The Italian Communist Party (PCI) after 1943, writes Stephen Gundle, managed to construct “the last great left-wing subculture in Western Europe” (7). Given the unusual interest in “culture” in the broadest sense of the term exhibited by Palmiro Togliatti, the undisputed key figure in post-war Italian Communist politics, an English-language study of the PCI's cultural policies is thus highly welcome and long overdue. Stephen Gundle manages to present an informative and authoritative account, which is highly recommended for anyone interested in the politics of culture and the culture of politics within the European Left.

In Gundle's narrative, it was Togliatti who signed responsible for the investiture of Antonio Gramsci as cultural icon of the Italian (and eventually European) Left. More importantly, Togliatti understood how to assemble a vast array of leading Italian intellectuals within the orbit of the PCI. And, despite repeated setbacks, such as “1956,” the PCI successfully managed to draw successive generations of writers, painters, filmmakers and others into the inner circle and the periphery of the largest Communist party west of the Iron Curtain. No other party of the European Left, let alone a Communist party, came close to such achievements at any point between the collapse of fascism and the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.

Yet, Gundle convincingly argues, such victories on the “high culture” front came at a price. Gundle points out repeatedly how such recruitment of Italian intellectuals was more than counterbalanced by PCI failures on the “mass culture” front. Indeed, Gundle makes clear that the PCI, and here above all Togliatti himself, for the most part exhibited a consistently narrow and exclusionary definition of “culture,” which paid next to no attention to most forms of popular culture. Most Italian high-ranking Communists positively loathed most forms of modern mass culture, above all (but not only) when imported from America.

Replicating bourgeois models of “high culture,” regarded as qualitatively distinct from “low culture,” Gundle writes, Togliatti was stuck in a mental mold appropriate to an earlier age when intellectuals produced individual works of art and indeed dominated the world of culture by “stressing the rational, cognitive aspect of cultural experience” (39). Togliatti—and with him much of the cultural establishment of the PCI—was “trapped in an old, pre-technical cultural model,” (41) “unable to grasp the industrial forms of culture that were undergoing rapid development;” (88) in short, in a day and age when ivory tower intellectuals were no longer “organizing hegemony,” (105) contemporary forms of culture largely bypassed the PCI.

What concrete forms did this cultural conservatism of PCI culture czars take? PCI press organs for a long time flat-out rejected television, radio and cinema and generally displayed a puritan anti-consumerism. Any cultural worker who showed an interest in the “new fashions, sounds, and tastes associated with America and the mass media” (67) thereby invited negative comments from PCI critics. The PCI regularly displayed “a prejudicial hostility toward new and visual forms of communication that offered an immediate and predominantly emotional sensation of aesthetic pleasure” (39). The PCI, for instance, only developed an interest in Italian neorealist films when leading filmmakers of this school began to show an interest in the PCI.

But, if this were all that Gundle does, this volume would be important but not particularly noteworthy. What transforms this study into a stimulating work is Gundle's successful recovery of various and repeated attempts on the part of PCI activists and, indeed, intellectuals to break out from this constricting mindset. For, again and again, Italian Communism showcased “sufficient dynamism” (35) to produce a series of stimulating cultural experiments which proved that popular culture did not necessarily have to remain alien to the realities and aspirations of the European Left.

One of the earliest such phenomena was called “mass theater,” aiming “to raise awareness of the problems facing ordinary people with plays that represented the conflicts that stemmed from daily life” (58). Enormously popular at the grassroots level, these attempts to create a “folklore of protest” (59) offered “for the first time a vision of what a cultural policy might look like that was posed from the point of view of the common people” (61). By the late 1950s, PCI cultural workers produced a series of “progressive photoromances,” aiming to utilize a popular new medium in the service of an older cause. Both experiments grew out of specific local developments in Modena and Palermo, respectively.

By the early 1960s, the PCI's Italian Recreational and Cultural Association (ARCI), founded in 1957, proved that culture, politics and leisure activities could be fruitfully combined even and especially under the conditions of late industrial modernity. Rather than creating a marginal subculture, ARCI, by putting “questions arising in everyday work and leisure on the political agenda,” (103) “helped the left's recreational network [to] supersede the fortress mentality that took shape in response to the repressive atmosphere of the early 1950s” (103). “ARCI circles contributed to the revitalization of grassroots culture by offering a rich program of films, musical events, debates, and lectures” (127). And, “through ARCI the labor movement began in some small way to occupy a critical place in the changing texture of social and cultural life” (104). The ticket to success lay in the conscious construction of “an ’alternative' cultural approach” (127), and ARCI, Gundle contends, managed to add “a distinctive antagonistic edge” (128) to cultural productions, unlike any other major initiatives the PCI had produced at any time in the first fifteen years after liberation.

But the trouble with all these creative attempts to create a popular culture of the Italian Left was the persistent reluctance of PCI luminaries to adopt such innovations for the party as a whole. To the PCI's credit, such experiments were usually tolerated for some time, but “the party leadership only partially grasped the overall sense of the phase of transition through which the country was passing, with the result that incremental adjustments were often late and neither coordinated nor translated into political innovations” (104). Unlike some western European sister parties, such as the French Communist Party, the PCI exhibited a high tolerance level for diverse experiences at the grassroots level, but none of these efforts managed to persuade the party hierarchy to change their course.

The most that the PCI was prepared to do was to utilize innovative practices in culture, media and communications for its “actual practice of politics” (95). PCI puritanism could clearly not be indefinitely sustained given the popularity of new media and American culture at the level of the party's rank-and-file. Non-political hit singers from the prestigious mainstream San Remo song festivals were employed as key attractions at the annual PCI open-air festivals from the mid-1950s onwards. Some PCI youth groups organized some of the very first discotheques in the 1950s in several cities in Italy's industrial north. When Italian state television lifted the cordon sanitaire from PCI politicians in the early 1960s, some PCI functionaries emerged as skillful TV-personalities. In the late 1970s, PCI culture czars in the city of Rome created new forms of entertainment—“Roman Summers”—in ways wholly unprecedented in Italy and, indeed, in most other European cities. “The whole of central Rome was revitalized with evening events including open-air theatrical performances, dance areas, rock concerts, and even large-screen television showings” (183).

But, critics were quick to comment, such reversals of earlier “orthodox” positions constituted all-too-often merely the other side of the identical coin. Whereas, earlier on, the PCI neglected new forms of cultural production and concentrated on ideological criticism of cultural products, now PCI cultural policy makers paid close attention to the management of culture at the expense of its content. If, earlier on, the PCI abstained from active engagement with most forms of popular and/or mass culture, now PCI policy makers merely celebrated existing forms of non-political culture. In the end, the PCI cultural model “was a niche within the existing order rather than an opposition to it” (193).

Precisely at this point of Gundle's critique, however, it is useful to draw attention to a key weakness in the author's argumentation. In the last analysis, the ultimate explanation of the trajectory of PCI cultural policy lies in the profound transformation of PCI politics from radical reformism to the (differentiated) acceptance of the status quo. This evolution is nowhere made clear in Gundle's study. Gundle's admiration for Enrico Berlinguer's politics of austerity in the 1980s can thus ill-afford to provide a satisfactory explanation for the watershed experience of 1977: “For the first time a social movement developed that regarded the PCI not as an ally but as an enemy” (161). The PCI's ideological heritage and political moderation go a long way towards explaining why some of the most important experiments in radical popular culture within the European Left were consistently unable to turn the ship around.

In sum, Gundle provides a most stimulating reconstruction of cultural debates on the Italian Left that should become mandatory reading for anyone interested in the cultural politics of the Left. But he tends to portray the encounter between Italian Communism and the challenges of mass culture above all as a series of missed opportunities rather than as a project that was likely to fail. Gundle repeatedly suggests that, above all else, only the effective application of a radical alternative strategy in the cultural field could possibly lead to political success. But he never clearly explicates why a system-transforming marriage of high and low culture, utilizing the latest techniques developed by the communications industry, did not and indeed could not result in a “new general culture of the masses” (59) within the confines of the PCI. Such a genuinely oppositional, antagonistic popular culture industry proved to be impossible to obtain within the parameters of an organization evolving from Stalinism to “third way” social liberalism.