Who we are and what we want
2000-2005: the review is now five
We do no confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.
Marx to Ruge, September 1843
A dynamic approach with the environment
This review officially began five years ago, however the origin of its body of work is much more remote in time. How far back we date it depends upon the level of continuity from our previous experiences. We are convinced – probably self-evidently – that our roots are nestled in Marx’s Communism, but we perhaps identify ourselves better by identifying our source further back in time, to early "prehistorical" and "protohistorical" Communism, which is connected to future Communism through the intermediate bridge represented by the concept of class in society. This is written in theses which are part of the huge amount of material produced by Mankind (not only by some special men) and which we adopt as foundation of the "political work" connected, and not disjoined, to the Marx's, Engels' and Lenin's one, as well as the work of many other revolutionaries. For us, our historical and editorial archives stand as a demonstration of an historical handover through complex vicissitudes.
As we can see, the birthday of n+1 become complicated. The review certainly follows up Lettere ai compagni [Letters to comrades], which had some hundreds of subscribers and came out from 1981 to 1999. But the Letters were themselves the consequence of events from the half of the 70’s, which were the product of other events referring to a series we can express through some dates: 1952, 1921, 1917, 1871, 1848, 1789 and so on. Of course we could go back to the social forms of transition between primeval communism and the civilization. Our aim is not to write on our blazon the names of illustrious ancestors, but simply accepting the laws of philogenesis. Every living species, in the great scenery of life, arises, dies, evolves or goes out, just like the individuals composing it. So the human social organisms, big and little, important or insignificant, behave according to the same laws. Our red thread involves, together with some famous dates, some others not less important, even if they may be absolutely uninteresting to some people: for instance those specifically concerning our current, or those related to important historical expressions of communism's need (communistic heresies, peasant and proletarian revolts, historical transitions, etc.).
Dates are a useful reference in placing facts, but they often express a periodization excessively bound to the will of those who use them: therefore, it is indispensable to accord them to the criteria of a continuity, inside which we make some distinctions, while nature follows its course. Moreover also our personal birthdays are artifices that do not correspond to the continuity of our life, actually regulated by very different cycles.
The criterion of continuity is the only one being consistent with the principle that during the past four hundred years has been at the basis of scientific development: every jump of science, from an achieved level up to the next one, occurs through a drastic break, still including the previous level. In this way Galileo could affirm: if Aristotle was here he would take aside with new discoveries, not with you priests who have mummified him in a frozen system, using him against me.
The individual contribution to the common work must be considered like the time too: continuous but beaten by us in units. Every man participates or does not in such a work according to well-defined cycles, but the alternating of men is continuous, just like the rising and the death of political organisms which refer to communism are. Only few members stand today with "n+1"among those who had, let's say thirty years ago, the same aims, but new forces have joined, the aims stayed and the work too. In the meanwhile an extinction could have occurred, but we are sure that the need of retracing the same path would have risen somewhere else. On the other hand there are some organisms that, even claiming the same philogenesis, devote themselves to different activities, and more than a reader wrote us asking for a comparison between "positions" and moreover a common debate. We think that this approach is useless. Obviously the differences exist and sometime they are enormous, but criticism could be nothing but symmetric, reciprocal, with no way to verify or fake the results of each other; the simple reason is that in the social field it is impossible to do laboratory experiments, and the only crucial reality is the revolutionary one that sweeps away the organisms unable to face the new levels the organised life of men is aiming at.
It is useless setting up small extra-parliamentary Parliaments. Our work have been carried out (and is carried out) together with all was (and is) around us, in an unceasing dynamics. Nobody can assert to have found shut doors in front of a discussion that could help the work itself proceeding.
Fertile qualitative premises
The plethoric existence of groups and small parties is a physiologic phenomenon typical of human society during particular periods. It happened at the eve of the revolution that gave rise to Christianity in a milieu of thousand Judaic sects; it happened during the European revolution around the explosion of the October. Therefore if one ask us what is the phenomenon that is peculiar to the present political activity, we don’t answer complaining on the lack of unity neither on the "communist Byzantiums", which are part of an analysis that would naturally bring a consequent action to avoid these inconveniences, which is the frontism; we answer that what strikes us more is the extreme narrowness of the horizons. There are some exceptions, often concerning only some individuals; but generally it's like if the exasperated social division of work, typical of mature capitalism, was deeply penetrated among those who refer to communism. Just like if they self-imposed an absurd limitation of interests and activities. Just like if communists, like plumbers and electricians, were workers specialised in a particular art instead of aiming at devoting themselves to whole universe. A real, absurd lack of quality, unknown by the enemy class from its own origins. It is obviously not a matter of "culture", but a matter of adapting oneself to reality (knowledge belongs to the social brain – the party – not to the individual, and revolution is not a matter of culture but of strength, as from our old polemics with reformists since 1912).
Marx, Engels, Lenin and all revolutionaries of every epoch were very careful not to limit their sphere of interests and action, while the subjects infinitely chewed by the leftie milieu can be counted on the fingers of one hand: the nature and the structure of the revolutionary party; relations with trade-unions; relations between proletariat and other classes in mature or backward situations; quarrels among currents which can be defined by the name of a specific man, a name transformed in an attribute. Other arguments such as antifascism, the national question, the parliamentarianism or the tactics, are only subsets connectable to the few general groupage which form the "programmatic" framework of the whole, the variegated world of the organisms who call themselves alternative with respect to the bourgeois politics. Far from considering those arguments unimportant at all, it is just useless to cultivate for decades the same quarrels over the same points that have already caused separations in galore.
Therefore in our opinion the variegated world of the commonplace could avoid the absurd atomisation in which it lies and could reasonably be gathered in big sets of homogeneous categories (parliamentarists, antiparliamentarists, pacifists, ecologists, primitivists, etc.), whose peculiarities we find instead distributed randomly within the sets and generating disastrous results. For instance, let’s think about the contortions` which are forced to those declaring themselves as communists and, at the same time, pacifists and parliamentarists.
Nevertheless every work that relates to Communism should start from the fertile qualitative premises proper to the huge theoretic patrimony we inherited. How could such a general depletion have happened? How could such a political babel have risen? It is funny that everybody knows very well to be living a paradoxical situation. In each discussion, correspondence, meeting of people coming from the described milieu, the tongue ever turns to the aching tooth and therefore they always slide, unavoidably, over the nature of groups and tiny parties, over their "positions", over their self-referential nature, over the impossibility of communication among them and over the total lack of connection not only with the so-called proletarian masses but also with the reality made of people who don’t receive any interesting message about communism, any example, any stimulus that could help them approaching it.
To us whilst the communism is a real datum, acting daily to prepare the conditions of future, it looks like nobody felt the need to bear this reality. We, on our side, set our mind on marking our work with this requirement. While complying with a tradition that no longer matches with the twisting it was forced to, we want to join communism in that real movement that changes the present state of things (as from the original Abc).
Nowadays the term is crushed by history, together with revolution and party: everybody uses and abuses them for the oddest motivations. So we are working also at the recovery of its original language, scarred by the degeneration of the Third International, but referable to the scientific power of Marx. We know that our behaviour is not shared at all. But we point out how really extraordinary it is that the simple empiric experience doesn't teach anything, it has not practical effects: in the end, after decades, no "communist" group has achieved greater results than someone else, speaking in practical significant terms, with regards to the social change or even only a non ephemeral numeric growth.
Historical dégringolade and forgotten organic unity
Here we will not insist on the acquired assumption for which at the moment the work being in harmony with the true meaning of communism can't have much support. It is unpleasant but we can't do anything about it. Who tries to do something has no different results from those who simply don't mind of "moving their asses", as an old comrade of ours used to say. Moreover he, having participated to the battle of the 20’s against the advancing of the national-bolshevik communism cliché, remembered the dramatic historical dégringolade, a tumble, a collapse, word that he translated through an onomatopoeic way as "sgranamento" [crumbling]. A "melting" of even rocky comrades in front of the advancing enemy. A revolution that lost "quanta of energy", individual grains which finally formed a mass.
Instead we will try to focus on the bases of a good work and therefore of a good final result, which following a "tradition" we like to hand on. We will base ourselves on an assumption– simple and vital – peculiar to our current: the conception of party work as the reproduction of the biologic cycle of nature, with the complex relations among its elements (feedback), which conceives the living being as an ultra-complex dynamic whole in which the parts can never be arbitrarily isolated or treated separately.
This peculiar bio-cybernetic conception is completely unknown even to those declaring to continue the work of our historical current. Nevertheless it is present in canonical texts with a crystalline clearness since 1921, and it emerges every time we deal with the organic concept of party. The development of the human society has originated phenomena comparable to the biologic functioning of the brain (nets, fluxes, information), as it was foreseen by Marx in the Grundrisse, and finally recognized even by bourgeois scientists. The communist revolution will not be leaded by a party standing under the level of the marxian general intellect. On the other hand they cannot be "created" in a laboratory by tens of willing people who decide to constitute a party. The deep-rooted need of a new human community must emerge from the underground of the present society; and it is around this certitude, peculiar to all revolutions, that our work is articulated, starting from the research into the deep transformations of some social aspects. Among them, for instance, the enormous and more and more evident spreading of communitarian forms, more or less alternative, more or less virtual (hackers, collective musicians and writers, etc.) involving by now tens of millions of people of the industrialized countries.
The party work is so a serious thing that we must never stop keeping our feet on the ground. By now high-sounding sentences like "we are the party" make a cat laugh, mainly when we ape the past organisms with their myths, statutes, parliaments, polls, hierarchies, internal and external competitions, admittance and leaving liturgies, even magistracy and police (colleges of arbiters and security services), etc. etc. Marx’s drastic proclamation of 1848 counts more than ever: the democracy party with its inter-classist frills has better be defeated so that the insurrection party may win. Today, in order to make the organic party, able to lead the communist revolution towards its final outlet, to be established, the big and diffuse party bearing democratic and bourgeois instances evident or hidden as they are, no matter how sticking to this society, must be defeated.
Shall therefore the work make its way in consistency with the organic party, an ancient work not "creative" at all, as all revolutions teach us, expressing their party as an anti-form community.The dégringolade was not a joke, and there is a lot more to recover from the historical patrimony, comparing to what was already said, made and forgotten, while going ahead.
Militants of the social brain
In this review we succeed in reverberating only the least of the whole work carried out, notwithstanding it is based on the classic and frequent meetings among militants and anybody willing to approach, as well as on the historical heritage, the publication and the result's diffusion. Obviously the Internet arrival has allowed a qualitative leap helping to make of a community composed by elements connected through the net who, thanks to it, can carry out a real collective activity apart from space and time. Those who nowadays snob this aspect of the social brain simply prove to not go beyond the surface of phenomena, not even knowing what Marx said about the social brain and the communications network at that time; they prove to be an old-fashioned politician doomed to be disdained, even overtaken by the Talebans. The collective work through the net, which has now come out from industry and which is now making its own experiments at any level, increases the social productive force. According to Marx this represents the major indicator of the material basis evolution which lets to another society. In our opinion it is a proof of the biologic paradigm over the human society operation, where the individual is finally placed in his correct function as a neuron of the global brain. The bourgeois work precisely on this and the great revolutionists don’t even know this phenomenon exists.
We are conscious that it is not simple to walk alone counter the mighty forces of the social preservation, but this is not new: in Lessons of counter-revolutions it is said very clearly: "Marxism is not the learning of revolutions, rather that of counter-revolutions: everybody can turn when victory is imposing, rather few can do it when defeat arrives, thickens and persists".
Going against the existing is tiring and uncomfortable. During ages of uncertainty like our present time an individual instinct prevail, individual natures and psychologies, and the chaotic set out of forces is comparable to the molecules of an overheated gas splashing in all directions. There is no "orderly chaos", or polarized, an anti-individualist chaos, like a strong river flowing, typical of the revolutionary process, the process of men pushed to the extreme fight. On the other hand the ways people get part are not so sharpen, so it would be absurd to classify the militants of the current underground revolution (the mole that digs) following the same rules which were used in previous revolutions or will be used at the point of the future revolutionary bifurcation.
On this review we have demonstrated through many examples that the objectively communist work can be easily flanked by unaware scientist who have dealt and deepen the same topics which stand at the base of the revolutionary theories, namely the evolution, the formation of strains proceeding towards sudden catastrophes, the new order emerging from the chaos in which the old one fell. The revolution does not recruit within closed fences, likewise it also gets rid of former aware militants now devoting themselves to feed their very personal whims, and it replaces them, for instance, with young people fed up with the prevailing communism-cliché, etc.
All this represents a normal and positive scheduling within the general conscription (determined) realised by the revolution army all around the world. We are (we, the American or Chinese scientist, the militant who comes and goes) the products of the surrounding environment and not vice versa. We firmly insist on this: it is wrong to think that whatever group is able to push one to the revolutionary militancy. Many are the determinations, sometimes inconsistent, that contribute to form the environment we are a part of; only one who is naturally on the same wavelength as the great "space of history", as the "continuous thread ", etc. and is able to resist, only that one, as a result, will acquire a real collective ability to modify the environment itself.
Who we are and what we want
With the Internet arrival, where everybody talks to each other within great distance without even knowing each other, in every site there is this prophetic Who we are and what we want, which is somehow an electronic pamphlet that more or less unknown political organisms used to put into circulation hoping their oblivion would be mitigated by an extra information. It is nearly accepted that right in the middle of the great net’s chaos one can think of introducing himself, everybody does it, so do we. In a period when an over-information burns the brain of anybody approaching with no cautions, the practical effect is much more volatile than the ancient pamphlets. Following the net’s features, with its 500 billion pages, the call will fatally stay unheard. It will only be received by those who will seek that call since they already know what they are looking for. The "explanation", written or yelled, for some molecules bobbing in ferment universe can only move those who have already stepped onto the same ground; for us this is a fundamental ascertainment, it represents the strong theoretical condemnation of all the "groupy-kind" 's activism. It is very hard to abandon the so-called proselytism, but a deceived hope is left when one doesn't consider that nobody can escape from the above-mentioned determinations and that the example of Internet is obviously valid for the society it faithfully reflects.
Here again we are facing the bio-cybernetic operation of the society: people send signals without knowing if they will be received or they receive them only if their receiver is tuned in to this end. As a matter of fact nobody gives up sending signals even if they are useless, more than that, everybody slaves away and builds sites, prints pamphlets, organises meetings, holds a dialogue, debates and shares opinions, arguing, uniting and parting, in other words, being part, willing or not, of a great confusion, dissipating a lot of energy as they stand in a primeval jungle. The will of each little molecule being part of this ocean of information and activity is obviously without influence; nevertheless it is only from this broth of culture that something can be originated, something interesting for a DNA mutation of the "communist" political species suffering the Darwinist evolution.
It would impossible trying to seek the determinations which will originate the mutant suitable for the revolution from that magma, but certainly we could detect the evidence of an attitude. In the situations next to the change, only those who have hand on the suitable elements for the new state on the thread of their genetic code, those who have proved to be able to preserve a programme which holds the key to carry out future tasks related to the changeable environment. Again in this case we are facing a specific dynamic derivable from the biologic sphere and applicable to the social one. In every living being it is not the organization itself, the place of the organs and cells forming it, that represents the evolution, but the way the totality react against the change. Translated into the social field, it means we must know the future line, what oneself work and organism are meant to.
In order to explain who we are and what we want it's not enough to show ancestors’ credentials and their programme. The genetic code is itself a conservative programme meant to keep unchanged the features of a given organism. Without it any transformation would be impossible, only a dynamic focused on the result can break this paradox. Nothing idealistically finalist in that: we all know that the matter has the ability of self organization, moreover the human species. Paraphrasing an old text, we say that communists work lies in conserving the unchanging programme suitable for the change. How? With a practical activity (meaning realistic) through any front allowed by the real force's relationship, with a method and a party spirit even when it is so clear, like today, that there are situations in which the organ-community-party can’t take a tangible shape.
Human society doesn’t just reproduce the organisation of the living being: it adds the capability of planning its future. Industry, the only rationally organized structure of bourgeois society, teaches us that when we organize ourselves we must be consistent with its purpose. The ancients too, they knew well that it is the purpose that determines the means to reach it. Consistently, our current, in 1921, said that the revolutionary party can only be designed by its future tasks. The structure of revolutions consists of an inseparable whole of "natural" processes and of "artificial" reversal of the praxis, where the party-organ of the revolutionary class is the tool to cause that reversal.
So the wide environment that refers one way to the other to communism is the product of a real movement which, as a biologic organism, shows a DNA that is conservative and revolutionary mutant at the same time. A movement which itself explicit so that in the social molecular chains the necessary hooking can born to allow the forming of new molecules ready to pass from the conservative repetition of the form to the morphogenesis, which means that process leading to a new form. This is the conceiving of the party that has been pointed out by our current since our writing of the ‘20’s arguing with the Third International. It should be considered as an evolutionist-gradualist conception, rather catastrophist, since the constant accumulation of social contradictions explodes in a precise event which matches with the change. The passage from the preservation of social characters to their subversion into new form is what mathematicians call singularity and what we call insurrection. The Third International was about to become only preservation and at last, precisely, it preserved instead of destroying. That is why it had to cause a criticism to itself, a criticism that could survive along the philogenetic axis of revolution.
We are not a "group", we are a work
From more than twenty years ago we have been saying to our interlocutors that we have not founded a small gauchiste group at all, neither a tiny "revolutionary" party but we have been devoting ourselves to a work of protection and diffusion of the theoretic patrimony owned by current that had the possibility, the courage and the occasion of anticipating the International’s disaster, and of analysing its objective and subjective causes. Obviously this means that we comply with a materially operative party, the revolution’s historical party, and that such an adhesion demands an active presence, how it has always been, in spite of some Stalinist legends circulating about the supposed "attendismo" (fence sitting) of the"Italian" Communist Left.
We know right well that the physical continuity has been broken, that the comrades are either dead or they gave up, that "Italian" Communist Left is extinguished, just like the three Internationals did. It is a shared conviction that we need the revolutionary party, and this matter has a historical significance, but the answers to this need are conflicting. It should anyway be clear that the revolution gave the most it could to those periods and that a qualitative leap is now necessary. But the author of that can't be anything else than an over-personal social force, instead of a bunch of willing "communists". Humanity, in part guided by the proletariat, will rise against the present state of things and will be forced to blow it up. The historical party is the real history of this announced explosion, made of clashes, victories, confusions, defeats and balances.
The physical continuity with the human groups who tried to make the jump during the years following the First World War broke, and any attempt of re-creating surrogates of those organisms is doomed to fail. That’s why we refused any unnatural label and more over any fake organizing model. In order to avoid misunderstanding we very soon said: "we are not a group but a work". At the end of the day it was nothing but a concise way to say "who we are and what we want", when, at the time when the intentions failed taking back the work interrupted by yet another extinction of previous organised group, even without being a party, we were trying to make people understanding that it was possible to work with the party’s meaning and method, as mentioned above. We had not been understood. They wanted to "rebuild" the organization in order to replace the previous dissolved one: there were many of us, we were resolute; we had experience and the collective preparation, what was missing? But the reality was much different; so we instinctively formulated that aphorism just like as a sharpen Zen haiku.
It is obvious that, somehow, we are also a "group" and, if we wrote on our review: Organ of the Whatever Party we would become a party as well, like many others. But we don’t intend to comply with the existing. More than that, we want to help the real movement that abolishes it. Our great historical current (not only the Left, how it is rightly underlined in some passages of its Thesis) left us just a lapidary description of the revolutionary process: we don't choose the revolution, but the revolution chooses us. We are its tools, instruments, labour. Somebody charges us with the following: you turn revolution into some sort of god acting at its own will. We even found on the Internet an ironical analogy between "our" organic centralism and Saint Paul’s conceptions. We accept the challenge: Saint Paul extracted the ordering principle for an international community, including the non-hebrews, from the programme belonging to one of the many ultra-localist Hebraic sects, the one restrained to the circumcised and destined to disappear. At the beginning there were many languages spoken in that sect, there were different habits, they were inclined to local quarrels even though it was immersed in the global world of the roman Empire. They needed to find a universal programme in order to assert their authority as well as an aim avoiding any compromises: which meant the totalitarian conquest of the society. In the First Letter to Corinthians (12.12) Paul says that the Christian community is similar to a body with many organs and where each part participates to the whole speaking the same language also if an interpreter is needed. Nobody can assert to be only himself and at the same time he cannot say to be other than himself. Nobody could say "I am Paul’s", Paulinism was not allowed. Only one "ism" was possible: the general movement taking its name from the christos, which was not the name of an individual but an attribute: "the Lord’s Anointed". Read by a bourgeois eye, Paul is a reactionary, but he didn’t belong to a bourgeoisie, he belonged to a former revolution. When you read the evangelic saying:" render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s", through Paul’s statement "we are in the world but we aren’t of the world" (taken back in this form 300 years later) then the apparent opportunism disappears and the emerging of a new society is revealed, a society able to generate within the old one its own community-party as a vanguard. After two thousand years, we can easily recognize not only the analogy, but also the function of the determinism which operates and disposes the utilizable material according to a new order, including the human instruments; instruments which are shaped by a greater strength than their single willing, even greater than the willing of prophets and saints, whom are simple intermediaries for prophecies and miracles. The reason why such strength also took the shape of an anthropomorphic god is and will be the object of reflections, but the image of a Fate moulding the environment and the inhabitant man denying the individual freedom, is common between many ancient mythologies. Only during the Middle Age the individual and the free-will appeared as a further step towards the forming of the Marxian man-industry.
As Engels writes regarding the human becoming of the primeval anthropoid, the work, the hand, the brain and the language develop in conjunction, even if the work naturally comes as first and the language comes at the end (as the modern paleoanthropology confirmed). We cannot reverse this logic. The body-party comes together with its organs and limbs, but again the work comes first and then its ability to reverse the praxis following a programme, even if just with the aim of disciplining the action and optimizing the internal order to obtain a fight structure, to achieve a project, etc. In other words, we cannot buy the programme at the supermarket just like any do-it-yourself tool.
Having said this, it should be clear that the revolution "does" everything together, it makes small groups-parties born and die, it forces to do works or to interrupt them, it conquers militants and rejects them continuously (like in the process called apoptosis, the self-programmed death of the cells of an organism in order to let life being). In the end: revolution works on its own, as it always was. And the communists have little to invent, they have to provide for a work that others were already doing, it will then clear if they are able to end it. Referring again to the Thesis, the communists expect quantitative results rather than qualitative ones deriving from their ability to make a well done work. The opposite would be as absurd as putting the cart before the horse. However this absurd thing was proposed to us for instance by those who abandoned the common work some twenty years ago, when they claimed to first uniform the various "positions". We answered that we were not working for the Plasmon (an Italian baby food industry) and that we were sure that good selection would have come (it was coming) while doing the work. Again: it is not the good party that does the good tactic, but the good tactic that does the good party. We came again to the Engels’ work/hand relationship.
Since we want to shock those freak politicians whom pretend to be alternative when they are perfectly homologated just like Emilio Fede (an Italian journalist devoted to the right Italian party), we will say something that must not be confused with the new age messes: the East knows ever since thousands years that it is the right work (the right Way) that offers the result, not the simple a priori desire not considering the path which leads to it.
Gramsci’s pseudo-party vulgarities
Therefore we stand for the party, but we firmly want to avoid falling into the past mistakes. The fact is that our criticism on the tragic errors that scattered the failure of revolution in Europe during the 20’s is the same we can address to the vast majority of people organised within today's groups and small parties - from whom we were divided by well known determinations. We will mention Gramsci, as he seems to resume well the party vulgarity of some of his modern followers, aware or not they can be. Set on the pedestal by somebody, criticized but imitated by others, Gramsci was an exponent of the anti-scientific bourgeois ideology of Croce who penetrated the Communist Party of Italy following the wave of the revolutionary enthusiasm which led to its building. An organic party was born in ’21, it didn’t need "functionaries" and secretariats, lance-corporals and hierarchies, since everybody knew, organically as we said, what was his task. From the editorial staff of countless magazines to the small executive centre (only composed by 5 militants) everybody "was doing a work" no needing of "leading" almost nothing. Nevertheless it was a strongly centralised and disciplined party that was able to arm itself against the fascist gangs and to have a military organization able to face the clandestinity requirements. In contrast with the Left organic character, the spare minority of Ordine Nuovo fell into the degenerate International line and, thanks to its imposition, it took the direction of the party. Gramsci, who was the leader of the centre faction, wrote in 1925:
"The commission that should have discussed especially with the comrade Bordiga, fixed in his absence the line that the party must follow to solve the question of tendencies and the possible fractions which can be originated from them, which means to let triumph the Bolshevik conception in our party. If we examine the general situation of our party in the same way the comrade Lenin's five fundamental qualities posed as necessary conditions for the efficiency of the proletarian revolutionary party in the period of the revolutionary preparation which means:
1) every communist must be Marxist; 2) every communist must stand in the front line during the proletarian fights; 3) every communist must abhor revolutionary poses and superficial scarlet phrases, that is to say he must be not only a revolutionary, but also a realistic politician; 4) every communist must always feel to be subordinate to his party’s will and must judge everything from his party’s point of view, namely he must be sectarian in the best sense this word can have; 5) every communist must be internationalist.
If we examine the general situation of our party according to these five points we observe that, if we can assert for our party that the second quality is one of his distinctive feature, we cannot say the same for the other four. In our party there is a lack of a deep knowledge of the Marxist doctrine and consequently Leninist".
It is difficult to concentrate in few lines such a lot of foolishnesses. We didn't control if Lenin really said or wrote nonsenses like that or if this is only a free interpretation. Apart from the fact that it would be necessary to explain in a Marxist way what does the verb "must" mean in the context of dialectic materialism, 1) saying that a communist must be Marxist is a ridiculous tautology; 2) there must be proletarian fights to be able to lead them; 3) we know that "realism" for opportunist like Gramsci means compromise with enemy, as in Aventino; 4) this is an exaltation of the party-church and not of the organic party; 5) another silly tautology, not respected by the various Gramsci, Stalin and all the "bolshevizers"/homogenizers of national-communist parties. Corollary: after years of passionate anti-culturalist struggle of the communist current animating the new party, Gramsci understood that the good party would be the one whose members are well cultured about Marxism, intended in this case in the vulgar-Bolshevik-Stalinist meaning!
What has changed in the party conceptions that nowadays are very popular and that many people oppose to the organic one? Nothing. The troubled vicissitudes that involve groups and small parties continuously forming and dissolving have always the same underlying reasons. We are working not to come to the same end, in any case we are absolutely aware of not being spectators of a process, but part of it, just like does that small piece of humanity, anyway made of thousands of men, who are not thinking with their work of research and popular science about "marxism" at all, but are observing an outstanding change, identifying its tendencies, discovering the laws of revolutions in nature, tracing paths, perhaps acting as they know and are able to, without even vaguely suspecting that they are moving towards the communism ground, capitulating in front of their social theory.
Connecting the part to the whole
Those who read us understand well that nowadays it isn’t possible to act widely for an immediate aim appropriate for the grand final spreading of the communist revolution. But this doesn’t mean that one can't feel unrelated to the process which will bring to the future society. After all it is not so difficult to take some immediate tasks which are at the same time consistent with the aim and with the real relationship of forces existing between the classes. We are the product of a "communist" environment that showed us the more and more evident renouncing of the revolutionary premises. Many supposed followers of our forerunners ended up steeling their name no longer related with the origins. In some cases they stepped onto the field of pure and simple collaboration with the preservation of this society. Here we are not talking about the band that, at long last, gave up also the names, the terminology and the last frills which linked it to the proletariat and to its historical party.
Considering the premises, we felt like it was natural, inevitable indeed, trying to recover theory e work method. We are talking of work continuity, therefore of the comprehension of what the Communist Left represented in History and the understanding of the legacy for the new generations. In its Naples Thesis this current wrote that organizing itself after the war in a new movement, it should not have to refer only to the Italian experience from which it was born. Such a proposal could appear incomprehensible, since at the end of the 20’s it refused a common front with the belated critics of Stalinism. Whom could it refer to if in that period the counter-revolution had struck to the bottom every other movement, highlighting, thanks to the anti-fascism and the anti-Stalinism, to the worst sides of the democratic conservation? To us it is clear to us that, by that statement, confirmed in more than one document; they simply meant to say that the Communist Left called Italian was only one of the expressions of the historical party, to which also organisms and fellows who in some difficult situations went together for a while belonged. In this way it consistently refused the separation from the whole, and it denied that it could be possible to split up the revolution body and define the amputated and degenerated part with a word having the root coming from a surname and which ending was again an "ism".
This has been the foundation our work grew on; and as a matter of fact we don’t consider ourselves the physical continuance of that current but we identify ourselves with the whole that it used to claim. It is true that we structured ourselves around the need of continuing its work and the work of our dead comrades: not to mock it, but trying to lead it to a greater completeness in the sphere of the general historical course. Even if we quiver at the idea of this challenge, we believe that nothing different can be made (it could be better done, for sure), and that any other way is destined to be merely conservative.
Which consequence is going to originate from such a context, itself part of a milieu where are moving Stalinist zombies, Trotskist waste, Bordighist ectoplasms etc. etc., in such a number to lose count? Which is the material support, the proper glue to stick the "living tools" of the historical party in "knots" and "nets" that can break the social isolation?
Winning back the man to the human community
During our last meetings, as part of some comments about current and partially finished works, some useful observations have been made for the understanding of the huge problem which anybody facing the future of the current revolution will have to deal with (from feudalism to communism passing trough capitalism, within the series of the relative en-plus-one ): the problem of the future party, no longer an organisation among the others belonging to this society but a new community, precursor to the future society.
The anonymous, impersonal, global Capital is sweeping away either the old categories of nation or of national bourgeoisie. If the engine of the american politic-war is no longer based in Washington but in the desperate need of Capital using any way to save itself, it is a logic consequence that the worker becomes a global worker producing just one ware as a sum of all the wares (see the Marxs' unpublished VI Chapter). And the Capital itself will force us to consider more and more every matter immediately with the future human community’s point of view rather than using the economic and political, as "revolutionary" they can be.
After all it is what is said, in other terms, in the Planning the main lines (Sinistra Comunista, 1946), where no space is left for reformism and con-formism since only for anti-formism takes its place. It’s what is asserted in Origin and functions of the party's form, where the human community as prefiguration of future is superimposed on organisation. It is as well what is asserted in thousands passages where the organic character of our organizing conception is mentioned. But let’s Marx word it:
"But do not all rebellions without exception have their roots in the disasterous isolation of man from the community? Does not every rebellion necessarily presuppose isolation? Would the revolution of 1789 have taken place if French citizens had not felt disasterously isolated from the community? The abolition of this isolation was its very purpose.
But the community from which the workers is isolated is a community of quite different reality and scope than the political community. The community from which his own labor separates him is life itself, physical and spiritual life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, human nature. Human nature is the true community of men. Just as the disasterous isolation from this nature is disproportionately more far-reaching, unbearable, terrible and contradictory than the isolation from the political community, so too the transcending of this isolation and even a partial reaction, a rebellion against it, is so much greater, just as the man is greater than the citizen and human life than political life. Hence, however limited an industrial revolt may be, it contains within itself a universal soul: and however universal a political revolt may be, its colossal form conceals a narrow split." (Marx, Critical notes on the article "King of Prussia and Social Reform").
This is a passage which, by itself, massacres any political like conception of organisation, and more over massacres any transcendent theory of proletariat (see the conceptions of the worker as a deus ex machina of the revolution, visions of universal class, lucubrations about the "multitude" as a substitute of the class, etc.). Being the industry (in a broad sense) the very true essence of Man, it is inside the reality and not in politics that the utmost antagonism comes true. It is the reality which imposes that the sequence of human organisations gets its conclusion consistently with the premises: if at dawn we find the human community with no properties and no State, and then we went through structuring the tribe, individualizing a people, forming the State, the representation in an elective assembly, ending trough the birth of the political party as we use know it, the "party" of the living revolution can only be directly a human community, anticipation of the developed community without classes, without properties and without State.
In order to not make "philosophic" a matter of real action we say that we don’t pretend to achieve the human community inside the inhuman society, but we join this community as it already configure itself nowadays. We don’t want to mould impossible phalansteries-party, but we try to adapt ourselves at least to what is more futurist in the capitalistic society expression today. For instance the "know-it-all attitude" linked together with specialisation, the extreme technical division of work linked together with the integrations carried out by the social brain, the abstraction and the project linked together with the manual character of work and with the physical exertion. The active life in the specific communist community, so as it was already said by the young revolutionary socialists in 1912, is essential no be dragged by the categories of worth (that are not only worth-money) and to carry out a fiercely anti-capitalist environment able to represent a real, and not a metaphysical, attractor for militants.
Taking again Marx’s quotation, we end on the footsteps of the work about the autonomised Capital (cf. last number of the review)as follows: being modern capitalism an industry sublimated in the financial field that tied up to itself all firms just like an impersonal command centre, in the same way the "industrial revolt" will have to be at the proper level to enclose the whole society and not only the factory. This is the condition so that the universal soul of the class-war can be released and the colossal cheat of political revolt as a narrow spirit, (the one belonging to the parties of this society, to the philosophic-existentialist groups, to the small pseudo-alternative parties and to the movement of the movements, the most colossal and narrower of all the existing politics). From the party point of view the effective industrial revolt can only correspond to the above described community, where the militant can only see a really hyper-uranium space instead of one of the many services offered within the capitalism, an "other" where he can refuge with a proudly sense of membership.
n+1