THE CORPSE STILL WALKS

From our pamphlet Sul filo del tempo, May 1953) 

It is not to sacrifice to the topicality of the ignoble May that passes, and takes worthy place among several of its predecessors consecrated to the past of the “tough virago” Liberty, now reduced to an old trotter, that we will once again deal with the theme: proletariat and electoralism.

Without giving, in fact, any importance to polls, or frantically examining statistics of results, to which for more than thirty years we have been contesting even this last alleged usefulness as a quantitative index of social forces, and without therefore attempting the cold sketch or admiring the pale photograph in numbers of today, and of the Italian country, we shall connect in brief strokes the positions of a historical period whose immense lessons are, at present, largely unused by the masses who flock – but with visible broad ebbs of distrust and disgust – to the usual ballot boxes.

In 1892 the Italian Socialist Party was formed at the Genoa Congress with the separation of Marxists from anarchists. The controversy and split reflects from afar that which ended the First International between Marx and Bakunin, and as it was said between authoritarians and libertarians. In the foreground it is seen thus: the Marxists are, in the situation of the time, for participation in the elections of administrative and political public bodies, the libertarians are against. But the real background of the issue is another (see the writings of the time by Marx, Engels on Spain, etc.). It is a matter of beating the individualist revolutionary conception that one should not vote for “not recognizing” by that act the State of the Bourgeois, with the historical and dialectical conception that the class state is a real fact and not a dogma that one only needs to erase, more or less idly, from one’s “consciousness,” and will be historically destroyed only by revolution. It is this (have you, Engels said, ever seen any?) par excellence fact of force and not of persuasion (much less of opinion counting), of authority and not of freedom, which will not be so naive as to throw autonomous individuals flying as if from a cage of pigeons, but will build the power and strength of a new state.

Hence, in this dispute between those who wanted to enter Parliaments and those who wanted to stay out of them (but as a corollary of the far more serious errors of inciting proletarians to deny the class state, the class political party, and even trade union organization) it was the Marxist socialists and not the anti-electionist and anti-organization anarchists who denied the bourgeois fable of freedom, the basis of the deception of elective democracy.

The correct programmatic position was to claim not so much the formal “conquest of public power”, but the revolutionary future “conquest of political power”, and in vain the possibilist and reformist right wing tried to cover up the formula given by Marx since 1848: dictatorship of the working class!

* * *

The European bourgeoisie, while allowing advances in the field of social reforms and seductive invitations of collaboration to the workers’ trade union and parliamentary leaders, enters the explosive circle of Imperialism, and in 1914 the First World War breaks out. A wave of bewilderment assails the socialists and workers who had however proclaimed on the eve, in Stuttgart and Basel, that social revolution would be opposed to war. The traitors take to measuring the catastrophic situation sweeping away decades of rosy illusions not by the yardstick of proletarian Marxism, but by that of bourgeois Liberty, whose highest clamors are raised whenever the cause and force of our Revolution forces them to their knees.

The existence of Parliaments and of the ballot right is invoked as a patrimony assured to the proletariat, which must defend it by allowing itself to be regimented and armed in the national army: and thus the German workers will be persuaded to be killed to ward off the Czarist spectre, the Western workers to do so against the Kaiserist spectre.

The Italian Socialist Party had the advantage of a lapse of time to decide before acceding to the national union: it decisively refused when for political alliance the Italian state would have to follow the Germans, and took refuge in the formula of neutrality (insufficient, as declared by the revolutionary wing even before the radiant May of 1915) and was then able to resist opposition when the bourgeoisie descended “into the field of freedom” by attacking Austria.

* * *

In 1919 the war is over, with national victory and the liberation of the “unredeemed” cities, but after immense blood sacrifice and with the inevitable aftermath of economic and social upheaval: inflation, crisis of production, crisis of war industry. Two powerful historical results are acquired and evident before the masses and their party. In the domestic field we have seen what an antithesis there is between the postulates of democracy and nation, identified with war and massacre, and those of class and socialist: the interventionists of all colors, from the nationalists (later fascists) to the demomasons and republicans, whether they were in the war or not, anxious to bask in the orgy of victory, soon cooled by the lashings of the imperialist allies, are rightly hated and mocked by the workers who sweep them from the squares where they descend determined to fight. In the international arena, the Bolshevik Revolution gave the de facto extremes to the theory of revolution opposed to demobourgeois and anarchists: victory can be achieved insofar as we radically rid ourselves of errors, illusions and scruples of democracy and freedom.

And then the crossroads opens before the great party beaten by the interventionists in May 1915. By the democratic way is easy to have a mighty numerical revenge. Much harder is the other way, which is faced by founding a revolutionary party, eliminating our own social democrats à la Turati, Modigliani, Treves, though saved from the shame of social patriotism, organizing the insurrectional seizure of power, which in the meantime is hoped to be possible throughout central Europe, in the territories of the defeated empires.

In the situation of 1892, there was no antithesis between the revolutionary path and that of electoral activity, the former having historically no other venue than the clear party program, not the maneuver of action.

An advanced group of Italian socialists at the Bologna Congress argued that in 1919 the antithesis was open. To take the path of elections meant closing the path of revolution. Evident was the perplexity of the bourgeoisie, which did not want, in its majority at the time, to prevent civil war by forceful initiatives, and with Giolitti and Nitti invited the workers to enter the defenseless factories, the one hundred and fifty MPs to pour into Montecitorio: let them sing Bandiera Rossa (Red Flag) in both precincts!

It was not possible to curb the enthusiasm for the election campaign, and to enforce the historically confirmed prediction that its effect, especially if successful, would be to lose all the gain made with the vigorous campaign of shaming the “democratic war,” with the enthusiasm with which the Italian workers, strongly deployed alone on the class front, had welcomed the seizure of power by the Russian Soviets, and the dispersal of the born-dead Democratic Assembly.

Mussolini, who had in 1914 betrayed us by switching to the opposite front with the partisans of democratic and irredentist intervention, advocate–would that he had succeeded earlier in that! – of a forceful initiative of the national bourgeoisie to stifle the proletarian organs – was in the elections ridiculed, and the infatuation subsequently ran its irresistible course.

In 1920, when laying the foundations of the Communist Party in Italy divided from the Social Democrats, the Moscow International held that an antithesis between elections and insurrection did not exist, in the sense that for the Communist parties solidly established across the dividing line between the two Internationals, it could be useful to make use of parliamentary action, to blow up Parliament itself, and by that means bury parliamentarianism . The question posed too generically was a difficult one, and all Italian Communists deferred to the decision of the Second Moscow Congress (June 1920), the solution being clear: in principle, all against parliamentarianism ; in tactics, neither participation always and everywhere, nor boycott always and everywhere.

The opinions of majorities are a little thing before the evidence of history. Such a decision, and its general acceptance in Italy, takes nothing away from the remembered antithesis of 1919: elections with a hybrid party of revolutionaries mostly on a slow path to orientation and well-determined social democrats – i.e., the breakup of the party (October 1919, it was time; in January 1921 it was late) and preparation for the conquest of revolutionary power.

It is unquestionable that Lenin did little good to collimate the position of antiwar socialists in Italy in the aftermath of a longtime democratic, and victorious, state and that of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the Czarist Dumas during the lost wars. But no less indisputable is that Lenin saw in time the historical antithesis posed by us then and confirmed by the future.

In the famous booklet on “Left wing communism, an infantile disorder” – in which the tendency to the left is not despised as puerile, but considered as an element of growth of communism, against right and center positions, elements of senescence and decomposition, which against Lenin’s desperate struggle and after breaking his brain had to triumph – in that text so exploited by the maniacs of the electoral method, this is how Lenin expressed himself on the struggle in the Italian party; these are the only passages:

Note of April 27, 1920: “I have had too little opportunity to acquaint myself with “Left-wing” communism in Italy. Comrade Bordiga and his faction of Abstentionist Communists (Comunista astensionista – in Italian in the text) are certainly wrong in advocating non-participation in parliament. But on one point, it seems to me, Comrade Bordiga is right—as far as can be judged from two issues of his paper, Il Soviet (Nos. 3 and 4, January 18 and February 1, 1920), from four issues of Comrade Serrati’s excellent periodical, Comunismo (Nos. 1–4, October l–November 30, 1919), and from separate issues of Italian bourgeois papers which I have seen. Comrade Bordiga and his group are right in attacking Turati and his partisans, who remain in a party which has recognised Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and yet continue their former pernicious and opportunist policy as members of parliament. Of course, in tolerating this, Comrade Serrati and the entire Italian Socialist Party are making a mistake which threatens to do as much harm and give rise to the same dangers as it did in Hungary, where the Hungarian Turatis sabotaged both the party and the Soviet government from within. Such a mistaken, inconsistent, or spineless attitude towards the opportunist parliamentarians gives rise to “Left-wing” communism, on the one hand, and to a certain extent justifies its existence, on the other. Comrade Serrati is obviously wrong when he accuses Deputy Turati of being “inconsistent” (Comunismo No. 3), for it is the Italian Socialist Party itself that is inconsistent in tolerating such opportunist parliamentarians as Turati and Co.

There is then the “Appendix,” dated May 12, 1920. “The issues of the Italian newspaper Il Soviet referred to above fully confirm what I have said in the pamphlet about the Italian Socialist Party” This is followed by a quotation from an interview of Turati with the “Manchester Guardian,” calling for labor discipline, order and prosperity for Italy. “Indeed, the correspondent of the British bourgeois-liberal newspaper has rendered Turati and Co. a disservice and has excellently confirmed the correctness of the demand by Comrade Bordiga and his friends on Il Soviet, who are insisting that the Italian Socialist Party, if it really wants to be for the Third International, should drum Turati and Co. out of its ranks and become a Communist Party both in name and in deed.”

So it is clear that the main issue is the elimination of socialpacifists from the proletarian party, secondary issue is whether it should participate in elections, in Lenin’s thinking at that time as well as in the subsequent debates and theses on parliamentarianism  of the Second Congress, shortly afterwards.

But for us today it is also clear what we argued then: that the only way to achieve the transport of forces to the revolutionary terrain was an enormous effort to liquidate, immediately after the end of the war, the tremendous democratic and electoral suggestion, which too many saturnalia had already celebrated.

The tactics desired by Moscow were duly, indeed demanding, followed by the Livorno party. But unfortunately, the subordination of revolution to the corrupting instances of democracy was now underway internationally and locally, and the Leninist meeting point of the two problems, as well as their relative weight, proved untenable. Parliamentarianism is like a cog that if it grabs you by a flap will inexorably crush you. Its employment in “reactionary” times advocated by Lenin was proposable; in times of possible revolutionary attacks it is a maneuver in which bourgeois counterrevolution too easily gains the upper hand. In various situations and under a thousand times history has convinced that better diversion from revolution than electoralism cannot be found.

* * *

From the concession to parliamentary tactics with wholly destructive application it slowly slid toward positions reminiscent of those of the Social Democrats. Alliances were proposed to these, where they led to a possible majority of seats, and since it made no sense to avail oneself of this numerical weight only to make platonic opposition and to bring down ministries there arose the other unfortunate formula of the “workers’ government.”

It was clear that there was a return toward the conception of parliament as the way to establish working-class political power. The facts proved that to the extent that this historical illusion was resurrected it all the positions previously won were gradually abandoned. From the destruction of Parliament among all the other cogs of the state by means of the insurrection, there had been a shift to the utilization of Parliament to accelerate the insurrection. It fell back to the utilization of Parliament as a means of arriving with the majority at class power. The fourth step, as clearly stated in the theses that the Left presented in Moscow in 1920, 1922, 1924, 1926, was to move from parliament as a means to parliament as an end. All parliamentary majorities are right, and sacred and inviolable, even if they are against the proletariat.

Turati himself would never have said this: but the “communists” of today say it at every hour and they inculcate it well down deep among the masses who follow them.

If we recall these stages once again, it is to establish the close link between every affirmation of electoralism, parliamentarianism, democracy, freedom, and a defeat, a step backward of the proletarian class potential.

The backward race had its completion without any more veils when, in reversed situations, the power of capital took the initiative of civil war against proletarian bodies. The situation was turned upside down in large part because of the work of the liberal bourgeoisie and the democratic socialists, of the same right wing nested in our ranks, as Lenin said for Hungary. In Germany it was those parties who were cops and executioners of the revolutionary communists, in Italy they not only favored the false retreats à la Nitti and Giolitti but gave their hand to the preparation of the open fascist forces, using for the purpose magistracy, police, army (Bonomi) to counterattack whenever the illegal communist forces (alone, and in full “pacification pact” signed by those parties) reported tactical successes (Empoli, Prato, Sarzana, Foiano, Bari, Ancona, Parma, Trieste, etc.). That in these cases the Fascists, not having been able to do so on their own, with the help of the forces of the constitutional and parliamentary state massacred our workers and comrades, burned newspapers and red headquarters, did not represent for them the greatest scandal: this erupted when fascists went against Parliament and killed, by then post festum, Deputy Matteotti.

The cycle was completed. No longer was Parliament for the cause of the proletariat, but the proletariat for the cause of Parliament. The general front of all non-Fascist parties above different ideologies and different class bases was invoked and proclaimed, with the sole aim of uniting all forces to overthrow fascism, resurrect democracy, and reopen parliament.

Several times we have reported the historical stages: the Aventine, in which the 1924 leadership of our party participated, but from which it had to withdraw because of the will of the party itself, which only out of discipline had had to put up with the directives prevailed in Moscow, but still retained intact its precious horror, born of a thousand struggles, at any interclass alliance; then the long pause and the further pratfall during emigration, to the policy of national liberation and partisan warfare, as we have repeatedly explained that the use of armed and insurrectional means took nothing away from the character of opportunism and betrayal of such a policy. We will not follow the whole narrative here.

* * *

Ever since before Italian Fascism and the other war we had enough to argue that in the West of Europe never the proletarian party had to accede to parallel political actions with the “left” or popular bourgeoisie, of which we have seen the most unthinkable editions ever since: anti-clerical Freemasons once, then Christian Democrat Catholics and convent friars, republicans and monarchists, protectionists and liberals, centralists and federalists, and on and on.

Opposite to our method, which regards every “rightward” movement of the bourgeoisie, in the sense of throwing off the mask of ostentatious guarantees and concessions, as a verified prediction, a “theoretical victory” (Marx, Engels) and thus a useful revolutionary opportunity, which a righteously initiated party must welcome not with mourning but with joy, lies the opposite method whereby at each of those turning points the class front is demobilized and we rush to the rescue, as prejudicial treasure, of what the bourgeoisie has dismantled and rejected: democracy, freedom, constitution, parliament.

Let us therefore leave doctrinal polemics, which can be proposed only to avowed anti-Marxists, and let us see where that method rejected by us has led, given that to it, by the concurrence of so many forces and so many accomplices, the proletariat, European and Italian, has been queued up and pinned down.

National resistance, war of the eastern and western states on the democratic front, stopping the Germans at Stalingrad, landing in France, fall of Mussolini and hanging by his feet, fall of Hitler. The stakes of the immense struggle, to which the proletarians have denied nothing: blood, flesh, class plot of their troubled century-long movement, are safe! Thanks to the armies of America above all, they are saved forever: Freedom, Democracy, elective constitution! All has been risked and given for you, Parliament, temple of modern civilization, and, having closed the doors of the temple of Janus, we have the joy of reopening yours!

A little gasping, human civilization resumes its generous and tolerant path, undertakes to hang people only by the neck, reconsecrates the human person who by necessity had been suitable material for making the omelet with liberating bombs: if historically all these apologists were right, the danger of Dictatorship is over, and from now until the end of the centuries we shall not see the thing, terrible to think of, of being without Members of Parliament, of doing without parliamentary chambers. From Yalta to Potsdam, from Washington to Moscow, from London to Berlin, and to Rome, all this was in May-always a May! – of 1945, entirely sunny and safe.

* * *

Let us look, then, at what the same subjects, and the transmitters from the same centers, say in this May 1953, not so far away, but “quantum mutatus ab illo!” Everything was safe then, on the agreement of all. Now to hear each of them all is still about to be lost, all is to be done over again.

So let us at least admit that in 1922-1945 we were dragged into an idiotic and stinking method!

Let us limit the demonstration to the Italian electoral array, subject to the application of the gas mask.

Basically there are three groups in the struggle, if we put aside the timid reappearance of the Fascists, who had every right to be evaluated a qualified historical fact as much as any other, but who with the ballot in their hands instead of the truncheon cut the sorry figure of being the most democratic. And in fact the most in-character Democrat of all time is the one who plays the victim of state persecution and police reprisals. Free apology for the baton, to be obtained, tut-tut, with a paper-based circus show.

So there are three groups into which broke the anti-fascist front and the bloc — and first government after salvation — of national liberation. Three groups that came together in mutual certainty — and gave each other mutual endorsement — that they were equals in the holy war, in the world crusade against dictatorships. Well, let us listen to the logorrhoea of the speakers and newspapers, albeit for three or four sentences, as more can hardly be endured. Each of the three sectors asks for votes with one and only argument: the other two impersonate “danger of dictatorship.”

According to the monarchist side, which rejects the definition of right-wing, and asserts itself as democratic and constitutional on the glorious traditions of the Giolitti era, which does not hesitate to make antivatican moves such as the breach of Porta Pia, it is clear that the communists will lead the country, if they win, to the red dictatorship and thus will blow up parliament. But they are no less virulent in asserting overpowering, police and reactionary Christian Democracy, which, with its minor allies, leads Italy back under the despotism of clerics in Phrygian caps. So they, too, see in De Gasperi a threat to parliament, to which he will substitute the council of bishops, replacing elections with Communion in the squares.

According to the communistoid left, no need to explain, not only are the monarchists preparing no more and no less than a new fascism and absolutism, but the Christian Democrat center is an agent of America’s dictatorship and Scelba’s Celere police corps worse than Benito’s militia. . Which, insofar as it is true, was possible only in grace of the policy of antifascist blockade and national liberation that made “military police” and national cops welcome with open arms, and with the immediate disarmament on the orders of the corridor “generals” of the workers “brigades” as soon as fascists and their militia were eliminated.

The Christian Democrats and allies, bombarded on two sides as certain impersonators of totalitarianism of tomorrow and of the new two decades, and especially swept up in the accusation of traitors to democracy with the immense boondoggle of the campaign on the swindle law (legge truffa), say they are no less than the saviors of the threatened Italy free from two opposing, and converging with gnashing teeth, ferocious totalitarianisms: the neo-fascist on one side, the communist on the other, painted the one with the traits of past Hitlerism and Mussolinism, the other with the present connotations of the ultra-state and ultra-dispotic Sovietism of Russia.

The cycle thus unfolded as follows. Starting point: loyal alliance among three ranks of equally fervent friends of Freedom to annihilate Dictatorship and the possibility of any Dictatorship. Killing the Black Dictatorship. End point: choice among three paths each of which leads to a new Dictatorship more vicious than the others. The voter has but to choose between the Red Dictatorship, the White Dictatorship and the Blue Dictatorship. 

Two methods bankrupt here historically, in all respects, but especially in that of the proletarian class that we are interested in. The first method is that of employing the legal means, the constitution and parliamentarianism  with a broad political bloc in order to avoid Dictatorship. The second is to lead the same crusade and form the same bloc on the ground of struggle with arms, when the Dictatorship is in place, to the sole democratic end.

Today’s historical problems are not dissolved by legality but by force. One does not overcome force except by greater force. Dictatorship is not destroyed than by a more solid dictatorship.

It is little to say that this dirty institution of Parliament does not serve us. It no longer serves anyone.

* * *

All the alternatives boasted and made to be feared by the three fronts have no substance. Should one of the lateral forces prevail it would immediately split up and a large part of its elected membership would pass to the Atlantic-American bourgeois center. The royalists make no mystery of this. The self-styled communists say it less openly, but it would be the inevitable outcome of their eventual success as a majority that appears impossible.

Little will change in the headcount of those who will be sitting “at another five-year banquet” of which the voters will not even get the crumbs.

At the time of the Matteotti crisis we said it was a trade union movement of professional MPs, who saw privileges and income in danger and resorted to strike action. The same should be said of the “historic battle” against the “swindle law.” Not only are elections themselves a scam, but it is all the more so as it is claimed to give equal weight to every personal vote. All of this meatloaf in Italy is cooked by a few thousand cooks, undercooks and scullions, who grossly share the twenty million voters.

If Parliament served to technically administer something and not just make fools of citizens, out of five years of maximum life it would not devote one to elections and another to debating the law to constitute itself! When the hours of ranting are counted, it goes beyond two-fifths. This arrogant sodality is but an end in itself: and the peoples who got themselves killed to put it back on have been cheated of more than twenty percent of their small share of sovereignty! By now those people vote in the other world.

If the parliamentarians of all bourgeois fractions don’t give a damn about the democratic principle, no less do the false communists laugh at it. This is not because they return in the slightest to positions of class and dictatorship after the bankruptcy of freedom-blocardism. And in fact they do not retrace the same path, disguising all party connotations, and put back on their feet a bloc of the sound Italian people, of the enlightened, the honest, not just with the dumb Nenni alternative, who basically promises what we said: give us access to parliament and we will govern with you and like you; but they raise up a whole host of flabby flankers, whom only inexorable decrepitude and arteriosclerosis has prevented from associating with the most bourgeois names in politics: Bonomi, Croce, Orlando, Nitti, De Nicola, Labriola and the like. ..

And they are so alien from thinking remotely of remounting the downward slope that they are not only the most ardent in invoking legality and constitutionality, when they claim against De Gasperi, whom they claim is “Austrian” (the Austrian bourgeoisie can teach how to administer without stealing, to the Italian bourgeoisie), the tradition of May 1915, of the war for democracy and Trieste, but they rant nationalist and patriot more than anyone else.

It is not only the consistent and respectable Turati who could re-enter holding his head up, but especially the 1914 Mussolini, both teachers for them for being able to betray the proletariat for democracy, and democracy for dictatorship.

* * *

The correspondent of a London newspaper described a scene he swears he witnessed with his mortal eyes, while sane and free from drug fumes, in a valley of mysterious Tibet.

In the lunar night, the ritual gathers, perhaps by the thousands, monks dressed in white, moving slowly, impassively, stiffly, among long dirges, pauses and repeated prayers. When they form a very wide circle, something can be seen in the center of the clearing: it is the body of one of their brothers lying supine on the ground. He is not spellbound or unconscious, he is dead, not only because of the absolute stillness that the moonlight reveals, but because the stench of decomposed flesh, at a turn of the wind’s direction, reaches the nares of the stunned European.

After much circling and chanting, and after more unintelligible prayers, one of the priests leaves the circle and approaches the corpse. As the chanting continues unceasingly he bends over the dead man, stretches himself over him adhering to his whole body, and places his living mouth over the decaying one.

The prayer continues intense and vibrant, and the priest lifts the corpse under his armpits, slowly lifts it back up and holds it before him in an upright position. The ritual and the dirge do not cease: the two bodies begin a long turn, like a slow dance step, and the living man looks at the dead man and makes him walk in front of him. The foreign spectator watches with barred pupils: this is the great experiment of reviving the occult Asian doctrine being carried out. The two are always walking in the circle of prayerful people. Suddenly there is no doubt: in one of the curves the pair describes, the moonbeam has passed between the two walking bodies: the one of the living has released its arms and the other, alone, is holding on, moving. Under the force of collective magnetism, the life force of the healthy mouth has penetrated the undone body, and the ritual is at its climax: for moments or hours the corpse, standing upright, by its own strength walks.

Thus sinisterly, once again, the generous young mouth of the mighty and vital proletariat has applied itself against the putrescent and stinking one of capitalism, and given it back in the tight inhuman embrace another span of life.