On the wall there are strange, brightly colored pictures, somewhere between Indian and Chinese, with surreal subjects, like those seen in America in the magazines of pseudo-Oriental underground groups. The pictures are his; he is a painter. We talk about ethics and theology. He doesn’t have the theological severity of the other evening’s pai-de-santo; his religiosity is more indulgent, pragmatic. He denies that good and evil exist: All is good. I say to him: “But if he [I nod towards my friend] wants to kill me and comes to ask your advice, you surely must tell him that it is evil to kill me!” “I don’t know,” he replies, with a vague smile, “maybe for him it’s a good thing, I don’t know. I will explain to him only that it is better not to kill you.” He displays a tender pride in his charisma. He tells of the love he feels for his people, the serenity that comes from contact with the Orixà. He won’t commit himself as to their cosmic nature, their relation to the saints. There are no differences; it is enough to be serene. The Candomble theology changes from one terreiro to another. I ask him who my Orixà is.
Again he fights shy, these things are hard to say, they can change with the circumstances; he doesn’t believe in this ability to judge; if I really insist, just looking at me like this, offhand, he would say I’m a son of Oxalà. I don’t tell him I received the same answer two nights ago. I still want to catch him out.
My friend, the one supposed to kill me, plays the politically concerned Brazilian. He speaks to the pai-de-santo of the contradictions of the country, the injustices, asks him if his religion could also drive men to revolt. The Babalorixà says evasively that these are problems he doesn’t want to discuss, then he smiles again with excessive sweetness, as when he assured me my friend wouldn’t kill me, and he murmurs something like:
“But if it were necessary, it could . . .”
What does he mean? That for the present it isn’t necessary? That the Candomble is still a religion of the oppressed, and would be ready to inspire them to revolt? Doesn’t he trust us? He dismisses us at four in the morning, as the trance is fading in the contorted limbs of the sons and daughters of the saint. Dawn is breaking. He presents us with some of his works of art. He looks like the manager of a dance hall in a working-class neighborhood. He has asked nothing of us; he has only given us presents and invited us to a supper.
I still have one question, which I didn’t ask even his São Paulo colleague. I have realized, and not only in these two cases, that the Candomble (not to mention the Umbanda) is attracting more and more whites. I’ve encountered a doctor, a lawyer, and many proletarians and subproletarians. Originally, an ancient assertion of racial autonomy, establishing for blacks a space impenetrable by the religion of the Europeans, these rites are becoming more and more a generalized offer of hope, consolation, communal life. They are dangerously close to the practices of carnival and soccer, even if more faithful to ancient traditions, less consumeristic, able to reach more deeply the personality of the adepts—wiser, I would say, truer, bound more to elementary pulsations, to the mysteries of the body and of nature. But still they represent one of the many ways the disinherited masses are kept on their reservation, while at their expense the generals industrialize the country, offering it to the exploitation of foreign capital. The question I didn’t ask the two pai-de-santos is this: Whose side are the Orixà on? As a son of Oxalà, would I have been entitled to ask it?
1979
Striking at the Heart of the State
The anxious waiting for another communiqué from the Red Brigades about the fate of Aldo Moro and the heated debates about how to behave when it comes have led the press to contradictory reactions. Some papers refused to print the first communiqué, but they couldn’t avoid publicizing it with banner headlines; others did print it, but in type so small that only those with 20–20 vision could read it (unacceptable discrimination). As for its content, here again the reaction was embarrassed, because all were unconsciously awaiting a text full of “Ach so!”s or words with five consonants in a row, thus immediately betraying the hand of the German terrorist or the Czechoslovakian agent; instead they were confronted with a long, political argument. For argument it was, and this fact eluded no one; and the more alert also realized that the argument was addressed not to the “enemy” but to potential friends, to demonstrate that the Red
Brigades are not a bunch of desperados lashing out at random, but must be seen as the vanguard of a movement justified in the context of the international situation.
If this is how things stand, you cannot react by simply declaring that the communiqué is raving, delirious, vain, mad. It must be analyzed calmly, attentively; that is the only way to ascertain where the communiqué, which commences from fairly lucid premises, reveals the fatal theoretical and practical weakness of the Red Brigades.
We must have the courage to say that the “raving” message contains a highly acceptable premise and translates, even if in a fairly sketchy way, a thesis that all European and American culture, from the students of ’68 to the theoreticians of the Monthly Review, as well as the left-wing parties, has constantly repeated. So if there is “paranoia,” it lies not in the premises but, as we shall see, in the practical conclusions drawn from them.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to smile at the bogey of the socalled SIM or Stato Imperialistico delle Multinazionali (the Imperialist State of the Multinationals). The way it is depicted here may have a B-film quality; still no one can refuse to see that international planetary policy is no longer determined by individual governments but, in fact, by a network of productive interests (it could also be called the network of the multinationals), which decides local politics, wars and peaces, and—again—establishes the relations between the capitalistic world and China, Russia, and the Third World.
If anything, what’s interesting is that the Red Brigades have abandoned their Disney-like mythology, in which on one side there was a wicked individual capitalist named Uncle Scrooge and on the other the Beagle Boys, a cheating rabble, true, but with a certain charge of crazy amiability because they stole, to the tunes of proletarian confiscation, from the stingy, egotistical capitalist.
The Beagle game had previously been played by the Tupamaros of Uruguay, who were convinced that the Brazilian and Argentinian Scrooges would become irritated and would turn Uruguay into a second Vietnam, while the citizens, impelled to sympathize with the Beagles, would become so many Vietcong. The game didn’t work, because Brazil didn’t make a move and the multinationals, which had to produce and sell in the Cono Sur, fostered Perón’s return to Argentina, divided the revolutionary or guerrilla forces, allowed Perón and his descendants to sink into the shit up to their necks, and at that point the more quick-witted Montoneros fled to Spain and the more idealistic paid with their lives.
It is precisely because the power of the multinationals exists (have we forgotten about Chile?) that the idea of a Che Guevaratype revolution has become impossible. The Russians had their revolution while all the European states were engaged in a world war; the long march was organized in China while the rest of the world had other things on its mind. . . . But when you live in a universe where a system of productive interests exploits the atomic stalemate to impose a peace useful to all sides and to send through the heavens satellites that spy on one another in turn, at this point national revolution can no longer be waged; everything is decided elsewhere.
The historic compromise on the one hand and terrorism on the other represent two answers (obviously antithetical) to this situation. The confused idea that motivates terrorism is a very modern principle and a very capitalistic one (for which classical Marxism found itself unprepared), a principle of systems theory.
The great systems are headless, they have no protagonists and they do not live on individual egoism, either. Therefore they cannot be struck by killing the king; they are struck when they are made unstable through acts of harassment, exploiting their own logic: if there exists a completely automated factory, it will not be upset by the death of the owner but rather by erroneous bits of information inserted here and there, making work hard for the computers that run the place.
Modern terrorism pretends (or believes) that it has pondered Marx; but in fact, even if indirectly, it has pondered Norbert Wiener on the one hand and science fiction on the other. The problem is that it hasn’t pondered enough—nor has it studied in sufficient depth—cybernetics. The proof is that in all their previous propaganda the Red Brigades still spoke of “striking at the heart of the state,” cultivating on the one hand the nineteenth-century
