>>2751753>The Communist parties of India and Italy have pretty interesting culture. I have no idea about India, but I really don't see what's interesting about the Italian Communist Party's "culture". In the end, it was a party who could never get in government unless they dropped any pretense of "communism" and, above all, any organic ties to the Soviet Union.
Long story short, they went ultra-moderate in the late '70s attempting the so called "historical compromise", which meant being allowed as a junior coalition parter of the ruling Christian Democracy (DC). In order to do that, they had to rein in the labour movement, and the largest national trade union centre (CGIL) was an obedient tool to achieve that. All across the decade there were successful struggles to obtain legislative recognition of labour rights, universal healthcare, access to higher education for children of workers and workers themselves, crazy stuff if you compare it to where things stood ten or twenty years before. The push from below was so strong that even moderate and conservative parties in government - and the unions they controlled - had to concede something. You had the chairman of the industrialist' association publicly stating that automatic wage increases matched to real inflation where there to stay and would have been crazy to put them in doubt. But then you had:
- the strategy of tension and the years of lead and
- PCI and CGIL cucking, starting to punch left - bear in mind there were even parties to the left of PCI in parliament back then - while cosying up to capital, Nato, European integration, the whole shegang.
In the end, their attempt to get into government failed, but the results of their compromise remained and the '80s were a slow, long decline until the collapse of the USSR pushed them to change name and become openly and officially neoliberal. They were allowed to get into government many times since and they have been as bad as the fascist rightwing.
>I rarely see a lot of theorists mentioned from these parties that never managed to come to power and great man worship is kind of sad to see from the left.PCI never had any genuine interest into fostering a vital cultural environment. Everything was fine tuned to justify the flip-flopping of the party in the face of capital and the parties in government. And foster individual careers in the party, the union or the once vast environment of newspapers and magazines, publishing houses, "cultural associations" and so on. Most of that survives to this day, even if it's a shadow of its former self and drastically cut down in terms of prestige and influence over society, but not in terms of money spent on it - thanks mainly to extravagant public subsidies - and the entitlement felt by those living off it - smuggest individuals that ever lived.