By MARCO MONDAINI*
In Togliatti's “doing politics”, the guarantee of building a “democratic strategy for socialism” was the maintenance of an unbreakable relationship with the first socialist country in the world
“Robespierristas, anti-robespierristas, please! Simply tell us who Robespierre was.”
(Marc Bloch, Introduction to history).
“The historian is not a judge, much less a judge who hangs”
(Edward Carr, quoting D. Knowles in What is History?).
Perhaps no communist party in the Western world has made more contributions than the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to the development of a strategy of socialist transformation suited to the new mass democratic political reality that began to emerge as such at the end of the 1930th century, gaining lighter tones in the 1940s and, mainly, from the second gloss of the XNUMXs, with the end of the Second World War.
Through decades of illegal opposition to fascism and legal opposition to Christian democracy, the PCI knew how to erect in a tortuous way, and not without the possibly traumatic presence of “turns” of political line, a democratic (non-insurrectionary) perspective of transition from capitalism to socialism – the nodal point of the so-called “Italian road to socialism”.
We would not be untruthful in stating that the person largely responsible for the strenuous work of beginning the construction of this diverse path to socialism was Palmiro Togliatti. A responsibility that brought with it not only the visualization of the new and the potential for ruptures, but also the attachment to the traditional and the defense of continuities with the communist tradition. Thus, a complex work of “political chemistry” took shape, in which the dosage of ruptures and continuities was carried out in Togliatti’s own “doing politics”.
It was precisely in the period after the end of the Second World War that Togliatti's ability to “do politics” showed itself to be more mature, enabling – in the rise and fall of the temperature of the Cold War and in the advance and retreat of the world's borders, to in accordance with the interests of the United States and the Soviet Union – to structure and defend the democratic option of the Italian communists.
Structure and defense are not immune to ambiguities and contradictions, but they have not, for that reason, resisted opposing pressures of different natures. In this sense, it was necessary to deal with the conflict of the international situation, the national context and the internal dynamics of the PCI, three realities with different logics, but which always interacted.
Palmiro Togliatti lived Stalinism and greatly contributed to its affirmation during the Comintern era. However, in the historical period between his return to Italy in 1944 and his death on August 21, 1964 – which is now 60 years old –, his political thought and action were decisively inflected towards valuing democracy, exactly during the two decades in which his leadership at the head of the PCI, as secretary general, was practically unquestionable.
Thus, the Togliatti post-fascist journey had as its fundamental axis the difficult search for deepening the existing ties between socialist and democratic ideas, seeking to make them organic to the political project of a communist party with a third-internationalist matrix.
In this way, according to the different political situations between 1944 and 1964, concepts dear to Togliattian thought were developed, such as “differentiated analysis”, “new type democracy”, “progressive democracy”, “new party”, “polycentrism ”, “unity in diversity” etc.
This, at the same time that his leadership at the head of a mass communist party had to be proven in the face of discontinuous moments: (a) of Italian political life, such as the years of “governments of national unity”, of “centrism Christian Democrat”, the “opening to the left”, the “conservative return” and the “first center-left experiments”; and (b) the international communist movement, such as the times of “restricted autonomy of communist parties in the post-Comintern”, of the “kominformist centralizing setback”, of “criticism of Stalinism in the post-XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” and of the “Sino-Soviet dissent”, which were interrelated with the fluctuations of the Cold War.
However, as indicated above, when talking about Palmiro Togliatti, we are dealing with a central character not only in the Italian political history of the mid-twentieth century – and, obviously, in the history of the Italian left in that period –, but also one of the main leaders of the international communist movement, which implied being, if not an accomplice of Stalin and Stalinism, at least complicit in their crimes and uncritical of their countless theoretical-political misrepresentations.
It certainly derives from the existence of this unquestionable double face – on the one hand, the intellectual and politician responsible for reflection and action of a democratizing nature, and, on the other hand, the leader who maintained a close relationship with Stalin – the confrontation of two exclusionary types of judgment on the political biography of the leader born in Genoa: while from the communist historiography comes the democratic Palmiro Togliatti, at the hands of conservative historiography comes the Stalinist Togliatti.
Despite an undeniable greater complexity of the analyzes carried out mainly after the fateful year of 1989, there appears to have been, in fact, a double mutation, which without a shadow of a doubt signals a (non-uniform) overcoming of prejudices on the part of scholars of history of Italian communism and the role played by Palmiro Togliatti, despite the recent offensive of Melonian neo-fascism in Italy: while communist hagiographic historiography gave way to critical left-wing post-communist historiography, anti-communist historiography gave way to revisionist historiography – a fact that However, it did not imply the total disappearance of interpretations linked to the contrast characteristic of the Cold War era, between communism and anti-communism, much less of analyzes of a typically Manichaean nature.
Now, a politically and intellectually complex personality, such as that of Palmiro Togliatti, is truly inaccessible to readings that insist on moving along the reductionist axis of good versus evil. Understanding the theoretical work and political role developed by Palmiro Togliatti, in the political history of the Italian and global left, brings with it the requirement to perceive him as a communist who accepted the challenges imposed by democratic thought and action.
A communist who never used the expression “Marxism-Leninism”, but who also never systematized a critique of Stalin and Stalinism (understood here as an authoritarian model for the construction of socialism, a bureaucratic form of functioning of the socialist State and communist parties and a monolithic way of theoretically conceiving Marxist thought). This is the great antinomy of Palmiro Togliatti.
This means realizing that continuity and rupture, tradition and renewal, permeate your action and your thinking in a way that never breaks an equilibrium, like a kind of “suspended contradiction”, a “permanent tension”, which constitutes the very fuel of the political project. Togliatiano: the construction of the “Italian road to socialism”, without ever breaking the “iron bond” with the USSR.
In other words, in Palmiro Togliatti's “doing politics”, the guarantee of building a “democratic strategy for socialism” was the maintenance of an unbreakable relationship with the first socialist country in the world. Thus, its political virtue and its theoretical innovation corresponded, concomitantly, to the very limit of its project – without which, however, the PCI would not have crossed the historical “snooker” of the Cold War times.[1]
Having died 20 years after Palmiro Togliatti, Enrico Berlinguer – his successor as leader of the PCI – would also carry the remains of such a historic challenge on his shoulders.
*Marco Mondaini, historian, is a professor at the Department of Social Service at UFPE and presenter of the program Trilhas da Democracia. Author, among other books, of The invention of democracy as a universal value (Avenue). [https://amzn.to/3KCQcZt]
Note
[1] In presenting such an argument, I am aware of the existence of the acute problem that surrounds the work of the historian and, in a more suffocating way, that of the specialist in contemporary history, namely: the thin thread that separates “historical interpretation” from “ historical justification”. Always having in your head the phrases of the two great masters of French and British historiography, mentioned in the epigraph of this text, perhaps serves as a possible antidote against certain slips into the field of “historical legitimization and/or condemnation”.
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