ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the political thinking behind Dario Fo's 1973 play Guerra di popolo in Cile. Before the September 1973 coup the very existence and reforming policies of Salvador Allende's government were frequently invoked by parliamentary Socialists against revolutionaries such as Dario Fo, to argue that real and significant reforms could actually be made through parliament. Dario Fo believed that dictators such as Pinochet could only be defeated by mass action, principally outside parliament. For Dario Fo, Berlinguer could no longer believe in socialism because he wanted to accommodate to these anti-democratic and anti-parliamentary forces, in other words not threaten the interests of powerful forces in society. So the Chilean coup represented a turning point, a trigger, for the Italian Communist Party to move slowly but steadily away from any notion of communism or socialism, and to become initially tolerant of, and by the 1990s, totally integrated with the traditions of the Italian state.
