The Italian Communist Party and the Birth of il manifesto: Languages and Cultures of a Conflict (1966-1970)

Abstract

The essay describes the rise and fall of the Italian Communist Party (ICP)’s dissident leftist wing taking its name from the journal il manifesto, which was its main tribune. The unauthorized monthly, founded in June 1969, was the main cause of a conflict that exploded following a creeping antagonism between the party leading bodies and the minority. This contrast involved some major issues related to international relations, ideology and, most of all, the party’s internal democracy. Its worsening was also due to the death of the ICP’s general secretary Palmiro Togliatti in 1964, which provoked a lack of unifying leadership and the emerging of such divergent identities within the party. The controversial history of il manifesto, which was bound to become one of the major protagonists of the European Left in the 1970s, represents well the evolving handling of dissidences in the post-1968 ICP. With respect to procedural solutions that were mostly based on the punishment of the dissent, the treatment of il manifesto shows a more negotiating model, in which administrative disciplinary procedures coexist with informal interactions between the two fronts as well as a real debate within them. The expulsion of the undisciplined militants was the solution of a long-lasting and intense confrontation, which the essay analyses by seeking to decrypt its communicational, cultural and ritual aspects.