The Italian left was once the largest and most impressive popular movement for social change in Western Europe. Comprising two mass parties, each with its own history and culture, and each committed not to ameliorating but to overcoming capitalism, the postwar alliance between Socialists and Communists, the PSI and PCI, did not survive the boom of the 1950s. In 1963, Pietro Nenni took the Socialists into government for the first time as junior partners of the Christian Democrats, on a path that would ultimately lead to Bettino Craxi, leaving Italian Communism in unchallenged command of opposition to the Christian Democrat regime. From the beginning, the PCI had been organisationally and ideologically the stronger of the two, with a wider mass base - more than two million members by the mid-1950s, extending from peasants in the South through artisans and teachers in the middle of the country to industrial workers in the North. It also had a richer intellectual heritage, in Gramsci's newly published Prison Notebooks, whose significance was immediately recognised well beyond the party. At its height, the PCI could draw on an extraordinary range of social and moral energies, combining both deeper popular roots and broader intellectual influence than any other force in the country.

LRB 12 March 2009 | PDF Download