The adherence of the left quadrant to the European integration project should come as no surprise. As we have shown more extensively in Historia y conciencia del precariado. Siervos y Señores de la Globalización (2021), this is explained above all on the basis of the very redefinition of the post-Marxist Left in a politico-economically liberal and culturally libertarian key.
In the transition from the communist anti-capitalism of Gramsci and Togliatti to the liberal-libertarian ultra-capitalism of a D’Alema or a Mitterrand, the Left passed unhurriedly from the struggle against Capital to that other one focused on the defense to the hilt and the glorification of the European Union, which represents the non plus ultra of de-democratizing liberalism in the Old Continent.
In other words, the enthusiastic adhesion of the rainbow and post-Marxist New Left to the project of Capital and the dominant global class had, necessarily, to be translated into a full and euphoric acceptance of the triumph of that project: the European Union.
Thus for the Left, already redefined as demophobic and a direct enemy of the interests of the working classes (from the 1980s onwards, every triumph of the Left has been punctually and inexorably translated into a defeat for the working classes), the priority has always been that of the cosmopolitan dream, crystallized in formulas such as “more Europe” and “more free movement,” that is, the very dream of the non-border ruling class; a dream that was always favorable only to the global-elitist Master and which, without exaggeration, proved to be a nightmare for the national-popular Servant.
On the other hand, for the market-friendly and post-Marxist, anti-sovereigntist and liberal Left, the tutelary deities from which to draw inspiration have long since ceased to be Marx and Gramsci, Lukács and Lenin, forgotten and, moreover, subjected to perpetual damnatio memoriae under the now dominant accusation of “totalitarianism,” with which the new global-capitalist mental order ostracizes all that is not akin to it.
The new “great spirits” in whom to find inspiration became the authors of the Ventotene Manifesto of 1941 (Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni), the basis of left-wing anti-sovereignism and coherent with the new liberal and markedly anti-communist framework of the New Left of complementing the dominant power relationship.
As has been shown in Pensar diferente. Filosofía del Disenso (2022), after 1989 the compatibility and overlapping between the battles of the liberal Right of Money and the libertarian Left of Custom, both invaded on all sides by their unbridled and dangerous relations with neoliberalism, have come to completion. What the former imposes at the structural level (denationalization, de-sovereignization, precarization, etc.), the latter glorifies at the superstructural level (trendy culture of cosmopolitanism without borders, demonization of the National State as such, etc.).
In this perspective, the Ventotene Manifesto indeed played a decisive role in legitimizing and, at the same time, in concealing the integral adherence of the post-Marxist Left to victorious turbo-capitalism and the liberal New World Order.
With its anti-fascist and, at the same time, anti-communist charge, the Ventotene Manifesto was the ideal platform for the reorganization of the liberal orientation of a Left ready both to fire anathemas against the red and brown totalitarianisms of the past, and to accept in silence the immense invisible violence of the fanaticism of the class economy, to which it had meanwhile sold both head and heart.
In addition to the left legitimization of the new liberal turn, the Ventotene Manifesto was assumed as the new foundational text of the theoretical program of the left quadrant also because of its anti-sovereigntist and clearly cosmopolitan vocation.
The central thesis of the signatories of the Manifesto was, in fact, that which dogmatized that the only way to definitively put aside the belligerence between sovereign states, which led to the atrocity of world conflicts, consisted in the absolute transfer of their sovereignty to a federal authority, which in the future would happen precisely with the genesis of the European Union.
It is true that in the pages of the Ventotene Manifesto one can find an impassioned defense of socialism and of the emancipation of the working classes, both connected with the idea of the “European revolution,” according to a direction which, in terms of results, is sidereally far from the “factual reality” of the European Union.
As the authors of the Manifesto write, “the European revolution, in order to respond to our demands, must be socialist, that is to say, it must aim at the emancipation of the working classes and the creation for them of more humane living conditions.” Democratizing society in the socialist sense, then, means that “the economic forces must not dominate men… but be subdued, guided, controlled by them in the most rational way, so that the great masses do not become victims.”
Under this profile, as has been shown, Ventotene’s original project aimed at a recovery of popular national sovereignty, but at the “higher” level of popular sovereignty of a European State: it aspired to a single federal army and monetary unity, to the suppression of customs barriers and direct representation of citizens, to a single foreign policy and to transforming the Old Continent into a sort of third way with respect to the United States of America and the Soviet Union.
And yet these socialist demands, noble in themselves, were necessarily impossible in the context of a supranationalization which, by emptying sovereignty, was destined to set in motion—contrary to what the signatories of the Ventotene Manifesto imagined with little historical realism—the primacy of the economic over the political and the centrality of post-national and, in turn, post-democratic organizations.
The conversion into reality of Ventotene’s reverie would thus have led no longer to cosmopolitan socialism, but to the non-border domination of the hegemonic class—with the European Union; the “free and united Europe” invoked by the original title of the Manifesto is only such for the ruling class, “united and free” to massacre without restraint the pole of the dominated. The signatories of the Ventotene Manifesto thus ended up falling into the Hegelian figure of the “beautiful soul” (schöne Seele), whose good intentions are quickly overwhelmed by the “course of the world” (Weltlauf). Years later, and still immersed in the same, largely utopian horizon, the reflections of Habermas, for example, looked to Europe as the only possible way towards a global implementation of this cosmopolitanism.
Both the Ventotene’s and Habermas’ illusions lacked the strong sense of realism with which Lenin was endowed when, without periphrasis, he affirmed that, in a capitalist regime, the foundation of a United States of Europe would be sic et simpliciter the union of the Capital of Europe against the European dominated classes.
To fully understand how the cosmopolitan project of such a union was to be determined in the sense envisaged by Lenin, while still rhetorically disguised behind the noble words of the Ventotene Manifesto, it may be useful to refer to von Hayek’s “The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism” (1939).
It is true that in this work Hayek does not think primarily of Europe. And yet, his reflections allow us to fully understand—much more than the Ventotene manifesto—the current mechanism on which the European Union is articulated. Hayek imagines that federal unification among the States should take place on the basis of a Single Market, with a single monetary system to replace the independent national Central Banks.
In this way, Hayek explains, the twofold objective of: (a) the limitation of possible intervention on the part of the States; and (b) the primacy of free movement is achieved. However, the State that emerges from the federation of preceding States does not recover the powers they have ceded individually: if it did so, it would degenerate, in Hayek’s opinion, into a socialist State. On the contrary, von Hayek’s federal construction is openly based on the external link and on the drastic reduction of the spaces for democratic decision that this naturally implies. For this reason, the new federal state outlined by von Hayek devours the sovereignty of the various member states and leaves them at the mercy of the free market, deprived of the possibility of any Keynesian-style intervention: the aim of the federation is therefore to alter the balance between democracy and capitalism, to the exclusive detriment of the former.
Thus, von Hayek writes: “in a federation, certain economic powers which are now generally in the hands of the national states cannot be exercised either by the federation or by the member states.” And this “implies that in general there should be less government interventionism for the federation to be viable.”
In its essential lines, the European Union has fulfilled Hayek’s model and not the utopian one outlined by the Ventotene Manifesto. The solidity of Lenin’s prophecy is thus accredited and, with it, the class victory that the rulers have obtained with the foundation of the European Union.
By formally adhering to the guiding line of the Ventotene Manifesto, the rainbow and post-Gramscian New Left abandoned the path not only of more or less heterodox Marxism (in the Italian case, that of the Gramscian and Togliattian communist party), but even that, more generally, of patriotic-based socialism (as, for example, was in Italy, that of Pietro Nenni). It hid its gradual adherence to liberal-capitalist dogma behind a cosmopolitanism that was formally the socialism of the Ventotene Manifesto and materially that of Hayek and the ruling classes, which can rightly be called capitalist globalism.
Suffice it to recall here how Togliatti, in an intervention in the Chamber of Deputies on December 2, 1948, vigorously defended (as, moreover, he had always done), national sovereignty, unconditionally rejecting the project of creating a European federation to be placed above national sovereignties: this would have meant—in Togliatti’s words—”not uniting, but dividing Europe.”
The strength with which the leadership of the party he founded with Gramsci defended national sovereignty against American interference was the same strength with which he protected it from a deconstruction mediated by the myth of European integration. Togliatti unceremoniously rejected the cosmopolitan vision, recognizing in it the quintessence of the ideology of the ruling class:
“Communism has nothing in common with cosmopolitanism… Communism does not oppose, but agrees and unites patriotism and proletarian internationalism since both are based on respect for the rights, liberties and independence of the different peoples. It is ridiculous to think that the working class can separate, split from the nation. The modern working class is the backbone of nations, not only because of its numbers, but because of its economic and political function. The future of the nation rests first and foremost on the shoulders of the working classes. Therefore, the communists, who are the party of the working class, cannot separate themselves from their nation if they do not want to cut off its vital roots. Cosmopolitanism is an ideology completely alien to the working class. It is rather the characteristic ideology of the men of international banking, of the cartels and international trusts, of the great stock market speculators and of the arms manufacturers.”
Also in 1948, Pietro Nenni, leader of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), strongly opposed the Atlantic Pact and European federation projects. In the first case, it would lead to Italy’s subordination to the dollar monarchy. In the second case, however, it would have been “Germany at the head of Europe,” as Nenni affirmed in the Chamber of Deputies on November 30, 1948.
Faced with this double eventuality, Nenni proposed “to organize the country in a free and autonomous democracy” and, therefore, on the basis of national sovereignty, understood as the inescapable foundation of the democratic project.
For both Togliatti and Nenni, and even for Lelio Basso, the anti-democratic implication of the supranationalization of the decision-making processes was immediately clear, as well as, in a convergent manner, its real meaning in the context of class conflict. This was Basso’s pronouncement in the Chamber of Deputies on July 13, 1949:
“Proletarian internationalism does not deny national sentiment, it does not deny history, but it wants to create the conditions that will allow nations to live together in peace. The cosmopolitanism from which the bourgeoisies suffer today, both ours and those of Europe, is a completely different thing: it is a disavowal of national values in order to better accept foreign domination.”
Even from mutually irreconcilable perspectives and political militancy, Togliatti, Nenni and Basso proposed a different path from that traced by the Ventotene Manifesto; and which, moreover, contained in itself all the fundamental elements for a precise critique of the latter and of its cosmopolitan vocation which—this is a central theme in each of the three authors just mentioned—was not only alien to the working classes, but even presented itself as the ideal instrument for dominating them even more intensely.
Still in 1957, the communist Gian Carlo Pajetta was strongly opposed to the idea of denationalization, in view of what today we would not hesitate to define as “Europeanization.” From the position of the dominated classes, it was necessary, Pajetta affirmed, “to understand… what a great and decisive value is that of national independence” (25 July 1957).
In these interpretative proposals, to which we have only briefly referred here, the great dilemma was already present: on the one hand, a denationalizing and de-sovereignizing cosmopolitanism (according to the model of the Ventotene Manifesto), to which the market-friendly anti-Gramscian Left adheres, which is the ideal humus for the cosmo-mercantilist power relation to flourish; and on the other hand, a democratic socialism with a national, sovereignist and internationalist base, aimed at protecting the working classes and, therefore, enemy of the post-national opening to the benefit of Capital.
The first path tended to annul proletarian internationalism in a cosmopolitanism favorable to the ruling class and based on the overthrow of national sovereignties; and ultimately led to the economic liberalism of post-national deregulation and the universalist and supra-nationalist doctrine of human rights exported by missiles (id est, in capitalist globalism). On this double basis, whose essential foundation lies in the abandonment of the internationalism of sister nations in favor of the globalism of the unified market, the Kafkaesque metamorphosis of the left quadrant was consummated, which ended up adhering to the liberal dogma (against any possible seduction of communism, socialism or Keynesianism) and to the Atlantist order of the American-centric one world (with imperialism of human rights, ethical interventionism and humanitarian bombing, all inclusive).
The second way, for its part, was based on the assumption that maintaining the national interest does not conflict with internationalism, but is its inescapable condition. Internationalism, in fact, is not governed by the overcoming of national sovereignties, but by their relationship of solidarity or, more precisely, by the fraternal relationship between democratic and socialist sovereign states, far removed from both conquering nationalism and market cosmopolitanism.
It has already been reiterated ad abundatiam why within the Left the line of the Ventotene Manifesto and the irrevocable condemnation of the very idea of Sovereignty of the national State prevailed.
It was the same condemnation, by the way, that would also become the mot d’ordre of the Masters of borderless competitiveness, of the “merchants of the future” and of the agents of cosmo-market relocation; which, moreover, the masters of the discourse had crystallized in a specific term of the globalist neo-language—”sovereignism”—with the aim of making impossible a priori any attempt to recover national sovereignty and, with it, democracy connected to the experience of the modern sovereign State.
It was the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that certified the “conversion of the Italian communists to neo-liberalism.” There the market-friendly Left’s integrally cosmopolitan forma mentis was defined, now convinced that any opposition to non-border globalism was no longer the possible defense of the dominated classes against the offensive of the unified market, but the path of identitarian, reactionary and regressive closure that necessarily had to coincide with the right quadrant of politics.
This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.
