Italian Communism's Gamble
SENIGALLIA, SILVIO F.
WAITING FOR BOLOGNA Italian Communism's Gamble By Silvio F. Senigallia Rome The strong winds of dissent blowing southwest from the Baltic shores have reached the Mediterranean. In the wake...
...Occhetto hoped to avoid precisely the sort of acrimonious wrangling that now threatens to split the party by conducting a lowkey, let-us-be-reasonable campaign before the Bologna congress in the form of a "free debate," as he put it, "separated from political action...
...During the '70s the PCI, led by the late Enrico Berlinguer, raised the flag of Euro-communism— an autonomous and greatly softened variation of the Soviet brand...
...Bologna is their ball game to win or lose...
...How would the Secretary's larger designs be affected, it is asked, if after the announcement of a wholly new direction at Bologna the party suffered heavy or even moderate losses in the upcoming May 6 elections...
...They are in no rush to change sides and become Occhetto's junior partner...
...What Occhetto has in mind specifically, though, is still unclear...
...2. It follows that the equation Stalinism = communism is grossly misleading...
...In early March a congresso straordinario (special party convention) is scheduled to be held in the Northern city of Bologna (a traditional stronghold where a Communist mayor has presided for over 40 years...
...Unless crossovers to Bettino Craxi's Socialist Party (PSI) and other defections were held down to less than 2 per cent, therefore, the new party would lack the credibility it needs simply to begin building, let alone lead, a Leftist coalition that might one day oust the reigning Christian Democrats (DC...
...According to recent estimates, at least 75 per cent of the heads of the provincial Communist federations are on Occhetto's side...
...The originality and individuality of the PCI can be denied or overlooked only by those who do not know or understand Italy's history...
...In an interview with the Rome daily La Repubblica, Ingrao, the active head of the fronte del no, went so far as to say: "It will be a fine result indeed when bureaucratic Stalinism is replaced by the colossi of finance, industry and science...
...He apparently wants not merely a new name and symbol, but also a new leadership and restructured operational systems (new is obviously the key word...
...The soul-searching in Italy's Communist Party (PCI) has followed a very different course...
...Craxi's reaction to date has ranged from a somewhat favorable wait-and-see attitude to a sharp remark hinting that the new party may prove to be a new bottle containing old wine...
...The congress will also vote on a resolution introduced by the Secretariat recommending "new strategies, objectives and methods...
...They simply represent a successfully aggressive capitalism's substitution of markets for bureaucracy...
...The last argument is made repeatedly by the hardcore PCI intellectuals who do not want to see the party dissolved...
...The major arguments of the fronte del no (the opposition faction) can be summed up thus: 1. Since the Italian Communists are different (diversi) from Eastern European Communists, they cannot be held responsible for the crimes that have been committed in the countries of the Soviet Empire...
...The DC conservatives, who have traditionally cashed in on antiCommunism, keep voicing pessimism and issuing warnings...
...Then there is the matter of securing thePSI's collaboration, akey element in any effort to end the 45-year-old Christian Democratic supremacy...
...The Socialists have been part of DC governments for over 25 years, and have greatly benefited from the arrangement in terms of prestige and patronage...
...Certainly an electoral setback would not be the right kind of prelude to an ambitious program for uniting Italy's Left...
...The question is a good one...
...He firmly denies that his proposed political formation amounts to an "empty shell, lacking both form and substance, as his opponents in the PCI and some neutral bystanders maintain...
...On French television Romania's new Prime Minister, Petre Roman, recently suggested that Marchais, an unbending boss since 1972, was preventing his party from "carrying out a thorough analysis of its Stalinism...
...As described by Miriam Mafai, a perceptive journalist very close to PCI's inner circles, the transformed political body should represent the "sum of many one-issue parties...
...Faced with the decision to kill the party that has been for years and often decades their political reason for being, many comrades may have a change of heart that will turn today's Yes into a No...
...Not without some measure of rhetoric and vagueness, Occhetto is calling for a Left, including Socialists and progressive Catholics, capable of opposing capitalism by direct participation in the evolution toward democracy taking place throughout the world...
...But there is a pragmatic issue that seems to worry the party's rank and file more than its highbrow battlers like Ingrao...
...The seating of the committee is intended to mark the opening of a transitional phase...
...Tensions within the PCI are already so high, however, that the Secretary's pleas for moderation have been disregarded by both sides...
...Nevertheless, the outcome of what is bound to be an emotionally torrid March congress is hardly a foregone conclusion...
...The bottom line is that the Communists are not getting any support from the outside...
...In addition, Occhetto plans to request that a special committee be appointed to "prepare the party's new path...
...He keeps moving its center of gravity away from the extreme Left, and wants to institutionalize more radical changes...
...It has been said that the party is to become a federation of national and sectoral groups, movements, clubs and leagues concerned with particular issues...
...Democracy and Leninism are not necessarily incompatible...
...But in his haste he failed to reflect on the political connotations of the differences between the Italian and the British labor unions...
...In early January he suggested renaming the PCI the Democratic Labor Party, clearly echoing the British model...
...In France and Portugal, the old-line Communist leaders Georges Marchais and Alvaro Cunhal, respectively, are digging in their heels as criticism mounts from within their ranks...
...4.The events of the past several months in Eastern Europe do not signify a triumph for democratic socialism...
...In the 1989 general elections, the PCI received 26.6 per cent of the total vote...
...Julio Anguita, the Spanish Communist leader—who last October entered a United Left electoral coalition with a group that broke away from the marketoriented ruling Socialists—is struggling to adapt his Marxist convictions to the implications of the democratic revolution in the East...
...As for the DC, its leaders, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and National Secretary Arnaldo Forlani, two shrewd oldtimers, have been guarded in their statements about the PCI maneuvers...
...There, the PCI Secretary has said he will ask the rank and file to give the party a new name, omitting the "Communist" label, and to remove the hammer-and-sickle symbol...
...All of the objections raised by Occhetto's opponents are either ideological or historical in nature...
...His aim is to reconcile a further distancing from the past with fidelity to traditional Leftist principles...
...The men in their 40s who surround the PCI leader speak of a nonbureaucratic, nonideological entity that can maneuver easily in many areas...
...A dispute involving two top-level party members, each of whom tried to exploit the still magic name of Enrico Berlinguer for his own purposes, has dramatically illustrated the extent of the precongressional bitterness...
...In the wake of the sudden and dramatic collapse of the regimes of the Soviet Empire, Western Europe's Communist parties are finding it hard not to draw some sobering conclusions...
...But some prominent left-wing Christian Democrats havesuggestedthat "thenew PCI may end up like a poor imitation of the PSI," and that "Occhetto's opening to the various components of society is old stuff...
...The Eastern European regimes had not been practicing communism according to the Italian definition of the term...
...Almost two decades later the current General Secretary, Achille Occhetto, is convinced that drastic steps must be taken if the party is to remain intellectually and politically active...
...3.Occhetto is in a hurry to drop the Communist label, but he has not yet offered a coherent explanation of what kind of party he wants to build...
...Political commentators here agree that for Occhetto's scheme to have a chance at succeeding, he would have to win the support of at least 25 per cent of the electorate in May...
...Moreover, while the numbers seem to be strongly in Occhetto's favor, those who reject his project as the repudiation of a glorious past and a dangerous political gamble have the advantage of being led by the charismatic leaders of the previous generation—notably Alessandro Natta, Occhetto's predecessor as general secretary, and Pietro Ingrao, the highly respected grand old man of Italian communism...
...Silvto F. Senigallia reports regularly for The New Leader on Italian affairs...
...The notion received only moderate support from the other Western European parties, reluctant to act independently of the Kremlin...
Vol. 73 • January 1990 • No. 2
