Fifthly we have sectarianism, which is largely the result of the previous four points, but is a problem of its own, and the smaller the organisation, the greater the problem. In many ways, the relationship between the Moscow-based communist movement and the various sects that either split from it or grew up around it is similar to the one between the Catholic Church and the Protestant sects. I have already stressed that religion is not politics, in spite of some remarkable parallels.1 However, you cannot pass by this analogy, which is particularly striking given that the Churches are by definition organisations that hand down unchallengeable truths, because these were apparently laid down by God, while political parties are supposed to create their policy decisions through internal debate. Surely such organisations could never resemble each other? Of course, the divine truths were not actually written by God, who tends to be wilfully reticent on these matters, so they were actually hammered out by clerics in the Councils, Conclaves, Presbyteries, Assemblies, Synods and all manner of other committees. The scientific truths of Marxist parties were also hammered out in small committees and ratified under the old threat, “Don’t let our enemies think that we’re divided.”
The large organisation is more stable, partly because the idea of starting again from scratch is off-putting to dissidents, however much they are hounded, and partly because large organisations know that they have to live with a degree of dissidence and it is more a matter of keeping it under control. None of these restraints apply to the sect or groupuscule, once they have struck out into the wilderness, and some of them are so small, they’re little more than large families. The Catholic Church is still a political power, particularly in Italy, but it is not the power it once was, and so it is more tolerant than it used to be (although there are small cycles; it was more tolerant under John XXIII and Paul VI than under John Paul II and Benedict XVI). It disapproved of radical priests such as Don Milani and Padre Balducci, but it did not expel them. When such people die, the Church waits to see if there there’s going to be a cult, and if there is, they fight it for a period. If the cult proves to be stubborn, then they suddenly accept it and co-opt it. You can learn a lot in two thousand years. The Soviet Union changed a great deal over its brief history, but it never developed a very mature attitude to dissidence, even in its most tolerant periods. There’s a lack of conviction behind incessant self-promotion, which the Americans also suffer from, and thus have to get their children to swear allegiance to their flag every morning. Time is one of the factors in legitimacy, and youthful states need to work harder.
The question that arises from these two cases is this: is the large organisation responsible for the fragmentation of the smaller ones? I think it probably is: take the Second International as another example. It had no centre, and each country developed its own social-democratic or socialist party, and they joined the international. There was no centre like Moscow or Rome, and they were autonomous. They did travel in more or less the same direction, but they were not coerced, and most importantly they did not fragment as much as the communist parties linked to the Communist International would do. In fact, the Second International, although diminished by the arrival of the Communist one, remained reasonably stable. I look on the collapse of the Soviet Union as a disaster for Russia and a disaster for humanity, although this was not my opinion at the time. One benefit it may have brought could be an end to the fragmentation of the left. But at the moment the left is so weak in the West, it is impossible to judge.
Sectarianism often arises from the fanciful idea that organisations should have a “position” on every damn thing, even if they’re tiny. Political sects fall out over the most obscure points of dogma. If politics is the art of the possible, members of small political groups are not in politics in the strict sense of the term; they’re in a kind of sport and the important thing is to win the argument. As there is no sports body to judge who has won and who hasn’t, all the sects decide that they have won, and the other ones are irrelevant. The intensity of the dislikes between sects is quite overpowering, particularly between the two halves of a sect that has just split. These newly created and depleted groupuscules hate each other more than they hate capitalism or anything else they’re supposed to hate. In Italy, a group divided overnight and in the morning its members were confused about which part of the party they were in. Adding to their confusion was the fact that both sides produced their weekly newspaper and both were denouncing the other in more or less the same language. Which was the proper Communist Party of Italy (Marxist-Leninist)? They showed a little maturity by agreeing to put a red line on one masthead and a black one on the other.
All this is an intolerable waste of time and energy. Every party must have different ideas within its membership, if the membership is made up of human beings and not automatons. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the natural way of doing politics is a series of shifting alliances in which the allies pretend to agree on all things for the duration of each alliance. More complex than robots, human beings are not ideal for rational organisation. Another question we might ask is, is this something peculiarly male? Would women do a better job? I cannot answer any of these questions.
I will, however, end with one answer I do have ready. I have said that the only distinction that should divide us is the one of class and redistribution. It follows then that the left needs only one party. People can have erudite conversations about degenerated workers’ states and state capitalism, although my life is too short for them. They can disagree over priorities and the whys and wherefores. They can even disagree over gradual and revolutionary change, traditionally an important distinction within the left. Revolutionaries are not people who want to blow up the houses of parliament; they are people who believe that when the “objective conditions exist” (that’s a blast from the past) and the forces are arrayed against each, they’re on the side of change and ultimately change can only come about through violent overthrow. Those objective conditions are unlikely to occur, particularly in the West. Sine die. Let’s not fall out over what isn’t going to happen. We are up against a technological state that has only two forces that can breach its absolute power: non-violence and mass movement (in that order). We can forget the storming of the Winter Palace.
Whether or not justifications existed for the Leninist model (and we could have another erudite conversation on that), they no longer do. The left never had to change its long-term aims (pace Tony Blair and his kind); what we need to do is change the way we do politics, and organise around the defence of our social rights. The rest will follow, and its exact direction is unpredictable.
Conclusion
I have said that in one of my dialogues, the three principal participants were Socialist Voice, Liberal Voice and Cynical Voice. These were and to some extent still are the three voices in my head or, in more rationalist terminology, what I call the three irresolvables. The first irresolvable is one that is well known to the Italian left, which experienced the first fascist regime for a twenty-year period. It is the conflict between justice and freedom and was reflected in the movements that adhered to Liberal-Socialism. This is the most pressing thing we have to resolve, but as something that can never be resolved; it has to be resolved anew in every generation through some kind of ad hoc compromise. I would push the balance quite far in favour of justice: the state should insist that everyone work in an unskilled working-class job for at least a year. I do not mean something akin to servizio civile, a replacement for national service in Italy whereby conscientious objectors could work in charities assisting the low-paid and destitute. I mean living the life of the low-paid and destitute. This is a restriction on people’s liberty, I admit. It is perhaps a regrettable one, but it is the only way to genuinely educate people about the life of the poorest in society and the ever-present threat of unemployment which drives their behaviour. However, many of those who will be outraged at my authoritarianism would not bat an eyelid at the idea of national service or conscription to force young men
into senseless drudgery designed to kill humanity in each of them and train them to kill others when ordered to. It is my own experience of life that the middle classes cannot understand the injustices, humiliations and occasional violence that are inflicted on working people unless they experience them for themselves or at least witness them up close from a different viewpoint. In this manner people would learn that the only truly bourgeois freedom – the freedom to control human beings through financial inducement – is wage slavery and therefore an infringement on the freedom of others. This economic freedom therefore has to be either abolished or severely restricted. After a generation or two, this practice of enforced unskilled labour might pervade social attitudes so deeply that it would no longer be necessary.
The second irresolvable is the one between cynicism and freedom. Cynicism says that freedom is always simply the right of individuals and classes to do what they wish, and their wishes are only enforced where those individuals, classes or imagined “ethnicities” have the power to enforce them. Cynicism says that freedom does not exist, only power. The Israelis say that they have a right to use the land they live on because it was given to them by God (secular Israelis have more complex and Byzantine justifications), while the Palestinians say they have a right to use the land because it belonged to their parents, grandparents and many generations before them. In fact, the Israelis have freedom to use the land because they have the tanks, jet fighters, artillery, munitions, propaganda machinery, lobbies, alliances and atom bombs to enforce that freedom. Cynicism takes yet another tack, and says that there is in any case no free will. We are all simply driven by the chemistry of our bodies and brains. Ultimately we need to enjoy life and accept the world as it is. We need to take as much as we can get, and you cannot change the course of history. Freedom argues back that freedom has to be achieved consciously and, in any case, only exists in consciousness, where it brings its own spiritual pleasures. Freedom allies itself with justice to counterbalance the dangers of cynicism, and together these bring more peace than the insatiable pleasures of greed and desire. By engaging with society in the name of justice, an individual can create an inner freedom, which is almost unassailable – almost, because with physical and psychological torture you can destroy freedom even in the strongest person. In fact, we are all called to freedom, but some of us defend it with more vigour than others. The thing that weakens our resolve most is not our DNA, our diet, our gods, our stars or our destinies; it is the failure to believe in our own moral capabilities. We are social animals and, perhaps uniquely, we are moral animals. Cynicism undermines that with the potent arguments of common sense. Hannah Arendt rightly spoke of the banality of evil, but it might have been better to speak of the evil of banality. However, cynicism’s acceptance of the complexity and limitations of human society is a voice that to some extent has to be listened to, although the destructiveness of its world-weary nagging often grates and feels overly predictable. You can redress the balance by recalling the repulsive piety of those who think they embody justice and the arrogance of those who talk of absolute freedom. Cynicism accuses the other two of oversimplification and to some degree it is right. As freedom involves interaction between the individual and ideas, freedom ultimately is strengthened by education, because education frees the individual not only from the self but also from the strictures of the society in which that individual lives.
The third irresolvable, between cynicism and justice resembles the second irresolvable in many of the arguments, because cynicism also adds a touch of realism to what justice can and cannot achieve. However, cynicism has an even more negative role in its relationship with justice, which is an intrinsically social good, and thus creates a slight circular movement around the three irresolvables (freedom is more undermined by justice than it is by cynicism, justice more by cynicism than by freedom and cynicism more by freedom than by justice). Because cynicism encourages inaction and acceptance of the status quo, a society in which cynicism is pervasive is a society adrift – much as ours is at the moment. Widespread social acceptance of the world as it is does not restrict the freedom of the mind to speculate. In fact, power feels so secure during a period of pervasive cynicism that it is often less authoritarian. Lone voices are allowed to go about their business – not encouraged but ignored, because suppression might only draw attention to them. But pervasive cynicism cripples a society and takes away its ability to evolve consciously through some kind of political process. This seesaw relationship between cynicism and justice explains the dramatic shifts between generations within the same culture. It is the reason why countries feel like different countries as the decades slip by. Marx was ignored during most of his lifetime, but later those who espoused his ideas would face repression, including those in “liberal” Britain. Our triangle of irresolvables comes alive in history.
I have said that there is a slight circular motion around the three irresolvables, because although there are currents running in both directions, the current in one direction is slightly stronger than the other one.
The cynical voice is the most dangerous, but we should not be deaf to it. You want to believe in humanity and to hope. This makes life sweeter and is therefore of benefit to you, but at the same time that persistent voice of cynicism says, “How can you? Did you not see what A did to B last week, and how the pompous idiot C bragged about what he had done? Do you really believe that this humanity is capable of making the changes it needs to make?” And in the name of justice and freedom you wilfully suppress that hideous voice, while accepting its element of truth. People do this all the time: they force themselves to take a more positive view of the society around them. Is that not a semi-religious moment, whatever your religious views? The word “religion” derives from the Latin verb, religo, to bind fast, to hold fast and perhaps originally to bind again or reconnect. In Italian, this meaning of binding society together remains, but in a hierarchical sense: so the expression, “There’s no longer any religion” is not about Church attendance or indeed religion as we understand it; it means that “There’s no longer any respect for those who deserve it.”1 This is the binding together of a hierarchy. Religion can have that function, and that is why it is quite reasonably distrusted on the left. But distrust should not lead to intolerance. The infinitive religare immediately suggests the Italian rilegare, which means to bind in the sense of binding a book. Book-binding and religion having the same etymology in a language is a good start to this argument. But how do we want to be bound together? This is the fundamental difference between right and left. Do we want to be bound together in deference and within a chain of command, or do we want to be bound together in a dialogue with each other as equals? Equality should not be the equality of the football stadium, where everyone is a spectator passively bound to all the others while an elite plays the game, which is how real existing socialism often worked. Equality that liberates is equality that binds together while retaining individuality. Often I have found that this idea receives opposition on the left, which derives from a strange idea that the mass really is a mass and the working class potentially can think in the same way, if only false consciousness could be removed. No just and free society could ever be uniform. Equality concerns distribution of wealth, not what people do with their lives. A good society cannot be created without education and tolerance, and it cannot survive without the understanding that a permanently good society has to be reargued and refined incessantly and never quite achieves its aims. Within that good society, conflicts and tensions will and must remain.
Perhaps at the risk of pushing this model too far, we could argue that the right kind of religare would occur in an ideal state of freedom and justice. In any case, where there’s a proper balance between religare and cynicism, you have scepticism, but I wouldn’t know where that balance is, and it is right that everyone finds their own. Each generation finds its own balance, and each generation rebels against the imbalance of the previous generation, creating a new and of
ten opposite imbalance. The human condition is that we are pushed and shoved by these forces, and different ones predominate in different periods of our lives. There is also a tendency for different forces to predominate in society during particular periods. Cynicism, always there, predominated in the nineties and continued until the financial crisis. It brings a stultifying conformism and senseless, ruthless competition. On the other hand, periods of insane moral outrage bind people together in terrifying social hysteria: the parabolani of Alexandria, the iconoclasts of Byzantium, the nicely termed piagnoni of Savonarola’s Florence,2 and the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution are extreme examples. These were all people with such a tin ear for that cynical voice that they invented a conformism more terrifying than that of cynicism. Not all forms of equality are good. Fortunately such periods are relatively short, but their passing usually ushers in extreme cynicism and social amnesia, as though society’s entire stock of utopian vision had been consumed in a short but crazed festival of finger-pointing.
Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 25