International Communist Party List of english language press FORCE, VIOLENCE, DICTATORSHIP IN THE CLASS STRUGGLE (This text originally appeared in Italian in our review Prometeo, nos 2 and 4 of 1946, nos 5 and 8 of 1947, and nos 9 and 10 of 1948).

I. ACTUAL AND VIRTUAL VIOLENCE

II. THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION

III. BOURGEOIS REGIME AND BOURGEOIS RULE

IV. PROLETARIAN STRUGGLE AND VIOLENCE

V. RUSSIAN DEGENERATION AND DICTATORSHIP

POSTSCRIPT

I. ACTUAL AND VIRTUAL VIOLENCE

In the history of social aggregates we recognize the use of material force and violence in an overt form whenever we observe conflicts and clashes among individuals and among groups which result, through many different forms, in the material injury and destruction of physical individuals.

Whenever this aspect comes to the surface in the course of social history, it is received by the most varied reactions of abomination or of exaltation which in turn furnish the most banal foundations of the various successive mystical doctrines that fill and encumber the thought of the collectivities.

Even the most opposing conceptions are in agreement that violence among humans is not only an essential element of social energetics but also an integral factor, if not always a decisive one, of all the transformations of historical forms.

In order to avoid falling into rhetorics and metaphysics, and roaming among the numerous confessions and philosophies which oscillate between either the apriorisms of the worship of force, of the "superman", or of the superior people, or else the apriorisms of resignation, non-resistance and pacifism, it is necessary to go back to the basis of that material relationship, physical violence. It is necessary to recognize the fundamental role of violence in all forms of social organization even when it acts only in its latent state, that is through pressure, threat and armed preparation which produce the most widespread historical effects even before it occurs, even beyond, even sine effusione sanguinis (without bloodshed).

* * *

The beginning of the modern age, which is socially characterized by the gigantic development of productive techniques and of the capitalist economy, was accompanied by a fundamental conquest of scientific knowledge of the physical universe that is bound to the names of Galileo and Newton.

It became clear that two fields of phenomena which Aristotelian and scholastic physics had held as absolutely separate and even metaphysically opposite – the field of terrestrial mechanics and the field of celestial mechanics – were in reality one and the same and had to be investigated and represented with the same theoretical scheme.

In other words it was understood for the first time that the force which a body exerts on the ground on which it rests, or on our hand which supports it, not only is the same force which puts the body in motion when it is left free to fall but it is also the same force which governs the movements of the planets in space, their revolutions in apparently immutable orbits, and their possible collisions with each other.

It was not a question of a merely qualitative and philosophical identity but of a scientific and practical one, since the same kind of measurement could establish the dimensions of the fly-wheel of a machine and determine, for instance, the weight and the velocity of the moon.

The great conquests of knowledge – as could be shown by a study of gnoseology conducted with the Marxist method – do not consist in establishing new eternal and irrevocable truths by means of revealing discoveries, since the road always remains open to further developments and to richer scientific and mathematical representations of the phenomena of a given field. Instead, they consist essentially in definitively breaking down the premises of ancient errors, including the blinding force of tradition which prevented our knowledge from reaching a representation of the real relationships of things.

In fact, even in the mere field of mechanics, science has made and will make discoveries which go beyond the limits of Galileo’s and Newton’s laws and formulas. But the historical fact remains that they demolished the obstacle of the Aristotelian conception according to which an ideal sphere, concentric to the earth, separated two incompatible worlds – the earthly world of ours, that of corruption and wretched mortal life, and the celestial world of incorruptibility and of the icy, splendid immutability. This conception was profitably utilized by the ethical and mystical constructions of christianity and was perfectly adaptable as a social parallel of the relationships in a human world based on the privileges of aristocracies.

The identification of the field of mechanical facts revealed by our immediate experience with the field of cosmic facts allowed for it to be simultaneously established that the energy a body possesses is identical in substance whether its movement with respect to us and its immediate surroundings is empirically evident or whether this body itself is apparently at rest.

The two concepts of potential energy (energy with respect to position or positional energy) and of kinetic energy (the energy of motion) when applied to material bodies will be and have already been subjected to more and more complex interpretations. These interpretations will lead to the point where the quantities of matter and energy which appeared invariable in the formulations of the classical physics texts (and which are still adequate to calculate and construct structures on the human scale that utilize non-atomic forms of energy) will prove to be transmutable through an incessant exchange whose radius of action extends to the entire cosmos.

However, it still remains that the recognition of the identity in their action between the potential reserves and the kinetic manifestations of energy was a historically decisive step in the formation of scientific knowledge.

The scientific concept has become familiar to everyone living in the modern world. Water contained in an elevated tank is still and appears motionless and lifeless. Let us open the valves of the pipeline with a turbine situated below and the turbine will be set in motion yielding us motive power. The amount of this power was known to us before we opened the valve, since it depends on the mass of the water and on its height: that is to say it is positional energy.

When the water flows and moves, the same energy manifests itself as motion, i.e., as kinetic energy.

By the same token, any child of today knows that if we do not touch the two still, cold wires of an electric circuit, no exchange will take place between them; but if we introduce a conductor, sparks, heat and light are emitted with violent effects on muscles and nerves if the conductor is our body.

The two harmless wires had a certain potential, but woe to whomever transforms this energy into a kinetic state. Today all this is known even by the illiterate but it would have greatly baffled the seven sages of ancient Greece and the doctors of the church.

* * *

Let us now pass from the field of mechanics to that of organic life. Among the much more complex manifestations and transformations of biophysics and biochemistry which govern the birth, nourishment, growth, motion and reproduction of animals, we find the use of muscular power in the struggle against the physical environment as well as against other living beings of the same or of different species.

In these material contacts and in these brutal clashes the parts and the tissues of the animals are hurt and lacerated and in the cases of the most serious injuries, the animal dies.

The intervention of the factor of violence is commonly recognized only when an injury to an organism results from the use of muscular power by one animal against another. We do not see violence, in common language, when a landslide or a hurricane kills animals but only when the classic wolf devours the lamb or comes to blows with another wolf which claims a share of it.

Gradually the common interpretation of these facts slips down into the deceitful field of ethical and mystical constructions. One hates the wolf but one weeps for the lamb. Later on man will legitimize without question the killing of the same lamb for his meal but will scream with horror against cannibals; murderers will be condemned but warriors will be exalted. All these cases of the cutting and tearing of living flesh can be found in an infinite gamut of tones which furnish the prolific soil for endless literary variations. Among them we also could include – according to our judges of actions, all armed with the most varied ethical apparels – the incision of the surgical knife on the cancerous tumor.

The early human representations, with the inadequacy which characterized them, investigated the phenomena of mechanical nature and, due to an infantile anthropomorphism, applied moral criteria to these phenomena.

Earth returned to the earth, water returned to the sea, and air and fire rose because each element sought its own element, its natural position, and shunned its opposites, since love and hatred were the main moving forces of things.

If water or mercury did not drop down from the overturned vessel it was because nature abhorred the vacuum. After Torricelli had obtained a barometric vacuum, it became possible to measure the weight of the air, which also is a body with a mass and tends downwards with such violence that it would crush us to the ground if we were not surrounded and penetrated all over by it. Air therefore does love its opposites after all and should be condemned for an adulterous violation of its duties. In every field, to one extent or another, voluntarism and ethicism lead man to believe in the same stupidities.

Going back to the violent struggle of the animal against adversities or to the struggle for the satisfaction of his needs through the use of his muscular strength (and leaving aside the bourgeois Darwinian discourse on the struggle for survival, natural selection and similar refrains) we shall point out that here too the same motives and effects of the use of force can present themselves as potential or virtual on one side, and as kinetic or actual on the other.

The animal who has experienced the dangers of fire, ice and flood will learn that instead of confronting them it is best to flee as soon as he perceives the danger signs. In the same way violence between two living beings can exercise its effects in many cases without being physically manifested.

The wild dog will never contend with the lion for the killed roebuck since he knows that he would follow the same destiny as the victim. Many times the prey succumbs from terror before being actually seized by the carnivore; sometimes a glance is enough to immobilize it and deprive it not only of the possibility of struggle but also of flight itself.

In all these cases the supremacy of force has a potential effect without the need of being materially carried out.

If our ethical judge should pass sentence on the matter, we doubt that he would acquit the carnivore on the sole ground that his prey had freely chosen to be devoured.

* * *

In the primitive human aggregates the network of the relationships among individuals grows and extends itself progressively. The greater variety of needs and of the means to satisfy them, in addition to the possibility of communication between one being and another due to the differentiations of language, all give rise to a sphere of relationships and influences which in the animal world were only roughly outlined.

Even before it is possible to speak of a true production of objects of use that can be employed for the satisfaction of the needs and necessities of human life, a division of functions and of aptitudes to carry them out is established among the members of the first groups, who devote themselves to the tasks of harvesting wild vegetables, of hunting, of fishing and of the first rudimentary activity in the construction and conservation of shelters and in the preparation of food.

An organized society begins to form itself and with it arises the principle of order and authority.

The individuals who have a superior physical strength and nervous energy no longer resort only to muscular strength to impose fixed limits on others in the use of their time and their labour and in the enjoyment of the useful goods that have been acquired. Rules begin to be established to which the community adapts itself. Respect of these rules is imposed without the needs of using physical coercion every time; it suffices to threaten the would-be transgressor with fierce punishment and in extreme cases with death.

The individual who, driven by his primitive animality, might want to elude such impositions must either engage in a hand-to-hand combat with the leader (and probably also with the other members of the collectivity who would be ordered to back their leader in exercising the punishment), or else flee from the collectivity. But in this last case he would be compelled to satisfy his material needs less abundantly and with more risks since he would be deprived of the advantages of organized collective activity, however primitive it might be.

The human animal begins to trace his cycle, a cycle which certainly is neither uniform and continuous nor without crises and reversals, but which, in a general sense, is unrestrainable. From his original condition of unlimited personal freedom, of total autonomy of the single individual, he becomes more and more subjected to an increasingly dense network of bonds which takes the features and the names of order, authority, and law.

The general trend of this evolution is the lessening of the frequency of cases in which violence among men is consumed in its kinetic form, i.e., with struggle, corporal punishment and execution. But, at the same time, the cases in which authoritarian orders are executed without resistance become doubly more frequent, since those whom the orders are addressed to know by experience that it would not pay to elude these dictates.

A simplistic schematization and idealization of such a process leads to an abstract conception of society which sees only two entities, the individual and the collectivity, and arbitrarily assumes that all the relationships of each individual to the organized collectivity are equivalent, such as in the illusory perspective of the "Social Contract". This theory postulates the ongoing march of the human collectivity as being conducted either by an obliging god who leads the drama towards a happy ending, or else by a redeeming inspiration, more mysterious still, which is placed who knows how in each person’s mind and is immanent to his way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It is presented as a march which leads to a idyllic equilibrium, in which an egalitarian order allows everybody to enjoy the benefits of the common work, while the decisions of each individual are free and freely willed.

Dialectical materialism, on the contrary, scientifically sets into relief the importance of the factor of force and its influence not only when it is overtly manifested, such as in wars among peoples and classes, but also when it is applied in a potential state by means of the functioning of the machinery of authority, of law, of constituted order and of armed power. It explains that the origin and the extension of the use of force springs from the relationships in which individuals are placed as a result of the striving and the possibility to satisfy their needs.

If we analyse the ways and means by which human aggregates since prehistory have procured their means of subsistence, as well as the first rudimentary devices, arms and tools that extend the reach of the limb of animal man to act over external bodies, we will be led to the discovery of an extremely rich variety of relationships and intermediate positions between the individual and the totality of the collectivity which are the basis of a division of this collectivity into many diverse groups, according to attributions, functions and satisfactions. This investigation provides us with the key to the problem of force.

The essential element of that which is commonly called civilization is this: the stronger individual consumes more than the weaker one (and up until this point we remain within the field of the relationships of animal life and, if we want, we can also add that the so-called nature, which bourgeois theories conceive of as a clever supervisor, provided for the fact that more muscles means more stomach and more food); but the stronger also arranges things in such a way that the major share of the workload falls on the weaker one. If the weaker refuses to grant the richest meal and the easiest job (or no job at all) to the stronger, then muscular superiority subdues him and inflicts on him the third humiliation of being struck.

The distinctive element of social civilization, as we said, is that this simple relationship explained above is materialized innumerable times in all the acts of social life with no need to use coercive force in its actual, kinetic form.

The division of men into groups which are so dissimilar in their material situation of life has its basis initially in a distribution of tasks. It is this which, in a great complexity of manifestations, assures the privileged individual, family, group, or class a recognition of its position. This recognition, which has its origins in a real consideration of the initial utility of the privileged elements, leads to the formation of an attitude of submission among the victimized elements and groups. This attitude is handed down in time and becomes part of tradition since social forms have an inertia which is analogous to that of the physical world; due to this inertia these social forms tend to trace the same orbits and to perpetuate the same relationships if superior causes do not introduce a disruption.

Let us continue our analysis, which even the reader who is unfamiliar with the Marxist method will understand to be a schematic explanation for the sake of brevity. When for the first time the minus habens (the havenot) not only does not constrain his exploiter to use force in order to compel him to execute the orders, but also learns to repeat that rebellion is a great disgrace since it jeopardizes the rules and order on which everybody’s salvation depends – at this point, hats off please, the Law is born.

The first king was a clever hunter, a valiant warrior who risked his life and shed his blood for the defence of the tribe; the first wizard was an intelligent investigator of the secrets of nature, useful for curing illnesses and for the well-being of the tribe; the first master of slaves or of wage labourers was a capable organizer of the productive efforts for the best yield in the cultivation of the land or in the use of the first technologies. The initial recognition of the useful function they fulfilled led them to build the apparatus of authority and power. This apparatus permitted those who were at the top of the new and more profitable forms of social life to appropriate, for their own enjoyment, a large portion of the increased production that had been realized.

Man first submitted the animals of other species to such a relationship. The wild ox was subjugated to the yoke for the first time only after a harsh struggle and with the sacrifice of the boldest tamers. Later, actual violence was no longer necessary in order to make the animal lower his head. The powerful effort of the ox multiplies the quantity of grain at the master’s disposal and the ox, for its nourishment and for the preservation of its muscular efficiency, receives a fraction of the crops.

The evolved homo sapiens did not wait long to apply this same relationship to his fellow-man with the rise of slavery. The adversary, defeated in a personal or in a collective conflict, the prisoner of war, crushed and hurt, is forced with further violence to work with the same economic contracts as the ox. At the beginning he may have revolted, rarely being able to overwhelm the oppressor and escape his grip; in the long run the normal situation is that the slave, even if superior to his master in muscular strength just as is the ox, suffers under his yoke and functions like the animal – only providing a much wider range of services than the beast.

Centuries pass and this system builds its own ideology, it is theorized; the priest justifies it in the name of the gods and the judge with his penalties prohibits it from being violated. There is a difference, and a superiority of the man of the oppressed class over the ox: no one could ever teach the ox to recite in a most spontaneous way a doctrine according to which the drag of the plough is an immense advantage for him, a healthy and civilized joy, a fulfilment of God’s will and an accomplishment of the sanctity of the law, nor will it ever happen that the ox officially acknowledges all this by casting votes in a ballot box.

Our long discourse on such an elementary subject aims at this result: to credit the fundamental factor of force with the sum-total of effects which are derived from it, not only when force is employed in its actual state, with violence against the physical person, but also and above all when it acts in its potential or virtual state without the uproar of the fight and the shedding of blood.

Crossing the centuries (and avoiding a repetition of this analysis for the successive historical forms of production relations, of class privileges, and of political power) we must come to an application of this result and this criterion to present-day capitalist society.

It is thus possible to defeat the tremendous contemporary mobilization of deceit; the big universal production which provides for the ideological subjugation of the masses to the sinister dictates of the dominant minorities. The fundamental trick of all this machinery is atrocitism: that is, the exhibition (which incidentally is often corroborated by powerful falsifications of facts) of all the episodes of material aggression in which social violence, as a result of the relationships of force, is manifested and consumed in blows, in gunshots, in killings and in atomic massacres – and this last would certainly have appeared as the most infamous if the producer of this show had not had tremendous success in stupefying the world. It will thus be possible to give the proper consideration, the quantitatively and qualitatively preponderant importance, to the countless cases in which aggression, resulting always in misery, suffering and destruction of human life on a tremendous scale, is exercised without resistance, without clashes and – as we said at the beginning – sine effusione sanguinis, even in times and places in which social peace and order seem to be dominant. This is the social peace and order that is boasted of by the professional pimps of spoken and written propaganda as being the full realization of civilization, order, and freedom.

In comparing the importance of both factors – violence in an actual state and violence in a potential state – it will be evident that despite of all the hypocrisies and scandalmongerings, the second factor is the predominant one. It is only on such a basis that it is possible to build a doctrine and to wage a struggle capable of breaking the limits of the present world of exploitation and oppression.











II. THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION



The research we have engaged in regarding the dosage of violence exercised in its actual state (through physical beatings and injuries) and violence left at its potential state (by subduing the dominated to the will of the dominators through the complex play of penalties threatened but not exercised) if applied to all social forms which preceded the bourgeois revolution would prove to be too lengthy. For this reason we shall consider the question by starting from a comparison of the social world of the "ancien régime" which preceded the great revolution with that of capitalist society in which we have the special pleasure and privilege to be living.

According to a first and well known interpretation, the revolution which carried into effect the principles of freedom, equality and fraternity, as expressed in the elective institutions, was a universal and final conquest for mankind. This was claimed on the basis 1) that it radically improved the conditions of life of all the members of society by freeing them from the old oppressions and by opening up for them the joy of a new world and, 2) that it eliminated the historical eventuality of any further social conflict which could violently shatter the newly established institutions and relationships.

A second interpretation which is less naïve and less impudently apologetic about the delightfulness of the bourgeois system, recognizes that it still harbours large differences of social conditions and economic exploitation to the detriment of the working class, and that further transformations of society must be carried out through more or less brusque or gradual means. However it maintains with absolute obstinacy that the conquests of the revolution that brought the capitalist class to power represented a substantial advancement also for the other classes which, thanks to it, gained the inestimable advantage of legal and civil liberties. Therefore, it alleges that the question is only that of proceeding on the road that has already been opened up; that is to say, it is claimed that all that is necessary is to eliminate – after the most ruthless and atrocious forms of despotism and exploitation – the remaining social forms, all the while keeping hold of those first fundamental conquests. This worn out interpretation is served to us in many forms. This is the case when Roosevelt, from the summit of the pyramid of power, deigns to add new liberties, freedom from need and freedom from fear, to the well known liberties of the old literature (and this at a time when a war of unprecedented violence was raging, and bringing extermination and starvation of human beings beyond any previous limit). This is also the case when, from the base of the pyramid, a naïve representative of the vulgar popular politicking formulates, with new words, the old concoction of democracy and socialism by chattering about social liberties which should be added to those that have already been achieved.

We should not need to recall that the Marxist analysis of the historical process of the rise of capitalism has nothing to do with the two interpretations we have mentioned.

In fact, Marx never said that the degree of exploitation, oppression and abuse in capitalist society was inferior to that of feudal society but, on the contrary, he explicitly proved the opposite.

Let us say right now, in order to avoid any serious misunderstanding, that Marx proclaimed that it was a historical necessity for the Fourth Estate to fight side by side with the revolutionary bourgeoisie against the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the clergy. He condemned the doctrines of "reactionary" socialism according to which the workers – warned in time of the wild exploitation to which they would be subjected by the capitalists in the manufacturing and industrial plants – should have blocked with the leading feudal class against the capitalists. The most orthodox and left-wing Marxism recognizes that in the first historical phase which follows the bourgeois revolution, the strategy of the proletariat could not be other than that of a resolute alliance with the young Jacobin bourgeoisie. These clear-cut classical positions are not derived at all from the assumption that the new economic system is less bestial and oppressive than the previous one.

They result instead from the dialectical conception of history which explains the succession of events as being determined by the productive forces which, through constant expansion and utilization of always new resources, weigh down upon the institutional forms and the established systems of power, thus causing crises and catastrophes.

Thus revolutionary socialists have been following the victories of modern capitalism for more than a century in its impressive expansion all over the world and they consider this as useful conditions of social development. This is so because the essential characteristics of capitalism (such as the concentration of productive forces, machines and men into powerful units, the transformation of all use values into exchange values and the inter-connection of all the economies of the world) constitute the only path that leads, after new gigantic social conflicts have taken place, to the realization of the new communist society. All this remains true and necessary although we know perfectly well that the modern industrial capitalist society is worse and more ferocious than those which preceded it.

Of course, it is difficult for this conclusion to be digested by minds which have been shaped by bourgeois ideology and which have been ingrained with the idealisms pullulating from the romantic period of the liberal democratic revolutions. In fact if our thesis is judged according to sentimentalist, literary and rhetorical criteria, it cannot but arouse the banal indignation from those righteous people who would not fail to confront us with their jumbled erudition about the cruelties of the old despotisms, the auto-da-fé, the Holy Inquisition, the corvées of the serfs, the right of the king as well as the last feudal squire to dispose of the life and death of their subjects, the jus primae noctis and so forth – thus showing us that pre-bourgeois societies were the theater for daily incessant violence and that their institutions were dripped with blood.

But if the research is founded on a scientific and statistical basis and if we consider the amount of human work extorted without compensation in order to allow a privileged enjoyment of wealth; if we consider the poverty and misery of the lower social strata; if we consider the lives which are sacrificed and broken as a result of economic hardships and of the crises and clashes which break out in the form of private feuds, civil wars, or military conflicts among States; if we consider all this, the heaviest index shall have to be computed and attributed to this civilized, democratic and parliamentarian bourgeois society.

In response to the scandalized accusation of those who reproach the communists for aiming at the destruction of private property, Marx answered – and it is a fundamental point of his doctrine – that one of the basic aspects of the social upheaval brought forth by capitalism has been the violent, inhuman expropriation of the artisan labourer.

Before the rise of the large manufactures and mechanized factories, the isolated craftsman (or one who worked in association with a few relatives and apprentices) was bound to his tools as well as to the products of his work by a factual, technical and economic tie. The right of ownership over his few implements and over the limited amount of commodities produced in his shop was, in fact, legally recognized with no limitation. The coming of capitalism crushes this patriarchal and almost idyllic system. It defrauds the intelligent industrious craftsman of his modest possessions and drags him, dispossessed and starving, into the forced labour camps of the modern bourgeois enterprise. While this upheaval unfolds, often with open violence and always under the pressure of inexorable economic forces, the bourgeois ideologists define its legal aspects as a conquest of liberty which frees the working citizen from the fetters of the medieval guilds and trade rules, transforming him into a free man in a free State.

Such was the process which manufacturing industry underwent on the whole, and the presentation, in Marxist terms, of the development of agricultural production is not much different. To be sure, the system of feudal servitude obliged the labourer of the soil to give up a large portion of his production for the benefit of the dominant classes, i.e., the nobility and the clergy. But the serf who was bound to the soil maintained a technical and productive tie with the earth itself and with a part of the products, a tie which indirectly offered him a guarantee of a secure, quiet life (a situation which was also due to the low population density and to the limited exchange of products with the large urban centres).

The capitalist revolution breaks those relationships and claims to free the serf-peasant from a whole series of abuses. However the land labourer, reduced to a pure proletarian, follows the destiny of the slave-army of industrial labourers, or else he is transformed into a fully legal manager or owner of a small plot of land, only to be dispossessed by the capitalist usurer, the tax collector, or through the melting away of the value of money.

It is not in the scope of this work to go into a detailed analysis of this process. However the elementary considerations we have made will be enough to answer those who pretend they have never heard before that Marx considered the new bourgeois society to be more infamous than feudal society.

The essential point to establish is this: the differentiating criterion which must be used in order to know if a new historical movement should be supported or combated is not whether or not this movement has realized and accorded more equality, justice and freedom, which would be an inconsistent and trivially literary criterion. Instead it is the totally different and almost always opposite criterion of asking whether the new situation has promoted and brought forth the development of more powerful and complex productive forces at society’s disposal. These more highly developed forces are the indispensable condition for the future organization of society itself in the sense of a more efficient utilization of labour which will be able to provide a larger amount of consumer goods for the benefit of all.

It was not only useful but also absolutely necessary for the bourgeoisie, by means of civil war, to demolish the institutional obstacles which hampered the development of large factories and the modern exploitation of the land. If we consider these results, it does not matter that the first and immediate consequence, a transitory one on a larger historical scale, was that of making the chains of the social disparity and the exploitation of the labour force heavier and more hideous.

* * *

The critique of scientific socialism has clearly shown that the great social transformation achieved by capitalism (a transformation which historically has fully matured and which in turn is fertile with further great developments) cannot be defined either as a radical liberation of the vast masses or as a meaningful leap forward in their standard of living. The transformation of the institutions concerns only the mode in which the small, dominant, privileged minority aligns and organizes itself in society.

The members of the pre-bourgeois privileged classes formed a system of complex hierarchies. The high-ranking ecclesiastics belonged to the ordered and well-organized network of the church; the noblemen, who also occupied the highest civil and military offices, were hierarchically arranged in the feudal system which had at its summit the King.

It is quite different in the new type of society (and it must be understood that we are referring here to the first and classical type of bourgeois economic society based on the unlimited freedom of production and exchange and leaving aside the great differences between the various nations and historical phases). In this society the members of the higher and privileged stratum are almost totally free from ties of interdependence since each factory owner has no personal obligations towards his colleagues and competitors in the management of his company and in the choice of his initiatives. This technical and social change, in the ideological field, takes the appearance of a historical turn from the realm of authority to that of freedom.

It is clear however that this conquest, this sensational change of scenery, did not take place on the theatre of the entire social collectivity but only within the narrow circles of the fortunate members of the stratum of full and gilded bellies, to which we may add the small following of accomplices and direct agents, i.e., politicians, journalists, priests, teachers, high officials and the rest.

The mass of half-empty bellies are not absent in this gigantic tragedy – on the contrary, they participate in it fighting with the sacrifice of their lives and blood. What they are excluded from is the participation in the benefits of this transformation.

The conquest of legal freedom, which all charters and constitutions claim to be the heritage of all citizens does not concern the majority who are even more exploited and starved than before; in reality this conquest is only the internal affair of a minority. All the contemporary and historical questions which have been placed again before the nauseating postulate of freedom and democracy must be resolved in light of this approach.

On the scale of the individual, the materialist thesis states that since the mind functions only when the stomach is nourished, the theoretical right to freely think and to freely express one’s thought in fact concerns only he who actually has the possibility of such superior activity. Of course it is perfectly contestable whether those who constantly boast of having attained this superior activity actually should be credited with it, but in any case it is certainly precluded for the mass of poorly-fed bellies.

The harshness of this thesis customarily unchains a sequence of bitter reproaches against the "vulgar obscene materialism". This materialism is accused of taking into account only the factor of economics and nourishment, ignoring the glorious realm of spiritual life and refusing to acknowledge those satisfactions which are not reducible to physical sensations, i.e., those which man is supposed to draw from the use of reason, from the exercise of civil liberties, and from the enjoyment of electoral rights by which the citizen chooses his representatives and the heads of State.

Here we have nothing new to present and at the most we will only verify well known theories with recent facts. Therefore in regard to these reproaches it is necessary once again to establish the real scope of the economic determinism professed by Marxists as opposed to a common deformation which is more obstinate in refusing to disappear than scabies or other contagious diseases. This deformation reduces the problem to the petty individual scale and pretends that the political, philosophical or religious opinions of each individual are derived from his economic relationships in society and mechanically spring forth from his desires and interests. Hence the large landowner will be a right-wing reactionary bigot; the bourgeois: businessman will be a conservative in regards to economics but sometimes, at least until recently, vaguely leftist in philosophy and politics; the petty bourgeois will be more or less democratic; and the worker will be a materialist, a socialist and a revolutionary.

Such a Marxism, custom-made for the bourgeois democrats, is very convenient for optimistically declaring that since the economically oppressed workers constitute the great majority of the populations, it will not be long before they have control of the representative and executive organs and, later on, all wealth and capital. Naturally for the rapid movement of this merry-go-round it will be of great advantage to swing the political opinions, beliefs and movements towards the left, forming blocs and jumbled conglomerations with all the slime of the middle strata which supposedly are progressively evolving and taking a position against the politics and privileges of the upper classes.

In place of this stupid caricature, Marxism draws a totally different picture. While speaking of the ideological, political and mystical superstructures which find their explanation in the underlying economic conditions and relationships, Marxism establishes a law and a method which have a general and social relevance. In order to explain the significance of the ideology which, in a given historical epoch, prevails among a people who are governed through a given regime, we must base our analysis on data concerning the productive techniques and the relationships of the distribution of goods and products. In other words, we must base it on the class relationships between the privileged groups and the collectivities of producers.

Briefly, and in plain words, the law of economic determinism states that in each epoch the general prevailing opinions, the political, philosophical and religious ideas which are shared and followed by the great majority are those which correspond to the interests of a dominant minority who holds all power and privilege in its hands. Hence the priests and wise men of the ancient oriental peoples justify despotism and human sacrifice, those of the pagan civilizations preach that slavery is just and beneficial, those of the christian age exalt property and monarchy, and those of the epoch of democracy and the Enlightment canonize the economic and juridical systems suitable to capitalism.

When a particular type of society and production enters into a crisis and when forces arise in the technical and productive domain which tend to break its limits, class conflicts become more acute and are reflected in the rise of new doctrines of opposition and subversion which are condemned and attacked by the dominant institutions. When a society is in crisis, one of the characteristics of the phase which opens up is the continuous relative decrease in the number of those who benefit from the existing regimen; nevertheless, the revolutionary ideology does not prevail in the masses but is crystallized only in a vanguard minority that is joined even by elements of the dominant class. The masses will change ideologically, philosophically and religiously through the force of inertia and through the formidable means utilized by every dominant class for the moulding of opinions, but this transformation will occur only after a long period following the collapse of the old structures of domination. We can even state that a revolution is truly mature when the actual physical fact of the inadequacy of the systems of production places these systems into conflict even with the material interests of a large section of the privileged class itself. And this is true in spite of the fact that the old traditional dictates of the dominant opinions, with their tremendous reactionary inertia, continue to be endlessly repeated by the mass which is the victim of it as well as by the superior layers which are the depositories of the regime.

Thus slavery definitively collapsed, in spite of an obstinate resistance on the level of ideology and on that of force, when it proved to be a system which was scarcely profitable for the exploitation of labour and which was of little advantage for the slave-masters.

To say it briefly, the liberation of an oppressed class does not proceed first from: the liberation of the spirit and then of the body but it must emancipate the stomach well before it can affect the brain.

The forces for deceptively mobilizing the opinions of the masses in a way which conforms to the interests of the privileged class are, in capitalist society, much more powerful than in pre-bourgeois societies. Schools, the press, public speeches, radios, motion pictures, and associations of all kinds represent means which are a hundred times more powerful than those that were available to societies in the past. In the capitalist regime, thought is a commodity and it is made to order by utilizing the necessary equipment and economic means for its mass production. Germany and Italy had their Ministries of Propaganda and People’s Culture, and Great Britain, in turn, instituted its Ministry of Information at the beginning of World War II in order to monopolize and control the whole flow of news. In the period between the two World Wars, the dispatch of news was already a monopoly of the powerful network of the British press agencies; today such a monopoly obviously has crossed the Atlantic. Thus as long as military operations were favourable for the Germans the daily production of tall tales and lies from the English information factory attained a level that the fascist organizations could only envy. To give one example, at the time of the incredible German military operation to conquer Norway in 48 hours, the British radio broadcasted the details of a disastrous defeat of the German fleet in the Skagerrak !

This social factor of the manipulation of ideas from above, which ranges from the falsification of the news to the fabrication of ready-made critics and opinions, is of no small importance (in fact, in the news industry today the various versions of an event are already compiled before the event actually happens, so even if a reporter seems to tell it like it is, it still remains a falsehood – the event that is reported is always the event which must take place according to this or that State or this or that party). This manipulation of ideas is a component of that mass of virtual violence, that is to say, of violence which does not take the form of a brutal imposition carried out with coercive means but which nonetheless is the result and the manifestation of real forces that deform and modify the actual situation.

The modern type of democratic bourgeois society does not joke with the administration of actual (or kinetic) violence through its police and military apparatus – and in reality it exceeds the level of kinetic violence used; by the old regimes which are so slandered by bourgeois democracy. But alongside of this, it brings the volume of that application of virtual violence to a level never known before, a level which is comparable to the unprecedented level of production and concentration of wealth. Due to this, sections of the masses appear which, out of apparently free choices of confessions, opinions, and beliefs, act against their own objective interests and accept the theoretical justifications of social relationships and events which cause their misery and even their destruction.

The passage from the pre-bourgeois forms to the present society has thus increased and not diminished the intensity and the frequency of the factor of oppression and coercion.

And when Marxism, for all these reasons we have explained, advocates the full completion of that fundamental historical step, we certainly do not intend to forget or to contradict this fundamental position.

It is only with criteria which are consistent with those we have established above, that we can judge and unravel one of the burning questions of today, i.e., the transformation of the bourgeois method of administration and government corresponding to the rise of the dictatorial and fascist totalitarian regimes.

Such a transformation does not represent a change of one ruling class for another, or even less a revolutionary rupture of the modes of production. But while making this critique it is necessary to avoid the banal errors which, in line with the deviations of Marxism we have been refuting, would lead to attributing to the democratic-parliamentary form and phase a lesser intensity and density of class violence.

This criterion, even if it were in keeping with the facts, would not in any case be sufficient to induce us to support and defend the democratic parliamentary phase, for the same dialectical reasons that we have used in evaluating the previous historical changes. But an analysis of this question can demonstrate that to refuse the temptation of considering only actual violence and to take into account, on the contrary, the whole volume of potential violence which is inherent to the life and dynamics of society, is the only way to avoid falling into the deception of preferring (even if it is in a subordinate and relative manner) the hypocritical method and the noxious atmosphere of liberal democracy.











III. BOURGEOIS REGIME AND BOURGEOIS RULE



This work examines the extent to which force is used in social relationships, distinguishing between the two forms in which violence is manifested: the open manifestations which are carried out up to the point of the massacre; and the mechanism of social rules which are obeyed by the affected individual or group without physical resistance, due to the threat of punishment inflicted on offenders or, in any case, due to the predisposition of the victims to accept the norms which rule over them.

In the first chapter we have established a comparison between the two types of manifestation of energy in the social domain and the two forms in which energy is manifested in the physical world: the actual or kinetic form (or energy of motion) which accompanies the collisions and explosions of the most varied agents; and the virtual or potential form (or energy of position) which even if it does not produce such effects plays just as great a role in the collection of events and relationships under consideration.

This comparison – developed from the field of physics to that of biology, then to that of human society – has been carried out with brief references to the course of historical epochs. Arriving at the present bourgeois capitalist period we have shown that in this period the play of force and violence in the economic, social, and political relationships between individuals and above all between classes not only has an enormous and fundamental role but – inasmuch as we can measure it – becomes much more frequent and widespread than in previous epochs and pre-capitalist societies.

In a more exhaustive study we could use a social-economic measurement if we try to translate into figures the value of human labour extorted to the benefit of the privileged classes from the great masses who work and produce. In modern society there is a constant decrease in the proportion of individuals and economic groupings which succeed in living in their own autonomous cycle, consuming what they produce without external relationships. Simultaneously there has been an enormous increase in the number of those who work for others and who receive a remuneration that compensates them for only a part of their work; likewise there has been an enormous increase in the social gap between the living standard of the great productive majority and that of the members of the possessing classes. In fact what is important is not the individual existence of one or only a few tycoons who live in luxury, but the mass of wealth which a social minority can use for its pleasures of all kinds while the majority receives only a little more than is absolutely necessary for existence.

Since our subject deals more with the political aspect of the question than the economic, the question we must pose in regard to the regime of capitalist privilege and rule is that of the relationship between the use of brute violence and that of potential force which compels the impoverished to submit to the rules and laws in force without violating them or revolting.

This relationship varies greatly according to the various phases of the history of capitalism and according to the various countries where capitalism has been introduced. We can cite examples of neutral and idyllic zones where the power of the State is exalted as being freely accepted by all the citizens; where there is only a small police force and where even the social conflicts between workers and employers are solved through peaceful means. But these Switzerlands tend, in time and space, to become more and more rare oases in the worldwide capitalist system.

At its birth capitalism could not conquer its ground without open and bloody struggle since the shackles of the State organization of the old regime could only be broken through force. Its expansion in the non-European continents with its colonial expeditions and wars of conquest and pillage was no less bloody, because only through massacre could the mode of social organization of the native population be replaced by that of capitalism, and in some cases this meant the extermination of entire human races, something unknown in prebourgeois civilization.

In general, after this virulent phase of the birth and foundation of capitalism, an intermediate period of its development begins. Although this period is marked by constant social clashes, by the repression of revolts of the exploited classes, and by wars between States which however do not embrace all the known world, it is the one which has more than any other given rise to the liberal and democratic apologia that falsely depicts a world in which – except for exceptional and pathological cases – the relationships between individuals and between social strata are supposed to have taken place with a maximum of order, peace, spontaneous consent and free acceptance.

Let us say incidentally that in these colonial or national wars, revolts, insurrections, or repressions – which constitute, even in the smoother and calmer phases of bourgeois history, the areas in which open violence is unleashed – the bloodshed and the number of victims in these crises tend to increase, all the other conditions being equal, with respect to the crises of the past, and for this we can thank progressive bourgeois technological development. In fact, in parallel with the improvement of the means of production, the means of attack and destruction are made more and more potent, more powerful weapons are created, and the casualties which Caesar’s praetorians could inflict by putting rebels to the sword were a joke compared to those which grapeshot fire can inflict against the insurgents of the modern epoch.

But our aim is to show that even in long phases of bloodless enforcement of capitalist rule, class force does not cease to be present, and its influence in its potential state against the possible deviations of isolated individuals, organized groups or parties remains the primary factor in conserving the privileges and institutions of the ruling class. We have already cited among the manifestations of this class force not only the entire State apparatus, with its armed forces and its police, even when its weapons are kept at rest, but also the whole arsenal of ideological indoctrination which justifies bourgeois exploitation and is carried out by means of the schools, the press, the church and all the other ways by which the opinions of the masses are moulded. This epoch of apparent tranquillity is only disturbed occasionally by unarmed demonstrations of the proletarian class organizations; and the bourgeois on-lookers can say, after the Mayday march, as in the verses of the poet: "Once more, thanks to Christ and to the police chief, we have had no trouble". When social unrest rumbles more threateningly, the bourgeois State begins to show its power by taking measures to maintain order. A technical police expression gives a good idea of the use of potential violence: "the police and the troops are confined to barracks". This means that there is no street fighting yet, but that if the bourgeois order and the bosses’ rights were threatened the armed forces would leave their quarters and open fire.

The revolutionary critique has never let itself be hypnotized by the appearances of civility and serene equilibrium of the bourgeois order. It long ago established that even in the most democratic republic the political State constitutes the executive committee of the ruling class; and thus it decisively demolished the stupid theories which would have us believe that after the destruction of the old feudal, clerical and autocratic State a new form of State arises in which, thanks to elective democracy, all the elements of society, whatever their economic condition may be, are represented and protected with equal rights. The political State, even and primarily the representative and parliamentary one, constitutes an apparatus of oppression. It can be compared to an energy reservoir which stores the forces of domination of the economically privileged class. This reservoir is such that these forces are kept in the potential state in situations where social revolt does not near the point of exploding, but it unleashes them in the form of police repression and bloody violence as soon as revolutionary tremors rise from the social depths.

This is the sense of the classical analysis of Marx and Engels on the relationship between society and State, or in other words between social classes and the State. All attempts to shake this fundamental point of the proletariat’s class doctrine have been crushed in the restoration of the revolutionary principles carried out by Lenin, Trotsky and the Communist International immediately after World War I.

There is no scientific sense in establishing the existence of a quantum of potential energy if it is not possible to foresee that, in subsequent situations, it will be liberated in the kinetic state. Likewise the Marxist definition of the character of the bourgeois political State would remain meaningless and ineffective if it did not involve the certainty that in the culminating phase this organ of power of capitalism will inevitably unleash all its resources in the kinetic state against the eruption of the proletarian revolution.

Moreover, the equivalent of the Marxist thesis on the increase of poverty, and on the accumulation and concentration of capital could, in the sphere of politics, be nothing other than the concentration and increase of the energy contained within the State apparatus. In fact once the deceitfully peaceful phase of capitalist era had been closed with the outburst of the war of 1914 and with the economic characteristics evolving towards monopoly and towards the active intervention of the State in the economy and in the social struggles, it became evident – above all in the classical analysis of Lenin – that the political State of bourgeois regimes was taking on more and more decided forms of strict domination and police oppression. We have established in other works that the third and most modern phase of capitalism is economically defined as monopolist, introducing economic planning, and politically defined as totalitarian and fascist.

When the first fascist regimes appeared they were considered in the more immediate and commonplace interpretations as a restriction and an abolition of the so-called parliamentary and legal "guaranteed" rights. In actuality it was simply a question, in certain countries, of a passage of the political energy of domination of the capitalist class from the potential state to the kinetic state.

It was clear to every follower of the Marxist perspective – a perspective defined as catastrophic by the stupid castrators of that doctrine’s revolutionary strength – that the increasing severity of class antagonisms would move the conflicts of economic interests to the level of an erupting revolutionary attack launched by the proletarian organizations against the citadel of capitalist State, and that the latter would uncover its artillery and engage in the supreme struggle for its survival.

In certain countries and in certain situations, for example in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933, the tensions of the social relations, the instability of capitalist economic fabric and the crisis of the State apparatus itself due to the war became so acute that the ruling class could see that the inevitable moment was at hand where, with all the lies of democratic propaganda being exhausted, the only solution was the violent clash between the opposed classes.

Then there occurred what was correctly defined as a capitalists’ offensive. Until then the bourgeois class, with its economic exploitation in vigorous development, had seemed to have been slumbering behind the apparent kindliness and tolerance of its representative and parliamentary institutions. Having succeeded in mastering a very significant degree of historical strategy, it broke the hesitations and took the initiative, thinking that rather than a supreme defence of the State’s fortress against the assault of revolution (which, according to Marx’s and Lenin’s teaching, does not aim at taking over the State but at totally smashing it) it was preferable to attempt a sally out of its bulwarks, and to launch an offensive action aiming at the destruction of the bases of the proletarian organization.

Thus a situation which was clearly foreseen in the revolutionary perspective was accelerated to a certain extent. In effect, Marxist communists had never thought that it would be possible to carry out their program without this supreme clash between the opposing class forces; and moreover, the analysis of the most recent evolution of capitalism and of the monstrous enlargement of its State machineries with their enormous framework clearly indicated that such a development was inevitable.

The great error of judgement, tactics, and strategy which favoured the victory of the counter-revolution was that of deploring capitalism’s powerful shift from the democratic hypocrisy to open violence, as if it were a movement that could be historically reversed. Instead of counterpoising to this movement the necessity of the destruction of capitalist power, it was instead counterpoised the stupid pacifist pretension that capitalism would go in reverse, backwards along its path, in a direction opposite to the one which we Marxists have always ascribed to it, and that for the personal convenience of some cowardly rogue politicians, capitalism would be kind enough not to unsheathe its class weapons and return to the inconsistent and obsolete position of mobilization without war which constituted the "pleasant" aspect of the previous period.

The basic mistake is to have been astonished, to have whined or to have deplored that the bourgeoisie carried out its totalitarian dictatorship without mask, whereas we knew very well that this dictatorship had always existed, that the State apparatus had always had, potentially if not in actuality, the specific function of wielding, preserving and defending the power and privilege of the bourgeois minority against revolution. The error consisted in preferring a bourgeois democratic atmosphere to a fascist one; in shifting the battle front from the perspective of the proletarian conquest of power to that of an illusory restoration of a democratic method of capitalist government in the place of the fascist one.

The fatal mistake was of not understanding that in any case the eve of the revolution which had been awaited for so many decades would reveal a bourgeois State drawn up for the armed defence against the proletarian advance, and that therefore such a situation must appear as a progress, and not as a regression, in comparison with the years of apparent social peace and of limited impetus from the class force of the proletariat. The damage done to the development of the revolutionary energies and to the prospects of the realization of a socialist society does not stem from the fact that the bourgeoisie organized in a fascist form is supposedly more powerful and more efficient in defending its privilege than a bourgeoisie still organized in a democratic form. Its class power and energy is the same in both cases. In the democratic phase it is in its potential state: over the muzzle of the cannon there is the innocuous protection of a covering. In the fascist phase energy is manifested in the kinetic state: the hood is taken off and the shot is fired. The defeatist and idiotic request which the treacherous leaders of the proletariat make to exploitative and oppressive capitalism is that it put back the deceitful covering over the muzzle of the weapon. If this were done the efficiency of the domination and exploitation would not have diminished but only increased thanks to the revitalized expedient of legalistic deception.

Since it would be even more insane to ask the enemy to disarm, we must gladly welcome the fact that, compelled by the urgencies of the situation, it unveils its own weapons, for then these weapons will be less difficult to face and to defeat.

Therefore the bourgeois regime of open dictatorship is an inevitable and predicted phase of the historical life of capitalism and it will not die without having gone through this phase. To fight to postpone this unmasking of the energies of the antagonistic social classes, to carry on a vain and rhetorical propaganda inspired by a stupid horror of dictatorship in principle, all this work can only favour the survival of capitalist regime and the prolonged subjection and oppression of the working class.

* * *

Another well-founded conclusion, though it is quite likely to cause an uproar from all the geese of the bourgeois left, is that the comparison between the democratic phase of capitalism and the totalitarian phase shows that the amount of class oppression is greater in the first (although it is obvious that the ruling class always tends to choose the method which is more useful for its conservation). Fascism undoubtedly unleashes a greater mass of police and repressive violence, including bloody repression. But this aspect of kinetic energy primarily and gravely affects, besides the very few authentic leaders and revolutionary militants of the working class movement, a stratum of middle bourgeois professional politicians who pretend to be progressive and friends of the working class, but who are nothing but the militia specially trained by the capitalists for use in the periods of the parliamentary comedy. Those who do not adapt their style and livery in time are ousted with a kick in the ass – which is the main reason for their outcries.

As for the mass of the working class, it continues to be exploited as it has always been in the economic field. And the vanguard elements which form within the class for the assault against the present regime continue as always to receive – as soon as they take the correct anti-legalistic way of action – the lead which is reserved for them even by the bourgeois democratic governments. This we can see in countless examples, as with the republican governments in France in 1848 and 1871, with the Social Democrats in Germany in 1919, etc.

But the new method introducing planning in the management of capitalist economy – which in relation to the antiquated unlimited classical liberalism of the past constitutes a form of self-limitation of capitalism – leads to a levelling of the extortion of surplus value around an average. The reformist measures which the right-wing socialists had advocated for many decades are adopted. In such a way the sharpest and extreme edges of capitalist exploitation are eased, while forms of public assistance develop. All this aims at delaying the crises of class conflicts and the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. But undoubtedly it would be impossible to reach this aim without having succeeded in reconciling, to a certain degree, the open repression against the revolutionary vanguard with a relief of the most pressing economic needs of the great masses. These two aspects of the historical drama in which we live are a condition for one another. Churchill in his latter days said with good reason to the Labourites: you won’t be able to found a State-run economy without a police State. More interventions, more regulations, more controls, more police. Fascism consists of the integration of artful social reformism with the open armed defence of State power. Not all the examples of fascism are at the same level. Nevertheless the German one, as pitiless in the elimination of its enemies as one may say, had achieved a very high average standard of living economically speaking and an administration that technically was excellent, and when it imposed war restrictions these also fell on the propertied classes and this to an unexpected extent.

Therefore, even though bourgeois class oppression in the totalitarian stage increases the proportion of the kinetic use of violence with respect to the potential one, the total pressure on the proletariat does not increase but diminishes. It is precisely for this reason that the final crisis of the class struggle historically undergoes a delay.

The death of revolutionary energies lies in class collaboration. Democracy is class collaboration through lots of talk, fascism is plain class collaboration in fact. We are living in the midst of this latter historical stage. The rekindling of class struggle will dialectically arise from a later stage, but for the time being let us establish that it cannot proceed through rallying the working classes behind the slogan of the return to liberalism, in which they have nothing to gain, not even relatively.

* * *

This work deals mainly with the use of force, violence and dictatorship by the ruling classes. It does not exhaust the subject of the use of such energies by the proletariat in the struggle for the conquest of power and in the exercise of power, an important question that will be dealt with in other party writings. But still remaining within the field of the study of the bourgeois forms of dictatorship, it would do well to specify that when we speak about the fascist, totalitarian and dictatorial capitalist method we always refer to collective organizations and actions. We do not see the prevailing factor of the historical scene to be individual dictators, who so greatly occupy the attention of a public that has been artfully enthralled, whether it is by their supporters or their adversaries.

During the last world war, two of the Big Three have been eliminated: Roosevelt and Churchill. But nothing has substantially changed in the course of the events we are delaying with. We will leave Italy aside because here the examples of fascism and anti-fascism have had a very clownish character (the first models of an innovation always make one laugh, as the early automobiles which can be seen in a museum compared with a modern mass produced one). In Germany the person of Hitler represented a superfluous factor of the powerful Nazi organization of forces. The Soviet regime will do very well without Stalin in due time. The other impressive machinery of domination, that of Japan, was based upon castes and classes without a personal leader.

We can escape from the overwhelming tide of lies which gorges modern public opinion only if we relentlessly drive away both the fetish of the individual as a protagonist of history, the ordinary person, the man in the street, and that of the brilliant man, the man in the centre of the stage, the Leader, the Great Man.

That we live in an epoch of self-government of the peoples, not even the simpletons believe.

But we are not in the hands of a few great men either. We are in the hands of a very few great class Monsters, of the greatest States of the world, machines of domination, whose enormous power weighs upon everybody and everything. Their open accumulation of potential energies foreshadows, in all corners of the earth, the kinetic use of immense and crushing forces when the conservation of the present institutions will require it. And these forces will be unleashed without the slightest hesitation on any side in the face of civil, moral and legal scruples, those ideal principles which are croaked about from morning till night by the infamous, purchased, hypocrisy of propagandas.











IV. PROLETARIAN STRUGGLE AND VIOLENCE



The first three parts of this work have briefly outlined the historical development of the class struggles up to present-day bourgeois society. They presented the perspective which Marxist socialism has long given on this subject but which nevertheless continues to be an object of deviation and confusion.

To clarify the question we made the fundamental distinction between energy in the potential state (energy which is capable of entering into action but is not yet acting) and energy in the actual or kinetic state (energy which has already been set into motion and is producing its various effects). We explained the nature of this distinction in the physical world and extended it in a very simple way to the field of organic life and human society.

The problem was then to identify violence and coercive force in the events of social life; we have emphasized that this is operating not only when there is a brutal physical act against the human body such as physical restraint, beating, and killing, but also in that much larger field where the actions of individuals are coerced through the simple threat and under the penalty of violence. This coercion arises inseparably with the first forms of collective productive activity and thus of what is considered to be civilized and political society. Coercion is an indispensable factor in the development of the whole course of history and in the succession of institutions and classes. The question is not to exalt or condemn it, but to recognize and consider it in the context of the different historical epochs and the various situations.

The second section compared feudal society with bourgeois capitalist society. Its aim was to illustrate the thesis, which of course is not new, that the passage from feudalism to capitalism – an event fundamental in the evolution of the technology of production as well as in the evolution of the economy – has not been accompanied by a decrease in the use of force, violence, and social oppression.

For Marx, the capitalist form of economy and society is the most antagonist that history has presented until now. In its birth, its development, and its resistance against its own destruction, capitalism reaches a level of exploitation, persecution, and human suffering unknown before. This level is so high in quality and quantity, in potential and mass, in severity and range and – if we translate it into the ethical-literary terms which are not ours – in ferocity and amplitude of application, that it has reached the masses, the peoples, and the races of all corners of the earth.

Finally the third section dealt with the comparison between the liberal-democratic and the fascist-totalitarian forms of bourgeois rule, showing that it is an illusion to consider the first to be less oppressive and more tolerant than the second. If we take into consideration not violence as it is openly manifested, but instead the actual potential of the modern State apparatuses, that is to say their ability and capacity to resist all antagonistic, revolutionary assaults, we can easily substitute the blind common-place present-day attitude, one that rejoices because two world wars supposedly drove back the forces of reaction and tyranny, and replace it by the obvious and clear verification that the capitalist system has more than doubled its strength, a strength concentrated in the great State monsters and in the world Leviathan of class rule now being constructed. Our proof of this is not based on an examination of the juridical hypocrisy or of the written or oratorical demagogy of today, which anyway are more revolting than they were under the defeated regimes of the Axis powers. Instead it is based on the scientific calculation of the financial, military, and police forces, in the measurement of the frantic accumulation and concentration of private or public, but always bourgeois, capital.

In comparison to 1914, 1919, 1922, 1933, and 1943, the capitalist regime of 1947 weighs down more, always more, in its economic exploitation and in its political oppression of the working masses and of everyone and everything that crosses its path. This is true for the "Great Powers" after their totalitarian suppression of the German and Japanese State machines. It is also and no less true even for the Italian State: although defeated, derided, forced into vassalage, saleable and sold in all direction, it is nevertheless more armed with police and more reactionary now than under Giolitti and Mussolini, and it will be even more reactionary if it passes from the hands of De Gasperi to those of the left groups.

Having summarized the first three parts, we must now deal with the question of the use of force and violence in the social struggle when these methods of action are taken up by the revolutionary class of the present epoch, the modern proletariat.

* * *

In the course of about a century, the method of class struggle has been accepted in words by so many and such various movements and schools that the most widely differing interpretations have clashed in violent polemics, reflecting the ups and downs and the turning points of the history of capitalism and of the antagonisms to which it gives rise.

The polemic has been clarified in a classic way in the period of World War I and of the Russian Revolution. Lenin, Trotsky, and the left-wing communist groups who gathered in Moscow’s International settled the questions of force, violence, the seizure of power, the State, and the dictatorship in a way we must consider as definitive on the theoretical and programmatic level.

Opposed to them were the countless deformations of social-democratic opportunism. It is not necessary to repeat our refutation of these positions but it is useful to simply recall some points which clarify the concepts which distinguish us. Moreover, many of these false positions, which were then trampled to the ground and which seemed to have been dispersed forever, have reappeared in almost identical forms in the working class movement today.

Revisionism pretended to show that the prediction of a revolutionary clash between the working class and the defensive network of bourgeois power was an obsolete part of the Marxist system. Falsifying and exploiting the Marxist texts (in this case a famous preface and letter of Engels) it maintained that the progress of military technology precluded any perspective of a victorious armed insurrection. It claimed instead that the working class would achieve power very shortly through legal and peaceful means due to the development and strengthening of working class unions and of parliamentary political parties.

Revisionism sought to spread throughout the ranks of the working class the firm conviction that IT WAS NOT POSSIBLE to overthrow the power of the capitalist class by force and, furthermore, that IT WAS POSSIBLE to realize socialism after conquering the executive organs of the State by means of a majority in the representative institutions.

Left Marxists were accused of a worship of violence, elevating it from a means to an end and invoking it almost sadistically even when it was possible to spare it and attain the same result in a peaceful way.

But in the face of the eloquence of the historical developments this polemic soon unveiled its content. It was a mystique not so much of non-violence as it was an apology of the principles of the bourgeois order.

After the armed revolution triumphed in Leningrad over the resistance of both the Czarist regime and the Russian bourgeois class, the argument that IT WAS NOT POSSIBLE to conquer power with arms changed into the argument that IT MUST NOT BE DONE, even if it is possible. This was combined with the idiotic preaching of a general humanitarism and social pacifism which of course repudiates the violence utilized for the victory of the working class revolutions, but does not denounce the violence used by the bourgeoisie for its historical revolutions, not even the extreme terroristic manifestations of this violence. Moreover, in all the controversial decisions, in historical situations which were decisive for the socialist movement, when the right contested the propositions of direct action, it admitted that it would have agreed with the necessity of resorting to insurrection if it were for other objectives. For example, the Italian reformist socialists in May 1915 opposed the proposal for a general strike at the moment of war mobilization, using ideological and political arguments in addition to a tactical evaluation of the relation of forces; but they admitted that if Italy intervened in the war on the side of Austria and Germany they would call the people to insurrection....

In the same way, those who theorize the "utilization" of legal and democratic ways are ready to admit that popular violence is legitimate and necessary when there is an attempt from above to abolish constitutional rights. But how can it be maintained then that the development of military technology in the hands of the State is no longer an insurmountable obstacle? How can it be guaranteed, in the event of a peaceful conquest of the majority, that the bourgeoisie will not use those military means in order to maintain power? How can the proletariat in these situations victoriously use the violence which is criticized and condemned as a class means? The social democrats cannot answer this because in doing so they would be obliged to confess that they are pure and simple accomplices in preserving bourgeois rule.

A system of tactical slogans such as theirs can in fact be reconciled only with a clearly anti-Marxist apology of bourgeois civilization, which precisely is the essence of the politics of those parties which have risen from the deformed stump of anti-fascism.

The social-democratic thesis contends that the last historical situation where the recourse to violence and to forms of civil war was necessary was precisely that situation which enabled the bourgeois order to rise from the ruins of the old feudal and despotic regimes. With the conquest of political liberties an era of civilized and peaceful struggles is supposedly opened in which all other conquests, such as economic and social equality, can be realized without further bloody conflicts.

According to this ignoble falsification, the historical movement of the modern proletariat and socialism are no longer the most radical battle of history. They are no longer the destruction of an entire world down to its foundations, from its economic framework and its legal and political system to its ideologies still impregnated with all the lies transmitted by previous forms of oppression and still poisoning even the very air we breathe.

Socialism is reduced to a stupid and irresolute combination of supposed legal and constitutional conquests, by which the capitalist form has allegedly enriched and enlightened society, with vague social postulates which should be graftable and transplantable onto the trunk of the bourgeois system.

Marx measured the irresistible and increasing pressures in the social depths which will cause the mantle of the bourgeois forms of production to explode, just as geological cataclysms break the crust of the planet. His formidable historical vision of social antagonisms is replaced by the contemptible deception of a Roosevelt who adds to the short list of bourgeois liberties those of freedom from fear and freedom from need, or of a Pius XII who, after blessing once again the eternal principle of property in its modern capitalist form, pretends to weep over the abyss which exists between the poverty of the multitude and the monstrous accumulations of wealth.

Lenin’s theoretical restoration of the revolutionary doctrine re-established the definition of the State as a machine which one social class uses to oppress other classes. This definition is fully and particularly valid for the modern bourgeois, democratic, and parliamentary State. But as a crowning point of the historical polemic, it must be made clear that the proletarian class force cannot take over this machine and use it for its own purposes; instead of conquering it, it must smash it and break it to pieces.

The proletarian struggle is not a struggle that takes place within the State and its organs but a struggle outside the State, against it, and against all its manifestations and forms.

The proletarian struggle does not aim at seizing or conquering the State as if it were a fortress which the victorious army seeks to occupy. Its aim instead is to destroy it and to raze its defeated defences and fortifications to the ground.

Yet after the destruction of the bourgeois State a form of political State becomes necessary, i.e., the new organized class power of the proletariat. This is due to the necessity of directing the use of an organized class violence by means of which the privileges of capital are rooted out and the organization of the freed productive forces in the new, non-private, non-commodity communist forms is made possible.

Consequently it is correct to speak of the conquest of power, meaning a non-legal, non-peaceful, but violent, armed, revolutionary conquest. It is correct to speak of the passage of power from the hands of the bourgeoisie to those of the proletariat precisely because our doctrine considers power not only authority and law based on the weight of the tradition of the past but also the dynamics of force and violence thrust into the future, sweeping away the barriers and obstacles of institutions. It would not be exact to speak of the conquest of the State or the passage of the State from the administration of one class to that of another precisely because the State of a ruling class must perish and be shattered as a condition for the victory of the formerly subjected class. To violate this essential point of Marxism, or to make the slightest concession to it (for instance allowing the possibility that the passage of power can take place within the scope of a parliamentary action, even one accompanied by street fighting and battles, and by acts of war between States) leads to the utmost conservatism. This is because such a concession is tantamount to conceding that the State structure is a form which is opened to totally different and opposed contents and therefore stands above the opposing classes and their historical conflict. This can only lead to the reverential respect of legality and the vulgar apology for the existing order.

It is not only a question of a scientific error of evaluation, but also of a real degenerative historical process which took place before our eyes. It is this process which has led the ex-communist parties down hill, turning their backs on Lenin’s theses and arriving at the coalition with the social-democratic traitors, at the "worker’s government", and then at the democratic government, that is to say a direct collaboration with the bourgeoisie and at its service.

With the unequivocally clear thesis of the destruction of the State, Lenin re-established the thesis of the establishment of the proletarian State. The second thesis does not please the anarchists who, though they had the merit of advancing the first, had the illusion that immediately after bourgeois power was smashed society could dispense with all forms of organized power and therefore with the political State, that is to say with a system of social violence. Since the transformation of the economy from private to socialist cannot be instantaneous, it follows that the elimination of the non-labouring class cannot be instantaneous and cannot be accomplished through the physical elimination of its members. Throughout the far from brief period during which the capitalist economic forms persist while constantly diminishing, the organized revolutionary State must function, which means – as Lenin unhypocritically said – maintaining soldiers, police forces, and prisons.

With the progressive reduction of the sector of the economy still organized in private forms, there is a corresponding reduction of the area in which it is necessary to use political coercion, and the State tends to progressively disappear.

The points which we have recalled here in a schematic way are enough to demonstrate how both a magnificent polemical campaign ridiculing and crushing its opponents and, above all, the greatest event up to now in the history of the class struggle have brought out in all their clarity the classical theses of Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the conclusions which have been drawn from the defeat of the Paris Commune. These are the theses of the conquest of political power, the proletarian dictatorship, the despotic intervention in the bourgeois relationships of production, and the final withering away of the State. The right of speaking of historical confirmations parallel to the brilliant theoretical construction seems to cease when this last phase is attained since we have not yet witnessed – in Russia or anywhere else – the process of the withering away, the dying down of itself, the dissolving away (Auflösung in Engels) of the State. The question is important and difficult since a sound dialectic can demonstrate nothing with certainty on the basis of a more or less brilliant series of spoken or written words. Conclusions can only be based on facts.

The bourgeois States, in whatever atmospheres and ideological climates, inflate in a more and more terrible way before our eyes. The only State which is presented, through tremendous propaganda, as a working class State, expands its apparatus and its bureaucratic, legal, police, and military functions beyond all limits.

So it is not surprising that the prediction of the shrivelling up and elimination of the State, after it has fulfilled its decisive role in the class struggle, is greeted with a widespread scepticism.

Common opinion seems to say to us: "You can wait forever, you who theorize and pretend to realize red dictatorships! The State organ, like a tumor in the body of society, will never regress and will instead invade all its tissues and all its innermost recesses until suffocating it". It is this commonplace attitude which encourages all the individualist, liberal, and anarchist ideologies, and even the old and new deformed hybrids between the class method and the liberal one, all of which are served to us as types of socialism, based on a mere personality and on the plenitude of its manifestation.

It is quite remarkable that even the few groups in the communist camp which reacted to the opportunist degeneration of the parties of the now dissolved International of Moscow, tend to display a hesitation on this point. In their preoccupation with fighting against the suffocating centralization of the Stalinist bureaucracy, they have been led to cast doubts on the Marxist principles reestablished by Lenin, and they reveal they believe that Lenin – and along with him all the revolutionary communists in the glorious period of 1917-20 – were guilty of an idolization of the State.

We must firmly and clearly state that the current of the Italian Marxist left, with which this review is linked, does not have the slightest hesitance or repentance on this point. It rejects any revision of Marx and Lenin’s fundamental principle that the revolution, as it is a violent process par excellence, is thus a highly authoritarian, totalitarian, and centralizing act.

Our condemnation of the Stalinist orientation is not based on the abstract, scholastic, and constitutionalist accusation that it committed the sinful acts of abusing bureaucratism, State intervention, and despotic authority. It is based instead on quite different evaluations of the economic, social, and political development of Russia and the world, of which the monstrous swelling of the State machine is not the sinful cause but the inevitable consequence.

The hesitation about accepting and defending the dictatorship is rooted not only in vague and stupid moralizing about the pretended right of the individual or the group not to be pressured by or forced to yield to a greater force, but also in the distinction – undoubtedly very important – made between the concept of a dictatorship of one class over another and the relationships of organization and power within the working class which constitutes the revolutionary State. With this point we have reached the aim of the present article. Having restated the basic facts in their correct terms, we of course do not pretend to have exhausted these questions, which is something that only history can do (as we consider it to have done with the question of the necessity of violence in the conquest of power). The task of the party’s theoretical work and militancy is something other: it is to avoid, in the search for a solution to these questions, the unconscious utilization of arguments which are dictated or influenced by enemy ideologies, and thus by the interests of the enemy class.

Dictatorship is the second and dialectical aspect of revolutionary force. This force, in the first phase of the conquest of power, acts from below and concentrates innumerable efforts in the attempts to smash the long-established State form. After the success of such an attempt, this same class force continues to act but in an opposite direction, i.e., from above, in the exercise of power entrusted to a new State body fully constituted in its whole and its parts and even more robust, more resolute and, if necessary, more pitiless and terroristic than that which was defeated.

The outcries against the call for the proletarian dictatorship (a claim that even the politicians of the iron Moscow regime are hypocritically hiding today) as well as the cries of alarm against the pretended impossibility of curbing the lust for power and consequently for material privilege on the part of the bureaucratic personnel crystallized into a new ruling class of caste, all-this corresponds to the vulgar and metaphysical position which treats society and the State as abstract entities. Such a position is incapable of finding the key to problems through an investigation into the facts of production and into the transformation of all relationships, which the collision between classes will give birth to.

Therefore to equate the concept of dictatorship that we Marxists call for, with the vulgar concept of tyranny, despotism, and autocracy, means to cause a banal confusion.

The proletarian dictatorship is thus confused with personal power, and on the basis of the same stupidities, Lenin is condemned just like Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin.

We must remember that the Marxist analysis completely disclaims the assertion that the State machines act under the impulse of the will of these contemporary "Duces". These "Duces" are nothing but chessmen, having only symbolic importance, which are moved on the chessboard of history by forces from which they cannot escape.

Furthermore we have shown many times that the bourgeois ideologists do not have the right to be shocked by a Franco, a Tito, or the vigorous methods used by the States which present them as their leaders, since these ideologists do not hesitate to justify the dictatorship and terror to which the bourgeoisie resorted precisely in the period following its conquest of power. Thus no right-minded historian classifies the dictator of Naples in 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi, as a political criminal but on the contrary exalts him as a true champion of humanity.

The proletarian dictatorship, therefore, is not manifested in the power of a man, even if he has exceptional personal qualities.

Does this dictatorship then have as its acting agent a political party which acts in the name and in the interests of the working class? Our current answers this question, today as well as at the time of the Russian Revolution, with an unconditional "yes".

Since it is undeniable that the parties which pretend to represent the proletarian class have undergone profound crises and have repeatedly broken up or undergone splits, our decidedly affirmative answer raises the following question: is it possible to determine which party has in effect such a revolutionary prerogative, and what criterion is to be used to determine it? The question is thus transferred to the examination of the relationship between the broad class base and the more restricted and well defined organ which is the party.

In answering the questions on this point we must not lose sight of the distinctive characteristic of the dictatorship. As is always the case with our method, before concrete historical events reveal the positive aspects of this dictatorship, we shall define it by its negative aspect.

A regime in which the defeated class still exists physically and constitutes from a statistical viewpoint a significant part of the social agglomerate but is kept outside of the State by force, is a dictatorship. Moreover this defeated class is kept in conditions which make it impossible to attempt a reconquest of power because it is denied the rights of association, propaganda, and the press.

It is not necessary to determine from the start who maintains the defeated class in this strict state of subjugation: the very course of the historical struggle itself will tell us. For the class we fight to be reduced to this state of a social minority, undergoing this social death pending its statistical one, we will admit for a moment that the acting agent can be either the entire victorious social majority (an extreme hypothesis which is unrealizable), or a part of that majority, or a solid vanguard group (even if it is a statistical minority), or, finally, in a brief crisis, even a single man (another extreme hypothesis, which was close to being realized in only one historical example – that of Lenin, who in April 1917, alone against the entire Central Committee and the old Bolsheviks, was able to read in advance in the march of events and to determine in his theses the new course of the history of the party and of the revolution, just as in November he had the Constituent Assembly dissolved by the Red Guard).

As the Marxist method is not a revelation, a prophecy, or a scholasticism, it achieves first of all the understanding of the way in which the historical forces act and determine their relationships and their clashes. Then, with theoretical research and practical struggle continuing, it determines the characteristics of the manifestation of these forces and the nature of the means by which they act.

The Paris Commune confirmed that the proletarian forces must smash the old State instead of entering it and taking it over; and that its means must not be legality but insurrection.

The very defeat of the proletariat in that class battle and the October victory at Leningrad have shown that it is necessary to organize a new form of armed State whose "secret" is in the following: it denies political survival to the members of the defeated class and to all its various parties.

Once this decisive secret has been drawn from history, we still have not clarified and studied all the physiology and the dynamics of the new organ that has been produced. Unfortunately an extremely difficult area, its pathology, remains open.

Above all else its basic negative characteristic is the exclusion of the defeated class from the State organ (regardless of whether or not it has multiple institutions: the representative, executive, judicial and bureaucratic). This radically distinguishes our State from the bourgeois State which pretends to host all social strata in its bodies.

Yet this change cannot seem absurd to the defeated bourgeoisie. Once it succeeded in