GMC

The answer to this question has to be provided by way of sociological, or better, psycho-sociological categories. First of all, the composition of the party’s political leadership is a fundamental element in this history. Who was behind the transformation of the PCI into the new mildly social-democratic PDS? The young generation of political leaders that came from the youth organization, the Italian Communist Youth Federation (FGCI). This should not be any surprise, as the battle for change is usually waged by the younger cohorts, and not the old guard.

Nevertheless, this latter group had all been trained politically in the distant but tough period of antifascist struggle, exile, incarceration, and Resistance in the final phases of World War II. In its immediate aftermath they personally took part in the fiercest of social struggles. It was typical in the late 1940s and into the 1950s to move from being a factory worker engaged in trade union activities, to become a small trade union official, and then to reach important positions in the Communist Party, eventually getting elected to Parliament.

In this way, at least in terms of its cadres’ origins, the social composition of the PCI itself, even at the highest levels, partly reflected the social groups it sought to represent. Let’s not forget that Giuseppe di Vittorio, founding leader of the CGIL until his death in 1957 and a towering figure in the PCI, had started working as a day laborer for the land aristocracy since he was a little child.

On the other hand, the youth organization had become — as in many other Communist parties around the world, not least the Soviet Union — the place in which the new leaderships were recruited in their teenage years. It was a sort of school for future leaderships in which institutionalized politics were taught and practiced.

Therefore, members of the FGCI were exceptional politicians, but they had never organized and led an actual social struggle. Had he been sent to lead a real political and social conflict, where workers, peasants or deprived citizens in a particular area were protesting, an FGCI leader would have not lasted even a minute, while an old PCI member would have led the picket line himself.

The way FGCI members were politically educated made them extremely good at changing their political position without ever having a single one. They had learned from the party that only the politique politicienne, politics for the sake of politics, could effectively tackle the contingency of certain political issues. They did not understand, however, the importance of formulating a long-term strategy, consistent with the political necessities of the moment.

Seen through this lens, one can appreciate how the distinctive positions of the most notable figures such as Achille Occhetto, Massimo D’Alema, and Walter Veltroni were in fact irrelevant compared to the underlying social and cultural homogeneity of their backgrounds and ideas. These names made up the “young guard” that came into the limelight when Enrico Berlinguer was general secretary (1972–84). Their role was to mediate between the party and the student movements in the period that went from 1967 to 1977, and they would later be the foremost proponents of the social-democratic, Atlanticist transformation of the party in 1991.

Remember that D’Alema later became the only former Communist prime minister of the Italian Republic (1998–2000). Inspired by the “Third Way” of Blair and Clinton, his premiership was characterized by the tragic involvement in the NATO bombardments in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999 and by a further acceleration in the privatization process of state-owned enterprises, which was a prerequisite for Italy’s membership in the European single currency.

Secondly, the party was always very weak as far as the urban intelligentsia was concerned. 1968, the student movement, and the launching of radical democratic movements in social groups such as teachers, doctors and magistrates, all fed the party with new social forces: not only votes and militants, but also leaders on the national level, first in the FGCI and later in the party. In other words, after the wave of 1968, a party that was mainly born of industrial workers developed and also changed with new generations of militants and leaders coming from the petty bourgeoisie, namely white-collar urban workers. This is an aspect that has to be taken into account in the continuous transformation of the party and its internal fluidity.

No wonder the party, having lost its identity, would change its name a number of times: Democratic Party of the Left, Left Democrats, Democratic Party, and on. In this same vein we can look to the recent creation of the Democratic and Progressive Movement, a split by some of the former Communist Youth (FGCI) “innovators,” who became increasingly sidelined in the Democratic Party after Matteo Renzi obtained the leadership in 2013. The name is an explicit reference to the first article of the Italian constitution, which states that “Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labor.”

There is nonetheless little or no credibility in this political operation. How can you portray yourself as the standard-bearer of progressivism and workers’ rights, if you are widely and rightly believed to be responsible for a government record of privatizing public companies, deregulating the labor market, abolishing a proportional representative electoral system, and so on? It is no surprise that this new party stands at only around 4 percent in the polls, despite the political weight of its most prominent leaders and their constant presence in mainstream media.