'A class struggle fought within ourselves'. Party morality and subjectivity in Cold War Italian Communism.

In the harshest phase of the Cold War between the end of the Second World War and the death of Stalin, the Italian Communist Party, in line with the orientation of international communism, stuck to a model of militancy forged in the 1930s and based on the submission of individual choices and behaviour to the rules dictated by the party. This claim was never fully realized: the discipline operated by the party was not a one-way process, and had to deal with the cultural, familial, existential and affective factors that make up each individual's life. However, the case of the communist leader Emilio Sereni shows how the higher up in the organizational structure one went, the more the identification of the individual with the party intensified, through a logic that affected even the most intimate sphere of feelings and family relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]