Palmiro Togliatti was the chairman of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 to his death in 1964.
He represented revisionism. In 1944, when the partisans were armed and ready to seize power, he capitulated to bourgeois politicians, fascists, and imperialists in the Salerno U-Turn.
He sowed the seeds of Eurocommunism in Italy.
His errors were rooted in bourgeois parliamentarism - making deals with bourgeois politicians rather than building a mass movement.
The danger that Social-Democratic survivals in the Communist Parties can represent for the revolution was strikingly revealed by the sad experience of the Workers' Government in Saxony, where the opportunist leaders tried to convert the idea of a united front, as a means for the revolutionary mobilization and organization of the masses, into a means for Social-Democratic parliamentary combinations. This marked a turning point, which opened the eyes of the Party membership and roused them against the opportunist leaders." - Stalin, Concerning the International Situation[1]
End of WWII[edit | edit source]
The fascist general Pietro Badoglio, who had committed genocide in Libya and Ethiopia, surrendered in September 1943 to the Allies. He and the Italian Monarchy signed an armistice with the Allies, and declared war on Nazi Germany in October. Wikipedia admits, "The British government saw Badoglio as a guarantor of an anti-communist post-war Italy. Consequently, Badoglio was never tried for Italian war crimes committed in Africa."[2]
On the mass level, communists had led the partisan resistance, and were now extremely popular and well armed. Yet in 1944, Togliatti carried out the Salerno U-Turn.
According to Wikipedia, "With the Salerno Turn, the PCI committed to supporting democracy and to abandon the armed struggle for the cause of socialism."[3] The communists had to lay down their weapons.
In exchange, Togliatti formed a "government of national unity" with the fascist Badoglio and the Italian monarchy. Togliatti received positions in the "second Badoglio government".
From April 1944 to June 1945, Togliatti was "minister without portfolio" (nothing) and Deputy Prime Minister, which is completely subservient to the Prime Minister (and a position that does not even exist in the constitution). The Prime Minister was bourgeois social-democrat Ivanoe Bonomi.
From June 1945 to July 1946, Togliatti served under a new Prime Minister, De Gasperi. As a Christian Democrat, De Gasperi worked with other Christian Democrats across Europe, like the German Konrad Adenauer, who knowingly let Nazis of a illegal secret terrorist army of 40,000 SS veterans join his Christian Democratic Union.[4][5] De Gasperi and Adenauer would create the European Union in 1958 as the economic Fourth Reich, with NATO as its military.
Under De Gasperi, Togliatti was Minister of Justice. Without the approval of his Communist Party, he decreed an amnesty for all crimes committed during WWII, except rape and sexual torture. The partisans had committed less crimes than the fascists, so this was widely considered a betrayal of his party. And the Allied Force Headquarters in Italy would end up pardoning even more fascists and framing partisans.
In January 1947, Togliatti was glazing De Gasperi as "the main exponent of the strongest among the popular and democratic parties on which the government will have to be based". [6] Here he was talking about a movement filled with fascist war criminals as "popular and democratic". Yet what Stalin meant by "people's democracy" was a dictatorship of anti-fascists led by the working class.
In March 1947, against the dominant line in his own Party, Togliatti voted to include the Lateran Treaty with the Vatican in the Italian constitution.
Soviet criticism[edit | edit source]
Some bourgeois historians claim Stalin wanted Togliatti to fail in Italy because his percentages agreement with Churchill gave Italy to the West. Yet, the Soviets harshly criticized Togliatti for disarming the workers and pursuing bourgeois electoralism.
At the first congress of the Cominform, the Soviets handed the Yugoslavs a bunch of material, prepared by Stalin and Zhdanov, to use for denouncing the Italians and French. [7] Togliatti was accused of hoping for peaceful parliamentary action and being subservient to the Vatican.
[The Cominform representative] began by asserting [the French and Italians] had placed their country at the mercy of American imperialism, first by permitting the resistance forces to be dissolved, then by making one concession after another to the forces of reaction, and finally by tolerating their own exclusion from the government. The two parties had committed their major error when they declared they would never be swayed from the path of parliamentarism. [7]
The leaders of the parties were accused of "political and ideological liberalism", and the parties suffered from fear of taking responsibility and lack of revolutionary vigilance. [7]
After Stalin's death[edit | edit source]
After Khrushchev denounced Stalinism in 1956, Togliatti allied with him, discarding the legacy of Stalin.
He created the "Italian Way to Socialism", adopting the Khrushchevite idea that Communism can take power peacefully, as if the bourgeois will not resist violently.
Final memorandum[edit | edit source]
Before his death, he wrote a memorandum that, according to bourgeois historians, "strengthened the trend toward liberalization in communist countries".[8] The Togliatti Memorandum condemned the Chinese, Albanians, and Stalin's "regime of restrictions", calling for "open debate" to resolve "the problem of the origin of Stalin's cult".[9] This was an early parallel to Gorbachev's "glasnost" (openness) policy which effectively allowed the Western bourgeois to take over the Soviet media, with the justification of criticizing "Stalinism".
The memorandum was later used to promote Eurocommunism.[8]
Legacy[edit | edit source]
Togliatti is one of the most notorious revisionists alive during Stalin's time. While he appeared to work with Stalin, in reality, whether due to bad intention or just incompetence, he betrayed his Party and made them capitulate to imperialism.
By laying down the partisans' weapons and disbanding their organizations, he castrated the Communist movement in Italy, when it had serious power and popularity.
Due to Togliatti's parliamentarism, notorious Italian fascists like General Badoglio got away with war crimes. The Communist Party of Italy was useless and, dominated by revisionists, it would turn Eurocommunist under Togliatti's successor's successor, Enrico Berlinguer (1972 - 1984), who was also promoted by Togliatti in 1944 and 1946.
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ MLOB, "The Origins of Modern Revisionism." https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.firstwave/mlob-mr.pdf
- ↑ Wikipedia, Pietro Badoglio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Badoglio#Final_years
- ↑ Wikipedia, Palmiro Togliatti. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmiro_Togliatti
- ↑ Sovinform on Facebook, Nazi Germany establishes an underground Nazi state. https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=140968699009296&id=100092884981407
- ↑ Der Spiegel, Nazi veterans assembled secret army. https://constantinereport.com/der-spiegel-nazi-veterans-assembled-secret-army-1949/
- ↑ https://sites.google.com/site/sentileranechecantano/cronologia/1947
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Bill Bland, The Cominform Fights Revisionism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bland/x01/cominform-fights-revisionism.pdf
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Britannica, "Palmiro Togliatti". https://web.archive.org/web/20230708001241/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Palmiro-Togliatti
- ↑ Togliatti Memorandum. https://www.marxists.org/archive/togliatti/1964/memorandum.htm