The text published here in French translation was born in Italy, during the year 1969, when the phenomenon of “student dissent” had provoked the illusion of a definitive turn that would intervene in the history of this interminable and stifling post-war era.
Facing the “revolt” of 1968-69, many, in effect, were inclined to believe that mobilization for the destruction of the bourgeois system had commenced; it acted, on the contrary, as a simple – but vociferous – readjustment of the system, thus it is true that in this “revolt” engendered by the insufficiency and failures of the regime, the anarchoid and anti-authoritarian whims that characterize petty bourgeoisie nature took a large part. Of the illusion that we spoke of above, we find no trace in The Disintegration of the System, which even affirms the necessity of a radical and absolute subversion; thus it was not a vain optimism that lead the author to publish this text, but the deep conviction that everything should be attempted, particularly at the moment where different youth were searching to give a revolutionary content to the student revolts, to avoid its extinction in Marxist reformism or bogging down in the swamp of moderation.
It is to these youth that The Disintegration of the System addresses itself, by reiterating, as the natural and normal premise of their action, the principles of the True State.
For the first time, the formulation of the “traditional” doctrine of the State gave rise, under the scheme of operational instructions, to a coherent and intransigent position of refusal of bourgeois “values.”
Those who claimed, hitherto, the “traditional” doctrine of the state, did not leave academic and nostalgic verbiage; in the worst case – and it was not a very rare case – they descended into the domain of political action (or, better, agitation) by enlisting, as poorly paid mercenaries, in the service of the bourgeois rear-guard, utilizing Evolianism as a coarse alibi for “reactionary” choices.
On the contrary, in the formulation of Freda, the doctrine of the True State was understood in the sense of an integral and irreducible opposition to the bourgeois world; the communist organization of the Popular State, that is presented in The Disintegration as an alternative to the society of merchants, is only an emergency therapy henceforth indispensable in view of the elimination, of the burial, of homo œconomicus: at first glance the “homeopathic” remedy for the “restoration of the human” to a virile Rangordnung.
Thus it is necessary to recall the contingencies against which the text was directed: recall the deformed and impudent political applications made by numerous “Evolians” and “traditionalists”: that is indispensable if we want to situate the writing of Freda in its right dimension.
However, the other part, beyond the contingencies and what they had conditioned in the communist-aristocratic utopia of Freda, The Disintegration holds an indisputable value, that holds in the fact of “pushing” those who want to engage in the political domain towards positions of radical coherence. We do not demand from them devotion to the “theses” of Freda, but natural reflections of a temperament and style made with clarity, fairness and dry lucidity, deepening – under the plan of existential adherence to its “essential” characteristics – the doctrine of the True State, and the elaboration of a flexible and “disenchanted” strategy of struggle, a strategy turned towards the disintegration of the bourgeois system.
The Disintegration of the System 