“Class is only a bourgeois category: in the attempt to conceive by classist means working revolutionary requirements, we indicate an expediency that the bourgeoisie have used in seeking to postpone, in the world and in the social framework of society, the representations of a new humanity, by a regime of transactions, compromises, and negotiations.”
Now, after having traced – by taking its elementary lines- the physiognomy of the true state, we should consider what political work is imposed on us in order to actively testify to our adherence to the image of the true state. It is not acceptable, even partially, to hold the hypothesis of those who, by cultivating this image (“the model fixed in the heavens” said Plato) in a solely rational fashion, support the necessity of remaining attached to looking at the collapse of the associative forms (that, more effectively, we could call them formula) that are expressed in today’s political reality. For them, effectively, the myth of the state becomes a utopia – contemplated in an overly intellectual fashion – : for them, detachment truly represents the alibi destined to mask uncertainty, incapacity, and fear.
For the sterile apologists of “discourse” on the state, in fact, all action in political terms would be nearly a fall in rank, a descent towards compromise…: they have no idea of the state, but at most, a concept of the state, well hidden in their mental folds. Consequently, we do not take into consideration these adorers of abstractions and the logic of the inevitable, these champions of intellectual testimonials! For us, to be faithful to our vision of the world – and thus the state – means to conform to it, leaving nothing untouched to realize it historically: and certainly not to manifest ideological devotion and contentment with this cerebral coherence.
And then, by developing this premise, we should affirm the condition – not sufficient, however, necessary – in order to pose the elements of the foundation of the true state, the SUBVERSION of all that exists today as a political system.
It is necessary by promoting, goading, accelerating the time of this destruction, intensifying the action of rupture from the present equilibrium and today’s phase of political arrangement. It is necessary to watch for those eventual means, the potential forces that should determine the short circuiting of the nervous centers of this bourgeois civilization not absorbed or integrated by one of the so numerous possibilities of ossification offered by the bourgeois system.
Consequently, we should inevitably transfer our considerations from the plan of recognizing principles to the operative plan: from the plan of what is valuable to the plan of what is effective, to adjust the miserable “reality” (that we should more exactly qualify as “unreality”) of the historical period where we live to the authentic “reality.”
The march to follow (we repeat it here) must be this: rigid firmness in the essential and maximum flexibility in the functional plan.
We have indicated above what we should, according to us, hold as essential. We have already considered the necessity of discovering a plan to hold solidly and a style that we must cultivate. We have already supported the principle by which our political action must essentially develop from and articulate to the men of tendencies, vocations, and characters close to ours: people who have the same ideas of the state as us. At present, in the coalition of men – that we cannot create, but that we can only recognize and strengthen – we have chosen to struggle in the world of bourgeois democracies, to these men that refuse as foreign to their style an equivocal function of intellectual “devotion”, for us, we must propose to these men a definitive objective of struggle: the destruction of the bourgeois world. That is to say we must convince them that they are poorly represented by incurably bourgeois society: that no therapy is possible, that henceforth a surgical operation would not even be effective, that it is necessary to accelerate the hemorrhaging and bury the corpse. We must persuade them that nothing we can construct wouldn’t go to ruins; that the fundamental premise to construct the true state is the demolition of the residual forms and surviving structures of the bourgeois regimes.
There will be, certainly, the fearful, the artless, and the incapable, those who demand guarantees “after the fact”, to the control of successive reactions to the disappearance of bourgeois regimes. Those who, fearing the leap into the fog (and by holding, evidently, the possession of true light) believe it possible to use the glue to reattach and prolong it, in one manner or another, with the aid of vague correctives.
To those we must respond that it is not the moment to ask how to maintain the discourse “of afterwards” The discourse of “afterwards” is presented as real in the measure where we can predict a rigorous method for afterwards, without allowing seduction by messianic solutions. And the discourse on the method afterwards must be traced solely in reference to concrete situations that will appear, that is to say on historical hypotheses. He who is persuaded – and it is a visceral conviction! – that the destruction of bourgeois society forcibly implies the foundation of the proletarian state (or better associative forms different than it), can only earn the recognition suitable for idiots and the superficial. He who realizes, without being conscious of being it, is complicit with the forces that pretend today to perpetuate the bourgeois equilibrium; without wanting to understand, exactly, how the hegemonic bourgeois equilibrium had only two centuries of life and how clear the symptoms are that demonstrate it has entered into a twilight phase and that it is in the process of exhausting its own ability to endure.
However, it is not towards them, but towards the other companions on the route that we turn our attention: towards those who have perfectly grasped that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are both results – or better, dross – of a unique process begun with the decomposition of the organic state; that both represent the faces of the same coin; that both constitute interdependent realities. Thus they have drawn the conclusion that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are necessary terms, one facing the other, of the internal relation which is assured by the equilibrium of this society. That neither of the two terms can survive disassociated from the other. That the “social question” appeared then as the bourgeoisie – becoming a class in the proper sense of the term – constituted its own dictatorship. The ancient world and the forms of organization of the state that were born in that epoch were experienced by the rich and the poor: but both recognized the dignity of men; while modern societies and times only know exploiters and exploited: and have imposed the slavery of money on both.
It is tiring to repeat, but if this repetition can suit the ends of explanation, we repeat: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are elements integrated into one another; that one appeals to the other; only the difference of qualitative order separates one from the other. And us, if from one side we refuse to distill the sweat of those who work to sublimate them and produce the smoke of incense, we do not want to support and exalt the glands that secrete this sweat any longer.
The solutions that we intend to propose concern the method to adopt will be outlined in the following part. They are limited, voluntarily, to determining the elements of organization of the state, that is to say to consider the reality of the state in one of its moments : that of the regimentation of the elementary relations of life between the citizens.
Between the orientations that follow and the preceding indications, representatives of what we have defined as the reality of the true state, maintain an organic coherence, even if its seems paradoxical the fact that we want to adopt an order that is thus called communist and simultaneously, supporting the value of the organic state and hierarchical order. It is profoundly true, on the contrary, the hierarchy does not mean oligarchy at all; that the organic state does not mean liberty for the bourgeoisie and exploitation for the proletarian; for those who understood well, order is not determined by the equilibrium of consumption offered by the bourgeois system. It is above all true that the two last centuries of bourgeois dictatorship have made us understand how much the desire for material wealth, the impulsion to hegemony based on the wealth of goods, have been factors of unsupportable aberrations, alienating situations, demeaning suffering by the men of the latter centuries.
Previously, we declared that we intend to propose orientations that serve to define the structures of the state in its moments or goals: those that aim to harmonize the economic relations between the citizens and order the sphere of their “socialization” (judicial, educational relations etc…). Besides that, the fact is that we want to consider an objective that is not certainly the first among those proper to the state but that only justifies itself in instrumental terms in relation to dominant ends (*): this fact, exactly, demonstrates insupportable character of the accusation of ideological syncretism, that reproaches the acceptance of the egalitarian premises and the typical collectivism of socialist democracies. Or better, it is truly necessary to explain that the fact to assume communist criteria in the domain of material goods does not mean at all adherence to the conditions of Marxist socialism?
Material wealth- all material wealth – must be property of the state because it serves the state in its moment of organization; because the state must be unbound from these preoccupations, it is necessary to guarantee it space free from these prevarications that the retention of wealth in the hands of an oligarchical group with economic power inevitably causes.
The Disintegration of the System 