The Italian Communist Party and the Vision of the Future

After World War II, the Italian Communist Party (Pci) wanted to differentiate it-self from socialist messianism. Therefore, as Norberto Bobbio remarked in 1955, it chose not to anchor its political action on a «contrast between, on the one hand, a historical society with oppressed people and oppressors, and, on the other hand, a metahistorical society without oppressors and oppressed people». Nevertheless, there is no doubt that in the "hard years" of the Cold War the reference to "dialec-tical materialism", although mitigated by the publication of Antonio Gram-sci’s Prison Notebooks, had a bearing on defining a teleological perspective that left long-term traces in the party’s vision. After 1956, however, a certain ideologi-cal indefiniteness, the proliferation of different paradigms of Marxism, the geopo-litical transformation of the world, and other factors, all reverberated on the PCI’s vision of the future, which tended to identify with the political line of the party it-self. In the last two decades of the Cold War there were no more certainties about the future of the world: if the "need for socialism" was reaffirmed, the same could not be said of the certainty of its advent, which no longer represented in any way a fact inscribed in the "Dialectic of History".

Keywords: Italian Communist Party, ideology, Marxism, Workerism, future, Antonio Gramsci

Ermanno Taviani, Il Partito comunista italiano e la visione del futuro in "MONDO CONTEMPORANEO" 2-3/2022, pp 195-213, DOI: 10.3280/MON2022-002009