The Communist Party and the End of the Politics of "National Unity" in Italy

Abstract

The historiography of post-war Italy is still indebted to the theme of the end of the governments of national unity ( May 1947) and to the persistent efforts of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to consolidate and defend in increasingly adverse international and domestic conditions its conquests of the Resistance period and its immediate aftermath. The main controversy over the position of the ICP after the referendum on the Republic and the elections to the Constituent Assembly (CA) of 2 June 1946, which has been waged in writings of a more general nature, the work of bourgeois authors, essentially boils down, albeit with different nuances, to the two craggy opinions - that the Communists were waiting for the opportune moment to launch a direct attack on the government or that they were disappointed by the results of the elections, which revealed for the seventh time the transience of the radical mood generated by the struggle for national liberation, they were content with what they had achieved, abandoning the implementation of the ideas of the Resistance.
Marxist historiography, for its part, generally supports the official thesis of the ICP, according to which it followed the only line of conduct that was correct in the conditions of the time, moderate in form but classist in content. But it seems that both bourgeois historians and Marxist authors - and this is quite natural, since these are works which only touch in passing on the subject under study - rather skim the surface of events, taking account of this or that positive or negative element in the activities of the Communists, without appreciating the main thing, the great task which the Party then had to solve.