When bourgeois society emerged, it created in man, in place of the old religion, a belief in Reason, or rather the myth of the individual who, alone and independently of his surroundings, is capable of knowledge and will. The science of previous societies was denied outright. It was believed that Man was able to choose freely what to do with himself and with the history of his time.

The disruptive and unconscious birth of the new bourgeois form of production, based on individual corporate profit and competition, shaped the bourgeoisie into the quintessence of individualism, in a continuous war between individuals defending their own miserable little gardens, or their equally miserable large capital. Bourgeois individualism seemed to fail only in those particular historical moments when the proletariat raised its head and opposed this bourgeois mystification with the objectivity of its own impersonal Revolution.

Today, 80 years of counter-revolution have decreed the victory of the bourgeoisie in the great and important social battle of the 1920s and, as a result, have imposed, with the tyranny typical of this imperialist regime, the most sinister individualism of one against all and of mors tua vita mea. Capitalism, spreading its tentacles to every part of the globe, even the most primitive, has imposed its ideals and its idiotic commodities and inoculated human beings with a fetishism for these commodities. The aberration of feeling “the only important man on this Earth” leads to petty struggles over a few crumbs between people of the same social class, as well as the desire to take pleasure in excluding or overwhelming others.

The banality of the petty bourgeoisie leads them to complain about how selfish “man” is and how he thinks of nothing but himself, forgetting his fellow men. However, those who share Marxist doctrine cannot rely on such superficialities, but must identify, with the weapon of historical materialism, the real causes, which can be traced back to the entire capitalist social development of the last few centuries. This obviously does not excuse the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, believing their mode of production to be “natural” and eternal, assert that man is “by nature” selfish and concerned only with himself. A minimally disinterested approach explains, on the contrary, that man is a social being, who possesses in his deepest instinct the will and the need to live as a community of men, as part of a material and emotional whole. This is demonstrated by the arc of the history of the species, starting with primitive societies. In subsequent societies, from which the abstraction of the individual is progressively extracted, the tension remains, the sense of lack of that lost richness.

Marxism explains that it is the various economic, social, and political structures of history, which have succeeded one another over the millennia, that shape man according to the needs of the ruling class: it instills in the minds of the rulers and the ruled the right ideologies for the preservation of these relationships. The man of class-divided societies is a divided man, a puppet, a slave to what he himself has produced and to the social relationships that he unconsciously reproduces throughout his life.

The subjectivity of modern homo capitalisticus, with his claim to emancipate himself, in every sense, by his own intellectual, moral, and material forces, as an individual, is a mystification aroused by the bourgeois point of view, a metaphor for the ideal of competition characteristic of present-day society, a fetish of its economy of transition to the destruction of the isolated individual. To this subjectivity of the civil, legal, and economic individual, we Marxists oppose the objectivity of the needs of the species, both collective and individual without contradiction, in all their broad spectrum, an objectivity that will finally be recognized and defended in Communism. This consciousness, these post-competitive feelings and modes of behavior are today anticipated within the Party and in its peculiar method of work.

Compelled by forces far greater than himself, man today is unable to rebel, to organize himself with his fellow sufferers and to understand. For this reason, he diverts his instinctive hatred of this world into various forms of religion or godless mysticism. According to many “sociologists,” against the sufferings of the bourgeoisie [fins de siècle] (the other was not very different), which seem to be individual frustrations, fears, anxieties, and nervousness, they say that relief is sought by resorting to [gurus] of all kinds, who promise to solve the problems of individuals, to “free” them from “negative charges.”

Capital pursues every trace of “solvent demand” and is ready to throw “spiritual” commodities onto the market, which are all the more filthy, and alas widespread, when coated with a scientific, exotic veneer, and often a mixture of both. Suffice it to recall that avowedly anti-scientific quackery known as “homeopathy,” which cures with full moon rays, the smell of toad tails, “succussions,” and the like, based on the pure nonsense that “there is no such thing as disease, only the sick.” Every true doctor knows that both the disease and the patient exist and that the task of medical science is precisely to relate the two to each other in a concrete way. Homeopathy – which is a multi-billion dollar industry – has surpassed Eastern philosophies, which have remained somewhat outdated in comparison, thanks to the complicity of some doctors who are either deluded or dishonest. But they need only wait: in this society, the past never passes, the nonsense of dying societies is always the same, and within a generation it all comes back into fashion. In Nero’s time, Eastern “exoticism” was already in vogue, and Egyptian healers and magicians (both real and fake) were in great demand in patrician villas and throughout Rome.

Another bourgeois discipline that is poorly founded and empirically impotent is psychology. The latter claims the dignity of science and, given the real need for some comfort, is sought after as a branch of medicine. Psychology, including psychoanalysis, while defining itself as a science, has never used scientific methods: its analysis starts from the abstract individual and ends up circling back to this abstract individual. It never reaches the concrete. On this basis, it cannot claim to stand alongside the natural sciences, let alone dialectical materialism.

This “spiritual” commodity claims to divide man into two parts: on the one hand, the corporeal, physical, and material, and on the other, his soul or inner self, which is immaterial. Whether we like it or not, we regress to Christianity and the Middle Ages, which places the soul as separate and more important than the body, and therefore the one to which care and attention should be applied. New Age, the latest fad of this chained generation, cynically tells a frustrated man that his problems can only be solved through education in “relaxation” and freeing his soul from the reality of the body. This trend, like the new waves of Buddhism and similar stuff, criticizes Western society for giving too much importance to physicality, to the “flesh” as the priests used to say, falling squarely into the opposite excess. The key to [social collectivity] has been missed by both.

Scientific communism, born in the 19th century as a necessary response by the proletariat to the evils of this society, discovered that in class-divided societies, and in particular in the present capitalist one, the subject of the problem is not Man, his Reason, or his Psyche, but the production of commodities with its ruthless law of value. Man becomes an object, a commodity with its own price.

In an article published in 1988 in our journal, we wrote: “[N]o one has ever realised (among all these convinced psychologists, ed.) that mental health is ensured by objective knowledge of reality and by its use for the benefit of the organism, provided that the environment has such a wealth of resources and stimuli at its disposal as to allow it to develop all its potential qualities.” ([The Materialist-Dialectical Theory of the Psyche], from Comunismo, No. 25, 1988).

The highest form of “spiritual self-emancipation” would be “intellectual” emancipation, i.e., based on the abilities of one’s own little brain, which autonomously accesses Knowledge. Meanwhile, bourgeois knowledge certainly cannot emancipate even the bourgeoisie, but rather reinforces the unhappy subjection of individuals to the tyranny of Capital. Proletarian knowledge is not given in this society except as revolutionary doctrine, living “within the armor” of the class-fighting party.

But this certainly does not trouble the conscience of intellectuals who, well paid, do their work as philosophers, journalists, historians, scientists, artists, etc. These people, who are our enemies and the clamorous servants of the ruling class, do not seek science but compete with each other for pay: on every minor issue (historical, philosophical, political, etc.), each one agrees with the other, adding, however, that on that single point, on that particular issue, the other was wrong...

Worst of all are those who call themselves “artists,” distorting the concept of this activity that once represented the progress of past evolving societies. Pathologically individualistic even by bourgeois standards, they have renounced their function of understanding and representing the world and the relationship between species and nature. Anarchy has reigned in art for at least a century, and today even those “currents” that proposed in their “manifesto” a more or less conscious interpretative model of reality are no longer expressed; a myriad of artistic currents are constantly creating new sub-currents among which – beyond the problem of lexicon – only pessimism, anguish or, without a doubt, cynical indifference prevails.

No less important factors in the spread of individualism are religion and the family. From its very origins, the Jewish religion, and later the Christian religion, broke forcefully with the objectivity of the ancient world, the idea of the community as a whole, and the concept of Nature as superior to the little man. The Judeo-Christian religion, as Feuerbach already said, isolated man from others by internalizing religion through prayer, recognizing the existence of the individual Man and recognizing his tyrannical dominion over nature.

But even in Christianity, the concept of the afterlife and individual judgment is very late.

Today, Catholicism, adapting as it has always done to the times, has eliminated the ancient fear of Hell among believers, thus eliminating any remnants of humanitarian precepts from the Christian conscience. “Humanitarianism” is now carried out by bourgeois wars, and machine guns and bombers redeem more than prayers!

Communists have always been indignantly accused of wanting to abolish the family. Apart from the fact that we do not want to “abolish” it but foresee that it will become extinct in the course of social development under communism, it is true that we consider the bourgeois family to be a mere creation of this society and, as such, transitory in nature.

One of the roles that the family has assumed in today’s society is to isolate human beings, keeping them prisoners within the narrow and selfish horizons of the four walls of their homes and enemies of “other” families.

Having said all this, it would appear that capitalist society is truly the bearer of individualism. But this ideology is a mystification and pure illusion, not reflecting the real dimension of modern man. While capitalism exalts the individual and their possibilities as a single person, it annihilates the same individual through the commodification of their work, reducing individuals to mere commodities, insignificant parts of a Whole that is only the Market. In this inevitable social process, the diverse concrete forms of individual persons vanish.

Our party, which is programmatically anti-individualist, does not for this reason engage in bourgeois commercial standardization: in the Party, a prelude to tomorrow, individuality reemerges. Our party has repeatedly declared itself to be anti-individualist in the philosophical field, anti-mercantilist in economics, and anti-electoralist and anti-democratic in politics. This trinity, a great achievement of the Party, is one of absolute consistency, where each element is a cornerstone of the overall system.

Our conception of the world is dialectical. Dialectical thinking is nothing more than the reflection in the human brain of a natural dialectic. Dialectics also involves the function of individualism in human history, so it is an important weapon for addressing this issue as well.

Individualism is not, as its apologists are quick to repeat, the natural “philosophical” condition of man, so much so that it arises very late in the development of the species. After a painful and very slow genesis, it triumphs with the development and formal domination of capitalism. The societies that preceded the bourgeois society were, in essence, more or less, not individualistic but organicist.

In those splendid historical phases in which a new society imposed itself on an old and outdated one, placing the individual at the center of the economy, history, science, and philosophy was a revolutionary and subversive act against the old order. It was, among other things, the work of giants who had nothing individualistic about them, since, as some of the highest exponents of the universal spirit of man, their minds were already beyond capitalism itself.

Transferring the engine from heaven to earth, as well as destroying the organic nature of the old human community, was a subversive act. In order to develop further, the human species had to go through a phase of total estrangement and self-denial.

But today, as Capital survives parasitically on itself, producing disorder, waste, and death, individualism has reached the bottom of its historical parabola. It is conservative and mystifying. While propagating individualism, Capital mercilessly crushes millions of flesh-and-blood individuals.

Therefore, the various forms of individualism listed above are in reality only mystifications, small degenerate utopias of modern man, who finds himself caught in the grip of counter-revolution. Today, when the power of associated labor, usurped by a parasitic minority, could free man from suffering and pain, 1.4 billion people have no drinking water and no means of heating it, and 6 million children die every year as a result; while the per capita production of calories on the planet is 2,700 calories per day, 3 billion individuals suffer from hunger.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Hamburg, the Stalinist labor camps, the Nazi and Allied concentration camps, which exterminated tens of millions of individuals who were surplus to the needs of Capital in an atrocious manner through labor and hunger, phosphorus, and uranium, are proof of what individuals really are to Capital, the vampire of life.

Individualism and individuality are not the same thing. Individualism is the theory that places the individual subject at the center of economics, history, and thought. In extreme terms, it can be summed up with the imperatives: “Think of your own interests,” “Think for yourself.” Individuality, on the other hand, is the set of abilities and characteristics that distinguish one human being from another. Capitalism exalts individualism but at the same time crushes millions of individuals like flies and massifies billions of individualities.

The irony of recent decades is that just when the Ego has died, we are witnessing the staging of the omnipotence of the Ego. Just turn on a television, read a newspaper, a philosophy or economics text, watch any commercial, and you will be overwhelmed by this delirium of Ego omnipotence.

The fact that today we Marxist revolutionaries are totally ignored by the outside world can be measured by the degree of spread of individualism. Acceptance of Communism has as its prerogative the understanding that one is nothing more than a small part of a whole, of the entire species, or that the individual taken alone is nothing.

Once this is understood, one can be a communist. The prevailing ideal of bourgeois individualism historically failed only in those moments when the proletariat was able to impose its own threatening doctrine, contrary to all forms of subjectivism, through struggle. On the other hand, the only solution to this total detachment of man from his interest in the species is the future fraternal communist society, already experienced in part today within the Communist Party through organic centralism and its working methods.

In the Party, those comrades who join it, driven by determinations far greater than themselves, seek to shake off the commodification of man imposed by this society. In it, not only is there no difference in terms of race, sex, age, class, profession, and “intellect,” but there is also no freedom for leaders to individually invent a new theory from scratch. There is a collective effort to explore, day by day, that common and human reality called Communism.

Capital leaves no escape. One can only resist by projecting oneself towards the anti-individualist communist society of the future, by militating in the organic community of the Party.

Revolutionaries in Party activity carry out a radical detoxification of the bourgeois pathology of the omnipotent Ego. However, they are aware that, living in the capitalist sewer and under enemy bombardment, the struggle is continuous, incessant, and never definitive.

The Party fights internally against any annoying bourgeois mania for protagonism or, even worse, against the method typical of bourgeois intellectuals of twisting and turning the unique and, for us, unchanging Marxist doctrine to suit their own tastes and satisfy their own itches.

Against all this, the Party opposes the serious, collective, and disinterested study of every problem, to be related not to the genius of exceptional comrades but only to what our doctrine and our school have taught us.

Marx wrote to Freiligrath in the last century: “Can one escape the filth in bourgeois intercourse or trade? But in the latter, the filth has its natural habitat (...) The honourable meanness or mean honourableness of solvent (...) morality (...) is to my mind not one whit superior to disrespectable meanness, from the taint of which neither the first Christian communities, nor the Jacobin Club, nor our erstwhile ‘League’ could remain entirely free. But bourgeois intercourse accustoms one to the loss of one’s sense of respectable meanness or mean respectability” (Marx to Freiligrath, February 29, 1860).

To avoid misunderstandings, we feel it is appropriate to specify that this struggle has nothing to do with the mortification of the body or the repression of desires of Christian memory. On the contrary, it is a struggle for the reappropriation of all the senses of man, which are first and foremost physical senses. Individualism also appeals to the senses, but to senses that are brutalized, completely annihilated by the sense of having.

For us, the Revolution is first and foremost a gigantic work of detoxification of the revolutionary class. This work of detoxification will not cease immediately after military and political victory, as individualism has penetrated deeply into the structure of human beings. The superstructure has much more inertia than the economic and social structure. Just think of the pre-capitalist and even primitive communist forms of thought that survive in the midst of modern capitalist society. Only the work of generations cooperating fraternally can eradicate the anguish of individualism from the hearts of men.

Individualism and individuality have gone hand in hand throughout history, the former favoring the latter’s possibilities for development. But for at least a century, it has been hindering it.

Individuality can only progress if it asserts itself as an expression of the community, if it resolves its contradiction with the community, if it becomes the community itself.

“When man has killed off his mercantile and individualistic selfishness, when in the fullness of his being he has risen to the height of free and disinterested work for the species, he will have finally affirmed the human community, the true Gemenweisen in which the individual being no longer exists in opposition to the community because it will be both at the same time: it will be both individual and universal. Since human nature is the true community of men, by manifesting their nature men create, produce, the human community, the social entity, which is no abstract universal power opposed to the single individual, but is the essential nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth” (Marx: [Comments on James Mill]).

The organic nature of the lost community will be recovered, enriched by the universal achievements of the human spirit obtained following the dissolution of primitive communism.

“Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature. Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature...”

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The nascent Renaissance bourgeoisie represented in the biblical young David his challenge to the gigantic forces of feudal conservation and the Church. Once again today, the proletarian man is nothing more than a little David in front of His Majesty, global Capital.

Only when conditions allow the giant to be overthrown will man, no longer miserable and alone, discover himself to be a being in full possession of his potential, master of himself and of the future. Communism will consider as a dark past, like ancient slavery for the bourgeoisie, the desire to make man independent of others and thus in a struggle for domination. In this future, men will not all be “equal,” but they will be able to define themselves for the first time as an integral part of a whole: the entire human species will produce and distribute affection, care, and material goods to each individual man, and the individual man will in turn need to produce and work not for himself but for the species. We wrote in the [Manifesto] of 1848: “The free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all.” There will then be no man equal to another (and moreover with the pretense of feeling different, as in capitalism), nor a mercantile “egalitarian” society such as that idealized by Proudhon or the “romantic” Stalin. It will be precisely the disappearance of the individual and his claim to centrality that will create the conditions for man to free himself from all past inhibitions and reach levels that he has not been able to reach until now. The disappearance of the individual man will then be the affirmation of the individual man himself. Only then will every man have the right stimuli to grasp all Knowledge and Learning and take them to ever more advanced levels: the common man will then discuss Einstein’s theory of relativity, how to make the Sahara Desert fertile, or how to travel up and down the Solar System. So let Goliath die by a single blow from a slingshot, and let this “massifying giant” never rise again! Some time ago, we wrote: “Remove character formation from the exclusive influence of present-day society, live together, all of us young people, workers or not, breathing a different and better atmosphere, cut the bridges that unite us to non-socialist environments, sever the ties that infiltrate the poison of selfishness and competition into our blood, SABOTAGE, in a word, this infamous society, creating a revolutionary oasis destined one day to invade it all, digging mines destined to shake it to its foundations” (“A Program: The Environment”, from L’Avanguardia, June 1, 1913).