ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the problem through four major instances: the historical, the ideological, the political and the economic. Revisionism's first distinctiveness recognises the link between the political strategy of the party of the working class, on the one hand, and the very changes capitalism undergoes in its various developmental phases, on the other. In fact, the disarticulation of the Fordist paradigm and the fragmentation of the ruling political class of the First Republic — including the crisis and transformation of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) — reduced both the rates of unionisation and the bargaining power of the unions. The PCI opted for the path which, as practical necessity and political orientation, had always prevailed in the party's post-war tradition: the reformist/Social Democratic road. Yet, mutatis mutandis, neo-revisionism considered its policy in parallel with the mainstream strategic lines of the post-war PCI, while Communist Refoundation was in a conflictual/class relationship to them.
