ABSTRACT
The Italian Communist party (PCI) was founded in 1921, when a left-radical group led by Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci, under pressure from the Communist International, split off from the Italian Socialist party and formed the Partito Comunista d’Italia. When the PCI held its Seventeenth Congress in Florence in April 1986, all alarm bells were ringing for this largest and most influential Communist party in Western Europe. Political democracy since 1956 has been for the PCI the basis of the road to socialism and of socialism itself. The theses of the congress emphasized not only the “heritage of the history and ideals of the workers’ movement,” but also the importance of the “liberal and democratic revolutions” of the nineteenth century. Paimiro Togliatti, and his successors as party leader Luigi Longo, Enrico Berlinguer, and Alessandro Natta took their program from the Gramscian conceptions with important lessons drawn from the experience with fascism.
