“It is inevitable that in this world of exploiters and exploited, no greatness is possible that was not ultimately made with economics. We have two opposed species of man, of arts and morals, but it is not necessary to have very much finesse to perceive that the source that feeds it is unique. It is also of the same type of progress where the protagonists of economic struggle find their justification. They meet in the fundamental pretension of everyone being a true factor of social prosperity, by which everyone is convinced of being able to undermine the positions of the adversary when he succeeds in contesting every right that is presented as such.”
The fundamental reason that lead us to gather this Congress is determined by a profound conviction – mine and yours – that the present moment imposes on our organization the requirement of “closing ranks” around central motifs of our vision of life and the world. The requirement, in the first place, of recognizing what are really the points of reference and the canon from which we derive our political presence, to distinguish the ideal direction to assume. In second place, – or better, consequently and simultaneously – the requirement of articulating in a flexible group, agile, without complexes, without inhibitions – in one word: without prejudice – our vocation, our will of political struggle.
We find ourselves in the moment where the necessity of accounting for our past errors, of understanding the deep reasons that permitted them, cutting through with the need to dive into our roots – “our” roots, that is to say those men who avow a politics without mental reservations, without equivocal intentions, without petite bourgeois alibis, but with, to thus say, the impersonal soul of he who accomplishes his own duty because he must accomplish it – at the center of our political doctrine, and to remain attached to essential things, without hesitation. A lucid adherence to the essential must permit, or later, consolidate our capacity to remain agile and flexible with what is functional and instrumental. I believe in effect that there’s nothing new to say in support, that the more we are rooted at the center, the more we can easily move on the points of the far circumference, without moving away – from what is important, from the essential – of the center.
I said firstly: close ranks, to give life to a flexible political organization. I want to now add: close ranks to possess a political organization able to give a helping hand to the men destined for conquest and power.
We have thus walked along a path until now. We should not fear the consequences of self-criticism when it is free and dignified and that is why we will say: we declined! We rest passively united with “others,” with the political schemes of “others”, with the false problems of “others,” with the ideological claims of “others:” he have recolonized our final ends- that were, at least, equivocally – with “others.” The comportment of all – firstly the leaders, and, then, the partisans – were, in the best hypothesis, naive, in the worst, obtuse.
Our political discourse was focused, from the start, on Europe, and we would believe that Europe was truly a myth and represented an authentic idea-force: while much later we only convinced ourselves that this word reflected a simple geographic definition, with which it was not allowed to have an original propaganda value in an epoch where even the tobacco stores, laundries, snack bars, and the hotels of spa resorts all call themselves “Europe!”
We have spoken of the European political conception opposed to the different nationalist petty patriotic conceptions, but we have never took care (or we never wanted to realize?) that we cannot have value from the side of the petite bourgeois nationalist right- especially with us – and consequently, all exhausted terms of an “indifferentist” polemic (it has also been surpassed, henceforth, since the neo-fascist kids themselves shout: Europe-Fascism- Revolution!) We have spoken in terms of “European civilization,” without even scratching the surface of this expression and without verifying it, going to the depths of the problem, if there exists, in reality, a homogeneous European civilization and what are the authentic coefficients of its meaning in light of a global historical situation in which the Latin American guerrilla adheres much better to our vision of the world than the Spaniard vassal to priests and the USA (1); where the warrior people of North Vietnam, with a Spartan, sober, heroic style are far closer to our conception of existence than the Italian digestive tract, or the French or German of the West (2); where the Palestinian terrorist is far closer to our dreams of vengeance than the Jewish or Judaized Englishman (European? I doubt it). (3)
We have fought for European hegemony, by addressing ourselves to a Europe that was henceforth Americanized and Sovietized, without considering that this Europe had become the slave of the USA and the USSR, because the European nations and peoples were absorbed – following the military defeat, but not as a consequence of this defeat – into the ideological exports of the USA and the USSR. Without considering that the political, economic, cultural collapse had intervened exactly because having ended this tension, it had collapsed, this support that had aroused in some peoples, among some European men, in certain historical epochs (only among some men in some determined historical epochs!), this superior dimension of civilization that we pretended to attribute to Europe without qualification.
The moment has come to end with entertaining ourselves with the puppet “Europe” and chanting its name.
We have nothing to do with the Illuminist Europe. We have nothing to see with the mercantile Europe, with the Europe of plutocratic colonialism: nothing to share. We only have accounts to settle with the Jewish or Judaized Europe.
However, when we speak in terms of “European civilization,” we consider all that: do not tell me that we speak also of that: we speak, unfortunately, only of that! Or, maybe, we want to see something else?
However. If we do not want to see another thing, of this “other” until now, we have never really and completely spoken. And I am sure that if we had truly considered and possessed this “other,” we would not have provided this content a container or, better an etiquette, or still better, a “brand name” represented by the word “EUROPE.”
Having grown such and such impure compositions, to push back, to bury; have intervened such – I dare say: too many – factors that have altered and corrupted this European liquid to the point of making it manure, it can still positively undergo processes of separation. Europe is an old hussy who has whored in all the brothels and has contracted all the ideological infections – since those of revolts of medieval communes to those of anti-imperial national monarchies; from Illuminism to Jacobinism, to Masonry, to Judaism, to Zionism, to liberalism, to Marxism. A whore, whose womb has conceived and engendered the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolt: whose soul was posseded by the violence of merchants and the rebellion of slaves. And us, right now, we would like to redeem it, by whispering the magic words: by saying, for example, that we must give to the “Europeans” exclusively … from Brest to Bucharest?! (4)
We have raised the flag of Europe without being able to stand for any viable and homogeneous meaning: without seeing the number of its sons and the knots that compose its torn tissue and how much excrement it hides!
We preferred, in summation, to hide our incapacity to choose what that was authentic and true to us and to know to reject what is impure and equivocal there within the European tradition (that is to say, in this case, historically), by having the illusion of filling in such a void by recourse to the formula, the word “Europe”; without considering, as I said at the start, that it is a democratic bourgeois or democratic socialist Europe; all as existed yesterday a Fascist of Nazi Europe; all as existed before yesterday a Jacobin and Counter-Revolutionary Europe. Without considering that many people, including the technocrats of the ECC, dream of a Europe in their manner: a Europe founded on a sinister hierarchy that imposed at the base of the pyramid the “rational” exploitation of Italian labor, and, at the summit, the investment of international capital.
In place of adopting this equivocal formula (which should only serve to distinguish us from those who support other formulas – the nationalist formulas -all as equivocal), it was necessary to say by name what principles, around what vision of the world, according to what direction of effectiveness, the best of the European men should engage in a “supernational organic political unity.” That is this other reality that we could still give the name “Europe.”, if the “old Europe,” the Europe of obscure centuries (to reverse the meaning of a phrase known by an old clown), the Europe of anti-imperial communes, the Europe of the Roman Church, the Protestant Europe, of mercantilism, of Illuminism, of proletarian and bourgeois democracy, the Judaic and Masonic Europe, if this monstrous specter was never presented before these men of a very different race.
I am stopping myself on this point, because it represents the most evident character of our errors and because the motif of Europe constituted, in the years of political activity of our organization, the focal point towards which our political perspectives flowed. I thus hold it useless to stop to specifically consider the other elements of our program, from the moment that they also have consequences, on the distinct plans, of these equivocations already mentioned.
Now, after having recognized our myopia and our errors, it is necessary to proceed, before verifying the direction to assume, to analyze the situation today and the operational criteria that follow the others. I continue to say “the others” – and not our adversaries or our enemies – exactly because the want to insist and clarify up to the most extreme representations that words can create or images evoke, how much between us and the others there is (and there should be) much more than simple difference of mentality, the fashion of acting, political ideology. It is a different soul, it is another race that gives our actions their typical meaning and gives them a proper physiognomy, irreducible to figures and the common terms of different political ideologies of our epoch.
The consideration that we leave is this: we live today in a world of others, surrounded by others, by these dignified representatives of the bourgeois epoch, under the domination of the most miserable and most demeaning of dictatorships: the bourgeois dictatorship, that of the merchants. All that surrounds us is bourgeois: political society, economics, culture, family, social mannerisms, religious manifestations.
In “Western” democracies, the spectacle presented to us is linked by a revolting coherence to the most orthodox canons of the bourgeois conception of life. In these democracies, the state is used to maintain stability, by the intermediary of all its repressive and oppressive instruments, the hegemonic relation of a class – the class of the bourgeoisie and, particularly, a part of that, the part that constitutes a plutocratic oligarchy – on the people. The exclusively classist support on which it is based does not admit realities and values other than economic realities and values: the bourgeois dictatorship victoriously emerging according to processes of reinforcement and hegemonic intensification since the French Revolution (*), now unalterable for about one hundred years the only relation that links the bourgeoisie to man: the relation of master to slave, exploiter to exploited. Despite all the sweeteners of assistance, of foresight, in general paternalism, here is the reality of the bourgeois regime.
This is even the reality that Marx, in 1849 already, described magisterially in the Communist Manifesto: “The political power of today of the modern state is only an administrative junta of common businesses of the entire bourgeois class … Everywhere where it has come to domination, it destroyed all those conditions of life, that were feudal, patriarchal, idyllic. It destroyed without pity all those multicolored links, which in the feudal regime brought men closer to their natural superiors, and only left between man and other men those links of immediate self interest and the merciless payment of accounts… It transformed personal dignity into a simple value of exchange; and to the numerous and different liberties well acquired and consecrated by documents, it substituted the sole and unique liberty of commerce, with a hard and pitiless conscience.”
If bourgeois society (**) concedes to the dominated (to the subjugated!) an amelioration of conditions of vegetative life (by including here even those of the mental domain!), that is not the exclusive selfish-economic premises on which it is founded that came to be missed. He usually say exactly that the “devil” is all the more dangerous when he becomes more respectable! And, in effect, the greatest well being should have consequently made in the historical development of bourgeois society, the tendencies of political hegemony of a part of the bourgeoisie, consolidated in a politically effective “abuse of power,” simply assume different modes of force than the preceding ruling classes, and the expressions in its coherent manifestations are of the same identical reality: reality enclosed, exactly, in the schemes of production – consumption tension.
The capitalist, thus understands that by raising the salary of the worker, the latter will buy a fridge or an automobile produced by the capitalist; the boss realizes that by stunning those who work with the obsession of always needing new things– and for the same unreal, illusory, artificial – and constraining him by the preoccupation of acquiring them, he can completely intoxicate the worker with work. Thus the latter, gentle and happy, tranquil as a cow ( a cow that, periodically, can roar for salary claims; which, sometimes, can even give the illusion of being a wild bull and can damage the stable!), undertakes no attempt to substitute its own hegemony for that of the bourgeoisie.
Consequently, the state of bourgeois “representative” democracies is only the political forum of the bourgeoisie; its unique function and real destination are determined by the bourgeois economy, in the sublimation of the bourgeois economy. Aided by the means of penetration that technical applications of bourgeois science offer, the bourgeoisie, after having reduced man to the level of the worker, succeeded in completing the process of cross-identification of the “individual” and the “social” and filling each domain with its presence. The merchant imposed on all his own inclinations, his own aspirations: different, foreign (we do not say superior, only different) vocations possessing no margin in the political space of the bourgeoisie, that belongs solely to he who is “bourgeois.”
Art itself, despite the hypocritical justification (or dignification?) of the schemes of autonomy that the bourgeois care to attribute to it, is rigorously used for the pleasure ( or better, for intellectual masturbation) of the bourgeois (5). “Free” science is only another thing that researches for the progress of the bourgeois civilization, that is to say the reinforcement of bourgeois society: it is only an effective technology serving the “conquests” of bourgeois civilization.
Justice itself is only another crystallization into the law codes of the ideas that dominate within bourgeois society, ideas of the “arrogant” class that is the bourgeois class. Any wrong note, any dysfunction of the system is attributed by it to sabotage committed by enemies of the system, by the rare men for whom the order simply is not an idol to adore, for whom the legalistic sublimation only represents profound and demeaning injustice.
When by chance, finally, all these coefficients of equilibrium do not suffice, bourgeois society puts in function its principal and decisive safety valve, sports, phenomena of mass transference, of deviance, exhausting the remaining energy towards a still exciting, near demonic objective (7).
Besides that, if the economy is the destiny of the bourgeoisie, it is, in the same fashion, the destiny of the poor, that is to say, the exploited, meaning, the proletariat.
It is not even from another reality, or a different fetish, that the proletarians begin the assault from the bourgeois refectory. It is the raging conscience of not wanting to serve the bourgeoisie any longer, not wanting to fatten their fortunes, that provokes the proletarian revolt (8).
If the bourgeoisie recite the “leitmotiv” of equality, as a juridical – cultural – sentimental concept, the proletarians do not content themselves with “good intentions,” but require that the formula, by becoming a means of concrete action, eliminates the distinction between he who has and he who has not, or between those who possess more and those who possess less. However, the economic and quantitative premises remain! It is always in the name of economic reality, it is always under the effects of the mystic delirium of the economy that the proletariat tends to impose its articulation of economic relations, its organization of justice, its fashion of conceiving – by way of consequences – artistic production, relations between citizens, etc …
The apparent antithesis between bourgeois democracies and socialist (*) democracies dissolves – like a wall of ice – in the face of this characteristic dominance of production and consumption.
Priority which, in bourgeois democracies, is represented by he who has economic power and, consequently, political power (he who possess, commands), is constituted in socialist democracies by he who has political power and has, consequently, at his disposal – as a unique privilege of his politically commanding function – these same means of production that, in the so-called “opposing” camp, form the property of the bourgeoisie.
On one side, the holders of capital, who possess – in the name of liberty, justice, order – the political power and aim to keep it, that is to say to increase it to increase their capital; on the other, the sole holders of capital, who, by using different branding, advertise the same product. The economic structure of the abnormal processes of production-consumption are thus present in the two cases (*).
It is not the moment to analyze – even briefly- the imperialist implications of these systems, whose logic necessarily poses, exactly, the solution of an imperialist assault as a means of protection, unique and fatal, of the capitalist system.
It is thus not astonishing if, like all in bourgeois society, in socialist society as well, the functions of power are qualified and expressed exclusively in terms of wealth; could it be anything else when we attribute to the state the sole function of counter of wealth (besides, what different state could the bourgeois and socialist themselves better establish?): when the function of the state is aroused by wealth, to seize wealth and to propose exclusively the satisfaction of the physical needs of vegetative existence (inevitably also, we will repeat, in the term “physical,” these disturbing complications that the bourgeoisie satisfy themselves to designate as “spiritual” needs).
In the two models, consequently, the identical phenomena only admit, by alternation, “blurred images.” Tension opposing the bourgeoisie and proletarians on one part, tension opposing the bureaucrats (technocrat functionaries) to the governed on the part.
On one side, private property is not included in the state (that is to say that it is not limited to represent one of the organizing coefficients of the state), but is the state itself, the state is the “property of the propertied”; on the other, the property of the state resolves itself in the property of those who administer the state, so well that the state and abstract equality resolve in a bureaucratic and technocratic prevarication.
At this point, it would be ridiculous to oppose to this analysis the subtle “distinction” according to which an identity regarding the form of results between the two forms of organization – the bourgeois and the socialist – would not correspond to a substantial identity in the form of “principles.” According to which, while the exploiter-exploited relation would be the typical and normal consequence, necessarily deriving from the premises of the bourgeois capitalist system, the exploitation of the governed by the government in the socialist capitalist system should be qualified by abnormal dysfunction and degeneration not imputable to the essence of the same system (9)! The truth, on the contrary, is that the essence of the two phenomena is the same, because the principles are the same: economy is the destiny of man, the unique elemental reality- the essential – of man, his sole existential dimension. And this “primordial reality,” having at its center the eternal image of the digestive tract (a tube with two openings: one to swallow and another to evacuate, other eventual openings only serve to embellish it or facilitate “good digestion” and the stimulate gastric secretions, when that is necessary) admits, however, two different interpretations of voracity: one, according to which all digestive tracts are equal (*); the other, according to which all the guts are not equal, but some fat and others very narrow (and that is why it is necessary that justice, order, etc, etc … ensure that a dangerous and subversive “expansion” does not happen). (**)
The Disintegration of the System 