Il comunismo impossibile. Tradizione e innovazione negli anni Sessanta: tracce di un «appuntamento mancato»

The attempt proposed in this reflection is to indicate some political and cultural reasons for what Giuseppe Chiarante called "missed appointment": the one between the Pci and the new left in the sixties. The article traces, by privileging the point of view of the debate in the Pci, the reasons for this missed meeting. An in-depth overview of the various trends present in the party is given by the conference The Italian Marxism of the Sixties and the theoretical and political training of the new generations, promoted by the Gramsci Institute in 1971, which will constitute privileged material for reflection, in addition to the press of the time, the testimonies of the protagonists and the historical reflections both contemporary and recent. We will analyze the communist debate and the comparison between the "right" and the "left" of the party, the synthesis made by Luigi Longo and the reasons for the lack of effectiveness of this in the "recovery" of the dispute, despite the attitude of openness so much of the secretary (and of the Ingraian "left"), as well as of a leading part of the student movement (see Scalzone). In conclusion, it will be said that the failure will be due in part to the political and cultural differences of the "two leftists"; in the other, and above all, for the particular conformation of the political framework, which already assigned the Pci the role of representative of the alternative and did not allow further margins of real action outside it but within a communist discourse.