In the great P.C.I. church of Muscovite descent, the process of canonising the founding father Antonio Gramsci is underway: according to the shameful curial practice of promoveatur ut amoveatur, comrade Antonio is also about to be mummified and reduced to an icon, as already happened with Lenin and as the Communist Left denounced as early as 1924 in its immediate commemoration of the great Bolshevik.

Before moving on to the presentation of our reasons of yesterday and today, we want to make it clear, to avoid any misunderstanding, that we neither wish to play the role of ‘devil’s advocate’, as is customary in all canonical investigations, to better highlight the outstanding qualities of the saint in pectore, nor to throw shit on anyone we dislike, in the classic terrorist style of the Stalinists. We maintain today, as we did face to face with Gramsci, that by virtue of a generous and powerful class movement such as that of the 1920s and under the strict direction of the Left, the qualities of a passionate militant and revolutionary leader such as Antonio were able to shine through, despite the intrinsic weakness of the Ordine Nuovo group on the doctrinal and, let us say, ‘philosophical’ level, just as the impersonal and collective organisational characteristics of the P.C.d’Italy, born out of the necessary, albeit belated, Livorno split in 1921, were exalted. Let us therefore leave, without regret, to petty-bourgeois and opportunist historiography the never-ending and gossipy controversies about Gramsci not speaking at the Florence conference and at the Congress of the split: they do not interest us, we deliberately leave them to the pigs who arrogantly indulge in psychological analysis and the study of mental reserves. For us, there is only one thing that matters historically, yesterday and today: the Ordine Nuovo group recognised the need to break with the feeble maximalist leadership of the P.S.I. and contributed, under the guidance of the Left, long organised and tested in revolutionary agitation, to the formation of the revolutionary communist party, in accordance with the directives of the International.

So that no one misunderstands the imaginary dialogue we have decided to establish with Antonio Gramsci, in a climate of facile epitaphs that can be changed and adapted to the different seasons of the ‘fortune’ of a great comrade in the communist revolutionary struggle, we begin with the Proletarian Martyrology of A. Gramsci, taken from Prometeo on 30 May 1937. We have nothing to remove and nothing to add. It is simply a matter of reading it and grasping its disconcerting relevance. Given the total and irremediable degeneration of the epigones, it will be easy to recognise in the current historical scenario not simply ‘errors’ and ‘faults’, but the complete betrayal and clearly anti-proletarian and anti-communist function of the conferences on Gramsci, the canonisation processes, and other macabre staged spectacles.

As far as we are concerned, having renewed our judgement and our bond with a comrade of his stature, we resume the discussion with him, for us never interrupted, because the Party as an organic and collective entity cannot die unless its historical goals have been achieved. We think it appropriate to speak again with him about the key issue of the leading role of the revolutionary party, not least because the remembrance we republished, our way of commemorating the departed while also denouncing errors and faults, is, we are convinced, the best way to prevent monuments and mausoleums, large or small, from having the power to mummify and sterilise a living and vital issue that had to mark, and does today definitively mark, a clear dividing line between those who uphold and practise the ‘correct revolutionary theory’ and those who, on the contrary, reduce it to a bedside book suitable for falling asleep over. This was certainly not the case with Antonio Gramsci, who suffered and confronted the issue with revolutionary and intellectual passion, in the best sense of the word, with which we were firmly in disagreement.

To each his own betrayal. Waves of degeneration strike the two fundamental classes that face each other in contemporary history: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Precisely because theirs is not a simple pitched battle between enemies, one armed against the other armed in chivalrous combat (as the foul deceiving opportunists imagine the confrontation to be, based on ‘peaceful’ electoral, economic and ‘ideal’, ‘détente’ and ‘emulation’ competitions), we have devoted so much attention, from Marx to Lenin, to the forms, structures, and reasons that allow one or other antagonistic force to drag behind the chariot of its own exclusive class reasons uncertain and spurious social forces, incapable of moving autonomously according to their own distinct purpose. From this need in Marxism arises the study and necessity of knowledge of the means and ways that allow the proletariat to conquer political power as a basic condition for a definitive reform of society, until the disappearance of opposing classes.

As you know, dear Antonio, your epigones, who increasingly bring shame upon you and tarnish your memory, have been chattering and continue to chatter about an alleged flaw in the Party’s origins in 1921, due to the dogmatism of the Left, insensitive, according to them, to the diversity, today they say the ‘pluralism’, of society. You know how bitter the dispute was, but neither we nor you spoke of betrayal, even when Stalin’s heavy knout came down on the entire international communist movement. No one then muzzled those who today are called ‘intellectuals’, even though we never allowed ourselves to address a militant with this pompous and sterile appellation. We had clearly stated what we thought of ‘culture’ in 1912, in the famous controversy that saw us opposed to the attempt to reduce enthusiastic and healthy young proletarian forces to study offices or to ‘cadres’. Nor did our much-maligned elder brother Amadeo ever have the courage to prevent your questionable and harmful association with a subtle and passionate young man like Gobetti. The fact is that you never thought, as they are now whoring around, to consider ‘intellectuals’ as such a ‘force for the revolution’. Nor did we ever consider useless the studies on the role of consensus mediators for the bourgeoisie, which intellectuals of various backgrounds carried out with skilful and subtle weapons, only that we never dreamed of ‘aggregating them’, as is liked to be said today, as a caste or category to the cause of the revolution.

It is so true that when there was talk of giving the party more space to the so-called ‘worker base’, we reiterated that the Party is not measured by the numerical presence of pure workers, but by respect for its nature and its leading role, whose only guarantee consists in the application of a theory and a strategy written impersonally from the overall experience of the class movement, consolidated and crystallised into rules of conduct that no ‘intellectual’, let alone any ‘pure worker’, can modify at will.

Hence your misunderstanding of our way of understanding the concept and practice of organic centralism, which reminded you sometimes of the Church and mysticism, sometimes of the Enlightenment and determinism, if even in your Notes on Machiavelli you could write: ‘Organic centralism. Schneider quotes these words of Foch: “Commander n’est rien. Ce qu’il faut, c’est bien comprendre ceux qui’on a à faire et bien se faire comprendre d’eux. Le bien comprendre, c’est tout le secret de la vie...”. Tendency to separate “command” from every element and make it a new kind of “panacea”. And again, one must distinguish between “command” as an expression of different social groups: from group to group, the art of command and the way it expresses itself changes greatly, etc. Organic centralism, with its overbearing and “abstractly” conceived command, is tied to a mechanical conception of history and movement, etc.’.

Well said! And how then to explain the Stalinist methods, the warnings against the alleged factionalism of the Left? Perhaps with organic centralism and overbearing methods? Overbearingness is a result, which has repercussions in the revolutionary party, of the weakening of momentum and the illusion of keeping it alive with tactical zigzags, perhaps supported by ‘workers’ consensus’ or the ‘rank and file’ of the party. How true! If only they were not limited in their analysis, reduced to the study of method and incapable of grasping the overall and material reasons for our disagreement. But you certainly did not think of the intellectual free from the commitment of an ‘organic party’ militant, as you put it.

Yet look: his epigones understood him as they wished, now theorising absolute loyalty to the Prince (Stalin) and claiming to build not only ‘socialism’ (and that’s saying something) but even a ‘socialist’ language, an art, a ‘proletarian’ culture; now floundering in search of free ‘spaces’, of participation, of freedom for poetry, for the universal.

All this, dear Antonio, because once the party is conceived as ‘part’ of the class, then yes all divisions, claims, and opinions are justified, provided they are gathered in the central committee. We have never been particularly concerned about whether our leading comrades were counts or marquises, of bourgeois or proletarian extraction, but rather that they did not stray from the tactical or strategic discipline imposed by the science of class movement, which is an impersonal and collective heritage.

But surely you, despite your ‘idealism’, never claimed the role of free intellectual, knowing full well, precisely from your study of the role of the intellectual in the bourgeois field, that the enemy class itself had perpetually oscillated in theorising now the free and neutral ‘man of culture’, above parties and above the State. From the scholar, wholly devoted to his mission, according to the impassioned S.G. Fichte, to Schopenhauer’s outbursts such as ‘I thank God every morning for not having to care about the Roman Empire’, against ‘the State referendary’ Hegel, the bourgeoisie, depending on its fluctuating fortunes and necessities, has given birth from its bosom, now the intellectual slave of power, now the smug and weary dandy of life, self-sufficient and libertarian, metaphysical and fideist.

The controversy surrounding intellectuals, as you teach us, Antonio, cannot be resolved as a question of method between freedom of research and political ‘commitment’. Let the self-righteous dust off the myth of the betrayal of the clerics at every turn of history, which would consist in the wrongdoing of the so-called man of culture in placing himself at the service of political interests, contaminating his research with these interests or theorising this combination. We will not be moved by the petty-bourgeois outbursts of a polygraph like Sartre, who, after flooding the world with his outbursts, sweetly discovers that ‘literature is worthless as long as there is a single hungry child in the world’. Yet he was for many years a companion on the road of Togliatti and Thorez, who were able to justify such ambiguous accompaniments through the distorted and degenerate form of the democratic party, open to critical contributions and so on.

We have never been weak enough to grant Marxist credentials to anyone who claimed to carry out their ‘intellectual’ activity outside the class party, or with a licence to sell or buy, even if they were the most aggressive Marxologist, devour of books and producer of glosses. Kautsky and Plekhanov were branded renegades by Lenin not because they did not know the sacred texts, which they in fact made known and illustrated splendidly, but because they claimed to overturn the rules and laws common to all, leveraging their authority as leaders and ‘creators’ of recipes and shortcuts. We are not prepared to recognise the contributions of intellectuals ‘specialised’ in publishing and disseminating even concrete party positions, because we have never believed in a revolution prepared or carried out by blows of ‘spreading ideas’ regardless of the good or bad health of the party of the working class in its entire organic whole, in its head and in its legs.

We have never accepted being defeated by Antonio Gramsci’s supposed ‘superior theoretical and philosophical dialectic’. He himself, in his statement at the Lyon Congress in 1926, was led to say: ‘I acknowledge the Left for having finally acquired and shared its thesis that adhering to Marxist communism does not only mean adhering to an economic and historical doctrine and to political action, but entails a well-defined vision, distinct from all others, of the entire system of the universe, including the material’.

He knew, therefore, and realised as we did, that ours and his was not a petty dispute, but a general, cognitive, and practical question, in the face of which our common communist passion was not enough to prevent the International from becoming increasingly the raison d’être of the Russian party, and the party from abandoning the terrain of correct tactics and the road of the historical programme for a shortcut, soon revealed as illusory and today clearly bankrupt, of greater ‘flexibility’ towards the class enemy, calling for collaboration with political movements that had definitively betrayed, and not only in words, the causes of the proletarian revolution.

We are convinced that the Left did not fail in its militancy in this work of meticulous and prohibitive defence of revolutionary positions, we do not believe that it should have abandoned Gramsci and loyal revolutionary militants to their fate by distancing itself from them. It is a question of an overall evaluation of social forces and objective determinations: we did not make it a question of ideological gymnastics and philosophical pedantry at the time: on the contrary, we still today consider it a matter of militancy that no longer allows us to speak to comrades like Antonio, but orders us to fire our batteries, unfortunately, and not by our own choice, against the traitors who, in 50 years of counter-revolution, have destroyed, in collusion with enemy forces, any possibility of jointly correcting the errors committed.

‘While Gramsci understood that those who fly the Marxist flag must bind the terms of their scientific and philosophical thought and make a decisive break with anything that, even through serious study, can be traced back to non-classist and non-Marxist sources, his posthumous followers have (since then) increasingly slipped towards the most eclectic tolerance of infinite ideological positions, sceptical and confessional, incredulous and mystical, individualistic and statist, reflecting in their inconsistency and ostentatious contempt for principles the current manifestations of ideological and theoretical laxity in the bourgeois world, to which they offer nothing but a wandering reproach for having violated its own wise traditions and institutional tables, here and there, now and then’ (from our ‘Communism and Human Knowledge’, Prometeo, 1952).

Comrade Antonio Gramsci will therefore not hold it against us if, ‘free from servile praise and cowardly insults’, we continue our long-standing battle, which has seen us as unyielding opponents of a series of choices, analyses, and actions that in 1977 are instrumentally invoked to legitimise the complete negation of the premises on which, in any case, his political proposal was based.

Nor do we intend to argue, according to a simplistic pattern, that since epigones are always worse, it could only have ended this way. That would be a myopic, reductive, and glib reading. The fact is that, while in the memorable battles of the first post-war period it was difficult, but possible, to fight also an ideological battle, supported by millions of proletarians, exhausted but standing, today all that remains is to ‘restore’ entirely a structure deformed and tampered with by those very epigones who have made themselves docile instruments of the class enemy, whose verses and prose, customs and philosophy they mimic without restraint.

We therefore do not feel inclined, perhaps out of a ‘servile praise’, to save even a comma of a supposed Gramscian ‘philosophy’ that we might even share, because this was not true then and is even less true today, nor do we feel inclined, out of ‘cowardly contempt’, to attribute the explicit misdeeds and betrayals of his epigones to the doctrinal errors or bad communism of Antonio Gramsci. The truth for us is that in the presence of a proletarian movement on its feet, in the heat of action, millions of wrong words are set right, while in the almost complete absence of class movement even one wrong word can contribute to delaying the spasms of recovery. We are therefore committed to being not only intransigent but ferocious toward the squanderers of a historical heritage accumulated over long years of experience and workers’ struggles.

Returning to the canonisation process still underway, which we do not know whether it will end with a solemn sanctification or with a probable postponement to Gramsci’s limbo, it must be said that the race toward open collaboration with the bourgeoisie is forcing the great P.C.I. church to distance itself from the founding father, or at least to ‘open a debate’, as they say, uninhibited, such as to authorise ‘the most open’ freedom of conscience on basic principles and the assertion of distinct ‘schools of thought’ (so to speak), among which the moderate one, pivoted on the De Sanctis-Labriola-Croce-Gramsci axis, and the ‘advanced’ one, difficult to identify but, it is assured, more ‘left-wing’, would stand out. In short, among those who would like to ‘go beyond’ Gramsci, there are those who are willing to say so explicitly, others known for appealing to ‘diversity in continuity’ (a famous formula coined by Togliatti and not by A. Moro, as is believed!), and those who pretend to want to remain anchored to the Father, with apparent intransigence that is more verbal than anything else.

The preliminary investigation could only take place at a ‘seminar’ held in Frattocchie from 27 to 29 January 1977, on the theme ‘Party, State, and hegemony in Gramsci’. Tasked with introducing the seminar, Professor Gruppi clearly proclaimed the need to ‘go beyond Gramsci’. For the first time, the need for the P.C.I. to begin to distance itself even publicly from the thought and teachings of Gramsci was explicitly stated. Until now, representatives of the P.C.I. had preferred to follow the path of elaborating continual ‘reintegrations’; even the strategy of the ‘historic compromise’ had been traced back by zealous manipulators to Gramscian Reflections. Now, not only was it not denied that the P.C.I. of Togliatti-Berlinguer had broken away from Gramsci’s teachings, but the party’s ‘intellectuals’ were given the task of finding theoretical justifications for this break, based on ‘differences in situations’, as is normal. There were no lack of those who, like Paolo Spriano, took to the podium to give lessons in politics to Gramsci and to stigmatise his ‘extremist and sectarian errors’ (committed, who knows, under the influence of the Left!).

On the other hand, it is reasonable to think so, if the ‘Crocean’ Amendola, having embarked this June in a polemic with Bobbio, Montale, and Sciascia, has consistently maintained that he sees no other way forward today than defence, uncompromising, and without ‘pessimisms’ or ‘cowardices’, of the State, once the P.C.I. would have taken more than 20 years to amend itself from the sectarianism of its origins, when it made the mistake of thinking and evaluating fascism as an ‘internal question of the bourgeoisie’. But let us leave aside this Neapolitan who has never understood the inner meaning of that phrase; let us leave him in the grim trench of the defence of the bourgeois State!

Also at the seminar, Leonardo Paggi, a young man with high hopes, strongly supported the ‘right to revisionism’, that is, to review and correct Gramsci’s statements of principle, just as, after all, ‘has been done and continues to be done with the classics of Marxism’ (we told you so, Antonio, about ‘revolution against Capital’, today me, tomorrow you!). In this regard, Paggi referred to Togliatti, who in 1964 not only did not reject the criticisms of ‘revisionism’ levelled at him by the Chinese, but boasted about them, naturally justifying himself with the ‘radically different conditions from the past’.

We would like to point out that once you embark on the path of ‘changed conditions’, you know where you are starting from, but not where you will end up. We are well aware that the world changes, as, and fortunately, do historical conditions. That’s all we need, otherwise how could we speak of a classless society? We have always considered philosophy to be revolutionary, destroying myths and gods, our own theory as a tool and guide for action and nothing more, but we have always fought to ensure that decisions on ‘changed conditions’ were not taken by an individual or a leader acting on their own initiative, but by the formal party in total accordance with the historical party, according to internal rules of decision-making that were the consistent deduction of general, tested, and impersonal principles. Our analyses on organic centralism, on the party as an organ and not part of the class, were not trifles, dear Antonio, far from it, as you can see!

Paggi admitted, taking up Gruppi’s suggestions, that one cannot place ‘on Gramsci’s shoulders choices and responsibilities that were not his’, that is, one cannot attribute to Gramsci responsibility for the current line of the P.C.I. Oh, this is correct. We have never been soft on Gramsci, but we certainly do not feel like placing the burden of his epigones’ bad faith on his already fragile shoulders!

From the inexperienced timidity of the project to the sophisticated operations of the école barisiénne (the Bari school, perhaps ‘the most difficult’, as defined by L’Espresso), among the hundred flowers of the P.C.I., the step is short. Biagio de Giovanni had in fact said that with Gramsci, ‘the Italian workers’ movement begins to free itself from an instrumental conception of the State, from the idea of a strict and simplified link between the State and the ruling class’. Gramsci would have called into question both ‘the Marxism of the Second and Third International, as well as the Leninist form of political mediation’. The ‘strategic novelty’ of the Prison Notebooks would consist in the indication to ‘fully bring the masses into the State’. Thus, regardless of the class nature of this State, in 1977 the ‘Barisien’ launches a proposal as ‘current’ as that of Gentilian ‘actualism’ and fascism: to overcome the limits of the liberal-democratic tradition and integrate the ‘producers’ into an organic community. Beautiful, isn’t it?

But, as it happens, Marxist theory, recently accused of failing to develop its own political conception of the State, stands there monumentally to remind us that only the seizure of power by the proletariat and the exercise of class dictatorship can perform this miracle!

Eurocommunism, considering the difficulty of the undertaking, has seen fit to choose the shortcut (this is the true meaning of opportunism, beyond all facile moralising!). Since there is a State (that of the bourgeoisie), let us finally and ‘entirely’ allow the masses to enter it.

The failure of liberal democracy and fascism has demonstrated to us, if ever there was any need, that between the bourgeois State and socialism there are no transitional stages, but a stark alternative. Take it or leave it.

Dear Antonio, do you remember the heated debates regarding the conquest of the State and the producers’ Councils? You naively thought you could penetrate the State and dismantle it through the ‘consciousness of the working class’: we told you clearly that the councils were not organs of government of a State to be conquered and destroyed, that the role of the party as the sole leading instrument of the revolution must not be neglected. Look where we are now: now they simply want to solemnly let the masses enter the State, with a full Te Deum, a thanksgiving officiated by the Supreme Pontiff.

We do not blame your illusions about the supposed working class ‘consciousness’, your followers do that, but would you have imagined such a total ‘evolution’ was possible? In turn, Ingrao, finally legitimised by his role as a high State authority, seems unwilling to waste time trying to carry out the operation, and in his volume Masses and Power he states that ‘the reform of the State is today the main economic reform to be carried out’.

Naturally, there is not even a hint of the ‘political reform’ of the State, which for revolutionary Marxism consists in the violent destruction of the bourgeois military, administrative and bureaucratic machinery. For these renegades, we are already at the stage of ‘economic reform’, or, in Engels’ words, ‘at the administration of things’, which is only possible under a fully developed higher socialist social system!

Ingrao combats ‘the tendency to flatten the planning and goal-oriented capacity of parties, seeing economic discourse intimately fused with the reasoning of the State, proposing a combination of economic initiative and social science, indicating the need for a planning conceived as “a continuous cultural revolution”’ and, quoting Gramsci, as a ‘widespread expansion of hegemony’. We told you, Antonio, that dictatorship was an unequivocal term, but hegemony was not! Just think how Ingrao could have spoken of a ‘widespread expansion of dictatorship’!

Ingrao imagines ‘a role for the State in helping the great masses of producers to plan for themselves and influence public decisions’! Scalfari’s La Repubblica comments approvingly: ‘This is the most remarkable effort to overcome the stalemate that has paralysed the two-year debate between liberal-democratic and Marxist currents on the link between democracy and socialism and on the characteristics of the so-called “transitional phase”. It is an attempt to outline a Marxist theory of the State, in which class conflicts, the pressures of civil society, the functions of elected assemblies at various levels find an articulated and dynamic composition and are the real guarantee of pluralism and democracy’. In a word, Marx and Engels, unable to outline a theory of the State, have found a brilliant ‘epigone’ in an Ingrao who, lo and behold, came to conclusions, reflecting on Gramsci, similar to those of Giovanni Gentile.

It should come as no surprise at this point that the ‘comrades’ of Mondo Operaio, in a round table discussion on Gramsci’s thought, had the idea, with someone of their calibre such as Furo Diaz, to say openly that talking about a ‘transitional phase’ no longer means anything, since the workers’ movement no longer has before it, as was believed until a few years ago, a goal that was called socialism. If the future now lies entirely in the ‘process’, in the ‘becoming’ of a political perspective, and this in an uninterrupted sense with the finishing line always shifting forward, then everything is a ‘transitional phase’, and it is pointless to talk about it.

Well, would you believe it? The observation was decisive: the ‘transitional phase’ appeared to everyone to be a pseudo-concept. Do you understand, Antonio? And to think that you harshly rebuked us because we did not accept your theory of transition, not because we considered it a pseudo-concept, but rather a hyper-conceptual construction, idealist, so to speak; and these people go on to conclude that it was not worth racking your brains so much, which even the Duce himself claimed should no longer function, in order to come up with a pseudo-concept! We would be doing you a ‘cowardly outrage’ if we told you that you reap what you sow, because the conclusions of the epigones are nothing more than betrayal that the carrion have carried out by drawing inspiration from the weaknesses of the doctrines that have been attributed to you.

To untangle the knot of counter-revolution and betrayal, neither candles lit before his holy icon nor little windows opened onto your mighty skull will suffice; only the class mobilisation of powerful workers’ sections will be capable of it, under the drive of the stomach, so abhorred and underestimated by your temperament. It is the party that understood, under the leadership of the Left, and continues to understand for the class; the class will understand after it has won, we repeat it to you!

The party of democratic centralism, there is no point in denying it, dear Antonio, has given birth to the Zhdanovs and the hundred flowers, the Sartres and the much-publicised nouveaux philosophes, so fashionable in France, the various Lévy and company. It is not for the sake of literary fiction that we will not enter into a specific ‘discussion’ of the doctrines of the ‘nouveaux’, but for the simple fact that there is nothing new about them, except for the flat and empirical ratification of the failure of socialism, very sportingly identified with Stalinism and the Gulag universe.

Nor, Antonio, do you need to be informed in detail of the arguments of both the ‘new’ and the gurus of classic and Stalinist opportunism, convinced as we are that the frogs in the swamp have certainly achieved their goal, which is to imitate the Olympus of the great saints where the ‘Marxism’ of churches and harmless icons has placed, in strict hierarchical order, complete with a dash of distinction, Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao-Gramsci-Togliatti, etc., and let’s stop there, because we wouldn’t want to run the risk of not having the most accurate information about heavenly dominions. We, dear Antonio, (having abandoned our irresistible and historic passion for mockery, and once again giving way to our defence of revolutionary truth, which you know well, and which you did not share, certainly not out of a desire for power or base betrayal) have already seen philosophers greater than these ‘new’ ones who gave theory to a practice that was already established; they did not make the (French) Revolution, but neither did they castrate it, like these their compatriots.

We already never approved of your definition of Marxism as a philosophy of praxis, an ambiguous term if you were being ironic about an article by G. Gentile published in the Spectator of 3 November 1928 and quoted in Fascist Education, precisely because of the malicious banality of a philosophical vocabulary that was to be rejected outright. Yet, you must admit, it was Gentile himself who was the first in Italy to read Marx in an actualist-idealist key ante litteram! You see, the ‘nouveaux’, who, incidentally, modestly mock themselves and do not want to be called that, are, for two reasons, the legitimate children of the ‘Philosophy that is not thought (!)’ but ‘is done’, and therefore is stated and affirmed ‘not with formulas, but with action’. Since, ever since man has existed, one has always ‘done’, there has always been ‘action’, this philosophy has always existed, and was therefore the philosophy of... Nitti and Giolitti (as you ironically pointed out). This philosophy has always existed because, says one of them, Lévy, ‘the prince, that is, power, is another name for the world; the master is the metaphor for the real’. Because, he continues, ‘there exists no social bond that does not establish the master. There is no free speech that is not marked by the seal of tyranny. If there is speech, if speech exists, this derives from the fact that society exists; and society is war... In the beginning was the State... History does not exist...’ and other chapter titles worthy of the most mephitic sacristy. But, you will tell us, why bother to dignify these sacristans with your interest?

And indeed we don’t have time, we have more pressing things to do, such as attempting to defend the basic living conditions of the working class, stunned by philosophies and symphonies lavishly dispensed precisely by those who invoke your name and your ‘praxis’, and who are incapable of guaranteeing not only daily bread, but even the struggle for daily bread.

It is your ‘epigones’ who, even when they swear to condemn certain theories, promise to engage in dialogue with them, because they now conceive of class struggle as a debate of ideas, with anyone, as is customary among the middle classes, for whom the individualistic point of view is the yardstick for measuring everything; because, having now entered into the logic of the State, they have more points of contact with the nouveaux than they realise, and they have no one to dialogue with except them, who are the little trumpeters and heralds of this principle, ‘the State is at the beginning’. To fight them, they would have to declare war not only on the ideologies they represent, but on the real historical facts, on the classes and middle classes they represent, and they would have to terrorise them, as we have always maintained. Here is our ‘policy of alliances’, which divided us at the time of the ‘united front from below’ in 1922, remember? But we were comrades then, passionately seeking the correct tactics, not dialogue with the middle classes, but the conquest of the ‘majority of the working class’! And you yourself said that ‘for the philosophy of praxis, ideologies are anything but arbitrary; they are real historical facts, which must be fought and exposed in their nature as instruments of domination, not for reasons of morality, but precisely for reasons of political struggle: to make the governed intellectually independent from the governors, to destroy one hegemony and create another, as a necessary moment in the overthrow of praxis’. (Prison Notebooks, 1319).

And instead, the new philosophers and the ideology they represent are nothing more than the other side of the middle classes facing the crisis of capitalist society and they put pressure on the state power, garrisoned by the party that was already of the working class, and they agitate against everything and everyone according to the classic anarchistic and rebellious cliché, which has nothing to do with Marxism and the communist revolution.

The dispute between the ‘new’ philosophers and the ‘free Marxist’ philosophers and those of the Botteghe Oscure does not concern different recipes to overthrow the State, but is a ruthless competition to identify the means and ways to keep it standing, some proclaiming the lofty idea that the ‘State is at the beginning’ and that those who fight to overthrow it today are utopians doomed to the concentration camp, others babbling about action from within, about democratisation, about defending the positive aspects of the State! It is so true that at the Unity Festival in Modena, a titled epigone, Ingrao, loudly proclaimed that his party had learned to ‘overcome the mystical phase and emerge from mythology and sentimentalism’: ‘we have learned to become the secularists of our socialism. We have learned that the transformation of society is built with rationality, scientifically, with a strategy that cannot be kept only in the minds of a few leaders... To those who tell us to return to the opposition, we say no. The bourgeoisie is defeated by becoming more and more a party of struggle, but also more and more a party of government, and above all by keeping both things together’.

As you can see, it is classic philosophy that is not thought, but that is done, and, what is worse, by many. And above all, it is secular socialism, so un-mystical that it is both socialism and capitalism, capitalism and socialism!

Yet you said that the philosophy of praxis ‘does not tend to resolve contradictions in history and society peacefully; rather, it is the very theory of these contradictions; it is not the instrument of government of dominant groups to gain consent and exercise hegemony over subordinate classes who want to educate themselves in the art of governance and have an interest in knowing all truths, even unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the deceptions of the upper class, and even more so of themselves!’

But the speciality of the ‘new’ and ‘human-faced’ national communists is their reflection on the Russian concentration camp universe. These scoundrels would have us believe that for the first time in the ‘democratic’ West, serious reflection is being given to the nature of ‘Barbaric and Asiatic Socialism’. As you know, nothing could be further from the truth. As early as 1924, the Communist Left demanded to discuss, in the presence of the already fearsome Big Moustache and the eternally indecisive Palmiro, who on that occasion attempted mediation, ‘where the Russian party is going’, identifying in the policy of the Communist International, supported by the Italian party, precisely by the centrists allied with Tasca’s right wing (and you, Antonio, were the leader of the centrists), a whole series of counter-revolutionary directives issued under the pressure of the ‘national’ interests of the Russian party. There were no Gulags yet, nor were there any Great Russian bards like Solzhenitsyn, let alone greenhorns from beyond the Alps reflecting on the totalitarianism ‘produced by the eclipse of the sacred’. Much more concretely, in the field of socialism, not only in Russia but worldwide, the oxygen that the ‘barbaric and Asiatic’ universe needed in order not to fall back into bourgeois domination, even if under the repulsive forms of socialism in a single country, was beginning to run out. That oxygen was and had to be the Revolution in the West. You yourself, in your famous letter to Togliatti in 1926, wondered, somewhat belatedly and under the influence of the ‘optimism of the will’, about the course of the internal struggles in the Russian party. But Palmiro ‘the frigid’ replied to you that without seeing one cannot judge, and that was the end of it, while the last chances to straighten out the policy of the Communist International were being squandered. And now the brats come along and theorise that, in the light of Kolyma-Auschwitz, one must conclude in a Christian and Augustinian manner that, unfortunately, Power is Evil, that the State precedes national reality itself, that any attempt to ‘revolutionise’ bourgeois social relations inevitably leads to tyranny and the concentration camp.

Not a word, as you can see, about the social roots of the Gulag. All the attention of these hack sociologists has been focused on the repulsive aspects that ‘consciousness’ cannot accept. But when you spoke of capitalist ‘madhouses’ and justified the positional war in the West, you were certainly not referring simply to asylums, barracks, to those realities that your epigones today very politely call ‘separate bodies of the State’, but, we are sure, above all to capitalist production, to the factory, where blood and surplus value are extorted every day from the working class. The origin of the concentration camp where the ‘different’ are re-educated, the origin of imperialist war for revolutionary Marxism is Capital, not perverse human nature, and competition between States, not the ‘sadistic desire for power’. This is what the ‘secularism’ of socialism is, not the anti-mysticism of Ingrao and company! On the contrary, once the social relations produced by capitalism have been interpreted and read according to the rules of democracy and gradualism, the theoretical and practical monstrosities of a Minucci, a young Berlinguerian lion, emerge. Reflecting on your Americanism and Fordism, he discovers you as a ‘brilliant forerunner of the idea that capitalism is capable of accommodating even some of the demands of the antagonistic class’.

Then there would be nothing left to do but to ‘dissolve’ the most shameful contradictions of the bourgeois universe in civil society, which re-educates everything and transforms everything into good. It is no coincidence that the ‘philosophes’, experts in the Gulag and the democratic psychiatrists who draw on the ultra-democratic theories of Basaglia and Guattari, theorise the end of the madhouse through the embrace of the poor by the sane, educated in factory life and urban relations.

Oh! Let us be clear, Antonio, it is not just today that we’ve been saying, and not as a joke, that the real madmen are outside and the sensitive people incapable of enduring the oppression of bourgeois social relations, inside. We will not oppose in any way the ‘madmen’ being left free to wander around the city or the countryside. The fact is, however, that we are not prepared to grant ‘civil society’ the label of ‘healthy’: for us it is rotten and fetid and produces every day, especially in its most aseptic and rarefied parts, in the air-conditioned ministries and skyscrapers where the ‘patrons’ make managerial decisions, the most brutal monsters that no asylum can host, namely imperialist war and the denial of the most basic living conditions to two-thirds of all humanity. We do not know how to advise the poor inmates to escape from the Gulag or the asylum, if the bourgeois, even ‘red’, can offer them nothing but humiliation, unpaid labour, and new entry visas for failed ‘readjustment’.

That is why we did not and will not accept your argument that madhouses should be demolished one by one. Because madhouses have a tendency to multiply, and even when they give the impression that they can be broken up like a metamer, like annelids, they feed on humus that has a common base and a common brain: capitalist production and reproduction.

While well-fed philosophes try to demoralise the timid proletarian energies by threatening them with the vengeance of power and its intrinsically perfidious and malicious nature, while your followers do not even dream of storming the Quirinale with votes to obtain a presidency of the Democratic Republic based on pluralism and historical compromise, we, much more modestly, encourage even the timidest efforts of the working class and reassure them by maintaining that the proletarian State is necessary, as is its violence, itself historical and transitory, not always the same as itself, especially when it is useful to allow the birth pangs to be accelerated and assisted.

It seemed impossible that in the Botteghe Oscure, in the climate of ‘historic compromise’, there was no need to ask the Holy Mother Church for instructions on the major issues of the ‘secularism’ of the State, atheism, and anti-theism, while the process of canonisation of Antonio Gramsci stagnates. Evidently, there is no longer much trust in its Word, or at least not only in it, partly because post-fascist super-concordat democracy, even if it wanted to, cannot ignore its ‘counterpart’ and its ‘worldview’. A lot of water has passed under the bridges!

Our imaginary dialogue, Antonio, is not at all aimed at stretching your ‘thought’ to our side, but to reiterate that our harsh polemics, which culminated in the Lyon Congress of 1926, were not a sectarian theoretical exercise, but the intransigent defence of a historical heritage that was dissolving and dissipating, and with it the historical party of the working class, beaten not on the battlefield, but captured by the class enemy.

Who would have thought, dear Antonio, that it would precisely be the Jesuits who would pose to the party (which looks to you as a patron saint, you who, faced with the ‘practical’ and, for us, temporary defeat in the revolutionary biennium of 1919-20 and in the years that followed, thought it best, against our thesis which maintained that there was nothing to enrich or add to classical Marxist revolutionary theory, to have to ‘strengthen’ Marxism with ‘new’ elaborations of a philosophical type that would render Marxism and communism definitively ‘secular’ and anti-religious) the fateful question: ‘Will you abandon Marx’s materialist philosophy?’

We do not need to hear your answer, we don’t doubt it. We are certain of it despite the fact that we already reproached you at the time for your weakness towards philosophical idealism, but never ever towards religious transcendence and bigoted practices! But, coincidentally, the Jesuits, men of the world and advisors to the powerful since time immemorial, ask your epigones, anything but ill-disposed, not so much, as the simpletons and the tabloid journalists delude themselves, that the P.C.I. and its leaders convert to the religious word, but that they renounce materialist philosophy, with the implication, precisely ‘Jesuitical’, that a solemn abjuration will not suffice, but rather the admission that Marxism no longer claims to be a ‘worldview’, a philosophy, but a ‘method’ among many, a critical form of society; in a word, in the climate of pluralism and democracy, a simple point of view, an opinion! It is indeed true, dear Antonio, that the Jesuits have come a long way! As you well know, they are asking for the same thing that Don Benedetto asked for, who was at least a sure connoisseur of secular and human history, we were even about to say religious! You had to write a veritable anti-Croce in order to repel this request, and now, look, your epigones have declared themselves willing to satisfy such pious desires even to the Jesuits!

But listen to the voice of one of these people, a propagator of the Word of the Pontiff of your former party, namely Lucio Lombardo Radice, who, to the persistent question replies: ‘As such, as a party, the P.C.I. does not intend to adopt or abandon Marx’s materialist philosophy, or any other philosophy; it intends to be the bearer and assertor of historical, political, social, and even moral, “Earthly” values. It concerns the values of socialism and their realisation on this issue: from this point of view, the P.C.I. is not only Marxist and Leninist (no hyphen), but also Gramscian and Togliattian. It is worth clarifying this with a couple of examples. A communist can be an atheist or a believer, a dialectical materialist and a neo-positivist: there was an illustrious exponent of this philosophy in the ranks of the P.C.I. (this is obviously a reference to Galvano della Volpe, a former lecturer on fascist mysticism, and not by chance! ed.). The important thing is that he is a communist, and being a communist is a political-ideal category, not a philosophical one’.

As you can see, all your efforts poured into defeating ‘mutilated’ Crocean historicism with the weapons of critique has been a battle against windmills! Against the identification of philosophy and history, you proposed the identification of history and politics: ‘If the politician is a historian (not only in the sense that he makes history, but in the sense that by operating in the present he interprets the past), the historian is a politician; in this sense (which also appears in Croce), history is always contemporary history, that is, political’ (Prison Notebooks, Turin 1975, p. 1242). And now here is any Lucio Lombardo rehashing Croce’s ‘distinction’ between the political-ideal and the philosophical categories!

For you, Croce does not justify the continuity of the past in the present except in a speculative manner: the meaning of every single moment of historical becoming is sought idealistically in the totality of the development of the idea, which becomes transparent to itself in the present of self-consciousness. History is therefore nothing more than the history of ideas, not the real history of concrete economic and social processes. Your critique of Crocean historicism, in addition to denouncing the residues of transcendence, metaphysics, theology, grasps the limits of every idealist conception of history.

So to speak: ‘If it is necessary, in the perpetual flow of events, to fix concepts, without which reality could not be understood, it is also necessary, indeed essential, to fix and remember that reality in motion and the concept of reality, while logically distinguishable, must historically be conceived as inseparable entities. Otherwise, what happens to Croce happens, that history becomes a formal history, a history of concepts, and, in the last analysis, a history of intellectuals, indeed an autobiographical history of Croce’s thought, a history of flies on the coachman’s hat’ (p. 1241).

Just think, dear Antonio, that the Jesuits of Civiltà Cattolica, whom you know well and to whom you devoted so much sarcastic attention, the very ones who posed to your epigones the fateful question, ‘but do you renounce Marxist materialist philosophy?’, in the same tone as ‘do you renounce the devil and all his works?’, have subtly recalled (Civiltà Cattolica, 3.9.77, Ideology and Party in the Political Thought of Gramsci) your polemic with Bordiga, who was concerned that the communist movement would end up being ‘contaminated’ by the values of ‘bourgeois liberalism’.

‘At the Lyon Congress, the Left of the Communist Party of Italy did not hesitate to explicitly accuse Gramsci of being a “Crocean” and a “Proudhonian”’. All true. So what about Berlinguer’s P.C.I. and Lucio Lombardo Radice? Simply this: that we were comrades committed to conceding nothing to the opposing, idealist, and bourgeois ideology, and that, on the contrary, your heirs are nothing but utter scoundrels all dedicated to the dismantling of revolutionary doctrine and theory. Proof of this is that, in the same response to the mellifluous requests of Father Sorge, Lucio Lombardo goes on to say: ‘...the P.C.I. does not even have, as such, its own theory of religion, and that, when it abolishes from its statute (naturally, ‘democratically’ in a congress, ed.) every formula suspected of dogmatism, such as the expression “Marxism-Leninism”, it will take care not to introduce into it, for example, that religion is a permanent value of the human spirit!’ (Brave, eh! And he concludes): ‘In short, “Marxism is not a dogma, but a guide to action”, as Lenin, the great master of method, said – But we do not swear by his words, precisely because we are his good students’! As if to say, we need the backing, but we will do as we please!

Now we ask ourselves what this elusive guide to action would consist of if it were forced to renounce its function, which is to counter the ‘opinions’ of others, of neo-positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, Christianity, Buddhism and so on? When the Party is identified with the functions and attitudes of the (bourgeois) State in the sense that it recognises freedom of conscience, the ‘option’ towards intellectual fashions and so on, then it might as well be said that the Party is nothing more than a component of the State, one of the many ‘channels’ for the formation of consensus, as the parties of the democratic and pluralistic constitution are defined! Or one of the many ‘channels’ for grace, the eighth sacrament, for saving one’s soul!

Now, dear Antonio, you who devoted attention to the sociology of the Catholic world beyond our most pressing needs, such as the struggle to defend the correct tactics and theoretical and practical tradition, you know well that pluralism, the demand for ‘channels’, is an old hobbyhorse of Catholicism that is not strictly integrist, which has not used the term ‘pluralism’ to claim a conciliatory attitude, that is, the aspiration to freeze (more apparent than real) power relations to be regulated from power to power. When Lenin calls for a secular State, he certainly does not have in mind a secular State, he certainly does not have in mind a neutral State, but rather, if we may use the term, a ‘religious’, ‘ideological’ State, understood as an apparatus for the repression of the proletarian class victorious over its enemies and against any possible counterattack. In the Marxist sense, a secular State means, against Masonic and narrowly bourgeois anticlericalism, a State that does not delude itself into eliminating exploitation and the opium of the people with words and the preaching of the revolutionary word, but by removing the conditions of the exploitation of capital on wages by abolishing the capitalist social relation.

So, a secular State does not mean agnostic, but rather, etymologically, of the victorious ‘people’. Let us leave the illusion of a neutral State, even on religious matters, to liberal and neo-liberal ideology! If your epigones truly want to be ‘secular’ as they understand it, let them say explicitly that not only do they feel themselves to be one of the many components of the pluralist State, but that they have renounced socialism, one of the many cinematic ‘worldviews’ with which the various Collettis and Marxologist editors of the Treccani Encyclopaedia delight in arguing, aping the Max Weber and Subtle Doctor of rational capitalism!

It is therefore not irrelevant within the Party, and you agreed with this, whether one is materialist or neo-positivist, existentialist or phenomenologist. This does not in any way contradict our traditional thesis that theoretical questions are not resolved at the drawing board, but on the terrain of tactics, of the correct tactics. When Kautsky’s journal Neue Zeit expressed concern that philosophical discussion could become a reason for division among Russian Social Democrats, the Bolshevik newspaper Proletary responded in February 1908: ‘This philosophical controversy is not (...) and should not be a [dispute between factions]; any attempt to represent these differences of opinion as factional is radically erroneous’. In a letter to Gorky (21 November 1908), Lenin reiterated that ‘[t]o hinder the application of the tactics of revolutionary Social-Democracy in the workers’ party for the sake of disputes on the question of materialism or Machism, would be, in my opinion, unpardonable folly’.

But if Lenin does not believe that the revolutionary workers’ party should set itself the task of resolving philosophical disputes, neither does he believe that the party called upon to lead a radical transformation of society can do without its own conception of the world. Of course, this ‘worldview’ is not a pie in the sky, it is the result of the experience of class struggle in the capitalist era and, as such, is the ‘conceptualisation’, a type of social mental order that only the Party possesses. This does not mean, by definition, that it is the absolute solution to reality, created on paper. But there is a long way from this to theorising a generic ‘freedom of thought’ or agnosticism.

In Two Tactics, Lenin writes: ‘The neo-Iskraist method of expressing its views reminds one of Marx’s opinion (in his famous “theses” on Feuerbach) of the old materialism, which was alien to the ideas of dialectics. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, said Marx, the point, however, is to change it. Similarly, the neo-Iskraists can give a tolerable description and explanation of the process of struggle which is taking place before their eyes, but they are altogether incapable of giving a correct slogan for this struggle. Good marchers but bad leaders, they belittle the materialist conception of history by ignoring the active, leading and guiding part in history which can and must be played by parties that understand the material prerequisites of a revolution and that have placed themselves at the head of the progressive classes’.

The harsh polemic waged by us Marxists against the deniers, enrichers, manipulators of revolutionary theory is not and never has been a verbal and ‘philosophical’ exercise on idealism in the abstract or on academic materialism, but against specific social forces which, in the course of the modern class struggle, have cloaked the defence of their economic and social privileges in the garb of general conceptions of reality, already elaborated or in any case suitable for giving theoretical dignity to a reality far more prosaic and material.

This is why basic Materialists, such as Lenin and ourselves, are not so blind and deaf as to fail to see and understand that ‘[p]hilosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism’. On the contrary, ‘[f]rom the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, (...) development (...) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge, into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised’.

Thus, behind Lombardo Radice’s proposal to admit philosophical agnosticism as a natural-secular attitude in the P.C.I., there is no simple erroneous philosophical statement, but the theoretical collection of 50 years of counter-revolutionary practice, which precisely cannot remain purely practical, but needs to be systematised and theorised. This is for us a reason for clarification which only serves to confirm our definition of counter-revolutionary, which we have applied to the P.C.I. for some time now.

In this regard, claims of primogeniture in intuiting the counter-revolutionary dégringolade are worthless, because it is not enough to shut oneself up in a conference to agree on defining the current Russian regime is oppressive and non-socialist. Much more is needed! It is necessary to accept the revolutionary doctrine and practice in a single block which, in order to be an effective guide to action, must involve the enunciation and implementation of rules known to all, at the centre and on the periphery, with the objective and impersonal force of a programme valid for all and recognised by all. On the contrary, in the prevailing climate of disintegration and mental confusion, it is fashionable to accept half-truths, alibis for new and more deleterious political proposals. Just think of the antics of the nouveaux philosophes mentioned before or the colourful conference of the so-called ‘heretics of dissent’ who in Venice, under the patronage of the salon-goers of the Manifesto, on the theme of ‘Power and oppression in post-revolutionary societies’, where, through the mouth of a guru of the calibre of Althusser, have stated that ‘the left has lived too long on the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, without wanting to admit that they were prone to err, to criticise and even to saying nonsense that we took as gospel’. Let’s look at a few: ‘the theory of surplus value’ - ‘the lack of a theory of the State and revolutionary organisations’.

We paleo-Marxists, dear Antonio, hold on to the nonsense that so disgusts the intellectualistic and snobbish petty bourgeoisie: we know of no more refined or efficient tools or guides to action. Indeed, we are truly satisfied that it is publicly acknowledged by the renegades that they are tired of washing their mouths out with words that clash with their daily practice. We therefore caution and insist on cautioning the working class from those who, from certain pulpits, at Trentin for example, propose slogans such as: ‘without the start of a revolution in the West, the problem of the East cannot be solved (...) We must abandon the old dogmas of the trade union and the single party of the working class in the struggles of the left in the West’. We do not believe that your ‘hegemony’ meant this, and even if your theoretical formulation, as we denounced, could give space and legitimacy to such proposals, we do not feel we can count you among the conscious operators of the definitive burial of the true World Communist Revolution, which will be led precisely by the single party of the working class, with the realisation within the movement of the single trade union of the working class and of workers in general.

The favourite topic of the rampant Marxologists, from the most renowned to the most obscure, is the alleged ‘crisis of Marxism’.

This is hardly surprising, since the illusion of having found the formula to relegate Marxism ‘to the attic’, so as not to return to the ‘stilt houses’ of class struggle, is a typically Italian idea and, what is more, not from the last of the ‘open’ liberal democrats and progressives ante litteram, namely Giovanni Giolitti.

This is not surprising, since the social material that has expressed Marxist theory, by explicit admission of the supporters of the ‘crisis’, has not only become more incandescent, but threatens to overwhelm all the Don Ferrantes of the situation who, by dint of repeating that class struggle is neither ‘substance’ nor ‘accident’, will end up (we sincerely hope) dying of this very infection.

Of course, like all insecure people, the gentlemen of the crisis are searching for the founding fathers of the crisis itself, and, as it happens, even Antonio Gramsci fits the bill nicely.

We intervene once again, not so much to defend Gramsci’s orthodoxy or good name, an orthodoxy we have always rejected and a good name which, as a comrade in arms, we have always defended, but to reaffirm that Marxist theory is not a debatable science, but rather a ‘guide to action’ in the class struggle that must be accepted in its entirety or rejected in its entirety, tertium non datur.

Back on air, dear Antonio, you remember the uproar caused by your Revolution against Capital. We on the Left, who claim the continuity of our struggle within the Socialist Party since way back in 1912, have never tried to shut anyone up by passing ‘press releases’, especially when it comes to questions of ‘science’ in society. Marxism is a block of steel, according to Lenin’s classic definition, in the sense that its internal coherence was not built for extrinsic contributions or annotations, to the point that Marx himself had no fear of appearing schematic in pointing out the essential discoveries revealed by the study of the modern class struggle: ‘1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production; 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Now everything can be said, except that even the most ramshackle ‘Marxist’ of those times denied this theoretical block. The coexistence within the Class Party of different factions was justified by the fact that, despite the heavy ambiguities on the terrain of practice (just think of the attitude towards imperialist war), no bore, not even Turati, had had the courage to theorise the failure of Marxism, which, even when it had supported the need for the Socialist Party to enter the ‘Nennian’ control room (deluding itself greatly), it had done so with the intention that this operation be the first step towards the future dictatorship of the proletariat.

We on the Left, the bottom of the class, have never judged our comrades by their intentions, but by their practical behaviour, and we have intensified our struggle for the formation of the revolutionary class party, in accordance with the directives of the International, not because we only discovered at a certain moment the aberrations and fornications of Turati and Serrati, whom we knew well and whom we had never failed to brand as reformists, but because world events in the class struggle, in their development, postulated irreversible choices, on pain of the contingent and future defeat of the communist revolution.

Certainly, your Revolution against Capital was intended to refute the mechanistic and economistic interpretation of historical materialism put forward by the reformists. Yours was intended to be a call to the energies of revolutionary will, against fatalism and the renunciation of the attack on the putrid bourgeois society. We did not deny your passion, even if we never shared your interpretations, so much so that a host of more or less official Party historians who refer to you cannot decide whether we were ‘deterministic maximalists’ or idealists with no connection to reality, and therefore ‘revolutionary nihilists’, but one thing is certain: it seemed to you, as it did to us, that the great elephantine socialist party proved incapable of leading the working class in the attack on the State, that Marxist revolutionary theory had to be read against the evolutionary and positivist divulgations of Treves and company.

We supported the necessity of the restoration of Marxism; and Lenin agreed with us. You supported creativity, moral impetus, and we did not agree with you at all. But we do not believe that your assessment of the ‘crisis’ of Marxism proposed its liquidation as an unscientific and unphilosophical conception inadequate to the tasks that lay before the working class.

Now, on the contrary, in pluralistic polyphony, the voices of those who are ‘out of tune’ are more than respected, who with their logical neo-positivism and empiricism (already defined as shitty by our Founding Fathers), tell us not only that Marxist theory is inadequate to the idea of revolution, but that in fact it never was, that it has always been a matter of passionate and nineteenth-century romanticism.

The supreme master of these ‘discoveries’ is Colletti, not coincidentally the author of the revised entry on Marxism in the Treccani Encyclopaedia (the national tradition first and foremost!). For this pompous academic (but with interesting repercussions both among the pipers of the ultra-left and in the lousy party), ‘Marxism has “aspired” to be a scientific analysis of reality, a scientific survey of the “laws of motion” (dialectics) of the capitalist mode of production. This is the object of “Capital”. These laws are a field of investigation like “laws of nature”. Engels, in his speech at Marx’s grave, argued that Marx achieved in the field of human history what Darwin did in the field of natural history (selection of species). Lenin, in “Friends of the People”, says: (we are listening to Colletti’s lecture, without comment for now): “historical materialism is the extension of the scientific method in the field of socio-historical disciplines”’.

So far, so good, Colletti. The trouble starts when Marx intends to realise this ambitious plan through the instrument of Hegelian logic. But science is not done with dialectics! Marx seems to have used two different concepts of science incompatible with each other. One is the naturalist-empiricist concept of English origin. The other, of Hegelian (even Platonic) origin, where ‘science’ is true knowledge, episteme as opposed to doxa or apparent knowledge. Thus, science would be essential knowledge, that is, science in the sense in which Hegel titled his work Science of Logic (or Croce, Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept).

Furthermore, there is no ‘Marxist theory of the State’, no ‘political science’. There is indeed the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (which would be of the proletariat and not of the single party, let alone its Political Bureau). Marx speaks of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional political form, being the political instrument of the expropriation of capital, private property, and the means of production. Marx and Lenin argue that after expropriation, the extinction of the State begins. At this point, the professor’s exposition, correct up to this point, makes a fine leap, indeed a real flight of fancy, with a rhetorical question that should falsify the entire theoretical armamentarium: how can all this be reconciled with socialism in Cuba, in China, in the Soviet Union? We would not have expected so much from a neo-positivist! A fine example of the English naturalist-empiricist method!

In conclusion, Professor Colletti finds it very convenient to argue that from the humus of German Romantic culture descend the asylums and Gulags casually identified with ‘real socialism’. Once again, dear Antonio, we see the classically bourgeois claim to a science that is above parties and classes, aseptic, which limits itself to knowing, to contemplating, as if knowing and contemplating were not already practical activities and transformations of reality!

This bourgeois ‘ideal’, already refuted by Marx as the hypostasis of abstractions, is congenial to a class that tends to present itself as the monopoliser of truth and respectful of it against all the pressures and demands of ‘passion, interest, and emotion’.

We paleo-Marxists pride ourselves on practising a science of society that cannot exist without revolutionary passion, even if (and we demonstrate this) we do not disdain the help of the natural sciences and of their method, their logic, including formal logic. We deny however, and you too, Antonio, agreed on this, that there can be a science of society that is not also a philosophy, a conception of the world.

The aspiration to a unitary science of reality, whether natural and social (here is the meaning of historical and dialectical materialism) is not only not foreign to us, but we strive towards it with all our strength. We deny however that it can be identified with the knowledge already accumulated, or with the methods presented as the latest cry of unveiled truth. In this sense, either we believe that dialectical and historical materialism is the highest form of the overall understanding of nature and society, or we must reject it entirely.

This is the meaning of ‘professing’ a conception of reality. To whom this criterion appears as ecclesiastical or religious, or even mystical, we must reply that we are indeed religious, ecclesiastical, and mystical. And on the other hand, what do the philosophers of the bourgeoisie complain about, when they themselves were the first to propose the mysticism of the pure act and the religion of freedom?

But the various Collettis respond that they want to free the human race from the German romantic dialectic, however disguised, and, coincidentally, they go on to re-evaluate, as revisionists do, the neo-Kantians such as Bernstein, the timid forerunners of the German romantic dialectic themselves, Kant himself, or his shakers from dogmatic slumber, namely the various Humes, proponents of the naturalist-empiricist method!

And how can they manage to convince us of their ‘eternal values’, from democracy to social justice, if they cannot even bring themselves to acknowledge the nexus of causality among natural phenomena, making a profession out of pragmatism, scepticism, and ‘sound’ enlightenment?

Once again, dear Antonio, we are faced with the projections of the very petty petty-bourgeois mentality, which confuses its narrow illusions with Reality, with a capital R.

Referring to your name, perhaps for the simple fact that they found themselves in very particular circumstances alongside you, in Turin perhaps, at the time of the Ordine Nuovo, the most shameless ‘scientific’ anti-Marxists of our age attack the ‘heart’ of Marxism itself, the theory of surplus value. Starting from the shittiest fact of the social product, from the ‘data’ on production and wages (physically determined on the basis of subsistence, evidently forgetting how much the incautious and duelling Lassalle and his ‘bronze’ law of wages has been battered, albeit much less than his face!), a former friend of yours, Sraffa, today pontificated by neoclassical economic science, claims to balance the accounts that for Marx did not balance, quite clearly renouncing the ‘mystical’ dialectic in the name of ‘science’.

For Marx, the theory of value is primarily a theory of profit, and above all of exploitation in the capitalist economy. Here, this claim to grasp and understand the reason for the subjugation of the wage-earning class to the holders of the means of production is, for the sophisticated minds of Cambridge, a bit radical and a bit ancien régime, a classically German obsession. How much more convenient it is, according to the morality of the fat cat, to start from the social product already dished out, from the extolled ‘modern’ technology and wages (those, however, are objectively determined on the basis of subsistence, a veritable concept from cave metaphysics!). The calculation becomes simpler, the transformation of values into prices a mere matter or, worse, a broken taboo, and the logic of the capitalist mechanism finally transparent precisely because it is so logical.

We realise, dear Antonio, that with the meticulousness that has always distinguished us and that sometimes got on your nerves in the past, we are informing you about a subject that was never congenial to you, given your focus on political science, on your ‘philosophy of praxis’. But, you see, the attempt by your most nefarious epigones, amid all their distinctions, according to the method of the most acrobatic diplomacy and the most anti-Machiavellian Machiavellianism, is somehow to suggest that this Sraffa knew you and was somehow inspired by you in some way that is not easily documented during his interactions with your powerful mind. And this operation does not seem to us very considerate towards you, if it is true that, without being a connoisseur in economics in the strict sense, you had already given a taste of his own medicine to another illustrious and renowned denier of the theory of surplus value, like Don Benedetto Croce. You had clearly claimed that the theory of surplus value is not a theorem of abstract formal logic, but the key to reading the social antagonism produced by capitalist society. You had refuted the various Robbins (still alive and kicking, you know?) who were the masters who, even in your day, proposed starting from the ‘data’ of the social product, technology, and wages! And so let us shove back down the throats of those fetid, fat cats that part of the social product (and it is not a small part, given the times we live in) that the bourgeoisie grants to its theorists and supporters and continues to withdraw from the world proletariat with the weapons of economics and violence!

We remained at the Metamorphoses of values into prices, which so preoccupied the mind of Marx that he, poor thing, was bound to succumb to such an arduous task. Let’s give a quick presentation of the issue, not for you, of course, but for those listening to us, for the bewildered wage-earners who now look up to ‘professors’ with so much awe and sacred terror for their mocked and pitied ignorance. (The lousy party you refer to has its own ‘separate’ schools and its own well-fed academics, forget collective intellectuals!).

Anyone who opens the book of Capital by Marx will find stated, in the first few pages, the theory according to which the value of commodities is determined by the amount of labour necessary to produce them. Market prices are the result of a ‘transformation’ of values. What disturbs the alleged discoverers of the falsity of the theory of surplus value is that Marx reasons throughout Book I of Capital ‘as if’ commodities were exchanged according to the amount of labour incorporated in them. Only in Book III would he approach the question of prices. Another accusation consists in the fact that the difference between values and prices was never thought of by Marx as a contradiction. Let us note, at the risk of appearing didactic, what the words that modern theorists of bourgeois and opportunist economics cannot stomach: Transformation, contradiction. Marx’s idea is that prices are obtained from values by redistributing the total surplus value (the sum of the surplus values extracted by individual capitalists). Each capitalist does not receive exactly the surplus value produced in his enterprise, but a share of the total surplus value proportional to the capital advanced, according to a rate equal for all. That is, capitalists, despite the competition that makes them act against one another, unknowingly constitute a large joint-stock company, and the total surplus value is the dividend. In this way, the law of labour-value is not denied but confirmed by the theory of prices, since the differences between prices and values and between profits and surplus value are offset in the totals. It emerges very clearly from Marx’s idea that capitalists, far from the Robinsonades so dear to old and new theorists of bourgeois economics, are a class. Here is another word that sounds ancient to the ‘new economists’.

Even class, like transformation, like contradiction, would be romantic terms, proper to the metaphysical and Platonic dialectic of Hegelian descent. For these analysts with pious intentions, reality should be much more linear, according to the logic of A = A, of A different from B and, finally, of Tertium non datur. For these admirers of cartoons and comic books, the economy (in the midst of an imperialist crisis) would be nothing more than the (eternal) struggle of man (perhaps in the guise of a somewhat neurotic Superman) against Nature (the usual, barren, cruel, and cavernous Nature!).

That is why the theoretical model of binary dialectics is easier for them, because it simplifies things: man on one side and nature on the other. Precisely the old metaphysics, the true old Platonism, which, incidentally, was very poorly digested and hastily reread!

The Sraffas, the new pontiff, and his more or less vocal admirers have an ace up their sleeve. Let’s forget about the reference to prices and values. Too complicated, and above all too German! In ‘Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities’, a true parthenogenesis, an engineering ‘cloning’, the problem consists more linearly in determining the rate of profit by taking as ‘data’ the social product, the methods of production, and wages, as already mentioned. And how were these ‘data’ produced? It doesn’t matter; indeed, genetic research is always a great complication, as in the case of races. Better to take note that there are blacks and whites, reds and yellows. At least the mathematical calculations add up. How blacks and whites, despite being contradictory, can in certain social conditions be part of a single class capable of shaking the world is too metaphysical for ‘economists’ à la Sraffa. The same social surplus is for Sraffa a given, as if to say: every society produces added value, otherwise it would be destined for simple reproduction. What is the secret of this fact? We are not interested. The problem is to determine the rate of profit and the ‘fair’ distribution of the surplus among the bearers of the different factors of production, i.e. among capitalists, wage-earners, and... Nature!!!

That was Robbins’ reasoning, and it still is, right Antonio? So, for Sraffa and the ‘Sraffians’, if the social product is taken as a given and wages are determined on the basis of considerations ‘external’ to the theory of value, then profits appear as ‘what remains’ once wages have been deducted from the social product, a residue lacking any justification and, above all, we imagine, always too little for poor Robinson. Right?

From the attack on the heart to the attack on the brain of Marxist theory: the daily litany of its detractors is that the Marxist notion of the State is flawed, that it is even lacking, or that it is rudimentary, and therefore in need of a ‘reform’. The lousy party has promptly assigned the task of studying for the ‘reform of the State’ to its most illustrious theorists who, taking advantage of your theoretical weaknesses, promptly contested by us at the time, have come to the conclusion that the destiny of the working class is to become the national centre of direction of the business committee of the bourgeoisie.

We have spoken of your weaknesses, because we never accepted as Marxist your analysis of the State and the resulting political theses on the tasks of the class party in relation to the war against the State; weaknesses which, in the face of the vigorous leadership of the Left, but essentially in the face of the world proletariat still standing and exalted by the great revolutionary trial in Russia, had to be fought within the communist militia, and not outside it.

Today, your epigones draw strength from your weaknesses to claim a primogeniture of their own in the original and creative analysis of the diversity of political and class conditions in Western Europe, in order to break down the supposedly ‘abstract and unarticulated’ theory of the State in revolutionary Marxism. You would have been the master of the new approach, the architect of the new theory after the lesson of the failed revolution in the West, the strategist of positional warfare, now that the moment for mobile warfare was over, the tactician of the conquest of the bourgeois casemates floating in the jelly of bourgeois society and preventing a frontal attack on the fortress of the State.

There is no doubt that the great clash that opened up within the Communist International in the face of the admission of the defeat of the workers’ movement in the West found you among the most authoritative supporters of the need to change tactics, to adapt to the changed conditions of the class struggle, but our revolutionary generosity prevents us from holding you responsible for the conclusions of your epigones, who pass off their presence in left-wing Municipalities, Provinces, and Regions, or even their co-optation into some hospital or asylum board of directors, as a conquest, if nothing else, of the casemates, now even crazier than those of 1921.

We were among those in the International who did not waver in considering the Marxist theory of the State to be reconfirmed both by the October Revolution, and by the defeat (temporary, however profound) of the possibility of attacking the bourgeois States, and who, far from considering that historical occasion as apocalyptic and eschatological, proposed with clear judgement and lucidity to keep their nerves steady and not fall into such despair to the point of not allowing an orderly retreat capable of preserving intact the theoretical and practical instruments for the continuation of the war. But the recognised capitalist ‘stabilisation’ produced its deadly repercussions within the International, which was degenerating under the pressure of the needs of the Russian State and the ‘builders of socialism’. It is in this situation that ‘creative’ analyses of the State question proliferated, along with the search for new solutions and ‘political initiatives’ that could face the objective negative reality.

For the Left, the thesis remained valid that, despite the change in ‘forms of government’, the bourgeois State is an administrative and repressive machine, the ‘business committee’ of the bourgeoisie. When we say administrative and repressive machine, we are well aware, you know, that the State is not simply violence, but also consensus and governance of the economy, except for the need to recognise that in the face of a fighting proletariat, violence was deployed without pretence, even with the explicit connivance of the pre-fascist liberal State, arming not only the legal State but also white vigilantes who roamed undisturbed in an anti-proletarian function. The political necessity, that is, the active mobilisation of all the energies of revolutionary will, did not justify, according to our theses of yesterday and today, the dismantling of the Marxist conception of the State; we did not accept and do not accept that politics in the first place should forget its foundations, its genetic conditions, which are the class relations determined by the state of the productive forces and the relations of production.

In the idealist revival of the early twentieth century, we never failed to denounce that, in the name of criticising positivist and evolutionist ‘readings’ of Marxism, Hegelian readings were being re-evaluated, without taking into account that Marxism is Hegelian only in the academic imagination of Marxologists, while it is a theoretical and practical block of steel for revolutionary militants, Lenin at the head. All this means for us, dear Antonio, certainly not censorship or an invitation not to read too much (if anything, this will be the practice established even in the party when ideological terrorism rages to the point of erasing entire uncomfortable sentences from its history!), but to stick to the tradition of class experience, against all suggestions.

It is true that for Hegel ‘civil society encompasses not only the sphere of economic relations but also their forms of organisation, both spontaneous and voluntary, i.e. corporations’, but precisely for this reason Marx already in his Critique of the Philosophy of Right, proposes that it is the system of needs, the productive forces and their relations of production that justify the institutions that regulate them, and not vice versa.

In your analysis, the structure of the relations of production ‘represents the first level of civil society, objective and independent of human will, which can be measured using the systems of exact or physical sciences’; it constitutes a permanent quantitative and passive given, the moment of necessity. On the second plane or level, that of forms of organisation no longer private but of political society or State, there corresponds the function of hegemony that the dominant group exercises throughout society, and that of direct rule or command, which expresses itself in the State and in the legal government. It is clear that for you the superstructure represents the moment of activity in history, the ‘catharsis’ through which necessity becomes freedom.

You cannot blame us, dear Antonio, for the fact that the party was not for us of the Left at the forefront of our thoughts, to the point that we even coined a schematic but unequivocal hierarchy expressed as follows: Party – Proletarian State – Soviets (as its territorial articulations) – Trade Union. But we never, ever indulged in the rampant subjectivist sociologism that led you to degrade relations of production and class articulations to a pre-state and pre-political ‘economic-corporative’ given.

Only an a-dialectical interpretation could make assumptions of this kind. Today, we are the only ones to claim that the economic struggle as such cannot go beyond trade unionism, but, coincidentally, we are also the only ones to argue that the proletariat needs its own organisations for economic struggle, its own Class Union. Your epigones, relying on your idealist weaknesses, have arrived at completely opposite conclusions: the union must be a structure of the State, its struggles must be regulated by compatibility with the general political will of the State, that is, in short, they are reduced to the private fabric of the State (Hegel docet).

For us, as for Marx and Lenin, the process of the extinction of the State is conceived as the overcoming of social antagonisms through class struggle, whereby the reabsorption of political society into civil society does not constitute an idealist ‘catharsis’ culminating in integral communism, but is the decapitation of the State of the bourgeoisie and its administrative and military machine, the obligatory passage to a new type of State (granted, armed not only with force, but also with consent), the proletarian State, capable of crushing the counter-revolution and intervening despotically to break all the fetters that constrain the ‘new’ productive forces within the Straitjacket of capitalist relations of production. The extinction of the State is not a pedagogical task, and the ‘administration of things’ is not a society regulated by the political power of the proletarian State, but the very extinction of the proletarian State, of its necessity, and therefore of the economic and social conditions that determine its necessity. The ‘regulated’ society is therefore not the triumph of politics, but the end of politics, not only of politics d’abord, but also of politics ‘after’.

Where did your neo-inverted reading of the conception of the State come from? From alleged ‘original sins’ that should have prevented you from being an integral part of the Communist Party of Italy with Ordine Nuovo? Certainly not! Only those who, post-festum, reproach themselves for having brought about the Livorno split, carrying with them all the dross of a poorly digested Marxism, imagining a pure metaphysical party of Marxists without blemish and without fear, can think or insinuate such things. We know that, despite the delays, the uncertainties, Ordine Nuovo was among the currents that gave life to the Communist Party, and we also knew that only the struggle of the proletarian would have allowed the purification in the party of non-Marxist movements through and through. That is why our polemics, dear Antonio, were never purely philosophical, but always tactical, executive, and practical. Your inverted reading of the State would have been mentioned only in the annals of academic diatribes if the revolution had not failed; and the explanation of its failure according to the inverted theses on the State is nothing more than the victory, even within the International, of those currents which, in the face of defeat, seek to justify it rather than oppose it by preserving the theoretical and practical tools indispensable for recovery. Social classes are not political and even institutional subjects, in some way a State. The organic identification between individuals of a determined group and the State means that ‘in reality, every homogeneous social element is a State, insofar as it adheres to its programme. Every citizen is a “functionary”, is active in social life in the direction traced by the State-government, and is all the more a “functionary” the more he adheres to the state programme and elaborates it intelligently’.

Even when, we admit, you think of the working class tending to make itself a State, we must once again object that this pedagogical image of class struggle is nothing more than an idealisation of bourgeois political practice, from the French Revolution to the present day. In order to become a proletarian State, the working class needs the party as a distinct organisation and the ‘natural’ organisational forms of the class, and the party itself does not so much ‘educate’ the class as influence it and push it under its theoretical leadership by leveraging the objectivity of its interests, which are not pure quantity, but neither are they pure quality or consciousness. The conception of social groups, institutions, and movements of civil society as political articulations internal to the State is of Hegelian origins in the enunciation of civil society as the ‘ethical content of the State’.

If the task of the bourgeois State is to preserve and confirm its rule by increasing consensus, not only that, but by educating this consensus, with political and trade union associations, the Marxist conception of the State that we claim has the task of demonstrating that these attempts, carried out through the control of ideological apparatuses of both force and consensus, cannot and do not succeed in their aim precisely because at the base of bourgeois society there is an unresolved antagonism to bring about the decisive attack on the state fortress. That you, dear Antonio, were fascinated by the Hegelian conception of the State, in which ‘corporations’ are an example of politics embedded in the economy, the ethical-political principle of a statisation immanent to civil society, is an intriguing question for Marxologists and philosophers of law, but it is a position to be fought and rejected by revolutionary communism, as we did and as we do.

The parties and trade unions of the imperialist phase can be presented by neo-idealism of various hues in different positions within the doctrine of the State: both the Crocean illusion of qualifying, according to the liberal tradition, a democratic game, a non-antagonistic conflict to be resolved always within the state framework, and the Gentilian image, more congenial to nationalism-fascism, of considering these modern organisations, or rather of justifying them as the ‘private fabric’ of the State, lead to the same conclusion for the Marxist conception: to prevent by all means, including legal ones, the indomitable antagonism of the classes from reaching its inevitable and necessary outcome for the proletariat, namely its class dictatorship and its exercise.

Our dynamic and dialectic of the fundamental antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is absolutely not comparable to the medieval intermediary bodies in relation to the absolute State in the process of the formation of the modern State. This has never meant for us that the class party does not have the task of recognising the phenomenal development of this irreconcilable conflict, and therefore of taking note of the powerful forms, not only directly violent, through which the ‘business committee’ of the bourgeoisie manages to tame or push back the thrust, in certain rare historical circumstances irresistible towards its explosion in an attack on the State. But this is consistent with the basic assumption, confirmed today on a global scale, that class struggle, even when smouldering in its ashes, is the key to understanding all antagonisms more or less mediated, disguised, appeased, or repressed. The ethical conception of the State starts from the conviction that wherever there is and has been society, the State is either present unconsciously, or unfolds in its most manifest and conscious forms, as in the modern bourgeois State, identified precisely in the absolute consciousness in action. But beyond philosophical suggestions, this theory inevitably connects with the much more prosaic justification of the current state of things, with the status quo, with the contingent domination of the ruling classes. Such is the fundamental weakness of the neo-idealist reinterpretations that you proposed and that your epigones stretch in every direction, either by resorting to the most hackneyed historicism or by claiming to offer an updated and correct reading.

In simple terms, dear Antonio, it was inevitable that even your ideas appeared ‘sectarian’ and undemocratic because, despite the gradualism, intermedialism, and idealism inherent in your arguments, your revolutionary passion postulated communism, liberation from class subjugation. We reproached you harshly, opposing our classic theses, which held that the path you were pointing to would have strengthened the rule of the bourgeoisie, in this case fascism, as the most up-to-date form of the government of capital. but we could not fail to recognise that this illusion was the price for the defeat suffered by the Western proletariat, in some ways justifiable, provided that it could be refuted and corrected within the class party, with its powerful historical memory and intrinsic ability to overcome despondency with mental clarity and revolutionary passion. The divide that opened up between staunch supporters, such as we were and still are, of the most complete and definitive organisational and political autonomy of the class party, even with regard to the intermediate organisations of the class, and those seeking hybrid alliances, even with forces already clearly rejected by the class struggle, not only could not be smoothed over in the years of counter-revolution, but has risen and is destined to mark the bedrock of the effective revival of the revolutionary possibilities of the world proletariat.

On the militant wave of the proletariat in the 1920s, your different ‘philosophical’ backgrounds and those of Ordine Nuovo could coexist within the class party, in accordance with the golden Marxist rule that it is not ‘ideas’ that move the world, but action and struggle. But, in truth, they all came from afar, from a hard struggle of intransigent defence of revolutionary Marxism within the workers’ movement of the 2nd International, as far as we were concerned against all gradualist, Darwinist, evolutionist, democratic, and idealist deviations. And we have never agreed with your reconstruction of the ways in which capitalism was formed in Italy, particularly the liberal State, precisely because it is explicitly tainted by sociologism and philosophical idealism. We started and continue to start from Marx’s Manifesto, which already in 1848 sees the opening of the perspective of revolution as the primary and inescapable task of the European proletariat, despite the victories and defeats, the highs and lows of the centuries-old struggle. You and the neo-idealists, precisely in order to justify the reversal of the correct Marxist tactic after the defeat of the revolutionary attack in the first post-war period, had to go looking for historiographical support in the ‘specific formation’ of the Risorgimento in Italy. The master, the prince of this ‘specific’ reading was the hated-loved Don Benedetto, who already in his History of Italy from 1871 to 1915 had admitted, albeit in an apologetic and optimistic key in the sense of the expansion of the liberal spirit, that the liberal spirit feeling in Italy had indeed been stronger than in other European states. Well, under this high patronage, you did nothing but accentuate this admission in a pessimistic sense, naturally with an eye on the conditions of the proletariat, reconstructing the authoritarian tendencies in the power struggles of the Italian bourgeois, agrarian-industrial, protected by the iron fist of Crispi until the military government of General Pelloux, up to the raids of the fascist squads protected by the liberal State.

But all this is not to say that these peculiar conditions surrounding the top-down formation of Italian independence did not arise in vitro, but rather in the midst of the clash of capitalist forces in Europe (which, let us not forget, still represents the world in the 19th century), were not determined solely by the inherent cowardice of the Italians, but by the machinations of already shrewd English and French capital. We too are attentive to history, dear Antonio, and we remember that Caracciolo and Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca were hanged from the mast of a British ship back in 1799, causing your distant precursor, Vincenzo Cuoco, to have second thoughts. This is why we have always proposed a Marxist reading opposite to yours, and we did not allow ourselves to be taken in by the sentimental hope of a ‘new Risorgimento’, of a true and real participation of the proletarian masses in the life of the bourgeois State. On the contrary, we have interpreted this possibility in reverse: as capitalism has become increasingly mired in its imperialist experience since 1870, the proletarian masses have been excluded, even with the most mystifying techniques of democracy and counter-revolutionary castration, from the effective possibility of being an active subject in the formation of the general will. The concern of European bourgeoisies, including the Italian bourgeoisie, which inevitably arrives late and with contradictory means, is to stifle the revolutionary ambitions of the workers’ movement, which, after the bloodbath of the Paris Commune, a true international defeat, is reorganising itself and showing itself ready for a new assault in the early twentieth century.

Hence our consistent stance towards the First Great Imperialist World Conflict. How many drunken binges, dear Antonio, in that tragedy do you remember? And it was not only the reactionaries who wanted the war, but also, and how fiercely, the Risorgimento currents of the ‘left’, the republicans and socialists like Bissolati and Bonomi on the right, and Mussolini on the left, healthily expelled from the PSI.

So, the reconnaissance of the causes of the failed revolution in Italy and in the West that you made could not find us in agreement, even at the moment of analysis, because we had learned to evaluate the political and state conditions of individual capitalist areas in Europe according to the yardstick of class contradictions, which were not yet resolvable at the national level in 1848, but already entailed the need for the proletariat to unite in a general and worldwide organisation. We had already read the characteristics of the formation of unity in Italy, as indeed those of Germany, as the expression of the unequal development of capitalism, which had found its cradle in England and then in France. The establishment in Italy of a ‘spurious’ liberal regime, which led Croce to say that the ‘liberal feeling’ of the historical right was harsher than that of other European liberals, including, for us, the notorious Thiers, was not a reason for us to be discouraged about the proletariat in the phase of organisation.

We have always maintained that the economic and political struggle of the proletariat is a training ground to prepare for the conquest of power and its management. Crispi’s iron fist, the vain colonial ventures in Eritrea, a tangible sign of the ragged imperialism that Italy, as the last-arrived power in the European concert, could not avoid in order to keep up with its stronger relatives, was to be expected: due to the dialectical (not mechanical, we know!) connection with political institutions, imperialism is an era that requires the concentration of enterprises and capital and the centralisation of the State for the bourgeoisie, with the inevitable militarisation that follows, even in ‘democratic and peaceful’ England. Nor were we impressed by the Giolittian ‘concessions’, always wrested through struggle, including universal suffrage in 1913: we were not ‘abstentionists’ at that time, because we never have been on aesthetic grounds, but we were abstentionists and intransigently so in 1919, after the outbreak of the world war, after the powerful boost that the world proletariat had received thanks to the great victory of the October Revolution.

So the whining over the failure of the Italian Risorgimento and the idealistic and patriotic aspiration to finally make it complete and satisfactory for all social classes was, for us, an inverted reading of history, a deviation and a desertion from the historical tasks that were forcefully imposed on the proletariat. We were the first to argue that Crispi, Pelloux, and Giolitti (yes, the very same Giolitti who was re-evaluated by the New Party democrat Palmiro Togliatti) were the expression of hard-line Italian liberalism, the only form compatible with the peninsula’s place in the political and economic world concert of the time, the forerunners of the bourgeois State’s need to arm itself not only within the Statute, but also outside it, through the white guards of fascism. Nor were we among those who, on the basis of this rigorously Marxist analysis, fatalistically awaited the completion of the drama: we organised ourselves as early as 1912 so that the old Socialist Party, at the mercy of its currents, where the clash between petty-bourgeois tendencies and our own, which referred entirely to Marxism, remained unresolved, would take on the historical tasks before it, and under the impetus and direction of the Left, the ‘belated’ split in Livorno took place in response to the directives of Lenin and the International. It was under the leadership of the Left that, against the demoralisation of an increasingly evident defeat, the proletariat, weakened by the incursions of the increasingly black White Guards and the betrayals of social democratic political leaders of various shades and reformist trade unionists ready to compromise with the enemy, social pacification at all costs and paving the way for Mussolini’s power, did not renounce its ability to fight and be defeated with honour, that is, on the battlefield, and not cheated by agreements made over its head that would have, as we have seen, depressed it, and certainly not for a short time.

This explains why your epigones and the shameful historiography of Crusca academics, set up by what was supposed to be the collective intellectual (in your pious intentions!), while they are committing the most total betrayal in the service of the bourgeoisie victorious on all fronts, today they veiledly accuse you of having put up with the Left’s leadership, of having timidly waited to take the initiative against nihilism and the situation of stalemate into which such leadership would have led.

There is controversy over the failure of the Leadership of the P.C.d’Italy to foresee the fascist ‘coup d’état’, preoccupied as it was with its hatred of social traitors and lulling itself into the illusion that the bourgeoisie would rid itself of the fascists as soon as it had achieved its goal of involving the reluctant social democrats in the government. Now, the attempt by the bourgeoisie to involve the social democrats in government collaboration was not a new phenomenon and, especially after the lesson of German Noskism, a possible weapon not exactly ‘democratic’. That certain currents within the Italian bourgeoisie dreamed of using the reformists in an anti-proletarian capacity, hoping to put an end to the deployment of the extralegal force of the white guards, does not contradict the handling of the two possibilities and the two practices. Indeed, we would say that, in the mortal crisis, it is precisely the aptitude and ability to combine the two weapons that gives the bourgeoisie victory, and all this seems to us to be contemplated in all the manuals from Machiavelli to Clausewitz. To fight and to negotiate, to negotiate and to fight, and would this not be the great discovery of modern creative Marxists! (Mao at the head).

As old as the hills. That was not the point. The counter-revolution consists in deluding the proletariat that it is possible to return to the status quo ante, to ‘normal life’, while fighting hard against any form of active resistance to state and fascist violence. We were not and are not interested in the ‘sentimental’ reading according to which Croce and Giolitti perhaps sincerely dreamed of being able to ‘condition’ fascism, of bringing the army back to the barracks, of restoring constitutional and legal praxis. Whereas we said and continue to say that fascism ‘is nothing more than another aspect of bourgeois state violence opposed to the revolutionary state violence of the proletariat’ (A. Bordiga, ‘How Noskism Matures’, L’Ordine Nuovo, Turin, 20 July 1921).

We are still waiting for a ‘more detailed’ explanation of the fascist phenomenon. Has its autonomous theory of the State and society finally been discovered, i.e. a theory that would not fit into the framework of traditional liberalism, or at least into the theory of the State that the bourgeoisie has prepared for itself in the course of its development? It does not seem to us that the reflections of your epigones have gone beyond intentions, or beyond the great idea worthy of the Mr. Dühring of seeking in the access of violence, in demonised or deified violence, in barbarism and so on. A little thin, for ‘rational’ and ‘disinterested’ judges of history, don’t you think?

Our thesis that fascism is also a form of social democracy since it aims at a Constituent of Labour (and achieves it!), since it theorises pacification between antagonistic classes and achieves it, ‘relatively’, by force, scandalised and still scandalises.

We acknowledge, dear Antonio, that during the formation of the ‘new leading group’ within the Communist Party of Italy, you were reluctant to bow to pressure from the Russian party to enter the executive in order to ‘counterbalance’ Amadeo’s influence and take his place: ‘I replied’, you wrote from Vienna to Scoccimarro and Togliatti on 1 March 1924, ‘that I did not want to lend myself to intrigues of this kind, that if a different leadership was wanted, the political question should be raised’. This was the fairness and loyalty in the life of the party that we claim and recognise in you, as opposed to the practice later established, consisting of methods of denunciation and ideological terrorism.

For its part, the Left never gave up measuring the evolution of the class struggle in Italy and around the World according to the yardstick of Marxist theory. It had played its part in the split, it had disciplined itself to Lenin’s dialectic on the parliamentary question, but without giving up proposing its own distinct theses. There is no doubt that the correctness and validity of these theses could be measured once again in practice, including the revolutionary use of participation in elections, of the revolutionary use of Parliament, against ‘cretinism’.

We wrote: ‘A practical attitude toward electoral abstention could not even be conceived by members of the Communist Party. It is not merely a question of party discipline: it suffices to reflect that the opinions expressed by various comrades in 1919 and 1920 in favour of the abstentionist tactic made sense only as a proposal put forward to the International, whose applicability was understandable only on the basis of precise resolutions for the various countries of the International itself. None of us questioned in 1921 that the Communist Party, founded on the basis of the decisions of the Second Congress of the Communist International, should intervene in the electoral struggle of that time’ (Stato Operaio, 28 February 1924).

Pluralists, democrats ante litteram, as your epigones like to call themselves today? Far from it, communists who practise and strive to ensure that the party practises organic centralism and true discipline in its conduct. We have never professed anti-electoralism as a matter of principle. ‘There is no need to reopen the debate on whether the abstentionist theses of that time are still theoretically valid. What is certain is that those theses, supported by a group of comrades, insisted on a double premise: an international situation preluding an offensive by the proletariat, and the regime of broad democracy prevailing in an important group of countries: everyone knows that, both internationally and in the Italian political arena, those conditions, if not reversed, have certainly changed in the opposite direction to that which gave rise to our well-known conditions. Our abstentionist thesis did not have purely contingent value, but Comrade Grieco has rightly pointed out how the dangers faced by abstentionists in 1919 no longer exist today, when Nitti averted the gathering revolutionary storm thanks to the electoral diversion flung open before the Socialist Party’.

Demonstrating once again our discipline in deeds rather than intentions as a weapon against all anti-materialistic subjectivism, we were thus, dear Antonio, the only ones to attempt a revolutionary use of parliament, in accordance with the directives of the International.

In our Lyon Theses (III, Italian Questions), when we took stock of the life of the Party at a crucial turning point that was to prove fatal to the very possibility of continuing to be militant communists together, precisely in relation to the question of elections we could say: ‘Participating in the 1924 elections was a very fortunate political act, but one cannot say the same about the proposal for joint action with the socialist parties nor of the way it was labelled “proletarian unity”. Just as deplorable was the excessive tolerance shown towards some of “Terzini’s” electoral manoeuvres. But the most serious problems are posed apropos the open crisis that followed Matteotti’s assassination. The leadership’s policies were based on the absurd view that the weakening of fascism would propel the middle classes into action first, and then the proletariat. This implied on the one hand a lack of faith in the capacity of the proletariat to act as a class, despite its continued alertness under the suffocating strictures of fascism, and on the other, an over-estimation of the initiative of the middle-class’. As you can see, dear Antonio, there is nothing spiteful in our theses, but rather a prescient evaluation of the mistakes that are made when one goes beyond class analysis. Today, when it comes to anti-fascism, your epigones not only underestimate the proletarian class, but also make the overestimation of the middle classes the exclusive focus of their politics and their vacillations.

‘In fact, even without referring to the clear Marxist theoretical positions on this matter, the central lesson to draw from the Italian experience has been that the intermediary layers will passively tail along behind the strongest and may therefore back either side. Thus in 1919-1920 they backed the proletariat, then between 1921-22-23 they went behind fascism, and now, after a significant period of major upheaval in 1924-25, they are backing fascism again’.

And even today, in 1978, fascism, which was supposed to have died with the ‘war of liberation’, is more alive than ever!

But proof that, having abandoned the clarity of Marxist positions, even the lessons of the great battles fought in the International were not consistently applied came in the Aventine affair. ‘The leadership were mistaken in abandoning parliament and participating in the first meetings of the Aventine when they should have remained in Parliament, launched a political attack on the government, and immediately taken up a position opposed to the moral and constitutional prejudices of the Aventine, which would determine the outcome of the crisis in fascism’s favour’.

This error was therefore fundamental and decisive in assessing the capabilities of a leadership group. ‘The Return to Parliament in November 1924 and the statement issued by Repossi (of the Left, ed.) were beneficial, as the wave of proletarian consensus showed, but they came too late. The leadership wavered for a long time, and only finally made a decision under pressure from the party and the Left. The preparation of the Party was made on the basis of dreary directives and a fantastically erroneous assessment of the situation’s latent possibilities (report by Gramsci to the Central Committee, August 1924). The preparation of the masses, which leant towards supporting the Aventine rather than wishing for its collapse, was in any case made worse when the party proposed to the opposition parties that they set up their own Anti-parliament. This tactic in any case conflicted with the decisions of the International, which never envisaged proposals being made to parties which were clearly bourgeois; worse still, it lay totally outside the domain of communist principles and tactics, and outside the marxist conception of history. Any possible explanation that the leadership might have had for this tactic aside – an explanation which was doomed to have very limited repercussions anyway – there is no doubt that it presented the masses with an illusory Anti-State, opposed to and warring against the traditional State apparatus, whilst in the historical perspective of our programme, there is no basis for an Anti-State other than the representation of the one productive class, namely, the Soviet. To call for an Anti-parliament, relying in the country on the support of the workers’ and peasants’ committees, meant entrusting the leadership of the proletariat to representatives of groups that are socially capitalist, like Amendola, Agnelli, Albertini, etc.’ (Lyon Theses, III – Italian Questions).

Thus, dear Antonio, we were not the undisciplined, the sectarians. Our theses, presented whenever we felt it necessary to make proposals, always had the meaning of proposals made to the International, and when the International rejected them, precisely because they had not been decided by the world party, they remained a warning and a reminder, but never conduct contrary to official decisions. That our undisputed attitude towards discipline in practice was not an alibi for our intentions is proven by the tenacious battle against the degeneration of the Russian party, which you yourself, belatedly, recognised, albeit without grasping the reasons and causes. Your famous letter of 14 July 1926 sent to Togliatti, who represented the Italian party in Moscow, has become the subject of academia for your epigones, who seek support for the original Italian path to socialism against the machinations of the Russian party under Stalin’s heel. Recognising the political line of the majority of the C.P.S.U. as correct, you deplored the type of opposition waged against it by Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky, and expressed the hope that the majority would avoid ‘winning too much’ and take excessive measures against the leaders of the opposition in the ongoing struggle. This was always with the aim of ensuring unity and discipline in the party that governed the ‘Workers’ State’, but ‘which cannot be mechanical and coercive, but loyal and based on conviction’.

Once again, we cannot deny our sincere passion for the party and its unity. Certainly, we ‘opponents’ within the Italian party did not suffer pressure or mechanical coercion from you or the new leadership group, but this did not and does not prevent us from denouncing that, albeit in a wholly ‘Italian’ form, the internal rules of party life were being flouted, according to the concept of organic centralism, which you considered worthy of churches but not of a ‘secular’ party.

You advocated the thesis of democratic centralism, according to a game, to a majority that governs and an opposition that criticises, which should have nothing to do with a communist party belonging to the International, after the lessons of the 2nd International parties defeated by the superior organisational and political form and practice of the Comintern. You were concerned not to ‘win too much’ even against us, demonstrating the ‘humanism’ implicit in your sincere revolutionary passion, but you failed to grasp the terms and scope of the issue.

We arrived at the Lyon Congress in conditions in which the life of the party, even before feeling the effects of the climate of precariousness and extreme difficulties caused by the pressures of fascism, suffered from a lack of knowledge among its militants of the real terms of the battle that was coming to an end. The Left did not yet give up on presenting its distinct theses, now isolated, though not overwhelmingly defeated. The democratic method had triumphed, victorious in Moscow and Italy, and despite your loyal recognition of the correctness and loyalty of the Left in defending communist doctrine and programme, forces greater than your will and ours triumphed, opening a dark era for the workers’ movement and unspeakable suffering for you personally.

Your suffering in prison certainly did not leave us indifferent, even when the by-then degenerated P.C.I., zigzagging according to the Stalinist ukases ‘frigidly’ carried out by Palmiro, had the bad taste to sow among the proletarians the image of a Communist Left subservient to the fascist OVRA and its most illustrious comrade, dedicated to ‘engineering’ constructions, throwing to the scrapheap, according to the P.C.I., every communist dream and enthusiasm. It would not be necessary to inform you that even the official historiographers of the party of betrayal have done justice to the alleged natural aptitude for denunciation of the sectarians of the Left, if it were not to remind all proletarians that the ‘Machiavellianism’ you have already severely condemned had the perfidious purpose of polluting and terrorising, bringing confusion and mistrust to the working class, relying on lies and deception.

Our sorrow at your destruction in prison was all the more genuine because the Left never attempted to exploit your communist militancy against the despicable manoeuvres of the Stalinists. Ever since your famous letter to Moscow in 1926 against the internal struggles of the Russian Politburo, which was never dealt with in a decent and useful way for the communist cause and for the proper structuring of party life in the world organisation and in the national sections, they had demonstrated their aptitude for discrediting and distorting the most valuable achievements realised in the hardest years of the struggle against democracy and fascism in collusion.

At the Lyon Congress, despite your noble recognition of the defence of the communist doctrine carried out consistently and constantly by the Left, the decision was taken to abandon the correct method of conducting the party. Under the crushing weight of the victory of fascism and the bourgeois State, the last residual attempts to resist bourgeois pressure in an orderly manner had been exhausted, which was now not only winning victories in the field of repression, but above all was tearing the working class away from its world party, penetrating it through the betrayal carried out by Stalinist opportunism.

On your part, you sensed the mortal danger, but you did not have the time or strength to interpret the events with a clear mind, betrayed by your optimism of the will, sacrosanct and just, but insufficient to save the essential.

In your prison, you had to endure the misunderstandings of your own ‘devoted’ comrades; outside the manipulation of your will and your teachings; but certainly not that of the Left, which was suffering the isolation of its residual forces.

The proletarian was now reaping the rotten fruits of the ‘dialogue’ with the bourgeois factions, surreptitiously inaugurated against our will by the C.I. itself in order to create a ‘political united front’, that dialogue with social democracy which was intended to destroy its influence over the majority of the workers. There is no doubt that at that time the top leaders of the C.I., and you yourself, believed it was possible to unmask the social democracies of various degrees through open debate, demonstrating to the workers their bad faith and their aptitude for yielding to the class enemy.

This is why the Left fought the hard battle, seemingly philological, for the correct definition of the nature of the class party, up to the elaboration of the notion of organic centralism against every form of internal and external democracy. We appeared talmudic and church-like to you, who had identified the party with the modern Prince capable of emancipating the proletariat materially and morally. We, much more modestly, against any neo-idealist superstructure, were intent on making the party an efficient and impervious instrument of struggle, sharpened like a weapon that we would have gladly thrown into the scrap heap of history, but only after the pursuit of our political end.

We distrusted every dialogue and even every personal association with political forces extraneous to the proletariat or falsely close to it (remember your enthusiasm for Gobetti?), because we foresaw what escaped you: once democracy was accepted as the internal method of party life, it would be necessary to accept democracy as a universal value, above class divisions and contradictions. This is what your unworthy epigones understood, if even the frigid Palmiro could arouse the enthusiasm of the masses, of the ‘people’, for the ‘new party’, no longer the party of the working class, but a national party, which would have had to limit itself to conquering hegemony through debate, culture, and file-keeping.

And what to say of the philistines of our unfortunate years who, through their increasingly brazen association with the bourgeois State, have discovered a truth opposite to your ideological party, the truth of the ‘open’ party, possibly governed by the majority and spurred on from within by the opposition, according to the canonical norms of bourgeois democracy. And so your paternity begins to become uncomfortable; hence the process of canonisation.

Do not be hindered by your defence against these bandits by those who received harsh and frank criticisms from you: we did not seek to ‘use you’ then, let alone now. You were a great fighter, and these are scoundrels. We must do this out of revolutionary generosity, regardless of the need to reaffirm our positions of then and now.

The working class party of the imperialist era does not dialogue with anyone, neither with social democrats nor with bourgeois parties: its leadership is unique and closed, opposed to facile alliances or ‘familial’ sentimentality among relatives and friends. Its substance is the entire revolutionary tradition, in its defeats, in its victories, etched in internal and external rules of conduct that therefore apply to everyone, centre and periphery, written in large letters, even before the theses and balance sheets of over 100 years of revolutionary life, in the urgency of defending the working class, demoralised and vilified by 50 years of counter-revolution. The single party of the communist revolution is not afraid of remaining alone in claiming the whole tradition, and will hail as a moment of liberation for the proletariat the moment when, once the illusions of national socialisms, children of the heresy of ‘socialism in one country’, have fallen, the false communist and socialist parties will decide, as it seems, to cut all ties with Marxism and Lenin in order to be better welcomed into the bosom of Holy Mother Democracy.

But we also know that this umbilical cord is too convenient for various circumstances, and that we must expose any attempt, however slight, by these people to invoke Marxist theory and the great ideal of communism. Moreover, in the shameful ideological squabbling between the old social-democratic faction and the Stalinist scum regarding Marx and Lenin, is this not perhaps the game of obscene jesters of Capital who flirt with the tradition of the workers’ movement and its sacrifices in order to delude it about the possibility, fiercely fought by us, of enriching, overcoming, and revising revolutionary doctrine and theory?

If it is true, as we had to say, revealing ourselves to be easy prophets, that Russian socialism would be denied by its very ‘builders’, stating that only the unmasking of the colossal illusion would open the eyes of the working class of all countries, we never thought to say that this operation would take place on the basis of litanies and moralism. Once again, it would be the ‘hard facts’ that would force opportunism itself to silence the drumbeat of the Russian myth, to revise the image of the beautiful country they had constructed, to remove the corpses from the mausoleum, to promise a third way, new, more radiant, happy, and exhilarating. That is why, while we watch the incredible acrobatics of your epigones in playing diplomacy with the masters of the Kremlin behind the backs of the poor proletariat, severely tested by the deep economic crisis and by deception, and while we hope that they will finally be forced to drop the mask in complete and utter rejection of Marxist theory, we are too experienced to delude ourselves that the jugglers over the abyss will vomit out en bloc a doctrine they have never digested, rather than, as they are accustomed to doing, in bits and pieces, albeit with increasingly violent retching.

Once again, and we are convinced of this, it will be the hard facts of the global crisis of capital that will tear away the carefully crafted mask. But, as before in August 1914, we are concerned and are working hard to ensure that we are not once again caught napping, so that tragedy does not once again befall the working class and the exploited of the world. For this reason, defending your sincerity as a revolutionary against your gravediggers will in no way serve to flirt with your usual probable remaining admirers, professors or petty bourgeois, but to remind the world proletariat of the echoes of struggles and sacrifices which, in their severity, saw us as clear-headed comrades and tenaciously capable of fighting for the common cause without ever indulging in theoretical confusion, ‘pluralism’, or ‘democracy’. We told you frankly yesterday: we are the only ones today who recognise you as a comrade for the revolution, for your sincere faith, not for your ideas!