PDF-Version: Il Programma Comunista – Who ever was behind the Swastika?
It is democratic cretinism.
This society, which wallows in the most decaying senility and reeks of putrefaction, attempts to drug its decadence with the craze for new facts.
Two stand out today, in the mass manufactured popular opinion. One is the pandering détente between the Americans and the Russians, an orgy of pacifist imbecility; the other is a phantom as new as it is decrepit: fascism or Nazism, spreading terror from walls scratched with hooked crosses – perhaps with fasci littori tomorrow. In Germany, Adenauer’s government is accused, in Italy Segni’s tomorrow; and they defend themselves by saying that the dead do not return. On the opposite side, in the press of the traitors to the proletarian revolution, one is happy for the dead to rise again, and revels in the euphoria of reviving the despicable anti-German crusade. The remedy on the horizon is the same as ever, a counter-novelty, a new parliamentary majority. Fascism, if it wants, will do the same good political business as then. It is better game to daub a wall in defiance of the police, who respond with legal and constitutional moves.
The crusade is the customary and accursed one; the campaign of national hatred that has marked the downfall of the working class movement every time. In 1914 the incantations were directed against Wilhelm, in 1940 against Hitler (with Stalin’s delayed outburst), today they are directed against the wave of charcoal drawings – once again against the backdrop of the waltz and alcove rounds between the Russians and Americans. The aim is always the same, to castrate revolutionary class energies by falsifying their historical target: bourgeois and democratic capitalism.
Our historical position (however meagre our following may be) allows us not to be surprised either by the distensive love affairs or by the dead rising. Even after the war, we did not believe the hoax that democracy had defeated fascism, nor that its alleged defeaters from West and East would clash with weapons above that tepid corpse.
The real facts, i.e. the establishment of the fascist method in today’s bourgeois society, and the concordance in pacifist homilies from all gangs, have a common origin and explanation in the general wooing of the middle classes, skilfully carried out by the powers of big capitalism, and filthily by parties that disguise themselves as communists and answer to Moscow. The war was lost by anti-fascism precisely because from all sides, and especially at the behest of the Kremlin police state, the democratic lie was courted in its most baleful form: the solicitation of the intermediate social classes, in which the large super-industrial monstrous states competed – emulatively[1], of course. What else was the tried socio-historical recipe of fascism?
In America, the most heinous dictatorship of big capital is disguised with the fable of shares distributed among millions of citizens in the alleged modern form of people’s capitalism, to deny the existence of an antithesis between rich and poor classes. Russia encourages the parties dependent on it to place the interests of the petty and middle bourgeoisies far above the protection of proletarian ones. Triumphing everywhere in the demagogic pitfalls – and it is no different in the case of the Russian structure – is the middle class[2], which in England, the experimental field of Marxism, two centuries ago meant precisely the capitalist bourgeoisie, then correctly understood as the middle class between the defeated feudal nobility and the nascent working class.
But while the middle class of the eighteenth century has everywhere in the nineteenth century become the open social ruling class, i.e. the outmost class, the romanticised middle classes of twentieth-century societies are human slime with no present or future history.
There are two potentially warring classes in the social war: the capitalist one and the wage-earning one. Between them there are layers crowded but amorphous, condemned to serve others. Hence the muddiness of majority solutions. Pacifists by nature, those classes can only fight as mercenaries. Capital can buy them, and the expression of this mercenarism is fascism, a stigma that characterises the contemporary phase. Fascism, expression of the dictatorship of big capital, could not have come into being, with its proclamation of illusions about an autonomous task for the middle class (which feeds off it in servile squads as in the hooliganism of deluded post-war youth) without the gigantic preparation of the age-old democratic and popular deception, tending towards interclassism on principle and thus deceptively exalting the middle classes as a vain cement between the two vital opposing historical classes. Parliamentary and popular democracy was the breeding ground for the fascist microbe. As early as 1919, when the modern phenomenon appeared in Italy, we said so, concluding that the only way to kill the fascist infection was to undermine and crush democracy, the parties and the classes on which it rests, of which those of social-democratic opportunism of the time, communist-democratic today, are an integral part.
Fascism won when in vain we proposed to respond by raiding with squads of pure proletarians the headquarters of the bourgeois tycoons, pertaining to banking and anonymous in character, lodges and bishoprics, instead of forming a pacifist bloc with those in tears about the defunct freedom peddled by the bourgeois, which Moscow ordered after failing to realise that any concessions to the parliamentary form (like those of 1919 and 1920) diverted us from the only extra-legal possibility of beating fascism. Today, the swastika reappears and the carcasses only know how to re-propose the convergence of the proletariat and the middle classes on the electoral plane. As loud as they clamour against neo-Nazism, as clear is their role as its mediators, if history teaches us anything.
A dictatorship can only be killed by a historical phase of counter-dictatorship. It was not a question of hanging the person of the dictator by the feet, who only in that position did not function as a clown. It was really necessary to hit the class that was behind him. But once again, just as the terror of the squadristi saved that class, so did its necessary complement, the parliamentary fraud. Must the stupid merry-go-round therefore begin again? To the polls, then, for Togliatti, converging therein with the squadristi born yesterday and tomorrow.
Can the party’s cretinous seniors understand that history is made with dictatorships and not with the excommunication of dictatorships? They, panderers of practice and doctrine, christened the false victory over fascism as the second Italian Risorgimento. But even this, in its place of class history, they are unable to understand. In that event, dictatorships shone and convergences were supremely repugnant.
On 18 April 1861, the parliament of the Kingdom of Italy met in Turin. Cavour was disarming Garibaldi’s revolutionary formations in the Mezzogiorno that were aiming at Rome. Garibaldi had at first refused the nomination, then made up his mind and accepted election to the first constituency of Naples, in an attempt to oppose the legal dismantling of the revolution, the only force he believed in. This ministry, he said, provoking Cavour’s anger and the suspension of the session, has extended its evil hand over the Mezzogiorno. At the resumption he continued:
“Your decree struck the decisive blow to the southern army. The dictatorship was a legitimate government; it is the author of the plebiscite that gave you two kingdoms; you have today rejected the army that gave them to you”.
The bespectacled Piedmontese bourgeoisie used and abused the irregular, revolutionary armies; it treacherously liquidated them in 1859, in 1861, in 1866. Why would it not have done the same, if other traitors had not done so, in 1945?
Togliatti and his men use the naive head of Garibaldi, who retired from his parliamentary seat in exile after that invective, for electoral purposes; but they theorise politics by taking the whorish count of Cavour, or his worthy epigone Giovanni Giolitti, as their model.
Marx’s theoretical critique of Garibaldi’s visit to London[3], when the latter was taken out of his insurgent mood and combined with the empty pacifist philanthropy of the leagues for democratic freedom, was valid in doctrine then and now. Garibaldi, a revolutionary in his method of action, was then babbling the same vain ideologies on the fraternity of peoples that today’s purported updaters of Karl Marx, let alone Khrushchev himself, enunciate in the same hypocritical style as Eisenhower on his side.
According to the ringleader and his caudatario[4] italiota[5], it would be a modern position, compared to the Leninian invocation forty years ago of the alternative dictatorship of one of the two outmost classes over the world, to defer to the judgement of majorities of national parliaments, or of international unarmed competitions!
These very modern people, always concerned with staging one last conversion and contortion, are nowhere near the historical height in doctrine of Lenin in 1919 and Marx in 1866. But the vile renegade practice that followed did not even reach the historical heights of a Garibaldi in 1861 – a general of the bourgeoisie indeed, but loyal to death to the means of armed action and dictatorship.
They are not forty years ahead, but a century behind.
Source: “Il Programma Comunista”, No. 2, 1960.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_emulation
[2] The expression is put in English in the Italian original.
[3] Garibaldi visited London in 1864. Marx and Engels discuss the event in letters dated 19 April and 29 April respectively, found in MECW 41. Contemporary Christopher Hibbert notes that “Karl Marx described them [the scenes caused] as ‘a miserable spectacle of imbecility’”. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/garibaldi-england-1864
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caudatario
[5] A blend word of Italian and idiot.
Libri Incogniti 