Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy

7. REDEFINING OPPRESSION: The 1960s, from Affluence to Youth Protest

244 7 REDEFINING OPPRESSION The 1960s, from Affluence to Youth Protest Affluence? Europe’s economic miracles were not only about growth, prosperity, and full employment. With the arrival of mass consumption, the diffusion of visual media, and the shaping of a new social order that privileged the private sphere over communal life, the “miracle” also heralded a profound cultural transformation. Starting in the late 1950s, a consumer-oriented culture, in which advertising contributed to socializing the masses more successfully than old patterns of social solidarity, fulfilled the promise of the politics of productivity the United States had transmitted to Europe during the Marshall Plan years. Although the end of the dollar gap and rapid industrialization marked Europe’s relative economic emancipation from the United States, the social transformation carried the American label more strongly than in the postwar period. In Italy, a wide, diffused prosperity confirmed patterns of consensus and Americanization, eroding the bases of left-wing support. The “ubiquity of American images,” as Stephen Gundle explains, was partly a consequence of internal social imbalances: since Italy “lacked a genuine secular culture,” rapid industrialization “created an enormous cultural gap that only ideas, themes, products, and norms of an American origin seemed able to fill.” Furthermore, television, reaching remote rural areas, introduced “an ostensibly classless visual culture [that] clearly followed the American pattern.” France, at a relatively more advanced stage of secularism and industrialization, experienced the socioeconomic change with fewer traumas. But even with all the confidence and inspiring force of the Gaullist leadership, the fear of cultural Americanization reached a peak during the early 1960s, as testified by the literary surge in defense of the French language (René Etiemble’s Parlez-vous franglais? was published in 1964) or the widespread admission that the American model of mass consumerism had been finally adopted by French society.1 Fear of cultural submersion continued to match the fear of political subservience . In France, the “sociocultural critique gradually suffusing antiAmerican discourse,” as Richard Kuisel noted, generated its own counterpoint . Even though French emulation of American mass consumption and mass culture “initially nourished anti-Americanism . . . in the long run REDEFINING OPPRESSION 245 [it] also weakened it.”2 Debates within the French and Italian Communist Parties reveal this contrast between short- and long-term effects. Under further scrutiny, they also elucidate how this contrast, while becoming fully evident in the late 1960s, elicited the Communists’ juxtaposition of ideological affirmation and awareness of neocapitalism’s potential. This very contradiction , reflecting frictions within the extreme Left, made the Communists’ worst fears about the demise of a proletarian outlook under the impact of modernization a self-fulfilling prophecy. IDENTIFYING NEOCAPITALIST FLAWS Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, until the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the Communists focused on the social menace of Americanism. French and Italian Communists were unhappy with the European settlement and continued to fight their countries’ political and economic transatlantic bonds. But, as we have noted, they had moved toward partial acceptance of European integration. For a short time in the early 1960s, the PCF even acquiesced in France’s continued membership in NATO, motivated by its need to form a political agreement with the Socialists. Long preceding the PCI’s compromises with Atlanticism, this move was not matched by an adaptation to the new economic realities. The PCF continued to exceed the PCI in economic orthodoxy, committing itself fully to the pauperization thesis. Despite evidence of improved living standards for the working class, Thorez in 1956 insisted that the workers were being exploited and impoverished (in absolute terms). At its onset in the mid-1950s, the campaign against pauperization was tied to anticolonial protests, which exposed the high cost of maintaining imperial ambitions. It was also combined with the already established cultural battle to defend small business against the monopolies. In this renewed context, that battle was in part an effort to regain popular support among the middle class, which tended to favor empire. This combination made the PCF the main representative of declining sectors in the economy, with strongholds “in cantons of industrial decay and demographic decline.” At the intellectual level, the tradition of individualism, a component of French identity that the Left saw threatened mainly by U.S. modernization, favored the party’s continuing attachment to the rural life and a precapitalist world. If this attitude contradicted the promise of socialist progress, it served the immediate purpose of resisting American cultural hegemony.3 While more flexible toward modernization, the PCI’s...