While in Rome I attended a lecture at the Fondazione Basso by Giancarlo Monina, its Responsible studi storici. He was speaking to a group of aspiring young journalists about the history of the foundation. He warned me that his lecture was for persons ‘con poca cultura storica’. But I suspected that I would learn a great deal and was not disappointed. It began by painting a picture of the historical significance of where we were gathered – the medieval building that Lelio Basso (1903-78) bought in the sixties, during a period in which he had withdrawn from active engagement in the various parties of Italy’s non-communist left. Monina described some of those who had spoken there: García Márquez, Sartre, Habermas, Allende, the numerous refugees from the Latin American dictatorships to whom the foundation was a refuge. He insisted that this was a place of ‘political culture’, which prompts the question of exactly what that means.

From an American perspective, there is nothing like it. It to some extent resembles a ‘think-tank’, but these tend to be without intellectual pretensions. The idea of a ‘political culture’ or of ‘political formation’ is foreign to Americans. The reason for this is perhaps two-fold: a combination of what could be termed ‘lay positivism’ and democracy. Regarding the first, for Americans, politics exists in two dimensions: there are facts and there are opinions. Facts exist as quantities and their relations, while opinions are views or attitudes toward the facts. The connective tissue or framework which links what is and what should be – the terrain of what could be called ‘political ideology’ – is accorded no reality. This metaphysics then combines with America’s civic religion, which insists that all persons have a right to their opinions and that all opinions are to be accorded equal respect. In this context the idea of a political culture, that one could acquire or not, is inconceivable. For it implies the possibility that one can, perhaps must, learn to be political; and this in turn suggests that a political culture can be imparted through a pedagogical relationship. But pedagogy is always at least partly a relationship of authority, which violates the precept of a democracy of opinions.

Monina now turned to Basso’s political and intellectual formation. His father, Ugo, was a ‘Giolittiano’ – an elitist liberal. The young Basso rebelled, sneaking off to socialist party meetings. His first political hero was Zapata. (The Mexican Revolutionary tradition had a huge influence on many Italian leftists, including Mussolini’s father, who named his son after Benito Juárez.) He graduated in law with a thesis on Marx’s concept of freedom under the direction of Rodolfo Mondolfo. During his university years and two stints of confinement under fascism, his views hardened into a commitment to Marxism, combined with a rigorous legal culture that would lead him to become one of the central figures in the writing of the Italian Constitution after the war.

Monina emphasized Basso’s Marxism, but also his ultimate rejection of communism, at least in its Leninist form. A convinced Luxemburgist, Basso believed in the priority of the self-organization of the working class, even as he rejected operaismo’s obsession with the factory. A member of the audience raised their hand: ‘if Basso was such a Marxist, why didn’t he join the PCI?’ Monina’s eyes lit up: an ideal opportunity to explain something important and truly distinctive about Italian socialism.

Basso was critical of the PCI, explained Monina, not despite his Marxism, but because of it – a position that was far from isolated. Neither Saragat, nor even Craxi, had ever renounced Marxism; there was no autonomous social democratic ideology. The conflict between Italian socialism and Italian communism was an intramural one within Marxism, in which it was far from clear who had the more compelling claim to orthodoxy. Italy never had a Bad Godesberg, the conference during the which the German SPD formally renounced its Marxist past. The basic reason for this was the political and above all cultural strength of the PCI, which protected the Italian left from the most extreme forms of Cold War anti-Marxism – forces to which the SPD was fully exposed, especially after the outlawing of the KPD.

Much writing on the relationship between Marxism and social democracy suffers from what could be called a Nordic-Germanic bias, taking the self-presentation of German and Scandinavian social democracy as an adequate account. Thus, it is said, social democracy broke with Marxism’s naïve attempt to nationalize production; it is oriented instead toward the political steering of private investment, income redistribution and the labour market. Marx’s analysis of the logic of capitalist development, and particularly his suggestion that capitalism might be superseded by a new system of social production, are presented as unnecessary, and leading to a harmful utopian radicalism. In Italy, by contrast, the link between Marxism and social democracy has always been clearer. The trajectory of the social democratic parties even in their Nordic-Germanic homelands after the fall of communism, as well as what has become of the PSI (Berlusconi’s original political home after all), shows which interpretation is ultimately most compelling. Social democracy without Marxism tends to lose all doctrinal and political coherence – exploding into fragments once the defining pressure of its antagonist disappears.

Read on: Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, ‘The Long Downturn and Its Political Results’, NLR 155.