A Special Road to Socialism

Could this really be a congress of Italy's Communist Party? There sat the 1,200 local delegates, bourgeois and beaming, as their leader talked tolerantly of compromise with the capitalists and collaboration with the Catholics. But for a lonely little bust of Lenin on the podium and the presence of Moscow's cadaverous Ideologue Mikhail Suslov (who brought it), not a single picture, statue or reference to Russia's Communist heroes, past or present, could be seen or heard. Instead, what hook-nosed Secretary-General Luigi Longo, 65, was promoting was something that he styled "the Italian road to socialism."

His line was tailored to the increasingly prosperous and conservative Italian working classes. Communist Party membership has wilted from its postwar peak of 2,145,317 to 1,615,296, and the slippage among youth groups (off 60%) and in the factories has been even more drastic. Seeking to match the mood of the new masses, Longo suggested a nuova maggioranza (new majority) that would unite Communists, Socialists and left-wing Christian Democrats behind a platform demanding nothing more doctrinaire than better economic planning and fewer monopolies. Over objections from some hard-lining delegates, Longo hinted that his merged party might even be willing to change its name. And he lavished praise on the Vatican Ecumenical Council. "We have observed," he conceded graciously, "a certain development beyond those conservative positions which made religious ideology the opiate of the people."

No other party appeared very interested in Longo's offer of "a new leftist unity"--least of all the two other major left-wing parties, the Socialists and the

Social Democrats, who have laid plans for a merger of their own. Just the same, no Italian politician could afford to ignore the latest Communist appeal, for some 7,000,000 Italians, or about one-fourth of the electorate, still vote Red in general elections--and the next elections might not be very far away if the nation's latest political crisis is not settled soon. Italy was without a government, thanks to the small Christian Democratic faction which voted down Premier Aldo Moro fortnight ago (TIME, Jan. 28). And though President Giuseppe Saragat had asked Moro to reform his Cabinet, the days passed with no news of his success.

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