XII – Why Did the PCI End? Analysis and Legacy of the Italian Communist Party

With the end of the PCI, the journey inside the "country within a country" concludes. It is appropriate at this point to ask two final questions that arise at the conclusion of the work carried out: "Why did the PCI end?" and "What remains of the PCI?".

First, why did the PCI end? Many would answer that once the socialist states collapsed, the presence of a Communist Party in Italy was no longer appropriate. This analysis is, in my view, too simplistic. Despite the profound upheavals brought by the fall of the Berlin Wall, it must be remembered that the PCI was never so timely in following transformations that it could manage to liquidate itself and its history, which lasted more than seventy years, in less than a year and a half, which was the time elapsed between the Bolognina turning point and the birth of the PDS. The PCI, from the post-war period onwards, has always made the "turns" requested by sudden transformations in society belatedly.

This was the other side of the New Party, and the Togliattian "giraffe" often became much more similar to an "elephant." Despite everything, the mechanism of democratic centralism, which was used for the political direction of the Party, was truly such. The PCI was a party in which there was undoubtedly "centralism," as all the main decisions were taken by the "top," after mediation among its "different sensibilities," but at the same time, it was also a "democratic" party, as most of those decisions were discussed involving the grassroots. Obviously, the role of the "intermediate cadres" was very important; they also played a fundamental role in the dissolution of the PCI, ensuring that the "top's" line was approved without too many problems by the grassroots.

Equally important was the prohibition against creating "factions," which effectively safeguarded the unity of the Party, even after the most wrenching discussions. Thus, a party of over 1,500,000 members moved in unison. Obviously, with this method, the decision-making times were very long. For this very reason, the PCI arrived late to some very important "appointments with history."

The most serious delay occurred in 1956, when the PCI lost the opportunity, after the invasion of Hungary, to accelerate its detachment from the USSR, remaining anchored to the positions of the Soviet State and thus losing the last possibility of uniting the Italian left and creating an alternative to the DC. Di Vittorio, and we can imagine how much it cost him to say it publicly, understood this better than the Party's Leadership and grassroots. Instead, with its choice, the PCI remained isolated on the left and ensured that the path from the creation of the "Italian way to Socialism" to the effective and total detachment from the USSR, proclaimed by Berlinguer in 1981 with the famous phrase about the "end of the propulsive thrust of the October Revolution," would last another twenty-five years.

Furthermore, it is impossible to believe that the liquidation of the PCI could have been simply a direct consequence of the end of the socialist Countries, as an international turning point of that type could not have been proposed, despite the understandable emotional wave, after only two days had passed from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the Bolognina turning point. And besides, the link with Real Socialism had been consigned to history and was no longer a "live" feature of the PCI, which, albeit with great effort, had managed to achieve a longed-for political autonomy from the Soviet Union for some years already.

To understand the real reasons that led to the end of the PCI, an analysis that can be defined as "Gramscian" must be carried out. It is necessary to focus on the Party's social bloc, which had profoundly changed over the years, and which could no longer, obviously, recognize itself in the two old main categories that Gramsci himself spoke of, namely workers and peasants. In the following years, also and above all following the economic boom, the working and peasant classes had achieved constant economic and social growth that had generated a real transformation of the Party's social body. The progressive attention towards the world of cooperatives is direct evidence of this reasoning.

Indeed, different sensibilities developed within the Party, of which the world of cooperatives was the most visible expression, which, over the years, transformed the PCI's economic instruments from a "transmission belt" into "instruments of pressure on the Party line." This phenomenon was also geographical, as the incidence of this old and new economic world was, and still is, certainly greater in the "red regions." Emilia Romagna alone comprised a quarter of all national Party members, and adding to this the members of the other two "red regions," Tuscany and Umbria, the total exceeded 40%. It is easy to imagine the political strength of these regions within the Party. The massive adhesion of those federations to Occhetto's line constitutes the missing piece of this analysis. The PCI was no longer the "Party of workers and peasants," but had also become the "Party of small and medium-sized enterprises." The name "communist" and the impediment this caused, due to the "K factor," to reaching government, clashed with the full insertion of the Party's new social bloc into the capitalist system. At the first opportunity, riding the Party's crisis and the emotional wave of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the decision was made to overcome the PCI, even if this meant a profound disorientation of militants and even a split. The renewed international framework was therefore only a concurrent cause in the dissolution of the PCI, which, in my opinion, was subordinate to the motivation of the change in the Party's social reference bloc.

The second question we ask is "What remains of the PCI?" What constitutes the best legacy of the PCI and its seventy years of life and struggle certainly concerns the Italian Constitution and democracy, workers' rights, and the welfare state. It is useless to revisit, as it is beyond discussion, the decisive role played by the PCI and the other anti-fascist parties in the birth and growth of Italian democracy, which emerged after the fascist dictatorship and the struggles of the Resistance. We have already spoken about the fruitful work done in the Constituent Assembly by the parties, which, despite the harsh divisions over internal politics, managed to reach a "high compromise" that gave birth to the Italian Constitution. But it must be remembered that until the disappearance of the PCI and the pentapartito parties, politics had an attitude of deep respect towards the Constitution. The parties felt the constitutional principles as an insurmountable limit for their political proposals, and the PCI even fought until its disappearance for the "substantial implementation" of the Constitution, i.e., the transition from the enunciation of the principles present in the Constitutional Charter to their implementation in the choices of the Legislature and the Executive Power.

In recent years, however, the wind has changed; the Constitution is no longer a fixed point, and almost all contemporary parties agree that serious modifications should be made to it. The debate is still open today, and without delving into the merits of this, it must be said that that fruitful climate of concord of the Constituent Assembly is now very distant. Also because, recently, the principle of making "constitutional reforms with majority votes" has, in fact, prevailed. The "high compromise" between communist, socialist, and Catholic cultures is therefore considered outdated by "unilateral" reform proposals that, in the best case, can be defined as having a "liberal" inspiration.

The pressures of the left-wing parties, especially the PCI, and the unions, inserted in a context that had the objective of the substantial implementation of the Constitution, ensured that an increasingly thick network of social guarantees and rights was formed. Workers and the weakest figures in society saw a considerable and constant expansion of their rights during the years of the so-called "First Republic." In subsequent years, the situation has also changed on these issues. As early as the 1980s, the "Welfare State" was put under accusation, and the PCI in its last years, despite being in a situation of crisis, tried to respond to these attacks in some way.

Since the 1990s, after the end of the PCI, governments of every political color have tried to put some order into the unstable Italian finances, and the keyword "economic recovery" has gained increasing weight. However, along with waste, the necessary cuts have very often also concerned rights. Even the unions, which should have constituted, along with the left-wing parties, the barrier against the excesses of neoliberal ideology, which in these years has had hegemony over other cultures and has been the main interpreter of these policies, have "defended rights" only in alternating phases and too often conditioned by the political color of the Government proceeding with the cuts.

The legacy of the PCI is therefore considered outdated by the majority of contemporary politics. But it is worth remembering that the Constitution, democracy, rights, and the welfare state constitute the best, even if not exclusive, legacy of the PCI, and certainly not its mistakes. On all this, the attitude of contemporary politics clearly shows its limits and its subordination to a singular economic thought that would have been unthinkable, for example, for a party like the DC.

The left of today has managed to debunk the "K factor," succeeding in going into government several times since 1996, but it has abandoned the idea of changing society. This choice has undoubtedly been influenced by the historical defeat of "Real Socialism," rightly considered by everyone an example not to be imitated as it lacked freedom and substantial equality, which has made an alternative to Capitalism untimely. Who knows when another generation of young people will be born, or perhaps has already been born, who, unable to be accused of "wanting to do as in the Soviet Union," will be able to push themselves to dream of a new idea of society and attempt, in a completely new way, the "assault on heaven." But that is another story.