Uno strano tipo di comunisti. Gli imprenditori e il PCI nella Toscana del boom economico

What, in economic sociology, corresponds to the ‘Third Italy’ and, in economics and political history, has been referred to as the ‘red sub-culture’, constitutes a stimulating experience of creativity because it unhinges the usual patterns of interpretation of the industrial production system (capitalism/statism; entrepreneurial culture/workers’ culture; individual/society). Rather than understanding it politologically as the ante litteram exemplification of a ‘third way’, in this article I propose to read the economic and political subjects of Tuscany in the 1950s and 1960s through the Graeberian category of everyday communism, and as the embodiment of a possibility of history and culture. The existential anthropology that emerges from the life stories and the analysis of the minutes of the local PCI meetings highlights a capitalism founded on work and not on rent and a specific moral economy, characterized by the tension between the entrepreneurial ethos and collectivism.