462
PARTISAN REVIEW
our Winter Palace, our society will have changed.
Birnbaum:
At the same time, not many blocks from where we are talking,
there is the seat of a vanguard party, the Italian Communist Party .
Through its spokesmen, that vanguard has mounted a major campaign to
reassure everybody that for the moment, it is interested in expanding the
p'roductive forces of the nation , and in integration with the rest ofwestern
Europe. It proposes not a tranquil transition
to
socialism, but
to
accept a
caretaker function, in a national crisis- which is, in fact , a crisis of capi–
talism. How can we explain so mild a policy from western Europe 's
strongest and most prestigious Communist Party?
Castel/ina:
Given the schizophrenia of Italian society, the Italian Commu–
nist Party has a quite understandable preoccupation. All the revolurions,
all the socialist experiments, have been very bad-and not only those of
eastern Europe, which nobody wishes
to
follow. Then there was the dra–
matic experience of Chile. This has paralyzed the Italian Communist
Party, which is obsessed by what could happen . In this situation, what
they are trying to do is to postpone the moment in which they will have to
take responsibility for managing society. They are trying to assume re–
sponsibility in a very gradual way . But the point is that this could be done
gradually, if we had a capitalist system strong enough to accept a gradual
transformation . Instead, we have come
to
a situation of profound crisis of
the system, a very, very deep crisis-not only an economic one, but a
collapse of the state, and a crisis of the traditional values by which
society has lived. In this situation capitalism can certainly survive in Italy
-but only at the prife of a very brutal restructuring of the economy and
the state. This would entail a concentration of resources in the strongest
sectors of industry, eliminating all the weaker segments . This would have
to be done in coordination with the dominant tendencies in international
capitalism. The result, however, would be to make marginal ever larger
sections of the economy, more unemployment rather than more employ–
ment, less power for the trade unions-who would of course struggle
against a reorganization of this kind. That is the contradiction we face
today, and there is not just one way to resolve it . There are two quite dif–
ferent ones . One would in fact restrict the productive forces and cunail
employment. The other way would see more employment and an expan–
sion of our productive forces-but that would require a different socio–
economic system; within the present system, we can 't obtain more em–
ployment and production.
Birnbaum:
I think that you are saying that it is impossible to treat Italy in
isolation from the crisis ofworld capitalism, which is also a crisis of models
of socialism, or the socialist movement. Amongst the more advanced
