Only the most superficial analysis could present the historic compromise as a completely new strategy for the Italian or international workers' and Communist movement. The fact is that the 'new' strategic options of the leadership of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) are no more or less than a re-edition, altered to conform to today's fashion, of the policy of the Popular Front adopted by the Seventh Congress of the Stalinized Communist International in 1935. The importance of a brief look backwards, then, lies not at all in idle concern to establish the continuity of the conceptions of the PCI as in the necessity to properly understand the political evolution of the party leadership as it sank deeper and deeper roots in Italian national soil. It is this evolution, and the process, that account for many of the aspects of the PCI's current policy.
This glance backwards will also enable us to grasp the elements of both continuity and discontinuity with the policy of the Stalinized Communist movement and thus to uncover the limits of Eurocommunism precisely on the central question it claims to have placed on the agenda: the connection between democracy and socialism.(1) Finally, by examining the historical roots of present-day PCI strategy, we can also sharpen our understanding of the worst political education the Italian masses have received from their reformist leaders.
The Italian Communist leaders themselves describe the strategy of historic compromise as the logical outcome of all the theoretical efforts of their party. In his famous articles on Chile, Berlinguer traced this orientation back to the Lyon congress of the Italian Communist Party in 1926, the congress at which Gramsci and Togliatti triumphed over the previous leadership of the Ultraleftist Amadeo Bordiga. Berlinguer situated the decisive event in this whole process with the 'Salerno turn' of 1944, effected when Togliatti returned to Italy from exile in the Soviet Union. Luciano Gruppi, another PCI ideologue, who has recently published a volume collecting the basic documents of his party on the subject of alliances with the 'Catholic world', introduces his collection with an article by Gramsci dated 1920.(2)
In the analysis of Togliatti — the major landmarks of which are the 'Salerno turn' of 1944, the interview with Nuovi Argumenti on the Khrushchev report in 1956, the eighth congress of the PCI, also in 1956, and the Yalta Memoir of 1964 — we do indeed find all the elements that underlie the strategy of the historic compromise: the conception of the working class as the 'national class'; the alliance with Catholicism and Christian Democracy; the perspective of a gradual democratization of the state and the connection between democracy and socialism; the rejection of the 'Soviet theoretical model' and of an international communist 'theoretical model'. On the basis of this corpus, the present leaders of the PCI have settled down to the task of lending flesh and bones to Togliatti's theory of gradual democratization, to bringing it up to date in the light of the new conditions that have emerged from the social and political struggles of the past ten years.
'This is Moscow...'
On 16 October 1943, during his daily transmission on Radio Milano Liberta, broadcast from Moscow, Palmiro Togliatti declared that the anti-fascist parties should consider participation in the government of the monarchist Pietro Badoglio, established just after the fall of Mussolini on 25 July 1943.(3) The news came as a bolt from the blue to the underground leadership of the PCI in Italy, to its rank-and-file activists and to the other anti-fascist parties grouped together in the National Liberation Committee (CLN).(4) The next day the party leadership in Rome sent a telegram to Moscow: 'Your radio broadcasts directing us to follow Badoglio are creating a number of difficulties, since they are in complete contradiction with the policy of the party and of the CLN'.(5)
The government of Marshal Badoglio, formed under the aegis of King Victor-Emmanuel (who had supported the fascist dictatorship), embodied the options of the reactionary bourgeoisie, which, sensing the way the wind was blowing, was striving to effect a painless change in regime while simultaneously assuring the continuity of the state apparatus, of which the monarchy was to be the symbol. Until Togliatti's broadcast, the anti-fascist parties, especially the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and the PCI, had refused to give any support to this bourgeois operation. They regarded Badoglio as 'the representative of reactionary and plutocratic groups', as the PCI put it. Moreover, both these parties were then fighting for the immediate abolition of the monarchy.
The thoroughly imperious character of Togliatti's initiative is most evident in the method he used: a radio broadcast [illegible] to the party. Not only had Togliatti disdained to consult the underground leadership of the party, he had also overstepped the agreements the PCI had signed with the Socialists and the Partito d'Azione (Action Party). Not to mention the disastrous effects of the news on the partisan organizations and the ranks of the party.
Togliatti's motivations were directly inspired by the global policy of the Soviet bureaucracy. The contacts between the Kremlin and the Western Allies that were eventually to lead to the Yalta conference and the 'division of the world' into spheres of influence had already begun. According to this division, Italy was to revert to the 'Western' bloc. Stalin's concern was therefore twofold: to prevent the Resistance, which was under strong proletarian domination in Italy, from flowering into an anti-capitalist revolution; to assure that the Kremlin retained in some measure influence in the Mediterranean, through Italy. In spite of the division of Europe into distinct zones, it was necessary to stem the intrinsic dynamic of the CLN in the North, which was evolving into a structure of alternative power, expropriating the factories of the fleeing fascist capitalists and placing them under workers' control. But this required that some other institution be counterposed to the CLN, and this in turn required participation in the reconstruction of the decaying bourgeois state apparatus. (This could be done through the PCI's entry into the Badoglio government in April 1944.) The Soviet Union recognized the Badoglio government in March 1944, the official newspaper Izvestia informing its readers that 'the present aim of the efforts of the Soviet Union is to help to unite all Italian anti-fascist forces around the Badoglio government'.
This political orientation, this 'turn' — which was announced officially on 1 April 1944 when Togliatti returned to Naples — provoked deep reaction within the Communist leadership. Giorgio Amendola, who was then in Rome, learned the news from Giuseppe Saragat. In his war memoirs Amendola explained: 'I rushed to the offices of the party secretariat on Ennio Q. Visconti Street, where I hoped to find Scoccimaro and other comrades. When I told them the news, Scoccimaro, tense and pale, shouted, "You can go carry out that policy alone!" A period of sharp discussion in the party and the CLN then began'.(6) Opposition to the new turn was strongest amongst the party leaders in the North (Longo, Secchia, and especially Curiel, the leader of the Youth Front), who had difficulty accepting the parity rules under which the CLN operated, since the relationship of forces was overwhelmingly favourable to the Communists.
These leaders were following with interest the policy of the Yugoslav Communist Party and were leaning towards a similar perspective: preponderance of the Communist Party in the anti-fascist front (in accordance with the real relationship of forces); creation of a government headed by Tito in the liberated zones, in opposition to the bourgeois government-in-exile organized by the imperialists in London. The Rome leadership, however, headed by Amendola, immediately ranged itself with Togliatti and launched a battle against the Milan leadership in the North.
The Salerno turn and progressive democracy
On 2 April 1944 (one week after his return to Italy) Togliatti wrote in the Communist daily l'Unita: 'Today we cannot be guided by any narrow supposed party interest, or by any narrow supposed class interest....It is the Communist Party, the working class, that must hold high the banner of national interests, which have been betrayed by fascism and the groups that accorded it power'.
The debate among the party cadres was lively. What was under discussion was not only whether or not to participate in the Badoglio government, but also the more general question of what sort of state should be rebuilt in Italy on the ruins of fascism. Togliatti had already expressed his ideas on this matter before his return to Italy. In November 1943, speaking to a meeting of trade unionists in Moscow, he had explained: 'It is still too early to think concretely about the kind of Italy we want to rebuild after the complete destruction of fascism and the expulsion and annihilation of the German invaders. But what we can say, what we must indeed proclaim even today, is that in a country that has suffered the tragic experience of twenty years of fascism, a country that is emerging from this painful stage exhausted, devastated, and torn asunder, with a considerable portion of its population in need of thorough political re-education, it would be absurd to think of a government by a single party or the rule of a single class'.
Togliatti traced out a road of national unity which he felt would give rise to a democracy of a new type, 'no longer completely bourgeois' but 'not yet socialist': 'progressive democracy'.
The clearest exposition of the position of those who advocated a new regime based on the CLN was offered by Curiel, the young Communist leader in the North. 'The CLN', he argued, 'must see itself not as a coalition of parties, but as the central mass political organ on a national scale, supported by all the organs forged by the Italian people in struggle. These are the bodies that enjoy the confidence of the masses, and it is these organs, and they alone, which are entitled to name and direct the new regime, to win victory by force and to impose respect for the new order on the reactionary forces'.(7) This perspective was in clear contradiction with the effort of the Badoglio government to re-establish the bourgeois state apparatus in a liberated Italy. 'It would be absurd', Curiel continued, 'to think that the CLN could re-establish the regime of the mayoralties, prefects, commissioners and generals, ceding them all the old bureaucratic administrative, judicial, and police machinery rotten with fascism and proto-fascism, for this would merely deprive the CLN of any authority and expose it to liquidation at the first possible opportunity. Today's CLN prefigures the government of tomorrow, for in all cities, in all villages and neighbourhoods, it is stimulating the emergence of organs of national liberation'.
Curiel also insisted that class differences could not be muted in the name of anti-fascist unity: 'In preparing the national insurrection, we must deal with the problems of the social divisions of the country; we cannot be content to postpone this to the happy future. Thus, we cannot renounce, or simply forget, our class convictions in the name of a higher national interest'.
This perspective was countered, with the full authority of the Soviet Union (and the enormous prestige of the USSR among the Communist anti-fascist fighters must be recalled in order to understand how they could have accepted the new orientation), by Togliatti's proposal, which was to resolve the question of the government through a national-unity accord to which all activity of the partisans would have to be subordinated.
Togliatti held that the working class and the PCI had to 'hold high the banner of national interests' by effecting a policy of national unity with the bourgeoisie. On 11 April, addressing the Communist cadres of Naples (in the famous 'Salerno speech'), he enunciated his policy in these terms: 'The objective we propose to the Italian people once the war is over will be to create a democratic and progressive regime in Italy. We want the rapid reconstruction of Italy, in accordance with the interests of the people. We know how deep the fissures in the Italian social fibre are, and we therefore know that if we set ourselves any other objective we would be shirking our duty to the nation, which is turning to us for leadership'. (8)
The objective, according to the Communist leader, was to reconstruct a regime that would extirpate 'all the roots of fascism', eliminate the inequality between the Mezzogiorno (the South) and the rest of the country, and guarantee the broadest extension of democracy, without altering capitalist relations of production. This, he held, would permit the creation of a balance of forces that would make any new drift towards fascism impossible. Togliatti proposed to build the regime in conjunction with the bourgeois parties, with the 'non-reactionary' capitalists, by joining the monarchist government of Badoglio.
This perspective, however, implied a change in the party itself. Where it had previously been an organization of cadres seasoned in underground struggle, it now had to become a 'new party': 'We can no longer be a small and narrow association of propagandists upholding the general ideas of Communism or Marxism.... We cannot be content to criticize and revile, no matter how brilliant our invective. We must propose solutions to all national problems, we must be able to indicate those solutions to the people at the opportune moment, and we must strive to lead the entire country towards their realization'.(9)
This proposal to throw open the doors of the party was, of course, tailored to meet the new needs of the prospect of entry into the government (a step actually taken only ten days later, on 21 April 1944). If the PCI was to become a government party, then the base of the party had to be broadened throughout the country, sectors of the middle layers had to be organized, and popular sectors which had once followed fascism had to be courted. This transformation — which was effected despite the very deep divisions in the leadership — rendered the party's theoretical framework somewhat 'more supple', as the old party cadres were swamped in the cascade of new, anti-fascist recruits. (Party membership rose from 100,000 in 1944 to 2,200,000 by the end of 1947!) It also greatly facilitated acceptance of the 'turn' imposed by Togliatti.
But the most important aspect of the transformation of the party lay in the second element emphasized by the PCI leader: the Communist Party would no longer be the party that organized the working class and its allies for the struggle for power, but the party that 'has solutions to all national problems' and is able 'to lead the entire country towards their realization'. Togliatti's 'new party' was to be a national party, a mass party, and a government party. Its central field of activity was to be parliament, and it was to view the question of alliances through the prism of parliament.
The reconstruction of the bourgeois state
Thus, in April 1945 the PCI (along with the other anti-fascist parties) joined the government of Badoglio, who was then replaced in June by Bonomi, a man viewed more favourably by the parties that made up the CLN. The effort to reconstruct the state apparatus in the liberated areas of Italy was set in motion by the establishment of prefects, staffed largely by the same people who had served fascism.
The PCI then hastened to explain its conception of the relationship between the government and the rank-and-file structures in which the masses had organized themselves. L'Unita commented on 16 June 1944: 'The work of the government may seem to be moving slowly. It will be necessary to overcome the resistance now being manifested within the government apparatus and among certain political circles....At this point, the popular masses cannot substitute for the regular organs of power, but they can intervene powerfully to break fascist resistance and complicity'. The arena of mass intervention was thus clearly defined, and subordinated to the action of the government. Speaking in Florence on 3 October 1944, Togliatti explained that CLN should 'back up and support the action of the government' and function as 'local administrations until it is possible to reconstruct these organs on a democratic basis'. In other words, the committees were to be liquidated as soon as the old 'democratic' organs (parliament, city councils and provincial governments, etc.) could be re-established.(10)
Around the same time — and the two events were clearly related — Togliatti proposed, for the first time, a direct agreement between the PCI and Christian Democracy (DC), offering DC a pact of united action to weld together the common front of the CLN. Speaking in Florence on 3 October he asserted: 'There are other parties within the CLN to which we feel specially linked. Prime among these is the party of Christian Democracy....Without prejudice to the unity of the CLN movement, we would like to see the creation in our country of a closer accord between these parties, which have special links to the toiling classes'.
Togliatti's concern was evident. It was critical to accelerate the reconstruction of the old institutions of bourgeois democracy in order to stem the revolutionary upsurge then taking shape in the rapid advances of the Resistance in the North. (In April 1944 the workers in the still-occupied northern provinces staged a general strike against the Nazi attempt to dismantle factories and cart machinery off to Germany. This strike had clear anti-capitalist overtones; its central political slogan was: 'For a popular government based on a network of people's committees that allow the masses to govern themselves'.(11)
In direct agreement with Christian Democracy Togliatti was attempting to resolve the politico-institutional problems of post-fascist Italy outside the CLN, thus assuring a smooth transition to a bourgeois-democratic regime. In this context, rank-and-file structures were assigned a completely subordinate role (only to be thoroughly liquidated shortly afterwards). And it was here that the underlying inconsistency of the position of the central leaders of the Resistance in the North became clear. These leaders — primarily Luigi Longo and Pietro Secchia, who represented the PCI left wing — finally accepted the option of 'national unity', but tried to conciliate it with a wider development of the mass organs of the CLN in the factories and neighbourhoods as 'the basic pillars of progressive democracy'. Although now more sensitive to the contribution that could be made by the mass movement, whose potential and dynamism they saw unfolding day by day in the Resistance, they failed to see — or perhaps pretended not to see, determined as they were to support the party line, the international motivations of which they understood(12) — that the extension of mass organization stood in direct contradiction to the rebirth of the state apparatus, acting in its dual capacity of guarantor of private property and guardian of law and order. (And whenever the CLN attempted to take control of requisitioned factories or to mete out justice to fascists, this dual role of the state came to the fore.) Once the option for national unity had been swallowed, the masses had to be barred from engaging in any action that would endanger its realization. Subsequent events were to confirm the incompatibility of reconstruction of the bourgeois state apparatus and development of rank-and-file organs whose dynamic was clear. The first forces to become aware of this, apart from the bureaucrats of the PCI, were those bourgeois parties that were members of the CLN. They had ceaselessly striven to limit the action of the CLN and, as of late 1944, to liquidate the local committees pure and simple.
Rome was liberated on 4 June 1944 when the Allied forces entered the city (without any popular insurrection). Badoglio was replaced by Bonomi, who formed his government of the six anti-fascist parties of the CLN. The military and monarchist bureaucracy re-established itself in the capital under the protection of the Allied military administration. These forces then united with the right wing of the CLN to plunge the government into crisis. A second Bonomi government was formed in December 1944. The new government derived its authority no longer from the CLN but from the Regent Umberto (who had replaced King Victor-Emmanuel, who abdicated in April 1944). The PCI, which joined the government even while the PSI and the Partito d'Azione refused to do so, accepted this arrangement, which made the monarchy the symbol of the continuity of the state. In the Centre-South, the conservative forces began to regain the upper hand.
The entire North was liberated by a vast popular insurrection that broke out on 25 April 1945. About two weeks before, on 10 April, Togliatti had issued his orders to the National Council of the PCI: 'Make the greatest effort for the total liberation of the country....Prevent the liberation of the North from being accompanied by clashes and conflicts that could give rise to serious misunderstandings between the people and the Allied liberation forces....Prevent the emergence of a chasm between northern Italy and the rest of the country once the North is liberated, for such a fissure could be fatal for our country, opening a thoroughly confused chapter of history'. In other words: block any revolutionary action and prevent the CLNAI (Upper Italy National Liberation Committee) from coalescing into a new regime standing in opposition to the government that had been set up in the South. In December 1944 the leaders of the PCI and PSI had brought pressure to bear on the CLNAI to sign the 'Rome protocols', in which the CLNAI, without obtaining the slightest attribution of any government functions, had agreed to cede full authority to the Allied military government. The protocols stipulated: 'in the liberated territories all partisans will place themselves under the direct supervision of the Allied command and will execute all orders issued by the latter or by the government acting in its name, including orders to dissolve or to surrender arms if this is requested'.(13)
In spite of this accord, which gave rise to violent polemics in the CLNAI, tension between this organ and the government in Rome persisted. In June Bonomi was replaced by Parri, who brought representatives from the North into the government. But the Parri government lasted only a few months, finally succumbing to the contradictions of its own policy, which sought to reconcile the revolutionary outbreak of the insurrection in the North with the reactionary drive of the possessing classes, the spread of self-organization among the masses with the reconstruction of bourgeois institutions.
In December 1946 the first government of the Christian Democrat De Gasperi was formed, on the basis of an accord among DC, the PCI, and the PSI calling for the convocation of elections to a Constituent Assembly. The Allied Forces then turned administration of the northern provinces over to the new government, whose president made no secret of his 'Western' aspirations. De Gasperi lost no time in setting himself to his task: re-establishment of prefectures in the provinces and liquidation of the workers' leaderships in the factories that had been taken over by the management councils (even though these councils, led by responsible Communists, were wholly devoted to the 'national interest'). In September 1945 PCI leader Sereni told an assembly of management councils in Milan: 'It would be only too convenient for the old ruling classes who led Italy to catastrophe to say to the workers: go ahead and run things for yourselves now....The workers have not fallen into the trap; they have been wise enough to demand that the representatives of property accept their share of responsibility for reconstruction'.(14) De Gasperi continued his effort at restoration by dissolving the High Commissariat for sanctions against fascism, demobilizing the partisans, and repressing northern struggles against rising prices and southern struggles for the occupation of land by peasants. The PCI and PSI accepted this programme and actively participated in implementing it, in order not to break up 'anti-fascist unity'. All 'reforms' were postponed until after the Constituent Assembly elections.(15)
The reconstruction of the state apparatus and the capitalist economy took decisive strides forward precisely during the period between the formation of the first De Gasperi government and the elections to the Constituent Assembly. On 15 January 1946 the minister of the interior replaced all the prefects of the Resistance with career prefects who had administered regional governments under Mussolini. There were 64 first-class prefects in all: only 2 of them had not served as functionaries in the Ministry of the Interior under the fascist government. There were 241 vice-prefects; all, without exception, had had careers in the bureaucracy under the fascist regime. There were 10 police inspectors-general, 7 of whom had worked for Mussolini. There were 135 police prefects, 120 of whom had joined the force under fascism. Similar figures could be adduced for all echelons of the apparatus of both the state and the army. Between 1944 and 1948 some 90 percent of the personnel of the state apparatus of the fascist regime reoccupied their former functions.
The Communist leader Scoccimaro, who had been high commissioner for the purge of fascists, himself recognized the complete failure of his High Commission, pointing to the notorious gap between the making of a decision to purge a fascist and the implementation of that decision. The reason for this gap was simple: all levels of the administration were riddled with complicity between the bureaucracy and the fascist state.
In a book entitled The Democratic Reconstruction of the State the Socialist Morandi likewise recalled the limitations of government action in this domain: 'Government experience also taught us the extent to which the bureaucratic apparatus rejects any effort to free state action of subordination to capitalist interests; we saw the formidable resistance it is capable of mounting, or, in the best of cases, the obstruction and lack of effectiveness that characterize it'.(16)
These quite correct remarks must have escaped the lips of the two reformist leaders in moments of extreme and unusual lucidity, for neither of them drew any conclusion about the nature of this state apparatus or about their own strategy for conquering it. And since they ruled out any call upon the organized masses to make and apply the decisions in question themselves, they had no alternative but to simply fold their arms. Which is what they did. De Gasperi's efforts in this domain were capped by the reconstitution of the police, first through the reopening of the police academy, staffed by officers of Mussolini's former colonial police, and then through the creation of the Celere (a sort of special branch), whose 'democratic' zeal was to be broadly appreciated by the Italian workers and students in the years to come. The bulk of the fascist legal code was left unchanged, and the police forces remained militarized (and still are to this day).
But there was another parallel process which had also been under way since the formation of the Badoglio government: the big capitalist groups had settled down to the task of reconstructing the economy in accordance with their own interests. Once again, as early as the time of the Badoglio government the workers' parties agreed to postpone any social reform until after the complete liberation of the country and the election of the Constituent Assembly. The DC took advantage of this time lag to weld together a reactionary bloc, making use of the support of the Catholic church to garner a mass base, primarily among the peasantry.
What line did the Communists take on the question of economic reconstruction once the country was liberated? Here again, all actions were determined by the necessity to maintain alliances. The weekly newspaper of the PCI put it this way:
'It was obvious — and quite normal, it should be recalled — that the Italian conservatives would be able to adhere to the policy of the most advanced forces of the anti-fascist bloc only if they were offered firm guarantees. The Italian conservatives had to be satisfied that the political liquidation of the fascists and the creation of the political conditions for normal democratic development would not coincide with profound, even revolutionary, modifications in Italian economic structures. Thus, all conditions were at hand for the development of a detailed compromise between the great currents of the anti-fascist front. The nature of this compromise could be based only on these points: renunciation of economic measures of a revolutionary type; agreement to leave the direction of economic life — and therefore also of financial reorganization and reconstruction — in the hands of the conservative forces on the decisive points...and defence, through the trade unions, against the possible dangerously anti-social and anti-national consequences of any conservative policy abandoned to unbridled liberalism....The compromise therefore left two perspectives open: that of the democratization of the country as a whole, which would permit pursual of fundamental political objectives, and that of the democratization of the Italian conservatives themselves'.(17)
Idealism ran rampant. Not only do the conservatives adhere to the economic reconstruction policy of the most advanced forces of the anti-fascist bloc (what, then, one may wonder, is this 'line of the most advanced forces', if not the anti-fascist alliance as an end in itself?); the objective of the 'compromise' is none other than the 'democratization of the conservatives themselves', which would doubtless eventually induce them to expropriate themselves.
But this idealism was reflected in a quite specific policy: rejection by the reformists of any measure that would have struck at the interests of private capitalism. All the various projects for tax reform to pare down the great fortunes, for confiscation of windfall profits reaped under fascism, timid as they were, remained mere scraps of paper. The Communist officials, for example, did not fight for an immediate change in currency, which would have been the only way to control fortunes in reality. The conservative forces resorted to all sorts of subterfuge to block this measure, which simply sank into oblivion.
The policy of the government was vastly more energetic on two essential points, however: wages and layoffs. The conquest of the sliding scale of wages was an essential advance for the workers, even though it guaranteed them only partial wage compensation for rises in the cost of living. But in the name of this agreement all wage demands were abandoned at a time when productivity increases in the factories were running at 50 to 100 per cent. In addition, the PCI and PSI accepted the lifting of the ban on layoffs, a measure the bourgeois forces in the CLN had been demanding since April 1945. This granted employers full freedom to eliminate workers, a freedom they exercised with abandon. All these concessions, of course, were made in the name of the 'national interest'. In exchange, the employers were asked to 'be content with normal profits' (the expression of Di Vittorio, leader of the CGIL (the trade-union federation), in a speech to the congress of the Confederation of Italian industrialists).
The period lasting from the inauguration of the first De Gasperi government and the Constituent Assembly elections (2 June 1946; on the same day, the monarchy was abolished and a republic inaugurated, by referendum) to the ouster of the workers' parties from the government (at the end of May 1947) was marked by the usual impedimenta of unbridled class collaboration.
A few days before its unceremonious dismissal from the government, the PCI leadership felt compelled to make this admission: 'It must be emphasized that although the toilers (workers, employees, pensioners, unemployed) have evinced a high degree of discipline and a lofty spirit of sacrifice in the common interest, the same cannot be said of certain groupings among the possessing classes. Although the toilers have accepted a truce on the wage front (which has not been accompanied by a price freeze), and although they have scaled down their demands and curbed their struggles in order not to damage the state and the nation, among the possessing classes we may note a worrisome tendency to shirk sacrifices and to make the toilers and the state bear the full burden of the situation'.(18)
The Communist leaders evinced similar blindness in their explanation of the government crisis that had resulted in their ouster from power. They denounced what was actually a long-term option of the Italian bourgeoisie as a 'conspiracy of plutocratic forces'.
Although Togliatti's policy was surely tailored to fit the instructions of the Kremlin, it seems likely that the period of government collaboration had actually stimulated the illusion in the leading group that this collaboration would long continue. It is this illusion that accounts for the scope of the concessions made to the bourgeoisie in 1947, which were criticized even by Moscow. (Similar criticisms were directed against the French Communist Party around the same time.) Although the PCI leaders were not unaware of the advances being made by the reactionary forces between 1944 and 1947, there is some evidence that they did indeed underestimate the dangers, in the illusion that they had embarked on an irreversible trajectory. In only two years their party's membership list had risen from 100,000 to more than 2 million; their representatives had become government ministers after twenty years of underground existence and prison. 'There were reasons for losing a sense of proportion', explained the veteran Socialist leader Pietro Nenni, recalling the triumphant speaking tour he made with Togliatti in early 1948 and the overwhelming majority won by the workers' parties in the municipal elections in the North in April 1946.(19)
The party was deeply shocked by its ouster from the government, although all signs had been pointing in this direction ever since January 1947. 'I believe', Pajetta later recognized, 'that we must admit that at the time we thought that even if it was not impossible, it certainly would have been extremely difficult to effect a capitalist restoration and to oust the Communists from the government for a long period. It seems to me that one can say that we ruled out the possibility of such a long period of confrontation and new alignment without either rapid progress on our part or an openly reactionary reaffirmation by the adversary'.(20)
Although the PCI was cast into opposition against its will (and subsequently hardened its position, which enabled it to reap the fruits of later mass upsurges), the leadership has always maintained its postwar strategy, even to this day. Initial evidence of this came in 1948, after the attempt on Togliatti's life. Frustrated by several years of constant concessions, and bearing the brunt of the attacks the bourgeoisie felt capable of intensifying in late 1947 and early 1948, the working class, although disoriented, was undefeated. Explosive reserves were building up. They were detonated when an anti-communist fanatic fired four pistol shots at Togliatti as he was leaving parliament on 14 July 1948. Within one hour the capital was paralysed by a spontaneously organized general strike; within several hours the strike had spread throughout the country. It quickly acquired insurrectionary overtones. In the North workers occupied factories and dug up the rifles they had buried in 1945 (sometimes hidden in the factories themselves). Armed clashes occurred in Genoa, Leghorn, Taranto, Venice, and San Salvatore. In several cities the workers occupied the telecommunications centres and railway stations. By 15 July the PCI leadership had been so disoriented by the popular explosion that Unita, which had published three special editions the day before, failed to appear. But the following morning, 16 July, the Communist daily was on the streets again, announcing that the strike should be halted by noon. This call was unheeded. It took several days for calm to be restored, for the workers to note, bitterly, that their local initiatives had not been coordinated and that their leaders were determined to restore order.
Togliatti's last words to his closest associates before he was removed to hospital on 14 July were these: 'Stay calm! Don't lose your head!'(22) And stay calm they did, both in the streets, where they strove to demobilize the workers, and in parliament. The government, yielding nothing and even taking advantage of the situation to press its offensive by directly attacking the CGIL for its participation in the strike, received this answer from Di Vittorio, president of the CGIL (which had not yet split). Speaking in parliament, he explained that the CGIL had joined the strike 'in order to keep it under control'. And Nenni, the Socialist leader, was even more explicit: 'It is genuinely stupid of the government, both morally and politically, to fail to understand the significance of the decision taken by the CGIL against the will of the working class'.
Glorious action by the trade-union leaders! According to official figures, 20 people were killed, 600 wounded, and 7,000 arrested during the turbulent days of July 1948. The government seized upon the opportunity to strike a decisive blow at the workers' vanguard as well. In late July the right-wing forces in the CGIL used the organization's decision to participate in the strike of 14 July to provoke a split. The late and unlamented minister of the interior, Scelba, took the lead in a war against the workers. Between 1948 and 1954 some 75 were killed, 4,104 wounded, 148,269 arrested, and 61,243 sentenced to prison terms in incidents of strikes and demonstrations. It was the beginning of the years of reaction.
Togliatti did not want to lose his head, but neither did the bourgeoisie, which, with consummate mastery and brilliant exploitation of Communist capitulations, was able to forge a power bloc that was to rule the country continuously for the next thirty years.
This rapid sketch of the period from the Resistance to the post-war reconstruction indicates the major elements in the origin of Togliatti's political approach. It was during this period that the first premises of the 'Italian road to socialism' were hewed out. These premises were to be systematized at the seventh congress of the PCI in December 1956.
Although the PCI orientation was dictated fundamentally by the pragmatic exigencies of the counter-revolutionary policy of the Kremlin, from the very beginning Togliatti did attempt to codify a coherent strategy, called 'progressive democracy'. The elements of that strategy were to be taken up again and further elaborated later. What were they?
Togliatti argued that the proletariat, which commands neither economic power nor central political clout, must establish its hegemony through superstructural action, through utilization of its presence in all the institutions of society, in order to isolate the reactionary sectors and permit a gradual democratization of all society (the emphasis on anti-fascism in the party's recruitment and propaganda was in complete accordance with this approach). Social and political institutions then become the major terrain of the class struggle (or of the 'dialectic' among the classes, as the PCI leaders prefer to put it). To be sure, this is not the sole terrain, but it is the crucible in which the 'dialectic' will be resolved.
In order to pursue this policy consistently, the new party, the national mass party, must present itself as a government party. To do this it must transform itself from the bearer of the proletarian programme into the upholder of a 'progressive' programme representing a mediation between the interests of various social layers.(23)
The PCI leaders maintained that the republican Constitution, issued of the Resistance, guaranteed a new type of democracy because of the great role of the masses in the drafting of that Constitution. It could become the framework for both democracy and socialism, since, as PCI leader Sereni candidly explained, 'although it does not prescribe a democratic and socialist transformation, neither does it exclude it'.(24)
The period of the Cold War impeded the further development of this initial programmatic approach by the Italian Communists. But although the reactionary offensive compelled them to shift the terrain of struggle, the perspective upheld in the party documents and congress reports remained that traced out during the period of the liberation and the immediate post-war years. The year 1956 was to mark a new step forward in the elaboration of the 'Italian road to socialism' and in the evolution of the PCI's relations with Moscow.
1956: a double turn
After the difficult years of isolation and Cold War, 1956 opened a new period in the evolution of the PCI. The background to that evolution was provided by the important changes that had occurred both in the Italian situation and in the international Communist movement.
The various 'centre' De Gasperi governments, which had presided over the reconstruction of Italian capitalism, began to suffer a crisis in the mid-fifties. The policy of the Christian Democratic leader, which was designed both to respond, through sectoral reforms, to the interests of the great industrial bourgeoisie and to satisfy the corporatist interests of conservative middle layers, faced ever greater difficulties. The DC managed to preserve and fortify its power only through an evermore thorough penetration of all the apparatuses of power. But what really exposed the limitations of the 'centre' governments was the tumultuous development of Italian capitalism itself.
There were two central questions on the agenda of the 1954 congress of Christian Democracy: how strongly to emphasize state intervention in the economy and how much to develop public industry. The Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI, a public body established by Mussolini to salvage industries in crisis), which had been acting merely to aid companies in trouble, began to take independent initiatives in the steel industry, with the creation of the 'Italsider' production centres; ENI, the national coal and oil company, was born as the product of an alliance between Amintore Fanfani and the ambitious industrialist and Christian Democrat Enrico Mattei; a Ministry of Enterprises, publicly owned in part, was created. Fanfani was the central DC leader who gave expression to this policy, which had a double objective: to meet the development needs of the most advanced sectors of Italian industry and, at the same time, to fortify the power of Christian Democracy through the stimulation of a state bourgeoisie in control of the entire public sector.(25)
The years 1954 and 1955 saw a turnabout in the direction of the policy of the leading branches of Italian capitalism. Previously, capital accumulation had been based essentially on the superexploitation of the work force (through massive unemployment and unlimited repression). Now, however, in order to compete more effectively on the world market, the Italian capitalists began to feel the need for a phase of development based on a massive injection of new technology in the apparatus of production, on the radical transformation of methods of production in the factories, and on indicative planning. The phase of reconstruction gave way to that of the 'miracle', of greater integration into the international market. The initial political overtures to the 'centre-left', in a bid for an alliance with a reformist workers' party with the aim of coopting a section of the working class, also date from this period. The centre-left policy flowed directly from the new needs of Italian capitalism.
It was this development of capitalism, which was not understood by the reformists, that plunged the policy of the PCI and the trade-union federation linked to it, the CGIL, into crisis.
The economic reconstruction had been accompanied by a violent anti-union and anti-communist repression, initiated after the split in the CGIL in 1948. By the thousands, militants were laid off and put on blacklists. Members of the class organizations were no longer accepted in the factories. A deep fissure thus arose between the workers and their organizations, and this prevented the organizations from following and analysing the transformations under way in the apparatus of production.
The PCI refused to recognize that economic development was occurring and accused the bourgeoisie of applying a deliberate policy of economic depression. The CGIL upheld a plan for production against the alleged recession-mongering of the bourgeoisie. The CGIL plan was intended to reveal the bourgeoisie's inability to resolve the question of employment and thereby to demonstrate the necessity for socialism. In one sense, the Communist trade-union leaders had incorporated an aspect of 'maximalism' in policy, in that they asserted that capitalism was ruining the national economy. Politically, however, they strove for class collaboration, in that they wanted to square the solution to the wage problem with the real requirements of production. In practice, this policy fractured into a combination of purely propagandist enunciations on the one hand and stubborn but limited struggles with no general prospects on the other hand'.(26) Thus, although politically the PCI preserved its monopoly of representation of the workers(27), a deep chasm arose in the factories. This was reflected in a sharp decline in CGIL membership and, in 1956, in the defeat of the PCI-dominated metalworkers' union (the FIOM) in the internal commission elections held in Fiat.(28) The trade union leadership responded to this defeat with a self-criticism, which concluded with a 'return to the factories', where the first signs of a new rise of combativity could already be seen. Politically, the Communists faced contradictory prospects. On the one hand, there was the possibility of a government opening to the left; on the other hand, the 'autonomist' policy inaugurated by PSI leader Nenni after the Hungarian events of 1956 had broken the front that had linked the PSI and PCI since the war. There was a danger of political isolation of the PCI, but also a hope that political discrimination against the left could begin to ease. Togliatti grasped the necessity of responding to these political changes. His statements about the twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party, at which Khrushchev had delivered his 'secret speech', and the theses adopted by the eighth congress of the PCI represented party attempts to meet this necessity.
Khrushchev delivered his famous report denouncing the Stalin 'personality cult' at the twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956. Togliatti seized upon this opportunity to express, publicly for the first time, his idea that there were 'different roads' to socialism. In an article entitled '1956, Some Premises of Eurocommunism'(29) — the Communist historian Giuseppe Botta emphasized that 1956 sanctioned for the first time the emergence of mounting differentiation within the international Communist movement. Immediately after the war, Botta continued, this idea had circulated sotto voce, but it was temporarily abandoned after the famous Cominform meeting of 1947, when the Italian and French Communist Parties were sharply scolded for their policy of government collaboration, a policy the Kremlin masters had come to regard as in excess of the conjunctural necessities of their own policy. Taking umbrage at Togliatti's inclinations toward independence, Stalin asked him to leave Italy in 1951 and come to Moscow to take charge of the Cominform. But the Italian leader had refused.(30)
Togliatti was thus quick to respond to the declarations of the Soviet twentieth congress. He emphasized that the themes enunciated by Khrushchev (on the role of parliament in the socialist transformation, for example) had been foreshadowed in previous theoretical works of the PCI,(31) and he insisted that this theoretical elaboration had to be carried forward. In June 1956 Togliatti was interviewed by Alberto Moravia's magazine Nuovi Argumenti on the subject of 'democracy and socialism, autonomy and internationalism'. In this interview Togliatti put forward his own analysis of the state of the international Communist movement.(32)
Nowadays, when Carrillo, Marchais, and Berlinguer have accustomed us to resounding declarations against the Mecca of the Kremlin, this interview appears quite orthodox and moderate. To appreciate the extent of its heresy, one must situate it in the atmosphere of obedience to Moscow that prevailed at the time.
In the interview, Togliatti first developed, in quite measured terms, a critique of what he called the 'deformations' and 'errors' introduced in the construction of socialism in the USSR. But he insisted on firmly upholding the socialist character of the Soviet Union: '...but this absolutely does not mean that the fundamental elements of Soviet society that determine its democratic and socialist character and make this society superior in quality to the modern capitalist societies have been destroyed'. He even firmly ruled out the prospect of any institutional changes (which in his view could only mean a return to the norms of bourgeois democracy). He further stated that the inauguration of a multiparty system would be useless: 'It seems to us impossible to conceive of a multiparty system in the Soviet Union today, however. Where would other parties come from? A decision by the leadership? A process of democratization that would [illegible]'
But the essential lesson drawn by Togliatti was that the Soviet experience could no longer be repeated in other countries. The USSR could no longer play a dominant role in the international movement; international organizations like the Cominform (which was, incidentally, dissolved in 1956) were no longer necessary; 'the Soviet model can no longer and must no longer be obligatory'; and finally, each party must advance according to its own path: 'The entire system becomes polycentric, and in the international Communist movement one can no longer speak of a single leadership, but rather of progress achieved through different roads'.(33)
Togliatti decided to convoke a special congress of the PCI (the eighth) to 'renew and strengthen the party'. In the discussion preparatory to this congress, the Communist leaders appealed to the 'national mode' of Marxism symbolized by Labriola and Gramsci.(34) The aim was to systematize, in the form of a programmatic declaration, both the relationship between democracy and socialism and the strategy of the parliamentary road to socialism. Here Togliatti developed his conception of the utilization of bourgeois institutions. The PCI, he wrote, 'does not regard the republican Constitution as an expedient allowing utilization of the instruments of bourgeois democracy up to the moment of the armed insurrection for the conquest of the state and its transformation into a socialist state, but as a united pact, freely established by the great majority of the Italian people and placed at the basis of the organic development of national life for an entire historical period. In the framework of this pact we can accomplish, within full constitutional legality, the structural reforms required to undermine the power of the monopolist groups, to defend the interests of all the toilers against the economic and financial oligarchies, to exclude these oligarchies from power, and to bring the toiling masses to power....Democratic institutions can be developed as the effective basis of a regime which, confronting the subversive efforts of the monopolist groups and depriving them of the basis of their power, can advance towards socialism....' (Programmatic Declaration of the Eighth Congress of the PCI, June 1956).
Of course, Togliatti explained, we are still dealing with a bourgeois state, since a bourgeois power bloc continues to hold the reins. The problem is to examine how this bourgeois power bloc can be modified through political advances. To do this, two factors must be taken into account: 1) Italy has experienced a process of great concentration of capital in the form of private monopolies and state monopoly capitalism; 2) Italian society is characterized by a highly complex social stratification, with a significant incidence of middle layers whose interests are in contradiction with those of monopoly capitalism. The large state sector currently serves to prop up private capitalism and is guided by the law of profit. The problem, then, is to achieve a serious political leadership that impresses a different role on the state capitalist sector, democratizes its management system, and turns it into the leading force in a system of economic planning guided by the principle of social utility. Consequently, the policy of the party must shift toward the superstructures, which does not mean that such issues become the sole terrain of party struggle, but that all other fields of activity are subordinated to it. Here we scent the principles that lie at the root of the historic compromise, principles the PCI intellectuals were later to strive to adorn with more alluring theoretical ornaments.
The Yalta Memoir, Togliatti's last published book,(35) reaffirmed his positions on the need to intensify the search for national roads, on autonomy for the different parties (he criticized, among other things, the idea of an international Communist conference to condemn the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party), and on the 'deformations' of the Soviet regime. On the latter point, he expressed regret that the self-criticism made at the twentieth congress had been circumscribed and he emphasized the necessity to explain the conditions that were permitted under the Stalin regime otherwise than by the personality cult: 'We do not agree that everything can be explained simply by the serious personal vices of Stalin. We strive to study what may have been the political errors which contributed to giving rise to the cult. This discussion is continuing among the historians and qualified cadres of the party'.
Togliatti thus left the Italian Communist Party a twofold legacy: the Italian road to socialism and polycentrism.
The evolution of the international situation (end of the Cold War, peaceful coexistence, the Khrushchev report) and of national conditions (the Italian economic 'miracle', the neo-reformist policy adopted by the bourgeoisie) offered the PCI prospects of development that Togliatti was quick to seize upon. From then on, the PCI found itself increasingly subject to national material pressures, determining its policy primarily on the basis of Italian reality and finding it ever more difficult to manifest blind obedience to the policy of the Kremlin.
National road to socialism and polycentrism in the Communist movement. It is this double legacy that the present leaders of the Italian Communist Party have pledged to fructify.
Footnotes
1. A long time must be spent in the pitch-black night of Stalinism to present the link between democracy and socialism as a 'discovery', for socialism was always seen by its founders as a regime of the highest democracy. But since Stalinism has indeed distorted the idea of socialism to exactly this extent, this discussion is essential today.
2. Luciano Gruppi, Il compromesso storico, Rome, 1977. The PCI leaders' insistence on tracing a 'red thread' from the theoretical work of Gramsci to their own current orientation is a product of their desire to assert their own national roots against both Moscow and the Italian bourgeoisie. This appropriation of Gramsci, however, is effected at the cost of very important revisions of the theoretical contribution of the Sardinian revolutionary.
3. De Radio Milano Liberta, Rome, 1974, pp. 381-382.
4. The CLN was established on 9 September 1943, just after the armistice that left all central and northern Italy under Nazi occupation. It included the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Movement of Proletarian Unity, the Action Party, Christian Democracy, and the Liberal Party. The CLN immediately issued a call to armed resistance against the occupiers. Party representation in the CLN leadership was on a parity basis, i.e. each party had equal representation, regardless of actual strength. The consequent incongruity was especially striking in the North, where the workers' parties, especially the PCI, held the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the Resistance fighters. Deep differences between the CLN in the North and in the South arose almost immediately. In the South, already liberated from Nazi rule, the CLN was primarily an alliance of the top leaderships of the anti-fascist parties; its perspective was to come forward as an alternative, democratic government force. In the North, where the proletarian class composition was predominant, the rank-and-file CLN committees that developed in the factories and localities tended to evolve into alternative structures of power, despite all the ambiguities consequent to the participation of bourgeois forces. Our aim here is not to trace the history of the Italian Resistance but to summarize the terms of the debate in the PCI at the time. This debate centred on these differences over the role of the CLN and gave a foretaste of what was to become the PCI position on the relationship between parliamentary democracy and rank-and-file democracy. For further information on this period, see: Livio Maitan, Opportunismo e stalinismo, la politica del PCI dal 1945 al 1969, Rome, 1968; Marcello Flores, Fronte popolare e democrazie progressive, Rome, 1973; P. Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, Einaudi; articles by Anna Maria Valentino, 'Il PCI e la ricostruzione economica', in Politica comunista, April-May 1976, and Silverio Corvisieri [illegible].
5. [illegible] cattolici e comunisti nella resistenza, Milan, [illegible].
6. Giorgio Amendola, [illegible], April [illegible].
7. [illegible].
8. Palmiro Togliatti, Opere Scelte, Rome, 1974.
9. [illegible].
10. Renzo del Carria, Proletari senza rivoluzione, storia delle classi subalterne in Italia, 1860-1960, Ed. Oriente, vol. II, p. 373.
11. The many works by historians, whether Communists or not, are unanimous in their assessment of the revolutionary dynamic of the Resistance in the North, where the masses saw the struggle against the Nazis as inseparable from the anti-capitalist struggle. See, for example, Renzo del Carria, and also Giorgio Galli, who notes in Storia del Partito comunista (1968): 'The proletariat of the cities and the countryside felt that the collapse of fascism would lead more or less rapidly to the end of the capitalist system. The working class was leaning towards a social system whose contours were rather ill defined, but which they identified as socialist, understood to mean primarily the abolition of private property. Only a vanguard of this class took part in the Resistance actively, in the mountain groups, in the GAP (Armed Partisan Groups, popular militias created on the initiative of the PCI), in carrying on propaganda in the factories, and in organizing strikes. But this vanguard gave active and combative expression to the aspirations of the entire class. The Resistance was seen as the beginning of the revolution, and since the Resistance was waged arms in hand, those who participated in it thought that the revolution would be conducted in like manner. And since the PCI had called upon the working class to take up arms and was guiding and orienting the masses in this direction, it cannot be considered an opportunist and moderate party, even if it was not an Italian version of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin. Although it did not raise the slogan of expropriation, did not call for the liquidation of the capitalists along with the Germans and the fascists, and although it collaborated with the king, all this was because it was necessary to act by stages, to wait for the right moment to strike with full strength, as Lenin had taught. In the meantime, however, the arms were there and the workers were taking them; in the meantime, there were strikes and sabotage in the factories; in the meantime, grain for the workers was being seized in the countryside. Once the war is over, the workers thought, once the Allied forces have gone, the rest will come'. Giorgio Galli attempts in this manner to account for the fantastic adherence of the working masses in the Resistance to the PCI despite the policy of moderation and compromise of principle the PCI was applying in the liberated areas. This adherence was also and even more importantly due to the extraordinary courage and revolutionary devotion of the Communist militants, who made up the bulk of the armed partisan groupings.
12. Nevertheless, it is important not to underestimate the real differences both on this question and on the scope of the concessions Togliatti made to the bourgeoisie. These differences are reflected in two works by Secchia: Aldo dice 26x1, Feltrinelli, 1963, and Ci sono i comunisti, Mazzotta, 1977.
13. Il movimento di liberazione in Italia, anno I, July 1949.
14. Giorgio Galli, Storia del PCI, p. 236.
15. Livio Maitan, the chapter entitled: 'Il biennio cruciale della ricostruzione'.
16. Cited by Livio Maitan.
17. Rinascita, 8 August 1946.
18. Resolution of 7 May 1947 in 'La politica dei comunisti dal V al VI congresso', resolutions and documents of the sixth congress, January 1948.
19. Pietro Nenni, Intervista sul socialismo italiano, Laterza, 1977, p. 72.
20. G. C. Pajetta, Dalla liberazione alla Repubblica, Rome, 1971.
21. On this point, it is particularly significant that the leaders of the PCI insisted on portraying 1977 as the year of reconciliation. When the accord of the six 'constitutional parties' was signed in July 1977, A. Reichlin wrote in Unita that 'what is important is not what they signed but that they signed it together' (27 June 1977).
22. Luigi Longo, interview in La Repubblica, 14 July 1977.
23. Around the same time Togliatti also developed a cultural conception that integrated all the traditions of Italian society, without exception. This provided ideological justification for the alliance between the PCI and DC, on the basis of an alleged identity between 'socialist solidarism' and 'Catholic solidarism'.
24. Rinascita, March 1947.
25. [illegible]. During this period the DC also introduced several electoral laws which it attempted to pass. The most important was probably the one on electoral reform, the so-called 'swindle law', which would have given 65 percent of the seats in parliament to a coalition getting only 50.01 percent of the vote. The project was abandoned when it failed to obtain the majority in the elections of 1953.
26. Giorgio Galli, pp. 305-308.
27. [illegible].
28. The FIOM's percentage of the vote fell from 63 to 36, while that of the FIM (linked to the Catholic trade union) rose from 10 to 40 and that of the UILM (Social Democratic) from 11 to 23. (Cf. L'esperienza CGIL alla FIAT, Vittorio Rieser, in Politica comunista, summer 1976.)
29. Giuseppe Botta, Studi Storici, '(the review of the Gramsci institute), no. 4, 1976; '1956: alcune premesse dell'eurocomunismo'.
30. See also G. Napolitano, Intervista sul PCI, Laterza, 1976: the Italian party had suffered severely from the fact that in 1947 there was a sudden interruption internationally of the Communist movement's search for new roads to socialism, which had been undertaken just after the Second World War, and not only in Italy. It suffered particularly because it had already gone quite far in tracing out an original road of advance to socialism' (pp. 34-36).
31. The Khrushchev report affirmed that the working class, by 'assembling around itself the peasants and intellectuals, all the patriotic forces, and by firmly rejecting opportunist [elements] incapable of renouncing the policy of class collaboration with the capitalists and landlords, can inflict a defeat on the reactionary, anti-popular forces, conquer a solid majority in parliament, and transform it from the organ of bourgeois democracy into an authentic instrument of the popular will. In that event, this traditional institution of many developed capitalist countries can become an organ of real democracy for the workers'.
32. Palmiro Togliatti, Intervista a Nuovi Argumenti, June 1956, since republished together with Yalta Memoir, Rome, 1976.
33. In the Napolitano interview cited above, the PCI leader explains that the leadership accepted this international orientation of Togliatti's without any differences. This assertion must be compared to what he had previously stated in regard to the massive entry into the Central Committee during this period of cadres recruited at the end of the war, who were brought up politically on 'progressive democracy' more than on the classics of Marxism-Leninism. On the other hand — and he recognizes this — it was among the intermediary party cadres that the reservations and opposition were most significant. Indeed, there was a deep crisis among the Stalinist cadres at that time, and many of them subsequently left the party to form the first Maoist-Stalinist groups when the Sino-Soviet polemic erupted. Although the crisis of Stalinism in 1956 did not result in an organizational split, it did see thousands of departures from the party and the loss of PCI hegemony over the intellectuals. Within the party itself, it enabled Trotskyist militants, then carrying out an entry tactic, to gain a certain audience. It was in the ranks of the Socialist Party, again in 1956, that a critique of the constitutionalist strategy of the PCI and PSI began to be developed, through the debate opened in Mondo Operaio by Raniero Panzieri and Lucio Libertini on the question of workers' control. Libertini later participated in the foundation of the PSIUP (Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity), when the PSI joined the first centre-left government in 1963 (Libertini later became a PCI member of parliament.) Panzieri played a leading role in the journal Quaderni Rossi, in liaison with left trade-union cadres of the FIOM in Turin. This journal was one of the sources of the revolutionary left in Italy. (Collaborators of Quaderni Rossi included Vittorio Foa, Vittorio Rieser, Asor Rosa, Mario Tronti, and others.) Panzieri died in Turin in October 1963.
34. Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks became known only in the early fifties. Napolitano has explained that from that point on Gramsci's writings began to become the patrimony of the cadres of the party, 'although the delicate coupling of his elaboration and that of the party remained to be accomplished'. This elegant formula was doubtless a reference to the unscrupulous use to which the theorists of the PCI have put the writings of Gramsci.
35. In August 1964 Togliatti was urgently summoned to the Soviet Union to participate in the preparation of an international congress of the Communist Parties. The battle between the Soviet and Chinese parties was raging, and Moscow wanted a solemn condemnation of 'the Chinese' by the international Communist movement. Togliatti fell ill barely after arriving in Yalta. He hastily drafted a few notes, which were to become the Yalta Memoir, and died a few days later. Longo, who arrived in Yalta in haste, immediately sent the notes back to Rome without informing the Soviet leaders of its existence. Having been raised among the wolves, he knew their ways. (Cf. Lajolo, Finestre aperte a Botteghe oscure, Rizzoli.)