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Lelio Basso and the peoples of the Third World

    Armando Córdova

    in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos, n. 9 (April 1987)

    It was with great satisfaction that I received the task assigned to me on the occasion of this homage to Lelio Basso, that is, to speak about his contributions to the struggles of the underdeveloped world and to the theoretical clarification of their deeper meaning within the complex reality of the contemporary world. I will add that the reason for this satisfaction is twofold: it is to pay homage and to do justice to an integral revolutionary, who moreover honoured me with his friendship.
    I would like to begin by emphasising that an accurate analysis of both Lelio’s written work and his own history as a fighter for revolution, i.e. how transformative theory and praxis were united in his life, would advise against treating his position as a socialist militant in a developed European country and his permanent consecration to the struggle for the rights and liberation of Third World peoples separately. This statement is based on the fact that Lelio did not conceive of these two aspects of the struggle against capital separately, but as specific inseparable moments of the same socio-historical process. We thus arrive at what constitutes the point of departure and permanent return in Lelio’s work, that is, the sense of totality that in George Lukács’s view is what essentially distinguishes Marxism from bourgeois science. Lukács also suggests to us -and this is important in the analysis of Lelio Basso’s work- that the methodological path towards the construction of a unitary vision of world capitalist society and its historical process of formation and maturation was just indicated in Marx’s fundamental work, Capital, which is why it had to be completed and developed by the subsequent contributions of other Marxist authors among which Rosa Luxemburg’s thought in The Accumulation of Capital occupies a central role. The central thesis that I wish to develop in this brief intervention is that, at least in one important aspect, Lelio Basso left us a decisive contribution to the process of development and deepening of the Marxist concept of totality. And it is precisely from this contribution of his that we can understand in all its revolutionary fullness his struggle for law and for the liberation of our underdeveloped world.
    I will argue my claim by beginning with a brief reference to Marx’s original approach and how this was expanded and superseded by Rosa Luxemburg as a socio-economic vision of the historical process, and then discuss how Lelio Basso, drawing nourishment from this vision, managed to set up a socio-political-cultural vision of the concept of totality, which I have not been able to find with such precision, lucidity and coherence between theory and revolutionary praxis in any other contemporary Marxist.
    In a paper that I was commissioned by Lelio on the occasion of the conference on Rosa Luxemburg, which he organised in Reggio Emilia in July 1973, I said that Marx’s Capital, as the first step in the process of understanding the objective laws that regulate the capitalist regime of production, had to be a model of pure, homogeneous and closed capitalism where there was no place for relations with other modes of production and therefore with social classes different from those of capitalism. In other words, there was no place for the development-underdevelopment contradiction that has played such an important role in the history of contemporary capitalism.
    Referring to this limitation, Lukács said that this view was only ‘a methodological hypothesis from which one had to advance to set the problem more broadly, to set the question of the totality of society’. It is well known that it was Rosa Luxemburg who overcame the aforementioned methodological hypothesis by opening up Marx’s closed model to include the role played by other modes of production subordinated to capital, to reinforce its historical process of accumulation on a planetary scale.
    Thus we arrive at the real vision of the socio-historical totality: the world capitalist system as the global scope of the process of capital accumulation and class struggle that take on a much more complex character than the simple opposition between capitalists and workers, which constitutes the focal point of the original Marxist analysis. It is within this broader conception of the historical process where colonial, semi-colonial and dependent countries find a permanent place in the history of capitalism, not only as an important source of so-called original accumulation, but also as the pole of a different antagonistic social contradiction between capital and wage labour.
    The Luxemburg vision of the economic-social framework of capitalism of his time posed a new problem for the Marxist theory of revolution, namely that of the role that the different strata and classes should play in the struggle against capital for the construction of socialism; a problem that did not exist in Marx’s original ‘methodological hypothesis’ as set out in the Communist Manifesto, i.e. establishing as a certain prospect that of a world that would be progressively homogenised by capital to the extent that it succeeded in transforming all the societies it penetrated into capitalist and all the workers of the world into wage-earners, i.e. proletarians. Hence the fact that the call for revolution could take on the simple formulation: ‘Proletarians of the world unite’.
    It is worth recalling that this simplifying view has been present, either explicitly or implicitly, in European socialist thought since the time of Marx and Engels through the various splits that arose in the Second International and also in Leninist theory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, which argued for the necessity of capitalist homogenisation as the first step towards building in the underdeveloped countries the conditions for their further incorporation into the struggles for socialism.
    I believe that in such a simplifying conception of the historical process lie the roots of the essentially unipolar and Eurocentric character that has dominated revolutionary thought on the old continent ever since; which made it very clear that the leap towards the deepening of the concept of totality, which in the socio-economic sphere had been made by Rosa Luxemburg, had yet to be made in the socio-political-cultural sphere, i.e. the struggles against capitalism were not yet considered as complementary aspects of the same historical process taking place simultaneously in developed and underdeveloped countries. This is an important problem that Lelio Basso posed and resolved in a sober and coherent manner both at the theoretical level and in his revolutionary praxis. At the theoretical level, his starting point was the realisation that the expectations of proletarian homogenisation of the whole world, advocated by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto, had been negated by history, giving rise instead to the development of a process that, described in Lelio’s words: ‘has created deeper distances and more radical disunities between the various parts of the world, with the consequence that, instead of a process of proletarian homogenisation, there is today a profound difference between the workers of the various regions of the globe’. These profound differences are also expressed in different forms of struggle against capital on both sides of the centre-periphery frontier. On the one hand the working class in advanced capitalist countries and on the other the heterogeneous working masses in underdeveloped countries. Analysing the particularities of both situations, Lelio arrives at conclusions that are summarised in a vision of the process of struggle against capitalism that will be radically different from both the simplified vision of the Communist Manifesto and that of two other extremist visions. I refer, on the one hand, to the Eurocentrism that considers the proletariat of the old continent as the only theoretically efficient subject in the struggle against capital, and on the other hand, to the more recent Third Worldist visions that, after noting the recent process of improvement in the lives of the working classes in developed countries, to which the so-called unequal exchange between centre and periphery contributed, concluded by affirming their definitive integration into the capitalist system. The task of overthrowing capitalism thus rested solely on the shoulders of the peoples of the Third World. Lelio confronts the false dilemma that the two extreme visions express and finds an answer that is deeply dialectical, that is, deeply immersed in his conception of the social totality. On the one hand, he rejects the view of the situation of the Western working classes as now devoid of any revolutionary possibilities, stating the opposite thesis: “I believe that those possibilities are growing, but that they are to be sought not in the economic condition but in the political condition and on condition that the revolution is not seen as the simple violent conquest of power, but as a slow process of penetration into the ganglions of capitalist society, of building the elements of the new society, of creating a system of counter-powers until the conquest of a hegemonic condition that allows the overthrow of the existing social relations.”
    On the other hand, with respect to the underdeveloped world, Lelio considers the process of struggle against capitalism not only as a form of radical opposition to the secular economic exploitation by developed countries, but also and above all as a defence of the cultural values of those peoples in which, unlike the European case, ‘capitalism arrives as an external fact, as a product of invasion (whereby) the anti-imperialist struggle takes on the ideology and forms of struggle of national liberations, not only to conquer political and economic independence, but to defend their own cultural values, rich in those communitarian human values that capitalism has destroyed in the West’.
    At the same time, Lelio rejects the possibility of a socialist revolution having its headquarters in the Third World, since this would mean “the definitive liquidation of Marx’s thought that considered the socialist revolution as a product of the countries that had reached the highest degree of development”. As a synthesis of this analysis, Lelio arrives at an integral conception of the struggles against capital conceived as a unitary and indivisible process of the revolutionary actions of the workers’ movement of the central countries and the underdeveloped peoples, both considered as central subjects of the struggles against the capitalist order on a world scale.
    It is on the basis of this idea that he develops his conception of imperialism in its current guise as transnational neo-capitalism that “oppresses the working classes of the West and the underdeveloped peoples in different forms”.
    “Destroying this power,” he continues, “overthrowing this oppression will not be possible either for the western working classes or for the underdeveloped peoples in isolation, because victory will never be complete until the world capitalist market, which is imperialism’s strong point, is destroyed.
    In this all-encompassing synthesis lies the essential strength of Lelio Basso’s thought, to which we must add his vital capacity to exercise a revolutionary praxis in an exemplarily continuous and coherent manner. It is the praxis that led him not only to develop the brilliant international action in favour of our peoples that is known to all, but also to fight in his own country to make the forces of the left understand that they could not be such if they did not exercise forms of proletarian internationalism that would lead them to fuse their actions with those of the peoples of the Third World.
    In this way the Marxist concept of totality reaches its fullness in its most global theoretical signification. If our countries first found a place under the sun of Marxist theory with Rosa Luxemburg’s work, with Lelio’s they became sine qua non subjects in the struggles to overcome capitalism and build socialism as a unique process on a global scale.
    Finally, in order to fully unveil the complex character of the heterogeneity of the capitalist system as a totality, a final step had to be taken: to shed light on the real content of the economic and social class structures in each individual country. Lelio was convinced that this step had to be taken by scholars and his own transformative movement in the underdeveloped countries themselves, starting with a scientific understanding of each concrete historical practice. As a true revolutionary, Lelio understood how far he could and should go.
    Córdova, Armando
    in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos, n. 9 (April 1987)

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