The PCI whose centenary we are celebrating is not that one founded in Livorno in '21 by Bordiga and Gramsci but the one re-founded in Salerno in '44 by Togliatti. Without the turning point of Salerno the PCI, in which many of us served and for which millions of Italians voted, simply would not have existed.
The PCI of Togliatti rested on two cornerstones: the first was the link with the October Revolution and with the historical process that that revolution had triggered on a global scale, the second was the New Party and that is a party whose fundamental characteristics were that it was no longer the party of the working class alone but that it was interclassist, that it was no longer a party of only cadres but of the masses and, above all, that it was not partisan but looked and acted like the Party of the Nation.
The first of these two cornerstones, connection with the USSR, has never been questioned by anyone: neither by Togliatti, nor by Amendola and not even by Berlinguer. All the leaders of the PCI were convinced of the fact that the October revolution, by breaking the weak link in the chain of imperialism (tsarist Russia), had set in motion a process of transition from capitalism to socialism on a global scale. And they were also convinced that, if that process had also affected the most industrially advanced countries, socialism in the West would have taken on forms and characteristics that were very different from the barbaric ones assumed in the Russia of Lenin and Stalin. However great the errors and horrors with which it was strewn, that process nonetheless represented the first concrete step of the transition on a global scale from capitalism to socialism. As Brezhniev would say many years later, that, like it or not, was real socialism, the rest were fantasies.
It took the flag is lowered over the Kremlin for the PCI to finally take note of the fact that that process, judged to be positive and irreversible, had actually resulted in a resounding failure and in a terrible tragedy. How such a blunder by so many was possible is difficult to explain. Perhaps the closest explanation to the truth was given by Christopher Hitchens in his Hitch-22: “… being inside that process gave (to the communists) the sensation of feeling at one with the great locomotive of history...in short, to be right, something truly exciting but also, if you think about it, terrible…”
The case of the second cornerstone, that of the PCI Party of the Nation. Togliatti considered the PCI as the heir to the democratic tradition of the Risorgimento (Garibaldi) and also to the best socialist tradition, which was certainly not the maximalist one, but the reformist one of the labor leagues, mutualism and cooperation, trade union organizations and the houses of the People. Like Gramsci, Togliatti believed that it was up to the working classes and the parties that most represented them (communists, socialists and Catholics) to carry out, through profound social reforms, that liberal revolution which the Italian bourgeoisie had left unfinished and which, ultimately, with fascism, it had betrayed. The strategy of the "Party of the Nation", later codified as Italian road to socialism. A strategy which, in order to be implemented, presupposed a deep rootedness in society, in the factories and in the countryside, among the middle classes and intellectuals. A strategy based on reforms and gradual transformations, certainly not on revolutionary ruptures. But, above all, a strategy which, in order to succeed, required a active participation of the masses and their constant political education. And this is perhaps the greatest contribution that the PCI has given to Italy and that we miss the most today. In the PCI (unlike today's parties, and not just the 5 Stars or the League) there was no room for demagoguery or for plebeianism, nor for populism and justicialism and, least of all, for extremism and terrorism. These are all diseases which historically found fertile ground in the left on which to take root and which, precisely for this reason, the PCI leadership fought with extreme rigor.
Naturally there were ambiguities and reticence in the PCI, also on fundamental issues, which then emerged when he was called to perform government tasks in the 70s and, even more so, when in the 80s the crisis of world communism confronted him with the irrefutable need to clearly define his own identity and goals.
On this last occasion, the leadership group of the PCI, which was also made up of young people such as Occhetto, D'Alema and Veltroni he was not up to the task. He lacked lucidity, political vision and that timing which Togliatti possessed in the highest degree and which allowed him to carry out the turning point in Salerno. In this case, however, there was no turning point and what Occhetto believes to have been such – that of Bolognina – turned out to be, in the light of history, a pirouette. And yet, looking back on it today, it wouldn't have been so difficult for forty-year-olds to say clearly that what they still persisted in calling a communist was in reality, and has already been for some time, a social democratic party, far less radical than English Labor or the Swedish Socialist Party; just as it would have been simply an act of political honesty on their part to claim the fact that the PCI's economic and social policy was actually a reformist policy, that is aimed at solving the problems of workers and the country, and certainly not aimed at building new and improbable development models. But the thing that should have been more natural for them to do, and which instead, deliberately, none of them did, would have been to welcome, even with gratitude, the offer of the Psi to start a process of reunification of the "scattered members" (as Norberto Bobbio called them) of Italian socialism, a reunification that the collapse of communism made possible. Yes is missed a historic opportunity. That group of young Turks lacked the courage to declare the historical experience of the PCI closed and to make those painful but necessary choices which, perhaps, would have allowed the Italian left to avoid common ruin.
The failure to turn followed the unhappy season of metamorphoses: from the PDS to the DS up to today's Pd. A season characterized by the progressive liquidation of the positive part of the PCI's legacy (in particular of its unitary vocation) and by the re-emergence of its worst vices: the eternal superiority complex due to the fact of feeling "inside the locomotive of history", the their belief that they are morally superior to others and even genetically different, contempt for their adversaries, which in the case of Craxi and Berlusconi has bordered on hatred, coercion with justicialism and, today, thepermeability to populism which pushes Goffredo Bettini to talk about a strategic alliance with Beppe Grillo's 5 Stars and Zingaretti to see in Conte a formidable point of reference for reformists. An impressive drift!
I may be wrong, but I am convinced that this epilogue is due to the levity with which that managerial group handled the end of the PCI, to their inability to close that story and to mourn. They have passed from communism to post-communism with the same lightness with which one drinks a glass of water and of this unbearable lightness is the son of the PD which, not being a social democratic party or even a liberal democratic party, risks being nothing and representing in today's Italy not the strength of democracy but its weak link.
