Premises
1. Party ideologies and systems are born of social settlements, e.g. socialism of industry and empire, communism and fascism of imperial collapse, social democracy and postwar Italian communism of the Second World War, neoliberalism of the postwar settlement’s exhaustion.
2. Neoliberalism is in crisis. Re-stabilisation or new progressive settlements are possible, but authoritarian populism is making the running - with the centre-right deserting liberalism and democracy.
3. ‘Third way’ centrism no longer works. Pre-2008, cheap borrowing and easy productivity gains allowed economies, incomes and opportunities to grow, without touching ballooning inequality. These preconditions for conflict-free ‘retail’ politics no longer exist.
Gramsci and the ‘War of Position’
Many ‘radical realists’ are influenced by Antonio Gramsci - whose notebooks address two key questions: a) why did liberal Italy collapse into fascism?, and; b) how could fascism be replaced by a progressive settlement?
His answer to the first was that the state and Left lacked the unity, legitimacy and social base to resist. His answer to the second was to unify the Left and an overwhelming popular majority in a constituent process for a new democratic state, as well as progressively embed democratic culture throughout society - especially in the places where ideas and values are produced and reproduced. He characterised this strategy as a ‘war of position’ - seeking to gain and hold marginal advantages incrementally, rather than the ‘war of manoeuvre’ through which most socialists envisaged seizing ‘power’ in a moment (by election or armed insurrection).
The Italian Communist Party (PCI, Italian: Partito Comunista Italiano) was Gramsci’s intended vehicle for executing this strategy. But the postwar PCI was actually designed by Palmiro Togliatti, one of the most experienced, crafty and realistic politicians ever. If you want to evaluate projects for Labour renewal, you could do worse than look into the history of his ‘New Party’.
Differences between today’s Labour Party and Togliatti’s are obvious. There are, however, parallels with the prewar errors and postwar challenges that Togliatti sought to overcome. Among the former are: 1) excessive focus on capture of delegitimised state apparatuses, and; 2) sectarian conflict, mistaking friends for enemies and vice versa. Among the latter are: 1) a world dividing into blocs; 2) ties to a fickle and dangerous global hegemon; 3) a fragmented, unstable party system and; 4) the need for economic and social reconstruction.
The Plan
In 1944, Togliatti began transforming a tiny sect into a ‘New Party’ whose job was to assemble the alliances required to build a ‘progressive democracy’ - combining ‘structural reforms’ with extra-parliamentary cultural struggle to condition Italy’s postwar settlement. He intended successive reforms to cumulatively add new ‘elements of socialism’ to the Italian state, closing the historic gap between it and civil society - as inequalities reduced and socialist influence grew.
Mass membership was a precondition: enabling the party to contact, absorb and engage with cultures it aspired to lead, through physical presence in their lives. Critically, this valued the function of bringing people and their aspirations into politics more than most parties do - where top-down messaging, mobilisation and arms-length mediation predominate.
Members were expected to endorse the party programme but not required to support its ideology, nor were they disciplined for ‘liking’ messages from party adversaries. On the contrary: they were encouraged to ally with adversaries on national projects and dialogue with antagonists. How else do you turn antagonists into adversaries and adversaries into allies?
What Happened?
By 1947, the PCI had 2.3 million members, 19% of the vote (40% for the combined Left) and was present throughout Italian society. It led national liberation and reconstruction while co-authoring one of the world’s most progressive liberal-democratic constitutions. It reconciled workers to a state that previously offered little but beatings and taxes, while legitimising the republic with its natural enemies — royalists, ex-fascists and catholic reactionaries.
By 1949, however, the party was out of government and humiliated in a general election - subverted by the church, the CIA and Joseph Stalin. During the Cold War, members were murdered, beaten, imprisoned, sacked, blacklisted and harassed. But the party survived and recovered: registering increased vote shares in every general election to 1976, when it teetered on the cusp of government with 34% - and anglophones discovered Gramsci.
The PCI had scale, social presence and awesome capacity to influence, mobilise, coordinate and educate. Crucially, 2+ million subscriptions allowed it to own and control its own means of reproduction - newspapers, magazines (national and local), academic journals, radio and film production, book publishing, distributors, etc. What it didn’t own, it influenced through ubiquitous presence - e.g. in management of publishing houses, the state broadcaster, trade unions, co-ops and industry.
Typically, the PCI owned the buildings it met in, hosting offices, women’s and youth groups, local co-ops, media facilities, entertainment, sports and leisure activities, etc. Voluntary work like staffing summer Festas dell’Unità, while barely political, positioned the party at the crossroads of countless local networks. In Italy’s ‘red belt’ regions, where the networks intertwined with local government and co-op-rich local economies, highly integrated subcultures developed.
All of this was coordinated by cadres and intellectual leaders of exceptional talent and dedication. Those formed by anti-fascist struggle in Italy, French exile and the Spanish Civil War were refreshed by resistance commanders in the 40s and by professional organisers from unions, co-ops, and local government in the 50s to 70s. Renewal through the party’s network of training schools and hierarchy of roles fostered accumulation of capabilities and collective memory.
Before 1956, the PCI was in thrawl to a Stalin cult — like most of the Italian Left. Thereafter, Togliatti asserted independence from the Soviet party and criticised it, but defended ‘real socialism’ to his end. His successor, Enrico Berlinguer, declared the Soviet model ‘exhausted’, but refused to describe his party as ‘social democratic’.
Programmatically, the PCI was actually more like the German and Swedish Social Democrats than the Spanish PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, Spanish: Partido Socialista Obrero Español) or Labour at the time. Its key differences were cultural, symbolic and ritual. The ‘identity’ which sustained it and built model democracies in the red belt also slowed its modernisation. ‘Change through continuity’ was often late. For many, hammers and sickles could never be disassociated from insurrection and Russian barbarism. Assertions of higher morality, anti-consumerism, resistance heroism, etc. pissed-off potential allies - as ever-fewer Italians identified with these values.
Lessons for Labour
Ultimately, the PCI dissolved, because its leaders judged ‘communist’ identity an obstacle to strategy. Successors - now the Democratic Party (PD, Italian: Partito Democratico) - broke the Italian centre-right’s monopoly to govern in alliance with previously unreachable catholics and centrists, but lost support to the left and struggled against the populisms of Berlusconi, Bossi, Grillo and Meloni.
Like Blair’s ‘Clause 4 moment’, the loss of ‘communist’ identity enabled party leaders to manoeuvre more easily, free of cultural and ideological ballast. But while the lighter craft delivered significant ‘wins’, they were flimsier and strained to maintain a progressive course through reactionary headwinds.
A key warning for Mainstream Gramscians is, however, that the politics of social presence are two-edged. The sense of solidarity, superiority and difference that enabled them to resist Cold War assault, also separated Italian communists from co-citizens and allowed the centre-right to isolate them. For a moment, it looked like Berlinguer’s charismatic leadership might bridge the gap, without sacrificing the party’s radical identity. His early and tragic death meant that this hypothesis was never fully tested.
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David Fisher is a semi-retired educator who has taught in schools, colleges, universities and community education across the UK and Western Europe. He is managing director of the Web Design Academy. Convivial evenings at Feste dell'Unitą inspired his postgraduate research into the history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and a lifetime's fascination with the party. David is co-author of a forthcoming biography of Palmiro Togliatti.
All blog posts represent the views of the author alone and not necessarily those of Mainstream.
