Two Editorials From Ordine Nuovo

I

In this issue we begin the publication of a brief study of Leonardo da Vinci by Comrade Aldo Oberdorfer of Trieste, written on the occasion of da Vinci's fourth centenary to be celebrated this year. We feel sure our readers and friends will not be surprised, as this represents not a failure to live up to our purpose but a partial fulfilment of the aims we made clear from the start.

On other occasions we have already set out what we believe a paper, a Communist cultural review, should be. Such a paper must aim to become, in miniature, complete in itself, and, even though it may be unable to satisfy all the intellectual needs of the nucleus of men who read and support it, who live a part of their lives around it, and who impart to it some of their own life, it must strive to be the kind of journal in which everyone will find things that interest and move him, that will lighten the daily burden of work, economic struggle and political discussion. At the least, the journal should encourage the complete development of one's mental capacities for a higher and fuller life, richer in harmony and in ideological aims, and should be a stimulus for the development of one's own personality. Why cannot we ourselves, with our modest forces, begin the work of the education system, the education system of the future among the youth, who support us and look to us with so much faith and expectation? Because the socialist education system when it emerges will of necessity emerge as a complete system whose goal it will be to embrace quickly all branches of human knowledge. This will be a practical necessity and an intellectual requirement. Are there not already workers to whom the class struggle has given a new sense of dignity and liberty who—when they hear the poets' songs and the names of artists and thinkers—ask bitterly: “Why haven't we, too, been taught these things?” But they console themselves: “Schools, as organised over the last ten years, as organised today by the ruling classes, teach little or nothing.” The aim is to meet educational needs by different means: freely, through spontaneous relations between men moved by a common desire to improve themselves. Why couldn't a paper become the centre for one of these groups? In this field, too, the bourgeois régime is on the verge of bankruptcy. From its hands, calloused from their sole work of accumulating private wealth, the torch of science and the sacred lamp of life have fallen. Ours is the task of taking them up, ours the task of making them glow with new light.

In the accumulation of ideas transmitted to us by a millennium of work and thought there are elements which have eternal value, which cannot and must not perish. The loss of consciousness of these values is one of the most serious signs of degradation brought about by the bourgeois régime; to them everything becomes an object of trade and a weapon of war.

The proletariat, having conquered social power, will have to take on the work of reconquest, to restore in full for itself and all humanity the devastated realm of the spirit. This is what the Russian workers, guided by Maxim Gorky, are doing today; this must begin to be done wherever the proletariat is approaching the maturity necessary for social change. The decay at the top must be replaced by new, stronger life from below.

23 August 1919

II

A number of comrades from Turin and the Piedmont region (where our review is especially circulated), inform us that the propaganda work they have engaged in for spreading Ordine Nuovo among factory and farm workers is not producing the lasting results which they had hoped to achieve because many comrades find the articles we publish "difficult". From our conversations with these friends we have come to the following conclusions: "psychologically", the period of elementary or so-called "evangelistic" propaganda has passed. The basic ideas of communism have been assimilated by even the most backward elements of the working class. It is astonishing how much the war has contributed to this, army life as well as the brass hats' systematic and savage anti-communist propaganda, which hammered into even the most resistant minds the elementary terms (words, expressions, language) used in the ideological arguments between capitalist and proletariat. First principles must now be taken as understood. We must now turn from the "evangelistic" phase to criticism and reconstruction. Communist experience in Russia and Hungary irresistibly claims our attention. We are avid for information, logical explanations (Are we in Italy ready? Shall we be equal to our task? What errors can we avoid?); we are eager for criticism, criticism, and for practical experimental ideas. But here the paucity of political education, or rather "constitutional" experience, among the Italian people is revealed. The parliament has always been a dead thing and in Italy there have never taken place, as in England and France, great battles between the popular State institutions (chamber of deputies, local bodies, etc.), and the institutions representing the crown or the most conservative classes (the senate, judiciary, executive).

The crisis through which the Italian proletariat is struggling, caught between the passionate desire to learn and the inability to satisfy this desire individually, must and can be resolved. And it can and must be resolved by methods suited to the workers and peasants, by Communist methods, by the methods of the Soviets. The winning of the eight-hour day leaves a margin of leisure time which must be devoted to cultural work in common. It is essential to convince the workers and peasants that it is above all in their own interest to submit to the permanent discipline of education and to create a conception of their own of the world and the complex and intricate system of human relations, both economic and spiritual, which shapes social life on the globe. These proletarian cultural soviet should be established by friends of Ordine Nuovo within workmen's circles and youth groups; they should become the focal point of concrete and realisable Communist education. In them, local and regional problems should be studied; persons should be found who can compile statistics on industrial and agricultural problems in order to determine urgent needs, and also to gain some knowledge of the psychology of small producers, etc.

Let comrades reflect on these considerations. In addition to generous heroism, the revolution also and especially needs painstaking, persistent and persevering work.

12 July 1919