For more than twenty years the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) has been one of the largest, most politically influential, and most intellectually lively of the nonruling Communist parties. Relying upon close documentation from original sources, Professor Donald Blackmer has explored in this study the relationship of the Italian party and the Communist movement during the years since 1956 when both international communism and Italian society were undergoing far-reaching change.
This book presents a microcosmic view of the conflicts within the Communist world through the saga of a powerful but nonruling political party trying to reconcile its national with its international values in the face of events over which it has had little control. De-Stalinization and upheaval in Eastern Europe initially forced the PCI to reconsider its relationship to the Soviet Union and the other Communist parties; the Sino-Soviet split, reducing the authority of the USSR, encouraged the PCI to articulate its own view of international Communist relationships and its own strategy for European communism; and the evolution of Italian economic and political life, while creating a crisis in the party's alliance system, has caused it to move steadily down a revisionist road. The author contends that the cumulative effect of these events was to push the PCI into a more autonomous role than it had previously played, while still striving to retain its ties with the Communist world.
One of the most interesting yet most neglected of all Communist parties, the PCI has long needed the close attention accorded it by this book. The political strategy adopted by the PCI's leader Palmiro Togliatti, an astute and flexible survivor from the Stalinist era, is closely analyzed. The author sees in Togliatti's “reacting and adapting to circumstance, rather than manipulating events in pursuit of any certain clear goals,” a basic style of opportunism and compromise. Since Togliatti's death, with the PCI weakened by internal strife and by the trend of Italian politics, the party has been confronted more sharply than ever before with the inherent difficulty of reconciling its political ambitions at home with its ideological and international commitments as a Communist party.
Vol. 13, Studies in International Communism, edited by William E. Griffith and published in cooperation with the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
