ABSTRACT
The Italian Communist party's (PCI) schema rests upon a compelling logic. The PCI strategy anticipates the possibility of an essentially political solution to this stalemate – that is, it looks to an institutional restructuring that would liberate the rationalizing potential arrested by a faltering bourgeois regime. A PCI-dominated state would stimulate institutional "renewal" and become what Ingrao has referred to as the ''protagonist of the masses." The PCI has carried its acceptance of the private sector much further–to levels that even the Togliatti leadership would surely have found objectionable. The PCI's aim is to eliminate the political clientelism and conservative obstructionism that have been so deeply entrenched in the Italian public bureaucracy since the fascist period and to replace it with a professionalized meritocracy independent of any single political formation. PCI-engineered rationalization would also involve the transition from private to social forms of consumption, congruent with a reorienting of the public sector.
