On 3 July, workers’ anger erupted in Turin. Rents are rising due to the unfreezing of the old residual leases and in anticipation of the next wave of ‘southerners’, attracted by the rumour that Fiat would hire as many as thirty thousand of them.

Marx and Engels addressed the issue of housing in their works, concluding that capitalism cannot solve any problem, not even that of housing. There are no solutions under the current regime. Those proposed to the working class by the bourgeoisie and opportunism only aim to delay the true historical solution, which begins with the violent overthrow of the existing state power through the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship.

The first, essential question is that of power. Only then will real and irreversible economic and social reforms be implemented.

The bourgeois and petty-bourgeois whores accuse revolutionary Marxism of wanting to solve everything in one fell swoop. Revolution is a process that begins long before the seizure of power and concludes with the disappearance of classes and the State. In this process, two periods can be distinguished: the one preceding and the one following the victorious insurrection. In the first, all energy is directed towards overthrowing the political power of the enemy class. In the second, all class forces, using the irreplaceable machinery of the dictatorship of the proletariat State, proceed to gradually dismantle the economic and social forms of the capitalist regime.

Armed insurrection serves to break the capitalist State, not to modify the economic structure. It is an anarchist and immediatist claim that the proletarian and ‘popular’ insurrection immediately and instantly destroys the economic and social structures along with political power. It will be the communist regime that undertakes this work of modification. While the political power of capitalism can be destroyed in a matter of days, economic reform is a gigantic task spanning several decades, given the international character of socialism, to which all local needs must be subordinated.

Reforms come after revolution, not revolution after reforms. Herein lies the unmistakable and unbridgeable divide between revolutionary communism and the shapeless host of petty-bourgeois demagogues.

Bernstein, Turati, and their comrades did not dream of denying the revolution in words, but they excluded it in the actions of the proletarian party and the masses when they placed the conquest of power at the end of the ladder of partial conquests and reforms. The modern Bernsteins add nothing, whatever the lucubrations with which they cover their counter-revolutionary actions.

The merit of the legal action (not legalistic, gentlemen historians of the PCI!) of the class party in Germany in the last quarter of the last century was that it took advantage of the relatively peaceful period of capitalist development to build gigantic class union organisations and spread the programme of revolutionary communism both within and beyond national borders: Every small and transient success was one more element in the certainty that everything would collapse if the capitalist State was not overthrown once and for all, with the violence of arms. When the marching order was reversed, the objective also changed. The result is tragically well known: the largest party of the 2nd International, the most powerful trade unions in the world, joined the first imperialist war, the revolution was defeated in Germany, then the Russian October and the proletarian communes in Europe and Asia were destroyed.

The social traitors shamelessly proclaimed that socialism had been compromised by ‘Bolshevik violence’ which had ‘forced’ the course of events by transferring to the democratic West methods and means of struggle incompatible with the peaceful and ‘orderly’ development of modern civilisation. The 1914-18 war had amply demonstrated that the economic crises of capitalism were irresolvable locally and, by directly affecting the great masses of workers, posed the historical alternative: perpetuation of the capitalist regime or revolution. Reformism exhausted itself in this contradiction. Its impotence spilled over into fascism, which, presenting itself as a ‘popular’ regime, deluded itself into reviving those hopes in a desperate attempt to unify the conflicting fractions of the bourgeoisie. The era of reformism is dead. The era of communist revolution has begun.

L’égalité of 1789 enshrined the principle that every citizen is equal before the State and, therefore, that the State is the State of all. No social formation had ever dared to use violence against the working classes, convincing them to believe that the political power of the wealthy classes was their own power. The theocratic, absolutist, feudal State stood opposed to serfs of the glebe and free workers as the State of privilege. The State was tax collector and executioner, demanding taxes from the people, condemned them, punished them. Only the classes that governed it were excluded. Democracy breaks down the orders and estates, and establishes equality: every citizen, whatever social class they belong to, has the same rights and the same duties. The tax collector demands payment from the proletarian just as much as from the bourgeois: if insolvent, they are subject to the same penalties. The deception of equality: the proletarian is defrauded twice, as a producer of surplus value, which is extorted from him by the bourgeois, and as a citizen, whose wages are forcibly reduced by the State in the form of taxes. In practice, the bourgeois pays nothing of its own to keep its State going, because taxes are a portion of surplus value produced solely by the worker. The State punishes the proletarian and his bourgeois master on the same grounds if they do not comply with tax laws.

All ‘rights’ meet this tragic end. The State guarantees their observance, and presents itself as the State of all, but acts as the State of capital and cannot do otherwise.

On this egalitarian criterion as the basis for price controls, or regime of maximum prices for basic necessities and even rents, imposed by the State, capitalism has invented nothing new. Every regime has seen State intervention in the distribution of the means of subsistence. It is just that the capitalist State uses this tool for the sole purpose of keeping workers’ wages at the lowest possible level and deceiving the masses about its function as the State of the whole people. The false workers’ parties accredit this lie by peddling rent freeze, price controls to the wage-earning class as a workers’ achievement. Let us see how things stand. Definition of wage according to Marx and non-degenerate Marxists: sum of the prices of the means of subsistence with which the worker replenishes his labour-power. Among the means of subsistence are also included housing, clothing, and other products and ‘services’ that capitalism tends to impose on the proletariat at certain times in order to better subjugate it. It is clear that wages fall or rise depending on whether these prices rise or fall. Capitalism tends to compress wages as much as possible below even the value of labour-power, that is, below the sum of the prices of the means of subsistence. On the contrary, the proletariat struggles to defend itself against this pressure and to raise wages above this limit.

When, then, there is a reduction in basic necessities, or in a part of them that has a significant impact on the total sum, precisely such as rent, there is, as backlash, a reduction in real wages. This reduction, usually, occurs first, and normally in an indirect way: as rents fall, the prices of other goods rise. This manoeuvre is achieved through inflation that precedes the government’s rent freeze measure.

The worker does not gain anything from it, not even in the immediate term.

For those who do not live on wages, such as the petty bourgeois (for the big bourgeois, the issue does not exist because, in most cases, they live in luxury hotels or have their own mansions), tenants of both houses and shops, the freeze is a great favour. For them, profits are not reduced due to the increase in rents: they normally react by increasing the price of commodities. They are in a position to increase their income. Workers are not, unless they extend the length of their working day beyond ten hours a day.

But history, particularly that of these last twenty-five years, is extremely significant in this regard. With the war, the regime of the rent freeze was instituted by fascism. It was an easy matter. Construction companies had to build for the war and ended up making piles of money. Even today, there is still a portion, albeit minimal, of rents that have been frozen since then. Once the war ended, the freeze remained in place for rents that had already been frozen, but it was not extended to the houses being built by the rich bourgeois, for whom the war, whether lost or won, had always been a colossal business opportunity. The big cities are ‘rebuilt’, in whose new neighbourhoods the workers looking for jobs and wages to survive do not settle in, but the non-wage earners who continue to trade on the black market, even with ‘gifts’ from the ‘allies’.

Gradually, rents are unfrozen, new houses are built, rents for houses inhabited by workers slowly rise and, due to inflation, the prices of other basic necessities also rise, so that the greater profits extorted advance the Italian economy in the way we all know. At the same time, however, the houses that the war had not destroyed – especially houses in working-class neighbourhoods – were about to be destroyed by capitalism’s thirst for profit. In homage to the ‘new regime’, it is said that they want to demolish ‘old slums’ in order to build modern and comfortable houses on top of them. Where this has happened, the areas have served to erect enormous and expensive buildings for the bourgeoisie. ‘Social’ housing was built, when it was done, for the evicted, which in many cases is no longer structurally sound, but which, in return, charges rents outside the freeze. The bourgeois has lived in well-built houses, outside the ghettos. They remained there with their old contracts, and in many cases they are still there. They did not move in search of work, as workers often had to do, thus losing their frozen contracts.

The national campaign for ‘housing for workers’ ended in a way well known to all: State officials, police officers, privileged workers, and petty bourgeois live there. Workers are a rarity, like museum pieces.

Alongside rent freezes and price caps, the opportunist parties, in unison with the union leaderships, add that of the so-called urban planning reform. The reform should prevent speculation on land and encourage construction.

But capitalism has done huge business mainly because construction companies have benefited from colossal subsidies and contracts. Capitalism has always sought ‘urban expansion’ in order to make profits. It has found conditions for survival through profits, but at what cost! Abandonment of agricultural land, disruption of productive forces, forced proletarianisation in the countryside, increase in the industrial reserve army. Town and country: an insoluble contradiction, in whose crass ignorance the parties that dare to refer to Marxism would claim to untangle centuries-old knots.

‘The housing question’, Engels comments in his essay of the same name, ‘can only be solved when society has been sufficiently transformed for a start to be made towards abolishing the antithesis between town and country, which has been brought to an extreme point by present-day capitalist society (...) only by the solution of the social question, that is, by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is the solution of the housing question made possible. To want to solve the housing question while at the same time desiring to maintain the modern big cities is an absurdity. The modern big cities, however, will be abolished only by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, and when this is once on the way then there will be quite many other things to do than supplying each worker with a little house for his own possession’.

Dismantling elephantine urban complexes, demolishing monstrous hives devoid of light and air, redistributing human masses across the earth’s surface harmoniously integrating them into nature: this is the ultimate goal.

But the philistine cries out for the ‘concrete’, the ‘practical’, the ‘immediate’, offering the proletarian, exhausted by work and nauseated by the demagogy of politicians, the bastardised order: rent control, houses on instalment!

‘(...) [O]ne thing’, Engels continues, ‘is certain: there are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy immediately any real “housing shortage”, given rational utilisation of them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those workers excessively overcrowded in their former houses. Immediately once the proletariat has conquered political power such a measure dictated in the public interests will be just as easy to carry out as other expropriations and billetings are by the existing state’.

This was Engels’s peremptory response to the scoundrels of his time, less despicable than those of today. The Marxist solution is hard for the bourgeois, the petty bourgeois, and aspiring property owners to swallow. This is why it is ignored by the false communo-socialists of yesterday and today.

There is no housing ‘shortage’. There is no need to build any more for several decades in the large cities. There is only an urgent need to evict banks, useless offices, churches, party headquarters, clubs, institutions of all kinds, luxury homes, headquarters of small unproductive and uneconomical companies, and to thin out many branches of production that are only necessary to keep this shaky society of profit afloat. This is the immediate programme of the communist revolution. Any other ‘concrete proposal’ is demagogy.

One might say that all this is just, coherent, possible, but that today it is not yet ‘mature’ because political power is still in the hands of capitalism. What can be done to defend the masses of wage-earners from the economic crushing of capital? The answer is not to be found in a formula or in a contingent initiative. The defence of the working class is inseparable from the revolutionary preparation of the proletariat.

Moreover, the ruling castes themselves, the trade unions, the same traitorous parties, are forced to admit that what is given to the workers with one hand is taken away with the other. Every wage increase returns to capitalism in the form of price increases. It is a grudging admission of the resounding failure of reformism, of gradualism.

Linking immediate action to the final struggle, mobilising the masses in a fierce and relentless struggle to put the bosses, the government, and the political parties against the wall: this is what can and must be done.

It is in this process of revolutionary preparation that the struggles themselves lose their precarious and insufficient character, taking on the character of struggles that tend to close the ranks of all proletarian sectors and bind them to the revolutionary leadership of the international communist party.

This process implies the overthrow of the current trade union policy, the abandonment of fragmented struggles, of the alliance between CGIL, CISL, and UIL, of reforms, of the protection of the national economy. In turn, this presupposes proletarian war against the State and the traitorous parties, against all forces, large or small, that hinder the linking march of the class with its party.

Capitalism no longer knows which saint to pray to. It hopes that the proletariat will continue to be deceived by the opportunist parties, so that it can control it at will and, when the time is right, deal it a violent blow that keeps it away from the revolution for another fifty years.

The struggle against the high cost of living is, therefore, a political struggle that workers’ unions can organise: with maximum effectiveness, provided that they are led by the communist programme. Otherwise, without this leadership, the struggle of the masses will only serve to demoralise them due to the absolute lack of results capable of weakening the enemy forces. It is a political struggle, it is a struggle against the state. It is a revolutionary, anti-reformist, anti-democratic struggle.