• THE INTERMEDIATE CLASSES
• THE INTELLECTUALS
• THE MIDDLE CLASSES OF THE COUNTRYSIDE
• THE CLASS OF SMALL PEASANTS WILL CONTINUE TO PERSIST
• ANY AUTONOMY OF ACTION IS DENIED TO THE MIDDLE CLASSES
• THE PROGRAMMES OF THE MIDDLE STRATA
• THE PROLETARIAT AND THE MIDDLE STRATA

One problem that could not fail to be of the utmost interest to those who follow the doctrine and practice of class struggle is the problem of the attitude and historical function of the intermediate classes. A common objection to the socialist idea, of which we are followers, is that we reduce the whole play of history to the clash between two classes alone, into which we claim it is possible to classify up to the last individual who makes up the social whole.

Now: our conception is not so simplistic; it is by no means an objection to the whole of our doctrine and our directives to show that there may exist, beyond the fundamental groups that we see: the ‘capitalist bourgeoisie’ and the ‘wage-earning proletariat’, other social groups.

The problem is quite different: it is a question of seeing what is the duel that defines the historical transition that is preparing itself before us; it is a question of seeing whether the present epoch must be followed by the epoch of proletarian class rule, or whether this outcome is not separated from us by the advent to the direction of social affairs of other intermediate strata that can be deployed today in the situation.

We therefore do not deny the existence of other groupings: we only want to discuss their nature and function. The intermediate classes may represent, in a certain sense, the last element of an epoch that separates us from that proper to the proletariat.

What is the function of these intermediate classes? I do not need to quote our fundamental texts here to demonstrate how Marxist doctrine and analysis are pessimistic with regard to the attitudes of these social classes and consider them more as possible allies of bourgeois reaction and conservation rather than of the proletarian advance. This is a lesson that has been taught to us since the beginning, from the Communist Manifesto onwards.

This thesis is not, however, uncontested across all the successive developments of political schools that have come and gone, so that today all the problems are linked to the consideration: what is to be done with these intermediate classes that stand between us and our declared adversaries?

The examination of the position of the intermediate classes therefore replaces the simplistic schema of only two classes with opposing interests: the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’, a schema that is somewhat more in line with the actual social situation in the most important countries that concern us.

As for the ruling class, we do not see it only in the large industrial, banking, and commercial bourgeoisie: we must also consider, alongside it, allied with it, yet its ancient adversary and enemy, another very important class which clearly positions itself around the economic field: the class of large landowners, a class representing the remnants of the ruling class that preceded the capitalist bourgeoisie, which was overthrown by the latter without any hope of regaining its lost positions, but which nevertheless survives in these remnants which, having almost definitively abandoned the illusion of restoring the forms of domination proper to it, are today themselves allies of the capitalist bourgeoisie in the common defence of the existing institutions.

Between these two classes, and our class – the class of the propertyless and wage-earning proletariat – lie the intermediate classes, which we can immediately divide into two categories for the sake of clarity, that is to say, the urban middle classes and the agrarian middle classes.

In the urban middle classes, we find the remnants of handicrafts, small artisans, small producers of those very same products that are manufactured on a large scale by big industry, small merchants, small shopkeepers; and finally, in the cities, we have another social stratum that we can consider among those we are precisely examining, namely the stratum known as the ‘intelligentsia’, i.e. the stratum of all those who possess a certain level of education and who undoubtedly play a very important role in the world of production.

Moving on to the agrarian middle classes, we are faced with a more complex problem; but we can essentially consider that in the countryside, alongside the large class of large landowners, alongside another genuine agrarian-capitalist bourgeoisie, which in agricultural centres represents the ruling class of the upper urban strata, we have the middle landowner, the small landowner, we have the small tenant farmer, until we reach that category of agricultural labourers who are perfectly, or almost perfectly, identical to the urban proletariat: that is, the farm labourers and wage-earners.

Now, having outlined this class schema, let us examine a little more closely what, from the standpoint of our social theory, is the destiny reserved for these classes as evolution continues. I cannot abandon the specific theme we have set ourselves here in order to seek out those facts that confirm our general views on the development of capitalism, on its concentration, on the deepening of class conflict, on the necessity that these conflicts have a revolutionary solution. The tendency towards the concentration of large-scale production has in recent times become increasingly evident with the very spread of the intimate crisis of modern production. Now, in this development, what place do the intermediate strata occupy?

They do not all occupy the same positions but very different situations. As far as the small artisan and the small shopkeeper in the city are concerned, we can say without hesitation that, from a Marxist point of view, these categories are destined to disappear. We have already clearly outlined the significant and precise tendency towards large-scale industrial production, destined to decisively defeat the remnants of small industrial firms; and we also have the less rapid, less advanced, but equally evident tendency of large commercial organisations to absorb the fragmentation of trade and the circulation of products.

Consequently, we must affirm that today’s capitalist society has already offered us a sufficiently developed framework such that, with the advent of the proletariat to power, it must be declared that these intermediate strata are destined to disappear, to have no part in the society of tomorrow, whether it be a further developed capitalist society or the immediate legacy of the proletariat’s economic administration of humanity.

We will then see what conclusions should be drawn from these predictions regarding the relationship between the proletariat and these strata: namely, that these middle classes are destined to be eliminated, absorbed by the capitalist regime and therefore pushed towards the proletariat.

Moving on to intellectuals, we clearly cannot come to the same conclusions. And here another objection, concerning the socialist conception, must be rejected: namely, the antithesis between manual and intellectual activity, which intersect and complement each other in production; the valorisation of the former as opposed to the contempt for the latter; the exaltation of material and mechanical work as opposed to the other.

In rejecting this claim, however, we cannot simply equate the situation of intellectual workers with that of workers in large-scale industry and large workshops. On one hand, it is a necessary and extremely useful role, which should be valorised by a higher organisation that enhances productive forces. For this part of the class, intellectuals will undoubtedly come to identify with the proletariat in a different and socialist organisation of production, in which the importance of manual labour will be equated with that of intellectual labour, which will increasingly become integrated into the great harmony of human activity.

But this does not detract from the fact that the class of intellectuals, especially in certain layers, gradually comes to have interests that are identified with those of the ruling class. Moving up the ladder, we still find intellectuals who are pure workers, albeit better paid; further up, we begin to find them co-interested in the profit of capital; their function is no longer merely contributory, as productive effort, but assumes the function of guard of capitalism, of surveillance over the proletariat so that its development does not break the bonds of the bourgeois capitalist system. This second function must be rejected and fought against by the proletariat, who, recognising in these intellectuals the fundamental defenders of the capitalist class, must treat them, without hesitation, as allies of its adversaries.

The class of intellectuals, in its part that serves a strictly technical function, is not destined to disappear, but rather to merge with the large ranks of the finally emancipated proletariat, and which, in a new organisation of economic and intellectual life, will see the effort of production harmonise ever more perfectly.

And it is not only this second white guard function entrusted to it that separates the broad layer of the intellectual class from us, but it is also the fundamental ideological influence that bourgeois society exerts on it. This class deludes itself into believing that it is a vanguard, possessing the key by which our path toward the future must unfold.

But this is not the case. Precisely because we are Marxists, because we have carried out a fundamental critique of the progressive evolutionary democratic conception, we deny that the process of humanity presents itself first as an intellectual fact and then as an economic fact. It is precisely the opposite. The culture of an era, its ideological conceptions, are nothing more than a reflection of the material conditions and the conditions in which the class struggle takes place and develops. The most advanced theory is provided to us not by those who have been able to draw from the great culture of the ruling classes, but precisely from the sacrificed class, the oppressed class. And here we come to that historical paradox that I like to repeat: that is, the theory and culture of tomorrow lie with the ignorant and not with the wise.

Consequently, we must fight against this class of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, as they are the ones who have been most thoroughly moulded by the entire cultural organisation of present-day society, which is an organisation of conservation, which is an organisation of counter-revolution. Nor must we fall into the error of believing that the intellectual class of experts, of technicians will be led by their own intellectual superiority to come spontaneously toward us, toward the proletariat.

We must, however, consider that the proletarian revolution, having to bear clearly in mind its indispensable collaboration with experts, with the technicians of production and science, will have to account for and examine this difficulty, which is becoming increasingly tragic as these social groups believe themselves to be a vanguard, performing an autonomous function, while in reality, in our bourgeois society, they have a leaden weight tied to their feet.

And now let us say something about the middle classes in the countryside. And here we must reach conclusions that are quite different from those we reached regarding the small artisans, etc. At the present stage of social history, we cannot give the small farm the same condemnation in the historical sense that we have pronounced for the small industrial and commercial firm.

In a general technical sense, we believe that development in agriculture should take place in the same way as industrial development: that is, concentration of productive activity, division and specialisation of labour: predominance of large-scale productive activity over the individual farm.

It is undeniable that the process of concentration of production, of specialisation in productive functions is far more advanced in industry than in agriculture. This is an obvious fact. Revolutionaries must not refuse to recognise the facts of reality; indeed, we recognise this fact in all its extent precisely in order to keep ourselves away from the counter-revolutionary conception to which the reformist conclusion could lead us, which would make the revolution dependent on a prior industrialisation of agriculture.

This process has not yet taken place. We allow industrial bourgeois capitalism, which has been unable to develop, within its spirit of superior concentrated organisation, the entirety of agricultural production as well, because only then, according to the erroneous reformist conception, would Socialism be possible.

Contemporary revolutionary history has given a very different answer to this problem. It is certainly true that, under the current conditions in which we live, we cannot envisage entrusting the entire industrial mechanism or the entire agricultural mechanism to the collective management of the proletariat; but we nevertheless conclude that the proletariat already possesses, in the present situation, the prerequisites for seizing power and for beginning the organisation of a new type of economic society.

In agriculture, this occurs only in a few special farms, some of which are already ripe for socialised management; but in all the others, even those that are large and extensive in terms of territory and legal status, these conditions that allow for collective management and intensive exploitation, as already occurs on a large scale in industry, have not actually been met. The latifundium is not a large agricultural enterprise; in the economic sense, the latifundium is still a collection of small personal and family farms, fully autonomous and completely unripe for collective management.

And so, if we frame the problem of the rural middle classes in these terms, clarified by the genius of Lenin and the Communist International, we must recognise that in many countries, important from the standpoint of historical and social development, the class of small peasants still has a future ahead of it; that is, it will have to survive the revolution for some time before fully merging with the urban proletariat. Because, in the face of the still-surviving feudal latifundium, and with the forms of exploitation to which it subjects the peasants, it will be a step forward, for the time being, to entrust each individual family with the entire product it cultivates, without having actually implemented a division beyond that recorded in the land registry, since, in economic terms, this division already actually exists.

Essentially, we are saying that in the sphere of the rural middle classes, we do not yet have the prerequisites to move tomorrow to an immediate socialisation without a transitional interval. We will have to start a new phase in the current agricultural industrial system. This requires a struggle because it is necessary to free the peasant who works his own land from outdated ideas, he must be encouraged to struggle in order to free himself from the conditions of servitude in which the bourgeois capitalist class itself holds him, in its thousand forms.

We therefore have an element of class struggle that is not at all parallel in historical terms to that of the urban proletariat, but we do have a class situation that can be used for the purposes of developing the proletarian revolution. Consequently, we must affirm that the class of small producers, small landowners, small agricultural tenants is not destined to disappear in the same historical epoch and with the same rapidity with which the small artisan, the small merchant, is destined to disappear.

Nor, even if we were willing to accept for a moment the hypothesis of a further phase of domination by the industrial capitalist bourgeoisie, can we imagine – assuming it overcomes the current crisis – such a rapid strengthening of agriculture, such a pouring of large capitals into the land. We cannot imagine that the problem of the modernisation of agriculture could make rapid progress in a further phase of capitalist domination; and for a very simple reason: in order to strengthen, to modernise agriculture, enormous capital investments are needed, which could only yield a profit after many years, after entire generations. Only a higher and social interest can lead to the enormous capital needed to bring agriculture to the level of development already achieved by industry being poured into the land.

For today’s society, this system of capital investment would be too slow, the profit would appear too distant, therefore the bourgeois prefer to invest their capital in industry, which offers a greater and, above all, immediate return, because modern capitalism is characterised by an increasingly violent rush for ever faster and more immediate profits, widely preferred to the slow undertaking of reorganising production.

Even if, by some damned chance, we still want to grant the bourgeoisie a long survival, we certainly cannot hope that it will succeed in overcoming this deadlock: only a proletarian regime will have the possibility of solving this problem, only a regime of administration in the name of a collective interest that draws productive energy from mutual consent in order to devote it to the strengthening of large-scale agricultural production, of technical production. And so it is only the proletarian regime that will address this problem.

But even that cannot be achieved in a day or a week, and perhaps not even in a generation, because we cannot hope, even in the best-case scenario, to inherit from the capitalist bourgeoisie an industrial production mechanism so perfect and so developed that it would even allow us the possibility to immediately invest its surplus energy in agriculture. No. Because the bourgeoisie has created a huge gap in wealth; because, even in the best-case scenario, a struggle will be necessary to wrest power from them, a struggle that cannot fail to paralyse the existing economic apparatus. And so overcoming the crisis and stagnation will already be a problem.

We must set forth, we must envision an era, immediately following the conquest, of taking possession of the great industrial and commercial economy, in which the small businesses and small agricultural property, liberated by the revolution from the exploitation of the feudal latifundist, will still largely exist over a wide area, with which a regime of coexistence will be established in relation to the revolutionary proletariat, which has become the master of the industrial and financial regime; a new regime that will not be of equal importance, of complete parallelism; that will not mean elevating the peasant to the same level as the industrial proletarian, who will have carried out the supreme effort of revolutionary vanguard.

This means courageously seeing a formula for the solution of the social problem, which must be addressed by the revolution as a problem of today, of tomorrow, not as a problem of some distant future. We must seriously consider the class whose historical life is not over: that of the small landowner who will still survive even after the proletarian revolution, who will still represent, within the framework of production, a factor that cannot be ignored.

Having thus considered what the future may hold for the various middle classes, we now turn to examine the repercussions this may have in the realm of the struggle over social or political ideologies based on the economic conditions of these strata.

This problem is linked to all the problems of the activity and tactics of the proletarian party. Anticipating the conclusions we will reach later, let us say right away that we must be very pessimistic regarding the consistency and value of the programmes and ideologies of these classes.

The fundamental characteristic of these attitudes, these programmes, these solutions, is the greatest indeterminacy, the greatest ease of moving from one thesis to another opposing thesis. It is therefore with extreme mistrust that the workers’ party must view these manifestations.

It is undeniable that the world war has, in a certain sense, thrown these middle elements onto the political scene. The world war was received by a large section of them as the failure of the direct and precise theory of class struggle. Already in the period preceding the world war, there was a tendency to lull this theory to sleep in the illusion of collaboration, in the illusion of a bridge being built between the two opposing classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The war would then mark, from this trivial point of view, the defeat of the class struggle, insofar as there was national solidarity.

The matchmaker and arbiter of this sacred union would have been the intermediate classes, who would have succeeded in instilling their patriotic ideologies in the proletariat.

And so, in the aftermath of the war, in one form or another, these classes sought to present themselves in the terrible thicket as capable of providing solutions, of having programmes that could fix the current social chaos. These are the issues that deserve the full attention of the proletariat because, depending on how accurately it assesses them, they could result in either great advantages or great dangers for it.

The middle classes, having entered political life with great boldness, claimed to possess autonomy and to be able to offer a self-styled solution to the social problem. But from a very quick examination of these relations, we will come to the conclusion that we must deny any power of autonomy, any original capacity, any possibility of independent action and struggle to these middle layers. We are entirely negative about the solutions we could draw from these programmes. In the immediate post-war period, those returning from the trenches seemed to have returned with a whole new ideological baggage, in the name of which they claimed they could take over the common administration of affairs.

What tremendous disappointments have followed, what open admissions have been made, is all too easy to show.

In reality, our concept, in the face of all these programmes teeming in every country around the world, and our conclusions are as follows: they are not original movements, they are not fruitful ideas, they are not ingenious recipes for new horizons: almost always it is a pure and simple mobilisation of these middle layers carried out by another class, by the dominant capitalist bourgeoisie, by high banking, by big industry, by big agriculture, which, through their confused ideology, manage to carry out their own manoeuvres and their own conservative-reactionary conversions.

One might wonder why we should be concerned with the programme of the middle classes when we claim that they completely lack any autonomous function.

At first glance, it might seem that the middle classes could tomorrow bring about right-wing social solutions, i.e. retrograde solutions that would take us backward. In a hasty judgement, one might conclude that the place of the proletariat and its Party was in defence of and solidarity with the most modern and advanced forms of bourgeois organisation.

Or if one wanted to recognise in these intermediate classes the possibility of accepting a left-wing programme, a programme of progress, of advancement regarding what are the pure forms of capital, one could also think that these middle classes offer us a bridge, built between the two opposing classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat; that we have every interest in encouraging this first transition because behind the new form of regime created by the middle classes we would find better conditions for carrying out, in a new historical era, in our turn, our own advance and our own revolution.

To reach these conclusions, we must examine the programmes with which the middle strata claim to present themselves in political life as an autonomous force, in the irreconcilable class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, with new formulas and solutions that are daily disproved by events, in which, upon a new examination, it shows very clearly that the fundamental antagonists are always the same: on one side, big bourgeois capitalism, on the other, the proletarian class, which, through errors, suffering, beatings, sacrifices, martyrs, always finds its way along this great revolutionary channel that Marxist doctrine has traced for it.

And let us say something about the right-wing, the nationalist wing, the fascist wing, the doctrine that was developed in the post-war period and which, moreover, had already had its premises elaborated beforehand within the middle classes. In various countries, including our own, in the aftermath of the war, political groups were formed that were based on an overestimation of national spirit, an overestimation of patriotic ideology, on a spirit of struggle against anything that smacked of more or less revolutionary socialism; groups that claimed to put an end to a policy of concessions and appeasement; that claimed to create a strong government; that claimed to create a revolution, to give a new direction to history.

And the middle classes threw themselves headlong into these movements with enthusiasm. In Italy, we witnessed a period of ideologies of this kind. Until then, the middle classes had watched passively as capitalism and the working class clashed, wavered and vacillated. It seemed to them that after the war they had gained greater influence; it seemed to them that the time had come to lay down the law, to form a party that aspired to take over the government in order to manage the economy in their own interests.

But, in reality, for three quarters of those elements who for a moment believed in this possibility, disappointment has already set in.

It was not, no, an original movement: it was purely and simply their mobilisation in the service of the eternal master, the eternal ruler. It was an ideological mobilisation, a mobilisation in which the bourgeoisie had become highly skilled after the material or military mobilisations of the classes subject to it. And that mobilisation, which it had conducted so skilfully during the war, it then conducted in the ideological field among all those layers where it found elements still naive, capable, let us say, of a spirit of sacrifice, who threw themselves into the fray believing they were opening a path for their social strata.

Today, this thesis, which perhaps, when we put it forward a few years ago, at the early emergence of the fascist phenomenon, might have seemed an overly simplistic thesis, dictated exclusively by our attachment to the old schemes, today is clearly demonstrated: these elements have proven to be nothing more than elements of defence of the capitalist bourgeoisie.

What have they brought that is new? Nothing. They have stolen reforms from the traditional programmes of democratic parties, believing they were borrowing a part of socialism, when in reality they were taking what is, in a certain sense, an empty caricature of it, namely pure cooperative syndicalism.

But all this rubbish was quickly thrown away and the true essence of the movement came to light.

This is followed by a critical examination of the alleged parallelism between the communist doctrine and political method, and the doctrine and political method of the fascists regarding violence, dictatorship, and anti-democracy, and an analysis of the elements that make up the current opposition to fascism. This examination and analysis allow the speaker to conclude that behind the mirage of petty-bourgeois ideology, the proletariat cannot harbour any illusions of possible solutions or compromises to the fundamental problem of class struggle. The speaker then poses the question of the proletariat’s attitude towards the middle strata, and continues.

The function of the proletarian class stands in relation to the function of these intermediate strata as an original force, standing above them as a driving force of history, and the solution we must give to the conflict is a distinctly class-based solution, it is a solution that must rely solely on proletarian forces, according to the old teaching of Karl Marx.

But when we say that the solution must be class-based, proletarian, autonomous, and original, we do not mean to reduce it to the simple, banal formula of pure workerism. Another error of a purely petty-bourgeois nature is labourism: and similarly, the thesis that a class party must be a struggle entrusted purely to economic corporations of wage workers, which is the syndicalist error. Because we must not forget that when we talk about these fundamental social agglomerations whose functions we have reviewed, we must not lose sight of the possibility of an exchange, of a transfer of human elements, and sometimes of leadership elements. The Communist Manifesto itself warns that the victory of capitalism and democracy over the aristocracy was possible because many elements of the aristocracy adopted the new ideas.

The proletariat must create its own organs of struggle. The organ of struggle of the proletariat must be a political party that sums up the experience and revolutionary will of the masses, which draws its support fundamentally from the proletariat, but also from those other elements that ideologically place themselves on the platform of the proletariat. It is a danger, but it is also a necessity. There is a danger in that we must prepare ourselves to see these people who have come to us from the other camp, who are often brought to positions of leadership because of their qualities, describe, at least in 90% of cases, a trajectory that slowly leads them back to the starting camp; nevertheless, they perform an indispensable function because, in order to achieve true class unity and the synthesis of the liberation effort of the proletariat worldwide, it is necessary to create an organisation whose fundamental character, whose unity, lies in overcoming individual interests and individual drives, in favour of a collective interest, a collective drive that at the same time encompasses all the thought, all the theory, all the action, all the political struggle that the working class, as such, must wage.

And so when we say that the solution to the current social chaos enveloping humanity must be a proletarian solution in the sense of autonomy and originality, we must not fall into the workerist, labourist misunderstanding, because in the absolute concept of the professional corporation a new form of socio-economic individualism peeks through that would certainly not lead to the unified organisation of productive effort.

What does the need for our autonomous and original class action mean in the face of the agrarian and industrial bourgeoisie and then in the face of the manoeuvres and complex ideological functions of which the intermediate classes are so generous?

It means that when faced with elements of the intermediate strata, we can have no other attitude than to say to them: ‘You are the proletarians of tomorrow and therefore you must show solidarity with the ascent of the proletariat’, without, however, hoping that such propaganda will be widely successful, because within the middle strata the individualist spirit predominates, and in the overwhelming majority, all these people aspire to one day ascend to the Olympus of the bourgeois masters; we can only say to them: ‘Remember that you will fall into the proletariat, that by the very monopolising tendency of capital you are being pushed towards the proletariat, and that therefore the more the proletariat advances, the more it will be able to gain its economic independence, and the better it will be for you too’.

Faced with the ‘intelligentsia’, the attitude of the proletariat is defined differently. The revolutionary proletariat in no way hides the need to have technicians and intellectuals alongside it, who must be its indispensable allies, who will receive all the benefits that the proletariat will win for itself.

The proletariat must insist on pointing out that the organisation of productive forces in the communist sense does not violently repress the technical, cultural, and intellectual functions that in present-day society are considered mere commodities that the intellectual strata sell in the interest of capitalist profit. They will be disabused of the error according to which the intellectual strata could be enhancers and shapers of systems. Therefore, even in this ideal sense, the elements of the ‘intelligentsia’ should draw closer to the proletariat, persuading themselves that culture itself is a product of new economic formations.

But the proletariat will not forget the predominance of bourgeois ideological influences that are strongly exerted on these elements, and will therefore prepare to fight them when, at the height of the conflict, they have taken a definite position; that is, it will use them to the extent that they participate in production and work alongside the proletariat for the consolidation of a new economic order.

The solution to the question of the agrarian strata is more difficult. But it was given clearly and definitively by Lenin. Whenever Lenin writes about the agrarian question, he emphasises that the most important thing is to save the industrial proletariat and the party from any contagion of petty-bourgeois psychosis. I repeat, this is a thesis of Lenin; but at the same time, the proletariat must understand that the social and historical situation gives it the opportunity to use, for the decisive struggle against capitalism, the emancipation of the small agricultural producer from the slavery in which the latifundist, capitalism, and the bourgeois State keep him.

Our propaganda towards the peasants must therefore be to offer them a direct, complete alliance with the industrial proletariat, reminding them that behind the industrial proletariat they can win, provided that they recognise the industrial proletariat as their guide.

Finally, from an examination of the parties that ideologically emanate from these groups, the concluding thesis emerges on the autonomy of the proletariat’s function, without being misled by the theory of a common target, and by the invitation to participate in blocs with elements that tomorrow will all be united against the proletariat itself in defence of the bourgeois interest of capitalism.

And he concludes:

We have an original function that will be fulfilled to the utmost on the day when it finally becomes clear that these buffer classes, these intermediate classes, have no right to represent anything in history. That is why we must affirm that there will come a time when the proletariat will have to act on its own, a time when it will be alone against everyone, a time when it will have no allies, but will find itself facing a united front of enemies.

(In Università Proletaria Milanese 1924/25).