“We know,” Cagnotta began again, “that recently you have taken up journalism. I would in fact like to ask you some particulars. About this activity of yours. These comrades and I have been so charged.” His gaze went around the room in circular fashion as if his eyes were underlining the words, uttered in a flat voice like a notary.
“A review,” he went on, “has published an article signed by Ferranini, expressing a negative opinion of the Marxist concept of alienation. If I have that right. I’m not personally familiar with the argumentation laid out in that illustrious document. Comrade Magrò, having thoroughly studied the text, can fill us in.”
Among his colleagues in the group at the chamber, Aniello Magrò, a professor of history of the law at Naples, was also known as Nasser, to whom he bore a resemblance. Togliatti had once praised him as the “most elegant Marxist” (after Labriola) born south of the River Garigliano.
“Ferranini affirms,” Magrò began, “that in the early Marx the worker is still, in Hegelian style, a sort of evoker or creator of external reality, even though in certain circumstances this creative function has regressive consequences for the worker. According to the article, pardon me if I go into detail in the interests of clarity, in Marx’s vision the worker with respect to his world continues to have the expectations typical of the Subject, in the idealistic sense. The world is seen to be at his disposition, or rather it owes to the worker, to man, its very existence. In short, as presented, Marx is steeped in idealistic illusions.”
“One moment,” Ferranini spoke impulsively, almost interrupting, “I wrote that the mature Marx goes beyond this perspective, and that seems to me an important point.”
Cagnotta silenced him with a wave of his hand. “Slowly. Slowly. There’s no hurry.”
He bit his tongue. He could have avoided that reprimand.
“In any event, if you will,” now Ferranini’s words and tone were measured, “if you will, in my view the concept of alienation is somewhat too abstract to hold the position it does in a reality like Communism, which is concrete, popular. The favor that word has had with the bourgeoisie makes it suspect to me. When I speak of work with my friends in Reggio—manual laborers, farmers, not intellectuals—I speak of fatigue and not alienation. Otherwise they wouldn’t understand me. I speak of so many biolche plowed by a tractor in a day, and the fatigue it costs.”
Beret on his head and belly protruding, Della Vecchia was now entering the room. He was breathing heavily, and greeted the group in his disproportionately reedy voice as he took his place to Cagnotta’s right. The fourth commissar was thus Della Vecchia, a real honor. He thought of Amoruso’s ironic remarks about “the Inquisition,” as he called it.
But he wasn’t inclined to irony, not even privately, just as he felt no overwhelming awe. Nor fear. This was not a rebuke for an act of indiscipline. They were criticizing an opinion, and he had the right to defend himself.
Della Vecchia authorized him to continue. The floor was his again.
“If I am speaking to workers, I was saying, I speak of the fatigue produced by labor, a fatigue that should not serve to enrich an owner. And that is a language they understand. We cannot have one Marxism for the educated and another for the people. The people know nothing of alienation, which is a concept. They know that labor means fatigue, which isn’t a concept but denotes concrete wear and tear. Labor costs flesh and blood.”
Magrò-Nasser turned to look at Della Vecchia, a faint expression of pity on his face. He moved a hand as if to say: As you see, that’s all there is to it.
“We’ll pass over that,” conceded Cagnotta, who apparently was leading the discussion. “Let’s go on. Schiassi, what did you want to say?”
Schiassi had been flailing around in his seat for some time. “I detect a far worse error,” he burst out. “Ferranini has not merely mounted a criticism of alienation. He has mounted a criticism of socialism! He has criticized the Marxist promise to give human beings a better life under socialism. Is that true or not?”
Cagnotta and Schiassi, seated alongside one another, were like brothers, with the same piggish eyes, the same hairless round face, the same eyeglasses, but Cagnotta was placid and easy-spoken, Schiassi full of tics and jerks, scowling and taciturn; from time to time he’d cuff an ear with his right hand. Together, in their affinities and contrasts, they were like a stage act, and for a moment Ferranini stared at them, mesmerized.
Schiassi stamped both feet on the floor. He was prompting him to reply. Ferranini thought: My mind is wandering, which means I am relaxed.
And in fact he replied quite calmly, “It’s not true. Socialism promises to free labor. It offers huge progress, and that justifies our struggle: I’ve always believed this and I always will. What I wrote in the article is different: that even when socialism is achieved, we will still have labor. And it will still be harmful, injurious. There’s a text of Marx’s that I consider fundamental, in which he writes: ‘Men make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own making.’ And that is true. The circumstances matter more than the men and history.”
He heard a snort of laughter. Magrò cleared his throat and said, “You’ve forgotten Marx’s great prediction. That is, with the real and universal victory of socialism, the effort connected with work shall be reduced to a minimum.”
His elbows sliding over the table, Della Vecchia leaned forward and pointed his open hands toward Ferranini.
“You,” he said, and it would be his only comment, “you know very well that before publishing a piece of writing of this kind, making such claims, that you should have had it examined, and that there are appropriate organs right in this very building. Why didn’t you?”
“The Press Office took care of it. I thought that was sufficient.”
“In what way ‘took care of it’? Explain.”
“I took the article to the Press Office. On December 24, in the morning. It was still in script, it hadn’t been typed up yet.”
“And are you sure of this?” Della Vecchia insisted, a hint of surprise in his thin voice.
He was sure. It was the truth. “Yes, comrade. And all the details can be checked. I went to the Press Office in the morning, you and I met each other here, and you asked me whether it had been a while since I was back in Ferrara. And I told you I come from Reggio.”
Della Vecchia drew back, making it clear Ferranini should be silent. Later, it seemed to him that Della Vecchia had paid less attention to the rest of the questioning. Ferranini turned toward Magrò and continued his self-defense.
“And so a promise in the sense Comrade Magrò refers to can be inferred from certain passages in Marx, although I believe there has never been a wish to linger over that point, and I think with good reason. Because in truth, labor cannot be abolished. Nor can its onerous nature be suppressed, the fact that it is irremediably fatiguing. Often labor is illness, almost always mortification. In this sense, if you will, ‘alienation.’ The duration of labor can be reduced, but the intensity increases and it becomes more harmful. Let us ask workers on the short week if that is not the case. And if labor is transformed so that it no longer exploits manual skills, it then weighs on different bodily organs. In general, these are even more susceptible to fatigue than the muscles are.” He had spoken with an ease and precision that were unusual for him. He himself was astonished.
Schiassi pinched his own cheek between two fingers, ferociously. “My dear man, but this is the age of technology! This is what you overlook. Technology, even capitalist technology, is on the verge of miracles. Automation!”
“You know,” said Ferranini, “in my opinion the massive propaganda we hear about automation making workers unnecessary is a new, powerful weapon of the ruling class. What’s new about neo-capitalism is not its notions of co-management and worker-shareholders, or its progressive paternalism. What’s new is this new classist mystification. They want to sap and destroy the workers’ movement using the specter of total unemployment.”
“Automation is a fact,” Schiassi thundered. “It’s not a fact,” Ferranini replied, tenacious. “It’s a phantom. It takes twice as much labor to build (and maintain) a halfway intelligent robot as it does to make the products it could supply. I tell you, technology cannot do the impossible. It cannot change the order of things. Labor’s inescapable, along with the wear and tear it brings, and this is an objective consequence of the battle for life, and not only human life, in nature.”
“Come on,” Schiassi sputtered, “everyone knows work is rewarding, that it’s good for a man’s health.”
Now it was Ferranini’s turn to smile. “Sure, the bosses, the capitalists, have always said so. And also that it is ennobling.”
“And so?” said Schiassi.
“I say the reality is somewhat different,” said Ferranini. “The labor of the workers, of the laborers, is not beneficial. Sometimes it is lethal. Nearly always, in one way or another, it hurts. Diminishes, debilitates, dulls.”
“Under a capitalist system.”
He would have liked to say: Any system that puts out the lie “work has its rewards” is a capitalist system. But he held his tongue: Schiassi didn’t seem capable of understanding. It was the others he had to deal with.
Comrade Magrò now intervened on a different point. “You referred to your theory that nature is hostile to life. Remember that the founders of scientific socialism have shown that the same law that governs human and economic affairs and all the rest applies to nature too. You forget that that law, the dialectic, admits no contradiction except insofar as it overcomes contradiction. Further, your thesis is gratuitous. Nature can’t be hostile to life. For the simple fact that nature produces life, which then develops in the successive phases of a process that is the law of dialectics in action.”
Ferranini thought of Comrade Pisani’s elegant style of expression that morning in Turin. Pisani, Magrò: Communists for whom communism was a kind of privileged cultivation. A caste.
Then he saw that Comrade Della Vecchia had written down a few lines on slip of paper, which he now passed to Cagnotta. He understood what the gesture meant: in those penciled lines was their decision. He felt himself stiffen. He thought, I’m going to panic.
Magrò persisted. “Do you know Engels’s contribution to the interpretation of nature? Do you know Stalin’s theories? You do know, at least, that they have given a new orientation to scientific research.”
“Comrade Magrò,” he replied, aware that he was losing his voice, “Comrade Magrò, may I say what I think?”
“Fair enough. This is not a trial, you must speak freely.”
“I would say that Comrade Khrushchev is correct here, that science must be left to the experts. Engels should have done that; it would have been better. At a certain point, Engels decides to philosophize about the reality of the physical world—that is, to do metaphysics. Then again he also argued that as science expanded it would restrict the domain of philosophy. Those precepts seem to me contradictory.”
He slid a hand beneath his jacket to massage his stomach. He had the bad habit of swallowing air when he spoke, and he could feel the pressure on his diaphragm. But panic, no. He spoke smoothly without having to search for words (a problem that sometimes troubled him even with Nuccia), but not too fast, even pausing slightly between one sentence and another. No, it wasn’t panic. He shifted on the chair. Went on.
“Engels considered the natural sciences crucial to the study of natural phenomena. In physics, biology, et cetera. And that is a recognition that in all these fields there is no room for concepts or interpretations, but only for the data that emerge from research. He praised the enormous progress in knowledge due to Darwin and the discovery of evolution. What need is there to pit competing ideas against them? Ideas that are not scientific?”
Facing him on the wall in front, the clock marked 1:20 p.m. A guard opened the door, and from the hall a grave, well-tempered voice with a hint of an accent could be heard approaching, a voice well-known to Ferranini.
The short, stocky figure appeared in the doorway. Behind the clear lenses, those eyes, you could swear, didn’t even register the five men inside the room, all of whom had risen to their feet.
“Della Vecchia,” the voice said, “let’s go.”
Della Vecchia reached the door at a trot, and it was closed. “So therefore,” said Magrò, “the dialectic is to be junked, in your view?” And he turned to look at the clock. A professor in a hurry to finish the exam. Like Comrade Pisani in Turin: professors irritated by the foolish exam-takers, priests in a hurry to lock up the chapel. The caste of the enlightened, faced with presumptuous amateurs like himself, like Mazzola.
But he was not going to give up.
“No, pardon me, comrade, I never said that. The dialectic explains perfectly the history of production and related phenomena—that is, the history of man. But the history of man is not the history of nature, and trying to explain nature using our criteria is anthropomorphism. We human beings are newcomers, our ‘history’ began only yesterday, while this little Earth on which we’re guests has existed for billions of years, and mature life appeared hundreds of thousands of years before us. If we want to believe Engels, we must assert that from the origins of the celestial nebulae to Comrade Khrushchev’s speeches in Red Square, it has been all one, identical process. I say we can be good Communists without believing that—”
“Ferranini!” Cagnotta interrupted. “Make it short! It’s late.”
“Yes, I’m about to finish. I am not a scientist but I have formed an idea, that the inanimate world around us is different from life, different from us, knows nothing of us, is extraneous and hostile. I’m finished now! Let me just say that so long as we live, we will be obliged to struggle to live. Struggle, and therefore be under constant stress. Labor is only one aspect of that stress. The appearance may change, but the substance will always be this.”
Schiassi was thrashing around on the floor in search of his gloves, or his glasses, which had fallen off. He got up, red-faced.
“Leave it alone, Ferranini! And the class struggle? Do you think it’s all pointless?”
“Socialism is essential. If all human beings, all living beings, must struggle, there must be no small minority that sits by and earns a profit from the labor of the others.”
“And you call yourself a Marxist,” an enraged Schiassi snapped back, “with ideas like this?”
“You know what Marx had to say, Schiassi. He said he was not a Marxist. If you prefer, I can say the same. However, six thousand preference votes show that as a Communist organizer back home, somebody trusted in me.”
•
Cagnotta brought down a chairman’s fist on the table.
“Enough! We’ve said what has to be said. We must now issue a communication. To Comrade Ferranini. As follows. You will submit to us the draft of a statement to appear in l’Unità. You will say this: ‘The article published in a well-known review is the result of a slanted misinterpretation of my thinking. Therefore, I do not recognize it as mine.’ Then, next Sunday you will speak at a rally. In Frascati, I believe. You will expand on the same concept, using particulars that will be communicated to you and which you will insert verbatim into your speech. Are we agreed?”
Cagnotta held up the note that Comrade Della Vecchia had passed to him not long before.
“The sanction that the Direzione applies in your case is Reprimand. I repeat: Reprimand. On the following grounds. ‘Rash and inconsistent theoretical position expressed.’ The meeting is over.”
On the street, walking toward where he would have lunch, Ferranini had a thought. An incongruous, sudden thought that came unprepared by internal argumentation. No, he was not going to leave the party and join the Gruppo Misto, the MPs not attached to any of the main parties. No, he would rather resign from parliament on health grounds.
So. It had come to this? What next?
?Next, to begin with, something to eat. Hunger, a nervou
s hunger, sapped his legs. He hailed a taxi. All the same, when he got out at the trattoria, his old trattoria on via dei Coronari, he decided it was best immediately to get down on paper what they had asked him, sentence by sentence, and what he had replied. He took a few sheets of paper from his briefcase and pushed the plate away. Two copies, he thought, and one I’ll send to Fubini. In any event.
He tried to reconstruct the encounter, but he was unable. His mind would not obey him. He’d gone in there, in that place he hadn’t been for a while (because of his need to isolate himself for all those days, to hide), and he’d had the sense that another individual, every bit as alive and real, had emerged in his head. Yes, there was the timid and resigned Ferranini, who could not be happier than when someone showed him where he’d gone wrong. But under fire, another individual took charge. Or another instinct.
The white sheet lay before him. “Dear Fubini,” he wrote, “I’m sure you’re aware of the Ferranini affair. But you haven’t written. I write to you after undergoing a one and a half hour examination at headquarters. To inform you of the following.”
What? That what had most offended him was the indulgent attitude of the examiners? Yes. That was it. What had happened to self-criticism, his vocation for self-criticism? He had fought for his ideas, he hadn’t given an inch. In the end, he understood that he had expected, he deserved, more serious adversaries—intransigent adversaries—and a final sentence. He felt he was a heretic. In a certain sense, yes, he had expected thunderbolts and excommunication. Two days ago, today’s outcome would have been the one he hoped for; now he rebelled against it. His contrition, the angst of those last days, his intention to submit, utterly, today suddenly became a cast-off suit.
“Maybe it was because they wore me out,” he wrote. “But I guarantee you, Fubini, that I can’t believe the business ended up this way. They treated me as if I were half a windbag, half a bonehead student. Why? My objections were quite substantial. (Theoretically, I mean; ideology had nothing to do with it.) The fact is, Fubini, that people here don’t stick to their guns. They wear themselves down in routine. They defend that cuckold Lonati, rich, bourgeois, a profiteer, and throw out Mazzola, poor and honest, an extremist because he’s unable to compromise. The ‘Curia’ (as Togliatti calls it) is full of good people all busy keeping the train on track, signing up as many members as possible, and making the organization, the press, the inspections, the archive, and parliamentary policy run. It’s the continuation of the state of things, dear Fubini, a profitable, secure, restful, pleasant state of things. And meanwhile some isolated voice appears to say: Watch out, it’s not all perfect! Mazzola denounces things blocking progress: bourgeoisification, paralysis, and so on; a reformist-style line of moderation that’s classified as anti-Stalinist. He’s a rebel, a potential danger, get him out of the way. Okay, at least they took him seriously. I, Ferranini, bring up some theoretical contradictions, point out where reality gives the lie to the theory and makes it unrealizable, absurd. But I’m just a dilettante wise guy, a pain in the neck. Not dangerous at all; I simply have to promise to shut up, and if I agree, they’ll pardon me. There you have my impressions, Fubini, and you can decide whether you can or cannot remain my friend. Best, and regards to the Bignami boys and the others.”
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