Communist internationalism and North-South asymmetries

On the transnational practices of solidarity between Italian Communists and the Brazilian Left (1975-1982)

Lesen Sie die englischsprachige Originalversion des Artikels von Victor Strazzeri für das JHK 2026 hier vorab:

I. Introduction: the southwards globalization of the ‘Italian road to socialism’ in the 1970s

[1]Although not usually considered alongside the Soviet, Chinese and Cuban ‘models’ of revolutionary transition which communist and other left-wing activists around the world considered adopting in the 1960s and 1970s, the political doctrine of the Italian Communist Party (PCI, Partito Comunista Italiano) arose to a distinct alternative during those decades. Its roots are in the decisive year of 1956, when Palmiro Togliatti proposed an ‘Italian road to socialism’, a transition strategy based on the progressive expansion of democracy and the engagement of communists in representative institutions.[2] It was, however, in the aftermath of a subsequent crisis of the communist world, the Warsaw Pact’s intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, a move heavily criticized by the PCI, that the party became a standard bearer of the peaceful transition to a democratic form of socialism, gaining followers (and critics) worldwide.

Recent scholarship has underlined that this international attention was not just a matter of admiration and attempt at emulation. Since the 1950s, the PCI conducted an active foreign policy on a global scale[3], with a considerable focus in the ‘Third World’ – from Latin America to Sub-Saharan Africa.[4] In the aftermath of the 1968 events in Czechoslovakia, the party intensified its efforts to become a relevant player in the global arena in the framework of a ‘new internationalism’ (see below).[5] The 1970s offered the PCI plentiful opportunities of intervention: alongside ongoing decolonization and anti-dictatorial struggles in the Third World, the decade brought a global economic crisis in the capitalist world and political upheaval in West Europe – including the fall of the Portuguese and Spanish dictatorships.

In that scenario, the resonance of Italian communism – which this paper examines with a focus on the Brazilian context – was not just a ramification of the PCI’s appeal as bearer of a democratic alternative within the communist landscape. Other aspects of the party’s intellectual tradition and political trajectory played their part in raising its prestige: for instance, the global diffusion of the thought of Antonio Gramsci, the erstwhile party leader whose writings while in fascist prison informed Togliatti’s views. Italian communists also drew credence from the central role they had played in anti-fascist resistance. The PCI would emerge from it to become a major political force in the country’s postwar democracy with a million-plus membership.

It is, however, with Enrico Berlinguer – who took over the leadership of the PCI in 1972 – that the ‘Italian road to socialism’ effectively ‘went global’ as a model for other communist organizations, a process catalyzed by the rise of ‘Eurocommunism’. The term is associated with the short-lived yet impactful attempt by the largest communist parties (CPs) of West Europe – mainly the Italian, French and Spanish CPs – to distance themselves from Moscow directives and converge around a platform centered on broad alliances and democratic politics as a lever for socialist transition. Despite what the label implies, however, not all West European CPs took a Eurocommunist turn – as in the case of the German Communist Party (DKP, Deutsche Kommunistische Partei) – while others experienced a polarization between ‘pro-Soviet’ and ‘Eurocommunist’ wings – in the case of Greece, leading to a full-on split.[6] On the other hand, scholarship has so far paid little attention to Eurocommunism’s impact beyond Europe[7] – a gap this paper contributes to addressing through a focus on the PCI’s relations to the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB, Partido Comunista Brasileiro)[8], based on sources from Brazilian and Italian archives.[9]

Brazilian communists’ reception of Eurocommunism is a revealing case study, because, while ostensibly conceived for the peculiar conditions of the struggle for socialism in advanced industrial democracies, the platform clearly appealed to CPs in dictatorial contexts as well. The Eurocommunist formula enabled, namely, the fight for democratic rights to be portrayed as integral to the ‘pathway’ towards socialism. This made the Spanish CP, for instance, an enthusiastic adopter in the twilight of the Franco dictatorship in the mid-1970s.[10] A similar dynamic contributed to the formation of a ‘Eurocommunist’ wing in the Brazilian CP at the end of that decade as the party struggled against the country’s civil-military dictatorship. Yet, as a North-South transfer, whose intensity – as this article will detail – caught Italians by surprise, the Brazilian reception of the PCI’s political doctrine called into question a further premise behind the notion of multiple ‘roads to socialism’ – namely, that a democratic pathway was only available for the highly developed economies of the ‘capitalist core’.

Furthermore, when the Eurocommunist platform was claimed not only by a segment of PCB militancy – becoming a source of contention within the party – but also by members of the newly formed Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT), which immediately began vying with communists for hegemony in the Brazilian left, PCI leadership had to contend with unexpected consequences of their party’s rising international prestige. The Brazilian reception of Eurocommunism reveals, in this regard, important ambivalences in the PCI’s effort to ‘globalize’ the ‘Italian road to socialism’ in the 1970s.

II. An autonomous convergence? The ambivalences of Italian Communists’ ‘new internationalism’

Those ambivalences were already on display at the Conference of European Communist and Workers’ Parties held in East Berlin in June 1976 and considered as the launchpad of Eurocommunism. In his speech on the occasion, Enrico Berlinguer stressed that this was not the meeting of ‘an international communist organism’, which ‘does not exist, nor can exist in any form, neither on a world nor on a European scale’. As such, ‘it did not determine directives and obligations for any of our parties’. While he acknowledged that internationalism and mutual solidarity were central to communist politics, the PCI leader emphasized that they had to be accompanied by ‘the recognition that each party conceive of their internal and international lines autonomously and in full independence’.[11]

That call for autonomy and diversity notwithstanding, the novelty of the conference consisted precisely in the convergence of several West European parties around a common line, with the PCI as its standard bearer. Berlinguer acknowledged this phenomenon: ‘It is very significant that a few other communist and workers’ parties of Western Europe also arrived, through their own autonomous inquiry, to analogous conceptions regarding the pathway to reach socialism and the makeup of the socialist society they wish to build. These convergences and common traits have been expressed recently in common declarations with the comrades of the Spanish, French and British CPs. It is to these new elaborations and inquiries of a new kind that some give the name of “Eurocommunism”.’[12]

This remark is one of the few instances in which a high-ranking PCI activist openly claimed the label ‘Eurocommunism’, which had originated in the press and outside the communist sphere.[13] Yet, its most revealing aspect consists in Berlinguer’s effort to underplay his party’s active role as a facilitator and main reference for its genesis. The PCI leader likely aimed to deter accusations of building a ‘Western pole’ within the communist movement. In another passage of the speech, however, Berlinguer did claim the right of CPs to openly diverge from and criticize the ‘theoretical and political positions of other parties’. He explicitly recalled the PCI’s ‘critical assessment of certain events and situations (as, for instance, Czechoslovakia)’, including ‘the relationship between democracy and socialism in many socialist countries’. In other words, the affirmation of diversity and non-interference did not preclude a critical voice and contestations in the dealings between communist parties.

The PCI’s stance on the international plane in the 1970s was, in that regard, ambivalent insofar as it combined criticism of the status quo of socialist states and advocacy for an alternative model of socialist transition with a reluctance to take on an open leadership role within the communist movement. Despite putting much effort and resources into establishing a global presence and exerting influence (within the communist spectrum and beyond) on the international plane, the PCI nevertheless did not wish to infringe on a key principle of its dealings with ‘brother parties’, namely, ‘the respect for the free choice of diverse pathways in the struggle to transform society and build socialism’.[14]

III. The place of Brazil within the map of Italian Communists’ internationalism (1964–1975)

By the time Berlinguer held his speech in Berlin in mid-1976, Italian and Brazilian communists had forged strong links. The PCI had provided solidarity and support to the PCB since the coup of April 1964 inaugurated a two-decade long dictatorial period in Brazil[15]. Yet, other factors were at play in the strong rapport between the two parties: from a century of Italian migration to the South American country[16] to the publication of the first Gramsci translations in Brazil in 1966. Matters of solidarity became more urgent after 1968, however, when the escalation in state violence heralded by the Institutional Act n. 5 – which suspended remaining civil liberties – marked the definitive closing of the Brazilian regime. This gave free reigns for its repressive apparatus to persecute organizations engaged in armed resistance. This spared the PCB initially, since it had opted to support the legal opposition[17] and to conduct its clandestine agitation within civil society and the labor movement. The situation changed in 1974-75 when, having eliminated guerrilla opposition, the regime directed its repressive apparatus towards the violent persecution of Brazilian communists. By the end of 1975, almost a third (10) of the party’s 32 central committee (CC) members had been murdered, its press had been dismantled, and most surviving members of the leadership were forced into exile (some settled in Italy).

The PCI’s solidarity activities with regards to the Brazilian opposition increased accordingly, catalyzed not only by the worsening situation in the country but by other global events of the mid-1970s. The topics discussed with longtime PCB general secretary Luís Carlos Prestes on his October 1975 meeting with PCI leadership in Rome make this clear: the included the condemnation of torture and state violence in Brazil and denunciation of the Spanish and Chilean dictatorships, the advances of détente in the aftermath of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe – held in Helsinki in July 1975 – and the situation of ‘the fledgling Portuguese democracy’.[18] In other words, the PCI’s efforts to ease East-West tensions intersected with its engagement for democracy on the North-South axis. Indeed, the four countries in question – Portugal, Spain, Brazil and Chile – often evoke each other in PCI discourse and international activities in this period, suggesting that they conformed a unitary ‘internationalist space’ of intervention. The recent September 1973 coup d’état in Chile constituted, in this regard, a veritable trauma for Italian communists; due to the violent nature of the deposition of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, which the PCI strongly identified with, but also because it had constituted an experiment in the ‘peaceful road to socialism’. Condemnation of the Pinochet dictatorship went hand in hand with that of human rights’ abuses in Brazil and in a declining, yet still highly repressive Franco regime in Spain. The overthrow of the Estado Novo in Portugal’s 25 April 1974 revolution, in turn, provided hope that other authoritarian regimes could be toppled.[19]

The PCI’s solidarity activities with the opposition in these countries was met, conversely, with the strong interest of the respective CPs in the Italians’ novel political line. While the PCI did not see eye-to-eye with the Soviet-aligned Portuguese CP, the Spanish CP majority and, as the following items will detail, a sector of the Brazilian CP leadership openly declared themselves ‘Eurocommunist’ in the late 1970s.

IV. PCI-PCB solidarity in the context of a changing political and social landscape in Brazil (1978/79)

A shifting political reality in Brazil elevated Italian communists’ engagement in 1978. As PCB general secretary L.C. Prestes detailed in an interview to l’Unità on another visit to Italy in May 1978, alongside the opposition’s concerted use of the legal channels at its disposal, including a tightly contested parliamentary election, a new political factor had emerged. Strikes in the industrial belt of the São Paulo area led by the metal workers’ union, the country’s first strike wave in ten years, had brought a ‘qualitative change to the situation’.[20] Combined with a women-led, broad civil-society agitation against the rising cost of living and for political amnesty, the moment was ripe for international pressure to be exerted on the Brazilian dictatorship.

Prestes’ interviewer on that occasion, Guido Vicario, subsequently went on a South America tour, which included Brazil, for l’Unità in October 1978. Vicario’s notes from the trip – which were transmitted to the PCI’s foreign affairs section leaders Antonio Rubbi and Giancarlo Pajetta – highlight the central importance of Brazil in the PCI’s outlook of the South American context. If the US-backed coup of 1964 had made the country a political testing ground for the subsequent instauration of multiple military regimes in the region, Brazil’s ruling generals now aimed to provide a ‘model of gradual liberalization’.[21]

Beyond the political situation, Vicario gave much attention to how Brazilian ‘society [had] grown and become more complex since the 1964 coup’.[22] In his view, the country’s economic and social development carried key political consequences: the opposition to the dictatorship had, namely, ‘created a common ground of democratic aspirations, of “civilization” and “modernity”; from the worker to the “national” industrialist, to a very lively class of intellectuals and professionals’.[23] What Vicario witnessed must have struck a familiar chord for a PCI-schooled activist. After all, behind Togliatti’s thesis of various possible ‘pathways’ to socialism and, more recently, of the Eurocommunist affirmation of democratic politics as the most adequate form of struggle for socialism for the developed ‘West’, was the thought of Antonio Gramsci. More specifically, the notion that a modern industrial society had a more consistent and variegated civil society, thus enabling a democratic transition to socialism, in contrast to ‘Oriental/Eastern’ contexts, in which revolution via direct assault on state power – as had been the case in a less-developed Zarist Russia – was the most viable ‘path’[24].

Perhaps expecting a social landscape more akin to ‘Oriental’ conditions in the West’s periphery, Vicario was confronted, instead, with ‘more international debate on the new pathways of socialism than one might imagine’, including ‘frequent references to the perspective of the PCI (in particular the work of Gramsci)’.[25] Indeed, the first translations of the Prison Notebooks in Brazil dated from 1966 and 1968, in line with the onset of a strong (and globally pioneering) Latin American reception of Gramsci’s thought. In other words, Vicario had encountered an already decade-long transatlantic debate on Italian Marxism upon his arrival in Brazil in 1978, one rooted not only on the circulation of texts and ideas, but also on the exile experiences of Latin American communists fleeing dictatorial persecution. That forced displacement put these activists in touch with ongoing debates of the European left. As a recent examination of Gramsci’s reception in Latin America details, ‘[…] so-called Eurocommunism influenced the evolution of [Gramsci’s] retrieval among Latin American Marxist intellectuals. In the second half of the 1970s, thinkers interested in Gramsci’s work started to focus their studies on the concepts of “hegemony” and “Western civil society”. Both became the basis to rethink the strategies that would be implemented in order to achieve socialism in their countries.’[26]

Along these lines, Vicario experienced an unexpected Southern ‘mirroring’ of the debates and politics of his Italian point of departure. Yet, he still proved a keen observer of the specific situation of the Brazilian workers’ movement and left-wing party spectrum. Referencing the strike wave of 1978, he remarked that, ‘in the emerging new trade union movement, autonomy from the parties is sought as the effect of a negative practice from the years before the coup’. Hence, ‘a communist party that presents itself in the old way would encounter many obstacles to its development’.[27] In that regard, the PCB’s hurdles to remain a relevant political force in a transformed Brazilian landscape were twofold: it needed to update its platform and practices but do so in the highly unfavorable circumstances of having its (surviving) leadership still in exile. Vicario observed that while ‘the CP [was] highly esteemed’ and had ‘a strong presence among intellectuals’, it was regarded ‘as a self-contained political reality’, one ‘closed in on its history’.[28] These observations regarding the diminishing capacity of the PCB to intervene in Brazilian politics and the search for a new political vehicle by the leaders of the union movement would prove prescient. The latter subsequently played a central role in the creation of the Partido dos Trabalhadores in 1979-80. Turning his attention to the PCI, Vicario concludes his report with a critical assessment of his party’s outdated views on the Latin American context and, crucially, of its limited ability to intervene within it: ‘Faced with the new in L[atin] A[merica], which is not a situation simply “in motion”, but rather a changing reality taking a specific course, our ability to follow and understand it, not to mention intervene in it, is lacking. We still think of Latin America with old conceptions and limit ourselves almost exclusively to solidarity with the victims of repression, whereas we are faced with a region of the world where the political battle is again open. The parties of the Socialist International appear much more active and perceptive.’[29]

A first effort by the PCI to strengthen its links to its Brazilian counterparts would soon follow: the party invited a delegation of exiled PCB women activists to visit multiple Italian cities between 8 and 14 January 1979. The PCB women’s trip, which I have analyzed in detail elsewhere[30], was – as the title of their report indicates – a ‘Women’s (solidarity and studies) delegation’.[31] In other words, it had a dual scope: raise awareness of and provide information on the struggle against the Brazilian dictatorial regime, but also enable PCB women to learn about the PCI and its politics with the clear goal of transferring aspects of that ‘model’ across the Atlantic once the democratic transition got underway.

Yet the trip had more immediate results. The Brazilian activists involved played a key role, alongside members of the PCI and a broad coalition of Italian parties and civil society organizations, in organizing the International Conference for Amnesty and Democratic Freedoms in Brazil held from 28 to 30 June 1979 at the Italian Parliament building.[32] This was the most important international event denouncing the Brazilian dictatorship’s foot-dragging on liberalization during that juncture and no doubt contributed to the introduction of an Amnesty Law by the regime only two months later.

V. An unexpected entanglement? The PCI as a model for a divided Brazilian left (1979–1981)

The combination of broad civil society and labor movement mobilization with the efforts of the legal opposition and pressure from international public opinion resulted in a wider-ranging political amnesty being signed into law by President Gen. João Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo on 28 August 1979 than Brazil’s ruling military elite had initially intended[33]. This dramatically shifted the political landscape in the country, heralding its democratic transition. It also meant that PCI activists would now be able to openly meet with their PCB counterparts on Brazilian shores. That was the case during the Conference on Italian Emigration to Latin America, held in São Paulo from 8-11 November 1979. The PCI sent Giuliano Pajetta, a former resistant fighter and senior party figure on the topic of emigration, with plans to ‘establish a legal presence in Latin America in general and in Brazil specifically’.[34] While Pajetta reports having had exchanges with PCB activists, the PCI had consciously refrained from a formal schedule of meetings: ‘This proved to be the right stance, considering that in the internal debates of the PCB and in their external statements in the press, the references to one of the tendencies as “Eurocommunist” [or] “friends of the PCI” are quite frequent and some press conferences were not lacking in insidious questions in this regard’.[35]

In other words, the impact of the reception of Eurocommunism within the Brazilian CP and beyond was by then a significant (and public) issue of the country’s left as it emerged from the underground. Pajetta also highlighted that with the political opening, ‘new intellectual, journalistic and trade union cadre […] were diffusing Marxist books, our texts (Italian, but also French and Spanish) and the like’.[36]

The PCB, he reported, ‘seemed at the point of a split’ due to the emergence of ‘two extreme wings’ within its CC. Both paradoxically ‘shared a simplistic assessment of Brazilian society’ in his view, namely, that having arrived at ‘a mature capitalism, the question of transitioning to socialism emerged’.[37] ‘The trouble’, he stressed, ‘is that one of these wings seems to be represented by a figure such as [Luis Carlos] Prestes’, who ‘saw things in the old way, i.e., “peaceful road or revolutionary road”’.[38] On the other side were those that saw socialist transition as ‘an inevitable evolution, with the upswing of the mass “movement” etc.’. The intellectuals of the latter current, to Pajetta’s apparent surprise, ‘interpret and instrumentalize some writings from our [PCI] comrades and “Eurocommunism” itself’.[39]

Yet, Pajetta reported another set of tensions regarding the PCB. If the PT’s creation was still a few months away, the specter of a new political organization that aimed to take over the leadership of the Brazilian left had already made itself felt at this point – as well as the negative sentiment with which Brazilian communists had met this development: ‘they consider the efforts of the São Paulo workers’ leader Lula to establish a “Labor Party” linked to the metalworkers’ unions inopportune and harmful’.[40] Pajetta concluded his report highlighting that while ‘Brazilian comrades showed a lot of esteem and respect for our party and gratitude for what we did for the amnesty, etc.’ there were also reservations: ‘the more serious comrades insisted, rightly in our opinion, that the PCB must avoid taking “models” from outside’.[41]

By the ensuing visit of a PCI operative (Pietro Capone) to Brazil in April 1980, i.e., around six months later, the crisis within the PCB’s leadership had deepened. In March 1980, Prestes had made public his Carta aos Comunistas (“Letter to the Communists”) in which he criticized the CC majority, leading to his removal from the post of secretary-general, though not to his expulsion. That same month, intellectuals from the PCB’s ‘Eurocommunist’ wing took control of the editorial board of the party’s new legal publication, the Voz da Unidade (“Voice of Unity”).[42] While all warring party factions agreed that a return of democratic rights and civil liberties was the priority, the role of democracy in the PCB’s strategy remained a point of contention.

Pietro Capone’s notes on this situation are revealing[43], because, while one wing of the PCB explicitly identified with the ‘Italian road’, he was nevertheless able to speak with representatives of every camp. As Capone detailed, the majority position favored a broad convergence of ‘popular sectors’ (communists, socialists, workers, Catholics) and – whenever possible – liberal-democratic sectors of the bourgeoisie ‘for the end of the military regime and the instauration of a democracy with strong progressive contents’.[44] Prestes, on the other hand, told Capone he believed a struggle for power by the masses and the establishment of socialism was on the table. While the Italian representative considered that prospect far-fetched, and saw it as a minority position, there were rumblings that within those in favor of a ‘progressive democracy’, the ‘Eurocommunist’ component represented a further splinter and future source of conflict within the PCB ‘center’.[45] Capone seemed to downplay this risk; the ‘“labeling” of the current PCB leadership’s position as “Eurocommunist”’, he believed, was rooted in their advocacy of ‘building socialism in freedom and following a national and autonomous path’.[46] From that standpoint, ‘if we want to talk about “Eurocommunism”, as the Brazilian press does, this term could be applied to practically the whole center and not a fraction of it’.[47]

The PCI’s role as interlocutor and peacemaker, rather than interested party in the fractional struggle is confirmed by a request of the PCB representative in Italy, Paolo Parra. As the PCI’s Latin America expert Renato Sandri reports in a letter from 15 May 1980,[48] Parra asked the PCI to mediate talks between the PCB leadership and Prestes, which the latter had signaled would be acceptable. There is no record of such a talk taking place as the situation was by then likely beyond repair – Prestes did not formally leave the party but would begin to conduct his own politics alongside a group of sympathizers. As the PCB majority turned its attention to the challenge posed by the ‘Eurocommunist’ current, the PCI’s focus increasingly converged on a fast-rising PT, which also sought support from Italian communists. The PCI’s shifting allegiances in Brazil are encapsulated by one of Capone’s assessments. After stressing the country’s newfound modernity as a ‘middle-high industrial power’ he concluded: ‘What is strongly felt […] especially amongst common people [gente del popolo], is this great demand for new answers to new problems. The Brazil of 1980 is hugely different from that of 1964’.[49]

VI. Split allegiances: the PCI torn between the PCB and a rising PT in the Brazilian context (1981-82)

‘Brazilian modernity demands the creation of a secular, democratic, mass socialist party, capable of taking up what is valid in the heritage of Brazilian communism, but at the same time of incorporating the new socialist currents originating from different political and ideological horizons.’[50]

The topos of ‘modernity’ as an overall frame informing the need for a new form of democratic socialist politics was not only a European projection upon a transformed South American social and political canvas. The passage above is from Carlos Nelson Coutinho, the young leading intellectual of the PCB’s ‘Eurocommunist’ current, formerly an exile in Italy, and translator of Gramsci to Portuguese. If the passage represents a faithful description of the orientation that the recently founded PT would aim to incorporate in its first decade of existence, it was published in 1980, when Coutinho was still a member of the PCB. It introduced the essay Coutinho had written in the previous year, whose title – ‘Democracy as Universal Value’ – was a direct reference to a central claim from Enrico Berlinguer’s Moscow speech of November 1977. The essay foreshadowed Coutinho’s own trajectory: the defeat of the Eurocommunist wing of the PCB in the aftermath of its publication would lead him to approach and eventually join the PT in 1989.

That the PCI also saw the PT as, perhaps, a more faithful embodiment of its current orientation in the Brazilian context is corroborated by the growing links between both organizations starting in 1981. In a letter[51] from January 1981, Renato Sandri references the meeting of Enrico Berlinguer with a delegation from the PT to Italy. A central topic was the PCI’s pledge to send observers to the upcoming trial of trade unionists by a military higher court in February 1981 on account of their role in the strike activity in May and June of the previous year. Despite the Amnesty Law, the dictatorship continued to selectively persecuted what it perceived as threats to the regime – civilian rule would only return in 1984, and the country’s protracted transition would only conclude with the approval of the Constitution of 1988 and first free presidential elections in the following year.

The PT delegation’s visit to Italy in 1981 is a key development, because the then charismatic metal worker Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva – since 2023 Brazil’s president on his third term – did not come simply as a representative of the trade union movement or the opposition at large. He arrived in Italy as the leader of a new political organization which vied for hegemony in the Brazilian left with the PCB. After the trip, Lula sent a letter of thanks to Berlinguer. Lula stressed that:‘[…] the interest and solidarity you expressed personally and through your party during our trip and, subsequently, on the occasion of the trial and conviction to which we were subjected by the São Paulo Military Court, reinforce and encourage the struggle of Brazilian workers for democracy. […] These gestures of international solidarity will not be forgotten. […] We will soon be sending more detailed information about the progress of the ABC trade unionists’ court case, and also about the organization of the Workers’ Party throughout the national territory.’[52]

The final remark indicates that the bonds between the two organizations went beyond solidarity efforts and that the PCI took an active interest in the PT’s politics and organization. This is confirmed by PCI documentation from 1982, when Italian communists made multiple visits to the country.

One of them was, once again, Pietro Capone who, in his trip to Brazil in February and March of 1982, met with leaders of the PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro) – the successor organization to the legal opposition party MDB (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro) –, the PT and PCB among others. His report is another lucid panorama of the situation in Brazil, whose democratic transition progressed against a background of economic recession, sovereign debt crisis and rising inflation.[53] By this point, the fraught relationship between the PCB and PT was at its peak: ‘The struggle for hegemony is very strong and one notices a strong resentment (if not hatred) from the “historical” left in their confrontation with the trade unionists close to the PT’.[54] The report indicates that the PCI’s sympathies are clearly being swayed by the new organization. Capone qualifies the PT’s fast rise – ‘it currently has four hundred thousand members’[55] – as ‘without a doubt, the most interesting phenomenon in the Brazilian political conjuncture’.[56] Compared to the despondency in the membership of a still illegal and divided PCB, Capone highlights ‘the great enthusiasm with which [PT] leaders and activists carry out their tasks’.[57] The PCI’s interest was reciprocated: ‘trade union leaders (from the PT camp and independents) have shown great interest in our experience and wish to establish ties to the CGIL [Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, Italian General Confederation of Labour]’.[58]

The identification between the two organizations went, however, deeper than the usual allegiances between left-wing allies of different countries. The maturation of the PT’s political perspective had been forged, according to Capone, through the actual ‘everyday antagonism with capital, with the system and the multinationals’ by its ‘working-class nucleus’. The PT, he stressed, ‘does not define itself as either Marxist or Leninist but it has a clear socialist alternative program always in respect of democracy’.[59] In that regard, it had, ‘mutatis mutandis, a “third way” perspective that is quite intelligible to us’.[60] Hence, despite their obvious differences, PCI operatives recognized key traits of the Eurocommunist platform in the PT. The newly founded Brazilian organization arguably radicalized that platform’s affirmation of democracy as a lever for socialist change in its program. This was aided by the fact that, while many of its leading activists had been members of far-left guerrilla organizations of various orientations (Trotskist, Maoist, Guevarrian etc.), it was unburdened by a Leninist heritage or formal ties to states of the communist space. Put differently, it could be ‘more’ Eurocommunist than the PCI, despite being neither active in a West European setting nor a communist organization. The PT’s leadership was aware of this affinity, and Capone mentions that ‘in numerous exchanges […] I found enormous attention and sympathy for our conception and our struggles’, and the ‘desire to tighten the bonds with our party’.[61]

The PCI-PT convergence also had an international component. Regarding the recent (1981) political crisis in Poland, the PCI’s critical position with regards to the repression of the opposition found echo in the PT, while the PCB’s warring factions were split on the matter. In an editorial of the Voz da Unidade, party leadership had ‘termed the Polish coup a “victory of socialism”, labeling those that saw the matter differently as “antisocialists and pro-imperialists”’.[62] By this point, Eurocommunist intellectuals had lost control of the newspaper: ‘The so-called “Euros”’, Capone added ‘have responded with documents, press articles […] refuting the analysis and assessment of the Polish situation and above all of the reality of the socialist countries’.[63] This act of rebellion against the party’s majority line would be followed by the departure of many “Eurocommunists” from the PCB. In the decision to fall in line with the Soviet position, Capone remarked, ‘the “Euros” saw evidence of the leadership’s inability to build a new, national party that is able to attend to the demands of the Brazilian masses’. It was ‘revealing’, he concluded, that ‘at that very moment, the PT was mobilizing workers against the Polish coup’.[64]

This was just the latest instance illustrating the ‘severe crisis’ of the Brazilian CP, after the Prestes-led split. The former general secretary was now enmeshed in a ‘struggle against the PCB […] publishing a book that portrays it in a very negative light […], bringing to the public information of an extremely delicate nature on the internal life of a party that was – definitely – and remains a clandestine organization’.[65] Yet now that ‘the Prestes-led group had been sidelined’, Capone added, ‘the direction turned its attention to the so-called “Eurocommunist” component (a pejorative term for some of the PCB leaders)’.[66] They were: ‘also a minority numerically (even if it controls the Committees of São Paulo, a part of Rio and all of Bahia’s), but with a strong presence in civil society and counting, in its core, with the brightest personalities of Brazilian left-wing culture. All of them have been removed from the posts of responsibility they held in the party (especially in the newspaper) and one notices amongst them and those that entered the party in the last five years a widespread pessimism.’[67]

By late 1982, the PCI’s attention seems to have shifted predominantly to the PT. This development coincides with documentation on relations with Brazilian organizations becoming scarcer as a whole for the years that followed. From the end of September to the beginning of October 1982, Dino Pelliccia – party expert on emigration issues – was in São Paulo. The most important events of his trip were a short meeting with the elected PMDB governor of that province and, above all, ‘a longer meeting, one more of political “collaboration” with leading figures of the PT’, at their request. On the occasion, they ‘emphasized the importance of the links of solidary collaboration with the PCI’, which they believed ‘could assist them concretely in the education and orientation of mid-level cadre and those for city administration’.[68] This echoed Pietro Capone’s assessment from March 1982: ‘in 1983, the PT will find itself as a governing party in many local administrations; hence the utility and necessity of being assisted in the formation of cadre through knowledge of our experiences’.[69]

Against the backdrop of the PT’s rise, the remaining critical intellectuals of the PCB were growing increasingly frustrated with their party’s failure to change course: ‘Their criticism with regards to the direction is that it has not managed – or does not wish to – renovate the party or their analyses, the manner of conducting its politics and struggles in the country’.[70] ‘The risk’, Capone stressed, ‘was that a large segment of the party, certainly the vast majority of the “brains”, will either leave politics or join the PT’.[71] This proved to be another perceptive estimation of later developments: most of the PCB’s ‘Eurocommunist’ intellectuals would leave the party between 1981-1983, including Carlos Nelson Coutinho, who like most would go on to join the PT during that decade.

VII. In the hall of mirrors: taking the ‘Italian road to socialism’ in Latin America

The stark echoes of the ‘Italian road to socialism’ within the Latin American left reconstructed above suggest that the image of ‘Eurocommunism’ in the latest scholarship – i.e., its characterization as a phenomenon rooted in a ‘Western environment’ [in einem westlichen Umfeld][72] and characterized by its utter failure[73] – should at least be relativized. Its fertile appropriation by Brazilian leftists in the 1970s and 1980s is, in this regard, not only an episode of reception, but an indication that Eurocommunism’s scope stretched well beyond West Europe. Resonance in the Global South has, however, been ignored in recent literature in large part because of the identification of Eurocommunism with the economic and political context of the ‘West’, utilized as a readily understandable and self-contained category.

But the premise that democratic politics (hence also a democratic form of socialism) requires a certain degree of economic development is not only a feature of contemporary scholars’ discourse; it was raised by both sets of communist activists examined above: Italian and Brazilian Eurocommunists. Alongside notions of East-West difference, it helped crystallize the enormous gaps existing between their respective contexts, a West European industrial democracy and a right-wing dictatorship in a fast-industrializing, but still highly unequal Latin American country. On the other hand, both the Brazilian identification with the ‘Italian road to socialism’ and Italian communists’ solidarity efforts constituted attempts to (at least partially) overcome the conditions underpinning those North-South asymmetries. While not the only or, perhaps, overriding aspect of the relationship between these actors, it represents a relevant dimension of their transnational bonds.

Two further trips of Italian communists to Brazil in 1982 and 1991, respectively, encapsulate the tensions inherent in such efforts to ‘relativize’ global inequalities through cross-border coordination and exchange. Though less than a decade apart, intervening events – above all the crisis of European socialist states – had brought a decisive shift in the asymmetries underlying these encounters. In April 1982, renowned Gramsci-expert and PCI member Luciano Gruppi spent two weeks in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where he met with intellectuals and leaders of the PCB as well as with members of a PT-affiliated research institute.[74] His main activity was a four-lecture series on ‘the Marxist concept of the state, concluding with Gramsci and Togliatti’. The lectures were published in Portuguese that year, along with Gruppi’s main works on Lenin and Gramsci – apparently to his great surprise: ‘As you see, anything can happen in this world!’.[75]

After the lectures, Gruppi reports that the 80-person audience posed ‘very numerous questions, which in the end referred to our politics, to the third way’.[76] Gruppi tried to ‘refrain from expressing views on our positions in a way that would seem polemical’, shifting the discussion to broader questions of theory.[77] Brazilian audience members were, however, intent on debating the validity and actuality of Italian communist thought and politics to their context: ‘I was surrounded, however, by the comrades that they call “Eurocommunists” there. They were dissatisfied with the fact that we define our politics as Eurocommunist, and with our reference to a European third way, holding that, beyond any senseless attempt at imitation, our line, i.e., the relationship we establish between socialism and democracy, also has a value – mutatis mutandis – for a continent such as Latin America.’[78]

This active Latin American appropriation of Italian left-wing thought and tradition, including a set of policies and views specifically conceived for a developed context in the North (as was the case of Eurocommunism), was still in play when Giuseppe Vacca, a longtime PCI intellectual, visited Argentina, Chile and Brazil in the spring of 1991. In February of that year, a party majority had voted to change the PCI’s name to ‘Democratic Party of the Left’ (PDS, Partito Democratico della Sinistra), marking the definitive renunciation of its communist heritage and bonds to a socialist world now in crisis. Though many – including in the contemporary research – saw the move as a fulfillment of the ‘social democratic’ undercurrent inscribed in the Eurocommunist program, Vacca’s interlocutors in Argentina, including Gramsci’s translator to Spanish, José Aricó, saw the matter differently: ‘The same evening that I arrived in Buenos Aires, José Aricó invited me to the Socialist Club for a meeting on the dissolution of the PCI and the birth of the PDS, which had occurred a few weeks earlier. Having travelled to Latin America since 1978, I had direct knowledge of the widespread interest held for Italian communism in the subcontinent, but the meeting at the Club was like a cold shower. The numerous intellectuals who participated were not interested in delving into the reasons that had led to the PCI’s dissolution; they contested in unison, one after the other, the legitimacy of our decision because they considered Italian communism a living source of innovation and revision of international importance, which we had no right to extinguish.’[79]

Far from a gesture of subalternity to a visitor from the North, the bitterness with which Vacca’s Argentinian hosts met the recent majority decision to dissolve the PCI and renounce its communist roots, foretold, perhaps, a broader shift in the space serving as a ‘living source of innovation’ for the global left in the 1990s: from Europe to Latin America. A shift underscored, moreover, by the seemingly permanent decline of the Italian left since that meeting in Argentina. The heritage of Antonio Gramsci and Italian communist thought more generally – including its short-lived ‘Eurocommunist’ phase – would, however, continue to play a role in left-wing movements and thought in Latin America in the ensuing decades: from the ‘pink wave’ of leftist governments in the 2000s and 2010s, to debates on decolonial thought, ‘left populism’ and unorthodox Marxism to this day.