The French communists—and their Italian comrades

NORMAN K O G ~

The French Communistsmand Their Italian Comrades

Annie Kriegel, The French Communists: Profile of a People, translated by Elaine P. Halperin. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Pp. xxiv, 408. This English translation of the first edition of Annie Kriegel's Les communistes frangais suffers from having appeared after the second French edition, substantially revised, became available. As Mark Kesselman has pointed out, " t h e English translation of Kriegel's book is outdated on publication . . . . ,, 1 since Kriegel rewrote one-fourth of the book to take into account changes of personnel and strategy, and to rethink some of her major conclusions. In spite of these changes, the English edition retains considerable value, since major characteristics of the French Communists, as discussed in the second French edition, appear to have survived the recent changes, which she considers real. Especially in comparison with their Italian comrades, more numerous and even more powerful, do these characteristics show up. So we can still be grateful to Elaine P. Halpefin for her relatively smooth and felicitous translation (in only a few spots are 1. See his "Letter to the Editors," in Comparative Politics, October 1972, pp. ! 55-156.

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English phrases awkward and contorted in the effort to do justice to the original), and to the University of Chicago Press for publishing it, wishing at the same time that the time lags of American publishers could have been avoided. Kriegel describes the French Communists as a eountersoeiety, reflecting nevertheless the political and social culture of France. The overall picture, however, to quote Kesselman again, is that of a eountersociety that " h a s a Russian accent. There is a heavy stress on conventional morality, a suspicion of flamboyance, individualism and lack of orthodoxy, extensive surveillance and extreme integration into the party's collective life." ~ This appears to be very un-French, but it is not really so incompatible with French middle-class culture and perhaps worker and peasant values. The picture that Americans have of French society is colored by the behavior patterns of aristocratic, intellectual, literary, and artistic groups, centered in Paris and divergent from bourgeois, proletarian, and peasant life. If the French Communists have a heavy Russian accent, perhaps it is because the Russian bolsheviks inherited more than just a revolutionary tradition from the French middle class. Although Aristide Zolberg, in his foreword ,to the English-language edition, notes that the French Communist Party (PCF) differs significantly from the Italian Party (PCI), he is incorrect in claiming that " t h e French [Party] alone was able to eventually incorporate into its own world a substantial part of the working class. In some Paris suburbs to grow up Communist is as natural as to grow up French." 3 In these respects, the Italian Party has been more successful than the French, and to grow up Communist in the " r e d b e l t " of central Italy (especially Emilia-Romagna) is as natural as to grow up Italian. Kriegel's emphasis is on the French Communists as people, especially those who make up the central apparatus of the Party, the professionals. She does give some attention to all the others, those who vote Communist, the sympathizers, those who join and then leave (there is a substantial turnover), the intellectuals, litttrateurs, and artists. She refers to the links between the inner core and the various outer circles, to the use made of .the outer circles by the professionals of the inner core; but these references do not receive extensive or 2. Mark J. Kesselman, "Changes in the French Party System," Comparative Polities, January 1972, p. 299. 3. Kriegel, p. ix. It is true that he qualifies his comment by reference to countries where universal political citizenship was already firmly established. Universal male suffrage came to France before it came to Italy, but it was present in Italy by 1912, even if not "firmly established." The women did not get the vote in either country until after World War II.

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intensive treatment. The relation between the Party and the largest trade-union confederation, the CGT, is covered superficially, as is the role of the intellectuals and artists. She makes it clear, however, that the latter are an adornment that, while useful and prestigious, can also be bothersome and untrustworthy. In any case, intellectuals and artists do not hold positions of power in the central apparatus. And if an occasional inteUectual such as Roger Garaudy does, he gets sloughed off when he attempts innovative and creative rethinking. The professionals can appreciate changes in strategy or tactics; they are unhappy when intellectuals attempt to modernize ideology and dogma. Kriegel gives little or no attention to the role played by the Party in almost a haft-century of French politics, inside or outside of parliament. She explains this neglect by noting that there is a vast bibliography on this subject and that she does not want to add one more volume to the outpouring. She devotes a paragraph at most to the role of Communists in local governments, their efforts as mayors and communal councilors, their promotion and administration of local social-welfare services. Hers is an ethnographic study, centered on the kind of people the Communists are, especially those who make up the hard core of activists. The problem that this kind of neglect poses is raised for us by our modem studies of politieal socialization. We know (or we think we know) that the socialization process of political activists continues throughout their fives; it is not substantially completed in their late 'teens or early twenties. Participation in French parliamentary and electoral politics, in the poli,tical and administrative operations of local governments, should have lasting effects on the behavior and world-view of the participants. This certainly appears to be the case with the Italian Communists. A quarter of a century of parliamentary aotivity, a similar amount of time spent in running a substantial number of communal and provincial governments and, since 1970, three regional governments, has apparently had profound effects upon the way the central core of Italian Communist activists behaves and thinks politically. Both parties started out as battalions in an international army commanded by Moscow. The Italian Party has changed; according to Kriegel, the French has not. She writes: " i t changes, and yet . . . nothing has really changed. Unvarying, unshakable, it remains as it is . . . . The scene, the fights, the action shift but the party reappears looking as it has always looked." ~ Why? One partial and certainly insufficient explanation is that the two 4. Ibid., p. 363.

THE FRENCHCOMMUNISTS--AND THEIR ITALIANCOMRADES 187 parties used their opportunities in their respective parliamentary systems differently. The Italian Party used its position as the major opposition party in parliament to play parliamentary politics. It is in constant working relation with other parties, especially in the parliamentary committees. It is regularly making deals with the dominant Christian Democrats, who have controlled the Italian government since December 1945. Parliament is not merely an arena for launching an ideological attack against " t h e system." It provides a way of working within the system to achieve, as far as possible, some concrete changes, not to millennium. The same generalization is true of the role, function, and participation of the PCI in local government. In the process, however, participation changes the participants. The PCF never seems to have played parliamentary politics in this sense, even during ,the Third and Fourth Republics when parliament dominated, even perhaps during the short period of the Popular Front after 1936. The PCF was in parliament, but not of it. It was uncertain, unhappy, and uncomfortable with parliamentary and electoral politics, while the Italians seemed to enjoy it. PCI mayors and local activists take to the electoral game, the contact with voters, the competition with opponents. They participate easily in political and social life beyond the inner Party circles, holding meetings, doing favors for constituents who are not necessarily Party members. The PCF mayors and local councilors, on the other hand, seem to prefer bureaucracy and administration to the rough and tumble of electoral politics, to be less open to outsiders--in other words, to be more sectarian. For these reasons, I believe (although Kriegel does not say so) that for the PCF parliamentary and electoral polities are not primary. Kriegel gives two other reasons: (1) the status of the PCF as one part of a supernational ensemble, and (2) the concentration on other arenas, economic, social, and cultural.~ The PCI has never cut its ,ties with the international Communist movement, although Palmiro Togliatti had insisted since the middle 1950s that the ties were those of common ideals and a common revolutionary patrimony, not of organizational disciplines and hierarchy. The CPSU was no longer the "guiding party" for the Italians. They are as interested as the PCF, and more successful, in penetrating economic, social, and cultural arenas. In all probability, although this is an impressionistic judgment, the PCI owns more businesses and industries, controls more producer and consumer cooperatives, and exerts more influence in the trade-union movement than does the PCF. In the last category, the links with Socialist, Social Democratie, 5. Ibid., p. 390.

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and Catholic trade-union organizations, especially during the past four or five years, have given the PCI an outreach that the PCF, through the C G T , has been unable to match. At the same time, the Italians have thus been exposed to external influences from which the more sectarian French have been shielded. The PCI, like the PCF, has built a wide network of women's, youths', partisan, and resistance organizations; professional associations; and peace movements. When it comes to " f r o n t organizations" they can compete. The PCI has probably penetrated into the academic world even further than the PCF. The Italian Communists bargain with Christian Democratic and other parties for the distribution of professorships. They are well established in the world of b o o k and magazine publishers, newspapers, art museums, and galleries. Their entrenchment applies not only to the network of newspapers, reviews, and publishing houses which they openly own, but to their strong presence in the arena of elite and mass communications not identified specifically with the Party. Nevertheless, the Italians emphasize the primacy of electoral politics. It is in parliament and among the parties that the crucial dialogues will take place, requiring as large a presence as possible in every political arena. The Italians pursue a strategy consonant with the eventual goal of participation in government at the national level, from which they have been absent since 1947----a government they know they cannot dominate but can only push along the road of resolving concrete problems. In the words of Gian Carlo Pajetta, a member of the P C I political bureau, In the long run, we have opened the question of communist government participation. For the moment, it is impractical. So we have asked for the constitution of a government which would have our support every time that it needs to resolve urgent problems facing the country: democracy on the shop floor, reform of the university, judiciary, social security, community problems, etc . . . . We shall hold dialogues with the government . . . in Parliament which is there for that . . . . G The PCF, in Kriegel's judgment, has never accepted this emphasis. Rather its goal is to seize power over ,the state from its base in the larger society. 7 In one sense this is a Gramseian idea, that of creating 6. Quoted in P. A. Allum, The Italian Communist Party Since 1945: Grandeurs and Servitudes of a European Socialist Strategy, Occasional Publication

No. 2 of the University of Reading Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies (Reading: University of Reading, 1970), p. 27. 7. Or perhaps, secretly, to hope that the Red Army, with banners flying, will do the job for it.

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a Marxist-oriented social and cultural structure from which to overthrow the power of the non-Marxist state; but the French, rather than the Italians, have clung to it longer. The goal is illustrated, also, by the importance that the French Party attributes to the basic unit, the cell. Cultivation of the cell, strengthening the network of cells especially in industrial plants, is, as Kriegel reports, a critical focus of Party attention. In Italy the cells are relatively moribund. It is the sections--fundamentally village, or in the larger cities neighborhood, organizations--which are the basic operational units. Their roles are primarily electoral and propagandistie, rather than revolutionary. A shared experience of the two parties has been the historical decline in Party membership, both absolutely and in relationship to the electorate. The French Party reached its peak membership in the years immediately after World War II, the Italian Party in the early 1950s. The decline for both of them became stabilized at the end of the 1950s, and there has been no significant growth since then. Their youth organizations have shrunk substantially; in the late 1960s they faced serious challenges from the extremist New Left student groups, which flourished by proposing and engaging in acts of indiscriminate violence. In the eyes of the New Left students, both parties were bureaucratic, fossilized, and irredeemably tarred with embourgoisement. Nevertheless, except for the June 1968 election after the " M a y revolt," which induced many Communist voters to support the forces of law and order, the French Party has held its voters. It has begun to recoup its percentage of the national electorate. The Italian Party gained steadily in voting support from 1946 on, and, after a temporary stalemate in the middle 1950s, renewed its growing attraction for the Italian voter. Today the ratio of voters to Party members in both parties is larger than ever. While this phenomenon indicates an ability to penetrate the larger society, it also reveals the limitations imposed by the existence of a static base of available activists. The PCI has achieved this growing electoral support by moving faster than the PCF toward becoming a catch-all, or populist, or interclass party. The PCI has not hesitated to reach out openly to the middle class, the believing Catholics, the white-collar workers, the small and medium-scale businessmen and industrialists. It claims to be a national as well as a class party, identifying the enemy not as the bourgeoisie tout court but as the huge, private monopolies. Since most of the huge firms in Italy are owned or controlled by the state through several large super-holding corporations, this leaves very few enemies for the PCI indeed. To attract this vast, non-proletarian electorate, the PCI has had to become the champion of their griev-

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anees and dissatisfactions, which are not necessarily the classic grievances identified by Marxist doctrine, and are in some cases contradictory to the aspirations of the proletarian masses. 8 The PCF has moved much more slowly away from the classical mass-party. It appears to be far more reluctant and less comfortable in reaching out to popular sectors beyond the classic triad of workers, peasants, and intellectuals. When, in the early 1960s, elements inside the French Party, especially in ,the youth organizations, pushed for a more " I t a l i a n " approach, Mauriee Thorez successfully fought off their campaign and reimposed a Stalinist discipline. So we have two Latin parties, the one following an Italian way and the other a French way to socialism, with the French way, as described by Kriegel, exhibiting far more of a " R u s s i a n accent." How do we account for these differences? One explanation is to ascribe them to a false comparison between outer appearances and inner reality. Kriegel had access to and knowledge of the inner workings of the French Party and the people who make up its central apparatus. I have never had such access to comparable sectors of the Italian Party. Perhaps if I were able to penetrate that inner core, I might conclude that the Italian Party has far more of a Russian accent than I think it has; and perhaps the differences between the two parties have been unjustifiably magnified in this review. Another explanation is to account for different or changing political behavior by reference to differences or changes in underlying socioeconomic conditions. The " e n d of ideology" debate, which for the most part has been a debate over the end of historic Marxist ideology, has emphasized to a substantial degree the effect of rising levels of economic development on .the validity of the premises of classic Marxist doctrine. In advanced countries the proletariat and the peasantry---defined in terms of soeio-eeonomie status, not in terms of the possession of a revolutionary class consciousness--are a steadily declining portion of the total population. The inevitable impoverishment and proletarianization of the lower bourgeoisie has been belied by experience. So Marxist parties have to change their assumptions and strategies, or else risk being dumped on the ash heap of history. 8. This policy of opening to the middle classes has incurred recent, suspicions among a younger generation of PCI activists. They appear to have little confidence that the bourgeoisie which their Party courts could be counted upon if a real crisis were to occur. Perhaps this generation has been affected by the attacks and charges of their New Left cohorts. See Stephen M. Hellman, "Generational Differences in the Federal Apparatus of the Italian Communist Party: Origins and Implications" (mimeographed). A paper presented at the 1972 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C, September 5-9, 1972.

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The levels of economic and social development in France and Italy do not show close linkage with new ideological outlooks. France has been ahead of Italy in all significant respects throughout the nineteenth and thus far in the twentieth century. All the standard economic indicators--gross national product, national product per capita, percentages of the labor force in agriculture, industry, and tertiary sectors --reveal the French lead. When it comes to education and training, the French have had on the average more years of schooling, higher levels of literacy, and a much larger reading public than have the Italians. Since World War II both countries have made enormous economic strides. Although for a short period in the early 1960s Italy was moving ahead at an even faster rate than France, France has since then taken the lead of Europe in the rate of economic growth. The gap between the two countries remains substantial. Arguing from this evidence, the French rather than the Italian Party should be in the forefront of change. Rather it has been the reverse, with the French Party reluctantly, hesitatingly, unwillingly, it seems, adjusting to the changing world around it. The Italians, on the contrary, appear to have moved forward more vigorously and confidently. Nor can it be claimed that the "Italian economic miracle" produced the basic revision in thinking. The Italian way to socialism was publicly laid out in its major premises by Togliatti in 1944 and 1945, as World War II was slowly coming to an end. Half the country was in ruins, over 40 percent of the labor force was still in agriculture (the number is less than 20 percent today): no one could forecast at that time any economic miracles or second industrial revolutions. The oppressive atmosphere of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with concomitant Stalinist pressures, muted the full application of the "Italian w a y " but did not suppress it: and in the mid-1950s it was put forward again by the Italian Communist leaders. The modernization of thinking preceded, not followed, the modernization of economic and social structures. This does not mean that changing soeio-economic conditions have not influenced political analysis and political ~behavior. Even the French Party, in spite of the reluctance of its central apparatus and leadership, has had to adjust to the world around it and to the Gaullist economic and political challenge. It would seem to me that these adjustments, both in France and Italy, are not easily reversible. No matter how unhappy many of the activists in both countries, including the younger generation, may be with a populist rather than a elassist approach, the modification in class structures in both countries makes the old classist approach untenable---that is, if free elections continue to exist and remain crucial to political success.

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Another explanation for the differences may be found in the historical experiences of the two parties between the two World Wars. The PCI was just barely getting on its feet when fascism in Italy outlawed all other parties and drove them into exile or underground. The anti-fascist underground struggle of the PCI during the 1920s and 1930s was an experience not shared by the PCF, which had only to resist a foreign occupation and a satellite Vichy regime for three years in the early 1940s? The anti-fascist struggle fostered tendencies in the PCI toward collaboration with non-Communist elements, even when it was not official Soviet policy. For example, the first Unity of Action Pact between the Italian Communist and Socialist partiesin-exile dates from 1934, one year before the Seventh Congress of the Communist International proclaimed the Popular Front and United Front strategies. It can be presumed, of course, that Moscow gave at least tacit approval to the Italian experiment. The Unity of Action Pact lasted until the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Treaty of 1939. It was renewed after the German attack on Russia in June 1941 and lasted until 1959 when the Socialists formally dropped it, although it was gradually disintegrating earlier. This long period of association and cooperation with the PSI served to reduce the isolation of the PCI in comparison with that of the PCF. Both Communist parties were out of their respective governments after 1947; but in Italy the Socialists joined the Communists in opposition, while in France the Communists were alone. In Italy the PSI continues to collaborate with the PCI in mass organizations, especially the CGIL (in comparison with the CGT), and in local, provincial, and regional governments up to the present time. The PSI minority presence in the mass organizations and local governments served to broaden the perspectives of the PCI and to moderate the sectarian tendencies. One example may be illustrative. In 1957 after Italy signed the treaty establishing the Common Market, the CGIL adopted an attitude of sympathetic interest, contrary to Soviet and PCI wishes. Although the Communists were and are the dominant force in the big trade union CGIL, the Socialist presence and perspective influenced their attitude. At that time the Party was not yet ready to go along; Party discipline prevailed and the CGIL Communists fell back into line. By 1961 the CGIL leaders were openly endorsing the Common Market, and by 1962 the PCI publicly affirmed its support, in defiance of Moscow. 9. I am dating the beginning of this resistance in June 1941 when Nazi Germany attacked Soviet Russia, although French Communists prefer to date it earlier.

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The PCF, in contrast, has lacked this record of persistent links with other forces of the left. Only during the short period of the Popular Front after 1936, and again in the resistance and immediate postwar periods, have the French Communists joined forces with other political groupings. In 1972 again, the Communists and Socialists have made an electoral agreement. Throughout most of its history, the PCF has been isolated, and this historical isolation from the larger French political community may help to explain some of its persistent characteristics. Another explanation for the differences between the two Communist parties can be found in differing aspects of French and Italian social behavior. In France people mix socially far less than in Italy; there is much more reserve and privacy. In Italy there are wider social contacts, even though a heavy emphasis is still given to the family circle. The Italian spends more of his life out of doors and in public--in the square and in the bar, discussing, arguing, exhorting. The Frenchman appears to believe that discussion and debate are a waste of time. In both countries social stratification is marked, but to an even greater degree in France than in Italy, encouraging the persistence of a traditional classist mentality. Even the formalism and the abstraction of the French language encourage stereotyped expressions and dogmatic outlooks, affecting the world-view of its users. 1° The greater sectarianism of the French Party is in part a reflection of the larger milieu. Most important of all are the types of people who dominate and symbolize the two parties. It can be debated whether they reflect the essential ideal-type of their party or whether their parties are a reflection of them. Kriegel emphasizes that the symbol and the prototype of the real French Communist is the skilled steel worker, and that skilled workers have dominated the Central Committee of the Party numerically and in outlook. ~ The names of Thorez, Waldeck Rochet, and Georges Marchais reflect the kind of leadership this kind of party raises. In Italy a different image and a different type of leader have prevailed. Symbolized by the names of Antonio Gramsci, Togliatti, Enrico Berlinguer, and Giorgio Amendola, we have here representatives of the intellectual, cultural, and aristocratic classes. They came from a tradition that still reflected the humanism of the Italian heritage and the liberalism of Benedetto Croce, who dominated Italian cultural and intellectual life for the first half of this century. It has been noted earlier that in at least one respect the French I0. I am indebted to Sidney Tarrow for the insights contained in this paragraph. 11 Kriegel, pp. 87-90.

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Party, knowingly or not, has given emphasis to one of Gramsci's arguments about the importance of social penetration. A cursory examination of Gramsci's larger corpus of writing will reveal, however, the Italian emphasis on elitism and voluntarism, and especially the crucial role of the educated man and the creative intellectual. There is present a suspicion of crude Marxist determinism; a rejection of the belief that the holy Marxist fathers of the nineteenth century had laid down the truth, in its perfect form, once and for all. In the 1930s Togliatti, even while an obedient and loyal bureaucrat in the Comintern apparatus, could argue, in the words of Fritz Fisher: It is necessary for each of us to re-establish continually the balance between the intellectual and the man of action, within the individual who gives to his thought perspectives for the future; in this way only can we educate the party in its totality to reach an analogous equilibrium. If the Communist intellectual neglects this duty, soon the party will be led only by organizers, by manipulators and tacticians. Fisher concludes : " H i s antipathy was directed to those functionaries who considered Marxism a closed system, a catechism in which all the basic problems had already received their definitive answer." x2 In the 1930s a new group of young university students and intellectuals joined the PCI because they felt it to be the only effective group fighting fascism, not because they were convinced, dogmatic Marxists. They too came from the Crocean tradition. Berlinguer, the current Secretary-General, and Amendola, a leading member of the Party executive, date from this era; the first, the offspring of landed aristocrats of a liberal-socialist tradition, the second, the son of the leading democratic adversary of Mussolini in the early 1920s. At the time of the New Left student revolts in the late 1960s, both the French and Italian parties could condemn the student revolutionaries for adventurism and left-wing infantilism. These are classic Leninist denunciations. But Amendola could go further and warn the students that the days of nineteenth-century barricade Communism were long since past. This is not to argue that the PCI does not have a mass base or deep roots among the industrial workers. On the contrary, the bulk of its votes still comes from workers and peasants while it extends its influence into the middle classes. It cultivates especially the metalmechanics union, the proletarian aristocracy of Italy, the equivalent of the French steel workers. Nevertheless, survey research analysis 12. L'Espresso, February 4, 1973, pp. 18-19.

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reveals that it is the least educated and least skilled workers, the poorest and least educated of the peasants, and ,the landless farm laborers and sharecroppers who are the most numerous backers of the Party. These groups cannot challenge the educated leaders for domination and control. I have presented a number of explanations for the differences between the French and Italian Communist parties. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I think the most important of the explanations is perhaps the difference in Party leadership. Leadership can change over time, and some French and Italian commentators believe that in the past two or three years the PCF is finally becoming Italianized under the direction of Marchais. xB The terms of the 1972 agreement between the French Communist and Socialist parties, and the very agreement itself, could not be anticipated on the evidence of Kriegel's volume, for the terms go beyond a classical popular-front coalition. Yet the claim that the French have finally adopted the Italian way to socialism should only be accepted with reservations. Francois Mitterrand, who negotiated the accord for the Socialists, told a French political writer that when the sections of the common program referring to international questions were under discussion, " t h e Communists interrupted themselves every half hour to telephone Moscow." 1~ I doubt, although I cannot prove it, that the Italian Communists would do this. To nourish my doubt is a passage in Berlinguer's address to the Central Committee of the PCI in February 1973. In it he describes the international posture that a united Europe, which the PCI supports, should have. Only peaceful coexistence can save humanity, but coexistence does not mean dividing the world into spheres of influence dominated by the superpowers. Neither of them can speak for other countries. He calls on Italy to play a role in Europe aiming toward " t h e progressive overcoming of counterpoised military blocs until they are finally liquidated." Western Europe, he concludes, can be "neither anti-Soviet nor anti-American," but must promote friendship with both. x5 I doubt that the French Communists would put Russia and America on the same level internationally. The Italians would not do so morally, for they still believe that capitalism is a morally corrupt system. But they are heirs of Maehiavelii as well as of Marx and Gramsei, and Machiavelli taught that polities and morality are two separate areas of human experience. 13. See Jean Daniel, " P C F : Berlinguer tradotto in Franeese" (PCF: Berlinguer Translated into French), L'Espresso, February 18, 1973, p. 14. 14. La Stampa, February 9, 1973. 15. Ibid., February 8, 1973.