The Italian Communist Party and the pursuit of revolutionary science

Although scholarship has demonstrated the inextricability of the history of science from the histories of industry and politics, little attention has been paid to the role of political parties in the shaping of scientific inquiry. A new article in Isis, “The Political Elaboration on Science and Technology of the Italian Communist Party Between the 1960s and the 1980s,” investigates how political parties mediate social change and scientific progress, using the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) as its object of analysis.

After WWII, the leadership of the PCI, mostly predominated by humanists and social scientists, considered science in mere cultural terms. Furthermore, following the politicization of science under the Fascist regime, the Italian academy tended to discourage its students of science from political engagement. At the beginning of the 1960s, the increasing centrality of science and technology acquired in productive processes, writes article author Daniele Cozzoli, led the party to elaborate an original collective reflection on science.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Italian industrialists were introducing increased automation into their factories, radically modifying the relative autonomy of workers in factories and keeping workers’ wages stagnant. The US and the USSR were locked in a space race that demanded ever greater technological progress, and which further tied scientific research to the military.

At the beginning of the 1970s, it appeared clear that economic growth incurred stunning ecological devastation. As Indira Gandhi explained in her famous speech at the 1972 UN Stockholm conference, putting a halt to industrialization in the Global South ran the risk of perpetuating the poverty of still developing nations.

In spite of its hierarchical structure, the PCI became a place where senior scientists, young nontenured scientists, politicians and policymakers, technicians, and workers freely debated. Different positions coexisted, but the prevailing one stressed that science was not neutral.

According to this view, the devastation of environment, the arms race, and the compression of workers’ role in factories were not the results of a “neutral” science, but rather those of the development of a military-oriented and consumerist science. The party’s collective reflection on the “non-neutrality” of science led the party leader, Enrico Berlinguer, to formulate the “austerity policy” as a way to give workers back their centrality in productive processes and at the same time establish a non-colonial relation with the Global South.

In the 1970s, when the global oil crisis spurred a panic over energy dependence, tension emerged within the party regarding the construction of nuclear power plants. Although nuclear energy presented a cleaner alternative to oil, and one that would reduce the extraction of resources from the Global South, the nuclear pollution posed an even greater problem. Moreover, the security required to monitor nuclear power sites would mean the increased militarization of the whole Italian society, the construction of an “atomic state” like in the postwar United States.

With the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union, the orientation of the PCI shifted from communism to social democracy and the party changed its name. But these dialogues demonstrate the nature of political parties as “places where ideas are debated, formed, and elaborated,” and remain as a record of the PCI’s efforts to couple science with radical ends.

By framing science within the structure of global inequality, Cozzoli concludes, the PCI aligned themselves with the growing movement in the history of science to recognize contributions and people that have previously gone overlooked.