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ANTONIO GRAMSCI, ITALIAN COMMUNISM AND EDUCATION

By

John R. Hall

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Secondary Education and Curriculum

1980

ABSTRACT

ANTONIO GRAMSCI, ITALIAN COMMUNISM AND EDUCATION

By
John R. Hall

It can be said that Italian communism from its earliest days

to the present has experienced three phases: (1) The Revolutionary,

 

from 1919 to 1926, in which it was believed that the Leninist revo-
lution was near. The PCI was formed, Mussolini came to power, and

the PCI was banished from Italy in this period. (2) The Intermediary,

 

from 1926 to 1935, during which thoughts of the revolution were post-
poned until after the defeat of fascism. The PCI found itself frag-
mented into three parts: the incarcerated, the underground, and the
exiled; and the party leadership was controlled to a considerable
extent by Moscow. (3) The National, extending from 1935 to the
present, when the PCI began to shift from the traditional communist
objectives to those which could be called socialist within a national
liberal-democratic framework. It has become, in the eyes of many, an
establishment party, and it appears to adhere rigorously to the Ital-
ian national Constitution in its dealings with other parties and with
the Italian society, though internally, at the 1eadership level, it

remains rather authoritarian.

John R. Hall

An assumption in this study is that educational views of a
group are reflective of its sociopolitical substratum. In the case
of the PCI one sees a different educational position with each of the

three phases mentioned above. In the Revolutionary period, propa-

 

ganda reigned supreme, propaganda being defined as speaking or writ-
ing with the primary objective of effecting a specific end. Propa-
ganda was relied upon in part because there was no time and little
willingness to seek supportive evidence. The message was emphasized.

During the Intermediary era the PCI needed to find explanations for

 

the success of fascism, particularly after Hitler's rise to power;
hence Italian communists were in a more receptive mood with regard
to the search for evidence. Although there was no abatement of
propaganda in this period, an approach to knowledge which might be
termed educational was beginning. Education is defined in part as
the search for and use of evidence, permitting conclusions to be
drawn from it.

In the third stage, the National, party education, pr0paganda
and indoctrination are increasingly supplanted by an educational
approach in which the Italian national educational system becomes
the most important educating instrument of the party. Its educational
outlook is consonant with the liberal-democratic environment in which
it operates because the socialist values of the party are bound up
in it to a large extent. The individual is to be recognized as
important within a social setting, and evidence is to be highly

regarded in the learning process.

John R. Hall

The second leader of the party, Antonio Gramsci, has con-
tributed substantially to the educational philosophy of the party
through his prison writings. His belief in the dignity of the indi-
vidual student is taken as the keynote of the Italian communist
approach to the question of education, and his educational position
is contrasted with that of Amadeo Bordiga, the first leader of the

PCI, and with that of Lenin.

This dissertation is dedicated to my beloved and wonderful
wife, Mina, who supported me unstintingly with advice, criticism,
and sacrifice through the long years of graduate work. I remain

indebted to her with all my heart.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ........................

Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION .....................

The Need for the Study ...............
The Purposes of the Study ..............
The Scope of the Study ...............
The Limitations of the Study ............
Definitions .....................
The Organization of the Dissertation ........

II. THE ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY 1919 TO THE PRESENT . . . .

The Italian Communist Party and the Revolutionary
Period 1919-1926 .................
The Factory Occupations of 1920 ..........
The Formation of the Italian Communist Party

in 1921 .....................
The Bordiga and Gramsci Factions .........
Some Gramscian Political Concepts .........

The Italian Communist Party and the Intermediary
Period 1926-1935 .................

The Italian Communist Party and the National
Period 1935 to the Present ............
The United Front Against Fascism .........
The Resistance ..................
The Years 1945 to 1956 ..............
The Years 1956 to the Late 19705 .........

III. EDUCATION AND THE ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY IN THE
YEARS 1919-1945 ...................

Introduction ....................
The Educational Implications in Gramsci's Concept
of Hegemony ....................
The Fascist Years--1922-1945 ............
The Increasing Orientation of the Italian Communist
Party Toward Italian National Education ......

00000wa

13

72
72

75
85

9T

Gramsci's Ideas Concerning Italian National
Education ....................
The Educational Implications of the Resistance

IV. EDUCATION AND THE PCI IN THE YEARS 1945 TO THE 19705

Party Education ...................
Italian Education Historically and Constitutionally
Considered ....................
Elementary Education and the PCI ..........
Gramsci's Ideas ..................
Reform Proposals of the Italian Communists .
Secondary Education and the PCI ...........
Gramsci's Ideas ..................
Reform Proposals of the Italian Communists .
Local School Districts ...............
Italian Universities and the PCI ..........
V. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION ................
The PCI's Changing Perspective ...........

The PCI and the Revolutionary Period: The Predomi-
nance of Propaganda over Education 1919-1926

The Intermediary Period: The Increasing Importance
of Education 1926-1935 ..............

The PCI and the National Period: The Ascendancy of
Education over Propaganda, 1935 to the Present

The Leninist Approach to Education . . . . . . . I
The PCI Approach to Education ...........
Problems, Desires and Objectives for the Present
and Future ...................
APPENDIX ...........................
BIBLIOGRAPHY .........................

iv

Page
91
100
106
106
108
110
110
111
116
116
117
126
128
151
151
152
154
155
156
158
166
175

179

Table
1.

LIST OF TABLES

Resident Population Over Six Years of Age by Level
of Education .....................

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

The Need for the Study

The importance of the Italian Communist Party will become
clear if one reflects upon its position in Italy today. Italy is a
highly industrialized nation in the heart of Europe, and the inter-
ests controlling her are of great significance to Europe and the
world. The Italian Communist Party1 has been on the threshold of
sharing governmental power at the national level in Italian politics
since 1976, and it possesses the largest membership of any communist
party in the free world. A question which needs answering is: Have
these communists jettisoned their revolutionary inclinations of for-
mer years and genuinely adopted the parliamentary way of accomplish-
ing objectives, or are they using parliament instrumentally to obtain
the ultimate Marxian goals with the intention of abolishing the par-
liamentary way of life upon achieving those ends?

Two objections of Washington to the prospect of the Italian
Communist Party, or the PCI, gaining power in Italy are the follow-
ing: (1) It is "antidemocratic"2 and therefore it would jeopardize
the continuing efforts toward democratization within the Italian
society. (2) It would "weaken the already shaky North Atlantic

Treaty Organization (NATO), undemnhuatheprecarious equilibrium

between the Soviet Union and the United States on which détente is
based, and further decelerate the process of European integration."3
The objections of Moscow to the prospect of the PCI gaining
power in Italy principally relate to Russian security. Edward
Crankshaw states that "from Moscow's standpoint, the first duty of
a foreign communist party is not to conduct experiments in revolu-
tion or succor the working class but to underwrite the security of
the Soviet Union."4 This security might be gravely threatened if the
Italian Communist Party, remaining true to its reputed "revisionism,"
were to obtain all or a share of power in its national government.
Crankshaw further states that "a successful show of independence on
the part of any Communist party beyond the immediate reach of the
Soviet Army is something the Russians regard with apprehension, alarm
and even fear, for its disruptive effect on their Eastern European

5

satellites." Arrigo Levi, writing in Foreign Policy, feels that

 

"from the Kremlin, quite a few recent actions by the PCI . . . must
be considered subversive 'interference' in their [the Kremlin's] own
affairs. But the PCI . . . will find it difficult not to continue

. ."6 One could

offering some support for dissidents in the East. .
guess that a communist party successfully abiding by a liberal-
democratic constitution would be a severe indictment of the USSR in
the eyes of many communists throughout the world and would probably
set loose waves of disaffection throughout Eastern Europe.

The study of the Italian communist views regarding education

is one way of ascertaining the veracity of this party's revisionism.

Stalinism or Leninism hardly mixes with a liberal-democratic7

educational posture and it would be reasonable to assume that the
contradictions of such a mismatch would not long remain hidden. A
need exists, therefore, to perceive the nature of Italian communist
sentiment toward or against the public educational system of Italy
which, because of its obsolescence and insensitivities, has elicited
reforming proposals and suggestions as well as spasms of disgust in
the form of riots and pr0perty destruction from students and others
representing many sectors of the Italian society.

There is a need to know if the PCI is now sabotaging Italian
public education in the interest of propagating sectarian interests;
if the party relies primarily upon its own party education or upon
the system of public education; and if its "educational“ message is
today one of monolithic solidarity with Moscow. Perhaps the Italian
party has demonstrated through its current educational stance along
with its other positions and actions that “a communist party may
change"8 from a conspiratorial Leninist revolutionary group to one
resembling a typical European social democratic party without losing

its identity. There is a need to know.

The Purposes of the Study

The following are the purposes of this dissertation:

(1) To show how the educational objectives of the Italian
Communist Party, the PCI, have become consonant with those of the
Italian liberal-democracy in which it is situated. (2) To show how
the PCI moved through three stages, each possessing different politi-

cal and social imperatives, viz., the Revolutionary, the Intermediate,

 

 

and the National of which it presently is a part. (3) To demon-
strate why each of these three stages possessed its own peculiar
educational orientation. (4) To indicate how and why the PCI has
become increasingly loyal to national and liberal-democratic goals
without abandoning its loyalty to a socialist reconstruction of
society. (5) To compare the leadership and educational philosophies
of two prominent PCI leaders, Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti,
with Lenin. (6) To point out some of the endemic characteristics of
the Italian life which have had and continue to have a bearing on
education, e.g., the Church, the South, the existing public school
system, and the fragmented and demoralized contemporary socio-

political situation.

The Scope of the Study

The historical development of the Italian Communist Party
will be examined from a period shortly prior to its formation to the
late 19705. Using this historical development as a base, the educa—
tional views of the party will then be seen as emerging naturally
from it, with the assumption being that educational orientations are
by-products of basic socio-political attitudes and forces. The study
includes brief examinations of the interrelationship of the PCI with
Moscow, the Church, Italian fascism, the Italian Socialist Party,
southern Italy, the post-war national educational system, and its
behavior in a Western parliamentary-style democracy, since 1945.
The scope will also include a presentation of the educational views

of the very influential Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci

and compare them with Amadeo Bordiga and Palmiro Togliatti, other
Italian Communist Party leaders, and Lenin.

The scope and direction of this dissertation depend upon the
writer's conception of the Italian Communist Party, the PCI, so a
description ishereby offered: Now, at the beginning of the 19805,
the PCI may be described as a communist party which, within the rela-
tively benign conditions of a Western democracy, maintains its posi-
tion as an organizer and leader of the working classes; emphasizes
the democratic, and increasingly national aspect of its heritage
externally while retaining a considerable degree of authoritarianism
internally; attempts to avoid both party splits and the demagogic
exploitation of controversial subjects; seeks to extend its mass base
by appealing to the socialist-democratic sentiments of the middle and
lower stratas of the population; believes that socialist structural
reform must be achieved not through radicalism and violent acts but
gradually and democratically while still within the capitalist sys-
tem in a manner which will move the nation out of that system by
gradually depriving it of power centers such as municipal and regional
governments, labor unions, academic councils, etc.: and finally,
which asserts its independence from any and all other communist par-
ties and organizations while yet affirming its sympathy with their
Marxian goals.

The PCI is structured in ascending order around cells, sec-
tions, federations, and the central organization. Basically there
have been two different types of cells, i.e., those organized in

geographical localities and those situated in work areas. Cells

through the 19605 have gradually been supplanted by the next highest
unit of organization, the sections, which "began to take over the
tasks of socialization and of activating and guiding the rank and

men'g

Cells and sections are operated by volunteers, but federa-
tions, which at the next level generally coincide in their territorial
jurisdiction with the province, are staffed by full-time professional
politicians and support staff, most of whom are paid. These paid
officeholders
have the task of coordinating party activities, including the
designation of the candidates who will appear on the party
tickets, in the territories under their jurisdiction. . . .
This power is limited, however, by the fact that the national
leadership must be in agreement with their sebection of candi-
dates, at least in the more important posts.

At the highest level, the party is organized around the Central
Committee which is elected by the annual party congresses and which in
the interval between congresses supposedly possesses pre-eminent
power. The Central Committee appoints the directorate and secre-
tariat. In 1962 the Central Committee had 140 members, the direc—
torate l9, and the secretariat seven; the Central Committee since 1956
has met four or five times a year while the secretariat "which in
practice is the true executive organ of the Communists and forms the

I] There are also

core of the directorate, meets about twice a month."
assemblies in addition to the annual congresses, both of which debate
agendas that the secretariat of the Central Committee largely deter-
mines.

Party electoral commissions decide upon slates of candidates

for elective office. Since 1956 delegates to the assemblies have been

able to add or withdraw names, something that was prohibited in pre-
vious years. Also, since 1956, members have had the right to with-
draw from the party whereas "prior to that time the only way to leave
the party was to be expelled from it."12 In summation, it may be
claimed that there is more than a little Leninist democratic cen-
tralism within the party, a holdover from its earlier days, but that
despite authoritarian measures, it cannot be called a Leninist, or
Stalinist party today, in 1979.

It should also be stated that although the core of the party
mechanism is hierarchical and centralized, it is "able to direct and
coordinate the actions of its local administrators only partially."13
Furthermore, it is a fact that among the large number of card-
carrying members there are many who are somewhat less than zealous
supporters, that the editorial pages of Rinascita and L'Unita, two
party publications, include a great variety of ideas not all of which
would have the unqualified support of the party leadership, and that
a rather significant number of communist voters support the party at
the polls solely out of protest against the ruling Christian Demo-
crats. With this party structure in mind related political phe-
nomena such as voting behavior, alliances and desire for national
power may be investigated in the text of this dissertation. The

scope, therefore, includes the political as well as the historical

and educational dimensions mentioned above.

The Limitations of the Study

This dissertation will exclude fascist political or educa-
tional doctrine; Catholic educational philosophy; secret societies
such as the Mafia, political terrorists of the left, e.g., the Red
Brigade and its variants, or of the right, e.g., neo-fascist groups.
It will have nothing to say about American intervention in the Ital-
ian scene, though the Allies in connection with World War II are
mentioned; and no analysis of trade or professional schools in Italy

is undertaken.

Definitions
In order for the reader to better understand the substance
of this study, the following definitions and clarifications are
offered:

Marxian Education: Marx believed that although education

 

and propaganda should be used in preparing the masses for revolu-
tion, it was the action of revolution itself which served as the
major educating force in society. Education for him involved ele-
ments of both voluntarism and determinism since the revolution itself
was a product of men acting in a social environment which had been
previously determined by the actions of former generations of humans.
Education: The presenting of evidence without an interest
in the ends to which it may be used. The student is free of con-
straint from the instructor and the educational establishment to
conclude what he will on the basis of the evidence presented. Edu-

cation also involves the moral assertion that the instructor should

help the student realize his potentialities to love, to be happy, to
use reason and to develop "specific potentialities like artistic
gifts."14

Propaganda and Indoctrination: The presenting of ideas with

 

 

or without evidence in the interest of effecting certain results.
The desire to bring about a certain effect supplants the dispas-
sionate presentation of evidence in importance, and it involves
manipulation of the student. Unlike education, there is an "absence
of faith in the growth of potentialities and [there is] the convic-
tion that [the student] will be right only if the [instructors] put
into him what is desirable and cart off what seems to be undesir-
able."15
The PCI: The Italian Communist Party.
The PSI: The Italian Socialist Party.

The DC: The Christian Democratic Party.

Liberal-Democratic Attitude: That socio-political stance

 

which accords protection to the individual while respecting the rights
of the masses.

Socialism: A system involving public ownership of the essen-
tial means of production in a pluralistic society where liberal-

democracy could operate under law in all areas of human endeavor.

The Organization of the Dissertation
This study is organized around the framework of three his—

torical periods: 1919 to 1926 (Revolutionary), 1926 to 1935 (Inter-

 

mediary), and 1935 to the present (National). Beginning in 1919

10

during the turmoil leading up to the factory occupations in northern
Italy of the next year, the Italian communists first emerge as an
identifiable group. The split in the Italian Socialist Party in
1921 resulting in the formation of the Italian Communist Party in
that same year was the next development, to be shortly succeeded by
Mussolini's rise to power in 1922 and the banishment of the PCI in
1926. The party survived outside of Italy until the conclusion of
the Second World War but to a great extent it found itself under

the protection and guidance of Moscow through the later 19205 and
early 19305. The party later moved toward a position of greater
independence vis-a-vis the Russians, the first indications of its
intentions to do so appearing in its concerns for the Italian nation
publicly announced as early as the mid-19305.

In the post-war era, the PCI has developed more independence
from Moscow and has immersed itself in Italy's liberal-democracy as
an increasingly active and supportive participant. It has an impor-
tant stake in the survival of the constitutional democracy in Italy
though it endeavors to move gradually and legally toward a basic
socialistic restructuring of society.

The basic assumption of this work is that the educational
goals of a group are linked with the socio-political orientation of
that group. So it is with that in mind that the socio-political

positions in each of three PCI phases, called the Revolutionary, the

 

Intermediary and the National within the historical framework cited

 

above, are investigated with the idea of yielding causes for the

particular educational positions of those phases. Chapter II, a

11

brief history of the PCI, therefore serves as the basis upon which
Chapters III, IV, and V, all dealing with the PCI's versions of
education, are founded. The party relied primarily upon indoctrina-
tion and propaganda in the Revolutionary period, but slowly abandoned
them, though never completely, in favor of education during the
National period. Education is examined primarily as the PCI has
viewed it through its leaders and journal contributors, and it is
broken into the three parts of elementary, secondary and university
to facilitate organization.

It should be stated that this writer is responsible for the
translations into English of the various primary and secondary

Italian-language materials used in this study.

12

Footnotes--Chapter I

1Hereafter frequently termed the "PCI" in this dissertation.

2Peter Lange and Maurizio Vannicelli, "Carter hithe Italian
Maze," Foreign Policy 33 (Winter 1978/79): 169.

3

 

Ibid., pp. 169-70.

4"Europe's Reds: Trouble for Moscow," New York Times “6932108,
12 February 1978, p. 20.

5

 

Ibid.. PP. 19-20.

6Arrigo Levi, "Italy's 'New Communism,'" Foreign Policy 26
(Spring 1977): 28.

7In this study, unless otherwise indicated, the word "liberal"
denotes its mid-20th century democratic position as opposed to its
18th and 19th century bourgeois stance.

 

8Levi, p. 30.

9Giorgio Galli and Alfonso Prandi, Patterns of Political
Participation in Italy (London: Yale University Press, 1970),
p. 95.

101bid., p. 100.

11Ibid., p. 101.

'ZIbid., p. 103.

131bid., p. 240.

14Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology

of Ethics (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1968):’p. 209.

151pm.

 

CHAPTER II

THE ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY 1919 TO THE PRESENT

The Italian Communist Party and the Revolutionary
Period 1919-1926

The Factory Occupations of 1920

 

The Italian Communist Party, or the PCI, was organized in
1921. In the years immediately preceding its formation much had
occurred which was to have a direct bearing upon the history of this
party, perhaps the most important being the factory occupations of
1920, the outgrowth of industrial malaise and dislocation in post-
war Italy.

In the factories, elected workshop committees had come into
existence during the course of the war. While the government acqui-
esced in their existence in the interest of pleasing the workers
whose increased efforts were needed for the promulgation of the war,
the employers were opposed to these committees since they were seen
as infringements upon managerial prerogatives. Antonio Gramschi, a

future leader of the PCI, and the staff of his journal L'Ordine Nuovo

 

attempted to "transform these committees into fully representative
councils (the factory councils), through which the workers would win
a share in factory management and acquire technical knowledge and
experience, as a first step towards the revolutionary exprOpriation

of industry."1 Gramsci also saw these factory councils as

13

14

intermediaries between the vanguard of the party and the masses to
whom they were to be re5ponsible.2 The councils gained considerable
importance during the high tide of leftist "revolutionary" discontent
in September and October of 1920 when hundreds of factories in northern
Italy were occupied by their workers.

These factory occupations amounted to defensive strikes and
although there was talk of revolution, it remained only talk. The
trade-union and socialist leaders proved to be disunited in this epi-
sode; they did not initiate the occupations, nor did they agree on
short- or long-range objectives once they had decided to participate.
It was, in fact, a combination of leftist bickering and purposeful
governmental inaction which doomed the efforts of the workers as they
sat uselessly in the factories for weeks. It could be said that
Italian bolshevism in 1919 and 1920 consisted mainly of chaotic out-
breaks in large segments of the Italian pe0p1e and that not only did
the ruling classes overreact with inappropriate bitterness, but that
it was the fascists who would emerge victorious in this three-way
standoff involving the government, the industrialists and the workers.
The fascists escalated terror to new heights (If intensity aftgr_the
collapse of the "revolution," their rationale being the assertion
that they alone could preserve the Italian society from bolshevism.3

The Formation of the Italian
Communist Party in 1921

 

 

The factory council movement had been defeated by the begin-
ning of October 1920, but this did not mean that all advocates of

leftist revolution faded into oblivion. Most Italian socialists,

15

called Maximalists, stood for a maximum program of immediate sociali-
zation but they were ineffectual when it came to action. The other
two branches of the Socialist Party, or PSI, were the right-wing
reformers and the extremists, the latter being those who, in January
of 1920, split off from the PSI at the Socialist Congress in Livorno
to form the Communist Party of Italy. This split occurred because
the extremists were the only group in Italy to accept the orders
sent by the Third Communist International, hereafter called the
Comintern, demanding complete adherence by all socialist and commu-
nist parties to its directives in the future. It should be stated
that this Split aided the rise of Mussolini's fascism which assumed

power in 1922.

The Bordiga and Gramsci Factions

 

Amadeo Bordiga, the first leader of the PCI, was ideologically
close to the Maximalists. He and his followers embraced a rational-
istic and rigidly mechanical formula which provided answers through
deduction to questions regarding everything from practical matters to
the ultimate objectives of the working class movement.4 He advocated
complete abstinence from elections and parliament while concentrat-
ing on preparation for the violent overthrow of the government.
Bordiga felt that the party should be a "sect consisting of a small
number of intransigent revolutionaries whom the masses would then
follow into revolutionary action"5 and he therefore desired the 1921

split which produced the new Italian Communist Party, or PCI.

16

In June of 1921, however, the Comintern requested a "united
front" be formed between the Italian Communist and Socialist parties,
and in December the Comintern stated that communist parties were to
cooperate with non-communists in usurping and sharing political power
if the opportunity arose. Finally, it ordered a new fusion of the
two Italian leftist parties since the Socialist Party had now agreed
to follow its orders. Bordiga steadfastly refused all of these
orders because he feared his communist party would be contaminated by
the "revisionist elements" of the non-communists in any close asso-
ciation.

Antonio Gramsci agreed with the Comintern and he replaced
Bordiga as party secretary in April of 1924. The new secretary saw
the party as one which should be "of the masses, 'not a party which
uses the masses to produce a heroic imitation of the French Jaco-
bins,”6 and,prior to January 1921, he had desired to work for his
objectives within the Socialist Party rather than split from it.
Arrested by the fascists at the end of 1926, Gramsci remained in
prison a little more than ten years, and died in 1937. The ideas
produced in his prison writings have continued to exercise an impor-
tant influence over the PCI and "they reveal Gramsci as a Marxist
thinker of unparalleled range and depth of culture: alongside them

Lenin's theoretical works look crude indeed."7

Some Gramscian Political Concepts

 

Gramsci learned much from Lenin's success and he agreed with

Lenin's struggle against the Marxist faction known as the Economists.

17

This group felt that the proletariat should confine its activities
to the economic realm with the objective of obtaining an ameliora-
tion of economic conditions and avoid the political arena since any
revolutionary political activities by the proletariat could frighten
the bourgeoisie into reaction. The Economists tended to believe that
the bourgeois revolution would occur more readily, indeed auto-
matically, if the bourgeoisie were ignored by the left. Both Lenin
and Gramsci felt that the Economists were overly deterministic and
mechanical and hence unrealistic; both used a partially voluntaris-
tic and pragmatic approach to problems. Gramsci, in not meeting with
the political success of Lenin, was repeatedly forced into doubting,
analyzing and questioning. Perhaps this perplexity coupled with his
probity contributed to the relatively open quality of the PCI as
opposed to the strictures of the Russian Communist Party which, by
the late 19205, was dogmatically embracing truth as that which
served its leadership.

Gramsci spoke of the importance of the Marxian concept of
superstructure by which he meant the entire complex of institutions,
ideas and practices bound up in the political and civil sections of
society. The character of the superstructure differed in the East
and West. Gramsci claimed that "in Russia the state was everything
while the civil society was primitive and tremulous but in the West
there are proper relations between them [and] . . . in the revolu-
tionary shaking of the state one notices the robust condition of the
civil society."8 This meant that the revolutionary tactics which

succeeded in Russia by simply conquering the political structure of

18

power could not be used in the West since conquest of the state in
the latter area could never be accomplished without a preceding con-
quest of its complex civil society. Italian conditions must be
taken into account, therefore, if Marxism is to succeed.

Gramsci's method of conquering the civil society was through
the development of "hegemony." By this he meant the moral and cul-
tural predominance of a class in society "obtained by consent rather

than force, .. . over other classes."9

Under the bourgeoisie this
hegemony is held by the agents of capitalism, but it is precisely in
this area of civil society that the proletariat must make great
incursions prior to the assumption of political power through the
proletarian revolution. A cardinal distinction between Gramsci and
Lenin in the matter of their concepts of hegemony proves to be of
interest here as Sarafino Cambareri tells us that

Lenin . . . spoke of hegemony . . . only when the proletariat

triumphed after having imposed its dictatorship creating the

appropriate conditions for this objective, since the masses

are not able to take possession of the culture. . . . The

Gramscian concept is that the working class must exercise its

leading function through the political-cultural hegemony

before the . . . conquest of power.10 (Italics added.)

Gramsci conceived of hegemonic progress in the superstruc-
ture, in large part educational though it was to be, as a phase of
the struggle for power, and he referred to this phase as the "war of
position" which was contrasted to the "war of maneuver." According
to Palmiro Togliatti, the emerging leader of the PCI after 1926,
Gramsci used the latter term to denote the quest for power through
violent revolution, but by the former he envisioned the efforts of

the "mature class under the direction of the revolutionary party

19

when violent action is not possible or when preparation for it is in

progress."H

This meant that there could only be different versions
of war, and none of peace, prior to the actual conquest of political
power.12 Yet this "war" would be different in practice from Lenin's
hegemonic phase if for no other reason than the fact that the effort
to promulgate it had to rely on persuasion since those conducting
the war of position were acting prior to the assumption of power by
their class, hence the importance of education in the Gramscian
scheme.

A point to remember in connection with this scheme is
Gramsci's continual emphasis on organic relationships. He had con-
demned the idealist Croce, the materialist Bukharin, the doctrinaire
Bordiga, and all species of sectarians including the Maximalists for
their common affliction, i.e., the detachment of their theories from
life. He thought their ideas were stilted, rigid and unrealistic as
a consequence. After 1926 when the confines of prison disallowed
him the opportunity of testing his theories in practice, an exercise
which he always considered to be vital, he bore his criticism in mind
and attempted as best he could to write objectively from his cell in
a manner which would not separate his preponderance of theory from
its grounding in life. Just as theory was to be inseparable from
practice, so the party leadership was to be linked organically with
the rank and file of the party; the party itself was to be linked

‘3 and the working class, through its hegemonic

with the working class;
efforts, was to become eventually linked in an organic sense with

society.

20

The Italian Communist Party and the
Intermediary Period 1926-1935

By 1926 the PCI was declared illegal in Italy. By 1928 an
Italian communist named Giorgio Amendola could describe the party as
divided into three parts: first, a segment working surreptitiously
within Italy; second, the emigres in exile; and third, those who were
jailed in Italy, each with a different political life. He asked,
"'Which one controls the movement?'" He also wondered, "'In what way
can and should the right of directing the movement remain with the
arrested leaders, and how can the emigrated leaders succeed in lead-
ing a movement while remaining within the country . . . of their

‘4 Scattered though it was, the PCI did not pass

operations. . . ?'"
out of existence in the intermediary years, but its remnants fell
into virtuallyr complete dependence upon Moscow. Perhaps if condi-
tions within Italy had permitted an actual communist revolution that
succeeded in the early 19205 the PCI might have declared its indepen-
dence from Moscow then as it has later done. However, the fascist
attack upon the Italian communists coupled with the historic example
of the success of the Russian Bolshevik revolution encouraged Palmiro
Togliatti, who lived in Russia through these intermediary years, to
lodge himself within the embrace of the Russians through the Com-
intern.

In a comparison of Gramsci and Togliatti, the "distinction
which usually emerges after a cursory examination is that Gramsci was

a 'theoretician' and Togliatti a 'politician,' that Gramsci was an

'idealist' and Togliatti was a 'realist'" yet, "the political stature

21

of Gramsci is not less perspicuous than the theory of Togliatti.
Gramsci who presided at the formation of the new group of party

leaders was not less 'realistic' than Togliatti would be 'idealis-
...15

tic' in 1944 when he promoted the 'new party.

Togliatti headed the PCI, first, in its worst days at the
height of the fascist power, second, through its most exhilarating
moments in the Resistance, and third, through the first two decades
of the post-war era when it realized steady, and sometimes spectacu-
lar Italian political success. He was out of Italy from 1926 to 1944
organizing clandestine Italian congresses, assuming a position in the
secretariat of the Comintern, and representing it in the Spanish
Civil War.

The Comintern in the 19205 and 305 can be seen in three
periods, states Franz Borkenau: "During the first period [it] is
mainly an instrument to bring about revolution. During the second
period it is mainly an instrument in the Russian factional struggles.
During the third period it is mainly an instrument of Russian for-

"16 From 1929 to 1934 Stalin moved left against Bukharin,

eign policy.
Romsky and Rykov on the right, and the Comintern now directed Euro-
pean communists to regard social democracy as "social fascism" and
to cease all trade union and parliamentary activities. The economic
depression that was now to strike Europe seemed to underscore the
Comintern claim that the revolution was at hand and those communists
throughout Europe who refused to believe and comply were banished

from their respective parties. The result was a rapid drop of party

membership in most areas of Western Europe. Within Italy this was a

22

savage period for the communists who, in carrying on "semi-public

methods of propaganda . . . [were] actually destroyed"17 as a group.

The Italian Communist Party and the National
Period 1935 to the Present

The United Front Against Fascism

 

In January 1933, Hitler gained power. By the end of 1934,
Stalin was directing European communists through the Comintern to
consider the "social fascists" as "social democrats." The vilified
were not supposed to be friends, as they and all other bourgeois
democratic and liberal elements were to be used in the fight against
the Nazis. Stalin had finally recognized that nazism and fascism
could not be defeated by the old bolshevik tactics of splitting trade
unions, expelling schismatics and calling for the proletarian revolu-
tion; instead, alliances must be formed as soon as possible with
any_group opposed to Hitler. The united front policy of the Comin-
tern was the result, but the communists who participated in these
groups were cautioned against forgetting the delayed proletarian
revolution and communist conquest of power and were told that they
must never relinquish control of these cooperative movements.18

Throughout these radical shifts Togliatti remained loyal to
the Comintern though it would not be fair to characterize him as a
"yes" man in Stalin's entourage. Bocca sees him as attempting to

"19 and Ernesto Ragionieri writes

"reconcile obedience with reason
about his "ability to conduct a prolonged polemic with success
despite internal and external obstacles" and the "firmness with which,

through bending and compromises, haltings and deviations, he is

23

successful in maintaining substantially unaltered the principles

20 According to Blackmer, Togli-

inspiring the prospective policy."
atti appears to be a man who was
entirely capable of decisive and ruthless action when the chips
were down, [but] he was instinctively a man of moderation and
compromise. Consistently opposed to sharp ruptures, he pre-
ferred to believe that unity could be preserved without either
destroying one of the contending factions or establishing by
superior force a purely artificial consensus. He was clearly
worried by the course events were taking as Stalin consolidated
his rule, in the Soviet Union and in the Comintern as well.
But being both a realist and a dedicated Communist, Togliatti
would set aside his personal convictions if they happened to
clash with the higher demands of the movement to which he was
irrevocably committed.21
The PCI in these years worked indefatigably for the defeat of
fascism. It had no time to think of correcting the national system
of education in Italy, and no time to engage in the abstrusities of
Marxian dialectics or to seek out and expel opportunists or sec-
tarians. Instead, it pursued with some misgivings but without any
apparent slip of its determination, a working relationship with non-
communist antifascists in a united front that even involved an
attempted rapproachment with the Church.
Gramsci had warned his comrades about the power of the
Catholic Church in Italy: ". . . the liberal state had to find a
system of equilibrium with the spiritual power of the Church: the

22 By 1936

workers' state must also find a system of equilibrium."
when the combined strength of Hitler and Mussolini made the PCI more
mindful of the search for allies, its Central Committee made the
following statements directed to the Catholic Church of Italy from

its position in exile:

24

The absolute respect of the religious opinions and the
defense of the liberty of conscience of the masses are for the
communists a question of principle. [We] . . . understand and
respect the profound aspirations of justice, liberty, peace
and of universal human brotherhood which nourish the religious
belief. . . . The position of the communists toward religion
is not dictated by cynicism and base opportunism. . . . [We]
do not declare war against religion but rather against the
social bias of exploitation, of misery and of war, against
that economic power which . . . is concentrated in the hands
of a small number of men who decide at their pleasure the des-
tiny . . . of the people.23

Togliatti and the Central Committee realized that there could be no
h0pe of any lasting change in the Italian society while the PCI and
the Catholic Church regarded each other with enmity. Gramsci's words
of caution had led the way and now the Church was seen by the PCI as
a possible weak link in the fascist society since its professed ends
conflicted with those of the fascist state; just as the Church har-
bored reactionary elements which could be isolated, so it nourished
progressive groups that could be harnessed by the party in its cause.
Perhaps the major reason why increasing attention was being
focused on the Church in this period by the party was that it seemed
to be inseparable from Italian nationalism. One of the many state—
ments which indicated how things would deve10p came from Togliatti
in an article entitled "The Policy of National Unity of the Commu-
nists" from 1944. He said in it: "We will gather up the flag of
national interest which fascism has dragged in the mud and betrayed--

24 He continued:

and we will make it ours."
When we defend the interests of the nation, when we put
ourselves at the head of combat for the liberation of Italy
from the German invasion we are in the line of the true and
great traditions of the proletarian movement. We are in the

line of the doctrine and of the traditions of Marx and Engles

25

who never repudiated the interests of their nation, always

defended it as much against foreign aggression and invasion

as against the reactionary groups which trample it underfoot.

We are in line of the great Lenin who affirmed feeling proud

of Russia. . . . We are in the line of Stalin. . . .2

Could this be a tacit admission by the most prestigious com-

munist of post-war Italy that the force generated by the world prole-
tarian movement paled beside the tremendous power released through
the nationalism displayed in the spectacle before him? However, the
new nationalism of the proletariat would be divested of those errors
of bourgeois nationalism such as "aggression and Oppression of other
people";26 one could say that "'the bourgeoisie ceased being national-

27

ists when they became imperialists.'" Togliatti had made a virtue

out of necessity.

The Resistance

 

Mussolini capitulated 25 July 1943. In the period between
this date and the conclusion of the war, the Resistance movement,
which was dominated by the political left, came close to accomplish-
ing what the Risorgimento did not: a social and emotional unifica-
tion of the Italian people. Committees of national liberation were
formed and the PCI was one of the many political elements to join
them. A PCI resolution which was approved by the National Liberation
Committee of the North (CLNAI) states the following about the Italian
Resistance and the forthcoming Italian nation:

"There will be no place tomorrow among us for a reactionary
regime, however masked, nor for a limp democracy. The new
political, social, and economic system will not be other than
a clear and effective democracy. The CLN of today is a pre-

figuration of the Government of tomorrow. In tomorrow's Gov-
ernment this is certain: worker's peasants, artisans, all the

26

popular classes will have a determining weight, . . . and a
place adequate to this weight will be held by the parties which
represent them. Among these is the Communist Party, which is
included in the CLN on a plane of perfect parity with the other
parties, with equal fullness of authority today and of power
tomorrow. . . . Whoevgr works against this union of them works
against the Nation."2
Although there was an element of self-interest at work among
the partisans of the Italian Resistance, "some of the very best ele-
ments in the country were prominent in [it], and it provided a fine
training in social consciousness as well as a new kind of idealis-
tic patriotism. No one who lived through such an experience could
forget it; never before had so many citizens participated so actively

in national life."29

H. Stuart Hughes writes about the vision of the
Resistance which "sought to bridge the gap between Communists and
democrats--and also the chasm which had so long separated Catholics
from anticlericals--by creating a new and nonsectarian socialism."

He continues with the assertion that the Resistance "strove to sup-
plant the old political parties with a new movement which would bring
to national leadership men who were both more public-spirited and more
technically competent than the usual parliamentary politicians of

the old stamp." He found that these types of men rarely gained
positions of power within the movement or in the political parties
after the conclusion of the war; this was unfortunate because these
young men of the Resistance "tended to think first of their own
country's needs, rather than of Moscow's orders, and [they] preferred
a political system in which the essentials of personal liberty were

..30
preserved.

27

In April 1944, Togliatti returned to Italy after an 18-year
absence to find a turbulent situation not entirely unlike that exist-
ing in the wake of World War 1. He moved decisively to defuse what
could never have succeeded: a communist revolution amidst the politi-
cal conservatism of the middle and upper classes and, more impor-
tantly, the guns of the Allied soldiers. Marshal Badoglio's govern-
ment took power following the departure of Mussolini but the commu-
nists at first had refused to c00perate with it because it had been
appointed by Victor Emmanuel III, the king who was besmirched by his
association with the fascists.

Togliatti induced the PCI to continue the c00peration with
the Italian Socialist Party which had been initiated in the united
front and in the 1943 "Unity of Action Pact" that had partially
closed the breach suffered between them in August 1939 as a result
of the Molotov-RibbentrOp deal. He signed the manifesto dissolving
the Comintern in April 1943 and then, after the removal of Musso-
lini, he moved the PCI toward cooperation with all other anti-fascist
parties and with the vilified king in an attempt to complete the war
effort. The PCI entered the coalition governments of Marshal
Badoglio, Ivanoe Bonomi and Alcide de Gasperi while Togliatti him-
self entered the Badoglio government as minister without portfolio

serving as vice-premier from December of 1944 to June of 1945.

The Years 1945 to 1956

 

Theypolitical position of the Italian Community Party in the

immediate post-war period.--At the end of the war the PCI found itself

 

28

in an Italy controlled by conservative powers. Togliatti knew that a
successful revolution would never be permitted by the victorious
Allies and he therefore began the long Gramscian journey toward
building a basis for eventual communist hegemony. This would require,
among other things, sensitivity to national problems and therefore
independence from Moscow, peace, a mass party willing to participate
in the non-communist government and educational reform. Unlike the

Revolutionary Period, from 1919 to 1926, when the PCI was continually

 

preoccupied with its defense and with preparation for a possible

revolution, or the Intermediary_Period, from 1926 to 1935, in which

 

the party was literally torn apart, the post-World War II era has
provided the opportunity for it to expand through peaceful methods
consonant with the parliamentary democracy in which it was now
ensconced.

A new type of mass party was found to be necessary to take
advantage of the situation which parliamentary politics forced upon
the PCI. If the party failed to maintain those ties with the masses
formed through its leadership role in the Resistance and turned
itself into a party of propagandists and conspirators, its retreat
would isolate it from involvement in the affairs of the nation and
its tasks would be difficult to fulfill. The party should be a
national party concerned with problems of the nation, one which
attempts to solve those problems with solutions applicable in the
present, but one which is also directed toward the accomplishment of
new objectives, those of the Gramscian hegemony, and it should incor-

porate elements of all the categories of Italian society except those

29

of the large capitalists.3] It should also try to avoid the debili-
tating intraparty splits which in the past bore their share of the
responsibility for the confusion leading to the rise of the Black
Shirts and which in the present could prove to be an obstacle to the
fonnation of such a national party.

The PCI had secured a reputation as one of the most effec-
tive of the Italian antifascist fighters, a reputation it had been
building since its inception as a party in 1921. It probably was
the best organized and disciplined of all Italian antifascist groups
in exile; within Italy it had carried on courageously in the face of
fascist intimidation before it was declared illegal in 1926, and it
had pursued its objectives in that country after 1926 through the
underground. Its history of hardship tempered it for leadership in
the Resistance, and its membership climbed from around 10,000 adher-
ents in 1943, to about 400,000 in 1944, and to some 2,166,448 by
1946. By 1947 the figure was 2,252,715 and, despite a slight decline
in the number the following year, the party had regained the 2.2 mil-
lion figure in 1949 and went on to measure about 2.5 million enrollees
in 1950.32

These very large membership numbers did not encourage Togli-
atti's intransigence in favor of promoting communist revolutionary
activities. Indeed, he was to continue working toward the mutual
accommodation of his party and the Italian nation-state. The Consti—
tution which became effective 1 January 1948 was a "mixture of Marx-
ist, Catholic, and Liberal doctrines" and, although it "was not . . .

a very reformist document" one could say that "it did not prevent

30

reform in the future."33 An important point to be made here is that

the PCI did not obstruct the Constituent Assembly, which was charged
with creating the constitution, by adamantly holding out for the
passage of Marxian ideas in such key areas as the economy or reli-
gion, but rather that it accommodated itself to the conservative
pressures with the belief that by breathing life into resurrected
democratic institutions, the essential reforms would come in time.
However, this did not stop them from verbalizing their objectives in
a way generally consonant with parliamentary democracy.

Giuseppe Mammarella informs us that in the first months
after the war the PCI attacked the system of monopolistic capitalism
which had been protected since the end of the 19th century and which
had received favorable treatment through the fascist era. It did so
by advocating "Management Councils" which were to include demo-
cratically elected representatives of the factory workers as well as
representatives of capital, and which were to become involved in
management decisions. In this manner the party intended to move
toward a planned and controlled economy through the avenue of indus-
try. But though there were as many as 500 of these councils by 1946,
this approach ultimately failed largely because of the fact that
Italy was experiencing a high rate of inflation causing the workers
to demand higher wages to which the capitalists agreed in turn for
the abandonment of the council idea. Thereafter these councils
decreased in number with the result that the PCI transferred the

locus of its energies from the industrial to the political arena.34

31

By 1949 the Italian level of production, as a whole, had
reached the prewar marks but there were extensive areas of impover-
ishment and great residues of bitterness as the rewards of the revived
economic system were very selectively bestowed. The Italians worked
assiduously, but frequently the conspicuous consumption flaunted
by those more fortunate few sabotaged what little existed of social
consciousness among them. One might say that the various govern-
ments--Badoglio, Bonomi, Parri, and De Gasperi--did not demand enough
from the people, that they were ineffectual and refused to implement
a satisfactory system of austerities. Yet these governments

had too little command over their own bureaucracy, to say noth-
ing of their command over the people as a whole. And the people
had too little faith in, or respect for, their own government

to have collaborated with a ration-system. But these deficien-
cies and attitudes of the government and the people in the imme-
diate post-war period were only extreme manifestations of more
deep-rooted and fundamental problems. Even in "normal“ times,
both before and after the war, the governments of Italy have
lacked the support and consensus of the people, who themselves
have lacked the social solidarity necessary to accept common
sacrifices for common goals.

The Cold War and the Italian communistypolitical position,
l948-1956.--Togliatti's tenure of office as Vice-Premier ended in
May of 1947 when he and his party were expelled from De Gasperi's
government just prior to completion of the work of the Constituent
Assembly. The PCI then commenced a series of strikes and demonstra-
tions with the objective being to force the government into readmit-
ting them to a coalition but, failing in this latter endeavor, the

party backed off into gatherings and assemblies. The party began to

campaign against economic aid from the West, calling it a tool of

32

American imperialism. By September 1947 the Cominform had come into
existence; in February 1948 the coup d'etat had occurred in Prague,
taking Czechoslovakia into the Soviet camp; and in that same year,
1948, the Berlin blockade caused tensions to rise even higher. The
Cold War had begun.

The short-range strategy of the party changed somewhat during
these years of the Cold War, and yet there remained throughout this
period a continued though subdued commitment to the long-range alli-
ance strategy involving the Gramscian hegemony that it had been
building since 1935. Being out of the government the PCI had to
assume the position of an opposition party but it remained faithful
to the terms of the Constitution because violating it would have
risked destroying the hegemonic work already accomplished and would
have resulted in a grave crisis in the Constituent Assembly which had

yet to complete its tasks.36

There is evidence that Togliatti and
the large segment within the PCI which were wedded emotionally to
the Gramscian methods, found the bald domestic and international con-
frontations of the Cold War unpalatable. For example, we have the
statement to an American agency, the INS, made by Umberto Terracini,
a member of the Directory of the party, that splitting the world
into two hostile blocs was inherently dangerous.

Although he was officially reproved by Togliatti for this,
Terracini was shortly thereafter readmitted to the fold after admit—
ing his error. However, as the communist Pietro Secchia observed,
Terracini could never have made such a remark without the approval

of Togliatti, and no one, including the Russians, was fooled.37 In

33

parliament the communists, despite appearances to the contrary during
the height of the Cold War, cooperated with other parties including
the Christian Democrats,38 moderated through their influence the
occupation of southern land by the peasantry in the interest of
broad electoral alliances,39 and concentrated on "the compactness and
effectiveness of the party itself."40
Yet there was also within the party a continuing feeling of
respect for the importance and legacy of the communist social,
economic, and political experiment that had been continuing in Russia
since 1917. There was a Stalinist group within the PCI which was
encouraged by the Cold War confrontations and which now emphasized
class warfare and support of Moscow in international affairs. Its
presence promoted ideological clashes between the PCI and the Chris-
tian Democratic Party with the latter being labelled in colorful
epithets of the Marxian lexicon reserved for class enemies, while in
a country where many still believe in demons, Togliatti was por-
trayed as the devil incarnate during the electoral campaign of 1948.
His name also appeared in the depiction of a pool of blood in one
anticommunist poster and in another his head was seen as crushed
beneath the hoofs of a charging squadron of cavalry.4]
The Italian elections of June 1946 saw the PCI receive 18.9%
and the Socialist Party, the PSI, 20.7% of the popular vote. Their
combined figure of 39.6% exceeded that of the Christian Democratic
party, the DC, which collected 35.2% of the vote, an outcome reflect-

ing the popularity of the left in the Resistance. However, in April

1948, the results were the reverse, with the PCI-PSI "P0pular Front"

34

gathering only 31.01% while the DC received 48.5%42 of the vote, a

direct result of the Cold War in which the PCI especially was seen

as a supporter of Moscow in the heart of Western Europe. Yet its
returns to communist orthodoxy were just that--apparent. By the
early 19505 the prospect of Russian bayonets aiding an Italian
proletarian revolution, always a negligible possibility in the post-
war conditions when the USSR was so preoccupied with Eastern European
affairs and the US was on the alert against any communist advance,
had faded into insignificance.

In the first half of the 19505 PCI adult membership declined
and, from 1951 to 1956, it hovered around the two million mark,43
but the party continued to climb at the polls and would do so at every
national election in this 1948-1956 period. In 1953 the PCI vote
was 6,121,922, a figure which represented 22.6% of the voting public.

44 Some of this vote

This amounted to a 3.7% increase since 1946.
was generated out of protest against the attempt of the Prime Minister
De Gasperi to alter the election laws in such a manner as to permit
the centrist coalition of four parties headed by his Christian Demo-
cratic Party, to continue in power. This new law, dubbed by the

opposition the "fraudulent 1aw"--1egge truffa--wou1d have permitted

 

any party or group of parties tied by alliance to occupy 65% of the
seats of the Chamber of Deputies, or 380 out of 590 seats if it could

obtain 50.1% of the vote at the po11s.45

The attempt failed and in
1954, the year of De Gasperi's death, the law was repealed.
De Gasperi had in effect resurrected the old classical lib-

eral state which had been dismantled by the fascists, but the trouble

35

was that this type of state was ill suited for a modern democracy.
Classical liberalism throughout the Western world, while bestowing
equal civil rights, denied equal political rights to the masses46
and Italy was no exception. By 1953 the mass parties on the left,
the PCI and the PSI, had stated in effect that if liberalism were to
remain the basic structure of the state in the foreseeable future,

it must be a democratic rather than bourgeois liberalism, or one
sympathetic to the problems of the masses.

The Christian Democratic Party, through compromises with the
parties of the right and left, has dominated Italian politics from
1947 to the present year, 1979; it encompasses political forces of
a rather widely divergent sort, but it tends generally more toward
the centrist position. The Liberal Party in these years grativated
rightward toward a strong affiliation with big business interests.
Confindustria, the chief organization of big business which controls
much but not all of Italian industry, had changed its policy of com-
promises by the mid-19505. With demands of reform emanating from
the left and center of the Italian political spectrum, it had moved
to the support of the Liberal Party and away from the Christian Demo-
crats. The most exciting Italian political development in the period
after 1953 was, however, the gradual movement of the Socialist Party,
the PSI, toward the assumption of governmental power in coalition
with the Christian Democrats.

In these years of the Cold War when the Church moved into a
period of reaction, when Italian politics was marked heavily with a

conservative orientation and when the term "immobilismo" could

 

36

describe accurately the efforts of the national legislature, there
was nonetheless an acute awareness by the leaders of the left and

by many progressives situated in more centrist positions on the
political scene, that the masses had never been brought into the
state. In the immediate post-war period, there were grounds for
believing that the united front against fascism could integrate the
society. However, with the onset of the Cold War, with the ejec-
tion of both Socialist and Communist ministers from the government

in 1947, and with the failure of the left in the polls during 1948,
millions of workers were excluded once more from the mainstream of
national political activism. During the electoral campaigns of 1953
Pietro Nenni, the leader of the PSI, mentioned in a speech the pos-
sibility of supporting the government in an "Opening to the left."
Though it would be ten years before the "impossible" DC-PSI coali-
tion would be formed, many of the preconditions were already present,
for example: the continued governmental stalemate coupled with the
feeling of most who were left of center in Italian politics that
something constructive in the way of reforms for the alienated middle-
and lower-class masses should be accomplished.

Perhaps the major reason why such an opening to the left could
occur was due to the dramatic changes occurring in the international
arena. The Cold War had begun to wane even before the death of Stalin
on 5 March 1953. The disturbances in Eastern Europe followed shortly
as people throughout the communist world perceived some uncertainty
and confusion at the top of the power structure in Russia. By mid-

1955 Khrushchev had emerged as the single most powerful individual in

37

the USSR, and it was on 24 February of the following year that he
made his secret denunciatory speech detailing the crimes of Stalin

to the XX CPSU Congress in Moscow.

The Years 1956 to the Late 19705

 

Khrushchev's speech and the repercussions.-—At the time of

 

this secret speech in 1956 the ambiguous position of the PCI in
Italian affairs appeared to be increasing. On the one hand the party
had not completely divorced itself from its Leninist revolutionary
heritage which accounted for its antidemocratic internal traditions
and its propensity to support the USSR in international affairs. On
the other hand the party leadership never seriously deviated from

its long-range commitment to work for the Gramscian hegemony. This
included widening the mass base of the party and working democratically
through alliances with other parties toward common goals; it also
implied the desirability of an increasingly independent position vis-
a-vis the USSR. However, just as revolution had been unrealistic for
the Italian communist so democratic methods seemed to be ineffective
in the face of the economic and social problems of millions of
Italians.

When the content of Khrushchev's speech became known it
caused concern throughout the world. The collapse of the myth of
Stalin aggravated existing differences within the PCI as some, the
old-line Stalinists, conditioned by 30 years of obeisance to their
master, cherished his memory despite the revelations; others, like

Giorgio Amendola, wanted to emphasize the "Italian" way to socialism

38

and free themselves from any vestige of Soviet tutelage.47

Togliatti,
finding himself in a delicate position because of his direct com-
plicity with Stalin, suggested that the dictator was not entirely
responsible for his crimes against humanity and that such elements
of the Soviet society as the growth of the bureaucratic apparatus;
the tendency of the Soviet leadership to usurp the initiative of the
masses; and the inclination of those leaders to view all errors as
evidence of capitalistically inspired sabotage were also at least
partly to blame.48 Togliatti, however, while making excuses for the
discredited Soviet socio-political behavior, made it clear that the
Italian party was not to be considered as simply an appendage of
Moscow.
He spoke of the independence that had been asserted by the

PCI against the Comintern as early as 1924 in certain policy matters.
He also stated that at the VII Congress of the Comintern which met in
1935 and proclaimed the policy of the United Front,

the parties which were growing stronger, were united, and were

well directed, already felt that a central international organ-

ization could make only general observations and judgments on

the situations and tasks of our movement, . . . [The] decisions

and practical political accomplishments were to be fully entrusted

to the initiative and responsibility of the single parties.49
Claiming that since the war "all our initiatives were exclusively
ours . . . because they were dictated by the conditions in which we
work in Italy," he used the term "polycentric" to describe the world
communist movement. This meant that there was no longer a single

source of authority within the movement, but rather that progress

toward a unified end was to be accomplished by the various parties

39

through following diverse paths.50

Although Togliatti appeared to
support the Russians in the Hungarian episode of 1956, and the PCI
seemed to continue supporting the Soviet line through the end of the
19505, years in which the triumph of Sputnik, the Russian moves in
Berlin and the Soviet economic advanced had occurred,51 it was the
PCI's clear denunciation of the 1968 Russian invasion of Czecho-
slovakia which demonstrated the extent to which the Italian party had
broken free of the Russians.

By 1961 there had developed within the PCI a new challenge
from its left wing whose criticism of the inadequacies of Soviet
society bore directly upon the PCI itself. Crystallizing around
Pietro Ingrao, they wanted more democratic participation of the
masses in the PCI and in the social and economic decisions of their

52 They also felt that the PCI should emphasize Gramsci's "war

lives.
of movement" to a greater extent by confronting the bourgeoisie
through union activities both in and out of the shop while it should
deemphasize the parliamentary strategy of the "war of position."53
This view was partially challenged by Giorgio Amendola and

the revisionists of the PCI's right wing. He also wanted the party
to be further democratized from within. Party discussions should be
more open and institutional guarantees should allow communist minori-
ties to express their opinions within a framework of "loyal opposi-
tion." Amendola also wanted to improve PCI-PSI relations and move
politically with the socialists toward effecting reform in all areas

of the Italian society. Neither the ideas of Ingrao's left wing nor

those of Amendola's right wing resembled the philosophy or methods

40

used in Soviet politics. As for the old-line Stalinists in the PCI,
they had lost all of their political influence within the party by

the mid-1960s.54

The Church and the Italian Communist Party in the Italian

 

society.--Ita1y is more than 99% Catholic, yet most of these people
are only nominally Catholic since only about 40% attend church.55
There has been a historic struggle between the clerical and secular
people in Italy since at least the end of the 4th century A.D. when
St. Ambrose quarrelled with the Emperor Theodosius. In the 19th
century the success of the Risorgimento established the political
victory of the secular authorities over the Church. The secular
state was controlled by the lay middle and upper classes, but with
the 1929 Lateran treaties between Mussolini and the Church, the latter
found new strength and, following the Second World War, it "acquired
an influence in politics which it never had before in the history of
united Italy," an influence which would be "material and political
rather than spiritual."56
Both the Church and the PCI grew in political power follow-
ing World War II to the point where an unreserved confrontation prob-
ably would have decimated the society through civil war. This was
prevented because, despite mutually hostile attitudes, each side
informally attempted to find common ground with the other. Togliatti
was now able to follow Gramsci's advice through concrete political

action; he attempted to find a way in which, while neither Catholicism

nor Italian Communism would have to compromise their respective world

41

views, broad contacts would be established and maintained, and a
solid and durable political accord might be reached. He demonstrated
his concern for national unity when he supported the constitutional
measures guaranteeing religious education and organization along with
freedom of conscience. He was to "cast the decisive votes of the
party in favor of including in the Constitution the 1929 Lateran
Pacts which perpetuated the Church's special status in the state."57
On the Catholic side, Pius XII was a conservative pope who
reigned from 1939 to 1958. He believed that Marxism in any form was
sinful and he felt that Italy was practically under siege, especially
in the years immediately following World War II. Believing that he
must intervene where religion and morality intersected politics, his
threat to withdraw the sacraments from voters supporting the PCI in
the elections of 1948 was very effective. In 1949 he excommunicated
all communists, and thereafter he regarded not only the socialists
as dangerous but even such proposals as free education and free medi-
cal treatment as alarming. The stage was set for the 1958 ascension
to the papal throne of John XXIII, a man whose ideas and personality
provided the sharpest contrast with his predecessors, and one with
whom Togliatti found some reciprocity in the matter of locating a

modus vivendi in Italian Catholic-Communist relations.

 

Indeed, where Pius IX in 1861 had condemned "'progress,
liberalism, and modern civilization,'" Pius X in 1907 had added a
"long list of further 'modernistic' errors" and Pius XI "after 1922
had encouraged authoritarianism in Church and State. . . . John was

anxious to repair some of the bridges which had been so hastily

42

1158

burnt. . . . In May of 1961 he issued his encyclical letter

Mater et Magistra, Mother and Teacher. This document endorses a

 

mixed economy and pointedly rejects the old liberal laissez-faire
approach which historically has tended to favor the rich and impover-
ish the lower classes. Governments have a duty both to intervene
for the protection of the victimized and defenseless but also to
promote individual freedom in all spheres of life as long as "the
basic rights of each individual person are preserved inviolate."59
The encyclical also observes that in the affairs of society Catholics
will frequently encounter those who subscribe to other religious and
phi1050phical persuasions and that although Catholics should not
deviate from "the integrity of religion or morals . . . they should
weigh the Opinions of others with fitting courtesy and not measure
everything in the light of their own interests. They should be pre-
pared to join sincerely in doing whatever is naturally good or con-
ducive to good."60

This seemed to sanctify cooperative efforts by Catholics with
any person or political party ready to work for social reform, and it
would therefore later be seen as support for the opening to the left
advocated by the Christian Democrats in early 1962. This projected
opening to the left featured both reform proposals that could be
supported by the socialists and the possibility of including the PSI
in a future governmental coalition, developments that would be highly
unlikely with Pius XII on the papal throne.

On 6 March 1963 Pope John received Khrushchev's daughter and

son-in-law in a private audience, a gesture which shocked millions.

43

In April of the same year he released his encyclical Pacem in Terris

 

which stated: "Just as an individual man may not pursue his own
interests to the detriment of other men, so on the international level,
one state may not develop itself by restricting or oppressing other

states."61

This and other assertions in this important document could
apply to both East and West in the matter of imperialism, colonial-
ism, ideology, and military development; it had the effect of tran-
scending the old Cold War dichotomy and appealing to the humanness
of mankind. Pope John probably knew that when he rescinded his
predecessor's edicts against voting for the Marxists and when he
removed the Vatican from direct intervention in internal Italian
politics he would be encouraging the left and increasing the drawing
power of the PCI at the polls. In fact, there was an increase of
more than a million votes for the PCI in the 1963 election as compared
with that of 1958.

Paul VI, the successor to John XXIII, retreated from Pope
John's advanced position in the matter of contact with the communists,
and by 1965, had condemned all Catholics who desired to continue the
dialogue with the PCI. Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that the
Vatican has continued to play a decreasing role in the Italian
political world since the tenure of P0pe John despite the resurgence
of Pope Paul's political intervention in the elections of 1976, and
that this has tended to reduce to some extent the type of direct and
embittering political confrontations it had formerly had with the
PCI. Also, discussions continued while Pope Paul began a policy

entitled "Ostpolitik" calling for cordial relations with communist

44

governments which Pope John Paul II has continued, as evidenced by
his Polish trip in 1979.
In spite of the anti-Communist barrage of the previous
decade, the Catholic and Communist groups inside Italy had
always been in contact with each other, both inside and out-
side of the political sphere. The Communist Party was too
large and too rooted in Italian society to have been kept at
arm's length, on the margins of Italian life.6
In 1964 Pietro Ingrao, the prominent "New Leftist" member of
the PCI, was advocating "a direct Communist-Catholic dialogue . . .
concentrating . . . on attracting the Catholic masses, negotiating
with the Catholic political, economic, and social organizations and
with the Church itself."63 A year later the Central Committee of the
PCI called for a kind of confederation of parties, especially of the
left, somewhat in the fashion of the old popular front, with each of
the various parties retaining its identity. This, among other things,
would facilitate “negotiating with the Catholics, and on a more equal

basis."64

In February 1966 the PCI was "praising the Ecumenical
Council, denouncing the state atheism and applauding the efforts of
Pope Paul . . . to promote a peaceful settlement in Viet Nam. Luigi
Longo [the heir apparent to Togliatti in the party] called for a
direct dialogue with both the Christian Democratic Party and the Roman

65 All of these efforts failed in the short run

Catholic hierarchy."
and yet the relations between the two great Italian subcultures con-
tinue and are expanding at the grass-roots level, especially between
the left wing of the Church-related Christian Democratic Party and

the right wing of the PCI.

45

The problem of the South.--As recently as 1953 it was deter-

 

mined that although the South contained "41 per cent of the land area
of Italy and has 37 per cent of the population, it accounted in 1953
for but 19.6 or 21.2 per cent of the country's national income depend-

ing upon whose estimate is used."66

The North responded to the dif-

fusion of technology, business practices and capital emanating south-
ward from northern France, western Germany and England in a way that

the South could not. Many of the preconditions for industrializa-

tion existed in northern Italy at the time of the Risorgimento, such

 

as geographical proximity to this Western Eur0pean industry, favor-
able cultural traits and a modicum of natural resources. Early north-
ern industrial development encouraged further satellite growth67 which
had already put it out of reach of southern development when the PCI
was formed in 1921.

The poverty of the land in the South68 had induced the emigra-
tion of some six million people to northern Italy between 1945 and
1971.69 Land reform efforts have repeatedly come to naught as land
too poor to farm in the South has been frequently abandoned.70 How-
ever, even if there had been no lure of work in the North and the
peasants had remained in their villages, reform efforts there would
have been severely hampered because of the selfishness, individuality
and social as well as biological misery of the people. Edward C.
Banfield states that there are societies

in which the level of biological well-being is even lower, but
in which people are not chronically unhappy. What makes the

difference between a low level of living and la miseria comes
from culture. Unlike the primitive, the peasant feels himself

 

46

part of a larger society which he is "in" but not altogether
'of." He lives in a culture in which it is very important to
be admired, and he sees that by its standards he cannot be
admired in the least; by these standards he and everything
about him are contemptible or ridiculous. Knowing this, he is
filled with loathing for his lot and with anger for the fates
which assigned him to it.

"Getting ahead” and "making a good figure” are two of the
central themes of the peasant's existence. But he sees that no
matter how hard he works he can never get ahead.7

The southern peasant has been frequently suspicious of all

others, especially those in authority, and he has felt that calamity
of one sort or another ending in death is more than a remote possi-
bility. In addition to this pervading fear, he usually has been

quite poor, academically ignorant and mainly desirous of achieving

the short-run economic advantage for himself and his family. Banfield

72 it has crippled

calls this latter characteristic "amoral familism";
collective social action in the community, town, region and nation,
and it has reduced existence to a state not unlike Hobbes' war of all
against all. These characteristics have existed in northern Italy
also, though in a less marked degree, and the mass exodus of the
southern peasantry probably has reinforced the traits among the
northerners.
Carlo Levi observed these peculiarities in 1935 while in

exile from the fascist government. Forced to reside in a village in
the barren province of Basilicata in southern Italy, he saw that these
characteristics were aggravated by the worst of the peasants' social
enemies, who were not the absentee land owners, but rather the

middle class village tyrants. This class is . . . no longer

able to fill its original function. It lives off petty thievery
and the bastardized tradition of feudal rights. Only with the

47

suppression of this class and the substitution of somethigg
better can the difficulties of the South find a solution.

With regard to the state, he quotes a peasant: "Everyone knows . . .
that the fellows in Rome don't want us to live like human beings.
There are hailstorms, landslides, droughts, malaria and . . . the
State. These are inescapable evils; such there always have been and
there always will be."74
In the 19605 and 19705 these peasant characteristics have
persisted, though perhaps they are undergoing some amelioration as
modernization slowly arrives. Realizing that measures must be taken
to bring the southerners into the mainstream of the Italian nation,

efforts were extended in this direction after World War II by the

national government. In 1950 the Cassa per il Mezzogjorno, a govern-

 

mental investment board for the South, was set up with substantial
funds. Its task was to develop the infrastructure for a future
industrial, commercial and agricultural "take-off" with the idea
that once the new economic potential of the South became sufficiently
attractive, private initiative would move in to take advantage of it.
Tax credits and reduced interest on loans were offered to private
northern industrial and commercial firms as inducements to expand in
the South but generally the public rather than the private corpora-
tions proved to be more cooperative in these efforts.

The northern private industries have preferred to expand in
the North while using the seemingly unending stream of emigrants pro-
duced by southern unemployment as the industrial need for labor dic-

tated. By 1957 the government directed the publicly owned firms of

48

the state holding companies, the IRI and ENI, to divert 60% of their
new investments to the South as it began shifting from agriculture and
public works projects to industrial development there. However, this
order was non-enforceable for several reasons, one of them being gov-
ernmental bureaucratic inefficiency.75
There was much political infighting and a great deal of commu-
nity and regional competition for the appropriations, and, though
there were some improvements, there were also many complaints about
what was done and how it was accomplished.
It was said that reforms were tackled piecemeal with far too
little coordinated planning between the Cassa and other gov-
ernmental agencies. Moreover, political considerations affected
the allocation of money, with the result that development organi-
zations were often staffed by second-rate politicians or clients
of some notable who was ready to trade his electoral support.
Whole villages were built in which no one ever came to live; dams
were built from which the water trickled profitlessly into the
sea. A fairly high percentage of the mongy--some said a good
third--must have been completely wasted.7
The reforming institutions and their governmental personnel were fre-
quently either corrupted or were suspected by the p0pu1ace of being

corrupt as many were drawn into the vortex of clientelismo,77 per-

 

petuated largely by the same stratum of middle-class village and town
notables that plagued the South during Levi's exile. The Cassa
became too frequently a system of patronage with loyalty to the
Christian Democratic Party among the most important considerations
influencing its financial disbursements.

Yet perhaps there was less corruption than the Italians
claimed, since, as Kogan states, “these are difficult charges to prove,

and most Italians take graft and corruption for granted, assuming them

49

78 It can be said, however, that both

to exist even when they do not."
corruption and the suspicion of corruption sabotage planning and the
execution of plans. The net result of the reform and modernization
efforts has been some political and economic progress in the South.
By the conclusion of the 19605 this could easily be seen in the

reduction of unemployment and underemployment; the disappearance of

the old latifondio;79 the three-fold increase in agricultural produc-

 

tion as compared to 50 years ago; and the gradual extension of wel-
fare benefits as well as television sets into the rural areas. Yet,
because the North continued to grow at a faster rate, the economic gap
between it and the South has continued to expand, though perhaps the
"cultural and ideological gap was lessening."80
What has been the role of the PCI in the South? Its efforts
to establish hegemony there have not succeeded for several reasons.
First, while southern Italy has been basically an undeveloped society
the North is by comparison quite developed. A basic problem of the
PCI has been that "[it imposed] a strategy deve10ped by Togliatti for
the advanced, industrial North upon the backward, agricultural South”8]
thus weakening the southern strategy because the South necessitates
Special consideration. Second, the PCI, a modern political party,
has had "a hard time breaking down the barriers of personalism of
traditional southern Italian politics."82 Third, the PCI has been
unable to devise successful strategies reconciling landlessness with
property possession. A landless peasant is a laborer when he can find

work, but when he obtains a piece of land he becomes a property owner.

The former is frequently prone to be revolutionary; the latter, as

50

possessories of "the most conservative capitalist institution ever

 

developed,"83 suddenly becomes politically retrogressive in communist
eyes.

In the fourth place the party has failed to link the northern
proletariat with the southern peasantry as Gramsci desired. He felt
that leaders must arise from the peasantry through the encouragement
of the northerners under the guidance of the party, but this has
failed to occur. The result has been that the southern leaders come
from the same class which Levi heaped abomination upon, the provin-
cial petty bourgeoisie, thus perpetuating the political evils of
clientelism and localism. Fifth, the PCI lost the position of
leadership in the struggle for agrarian reform, which it held in
the years following World War II, to the DC Party. The central gov-
ernment set up reform agencies in the South but because the Chris-
tian Democrats controlled the government, they controlled these
84

agencies, and turned them into "massive patronage organizations."

The old clientelismo involving personal relations with a notable was

 

transformed by the DC into ”clientelismo of the bureaucracy"85 financed

 

by the resources of the state. The PCI has not been able to prevail
against it.

However, Tarrow asserts that PCI activity in the South has
been important because it assisted in the dismantling of the regres-
sive latifondi through its mobilization of the peasantry; it is hated
by the Mafia and distrusted by the Catholic Church; and "its presence
has helped convince the Italian state to begin a massive program of

economic development in the region."86 Finally, Tarrow claims that

51

since the major cause of political dualism [between North and
South] has been the clientele system in southern Italy, true
integration occurs only as new agencies of political expression
and representation arise to take its place. The most important
agent of this tyge in southern Italian politics is the Italian
Communist Party. 7

National politics and the Italian Communist Party in Italy--

 

1956 to the late 1970s.--Reforms have languished in all areas of the

 

Italian society because no major policy has enjoyed the necessary sup-
port among the elites of the various parties. Even reform proposals
which have been stripped of the essentials have a difficult time in
Parliament and, if they are passed, years frequently elapse before
partial implementation is realized. The Church and its allies con-
stitute one of the basic segments of the society. It is contradicted
by both the liberal and republican factions which were instrumental

in the construction of the national state during the Risorgimento on

 

the one hand, and the two major parties of the left, the PSI, or
Italian Socialist Party, and the PCI on the other. The Liberals and
leftists clash because the former cling to vestiges of earlier ver-
sions of economic and political liberalism, while the latter desire a
collectivist society with equitable distribution of its wealth. The
clerical, liberal and leftist views could be seen as ultimately
irreconcilable, and this, coupled with the tradition of ideological
intransigence at key historical points in the last century, has
resulted in paralysis at the policy level of politics.

Yet there has developed a means of reconciling conflicting

demands at political levels below the summit.

52

In Parliamentary committee negotiations, in the seclusion of
prefectural conference rooms, in the horse-trading that goes
on over the allocation of seats on a city council or the divi-
sion of a regional budget between different communities, elites
. have developed a consensus on procedural rules of the
game that contrasts with the ideological conflicts that mark
their public debates. While little normative consensus on
goals has developed to provide a legitimate basis for reconcilia-
tion at the summit, new modes of political exchange have arisen
to provide a working consensus that could, someday, be tggns-
lated into a more legitimate basis for political action.

This working consensus has been a slow process; it has been both
devoid of ideological content and mired in particularism, thus
sabotaging efforts for a coherent, well-defined policy.

This has tended to encourage the growth of a large national
bureaucracy, infamous for its inefficiency, corruption and procras-
tination. It has been self-serving, alert to its own comfort and
perpetuation, and it has been in large measure unresponsive to the
Constitution, the Parliament and the needs of the pe0ple. It has been

frequently responsive to the bribe, or 1a bustarella, however, which

 

is so all-pervasive, or thought to be so all pervasive by the pe0p1e

that

the Roman Catholic Church has come out with advice for priests
who hear confessions, suggesting that it is not a sin to offer
or pay a bribe to a public servant when it appears to be the
only way a citizen can get a service to which he has a right,
and it is not a sin to accept payment ggr assistance to the pub-
lic that goes beyond the call of duty.

These characteristics have produced cynicism and hostility in the
people toward the state since the bureaucracy has represented the
state in their eyes, hence it has played a crucial role in thwarting
the cultural, spiritual and ideological unity of the nation.90

Togliatti's views of the Italian nation-state were not so

bitter. He felt that its "progressive democracy" was something to

53

work with on the way to socialism. Progressive democracy was no sub-
stitute for the dictatorship of the proletariat because it "'would
not strike radically at the roots of capitalist pr0perty. But this
did not mean that the most unfair privileges of capital, of the great
property and its most reactionary forms would not be abolished.'"91
In June of 1956 he declared to the Central Committee of the PCI that
this democracy, had it been realized in the form that the national
Constitution framed it, ”would have been a democracy of a new type,
different not only from anything experienced in Italy prior to fas—
cism but different from the traditional type of capitalistic democ-
racy." He continued with the important statement:

We have derived from this the general orientation of our

political struggle which has been a democratic struggle for

the application of the Constitution of the republic in its

political and economic principles, and for the realization

of those reggrms which, . . . it indicates more or less

exp11c1tly.
However, the most significant reforms for the communists would be
those considered preparatory to the emergence of socialism.

The problem was that the party seemed to be paralyzed:
revolution was impossible but acting democratically in a corrupt and
inefficient democracy seemed to be self-defeating. Membership
declined. In 1954 there were 2.1 million members;93 by 1968 there

94 The party has

were 1.6 million representing a drop of nearly 25%.
remained, however, primarily working class in social composition,
though urban workers themselves "were in the majority only in the
immediate postwar years."95

Countering the mounting malaise within the party were the

results at the polls. Where, in 1958 it had received 22.7% of the

54

ballots, up .1% from 1953, in 1963 it would receive the votes of
25.3% of the electorate. Translated into whole numbers that meant
that where 6,704,763 people voted for the party in 1958, over a mil-

lion more, or 7,767,072 would choose the PCI in 1963.96

Italy was
now experiencing an economic growth rate higher than that of the
Western European average.

This economic development achieved in the years 1952—1963
has been called the "Italian miracle." Growth in the industrial seg-
ment of the economy proceeded at a "rate of almost 6 per cent annually
in the two decades 1951-1971" which means it had "been exceeded by
Japan alone among the major capitalist countries. Its GNP doubled in
twelve years (1950-62) and it appeared well on the way to repeating

97 Yet Italy's pro-

the performance before the recession of 1971-2."
gressive democracy was unable to deal with the urban problems in
areas such as housing, transportation and education which were
exacerbated by the surge in urban population growth associated with
this economic development. Though many in the PCI dropped out, many
outside the party voted communist as a protest against the continuing
inefficiency, insensitivity and corruption of local and national gov-
ernment.

The parliamentary posture of the PCI has been an indication
of its desire to work harmoniously with other parties toward basic
structural reforms anticipatory of the Marxist objectives it has
never denied. Although loyalty to the party has been basic, the PCI

has placed great emphasis upon its parliamentary performance not only

because of the desire to accommodate itself to Italian conditions

55

(La via Italiana a1 socialismo) but also because the parliament "is

 

the only major public institution in which the communists have been
on an equal footing with the other parties, even though in the role

98 It can be shown that even at the

of the permanent opposition."
height of the Cold War the communist deputies both on the floor of
the legislative chambers and in legislative committees were coopera-
tive and dedicated to the smooth functioning of the parliament.99
Parliament is also important to the PCI because its strength
as a party lies essentially at the grassroots level where the national
democratic voting procedures allow it to produce for the legislative
bodies a delegation reflective of its p0pular strength. It has not
been represented, however, in the executive branch which has been
the DC bailiwick since 1947, and it has been faced on several occasions
with DC attempts to strengthen that branch at the expense of parlia-
ment, hence the PCI support of increased parliamentary control over
the executive branch. Communists have also supported legislation
dealing with "facilitation of popular participation in politics and
government, decentralization of power, particularly to the regions,

. and, . . . reduction in the power of big business interests."100
Communist proposals are presented in political language which could
be accepted by the non-communists rather than in the sectarian terms
appropriate only to the traditional communist mentality. This
responsible parliamentary behavior exists today because other parlia-
mentary groups accept the legitimacy of its delegation and are willing

to accept its proposals as well when the measures are agreeable.]0]

56

Historically communists have disagreed with the Liberal view
of Parliament. This consisted primarily of the ideas that these
legislative bodies functioned as barometers of the political sensi-
tivities of the state, that they represented the people in counter-
ing excesses of the government and so served to check it, and that
they were able to govern in their own right. This was true because
each of the delegates to parliament, while representing a local con-
stituency and therefore promoting its local interests, also repre-
sented the entire nation in his person, and hence subordinated his
particular interests to those of the whole.102

Communists have generally seen parliament as a ratifier of
the already existing will of the people, hence the entity of greatest
importance was not parliament but the party which in its role of the
vanguard enlightened the people to the point where a discernible
"general will" could be elicited. In parliamentary activities and
the electoral campaigns leading up to it the PCI now appears to be
moving with reservations toward the Liberal position of valuing par-
liament in its own right as a legitimate political organ of sensi-
tivity and governance in the affairs of the nation. This appears in
the parliamentary behavior of the PCI delegates though it is not so
evident among the party leadership which still retains some loyalty
to the notion that "parliament [cannot be] a forum of open discussion,
where the political will of the people is formed."103

The PCI enters into electoral campaigns today in a fashion

resembling other Italian political parties complete with hoop-la and

spectacle. Though the party engages in "clientelistic activity [as do]

57

all Italian parties"104

it has not been done as blatantly as others.
The relatively clean record of the Italian communists in local gov-
ernment has given them something to protect, and the PCI candidates
have watched each other closely to ensure that proper election behav-
ior among them prevails. It has been stated by one of them that
this tight scrutiny has been even more effective than a system of
democratic centralism in forcing compliance with acceptable election-
eering tactics.105

Individuals running for office have been subjected to the
same exhausting rounds of speechmaking, partying, deliberation and
argument as the candidates of other parties. Some party members have
criticized other communists who have placed a greater premium upon
stentorian qualities of Speaking voices and physical endurance than

upon the cogency of reasoning.106

However, there also has been a
notable element of selflessness and devotion to duty displayed by
many PCI candidates and their supporters as typified by the campaign
of Maria Antonietta Macciocchi cited in the source above. Activity
of the party sections has increased considerably during the elec-
toral periods. One study revealed that in many sections only about
10% of the members were involved in the daily activities of party
affairs, and that 15% of them attended the important annual con-
gresses, while only 20% of the members took a serious part in the
campaign of 1970.107

The party has been attempting to gain legitimacy at the mass

level as well as the elite level of party alliances since the conclu-

sion of World War II. It has been solidly based on the working class

58

though it has drawn support from other segments of society as a mass
party must. This has included the middle classes, the traditional
enemy of the proletarian movement, which have played such a crucial
role in the grand transformation of the Italian society in the 19505
and 19605. If the middle classes had been such a moving force in
the development of the post-war Italian nation, and this nation was
being accepted by the PCI, there should be a legitimate place within
the nation for these middle classes, at least for the foreseeable
future, according to revised PCI opinion. The old sterile and rigid
class arguments were falling apart; it could even be said that the
PCI was supporting petty bourgeois interests.

Since the 1960's, the [PCI] claim seems . . . to be that even

a full-fledged socialist economy can and should be pluralis-

tic and tolerate small property within the context of a con-

trolled market. The notion that the ceti medi [middle classes]

are merely tactical allies is Sharply rejected, and party 1ead-

ers insist that these strata are strategic allies of the work-

ing class.

The PCI thus forecasts a mixed economy, largely to avoid

the hypercentralization and inefficient production and distribu-

tion of consumer goods that characterizes the USSR and other

socialist countries. But while the PCI defends a role for small

producers, it is an error to claim that it favors unfettered

individualistic, rather than cooperative, development in such

spheres as agriculture or commerce. In fact, the party is on

record since 1956 with the claim that small firms will be able

to survive economically only if they band together in coopera-

tive or associative forms.1 8

The party has attempted to widen its influence in nearly all

sectors of the Italian society, being prevented by its doctrine and
tradition from working with only those belonging to the monopolis-
tic circles of Italian capitalism. It has constructed a far-ranging
net of social groups including cooperatives, women's groups, youth

groups, and cultural organizations. The idea is for it to be

59

"present" throughout as much of the society as possible, but for this
to be done, non-committed or hostile people must become supportive.
Yet how does a party accomplish this in a country where 63.2% of

the people polled in a 1972 study believed that "political parties

‘09 and 44.5% interviewed

110

serve only to create discord among Italians"
in another 1972 study claimed to have no interest in politics?
The alliance strategy of the PCI since World War II has been
an attempt to gain working agreements with as many acceptable non-
communist groups as possible. According to Stephen Hellman, this has
been essentially a conservative policy since it has gathered together
indiscriminantly any and all groups which have axes to grind against
the powers that be. It also has been somewhat counterproductive in
that these groups do not all desire progressive resolution to their
disputes. Criticism from the left wing of the PCI has attempted
without success to pressure the party into discarding the quanti-
tative alliance system in favor of a strategic alliance system with a
view toward selecting the most progressive groups for any given bloc.
Hellman indicates that economic motives, upon which one might expect
all Marxist political policy to be founded, have been supplanted in
the case of the PCI by political motives, some of which may be seen
as opportunistic, with the result that economic flaws existing in
this wide-ranging alliance system have been permitted to continue.]]]
An example of this is the PCI position in the South where it
has frequently chosen to support the conservative small-holder rather

than the propertyless agricultural workers and their more radical and,

for the communist, traditionally acceptable demands. The party has

60

also chosen to attack commercial wholesalers and chain stores as
monopolistic forces but it defends the small shopkeeper as largely
innocent of contributing to the inflationary spiral these larger
units induce. The fact is, however, that in 1972 there were "1.2
million commercial firms of all types, [but] over a million employ
two people or fewer," a situation which in itself contributes to the
high rate of inflation in a rather substantial manner.”2

This is political expediency. The PCI has recruited the
reactionary, or very conservative groups of smallholders, artisans
and shopkeepers, all the older, more traditional segments of the
middle and lower middle classes, while it is hesitant about courting
the newer middle-class groups such as the clerks, technicians and
other white-collar workers. This has been true in large part because
of short-run considerations at the national level of the PCI which
view the "special legislative status . . . [and] the organized

political leverage of the older, more established groups"”3 as

a
distinct advantage in indiscriminantly broadening its mass base. It
has been seen also as an attempt to establish a hedge against the
inveterate tendency of the middle classes to move to the right in
troublesome periods. Yet this approach to building alliances has
seriously hampered the political maneuverability of the PCI since

its policies have frequently contradicted its natural inclinations
which would be to support the demands of the landless in rural areas
and the new categories of the middle class, many of which are unioniz-

ing in the urban areas.”4

61

In its alliance strategy with other parties, the PCI has been
primarily concerned with the relations it has had with the PSI and
the DC. The socialists have been allied rather closely in the past
with the communists but their differences have produced periods of
mutual alienation. Throughout most of the 19605 with the "Opening
to the Left" in effect, the PCI has found itself politically iso-
lated as the PSI defied tradition and joined in a series of govern-
mental coalitions with the Christian Democrats. The PCI did continue
throughout this time, however, to collaborate with the PSI in local
elections and in local governmental bodies, being always desirous of
maintaining relations with a prospective partner in a future national
governmental coalition. The socialists have continued to lose at the
polls throughout the post-war era while the communists have steadily
gained except in the 1979 elections when the PCI for the first time
lost some votes. Yet "although there is no hard evidence that
socialist electors have been shifting to the PCI, it is clear that
the electoral 'Space' occupied by the Left has grown only slightly in
the last twenty-five years."n5

In 1972 the PCI agreed upon the "Historic Compromise." This
referred to the decision to join in a national governmental coali-
tion with the DC should the opportunity arise. It meant also that
the party was willing to assume a share in democratically bestowed
power prior to the realization of the reforms, the agitation for
which had served as the basis of its appeal to the Italians, a risky
venture in a nation of volatile voters. What it does not want at the

present is to assume national power either alone or in a coalition of

62

the leftist parties because it fears the kind of reaction which
destroyed the Allende government in Chile would be repeated in

Italy.”6

Localygovernment and the Italian Communist Party.—-The PCI

 

has had many electoral victories at the local governmental level. In
the 1975 local elections, the PCI reached a new high of approximately
33%. This paved the way for the national elections the following
year, June 1976, in which the party, increasing its vote by 7.2% over
the last national elections of 1972, scored an impressive 34.4%, the
best showing ever made by the party in a national election. As a
result, in part, of communist work done at the local level of govern—
ment, 52.7% of the voters wanted the PCI to participate in a national
government according to a poll taken in March of 1976, two months
prior to the national elections.”7
By mid-1977 the party governed 6 of the 20 administrative
regions and 45 of the 94 provinces. It had mayors in Bologna, Turin,
Florence, Naples and Rome.“8 AS of October 1977, the communists,
either independently or in coalition with other left-wing forces,
governed 2,779 of the 8,068 municipal councils, called communes;
hence they governed 54% of the entire population. Italy's five largest
cities, viz., Rome, Milan, Naples, Turin and Genoa, were governed by
left-wing forces and of the 100 most populous cities 65 were adminis-
tered by left-wing administrations. Smaller communes, however, do
not possess as high a percentage of leftists in their governing bodies
as evidenced by the fact that there are 6,089 comnunes witha population

of less than 5,000 but these forces govern only 1,878 of them.”9

63

In some communes, such as Bologna, where the communists gained
power in 1945 and have since retained it, the PCI has had to act in
such a manner as to induce a feeling of trust and security within the
electorate. Norman Kogan, for example, declared in 1962 that because
the communists and socialists were so distrusted, the communes over
which they ruled were scrutinzed by the prefects, those officials of
the central government who have the power to dissolve communal coun-
cils and dismiss their officials, in a much closer manner than the
communes administered by the other parties. The result was that
"left-wing communes are the best governed in Italy, and few have been

120

involved in the scandals." According to Newsweek

. the Communists . . . in Naples, . . . have been the major
power in a coalition government since last June. They have
managed to reduce corruption and clean up the city's filthy
streets. They have been unable, however, to solve the moun-
tainous problems they inherited, including high unemployment
and the crippling of tourism and fishing by an outbreak of
cholera two years ago. Nonetheless, one Neapolitan businessman
admits: "The Communists may not have done much here, but they
have shown themselves much more open and attractive than the
last lot we had."121

And finally, the Vice Chairman of Fiat Umberto Agnelli states: "'If
. I look at the facts, at the Party's actual behavior on the
local level, I cannot but admit that good administration is guaran-
teed in those localities where the PCI is in power."'122

The PCI has desired democratic participation in communal
government so that policy will result from the political demands of
a broad popular base consisting of many social classes. It recog-

nizes today that the ruling or administrating efforts of one class

would be both inadequate in the modern pluralistic conditions of

64

society and dangerous in that a reaction from the right might develop
with calamitous results. Second, it desires that these communes
"Should be regarded as general governing bodies on their territory,
that is, they should be able to exert directive functions in all
spheres. The communes only have jurisdiction over the social ser-
vices--transport, schools, hospitals--but have no power whatever to
influence economic processes."123 Because the Italian economy has
always been in difficult straits with the power to influence economic
processes emanating from the same sources above, which have continued
to emphasize high profits for the few, the communes are frequently
left in very impoverished condition, some being financially bankrupt.
The communists have wanted the communes to be local autonomous bodies,
responsible for basic economic decisions as the Constitution has stipu-
lated, and therefore able to influence basic structural changes toward

decentralization, humanized social services, and improved economic

possibilities.

65

FootnoteS--Chapter II

 

1Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism
1870-1925 (n.p.: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1967), p. 526.

 

2Antonio Gramsci, “L'Unita Proletaria," L'Ordine Nuovo:
1919-1920 (n.p.: Giulio Einaudi, 1954), pp. 100-101.

 

3Gaetano Salvemini, The Origins of Fascism in Italy, trans.
and ed. by Roberto Vivarelli (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 263,
306, 307.

 

4Franco De Felice, Serrati, Bordiga, Gramsci e il problema
della rivoluzione in Italia: 1919-1920 (Bari: De Donato, 1971),
p. 23.

 

5Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary
(New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1971), p. 143.

6

7H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reconstruc-
tion of European Thought 1890-1930 (New York: Random House, Inc.,
1958), p. 101.

 

Ibid.

 

8Antonio Gramsci, Nota Sul Machiavelli Sulla Politica e Sullo
Stato Moderno (n.p.: Giulio Einaudi, 1953), p. 68.

9John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian
Communism (Stanford, Ca1if.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 204.

10"ll Concetto di Egemonia nel Pensiero di A. Gramsci," Studi
Gramsciani: Atti del convegno tenuto a Roma nei giorni 11-13 gennaio
1958 (n.p.: Editori Riuniti, 1958), p. 91.

11Pa1miro Togliatti, Gramsci, ed. Ernesto Ragionieri (Rome:
Editori Riuniti, 1967), p. 180.

12

 

Ibid.

13Gramsci, "L'Unita Proletaria," L'Ordine Nuovo: 1919-1920,
pp. 96-101.

14Giorgio Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti (Rome: Editori Laterza,
1973), p. 154.

15Ernesto Ragionieri, Palmiro Togliatti: Per una biografia
politica e intellettuale (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976), p. 17.

 

 

 

66

16F. Borkenau, World Communism: A History of the Communist
International (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1963),
p. 419.

17

 

 

Ibid., p. 377.

18Togliatti, "Problemi del Fronte Unico," 11 Partito Communista

 

Italiano dalla Origini a1 1946, ed. Vittorio Vidotto (Bologna:
Cappelli, 1975), pp. 304-14.

19

 

Bocca, p. 211.
20

2lDonald M. Blackmer, Unity in Diversity: Italian Communism
and the Communist World (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1968),
p. 12.

2ZGramsci, "Cronache dell' 'Ordine Nuovo,'" L'Ordine Nuovo:
1919-1920, p. 476.

23Central Committee of the PCI, "I Comunisti ai Cattaloci
Italiani," Il Partito Comunista Italiano dalle Origini a1 1946,
pp. 323-24.

24"La politica di unita nazionale dei comunisti," Opere
scelte, ed. Gianpasquale Santomassimo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974),
p. 303.

25

26Luciano Gruppi, Togliatti e la via italiana a1 socialismo
(Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976), p. 68.

27

Ragionieri, p. 41.

 

 

 

Ibid.. PP. 303-304.

 

Ibid.

28Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini's Enemies: The Italian Anti-
Fascist Resistance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961),
p. 356.

29Denis Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History, new rev. ed.
(Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 492.

30H. Stuart Hughes, Contemporary Europe: A History, 2d ed.
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), pp. 402-403.

 

 

 

 

3lTogliatti, "I compiti del partito nella situazione attuale,"
Qpere scelte, ed. Gianpasquale Santomassimo (Rome: Editori Riuniti,
1974), pp. 340-69.

 

67

32Norman Kogan, A Political History of Postwar Italy (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966, p. 29. See also Gianfranco Poggi,
ed., L'Organizzazione Partitica del PCI e della DC, Vol. II: Ricerche
sulla partecipazione politica in Italia (Bologna: Societa Editrice
i1 Mulino, 1968), p. 40.

33

 

 

 

Kogan, pp. 39-40.

34Giuseppe Mammarella, Italy After Fascism: A Political
History: 1943-1965 (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press,
1966), pp. 126-30.

35Kogan, pp. 45-46.

 

 

36Bocca, p. 484.
37Ibid.. pp. 485-86.
38

Donald M. Blackmer, "Continuity and Change in Postwar
Italian Communism,“ Communism in Italy and France, ed. Donald M.
Blackmer and Sidney Tarrow (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1975), p. 48.

39Sidney G. Tarrow, Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 284-90.

40Blackmer, "Continuity and Change in Postwar Italian Commu-
nism," Communism in Italy and France, p. 50.

4lPalmiro Togliatti, Conversando con Togliatti, ed. Marcella
Ferrara and Maurizio Ferrara (Rome: Edizioni di Cultura Sociale,
1953), p. 369.

42Giorgio Galli, ed., 11 Comportamento Elettorale in Italia,
Vol. I: Richerche sulla partecipazione politica in Italia (Bologna:
Societa Editrice Il Mulino, 1968), p. 332.

 

 

 

 

 

 

43Poggi, p. 59.

44Ga11i, p. 332.

45Mammarella, pp. 249-52.

46d. Salwyn Schapiro, Liberalism: Its Meaning and History
(New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., 1958), p. 32.

47Blackmer, Unity in Diversity, pp. 40-43.

 

 

48Togliatti. "Intervista a 'Nuovi argpmenti,'" Opere scelte,
pp. 705, 716. 719.

 

68

4916id.. p. 726.

 

5OIhid.. pp. 726-28.

5'81ackmer, Unity in Diversity, p. 148.
521bid., p. 184.

53

P. A. Allum, The Italian Communist Party Since 1945:
Grandeurs and Servitudes of a European Socialist Strategy, Occasional
Publication No. 2 (Reading: Univ. of Reading Grad School of Contempo-
rary Eur0pean Studies, 1970), p. 23.

54

 

Blackmer, Unity in Diversigy, p. 190.

 

55F. A. Allum, Italy--Repub1ic Without Government? (New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1973), pp. 48, 54.

56Norman Kogan, The Government of Italy (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell Co., 1962), p. 29.

57Blackmer, "Continuity and Change in Postwar Italian Commu-
nism," Communism in Italy and France, p. 30.

58Mack Smith, p. 511.

 

 

 

59Anne Fremantle, ed., The Social Teachings of the Church
(New York: The New American Library, 1963), p. 229.

60Ibid., p. 270.
61

 

Ibid., p. 296.

62Kogan, A Political History of Postwar Italy, p. 193.

63Ioid.. p. 206.

64Ibid., p. 208.

65Ibid., p. 212.

 

66Shepard B. Clough and Carlo Livi, "Economic Growth in
Italy: An Analysis of the Uneven Deve10pment of North and South,"
The Journal of Economic History 16 (September 1956): 335.

67
68Southern Italy is defined as the islands of Sardinia and

Sicily, and the mainland regions of Calabria, Basilicata, Puglia,
Campania, the Abruzzi, and Molise.

 

Ibid., pp. 338 ff.

69

60Elizabeth Wiskemann, Italy Since 1945 (London: Macmillan,
1971), p. 100.

70Kogan, A Political History of Postwar Italy, pp. 149-50.

 

 

7lThe Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, Ill.: The
Free Press, 1958), pp. 64-65.

721bid., p. 10.

 

73Christ St0pped at Eboli, trans. Frances Frenaye (New York:
Pocket Books, Inc., 1965), p. 214.

74

 

Ibid., p. 63.

75Mack Smith. pp. 505-506.

76Ibid., p. 506.

77Clientism is the practice of exchanging favors in lieu of
formal liberal-democratic political behavior. It personalizes
political relationships and allows positions of political power to
be given by those who are able to dispense the most favors. It has
been practiced widely in southern Italy and to a lesser extent in
the North.

78Kogan, A Political History of Postwar Italy, p. 60.

 

79The Latifondo was a type of great estate mainly devoted to
pasterage and the growing of cereals which was frequently owned by
absentee landlords, managed by middle-men and worked by impoverished
peasants. (Christopher Seton-Watson, p. 23.)

80Mack Smith, p. 521.

87

8ITarrow, p. 366.
821bid., p. 194.
83Ihid., p. 299.
84Ibid., p. 349.
85Ibid., p. 326.
8610id., p. 4.

p.

Ibid., 11.

70

88Sidney Tarrow, Between Center and Periphery: Grassroots
Politicians in Italy and France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press,
1977), p. 253.

8911 Ponte 15 (1959): 1491. Quoted in John Clarke Adams and
Paolo Barile, The Government of Republican Italy (Boston: Houghton-
Mifflin Co., 1962), p. 220.

90Joseph LaPalombara, Interest Groups in Italian Politics
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 119-20.

 

9'eruppi, p. 74.

 

 

 

 

9ZTogliatti, "La via italiana a1 socialismo," Qpere scelte,
p. 755.

93Poggi, p. 372.

94A11um, The Italian Communist Party Since 1945, p. 39.

95Galli and Prandi, p. 122.

96Galli, Il Comportamento Elettorale in Italia, p. 332.

97Allum, Italy--Republic Without Government?, p. 25.

98Galli and Prandi, p. 261.

99

Blackmer, "Continuity and Change in Postwar Italian Commu-
nism," p. 48. See also Galli and Prandi, pp. 271-74.

100Robert Putnam, "The Italian Communist Politician," Communism

in Italy and France, pp. 200-201.

10lSidney Tarrow, “Communism in Italy and France: Adaptation
and Change," Communism in Italy and France, p. 618.

102Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism,
trans. R. G. Collingwood (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 365.

103

'04A1ium, The Italian Communist Party Since 1945, p. 20.

 

 

Galli and Prandi, p. 263.

 

105Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Letters from Inside the Italian
Communist Party to Louis Althusser (London: NLB, 1973), p. 174.

106Ibid., p. 217.

 

71

107Peter Lange, "The PCI at the Local Level: A Study of
Strategic Performance," Communism in Italy and France, p. 275.

108Stephen Hellman, "The PCI's Alliance Strategy and the Case
of the Middle Classes," Communism in Italy and France, pp. 379-80.

109Giacomo Sani, ”Mass-Level Response to Party Strategy: The
Italian Electorate and the Communist Party," Communism in Italy and
France, p. 502.

11011mm, p. 497.

 

 

 

mHe11man, pp. 381-82.
llzlbid., pp. 392-94.
113

Ibid., p. 386.

H4Ibid., pp. 388, 391.

115Lange, p. 262.

‘16He11man, p. 419.

H7"Red Star Over Italy," NEWSWEEk, 25 April 1975’ P- 42-

]]8Jane Kramer, "A Reporter in Europe," The New Yorker 53
(2 May 1977): 110.

119Luciano Antonetti and Alexander Volkov, "Communists in
Municipalities: The Experience and the Problems of the Left Giuntas
in Italy," World Marxist Review 20 (October 1977): 95.

 

 

 

120Kogan, The Government of Italy, p. 157.
12]"Red Star Over Italy," 26 April 1975. PP- 42‘43-
122

Sergio Segre, "The Communist Question in Italy," Foreign
Affairs 54 (July 1976): 697.

123Antonetti and Volkov, "Communists in Municipalities,"
World Marxist Review, p. 73.

 

CHAPTER III

EDUCATION AND THE ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY
IN THE YEARS 1919-1945

Introduction
In determining what type of education the Italian Communist
Party advocated and used from its earliest days to the present, the

term party education means, first, the endeavor to train party mem-

 

bers within the organization through party "schools" to the point
where the students not only are knowledgeable of and accept the ver-
sion of communist doctrine taught, but also where they learn about
the practical matters associated with their rolesin the party, and
second, the ideas of Gramsci pertaining to the party's attempts to
deve10p hegemony outside of the national educational system. In
both cases propaganda was the primary mode of instruction. By
education is meant the attempt to impart knowledge using evidence in
such a way that the student is encouraged to realize his potentiali-
ties. Some propaganda could be included in the educational process
but in that case propaganda is usually subservient to the evidence,
and those using it appear to be willing to change it when the evidence
supports another approach.

From its earliest days the PCI has been interested in impart-
ing information to its members with the avowed hope of raising their

awareness of socio-political conditions. The primary mode of doing

72

73

this during the period 1919 to 1945 was propaganda rather than edu-
cation. I. A. Snook argues that
the indoctrinator intends that the pupil believe [the proposi-
tion] "regardless of the evidence." In full-blown cases of
intention, this captures very well the difference between the
indoctrinator and the educator. For the educator, the beliefs
are always secondary to the evidence: he wants his student to
end up with whatever beliefs the evidence demands. He is con-
cerned with methods of assessing data, standards of accuracy,
and validity of reasoning. The answers are subsidiary to the
methods of gaining answers. The indoctrinator, however, is
typically most concerned with the imparting of beliefs: these
are what he strives to hand on. It is the evidence that is of
subsidiary importance. . . . The indoctrinator will . . . make
use of evidence, logic and proof--but it is a use of in order
to furthep his aim: the beliefs are more important than the
evidence.
It is important to state that indoctrination and propaganda on the
one hand and education on the other, are not mutually exclusive
concepts, that they overlap both conceptually and in practice.2
Where the precise line of demarcation lies is in many instances
impossible to ascertain and frequently it is a matter of opinion
despite the clear separation in emphasis of the two concepts.

Not having access to the national system of education in any
significant sense until after the Second World War and not being
reconciled to the existence of the Italian nation through much of
this period, the efforts of the Italian communists remained primarily
geared toward the use of pr0paganda to influence both its members in
the party schools and those outside the party. One may judge from

the tone of the journal L'Ordine Nuovo, initiated in Milan during

 

1919, that it was primarily devoted to pr0pagandizing. According to
Togliatti, Gramsci "loved the almost mathematical precision of

reasoning and . . . [he] had a taste for the extreme exactness of

74

information [while he] disdained, but more than that, had a kind of
moral repugnance for improvisation, for superficiality, and careless-
ness."3 He used his reasoning abilities in these early years for
propaganda as his statement below admits:

The position of L'Ordine Nuovo consisted essentially of the
following: . . . knowing how to translate into Italian the
principal postulates of the doctrine and tactics of the Commu-
nist International: in the years 1919-1920 the [Ordine Nuovo]
wanted to relate the proceedings [dire lagparola d'ordine] of
the factory councils and of the control of production, that
is to say of . . . the expropriation of the expropriators, or
the substitution of the proletariat for the bourgeoisie in the 4
control of industry and therefore, necessarily, the state; .. .

 

 

 

The emphasis upon propaganda was to continue unabatedly until
the advent of Hitler forced a communist reconsideration of evidence
explaining the fascist movement. From that time onward, though
Italian communist propaganda persisted, it was increasingly necessary
for the party to take into account ever-widening areas of phenomena
in explaining its message. Political-military developments such as
those associated with the Popular Front forced the party to cooperate
with non-communist antifascists, while their efforts to liberate
Italy induced feelings of nationalism in the communists despite them-
selves. All of this had important implications for Italian Commu-
nist ideas regarding education because it tended to dilute sectarian
ideology and supplant it with a greater concern for and identifica-
tion with the Italian national education system, which however unjust
in its exclusiveness, did incorporate ideals of dispassionate scholar-
ship and liberal respect for the individual.

In the heated days of the 1920 factory occupations. Gramsci

and his circle "closed down Ordine Nuovo and started to live in the

 

75

factories, engaging in an endless round of organizational work, agi-

tation, and propaganda."5

In these years it was believed by some
that there was a realistic chance for a bolshevik type of revolution
to be induced in Italy and time was of the greatest importance, hence
the emphasis was placed upon partisan bias and evidence was deempha-
sized. The fundamentals of the Marxist-Leninist labor movement as
they were interpreted by the leaders of this group were taught in the
factory councils, and were probably taught through timely repetition
of salient points because the average worker could boast of only a

limited formal education. Slogans were probably used generously and

L'Ordine Nuovo itself both before and after the factory occupations

 

was written at perhaps the equivalent of our American eighth or ninth
grade reading comprehension level. The indoctrination was geared to
the revolution which some thought was upon them, but with the collapse
of the factory occupations came the realization by many Italian com-
munists that class consciousness had not been sufficiently developed
and that it would probably take a considerable length of time to
do so.
The Educational Implications in Gramsci's
Concept of Hegemony
According to Gramsci the extension of hegemony in Italy was
to be accomplished primarily through educational means of one sort or
another. The drive for hegemony linked the party leadership with
the rank-and-file of the party, the entire party with the working
class, and the working class with society as a whole. These organic

connections had pedagogical implications, Gramsci felt, because the

76

new generation could learn from the experiences and values of its
elders just as the latter could derive benefit from the perspective
of the former. He said that "every teacher is . . . a student, and
every student a teacher"6 in society as well as the academic world,
hence "every hegemonic relationship is necessarily a pedagogical
relationship, and it exists not only throughout the nation among the

diverse forces composing it, but throughout the entire world within

the complex of civilized nations and continents."7

In the factory councils Gramsci saw "the most effective organ
for mutual education and for developing the new social spirit which
the proletariat has sensed in the lively and fertile experience of
the working community."8 Gramsci hoped that the worker-member's
conception of himself would, with the aid of his factory council, be
changed from wage-laborer to producer. This would be done if the
worker

sees himself as an inseparable part of the whole labour system
which is concentrated in the object being manufactured, and
only if he experiences the unity of the industrial process
which in toto demands collaboration between manual workers,
skilled workers, management employees, engineers and techni-
cal directors. The worker will see himself as a producer if--
after he has become psychologically part of a particular pro-
ductive process in a particular factory (e.g. in a car plant in
Turin) and has come to think of himself as a necessary and
indispensable factor in the activity of the social complex pro—
ducing the car--he can now go one stage further and comprehend
the whole of the Turin car-manufacturing process. . . . Start-
ing off from this original cell, the factory, seen as a unit,
as an act that creates a particular product, the worker pro-
ceeds to the comprehension of ever vaster units, right up to
the level of the nation itself. . . . At this point the worker
has become a producer, for he has acquired an awareness of his
role in the process of production, at all levels from the work-
sh0p to the nation and the world. At this point he is aware of
his class; he becomes a revolutionary because he sees the

77

capitalist, the private property owner, as a dead hand, an

encumbrancg on the productive process which must be done

away w1th.
Gramsci is writing here about a process of self-education in which
the worker, becoming aware of himself, his class, and his role in the
whole productive process, is able finally to understand that he is
part of an organic whole. In this consciousness he becomes trans-
formed from citizen, the old liberal appellation, to comrade.

These workers were collectively the embodiment of the revolu-
tion and so their education was of critical importance; in fact edu-
cation was to be a major determinant in the success of the revolution.
Improving the working skills of the proletariat was to be recommended
by Gramsci, and he asks the workshop delegates: "Why could you not
set up inside the factory appropriate instruction departments, real
vocational schools, in which every worker, rousing himself from the
fatigue that brutalizes, would be able to gain knowledge of the

10 However,

processes of production and therefore improve himself?"
it was in the "knowledge of the process of production" involving the
worker with others that Gramsci had primary interest rather than
knowledge of the details necessary to perform any particular job
within the factory; and while he devoted more attention to the indi-
vidual than perhaps most other Marxists, he was after all, still a
Marxist, which meant that the social rather than the individual
dimension was emphasized.

Gramsci spoke of the necessity of proletarian self-discipline

in building the communist hegemony in Italy. As the workers gained

awareness of their deprivations through pedagogical relationships

78

they would gradually realize that some of their immediate self-
interest should be forfeited for the purpose of furthering the long-

1] This meant that

range possibilities of the proletarian revolution.
not only must they defer fulfillment of their immediate desires, but
that they must do their part in facilitating communist c00peration
with the peasantry and various segments of the middle classes includ-
ing the intellectuals, pe0ple with whom the annointed of Marx have

rarely had easy relations. Gramsci realized that the 19th century

Italian bourgeois revolution known as the Risorgimento was not a

 

national effort of the masses and he believed it failed in large part
because it was attempted without the southern peasantry; he had no
intention of seeing that failure repeated. It would take discipline
to forge the alliance and it would take discipline to encourage its
growth once initiated.

12 .
pr1or

While workers' self-discipline is Gramsci's ideal,
to its existence external force may be necessary for its formation.
He wrote of the discipline that the workshop delegates "will require
of the working masses" and he indicated that the central political-
economic-social organs created at every level from the workshop to
the national Workers' Council "will pursue, broaden and intensify the
job of controlling, preparing and organizing the whole class for the
duties of conquest and government."13 However, discipline should
not be understood as the passive and servile reception and mechanical
execution of orders; rather, it should be considered "as a conscious

and lucid assimilation of the directive to be accomplished. Disci-

pline, therefore, does not annul the personality in an organic sense,

79

but only limits the irresponsible and arbitary impulse. . . ."14

Discipline should not be an arbitrary, extrinsic, or exterior impo-
sition, and it should be adhered to since it is "necessary to the
order of democracy and liberty."15 Discipline might require the
formation of a coercive group of factory councils and soviets culmi-
nating in a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, since the
emergence of the party with indisciplined soviets and with apathetic
worker participation would have been condemned by Gramsci as counter-
revolutionary; the desiccation of its roots in the masses would have
turned the party into an abstraction.

What Gramsci saw as the essential task for his revolutionary
forces in Italy was, in short, the promotion of a mass transformation
of attitudes which he thought could not be accomplished without the
aid of two different types of intellectuals: the traditional and
the organic.16 The role of the first group "is entrusted to [it]
by the dominant group in society for the exercise of the subordinate

17 By this

functions of both social hegemony and of the government."
he meant that they channeled the spontaneity of the great masses of
the population in a direction dictated by the dominant social group
from its controlling position in the world of production. He also
meant that these intellectuals operate the machinery of state coer-
cion, including the educational institutions, which legally guaran-
tees the proper behavior of all groups in society, and he stated that
they exist as "representatives of an historical continuity, uninter-
rupted by the most complex and radical changes in social and political

forms."18

80

In many ways this group of intellectuals has been a distinct
class, and it has been from their midst that much social fermenta-
tion has originated historically. These intellectuals can work most
effectively for change if they form an emotional and ethical identi-
fication with the common pe0ple and eschew any notions of ivory-
tower snobbishness. Gramsci considered ideas divested of concrete
reference, ideas produced in isolation from the objective world, and
ideas which evoke response only among intellectuals in a detached
environment, as vacuous and of no use to the labor movement. True
understanding as opposed to these abstractions can be experienced by
the intelligentsia when they are organically related to the other
stratas of society. In forming contacts with the proletariat and in
helping to bring about that crucial alliance between the working class
and the peasantry which Gramsci felt was absolutely necessary to the
success of any Italian revolution, the intelligentsia could work
toward forming organic relations.

This would be accomplished by these traditional intellectuals
meeting kindred types called "organic" intellectuals through the
medium of the communist party. Gramsci wrote: "Every social group,
rising on the basis of an essential function in the world of economic
production creates . . . organically one or more classes of intellec-
tuals which give it homogeneity and the awareness of its proper func-

."19 He saw

tion in the economic, social and political fields. . .
these pe0ple as the specialists and directors which each class pro—
duces, and he hoped that they would be developed in increasing numbers

because it is they who, more than the traditional intellectuals,

81

would be influential in encouraging the expansion of the working
class and in creating favorable conditions for its hegemonic control
in society. It is primarily they who, with the party, should lead
the way to the grand transformation by working for a new unity of
Marxian consciousness. They are supposed to rise out of the masses
and yet be part of them, and they therefore also perform a mediating
function between the proletariat on the one hand and the traditional
«-~_———*—~\
intellectuals, the other classes including the peasantry, and the
PCI itself, on the other.

So the organic intellectuals should perform an extraordi-
narily valuable educative service in the interest of furthering the
hegemonic control by the working classes of society. Although these
are specialists in production, such as technicians and foremen, the
knowledge which the most progressive among them need possess should
be broader than that dealing with mere job proficiency, for these

people must form an integral relationship with the traditional intel-

lectuals. The major function of the weekly L'Ordine Nuovo was "to

 

develop certain forms of new intellectualism and to induce new con-

20 through propaganda, the idea being to encourage the forma-

cepts"
tion of new organic intellectuals from within the proletarian class.
To this end, a technical and industrial education could be obtained
to be complemented for the most progressive students by the study of
"technical science and historical humanistic views, without which
[they] would remain 'specialist[s]' and would not become 'director[s]'

("“15“ 15 to say, specialist plus politician)."2]

82

If promising individuals located too far from Torino desired
the instruction given in the socialist school, presumably operated
by the communists in the days prior to the formation of the PCI,
they could obtain an education by reading the journal because all

the summaries of the lessons studied and discussions heard at the

22

school would be printed in it. As for the students near at hand

able to absorb more intellectual material, the journal

L'Ordine Nuovo established a "School of Culture and Socialist
Propaganda" in December 1919, attended by both university stu-
dents and workers. Gramsci, Togliatti, Tasca, and Pastore

gave frequent lectures there, as did several professors from
the University. This school examined the idea of the Stato dei
consigli, a new state completely replacing the liberal state by
a 'system of councils."2

 

Gramsci displayed a partiality for studying and education24

throughout his career, and his writings became less propagandistic
and more educational as time passed. In a passage revealing his deep
inner respect for the individual he refers to everyone as an intel-
lectual since all use their minds in at least some capacity, though

25 This

he admits that not all perform intellectual tasks in society.
declaration is important pedagogically because it implies both that
people are not just empty vessels into which the "correct" informa—
tion is poured by the authority and that there may be a legitimate
place for independent judgment among them. It is important because
it sets the tone not only for Gramsci's personal estimation of the
masses which is different from that of both Bordiga, the first leader
of the PCI, and Lenin, since it possesses greater respect and trust

of the masses; but it is also important because it serves as a key-

note of the PCI, and thus differentiates it from the Russian Communist

83

Party's assessment of Russian masses. This is as close to liberalism
as Gramsci and the PCI ever came.

In the early days the PCI had the problem of defining itself
and establishing its proper relationship with the bourgeoisie, with
other leftists, and with the Soviet Union. It had been a Leninist
party under Bordiga which meant that it was a small conspiratorial
group composed mainly of professional revolutionaries. Unlike Lenin
this early group waited for deterministic and mechanistic forces in
society to invite them into the proletarian revolution, but like the
earliest Christians waiting for the Second Coming, they waited in
vain. Education for them consisted mainly of "unmasking" dissidents
and cajoling the orthodox into keeping the faith. Bordiga "did not
want to waste [his] time in theoretical discussion" and he "denounced
the influence of the intellectuals and the insistence on education
and study which was to be so characteristic of Gramsci's attitude.”26
For Bordiga, "education" consisted primarily of propaganda.

Gramsci wanted another kind of party, one which, though not
a mass party, would have "organic" ties with the masses, but the
impetus toward such a party was truncated by the accession to power of
Benito Mussolini. Gramsci viewed his own version of education as
absolutely vital to the cause of his party and the revolution. Where
Bordiga was satisfied to wait on events, Gramsci, like Lenin, saw
that only through the intervention of forces made "conscious" could a
revolution come about, though ultimately the latter two differed on

the methods which should be used to make the revolutionary forces

conscious.

84

The educational process according to Webster's New Collegiate

 

Dictionary is mental or moral development which is accomplished

 

especially by instruction. Gramsci thought that educating the masses
was identical with bringing class consciousness to them, and this
meant enlightening them through Marxian doctrine as to who they were,
why they occupied the position they did in society, and what lay
ahead of them in terms of the development of both themselves and this
society. This process could take months in some cases and years in
others, depending upon the abilities and the state of "consciousness"
of the students. However, with the successful conclusion of this
instruction, those who had received it would, it was felt, be eager
to act in the best interest of themselves and society by contributing
to the revolution and the Marxian reconstruction of society.

Gramsci emphasized his version of education for two reasons:
(1) he and his group lacked the political power with which to force
the consciousness they envisioned upon the Italian people and (2) his
trust of the masses was greater than that of most other communists.
It is possible to argue that the second reason was encouraged because
of the first, and that to create a mass of enlightened workers in a
bourgeois society, the only alternative to the Bordigan illusions
involved a heavy investment of effort in education entailing trust
since it involves helping the student to realize his potentialities.
This assertion, however, ignores the possibility of "enlightening"
through Lenin's methods of propagandizing which abbreviated both the
time of learning and the truth itself, and which essentially existed

at the expense of education. The latter could have been Gramsci's

85

approach but, apart from some early propagandizing efforts, it
was not.

Lenin found what appeared to be shortcuts to the time-consuming
process of education. He saw that eagerness to act in the revolu-
tionary manner could be artificially generated hithe masses given
appropriate instabilities and tensions in society, and given the
effective usage of techniques such as staging, timing, and the manu-
facturing of propagandistic slogans. Appearances were emphasized
rather than substances because appearances are malleable; and since
the unlettered easily grasped and believed these appearances which
were in effect simplified truths if not outright falsehood, Lenin
knew that the people themselves were manipulable. This allowed him

to use them as instruments in his move for power.

The Fascist Years--l922-l945

The ineptitude of the socialists and communists coupled with
the determined actions of the fascists produced disaster for the
entire left as well as the liberal elements in Italy when Mussolini
acceded to power in 1922. As a result, throughout much of the next
two decades, theory would triumph over practice among the broad
stratas of the dispossessed Italian left instead of being united with
it as many communists including Gramsci desired. Palmiro Togliatti
succeeded Gramsci as the leader of the PCI. Since he owed his primary
allegiance to the Marxian movement, and since it had found its most
eloquent expression in the 1917 Russian Revolution, he held that

experience sacred as did most adherents of the left in Italy. This

86

attitude was typified in the curriculum of a party school during the
19205 in which a course on the history of the Russian communist party
occupied some 20 hours weekly, while another course dealing with the
history of the PCI lasted only six hours a week.27

In 1927 Togliatti organized a party school at Soletta,
Switzerland, in a modest house donated by a sympathetic socialist.
Including elements of both propaganda and education, it drew "youth-
ful cadres from the working class, hence the lessons of Marxism were
very simple and there were studies of the movement in Russia and in
Europe along with attention devoted to general culture."28 Some of
the schools were discontinued as a result of police action and some
of the discontinued schools commenced again in other locations, as
was the case with the Soleta school which, after closing due to the
revelations of a suspected spy, reopened in Berlin.

Another type of party school, conducted under the most hos-
tile conditions imaginable, was that operated informally within the
fascist prisons. The PCI had very close contact with some of the more
favorably situated prisoners, and Togliatti, in a letter of 1932, was

worried about some of the younger imprisoned communists who have no
experience in the revolutionary class struggle and who are most sub-
ject to the influence of fascist ideology. These comrades are full

of enthusiasm but ideological virgins and politically very inexperi-

enced."'29

He continued with the assertion that the "'school'" should
be a permanent feature of the prison, and that it should seek to
influence those susceptible of being influenced whether with or without

other party allegiance as well as incarcerated comrades of the PCI.

87

So the foreign center of the PCI made arrangements for elemen-
tary educational materials to be smuggled into the prisons. Other
kinds of reading materials such as prohibited books dealing with
political economy, history, and Marxist classics, most written in
French, penetrating the prisons disguised in an ingenuous manner,
were read avidly and hidden secretly in the walls. The French,
German and English languages were studied by these inmates in this
order of importance because the prohibited literature was written in
them. There also were officially approved readings available in the
prison libraries or acquired easily elsewhere by the prison authori-
ties consisting of classical literature and historical compendia.

The study within the prisons was made as systematic as possible, and
the total effort was accompanied by an elevation in general culture
among the detained.30

By 1934 fascism could no longer be treated as a sign of
bourgeois weakness, and the communists realized that there was some-
thing wrong with the proposition that "the bourgeoisie resorts to
fascism because it cannot govern with the old systems";31 it now had
assumed its true proportions of license and power. Communists
throughout Eur0pe now regarded it as the major enemy and all of their
resources were called up for use in the desperate struggle against
it. This meant forming alliances with others including the despised
socialists, alliances that were only temporarily disrupted by the
Russian-German non-aggression pact of 1939 and hastily renewed at
the time of the German invasion of Russia in 1941. Education was put

in the service of this campaign, and the subject<rffascisn1predominated

88

in the minds of the PCI educators, as is evidenced by Togliatti's
lectures on this subject in these years.
In 1935, for example, he delivered some lectures at the
Italian division of the Lenin School in Moscow dealing with the
topic: "The Adversaries." They aroused considerable interest among
Italian as well as non-Italian students and teachers, but he found
it necessary to speak simply and clearly because most of the Italians
in attendance came from the working classes and the fascist prisons,
and were therefore unaccustomed to studying in a formal course. In
these lectures he not only defined fascism and described it from many
angles, he attempted to reconcile the two communist policies which
during this period coexisted, viz., the demands to c00perate with
non-communist elements in the p0pular front against fascism, and the
never-relinquished pursuit of the proletarian revolution which,
though continuing, was for the moment subdued. He told these stu-
dents, many of whom were to return to fascist Italy clandestinely:
When we speak of "adversaries" we do not have in mind the

ma§§e§_enrolled in the fascist, social-democratic and Catholic

organizations. Our adversaries are the fascist, social-

democratic and Catholic organizations. But the masses belong-

ing to them are not our adversaries; they a5? masses of workers
whom we must make every effort to win over.

 

He talked about how fascism in Italy mobilized a mass movement
when the "big bourgeoisie won over the discontented petty-bourgeois
masses," and how the PCI was misled:

We didn't understand that there was an Italian social phe-
nomenon underlying all this; we didn't see the deep—going social
causes determining it; we didn't understand that the ex-
servicemen, the misfits, were not isolated individuals but a
mass, and represented a phenomenon having class aspects; we

89

didn't understand that we could not simply tell them to go to
the devil!

Our job was to win over a part of this mass and neutralize
the other, thereby preventing it from becoming a mass maneuvered
by the bourgeoisie. We neglected these tasks.3

He told the students, many of whom were to be returned secretly to
Italy, that it was necessary to infiltrate the fascist organizations

such as the GUF, or the Fascist University Groups, the dopolavoro,34

 

and the trade unions, and "organize the struggle for our principles
35

 

inside of them." This should be done despite any moral revulsions

 

against associating with the fascists in them. He said that while
he respected those feelings in other antifascists because they indi-
cate principled behavior "their position is wrong because it is not
in this way that one sticks to one's principles; otherwise, we could
become hermits, go into a forest and worship communism there."36
Togliatti had less to say about education than Gramsci.
Since Togliatti presided over the party during its greatest fluctua-
tions in both membership and success he probably had less time to
reflect upon the virtues of education because the practical matters
of leadership, especially under such trying conditions, left little
time for such long-range speculation. Although it is true that
Togliatti was a theorist as well as a practitioner, it is also true
that in matters of educational theory, he selected paths already
trod by his ideological predecessor. For example, like Gramsci, he
felt that education consisted of much more than simply work training.
The student should be informed of the "slow, long, and toilsome"

struggle of mankind against the "blind and brutal forces of nature"

and against social and political oppression. Likewise the student

90

should come to realize a sense of identity with the "working commu-
nity throughout the centuries" and learn to appreciate the value of
his work, however humble or limited it might appear to be.37 Yet
Togliatti is important in this matter because it was under his
leadership that the party expanded to such large pr0portions follow-
ing the war and that plans proceeded toward the hegemonic control of
the state.

When Togliatti assumed leadership over the fledgling party,
it was already in a state of shock from Mussolini's attacks. Its
tripartite division, the emigrated, the incarcerated, and the under-
ground, hampered not only effective education, but effective inter-
nal communication. In addition, as if this were not devastation
enough, it fell under the domination of Moscow in the latter twen-
ties and early thirties, which meant that there was even less media-
tion between the PCI and the tremors of the wildly erratic policies
emanating from the Kremlin after 1926 than there had been prior to
that date when the PCI at least was based in Italy. Under the
assaults conducted against the PCI by Mussolini and the control
exerted over it by the Soviet leadership,38 continued party activi-
ties inside Italy resembled nothing so much as the lemmings' march to
the sea. It gradually dawned upon the Italian communists that condi-
tions under a fascist dictatorship were somewhat "less conducive" to
the fulfillment of Gramscian and Togliattian objectives than those
under even the most depraved and inhospitable versions of bourgeois

democracy, and so the content of education had to change.

91

Because the members of the party were scattered in this
period and because its schools were frequently closed, the indoctrina-
tion given was probably sketchy and incomplete. There was little
time or inclination to permit genuine education. Probably the party
members who came closest to immersing themselves in education rather
than propaganda were the incarcerated who were given the opportunity
to read anything available in the prison libraries; and though that
material would have been screened through the sectarian bias of
fascism, certain classics in literature were allowed to be read, as
mentioned above. There is the case of the imprisoned Gramsci who
not only took advantage of this opportunity and who had a few books
and journals sent in to him, though some were arbitrarily withheld
from his possession, but who was able to produce a set of highly
respected scholarly theories under the most aggravating conditions.
What he wrote there, though unavailable to his party in those years,
is today a basic guide to the communist strategy in Italy.

The Increasing Orientation of the Italian Communist
Party Toward Italian National Education

Gramsci's Ideas Concerning
Italian National Education

 

 

Gramsci was probably more free and Open in his approach to
truth than either Lenin or Togliatti and as a result he was willing
to admit the legitimacy of knowledge emanating from sources outside
the broad stratum of the labor movement to a greater extent than the
others. Because Gramsci realized that the process of gaining hegemonic

leadership by the proletariat and the peasantry was going to be a

92

lengthy affair, because he himself had long years to think in soli-
tude about it, and because he recognized the Italian national entity
in a way most communists did not, he had much to say about the Italian
national system of education. He also provided suggestions as to
where and how improvements in it could be made.

In speaking of the deficiencies of the Italian national edu-
cation, as distinct from communist education or indoctrination,
Gramsci said that the traditional Italian schools were oligarchies
because they were operated by the leading class in society with the
idea of perpetuating the superiority of this class by producing from
it, through these schools, the leaders of the future. They have not
been oligarchical because of the method of instruction, the acqui-
sition of the ability to direct, or because of their alleged tendency
to produce the superior man. This type of school has developed “from
the fact that every social group has an appropriate type of school
designed to perpetuate a traditionally determined directive or sub-
ordinate function for the group in its social stratum."39

Gramsci believed that prior to the onset of industrializa-
tion in Italy, this type of differentiation between the kind of edu-
cation offered to the children of the ruling classes and that to the
others, was rationally conceived. However, with the coming of
industrialization came a need for a new kind of urban intellectual
to be developed in a new kind of school, and this caused the question-
ing of something heretofore unquestioned, viz., the direction in which
the society was going. This discussion killed the prestige of the

ruling classes upon which the system of education had been based, and

93

the need arose for a new system and a new kind of schooling.40

Gramsci wanted a single school which would initiate formal education
with a humanistic orientation, i.e., one sensitive to human needs.
This school should accommodate the inclinations of the student
whether in the technical, manual labor, or intellectual areas41 but
it should also do so by exposing each child to both human history and
the history of "things" in the same curriculum.42
This single or comprehensive school would be a combination
elementary-secondary institution, and it would counteract the divi-
siveness in society advanced by the tendency to create greater num-
bers of technical and professional schools which become more
Specialized and which fill with students who have not received a
thorough grounding in a general education curriculum. Appearing to
be democratic because they seem to offer to the peasant the possi-
bility to becoming an agronomist or to the laborer the possibility
of graduating to the status of a skilled worker, these types of
schools in reality attack democracy by perpetuating the traditional
class divisions through recruitment which is restricted primarily to
the technically qualified governing social and political classes
and which as a result tends to discourage individual initiative on
the part of those outside these classes. Even if hodmen, farmers,
and geometrists become qualified in their trades they lack the politi-
cal skills which should allow them as citizens to become rulers if
only in the abstract sense of developing a reasoned consent to the

policies and direction of the elected leaders. The unitary school

"would take the child up to the threshold of his choice of work,

94

forming him during this time as a person capable of thinking, of
studying, and of directing--or of controlling those who direct."43
The unitary school could only flourish, Gramsci felt, if the
state were to make a serious attempt to finance it and to provide it
with a favorable ratio of instructors to pupils. It should have
dormitories, dining halls, specialized libraries and halls. The
traditional structure of schooling in Italy consisted of four stages:
(1) elementary; (2) gymnasium, or lower secondary; (3) ligeg, or
upper secondary; and (4) university along with the Specialized pro-
fessional, theoretical or practical schools. Gramsci saw the unitary
school as encompassing the first three of these groupings in the cur-
riculum and methods of teaching. The elementary part should last
three to four years and the material should be taught in a relatively
strict manner. The curriculum would stress the first elements of
the Marxian conception of the world and would feature reading, writ-
ing, arithmetic, notions of geography, history, and the rights and
duties of the student in society. The lower secondary should be
reduced to four years and the upper secondary to two, meaning that a
child who entered the school at Six could graduate from it at the age
of 15 or 16. This would be considerably earlier than he could com-
plete the upper secondary in the traditional structure.44
Gramsci observed that children of educated parents and chil-
dren who live in the cities possess advantages over children raised

by uneducated parents and those in the country because of the greater

exposure to the kinds of experiences which facilitate academic life.

95

The unitary school should attempt to duplicate the favored environ-
ment in the school and in the dormitories after school.45

The student should be freed from hypocritical and mechanical
instruction and to this end the tutorial services of the better stu—
dents should be utilized as well as the talent of the regular teach-
ing staff. The ljggg_segment of this school should be considered as
a transitory phase in which fundamental values of humanism, intellec-
tual self-discipline and moral autonomy, so necessary in any later
endeavor, should be created in the student. The study of the scien-
tific method must begin, he thought, in the ljgeg_part of the unitary
school, and must not be reserved only for the universities. Gramsci
also wrote about creativity in the ligeg_section of the projected
unitary school, by which he meant the active encouragement of find-
ing truth without suggestions or impulses from external sources. If
success is achieved along this line, the truth discovered is creative
even if it is an old truth.46

Gramsci believed that Latin and Greek should not be the focal
point in the curriculum of this comprehensive school, as it had been
in the past, and was during his lifetime in the traditional secondary
schools. However, this would mean that the admitted educative prin-
ciple which was bound up in the study of these languages and their
concomitant literatures and political histories, would not be avail-
able for use in the schools and that a new educative principle must
be forthcoming. It must deve10p

in a didactic form which gives equivalent results in terms of

education and personality-formation from early childhood to
the threshold of the adult choice of career. In this period

96

what is actually learned, or the greater part of it, must be--

or appear to the pupil to be--disinterested, that is to say,

not have immediate or too immediate practical purposes. It

must be formative, while being "instructive"--in other words

rich in concrete facts. In the present school, the profound

crisis in the traditional culture and its conception of life

and of man has resulted in a progressive degeneration. Schools

of the vocational type, preoccupied with satisfying immediate,

practical interests, are beginning to predominate over the for-

mative school, which was not immediately "interested."47

The educational principle which he recommended revolved around
the concept "work." He felt that it was work which enabled mankind to
dominate the realm of nature with the purpose of transforming and
socializing it, and that for work to be fully realized man must
necessarily possess both "an exact and realistic knowledge of natural
laws and . . . a legal order which organically regulates men's lives
in common." In addition, he asserted that "men must respect this
legal order through spontaneous assent, rather than as an external
imposition--it must be a necessity recognized and proposed to them-
selves in freedom, and not be the result of coercion."48
However, Gramsci felt that a certain amount of coercion should

be used in the early stages of formal schooling 'uJ encourage the
habit of studying. Theoretical problems with internal freedom emerg-
ing out of externally imposed discipline aside, one may easily agree
with his assertion that to study effectively is to work, that study-
ing is an exhausting job involving "muscles, nerves and intellect,"
and that "it is a process of adaptation, a habit acquired with effort,

49 In effect, it involves a great deal

tedium, and even suffering."
of self-control, especially for those who are reared in non-

intellectual families. Just as it is expected that many children from

97

non-intellectual or rural families will be deprived to a certain
extent of educative experiences, so it is to be expected that they
will similarly lack educative discipline. Since this is true, and
since many of these individuals could be attending the comprehensive
school should it be created, Gramsci stated that "it would be essen-
tial to resist the tendency to simplify studies which cannot become
Simplified without being distorted."50
Gramsci believed that the strictly individual conscience
either did not exist, or was an extreme rarity because, as a rule,
it reflects the individual's physical and social surroundings. He
saw the social relationships experienced by typical Italian children
in their homes, neighborhoods and towns as unfortunate because of the
"fossilized and anachronistic" character of these relations. One
aspect of society proving to be disadvantageous was folklore super-
stition which was and continues today to be especially prevalent in
southern Italy and the islands, one of which, Sardinia, was Gramsci's
birthplace. He desired to combat the notions of magic and other
elements of "individualistic and parochial barbarism" found in folk-
lore through instruction in both the natural sciences on the one hand
and civil duties and rights on the other. The student must realize
that there are objective natural laws which must be obeyed, that man
himself creates the social and political laws by which his civil
society operates, and that there is no place in civilized society
for the destructive aspects of folklore.51

Gramsci insisted upon the importance of a unity between

schooling and the life of the child. This can only come about, he

98

wrote, if the student, who may reflect an inferior culture, abandons
that culture in favor of the advanced enlightenment of the teacher.
The latter must always bear in mind the cultural differences separat-
ing the student from the instructor and must endeavor through every
constructive method to narrow the hiatus between them in this matter.
In so doing, he should always remember that the student is neither a

52 and

passive receptacle nor a mechanical receiver of information,
that "education is a struggle against the instincts bound to the
elementary biological functions, a struggle against nature to domi-
nate and create the 'real' man in his period."53
Knowledge absorbed by the student could be inert or rhetori-
cal if it is true only in words. This would be the situation if the
instruction were not the "living work of the teacher" or the product
of his awareness of the cultural differences between the pupil and
himself. Contrarily, absorbed knowledge would be "living" knowledge
were the teacher to fulfill this requirement and to realize that,
however' effectively he taught, academic life is but a fraction of
the life of the student, and that exposure of the latter to society
is much more important than commonly credited. This is especially
true because members of each new generation, all born without innate
ideas, are educated by the preceding generation.54
Gramsci's consciousness of the limitations of formal educa-
tion is far from being an admission of futility with regard to its

effectiveness as an instrument in changing society; his is probably

a realistic assessment of its powers. He states that a modern pedagogy

99

should include the following principles: "a friendly collaboration
between the teacher and student; an open school; and the necessity
of freely allowing the development of the spontaneous powers of the
student under the vigilance but not the conspicuous control of the

teacher"55

as the child moves through the unitary school. Gramsci
realized that the student should have rights, that he is not infi-
nitely malleable, and that any future support of the Marxian refur-
bishment of Italy would be much more dependable and therefore valu-
able if it could be rendered out of a freely given consent developed
in the student through his school years.

It should be noticed that Gramsci was plagued with the old
revolutionary problem of "how to reconcile freedom and authority,

56 and that this problem reared its head

spontaneity and discipline"
in both his educational and political theories. A cardinal point in
his political philosophy was the belief that "it is possible through
education and explanation to persuade people to accept spontaneously

57 .
Gramsc1 never

decisions and ideas formulated by their leaders."
satisfactorily solved this dilemma in either education or politics
though he earnestly tried to do so. According to H. Stuart Hughes,
"there was something innocent about the totalitarian aspects of
Gramsci's thought. Like Marx himself, he failed to draw the final
implications of his own thinking and quite sincerely believed he was
aiming at human liberation."58 However, his views on education rep-
resented a considerable advancement in freedom and dignity for the

student when compared to the educational environment of either the

old Italian liberal or fascist systems.

100

Although Gramsci's ideas concerning Italian national educa-
tion were written under abysmal conditions of imprisonment59 and
during a period when fascism seemed to be waxing in strength, the
time came when they would bear heavily upon the national educational
conditions and practice. Shortly after his words about education
were written in the late 19205 and early 19305 the PCI began to
realize the virtues of a change in its fighting tactics against
fascism. It had been engaging in suicidal antifascist efforts
inside Italy with the erroneous assumption that the world—wide capi-
talist depression coupled with a communist shove would overthrow
Mussolini's regime, but now in the mid-19305, PCI units in Italy
became more secretive while the party simultaneously strengthened its
organization outside the nation. By 17 August 1934 a "unity of
action" pact had been concluded between the PCI and the Italian
socialist parties that would lead the way to the collaboration of all

antifascist elements in the Popular Front and the later Resistance.60

The Educational Implications
of the Resistance

 

 

One may assert that the c00peration required of Italian com-
munists in their relations with non-communist Italians in the Popular
Front and the Resistance surreptitiously infected the resolve in
many of these communists to stage the proletarian revolution should
the Opportunity for it later arise. It never did. The precedent of
cooperation had been established and when this was combined with the
conditions requiring a democratic posture in post-war Italy if any

hope of success were to be envisioned, the old bolshevik notions of

101

revolution for Italy could not hope to be entertained by other than
the irresponsible few.

This cooperation thus began to turn the PCI in the direction
of national as opposed to strictly party or working-class concerns.
The field of education understandably received little attention from
the PCI in these periods when all party activity was subsumed under
initially the resistance to and subsequently the defeat of fascism,
including the education and indoctrination in the party schools.

The increasingly national orientation of the party in these years
from 1934 to 1945 imposed itself upon its educational concerns when
the war was concluded and when Italian communists along with other
Italians began reconstructing their nation.

As the work of Gramsci became available to the PCI in the
post-war years it appeared that his ideas reinforced this trend.

Gramsci's originality as a Marxist lay partly in his con-

ception of the nature of bourgeois rule (and indeed of any pre-
vious established social order), in his argument that the
system's real strength does not lie in the violence of the
ruling class or the coercive power of its state apparatus, but
in the acceptance by the ruled of a "conception of the world"
which belongs to the rulers. The phiIOSOphy of the ruling class
passes through a whole tissue of complex vulgarizations to
emerge as "common sense": that is, the philosophy of the masses,
who accept the morality, the customs, the institutionalized
rules of behavior of the society they live in.51
If the "real strength" of any social order lies in the acceptance by
the people of the Weltanschauung espoused by the rulers in that order,
would not any effort to produce a change hithat order necessitate a
nation-wide effort toward the re-education of the masses? Also,

would not any communist nation-wide effort be influenced in Italy at

least in part by the modest liberal-democratic tradition of the

102

Risorgimento which persisted in that nation despite the interlude of

 

Mussolini; which invested at least some of the political processes
throughout the entire post-war era with which the PCI has had to
come to terms; and which was supported by the victorious Allies?
Gramsci would have answered affirmatively, and it may be said that
generally the PCI has operated on the basis of accepting that tradi-

tion since 1945, though admittedly with some reservations.

103

FootnoteS--Chapter III

 

1Indoctrination and Education (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1972), pp. 55-56.

2

 

Ibid. 9 pp. 47-49.

3Fu1vio Bellini and Giorgio Galli, Storia del partito
comunista italiano (n.p.: Schwarz, 1953), p. 24.

 

 

4Paolo Spriano, Storia del partito comunista italiano, Vol. 1:
Da Bordiga a Gramsci (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1967), p. 49.

5Alastair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual
Biography (London: Merlin Press, 1977), p. 143.

 

 

 

6Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, Vol. II (Torino:
Giulio Einaudi, 1975), p. 1331.

7

 

Ibid.

8Gramsci, "Sindacati e Consigli," L'Ordine Nuovo, p. 37.

 

9Gramsci, ”Sindacalismo e Consigli," L'Ordine Nuovo, pp. 46-47.

10Gramsci, “Ai Commissari di Reparto delle Officine Fiat Centro
e Brevetti," L'Ordine Nuovo, pp. 33-34.

HJohn Merrington, "Theory and Practice in Gramsci's Marxism,"
The Socialist Register 1968, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Saville
(London: The Merlin Press, 1968), p. 159.

12

 

 

 

Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, Vol. II, p. 751.

 

13oramsci, "Ai Commissari di Reparto delle Officine Fiat
Centro e Brevetti," L'Ordine Nuovo, p. 34. See also his "Sindacti e
Consigli,“ L'Ordine Nuovo, p. 38.

14

 

 

Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, Vol. III, p. 1706.

 

1511nm, p. 1707.

16Traditional intellectuals were those associated with univer-
sities, governments, and the arts and sciences; organic intellectuals
were those in white-collar positions such as technicians, foremen, etc.

17Ioid., p. 1519.

18Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, Vol. I, p. 475.

 

104

'91oid., Vol. 111, p. 1513.

20Antonio Gramsci, Gli Intellettuali e L'Organizzazione della
Cultura, 6th ed. (n.p.: Giulio Einaudi, 1955), p. 7.

Z'Ioid.

22Gramsci, "Cronache dell' Ordine Nuovo,'" XXI, L'Ordine
Nuovo, p. 468.

23Cammett, p. 81.

24James Joll, Gramsci (n.p.: Fontana/Collins, 1977), p. 41.

25Gramsci, Gli Intellettuali, p. 6.

 

26Jo11, p. 41.

27Bocca, p. 121.

28Ibid., p. 147.

29Spriano, Vol. II, p. 362.

30

3lPalmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1976), p. 7.

32

Ibid.

 

Ibid., p. l.

33Ioid.. pp. 5-5.

34A system of organizations erected by Mussolini with the idea
of extending totalitarian control to the after-work hours, dopolavoro,
through sports, camping, theatre, and other associations.

35Ioid., p. 83.

36Ibid.

37Togliatti, Conversando con Togliatti, p. 72.

 

38Blackmer, p. 10.

39Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, Vol. III, p. 1547.

 

4OIbid., Vol. I, p. 483.

4'Ihid., Vol. III, p. 1531.

105

42Ibid., Vol. I, p. 114.

43Ibid., Vol. III, p. 1547.

44Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 484-85.

45Ioid.. pp. 485-86.

46Ibid.. pp. 485-87.

47Ihid., Vol. III, pp. 1546-47.

48Ibid., p. 1541.

491616., p. 1549.

501616., p. 1550.

5'Ibid.. pp. 1540-42.

521bid., p. 1541.

53Ibid., Vol. I, p. 114.

54Ibid., and Vol. 111. pp. 1541-42.

551616., p. 114.
b6Joll, p. 39.

57Ibid.

58Consciousness and Society, pp. 101-102.

59These ideas were included in his most important series of
writings, his Quaderni del Carcere (Prison Notebooks). They were
written with the benefit of only a few reference works and they con-
stitute an admirable example of far-ranging scholarship which con-
siders themes and individuals in, as well as outside, the labor
movement in its nearly 3,000 pages.

60

 

 

 

Delzell, pp. 123-30.

b‘Fiori, p. 238.

CHAPTER IV
EDUCATION AND THE PCI IN THE YEARS 1945 TO THE 19705

Party Education

The educational problems of the PCI after the Italian libera-
tion have been vastly different from those it faced before and during
the liberation because now its educational concerns would center for
the most part in the public school system. It continued some infor-
mational activities with a view toward increasing its membership and
expanding its alliances, but this was done primarily by propaganda.
It became obvious that the party genuinely desired to reform the
national school system and that it believed such a reformed system
would be of critical importance in the development of the nation and
in the eventual realization of the goals of socialism. It came to
place a much greater emphasis upon national education than it did
upon party education in the years following World War II as the
"Italian way to socialism" and the "Historic Compromise" were
stressed.l

A central party school was created at the conclusion of the
war which, according to a document of the PCI, trained the most promis-
ing youths and which completed its course every three months.2 There
were ten party courses taught in the years 1945 and 1946 with a total
enrollment of 363 students at this central school, and at such
regional schools as Reggio Emilia, Bologna, Ancona and others, 15

106

107

3

courses were offered in the same period with 209 students. From

1945 to 1950 it is estimated that more than 60,000 students attended

the various PCI schools in Italy.4

According to the communist parliamentary candidate for the
1968 general elections, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, "it is impossible
to Speak of theoretical education in the PCI today" because of the
strong prevalence of Italian communists to "mouth . . . obsolete"
phrases such as "'the unity of the Left'" and "'the new unity of the
South'" along with "other frontist alliance formulas" which have
removed the party from "a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the motor
forces of the revolution, the working class and its fundamental
allies."5 Armando Cossutta, a member of the leadership of the party,
in effect confirms this when he states "after the electoral success
of June 15, 1975, our party courses went over largely to training
people for local administration." He continues with the information
that there are permanent party schools throughout Italy.

There are one central, four interregional and three provincial
schools run by a Central Committee department. But we also
have permanent training courses in all regions and the biggest
provinces. . . . We have also correspondence courses for tens
of thousands of people. We are preparing textbooks which will
be brought out in series. Each book of the series is mailed
to students and contains one lecture and certain questions
they must answer. After three or four lectures, a conference
is held in the province concerned to discuss problems of the
economy, urban development, social maintenance, finance, educa-
tion and public health. But, of course, schools alone are not
enough. The best form of study is experience. . . . This is
why we organize numerous interviews, conferences and meetings
to compare notes; we transfer cadre members from one community
to another to train them and ensure that the best experience
is shared.

In this way we communists contribute to the training of
increasingly qualified people to direct administrative bodies,
and this serves ghe fundamental interests of the working pe0ple
and the country.

108

The emphasis on administrative preparation and the deemphasis
of traditional communist theory in these schools is further evidence
of "the Italian way to socialism," of the desire of the party to push
for practical solutions at the expense of the theoretical and sec-
tarian. This allows it a reasonable chance to increase its mass
base of support while forming workable alliances at the party level
which promise to bear some fruit in the matter of essential reforms.
The danger is that the continued disregard of fundamental communist
theory throughout the party and especially in its schools could
eventually cause it to become indistinguishable in its practice from
others which, because of the paralysis at the elite levels, have
abandoned to a considerable extent their party canons in the interest
of realizing success in the press of the moment.

Italian Education Historically and
Constitutionally Considered

School reform is seen as an integral part of the reform of
the entire society, and any improvement in the former is usually
associated with the latter in the view of communists. The school
system has historically been controlled by the Ministry of Public
Instruction. In 1876 the Sinistra, or the Left, came into power
replacing the rightists of Cavour's beliefs who had ruled since the

completion of the Risorgimento six years earlier. Although the Left

 

advocated free and compulsory education and invested more heavily in
the schools, education remained in a neglected state and would
remain so through the conclusion of World War I, during the fascist

interlude and through the post-war era. Its organization has remained

109

hierarchically centralized throughout this entire period with few
fundamental changes being realized in the direction of decentrali-
zation. This has been a consequence of and a carry-over from the
days when the modern Italian nation—state, conceived through the
maneuverings of a few, was forced upon the many with the result that
those in power perceived grave threats to the existence of the state
in the opposition that developed. Those exercising power in the new

liberal state of the Risorgimento doubted the abilities of those out

 

of power to govern or educate themselves since the powerless had been
ruled for so long by both foreign and native autocrats.

The Constitution which went into effect 1 January 1948, pro-
vides two major articles on education, numbers 33 and 34, and many
articles on decentralization for the regions, provinces and communes.7
Much of the attempted school and university reform advocated by the
PCI since the effective date of the Constitution has been geared
toward implementing these articles. Today the school system continues
to be controlled by the Ministry of Public Instruction in a central-
ized fashion despite some positive steps taken in the direction of
decentralization. For example, it still controls a standardized cur-
riculum and entry to each grade level from elementary through the
university as well as controlling entry to the professions through a

8

system of state examinations. The minister of public instruction,

a member of the cabinet, is ultimately responsible for the “adminis-
tration, supervision, and coordination of all activities in the areas

"9

of education, culture, and the arts. The Constitution stipulates

in Article 33 that ”The Republic lays down general standards for

110

instruction," but the trouble has been that these "general standards"
have been bureaucratized while edicts from the top have tended to
ignore local needs.

There have been some steps taken toward decentralization, as
mentioned above. For example, the schools at the local level are
supervised by the provincial education departments, but true decen-
tralization is defeated by the fact that these are in turn respon-
sible to directorates which are responsible to the national ministry.
The provinces provide the land, buildings and maintenance personnel
for secondary schools while the communes do the same for elementary
schools and the national government pays the salaries of all teachers.10
The Higher Council of Public Education is the head advisory body for
the national educational system including the elementary, secondary,
and university segments, but its chairman is the minister of public
instruction. The point is that any decentralization achieved seems
to be only partial in that nothing can be instituted or implemented
locally that does not have the assent of the national ministry which
in turn has been stymied by the paralysis plaguing Italian governments
since World War II. Some reforms have been accomplished in this
period but these have been overshadowed by the inability of the

Italians to enact others.

Elementary Education and the PCI

Gramsci's Ideas

 

Gramsci is seen by the PCI today as not only its chief

political and social theorist, but as the "inspiration behind the

111

value which the battle for reform of the school possesses for both
the workers' movement and the great national questions."]] Gramsci
believed that children should be treated "'as rational creatures
with whom it is possible to discuss even the most serious matters.”12
The desire to treat children as rational creatures who possess rights
may be seen as the keynote of the entire modern PCI educational reform
effort in the elementary and secondary schools, for all facets of
reform ultimately lead back to this central proposition. Gramsci saw
through his own experience that this was an idea whose currency was
found only rarely in the Italian schools of his day. He talked
about the

tedious experiences of the students and the difficult times

encountered by the teachers in the bourgeois schools which

possess cold environments, which are opaque to every inspira-

tion, resistant to every force of a unifying ideal, whose

youths attend not with the desire to improve themselves and

to understand, but from the objective perhaps not mentioned

and yet clearly held by all, to proceed with the idea of acquir-

ing a title with a proper Show of vanity and laziness, and to
deceive themselves today and others tomorrow.1

Reform Pr0posals of the
Italian Communists

 

 

Much of this type of student attitude mentioned by Gramsci
above was derived from the disrespect with which any kind of progres-
sive formal education was treated by the adults. The PCI today
clearly states that it desires formal education to be more respon-
sive to the needs of both democracy and the individual students. Its
top executive board, the Directive, stated in 1972 that for the

advance of democracy in Italy it would be necessary

112

to carry on in the school a resolute democratic and antifascist
battle, extending and reinforcing the struggle against bureau-
cratic centralism and the conservative and authoritarian spirit,
to promote new forms of democratic government in the school with
the prospect of non-corporative social management in which not
only all the components of the scholastic life but also the
forces which represent the collectivity, especially the local
representative bodies such as the communes and district coun-
cils would be present.14
Italian communists since the Second World War have objected
to the pattern of instruction which, though admittedly changing now,
has been typical throughout Italy: small groups have been rewarded
with a classical and literary humanistic education; others have been
offered a technical education as an alternative on an even more lim-
ited scale, while the vast majority of students have been virtually
ignored by exposing them to merely a few years, in many cases only
five, of elementary education. They claim that this is a dual sys-
tem which perpetuates class divisions. Ottavio Cecchi, a contributor
to Rinascita, a weekly PCI journal, quoted the following from a book
published by the staff of a journal ideologically to the left of the

PCI named Potere Operaio:

 

"School is class school two times. First because it succeeds

in serving only the students coming from the privileged classes;
second because the culture transmitted in the school is a cul-
ture of class. . . . The ultimate end of the school is to organ-
ize consent for the society and the type of social relations
which it develops. . . . The Italian school has a violent and
discriminatory character [and] it is a place where classes col-
lide, [hence] we cannot neglect this field of battle." 5

Many communists assert that the school has minimized education
for most pe0p1e in Italy and that it has denied to the select few the
kind of contact with real life situations which is required in an

effective education. They assert that the children in the elementary

113

schools are educated not so much for themselves and society as for
conformance with a preconceived notion of class culture. The "hands-

on instruction and progressive techniques of mid-20th century Ameri-
can education have rarely been seen in Italy with the result that it
is difficult for many, if not most, children to relate the activi—
ties within the schools to their lives outside and to their families,
a point which Gramsci stressed when he advocated a greater unity
between school and life. Most communist spokesmen for education
would probably agree with Giuseppe Chiarante who wrote in Rinascita
the following words about the goals of elementary education:

" . they are clear at least in principle and easily enough defin-
able--to furnish to all citizens without immediate concern for profes-
sional training those fundamental tools of communication, of analysis
and of knowledge which are indispensable for the participation in a

productive and civil life.nl6

Enrico Berlinguer, the present General
Secretary of the party, sees the ultimate objective of the elementary
school as one which seeks a greater "organic unity with life and a
more formative direction capable of furnishing the basic cultural

"17 These views

instruments for understanding and acting in reality.
contrast sharply with the tradition of Italian conservatism and lit-
erary humanism which had the effect of separating academia from life.

The literature reviewed indicates that Italian communists want
an elementary school which is free and obligatory for all children
aged 6 through 11. Some desire it to begin a year earlier in the

child's life because other European countries allow this, because

children mature earlier today, and because it would reduce the duration

114

of the maternal school to two years,18

thus decreasing its cost and
allowing more people to avail themselves of this non-obligatory
pre-elementary education. Berlinguer feels that this maternal school
is an especially critical point in the educational chain because "it
is at this level . . . that the consequences of the disparity of
classes and of the social milieu begin their destruction of the young,
and it is here that the first conditions exist for putting all Ital-

"19 Yet he claims in the same article that

ian youth under equality.
almost half of the children between the ages of three and five do

not have a place in this school despite the positive commitments of
the communes, various groups, associations and religious orders.

Many elementary schools in Italy do not have full-time
scheduling, but rather use a double shift with some children attend-
ing only in the mornings and others only in the afternoons; many
schools need their physical structures refurbished; and teachers need
more money. Generally, building more schools and renovating exist-
ing structures have been the responsibility of local governmental
bodies,20 and these have been chronically short of cash.21 Teachers'
salaries are the responsibility of the national government, but its
priorities lie in other areas. Though having improved in recent
years, the low salaries have been the subject of bitter recriminations
and have caused great difficulties for those who work in this pro-
fession.

Sandro Ferragni wrote in L'Unita during the 1962 academic

year about a teacher of practical technology who had a paycheck for

36 teaching hours totaling 50,500 lire a week. As a magician working

115

in his spare time he earned 70,000 lire a month by charging SOO lire
per person for admission; this amounted to 150 lire more an hour than
he made teaching. He continued: "A police officer, a typist in a
business office, and a salesman in a bookstore make more than a
teacher."22 It seems that the major ambition of most teachers is to
leave school and find a better paying profession, while in the interim
perhaps private lessons may be given.23

The matter of private lessons, called doposcuola, is another

 

of the aspects of Italian schooling which is questioned by many com-
munists. One states: "It has allowed . . . commercial speculation,
it affects negatively the professional preparations of the teachers,
and promotes a discrimination between those families which can and

24 The overcrowded classrooms make it dif-

those which cannot pay."
ficult to teach the students properly, one of the results being the
Split-shift, and it also detracts from the performance of the teacher
who has had to forego proper lesson preparation in order to supple-
ment his inadequate teaching income. Romano Ledda believed that

there were three ways to attack this depressing situation. First, pay
the teacher not only for teaching but also for lesson preparation,
correction of exams and cultural preparation. The increased pay will
promote better lesson preparation, and an improved performance on his

part in the classroom will mean fewer students will need the ser-

vices of the doposcuola. Second, invest in more teaching assistants

 

at all levels of schooling and thus more and better teaching may be
accomplished in the classroom itself. Third, it is necessary to

realize "the principle that there can be no more than 25 students in

116

the classrooms of the obligatory schools [elementary and lower secon-

dary]. and even less in the upper secondary classes."25

Secondary Education and the PCI

Gramsci's Ideas

 

Gramsci believed in the right of every student to study
regardless of ability to pay. At the conclusion of his fifth year in
the elementary school he received tens in composition, dictation,
arithmetic, grammar, reading, history and geography--the highest pos-
sible score forlastudent, but he "suffered the same fate as so many
other poor children . . . he had to give up school."26 When he wrote
that in the socialist order "'schools would educate intelligence, whom-
ever the intelligence belonged to'"27 Gramsci was no doubt writing
about the right of students to study following their period of com-
pulsory education when tuition became a consideration.

Gramsci also had something to say about the required Latin in
the secondary schools. He cites the differences between studying and
learning the language, the former being much too common in the schools,
but the latter constituting a rare experience indeed. Latin is treated
"like a cadaver on an anatomy table." It is dissected, analyzed and
used most of the time not for the study of the language itself, but
rather for a "cultural-scholastic tradition . . . [and] one studies
it as an element in an ideal scholastic program, an element which
summarizes and satisfies a series of pedagogical and psychological

1128

requirements. . . . He continued with the observation that this

dead language is continually revived in examples and narrations which

117

could be studied in a live and useful language such as Italian.

"None of the students learn Latin with the analytical method used.

If a single student knew it the language would be alive; the enchant-
ment would be destroyed and all would immediately enroll in the local

Berlitz school."29

Reform Propgsals of the
Italian Communists

 

 

The overcrowded conditions in the years since World War II
may be partly surmised from the following information concerning the

public schools. In 1945 there were 3,262 scuola medie inferiori,

 

junior high schools, and 508,418 pupils. In 1965 the corresponding
figures were 6,511 schools and 1,801,231 students, and therefore a
99% rate of increase in schools but a 254% increase in the students
had occurred at that level. If one considers all the public secon-

dary schools, the various scuola sgperiori or upper secondary as well

 

as the lower secondary schools, the figures represent an increase of

30 This was an

76% in the schools and a 245% rise in the students.
especially acute problem for the northern urban areas which led in the
creation of the "economic miracle" and which experienced a tremendous
influx of immigrants from the South creating demands for housing,
schooling and municipal services which far exceeded their accommodat-
ing capabilities. These problems in schooling were added to the
already existing insuficiencies of all kinds in the South to form a
distressing national picture.31

There were serious problems facing the youths who dropped out

of school. The dry, formal and frequently heartless instruction of

118

the elementary school "effectively" weeded out the "undesirable"
students by the conclusion of their programs and bestowed upon many
others the "kiss of death" insofar as continuing in academia, with
the result that unskilled youths had to face the rigorous demands of
job-hunting in a nation without plentiful employment possibilities.
People within the party such as Claudio Petruccioli, who Spoke at
the XI Party Congress, began supporting the extension of the obliga-
tory period of education from the age of 14 to the age of 16 so as
to "guarantee the reaching of a level of cultural and professional
preparation which permits the development of a qualified worker."32
The call for the extension of minimum education to the age
of 16 is reflective of a metamorphosis being experienced by the Ital-
ian society, as the following data illustrate: In the short space
of ten years--from 1961 to 197l--the changes indicated in Table l
have occurred; they testify to a remarkable increase in educational
credentials in a population which has grown from 49,903,878 in the
1961 census to 53,744,737 in the 1971 census,33 for a 7.6% rise.
The decrease of Six million elementary school graduates in the 1971
census may mean that many who would have terminated their schooling
prior to the 1961 school year with the completion of the elementary
experience had by the later year continued to higher levels of edu-
cation. Although the percentages in the first three categories
demonstrate a significant increase in the level of education across

the general population, it also means that expectations are higher

today.

119

Table l.--Resident population over six years of age by level of

 

 

 

education.
196134 197135
Level of Education Census Census Percentage
Total Total
University graduates (Laurea) 603,205 883,188 +46%
Senior high school graduates ,
(Di loma) 1,938,816 3,363,969 +73%
Junior high school graduates
(Licenza scuola media 4,375,023 7,151,289 +63%
inferiore)
Elementary school graduates ,
(Licenza) 27,588,007 21,586,160 -21%

 

Enrico Berlinguer spoke at the X111 party congress of the
great contradiction between the number of secondary school gradu-
ates who have "Quadrupled in 20 years and the more than 100,000 youths
annually entering the labor market" on the one hand, and the fact that
"the offer of positions in the work-world has not increased" on the
other; thus the understandable anger and fury of these desperate
youths.36 He continued with the assertion that Italy could do
something about this because her "resources are not lacking" and that
it "is their use which must be changed." He stated that one of the
ways to "create new resources is by instituting reforms."37

One of the very important educational reforms to occur in
Italy since World War II has been the creation of a single middle

school in accordance with the law of December 1962. It is compulsory

and free, provides education for students from ages 11 through 14, and

120

has been demanded by countless Italian communists beginning with
Gramsci who advocated a single school, though with the addition to

it of the upper secondary level. Prior to the existence of this
school, students at the age of 11 and upon completing the elementary
school had been divided into academic and non-academic categories,
with only those in the academic category who had attended the gggglg
megig, or lower secondary, permitted to move into higher academic
studies including the upper secondary and the university. The others

were shunted to the scuola di avviamento a1 lavoro which was divided

 

into different types of training for speedy entry into the world of

work; the scuola post-elementare, which prolonged the elementary

 

school for another three years with neither type giving access to the

upper secondary school; the scuola tecnica which provided the founda-

 

tion for certain professional studies; or the scuola d'arte which did

 

the same for further studies in art.

The new middle school replaced this academic fragmentation
with a single, unitary institution and delayed until the age of 14
the decisions regarding future education. Where, previously, entrance
to university admitting upper secondary programs was reserved only to

the academic scuola media graduates, from 1963 on, access to these

 

higher academic programs has been permitted to all providing certain

examinations were passed. The liceo classico, or Latin grammar school

 

of the upper secondary level, is a case in point: a student who
passed its Latin entrance examination could now be admitted regard-

less of his program in the new single middle school.

121

These reforms, namely the creation of the unified middle
school and freer access to higher schools, were requested by the
communists not only to rationalize the educational structure, but
also to promote the rights of the children, many of whom, having been
"tracked" from the age of 11 in non-academic areas, were later to
find their conversion to academic fields barred when they experienced
a change in preference. Another strong communist argument against
the tracking system beginning at age 11 was the assertion that the
determination of academic or non-academic categories for pupils was
frequently a product of the socio-economic status of the family from
which they came, and that permitting this system to continue was

reinforcing the class division of the Italian society. The Avviamento

 

and post-elementary schools did not offer sufficient training for
their graduates to enter directly into the work world and so they,
by their default, seemed to reinforce "the maintenance of an agrarian
type of society-—authoritarian and socially stratified. The rapid
development of industrialization and the consequent social mobility
of the 1950s, probably more than any pedagogical or political argu-
ments, prepared the way for the elimination of this scholastic
dichotomy."38
Yet, despite the admitted advancement which this single mid-
dle school represented for the Italian society in the eyes of the
communists, it was criticized for "remaining within the structure,
the system, and the cultural establishment which characterizes the

39

school for the few." Massimo Paci claimed that "many commit the

error of judging the school of the masses exclusively in relation to

122

its . . . function with respect to the demands of the economic sys-

tem"40

which divide the society into classes. Berlinguer was to say

that although
something of the new has been realized as thousands of citizens
including workers and women have gained more familiarity with
the life and difficulties of school, thousands of large and
small problems have been resolved with good will and good sense,
new didactic experiences and initiatives have been realized with
cultural benefit in many cases, and new democratic groups which
have developed an active policy have laboriously come into exis-
tence at the base . . . only the first step toward a reform has
been taken. The . . . crisis of the school has been aggravated
by the free field accorded to bureaucratic hindrance, the con-
fusion and frequent provocatigg of the ministerial circles and
the old centralist mentality.

There are also problems with Latin which remain at this level
of schooling today. Italian communists wanted Latin excluded and
science emphasized in the curriculum of this middle school, while
the Christian Democrats wanted the retention of Latin. The compro-
mise, which involved other parties and assertions, amounted to keep-
ing the Latin but as an optional course in the third and final year
of the curriculum. However, the fact of the matter is that "Latin
still occupies a central position in the program which the teachers
of literacy subjects (Italian, history and civic education, geography,
and optional Latin) must follow. Many doubt that even newly trained
teachers are capable of revising the educational tradition."42
The Latin requirements for graduation from all the upper

secondary schools except for the liceo classico, the traditional and

 

prestigious classical Latin grammar school, have been reduced and in
some cases eliminated as a result of reforms instituted in February

1969 which the PCI supported. There are a total of eight different

123

types of upper secondary schools to which students may be admitted
upon completing the unitary middle school. The first is the above-

mentioned liceo classico which has a three-year program in the study

 

of the classics preceded by a two-year course in the ginnasio, or
lower secondary, on the classics with Greek and Latin being empha-

sized in both segments. Second is the liceo scientifico which has

 

a five-year course stressing mathematics and science, though the

communists charge that this school is really a liceo classico without

 

the Greek and Latin language requirements. Third is the istituto

magistrale, a four-year course in teacher training for the elemen-

 

tary schools which was expected to increase to five years in 1972.

Fourth is the liceo artistico offering a four-year course in art and

 

culture, and the fifth through the eighth are various types of

istituti technici.

 

A basic complaint by the communists regarding the upper sec-
ondary system echoes that heard by them prior to 1963 about the lower
secondary structure--its fragementation. There was and still is a
desire of many communists, as with Gramsci, to unify these disparate
groups and to shorten the distance between that part of the curricu-
lum devoted to the cultural formation of the student, or what is
termed basic or general education in the United States, and prepara-
tion for the world of work which is a second aspect of the curriculum.
The upper secondary school has had a more difficult set of objectives
to fulfill than the levels of schooling below or above it. Whereas
the obligatory school, the elementary and lower secondary, has had a

mission that clearly concerns imparting cultural awareness, and the

124

university finds itself absorbed in education for the professional
life, the upper secondary must reconcile cultural instruction with
preparation for work. Many Italian communists have desired the
obligatory part of the schooling to extend at least a year into the
upper secondary so as to provide a more thorough grounding in basic
cultural awareness.43

Another idea which Gramsci elaborated upon and which has been
repeated by many members of the party has been that concerning the
educative value of work. It is asserted that a more unitary char-
acter to the curriculum with manual labor introduced into it as an
educative principle would do much to develop a sense of "equality,
justice and solidarity, and it would allow a re-evaluation of the
productive work of which the working class has been the bearer."44
There has continued to be, they claim, a clear and impassable barrier
between intellectual and manual work with the result that destructive
class discrimination continues in society.

The society in which this discrimination is found today is a
different society than that of the time prior to the economic miracle
of the 1950s and 19605 when a basically agricultural society had
emerged from the destruction of the Second World War. Another tell-
ing complaint of the communists against the secondary school system
has been that it has perpetuated the cultural configuration which had
meaning in the old agricultural society where educated people moved
into the public administration or the liberal professions. In

essence, the criticism has stated that the society has changed but,

apart from some

125

internal adjustments, the old order of the secondary school is
maintained. . . . The poverty of the scientific studies, the
almost total absence of the science of society, the reduction
of the notion of culture itself almost exclusively to the lit-
erary tradition and in particular to the Italian (it is enough
to think of the widespread ignorance about music or art and,
more in general, about the culture of other countries), the
distance from, and more than that, the contempt toward doing
things with the hands and productive manual labor--these have
by now been analyzed many times and there is no need to insist
upon them.

What better way to illustrate the unity of theory and practice than
to interject into the curriculum of the upper secondary school a
study of and practice in manual labor? Gramsci would have applauded
such a move.

The worker himself has been encouraged to learn, and it has
been suggested since the days of the factory councils that he improve
himself in his job skills as well as his cultural awareness. Claudio
Petruccioli at the XI PCI Congress in 1966 stated that a "double
scholastic system with morning and afternoon sessions for the secondary
superior and . . . for technical and professional instruction ought to
be created for the purpose of allowing working youths to continue

their studies."46

Apprenticeship in its various versions should be
abolished and "new conditions of work and contract for the youth from
16 to 20 years of age" should allow a "reduction of work-time to six
hours daily to permit study."47
At the same XI Congress a G. Luporini reported that it was no
longer sufficient to expect the communist youth to simply negate every
wish of his non-communist boss, and to expect that the only cultural
preparation necessary for them could be learned "technically and pro-

48

fessionally with much struggle through practical work." Today it

126

is different, he insisted. Where in earlier days goals "were sug-
gested fundamentally from the instinct of the class and from its
expression in political militancy [the youth of today] want to under-
stand many things . . . and not just pr0paganda on the ideal of
socialism. . . . They desire to know what the objectives are toward
which they march and they want to know for what the boss stands."49
Another topic of educational concern which is found with both
Gramsci and the modern Italian communist is that dealing with academic
standards. Nearly all want a school of the mass, an obligatory
school, and want the student to possess the right to study, not only
at the secondary schools, but at the universities as well. Yet they
think this presupposes certain obligations on the part of the edu-
cators to resist diluting the course content and to "pursue the rigor
and the seriousness in a new way, Open to life, to the tension of its
contradictions, and to the connection between the traditional and the

experimentation of the new."50

Again, "it is necessary to have a
school where teaching and studying is accomplished with seriousness
and rigor. Saying seriousness does not imply the backward and suffo-
cating conception of a study separate from life, from the civil pas-

sions, from the moral tensions, from the tumult of history."51

Local School Districts
It should be noted that in educational concerns as in other
policy matters, the PCI is taking a gradualist approach, called "revo-

"52

lutionary gradualism by one communist writer, and attempting to

work in a responsible manner for basic reform. The fact that it does

127

not possess state power in Italy means that it deals with an exist-
ing educational system devised by a liberal monarchical state and
modified by Gentile of the fascist period; it also means that it

has been severely limited in what it can actually do to effect change
in that system. This is true as well in those municipal areas where
the PCI governs either by itself or in coalition with other parties,
though in some cities such as Turin, for example, notable progress in
education has been made.

Turin has recently been ruled by a communist/socialist admin-
istration. In 1975 it inaugurated a new education program which, if
it has succeeded, will have alleviated several problems and accomp-
lished several positive objectives Simultaneously. The city had
experienced the nation's highest rate of crime and one of the reasons
for it, hypothesized the city fathers, was probably due to the
absence of the working mother from her home and the consequent libera-
tion of her children with no adult guidance. Though the city could
ill afford it financially, it decided not to continue waiting for the
central Education Ministry to act, and it launched the new program
itself. This program was to be Operated by both qualified teachers
and their assistants who would provide a rich afternoon schedule of
recreation, tours to the countryside and visits to museums, places of
business, and factories, and would oversee periods of creative study
as well. In addition to this the children were given free school
lunches preceding the afternoon program, both of which were made pos-
sible in terms of scheduling because the Italian elementary schools,

with few exceptions, operated only in the mornings during this period.

128

Finally, the city government in implementing this scheme was able to
obtain the cooperation of Fiat and thus was able to secure the use of
its plant busses when they were not scheduled to carry workers.53
Generally, local governmental financing, upon which much of
the expense of education depends, has been in a deplorable condition.
The communes have been either at or near the state of bankruptcy
throughout the post-war period and the central government has been
unwilling to relinquish fiscal control of these bodies by allowing
them wider powers of taxation. The result is that it has had to
intervene with the financial support necessary for many local pro-
jects, with each successive occasion reinforcing the dependence of
these local bodies upon the central government. The PCI has not
pushed as assiduously as it could have for reform in this area
despite its desire to strengthen the local governments "which are its
major centers of power [because] it knows that a battle with the
Christian Democrats on this issue would result in an ideological
contest between democracy and authoritarianism, which it prefers to

54 The significance of this for education is that the commu-

avoid."
nists have usually been unable to enact meaningful reforms in those

communes which they control, and unable to influence decisions in the
communes where power is shared with other parties, because most mean-

ingful reforms cost more money than is available.

Italian Universities and the PCI
With respect to the transition between the upper secondary

and the university, Gramsci had some important ideas. He believed

129

that in his day educators in the public school system did not differ-
entiate in the teaching methods used in the upper and lower secon-
dary schools because they thought that the students in each were
immature intellectually and morally, and that maturity in them would
not be realized until their university days when it would blossom
automatically. Gramsci said that this common teaching method for
both schools failed to accommodate the gradually growing maturity of
the upper secondary students with the result that they, having been
conditioned by externally imposed discipline, were ill-prepared for
the demands of self-discipline required in the university environ-
ment. This transition was difficult, Gramsci stated, because it
"occurs immediately after the crisis of puberty when the impetuosity
of the passionate instincts has not yet been completely controlled

55 He continued with the

by the character and the moral conscience."

assertion that this passage which in Italy has been generally too

sharp and mechanical, could be more easily navigated if the upper

secondary school would serve as a transitional bridge in which not

only the study of the scientific method should commence rather than

be delayed for the university curriculum, but in which the "funda-

mental values of humanism, the intellectual self-discipline and the

moral autonomy to be used either in the university or in the practical-

productive work outside the university . . . could be created."56
To understand some of the problems associated with the Ital-

ian universities, it Should be remembered that many of them were

founded in the Middle Ages, for example, the University of Rome which

is about 700 years old, and the University of Bologna, allegedly the

130

oldest in Europe, which dates from the 12th century. In the consid-
eration of this antiquity one is led to ruminate upon the deve10p-
ment of universities in general. How true it is that they, despite
the progressive and indeed at times revolutionary concepts engendered
by them, plod along with antiquated practices that frequently other
segments of society have long since jettisoned. In the case of the
Italian university this is amply proven by many restrictive prac-
tices which run counter to the spirit of the liberal-democratic
national Constitution, to which the communists frequently point in
justifying their reform efforts throughout the entire Italian school
system. Among the problems plaguing the Italian university have been
the "baronial system," politicization, overcrowded conditions with
insufficient physical facilities and teaching staff,57 examinations,
prohibition of assemblies, poor employment prospects for many gradu-
ates, and insufficient opportunity for all to enjoy the benefits of
higher education.

The barons compose a select group of about 3,000 full pro-
fessors,58 called ordinari, possessing vested interests both inside
and outside the university which they protect with great tenacity
sanctified by tradition. They possess "almost limitless power over
their retinues of ill-paid and insecure assistant professors and

59 on the teaching staff. The full professors also hold

instructors"
themselves aloof from the students, whom they rarely meet outside

the classroom, and the only sense of common purpose they have seems
to be related to preserving the status quo. Robert Wuliger claims

that some of these university baronial fiefdoms "are supported by

131

Communists and Socialists, as well as by right-wing Christian Demo-

60 and Burton Clark states that a "'Red Baron' can be a baron

61

crats"
first and a Communist second.'" Yet the PCI has spoken out against
this academic restriction of democracy on numerous occasions. A sug-
gestion by Gianfranco Ferretti writing in Rinascita would involve
the expenditure of no monies in promoting a particularly important
reform involving the restriction of their "extracurricular" activities;
these professor-professionals spend little time actually teaching and
much time off campus directing their private institutes or clinics,
or engaging in consultation activities, for which they collect millions
of lire each month. This is a problem plaguing university life
throughout Italy and he claimed it could be terminated or at least
drastically modified by Tom.62

According to Burton Clark, the central administration in Rome
controls the administration of university financing, curriculum and
personnel without input from the universities but also without any
63

"procedure for implementation or enforcement." It is neither a

centrally administered bureaucracy nor a free bargaining
marketplace. As a result, it manages to accumulate the
damaging features of both, but nonetheless is capable of avert-
ing a final crisis. The system has a miraculous capacity to
work out crises time and again by marginal adjustments that,

while solving nothing, do provide sufficient equilibrium to
keep things going.

It is a system in which, though "disguised as a state bureaucracy
. the advantages of patronage and favoritism outweigh those of

65

civil service or professional achievement." An article in Rinascita

declared that

132

the university is today a closed body dominated corporatively
by the academics: the first fundamental democratic request

is that of Opening the directive organs including the councils
of the faculty and the councils of the administration to the
full representation of those below the professorial "chairs"
such as the aggregati, incaricati [assistant professors],
assistants and . . . students.bb

 

 

This was the subject of much of the student activity of 1968,
the demand of the students for more self-determination not only in
course selection and curriculum develOpment but in the actual govern-
ing of the universities. One could say that just as the l'barons'I
perpetuate a bit of the feudal era in their fiefdoms and privileges,
so the students demanded a return to the same era when it was their
historical counterparts who actively operated the universities and
who employed the professors. Yet these contemporary students repre-
senting all shades of political opinion from Catholics to communists
demanded not dominance over the professors but a consultative rela-
tionship with them in which the students would hold some power of
self-determination.

The student rebellions started in November 1967 when students
occupied buildings on the campus of the University of Turin, and by
February of the next year, the University of Rome was occupied along
with the buildings on many other'Italianuniversity campuses. Some of
the radical students attempted to use these demonstrations as a
catalytic force for revolution against the entire society and were
induced to violence. Many of the protesting students had seen the
resemblance between the stability-through-paralysis of the central
government and that of the universities, the latter being legally

subservient political structures to the national government. There

133

were attempts on the part of many student revolutionaries, recently
emerged from backgrounds of affluence, to link with the workers in

an effort to extend the struggle to the entire society, but in the

context of this turmoil the attempt became an exercise in futility,
as it has in other times and places.

The Italian Communist Party was unprepared for these great
student uprisings of 1968. However, in comparison to the French Com-
munist Party which divorced itself from the French student efforts
in that year, "the PCI [took] an incomparably more flexible and
conciliatory position toward the [Italian] students and . . . [their]

spontaneous strike movements."67

Perhaps this flexibility was derived
from uncertainty within the party ranks as typified by the contradic-
tory advice given in Rinascita to the students and the Italian commu-
nists by its writers Robert Antonelli representing one point of view
and Nora Federici along with Dr. Angiola Masucco Costa, representing
others, all published in the inflammatory year of 1968.

According to Robert Antonelli, the Italian university, in
the year of these great student upheavals, displayed both the typical
forms of the old backward authoritarianism and the responsiveness to
"capitalistic development through the growing subordination of the
direction of study, of research, and of professional formation, to
the demands of the market of work dominated by the laws of profit."
He felt that it was the students within the university structures
who possessed the force “capable of opposing in a bloc the old forms

of authoritarianism and the new expressions of the system," and that

"the fundamental student objective is the destruction of the present

134

structure of power existing in the Italian university and the founda-
tion of the radical new possibility of teaching and of study."68
Antonelli warned that unless the students would attempt to
accomplish this as soon as possible, that is, during the transitory
moment that was upon them, the forces of tradition would be recovered.
He struck with the usual arguments against the oligarchic government
of the tenured professors at both the teaching and administrative
levels of the university, the marginal position in which all others
in the university setting are placed, and "the lack of any liberty
and possibility of student initiative in themes of reform, in deci-
sions pertaining to professional and cultural formation in the choice

. . . . 6
of courses, or 1n the institutTOn of new courses." 9

Furthermore he
saw the "examination as a manifestation of academic authority and as
a sanction Of the develOpment of memory . . . uprooted from any real

70 Finally, Antonelli suggested the

process of cultural reality."
abolition of these exams along with the "constitution at all levels
(whether administrative or scientific) of joint committees of profes-
sors and students, to be engaged in effective and cooperative efforts,
and to open both the principle of collegial research and that of
teaching to new cultural experiments and hypotheses."71
The examinations are now conducted three times yearly. They
are oral, last about ten minutes per individual and are conducted
amidst some confusion since vast throngs of students who never appear
on campus except at examination times must be tested as quickly and

efficiently as possible. The examining board consists of three pro-

fessors who, having probably never seen the student before, must

135

arrive at a decision regarding his knowledge and intellectual capa-
bilities. Since the number of professors serving on the examining
boards is in some institutions 50% less than the full teaching staff
Of those institutions, pandemonium is built into the system. This
type of examination and the procedures involved in conducting it are
severely criticized by many, especially in view of the overcrowded
conditions which in some instances are ludicrous. As an extreme
example, the modern University of Rome was built in the 1930s for
15,000 students, and although its facilities have expanded somewhat,
they had not done so sufficiently to accommodate even half of its
enrollment of 1975 which was 122,483. Naples University had nearly
79,000 and Bologna more than 53,000 students in that same year.72 As
a way of opposing the examination system, an informal demand grew for
the so-called "countercourses" to be taught free of charge by volun-
tary faculty members and qualified students.

In an article written by Nora Federici we find a cautionary
note regarding the student's demands for the abolition of exams and
for the institution of the countercourses; she wondered if the latter
would really accomplish the revolutionary objectives intended by its
advocates.

Indubitably these "countercourses" . . . would have a major
formative value comparable to that of some official courses,
but how many peOple could really avail themselves of this
"counter-university" and obtain profit thereby? Would it
not be as the situation is now--only a minority of students
being able to participate, i.e., those who attend full-time
at the university and those who are for social reasons or

personal attitudes, able to involve themselves totally and
profitably in this difficult work?73

136

There is a legitimate place in the university for seminars and
laboratories, she insisted: "they should constitute a place of train-
ing for the youths who, together with professors and assistants,
would debate there the arguments revealed in the formal lesson and
they could propose, discuss and elaborate themes of research and
exercise."74 Furthermore, seminars and laboratories could serve some
of the functions now inappropriately assigned to the examination;
they could in short be vehicles for improving the level of prepara-
tion of the students. Examinations should be retained but their
format should be revised to eliminate the "quiz" aSpect.75
More conservatism could be seen in another article in
Rinascita during March of 1968, where the author, Dr. Angiola Massucco
Costa, hasinformed the students that it was "utopian and illusionary
to demand total autonomy, or to claim power without knowing exactly

76

in what it consists." To prevent a stiffening and counter belliger-

ence of the right with possibly disastrous consequences, they would
have to

avoid improvizations, prepare a more precise and deliberate
appraisal of reality, and choose, among the sound and conspicu-
ous results which their revolt will certainly have produced,
the path of continued and constructive cooperation with the
other revolutionary forces already operating in our society to
which7§hey will have had the merit of furnishing new stimula-
tion.

And finally, Berlinguer balanced "revolution" with conservatism when
he stated that "the old authoritarian hierarchy and the intolerably
repressive methods must be liquidated . . . [and] the right of meet-
ings both of the students and of the teachers must be sanctified and

78

exercised fully." The students must, however, avoid "quarrelsome

137

and inconclusive assemblies" because this irresponsibility only
encourages the fascist groups and provokes their agitation in turn.
Therefore the students must learn to be "self-disciplined and
organized."79

Actually the PCI was seen by many of the student radicals in
1968 and thereafter as an establishment party, one that, though mouth-
ing Marxian precepts, had come to terms with the capitalist society;
and as such, it was considered by them as indistinguishable from the
Christian Democrats. In Bologna, which had been controlled by the
PCI since World War II, student disturbances in that year brought
down upon them the city police directed by none other than the commu-
nist municipal authorities. This had the effect of further reinforc-
ing the charge of "establishment" hurled at the party by the radicals.
Indeed, it must be admitted that in many of the student groups, the
communist students were the most responsible and conservative of the
lot.

Ottavio Cecchi, writing in 1974, said that the latter part of
the 1960s were "good years" for the universities because of their
"uncontrolled growth." Many students of this period wanted superior
instruction but had no intention of advocating university reform;
others used the universities for shelters while they were waiting
for work. Soon it became apparent that "youths with the highest
grades and academic honours were not successful in locating work.
Some took the way of teaching but very quickly the lists of teachers
--in a country which has a moderate amount of illiteracy, especially

in the South--were also full, and there was nothing more to do for

138

80 Taxi and bus drivers increasingly appeared With the

anybody."
university degree. Cecchi said that the government's education poli-
cies in those years were Shortsighted and "today [it] gathers the
fruits of these policies. The fruits are bitter [and] the cost of
the university policy of the government in these years has been
expensive. To pay it are the youths who have hoped to reach the
university degree, that piece of paper which . . . today . . . repre-
sents the Sign of mass aspiration."8]
Writing in 1964 Cecchi estimated that in the next year there
would probably be some 106,400 individuals likely to achieve univer-
sity degrees, and he wondered whether they would be "successful in
locating positions if the relations between school and job are not
changed."82 Since there were 97,761 who finished in 1973 and 102,747
in the 1974 academic year, his figures may prove to be about correct
for 1975. Of these individuals those who received their degrees in
the Gruppo Letterario, or the literary category, constituted by far

the largest single category: 36,585 in 1973 and 39,697 in 1974,83 a

 

difficult category for which to find employment in a nation already
burdened with the jobless. The communists continue to believe that
a planned economy dominated by the political structure could more
easily deal with the problem of the educated unemployed or under-
employed by ensuring a stronger relation than now exists between the
output of the universities and the needs of society.

The students who continue to the universities today are in
overwhelming numbers the sons and daughters of the professionals,

bureaucrats and capitalists; they are the "haves" of the Italian

139

society. The PCI has constantly urged that admission to the insti-
tutions of higher learning be liberalized and to this end it sup-

ported the use of a scholarship termed the pre-salario throughout

 

the 19605. Gianfranco Pintore, for example, in L'Unita advocated it

because the pre-salario would enhance the right of all to study at

 

these institutions on the basis of merit and thus it would tend to

work toward the abolition of the class division of the school.84

By 1975 the pre-salario had been instituted and it was paid to

 

180,000 of the 650,000 university students of the nation.85 Theodora
Lurie, writing in 1978, stated that it had become “a stipend of $280
to $560 a year awarded to needy students whose annual family income
is less than $5,000" and who are able to score an average of 27 out of 30

86 The party continues to assert that anyone who is

on their exams.
capable of succeeding in the universities ought to be allowed to
enter them and to continue on the basis of performance rather than
wealth or class, and that the old educational system based upon
privilege should not be continued.87

A very important question which has been ignored by the
Italian communists emerges here. If on the one hand they have desired
a liberalized university admissions policy with anyone being admitted
who is a graduate of any upper secondary school curriculum; but on the
other they have desired a planned economy possessing greater coordi-
nation between the output of the universities and the requirements
of society, it would not be difficult to see the problem that may be

encountered. Any quota could easily be exceeded if all qualified

students who applied were admitted to the universities and allowed

140

to enroll freely in the curriculum of their choice, provided pre-
requisites were fulfilled; the result would be, as it indeed is today,
dire unemployment. However, restrictions enforcing the quotas would
subvert both the individual liberties of the students and the Italian
liberal-democracy while employment difficulties would simply be
shifted from the university graduates to those who were never admitted.
Because individual Italian communist writers have continued advocat-
ing each side without denying the other, one is led to believe that
either opportunism is at work here or the party out of some measure

of diffidence has refused to take the stand that is required--the
crucial question being, to what extent is the Italian society to be
controlled in this area?

Actually it has been easier to enter the universities as a
student since 1969 because it was in that year that admission poli-
cies were liberalized by a law which enabled students who had gradu-
ated from the less prestigious secondary schools to enroll; by 1971
“all high school graduates had access to all departments at all insti-

88

tutions of higher learning." This was a necessary step in the

abolition of the monopoly the privileged have had in higher educa-
tion. Yet

following Guattopardo's logic--in order to change nothing one
has to change something--this law seemed the best way to
accommodate popular pressure backed by moderate—to-left parties
and unions, without changing anything in the university core
structure and power system.

Enrollment jumped by about 16 percent [in 1970 as compared
to the previous year] and has kept growing.

The major difficulty in regard to university attendance con-

tinues today to be social discrimination, much of which originates

141

with devastating results in the home environment. Gramsci saw
manifestations of it when he wrote of the academic advantage experi-
enced by children emerging from affluent or relatively affluent homes
and the greater degree of probability those children had of desiring
to attend institutions of higher education, actually attending them,
and doing so with more success than that realized by children produced
in more "modest" surroundings. The problem continues to run deeper,
therefore, than simply the deprivations experienced as a result of
unfair university admissions policies; it has been rooted deeply in
society, and it has been one with which the PCI has attempted to
deal especially through the concept of the maternal school, that level
of formal education preceding the elementary stage. The point should
be made that the PCI has realized the necessity of interrelating
educational reforms, perhaps more so than other Italian political
parties, and it has perceived that success in some areas may be
endangered by a lack of success in other areas. Failure in the work-
ing of the maternal school, the level of education most directly
concerned with the problem mentioned above, probably means a perpetua-
tion of social discrimination at the university level, and failure of
the universities probably means the continuation of this social dis-
crimination in the homes and a desultory maternity-school policy.

The PCI sees the educational system as too centralized
today, and at the university level it is working toward both the
implementation of university autonomy and the creation of the univer-
sities for each region. Probably its major effort at the level of

higher education is devoted to organizing cooperative units of

142

students, teachers and workers. Dr. Angiola Massucco Costa believed
that there were some tenured professors who supported the students
in the uprisings of 1968 "not to the point of resigning . . . but
with the clear will of establishing effective communication with them

90 She

and of operating together for common democratic objectives."
claimed that some of the tenured university professors expressed
"some of the most advanced ideas" before the student demonstrations
became radicalized and that "some among them were the signatories of
the requests for resignations of the rettori [presidents] who proved
to be too faithful to the constituted power."9]
She called for the tenured professors and in fact all intel-
lectuals, whether associated with an institution of higher education
or not, to join with the students to prevent their isolation. The
intellectuals and students should then unite in a ”convergent action
with those of the working class for a democratic redistribution of
power and a new order of the Italian society."92 Berlinguer has seen
the struggle for educational reform in Gramscian terms as "part of
the battle for an ideal and cultural hegemony of the working class
and for the enrichment of its alliance with the intellectual force,"
hence "it is an essential Obligation of the party."93
With regard to curriculum content, Nora Federici writing in
Rinascita has stated that the university has no business ignoring
technological progress Since the latter is bound up in scientific
progress which is irreversible and is therefore not an integral part

of capitalism. Furthermore, she wrote that "there . . . should not

be any contradiction between the cultural formation and the

143

professional preparation [of the student hithe university]." There-
fore, "disciplines such as history and philosophy should be intro-
duced in the first year of course work in the different departments
of study (e.g., the history of science, or the philosophy of science

"94 Gianfranco

in the various departments of science and technology).
Ferretti has noted regrettably that "the esteemed marble architec-
ture . . . in many of our universities seems to be more important
than microsc0pes or libraries."95 Finally, Berlinguer had this to say
on the matter of curriculum:
Insofar as the content of the curriculum is concerned, one
deals first of all with making the historical experience and
the traditional ideal of antifascism an integral part of it.
. . In the second place one deals with binding the study and
the life of the school to the reality of our epoch, the course
of great movements of renewal, of new currentg of thought, and
of great scientific and technical conquests.9
Alessandro Natta warned that "the politics of reform and of
scholastic progrannfing have a real value only if they are conceived
in the area of a different type of economic develOpment," otherwise
any innovation will be useless because it is in its function "sub-
ordinate to the economic-productive necessities of the present sys-

"97 However attractive such an outlook might be to the average

tem.
communist, who in Italy could see it as containing more than a hint
of Opposition to Gramsci's words, it is a closed position, and some
communist writers would disagree with it because it is closed.

Ettore Casari, e.g., advocated the Open-minded and the scien-
tific method which not only "encourages the determination to solve
problems" but which should always induce one to "question why?" and

which "teaches us . . . that one can find an answer to the precise

144

and sensible question."98 Continuing with the matter of communist
Openmindedness, Paulo Bufalini wrote in Rinascita during 1968 con-
cerning how his people fought to the last against the reactionary

educational laws of the government:

we had proposed . . . our plan for [a particular] law which
we did not claim was perfect but which certainly in a large
measure corresponded to the necessity of the university and

to the aspirations of the students and the democratic and pro-
gressive professors. We are declaring ourselves always ready
to negotiate and agree with what would respond to the real
needs and to the requests of the university movement.

(Italics added.)

Giuseppe Chiarante stated that there are no simple solutions to the

100

difficult problems of educational reform, and in 1968 Bruno Vitale

counseled his readers to "confront the new situation [in education]
with open eyes, and without dogma."]0]
In view of the dOgmatic qualities too many communists have
displayed in the past, it is refreshing to come across disclaimers
and denials regarding their possession of absolute truth in the mat-
ter of effecting educational reforms. Italian communist writers do
frequently imply that they are uncertain and that they can learn from
others outside of the communist ranks, an attitude which may be due
to the relatively secure position of the party in Italy as Gordon J.

DiRenzo suggests.102

145

Footnotes--Chapter IV

 

1The "Italian way to socialism" is a phrase used by Italian
communists to indicate their awareness of the belief that peculiar
or endemic national conditions must call forth peculiar or endemic
communist responses for progress toward socialism to be realized.
In the case of Italy, liberal-democratic conditions must be taken
into account. This idea is related to the Polycentrism of Togliatti.

The "Historic Compromise" refers to the PCI decision reached
in 1972 to join in a national governmental coalition with the Chris-
tian Democrats should the opportunity for it arise.

2La Direzione del Partito, 11 PCI contro 1a guerra, il
fascismo, per la liberta, democrazia, per l'indipendenze d'Italia
(Rome: Societa editrice L'Unitfi, 1945), p. 8, as cited by Poggi,
p. 33.

 

 

3Informazioni riassuntive sull'attivita de11e Commissioni
Centrali di Lavoro per L'anno 1946 (Roma: Stabil. Tip. UESISA,
Commissione di Organizzazione, Ufficio Statistico, n.d.), pp. 14,
15, 19, 20, as cited in Poggi, p. 48. From this source it is impos-
sible to ascertain whether these were different courses, the same
course repeated, or even what the precise subject matter entailed.
Being termed "party schools" should allow one to infer that they
dealt with propagandistic materials as well as instruction concern-
ing the practical operations of the party.

4VII Congresso Nazionale del PCI. Relazioni sull'attivita
dei Gruppi Parlamentari e delle Commissioni Centrali, Documenti per i
delegati (n.p.: n.d.), p. 72, as cited in Poggi, p. 48.

5

 

 

 

Macciocchi, p. 94.

6Antonetti and Volkov, "Communists in the Municipalities,"
World Marxist Review, p. 95.

 

7See the Appendix.

8See Article 33, Appendix.

9Anthony Scarangello, "Italy," The Encyclopedia of Education,
Vol. V (New York: Crowell-Collier Educational Corp., 1971), p. 229.
10

11La Direzione del PCI, "Scuola: problemi urgenti e prospettive
di riforma," Scuola & Universita 4 (1972): 3.

12

Kogan, The Government of Italy, p. 153.

 

 

Fiori, p. 23.

146

13Gramsci, "Cronache dell' 'Ordine Nuovo'" 20, L'Ordine
Nuovo, p. 466.

14

 

La Direzione del PCI, p. 3.

15Ottavio Cecchi, "Pisa: le idee degli studenti," Rinascita,
1 March 1968, p. 15, quoting from the book Relazione sulla scuola:
Per un'opposizione alla politica attuata nella scuola dalla classe
dOminante (ho author indicated), Libreria Feltrinelli, 1968, no page
reference.

16“La Media Superiore: Una scuola da rifare: La Cultura e il
lavoro," 28 January 1977, p. 15.

17"Il discorso di Berlinguer alla manifestazione del PCI,"
Rinascita, 9 December 1977, p. 22.

18Guglionesi Campobasso and Sandro D'Astolto, "Per un anticipo
della scuola dell' obbligo," Rinascita, 22 July 1977, p. 29.

19

 

 

"Il discorso di Berlinguer alla manifestazione del PCI,"
p. 22.

20The Encyclopedia of Education, Vol. V, PP. 229-30.

 

2lKogan, The Government of Italy, pp. 154-55.

22"Professori chiromanti per arrotondare lo scarse stipendio,"
4 May 1962, p. 6.

23

 

Ibid.
24Romano Ledda, "La questione del doposcuola," L'Unita,
31 March 1962, p. 3.

25Ibid.

26Fiori, p. 26.

27Ibid., p. 107.

28Gramsci, Quaderni, Vol. III, pp. 1544-45.

29Ibid.

30Sommario di Statistiche Storiche dell'Italia: 1861-1965
(Rome: Istituto Centrale di Statistica, 1968), Tavola 29, p. 42.

3‘See Togliatti's comments regarding the "economic miracle,"
Nella democrazia e nella_pace verso i1 socialismo: I rapporti e 1e

147

conclusioni all'VIII, IX e X Congresso del Partito comunista italiano
(Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1963), pp. 217-18.

32XI Congresso del partito comunista italiano: atti e
risoluzioni (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1966), p. 471.

33The 1961 census figure is in Annuario Statistico Italiano:
1965 (Rome: Istituto Centrale di StatiStica, 1965), Tavola 10, '
pp. 10-11. The 1971 figure is in Annuario Statistico Italiano: 1975
(Rome: Istituto Centrale di Statistica, 1975), Tavola 9, pp. 10-11.

34

 

 

 

 

Annuario Statistico Italiano: 1965, Tavola 16, pp. 20-21.

 

35Annuario Statistico Italiano: 1975, Tavola 12, pp. 26-29.

 

36Enrico Berlinguer, XIII Congresso del partito comunista
italiano: atti e risoluzioni (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1972), p. 32.

37

 

 

Ibid., p. 39.

38Antonio Santoni Rugiu, "The Evolution of the Italian Edu-
catignal System 1956-1966," Comparative Education Review 11 (October
1967 : 349.

 

39Berlinguer, "Il discorso di Berlinguer alla manifestazione
del PCI,‘I p. 19.

4O"Scuola di massa; una conquista civile," Rinascita,
23 September 1977, p. 8.

41
p. 22.

42

IIIl discorso di Berlinguer alla manifestazione del PCI,"

Rugiu, p. 351.

43Berlinguer, I'Il discorso di Berlinguer alla manifestazione
del PCI,” p. 21.

44Achille Occhetto, "La scuola punto cruciale del rinnova-
mento," Rinascita, 23 September 1977, p. 7.

45Chiarante, "La Media Superiore: Una scuola di rifare: La
cultura e il lavoro," p. 15.

46
p. 471.

47

Petruccioli, XI Congresso del partito comunista italiano,

 

Ibid.

48Ibid., p. 481.

148

49Ibid., pp. 481-82.

50Achille Occhetto, "Costituente di massa per la scuola,“
Rinascita, 22 July 1977, p. 6.

51Berlinguer, "Il discorso di Berlinguer alla manifestazione
del PCI," p. 21.

52Occhetto, "Costituente di massa per la scuola," p. 6.

53Dalbert Hallenstein, "Left-Controlled City Council Launches
'All-Day' Plan," Times Educational Supplement, No. 3147, 26 September
1975, p. 18.

54

 

Galli and Prandi, pp. 231-32.

55Gramsci, Quadern', Vol. I, p. 486.
56Ibid.
57

Among the manifold problems plaguing these instructors is
that of their pay which is not only very low but at times irregular.
In one instance a group had not been paid for three months. Check
Mario Passi, "Lo sciopero dei docenti e un contributo al rinnovamento
dell'Universita italiana," L'Unita, 30 January 1962, p. 3. Also see
Luca Perrone, "Micropolitics of Barony: The Italian University Case,"
Harvard Educational Review 48 (November 1978): 490, ". . . the junior
staff . . . bear the brunt of the teaching burden, but [their] offi-
cial salaries range from $150 to $450 per month."

 

 

58Paul Hoffmann, "Italy's Faltering School System Beset From
All Sides," New York Times, 9 March 1971, p. 39.
59Ibid.

6O"Italian Universities and the Social Crisis," American
Association of University Professors Bulletin 61 (October 1975):
234, 236.

6lBurton Clark, Academic Power in Italy(Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1977), p. 90, as quoted in Luca Perrone, "The Micro-
politics of Barony: The Italian University Case," p. 489.

62

 

"Universita: nulla di fatto," 16 March 1963, pp. 25-26.

63Quoted in Perrone, p. 485.
64Ibid., p. 486.

65Ibid., p. 487.

149

66"Universita contro Gui," Rinascita, 12 December 1954, P- 2-

67Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), p. 292.

68"11 rapporto tra docenti e giovani," Rinascita, 1 March
1968, p. 18.

69Ibid.

70
71

Ibid.
Ibid.

72Annuario Statistico Italiano: 1976 (Roma: Istituto Centrale
di Statistica, 1976), Tavola 77, pp. 110-11.

73

 

"Proposte dagli atenei," Rinascita, 1 March 1968, p. 17.

74Ioid.

75Ibid.

76"Professori codini e professori che lottano,‘I 15 March
1968, p. 30.

77Ibid.

78XIII Congresso del PCI, p. 47.

791bid.

80"Universita 'crescita zero?'" Rinascita, 1 February 1974,

8]Ibid.

821bid.

83Check Annuario Statistico Italiano 1975, Tavola 84, p. 124,
and Annuario Statistico Italiano 1976, Tavola 79, p. 113 for the
1973 and 1974 figures, respectively.

84"Gli studenti delle medie chiedono il pre-salario,"
26 April 1962, p. 7.

85

 

 

Wuliger, p. 238.

86"Terror on Italy's Campuses," The Chronicle of Higher Edu-
cation 16 (27 March 1978): 1, 7.

150

87Paolo Bufalini, I'Il partito e gil studenti," Rinascita,

1 March 1968, p. 2, and Berlinguer, "Il discorso di Berlinguer alla
manifestazione del PCI, pp. 19-22.

88Hoffmann, p. 39.

89Luca Perrone, p. 490.
90
91

92

Costa, p. 30.
Ibid.
Ibid.

938er1inguer, x111 Congresso del PCI, p. 48.

 

94"Proposte dagli atenei," Rinascita, p. 17.

95"Universita: nulla di fatto," p. 25.

96Berlinguer, XIII Congresso del PCI, p. 47.

 

97"Miliardi alla scuola privata," Rinascita, 19 December
1964, p. 9.

98"Insegnare la scienza nella scuola di massa," Rinascita,
12 April 1974, p. 20.

99"Il partito e gli studenti," p. 2.

100"Universita '68,'" Rinascita, 9 February 1968, p. 24.

10]"La testa del rettore su un piatto d'argento," Rinascita,
16 February 1968, p. 9.

102Gordon J. DiRenzo, Personality, Power and Politics: A
Social Psychological Analysis of the Italian Deputy and His Parlia-
mentary System (Notre Dame, Indiana: Univ. of Notre Dame Press,
1967), pp. 152-53.

 

 

CHAPTER V

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

The PCI's Changing Perspective

If one were to examine the comments of important Italian

communists about their party at critical moments in the history of

that organization, a changing perspective becomes apparent. For

example, just prior to its formation in 1921 Antonio Gramsci, secre-

tary of the PCI from April 1924 to November 1926, wrote this about

his

for

future party: It would

through a central council of the national economy coordinate
and unify the initiatives of production, attempt to socialize
all capitalist industry, and all areas of work not yet absorbed
by capitalist industrialization; it [would] tend to convert all
in society to the status of the proletariat; but of an emanci-
pated and regenerated proletariat which does not possess pri-
vate wealth but which agrees to the administration of wealth

in common and which derives from it that enjoymentland security
of life which it deserves for its productive work.

In 1925 Palmiro Togliatti, who would lead the Italian party
nearly 40 years, had the following to say about it:

It is true in fact that the mainspring of historical develop-
ment lies for us in the modification of the relations of pro—
duction, but it is also true that the relations of production
translate themselves into class relationships, [that] the
class is an element which organizes itself, which acquires a
consciousness, [and] which "desires" and is able to make its
will, consciousness and organization count in the complete
process of social transformation. It is the party which
gives consciousness, organization, and will to the class.2

In 1946 Togliatti made this statement about the most decisive

element in the movement of the PCI. It has been "the tendency to

151

152

constantly affirm the value of a democracy which should be open to
every possible new development," a democracy “with an aversion not
only to every form of totalitarianism and reaction, but also to any
form of hardening [and insensitive] bureaucratic development of the

3 Finally, Enrico Berlinguer, the present Secre-

political life."
tary General of the PCI, had this to say about his party in 1975:
[it] has struggled to guarantee all the fundamental liberties--
the liberty of association, of speech, etc.--in the frame of
a very advanced social and economic system, according to the
Constitution of 1948 which we consider one of the most advanced
in Western Europe from the point of view of democracy. And the
communist party has played a decisive role in the formulation
of this Constitution. We have never believed, not even in 1945,
that a single party--or a single c1ass--would be able to resolve
the problems of our country.

The Italian Communist Party is a mass party rather than a
party of cadres as some other communist parties are. We have
enrolled almost 1,700,000 members.

One may see the decreasing emphasis on the proletarian class with
each succeeding statement, and an inversely proportional emphasis
upon an open-minded approach to what by 1975 have become in effect
"national" problems.

The PCI and the Revolutionary Period: The Predominance

Of Propaganda over Education 1919-1926
The Italian Communist Party has undergone a considerable
metamorphosis since its earliest days, but from those days to the
present its educational philosophy has flowed from its basic political-
philoSOphical orientation. The first period, that extending from the
disturbances of 1919 and the factory occupations of 1920, prior to
the formation of the party, to 1926, five years after its establish-

ment, could be called the Revolutionary Period. In this segment of

 

153

time the revolution was expected from moment to moment, and even
after the triumph of fascism in 1922, the belief lingered among many
Italian communists that the revolution was just around the corner.
The factory occupations seemed for many to be in the very
vortex of the revolution leading to the "inevitable" emergence of
socialism. Evidence could be "justifiably" ignored in the formation
and presentation of the message because either socialism was to be
the wave of the future, in which case carelessness would not matter,
or it ggglg be the wave of the future, in which case time and the
"right moment" might be the most important consideration. Propaganda

in one of its definitions is described by Webster's New Collegiate

 

Dictionary of 1976 as "the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor

 

for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or

a person." In the dispensing of information it was this approach
which was emphasized even in the "educational circles" which were
formed in some of the factories where the message supplanted the evi-
dence in importance.

In L'Ordine Nuovo, the material tended to be written in a

 

journalistic style and, though rather broad in its sweep, it quali-
fies as both propaganda and educational material with the former
predominating. With the collapse of the factory occupations, the
reassessment by those who called themselves "communist" resulted in
the formation of their party under the leadership of Bordiga as they
split from the socialists in 1921. Bordiga was hardly one to examine
realistic evidence, and his ideological leadership consisted in wait-

ing for preordained and deterministic forces to sweep his group up

154

once again into a revolutionary fervor, this time with success to
be "assured." Bordiga was not interested in education, and the newly
formed party had to await great world developments which would turn
it away from its alleged revolutionary propensities.
The Intermediary Period: The Increasing Importance
of Education 1926-1935
The second phase was more complicated and has been termed

the Intermediary Period. In it the Italian communists were forced

 

to abandon their earlier expectations for a rapidly approaching pro-
letarian revolution as it gradually dawned upon them after 1926 that
it was not just around the corner; instead they found themselves
grappling against fascism in a cooperative effort with other commu-
nists. The proletarian revolution had to be postponed while the
immediate task of vanquishing fascism was undertaken. The educational
implications of this were important for two reasons: First, the ele-
ment of time underwent a change in the thinking of the Italian commu-
nists. Where previously there was felt to be insufficient time to
prepare for the revolution, now the probable date of that revolution
was pushed far into the distant future for those of the PCI who "kept
the faith." This meant that time could now be taken to examine infor-
mation for its evidence and that therefore one of the reasons for the
existence of propaganda was now generally elimitated. Second, it
became increasingly necessary to examine realistic evidence which was
used to explain the reasons why the grip of fascism seemed to be so
unshakable in Italy and, after 1933, in Germany. The old explanations

Showing fascism to be simply a virulent form of liberal-capitalism

155

were becoming patently absurd even to many of the most doctrinaire
members of the PCI by the mid-19305.

This called for a reassessment of the Situation, one that
aligned explanations to a much greater extent with objective condi-
tions, and therefore, one which more frequently tended to elevate
these efforts from propagandizing and indoctrinating exercises to
education-related research. Propaganda and indoctrination continued

throughout the Intermediary Period, as can be seen in any reading of

 

the literature of this era or in examining the curricula of the vari-
ous party schools set up outside Italy, but the share of activity
devoted to locating evidence and supporting it with logic and proof

increased considerably over the Revolutionary Period.

 

The PCI and the National Period: The Ascendancy of
Education over Propaganda, 1935 to the Present

Although Gramsci's active political life fell within the

Revolutionary Period, and his major writing, the Prison Notebooks,

 

 

the Quaderni del Carcere, was produced in the Intermediary Period, his

 

 

greatest influence upon the party and the nation had to await the

post-war segment of the third and last period, the National Period.

 

It may be claimed on the basis of his writings that he viewed educa-
tion differently than his great Russian precursor, Lenin, whose
organization provided the model for the Italian communists in the
first years of their existence, and whose views pursuant to educa-
tion will briefly be indicated in the following digression, prior to

considering the importance of the National Period.

 

156

The Leninist Approach to Education

 

Where Marx discounted the importance of ideas in history and
seemed to assert that a rise in class consciousness would be an
inevitable by-product of men's actions in bringing about the prole-
tarian revolution, Lenin believed the revolution could be the by-
product of knowledge and consciousness. He also felt that the masses
possessed a spontaneity which, uncorrected by leadership, would either
doom them to aimless and ineffectual actions, or to a trade-union
consciousness that really made them a part of capitalism. Though
Marx felt that the irrationality of the masses would be transformed
into rationality with the spontaneous initiation of the revolution,
Lenin believed that it was the function of the party to induce both
rationality in the masses and their revolutionary activity at the
most propitious moment.

The party was to be a centrally organized, disciplined, and
unscrupulous force dedicated to the victory of Marxism and willing
to use any means to achieve it. The party institutionalized distrust,
insecurity and hierarchical control by emphasizing the "centralism
in the concept of democratic-centralism," while "orthodoxy, or the
ability to make correct decisions, became identified with the power
to make decisions."5 Lenin's emphasis upon expediency and his pre-
occupation with the question of power as evidenced by his willingness
in 1917 to take it and worry about the political task later;6 his
pessimistic appraisal of the masses; and his consequent approval and
use of manipulative techniques all had implications for education.

Since the Leninist party considered itself to be the elite of the

157

working classes, the guardian of its true interests and the vanguard
of its aspirations, since authority therefore emanated downward, and
since the party believed it had a monopoly of truth as determined by
its leadership,7 education was seen as the inculcation of that truth
in the masses.

The masses were seen as manipulable, and hence a dilatory
attitude with regard to developing the "true" enlightenment or con-
sciousness of the masses could be taken. They could be educated
after the assumption of power rather than before if it suited the
expediency of the leaders, but how easy it would be under the press
of gaining and maintaining power, to delay the complete education
program designed to endow the masses with consciousness. If it is
finally promulgated it must always defer to considerations of power
and to the whims of the top political leaders since it exists by
their grace and its content is constituted by their pronouncements.

Truth is given, bestowed, inculcated, or forced upon the
student who is distrusted and patronized. Education here does not
mean helping the student to realize his potentialities, search out
evidence, or concentrate on mental or moral development, but, based
upon the absence of faith in the development of desirable traits in
the student, it means dictating the "truth" to him. One who is
"educated" or conscious under these circumstances follows orders and
sees things in conformity with the "line." This type of mass "educa-
tion" sabotages any realistic appraisal by the party of true mass

sentiments and the necessity of manufacturing them must be plagued

158

by the question of their effectiveness, a preoccupation which creates

its own slavery.

The PCI Approach to Education

 

The above was the Leninist approach to education. Has it
also been the Italian communist approach? There have been similari-
ties, but there are differences as well. One may say that the lead-
ing position of the PCI in the Italian labor movement has entailed a
concomitant assumption of leadership in the realm of education, as
has been the case with the Leninist party. The PCI has assumed that
it has possessed the Marxian consciousness, the dispersion of which

among the masses is the sine qua non of their future happiness and

 

prosperity. This assumption has frequently resulted in propaganda

and indoctrination especially in the Revolutionary and Intermediary

 

 

 

Periods, but also somewhat in the National Period, and yet its atti-
tude in the propagating of the Marxian message is significantly dif-
ferent from that of the Leninist. Despite some rather dramatic
gyrations in the political position of the PCI during the nearly
60 years of its history, one central point around which these oscil-
lations have occurred has been that of trust rather than distrust of
the masses.

It may be said that the socio-political preconditions for

the National Period began to coalesce long before the completion of

 

the Second World War and the redemption of Italy from fascism. The
earliest signs are to be found in the Popular Front of 1935 which was

originally planned by the French and Italian communists with the "idea

159

of common action alongside Socialists and middle class democrats"8
against fascism; by the time of the Resistance these conditions had
advanced to a high-water mark of elation and cooperation which has
yet to be duplicated. Bound up inextricably in this cooperation
was the feeling, at this point yet inchoate, that the destiny of the
PCI was linked with that of the Italian nation, and that both Marxism
on the one hand and the Italian nation and culture on the other pos-
sessed viable and unifying ideals for the future as well as the
present.

Since it is the supposition of this writer that the educa-
tional philosophy of a group is a product of its Weltanschauung,
and thus its socio-political orientation, we may expect that the

National Period would reveal an educational stance in which national

 

and democratic concerns would figure prominently. In the Revolu-

tionary Period the emphasis was placed upon party education, indoc-

 

trination and propaganda rather than education. However, the National
£22199 has reversed this and has placed the emphasis upon the latter.
The Italian communist of the 19705 probably would claim that the
ultimate objective of a classless society characterized by altruism,
harmonious social and economic arrangements and individual self-
fulfillment is attainable only through efforts related in quality to
that end. These efforts include the inducement of an awareness of
both human dignity and human rights along with a consciousness by
the individual of himself within his natural, and especially his

social environment.

160

The Italian communists emphasize the social rather than indi-
vidual dimensions of human existence. They claim that man does not
exist in and by himself, that he could never be a recluse and experi-
ence the full measure of what it means to be human. Individual
consciousness or awareness is stressed, but it is always conscious-
ness or awareness within an environment, whether natural or social.
Perhaps this is the greatest criticism which the PCI could lay at the
doorstep of the traditional aristocratic and 19th century liberal
Italian educators: their educational fare reinforced the isolation
of classes and individuals with the result that their humanness
appeared to be diminished.

Growing out of this consciousness within an environment is
the realization that labor is necessary to transform the environment
into a beneficial habitat for man, hence Italian communists, echoing
Marx, stress the importance of labor and production in man's basic
life. Labor, therefore, possesses formative and educational values
which the PCI has claimed should be part of the curriculum of the
public schools, both as an activity and as a study.

Marxist ontological views regarding the relation of freedom
to necessity, that freedom is seen to be the recognition of neces-
sity, were not mentioned in the literature reviewed, though hints
were revealed by many PCI writers. For example, Gramsci's reference
to forcing the young student into studious ways and contemporary
allusions, under the onus of severe unemployment, to establishing a
closer relationship between the needs of the society and the output

of the educational institutions. Generally, however, the sense of

161

freedom predominated in the researched literature, thus accounting
for perhaps the greatest distinction between the advocacies of the
PCI and those of a typical Leninist.

These ideas could not only be taught more effectively through
techniques of education in a reformed public school system, say the
communists, they would reach more people than could be approached
through the party schools using their tools of propaganda and indoc-
trination, thus increasing the mass base of PCI supporters.

The National Period has seen some essential educational

 

reforms, headed by the unitary junior high school, and the increasing
support of mandatory education at least through age 14. Teachers'
salaries have improved. There is also general agreement among most
responsible political parties as to the destructiveness of the past
educational system under both traditional liberalism and, after 1922,
fascism, since they featured separate schools and several inflexible
tracks with the effect of encouraging the continuing domination of a
particular class in society. Not only was this scheme contradicted
by the PCI, it was and is contrary to the intent of the Italian
national Constitution. The rising rate of literacy is important and
so is the appearance "today [of a] much more homogeneous and inte-
grated [society] than that which existed thirty years ago . . . due
to the processes of acculturation of the masses . . . and to the

9 The journey ahead, though,

expansion of the obligatory school."
will be long and arduous, and there will be a continuing need for the
support of the masses in any reform laws which are enacted by Parlia-

ment.

162

These laws are necessary for improvement to be realized in
the schools, but they are in and of themselves not sufficient.
First, there is a continuing need to use them as a basis for further
innovation and as a means of escaping from the education-insensitivity
and inefficiency of the past. Second, there should be a broad under-
standing in society that its needs Should more closely determine
educational output, that instead of massive unemployment of the highly
educated, some means of channeling, as consistent with freedom as
possible, might be used to bring each into closer alignment with the
other. Third, it is necessary to combat the notion of some groups
that Parliament is irrelevant'hithe matter of school reform, or any
other reform, and that the only method lies in the use of terror and
violence. Fourth, the support of the masses is of critical importance
in effectuating any laws.

With regard to the support of individuals, Berlinguer has
this advice: "there is no need to say: I don't know, I am not an
expert, I don't know how to speak, or I am not needed. The school
has need in the first place of workers, of the simple men and women;
it has a need for obligation, for participation, for democratic

10

tension." Insofar as the institutional and social dimensions of

the masses are concerned, he said:

in our society, education of the citizen does not depend exclu-
sively upon the school, but rather it is completed through a
plurality of centers and institutions. But because this mul-
tiplicity exists, the Specific task of instruction must be the
highest responsibility of the public school. So that it fully
faces this responsibility, it is fundamentally necessary that
society participates with its different aspects in the life of
the school.

163

The PCI feels there is a need to recognize the essential unity
of the formal educational establishment and the society, and that
just as the various levels of the educational system should be inter-
related and mutually supportive so the expectation of an effective
reform campaign in the schools and universities would not be realis-
tic without concomitant support action in the society. One form of
support is the recognition of the right of students to study apart
from any economic reasons. Italian communists feel that aid ought
to be extended to any impoverished student capable of succeeding in
the upper secondary schools and universities; if this could be
effectuated, a great step could be taken hithe direction of democ-
ratizing society.

In attempting to link the needs of education and society,
the party recognizes the necessity of free expression and differences
of opinion in the educational system as well as society. Many Ital-
ian communists are very outspoken on the virtues of pluralism and of
democratic participation. They claim that they are not infallible,
thatvaluableinsight into the problems and creditable solutions do
come from outside the communist ranks and sometimes from sources other
than the left. It has been stressed by many including Gramsci and
Berlinguer that Marxism does not exist at the expense of other knowl-
edge but that rather Marxism complements and rests upon it; hence
scholarship outside of the narrow confines of Marxism is to be encour-
aged, and cooperation with any group advocating progressive and
democratic solutions to educational problems endorsed. The student

movement for educational reform is not a single movement, declared

164

Berlinguer, but rather is composed of many movements, and "there is a
need to recognize the possibility of different movements and forces
working together" for common goals.12
The Italian communists have talked of the desirability of
workers and university students joining forces, especially during
the 1968 disturbances, without, however, investigating at any length
the difficulties attendant upon the realization of such a suggestion.
The 1968 student agitations did not accomplish much in the univer-
sities beyond the energetic revelation of their afflictions to the
Italian public and the world. True, admissions were eased and more

students were able to attend from hitherto prohibited schools, e.g.,

those of the upper secondary system other than the liceo classico

 

and liceo scientifico, but

 

student overload on the fine texture of bureaucracy and oli-
garchy . . . caused short-term adjustments such as the further
increase and stratification of junior faculty. But neither
the reform laws nor the pressure of the student movement were
able to change the baronial prerogatives of the senior faculty,
their scarcity, their discretion, and their accumulation of
outside jobs and status. The . . . research [became] poorer,
the student overcrowding worse, and the senior professors even
more remote.

. Far from changing the initial "logic" of the system,
the effect . . . has been the accentuation of the bottleneck
by increasing the number of students while leaving unchanged
its inner workings--a restricted number of full professors, a
very high ratio of junior and nontenured staff to full profes-
sors, and an alarming dropout rate.13

By mid-1977 Achille Occhetto claimed that the major difference between
that year and 1968 from an academic standpoint was that in the latter
year "there is an attempt to expand the same expectations of the

movement through a political and cultural struggle"14 presumably

165

because so many of the reformers' objectives had by 1977 been
deflected or defeated.

Yet hope should not be lost and the struggle Should continue.
There was everything to gain by its continuation, and communists
could learn much from the example of a don Milani, a Catholic priest-
educator who had long experience as a teacher of children. Accord-
ing to Luciano Della Mea, writing in Rinascita, don Milani

is a comrade, a communist. . . . He was against piece work,
against militarism, against the draft, against the rich, against
hypocrisy, superficiality . . . against despotic authority . . .
and this for one who believes in the redemption and in paradise.

. In short, don Milani was not a schismatic and not an oppor-
tunist, and this is the essence of what it is to be or become a
communist. . . . For don Milani everything was school because
life is school, and therefore to create a good school one needs
to know how to live with simplicity, that is to say with purity
which is not an alibi. . . . He has been more severe with him-
self than with the others, . he has given an irreversible
lesson in democracy. . . .15 (Italics added.)

This is indistinguishable from humanistic socialism. Further-
more it seems to be indicative of a rather important moral strand of
Italian communism, that for example subscribed to by the novelist
Ignazio Silone prior to his departure from the party, and one which
cannot be ignored with impunity by other more bureaucratically-minded
and traditional Italian communists. Educational reform is seen by the
moral group as a crusade, and it could be encapsulated in the follow-
ing quotation from Giorgio Napolitano speaking at the XIII Congress
of the PCI: "With the transformation of the Italian public school,
the possibility of a rapid elevation of the cultural level of the
working class and of cultural progress without precedent in the his-

tory of our country becomes plausible."16

166

Problems, Desires and Objectives
for the Present and Future

 

 

With the completion of the war, cooperation began to fade but
the PCI embarked upon the task of gaining power and, except for the
first few months when talk of revolution was bandied about among its
members without seriousness, and the Cold War in which its position
was not only ambivalent but defensive, the party has assiduously
pursued power within the limits imposed by the Italian democratic-
republican constitution. Three of the many problems lying ahead of
the PCI in the 1980s will be the following:

1. It has been established that the party' has moved into a
position whereby it can be said to be situated within the Italian
political system. While it does not accept the economic and social
basis of this system, it has become reconciled to working within the
parliamentary framework in order to change the economic, social,
political, and of course educational structure of that system. It
therefore works gradually for reform; yet this very process opens up
one of the basic contradictions of the party. If it proves to be
successful, and reforms are instituted which carry the society toward
the socialist objectives, there will come a time when those capital-
ists who still possess power will refuse further movement in the
socialist direction, at which point the PCI must decide to carry the
struggle forcefully or to remain working peacefully for its reforms.
If it chooses the former it belies its newly acquired legitimacy
within the system; if it opts for the latter it becomes indistinguish-

able from European social democracy.

167

2. The PCI faces another grave problem in that it must
attempt to create as broad an alliance structure as possible with
political forces outside of communism in order to bring about the
reforms it desires. Yet, as Peter Lange indicates, this tactic might
very well conflict with the efforts of the PCI to exert the pressure
needed to change the prevailing national political and social poli-
cies, because this kind of pressure could alienate would-be political
allies.17

3. As the PCI has continued to gain at the polls through the
post-war period, until the 1979 election when it was set back slightly,
it may be seen that an electoral victory admitting them to power would
also be placing responsibility in their hands, and that a mediocre
performance in an environment virtually guaranteeing mediocrity, or
worse, would reflect unfavorably upon the entire party and its efforts.
Participation in a coalition government would not give the PCI suffi-
cient power to implement its reforms and it would seem that the party
could only lose by entering such an arrangement, yet in the last few
years it has actively attempted to do so. It is presently aware that,
given its mass base, it cannot remain out of power indefinitely and
that it must produce, given the Opportunity, lest it be judged a paper
tiger by friends and foes alike.

The PCI disagrees with the typical liberal state because the
communist view is that the much-vaunted disinterest of that type of
state is in actuality partial to the propertied interests and pro-
tects the distribution of wealth and privilege which heavily favors

the well-to-do stratas. The communist would say that the bourgeoisie

168

is under a misapprehension if it conceives of its education as serv-
ing universal interests of great humanistic concerns and therefore as
serving society. It serves special interests only; and the same may
be said of bourgeois democracy. When the PCI talks of "democracy"

it means, at least ideally, the type of democracy related to Rousseau
rather than to Locke, though the party has been severely criticized
by people to the left of it as having come to terms with the bour-
geois liberal establishment; for many years the far left in fact has
considered the PCI to be an establishment party little different from
the Christian Democrats.

The PCI also disagrees with the concept of universal mono-
lithic communism. It was true that Bordiga, Gramsci and Togliatti
all had submitted to Moscow's direction, but they had also displayed
independence on frequent occasions. Bordiga refused the Comintern's
request that his PCI fuse with the PSI and Gramsci's theories while
related to Leninism were profoundly different. Togliatti and the PCI
asserted their independence in 1928 from the Comintern when they
rejected repeated requests from it that Togliatti assume a position in
its central organs.18 Yet the most drastic declaration of Italian
independence vis-a-vis Moscow was made in the mid-1966 interview with

the journal Nuovi Arggmenti in which Togliatti described the inter-

 

national Communist movement as "polycentric." Finally, Berlinguer
Speaks: "For a long period of time--for example during the Comintern--
a special function of leadership of the Soviet communist party was
recognized. We ourselves at that time had recognized that function--

but now the sun is definitely set on that period."19

169

It is the writer's belief that the PCI is doing what it claims
to be doing, that is, working through democratic means for a quali-
tative change in a socialist direction, and that what distinguishes
it from the various socialist parties is the assumption among its mem-
bers that the revolutionary alternative rests in its arsenal. It
has not hurled anathemas against the concept of socio-political revo-
lution. In certain times and places, the party would say, this type
of activity, the launching of a revolution, is not only permissible
but advisable. Modern Italy is not one of those places and the post-
war era has not been one of those times, they would claim, though

admittedly a drastic change in conditions could bring a volte-face

 

of the PCI in the direction of revolution. Although one could say

the same for most Italian political parties, the nearness of the revo-
lutionary tradition to the PCI and the characteristic discipline of
the party would probably induce it to arrive at a revolutionary boil-
ing point with greater speed than would be experienced by the other
establishment parties of the left and center in the Italian political
spectrum. In everyday practical political, social, and educational
affairs, the far left in Italy is correct, the PCI has become an
establishment party.

The party displays a trust of the masses as exemplified in an
accepting attitude toward pluralism in modern society and one can
therefore say that it is relatively open-minded when compared to the
postures of other communist parties. It can even be shown that
Italian communists are less dogmatic and more democratically oriented

than many other so-called democratic segments of the Italian populace.20

170

Although the PCI has been working toward a definite set of socialis-
tic Objectives, Giorgio Napolitano, a member of the PCI Directorate,
has this to say about them:

We do not believe that the public sector of the economy
Should be expanded: it is already sufficiently large in Italy.

. . We are convinced that a party of Marxist formation in a
country like Italy should not aim at total state ownership of
the means of production. This should not be considered a neces-
sary condition for achieving socialist ends and values in an
industrialized, Western-style economy. The role of private
initiative, and even large-scale private industry, the function
of profit and the market economy, cannot and should not be
denied. The characteristic feature of our Party's program today
lies in its refusal to abandon economic develOpment to spontane-
ous activity, in its insistence on democratic control of the use
of the "surplus," and in the guidance given by democratic public
powers to social and economic transformation, thus ensuring con-
tinuity and a ngw quality of development, not merely a steadier
overall growth.

The PCI not only tolerates and cooperates with many groups and indi-
viduals outside the party, and even outside the left, it is willing
to learn from them.

This spirit of cooperation is not something recently adopted
by the PCI. It is true that many examples of uncooperative, even
obstreperous behavior could be cited in this party's history Since
World War II, but many of these incidents were defensive in nature,
and occurred prior to the broad social and political legitimization
that it has acquired in the Italy of the 1970s. One could return to
the employment of the famous liberal Piero Gobetti on the staff of

the communist journal L'Ordine Nuovo during the early revolutionary

 

days prior to the formation of the PCI; to the numerous incidents of
cooperation with the non-communists and even non-leftists during

the Popular Front; and to the communist contributions to the writing

171

of the Constitution provided in the early post-war period when the
party shared political power at the national level with others.

In the 1968-69 Italian social turmoil perpetrated by radical
workers, students, and others, the PCI demonstrated a rather conser-
vative position, but by then the old-line Stalinists within it had
virtually disappeared; it had become a fully responsible party, one
which acted self-consciously in a very parliamentary way in its rela-
tions with its constituency and with other parties. AS Antonio

Gramsci, the paterfamilias of Italin communism, had claimed, condi-

 

tions in Italy would not allow the bolshevik type of revolution to
occur there, with the result that communist victory required other
tactics of a predominantly educational and propagandistic nature.

It appears that nearly 35 years of active social-political participa-
tion withinaaliberal-democratic framework have transformed what
initially was a Leninist revolutionary party into a provisional pro—
ponent of the liberal-democratic regime; a proponent which desires
ultimately to move in to socialism using the parliamentary methods
of this liberal-democratic state and one whose socialism, Should the
PCI achieve it, would be largely conditioned by its present liberal-
democratic experience.

In conclusion, the trust of the party for the masses of
Italians as indicated by its willingness to involve itself in the
affairs of Italy using the liberal-democratic levers available, its
desire to demonstrate responsible and dignified political behavior,

and its expressed wish to implement the Constitution to an extent at

172

least as great as any other Italian political party--these together
with its struggle for a meaningful educational system in Italy draw
from this writer a tentative vote of confidence in its activities of

the present and hopes for the future.

173

Footnotes--Chapter V

 

1Gramsci, "Partito di Governo e Classe di Governo," L'Ordine
Nuovo: 1919-1920, pp., 91-92.

2

 

Togliatti, Conversando con Togliatti, p. 156.

 

3Togliatti, "Programmazione O politica dei redditi?,"
Opere scelte, p. 1161.

 

4Enrico Berlinguer, "La vittoria del 15 giungo," Il compromesso

 

storico, ed. Pietro Valenza, 3rd ed. (Rome: Newton Compton, 1976),
p. 294.

5Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,
1963), p. 100.

6Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical
History (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1964), p. 296.

 

7Harold Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR,
1946-1959 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 11.

 

8Stuart Hughes, p. 251.

9Paci, "Scuola di massa; una conquista civile," p. 8.

10"Il discorso di Berlinguer alla manifestazione del PCI,"
p. 22.

“Ibid., p. 21.

”Ibid., p. 22.

13Luca Perrone, p. 490.

14"Costituente di massa per la scuola,” p. 7.

15"Piangere un po'meno nella valle di lacrime," 15 July 1977,
p. 45.

16

XIII Congresso del partito comunista italiano: atti e
risoluzioni, p. 399.

17"The PCI at the Local Level: A Study of Strategic Per-
formance," Communism in Italy and France, p. 266.

18

 

 

 

Spriano, Vol. II, p. 184.

174

19"La Vittoria del 15 giungo," 11 compromesso storico, p. 295'

 

20DiRenzo, p. 196.

21"The Italian Crisis: A Communist Perspective," Foreign

Affairs 56 (July 1978): 798-99.

 

APPENDIX

175

APPENDIX

PARTS OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE ITALIAN REPUBLIC1

Part I: Rights and Duties of Citizens
Title II: Ethical-social relations

ARTICLE 33: The freedom of art and science and freedom of instruc-
tion in them is affirmed.

The Republic lays down general standards for instruction and
institutes state schools of all orders and grades.

Organized groups and private persons have the right to estab-
lish schools and educational institutions without burden to the state.

The law, in fixing the rights and obligations of non-state
schools which request parity, must assure full liberty to them and
must assure to their students a scholastic treatment equipollent to
that of students of the state schools.

A state examination is required for admission to the various
orders and grades of school, or for passing any of them, and in order
to qualify for practice of a profession.

Institutes of higher learning, universities and academies,
have the right to give themselves autonomous regulations within
limits established by the laws of the state.

 

ARTICLE 34: The school is open to all.

Elementary instruction, imparted for at least eight years, is
obligatory and gratuitous.

Those of capacity and merit, even if without means, have the
right to attain the highest grades of study.

The Republic renders this right effective by means of scholar-
ships, allowances to families, and other aids which must be assigned
by competition.

 

Part II: The Organization of the Republic
Title V: The Regions, the Provinces, the Communes

ARTICLE 114: The Republic is divided into Regions, Provinces, and
Communies.

 

ARTICLE 115: The Regions are constituted as autonomous bodies with
their own powers and functions according to the principles fixed by
the Constitution.

176

177

ARTICLE 117: Within the limits of the fundamental principles estab-
lished Byithe laws of the state, the Region legislates in regard to
the following matters, provided that such legislation is not in con-
flict with the interest of the nation or of other Regions.

Organization of the offices and of the administrative bodies
dependent on the Region;

 

Communal boundaries;

Urban and rural local police;

Fairs and markets;

Public charities and health and hospital assistance;

Professional instruction, training of artisans and scholastic
assistance;

Museums and libraries of local bodies;

City matters;

Tourist trade and hotel industry;

Street railways and automobile lines of regional interest;

Thoroughfares, aqueducts, and public works of regional
interest;

Lake ports and lake navigation;

Mineral and thermal waters;

[etc.].

The laws of the Republic may delegate to the Regions the
power to issue norms for their execution.

ARTICLE 118: The administrative functions pertaining to the subjects
listed in the preceding article reside in the Regions, except those
of exclusively local interest which by the laws of the Republic may
be attributed to the Provinces, the Communes, or other local bodies.

. . . The Region normally exercises its administrative func-
tions by delegating them to the Provinces, to the Communes or other
local bodies or by making use of their officials.

 

 

178

Footnote--Appendix

 

1Kogan, The Government of Italy, pp. l92-93, 205-206.

 

 

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179

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