The necessity of communism does not only derive from ‘deep historical reflections’, but is now obvious to anyone who wishes to objectively examine everyday facts themselves. Everyone is forced to recognise that Capitalism is war and wicked destruction of human and natural resources. Suffice it to say that, according to official estimates, there are between twenty and thirty million people in the world between the ages of 20 and 30 who handle weapons on a daily basis, on which some 600 billion dollars is spent annually. War is more and more a daily occurrence even in the form of the threat of a new and more deadly war than the two past generalised wars; and there is no need to emphasise the now daily ‘ecological disasters’ caused by the laws of profit all over the world.

Today, however, it is not enough to advocate, as a remedy to such disasters, the necessity of communism in a generic way. We must be very precise and state clearly what we mean by communism, given that over the last 150 years of history, the most diverse political programmes have been referred to by this term. A first delimitation must be made with those ideas that derive their existence from the utopian tradition, indeed much more respectable than the far more fetidly opportunist currents of today. Marxism, of which we claim to be the sole continuators, has never hidden the fact that it recognises in many utopians ideas both brilliant and anticipatory of the future historical course; however, it irrevocably distances itself from this since it transformed the ancient and naive vision of communism as the development of an idea to be propagated and whose success was assured by its intrinsic goodness, into a historical science that instead sees communism as the necessary goal of human coexistence.

In effect, humanity, despite all appearances to the contrary, is moving towards communism; the only alternative increasingly manifests itself as the total destruction of life on Earth. What demonstrates the objective and inevitable tendency towards communism is the continuous centralisation of economic activities: all States, despite declaring their iron will to ‘re-privatise’ the economy as a remedy for the swelling of public spending, are forced into ever more massive interventions, thus demonstrating precisely that the tendency towards a total centralisation of human activities is an objective necessity.

Complete planning, which Capitalism will never achieve, will be one of the fundamental characteristics of communism. It is false, as many believe, that the communist programme envisages the return of producers to the ownership of their means of production. What for many would be the ultimate communist achievement would in reality be nothing more than a return to the Middle Ages: if the bourgeoisie has divided property from labour, communism will not be their reunification but the definitive end of bourgeois property and wage labour.

All of Marx’s commentators, seizing the opportunity on the centenary of his death, are at pains to ‘prove’ that Marxism as a science is only that which describes the current society, and that it would be empty metaphysics to claim to predict what communism will be. This is their Marx. Our Marx, the one who has armed the proletariat with the strength of theory and will allow it to finally emerge victorious in the historical clash of classes, is decisively opposed to that Marx made for the use and consumption of the university professoriate and existing only in their empty heads. Our Marx is not the cold cataloguer of historical facts; he is the fighter for communism, of which he gave mighty anticipations in his works that constitute its true strength, invincible across a period of time the length of which it is useless to measure.

The most decisive of these true descriptions of the future communist society, always seen as joyful and fraternal harmony, is the ignominious end of every concept of ownership of land and industrial plants, but also of the products of labour and even of one’s own individual body. In fact, the very notion of property is tied to that of the person: it is claimed that, since the end of slavery every individual is master of himself, so he is the owner of material goods, considered accessories to his person. This is an idea directly connected to the end of the slave epoch, but the condition of being a slave to others or to oneself is not qualitatively different. And at times it is a very bad deal.

Our communism does not mean an insipid ‘liberation’ of the individual from social bonds, but social control, and not just of production, but of reproduction. The human species lives not only in the society of the living, but also in the society of the dead and the unborn: this is why not even society will be owner of the land, nor of the industrial plants, nor of the goods produced, nor of the physical bodies of individuals. Our thesis is that there will no longer be any ownership, but only usufruct of natural and human resources for the purpose of preserving and improving what one generation receives in order to hand it over to new generations. Thus each individual will be perfectly integrated not only into the society in which he lives, but into the human species itself, which is not transient like individuals, but immortal. In Communism, therefore, there will be no owners but only social usufruct of all goods, of nature, and of all the individuals that make up the Social Body.

The goal that we set for ourselves is not just the destruction of capitalism. Unlike any plan, however ingeniously elaborated, typical of utopianism, our communist programme corresponds to a goal towards which humanity is objectively moving. This does not detract from the fact that it is a historical outcome that will be neither automatic nor painless: on the contrary, it will be the result of the fiercest clash that humanity has ever endured, the clash between the force of the proletariat and that of the countless elements hostile to communism. It will be a painful birth, but only on this condition can the prehistory of humanity, founded on the dissociation between individual and species, come to an end and the happy era of the greatest human achievements begin.

In the varied opportunist arc there is no shortage of supporters of the uselessness of the Party in achieving such a result and advocates of the most varied ridiculous theses about ‘communism that will come by itself’ and that we could all therefore go in the direction we individually like best, dissolving what remains of the Communist Party. This is yet another and most dangerous aspect assumed by the enemies of communism: without the leadership of the Party the proletariat has already been beaten and would be beaten again. Hence the reason for the Party’s existence and for the fiercest defence of it. In the Party in fact, and only in the Party, is condensed not only the precise awareness of the entire historical process that will lead to communism, but also the reasons for the defeats suffered by the proletariat in the past. And there can be no future victory if the lessons of the defeats suffered are not transformed into a fundamental weapon against the enemy.

Indeed, Capital, like any dying organism, will put up all its resistance before its definitive collapse; it will mobilise all its resources, from economic ones to military ones. But above all it will use the weapon that it has already used profitably during the most serious crisis that has struck it so far: the weapon of opportunism and the corruption of vast strata of the Western working class, which has allowed it to win the class battle of the 1920s. Opportunism is the worst enemy of communism because it skilfully changes physiognomy as the need arises: it was tinged with reformism in the early twentieth century, with nationalism at the outbreak of the First World War, with Stalinism after the magnificent victory in Russia in 1917, and it does not hesitate today to dress in the guise of ‘terrorism’ to divert the few proletarians disposed to rediscover the true principles of communism. All shades of opportunism are already present today, ready to cage the first proletarian struggles, as has already become clear in Poland. In the sharpening of a new social clash, all the breeds of opportunism will have to be recognised and fought against by the proletariat as tentacles of the capitalist hydra that does not want to die, and only through the historical experience of the Party will such an operation of vital importance for the victory of the Revolution be possible.

If the proletariat needs leadership, it is not just any party that can defeat Capitalism. It must first of all have drawn the lesson that all other parties represent the interests of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and that it must fight them all as a single bloc. Hence the fundamental thesis that the true Communist Party neither dialogues ‘culturally’ nor, much less, electorally with other parties or groups: its function is that of destroying the enemies of communism, a decidedly ‘anti-cultural’ function. The school of the proletarians can only be the victorious revolutionary struggle.

Performing such a function presupposes having been able to draw from historical experience the lesson that historical reformism, and worse, current reformism, has passed completely into the camp of the bourgeoisie since 1914; that such reformism is transformed, in the space of a morning, into nationalism when events threaten the war crisis. Therefore, any form of pacifism, if not strictly connected to the prospect of communist revolution, amounts to open support for the interests of world capitalist preservation. It presupposes having been able to draw the lesson that the prevalence of Stalinism in Russia since 1926 has meant open counter-revolution, as its participation in the Second World War as an imperialist power and its policy of imperialist rivalry from the post-war period to today have shown. Finally, it presupposes having been able to draw the lesson that anarchist opportunism means an anti-historical exaltation of the individual, a vision of the historical process totally opposed to the communist one, which has already shown its counter-revolutionary essence in the 1921 Kronstadt uprising against Lenin’s Russia, which foundered in defeat during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, which futilely, at best, is currently agitating in the thousand rivulets of terrorism.

Only our Party, the only one that has maintained the tradition of the Communist Left in its integrity, can claim to have drawn such historical lessons to the full. This is proven by the fact that it remains the only one to uphold not only the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional phase towards communism, but also that the organ of this dictatorship will be the Communist Party alone, which it will have to wield against all other parties, even self-styled communists and revolutionaries. This decisive affirmation, together with the constant reaffirmation of the entirety of the communist programme, are the best antidotes against the historical opportunist waves and against the bureaucratic and piecard-esque degenerations characteristic of all other parties. Therefore, working within the Communist Party, putting all strength at the disposal of the Communist Party, abandoning every individualist reticence and resistance, is thus indispensable to prepare the organ necessary for the victory of the world communist revolution.

The piece by Marx that we briefly present here, taken from the chapter Forms which precede capitalist production in the Grundrisse, serves magnificently to rid oneself of two formidable counter-revolutionary theses raised by opportunism in a thirty-year-long work.

The first thesis demolished is that socialism is ‘scientific’ insofar as it would shy away from describing the distinctive features of the society for which it struggles and towards which it tends; any attempt to describe our society would therefore be utopian, a move that has allowed Stalinism, Maoism, and their variants to pass off as socialist States and societies that are purely bourgeois, struggling – to boot – with difficult national accumulations of capital.

Marxism, on the other hand, has fully described what socialism will be, precisely because it scientifically bases its predictions, not on ideals of justice and equality, but on the careful study of the relations of production and property of bourgeois society and on that of the development of the material forces of production. Marx will say lapidarily, still in the Grundrisse:

‘On the other hand, if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic’.

It is opportunism that cannot see what is concealed beneath the all-powerful capitalist State scaffolding; having lost every interpretive key, it deliberately confuses socialism with State capitalism, and admits its existence in the presence of the market and competition and despite the maintenance of wage slavery!

Another thesis that Marx’s passage demolishes to its foundations is that of the alleged superiority of ‘modern times’ over the ancients; a thesis that has as its corollary today’s superstitious worship of the latest findings of ‘modern science’, which could do everything.

The fact is, modern ‘science’ and ‘technology’ are incapable of controlling the formidable development of the productive forces resulting from the capitalist mode of production, which today, as in the distant nineteenth century, continues to draw strength and vigour from periodic commercial and productive crises with violent destruction of capital, with unemployment, wars, etc.

It is therefore not a matter of worshipping science and technology, but of demonstrating the failure of a mode of production that, having reached a certain point in its cycle, becomes an obstacle to the very free development of the productive forces of labour, impeded by the economic imperative of capital: its own self-valorisation.

If, therefore, on the one hand, capitalism produces all the material conditions necessary for the negation of capital and wage labour, themselves negations of previous ‘unfree social forms of production’, on the other hand, the ‘childish world of antiquity’, which in its narrowness did not set the individual person against the social forms of production and against nature as a whole, stands a full head higher, materially and ideally, above ‘capitalist vulgarity’.

‘Now, wealth is on one side a thing, realised in things, material products, which a human being confronts as subject; on the other side, as value, wealth is merely command over alien labour not with the aim of ruling, but with the aim of private consumption etc. It appears in all forms in the shape of a thing, be it an object or be it a relation mediated through the object, which is external and accidental to the individual. Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange?

‘The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?

‘In bourgeois economics – and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds – this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end. This is why the childish world of antiquity appears on one side as loftier. On the other side, it really is loftier in all matters where closed shapes, forms and given limits are sought for. It is satisfaction from a limited standpoint; while the modern gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar’.