For Communism. Theses of The Il Manifesto Group

Politics
& Society
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For Cmnmunism: Theses of the Il Manifesto Group

Andrew Levine
Politics Society 1971 1: 409
DOI: 10.1177/003232927100100401
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>> Version of Record - Jan 1, 1971

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For Cmnmunism:
Theses of the Il Manifesto
Group
(Translated by Andrew Levine)

The Strategic Vacuum
1. For many years, the Italian and European left have lacked a clear
and coherent strategy. The two principal hypotheses that, historically, have
shaped the entire western left are in a state of crisis: the reformist hypothesis,
held not only by the pitiful Italian social democracy, but also by the important social democracies of northern Europe; and the hypothesis that might be
called &dquo;Frontist&dquo; which the strongest communist parties have developed
after the failure of the revolution in the 1920s.
2. The crisis of the reformist strategy is not a matter of one country or
another, one period or another. The development of modern capitalism
itself, on which reformists staked everything, has undermined its presuppositions.
3. It has become clear that economic expansion in a capitalist framework
does not constitute a sufficient basis for social and civil progress. On the
contrary, it compromises progress. Equality of income and of power, full
employment of productive capacity, improvement of living conditions in the
factories and cities, the instruction and culture of the masses, the emancipation of women, and the equal development of regions-all these objectives
of the &dquo;welfare state&dquo; are not achieved with economic development. Instead,
they always appear more remote. Even when the slow action of reformism
corrects this or that objective of the logic of the profit system, this same
logic has already displaced and aggravated the terms of the problem.
4. Moreover, the very possibility of intervening in capitalist development
with the instruments of political power has actually diminished. The crisis
of representative institutions, the symbiosis between technocratic elites and
monopolistic groups, the disintegration of political machines-all prevent
the quantitative growth of public intervention in the economy and in the
society from corresponding completely to the development of a real, autonomous public power. The latter is reduced to an instrument of mediation and
compensation in a mechanism over which it has no real control. The very
exercise of popular sovereignty with the political machine that it has produced turns back against itself. It becomes the instrument to which the
system punctually resorts to combat radical change, and is a source of continual stabilization.
410
5. Such an integrated and weakened political power finds itself facing
socio-economic mechanism that is more compact, and dominated by increasingly uncontrollable objective laws. The increase in investments, longterm planning, the integration of scientific research into the capitalist apparatus, the international integration of capital, markets, and currencies, sectorial interdependencies, the conditioning of consumption and of social
organization-all combine to prevent the modification of the model of development by means of progressive and sectorial interventions. To each intervention that challenges its interests, the system reacts with a crisis that blocks
the reformist attempt. Such is the history of the past twenty years of
experience with social democratic power. And therein lies the explanation for
the uniformity of capitalist lines of development in countries with profoundly different political directions and juridical systems.
6. The failure of social democracy on the international level is no less
clear. Throughout the years, social democracy has cultivated the illusion
that the aggressive thrust of capitalism is bound up with its backwardness and
with the survival of classically reactionary elements. Today, the role that
rearmament has played in the equilibrium of &dquo;mature&dquo; capitalism, the
impossibility of the latter to liquidate the exploitation of depressed areas,
the continual regeneration by the system, at its core, of nationalist and
racist bureaucratic-military pressures are all perfectly clear.
7. For all these reasons, reformism has not for a long time served as a
political strategy for the workers movement. It has ceased not only to be
a genuine variant of the socialist movement, capable of theorizing a stage
beyond capitalism, but also to be a political force in the narrow sense.
Social democracy has survived this crisis only by transforming itself into a
vast apparatus of power and of mediation of corporate interests, at the very
center of the given system and of its dynamic of development.
Crisis of the Frontist Strategy

8. The Frontist strategy is not reducible to reformism even if it has several
points in common with it: especially the importance attributed to the backwardness of Italian and European capitalism, the concentration of struggle
around contradictions deriving from this backwardness, and the waving of the
banner of &dquo;national economic development&dquo; and of &dquo;democratic liberties.&dquo;
9. This strategy is based in the first place on a tenacious construction of
mass protest movements around the most immediate problems in all sectors
of society: standard of living, occupation, respect for constitutional rights.
These movements were led in such a way as not to radicalize their content
and their forms so far as to make a revolutionary intention explicit and to
precipitate a general political crisis; but also so as not to reduce them to a
purely reformist horizon. Their objective, in the strategic design, was to
provoke tensions that the system was incapable of absorbing, to accomplish
411
step towards mass revolutionary consciousness, thus changing the political

relations of force.
10. This type of mass movement found its complement in a strong emphasis on electoral and parliamentary struggle, not so much from the conviction
that the fundamental problems of society can be resolved in this arena, but
as an instrument to gradually break up the bourgeois political equilibrium,
and to form a politically progressive grouping, assembled around a program
of democratic reforms.
11. The end-point of such a perspective was the formation of a unified
government of the forces of the left, which would, in the most favorable
circumstances, consent to pose the problem of the crisis of the system and
of the transformation of the regime. A final solution was always postponed
because it was subordinated to the maturation of relations of force on a world
scale sufficiently favorable to the socialist camp in order to avoid a frontal
collision.
12. Thanks to this strategic schema, a heavy parliamentary political practice, a very trade-unionist line of movement, a highly prejudiced conception
of alliances has come, over time, to coexist with a classical conception of the
seizure of power, an organizational practice essentially that of the Third
International, and an international political line rigidly subordinated to the
USSR.
13. Such a political line has shown itself, even in its best phase, absolutely
incorrect for bringing about revolution in the West. And even though it had
great defensive value against fascist aggression, it neither succeeded in building a revolutionary opposition in the more advanced capitalist countries
(U.S., England, northern Europe), nor in preparing the conditions for a revolutionary development of the anti-fascist struggle in continental Europe.
Rather, this strategy reveals its own organic limits even on the terrain of
anti-fascist struggle, since it is true that fascism was defeated only in a world
war and by the alliance of the Soviet Union with the great capitalist powers.
14. Frontism kept its credibility even after the war on the basis of two
presuppositions: faith in the linear development of the Russian Revolution
as an authentic guarantee against sliding back towards opportunism and as an
element of force that would permit a semi-peaceful transition to socialism in
the West; and the incurable economic and political backwardness of Italian
capitalism, as the objective terrain on which to base both the alliance between
the working class and the petit bourgeoisie and the revolutionary character
of the struggle for economic development and democracy. The communist
parties have closed their eyes to the inadequacies of these presuppositions
precisely because they touch the heart of their strategic conception.
15. On the one hand, the decline of the USSR as a reference point for
world-revolution, and, on the other hand, the transformation of Italian
capitalism have finally established themselves as irrefutable processes. From
a
412
that moment, the elements that constitute the Frontist strategy change their
sign; the old conception of the mass party, the overestimation of parliamentarism, the bureaucratization of the party, separated from the original
strategic hypothesis, are blended together as in a purely reformist practice,
accompanied by a process of ideological revisionism. And inasmuch as even
the reformist hypothesis is manifestly impracticable, the Communist parties
are left with no coherent perspective for the passage to socialism.
16. The &dquo;Italian road to socialism&dquo; has become a formula so hollow that
it can be filled in with the most eclectic content: from impudent parliamentarism to provocations in the workers councils, from reformist banalities to
maximalist formulae about power, from the investigation of a compromise
government with the bourgeois parties to talks on the restructuring of the left.
The only axis possible: a propensity for historicism, an abstract faith in the
historical process, surmounted by a tactical competence that masks a
strategic renunciation. In this, the Italian left today recalls in an alarming
fashion the situation in the first postwar period: the intermingling of a
maximalism and of a reformism, as confused as they are impotent.
The Roots of
Revisionism
17. This situation has distant historical roots and deep social causes. If
the revolutionary components of the working-class movement in the West,
the great Communist parties, born of the October Revolution and of the
teaching of Lenin, actors in mass struggles and in heroic combat against
reactionary dictatorship, have for so long a time persisted in a defensive and
inadequate strategy, leading to the present situation, it is not due to the betrayal of leaders or the loss of solid principles. In the West, as in the USSR,
there are objective bases for modern revisionism.
18. One must investigate these roots above all in the defeat of the revolution in the West in the 1920s. From this defeat, there followed the necessity for building socialism in the USSR under extremely difficult conditions, as well as a profound crisis in the European Bolshevik parties, experiencing severely the limits of a chiefly propagandist activity, while awaiting
the collapse of the system. Frontism was bom precisely from the need to
construct an international front of alliances for the defense of the Soviet
Union, and to rediscover a real political relationship with the masses and their
needs. This presented the fatal retreat of a workers movement that had not
been able to use the experience of October in a creative way-to define a
strategy adapted to the structure of European capitalism.
19. But above all, the bases of revisionism should be sought in the deep
changes that the crisis of the 1920s produced within the capitalist system.
Fascism represents only one aspect-and not the most important-of these
changes. They were above all tied to the expansion of mass capitalism and
to the New Deal reforms in the U.S. Such is the new capitalist model, which
413
subsequently asserted itself throughout the West, which the Communist parties have so long ignored, but with which they must, finally, settle accounts.
20. This model was characterized by an intensive development of productive forces, an extended application of science to the economy, increasingly planned investments, a strong concentration of economic power, a
systematic utilization of the state to regulate the business cycle and to
output of standardized and massand a progressive enlargement of the tertiary
sector of the economy. All this has profoundly modified the data upon
which the traditional strategies of the workers movement are based.
21. The expectation of a cataclysmic economic crisis, like the expectation
of permanent stagnation in production, has become blurred. The traditional
petit-bourgeois strata have been progressively liquidated, but new intermediary strata-privileged in many ways and tied to the monopolist forms
of development-have taken their place. The working class itself is becoming
increasingly differentiated internally, while representing only a part, sometimes even a diminishing part, of the mass of workers. The instruments of
ideological integration and the conditioning of consumption models imposed
by the system have multiplied. Productive forces (science, technology, professional capacities, needs) have become profoundly influenced by changes in
mediate social tensions,
produced
consumer
vast increase in
goods,
capitalism.
22. For these reasons, the classical schema of revolutionary rupture-as
intervention of a conscious minority that inserts itself into a situation of
societal disintegration and utilizes elementary mass demands to take possession of state power and to subvert the propertied order-becomes impracticable. Such crises do not occur, or else, when they begin to appear, the
majority is so uncertain of the alternative and so deeply conditioned that it
retreats into moderate positions and restores the situation. It is on this basis
that both social democratic and laborite hegemony in the advanced capitalist
countries, and the progressive abandonment of the revolutionary hypothesis
by the Communist parties are built. Even the idea of rupture, of crisis, of
challenging the system appears synonymous with adventurism and defeat.
23. This is why one must view as incorrect a struggle against revisionism
that leaves aside the objective roots and does not respond to the problems
that follow from them; a struggle that advocates simply a return to the
principles and platforms of 1921 or of the Stalinist period, as if revisionism
were not also the fruit of the deficiencies of these platforms. One combats
revisionism not by denying the specificity and novelty of the revolution in
our epoch in the advanced capitalist countries but by offering a real
theoretical and practical response.
an
A New InternationaliSm
24.
Today,
the full
comprehension
of the existence, nature, and
conse-
414
quences of
new
a new phase of world opposition is one of the prerequisites of a

revolutionary strategy. At the center of this phase is the change in the
Soviet camp and the consolidation of the Chinese Revolution as the new
historical antagonist of imperialism; and the reemergence of revolutionary
pressure at key points in the capitalist system..
25. The world we know is the product of an historical process dominated
by the October Revolution. The construction of a mighty power under
proletarian direction, and of a world front around it, and the victorious
struggle against fascism have broken the uncontested domination of the
imperialist powers, given a national dimension to class conflict, favored the
disintegration of the classical colonial systems and the affirmation of new
peoples, and imposed on capitalism an acceleration and modification of its
model of development.
26. But the historical limits of the Russian Revolution and of its social
protagonists, the immense effort that was necessary to support it in isolation
for an entire historical period, and the subjective deformations that grew out
of this situation have prevented a general reemergence of revolution out of
these eruptions, as had been anticipated in the Stalinist strategy. After the
world war, the European proletariat did not succeed in transforming the
victory over fascism into a victory over capitalism. Rather, American power
emerged as the new keystone of imperialism, replacing the old colonial
systems with new forms of domination. And Soviet society appeared
hampered by a repressive political structure and an economic structure
wherein an excessive centralism masked serious social contradictions, and
hampered further economic development. The cold war was the expression of
this impasse. Hence, the dramatic efforts of the USSR and the Communist
parties to contain imperialism in its efforts at reconquest; and the policy of
favoring the growth of new pressures for rupture at the peripheries of the
imperialist system. All this took place without the power or the knowledge to
propose a strategy for a new phase of revolutionary initiative.
The Twentieth
Congress
27. By the middle of the 1950s, a way out of the Stalinist line was
rendered simultaneously necessary and possible by the end of the American
nuclear monopoly, the assured victory of the Chinese Revolution, the
development of independence movements in Asia and Africa, and the growth
of productive forces within Soviet society. The Twentieth Congress then
under the leadership of Khrushchev gave the following response to this
problem:
a) rapid development of the Soviet economy; using market mechanisms,
assimilating techniques and values of the advanced capitalist countries, and
using a system of material incentives and increasing social differentiation;
b) support of national bourgeoisies and new bureaucratic strata in the
415
a program viewed both as a necessary phase and as
decisive instrument for the anti-imperialist struggle and for the solution to
the problem of underdevelopment;
c) Russian-American partnership as an axis of international stabilization in
which economic competition would find a favorable framework.
28. In substance, this was a &dquo;right turn&dquo; out of the Stalin period. For the
USSR, it amounted to the abandonment, or indefinite postponement, of the
most radical objectives for the construction of a new social order. For the
western parties, it meant the opening of the path of compromise with social
democracy. And for those countries and forces (notably China) who saw their
pressing needs for liberty -and development negated in such a design, it
amounted to isolation for a long period.
This strategic choice, which is at the origin of the present world
organization, cannot be explained as a trick of a corrupt group in power, or as
the return of bourgeois elements that, socially and ideologically, had survived
the effort to build a new society. Such a choice represents the
predominance-in both Soviet society and in the Communist parties-of social
interests and theoretical positions that had already been nourished by the
contradictions of the Stalinist line on the construction of Socialism.
29. This line was based on the distinction between two phases in the
period of transition: a first phase in which the goal is to assure the &dquo;material
basis&dquo; of socialism; and a second phase in which one may finally face the
problem of deep and total revolution of social relations of production. Hence,
the collectivization of agriculture as a brutal expropriation of agricultural
surplus; hence, the hierarchical structure and &dquo;productivist&dquo; ideology that
governed life in the factories; hence, the selective and technocratic structure
of education; hence, the severe centralization of political power and the
progressive growth of bureaucratic despotism. One allows the survival of
those elements that are decisive in the political and social structure of
capitalism in order to use them in a voluntarist and jacobin effort to capture
superiority. Thus one finds purges and absolute political power increasingly
necessary instruments; until, finally, they become exclusive. Such a prolonged
application of revolutionary terror progressively destroys the mass participation, the proletarian character of the party, the capacity for self-transformation of men in social struggles, that are the very foundations of the
Communist revolution.
30. The Khrushchevian turning-point is born out of this double terrain:
the development of productive forces amidst relations of production that are
not really attacked; and the formation of a bureaucratic power that grows
increasingly more distant from its revolutionary origins and increasingly more
disposed to make use of its political privileges to reproduce social privileges.
This serves as an outlet for pressures that are present, though not yet
dominant, in Soviet society. It is a line destined towards the restoration of
underdeveloped countries;
416
B
capitalism.
31. Even more than its origins, it is essential to evaluate the consequences
of this change in the social nature and international function of the USSR. It
seemed that from the beginning of the 1960s, this turn stimulated a
&dquo;reformist&dquo; type of line of development: a synthesis of the two dominant
systems, under the banner of democracy and economic development, a
peaceful resolution of conflicts between states, and the progressive solution
to the problem of underdevelopment. The U.S. of Kennedy and the USSR of
Khrushchev both held confidence in their own capacities for development
and in the positive evolution of the opposite camp. They seemed engaged in
peaceful competition. The dream of revolution as a radical change seemed set
aside in each sector of the world-replaced by the hope of a common
progress. Each of the great partners, to be sure, remained convinced of its
own capacity for victory, even without direct confrontation, through
competition. But although the problem of hegemony remained open, this
competition had made it a part of a fundamental &dquo;understanding.&dquo;
32. It did not take many years for the failure of these hopes to become
clear. Reformism and revisionism have failed, regarding their own objectives,
even on the world scale. Today the characteristics of the world situation
include explosions of instability even in the interior of the two systems, the
increase of tensions, and a throwback to the logic of repression. And thus the
dilemma that has dominated the entire history of our century reemerges:
revolution or catastrophe.
The Failure of Reformism
33. The advanced capitalist societies are passing through a dangerous and
complex crisis, that puts their fundamental values and structures in question:
a) The crisis is no longer a consequence of the halt in mechanisms of
development, but rather grows out of developing itself. This developmenthaving the enlargement of profit as its only objective-nourishes growing
zones of parasitism and waste, makes entire social strata lead marginal
existences, produces increasing needs that cannot be satisfied, multiplies
phenomena of societal disintegration, and provokes tensions that only a
monstrous apparatus of manipulation and overt repression can control. The
student revolt and the black movement in America, the crisis of political
unity in that society, the extension of student struggles in Europe, the
vigorous resumption and the new content of workers and mass struggles up
to the explosion of &dquo;May&dquo; in France, to the tumultuous social crisis of Italy,
to the resumption of elements of movement in Germany-all fill out this
picture.
b) The
crisis directly challenges the central mechanisms of the system,

if these mechanisms cannot transform themselves without surpassing
themselves, and without the action of ideas and forces capable of effecting
even
417
such a transformation. By lack, or by insufficiency, of these forces and ideas,
the crisis nourishes a movement of irrationality and of violence whose
outcome cannot be foreseen. The symbol of this process is Nixons America:
at the threshold of an endemic civil war after one of the longest periods of
productive expansion, and on the edge of an extension of the Asian conflict
and of brutal interventions elsewhere.
34. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America reformism has reached analogous
contradictions, not only because of the exclusion of these areas from the
process of capitalist unification, but also because of the character taken by
this process. The penetration of modes of capitalist production, rapidly
accelerated by the collapse of the classical colonial system, has not helped to
overcome the tragic problems of these continents, nor led to a progressive
recovery from backwardness. On the contrary, the gap between the two areas
has grown, the subordination of the one to the other has been perpetuated;
and all the while, overpopulation and hunger take on an increasingly
frightening dimension, new instruments of repression appear at the very heart
of the backward countries, and violence against revolutionary pressures
becomes general.
35. These results are not explained by the relentlessness of the imperialists, but by the insurmountable obstacles facing reformism:
a) the fact that the development of backward countries presupposes the
liquidation of the old, dominant classes and of the new bureaucratic strata,
the mobilization of the peasant masses, the formation of political vanguardsthat is to say, a revolutionary transformation of the entire political and social
system supported by imperialism, even in its most modern forms. For
economic and political reasons, imperialism must favor the opposite: the
formation of a new social bloc consisting of the landlords, the traditional
bourgeoisie, and the newer bureaucratic and military castes. In this regard,
Soviet politics in the backward areas is no different: except perhaps more
actively supporting modern forms of subordination, relative to the traditional
equilibrium. &dquo;Alliances for progress,&dquo; and political aid, support for &dquo;national
bourgeoisies,&dquo; and for strictly nationalist and independence movements are
lines that encounter similar failures;
b) The development of the backward countries is incompatible with the
total development of the capitalist world into which the backward countries
are integrated. This incompatibility is not only tied to the mechanisms of
unequal exchange or to the transfer from the backward countries to the
developed areas of profits on invested capital; but, more subtly to the very
nature of these investments, to the commercial penetration of their product,
to the type of technical progress exported, and to the type of consumption
that is determined by these factors. For these reasons, the economic
compression and social disintegration of the subordinated countries follows
inevitably. Without a rupture of this umbilical cord and a contestation at the
418
of this model of development in the advanced areas, the tragedy of the

backwardness of so much of the world will not be resolved, but aggravated.
36. The failure of reformism in the underdeveloped countries has had as its
logical consequence not only the radical break between China and the Soviet
Union, of which the causes are deeper and more general, but also an
irremediable gap between the line of peaceful coexistence and the program of
the revolutionary vanguards of the oppressed countries. The latter have taken
up the road of armed struggle; and against them, imperialism, with the
tolerance of the USSR, has unleashed brutal violence.
37. The failure of reformism is no less evident in the Soviet Union and in
the countries of Eastern Europe. Their priority objective, rapid economic
expansion, is not being realized Measures of partial liberalization of the
economy and the relaxation of ideological tension-in a system conditioned
by political and social structures built in a different period and with a
different finality-have not produced dynamic pressures, but centrifugal ones,
as well as passive resistance among the masses, paralysis of the mechanisms of
economic direction, and disintegration of the political apparatus. To this
crisis of production and of the social order, the ruling groups have reacted by
recourse to authoritarian methods both within each state, and between states;
a vicious circle of liberalization and repression that aggravates the crisis.
38. The events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 fully expressed this contradiction. The necrosis of the bureaucratic rule of the Novotny period culminated
in the emergence of a new current, where a &dquo;liberal&dquo; and technocratic
hegemony was the logical continuation of the preceding period, but where a
mass initiative developed with the possibility of fruitfully reopening class
struggle. The first element, the liberalizing and rightist direction of the &dquo;new
current&dquo; above all on the economic plane, is as important as the second, the
potitive potential for a return of the working class and of the masses to the
life of such a society and to the struggle for communism.
39. This element gave an explosive value to the Czech experience in
relation, particularly, to the stability of the Warsaw Pact societies. It
threatened the very system of power and privilege towards which, though
from different starting-points, the technocratic and bureaucratic, liberalizing
and neo-Stalinist tendencies converge. Therein lies the counter-revolutionary
significance of the Russian invasion. And thus, two years later, the Soviet
Union must itself open its doors to German economic penetration, having
used precisely the threat of such penetration as a pretext for repression of the
&dquo;new current.&dquo;
40. Thus the response that the ruling groups of both the imperialist camp
and the Soviet Union seek to give, on a world level, to this vertical crisis of
the reformist hypothesis is everywhere the same: an accelerated process of
integration, and a parallel politics of &dquo;normalization,&dquo; consisting of a
generalized repression of all who revolt against the common domination.
source
419
Repressive
&dquo;Normalization &dquo;
integration today is meeting unforeseen drawbacks. The

contracting parties are each pushed by necessity and interest. The Western
countries have exhausted that phase of their development that found its most
dynamic elements in the modernization of Western Europe and in rearmament. Not finding new interlocutors in the enlargement of the developed
areas, they seek a new external impulse in the integration of the &dquo;socialist&dquo;
areas of Europe: an impulse capable of permitting a new external expansion,
a new international division of labor, and an absorption of the tensions
growing in their midst. The countries of Eastern Europe, having resolved the
dangers of a political crisis by authoritarian means, but incapable, also for
that reason, of resolving the problems of their economic development seek in
41. East-West
the financial and technical support of the West a way out of the bottleneck
that has become unattackable from inside.
42. But this integration has made a qualitative leap compared to the past.
By the relation of forces and the economic framework in which they are
situated, it is clearly a process of capitalist supremacy that advances as &dquo;an
opening to the East&dquo;; socialist Europe is being progressively annexed to the
world capitalist market. This process cannot be reversed on the way. A
massive development of trade brings with it a substantial homogenization of
the type of development and of the level of productivity. For the USSR, this
situation implies the dismantling of the last vestiges of the revolutionary
period: the suppression of the most fundamental rights won by the workers,
the acceptance of the capitalist model of consumption, the demise of older
structures of power, a risk of increasing class contrasts, of new town-countryside contradictions, and of national tensions. For the West, it allows a return
to productive expansion; but only by exterior solicitation and according to
the logic of profitability, therefore further reducing the social and political
quality of development and aggravating internal disequilibrium.
43. A complement to this American and Soviet line is the process of
&dquo;global normalization&dquo;; that is, the more or less violent intervention, whether
commonly or separately, into those sections of the world that escape the
common design. When in Vietnam or Cuba, the heroic struggle of a people or
the victory of a revolution force the USSR to guarantee security and a
measure of support, the latter exercises pressure and political conditioning.
When, as in Cambodia or Palestine, armed struggle is less profound, agreement
among the great powers follows-aiming at isolating the troublespots and
rendering them less important. At the interior of each camp, each power
recognizes the right of the other to act as an international policeman. Thus
the United States does not consider the intervention of the USSR in
Czechoslovakia serious. And the USSR creates obstacles to armed struggle in
Latin America, and fulminates against the &dquo;extremism&dquo; of the New Left in
420
the West. The logical culmination is the reduction of philosoviet internationalism to a shadow of its former self, and, the disappearance of Communist
parties tied to the Soviet Union as real political forces (in the underdeveloped
countries) or as revolutionary political forces (as in France or Finland).
44. But even &dquo;global normalization&dquo; provokes more tensions and rebellions than it can absorb. The Asian front is in movement: the war in Vietnam
instead of unfolding according to the logic of coexistence extends itself
throughout Indochina, India takes the first steps toward popular armed
struggle, and Japanese pressure reopens an uncontrollable contradiction. In
the Middle East, the anti-imperialist struggle tends to transcend the
nationalist horizon and takes on a revolutionary content, challenging the
regimes of the Arab countries directly. In Latin America, the political
vanguards use a critique of the parliamentary line, and of the guerrilla
approach to search out the path of peoples war. &dquo;Normalization does not
normalize&dquo;; it stimulates new opposition, increasingly unveils its true
character, and risks elevating the level of violence.
45. After fifteen years, it is absolutely clear that the turning-point of the
Twentieth Congress has led only to a reformist hegemony, and has neither
created a peaceful world, nor resolved any of the problems of the masses. On
the contrary, this turning-point has led to imperialist hegemony in all the
advanced areas, and to a generalized repression on a world scale. The
reemergence of a revolutionary front thus becomes a vital condition for
halting the catastrophic tendency that is once again surfacing in world
history.
The Chinese Revolution
46. The Chinese revolution represents the only alternative to the crisis of
the Communist movement and of Soviet society. On the world scale, it is the
organic reference-point of revolutionary forces. Its value does not derive just
from its anti-imperialist radicalism or from its revolutionary coherence, but
from the dynamism imprinted upon its own political and social development.
47. The Chinese Revolution, in isolating the deep source of the
degenerative processes at work in the European socialist societies, has
emphasized its refusal to recognize &dquo;two stages&dquo; in the construction of
socialism, and a parallel acceleration of structural and political transformations : in attacking relations and modes of production, in emphasizing the
motif of equality, in crticizing the hierarchy produced by the social division
of labor, in denying the pretended objectivity of development, and the
pretended neutrality of science and technology. Thus the Chinese refused to
accept the accumulation model of the other socialist countries, based on the
preeminence of industry and the expropriation of the peasants. Instead, they
seek a total and unified development with radicalization of social relations,
421
collective management from the base, and a tendency towards fusion of
productive and formative processes (town-countryside, industry-agriculture,
manual and intellectual labor). Thus the entire political-bureaucratic system is
invested with a permanent resource of mass struggle, and with a permanent
reaffirmation of the dictatorship of the proletariat during the period of
transition, and a permanent decomposition and recomposition of the party in
the fire of combat.
48. The revolutionary importance of this choice is at the root of the
combat with the USSR and the new phase of class struggle, among the people
and the party, opened with the Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This rupture
clarifies the choices of Chinese- communism on the international plane, the
value of its propositions for the oppressed peoples, and the contribution it
offers to revolution in the developed capitalist countries:
a) on the international plane, the refusal to share the world among the
super powers, the denunciation of a coexistence founded on the status quo,
the fact of having underlined the frontal and mortal character of the combat
between imperialism and socialism; that is, the refusal of all stabilization, the
call to revolutionary forces in the entire world, and the accentuation of the
subjective and direct character of the revolutionary process against all notions
of &dquo;leadership&dquo; of a &dquo;camp&dquo;-all that signifies today, especially for Vietnam,
a deepening and an extension of anti-imperialist peoples war, and a profound
rejection of the Soviet thesis of negotiation and flexibility;
b) in the underdeveloped areas, the denunciation of all attempts to escape
from backwardness that do not pose this question first as a revolutionary
choice, founded on mass-based peoples war, fought according to a line that
separates the Chinese position not only from the politics of non-alignment
(formerly supported by China) and from the practice of coexistence, but also
from those vanguards (like certain Latin America guerrillas) who subordinate
the political to the military;
c) for the advanced capitalist countries, the principle indication of the
refusal of a gradual progression of stages of development, the fact of
revolutionizing a system in its totality, the necessity for the destruction and
constant reconstruction of the alternatives, the historic maturity of communism-that is, those very questions which are, in a different context and
excluding all infantile imitation, at the center of the process of the general
crisis of capitalism and of the new forms of social struggle in the West.
49. By its characteristics, the Chinese Revolution, Maoism, calls forth a
new type of internationalism. China does not entrust its survival and the
future developments of the world revolution to the reopening of a
contradiction (in the last analysis, a war) between the imperialist powers and
the social-imperialists; nor to its own development as a state among states, an
army among armies, an economy among economies. It puts its trust rather in
the coherence and the richness of its own revolutionary growth, and the auto-
422
and parallel growth of revolutionary initiative in other sectors
of the world. The internationalism to which this line lays claim has nothing to
do with the retrenchment of socialism in one country, nor the reconstitution
of a united front around a model state; but is an internationalism where each
&dquo;takes his own affairs in hand&dquo; by creatively challenging the problems of his
own society, and where unity is the product of a common inspiration and of
the individual nature of the revolutionary process.
50. This unity finds its objective base in the convergence of the problems
of all areas of the world around a single theme: the construction, in different
times and forms, of communist society. This is a theme that today is born
out of reality and not just ideological choice: that is, from the fact that there
exists no &dquo;capitalist road&dquo; to industrialization for the countries of Asia or
Africa, that there exists no &dquo;thermidorian road&dquo; to the development of East
European society, and that there exists no reformist road to expansion in the
advanced capitalist countries. Therein lies the universal value that, for the
first time, the Cultural Revolution has advanced, and towards which, with
varying contents, the other formations of the world revolutionary front
nomous
converge.
51. The Chinese Revolution itself needs this autonomous and multiple
initiative. At the center of Maoist thought is the full consciousness of the
unstable and precarious character of the revolutionary process, even when the
revolution has won and held onto power. The future can only be guaranteed
by the rupture of the old framework, and by the contributions of other
peoples and other traditions and the expansion of the world revolutionary
process.
The Value of Class Struggle
picture, class conflict in the advanced capitalist countries once

primary value. This conviction does not arise from an absurdly
Eurocentric position, but from consciousness of the unitary character of the
capitalist system of domination and, therefore, of the impossibility of
separating revolution in the two areas. Without a resumption of revolutionary
activity in the West, one cannot prevent imperialism from following its own
logic of violence towards catastrophic war; or else, one cannot prevent the
world from suffocating irremediably from the cover pressed over it by the
52. In this
again takes
on
superpowers. If the
enormous
economic and scientific
resources
accumulated
by the advanced countries are not used in a revolutionary way, one cannot
successfully challenge the problems of world underdevelopment, and give life
to the national revolutions. The enormous problems of building communism
could find
where the concrete historical conditions are

definitive
solution.
permit
53. One is not justified in thinking that the world context blocks
revolution in the West because the Western proletariat enjoys a privileged
a
response
most mature-and
precisely
a
423
position and participates in the mechanism of imperialist exploitation. Today,

fact, the so-called &dquo;welfare&dquo; of the developed countries is only marginally
nourished by imperialist exploitation, and world underdevelopment is not
essentially the consequence of the transfer of wealth from one area to the
other. On the contrary, the exploitation of the backward countries is vital for
imperialism insofar as it nourishes the internal and international mechanisms
in
self-reproduction of its economic system, and insofar as it paralyzes the

development of the backward countries by disassembling their economic
structure and conditioning their political structures. This is the very same
mechanism that oppresses the masses in the Western countries, thus unifying
of
reasons for mass rebellion in the two areas.

54. The liquidation of this world mechanism and of its technological
model of production and civilization would permit a liberation of productive
forces in both areas, and a control over the ends of development capable of
guaranteeing a simultaneous leap forward. It is enough to think of the
resources blocked by world rearmament, and of the absurd direction taken by
scientific research under capitalism to grasp this connection that materially
unites the Western proletariat with the peoples of the backward areas-not
just by subjective solidarity, but objectively and materially. Except on this
condition of common revolutionary struggle-without which &dquo;aid&dquo; merely
finances the waste consumption of the privileged classes of the exploited
countries and the super-profits of international monopolies-the politics of
disarmament endangers whole occupational levels and threatens the suppression of &dquo;opulent&dquo; consumption without offering a different method for
satisfying needs. This is why disarmament has never succeeded in coming
down from the clouds to nourish the internationalist impulse of the Western
the
proletariat.
New Choices
55. In conclusion, for the
proletariat
and the
Left,
the entire world
picture signifies:
a) that the development of revolution in the West, the contestation of

entrenched capitalist power, is of precise moment and determinant value. The
space and forces capable of guaranteeing peaceful development and
democratic stabilization do not exist in the world situation. Rather, the crisis
is intensifying. To undergo a provincialist enclosure or to postpone struggle is
to be carried away by the total degradaton of the international framework;
b) that the development of revolution in the West presupposes a new
international establishment of anticapitalist forces. To allude to a &dquo;socialist
camp&dquo; that includes the Soviet Union, China, European socialism and Cuba is
to construct ones politics around a paralyzing ambiguity. This does not mean
that one ignores the contradictions between the United States and the Soviet
Union as they pursue their power politics, nor that the differences that still
424
these two types of class and repressive societies are unimportant.

means that the USSR can no longer be considered a force
engaged in the revolutionary front, and that its internal and international
choices are contested. The spokesman for the anticapitalist movement today
is the Chinese Revolution.
c) that revolutionary initiative in the West, and particularly in Italy, can
today count on the crisis of the world equilibria and on the maturation of
new forces in all sectors. If international relations of force appear to weigh
heavily against the Italian Revolution, there nevertheless exist new issues and
new terrains of initiative. Above all, it is reasonable to expect that the
development of anticapitalist struggle in Italy will act as a rapid multiplier in
other countries, setting in motiori a far vaster process that will permit the
Italian Revolution to escape isolation in a conservative and stabilized Europe.
56. The change in the international function and social nature of the
USSR marks a qualitative turning-point in the world conflict. The Soviet
experience and the Third International have ended in a manner profoundly
different from that for which entire generations of revolutionaries have
fought. But this is not an historic defeat. The world order has changed. The
catastrophic thrust of capitalism has been contained. And new actors now
affirm themselves on the stage of history. The level of problems has brought
about a qualitative leap. China-thanks also to the struggles she has behind
her, her own, those of the USSR, and those of the entire revolutionary
movement-not only takes the place held by the USSR in the 1920s, but
represents a new line for the construction of socialism. Around her, a new
revolutionary front of recently independent countries is growing. In the
revisionist countries, political and social dialectics can be reopened with
unsuspected rapidity and richness. And, once more, the Western proletariat
resumes its historic role. Revolution, on the world scale, and in its most
radical form, becomes the order of the day, the sole alternative to the
catastrophic end and the degeneration of human society. In this struggle,
whose outcome remains in doubt, the Western Left has a great responsibility.
It is a political force that has, for far too long, delegated to others the
problems and tasks that are, above all, its own.
distinguish
Rather, this
Maturity of Communism
57.
During
these last years, the
myth of the integrated, one-dimensional
society has lost much ground in the West. The workers struggles in Europe,
the explosion of the student revolt, cultural contestation, the black
movement in America, the French May, the Italian crisis-all show that
throughout the West new contradictions are appearing that are reconciled
with difficulty within the framework of the system. But this movement has
not yet shown that it is something other than an acute malaise of society. Its
difficulty in organizing itself into a strategy still leaves open the problem of
425
the
maturity of
the
population
new
direction.
revolutionary practice capable of uniting the majority of

an attack against State power, and to guarantee a
to launch
58. However we are dealing neither with a temporary crisis nor with a
surface movement. It is, rather, the expression of permanent contradictions
linked to the particular dynamic of capitalist society, and of the incapacity of
the system to guarantee the real development of productive forces, to
dominate social pressures, and to satisfy the needs it has itself brought forth.
The verification of this hypothesis, and the explanation of what distinguishes
it from waiting, from paralysis, and from collapse, is today the fundamental
problem of a strategy for the Western revolution.
59. If a revolution has not yet succeeded in the West, it is because the
capitalist system has been capable of ordering society according to a
perspective of development sufficient for reabsorbing the most revealing
demands expressed by the masses, for utilizing these demands as correctives
for tendencies towards stagnation, and finally for utilizing its own development as an instrument of ulterior conditioning of these demands. It is this
triumphant model of the past twenty years that has nourished the ideology of
the
&dquo;integrated society.&dquo;
side, the workers movement has always centered on demands
for more rapid and extensive development. The fundamental contradiction on
which the crisis of capitalism was to have been born was the contradiction
between forces of production brought about by capitalism and paralyzing
relations of production. Such a theoretical position, derived from the
Marxism of the Second International, was a consequence not of subjective
error, but of the fact that the system still presented itself, on the world level,
as hegemonic and capable of dictating the fundamental lines of historical
development. Only those zones and classes that remained outside this process
of development could revolt against the system, and only while remaining at
the interior of the same model. A radical struggle against capitalism, a
contestation of its relations of production, would be possible only when this
mode of production had run through its own cycle and created the conditions
60. On its
for its own transcendence. This would occur, to use an expression of Marx, at
the moment when the exploitation of labor would become in fact &dquo;a very
poor foundation for the further development of wealth.&dquo;
61. This is the condition that, historically, is coming to maturity. An
obstacle to the understanding of this reality on the part of the masses and the
forces of the Left is the apparent permanent dynamism of capitalist
production, the capacity of the system to produce increasing revenues, new
goods, and new technologies. But this is precisely an appearance that must
and can be explained in different ways and under different aspects.
62. In the first place, from a quantitative point of view, a system of
relations of production is not historically exhausted only when it is no longer
426
capable of guaranteeing any productive development; but rather, is already

exhausted when it represents an obstacle to the full use of existing potential.
Even from this point of view, the most advanced citadels of the capitalist
system have reached a fundamental crisis. The growth of unproductive uses of
revenue (rearmament, the production of useless and dangerous consumer
goods), the inability to stimulate backward sectors of national and international society, the purely wasteful character of &dquo;free time,&dquo; the disequilibrium between capacity and function for each category of worker-all give
witness to an increasing irrationality of the system.
63. In all states in question, in order to guarantee a dynamic of
development, the system has put an entire series of social and political
processes into practice: rearmament, international aggression, permanent
inflation, individual disintegration of consumption and of social life,
corporative structure, rediscovery of racist ideology, and multiplication of
privileges. These act like a drug, letting the system survive, but at the expense
of new and often explosive tensions. And thus a new catastrophic tendency
comes into play-not in terms of economic collapse-but of political-economic-social crisis,.
64. This disequilibrium between real and possible development is still
more evident on the qualitative plane. It is undeniable that those modem
societies where the level of income and of knowledge could permit the
satisfaction of basic needs with a fraction of available labor-power, are the
same societies where repetitive, parcelized, and alienated work constitutes in
fact the lot of the great majority of workers. Societies where a good share of
available renevue could satisfy those needs reflected by free choices, are the
same societies where the major part of consumption, on the contrary,
responds to exigencies determined by production in ways devoid of any
human significance. Societies where the development of means of communication and knowledge ought to assure a unification of society and a diffusion
of power; are the same societies that carry the isolation of the individual, the
concentration of power, and the intensification of natural and racial
boundaries to their maximum limits. Only our being unaccustomed to
considering the long-term significance of social development as an entity itselfalso a product of the system-hides the fact that never in history has there
been a system like advanced capitalism: utterly lacking in rational design,
founded on an insane model of development, and giving rise to the most
absurd dissipation of potentialities that history has produced.
65. But for a system to be historically surpassable, it is necessary that its
&dquo;irrationality&dquo; give rise to a real social dialectic: a class struggle capable of
overthrowing it. And this is precisely the chief novelty, blossoming forth now
in advanced capitalism. The integrated universe is beginning to crumble, in
that the system itself produces pressures and needs that neither its current
nor even its potential development can satisfy. These pressures and needs, if
427
they are not traditional, are nonetheless &dquo;material.&dquo;

Break
Capitalist Relations
66. To develop, the system requires, for example, an increasing level of

skill and knowledge that it does not utilize, and the fact that such knowledge
bears the deforming mark of the function for which it is destined does not
prevent a great part of the workers from coming to perceive the contradictions of alienated labor. To develop, the system requires an increasing level of
scientific knowledge; and to the degree that research is oriented towards the
ends of the system, it unceasingly produces alternative possibilities and opens
up new ways that it must unceasingly abandon. To develop, the system needs
an increasing social dynamism: it must subvert traditional institutions and
customs, awaken and simultaneously disappoint new needs for social
participation, new relations between individuals, sexes, and generations. To
develop, the system produces an order of social life that, under new forms,
sharpens age-old problems to the extreme: health, beset by diseases of social
origin; old age, consigning increasing numbers to marginal existences; the
problems of the young and of women, growing parts of the population
increasing in strength, who, while escaping the traditional mechanisms of
subordination, find no place, or effective outlet for the effective expression
of their power.
67. From this point of view also, examples could be multiplied to infinity.
But the essential is this: the irrationality of the system does not appear only
in relation to an intellectually elaborated &dquo;scale of values&dquo;; nor to a sacrificed
metahistorical &dquo;human nature&dquo;; but in relation to socially and politically
defined needs and interests that the system has produced and continues to
call forth unceasingly.
68. What is most significant is that this irrationality appears increasingly
tied to the very essence of capitalist relations of production, and that it is
directly with these relations that the new needs collide. The problems in
which Marx, a century ago, saw the essence of communism, are beginning
now to fix themselves at the forefront of the real contradictions of social
development, and are returning, henceforth, in the field of historically
possible solutions.
69. The transcendence of the capitalist division of labor and of its
alienated character is becoming a real need for an increasing mass of workers,
not only for those condemned to the most repetitive and unbearable tasks,
but also for those who claim a higher capacity for intervention and who find
in their work no expression of themselves. The need for habitable cities, for
social participation, for health become implicit critiques of the individualist
model of social life, of the productivist character of the economic structure,
and of the lack of collective planning for development. A model of
428
consumption different from the current insane multiplication of illusory

needs, or from the exhausting pursuit of false models that development itself
produces, is no longer even conceivable without a modification of the very
of work, a multiplication of free activities, and a transcendence of the
individualist character of social organizations. Necessarily, the critique of
authoritarianism and the concentration of power challenges these economic
roots, the societys type of organization of production, the mystified
character of representative democracy, and the separation between the
political and the social. The struggle against inequality-not only economic
inequality, but also cultural inequality, inequality of functions and of power,
the struggle against statuses and arbitrary hierarchies, the struggle to
guarantee a real possibility of expression-is directly tied to the following
principle: from each according to his capacities, to each according to his
needs.
70. On the other hand, it is clear that the development of mass culture
and of mass communications would permit the realization in a new social
structure of tremendous resources of initiative and free activity. It is clear
that in the advanced countries, automation would provide the possibility of
reducing instrumental and repetitive activities to a minimum; and the same
for the potentialities of scientific research, freed from the constraints of the
profit system, and supported by social wealth. The same, too, would hold for
a model of unalienated consumption that would nourish individual and
collective capacities, and that would have enormous consequences both for
material production and for the level of civilization in general.
nature
Revolu tion As A Social Fact

71. All this signifies that, for the first time in history, communism, in the
radical sense of the term, and therefore socialism, as a period of transition,
have entered into a period of maturity and become a possible political
program. For the first time, the working class and its party need no longer
lead struggles that raise demands proper for other social strata, while
expressing itself as a subordinate force. Instead, the working class can present
itself as a hegemonic force, and as the bearer of new relations of production
and of a new model of social organization. In this sense, revolution can once
again become, as it was for Marx, a social fact before being a political one.
The conquest of state power thus becomes the means for the affirmation of a
new social hegemony. The contradiction between power and program no
longer exists: the proletariat is at the same time expressing and realizing the
content on the basis of which it demands power. In this new and infinitely
richer way of making a revolution-perhaps the only way possible in the
West-there is also the value of a hundred years history of the workers
movement, of a century of struggles that have shaken. the system and
prevented it from making explicit its permanent catastrophic tendency. This
429
is the axis for a new strategy for revolution in the West.
72. At the bottom of this reality is not merely the development of
productive forces, but the qualitative leap produced by such a development
and the reaction between the new level thus attained by productive forces
and capitalist relations of production. The analysis of this qualitative leap is
the new task that Marxism has not yet seriously confronted, leaving a
theoretical vacuum that sociological &dquo;description&dquo; and political intervention
do not succeed in filling up. Schematically, the constituent aspects seem to
be:
a) The massive entrance of science and technology into production. The
economic development that, in preceding periods, was chiefly extensive and
that found its propelling elements in the exploitation of labor and in the use
of unused material resources, now realizes itself principally through the
continual overthrow of technologies, of materials, of the professions, and of
goods. Human society in the advanced countries has reached a level where the
decisive source of enlarged production is, or could be, not direct human work
but the social patrimony of knowledge, finally rendering a constant
expansion of production through an always more efficient use of given

constant capital possible, as a consequence drawn from the omnilateral and
global development of free social activity. Such a possibility is inherently
contradictory with a mode of production that has profit for its fundamental
stimulus, where the calculation of productivity is sectorial and direct, and
where the political and social division of labor is opposed to the omnilateral
development of all individuals. Capitalisms response to such a contradiction
is to restrict the area and rhythm of introduction of new techniques, to
multiply waste and parasitism, and to subordinate the quality and the
quantity of development to the particular end of reproducing existing class
and power relations.
b) A new relation between
production and consumption. Until now,

been
the
fundamental
production
point of reference for largely
in
needs.
the
advanced
autonomous primary
countries, a determining
Today,
to
of
on
the
needs that the social
contrary, responds
consumption,
part
determines
or
even
arises
from
the
isolated consumption
artificially,
system
and
demand
is
to
of all needs
destined
only by artificial means. Thus
support
basis
of
economic
the very
rationality, which is always defined as
capitalist
the most efficient mode for the distribution of resources in relation to a
predetermined end, is increasingly missing. It then becomes imperative to
establish which mechanisms regulate the formation of needs and to judge
them simply by quantitative indicators. The formation of efficient, but not
artificial, stimulants for the utilization of existing potentialities becomes
crucial. And it then becomes possible to devote social labor to the fulfillment
of superior human needs-and not necessarily through the production of
material goods and services and their exchange on the market. The capitalist
has
430
these problems and possibilities, responds to this
between
relationship
consumption and production by pointlessly
dedicated
to the satisfaction of given material needs, by
multiplying goods
waste
determining pure
consumption, or by multiplying outlays for parasitic
social machinery.
c) A new relation between man and machine. On this historic level, the
problem of work is modified, or could be modified, radically. Whether this be
in the sense that many parcelized and repetitive jobs could be reduced, when
free omnilateral activity could become directly productive (of new techniques
and of new needs), and especially when the quality of work could be taken as
an objective of development and as the standard of progress. But, since the
appropriation of surplus on direct labor and the hierarchical structure of
power are the regulating mechanisms of capitalism, the result is rather an
accentuation of specialization and of parcelization of work for the masses, to
the point excluding an increasing part of the population from productive
activity, with the expansion of &dquo;free time&dquo; conceived as pure leisure for
repair after expended effort.
d) A new character of scientific development. Having arrived at a high
level of knowledge, at a capacity for planning, at a direct relation with
production, science too takes on diverse significance. On the one hand, in
relation to its history, it is increasingly autonomous, being continually the
result of a choice between different possible directions of research and
programs for the use of men and resources. On the other hand, it is infinitely
less autonomous in relation to the social system in which it receives its
objectives and resources, and to which it furnishes decisive instruments of
development. Moreover, through technology, it is not longer limited just to
furnishing methods and means-more or less far-reaching, more or less
new-for the realization of certain objectives of production. It now plays on
the natural equilibrium and on the human subject. At this point, it becomes
imperative to know who governs scientific progress and how (for it is no
longer neutral and predetermined) and what consequences this progress is
destined to have in the long run. Capitalism can give only one response to
these questions: it can only tie scientific development to the necessities of
profit, of power, and of the manipulation of the masses.
73. But if the specific contradictions of capitalism and the maturity of
communism as a radical revolution do not derive from a generic development
of productive forces with regard to their specific qualitative leap (which Marx
had, with genius, foreseen and begun to analyze), two fundamental
consequences follow as presuppositions for all strategic research on the
Western revolution.
system, by
nature
foreign to
new
The Communist Perspective

74. The first consequence is that
by
the
maturity of communism
one
431
to understand a spontaneous and progressive formation of elements
&dquo;new society&dquo; at the interior of the present society, a linear and
increasing contradiction between productive forces which already anticipate a
new social order and relations of production which hinder the advent of this
new order. This neo-Kautskyist, evolutionist conception, a conception once
more in vogue today, is disproved by the facts. It is precisely those elements
which cause the need and the possibility for communism to mature that also
permit capitalism to deform the very development of productive forces
(technology, professions, model of consumption, ideological forms, institutions) and to use them for its own ends. Thus between the schema of the
bourgeois revolution and that of the proletarian revolution, a radical
difference remains and is even intensified. The proletarian revolution is not
the pursuit and liberation of tendencies ripened in capitalist society. It is the
acceleration of a dialectical contradiction: a qualitative leap.
75. The formation of a revolutionary alternative and the construction of a
new society pass through a radical and concrete critique of all manifestations
of the present society: of its mode of production, of consumption, of
thought, of life. It is not the fruit of the spontaneity of a class, but of a
conscious and organized activity through which this class suppresses itself as a
conservative class and as an upholder of the old order. Communism, just as
Marx had seen it, is not a further degree of historical progress, but the
overthrow of the history that capitalism has rendered possible. It is not a new
political economy. It is not the just state, but the end of the state. It is not a
hierarchy reflecting different natural values, but the end of hierarchy and the
full development of all. It is not the reduction of work, but the end of work
as an activity foreign to man and as a simple instrument.
76. Second consequence: the maturity of communism does not at all
signify fatality. Before all, this maturity designates an historic phase, not an
accidental crisis. At least on the world level, the processes to which it gives
rise have for a long time been restrained and neutralized by various
counter-tendencies. To pass to a synchronization of this process with a real
revolutionary crisis, the specific elements of the international situation and of
each country must be introduced into the picture. What matters most is that
an increasingly repressive capitalist development is not only always possible in
the abstract, but is actually being nourished today by precise economic,
social, political and military mechanisms. A theory opposed to this
deterministic view of the necessity of socialism, a dialectical conception of
history-a conception which refuses to exclude regression and catastrophe a
priori-is a fundamental discrimination at the interior of Marxism. Today,
the development of advanced capitalism renders this discrimination all the
ought not
of
more
important.
77. There exist very powerful tendencies and forces pushing towards the
disintegration of civilization and the aberrant and self-destructive use of the
432
new
power which progress has
communism is
only
one
provided for mankind. The maturity of

side, the positive side, of the gigantic historic
contradiction; the other side is catastrophe-catastrophe of which atomic war

offers to mind the simplest and most terrifying image, but not the only one,
and
perhaps not even the worst.
A New General Line
78. Certain strategic hypotheses follow from this analysis, elements of a

general line on which to found revolutionary action in the advanced capitalist
societies related to the level attained by the international class struggle.
79. The suppression of capitalist relations of production and the
construction of communism as a progressive process (but one beginning
immediately) constitute the inspirational principle of the revolutionary
program; the perspective within which each particular struggle is situated, the
terrain on which a bloc of revolutionary social and political forces is built.
Communism is the concrete program in the name of which the working class
struggles and demands power. That signifies:
a) a struggle against the capitalist division of labor and the capitalist
conception of work. This requires an increasing reduction of subordinate and
repetitive jobs (along with conscious renunciation of the goal of maximizing
the quantity and variety of consumer goods, a goal tied to this form of work);
resistance to the technical and organizational development that regards work
as a commodity and the production of value as an exclusive end; the rotation
of all members of society in the most subordinate and alienating jobs,
insofar as these cannot yet be suppressed; the multiplication of socially
organized activities outside the traditional work process; and the abolition
of the school as a separate organism, that is, of the permanent and
social character of education.
b) a struggle for equality. That means a real standardization of incomes;
an end, at the same time, to the selective character of the educational system
and of every hierarchical system that follows from it at all levels of society;
and liquidation of the individualist models of consumption. This does not
mean leveling, but the contrary: for an increasingly arbitrary and impersonal
hierarchy of incomes and of power, the substitution of a differentiation
between individuals resulting from the equality of social conditions offered to
each individual for the free expression of himself.
c) a radical struggle for social management and against the political state.
That involves the overcoming of parliamentary democracy and of the
function of specialized bodies of the state, of the division between
politics and economics. This does not mean the limitation of political liberty
and of the participation of the masses in power, but the contrary: it means
struggle against the abstract character of bourgeois liberties, against delegation as the essence of political power, against separation of the state and
433
society, the public and the private. Bourgeois parliamentarism is not the
definitive model of political liberty but one of its mystified specific forms.
80. These general objectives can unfold in a reciprocal way: without the
overcoming of the divided and alienated character of work, the importance of
material stimulants cannot decline freely; social management of the productive process is not possible if this structure has a hierarchical character, and
without social and cultural equality between individuals; a multiplication of
free activities occurring within the closed framework of the production of
goods is unthinkable so long as it is not determined by an expansion of all of
social life. Communism is a total and conscious process.
81. This class struggle in no way means the establishment of communism
in a &dquo;single blow,&dquo; without a &dquo;transition.&dquo; Nor does it mean the introduction
of &dquo;elements of communism&dquo; in a capitalist society. It means that the
alternative to be constructed cannot be &dquo;democratic&dquo; first and &dquo;socialist&dquo;
later (as in the frontist strategy); nor can it be founded only on the reversal of
state power and bourgeois ownership (as in the Leninist strategy). Instead, it
can and must make the real possibility of overcoming capitalist relations of
production explicit, clear and concrete, and it must animate this perspective
within the entire range of struggles already existing in capitalist society.
Functions
of the &dquo;Councils &dquo; and of the Party
82. The conditions exist for the communist perspective to be translated

into objectives for concrete struggles, born of a real movement in key sectors
of society. This perspective can escape from being reduced to a pure discourse
of propaganda and of ideological consciousness. The problem of intermediary
objectives can, in effect, be posed in a new way. The first change is that their
value is no longer reductive, instrumental for rupture (terrain of convergence
of diverse interests united in a common struggle against the bourgeois state),
but instead their value is in progressively clarifying a perspective and a
construction of political and organizational capacities for the management of
a different society. The second change is that the intermediary objectives
cease to be useful only at moments of acute crisis; the specificity of their
content does not prevent a reformist absorption. They become, in fact,
permanent instruments for the construction of an alternative force.
83. One can therefore establish a new relationship between the movement
of struggle and political unification. Traditionally, the struggle of the masses
was centered around demands. It was through these alone that one might
break the trade-unionist horizon through radicalization of the syndicalist
theme, thus uniting particular struggles around a political perspective. To this
relation between social and political movements corresponds the distinction
between union and party. In advanced capitalism, this distinction between
economic struggle and political struggle tends to disappear. In consequence, a
434
between mass movement-unitary and autonomous, progressively discovering the political dimension of its own immediate
struggles and the paths towards liaison with other sectors-and a political
organization, no longer understood as an exterior political consciousness, but
as the source of continual synthesis between the movement in struggle and
the patrimony of theory and of class organization: a corrective against
corporatist disintegration and a guarantee of strategic unification.
84. This relationshop implies that the mass movement no longer presents
itself as atomized and spontaneous, but has its own structure. The latter is
constituted by councils, organs of unitary and direct expression of homogeneous social groupings, political and syndicalist at the same time, always
revocable: neither organs of self-management, nor transitory expressions of a
phase of dual power, but organizational forms that establish and develop the
levels of mass political consciousness in the life of specific social defiance.
85. An expansion of the mass movement is indispensable for determining
real social crises and, at the same time, for reunifying a bloc of forces capable
of reversing capitalist power and of directing a program of transition to
communism. The councils will not grow in a linear and progressive manner, as
counterpowers at the interior of capitalist society, but will develop in phases
of conflict and will recede when the movement faces a halt. The problem is to
prevent this recession from wiping out all gains, to guarantee a leap forward
each time on the level of self-organization and class consciousness.
86. But because of the ambiguity of all social forces in their immediacy,
and because of the fragmentation of the class front unceasingly produced by
the system, this expansion requires that there be a political force both inside
and outside the movement: that is, there must be a theory and an
organization, produced from the entire history of the class and from its world
dimension, a memory of the masses, an instrument of coordination for their
struggles. This instrument of continual synthesis, without which anticapitalist
pressure remains secondary, is the party- Revolution in an advanced capitalist
country does not demand a minimum but a maximum of organization, not a
minor, but a major mediation of consciousness-in the entire society and in
direct relation to the movement.
new
relationship
The Illusion
is
imposed
of the Parliamentary Road
87. The growth of struggles antagonistic to the system, to the extent that
they obtain results, modifies relations of force and tends to precipitate an
economic and political crisis. This crisis is necessarily violent, by the very
force of the movement, even if it does not take the form of civil war. The
acceleration of economic and political combat obviates the mediating
function of traditional institutions and political forces; it destroys institutional normalcy. This does not mean that the revolution, and the state
coming out of it, will deny universal suffrage, but that universal suffrage can
435
sanction the issue of a combat already resolved by other instruments,
and will be exercised in a system of democracy which is no longer
representative and formal. In this sense, the parliamentary road to socialism is
an illusion. Parliament is neither the center nor the highest moment in which
the movement expresses itself. It is an impoverished projection, a sometimes
useful but imperfect instrument-the more imperfect as class struggle
becomes more acute and new forms of alternative organization are extended.
88. For this combat to result in victory and for this &dquo;leap&dquo; to be
accomplished, the latter must add itself to a long series of struggles, a long
labor of construction of a line, of a system of forces, of a program. Only a
progressive expansion of the movement can in fact permit: (a) the promotion
of unity in an increasingly differentiated proletariat; (b) the gathering around
the proletariat of other social strata that are potentially revolutionary, but
captives of cooptive instruments of the system and of corporate interests; (c)
the concrete construction of the alternative program, for which struggle alone
can provide the necessary data (needs, capacities, organization).
89. To define the problem of the alternative program, the traditional
parties have adopted two formulate, each full of equivocation: that of &dquo;the
model of development,&dquo; and that of &dquo;the program of transition to socialism.&dquo;
a) the equivocation in the formula, &dquo;model of development,&dquo; follows
from the fact that the fundamental discrimination between reformism and
the necessity of revolution is veiled. Thus cast to the shadows are the
necessity for the conquest of state power by a bloc of forces employed in
overcoming the capitalist system, and the necessity for a transformation of the
very structure of political-statist power without which it is illusory to effect
those modifications of international relations, that conversion of the
productive apparatus, that limitation of privileges, that mobilization of
energies, that planning of resources which are essential for a truly alternative
type of development. Moreover, this formula suggests that the objective
conditions for an alternative development already exist, and are blocked only
by the will of the rulers or the capitalists; whereas the objective possibilities
for this type of development do not yet exist, inasmuch as class struggle has
yet to create preliminary conditions-a different capacity for organization
and for direction of the masses, a new, and conscious hierarchy of social
needs, a different hegemony for each sector of the society.
b) the formula, &dquo;program of transition to socialism,&dquo; also contains an
equivocation. It is tied to the idea of the conquest of state power by a
proletarian force which, on the face of it, has the enormous task of
completing the bourgeois revolution, and it proposes confronting this task at
the outset, and then proceeding to a really radical transformation of the society (approximately: &dquo;transition to a regime of transition&dquo;). In an advanced
capitalist society where the problem of socialist transformation is posed
immediately and where the weight of social organization does not permit a
only
436
prolonged uncertainty about the fundamental mechanisms for regulation of

this development, such a schema has an ambiguous meaning: it serves as a
verbal cover for a progressive and reformist position, or as a maneuver for
at a government and a program in direct contradiction with the
decision to dismantle the bourgeois state and to accelerate a crisis.
c) the problem can be posed itself in entirely different terms. To the
degree that the movement of anticapitalist struggle produces a crisis in the
society and establishes the objective conditions for a different development,
revolutionary political forces must synthesize these conditions and offer a
programmatic alternative to this crisis-based on the explicit pressupposition
of a total transformation of the system of ownership and institutions and on
the progressive though immediately initiated, creation of a different social
order. This must be neither a model different from the development of
capitalist society, nor a transitional program waiting for a socialist revolution,
but a program for the construction of communism, making explicit what this
signifies in a given situation, in a particular country, at a given level of
productive forces, and of international relations of force. The function of
such a program is obvious: to clarify the perspective of struggle, to show the
coherence and the realism of their objectives outside the given system, to
nourish the necessary conviction in the masses and on the level of political
forces for conquering and directing power and to make perfectly explicit the
maturity and concrete character of the destruction of the system.
arriving
The Revolutionary Historic Bloc

90. The proletariat, representing the majority of those exploited in
modern society, is the central motor and directing force of the revolutionary
historic bloc built around a communist persepctive. In an advanced capitalist
society, however, the proletariat is not a reality that is sociologically
definable with precision. It cannot be identified with the traditional factory
workers: for the boundaries of the force of wage labor have been
considerably enlarged. It cannot any longer be defined as those who produce
surplus value: for the limits between productive and nonproductive labor
appear less rigid. Thus the concept of proletariat runs the risk of being
watered down until it signifies everything and nothing. In an advanced
capitalist society, just as Marx had seen, the proletariat constitutes itself as a
class especially through its struggle, its relationship to the reversal of the
system. It is that part of the force of wage labor that, by its social aspect, its
level of struggle, its degree of organization, stands up to capitalist relations of
production. This is why the fundamental means for the construction of a
socialist alternative in the West does not consist in alliances between the
proletariat and other social strata, but in the unification and constitution of
the proletariat as a class through the politicization of its economic struggle
and the socialization of its political struggle.
437
91. There exist, in advanced capitalist society, two social zones that
be defined as proletarian, but that are decisive for revolution:
intellectuals and technicians with functions of management and research, and
oppressed minorities on the margins of society (women, migrant workers,
racial minorities, the unemployed). The relationshop of the proletariat with
these strata cannot be one of traditional alliance. One the one hand, a
convergence of these strata is only possible at the highest level of proletarian
struggle: it is only in carrying its radical critique of the system and its
communist perspective to the limit that the proletariat discovers the
progressive nature of these strata and can satisfy their profound demands. On
the other hand, because these strata do not represent a &dquo;residue&dquo; of a feudal
and bourgeois past, but are a specific product of capitalist development, and
present values and needs essential for the revolutionary process, only a
critique of science and of the social roles of those who produce science, by
professionals, permits the proletariat to go beyond a mere refusal of capitalist
technology and organization. And it is the same for excluded minorities (as,
on the world level, for pre-bourgeois civilizations and peasant populations)
who directly bear the values and needs (equality, community, critique of
productivism) essential for the communist perspective. In this perspective, the
role of students appears clear; they participate in both these aspects of
capitalist society-as a force of intellectual labor coming into being, and, as a
declassed group, excluded from productive life and, as youth, the principle
victims of the disintegration of the social body.
92. From the point of view of the proletariat and the exploited strata, a
series of oppressed and subordinated social groups, participants in the
structure of capitalist power and consumers of surplus value (the plethoric
bureaucratic apparatus, the proliferation of intermediary workers, etc.)
assume qualitatively increasing importance. Because of their professional
nature, their relatively privileged income, and their disaggregation, it is very
difficult to mobilize these strata in a non-corporatist struggle. But their
neutrality is very important and depends on two factors: a growing
proletarian struggle which, by its economic and political results, reduces the
scope of the integrating mechanisms of the system, mechanisms that sharpen
the malaise of these groups and impose a precise direction to their oscillating
orientation; and the political &dquo;decapitation&dquo; of these social groups-that is,
the relationship that the revolutionary movement succeeds in establishing
with the current ideals and the intermediary political forces that, in some
way, represent these strata.
93. In an advanced capitalist society, this relationship, on the level of
political forces, is contradictory and complex. The bureaucratic-corporatist
transformation of state power has invested even political organizations until
they have become clientele systems, power machines, instruments of
mediation. But the development of society has also demystified the
cannot
438
relationship between the system and politically reformist, liberal, and catholic
ideologies. Thus a contradiction opens between the best components of these
ideologies and the system. Which of these two processes, will prevail, and in
what form, is one of the fundamental problems for investigation in each
capitalist society. To bring about a crisis in the political-ideological apparatus
of the system is an essential objective: as much to unmask the arbitrary and
violent content of class domination, as to favor the maturation on the
neutralization of important social strata. This is possible to the extent that
the contradiction between the best of the culture produced in history and the
capitalist system deepens, and that the capacity for proletarian revolution
increasingly manifests its universal character.
The Problem of the State
94. The conquest of the state by a bloc of forces already constructed on a
communist perspective-in a society that has already resolved the problems of
primitive accumulation and where a unitary organization of production and
of the state exists-allows for power to be exercised in a profoundly
democratic way, with an active and total participation of the masses. It can
permit not only full respect for freedom of expression, thought and
organization, but can give new material bases and new social presuppositions
to these freedoms, liquidating the formal and abstract character that they
assume in bourgeois society. The real exercise of these freedoms and the
participation of the masses in political leadership at the very highest level are
not obstacles to the revolutionary process but, on the contrary, the
indispensable precondition for the advance of the revolution, above all in a
complex society. The revolutionary state can and must be, from the very
beginning, in the advanced countries, a &dquo;sui-generis&dquo; state, a state of a new
type; that is, a state which, from the first moment, begins to wither away.
95. This does not mean that one should consider the Marxist-Leninist
insofar as communist society

is not built, and direct management by the masses is not possible, elements of
centralization and delegation must progressively wither away, although
continuing to dominate in the political constitution. Insofar as differences
between classes remain, the tendency of privileged social groups to use their
privileges to seize the instruments of power is constant. Thus the revolutionary process can advance to its limit only if this tendency is conquered, only if
political power rests in the hands of those whose material interest is the total
suppression of exploitation. Thus the political constitution of a socialist state
cannot be neutral, above classes. The political &dquo;equality&dquo; of the bourgeois
constitutions (founded on the abstraction of the citizen and on his right to
vote) is only the sanction for a real inequality (political and economic). A
socialist state cannot have an &dquo;unequal&dquo; constitution; that is, a constitution
that gives political power a structure that guarantees &dquo;the leadership of those
principle of proletarian dictatorship surpassed.
439
who have not all the titles to lead.&dquo;

96. Historical experience shows however that this inequality tends to turn
back against itself, to transform itself into domination by an elite governing
in the name of the proletariat. The response to this decisive problem for the
society of transition can only come from the correct solution to two other
questions: the question of the councils, and the question of the party.
97. Just as the maturity of communism in the present society gives a
directly anticapitalist character to mass movement and permits autonomous
and unitary forms of organization and direction (the councils), a revolutionary rupture effected at this level and with these instruments can bring about a
type of state really &dquo;on the road to extinction.&dquo; As Lenin thought, but as the
conditions of the Russian Revolution did not permit, the supporting structure
of a proletarian state is the councils: as the specific form of the society of
transition and as the surpassing (and not the completion) of the bourgeois
parliamentary state. To found state power on the councils (in the factories,
the schools, the neighborhoods-in all the decisive articulations of the
society) already signifies: the organization of power and suffrage in relation
to its concrete contents, the uprooting of &dquo;delegation&dquo; in its abstract and
general character which still persists, in all forms of the state; making this
delegation really revocable and therefore guaranteeing permanent exercise of
power on the part of the masses; the support of power in a structure that
assures a decisive weight to the proletariat and to the most homogeneous,
numerous, and active groups, without suppressing the liberty or denying the
political equality of the base.
98. Even in a society of transition which is, by definition, a society where
social management of production is not yet possible and where relations
between men are still characterized by exchange, the councils cannot be
exclusive organs of self-management of productive activity. Production must
be coordinated in a plan, and the behavior of individuals and of groups
conditioned by still partly coercive elements. The structure of the councils is
therefore complementary to the presence, outside and apart from them, of a
subjective unifying force-the party. In the dialectic between these two
institutions-the council as the immediate expression of the social group and
the obstacle to the degeneration of the party and the self-conservation of the
state, and the party as the expression of revolutionary consciousness and
obstacle to the corporatist tendency of the masses and of the councils-the
guarantee for the functioning of the system is to be found.
99. In its struggle for power, in the period of transition, the revolutionary
party has three characteristics: it is the party of militants, tending to solderize
itself while transforming men both as a preliminary to and a consequence of
their political and social activity; it is also the proletarian party, not only
because its constant point of reference is the interests of the proletariat, but
also because it provides for its direction by the proletariat of its own practice;
440
it is the mass party, not only by its size and ties to the masses, but also
because it works where the masses labor concretely and organize themselves,
and because it orients the masses in a concrete struggle for the transformation
of reality; and, last, it is the unitary party, not because it conforms and is
subservient to the richness and autonomous responsibility of its own militant
body, but because it is an historic formation with a common end and the
locus of the unification of the working class.
100. The rules and institutions that guarantee these characteristics for a
party and therefore determine its organizational structure cannot be defined
in the abstract, because different situations demand different institutions and
the same structure assumes different significance in different situations. It is a
permanent and undeniable given that the guarantee of the democratic
character of the party lies, above all, outside the party: in its relation with the
All the partys internal norms must be subordinated to this
relationship. In this sense, the rules through which the party expressed itself
during the period of the Third International, rules still expressed in
democratic centralism, are not only historically surpassed, but constitute one
of the fundamental causes of the present revisionism of the communist
parties of the West.
masses.
[Readers
interested in the second 100 theses of For Commurefer more directly to the Italian political situation.
which
nism,
will find them, in Italian, in Il Manifesto, Year II, No. 9, September, 1970, which can be obtained from the publishers, Piazza del
Grillo 10, Rome 00184, Italy.]]

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Politics

For Cmnmunism: Theses of the Il Manifesto Group

>> Version of Record - Jan 1, 1971

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Theses of the Il Manifesto

(Translated by Andrew Levine)

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Crisis of the Frontist Strategy

step towards mass revolutionary consciousness, thus changing the political

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of the existence, nature, and

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a new phase of world opposition is one of the prerequisites of a

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crisis directly challenges the central mechanisms of the system,

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of this model of development in the advanced areas, the tragedy of the

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integration today is meeting unforeseen drawbacks. The

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picture, class conflict in the advanced capitalist countries once

economic and scientific

where the concrete historical conditions are

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position and participates in the mechanism of imperialist exploitation. Today,

self-reproduction of its economic system, and insofar as it paralyzes the

reasons for mass rebellion in the two areas.

the entire world

a) that the development of revolution in the West, the contestation of

these two types of class and repressive societies are unimportant.

these last years, the

myth of the integrated, one-dimensional

revolutionary practice capable of uniting the majority of

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capable of guaranteeing any productive development; but rather, is already

they are not traditional, are nonetheless &dquo;material.&dquo;

66. To develop, the system requires, for example, an increasing level of

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consumption different from the current insane multiplication of illusory

Revolu tion As A Social Fact

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expansion of production through an always more efficient use of given

production and consumption. Until now,

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The Communist Perspective

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power which progress has

provided for mankind. The maturity of

contradiction; the other side is catastrophe-catastrophe of which atomic war

perhaps not even the worst.

A New General Line

78. Certain strategic hypotheses follow from this analysis, elements of a

of the &dquo;Councils &dquo; and of the Party

82. The conditions exist for the communist perspective to be translated

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of the Parliamentary Road

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prolonged uncertainty about the fundamental mechanisms for regulation of

The Revolutionary Historic Bloc