With this work we want to demonstrate the reason why organic centralism is a principle of communism and not a mere contingent organisational formula liable to modification, or usable at moments depending on the alternation of the class struggle and the situation inside or outside the party.

Our organic centralism is related to the organicism of primitive communities at the dawn of human history, as well as to the organic centralism that will inform the entire evolutionary process towards communism, after the proletariat’s conquest of political power, which will fully unfold in communism as an expression of human solidarity – a material productive force this is and not an abstract ideal – whose memory has been passed down through the millennia and is in the communist revolutionary programme.

What we mean is that organic centralism expresses the unity of the communist vision, an overall vision of the entire human species from its emergence to its communist landing, which in turn is the starting point for further evolution: a centralist and unitary vision of the world in continuous becoming. It is for this reason that organic centralism was not adopted by the historical party, at a certain point along the path of the workers’ movement and its formal party, as a fact external to its programme, but rather it is the workers’ movement that, through its formal parties, and through a succession of struggles and thus of class and revolutionary experiences, has appropriated its integral programme, hence also organic centralism as the way of being of the party and the communist society that the party wishes to affirm.

A way of being therefore not dictated by contingency nor by a revolutionary aesthetic, but deduced from the becoming of the human species in its free and growing cooperation, i.e. communism.

Let us immediately introduce two passages from Engels and Marx that describe the great historical fact – the birth of man – which arose through differentiation and with special physical characteristics compared to all other living species, through which the process of transformation of man and nature would begin; a process that would not stop except for the destruction of the species on the globe.

Marx and Engels show us that man, by his nature, is unitary and universal; his universal essence is deduced from his moving and producing; the communist way of life coincides with his universality and unitarity. Communism is deduced from the materialistic analysis of human history.

Engels, Dialectics of Nature:

«And from the first animals were developed, essentially by further differentiation, the numerous classes, orders, families, genera, and species of animals; and finally mammals, the form in which the nervous system attains its fullest development; and among these again finally that mammal in which nature attains consciousness of itself – man (...) When after thousands of years of struggle the differentiation of hand from foot, and erect gait, were finally established, man became distinct from the monkey and the basis was laid for the development of articulate speech and the mighty development of the brain that has since made the gulf between man and monkey an unbridgeable one. The specialisation of the hand – this implies the tool, and the tool implies specific human activity, the transforming reaction of man on nature, production (...)

«Man alone has succeeded in impressing his stamp on nature, not only by shifting the plant and animal world from one place to another, but also by so altering the aspect and climate of his dwelling place, and even the plants and animals themselves, that the consequences of his activity can disappear only with the general extinction of the terrestrial globe. And he has accomplished this primarily and essentially by means of the hand. Even the steam engine, so far his most powerful tool for the transformation of nature, depends, because it is a tool, in the last resort on the hand (...) But step by step with the development of the hand went that of the brain; first of all consciousness of the conditions for separate practically useful actions, and later, among the more favoured peoples and arising from the preceding, insight into the natural laws governing them.

«And with the rapidly growing knowledge of the laws of nature the means for reacting on nature also grew; the hand alone would never have achieved the steam engine if the brain of man had not attained a correlative development with it, and parallel to it, and partly owing to it.

«With men we enter history. Animals also have a history, that of their derivation and gradual evolution to their present position. This history, however, is made for them, and in so far as they themselves take part in it, this occurs without their knowledge or desire. On the other hand, the more that human beings become removed from animals in the narrower sense of the word, the more they make their own history consciously, the less becomes the influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces of this history, and the more accurately does the historical result correspond to the aim laid down in advance».

Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

«The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity (...) In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty».

The human essence of man is thus born with it; we mean that already the first humans – no different from animals in their immediate needs – carry within themselves those characteristics that are expressed through labour, in the dialectical relationship between hand and brain, and that make man a universal entity. The ability to transform nature expressed by man from his earliest steps already characterises him as the one who can consciously dominate it. Marx demonstrates in the Manuscripts that animals, plants, stones, light, etc. can be transformed.

«[they] constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity (...) The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is 1) his direct means of life, and 2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature».

In the meaning of nature, man is included, just as in the meaning of man, nature is included. The conjunction occurs through production, through which man, due to his particular characteristics, can transform nature according to a determined purpose.

Engels:

«The animal merely makes use of external nature, and brings modifications to it only by his presence; man makes it usable for his purposes by modifying it: he dominates it. This is the last essential difference between man and other animals; and it is again labour that makes this difference».

The beginning of this evolutionary process of man is perfectly described by Engels in The Origin of the Family where he shows how man, once constituted into a community, slowly but irreversibly initiates the process of transforming nature and thus himself. The Left takes up this theme in On the Thread of Time – Marxism of the Stammerers:

«Although at first these groups live only on the food they gather and consume in the natural state, and although the men are few in number and the territories immense, so that they generally move easily to more fertile areas for spontaneous vegetation when they have exhausted the resources of the one they inhabit, as soon as we have the first forms of activity: hunting, fishing, rudimentary cultivation of vegetables, rudimentary manufacture of tools, which hunting itself requires, we must recognise the existence of organised social forms. Food and objects take on a use value, and the members of the community exercise functions that are true labour activities. We have use value, but not exchange value. We have associated labour, but not individual labour. We do not have companies, but the clan community, i.e. the whole society is the only company. In its bosom there is a division of simple tasks, which Marx calls physiological, immediate, natural, since it is of practical evidence what the child, the woman, the adult man, the old man can do (...) These our progenitors know only one circle of production and consumption, they make no distinction between the effort and the need of one or the other».

We speak of primitive communities, of the period we call ‘crude communism’. It is precisely in this period that the dialectical and non-gradual course of human history is most clearly manifested. With primitive communities, man expresses his natural communist essence precisely because they are the first forms of organised life, but it is precisely from this moment that every evolutionary step of man towards an ever better survival and organisation of his life will mark the path towards their dissolution.

What we mean is that these communities were not destroyed by a particular external force, but dissolved by the development of human labour. Accumulation of the goods produced, division of labour, exchange – the determining elements in the class division of society – were changes that occurred within the primitive communities at the hands of the very men who had brought them into being.

Engels sees the separation of the tribes of shepherds from the remaining mass of barbarians as the first great division of labour, and shows how:

«From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited»,

and in the separation of crafts from agriculture the second major division of labour and explains how:

«The distinction of rich and poor appears beside that of freemen and slaves (...) The transition to full private property is gradually accomplished, parallel with the transition of the pairing marriage into monogamy (...) War, formerly waged only in revenge for injuries or to extend territory that had grown too small, is now waged simply for plunder and becomes a regular industry (...) Thus the organs of the gentile constitution gradually tear themselves loose from their roots in the people, in gens, phratry, tribe, and the whole gentile constitution changes into its opposite: from an organisation of tribes for the free ordering of their own affairs it becomes an organisation for the plundering and oppression of their neighbours; and correspondingly its organs change from instruments of the will of the people into independent organs for the domination and oppression of the people».

Here are the stigmata of the future bourgeois society as a result of the forward march that man is undertaking. It is a discontinuous march, but everything that has occurred from the beginning of human life to the present day marks this unstoppable evolution that, despite occasional destruction and involution, drives it towards communism. The infant man of primitive communities found himself, in his progress, denying himself as a human being, that is, as unitary and universal.

The infant man could not have been aware of the objective determinant differences that would lead him to qualitatively and irreversibly distance himself from the other living species. His history was already written in his human nature, but only labour, in his continually increasing and troubled development, would mark the path to the conquest of self-consciousness and the means necessary to fully express his ability to dominate nature.

Until then, that is, until communism, revolutions will express the qualitative leaps in the human evolutionary path. Every revolution arose out of the need to allow the productive forces to develop further, destroying the social and political barriers that proved inadequate to their progress; every class that has taken power has been revolutionary precisely insofar as and as long as it made a contribution to the general development of the whole of society.

Private property and the class division of society is the form in which the evolution of the human species has manifested itself to date, as its negation will be the next step consistent with the degree of development of the productive forces in modern society.

«To assert that division of labour and exchange rest on private property is nothing but asserting that labour is the essence of private property (…) Precisely in the fact that division of labour and exchange are aspects of private property lies the twofold proof, on the one hand that human life required private property for its realisation, and on the other hand that it now requires the supersession of private property» (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts).

Also from Marxism of the Stammerers:

«For our part, we recognise the necessity for the passage from the light of the early and generous primitive communism, without commodities, to the shadowy society of feudalism, and then onto the fetid sewer of bourgeois civilisation in order to pass beyond it. For us nothing is a fetish, not even hatred of capitalism».

We want to emphasise that, with the advent of the class-divided society, not only the exploited but the entire human species will be deprived of its human essence. Man will not change his quality as a ‘species-being’, his ability to feel, think and produce in a universal manner, but these capacities will be impeded by the exasperated development of the division of labour and the non-species aims of production, that is, by the rupture of the primitive links between man, the means of production and the product of labour, a rupture which is fully enhanced by capitalist production.

It is for this reason that all the great men included in the historical process of the anti-feudal revolution, who with their deeds and ideas enabled the establishment of the political structure most perfect for the exaltation of capital, did not give themselves a programme limited to that historical transition – albeit a progressive one – but a general programme of the liberation of all humanity. It was not hypocritical what the great men of the revolutionary bourgeois period dreamt of: they truly felt the need to bring all of humanity back to its completeness in free and fraternal cooperation. They were great men with great social aspirations, but the objective development of the productive forces and the consequent relations of production would later give the bourgeoisie, which had become the ruling class, real self-consciousness, i.e. that it did not represent the whole of society but a part of it; that it was an exploiting class that could only maintain its exploitative regime and thus its privileges by effectively renouncing the universal goal.

«It was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind has so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants – giants in power of thought, passion, and character, in universality and learning. The men who founded the modern rule of the bourgeoisie had anything but bourgeois limitations. On the contrary, the adventurous character of the time inspired them to a greater or lesser degree. There was hardly any man of importance then living who had not travelled extensively, who did not command four or five languages, who did not shine in a number of fields. Leonardo da Vinci was not only a great painter but also a great mathematician, mechanician, and engineer, to whom the most diverse branches of physics are indebted for important discoveries. Albrecht Dürer was painter, engraver, sculptor, and architect, and in addition invented a system of fortification embodying many of the ideas that much later were again taken up by Montalembert and the modern German science of fortification. Machiavelli was statesman, historian, poet, and at the same time the first notable military author of modern times. Luther not only cleaned the Augean stable of the Church but also that of the German language; he created modern German prose and composed the text and melody of that triumphal hymn which became the Marseillaise of the sixteenth century. The heroes of that time had not yet come under the servitude of the division of labour, the restricting effects of which, with its production of onesidedness, we so often notice in their successors. But what is especially characteristic of them is that they almost all pursue their lives and activities in the midst of the contemporary movements, in the practical struggle; they take sides and join in the fight, one by speaking and writing, another with the sword, many with both. Hence the fullness and force of character that makes them complete men» (Dialectics of Nature).

It is precisely from this passage that we see how in revolutionary periods man returns to express himself with completeness and above his own limitations as an individual. All the more so as non-communists, these greats of whom Engels speaks, show us that the need for completeness and universality is of our entire species. In the same way, we have the demonstration that individual narrowness is a result of the division of labour that dismembers man – born ‘social man’ – into as many parts as the compartmentalisation of capitalist production requires: in its place will appear ‘alienated man’, i.e. alienated from himself, from his quality of belonging to the species.

«The first great division of labour, the separation of town and country, condemned the rural population to thousands of years of mental torpidity, and the people of the towns each to subjection to his own individual trade. It destroyed the basis of the intellectual development of the former and the physical development of the latter. When the peasant appropriates his land, and the townsman his trade, the land appropriates the peasant and the trade the townsman to the very same extent (...) All other physical and mental faculties are sacrificed to the development of one single activity. This stunting of man grows in the same measure as the division of labour, which attains its highest development in manufacture. Manufacture splits up each trade into its separate partial operations, allots each of these to an individual labourer as his life calling, and thus chains him for life to a particular detail function and a particular tool» (Engels, Anti-Dühring).

«It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts (...) the individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation» (Marx).

«And not only the labourers but also the classes directly or indirectly exploiting the labourers are made subject, through the division of labour, to the tool of their function: the empty-minded bourgeois to his own capital and his own insane craving for profits; the lawyer to his fossilised legal conceptions, which dominate him as an independent power; the “educated classes” in general to their manifold species of local narrow-mindedness and one-sidedness, to their own physical and mental short-sightedness, to their stunted growth due to their narrow specialised education and their being chained for life to this specialised activity» (Engels).

Here then, the division of labour and thus the division into classes will force man into the dark and lonely path of alienation from himself. Not only will he break up into a thousand pieces, but the whole of society will present one individual next to another without any contact, and all will be separated from nature, the ‘man’s inorganic body’. Man will become one-sided, just as the consumption of produced goods (material and spiritual) will become selfish and individual, while the purpose of general human activity will become ‘production’: the means becomes the end.

It is precisely from the critique of the capitalist mode of production that Marx derives the meaning of ‘social man’ and thus the prediction of communist society. Of course, this is not a cold description made on a technical level, but rather the demonstration that it is precisely in the moment of labour, when not alienated, that the whole human essence is expressed, that is, an identification between me and the other, an expression of the ‘love needed by all’, which can only arise through selfless work and in the joy of representing the satisfaction of the other’s need.

The Left thus comments on Marx’s next step:

«It shows how, having killed off mercantile selfishness in the human being, it has risen to the heights in the fullness of joy of a hitherto unknown life.

««Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature» (From Extracts from ‘Mill, Eléments d’économie politique’).

It is Marx again who in one short sentence expresses the unitary and universal significance of man when free from the alienation of wage labour:

««It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him» (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts).

For the animal is one with nature, as we have seen in Engels, it does not need to transform it according to a purpose in order to realise itself, nor does it suffer from its partiality since it can express its whole self as a partial being. Man, on the other hand, in alienated labour separates himself from a part of himself and suffers a real impairment.

Marx continues:

««Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life».

Hence man, in the society of alienated labour, no longer a unity of species but an individual isolated from the others, all in reciprocal competition, which will also reproduce itself in the relationship between man and nature, will be forced into an immediate existence for survival where ‘life itself appears only as a means of life’.

Masters and slaves will fall under the same alienation by denying their species characteristic, i.e. free conscious activity. Man will no longer know that he belongs to a species. His movements like his production will be random, unforeseen. Even his acquisitions will be accidental and limited like his individual living. This will make it impossible for man to foresee his future path. The most obvious manifestation of this contradiction is the separation between the science of human society and the science of nature, sanctioning the forced existence of two separate parts of the same body.

This is why we say that in the class-divided society, any human science is impossible. Faced with millions of men reduced to the animalistic partiality of the repetitive reproduction of their lives, specialists in thought rise up. They claim that laws of motion opposite to those governing inorganic matter apply to the human spirit, which Engels defines as ‘the highest product of organic matter’. The minority of scientists, even in the most favourable cases, i.e. not consciously in the service of capital, will remain relegated to their discipline for life – thus in a narrow one-sidedness – developing, at most and whenever possible, the ability to predict a future course of action only with regard to the scope of their studies.

It is precisely in this type of society, which has now reached the limits of human involution, that Marxism cannot but appear a vain prophecy, a hallucination of a few madmen, a utopia of dreamers. The greatest scientists, be they economists or philosophers, or whatever branch they belong to, expressed by bourgeois society have now irreversibly distanced themselves even from their predecessors – those great men of whom Engels speaks – enslaved to the needs of production for production’s sake and fallen under the immediacy of the preservation of their privileges.

Marxism’s capacity for foresight, derived from its unitary method of investigation, is summed up in a few lines with which the Left comments on and ‘rebuts the nails’ hammered in by Marx in the Manuscripts:

««We maintain that the investigation of the laws of the future society is possible insofar as we give to the science of human society, although it is only in its infancy, the same capabilities as to the science of nature, which was already in full bloom at the beginning of bourgeois times, four centuries ago. With this, the Marxist has overcome the reverence for an insurmountable barrier between the forms of knowledge of the facts of nature and that of human facts. Our claim to describe future society is based on the astronomer’s claim to predict eclipses, and even the millennia-long phases in the life of a star or nebula. The philosophy of history has no reason to be different from the philosophy of nature; and this is most correctly expressed by saying that, whatever the different degree of development, the science of nature and history make use of the same methods of investigation, for the single purpose of establishing uniformity of past and present events, and from this to rise to the prediction of future events (...) The play of dialectics must instead be placed in a quite different relationship: not between nature and man, but in that between human society and the individual. All the ideologies that want to take man ahead of the physical world, and give him an empire over it that frees him from determination, do not think of man as a species, but of man as a person (...) In Marxist doctrine, the science of human society is included in that of material nature, indeed the latter must necessarily precede the former in its construction».

Man is therefore nature in its human depiction. The Communist Left will defend and reaffirm Marxist monism,, rejecting the accusation that Marx abandoned it «to establish an empty dignitary equality between nature and man, a kind of neo-dualism». As we have seen, neither parity nor hierarchical subordination, as if by a decree established by man, but a continuous process of interpenetration of the one into the other, both in continuous transformation.

When we say that man will ‘dominate nature’, we do not mean to express a kind of struggle between the ‘hero’ and the ‘monster’ to be chained up and tamed. Instead, we mean that man, brought back through the anti-classist revolution to communist community, will become a conscious force in nature. His pre-eminence over it will respond to a natural hierarchy precisely because of his natural characteristics as a species. Communist man will not bend nature by exercising his own selfish will, but will rejoin it by operating in a continuous and conscious relationship according to a harmonic plan. «Communist man will not be able to harmonise himself without at the same time harmonising the other part of himself: nature».

These are not philosophical vague ideas of men who, not being called to action, could afford to free their thoughts to the ideal construction of future ‘sun cities’, but Marxist doctrine, confirmed by the Bolshevik party, in perfect continuity, right in the middle of the revolution. We are in the presence of a class that has seized power, of a party therefore that must defend it against the overthrown classes and, at the same time, must lay the foundations of what – from generation to generation – was to become the communist society. All the more so at that time and in the midst of the great difficulties of the state of siege by the international bourgeoisie and the non-linear situation of double revolution, it was indispensable to be extremely steadfast and defend the communist perspective and, above all, to ensure that every step descended from that universal and unitary vision of human becoming represented precisely by Marxism.

In the text we are going to quote, Trotsky, on behalf of the party, will speak on a subject, ‘revolutionary art and socialist art’, apparently intangible, abstract and until then represented by very evanescent and undisciplined social strata: the ‘artists’. The answer to this question will not be an empty and emphatic workerist slogan, nor even less an anathema against that aspect of human activity that until then had been, like the others, an instrument of oppression against the proletariat and a clear sign of man’s alienation from himself, but a precise, rigorous and harmonious reuniting of this human activity with the other sphere of man’s vital expression. A reunification of art and production. In this piece, the man of the future emerges from theoretical design and unfolds in all its concreteness and tangibility.

«There is no doubt that, in the future – and the farther we go, the more true it will be – such monumental tasks as the planning of city gardens, of model houses, of railroads, and of ports, will interest vitally not only engineering architects, participators in competitions, but the large popular masses as well. The imperceptible, ant-like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick, from generation to generation, will give way to titanic constructions of city-villages, with map and compass in hand. Around this compass will be formed true peoples’ parties, the parties of the future for special technology and construction, which will agitate passionately, hold meetings and vote. In this struggle, architecture will again be filled with the spirit of mass feelings and moods, only on a much higher plane, and mankind will educate itself plastically, it will become accustomed to look at the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life. The wall between art and industry will come down. The great style of the future will be formative, not ornamental (...) Does this mean that industry will absorb art, or that art will lift industry up to itself on Olympus? This question can be answered either way, depending on whether the problem is approached from the side of industry, or from the side of art. But in the object attained, there is no difference between either answer. Both answers signify a gigantic expansion of the scope and artistic quality of industry, and we understand here, under industry, the entire field without excepting the industrial activity of man (...)

«The wall will fall not only between art and industry, but simultaneously between art and nature also. This is not meant in the sense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that art will come nearer to a state of nature, but that nature will become more “artificial”. The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming. Faith merely promises to move mountains.

«Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad (...) Through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may say that this will be a bore, but that is why they are simpletons. Of course this does not mean that the entire globe will be marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks and gardens. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain. And man will do it so well that the tiger won’t even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times (...)

«Having rationalised his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life. The care for food and education, which lies like a millstone on the present-day family, will be removed, and will become the subject of social initiative and of an endless collective creativeness. Woman will at last free herself from her semi-servile condition. Side by side with technique, education, in the broad sense of the psycho-physical molding of new generations, will take its place as the crown of social thinking. Powerful “parties” will form themselves around pedagogic systems. Experiments in social education and an emulation of different methods will take place to a degree which has not been dreamed of before.

«Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be directed and corrected. Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build peoples’ palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous. More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonise himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play.

«He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship.

«The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organisation of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life. Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection!

«Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.

«Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process (...)

«More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point.

««Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonised, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise».

TThis harmonious and entirely concrete bridge which unites immediate revolutionary action with the communist future, the possibility therefore of anticipating the future human journey in its essential lines, does not descend from the ‘personality’ of the great men of the communist revolution – even if they were great and had strong personalities – but from the possession of a theory, Marxist theory, «the only one that can rest on an action of the future», as one of our works from 1958 is titled.

«Science is very very far from being able to establish from the physical data of the environment in which a human organism lives, and from... the menu of food served to him, the generation of thoughts in his brain; for the link between the vegetative and neuro-psychic systems has not yet been discovered. But in our materialism we believe that we can treat with scientific rigour, i.e. with a good reduction of the effects of error, the causal relationship between the material conditions of life of a human collectivity, as a relationship to nature and relations between men (between social classes), and the characteristics of its legal political organisation and so on (...) Because of the elusive determination that plays out in the individual organism and personal brain, we do not seek the empty fantasy of “personality”, but base the relationship on the material conditions of a social community and the whole series of its historical manifestations and developments» (Original Content of the Communist Programme..., Il Programma Comunista, no. 22/1958).

IIn fact, as we have seen, even the bourgeois revolution expressed complete great men, «had anything but bourgeois limitations», as Engels puts it, but it was what they objectively had to say that was limited, partial, even if grandiose from a historical point of view. Theirs was the first ‘great revolution’ in history, but it could not be the last, because it did not have the task of bringing the whole of humanity back to species unity. On the contrary, it performed the highly positive function of giving birth to the last class in history – the proletariat – to which that ultimate task would fall. The Left will say that the bourgeois revolution was charged with ‘liberating the individual’, while the proletarian revolution is charged with ‘killing him’.

That is why for the great men, representing the nascent bourgeoisie, the future that they claimed was universal, capable of freeing humanity from need and social injustice, was necessarily only thought of, resided only in their heads and feelings. For the bourgeoisie, the theorisation of itself came later, when the unitary movement that had demolished the past was transformed and brought to light – through class action – the new antagonism between the new exploited and the new exploiters, in turn the expression of a contradiction residing in the objective development of the productive forces.

««But the bourgeoisie, as is also shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men (...) The means of production, and production itself had become in essence socialised. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market (...) This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all decisive fields of production and in all economically decisive countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residium, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialised production with capitalistic appropriation (...) The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie» (Engels, Anti-Dühring).

Marxist theory is born precisely when these two fundamental conditions – social production and capitalist appropriation – are present on the world scale. The proletariat is the class historically designated to complete the troubled journey of the human community to its communist landing. It is the class on which the communist programme will be based, which, born out of the capitalist mode of production, expresses not only the antagonism between exploited and exploiters, but the path that the human species will undertake, after the overthrow of capitalist society, towards communism, its own form of life.

The communist programme expresses the opposition between capitalism and communism, or rather, the qualitative leap that man will have to make to emerge from his prehistory and begin his life as a species:

««With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones (...) Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history – only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom» (Anti-Dühring).

Once again, history needs giants, fighters with a unified and universal vision. Scientific socialism encapsulates the dialectical unity between present and future, just like the proletarian class, called to action and the life force of Marxist theory. The appearance of Marxism in fact does not mark the date of birth of the need for a communist society, but the date when this need, present since the beginning of humanity, could be transformed into a scientific theory and method of action.

The proletarian class is the first class in history that by affirming itself takes the first step in affirming the future for all humanity. This characteristic does not derive from its greater oppression or exploitation than other classes or poor strata of the past, but from the fact that it represents in its pure state both the contradiction of the present, between social production and capitalist appropriation, and its opposite, the possibility of eliminating the capitalist form assumed by human production.

Social production and capitalist appropriation result in a proletarian, impersonal, unitary and propertyless class as the new society to be established. It cannot be the bearer of a new oppression because the very social nature assumed by production through the work of capitalism requires as a next step that all spheres of human activity be made social, drawing all humanity into material production, in line with the development of the means of production. This coincides with the immediate interest of the working class, because it is the only one in today’s society that bears the burden of social production: alleviating its living conditions cannot come about through the subjugation of another human group, but, necessarily, through the extension of the proletarian condition to the whole of humanity, thereby putting an end to class division.

In The Civil War in France Marx will say that the working class

««have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant».

And Engels, in Anti-Dühring:

««To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism».

The consciousness of its historical task, therefore, is external to the proletarian class, and scientific socialism must take on the task of making it conscious. For it is not the working class that expresses Marxism, the product of all human history. The working class is merely the latest result of the long march of humanity from its emergence to the present day, and while it is the life-force of Marxism, it suffers from the same unawareness and partiality that pervades the whole of the society of which it is a product.

«Even society as a whole, and as long as it is a class-divided society, does not possess vision and direction for its own future; in it, in the course of history, the interests of the clashing classes are clothed in forecasts (prophecies) and conflicting ideologies, but they do not attain the power to foresee and prepare for the future. That one class alone, present in this capitalist society, which has an interest in the abolition of the class-divided society, can aspire to the capacity to fight for this end and to have knowledge and insight into it, and this class – Marxism discovered – is the modern proletariat. But as long as this class lives in capitalist society, the conscious vision of its future cannot be had in each of its members or even in its totality, and it is only foolish to expect such consciousness and will in the majority of it (...)

«The dialectical exit from this double thesis: that the proletariat can and cannot, is the first class tending to the aclassist society, but does not have the light that will shine on the human species after the death of classes, lies in the double step contained in the Communist Manifesto:: first half: party; second half: dictatorship. The amorphous mass proletariat organises itself into a political party and becomes a class. Only by leveraging this first conquest does it organise itself into the ruling class. He goes to the abolition of classes with a class dictatorship. Dialectics!» (Original Content of the Communist Programme...).

TThat is why the party cannot arise spontaneously from the working class, even if it represents it in its historical interests. Instead, it arises from scientific socialism, that is, from the scientific prediction of the future society without classes and without a State:

«[The party] expresses the organisation of the modern proletarian class, but rather than representing the class in a bourgeois sense of democratic proxy, it represents it in its programme and its future implementation, it represents the communist society of tomorrow and this is the meaning of the leap (Marx-Engels) from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom, which is not made by man in relation to society, but by the human species in relation to Nature».

It is from this foresight that the programme is defined, which finds in the party form the most suitable to defend it and direct the proletarian class in its affirmation. The party is therefore the conscious organisation necessary for the transition of the human species from its prehistory to the affirmation of social man. It is only in the party that human knowledge, i.e. the entire human journey from its emergence to its communist arrival, can be accessed.

It follows that the party is the only organised form of life that moves on the unitary and universal track inherent to the human species and the only existing predictive instrument that man has. All human science is mediated by the party, which represents the first organised form of the new world and works towards the destruction of bourgeois society as the first step towards the communist becoming. The entire dialectical movement that will lead from the negation of bourgeois society to the affirmation of communist society will rely on a single direction, that of the party, which will simultaneously be called upon to act on two fronts: the military one to repress the ousted classes through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the one to lead the economic and social transformation. Until, the reasons for a class dictatorship no longer exist, it will remain a unified and conscious instrument of the ‘administration of things’.

The overcoming of the party’s political tasks will not come by decree or on predetermined dates, but through a dialectical process dictated by the material progress of social transformation, through which there will be an ever greater expansion within society of the party’s communist characteristics and an ever diminishing need for its political characteristics, and thus their ever greater narrowing to the point of extinction.

««Since we want to establish the supremacy of the party, which includes only a minority of the class, over the other forms of organisation, it could be possible for someone to object that we seem to think that the party is eternal, in other words that it will survive the withering away of the State of which Engels spoke. Here we do not want to go into a discussion on the future transformation of the party. Just as the State, in the Marxist definition, withers away and is transformed, from a political apparatus of coercion, into a large and always more rational technical administration, so the party evolves into a simple organisation for social research and study corresponding to large institutions for scientific research in the new society» (Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle).

ItIt is for this that the party must never at any time exchange means for ends, structuring itself internally according to the indispensable but transitory functions that from time to time impose themselves in the revolutionary process, being itself – in its political-dictatorial aspect – a conduit, a means. The proletarian State is an instrument that the party must manipulate and direct, but with which it must never identify, because it must be ready to abandon it if it does not coincide with its aims, as well as to allow its natural extinction as the communist becoming is accomplished.

«But without revolution, socialism cannot be made possible. It stands in need of this political act just as it stands in need of destruction and dissolution. But as soon as its organising functions begin and its goal, its soul emerges, socialism throws its political mask aside» (Marx).

The party, precisely by virtue of its ‘organic’ method, makes possible the unfolding of that objective procedure that Marxism calls ‘negation of the negation’, a law that «holds good in the animal and plant kingdoms, in geology, in mathematics, in history and in philosophy».

It is Engels who speaks:

««And so, what is the negation of the negation? An extremely general (...) law of development of nature, history, and thought (...) Dialectics, however, is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought (...) Negation in dialectics does not mean simply saying no, or declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes (...) I must not only negate, but also sublate the negation. I must therefore so arrange the first negation that the second remains or becomes possible» (Anti-Dühring).

ThThe party, in its programme and in its way of being and organising itself, makes its own, assimilates, this general law of development. Its method corresponds to its action: the first act, the destruction of the bourgeois State, is followed by the dictatorial State of the proletariat, which in turn will be negated by the objective development of the new relations of production. This second negation is possible precisely because the function of the proletarian State is not to subjugate a new class, but to ‘dissolve and destroy’ the old society.

«The first act by which the State really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – is also its last independent act as a State» (Lenin, State and Revolution).

«Hence Engels’ proposal to adopt the good old German word Gemeinwesen (to be common, i.e. social community) instead of the word State, which related to Marx’s judgement that the Commune was no longer a State, precisely because it was no longer a democratic corporation» (Left).

The proletarian State represents the whole of society in a unified manner because it is the State of that class that anticipates the unity of the species. Even the party, in its internal organisation, is no longer a ‘party’, but Gemeinwesen, or rather, according to a Left definition, ‘human organ’. The party is the anticipation of the communist society, not as an exemplary testimony or aesthetic fact, but as an operating and recognisable structure in its way of being. The party knows what communism is, it was born from this awareness, which gave substance to the already mature need for a new society. Therefore it can and must apply the corresponding communist method internally. Those methods which, after the conquest of political power, from being the heritage of the party alone, will begin to be, in an ever-increasing expansion, proper to the new communist society.

In the event of a dissension arising within the party, preserving its method and its organic unity are a condition to remedy the error and to bring it back to clarity, through the study of the problems, using the powerful investigative tool of Marxist theory, condensed in the revolutionary tradition of which the party is the repository. Attributing the alleged ‘error’ to the entire party means defending the intelligence of species, which the party expresses in its universality and organic unity, founded on the monolithism of its doctrine. The moment it abandons this healthy proceeding for whatever reason, it becomes incapable of becoming the bearer of human science and is reduced to a sterile ephemeral organisation.

TThe future society, which lives in the party, has no need of any revolutionary aesthetics. Nor does it seek in this society ‘the most gifted individual’, the model of the man of tomorrow. On the contrary, it manifests itself in an impersonal, unitary and propertyless organisation, as the class that is to destroy bourgeois society and as the future communist society. It is the Left that reconfirms Marxism by opposing to the individual – whether proletarian or not – the «universal qualitative unitariness of the party, in which the revolutionary concentration is implemented, beyond the limits of locality, nationality, labour category, the company-herd of wage-earners, in which the future society without classes and without exchange lives in anticipation» (Original Content of the Communist Programme...).

It is in the party, therefore, that the solid foundations are laid for the solution of the split between individual and social man, because its principles of internal life and organisation draw nothing from those of the society it wants to overthrow. In the party, the individual no longer exists because what has produced him no longer exists: class division, mercantilism. The party, an impersonal force above generations, represents the future human species. This characteristic is translated into its mode of being through which the ‘collective brain’ – tomorrow’s social brain – is realised, allowing individuals to break out of the one-sidedness that represents man’s alienation from his being and which limits the present society.

That is why there are only militant communists in the party, just as there are only communists in the party.

««The distinctive characteristic of the party follows from its organic nature. One does not join the party because one has a particular position in the economic or social structure. No one is automatically a party militant because he is a proletarian, a voter, a citizen, etc. Jurists would say that one joins the party by free individual initiative. We Marxists say otherwise: one joins the party always due to factors born out of relationships of social environment; but these factors can be linked in a more general way to the characteristics of the class party, to its presence in all parts of the inhabited world, to the fact that it is made up of workers of all trades and enterprises and, in principle, even of those who are not workers, and to the continuity of its work through the successive stages of propaganda, organisation, physical combat, seizure of power, and the construction of a new order» (Force, Violence, Dictatorship in the Class Struggle).

Adhesion can only be individual precisely because such adhesion does not mean the elevation of a part of the present society, even if it is the revolutionary proletariat, as a model, but adhesion to the future society of the species; the recognition therefore of a historical necessity with which the individual’s need is identified. In this identification, the need to overcome any social characteristics arising from the present society is also already expressed.

The party’s principles of life and organisation are those of further human evolution, which in the party takes its first steps: the party defines itself by its programme (a condensation of scientific socialism), which in turn is corporeally translated into its principles of life and organisation, which dialectically express a link in the human evolutionary chain in the transition towards the social man of tomorrow.

The first link in the chain is that of the primitive communities, an irrefutable example that ‘organic centralism’ is the necessary way of organising and living of every classless community. To their organicism and their joyful, fraternal cooperation corresponds our organic centralism. Man in his early days expressed his human essence in the spontaneous communist disposition, in full fraternal co-operation and in the maximum of centralism for the necessary functions of the group, survival and defence against hostile things from outside, without ‘distinction between the effort and the need for one or the other’.

To the party, a community striving for the communism of tomorrow, that is, not primitive but conscious of itself and its historical ends, falls the task of leading the proletarian class into revolutionary action, the first step towards the future species society. But even in the midst of dictatorial political action, the internal life of the ‘party-community’ must be based on its communist essence. The sentiments and behaviour of our distant ancestors today are reunited in the continuity of the party, tomorrow in the proletarian revolution, and finally the expression of the species in communism.

We want to synthesise our organic centralism with a definition of the primitive community from Marx and taken up by the Left:

««At the end of this paragraph Marx returns to the primitive community, and gives a moving description of those of India (...) noting that in their sphere there is no trace of the “anarchy of the social division of labour” proper to capitalist mercantilism, nor of political despotism. Marx demonstrates how much balance, harmony, fraternity and wisdom there is in this “planned and authoritarian organisation of social labour” with barely a dozen “functionaries”, who go as far as the poet!» (In the Whirlpool of Mercantile Anarchy).

Political ‘despotism’ within the community is exactly the opposite of everything that is termed ‘communist’. The men of primitive communities did not use it because they were unaware of it: they knew the meaning of authority and centralism and they also knew the ‘state of siege’ resulting from the hard struggle for survival. But they knew that the adversary was not among them, and that only fraternal cooperation would have won it over against external hostile forces, allowing them the common goal of surviving and reproducing themselves.

Here we have balance, harmony, fraternity, wisdom (i.e. science), not as the expression of a ‘disembodied’ organisation, but rather by instinct for the preservation of the species which gives, as an organic result, the authoritarian planning of social labour. ‘Authoritarian’ stands for ‘centralised’: a unified vision of the group’s needs and spontaneous disciplining to its known necessary and proven methods. The necessity of exercising revolutionary violence and fierce class dictatorship, which lie in the party programme as indispensable means on the path to communism, can never justify the renunciation of organic centralism within it.

Revolutionary violence and class dictatorship do not encompass the soul of the party; they are transitional means to be employed towards the class enemy, necessary for the transition from capitalism to communism, deduced from the unitary body of Marxist theory transferred into the communist programme. Political despotism and coercive means can only be turned outwards. The will of the party, its ‘authority’, derives from the historical need that generated it, from its function as the organ of proletarian revolution and social transformation to communism.

The resurgence of the party on the basis of organic centralism, rather than ‘organisational weakness’, expresses the qualitative leap produced by history: the advent of the monolithic, worldwide communist party. The fraternal consideration among all militants without distinction is not ‘idealist softness’ but an expression of the last political party in history. Man is born communist and only by regaining this essence will he finally be able to recognise himself as human.