Italian communism is neither Stalinist nor Trotskyite but instead has been an influential popular movement for socialism and against fascism.
- Under Fascist rule, Communist Party (PCI) leaders were jailed.
- Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist leader, was a powerful advocate of council communism (which was definitely not the Soviet system; sympathy with council communism has been expressed by anarchist Noam Chomsky).
- Once imprisoned, he wrote down his thoughts in a series of notebooks, and is widely agreed to be one of the most important Marxist intellectuals of this century.
- Gramsci angrily condemned Stalinism.
- Under Fascism, the strongest and most persistent anti-Fascist movement was that of the Communists.
- After WWII, Italian Communism was so widely supported in Italy that the CIA had to resort to propaganda, bribery, and election-rigging to keep them out of power.
- Before long, the Communists in Italy abandoned all notion of dictatorship and committed themselves fully to democracy and to gradualist means.
- In effect, their whole postwar history has been as a social democratic party, normally advocating much the same programme as the (very much smaller) Socialist Party (PSI), but kept out of power perpetually by the corrupt US-backed Christian Democratic (DC) regime.
- In the 1970s, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) typically gained around a third of the popular vote. It recognized it could not govern alone, and sought a coalition with the Christian Democrats (DC), who, however, after wavering, were pressured by the US into maintaining their corrupt stranglehold over political power.
In 1991, the Communists formally re-established themselves as the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), and were accepted into the Socialist International, as the comrades of British Labour, German SPD, French Socialists, Swedish Social Democrats (SAP), etc. A small faction of the old Communist Party re-consistuted itself as the "Communist Refoundation" (RC). In 1998, both communist parties are now party of Signor Prodi’s "centre-left" coalition government in Italy, the first competent government Italy has had for many years.
In 1993, both the old Socialist Party of Italy (PSI) and the Christian Democrats (DC) all but collapsed, the DC enveloped in its own US-backed corruption. In their place there was a resurgence of populist separatism in the North (the Northern League) and a resurgence of neo-fascism in the South (the rightwing National Alliance, now trying to present itself as a "post-fascist" party), while the prime place on the right was taken by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi’s new Forza Italia, a rightwing populist and nationalist party.