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If we were to play the game of ‘democracy’ and of the shifting currents of opinion, what chances would the Proletarian Revolution have today? Let’s be honest: none. But, as in the past, we do not adhere to the moods of the moment, but to historical ‘necessity’, to the pressures of the incessant struggle between social classes, which are the engine of great events and great changes.

Quite simply, we want to reiterate that, crazy as it may seem, never as today, after the reversals of ‘real socialism’ and the structural crisis of Western capitalism, does the Proletarian Revolution remain the solution and the key to the future.

It is true that in the prevailing confusion and babel of languages, cunning and boorish intellectualism keeps itself far away from the use of strong terms such as Science, Determinism, Necessity, and prefers the more uncertain and lighter ones such as probability, probabilism, social fluidity, weak thought, and so on.

We hold fast to our doctrine, a term that even the churches seem to repudiate, so rigid and unbearable does it appear. Yet the possibility of measuring ourselves against the theories of probabilism, both mathematical and social, does not impress us, because their weakness is equal to the discreet charm they exert on weak minds and on the strong desire for demobilisation typical of epochs like the present one of crisis, which we have been awaiting and predicting for at least 70 years.

Let us therefore clarify.

What is probability? For a long time, even up to the beginning of our century, it was said that the probability of an event is the ratio between the number of cases favourable to the realisation of that event and the total number of possible cases, all assumed to be equally probable. Unfortunately, we are faced with a definition which is technically called ‘circular’. What in fact does ‘equally probable’ mean? That they have ‘equal probabilities’.

As can be seen, we have some reason not to trust purely formal logic, even though we are necessarily curious about it. Faced with this situation, even the great mathematician Poincaré saw no way out: ‘it is not at all possible to give a satisfactory definition of probability: there is in it something mysterious, inaccessible to the mathematician’.

Yet modern probabilists swear by the superiority of probabilistic physics, on indeterminism and its philosophical-theoretical consequences, against the ‘myopia’ of determinism and the connected inevitable ‘dogmatism’.

Within the sphere of social theory, we are therefore back again with mysteries, especially painful ones..., and raging in this field is once again the ‘heterogenesis of ends’ à la Hegel, or the fable-telling à La Fontaine, which states: ‘one meets destiny precisely through the paths taken to avoid it’.

This is what happens to bourgeois ideology in its various versions: it does not have time to celebrate the definitive burial of every communist illusion and utopia, when the notorious class struggle is seen re-emerging on all sides, not only in the anomalous and sickly little Italy, but in the heart of the coruscating Germany just unified.

But back to probabilistic theory and its ‘impossible’ predictions...

It was D. Hume, in advanced 18th-century England, who had conceived cause and its effect as distinct events: A causes B. The problem therefore is that of the connection between A and B, both in the spatial and temporal sense.

Thus the problem arises: how can one link in the chain produce the next? Let us think, says C. Salmon – instead of a chain, of a strand of rope. In this case a ‘subsequent event’ does not exist. Which is to say that, by hypothesising an original cause, the influence is transmitted continuously.

The concept of the transmission of a signal applies to our case. A local interaction transmits the signal: it nonetheless takes place ‘in the process’, the signal transmitted from P to Q. In this case, the signal is transmitted by virtue of its being present at every point between P and Q. And we are faced with the ancient paradox of Zeno’s flying arrow, with which B. Russell also grappled.

Experience has shown that electromagnetic waves and material objects, both in motion and at rest, are important types of causal processes. Transmission can be of signal-information, energy, and causal influence. Such processes can transmit and provide causal connections between what happens at one point in spacetime and what happens elsewhere. There are two types of causal action: production and propagation.

In historical experience in general, the problem of causal links arises: but when the tangle becomes further entangled – and this is the case with epochal crises – attempts to confuse, et pour cause!, the past with the future spring up like mushrooms, spacetime coordinates tend to recede, the reality principle tends to be denied or contradicted by phantom-like philosophies of catastrophe, or hazy metaphysics. Following the example of Salmon’s rope, which suits us perfectly well, we follow the red thread of historical time, of the class struggle, of the party in its interaction with it. Our reading cannot accept the sleight of hand of bourgeois visionary thinking, a mixture, often esoteric and sometimes vulgar, of magic and scientism of a poorly digested positivist stamp.

We, who remain anchored to a comprehensive view of the development of contradictions between the modern social classes, reject the idea whereby effects would not follow from causes, and which would entail the possibility of a scarcely tenable reversibility of effects, with the consequence of the revocation of all ‘responsibility’ of forces, parties, leaders, and other nomenclatures.

We are convinced that our action, without the strains of any kind of voluntarism, is indispensable for the class to resume its path and direction. The ‘signal’ of class action is imprinted upon the overall reality of the struggle according to the intensity and rhythm proper to the phase and areas of development of the productive forces and the relations of production. Only the party, however, is capable of holding the thread, or the rope; no other mythical Ariadne is able to replace it.

Yet it is there for all to see, especially the disoriented proletarians left to themselves, the attempt to pass off the current phase of bourgeois reshuffling as a democratic ‘restructuring’ of the State, in which workers should participate as ‘citizens’, in an atomistic, scattered, and unguided order.

One thing, however, is certain: we remain proponents of a worldview (...yes, we still go to the cinema, as Max Weber would ironically put it) that does not concede very much to chance: our type of determinism, while being dialectical, concedes nothing to petty-bourgeois existentialism, to the indeterminism in philosophical salad to which the various rampant weak-thought currents appeal, and which, not daring to propose their own political or cognitive programme, delude themselves into thinking they can make their way by sowing doubts and discord of every kind even within the ranks of the proletariat.

The defence of the historical programme is not a generic harking back to the glorious struggles of the past: if that were so, it would be a simple nostalgia for suffering or for victories, which indeed there have been, and great ones; on the contrary, it is a concrete and current struggle, following a signal that propagates through history and imprints itself there not simply as vestiges of remote causes, but as an incessant pressure against Capital that weighs upon the shoulders of workers of every area and every culture.

The Party, on the contrary, sets itself the task of spreading and propagating the imprint of the programme within the class, of manifesting it even in the most prohibitive phases, because it attributes to it not only the value of an opinion among others, as the bourgeois and opportunist political movements idealistically claim, but of an energy and force that penetrates into the workers’ organisations, orients them and influences them according to the real conditions of the struggle, which develops continuously due to the inevitable tensions between capital and labour.

The denial of the links between causes and effects inaugurated by bourgeois scepticism, if, at the dawn of capitalist development, it had the merit of breaching the arrogance and dogmas of feudal reaction, today, dialectically, it has only a counter-revolutionary sense and meaning aimed at denying the ‘reality principle’, the only one capable of constituting a guide for working-class action.

We consider the choice of camp made by opportunism to be ‘irreversible’, which today, after squalid abjuration, no longer even deserves this designation. In this case too, the principle holds whereby, against the easy mental lability of the democratic method, it is possible to ‘ideally’ go back on one’s own decisions and switch to the enemy camp with impunity. The debacle in which the ‘probability’ of the proletarian revolution finds itself has not rained down from heaven, and if it reaches its peak today, it is also ‘probable’ that, having burnt all its opportunist masks, the proletariat will find itself back on the main road of revolutionary struggle.

For the ‘principle of responsibility’, moreover, we are of the conviction that the few adherents to the Party cannot delude themselves into thinking that they will see an increase in fellow travellers by means of easy annexations of groups or circles: not that at this moment the possibility can be seen, but we say for future reference, for any eventuality, that the Party must prefigure every political act of some substance.

Outside these cornerstones, there is nothing but the dream of visionaries. Our kind of dream, which our tradition has not only never forbidden but rather kept alive, entails being able to foresee the future without losing touch with the present and the past. Our future, communism, is able to allow us to understand the historical past and decipher the most chaotic and confused present.

Let us, for the moment, leave to bourgeois voyeurism the ‘virtual reality’ constructed with the contraptions of green glasses which make what is nothing but coarse straw appear to be hay, or worse, fodder for donkeys.

But let us finally return to the probabilities of the Proletarian Revolution. Which and how many are the cases favourable for the realisation of the ‘event’ which, compared to the total, or rather indefinite number of cases, should precisely make it possible to calculate the probability of the revolution? As is well known, Lenin indicated the fundamental conditions without the presence of which it is unrealistic and utopian to speak of revolution, namely: 1) the crisis of the ruling class, incapable of governing the dominated class; 2) an evident process of tension and organisation of the dominated class capable of overthrowing the bourgeoisie; 3) a unity of command of the revolutionary forces, endowed with a political programme capable of establishing itself as a leading force capable of attaining power and managing it for its own ends.

Which of these fundamental conditions can be considered as being before our eyes? The bourgeois ruling class, in the various imperialist countries that dominate and divide up the world among themselves, is indeed going through a rough patch, but the tension between the opposing factions of world Capital does not seem in the slightest threatened by proletarian class forces of any significance. The years of counter-revolution have not passed without leaving a trace, and today the proletariat, though struggling mutedly, is in the position of having to equip itself first and foremost with truly efficient and viable organisations of immediate defence, while its political leading organisation is at an all-time low in terms of strength and general influence.

Is this perhaps a consideration that should lead to pessimism and resignation? There is no time for ‘psychology’ and introspective withdrawals: quite the contrary. Having passed a dark historical period made murky by democratoid penetration into the workers’ milieu, the worsening of the economic and social crisis will inevitably force the workers to rediscover direct action, the class organisation capable of protecting its own interests without compromise, the need for the party organ capable of guiding it with its historical knowledge against the opposing class.

In this way, ultra-imperialism, by now taken as victorious on a global scale, will have to open its eyes and realise that the fundamental antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie has by no means been eradicated. So much for ‘capitalism as the last stage of economic life’ as Braudel maintains, the coryphaeus of the Annales, the latest, cultured, and scholarly version of perennial Kautskyism. It is certainly not the capitalists in the first place who lead a ‘not very enjoyable’ life: from our point of view, it is the proletarians, from Hong Kong to Algeria, who lead a terrible life, nor will the victory of the market as the unsurpassable and eternal expression of human life ever be able to alleviate their damnation.

The Probability of the Revolution does not depend on the solution to the dilemma of whether it is men or Man who make history: instead, it flows before our eyes, only that we know how to see it and recognise it, even when it smoulders unseen and unheeded by supposedly cultured or sensitive men. This is only clear to the party organ, which resists the ups and downs of historical dialectics, which does not renounce the science of society in the name of an easier virtual reality. Nor, as Poincaré admitted, is a purely mathematical relationship able to establish the day and the hour: they are inaccessible to a vision so short and so myopic, which only reflects the need for survival proper to the miserable prehistory that we are still living through.