ABSTRACT
Pietro Ingrao’s remark in a conference held in Athens by the KKE Interior’s Centre of Marxist Studies in 1984 that “the Left could acquire the ability to manage the nation state, just at the moment that the latter’s tools are being rendered useless by the new global order” reflects the way Eurocommunism responded to the global economic crisis of the 1970s and the transformations it brought in its train. Our analysis here will move on three interdependent levels, which could be summarized as the description of a major turn that has remained incomplete. At the macro-historical level the Eurocommunist parties successfully surpassed the paradigm that had been shaped by the reaction of the European communist movement to the previous great capitalist crisis of the 1930s. They succeeded in moving, in a coordinated fashion beyond the post-war planned-economy model, common to both Western and Eastern Europe, adopting positions that frequently displayed originality. But ultimately, in both the short term and the long term, the theoretical and political inventiveness of Eurocommunism came up against its limits in just the way Ingrao described: while it succeeded in formulating a modern framework for left-wing economic policy at the national level, it largely failed, like its “enemy brother” social democracy, to adopt a persuasive position against the greatest transformation brought about by the crisis of 1970: the transition from national to supranational. That which, ultimately, was achieved, in hegemonic terms, by the conservative neo-liberal counter-offensive.
