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ITALY. The new Italian Marxists draw their strength from a group of some 200 far-left organizations known collectively as "the extraparliamentary left," from the 14 universities (out of a total of 43) in which they wield major influence, and such cultural crannies as the Italian artistic community, which is almost totally Marxist. Still, they have not made much headway against the Italian Communist Party, which has a membership of 1,500,000 and won 27% of the vote in last year's election. The party has chosen to march to real power by proving itself effective and responsible. Communist mayors preside over a number of cities, including Bologna (pop. 500,000), Italy's best-run metropolis. Party Leader Enrico Berlinguer has denounced the far-leftists as "objective fascists"—just about the worst insult one follower of Marx can hurl at another.
FRANCE. Like their West German cousins, France's young Marxists have decided that they were "too ideological, intellectual and elitist" back in 1968. The French far left—ten main groups, with a total membership of no more than 30,000—is much smaller than the German movement. But it has achieved striking success in mining pockets of discontent that have been neglected by both the Gaullist regime and the establishment left. A variety of Marxist fronts—Trotskyites, Jean-Claude Navatte's Marxist-evangelist Christian Student Youth organization—helped transform hundreds of France's often-bored secondary-school students into a politically conscious, slogan-chanting pressure group powerful enough to put the government on the defensive and to force it to resubmit a controversial new draft law to the legislature (TIME, April 16). Radicals have also been marketing their "Marxist humanism" up and down factory assembly lines in Paris and other cities. As a result, France's floating population of 3,000,000 unskilled workers from Spain, Portugal and Africa have become a new minority with demands of its own.
Navatte, a Paris law student, talks hopefully of forging many alliances with "the masses of dissatisfied people in the country and obliging the government to listen to us." The Socialist and Communist politicians and union leaders of France's big left-wing establishment let the nimbler New-Left radicals get ahead of them in 1968—a mistake they are determined not to make again.
The Marxist renaissance defies current European realities at several points. One is the spiritual drabness of life in East bloc nations, where Communist dogmatism simply will not tolerate what one Polish theoretician dismisses as "Marxist dead talk." By and large, students in Poland and Hungary are baffled by the enthusiasm of their counterparts in the West for Marxism. In fact, to some young East Europeans Marx and Lenin are not exactly household words. Asked to identify them, a girl in Belgrade pondered for a moment and then guessed: "Two brothers?"