by Pierpaolo PasoliniABSTRACT: We are publishing the text of the talk Pierpaolo Pasolini should have given at the Radical Congress in November 1975. It could only be read to a shocked and silent audience, because two days earlier, Pasolini was killed. There is a grave danger - the poet and scholar warns us - that threatens the Radical Party just because it is responsible for great victories in gaining civil rights. A new left-wing conformism is ready to appropriate your battle for civil rights "creating a contest of false tolerance and false laicism". It is precisely the Radical culture of civil rights, the Reform, the protection of minorities that will be used by intellectuals of the system as a violent and oppressive terrorist force. In brief, power is on the point of assuming intellectual progressists as its own clerics. Pasolini's premonition came true, not only in Italy, but in the rest of western society where, precisely in the name of progressism and modernism, a new class of totalizing and transformist power was affirme
d, certainly more dangerous than the traditional conservative classes. Against all this - Pasolini concluded, I believe that you should do nothing but continue simply to be yourselves: which implies continuing to be unrecognisable. Forget your great triumphs immediately and continue unperturbed, obstinate, eternally contrary, to claim, to want, to identify yourselves with the different, to scandalize, to blaspheme.
("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)
First of all, I must justify my presence here. I am not here as a radical. I am not here as a socialist. I am not here as a progressist. I am here as a marxist who votes for the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and who believes a lot in the new generation of Communists. I have great faith in the new generation of Communists at least as much as in the Radicals. I have just about enough goodwill and irrationality and maybe judgement to hold reality at an arm's length, perhaps with an eye to Wittgenstein, in order to reason about it freely. For example the official PCI declares it now accepts "sine die", the democratic process. So I must not have any doubts: it is surely not the democratic process codified and conventionalised by the events of these last thirty years that the PCI is referring to: it refers undoubtedly to the democratic process understood in the purity of its original form, or of its formal pact.
It must be referring to the lay religion of democracy. I would be degrading myself if I were to suspect that the PCI refers to the democracy of the Christian Democrats; and it cannot be inferred either therefore, that the PCI espouses the Radical concept of democracy, for example.
Paragraph One
A) The most adorable people are those who do not know that they have rights. B) People who, knowing that they have rights, do not claim them or renounce them are quite adorable too. C) There are also rather nice people who fight for other people's rights specially for those who do not know they have them. D) There are, in our society, the exploited and the exploiters.
Well then, too bad for the exploiters. E) There are intellectuals, committed intellectuals, who consider it their duty and the duty of others, to inform the adorable people, who do not know it, that they have some rights; to incite the adorable people, who know that they have rights but relinquish them, not to do so and then to feel the historical impulse to fight for the civil rights of others: and to consider, finally, irrefutably and without discussion, the fact that, among the exploited and the exploiters, the unhappy ones are the exploited.
Among these intellectuals who for more than a century have assumed such a role, in the last few years some groups have tried particularly hard to make such a role an extremist role. I am referring hence to extremists, the young ones and their aged admirers. Such extremists (I only want to refer to the best) have as their first and most important objective that of spreading among people, I would say apostolically, the awareness of their own rights. They do it with determination, rage, despair, optimistic, patience, or explosive impatience, depending on the cases...
Paragraph Two
Flaunting the distorted will of professional historians and politicians as well as that of Roman feminists who would like to see me confined to Elicona, exactly like the Mafiosi to Ustica, one evening this summer, I took part in a political debate in a northern town. As usually happens, a group of young people had wanted to pursue the debate even in the street, in the warm cheerful evening. Among those young people there was a Greek, who was precisely one of those friendly marxist extremists of the kind I have mentioned. His friendliness, however, was adorned with all the flashiest defects of rhetoric and of the extremist subculture. He was an "adolescent", rather scruffy in his way of dressing: perhaps even a bit of a Neapolitan urchin; at the same time, however, he had the beard of a true and real thinker, something between Minippo and Aramis: but his shoulder-length hair corrected the posturing and grandiloquent function of the beard with an exotic and irrational touch: an allusion to Brahmin phil
osophy, to the naive haughtiness of the gurumparampara. This young Greek, lived his rhetoric in the most complete absence of self-criticism; he did not know that he had these flashy sides, and for this he was adorable, exactly like those who do not know they have rights....Among his defects so nicely experienced, the worst was certainly his vocation to spread among the people "a little at a time" he said, for life was a long thing for him, almost endless "the awareness of one's own rights and the will to fight for them". Well there is the enormous fallacy, as I understand it, in that Greek student, incarnate in his own naive person. Through marxism, the apostolate in favour of the awareness of rights and the will to achieve them, is nothing less than the unconscious rage of the poor bourgeois against the rich bourgeois, of the young bourgeois against the old bourgeois, of the powerless bourgeois against the one who is powerful. It is an unconscious civil war disguised as a class struggle within the hel
l of the bourgeois conscience. (If you remember well, I am talking about extremists, not about Communists). The adorable people who do not know that they have rights, even the adorable people who know that they have rights but renounce them in this disguised civil war have a well-known and ancient role: to be cannon fodder. With irresponsible hypocrisy, they are used, in the first place, as subjects of a transfer that frees the conscience of the weight of jealousy and economic grudge and in the second place, they are sent as an army of innocent pariahs, by the young uncertain and fanatic bourgeois into a mindlessly impure struggle, precisely against the rich, secure and fascist old bourgeois. Mind you, (let me make it clear) the Greek student that I have taken as a symbol was, to all purposes (except with regard to me, a ferocious truth), an innocent also, just as the poor are. And this "innocence" was due to nothing other than the "radicalism" that was in him.
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It is now time to say it: the rights that I am talking about are "civil rights" that, out of a strictly democratic context, as in the ideal puritan democracy in England or in the United States even in lay France have acquired a classist connotation: the socialist italianization of civil rights was bound fatally (historically) to popularise itself. In fact what is the extremist that teaches others that they have rights, teaching? He is teaching that the one who serves has the same "identical" rights as the one who commands. The extremist who teaches others to fight in order to obtain their own rights, what is he teaching? He is teaching that one needs to enjoy the same "identical" rights as those of the masters. The extremist who teaches others that those who are exploited are unhappy, what is he teaching? He is teaching that one needs to ask for the "identical" rights the exploiters enjoy. The result that is reached in this way is therefore an "identification", a democratisation, in the bourgeois s
ense. The tragedy of the extremists thus consists in having achieved a regression in the struggle that they verbally define "marxist-leninist revolutionary", into a civil struggle old as the bourgeoisie itself: on which the bourgeoisie depends for its existence. The achievement of one's rights does no more than promote those who achieve them to the rank of bourgeois.
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In what way does class consciousness distinguish itself from marxist type civil rights consciousness? In what way does the PCI distinguish itself from extremists (even if, for the sake of old bureaucratic diplomacy it sometimes lays a claim to them: as it has done for example, by already classifying the 1968 "Sessantotto" movement on a par with the Resistance)? The answer is quite simple: while extremists fight for marxist type civil rights consciousness pragmatically, in the name of, as I have said, a final identification of the exploited with the exploiter, Communists, on the contrary, fight for civil rights in the name of "alterità", otherness.
This otherness (which does not simply mean alternative) by its very nature precludes the possibility of an assimilation of the exploited by the exploiters. The class struggle has been, until now, also a struggle for the prevalence of another way of life (to quote Wittgenstein again as a potential anthropologist), that is for another culture. Indeed the two classes at war were even, how should we say, racially different. And, in fact, they still are to a great extent, in our age of consumerism.
Paragraph Five
Everybody knows that when the "exploiters" (through the "exploited") produce goods, they are in fact producing humanity (social patterns). The "exploiters" of the second industrial revolution (otherwise known as the consumer society: characterised by quantity, superfluous goods and hedonism) are producing new goods: they are thus producing a new humanity. Now, throughout its two hundred year history, the first industrial revolution consistently produced alterable social patterns. What proof have we of this? The proof is in the completely certain alterability of the social relationships of those who fought for revolutionary otherness. They never confronted the capitalist economy and culture with an alternative, but precisely with otherness. This otherness should have completely modified the existing social relationships, or in anthropological terms, the existing culture. The "social pattern" between the serf and the feudal lord is really not very different from the relationship between the factory w
orker and the industrialist. These, in any case, are "social relationships" which have revealed themselves to be alterable. But what if the second industrial revolution were from now on to produce, through the immense new possibilities it has acquired, unalterable social patterns? That is the great and perhaps tragic question which now poses itself. And this is in fact the key to the total embourgeoisement which is taking place in all countries: it is very clear in all capitalist countries and it is dramatically so in Italy. From this point of view capitalism would appear to have a rosy future. The needs created by the original capitalism in fact closely resembled primary needs. New capitalism on the other hand is giving rise to perfectly useless and totally artificial needs. This is why, through these needs, new capitalism is not only historically modifying certain types of men: it is changing humanity itself. I should add that consumerism can create unalterable "social patterns" either by substitut
ing, in the worst hypothesis, the old clerical fascism by technological fascism (this could only happen if the latter could pass as antifascism), or, as is more likely, by creating through its hedonistic ideology a context of false tolerance and false lay values: in other words of the false achievement of civil rights. In both cases the scope of true revolutionary "otherness" would be reduced to mere Utopia and a thing of the past; limiting the role of marxist parties to a purely social democratic function which would, from an historical point of view, be something completely new.
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Dear Pannella, dear Spadaccia, dear Radical friends, with your saintly patience you put up with everybody, and even with me: otherness is not only a feature of class consciousness or of marxist revolutionary struggles. Otherness exists in its own right as part of the capitalist entropy. And that is why it enjoys (or rather suffers, and suffers horribly) a concrete, a factual entity. What it is and the other it contains, are two cultural facts. The two are often locked in a relationship of prevarication which indeed is often horrible. Until now the function of marxism has been to mould this pattern into a dialectical relationship: a dialectical relationship between the dominating and the dominated classes. Such a dialectical relationship would no longer be possible in a context where the culture of the oppressed had disappeared, been eliminated or abrogated, as you would say. It is therefore necessary to fight for the conservation of cultures be they alternative or subcultures. This is what you have
been doing now for many years, especially recently. You have managed to find alternative and subcultures everywhere; in the city centres, in their furthest and most remote, dead and dangerous corners. You did not act out of human respect, false dignity or yield to any pressures. You were not afraid of pharisees or publicans, and not even of fascists and that says everything.
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Civil rights are substantially the rights of other people. To speak of otherness is thus to approach an unlimited concept. In your kindness and in your intransigence you made no distinctions. You committed yourselves uncompromisingly to every possible type of otherness. But a remark should be made at this stage. There is a type of otherness which is a characteristic of the majority and there is another which belongs to minorities. The problem of the destruction of the culture of the oppressed which is seen as the elimination of a dialectical otherness and therefore a threat, is a majority problem. Divorce is a majority problem. Abortion is a majority problem. Indeed the majority is made up of workers and farmers, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. On the general issue of otherness, on divorce and on abortion you achieved great success. That in itself, and you know this very well, is a great peril. It is perilous for you, but you know well how to react to such danger and it is perilous for t
he whole country, which particularly at what should be the higher levels of culture, tends generally to react badly. What do I mean by this? Through a marxist type adoption of civil rights by extremists as described in the first paragraphs of this presentation civil rights have found their way not only in the conscience, but also in the dynamics of the progressive Italian ruling class. I am not referring to your sympathisers, I am not referring to the many you have been able to reach out to in diverse and distant places, of which you may be justly proud. I am referring to Socialist, Communist and left wing Catholic intellectuals; to intellectuals in general (...)
Paragraph Eight
I know that I making grave statements. However that was inevitable. What else would I have come here for? I am outlining at a time of justifiable left wing euphoria what seems to me will be the greatest and worst danger for us intellectuals in the years to come. It will be a new "trahison des clercs"; a new acceptance; a new joining of forces; a new giving in to the "fait accompli"; a new regime under the guise of a new way of life and quality of life. I repeat what I said at the end of paragraph five: consumerism can make the new social patterns which are the expression of new production methods unalterable "by creating, through its hedonistic ideology a context of false tolerance and false lay values; in other words of false achievement of civil rights." Now the mass of intellectuals which has gravitated towards you, due to a pragmatic "marxistisation" of extremists, in the struggle for civil rights, giving it their progressive and left wing conformist blessing, have actually played into the hand
of existing power structures: the more a progressive intellectual fanatically demonstrates his belief in civil rights, the more he in fact accepts the social democratic function given to him by state authority, thus abrogating, through the application of false and totalitarian civil rights, any semblance of otherness. Such a power system, therefore endeavours to recruit progressive intellectuals in its own clerical ranks. And the latter have already invisibly joined the invisible power structure by accepting an invisible party card. All you must do against this trend, I believe, is simply to continue being yourselves: that means to go on being unrecognisable.
Forget your great successes immediately; and carry on unperturbed, obstinately and eternally contrary, demanding and wanting to be seen to be different by scandalizing, by profaning.