THE ANTI-FASCIST RESISTANCE AND THE SHIFT IN POLITICAL-CULTURAL STRATEGY OF THE ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY 1936-1948

The dissertation traces the changes in political and cultural strategy of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the anti-Fascist period, changes which culminated in the World War II resistance, 1943-1945. It is my contention that the shift in the party's tactics cannot be understood in purely political terms, but involves an analysis of cultural activity as well.; Part I is an overview of the period 1921-1943, when the PCI was effectively repressed by the Fascist regime in Italy and when PCI militants, like those of other western Communist parties, increasingly toed the line with respect to Comintern discipline from Moscow. During this period the PCI vacillated between a sectarian and insurrectionary strategy aimed at violent seizure of power, and a more calculated "popular front" stance in concert with other anti-Fascist exiles and with the nascent anti-Fascists of the so-called "legal resistance" within Italy.; Part II treats the rapid growth of the PCI during the armed resistance, the Party's realization that a Bolshevik-style revolution would be impossible in the presence of the Anglo-American allies, and the ideological adjustments that the Party made in response to this situation. The aim of the so-called partito nuovo or "new Communist Party" was to become a mass party with seats in the postwar Cabinet. Part II also deals with the paradox of how the PCI opened its doors to non-Marxists precisely when the party's Stalinism was at its zenith.; Part III considers the new constituencies which the partito nuovo tried to attract or appease during and after the resistance: Catholics, peasants, and intellectuals. This constituency-building was a corollary of the Party's view that the path to power was to be a long-term "war of position," cultural as well as political.; The Epilogue relates the decline in the PCI's political prospects after World War II. The PCI, having failed to achieve cabinet-level power, strove to defend and advance its gains in the cultural and intellectual arena as a prelude to hoped-for political power on a national level.