Piero Basso
in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos, n. 6 (February 1985)
As we begin the work of our first organising conference, I would like to thank the comrades of the Naples section who have ensured its organisation, the Naples City Council who are hosting us in this room and who will later receive one of our delegations, the comrades of the other sections of the League who are taking part in the conference and who will bring their experience, the distinguished guests present, representatives of political and social organisations, of the world of culture and science, of liberation movements, who have agreed to discuss with us the issues at the heart of the League’s initiative. Because this is the aim of this morning’s event: to compare our experience, our choices, our way of doing politics, with the experiences and choices of other forces and other organisations engaged in the same battle for peace and the liberation of peoples. In fact, we do not think that it is possible to tackle the problems of the League’s organisation and way of working in isolation from the objectives and contents of our action, objectives and contents to which the organisation must be aimed, just as we do not think that the elaboration of our political project is possible without the widest possible confrontation of ideas and experiences.
The comrades have entrusted me with the task of presenting the League’s positions here. I do not believe it is possible to speak of the League’s position without mentioning the current difficulties of historically important forms of international solidarity that have, directly or indirectly, influenced the League’s collective consciousness.
Only indirectly, through the experience of many of us, is the influence of the internationalist tradition of the labour movement. This internationalism has written glorious pages of history, from the great international solidarity and boycott campaigns to the defence of the Soviet Revolution and the International Brigades in Spain.
Today, this internationalism is in difficulty: on the one hand, a certain flattening to the positions of the Soviet Union has weighed heavily; on the other, and this is what interests us most, a certain inability to grasp the reality of the Third World peoples’ liberation struggles. The positions of the Second International, against the repression of colonised peoples that prevents the development of trade and outlets for the products of the ‘civilised’ states, are ambiguous, and, closer to home, we are reminded of the delays with which the Communist parties of the metropolises themselves grasped the meaning of the national claims of the colonial peoples and sided with them. The many noble exceptions (among which the work of Louise Michel, almost the only one among the thousands of communards deported to New Caledonia to approach and understand the native population) do not cancel out this overall delay of the parties of the European left, in part also deriving from a dogmatic reading of Marx, in linking up with the great national liberation movement of the peoples of the Third World of the last fifty years.
The development of struggles for independence and the fierce repression that often accompanies them arouses sympathy and new forms of solidarity. The cases of first Algeria and then Vietnam are, from this point of view, exemplary. In both, international solidarity, albeit belatedly, plays an important role and contributes, together with the military victories of the combatants, to growing opposition to the war in France and the United States, finally forcing the two governments to negotiate.
On the other hand, the works of Franz Fanon, Josué de Castro, Samir Amin, René Dumont, Arghiri Emmanuel, Celso Furtado, Gunder Frank and many others contribute to the growth and affirmation of a critical reflection on North-South relations, or rather Centre-Periphery relations, and on the ‘development model’ imposed by the West on dominated countries.
It is in this context that, in the mid-1970s, the League was born, formed in the experience of the first and especially the second Russell Tribunal, on Vietnam and Latin America.
Today even this form of solidarity tends to weaken, as the conquest of formal independence and the weight of the global economic crisis make problems more acute and complex, develop contradictions, and make identifications more difficult. It is no coincidence that this is the moment in which, parallel to the Reagan economic, military and diplomatic offensive (think, for this last aspect, of the attack against the United Nations system, from UNESCO to the Hague court to the innovative ‘law of the sea’), the ‘ideological’ attack against all the achievements of Third Worldist thought of recent decades is developing.
At the beginning of the 1980s, the Lega was part of this movement, and it was so with the prestige and strength that came from its history and the specificity of its commitment to the rights of peoples, when the movement for peace was born and developed impetuously throughout Europe and in Italy. Faced with the danger represented by the proliferation of increasingly deadly and uncontrollable weapons, millions and millions of Europeans of all persuasions took to the streets to demonstrate their desire for peace. However, this unprecedented wave of protest is not only directed against the installation of Euro-missiles, in the East as well as in the West; it is also directed against the role of ‘battle theatre’ reserved for Europe and our subordination to the political and military choices of the two great powers; and it is directed against the expropriation by governments of the right of peoples to decide their own future and even their own survival. Let us not forget that where the people have had the opportunity to express themselves, as for example in the referendums organised a couple of years ago in various states of the United States, the choices have always been radically opposed to those of the respective governments.
We do not hide the fact that the process that led us to place side by side our traditional commitment to the liberation and peoples’ rights movements with our attention to what was new in the peace movement (from the priority given to the relationship between the people’s desire to participate and have an impact to the new and broader mobilising capacities that the movement was demonstrating) encountered some difficulties on the internal ribbon. The ‘explosion’ of the peace movement obliged the League, and not only the League, to reflect more deeply on the relationship between North-South and East-West, between rearmament-disarmament and development-underdevelopment, between military, political and economic choices.
This year is the 40th anniversary of the Yalta conference, which is taken as the starting point for the current division of the world into two spheres of influence, into two opposing blocs; and this year is also the 100th anniversary of the Berlin conference, which sanctioned the partitioning of Africa between the European powers by means of borders drawn at a table that separated peoples united by common ties of ethnicity, culture and history. The juxtaposition of these two anniversaries seems to us emblematic of the link that runs between two orders of problems that are usually considered separate, those of relations between North and South and East and West.
We approached the novelty represented by this great popular mobilisation with a precise background of experience. We knew that the relationship between ‘disarmament and development’, to use a binomial that we make our own, could not simply be the fruit of a great popular mobilisation, because of the complexity of the political, economic and military relations and conditioning that govern the development of events. We were well aware of the experience of the non-aligned countries, which had gone from a purely political and military non-alignment to an active intervention in the search for and proposal of new forms of international relations. Above all, we had with us the baggage of our experience as active militants for the rights of peoples, and the relationship with many liberation movements.
The peoples are at the heart of the Algiers Declaration and our initiative. If the nation is the historical heritage, the common origin in which men recognise themselves, the people is the becoming, it is the self-consciousness that is built in struggle. But the same word, people, is, in all languages, synonymous with subordinate classes as opposed to ruling classes. The right to self-determination cannot only apply to peoples dominated by colonial regimes or foreign powers, but also to formally independent peoples who cannot choose their historical destiny due to the domination of a privileged social class or a government imposed by force.
Our entire Algiers Declaration is permeated with this call for the right to self-determination. Lelio writes: ‘Popular consciousness in the West has moved from a liberal conception, which demanded that the government guarantee the fundamental rights of man and citizen, to a democratic conception that sees the people themselves as the true sovereign, with the right to self-government and self-determination. The same process must lead developing peoples from a purely formal and political independence to total independence… This centrality of the right of self-determination, so often expropriated by ruling groups (and not only in third world countries) is the most important component of our heritage, and we started from it to build the hypothesis we called the ‘non-alignment of peoples’.
This may seem a meaningless formula, because non-alignment, or vice versa alignment, to one or the other bloc, is the condition of a state, not of a people; or it may seem a utopian formula, once it is correctly understood as an appeal to the commitment of the peoples to initiate a policy of non-alignment, considering the profound integration of the peoples of Europe into the two opposing alliances, not only from a military point of view but as a ‘choice of civilisation’.
In reality, the aspiration summarised in the expression ‘peoples’ right to non-alignment’ is neither utopian nor meaningless. More and more voices are being raised, not only by public opinion but also by some western governments, for a commitment to overcome the opposition between East and West, an opposition that is seen not only as a potential threat of war but as a real instrument of domination of the two great powers within their respective blocs, for a policy of disarmament not detached from the search for alternative forms of defence of democratic institutions, for a role of peace and development of European countries.
The call for the participation of peoples, for protagonism, for the re-appropriation of the capacity to self-determine their own future, is also neither utopian nor unfounded. We are aware that the centres of political, economic and military decision-making are becoming fewer and fewer in number and increasingly powerful and distant from the will of the people. We are also convinced that phenomena such as the national liberation movements, such as the renewed struggle against apartheid by the peoples of South Africa, such as the development of the trade union movement in countries as diverse as Poland, the Philippines and Brazil, such as the peace movement in Europe (and such as the same demands for autonomy and local particularities in so many European countries), are all manifestations of the refusal of ever larger layers of men and women to be deprived of any real power of decision, even in countries with stronger democratic traditions. It is no coincidence that one of the themes that the League has placed at the centre of our discussion in view of the tenth anniversary of the Algiers Declaration is precisely that of the possible future incidence of the will and struggles of peoples in determining the destinies of humanity.
Not only do we believe that the right of peoples to non-alignment can become a concrete political objective, but we also believe that this is the road that can give unity to the claims of the peoples of the North and the South. The League’s initiative has always had two fundamental points of reference: on the one hand to give a voice to the ‘mute peoples’, to all those who by foreign domination, dictatorial governments or cultural ‘diversity’ were deprived of the same possibility of expressing themselves, of making their voice heard; on the other hand to search for the links between their and our struggles, to make it understood that this voice is also ours. We believe we have succeeded in fulfilling the first of these two commitments. We all remember Senator Michelini’s words at the opening of the Russell Tribunal: ‘… we represent those who cannot come because they have disappeared from the face of the earth, murdered by the regime. Those who cannot come because they have been maimed; those who cannot be heard because their minds have been closed forever, victims of the torments they suffered. Our voice is that of all those who, having suffered, cannot shout their rebellion and proclaim their struggle…”. To these men, these women, we have always tried to give them a chance to be heard; the only measure for our commitment has been the oppression they were subjected to, their will to free themselves, never the greater or lesser closeness to our ideas or goals.
Perhaps we have been less successful in grasping and presenting, to ourselves and to the public we address, the link between the mechanisms of domination at work here and in Third World countries and the substantial unity of struggles for social and political progress. Today we can and must take a step in this direction. The confrontation between East and West, which for us means a reduction in the spaces of democracy and the threat of possible future extermination, for the peoples of the Third World is already more than a threat but a reality made up of the military occupation of entire countries, either directly by the two great powers or through their allies; of oppressive regimes that can perpetuate themselves only because they are firmly supported by one or the other great power; of wars that, although ‘local’, are no less bloody for the peoples forced to suffer them as well as harbingers of dangers to international stability; of ferocious repression of any liberation struggle whose eventual success is seen as a victory for the other great power. Overcoming the blocs is therefore a vital and immediate requirement for all the peoples of the world. But also on another level, that of social and political development (which is quite different from economic growth for the profit of a few), there is a unity of interests and goals that it is our duty to highlight. Let me again quote Lelio, who in the round table on ‘liberation movements and the workers’ movement’, on the eve of our second congress, recalled how for the Third World countries the entry into the world capitalist market is not so much the affirmation of the wage relationship, of the capitalist factory relationship, but the destruction of the economic-social-cultural fabric of society, with the serious consequences of paroxysmal urbanisation, pollution, unemployment, emigration, deculturation, and alienation that in almost all these countries have replaced the pre-existing equilibriums, which in any case ensured an albeit very modest possibility of subsistence (and of this rupture the vertiginous growth of areas of hunger is the most macroscopic manifestation). And it was from here that he started to emphasise how the rebellion that arises against this destruction does not aim to reconstruct the past, but to use tradition to build a new society, how revolutionary consciousness arises not so much from the wage relationship as from the relationship of dependence, of exclusion from choices, that unites very different social classes in both peripheral and central countries.
If this, which I have tried to outline, is the framework within which our research moves, how and to what extent do the issues we address in the daily practice of League life and our meeting today itself fit into this perspective?
It is superfluous to reiterate here that the broad autonomy of each section of the League, of each of its working groups, allowing the development of different initiatives and at different levels – which in my opinion is an asset and a strength for the League – excludes any rigid planning of activities around one or a few themes. The overall unity of the initiative and research stems from our common experience, from the commonality of the point of view from which we position ourselves to understand events and to contribute to the growth of attention to the rights and liberation of peoples. The right to non-alignment, the search for meeting grounds between the aspirations of peoples differently placed on the international scene are therefore not so much research topics in themselves but ‘keys’ to events, objectives to be sought in the most diverse initiatives. Our organising conference must also be a moment of confrontation on these issues.
Last year, we held two conferences in Rome and Genoa on the subject of development cooperation. In both – despite the differences in the specific topics addressed and the type of participation – we tried to see the role that development cooperation can play in determining a different ‘quality’ of Italy’s international policy. Here too, it is not a matter of utopias: the example of Enrico Mattei’s ENI, unfortunately now distant, reminds us how it is possible to combine the interests of our country with the aspiration of other countries and peoples for economic independence.
In October, we held a quick meeting in Milan on the topics of Europe and non-alignment. On that occasion, too, it was clearly emphasised that our solidarity with the independent peace movements in the countries of Eastern Europe stems not so much from a generic solidarity, albeit an important one, but from the need – vital for us – to bring the experiences of democracy, participation and political struggle in our societies closer to the experiences of planning and self-management carried out, albeit amid contradictions and difficulties, in the other half of our continent.
I am just back from the conference on migration, which took place with great and important participation a fortnight ago in Milan. Solidarity with immigrants, these modern slaves ‘taillables et corvéables à merci’? Certainly; but we think it is important that the conference also highlighted how the presence of immigrants contributes to highlighting contradictions not created by them but all internal to our society, contradictions that concern an expensive school system that always churns out new recruits of unemployed, the parallel growth of unemployment and immigration, backward modes of production that require undeclared labour and which, thanks to this, become increasingly backward, inadequate and inefficient social services, with the conclusion that the condition of immigrants is that of many young people, women, marginalised workers, and that the problems of some can only be solved together with the problems of all.
Let’s go to a big conference on international debt: beyond the technical content of the problem, how can we not see that here too there may be objective convergence of interests between the peoples of the Third World, who are paying heavy tolls of recession and often outright starvation to the rise of the dollar and interest rates, and the interests of our country – if not of the banks – which has everything to gain from the development of trade and commerce?
The road ahead is not easy, just as it is not easy for anyone who shuns easy demagoguery about ‘extermination by starvation’ (which is, unfortunately, very real, and will not be stopped by radical-electoral initiatives). But that it was not easy we have known for some time. We know how slow and arduous has been the path to the affirmation of human rights, from simple civil and political rights to economic, social and cultural rights, up to the current affirmation of ‘solidarity rights’ to peace, development and the environment; a path made up of claims, struggles, of slow affirmation in men’s consciences. Of this struggle we are and want to continue to be modest but not negligible protagonists. For this we need clarity of ideas and organisational strength. The conference we are starting today can give us a contribution in both directions.
On the issue of the non-alignment of peoples, the entire League is actively engaged, in very different forms.
In Argentina and Spain, the search for adhesions to the declaration published in 1984 was actively pursued. Among the most significant adhesions are those of Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize winner, the OSEA in Buenos Aires (coordination of various associations committed to the defence of human rights in solidarity with Argentinean exiles), Justitia et pax in Barcelona, the Spanish Socialist Youth, the youth department of the UGT, the missionary association Seglar in Madrid.
Numerous League leaders have quoted or published the declaration on several occasions: Luis Molta presents the proposal extensively in an article entirely devoted to the right of peoples to non-alignment; Michele Charalambidis discusses it in an article in Pacifism and Third Worldism; Edmond Jouve refers to it extensively in the volume of the series “Que sais-je?” devoted to the rights of peoples.
In Italy and Spain, a debate and discussion has begun on the contents of the proposal. Among the many topics emerging were the problems of neutrality between the blocs and alternative defence, relations between Western and Eastern Europe, trade and ‘aid’ policies, and international debt.
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos, n. 6 (February 1985)