Italian Communism: The New and the Old

Is the PCI—Partito Comunista Italiano—”different”? Different from what, should be the immediate response to so general a question. No longer the sectarian party it was at its birth, nor the paragon of popular-front tactics it became in the 1930s, the PCI is still not, nor is it ever likely to be, a classical social democratic party. Yet the circumstances of its birth, development, and current strategy leave the possibility that the party will transcend the classical oppositio...