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From the Streets to the State
SUNY series in New Political Science

Bradley J. Macdonald, editor

From the Streets to the State
4

CHANGING THE WORLD

BY TAKING POWER

edited by
Paul Christopher Gray

SUNY
P R E S S
 Cover: Noche en el tiempo (Night through Time) by Fabio Mesa, 2010,
oil on canvas, 51 inches x 55 inches.
Used by permission of the artist.

Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2018 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact

State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gray, Paul Christopher, editor.

Title: From the streets to the state : changing the world by taking power /
edited by Paul Christopher Gray.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series:
SUNY series in new political science | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017034947 | ISBN 9781438470290 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781438470306 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Right and left (Political science)—Case studies. | New
Left—Case studies. | Left-wing extremists—Case studies. |
Capitalism—Political aspects—Case studies.
Classification: LCC JC328.3 .F76 2018 | DDC 320.53—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034947

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Ev pirtûk diyarî ye ji bo çalakvan, rojnamevan û rewşenbîrên li Tirkiyê û
li Kurdistanê ji bo edaletê têdikoşin.
—Kurmanci dialect of Kurdish spoken in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Iran

No kitab seba çalakîker, rojnameger û roşnvîrê ke Tirkîya û Kurdistan de

semedê edaletî teko în kenê rê dîyarî yo.
—Zazaki dialect of Kurdish spoken in Turkey

Bu kitap, Türkiye ve Kürdistan’da adalet için mücadele eden aktivist,

gazeteci ve entellektüellere adanmıştır.
—Turkish

This book is dedicated to the activists, journalists, and intellectuals

fighting for justice in Turkey and Kurdistan.
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Part I: Changing the World . . . and Ourselves: The Radical

Left and the Problems of State Power

Chapter 1. From the Streets to the State: A Critical Introduction 3

Paul Christopher Gray

Chapter 2. Democratizing the Party and the State: Transcending

the Limits of the Left 25
Leo Panitch

Part II: Confronting Leviathan: Parties, Social Movements,

and the Capitalist State

Chapter 3. Building “Parties of a New Type”: A Comparative

Analysis of New Radical Left Parties in Western Europe 43
Xavier Lafrance and Catarina Príncipe

Chapter 4. Watching Over the Right to Turn Left: The Limits of

State Autonomy in Pink Tide Venezuela and Ecuador 65
Thomas Chiasson-LeBel

vii
viii Contents

Chapter 5. Casting Shadows: Chokwe Lumumba and the

Struggle for Racial Justice and Economic Democracy
in Jackson, Mississippi 93
Kali Akuno

Chapter 6. The Radical Democracy of the People’s Democratic

Party: Transforming the Turkish State 119
Erdem Yörük

Chapter 7. Toward a Radical Politics of Rights: Lessons about

Legal Leveraging and Its Limitations 139
Michael McCann and George I. Lovell

Part III: In, against, and beyond the Behemoth:

Projects for “Democratic Administration”

Chapter 8. Market Failures, Failing States: Challenges for

Democratization Projects 163
Greg Albo

Chapter 9. Forging a “Social Knowledge Economy”:

Transformative Collaborations between Radical Left
Governments, State Workers, and Solidarity Economies 183
Hilary Wainwright

Chapter 10. Femocratic Administration and the Politics

of Transformation 207
Tammy Findlay

Chapter 11. Beyond Service, Beyond Coercion? Prisoner

Co-ops and the Path to Democratic Administration 229
Greg McElligott

Contributors 251

Index 255
 Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I thank Adam Hilton, who helped me to conceptualize this
book and suggested its title. I also thank Leo Panitch for funding a one-day work-
shop where the book’s authors presented and discussed early drafts of their es-
says. For hosting the workshop and providing administrative support, I express
gratitude to Carolyn Cross, Margo Barreto, Judy Matadial, David Mutimer, and the
York University Department of Politics. I also appreciate those who presented pa-
pers at the workshop and contributed to the discussions, including Susan Spronk,
Lesley Thompson, Michalis Spourdalakis, Christian Parenti, Bryan Evans, Kristinn
Arsaelsson, and Pete Ramand, as well as Erik Olin Wright, who provided funding for
Kristinn and Pete to attend.
For reading parts of the manuscript, providing feedback, and discussing
the project, I thank Janaya Letkeman, Nora Parker, Genevieve Ritchie, Herman
Rosenfeld, Meghan Sangster, and Emily Stewart-Wilson. Special thanks go to Sam
Gindin, who provided extensive comments, as well as Umair Muhammad, Assya
Moustaqim-Barrette, and the Political Conversation Café for organizing a discus-
sion of the book’s major themes. I also thank the anonymous peer reviewers for
their careful reading of the manuscript and their valuable comments. I thank Julian
Ammirante, who first piqued my interest in the issues addressed in this book. For
providing this first-time editor with excellent advice throughout the project, I thank
Greg Albo. I also thank David McNally for his encouragement. I greatly appreci-
ate Michael Rinella and SUNY Press for their efficiency and support. I also thank
Erdem Yörük for helping me to translate the dedication into some of the dialects of
Kurdistan and Turkey. I happily acknowledge the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung’s New
York Office for providing permission to publish a revised version of Kali Akuno,

ix
x Acknowledgments

Casting Shadows: Chokwe Lumumba and the Struggle for Racial Justice and Economic
Democracy in Jackson, Mississippi (New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York
Office, 2015).
Finally, I am unendingly grateful for the love of my family and friends. Thank
you.
 PART I

Changing the World . . . and Ourselves

The Radical Left and the Problems of State Power

 Chapter 1

From the Streets to the State

A Critical Introduction

Paul Christopher Gray

I
The communist playwright Bertolt Brecht (1977) once wrote, “The individual can
be annihilated / But the Party cannot be annihilated” (29). And yet, the party has
been annihilated. It seems that only the individual remains. A century after the
Russian Revolution, communist parties have become insignificant political forces,
or, as in China, are establishing capitalism. Meanwhile, social democratic parties
everywhere have abandoned any attempt to achieve socialism through gradual re-
forms. At the most, they are resigned to preserving a more humane capitalism, the
permanence of which they do not doubt. Given the declines of communism and
social democracy, what constitutes the radical left today? Among other things, it
includes anyone who believes that capitalism is fundamentally unjust because it has
inherent social inequalities that are the result of imposed historical circumstances,
not permanent natural hierarchies. For that reason, radical leftists argue that capi-
talism can and should be replaced by a much more egalitarian social order. In recent
decades, for certain sections of this radical left, the experiences of state socialism
have not discredited the need for an alternative to capitalism, only the idea that it
can be achieved through taking state power. For them, the annihilation of the party
is not an obstacle, but an opportunity. The spirit of this diverse political tendency
is best captured by the radical left theorist John Holloway (2002) and his slogan,
“Change the world without taking power.”
In general, this anti-power politics believes that fundamental transformations
of capitalist society cannot occur through political parties, electoral politics, and
winning government office. Instead, radical change requires creating and expanding
institutions that are autonomous from the states that they will eventually replace.
These parallel institutions are variously described as dual power, counter-power,

3
4 From the Streets to the State

diarchy, or autonomism. They can include popular assemblies, cooperatives, and

councils in workplaces, schools, barracks, neighborhoods, social centers, and free
zones. This strategy has persuaded significant parts of the radical left, including
within the New Left and the new social movements since the late 1960s; the an-
ti-globalization, alter-globalization, and global justice movements from the 1990s;
the World Social Forums since the early 2000s; and the Occupy and Squares move-
ments from the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Indeed, we can situate Holloway in these shifts. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was
one of the more articulate strategists of taking state power.1 In the 1990s, however,
Holloway became inspired by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, better
known as the Zapatistas, who demanded from the Mexican government autono-
mous control of the land and resources in Chiapas, the country’s southernmost
state. Seizing territory and establishing autonomous municipalities, the Zapatistas
used the surrounding jungles and mountains, and, eventually, protracted negotia-
tions with the central government, as cover for an anti-power strategy that rejects
political parties and electoral politics, which they believe perpetuate a state they
regard as completely illegitimate. Holloway (2002) attempted to turn the Zapatista
experience into a global strategy with his book, Change the World without Taking
Power. Many of the criticisms of twentieth-century state socialism are, of course,
warranted.2 Nevertheless, anti-power politics has existed long enough to show per-
sisting problems that throw into question its ability to change the world.
First, we on the radical left have become increasingly fragmented. Many radi-
cal leftists are quite wary of, or outright reject, the socialist political parties and
programs that attempt to integrate diverse egalitarian struggles into a unified polit-
ical force. This is accused, often justly, of class reductionism, of reducing manifold
oppressions to class exploitation. Other forms of oppression are as integral to capi-
talist society, including patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, racializa-
tion, ethnic persecution, colonialism, and imperialism. Indeed, these oppressions
are mutually reinforcing or co-constituting, because each is transformed through
its complex and shifting relations in the broader social whole such that no form of
oppression is likely to be overcome unless all of them are (Ferguson 2016; Bannerji
1995). Nevertheless, in the name of pluralism, the radical left has given way to a
fractious politics that precludes substantive compromise and integrated activities.
The proposed alternatives to socialist parties are coalitions or networks that are
more than a movement but less than a party. But our coalitions tend to prioritize
an internal focus motivated by suspicion of potential allies. This sacrifices much
of our externally focused action to a new sectarianism (Reed 2000). Influenced by
intellectual movements like postmodernism, post-Marxism, and identity politics,
we recast our fragmentation by describing ourselves as the multitude (Hardt and
Negri 2000). This turns our thorough defeats into false victories. The anti-power
milieu has, in its own ways, uncritically absorbed the rampant individualism of the
prevailing neoliberal capitalism just as surely as have many of the social democratic
and communist parties.
 From the Streets to the State 5

Second, we lack cohesive and long-term strategies. Many radical leftists now
reject the idea of attempting to forge a collective will among different struggles by
developing a single encompassing strategy based in universal principles. This is
criticized as a rigid party line, and, in many cases, rightly so. Instead, they promote
coalitions based in deliberately vague notions of anti-capitalism and the diversity
of tactics in which each participating group is given enough autonomy to choose
their own political activities. This fruitfully challenges narrow conceptions of “the
political,” especially given how often socialist parties become co-opted into the bu-
reaucratic, legal, and parliamentary channels of state institutions. Nevertheless, this
means that our collective political positions and issues must satisfy every participant
as they are presently constituted, which leads to a politics of the lowest common
denominator. Furthermore, in the name of autonomy, our affinity groups neglect
how each of our uncoordinated tactics inadvertently interfere with and altogether
prevent those of others. Thus, the diversity of tactics necessarily becomes a disparity
of tactics. Indeed, the lack of broader accountability “privileges risk-taking, regard-
less of whether the majority believes such risks are worthwhile, effective, or justi-
fied” (Ross 2003, 296). This adventurism further divides us as certain activists aspire
to a kind of Socialism in One Person. Our organizations and strategies must be even
more co-constituting than the many oppressions against which we struggle.
Third, we suppress rather than solve the problem of leadership. Many radical
leftists justifiably condemn the ways in which socialist parties and organizations
have reproduced social inequalities through their internal relations and practices.
In contrast to the often hierarchical and bureaucratic structures of socialist par-
ties, much of the radical left now advocates for a movement of movements (Mertes
2004). Indeed, it is crucial that we decentralize and democratize our political orga-
nizations and spaces. But this usually becomes a horizontalism that rejects formal
leadership. Inevitably, informal leaders emerge. Since they are privileged enough
to be initiated into the unspoken rules of the informal structures, they are largely
unaccountable to the communities who they claim to represent (Freeman n.d.).
Because this new form of vanguardism is covert, it would be all the more pernicious
had it not proven so ineffective.
Fourth, we neglect the persisting importance of the state. Widespread rejec-
tions of the political party as a form of organization are often associated with the
optimistic assertions that, in the age of globalization, nation-states and national
struggles are of diminishing importance. Those who espouse “Think globally, act
locally” correctly expose the constraints on democratic spaces imposed by interna-
tional institutions, trade agreements, currency zones, and new forms of imperialism.
Nevertheless, they often ignore that nation-states are not superseded by, but rather
are the facilitators of, globalization (Panitch 1994, 63). The prevalent depictions of
contemporary capitalism as postindustrial or postmaterialist attempt to transcend
in thought the social relations we have been unable to transcend in practice. The
recent waves of technological and social innovations are staggering, but they remain
developments within capitalism (Albo 2007, 12). An eroding collective memory and
6 From the Streets to the State

the obsession with academic novelty tend to neglect the extent of historical continu-
ity in our era. Indeed, the only things new under the sun are the carbon emissions
that disastrously trap its rays.
Finally, disengaging from the state cedes much political space and operational
terrain to ruling classes. It is true, Holloway’s anti-power politics has helped to cul-
tivate a healthy wariness of co-optation by government institutions. Nevertheless, by
rejecting all electoral politics as a legitimation of the state, much of the radical left
relies, often unconsciously, on an anarcho-reformism3 which can only make radical
demands from outside of the state. Consequently, we allow the atrophy of the col-
lective capacities necessary to transform the state and stifle the development of new
such capacities. Furthermore, there are uncomfortable parallels between anti-power
politics and the dominant neoliberal assertions that public institutions are inher-
ently corrupt and inefficient. Ruling classes have harnessed widespread discontent
with government bureaucracy to promote the marketization, privatization, and
deregulation of state institutions and practices. To the extent that the radical left
engages in the big refusal, we hasten these attacks on the welfare state, redistribu-
tive measures, and social programs. Indeed, the neoliberal hollowing of the state is
complemented by a neo-anarchist Hollowaying of the state. By abstaining from this
terrain of politics, we play the game of the neoliberals “as conscientious objectors
play the game of the conquerors.”4 Surely, we cannot glorify dirty hands, “right up
to the elbows” (Sartre 1989, 218). But if the anti-power milieu has clean hands, it
is only because they hold them above their heads in surrender as the tide of blood
creeps up their legs.
Anti-power politics has proven to be as unable to challenge capitalism from
outside of the state as is any purely party politics from the inside. Transcending cap-
italist society and the state might very well depend on reconciling the best aspects of
both of these equally one-sided tendencies. Indeed, this split has divided the radical
left throughout the history of its resistance to capitalism. We can describe these two
long-standing tendencies as parliamentarism and extra-parliamentarism.
On the one hand, for the parliamentarist tendency, to the extent that the state
is democratic, it embodies universal liberties, not the power of the capitalist class
and elite groups. This tendency argues that the radical left can use this state to fully
realize these liberties in ways that preserve the continuity between the partial de-
mocracy permitted under capitalism and the full democracy allowed by socialism.
For the parliamentarist tendency, the most important factor is a sufficiently strong
and long-lasting governing majority that can fundamentally transform the hin-
drances to full democracy in civil society. Nevertheless, this tendency, historically
exemplified by the social democrats, has been completely absorbed by the state. It
can reform capitalism, but not transform it.
On the other hand, the extra-parliamentarist tendency believes that even the
most democratic of states is essentially controlled by the capitalist class and ruling
groups. Therefore, instead of attempting to win the already existing state power, this
tendency builds alternative institutions in its shadows. Rather than being co-opted
 From the Streets to the State 7

into the inferior forms of merely representative democracy, it creates qualitatively

different forms of participatory, deliberative, and direct democracy. Ultimately, this
tendency envisions long preparations for what will be a sudden and total break with
capitalist institutions, either by violently smashing them or through a more non-
violent exodus from them. Those in the former subtendency, exemplified by the
communists, have typically remained dependent on and lacked real control over the
state that they have “conquered.” Thus, they resort to recruiting the former state of-
ficials and administrators of the ruling classes. This, among other causes, has meant
that they tend to replace the capitalist state with a command economy that is just
as undemocratic, if not more so. Those in the latter subtendency, exemplified by
the anarchists, altogether refuse to operate on the terrain of the state, which, when
it can no longer ignore them, easily crushes them. Despite all of their differences,
these two subtendencies meet a similar fate. They can oppose capitalism, but not
transcend it.5
In recent decades, the balance has shifted toward the extra-parliamentarism of
those who espouse anti-power politics. As is often the case, they point to the short-
comings of parliamentarism without being sufficiently critical of their own attempts
to change the world without taking power. But the pendulum might be swinging to
the other tendency given the emergence of the new radical left parties, the “parties
of a new type,” in Latin America, Europe, Turkey, the Philippines, Tanzania, and
elsewhere (for more on this, see chapters 3 to 6 in this volume). Even Holloway’s
major inspiration, the Zapatistas, have recently announced their intention to engage
in electoral politics (Niembro 2017). Nevertheless, the new radical left parties are
beginning to fall into the problems typical of traditional social democratic parties,
as is illustrated by the ways in which the Syriza government has become co-opted
into the Greek state and the institutions of the European Union (see chapters 2
and 3). These parties do not sufficiently heed the criticisms leveled by anti-power
politics. Indeed, it has been the case historically that both the parliamentarist and
the extra-parliamentarist tendencies bend the stick so far in their own directions
that they turn it into a dull boomerang capable only of glancing the arguments of
the other side before returning to their own. Surely, this is the most narcissistic of
weapons.
In what follows, I will first discuss the shortcomings of purely extra-parliamen-
tary politics. Then I will explore the flaws of the narrowly parliamentarist approach.
Finally, I will introduce some of the general issues of how to begin reconciling these
two tendencies, a project that is tackled much more concretely in the essays that
comprise this collection.

II
There are several, likely insurmountable, practical problems for any attempt to
change the world without taking power. These problems will arise for extra-par-
liamentarists whether they envision nonviolent mass withdrawals from the state or
violently smashing the state.
8 From the Streets to the State

Those who espouse anti-power politics often treat it as a general model that
is applicable to every capitalist country. But when genuinely autonomous institu-
tions have actually competed with their national states for political legitimacy and
sovereignty, it has been under the most exceptional and temporary circumstances. It
occurs amid defeat in war, as was the case for the Paris Commune, the Russian sovi-
ets, and the councils in post-World War I Germany and Austro-Hungary, or defeat
in colonial war, as was the case for Portugal in the 1970s. It also arises in response
to direct attacks by fascist forces, as with Spain in the 1930s. In all of these cases,
parliamentary institutions were nonexistent or much weaker and more corrupt than
is typical (Sirianni 1983, 91–98; Bensaid 2007). In every other case, autonomous
institutions have been tolerated by the central state because they exist in single
neighborhoods or in rurally isolated areas that do not directly encroach upon its
power, as is true with the significant achievements of the Zapatistas. To paraphrase
Wainwright (2006, 52), there is a lot of autonomy on the margins.
Beyond these rare cases, autonomous institutions are confined to local levels
and limited scales. The bulk of their activities have been focused on supervising gov-
ernmental agencies and providing basic necessities, such as food, fuel, and housing.
Where they have grown beyond local levels and when they are established in more
urban, populous, and politically central locations, they are short-lived. Therefore,
these autonomous institutions do not last long enough to show the majority of
people that they are a legitimate alternative to the sovereign nation-state. While the
case of the Russian soviets before the Bolsheviks took power is an important inspi-
ration for projects to develop parallel institutions, it is even more exceptional. It was
aided by the collapse of Russia’s outdated state, its relative isolation from the rest
of Europe, and the length of time that its “dual power” organs lasted, which was
comparatively lengthy, but still less than a year (Sirianni 1983, 109–10, 117). Even if
similar conditions emerge again, there are other profound obstacles to anti-power
politics.
The most frequent criticism of attempts to build autonomous institutions is
that, wherever they gain much significance, they will face constant state repression
(Bensaid 2006, 10; Callinicos 2006, 63–64). This not only includes outright coer-
cion. It also has more subtle forms. Agencies comprised of volunteers who deliver
important services like health and education are harassed by the state over things
like licensing. Furthermore, the proposed alternatives to political parties, such as
unions, workers’ councils, and neighborhood councils, have often benefitted from
the existence of sympathetic political parties (Sirianni 1983, 111–13). These can cre-
ate supportive legislation and hold back the coercive state apparatuses. Nevertheless,
even if state repression is somehow overcome, there are a number of other signifi-
cant shortcomings.
If autonomous institutions grow beyond the local scale, they can not mobi-
lize the resources necessary to meet society-wide needs. Consequently, these insti-
tutions face permanent fiscal crisis. Governments will not grant taxation powers
to organizations that are not connected to existing state institutions. It would be
 From the Streets to the State 9

impossible to organize a disciplined withdrawal from tax collection, not only be-
cause this would be difficult to coordinate but also because of widespread fears of
interrupting the public services upon which workers, the poor, and the marginalized
especially depend. Furthermore, it would be quite difficult for autonomous insti-
tutions to coordinate and fund their activities beyond local scales for an extend-
ed period of time. Among other things, they would have to contend with elected
municipal governments that control services above the local level and are backed
by fiscal reserves from provincial, state, and national governments (Sirianni 1983,
112–14; Albo 2007).
This proved difficult even in Red Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s and Red
Bologna in the 1970s, where a variety of councils were supported by radical left mu-
nicipal governments. For example, when Bologna dramatically expanded schooling
and established parent-teacher councils, the central government in Rome interfered
by allocating a mere 25 teachers for its afternoon schools in 1972–73 compared to the
2,000 it sent to Milan in 1974 (Jäggi, Müller, and Schmid 1977, 124). Furthermore,
some radical left governments have provided conditional institutional and financial
support to civic initiatives like councils and services while also prioritizing their
autonomy, even from these left governments themselves. Take, for example, the ways
in which the Australian femocrats in the 1970s and the Greater London Council in
the 1980s supported and greatly expanded women-led childcare cooperatives and
rape crisis centers (see chapters 9 and 10).
Any attempt to fundamentally transform capitalist society also needs to form
alliances with state workers, especially the front-line providers of public services
(Therborn 1978, 279–80). But attempts to create autonomous institutions on large
scales will not win support from otherwise sympathetic state workers. Since their
jobs depend on the public sector, they “would support the democratization of ad-
ministrative apparatuses, but hardly their decomposition” (Sirianni 1983, 114). It is
not merely that disaffected state workers are capable of wide-ranging sabotage of
revolutionary efforts. More importantly, public sector unions can also be positive,
active participants in democratizing state structures and empowering egalitarian
social movement and labor movement organizations (see chapters 8 to 11). Take,
for example, Toronto immigration officers in the late 1980s. Fed up with the lousy
services they were forced to provide, they formed coalitions with immigrant rights
groups, and, in coordination with them, engaged in a work-to-rule campaign for
more resources, boycotted overtime and excessive caseloads, and saw only as many
clients as could be reasonably served during the working day. The joint picket lines
of these producers and users of public services garnered such significant community
support that the government was forced to respond by hiring 280 new immigration
officers (see chapter 11). Indeed, establishing councils between the providers and
users of public goods would go beyond specific reforms and begin to transform the
state.
Another reason why alliances must be formed with state workers is that
autonomous institutions have never managed highly integrated and complex
10 From the Streets to the State

administrative systems above local scales. The knowledge necessary to plan and
run industry on national scales cannot be cultivated merely through improvisation
(Sirianni 1983, 118). Furthermore, a sum of autonomous institutions linked by a
system of mandates likely cannot develop a collective will, a spirit of compromise
within the bounds of a generally recognized solidarity. For example, during popular
participation in urban planning, if a town opposes having a waste-collection center
that they would rather pass off to their neighbors, this requires some form of cen-
tralized arbitration to distribute benefits and burdens between legitimate interests
(Bensaid 2007). Indeed, this would be crucial for, among other things, ending the
environmental racism that locates undesirable facilities in racialized communities.
During the crucial early period of any revolutionary transition, it is likely that
there would need to be in place an already existing nation-wide infrastructure. This
long-term and widespread cultivation of democratic capacities, of both the skill and
the will, is crucial not only to prevent major societal disorganization and disintegra-
tion. It is also necessary to account for the fact that, when autonomous institutions
reach a certain scale, they have often prioritized their own survival and become quite
competitive with each other. Take, for example, the Russian case: “The soviet system
was continually plagued by problems with credentials, forged mandates, co-opta-
tion of outsiders into executive organs, violation of formal divisions of authority,
highly uneven representation due to the lack of consistent formal regulations, and
the disproportionate influence of the more powerful, strategically located, or po-
litically favored factories, unions, garrisons, and local soviet bodies” (Sirianni 1983,
104–5). In other similar cases of dual power—such as the Spartacists in Germany,
the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in Spain, and the Hungarian council gov-
ernment—these problems occurred to the extent that they attempted to displace the
existing state institutions. During revolutionary transitions, this has often provoked
attempts to counter the widespread disorganization and competition through au-
thoritarian centralization (Sirianni 1983, 106–7, 117–18). Thus, autonomous institu-
tions are susceptible to becoming precisely that which they intend to avoid.
These are some of the major problems that will confront any attempt to change
the world without taking power. Louis Blanc’s (1964) refrain about the state remains
true: “Not to use it as an instrument is to encounter it as an obstacle” (232). The
risks of potential co-optation inherent to the struggle for public office are profound,
but they entail fewer difficulties than altogether refusing to operate on the terrain
of the state. This attempt to cut the Gordian knot forgets that the state holds the
sword. It substitutes an impossible strategy for one that is merely excruciatingly
difficult.
Holloway (2010) neglects these obstacles because he makes at least two theo-
retical errors. The first occurs when, in his discussion of the dangers of co-opta-
tion, what he says about entering the state is also true of every other significant
institution in capitalist society, including the spaces he affirms as legitimate sites of
struggle. For example, he explains that the state hierarchically separates those who
create the authoritative ideas and those who merely carry them out. Therefore, we
 From the Streets to the State 11

should disengage from the state because it converts the innate human capacities for
creative activity (what Holloway calls “power-to”) into the authority of some over
others (what he calls “power-over”). “It is absurd,” Holloway asserts, “to think that
the struggle against the separating of doing can lie through the state, since the very
existence of the state as a form of social relations is an active separating of doing. To
struggle through the state is to become involved in the active process of defeating
yourself ” (214). Nevertheless, this “separating of doing” is no less true of capitalist
production in which workers are separated from creative control over their work by
capitalists who own and discipline their labor power. And yet, Holloway does not
think that we should disengage from workplace struggles (156). Otherwise, how can
he praise the struggles of Liverpool dockworkers or migrant workers? The same can
be said of other institutions that have often been crucial for reproducing capitalist
society and yet remain essential terrains for democratic struggles, such as families,
schools, and healthcare.
These inconsistencies ultimately stem from Holloway’s second theoretical
error: he contradicts himself on the matter of functionalism. This is the theory that
state actors pursue specific policies and strategies because the state’s function is to
reproduce society as a whole. Initially, Holloway argues that, although the state is
a capitalist state, “it cannot be assumed, in functionalist fashion, either that every-
thing that the state does will necessarily be in the best interests of capital, nor that
the state can achieve what is necessary to secure the reproduction of capitalist so-
ciety” (2010, 94). He wisely rejects functionalist explanations of the state. They are
a form of circular reasoning. These explanations argue that the capitalist state pro-
motes certain policies because they functionally reproduce capitalist society, and
that these policies functionally reproduce capitalism because they are supported by
what is obviously a capitalist state. This is not particularly illuminating. Every state
action that does not lead to the total collapse of capitalism is deemed functional
to capitalism (Albo and Jenson 1989, 209n55). And yet, when Holloway asks if we
should attempt to win state power, he replies, “The state is a process of reconciling
rebellion with the reproduction of capital. It does so by channelling rebellion into
forms which are compatible with capitalist social relations” (2010, 232). Holloway
thereby resorts to functionalism when he argues that we should disengage from the
state because it unavoidably channels anti-capitalist struggle back into the repro-
duction of capitalism.
Even if this channelling is not inevitable, however, we must nonetheless admit
that socialist political parties have often become thoroughly absorbed by the state.
Before we can attempt to reconcile the salvageable aspects of both the parliamenta-
rist and extra-parliamentarist tendencies, we must first detail the shortcomings of
previous strategies for changing the world by taking state power.
III
Many on the radical left reject parliamentary politics because they believe that it will
inevitably lead to what is called the social democratic trap. In general, this is the idea
12 From the Streets to the State

that, when socialist parties achieve political power during periods of social crisis,
their attempts to transform capitalist society through the state often do little more
than improve living conditions under capitalism. When leftist governments fail to
transition from reform to revolution, they fall into the social democratic trap by
“carrying out ‘better than the right’ the same policies as the right” (Gorz 1968, 114).
Ultimately, these socialist governments save capitalism from itself.
The misgivings of many radical leftists are certainly warranted. The parliamen-
tarist tendency, throughout its history, has been regularly co-opted into the standard
practices of state institutions. Amid the onset of World War I, the socialist parties of
the Second International did not call for proletarian solidarity and revolution across
nations but, rather, voted to support their respective countries in the hostilities. In
the post-World War II era, social democratic parties suppressed their members’ mil-
itant demands and struggles for greater popular control of workplaces and banking
institutions. Most recently, the Syriza government in Greece accepted the austerity
memorandum of the European Troika (the European Commission, the European
Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) despite the unprecedented op-
position in the national referendum of July 2015 (see chapters 2 to 4).
Indeed, the parliamentarist tendency has fallen into this social democratic trap
so often that we cannot explain it merely as the betrayal of socialism by individual
socialists. But neither can we explain it simply in terms of an abstract institutional
logic of the state. Rather, our explanations must strike the right balance between, on
the one hand, the systemic obstacles to transforming capitalist society and, on the
other hand, the failure of socialist strategies to sufficiently account and prepare for
these obstacles amid circumstances over which we have had some control.
In the standard liberal theories, modern society is comprised of a plurality of
interests between which the state is a more or less neutral arbiter. If the govern-
ment tends to favor certain interests more than others, it is because those interests
have organized into interest groups and policy networks capable of mobilizing the
citizens, resources, and practices necessary to influence government. Conversely, the
best critical theories of society and the state contend that capitalism is the scene of
systemic inequalities between different classes and groups (Clarke 1991; Aronowitz
and Bratsis 2002). Ours is a capitalist society because a minority of people, the capi-
talist class, has private ownership and control over capital, the property necessary
for production, including the land, worksites, instruments, materials, financial as-
sets, and labor power. The capitalist class also attempts to maintain its rule through
mutually reinforcing alliances with those privileged groups whose power is based
on co-constituting forms of oppression. Furthermore, this ruling bloc absorbs and
cultivates representatives and leaders from the upper strata of oppressed groups.
For these reasons, the government is not simply a state in capitalism, but rather it is
a capitalist state. It is systemically biased toward the capitalist class and allied elites
(see chapters 3, 4, and 7).
The capitalist state has three levels of bias (Wright 1994, 93).6 Each successive
level is an ever deeper trench by which the ruling class defends its control over the
 From the Streets to the State 13

state. It is only when democratic socialist governments and movements begin to

traverse the final trench that we will have any chance of fundamentally transforming
capitalist society. Until that point, no matter how profound our achievements, we
remain within a capitalist state.
The first level of bias is interpersonal. Most state officials come from the capi-
talist class or have been recruited and educated by its organizations: the private
schools, the exclusive clubs, the corporate boards, and the philanthropic initiatives.
Therefore, state officials tend to share social networks and worldviews. Whereas the
children of the working class are raised, in the ruling class they are groomed.
The second level of bias in the capitalist state is institutional. Getting elected
and influencing those who have been elected typically require significant financial
resources. Given that the capitalist class has private control of productive property,
they and their allies have more of these than other groups. Furthermore, the capital-
ist class has the institutional connections and the insider’s knowledge of state struc-
tures and governmental practices that come from the electoral machines and policy
networks, the elite lawyers and expert advisors, the seasoned lobbyists and senior
bureaucrats, and the discreet back channels and decadent fundraisers. As Levins and
Lewontin (1985) note, “Hundred-dollar-a-plate dinners sustain the body politic, not
the body physical” (262). Indeed, that figure, laughable by today’s standards, would
have to be adjusted not only for inflation but also for the ever-higher concentration
of wealth.
The interpersonal and institutional levels of bias within the capitalist state are
significant, but they cannot sufficiently explain the social democratic trap. For this,
we must turn to the final trench. The third level of bias in the capitalist state is sys-
temic. In order to continually reproduce itself, the state requires tax revenues. These
are derived from incomes, which depend on continuing investment and economic
growth. Since the capitalist class controls most economic production as their own
private property, they are free to refrain from investing when they deem the cir-
cumstances unprofitable, unpredictable, or politically unpalatable. When a govern-
ment attempts reforms that encroach upon the power of the capitalist classes, they
often respond with capital strikes, the refusal to reinvest profits in continuing and
expanding production. They also engage in capital flight by pulling their financial
resources out of the country and reinvesting them elsewhere. This lack of private
investment by the capitalist class reduces economic growth, incomes, and tax rev-
enues, which thereby hinders the ongoing activities of government (see chapter 4).
That is why, systemically, the state is a capitalist state.
This is the paradox of socialist governments in capitalist states. They are typi-
cally brought to power by alliances within and beyond the working classes between
the exploited and the oppressed. These socialist governments initiate their promised
reforms, such as expanding redistributive measures and the welfare state, affirmative
action and other equity policies, environmental regulations, nationalization of stra-
tegic economic sectors, public control of financial institutions, and so on. Then, the
capitalist class reacts with, among other countermeasures, investment strikes and
14 From the Streets to the State

capital flight. This reduces the funds by which socialist governments can imple-
ment their programs and provokes society-wide economic downturns and crises
that hurt those with the least resources. When these burdens become too much to
bear, the diverse constituencies of workers and their allies vote their own parties
out of office (Bowles, Edwards, and Roosevelt 2005, 521–23). Socialist parties have
often stumbled upon the first two trenches of the capitalist state, but, for socialist
governments, the third trench, which is by far the deepest, is the classic source of
the social democratic trap.
Any democratic socialist government must recognize from the outset that, be-
cause productive property is privately owned, substantive reforms will necessarily
provoke confrontations with the capitalist class and economic crises. Governments
can pressure capitalist enterprises but cannot force them to invest against their
interests. It is impossible to transform capitalism while cooperating fully with it
(Panitch 1986, 79). If radical left governments are unable or unwilling to follow
through with the conflicts that their initial successes will inevitably ignite, they will
create their own obstacles (Gorz 1968, 118). Therefore, democratic socialist par-
ties and movements must campaign for government office by explicitly promoting
their intentions to use these crises to extend and deepen democratic institutions and
practices in the economy and broader society. When corporations engage in invest-
ment strikes and capital flight, they annul their responsibilities over the economic
production upon which the whole society depends to meet our needs. This, among
other things, justifies bringing that otherwise unused productive property under the
public control and, more importantly, the democratic control of workers and their
communities (see chapter 4).
The only way to traverse the third trench is through simultaneous challenges
to the multiple sources of power of the capitalist classes and ruling groups. This
not only requires democratic transformations of the state through which they wield
political coercion. We must also confront their systemic sources of power in other
significant social spheres, including our families, communities, and economies. In
particular, it requires challenging their private ownership of productive property
through which they wield economic coercion against a state even when they do not
directly control it as the ruling political party. We cannot defer a strategy for ap-
propriating and democratizing privately owned productive property. It must inform
our practice from the very beginning, because transforming the systemic biases of
the state will require not merely parallel but interconnected transformations in the
state and in the broader society.
Take, for example, campaigns for free and accessible mass transit. There are
numerous reasons why they embody the kind of politics that could bridge the ex-
tra-parliamentary and parliamentary divides. These campaigns can unite diverse
groups in common struggle, especially those who are most dependent on public
transit, including women, people of colour, youth and the elderly, people with dis-
abilities, and the working class. Furthermore, since mass public transit is much
more energy efficient and ecologically sustainable than many other forms of travel,
 From the Streets to the State 15

it is crucial for the major collective issue of our time, climate change. Indeed, be-
cause these campaigns require a broad range of knowledge, skills, and actions, they
will result in the disparity of tactics unless they are connected to a broader political
strategy. Establishing mass transit could otherwise have unintended consequences,
such as gentrification. These campaigns, therefore, need to go beyond attempts to
address the overlapping interests of a broad and diverse patchwork of groups. Rather,
the strategy must be genuinely co-constituting. Identifying and combatting not only
each and every oppression but also their dynamic enmeshing and blending is the
condition of overcoming all oppression (for particular case studies that emphasize
this, see chapters 5 to 7 and 9 to 11). Free and accessible mass transit will also
strengthen and expand the public sector (see chapter 9). Eliminating transit fares
removes the policing function of transit workers and shifts public services from
disciplining users toward providing for social needs (see chapter 11). Furthermore,
these campaigns could foster councils between the providers and users of public
services, between the unions of transit operators and transit riders, thereby bridging
the struggles of social movements, labor movements, and state workers.
In fact, these kinds of political strategies not only offer a tangible and relatively
immediate campaign, but, if the dramatic expansion of public goods is combined
with the democratization of their production, distribution, and consumption, they
also point toward longer-term goals and strategies. For example, when Lisbon tran-
sit workers went on strike, instead of withholding their labor, they refused to accept
fares. This “good work strike” not only put financial pressure on their government
employer, but also won the support of the public who relied on the service. Indeed,
these transit workers offered a glimpse of a totally decommodified future, a vision
of transcending capitalism and the state. Furthermore, developing mass public tran-
sit will not only require progressive taxes, but also industrial strategies based on
the green transition of our economies. The scale of these transformations demands
political parties in government with mandates to nationalize and democratize key
industries and financial institutions. This could expand public participation in the
economy through long-term planning mechanisms that are based on collaborations
between public banks and enterprise boards. For example, certain regions could
convert their declining automobile industries toward producing mass transit infra-
structures and vehicles. This will bring sustainable and socially useful jobs to areas
devastated by deindustrialization and high unemployment, including those places
that have become the focus of far-right, xenophobic movements and parties. Finally,
egalitarian attempts to win and fundamentally transform state power are likely pre-
mature unless there have also been massive campaigns for workers’ control that
develop the capacities, strategic relationships, and confidence necessary to democ-
ratize production on a mass scale.7
The parties of a new type are promising because, having emerged from egalitar-
ian social movements, they have the potential to build interconnected organizations
and struggles that can challenge the capitalist class and its allies at their multiple
sources of power in the realms of government, production, and social reproduction.
16 From the Streets to the State

Nevertheless, we must learn from the recent experiences of Syriza whose connec-
tions with the solidarity movements have dwindled since forming the government
in Greece. Take, for example, the scene in Mexico, which is quickly becoming a mi-
crocosm of the familiar splits within the radical left between its extra-parliamentary
and parliamentary tendencies. Separate from the Zapatistas, a party of a new type
is emerging. The Movement for National Renewal (MORENA) is a pluralist party
of egalitarian social movements that has a horizontal, grassroots structure. By 2014,
MORENA had thirty-four thousand committees in twenty-five hundred munici-
palities. Its leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who came very close to winning
Mexico’s presidential election in 2006, has an extremely tense relationship with the
Zapatistas (Niembro 2017). It is true, Zapatismo has confronted some of the limits
of an extra-parliamentary politics. Nevertheless, MORENA should be equally wary
of the limits of parliamentarism. According to Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, a prominent
member and the editor of its free newspaper,
MORENA’s platform represents a substantive change, an alternative
project for the nation, an in-depth vision of radical transformation,
but the electoral reform and the economic and political programs are
more moderate. It doesn’t foresee the expropriation of large companies
or the transformation of the market economy but it does intend to cre-
ate a counterweight and strengthen social economy, social ownership,
and the agencies of the state to change the direction of the economy.
Finally, it must be a decision of society how deep the change must be
and to which extent, but it isn’t the political decision beforehand from
a vanguard that decides to impose a change, either socialist or closer to
capitalism. (quoted in Ross and Rein 2014, 24)
Of course, revolutionary initiative must come from the majority of people, not
a vanguard: “It is better to have no socialism than an undemocratic form of it”
(Glaser 1997, 157–58). Nevertheless, even if deferring the question of appropriation
is more conducive to recruitment and party unity in the short term, a MORENA
government that is able to “change the direction of the economy” will provoke con-
frontations with the capitalist class that will likely cause economic crises and sig-
nificant burdens on the party’s members and supporters. Ruling classes will claim
that these crises are not the result of systemic inequalities but of an incompetent
utopianism that shows once again that radical left governments cannot manage na-
tional economies. If we do not prepare for this from the outset and thus get elected
on misguided pretenses, we will prove the ruling classes right.
Despite the disagreements between the extra-parliamentarist critics and the
parliamentarist supporters of taking power, both tend to conflate it with taking of-
fice. Indeed, Holloway does not explain what is entailed by taking power as distinct
from merely taking office. Therefore, he does not establish the strongest possible
argument for his opponents’ theory before trying to refute it. What, then, is the
distinction between taking office and taking power? Whereas taking office only
 From the Streets to the State 17

surmounts the interpersonal and institutional biases of the state, taking power be-
gins to transform its systemic bias. This requires a series of interconnected democ-
ratizations in both the state and in the broader society. Otherwise, the lack of it in
one realm will leave a bastion of strength from which ruling classes can ultimately
stifle it in the others. It is not that we must move from the streets to the state, but
that our movements must extend from the streets to the state. This is why we must
try to reconcile the best aspects of both the parliamentarist and extra-parliamenta-
rist tendencies.

IV
Since we must challenge the ruling classes and groups on various fronts, both in the
state and in their manifold sources of power in other significant social spheres, the
radical left cannot simply bring together the extra-parliamentary and parliamentary
tendencies. We must genuinely reconcile them. Beyond Holloway’s aforementioned
theoretical mistakes, this is where he makes a fundamental strategic error. Holloway
notes that many current political movements, including the pro-Zapatista move-
ment that he extols as a model, feature collaborations between those who support
and those who reject engaging on the terrain of the state:
This seems to me to be good. Any movement for radical change will be,
and should be, a dissonant mixture of positions and forms of organisa-
tion. My position is not at all one of ultra-left sectarianism: I understand
my argument as an argument within a movement, not as an argument
to divide or exclude. The aim is not to create a new Correct Line. It is
precisely because the movement is a broad one, and because we are all
confused (whatever our degree of ideological purity), that it is important
to discuss clearly. The fact that those who channel their struggles towards
the state combine with those who reject the state as a central point of ref-
erence should not prevent us from saying clearly that we should be aware
that there is an enormous tension between the two approaches, that the
two approaches pull in opposite directions. (2010, 236)
In this, Holloway affirms what we can call a diversity of strategies. He merely points
to the tension without attempting to resolve it. This will have fairly obvious con-
sequences in the long term. If parties and movements remain satisfied with this
tenuous balance, if they do not attempt to develop a collective will and a common
strategy among their members and allies, then there will be no process of mutual
transformation. Consequently, their extra-parliamentary and parliamentary wings
will persist in their equally one-sided tendencies.
On the one hand, the extra-parliamentary wing will likely fail to develop the in-
fluence and the democratic mechanisms within the political party that are necessary
to check those party leaders and members who would attempt to take government
office in premature, opportunistic, or strategically problematic ways. Furthermore,
they will likely remain detached from political activities within state institutions,
18 From the Streets to the State

which can perpetuate a moralizing purity that condemns as co-optation any of the
party’s maneuvers and compromises, even those that genuinely pave the way for
further democratizations. Finally, there will not be enough actively engaged party
members who remain outside of the state offices and ensure that the party and the
affiliated organizations have a life independent of the government (see chapters 2
to 6). Therefore, the extra-parliamentary wing will prevent itself from becoming,
as Lafrance and Príncipe put it, a “loyal opposition” to the party-in-the-state (see
chapter 3). They will be unable to push those party-members who are the elected
officials, advisors, administrators, and state workers toward ever-greater democrati-
zations of the state.
On the other hand, the parliamentary wing will likely become distant from
their allies in the party and the movements as well as from their broader constituen-
cies. Their positions within the party will strengthen, making it unbalanced, because
they hold the promise of getting elected and thereby access to state resources and in-
fluence. This can only intensify the myopia of those party members within the state
who are constantly attempting to navigate the institutional balance of forces, make
principled compromises, engage in necessary horse-trading, and win the crucial
votes. Since the parliamentary wing will be those who most frequently and directly
interact with state officials, unless there are counterweights within their own party
and affiliated organizations, they are likely to be increasingly influenced by this gov-
erning elite. Indeed, they will begin to listen to the state administrators and advisors
who say, “Wonderful, Minister, you’re putting all this Party thing behind you, and
really working for the Department—that’s so fine of you” (Crossman 1972, 63). As
they narrow their horizons, they could begin orienting the party toward a national
interest above the struggles between classes and social groups. Consequently, they
will tend to prioritize moderation and social harmony rather than the agonistic so-
cial conflicts that are necessary for egalitarian change. Furthermore, they will tend
to accept the existing structures of the state, overemphasize parliamentary debates
and timetables, and focus mobilizations around the next election (Panitch 1986, 92).
All of this will perpetuate the divisions of labor between, on the one hand,
the parliamentary organizations of the party and, on the other hand, their allied
organizations in the egalitarian labor movements and social movements. Struggles
in workplaces, communities, and families will not be politicized in ways that can
transcend their fragmentation and, indeed, their sectionalism. Meanwhile, gov-
ernment reforms will be achieved through elite power brokerage in bureaucratic,
legal, or parliamentary back channels. This stifles attempts to bridge these divides
by opening the conceptualization, deliberation, and implementation of radical re-
forms to a more active popular control in ways that develop our democratic capaci-
ties (Magri 1970, 116, 127–28; Hammond 1988, 259–60; Panitch 1986, 64). Indeed,
we must go beyond a more equal balancing between the extra-parliamentarist and
parliamentarist tendencies, which, “in practice, might boil down to a compromise
between ‘below’ and ‘above’—in other words, crude lobbying by the former of the
latter, which is left intact” (Bensaid 2007). Mutual transformations toward a more
 From the Streets to the State 19

collective will and common strategy require the interpenetration of these elements.
We are in the wake of two successive eras from which emerged two differ-
ent forms of political organization, neither of which have proven adequate. The
industrial age, which gave us Lenin’s “party of iron,” was pervaded by these metallic
metaphors, including Goethe’s “great, eternal iron laws,” Marx’s “iron laws of his-
tory,” Lassalle’s “iron law of wages,” Bismarck’s “through blood and iron,” Weber’s
“iron cage,” and, of course, Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy.” Conversely, the fluidity
of our so-called postindustrial age is saturated with a more liquid language, in-
cluding Berman’s “perilous flow of modernity,” which floods into Foucault’s post-
modern preference for “flows over unities,” Barthes’s “power flows,” Deleuze and
Guattari’s “economy of flows,” Castells’s “spaces of flows,” Leitch’s “local effects and
global flows,” and Hardt and Negri’s “global informational flows.” This culminates
in Holloway’s praise for anti-power politics as the “social flow of doing” (2010, 28).
In his diversity of strategies, however, the hierarchy of the party and the horizon-
talism of the movement of movements sit uneasily beside each other. Instead of a
genuine synthesis between the best aspects of both, this only builds the solid struc-
tures of the party of iron in the dynamic current of the flow of doing. But then the
structure corrodes and collapses into water that has become too toxic to nourish.
This combines the worst of both worlds.
We are caught between, on the one hand, the conviction that the party can-
not be annihilated, only the individual can be annihilated, and, on the other hand,
the aspiration for more than a movement, less than a party. But network politics,
coalition-building, and a movement of movements are as one-sided as is any party
that would attempt to become the only significant base of struggle. The nonsectar-
ian interactions between the parties of a new type and the egalitarian social move-
ments demonstrate what our principle could be: More than a movement, more than
a party.
We should not be too quick to settle accounts with twentieth-century social-
ism. Furthermore, we require historical, empirical, and comparative analyses of the
persisting interpersonal, institutional, and systemic constraints on challenging and
transforming state power and capitalist society in the twenty-first century. After nu-
merous theorists criticized Holloway for failing to sufficiently ground his anti-power
politics in historical analysis, he responded, “Spit on history, because it is the great
alibi of the Left, the great excuse for not thinking. Make any theoretical or political
argument about revolution and the response of the Revolutionary Left is to bring
you back to 1902, to 1905, to 1917, to 1921” (2006, 19). It is true, history can be used
in this way, but it need not be. Moreover, we can be as phlegmatic as we like, but,
when history spits back, it is with the force of a tsunami.
That is why the authors in this volume base their analyses in historical case
studies, both past and present. Part I provides broad historical context for these
debates. In chapter 2, Leo Panitch offers a sweeping historical survey of the attempts
by working class movements to develop their democratic capacities. He then poses
the enduring questions of democratizing our political parties and the state.
20 From the Streets to the State

Part II canvasses some of the most important recent attempts to challenge

for state power by bridging social movements with other political vehicles, such
as new political parties and empowering forms of legal mobilization. In chapter
3, Xavier Lafrance and Catarina Príncipe discuss the nonsectarian relationships
between egalitarian social movements and the parties of a new type through a
comparative analysis of the new radical left parties in Greece, Germany, Spain,
and Portugal. In chapter 4, Thomas Chiasson-LeBel explains the rise and receding
of the Pink Tide in Venezuela and Ecuador by situating it in long-standing debates
about the extent of state autonomy under capitalism. In chapter 5, Kali Akuno
gives a firsthand account of how a dynamic balance between popular assemblies,
solidarity economies, and independent political organizations helped get a radical
leftist lawyer elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. He also evaluates what their
time in office means for these movements going forward. In chapter 6, Erdem
Yörük explains how the success of an emerging party of a new type in Turkey is
based on, among other things, the legacies of Kurdish resistance, the self-orga-
nizing of women’s movements, and the significance of social services as a battle-
ground for transforming the state. In chapter 7, Michael McCann and George I.
Lovell offer lessons about how the law need not necessarily be only a tool of op-
pression. If movements use it in radically democratic ways, legal mobilization can
make significant contributions to declaring, establishing, expanding, and enforc-
ing transformative human rights.
Part III explores different aspects of radically democratizing public adminis-
tration. In chapter 8, Greg Albo explores the three major traditions of public ad-
ministration, including the Westminster technocracy of the postwar period, the
new public management of the neoliberal era, and, the most substantial alternative
posed by the radical left, democratic administration. In chapter 9, Hilary Wainwright
makes an important contribution to epistemology by discussing the various theories
of knowledge offered by different traditions of public administration. She then uses
case studies to show how radical left governments can democratize the economy
and the state by supporting and expanding the practical knowledge of workers in
the public sector and in solidarity economies. In chapter 10, Tammy Findlay argues
that, just as surely as feminist theories and practices have often neglected the state, so
too have theories of democratic administration neglected intersectional feminism.
She offers three case studies that reveal in various ways the promise of a femocratic
administration. In chapter 11, Greg McElligott discusses democratizing coalitions
between the providers and users of public services. He then asks, can these successes
be replicated in some of the most coercive parts of the state?
If the fundamental transformation and transcendence of capitalist society
must occur not wholly, but substantively, in, against, and beyond the state, how
can we develop a democratic socialist politics that has a strategy for preventing
co-optation into government institutions and ruling classes? The fruit of our con-
tributions to this question is From the Streets to the State: Changing the World by
Taking Power.
 From the Streets to the State 21

Notes
1. See Holloway’s essays in Clarke (1991). He is also a contributor to the London
Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (1980).
2. For a magisterial account, see Eley (2002).
3. I owe this term to David McNally.
4. This phrase is borrowed from Maritain (1952, 161), who uses it in a radically differ-
ent but not unrelated context. To be sure, there is just as much moralizing among the col-
laborators as there is among the conscientious objectors.
5. This paragraph is influenced by Luxemburg (2004, 301–8) and the analysis of Geras
(1985, 133–93).
6. I thank Vivek Chibber for pointing me to this work.
7. This example is inspired by an actual campaign (Socialist Project 2013), as well as by
Costello, Michie, and Milne (1989, 255–61) and Stanford (1999, 397–402).

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 Chapter 2

Democratizing the Party and the State

Transcending the Limits of the Left

Leo Panitch

Socialist labor movements convincingly championed the cause of de-

mocracy . . . consistently pushed the boundaries of citizenship out-
ward and onward, demanding democratic rights where anciens regimes
refused them, defending democratic gains against subsequent at-
tack and pressing the case for ever-greater inclusiveness. Socialist and
Communist parties—parties of the Left—sometimes managed to win
elections and form governments, but more important, they organized
civil society into the basis from which existing democratic gains could
be defended and new ones could grow. . . . Without them democracy
was a nonstarter.
—Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy

Introduction
Almost a century after the greatest extension of the democratic suffrage in 1918,
we are witnessing considerable working class support for a xenophobic right-wing
politics that is deeply hostile to the democratic gains that socialist labor movements
played such a large role in winning. That working class people should be voting in
significant numbers for the Trumps of this world as a means of expressing their
plight in today’s chaotic, irrational, increasingly inegalitarian and crisis-ridden capi-
talist global (dis)order is itself almost enough to restore the credibility of the con-
cept of false consciousness. Indeed, what we appear to be witnessing in the wake
of the severe defeats suffered by trade unions and the total loss of socialist purpose
of the parties most closely associated with them in the twentieth century bears a
certain resemblance to the populist Jacksonian and Bonapartist successes of the

25
26 From the Streets to the State

mid-nineteenth century, among the few early instances of anything like mass suf-
frage elections in the era before the rise of the modern labor movements.
What accounts for the impasse of the left by the late twentieth century? Over
the last four decades one of the central tropes of intellectual discourse, epitomized
by the popularity of Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, criticizes
the strategic mistake of excessively emphasizing class identity and consciousness.
Even Geoff Eley’s (2002) monumental historical study, quoted above, which dem-
onstrates how effective socialist labor movements were as advocates for democratic
reform, also stresses “the insufficiencies of socialist advocacy,” not least pertaining to
gender and race, in terms of “all the ways socialism’s dominance of the Left margin-
alized issues not easily assimilable to the class-political precepts so fundamental to
the socialist vision” (10).
Yet the left’s current conundrum in the face of the new right also brings to
light the insufficiencies of the politics of identity, which has not only filled the void
of class politics in recent decades but has often played a significant role in shunting
class aside. Adolph Reed Jr. (1999) has perhaps most powerfully made the case for
“a politics focused on bringing people together” around
the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by po-
litical economy—for example, finding, keeping or advancing in a job
with a living wage, keeping or attaining access to decent healthcare, se-
curing decent, affordable housing. . . . Such concerns and the objective
of collectively crafting a vehicle to address them is a politics that pro-
ceeds from what we have in common. . . . To the extent that differences
are real and meaningful, the best way to negotiate them is from a foun-
dation of shared purpose and practical solidarity based on a pragmatic
understanding of the old principle that an injury to one is an injury to
all. This is not simply a politics that attempts to build on a base in the
working class; it is a politics that in the process can fashion a broadly
inclusive class identity. (xxvii–xxviii)
The failure to absorb this strategic insight, which might entail severe costs even
for liberal democracy, is becoming ever clearer amidst the reactionary electoral ap-
peal of a new right to working class voters. Nevertheless, this chapter shall argue
that it also has much to do with the longstanding problems with the practice of de-
mocracy inside the institutions of the labor movement and the political parties with
which they were intertwined.
It has become far too commonplace to address these problems by criticizing
the “ontological” mistake of those theorists who advance a class-oriented politics.
This is a kind of idealism which attributes far too much historical impact to theo-
retical texts. It avoids serious inquiry into what determined the actual historical
practices of working class parties and unions as democratic institutions. It thereby
fails to uncover what really accounts for their limited contribution to the develop-
ment of workers’ democratic capacities so as to carry the struggle for democracy
 Democratizing the Party and the State 27

beyond the electoral arena to the workplace, to the corporations and banks that
dominate the economy, and perhaps most important to the democratization of the
institutions of the state.
After first assessing the long historical process through the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries whereby working people began to conceive through collective
organization what such democratic capacities might entail, and then drawing les-
sons from the insufficiencies of their practices in face of the limits and constraints
they encountered, this chapter will go on to examine the recent shift from radical
anti-capitalist protest movements to a new class-focused party politics in the second
decade of the twenty-first century. By helping to recognize their democratic insuf-
ficiencies, not least in relation to transforming the state, we can perhaps help point
the way to transcending them.

Class and Democracy

The great Canadian political philosopher C. B. Macpherson (1973) advanced the
thesis that “the principle introduced into predemocratic liberal theory in the nine-
teenth century to make it liberal-democratic . . . [was] a concept of man [sic] as at
least potentially a doer, an exerter and developer and enjoyer of his human capaci-
ties, rather than merely a consumer of utilities” (51). Nevertheless, he understood
very well that the realization of liberal democracy was not brought about by its
theorists or even by the bourgeoisie and its political representatives by themselves.
Although liberal-democratic institutions appeared only in capitalist countries, it is
also a matter of historical record that this happened “only after the free market
and the liberal state have produced a working class conscious of its strength and
insistent on a voice” (173–74). Moreover, he understood that even the democratic
reforms that eventually produced the welfare state did not cancel the “net transfer
of powers” that the exploitation of wage-labor entails in a capitalist market society:
“The changes in the liberal-democratic state, since the introduction of the demo-
cratic franchise, have been less fundamental than the changes in the society and
economy” (180). The “maximization of democracy,” which is stifled even by the
most democratic of capitalist states, requires transcending liberal democracy. This
first requires, however, “a revolution in democratic consciousness” (184).
To be sure, Marx and Engels (1947) had stressed exactly this as early as the
1840s. They argued for “the production on a mass scale of this communist con-
sciousness” on the part of the newly emerging working class, “the majority of all
members of society.” As they put it, “for the success of the cause itself, the alteration
of men [sic] on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in
a practical movement, a revolution” (69).1 They did not conceive of the revolution
as a spontaneous cathartic moment of insurrection. Rather, they saw it as a long
process of class organization and institution building through which workers, by
developing their transformative capacities, “become fitted to found society anew”
(69). The formation of trade unions oriented to bettering the conditions of wage-la-
bor within capitalism might sometimes become schools for socialism. But it would
28 From the Streets to the State

require working class political parties to play the most crucial role in “the formation
of the proletariat into a class” and their “resolute” development of their capacities so
as to be able to effect the “conquest of political power” (Marx 1996, 13).
Throughout history, subordinate classes had engaged in slave revolts or in
bread riots (usually led by women). But the long-standing political institutions that
emerged out of the new labor movements by the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were an entirely new historical phenomenon. These institutions did not
come out of nowhere. They involved the confluence of various previous formations
that had been unable to be as encompassing of the working classes or sustain such
longevity. These lineages often long preceded the Communist Manifesto, and, as has
often been said of the regroupment that produced the British Labour Party, they
were sometimes “more Methodist than Marxist.” Both before and after the forma-
tion of the new mass working class parties, their efforts were crucial to the struggle
for and realization of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, their own internal practices
often fell short in democratic terms. This can be said of the Communist League
that commissioned the Manifesto, and, of course, this was Bakunin’s (2016) famous
complaint about the practices of the First International led by Marx himself in the
latter half of the 1860s. But this was hardly just a problem with those political orga-
nizations inspired by Marx and his followers. It also applied to those that were more
Methodist than Marxist. Indeed, as E. P. Thompson (1964) noted in The Making
of the English Working Class, “throughout the whole period of the industrial revo-
lution, Methodism never overcame this tension between authoritarian and demo-
cratic tendencies” (46).

Party and Democracy

As Robert Michels (1962) correctly discerned in his classic study, Political Parties,
first published in Italian in 1911, there was no point in assessing the promise of de-
mocracy within the parties of the old ruling classes or of the new liberal bourgeoi-
sies. Although they accommodated to the extension of the suffrage to the working
classes by establishing their own mass party organizations, these parties necessar-
ily remained “essentially anti-democratic in nature” (44). Michels recognized that
the real test of the possibilities and limits of modern democracy lay with the mass
socialist parties that initially formed outside of the state (61). The achievement of
what we now recognize as modern political democracy required the emergence of
the labor movements’ mass political parties in which the membership meetings of
local branches sent delegates to their national congresses where party leaders were
elected and party policy was set.
And yet, using the example of the German Social Democratic Party, the largest
and most influential party in the Second International, Michels meticulously identi-
fied the practices that inhibited democracy within the new mass party organizations
of the labor movements. Expanding and securing democratic rights from capital
and the state, let alone effecting a socialist transformation, could not be accom-
plished in the little free time left to workers. Therefore, leaders became full-time
 Democratizing the Party and the State 29

professionals in the new organizations. At one level, this achieved the greatest possi-
ble economy of energy in making the working class organization “the weapon of the
weak against the strong” (61). But this also meant placing the day-to-day operations
of the organization, including the party finances and the party press, in their hands.
Although they remained formally accountable to the party membership, this was
tempered by their influence over the exact timing and agenda of party meetings.
There was a discernable tendency on the part of the leadership to deploy these orga-
nizational resources so as to reproduce their leadership positions. Furthermore, they
increasingly spent a significant part of their days in the gentleman-club atmosphere
of parliamentary assemblies or in direct bargaining negotiations with employers or
the representatives of business. This tendency was buttressed by the deference of
much of the mass membership to leaders who spoke so eloquently for the interests
of workers. All of this reinforced the political longevity of leaders in working class
parties as compared with the leaders of other parties—a remarkable phenomenon
given that working class political parties are ostensibly in favor of challenging the
social gulfs between leaders and led.
In winning the struggle for working class suffrage the Social Democratic Party
became the agent for the integration of workers into the nation-state. Nevertheless,
the growing separation of leaders from led inside workers’ organizations under-
mined not only their accountability but also their ability to develop workers’ demo-
cratic capacities. Michels drew from this his famous “iron law of oligarchy,” the two
basic elements of which were that even working class organizations tend to become
oligarchical over time and that their goals and tactics become increasingly conserva-
tive as leaders prioritize the survival of the organization. Yet the conclusion Michels
reached on this basis was that “it is consequently the great task of social education
to raise the intellectual level of the masses so they may be enabled, within the limits
of what is possible, to counteract the oligarchical tendencies of the working class
movement” (369).
Michels concluded Political Parties by insisting that he did not “wish to deny
that every revolutionary working class movement, and every movement sincerely
inspired by the democratic spirit, may have a certain value as contributing to the en-
feeblement of oligarchic tendencies” (368). There was very little time for this before
the Great War that erupted in August 1914. Indeed, amidst the interimperial rivalry
of the time, this showed how disastrous was the political strategy of a class-inclusive
nationalism that developed on the basis of the increasingly undemocratic relation-
ship between leaders and led within working class organizations.
Revolution and Democracy
Those who broke with social democracy during World War I in the name of an
international proletariat could be seen as embodying the reassertion of the demo-
cratic spirit in the revolutionary working class movement. To be sure, Lenin’s disci-
plined vanguard-led party was more the product of the tactical response to specific
political conditions under the Czarist regime in Russia than of an explicit rejection
30 From the Streets to the State

of the German mass social democratic party model (Lih 2005). Yet the revolution-
ist’s antipathy to the statist tendencies of German social democracy, which Marx
had already identified four decades earlier in his Critique of the Gotha Program, was
evident in Lenin’s The State and Revolution. Written on the very eve of the October
Revolution in Russia, it embraced some aspects of the planning capacity of the war-
time German state. But its central claim was that a workers’ state founded on the
workers’ councils that formed in the process of making the revolution would replace
the bourgeois state with something like “facility and ease” (Krausz 2015, 181). That
said, Lenin was also concerned to show that he was not ‘utopian’ in this respect. He
explicitly admitted that “an unskilled laborer or cook cannot immediately get on
with the job of state administration” (181). Indeed, by challenging the prejudiced
view that only “officials chosen from rich families are capable of administering the
state” (181), Lenin seemed to define the central revolutionary task as the develop-
ment of workers’ administrative capacities.
In the event, the Bolshevik revolution rather quickly yielded not a democratic
workers’ state but rather a dictatorship that would “at best represent the idea of the
class, not the class itself,” as Isaac Deutscher (1954, 505) later insightfully noted. The
Bolsheviks had not merely “clung to power for its own sake,” but in banning opposi-
tion parties and reconstructing the soviets as well as trade unions as agents of the
new party-state, they identified the new republic’s fate with their own. Believing they
were “the only force capable of safeguarding the revolution,” they steadfastly refused
“to allow the famished and emotionally unhinged country to vote their party out
of power and itself into a bloody chaos” (505).2 And yet, as Rosa Luxemburg (2004)
discerned within its first year, this type of revolutionary process inevitably narrowed
rather than broadened the scope of public participation. The revolutionary party
would become a “clique affair,” one where “in reality only a dozen outstanding heads
do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meet-
ings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed
resolutions unanimously” (304–6).3 Therefore, it stifled “the most essential thing,”
that is, “the political training and education of the entire mass of the people” which
the bourgeois state has no interest in, “at least not beyond certain narrow limits.”
The great danger, Luxemburg foresaw, was that in a state “without general elections,
without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opin-
ion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in
which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element” (304–6).
Lenin himself admitted in 1923 that virtually no progress had been made in
developing capacities for popular administration. He lamented that state institu-
tions still bore all the traces “of the overbearing, centralized, merciless Russian
Bureaucracy, inherited in large part from the tsarist system” (Krausz 2005, 342).
Tamás Krausz has aptly summed Lenin’s quandary in coming to this conclusion
shortly before his death:
Because of the limits imposed by historical circumstances and individ-
ual mortality, Lenin was able to provide only a limited Marxist answer
 Democratizing the Party and the State 31

to the issue of having to resort to a dictatorship even against its own

social base for the sake of preserving Soviet power. On the one hand, he
tried to compensate for political oppression by proclaiming, in opposi-
tion to the remaining and ever stronger state power, that “the working
class must defend itself against its own state.” He left unexplained how
it could do so with the support of that very state. In other words, the
workers must confront the state, yet defend the state and all its insti-
tutions at the same time. There was no dialectical solution for such a
contradiction. (368)4

A New Politics
The twentieth century was marked by the unfolding of a great many of the tenden-
cies in both social democratic and communist parties that inhibited rather than
expanded democracy in both the party and the state. The many protest movements
that spawned in the 1960s, and the widespread attraction of notions of “participa-
tory democracy” associated with them, were a reflection not only of the rejection
of the authoritarian legacy of Stalinism by the New Left but also of the frustration
with social democratic parties which exhibited virtually all the characteristics that
Michels had identified so many decades earlier (Miliband 1961). This was the remit
of Ralph Miliband’s 1961 classic, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics
of Labour. Even at the height of these parties’ greatest successes in the post-World
War II period, their oligarchic tendencies were reinforced by their embrace of many
predemocratic parliamentarist practices as well as of the conventional roles of gov-
ernments of states which were administered through bureaucracies that followed
classic Weberian principles.
This was also true of the alliance between the American unions and the
Democratic Party forged during the New Deal and the war. This alliance not only
hardened and narrowed amidst postwar anti-communism but became deeply em-
bedded in the structures of the American empire. More generally, whatever the
undeniable benefits that came with the postwar Keynesian welfare state, its ad-
ministration actually led to the atrophy rather than the enhancement of workers’
democratic capacities. The industries that were nationalized remained bereft of any
vestiges of workers’ control. State-sponsored corporatist structures were explicitly
designed to secure union discipline over their members. Even those working people
who depended for their livelihood on welfare-state benefits felt far more disciplined
than represented by the officials who administered them.
By the late 1960s, this produced intense frustrations inside the old parties of
the labor movement. This was perhaps most articulately expressed by Tony Benn,
who led a new democratic insurgency inside the British Labour Party right through
the 1970s and into the early 1980s, before that insurgency was finally defeated
amidst the Thatcherite neoliberal ascendancy in the United Kingdom. In good part
based on his own frustrations as minister of technology in the 1960s, Benn sensed
that just as the labor movement had set out to transform the parliamentary system
32 From the Streets to the State

in the previous century, there now was the need for “equally radical changes in our
system of government to meet the requirements of a new generation.” As he put it
in a 1968 speech to Welsh trade unionists, “Beyond parliamentary democracy as we
know it we shall have to find a new popular democracy to replace it” (quoted in
Panitch and Leys 2001, 47–48).
Benn’s key argument was that the overall failure to develop working class dem-
ocratic capacities was opening the way to the neoliberal assault on trade union-
ism and the welfare state, not least through the interpellation—the ideologically
imposed identification—of workers as “taxpayers.” He was already warning against
the basically undemocratic market alternative “now emerging everywhere on the
right,” which promoted a “greater freedom from government” that would mainly
be “enjoyed by big business” while allowing it to “control the new citizen at the
very same time as Government reduces its protections.” Against this, Benn pointed
to the worker militancy, student uprisings, and radical community politics of the
1960s, as well as their intraparty expression through the Campaign for Labour Party
Democracy through the 1970s. For him, they were key to understanding that “our
long campaign to democratise power in Britain has, first, to begin in our own move-
ment” (quoted in Panitch and Leys 2001, 40).
To varying degrees social democratic parties everywhere felt the internal im-
pact of the New Left of the 1960s. Not even the US Democratic Party could escape
the reverberations of the “new politics,” which came to be expressed within it with
such explosive and divisive effects in 1968 and after (Hilton 2016). A key condition
for the success of the new politics was substantial support from the trade unions.
The fact that there was much more of this support in the British case than in the
American explains why the insurgency was cut short more quickly in the latter. But
the defeat of every New Left insurgency within these parties hinged above all on the
strong opposition of party elites, and their subsequent ability to demonstrate that a
divided party could not win elections. In the face of the rise of the neoliberal right,
this was seen as more and more necessary from a purely defensive perspective.
As the democratizing elements in communist parties, which were for the most
part known as the Eurocommunist tendency, themselves increasingly emulated the
limited reformism and conventional parliamentarism of social democracy, it was
hardly surprising that many New Left activists turned back to Lenin in the 1970s.
Nevertheless, as Nicos Poulantzas (1978) noted, this turn still had no answers for
Luxemburg’s critique of “dual power.” The notion of seizing and smashing the old
state power and replacing it with an entirely new workers’ state still lacked “the
strategic vision of a process of transition to socialism—that is of a long stage dur-
ing which the masses will act to conquer power and transform state apparatuses.”
This must always rest on the “increased intervention of the popular masses in the
state . . . certainly through their trade union and political forms of representation,
but also through their own initiatives within the state itself ” (258, 261). For the
working class to displace the old ruling class, in other words, it must develop capaci-
ties to democratize the state:
 Democratizing the Party and the State 33

The basic dilemma from which we must extricate ourselves is the fol-
lowing: either maintain the existing State and stick exclusively to a
modified form of representative democracy—a road that ends up in
social-democratic statism and so-called liberal parliamentarism; or
base everything on direct, rank-and-file democracy or the movement
for self-management—a path which, sooner or later, inevitably leads to
statist despotism or the dictatorship of experts. The essential problem
of the democratic road to socialism, of democratic socialism, must be
posed in a different way: how is it possible radically to transform the State
in such a manner that the extension and deepening of political freedoms
and the institutions of representative democracy (which were also a con-
quest of the popular masses) are combined with the unfurling of forms of
direct democracy and the mushrooming of self-management bodies? (256)

Beyond Neoliberalism
During the construction of the neoliberal era, the question of transforming the
state, rather than escaping from it, was severely marginalized. Perhaps this is unsur-
prising given the dead end into which the new Leninists ran as well as the total de-
feats suffered by those who hoped to transform social democratic parties, let alone
the US Democratic Party. Strategies to democratize the state were also maligned by,
on the one hand, the free market rhetoric of Thatcherism and Reaganism, and, on
the other hand, the abstract discourses of the postmodernists. The main progressive
political response to the new right’s call for less state was usually a tepid defense of
the Keynesian welfare state. Only occasionally would a more ambitious perspective
go beyond debates about less state versus more state to attempt instead to articulate
strategies for a different kind of state (Albo, Langille, and Panitch 1993).
The struggle against neoliberalism was led primarily by protest movements
that, although often supported and even funded by trade unions, were not deeply
based in the working classes. Indeed, these classes appeared to become less and less
a force capable of extending and deepening democracy in the state amidst the se-
vere defeats trade unionism suffered at the hands of corporations and the state in
the neoliberal era. Union density withered as manufacturing employment declined,
public sector employment froze, and workers in the new precarious service jobs
remained unorganized.
If this was the situation in the advanced capitalist liberal democracies as well
as in the former communist states that now embraced capitalism, developments
elsewhere evinced a good deal of the dynamism and potential that newly organized
working classes had shown a century earlier. This was especially the case in South
Korea, South Africa, and Brazil in the 1980s, where militant new union formations
all proved to be the backbone of democratic regime change. Nevertheless, much
of the promise this offered had faded by the late 1990s. The Korean labor move-
ment was becalmed in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The leaderships of the
34 From the Streets to the State

governing ANC/SACP/COSATU triple-alliance in South Africa accommodated to

neoliberal capitalism and corrupt state practices. Finally, the Brazilian Workers Party
(PT), despite its showcase participatory budget structures at local levels, engaged in
a visible social democratization by the turn of the millennium. In reaction to this,
the anti-globalization protest movements expressed an understandable suspicion of
political parties. Even as they gathered annually at the World Social Forums in Porto
Alegre, which were funded by the Brazilian trade unions and hosted by the PT, these
movements fueled a Zapatista-inspired orientation to “changing the world without
taking power.”
We are now in a new conjuncture.5 It is quite different from that conjuncture
that led to the perception that neoliberalism, at the height of its embrace by Third
Way social democracy, was “the most successful ideology in world history” (Anderson
2000, 7, 13). While neoliberal economic practices have been reproduced—as has the
American empire’s centrality in global capitalism—neoliberalism’s legitimacy has
been undermined. As the aftershocks of the US financial crash of 2007–08 rever-
berated across the eurozone and the BRICS, this deepened the multiple economic,
ecological, and migratory crises that characterize this new conjuncture. At the same
time, neoliberalism’s ideological delegitimation has enveloped many of the political
institutions that have sustained its practices, from the European Union to political
parties at the national level. What makes the current conjuncture so dangerous is
the space this has opened for the far right to use ultra-nationalism, racism, sexism,
and homophobia to capture popular frustrations with liberal democratic politics in
the neoliberal era.
The delegitimation of neoliberalism has also restored some credibility to the
radical socialist case for transcending capitalism as necessary to fully realize demo-
cratic aspirations. It has spawned a growing sense that, when protesting the mul-
tiple oppressions and ecological threats of our time, capitalism can no longer be
bracketed. As austerity was prioritized over free trade, the spirit of anti-neoliberal
protest also shifted. Whereas capitalist globalization had defined the primary focus
of oppositional forces in the first decade of the new millennium, the second de-
cade opened with Occupy and the Indignados dramatically highlighting capitalism’s
gross class inequalities. Yet, with this turn, the insurrectionary flavor of protest with-
out revolutionary effect very quickly revealed the limits of forever standing outside
of the state.
Consequently, one of the key dimensions of the new conjuncture has been a
marked turn on the left from protest to politics. As opposition to capitalist global-
ization has shifted from the streets to the state theaters of neoliberal practice, Micah
White, the editor of Adbusters magazine who takes credit for cocreating Occupy
Wall Street, has gone so far as to call this development “the end of protest.”6 This
is in good part what the election of Syriza in Greece and the sudden emergence of
Podemos in Spain signified. Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labour Party
attracted hundreds of thousands of new members with the promise to sustain activ-
ism rather than undermine it. Even in the heartland of the global capitalist empire,
 Democratizing the Party and the State 35

a short bridge spanned Occupy and Sanders’s left populist promise for a political
revolution “to create a government which represents all Americans and not just the
1%.” This was reflected in polls indicating that half of all millennials do not support
capitalism and hold a positive view of socialism.
This transition from protest to politics has been remarkably class-oriented.
It has focused on addressing inequalities in income, wealth distribution, and eco-
nomic and political power relations. And yet, as Andrew Murray (2016) so incisively
notes, “this new politics is generally more class-focused than class-rooted. While
it places issues of social inequality and global economic power front and center, it
neither emerges from the organic institutions of the class-in-itself nor advances the
socialist perspective of the class-for-itself.”7
Leaders like Tsipras, Iglesias, Corbyn, and Sanders point beyond Third Way
social democracy as well as the old limitations of Leninist parties. But their capacity
to actually move beyond social democracy while following an electoralist path to
state office is another matter. This is due in part to their personal limitations, but it
is based much more on the specific limitations of each of their political parties. Even
the strongest left currents within these parties are not adequately preparing for the
challenge of actually transforming state apparatuses. Yet a reversion to a politics of
protest—as in Black Lives Matter or the women’s marches against Trump, however
necessary and impressive in their own right—cannot adequately address this.

Lessons from Syriza

The experience of the Syriza government in Greece particularly highlights this.
Syriza’s roots go back to the formation of Synaspismos, first as an electoral alliance
in the 1980s, and then as an independent, although factionalized, new party in the
early 1990s. This was part of the broader institutional reconfiguration inaugurated
by the Eurocommunist strategic orientation as it searched for a way forward in the
face of communist and social democratic parties having lost their historic roles and
capacities as agencies of working class political representation and social transfor-
mation. This search went all the way back to the 1960s and accelerated after the col-
lapse of the Soviet bloc and social democracy’s embrace of the Third Way. In Greece
especially, the Eurocommunist orientation continued to embrace the tradition of
political revolution as experienced in the civil war after 1945, even while distanc-
ing itself from the Soviet regime and offering enthusiastic support for European
integration.
As the neoliberal form of Economic and Monetary Union buried the promises
of a European Social Charter, however, the grounds were laid in Greece, as elsewhere
on the European radical left, for a more Eurosceptical orientation (Eleftheriou n.d.).
This new critical posture towards the European variety of capitalism was a cru-
cial element in Synaspismos explicitly defining, by the turn of the millennium, its
strategic goal as “the socialist transformation of Greek society” (Eleftheriou n.d.).
It also increasingly encouraged “dialogue and common actions” not only with the
alter-globalization movement, but with radical ecologists and political groups of a
36 From the Streets to the State

Trotskyist or Maoist lineage (Eleftheriou n.d.). The Coalition of the Radical Left,
with the acronym Syriza, emerged out of this process as an electoral alliance. It was
designed, as Michalis Spourdalakis (2012) notes, “not so much to unify but rather to
connect in a flexible fashion the diverse actions, initiatives and movements . . . and
to concern itself with developing popular political capacities as much as with chang-
ing state policy.” But actually turning Synaspismos, and through it Syriza, into such
a party was, as Spourdalakis immediately adds, “more wishful thinking than realistic
prospect” (102).
As the eurocrisis broke, however, with Greece at the epicenter of the attempt
to save the euro through the application of severe austerity at its weakest point, all
the elements of Syriza threw themselves into the 2011 wave of protests, occupa-
tions, and strikes, while supporting the 400 or so community solidarity networks
around the country to help the worst affected cope. This prepared the ground for
Syriza’s electoral breakthrough of 2012. Syriza’s active insertion into the massive
outbursts of social protest from below across Greece the year before was a source
of radical democratic energy that went far beyond what can be generated during an
election campaign, however successful. What this meant was eloquently articulated
at Syriza’s congress in 2013 when it finally turned itself from an electoral alliance
into a single party political organization. The conclusion to its founding political
resolution called for “something more” than the programmatic framework that
resolution set out. Since “a Government of the Left, a parliamentary majority—
whatever its size—is not enough,” it called for “the creation and expression of the
widest possible, militant and catalytic political movement of multidimensional sub-
version. . . . Syriza has shouldered the responsibility to contribute decisively to the
shaping of this great movement of democratic subversion that will lead the country
to a new popular, democratic, and radical changeover” (Syriza 2013).
This sort of language was rare on the European radical left, let alone anywhere
else. And yet, as the Syriza leadership contemplated the dilemmas it faced as it stood
on the doorstep of government, its concern to appear as a viable government in
the media’s eyes led them to concentrate on refining and scaling down the poli-
cy proposals in the 2013 party program. This became evident in the Thessalonika
Manifesto proclaimed just a year later, and it was accomplished with very little in-
ternal party consultation. Furthermore, the leadership was concerned mainly with
there not being enough experienced and efficient personnel in the party to bring
into the state in order to change the notoriously clientelist and corrupt state appa-
ratus. Therefore, little attention was paid to who would be left in the party to act as
an organizing cadre in society. The increase in party membership was not at all pro-
portionate to the extent of the electoral breakthrough. Even when new radical ac-
tivists did join, the leadership generally did very little to support those in the party
apparatus who wanted to develop these activists’ capacities. Consequently, party
branches were not turned into centers of working class life. Furthermore, there was
insufficient strategic coordination with the Solidarity Networks in planning for al-
ternative forms of production and consumption. All of this spoke to how far Syriza
 Democratizing the Party and the State 37

still was from discovering how to escape the limits of social democracy, as depicted
by Miliband a half-century earlier and by Michels a half-century before that.
Even as the new Syriza government implements austerity measures forced
upon it by the institutions of the European Union and International Monetary
Fund, its continuing ideological rejection of neoliberal logic distinguishes it from
social democratic governments in the neoliberal era. And yet, in terms of its rela-
tions to the party, let alone the social movements, the Syriza government has failed
to escape from familiar social democratic patterns. It distances itself from party
pressures and seems incapable of appreciating the need for activating party cadre to
develop popular democratic capacities. Ironically, it was the party members in the
Left Platform who advanced the ostensibly more radical Plan B, namely, Greece’s
immediate exit (or Grexit) from the eurozone, who seemed to treat state power
most instrumentally. They offered a mainly technical solution while paying little
attention to what would be required to prepare the political foundations for such
an endeavor in Greek society. Nor did they pay much attention to how to disen-
tangle a very broad range of state apparatuses from budgetary dependence on EU
funding, let alone to the state transformations necessary merely to administer the
controls and rationing required to manage the black and grey markets that would
have expanded inside and outside of the state if Grexit occurred. This was especially
problematic given the notorious clientelist and corrupt state practices that Syriza as
a party had been vociferously committed to ending but, once in government, did
not have the time to change, even where the inclination to do so was still there.
It must also be said that the social movements themselves were largely passive
and immobilized in this respect, as if waiting for the government to deliver. Activists
from the networks of food solidarity were rightly frustrated they could not even
get from the Ministry of Agriculture information on the locations of specific crops,
which the activists could have used to approach a broader range of farmers. But
these activists did not see it as their responsibility to develop and advance propos-
als on how the state apparatuses should be changed, even minimally, so as to cope
with the economic crisis. For instance, there could have been proposals on how
the agriculture ministry could identify idle land, hand it over to community food
production co-ops, and coordinate this production across subregions. Furthermore,
activists could have proposed how the defense ministry might direct military trucks
(at least those sitting idle between demonstrations) to facilitate the distribution of
food through the solidarity networks. Indeed, insofar as the Syriza government has
failed the most crucial democratic test of linking the administration with popular
forces—not just for meeting basic needs but also for planning and implementing
the restructuring of economic and social life—there were all too few on the radical
left outside the state who treated this as a priority either.
Conclusion
As Andre Gorz (1968) insisted 50 years ago in his path-breaking essay “Reform
and Revolution,” embarking from liberal democracy onto “the peaceful road to
38 From the Streets to the State

socialism” has never been a matter of the “installation of islands of socialism in a

capitalist ocean (112). Rather, it involves structural reforms or nonreformist reforms
that do not obstruct class antagonism, but that further challenge the balance of
power and the logic of capitalism by introducing a democratic dynamic that pushes
the process further. What this still left aside, however, are the crucial changes in state
structures that would need to attend this process. As Goran Therborn (1978) sub-
sequently pointed out, insofar as “state bureaucrats and managers will not thereby
disappear, and problems of popular control will remain,” it was only to be expected
that “unions of state employees” would have to play an important role in developing
the cadre with the capacities to lead this process of transforming state apparatuses,
and be centrally involved in addressing the many “serious and complicated ques-
tions” of state transformation through socialist democracy (279–80).
Indeed, given how state apparatuses are now structured so as to reproduce cap-
italist social relations, their institutional relations and practices would require fun-
damental transformations. State employees would need to become explicit agents of
transformation, aided and sustained in this respect by their unions and the broader
labor movement. Rather than expressing defensive particularism, unions themselves
would need to be changed fundamentally so as to be actively engaged in developing
state workers’ transformational capacities. This would include establishing councils
that link state workers to the recipients of state services.
Amidst the deep economic, political, and social contradictions of the neolib-
eral era, a democratic socialist strategy for entering the state through elections, and
indeed of transforming the state, is today less than ever a matter of discovering a
smooth or gradual road to socialism. Ruptures, or an extended series of ruptures of
various intensities, are inescapable. These are the contradictions inherent to reach-
ing beyond capitalism while still being of it. Any radical democratic government
that is engaged in this process will have to manage a capitalist economy that is likely
in crisis while simultaneously trying to satisfy popular expectations for promised
relief. At some points in this process, more or less dramatic initiatives of national-
ization and socialization of industry and finance would have to take place. And, all
the while, it must not postpone to an indefinite future its longer-term commitment
to transform the state.
This is why it is so very important that democratic socialists undertake strategic
preparations for this well before entering the state. Concentrating on local or regional
levels before coming to national power fits with this perspective. So does encourag-
ing trade unions and social movements to develop alternative economic plans in the
face of closed or threatened production and distribution facilities or transportation
networks, as well as plans for alternative means of producing and distributing food,
health care, and other necessities. In the course of this undertaking, widespread po-
litical education and preparation would have to be oriented to developing capacities
to support and engage in even more radical changes, from codifying new collective
property rights to developing and coordinating agencies of democratic planning, but
above all oriented to developing capacities of state transformation.
 Democratizing the Party and the State 39

Notes
1. For the case that “Marx and Engels were the leading protagonists in the democratic
movement in the nineteenth century,” see Nimtz (2000). For the problematic history of The
German Ideology as a text, see Carver and Blank (2014).
2. By the time the regime was consolidated in 1921, it was not the reactionary ruling
class forces of the whites in the civil war that workers and peasants would have voted back
into power. Rather, it was the anarcho-syndicalists who were “far more popular among the
working class,” even though they “possessed no positive political programme, no serious or-
ganization, national or even local.” This was something for which the Bolsheviks were “men-
tally quite unprepared.” Like all Marxists, they had “always tacitly assumed that the majority
of the working class, having backed them in the revolution, would go on to support them
unswervingly until they had carried out the full programme of socialism. . . . It had never oc-
curred to Marxists to reflect whether it was possible or admissible to try to establish socialism
regardless of the will of the working class” (Deutscher 1954, 505–6).
3. Intraparty factions and debates initially became more intense because they were the
only remaining outlet for political debate. Nevertheless, by 1920, the 21 Theses, which for-
mulated the conditions for admission of communist parties to the new Third International,
effectively established the organizational principle of “democratic centralism” and laid over-
whelming stress on the party center as the most “powerful, authoritative organ,” thereby
claiming to embody the “the general thrust of the party membership” while in an effectively
hierarchical relationship to it (Miliband 1977, 167–69).
4. See especially Lewin (2005).
5. The following draws on Panitch and Gindin (2017).
6. See White (2016), which sets out a medium term strategy “to gain electoral, legisla-
tive, and administrative control of rural, resource rich cities” and a longer term strategy of
founding a transnational women-led World Party “that sweeps into legislatures in countries
with fair elections” and brings “the old world’s leaders to the negotiating table” (197–202).
7. This is in fact epitomized by the astonishing lack of any kind of class-analytic founda-
tion for the strategic proposals in Micah White’s The End of Protest.

References
Albo, Greg, David Langille, and Leo Panitch, eds. 1993. A Different Kind of State? Popular
Power and Democratic Administration. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, Perry. 2000. Renewals. New Left Review, n.s., 1:1–20.
Bakunin, Mikhail. 2016. “On Leaders and Politics: July 1871.” In Bakunin: Selected Texts 1868–
1875, edited and translated by A. W. Zurbrugg, 113–41. London: Merlin Press.
Carver, Terrell, and Daniel Blank. 2014. Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts:
Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach Chapter.” New York: Palgrave.
Deutscher, Isaac. 1954. The Prophet Armed. London: Oxford University Press.
Eleftheriou, Costas. n.d. “The Uneasy ‘Symbiosis’: Factionalism and Radical Politics in Syn-
aspismos.” Paper prepared for 4th Hellenic Observatory PhD Symposium.
Eley, Geoff. 2002. Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Gorz, Andre. 1968. “Reform and Revolution.” In Socialist Register 1968, edited by Ralph
Miliband and John Saville, 111–43. London: Merlin Press.
Exploring the Variety of Random
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SERATE

D'INVERNO ***
 LA MARCHESA COLOMBI

Serate d'Inverno
RACCONTI

TESTE ALATE — LA PRIMA DISGRAZIA

IMPARA L'ARTE E METTILA DA PARTE — FIORE D'ARANCIO

IN PROVINCIA — UN VELO BIANCO

1914
CASA EDITRICE MADELLA
SESTO S. GIOVANNI
 INDICE

Prefazione Pag. 5
Teste alate 19
La prima disgrazia 75
Impara l'arte e mettila da parte 103
Fiore d'arancio 153
In provincia 177
Un velo bianco 193
 PREFAZIONE

Sono l'incubo di mezzo mondo quelle lunghe, lunghe sere d'inverno,

che durano dalle sette alle dieci; tre ore per lo meno; per molte
famiglie assai più.
Alle quattro e mezzo, al più tardi alle cinque, s'è accesa la lampada
in sala da pranzo. Ad uno ad uno i membri della famiglia, chi da
fuori, chi dallo studio, chi dal salotto, si sono radunati là, intorno alla
tavola apparecchiata.
Quelli che sono usciti hanno reso conto dei gradi di freddo della
temperatura esterna, della maggiore o minore densità della nebbia,
dello stato delle contrade, se asciutte, fangose, gelate, ecc.
Le signore hanno riferite le visite fatte, le abbigliature della Tale e
della Talaltra, le carrozze che erano al corso, le stoffe nuove esposte
nei negozi di moda, le pelliccie, i cappellini.
I giovinetti hanno riportate le novità raccolte al caffè o al club; chi
s'è sposato, o è in procinto di farlo, chi è morto, chi è innamorato;
che nuovissime promette il manifesto del Manzoni: chi era la signora
più brillante la sera innanzi alla Scala; che cosa combinano di fare gli
ammiratori per la beneficiata della prima donna o della prima
ballerina.
Il babbo, i membri seri della famiglia, hanno recate le notizie
politiche e quelle dei loro reumi, che aumentano o diminuiscono in
ragione diretta dell'intensità del freddo, e dei loro catarri a cui
l'umidità fa dei brutti tiri.
Intanto è stata servita la minestra; ciascuno ha preso il suo posto, e
durante più d'un'ora tra un boccone e l'altro, si sono particolareggiati
tutti gli avvenimenti messi sul tappeto, si sono analizzati, discussi, se
n'è visto il fondo.
Alle sette il pranzo è finito, la tavola è sparecchiata, e la sera,
l'eterna sera d'inverno, non è cominciata ancora.
Gli scrittori sentimentali che hanno l'abitudine di guardare il mondo
traverso una lente azzurra come se fosse un eclissi, hanno scritto
volumi di prosa soave, sulle serate di famiglia intorno al focolare
domestico; ce le hanno dipinte come un perpetuo idillio.
Ma in realtà sono una delle tante cose, che sembrano belle soltanto
quando si guardano da lontano.
Io pure a quest'ora, dopo tanti anni e tanti avvenimenti, le ripenso
con dolcezza infinita le serate casalinghe della mia casa paterna.
Il capo di casa ottuagenario, che sonnecchiava in una poltrona
accanto al camino, e tratto tratto si svegliava in un sussulto, o
perchè le molle gli erano cadute dalle mani, o perchè la serva
entrando gli aveva mandata una corrente d'aria tra capo e collo, o
per qualunque altro avvenimento della medesima importanza.
Domandava l'ora, picchiava i tizzoni, osservava che io sporgevo
sempre le labbra come se fossi in collera col Padre Eterno, che mio
fratello non faceva mai nulla, che mia sorella aveva gli occhi rossi,
che le zie dovevano annoiarsi di far sempre lo stesso lavoro.
— Maria, tira dentro quel muso.
— Mario, fa qualche cosa, fannullone.
— Teresa smetti quel ricamo che ti guasta la vista.
— Quante calze ha fatte quest'inverno signora Caterina? Deve
averne per un reggimento.
— Ce n'ha sempre di bucato da raccomodare signora Rosa?
Quando aveva fatta l'una o l'altra di queste osservazioni, tanto per
provarci che non dormiva, s'addormentava daccapo per un altro
quarto d'ora.
La zia Rosa non amava conversare; parlava soltanto quando poteva
imprendere una narrazione tutta finezze, e particolari, e
dissertazioni, e commenti, che le permettesse di tener la parola per
una mezz'ora o più, senza interruzione. Ma la sera non era più in
lena, e preferiva star zitta.
La zia Caterina parlava sempre per proverbi. Ne aveva una raccolta
immensa, colle rime che non tornavano, mezzi in lingua mezzi in
dialetto, e ad ogni discorso ne trovava uno da applicare.
Quando qualcuno si meravigliava degli interminabili rammendi di sua
sorella, era lei che rispondeva:
«L'ago e la pezzuola, tengono in piedi la camiciola.»
Se si osservava a lei che, a forza di far calze tutta la vita, doveva
averne una provvista sterminata, rispondeva subito:
— Pane e panni, buoni compagni.
— Che freddo! diceva qualcuno, non s'ha voglia di uscire.
— Ma sicuro, ribatteva lei. A Santa Caterina, chiudi i buoi nella
cascina.
— Le giornate cominciano ad allungarsi un poco.
— Senza dubbio. Natal el pass d'un gall.
Questo era uno de' suoi proverbi più infelici, perchè oltre la rima
impossibile, aveva bisogno d'un discorso preparatorio per stabilire
che il passo d'un gallo era la misura di cui s'era allungata la giornata
a quell'epoca.
Mio fratello la chiamava il Giusti; e quando aveva bisogno d'una rima
pe' suoi infelici tentativi poetici, ricorreva sempre a lei.
Ma quei proverbi che ora mi fanno sorridere quando li ricordo, allora
li udivo ogni sera, li sapevo, li avevo in uggia.
Il nostro capo di casa aveva un fratello di settant'anni, che gli pareva
molto giovine perchè aveva undici anni meno di lui; egli veniva ogni
sera a sedere per un paio d'ore dirimpetto al suo primogenito
dall'altro lato del camino.
Quello parlava a monosillabi, e bisognava strapparglieli con una serie
di domande. S'accontentava di starsene zitto contemplando il
fratello, pel quale aveva una grande venerazione, e cogliendo il
momento opportuno per impadronirsi delle molle che l'altro si teneva
amorosamente tra le ginocchia, per picchiare un poco alla sua volta i
tizzoni.
Qualche rara volta mancava. Era il solo avvenimento che
introducesse un po' di varietà nelle nostre serate.
Allora il primogenito si metteva in grande apprensione. Si alzava
tutto ingranchito dal sonno, coi calzoni raggrinzati sulle ginocchia pel
lungo star seduto, passeggiava barcollando fin in fondo alla stanza, e
sospirava:
— Ma! Cosa sarà accaduto a quel ragazzo? Per lui il suo
secondogenito era sempre un ragazzo.
E noi, coll'insolenza della gioventù, facevamo a gara a suggerirgli
una serie di disgrazie infantili e burlesche:
— Sarà rimasto sotto una carrozza.
— L'avrà portato via lo spazzacamino nel sacco come i bimbi cattivi.
— Avrà fatto i capricci, e la mamma l'avrà mandato a dormire senza
cena.
Ridevamo un momento, poi ricadevamo nella solita monotonia,
finchè non accadeva un altro di quegli episodi profondamente
insignificanti, che la nostra allegria giovanile, priva di sfogo, afferrava
al volo per farsene argomento di spasso.
La massima parte ce li forniva l'eccentricità bonaria del nostro
vecchio capo di casa.
Era un uomo estremamente alto e dritto, forte, magro, col volto
color del legno di noce, e talmente rugoso che sembrava una
collaretta arroccettata. Portava una folta parrucca bionda, sebbene
nessuno si ricordasse d'averlo mai visto biondo. Egli stesso non ne
aveva idea. Quando gli domandavamo com'erano stati i suoi capelli,
ci rifletteva un pochino colla sua bontà condiscendente, poi
rispondeva:
— Così... come i tuoi.
E questa medesima risposta la dava ugualmente a me che avevo i
capelli neri, a mio fratello che li aveva biondi, a mia sorella che li
aveva d'un bel castano bronzato.
Del resto egli non metteva punto civetteria nel portare la parrucca.
Non aveva mai pensato che dovesse illudere alcuno. Era leale in
quello come in tutto; le dava semplicemente per una parrucca; nè
più nè meno. L'aveva adottata nei tempi trapassati remoti, al
principio della sua calvizie, per riparare il capo dal freddo, e l'aveva
serbata sempre come una parte indispensabile del suo vestiario.
Quando le giornate erano rigide egli scendeva dal letto assiderato,
ed affrettava la toeletta per trovarsi più presto nella sua poltrona
accanto al camino. Allora la parrucca presentava ogni sorta di novità
bizzarre. Ora aveva un orecchio in mezzo alla fronte, ora sopra un
occhio; alle volte era messa col davanti di dietro addirittura.
Poi quando il freddo aumentava, il riparo della parrucca non bastava
più; ci voleva anche una berretta di lana. Ma per sentire il beneficio
della lana sul cranio calvo, egli si metteva la berretta di sotto, giù giù
fin sulla fronte, sulla nuca, sugli orecchi; poi la parrucca inalberata
sopra, come Dio vuole, con un largo orlo di berretta che sporgeva
tutto in giro.
— Babbo, un fenomeno! diceva mio fratello. Una capigliatura bionda
cresciuta sopra una berretta.
Potrei continuare per un volume a narrare così i piccoli svaghi delle
nostre sere; miseri svaghi, che si rassomigliavano tutti, e passavano
presto.
Ora ripenso a quelle sere coll'animo commosso; ne risento soltanto
l'atmosfera tepida della famiglia, la pace, l'intimità. L'immensa
lontananza a cui le ha respinte il tempo, non permette più di
vederne le ombre.
Dio, com'erano noiose quelle sere d'inverno! Sempre i due vecchi
accanto al fuoco; sempre lo stesso tavolino un po' più indietro, colla
stessa lampada, e le stesse zie cogli stessi lavori. Sempre mio
fratello, imbronciato di non poter uscire a fare il giovinotto, che
tirava certi sbadigli da destare un morto. Ed io e mia sorella, sempre
occupate a ricamare fiori improbabili ed animali mostruosi, con tutta
la precisione possibile, su qualche inezia elegante.
Ogni tanto esclamavamo:
— Oh Dio! Sono appena le otto! Sono appena le otto e mezzo!
E cosí via, di mezz'ora in mezz'ora, finchè veniva un'intimazione
superiore del nonno, sempre impensierito del nostro bene, di
smettere il ricamo perchè ci affaticava gli occhi.
— Ma non sappiamo cosa fare, si rispondeva noi.
— Leggete.
— Non abbiamo libri.
— Leggete una commedia di Goldoni.
Il nostro caro capo di casa era un uomo positivo. Si occupava, o
piuttosto s'era occupato di fisica, di chimica, di scienze esatte. Non
amava le vaporosità sentimentali; abborriva i romanzi.
Una volta un suo lontano parente povero, ch'egli colla sua grande
bontà manteneva a Torino per gli studi universitari, ebbe l'idea di
scrivere un romanzo, e trovò un editore che lo stampò, forse in
penitenza de' suoi peccati.
A titolo di riconoscenza il giovine autore dedicò quell'opera al suo
benefattore, e gliene spedí una copia.
È l'unica volta che mi ricordo d'aver visto in collera quell'uomo, che
era l'incarnazione della indulgenza, della mitezza. Non lesse una
parola; non guardò neppure il titolo. Prese il romanzo colle molle (le
compagne e la distrazione costante delle sue serate) lo mise sul
fuoco; e finchè lo vide interamente bruciato picchiò i tizzoni con
maggiore accanimento del solito. E da quel giorno soppresse la
pensione al suo parente.
— Non voglio il rimorso d'aver fomentati i suoi cattivi istinti, diceva.
Quando non avrà denaro in tasca, sarà obbligato a lavorare, ed il
lavoro gli rimetterà la testa a posto.
Con queste idee, è facile immaginarsi come fosse fornita la nostra
libreria quanto a letture amene.
Oltre una serie infinita di opere scientifiche, c'erano il teatro di
Goldoni e quello di Alfieri.
Goldoni era il solo autore letterario che avesse trovato grazia agli
occhi del nostro capo di casa.
«Quello era vero; mostrava la vita com'era realmente; non inventava
passioni esagerate; ritraeva uomini e donne in carne ed ossa come
noi, colle nostre virtù ed i nostri vizii, e senza fantasticaggini, senza
esaltazioni. Quelli erano libri che facevano buon sangue,
rasserenavano lo spirito, e non guastavano la testa alla gioventù.
Più tardi aveva comperato il teatro d'Alfieri, sperando di trovarci le
stesse qualità. Ma era stato un gran disinganno. Quegli eroi
cattedratici, quelle passioni frementi, quelle tirate retoriche lo
avevano esasperato.
«Egli non aveva mai conosciuto nessuno, in ottantun'anni di vita, che
parlasse a quel modo. Quegli uomini e quelle donne sempre
furibondi, che ammazzavano e si facevano ammazzare come se si
fossero fatto strappare un dente, che vivevano sempre nelle nubi, gli
parevano matti; gli davano le vertigini.
Appena noi ragazze eravamo tornate di collegio aveva messo l'Alfieri
sotto chiave.
— Se leggono questa roba, addio lista del bucato, diceva; addio note
della spesa; addio testa! Si mettono in mente di sposare un eroe e
non si maritano più.
Rimaneva il Goldoni. L'autore positivo e vero delle scene casalinghe,
dai pettegolezzi borghesi, dagli amori tranquilli. Ed ogni volta che
sentiva il bisogno di darci una distrazione per quelle benedette sere
d'inverno, era sempre il suo ritornello:
— Leggete una commedia di Goldoni.
Le avevamo lette tutte, rilette, ri-rilette; le sapevamo a memoria, le
avevamo talmente negli orecchi, che per gioco i miei fratelli ed io
parlavamo qualche volta per ore intere in versi martelliani (che le
nove Muse ce li perdonino!) ma le sillabe e le rime tornavano
sempre.
Se in quella noia profonda ci fossero capitati dei libri di racconti, in
cui non si fossero narrate passioni da romanzo per far infuriare il
capo di casa vecchio, e che avessero ritratta qualche scena amena e
commovente per divertire i giovani, sarebbero stati una benedizione.
Si sarebbe letta una novella ogni sera, ci si sarebbe conversato sopra
un quarto d'ora senza misericordia pel povero autore, e sarebbe
venuta l'ora di coricarsi; ed allora si sarebbe finito per dire:
— Malgrado tutto, ci ha fatto passare la sera, però.
Ed in vista di questo gli si sarebbero perdonati i suoi difetti, e
l'indomani si sarebbe fatto ancora buon viso al libro, ed ancora, ed
ancora finchè si fosse giunti all'ultima pagina.
Dopo si sarebbe dimenticato; pazienza; questa è la sorte comune dei
libri che non hanno altro scopo fuorchè il diletto; ottenuto lo scopo il
mezzo non serve più.
Ma più tardi, giungendo fra noi un altro volume dello stesso autore,
avrebbe trovata la stessa accoglienza.
Di gente che passa la sera come la passavamo noi, ce n'è un numero
sterminato. Sono le famiglie modello che stanno riunite, che si
amano, che s'annoiano insieme; quelle che hanno inspirata la poesia
del focolare. Poi c'è un altro numero sterminato di famiglie, in cui il
babbo è fuori da un lato, i fratelli dall'altro, e le signore passano la
sera in casa tra loro. Poi vi sono le altre in cui la mamma è ancora
giovine o crede di esserlo, e va a teatro, va in società; e le signorine
che non debbono assistere alla commedia, non debbono vedere le
ballerine, non debbono udire una quantità di cose in conversazione,
rimangono sole a casa. Oppure è tutta la parte giovine della famiglia
che esce e si diverte; ed una nonna, una zia, una vecchia parente,
ha dinanzi la prospettiva d'una lunga serata tra il caldanino e la
lampada.
Queste persone solitarie ed annoiate, in quelle ore di solitudine e di
noia, sono disposte all'indulgenza, come eravamo io ed i miei fratelli
nelle nostre serate di famiglia. Ed è a loro ch'io raccomando i miei
poveri raccontini, implorando per essi quell'accoglienza ch'io avrei
fatta ai raccontini di chi allora avesse avuto il pensiero pietoso di
scriverli per me.
 TESTE ALATE

I.

Nell'autunno del 1869 mi trovavo a villeggiare ad Intra sul lago

Maggiore.
In una gita ad Arona, fra le solite figure straniere che sembrano
darsi convegno da tutti i paesi d'Europa sul ponte di quel battello a
vapore, avevo incontrato un giovinotto lombardo, col quale avevo
stretta relazione.
Io andavo poi regolarmente due volte ogni settimana ad Arona, e
nell'andare o nel venire mi trovavo sempre con quel giovine.
Gli altri passeggeri si vedevano una volta, due, poi scomparivano.
Erano sempre figure nuove, quasi sempre figure ignote. Noi soli
tornavamo ancora ed ancora.
Quel giovine non era facile ad entrare in discorso. Ma una volta
entrato, era piacevolissimo, e qualche volta s'abbandonava ad
un'allegria clamorosa. Ma bisognava che altri lo eccitasse. Sembrava
una di quelle macchine che, appena montate, vanno, vanno con una
celerità sorprendente; ma se le vediamo ferme, non possiamo
persuaderci che quegli ammassi di ordigni muti ed inerti abbiano in
sè la facoltà di tanto rumore, di tanto movimento.
Non dirò che provassi pel mio compagno di viaggio nè una
misteriosa attrazione, nè quella curiosità, quell'interessamento
irresistibili che si trovano soltanto nei romanzi. Fu la circostanza dei
nostri frequenti incontri che fece nascere tra noi una relazione
superficiale, la quale si andò facendo man mano meno cerimoniosa,
più franca, più espansiva, più confidenziale, e finì col diventare una
sincera ed affettuosa amicizia. Tutto questo nello spazio di un mese.
Ma eravamo giovani tutti e due, ed alla nostra età le amicizie si
fanno presto.
Conoscendo intimamente Gustavo, mi accorsi che, sebbene il fondo
del suo carattere fosse gioviale, il suo stato abituale, in quel
momento almeno, era triste ed impensierito. Però non cercai di
provocare le sue confidenze con domande indiscrete; c'è una così
lieve sfumatura tra l'interessamento e la curiosità!
— Se un giorno sentirà il bisogno di dirmi i suoi crucci, li accoglierò
con cuore d'amico, pensavo. Se vorrà serbarli per sè, rispetterò il
suo segreto.
Intanto cercavo, per quanto era in mio potere di mantenerlo
divertito. Ogni mattina gli facevo un programma per passare la
giornata: erano gite sul lago, pranzi alle isole, partite di pesca,
escursioni sui monti, visite alle fabbriche di tela, di carta, di vetro,
ecc.
Una mattina mi parve più mesto del solito.
— Cosa facciamo oggi? gli domandai.
— Quello che vuoi, mi rispose, purchè siamo soli.
— Prendiamo un canotto, e facciamo un viaggio d'esplorazione sul
lago, in cerca di un luogo pittoresco per pranzare insieme?
— Io preferirei una gita su qualche monte. In barca si rimane così
inerti che si cade in malinconia. Ho già tanta tristezza nell'anima; ho
bisogno di movimento per distrarmene un poco.
Era la prima volta che alludeva alla sua tristezza. Ebbi la delicatezza
di non rispondere a quella mezza confidenza, per non mostrare
d'esserne stato all'agguato.
Gli proposi di andare a Premeno. Egli accettò, e mezz'ora dopo
salivamo una stradetta di montagna, erta, tortuosa, pittoresca.
Camminavamo da quasi due ore, quando il cielo cominciò ad
annuvolarsi; minacciava un temporale.
— Guarda, Carlo, mi disse Gustavo additandomi una nuvoletta scura,
non ti pare che quella nuvola abbia la forma di due teste di angeli?
— Ma che! Mi sembra piuttosto che raffiguri un cane accovacciato.
— Ah! Lo sapevo, sai, che tu non l'avresti veduta come me! E disse
queste parole con accento addolorato.
Non capivo perchè desse tanto peso a quella sciocchezza, e gli
risposi meravigliato:
— Ti dispiace tanto che io non veda due teste d'angeli! Via, ci
metterò un po' di buona volontà. Già, nelle forme vaghe delle nuvole
si vede quel che si vuole.
— No. Lo sapevo già che tu non avresti veduto come me. È una mia
visione, eterna, crucciosa. Vedo dovunque delle teste alate. È il mio
incubo.
— È un bell'incubo. Dicono che Iddio si circondi di angeli per
abbellire il Paradiso, e tu che hai la fortuna di vederne in hac
lagrymarum valle, te ne lagni?
Gustavo chinò il capo sul petto, e stette zitto un pezzo, come
discutendo qualche cosa di grave tra sè e sè. Ad un tratto si fermò,
mi prese le mani, e mi disse con voce commossa:
— Senti, Carlo. Questa storia delle teste alate, che ti sembra certo
una puerilità, è il segreto della mia malinconia, delle mie incertezze.
È il cruccio della mia vita. E mi pesa, e vorrei parlarne con te. Tu mi
sei amico, mi vuoi bene. Ti dirò tutto, quello ch'è passato e quello
che mi tormenta ancora; e tu mi darai il consiglio ed il coraggio di
cui ho bisogno. Lo vuoi, Carlo?
Non so dire che slancio d'affetto, e che senso d'immensa pietà mi si
destassero in cuore per quella sventura misteriosa e grande. Se
avessi secondato il primo impulso, mi sarei stretto Gustavo al cuore,
avrei pianto con lui. Ma per quello sciocco riserbo che ci fa arrossire
de' nostri sentimenti migliori, e ne imbriglia le manifestazioni, mi
limitai a stringergli le mani, e gli dissi con calore:
— Con tutto il cuore Gustavo, con tutto il cuore.
Egli mi prese il braccio, continuò a salire, e lasciandosi dietro
Premeno, mi trasse sopra un'altura in un piccolo spianato sassoso e
disuguale, che si chiama col nome pomposo di Piazza Garibaldi. Vi
trovammo alcune panche e delle tavole di sasso. Sedemmo sotto
una specie di grondaia per ripararci dalla pioggia che cominciava a
cadere. Gustavo prese alcuni sassolini sulla tavola che aveva dinanzi,
li agitò un poco in silenzio, poi prese a parlare rapidamente, sempre
baloccandosi con quei sassi per darsi un'aria disinvolta, mentre
invece la sua voce tradiva l'agitazione dell'animo.

II.

— Tre anni sono, disse, ero un giovinotto allegro, pieno di vita,

affettuoso, noncurante del domani, amante del lavoro, appassionato
per la mia arte, nella quale mi sentivo capace di riescire a qualche
cosa.
— Bada alla tua modestia, Gustavo. La farai arrossire.
— No; lasciami dire quel tanto di buono che ho avuto; ne avrò
bisogno per farmi perdonare il tanto male che mi resta a dirti.
Poi soggiunse con un sorriso penoso come una lacrima:
— Parlo di un morto. Il Gustavo d'allora non esiste più.
E continuò a rimovere vivamente quel pugno di sassolini, a gettarli in
alto ed a riprenderli, finchè l'intenerimento che gli aveva fatta
oscillare la voce nelle ultime parole fu dominato. Allora riprese senza
alzare lo sguardo:
— Una mattina giravo per Milano cercando alloggio. Passando in via
dell'Unione, vidi ad una porta un appigionasi, ed entrai.
«È al secondo piano, l'uscio a destra,» mi disse la portinaia.
— Salii. La serva che venne ad aprire m'introdusse in un salotto, e
mi lasciò dicendo:
«S'accomodi. La signora verrà a momenti.
— La prima cosa che vidi fu un cavalletto, su cui stava una tela
finita, rappresentante due teste alate. Ma non erano teste di puttini.
Erano due belle teste di donna, piene d'espressione e di vita. Una,
pallida, con una ricchezza di capelli, di ciglia e di sopracciglia d'un
bel castano chiaro e due grandi occhi color dell'ambra,
dall'espressione malinconica e dolce. L'altra sembrava piuttosto la
testa d'un'amazzone che quella di un angelo. Capelli nerissimi, occhi
neri scintillanti, profilo greco, bocca stretta e severa, carnagione
bruna, colorita, attraente.
— Erano due belle teste ed era un bel lavoro. Stavo assorto in quella
contemplazione che mi appassionava come uomo e come artista,
quando udii aprire l'uscio del salotto, ed una voce lieve lieve mi
disse:
«È il signore che desidera di vedere il quartierino da affittare?
— Mi voltai a quella simpatica voce di donna; ma invece di
risponderle, misi un'esclamazione di meraviglia.
— La signora che mi aveva parlato era l'originale della testa alata,
dagli occhi color dell'ambra, dall'espressione malinconica e dolce.
— Ella comprese la causa del mio stupore, e mi disse:
«Ha osservato quel lavoro, nevvero? Deve trovarmi vana assai per
essermi ritratta così. Ma veda: non ho che una parente al mondo,
una sorella che mi è tanto cara. E viviamo lontane, lontane. Quando
ho cominciato questo quadro destinato a lei, mi venne naturale di
ritrarre il suo bel volto; e poi non ho potuto rassegnarmi e mettergli
là accanto una testa qualunque, ideale o vera, ma indifferente. Ci
voleva la testa di qualcuno che l'amasse, e ci ho posta la mia.
— Ella aveva cessato di parlare, ed io non pensavo a risponderle ed
ascoltavo sempre, e quella voce lieve lieve vibrava ancora nell'aria
intorno a me. Era lei l'originale del quadro; l'aveva dipinto lei! Era
giovine; era bella di quella bellezza sofferente che interessa ed
affascina; era artista come me.
— Trovai superbe quelle camere che dovevano farmi vivere accanto
a lei; e mi affrettai ad impadronirmene.
— La mia padrona di casa era una signorina. Si chiamava Clelia
Moris, ed aveva ventiquattro anni. Era una natura eletta,
aristocratica, delicata, fatta per vivere in un ambiente di poesia; le
cure materiali dell'esistenza la urtavano penosamente. Quando le
domandai il prezzo del mio nuovo alloggio, me lo disse rapidamente,
senza guardarmi, a bassa voce, ed arrossì fin sulla fronte. Quando la
sera, appena installato in casa sua, le posi dinanzi il denaro, ella
arrossì ancora di più; cercò di profferire un grazie che le rimase fra i
denti; tenne sempre gli occhi fissi sul lavoro, si diede a cucire con
una rapidità febbrile, e lasciò il denaro sulla tavola senza osare nè di
ritirarlo, nè di guardarlo.
— Al confronto di quell'estrema delicatezza, io che senza essere nè
cupido, nè avaro, non avevo mai avuta l'idea di trovarmi umiliato per
rapporti di denaro con chicchessia, mi sentii compreso da tanta
inferiorità, che non osavo quasi più parlare, e sostenevo male la
conversazione con frasi scucite, alle quali Clelia rispondeva con
monosillabi, senza alzar gli occhi. Compresi che quel denaro posto là
tra me e lei sul tavolino era la causa della sua confusione e mi ritirai.
— Il mio cuore d'artista, che s'era conservato entusiasta e buono
malgrado la vita burrascosa d'un giovine affatto libero, era fatto per
apprezzare le cose belle, per amarle con passione.
— Così non mi feci neppur un momento l'illusione di rimanere con
quella fanciulla nei prosaici rapporti di padrona di casa ed inquilino, e
nemmeno in quelli paradossali dell'amicizia. L'amore non mi venne
addosso inavvertito. Da quel primo giorno, da quella prima ora,
sentii che avrei amata Clelia con tutto l'ardore di cui era capace il
mio cuore. Ma non pensai menomamente di fuggire, di sottrarmi a
quel fascino: lo guardavo venire con delizia, come si guarda in aprile
rinverdir la natura, gonfiarsi le gemme, sbocciare le rose.
— Quando rividi Clelia il giorno dopo, non le parlai più di pigione, di
denaro. Discorremmo d'arte, di libri, di teatri, di amici lontani, di noi,
di tutto. Ed allora non fu punto impacciata; le parole non le morivano
fra i denti come la sera innanzi; parlava con entusiasmo, e mi
guardava negli occhi senza sfrontatezza, ma con un'espressione di
curiosità e di simpatia.
— Così passarono dieci giorni. Dieci giorni così belli, così inebbrianti,
che darei tutto il sangue delle mie vene per farli rivivere. Amavo
quella fanciulla come un pazzo; e sentivo il bisogno di dirglielo, di
dirlo a tutti, di gridarlo sui tetti. E tuttavia la sapevo così delicata,
che temevo d'offenderla. Esitai due giorni ancora. Ma la passione, la
speranza, la gioia mi gonfiavano talmente il cuore, che mi pareva
dovesse scoppiare. Tremavo da un momento all'altro di non sapermi
frenare, di saltarle al collo e di coprirla di baci, senz'altro preavviso a
costo di farmi scacciare come un malcreato. Non potevo più vivere
così. Bisognava che ella mi amasse, o che me ne andassi per non
vederla mai più.
— Una sera stavo seduto accanto a lei che lavorava. Frenai i miei
impeti entusiastici, e cercai di fare la mia dichiarazione un po'
indirettamente ed accartocciata, come si usa fra persone ammodo.
«Lei non ha altra affezione al mondo che per sua sorella, signora
Clelia? le domandai.
«Perchè me lo domanda?
— Ella mi diede questa risposta continuando a lavorare, tranquilla,
senza il menomo imbarazzo. Mi parve molto fredda. Provai nel cuore
un senso di delusione penoso, e tra l'amore e lo sdegno, tutti i miei
propositi di convenienza sfumarono; me le accostai all'orecchio fin
quasi a toccarlo colle labbra, e con tutta la passione che mi sentivo
nel cuore, le dissi:
«Perchè vi amo, Clelia. Vi amo!
— M'aspettavo un'esplosione di sdegno. Ero spaventato dalle mie
stesse parole. Ma ella si voltò lentamente, e guardandomi in volto
coi suoi grandi occhi limpidi, mi rispose:
«Lo so bene che mi amate, Gustavo.
— Rimasi istupidito. Era la schiettezza dell'innocenza, o era un
artificio di civetteria? Quella pace, quella sicurezza, volevano dire che
mi amava, o che si prendeva gioco di me? Volli saperlo, e col cuore
tremante le domandai:
«Lo sapete, e non ne siete offesa?
— Ella depose il lavoro, e senza precipitazione, colla calma d'una
vera beatitudine mi guardò a lungo e mi disse:
«Non posso esserne offesa, perchè anch'io vi amo.
«Voi mi amate, Clelia? Oh non avrei mai osato crederlo!
«Osatelo, Gustavo. Osatelo perchè siete un bravo giovine.
— E mi prese il capo colle sue mani bianche, e senza agitarsi, senza
arrossire, mi baciò sulla fronte. Ricevetti quel bacio in ginocchio, a
capo chino, senza ricambiarlo, in un religioso raccoglimento, come si
riceve una benedizione.
— Vivemmo otto mesi così. Otto mesi di incantevole ebbrezza,
amandoci con tutto l'ardore dei mortali, con tutta la purezza degli
angeli.
— Clelia aveva in casa una serva che l'aveva veduta nascere; una di
quelle donne che invecchiano nella famiglia del primo padrone, ci si
affezionano come se fosse la famiglia loro e ne dividono eroicamente
quando occorra, le disgrazie, i sacrifici, le privazioni, senza
immaginarsi nemmeno per ombra il proprio eroismo.
— Da quel giorno ogni volta ch'io sonavo alla porta di Clelia, la
vecchia Rosa, dopo avermi introdotto, sedeva anch'essa nel salotto,
a qualche distanza da noi, e lavorando in silenzio, assisteva a tutte le
mie lunghe visite. Era un po' sorda, e le nostre parole le sfuggivano;
ma non eravamo soli.
— Ci eravamo fidanzati tra noi, da cuore a cuore; ed io lavoravo
assiduamente ad un quadro che dovevo mettere all'Esposizione di
Firenze, e col quale speravo di farmi conoscere per guadagnarmi una
situazione da dividere con Clelia. Quando le dissi questi particolari
che non mi permettevano di sposarla subito, mi rispose senza
vergognarsi:
«Io pure sono povera, Gustavo. Non vi porterò altra dote che il mio
amore.
— Del resto non seppi mai nulla riguardo ai suoi interessi. Evitava di
parlarne; credo che soffrisse delle privazioni, ma non me le disse
mai. Cercai più volte di farmi raccontare di quella sorella lontana, ma
ella mi rispose vagamente, e finì col dirmi:
«Perchè cercate di indagare i miei interessi di famiglia? Dubitate di
me, Gustavo? Mia sorella è maritata, ed è onestissima.
— Io non dubitavo di lei, e non domandai più nulla, e non pensai che
ad esser felice.
— Una sola cosa mi tormentava durante quegli otto mesi così belli:
la salute di Clelia. Non era precisamente inferma, ma era tanto
gracile e delicatina, che un nulla la faceva ammalare. Parecchie volte
al giorno prendeva un cucchiaio di olio di fegato di merluzzo, ed
aveva sempre la tosse. Ma io pensavo: «Non è più tanto giovine, la
tisi è la malattia delle giovinette.» E scacciavo le idee tristi
guardando la serenità dei suoi begli occhi.
— Sul principio della nostra relazione, uscendo di casa, una sera
incontrai alcuni amici, che m'invitarono ad una cena. Dopo la cena, si
fece un po' di chiasso, e rimasi fuori tutta la notte.
— La mattina, quando andai da Clelia, fui spaventato al vedere
quanto male le aveva fatto quella mia scappata. Era pallida,
abbattuta, cogli occhi gonfi di pianto; sembrava che uscisse da una
malattia. Non mi fece alcun rimprovero. Ma la sua sofferenza mi fu
un rimprovero crudele. D'allora rientrai più presto la sera, la
circondai di affettuose assiduità, ma per parecchi giorni le durò una
febbricciatola che mi rodeva la coscienza.
— Ogni volta che nasceva tra noi una di quelle piccole questioni da
innamorati, che sono tanto belle per la pace che le segue poi, Clelia
ne aveva la febbre.
— Più volte, solo nella mia stanza, piangevo di rabbia pensando a
quel che potrebbe accadere. Avrei voluto parlarne alla vecchia Rosa;
ma non mi aveva più perdonato quella notte passata fuori, che
aveva fatto soffrir tanto la sua padrona; e non mi badava più. E poi
col suo udito, non era possibile discorrere in segreto con lei.
— Un giorno condussi a casa un amico medico, pregandolo di
osservare attentamente la mia fidanzata, senza farsi scorgere. Glielo
presentai e lo feci rimanere tutta la serata con noi.
— Quando uscii ad accompagnarlo mi disse che non osava dare un
giudizio senza avere visitata l'ammalata, ma aveva tutta la veste
della tisi. Forse potrebbe ancora vivere a lungo; ma la menoma
scossa, la menoma sofferenza fisica o morale potrebbe esserle
fatale...
— Ebbi alcuni giorni di profondo sconforto. Ma Clelia era così serena,
cosí felice; mi parlava sempre del nostro avvenire, ci credeva tanto,
che tornai a crederci anch'io.
— Infine quel medico non l'aveva oscultata. Chi sa? Forse s'era
ingannato sulla natura del male. Appena Clelia sarebbe mia, la
condurrei a Napoli, a Madera, la farei vivere in una pineta, dove i
polmoni delicati si riconfortano; ne avrei tanta cura, la renderei tanto
felice, che non soffrirebbe più...
— Intanto il mio quadro era finito ed era tempo d'andarlo ad
esporre. Dovevo separarmi per poco da Clelia. Ci scambiammo le
solite promesse e raccomandazioni.
«Scrivimi, sai, mi diceva, non tenermi in pena, non darmi crucci, te
ne prego. Io sono come quelle povere pianticine esotiche che si
conservano belle e profumate, finchè sono tenute in un dato
ambiente, con quelle date cure; ma un soffio d'aria, una goccia
d'acqua più o meno, bastano a farle morire.
— Io promisi, di cuore, di gran cuore, perchè l'amavo più della mia
vita, e tremavo per la sua. E partii.
 III.

— Avevo venticinque anni. Mi sentivo pieno di vita e di speranza.

Partivo lasciandomi dietro la dolcezza dell'amore, per andare
incontro alla dolcezza della gloria.
— Clelia sembrava rinverdita colla primavera; da qualche tempo
stava bene, ed era evidente che quel medico s'era ingannato.
— Ero contento di me, del mondo, di tutti. Quegli otto mesi di amore
virtuoso, di vita casalinga, mi avevano ritemprata la salute. Il sangue
mi scorreva caldo e robusto nelle vene. La natura mi rifulgeva
intorno splendida e giovine come nel giorno della creazione. Ed io
pure ero giovine e felice come Adamo. Ma per me pure c'era un
frutto proibito; ed io pure trovai l'Eva che me lo porse.
— La incontrai nel breve tragitto di mare tra Genova e Livorno,
quella Eva francese col viso dipinto di bianco o di roseo, e gli occhi
dipinti di nero, e le labbra dipinte di rosso. Ho sempre avuto un
profondo disprezzo per le donne imbellettate. Ma pur troppo vi sono
delle ore maledette nella vita, in cui la materia vince l'anima, ed
allora si accoglie volentieri una donna che si disprezza, perchè i suoi
favori si ottengono facilmente. Quella straniera bionda fece due terzi
della strada per avvicinarsi a me. Nelle disposizioni in cui mi trovavo,
lo spirito è pronto, ma la carne è debole: ed io non mi feci pregare
per fare l'altro terzo.
— Avevo promesso a Clelia di scriverle da Livorno la prima lettera.
Ma quando presi la penna per scrivere a lei che stimavo tanto, alla
mia sposa, in una camera profanata dalla presenza di
quell'avventuriera, sentii una profonda vergogna di me, e per non
mentire non scrissi nulla. L'amavo con tutta l'anima ma le ero
infedele; cosa avrei potuto dirle in quell'ora che non ripugnasse alla
mia coscienza?
— Pensai che quella relazione avventurosa sarebbe presto troncata;
che quella donna se ne sarebbe andata, e quando mi fossi sentito
ancora degno dell'amore di Clelia, le avrei scritto.
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