...
...Though even the most radical among them lowered their sights in the 1970s, they all agree that to ignore base-building entirely, in favor of establishing broad-based electoral coalitions, would be to incorporate the left into the existing hegemony and to impair perception of what is distinctive about a socialist alternative...
...And since Togliatti did not share Gramsci's doubts about the course of Soviet internal and foreign policy after 1928, when the question of "what socialism really means" did arise, it could be answered with a nod in the direction of the Soviet Union...
...This model had worked in Russia, which was politically underdeveloped, but it would not work in Central and Western Europe, where the much more complex and massive "political superstructures created by the greater development of capitalism . . . make the action of the masses slower and more prudent and therefore require...
...Yet the casual reader of the rest of his report might be forgiven for not having divined this antipathy...
...Yet it is equally obvious that social democracy not only represents a significant compromise of traditional aims of the left, such as equality, political self-governance, and a nonalienating culture—but that it may not even be viable except in periods when capitalism is experiencing relative prosperity and growth...
...Their situation, obviously, was no longer that of defense against an aggressive fascism...
...232...
...The image is, of course, subject to different interpretations by the various PCI factions, but more than anything else it is also what holds them together...
...So remarked Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the Italian Communist party (Partito Comunista Italiano—PCI), in a recent report to its Central Committee...
...And those references we find to a more than social democratic politics tend neither to be very thoroughgoing nor very precise...
...Gramsci, who spent most of 1922 and all of 1923 in Russia as the PCI's representative to the Communist International, began to outline his theory by early 1924...
...Lama, who proposed a policy of union self-restraint in 1976, now argues that Amendola underestimated the difficulty of getting millions of workers to accept "sacrifices...
...Such a strategy would mean building socialist institutions in the present (like the workers' councils of Turin in 1919-20), and it would also have to incorporate a cautious, realist dimension of class alliance and compromise, of political accommodation and restraint...
...One faction among them, led once by Amendola and now by Luciano Lama and rooted in the trade union movement, is centrally concerned with the economic fate of the workers: how to help them keep pace with inflation, how to humanize the workplace so as to overcome the conflicts that increasingly plague it, and so forth...
...Born in 1921, after three years of the most intense revolutionary activity Italy (and Europe) experienced in this century, the PCI had to switch almost immediately to a defensive struggle against fascism...
...For a long time after Gramsci's arrest and imprisonment no such left/right division was apparent...
...Whatever the differences between the Italy and the PCI of the early Fascist and of our own era— and they are obviously substantial—this Gramscian image of "Western revolution" remains the central ideological element of Italian communism...
...230 NOWHERE IS THIS more evident than in the theory of revolution developed by Antonio Gramsci, the PCI's major theoretician and its leader from 1924 until his arrest and imprisonment by Mussolini in October 1926...
...No doubt, Berlinguer has many problems not shared by the left elsewhere in the West, but this, his most fundamental one, appears to be embedded in the present historical situation...
...Despite this evidence, and much more that could be cited, I wish to suggest that Berlinguer's claim to be leading something other than a social democratic party makes sense in terms of his party's unique historical tradition...
...Even the critique of social democracy is voiced in terms of its political weaknesses and recent strategic defeats rather than for its intrinsic undesirability...
...For them the politics of accommodation and class compromise would now necessarily mean the politics of parliamentary electioneering...
...Whether his vision of transformation will someday be enacted as the final act of Gramsci's glacially paced drama of "Western revolution" is, of course, far from clear...
...The Gramscians of the right, however, could no longer refer to a concrete historical model...
...who continue undaunted to urge us to become a Social Democratic party...
...The two paths were not equally easy to defend...
Vol. 29 • April 1982 • No. 2
