communists-from-italy

"My first realization of inequality and injustice grew out of these experiences in my early childhood. I saw that there were those who commanded and those who obeyed, and probably because of my own rebellion against my mother, who ruled my life and who for me personified all despotism, I instinctively sided with the latter. Why, I asked myself, should mother be able to rise when she pleased, while the servants had to rise at an early hour to carry out her orders? After she had raged at them for some mistake, I would implore them not to endure such treatment, not realizing that necessity held them as tightly to our home as it had held the peasants to the feudal landlords. (page 4)"

"Balabanoff, the revolutionary humanist."

"The issue of dissent from established doctrine was clearly in her mind when she wrote: "You have to choose between what you conceive to be your duty, between your personal dignity and honesty, and your collaboration with this institution.... You can't expect a revolutionist to remain indifferent when methods he considers damaging are applied to the movement he is supposed to serve.""

"Victor Serge describes her as secretary: "Perpetually active, she hoped for an International that was unconfined, open-hearted and rather romantic.""

"Balabanoff supported the organizing of working-class women and wrote several pamphlets on women's liberation-among them a denunciation of the Baryshnyas, "young ladies from petty-bourgeois families accustomed to idleness and being kept by men of wealth and position." She also maintained that when asked to assume leadership responsibilities in the Women's Union, she refused because she claimed to have neither the interest nor the talent for such work."

"Throughout her life, in letters and other personal expressions, Balabanoff consistently emphasized her sense of duty to alleviate the sufferings of others. While she recognized that society and nature contained no perfect justice, she believed that self-denial and moral humility provided the only real guidelines for the realization of her ideal "to share the sufferings and deprivations of the poorest among the poor." In the sense that the party had remained her family and the workers her children, the obituary in the Corriere della sera correctly pointed out "the only monogamy to which she felt morally pledged was to that of her own ideology." Peace, equality, social welfare, and justice were her values."

"Like many other Social Democratic women, she did not examine specifically how Marxist theory related to women, and her approach still remained quite reductionist or economistic when it came to the "woman question." Nevertheless, she showed increasing interest in the crucial role women could play in creating a socialist society and clearly seemed aware of specific problems women faced in the postwar world."

"One writer noted that "her single most remarkable trait [is] her total integrity, which is why she fail[ed] in the game of power politics"; while another wrote that "to listen to her soft, compassionate voice, telling of the suffering of the people of Italy and all over Europe. . is to understand that revolutionary faith can be synonymous with humanitarianism.""

"Living in New York, she discovered support for Mussolini in some Italian-American and conservative circles before the United States entered World War II, and so she edited and wrote a small periodical, Il Traditore, which between January, 1942, and May, 1943, contained a series of articles describing Mussolini's early years, his persecution of socialists, and the fascist record of assassinations and brutality in Italy.""

"She had not wavered in what she believed to be the true work of socialists; that is, the education of the masses toward a consciousness of their human and social rights resulting in a spontaneous mass movement that would inevitably lead to an egalitarian society."

"Balabanoff's position was characteristic of the general movement and in keeping with her previous view that women's rights issues were secondary to the question of the workers' struggle. She sought to make proletarian women and men aware of capitalistic society as their common enemy, but she was most sympathetic to women, since they often bore the burdens of class oppression as well as the brunt of fascism and war. Balabanoff became highly emotional when describing their suffering and hoped to rouse women from their passivity."

"As her old friend Bertram Wolfe observed, "she is too honest with herself not to realize that her dream has failed to come true.""

"At the time that Balabanoff joined the PSI, concern for the emancipation of women was already a stated party goal largely through the work of Anna Kuliscioff's"

"The guideline for her own life was clear; "there has never been any conflict between my heart and my brain.""

"When Angelica Balabanoff died in Rome on November 25, 1965, at the age of eighty-seven, an obituary referred to her as "one of the most striking personalities of the International Socialist Movement." Her life since 1878 was marked by activism in a wide range of radical causes. As a leader of the Italian Socialist party (PSI) and later of the Italian Social Democrats as well as an intransigent antifascist and a dedicated humanist, Balabanoff was a key figure in the history of European radical politics."

"most readers will note that Miss Balabanoff resembles not only some of the early romantic socialists but also some of those active in women's liberation movements today, especially those whose parents represent the affluent society. Above all, Balabanoff provides insights concerning the international socialist movement during the first two decades of the twentieth century. She is especially informative concerning socialism among the poor Italian textile workers in northern Italy and in Switzerland, but she also attended the crucial 1907 congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Before the war, her extraordinary talents as a speaker and as an interpreter-she spoke six languages fluently-brought her into close contact and often friendship with all of the socialist leaders, Auguste Bebel, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Jules Guesde, Jean Joures, and all of the Italian leaders. Mussolini received her greatest attention and her deepest contempt, not only for his betrayal of socialism in 1914 for French money, but also because of his servility and his gross interest in the things of this world, rather than in helping the poor."

"Angelica Balabanoff was the last great representative of the nineteenth century revolutionary tradition in Russia. Her emphasis upon ethical values, her thrust for liberty and equality, and her deep concern for the poor of all countries put her squarely in the sentimental socialist movement which appeared first in the 1830's and 1840's in Western Europe. She was a romantic idealist, in many ways an anarchist, and a true European and internationalist. Thus, she was one of the first of the old socialists to recognize that Lenin and his Bolshevik colleagues, who were riding the storm of the Russian Revolution and creating the new Soviet State, were cynical, ruthless, and self-interested. She therefore left Moscow and the Third International in 1921 and was expelled from the Communist Party a few years later for placing her ideals and integrity above the demands of the Party, even of Lenin."

"Angelica Balabanoff paid us a visit last week, and brought us personal greetings from [[Emma|Emma Goldman. The poor soul changed a lot since I have seen her in Berlin last: she looks so old! But not only physical (sic) she has changed, she seems to be so pessimistic and depressed. Her lectures are not very successful we are told, and if not for the Italians it would be worse still. She is envying Emma that she can be active in England, just the country where she would love to be. And Emma enrages her that she is in the states: that how it is, nobody can have ones choice, even not in the most elementary and simplest things these days, it is a miserable state of things."

"The two leading Communist women of Russia proved the greatest contrast. Angelica Balabanoff lacked what Kollontay possessed in abundance: the latter's fine figure, good looks, and youthful litheness, as well as her worldly polish and sophistication. But Angelica had something that far outweighed the external attributes of her handsome comrade. In her large sad eyes there shone profundity, compassion, and tenderness. The tribulations of her people, the birth-pangs of her native land, the suffering of the downtrodden she had served her whole life were deeply graven on her pallid face…I left the dear little woman with mixed feelings. Soothed and comforted by her rich fount of love, I at the same time disapproved of her acquiescence in the evils and abuses about her. I had known of her as a fighter, always firm and unflinching in her stand. What had made her so passive now, I wondered. Communists enjoyed the right of criticism, as I had learned from the Bolshevik press. Why, then, did Angelica not use her pen and voice in and out of the party? It kept worrying me and I sought an opportunity to speak to her woman comrade who had served us tea. From her I learned that Angelica had been secretary of the Third International. In that capacity she had fought determinedly against the growing bureaucracy of the clique led by Zinoviev, Radek, and Bukharin. As a result she was most unceremoniously kicked out and denied all responsible work. [...] Her mental state was due to the methods employed by her party, including the wide-spread suffering, the terror, and the cheapness of human life. Angelica could not face them…she suffered more than most of her comrades from the latest somersault of her idol Ilich. To see constantly the hungry crowds around the bakeries and pastry-shops was torture to one who, like Angelica, felt guilty to accept the gift of even a few biscuits from her Swedish friends. It was a purgatory which only we, who knew her well, could appreciate."

"Alix Kates Shulman's narrator quotes the real memoir of revolutionary socialist Angelica Balabanoff: "the experience of the individual in relation to historic events does not belong to oneself alone.""

"If a new world war-which can no more make the world safe for democracy than did the last-does not plunge us into a new nightmare within the next few years, I believe that the international labour movement can be built again, and that in this movement and its courage and solidarity lies the only hope for humanity. Such a movement will have learnt from its past defeats at the hands of Fascism and from the mistakes and the betrayals of the Russian experiment. A new world war, with the inevitable rise of totalitarianism of various sorts within the democratic countries, can very well kill the possibility of such international action for decades to come. I am proud to have lived and worked with the artisans of a new social order. Many of them are now dead or defeated-in exile or in their own countries. But a new generation will take their place-to build more wisely and more successfully on the foundations we have laid. (page 319)"

"It is this that kills the spirit of the labour movement-not only in Russia, but throughout the world: that an Idea which has inspired whole generations to matchless heroism and enthusiasm has become identified with the methods of a régime based upon corruption, extortion and betrayal; and last, but not least, that the sycophants and assassins of this régime have infected the world labour movement. In this, Bolshevism identifies itself more and more with the methods of Fascism. I am among the few people who have not been surprised at the various abrupt changes in the tactics of the Communist International. I knew that its tactics were always imposed, rather than accepted, and as they never corresponded to conviction, there has been no need of any psychological adaptation. These changes have been the result of bargains, or the failure of bargains, between Stalin and the military and diplomatic authorities of other countries. (page 319)"

"After reading this chronicle of my collaboration with the international labour movement in its periods of victory and defeat, the reader is entitled to ask where I stand now. At sixty I am drawing conclusions from those experiences. My belief in the necessity for the social changes advocated by that movement and for the realization of its ideals has never been more complete than it is now when victory seems so remote. I am more than ever persuaded that a militant international labour movement must be the instrument of those changes. The experience of over forty years has only intensified my Socialist convictions, and if I had my life to live over again, I would dedicate it to the same objective. This does not mean that I do not recognize my own mistakes or those of the groups in which I have worked. (page 314)"

"The path of least resistance can very easily become a trap and the price one pays for taking it may ultimately come too high. This has certainly been the case with Russia. The trials and executions of the past two years which have dishonoured not only Russia but the entire revolutionary movement, may cancel in the memory of mankind the gigantic social and technical achievements of the Revolution. These crimes did not begin with Stalin. They are links in a chain that had been forged by 1920. They were implicit in the development of the Bolshevik method-a method which Stalin has merely amplified to incredible proportions and used for his own non-revolutionary ends. (page 185)"

"Our conference [Women's Congress in Bern] had two tasks to perform: to publicize the fact that in spite of the vetoes of their governments and the opposition of the labour leaders, women had met and worked together for peace and for Socialism; our second task was to formulate slogans for this struggle and to publish a leaflet for women to whom the reaction to the war marked a first approach to social problems, to explain the causes and consequences of the war and the manner in which they could be abolished. Our appeal to them began: "Where are your husbands, your brothers, your sons? Why must they destroy one another and all that they have created? Who benefits by this bloody nightmare? Only a minority of war profiteers...Since the men cannot speak, you must. Workingwomen of the warring countries, unite!" (page 131)"

"My independence, which is my strength, implies my loneliness, which is weakness. (Italian: La mia indipendenza, che è la mia forza, implica la solitudine, che è la mia debolezza.)"

"Seriousness is the only quality of people who have no other ones. (Italian: La serietà è la qualità di coloro che non ne hanno altre.)"

"Nothing is more anarchic than power. Power does what it wants. (Italian: Nulla è più anarchico del potere, il potere fa praticamente ciò che vuole.)"

"If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief."

"I think you can understand time just by the fact that everything, everything changes. Everything ages. You’re born, you die. The living beings as the objects if they are new, then they become old. Even the stones, even in our Earth, aged four and a half billion years, has changed enormously. So we can define time only thanks to the fact that everything changes."

"I’m an atheist in the sense that I do not believe in God, I do not believe in the afterlife. I believe that the soul is our brain. It’s impossible to scientifically prove either that God exists, or that God does not exist. The idea of God does not convince me. I prefer to believe that there is matter and that matter has the properties we observe. … When I pass away, if I meet God, I will tell him I was wrong."

"Nel mondo reale il pericolo principale non è rappresentato dalle forze della natura, ma [...] dalla violenza dell'attuale globalizzazione neoliberista. Anzi la natura stessa è vittima di questo processo se è vero, come ricorda il biologo Edward O. Wilson, che le specie stanno scomparendo con una velocità di tre all'ora."

"Il ragazzo morto non era uno dei nostri, era un black block."

"Yet, alongside Western weaknesses, there were also serious problems for the Soviet system, while the American position was less bleak, in both absolute and relative terms, than the successive electoral defeats of presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in presidential elections in 1976 and 1980 might suggest. Moreover, the failure of the Communists to benefit substantially from the changes in Portugal, Spain and Greece was matched by Communist weakness elsewhere in Western Europe. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, French President from 1974 to 1981, and Helmut Schmidt, German Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, combined to act as a very strong stabilising force and to relaunch the EEC project. Within the Socialist International, the so-called Socialist Triangle of Willy Brandt, Olof Palme, Swedish Prime Minister, and Bruno Kreisky, Austrian Chancellor, was dominant. In Italy, the Communist Party, the most powerful in Western Europe, adopted a ‘Euro-Communism’ that was opposed to Soviet direction. Enrico Berlinguer, who became Party Secretary in 1973, a key figure, was committed to the existing democratic system and pursued what was termed the ‘historic compromise’ with the established Christian Democrat-dominated political system. A pact was negotiated in 1976, with the Communist Party agreeing not to try to overthrow the Christian Democratic government. Euro-Communism was a term coined in 1975 by Western European Communist leaders keen to demonstrate their democratic credentials. More generally in Western Europe, the declining position of heavy industries was a challenge to the trade unions that were central to left-wing political parties, and notably to the Communists."

"Berlinguer was an honest person, but that's not enough to be a communist."

"Nowadays he's depicted as a reciprocal of Hitler, his name serves the purpose of fighting communism. Yet just remembering him makes the bosses tremble. He built the first socialist state and without him nazism would have won. His Russian name is translated as "steel". Stalin, terror of the fascists and of the false communists. Honor and glory to you!"

"Against the obvious dictatorship of the globalist bourgeoisie we have to develop the idea of a proletarian dictatorship, that nobody has to fear, since it's the only true democracy for the people."

"I am Christian, therefore I am communist. The first Christian communities were very communist... except that they were expecting the immediate end of the world."

"Soviet communism and Western capitalism share the same crazy ideology: forced industrialization of society."

"Stalin imposed the development of heavy industry against agriculture and thence the displacement of people, the sacrifices, the deaths... A crazy dream! But... without the Stalinist industrial force, the Nazis would have won!"

"Eco is one of the few people I recognize as being more intelligent than me. They don't give him the Nobel Prize only because they already gave it to Dario Fo. But he's sly, he identifies too readily with his social persona as a sacred monster, a national monument. And I get pissed off with him when I see him hanging out with the people from “Libertà e Giustizia” (Freedom and Justice), which is a kind of Red Cross committee. These are balanced gentlemen who are unlikely to be seen in their smocks in Piazza San Giovanni shouting at Berlusconi."

"Even if we have to think that the Higgs boson has nothing to do with God, it is nevertheless true that discoveries such as today's have a powerful impact on our lives, on our worldview, and therefore also on our religiosity. It is a kind of effect that we can only call “neutralizing” with respect to our lived history. How can we compare the few millennia of human history with the endless horizons of geological eras, the formation of the physical cosmos, and, indeed, the minutes following the Big Bang?"

"The tradition of the Catholic Church is based on keeping the faithful under terrorist threats. The story of Eluana Englaro shows that the Catholic Church as an institution cannot be reformed; it deserves only to be destroyed. We are witnessing the final madness"

"The paradoxical fact is that it is precisely the passion for truth, conscience, in its search for the truth, that has come to undermine itself: it has discovered, in fact, that it is just a passion like any other."

"Someone said that it is important — you cannot live without it — exactly because it is useless. As Heidegger put it in a famous sentence: "Science doesn't think" — precisely because it is useful, it works toward goals that it doesn’t choose. In Kantian terms, science deals with phenomena, factual data that it receives according to reason’s frames, organizes them in time and space, expresses them mathematically, connects and measures them in various ways. But Kant says that there is the noumenon beyond the phenomenon: what you can think but is phenomenologically unknown. It is part of what Kant calls the "Kingdom of Ends". In this kingdom you encounter freedom; that is something impossible to know phenomenologically. The same goes for the existence of God. In philosophy, there are higher questions that usually don’t have an answer because they do not concern phenomenal data, the way science does. This is the source of a peculiar feeling of uselessness and void-ness about philosophy. But we cannot live without it if we don’t want to become machines or robots."

"Just as Western literature would be unthinkable without the Homeric poems, without Shakespeare, without Dante, so our culture as a whole would be meaningless if we were to cut Christianity out of it."

"Those who rail against relativism are not addressing us as individuals, who are not and can never be relativists—since perhaps only God can truly be so, looking down from above on the plurality of cultures and interpretations. Relativism can only be a feature of society, since it is within society that multiple worldviews coexist and often clash. Would eliminating the vice of relativism not simply mean doing away with liberal society?"

"I grew up as a Catholic militant; when I was a boy I used to read authors like Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier and novelists like Bernanos. But Catholic inspiration led me also to read authors that were heretical to the modern tradition. I didn’t like rationalistic historicism that came from Enlightenment, peaking in Hegel and Marx."

"Opposing homosexual families is only possible in the name of a philosophical belief about the natural essence of the family itself. This cannot be professed by a lay state."

"Seventy years ago people used to die for this idea [communism] [...], in Turin the members of the Communist Party, during the Resistance, had to endure 8 hours of torture. Fascists] would pull your eyes out with teaspoons, they'd rip your nails out with tweezers. And you had to stay silent for eight hours, and only after that you were allowed to confess and give the names of your comrades, and that was a Party guideline, to ensure the comrades' flight in those eight hours. Those men and women died for this idea. And what's politics today? They must be rolling in their own grave, can't you see that?"