Episodes in the World Revolution, Reported by José Carlos Mariátegui

The Italian Socialist Forces

Published in El Tiempo: Lima, 28 July 1920. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/cartas_de_italia/paginas/las%20fuerzas%20socialistas%20italianas.htm>.

At this time when there is so much talk about the importance of the Italian socialist forces and their influence on the internal and external politics of Italy, it is appropriate to inform, globally and summarily, the Peruvian public about the history, the organization and the orientations of these socialist forces.

The Official Socialist Party represents, as is well known, the great mass of Italian socialism. The other socialist grouping, called the Italian Socialist Union, is a secondary grouping. Its founders have been reformist socialists who, due to their collaborationist criteria, have not been able to remain in official Socialism. And both during the war and after it the Italian Socialist Union has differed from the Official Socialist Party in its position on international socialism. Thus, during the war, the Italian Socialist Union was favorable to the intervention. Some of his leading men, such as Leonidas Bissolati and Ivanoe Bonomi, participated in the government. After the war, the Italian Socialist Union maintained its membership in the Second International, while the Official Socialist Party joined the International of Moscow. Recently, however, the Socialist Union has not been able to escape the effects of the phenomenon of polarization that is present in all European political fields. And, gradually, it has turned back towards the extreme left. Which has motivated the autonomous socialists of the chamber to depart from it, with the exception of Arturo Labriola and some others. These autonomous socialists have collaborated and are collaborating with the [Francesco Saverio] Nitti government against the agreements of the Socialist Union. Autonomous socialism thus turns out to be divided in a way that typically reflects the character of polarization. On one side the deputies, that is, the professionally political elements of the grouping. On the other hand, the workers' organization, that is, the elements of the class.

It is, therefore, the Official Socialist Party that must be taken into account as an expression of Italian socialism. It is the party that has won one hundred and fifty-six deputies in the last general elections. And the one that, therefore, weighs decisively in Italian politics.

The "popular" party has points of contact with socialism in the field of political achievements. It belongs to the Christian socialist hue. It was born recently, waving the flag of bold economic and social reforms. But it cannot be considered effectively as a socialist force. More than because of his spiritualist mentality, which is opposed to the materialist mentality of Marxism, because of the authority exercised over its leadership by the Vatican. Furthermore, the Socialist Party is more extreme in its attacks against this grouping than any other. For being the only one which disputes its ascendancy over the working classes. Because it is the one which opposes, especially in the countryside, the white syndicates to the red syndicates.

Speaking of which. It is necessary to point out that the progress of the Socialist Party, the authority it has acquired, is due to the support of the workers' organizations. The Italian socialists have always taken care to be close to the proletariat. While other socialist parties in Europe have lived apart and sometimes divorced from the workers' unions, the Italian Socialist Party has made these unions its base and its seat. The General Confederation of Labour is the economic organ of the working classes; the Socialist Party is a political organ.

The existence of the party dates back to 1890; in that year it was founded under the name of the Italian Workers' Party. Two years later its first congress was held in Genoa. At the Congress of Genoa, it adopted the name of the Italian Socialist Workers' Party along with the program that it has kept intact until the Congress of Bologna, held in October last year, under the ideological influence of the Russian Revolution. At the same congress in Genoa, [Mikhail] Bakunin's disciples, who had previously contributed to its organization, left the party, for disagreement with its Marxist program, and turned to constitute autonomous libertarian groups.

From the Genoa Congress the party began to develop rapidly. Many intellectuals adhered to it enthusiastically. Among them, Enrique Ferri, radical deputy and renowned orator, who immediately occupied an eminent position in Italian socialism. The government persecuted socialist propaganda as much as or more than other governments in Europe. The third congress, which should have met in Imola in 1895, was banned. It had to be held secretly in Parma. In it, the name of the Italian Socialist Party was finally adopted.

In 1896, at the congress of Florence, the party resolved the founding of Avanti that appeared in the month of December of the same year and that to this day is its official organ. Owner of a newspaper and parliamentary representation, the party continued to grow and invigorate.

During the following years, the same differences in criteria manifested themselves within it as in the other European socialist groupings. Some elements advocated the preferential conduct of the minimum program. Others advocated absolute fidelity to a single program, the maximum program. The nuances in which the party was divided were four. One reformist, represented by [Filippo] Turati; another integralist, represented by [Oddino] Morgari; another revolutionary, represented by [Enrico] Ferri; and another syndicalist, represented by [Antonio] Labriola and Enrique Leone, a universally known syndicalist writer.

At the 1908 Congress, also held in Florence, the reformist current also prevailed. The trade unionists on that occasion broke from the party, always with Labriola and Leone at the head. At the Milan Congress of 1910, the reformists prevailed again. But the revolutionary tendency had acquired a lot of body. And at the subsequent congress, meeting in Modena, four currents manifested themselves again and none of them managed to predominate. In 1912, at the congress of Regio Emilia, the party was frankly anti-collaborationist. Four deputies were expelled from its ranks: [Leonida] Bissolati, Bonomi and [Angiolo] Cabrini, guilty of having visited the king after the May 4 attack; and Podrecca, guilty of having supported the expedition into Tripoli. Following their expulsion, these four deputies founded the "autonomous socialist party."

When the war broke out, the party had just achieved great successes. Fifty socialists had entered the chamber. The sections of the party had reached 1800. And in the municipal elections, the socialist lists had won in four hundred communes, those of Milan and Bologna among them. In the midst of these successes the war caused division. Several socialists came out in favor of the Italian intervention. [Benito] Mussolini, director of Avanti, resigned his position and founded Il Giornale del Popolo, an interventionist newspaper. The à’outrance [unsparingly] neutralist opinion prevailed in the party's directive. When the intervention took place, the party set its attitude in this way: it did not adhere to the war, but it did not sabotage it either. (The derivatives of the word that we say, sabotage, are not very Spanish; but they will end up looking like such. The lexicon will familiarize us with them).

Later, a fraction of the Party started a pacifist propaganda. The Russian revolution gave this propaganda many stimuli. And the government, as is well known, repressed it harshly. Constantino Lazzari, a member of the board, Nicola Bombacci, one of today's leaders, and [Giacinto Menotti] Serrati, director of Avanti, were sentenced to prison for defeatism.

After the armistice, the progress of the Socialist Party, disturbed by the divergences caused by the war, regained its intensity. The maximalist current spread, simultaneously, in their ranks. Meeting in March last year, the board agreed to break with the International Bureau, accused of having betrayed the proletarian cause, and join the Third International, that is, the one founded in Moscow under the shadow of the Bolshevik flag. It was in this atmosphere that the Bologna congress of the month of October was prepared, held on the eve of the elections in which the Party was supposed to triumph very loudly and unexpectedly.

There were three tendencies at the Bologna congress. An abstentionist maximalist, led by [Amadeo] Bordiga, opposed the Party's participation in the elections. The second elected maximalist, headed by Serrati. And the third, evolutionist, headed by [Claudio] Treves and Turati.

It was the second trend that won it. By virtue of an order of the day of Serrati, the party declared its adherence to the International of Moscow and, in consideration of the Genoa program overtaken by events and by the international conditions created by the war, introduced several reforms into it. According to these reforms, the party considers that the bourgeois state’s instruments of domination cannot in any way be transformed into organs of liberation of the proletariat. They must be opposed by new proletarian organs—workers' and peasants' councils, etc.—, which, functioning for now under bourgeois domination as instruments of struggle, will tomorrow be the organs of social and economic transformation into the communist order of things. That the transitional regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat must mark the passage of power from the bourgeoisie to the workers. And that by means of this regime the historical period of social transformation may be shortened.

The motion that, reformed in such a way the Genoa program that was approved by 48,411 votes, against 14,880, reached by the centrist motion of Lazzari, to which Treves and Turati adhered, and against 3,417, reached towards the communist motion that was aimed for the conversion of the party into a communist party.

The directions sanctioned by the Congress of Bologna have been ratified by the National Council of the Party which has just met in Milan; but they have been interpreted with moderation and sagacity. In obedience to the Genoa program, it has been resolved to proceed to the constitution of soviets, destined to serve at the same time as elements of struggle and preparation of the proletariat for the exercise of power; but these soviets will be limited to the big cities, to the large nuclei of workers.

The socialist parliamentary group acts compactly and disciplined. But, it can be noted in it, even more defined than in Bologna, the three tendencies of the Congress. The tendency pursued by Turati and Treves—who are two conspicuous intellectual figures of the party—has been called, suddenly, the collaborationist tendency. But, in truth, collaborationism is not such an extent of collaborationism. Turati and Treves do not want the party to go to government under the monarchy. They know that a socialist cabinet would not have the approval of the masses and that the masses, without giving them their support, will demand "the moon in the well" as Turati says. They are not, therefore, collaborationists. But they disagree with the dominant view in the party about the role of the parliamentary group. They think that the socialist parliamentary group should wrest all possible reforms from the current regime. They do not agree with the maximalist majority that the role of socialists in parliament should be a negative role and not a positive role.

Fundamentally, the terms of the disagreement are as follows: a part of the Socialist Party does not believe in the possibility of immediate revolution. Even more so. It does not believe in the current capacity of the proletariat to assume power. And it judges that it is necessary to take care of creating this capacity for it. And that the parliamentary force of socialism must be used. The one hundred and fifty-six socialist votes can be used for many urgent reforms. For all those reforms to which other groups of the parliamentary left would not deny their vote. Meanwhile, another part of the Socialist Party, the extremist part, believes in the possibility of revolution. It deems it necessary that the action of the Party should be reduced to organizing it, to precipitating it. He believes that the Party should reserve its constructive work for when power is entirely in the hands of the proletariat. That not to proceed in this way is to delay the revolution and collaborate with the bourgeoisie.

The one and the other fractions are consistent with their respective appreciation of the historical moment. The difference of this appreciation is what separates them. It is logical that those who consider that it is time for the revolution, oppose the socialism which is concerned with anything other than accelerating it. And it is logical that those who consider the opposite want socialism to cross, negatively, its arms, in the face of the present problems, which do not affect one class but all and, mainly, the working classes.

Mexico and the Revolution

Published in Variedades: Lima, 5 January 1924. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/temas_de_nuestra_america/paginas/mexico.htm>.

The dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz produced in Mexico a situation of superficial economic well-being, but of deep social unrest. Porfirio Díaz was in power as an instrument, a proxy and a prisoner of the Mexican plutocracy. During the revolution of the Reform and the revolution against [Emperor] Maximilian [I], the Mexican people fought the feudal privileges of the plutocracy. At the dispiriting of Maximilian, the landowners took over one of the generals of that liberal and nationalist revolution in Porfirio Díaz. They made him the head of a bureaucratic military dictatorship aimed at stifling and repressing revolutionary demands. Díaz's policy was essentially a plutocratic one. Cunning and fallacious laws stripped the Mexican Indian of his lands for the benefit of national and foreign capitalists. The ejidos, traditional lands of the indigenous communities, were absorbed by the latifundia. The peasant class turned totally proletarianized. The plutocrats, the landowners and their clientele of lawyers and intellectuals constituted a faction structurally analogous to Peruvian civilismo, which dominated the feudalized country with the support of foreign capital. Its gendarme ideal was Porfirio Díaz. This so-called oligarchy of the "científicos" feudalized Mexico. It was martially supported by a numerous Praetorian guard. It was protected by the foreign capitalists who were treated with special favor at that time. They were encouraged by the lethargy and anesthesia of the masses, temporarily devoid of an animator, of a leader. But a people, who had fought so stubbornly for their right to the possession of the land, could not resign themselves to this feudal regime and renounce their claims. In addition, the growth of the factories created an industrial proletariat, to which foreign immigration brought the pollen of new social ideas. Small socialist and syndicalist nuclei appeared. [Ricardo] Flores Magón, from Los Angeles, injected some doses of socialist ideology into Mexico. And above all, a sour revolutionary mood was fermenting in the countryside. A caudillo, any skirmish could ignite and set the country afire:

When the end of the seventh period of Porfirio Díaz was approaching, the caudillo appeared: Francisco Madero. Madero, who until that time was a farmer with no political significance, published an anti-reelectionist book. This book, which was an indictment against the Díaz government, had an immense popular echo. Porfirio Díaz, with that vain confidence in his power that blinds despots in decline, did not worry at first about the agitation aroused by Madero and his book. He judged Madero's personality a secondary and impotent personality. Madero, acclaimed and followed as an apostle, aroused in the meantime, in Mexico, a powerful anti-reelection current. And the dictatorship, alarmed and discouraged, finally felt the need to violently combat it. Madero was imprisoned. The reactionary offensive dispersed the anti-reelectionist party; the "científicos" re-established their authority and dominion; Porfirio Díaz won his eighth re-election; and the celebration of the Centenary of Mexico was one of the Faustian apotheosis of his dictatorship. Such successes filled Diaz and his side with optimism and confidence. The end of this government, however, was near. Released on parole, Madero escaped to the United States, where he turned to the organization of the revolutionary movement. [Pascual] Orozco gathered, shortly after, the first insurrectionary army. And the rebellion spread rapidly. The "científicos" tried to attack it with political weapons. They declared themselves ready to satisfy the revolutionary aspiration. They passed a law that closed the way to another re-election. But this maneuver did not stop the movement in march. The anti-reelection flag was a contingent flag. All the discontented, all the exploited, all the idealists were gathered around it: The revolution did not yet have a program, but this program was beginning to be outlined. Its first concrete demand was the demand for the land usurped by the landowners.

The Mexican plutocracy, with that keen instinct of self-preservation in all plutocracies, hastened to negotiate with the revolutionaries. And it prevented the revolution from violently overthrowing the dictatorship. In 1912, Porfirio Díaz left the government to [Francisco León] de la Barra, who presided over the elections. Madero came to power through a compromise with the "científicos." He therefore accepted their collaboration. He kept the old parliament. These transactions, these pacts, weakened him and undermined him. The "científicos" sabotaged the revolutionary program and isolated Madero from the social strata from which he had recruited his proselytism and who were preparing themselves, at the same time, for the reconquest of power. They were waiting for the moment to evict the invalidated and undermined Madero from the Presidency of the Republic. Madero was rapidly losing his popular base. The insurrection of Félix Díaz came. And after it came the betrayal of Victoriano Huerta, who, over the corpses of Madero and Pino Suárez assaulted the government: The "científico" reaction appeared victorious. But the pronunciamiento of a military chief could not stop the march of the Mexican Revolution. All the roots of this revolution were alive. General Venustiano Carranza picked up the flag of Madero. And, after a period of struggle, he expelled Victoriano Huerta from power. The demands of the Revolution were accentuated and defined better. And Mexico revised and reformed its Fundamental Charter, in accordance with these demands. Article 27 of the Constitutional Reform of Querétaro declares that the lands belong originally to the nation and provides for the subdivision of the latifundia. Article 123 incorporates several workers' aspirations into the Mexican Constitution: the maximum working day, the minimum wage, disability and retirement insurance, compensation for work accidents, profit sharing.

But Carranza, elected President, lacked the conditions to carry out the program of the Revolution. His quality as a landowner and his commitments to the landowning class hindered him from fulfilling the agrarian reform. The distribution of land, promised by the Revolution and ordered by the constitutional reform, did not take place. The Carranza regime gradually became stagnant and bureaucratized. Carranza intended, in short, to appoint his successor. The country, incessantly agitated by revolutionary factions, revolted against this intention. Carranza, virtually deposed, died at the hands of an irregular gang. And under the provisional presidency of [Adolfo] de la Huerta, the elections that led to the presidency of General [Álvaro] Obregón were held.

The government of Obregón has taken a decisive step towards satisfying one of the deepest longings of the Revolution: it has given land to the poor peasants. In its shadow, a collectivist regime has flourished in the State of Yucatán. Its prudent and organized politics have normalized the life of Mexico. And this has induced the United States to Mexican recognition.

But the most revolutionary and transcendent activity of the Obregón government has been its educational work. José Vasconcelos, one of the most historically important men in contemporary América, has led an extensive and radical reform of public education. He has used the most original methods to reduce illiteracy; he has opened the universities to the poor classes; he has spread like a gospel of the time, in all schools and in all libraries, the books of [Leo] Tolstoy and Romain Rolland; he has incorporated into the Education Law the obligation of the State to support and educate the children of the disabled and orphans; he has sown the immense and fertile Mexican land with schools, books and ideas.

The Bolshevik Party and Trotsky

Published in Variedades: Lima, 31 January 1925. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/figuras_y_aspectos_de_la_vida_i/paginas/el%20partido%20bolchevique.htm>.

Never has the fall of a minister had such an extensive and intense resonance in the world as the fall of [Leon] Trotsky. Parliamentarism has accustomed the world to ministerial crises. But Trotsky's downfall is not a crisis of ministry but a crisis of party. Trotsky represents a defeated faction or tendency within Bolshevism. And several other circumstances contribute, in this case, to the exceptional sonority of the fall. First of all, the quality of the disgraced leader. Trotsky is one of the most interesting characters in contemporary history: condottiere of the Russian Revolution, organizer and animator of the Red Army, brilliant thinker and critic of communism. The revolutionaries of all countries have been following the polemic between Trotsky and the Bolshevik general staff closely. And the reactionaries have not concealed their meagre hope that Trotsky's dissent will mark the beginning of the dissolution of the Soviet Republic.

Let us examine the process of conflict.

The debate that caused Trotsky's separation from the Soviet government was the most passionate and ardent of all those that have agitated Bolshevism since 1917. It has lasted more than a year. It was opened through a report of Trotsky to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In this document, in October 1923, Trotsky posed to his comrades two urgent questions: the need for a "plan of orientation" in economic policy and the need for a regime of "workers' democracy" in the party. Trotsky argued that the Russian Revolution was entering a new stage. Economic policy should direct its efforts towards a better organization of industrial production that would restore the equilibrium between agricultural and industrial prices. And a real "workers' democracy" had to be implemented in the life of the party.

This question of "workers' democracy," which has altogether dominated opinions, needs to be clarified and clarified. The defense of the revolution forced the Bolshevik party to accept a military discipline. The party was governed by a hierarchy of officials chosen from the most tried and most indoctrinated elements. [Vladimir] Lenin and his general staff were invested with full powers by the masses. It was not possible in any other way to defend the work of the revolution against the assaults and the stalking of its adversaries. Admission to the party had to be severely controlled to prevent careerist and questionable people from filtering into its ranks. The Bolshevik "old guard," as the Bolsheviks of the first hour were called, directed all the functions and all the activities of the party. The communists unanimously agreed that the situation did not allow for anything else. But when the revolution reached its seventh anniversary, a movement for a regime of "workers' democracy" began to take shape in the Bolshevik party. The new elements demanded recognition of their right to an active participation in the choice of the directions and methods of Bolshevism. Seven years of the revolutionary experiment had prepared a new generation. And it did not take long for impatience to ferment in some nuclei of the communist youth.

Trotsky, supporting the demands of the youth, said that the old guard constituted something close to a bureaucracy. He criticized its tendency to consider the question of the ideological and revolutionary education of youth from a pedagogical point of view rather than from a political point of view. "The immense authority of the party veterans' group," he said, "is universally recognized. But only by constant collaboration with the new generation, in the framework of democracy, will the old guard retain its character as a revolutionary factor. If not, it may senselessly become the most complete expression of bureaucratism. History offers us more than one instance of this genre. Let us cite the most recent and impressive example: that of the heads of the parties of the Second International. [Karl] Kautsky, [Eduard] Bernstein, [Jules] Guesde were direct disciples of [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels. However, in the atmosphere of parliamentarism and under the influence of the automatic development of the party organism and the trade unions, these leaders, totally or partially, fell into opportunism. On the eve of the war, the formidable mechanism of social democracy, protected by the authority of the old generation, had become the most powerful brake on the revolutionary advance. And we, the ‘old men,’ must tell ourselves that our generation, which naturally plays the leading role in the party, would not be absolutely united against the weakening of the revolutionary and proletarian spirit within it, if the party tolerated the development of bureaucratic methods.”

The general staff of Bolshevism was not unaware of the need for the democratization of the party; but it rejected the reasons on which Trotsky supported his thesis. And it protested strongly against Trotsky's language. The controversy turned acrimonious. [Grigory] Zinoviev met the antecedents of the men of the old guard with the antecedents of Trotsky. The men of the old guard—Zinoviev, [Lev] Kamenev, [Josef] Stalin, [Alexei] Rykov, etc.—were the ones who, on Lenin's flank, had prepared, through tenacious and consistent work over many years, the communist revolution. Trotsky, on the other hand, had been a Menshevik.

Several prominent communists were grouped around Trotsky: [Georgy] Pyatakov, [Yevgeny] Preobrakhensky, [Timofei] Sapronov, etc. Karl Radek declared himself a proponent of a reconciliation between the views of the Central Committee and Trotsky's views. "Pravda" devoted many columns to the controversy. Trotsky's theses met with enthusiastic proselytism among the Moscow students.

But the thirteenth congress of the Communist Party, which met at the beginning of last year, proved the old guard right when it declared itself, in its conclusions, favorable to the formula of democratization, consequently canceling Trotsky's banner. Only three delegates voted against the Central Committee's conclusions. Then the Congress of the Third International ratified this vote. Radek lost his position on the committee of the International. The position of the Leninist general staff was strengthened, moreover, as a result of the recognition of Russia by the great European powers and the improvement of the Russian economic situation. Trotsky, however, retained his positions on the Central Committee of the Communist Party and on the Council of People's Commissars. The Central Committee expressed its willingness to continue cooperating with him.

Zinoviev said in a speech that despite the existing tension, Trotsky would be kept in his influential posts.

A new fact came to exasperate the situation. Trotsky published a book, 1917, on the process of the October Revolution. I don't know much about this book yet, which has thus far not been translated from Russian. The last polemical documents of Trotsky that I have in view are those gathered in his book The New Course. But it seems that 1917 is Trotsky's injunction against the conduct of the main leaders of the old guard in the days of the insurrection. A group of prominent Leninists—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, [Vladimir] Milyutin and others—then disagreed with Lenin's opinion. And the dissension endangered the unity of the Bolshevik party. Lenin proposed the conquest of power. This thesis, accepted by the majority of the Bolshevik party, was opposed by this group. Trotsky, meanwhile, supported Lenin's thesis and collaborated in his conduct. Trotsky's new book, in short, presents the current leaders of the old guard, in the October days, in an adverse light. Trotsky undoubtedly wanted to demonstrate that those who made mistakes in 1917, at a decisive moment for Bolshevism, have no right to claim to be the sole depositaries and heirs of the Leninist mentality and spirit.

And this criticism, which has reignited the polemic, has motivated the rupture. The Bolshevik general staff had to respond with a ruthless and aggressive revision of Trotsky's past. Trotsky, as almost no one is unaware, has never been an orthodox Bolshevik. He belonged to Menshevism until the World War. Only from then on did the Leninist program and tactics take hold. And only in July 1917 did he enroll in Bolshevism. Lenin voted against his admission to the "Pravda" network. The rapprochement between Lenin and Trotsky was ratified only by the October days. And Lenin's opinion diverged from Trotsky's opinion regarding the most serious problems of the revolution. Trotsky refused to accept the peace of Brest-Litovsk. Lenin quickly understood that, against the manifest will of the peasants, Russia could not prolong the state of war. Faced with Kronstandt's demands for the insurrection, Trotsky again disagreed with Lenin, who perceived the reality of the situation with his brilliant clairvoyance. Lenin realized the urgency of satisfying the peasants' demands. And he dictated the measures that inaugurated the New Economic Policy of the Soviets. The Leninists accuse Trotsky of having failed to assimilate to Bolshevism. It is obvious, at least, that Trotsky has not been able to merge or identify with the Bolshevik old guard. While the figure of Lenin dominated the entire Russian scene, the intelligence and collaboration between the old guard and Trotsky were ensured by a common adherence to Leninist tactics. When Lenin died, that bond was broken. Zinoviev accuses Trotsky of having attempted commando assault with his supporters. He attributes this intention to Trotsky's entire campaign for the democratization of the Bolshevik party. He claims that Trotsky has demagogically maneuvered by opposing the new to the old generation. Trotsky, in any case, has lost his greatest battle. His party has excommunicated him and withdrawn its trust from him.

But the results of the controversy will not engender a schism. The leaders of the Bolshevik old guard, like Lenin in the episode of Kronstadt, after suppressing the insurrection, will carry out their demands. They have already explicitly given their support to the thesis of the need to democratize the party.

It is not the first time that the destiny of a revolution wants to fulfill its trajectory without or against its leaders. Which proves, perhaps, that in history great men play a more modest role than great ideas.

The Final Struggle

Published in Mundial: Lima, 20 March 1925. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/el_alma_matinal/paginas/la%20lucha%20final.htm>.

I

Madeleine Marx, one of the most restless and modern women of letters of contemporary France, has gathered her impressions of Russia in a book that bears this title C'est la lutte finale... The phrase of the song of Eugène Pottier acquires a historical relief. "This is the final struggle!"

The Russian proletarian greets the revolution with this cry which is the ecumenical cry of the world proletarian. A massive cry of struggle and hope that Madeleine Marx heard in the streets of Moscow and that I have heard in the streets of Rome, Milan, Berlin, Paris, Vienna and Lima. All the excitement of an era is in it. The revolutionary crowds believe they are waging the final struggle.

Are they really freeing themselves of it? For the skeptical creatures of the old order this final struggle is only an illusion. For the fervent fighters of the new order it is a reality. Au dessus de la Melée [Above the Melee], a new and astute philosophy of history proposes another concept: illusion and reality. The final struggle of Eugène Pottier's stanza is, at the same time, a reality and an illusion.

It is, in fact, the final struggle of an epoch and a class. Progress—or human process—is accomplished in stages. Therefore, humanity perennially has the need to feel close to a goal. The goal of today will certainly not be the goal of tomorrow; but, for the human theory in march, it is the final goal. The messianic millennium will never come. Man arrives to leave again. He cannot, however, dispense with the belief that the new stage is the definitive stage. No revolution foresees the revolution that will come later, even if it carries its germ inside. For man, as the subject of history, there is only his own personal reality. He is not interested in the struggle abstractly but in his struggle concretely. The revolutionary proletariat, therefore, is living the reality of a final struggle. Humanity, meanwhile, from an abstract point of view, lives the illusion of a final struggle.

II

The French Revolution had the same idea of its magnitude. Its men also thought to inaugurate a new era. The Convention wanted to record the beginning of the Republican millennium forever in time. It thought that the Christian era and the Gregorian calendar could not contain the Republic. The anthem of the revolution greeted the dawn of a new day: le jour de gloire est arrivé [the day of glory has arrived]. The individualist and Jacobin republic appeared as the supreme desideratum of humanity. The revolution felt definitive and insurmountable. It was the final struggle. The final struggle for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Less than a century and a half has been enough for this myth to grow old. The Marseillaise has ceased to be a revolutionary song. The "day of glory" has lost its supernatural prestige. The supporters of democracy themselves are disenchanted with the performance of parliament and universal suffrage. Another revolution is brewing in the world. A collectivist regime strives to replace the individualist regime. The revolutionaries of the twentieth century are preparing to summarily judge the work of the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century.

The proletarian revolution is, however, a consequence of the bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie has created, in more than a century of dizzying capitalist accumulation, the spiritual and material conditions of a new order. Within the French Revolution the first socialist ideas were nested. Then industrialism gradually organized the armies of the revolution in its mills. The proletariat, previously confused with the bourgeoisie in the common-law state, then formulated its class demands. The linguistic bosom of capitalist wellbeing fed socialism. The fate of the bourgeoisie willed that it should supply the revolution directed against its power with ideas and men.

III

The illusion of the final struggle is therefore a very ancient and a very modern illusion. Every two, three or more centuries, this illusion reappears with a different name. And, as now, it is always the reality of an innumerable human phalanx. It possesses men to renew them. It is the engine of all progress. It is the star of all rebirths. When the great illusion arises, it is because a new human reality has already been created. Men then rest from their eternal restlessness. A romantic cycle closes and the classical cycle opens. In the classical cycle, a form develops, stylizes and degenerates that, fully realized, will not be able to contain the new forces of life in itself. Only in cases where its creative power becomes enervated, does life slumber, stagnate, inside a rigid, decrepit form, expires. But these ecstasies of peoples or societies are not unlimited. The sleepy lagoon, the quiet pond, ends up shaking and overflowing. Life then regains its energy and momentum. Contemporary India, China and Turkey are a living and current example of these revivals. The revolutionary myth has shaken and powerfully revived these collapsing peoples.

The East is waking up for action. The illusion has been reborn in its millennial soul.

IV

Skepticism was content with corroborating the unreality of the great human illusions. Relativism is not satisfied with the same negative and infertile result. It begins by teaching that reality is an illusion; but it concludes by recognizing that illusion, in turn, is a reality. It denies that there are absolute truths; but it realizes that men have to believe in their relative truths as if they were absolute. Men need certainty. What does it matter that the certainty of the men of today is not the certainty of the men of tomorrow? Without a myth, men cannot live fruitfully. Relativistic philosophy proposes to us, therefore, to obey the law of myth.

[Luigi] Pirandello, a relativist, offers his example by adhering to fascism. Fascism seduces Pirandello because while democracy has become skeptical and nihilistic, fascism represents a religious, fanatical faith in hierarchy and the nation. (Pirandello, who is a Sicilian petty-bourgeois, lacks the psychological aptitude to understand and follow the revolutionary myth.) The writer of exasperated skepticism does not love doubt in politics. He prefers violent, categorical, passionate, brutal affirmation. The crowd, even more than the skeptical philosopher, even more than the relativistic philosopher, cannot do without a myth, cannot do without a faith. It is not possible for it to subtly distinguish its truth from the past or future truth. For it there is nothing but the truth. Absolute, unique, eternal truth. And, according to this truth, their struggle is really a final struggle.

The vital impulse of man answers all the questions of life before philosophical research does. The illiterate man does not care about the relativity of his myth. It would not be possible for him even to understand it. But he generally finds, better than the literati and the philosopher, his own way. Since he must act, he acts. Since he must believe, he believes. Since he must fight, he fights. He knows nothing of the relative insignificance of his effort in time and space. His instinct diverts him from sterile doubt. He aspires only to what every man can and should aspire to: to complete his stage well.

Imperialism and Morocco

Published in Variedades: Lima, 1 August 1925. Available online at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/figuras_y_aspectos_de_la_vida_i/paginas/el%20imperialismo%20y%20marruecos.htm>.

The Rif is in these days fighting a decisive battle. Spain and France, longtime rivals in Morocco, are currently combining their forces to put down the Rifian independence revolution. Western civilization feels threatened by Abd el-Krim. At least, as stated in its nervous articles by one of the most conspicuous lawyers and drivers of reaction in Europe, Mr. Raimond Poincaré. And in this language the men of reaction and the men of democracy almost agree. [Paul] Painlevé, an honest democrat, thinks that France has the historical mission of civilizing Morocco.

The Western democracies, from this point of view, have not represented progress with respect to the ancient empires. Europe, after its bourgeois revolution, has felt more or less liberal at home. But it has not felt absolutely liberal in someone else's house. The rights of man and of the citizen, the "immortal principles" of revolution and democracy, have seemed to it good and valid only within the Western world. During the last century, which was precisely that of the development of democracy and its characteristic organs—universal suffrage and parliamentary regime—Europe divided the dominion of Asia and Africa with the same lack of scruples with which the Rome of the Caesars carried out its conquests. In other eras, imperialism carried out its annexations and invasions in the name of the Emperor or the Church; in our democratic and capitalist epoch, it carries them out in the name of Civilization. The motto has changed. But the substantial fact remains the same.

The tactics of conquest have also been modified in many cases. England, for example, has used a flexible praxis. Since capitalist civilization does not care if the indigenous people of its colonies change their religious beliefs, it lets the conquered peoples keep their religion and their rites. It also tolerates, where it does not oppose the rights of the Empire, that they keep their institutions and their political tastes. The English do not need in this time, as the Spaniards did at the time of the conquest of America, to force the natives of their colonies to adopt their ideas and their religious confession. They have the dominion of spirit, more or less, without worry. What interests them is the dominion of matter.

This has also been the colonial policy of France. France has landed its soldiers in Africa and Asia so that its bankers and merchants could widen the radius of their business. The warlike aspect of the company was very secondary. [Hubert] Lyautey, for example, has been praised in France not as a great warrior, but rather as a good administrator. Lyautey's function in Morocco consisted, far more than in increasing the military and political glory of France, in ensuring a solid market for its finance and commerce. Consequently, he tended to use the language of a general of the Third Republic with Moroccans. He surrounded the Sultan and his court, knowing them to be perfectly tame, with all sorts of innocuous honors and diplomatic courtesies. The opening of a road was a more important objective for his administration than the truncation of a rebellion.

Spain had tried to test an analogous system. But in its colonizers the instinct of Inquisition persisted. The Spanish soldiers and officials represented capitalism in Morocco. But they preferred to behave as if they exclusively represented the Kings of Spain. For this reason, Spain could not settle quietly in Morocco in the way of France. Abd el-Krim, in a recent report by an Italian journalist, tells how the Rif people were pushed, little by little, into insurrection, by the Spanish policy itself. His father, Qadi [sharia judge] of Tafersit—recalls Abd el-Krim—understood that since France took possession of Morocco, the Rif could not fail to enter the orbit of European civilization. "The commercial changes”—adds the Rifian chief—”were intensified, the manifestations of sympathy were not scarce, and everything suggested the peaceful arrival of the Spaniards in hospitable land. But the heirs of the ‘conquistadores’ suddenly proclaimed that program of ‘desmusulmanización’ which was the main chapter of the program of Isabella the Catholic.” This policy spawned the rebellion. The son of a peaceful Qadi transformed into the general and the caudillo of a great warrior epic.

The political consequences of the war strengthened, undoubtedly, the nationalist movement of the Rif. They provoked that widespread phenomenon of the resurrection of the Eastern peoples that currently undermines the roots of the Western power. The Rif no longer felt alone in the struggle for its independence. The Rifian revolution ceased to be an isolated event to become an episode and a sector of the world revolution. And France, which until then had considered Abd el-Krim only as an enemy of Spain, began to look at him as an adversary of the capitalist West.

This is the genesis of the Franco-Spanish agreement. France and Spain understand each other, after having quarrelled for a long time in Morocco, because they recognize in Abd el-Krim a common danger. France, under the government of the national bloc, directed its policy towards the possession of the Rif. It thought that Spain, disappointed by its military malandances in Morocco, would easily resign itself to ceding to it the enterprise of subduing Abd el-Krim. The government of the leftist cartel partially rectified this policy, but it could not and did not want to renounce its consequences. France, under the rule of [Édouard] Herriot, prepared for the campaign against Abd el-Krim. And now France and Spain, if they do not definitively agree on the ultimate goal of their imperialism in Morocco, at least recognize the need to move together and jointly against the Rifians.

The Rif has been, in this case, the one that has attacked. But Abd el-Krim, as he very well explains, has found himself in need of taking the offensive. [Miguel] Primo de Rivera defeated, the military opponent of the independence of the Rif was [Hubert] Lyautey. Abd el-Krim knew this perfectly well. He therefore had no choice but to launch his legions against Lyautey before the French preparations were more advanced. The documents published recently in Paris reveal that, since last year, Lyautey was organizing the campaign against the Rif.

France and Spain intend to impose an imperialist peace on the Rif. Abd el-Krim and his legions feel strongly for fighting to the end. And, above all, as I noted above, they do not feel alone. In France itself, a part of the opinion maintains the right of the Rif to decide on its destinies. Painlevé and [Aristide] Briand have had to declare in the French chamber that France has no intentions of conquest. The new Hispanic-American generation salutes, in the enterprise of Abd el-Krim, the repetition of the enterprise of [José de] San Martín and [Simón] Bolívar. And it realizes that more than just Rif independence is at stake in Morocco. Abd el-Krim represents, in that conflict, the human cause.

East and West

Published as a chapter in The Contemporary Scene (Editorial Minerva: Lima, 1925). Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/la_escena_contemporanea/paginas/oriente%20y%20occidente.htm>.

The revolutionary tide does not only move the West. The East is also agitated, restless, stormy. One of the most current and transcendent events of contemporary history is the political and social transformation of the East. This period of Eastern agitation and gravity coincides with a period of unusual and reciprocal eagerness of the East and the West to get to know each other, to study each other, to understand each other.

In its vain youth, Western civilization treated the Eastern peoples disdainfully and haughtily. The white man considered his domination over the colored man necessary, natural and lawful. He used the words oriental and barbarian as two equivalent words. He thought that only what was Western was civilized. The exploration and colonization of the East was never the work of intellectuals, but of merchants and warriors. The Westerners unloaded their goods and their machine guns in the East, but not the means of their skills in research, interpretation and spiritual uptake. The West was concerned to consummate the material conquest of the Eastern world, but not to attempt its moral conquest. And so the Eastern world kept its mentality and psychology intact. The thousand-year-old roots of Islamism and Buddhism are still fresh and vital to this day. The Hindu still wears his old khaddar. The Japanese, the most saturated with Westernism of the Easterners, keeps some of his samurai essence.

But today when the West, relativistic and skeptical, discovers its own decadence and foresees its next journey, it feels the need to explore and understand the East better. Driven by a feverish and new curiosity, Westerners passionately delve into Asian customs, history and religions. Thousands of artists and thinkers draw from the East the storyline and the color of their thought and their art. Europe avidly collects Japanese paintings and Chinese sculptures, Persian colors and Hindustani rhythms. It gets drunk on the orientalism distilled by Russian art, fantasy and life. And it confesses almost a morbid desire to orientalize himself.

The East, in turn, is now imbued with Western thought. European ideology has filtered abundantly into the Eastern soul. An old oriental plant, despotism, is dying, undermined by these leaks. China, republicanized, renounces its traditional wall. The idea of democracy, which has grown old in Europe, is sprouting up in Asia and Africa. The Goddess Liberty is the most prestigious goddess of the colonial world, in these times when [Benito] Mussolini declares her renegade and abandoned by Europe. ("The Goddess Liberty was killed by the demagogues," the condottiere of the blackshirts has said.) The Egyptians, the Persians, the Hindustanis, the Filipinos, the Moroccans, they want to be free.

It happens, among other things, that Europe reaps the fruits of its warlike preaching. During the war, the Allies used a demagogic and revolutionary language to stir up the world against the Austro-Germans. They emphatically and thunderously proclaimed the right of all peoples to independence. They presented the war against Germany as a crusade for democracy. They advocated a new international law. This propaganda deeply moved the colonial peoples. And when the war was over, these colonial peoples announced, in the name of European doctrine, their will to emancipate themselves.

The doctrine of [Karl] Marx, imported by European capital, penetrates into Asia. Socialism, which at first was only a phenomenon of Western civilization, is now extending its historical and geographical radius. The first workers' Internationals were only Western institutions. Only the proletarians of Europe and America were represented in the First and Second Internationals. The founding Congress of the Third International in 1920 was instead attended by delegates from the Chinese Workers' Party and the Korean Workers' Union. Persian, Turkestan, Armenian deputations have taken part in the following congresses. In August 1920, sponsored and provoked by the Third International, a revolutionary Congress of the Peoples of the East was held in Baku. Twenty-four Eastern peoples attended that conference. Some European socialists, [Rudolf] Hilferding among them, reproached the Bolsheviks for their intelligentsia with the moves of a nationalist structure. [Grigory] Zinoviev, arguing with Hilferding, replied: "A world revolution is not possible without Asia. Four times more men live there than in Europe. Europe is a small part of the world." The social revolution historically requires the insurrection of the colonial peoples. Capitalist society tends to replenish itself through a more methodical and more intense exploitation of its political and economic colonies: And the social revolution has to stir up the colonial peoples against Europe and the United States, in order to reduce the number of vassals and tributaries of capitalist society.

The new moral conscience of Europe is also conspiring against European domination over Asia and Africa. There are many millions of men of pacifist affiliation in Europe today who oppose every act of war, every bloody act, against the colonial peoples. Consequently, Europe is forced to make a pact, to negotiate, to give in to these peoples. The Turkish case is, in this respect, very illustrative.

A strong will for independence is thus emerging in the East, while the capacity to coerce and stifle it is weakening in Europe. In short, the existence of the historical conditions necessary for the Eastern liberation is confirmed. More than a century ago, a revolutionary ideology came from Europe to these peoples of América. And aflame with its bourgeois revolution, Europe could not avoid the American independence engendered by that ideology. Even now, Europe, undermined by the social revolution, cannot suppress the insurrection of its colonies by martial means.

And, in this grave and fruitful hour of human history, it comes forth that something of the Eastern soul transmigrates to the West and that something of the Western soul transmigrates to the East.

The Exile of Trotsky

Published in Variedades: Lima, 23 February 1929. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/figuras_y_aspectos_de_la_vida_iii/paginas/el%20exilio.htm>.

[Leon] Trotsky, exiled from Soviet Russia: this is an event to which the revolutionary opinion of the world cannot easily accommodate. Revolutionary optimism never admitted the possibility that this revolution would conclude, like the French one, by condemning its heroes. But, sensibly, what should never have been expected is that the task of organizing the first great socialist state would be accomplished by a party of more than a million passionate militants, with the agreement of more than one unanimity, without debates or violent conflicts.

Trotskyist opinion has a useful function in Soviet politics. It represents, if one wants to define it in two words, Marxist orthodoxy, in the face of the overflowing and uncompromising fluency of Russian reality. It translates the working-class, urban, industrial sense of the socialist revolution. The Russian revolution owes its international, ecumenical value, its character as a precursor phenomenon of the emergence of a new civilization, to the claim of the thought of Trotsky and his comrades in all its vigor and consequences. Without vigilant criticism, which is the best proof of the vitality of the Bolshevik party, the Soviet government would probably run the risk of falling into a formalistic, mechanical bureaucratism.

But, up to this moment, the facts do not prove Trotskyism right from the point of view of its aptitude to replace [Jsosef] Stalin in power, with a greater objective capacity to realize the Marxist program. The essential part of the platform of the Trotskyist opposition is its critical part. But in the estimation of the elements that may underlie Soviet policy, neither Stalin nor [Nikolai] Bukharin are very far from subscribing to most of the fundamental concepts of Trotsky and his adherents. Trotskyist propositions and solutions, on the other hand, do not have the same solidity. In most of what concerns agrarian and industrial policy, the struggle against bureaucratism and the nep [New Economic Policy] spirit, Trotskyism tastes of a theoretical radicalism that fails to condense into concrete and precise formulas. In this field, Stalin and the majority, together with the responsibility of administration, possess a more real sense of the possibilities.

The Russian Revolution, which, like every great historical revolution, is advancing along a difficult path, which is opening up with its impulse, has so far known neither easy nor idle days. It is the work of heroic and exceptional men, and, for this very fact, it has not been possible except with a maximum and tremendous creative tension. The Bolshevik party, therefore, is not and cannot be a peaceful and unanimous academy. [Vladimir] Lenin imposed on it until shortly before his death his brilliant direction; but even under the immense and unique authority of this extraordinary leader, violent debates were scarce within the party. Lenin gained his authority by his own strength; he maintained it, then, by the superiority and clairvoyance of his thought. His views always prevailed because they were the ones that best corresponded to reality. However, they often had to overcome the resistance of their own lieutenants of the Bolshevik old guard.

The death of Lenin, which left vacant the post of the brilliant leader, of immense personal authority, would have been followed by a period of profound imbalance in any party less disciplined and organic than the Russian Communist Party. Trotsky stood out above all his comrades by the brilliant prominence of his personality. But it wasn’t only that he lacked a solid and long-standing connection with the Leninist team. Its relations with most of its members had been, before the revolution, very cordial. Trotsky, as is well known, had until 1917 an almost individual position in the Russian revolutionary camp. He did not belong to the Bolshevik party, with whose leaders, not excepting Lenin himself, he more than once sharply polemized. Lenin intelligently and generously appreciated the value of the collaboration of Trotsky, who, in turn,—as testified in the volume in which they are collected—his writings on the leader of the revolution—, accepted without jealousy or reservations an authority consecrated by the most suggestive and overwhelming work for the conscience of a revolutionary. But if between Lenin and Trotsky almost all distance could be erased, between Trotsky and the party itself the identification could not be equally complete. Trotsky did not have the full confidence of the party, however much his performance as People's Commissar deserved unanimous admiration. The party mechanism was in the hands of men of the Leninist old guard who always felt a little strange and alien to Trotsky, who, for his part, could not get along with them in a single bloc. Trotsky, it seems, does not possess the specific gifts of a politician that Lenin had to such an extreme degree. He doesn't know how to pick up on men; he doesn't know the secrets of running a party. His unique position—equally distant from Bolshevism and Menshevism—during the years running between 1905 and 1917, in addition to disconnecting him from the revolutionary teams that prepared and carried out the revolution with Lenin, made him out of habit to the concrete practice of party leader.

As long as the mobilization of all revolutionary energies against the threats of reaction lasted, Bolshevik unity was assured by the warlike pathos. But since the stabilization and normalization work began, the discrepancies of men and tendencies could not help but manifest themselves. The lack of an exceptional personality like Trotsky would have reduced the opposition to more modest terms. In that case, the violent schism would not have been reached. But with Trotsky in the command post, the opposition has in a short time taken on an insurrectionary and combative tone to which the majority and the government could not be indifferent. Trotsky, on the other hand, is a man of the cosmopolitan. Zinoviev once accused him, at a communist congress, of ignoring and neglecting the peasant too much. In any case, he has an international meaning of the socialist revolution. His remarkable writings on the transitory stabilization of capitalism place him among the most alert and astute critics of the time. But this same international sense of the revolution, which gives him so much prestige on the world stage, momentarily takes away his strength in the practice of Russian politics. The Russian revolution is in a period of national organization. It is not a question, for the moment, of establishing socialism in the world, but of realizing it in a nation that, although it is a nation of one hundred and thirty million inhabitants that overflow over two continents, does not cease to constitute, for that reason, geographically and historically, a unity. It is logical that at this stage, the Russian Revolution is represented by the men who most deeply feel its character and its national problems. Stalin, a pure Slav, is one of these men. He belongs to a phalanx of revolutionaries that has always remained rooted to Russian soil. Meanwhile Trotsky, like [Karl] Radek, like [Christian] Rakovsky, belongs to a phalanx that spent most of its life in exile. In exile they did their apprenticeship as world revolutionaries, that apprenticeship that has given the Russian Revolution its universalist language, its ecumenical vision.

The Russian Revolution is in a forced period of economizing. Trotsky, personally disconnected from the Stalinist team, is an excessive figure on a plane of national achievements. One imagines him predestined to carry the socialist gospel in triumph, with Napoleonic energy and majesty, at the head of the Red Army, throughout Europe. He is not conceived, with the same ease, filling the modest office of minister of normal times. The NEP condemns him to return to his belligerent polemicist position.

The Mission of Israel

Published in Mundial: Lima, 3 May 1929. Available online in Spanish at <https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/figuras_y_aspectos_de_la_vida_iii/paginas/la%20mision.htm>.

As René Guillouin notes, in a recent article in "La Nouvelle Revue Francaise," although the echoes of Henri de Massis's book [The Defense of the West] have faded much, the problem of the West "has lost none of its essential interest." The problem of Israel, in these times of Zionist organization and propaganda, is undoubtedly one of its most interesting aspects. Perhaps what best permits to clarify it is responding to the question: East or West? After having given their enormous contribution to Western or European civilization, do the Jews tend to return to Asia, to reintegrate to the East, by way of a nationalism of totally Western origins and stimuli?

Yes. One of the current, modern missions of the Jewish people is to serve, through its ecumenical activity, the advent of a universal civilization. If the Jewish people can believe in a predestination, it must be that of acting as the international leaven of a new society. This is how, in my judgement, the question first arises. The Jewish people I love do not speak exclusively Hebrew or Yiddish; they are polyglot, traveler, supranational. By dint of identifying himself with all races, he possesses the feelings and arts of all of them. His fate has been mixed with that of all the peoples who have not repudiated him (and even those who have treated him as an odious guest, whose nationalism owes much of its character to this closure). The greatest global value of Israel is in its variety, in its plurality, in its differentiation, gifts par excellence of a cosmopolitan people. Israel is not a race, a nation, a state, a language, a culture; it is the overcoming of all these which poses at once as something so modern, so unknown, that it has no name yet. Giving a new meaning to this term, we can say that it is a complex. A supranational complex, the elementary, primary fabric, is still loose from an ecumenical order.

The national bourgeoisies, the British in the first place, would like to reduce the Jews to a nation, to a state. This attitude, perhaps subconsciously, is but the latest persecution of Israel. Hypocritical, diplomatic, parliamentary, shrewd persecution, which offers the Jews a new "ghetto.” In the age of the League of Nations and imperialism ov grand style, this new "ghetto" could not be smaller than Palestine, nor could it lack the sentimental prestige of the land of origin. The traditional "ghetto" typically corresponded to the Middle Ages: to the age of cities and communes. Loyal nationalists, from peoples of acute anti-Semitism, have more or less explicitly confessed their hope that Israel's nationalism will liberate their homelands from the Jewish problem.

Israel has already paid its full tribute to capitalist civilization. Feudalism denied Jews access to agriculture, to the nobility, to the militia. It did not know that by forcing them into the services of craftsmen, it was pushing them into Industry, and by forcing them into the services of moneylenders and merchants, it was preparing them for Banking and Commerce, that is, it was handing them the secret of the three great factors of capitalism, that is, the order that was to destroy it and bring it to pass. The Jew, with these tools, opened himself at the same time as the doors of Politics, of the State, other doors that the Christian Middle Ages had officially kept closed to him: those of Science and Knowledge. The Science and Knowledge that, in this new order, had to be formed not in the castles of the nobility, nor in the cloisters of the monks, but in the workshops of an urban and industrial economy. The Jew, banker or industrialist, could dominate from the democratic-bourgeois and liberal city to the aristocratic or frondeur countryside.

But, since [Karl] Marx, the last of its prophets, Israel has surpassed capitalism spiritually, ideologically. Capitalist society is declining because of its inability to organize production internationally. Perhaps the most irremediable of its contradictions is the one existing between its exacerbated antagonistic nationalisms and its necessarily international economy. The Jews have contributed, in the revolutionary and organizing epoch of nationalism, to the assertion of various nationalities. They have used in the work of creating various States the energy that is proposed to be used—now that the capitalist world is definitely distributed among a few States—, in establishing themselves, in their image and likeness, as a Jewish State.

Because of the slope of this temptation the Jewish people is in danger of falling into its most serious sin of pride, selfishness, vanity. The construction of a Jewish state, even if the open or hidden protectorate of any Empire did not weigh on it, cannot constitute Israel's ambition today, since its reality is not national but supranational. The size and the object of this ambition have to be much bigger. Judaism has given multiple [Benjamin] Disraeli to other States in the organizing and assertive epoch of its nationalism; it has reserved none for itself. It would be a sign of decadence and fatigue, if it endeavored to procure it in this epoch of the Superstate.

Internationalism equals Supranationalism. Internationalism is not, as many obtuse people on the right and left imagine, the negation of nationalism, but its overcoming. It is a denial dialectically, in the sense that it contradicts nationalism; but not in the sense that, like any utopianism, it condemns and disqualifies it as a historical necessity of an epoch. Raymond Lefebvre was right, when responding to the contradictors who interrupted him at the socialist congress of Tours to accuse him of unorthodox internationalism, he affirmed that internationalism is superpatriotism. Jewish patriotism can no longer be resolved into nationalism. And when I say can't, I don't mean a duty, but an impossibility.

Because the danger of the Zionist temptation exists only for a part of the Jews. The majority of Jews are no longer masters of choosing their destiny: some are firmly committed to the enterprise of capitalism; others are deeply committed to the enterprise of revolution. Zion, the small State created to re-establish Israel in Asia, in the East, must be nothing but a cultural home, a land of experimentation.

Palestine represents nothing but Israel's past. It does not even represent their tradition, because since the beginning of their ostracism, this is for many centuries past, the tradition of Israel, the culture of Israel are made of many other things. Israel cannot deny Christianity or renounce the West, to sullenly close itself in its native plot and in its pre-Christian history.

Judaism owes to Christianity the universalization of its values. Its ostracism has been the most active agent of its expansion and greatness. It is from the moment they live without a homeland that the Jews play a great role in Western civilization. With Christ and Saul, they ascend to the highest plane of history. Palestine would have located them in Asia, miserably limiting their possibilities of Growth. Israel, without Christianity, would be today no more than Persia or Egypt. It would be much less. Georges Sorel is not mistaken, when recalling some words of [Ernest] Renan in his History of the People of Israel about Judaism after the destruction of the kingdom of Judah, he says: "It is precisely when they had no homeland that the Jews came to give their religion a definitive existence; during the time of national independence, they had been very prone to a syncretism hateful to the prophets; they fanatically became worshippers of Yahweh when they were subjected to the pagans. The development of the priestly code, the Psalms whose theological importance should have been so great, the second Isaiah, are of this epoch." Christianity later forced Israel to renew its efforts. Thanks to Christianity, their ancestors are also from the West and the Bible is not today the sacred book of a small Asian country. Judaism gained by losing its soil, the right to make its homeland from Europe and America. In Asia, after centuries of creative ostracism, the Jew is today more foreign than on these continents, if one can say that it is so. The Puritan of the United States, the Marxist of Germany and Russia, the Catholic of Spain or Italy, is closer to him historically and spiritually than the Arab of Palestine.

Israel, in twenty centuries, has linked its destiny to that of the West. And today, when the Western bourgeoisie, like Rome in its decline, renouncing its own myths, seeks its health in exotic ecstasies, Israel is more Western than the West itself. There has been a fruitful interaction between Israel and the West. If Israel has given much to the West, it has also acquired and transformed much. The Jew thus remains faithful to his philosophy of action condensed in this phrase of the Italian rabbi: "L'uomo conosce Dio operando [Man knows God by working].” And the West, in the transition from capitalism to socialism, is no longer an antagonistic and enemy form to the East, but the theory of a universal civilization.