which later, under the post-war Republic, allowed the party to attract the
largest support of any Western European communist party. His major work in
this area, thePrison Notebooks, are the source for much of this inspiration and
indeed for the wholeEurocommunismmovement.
Although Gramsci never dropped the theoretical basis ofcommunism,
remaining always committed to the doctrine of historicalmaterialism, he
did drop the insistence on a violent proletarian revolution. He made a
distinction between tactics for the socializing of a state between the ‘tactics
of siege’ and the ‘tactics of movement’. The former was the traditional notion
of building class consciousness inside a working-class ideological ghetto,
ignoring all reformist movements, and waiting (as though besieged by an
enemy) until the final moment of the ‘true revolutionary situation’. This, the
working doctrine for example of the French Communist Party, and the one
that had been forced on the RussianBolsheviksby their situation and the
nature of the Tsarist regime, he felt was quite out of place in Italy. Instead he
wished to adopt a much more flexible approach by which the communist
movement would seek to ally with progressive forces, and seek to win to its
cause those members of thebourgeoisiewho had no long-term reason to
support the capitalist state. At the same time the party should try, by its allies in
the media and educational structures, to propagandize the whole society, to
win a willing acceptance of communism, rather than try to enforce it by a
dictatorship of the proletariat. This flexible and non-violent tradition of
Italian communism enabled the party to advocate the ‘Historical Compro-
mise’, by which it hoped to join the ruling Christian Democrats in power. An
interesting point about Gramsci’s work is that he gave a theoretical justification
forgradualismwhich clearly was not subject to the usual criticism that
gradualists, in the end, were merely bourgeois reformers. The collapse of the
old party system in Italy after 1992, initially seemed to doom all forms of Italian
communism. However disenchantment with the centre left governments of
the 1990s led to something of an electoral reprieve for the reformed Italian
communists. They now cling even more strongly to Gramscian analysis as the
only way to seem relevant in the post-cold war new Republic and the 21st
century.
Green (see Environmentalism)
Green Socialism
Green socialism is a name sometimes given to ecological or environmental
political parties and movements. The term more broadly refers to the con-
catenation of liberal and socialist values, often attractive to middle-class
Green Socialism