Alienation is inseparable from the capitalist mode of production. The alienated man is, precisely as the term implies, the man separated from himself, the man become ‘other’ to himself.

This is because in the world of capital, where the sole law is profit and where everything is a commodity, man is a commodity among others for sale on the market, and is a commodity that seeks to sell itself to the highest bidder. This is precisely bourgeois freedom, that freedom which we enjoy today, and which has endured from the French Revolution to the present day: the freedom for the proletariat to sell its labour-power to the highest bidder, as well as the freedom to die of hunger in those moments of overproduction crises when this commodity is in considerably lower demand. This schizophrenia, this separation of man from his own labour and thus from himself, can only be reflected in the bourgeois ideology commonly accepted by proletarians as by bourgeois.

Obviously, he who is separated from himself is also separated from others, and so a fragmented, atomised world opens up before our eyes on a daily basis, a Leibnizian world made up of monads gone mad, devoid of doors and windows, and because they have the presumption of being self-sufficient, closed in their own selfishness and in their own ridiculous and tragic individualism.

We can say that capitalism is a form of monotheistic religion because Christians, ‘secularists’ and atheists all venerate the same god, money, to whom numerous human sacrifices are made every day. Honesty, dignity, sincerity, love, and ultimately human life itself are sacrificed to this deity. In this highly atomised and individualistic way, the individual no longer exists in reality: there exist only persons in the original sense of the term. The term ‘person’ derives from Greek and used to mean the mask behind which however there was nothing, the mask over nothingness, the mask of nothingness. At the bottom of bourgeois ideology, in its religious and non-religious variants, there is in fact nothingness. The world of capital is therefore the temple of the worshippers of nothingness, where the faithful, through mystical union with the deity, identify themselves also with nothingness. It is a world from which men have disappeared because they have been turned into pillars of salt, as in the biblical story, for not having known how or been able to look away from nothingness. It is a world increasingly dominated by indifference, where men seem less and less capable of indignation for things that are worth being indignant about, and less and less capable of enthusiasm, less and less capable of things that require courage and a willingness to risk oneself. One often has the impression therefore, of living in a world of zombies, of the walking dead, indifferent to pain, to injustice, to generosity.

For us communists, who remain outside the crowded temple of the worshippers of nothingness, it is certainly not a pretty sight to see that proletarians often lose the sense of solidarity that should exist among them, as when at the time of the USA-Iraq war, the greatest concern among Western proletarians seemed to be for a possible increase in the price of petrol, and not for the fate of their proletarian brothers, whether they were Arab proletarians, victims of the war, or immigrant proletarians over there, protagonists of a tragic exodus.

All this cannot, however, surprise us, because we do not explain it by human wickedness or stupidity, but by the historical necessity of the affirmation first, and of the unfolding afterwards, to the point of putrefaction, of the capitalist mode of production, and thus by the ideology connected to it. This ideology will crumble when the capitalist mode of production, by the very necessity by which it arose, comes to an end. Let us therefore not cultivate the missionary or Enlightenment – like illusion of ‘restoring sight’ to those who are alienated through words and persuasion. Of course, this does not mean renouncing the necessary and dutiful work of propaganda. Bourgeois ideology corrupts all, even proletarians: after all, it is primarily for them that it is created. This does not mean, however, giving in to pessimism or of renunciatory attitudes, but on the contrary to look at reality as it is and not as we would like it to be, in order to start from there and realise what does not exist anywhere today, and therefore in this sense is a utopia, but which tomorrow will be everywhere: Communism. Communism, Marx said, is the negation of the negation: it is the negation of capitalism, which is characterised by the law of profit and the resulting human alienation, and is therefore the negation of man.

The negation of this negation is therefore the affirmation of man. In the moments when the revolutionary situation precipitates, we will then see, as we have already seen in the past, that even those who seem not to see, not to hear, and not to understand, then see, hear, and understand, and for the most part take the right side. Lazarus has already awakened in 1848, in 1871, and in 1917 and, we do not know where and when, but certainly, he will awaken again.