Rebibbia, 15 October 1981
Cher David,
In 1954 I was twenty. I spent the winter semester in Paris on a scholarship. I was living in a Catholic environment – spending time at the editorial offices of Esprit in Rue Jacob and in the tumultuous debate that was developing there – which included the termination of French Indochina, a general enthusiasm for Mendès-France, and Pius XII’s elimination of the worker priests. I was living various contradictory experiences. Actually I did not understand all the things I was hearing around me, and at that time it was hard to disentangle reason from emotions. Meanwhile, in Italy, my friends in the central committee of the Gioventù Italiana di Azione Cattolica (GIAC) in Rome were arguing around positions that were similar to the experiences of Catholic protest in France. They were soon removed from their positions. In Paris I worked with Hyppolite, and at the Sorbonne I attended lectures by Alquié, Gurvitch and Bachelard. Fleetingly I was dazzled by Merleau-Ponty. Precious insights and pointless knowledge were piling up in my brain simultaneously – good luck alone saved me from being poisoned. Good luck – and also my working days, which were very long and concentrated, in a way that has never happened with me since – ‘in the studious silence of the library of Sainte Geneviève, sheltered from the sin of Paris . . .’1 I was beginning, confusedly, to perceive elements of class struggle within the church. I was studying Henri de Lubac and other theologians. During the Christmas holiday I travelled to Sicily to meet Danilo Dolci. That was the first time I had been to the South. My impressions were traumatic. The previous spring there had been discussions – equally traumatic – about the swindle law.2 It was then that I joined the Socialist Party, which in Padua represented most of the labour movement, both in electoral terms and in terms of its presence in mass organisations.
But let’s try to put some order into all this. I was experimenting tirelessly, wandering in various worlds with a youthful sense of intellectual adventure – but starting from a solid anchor point and from a grid of subjective responsibility within which, as if prompted by small stimuli and microscopic accumulations, ideas and decisions were forming. I found it difficult to talk about what was happening to me. But I do remember terrible feelings of pain, as well as moments of high-flown utopianism and sublime imagination. In effect the unitary emotional fabric of my individual culture was being broken – and in such a splitting of one’s consciousness it is hard to take a position. It is painful. Love, generosity, and the moment of community clashed with a real negative: I was then a fledgling in the discipline of dialectics and I related the Hegelian Phenomenology, which I was learning from Hyppolite, to the whole story of my consciousness. What a confusion. Somehow, however, I sensed that a new and equally damaging form of indistinction could exist: the romantic and Hegelian geistige Arbeit [intellectual work], which translates the work of life into the dialectic of consciousness, confusing them and subordinating work to spirit. But mine was a very weak acculturation – culture was not able to pluck me from that grammar of witnessing and from that communion of theory and practice that were the structuring principle of my existence. The only possible solution to this crisis would come through practice.
But this did not happen. My research was twisted around a dialectic that was caught in an all-encompassing vicious circle – my apprenticeship was not creating tools for a lucid discipline. The Catholics – outside of my country, where they put down solid roots, and outside of the Parisian circles, where soft hope was the order of the day – were in a state of agitation that, I had to admit, even when it was theoretically correct, was no more than virtual and when it was effective was a variant of reactionary populism. The likes of Péguy and Léon Bloiy could too often be glimpsed behind Mounier. In Italy during those years the fascist Sturzo stood in a clear and popular tradition of Murrian descent.3 So it was not a time of crisis and disintegration – it was a time of stability, and the word still gives me a bit of a shudder; and there was little to be done except to continue, indeed to understand. The fact that the church – which had been one of the specific elements in the debate that my companions had conducted in the Roman Curia in 1954 and that I heard again in Rue Jacob – did not accept the state of grace associated with the activity of workers, and thus the sanctity of their political actions as a class, offended me deeply, because, for God’s sake, it was self-evident that factory workers and workers in general were a collective representation of the poor. And their desires stood for justice and renewal. If grace is the possibility of redemption, the worker in his poverty was a prefiguring of redemption. ‘To that extent the worker stands on a higher plane than the capitalist from the outset, since the latter has his roots in the process of alienation and finds absolute satisfaction in it whereas right from the start the worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and experiences it as a process of enslavement.’ In those days, of course, I did not know Marx’s unpublished Chapter 6,4 but in the gnostic articulations of research I could have taken up residence in that page.
I was in Sicily that year and, while I had my suspicions about the secular religiosity of Danilo Dolci, I met a number of working-class communist militants who talked to me about land occupations and detailed the fierce and powerful characteristics of agrarian class struggle. Life and death, killings and vendettas – very often intertwined with demands for land and peace – stories of the mafia – and the religious and untamable demands for justice for the poor – this Sicily, so Asiatic, so desperate – Mediterranean and burning – and my attempt to understand love and hate and to set them in the right place – a bit like a blind kitten, impossible. We went down the earth road to the peasants’ protest at the dam, and we didn’t even take a knife to cut the bread. What could all this mean, these subdued but very violent flashes of peasant revolt and of mafia despotism? When the carabinieri chased me out of Partinico, it completely threw me, in my youthful ingenuousness. Then, crossing the mountains above Palermo, I experienced one of those adolescent moments of clarity in rebellion that last for a lifetime. One has to rebel; it is right to rebel. Poverty is intolerable. So I had to get to know the labour movement – and reinterpret the meaning of justice and transformation, connecting it to a subject that was more real than the one to which, generically and pacifically, I had been relating up to that point.
But it was an impotent desire. I was trying to escape from a situation that was indistinct but firm and solid: the traditional Catholicism of my land, compact and luminous in its isolation – and I was extending to others a hand to help in this somewhat stormy crossing. But I found only crudeness, vulgarity and cynicism. The indistinction of religion had to be broken through class struggle because it was materially traversed and unveiled by it – this is what I told myself. But the real terms of comparison were confused by an overwhelming negativity. When I began to get to know the cadres of the official labour movement, I was disappointed and taken aback. I presented myself, bringing a sweet and combative disposition and an extreme richness of desires. But it was like talking to the wind. A wind that was oppressive and suffocating. Uneducated and arrogant little professors scattered maxims and learned utterances, and every problem was dealt with through quotations or case histories. The few union leaders I met were, if anything, even more crude. Relationships with women were sexually maniacal – was this liberation? Brutality in love, cynicism in hatred. The sense of being part of the working class was marked by a negative – a combination of poverty and resentment. The death throes of a prehistory rather than a foreshadowing of the future history of humanity. In its brutishness, their political behaviour aped that of the bourgeoisie.
In 1953 Joseph Stalin died. The morning the news arrived I was at the university, attending a lecture by Padovani – the Catholic professor of moral philosophy. He spoke highly of Stalin, as a representative of politics tout court. The autonomy of the political – the good Lord alone can offer a judgement about its place in the harmony of creation. Furthermore, he added, in a language that sat somewhere between Jean Genet and Baltasar Gracián, the Devil and the Lord work in mysterious ways. This Catholic professor spoke in the same language I was hearing in the Stalinist federation. But there it was even further depleted of meaning because, while the good Catholic taught that the bosses were an irrelevance and that exploitation could be transcended, the Stalinist functionary expressed a bloodless cynicism, like that of a slave. And yet the slave had to be in the right; it was here, in the federation, that you had officials strutting around speaking Italian with a Russian accent (‘Caro compàagno noi sciàamo la richéscia del proletariàato!’ – ‘Comrade, we are the richness of the proletariat!’), it was here that you sensed, occasionally, that damnable power, vague but real, of proletarian hope and desire.
Sometimes I talked with my paternal grandfather Enea, who started out as a farm labourer, then worked as a tram driver, and eventually ended up as the doorkeeper at Bologna’s Monte di Pietà savings bank. He was a communist. As a child I spent a lot of time with him and he gave me a lot of affection, as a way of compensating for the father I had never known. He used to tell me stories about his arrival in town from rural Romagna in the late 1890s, how they had been driven from the countryside by famine; and then he would go on to tell me about their struggles against the bosses and against the bourgeoisie. In his Emilian accent the word ‘bourgeoisie’ sounded like the devil incarnate. Then he spoke of his hatred of fascism. And the establishment of the Communist Party. It was an epic tale that he conjured for me each time – but it seemed so far away. A fairy tale. Now he was contemptuous of everyone and everything. Everything was just the same as before. I saw my grandmother: an old lady, all white and gentle in appearance – a seamstress who worked from home, where she would be distracted at any moment by the demands of housework. He, my grandfather, now worked as a doorkeeper. This wasn’t work, he said; work is when they put a hundredweight load on your back and off you go! A doorkeeper, but one without a uniform, because he had always refused to wear uniforms. Don’t even talk about the blackshirts! Then he told me about my father, also a communist. He suffered from malaria, which he had contracted during the war; and what destroyed his liver was the oil that the fascists had forced him to drink. That, Enea explained, was how my father had died. This positive class hatred left its mark on me, and I tried to understand. But I did not understand. I was looking for happiness, looking for the father whom I didn’t have, looking for something to replace the fullness of a community that I had lost – and all I was hearing was about the misery of a relation of power stretched to breaking point. Deceptive and overstated.
What might this ideology be? I came from a maze of passions that were certain, of a love that was proclaimed – and sometimes socially effective. I wanted a horizon where it was not poverty, but the richness of our new motivations that found expression. The indistinct and ultimately dull emotion of the traditional world of the Veneto was coming up against a crude, simple relationship of violence. How many times was I to repeat, later in life, the experience of this absurd reversal! Perhaps it should be read as a pregnant element of the present brutality of domination: and in the very phenomenology of collective praxis, in the desire for revolt, as a pathological condition. Cher David, if I had not only despised its obsolescence but had also at that time understood its practical pregnancy and the dangers, perhaps I would have succeeded better, in more recent years, in controlling the trajectories of extremism. But this is how things were: we grew up in that brutality, and you can’t fight the contagion – it was as if we had been pitted by smallpox. Love, violence – and my solitude. On the one hand, indifference of love and of solidarity; on the other, wretched difference and crude emergence of a violent reaction – of resentment.
So I chose solitude – one that embraced me and a small group of close friends. I had joined a party of the working class, as the still Morandian Italian Socialist Party (PSI) proclaimed itself at that time. I was one of the brightest jewels in the crown of the federation – a tangible outcome of the ‘dialogue with the Catholics’. But how incredibly alone I was! So I had to study. I had to roll up my sleeves and move onto the only terrain where solitude could be productive: research. A strange paradox, practical choices that were seeking to overcome the abstractness of ourselves as individuals, but that, by the same token, meant that you needed to be alone – abstracted, immersed in study, separated from the totality of practice. Anyway, I worked on historical materialism and materialist dialectics: a first – and last – attempt to match myself to that new society, which might have been thought crude but was desired and real. Cher David, the experience was disastrous. On the advice of small-time professors, I immersed myself in reading Stalin and the book on diamat [dialectical materialism] written by Father Vetter, SJ [Society of Jesus]. It threw me, and I abandoned it. Then various caring friends, solicitous for the welfare of the political neophyte, advised me to get my teeth into Gramsci and also to do some minor reading of Marx. Only later, tempered by the Italian ideology, would I have been able to approach freshly – and usefully, they assured me – the theology of Marxism–Leninism– Stalinism. The local science and the international science, the ambiguity of the double truth, Soviet science and the Italic, popular– national viewpoint – a fine discovery, and I turned it over in my mind. The fact was that the Catholic world from which I was coming possessed a pastoral theology that was immediately practicable. So was it the case that the old theology was popular, and the new theology was cynical? Why this situation? Why was it that here, in this new society, so many difficulties stood in the way of achieving a balance of theory and practice, and why were the solutions so hard to grasp? I came from a reality of hegemony – the Catholic world of the Veneto. I was accustomed to a condition of correspondence among the various different aspects of the world – the problem was one of ‘prudence’, in mobilising organically the context of class relations and ‘compassion’ in making these changes correspond to the needs of the poor. (What the ‘ambassadors of the Veneto’ – our political patriarchs – were doing was not much different – Ranke and Musil, the political art of the parish priest.) My crisis had grown out of the crisis in the relationship between ‘prudence’ and ‘compassion’ – where the first was showing itself increasingly as reactionary regulation and, in consequence, compassion was spiritualised, individualised, and formalised, wrenched away from the materiality of needs. It was no longer the evangelical and theological figure of a collective redemption.
But what exactly were these ‘Marxists’ offering me? A philosophy of materialism that I found strange, distant, anachronistic – only after many years and many strange crossroads did I finally understood materialism; a dialectic of nature that was very much like that of the neoscholastic texts of Vanni Rovighi; and a debased theory of history, which bore no relation to the heights and luminescence of Hegel – so complex even in its reactionary one-sidedness, as was made clear to me by Hyppolite. In Hegel the dialectic of self-awareness tends towards a theological escroquerie, but in passing through unhappy consciousness it overturns the initial attributions of sensible and rational appetites – to the master it grants fear, and in the slave it recognises cupiditas. Why step backwards in relation to this role of the subject in history? Yet this theoretical discomfort of mine would have been completely secondary had it not been constantly combined with a practical frustration, which was expressed in the form of party discipline. The act of witnessing was impossible in the official labour movement: the stimulus of collective desire was subordinated not to the creativity that was beginning to be glimpsed in the mass struggles and in the factory struggles, but to a collective alienation in organisation, an alienation similar to that of command and exploitation. Later I learned to interpret this situation and to understand how it was a manifestation of the effects of that cancerous opportunism in the official labour movement that was destroying revolutionary hope. I did not react with attitudes typical of Edelanarchismus – that lordly kind of anarchism or intellectualism, so odious to me – instead I suffered the creeping tragedy in silence. Gramscian hegemony as interpreted by Togliatti was a figure of bourgeois cynicism, an idea of the crisis and of disenchantment, as people would say later, a technique of command, not working towards forming the proletarian collective but towards the exercise of power, whatever the circumstances. Reduced to a phantasm, the nostalgic celebration of the people’s power manifested in the soviets went hand in hand with an emptiness of behaviours and a certain ritualism: this is what communism had become, having been taken over by a bureaucratic mentality, supported by a charismatic legitimation, and made to work in a framework of instrumental rationality. Maybe today I am putting too rational a colouring on all this; maybe at the time it was just an opportunistic mish-mash, half-Giobertian and half-Stalinist. The defeat that had been suffered, between the Resistance and the subsequent restoration, was rife with theoretical ambiguities and – for the working class – with illusion and pain. The fact remains that I learned nothing from Gramsci. In the way he had been handed to me he was the father of the new church. I found his teachings inimical, and occasionally banal or incomprehensible. This was the case until the late 1960s, when I started reading him again and realised the power of what he was saying. I can tell you, David, that I do not forgive the person who originally took that pleasure from me!
As for Marx, I attempted a systematic reading, as I always try to do with authors I’d like to love. Once again, stalemate. On that occasion it was the grand old man himself who denied me access. Alas, I was granted only pieces of the Vulgate. I learned the law of value as objectivistic jargon – this was how I heard it repeated a thousand times by dogmatists in the years that followed, and even nowadays, when it just increases my unhappiness in prison, repeated by so-called ‘communists’ soiled by heresy and steeped in blood. ‘The cold current of Marxism is destructive and can appear as the mirror image of the gear mechanisms of domination.’5 So said old Bloch . . . The situation in those days was even worse: the mechanisms of domination were cold-bloodedly manipulating Marxism. To understand that value was not some kind of cement, but a productive human activity, that the whole of human history was based on the exploitation of the freedom to produce and on forcing people into work, and that the exploited subject both fed and overturned the development of capital – for this we would have to wait years. Without that understanding, without grasping the hot and dissolving current of Marxism, how could one understand Lenin and State and Revolution, the abolition of the state, and the theory of liberation from the slavery of capital? The various versions of the law of the falling rate of profit only made me laugh – even Benedetto Croce could joke about it, and that says it all. Communism is not inevitable, I would tell myself; we have to build it as an act of witnessing a world of suffering that stood behind us and a future of transformation and hope that I could see as our destiny. ‘Hope: the last comfort of fools’? I had to confess to myself, though, that my conversion was laborious. So, asking questions to which I received no replies, feeling that the most active stimuli were being frustrated, I went into survival mode and isolated myself more and more.
On the bourgeois side of things new opportunities were opening up for me. This was the season of the first importation of American sociology into Italy. The goods were being offered by professors who combined a firm concept of order with the hope of being able to get a refund for it, after the catastrophe of Croceanism, via the likes of Sorokin, Merton and Parsons . . . (It’s amusing to see similar transactions nowadays, but with Luhmann instead of Parsons – no, no, no, the catastrophe today is not in the ideology, it runs in the real: it’s not the catastrophe of fascism and idealism, but one within capitalism!) Basically, even then I applied a certain sense of humour when considering the wealth on offer in sociological work. I managed not to end up doing sociology studies at Olivetti, unlike so many of my peers – tortoiseshell glasses, strutting top of the class. Without too much effort, I have to admit. Sociology, with a few notable exceptions, seemed to me a poor example of compensative thinking – when it was not downright mystificatory; and its relation to historical materialism was like that of pornography to love: a heretical and boss class variant of the science of transformation to which one could apply, mutatis mutandis, the thought of that obscure seventeenth-century politologist quoted by Koselleck: ‘l’héresie n’est plus auiourd’huy en la Religion; elle est en l’Estat’ [‘heresy today is no longer in religion; it is in the state’].6 But there was more in this refusal – a something that was rationally hard and ethically uncompromising, a taste of the sacred nature of reason, of its ontological potentiality – an origin that allowed and nourished only certain pathways of the will. ‘Since there, where I really want to go, is a place where I already am.’ And on the other hand a distaste for fashion and a natural dislike for any culture, which, already in its genesis, smells of death. Away, away – away with formalisms and hypocrisy, the dress of science – a stalling of reason to conceal its crisis. Can this be called arrogant, this immediate rejection of formalism and of the sterile labours of those who try to climb onto its grill? (Perhaps this terrible period of struggles that we have recently traversed has allowed us to tear away from collective consciousness not only all taste for mannerism, but even the very possibility of that pleasure.)
However, rather than theory my friends and I preferred investigation and fieldwork – we went to see what was happening, to measure the malaise of the first mass emigration and the uprooting of communities. With this, however, the basic question not only remained unanswered, it was not even touched on: how to build a liberation movement of the poor, how to build the working-class movement. Behind me I had that representation of the collective that the church had offered to the imagination of my teenage years: a compact and static world, which tended towards reaction, in order to preserve its own values. On the other hand I had approached the labour movement and, having lifted the veil from the myth, I saw, even in the best of cases, a cynical Jacobinism and a calculating concept of the autonomy of the political. [Palmiro] Togliatti, The Prince: small-time professors whispered among themselves, repeating slogans from the dirtiest version of Machiavellianism (or anti-Machiavellianism, which is the same thing). Alongside this was a crudeness, a minoritarian attitude, like that of fractious and resentful slaves. A desert, a world that was wertfrei, a sécheresse. For me, it stank. If this was the choice, it was better to stay with the priests – there at least, in that world, the prudence would always have been broken by outbursts of compassion – whereas here one drank the milk of the lean cow. But surely there is more than this. Thus, while I was increasingly closing in on myself, defining and measuring the things that I discovered, there emerged, from this objective clash in which I was immersed, a statement as restless in its capacity as it was determined in its intensity. A statement of project: to go ahead with my research, to dig that solid ground (and to hold onto it), that ground from which a lot of love had been expressed and where a lot of violence had been exercised. Beyond the representations there needed to be this vigorous noumenon. Where the desire for truth could meet with the potenza of the collective. What is communism, other than that?
That’s all for now, David. Today is a beautiful day. Here too there is a joy. In our discussions we continue to ask ourselves that selfsame question. I send you a hug.