Fifth International?

Italy's Socialist chieftain Pietro Nenni junketed to Paris and London, consulted with Socialists Leon Blum and Harold J. Laski. In London last week, Nenni told the press what they had talked about. All the world's "true Socialists" would shortly be invited into a new International to provide a common political strategy. Its grand premiere was set for 1947.

But gestation of a Fifth International had scarcely begun when the old quarrels--and some new ones--broke out among the confused legions of the Left.

Nenni's "true Socialists" did not include the Communists, but he hopefully promised limited tactical cooperation with them. Labor's Laski hastily agreed in a press statement. But Labor Party Secretary Morgan Phillips rejected the Communists' twelfth plea for affiliation. Said he: "The gulf between us has not been narrowed. . . ."

In Paris, right-wing Socialist bigwigs sputtered that Nenni, "like Harold Laski," talked too much. Socialists would not form a Fifth International, they claimed: at most they would revive the moribund Second International. They charged Nenni with trying to deliver Socialism to the Communist ogre. When reminded that in London Nenni had spoken out against a merger with the Communists, they snapped: "That was on an odd day of the month. On even days he's for [it]." Declared a like-minded right-wing socialist in New York: "This mountain will give birth to a little left-wing mouse."

But Nenni's embryonic International could expect a blast from the other side too. The Communists seemed ready to hurl their inevitable charge of a capitalist plot to form an anti-Soviet western bloc. When a reporter for Moscow's Tass News Agency asked Leon Blum whether he really wanted to resurrect the Second International, Blum replied he did not understand the question. The Tassman rushed from the room, in a huff, slamming the door.

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