Italian Communists Sever Marxist Roots : Europe: The party votes to ally with socialists. Reform in Eastern Europe spurred the move.

BOLOGNA, Italy —  From an elaborate VIP platform of yesterday-red, the largest Communist Party in the West waved a tearful farewell here Saturday to its Marxist roots.

Struggling for survival in the swelling wave of European political change, Italy’s Communists moved to relaunch their proud but fading party on democratic socialist principles.

Reformers led by Secretary General Achille Occhetto carried an extraordinary four-day, 1,092-delegate party congress by a margin of about 2 to 1 Saturday in a series of motions that cut ties to the past.

“This great community of men and women must move itself to renew its own strength--a precious strength so essential to Italian democracy and to the left,” Occhetto said in a closing address Saturday. The speech ended with strong applause, Occhetto’s tears over a bouquet of red roses and a spontaneous, off-key rendition of “Red Flag,” the Italian Communist anthem.

Rebirth will mean a new name for the 1.4-million-member, always-a-bridesmaid Partito Communista Italiano--and goodby to baggage ranging from the class struggle to the hammer and sickle.

In practical terms, the political renaissance institutionalizes ideas that are already dominant in a party that long ago abandoned revolutionary objectives of the sort that have been jettisoned in the Soviet Union and East Europe over the past few months.

A 54-year-old professional politician, Occhetto promises a new, left-wing party that will be socialist and reformist. It will, he says, aim at “changing the course of Italian politics, at gearing the country’s change prospects, at carrying the left into government and contributing to the creation of new world order.”

Seeking to integrate Italy’s Communists within the European political mainstream, Occhetto wants the reborn party to join the Socialist International as a pledge of its commitment to social democratic pluralism.

In coming months, he will seek common cause with Italian Socialists, radicals, disaffected Christian Democrats, environmentalists and other leftist groups in search of a unified, broadly based--and electable--Italian left.

The Communists’ new name and detailed party policies will be worked out by year’s end through internal debate and consultation with prospective allies. Until then, the party will no doubt keep the irreverent nickname it has borne with good humor since Occhetto announced his reform scheme last November: La Cosa-- the Thing.

As one of its achievements, the congress that ended Saturday shattered the monolithic facade so long prized by so many Communist parties around the world.

In an internal introduction to pluralism, Italian Communists head home today from the historic meeting divided into three uneven camps: Occhetto’s “new dealers” representing about two-thirds; middle-of-the-roaders who sought renewal without dissolution, accounting for nearly all the rest; and an unrepentant handful of Stalinists howling in the left-flank wilderness.

Resplendent for his closing address in a television-blue shirt, his salt-and-pepper mustache neatly arrayed, Occhetto took pains to avoid any breakaway by his opponents within the party.

The drenched-in-red decor of the congress site at a sports arena here and the red, nine-tiered, semicircular, Soviet-style VIP platform were more than decorators’ inspiration.

Occhetto stressed the obvious: “Everyone will notice that this hall is particularly red. That does not contrast with what we seek to do. Red is the color of the workers movement of socialist and common inspiration,” he said. “We wish to change many things, but we do not intend to leave the historical base from which we spring; we wish to expand it.”

As Occhetto and his allies acknowledged, events in Eastern Europe have accelerated change in Italy’s Communist Party.

The country’s second-largest political party since the end of World War II, the Communists have seen their vote drop from 34.4% in 1976 to 26.9% in 1987. Still, the party draws nearly 10 million faithful to the polls.

Unremitting Communist resistance to Benito Mussolini’s Fascists and to subsequent Nazi occupation during World War II is still proudly remembered in Italy. But since the war, more than 4,000 coalitions built around Italy’s strongest party, the Christian Democrats, have deprived the Communists of any role in national government.

At one time or another, though, Communists have administered virtually every major Italian city. In the process, they have won the reputation as the party that gets things done. Prosperous, bourgeois Bologna, a solid, stolid and well-run city about 220 miles north of Rome, has a Communist mayor today.

Italy’s Communists broke with Moscow two decades before that became fashionable, but events have overtaken them this revolutionary winter.

Now, as the party congress acknowledged Saturday, Italian communism must change quickly and credibly once and for all or risk becoming as obsolete as the Berlin Wall.