60
PARTISAN REVIEW
after the April Insurrection that drove out the Germans and saw all
the key points, services, material life of Italy's principal city taken over
by a population armed, organized, and officered by radicals? And then?
Nothing. And since that time the tide has been running down steadily
and continuously. The Allies had arrived meanwhile, but that doesn't
explain the extent of the recession in revolutionary potential. Orders
from Moscow? At that time Russia may have wished that nothing disturb
the status quo alignment with the Allies. Probably, more fundamentally,
the iron fact of material economics: to occupy the factories when the
factories are without resources is not to take over the means of produc–
tion; you may sit in them but you can't make them produce. But per–
haps, beneath everything else, simply the failure
in
energy, the unmeas–
ured exhaustion of the people themselves,-which is everywhere the
unchartered surd at the heart of European politics.
European politics is in fact a nest of such surds, and the political
reporting I have read seems to me to have barely scratched the surface.
Put in the novel position of an on-the-scene political observer, I couldn't
avoid the echoes of that great Marxist political journalism of the past
which I had admired, so that I began by trying to see the problems
of Italy against the fundamentally nineteenth-century conception of a
possible
national
revolution-a conception not profoundly relevant to
the present condition of Europe. Day by day reading of its press dis–
abused me of the Socialist Party: it has no clear conception of what
the European tasks of a Left party should be, and it has in its leader,
Nenni, a man of totalitarian mind, albeit anachronistically stupid in
other ways. (Nenni, for example, daliberately distorted the news about
the vote of the French Socialist Party against fusion with the Commu–
nists. In Milan, by the way, the movement towards fusion with the
Communists is stronger than in Rome, which means only
th~t
the Party
in
the
North
is more honeycombed with Stalinists. The strong show of
the Communists in the French national elections will be another push
in the direction of fusion.) A political party must deal
in
immediate
futures, and a really socialist revolution-the basic premises of which do
not exist in Italy, and probably nowhere else in Europe-is strictly a
longterm vision. All Europe is now in the position of a backward nation
-the position of Russia in 1917-and a so-called "socialist" revolution,
within the framework of a national state, would only be the birth throes
of a new totalitarian abortion. (This backwardness is so complete and
paralyzing that only someone living in the midst of Europe's univer–
salized want will remember the sinking feeling on the morning of August
18th of hq.ving opened the paper and read the Potsdam Declaration,
the charter for Russian looting to reduce permanently the level of west–
ern Europe to her own.) The immediate future of Europe is to be made
on the stage of international relations, in breaking down the old inter-
