The New Old World (59 page)

The impact of
operaismo
came not just from the enquiries or ideas of its thinkers, but their connexion with the upsurge of new contingents of the working class, composed of young immigrants from the south, rebelling against low wages and oppressive conditions in northern factories—not to speak of Communistled unions, disconcerted by spontaneous outbreaks of militancy and unexpected forms of struggle. To have anticipated this turbulence gave
operaismo
a powerful intellectual headwind. But it also fixated it on the moment of its insight, leading to a romanticization of proletarian revolt as a more or less continuous flow of lava from the factory floor. By the mid-seventies, aware that Italian industry was changing once again, and workshop militancy was in decline, Negri and others would fall back on the figure of ‘social labour' in general—virtually anyone employed, or unemployed, wherever, by capital—as the bearer of immanent revolution. The abstraction of this notion was a sign of desperation, and the apocalyptic politics that accompanied it took eventually took
operaismo
into the deadend of the
autonomia
of the late seventies. The PCI, however, after missing the mutation of the sixties, had not learnt from it, and offered nothing better by way of an industrial sociology. So it was that when the Italian economy underwent critical further changes in the eighties, with the rise of small export firms and a
black economy—the ‘second Italian miracle', as it was hopefully referred to at the time—the party was unprepared again. This time the blow to its standing as the political representative of the collective labourer proved fatal. Twenty years later, just as the triumph of Forza Italia would dramatize its failure to react and intervene in time to the massification of popular culture, so the victories of the Lega would reveal its inability to respond in time to the fragmentation of post-modern labour.

These were deficits of a
mentalité
with deeper sources than the party's Marxism, a classical sense of intellectual values that for all its limitations was in its own fashion rarely less than honourable, often admirable. There was another and more damaging side to the same idealism, however, that was specific to Italian Communism, and for which it bore conscious political responsibility. This was a strategic reflex that never really altered from the Liberation onwards, and whose after-twitches continue today. When Togliatti returned from Moscow to Salerno in the spring of 1944, he made it clear to his party that there could be no attempt at making a socialist revolution in Italy on the heels of the expulsion of the Wehrmacht, already foreseeable. The Resistance in the north, in which the PCI was playing a leading role, could supplement but not substitute the Anglo-American armies in the south as the main force to drive the Germans out of the country, and it was the Allied High Command that would call the shots once peace was restored. After twenty years of repression and exile, the task of the PCI was to build a mass party and play a central role in the an elected Assembly to put Italy on a new democratic basis.

This was a realistic reading of the balance of forces on the peninsula, and of the determination of Washington and London not to permit any assault on capital in the wake of German defeat. A post-war insurrection was not on the agenda. Togliatti, however, went much further than this. In Italy, the monarchy which had helped install, and then comfortably cohabitated with Fascism, had ousted Mussolini in the summer of 1943, fearful of going down with him after the Allies landed in Sicily. After a brief interval, the king fled with Badoglio, the conqueror of Ethiopia, to the south, where the Allies put them atop an unaltered regional administration, while in the north the Germans set up Mussolini at the head of a puppet regime in Salò. When the war came to an
end, Italy was thus not treated like Germany, as a defeated power, but as a chastened ‘co-belligerent'. Once Allied troops were gone, a coalition government, comprising the left-liberal Partito d'Azione, Socialists, Communists and Christian Democrats, was faced with the legacy of Fascism, and the monarchy that had collaborated with it. The Christian Democrats, aware that its potential voters remained loyal to the monarchy, and that its natural supports in the state apparatus had been the routine instruments of Fascism, were resolved to prevent anything comparable to German de-Nazification. But they were in a minority in the cabinet, where the secular Left held more posts.

At this juncture the PCI, instead of putting the DC on the defensive by pressing for an uncompromising purge of the state—cleaning out all senior collaborationist officials in the bureaucracy, judiciary, army and police—invited it to head the government, and lifted scarcely a finger to dismantle the traditional apparatus of Mussolini's rule. Far from isolating Christian Democracy, Togilatti manoeuvred to put its leader De Gasperi at the head of the government, and then joined with the DC—to the indignation of the Socialists—in confirming the Lateran Pact that Mussolini had sealed with the Vatican. The prefects, judges and policemen who had served the Duce were left virtually untouched. As late as 1960, sixty-two out of sixty-four prefects had been minions of Fascism, and all 135 of the country's police chiefs. As for judges and officers, the unreconstructed courts acquitted the torturers of the regime and convicted the partisans who had fought against them, retrospectively declaring combatants of the Fascist Republic of Salò legitimate belligerents, and those of the Resistance illegitimate—the latter hence liable to summary execution after 1943, without penal sanctions for the former after 1945.
⁶⁰
These enormities were a direct consequence of the actions of the PCI. It was Togliatti himself who, as minister of justice, promulgated in June 1946 the amnesty that enabled them. A year later, the party was rewarded with an unceremonious ejection from the government by De Gasperi, who no longer had need of it.

The post-war history of Italy was thus to be entirely unlike that of Germany. There, where there had been no popular Resistance,
Nazism was destroyed by both the extremity of military defeat, and the uprooting of the subsequent Allied occupations. In the Federal Republic, Fascism could never raise its head again. In Italy, by contrast, the Resistance bequeathed an ideology of—patriotic—anti-fascism, whose ubiquitous official rhetoric, in which the PCI took the lead, covered the actual continuities of Fascism, both as an inherited apparatus of laws and officials, and as an openly proclaimed creed and movement. Reconstituted as the MSI, the Fascist party was soon sitting in Parliament again, and eventually received into the establishment under its leader Giorgio Almirante. This figure, exalting Mussolini's anti-Semitic laws, had told his compatriots in 1938 that ‘racism is the vastest and bravest recognition of itself that Italy has ever attempted', and in 1944, after Mussolini had been air-lifted north by the Germans, that if they did not enlist as fighters for the Republic of Salò they would be shot in the back. When Almirante died in the eighties, Togliatti's widow was among the mourners at the funeral. Today Fini, his appointed heir, is speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, and probable successor to Berlusconi as prime minister.

Beyond the obvious reproaches to this trajectory, what is most damning in the PCI's part in it was its self-destructive futility. When it had a chance to weaken Christian Democracy by sinking the sword of an intransigent anti-fascism into its flanks, to cut it away from the reactionary constituencies that had sustained Mussolini's regime, it did just the opposite. Helping the DC to establish itself as the dominant force in the country by passing a lenifying sponge across collaboration with the regime, it simply consolidated the conservative bloc under clerical command that would shut it out of power till its dying day. In this debacle, the party's conduct was without international excuse. If revolution was ruled out in post-war Italy, by 1946 the Allies had essentially left the country, and were in no position to halt a lustration of Fascism. Togliatti's naiveté in being so completely outmanouevred by De Gasperi had little to do with external influences. It was rooted in a strategic conception he had derived from Gramsci, interpreted through the gauze of Croce and his forebears. The pursuit of political power, Gramsci had written, required two kinds of strategy, whose terms he took from military theory, a war of position and a war of movement—trench or siege warfare, versus mobile assault. The Russian Revolution had exemplified the second; a revolution in the West would, for a considerable period,
require the former, before eventually passing over to the latter.
⁶¹
Just as it had diluted Gramsci's notion of hegemony simply to its consensual moment, fixing it essentially in civil society, so under Togliatti the PCI reduced his conception of political strategy to a war of position only, the slow acquisition of influence in civil society, as if no war of movement—the ambush, sudden charge, rapidly wheeling attack, catching class enemies or the state by surprise—were any longer needed in the West. In 1946–7, De Gasperi and his colleagues did not make the same mistake.

By 1948 the popular élan of Liberation was broken. After electoral defeat amid the onset of the Cold War, it was twenty years before another wave of political insurgency crested in Italy. When it came, the generational rebellion of the late sixties, embracing both students and young workers, went deeper and lasted longer than anywhere else in Europe. Under Togliatti's successor Longo, somewhat more of a fighter and less of a diplomat, the PCI did not react as negatively to the youth revolt as the PCF in France. But nor did it respond creatively, failing either to connect with a culture of the streets in which high and low—the classics of the Marxist and Bolshevik past, the graffiti of the spray-can present—did for a time interact dynamically, or to renew its increasingly stationary stock of strategic concepts. When critical opposition to its inertia emerged within the party in the shape of the Manifesto group, that numbered the best minds of its post-war levy, the PCI leadership lost no time in expelling it.

The excommunication came after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which the Manifesto condemned without reservation. Here, alongside the native idealism of its formation, lay the second reason for the continuing strategic paralysis of Italian Communism. However flexible in other respects, the PCI remained Stalinist in both its internal structures, and its external ties to the Soviet state. Despairing of one-party rule by a torpid Christian Democracy, liberal well-wishers of the party—of which there were to be many over the years—would time and again express their admiration for the PCI's sensible domestic moderation, yet exasperation that it should compromise
its otherwise excellent record by its links to the USSR, and the organizational norms that followed from it. In reality, the two were structurally inter-related. From Salerno onwards, the party's moderation was a compensation for its relations with Moscow, not a contradiction of them. Just because it could always be taxed with a suspect kinship to the land of the October Revolution, it had to over-prove its innocence of any wish to emulate that all too famous model of change. The burden of an imputed guilt and the quest for an exonerating respectability went hand in hand.

Incapable of assuming or developing the revolts of the late sixties and early seventies, the PCI turned instead once again towards Christian Democracy, in the wistful hope that the DC had changed its ways and would now be prepared to collaborate with it in governing the country—Catholicism and Communism uniting in a ‘Historic Compromise' to defend Italian democracy against the dangers of subversion and the temptations of consumerism. Proposing this pact in 1973 soon after he became the new leader of the party, Berlinguer invoked the example of Chile, where Allende had just been overthrown, as a warning of the civil war that risked breaking out, were the Left—Communists and Socialists combined—ever to try to rule the country on the basis of a mere arithmetical majority of the electorate. Few arguments could have been more obviously specious. There was not the faintest prospect of civil war in Italy, where even such outbreaks of violence as had occurred—the bomb planted by right-wing terrorists in the Piazza Fontana of Milan in 1969 was the worst case—had little incidence on the political life of the country as a whole. But once the PCI had moved to embrace the DC, the revolutionary groups to the left of it that had sprung out of the youth rebellion foresaw the emergence of a monolithic parliamentary establishment, government without opposition, and shifted towards direct action against it. The first lethal attacks by the Red Brigades began the following year.

But the political system was in no danger. The elections of 1976, in which the PCI did well, were perfectly tranquil. In their wake, the DC graciously accepted Communist support for governments of so-called ‘National Solidarity' under Andreotti, without altering its policies or conceding any ministries to the PCI. Repressive legislation, gratuitously curbing civil liberties, was stepped up. Two years later, the Red Brigades seized the DC's most influential leader, Aldo Moro, in Rome, demanding the release of its prisoners in exchange for freeing him. In fifty-five days of
captivity, fearing he would be abandoned by his own party, Moro wrote increasingly bitter letters to his colleagues, posing a clear threat to Andreotti were he to be at large. In this crisis, once again the PCI showed neither humanity nor common sense, denouncing any negotiations to secure Moro's release more vehemently than the DC leadership itself, which was understandably torn.

Moro was duly left to his fate. Had he been allowed to live, his return would certainly have split Christian Democracy and probably ended the career of Andreotti. The price of saving him was negligible—the Red Brigades, a tiny group that in any objective sense was never a significant threat to Italian democracy, could hardly have been strengthened by the release of a few of its members who would have been under continuous police surveillance the moment they walked out of jail. The notion that the prestige of the state could not survive such a surrender, or that thousands of new terrorists would have sprung up in its wake, was little more than interested hysteria. The Socialists realized this, and argued for negotiations.
Plus royalistes que le roi
, the Communists, in their anxiety to prove that they were the firmest of all bulwarks of the state, sacrificed a life and saved their nemesis in vain. The DC showed no gratitude. Once he had used them, Andreotti—a greater master of timing than De Gasperi himself—reduced them. When elections came in 1979, the PCI lost a million and a half votes, and was out in the cold again. The Historic Compromise had yielded it nothing, other than the disillusionment of its voters and a weakening of its base. When in the following year Berlinguer called for solidarity with Fiat workers, threatened with mass dismissals, his appeal fell on deaf ears. The last big industrial action in which the party would ever be involved was rapidly crushed.