The Explanation of a Why

Sometimes even the sympathizers and readers of our press, the workers closest to us in the daily battle against opportunism and for the defense of the revolutionary program, allow themselves to be overcome by the anxieties of the current situation, and wonder why we do not also direct our activity towards the solution of what are commonly called “company problems.”

The disgust for the dominant political currents and their trade union affiliates has reached, in many workers, a degree that is sometimes violent, well justified by years of inconclusive struggles and bitter defeats. But what they find difficult to understand is that today’s situation is linked to an inexorable chain of past events, and that the problems of the proletariat are not limited to the company, the factory, or the city, but encompass the whole range of relations between the classes, the general events of the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class, and the degree of maturity of this struggle. It is precisely this overall vision that, among the tasks of the revolutionary minority, brings to the fore the uncompromising criticism of opportunism, the identification of the enemy lurking within the ranks of the working class itself, and the unmasking of the forces and ideologies that first corrupted and then destroyed the proletarian movement. If, like all movements in the throes of contingency and voluntaristic epilepsy, we were to derive our limited activity in the various fields of social and political organization from the philistine concern for “today,” considering revolution as the accumulation of a series of fragmentary and local episodes, each with its own progressive meaning in time and quality, we would achieve the furthest thing from the historical struggle between classes, and we would be all the closer to the political end of the organization; if we created in the proletariat, in the workers who are disappointed and forced by necessity to fight anyway, the illusion that, as the countless acrobats of petty politics say, we have up our sleeve, ready to be pulled out at the right moment, a recipe for “current events,” to be applied regardless of a general reversal of the proletarian movement, we would be doing nothing different from the traitors of the labor movement, we would be preparing new disappointments and new defeats for the working class.

The truth is that the situation is inexorably fixed in terms that leave no room for doubt: we are suffering the extreme and necessary consequences of defeat on the entire international front of the revolution. The bloody price of a reversal of the proletarian movement is the situation today: this is why proletarian organizations are enslaved to opportunism and corroded by betrayal; this is why, to refer to a “corporate” case, the internal commission is, by statute and in fact, an organ of collaboration with management, indeed a longa manus of management within the working class; and that is why, today, we do not present lists in elections; that is why the proletarian class groans under the full weight of capitalist oppression and cannot find the way to overthrow it. It is still this situation that limits the possibilities for revolutionary patrols to intervene in the struggles for demands. When the brain of the proletarian movement is sick, concern for peripheral organic dysfunctions takes a back seat to the preliminary problem of healing its motor center; it is not by starting from the limits of the company, but on the contrary by moving from an attack on the general relations between the classes to invest the whole of bourgeois society, that the conditions for proletarian recovery are set. Let the opportunists shout that we are not interested in the sad living conditions of workers, low wages, and unemployment; the fact remains that none of these problems can be solved, especially today, without solving the problem of the direction of the proletarian movement, its orientation, and therefore the elimination—not in individual and peripheral points, but centrally—of the leprosy of class conciliation. To resist the storm of opportunism and betrayal of principles is to defend, with the ultimate tomorrow of the class, its present as well; it is to prepare the solution to the overall problem of the relationship between capital and labor, and, at the same time, the problems of the “workplace.”

Therefore, until the recovery has taken place, and in active preparation for it, the first task remains that of getting the engine of the proletarian revolution working again after having “overhauled” all its delicate mechanisms. The weapon of criticism, of unmasking opposing forces and ideologies, and of reaffirming the communist program is the dialectical premise of the critique of weapons. There is no such thing unless the former has been exercised.