After a short break, the working group on the general cognitive theme heard a paper entitled Humanity of Communism. Inhumanity of Civilisation which, in the first part, dealt with the historical process of the ALIENATION of man from himself, spanning from primitive communism through the first class societies of Greek antiquity up to the modern capitalist world. Useful passages were read from the works of Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Dialectics of Nature, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and of Marx: On the Jewish Question and the so-called Writings on Political Economy, as well as from The Manifesto of the Communist Party.

In polemic with current historians and psychologists, it was noted that the man truly healthy in body and mind has never yet existed so that he can only be envisaged in the future communist society, while present-day man is as far removed from his true humanity as ever, as demonstrated by contemporary misery and suffering and confirmed by the deadly state of war that capitalist man has waged against the host environment which he destroys and plunders ‘like a conquered country’.

Entering the examination, it briefly described, after the emergence of the market and money, the resulting various forms of alienation typical of class societies, from the religious ones to those of philosophical thought, according to Marx’s formula that alienation is the normal pathological condition of man dispossessed of his humanity.

Finally, the report identified in the thought of the long cycles of the human saga alternately the regret for the lost common social good, or the condemnation of the classist hell and even, in some exalted ones, who for this reason appear immortal and above time, the intuition in poetic form of the entire millennial human trajectory, destined to find itself again in future communism. In particular, the audience was shown how the class epic of Ulysses, transcribed in the period of the decline of ancestral communism, represents the allegory of the future path and man’s return to himself.

This presentation, due to the variety of quotations taken from long historical tracts and commented on with our materialist method, could not be concluded on Saturday evening and the last part was postponed until the following day. (Il Partito Comunista, No. 153/154, 1987: Summary of the Knowledge Report).

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Man is a set of interdependent organs whose normal harmonious functioning ensures his physical and mental health, provided that the environment allows him to develop his potential qualities and at the same time has adequate resources at his disposal to satisfy his material and spiritual needs, resources of which he can freely avail himself. To date, however, man has never been truly healthy in body and mind, that is to say, master of himself and of his humanity as a species, has never existed, and this because the environmental conditions, suitable for a specifically human existence, must still be created by man.

Two principles govern living creatures, to preserve and reproduce themselves according to the laws of nature, which for millions of years have guaranteed a marvellous biological equilibrium; but with the advent of the mercantile economy this equilibrium began to be disturbed, it was then overturned from top to bottom by capitalism, and the damage that planet Earth suffers daily is there for all to see. What, then, is the origin, what are the causes of so much degradation that constitutes a death threat to man and the entire biosphere?

Engels, taking the Iroquois as an example, describes how our ancient forefathers lived in a classless society, in which private property and, consequently, commodities and money were unknown.

‘Their mode of producing the necessities of life, unvarying from year to year, could never generate such conflicts as were apparently forced on the Athenians from without; it could never create an opposition of rich and poor, of exploiters and exploited. The Iroquois were still very far from controlling nature, but within the limits imposed on them by natural forces they did control their own production. Apart from bad harvests in their small gardens, the exhaustion of the stocks of fish in their lakes and rivers or of the game in their woods, they knew what results they could expect, making their living as they did. The certain result was a livelihood, plentiful or scanty; but one result there could never be – social upheavals that no one had ever intended, sundering of the gentile bonds, division of gens and tribe into two opposing and warring classes. Production was limited in the extreme, but – the producers controlled their product. That was the immense advantage of barbarian production, which was lost with the coming of civilisation (...) ‘Not so among the Greeks. The rise of private property in herds and articles of luxury led to exchange between individuals, to the transformation of products into commodities. And here lie the seeds of the whole subsequent upheaval. When the producers no longer directly consumed their product themselves, but let it pass out of their hands in the act of exchange, they lost control of it. They no longer knew what became of it; the possibility was there that one day it would be used against the producer to exploit and oppress him. For this reason no society can permanently retain the mastery of its own production and the control over the social effects of its process of production unless it abolishes exchange between individuals (...) ‘Money followed, the general commodity with which all others were exchangeable. But when men invented money, they did not think that they were again creating a new social power, the one general power before which the whole of society must bow’ (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State).

Producing for exchange instead of for needs soon made commodities and money the purpose of all human activity and of man’s very existence, led to the creation of ever new needs as they demanded ever new commodities, subjugated the whole of society, including inventors and scientists, to such a mode of production: all this has resulted and continues to result in exploitation and oppression, of which alienation is the spiritual form, together with pollution, the poisoning of the planet that every day becomes less suitable for life. As a result, the product, besides dominating the producers and being used to exploit and oppress them, has turned into their mortal enemy.

Dialectical thought represents the qualitative leap that differentiates man from the entire world of living beings and even from the higher mammals. Thanks to dialectical thought, man is able to foresee the results of his actions over long distances and even to ascertain them moment by moment, and would be able to plan his own life as a species and as an individual, to appropriate his entire humanity if he were not bound hand and foot to his original animality by the capitalist mode of production of which he has become a cog. In the animal kingdom, the very inability to foresee leads to a very high waste of nourishment. Moreover, where the absence of carnivores does not limit the number of herbivores so that there is a balance between the amount of resources nature can produce and their consumption, they completely destroy the vegetation thus condemning their own species to extinction.

By forcing man into the same shortsighted behaviour, capitalism makes him suicidal both as a species and as an individual. But the helpless awareness of rendering unusable land, water and atmosphere, and of plaguing the home where he lives, the resources on which he feeds and the very air he breathes, denounces the dramatic condition of homo sapiens, increasingly confronted with the dilemma, with the choice that cannot be postponed: either to destroy the current society in order to build COMMUNISM, or passively witness his own demise along with that of the biosphere.

‘Animals, as has already been pointed out, change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them. In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because this manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things’ (Engels, Dialectics of Nature).

It is precisely the amount of modifications-destructions, this domination of nature ‘like a conqueror over a foreign people’ (Engels) that demeans man compared to animals by as much as dialectical thought raises him above them.

The capitalist mode of production, dominated by the frantic pursuit of profit, never takes into account the deleterious effects of its activity on man and nature; it consequently generates increasingly distressing and intolerable pathological states, assailed as we are by the degenerative diseases that mad industrialisation spreads by the handful, oppressed as we are by ever more wearisome rhythms of life and work for the proletariat, to which the organism is less and less able to adapt, obsessed as we are by a sense of anxious insecurity that is at the root of growing fear, mistrust, helplessness, apathy.

In ever greater numbers than in the past, people today are questioning themselves about the causes of their unhappiness, a painful questioning to which ‘bourgeois culture’ does not provide valid answers, rather it mystifies objective knowledge itself in order to prevent the oppressed from becoming aware of the abyss into which the current socio-economic system inexorably plunges, along with man, the entire world of living beings. And the bourgeois ‘scientists’, also supporters of the dogma that capitalism is the best of societies and, in any case, the only one possible and to which no alternative exists, like the Jewish mythographer author of Genesis, are at pains to prove that man alone is to blame for the evils that afflict him and for diseases not only physical but also mental: alienation, frustration, depression, stress, psychic trauma, etc. To these toxic fruits, Capitalism neither knows nor can offer any remedy other than resignation, the fiat voluntas dei on one side, and on the other, alcohol and all sorts of drugs, from religion to cocaine, up to suicide. No longer satisfied with preaching from the pulpit, it continually resorts to sales talk from the lecterns, thus making the ‘man of science’ its most authoritative champion; moreover, while proclaiming that objective truth does not exist and that science is in crisis, it then exalts its most zealous ideologues as great scientists. Dr. Freud for example, the father of Psychoanalysis and grand master of the Unconscious, after criminalising human beings, for him infected from birth with the positive Oedipus complex (erotic attachment of boys and girls to the parent of the opposite sex) and the negative or inverted Oedipus complex (erotic attachment of boys and girls for the parent of the same sex), invented aggression, irrationality and the death instinct to attribute to man the origin of all violence, of the horrid imperialist massacre that was the First World War.

And one of his epigones, Professor Andreoli (notebook no. 31 of Le Scienze, September 1986, entitled The Brain), after repeating the old clichés about human aggression, after attributing to man the massacres and slaughters so congenial to the nature of capitalism, writes: ‘These apocalypses are linked to the plastic encephalon and therefore to culture and the future... There is a need for a brain without violence and without oppression, in which every process that could lead to the elimination of the species is blocked, in which the logic of destruction is erased... Between the circumvolutions of the brain the fate of humanity is decided’.

Yahweh expelled Adam from Eden because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil; the distinguished psychiatrist Vittorino Andreoli wants to save bourgeois society by ravaging the paleocortex and decorticating the neocortex: a fine step forward, psychiatrically speaking, after insulin shock therapy and electroshock, leucotomy and lobotomy, the proposal to remove the amygdala put forward by American psycho-surgeons V. Marc and F. Ervin to free American cities from violence, a removal to which 5 to 10% of U.S. citizens, mostly ghetto rebels, women, and Black proletarians, should be subjected.

The reign of Reason preconceived in the 18th century was an illusion of bourgeois philosophers firmly convinced that finally ‘superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man. We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realisation in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic’ (Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

What bourgeois society really is, the realm of justice, equality and freedom, we see on a daily basis. In this 20th century of ours, the contradiction between social production and capitalist appropriation has become explosive: too much wealth is produced alongside far greater destitution, some fall ill from excessive material prosperity and at the same time others starve to death. This is also why countless people of all conditions and social classes, poor or privileged, ignorant or learned, distressed by a present characterised, among other things, by the balance of atomic terror and the lack of a future, in need of security, turn to alcohol and drugs. Not content with the opium of traditional religion, they even take refuge in beliefs that once constituted the sum total of knowledge for our distant ancestors who lived in Prehistory, beliefs that did not guarantee survival then and that do not alleviate fears, anxiety, depression today.

Throughout the course of civilisation over the millennia, culture has always been the reflection of the class that, in every society (slave, feudal, and bourgeois), holds economic power, generalising and idealising its interests: progressive only during brief revolutionary periods; otherwise always conservative and regressive. No wonder, then, that the now putrescent capitalist society, together with so much ballast passed off as knowledge, as scientific knowledge, and even sold in weekly instalments at newsstands, produces, like never before, armies of magicians, fortune-tellers, astrologers, clairvoyants, witches, exorcists, parapsychologists, soothsayers, and swindlers of all kinds, who fatten themselves up by swindling their fellow man. According to journalist Camilla Cederna (Cosa Nostra, Milan 1985), in the city of Turin alone ‘the revenue from the occult exceeds that of Fiat’!

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The young Marx writes of religion (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction, 1844), which along with fetishism, superstition, witchcraft, etc., is one of the many manifestations of alienated man:

‘Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo’.

Many ailments today deserve the epithet disease of the age; only civilisation, however, is the disease par excellence, the matrix of all evils, alienation included, which for millennia have oppressed homo sapiens. With the advent of civilisation, alienation becomes instrumentum regni; it is both the essence and the aim of religion and education, it permeates all culture and the arts. But let us briefly examine the history of the noun alienation, which legally is synonymous with sale, expropriation of a good, and, in general, indicates the wretched condition of man expropriated by his fellow men of his humanity, estranged from the product of his labour, which does not belong to him. In N. Abbagnano’s Dictionary of Philosophy we read ‘The term, which in common language means loss of a possession, of an affection, or of mental powers, has been used by philosophers in certain specific meanings. 1. In the Middle Ages it was sometimes used to indicate a degree of mystical ascesis toward God. Thus Richard of Saint Victor considers alienation as the third degree of the mind’s evolution toward God (after dilation and elevation) and holds that it consists in the abandonment of the memory of all finite things and in the transfiguration of the mind into a state that has nothing human about it (De Gratia Contemplationis, V, 2). In this sense, alienation is nothing but ecstasy. 2. The term was used by Rousseau to indicate the cession of natural rights to the community effected by the social contract. “The clauses of this contract are reduced to one: the total alienation of each associate with all his rights to the community” (Contract Social, I, 6). 3. Hegel used the term to denote the estrangement of consciousness from itself, whereby it regards itself as a thing’.

Hegel takes God as the subject of history, he therefore sees God in man, i.e. in a state of self-alienation and thus, in the historical process, the return of God to himself. Feuerbach reverses this position of Hegel’s; for him, God represents the very forces and substance of man transferred to a being outside of him; and the consequence will be that man becomes all the more wretched and powerless the happier and more powerful he conceives God to be.

Great merit belongs to the young Marx for having discovered and denounced that alienation is the normal pathological condition of man dispossessed of his humanity, it is essentially the pathology of the man of civilisation in general and of bourgeois society in particular, of the man who is not master of himself. On the alienating power of money he writes:

‘The true law of political economy is chance, from whose movement we, the scientific men, isolate certain factors arbitrarily in the form of laws. Mill very well expresses the essence of the matter in the form of a concept by characterising money as the medium of exchange. The essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. Objects separated from this mediator have lost their value. Hence the objects only have value insofar as they represent the mediator, whereas originally it seemed that the mediator had value only insofar as it represented them. This reversal of the original relationship is inevitable. This mediator is therefore the lost, estranged essence of private property, private property which has become alienated, external to itself, just as it is the alienated species-activity of man, the externalised mediation between man’s production and man’s production. ‘All the qualities which arise in the course of this activity are, therefore, transferred to this mediator. Hence man becomes the poorer as man, i.e., separated from this mediator, the richer this mediator becomes’ (Comments on James Mill).

This pathological condition, especially nowadays in the most industrialised countries, with increasing frequency turns into mental alienation, which Psychology and Psychiatry also call social maladjustment, an affliction of any kind that renders individuals incapable of assuming their normal role in society. Normal role is a euphemistic synonym for imposed labour, for wage slavery. Bourgeois society divides these subjects into two broad categories, the involuntary social misfits and the voluntary social misfits: the former are considered sick or infirm; the latter criminals. To the extent that their failure to fulfil their role – i.e. the behaviour of the rebel who refuses lifelong oppression – leads them to break the law, the former end up in a psychiatric hospital, the latter in prison.

We, the Revolutionary Communist Party, have denounced the role and aims of these inhuman and dehumanising pseudo-sciences that set themselves the task, in competition with religion and education, of adapting man to society, which decrees civil death, and not infrequently the very physical death of social misfits. For the priests of these pseudo-sciences, psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists, class society, obviously idealised, that is, stripped of all its inherent brutal and hypocritical forms of violence and oppression, represents the supreme good that would fall to man to defend and preserve by conforming one’s behaviour to its rules whatever the circumstances, even if they are wars of plunder and extermination that the citizen is forced to fight. From such dogma follows the abnormality and dangerousness of whoever does not submit, or rather, fails to submit to the sanctity of the law. But, since man is a social animal, indeed the social animal par excellence, where does maladjustment originate that we do not find in any of the many animal societies, from those of insects to those of mammals? Obviously, none of the psychologists and psychiatrists will ever answer such a question, will ever tell us what the society of commodities and money, which also produces maladjustment in its dual aspect of mental illness and criminality, really is; still less will they tell us that, in order to deserve the attribute of human, it should really be the world in which humans, without any discrimination, could fully realise themselves, that is, develop all their potential qualities. The conclusion spontaneously arises, therefore, that psychologists and psychiatrists, if they were not ideologues, alienated and, at the same time, sellers of alienation, would consider man the supreme good, and thus civil society would appear to them in its real inhumanity, a hell of the damned.

For that particular alienated man who was Augustine, bishop of Hippo, justice, equality, happiness, and goodness can only exist in a heavenly realm, the Civitas Dei; for that particular alienated man who was the heretic Arius the Logos, Christ is not a God who lowers himself by becoming human, but a man who raises himself by becoming divine; in both of these alienating conceptions we find a manifest need for escape from a social reality that denies man the possibility of living humanly.

For the young Marx, ‘Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man. Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society. But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money’.

This consideration helps us to understand, among other things, why in the Christian religion, whatever the sect may be, it is always Christ, the man-God, the central figure of the new heavenly Olympus. Alienated man, however much outside himself and other than himself, never completely loses his humanity, unless mental derangement completely obscures his consciousness; and therefore, while it is impossible for him to identify with a God who always remains alien, unknowable, and incomprehensible to him, as are all imagined things of an immaterial nature and, therefore, existing outside time and space, he can easily identify with a Christ who through suffering has raised himself up to divinity: Christ, an abstraction of man annihilated by inhuman living conditions, appears to the wretched unhappy as the incarnation of the longed-for redemption. And thus the alienated sublimate their suffering, make it the means to attain heavenly bliss, which represents the pinnacle of self-alienation since the realm of man is the planet Earth and, therefore, only on Earth can and must be fully realised. The much-celebrated Sermon on the Mount, precisely because it promises the humble and the humiliated, who stoically wallow in material and spiritual oppression, happiness in an absurd kingdom of heaven, constitutes the essence of Christianity, which even prescribes as human wisdom turning the other cheek, the distilled essence of the inhuman; it sufficiently explains why religion is, in every historical epoch, an effective weapon of social preservation and of the predominance of one class over others, and explains why Christianity, whose doctrine is an updated re-edition of the old Fate, is the weapon of ‘acculturation’ of colonised and neo-colonised peoples, the former with the sword and the cross, the latter with finance capital and the cross.

The culture of slave society already toward the end of the 5th century BC was sounding the death knell of polytheism – in the tragedies of Euripides, for instance, the gods have lost their halo, they embody the worst vices of human beings – which increasingly lapsed into a formal, outward cult. Early Christianity was a gust of enthusiasm, a promise and certainty of a better world, and it brought together crowds of believers who imagined earthly redemption to be imminent; it represented the banner of hope for millions of slaves, for the innumerable plebeians of the jobless and the futureless, the inevitable consequence of the slave mode of production, due to the economic and political collapse of the Ancient World. But earthly redemption was then a utopia and the unhappy outcome of the Servile Wars, the end of Spartacus, had sufficiently demonstrated this. Then, Christianity gradually lost its revolutionary and plebeian charge, adapted and hierarchised itself to become in the 4th century the prop of the crumbling Roman Empire. Irrefutable proof of this adaptation is the Epistle to the Romans in which the apostle to the Gentiles writes, among other things:

‘Let everyone be subject to the higher authorities; for there is no authority that does not come from God; and those that exist are ordained by God. And therefore those who oppose authority resist the order established by God; and those who resist draw condemnation upon themselves. Those who command are not to be feared for good deeds, but for evil deeds. Wilt thou not be afraid of authority? Depend on it well and you will receive its approval. For it is God’s minister for your good. If, on the other hand, you act evil, fear it; not for nothing does it bear the sword, but, being God’s minister, it must punish those who do evil. You must therefore be subject, not only out of fear of punishment, but also out of conscience. For the same reason again, you must also pay taxes; for they are public servants of God, those wholly employed in that office. Yield to all what is due: to whom the tax is due, the tax; to whom the custom, the custom; to whom reverence, reverence; to whom honour, honour’.

Even the words put into Christ’s mouth (the Gospels date back to the 2nd century of the common era): ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ and ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s’, yesterday served to nail all the dispossessed without a future to their wretched condition while the collapse of slave society was now unstoppable; today they serve to nail to their wretched condition many millions of other alienated believers to whom putrescent capitalism denies any future. Indeed, galloping and ever-increasing unemployment abnormally swells the army of the unemployed who are reduced to a rabble, to a proletariat of rags, to vagrants, prostitutes and prostituted, to criminals, and this confirms the brilliant analysis that Marx and Engels made of bourgeois society in The Manifesto of the Communist Party:

‘But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society’.

Today, however, unlike in the Ancient World, there exists the working class whose historic task it is to save humanity from the tragic fate reserved for it by Capital, and salvation is called Proletarian Revolution, salvation is called Communism.

Alienation has been the disease of homo sapiens since prehistoric times – Savage State and Barbarism in which the maximum social organisation was the tribe – during which it essentially took on a religious form. Marx writes in Capital, Vol. I:

‘Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature. The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development’.

This primitive form of alienation peculiar to ‘those ancient social organisms of production’, determined by the elementary nature of the means of production, was natural because nature itself then stood before man as a hostile and threatening power that subjugated him, which he could only oppose with the GENS, a community of free and equal people bound together by ties of blood and by a fate that united all its members, a common fate because the ownership of the land from which they drew meagre sustenance was common. But with the advent of civilisation, nature and society swap roles; it is society divided into antagonistic classes of free and slave, of owner and propertyless, of privileged and wretched that rises before man, thanks to the growing and unstoppable development of productive forces and its increasing dominion over nature, as a hostile and threatening power. The division of labour into manual and intellectual will then lead to the formation, within the hegemonic class, of the very powerful caste of priests who spiritually subjugate the people, especially the great mass of workers, influencing their behaviour – spiritual domination makes material oppression more acceptable – they possess enormous wealth, the fruit largely of offerings of the faithful to the gods, are particularly educated in astrology, medicine, engineering, etc., and enjoy great prestige. With the advent of civilisation, spreading the alienation of the people will be the principal aim of the priestly ministry, whatever the religion, given what it yields in privileges and power.

All fanatical peddlers of alienation have, at all times, condemned those who rebel against spiritual oppression because they are rebels against material oppression.

The effects of alienation can also be seen in the works of philosophers as well as in literature and the other arts. The division of labour into manual and intellectual is at the origin of Idealism, a philosophical conception that upholds the primacy of the idea over nature, of spirit over matter, of soul and mind over body; it opposes a creator god to a created world or even a demiurge to an ordered world, etc.

The hierarchical pyramid structure of civil society entails a whole complex system of roles suited to man’s innumerable activities: political, judicial, bureaucratic, military, educational, religious, artistic, literary, economic, production, distribution and sale of all kinds of commodities, etc.; at the same time, it entails a large number of professions and trades that pigeonhole man into the work he does, work imposed on him by circumstances beyond his control and therefore weighs on him worse than a sentence without appeal. Man is thus denatured, dehumanised, reduced to a mere function, a cog; his behaviour must correspond, whether he likes it or not, to the role, to the status that has fallen upon him like a curse and in which he will wear himself out until old age. Thus the worker, and especially the manual worker feels, and socially is, all the more vile the more humble and humiliating his task and the more miserable his material conditions of existence. But in what does the alienation of labour that dispossesses man of his humanity consist?

‘First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind... ‘His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another’. (Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844).

The condition of the alienated is no different for all other manual and intellectual workers, from the labourer to the engineer, from the clerk to the bureaucrat, from the ideologist (philosopher, man of letters, artist, etc.) and to the scientist; these latter, the privileged, feel ever prouder the more important their social function, which is also rewarded with titles, honours, medals, which are the spiritual chains of subjugation. And therefore they do not even realise that they are reduced to the four personal data on a business card that they flaunt with narcissistic complacency. The historical Cornelia who shows off her children as her jewels is the symbol of the human; these functionaries who pride themselves on their plumes are the symbol of the inhuman, of the inhumanity wrought by capitalism.

The division of labour, of society into antagonistic classes explains to us, among other things, also the theory of the two peoples: the one people, formed by manual workers, the deprived (bánausoi in Greek), is a sentient mass; the other people, formed by the holders of economic and political power, the so-called cultured people, is a rational minority. For Aristotle, the condition of the slave is ‘as natural as is the property of which he is the object and a means like any other instrument of labour’ as we read in the Politics and he adds: ‘Those who differ from one another as the soul from the body and man from the beast (and in such a condition are those whose activity is reduced to the use of physical forces, and this is the best that can be drawn from them), these are by nature slaves, and the best for them is to be subject’. And to be subject to man is, for the supreme philosopher, the natural condition of woman. The one people therefore, like the beasts, possesses the sensitive soul while the other people, to whom it falls to enlighten, guide, and govern, possesses the intellectual soul (rational in Plato).

Contempt toward labour and manual workers, considered inferior beings, characterises all civilisation throughout the millennia; it too is the product of society divided into antagonistic classes and of the division of labour into manual and intellectual, of which another consequence is the theory of the flock and the shepherd. The supreme Homer calls Menelaus shepherd of the peoples just as the ministers of worship call themselves shepherds and the believers a flock, and pastoral staff is the name given to the stick curved at the upper end, the weapon of shepherds who lead the livestock to pasture and a symbol of the authority of the bishop who holds it in solemn ceremonies. Yet a flock of believers yields much more to the priest than a flock of sheep yields to the shepherd, but costs him far less in toil and worry.

Unsurpassed and unsurpassable symbol of alienation, of the inhuman, is the hero of the Virgilian poem, in which everything happens by decree of Fate and by order of the gods, creators, the one and the other, of Rome caput mundi. Aeneas is the incarnation of the civis romanus to whom it is not allowed to oppose the State, which sacrifices everything to its omnipotence. Just as Augustus confiscated Virgil’s muse to exalt Gens Julia and alma Roma, so the gods confiscate the will of the son of Venus, urging him to flee from burning Troy, to go in search of the land promised by fate to his descendants. And the hero, a most efficient automaton, always obeys, whatever the cost; an extremely high cost in human lives, starting with the gentle Dido who kills herself when he abandons her. To the reproaches of the betrayed lover, of the generous queen who has given him everything, father Aeneas, origin of the Roman lineage, justifies himself thus: ‘If I had been able to live in my own way, I would have remained at Troy to rebuild the city and the palace of Priam for the defeated Trojans. Even now the gods compel me to leave; compelled, I seek Latium’.

The Phrygian Aeneas is the unhappy refugee driven from his homeland by an inhuman war, damned to live and die in exile – Virgil himself was a refugee – he does not exist for himself but to realise something that is outside him, that is alien to him and at the same time towers over him, and therefore denies him as man. Hence such a hero does not please, he is the dead thing of the poem, the incarnation of the inhuman as inhuman as were the ideals of Roman statolatry. On the other hand, Ulysses of the Odyssey, who faces endless ordeals without ever surrendering, without yielding to the lure of Circe and Calypso, who allure him with the mirage of immortality as the price of his love, very much pleases. But love is not separable from the sexual being; to separate love from man and from woman amounts to prostituting it, to reducing man and woman to an inhuman function, to an object: nature is unaware of this abomination so connatural to civilisation. Prostitution, as a religious institution linked to the temples that derived much of their income from the trafficking of female prostitutes and male prostitutes, dates back to the 3rd millennium BC. The most ancient brothel in memory belonged to the sanctuary of Anu, supreme deity of the Sumerians, and was located in the city of Uruk. Ulysses desires nothing other than to return to Ithaca, to his native land, to reunite with his beloved bride and with the son whom he does not know. The ten-year odyssey of Ulysses is the objective representation – a miracle of Homeric realism – of the multi-millennial odyssey of homo sapiens who, in Communism, will finally appropriate his humanity. This is why Ulysses is more concrete than the most renowned historical figures, than the Aristotles and Alexanders; unlike them, however, he embodies the triumph of man who lives and fights for himself, and the wife and son are himself. Unlike the Suitors, alienated lovers and oppressors whose fate does not move us. Ulysses is human in his willingness to love/suffer; consequently he is alive, present, and the readers, as a human essence not completely alienated, by identifying with the character feel themselves for a moment redeemed.

Architecture and the very style of dress also have an alienating function. On the subject of architecture, our thoughts turn to the Louvre, to the Escurial, to the Kremlin, to the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Colosseum, to the Rome that Pope Barberini wanted as sumptuous to represent the earthly power of the Catholic Church as the building of St. Peter’s represents its spiritual power, and immediately the question arises: how has power been exercised in the different epochs of history? What part have architecture, painting, the arts in general and even fashion played in it? The oppressed have always erected immense structures – especially when the multitudes inhabited miserable hovels, even mud huts – to divinity and royalty, and to the former before the latter: temples, the abode of the gods, to challenge the heavens with their height; palaces, the abode of sovereigns, to challenge the earth with their grandeur.

Typical products of religious alienation are, in order of time, fetishism and idolatry.

The believer is idol-dependent, as Thomas wants to see and touch with the hand. This explains theriomorphism, anthropomorphism, the man-god monarch and the man-God Christ himself; it also explains why, despite the prohibition of Yahweh, the Judeo-Christian God, the Catholic religion is super-idolised, has created and continues to create so many saints before whose simulacra the believer prostrates himself, invoking graces and, what is more important for priests, offers precious gifts as testimony of his own faith. Among the consequences of religious alienation, one must remember the human victims sacrificed to idols and, what is even worse, the countless victims of religious fanaticism, of which Iran in the 80s is an emblematic demonstration.

When man’s aim is not intrinsic self-realisation, at least insofar as it is possible for him; when believing and possessing become more important than being; when finally any ideal (wealth, religion, Fatherland, State, duty, celebrity, etc.) constitutes the essence of living for which the many are willing to die and to kill, then the depths of alienation are reached. This is why homelands dedicate post-mortem monuments to their heroes, to propagandise heroism. Moreover, alienation has such a hallucinatory power that to those dying in defence of the fatherland this even appears as a divinity worthy of receiving human sacrifices.

Civilisation is also a dispenser of alienation in the form of fetishes and needs. In a world where inequalities of class, and thus of roles, functions, trades, and professions, dominate, distinguishing oneself from others is a feeling that is inculcated in us from birth, therefore interpersonal relationships are founded on emulation, rivalry, hostility. Class society preaches solidarity and love of one’s neighbour while in fact it nurtures pride, authoritarianism, predominance in some and subordination, humility, servility in others, in the majority of human beings. This subtle manner of exploitation has reached the height of hallucination in the stakhanovism of Stalinist memory. Moreover, in the realm of now putrescent capitalism, people are seduced, the well-to-do along with the poor, with the phantasmagorical spectacle of commodities of every sort, from clothes to jewellery, to the car; the longing for possession is excited, since possessing them is, for the alienated, a sign of social destination and promotion, growth and enrichment of personality: buy, buy beguiles advertising, pointing out even the most useless objects as necessary; one is only a good citizen if one is a great consumer, unlike the last century when one was only a good citizen if one was a saver. And because of this, ever new needs are created, and ever more unnatural and inhuman.

The problem of the ‘distinction between human and inhuman, real and imaginary, useful and harmful needs’, writes E. Fromm, ‘is in reality the fundamental psychological problem, which Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis would not have even begun to investigate, since they do not establish such distinctions; and how could they, given that the current concept of freedom largely reflects only the customer’s freedom to choose between various and virtually equal brands of the same products within the reach of his pocket... Only a dialectical and revolutionary psychology, which sees man and his potentialities beyond his mutilated appearance, can arrive at this important distinction between two kinds of needs, the study of which can be initiated by those psychologists who do not confuse appearance with substance’. Of course, Fromm does not tell us that the customer’s famous freedom of choice is itself conditioned, as much as the need to buy, by hammering advertising, by continuous sales talk. And again, there can be no dialectical and revolutionary psychology in a society where everything and everyone must serve capital, which determines the licit and the legal, the just and the holy; furthermore, psychology has no reason to exist in a society without classes, i.e. without servants to condition and slaves to oppress.

Here it is appropriate to emphasise the enormous difference that passes between science, which as objective knowledge at the service of man is always revolutionary, and the mystifications passed off as science that serve the ruling class, which however uses science in the production of commodities and weapons of extermination, only to preserve itself. It is the same difference that passes between dialectical materialism and mechanistic or vulgar materialism, idealism and all manner of dogmas. An identical difference passes between Communism which will be the ‘real moment, and necessary for the coming historical unfolding, of the emancipation and reconquest of man’ (Marx), and the commodity and money society in which inhuman man wallows, and perhaps contentedly, in the quagmire of alienation and abjection.

On the subject of inhuman needs, Marx in his 1844 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts writes, among other things: ‘[N]o eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch – the producer – in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver, in order to charm the golden birds, out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbours in Christ. He puts himself at the service of the other’s most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses – all so that he can then demand the cash for this service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other’s very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the glue-pot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man, is a bond with heaven – an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one’s neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.)’.

For more than a century the origin of man has been known to us in its broad outlines. We know, in fact, that in the course of evolution, the hominoid family was formed from the order of primates through a long series of mutations, and from this subsequently, through an unspecified number of other mutations, came the genus homo, whose specificities consist: 1) in the upright position; the lower limbs changed to legs and feet; 2) in the hand, which refined itself through labour; 3) in the vocal cords, which refined themselves to the point of allowing the acquisition of articulate speech. Simultaneously with the refinement of the hand and the refinement of the vocal cords, the frontal lobe of the encephalon and the neocortex developed: thus the genus homo mutated into the species sapiens, the only species which has consciousness of itself, of its own needs and of the world in which it lives. The homo sapiens is the only creature endowed with an extraordinarily plastic brain, capable of dialectical thought and even of daydreaming, of hypothesising a human society in which it will be able to finally realise its full potential. Utopia expresses this conscious inescapable need for liberation, the existential necessity to break the chains of one’s own millenary servitude.

Contrary to what the science of evolution teaches, what origin of man does ideology propagate?

1) The mythical creation by the work of a god, of a power alien to the world, common to many primitive religions characteristic of the Savage State and of Barbarism; among these, the most widespread is the Judeo-Christian one, according to which Yahweh created the entire cosmos, the plants and the animals, and finally moulded man in his image and likeness.

This mythological Jewish theory is obviously anti-scientific in that it supports, along with the immutability of the universe, the immutability of all living species, man included (fixism). But why is such an old and rancid fantasy still so widely believed today? For the very simple reason that in every historical epoch, the dominant ideas are the ideas of the ruling class: ‘the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’, Marx and Engels teach us in The German Ideology. And therefore every fatalistic preaching: it has always been this way and always will be this way, every naive belief that man is solely responsible for the ills that afflict him serves the interests of the ruling class very well. It is no coincidence that Napoleon I restored Catholicism which the French Revolution had outlawed.

2) So many ‘cultured people’ and so many ‘men of science’ are instead followers of the conception of the machine man, of the homme machine, which dates back to the 17th-18th centuries. It parallels the Judeo-Christian one, it is equally fatalistic as well as fixist; both teach: a) since we are the descendants of Adam from whom we have inherited sin per omnia saecula, b) since we are mass-produced machines, any hope of earthly redemption is an illusion. This is the conclusion we come to. Moreover, if man is a machine, necessarily so are his brain and psyche itself; hence the journalist who edits the most famous scientific column on state-run RAI-TV has entitled one of his books The Machine for Thinking, subtitle: ‘Discovering the Brain’; hence a ponderous volume of Psychology of some 900 large pages still fresh from the press, the work of distinguished professors and researchers, entitled the most important and longest of its chapters ‘That Machine Called Psyche’. No wonder then that among such ideologues there are those who swear that sixth or seventh generation computers will be able to perform the identical functions of the human brain. They ignore the fact that the brain is not any generic organ such as, for example, the heart, kidneys, or lungs, whose functions can be performed by purpose-built machines, but a specific and plastic organ all at once: as a specific organ, it is only potentially a human brain and, as a plastic organ, the knowledge and experiences acquired from the social environment continually change it, thereby changing the behaviour of the single individual; therefore it is capable of being educated and of self-educating. Moreover, thanks to the plasticity of the brain, knowledge and experiences become, in human beings, consciousness, feelings and complex activity also creative, multifaceted intelligence, imagination, desires.

The real nature of homo sapiens is admirably explained by Marx and Engels in many passages of their works. In the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes:

‘The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character (...) ‘An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty (...) ‘This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality (...) In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him’.

Obviously Marx is referring here to the wild animal, whose species life is regulated by the laws of nature intrinsic to it. The domestic animal, on the contrary, is reduced to an instrument of labour, an object at the service of man’s production, of his needs and pastimes; not dissimilar is the condition of the man-citizen, enslaved to a trade, to a job that degrades him to a function, to a cog of production and of civil society itself. Marx rightly states:

‘Estranged labour turns thus: Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect. An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man’.

And further on Marx adds that the capitalist mode of production ‘does not simply produce man as a commodity, the human commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with this role as a mentally and physically dehumanised being. – Immorality, deformity, and dulling of the workers and the capitalists. – Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity... the human commodity...’

In his early works, Marx called the ‘essence of man’ and in Capital ‘human nature in general’ the specific nature of homo sapiens. This species nature must be clearly distinguished from the behaviour of the man-citizen, the political animal that class society moulds in its own image, conditions and alienates in every possible way, and thus degrades, distorts, and dehumanises. In this product of a social organisation that denies the essence of man, insofar as he is a slave forced to adapt and to submit, ideologues see real human nature. Hence the dogmatic conception of man descended from Adam, of the man-machine, of aggressive, irrational, greedy, and insatiable man, vessel of every vice and of all perversions: this half-angel, half-demon monster, so dear to the bleating crew of philistine mystifiers, is not the creator of civilisation’s evils; he is rather its victim and, at the same time, its scapegoat.

Irreconcilable contradictions characterise class society from its origins, which is why it is not difficult to encounter, among the ideologues themselves, those who attribute man’s behaviour not to a perverse nature but to the environment in which he lives and which corrupts him. Plato, for example, writes in The Republic that the degenerations of the perfect State correspond, from time to time, to particular types of men who are the degeneration of the just man. For the philosopher theorist of Idealism, there are four degenerate forms of the State: 1) timocracy, in which the rulers appropriate land and dwellings: it generates the timocratic man, authoritarian, ambitious, a lover of honours and distrustful of the wise; 2) oligarchy, founded on wealth and in which the rich rule: it begets the oligarchic man, greedy for riches; 3) democracy, in which citizens are allowed to do whatever they want: it generates individuals enslaved to immoderate desires; 4) tyranny, the worst form of State because the tyrant surrounds himself with the most contemptible people: it generates the man enslaved to all sorts of passions.

Obviously such a Platonic schematism tells us very little about the slave mode of production which, by concentrating landed property ever more into a few hands, was destroying the very bases of the polis and of the Ancient World constituted by small landed property, i.e. small production, and was thus continually altering its political superstructure. The aristocratic Plato felt that Greek society was marching towards ruin; not knowing however the real causes of this phenomenon, nor that the State is always the political organisation of private property, he condemned all the states that succeeded one another in Athens. It is no coincidence that the utopians, Thomas More and Thomas Campanella, ban private property from their idealistic perfect republic, of which money is the essence, the true god, the dominant power; it has, since antiquity, been considered the principal corruptor of man.

We read in Sophocles’ Antigone: ‘Nothing infests mortals like gold; it destroys cities; it banishes men from their homes; it teaches the minds of good men to evil deeds and perverts them; and it teaches them the arts of iniquity and the ways of impiety’.

William Shakespeare in Timon of Athens writes: ‘Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?... A little of it will make black the white, fair the ugly, right the wrong, noble the low, young the old, valiant the coward. O gods, why this? What is this, O gods? This will take away your priests and your servants, and will tear the eavesdropper from under the heads of the still-vigorous sick. This yellow slave will sew and break all faith, he will bless the cursed and make the livid leper worship, he will place the thief on high and give him titles, genuflections and praise on the senators’ benches; he is the one who decides the exhausted widow to marry again. She whom a hospital of ulcerosis would reject with nausea, gold perfumes and embalms her like an April day’.

A little further on we read: ‘O thou sweet regicide! Dear instrument of divorce between son and father. Thou bright defiler of Hymen’s purest bed! Thou, gallant Mars, thou ever young, fresh, beloved and delicate seducer whose blush melts the consecrated snow that lies in Diana’s womb! Thou, visible god, who unites the most incompatible things and makes them kiss! Thou who speakest with every tongue and to every end! O touchstone of hearts! Consider thy slave humanity rebellious, and with thy might cast it into a chaos of discord that beasts may rule the world’.

Homo sapiens will therefore appropriate his specific human nature only in the classless, socialist society which, by also marking the overcoming of any form of alienation, will be the true realm of freedom, which Marx summarises in Capital as follows: ‘In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis’.

But what are the peculiarities of civil society? They are the division of labour into manual and intellectual, the existence of antagonistic classes and private ownership of the means of production that have given rise to the exploitation of the majority of the population by an economically dominant minority. Just as exploitation entails the use of the VIOLENCE necessary to oppress the exploited, so violence entails the existence of the STATE which is, itself as well, an instrument of violence that is exercised in so many different ways and, especially, under the capitalist regime, not only on the working class but also on all men and the whole of nature, the organic and inorganic world; a violence that is overt and covert, brutal and hypocritical, material and spiritual, legal and illegal. And violence is so intrinsic to civilisation that legal violence, together with that which is not contemplated by laws and therefore permitted, reaches the maximum of crimes against humanity. And while it is true that violence already appears, but only as a necessity of survival, in classless society, when the elementary nature of the means of production and, therefore, the difficulty of procuring nourishment led to cannibalism and the slaughter of the defeated in war, which constituted a normal mode of production and the robbing of enemy tribes an honourable activity, it nonetheless characterises class society.

The assertion that the State, itself as well, is an instrument of violence requires one to examine the nature of Law, a set of norms that regulate social and interpersonal relations, and the nature of Justice, which does not consist at all in attributing to each their due, and still less in the longed-for equality that exists in polite society, but in punishing anyone who dares to violate the aforementioned norms; hence the verb to execute, that is, to kill according to the liturgy prescribed by the Codes.

As we have specified above, two fundamental principles govern living matter, self-preservation and reproduction: preserving and reproducing oneself in one’s own habitat would constitute for all living beings, as long as they are aware of it, the essence of life that is guaranteed by the complete satisfaction of all needs – the GOOD of philosophers is, not infrequently, the abstraction of real and inalienable needs – protecting and guaranteeing the integrity of the troposphere, which provides what is necessary to live and reproduce, would constitute, for all living beings, and again provided they were aware of it, the specific task of Justice, to which philosophers have from time to time assigned as an end either happiness, utility, freedom, or peace. The man of Barbarism did not allow anyone to degrade his environment, he killed to defend its integrity; but the barbarians were unaware of the degeneration of the human caused by civilisation. Indeed, civilised man is so alienated that his ideals are foreign to his real species needs, so he passively witnesses the degradation of his own world. It should be emphasised here that the laws of nature (physical, chemical, etc.) are as intrinsic to the formation and evolution of the inorganic world as they are to the emergence and evolution of the organic world, and therefore all animal and plant creatures conform to them. But civil society is founded on the division of labour, on private property and class antagonisms, on inequalities and all manner of discrimination; the laws that govern it are extrinsic to man and nature but intrinsic to it, accompanying its evolution step by step, codifying its modes of production and the privileges of the class that holds economic and political power, prescribing its defence and preservation which are imposed on the citizens. For this purpose, the State exists, which, among other things, has the task of guaranteeing the peaceful exploitation of workers, metaphorically called order, social peace, and preventing class antagonisms from escalating into armed clashes. The nature of the State and its purposes are well specified by F. Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, where among other things we read:

‘As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labour by capital. Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both’.

The defence and preservation of society, in our days much more than in the past, is at the origin of all sorts of violence against nature, of an immeasurable waste of resources that the planet is no longer able to reproduce, of its disruption as an ecosystem. Penal Codes have always judged as crimes against the human person not all actions that cause mutilation, incurable diseases, and the death of individuals; they have always judged as crimes against property not all thefts, robberies, and destruction of goods but only those that they very arbitrarily contemplate as crimes to prosecute and which are certainly not the most serious nor the most heinous. Not only that, but the quibbling of the Codes impudently plays tug-of-war over responsibility, so that it becomes possible to carry out even real massacres virtually with impunity, even in peacetime. Bhopal teaches: several thousand dead, hundreds of thousands injured, damned, for the most part, to curse every moment they have left to live, and for such slaughter there are no real responsible parties to prosecute and punish according to the rulers of states and their Penal Codes. Capital has a licence to kill, capitalist production takes precedence over human life, this is the first rule of class Law. But Bhopal, this Seveso of gigantic proportions, is but a bubble of the rot that is engulfing the planet Earth, which has now become a boundless landfill of poisonous waste.

In Italy alone, pollution causes a few hundred thousand deaths every year in addition to the incalculable damage that cannot even be quantified; but no one goes to jail because polluting is not prohibited by the Rocco Code. And let us overlook the hundreds of thousands of other deaths for which tobacco smoke and alcohol are responsible, which are far more deadly than heroin, morphine, cocaine...

The rulers of the superpowers together with those of the countries belonging to one or the other military bloc, and those of the so-called non-aligned countries, are preparing the Third World War (it matters little who will fire the first missile), which citizens would have a sacred patriotic duty to go and fight.

The massacres of human beings, genocide and ethnocide, the destruction of goods resulting from the labour of entire generations, and, first and foremost, the manufacture of weapons of mass extermination are not crimes covered by the Penal Codes.

Without profit, we would not have the macroscopic State violence that are wars that have now become planetary: the last one cost fifty million lives; not to mention that from 1945 until today another hundred local ones have been fought. Without profit we would not have arsenals full of conventional, chemical, bacteriological, and atomic weapons. Without profit, we would not even have the multiform violence of private individuals, so-called organised crime along with petty crime and rampant corruption even at the political-administrative level.

This is the cost of capitalism in which crimes are also made possible by the fact that ‘[t]he executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (Marx-Engels).

To erase once and for all so many millennia of infamy, the International Communist Party calls the proletariat and workers of all countries to unite and fight for Communism.