The Central Committee of the Communist Party, faced with the rather significant shifts and upheavals in the Italian and European situation, has resorted – whilst still avoiding further clarification on the party’s tactics, which no one, inside or outside the party, knows whether to define as ministerial or oppositional, legalitarian or insurrectionist – to a stern call for ideological rigour, for doctrinal purity.

The party’s theoretical heavyweights have cracked the whip against the gay little swarm of ‘intellectuals’ who had flocked there following the fall of fascism, and have censured without restraint their contortions. What the hell! The scandal was enormous, and it had reached the point where regular card-carrying members of the Communist Party professed existentialist philosophy, morality, and aesthetics. A word of this sort, with so many letters and such frequent resonance in the present day, is enough to make the earth and Olympus tremble, to make the multitudes shudder, to pulverise the poor excommunicated.

Now, despite the near equivalence between the contempt we feel for these moulds of the decay of bourgeois thought, these mercenary knights of hack-writing, adrift from servile fascist ranks to the backbenches of today’s anti-fascist subculture, and the contempt we have always harboured for the deserters and falsifiers of Marxist theory, we must justify the former in the face of the hypocritical indignation of the latter. If existentialism, as an efflorescence of these troubled times, means anything at all, the degenerate and aberrant direction of the proletarian political movement represented by ‘Stalinism’ in the world, in Russia and in Italy, fully defines itself as the existentialist deviation from Marxist revolutionary doctrine.

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What is existentialism, everyone has been asking themselves in hushed tones for some time now? It is one of those things that everyone – blessed democracy of spirits – claims to know and yet cannot manage to formulate. Yesterday it was the mystique of national and racial destinies; today it is these other oddities, which straddle the line between solemn academic posturing and the orgiastic practices of degenerate cliques.

Let’s go with a reasonably good definition from one of the many magazine articles, given that we spend our nights fast asleep rather than poring over the texts of the great masters of the new school after a day’s work.

‘Existential philosophy consists, as its name suggests, in taking as its subject not merely knowledge or consciousness, understood as an activity that posits immanent and transparent objects in complete autonomy, but existence itself, that is, an activity given in and of itself within a natural and historical situation, and just as incapable of abstracting itself from it or reducing itself to it. Knowledge finds itself repositioned within the totality of human praxis and, as it were, straightened (we translate lestée, lit. ‘ballasted’) by it. The “subject” is no longer merely the epistemological subject, but the human subject who, through a continuous dialectic, thinks in accordance with his situation, forms his categories in contact with his experience, and modifies this situation and this experience by virtue of the meaning he attributes to them’.

It may seem complicated, but it is actually quite simple and, above all, age-old. It is a matter of breaking lances for the usual positions that suit the full bellies and stuffed chests of the insignia of command and power. On the one hand, there is a desire to reaffirm once again the impossibility of dealing with the reality that surrounds us, from the cosmic to the social, in general and certain conclusions, of establishing relations of causality and determination capable of casting glances and programmes into the future. On the other hand, there is still and ever a tendency to delude the human individual regarding their possibility of escaping the determinations of the environment, to restore them onto the plane of initiative and freedom, at a time when, as never before, they have been physically shredded and crushed, atomised and ground alive in the sinkholes, ideologically stuffed and sweet-talked with a never-before-seen array of lies and deceptions, buffeted and subjugated by the numbing effect of printed and broadcast media, intoxicated by optical and acoustic illusions, manipulated and seized without regard from every side and by the parts that would seem least graspable.

The article from which we took this quotation tends towards the thesis that Marx was an existentialist. But who has not made use of Marx and offered their own version of him? Here, too, there is nothing new. One exploits the correct position that Marxism too establishes: a general critique of all philosophical systems that claim to fix reality into absolute formulas and, asserting that they have grasped the primary essences in the cognitive endeavour, make them consist of deities transcending our human sphere, of guiding properties immanent to our thought, or even of an abstract conception of physical matter containing the secret of the development of all forms, or awaiting fertilisation by God or by the Idea. One plays upon the thesis of Marxist determinism, which explains even the stages of human knowledge through the influences of the material and social environment, to arrive at the impossibility of knowledge and science. The thought of the bourgeois revolutionary epoch had assumed, by shattering the authority of the dogmas upon which the power of the hostile and reactionary classes rested, the possibility of a knowledge of nature and its relations, thereby founding modern science; the thought of the revolutionary proletariat treats the realm of human and social facts with the same iconoclasm as it does old lies, and constructs a knowledge and a science of them, that is, it declares their general relations and processes investigable and traceable.

This is disturbing to the established order and its servants, and the anti-scientific movement comes into vogue. This brief note, prompted by a news item, is certainly not the place to clarify the problem of knowledge and science within the Marxist method, nor to examine the so-called anti-causal and indeterministic trend of modern physics, with the consequent methodological considerations regarding the scope of social science. Such a discussion requires not only that the expositor be up to date with the findings of modern research, but also that the reader be familiar with the arduous mathematical apparatus required. But following Engels’ Anti-Dühring and Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism, the Marxist school will have to undertake this study.

The thesis to which it will arrive after having examined the indeterminist and subjectivist objections from all sides, is the possibility of objective knowledge, that is, of the general treatment of the relations proper to nature and human history. As the instrument of such knowledge there is no longer the revealing God or the introspective self, but the common and social labour of theoretical and applied science as a collective fact and, at a certain point, also a class and party fact. The original thesis of Marxist epistemology is that human knowledge is a system of relations between two fields of natural facts, no different in mysterious principles from all other systems of real relations. Human thought can record the imprints of external processes according to a transmission to be understood using the very same resources that serve, to give an example, to establish the correspondence between the past history of the planet and the traces handed down to us by the stratification and geological arrangement of the terrain.

To associate Marx with the sceptical eclecticism of the various contingentists – or existentialists, as they are called today – on the grounds that he acknowledged the role played by human beings within the historical process, and did not claim that commodities, money, or machines would stroll about the earth of their own accord, determining the behaviour of political or economic individuals, amounts precisely to failing to grasp this: that our general way of viewing events, and, if you will, our philosophy, as Marxists, corresponds to attributing nothing eschatological or astonishing to the intervention of human beings amongst stones, plants, and animals, so that the method of analysis must not, at any moment, ascend onto the stilts of an astral intoxication and vibrate at the encounter of ineffable ‘activities’...

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Truth be told, we didn’t want to take issue with the existentialist who – il en a du culot! – presumes to pigeonhole Marx, but rather with the philosophical prudishness of the P.C.I. leadership. Examining the philosophical credentials of the latter could incur the wrath of Togliatti, who insists that to speak of philosophy one must have studied it. If by this he once intended to give weight to the theoretical framework within the party, he must be granted credit, but if he meant that philosophy and party politics were two non-communicating fields, then he was dead wrong.

The philosophical baggage of Italian socialism at the birth of the Communist Party stemmed from the struggles against the two voluntarist deviations of revisionism, syndicalist on one side, reformist on the other, both of which sowed doubt regarding the certainty of revolutionary predictions and sought to reduce the movement to practical and momentary positions, feeling, like all the opportunist currents within the proletarian movement, the influence of the bourgeois thinkers then in vogue, James, Bergson, and so on...

The group that now controls the P.C.I. ostensibly merged into the current of orthodox Marxism, but it arose from positions that were highly questionable even on economic and social terms, with its ‘concretism’ whereby, for all intents and purposes, the agonising doubt as to whether the revolutionary dictatorship and the communist order would actually come to pass had to be verifiable every fortnight with an analytical method, for example by examining the payslip of a Fiat lathe operator.

Other philosophical origins of dubious stamp are found in the affinity many of the current leaders of the Party have for Croceanism and other idealist philosophies; even some, more or less set on the Marxist path, claimed to have climbed a few rungs by ‘drawing closer’ to Croce.

But these are mere trifles. Much progress has been made since then. It would be unfair to Don Benedetto Croce to attribute the current existentialist tendencies to him. Croce may be regarded as the representative of classical bourgeois thought, after his backward excursions into the Marxist field; he may be regarded, now that liberalism is the deadest of all competing doctrines, as a caryatid or a fossil, but that is not enough to attribute to him the stench of ongoing decay, to lump him together with the twilight-poets, the tremblers, the decadents, the snobs, and the catamites of the school of Sartre and company.

In any case, our traditional leaders and the theoretical minds of Togliatti’s party can only derive the directives of philosophical orthodoxy and the obligation to profess the purest form of dialectical materialism from Moscow, which, in this as in so many other fields, has made its position clear and has long warned against straying from the prescribed line.

It is precisely the Moscow line which, by straying ever further from the revolutionary path in political struggle and tactical methods, has also marked, even in doctrine, a terrifying retreat, whatever may be written in university lecture notes, and even though crises involving the liquidation of aberrant thinkers have been staged there too.

Compared to the path that the proletarian vanguards of the world were certain they could follow in the years following the October victory, after the first stable seizure of power by the working class, after the sweeping campaign of criticism and attack on all the positions of the past, theocratic, absolutist, bourgeois, democratic, and social-democratic, the attitude of the Russian state, of the political group that controls it, and of the groups that follow it abroad, with their implausible reversals and incredible adaptations and renunciations of their original positions, cannot be designated by any better label than that of ‘existentialism’.

Existentialism is the attempt to give political opportunism a philosophical respectability, just as it is the bare minimum required for the decency of personal opportunism.

Vladimir Lenin, after having mercilessly lashed the betrayal of the social-militarists, the social-patriots of 1914, branding them with the stigma of opportunism for having renounced the overarching historical vision of the international proletarian advance in order to defend the existential needs of the contingent threatened bourgeois fatherland, proclaimed, as revolutionary action was grafting itself onto theory and critique in Russia, the inexorable antithesis that filled the world of that other post-war period: either the organisation of the world economy by the advancing proletarian revolution, or its domination under capitalist power. Until this formidable antagonism was resolved, the weapons of social war could not and should not be laid down. Communist parties from every corner of the earth responded to this call, uniting within the new International.

But to the historical power of this vision stretched beyond the narrowness of space and time, there unfortunately followed the pitfalls of concessions and compromises. One retreated into the insidious examination of situations which are the ground on which the manoeuvres of opportunism take root, the adoption of today’s ‘existentialist’ discourse. One relapsed into the revision of Marxism’s antagonistic perspectives. Capitalism still wanted to, and still managed to, exist. Did this mean that it still possessed the strength to win the battle, to bend the revolutionary assault? It could be, and indeed it was. But in this objectively adverse situation, things were even worse within our class, subjectively speaking. A correction of the ‘consciousness’, of the ‘knowledge’ of the movement was drawn from the situation, just as the existentialist would later theorise so blatantly twenty years on. It was deemed that the revolutionary proletarian State could coexist without denying itself alongside capitalist control of the world. The State is in turn a ‘concrete’ subject not to be trifled with, when it governs millions upon millions of people and immense potential forces. Its tendency to exist and persist, tremendous and heavy, stifles the factor of the general historical movement, the engine of the revolutionary leap from one social regime to another, which is and can only be the world class party. The State continued to exist, the doctrine and historical direction of the movement were lost. It was Stalinism; it was the doctrine of socialism in one country, a masterpiece of existentialism at the heart of the twentieth century, a hundred years after the perfection of Marx’s theoretical edifice.

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The political stances that proved decisive on the world scale were a reflection of situations experienced in a ‘realist’ – we would say existential – political sense: the alignment with Hitler in 1940, and then with the Western plutocracies (now thoroughly discredited) in the years that followed. The situations both dominated and were simultaneously shaped by the meaning that we, that is, it, the now pseudo-proletarian State, gave to them. Pure existentialism.

In all other countries, and under their different conditions, the practices of the so-called communist parties followed the same rhythm and style. Fascism was viewed in the utterly false light of a dualism deeper than that between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and everything was subordinated and prostituted to the need to eliminate it by forming an alliance with the most disparate domestic and foreign elements of the democratic currents. And to be brief, let us not continue to unravel the attitudes of recent years and their despicable reversals, from the apology of American capitalism to its denigration, from Article Seven to the forceful reheating of anticlericalism now underway, through the same key of a base existential method.

It is all a product of the era of decay that is being traversed. History has recorded many others, along with their respective precursors of existentialism, ranging from the Greek Sophists to the sceptics of late Roman antiquity to the atheistic little abbés of the eighteenth century. In these epochs, the proponents of methods and doctrines possessing the force of historical generality had no choice but hemlock, or slitting their veins, or the gallows; or that which, for those afflicted by existential malaise, is far more bitter than hemlock: obscurity.

Why cry crucify at those four kobolds who, after the victory, not of anti-fascism, but of the now much-defamed ‘fascists’ Montgomery and Eisenhower, posed themselves anxious questions not of class and party historical consciousness or knowledge, but of existential contingency, and who, having opted for Mussolini between 1922 and 1924 following difficult run-offs, thought it a good idea in 1944 to join Stalin’s ranks?

They are entirely at home in the atmosphere and style of the time. The contradiction and incoherence, the blame for doctrinal desecration, all remain with those who, after having been the culprits and architects of this indecorous state of affairs, still find it convenient, in contingent turns of situation and manoeuvre, to blaspheme faithfulness to communist principles.