ABSTRACT
In Italy, the increase in political mobility and in class struggle were bound together with the crisis of the social economy. As long as capitalism is able to create revolutionary changes in the social/technical division of labour, social mobility becomes one of its dominant features. In addition, 'neo-capitalism' in Italy promoted the entire model of production and labour relations which had been fully developed in America during the 1930s and thoughtfully analysed by Gramsci. The duplicity of Italian Communist Party (PCI) was thus a duplicity over the interpretation of capitalist modernisation. This interpretation encompasses, as two distinct moments of one and the same process, both dimensions of the Marxist discourse of modernity. However, the point at issue is that the Catholics, and particularly their left-wing radical group at which the PCI aimed, had an anti-secular ideology which contradicted the very notion of modernity.
