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William H. Hinton
(1919 –2004)
Honest, Able, and
Fearless
Communists Return
to Power in Moldavia: Hope for a Communist Democracy in the Former Soviet
Union?
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Pier Paolo Pasolini, born in Bologna on March
5, 1922, and raised in the Friuli region of Venetia, is, in the words of
Alberto Moravia, the major Italian poet of the second half of the
twentieth century. He was also a filmmaker, novelist, and political journalist
of genius. He was murdered twenty years ago, on November 2, 1975.
A teacher and active Communist in the Friuli, Pasolini was accused of
“obscene acts” with teenage boys and “corrup tion of
minors” in the summer of 1949. In 1952 an appellate court finally
determined that he had violated no Italian law, but by that time his prior
existence was shattered. He had moved to Rome in 1950 and, having no work for
two years, lived in abject poverty, sustained in every sense by his mother who
had fled with him. Slowly he obtained a pittance for freelance writing of
criticism and poetry. In 1955 he published the novel Ragazzi di vita
[Real Life Kids], immediately prosecuted for containing
“pornographic content” that was “contrary to good morals.”
The book was denounced by the Vatican, and also by the Communist Party (PCI).
But the prosecution failed (the judges in their opinion praised the book’s
“authentic lyricism”), and Ragazzi di vita ended up as a
finalist for the 1955 Strega Prize, Italy’s leading literary award. For
the rest of his life, Pasolini was at the center of Italy’s living culture
and politics. And this at a time when Italy’s culture (particularly its
cinema) and politics were for a brilliant moment at the center of the global
stage, perhaps to a degree not seen since the sixteenth century. Openly gay and
a critical Communist, in 1964 Pasolini utilized the flicker of liberation
sparked by Pope John XXIII to make the film The Gospel According to
Matthew, said Pasolini: “…someone who walks up to a couple of
people and says, ‘Drop your nets and follow me’ is a total
revolutionary.” When, in the wake of 1968, full depictions of things
sexual were permitted, Pasolini made the achingly lyrical films
Decameron (1971), Canterbury Tales (1972), and Thousand and
One Nights (1974), filled with a nostalgia for noncommodified human
relations. He denied the films were an appeal for sexual
“liberalization”; said Pasolini: “If my films should happen to
contribute to the present form of ‘permissiveness’ I would reject
them. In fact, I find such permissiveness planned and programmed by those in
power.”
In the months before his death Pasolini waged a campaign as a political
journalist against the “genocide Marx prophesied in the Manifesto,” a
consumerist “genocide in the form of the suicide of an entire
country.” He called for the immediate abolition of television, explaining
that “genocide” was the “acculturation by the power of
consumerism” through the tool of television, that would soon overcome the
difference between fascists and anti-fascists in a common imbecility. This has,
of course, now come to pass in the form of the unprecedented Italian electoral
victories of the television monopolist Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (a
political commodity sold like soap) in alliance with the “post”
fascists. But the truly awesome prophecy was in Pasolini’s final work as a
journalist in September 1975; the consumerist degradation of the Italian
people, the environmental degradation of Italy (“there are no more
fireflies”), is, he wrote, the crime of the Christian Democratic
politicians who had governed the country since 1947.
There is only one solution, the Christian Democratic leaders must be put on
trial, and charged with “a moral list of crimes.” Pasolini wrote in
September1975 that these are crimes “which should drag a dozen political
bosses into the docket in a penal trial in a courtroom” from which the
Italian establishment defendants would emerge “handcuffed between
carabinieri.” And so it came to pass.
When charged with sex play with teenage boys in 1949, Pasolini was expelled
from the PCI. L’unita (the national PCI official daily) printed the
expulsion notice warning its readers against “the most harmful aspects of
bourgeois degeneration.” Pasolini wrote to L‘unita:
“Despite all of you, I remain and will remain a Communist in the truest
sense of the word.” After he was murdered by a male prostitute in November
1975, his coffin lay in state in the party’s Casa di Cultura in the center
of Rome, and Enrico Berlinguer, general secretary of the PCI, took his turn as
a guard of honor. In his final prophetic clarity, Pasolini had seen but one
thing sound in Italy, the PCI (“a clean country in a dirty country, an
honest country in a dishonest one…a humanistic country in a consumerist
one…”). Yet he doubted that the PCI could remain long
“uncompromised” (yet another prophecy) in such a divided country. For
Pasolini hope lay in a spirit and tradition of revolt that would emerge
wherever capitalism reproduces, as it must, a mass of people robbed and
brutalized but conscious, for whom the social and cultural genocide by way of
Disney is not an anesthetic but a foul sadistic joke.
ALLA BANDIERA ROSSA
Per chi conosce solo il tuo colore, bandiera rossa,
tu devi realmente esistere, perché lui esista:
chi era coperto di croste è coperto di piaghe,
il bracciante diventa mendicante,
il napoletano calabrese, il calabrese africano,
l’analfabeta una bufala o un cane.
Chi conosceva appena il tuo colore, bandiera rossa,
sta per non conoscerti più, neanche coi sensi:
tu che già vanti tante glorie borghesi e operaie,
ridiventa straccio, e il più povero ti sventoli.
TO THE RED FLAG
For him who only knows your color, red flag,
you must really exist, so that he can exist:
he who was covered with scabs is covered with wounds,
the laborer becomes a beggar,
the Neapolitan a Calabrese, the Calabrese an African,
the illiterate a buffalo or dog.
He who hardly knows your color, red flag,
won’t know you much longer, not even with his senses:
you who already boast so many bourgeois working-class glories,
you become a rag again, and the poorest wave you.
Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Roman Poems, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente,
prefaced by Alberto Moravia. (City Lights Books: San Francisco, 1986) pp.
78-79. All other quotes are from Enzo Siciliano, Pasolini, translated by
John Shepley (New York: Random House, 1982) or B.D. Schwartz, Pasolini
Requiem (New York: Pantheon, 1992).
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