The Immediate Revolutionary Programme

1. With the gigantic recovery after the First World War, potent on a worldwide scale and in Italy resulting in the formation of a strong party in 1921, it became clear that the most pressing postulate was the taking of political power and that the proletariat could not take it by legal means but only by using armed action; that the best opportunity arises from military defeat of one’s own country; and that the political form which will follow victory is the dictatorship of the proletariat. Social and economic transformation occurs later, and its prior condition is the dictatorship.

2. The Communist Manifesto clarified that the social measures which would follow, to be realised and accomplished “despotically”, will differ – the road to full communism being very long – according to the level of development of the productive forces in the country where the proletariat conquers power, and the rapidity with which this victory is extended to other countries. It indicated the measures appropriate then, in 1848, for the most advanced European countries, and emphasised that they weren’t the whole of the socialist programme, but rather a group of measures which it qualified as transitory, immediate, variable, and essentially “contradictory”.

3. Subsequently (and this was one of the elements which misled some into supporting a more flexible theory, continually re-elaborated on the basis of historical evidence) many of the measures originally viewed as the responsibility of the revolutionary proletariat were carried out by the bourgeoisie itself in this or that country, for example: free public instruction, State bank, etc.
But this didn’t authorise anyone to believe that the precise laws and predictions concerning the transition from the capitalist mode of production to the socialist one, with all its economic, social and political forms, had changed, it merely meant that the immediate post-revolutionary period – the economy of transition to socialism, preceding the subsequent lower stage of socialism, and the final, higher stage of socialism, or full communism – would be different and slightly smoother.

4. Classical opportunism consisted in having people believe that all of these measures, from the highest to the lowest, could be applied by the bourgeois democratic State, in response to pressure from, or even after having been legally conquered by, the proletariat. But if such were the case these various “measures”, if compatible with the capitalist mode of production, would have been adopted in the interests of continuing capitalism and postponing its collapse, and if incompatible, the State would never have adopted them.

5. Today’s opportunism, following a formula of popular and progressive democracy within the framework of the parliamentary constitution, has a different, worse historical task. Not only does it delude the proletariat that some of its own measures can be entrusted to an inter-classist and multi-party State (that is, as far as yesterday’s social-democrats are concerned, it relinquishes the dictatorship) but it even drives the organised masses to fight for “popular and progressive” social measures which are directly opposed to those to which the proletarian power has been committed ever since 1848 and the Manifesto.

6. Nothing better illustrates the total ignominy of such an involution than a list of the measures which will need to be drawn up in the future, when there is a real prospect of taking power in a country of Western capitalism, to replace (a century later) the list in the Manifesto, although its most characteristic measures would still be included.

7. Here is a list of such demands:
– Disinvestment of capital, namely assignment of a much smaller part of total production to goods which are instrumental and non-consumable.
– Increasing the costs of production in order to be able to pay, for as long as wages, markets and money survive, higher wages for less working time.
– Drastic reduction of the working day, to at least half of the hours currently worked, by absorbing unemployment and anti-social activities.
– Reduction in the volume of production with a plan for lower production that focuses on the most necessary areas; authoritarian control of consumption to counter-act the promotion of dangerous and unnecessary goods, and the forceful abolition of activities dedicated to propagating a reactionary psychology.
– Rapid breaking down of business and company boundaries with the forcible transfer not of personnel but of objects of labour (productive activities), in order to move towards the new plan of consumption.
– Rapid abolition of welfare of a mercantile type in order to substitute it with social provision, up to an initial minimum, for non-workers.
– Cessation of building of houses and workplaces around cities, big and small, with a view to attaining a uniform distribution of the population in the countryside. Reduction in the congestion, volume and velocity of traffic and its prohibition when unnecessary.
– Resolute struggle, through abolition of careers and qualifications, against professional specialisation and the social division of labour.
– Obvious immediate measures, akin to the political, in order to bring schools, the press, all means of transmission, of information, and the leisure and entertainment network, under the authority of the Communist State.

8. It is no surprise that the Stalinists and the like, and their parties in the West, are today calling for the exact opposite; and not only in their “institutional” or politico-legal demands, but also in their “structural” or economic-social demands. This allows their actions to run in parallel with those of the party which leads the Russian State and the ones connected to it, in which the task of social transformation is to effect the passage from pre-capitalism to full capitalism, with its entire baggage of economic, social, political and ideological demands, all orientated toward the bourgeois zenith: and viewing with horror only the feudal and medieval nadir. These filthy renegades in the West are all the more contemptible insofar as that peril, still physical and real in parts of Asia in turmoil today, doesn’t exist, as anyone can see, in the triumphant capitalarchy across the Atlantic, whose proletarians languish under the latter’s civil, liberal and national-unitary heel.