Italy, Europe, the Left: The Transformation of Italian Communism and the European Imperative by Vassilis Fouskas

Author:Vassilis Fouskas [Fouskas, Vassilis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429836688
Google: CPmADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-20T10:25:02+00:00

Political ideology

The importance of the ideological discourse to which, implicitly or explicitly, the conception of the 'new course' referred, does not only involve the adoption of the principles of the French revolution, but also, and perhaps even more significantly, it constitutes a real revision of the concept of hegemony as derived from the tradition of Gramsci and Togliatti: this is the key point to an understanding of why the 'new course' started mainly with a fierce criticism of Togliatti. In fact, the concept was prone to two diametrically opposed interpretations.

The first exegesis, which had Norberto Bobbio as its most prestigious supporter, maintained that Gramsci elaborated a revisionist and reformist theoretical thesis, according to which the proletariat, prior to achieving political power, must enjoy the broad consensus of the masses. This, in turn, implied that a Communist Party needs, for example, 80 per cent of the people's vote in order to create the national unity necessary for a Left government.64 It was on this basis that Bobbio rebuked the PCI for the explicitly reformist assumptions of the compromesso storico, as a strategy to achieve the widest popular consensus.

The second interpretation, which was advanced by neo-Marxists such as Perry Anderson, attempts a revolutionary reading of Gramsci's remarks concerning the point at issue. When Gramsci suggested that the working class should have an ideological and political hegemony before achieving political power, he simply referred to the hegemony the proletariat must have within the ensemble of dominated classes, not over the capitalist social formation in general. Therefore, the question of national consensus is not posed before the conquest of class power. At this stage, the requirement is the hegemony of the proletariat within the boundaries of the dominated classes.65

This is not the place to speculate on whether or not the former interpretation implies a Social Democratic/reformist point of view and the second a Communist/revolutionary one. What should be stressed, however, is that both contained in common a stable reference point: the idea of the nation-state as the centre of revolutionary and/or reformist actions. The 'new course' of PCI was unable to fully adopt either of the two interpretations for two main reasons: firstly, the crisis of 'actually-existing socialism' bearing in itself the crisis of Communist revolutionary ideas; secondly, the process of the internationalisation which undermined the ability of the nation-state to act as organiser of hegemony. Taking into account such constraints, Occhetto's 'new course' attempted to establish a conception of hegemony that would have given the party the possibility of going beyond either traditional interpretation. As we saw earlier, one of the first demands put forward was for a functional democracy of alternanza and the pre-condition for it was the change of the pure proportional electoral system while insisting on concrete programmatic platforms. In this context, the party began acquiring not merely a Social Democratic identity — although this might imply a mass notion of politics — but a newly revisionist one alongside the parties of the Socialist International.

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