La Terza Via

Conclusion From these critical contributions, it is clear that there exists, among secondary commentators, extensive support for Carl Boggs's claim that the strategy of the Southern European communist parties, and the PCI in particular, represents not an optimistic third path but a return to the original path of Bernsteinian social democracy. There is also evident a widespread, if not universal, belief that orthodox leninism does not offer a satisfactory alternative. But while the standing of the PCPs Terza Via as an alternative to either social democracy or leninism is thus repeatedly questioned, counterposed authentically distinctive and radical accounts of the third way are, at best, rudimentary. Though not wholly unsupported, the advocacy of anti-passive revolution or sweeping transformation of the state gives very little indication of what an alternative third way would entail in practice in, for example, the Italian context. This is clearly one source of the PCI's impatience with its overly theoretical critics.If the suggestions of Buci-Glucksmann, Poulantzas, and others are too general and programmatic, it is possible that a practical alternative to the established party interpretation of the Terza Via might be sought among differing positions within the PCI. If we take the PCI's most recent strategy - the pursuit of the Democratic Alternative - it is indeed possible to identify significant divergences between right and left. As presented by Berlinguer, the strategy of Democratic Alternative was seen to consummate a breach with the Historic Compromise - a move away from Christian Democracy in favor of a left alternative, a move away from an exclusive reliance upon parliamentary alliance in favor of a mobilisation of social forces and movements. But he continued to emphasize that the party's electoral strength... is still the decisive factor in changing the balance of forces in favor of the alternative, while Napolitano, speaking for the right of the party, has tended to view the Democratic Alternative as a strategy for party and parliamentary alliance with the PSI, as the basis of a government able to pursue a policy for the relaunching of (economic) development in such a way as to avoid fuelling inflation. By contrast, Pietro Ingrao, spokesperson of the left of the party, has insisted that the alternative is not simply a proposal for central government and he has given much more weight to the promotion of a more general radical social movement organized around the pursuit of radical social alliances, built upon greater local autonomy and in-party democracy.But it is not clear that (even) this left variant of the Democratic Alternative has defined the grounds upon which a more radical Tefza Via could be constructed. Indeed, the experience of the PCI strategists themselves lends considerable support to the belief that there are chronic difficulties in overcoming the social democracy-leninism divide from within even a broadly conceived Marxian framework. For example, the experience of the new social movements - to which all sides of the PCI express themselves to be open - illustrates the considerable difficulties of comprehending the diversity of contemporary emancipatory struggles with the tools of conventional Marxian class analysis. Similarly, the ambivalence of state action - neatly captured in Offe's claim that socialism in industrially advanced societies cannot be built without state power and it cannot be built upon state power - is illcomprehended by classical Marxist accounts of the capitalist state and its withering away. In short, the evidence of the Italian experience suggests both that an emancipatory politics is perhaps not best understood as the pursuit of a third road to socialism and that, in fact, such a politics can no longer be exclusively based upon Marxian premises. Contemporary circumstances suggest the need for a new evaluation of the nature of state and civil society and a view of democracy and pluralism quite at variance with the rudimentary positions of both social democracy and leninism.If the capacity of the left wing of the PCI to respond to this challenge is doubtful, the prospects of the mainstream PCI meeting it are minimal. For they are resolutely committed to a reformist interpretation of the Terza Via in which a deeply entrenched commitment to Marxism as an objectivistic theory of social development seems to legitimate, as it did for the Second International, a largely reformist practice. But, at the same time, it should be clear that this is a commitment that arises less from doctrinal preferences than from the institutional and practical dilemmas experienced by any socialist party seeking mass electoral support. It is a difficulty starkly posed by Przeworski: Participation in electoral politics is necessary if the movement for socialism is to find mass support among workers, yet this participation seems to obstruct the attainment of final goals. Under the peculiar exclusionary circumstances of Italian politics, this problem is especially pronounced. In the election of 1983, under the new strategy, the Communist vote held up quite well, (down 0.5% at 29.9%), while the DC tumbled from 38.3% to 32.9%. In the European elections of 1984, the PCI even crept ahead of the DC. But despite these historical reversals for Christian Democracy, Italy continued to be governed by a DC-PSI coalition, under the premiership of the PSI leader Bettino Craxi. Committed to an electoral strategy, the Italian communists - powerful in the unions, strongly embedded in civil society, experienced and widespread in local government, consistently able to secure around a third of the popular vote - still found themselves excluded from governmental power.The irony of the PCI's position is neatly caught by Middlemas: the PCI has come closer than any other CP to bridging the ancient gap between the Second and Third Internationals, yet the only fruit appears to be that it has inherited what in the halcyon mid-70s it used to call the crisis of social democracy. While elements of a radical third way may indeed be found in the experience of Italian Marxism, the PCI repeatedly finds its options foreclosed, on the one hand, by the limitations of social democracy and, on the other, by the unacceptability of leninism. Indeed, its continuing difficulties, in the face of its very considerable strengths, lend further support to the claim that even a quite radically reconstructed Marxism is inadequate to the task of defining a satisfactory basis for a democratic socialist politics. This is evident in the circumlocutions in which the PCI has found itself involved in reconciling its day-to-day political practice to the broadest parameters of Marxian analysis. From this, it seems clear that if a radical Terza Via is indeed to emerge, it is unlikely to arise from within the mainstream of Italian Communism.

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La Terza Via

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