By EUGENIO BUCCI*
In our days, the most momentous news is that the nationalist extreme right, covering the political stage with heavy shadows, wants to be international
The idea of internationalism comes from the left. Appeared on Communist Manifesto, a small book written by two young authors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Real young people: in February 1848, when the incendiary brochure was released, Marx was 29 years old and Engels was 28. The catchphrase they invented, “Proletarians of the world, unite”, outlived them both and demarcated the concept .
In the 20th century, one of the fatal incompatibilities between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky was right there. The first, already enthroned as tyrant of the Soviet Union, embraced (like a bear) the thesis that it was possible to build socialism in a single country. The second, jumping from exile to exile, stated that the socialist revolution would have to be international – or it would be neither revolution nor socialist.
Joseph Stalin prevailed and established himself on a deadly rise. Its track record contains millions of corpses, including those that were swallowed up by the famine-terror in Ukraine, during the Holodomor, in 1932 and 1933. In the same period, through the fraudulent “Moscow trials”, the “genius guide of the peoples ” decimated several of his comrades who in 1917 were part of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Shortly afterwards, in 1940, he sent secret agent Ramón Mercader to assassinate another of them, León Trotsky.
In Coyoacán, Mexico City, Ramón Mercader used a mountaineer's pick to open his victim's skull and, in 1961, was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. He served Stalinism in distant lands, but he was never an internationalist – he killed one.
Between good and evil, the labor movement has always been linked to supranational organizations. Some were better, others were vile. The Second International, linked to social democracy, inspired the creation of the PSDB in Brazil. León Trotsky's Fourth International fragmented into sequential splits until it shattered into practically invisible pieces. The Third International, commanded by Moscow, limited itself to transmitting the Kremlin's orders to its branches around the world.
Now it's gone. The dream of solidary internationalism has plunged into a downward trend. Sometimes it’s a hymn on the record player – or at a saudade dance. Other times, it's ideological junk. In our days, you see, the most momentous news is that the nationalist extreme right, covering the political stage with heavy shadows, wants to be international.
Yes, it is a contradiction in terms. Xenophobic forces – the kind that abhor immigrants, insult the UN, scorn the World Health Organization (WHO), snub Mercosur, flatter Elon Musk and disdain efforts to contain global warming – have dedicated themselves to promoting international meetings. Meetings for what? Now, to celebrate disunity and exacerbate hatred against any form of understanding, agreement, international meeting. If there is something that, by definition, cannot be internationalist at all, it is nationalism, but nationalism seems to have been left unannounced.
Marx and Engels said that the labor movement had to be internationalist because production relations had already been internationalized by capital. Therefore, if they wanted to change the game, revolutionary parties could not limit themselves to national spaces. At that point, they were Cartesians. You may even disagree with the two boys, but you can't help but recognize the logic of their reasoning.
Internationalist nationalism, on the other hand, is illogical. Its exponents proclaim, among other involuntary aporias, that they are against globalization. Have they not seen that globalization is a consequence of the economic order they swear to defend with arms? Haven't they seen that they themselves are a reverse symptom of globalization? They attack “globalism” – which they blame for migrations and digital money, which goes around the planet in less than a second –, without noticing that those they call “globalists”, far from being the culprits, are those who most denounce the perverse effects of globalization.
They didn't understand themselves and they abhor those who did. In an anti-civic trance, in a seismic rhythm, they cherish globalitarian fantasies. Perhaps they desire a future in which nations, fortified, armed and enclosed within themselves, will compete with each other until the end of time. Perhaps they believe that, from the war of all nationalisms against all nationalisms, paradise will sprout like a mushroom.
To complicate the game, a portion of Brazil embarked on this thanatic delirium, between mental nothingness and performative opulence. No surprises. We have been living for decades with incongruous phenomena that pass by as if they were normal. Take, for example, the adjective “progressive”, which refers to people who have converted to more conservative guidelines. Take another adjective, “republican,” which baptizes a segment of church worshipers. There are also illiberal liberals.
In this environment, internationalist nationalists are more of the same. Do they know that internationalism is leftist? Probably not. They never knew that Nazism was (and is) right-wing.
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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