Sorel and the International - Amadeo Bordiga

The old Sorel, who has long since become, despite the hullabaloo surrounding certain of his sympathies for Bolshevism, an esteemed collaborator of the Italian bourgeois press, published in Time an article with which he would like to demonstrate the bankruptcy of internationalism. For this purpose, the no longer young author, who, ironically, talks about the cere-pamphlet of the International, reviews some facts taken, with a bit of good will, from the history of recent decades.

Let's leave aside the rehashing of a rude criticism of Marx and the first glorious International. The chief theorist of Latin syndicalism believed his passage to posterity was assured with the fame of the overcomer of the "Teutonic" Marxist verb; instead, while Marx is more than ever alive with a perennial and flamboyant youth, his decrepit critic saddens amidst the last flashes of an eclectically bourgeois and decadent genius. Making the last stages of his intellectual life groping in the dark, sometimes badly hitting the corners, yesterday of neocriticism, today of a revised edition of leftism, tomorrow in who knows what other manifestations of theoretical inconsistency. How could this unpublished, interesting essay of neurasthenic bourgeois decadence order the Master and the Head of a school that took from him indelible paths of rectilinear and unshakable continuity, and where necessary silky and implacable.

Let us also leave aside the obvious observation of the bankruptcy of the Second International in 1914. the starting point of the formidable movement of revision and criticism which historically confirmed the first and third, if history is not a cold chronological following of external facts.

But the argument on which the desire, worthy of a better cause, to demonstrate that the idea of ​​the International is lost and bankrupt is truly such as to do a great disservice to the quality of a scholar of historical disciplines of those who resort to it, putting themselves on the same level as any newspaper writer. Sorel notes the failure of the Vienna Conference from which the "2 1/2 International" was supposed to emerge and has the courage to immediately take this fiasco into account in the decline of the International, as if in Vienna it had been a question of the only possibility of creating any International, as if the Moscow International were, with its structure and its activity, a negligible quantity before the project of the defendants in Vienna! It seems to him that the Congress of Vienna dealt the final blow to internationalist illusions!

Sorel would thus have freed himself in passing from the inconvenience of a certain Third International and allows himself to exist in spite of the thesis that he has the senile whim to take up supporting. He barely mentions Lenin's intention (Sorel only has to go down another step and also deprive Lenin's person of the precious consideration, which he still seems to deign to grant him) to create an international organisation. «He had his Moscow Committees draw up rules, etc. but since he doesn't know Western conditions...". It is clear: Lenin's mistake is that he did not study Sorelian's works enough, so well founded in their assessments and predictions on the life of the West, which were so brilliantly confirmed by the facts... And to demonstrate that Lenin's plan failed, Sorel adopts a strange argument such as the one whose paternity and priority could not be denied in the past, but which is very original and very valid... The split of the Italian Party. We did not know that we had disturbed the anguished sleep of Sorel, who was reduced to himself evoking in the grandiose controversies of the English and American schisms the dissenting tendencies from the politics of the Communist International in Italy.

There is no one who does not see that the true proof of the strength, vitality and solidity of the Communist International lies in the energetic, safe and systematic way with which the resolutions of its second Congress were applied everywhere. If the International had been an insecure organism, put together at worst, then in order to save its effective formal effects from a curtailment it would have tolerated all the flaws here and there. Instead, the most effective demonstration that the Moscow International is truly the common denominator of proletarian action in all the countries of the world, very different from each other in a thousand conditions, lies in the fact that, after having established rules destined for universal application, it was able to take the luxury, and let's put it mildly, of being extremely intransigent in demanding execution; at the cost of eliminating large numbers of people to achieve a necessary homogeneity. Sorel therefore wants to see proof of the inconsistency of the International, precisely where it is best demonstrated that it is a reality, a formidable operating force, a directive of action that everywhere now has considerable organized forces and agents following its trail.

The balance of the work carried out by the second to third upcoming World Congress is formidable. For all the long months that have elapsed and are intervening between them, how much of the opposing press has not been dedicated to reporting, as events taking place on the foreground of world politics, the development of the work of organizing the communist movement, the Congresses, the unifications, the splits of the parties adhering to Moscow? When Lenin dictated to the so-called Committees those rules that the high peaks of the Serratis, the Nobs, the Adlers, etc., etc., supported by the historical authority of a Sorel, find childishly incorrect, he would however have been able to instill in them that diabolical spirit which meant that public opinion, even bourgeois, had to become passionate about them and concentrate all its permanent attention on them, scandalizing them, getting angry, being amazed, horrified, but in spite of herself dealing with the infamous twenty-one points, a true nightmare for the whole bunch of our multi-coloured opponents.

At the Third Congress the Communist International will explain its forces to the world, with the precise framework given to them by the rational and disciplined application of the deliberations of the Second. The greatest force in human history will be reviewed. It will reaffirm the granite doctrines that animate it, which displease the mushroom farm of bourgeois intellectuals, but in whose footsteps a world is being reshaped, while other schools, other methods, other glittering discoveries, after the complacent fashion of one day, disappeared without leaving any other trace than the tremulous and fleeting one that follows the meteors after the few moments of their glare.