From Battaglia Comunista — June 1946

In the history of class struggle, in the particular manner in the period most recent to ours, the point of availing the politics of compromise has always gone alongside the peaceful reconstruction of the “legal” apparatus of the rule of the bourgeoisie and the reappropriation and the readjustment of the “illegal” forces of defense against the workers.

The two fenomena are are, regardless of appearances, perfectly parallel. Out of both, the abandonment of the struggle of the organisms of the working class, comes their renunciation of attacking the historical basis of bourgeois rule.

If the reconstitution of capitalist “legality” is not able to take place, in virtue of the weakness of the proletariat, from their impotence in the face of the problems of the class. It is precisely this weakness and this impotence in permitting the unleashing with impunity of the anti-worker violence of the illegal organizations of the bosses.

The politics of compromise and thus the twofold historical result of facilitating to capitalism the parallel employment of all their instruments of rule, and of placing the proletariat in the position of not being able to defend itself against these instruments by the very fact of having relinquished to the state, to the “legal authority”, the task of defense that only an autonomous organization of class can exercize.

The situation is today exactly this. The bourgeoisie, that has been able to reconstitute itself, thanks to the assured loyalty of social-centrist neo-reformism, the mechanism destroyed by the state and on the otherhand, prefers in absence of a direct menace, (not committing to itself the task of too open an anti-worker repression) dedicates to itself to the preparation and training of armed bands in the dually conscious of having to renew the domination of their class adversary and of the ability to count in the “neutrality” (that is in reality tacit acceptance) of the reconstruction of the legal order.

Is it possible that this violence may be directed against the state apparatus, against the new-born institutions of the republic, as is convenient for the opportunists of every stripe to maintain? Not at all: it is directed against the workers and against the workers organizations, against the exploited peasants and the hungry of the south [i.e. southern Italy] and against their elementary organs of defense.

The democratic state assists and… allows it to be done.

Evidently, the episodes and the recurrent outbursts of bosses’ violence are not, as is generally said, so that they may sow further alarm among the masses and thus induce once more through inaction, fascism. Fascism presupposes as its method, organized anti-proletarian violence, the failure of a social mode at the limits of the revolution or it has been surmounted (as in the two classic examples of Italy and Hungary); is the sadistic and brutal violence of those that have already conquered their adversary on the political terrain and now proceed finish them off [uccidere “l’uomo morto” — lit. to kill the “dead man”]. In Italy today the situation is different, the defeat of the proletariat is not taking place, because their has not been a struggle. The violence, that the outbreak of which is not a symptom of the vitality of the bourgeoisie (vitality whose oxygen flows to the class through the praxis of opportunism) that itself is expressed in the lack of a revolutionary cycle at the fall of the Mussolini regime. It is at the same time a warning that they are already preparing repression in reserve against an eventual return to activity on the part of the proletariat.

To us, as a party of the class, the fenomenon of this periodical recurrence of the bosses violence concerns us in a very different manner than it appears to concern the socialists and the national communists. It is these two camps that exert pressure to show that the republic is somehow “menaced”. It is more pressing to us to indicate how the reinforcement of capitalist institutions may have as its natural reflex the unleashing of violence that has as its only real objective the class adversary of bourgeois society — the proletariat.

The problem of defense for us is not put in the context of defending institutions that are not seriously menaced, but in how to defend the proletariat, the victim of a time of capitalist legality and illegality.

How should the proletariat defend itself against this resurgent violence? By appealing to the democratic state in order to make it respect the law? No, the law is bourgeois and has as its task to defend the stability of bourgeois institutions. How to remind the proletariat, the democratic republic of today has taken up, order to keep its head above water, the men, the methods and the weaponry of 1920-22 [the rise of fascism in Italy], those that have demonstrated in a most effective manner the function of “covering” the squadrist maneuver with formal respect for the rules of the democratic game. These are the methods of the Royal Guard, from the circulars in the judiciary in order that the practice relative to fascist crimes be recorded, from the police that (as in the days of the assault on the Headquarters of Labor) arrest those communists that defend themselves and release those that attack them, from the more of less secret agreements of Giolittism and Nittism and those of Mussolini and D’Annunzio. These are the methods, adapted to fit the times, of peace pacts, of pledging solemnly to respect legality and disarm, of the so-called neutrality of the state, of the defense of order with a capital “O”, that is to say of the order superior to the classes, mediating the forces of the order of one class — the bourgeoisie.

It is not a personal polemic that weighs on us, it is the analysis of certain constants taking shape and thus as a dynamic of class struggle.

Fascism itself is affirmed with the full cooperation of the liberal and democratic state because they both always perform and fulfill a parallel function of defense of bourgeois society. The violence, may even be momentaneously sporadic for the ruling class, it may be encountered and continue to be encountered, at least physically, through disposition of the support of the majority of the working class. It may guarantee itself all the more as long as it is possible for the ruling class to guarantee this support.

It is not therefore in petitioning for protection from the state of informing political coalitions operating in the orbit of democracy and mobilizing in “defense of the republic” that the proletariat will be able to defend itself against the shameless and unhindered exercize of the violence of the ruling class, but only through the exercize of the class struggle, that is to say through the strengthening of the party of the revolution and returning to life the class framework, organisms that have been lost.

The working class should be able to draw out a lesson from the events that years of legality have allowed and desired them to be detached from; to understand that it is not legal organisms that are to be defended, that the state is not neutral and it is not the courts in whom to appeal and that it is from the tyranny of the two forms of bourgeois violence that come the right and the force. The proletariat can only defend itself by creating its own organs of defense and offense.

Since, on the terrain of the right and of the appeal to “good standards”, on the terrain of recourse to the defense of the law and of the right of asylum that the state (or the church) would be recognized in the oppressed citizen, the working class will always be beaten.

It would be foolish to view the violence only in the brutality of this or that band of thugs, and not see in these the natural conclusion of the renuniciatory politics of national solidarity that numb and bewilder the proletariat in order to make them produce in silence.

So the problem of the defense of the proletariat against the second wave of the capitalist offensive raises the political problem of reqonquering class autonomy in the full redoubt of the party and neither is this the only aspect of the problem.