COMMUNISM / A NOMINAL DEFECTION : What’s in a Name? In Italy, It’s What’s Left : The hammer and sickle survive--but barely--as Communists draft a new look for the party.

ROME —  The decision by the sagging Italian Communist Party to change its name has triggered a donnybrook for control of the large and potentially dominant political left in a country where successful capitalism has long been a comfortable bedfellow of forces that nominally oppose it.

After a noisy and divisive 11-month gestation, the Communists now proclaim their party, the largest in the West, to be the Partito Democratico della Sinistra-- the Democratic Party of the Left .

As a compromise between demands to scrap it entirely or to retain its prominence, the hammer-and-sickle emblem that was born with Italian communism in 1921 has survived the overhaul--but barely. It now sits at the base of an emblematic oak tree that is supposed to symbolize both the party’s deep roots and its latter-day preoccupation for the environment.

The new name is expected to be ratified at a party congress in January, but critics inside and outside the party say the move is too little, too laborious and too late to rescue a political force that time has left behind.

“The great goal of the European left, and of the new Italian party of the left, is to join the values of liberty and equality so often separated during the 20th Century,” said Communist leader Achille Occhetto in announcing a new name intended to place his party within the mainstream of European social democracy.

Occhetto has majority support within his party for the switch, but hard-liners, about one-third, support traditional Marxist principles and think it is a mistake. Even within the majority, there is disquiet. If yesterday’s Communists are really now social democrats, the new name should have clearly reflected that, the argument goes.

The Communists remain Italy’s second-largest political movement, but their base is being eroded by apathy and an absence of definition.

Although Communists have generally good records in governing major Italian cities, their national support is slumping, particularly among young Italians for whom the party’s history of opposing fascism means nothing.

Italian Communists jettisoned Marxist economic and totalitarian baggage decades before that became fashionable in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Now, with Italy enjoying unprecedented prosperity as one of the world’s five leading industrial democracies, they are rushing to catch up.

A Communist-dominated labor union, Italy’s largest, severed its political links with the party last week. A new party program being hammered out this week is distinctly social democratic in tone, seeking a new party profile on such issues as the environment, feminism, social justice, the quality of life and Italy’s role in the new Europe. The trouble in sounding like social democrats is that the Communists also now sound like a lot of other parties in Italy’s crowded political firmament.

Italian communism crested with 34% of the vote in 1976 elections that marked the high-water mark of Eurocommunism. The Communists have retained their following--now around 27%--better than counterparts in France, Spain or Portugal. But they are as far as ever from a share of government power that has eluded them since the republic was born in 1948.

In announcing the search for a new name last year, Occhetto envisioned a united Italian left that, burying historic Communist-Socialist enmity, would offer voters a viable national alternative to the conservative Christian Democrats who have dominated Italian government since World War II.

Of unity there is no sign. Not only are the Communists in disarray after their prolonged soul-searching. Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi, whose No. 3 party they had hoped to woo, is instead jockeying to profit from their discomfit.

Craxi, a boundlessly ambitious former prime minister, has found comfortable common cause with the Christian Democrats as a partner in the ruling coalition for the past decade.

If there is ever to be unity on the left, Craxi wants to be at its head.

The Communist Party, which Italians derisively nicknamed La Cosa (The Thing) over the last 11 months of indecision, finally limped to the delivery room door only to find Craxi already there.

With the autocrat’s aplomb that is his trademark, Craxi announced recently that after short labor the night before, the Italian Socialist Party had been reborn as Unita Socialista-- Socialist Unity.

ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY VOTE Percentage of vote in various elections since 1963 1963 National elections: 25.3% 1968 National elections: 27.0% 1976 National elections: 34.4% 1979 National elections: 30.4% 1980 Local elections: 31.5% 1984 European elections: 33.3% 1985 Local elections: 30.2% 1987 National elections: 26.9% 1988 Local elections: 21.9% 1989 European elections: 27.6% 1990 Local elections: 24.2%