Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-1991
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Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-1991
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Overview
Gundle focuses on the theme of cultural policy, examining how the PCI’s political strategies incorporated cultural policies and activities that were intended to respond to the Americanization of daily life in Italy. In formulating this policy, Gundle contends, the Italian Communists were torn between loyalty to the alternative values generated by the Communist tradition and adaptation to the dominant influences of Italian modernization. This equilibrium eventually faltered because the attractive aspects of Americanization and pop culture proved more influential than the PCI’s intellectual and political traditions.
The first analysis in English of the cultural policies and activities of the PCI, this book will appeal to readers with an interest in modern Italy, the European left, political science, and media studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822380344 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/04/2000 |
| Series: | American Encounters/Global Interactions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Stephen Gundle is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Italian at Royal Holloway, the University of London.
Read an Excerpt
BETWEEN HOLLYWOOD AND MOSCOW
THE ITALIAN COMMUNISTS AND THE CHALLENGE OF MASS CULTURE, 1943-1991By Stephen Gundle
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2000 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2563-5
Chapter One
The Pen and the SwordPolitics, Culture, and Society after the Fall of Fascism
Far more than at any time in the years that followed, the framework of Italian political life was subject to change and redefinition between 1943 and 1947. The years of the struggle for Liberation and postwar reconstruction saw the interplay of many possible visions of national development, by no means all of which were compatible with the restoration of a moderate set of arrangements in the country. One of the most powerful visions was articulated by the Communist Party, which during this period of transition came to occupy a position of unprecedented prominence. The earliest organizer of an armed resistance, the PCI was also the first party to signal its willingness to participate in a government of national unity in 1944 and the force that most easily won a mass following among the workers and some sections of the peasants. That it was able to insert itself so decisively into the life of the country after an absence of almost twenty years bore witness to how the party successfully interpreted widespread hopes and aspirations. Naturally, it was most closely associated with classconflict and uncompromising confrontation with employers and with the Fascists and their supporters. But it was also practical in the way it took up and aimed to resolve problems. It tried to be flexible, adapting its politics and organizational forms to social groups not usually incorporated into left-wing activities. Most importantly, the party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, struggled to impose a new, more national image on the party. The aim, he repeatedly declared, was not to make the revolution or create a Soviet-style regime, but to build a new society in which the bases of a pluralist and representative order would be so firmly established as to rule out any future resurgence of Fascism.
In tandem with this view went an unprecedented emphasis on intellectuals and culture. To an extent not previously witnessed, Togliatti's PCI valorized the role of the intellectual in legitimating social and economic relations. Because the collapse of Fascism was held to have signaled the demise of monopoly capitalism and the historic defeat of the old ruling class, little attention was paid to specific government policies. Instead, every effort was devoted to the struggle to weld together a new, progressive ruling bloc and consolidate its hegemony in society. This involved an unusual involvement with culture.
Before I look at this area in detail, it may first be useful to consider why it was that the PCI, and Togliatti in particular, attached so much importance to action in an area that, by any usual standard, was rather remote from the pressing tasks at hand. Although the cultural policy of the party in the immediate postwar years, and in particular its relationship with the intellectuals, has been the subject of much debate in Italy, it is rarely appreciated that a well-directed strategy aimed at achieving a hegemonic position within national thought and culture was virtually without precedent in the history of the European working-class movement. To be sure, the party's intervention resembled the stance adopted by the French Communists during the Popular Front, with Togliatti on occasion employing the same language as Maurice Thorez did eight years previously, but in its aims and articulation the policy of the PCI was infinitely more ambitious.
The PCI leader, like much of the Italian intelligentsia, viewed the realm of culture as a vital sphere in the construction and maintenance of a social order. Intellectuals were, as Togliatti would repeat on more than one occasion, the "connecting tissue" of the nation. Thus on the eve of the collapse of Fascism and in the period of transition that followed, their attitude became central. From July 1943 Togliatti appealed to them directly in radio broadcasts from Moscow. If they placed themselves at the service of the fatherland and spread word of the coming liberation in schools, offices, factories, the army, the universities, and families, he declared, they would win recognition before the nation and perform their natural leadership function. The vital importance of their role was again stressed in April 1945 when Togliatti drew attention to the considerations on this theme contained in Gramsci's prison notes. "The intellectuals," he explained, "can orient the development of this state in one way or in another depending on whether they serve the reactionary, egotistical, nationalistic, and imperialistic castes, which can do nothing but carry Italy along the road to ruin, or whether rather, by modifying their orientation, they offer support to a solid alliance with the working class, with the working masses of the cities and the countryside and collaborate with these in the construction of a new society."
During this chapter I suggest that, although the emphasis on cultural and ideological struggle perfectly suited some of the objectives of the PCI leadership, it did not adequately express the demands for structural renewal that were widespread in the country. The problem was not simply that the collaboration of the working class in the reconstruction was by no means as indispensable as was widely thought, but that the means by which the party proposed to forge its hegemony were at least partially outdated. The role of the traditional intellectual in legitimating social arrangements had not been superseded in Italy, but it had already begun to be undermined by the extended functions taken on by the state in the interwar years and the emergence of strategies of integration typical of mass society that would rapidly become the norm in successive years. The PCI's failure to take account of these developments weakened its action in crucial ways.
Togliatti and the Strategy of the PCI
When Palmiro Togliatti set foot on Italian soil for the first time in eighteen years on 27 March 1944, the positions of the main contenders for power in the peninsula were already well defined. Following the Allied landing in Sicily in July 1943 and the tumultuous workers' protests in the North the previous spring, Mussolini had been deposed, and his position as prime minister had been taken by the military veteran Marshal Badoglio, whose task it was to confine pressures for change within the contours of a flexible, but nevertheless relatively strict, continuity. Badoglio abolished the Fascist Party and began secret negotiations with the Allies, which eventually resulted in the proclamation of the armistice on 8 September 1943. In response to the betrayal of their former ally, the Germans occupied the North and Center of the country, recuperating Mussolini in the process and installing him at the head of a puppet administration, the Italian Social Republic, based in Salò. Italy thus found itself divided in two. In the liberated zones of the South, Badoglio and the king, having fled the capital on the eve of the armistice, basked in the protection of the Allies and offered at least the semblance of continuity in constitutional authority while the democratic parties began to regroup and prepare for a process of political transition. In the North, the German occupiers and their Fascist collaborators imposed a vicious regime of control, challenged by a nascent Resistance movement that expanded rapidly in 1944 and would ultimately help liberate the towns and cities of the Po valley in spring 1945.
Togliatti had been delayed somewhat in his efforts to return to Italy, and by the time he reached Naples the PCI had already begun to re-form. Nevertheless, following a meeting of the party's national council on 30-31 March, he was able to overturn the line of conduct followed by the Communists up to that point and recast the party's approach to the whole question of Italian political development after Fascism. In a shift of policy that would become known as the svolta di Salerno, Togliatti stressed the need for absolute priority to be accorded to a united war effort against the Germans and the Fascists. The resolution of all other matters, including the question of the monarchy, could be postponed until the end of the war.
The sensitivity to intermediate goals and alliances was a constant feature of Togliatti's politics. In response to the consolidation of Nazi power in Germany he had elaborated the moderate platform adopted in striking contrast with the previous uncompromising line at the seventh Comintern congress in 1935 and that found a natural extension in the subsequent formation of the European Popular Fronts. Even before this, in the second half of the 1920s, he had embraced the view that the middle classes needed to be won to democracy before there could be any hope of advancing to socialism. The tragic experience of Fascism taught him before many of his colleagues in the international Communist movement that a democratic bourgeois state was infinitely preferable to an authoritarian one and that disunity on the left could only lead to defeat.
The svolta and the related insistence on the avoidance of revolutionary confrontation were justified by reference to Antonio Gramsci, a former leader of the party whose death shortly after his release from prison on health grounds had provoked an international outcry in 1937. In 1943-44 few people in Italy had any recollection of who Gramsci was. Many of the several thousand mostly young militants who belonged to the PCI's clandestine network were unfamiliar with his name, and no one beyond Togliatti's immediate circle knew of the existence of the notebooks Gramsci had written between the late 1920s and the early 1930s. There thus existed an enormous margin of discretion as to how Gramsci and his ideas were presented. That the party leader should have chosen to address the question in a way that conformed to his own political outlook is not surprising. But the very careful manner in which a highly partial and in some respects distorted image of the figure of Gramsci was employed should nonetheless be mentioned. The motivation for this was as much internal as external, since at no point did Togliatti totally dominate the PCI in the way, for example, that Thorez controlled the PCF. In marked contrast with most other European Communist parties, the PCI had escaped full Stalinization in the 1930s, and the party chief was obliged to mediate between the various components of a strikingly heterogeneous leadership in order to win support for his line. This meant that a sound and absolutely unimpeachable justification was required for the new policies that were advanced from March 1944.
This was all the more important because the party itself constituted the first terrain of change. From almost the very start, the need to refound the PCI as a "new party" on different bases from those on which it had originally been founded in 1921 was stressed. In Togliatti's design, experienced cadres schooled in a harder, less compromising variety of Communism than that on offer in the mid-1940s still had a role to play, but it was not to such men that he looked to turn the idea of the new party into a living reality. Shortly after he resumed full powers of leadership, Giorgio Amendola, Mauro Scoccimarro, Celeste Negarville, Girolamo Li Causi, and others who had determined policy in his absence were dispatched to the regions in order to supervise activities on the ground in the closing months of the war. In their place Togliatti installed a number of handpicked young men of an educated middle-class background in strategic positions in the PCI apparatus. The Neapolitans Italo De Feo and Massimo Caprara were brought into his private office, the latter becoming his personal secretary. Following the liberation of Rome in June 1944, Pietro Ingrao, Mario Alicata, Paolo Bufalini, Fabrizio Onofri, Antonello Trombadori, and Carlo Salinari, to name but the most prominent, were appointed to departments of the party organization, the staff of the Communist press, the leadership of the Roman federation of the PCI, and the central committee. Although some had already participated in acts of armed resistance, the most important quality they possessed was that they were unaffected by the previous history of Italian Communism and uncontaminated by contact with the more Bolshevik sections of the party.
The role of these young men, all of whom had come into contact with communism in the late 1930s or during the war years, has to be seen in relation to the overriding need to redesign the party profile at the very highest level and thus make it much more difficult for those who opposed the moderate political line to suggest radical alternatives. As almost the only member of the PCI old guard to feel completely at ease with ideological and cultural issues, Togliatti had little difficulty in establishing his preeminence in this field. Combined with his privileged access to Gramsci's legacy of ideas, this expertise ensured that the cultural policy of the PCI in the postwar years was, much more even than its politics, Togliatti's personal fief. It was the field in which his domination was least vulnerable, the control center from which he sought to orient the party as a whole.
At first Gramsci was presented simply as a martyr in order to highlight the price the party had paid in its long opposition to Fascism. "The best of all of us, Antonio Gramsci, died in prison, tortured and driven to an untimely end by Fascist beasts on the express orders of Mussolini," Togliatti declared in his first public speech following his return. In the months that followed, however, a more precise image was furnished. In a speech delivered in Naples toward the end of April 1945 that was of fundamental importance in framing the image of the postwar PCI, Togliatti referred to Gramsci as the founder and head of the party. In this way he provided a version of its history that canceled the decisive role of Amedeo Bordiga, the sympathizer of Trotsky who materially founded the party in 1921 and led it until he was removed at the behest of the International in 1924. To stress further the connection between his own leadership and the man who in practice led the PCI for just two brief years between 1924 and 1926, Togliatti also implied that Gramsci had continued to inspire the party even after his imprisonment. "In the face of grave difficulties," he said, party cadres struggled to keep in touch with their spiritual leader in the 1930s, receiving from him "words that were a cry, that illuminated our path before us." In general terms this was hardly true, but Togliatti also made a specific claim that was of particular importance as far as his own policies were concerned. Just a few days before his death, Togliatti said, Gramsci "communicated to us ... that the struggle of the working classes and of our vanguard party should, in the period of Fascism's final demise and even after, be a national struggle if we wanted the working classes and the people to fulfill the function demanded of them in the history of our country and of humanity." Whatever the importance attached to the national point of departure in the prison notebooks, and it was by any measure considerable, the particular suggestion that advice was issued to the PCI in March or April 1937 concerning its future conduct was entirely false. As Giuseppe Fiori's biography of Gramsci revealed over two decades later, there was no attempt to contact the party in the last few days of his life or any attempt by the party to make contact with him.
This is not to say that the connection between Gramsci and Togliatti was not a strong one or that the latter was not influenced by the prison notebooks. The point, rather, is that a manipulation of the party's past took place in order to underwrite a new line that was potentially far from popular with party militants. Although Togliatti possessed sufficient authority to convince members of the PCI's national council of the need to pledge support for the Badoglio government, resistances to the policy persisted at all levels. This made it difficult for him to carry through effectively the reform of the party itself that was the direct corollary of the assumption of national responsibilities. Every argument that could be deployed in its support was therefore grasped, and, where these were lacking, reasons were improvised or invented.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsList of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter One: Between Hollywood and Moscow
Politics, Culture, and Society after the Fall of Fascism
Chapter Two: Bread, Love, and Political Strife
Cold War Communism and the Development of Cultural Policy
Chapter Three: What’s Good for Fiat is Good for Italy
Television, Consumerism, and Party Identity in the 1950s
Chapter Four: From Elvis Presley to Ho Chi Minh
Youth Culture and Cultural Conflict Between the Centre Left and the Hot Autumn
Chapter Five: Crisis, Austerity, Solidarity
The Question of Hegemony in the 1970s
Chapter Six: Welcome to Prosperity
Economic Growth and the Erosion of Left-Wing Culture
Chapter Seven: The Last Tango
The Collapse of Communism and the Dissolution of the PCI
Conclusion
Bibliography
What People are Saying About This
Stephen Gundle's book is a highly original contribution to our knowledge of the culture and politics of modern Italy, combining as it does theoretical sophistication with extensive empirical research.-—(Paul Ginsborg, Universita degli Studi di Firenze)
Between Hollywood and Moscow makes an original contribution to the study of the PCI and post-war Italy in general from a cultural point of view, and reveals the importance of specific cultural strategies and transformations in the political history of the PCI.—-(John Dickie, University College, London)
“Gundle’s analysis is well documented and persuasively argued.”
Between Hollywood and Moscow is an outstanding work that treats the effects of modernization and the development of a mass consumer society in Italy in an original and illuminating manner. It restores a sense of the importance of culture as an integral part of political strategizing and communicates the shifting meanings of culture over four decades of Italian history.-—(Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University)