Urban Movements and Communist Power in Florence

Abstract

In what ways is a political party that seeks political and social transformation itself affected by policies it institutes once in power? This article discusses the Italian Communist party (PCI) in its first years at the helm of Florence's city government. My primary aim is to examine the effects of the Florentine Communists' major policy initiative while in office on the party's own organization, as well as on the links with the society the PCI seeks to lead and transform. The crucial tie that the PCI has sought with a politically mobilized Italian society has been jeopardized by reforms the party itself has instituted while in power and by particular strategic choices characteristic of Communist rule in Florence and in other cities where the PCI predominates. The Florentine PCI's experience indicates that latent tensions and ambiguities in Italian Communist strategy have now become real and alarming sources of disunity, conflict, and contradiction. Conventional wisdom, extensive scholarship, and political polemic all suggest that the mass parties of the Left-whether overtly revolutionary in their intentions or not-are prone to crisis upon coming to power. There is a common thread sewn through experiences as diverse as the French Popular Front government of 1936, the British Labour party in power in 1945, and Chile's late Unidad Popular government. All these Left governments have unsuccessfully sought to use the liberal democratic institutions they inherited for the achievement of their goals. In the process, all of them downplayed the benefits of popular mobilization for political and social transformation.' Speaking of the parties of France's Popular Front, Ralph Miliband has summarized the consequences: