‘Communist society ? – They’re achieving it in the USSR, dream on, you poor fools. There are already rest homes for workers, by the sea, over there...’

‘Communist society ?’ scoff the bourgeoisie. ‘Do you believe people are happier in the USSR than here?’

‘Communist society ? – How dreadful!’ say the individualists who tremble at the thought of seeing their dear little self disappear in the ‘levelling of the anonymous mass’.

Against all those who speak without knowing, and against those who cynically exploit this ignorance, against the peddlers of a shoddy communism, ⁽¹⁾ we must recall the description of the true Communist Society, as found in the classic texts of Marxism.

But first we must explain where this description fits into Marxist theory as a whole. Indeed, now that bourgeois theorists can no longer reject Marxism outright, they strive to cut it into pieces; they are happy to acknowledge that it has some merit, some validity, but only within a limited scope of space and time.

Some lavish high praise on the Marxist analysis of capitalism (of the past century...) while dismissing the inevitable consequences of this analysis as ‘messianic daydreaming’.

Others more or less claim allegiance to the future society, but understand neither why nor how it will come about.

To all these people, who are both empiricists and utopians, we oppose the unitary conception of Marxism. For Marxism is much more than an abstract analysis of 19th-century English capitalism, or a plan for the ‘construction’ of an earthly paradise.

Marxism is the doctrine of the proletariat, which simultaneously becomes aware of the laws of historical development of humanity, the laws of the development of capitalist society, and its own revolutionary task.

Indeed, while Marxism is not a science in the usual sense of the term, it is nevertheless scientific, that is to say, based on real knowledge of the real laws of the real world. Whereas bourgeois sociology, which claims to be a science, does not dare, and for good reason, to venture beyond the most shallow empiricism, the scientific and revolutionary rigour of Marxism’s analysis allowed it to predict, already a hundred years ago, the entire subsequent development of capitalist society and the general features of the society that will succeed it.

It is this ability to foresee that is our strength. It is what enables us to withstand all the vicissitudes of the class struggle and to laugh at the discoverers of ‘new facts’. They are new only to them; we, however, foresaw them long ago: well before their actual development, Marxist theory had explored all the possibilities of capitalism and exhausted them all. For us, capitalism is already dead, in the sense that it can no longer produce anything unexpected and is moving inexorably towards its abolition.

If the current development of capitalism is proceeding according to Marxist predictions, this does not mean that history graciously obeys our theory: it proves that our theory accurately reflects the real laws of historical development. And this current verification strengthens the power of our predictions.

The death of capitalism, and the advent of communist society, were foreseen by Marxism not starting from an ‘Idea of the Good’ to be realised, but from the real, concrete state of society and the laws of its development. The great utopians of the 19th century believed they were inventing the Best of All Worlds. In reality, they were only partially expressing a need, a necessity, already embedded in society. Marxism became conscious of this determination. It does not propose an a priori Ideal. It consciously expresses a historical necessity that exists concretely in the material and human facts of current society. It did not ‘dream up’ communist society, but showed that it already exists in potential within capitalist society. It is in this sense that Marx said that ‘[m]ankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve’.

The description of communist society is therefore for us much more than a superfluous embellishment or a carrot dangled in front of a stubborn donkey. It is an integral part of our doctrine. It is because it forms the horizon of it, and because the development of humanity leads to it, that we can understand it as a whole, understand all of prehistory prior to the moment when humans will consciously and freely make their own history.

And if we cannot see beyond this horizon, if we cannot predict what humanity will do, we can and must predict how it will do so, what this society will be like, this society that will constitute all humans as humanity.

A Marxist once said: ‘You want to know what communist society will be like? It’s very simple. Look around you at everything that happens in capitalist society, and tell yourself that in communist society, nothing will be like that!’

This sentence, which may seem like a joke, is nevertheless a rigorous definition of communist society, and indicates the method to follow in order to describe it. It is indeed capitalism itself that has developed the possibility and necessity of communist society, of that society that will be the negation of all capitalist relations.

The great merit of capitalism is to have transformed all production into social production. This means, on the one hand, that production has become a collective act, combining the associated labour of large masses of people, and, on the other hand, that the circulation of products has been extended to the entire globe. This means that the activity of any given person depends on the activity of all other people, and also that no one produces for themselves, but everyone produces for everyone else. It is this socialisation of production that has enabled the tremendous development of productive forces, and it is this that has transformed man’s productive activities into general human productive activity.

But this socialisation of production was carried out by capitalism on the basis of private appropriation, private property, and generalised mercantilism. It turned the specifically human quality of man, his capacity to produce, into an object of property, a commodity. It transformed all human production into the production of commodities, and, by establishing the circulation of products in the form of the market, it transformed all human relations into commerce.

It is this character of capitalist production, which is at once social and private, universal and particular, that constitutes the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, and it is from this that all its other contradictions or oppositions derive: the opposition between man and worker, between the individual and society, etc. Now, this very contradiction is the ‘engine’ of capitalism. It prevents any halt, any stabilisation; it inexorably drives capitalism forward, and any development of capitalism only inexorably accentuates it. Until the violent destruction of capitalism by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will pave the way for the flourishing of communist society.

The only way to resolve the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is through the abolition of property, that is, of exchange, of mercantilism. We must briefly explain that property and exchange are synonymous, and also why we simply say property.

For an isolated human group that produces and consumes in common, the very notion of property does not exist ⁽²⁾. Everything it has at its disposal, itself, its tools, and its products, are not objects of property, but simply goods, useful things, whose only value is precisely the service they can render, their use value. But what happens when such a group comes into contact with another and they begin to exchange the surplus products at their disposal? These products suddenly acquire a new value, of a different nature: an exchange value; and, at the same time, they become objects of property. It is in exchange that someone asserts their right over an object in relation to someone else. Only a proprietors’ ideology confuses property with the right of free enjoyment: free enjoyment is a relationship between a subject, individual, or collective, and an object; property is a relationship that two subjects maintain through an object; an object of property is precisely an object that one does not use oneself, but whose enjoyment one cedes to another ⁽³⁾.

The first form of property that humanity knew was collective property: one group of people asserted its right over objects in relation to another group. But the development of productive forces, and the resulting expansion of exchange, destroyed these collective properties in favour of ‘private’ or individual property. It is capitalism that dealt the final blow to all forms of common ownership and is today destroying its last vestiges. It did so precisely by transforming labour power, the capacity to produce, into a commodity, an object of individual ownership. Here we find the fundamental contradiction of capitalism again: people can only work together, but each person must sell their labour power.

This contradiction cannot be resolved by returning to some form of common ownership, as many brave ‘collectivists’ would like. First, such a return would only be a rejuvenation of capitalism. If groups of producers, owners of their means of production and their products, were set face to face again, they would necessarily have to exchange those products, which are specifically intended for exchange. Now production for exchange has inexorable laws: they are precisely those of capitalist production.

This is precisely why such a return is impossible. The development of productive forces (and of exchange) has already destroyed those forms of common ownership that were unable to contain them ⁽⁴⁾. Common ownership has become an impossibility, or a legal or demagogic formula with no concrete meaning, since there practically no longer exist any groups of producers working essentially for their own consumption. Capitalism has already woven such a global network of co-production and circulation that the only group of producers working for itself that can be isolated is humanity as a whole.

Now, to say that all of humanity will become the owner of all its production would be meaningless. Ownership has this much in common with love: it takes two. And humanity has no one against whom to be the owner ⁽⁵⁾.

Since human production has become general human production, it can no longer coexist peacefully with any form of property. It necessarily tends towards the appropriation by all of humanity of its means of production and its products. And this appropriation is the negation of all property: it means, precisely, removing from objects, people, or human qualities their aspect as objects of property, objects of exchange, commodities, in order to allow their aspect as goods, objects of enjoyment, to flourish.

Mercantile production, for exchange, obeys, as we have said, inexorable laws, which can be summarised as follows: each unit of production, or enterprise, can only function, can only produce, if it has a positive balance sheet, if it makes a profit, if it produces capital; enterprises that yield a higher profit necessarily grow at the expense of those that yield a lower profit.

It is this need to be profitable that inevitably transforms all production for exchange into production for profit. In this mode of production, it is not the social utility of objects that determines their manufacture, but their profitability for the enterprise. The most profitable products are often socially harmful, and socially useful products are not profitable enough to be produced in sufficient quantities to meet needs. But as long as humanity remains locked into this mode of production, it will never escape this contradiction: not only will it be unable to subordinate its creative activity to its needs, but these needs themselves will never be truly human and social needs, but only those imposed on it by the productive anarchy of capitalism within each class.

This leads to such glaring contradictions that capitalism itself is forced to develop enterprises or ‘services’ that are not profitable in themselves but are indispensable to the functioning of production as a whole. However, even these apparently loss-making services can only be developed on the basis of and in accordance with the general profitability of production. Far from eliminating it, they only aggravate the contradiction by sacrificing local profit for the sake of more general profit. It can only be resolved by eliminating profit in general, that is, by eliminating exchange, mercantilism.

What, then, is non-mercantile production? It is a form of production in which a production unit produces and consumes according to its possibilities and needs. And we have sufficiently demonstrated that production and circulation have become universal, so that it is obvious that this unit can only be the whole of humanity. Wanting to realise communism in a limited region of the globe is a flagrant impossibility: today, there is no longer an iron curtain, fire or blood that can stop global circulation.

The regime of private property has dulled our minds to such an extent that it may seem difficult to imagine what production without exchange, non-mercantile production, would look like. Before giving a general idea, let us illustrate it with a small example. Here is a troop of scouts going camping. They have to set up camp, pitch tents, dig latrines, fetch water, gather wood, prepare meals, etc. These tasks are allocated and accomplished without any exchange or property coming into play. And the products of these activities are also distributed and consumed without exchange: the soup that the cooks have made is not a commodity, it is not exchanged for anything; it is poured into bowls and eaten, that’s all. The older, more experienced campers who have pitched three tents while the newcomers have only managed to get tangled up in the ropes of one do not, for that reason, eat three times as much soup.

However derisory these attempts at reconstructing primitive communism may be, which are nothing more than games on the margins of society, they have a thousand times more real content than Mr. Khrushchev’s ‘communism’. (This is, moreover, what makes them so appealing). Despite its somewhat artificial character, our small example has helped us to highlight the essential features of non-mercantile production: the group forms a single subject of production and consumption; it distributes tasks and products according to the abilities and needs of each individual.

In communist society, it will be all of humanity that serves as the subject of its own production and consumption. It will take stock of all its resources and needs and will distribute tasks and products according to the capacities and needs of each individual.

There will no longer be separate, autonomous enterprises from which more value must emerge than is put in. This means that man himself will no longer be the producer of value who must produce more value than he consumes. This entails the elimination of all value accounting, which, while indispensable to the functioning of capitalist production, burdens it with an unproductive dead weight. But this does not mean an ‘equitable’ distribution, a ‘fair wage’ or ‘to each the full equivalent of the value they produce’ ⁽⁶⁾: it means the disappearance of any notion of value other than use value, the utility of products and the satisfaction derived from their production.

This takeover by humanity of all its production will radically change both the content of production itself and all human relations. By making need, and not profit, the driving force of production, it will put an end to this orgy of empty production that capitalism cannot curb. It will put an end to the frenzied accumulation that, while necessary at a certain point, now suffocates humanity under the weight of accumulated dead labour. It will make human beings masters of their own activity and allow for the harmonious development not only of their capacities, but of their very needs, which class society mutilates or distorts.

‘That’s all well and good’, said the philistine. ‘But what I want to know is, who’s going to be in charge?’

What does it matter, really? This question is so pointless that we are strongly tempted to leave him to solve this troubling enigma on his own. However, he may perhaps find an answer to his painful concerns in the rest of our study.

We have said that communism is the abolition of property, or of exchange. We must now show that this abolition entails the elimination of both the division of labour and the division of society into classes. The latter, moreover, follows automatically from the former: the division into social classes rests on the division of social labour into broad categories. Therefore, once the division of labour is abolished, the division into classes disappears. The same applies to exchange, which necessarily presupposes the division of labour. We can thus see that we could just as well have defined communist society by the abolition of the division of labour, which entails the abolition of exchange and of property.

It is simply because, since the advent of capitalism, these expressions: property (or private property), division of labour, exchange (or mercantilism), division into classes, etc., have become synonymous, or, more accurately, express different aspects of one and the same social relation.

The division of labour, which chains man to a particular activity, which enslaves him to the machine, which turns him into a cog in the machine, is only one aspect of humanity’s enslavement to its productive apparatus, an apparatus that functions not to satisfy human needs, but to generate profit and accumulate capital.

But productivity itself no longer requires, today, the specialisation of workers. What is more, technical developments and changes in working methods have made de-specialisation not only possible, but necessary. All men, not only lathe operators or agricultural workers, but also bankers or ‘great professors’ as well as professional idlers, are today completely stupefied, cretinised by their specialisation. Yet the universal character of productive activity now requires all producers to have knowledge and views that are as universal as possible, and the narrow-mindedness of its specialists hinders capitalist production itself. But, stuck in its universal-particular contradiction, capitalism is incapable of achieving this de-specialisation. At best, it will manage to create a new speciality: that of ‘non-specialists’.

For communism, on the other hand, there is no problem here: this ‘technical’ necessity indeed coincides with man’s need to develop all his faculties to the fullest and to allow his possibilities of activity to flourish. And once it is no longer profit but need that determines human activity, the free satisfaction of this fundamental need will go without saying. Just as it goes without saying that this cannot occur in anarchy, but requires an organisation of all human activities. We will deal with this ‘organisation’ a little later (which will, we hope, satisfy our unfortunate philistine). Before getting there, we must say a few words about these human activities, which are currently divided.

Let us quickly gloss over some well-known aspects of the abolition of the division of labour, such as the elimination of the difference between agricultural and industrial labour – that is, the elimination of cities – or the difference between intellectual and manual labour. Let us instead focus on the radical change that the very notion of labour will undergo. Under capitalism, labour is the act in which the separation between man and the product of his activity, between man and his activity, takes place. In this labour, man does not realise his capacity to produce; on the contrary, he is dispossessed of it. Thus, far from fulfilling himself in his labour, he is literally despoiled of it, dominated by it. This labour becomes an obligation imposed from outside, a mere means of ensuring his physical existence. And this physical existence itself, thus cut off and opposed to all human activity, becomes a purely animal existence.

This separation of man from himself is so atrocious that, spontaneously, man reacts and desperately seeks outside his work a free activity in which he might realise himself: DIY, stamp collecting, a private artistic pursuit, ‘hobbies’, leisure activities of all kinds. But the bourgeoisie, and its psychologists who today encourage the development of these ‘leisure activities’, are wrong to expect from them a resolution to the contradiction inherent in capitalist labour. These activities, precisely, are nothing but games, artificial activities that remain outside social production. They are merely the negative of capitalist labour: the latter is productive slavery, the former are empty free activities ⁽⁷⁾.

Most production today is social production. It is this social production that man must master in order to make all human activity a free productive activity. This means that in communist society there will be neither labour opposed to leisure, nor learning opposed to production ⁽⁸⁾, nor private activity opposed to public activity. All human activity will simply be human activity, participation in human activity.

This is what the abolition of the division of labour means. Under capitalism, where labour is divided among men, it divides men from one another, and man from himself. Communist society, which will not confine anyone to a single activity, which will give everyone free access to all human activity, will make this activity the concrete link between man and humanity, between man and himself.

We have said that the distinction between private activity and public activity withers away as soon as the division of labour disappears. It is this aspect of de-alienation that we will now address.

First, let us remember that this distinction is in no way natural. The individual interest-collective interest distinction, the individual-society opposition, arose historically with the development of property and class divisions. It is simply another expression of the split that alienated labour introduces between man and humanity. For centuries, this opposition has continually intensified, and system-builders have endlessly sought in vain for ways to reconcile individual interests with social interests. But they are irreconcilable: they are distinguished from each other precisely because there exist truly irreconcilable social antagonisms. And the disappearance of these antagonisms will not lead to the reconciliation of these opposing interests, but to the disappearance of the dissociation of human relations into individual and social, private and public.

This separation is particularly embodied in two institutions: the family and the State.

In today’s families, it manifests itself in two ways: both in the opposition of the family to society and as an antagonism within the family itself.

The development of private property gradually dissociated kinship groups until they were reduced to their simplest form, and bourgeois society developed on the basis of the simple monogamous family. But capitalism pushes the privatisation of property, and individualises it to such an extent that it introduces it into the couple itself, thus undermining its own family ⁽⁹⁾.

This destruction of the family, which capitalism pursues before our very eyes, is incapable of carrying it through to completion. There are various reasons for this, which we can only summarise here.

Alongside social production dominated by profit, capitalism leaves the task of satisfying certain basic human needs to a multitude of private activities. It has created the possibility of socialising all human activity, including domestic activity, it initiates this socialisation, but it cannot complete it ⁽¹⁰⁾.

Moreover, the family constitutes a reservoir that can supply or absorb labour: depending on the needs of the labour market, women and young people are drawn into industrial production, or pushed back into the family where they must live on the man’s wage alone. And the very existence of this labour reserve allows it to weigh heavily on wage levels.

Finally, though torn apart and fragmented, the family is today the last haven of communal life, the last place where man is not yet quite a wolf to man. At the same time, it represents the last ‘moral cover’ for frenetic competition, the ‘struggle for life’ that reigns in society. Under capitalism, the destruction of the family ‘liberates’ man only in the sense that it casts him alone against all others in a hostile world ⁽¹¹⁾. It thus contributes to making life unliveable and thereby aggravates the crisis of capitalist society. (All the more reason why capitalism cannot carry it through to completion!)

Therefore, there is no point in trying to ‘save the family’; besides, it is impossible. Family forms are tied to forms of production. Communist society, on the other hand, will establish the true human community, the fusion of ‘social’ and ‘private’ life; it will bring all domestic production, including infant care and child education, into general human activity. It will unravel the narrow bonds of the nuclear family, which will merge into the larger human family. In this way, it will truly liberate the emotional and sexual life of human beings. This does not mean, as the repressed petty bourgeois imagines, that people will mate at random, but that the union of woman and man, as well as relations between generations, will be freed from all the fetters and constraints that property imposes on them – that they will be formed freely, according to the free attraction and genuine attachment of one truly human being to another.

The other institution in which the separation between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ is embodied and organised is the State, which will give us the opportunity to finally answer our philistine’s question: ‘Who will rule?’. We were wrong, moreover, to mock him: he is only the representative of his class. And it is normal that the petty bourgeoisie, which has never held power and whose situation prevents it from understanding social mechanisms, should have a completely false idea of what power is. Behind their ‘Who will rule?’ there is always the image of someone who does and makes others do what they want, because they cannot – and for good reason! – understand why that someone is kicking his ass.

In reality, any leader or ruler, even the most tyrannical despot, is merely the interpreter, the agent of a force, of a social necessity. It is not the will of a leader, of a power, that determines social conditions, but rather social conditions that determine the will and even the existence of a power.

There have been societies where there was no sort of power distinct from society itself; where the entire community personally directed and regulated all its activities, delegating to certain of its members only a few tasks, of centralising execution, or representation. This was possible because these societies were unaware of class divisions, of social antagonisms. On the basis of this unity of fundamental interests, the community directly and effortlessly resolved conflicts or disputes that could arise. In fact, very few such conflicts arose: these societies without police were the most ‘policed’ in the world.

It was with the division into classes that the need arose for an authority, a power distinct from society itself. This power, the State, is not the organisation of society, but the organised form of social antagonisms ⁽¹²⁾. It is the existence of social antagonisms, the existence of classes with opposing interests, in other words the existence of the private interest-public interest, private life-public life, man-citizen distinction, that gave rise to this political and coercive apparatus distinct from civil society, an apparatus responsible in principle for maintaining, despite these antagonisms, a certain social cohesion, for containing and organising these antagonisms so that they do not devour society as a whole.

But in a class-divided society, this apparatus necessarily falls into the hands of the class that holds the very basis of social life: the means of production. This State, which would like to be the arbiter in the class struggle ⁽¹³⁾, inevitably becomes the instrument of domination of the ruling class.

Today, and in line with Marxist predictions, control of capital increasingly slips from individual capitalists who, once free owners and entrepreneurs, become managers of an anonymous capital. And the class State, the capitalist State, increasingly becomes State-Capitalist, obeying more and more directly the objective necessities of the capitalist mode of production: the production of profit, the accumulation of capital.

But this transformation of the bourgeois into a bureaucrat does not represent the birth of a new class: since it is the mode of production that determines classes, this would require a change in the mode of production. However, even a World State Super-Capitalism would, if it were possible, only be the capitalist mode of production pushed to its ultimate ‘logical’ development ⁽¹⁴⁾.

If Marxism cannot be ‘surpassed’, it is precisely because the only mode of production that can succeed capitalism is the communist mode of production. The concrete development of humanity, the formidable impetus provided by capitalism, have brought us to a point where the communist mode of production becomes the only materially possible one.

Now, the communist mode of production will make all social antagonisms wither away, all divisions and oppositions that tear humanity apart. It will automatically make all domination, all coercion, all authority distinct from society wither away. It will therefore eliminate all forms of power, even that ‘truly democratic democracy’ dreamed of by the petty bourgeois. For even ‘ideal’ democracy can only be a form of oppression, the manifestation of social antagonisms.

It is human society itself that, without any apparatus of direction or coercion, will direct and regulate its own activities. How? It is difficult for us to grasp this now, walled in as we are by a class society, but it will simply and spontaneously occur through a diffuse mechanism that will permeate all social life, that will itself be social life, human life. It would be odd if humanity did not manage to make itself aware of its own needs!

What will then remain of ‘management’ tasks? Nothing, or almost nothing. There will still remain indispensable tasks of centralisation, organisation, in short, coordination of activities. But these tasks, stripped of any aspect of domination, of any mystical aura, will simply become necessary tasks, like cleaning toilets. They will blend into the whole range of human activities. They will not be the prerogative of anyone in particular; they will be carried out by one person or another until automatic machines are put in charge of them. These machines for compiling, calculating, combining, already exist. Admittedly, one would have to be as stupid as an engineer to believe that today they ‘manage’ anything at all, when in fact they manage the production of profit, of capital. But it is not their fault, these poor machines: they do what they are made to do. Tomorrow they will relieve humans of necessary but tedious and uninteresting work.

Far be it from us to claim that we have provided, in this brief overview, a complete picture of communist society. There are many aspects of this society (such as, for example, the regenerated relationship humans will maintain with nature) that we have not mentioned. We simply wanted to recall its fundamental features, and in a way provide a framework that facilitates a more in-depth study ⁽¹⁵⁾.

We must now return to a point that we only touched upon in the introduction, the necessity, for the proletariat and its party, of anticipating communist society.

If the proletariat, if the party of the proletariat, must anticipate the form of the future society, it is not only to encourage and inspire its militants. It is above all because only knowledge of the future will enable the proletariat to realise it.

Social determinism, indeed, is not mechanical determinism. In order to be realised, it necessarily passes through human consciousness. Not individual consciousness, but that of classes, for it is not individuals but classes that are the protagonists of history. Upheavals in modes of production, social revolutions, are determined by historical conditions, but they do not occur ‘on their own’. It is the action of classes, directly determined, in turn, by those conditions, that brings them about.

It is true that past revolutions, such as the bourgeois revolution, could be carried out by classes that were not conscious of their true historical role, that had a false conception of their actions. But the real history of humanity has nothing in common with the simplistic schema of an endless cascade of successive class dominations, and the communist revolution will not be a ‘revolution like any other’, neither in its effects nor in the consciousness it will have of itself.

The proletarian revolution will be the first revolution in history to give birth to a classless society, to a society where human beings will truly be masters not only of nature, but also of their own instruments of production, to which capitalism has enslaved them. It will do so precisely because, being the first genuine revolution of the workers, it will also be the first to aim at transforming ‘labour’ into free human activity, and in doing so, it will necessarily liberate mankind in general.

But for human beings to become masters of their own destiny, a class had to emerge which, like the proletariat, is capable of a true consciousness of its goals, because it has no class to deceive in order to rally it behind itself, but only an enemy to overthrow. For the communist revolution to triumph, the proletariat must know why it does what it does, and where it is going, if not in its entirety, then at least in its living and fighting fraction: in other words, it must have constituted itself into a party, that is, it must already have acquired, within the fraction in question, mastery of the objective laws of historical development. It is because this process is already potentially contained within the mere existence of Marxist doctrine, which has accounted for these laws, that the proletariat can act in accordance with them, transforming blind social impulses into conscious class action, whereas the revolutionary bourgeoisie was under illusions about its own action, and the petty bourgeoisie has always ended up in dead ends whenever it attempted independent action.

If the necessity of communist society is inscribed in objective reality, so too is the path to reach it. There are people who, while understanding nothing about the laws of history, are so enthusiastic about the vision of the future society that they want it now, right away. Yet, however sympathetic it may be, this enthusiasm can only lead to disaster: if we can ‘define’ communist society by any one of its aspects, we cannot achieve it by starting from just any point.

Social classes, the division of labour, or the State cannot be ‘abolished by decree’. The causes of their existence must be eliminated; capitalism must be attacked at its roots.

It is not a matter of distributing certain consumer products, supposedly free of charge, produced by a system that operates ‘freely’ according to the laws of capitalist production. We must intervene in production itself, production must be directed against all the ‘laws of the economy’.

It is by violently breaking the laws of mercantile production, of the production of capital, that the proletariat will enable the flowering of communist society.

Only the proletariat can do this, because it is the only class for which it is the total and immediate interest. And it can only do so by exercising its class rule, its class dictatorship, over the whole of society.

This transitional phase will be hard and long. It involves radically changing all social structures, all human relations: this cannot be done overnight. But once it holds power, the proletariat will show infinite patience and ‘realism’; we will move forward firmly and cautiously, without harmful haste; we will take into account all particular conditions, all concrete situations. Precisely because we, who are portrayed as dreamers, know the real laws of history, we are the only true realists.

The only ‘reality’ with which it is impossible to compromise, the only one that cannot be made to ‘progress’, which blocks the future of humanity, is the domination of capital.

This reality must be overthrown.