The enduring explanatory powers of Pier Paolo Pasolini...

in the form of a translation, excerpted from

Apology (to “Il PCI ai giovanni!” [“Communist Party of Italy to the Young!”])
by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968
translation by Daniel Frontino Elash
from “Empirismo eretico” [Heretical Empiricism], 2 ed. (Rome: Garzanti, 1991 [1972]), 156-159.


...until and including my generation, the youth had before itself the bourgeoisie as an “object,” a “separate” world (separated from them, because, naturally, I speak of the excluded youth, excluded by trauma, and let’s take as a typical trauma that of 19-year-old Lenin who had seen his brother hanged by the forces of order.) We were able to watch the bourgeoisie, thus, objectively, from the outside (even if there were horrible implications to this, history, school, church, anguish); the way to watch the bourgeoisie objectively was offered to us, according to a typical scheme, from the gaze placed on it by that which wasn’t bourgeois: workers or peasants (by those that would therefore be called Third World). For this reason we, young intellectuals of twenty or thirty years ago (and, by class privilege, students) were able to be antibourgeois also outside of the bourgeoisie: by means of the view offered us by other social classes (revolutionary or rebellious as they may have been).

We have grown up, therefore, with the idea of revolutions (Russia ’17, China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam). Consequently we have made, from the traumatic hatred for the bourgeoisie, also a correct perspective in which to integrate our action, in a non-evasive future (at least partially, because we’re all a bit sentimental).

For a youth of today the thing is placed differently, for him [or her] it is much more difficult to watch the bourgeoisie objectively by means of the gaze of another social class. Because the bourgeoisie is winning, it is making the workers bourgeois, in part, and ex-colonial peasants in part. In sum, by means of neocapitalism, the bourgeoisie is becoming the human tradition. Those born in this entropy cannot in any way metaphysically get out of it. It’s finished. This is why I provoke the young: it is presumably the last generation that sees workers and peasants, the next generation will not see inside itself [anything] but bourgeois entropy.

Now I, personally... and publicly... am too traumatized by the bourgeoisie, and my hatred of it is by now pathological. I can hope neither for anything from it, nor that from it will come antibodies to itself (as happens in entropy. The antibodies that come from American entropy have life and reason to be only because in America there are the Blacks, who have for a young American the function that poor workers and peasants have had for our youth).

Given my “total” lack of faith in the bourgeoisie, I resist, therefore, the idea of civil war that, ideally given the student explosion, the bourgeoisie would fight against itself. Already the young of this generation are, I would say physically, much more bourgeois than us. Therefore? Do I not have the right to provoke them? What other mode is otherwise given me in relation to them, if not thus? ... To conclude, therefore, the students of today, belonging to a “totality”... are strictly unified and enclosed; they aren’t therefore in a position, I believe, to understand on their own that when they are defined as “petit-bourgeois” in their self-criticisms, they commit an error as elementary as it is unconscious; in fact, the petit-bourgeois of today no longer have peasant grandparents, but great-grandparents and maybe great-great-grandparents; they haven’t seen an anti-bourgeois revolutionary experience (of workers) pragmatically (and from that [come] the inane attempts at research on worker-comrades); it’s been experimentally tried, instead, the first type of quality of neocapitalist life, with its problems of total industrialization. The petit-bourgeoisie of today, therefore, is no longer that which was defined in the Marxist classics such as in Lenin. (Such as, for example, today’s China is no longer the China of Lenin, and therefore to cite the example of “China” from Lenin’s pamphlet on imperialism would be foolish.) Instead the youth of today (that might be hurried then to abandon the horribly classist denomination of students, and to become young intellectuals) don’t realize just how repellent were the petit-bourgeoisie of today; and that the workers might be conformed to such a model (despite the persistent optimism of the Communist canon), as might the poor peasants (despite their mythicization on the part of Marcusian and Fanonian intellectuals, including me, but ante litteram [ahead of one’s time]).

To such a Manichean conscience of the evil bourgeoisie the students can therefore add (to recapitulate):

a) reanalyzing - outside thus of sociology like the classics of Marxism - the petit-bourgeoisie that they (and we) are today.

b) abandoning their own ontological self-definition and “student” tautology and accepting simply to be “intellectuals.”

c) using the last possible choice - on the eve of the identification of bourgeois history as human history - in favor of that which is not bourgeois (what can they do anymore only substituting the force of reason for the traumatic personal and public reasons that I have hinted at, an extremely difficult operation, this, that implies a “genial” self-analysis of itself, outside of all conventions).