The Left and the Decomposition of the Party System in Italy

Due to its domination by the largest and most interesting Communist Party in the West, the Italian left always moved according to its own rhythms, though it was never immune from the problems that afflicted the workers' movement and progressive forces everywhere. The PCI's distinctiveness earned it considerable attention, and no small amount of admiration, at times because it was successful and innovative (think of the heyday of Eurocommunism in the mid to late 1970s), and at other times simply because it was. The existence of a large, flexible, and open organization like the PCI - with the added bonus of Antonio Gramsci as a former leader - served as an inspiration to militants and intellectuals across Europe in their struggles against the obtuseness and lack of imagination of their own leaders, whether of the social democratic or the Brezhnevite variety. Distinctive to the end, the PCI formally dissolved itself in 1991 while it still controlled more than a quarter of the seats in the Italian parliament. Other CPs, like the French, might cling to a practice and an identity that had failed to keep up with changing times, rendering such parties marginalized onlookers even before the dissolution of the USSR. The PCI's new leader, Achille Occhetto, surrounded himself with renovators and tried radical therapy in an effort to reverse the decline that had afflicted the party for over a decade. Convinced that this decline would continue if the party simply reacted to events, Occhetto felt that a break with the past was needed to lay the groundwork for a recomposition of the entire left. And only such a total reshuffling of the political cards, he believed, would create the conditions for a new, progressive aggregation of forces able to force the Socialists out of their collaboration with the Christian Democrats and finally drive the DC from power