Political Dualism and Italian Communism

The poverty of philosophy, for Marx, was its formalism. The social sciences, in contrast, are blessed with the ability to adjust theory to experience. In our study of Marxist movements, however, we lack precisely the marxian flexibility we need to overcome a patrimony of ideology, misinformation and rigidity. Writers like Duverger and Selznick, for example, talk about “devotee parties” and “organizational weapons” without considering that their terminology may in some cases be misleading.The devotee party, writes Duverger, “represents a change from the conception of the party as a class; it is the party conceived as the elite.” Its members pledge their “whole human being” to the party while its structure focuses upon “unceasing propaganda and agitation,” to the detriment of parliamentary activity. Duverger leaves no doubt that his archetype of the devotee party is the Communist Party. What he never asks, however, is whether a Communist Party may be anything but a devotee party.With a similar focus, Philip Selznick describes “the combat party,” whose peculiar property is its “competence to turn members of a voluntary association into disciplined and deployable political agents,” and its “adoption of subversion” and “penetration and manipulation of institutional targets.” While the model is most relevant in societies in which Communist doctrine is remote and unappealing to the population, Selznick, like Duverger, holds that it “provides a fair interpretation of the Communist vanguard or combat party, wherever it is found.”