We live, it is said on all sides, in an age of ‘rampant immorality’.

It means then that society is condemned to death. All class societies arise in history as the bearers also of a moral idea, that is, a set of rules that regulate the practical life of men.

When societies become ‘immoral’, it is because the ruling class, guardian and custodian of the prevailing morality through the school, the church, the police, and literature, realises that the ethical precepts inculcated in the exploited masses and defended with coercive means are unable to block the erosive forces undermining the economic and social foundations of society. From that moment, the ruling class ceases to firmly believe, or no longer believes, in its own moral commandments. It realises that they are useless, that only the use of corruption and violence can avert the day of reckoning. In a word, it becomes immoral, that is, it sets itself up to live contrary to its own moral theories.

The disintegration of a society begins above all within the ruling class and manifests itself as moral dissolution. This does not mean that the degenerative process unfolds in the closed world of ideas. Rather, it happens that the moral rules that previously presided over practical activity prove insufficient, because economic evolution has profoundly altered the social reality. Let us consider sexual morality, that is, the set of customs and moral precepts that regulate relations between the sexes in bourgeois society.

The foundation of bourgeois social organisation is the family based on monogamous marriage.

In the ideological struggle against the feudal aristocracy, which revelled in the gilded Versailles of the 18th century, the then revolutionary bourgeoisie thundered against the libertinism of the nobles, and presented itself as the herald of the renewal of the family and the sanctity of marriage; it expressed against the alcove lures and sexual perversions of the Casanovas and De Sades the same sacred fury of indignation that, many centuries ago, had driven the Christians of the catacombs to curse the debaucheries of the Roman patricians. In a word, the bourgeoisie rose up against the feudal aristocracy, cynical scorners of carnal continence, as the embodiment of Virtue. Indeed, as redeemer of the same corrupt representatives of the ancien régime, smugly mirroring themselves in the characters of Georges Ohnet and Octave Feuillet.

But where are the descendants of the abstemious, puritanical, and regicidal Third Estate? They are at the orgy. It is certainly no coincidence that the moral decomposition of the ruling classes manifests itself in the tendency to give maximum publicity, so to speak, to certain acts that are normally, especially if ‘sinful’, carried out in secret.

At a certain stage in the evolution of the ruling class, the orgy appears. But historical experience teaches that when this form of entertainment of the potentates appears, the Revolution is at the door. And this is understandable. The orgiastic fashion explodes when the ruling class hears the toll of the death knell. It is no coincidence that the lords of Babylon loved to adorn the site of their feasts with symbols of death. Frenzied orgiasts were the patricians of the Late Empire, the powdered aristocrats of the eighteenth century, the Russian nobility clustered around Rasputin. It is the consciousness of their own impotence to stop the disintegration and ruin of society that drives the ruling class to avenge itself masochistically upon the fear that the Revolution inspires. The orgy is the antidote against fear and despair.

However, we must do justice to the organisers of the Trimalchian dinners of antiquity, as well as to the powdered fops and dainty ladies of the eighteenth century.

If they could be resurrected they would certainly feel immense disgust at the sordid spectacle of the bourgeois orgy. The shopkeeper spirit, counter of filthy money, does not abandon the bourgeois, not even when he poses as a hero of existentialist despair. The places where gatherings of both sexes take place, the… Adamite costume or the pink ballets being obligatory, must reek like a brothel a mile away. Nor is it practically possible to separate the libertinism of our rich from prostitution.

Certainly the bourgeois who sins knows how much it costs him to break the rules… in banknotes.

If the ruling class tramples its own sexual morality underfoot, its intellectual lackeys will follow suit. Hence the pornography flooding literature and the arts, the press, and the cinema. Moral principles that were once genuine taboos: the virginity of girls, the modesty of married women, the watchful surveillance of husbands, are now the favourite target of the press, especially those dedicated to a female audience. The puritan rigour in matters of love makes the descendants of Robespierre and Cromwell smile. We are ‘at laissez faire, laissez aller’ not only in relations between the sexes, but within the same sex.

The adulteress no longer inspires the fiery invectives of the censors. One continues to blame, it is true, those who abandon their legitimate spouse to satisfy a sudden homosexual passion, as in the case of that Roman noblewoman; but the crime of passion is branded as supreme barbarity, not to mention the crime of honour, still in vogue among the populations of the former Magna Graecia… The ruling class tends to universalise the orgy.

All this does not happen by chance, it happens because the economic and social evolution of capitalism has undermined at the foundations the institution to which bourgeois sexual morality corresponded, namely marriage.

Monogamous marriage is not, as is well known, an exclusively bourgeois social institution. Capitalism, and in this too its character as a class society becomes evident, inherited it from feudalism, which in turn had it in common with classical antiquity. But history will say that it was under capitalism that monogamous marriage fell apart. Communism will certainly not be able to inherit it: one does not inherit the dead. At most, it will have to draw up the death certificate that bourgeois hypocrisy, the bourgeoisie of orgies and universal prostitution, refuses to draw up.

A necessary condition for the preservation of monogamous marriage was the subjection of the woman to the man. It maintained itself on the privilege of the husband, whose status as sole breadwinner gave him the right to give his surname to his wife and children. The woman’s inability to provide for her own sustenance cast her into a position of inferiority, from which it was almost impossible to escape. But capitalism, at a certain stage of its development, had to break the age-old relation of subordination. Oh! It was not induced to this by a moral ideal. Certainly not. The introduction of women into the production process was imposed by unavoidable economic necessity. The race for profit led to mass production (and consumption), and thus to an increase in the workforce. Extra-domestic labour, labour that once was the exclusive task of men, began to draw outside of the domestic walls first the women from the lower classes.

For a long time, the middle classes considered it a dishonourable thing, or at least improper, to send their daughter or wife to work behind a shop counter or office desk. Then the process of grinding down the middle strata induced the petty-bourgeois householders to ‘modernise’, i.e. to submit to the despotic power of Capital. Today, needless to say, we are at the point, in capitalist countries, that the production process would certainly remain disrupted, and in certain branches even paralysed, if, hypothetically, female labour, manual and intellectual, were sent back to domestic occupations.

The enlightened minds of the bourgeoisie and the pseudo-socialist opportunists who foolishly imitate them are quick to extol the modern family, where husband and wife are equally ‘independent’. But it is an incontrovertible fact that the worker-wife and the worker-mother cannot come to terms within the woman-worker. Nor can it be otherwise. It is absurd to expect that a woman, who is obliged to work for eight hours, almost always performing laborious and poorly paid tasks, can return to the walls of the home and take on the heavy housework. Necessarily it happens that the working woman has to neglect her duties as a mother. But an inadequate commitment to child-rearing undoubtedly results in social harm. On the other hand, the greater freedom of action acquired by the woman inevitably leads her to shirk the mentality of a Muslim harem dweller. And this makes it difficult for her to fulfil her duties as a wife, even when it does not lead to adultery.

This does not mean that the emancipation of women from domestic slavery is a source of corruption as the reactionary philistine claims. It only means that labour, under capitalism, enslaves the woman as well as the man. Nor, moreover, does the entry of the woman into the production process put an end to the subordination of the woman to the man. The acquisition of the right to extra-domestic labour on the part of the woman has brought marriage into crisis but has not freed either man or woman from the heavy restrictions that make their sexual life difficult.

Capitalism has destroyed monogamous marriage. Even if this institution formally survives, its historical basis is gradually crumbling. Female labour has by now demonstrated that, except for the transitory impediments associated with motherhood, the woman can successfully replace the man in any productive activity. At one time, it was believed that only to war was the woman denied. But today even this extreme limitation has fallen. Just like the man, the woman, besides producing economic goods, has also learned to slaughter her fellow human beings. What more could one want?!

Capitalism, in its unstoppable race toward the abyss, has determined a social evolution to which the officially prevailing sexual morality no longer corresponds. But it is incapable of substituting new matrimonial forms for the old. From this contradiction springs the corruption of customs, which finds its most glaring manifestations in the ruling class itself. In theory, the rules of sexual morality continue to subsist. In the Penal Code, especially in that which delights this civil Italy, there continue to be articles in force that sanction the state of inferiority of the woman: the husband is, in Muslim fashion, master of the wife’s goods and body to the point that he imposes his own surname even on the children his wife has had through an adulterous relationship: adultery itself is made to be paid for by the wife with greater penalties than those imposed for the same offence on the husband; the attribution of head of the family is an exclusive right of the husband, even when the wife earns alone that which sustains the family, etc.

In custom, at least verbally, transgressions of moral rules continue to be censured, but who does it with commitment and conviction? Everyone senses, more or less clearly, the futility of recrimination. In practice, one realises that moral theory no longer corresponds to social needs. And this fills with horror and dismay the reactionary philistine, the petty bourgeois who curiously confuses the effect with the cause and sees in the advance of subterranean revolutionary forces the moral dissolution of society.

What is the attitude of the workers’ parties towards these issues? Those who follow the press of the socialist and communist parties, and especially the press dedicated to women, cannot help but get a disheartening impression. With a typical petty-bourgeois attitude, those who promise the Italian working class that they will work for the suppression of capitalism instead busy themselves with healing the wounds that bourgeois society inflicts upon itself.

To remain on the issue of relations between the sexes, they are careful not to proclaim what is shouted by the facts, namely, the decline of marriage.

They speak of a crisis of marriage and lead the masses to believe that Marxist theory holds monogamous marriage compatible with communist social organisation. Having retouched this or that article of the Civil Code, generalised the practice of extra-domestic female labour, proclaimed the legal equality of the spouses, all that would remain would be to transplant the institution of marriage as-is into the communist social organisation. Perhaps in Russia, the country of triumphant socialism, do men not continue to reproduce within the matrimonial form?

Here is the way of understanding communism by the fierce anti-capitalists who ‘fight’ in the bourgeois Parliament: the reconciliation of domestic economy with social economy, of domestic labour with social labour. Why, then, does capitalism, despite the disintegration of the family, bitterly defend the principle of the molecularisation of society within the narrow familial framework? Why do bourgeois ideologists consider every reform of the family institution ‘immoral’? The reason is known. It is in the family, in the hallowed and egoistic domestic economy, that man’s social instincts suffer the greatest mortification.

The morality of the bourgeois class, like that of every ruling class, is profoundly immoral, for the Marxist materialist, precisely because it tends to extinguish in man the social instinct that binds him to his fellow, and transforms him into a ‘person’, i.e. into a sum of needs and egoistic interests that are necessarily opposed to those of society…

Revolutionary communism is bearer of a new moral ideal, which it certainly does not draw from the bottomless well of the spirit, where idealist ideologues manage to find everything. The moral theories of the ruling classes draw their true origin from a social mechanism that violates man’s human nature. Therefore they are presented as emanating from entities that stand outside and above society: sources of law become God or Spirit or Consciousness. But, for revolutionary communism, the source of the moral rules governing men’s practical activity is the SOCIAL INSTINCT, the profound indestructible instinct that binds the human species, indivisibly, to physical nature. Anything that clouds the social instincts of men is immoral, is unnatural.

The bourgeois philistine, having to justify the fierce struggle that man wages against man for the possession of economic goods and for the conquest of social privileges, posits as a postulate the natural egoism of man. Egoism, the tendency to harm one’s fellow man, would be inherent in man, derived from his animal origins. Hence the need for an Entity separate from the natural world, for a God who intervenes to mitigate the cannibalistic tendencies of man. The truth is quite different. The fundamental law of living beings is the subordination of the individual and his needs to the general and impersonal needs of the species.

The force that regulates the evolution of the species is the social instinct. Egoism is a poisoned product of sociology, not zoology certainly. It is true that animal and plant species struggle incessantly to defend their place in nature and perpetuate themselves. But only in the human species does it happen that the worst enemy is one’s own fellow man. And this happens because the division into economic classes forces man to devote more vital energy to the struggle against his fellow than he spends in the struggle against natural adversities.

The revolutionary proletariat does not invent new moral myths as the ruling classes did in the past because it has nothing to oppose to human nature.

The moral ideal of revolutionary communism is the liberation of the social instinct, of the deep, healthy, and vital animal instinct that is at the origin of the prodigious phenomenon of living matter. For long and bloody millennia, though always few and insignificant compared to the evolution of the species, the social instinct that induces men to unite, to struggle, to produce in common, to ensure with the minimum of suffering the perpetuation of the betterment of the species, has been obfuscated and deadened by the egoism of the ruling classes.

The moral revolution of communism consists in destroying the power that poisons human existence: the social class. The proletariat tends not only towards the destruction of the bourgeois class, but also, and this does not seem a paradox, towards its own suppression as a distinct class. Only the destruction of classes can place man under the rule of the social instinct. And therein lies true human freedom: in becoming conscious of what is his true nature. For anyone who has pondered these issues, it is easy to notice the mystifications perpetrated by the false communists of Moscow.

The family is the stronghold within which man entrenches himself against his fellow man, the justification for all the high-handedness, the baseness, the vileness that man commits against his fellow man. For the family, man transforms himself into a predatory beast, but the prey he brings home triumphant has been torn from the mouth of his fellow man. And in this, man descends below the level of the beasts. The eagle that goes out hunting does not bring to its nest the corpse of an eaglet. Nor do wolf cubs eat wolf flesh. But bourgeois moral law justifies and rewards him who enriches his own family by starving the children of others. The bourgeois moral law exempts me from the obligation to contribute to the feeding and rearing of your children: on the contrary, since they do not belong to me, i.e. they are not part of my family, I can without remorse starve your children, if this allows me, not to say to feed, but to procure the superfluous for my own. Such is the moral law that regulates the bourgeois family.

Revolutionary communism rejects such infamies. The proletarian revolution puts an end to the division between domestic and extra-domestic labour, between domestic economy and social economy. It does so by suppressing domestic labour, transforming HOUSEWORK INTO PUBLIC SERVICE, and with that, it liquidates the family once and for all.

The leaders of the PCI claim that the full equality of the sexes, the liberation of the woman, has been achieved in Russia. Let us see what Lenin thought on the matter of such an issue.

In his speech delivered at the 4th Conference of Non-Party Women Workers in Moscow in September 1919, Lenin addresses the question of women’s liberation. It is worth re-reading it. In the meantime, it will be useful to report a few salient passages.

«To effect [the woman’s] complete emancipation and make her the equal of the man it is necessary for the NATIONAL ECONOMY TO BE SOCIALISED AND FOR WOMEN TO PARTICIPATE IN COMMON PRODUCTIVE LABOUR. Then women will occupy the same position as men».

Clear, no? It is not enough that the Charlottes and Sonias participate in common productive labour for them to be considered liberated. Domestic labour must be abolished. And why is that, asks the fake dimwit radical or pseudo-socialist? Better to answer in Lenin’s words:

«Here we are not, of course, speaking of making women the equal of men as far as productivity of labour, the quantity of labour, the length of the working day, labour conditions, etc., are concerned; we mean that the woman should not, unlike the man, be oppressed because of her position in the family. You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain factually downtrodden because ALL HOUSEWORK IS LEFT TO THEM. IN MOST CASES HOUSEWORK IS THE MOST UNPRODUCTIVE, THE MOST BARBAROUS AND THE MOST ARDUOUS WORK a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman».

Our ridiculous reformists don’t give a damn about revolutionary positions. They have a ready-made recipe handed down from the Nordic countries. If washing the dishes and polishing the floors is labour that demeans women, well then, housework will be carried out in good harmony by both wife and husband. And here is the rotogravure press presenting Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon husbands as models. Whatever time the wife manages to save from housework will simply be picked up by the docile spouse. Thank you very much! Domestic quarrels may have found some alleviation, but SOCIALLY, the labour squandered in inconclusive housework remains quantitatively the same. Merely to save the fetish of the family, reformism on both sides of the Iron Curtain puts the apron on the husband…

To know how Lenin, and thus revolutionary communism, conceived the transformation of housework into public service, we must reread the text of one of his articles on ‘Woman’s Contribution to the Construction of Socialism’ written on 28 June 1919. Lenin reproaches the Bolshevik party for not dealing sufficiently with the question of women’s emancipation (a reproach we could address to ourselves). And he concerns himself above all with clarifying the terms of the question:

«Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a DOMESTIC SLAVE, because PETTY HOUSEWORK crushes, strangles, stultifies, and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN, REAL COMMUNISM, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding the power of the state) AGAINST THIS PETTY HOUSEKEEPING, OR RATHER WHEN ITS WHOLESALE TRANSFORMATION INTO A LARGE-SCALE SOCIALIST ECONOMY BEGINS».

The following passage is exceptionally powerful, because it sums up the substance of the matter in a few words:

«Do we in practice pay sufficient attention to this question, which in theory every Communist considers indisputable? Of course not. Do we take proper care of the GERMS OF COMMUNISM which already exist in this sphere? Again the answer is no. PUBLIC CATERING ESTABLISHMENTS, NURSERIES, KINDERGARTENS – HERE WE HAVE EXAMPLES OF THESE GERMS, HERE WE HAVE THE SIMPLE, EVERYDAY MEANS, INVOLVING NOTHING POMPOUS, GRANDILOQUENT OR CEREMONIAL, WHICH CAN REALLY EMANCIPATE WOMEN, really lessen and abolish their inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life. These means are not new, they (like all the material prerequisites for socialism) were created by large-scale capitalism. But under capitalism they remained, first, a rarity, and secondly – which is particularly important – either PROFIT-MAKING ENTERPRISES, with all the worst features of speculation, profiteering, cheating and fraud, or “ACROBATICS OF BOURGEOIS PHILANTHROPY”, which the best workers rightly hated and despised».

This last point is truly illuminating. The crisis maturing within capitalism itself suggests (not therefore the solitary speculation of the utopian) the means to overcome it, and these means are already virtually present in capitalism. They are the GERMS OF COMMUNISM that capitalism itself objectively creates. The task of revolutionary power is the removal of all obstacles that prevent them from expanding. But housework (cooking, washing clothes, raising children) can be transformed into a public service run by the very people who benefit from it, on the sole condition that it is freed from the mercantile and monetary circuit. Otherwise, the people’s restaurant, which abolishes an important part of housework, falls into the same condition as the bourgeois restaurant, where the one who pays more is served well, while the slop is reserved for the penniless customer. And this is possible only on the condition that the whole of social production is wrested from the laws of mercantile exchange.

But the suppression of housework, by completely liberating the woman, consequently leads to new forms of marriage and buries the family forever. Whoever reduces communism to mere expropriation of capitalists and the substitution of private property with state property show that they have understood nothing of Marxism. Communism changes mankind’s entire social existence, as it has been shaped by the long centuries of class history. It changes not only the form within which men produce economic goods, but also the forms of marriage within which men reproduce themselves. It certainly does not, as the priest and the petty bourgeois claim, lead the human species back to its zoological origins. Ever since the hominid transformed into homo sapiens, that is, into the only living species capable of fabricating its own instruments of production, chief among which is language, man no longer belongs to zoology. Nor can he return to it.

On the contrary, it is class domination that reduces man to the level of a beast of burden from which everything can be taken: sweat, blood, life itself. Not surprising, then, that in periods of historical transition, such as the one we are living through, in which the old society is putrefied and the forces that will bury it are stirring in the social subsoil, not surprising that in a society gripped by crisis and dissolution, men are forced to produce and reproduce themselves in sub-animal conditions.

Communism intends to awaken the social instincts that have their roots, it is true, in the animal nature of man. This horrifies the bigot and the hypocrite, enrages the orgy-organising debauchee and the refined intellectuals specialised in the description of similar material. But one fact is certain: incontinence, cynicism, perversions, fraud, hypocrisy that make repugnant the sexual life of civilised man, that is, accustomed to living in the jungle of class society, are psychological deformations that are completely unknown among primitive peoples. Do we intend to bring men back to their level? No. But if you ask us whether we intend to revolutionarily instil into the man of the much-vaunted ‘atomic age’ the moral rules that are proper to primitive peoples, we have no hesitation, we answer: yes.

Long centuries of class domination have not extinguished in humans the irrepressible voice of the social instinct, the gregarious spirit that allowed the ape-man to become Homo sapiens.

To the proletarian revolution falls the historical task of completely liberating men from the egoistic infection.

The men of modern communism intend to produce the means of their subsistence utilising those germs of communism represented by big capitalist industry, and to live according to the moral law of primitive communism, which represents the dawn of humanity.

Only then can the monstrous contradiction that sets society against human nature be able to be healed.