The English Way to Italian Socialism: The PCI, ‘Red Bologna’ and Italian Communist Culture as Seen through the English Prism

Abstract

This contribution analyses the British perception of Red Bologna during the seventies and eighties, when politicians in the UK thought of Bolognese Social-Democrats as an example of good government. Maccaferri investigates the way in which the British political debate and the intellectual public discourse (as seen in journals, pamphlets and books) ‘imported’, deconstructed, adapted and appropriated the Italian communist model. The aim is to cast light on an ‘Italy Made in Britain’ that was constructed in the prevalently left-wing British political debate between the mid-nineteen seventies and the late nineteen-eighties, namely until Italian Communism started to search for a new name and a new identity, and, indeed, it liquidated the model itself. This article considers the debate expressed in the pamphlet Red Bologna (eds Max Jäggi, Roger Müller, Sil Schmid, 1977), journals such as Power and Politics and The New Left review, and newspapers such as The Guardian and The Observer. Furthermore, it focusses on the resurgence of leftist intellectuals. It deals primarily with Marxism Today’s Italian discourse. By focusing on such a view, Maccaferri reconstructs the way in which, whilst engaging with the Thatcherite period, the English political debate and intellectual discourse perceived and constructed a very different kind of Italy that was simultaneously revolutionary and communist in its ideology and ‘moderate’ and socialist – if not liberal – in its policies.