The Crisis in Italian Communism

...Obviously, the statements from Italian Communist leaders and militants that I have quoted are important not so much in their own right—for they are "ideological reflections" created by fiat —but as symptoms of the deep crisis that is coursing through the Communist world...

...A militant of the rank-and-file, Armando Sarti, informs us that conformism has also invaded all the discussion held in the section meetings or cell groups, where any vocal criticism must be based on a written memorandum submitted to a preliminary censorship of the leaders, who have a habit of arriving at the end of these meetings with an enormous file of notes under their arms, the thickness of which bears witness to their importance in the Party...

...A Communist writer, Ruggero Zan grandi, defends the "responsible silence" to which he adhered for ten years through Party discipline, which went so far as "accepting an inferior Russian painter (and maintaining, sometimes, in the heat of the polemics, that after all he was not so bad)" or convincing his friends that "the statues of Stalin would not harm anybody and were not even embarrassing...

...When Togliatti decided to show some signs of independence in his Nuovi Argomenti interview, he was trying to satisfy a rank-and-file moven: ent within his own party and at the same time, to head off Nenni s competition...

...First, he criticized the Soviet leaders for having been content to .personalize" the Stalin case, without trying to give it an historical interpretation...

...At which point will the Italian Communist party cut short its pursuit of revisions demanded by its rank-andfile and by a good number of its leaders...

...The, responsibility for the atrocities revealed by the Khrushchev Report falls also on the current Soviet leaders and disqualifies the Soviet regime just as much as it does the single-party system...

...In a series of articles published in the theoretical review of the Socialist Party, Mondo Operario, Nenni has posed some basic problems which are not without embarrassment to Togliatti...

...It is here that Nenni intervenes and asserts that the Communists should have thought earlier about following democratic methods...

...Within the framework of the current perspectives, socialism cannot go forward, in Italy or any other country, except in the direction of maximum democracy...

...Another rank-and-file militant, Marco Bragadin, of the Federal Committee of Lucca, explains that the "double game" to which Togliatti alluded in his Report is necessary, for while the Communists are conducting their "struggle for peace," they know—or knew very well—that "as long as capitalism exists war will be inevitable" and that while they pretend to wish to lead their struggle in a democratic manner they are perfectly aware that "only violence can compel the bourgeoisie to surrender its power...

...Thus Senator Pietro Secchia, former Deputy Secretary of the Party and leader of its "left" wing, deplores in Unita, the party paper, the fact that the Italian Party is controlled by a group "which makes and elaborates the decisions" and then passes them on to a mass of members who are called in only "to approve and apply" whatever has been decided by the leaders...

...Meanwhile, one can affirm that from now on, on the ideological plane, the Socialist Party will tend to detach itself from the Communist party and to look for an entente, if not a unification, with those Socialists who left the party as followers of Saragat in 1947, because they objected to its unity of action pact with the Communists...

...But it is still difficult to foresee whether the Communists are in a position to block this decline...

...August 5, 1956...

...The Party," he writes, "is not and cannot be a school where one teaches its political line to the militants through pedagogic methods...

...Secondly, Togliatti revealed his fear that a period of recurrent crises may be opening up in the Soviet Union and that the convulsions produced by these crises may set the whole Communist movement back by several decades...

...IT IS STILL too soon to judge the effects of the crisis provoked by the 20th Congress on the Italian political structure...

...All quotes from Unita...

...This is the nowfamous notion of polycentrism, a number of parallel centers for the international movement...

...It is almost as if England were suddenly to go Communist and suppress the Crown: the more conservative Dominions would no longer recognize themselves in her...

...Will it, at its 8th Congress, end by checking its crisis through "democratic" reforms of the Party statutes, as seems to be the desire of Togliatti...

...but it is not necessarily the most important one...

...IF THE "LEFT," the intellectuals, and the rank-and-file are fighting for the re-establishment of some democracy within the Party, the "right," in imi tation of Umberto Terracini, former President of the Constituent Assembly, who was thrown out of the Party in 1939 following his criticism of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggresion pact, directly takes up the theme of the dictatorship of the proletariat and tries to draw from it all the advantage it can...

...The Report presented by Togliatti to the Central Committee of the Italian CP on June 24, 1956 completes and to some extent goes beyond this interview...

...So writes Nenni, the ally or former ally of Togliatti...

...In limiting themselves to a condemnation of the "personality cult," the Soviet leaders opened the way to a "revisionism" which not only might cause difficulties for the various national Stalins of the other Communist parties, thereby weakening the ties that bound them to the USSR, but might also entail changes in the Soviet structure of such abruptness and magnitude as to place the foreign Communist parties in the most critical positions...

...At the administrative elections of May 27, 1956, before the publication of the Khrushchev Report, there ocurred a certain turn in the workers' votes from the Communists to the Socialists...

...The Socialists withdrew thirty-six years ago from the Third International precisely for the reasons which today propel the Communists to express some reservations on the subject of Soviet politics...

...Or will it instead have to accept the task of sliding on the dangerous terrain of "ideological revision", if only to bar this road against Nenni...

...and Nenni, for his part, was not hampered by any diplomatic connections to Moscow that might keep him from beating out his friend Tog liatti...

...The Soviet experience raises the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in the USSR became first the dictatorship of a party, then of its leaders, and finally of a mythomaniac...

...They do not concern themselves with following the discussion through its course, but only with controlling the orthodoxy of the result...

...The interview given by Palmiro Togliatti to Nuovi Argomenti (reprinted in the New York Times) is the best-known reaction of Italian Communism to the Khrushchev revelations...

...Velio Spano, former director of Unita and member of Parliament, deals at length with the conformism which dominates the Party and which impels the militants to accept "the positions of the Party without discussing them or feeling the need to understand them...

...The open discussion in the CP press, which is supposed to prepare for the 8th National Congress of the Italian party, poses problems that Togliatti had barely touched upon...

...The Communist deputy Bruno Corbi asserts, for instance, that the plurality of routes to socialism means that "in certain countries and under certain conditions one can avoid revolutionary violence," and that "even the dictatorship of the proletariat is no longer an indispensable goal of the conquest of power...

...Meanwhile, Nenni s polemic has aggravated the embarrassment of the Italian Communists, who find themselves flanked by his Socialist Party, a party that is both "leftwing," and formally independent of Moscow...

...For this reason he feels that the reorganization or realignment of the national Communist parties, which began with the Second World War and led up to the dissolution of the Co mintern, ought from now on to be continued without the guardianship of an unstable center...

...IT IS TRUE that under pressure from Moscow Togliatti subsequently retreated from his apparently bold criticism, but what matters most at the moment is that through the breach opened by his statements the critics of both the "right" and "left" within, the Communist Party found a way for opening an attack on Togliatti's regime...

...The critics of the "left" demand more democracy in the Party, while those on the "right" demand more democracy in the State, openly calling into question the theory of the violent conquest of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...This is why Togliatti in his report to the Central Committee was soon forced to go beyond his formulations in Nuovi Argomenti...

...For once, however, the Communist rank-and-file did not seem disposed to accept skillful dialectical tricks...