Ingar Solty
Jacobin
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/rossana-rossanda-fought-for-the-world-revolution
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| A escritora e jornalista italiana Rossana Rossanda em Roma, Itália, 18 de maio de 1996. (Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images) |
O ano de 1945 foi um grande avanço para os comunistas da Europa. Paradoxalmente, o papel soviético na libertação do continente do fascismo alemão significou que os comunistas foram elevados ao poder nos países orientais, onde tanto o capitalismo como o movimento dos trabalhadores eram, na sua maioria, relativamente fracos. Também existiam Partidos Comunistas de massa no Ocidente. Mas as condições da Guerra Fria impediram-nos de ocupar altos cargos, inclusive graças à considerável atividade dos serviços secretos dos EUA - e na Grécia, a uma sangrenta guerra civil.
A base do comunismo como movimento de massas da Europa Ocidental foi o seu papel na luta contra o fascismo e a ocupação. Isto foi particularmente verdadeiro na França e na Itália. Em 1945, um governo trabalhista radical chegou ao poder na Grã-Bretanha, apoiado por sindicatos de adesão em massa, e os sociais-democratas e os comunistas cresceram rapidamente em toda a Alemanha do pós-guerra ocupada pelos Aliados. Mas foram especialmente o Partido Comunista Francês (PCF) - "o partido dos 75.000 executados" - e o Partido Comunista Italiano (PCI) que amadureceram e se transformaram em enormes organizações de massas.
O PCF francês cresceu de trinta mil membros antes da política da Frente Popular para meio milhão no final de 1945. Tornou-se imediatamente o partido mais forte no parlamento, com 26,2% dos votos e 159 assentos na Assembleia Nacional. Um ano depois, atingiu 28,3 por cento e 182 deputados. Na Itália, o número de membros do Partido Comunista aumentou de quinze mil para 1,7 milhão em um ano. Rapidamente se tornou um dos maiores partidos comunistas do mundo capitalista, superado apenas pelo partido indonésio, que atingiu o pico de três milhões de membros antes do genocídio anticomunista de 1965.
Quando o exército dos EUA iniciou a invasão de Itália no Outono de 1943 e abriu caminho para Roma em junho de 1944, a percepção era que a Itália só conhecia "padres e comunistas". Esta é a realidade por trás das histórias satíricas de Giovanni Guareschi sobre o padre Don Camillo e o seu homólogo Peppone, um comunista que governa uma pequena cidade rural.
As was still typical of her generation, for Rossanda a love of literature and the class struggle went hand in hand. She would write as elegantly about political economy and imperialism as she did about Virginia Woolf and the art historian Aby Warburg. She translated Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Thomas Cullinan’s The Beguiled.
Rossanda had a special love affair with the culture of Germany, which had just covered the world with unprecedented barbarism. This is striking today, when great humanists from Leo Tolstoy to Anton Chekhov are being banned from playbills and curricula because of the demonization of all things Russian. “German culture,” she writes at one point, is “the object of my admiration, [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel my grandfather, [Karl] Marx my father, [Bertolt] Brecht my brother and Thomas Mann my cousin.”
Rossanda brought this bourgeois knowledge to the proletarian movement. In Milan, she initially headed the PCI’s “House of Culture,” became a member of the city council, a Central Committee member and, from 1963, an MP. For her, politics was, as for Rosa Luxemburg, the whole of life in all its sensual aspects: the “path to knowledge,” a “strict éducation sentimentale“: a “path through suffering and passions, through friendships and controversies, through trust and parting...”
Rossanda’s motivation was the liberation of humanity. She dreamed of world revolution. She traveled to Francoist Spain on a secret mission in 1962 on behalf of the PCI and a nonparty “democratic committee” to sound out the prospects of the Communist Party and a “democratic revolution.” She headed to Spain wondering, “Could the revolution in the West be back on the agenda?”
The fact that she was a woman among Communist leaders drew little specific reflection. She said of her career: “We were self-confident because we knew — after observing how our mothers and aunts lived — what we didn’t want. The highest level of education and active participation would save us.” It was not until the late 1970s that she would also think more about femininity.
Pensando para a revolução
Rossanda’s thinking was vividly Marxist. Intellectual orthodoxy laid the foundation for focus, perseverance, and systematic thinking. It thus remained unclouded by arbitrariness, laziness of thought, and intellectual fads. Thinking in and for the party was part of a collective search for meaning. Yet there was also a certain unorthodoxy, allowing for boundless intellectual creativity.
Aware of the incompleteness of Marx’s work and its constant need for application, Rossanda drew on the entire theoretical heritage of the workers’ movement — including its more unpopular elements — in order to inform practical change. An irrepressible will to study, and arrive at a Leninist understanding of truth, allowed a concrete approach to all the many colors of reality and the forces that could revolutionize it.
Rossanda is often compared to Luxemburg. She surely saw herself in the spirit of the Polish revolutionary, at a time when her “spontaneism” was still seen with suspicion by the defenders of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Rossanda once described her movement of thought on class, party, and proletarian revolution as: “Starting from Marx, we are gradually returning to Marx.”
Her thought is best understood as the search for a world revolution. Her dialectical thinking ultimately measured everything against this question. While she grew up in the spirit of Gramsci — the theorist of the failure of revolution in the West — she spoke of revolution instead of transformation. She argued sharply against “the rediscovery of the [supposedly] spurned ‘superstructure’” as well as against the later “fashionable” “slogan of the autonomy of politics.”
Rossanda was also an “optimist of the will.” Contrary to the likes of Theodor Adorno or Louis Althusser, she was concerned with the “dialectic of rupture and continuity” and the windows of opportunity for revolutionary action on the path to socialism. But unlike later post-operaists, who abandoned the working class as the subject of change, she was no idealistic voluntarist. Her Marxist thinking in material power relations and their combinations prevented her from doing so.
But how does revolution work? Rossanda remarks that she “can’t find a definition of revolution anywhere in Rosa’s work.” “How could I find one? You don’t define what you live.” But she herself defined it: revolution, she wrote in 1969, is “the indissoluble result of the material maturation of the class struggle, its self-formation in political forms of expression and the subjectively forming consciousness, whereby none of the three moments can be separated from the others.”
Such a “conception” allows “neither mechanistic nor evolutionist interpretations, because it sees the motor in the violence of the proletariat breaking in,” nor can “it be equated with a subjective design . . . a historical and class consciousness before history and the class.”
Class consciousness arises “in the course of the struggle” The working class remains “the permanent historical subject” because capitalism creates the working class in “form and dimension” and “also alienation”; what makes it “negate capitalism is its real position. The class struggle has its material roots in the system-mechanism itself.”
Rossanda followed Gramsci’s view that the revolution in developed Western capitalisms, unlike in the dependent peripheries such as Russia, succeeds as a “war of position.” It would proceed through the struggle for hegemony by a “historical bloc” of nonantagonistic classes, rather than as a “war of movement” modeled on the “storming of the Winter Palace.” According to Rossanda’s Luxemburgist view, this would also produce a better starting point for the construction of socialism.
The “maturity of a social revolution” is characterized by the fact that it “goes beyond a merely political [revolution]” and thus “will be more radical than a political one; it will not be Jacobin [centralized, top-down] and therefore not authoritarian.” Rossanda poses the following question as the guiding question of the revolution: “What type of state and institution is capable of ensuring the preservation of the revolutionary alliance for the working class and the people — a complex formation — and at the same time changing the institutions inherited from the social division of labor, i.e., establishing a different rationality of production?”
In this view, the party is not an end in itself. The important question is what benefit it offers to the revolutionary (self-)liberation of the working class. Rossanda was concerned by the twentieth-century migration of the revolutionary process to the weakest links of the imperialist world system, while capitalism was stabilized in the imperial core. She was concerned by the fact that in the periphery, the revolution was not carried by the industrial proletariat but primarily by small farmers and agricultural workers.
Il Manifesto
Poucas semanas depois destas deliberações, Rossanda foi forçada a sair juntamente com outros membros de esquerda do PCI, incluindo outros dois do comitê central. O fator decisivo foi a fundação do seu próprio jornal: Il Manifesto.
Tais iniciativas independentes muitas vezes levaram a expulsões: desde o Reasoner de E. P. Thompson, que levou à retirada da "Primeira Nova Esquerda" do Partido Comunista da Grã-Bretanha (CPGB) em 1956, até o "Debate de Düsseldorf", que provocou expulsões do Partido Comunista Alemão (DKP) em 1984.
Ainda assim, ao contrário do Reasoner, o manifesto surgiu apenas parcialmente em oposição às justificativas do partido para a política externa da URSS. Ao contrário do PCGB, um distanciamento relativo do "socialismo realmente existente"de estilo soviético era, em qualquer caso, compatível com elementos centristas e de direita no PCI. Pelo contrário, a preocupação da esquerda do PCI era que a chamada "via italiana para o socialismo" já não conduzisse a esse ponto final. Pelo contrário, representou um abandono da revolução em favor de ilusões reformistas. Esta crítica, e não a (não)reação do PCI à supressão da "Primavera de Praga", foi decisiva.
Il manifesto was no sudden whim but the result of a long process of alienation from the PCI. Rossanda dates the beginning to 1962, and the aforementioned journey to Francoist Spain on the party’s behalf. The trip brought “doubts to light,” “which later provided the impetus” for a new departure. At the time, she had sensed “that things, when held up to the light of experience, revealed different patterns and proportions” than those advocated by the Communists. “And there is probably no communist who does not become uneasy when he recognizes his party, in whatever situation, as blind.”
She had headed to Spain with the idea of a “democratic revolution,” which was to lead to socialism on the ruins of the dictatorship. Ultimately, the assumption was that the fight against Francisco Franco would strengthen the movement much as the popular-front strategy had bolstered the PCI after 1944. The hope was that the Spaniards would have more luck after the end of their “fascism” than the Communists in Italy or Greece.
Back then, Rossanda writes, “for the first time a calculation did not work out.” “We had certainly felt the blow of 1956; we were certainly tormented by the open wound of ‘actually existing socialism’... But in our own house... we considered ourselves knowledgeable.” From Spain, she developed a critique of the popular-front strategy because there is no “democratic revolution” that would “lead us close to the wall that separated us from socialism.”
The alienation intensified over the next four years. Togliatti died in 1964, and the question of his legacy occupied the 11th Party Congress two years later. This itself marked a rift. The congress discussed the “betrayal” of the revolution and the popular-front strategy — a harbinger of the “historic compromise” with Christian Democracy, i.e., the party of the bourgeoisie. The party conference ended in defeat for the Left. As Rossanda put it, “De facto, I was only expelled three years later, but the separation took place when I stopped thinking ‘within the party and for it’ for the first time since 1943.”
Yet this alienation also favored intellectual creativity. Her theoretical texts on Mao Zedong, party, class, and revolutionary theory were written under the “well-founded assumption of my heterodoxy.” She “rehabilitated the classics of heresy,” above all Luxemburg. “In my head, as in other heads, a ‘left-wing revisionism’ was clearly taking shape.”
For the PCI’s left flank, the mirror image of social democratization in the West was the betrayal of the revolution in the East. The Soviet Union’s foreign policy, defensively focused on securing its existence while avoiding conflict with the United States, prevented new revolutions. While the USSR no longer sought to export the revolution and looked skeptically at Che Guevara’s adventures in the Congo or the US backyard of Bolivia, the PCI was revolutionary in name only: there were postrevolutionary states in the Eastern Bloc and a postrevolutionary party in Italy. Rossanda eventually felt vindicated by the suppression of the coup in Chile in 1973 by the US-backed military — she had visited Chile and had sympathized strongly — given that, unlike with the Cuban Revolution fourteen years prior, now the USSR and China essentially tolerated its suppression.
With this outlook in mind, Rossanda organized an important international conference on “postrevolutionary societies” in 1977. This approach was light-years away from today’s usual left-wing moralism, which first celebrates breakthroughs — Syriza’s election in Greece or the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela — projecting their illusions onto these experiences, only then to demonize them after their defeat. Similar thinking to Rossanda’s today would also demand the development of a position on China as a world-historical force. Instead, many leftists maintain a helpless non-position or even allow themselves to become the useful idiots of Western imperialism and a devastating new bloc confrontation.
Rossanda suffered from the standstill of the revolution in East and West. The Soviet invasion of Prague was not the trigger, but a symptom of the processes that led to il manifesto. In the international 1968, including the Prague Spring, she saw the potential for a revived, revolutionary workers’ movement: as she put it “1968 washed away my melancholy.”
The “ingraiani,” named after the “leader of the [PCI’s] left wing” Ingrao, saw the world on the move. Ingrao, who remained loyal to the party, was given the label of movimentista — “the movement-oriented Communist.” For her part, Rossanda traveled to Paris to study the French May. In 1968, her book The Year of the Students was published; like her comrade-in-arms Magri in his own book, she pleaded for an alliance between the student revolt and the workers’ movement. Many students attributed the subjective failure of the longed-for revolution to their lack of connection with the working class. But connections were made as a result.
The year 1968 interested the forty-four-year-old Rossanda because of its spirit of revolt, which she wanted to infect the traditional workers’ movement. Four decades later, she reflected:
Il manifesto’s platform published in September 1970 stated that the “communist perspective” was the “only alternative to the catastrophic tendencies of today’s world.” However, the “parliamentary path” to socialism was an “illusion” and the “center left” (1960s coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists) had failed. Social democratic reformism” had made itself the “pillar of capitalism and its state.” The prospect of a future “subaltern entry of the PCI into government” would be a strategy of co-optation by the bourgeoisie, which would “not solve the crisis, but exacerbate it.” It was necessary to “develop the theory of revolution in the West” and “build a truly revolutionary force.”
Rossanda was no sectarian. She was aware of the importance of the class-based mass party for the revolution in the West. Looking back, she wrote: “The fact is that certain voyages can only be undertaken in large ships.” Il manifesto initially sparked considerable momentum. Local groups emerged in almost all Italy’s major cities. “It’s not a split,” wrote Rossanda, “it’s a real hemorrhage that refuses to calm down.” The newspaper, which appeared daily from April 28, 1971, soon had sixty thousand subscribers.
The main party project was the “Party of Proletarian Unity” (PdUP). But the attempts to found a stable party to the left of the PCI were disappointed. The PdUP failed in elections. At Berlinguer’s suggestion, it rejoined the PCI in 1984, albeit without Rossanda.
Increasingly, Rossanda saw rising neoliberalism as the main cause of the defeat that broke the back of the workers’ movement in the West and the anti-imperialist movements in developing countries — while also increasing the pressure on actually existing socialism. Rossanda saw the collapse in the Eastern Bloc as a catastrophe. In 1994, she described the “pull” that “brought down the idea of a possibly different society with the regimes of the East.” But: “The crisis of the ‘revolutionary’ space had been brewing for a long time.”
The neoliberalization of the social democratic parties, including the degeneration of the PCI into today’s Democratic Party, for Rossanda expressed the eradication of an “entire idea of social transformation.” She saw the first Gulf War as the prelude to a new imperialism. Unlike those leftists who today invoke the need to support an invaded sovereign country while they actually support a proxy war by their own imperialist states (against Russia, and, lurking behind, China), Rossanda and Ingrao rejected thinking about imperialism in moralistic and liberal terms.
The new world order of global capitalism was already apparent to Rossanda and Ingrao. They wrote in a joint manifesto in 1995: the Gulf War is the “turning point in the geopolitical world situation”: not only is “new terrible technology being tried out, but also no less alarming categories of thought are being made acceptable: the concept of ‘just war’... the notion of ‘international police action,“ with which “a new authority has been enthroned that arrogates to itself the right to impose a new world order” that “renews the domination of the North over the southern hemisphere.”
Rossanda was stunned by the complete disappearance of the socialist left. In an interview in 2018, she lamented: “Everything, everything has been lost. The voice of the humiliated and insulted can no longer be heard anywhere.” Even in the early 1990s, she wondered whether she was looking for answers to questions that no one was asking anymore. She probably remembered her trip to Spain. At the time, a Socialist Party representative explained to her what defeat means: “[T]hrown back into silence, you notice the absent-mindedness of those who saw you as a symbol and who do not forgive you when you are no longer one; sometimes they regret you, but generally they forget you.”
Her 2005 autobiography (published in English as The Comrade from Milan) featured her memoirs up to 1969. Rossanda asked: “Why were you a communist? Why do you say you still are?” She described herself as a “defeated communist.” Communism had “failed so miserably that it was essential to come to terms with it.” It “may have done wrong things, but it wasn’t wrong.”
Rossanda died in 2020 at the age of ninety-six, after over three-quarters of a century in the movement. After her death, Deutschlandfunk reported that things had become “very lonely around left-wing intellectuals” like her. But only “history will show” whether her life truly ended in defeat.
A base do comunismo como movimento de massas da Europa Ocidental foi o seu papel na luta contra o fascismo e a ocupação. Isto foi particularmente verdadeiro na França e na Itália. Em 1945, um governo trabalhista radical chegou ao poder na Grã-Bretanha, apoiado por sindicatos de adesão em massa, e os sociais-democratas e os comunistas cresceram rapidamente em toda a Alemanha do pós-guerra ocupada pelos Aliados. Mas foram especialmente o Partido Comunista Francês (PCF) - "o partido dos 75.000 executados" - e o Partido Comunista Italiano (PCI) que amadureceram e se transformaram em enormes organizações de massas.
O PCF francês cresceu de trinta mil membros antes da política da Frente Popular para meio milhão no final de 1945. Tornou-se imediatamente o partido mais forte no parlamento, com 26,2% dos votos e 159 assentos na Assembleia Nacional. Um ano depois, atingiu 28,3 por cento e 182 deputados. Na Itália, o número de membros do Partido Comunista aumentou de quinze mil para 1,7 milhão em um ano. Rapidamente se tornou um dos maiores partidos comunistas do mundo capitalista, superado apenas pelo partido indonésio, que atingiu o pico de três milhões de membros antes do genocídio anticomunista de 1965.
Quando o exército dos EUA iniciou a invasão de Itália no Outono de 1943 e abriu caminho para Roma em junho de 1944, a percepção era que a Itália só conhecia "padres e comunistas". Esta é a realidade por trás das histórias satíricas de Giovanni Guareschi sobre o padre Don Camillo e o seu homólogo Peppone, um comunista que governa uma pequena cidade rural.
O sucesso dos comunistas italianos também deveu muito à sua independência. Isto foi enfatizado até mesmo pelo lendário presidente Palmiro Togliatti, companheiro de longa data de Antonio Gramsci. No entanto, após sua morte em 1964, os soviéticos nomearam uma cidade industrial em sua homenagem. O líder Enrico Berlinguer reforçou este caminho italiano para o socialismo na década de 1970. Os seus oponentes de esquerda no interior do partido, em torno de Pietro Ingrao, Rossana Rossanda e Lucio Magri, também defenderam tal caminho. O PCI "italianizou" o comunismo e não baseou as suas políticas exclusivamente na política externa soviética. Segundo Rossanda, o sucesso do PCI deveu-se ao fato de "ainda estar discutindo e discutindo", e não a ser um monólito. Isto também produziu uma atmosfera intelectual vibrante, onde Rossanda foi uma das luzes brilhantes da criatividade marxista.
Um partido orgulhoso da qual nada resta
No entanto, quase nada resta deste orgulhoso partido depois de 1991. Nesse momento, não só perdeu membros e eleitores, mas também o seu nome e caráter. Negou ambos, na crença enganosa de que o termo "comunista" e o antigo programa eram meros obstáculos eleitorais. Os sucessos recentes do Partido Comunista Austríaco em alguns dos lugares mais burgueses imagináveis, como Salzburgo, mostram como isto era desnecessário.
O PCI transformou-se primeiro no Partido da Esquerda Democrática (PDS) e em 2007 no Partido Democrático (PD). Esta aliança desajeitada e ampla é explicitamente modelada no Partido Democrata dos EUA - um pouco social, um pouco verde, mas acima de tudo completamente liberal e antimarxista. Isto não ajudou: hoje tem apenas cento e cinquenta mil membros e apenas cinco milhões de eleitores, nem sequer metade dos resultados típicos dos comunistas na década de 1980.
Quase nada resta do comunismo italiano hoje. Um dos sistemas políticos mais estáveis do período pós-guerra, dominado por uma forte Democracia Cristã (DC) e pelos Comunistas, é emblemático da fragmentação dos sistemas partidários e da instabilidade. Tal como os comunistas, a grande tenda DC também se desintegrou a partir de 1992 como parte do escândalo de corrupção "Tangentopoli".
Sem o autodesmantelamento do PCI, Silvio Berlusconi, a Liga do Norte e a Alleanza Nazionale de extrema-direita não teriam conseguido o seu avanço. E a Itália não seria governada hoje pela (pós-)fascista Giorgia Meloni, que, cortejada por aliados internacionais, está ainda melhor nas sondagens do que em 2022. Acima de tudo, nunca teria existido o Movimento Cinco Estrelas - nem um partido de esquerda, mas um aspirador capaz de sugar o estrondoso mal-estar social.
Em 1975, o historiador marxista britânico Eric Hobsbawm disse que devido ao papel de liderança dos comunistas na Resistência "na vida da nação italiana" tinha havido "a continuação de uma hegemonia cultural de tendências antifascistas, democráticas e progressistas [...] em contraste com o que aconteceu na Alemanha Ocidental". Na Itália, parecia não haver "mais intelectuais de direita" depois de 1945. Então, como é que este país, onde quase todas as aldeias ainda têm uma Via Gramsci, se tornou a terra de Berlusconi e Meloni?
O caminho para o comunismo
A biografia da intelectual marxista Rossana Rossanda é reveladora. Mais tarde, ela se descreveu como uma "típica intelectual burguesa que fez uma escolha comunista".
Ela nasceu em Pola, na península de Ístria (hoje Pula, Croácia), onde sua mãe possuía "ilhotas" inteiras. Mas ela cresceu em Milão, onde também estudou. Em 1943, juntou-se à Resistência antifascista através do seu professor de filosofia Antonio Banfi, cujo filho Rodolfo mais tarde se tornou seu primeiro marido. Como partidária "Miranda", ela viajou como mensageira. Mais tarde, ela refletiu:
Um partido orgulhoso da qual nada resta
No entanto, quase nada resta deste orgulhoso partido depois de 1991. Nesse momento, não só perdeu membros e eleitores, mas também o seu nome e caráter. Negou ambos, na crença enganosa de que o termo "comunista" e o antigo programa eram meros obstáculos eleitorais. Os sucessos recentes do Partido Comunista Austríaco em alguns dos lugares mais burgueses imagináveis, como Salzburgo, mostram como isto era desnecessário.
O PCI transformou-se primeiro no Partido da Esquerda Democrática (PDS) e em 2007 no Partido Democrático (PD). Esta aliança desajeitada e ampla é explicitamente modelada no Partido Democrata dos EUA - um pouco social, um pouco verde, mas acima de tudo completamente liberal e antimarxista. Isto não ajudou: hoje tem apenas cento e cinquenta mil membros e apenas cinco milhões de eleitores, nem sequer metade dos resultados típicos dos comunistas na década de 1980.
Quase nada resta do comunismo italiano hoje. Um dos sistemas políticos mais estáveis do período pós-guerra, dominado por uma forte Democracia Cristã (DC) e pelos Comunistas, é emblemático da fragmentação dos sistemas partidários e da instabilidade. Tal como os comunistas, a grande tenda DC também se desintegrou a partir de 1992 como parte do escândalo de corrupção "Tangentopoli".
Sem o autodesmantelamento do PCI, Silvio Berlusconi, a Liga do Norte e a Alleanza Nazionale de extrema-direita não teriam conseguido o seu avanço. E a Itália não seria governada hoje pela (pós-)fascista Giorgia Meloni, que, cortejada por aliados internacionais, está ainda melhor nas sondagens do que em 2022. Acima de tudo, nunca teria existido o Movimento Cinco Estrelas - nem um partido de esquerda, mas um aspirador capaz de sugar o estrondoso mal-estar social.
Em 1975, o historiador marxista britânico Eric Hobsbawm disse que devido ao papel de liderança dos comunistas na Resistência "na vida da nação italiana" tinha havido "a continuação de uma hegemonia cultural de tendências antifascistas, democráticas e progressistas [...] em contraste com o que aconteceu na Alemanha Ocidental". Na Itália, parecia não haver "mais intelectuais de direita" depois de 1945. Então, como é que este país, onde quase todas as aldeias ainda têm uma Via Gramsci, se tornou a terra de Berlusconi e Meloni?
O caminho para o comunismo
A biografia da intelectual marxista Rossana Rossanda é reveladora. Mais tarde, ela se descreveu como uma "típica intelectual burguesa que fez uma escolha comunista".
Ela nasceu em Pola, na península de Ístria (hoje Pula, Croácia), onde sua mãe possuía "ilhotas" inteiras. Mas ela cresceu em Milão, onde também estudou. Em 1943, juntou-se à Resistência antifascista através do seu professor de filosofia Antonio Banfi, cujo filho Rodolfo mais tarde se tornou seu primeiro marido. Como partidária "Miranda", ela viajou como mensageira. Mais tarde, ela refletiu:
Quando o fascismo explodiu, durante a guerra... com violência, perseguição e morte... a mera compreensão já não bastava, era preciso intervir. Aqueles que atingiram a maioridade naqueles anos nunca conseguiram ver a busca pela sua identidade como um assunto privado. O mundo inteiro passou por cima de nós e tem feito isso sem parar desde então.
Da Resistência, Rossanda encontrou o seu caminho para o movimento operário liderado pelos comunistas. Na primavera de 1945, ela foi uma das milhões que aderiram ao PCI. Ela se tornou uma traidora de classe. Isso não era apenas consequência do reconhecimento teórico, mas também encorajado pela realidade que estava diante dela. Na Milão industrial, emergiu um novo e poderoso movimento operário, com "fortalezas vermelhas" nos pneus Pirelli, na siderúrgica Falck e nas obras de engenharia da Magneti Marelli.
As was still typical of her generation, for Rossanda a love of literature and the class struggle went hand in hand. She would write as elegantly about political economy and imperialism as she did about Virginia Woolf and the art historian Aby Warburg. She translated Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Thomas Cullinan’s The Beguiled.
Rossanda had a special love affair with the culture of Germany, which had just covered the world with unprecedented barbarism. This is striking today, when great humanists from Leo Tolstoy to Anton Chekhov are being banned from playbills and curricula because of the demonization of all things Russian. “German culture,” she writes at one point, is “the object of my admiration, [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel my grandfather, [Karl] Marx my father, [Bertolt] Brecht my brother and Thomas Mann my cousin.”
Rossanda brought this bourgeois knowledge to the proletarian movement. In Milan, she initially headed the PCI’s “House of Culture,” became a member of the city council, a Central Committee member and, from 1963, an MP. For her, politics was, as for Rosa Luxemburg, the whole of life in all its sensual aspects: the “path to knowledge,” a “strict éducation sentimentale“: a “path through suffering and passions, through friendships and controversies, through trust and parting...”
Rossanda’s motivation was the liberation of humanity. She dreamed of world revolution. She traveled to Francoist Spain on a secret mission in 1962 on behalf of the PCI and a nonparty “democratic committee” to sound out the prospects of the Communist Party and a “democratic revolution.” She headed to Spain wondering, “Could the revolution in the West be back on the agenda?”
The fact that she was a woman among Communist leaders drew little specific reflection. She said of her career: “We were self-confident because we knew — after observing how our mothers and aunts lived — what we didn’t want. The highest level of education and active participation would save us.” It was not until the late 1970s that she would also think more about femininity.
Pensando para a revolução
Rossanda’s thinking was vividly Marxist. Intellectual orthodoxy laid the foundation for focus, perseverance, and systematic thinking. It thus remained unclouded by arbitrariness, laziness of thought, and intellectual fads. Thinking in and for the party was part of a collective search for meaning. Yet there was also a certain unorthodoxy, allowing for boundless intellectual creativity.
Aware of the incompleteness of Marx’s work and its constant need for application, Rossanda drew on the entire theoretical heritage of the workers’ movement — including its more unpopular elements — in order to inform practical change. An irrepressible will to study, and arrive at a Leninist understanding of truth, allowed a concrete approach to all the many colors of reality and the forces that could revolutionize it.
Rossanda is often compared to Luxemburg. She surely saw herself in the spirit of the Polish revolutionary, at a time when her “spontaneism” was still seen with suspicion by the defenders of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Rossanda once described her movement of thought on class, party, and proletarian revolution as: “Starting from Marx, we are gradually returning to Marx.”
Her thought is best understood as the search for a world revolution. Her dialectical thinking ultimately measured everything against this question. While she grew up in the spirit of Gramsci — the theorist of the failure of revolution in the West — she spoke of revolution instead of transformation. She argued sharply against “the rediscovery of the [supposedly] spurned ‘superstructure’” as well as against the later “fashionable” “slogan of the autonomy of politics.”
Rossanda was also an “optimist of the will.” Contrary to the likes of Theodor Adorno or Louis Althusser, she was concerned with the “dialectic of rupture and continuity” and the windows of opportunity for revolutionary action on the path to socialism. But unlike later post-operaists, who abandoned the working class as the subject of change, she was no idealistic voluntarist. Her Marxist thinking in material power relations and their combinations prevented her from doing so.
But how does revolution work? Rossanda remarks that she “can’t find a definition of revolution anywhere in Rosa’s work.” “How could I find one? You don’t define what you live.” But she herself defined it: revolution, she wrote in 1969, is “the indissoluble result of the material maturation of the class struggle, its self-formation in political forms of expression and the subjectively forming consciousness, whereby none of the three moments can be separated from the others.”
Such a “conception” allows “neither mechanistic nor evolutionist interpretations, because it sees the motor in the violence of the proletariat breaking in,” nor can “it be equated with a subjective design . . . a historical and class consciousness before history and the class.”
Class consciousness arises “in the course of the struggle” The working class remains “the permanent historical subject” because capitalism creates the working class in “form and dimension” and “also alienation”; what makes it “negate capitalism is its real position. The class struggle has its material roots in the system-mechanism itself.”
Rossanda followed Gramsci’s view that the revolution in developed Western capitalisms, unlike in the dependent peripheries such as Russia, succeeds as a “war of position.” It would proceed through the struggle for hegemony by a “historical bloc” of nonantagonistic classes, rather than as a “war of movement” modeled on the “storming of the Winter Palace.” According to Rossanda’s Luxemburgist view, this would also produce a better starting point for the construction of socialism.
The “maturity of a social revolution” is characterized by the fact that it “goes beyond a merely political [revolution]” and thus “will be more radical than a political one; it will not be Jacobin [centralized, top-down] and therefore not authoritarian.” Rossanda poses the following question as the guiding question of the revolution: “What type of state and institution is capable of ensuring the preservation of the revolutionary alliance for the working class and the people — a complex formation — and at the same time changing the institutions inherited from the social division of labor, i.e., establishing a different rationality of production?”
In this view, the party is not an end in itself. The important question is what benefit it offers to the revolutionary (self-)liberation of the working class. Rossanda was concerned by the twentieth-century migration of the revolutionary process to the weakest links of the imperialist world system, while capitalism was stabilized in the imperial core. She was concerned by the fact that in the periphery, the revolution was not carried by the industrial proletariat but primarily by small farmers and agricultural workers.
Segundo Vladimir Lenin, a "cadeia imperialista" se rompe primeiro na periferia. Aqui, Rossanda conclui:
O confronto deve... ser devidamente preparado: quanto mais “imatura” é a sociedade, mais a vanguarda tem a tarefa de encurtar, por assim dizer, a distância entre as condições objetivas de exploração intolerável e a eclosão aberta do conflito, rasgando os explorados e oprimidos... por sua ignorância ou resignação - transformando-os... em revolucionários.
Mas uma vez que as possibilidades de sucesso da revolução nas formações dependentes dependem da revolução nos centros, também se trata dos países capitalistas centrais. No entanto, uma vez que prevalece uma estabilidade completamente diferente nos centros, surge aqui uma forma partidária diferente: a do partido de massas baseado em classes.
Il Manifesto
Poucas semanas depois destas deliberações, Rossanda foi forçada a sair juntamente com outros membros de esquerda do PCI, incluindo outros dois do comitê central. O fator decisivo foi a fundação do seu próprio jornal: Il Manifesto.
Tais iniciativas independentes muitas vezes levaram a expulsões: desde o Reasoner de E. P. Thompson, que levou à retirada da "Primeira Nova Esquerda" do Partido Comunista da Grã-Bretanha (CPGB) em 1956, até o "Debate de Düsseldorf", que provocou expulsões do Partido Comunista Alemão (DKP) em 1984.
Ainda assim, ao contrário do Reasoner, o manifesto surgiu apenas parcialmente em oposição às justificativas do partido para a política externa da URSS. Ao contrário do PCGB, um distanciamento relativo do "socialismo realmente existente"de estilo soviético era, em qualquer caso, compatível com elementos centristas e de direita no PCI. Pelo contrário, a preocupação da esquerda do PCI era que a chamada "via italiana para o socialismo" já não conduzisse a esse ponto final. Pelo contrário, representou um abandono da revolução em favor de ilusões reformistas. Esta crítica, e não a (não)reação do PCI à supressão da "Primavera de Praga", foi decisiva.
Il manifesto was no sudden whim but the result of a long process of alienation from the PCI. Rossanda dates the beginning to 1962, and the aforementioned journey to Francoist Spain on the party’s behalf. The trip brought “doubts to light,” “which later provided the impetus” for a new departure. At the time, she had sensed “that things, when held up to the light of experience, revealed different patterns and proportions” than those advocated by the Communists. “And there is probably no communist who does not become uneasy when he recognizes his party, in whatever situation, as blind.”
She had headed to Spain with the idea of a “democratic revolution,” which was to lead to socialism on the ruins of the dictatorship. Ultimately, the assumption was that the fight against Francisco Franco would strengthen the movement much as the popular-front strategy had bolstered the PCI after 1944. The hope was that the Spaniards would have more luck after the end of their “fascism” than the Communists in Italy or Greece.
Back then, Rossanda writes, “for the first time a calculation did not work out.” “We had certainly felt the blow of 1956; we were certainly tormented by the open wound of ‘actually existing socialism’... But in our own house... we considered ourselves knowledgeable.” From Spain, she developed a critique of the popular-front strategy because there is no “democratic revolution” that would “lead us close to the wall that separated us from socialism.”
The alienation intensified over the next four years. Togliatti died in 1964, and the question of his legacy occupied the 11th Party Congress two years later. This itself marked a rift. The congress discussed the “betrayal” of the revolution and the popular-front strategy — a harbinger of the “historic compromise” with Christian Democracy, i.e., the party of the bourgeoisie. The party conference ended in defeat for the Left. As Rossanda put it, “De facto, I was only expelled three years later, but the separation took place when I stopped thinking ‘within the party and for it’ for the first time since 1943.”
Yet this alienation also favored intellectual creativity. Her theoretical texts on Mao Zedong, party, class, and revolutionary theory were written under the “well-founded assumption of my heterodoxy.” She “rehabilitated the classics of heresy,” above all Luxemburg. “In my head, as in other heads, a ‘left-wing revisionism’ was clearly taking shape.”
For the PCI’s left flank, the mirror image of social democratization in the West was the betrayal of the revolution in the East. The Soviet Union’s foreign policy, defensively focused on securing its existence while avoiding conflict with the United States, prevented new revolutions. While the USSR no longer sought to export the revolution and looked skeptically at Che Guevara’s adventures in the Congo or the US backyard of Bolivia, the PCI was revolutionary in name only: there were postrevolutionary states in the Eastern Bloc and a postrevolutionary party in Italy. Rossanda eventually felt vindicated by the suppression of the coup in Chile in 1973 by the US-backed military — she had visited Chile and had sympathized strongly — given that, unlike with the Cuban Revolution fourteen years prior, now the USSR and China essentially tolerated its suppression.
Olhando para trás, ela escreveu em 1977:
A identificação do "socialismo realmente existente" com o movimento anti-imperialista, socialista e anticapitalista no Ocidente... dissolveu-se na década de 1960, por várias razões: Devido ao cada vez mais evidente papel de grande potência da URSS; a divisão que ocorreu entre... a URSS e a China; na sequência da política externa mutável da China, que oscilava constantemente entre o auto-isolamento e a defesa dos países isolados do Terceiro Mundo; [e]... pela desastrosa... invasão da Tchecoslováquia.
Desde então, a ajuda revolucionária da URSS e da China tornou-se "cada vez mais... misturada com os seus interesses no tabuleiro de xadrez mundial". Com o apoio do Vietnã, "tudo se esgotou... Os camaradas vietnamitas venceram porque a URSS e a China existem, mas também... embora existam". "No geral, o 'socialismo realmente existente' hoje não é um modelo nem uma garantia para revoluções futuras e diferentes."
After the Chilean events, Rossanda’s thinking turned on the question of how a revolution in Italy could escape this fate. This also raises the question of “whether a revolution is possible at all without being supported or guaranteed by. . . the USSR and China.” In fact, “no revolution can escape the obligation” to “deal with the present crisis of the USSR and the ‘socialist’ camp, resulting from internal as well as external factors. It has become our own serious problem, whose solution cannot be put off.”
With this outlook in mind, Rossanda organized an important international conference on “postrevolutionary societies” in 1977. This approach was light-years away from today’s usual left-wing moralism, which first celebrates breakthroughs — Syriza’s election in Greece or the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela — projecting their illusions onto these experiences, only then to demonize them after their defeat. Similar thinking to Rossanda’s today would also demand the development of a position on China as a world-historical force. Instead, many leftists maintain a helpless non-position or even allow themselves to become the useful idiots of Western imperialism and a devastating new bloc confrontation.
Rossanda estava familiarizada com esta atitude apolítica. Em 1981 ela escreveu:
Velhos e novos esquerdistas, agarramo-nos à última revolução que se nos apresenta... Somos os drones dos projetos e práticas dos outros. Parasitamente, participamos de suas convulsões e lutas, exceto quando perdem; então nos retiramos, ressentidos e taciturnos. Somos os primeiros a antecipar o julgamento da história com o carimbo dos arquivos; conhecemos os erros dos outros até o último detalhe, amamos as decepções e as destacamos meticulosamente para justificar nossas próprias atitudes comprometedoras.
No seu discurso de encerramento da conferência de 1977, ela insistiu: "Por mais imperfeito e cheio de culpa que o socialismo possa ter aparecido nestas sociedades, do outro lado da barricada estavam o imperialismo, o colonialismo e, finalmente, o fascismo".
Esperanças do 68
Rossanda suffered from the standstill of the revolution in East and West. The Soviet invasion of Prague was not the trigger, but a symptom of the processes that led to il manifesto. In the international 1968, including the Prague Spring, she saw the potential for a revived, revolutionary workers’ movement: as she put it “1968 washed away my melancholy.”
The “ingraiani,” named after the “leader of the [PCI’s] left wing” Ingrao, saw the world on the move. Ingrao, who remained loyal to the party, was given the label of movimentista — “the movement-oriented Communist.” For her part, Rossanda traveled to Paris to study the French May. In 1968, her book The Year of the Students was published; like her comrade-in-arms Magri in his own book, she pleaded for an alliance between the student revolt and the workers’ movement. Many students attributed the subjective failure of the longed-for revolution to their lack of connection with the working class. But connections were made as a result.
The year 1968 interested the forty-four-year-old Rossanda because of its spirit of revolt, which she wanted to infect the traditional workers’ movement. Four decades later, she reflected:
The 1968 generation had the élan to break with the old ways. But they had no political culture of their own. The PCI, on the other hand, had a long political tradition, but had lost all will to bring about social change. I think that a dialogue could and should have taken place... It didn’t happen. The generational gap was too big.
The failure had a devastating effect: “Most of the political organizations and formations of the historical left of the 19th and 20th centuries collapsed internally and have not been able to recover.”
Rossanda’s break with the PCI came in 1968 and the opportunity that was missed. Hence “on an evening in July 1968, I was once again told the reasons why the party had to proceed with caution, otherwise it would collapse. . . . In those days, we pulled the first strings for il manifesto. . . . They shut us out. But we were not thrown back on ourselves: we were released into a historical process which we had to navigate.”
Rossanda’s break with the PCI came in 1968 and the opportunity that was missed. Hence “on an evening in July 1968, I was once again told the reasons why the party had to proceed with caution, otherwise it would collapse. . . . In those days, we pulled the first strings for il manifesto. . . . They shut us out. But we were not thrown back on ourselves: we were released into a historical process which we had to navigate.”
Comunismo: derrotado, mas necessário
Il manifesto’s platform published in September 1970 stated that the “communist perspective” was the “only alternative to the catastrophic tendencies of today’s world.” However, the “parliamentary path” to socialism was an “illusion” and the “center left” (1960s coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists) had failed. Social democratic reformism” had made itself the “pillar of capitalism and its state.” The prospect of a future “subaltern entry of the PCI into government” would be a strategy of co-optation by the bourgeoisie, which would “not solve the crisis, but exacerbate it.” It was necessary to “develop the theory of revolution in the West” and “build a truly revolutionary force.”
Rossanda was no sectarian. She was aware of the importance of the class-based mass party for the revolution in the West. Looking back, she wrote: “The fact is that certain voyages can only be undertaken in large ships.” Il manifesto initially sparked considerable momentum. Local groups emerged in almost all Italy’s major cities. “It’s not a split,” wrote Rossanda, “it’s a real hemorrhage that refuses to calm down.” The newspaper, which appeared daily from April 28, 1971, soon had sixty thousand subscribers.
The main party project was the “Party of Proletarian Unity” (PdUP). But the attempts to found a stable party to the left of the PCI were disappointed. The PdUP failed in elections. At Berlinguer’s suggestion, it rejoined the PCI in 1984, albeit without Rossanda.
Increasingly, Rossanda saw rising neoliberalism as the main cause of the defeat that broke the back of the workers’ movement in the West and the anti-imperialist movements in developing countries — while also increasing the pressure on actually existing socialism. Rossanda saw the collapse in the Eastern Bloc as a catastrophe. In 1994, she described the “pull” that “brought down the idea of a possibly different society with the regimes of the East.” But: “The crisis of the ‘revolutionary’ space had been brewing for a long time.”
The neoliberalization of the social democratic parties, including the degeneration of the PCI into today’s Democratic Party, for Rossanda expressed the eradication of an “entire idea of social transformation.” She saw the first Gulf War as the prelude to a new imperialism. Unlike those leftists who today invoke the need to support an invaded sovereign country while they actually support a proxy war by their own imperialist states (against Russia, and, lurking behind, China), Rossanda and Ingrao rejected thinking about imperialism in moralistic and liberal terms.
The new world order of global capitalism was already apparent to Rossanda and Ingrao. They wrote in a joint manifesto in 1995: the Gulf War is the “turning point in the geopolitical world situation”: not only is “new terrible technology being tried out, but also no less alarming categories of thought are being made acceptable: the concept of ‘just war’... the notion of ‘international police action,“ with which “a new authority has been enthroned that arrogates to itself the right to impose a new world order” that “renews the domination of the North over the southern hemisphere.”
Rossanda was stunned by the complete disappearance of the socialist left. In an interview in 2018, she lamented: “Everything, everything has been lost. The voice of the humiliated and insulted can no longer be heard anywhere.” Even in the early 1990s, she wondered whether she was looking for answers to questions that no one was asking anymore. She probably remembered her trip to Spain. At the time, a Socialist Party representative explained to her what defeat means: “[T]hrown back into silence, you notice the absent-mindedness of those who saw you as a symbol and who do not forgive you when you are no longer one; sometimes they regret you, but generally they forget you.”
Her 2005 autobiography (published in English as The Comrade from Milan) featured her memoirs up to 1969. Rossanda asked: “Why were you a communist? Why do you say you still are?” She described herself as a “defeated communist.” Communism had “failed so miserably that it was essential to come to terms with it.” It “may have done wrong things, but it wasn’t wrong.”
Rossanda died in 2020 at the age of ninety-six, after over three-quarters of a century in the movement. After her death, Deutschlandfunk reported that things had become “very lonely around left-wing intellectuals” like her. But only “history will show” whether her life truly ended in defeat.
Colaborador
Ingar Solty é investigador sênior em política externa, de paz e de segurança no Instituto de Análise Social Crítica da Fundação Rosa Luxemburgo, em Berlim.
