Speculations - Amadeo Bordiga

If politics in Italy were presided over by an uncontaminated debate on high human and social ideals, speculation on corpses would not be possible. These elections, imposed on the country by surprise, do not worry us communists, who expect nothing from certain wild beasts. We do not need speculation in the sense of taking electoral advantage of the crowd's state of mind to shout for consensus for our ideas. We must inexorably reject those who come to us determined by the force of the current; we must know how to go back up the source, against the current, with difficulty, because with us must be those who will never abandon us again, determined to lose everything. When it is possible for a man of government to gamble the entire national representation on the "maybe yes, maybe no" of the elections; when, in the game of parliamentary forces, parties that draw life from the humus of the people must deform and adapt until they are caught in the grip of the pincers; when the proletarian lion roars in the squares, there is no reason to place any trust in this bourgeois institution; no conquest deserves such a waste of energy, no hope of being able to bend the instrument of bourgeois legality to itself. Political prestige is more valuable on the streets, in illegal territories, than among the bills in the chamber and in the offices of Parliament.

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But if we care little about the number of deputies ordered, as Bilotti says, to keep watch in the bourgeois Parliament, this is not the way, think the Socialists, who, naturally, like all speculators in the electoral game, are worrying about the platform, as they say in electoral jargon, on which to carry out the program for the conquest of seats in Parliament. And they found it! The dead of Diana, with philosophical dissertations on the more or less trained and conditioned use of violence.

Turati has already made a panegyric of it, remembering the lawyer Giordani and almost the poor fascists who fell in unequal combat with the proletarian rabble. And as if the first-class funeral that Mr. Giolitti had given to the so-called "workers' control of the factories" was not enough, he wanted to bury, with all the bourgeois honors, the beautiful battle fought by the workers for the occupation of the factories. They say that he achieved great success; who knows who listened to him.

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So violence is a "fraud". It is very true, the fraud borders on adultery, and the Socialists who now preach like this are low-market fraudsters. They look to repent violence now the bourgeois and capitalist serpent has awakened from its lethargy and bites at the proletarian organization.

First, they ran after the consensus of all the disappointed of the war, of all the displaced, of all those who suffered from the high cost of living, and they were for Lenin, for the dictatorship and the arming of the proletariat. Now that the bosses' reaction becomes more efficient and acute the more it feels condemned to perish for its mistakes, they throw away the cumbersome burdens and borrow the dead of the civil war to condemn the proletariat.

Yes, because it is nothing but a condemnation of the proletarian revolution that Turati recited in Milan to set the tone for the socialist battle. But before remembering the brave, courageous, kind Giordano, before remembering those torn apart by the Diana bomb, why didn't he remember the first proletarians killed at the hands of fascist murderers? Why didn't he remember the first killed in Bologna? Why didn't he remember all the other proletarians killed from Puglia to Tuscany, from Ferrara to Polesine, only because they were organizers or because they sang the anthem of their recovery? Why didn't he say that the proletarian masses suffer pain, fires, devastation, imprisonment, insults without reacting? And despite this, fascist delinquency does not stop for a single moment. What armed the hand of the worker if not the exasperation of fascism?

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Ah! Must the worker who loves his membership card, spit on it because a dozen fascists want to attack him? Must the Socialist, the anarchist, the Communist declare that he is not one and shout "Long live the King!" because of a drunken mob of fascists? Why not teach that worker, that anarchist, Communist or Socialist, to be proud of himself and not to suffer threats and insults? "So as not to commit fraudulent violence that is no triumph", Turati would say. It's fine for you, Turati, for we have known for a long time that you are no longer a Socialist; but for all those who devote themselves to the electoral fair to rehash your philosophical lucubrations, your humanism, out of place, the only consensus of the proletarian crowds would be real lynching, because, by God, it is not right to mock a phalanx of wage slaves, just when the bourgeoisie is waging its class war.

The Parisian speculators were hung on lanterns by the Communards. We see no difference between them and today's speculators of proletarian passions for the purposes of the electoral market. One is as good as the other.