80th Anniversary of Italian Communist Party

["Jay Moore" <research@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Italy's left split in celebration of defunct communist party
ROME, Jan 18 (AFP) -

Italy's once proud communist party (PCI) vanished from the country's
political landscape in 1989 in the same way it was created -- through a
split which continues to leave its heirs in disarray as they prepare to mark
the 80th anniversary of its foundation on Sunday.

The PCI, during the cold war years western Europe's biggest and most
influential communist party, was created after splitting from the socialists
on January 21, 1921. The party decided to dissolve in 1989, only days after
the fall of the Berlin Wall as hardline communism was crumbling throughout
eastern Europe.

A name change was made final two years later when the PCI split into the
moderate democratic party of the left (PDS), which was to become the social
democrat Left-wing Democrats (DS), and a minority communist group, the PRC.

Today three parties -- the governing Left-wing Democrats, the PRC and the
moderately communist PDCI which backs Prime Minister Giuliano Amato's
center-left government -- lay claim to the old communist party's estate.

But while self-assertion is the keyword for the communists, Left-wing
Democrats fighting an uphill battle to keep the center-left in power in
upcoming legislative elections are not planning any public celebration.

The DS led one of four center-left governments under Massimo D'Alema for 18
months after the resignation of the center-left's first premier Romano
Prodi, now the president of the European Commission.

The party has 165 deputies in the lower house of parliament and seven
ministers in Amato's government.

"We will not just celebrate January 21 but reaffirm that politics must be
serious, coherent and honest," said Marco Rizzo, one of the PDCI's leading
figures.

His party, which was only founded in 1998 after moderates split from the
more hardline PRC, is represented in Amato's government by two ministers,
for public works and equal opportunities.

Party militants are planning to hold an anniversary rally in Rome Sunday.

The hardline opposition PRC, on the other hand, will return to where it all
happened and celebrate the birth of Italian-style communism in Leghorn.

Italy's old socialist party split among reformers and supporters of
Soviet-style communism, led by Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, at its
17th congress in the Tuscan port in 1921.

On Sunday, 1,000 bottles of red Montepulciano d'Abruzzo wine, one of Italy's
best, will be for sale at the Leghorn meeting, complete with a label that
carries the miniature reproduction of the poster designed for the founding
congress.

In its prime after World War II, the now defunct communist party had a
membership of more than two million, garnering more than 30 percent of the
votes in general elections.

After backing Moscow in 1956 when Soviet troops quelled the Hungarian
uprising, the party condemned the Soviet clampdown in Czechoslovakia in 1968
and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979.

Two years later Italy's communist leaders expressed support for the Soviet
bloc's first independent trade union Solidarity in Poland, which was later
banned by communist general Wojciech Jaruzelski.

The party created its own form of communism, labeled Eurocommunism which
distanced itself from Moscow's hardline leadership under Leonid Brezhnev,
and in the 1970s under Enrico Berlinguer sought alliances with centrist
parties in what was to be called the "historic compromise" to ease a
possible rise to power.

At the same time, the party deleted all reference to communist staples like
the dictatorship of the proletariat, democratic centralism and
Marxism-Leninism.

But it failed to enter any government after the death at the hands of Red
Brigades terrorists of christian democrat leader Aldo Moro, a key supporter
of a center-left alliance including the communists.