Delusion & inhumanity.(Book Review)

Richard Drake Apostles and Agitators: Italy's Marxist Revolutionary Tradition. Harvard University Press, 288 pages $45.

Revolution was a topic supremely exercising intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In one country after another, self-selected and self-admiring men and a few women took their inspiration from the French revolution and Karl Marx. They met, corresponded with one another, and concerted their programs, and sometimes their conspiracies, through the Second and then the Third International. As though it were a mere matter of opportunity and organization, they debated who was to be murdered, and when and how, and in what numbers. These debates found consummation in the careers of Lenin and Stalin, and their many imitators, arguably including Hitler. And by means of the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting, as Auden was to put it, people of supposedly sensitive disposition were promoting the execution squad and the armed mobs in the street, thus becoming accessories to the totalitarian crimes of the recent age.

Many have likened the unconditional surrender of so many intellectuals to Marxism to a religious phenomenon, and the passing of time seems more and more to confirm such an explanation. Marx was an improbable deity. For all the wide range of his reading, he was coarse and brutal as a thinker, as in the way he lived. Prescription for him was the end of argument. But he had the one over-arching idea that class warfare is the motor necessarily driving history. Deemed elect by definition, the proletariat was to dispossess and eliminate other classes, whether feudal, bourgeois, or capitalist, all deemed irredeemably non-elect, therefore condemned to death. The idea of class warfare appealed naturally to hard men because it could serve so well to justify a predisposition to murder strong enough altogether to detach them from reality.

Class is only a figment, a reduction of human beings to their material means and occupations, in short one of those vacuous organizing principles that those with a sociological bent like Marx are in the habit of inventing. Marx's one-time friend, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and certainly a hard man, foresaw that the projected "dictatorship of the proletariat" was bound to end in tyranny and corpses. Such admirers of Marx as Friedrich Engels, Eduard Bernstein, and Karl Kautsky also came to have doctrinal doubts, but still class warfare as a sacrosanct engine of politics and history worked its way deep into the European imagination, to become the core value of the Communist Party.

Class warfare took on different glosses in different nations. In Italy, the hard men were formed in a famously historic culture of violence, compounded with genuine revolution against foreign occupiers as well as the turmoil of the Risorgimento. There was also plenty of injustice and inequality for the hard men to latch on to. Naples and the southern provinces were a by-word for human misery.

Richard Drake is an academic who has previously written about the Italian Left, and in Apostles and Agitators he describes in self-contained essays the careers of seven of Marx's principle disciples in Italy, the hard men who perpetuated his influence and built the Communist movement there. Giving his accounts of these leading Italian Marxists, Drake has based himself" almost exclusively on their publications, repotted speeches, and letters. The result is certainly elegant, but limited by its literary approach, not to say stylization. The context in which these hard men operated is left to look after itself. The industrial unrest, peasant uprisings, political crises, wars and other events against which to measure the opinion and careers of these revolutionaries are passed over with a distant nod at most. Also accorded only an oblique mention here and there was what Drake calls a "time-honored play between reform and revolution." He drops the names of the reformers--Filippo Turati, Giovanni Giolitti--on to the pages as though they were self-explanatory. Specialists alone will be able to fill in the blanks, and know that those who advocated reform were both brave and right in their stand. It is only when measured properly against reformers that revolutionaries stand revealed as ...