Ferriera mutters into his beard: “So you think the spirit of our men … and the Black Brigade’s … the same thing?”

The same thing, the same thing … but, if you see what I mean …”. Kim has stopped with a finger pointing as if he were keeping the place in a book, “The same thing but the other way round. Because here we’re in the right, there are in the wrong. Here we’re achieving something, there they’re just strengthening the rivets. That age-old resentment wich weights down on Dritto’s men, on all of us, including you and me, and which find expressions in shooting and killing enemies, the Fascists have too. But with us nothing is lost, not a gesture, not a shot, though each may be the same as theirs – d’you see what I mean? – they will all serve if not to free us then to free our children, to create a world that is serene, without resentment, a world in which no one has to be bad. The others, on the side of lost gestures, of useless resentment, which are lost and unless even if they should win, because they are not making positive history, they are not helping to free themselves but to repeat and perpetuate resentment and hatred, until in another twenty or a hundred or a thousand years it will begin all over again, the struggle between us and them; and we shall both be fighting  with the same anonymous haterd in our eyes , though always, perhaps without knowing it, we shall be fighting  for redemption, they to remain slaves. This is the real meaning of the struggle now, the real, absolute meaning, beyond the various official meaning. An elementary anonymous urge to vindicate all humiliations; the workers from his exploitation, the peasant from his ignorance, the petty bourgeois from his inhibitions, the outcast from his corruption. This is what I believe our political work is, to use human misery against himself, for our own redemption, as the Fascists use misery to perpetuate misery and man fighting man.”

Italo Calvino (1947), Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Einaudi, Torino; English translation: The Path to the Nest of Spiders, Ecco Press, New York, 1976.