The author of this Report is afflicted with a great
disadvantage: it seems to him that nothing, or almost nothing, must be
treated in a light tone. The 20th Century thinks the opposite, and it
has its reasons for this. Our democracy, which demands the expression of
personal opinions from an infinity of brave people who do not have the
time to form a single one, forces everyone to speak with a thoughtlessness [une légèreté] that we, in our turn, are
obliged to excuse, given the necessities of the times.

Nevertheless, this first disadvantage does not shelter us from an
opposite one: if we refuse to use a light tone, we also reject an
academic or serious style for the good reason that we do not intend to
demonstrate in 50 pages what can be said in five lines. We hope that
this double premise will at least serve to excuse, if not justify, the
trenchant [French in original] tone.

In these first few lines, we would like to thank a number of
illustrious Italians, whom we would name if they were dead, but who at
this moment are occupied with important tasks in our economy and
politics, and thus will be grateful to us for our discretion, given the
undeniably delicate character of the subjects treated herein. All that
we can permit ourselves to do is offer to them these pages, which we
have finally decided to publish under the rubric of this Report,
although, we must confess, we secretly but unsuccessfully nourished the
hope that someone other than us would undertake it. On the other hand,
given the speed of the Italian crisis, and the urgency of adopting
remedies, we have had to resolve ourselves to confiding our opinions in
a published work, because, after their previous distribution in the form
of confidential notes and private conversations, it hasn’t seemed to us
that they have encountered all of the desired audience, precisely “there
where one can do what one pleases” [Dante: là dove si puote ciò che si
vuole], that is to say, at the summit of economic power.

It is fitting to say immediately that we do not intend to speak for
all of the Italian bourgeoisie, which has been bastardized by its
own illusions of “openness,” but only a part of it, in which one can
distinguish a Truthful elite [French in original] of the
powerful. It is to this elite that what follows is addressed, in an
epoch in which the monopoly on the more or less critical discourse on
contemporary society seems to belong to those who are opposed to it in a
more or less effective manner, while on our side of the barricade one
discerns a pitiful silence and even an ever-more clumsy recourse to
embarrassed justifications for it. As for us, at this moment in which we
break this monopoly, we are quite far from wanting to seek the least
appearance of “dialogue” with our real enemies. We speak to the heart of
our own class so as to perpetuate its hegemony over this society.

Unlike those who critique society so as to revolutionize its bases,
we will not make grand demagogic or pedagogic speeches; and rather than
resorting to our radical critics, we prefer to personally assume the
disgraced grace [Greek in original: αχαριν χαριν], that is to say, the
displeasing honor of criticizing, even pitilessly, that which in our
management of economic and political power must be effectively
criticized with the sole goal of reinforcing efficiency and
domination.

Thus we do not seek to prove that contemporary society is
desirable, and even less to weigh the possibly modifiable aspects
that it compose it. With all the cold veracity that we have adopted for
all the other affirmations contained in this Report, we say that
this society suits us because it exists and we want to maintain
it to maintain our power over it. To speak the truth in these days is an
exacting and time-consuming task, and since we cannot hope to
exclusively encounter impartial readers, we will content ourselves by
being ourselves as we write, even at the price of making accusations
against the politicians who, over the years, have defended our interests
with more good will than success. We must cease to be hypocrites amongst
ourselves, because we are in the process of becoming victims of this
hypocrisy.

Today, from the point of view of the defense of our society, there
only exists a single danger in the world, and it is that the workers
succeed in speaking to each other about their conditions and
aspirations without any intermediaries. All the other dangers are
attached to, or even proceed directly from, the precarious situation that
places before us this primary problem, which in many respects is
concealed and unacknowledged.

Once this true danger has been defined, it is a question of
exorcising it, and not seeing false dangers in its place. Yet our
politicians only seem preoccupied with saving their own reputations, and
too often this comes too late. But, on the contrary, it is saving our
basis, which is economic above all, with which they must occupy
themselves. For example, we have noted the stupidity that currently
dominates the debate, conducted under the heading of “the Communist
question,” among the principal political leaders, as if this were a
problem that was so embarrassing as to be “new,” as if we ourselves –
and several others, who are certainly no less qualified – had not
already set the form, timing and conditions that will render the
official entrance of the Italian Communist Party [ICP] into the sphere
of power useful for both sides, and as if the Communist leaders had not,
during the most recent meetings that we have held, already unofficially
accepted even the most unfavorable aspects of the project that at this
moment, with the prudence that is now necessary, they are attempting to
get the rank and file of their party, which believes itself to be the
most radical, to accept. This imaginary political debate, which does not
even serve the majority parties by assuring them of the support of
moderate voters – which is a superfluous concern, since the voters
always vote as they are told to vote – , cannot mislead the intelligent
conservatives, either in Italy or abroad, because we know that it is no
longer a question, at the current moment, of seeing if we more or less
need the ICP, given that no one can doubt the utility that this party
has been to us during the last few, very difficult years, when it would
have been so easy for its leaders to harm us and perhaps in an
irreparable fashion, but instead a question of us being in a position to
offer this party sufficient guarantees so that it will not run the risk
– once it is openly allied with our management of power – of being
involved in our possible ruin, for which the ICP would ipso facto
find itself sharing the responsibility and the consequences by, at the
same time, losing its own basis among the workers who, no longer having
any illusions about the most minimal changes in their fate – a fate that
is indeed hardly enviable – and no doubt estimating this to be a
betrayal by their leadership, would react freely, beyond any control and
against all control. That’s the real question; that’s the real
danger.

We know quite well that the Communist parties have many times
furnished proof of their aptitude at collaborating in the management of
bourgeois society, but we must not rely on such a general certitude, as
if it would confer upon our power a reserve of unlimited security, that
is to say, a recourse that would be sufficient in every case no
matter what “the day and hour” of the supreme danger would be, as if
this recourse would not itself be a historical force among others, as if
this force wouldn’t be susceptible of wearing out, either through
inaction or an action that was too maladroitly or too tardily engaged
in. The height [of folly] for us would be finding ourselves, precisely
ourselves, to be the last dupes of the Communist myth by betting on the
fantasy of its omnipotence, which we ourselves have supported at the
times in which it was advantageous for us to combat it. We must never
forget that the only effective power is ours, and that it is
nevertheless threatened. Thus, it isn’t sufficient to know that the
Communist Party is ready to manage society for our profit; we must also
have a place to offer it in a capitalist society that still merits
being managed. Who doesn’t understand that, if the State and civil
society continue to deteriorate at such a dramatic speed under the
pressure of truly irreconcilable enemies whom we – the Communists and us
– have in common, the Communists, caught up with us in the same
disaster, will find themselves as incapable of helping us as the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire or the Kingdom of Jerusalem? If, at that
moment, the Communists deplore the fact that they can no longer maintain
the existing order, that will be a subjective event that will not offer
us any consolation! And if the Communists, by once again taking up the
weapons of counter-revolution, crush the attempt to set up a classless
society in Italy, they would certainly merit the recognition of the
property-owning classes in America and Russia, in Europe and in China,
and they could be admitted more or less quickly into the UN as the
masters of our country, but we – the real dominant class in Italy, the
particular class that can even call itself the founders of the universal
bourgeoisie of modern times and the millennium that it has
effectively imposed on the entire world – will no longer be here. We
will endlessly experience how salty is the taste [Dante:
Paradiso, XVII, 58] of the bread of exile in London or
Madrid.

What we must save isn’t only [the] capitalism that maintains the market
economy and salaried employment, but, rather, capitalism in the
only historical form that suits us, which, moreover, can quite
easily be shown to be the effectively superior form of economic
development. If we don’t even know how to offer the Communists a
chance to save this form of capitalism, they will confine
themselves, as much as they can, to saving another form of it,
the unfortunately rustic character of which one has seen in Russia for
more than a half-century. The new class of property-owners that this
inferior form produces, one knows well, leaves us no existence locally,
just as it also suppresses – everywhere in which its crude dictatorship
takes the place of the one that we don’t fear to call ours – the
totality of the superior values that give existence a meaning.

What we have said here are banalities, obvious facts. Those who do
not accept them are sleepwalkers who haven’t for a moment reflected on
the fact we will lose all of our reasons for managing a world in which
our objective advantages have been suppressed from the moment that it
will no longer be possible for anyone to enjoy them. Capitalists must
not forget that they are also human beings, and as such they cannot
accept the uncontrolled degradation of all human beings and thus
the personal conditions of life that they especially enjoy.

We would like to prevent an objection, nay, a reproach, that could be
addressed to us, and that we judge to be absolutely unfounded when it
comes to our Report: namely, that we herein reveal secrets that
we have come to know over the last few years, which, when it comes to
State secrets, have certainly not been few and far between, and that we
divulge them without preoccupying ourselves with the possibly dangerous
consequences they will cause in public opinion. Well! We can immediately
reassure anyone who fears this: if one takes into account the double
presupposition, which is too neglected in our country, that, on the one
hand, he who always lies will never be believed, and, on the other, the
truth is destined to forge its route with a force that can override the
most powerful lies, whose destiny it is, on the contrary, to lose all of
their strength when and to the extent that they are repeated, then we will see that the small number of naked truths that we have decided
to reveal in this pamphlet can no longer be kept quiet without our
running the risk that, in a short period, one or another of them will be
put to seditious ends.

Moreover, our remarks will be quick, and we will never dwell on
anything for too long, supposing that the readers to whom we are
addressing ourselves through special means, and who are the very people
with whom we have done business during these last few years, are
sufficiently up-to-date concerning a good part of the delicate details,
of which we will content ourselves with a quick review, that they will
grasp the insinuations or allusions to facts or individuals, while all
this will completely escape those will live at a distance from the
centers of power in our society.

Instead of the celebrated phrase loqui prohibeor et tacere non
possum [Latin for “I am prohibited from speaking and I cannot keep
quiet”], we prefer the honesty of omnia non dicam, sed quae dicam
omnia vera [Latin for “I will not say everything, but everything
that I say will be true”].

Perhaps it might useless for me to specify, before concluding this
preface, that we are not in the habit of writing books, not because we
don’t love reading them, but precisely because we love them more than
this century seems to permit us. This is why, personally speaking, we
are grateful for those who today do not write them and we abhor
the amateur or professional writers of our times, in which illiterate
intellectuals unsuccessfully pursue the remission of their ignorance by
publishing the proofs of it in a multitude of unreadable volumes,
volumes that our culture industry undertakes to erect as a kind of
barricade against true culture, which is currently out of fashion. If we
ourselves have taken up the pen, this should rather be interpreted as
our manner of payment of a una tantum [Latin for “unique”] tax to the
troubled Republic. And, if we have wanted to give to this Report
the literary form of the pamphlet, which has been out of fashion for two
centuries, this is only because it possesses the double advantage of
being easy to read and quick to write. In it we address ourselves to men
for whom the time to read is less than the necessity to act. And if
we ourselves reject the method of reading quickly what appears to be
important, without exhaustively treating each question that is raised,
perhaps we might leave [behind] some monumental work of which the
historians will one day make use to shed light on the years in
question here, but in such case we would lack the time to confront and
master (such is our intention) the crucial problems that we limit
ourselves herein to sketching out, because we are not in the habit of
believing that real difficulties can be resolved through writing.
Thus, this pamphlet must be read as it was written: in one sitting,
following the mood of the moment – a mood that, in this case, cannot be
better than the gravity of the moment allows.

As for the fact that the author of this text has used a pseudonym:
this was done to respect the tradition of the pamphleteer, illustrated
by the Fronde under Mazarin [France between 1649 and 1652] and by Junius
in 18th Century England. Moreover, we are sure to be easily recognized
by all those who have had the occasion to encounter us over the course
of the last 30 years. Finally, for all the others, we prefer that it
isn’t our name that encourages the most rigorous reflection, but the
seriousness of what we evoke.

Censor
June 1975

“You will soon be, thank Heaven, out of the hands of your rebellious
subjects (…) Where they are concerned, my Cousin, I share all of your
feelings, as you can see, and pray God that that He will keep you safe,
but I cannot approve of your repugnance for the type of government that
one calls representative and that I myself call recreational, there
being nothing in the world that is so entertaining for a king, not to
mention the not insignificant utility that it has for us (…) The
representative form of government suits me marvelously (…) Money comes
to us in abundance. Ask my nephew in Angoulême [in France]. Here we
count by the thousands or, to tell the truth, we ourselves no longer
count, because we have our own representatives [ des députés], a
dense majority of them, as one says here; expenses, but they are
small (…) One hundred voices, I am sure, doesn’t cost me in a year what
Mme. de Cayla costs in a month (…) I truly thought as you did, before my
trip to England; I had no love at all for representative government; but
there I saw what it really is. If the Turk suspected as much, he
wouldn’t want anything else, and he would make his Divan a two-chambered
body (…) You shouldn’t be scared off by the words liberty, the general
public, or representation. They work to our benefit, and their products
are immense, the danger nonexistent, whatever one says. . . .”

(These extracts, translated here for the first time into Italian,
come from a secret letter that Louis XVIII sent to Ferdinand VII in
August 1823. In Cadix, this letter fell into the hands of a secret agent
from Canning, and its publication caused a controversy in England. –
The Morning Chronicle [English in original], October
1823.)[1]

What constitutes the most notable trait of our century isn’t so much
the fact that capitalism has been challenged in a reiterated and bloody
manner by the workers of all industrialized countries and also in some
countries where the economy is still predominantly agrarian (not at all
unexpected phenomena, except to those who undervalued the warnings
issued by the first failed revolutions of the prior century), nor the
fact that serious economic and monetary crises have regularly shaken
internal stability (serious inconveniences, but unavoidable in any
complex economic system), nor even the fact that errors in the
management of power have been quite numerous and very costly in every
country (this fact is inseparably tied to any historical form of
domination). It seems to us that what is notable in our century, quite
the contrary, is that the capitalist system has managed to resist all
that, and that, despite all that, today it still continues to
exist everywhere, in manifestations that are different and even
appear to be contradictory, as the only existing form of domination
in the world, not only capable of surpassing its own crises, but even
coming out of them reinforced to the point that it has managed to spread
and impose its methods of production, exchange and commodity
distribution upon the whole planet. Even in the Communist countries, the
economic and technological systems of modern capitalism have long since
become the declared preference of the dominant bureaucratic class.

For the first time in universal history, an aggressive [
déterminé] system has imposed itself everywhere, annihilating
all of the archaic forms of domination that were opposed to it, at the
same time that it has successfully confronted the questions posed to it
by new social forces, such as the class of industrial workers and
salaried workers in general, who are necessary for the production and
consumption of commodities, but who have an underlying disposition to
combat in the name of their own “emancipation” the world for which they
work and in which they live.

At the beginning of a Report dedicated to the critique of the
current management of our system, it appears to us necessary, and just,
to recognize its unquestionable historical success and its objective
merits, which we risk seeing compromised in the near future because of
current errors. It is fitting to know clearly what to preserve in
what we must fight hic et nunc [Latin for “here and now”], and to
be aware of what we have to lose at a moment when it is indispensible to
choose how to comport ourselves, and what weapons will help us, if we
wish to emerge victorious from the very grave crisis that is the cause
of our worries and the origin of this text.

According to Thomas Carlyle, the French Revolution had the demand for
truth as its essential meaning. It was an historic proclamation of the
fact that all lies, on which one had up until then based the harmonious
organization of a social hierarchy, had to be rejected from then on. If
these ideas are correct, we can determine that, for the last two
centuries, we should have been able to avoid the greatest part of what
harms us.

All of the historically dominant forms of society have been imposed
on the masses, who quite simply must be made to work, either by
force or by illusion.[2] The greatest success of our modern civilization is
that it has been able to place an incomparable power of illusion
at the service of its leaders. Later in this pamphlet, we will see that
this is also where the weakness of our power lies and threatens to
become a serious crisis at any moment, because this illusion must
never be shared by the ruling elite [French in original]
that produces and makes use of it. Accumulative and rapid economic
development (accumulative in the dimension of its rapidity), as well the
positive technological upheaval that incessantly accompanies this
development as its corollary, have caused in the totality of production
and distribution an extreme concentration and a control that tends to
become absolute. What has unfortunately challenged the current state of
the world is the fact that this control possesses a strategy on the
scale of its immense means. We will return to this point. But what is
beyond doubt is the fact that economic development itself has demanded
and brought about (in previously unimaginable proportions) the
separation and passivity of the agents of production, that is to say,
the very same ones who are identified by another branch of the social
sciences as “consumers” and “citizens.”

This situation has produced, as a natural product of our stage of
historical development, the social necessity for contemplation,
which Bergson, in his time (in the pages of Creative Evolution),
called “a luxury.” This contemplation is opportunely satisfied by the
privileged part of our technology that is dedicated to the fixation and
diffusion of images. The reason for this cannot escape anyone of good
faith. The objective and measurable successes of our society are
completely economic and technical. This society produces more and more
things to watch [Ce que cette société produit, il n’y a plus qu’à le
regarder]. Some people have asked us, moved by perfectly irrelevant
sentimentality: “Must we also love this society?” The question is asked
in vain or, rather, if one admits that posing such a question from any
transcendent point of view means that real society would be a pure
absurdity, we can only say that the question is effectively asked in
vain in the sense that it has already fully found its response from the
moment that one poses it in terms of real society, that is to say, in
terms of social classes, by wondering, “Who must love this system
of production?” Those who appropriate surplus-value necessarily love the
existing form of production. As for the others, why should they love it?
Production in itself appears to them as a simple necessity, and this is
what it really is. As for the particular form this necessity assumes,
those who hold capital don’t find it any more defensible than any other
form, and are only attached to it due to the specific advantages that
they draw from it. If the excessive hypocrisy of the social thought of
our epoch hadn’t so mixed up and dirtied the playing cards that,
cheating as always, it has ended up being unable to cheat intelligently,
we would blush to recall such truisms. Our workers have in no way
decided upon what they produce. And this is quite fortunate, because we
might wonder what they would decide to produce, given what they are. It
is quite sure, whatever the infinite variety of conceivable responses,
that a single truth would be constant: they would assuredly not produce
anything suitable for the society that we manage. And as these workers
cannot be dazzled (no more than you or we ourselves) with happiness by
the enlargement of the organizational chart of a multinational
corporation or by the rate of growth in the sales of fighter planes to
the Middle East, but find themselves deprived of any real compensation
in the existence that is created for them, we must distribute to them
some other compensation. This is what is accomplished by the massive
diffusion of images that can be contemplated, though they no longer
constitute the “luxury” spoken of by Bergeson, but a contemplative
necessity, a diversion [French in original] like the Roman
circuses [Latin in original] or Pascal’s definition of the
term.

Whatever the importance, and even the gravity, of the dangerous
weaknesses of our power that we must criticize today, we must not lose
sight of the fact that all this is subordinate to these brilliant
successes. One only defends a social order that is alive. And if
bourgeois society hadn’t won this victory at the universal level, we
wouldn’t be here today to discuss its defense, because it would
otherwise be as dead as Darius’ Empire.

If we take a moment to remember (and that would be a healthy
propaedeutic during the current struggles) that, for the last hundred
years, we have run the risk of having the world escape from of our grasp
in a short period of time, we will ascertain the importance of the
reprieve that we have obtained, which, in addition, has permitted us to
undertake a profound transformation of all the conditions for this
strategy – a transformation that we can define as follows: the
construction [l’aménagement] of a new terrain of battle in which
we await a disoriented adversary who must at first recognize it
as such and then is constrained to advance while surrounded by the
powerful defenses that we have wisely set up.

One can say that the 19th century, in the wake of the frightening
revolutions of 1848, discovered political economy. Society divided into
classes and private property had already been challenged: the critique
of them seemed inexorably tied to the progress of knowledge, notably
among the working classes. Thus, because the ruling class feared the
education of the working classes and universal suffrage (and apparently
quite legitimately so), it tied its defense to a position in the past,
to an attitude of retreat, which continually became more pronounced.
Modern industry required education, at least a summary one, and
education, by spreading, necessarily worked in favor of universal
suffrage. The bourgeoisie remembered that the progress of its leading
lights had accompanied its own march to political power, and it feared
that the same route would be followed by the proletarians. Fortunately,
the proletarians also believed in this identification of their
respective destinies; both classes thereby deceived themselves, because
the two revolutionary projects were so different that they could not
make use of the same leading lights, nor their diffusion and usage by
analogous means. Thus, both the fears of one class and the hopes of the
other were in vain.

Over the course of the century, the development and expansion of
political and economic power changed the face of the world, much more
than any past revolution had been able to do. What have been the
characteristics and the permanent effects of this change? What did it
destroy, and what did it create? It seems to us that the moment has come
to define and set forth the distinctive traits of the new reality,
because today we find ourselves at the precise point where we can best
evaluate the results of a series of upheavals. Though we are far enough
from their beginnings to be sheltered from the passions of those who
began them, we are close enough to them to distinguish their essential
elements. Soon it will be difficult to make an objective judgment of
these events, because, by making their causes disappear, the great
historical changes that succeed subsequently become less comprehensible
due to the very fact of their success. Thus we will now consider the
secrets of our victories in the old campaigns, not to seek some hollow
compensation in our pride in the successes of bye-gone days, but rather,
at the heart of a new war that has suddenly been revived throughout the
entire social field, to pull together and consciously use these secrets
in other battles that we are called upon to fight anew. In the epic tale
of the old social war, what were our decisive battles, our Salamines and
our Marengos?[3]

To be brief, we will distinguish five of them.[4]

First, we have in a certain manner challenged Carlyle’s remark by
quantitatively and qualitatively realizing the progression of the lie
in politics to a degree of power never before seen in history, with
its content growing alongside the proliferating extension of its means.
It developed with the “radical” bourgeoisie and its journalistic and
parliamentarian practices, which managed to survive the workers’
movement organized as socialist political parties. The process begun by
the parliamentary representation of the citizens has been quite
naturally and considerably reinforced by the success of the unionized
representation of the workers, since it is true that all
representation plays our game. What one has customarily called
brainwashing [French in original], that is to say, the propaganda
of false news diffused day after day by all the governments during World
War I, has subsequently crossed a threshold beyond which, in normal
times, one wouldn’t have believed it possible to take literate citizens.
Cardinal Carafa’s remark, made at the time of the Inquisition, remains
true: As far as the people can be deceived, that is as far as one
should go [Latin in original]. Fascism was a pathological excess of
the unlimited lie, but also a remedy in a time of crisis. But it is
fitting to note that fascism completely failed due to its very nature,
but by no means on the terrain of its means of propaganda, to the point
that Hitler could theorize the fact that “the masses . . . will be more
easily deceived by a big lie than by a small one.” The advertising of
the modern market then came to exploit the possibilities more
rationally, and it has proved its excellence as an autonomous power,
although one must naturally criticize the excessively unilateral results
that have followed from this very autonomy, which too often hasn’t
conformed to the higher interests of the entirety of our economic
order. And, no doubt, the most significant result of this entire period
was the identification of communism with the totalitarian order that
reigns in Russia and, subsequently, with the perspectives of its
partisans in our countries, who, over the years, have believed that
Lenin and Stalin abolished capitalism. It pleases us to remember the
remark by our friend the eminent economist Piero Sraffa, who, years
before the translation [into Italian] of Karl Marx’s Grundrisse,
placed this passage in the book that settled the question: “To let
salaried work continue and, at the same time, suppress capital, is an
action that contradicts and destroys itself.” Thus the social revolution
that had been desired in the 19th century quite effectively became
utopian, since it no longer existed anywhere in the global
society where it might have been able to assert itself as what it could
truly be.

Second, we have witnessed the imposing reinforcement of the
power of the States as economic powers, political authorities and
evermore refined organisms of surveillance. We can even say that, in
this sense, the dream of the bourgeois economists of the 18th century (a
legitimate dream, but one that often aroused the hostility of the
aristocrats of the time) has been realized, but in a different form. The
State theorized by these economists not only had to command the nation,
but also to form and educate it in a specific way. According to Turgot,
Quesnay, Letronne, Mercier de La Rivière and so many others, it was the
task of the State to shape the spirit of its citizens according to a
certain model that it proposed; the State must inculcate in them certain
ideas and sentiments that it judged to be useful and necessary to
overcome the obstacles that social reality presented to its activity.
The economists of that period said that the State had to reform its
political and civil institutions, and even the conditions of the lives
of its citizens, so that they could be transformed. Bodeau summarized
these ideas by advancing this prophecy, which was very radical for his
times: “The State makes men as it wishes them to be” [French in
original]. In the 19th century, a very cultivated aristocrat, who was
nevertheless too attached to the past, accused these economists of
trying to create “an immense social power that isn’t merely greater than
all those that currently exist; it is also different from them in its
origin and character. It does not proceed directly from God; its origin
doesn’t lie in tradition; it is impersonal; it doesn’t identify with the
King, but with the State (…) This democratic despotism (abolishes) all
hierarchies in society, all class distinctions, all fixed ranks;
composed of individuals who are almost identical and completely equal,
this confused mass recognizes only one legitimate sovereign (the State),
but it has been carefully deprived of all the faculties that could
permit it to lead or even oversee its government.” The economists
defended themselves against these accusations by invoking public
education. Quesnay said, “despotism is impossible if the nation is
enlightened” [French in original]. The demands that these economists
advanced were indeed better founded. Before the French Revolution,
Letronne noted that, “for centuries, the nation has been governed by
false principles; everything seems to have been done by chance” [French
in original]. Today we see what they foresaw. Perhaps it is fitting to
emphasize that, a century before Marx, contemporaries of these
economists, working in the same direction, advanced the current of
thought that was subsequently called socialism. For example, one finds
in Morelly’s Code de la Nature all of socialism’s doctrines
concerning the necessity of reinforcing the power of the State, and in
this work he foresees “the right to work, absolute equality, the
uniformity of all, [and] mechanical regularity in all of the movements
of individuals.” It is surprising to see that in 1755, when Quesnay
founded his school, Morelly recommended what is only today being fully
realized everywhere. For example, we read in Code de la Nature
that “the towns will be built according to the same plan; all the
buildings used by individuals will be similar (…) Children will be
removed from their families and educated in common in a uniform fashion,
at the cost of the State” [French in original]. The Statist
centralization engineered by the bourgeoisie and the socialist
bureaucrats was the product of the same necessity and the same terrain;
each of these powers is, with respect to the other, like the cultivated
fruit and the natural tree. But everywhere the State has become the
protagonist that, with more or less efficiency, plans and programs the
life of modern society. Therefore, the State is the palladium of
market society, which converts even its enemies into property owners, as
has happened in Russia and China, for example. And this fact allows us
to remark that we do not fear resurrecting the old and noble term
“market society.” All of the grandeur of the world has been provided by
merchants and the societies that they have built. Art, philosophy,
knowledge in all its scientific and technical forms, political freedom
in its actually practicable modalities – all this only appeared in
history, and has lasted, with the emergence and survival of the
mercantile bourgeoisie and within the exact limits of its local or
universal domination.

Third, the isolation and the separation of people from each other
has been highly perfected.[5] Everything that could more or less
directly disturb the tranquility of the social order, everything that
could unite individual communities, corporate bodies, the neighborhoods
of old towns or villages, and even the customary clienteles of cafés and
churches, have been almost completely dissolved by the putting in place
of the new conditions of everyday life and the new urbanistic
countryside. We can say that each person now finds him- or herself in a
direct relationship with the powerful center of the system that commands
even the details of existence, and this center appears to each person,
either successively or simultaneously, in its restrictive aspect as
governmental authority, in the choices made by industrial production as
to what will be available on the market, and in the selection of images
to contemplate. Thus the masses consume and watch what they want among
the diverse things that are programmed for them, but they can only want
what is available.

Fourth, we have witnessed the unprecedented increase in the
power of the economy and industry. The modern economy has succeeded
in giving a value and a price to everything, thus permitting everyone to
consume the commodities that industry produces. We might even say that,
to the extent that it has satisfied the essential needs of the
population, the modern economy has been in the position to offer that
population unnecessary things. Thereafter, what was inessential became
necessary and this in the double sense that, subjectively, those things
came to be perceived as such by the consumer and, objectively, they came
to constitute a necessity for the industrial expansion that produced
those precise commodities. Thus, at the moment that the citizen as
consumer gained free access to the superfluous, all that was appreciated
by the people of the past and all that was indispensible to guarantee
them the maintenance of poorer and more precarious realities became
useless and disappeared. From food to the entertainments of free
time or vacations, there no longer exists anything that cannot be
produced industrially, that is to say, cannot bring in an economic
profit.

We do not want to deny that these developments also resulted in
previously unknown inconveniences, such as new diseases caused by
pollution, etc. But, in any case, the very progress of science – the
science of pharmaceuticals, for example – in its turn furnished
antidotes that, industrially produced, constituted more commodities that
could be sold to the population.

The system came to make use of (as an attribute of its sovereignty)
the still growing distance between these rapidly changing realities and
the words and feelings that now only correspond to appearances.

Popular notions, rooted in place for generations, no longer bear any
relation with the completely different realities that have been produced
by the most modern industries. Whether it is a question of what one used
to call work, vacation, meat, influenza, or house, economic and Statist
power makes use of all its elements to make known the modifications
introduced into these realities. This power itself experiences
modification, either by chance or by pursuing deliberate goals. And yet
people still speak of other things, the things that have
disappeared, using the same old words, which are also used during their
debates on electoral programs.

Fifth and last – and this result concentrates together all the
previous ones that we’ve enumerated – we have seen the vertiginously
growing complications of the daily intervention of human society on all
aspects of the production of life, and the replacement of all apparently
natural elements by new factors that we could call artificial, fully
justify the indivisible authority of every expert who builds or corrects
the new economic and ecological equilibriums without which no one could
live.

Therefore, there are now only experts in the [workings of the] State
and the economy, because there are no operational fields or diplomas
outside of these areas. And so the existing hierarchy is forced to
develop the secret and control in everything, even when it doesn’t
want to do so. But all the hierarchies in history have always wanted to
develop these things, even though doing so wasn’t obviously necessary
for everyone’s interests. The double advantage that we derive from this
situation resides in this: discontent with our society no longer makes
sense, at the very moment that it has spread wider than ever before and
concerns every single detail. Today, only total refusal, which is always
difficult to formulate and put into practice, has a meaning that is
threatening to our social order. And this threat is itself attenuated to
the extent that a refusal of this kind, deprived of an exact
comprehension of the totality and disinclined to envision the
repercussions of real, historical confrontations, has the greatest
chances of being stupid and contenting itself with some ideological
illusion that leads its adherents astray.

Here, in brief, is how modern capitalism has been able to make the
entire population participate in the freedom that it has built. And it
is right to rejoice in this fact, because this enterprise had never been
undertaken before, and bad omens piled up at the beginning. Perhaps a
more lucid comprehension of history – for a century neglected in favor
of economic studies that were themselves poorly disengaged
intellectually from theology – would have inspired more confidence in
the elite [French in original] of the time, who certainly could
not have exactly foreseen the appearance of forms of domination that we
have characterized here, but who could have speculated more boldly along
the general line of the evolution to come, and thus perhaps more
consciously hastened the useful formations? At the same time, one might
have been spared a certain number of inconveniences from which we still
suffer, such as the regressive mutation of capitalism in Russia. Let us
reaffirm the point: despite the often legitimate, but many times
exaggerated worries that the question has aroused in the dominant
classes of almost all the countries, capitalism must be
democratic because it can be nothing other. A glance at history, not
to mention the most attentive and sharpest study of it, always leads us
to the undeniable result that capitalism could never have grown,
whatever the location, without a democratic society, [that is to say,]
in the precise layer of society that lives the democratic life, wants it
and needs it. And to deploy itself fully and completely, to transform
everything into a commodity and incessantly renew the totality of
commodities, capitalism must permanently give the entirety of the
population a choice, the terms of which have been fixed by capitalism
itself. Because one must be able to choose between two equivalent
commodities, one must also be able to choose between two
representatives. He who remembers fascism, who knows how badly State
capitalism is managed by the totalitarian bureaucracies in the East, or
who considers the permanent atrophy of the development of the merchant
class in ancient Oriental despotism, will find the proof a
contrario of this axiom.

Those who do not understand the necessity of remaining free quite
simply do not have the [good] taste to do so, and we must give up trying
to convince mediocre minds that have never known this sublime taste. The
impassable limits that democratic freedom implies are its own safeguard,
and it is reality that imposes them on it. Nevertheless, we can conclude
that the peoples of the world have been more interested in concrete
reforms put into action by democratic capitalism than in the multitude
of sermons in favor of an abstract and total “freedom,” a “freedom” that
no one has ever seen because it has never been realized. Thus freedom
can only be understood on the basis of the actual reality of democracy,
without being frightened or getting enthusiastic about the monotonous
illusions that are always springing up about it.

No sensible person would think to deny the fact that, from its first
admirable appearance in history, participation in the political
management of democracy has been a domain reserved for a class of rich
merchants or property owners, whether it was in the Athens of the 5th
century [BCE] or the Florence of the 14th century. We see nothing
different [from this pattern] in the famous year 1793 or anytime since
then – beyond the fact that the dominant class of today isn’t as well
served by the always more numerous personnel to whom it has delegated
the tasks of political administration, and nowhere as scandalously as in
Italy where these roguish and incompetent domestic servants have allowed
the roast to burn while they have nabbed the loose change from the
pockets and drawers of their masters. As for the quite notorious other
side of the democratic republics, we would like to say that the
always-resurgent excesses of the infinite pretentions of the working
classes quite clearly constitute the opposite of this democracy. The
proof of this is that they have always resulted in immediate loss. But
we are no longer at that moment in history when democracy – put into
place or realized in a few cities – could have succumbed under the blows
of these pretentions without impeding the general growth of a capitalism
that was still generally sheltered in its previous social relations.
Capitalism seized hold of the world for its own ends. The democratic
order must be defended without any thought of retreat, “not only with
the spear, but with the axe”[6] because, at the same moment that it is
defeated, capitalism will definitively succumb, too.

Of those minds and hearts that have become discouraged because, for
the last ten years, they have taken the end of the troubles of a
particular time for the end of the time of troubles, we ask, “Must we
be resigned to the idea that any certainty that has been triumphantly
conquered will be ceaselessly put into question, and is the crisis in
society destined to always last?” We will respond coldly, “Yes.” We must
confront the harshest truth, “the truest cause” (to quote Thucydides) of
this social war, which is unfortunately but unavoidably permanent. Our
world is not made for the workers, nor for the other strata of
impoverished salaried workers whom our reasoning must place in the
simple category “proletarian.” But every day our world must be made
by them, under our command. This is the fundamental contradiction
with which we must live. Even during the calmest days, the spark that
could rekindle all of the masses’ insatiable passions and their
limitless and unstoppable hopes always exists in the cinders. This is
why we never have the right to abstain from being intelligent for too
long.

[1] As Sanguinetti would later point out in his text “Proofs of the
Nonexistence of Censor by His Author” (December 1975), “the letter
attributed to Louis XVIII is in fact a celebrated literary fake by
Paul-Louis Courier.”

[2] Machiavelli, Chapter VI, The Prince.

[3] The Persian Emperor Darius, who ruled from 522 BCE to 486 BCE,
suffered a crucial naval defeat at the hands of the Greeks at Salamine
Island. In 1800, Napoleon won an important battle in Marengo, Italy.

[4] See “The Chief Features of the Revolution” in Arnold Toynbee’s
The Industrial Revolution (1881).

[5] See “Separation Perfected” in Guy Debord’s The Society of the
Spectacle (1967).

[6] A quote from Herodotus, Chapter CXXXV of The Histories. It
also appears in “Investigations without a Guidebook,” an essay published
in Internationale Situationniste #10, March 1966.

O my own Italy, though words are vain
The mortal wounds
to close,
Unnumbered, that they beauteous bosom stain (…)
That
your truth is understood here through my mouth – the one whom I could
be.

Petrarch, The Songbook[1]

We have rapidly enumerated the objective successes that modern
capitalism obtained prior to the last few decades. But since we do not
intend to make an apology for this world – an apology whose utility in
the proper domain of propaganda we do not deny –, we must set out in
several summarized lines the origins of the internal crisis in our own
country, a crisis that we are called upon to understand and confront
without delay.

We know that, in the States, an illness is at first difficulty to
recognize, then easy to cure, and that, through its progress, the
disease becomes ever-more easy to recognize, but more difficult to
treat.[2] As for what concerns Italy, we are convinced that, if we have
so far been spared a pure, simple and irreversible politico-economic
disaster, this has been thanks to the relative, contingent weakness of
the adversary’s forces and less so due to the merit and prudence of our
politicians.

If we want to avoid a situation in which the illness becomes too
easily recognized without relying on chance or hope, we must
immediately diagnose it and simultaneously begin shock treatment
before the workers understand its proportions and seriousness, which
would inevitably open up to them new possibilities and new pretexts for
struggle, as well as radiant perspectives of victory. The current
wait-and-see attitude of the ruling class, which always fears to act or
only acts out of fear, makes it look ridiculous in the eyes of the
uneducated, working class masses. People are tired for a while
before they perceive that they are, and nothing animates and supports a
movement more than the ridicule of those against whom it is directed.
Such situations are always very dangerous for both parties because they
cause impotent despair in one and fatal fervor in the other. To not fall
into the opposed risks of dramatizing or de-dramatizing the current
crisis, there is only one route: to understand the nature and real
depths of it exactly.

Our history from 1943 to 1967, when seen from a distance and in its
entirety, appears to us as the representation of a fierce struggle that,
in its first five years (up to the elections of 18 April 1948),[3] was
seen in the majority of the countries opposed to the Ancien
Régime of the Kingdom of Italy, which was born old and of which
fascism was the supreme episode and the most recent archaism. It was
exactly the Kingdom’s traditional routines, its hardly glorious
memories, its always disappointed illusions of grandeur and its mediocre
representatives to which the entirety of the new Italian society was
unanimously opposed, like a single person.

From the moment that the Ancien Régime was permanently
destroyed, the elections of 1948 definitively concluded this first
period of unified collaboration between the bourgeoisie and the lower
classes of our country. By putting an end to the illusions of the
workers, who still hoped for a possible collaboration between their
parliamentary representatives and those of the wealthy classes, the
bourgeoisie showed itself to be more realistic than the workers were.
The triumph of the middle class was double: over all those who had been
above it in the defunct Kingdom, and over all those who had been
below it. This was a complete triumph, but it was only definitive
in relation to those who were above the bourgeois, that is to say, the
old decadent aristocracy of the large landowners. In this sense, the
victory was effectively complete because all the economic and
productive powers, and all the prerogatives and the government of the
young Republic in its entirety were united as a monopoly within the
boundaries that defined this bourgeoisie, which from then on became the
unique leader of the ex-Kingdom. It took positions in all the useful
posts of power by prodigiously multiplying their number, and very
quickly got accustomed to living there, as much upon the public treasury
as upon its own industry.

But this was, moreover, a provisional success because all the
classes that had also contributed to the struggle against the Kingdom –
first under fascism, then during the Resistance, and finally during the
era of the Constituent Assembly – saw that the largest part of the
fruits of victory were “expropriated” at the very moment when this
victory became definitive. In such a situation, it wasn’t a good thing
to have too many illusions about the possibility of avoiding a new
confrontation within the very interior of the heterogeneous coalition of
the forces that emerged victorious from the preceding conflict. This
conflict, which itself was part of a vaster conflict of global
hostilities, had nevertheless quite weakened the working population and
thus permitted the bourgeoisie to dedicate itself to its own interests
without fear of once again finding itself obligated to measure up to a
strong and unified adversary. On the other hand, after 1948, two
decisive events contributed to once again reinforcing the position of
the new dominant class: above all, the political strategy chosen by
Togliatti[4] for the Communists and by the Left in general was not at
all in contradiction with the new needs of the democratic and liberal
center since, under the sufficiently vague mandate of the economic
“reconstruction” of the country, renewed social tensions were
momentarily frozen and, reciprocally – to the extent that this
reconstruction was effectively undertaken – political passions calmed
down and a public and private wealth such as Italy had never before
known developed very rapidly. No one can forget how the Cold War, which
excessively augmented international tensions, opportunely served to cool
and defuse the real reasons for the internal conflict, which was
constantly projected beyond Italy’s frontiers. The insurrectional
episode of July, 1948, for which the attack against Togliatti served as
a pretext, was the only noisy consequence of the workers’ disappointment
after the elections of 18 April, and this was the occasion on which the
Italian Communists, who loyally repressed the insurrection from within,
with their own troops, proved their coherence and their responsibility
with respect to their democratic political choices.

From then on, the particular needs of the bourgeoisie became the
general needs of the republican government. They also dominated both the
foreign policy and the domestic affairs of the country. The spirit of
the times was active, industrious, poised; what one calls political
dishonesty had precise justifications; it was, by temperament, a timid
spirit, but was rash due to egotism, moderate in everything except its
mediocre taste for “well being.” This spirit would have accomplished
miracles if only it had possessed a little of the nobility of intention
that has always appeared indispensible to us, but, by itself, this
spirit could produce nothing other than a series of weak governments,
without virtue or grandeur. Master of everything as no other aristocracy
on the peninsula had ever been, the middle class or, rather, that part
of this class that we could call the class of government, had taken up
its residence in governmental power and, soon after, in its
idiosyncrasies: the government took on the appearance of a private
industry and was no longer the political expression of private industry
properly speaking. None of the members of this class appeared to think
about public affairs, not even to make them turn a profit for their own
private interests or their own political current, while the holders of
economic power and the common people – in a blithe thoughtlessness that
united them for a while – occupied themselves with their respective
individual interests, which were great in the case of the former and
small in the case of the latter, with both contributing to the deceptive
success of the ideology of well being.

Posterity, which only sees the brilliant crimes and ordinarily misses
the vices that are at the origins of all the most serious crises, will
perhaps never know how all the successive Italian governments had
gradually but increasingly taken on the appearance of a commercial firm
in which all the operations were made in view of earnings that could be
derived for its particular associates, naturally under the sign of the
public interest. When some of the most authorized representatives of
economic power began to worry about the risks and the costs of a
parallel system of government, the leaders of Christian Democracy, then
accustomed to consider any government ministry as sinecure guaranteed to
each of its notables, resorted to the saddest kind of blackmail by
threatening to render public several virtual scandals in which economic
power wasn’t any less implicated than political power, with the intent
of keeping the reins of the government locked into imbroglio and
bankruptcy. It was certainly an error to give in to this blackmail.
Almost all of the political despicable acts of which we have been the
unwilling and mostly powerless witnesses have, in our country, followed
from the fact that the men who are introduced into political life –
deprived of a personal inheritance – fear their ruin if they abandon
their places [in government] or from the fact that their ambitions,
personal passions or fears render them so obstinate in the continuation
of their careers in power that they consider the simple idea of
abandoning them with a kind of horror, which distorts their judgment and
makes them sacrifice the future to the benefit of the present and their
honor to the roles that they play.

On the other hand, no one can forget the responsibility of America,
which seems to have accorded more confidence to the forced and
artificial stability of the Italian political class – which obviously
presented as its own work the recent well-being to which the country has
acceded – than to the real craftsmen of the economic miracle, who were
the industrialists and entrepreneurs, in general.

The current politico-economic paralysis, which had to be the direct
and principal result of such irresponsible conduct, was the least
unforeseeable thing in the world and yet it was regarded as a
Cassandra-like prophecy that could have warned against such a
possibility, which was what we exhausted ourselves trying to do. If our
efforts weren’t publicly mocked, this was, in the best of cases, due to
a residue of respect and, most often, due to pure and simple fear.
Instead of praises for our alleged foresight, which at the moment come
to us from all sides, we would have more modestly preferred a more
attentive audience at the moment when there was still time to avoid this
dreadful situation.

In a political world composed and led in such a fashion, what was
most lacking was political life itself. On their side, the majority of
the industrialists and, more generally, the holders of economic power,
who were once again too devoted to their religion of laissez
faire [French in original], didn’t entertain with sufficient clarity
the consequences (obviously more damaging to them than to the
politicians) of such a doctrine when it was set up as the unique rule
for Italian politics and were too trusting of an inertial power that had
made the politico-economic machine, following its own internal rules,
function “automatically,” and all the more so when one kept one’s hands
off of its delicate mechanisms. What one cheerfully forgot were the very
society in which this “automatism” functioned and the profound
transformations that it had brought about over the prior 20 years. The
industrialists, who were rightly bored by the empty and verbose speeches
of the government, placed, on the other hand, an extravagant confidence
in the simplistic technical studies made by mediocre economists with
whom they surrounded themselves and from whom they asked forecasts that
reassured them concerning the expansion of and increase in their
profits. With the arrival of the critical moment in which these
forecasts were challenged point by point by the facts, the
industrialists asked for more forecasts, as if to compensate for
real losses with illusory certitudes, to which they hastened to make
themselves slaves. A collective neurosis seemed to have seized these
men, the majority of whom lacked the mental strength of their fathers
and the character traits of their ancestors. They had inherited their
money but not their courage, their pride but not their dignified
prudence. The first failures sufficed to depress them psychologically
and to remove from them the spirit of free enterprise. Thus they
progressively lost the indispensible class solidarity that should have
been their first line of defense when they were confronted by the
excessive political power and the growing pretentions of their workers –
and all this deteriorated into a kind of law of silence; they became
accomplices in a shared impotence with the political class that, in
truth, they allowed themselves to be fleeced by.

The nation in its entirety then overtly felt a tranquil contempt, as
much for economic power as for the political administration, and those
concerned were quite wrong to consider this tranquility to be confident
and satisfied submission, the forthcoming end of which they did not
perceive. Slowly the country divided into two unequal but still not
opposed parts: on high there reigned apathy, boredom, impotence and
immobility; down below, by contrast, political life began to manifest
itself in feverish, irregular and apparently extra-political or
extra-unionist symptoms that an attentive observer could have picked out
without difficulty. We have had the misfortune of being one of those
observers, and consequently we were much more sensitive to the
inquietude that grew and rooted itself in the heart of our society to
the extent that public morals deteriorated into general indifference; we
were no doubt favored by our personal integrity, which has always been
above party interests, and by the fact that our interests have never
been dependent upon chance. In addition, we were favored by our
position, which has required a character hardly inclined to false fears
and false consolations, and so it was easy for us to enter into the game
played by these institutions, as well as the mass of small, everyday
facts, where in complete coldness we examined the evolution of the
morals and opinions of the country, among the ruling class as well as
among workers. It was thus, and not at all thanks to the chimerical
wisdom that today one wants to attribute to us, that we have been able
to clearly discern the many indicators that have ordinarily appeared in
history in advance of each of its catastrophes and that always herald
revolution.

Towards the end of 1967, these symptoms became so numerous that we
believed it our duty to communicate in a private manner our
preoccupations to the man who, due to the very position that he
occupied, had to be able to understand (more than anyone else) the
seriousness of the disastrous consequences, and who had the greatest
interest in preventing them.

We then said [to him] that the Constitution of the Italian Republic
had abolished all the secular privileges and destroyed all the protected
rights, yet let a fundamental one (the right to own private property)
continue to exist amidst the utopian perspective of extending that right
to everyone. We then added that, in a period when half the States in
Europe were confronting a growing discontent among the workers and the
entirety of the young generation, the property owners shouldn’t have too
many illusions about the solidity of their situation, nor should they
imagine that the right to own private property would continue to remain
an insurmountable wall for the simple reason that in Europe, until then,
it had never been breached, because our times resemble no other.
We have shown how, at the origin, when the right to own private property
was the only foundation required for the support of many other rights,
we defended it without too many difficulties or, rather, our enemies
didn’t dare attack it directly. The right to own private property
constituted a kind of wall within the wall of society, and all the other
rights and privileges were its forward defenses. Blows could not reach
it and, on the other hand, our enemies did not seriously seek to besiege
it. But today, for many people the right to own private property seems
to be the last remains of an aristocratic world that was destroyed de
jure et de facto. Standing alone, it appears with the greatest
obviousness to be a unique, isolated privilege in a leveled society,
while all the other protected rights (much more contestable and justly
hated) no longer serve as a screen, and so the right to own private
property itself has been challenged in the most dangerous manner and
with a contagious violence. It is no longer the attacker, but the
defender, who seems obligated to justify himself.

Confirming our preoccupations and aggravating them with the stamp of
an event, what took place in May 1968 showed the world that the time had
come when our form of society was revealed to be divided into two large
parties in the most unhealthy way. Real political struggle, which
we could neither prevent nor win with speeches and which unavoidably had
its theatre of operations in the factories and streets, henceforth broke
out between those who possessed and those who were deprived of this
right and, under a thousand diverse pretexts, our enemies did not miss
an occasion to choose private property as the battlefield, and everyday
and everywhere salaried work became a casus belli. Our political
calendar could have been illustrated by an old maxim: “the illness never
ends when those who command have lost their sense of shame, because that
is exactly the moment when those who used to obey lose their respect for
them, and it is at that very moment that they leave their lethargy
behind through convulsions” [French in original: Cardinal de Retz,
Mémoires].

Thus in France in 1968 and Italy in 1969, we saw our class tremble,
without either courage or dignity, as if overwhelmed by the phantasm of
its imminent death. Subsequently, this very bourgeoisie, as if awoken
from a nightmare, believed itself to be definitively saved, but without
seeking any further explanations. We never allowed ourselves to share
either one of these errors, because we still heed the effects that
passing whims, determined by this or that circumstance, can have on the
human spirit, and because we are too well informed about the singular
doctrines that, from time to time, appear or are rediscovered everywhere
and that, under different names and labels, have had as their common
denominator the denial of the right to own private property and the
contestation of the duty of salaried work. The seriousness of the
situation in which these things came about could be measured by the
extreme ease with which these ideas spread in the factories,
neighborhoods, schools, and offices, and the enthusiasms that they
aroused.

”Beauty,” Stendhal says, “is the promise of happiness” [French in
original], and we acknowledge that all the new theories, and the ideas
that have simply been sketched out, denounce above all the pallor,
boredom, and routine [French in original] of everyday survival in
industrial societies; the real ugliness that has overcome the appearance
of our towns that have been abandoned to the ravages of urbanists and
speculators of all kinds; the pollution of the air, food and minds that
has been democratically imposed on all the inhabitants of the urban
centers. As a result, we easily understand that this “global” critique,
even if it is generally imprecise, has easily hit the bull’s eye for
people who are bored and impatient with the so-called diversions and
leisure activities [French in original] that this society can
offer them, and we can likewise explain how at present it has become
objectively easy to make the workers believe anything that comes from
channels of information that are different from the customary ones,
which are accused – often rightfully so – of hiding the truth and being
specialized in the manipulation of lies in which the majority of the
country has believed for many years. Disappointment, the effects of
which are always dangerous, seized the petit-bourgeoisie, which in these
last few years has seen the disappearance of the social promotions that
had been promised to it by the political parties that it voted for. The
disappointment of the petit-bourgeoisie, which we should fear less than
the rage of the workers, first manifested itself through the
contestation that the children of this class engaged in at the high
schools and universities, and subsequently it spread to their families,
who were politically oriented toward the right-wing opposition parties
or, in the majority of cases, the left-wing ones. The Communist Party
was therefore able to offset the electoral losses that had cost it the
defection of a part of its base among the workers, who became
radicalized and escaped from its control. But what appears to us the
most immediately worrisome development is the vulnerability to illusions
of happiness and beauty that our political class has created in all the
classes that, due to vocation or disappointment, are now openly opposed
to the bourgeoisie, which has prepared the battlefield without preparing
itself for battle against the other class, thus forgetting the following
infernal prophecy.

For all eternity they will be against each other:
The
one lot will arise out of their graves
With fists clenched, the
other with their hair cut off.[5]

[1] The first three lines here are from Canto XVI, “To the Princes of
Italy, Exhorting them to Set Her Free,” but the concluding two lines are
not. Perhaps they were taken from Pierre-Louis Ginguené’s Histoire
littéraire d’Italie (1819).

[2] Niccolo Machiavelli, Chapter III, The Prince: “[B]ecause, by
providing for oneself beforehand, one can remedy them easily, but if one
waits until they draw close, the medicine is not on time, because the
illness has become incurable [...] [I]n the beginning of its malignity,
it is easy to cure and difficult to know, but in the progression of
time, not having known it at the beginning, nor medicated it, it becomes
easy to know and difficult to cure. So it happens in the things of
state; because, knowing far-off (which is not given except to the
prudent) the evils which are borne in it, one quickly cures them, but,
not having known them, one allows them to grow so that anyone knows
them, there is no longer any remedy for them.”

[3] Thanks to financial assistance and clandestine “hit squads”
provided by the CIA, the political right-wing won the Italian elections
of 18 April 1948, which were “in danger” of being won by the
Communists.

[4] Palmiro Togliatti was head of the Italian Communist Party until
his death in 1964.

[5] Dante, The Inferno, Canto VII, lines 55-57.

“What causes apathy in the States that suffer from it is the duration
of the illness, which seizes the imagination of men and makes them
believe that it will never end. As soon as the day comes when it does,
which never fails to happen when the apathy reaches a certain point,
they are so surprised, so relived and so carried away that they
immediately swing to the other extreme and, although they are far from
considering revolution to be impossible, they believe it to be easy, and
this disposition is sometimes capable of making one on its own.”

Cardinal de Retz, Mémoires

Our social preoccupations were obviously not born from a romantic
outburst of the heart, but intelligent reflection, because in the
relative but incontestable poverty of certain social strata, we don’t
see suffering that must be cured – a demagogic utopia on which we will
willingly let others speculate – but a disorder to be prevented.
Yet in no other period of history have so many principles and concepts
been enunciated, and with so much pretense and claims to universality,
where this matter is concerned. If history seems to most often present
itself as a conflict of interests and passions, our recent history up to
these last few years – although passions have not been lacking – has
mostly presented itself, instead, as a struggle between principles of
justification and partly as a struggle between subjective passions
and objective interests that are almost always hidden behind the flag of
“superior” justifications.

Over the years, we have impassively witnessed the lamentable
spectacle presented by our bourgeoisie, which justified itself to the
other classes by what it intended to do in defense of the “exploited”
people and, reciprocally, the other classes, which work at this project
all the time, were accused of pursuing egotistic interests. This was one
way among others – although a less than useful one – of passing the time
at a time when one could still allow oneself to waste it. For our part,
we note that the quite respectable and artificial interest of these
gentlemen in social questions had a principally psychological origin.
This interest was its own justification, and more or less responded to
the “moral” need to soothe one’s conscience in one manner or another
during the period of the “economic miracle,” which made these men quite
euphoric. With an academic casualness and a studied ignorance, they
discoursed about social questions, because the new middle class believed
them to be nearly resolved and hadn’t known about nor comprehended the
magnitude of the revolutionary jolts of 1919-1920, nor even how the
bourgeoisie had defeated them. However, in reality, a solidly unified
and vague worry about, and genuine disinterest in, civil society was
hidden behind this “sensitive” façade. Among the members of the
bourgeoisie, class spirit had been lost, and this corresponded to the
loss of its self-assurance and the acquisition of a great timidity. In
our opinion, this new bourgeoisie feared being right and feared being
afraid. Shortly thereafter, they came to realize that they were right
to be afraid.

The ruling class’s lack of interest in the mutations then taking
place in civil society reached its height when an unforeseen fact of
global scope was suddenly revealed, but in a traumatic way.

The insurrectionary events that shook France in May 1968
unquestionably showed that a new social revolution, one unburdened of
all previous illusions and delusions, was knocking at the door of modern
society. At first it wasn’t understood and then it was hidden – not
without reason – but this insurrection was, due to its very existence,
the most scandalous and terrible failure that the European bourgeoisie
had suffered since 1848. As in 1848, the wind of revolt blew all over
Europe, and it was inhaled in France as in Germany, in Italy as in
Czechoslovakia, in Yugoslavia as in England. In different forms and
diverse fashions, the thoughts and actions of the populations in open
revolt against society turned against the world that is ours, and these
were the same populations that (no less than the ruling class) seemed to
have forgotten for a half-century what people in the 19th century called
the “social question.”

We need not insist upon recalling here that, in 1968, France
experienced the most extensive and longest general strike that had ever
paralyzed the economy of an advanced industrial country, and that this
strike was also the first “spontaneous” general strike in history. For
several weeks, all of the powers of the State, the political parties and
the unions were quite simply effaced, and the factories and
public buildings in all the cities were occupied. Because we do not want
to obligate anyone to share this opinion, it is outside the scope of
this pamphlet to demonstrate why the events of May were profoundly
revolutionary and virtually much more dangerous to the world than the
Russian Revolution of 1917. Thus we will limit ourselves to considering
the facts that these events set a very menacing precedent and
that the ideas of the movement that began then and there have spread
everywhere, because everywhere in Europe the poor classes have grown in
number, their importance has grown more than their way of life, and
their aspirations have grown more than their power.

Ever since the French Revolution of 1789, that is to say, ever since
the bourgeoisie seized hold of the political responsibility for the
management of the States all over Europe, the people in these countries
have sought to throw off their conditions, thus [periodically] changing
all of the political institutions. But after each change, they have
discovered that their lot hasn’t truly improved or that it has been
improved with an unacceptable slowness with respect to the speed of
their desires. Thus it was unavoidable that, one day or another, the
workers would finally discover that what has confined them in their
situation wasn’t the constitution of the different States –
kingdoms or republics, fascist or Socialist dictatorships, parliamentary
or presidential democracies – but the very laws and principles that
constitute all modern societies, and thus it was natural that the poor
classes sooner or later came to wonder if they didn’t have the power –
and perhaps the right, as well – to change those laws as they had
changed other things. And to speak specifically of private property and
the State, which are the foundations of the entire social order, wasn’t
it an unavoidable consequence that they were once again (but in a
completely new way) denounced as the principal obstacles to the demand
for equality among men and women, and that the idea of abolishing them
completely – and not in the manner that one once said they had been
abolished in Russia – came to the minds of all those who felt that they
were subjected to and excluded from them?

This natural inquietude in the spirit of the people, this unavoidable
agitation of their desires, this resentment of unfulfilled needs, and
these mob instincts formed, as it were, the fabric out of which
professional agitators wove monstrous or grotesque figures, which were
rejected by all the political parties and especially by the Communists.
In May, in Paris, each person proposed his or her own plan for the
construction of the “new society.” One demanded the immediate abolition
of salaried work; another the inequality of the distribution of goods; a
third wanted the end of market society and the oldest of the
inequalities, the one between men and women; all seemed to agree to
exclude all kinds of external authority, to experiment with forms of
direct democracy, to reject all institutions, political parties and
unions.[1]

The most attentive observer was struck by the fact that, quite
contrary to what was collectively said at the time, the overwhelming
majority of this movement wasn’t composed of students, but workers and
other salaried employees. One could obviously find utopian or simply
ridiculous ideas among them, but the terrain on which these ideas were
nourished and propagated is the most serious subject that the political
parties and statesmen can examine today, because what is in question is
our very world.

In France and Czechoslovakia, where this insurrectionary movement (it
would be more exact to call it a revolutionary movement) had principally
taken hold, who repressed it with the greatest efficiency? Who favored
or imposed the return to normal in the factories and streets? Well! In
one case as in the other, it was the Communists: in Paris thanks to the
unions; and in Prague thanks to the Red Army. This is the first lesson
that we can draw from those events.

But the social sickness that produced the most conspicuous symptoms
in France was quickly transformed into an epidemic, and Italy was
subjected to the contagion in a completely unique way. The incubation
period and the development of the sickness came so close together in
time that here it is a question of writing history, and that history is
still so well engraved in our memories that it would be useful to
retrace it in this pamphlet. It is sufficient to remember that the
so-called student protests were naturally, here as elsewhere, ephemeral
and quickly became a simple phenomenon of depravity – tolerable due to
the presence of so many others – that occupied the pages of the daily
newspapers and the discourses of the intellectuals rather than a vital
sector of productive society. Nevertheless, each person knew that a
quicker, less apparent but much more worrisome movement – parallel to
and contemporaneous with the student movement – had begun in the
factories, at first without connecting links or widespread publicity.
Despite the traditional unionized management of the Italian working
class, Italy also saw its first forms of “spontaneous” struggles and
para-union strikes. Precisely because the significance of this
phenomenon was underestimated at the time, it was easy for it to spread
during the following months with a growing radicalism. A kind of frenzy
seemed to have seized our workers who, united into so-called “base
committees,” began in an autonomous manner to advance extravagant
extra-salary claims that were sometimes colorful and sometimes absurd,
but always noxious because, in every case, they found partisans who were
ready to fight for them. Leaving aside all the other examples, we will
mention the one furnished by the employees of an important public
enterprise in Milan, where at the end of 1968 a “base committee”
organized (and with “success”) a series of strikes that aimed at getting
the time it took the workers to get from home to their workplace counted
as time at work and thus subject to compensation as such!

We had the impression that the workers were literally in competition
to see who could record the greatest amount of damage with their
disastrous fantasies. In reality, the declared goal of each particular
conflict was out of proportion with the social damage that the
generalization of the strikes and demonstrations of all types caused to
the country. In our opinion, the rest of the workers did not care what
they combated: what they wanted was combat itself. Thousands of
pretexts were found, but this was the single undeclared goal, and no
salary increase would suffice to appease them.

We know that it was, nevertheless, only in 1969 that Italy
experienced all of the fateful “modernity” of its social crisis. In
fact, it was the first serious disorders in the prisons and factories of
the North, along with the revolt in Battipaglia in the spring of that
year,[2] that illustrated the extension of the crisis from one end to
the other of the peninsula and that could be called the “qualitative
leap” of the crisis’ seriousness with respect to the prior year. In
truth, the passions of the students of 1968, despite their claims that
they were from “the Left,” didn’t go beyond politics, while the passions
of the working class were social, and our readers will not be
ignorant of what this inevitably implies. The workers did not ask for
this or that reform; they did not contest a policy, this government or
that government, or one political party or another, but society itself
and the bases upon which it rests.

And yet, despite all this, we can affirm that in this period the
government was not as alarmed by what took place in the country as were
the leaders of the Communist opposition. In the first phase of 1969, the
only people really and truly worried about the near future were a few
union leaders [English in original] and officials of the
Communist Party, because they were the only ones to observe the working
classes from close range, each day registering their mood and subversive
will. The state of permanent agitation in the country had already
surpassed not only the hopes but also the desires of the most fervent
unionists, that is to say, those who believed (wrongly) that they were
at the origin of the phenomenon. This wasn’t the first or the last
occasion in which we were able to recognize the lucidity of the
Honorable Giorgio Amendola,[3] but perhaps on this occasion he surprised
us even more than usual and, as a result, we held him in even greater
esteem than before. Unlike so many others, this politician possessed an
agile spirit, cold but cordial, eminently subtle, which immediately went
to the heart of any question, but didn’t neglect the details, without
prejudice and without rancor, a true connoisseur of the range of human
weaknesses and penchants, especially where his party was concerned, and
always capable of playing upon them when his interests weren’t opposed
to him doing so. In sum, he was a man whom we could not prevent
ourselves from esteeming and listening to. And so much more so in such
an epoch as post-1968 Italy, when the Honorable Rumor, President of the
Council,[4] did not enjoy our confidence because he said things of this
kind: “Be tranquil, everything will end well, there isn’t a free
government that couldn’t surmount tests of this sort.” We, who are less
worried about the fate of the government than we are about all the other
problems, we found that this response perfectly captured this resolute
but limited man, limited with much spirit, but this spirit is of such a
kind that – seeing clearly in detail all that is on his horizon –
doesn’t imagine that this horizon could change without warning. On the
other hand, we must keep in mind the industrialists, some of whom –
victims of an anguish that is confined to cases of pure and simple
stupidity – imagined doing nothing more than calling the unions to
order, as if the unions, from the moment that they weren’t responsible
for this situation, had been in a position to be officially opposed to
it without running the risk of having the movement eliminate them and,
this time, formally.

It was around the middle of 1969 that we came to explicitly demand
from the Italian Communist Party [ICP] what guarantees it could offer
the government to help it stop the workers’ movement before autumn and
what it would demand in return. The Communists, who knew better than
anyone else the magnitude of the stakes and the danger of this movement,
transmitted their wishes, but both political power and a large number of
industrialists – either because they underestimated the risks of the
months to come or because they overestimated the “risks” of any
agreement with the ICP – found the compensations demanded by the
Communists to be out of proportion to the guarantees that they could
offer. With a posteriori knowledge, we can say that the Christian
Democrats still ignored the strength and utility of a Communist party in
such circumstances and that the ICP, for its part, underestimated the
strength that the wave of “spontaneous” strikes would have in the
following months, because the Communists counted on time and the
“natural” speed of the events with a little too much casualness,
awaiting the moment when they would be called, and the Christian
Democrats counted too much on the fact that the Communists – so as to
not come to an open break – had in any case to do what they had promised
to do, even without receiving immediate compensation for it. The
calculations of both groups would have been justified or justifiable if
confronting a political crisis was the order of the day. Both
sets of calculations proved to be insufficient, not to mention
thoughtless, because everyone seemed to forget that Italy was actually
in the midst of a pre-insurrectionary social crisis. From the
moment that the Communist leaders, expecting subsequent developments,
remained entrenched in a position that was no less rigid than that of
the Christian Democrats, who nevertheless bore the initial
responsibility for this stiffening and did so from the moment it became
clear that, in this case, one could not come to the end of anything by
this route and that one had to act immediately but in another way. What,
consequently, was the direction to follow? We will answer with the words
of a journalist (Nicola Adelfi, writing in the pages of Epoca),
because a great philosopher who taught more than a century and a half
ago pointed out that, “there is all of the truth and all of the false in
public opinion,” and because journalists are specialists in public and
private opinions. To wit: “A number of political, union-related and
political symptoms make one think that this situation will continue (…)
We don’t see how the wave of violence can be broken or even simply
attenuated. At least not without the occurrence of something
unforeseeable and traumatic in nature: that is to say, something that,
unexpectedly, deeply shakes public opinion and gives it the feeling of
finding itself henceforth a step away from anarchy and its inseparable
companion, dictatorship.” We couldn’t have said it any better ourselves,
but for something “unforeseeable and traumatic in nature” to take place,
one needed to have, above all else, a homogenous and less fragile
government than the Rumor-Nenni Center-Left coalition. We know that,
after the formation of the first Center-Left coalition, various
representatives of economic power took up or placed certain men in
eminent positions in the unfortunate Socialist parties, which were
called unified at the time. Well! To topple the Rumor-Nenni Center-Left
coalition, it was enough, at the beginning of July [1969], to ask the
Social Democrats (always ready to undertake operations of this kind) to
provoke a new split. The unification intended to last 10 years collapsed
after only 10 months. The next day, the government fell and, a month
later, at the beginning of August, Rumor constituted his second
“mono-color” government, in which all the currents in the Christian
Democratic Party were represented, if our memory serves us well. Despite
all of its inadequacies, Rumor’s cabinet appeared to us to be among the
most efficient in the history of the Republic, if only for the
actions successfully executed by the Minister of Labor, the Honorable
Donat-Cattin, and the Minister of the Interior, the Honorable Restivo,
during the autumn of 1969, which since then – in an admirable
understatement [English in original] – has been called “hot.”

As the foreign press affirmed at the time, the only institutions that
continued to function in Italy were the unions and the police, that is
to say, the Ministries of Labor and the Interior. Carlo Donat-Cattin had
in fact once been a union leader, and Franco Restivo, close friend of
Vicari, then the Prefect of Police, had already had (with Vicari)
experience with political terrorism in Sicily (of which Restivo had been
the president) after the Second World War, when the bandit Giuliano ran
wild.[6] Precisely in 1968, a number of small attacks using explosives –
though they didn’t have serious consequences – contributed to increasing
the disorder that the protests by students and workers continued to
create in the large towns, and even in the small ones. These were acts
of narrowly limited scope in comparison, for example, with the acts of
sabotage that were taking place in the factories. These limited attacks
bore the signatures of fascist or Maoist groupuscules that there
fighting their local adversaries, but these attacks were at the origins
of larger ones and, as Tacitus says, “it will not be useless to study
those things that, at first sight, are trifling events, because out of
them the movements of vast changes can arise.”[6] Because in Italy, at
that time and afterwards, the unions and the police weren’t the only
forces that still functioned. For several months, the secret services
had been silently at work, too. And since the political sphere continued
to shilly-shally in the face of the worsening crisis, it was necessary
to finalize (before the summer) a tactical diversion, an artificial
tension of which the principal goal was to momentarily distract
public opinion from the real tensions that were tearing the country
apart. In the next chapter, we will see what were the undeniable
advantages of such a tactic, and what were also the damages that it
inflicted when it was transformed into a strategy, and we will therein
render public the critiques that, in another place and at another time,
we addressed to our secret services, which – due to a blunder that had
no precedent in history – today are publicly exposed to the accusations
of the first judge to come along and the entire country.[7]

And so, although the aforementioned small attacks were the
background [English in original] for these tactical diversions,
their proper beginning coincided with what took place in Milan on 25
April 1969 and during the month of August [1969]. The operations to
which we have alluded here were, in a certain sense, a repetitive
preview of the events that took place in the autumn of 1969. These
events were not expected and, starting in September, the first acts of
sabotage of considerable magnitude took place at the FIAT factory in
Turin, the Pirelli factory in Milan, and hundreds of other places. The
top-level negotiations concerning the renewal of the contracts between
employers and unions were only one set of pretexts among many others. A
number of actions and events – in a period that truly didn’t lack them –
were eclipsed by others that followed them in an always rising
crescendo, and we can be dispassionate about them here because
the profound meaning that this class war unwittingly[8] gave itself
through its intensive and extensive development became more important
than any of its particular episodes, which were only the Roman mile
markers along the road that led, always more obviously, to a social
revolution.

In the course of our life, we have associated with well-informed
people who have written history without getting mixed up in it, and we
have had to act in concert with politicians who have constantly and
uniquely been involved in the production and prevention of historical
events without thinking too much about describing them in writing. We
have always observed that the former see general causes everywhere,
while the latter – living in the midst of everyday occurrences, which
apparently produce each other – gladly represent things in such a way
that all the events that serve them well must be attributed to their own
personal merits, as if it fell to them exclusively to determine the
course of the world, and as if any setback was only the consequence of
this or that particular and absolutely unforeseeable event. There are
times when both the historians and the manipulators of events are wrong
and, if in this epoch one must expect everything, because everything is
possible, we must not allow ourselves to be taken by surprise. For
example, in the autumn of 1969, which Raffaele Mattioli[9] defined, with
the philosophical detachment that was unique to him, as “the lyrical
expression of history in action, where no one had the courage to be what
he was,” we witnessed the pitiful spectacle of industrialists placing
more confidence in the unions than in themselves, and the unions placing
their confidence in the concessions that they could obtain from the
government, and the government placing its confidence in the
efficaciousness of its special services. We were among a small number
who knew that the worst that one foresaw was in fact too
optimistic, just as today few know that Italy once more finds itself
only an hour away from a general insurrection, and that if this
has, fortunately, not happened yet, we have to thank the precautions
taken by this or that person, and not the interplay of other
factors.

The struggles surrounding the contract negotiations obtained notable
success on the terrain of salary increases, but it was a pitiful
illusion to believe that things would calm down once the new contracts
were put into place. As we have already said, from the moment that the
workers no longer fought to simply obtain salary increases, it was clear
thereafter that, though such increases were constant, we could no longer
hope to purchase social peace with them. Such peace risked being no more
than a happy memory of past times. In fact, when certain categories of
laborers – such as municipal workers – obtained a new contract, they
continued their illegal strikes under the pretext of supporting the
struggles of workers in the private industries, for whom the
negotiations remained suspended. On their part, the unions could not
expose themselves to the danger of cutting themselves off from the
working masses by disavowing all the strikes that the unions did not
want to undertake and had not been able to prevent. On the contrary,
they had to accept the existence of those strikes so as to not exclude
in advance the possibility of being accepted by them in turn, at a later
stage, as the authorized spokesmen for the workers’ demands. To prevent
open riots, the union confederations had to find other objectives than
salary demands and then try to channel the workers’ protests towards
them.

It was in fact one of those objectives, which appeared artificial to
the workers themselves, that furnished the occasion to unleash a blatant
and obvious insurrection. On 19 November 1969, the unions announced a
national day of general strikes over the question of rent. In Milan,
this strike, which saw the largest abstention from work in the history
of the Republic, degenerated into a riot very quickly. The union
leaders [English in original], who made speeches at the Lyric
Theatre, were boycotted and insulted by the workers who, abandoning the
meeting, severely attacked the forces from the Department of Public
Safety, who were forced to withdraw from the entire neighborhood, and
then the workers erected barricades in the center of the town.

We have precise memories of this spectacle, because around noon on 19
November we had to cross the via Larga to go to the home of an
industrialist (not far from the location of the confrontations), where
we were invited to have lunch with several politicians and other people
from the economic world. Since it was impossible to find a taxi, we
crossed a part of town on foot. We found the majority of the streets to
be tranquil and almost deserted, as happens in Milan every Sunday
morning in early hours, when the rich are still asleep and the poor are
not at work. Here and there, from time to time, a young man – looking
more like a suburban salaried worker than a student – tranquilly posted
a placard on the façades of the buildings. He offered us several of
them, signed by some group of “autonomous workers” or by a “base
committee,” and one of those manifestoes surprised us with its gloomy
title, which was redolent of the 19th century and went something like
this: “Notice to the Proletariat on the Current Occasions for Social
Revolution.”[10] Having passed through the obstructions of the police
and the demonstrators (not without some difficulty), we finally reached
the apartment of our host, who was more upset than usual. The food was
magnificent, as was customary, but the table was deserted. Of the
half-dozen people invited, only one other person was present, and he was
late and wasn’t even the most eagerly expected guest. We sat with a
passive air among this useless abundance, and a profound silence
descended upon us after I made the simple observation that we live in
strange times, in which, as Tocqueville noted in 1848, one can never be
sure a revolution won’t break out between the moment when one sits down
at the table and when the meal is served.[11]

Telephone calls that relayed the news rendered the expectation of
dire events even more unnerving. The news accumulated: a Public Safety
officer was killed in front of the Lyric Theatre, and neither the police
nor the unions were in a position to control the battlefield, which they
had abandoned. All through the afternoon, the telephone line was the
only umbilical cord that tied us to the world. The worst fears concerned
the situation in Turin, because if the workers in Milan believed that
the situation there had also escaped from our control, the
chances [English in original] that the riot and the strike would
remain limited to that day would have completely evaporated. From Rome
we learned that the unions still “held” Turin, and that serious
incidents had not been reported there or in Genoa. Several hours later,
this information was directly confirmed to us by the union
leaders [English in original] who were there. Fortunately, there
had been no deaths among the demonstrators, because that was the piece
of good fortune that, deep down, the agitators counted on. In the
evening, Milan – the workers’ Milan – was discouraged to learn that
everywhere else the strike had taken place without incident, but in
Rome, and certainly in working class Rome, the events in Milan were
perceived in all their seriousness, and they even created more emotion
than one could hope for in a capital that is underhandedly insensitive
to the impulses of the rest of the country. The city was notified that
there was no time to lose, since in Milan neither the unions nor he
police had been able to prevent the riot and, even if this riot had,
fortunately, been brief, it was only too well known that none of the
conditions that caused it had been surmounted, neither in Milan nor
anywhere else in Italy. Thus, there was more than good reason to fear
that several weeks later, if not sooner, a new riot would turn into a
general insurrection.

Instead, three weeks later, on 12 December [1969], bombs exploded at
the Piazza Fontana in Milan and in Rome, and in truth we saw the
“unforeseeable and traumatic” act of which Nicola Adelfi had written and
which so profoundly roiled public opinion in Italy and abroad.

Disoriented and astonished by the number of innocent victims, the
workers remained hypnotized by the unexpected event and were led astray
by the rumors that followed it – because, confronted by deeds of this
type, their spirit is changeable – and, as Tacitus says, “like all
multitudes, they were liable to sudden impulses and were now as inclined
to pity as they had been extravagant in fury.”[12]

As if by magic, struggles that had been so widespread and so
prolonged forgot themselves and ceased.

[1] Direct quotes or paraphrases from Alexis de Tocqueville,
Recollections of the French Revolution of 1848.

[2] The revolt occurred on 9 April 1969 in response to the closing of
a tobacco plant, which was one of the biggest employers in the
region.

[3] A member of the Italian Communist Party, Amendola (1907-1980)
favored non-Marxist moderation in the Party’s dealings with the
government and the economy.

[4] Mariano Rumor (1915-1990), a member of the Christian Democratic
Party. In 1969, he was the Prime Minister of Italy and, in 1975, the Italian
Minister for Foreign Affairs.

[5] Salvatore Giuliano had been the leader of the Voluntary Army for
the Independence of Sicily. He was murdered in 1950.

[6] The Annals, Book 4, paragraph 32. Latin in original.

[7] In September 1974, General Vito Micelli, the head of the
Servizio Informazioni Difesa (the Defense Intelligence Service),
was arrested and charged with involvement in a failed coup attempted in
1970 by the veteran Fascist Valerio Borghese and Stefano delle Chiaie’s
neo-Nazi Avanguardia Nazionale organization. During his
subsequent trial, Micelli defended himself by disclosing the existence
of a “parallel SID” that had been formed as a result of a secret
agreement with the United States within the framework of NATO (i.e.
“Operation Gladio”).

[8] The word employed here, inconsciemment, also means
unconsciously and thoughtlessly.

[9] Raffaele Mattioli (1895-1973) was an Italian economist, banker
and business executive.

[10] Cf. Avviso al proletario italiano sulle possibilita presenti
della rivoluzione sociale (“Notice to the Italian Proletariat on the
Current Possibilities for Social Revolution”), a tract written and
distributed on 19 November 1969 by the Italian section of the
Situationist International, of which Gianfranco Sanguinetti himself was
a member.

[11] Cf. the skit by Monty Python’s Flying Circus entitled “Party
Hints” (1972), in which “Veronica” gives the following advice.

This week I’m going to tell you what to do if there is an armed
Communist uprising near your home when you’re having a party. Well,
obviously, it’ll depend how far you’ve got with your party when the
signal for Red Revolt is raised. If you’re just having preliminary
aperitifs – a Dubonnet, a sherry or a sparkling white wine – then the
guests will obviously be in a fairly formal mood and it will be
difficult to tell which ones are the Communist agitators. So the thing
to do is to get some cloth and some bits of old paper, put them down on
the floor and shoot everybody. This will deal with the Red Menace on
your own doorstep. If you’re having canapés, as I showed you last week,
or an outdoor barbecue, then the thing to do is to set fire to all
houses in the street. This will stir up anti-Communist hatred and your
neighbors will be right with you as you organize counter-revolutionary
terror. So you see, if you act promptly enough, any Left-wing uprising
can be dealt with by the end of the party.

[12] The Annals, Book 1, Paragraph 69. Latin in original.

Before the wars of the French Revolution, this way of
seeing things was rather dominant in the sphere of theory. But when
these wars, in a single blow, opened up an entirely new world of warlike
phenomena . . . one put aside the old models and one concluded that
everything was the consequence of new discoveries, great ideas, etc.,
but also transformed social conditions. Thus one estimated one no longer
had any need of that which belonged to the methods of an older time (…)
But because, in such reversals of opinion, two parties arise in
opposition, the old conceptions find their knights and defenders, who
consider recent phenomena to be shocks of brutal force that cause a
general decadence in the art of war, and who precisely support the idea
that a stalemate – deprived of results, empty – must be the goal (…)
This way of seeing things so lacks logical and philosophical basis that
one cannot define it other than a pitiful conceptual confusion. But the
opposed opinion, according to which everything that happened in the past
will not happen again, is also not well considered. A very small number
of new phenomena in the field of the art of war must be attributed to
new discoveries or new concepts; the majority of these new phenomena
should be attributed to new circumstances and social conditions (…) The
natural course of war is to begin by defending and to end by
attacking.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War.

We know that the truth is that much harder to understand the longer
it has been suppressed. On the other hand, we have too much experience
with the interplay of real forces at the heart of human societies,
present and past, to be counted among those who claim, either due to
ingenuity or hypocrisy, that one can govern a State without there being
secrets or deception. If we thus reject this utopia, we reject no less
and just as resolutely the pretention of governing a modern democratic
country by founding it exclusively on lies and the systematic use of the
bluff [English in original], as ex-President Nixon, who repented
at the end, believed he could do with impunity. Quite the contrary, we
have always firmly believed that the people, when they say they want the
truth (which the democratic Constitutions give them the right to have),
really want nothing other than explanations. And why not give
them? Why lead them astray in the impasse of the most maladroit lies, as
one has done, for example, concerning the bombing of the Piazza Fontana?
Our governors, our judges, and those in charge of law and order too
easily forget that there is nothing in the world more noxious to power
than producing in the mind of the democratic citizen the feeling that he
is continually taken to be an imbecile, because this, at bottom, is the
spring that unavoidably puts into action the subtle gears of human
passions and resentments, by virtue of which even the most timid of
petit-bourgeois will rebel and accept and nourish radical ideas. The
citizen will then feel he or she is right to demand “justice,” less due
to a love of justice than the fear of being subjected to injustice in
his or her turn.

Today our class politics are in the process of perceiving how costly
all the embarrassed and stupid justifications that have accumulated (and
always at the wrong moment) on the crucial question of the bombs of 1969
are beginning to be. If there’s never been a good politics that has been
principally founded on the truth, the worst politics would be
exclusively founded on the unbelievable, and this because such a
politics would incite the citizen to doubt everything, to engage in
conjecture, to want to penetrate into all of the State’s secrets with a
great abundance of casual suppositions and chimerical fantasies. From
then on, any imposter would have the keys to the city and could operate
with complete freedom and, from the moment that everyone has taken on
the figure of shameless artifice, the voter – who habitually contents
himself with the plausible – would express with great cries the
pretention to know all of the truth about everything, thus hurling a
menacing hic Rhodus, hic salta[1] at political power. At that
point, everyone would be bold and full of courage in the face of the
cowardice with which they would reproach the State, which would be
locked into a vicious circle in which it had to successively deny all
the preceding official versions of the facts. And it would thus be that
a State would inevitably wear out, to the point of losing the strength –
we don’t want to say the strength to correct its errors, but simply the
strength to admit them. Thus, to regain that strength, it would have to
expose itself to finally telling the truth, because power in
Italy is in one of those situations, always dangerous to any State, in
which it is no longer possible to say anything other than the
truth. And the truth, when it finally comes out, after all the lies
have been refuted, will be strong enough – although this might also seem
unbelievable – to confront all kinds of suspicions and prevail over the
general distrust.

To that truth that has the look of falsehood
A man should always
close his lips, if he can,
Because he incurs shame where there is no
fault:

But I cannot be silence here; and swear,
Reader, by
the verses of this Comedy (…)[2]

Goethe was convinced that “writing history is a way of disencumbering
us from the past,” and we will add that we must immediately and
definitively disencumber ourselves from the phantom of the Piazza
Fontana, whatever the costs, because the moment has come in which it is
infinitely more costly to keep that phantom alive artificially.
Moreover, we have wanted this Report to be truthful, and
we wish that the healthy forces in Italy will benefit from the bitter
lesson that we must teach ourselves.

Previously [in Chapter III], we detailed the social situation in
Italy towards the end of 1969: the workers, without any leaders to obey,
were freely acting outside of and against democratic legality;
they were refusing work and their own union representatives; they did
not want (in sum) to renew the tacit social contract on which any State
based on rights is founded and especially our republic, which is,
according to the first Article of its Constitution, “founded on work.”
Every day, and everywhere, the workers were effectively violating this
Constitution in a hundred different ways. What had been the dramatic
choice that our republic found itself confronted with? The choice had
been nothing more and nothing less than this: put constitutional
legality and civil order back into force, or disappear. Who could
the State count on to impose the return to law and order at the moment
that the forces of Public Safety and the unions were powerless, and the
formation of a government with Communist participation was a hypothesis
that was rejected as blasphemy by all the other political parties? After
the riot of 19 November, the State could no longer count on anything
other than its secret security forces and on the effects that their
means of information and propaganda could have on public opinion, that
is, once public opinion had been sufficiently shaken up by the
“unforeseeable and traumatic” bombs of 12 December.

Was the recourse to bombs an error or salvation? It was both at the
same time or, rather, the provisional salvation of society’s
institutions as well as a permanent source of successive errors. This is
why we are persuaded that that we can never criticize the operation of
12 December enough, because the bombing of the Piazza Fontana – at the
same time that it was intended to be the last warning shot against the
menace of proletarian subversion – was already the first cannonball of
the civil war, and the manner in which this shot was fired showed the
incapacity of our forces in a civil war. The burlesque quality of the
successive failed putches of our extreme Right was already
contained in that manifestation of great incompetence.

We wouldn’t dream of denying the utility for any of the modern
countries of similar emergency initiatives, which the necessity of a
particular critical moment could impose, just as we would not deny that
the bombing of the Piazza Fontana had, in its way, an obviously salutary
effect by completely disorienting the workers and the country, and by
permitting the Communist Party to rally the workers behind it in the
democratic “vigilance” against a ghostly fascist danger, while the
unions could finally quickly and efficiently conclude the last and most
laborious of the contract negotiations. On the contrary, what we
resolutely deny is the idea that these positive effects were assured of
or only made foreseeable with a margin of suitable security, that is to
say, the idea that we hadn’t had recourse to a remedy that was worse and
more dangerous than the illness itself when we engaged in an unofficial
action in such an inexact way, and this from a double point of view.
Above all, too many people were familiar with operations of this type,
even before 12 December. Here we will limit ourselves to advancing a
single consideration. If just one of the representatives of the Left
among all those who knew about it had gone public with the truth that
today is on the lips of everyone, even if only as a private person,
immediately after the bomb exploded. . . .[3] Well! The television could
have said whatever it wanted, but civil war would have exploded
immediately, and nothing would have been able to prevent it. We can
say that it was a real stroke of luck that this didn’t happen and at a
moment that the political class was surrounded by a sealed but closely
watched grouping of murmurs. Moreover, we can reveal that, due to the
worst possible choice of guilty parties – someone like Valpreda[4]
wasn’t believable as the perpetrator of the attack, even if a hundred
taxi drivers had, before dying, given a hundred statements for
subsequent public display – as well as due to the manner in which the
police and the magistrates behaved during the affair, we made this
operation into a grotesque farce of misunderstanding and gloom that was
more worthy of a South American dictatorship than a European
democracy.

Despite all this, how can the operation of 12 December be considered
a success? The bombs succeeded in imposing the desired effects to the
extent that all of the sources of information put forth, instead of the
single true meaning, a variety of labels – anarchist or fascist
supporters and outcomes – and these sources of information were at first
believed, despite or even precisely because of the contradictory
versions. On the other hand, the attack also succeeded because one had
never seen such reciprocal support by all the institutional forces, such
great solidarity between the political parties and the government,
between the government and the forces of law and order, and between the
forces of law and order and the unions. Thus, what might have appeared
to public opinion as an act of parliament “against” the government, the
government “against” the bombs, and the bombs “against” the Republic,
wasn’t obviously a conflict between one constitutional power and
another, between the legislative and executive powers, but was well and
truly the State itself that, in extreme peril, found itself led to use
(as best as it could) certain extreme instruments against itself and for
its own support, so as to show everyone that, when the State is in
peril, everyone is.

Several years currently separate us from the events that were
dangerous to all and sad for some, and that we now criticize publicly.
Nevertheless, we must not underestimate what was admirable about this
“lyrical expression of history in action” (as Don Raffaele called it) in
which the State, reduced to the role of deus ex machina, put
onstage its own terrorist negation to reaffirm its power, because the
ruse of reason[5] that governs and moves forward universal history is
present in each of its contingent and decisive episodes, even if men do
not perceive it immediately, because they are too dominated by the
particular passions that serve as pretexts for the permanent conflict
that sets them in opposition to each other. Anyone courageous enough to
not fear being accused of ingenuity would today be astonished to see how
well the expedient of the bombs obtained good effects on the masses, but
this hypothetical naïve person [French in original] would be
deceived, because, as Machiavelli says, “the majority of men feed upon
what appears as much as what exists; very often they are set in motion
more by things as they appear than things as they are.”[6] But – and
here’s the negative limit of similar expedients, also formulated by
Machiavelli – “such methods and extraordinary recourses render the
Prince himself unfortunate and badly assured, because, to the extent he
uses cruelty, his government becomes weak.”[7]

Though this might be incomprehensible or terrifying to some people,
it is no longer possible to deny the new reality. Beginning in 1969,
Italy had a revolutionary “party” that was informal but, consequently,
more difficult to strike at. Here, of course, we are not alluding to the
para-parliamentary student groups, which wouldn’t even frighten the most
fearful provincial employee, but all those who, in the factories and the
streets, individually or collectively, demonstrated a total refusal of
the current organization of work, and even work itself, which in truth
was already the [total] refusal of the society that is based upon such
an organization. Since 1969, all the acts, failures and successes of our
domestic and economic policies are not even comprehensible if one does
not put them into relation with the sometimes open, sometimes hidden
conflict that opposes this new reality to all of the traditional
institutions, which are now in crisis.

Deprived of leaders, as well as a coherent politics, the workers,
young people, women, homosexuals, prisoners, high-school students and
mentally ill people unexpectedly decided to want everything that had
been prohibited to them, at the same time that they rejected en
bloc all the goals that our society permitted them to pursue. They
refused work, the family, school, morality, the army, the State and even
the very idea of any kind of hierarchy.[8] This heterogeneous, violent,
uncultivated and clumsy “party” wanted to impose itself everywhere with
brutality, and it became, so to speak, the measure of all things:
that which takes place, since no one can any longer prevent anything
from happening; and that which doesn’t take place, since our
institutions are no longer in a position to make anyone obey them.

To say that this situation has been produced by errors in the
management of Italian society would be even more false than unjust – and
the Communists know this well – from the moment that such situations can
be found in every industrial country, whether they are bourgeois or
socialist (as in Poland) – and this the Communists also know well. But
such a fact assuredly cannot console us. On the contrary, it is just to
say that, in Italy, the virus of rebellion found, more than
elsewhere, a cultural broth that was particularly propitious for its
development, that is to say, a syndrome of pathological infirmities with
which our institutions were already chronically afflicted, as we saw in
the second chapter of this Report.

How have we in Italy reacted to the new revolutionary threat? At
first, our politicians simply denied its existence, finding it more
convenient to regard the actions of the workers in 1969 in the same
manner that they regarded the students of 1968: little more than a
phenomenon of morals, a kind of “fashion” that would pass as do all the
others. One neglected to consider the fact that a State can temporarily
do without universities, which have since then ceased to exist as
universities, but cannot do without factories. Later, when the daily and
measurable reality of the damage caused by the social conflict had
become striking, our ruling class awoke from its comfortable sleep,
believed and judged itself to be besieged by an enemy who was everywhere
and that, for this very reason, was difficult to control and define, and
from that moment it entrenched itself in a policy of absolute
defense.

In our youth, when we took a course in military strategy, the
lieutenant colonel who was in charge gave us a copy of a beautiful book
that we still have and that is little known among the men currently in
power: Carl von Clausewitz’ On War. (We should note that the
lieutenant colonel’s only weakness was being too much of an expert in
military questions and too distant from the politics of the regime at
the time to have a career in the Italian Army, and the fact is that we
haven’t heard anything about him since then.) In the 1930s, our own
Benedetto Croce[9] deplored the Italian neglect of this work. “It is
only the poor and unilateral culture of those who ordinarily study
philosophy, their unintelligent specialization, and the provincialism of
their social manners that keep them at a distance from books such as the
one by Clausewitz, whom they estimate to be foreign or inferior to their
discipline.” As for us, who, from the moment that this book was offered
to us, judged that it was no less important than The Prince to a
man of power, we would like to quote a passage from it here so as to
critique the political strategy of absolute defense that our governments
have adopted these past few years.

What is the fundamental idea of defense? To ward off a
blow. What is its characteristic? To wait for the blow that one
must ward off (…) But an absolute defense would be in complete
contradiction with the idea of war, because it rests on the supposition
that one of the adversaries commits an act of war; consequently, defense
can only be relative (…) The defensive form of the conduct of war
thus isn’t limited to warding off blows, but also includes the skillful
use of counter-blows. What is the goal of the defensive? To
conserve.

And he goes on, a little later, to say that,

The goal of the defensive is negative, it is conservation, while the
goal of the attack, conquest, is positive, and thus conquest
tends to increase the means of warfare, while conservation doesn’t (…)
The result is that (the defensive) must only be employed to the extent
one has need of it, because one is too weak, and that, on the contrary,
it is fitting to abandon it as soon as one becomes strong enough to be
able to attempt a positive goal.

Quite the contrary, to anyone who has observed it with a minimum
amount of attention, Italian domestic policy in its entirety, from 1969
until today, appears to be an absolute defense, that is, with the
sole exception of the use of the counter-attack of 12 December (and we
have seen its degree of skillfulness). We would like to specify our
thinking here, because it goes to the heart of our critique. All during
that year, until its last few months, we had expected (and we could only
expect) the aggravation of the crisis. Since the end of June, only the
leaders of FIAT – thus proving their foresight – had sought a “global
solution” in the negotiations, which nevertheless remained insufficient
because one could not hope to resolve a general crisis through an
agreement in one sector. What does “to expect” mean? One quickly sees
that it means leaving to the workers (who launched the offensive) the
time necessary to act in concert, to unite, to reinforce and tighten
their ranks. It means letting the unions wear themselves out in a
thousand conflicts, during the course of which they were tested daily by
the working classes. We do not quite know, and knowing such things now
is of little importance, if the roots of the government’s excessive
wait-and-see attitude were in its conscious and erroneous choice
or, more precisely, a pure and simple refusal to choose. Nevertheless,
we know that this refusal produced almost all of the subsequent errors
in political conduct and that, at its basis, there was a crude error of
evaluation or, what’s worse, a crass ignorance in matters of revolution.
In reality, none of the men who were then in government (and who are
still there now) believed that it was possible that the workers –
without leaders, means or apparent coordination – were capable of
constituting a real danger to the security of the State and the very
survival of our society order. They simply worried about the economic
damages caused by the strikes, which were considered to be enormous,
while in fact, in their entirety, they only constituted the least
damage, because at that moment our economic situation was rosy when
compared to the one of today.

On the contrary, we were in one of those circumstances in which the
most serious error precisely consisted in not fearing such an
adversarial “party” because it had no leaders. One hardly kept this
“party” in mind because it was informal and the State was armed, and yet
we have always been persuaded (and history only offers us too many
examples) that it is fitting to heed populations every time that they
take themselves for everything, because “the misfortune is that their
force lies in their imagination and one can truthfully say that, unlike
all the other kinds of power, they can do anything they want to do when
they have come to a certain point” [French in original], as Cardinal
de Retz once said of the Fronde. Moreover, all revolutions in history
have begun without leaders and they have ended when they have gotten
them.

Thus this absolute defense presupposed that only the workers could
carry out “acts of war,” to keep to Clausewitz’s schema, and this
attitude on the part of power gave the workers their principal
encouragement. One waited, almost with resignation, and did almost
nothing other than wait. Or, more precisely, what one did to justify
this attitude led to several laughable episodes of an artificial and
useless pseudo-offensive represented by the attacks carried out in April
and August. We might admire this monument to political irrationality:
these attacks, according to one’s calculations or hopes, had won over at
least a part of public opinion to the party of law and order at a time
when public opinion was generally favorable to the strikers. In that
way, one hoped to win the war with the weapon of public opinion,
joyously forgetting the simple truth that public opinion, when it is
hostile to power, harms it, and when public opinion is favorable to
power, it does nothing for it as an ally. This was precisely because, at
first, one didn’t want to understand the nature of the conflict and then
because one underestimated the danger, with the result that
insurrectional episodes such as 19 November took place. The great fear
created by 19 November was thus necessary and sufficient for the change
of course in thinking that led to the operation of 12 December, which –
having been conducted with such fury – had to be hurried and
approximate. In fact, we can say that the time that elapsed between 19
November and 12 December was dominated by the anxiety caused by the
approach of an imminent event, which the majority of people imagined
would be a riot with much worse consequences than the one in Milan.
Every day new authentic or artificial alarms served to put pressure on
this or that sector of power or public opinion. A friend whose offices
were at Montecitorio[10] reported to us that the entirety of Parliament
was so obsessed by the idea of open social conflict, which appeared
unavoidable and for which the State was apparently unprepared, that one
said that it could read the words civil war written on the walls
of the auditorium. Following the customs of parliamentary assemblies,
what was the most troubling in the depths of their minds was that which
one spoke of the least, but they implicitly proved that they didn’t
forget about it for an instant. Added to this was the fact that the
unshakeable tranquility of the leader of the government [Mariano Rumor]
was a preoccupation for those who didn’t know the reasons for his
tranquility and they regarded it as a kind of unconsciousness. For those
who knew the real reason for it, his tranquility was an even greater
preoccupation. One knew that the High Commander of our Army, if he was
incapable of fighting a classic war, was even more incapable of fighting
a civil war and, as for the Army itself, we can say – making use of a
recent and welcome expression from a book of “political fiction,”
written anonymously – “although no one ever speaks about it, our
divisions aren’t any less disorganized than our postal services.”

As we have always found the personality of Admiral Henke to be the
least disconcerting, we believed we were authorized at the time to
discretely advise him to be prudent and keep himself far above the fray
that some politicians had long created around him, so that he would not
uselessly compromise either his person or his reputation in the
forthcoming chaos, which is always good advice to give to a man so
impassioned by action, but so little accustomed to act before having
been provided with truly useful and even the most necessary reasons to
do so that he always seemed to us ready to undertake noxious and
dangerous actions rather than do nothing at all, but this advice wasn’t
heeded, like all advice that goes against human nature! What followed
confirmed this.

It is precisely because one did not foresee the situation in which
the operation of 12 December became necessary, and because one then
conducted it in such a maladroit fashion, that we have imperceptibly
made it a habit here in Italy to confront all the critical situations in
the years that followed with the false card of artificial terrorism,
which has been lacking believability and especially usefulness. Because
the expedient of bombs obtained good results the first time, one has –
without posing other questions – made this tactic into a unique
strategy, which has since become known under the names “the strategy of
tension” or “the strategy of opposed extremisms.” Perpetually continuing
to defend itself against ghostly enemies – sometimes red, sometimes
black, according to the mood of the moment, but always badly constructed
– our State has never wanted to confront the problems posed by the
real enemy of the society that is founded on private property and
work, and has wasted its time combating the phantasms that it has
created and thus creating an alibi that would clear it of its real
desertion. The result of this has been that the State hasn’t even
obtained the people’s support for its hardly believable battles. On the
contrary, the following has been the result: para-Statist emergency
practices have become completely ridiculous and, as one says, “burned.”
Once the game became too obvious, the State was even obligated to put
its own secret services chief into prison. No one believed that General
Miceli would remain in prison any longer than the time necessary to
release him. The insolent hypocrisy with which one has accused him was
only a prelude to the hypocrisy with which one released him from
detention. Great result! The Servizio Informazioni Difesa
[Defense Information Service] has become the worst scandal in our
country. So we will say this clearly, and once and for all: it is time
to end the uncontrollable use of unofficial action, which is brutal,
useless and dangerous for law and order, even when it shows itself able
to safeguard law and order with the most efficient procedures. More
particularly, we would like to ask, What have been the actual fruits and
the practical utility of each of the acts of terrorism that followed the
one committed on 12 December 1969? What was the usefulness of the
pre-electoral attack on the publisher named Feltrinelli,[11] who was an
inoffensive Leftist industrialist? What was the usefulness of the
elimination of Commissioner Calabresi,[12] when today every citizen
knows more about the attacks of those years than he did?

Our secret services’ alternation between ineffectiveness and
hyper-effectiveness over the course of the last few years reveals a
worrisome equivocation: those who can remove it don’t want to, and those
who want to do so cannot. In this matter, the more one knows about the
suspicious maneuvers that take place between the scenes, the less one
takes the risk of denouncing them, either because the people who have
proof of their existence are personally implicated in this vicious
circle or because they fear dying like so many witnesses whom one hasn’t
wanted to call to testify in the trials of the last few years. Moreover,
it is well known that every modern secret service is in a position to
greatly abuse its secret character and thus its power, arbitrarily
enjoying that which goes well beyond what is necessary for the defense
of the general interests of society and forcing silence (by one means or
another) upon anyone who advances some well-founded suspicion about the
practices that are certainly not above suspicion, but then “is there
any hope for justice when the criminals have the power to condemn their
critics?”[13]

The paradox resides in the fact that these are not the means by which
public order (blanketed by military secrecy) is maintained, but the
means by which it hasn’t been maintained, because everyone has seen
how these methods have generally exacerbated the disorder, that is, when
they haven’t deliberately created it.

In all the States of the world, a secret service receives its orders
from the executive power, but the executive power is (fortunately) not
administered in all the other States of the world as it is in our
country. Thus, isn’t it permitted to conclude that the Italian secret
service has become the two-edged sword in the hands of a fool[14]
of which the Latins spoke? By dint of [too many] helping hands and
dramatic turns of events, the majority of the population has become
drugged and habituated to learning about some new carnage at the
same time as the recall to Rome of the inquest into the preceding
massacre, or the “recusal from office” of a magistrate who came
dangerously close to the truth, with the result that one can no longer
hope that the healthy forces of this country are capable of obligating
the State to make a radical purification by applying pressure from
below. Such a purification is urgent, but it must come from the
top, and our own public intervention marks the beginning of it, at
the same time that it shows the necessity of such an intervention:
“there where everything is bad, it is a good thing to know the
worst.”

The magistracy itself, in which men of great value preside, is
governed in such a manner that it currently resembles a poor troupe of
traveling actors from long ago that, booed in one place, is always
hopeful (always in vain) of finally being successful in another town. If
this troupe no longer performs the plays that the public in Northern
Italy finds obscene or that Rome finds too audacious, it tasks
Catanzaro[15] with constituting a Court of Justice that will restage
those plays using the same libretti, but they are inevitably
suspended shortly after the contrasting prologue because the renown of
the preceding failures have preceded the show. A humorist from another
century said that one of the principal differences between a cat and a
lie is that the cat has nine lives.

After doing something stupid, men ordinarily do a hundred other
stupid things to hide it. Our State, still dominated by the same men,
doesn’t behave like a State, but like men: it seeks to limit the damage
of one error by making another, more serious one, and it finally arrives
at a situation in which it is no longer possible to do anything other
than make errors. As one knows, the defense of a bad cause has always
been worse than the cause itself, but the defense of a just cause –
and we have the weakness of believing that our world merits being
defended –, when this defense is conducted without dignity and
maladroitly, is in every case a crime that obtains effects that are, on
all points, the opposite of what was desired.

On the question of “the strategy of tension” and the unofficial
services, it is necessary and fitting that, from now on, we be more
radical than the Communists themselves, and it pleases us to summarize
our thinking on this question with phrases that are not ours.

It appears to me that we have come to the extreme point of a
great danger when there is no other course of action than choosing
between enlightening the people and preparing oneself for combat with
them (…) If trouble with the plebeians is to be feared, we do not fear
popular disgust any less, and we guard against all the steps and
proceedings that could excite them. They could lead to greater evils and
not exclusive of more serious and more reasonable troubles.

(Thus wrote Francesco-Maria Gianni, former State advisor to the Grand
Duke Pierre-Léopold, in a work from 1792 evocatively entitled The
fears that I feel and the disorders that I dread due to the
circumstances that the country is currently in.)

To conclude, we will say that the dramatic turn of events (that
decadent theatrical trick) – and its chronic politics in Italy – have
sufficiently demonstrated the impotence of the governors, as well as a
general desire to change the scene, the plot and the actors. All the
serious problems of 1969 are still before us and, if one speaks less of
them today, this is only because other, no less serious problems have
been added since then, while the men who have not resolved them are
still in power and, at the very moment that we are writing, they are in
the process of quibbling at length over the collapse, while it is our
very Republic that is failing. Frailty, thy name is Italy!
[English in original].

[1] This Latin expression (a translation of a line in Aesop’s fable
“The Boastful Athlete”) literally means, “Here is Rhodes, jump here.” In
his preface to The Philosophy of Right, Hegel – in an apparent
reference to the Rosicrucians – offered an altered translation: Hier
ist die Rose, hier tanze (“Here is the Rose, dance here”). According
to Marx, writing in The 18the Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “a
situation is created which makes all turning back impossible,
and the
conditions themselves call out: Here is the rose, here dance!”

[2] Dante, Inferno, XVI, 124-128.

[3] On 19 December 1969, the Italian section of the Situationist
International wrote, printed and posted all over Milan a text entitled
Is the Reichstag Burning?

[4] Pietro Valpreda, an anarchist who was initially (and falsely)
accused of perpetrating the bombing at the Piazza Fontana.

[5] Cf. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right.

[6] An alternative translation of the same passage in Chapter XVIII of The
Prince reads as follows: “Men in general judge more by their eyes
than by their hands, because everyone can see, but only a few can feel.
Everyone see how you appear, but few feel what you are.”

[7] An alternative translation of the same passage in Chapter XVII of The
Prince reads as follows: “The Prince must make himself feared in
such a way that, if he does not obtain love, he may escape hatred,
because being feared and not hated can go together very well, which he
will always manage to do when he keeps himself away from the possessions
of his citizens and subjects, and their women.”

[8] Taken from Thesis 12 of “Theses on the SI and Its Time,” The
Veritable Split in the International (1972).

[9] An Italian philosopher, author and politician (1866-1952). His
comments on Clausewitz appeared in an essay titled “Succès et Jugement
dans le ‘Vom Kriege’ de Clausewitz,” Revue de Metaphysique et de
Morale, Vol. 42, 1935.

[10] The meeting place of the House of Deputies.

[11] Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, murdered on 14 March 1972. The
circumstances of his death were made to look like he’d blown himself up
trying to dynamite an electrical tower.

[12] Luigi Calabresi, the officer in charge of investigating the
attack on the Piazza Fontana, was murdered on 17 May 1972.

[13] Slightly modified quotation from Saint-Just. French in
original.

[14] The Latin expression employed here, gladium ancipitem in manu
stulti, seems to include an allusion to “Operation Gladio,” which
was the Italian code name for the secret NATO plan in which armed groups
prepared to either overthrow Communist governments after they’d been
formed or before they had seized power.

[15] Not only a politically “neutral” area, but one in which the
geography served to aid security procedures.

Troy, yet upon his basis, had been down,
And the great Hector's
sword had lack’d a master (...)
The specialty of rule hath been
neglected:
And, look, how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow
upon this plain, so many hollow factions (...)
When that the general
is not like the hive (...)
The unworthiest shows as fairly in the
mask (...)
When the planets
In evil mixture to disorder
wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!
What raging
of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights,
changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The
unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture! O, when
degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then
enterprise is sick! (...)
Then every thing includes itself in
power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an
universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must
make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself (...)

Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.

Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida[1]

When the present does not regret the past, and when the future does
not appear compromised by the precariousness of a present like ours, men
and women live their lives in all its richness. To give an evocative
example: in the second half of the 18th century, Venetian society could
offer itself the luxury of literally forgetting the masterpieces of
Vivaldi and Albioni because of the new masterpieces of Mozart and
Lorenzo Da Ponte that had come from Vienna.

But in an epoch in which the poverty of a present that is
simultaneously anxious and stagnant announces the coming of a troubled
and tragic future; in an epoch in which the rediscovery of the
masterpieces of the past, quickly pillaged, hardly consoles us; in an
epoch in which poverty, and especially cultural poverty, dominates our
societies of lost abundance and assaults all of us – individuals and
social classes, the leaders and the led, up to the State itself –
everyone seems to fidget in a kind of “absolute anxiety of not being
who he really is,” as Hegel would say. Thus we witness a strange,
generalized and universal alienation, by virtue of which no one can any
longer play the very role that defines him. The workers no longer want
to be workers; the leaders fear to appear to be leaders; the
conservatives hide or keep quiet; the bourgeoisie fears being bourgeois
– we wish to repeat that, “when all the ranks are disguised, the most
unworthy also cut beautiful figures in the masquerade,” and then “the
unity and peaceful marriage of the classes” evaporate, because there is
no longer a “fixed condition” for anyone.

And, in what concerns the Italian bourgeoisie, which was reminded
(unsuccessfully) by Giorgio Bocca[2] that “it wasn’t born yesterday,”
and that it was even the first bourgeoisie in history and the inventor
of the bank, today we see it believe every word of its adversaries,
accord credence to fashionable Marxism and its predictions (instead of
having faith in its own history and culture, which have been forgotten
or ignored), and fill its mouth with quibbling about the proletariat and
the most adequate means by which the workers should conduct their own
struggles to such an extent that, for a part of our bourgeoisie, in the
great sunset of capitalism, of which it speaks, all cows are
red.[3]

This general crisis of identity, in its turn, is only a particular
aspect of the current global crisis, but it does not any less merit our
attention for that, and while we are on the subject, we would like to
argue a contrario, for the benefit of the Italian bourgeoisie, by
quoting from (and not providing any commentary on) an eloquent passage
from a private letter sent to us by a Russian diplomat, whose name we
will not divulge, immediately after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968.

It is stupidity that causes you Italians to raise the
question of the workers. I absolutely do not see what you would like to
do with the European worker after you have turned him into a question.
If you want slaves, you are crazy to grant to the workers that which
makes them masters; but you have destroyed, down to their seeds, the
instincts that make the workers possible as a class, that is, that
which makes them admit this possibility to themselves. What would be
astonishing if your worker finds that his existence today appears to him
as a calamity, to speak the language of morality, as an
injustice?[4]

We have reported this morsel, the italics in which were in the
original, not out of a taste for anecdotes, but to show that, in the
cold and brutal language that is proper to the Soviet bureaucracy, there
can sometimes be more truth, sincerity and realism than in the Marxist
dissertations of some more or less intellectual members of the Italian
bourgeoisie. All the same, it would be the height of historical irony if
our politics, forgetful of people like Machiavelli, must seek its
science lessons from the dominant bureaucracy in Moscow! And yet, in
Moscow, the power-holding class seems to forget its own identity less
than we do ours, and, despite its immense deficiencies, it is aware of
its interests, it knows how to defend them, and it knows against
whom it must defend them. In Russia and elsewhere, the Communists in
fact know better than others in the world today that no true revolution
is possible if it is not really proletarian, that is to say, if it does
not turn against all domination and all ruling classes, and thus against
the ruling class that they themselves constitute in the country where
they hold power, and it isn’t by chance that their political parties
abroad have everywhere ceased to speak of a revolution that they cannot
in fact accept, because in Russia in 1917 they knew one directly and, if
they managed to seize power, it was only by ruining that revolution that
the Communists were able to remain at the helm of the State and the
economy.

But now, since we are broaching the most important question that we
would like to deal with briefly in this chapter, we will say that it has
only been since the autumn of 1973 – and here our reference point is the
most recent Arab-Israeli war, which was so full of consequences – that
the social crisis, which has in the last five years broken out in almost
all the European countries, and not just in those countries, has become
completely global and total.

This crisis is global because, extensively, all the regimes
and all the countries of the world – in one fashion or another – have
been struck by it simultaneously, even if the specific characteristics
of the crisis had initially presented different predominant threats in
accordance with the respective situations of those different
countries.

On the other hand, this crisis is total because, intensively,
it has been the basis of life – insofar as the crisis has unfolded in
the interior of each of these countries – that has been subjected to the
contagion.

Whether it is a question of political or economic crisis, the
chemical pollution of the air that one breathes or the falsification of
food, the cancer of social struggles or the urbanistic leprosy that
proliferates where there used to be towns and countrysides, the growth
of suicide and mental illnesses, what is called the demographic
explosion or the threshold crossed by the noxiousness of noise, the
public order that is disturbed by dissent and bandits – everywhere one
bumps up against the additional impossibility of going much
farther along the road of degradation of what had been the conquests
of the bourgeoisie properly speaking.

We must admit it: not personally, but as the inheritors of these
conquests, we have not known how to think strategically. Instead,
here resembling the little people, rather than a property-owning class,
we have thought and lived from day to day, systematically
hypothesizing the continuation of the present while accumulating
insolvable debts for the future, that is to say, every day renouncing a
future worthy of our past so as to not renounce a few negligible
advantages, which are the deceptive advantages of a fleeting present. As
the poet from Vaucluse says,

Life passes quick, nor will a moment stay,
And death
with hasty journeys still draws near;
And all the present joins my
soul to tear,
With every past and every future day.[6]

Thus our ruling classes everywhere have today been reduced to
discussing nothing other than the expiration of their mandate – a
mandate that (we too often forget) we do not hold thanks to God or the
people, but thanks only to our own abilities in the past –, and even
this global discussion is more or less reduced to the sad examination of
the palliatives that would best delay this expiration. And this
because, in such a process of decadence in action, we have come to the
point of total incompatibility insofar as the social, economic and
political system that we manage appears to want to tie its fate to the
incessant continuation of a growing and [already] intolerable
deterioration of all the conditions of existence for everyone. One has
said that the crisis caused by the oil embargo, and then by the
increases in the price of crude oil made by the oil-producing Arab
countries, has in turn caused the very serious economic crisis upon
which the world debates, and there’s something true in this observation,
but it is only a part of the truth and certainly the most contingent
part, even if we cannot say that it is a passing phenomenon. With
respect to the current global crisis, we must say what Thucydides said
of the Peloponnesian War, “Thn men gar alhqestathn projasin, ajanestathn
de logw,”[6] which is really “the truest cause, but the one least spoken
about openly,” because the real crisis today – which no one speaks about
– is not an economic crisis, like the one in 1929, for example,
which we were capable of overcoming (and we know how). Above all, our
crisis is a crisis of the economy, which means the economic
phenomenon in its entirety, and it is within this general crisis that a
particular, oil-related, economic crisis has subsequently appeared.

This is the most worrisome effect of a converging double process: on
the one hand, the workers, who have escaped from the framework of the
unions, are imposing on us working conditions and incessant salary
demands that seriously disrupt our decisions and the forecasts of our
economists; and, on the other hand, these same workers as consumers
appear completely disgusted by the goods that they willingly purchased
not so long ago, thus creating difficulties – if not obstacles – to the
circulation of commodities. The result is that we find ourselves in an
impasse [French in original]: we are not successful at selling
the commodities that the workers refuse to produce or consume. At the
root of this crisis, there is not – as some people think – the
subjective attitude of the individuals involved, who, nevertheless, are
brought into the process and subsequently increase the damages. The
economy has entered into crisis on its own and, through its own
movement, it is misled down the road of itsown self-destruction. It is
certainly not quantitatively that the economy has discovered itself to
be incapable of increasing production and developing its productive
forces, but qualitatively.

The development of this economy, the crisis of which we are the
shareholders, has been anarchic and irrational. We have followed archaic
models that would be more suitable to an agrarian economy than to an
evolved industrial economy, because – like all the ancient societies,
which always struggled against actual shortages – we have pursued the
maximum degree of purely and progressively quantitative productivity,
“not discerning the overflow of what is sufficient.”[7] This
identification with the agrarian mode of production was then transferred
to the pseudo-cyclical model of the superabundant production of
commodities[8] in which one has deliberately created “built-in
obsolescence” to artificially maintain the seasonal character of
consumption, which in turn is used to justify the incessant repetition
of productive effort, thus preserving the proximity of shortages. And
this is why the cumulative reality of such production, which is
indifferent to both utility and wastefulness, today returns to haunt us
in the forms of pollution and social struggle,[9] because, on the one
hand, we have poisoned the world, and, on the other, we have thereby
given to the people – for every instant of their everyday lives – a
special reason to revolt against us, who are the ones who have poisoned
life. In the last chapter of this work, we will present several remedies
for this “economic sickness.”

We note here that our power, which from the first symptoms of the
[new] social war has defended (not too well) the abundance attacked by
subversion, must today defend lost abundance. In sum, we must
manage the world’s misfortune. Hopefully our readers will be attentive
to the following paradoxical coincidence, which is unprecedented in
universal history. At the very moment in which the powers of the world
are disposed to come to each other’s aid – despite their differences
concerning details, which no longer truly set them against each
other – each one of these powers has such great need of help that none
of them are in a position to effectively help any of the others. The
power of each State is very limited outside of its own borders, because
each one is seriously compromised within them.

On the other hand, the so-called peaceful coexistence between the
great powers is not at all the fruit of a commendable choice that was
deliberately made in the sphere of global politics, nor was it the
result of the successes of modern diplomacy, as the people of the world
believe. We know that peaceful coexistence is not a virtue, but a
necessity, and a much less joyful one than people would like to
believe, because if global conflict has no place in these hypotheses,
this is not because of the danger that thermonuclear weapons represent,
but because of the new and (according to us) more serious social
conflict that each nation must attempt to surmount on its own. We can
say, in a few words, that global war is no longer possible because peace
has abandoned this world and that the highest degree of military power
ever attained corresponds to the highest degree of impotence.

Clausewitz said that “war is the continuation of policy by other
means,” but even this definition, valuable until now, is no longer
valuable (and it will not be in the future) because today’s alleged
“peace” is in fact the continuation of war by other means, and it
is the continuation of another type of war that the States have
neither chosen nor declared. Their very weapons must be quickly and
completely redesigned following the English example of the professional
army, but trained to fight domestically against subversion, while the
secret services will henceforth (from a military point of view) have to
principally occupy themselves with domestic politics and not politics
abroad (but hopefully not following the example of the Italian S.I.D.!).
The next “great war” will be a generalized civil war, and it will thus
welcome theoreticians capable of instructing professional units that
will be engaged in combat “for hearth and home” [Latin in original].

Naturally, there will still be wars between the States, but they will
be “local wars,” such as those fought in the Middle East,[10] and the
great powers will have to intervene in them indirectly to limit the
damages and counter-attacks on the global level, where these conflicts
are liable to involve the advanced industrial countries, which are all
in precarious positions. And here it is important to emphasize the
failure of the policies of the great powers, and consequently the entire
world, after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. The Israeli victory,
applauded by Europe, was obtained with the military and diplomatic
support of the United States (as everyone knows), and it cost, and
continues to cost, the United States and all of its allies much more
than a defeat in the global theatre of operations would have. At that
moment, even those who were the most reluctant to admit it were
convinced of the vulnerability of our entire economic and monetary
system, which had already been put into a very delicate situation by the
social crisis.

David Ricardo defined wheat as “the only commodity that is necessary,
as much for its own production as for the production of every other
commodity,”[11] because, in the economy of that time, wheat assured the
survival of the laboring forces themselves in a privileged manner. Times
have changed, and today it is petroleum that can be defined as the
product that is necessary and indispensible for the production and
consumption of all the others. At the time of the Yom Kippur War, it
was enough for Europe to foresee the possibility of spending the winter
without heat for the Atlantic Alliance – created to resist the armed
forces on the other side of the Iron Curtain – to melt like snow in
sunlight. Only Caetano remained loyal to NATO, and today NATO can no
longer count on him.[12]

Later on, the energy crisis, the successive increases in the price of
crude oil and all the displacements of the economic and financial
equilibriums produced – within the crisis of the economy – the current
intensification of the economic crisis and, at the same time, we offered
to the Arab countries the sword of Damocles that, for our comfort, they
have quite willingly been tasked with holding, suspended, over our
industries. In passing, we note the mental debility that can be seen in
the economic-political calculations of those who have directed our
affairs for the last generation. If we wanted to pursue this
precise form of expansion, which is largely based on low petroleum
prices, then we should have maintained the old form of colonialism, and
should not have sacrificed it in favor of illusions of immediate
profitability from “neo-colonialism.” Almost 30 years ago, the troops of
the principal bourgeois States controlled almost the totality of the
countries that produced our raw materials and sources of energy. Through
the most simplistic calculations, we chose to abandon these colonies
at the cheapest possible costs and we did this to develop our
technology as if we still controlled those countries! A dozen
permanent colonial wars would not have cost us a quarter of the costs of
the current predicament.

Moreover, this hardly unforeseeable failure came at the moment when
American power over the world had begun to decline, and this failure
intensified the domestic political crisis, which soon after overthrew
Nixon, who departed in ridicule, and it brought beyond the danger level
the crisis that for years that had silently torn America’s internal
social tissue. Thus, the first effects of all these errors were felt
right away, but we have only just begun to see them, and we have not
seen the end of them. And what can we say about the naïve casualness
with which Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, proclaimed the following in
his first speech as president? “Henceforth we know that a State strong
enough to give you all that you want is also a State strong enough to
take away all that you have.”[13] But what do we know? Today, just a few
months after this bold declaration, we know that the federal deficit has
grown vertiginously since then, and that Ford hopes that, in the budget
for the year 1975-1976, the deficit will not exceed 900 percent of the
one from the preceding year. If the poor thinkers of a power that grows
poorer in the blink of an eye foresee good things, they see badly, and
if they foresee bad things, they see quite well. For example, Henry
Kissinger, although he is not a “man without qualities,” resembles Musil
in his defects.[14] He constantly dissolves action in the vanity of
action, and the useful in the useless. In other words, like the majority
of those with whom he meets every day all over the world, Kissinger
lacks a strategic vision of what must be done and what must be avoided –
beyond contingent obligations – to save a world that controls itself
with a growing difficulty, because it is useless to want to dominate
that which has fallen into ruin, when, instead, it is a question of
saving that which one wants to dominate. And, concerning the war that
the Israelis won over the Arabs, it is enough for us to say to all the
modern incarnations of Metternich[15] that they had better reacquaint
themselves with a couple of old maxims. First, “it is never a wise
course of action to reduce the enemy to despair” (Machiavelli); second,
“those who know how to win are much larger in number than those who know
how to make good use of their victories” (Polybius).

As for Europe, which seems to have forgotten that it produced all the
masterpieces of human thought, and which for the last 30 years has
placed more confidence in the thinkers from across the Atlantic Ocean
than it has had in its own: today it is obvious that Europe has fallen
apart even as a simple “economic community.” And, in Italy – if
we consider the fact that the greatest efforts to deal with the crisis
undertaken by certain centers of economic and political power have only
resulted in laughable attempts to return to the old fascist “solution”
at the very moment when the last ruins of fascism have reached their
foreseeable ends in Portugal and Greece[16] – well, they can go without
commentary.

The politicians can deny it as much as they want to, but today their
currency of exchange – the lie – is gnawed away by inflation, even more
so that the lira: one epoch is over and a new one has begun. We know
that men, who are so often ready to interpret the past in new terms, are
also frequently brought to interpret the new in old terms, and thus they
do not understand what must be done, because changes in the times always
and above all express the fact that the hour has come. The
cohabitation of one epoch with the one that follows it never risks
becoming institutionalized in marriage, no matter what is thought by
Senator Amintore Fanfani,[17] who would indubitably be more highly
esteemed as an interpreter of the Tuscan landscape than history.

But we can say everything that there is to say about the intellectual
poverty that is durably installed in power in our country (and that
devastates it) when we review the apparently innocent reflections about
the expectation of some unknown panacea with which they [try to] amuse
us and that abound in our newspapers (and not only in the worst ones).
Here, for example, we are thinking of the candor with which our most
important daily newspaper has repeatedly stated that it “envies the
French for Giscard d’Estaing.” It is quite true that our political
class, considered as a whole (and with all due exceptions noted), would
bring shame to a tribe of Pygmies, but, all the same, this is not
sufficient reason to mock our neighbor, unfortunate France, by
pretending to envy it for politicians with whom no tribe of Watusis
would be contented. Someone who has less urbanity than we do, but whom
has had occasion to dine once or twice with the French neo-President,
came to conclusions about this person that are not too different from
what My Lord Niccolo said in his post mortem epigram about the
Gonfalonier:

The night that Piero Soderini died,
His soul came to
the gates of Hell.
Pluto cried out: ‘You, in Hell?
Foolish soul,
go to Purgatory
With the other children!’

Pardon us for the literary device but, in the current generalization
of bad morals, each instance of stupidity asserts the rights that are
due it, and imbecility never goes without a patron. Here in Italy, we
respect too many [unworthy] things to be worthy of being respected. At
bottom, it is not even Giscard whom this journalistic triviality envies
the French for having; she envies the enticing image of the
president-manager, the efficient and hopeful technocrat who casually
makes a few spectacular changes in protocol and promotes with juvenile
fervor a hundred innovative details that momentarily distract his
country from the coming subversion, which in fact still smolders under
the ashes, seven years after May [1968].

The “Italian question” – or the French or the English questions, for
that matter – certainly cannot be resolved by replacing Flaminio
Piccoli[19] or [Mariano] Rumor with someone more “telegenic,” less
implicated in the failures of the past or less compromised by
association with the Mafia, as is Minister Gioia.[20] No one can deny
that it is necessary and, at present, urgent to also change the
majority of the men who must defend our interests, but to replace them
with people like Giscard would be a remedy that would not fight the
sickness at all. The sickness from which we suffer is spoken about,
discussed and written about by the very people who, pretending to be
doctors, suffer from it: their diagnoses are always diseased and their
prescriptions are only additional symptoms of the collective disease.
The opinion of Manzoni[21] was that, “we common men are generally made
thus: we revolt with indignation and anger against mediocre evils and we
are resigned to the extreme ones; we support – not with resignation, but
stupidity – the heights of what we had at first declared to be
unsupportable.”

We will not hide from our readers that speaking so coldly is a
thankless task, but speaking otherwise seems impossible and silence
would be shameful. And our very coldness in treating the things that
touch us so personally is not the product of cynicism, which some
malicious minds would like to attribute to us, but the necessity of
keeping our cool in the face of the danger that our world might
be at an end. By contrast, those who do not sense that danger will never
be in a position to truly put an end to it.

Those in Italy and elsewhere who currently put forth risky forecasts
concerning the economic “recovery,” feigning to believe that this crisis
resembles unfavorable but fleeting circumstances in the past, do so with
demagogical intentions, estimating that it is useful to make the people
(to whom they can no longer promise mountains and miracles) believe that
at least the leaders, unlike the workers, foresee a certain
recovery in the next year, but, with each passing fiscal quarter, these
same prophets are unavoidably obligated to delay or cancel such
unfortunately chimerical changes. The illusion of change then only
causes a change of illusions. Piero Ottone[22] recently wrote, and with
good reason, that

the expectation of a misfortune is oppressing and unnerving.
When the misfortune finally strikes, we almost sigh with relief and,
paradoxically, we suffer less than before. Until yesterday, we feared
that the country would collapse; the simple fact that it still hasn’t
procures a curious sensation of victory for those who were the most
pessimistic.

We, who are neither pessimistic nor optimistic, do not even envy
those who possess this “curious sensation of victory,” but as we do not
want to leave too much of its bad mood with the readers who have reached
the end of this hardly cheerful chapter, we will provide a little
pleasantry, the spirit of which is not foreign to its subject matter.
The pleasantry, which is a very minor Italian art, but the only one that
remains alive today, exists in an inverse proportion with the times: the
happiest ones come from the most unfortunate days and hold out to them a
kind of unique consolation. “It is a shame,” the president of one of our
most famous national industries said to us, “that pleasantries are not
quoted on the Stock Exchange!”

Here’s a little story, set in another time and place. The chief of a
tribe of Sioux, after a year in which the harvest had been destroyed by
catastrophic rainstorms, united his tribe at the beginning of winter to
tell them the news. Not knowing how well his anxious audience would take
it (they suspected the existence of the calamity), he found an
oratorical expedient that our politicians would envy. He said, “My
brothers, I have two bits of news to announce: one is good, and
the other is bad. Let us begin with the bad news. This year you will
have nothing to eat but shit. And now the good news: as compensation,
there will be enough for everyone.”

[1] Fearing that the result would be a dreadful series of
mistranslations, we have not provided an English translation of
Guy Debord’s French, which was in turn a translation of Censor’s
Italian, which was (we presume) a translation of Shakespeare’s English.
Instead, we have provided these lines as they appear in the original
text. But our readers should know that the French version contained two
lines that were so different from the original English, and yet so
relevant to the themes of The Truthful Report, that they could
only have been intentional: “the unity and married calm of states” was
rendered as l’unité et le paisable mariage des classes (“the
unity and peaceful marriage of the classes”), and “when degree is
shaked” was rendered as quand la hiérarchie est ébranlée (“when
the hierarchy is shaken”).

[2] An Italian journalist and essayist (1920-2011) who authored a
controversial history of the resistance to fascism during World War
II.

[3] A détournement of a famous remark in Hegel’s preface to The
Phenomenology of Mind (1807):

To consider any specific fact as it
is in the Absolute, consists here in nothing else than saying about it
that, while it is now doubtless spoken of as something specific, yet in
the Absolute, in the abstract identity A = A, there is no such thing at
all, for everything there is all one. To pit this single assertion, that
‘in the Absolute all is one,’ against the organized whole of determinate
and complete knowledge, or of knowledge which at least aims at and
demands complete development – to give out its Absolute as the night in
which, as we say, all cows are black – that is the very naïveté of
emptiness of knowledge.

[4] This alleged letter is actually a détournement of a famous
passage in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols:

I simply cannot see what one proposes to do with the
European worker now that one has made a question of him. He is far too
well off not to ask for more and more, not to ask more immodestly. In
the end, he has numbers on his side. The hope is gone forever that a
modest and self-sufficient kind of man, a Chinese type, might here
develop as a class: and there would have been reason in that, it would
almost have been a necessity. But what was done? Everything to nip in
the bud even the preconditions for this: the instincts by virtue of
which the worker becomes possible as a class, possible in his own eyes,
have been destroyed through and through with the most irresponsible
thoughtlessness. The worker was qualified for military service, granted
the right to organize and to vote: is it any wonder that the worker
today experiences his own existence as distressing — morally speaking,
as an injustice? But what is wanted? I ask once more. If one wants an
end, one must also want the means: if one wants slaves, then one is a
fool if one educates them to be masters.

[5] Petrarch, Sonnet IV, in The Sonnets, Triumphs and Other
Poems, edited by Thomas Campbell (1879).

[6] Ancient Greek, which Censor himself translates by the phrase that
immediately follows it. Cf. The History of the Peloponnesian War,
Book I, Paragraph 23.

[7] A remark by Francesco Guichardin (1843-1540), an Italian
historian and politician.

[8] Cf. Guy Debord, “Time and History,” The Society of the
Spectacle (1967).

[9] Cf. Thesis 17, “Theses on the Situationist International and Its
Time,” The Real Split in the International (1972): “Pollution and
the proletariat are today the two concrete aspects of the critique of
political economy.”

[10] Cf. “Two Local Wars,” Internationale Situationniste #11
(October 1967).

[11] It was Karl Marx, not David Ricardo, who said this, and
Marx wasn’t speaking of wheat, but of human labor-power.

[12] Marcelo Caetano, the Prime Minister of Portugal, was deposed by
the revolution of 25 April 1974.

[13] Speech given on 12 August 1974. In point of fact, Ford referred
to “a government big enough,” not “a State strong enough.”

[14] Cf. Robert Musil, an Austrian novelist, author of The Man
Without Qualities (1942).

[15] Clement Wenceslas Lothar von Metternich-Winneburg-Beilstein
(1773-1859) was a German-born Austrian diplomat. The Revolution of 1848
forced his resignation.

[16] Just four months after these lines were written, fascist Spain
could be added to this list.

[17] An ex-fascist and Christian Democrat, Fanfani (1908-1999) led an
unsuccessful campaign to repeal the laws that allowed married couples to
get divorced.

[18] Machiavelli, La Mandragola.

[19] Flaminio Piccoli was the General Secretary and President of
Italy’s Christian Democratic Party.

[20] In 1973, Giovanni Gioia (1925-1981) was the Minister for
Parliamentary Relations. In the 1950s and 1960s, he openly worked to
bring members of the Mafia into the Christian Democratic Party.
Salvatore Lupo’s book Storia della mafia: dalle origini ai giorni
nostri (1993) quotes Gioia as saying, “Il partito ha bisogno di
gente con cui coalizzarsi, ha bisogno di uomini nuovi, non si possono
ostacolare certi tentativi di compromesso” (The Party, needing new
members, needs to unite with people with whom attempts at compromise
cannot be prevented).

[21] Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) was an Italian poet and novelist.
He considered the “father” of modern Italian.

[22] Leftist editor of Corriere della Sera and correspondent
for the BBC.

Princes (…) have found more loyalty and usefulness in
the men who, at the beginning of their reign, have been held to be
suspect than in those who then had their trust (…) I would say only
this, that the prince will always be able to gain with very great ease
those men who in the beginning of a principality had been enemies,
who are the kind who need to lean upon others to bear themselves up; and
they are more powerfully forced to serve him with faith, insomuch as
they know it more necessary for them to erase with works that sinister
opinion which one had of them. And thus the prince always draws greater
utility from them than from those who, serving with too much security,
neglect his things.

Machiavelli, [Chapter XX] The Prince

At this point of this pseudonymous work, there will certainly be
people who, in the course of their reading, have recognized our hand
behind a good number of the preceding arguments. We do not want these
readers, reading what follows, to change their opinions because, if they
have divined from whom this exposé emanates, what comes now is only
apparently in contradiction with our prior stances and, moreover,
was already announced in the preface to this pamphlet. If it is true
that, in the past years, if not the last few months, we have said and
repeated in answer to the “Communist question” the celebrated phrase by
Phaedra’s fox, they are too green [Latin in original], we must
now make it clear that the fox had his reasons to say this, just as
today there are other reasons to change one’s mind about everything. In
truth, it is not at all a question of a subjective change of opinion on
our part but, rather, the objective occurrence of the possibility for a
useful and necessary change that we – in the company of other, no less
qualified people – have been tasked with preparing, and have been so
tasked since the time when it still seemed appropriate for us to
emphasize the disadvantages of that change. There is nothing in the
world that has its decisive moment, and the capstone of good conduct,
especially in politics, is recognizing and seizing the moment.

We will not say that this change of premise creates novelties in the
treatment of a question that, in fact, is not new: we will say what is
necessary and what has become urgent. For those who have had the
occasion to know us in the past, what will be new here will only be our
current disposition towards the Communists, which has in fact shown
through in the preceding chapters. The hour has come in which it is both
necessary and possible to reject a large part of the defects in our
nation: the ruse that suits the current situation is doing without one;
intelligence consists in never forgetting it; and, in this case, what is
prudent is not having too much prudence. At such a moment, it is more
important to pay attention to not missing the opportunity, which
excellently makes the most of a hundred others in different directions,
because “neither the seasons nor time wait for anyone.”[1]

Henceforth are finished the seasons of verbal games of prestige in
which our political trapeze-artists measure themselves in “parallel
convergence” with the Communists, offering them what has been called the
“strategy of attention,” i.e., the indefinitely long wait before
reaching the “historic compromise,” which the President of the Council,
the Honorable [Aldo] Moro, has defined – with the precautions that have
obligated him to walk on eggshells – as “a kind of meeting half-way,
something new, which both is and is not a change in the roles of the
majority and opposition [parties], the outlining of a diversity that
doesn’t consist in a change of leadership, but in a modifying addition
of the Communist component to the others.” So much noise just to make
an omelet! [French in original.]

Among the political leaders [English in original] who for
months have gargled with the “historic compromise” so as to ward it off,
no one has yet spoken of the principal and simplest truth in the matter:
the “historic compromise” is, in the true sense of the term, a
compromise only for the Communists and not at all for us. For us,
the agreement with the Communists is not at all “historic,” at least if
we want to call “historic” any tactical action that we find it
necessary to take to make those who do not want to work go to work. But
in this case, and lacking such an agreement, how many “historic charges”
will our police forces have to lead at the factories? And with what
results? Even the former Minister of Labor, the Socialist [Luigi]
Bertoldi – who was considered by a right-wing journalist, Domenico
Bartoli, to be “a subtle interpreter of the Hegelian dialectic” – said
it better than anyone else, and once and for all: “We must decide if we
want to govern through the unions or the carabinieri.” Because that is
the heart of the question, which is as much political as it is economic,
because – throughout the last few years – we could have gained much more
if we had been able to use the unions three times more than we used the
carabinieri. Alberto Ronchey,[2] who is far from the best Italian
editorialist, recently wrote that the greatest economic problem we
currently face is convincing people to work, and he was right. At
present, it is no longer possible to allow ourselves to live by always
hoping that the workers will delay their smoldering revolt for “one more
moment,” or that our industry will regain its breath and vigor, although
the anarchy of protest still reigns in our factories. Meanwhile, Italy
changes governments, one after another; each of them only lasts for
several months; and these are governments that are constantly and
uniquely engaged in the titanic enterprise of remaining in power a
little longer than what appears possible to them, all the while
deflecting all questions, even the least important ones, because they
would be enough to make them fall. But who today could better impose on
the country a period of convalescence, during which the workers would
cease struggling and go back to work, than the Communists? Who would be
a better Minister of the Interior than Giorgio Amendola[3] when it comes
to the eradication of the delinquency that has spread to all levels of
society or the silencing of the agitators, either through good or less
good methods? We must undertake a long-term governmental effort and, to
do this, we must have a solid and resolute government. Today, not
accepting a “compromise” such as the one in question in truth means, for
us, accepting the fatal compromise of the very existence of tomorrow. We
must remember that neutrality in such an affair is the daughter of
irresolution and that “irresolute princes most often follow the neutral
route in order to avoid present perils, and most often end in ruin.”[4]
So as to not see the real danger, we feign to believe that the agreement
with the Italian Communist Party [ICP] is a danger, and we flee before
both of them.

Even if they are obliged to admit the justness and utility of what we
are saying, timorous spirits may find in our remarks the slight fault
that they appear to set little value on the dangerous aspect of placing
a Communist party at the heart of political power when, at this stage of
the crisis, our powers are incapable of continuing to make the workers
work. Who will guard our guardians? [Latin in original.]

We would respond to such an objection that it is without foundation
and that fear is a bad advisor. First of all, we must never fear a
future and hypothetical danger at a moment when we are dying from a
present and certain one, and, moreover, we must never risk all of our
fortunes without risking all of our forces.[5] Since the current strength
of the Communist Party and the unions has already served us well and, in
fact, has been our principal support since the autumn of 1969, and since
the effects of this support have, until now, been quite insufficient to
reverse the process, there is no doubt that our interests lie in
galvanizing this strength as a matter of great urgency, and to do
so by offering it [access to] the central point of application in
society, that is to say, by introducing that strength into the center of
State power.

On the other hand, we will say that the alleged future dangers of
Communist participation in our government only exist in the sphere of
illusions about the revolutionary tendency that the Communist Party
constitutes in our society. These illusions were artificially spread at
an epoch that is now over, that is, when they were useful for the
defense of a world that (the times having changed) today wants to be
defended with the support of these same Communists. Only our current
crop of politicians – who, despite their unfortunate failures, aspire to
become [permanently] autonomous in their existence as simple delegates
of Italian society in the service of its governmental administration –
still pretends to hold as a real [and permanent] fact in strategic
reasoning that which (i.e., the allegedly revolutionary tendencies of
the ICP) was never anything more than an ideological “export” for
consumption by the people. Which makes these worn-out leaders subject to
this severe condemnation: what they in fact want when they hang on to
their old specializations (when necessary modernization imposes
“recycling” on them) is not to prolong (for their own limited interests)
the apparent existence of a trade that they still know how to ply, but
a trade that they do not know how to ply.

The Trojan Horse is only to be feared when there are Achaeans inside
it. The Communist Party has wanted to manufacture, and even must still
[try to] manufacture, a certain costume to disguise itself as the enemy
of our City-State, but it is not such an enemy, just as our
leader is not Ulysses. In fact, the Italian Communist resembles the
carpenter in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream who lets half of his
face be seen through the mask he is wearing and who says to the members
of the audience: “I (…) entreat you, – not to fear, not to tremble: my
life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were the pity
of my life: no, I am no such thing.”

And precisely because we dare to admit that the Italian workers, who
have taken the offensive in the social war, are our enemies, we know
that the Communist Party is our support. We can no longer continue to
reassure the country by pretending that the opposite is true, because we
have come to the moment of truth, when lies no longer work and only
force will do.[6] In past years, when we happened to speak of the
Communists with Raffaele Mattioli, we never heard that he found them
worrisome, and many times we heard him repeat the same conclusion: “They
are quite brave.” When Togliatti, a year before his death,[7] sent his
last book to Mattioli, he (both flattered and amused) showed to us the
dedication, which was written in the famous turquoise-blue ink of the
Communist leader [English in original] whom imbeciles feared and
we appreciated: “To My Friend (…) with the only regret that I cannot
call you Comrade,” if our memory serves us well. Who knows if Raffaele
Mattioli, were he still with us, would not, in his turn, have written a
dedication of the following type: “To Comrade Amendola,[8] in the hopes
of soon being able to call you ‘Your Excellence.’”

In any event, we will not let ourselves forget that, for a long time,
our parliamentary majority has ruled with the Communist opposition, and
that the Communist opposition has been opposed to the same things to
which the majority has been opposed. And yet today the entire political
life of this country is paralyzed by the simple idea – a nightmare to
the Christian Democrats – of granting a few administrative posts to the
Communists. Until quite recently, the Christian Democrats found
semi-rational justifications for the necessity of their keeping a
monopoly on power by continuing to hide the manner in which that power
has been managed, as well as by hiding several particular facts that
were so scandalous that, if they were known, would have immediately
caused the immediate dissolution of their party. But now that these
facts are, little by little, becoming known throughout the country,
these justifications have become null and void, and it is the
dissolution of Italy itself that we must avoid, if we can.

Let us pose the question: What is the alternative to the
“historic compromise”? Sooner or later, we will be in a situation in
which neither the Communists, the unions, the forces of law and order,
nor the secret services will be able to prevent the workers from
mounting a general insurrection, all the consequences of which are
difficult to foresee. In the best of hypothetical situations – and we
only see two of them – if this insurrection does not become a pure and
simple civil war, that is to say, if the Communists succeed in taking
command of it (first by seeming to participate in the insurrection and
then by seizing command of it), it is obvious that Berlinguer[9] would
be able to set his conditions, and he would not be disposed to sharing
his government with us. Riding the crest of the insurrectionary
movement, the Communists would seize control of the State in the name of
the workers, whom they would call upon to defend it. But, on the
contrary, what seems to us more probable is that the credibility of the
Communist Party among the workers would be completely exhausted at the
moment of an insurrection – this is quite foreseeable – with the result
that the Communists’ attempts at “recuperation” among the ranks of the
insurgents would be useless or impossible. Civil war would no longer be
avoidable, and the Communist Party, amputated from its base, inevitably made up of revolutionaries, would no longer be of any use to us.
These are the two variations that form the [single] alternative to the
“historic compromise.” There is no third one. [Latin in
original.]

During such an event, what would become of the Atlantic Alliance,
which is already in a state of crisis? And what about the Warsaw Pact,
which was powerless during the workers’ insurrections in Szczecin and
Gdansk?[10] In the tragedy that would follow and play itself out in a
theatre of war that would be no less vast than the territories affected
by the current crisis, we would only be able to repeat – in the guise of
a useless mea culpa – this verse from Aeschylus’
Agamemnon:

Where, where does the Law hide? Reason despairs of its
powers, Intelligence gropes numbly, Its swift resources are
dead. Our rule is compromised, Disaster is near: Where can I
turn?[11]

In sum, our opinion today on the “Communist question” can be
summarized in a single phrase: We do not make a question of that which
is no longer one, while the real questions and problems do not wait upon
the decisions of Senator Fanfani, who is slow in providing what may
prove of use,[12] to get irremediably worse. Giovanni Agnelli[13] –
who is, among our young men of power, perhaps the [only] one who can
flatter himself with possessing an intelligence that is the most deeply
rooted in the reality of our epoch – has openly offered the same
analysis that we have put forward. Despite certain differences in the
details, our views converge where the majority of the conclusions are
concerned. Without saying anything about our private commitments, we
will content ourselves with recalling to our readers one of his publicly
stated positions, enunciated at the beginning of 1975:

If our sickness is nearly fatal, we are allowed to think
that the Communist Party has understood the necessity of making good use
of it, so that we can all save ourselves together. So that class hatred
does not come to set the world on fire and divide it into two parties:
the enragés in the streets and the others in their bunkers
[English in original] with their bodyguards.

We could not say it any better ourselves.

Finally, let us conclude. With the aid of the Communist Party, we
will either succeed in saving our domination, or we will not succeed [at
all]. If we do succeed, we will easily dismiss the Communists, as well
as a large part of the current political personnel, as if they were
domestic servants. The Communists themselves have already and clearly
accepted this as an article in their work contract, and we have known
since Heraclitus that “all that crawls upon the earth is governed by
blows.” And if we do not succeed, nothing else will matter, because
everyone will admit that it would be the worst of byzantine discussions
– when the Turks are at the ramparts – to calculate which trophies are
going to be awarded to the Greens and the Blues at the circus,[14] in a
world that will have collapsed.

[1] Baltasar Gracian, Paragraph CCLXIX, “Make Use of the Novelty of
Your Position,” The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1637).

[2] Employed by Corriere della Sera.

[3] Giorgio Amendola (1907-1980) was a deputy in the Italian
Communist Party from 1948 to his death. He advocated non-Marxist
positions and the making of alliances with other political parties,
especially the Socialists.

[4] Machiavelli, Chapter XXI, The Prince.

[5] Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Book I, Chapter 23.

[6] Machiavelli, Chapter VI, The Prince.

[7] Palmiro Togliatti, a leader of the Italian Communist Party, died
in 1964.

[8] Giorgio Amendola (1907-1980) was a member of the Italian
Communist Party.

[9] Enrico Berlinguer (1922-1984) was a leader of the Italian
Communist Party. He favored a “Euro-Communism” that would be separate
from the Soviet Bloc.

[10] December 1970.

[11] In point of fact, this verse is not from Aeschylus’
Agamemnon.

[12] A line from Horace’s Art of Poetry. Latin in
original.

[13] The director of FIAT Motors (1921-2003).

[14] Factions in the Byzantine chariot races, circa the Fifth Century
CE.

[1]

They find me difficult?
I know it well:
I obligate
them to think

Alfieri, Epigrams

He who considers the world in accordance with reason is himself
considered in accordance with it. We must act in accordance with the
times, and they have changed. To want to go against them is an
undertaking whose success is as impossible as its failure is quite
assured. The proximity of the fateful moment, if it is eventually
perceived as such by us all, can paradoxically be our last chance
for salvation and perhaps one day we can say, in our turn, what the
Prince de Condé said during the religious wars:[2] “We would perish if
we were not so close to perishing” [French in original]. On the
condition that we know how to exploit for our exclusive advantages
all the occasions that are presented to us, none of the evil will
harm us, despite the undeniable precariousness of our current situation.
In the words of the “Exhortation to Retake Italy”[3]: “At present, to
know the virtue of an Italian spirit, it has been necessary that Italy
reduce herself to the conditions in which she is at present (…) without
chief, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn, overrun, and having borne
every sort of ruin.”

We will say to those who would accuse us of speaking too much or too
quickly of our ruin and its non-hypothetical proximity that such is the
primary task of those who truly want to avoid it, because one does not
always find oneself in the position to avoid such disasters. And,
moreover, what else is there to speak about today?

The intelligent conservative can express the principle of his actions
in a single phrase: everything that does not merit being destroyed
merits being saved – and this immediately and everywhere in the
world. But that which does not merit beings saved, that is to say, that
which is in contradiction with our own salvation or, more simply,
anything that is an inconvenience or an embarrassment, must be abandoned
and destroyed without beating around the bush or superfluous scruples.
Unburdening oneself of the dead weight of the past is necessary to make
the task of cleaning up the present less difficult.

Today, the principal irrationality of capitalism is that,
although it is under dangerous attack, it does not do everything
necessary to defend itself. But we will admit that there are others. We
must correct them as well, if we can. In those areas in which our
management has been unreasonable, it must be changed, because, ever
since the origin of the bourgeoisie, all of our power has been
intimately linked to rational management, and it cannot last
without it. There is nothing new about the appropriateness of making
profound reforms. We have given birth to them in every epoch. That is
our strength: we are the first society in history that has known how to
correct itself continuously. We call “unreasonable” everything that is
not a real necessity for our possession of society and that produces
results that are objectively in contradiction with those necessities,
that is to say, results that we ourselves can measure and are felt by
everyone. We will mention the necessary reforms below.

For the moment, we must repeat that, in the midst of the current
dangers, we must (as the French say) make every piece of wood into an
arrow [French in original], starting with the most accessible and
malleable pieces. Thus, we must employ our own Communists – rather than
sell the entire country to the Arabs, as some of our insane politicians
have seriously proposed – with the sole goal of making the most of this
experiment with a government in which the Communists participate. But
this experiment will cost us nothing, while the logic of the other
proposal would inevitably lead to our complete dispossession. How is it
possible to compare, even for a moment, two obviously unequal solutions?
What is inconceivable on the plane of logic properly speaking obeys a
particular logic that is hidden but easily discernible. Should we be
able to save ourselves, three-quarters of our political personnel must
be discharged. Should we fail to save ourselves, these same people will
remain in place and, in a few years, they will squander or embezzle a
large part of our capital, which they will eventually expropriate from
us and without even assuring the power of the new property owners. In
the aftermath of this grotesque prospect – which in fact supposes that
the productive forces and the properties of Europe would in large part
belong to a few Arab potentates, who would control the defective
international monetary system because they would provisionally control
the principal source of energy upon which the industrialized countries
are dependent – would not the workers, from whom we already have so much
trouble, expropriate these new foreign, archaic and perfectly
incompetent masters with an even greater facility than they would have
with us? Transporting the property-owning class of our country to exotic
and backwards locations means selling our birthright for a plate of
lentils. But could such upstarts [French in original] hope to
control our country? With their own troops or with the help of ours?
With our political skill or theirs? Our troops are no longer reliable,
and theirs are worth nothing. Our skill is worn out. As for theirs:
simply posing the question is to answer it [in the negative].

Thus, we will not be surprised if those responsible for such a
strategy, especially in Italy, have no other policy than the complete
liquidation of our national patrimony and its clandestine export
to their Swiss bank accounts. While the high functionaries of our
government ministries and economic organizations will charge very dearly
– in bad money, alas! – to depart from careers that have already
departed from them, the hospital in Padua has announced that it will
sell to the highest bidder a Mantegna[4] that belongs to it. All of
those who are responsible for the management of Italian society, seeing
that society march so quickly to its forfeiture, dream of selling what
he or she holds. And, in the final analysis, what they hold is Italy
itself, its monuments and its soil. And they want to sell it all because
soon our productive forces, with such bad workers and such bad managers,
will not be worth much on the market. We must counter those who plan to
offer Italian society up to a “Public Takeover Bid.”

We would like to return for a moment to one of our preceding statements,
according to which we must (without scruples) remove all the
impediments to the surmounting of the crisis in which our State
is in. For example, a year ago, President Leone,[5] who is not
completely unappreciative of our arguments, made an allusion (with
perhaps too much circumspection and, thus, without any success) to the
necessity of a constitutional reform that certain Communists now believe
to be urgent. Today, we must propose a reform that is both radical and
favorable to the restructuring of the Republic in conformity with the
highest-priority necessities for the survival of our world and that, of
course, would not be prejudicial to the continuation of democracy, as we
said was important to us in the first chapter of this Report.

With the commitment of the Communist Party, as much in the
elaboration as in the application of the new constitution, we are
persuaded that there is a real possibility of surmounting this great
crisis. The new Magna Carta must maintain democracy, yes, but in
a disabused way, thus contrary to what has happened in the first 30
years of our Republic. Maintaining democracy means maintaining the rule
of the vote, which is the basis of all the free, modern republics. We
know that this rule is the inverse of the one that presided over
primitive democracy. Among the ancient Greeks, the rule was to count the
votes of those who were ready to fight openly for one camp or the other,
and Plato (and subsequent history) showed how this primitive democracy
led to disorder and despotism. In its modern meaning, “democracy” must,
on the contrary, be understood to be the manner of making the people vote on
all the questions for which they are not disposed to fight. This aspect
must be accentuated, and we must summon the citizens to vote, as in the
past, but on a much greater variety of subjects that are not detrimental
to the smooth functioning of society, and the citizens must continue to
choose between diverse candidates. But these candidates, no matter what
side they come from, must have already been selected in their turn, and
with a qualitative rigor unknown in our times, by a veritable
elite [French in original] in the spheres of political power, the
economy and culture.

And this economy itself – this modern technology that we make use of,
and whose power is virtually unlimited – requires that we make a better
and more intelligent use of it. That is to say, we must no longer
allow ourselves to dominate through this power, which incessantly tends
to become autonomous by escaping from our hands, which in the recent
past have manipulated it, above all, according to democratic and
demagogical fictions upon which (during the epoch of “the abundance of
well-being” and market abundance) we built a giant with clay feet. But
since that epoch is over, we must now cease to make the people consume
images that are too beautiful and too wild, and must instead give
ourselves the means to make them consume images of a reality that is
less harsh than the current one: less pollution; fewer automobiles;
better bread, meat and houses; and so forth. In sum, the reform of our
economy from the ground up and its reconstruction on more solid
bases must establish a new economy, one that is capable of being
both authentically liberal and severely controlled by the State –
certainly not this particular State, because it must be
rigorously lead by an elite [French in original] that is really
worthy of the name. We will return to this subject below.

Today, it is important for us to consider that we must not only
maintain a dominant class, but the best possible dominant class.
Our government ministers must strive to rule through merit and talent,
because we know that those who start out aiming to be satisfied with a
secondary position will never attain it: they will never attain anything
at all. If today this minimum requirement seems too utopian or too
ambitious, it is so with respect to the pitiful panorama of our current
crop of politicians. But such a requirement, which the current situation
makes obligatory, is not in fact disproportionate to the reality that we
must eventually confront and to the long-term tasks that the good
administration of our society requires.

What is convenient to a prince that he might be esteemed?[6]
Which men are able to save our society? This is what we must ask when we
are choosing our governmental ministers; this is what is especially
neglected when we privilege a hundred laughable “titles of merit,” such
as the fact that the Honorable [Aldo] Moro is more or less the enemy of
Cefis,[7] or that someone else’s wife is the intimate friend of General
Miceli’s wife. “Stranger,” Plato says, “the moment has come to be
serious,”[8] and we know the interest that this philosopher had in the
political problems of our peninsula.

Well! We will say, and we will try to prove, that today in Italy the
men we need exist, and we must make use of them as soon as
possible, by bringing them out of the limbo to which a herd of Christian
Democratic notables, disguised as wolves, flatter themselves with having
condemned these men forever, so that these same Christian Democrats can
have the pleasure of satisfying their own raging hunger for ministerial
posts and clients in complete freedom. Moreover, a few traits would
suffice to define these men, because merit accounts for so little in our
Republic, and a few well-chosen ministers would suffice to make any
State function as it should. It is true that in France under Louis XIII,
a single one sufficed. But it is also quite obvious that if we want to
continue to coat the various pâtés of our governments in Italian-style
sauce – by assigning a ministerial post to a man of Bruno Visenti’s
talents,[9] and another one to someone like Gioia, of whom it is well
to say nothing,[10] – we will compromise to the very roots any
possibility of action by men of value, and we will once again prove
right Mussolini’s justifying formula, according to which “governing
Italy is not a difficult business; it is a useless one.”[11]
Fortunately, the future of capitalism is not tied to the future of
Christian Democracy, no more than it was to the future of fascism, but
let us recall that a half-century of stupidity in power is a hardly
enviable world record, and especially if no one tries to contest it.
Because today few and far between are the men of talent who will take
the risk of compromising themselves in the midst of the administrative
corruption of a State that appears to be, in the words of Dante, “the
sad sack that covers with shit everything that it swallows.”[12]

To save ourselves from the threat of subversion, which will probably
persist in the years to come, even if the Communists in government are
able to master it better than we are at the moment, our first operation
must not be an obstinate and obtuse defense of current Italy and its
incapable leaders. On the contrary, our first operation should resemble
a scorched-earth policy, which will permit us to unburden
ourselves of these men and the frilly trimmings with which we cover our
poor Republic. And, simultaneous with this radical housecleaning, we
must reconstruct around ourselves a society provided with all the
qualities that would render it worthy of being defended in the eyes of
many people. And who knows if, at that moment, the workers themselves
will not cease to attack us so violently, even if they must always
remain irreducibly hostile to private property at the bottom of their
hearts? But without venturing into utopian philosophical theories about
the future of the world in a time when, personally, we will no longer be
around, it is fitting to consider, while we are still here, all that
would be necessary to have our world die out. In the final
analysis, who are our real enemies?

We will say that, today, we must confront several hostile
realities, only one of which is historically immanent to our mode of
domination and production: the proletariat, which has a natural and
perpetual tendency to revolt. The ancient Romans summarized this fact in
the adage we have as many enemies as there are slaves [Latin in
original]. Once we have taken action upon this incontestable and
constant fact, it will be important to see if the other realities that
are hostile to us have the same immutability and constancy. Even more
precisely, we would like to say that it will be fitting to see if these
other realities are as necessary and useful as the proletariat.
Because we should not forget for an instant that the workers, at least
when they work and do not revolt, are the most useful reality in the
world and merit our respect, for in a certain way they (under our
well-informed direction) produce our wealth, i.e., our power. Well! We
would contest the idea that the other realities that currently contest
our power are in fact necessary and unavoidable. And we propose to
examine at least two of them here: the bad morals and incompetence of
which our political class have given ample proof, on the one hand, and
economic anarchy, on the other. These two phenomena are deleterious, but
both can be opportunely eliminated, because they depend on our will.

For those who regard what we define as the insufficiency – that is
only a euphemism – of our governing strata as a whole, and setting aside
all due exceptions, we can affirm that we must no longer have scruples
about letting it sink like a stone in the great sea [Latin in
original] of its errors and scandals, because we already have shown it
more gratitude than it deserves for the services that we admit that it
has rendered us in the already-distant past, and for too long we have
accorded it patience at costs that we did not believe that we were
capable of sustaining. Because patience, among all the human virtues,
is, according to us, the only one that ceases to be a virtue when one
practices it excessively. We leave to the Pope, who is less pressed than
we are by the contingent necessities of mundane life in this century,
the occasion to make an act of charity by rescuing and clearing the
consciences of these orphans of power. Apart from the
satisfaction that we must finally provide to public opinion, which is
legitimately tired of seeing incompetence in power being rewarded, we
can spare ourselves the future burden of having to defend the men who,
instead of conducting a policy of intelligent conservatism, as we have
required of them, have instead preferred a policy of obtuse reaction
that always squanders everything that passes through their hands. These
are men supported by our capital, which they have declared that they
want to defend so as to mock the voters, and now they support themselves
upon the voters so as to mock us. Finally, these are men who (to once
again express ourselves by quoting Machiavelli), “while you use them,
you lose the power to do so.”[13]

Moreover, even in the Christian Democratic Party there are
intelligent men, and here we do not simply allude to people like
Andreotti and Donat-Cattin. But in [good] conscience, how can we say
that the intelligence of these politicians can bring forth fruit when
Fanfani asks them to make use of it with the sole aim of defending the
indefensible and the useless, meanwhile systematically neglecting to
save the essential? The survival of a political world of this type is
already in itself one of the hostile realities that we must cease
to keep alive. We must rid ourselves of it, “and the combat
[thereafter] will be short.”[14]

As for what we have called “economic anarchy,” we will say that, from
now on, we must authoritatively limit the tendency to accumulate
excessive profits in certain basic sectors where the level of
development reached by modern techniques – especially chemical ones –
permit everything, but where the results assault the population in its
everyday existence and tends to deprive it even more of the little that
we must absolutely let it have. For example, we completely disapprove of
the industrialists who take the risk of uninterruptedly provoking the
people, who are made to consume petroleum-based products, chemically
treated wines and inedible food with the sole aim of increasing their
sector-based profits, insolently neglecting the more general and
superior interests of our class [as a whole].

We repeat that nothing more provokes the democratic citizen than the
impression that we give him when, with impunity and systematically, we
take him for a ride. Even when this citizen is disinterested in
politics, he is not insensible to the quality of what he eats or the air
that he breathes. On the contrary, we must preoccupy ourselves with
maintaining the best possible qualitative levels of life, primarily for
the dominant class and secondarily for the dominated classes. Moreover,
in 1969, an industrialist like Henry Ford said (and we would like to
quote his own words), “the terms of the contract between industry and
society have changed (…) We are called upon to contribute to the quality
of life much more than the quantity of goods.”[15] Playing the hypocrite
does not bring back anything [good] or, at least must no longer
do so. We are hardly brought to record the assets that Cefis vaunts in
the balance sheets of Montedison with the satisfaction that is reserved
for the poor money-saver who is a small stockholder, especially when
these assets have been more or less acquired by the means that Scalfari
has recently revealed to the public in his book The Master
Race[16] and while these very profits, in truth, represent a
formidable incitement to social revolt.

And since we have cited Eugenio Scalfari, a man whose courage and
intelligence we value, we will seize this occasion to express our
opinion on what he has excellently defined as the “State
bourgeoisie.”

(Precisely one of the reasons that led us to choose for this
Report the old form of expression of the pamphlet, instead of a more systematic text, is that we need not reject the pleasure of talking about
this and that, as one does in conversation, which allows us to touch
upon everything without ever have the pretention of being exhaustive
and, at the same, allows us to avoid getting bogged down in the marshes
of sophisticated “demonstrations” of which our politicians are fond when
they try to pass off their elastic “truths.” To say the truth,
few words suffice: the truth is the indicator of both itself and the
false [Latin in original]. And because this fashion of writing is rapid, it appears
useful to us, at a moment when so many other commitments that cannot be
put off impose on us the necessity of not wasting time.)

This “State bourgeoisie,” which combines the faults of the
parasitical and decadent bourgeoisie and those of the bureaucratic class
that holds power in the socialist countries, is one of the several
products of the “Italian style” of management of power, and it is a
highly noxious residue of the parceling out of this power. Cefis, the
President of Montedison, is the model that inspired Scalfari’s
description. But, in reality, this “State bourgeoisie” exceeds this
model; it is nested almost everywhere in the nationalized industries and
those that involve governmental participation, as well as in the forest
of the 60,000 public “organizations” in existence today, and thus it
possesses a proper power that is autonomous with respect to the large,
traditional bourgeoisie, and it has founded on this power what Alberto
Ronchey has pertinently called “Christian-Democratic State capitalism.”
The members of such a “master race” are, in reality, individuals who
have no original personal patrimony nor any culture – we do not even
want to say deprived of a culture that is worthy of a ruling class, but
deprived of one that is comparable, even from a distance, to the culture
of an austere petit-bourgeois (a teacher, for example) in the past. Of
course, today, only a relatively limited number of these individuals
hold real power, and the largest number of them can only do harm
with their limited talents. But this does not change the fact that this
phenomenon is growing and thus merits our attention.

Over the course of its history, capitalism has continuously modified
the composition of the social classes and has done so to such an extent
that it has transformed society. It has weakened or recomposed,
eliminated or even created the classes that have had subordinate but
necessary functions in the production, distribution and consumption of
commodities. Only the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have remained the
historical classes that have – in a conflict that has essentially
remained the same for the last century – continued to play out the
destiny of the world. But the circumstances, scenarios, walk-on
performers and even the spirits of the principal protagonists have
changed with the times.

Thus, this phenomenon is not particular to Italian society. The
expansion of the last 30 years, which is unprecedented in the history of
the global economy, has involved the necessity of creating a class of
managers [English in original], that is to say, technicians
capable of directing the industrial production and circulation of
commodities. The managers [English in original], as one has
called them since their modern popularization, these
executives[18] have necessarily been recruited from outside of
our class, which can no longer assume the totality of managerial tasks
on its own. Despite a gilded legend, which they are the only ones to
believe, these executives are nothing other than a metamorphosis of the
urban petit-bourgeoisie, previously constituted in the main by
independent producers of the artisan type, who today have become
salaried, no more or less so than the workers [properly speaking],
and this despite the fact that sometimes these executives hope to
resemble members of the liberal professions. Given this “resemblance,”
which they have obtained on the cheap, these executives have in a
certain way become the object of the promotional reveries of many strata
of poor employees, but, in reality, they have nothing that could define
them as rich. They are only paid enough to consume a little more than
the others, but the commodities they consume are always the same ones
consumed by everyone else.

Unlike the bourgeois, the worker, the serf and the feudal landowner,
the executive never feels at home. Always uncertain and always
disappointed, he continually aspires to be more than he is or will ever
be. He pretends and, at the same time, he doubts. He is the man of
uneasiness, so little sure of himself and his destiny – not without
reason – that he must continually hide the reality of his existence. He
is dependent in an absolute manner, and much more so than the worker,
because he follows all the fashions, including ideological fashions. It
is for him that our “avant-garde” writers and authors make the repugnant
best-sellers [English in original] that turn bookstores into
supermarkets. We refuse to set foot into such places. (Fortunately there
are still several good stores devoted to old books, and these are our
consolation.) It is for the executives that, today, one changes the
physiognomy and functions of our towns, which used to be the most
beautiful and oldest in the world, and it is for them that, in the
once-excellent restaurants, they program the repugnant and falsified
cuisine that the executives always appreciate in loud voices so that the
people at the other tables can hear that they have learned their good
pronunciations from the announcements on the [multi-lingual] loudspeakers at
airports. “Oh, Plebe! Created worse than all the rest.”[20]

Politically, this new class perpetually oscillates, because it
successively wants to attain contradictory things. Thus there is not a
single political party that does not compete with the others for the executive's
vote and, at different times, each one gets it from him.

Like the members of the old petit-bourgeoisie, the executives of
today are very diverse, but the strata of upper-level executives, who
are the model and illusory goal for all the others, is already tied in a
thousand ways to the bourgeoisie [properly speaking] and it integrates
new members into itself much more often than it provides them for
itself. There, in a few words, is the portrait of those in whom our
bourgeoisie has entrusted a growing portion of its own functions. Thus
there cannot be too much reason to be surprised if these functions have
been assumed in the [bad] manner in which they have.

In fact, a progressively growing part of our own class has become
parasitical, either through discouragement or inaptitude, and, when this
part is not ruined financially, it is at least significantly
impoverished, as we might have expected. Well! We will not only say that
this part of the bourgeoisie must no longer be defended; we will also
say that it must be eliminated. Either it will be reintegrated,
with dignity and all the intelligence that the current situation
requires, into a society whose very tissue we must remake, or, in the
opposite case, the Communist ministers who strike that part of the
bourgeoisie with a Draconian fiscal reform (one finally worthy of the
name “reform”) will have our full support. And those comfortable,
inactive bourgeois should not believe for a moment that a Communist
minister would be necessary to make such a reform, because this measure
derives less from the “historic compromise” than their own behavior,
which is lacking all combativeness. The people say that necessity
sharpens intelligence, and the moment has come in which creativity and
the fantastic spirit of enterprise, proof of which the bourgeoisie gave
in previous times, today encounters all the conditions for being
deployed anew. There are only two possibilities: either the bourgeoisie
in Italy and elsewhere proves its intelligence and its will to live, or
it will perish, having collaborated too much with its own enemies and
thus accelerated and rendered unavoidable its end – because it had
wanted to identify its survival as the hegemonic class with the survival
of its failings. In that case, its condemnation has already been
written:

For such shortcomings, and not for any other fault, we are
lost, and are condemned to live here with desire, but no
hope.[20]

At the beginning of this final chapter, we alluded to the possibility
of making reforms. This is not the place to treat in a profound manner
such questions, which we have already envisioned elsewhere, in an
unsigned document, very confidentially distributed, entitled The
Republic of the Italians in homage to a celebrated text by the
pseudo-Xenophon.[21] We do not believe we lack modesty when we recall
that this document encountered the heartwarming approval of the people
who occupy the highest positions of power, because it honors these
people that they promptly understood its necessity. Thus we will limit
ourselves here to sketching out a few methodological bases for these
reforms.

Obviously the difficulty here resides in the necessity of defining
what in fact is vital for our economic and social order, that is to say,
the necessity of making a severe distinction between those vital things
and the appearances that are all too easily accepted by people affected
by illusions, readiness and routines. Like everyone else, we recognize
that current practices cannot continue, but we do so in a lucid and
combative perspective, and not in the imbecilic despondency that
currents reigns among all the authors of the errors of the past, who are
not even able to discover that they are simply a question of crude
errors, with the result that they have the impression that they have
been refuted by a thunderbolt from out of the blue, i.e., in a totally
unforeseeable manner. In fact, we must correct the irrationalities of
our power and, for those who can view our history with disabused eyes,
this is nothing new.

Wild capitalism is to be condemned. From the moment that one can sell
anything, it is uncivil to only (and with the highest priority) produce
what is immediately the most profitable when doing so is detrimental to
every conceivable future. All of the excesses of competition must be
eliminated by the very power of production, and without delay, because,
quite literally, there is nowhere to live with this form of
production, which destroys its own basis and its own conditions for the
future. At a time when the productive process threatens itself because
we have believed too much in the value of its automatism (which
has been helped but never really corrected by political power), all of
the social justifications for this form of production have
universally ceased to be accepted. We no longer believe – no one any
longer believes – that the progress of production is capable of
reducing work. We no longer believe – few people still believe –
that this form of production is capable of distributing genuine
goods in increasing quantities and qualities. Thus, conclusions must
be drawn. As soon as possible, the true holders of social authority – in
the sectors of property, culture, the State and the unions – must
secretly, and then publicly, get together to put together a long-term
plan for the rationalization of society. Capitalism must proclaim
and fully realize the rationality that it has carried since its origin,
but has only been accomplished partially and poorly. If we can
accomplish such urgent and necessary work here in Italy – precisely
because our country can draw the strength of salvation from the excesses
of the danger – the “Italian model” of capitalism can be adopted by all
of Europe and can subsequently open up a new road to the entire
world.

From the perspective of a qualitative society, we must, above all,
very consciously and clearly distinguish two sectors of
consumption. One sector should supply authentic quality, with all of its
real consequences; the other (that of current consumption) should be
cleaned up as much as possible. For a long time, we have feigned to
believe that the abundance of industrial production would, little by
little, elevate everyone to the conditions of life enjoyed by the
elite [French in original]. This argument has so completely lost
its very slight appearance of seriousness that, today, it has become
degraded to the point of being nothing more than the ephemeral basis for
the reasoning and incitements of advertising. Henceforth we must know
that the abundance of fabricated objects demands (with ever-greater
urgency) the setting up of a [true] elite, one that precisely shelters
itself from such abundance and keeps for itself the little that is
really precious. Without this, there will soon be nowhere on Earth where
anything truly precious exists. The mechanically egalitarian tendencies
of modern industry, which wants to fabricate everything for everyone,
and that disfigures and breaks everything that exists so as to
distribute its most recent commodities, has spoiled almost all our space
and a large part of our time by crowding them both with mediocre goods.
Cars and “second homes” are everywhere. If words remain rich, the things
they refer to are not, and the landscape is degraded for everyone. The
law that dominates here is, of course, that everything that we
distribute to the poor can never be anything other than poverty: cars
that cannot circulate because there are too many of them; salaries paid
in inflated money; meat from livestock fattened up in several weeks by
chemical feed, etc.

What would a true elite [French in original] love? Let each
reader ask himself this in all sincerity. We love the company of people
of good taste and culture, art, the quality of well-chosen food and
wine, the calm of our parks and the beautiful architecture of our
ancient residences, our rich libraries, and the handling of great human
affairs or merely contemplating them from behind the scenes. Who could
be convinced that he could have all that, have it be available to
everyone else, or only to the [top] 10 percent of our quite excessively
large population, buy it on the market and have it made by our current
industries, which produce nothing but cheap junk? And would anyone even
dare to suggest that such things could be appreciated and enjoyed by
just anyone, even by some guy we have made a government minister but who
still feels the sweat of his poor childhood and his feverish arriviste
studies?

Thus we must rethink the entirety of production and consumption, and
reeducate ourselves in class consciousness by reminding ourselves
that our class has the historical merit of discovering the existence of
socio-economic classes, and that it was the bourgeoisie – not Marxism –
that announced the class struggle and founded upon that struggle its
possession of society. Our social elite [French in original] is
not closed, as were the “states” of the Ancien Régime. People have easily gained access to it, over the course of
several generations, when our educational system has been realistic and
tailor-made for the job, and when we offered to the most suitable
individuals the opportunity to enjoy the real advantages that justify
the greatest efforts. Likewise, we must remain in a position to offer to
the subordinate classes (the craftsmen, the governmental and
political/labor union functionaries, etc.) lesser but still satisfying
and authentic advantages. Thus, the inclination to valorously elevate
oneself on the social ladder so as to attain a qualitatively rich form
of existence will be reinforced, because such a goal must appear in all
of its beautiful reality and to the precise extent that we can once
again begin to enjoy it peacefully. Today, such a reality is out of
reach because we have spread false luxury and false comfort so
excessively (and without thinking about the consequences) that the
entire population is quite unsatisfied by them both.

Miserliness could make the trivial objection that the delimitation of
the consumption of things of quality, which would recreate a barrier
of money against polluted consumption by the lower classes, would
also cause unfortunate obligations among the dominant class to spend
more money on its everyday purchases. We would respond that the rich
must pay for their luxury; otherwise, in a short period of time, they
will not have any luxuries at all. The bourgeoisie, especially in Italy,
must understand that it is no longer possible for the rich to get
everything on the cheap, just as they must also pay their taxes. On the
other hand, we must work to improve the consumption by the people by
correcting as much as possible everything harmful to physical or mental
health that is currently inflicted on them, and everyone knows that
there are a lot of these harmful agents, ranging from our means of
transportation to our food, not to mention our mind-numbing distractions
and leisure activities. At present, the people are so worn out by
the abundance of artificial and disappointing consumption that they
would accept (with relief) consumption that was measured and reassuring,
and that pretty much satisfied their authentic needs. It would be
sufficient for us – to the extent that we make these corrections – to
reveal the reality, especially from the medical point of view, of what
has become of bread, wine and the air: in short, all of the people’s
simple pleasures. If the people are justly frightened, we will be
praised for having stopped them for sliding any further down the fatal
slope of current reality. We must no longer create pollution, except
when industry really cannot avoid doing so, and then we should
only pollute industrial zones that have been set aside and peopled on
the basis of fundamental criteria, and not all over the country,
thoughtlessly and casually,[22] as is done now.

On its own, the question of education is so serious that it would
almost suffice to make everyone understand that we must urgently
reconstruct a qualitative society, as much in our own well-understood
interests as in those of the entire population. When we see the quantity
of graduates from what we ironically call our universities, who are not
only bereft of real culture but usefulness as well, who cannot even find
jobs as workers because employers routinely refuse to hire such people,
and who thus inevitably become malcontents and perhaps even rebels, we
consider that they are the products of an incompetence that feels no
embarrassment in squandering the State’s resources, not without result,
but, rather, with the result that we are exposed to dangers, and this
clashes not only with the most elemental sense of honesty, but with
basic logic, too. The Italians – who invented the university and the
bank, who during the Renaissance devised the first and best scientific
theory of domination – are now the first ones, and more than any other
people, to suffer the crisis of everything in which they have excelled.
We can still be the world’s leaders, that is, if we can show the world
the road that will lead us out of and beyond this crisis.

If we offer each person a relatively satisfying place, but especially
if we can assure ourselves, without shilly-shallying, the collaboration
of what we might call the elites of control [les élites de
l’encadrement], we will not have difficulty resisting all subversion
with a minimum of intelligently selective repression. Because it is
certainly not the so-called “Red Brigades” that put our power in danger,
and if today the four fanatics who compose them seem to be a danger to
the State, and easily escape from its prisons, this is not because the
“Red Brigades” are a small but very powerful group, but quite simply
because the State has faded to such an extent that anyone can make it
seem laughable. When we speak of selective repression, we are talking
about defending ourselves against something other than them.

Censorship – and here we confess that we must keep our Communist
allies on a short lease – is not in keeping with the very spirit of
capitalism. Censorship can only be envisioned in our laws and used in
practice as a completely exceptional recourse, at least when it comes to
books. We must neither overestimate their danger nor allow ourselves to
forget about them. For example, in the last ten years, and taking into
account all of the democratic countries, it seems to us that an
intelligent censorship would only have had to ban three or four books in
total. But it would have been necessary to make these books disappear
absolutely, by every possible means. We ourselves have not neglected to
read them, but we did so while keeping them away from everyone else, as
the library at the Vatican does with erotic books. When books of
political critique only concern topical details or local incidents, they
are out of date even before there has been enough time for them to
attract a large number of readers. We have only to pay attention to the
very rare books that are able to attract followers over long periods of
time and eventually weaken our power. We must assuredly educate
ourselves about them. Nevertheless, it should not be a matter of
criticizing the authors of such books, but annihilating them. Indeed, we
know, but often forget, that the pens of such authors always end up
making people take up arms, when the opposite does not take place or
until the opposite takes place. We no longer remember who said it the
first time, but there exists a significant simultaneity between the
inventions of printing and gunpowder. In sum, we must treat the authors
of certain books as disturbers of the public peace, as harmful to our
civilization, which they do not want to reform, but to destroy. On all
the crucial points, we must scrupulously guard against all
sentimentality and all pretentions to excessive justifications for our
censorship. Otherwise we risk corrupting our own lucidity. We do not
manage Paradise, but this world.

As terrible as it is at the moment we are writing, the situation in
Italy, the danger and discomfort of which no one can accuse us of
exaggerating to the point that we have derived all that assaults us as
the universal class from the particular misfortunes of this servile
Italy, place of grief, ship without a pilot in a great tempest.[24] On
the contrary, if we are worried about what has happened and what could
still happen in Italy, this is precisely because we know that the crisis
is global. Given that capitalist unification is so advanced on the
planetary scale, it is global capitalism that we risk driving into the
abyss. Italy is no longer what it was for a long time: a backwards
province, separated from the modern nations. From this situation came
both its misfortune and its peace and quiet. Class power is threatened
in Russia as it is in America, but Europe – weak in every aspect – is at
the center of the tempest. And all the historical misfortunes of Europe
have in common the fact that, at the center of them all, one finds the
French. Everything permits us to think that, without them, capitalism
would have known a superior development from the qualitative point of
view. The attack by Charles VIII broke the Italian commercial republics
and, three centuries later, Bonaparte did the same thing to Venice. The
[French] Revolution of 1789 gave free rein to the unlimited programs of
the riff-raff, while the bourgeois revolutions in England in the 17th
century appeared to found the city politics that were propitious to the
harmonious development of modern capitalism. Finally, even more
recently, while the ideology of commodity abundance appeared capable of
calming the discontents of the working classes – although it is true
that well-informed observers always doubted the stability of such an
equilibrium – it was again the French who, in 1968, dealt that ideology
its death blow.

What we confront today is a universal problem and, at the same time,
a very old one. Last year, Giovanni Agnelli said that the workers no
longer want to work because they have been demoralized by the modern
living conditions that we have constructed for them. Whatever subtlety
we might recognize in this [quite] original observation, we must say
that Agnelli – by privileging too much the examination of circumstances
that are the most characteristic of the current period – did not go to
the heart of the matter this time. The workers do not want to work every
time that they glimpse the slightest opportunity of doing so, and they
glimpse opportunities of this type every time that economic and
political domination is weakened by objective difficulties or by
difficulties that follow from our blunders. If we get to the heart of
the matter, to never work again was the goal of the Ciompi as
well as the Communards.[24] Every past society in every era has, in its
way, confronted this problem and managed to dominate it, while at
present we are the ones who are in the process of being dominated by
this problem.

Those of our readers who have recognized us know quite well that at
no time in our life have we consented to make a pact with fascism, and
that we will not make one with any form of totalitarian bureaucratic
management, and for the very same reasons. The bourgeoisie must want to
remain the historical class par excellence. Irrefutable on this point,
Karl Marx himself demonstrated very well the error that the bourgeoisie
commits when it places its political power in the hands of
“Bonapartism.”[25] Thus, we are turned towards the future, but not any
old future.

To speak the language of our “executants,” what will we our “model”?
While the most cultivated of our adversaries find the rough outline of
their model in Pericles’ Athens or pre-Medici Florence – models that
they must confess are quite insufficient, but nevertheless worthy of
their real project, because they display to the most caricatural degree
the incessant violence and disorder that are its very essence – we, on
the contrary, designate the Republic of Venice as our model of a
qualitative society (a model that, in its time, was sufficient and even
perfect). Venice had the best ruling class in history: no one resisted
it, nor purported to demand an accounting from it. For centuries, there
were no demagogic lies, no troubles (or hardly any) and very little
blood was spilled. Venice was terrorism tempered with happiness,
the happiness of each person in his proper place. And we do not
forget that the Venetian oligarchy, which relied upon the armed workers
from Arsenal during certain moments of crisis, had already discovered
the truth that an elite [French in original] selected from among
the workers always plays the game of society’s owners marvelously
well.

To finish up, we will say that, rereading these pages, we have not
discovered what pertinent objection a rigorous mind could make to them,
and we are persuaded that their truth will generally impose
itself.[26]

[1] Cf. Machiavelli, Chapter XXVI, The Prince.

[2] Louis de Bourdon (1530-1569). The French religious wars lasted
from 1562 to 1629.

[3] Machiavelli, Chapter XXVI, The Prince. Latin in original.

[4] Italian painter (1431-1503).

[5] Giovanni Leone (1908-2001), a right-wing member of the Christian
Democratic Party, was the President of Italy from December 1971 to June
1978.

[6] Machiavelli, Chapter XXI, The Prince. Latin in original.
(In the translation provided by Guy Debord, this phrase is rendered as
“How should the prince govern to acquire esteem?”)

[7] Eugenio Cefis, the chairman of ENI (petrochemicals) and
Montedison (chemicals), both State-owned enterprises.

[8] The Republic.

[9] Bruno Visenti (1914-1995) was an industrialist who became the
Minister of Finance in 1974.

[10] Dante, Inferno, IV, 104.

[11] In point of fact, Mussolini never said this.

[12] Inferno, XXVII, 26-27.

[13] Machiavelli, Chapter XVI, The Prince.

[14] Petrarch, quoted at the very end of The Prince: “Virtue
against furor / will take up arms; and the fighting will be short; / for
the ancient valor / in Italian hearts is not yet dead.”

[15] Henry Ford, speech to the Harvard Business School, 1969.

[16] Razza Padrona: Storia della Borghesia di Stato
(1974).

[17] Spinoza, Ethics, I, proposition 36.

[18] See Thesis 36, “The Situationist International and Its Times,”
The Real Split in the International (1972).

[19] Dante, Inferno, XXXII, 13. Sometimes translated as “O you
who are the lowest dregs of all.”

[20] Dante, Inferno, IV, 40-43.

[21] Pseudo-Xenophon did in fact write a text called The
Constitution of the Athenians, but it was hostile to its announced
subject. As for Censor’s The Republic of the Italians, it appears
that it never existed.

[22] a bischero sciolto, an old Florentine expression.

[23] Dante Purgatory, VI, 75-77.

[24] The Ciompi (wool carders) of Florence revolted and set up
a short-lived government in 1378. The Communards were partisans of the
Paris Commune (1871).

[25] Cf. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).

[26] Cf. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, the concluding
paragraph of which includes this line: “I can think of no one Objection,
that will possibly be raised against this Proposal.”