Italian Communists and the Gramscian Traditions

So remarked Enrico Berlinguer, leader of the Italian Communist party Partito Comunista Italiano—PCI), in a recent report to its Central Committee. Yet the casual reader of the rest of his report might be forgiven for not having divined this antipathy. For while one reads, for example, about the importance of Italian participation in the European Economic Community, about the “major moments” in recent “parliamentary life,” “the youth question,” and “welfare and pension policy,” nowhere does one find any discussion of such traditional Communist policies as the nationalization of industry, centralized economic planning, or a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Even the critique of...