COMMENTS: The Italian CP Debates Its Future
Barkan, Joanne
With a sigh of relief, the Italian Communist party (PCI) laid to rest the "Soviet Question" in the early 1980s. For more than two decades, the leadership of this massive party (29.9 percent...
...These provisions are typical of other West European countries...
...But the leadership has never made this fact explicit simply because the membership still hopes for a different and better society, historically called socialism...
...it has seen important social movements—the peace and women's movements in particular—founder...
...Outside the party, reaction to the proposal was strong...
...PCI leaders have been meeting with their counterparts in the northern parties...
...This is the difficult terrain out of which the debate on the PCI's identity grows...
...Even efforts to rationalize the economy a bit or to carry out an investigation run into obstacles...
...With 29.9 percent of the vote, the PCI can't hope to enter the national government without coalition partners...
...Lanfranco Turci, the 45-year-old president of the Emilia-Romagna regional government, fueled the debate last August with an article in Wnita, the PCI's daily...
...Outside the PCI, skeptics did not expect the debate to clarify the party's identity...
...The miglioristi are not a unified group...
...Giorgio Galli, a well-known political commentator, argued that the debate over whether the PCI should adapt to capitalism or try to go beyond it was not real...
...In the accompanying story, he was hailed for giving the PCI a concrete political project, for keeping the precongress debate open, and for responding to the crisis of the Republic...
...For most observers, the central committee vote was another example of how the leadership rallies around the bureaucratic center in order to hold the party together, rather than deciding the questions that divide the PCI...
...Will it be easier to regain strength if it is a transformer of capitalism or just a modernizer...
...WHY THEN SHOULD A PARTY as seemingly sophisticated and well-established as the PCI recapitulate this old debate...
...Just three years later, the PCI is preparing for another congress with yet another highly publicized debate...
...This document reaffirmed both the critique of the Soviet Union and the PCI's commitment to Western Europe...
...But to do that they will need much more support than they now have—support based on broader cross-class alliances...
...For more than two decades, the leadership of this massive party (29.9 percent of the vote in the 1983 parliamentary elections) had been gingerly stepping away from the Soviet Union and reinforcing its doctrine of independent, national roads to socialism...
...After the fuoriuscitisti/ miglioristi conflict caught the attention of the press, PCI leaders tacitly agreed to avoid a polarizing argument that would lead to a vote on that question...
...A few even advocate dropping the name Communist and joining the Socialist International...
...If the party becomes accepted in the "mainstream" West European left, more channels will open...
...Moreover, the Communists are not expanding their electorate...
...According to Turci, the only other choice is social democracy, with all its limitations and periodic crises...
...Galli believes that, in practice, a majority of the PCI would accept the loyal management of capitalism as the party's task...
...Italian governments are increasingly unproductive because of the large number of squabbling parties in parliament...
...What was seen in Italy as the definitive break between at least the leadership of the PCI and the Soviet Union came in December 1981 when the PCI executive committee passed a resolution declaring that the "phase of socialist development that began with the Russian Revolution of 1917 has exhausted its driving force...
...Yet, as formulated, even the truncated fuoriuscitisti versus miglioristi debate managed to skirt the most important issue...
...Thus Ingrao, who is a leader of the fuoriuscitisti, has managed to break away from the stale left/right dichotomies within the party...
...Or should it be a loyal reformer of capitalism...
...The governo costituente will probably be discussed at the PCI's congress...
...Ultimately, they argue, the left will succeed in implementing an alternative model (no one is very comfortable using the word socialism) only when there is a united Europe that can steer a course independent of the Soviet Union and the United States...
...They cannot build up that support and those alliances unless they have attractive, believable programs...
...This debate captured extensive media coverage, and, as always in Italy, a new set of catch words was spawned...
...It also called for a governo di programma (a coalition government formed around a programmatic agreement), but it did not specify what that program might be or which parties could concur on a program...
...A pro-Soviet amendment to the official document prepared for the PCI's 16th Congress in March 1983 occasioned a party-wide survey...
...One disgruntled PCI leader summarized a widespread negative reaction to this part of the document when he said it simply used the words new, renewal, and renovation to cover over "uncertainties, imprecisions, vague and generic ideas...
...The goal would be to develop in Italy a two-party or two-coalition system...
...The "in-or-out-of-capitalism" debate is an old one...
...Fewer than 5 percent supported it...
...there will be more access to the international media...
...The PCI's research institutes have been organizing joint conferences with West German, British, Swedish, and other West European socialists to discuss common problems...
...Why now...
...The Italian Communists are in a bind...
...The PCI is expanding its contacts within the Socialist International...
...More than other PCI leaders, Ingrao has been able to use the dilemmas of his party to fashion a clear-cut political choice, one that is radical in its own way and risky...
...On the front page of PUnita, this unequivocal rejection of the Third Way strategy—a strategy that had shaped the PCI's postwar identity—was noteworthy...
...Even if a conservative bloc won, reasoned Ingrao, the left would be better able to play its role of parliamentary opposition, and, most important, the left would have a chance of being voted into office in the future with enough strength to pass its program...
...The nagging doubts dispelled, the party could presumably get on with other tasks...
...After two years, elections would be held...
...Ingrao proposed a two-year governo costituente (constituent government) made up of all the legitimate, democratic parties, which would rewrite the sections of the constitution dealing with government structure and the electoral system...
...Changes would probably include granting the party with a relative majority additional seats in parliament and/or setting a minimum of 5 percent of the vote for parliamentary representation...
...Although the party's share of the vote fluctuates a bit from election to election, there may even be an overall tendency toward decline from the high of 34.4 percent reached in 1976...
...Ingrao's photo filled the cover of the most influential newsmagazine in Italy, L'Espresso...
...In Italian political code, this meant that the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries were not seen as revolutionary socialist societies or as progressive models...
...150 The PCI's precongress debate unexpectedly focused attention on this problem...
...If resolving the question means splitting the party, most of the leadership would prefer to live with ambiguity...
...This alternation characterizes most of the European countries where there are strong social democratic parties...
...In actuality the PCI, wrote Galli, has adapted for decades...
...At its December 1985 meeting, the central committee voted overwhelmingly to adopt the document produced by a special commission for the April 1986 congress...
...Yet the only potential collaborator, the PSI, has been bent on isolating the PCI...
...The intellectuals and PCI leaders behind these efforts include, among others, both Pietro Ingrao and various miglioristi...
...To those who argue that both are necessary steps, with social democratization preceding radicalization, observers within and outside the PCI respond that the party has developed neither identity adequately and certainly has not clarified the links between them...
...But they all agree that the PCI must give up its old rhetoric and schemas to become Italy's true reformist party...
...The critics are probably correct...
...But regardless of the PCI's record, Craxi's PSI prefers to set up coalitions with other centrist parties rather than govern locally with the PCI...
...Should the PCI commit itself to getting out of the capitalist system and building a radically different society...
...At the December central committee meeting, Pietro Ingrao, a respected elder statesman of the party's left wing, presented an alternative to the secretariat's document...
...Party leaders afraid of losing everything—identity, name, votes, local government positions—may opt to clarify nothing...
...That argument split the PSI...
...Mediocre performance in some locales lost the Communists votes in 1980 and 1985...
...There are others...
...The PCI has been unable to prevent defeats of the labor movement...
...They represent various generations and wings of the party...
...One question continued to nag at PCI leaders: how much pro-Soviet sentiment was there at the base of the party...
...INGRAO'S PROPOSAL received only ten favorable votes and twelve abstentions among the more than 200 central committee members...
...Critics say that if the PCI were given responsibility for Italy's government tomorrow, it would not know what to do...
...The PCI's ability to withstand and maneuver around the opposition would then depend on the depth and breadth of the support for its program...
...At first the debate churned around two questions...
...Again, the old right/left rigidities are breaking down...
...And program is precisely where the Communists are weak...
...Already vindicated are the skeptics who predicted that the precongressional debate would fail to clarify the party's identity...
...In office, they would face the opposition of the capitalist class and of Italy's many middle-class groups and special interests, all fearing for their privileges...
...Turci and those who side with him argued that both the Leninist notion of socialist revolution and the "Third Way" strategy (based on structural reforms and, more recently, incorporating social movements such as feminism, the peace movement, and "green" culture) are chimeras...
...With the Christian Democratic party much weaker than it was in the early postwar period, every coalition is more and more dependent on the support of small willful parties representing entrenched interests...
...Social democracy refers here to the large reformist parties in Northern Europe that are fully accepted in their political systems, have led coalition governments, and have loyally managed—and sometimes reformed—capitalism...
...For this reason, popular sentiment has been growing over the last decade for a change in the proportional representation system...
...No coalition—right, center, or center-left—is able to agree on a legislative program...
...THERE IS ANOTHER PROBLEM...
...In the end, the discussion of the PCI's identity and project may fizzle out...
...it has watched almost helplessly as Prime Minister Bettino Craxi of the PSI appropriates the title of reformer and modernizer, although his government has yet to pass significant reforms...
...Interestingly enough, his proposal would probably bring about the alternation of conservative and progressive blocs in government that has been the goal of many Communist miglioristi...
...But his support is much greater at the base of the party, where his idea will be brought up again...
...Everyone involved agrees that more cooperation within the European left is needed to develop adequate programs...
...Still, something is rumbling in this political colossus...
...They cannot hope to maintain their constituency unless they get a chance to enter the government and implement reforms of some kind...
...This resembles the attitude it once adopted on the Soviet question...
...Its ambiguous identity has become too uncomfortable...
...Tens of thousands of members voted on the amendment...
...The fuoriuscitisti (those who would go beyond capitalism) were pitted against the miglioristi (those who would improve capitalism...
...Italians put it this way: Democracy is blocked...
...contacts in the United States might be broadened...
...This is a promising sign...
...q 151...
...The PCI has been turned out of almost all the local, provincial, and regional governments that it won in 1975...
...A sizeable minority would not...
...The congress was called to clarify the identity, role, and political line of a party disoriented by the sudden death of Secretary Enrico Berlinguer in 1984...
...it has failed to attract young people, so that the Communist youth section has many fewer members now than it claimed ten years ago...
...The likely answer is that the PCI, like a crippled giant, has spent almost six years languishing on the sidelines of Italian politics...
...Perhaps it will erupt in time to help revitalize the European left...
...As Galli points out, the dozens of precedents include not only Eduard Bernstein and the orthodox German Marxists at the end of the last century, but also the discussion within the Italian Socialist, party (PSI) in the early 1960s over 149 whether to enter a coalition government with the Christian Democrats...
...Stranded in opposition, the party must decide what to do next...
Vol. 33 • April 1986 • No. 2
