Reform Communists in the twentieth-century global network: The Italian Communist Party’s agrarian policies in the postwar period

Abstract

This article aims to explain the main agrarian policies of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the early postwar period with the analytical category of “reform communism” and the “global network” methodological approach. These tools help to understand the PCI decisions in these years in historical rather than polemical terms. The argument is strengthened by archival materials which include Central Committee meeting minutes, congresses records, internal reports and pamphlets. In the first part, the author introduces the ‘New Party’, which was the evolution of the traditional Communist Party of Italy, to identify its main historical and intellectual coordinates. Then, the article analyzes through those analytical innovations some of the main agrarian policies that the PCI tried, more or less successfully, to implement between 1944 and 1947, i.e. when there existed a series of governments of national unity. These policies were the 1944 Gullo Law, the subsequent organs like Land Committees, and the debates around the Agrarian Reform, which are analyzed respectively in the second, third and fourth parts.