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From International Socialism (1st series), No.64, Mid-November 1973, pp.29-30.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Letters from Inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser
Maria Antonietta Macciocchi
New Left Books, £3.95
IN 1968 Maria Antonietta Macciocchi left Paris, where she was the correspondent for the Italian CP’s daily paper, Unita. In that year’s elections, she was a party candidate in the Naples multi-seat constituency. She was a deputy until 1972.
Throughout the campaign she sent letters recording her feelings and experiences to her friend, Althusser. His replies, duly recorded in the book, are mercifully few. They are more than sufficient however to dispel any illusions in the French philosopher.
His letter on the May 1968 events (p.301) is a reactionary whitewash of the French CP’s role and an indictment of student ‘leftism’. It is a superb example of the way one can use marxist language to reach profoundly un-marxist ends.
The book has some interesting sections on the sociology of the Neapolitan lumpenproletariat. The squalid conditions of life; child labour; the crass exploitation of women compelled to work at home without any of the benefits of proper employment; families whose economy is totally dependent on the family allowances (and therefore on the number of children) – all this is interesting and often vividly described.
Comrades should however reject the view expressed by the author that these are special conditions. A brief visit to Southall, Brixton, and other areas of high immigration will quickly reveal an essentially identical picture. Much of the rag trade for instance is sustained by just such home work, outside the benefits and remunerations of normal employment
The book however purports to be a critique of the CP from a revolutionary standpoint A view reinforced by the appendix, which contains articles and letters (for and against) which had appeared at the time of its publication in the CP’s theoretical magazine, Rinascita. It is therefore from this standpoint that the book needs to be analysed and judged.
The Italian CP was formed in 1921, as a revolutionary split from the Socialist Party. It was from the beginning a mass party, not a sect, deeply rooted in the working-class movement. In 1926 the party was forced underground by Mussolini’s regime. Its leader, Gramsci, was imprisoned. He was never free again, but died through medical neglect, effectively murdered, in prison in 1937.
The leadership of the party was taken over by Togliatti, who was in Russia. He survived all the purges and in fact rose to considerable fame under Stalin. He carried out a number of international assignments (some of the least savoury in Spain during the Civil War) under the assumed name of Ercoli.
As well as its representatives on the Comintern, the party maintained an organisational and political apparatus in exile in Paris, and throughout the Fascist dictatorship it kept alive an underground network in Italy itself.
Although at times it was probably better represented in many of the political prisons than outside, the CP was the only party able to maintain an underground organisation. It was therefore ideally poised to capitalise on the groundswell of anti-fascist feelings and activity which grew rapidly after 1937. Mussolini’s intervention in Spain, Ethiopia, and finally the Second World War, were widely opposed and increasingly actively resisted.
In January 1943 the Italian offensive on the Russian front collapsed. In March strikes broke out in Milan and Turin. They soon spread and took on a clearly anti-fascist character. Those forces which had supported the dictatorship all along decided to save the system by getting rid of an inconvenient figure.
Mussolini was deposed and placed under arrest, and Marshal Badoglio was placed at the head of the government by the king. On 8 September, Badoglio broadcast to the nation the news of the armistice with the allies (and immediately the king fled south).
Northern and central Italy were occupied by the Germans, Mussolini was freed and placed at the head of a puppet republic. The resistance started in earnest.
The active partisans were always a small group. Even so some 300,000 men and women died in the resistance, either in combat, prison, reprisals or German camps. In the winter of 1944-45 it has been estimated that 100,000 individuals were actively participating.
Working-class support for the partisans was overwhelming. The factories provided the men that were to become the leadership of the partisan bands and Italy was the only country to be shaken by political strikes during its resistance. Two great waves took place, in November-December 1943 and April 1944. In the second some 350,000 workers downed tools in the Milan region alone.
Of course, taken overall, the character of the resistance was that of a national liberation struggle. But this was largely the artificial result of the fact that all ‘democratic parties’ had equal representation on the ‘Committee of National Liberation’.
In reality the CP was the main force in the resistance (about 75 per cent), and also monopolised the militant factories. Thus much of the resistance was not simply concerned with the removal of fascism, but with the setting up of a new order. This fact was recognised by the combatants themselves: the partisans of bourgeois groups used to wear a tricolour neck scarf, the others a red one.
Yet this fantastic potential was to be wasted. The Moscow line was that Italy was to remain under allied control and Togliatti was the instrument of its implementation. The Communist Party declared that its objective was to ‘set up a democratic, progressive, republican state’. The third issue of its periodical (winter 1944) stated boldly:
‘The Italian working class knows that it is not its task today to struggle for the immediate institution of a socialist order.’
The partisans were disarmed in 1945, (although many kept their weapons). A new republican state was set up. The CP voted in the new parliament for the retention of the agreements between Vatican and state drawn up in 1925 by Mussolini (making Catholicism the monopoly religion). Togliatti as Minister of Justice gave an amnesty to all fascist criminals, while refusing to recognise the decisions of partisan tribunals made during the resistance.
One of the results was that convicted fascists walked the street while ex-partisans were imprisoned for ‘unlawful’ exercise of the law.
Macciocchi is unable to understand the simple fact of that massive betrayal. On the contrary she glorifies Togliatti’s ‘new mass party‘ (her emphasis). Reminiscing about her first encounter with him, she says:
‘None of us at that time was aware of the fact that there had been a division of the world into spheres of influence ... we did not know that our part of the west ... had been excluded from any prospect of socialist revolution. In this perspective – of which Togliatti was perfectly aware – his task was that of constructing a progressive democracy ... In order to do this, he needed the largest possible Communist “army”, the broadest possible alliances, the widest possible trade union unity, and first and foremost the mass party.’ (her emphasis)
Thus, ‘from the horse’s mouth’ you have the transformation of a class fighting party, designed for revolution, into a class-collaborationist alliance designed for the parliamentary game – ‘the Italian way to socialism’.
Unable to come to grips with this central truth, the author’s criticisms are superficial The final result is a barely-veiled apologia, an elaborate mystification, a useful left cover. A judgment of whether the deception is deliberate or not, is outside the purpose of this review.
One last point needs to be made. The book came out originally in Italy in 1969, as a cheaply-priced paperback. It was a publishing coup. In 1973, in Britain at £3.95, it can hardly hope to be the same success. Is NLB ideologically committed to Macciocchi’s positions? Are we witnessing a recrudescence of the Togliattism which distinguished New Left Review in the early sixties?
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