EUROPE: RECOVERY AND NIHILISM
Paz, Octavio
The following article by the distinguished Mexican writer is taken, with permission, from a forthcoming book, One Earth, Four or Five Worlds, to be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This...
...This transformation, like the grace of old, would make men and women other...
...We may nonetheless allow ourselves to wonder whether the policy of the Italian Communists would be the same if there existed in Italy a strong Socialist party such as that in France or Spain...
...at the same time, social democracy has been unable to fill the vacuum left by the failure of the great Communist hope...
...Even though the disturbances in the universities shook the West, neither the Soviet Union nor the Communist parties in the various countries exploited or attempted to channel them...
...This has been disastrous, since these countries, in Asia and Africa as in the Americas, have been and will be focuses of disturbances and conflicts...
...Gide's criticisms in 1936 and Camus's more penetrating ones in 1951, prior to the revelations of the dissidents, seem timid...
...The failure of the revolutions of the 20th century has been tremendous and is quite evident...
...In the decade of the '60s an ambiguous . image, alternately angry and orgiastic—the Sons—displaced the saturnine Father...
...The truth is that, if the goal is to return to the true socialist tradition, there is a twofold moral and political prerequisite that must be satisfied...
...If Communist parties wish to cease being religious and military orders so that they may become genuine political parties, they must begin by practicing democracy at home and denouncing tyrants wherever they may be, in Chile or in Vietnam, in Cuba or in Iran.' My critique of the European Communist parties should not be regarded as an attempt to exculpate the other parties...
...the ideal of democracy may be defined succinctly as a strong people and a weak government...
...For years the leaders of the Communist parties had kept Soviet realities hidden: institutional terror, the servitude of workers and peasants, the regime of privileges, the concentration camps—in a word, all those practices that Communists chastely call "violations of socialist legality...
...The novelty of the rebellion was not intellectual but moral...
...Not the one that stems from Rousseau's "general will," the mask of tyranny and the intellectual origin of Jacobinism and Marxism-Leninism, but the libertarian, pluralist, and democratic one, founded on a respect for minorities...
...It was a political crisis and, even more, a moral and spiritual one...
...their ideal is not freedom but the establishment of sectarian despotism...
...A person lives for a greater number of years now, but they are empty, hollow years...
...But politics is not, nor can it be, anything other than a practice and, at times, an art: its sphere is immediate, contingent reality...
...In the contemporary era, the process of revision and criticism was unleashed by the Khrushchev Report...
...Other circumstances that accelerated the evolution of the European Communist parties were the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia, the occupation of Afghanistan, and the humiliation of Poland...
...This latter condition means revising the Leninist tradition at its very roots...
...In all three countries, democracy is a recent institution...
...Their long association with Russian bureaucratic despotism is a sort of original sin that as yet no democratic baptism has been able to wash away...
...Is a government's skepticism the only possible answer to the terrorists' fanaticism...
...Spaniards and we Hispano-Americans have confronted the same obstacles in our attempts to implant democratic institutions in our lands...
...It does not govern—or, rather, it has reduced the art of governing to a conjurer's trick in which it is dexterity that counts, a mastery of the art of compromise...
...It is necessary, first, to break with the myth of a socialist Soviet Union and, second, to establish internal democracy within Communist parties...
...Yet these material and political gains have not been matched by the attainment of a loftier wisdom or a more profound culture...
...The failure to achieve a thoroughgoing and truly democratic reform of their structures explains the progressive and, in my opinion, irreversible decline of the French and Spanish Communist parties...
...That is true, but we live at a crossroads of history, and Europe is the great absentee in world politics...
...The following decade saw the emergence, and the recognition in the West, of dissidents in the Soviet Union and in the other "socialist" countries...
...The political leaders of antiquity, too, were not able, save in rare instances, to predict the future: they hit upon the right solution because they knew how to answer the challenge of the moment, not because they were able to see into the future...
...This does not mean, naturally, that the Germans, the Italians, and the Spaniards are 185 doomed to terrorism by some kind of historical defect...
...Though Italian political life is an extremely agitated affair, nothing happens...
...second, both the IRA's methods and its political program (a "socialism" of the Arab or African variety) have lost it friends and supporters in the Republic of Ireland as well as in Northern Ireland...
...There has been no lack of critics to denounce the policy of the Eurocommunists as a decoy, a maneuver of the same sort as the Popular Front and the "outstretched hand" of Stalin's day...
...I: From Criticism to Terrorism Around 1960 a series of civic upheavals began that made the West tremble...
...The hostility of the Soviet hierarchy is understandable: the rebellion of the young was a libertarian movement and a passionate, total critique of the state and of authority as much as it was a rebellion against the capitalist consumer society...
...The heirs of these youthful rebels have been the terrorist bands...
...We went from the glorification of the solitary old man to the exaltation of the juvenile tribe...
...Why did French socialists, who can look back on many a bitter experience of Communist about-face, 187 decide to govern as "common partners" with them...
...This picture would be incomplete if I did not add that the politics of these Western leaders have been the politics of complacency, of the easy way out...
...Productive capacity, free labor unions, the right to strike, the power to negotiate: this is what has made the Western democracies viable and prosperous...
...Another is the progressive weakening of the notion of authority, be it governmental or paternal...
...Abandoning revolutionary rhetoric is a sign not only of intellectual sobriety but also of political honesty...
...it has become a political and military catechism of the revolutionary elite of the less developed countries, such as Nicaragua and Ethiopia...
...Their vision of history is that of trade, and it is for this reason that they have seen in Islam not a world awakening but a client to be bargained with...
...Feminism was an exception, but this movement began much earlier and will surely continue for several decades more...
...Two circumstances conspire against that organization: first, the Catholics are in the minority in Ulster...
...This was the reverse of bolshevism: incapable of taking over the state and instituting ideological terror, the activists have been caught up in the 184 ideology of terror...
...on the other, Las Casas and Sahagtin...
...It seems to have nearly disappeared in Germany...
...During the '70s, no moral and political critique appeared in the West that was comparable to that of the dissidents of the "socialist" countries—a notable contrast, yet one to which no one, as far as I know, has given serious thought...
...As for the Communist party, it does not know which way to turn...
...At one extreme it is a kind of gluttony, an insatiable craving for more and more...
...II: The Jacobin Heritage and Democracy A phenomenon of inverse symmetry: the evolution of the great European Communist parties (in Italy, France, and Spain) has taken the very opposite direction from that of the terrorists...
...Thanks to them, the lies of some 10 or 15 years ago cannot be repeated with impunity today (this attitude stands in sharp contrast to that in Latin America, where so many intellectuals do not open their mouths except to recite catechisms drafted in Havana...
...But are today's European Communist parties revolutionary...
...The most spectacular reform has been the abandonment of the dogma of "the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...It will not be government repression but the establishment of local and regional freedom and autonomy that will bring an end to Basque terrorism there...
...The abandonment of the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" has been yet another sign that the European left, not excluding the Communists, is finally beginning to retrieve its other tradition...
...It has rejected Leninism but does not dare embrace democratic socialism wholeheartedly...
...A holdover of Jacobinism or a Machiavellian maneuver to immobilize them...
...At times the conquistador himself is, in his own way, an ethnologist (Cortes...
...Whether or not one agrees with this testimony in all respects, it is a pleasure to have it here...
...It wavers between Lenin and Kautsky without yet having found its own proper course...
...I am not unaware that the leaders of the 188 liberal democracies have been skillful and efficient, and that they have resolved many conflicts and problems in a civilized manner...
...In the beginning the criticism tended to be along moral lines, and this was followed by historical, political, and economic criticism...
...Through a moral and psychological mechanism that has yet to be described, Thorez, Togliatti, La Pasionaria, and the others not only accepted the great lie but collaborated actively in perpetuating it...
...Nor is one venturing too far to conjecture that it will diminish in Spain as well...
...A passionate negation of the values reigning in the West, the cultural revolution of the '60s was the offspring of criticism, but, strictly speaking, it was not a critical movement...
...in Western Europe it shattered the credibility and prestige of governments and institutions, if not their power...
...This reaction has been salutary...
...Everybody scurries around yet remains in precisely the same place...
...But there is something else involved, something of greater importance...
...They have exercised power—or opposition—with moderation and relative intelligence...
...The rebellion of the young in the '60s took up the same themes and lived them as passionate protest...
...Nonetheless, it would not be fair to fail to acknowledge the great benefits that workers and the middle class have attained in the last 40 years...
...If we reread today the polemic between Karl Kautsky and the Bolsheviks, we are most likely to side with Kautsky: his position vis-à-vis the Communist dictatorship is not very different from that of Enrico Berlinguer's and Santiago Carrillo's today...
...Hence the fascination exerted on their peoples by pacifism, not as a revolutionary doctrine but as a negative ideology...
...It is by no means an accident that terrorism has been most rampant in Germany, Italy, and Spain—the three countries where the historical process of modern society (the transition from the absolutist state to the democratic one) has been interrupted more than once by despotic regimes...
...For the first time, the dissidents of the Russian Empire managed to make themselves heard by European intellectuals...
...From the 18th century on, it was thought that this change would consist of a superhuman, though not a supernatural, task: the revolutionary transformation of society...
...Yet Spain today, after 40 years of dictatorship, is beginning to live a democratic life that is in many respects exemplary...
...For Communists, alliance means annexation, and anyone who keeps his independence becomes a heretic and an enemy...
...The spectacle of the unshakable faith of innumerable "progressivist intellectuals"—precisely those whose only profession of faith ought to be criticism, examination, and doubt!—was no less scandalous...
...Trotsky's analyses insufficient...
...There is a disproportion—I don't know whether to call it comic or tragic—between this slippered ease and the decisions that the present demands...
...I confess that as the years go by I view revolt with more sympathy than I do revolution...
...Contrary to the predictions of Marxism, the crisis was not an economic one, nor was its central protagonist the proletariat...
...The absence of proletarian revolutions in Europe has proved the central prophecy of Marxism to be false...
...Not only are their methods reprehensible...
...The frankest justification of the necessity of the state was Hobbes's: "[Since] the condition of man is a condition of war of everyone against everyone," men have no other recourse save to yield part of their freedom to a sovereign authority capable of ensuring the peace and tranquillity of each and all...
...Although it has lost some of its impetus in the last few years, it is a phenomenon destined to endure and change history...
...Our materialism is not carnal: it is an abstraction...
...Their policy toward Russia—I am thinking not only of social democrats such as Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt but also of conservatives such as Valery Giscard d'Estaing—has been and is a gigantic self-deception...
...I do not know whether these commentaries contain valid interpretations...
...I do know they express the reactions and sentiments of an independent writer from Latin America confronting the modern world...
...With him 189 ended a tradition that even in his own day, and despite his powerful personality, was an archaism...
...Perhaps the Modern Age has been guilty of a terrible confusion: it has tried to make of politics a universal science...
...In the mind of Communists, other parties do not exist, save as groups of individuals who must be either converted or eliminated...
...Americans, Europeans, Japanese have managed to overcome the postwar crisis and create a society that is the richest and most prosperous in human history...
...A great contradiction: to lovers of freedom the erosion of the authority of government in the countries of the West ought to be a cause for rejoicing...
...The first lesson here, above all for our obtuse, barbarian oligarchies ever in search of an imposing brass hat to guarantee order: if Spaniards have managed to live together peacefully and democratically, why can't we do it...
...But this possibility never really played a part in General de Gaulle's vision, for two reasons: first, because he was a profoundly nationalistic political leader and, second, because his great intelligence was in no way incompatible with a goodly share of realism...
...Ens...
...This book of political and cultural essays consists of writings that Paz published in Latin-American and Spanish periodicals and in a German Booklet from 1976 to 1984, which have been revised for the English-language version...
...Irish terrorism was born of the explosive conjunction of two elements: a nationalism steeped in religious fervor, and the second-class status forced upon the Catholic minority...
...The European working class and its leftist intellectuals have taken Russian foreign policy as a double offense: to their socialist feelings and to their nationalist feelings...
...The leaders' great errors and misdeeds have taken the form, rather, of sexual or financial scandals...
...Our era turned gods and angels out of heaven, but it inherited from Christianity the age-old promise to change humankind...
...In the French party the Stalinist heritage weighs heavily in the balance and proSovietism continues to be de rigueur...
...and even Souvarine's descriptions pale, though the latter, 40 years ago, was the first to understand the true nature of the Russian regime...
...On this point, it is useful to distinguish between dictatorship of the proletariat and dictatorship of the Communist party...
...Does this mean, as many predict, that the hour of the churches has come...
...The second lesson is of particular concern to the Latin-American left, dogmatic and stubborn-minded, descended not from the Enlightenment but from the theologians of the 16th century: the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Workers' party [Spain's Socialist party], has not merely renounced Marxism but has willingly gone along with the democratic rotation of parties and power...
...The history of the 20th century has confirmed something well known to all the historians of the past, something our ideologies have stubbornly ignored: the strongest, fiercest, most enduring political passions are nationalism and religion...
...This characteristic, and the propensity to divide itself and subdivide itself into sects and factions, are proof that communism is not really a political party but a religious order animated by an exclusivist orthodoxy...
...Until just a few years ago, only a few marginal groups—anarchists, Surrealists, former Marxists and Communist militants who had shed their cassocks—had dared to describe bureaucratic "socialism" as what it really is: a new, more total, and merciless system of exploitation and repression...
...They all are more interested in reaching power or remaining in power than in shaping the future...
...Translated from the Spanish by HELEN LANE 191...
...It is the Italians and the Spaniards who have gone furthest...
...The spiritual panorama of the West is desolating: cheap tastes, triviality, shallowness, rebirth of superstition, degradation of eroticism, pleasure enrolled in the service of the communications media...
...The extraordinary freedom of mores in the West, above all in the sexual realm, is one of the consequences of the moral insurrection of the young in the '60s...
...Their countries have great material, technical, and intellectual resources to draw on...
...Following World War II, the nations of the Old World withdrew into themselves, and since then have devoted their immense energies to creating a prosperity without grandeur and cultivating a hedonism without passion and without risks...
...The youth movement was not a revolution, in the strict sense of the word, although it made the language of revolution its own, nor was it a ' See Alternating Current (1973...
...Our pornography is visual and mental...
...In the '70s, rebellion died away and criticism fell silent...
...If circumstances so require, Georges Marchais and the French CP will not hesitate to break off the alliance as they have done before.' Communists look upon ideological tendencies akin to their own with rage: socialists of every shade, anarchists, labor parties...
...And the case of Northern Ireland...
...183 On the contrary: they denounced these disturbances as anarchic, decadent, petit-bourgeois movements, manipulated by agents provocateurs of the right...
...It is plain that without the action of leftist intellectuals the evolution of the European Communist parties would have been impossible...
...In the case of the Irish, the union between the two is inextricable...
...Eurocommunism has been an attempt on the part of its leaders to respond to the social and historical changes that have taken place on the continent over the last 30 years...
...Since it has ceased to represent popular aspirations, growing isolation will lead it to the worst form of violence: political suicide...
...Neither politics nor the sciences can bring us paradise or eternal harmony...
...it was a rebellion, in the meaning I have given that term in other writings.' It was the rebellion of a segment of the middle class and a real "cultural revolution," in precisely the sense that the so-called one in China was not...
...The West ceased to have critics and dissidents...
...Marx put forward the former as a 2 They actually did so in 1984...
...The European Communist parties— the French one in particular—continue to be closed groups, at once religious and military orders...
...The cult of revolution is one of the expressions of modern excess—an excess that at bottom is an act of compensation for an inner weakness and a lack...
...The situation bears more than one similarity to that of the Palestinians and the Israelis—the dilemma of how to satisfy the contradictory and exclusive, though equally legitimate, aspirations of two communities...
...By this I mean that the protests, declarations, and manifestoes of the rebels set forth no ideas and concepts not already found in the works of the philosophers and poets of the immediately preceding generations...
...They are not theory but testimony...
...Have they not thereby proved that they possess a more acute historical sensibility than their dogmatic critics...
...Unlike the Basques, who do not want to unite with anyone except one another, the Catholics of Ulster feel that they are part of the Republic of Ireland...
...Our hedonism is a hedonism for robots and wraiths...
...This movement is an oddity in that it is not restricted to a single current: the plurality of tendencies and philosophies that characterized pre-Bolshevik Russia reappears among the dissidents...
...The national state—the necessary complement of Western societies' evolution toward democracy—came into being at a late date in Germany and Italy...
...Another great achievement is tolerance—a tolerance not only toward ideas and opinions but also toward mores and inclinations...
...Idolaters of the status quo and specialists in the art of wheeling and dealing, they have displayed precisely the same weakness of will in the face of the incredible selfishness of the masses and the elites of their countries as in the face of the threats and blackmail of foreign countries...
...These gains are owed, above all, to the labor unions and to the action of social democratic and labor parties...
...The one thing that unites them is their passivity in the face of destiny...
...The activities of the Italian terrorists have been, more than anything, the result of the crisis of the state, which in turn has been the consequence of the double paralysis of the two great parties, the Christian Democrats and the Communists...
...The history of Spain and of Hispano-America over the last two centuries has given me occasion to doubt more than once whether democracy is viable in our case...
...Hence to turn revolutionary politics into a universal science was to pervert both politics and science, to make of them a caricature of religion...
...To the somnambulism of society, mechanically spinning round and round the endless production of objects and things, terrorism offers in opposition a frenzy no less somnambulistic but more destructive...
...How much longer will the governments of the West be able to assure their peoples that they will enjoy this well-being that, though it may be neither happiness nor wisdom, has been and is a sort of placid contentment based on work and consumption...
...If this should turn out to be the case, I hope that there will be left on the earth at least a small handful of human beings—as at the end of antiquity—who will resist the temptation of divine omniscience, as others, in our day, have resisted that of revolutionary omniscience...
...A portent of the times: as terrorist groups grow bolder and more intransigent, the governments of the West become more timid and hesitant...
...As I see it, we are dealing here with a very different phenomenon...
...The youth movement, admirable on more than one account, oscillated between religion and revolution, eros and utopia...
...As extremist groups step up the violence of their tactics, the Communists draw closer to the methods and programs of the traditional democratic parties...
...The leaders of the Communist parties have tried their best to adapt their ideology and tactics to the realities of the new Europe...
...But in the "socialist" countries of today, the Communist minority exercises, in the name of the proletariat, a total dictatorship over all classes and social groups, including the proletariat itself...
...We now know that this key has not unlocked a single prison door: instead, it has locked many...
...The task of demolishing an edifice of lies that has stood for more than half a century has not yet come to an end...
...Their idea of movement is the in-and-out of office holding, the shuffling of cabinet posts: politics as a game of musical chairs...
...The pragmatism of social democracy, its gradual loss of the radicalism and the vision of justice that had inspired it in the beginning, can be seen as a reaction against the excesses and the crimes of authoritarian and dogmatic "socialism...
...The process will be slow but irreversible...
...The former is a spontaneous and almost invariably legitimate uprising against an unjust power...
...Despite the importance of the changes that have taken place in the Communist parties of Italy and Spain, they have not yet fully evolved...
...it exacerbates loneliness and verges at one extreme on masturbation, at the other on sadomasochism—elaborate solitary exercises, at once bloody and spectral...
...The decline of European influence cannot be attributed solely to its political leaders' lack of political imagination or boldness...
...original Spanish edition, Corriente alterna, 1967) and the chapter "Inicuas simetrias" ["Iniquitous Symmetries"], in Hombres en su siglo [Men in Their Time], 1984...
...English translation copyright © 1985 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc...
...The last great attempt to regain lost influence was made by General de Gaulle...
...None of them has acted as a bloodthirsty despot, and all of them have endeavored to respect minorities as well as the majority...
...The conversion of revolutionary politics into a universal science capable of changing humanity was a transformation of an essentially religious type...
...The case of Spain was quite the contrary, but the results have been similar: the different peoples living side by side in the Iberian Peninsula were immobilized, from the 16th century on, in the straitjacket of a centralist, authoritarian state...
...Nor is the cold, obtuse anger of the terrorists and their pedantic teachers a way out...
...Their criticism was unusually violent and lucid...
...According to the original conception of Marx and Engels, during the transition period leading to socialism, power was to be in the hands of the various revolutionary workers' parties...
...Yet the situation saddens us because the terrorists seem bent upon proving Hobbes right...
...As democracy and federalism are strengthened (and with them the national state), terrorism will decline...
...If the latter, it is a naive trap that will ensnare no one but the Socialists themselves...
...MarxismLeninism is no longer a European ideology...
...The rebellion of the young flared up when no one was expecting it and faded away just as unexpectedly, a phenomenon that our sociologists are still unable to explain...
...The case of Spain is especially pertinent...
...What is most significant is that Marxists are a minority within the movement...
...basic tenet, not the latter...
...they have resisted the old imperial temptation and have tended to these resources carefully...
...The essential thing has been to wriggle out of difficult situations, assure oneself of another year of tranquil digestion, and win the next election...
...Perhaps in view of the example of Spain, our own political leaders, both conservative and radical, will learn to practice tolerance, accept criticism, and respect the opinion of others...
...The criticism of the Western intellectuals was effective—unlike the reception given such earlier critics as Serge, Ciliga, Souvarine, Breton, Camus, Silone, Howe, and others— because, almost at the same time, the world discovered the existence of a dissident movement in the Soviet Union...
...As the economic crisis worsens, there will be less work, fewer things to buy, and less money with which to buy them...
...Copyright © 1983 by Octavio Paz...
...To these causes must be added, as a basic economic condition, the extraordinary productive capacity of modern industrial societies and, as a no less basic social and political condition, the democracy that has allowed the struggle and the negotiation between capitalists and workers, and between both and governments, to take place...
...The government goes around in circles, not getting anywhere, because the party in power, that of the Christian Democrats, no longer has any program beyond maintaining the status quo...
...We seek from revolution what our elders 190 sought from religion: salvation, paradise...
...These victories bear within them lessons that should be pondered by all Latin Americans, especially those who are democrats and socialists...
...However pernicious the actions of these groups, the real evil of liberal capitalist societies lies not in them but in the predominant nihilism...
...His case is akin to that of Julian, the Roman emperor in the tradition of Marcus Aurelius (and a valiant warrior), who through the work of his Christian enemies is known today as Julian the Apostate...
...Viewing the body as merely a mechanism leads to the mechanization of pleasure...
...In the United States the rebellion of the young played a decisive role in discrediting American policy in Indochina...
...This is strange, since from the 16th century on, criticism has accompanied Europeans in all their undertakings and adventures, at some times in the form of confession and at others in the form of remorse...
...This is the other face of terrorism: two contrary expressions of the same nihilism...
...The worst of it was that they managed to preserve the myth of the Soviet Union as the "homeland of the proletariat," not only in the minds of militants but also in the minds of millions of sympathizers...
...On the one hand, Pizarro...
...No idea of change inspires them, nor do they represent anything new in the history of this century...
...the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the repression in Poland confirm that the interests of the Russian state do not coincide with the interests of the working class or with socialism...
...Yet even Hobbes conceded that "the condition of subject is a miserable one...
...But if Western leaders have not been generous as well as prudent, neither have they committed great excesses...
...The spectacle of the West today would have fascinated both Machiavelli and Diogenes, for quite different reasons...
...the minorities in the opposition turned to clandestine action...
...This hedonism, moreover, is far removed from that of Epicurus: it does not dare to look death in the face, and it is not a form of wisdom but a surrender...
...If the revisionist Eduard Bernstein were still alive, he would rub his hands with glee at some of the public statements Berlinguer and Carrillo have made...
...In his Foreword Paz writes that these essays were written from a point of view "that I might call eccentric or simply marginal . . . never from fond rooted in the certainties of an ideology with encyclopedic pretensions such as Marxism or in the immutable truths of religion such as Christianity and Islam...
...In the last few years we have witnessed the electoral triumph of democratic socialism in Spain, France, and Greece...
...That is why they have failed...
...revolt...
...It has been believed that revolution, once it became a universal science, would be the key to history, the open-Sesame that would break down the doors of the prison in which humanity has lived since its very beginnings...
...Previous generations had seen the cult of the terrible father, adored and feared: Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, de Gaulle...
...The West's modern history begins with the expansion of Spain and Portugal in Africa, Asia, and America...
...It is a nihilism poles apart from that of Nietzsche: we are not confronted with a critical negation of established values but with their dissolution in a passive indifference...
...These were sudden moves that, after the bloody intervention in Hungary, were well-nigh intolerable to the European left...
...Despite the sports and health cults, the attitude of the masses in the West implies a lowering of vital energy...
...Some people will surely remind me, not without reason, that politics is an art (or a technique) that lives and moves and has its being in the relativity of the immediate and the proximate...
...Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over...
...There is no doubt that socialists and social democrats have ceased to be revolutionaries...
...Yet the name of this German Marxist has been coupled for half a century now with Lenin's damning epithet: Kautsky the Renegade...
...The origins of this process lie in the controversies and polemics that successively tore apart the First, Second, and Third Internationals...
...Unfortunately, there is no Solomon in sight...
...The Italian Communists, the most flexible and intelligent in Europe, have set out to fill this gap, but they have not succeeded because of their historical genealogy...
...The Sino-Soviet conflict was proof that "proletarian internationalism" is a mask for nationalist aggression...
...The pragmatism of the democratic parties, especially the social democrats, has positive aspects, virtues that become visible in the light of the critiques of revolutionaries...
...But at the same time they have not known how, or have not wanted, to use their riches and their technical knowledge for the benefit of poor and economically underdeveloped countries...
...But after the Khrushchev Report it was no longer possible to keep the truth under wraps...
...No question, opportunistic tactics play a fairly 186 large role in the positions taken by the Eurocommunists...
...What is being argued about today had already led, more than a century ago, to fierce disputation, although in another language and from other perspectives, between Marx and Bakunin, between Martov and Lenin—that is to say, among all the leaders of the workers' movement...
...almost at once, denunciations of the horrors of the Conquest make their appearance, and descriptions—often wonderstruck—of indigenous societies are written...
...But the underlying problem nonetheless remains: Italy suffers from the absence of democratic socialism...
...But terrorism is not a critique of this situation: it is one of its symptoms...
...Today we are paying for this confusion in blood...
...Italian Communists, it is true, speak of a "historic compromise," a term that implies alliance not only with the other labor parties but with the middle class as well, bourgeois liberals included...
...This has left its mark on the contemporary intellectual conscience, and its moral and political consequences will be felt more and more deeply, not only in Europe but in Latin America as well...
...Since the last years of the 19th century, we have lived the myth of Revolution, as the men of the first Christian generations lived the myth of the End of the World and the imminent Second Coming of Christ...
...It was simply not possible for France, by itself, in its new secondary rank on the world scene, to reestablish the international balance of power and act as a counterweight to the United States and Russia—a role that could only be filled by the combined forces of a united Europe...
...in its turn, the cult of the image—movies, television, advertising—gives rise to a sort of generalized voyeurism that converts bodies into shadows...
...Yet Irish Catholic nationalism is one thing and the IRA another...
...I shall not deal at length with this subject: it is a familiar theme and I, too, have discussed it in a number of my writings...
...As always happens, there were intellectuals—among them many Communists— who began the critical examination...
...The ETA (Basque terrorists) is doomed to die, not suddenly, but as a consequence of gradual but inexorable isolation...
...at the other it is dereliction, abdication, cowardice in the face of suffering and death...
...The magnitude of the problems with which we of the 20th century are confronted stands in sharp contrast to the modesty of the programs and solutions put before us by the governments and political parties of Western Europe...
...We would be closer to the mark to call it hedonism: the temper of the nihilist is tragic, that of the hedonist resigned...
...Nor has science (or, more exactly, have the sciences) ever proposed to change humanity: only to know it and, if such a thing can be possible, to cure it, to better it...
...Today no one dares defend "real socialism" as before, not even the members of the species we call "liberal intellectuals...
...De Gaulle knew what we all know: the nations of Europe want to live together and prosper in peace, but they do not want to do anything in common...
...In the first half of the 20th century, the critique of the West was the work of its poets, its novelists, and its philosophers...
...Never have so many had so much...
...its agents were not workers but a privileged group: students...
...It is a process that belongs to the realm of the "long count...
...It is a moment in a long and tortuous process of revision and criticism that began long ago and has not yet ended...
...Guilt feelings of the West go by the name of anthropology, as Levi-Strauss has pointed out: a science born at the same time as the European imperialism that it has outlived...
...If the former, it is most regrettable...
...the young did not discover other ideas—they lived, with passionate intensity, those they had inherited...
...Not only have they always attacked them, but whenever they have been in a position to do so they have actually persecuted and exterminated them...
...Copyright 1983 by Editorial Seix Barral, S. A. — Barcelona...
Vol. 32 • April 1985 • No. 2
