Communism in Italy and France

by Donald L.M. Blackmer (Editor), Sidney Tarrow (Editor)

Overview

The contributors to this volume address themselves to the growth, behavior, and prospects of the two largest Communist parties in Western Europe. The book deals in particular with the adaptation of the French and Italian Communist parties to the secular changes in their advanced societies. It emphasizes the different attempts made by each party's leaders to participate actively and fruitfully in parliamentary political systems.

Originally published in 1976.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691607689
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1405
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

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Communism in Italy and France

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By Donald L. M. Blackmer, Sidney T arrow

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10054-8

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CHAPTER 1

Continuity and Change in Postwar Italian Communism

DONALD L. M. BLACKMER

This volume approaches in different ways the evolution and adaptation of the French and Italian Communist parties. Many of the essays report the results of recent empirical research on party organizations and cadres operating in a variety of geographical and institutional settings. Others, including this one, approach the problem from the broader perspective of how the parties as a whole have acted — that is to say, how their leaders have responded to the infinite variety of signals that reach them from the party organization, from the domestic political arena, from the economic and labor fronts, from the international scene. The behavior of top party elites represents, in effect, their net judgment about which of the manifold aspects of a complex environment should, at a given moment, be given the greatest weight. What do they tend to listen to? To what extent do the two parties today listen to the same signals they did over twenty-five years ago when they were "reborn" after the Second World War as mass parties centrally involved in the politics of their respective countries?

My own inclination with regard to the Italian party is to put rather greater weight on elements of continuity than of change. An endless number of relevant changes have of course occurred, in the party itself, in the Italian economy and society, in international affairs. These seem to me of secondary importance, however, compared to certain structural factors that have remained constant throughout the postwar years. The most obvious and decisive of these factors has certainly been the Christian Democratic and Catholic predominance that has kept the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) in a permanent minority position, both politically and socially. Hardly less important has been an international context that, despite significant recent changes in international alignments, has found the Italian government a consistent supporter of the United States and the PCI an equally consistent ally of the USSR. These structural continuities have been powerful enough to set fairly rigid boundaries on the degree of choice or of change open to the PCI, given the basic interests it has sought to protect and promote.

The heart of the issue lies in this last phrase. Can we, without too gross a simplification, identify certain patterns of behavior clear and persistent enough to be designated as basic or permanent interests of the party? I will propose such an interpretive framework and illustrate it from the party's behavior during the postwar era. The illustrative material can be nowhere adequately detailed, but will be more fully developed for the early than for the later years, for two reasons. First, the 1943-1948 period seems to me more crucial for understanding the party's development than is often realized, in that a pattern was established which has in many respects continued down to the present. Second, since the contributions to this book concentrate largely on recent events, it seems especially necessary to draw attention to this critical earlier period.

By the concept of "permanent interests" I intend to convey something a good deal broader than is normally implied by words such as "goals" or "strategies." To discuss a Communist party's evolution in terms of changing goals seems to me a fruitless endeavor, largely because the problem of distinguishing ends from means is virtually insoluble. The distinction turns out to be an essentially subjective one, not open to empirical tests. Debates about whether a party has or has not become "revisionist," that is, whether it has consistently pursued its original goals or has "betrayed" them, can never be resolved since they rest on an appraisal of the intentions of party leaders: in Leninist terms one may make compromises without becoming an opportunist as long as one does not lose sight of the longer-term objectives behind present actions. Strategies are more readily identified than goals, but have too narrow a connotation: they generally refer to the choice of means and ends designed to influence over a period of time the environment in which the party operates. Strategy has an active, positive connotation about it, within which it is difficult to encompass many of the passive or reactive dimensions of party behavior. When the PCI in 1956 supports the Soviet invasion of Hungary, is this best regarded as an aspect of its "strategy"? I find it more useful to think of such behavior as a response designed to protect certain basic party interests, of which domestic strategy, in the conventional sense, is only one.

I will suggest, then, that the PCI's behavior during the postwar period can be understood in terms of its pursuit of three basic interests: (1) development and maintenance of the Communist party itself and its influence over other organizations and groups; (2) search for the political and social alliances that constitute the core of the via italiana al socialismo; and (3) maintenance of a close link with the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement as a whole.

This set of interests comprises three aspects of party behavior — organization, domestic strategy, and international relations — that are generally dealt with under separate headings and only loosely linked to each other. It seems to me analytically advantageous to consider all three aspects within the same framework. Such an approach encourages attention to interactions among the three and to changes over time in their content and relative salience for the party. I am unwilling to argue that any one of these interests has a clear general priority over the others. I do not believe, for example, as some hold to be the case for both the PCI and the Parti Communiste Frarncais (PCF), that allegiance to Soviet interests is in the last analysis the party's top priority. ( For a contrasting view, see Annie Kriegel, Chapter 2 in this volume.) Nor can I accept the opposite contention that the PCI's evident conflicts of interest with the USSR imply that the requirements of its domestic strategy have come to predominate over its international allegiances.

My conception, in general, is that the art of leadership in the PCI has consisted in maintaining a working balance among these three permanent interests and in modifying their content in response to changing external conditions. The most comfortable and productive periods for the party have been those during which there has existed a basic compatibility among these interests — when, that is, they have tended to reinforce rather than conflict with each other. The most difficult and sterile periods have been the ones in which the party was obliged to choose among them, to sacrifice substantially in one realm in order to protect its interests in others. The necessity of maintaining a balance — of never sacrificing completely any one of its basic interests — has also meant that no one of them could be developed to the fullest possible extent. Loyalty to the Soviet Union has been genuine but limited, just as the party's real and serious pursuit of domestic alliances has been constrained by its international ties. As has often been noted, the interplay of such internal tensions or "contradictions" as these has resulted in a political style in which apparent decisiveness has masked an underlying ambiguity of purpose.

I will try to elaborate on this design by looking at the ways in which these interests of the party were expressed and how they interacted in each of the three basic periods of the party's postwar evolution. These periods will for convenience be labeled the phases of participation (1943-1948), of confrontation (1948-1956), and of opposition within the system(1956-present).

The Phase Of Participation (1943-1948)

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Resistance and early postwar years for the PCI. Despite the striking changes that have taken place in Italy and on the international scene, the behavior pattern established by the party at that time has shown remarkable vitality. The choices made between 1943 and 1948 have proved in most important respects to be fundamental strategic choices, not merely tactical responses to a specific set of environmental conditions. 1 The specific content of party behavior has of course changed in important ways; but a pattern of basic values was revealed during this period that seems to me largely valid even today.

During this period both the international and the internal political situations were dominated by a dual alliance: on one level that of the Allied powers with the Soviet Union, and on the other that of domestic anti-Fascist. (or national democratic) forces, in the "people's democracies" as well as in Western Europe. Within this context, PCI strategy — until shattered by the elections of 1948 — was entirely consistent. Since an objectively revolutionary situation did not exist, the party's immediate objective was not socialism but a "progressive democracy" which, by destroying the political and economic vestiges of fascism and introducing structural reforms which would ensure the participation of the masses in the direction of the country, could open the way for a gradual and democratic transition to socialism. The keystone of party strategy was national unity — collaboration between political parties and social classes — for the purpose first of military victory over the Germans and then of economic reconstruction and creation of a democratic political order. The strategy gave first priority to democratization of political life and was premised on Communist participation in government as the legitimate representative of working-class interests.

Within the above strategic context, the PCI sought to maximize three potential sources of strength, all of which had been created or greatly strengthened as a result of its participation in the Resistance movement. These resources were: (1) a capacity for political alliances — the experience of the Resistance and the imperative of close collaboration among anti-Fascist forces of all political shades which it engendered gave PCI leaders and militants a capacity for alliances with forces outside the working class which they had largely lacked before; (2) the party itself, no longer conceived as a semiclandestine cadre organization but rather as the core of a mass following initially attracted by the PCI's organizational capacity and prestige during the Resistance; (3) a strong link to the US S R, one which had always existed but which emerged strengthened from the war as a result of the decisive Soviet contribution to the war effort and the impact of the Stalin myth, then at its apex.

These assets, which came into being in a very specific historical context, would gradually be transformed into what I have termed the permanent interests of the party. For a brief time, as we shall see, all three resources pulled in the same direction and reinforced each other. Then as a result of circumstances that the PCI could do nothing to influence, they began to pull in conflicting directions, creating a state of inner tension that has been a source both of difficulty and of vitality for the party ever since. If the PCI is to attain even its intermediate goal of regaining a share of governmental power, it must discover and exploit a way to allow its three basic assets once again to work in harmony.

It will be necessary first to examine the nature of these three basic party interests as they emerged in the war and early postwar context. I hope at the same time to give some sense of how these interests were rooted in the party's earlier experiences in the difficult years under the Fascist regime.

The Strategy of Alliances

The strategy of collaboration and national unity announced by Togliatti in 1944 implied as a condition for its success the need to construct a system of alliances with other political parties and social groups. Acutely aware of its weaknesses as a minority party in a Catholic, agrarian country with a strong socialist, but democratic, tradition among the relatively small working class, the PCI leadership was constantly preoccupied with the danger of isolation and the need to avoid it by extending political and social alliances beyond the working class. That the urgency of this problem was understood by the leadership even before Togliatti's return from Moscow is clear from Luigi Longo's admonition in September 1943 concerning party policy toward the Committees of National Liberation (CLN), in which a wide range of political groups collaborated: "It is clear ... that all our actions must follow from the necessity of maintaining the unity of the CLN, especially if a break would mean our isolation."

Such an outlook was by no means new to the PCI. The strong subordination of the party's domestic interests to those of the Soviet Union and the consequent acceptance of periodic shifts in the party line had not prevented the gradual development of a preference for a strategy of alliance-building. Since the ouster of Bordiga in 1924, the PCI leadership had tended to favor the goal of working with other socialist and democratic forces toward a transitional democratic system to replace fascism. The alternative objective of working directly for a socialist revolution without passing, at least briefly, through the stage of a bourgeois democratic republic was advanced only reluctantly, under Soviet pressure, and was dropped whenever circumstances allowed. Because his political career came to an end with his arrest in 1926, before the Comintern turned to the left, Gramsci was never obliged to accommodate his own subtle and somewhat ambiguous views on this issue to the radical formulas emanating from Moscow. Togliatti was not so fortunate in that respect, but the pattern of his relations with the Comintern and the USSR left no doubt as to his position; he was under severe attack in 1929 and again in 1937, when the major shifts to the left were accomplished, and he reached the pinnacle of his Comintern career between 1934 and 1936, the years of the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War, in which interclass alliances and united front governments were being sought as transition stages to the proletarian revolution.

Its experience with fascism strongly influenced the postwar strategy of the PCI. In its analyses, the party emphasized the role that division among working-class and democratic forces had played in the advent of fascism and insisted on the importance of fascism as a mass phenomenon and on the significance of middle-class support as one of the bases for the survival of the Fascist regime. These perceptions underlined the need for cooperation not only with Socialists, but above all with Christian Democrats and Catholics in the anti-Fascist struggle and the construction of a postwar democracy. Having matured politically in the heroic but futile battle against fascism, the PCI leadership learned much about the dangers of isolation in Italian politics and the need for compromise and cooperation among all "democratic" forces.

Given this prewar heritage, it should not have been so surprising as it then seemed that Togliatti's first political act upon his return to Italy was to reverse existing party policy and to reject the so-called pregiudiziale repubblicana(in the name of which the Communists, Socialists, and Actionists had insisted upon the abdication of the monarchy, deeply compromised by its involvement with the Fascist regime, as the condition for participation in any government coalition). From the day in April 1944 when Togliatti proclaimed the svolta di Salerno, by which the PCI agreed to enter a coalition of national unity under the king and Marshal Badoglio, to the day three years later when the party was removed by De Gasperi from the governing coalition, party strategy was dominated by one overriding motive: to avoid isolation and to participate in the government, in collaboration with other anti-Fascist forces. The svolta itself, and every other major tactical decision the party made, was consistent with that strategic objective.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Preface, pg. v
• Preface to the Paperback Edition, pg. ix
• Contents, pg. xv
• List of Abbreviations, pg. xvii
• Introduction, pg. 1
• I. Continuity and Change in Postwar Italian Communism, pg. 21
• II. The French Communist Party and the Fifth Republic, pg. 69
• Ill. The PCF, the State, and the Revolution: An Analysis of Party Policies, Communications, and Popular Culture, pg. 87
• IV. Party Activists in Public Office: Comparisons at the Local Level in Italy and France, pg. 143
• V. The Italian Communist Politician, pg. 173
• VI. Political Legitimacy in Local Politics: The Communist Party in Northeastern Italy, pg. 221
• VII. The PCI at the Local Level: A Study of Strategic Performance, pg. 259
• VIII. Left-Wing Unity at the Grass Roots: Picardy and Languedoc, pg. 305
• IX. The PCF and Local Government: Continuity and Change, pg. 340
• X. The PCI's Alliance Strategy and the Case of the Middle Classes, pg. 373
• XI. Alliance Politics and Revolutionary Pretensions, pg. 420
• XII. Mass-Level Response to Party Strategy: The Italian Electorate and the Communist Party, pg. 456
• XIII. Party and Mass Organization: The Changing Relationship of PCF and CGT, pg. 504
• XIV. The CGIL and the PCI: From Subordination to Independent Political Force, pg. 541
• XV. Communism in Italy and France: J Adaptation and Change, pg. 575
• List of Contributors, pg. 641
• Index, pg. 643