ABSTRACT: A hard criticism of the "internationalism" of the left.

On the one hand the neutralism of the Communists which seems to close its eyes to the USSR's militarist role and persists in distinguishing between "revolutionary" massacres and "reactionary" ones. And on the other hand the transformistic opposition of the non-NATO democratic left. The need to find one's own international identity in the confrontation with one's own army camps and armaments and in the daily exercising of one's political responsibilities. The conversion here and now of military structures into structures for civilian service and production.

(AGENZIA RADICALE No.118, February 25, 1966)

Among the nonsense encountered on the national roads to Socialism (these old national-populist stencils of international Stalinism which would like to pass for the new achievement of Communist maturity); among the neutralist nonsense which is the habitual recourse of the left when it is incapable of anything but adapting itself to the positions of others; and the nonsense, once again, of an Atlantic Pact that entrusts the foreign policy of a country to military commands, whether integrated or not - and entrusts the military commands, in turn, to police generals and secret services; to the nonsense of a Europeanism that is supposed to be extremist and is by now anti-federalist and provides a cover for the forces of international neo-capitalism - to all this nonsense we have to add the return of [Amintore] Fanfani (1) as foreign minister. He is, this man, precisely the international representative that Italian politics deserves. And if the vote of investiture were independent of the government to which h

e belongs, he would obtain easily a much greater majority vote than the parties of the centre-left can provide.

The same thing could be said of many of the worst and least capable ministers who have returned to govern us: for Minister Bo, responsible for having so ineptly and disastrously directed IRI (2) and the public sector of the economy that it is now possible to declare that the Ministry of State Economic Participation has provided another stronghold in the Italian system to monopolistic and corporative forces; for Minister Bosco, who represents the worst transformist and clerical interests, corruption and complicity of a ministry whose true and principal incumbency is to guarantee the clerical and private baronies of the paralysis of the country's social security system.

But we want, for today, to limit ourselves to several other observations on the left and "its" international policies.

The hundreds of thousands of "Communists" slaughtered in Indonesia by an army made up and developed with arms coming from the "Socialist" sphere; the assassination of Ben Barka after the thousands of other victims of General Oufkir, which shows what the purpose of the prestigious Mig and other Soviet arms has been which were supplied to Morocco; the isolation and hostility that the same international "camp" has always reserved for the Middle Eastern Baath groups (to the point of corrupting and cutting off the great motives that were theirs) to the advantage of Nasser's militaristic bourgeoisie even during those years when Communists and "liberals" were being systematically persecuted and killed; the conditioned reflexes that have always led to discriminating between "revolutionary" massacres and "reactionary" ones, nationalist tyrannies and neo-colonialist ones and to the confusing of bloody rebellions with non-pacifist revolutions in the Third World countries; the uncritical defense of the likes of B

en Bella and Nkruma and the systematic yielding to the speculations of the American neo-colonialists and the CIA of the virtually democratic ferment of the intellectual and tribal opposition which often converged in many African countries; the embarrassed silence or the crude criticisms opposed to models of development such as that of the Ivory Coast in which cases one does not see why Socialist forces should be more moralistic and rigorous than they are towards grotesquely folkloristic tyrants of manifest incapacity; and, not least, the by-now intolerable exploitation arising from "inertia" and calculation of the just anti-colonial revolutions and wars of liberation as the "Chinese" - either native or naturalised - do with regard to Vietnam; all this - and plenty more - testifies to a crisis of strategies and ideals which one obstinately refuses to recognise.

This is but one of the faces of neutrality. The other is that of Pietro Nenni and the democratic, non-NATO left. Its transformist turn is evident in the facts and in their own statements: a vacuum of ideology and of struggle which has the same relation to "chinoiserie" as senility does to infantilism. In the confrontation with them and with the tragedies of these times, with the bloodshed, the destruction, the horrible dangers that menace the world always more seriously, there comes again to mind the invective of Jaures against Mitterand: spare the people the shame of these "ilotes degrisés" of the working class. Unjust as is all invective which is essentially correct.

As long as the left does not go looking for its internationalist credentials in the confrontation with its own army camps, the armaments of its own country, the daily exercise of its own political responsibilities, and in all the factors and sectors of its civil and state life, these tragic combinations will persist.

And the recurring historical bloodlettings, that as a rule seem to assign the most reactionary and criminal adventures to Socialist renegades, will not fail to give a partial but significant clarification to the question of responsibility. Internationalism is first of all a position of internal struggle, of "national" politics, or else it is nothing but convenient and artificial cosmopolitan evasion. Internationalism cannot avoid being also a fight against the national state, because of the "forms" that the latter necessarily assumes as well. And these, it is time to consider the fact, are common to the "Western" and the "Eastern" countries. Armies, "police", justice which is not independent (because of laws, or in practice, or in its forms), armaments industries, are all the "forms" historically assumed by both "Socialist" and "bourgeois" states. And not by chance, in our country too, the parties become an example: always more state organisations, parties of the regime. Conscientious objection, for ex

ample, and its political limits, often conscious and voluntary, cannot be practised today certainly with regard to any one of the political alliances: but this concept, this phenomenon, will have no power as long as the inertia of others, so-called political realism, continues to be invoked to avoid one's responsibilities.

The fight for peace and the anti-militarist fight are a fight for conversion, "here and now", of the service structures and civilian production and military structures.

Strange that the Socialist "roads" cease to be "national" precisely in this field and only in the face of struggle. We are facing, we were saying, a serious confusion of the left with regard to these essential problems: to omit denouncing them, to limit ourselves to surviving thanks to denouncing the guilt of the adversaries, would by now be tantamount to consenting to a true imposture.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Amintore Fanfani (1908) DC leader and several times prime minister.

2) IRI - Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale.