PDF-Version: Il Programma Comunista – The Middle Class, Our Bête Noire

The truly essential reports of our recent international meeting, with the perfectly consistent contributions of comrades of various languages, can be said to have focused on one crucial point: the reaffirmation of the old declaration of war on the middle class.

The work on the course of Western imperialism in the Marxist line will demonstrate the impossibility under capitalism of reaching greater human well-being without disaster; better, the refutation of revisionism has already been established.

In the military question, it has been highlighted that any transition between historical modes of production implies a war between classes, unmasking those who would like the most bellicose of classes, the proletariat, to constitute an exception to this historical law.

The analysis of the social and historical stratification of Chinese structures, especially in the countryside, has done justice to the recourse to violence at major turning points; it has shown the lack of revolutionary content of this process, not only in the perspective of a multiple revolution culminating in proletarian revolution, but even from a bourgeois revolutionary viewpoint, because of the petty-bourgeois meanness of the perspectives.

The introduction to a history of the democratic trap reaffirmed the classical antithesis between proletariat and democracy, a reflection of the antagonism between capital and the working class proletariat, by giving historical proof that it is never the counting of opinions but always and everywhere the armed confrontation that has opened new paths for humanity. Freedom and democracy are good ideals for the petty-bourgeois philistines, they are at the opposite of the doctrine of the historical goals of proletarian revolution whose key is not freedom, but dictatorship. The study of Marxism and art leads to the same conclusion: to dishonour petty-bourgeois superstitions.

The criticism of the famous 25 points of the Chinese[1], revealed to world political publicity during our meeting, highlighted the rare but harsh reprimands of Soviet treason; but it has shown the absurdity of opening a theoretical and ideological debate under the pretext of verifying coherence with Marxism and Leninism, when all or almost all of Beijing’s 25 theses are tainted with the most serious revisionism; and when their tortuous formulas are located in the middle of the opportunist mud whose real father is Stalin and whose date of birth is 1924, if not before. It was endorsed by the Chinese leaders back then and today who not only never protested against the crime of lèse-doctrine[2], but who committed serious opportunist betrayals against the standing and armed proletariat (Canton!) whom they hamstrung in the name of the infamous united front, they delivered it to the executioner Chiang Kai-shek.

The work accomplished with these studies has appropriately crowned a work of nearly twenty years devoted to the theoretical restoration of revolutionary Marxism ravaged by opportunism commanded by Moscow and at the same time it has laid the foundations for further work for future meetings.

A significant number of our fundamental texts of synthesis are already available in several languages, but a synthesis of the syntheses may be prepared in the near future with the help of our magnificent young forces, who have no other ambition than to work anonymously to enable the party to achieve particularly brilliant results.

***

The following is a schema of this body of theses whose material we know where to find, starting with the great classics.

We have devoted several studies to these historical events of great importance and frequency, especially in modern times, which occur after the bourgeois revolution and before the great world proletarian revolution; as we know, we have called them intermediate or double, or multiple revolutions. In these revolutions there are generally more than two main classes in the race: at least three, not to mention the many and varied sub-classes and quasi-classes. As in all true revolutions, they involve armed and bloody clashes.

The simplest case is the binary revolution, like the French revolution of 1789-93. The bourgeoisie overthrowing the feudal system is undoubtedly the hegemonic class; there are, however, other classes, including the nascent proletariat, which however remains a class of secondary importance.

For Germany in 1848, Marx and Engels traced the classical pattern of the double revolution to three protagonists: feudalism, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Neither the third nor the second won: total counterrevolution. In the French 1848, in 1871 and in the Russian 1917, several classes and middle classes were on the scene; the proletariat was already a first-rate class and was trying to impose its hegemony. The bourgeoisie defeated it in 1849 and 1871 in Paris, but it was the bourgeoisie that was defeated in 1917, at the same time as feudalism, in Leningrad and Moscow…

We explained theoretically how the proletariat did not lose its hegemony on the battlefield, but as a result of opportunistic infection.

When a multiple revolution finally subsides, a false clash of historical ideologies takes the place of the reality of armed confrontation. Hence this endless curse of the claim of Marxist or Leninist positions by the gravediggers of the revolution. But perhaps we can see the end of this period.

This is followed by complex mixed or multiple revolutions outside the white countries (China, Asia, Africa). The fact that the guns are still smoking can still justify within certain precise historical limits blocs between classes (including the four classes!). But ruin looms when the proletariat not only fails to ensure military hegemony, but also tolerates, through its false class parties, that ideological hegemony belongs to the middle classes. The proof is the orgy, whose echoes resonate in the four cardinal points, in the famous anti-Marxist terms: People, Nation, Fatherland, Democracy, Liberty, Pacifism.

Such a contrast between military facts and demagogic propaganda allows, in our dialectic, only one conclusion on the current situation: it is not the proletariat, it is not the middle classes (anti-historical hypothesis), but it is world capitalism to which any national middle class is subject, which has hegemony.

The disavowal of Marxism, not on the “ideological” level but in fact, consists in putting in the foreground, in the so-called developed countries, the middle class (non-salaried farmers, craftsmen, traders, liberal professions, artists, students and so on up to small industrialists) while hiding behind it a proletariat castrated since its resounding historical defeats.

Since the middle class, enjoying against nature, is under the domination of world capitalism, it is counter-revolution that triumphs.

Leaving aside the problem of “backward” countries – where opportunism carves a frightening abyss under its feet – the crime in “developed” countries consists in putting the famous monopolies “on the right” and the obscene front of middle classes and wage workers on the left.

Throughout the West, obviously in Russia for several decades, just as clearly as tomorrow in China, the bourgeois economic structure is divided into large pyramids or super-companies, or super-organisations (quickly extended to establishments born in the West) that do not correspond to the category of “monopoly” but to that of mercantile competition (two complementary faces in the classic Marxist doctrine of capitalism).

At the increasingly impersonal, less and less owner-led summits of this pyramid forest is the super potential of capitalism, a true natural physical force. In the vast lower layers are squeezed like pigs in the trough, the members of the middle classes sucking fractions of surplus value by assuming the multiple forms of lackey, intermediaries, brokers, ass-kissers responding to the rings of the bell of big capital.

Only an international productive and commercial crisis or the Third World War (1975?) can dismantle this organised system of nipples and suckers.

Do the Chinese really expect the World War? No, they only regret Stalin’s Cold War with its united-front policy between the classes for which he gratified imperialism by passing to its side. This instruction is being followed today by his worthy disciples. Mao will be no exception to the rule.

And what is our instruction? To prepare once again for the historical death of capitalism, a gigantic octopus whose suction cups sucking the blood of the proletariat are the dirty elements of the intermediate layers: war on the middle class, death to the middle class, shit on its cursed ideals!

Source: “Il Programma Comunista”, No. 15, August 4th – September 1st, 1963

[1] On June 14, 1963, the Communist Party of China in a letter replied to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which then became famous as the letter in 25 points.

[2] Referencing “lèse-majesté”.