I confess that looking at the film that the young director Andrea Secret he dedicated to “Berlinguer. The Great Ambition"I was moved, as happens when you happen to relive an important part of your life. But I must also say that there in that which is established in the film between “the great ambition” of Berlinguer and the “historic compromise" It's misleading.
Berlinguer, what the “historic compromise” really was
The “historic compromise” was a strategy aimed at overcoming the serious economic crisis that had hit the entire West following the energy crisis. It did not represent a surrender, as the young people of the time feared, nor, even less, a renunciation of the aims of communism. It was, instead, the repurposing of something that had already been historically achieved in Italy from '43 to '47 with the governments of national unity and whose greatest fruit had been the Republic , ConstitutionIt was a parenthesis, important as it may be, but destined to close sooner or later.
The real “great ambition”: a complete socialist society
The real goal, or to use the title of the film, “The great ambition"of the PCI was not the historical compromise, but rather the realization “also” in Italy of a “fully” socialist society. What did “fully” socialist mean? It meant, first of all, that it was necessary go “beyond” politics of economic and social reforms and of a Keynesian-style "welfare state" that the Scandinavian social democracies had resorted to with evident success. Those reforms had indeed improved the living conditions of workers but had however failed in the fundamental objective of socialism which was to put an end, through economic planning, to the cyclical crises of capitalism and thus guarantee a continuous and harmonious development of the whole society.
The Critique of Capitalism: From Driver to Obstacle of Development
Il capitalism, according to the PCI, could not be reformed. As Maurizio Landini would have said, if he had been secretary of the CGIL at the time, "it had to be turned inside out like a glove". Furthermore, capitalism, as Berlinguer argued in a speech in Genoa, "had exhausted its expansion capacity“From a formidable engine of development, praised for these capabilities even by Karl Marx in his communist manifesto, it had transformed itself into a obstacle to development. To overcome the crisis they were therefore necessary policies and structural reforms much more courageous than Keynes's warm blankets. "We must go much further, much more must be done" was the mantra that was heard repeated by authoritative leaders of the PCI to the point that Luigi Spaventa, the illustrious economist elected as an independent on the PCI lists and then Minister of the Budget in the Ciampi government, coined the term “benaltristi” precisely to indicate those who had nothing to say about the “here and now”.
The obstacle of the name: the weight of communism
The real stone ofstumble on the path of the PCI to assert itself as a governing force, however, it was his being and declaring himself a communist. When, in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake in Irpinia, Berlinguer declared the season of historical compromise over and opened up to the idea of an alternative, the problem of the name arose, objectively. The “convention to exclude” it was not an invention of the DC but a consequence of the division of the world into opposing blocs and the Pci was too big and cumbersome to take on a governing role in a border country like Italy without this causing a change within the blocs. The same Moro affair and his assassination should be placed in this context to be better understood. It is true that the Berlinguer's PCI had made giant steps in relation to his international position both with the recognition of NATO (“I feel safer under its umbrella”, Berlinguer told Giampaolo Pansa who interviewed him in 1976 for the Courier) either in relations with socialist countries when, the day after the coup d'état in Poland by the general Yaruselsky declared the exhaustion of the propulsive thrust of the October Revolution. But, to these undoubted progresses (welcomed by Hugh La Malfa as more than sufficient to encourage the PCI to assume government responsibilities) only theexplicit recognition of the fact that the PCI he was in all respects, except in name, an European Social Democratic Party. In some ways it was more moderate than the German SPD and the English Labour Party and, compared to the Italian PSI, it had, perhaps, more sense of the State. All these things were right, but not enough. The PCI maintained, at least in the consciousness of the masses that followed it and also in large sections of its militants as well as in vast sectors of Italian and international public opinion, a sort of duplicity that had to be resolved.
The failure to turn towards democratic socialism
The best way to do this would have been the one chosen at the time by the SPD with the Bad Godesberg turning point: to organize in some spa town a conference to formally bid farewell to socialist statism, Marxist-Leninist dogmatism and, above all, toidea of overthrowing, rather than reform, the capitalismWe could have done it rpicking up the broken thread of the discussion started in 64 by Norberto Bobbio e George Amendola on the necessity and, for the two illustrious interlocutors, on the possibility of giving life to a process of "unitary recomposition of the scattered limbs of Italian socialism". That is, on the creation of a the only major party of Italian workers. A party that, Bobbio stated with stringent logic, "precisely because it was engaged in politics and moreover engaged in government politics in a State governed by a liberal Constitution (and not in a popular democracy) could only engage in social democratic politics". To this, Bobbio concluded, "there is no alternative". And he was absolutely right. This step, however Berlinguer didn't want it or did not know how to do it. He maintained and even accentuated his critical judgment on social democracy and on the possibility of capitalism to still create development. Above all he accentuated the criticism of the Italian political system which seemed to him to be irremediably enslaved to party politics and therefore profoundly corrupt. In that context the only thing that seemed to really matter to him was maintain the identity of the Communist Party, to underline its diversity (superiority?) compared to other parties and to defend its unity.
In a meeting of the Management which I had the opportunity to attend, Berlinguer introduced this theme among the various and sundry. He said, in extreme synthesis: “There are comrades, even authoritative ones, (the reference was to Napolitano) who believe that the natural outcome of the Party is to declare ourselves for what we already are, a party of European socialism. The issue exists and is serious, we will have to discuss it. But, he concluded, I limit myself to observing that if this were our choice, a new Communist Party would arise in a short space of time on our left, to which a large number of our members and voters would adhere…”and Ugo Pecchioli, who was sitting next to him, commented with somewhat suspicious timing, “and I would be among the first to sign up.”
From system alternative to civil rights party
Since then the policy of thedemocratic alternative increasingly took on the characteristics of a confusing system alternative. The historic banners of the fight for democracy, development and work were joined by those of the moral question, of austerity understood as a value and not as a possible harsh necessity (a sort of anticipation of happy degrowth) of environmentalism (which led the party that had elected Happy Hippolytus to the European Parliament to close the few nuclear power plants we had) and the women's issue, no longer expressed in terms of emancipation, but in the incomprehensible terms of "difference". From a labour party to civil rights party: Berlinguer's PCI was on its way to becoming what it was Mino Martinazzoli he feared more: a mass radical party.
The great illusion shattered
A party different (and superior) to all the others, promoter of a great moral and intellectual reform, standard-bearer of the fight against corruption and standard-bearer of honesty: too much! More than a great ambition this was a great illusion which however prevented the PCI, after Berlinguer's death, from opening a fruitful dialogue with all the other forces of Italian socialism in order to converge on the only ground that made an alternative to the DC possible: that of the socialist reformism. This was not the case and this is also why the “great illusion” was shattered against the Berlin Wall and remained buried under its rubble like the communist utopia from which it had derived.
