BIRN BAUM ICASTELLINA
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conservative one), moved directly to the Communists . They didn't join
with the Socialists, did not form their own left Christian party, did not
move to your own party. In one way, we could say that they are moving
from one form of integralism to another-without quite developing new
ideas about participatory democracy, new forms of socialist culture-which
is just what may be happening in the space between the Communists and
Socialists in France, not least due to left Christians there. How do you ex–
plain this?
Castel/ina:
The explanation is that, unlike in France, the class struggle here
is very acute. In France, to be sure , the left is larger than in Italy, and is
about to become a majority. In France, however, the state is strong and
bourgeois values are still very pervasive in the whole society. The working
class movement is not as politicized or as powerful as in Italy. The con–
tradictions in Italy are much deeper than in France, where we could ima–
gine a left government which would not change the system very much. In
Italy, by contrast, the left would enter government in a situation in which
the bourgeoisie were much weaker: it would change the system. Our own
Socialist party, unlike the French one, is not Strong, because it is a prison–
er of this contradiction. It either joins the bourgeoisie (as it did in the
center-left coalitions), or it joins the left: there is little room for simple re–
form, and the Socialists have to go one way or the other.
Birnbaum:
If we accept that analysis, a set of
~uestions
arise on the cultural
and ideological level. Thirty years ago Italy was liberated from Fascism,
and in the generation that has now grown up, we have a militant working
class and an intelligentsia influenced by the ideas of Gramsci, which are
certainly not the exclusive property of the Italian Communist Party. You
also
have in Italy some
kinds
of left Catholicism which now and then break
through-despite the very presence of the Vatican as a kind of ecclesias–
tical police force . Can we see in Italy, through its specific modes of class
conflict, the development of a new socialist culture which might have
model functions for the rest of western Europe, or for other countries as
well? On the other hand, is class conflict largely confined to the direct
confrontation of opposing forces in the market and the state?
Castel/ina:
You touch upon a singular aspect of our situation, an Italian pe–
culiarity. In ltaIy, for the first time in history we may be able to realize
what Marx thought about: a revolution that ·would occur without a
Jacobin vanguard, but as the result of a real social process. The assumption
of power by the working class is already going on in Italy. We have the
embryo of a new state , a new society, a new hegemony, and the revolu–
tion will express these forces, will be their work, not that of a vanguard
which seizes power and then, aftetward, changes society. Before we take
