Italian Communism, the Working Class, and Organized Catholicism

Abstract

F ROM THE BEGINNING of the post-Fascist period the Italian Communist party followed the policy of insertion in Italian society and collaboration with other political and social forces, especially the Socialist party, the Roman Catholic Church and the political party identified with it, the Christian Democratic party. Collaboration with the Socialists antedated World War II. A of pact had been signed in 1934 by Communist and Socialist leaders exiled in France, one year before the VIIth Congress of the Communist International formally proclaimed the popular front and united front strategies. This Unity of Action agreement was ruptured in 1939 as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, but was renewed in 1941 after the German invasion of Russia. During the war Communists participated in the various underground committees which, after the Italian surrender of September, 1943, became the Committees of National Liberation. Within these Committees they followed, in general, a conservative line, supporting collaboration with the monarchy, with the Church, and with the United Nations Allies. They were part of the first post-war political government formed in southern Italy in April, 1944 and remained in subsequent Committee of National Liberation governments even when the Socialist and Action parties temporarily withdrew from them, as happened in December, 1944. They early demonstrated, in other words, their preference for sharing power within the government to a position of external opposition. Within a few weeks after the end of the war in Italy Palmiro Togliatti went to Milan, the center of the northern partisan resistance to the Nazi-Fascist occupation, where he informed his northern comrades that the party would have to follow the legal rather than the revolutionary way to power. There was no Red Army to covet a revolution. There were over one million Anglo-American troops in Italy to suppress one,