Leaflet signed Comunismo dei Consigli [Council Communism], Milan, December 9, 1968. As Miguel Amorós reports, the leaflet was the result of a meeting between “the Milanese radical nuclei, that is, between Sanguinetti's group, that of the anarchist renewers of the FAGI, including Joe Fallisi and “Pinki” Gallieri, that of the editors of Il Gatto Selvaggio, including Eddy Ginosa, proponents of a critical reworking of the Council Communist theses, and, finally, some isolated individuals or “mavericks” such as Giorgio Cesarano, who recognized themselves in the theoretical perspectives outlined.” (Brief History of the Italian Section of the Situationist International, 2009)
Comrades,
The collapse of the revolutionary image presented by the international communist movement followed with forty years delay the collapse of the revolutionary movement itself.
But the process of reconstruction of the integral revolutionary movement could not take place except through the integral dissolution of Leninist ideology, in all its disguises, beyond the false oppositions between the defenders of the Moscow bureaucracy and the worshippers of the Peking bureaucracy: the defense of Stalin's “construction of socialism,” as of Mao-Tze-Tung's “revolution,” is at once the expression of unlimited loyalty and scandalous renunciation.
We think it useful, in this regard, to point out an exemplary episode in the overall dissolution of the international association of totalitarian bureaucracies: within the Communist Party of Italy (Marxist-Leninist), a rupture occurred between two rival rackets, which almost immediately expelled each other, exchanging the ritual accusations of anti-partyism, neo-revisionism and Trotskyism.
These unnerving polemics, justified under the pretext of a “class struggle in the Party,” express the fact that each faction is forced to blame its opponent for every antiproletarian crime, simply because it cannot name its real fault, namely the class power of the bureaucracy.
With the simultaneous release of two mutually opposed editions of the Party's official organ, “Nuova Unità,” with the same headline, the farcical was added to the absurd.
It is the unity of misery hiding under spectacular oppositions.
It is ideology to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes schizophrenia.
At the moment when, in the confusion of a bureaucracy that cannot be itself, the bureaucrats fight each other in the name of the same dogma and denounce everywhere “the bourgeois protected by the red flag,” the double thinking has itself split.
The resurrected Bolsheviks playing the comedy of activism in leftist minority groups are but the stench of the past and do not herald the future. Forty years of counterrevolutionary history separate these wrecks from the great shipwreck of the “revolution betrayed.”
They are wrong because we are no longer in 1920, and in 1920 they were already wrong. They have nothing to do with the modern revolution. While they seem to identify the Party with the revolution, they in fact identify the revolution with the Party.
Proletarian revolutions mercilessly mock the uncertainties, weaknesses and miseries of their first attempts; they continually backtrack in the face of the indefinite immensity of their own aims, until a situation is created that makes any return to the past impossible.
Milan, 9 December 1968 Comunismo dei Consigli
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