Any comparative study of Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCD’I) history must take into account the party’s particular circumstances. At the time of its foundation, the PCD’I was – to a greater extent than most other European communist parties – rooted in its own society, with reasonably wide and expanding grassroots support. ...
(Show more)Any comparative study of Partito Comunista d’Italia (PCD’I) history must take into account the party’s particular circumstances. At the time of its foundation, the PCD’I was – to a greater extent than most other European communist parties – rooted in its own society, with reasonably wide and expanding grassroots support. Appropriate comparison can, therefore, be made only with parties that originated from majority secession from an established social democratic organization, such as the French, German, Czech and possibly the Norwegian party. Such parties were not only legal, but also had a solid organizational base, a significant presence in parliament, a considerable influence in ‘parallel’ mass organizations, and their own press and campaigning offices.
Yet, despite itself, the PCD’I thus became the exemplification of the contradiction which dominated the early years of international communist party development and consolidation: the contradiction between instruments conceived and created to lead a revolution instead being forced to operate in situations which were no longer revolutionary, or even reactionary.
Less than two years after its foundation, following the ascent of the Fascist Party to power in October 1922, the PCD’I was already working in conditions of precarious semi-legality. Its militants were persecuted and arrested; its press was proscribed. By 1926, once the short-lived period of political instability that seemingly opened up new opportunities for the democratic and workers’ movements had come to an end, a blanket of fascist dictatorship descended over Italy and remained for the next 17 years. From there on, the PCD’I sunk into clandestinity and continued its battle in exile. Thus, a comparative study of the PCD’I must consider communist parties which were in the same situation, for instance the Hungarian party, or, from 1934, the Austrian party. Similarly, analysis of PCD’I Bolshevization and, later, its Stalinization must take into account this time discrepancy. Bolshevization did not turn the PCD’I into a more working-class party. At the same time, because of the specific nature of the Italian situation, it produced a very important phenomenon: the aggregation around the party of forces of differing political origins . This was due to the PCD’I’s being recognized as the most combative and organized adversary of Fascism. It can hardly be argued that Bolshevisation resulted in an impoverishment of the party’s political analysis, as happened in other instances (most clearly in Germany and France). It can even be said that, while the party fulfilled the task of its organisational Bolshevization (though with some peculiar and atypical features), the intellectual element in the PCD’I leadership provided a sort of intellectual resource to withstand ideological Bolshevization, or at least to contain it in limits that were stricter than the ones experience dy the KPD or the PCF. However the situation changed after the 10th ECCI Plenum. The party’s official decisions between 1929 and 1933 followed all the paradigms of the third period and the tactics of ‘class against class’. Up to that time, the PCD’I had been - in a ‘Leninist’ sense, at least - a democratic party, and internal debate had flourished. From 1929, however, such characteristics were drastically curtailed. The new trend in the party suffocated the capacity for political analysis of the Italian situation, internal dissent was regarded as equivalent to betrayal, and other anti-fascists organizations regarded as 'socialfascist'. After 1934 and the Comintern’s cautious attempts to create broad alliances against the aggressive politics of international fascism , the search for a comprehensive political line that could respond to both the expectations of a united anti-fascist movement in exile and the discontent (often overestimated) growing in the fascist ranks occupied the PCD’I in the following years with not always felicitous tactical manoeuvring. The threatening shadow of Stalin’s repressive clutch on the USSR began to lengthen over the PCD’I, opening a new phase of its ‘Stalinization’. The party accepted the verdicts of the sensational public trials against ex-Bolshevik leaders without reserve, and Togliatti – as a member of the ECCI secretariat – excelled himself with an implacable denouncement of the ‘crimes of the Trotskyist bandits’. With the outburst of the war, the varying fortunes of the PCD’I in its relations with Moscow had thus reached perhaps their lowest point, and few could have foreseen that in only five years a political group of exiles, with feeble and precarious links in the country, would become one of the strongest communist parties in the west.
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