The essay describes the rise and fall of the Italian Communist Party (ICP)’s dissident leftist
wing taking its name from the journal il manifesto, which was its main tribune. The unauthorized
monthly, founded in June 1969, was the main cause of a conflict that exploded
following a creeping antagonism between the party leading bodies and the minority. This
contrast involved some major issues related to international relations, ideology and, most
of all, the party’s internal democracy. Its worsening was also due to the death of the ICP’s
general secretary Palmiro Togliatti in 1964, which provoked a lack of unifying leadership
and the emerging of such divergent identities within the party. The controversial history of
il manifesto, which was bound to become one of the major protagonists of the European
Left in the 1970s, represents well the evolving handling of dissidences in the post-1968
ICP. With respect to procedural solutions that were mostly based on the punishment of
the dissent, the treatment of il manifesto shows a more negotiating model, in which administrative
disciplinary procedures coexist with informal interactions between the two fronts
as well as a real debate within them. The expulsion of the undisciplined militants was the
solution of a long-lasting and intense confrontation, which the essay analyses by seeking
to decrypt its communicational, cultural and ritual aspects.
