Author: Matthijs Krul

Bonapartism in Italy?

by Matthijs Krul

The edition of NRC Handelsblad of Saturday, the 15th of November, reported on a new study published in Italy on the extravagant corruption endemic to the politics of that country. The Italian President has virtually no powers and is usually an octogenarian whose main task is to rest on his laurels and appear regal (the actual Royalty in Italy is still banished, but it makes little difference), and yet the annual costs of this charade are twice that spent on the Elysée, whose powers are real and far-reaching. Italian politicians receive state pensions from their third year in office, so the sight of a perfectly healthy and vigorous member deciding to “retire” at the ripe age of 47 is not uncommon. Then there are the state-owned villas and mansions, rented to leading politicians of all parties at extremely low cost; the actual rent clearly being no more than a transparent attempt at maintaining what the Americans call “plausible deniability”.

This corrupt mess is possible because of the generally lamentable state of Italian politics. Italy is a major European power, and as such is primary among the imperialists of the world, but it is and has always been a power of the second tier, compared to its inevitable competitors Germany, France, and the UK. These latter two have about the same population Italy has, but much larger economies and much more international clout when it comes to dividing the spoils of imperial exploitation. All Italy’s past adventures in colonialism, settlerism and annexationism have ended in dramatic and embarrassing failures, from the defeat at Adowa (1896) to the stalled campaign in Greece in 1941. Of course, much of this is caused by Italy’s relatively late development and appearance on the world stage, since it was hampered for the longest time by its partitioned state and the Austrian and French interference to keep it so. Final unification was only achieved with significant French support and as a move by France against Austria, for all Garibaldi’s exploits, and Mazzini’s earlier attempts at bourgeois revolution failed for the most part.

The most characteristic of Italy’s post-unification political development are however two clear elements. The first is the strong regional division between the country’s industrialized North and its mostly rural and underdeveloped South. The second is the contrast between left and right, which is quite extreme and allows of little political weight in the center, leading to Italy’s politics being notoriously unstable.(1) There is, as one might expect, a direct connection between the two, but not a straightforward one. Italy’s industrialized north and center have the strongest left-wing presences. Part of this coming from the Italian working class, which was represented together with the progressive petty bourgeoisie in the PCI and which as a result of post-war developments and Italy achieving its own First World imperialist share became increasingly social-democratic under the guise of “Eurocommunism”, and part of this coming from the anarchist and autonomist movements in Italy, which remain strong particularly under the urban industrial workers dissatisfied with the parliamentarism and stuffy reformism of the official Communist cliques, yet never achieving any real results other than making a cultural mark on things. Italy’s vast amount of smallholders, 94.7% of which are classified as small family farms and which still employ a relatively large share of the population, were represented in the conservative Christian-Democrat parties of various stripe – particularly in the South – which were propped up by the United States as a bulwark against the feared PCI. They were joined in this by the right half of the petty bourgeoisie in the towns as well as much of the small town bourgeoisie, while the big industrialists, organized in Confindustria, supported what little liberalism existed, as well as of course being the main supporters of the fascist ‘solution’ for Italian empire.

In recent times however the situation has changed somewhat on Italy’s political scene. As mentioned above, the Italian Communists developed an increasingly reformist position as the Italian workers turned more and more from a proletariat in a recently freed country to a typical Western style labor aristocracy, especially in the union-heavy areas in the North such as Milano and Torino. This is precisely as Marxist science predicts, and is nothing remarkable; the subsequent collapse and attempts at reformation of this ‘mass party’, without this leading to the slightest sign of revolt or even interest on the part of the Italian workers, are just the demonstration of the theoretical rule. Actual reformist parties took over the torch, just like in France, no longer seeing the use in ceremonial watchwords which in practice had long ago become ever so much dead tradition.

More importantly, the Christian-Democrats imploded as a result of their infiltration by the mafia and the accompanying corruption being revealed publicly. The mafia of course is the professional organization of the traditionally large Italian lumpenproletariat, which were known even in Marx’ days, and often named the lazzaroni. Industry being underdeveloped in the South (the South’s backwardness has a long history which will be addressed at a later date) and unable to meet the competition of Northern capital, a large class of perpetually unemployed was created as the dirt-poor Italy moved to its cities, particularly Napoli. Even now unemployment in the Southern areas of Italy is often 20% or higher, and probably understated. (2) With increasing deindustrialization as a result of parasitism and resulting capital movements, there is little prospect for improvement on this front in that area.

This has important consequences for Italian politics which show themselves in recent results. The Italian labor aristocracy in the North has increasingly become a liability for the significant Italian industry that remains (cars, electronics, household appliances), and is undergoing competition from immigrants, particularly from Africa and Albania, pulling them violently towards the political right and a philistine xenophobia and racism. This of itself is nothing new either, as similar movements can be noted in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and even Greece and Denmark. However, here the peculiarities of the Italians come in. Because the Italian South mostly thrives on organized lumpenproletarian thievery and extortion, and its main source of income is support funds for underdeveloped areas sent by the European Union, it has become a parasite upon the parasites. Its modus operandi is to steal, extort and ‘legally’ embezzle as much as can be carried to the South while deftly avoiding the ire of the North, which is because of its late unification and the resulting regionalist political structure fairly impotent to do anything about it.

This has led to the remarkable development of the Lega Nord, the organized party for both Northern industrialists and Northern labor aristocrats, both of whom are being fleeced by Southern politicians and organizations and are seeking to rid themselves of this large mosquito on their neck. Indeed it is a good sign of the degeneration of the situation in Italy that the leader of the Lega Nord, Umberto Bossi, had before becoming a regional chauvinist been politically ‘raised’ by the PCI itself. The chauvinist opportunism displayed by this political tendency is further reinforced by the ease with which they supported their counterparts in Sicily, the so-called “Movement for Autonomy”. After all, it is no loss to the ‘Padanians’ and their imagined homeland if Sicily should depart the union. The only proponents of the union from conviction remain the social-democratic parties, in their various liberal, left, left-liberal, and whatnot forms, mostly relying on the workers in Rome and other parts of the country’s center, as well as on nationally minded elements of the bourgeoisie, particularly those in intellectual trades or government functions.

When such contradictions arise, the winners are always those on the side of the demagogues and plunderers, who use the internal tensions between the different interests of these groups in a deeply divided nation for their own gain. What this requires is someone who produces an aura of national strength and revitalization, while at the same time relying on those elements in all classes who have become cynical from the stalemate, as well as the lumpenproletarians and their chiefs, who seek opportunities to further enrich themselves at the expense of the state’s wealth. In France in the post-1848 situation, Napoleon Bonaparte III was precisely this person, using peasant and lumpenproletarian votes to produce a mirage of national strength on the global political scene, while freely playing each group against each other to steal from the state coffers. Such a person in Italy is Silvio Berlusconi, the master of the thieves’ guild. Where petty Southern politicians had been satisfied with buying a quantity of regional votes and so getting themselves elected to profitable positions from which they could not be ejected again without much political effort, such as Clemente Mastella’s UDEUR phenomenon, Berlusconi handily used the political vacuum created by the collapse of the Christian-Democrats to maneouvre and bribe his way to the highest office. This Italian Bonaparte’s alliances with other parties are merely for convenience, and he takes good care to cede them nothing of their demands, for he profits the more the longer all involved are dissatisfied. Much as Marx described Bonaparte’s “protection racket” in his usual brilliant style in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, so now do we find this a fitting description for this shiny crook. Indeed the “embarrassment of riches” has taken on a whole new meaning for Italy.

(1) This is not a product of its proportional voting system, which merely reflects properly the existing contradictions. Italy’s plurality voting was no more stable than its current procedures.
(2) OECD, Economic Survey of Italy 2005

The Meaning of Moral Prototypes

by Matthijs Krul

There is no real evidence as to whether Homeros, historically accredited writer of the Iliad and the Odyssey, actually existed. When in the 1930s the American researcher Milman Parry interviewed bards performing epic poems based on the oral traditions of the Bosniaks, in what was then a very underdeveloped part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, he discovered that they all referred to a certain bardic hero. The name of this hero varied by whom was asked, but all agreed that this person was better at the performing arts than anyone else, knew all the old legends and tales better than any other, could memorize them more clearly and present them in a superior manner, and so forth. None of the people involved had ever seen him or knew anyone that had, but they had all heard from various other trustworthy people that he existed or had existed. To any objective outside observer, it seemed clear that this figure was mythical.

Parry, a specialist in the very early period of ancient Greece, was led by this research to propose that Homeros himself had been a mythical ideal figure of this kind. Perhaps he had not even existed at all, or perhaps he had, but had merely been someone to whom a much longer oral tradition had been ascribed, or he might have been the name given to what was really a development in ancient Greek society where the epic tales started being written down rather than further transmitted through their telling. Any of these were a possibility, but in the classical studies of that period this idea was a veritable bombshell. It was much resisted, for it implied that the 150 years or so that classical scholars had just been spending on a scientific approach to studying the meaning of these works as the products of one particular mind had been utterly in vain, for it would much more likely have been a compilation or mixture of various oral traditions from various sources.

This, however, is not all that can be said about this shift in viewpoint. What is interesting about this is that Homeros was nonetheless throughout all of the ancient times, both Greek and Roman (so-called, not to imply that Greece ceased to exist culturally under Roman rule), to have been the absolute ideal in poetry. In his book chronicling the reception of the Iliad and Odyssey through the ages, Alberto Manguel describes very well how for everyone from Greek tragic playwrights in the classical period to Latin-cultured Renaissance writers, Homeros was the gold standard in writing, not just for epic works (such as Vergilius’ Aeneis, a wholesale Romanization of both works in one) but also for other forms of writing, in terms of style, metaphor, structure, and so on. All this although they had no actual proof of his ever having existed, except that tradition would have it so.

Such moral prototypes, people who may not actually have existed, or if they did, not really in the grand manner ascribed to them, but who serve the purpose of being a lived reality of virtue, can also be found most interestingly in the Bible, to be precise the Old Testament. For the Jews living in the Judah and Israel of the post-exile period, the period of reconstruction as a small recently liberated group (albeit under Persian, Achaemenid rule) required a strong sense of norms to give life to the newly reconstructed society and to bind the group together against the many peoples in the surrounding area. This role was not only fulfilled at the time itself by the various prophets mentioned by the Bible to have lived at this time, Haggai and Zachariah, but also by the writing down of those ancient traditions which we know now as the Old Testament. These for the most part, as anyone knows, play the role of establishing the laws and norms for the Jews, to which they ascribe a divine origin. But more interestingly in light of what has been said above, it is clear that it was not enough for these laws and ordinances to merely be known; they must also be lived by example. After all, the content of a law, no matter how precise, is merely a dead letter unless people actually follow it, and all experience shows that the force of example is a much stronger one to enjoin people to do something than the force of codes alone.

However, the obvious problem was that since these laws and ordinances were to have been from ancient times, even from before the exile, and to fit within the known chronology of the Jewish history, the people living these laws also had to be from that time. In an essential move for any society seeking a new foundation to reconstitute itself, they undertook what Hobsbawm has called the invention of tradition; and not just in any specific form, but what is interesting to us here is how it took the form (among other things) of moral prototypes. Joshua is clearly the embodiment of the virtue of leadership in war for the Jews, as Solomon is the embodiment of wise rule. More rounded is the character of David, who embodies on the one hand loyalty to one’s legal ruler even when such ruler goes against the traditional laws and rules (indeed for all the talk of the absolute importance of obedience to God’s laws, the Old Testament chronicles seem to give no indication of any right of Jewish subjects to hold their Kings to these laws, but instead this is undertaken by God alone), and on the other hand the embodiment of the character virtues that a Jewish ruler should have. Where Solomon is the moral prototype of wisdom, David is clearly the moral prototype of leadership altogether, in precisely the sense as in the case of Homeros: he serves as the gold standard to which all in a similar position ought to aspire, he is the yardstick for all measurements of current equivalents, and yet this alone is not enough, for he also needs to have a narrative description of how these rules were lived and obedience to them displayed in practice.

People always have a need to know what a given law or moral norm means for them in practice, and how to apply them in the situations that may occur in their life. The continuing popularity of all forms of exemplary narrative in this regard is sufficient proof, from books with tips on Christian living to fairytales and invented epics like Tolkien’s. The moral prototype, however, seems to be the oldest and perhaps the most enduring of all these forms, for it embeds in our cultural-historical consciousness a human narrative, one that people can relate to in a way that they cannot to mere codes and norms, that describes how those same codes and norms can be lived in practice. Precisely because this is a historical, often epic or romantic adventure-type tale, it can be projected into the very shadows of the origins of that historical consciousness to which it wishes to speak, which maximizes its effect – the time of the Achaeans for the classical Greeks, the time of the early Kings and Judges for the post-exile Jews, the time of the Brythonics for the high Medieval courtiers, and so on. It is important to learn from these cultural phenomena to understand the workings of a new society.

On the ‘objective’ mode of reasoning

by Matthijs Krul

Very often in political discussions, particularly within certain kinds of socialism, the superiority of the objective mode of reasoning over the subjective is proposed. By this ‘objective mode of reasoning’ I mean the way of speaking in which it is argued that the actual, concrete effect of someone’s action counts more strongly than the intent that person had with that action or the subjective attitude that person had towards that same action. Here it is said that what counts is the ‘objective’ effect, not the ‘subjective’ aspects of it. The argument in defense of this particular way of reasoning is usually that it is the objective effect that actually exists in the external world, and that has causative power, rather than the subjective intentionality of the actor, which has only relevance for himself.

This issue often appears, for example, when it comes to questions of Party loyalty, and was for this reason often used by the orthodox Comintern parties and their leaders to ensure discipline among Party members in undertaking unpopular directives, or instructions considered to be contrary or even treasonous to the ideology that drew those people to such Parties in the first place. This went in particular during the period of Stalin’s government in the USSR, when many a Party Communist was appalled by instructions such as those aimed at combating social-democracy more than fascism, or, and I have personal experience with people burdened by this historical event, the forced repatriation of Communists who had fled the Hitler-governed Germany; in this latter case Communists were instructed not to subvert foreign governments’ efforts in sending these people back to Germany (and almost certain death or horror), because the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, guaranteeing the safety of the USSR, might be endangered by anti-German activities. The idea here was that although such directives might not subjectively have appeared becoming of a Communist Party, it was nonetheless necessary because the ‘objective’ effects of such actions were positive to the cause of Communism (which was then identified entirely with the USSR, but that is another issue which I will not go into here).

Nonetheless, the ‘objective’ mode of reasoning is seriously flawed. In particular, it suffers from an extreme vulnerability to reductio ad absurdum. Indeed, one may argue that at certain times it is more important what the objective effect of an action is for the actor than his subjective will or experience of it – all organized political activity depends on this, as otherwise every movement or party would split into as many parts as there are members, when nobody would be willing to pay heed to the effects of their actions, and only be concerned with their individual ideas of what should be done. Not even the most liberal party can operate on this basis – in fact, not even the anarchists, fierce opponents of all authority, allowed it when push came to shove in the past. But the risk lies on the other end. Say, one believes that capitalism suffers from inherent flaws, that will appear the more capitalism develops, so that the fullest development of capitalism will cause it to “create its own gravediggers” and lead to its overthrow, and that such overthrow is desirable. Under those conditions, a partisan of the ‘objective’ mode of reasoning could argue that any attempt whatever to impede capitalism only slows its development, and thereby the inevitable eventual overthrow of the system. Indeed, it would then be, ‘objectively’ necessary for Communists to support capitalism as much as possible in its development, because otherwise it would take longer for it to disappear! This might well be what Marx had in mind when he argued in his Speech on Free Trade that although workers have no particular benefit by either protectionism or free trade in Britain, free trade develops capitalist contradictions more fully, and thereby helps communism. But what an ultra-Trotskyist position this ‘objectively’ leads to, one that not even most Trotskyists would endorse! A similar result appears when one argues from a Third Worldist perspective that the overwhelming majority of First Worlders are parasites living at the expense of the Third World, and that this imperialist relation is the primary contradiction (as the Maoist terminology has it) of the world today. Under such circumstances, it can be said that it is incumbent on a Third Worldist living in the West to cause as much destruction and misery as possible in his environment, because regardless of what subjectively he may think of this, this would ‘objectively’ weaken the First World (if ever so little) and make the parasites less comfortable on their stolen thrones. In fact, one might even from this perspective argue ‘objectively’ for suicide of First Worlders who understand such contradictions, as this will also make the First World weaker and eliminate parasites.

Of course these examples may appear far-fetched or unfairly neglecting alternatives, but this kind of Modest Proposal-like ‘logic’ is precisely that which can be applied to any kind of situation, as long as one is willing to carry the ‘objective’ mode of reasoning to its extreme. We must recognize therefore, if we are not to be self-destructive in the extreme, that the scale of objectivity versus subjective experience is a sliding scale, where even if the truth is not necessarily found in the middle, then certainly at least some moderation must be sought rather than to seek certainty on either end. A lot of the infighting and internal strife between various Communist factions and sects, one would almost say denominations, of the past century has been the result of inability of the participants to see this particular phenomenon as a tension inherent in their reasoning, something which goes in particular for the various Leninists (tending toward the ‘objective’ end) and the anarchists & friends (tending toward the ‘subjective’ end). There are countless examples of situations where different positions on the scale of ‘objectivity’ have clashed within the left, leading often to dramatic results: Kronstadt, Molotov-Ribbentrop, Trotsky vs. Stalin, not to mention the numerous disputes over egalitarianism on the one hand and the need to promote specialists for planning and development purposes on the other hand, and many more. Yet socialists of all sorts do not cease haughtily berating each other either for lack of ideological commitment, or lack of sober, ‘objective’ thinking, causing much recrimination and little advancement.

I believe it is time we recognize this sliding scale for what it is, and accept that different people can take up different positions (even at different times) as to which should have the upper hand, without this leading necessarily to giving up any rooting in reality, or any seriousness about the idealistic content of socialist thought. If we do so, we will better be able to stick to factual and theoretical matters in discussions about policy and positions, rather than having to resort to arguing who is a ‘true’ committed Communist and who isn’t, based on differences on this normative scale.