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The poorly understood question of the “middle classes” has always been an important vehicle of opportunism in the camp of the proletarian and communist movement. It is since the time of Bernstein that it has been said that socialism ought to concern not only the proletariat but also the “middle layers”, because they do not disappear and, above all, because the announced fall of capitalism due to the combined pressure of the law of the falling average rate of profit and the growing impoverishment of the wage-earning class fails to materialize. Since then, opportunisms of all kinds have only been rehashing this position under a thousand different forms.

Heaps of nonsense hail, today especially, from all directions, regarding a so-called new “social proletariat” that would be counterposed to the old “mass worker” or industrial worker. Such novel nonsense springs, as it is inevitable, from the “thought” of the usual more or less new modernizers, who believe they have discovered something to add to the solidity and compactness of the classic and “palaeolithic” Marxist construction. All the bricks were set in place from the very beginning, both from the economic-social and the philosophic-scientific point of view.

If we dwell on these current disputes, it is not because of any consideration we have for the thinkers on duty, but because it allows us to continue the thread of our own and only ours uncorrupted tradition.

Vanishing or decay of the middle classes?

The thesis of the “physical” disappearance of the middle classes cannot be read in any Marxist text, from Marx onwards; not even in the Manifesto (which is the most misquoted text in this regard), where it is stated that faced with the bourgeoisie only the proletariat, in modern capitalist society, is a revolutionary class and that the middle classes (listed precisely: the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant) are not only conservative but even reactionary and are destined to “decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry.” It is the end of all their autonomous functions that is highlighted, more so than their physical vanishing; in any case, the inevitable “disappearance” refers to the categories of the middle classes mentioned and not to the other social strata, today enormously swollen, which exist between the workers and the bourgeoisie. In no other Marxist text can anything different be found and our school has a long time ago established a concise thesis on this subject:

The Marxist thesis that the middle classes disappear is not taken to mean that in the near future in all developed countries there should be only capitalists, big landowners, and wage earners, but instead that of the three model classes only the proletariat can and must fight for the advent of the new social type, of the new mode of production.¹

After all, Marx had already affirmed, in his polemic with Ricardo, that:

What he forgets to emphasize is the constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other. The middle classes maintain themselves to an ever-increasing extent directly out of revenue, they are a burden weighing heavily on the working base […].²

In any case, the question is of considerable importance not only and not so much as to respond to the banalities of the latest “modernizers”, but above all to delimit and specify ever better the field of the activity of the party.

The role of the middle classes in different geopolitical areas

Already in the Manifesto, as we have mentioned, the thesis is established that in societies fully developed from the capitalist point of view only the proletariat is a revolutionary class. As is well known, this thesis has been bastardized not only by the classic opportunism of the Second International, but still more so by Stalinist opportunism, rampant from the degeneration of the Third International onwards, and all the more fetid the more it tried to cheat even with Lenin’s texts.

Only in areas of double revolution can the question of the proletariat’s alliance with other revolutionary classes still be raised. It cannot in fact be ruled out that in such areas could still arise a revolutionary, anti-imperialist nationalist movement in which the proletarian and communist movement would find a natural ally. In areas where the state is still of the pre-capitalist type, the middle classes, and especially the peasantry, can indeed still fulfil a revolutionary function if they call into question at least one form of property. This is the basis of their revolutionary role with respect to the political structure of the state, the guarantor, as we know, of every existing form of property.

In areas of direct revolution, on the other hand, the question of the proletariat’s alliances with other classes is completely absent. That said, even there the relationship between the proletarian state and the middle classes will not manifest itself in an undifferentiated way. Since the evolution of fully capitalist forms of production in the agricultural sector happens slower than in the industrial sector, even in the areas of direct revolution the relationship between the proletarian state and the middle classes will not be indiscriminate, but particular attention will have to be paid to the relationship with small peasants. It is indeed necessary to bear in mind the degree of socialization of agricultural activity, as in this sector it is not possible to pass from a technical condition that is still of the individual type to one that is fully socialized except after an intermediary phase, in which individual allocation of land will still prevail, be it only in the form of possession, and formation of cooperative enterprises will be facilitated.

This is nevertheless a technical rather than a political issue. The conclusion is not that poor small peasants will be able to play an autonomous revolutionary role in fully capitalist areas, where the only form of property is capitalist and where the state is therefore its unique guarantor. In these areas, the only revolutionary class is the proletariat, which will accordingly have to on its own and without allies break the capitalist state and establish its own iron dictatorship.

Compared with the small peasant, the small artisan and small merchant will be more quickly abolished as such following the proletarian revolution, since there will no longer be a single economic-social reason for their survival, comparable to the reasons which regard petty agricultural production. Already today, if the artisans or the small merchants of the cities survive, this happens due to them either exploiting situations of genuine parasitism or only carrying out functions of support to big industry and not playing any autonomous economic role. The proletarian power, with the subjugation of big industry, would subject to its control also those marginal activities.

Delimitation of the proletarian class

When tackling this question we do not succumb to social, or worse, sociological classification criteria. It is not by chance that we use the term “delimitation” (and not “classification”). Marxist categories have to do with trend and force lines rather than statistical data. Nevertheless, it is necessary to return also to the economic and social preconditions underlying the action of social classes. This is indeed a particularly important issue, both before and after the revolution. First, because the party, in areas of direct revolution, takes on the task of defending the living conditions of the proletariat alone and not of other classes, with the exception, within the limits described above, of the peasantry. It takes on this task not for “moralistic” reasons, but exclusively for reasons of economic and political nature, since it is the proletariat alone that is capable of transforming the struggle for the defence of its own living conditions, after this struggle reaches a certain degree of intensity, into a revolutionary political struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state. It follows that classes other than the proletariat, as non-revolutionary, could never participate in a truly revolutionary struggle against the capitalist state. Therefore, in no case do they merit the slightest interest of the party.

The question of the delimitation of the proletarian class is of special relevance also for the period immediately succeeding the victory of the proletarian revolution, since the state which will emerge out of it will be exclusively a state of just one class and for that reason all the others will be excluded from it. A text of ours has a long time ago declared, in perfect alignment with Lenin, that:

Proletarian theory openly asserts that its future state will be a class state, i.e. a tool wielded by one class as long as classes exist. The other classes will be excluded from the state and outlawed in fact as well as in principle. The working class having achieved power “will share it with no one” (Lenin).³

In this way, from the unique perspective of the party, a major importance is gained by one of the most debated subjects within the movements which in this fetid current situation boast even of the qualifier “revolutionary” and which perhaps preach nothing less but an instant armed struggle, dreaming of an impossible immediate revolution, which they say has the characteristics of the proletarian one. The subject at issue is that of the consideration of the vast layers of so-called unproductive or service workers. The big question that arises is whether such workers should be considered part of the “middle classes” or even whether they should be considered the “new” revolutionary class, counterposed even to the so-called “industrial proletariat”—revolutionary because it provides a type of work that does not produce surplus-value, but only use-value, a fact which would then immediately pose the need for communism. In essence, there is a division into those who prattle and those who, even though inclined to prattle, have not understood a single word of the colossal Marxist concepts relating to the long-standing question of the division of workers into productive and unproductive, and who at best know nothing else but to return to… Smith!

Productive and unproductive labour

Marx explains abundantly that such a distinction can be made, given the existing social relations, only from the point of view of capital: the distinction between labour productive of surplus-value and labour that does not produce surplus-value because it is employed for revenue and not for variable capital concerns only capital. Spectacularly mistaken are those who consider as belonging to the proletariat only those engaged in productive labour, because this depends not on the content of the labour, but exclusively on the needs of valorization of capital. Still more mistaken are those who see in the work conditions of unproductive workers the possibility of expressing a movement that poses immediately, with its “refusal of work”, the need for social relations that are downright fully communist. They forget that this “refusal of work” expresses the inhumanity of the capitalist relation, within which all work activity is today carried out, and they reformistically and anarchically skip over the necessity of the destruction of the bourgeois state before the transformation of the mode of production. If the former, hiding behind the myth of the productive worker, erroneously understood as the “factory worker”, rehash the false councillist and workerist theory, the latter, with the theory of the “social proletariat” and its “refusal of work”, theorize precisely the aspirations of the middle classes and especially their tendency to eternalize their privileges.

The only sense in which one can qualify work as productive and therefore distinct from unproductive work (in the capitalist era) is that of work which does or does not produce surplus-value. Since capitalist production is exclusively production for the growth of capital, this is the only yardstick one can use to qualify different kinds of work. As long as productive activity is subject to the barbaric laws of capital, it is not possible to use other socially quantifiable and identifiable measures. From this follows the obvious conclusion that the distinction in question is of fundamental importance to capital, but has no importance from the point of view of its antagonist, of the proletarian class, at least for as long as it remains a slave to capital. The proletariat possesses only generic labour-power. Whether this power is engaged in productive activities that generate surplus-value or in others that are only capable of consuming it, liquefying it, cannot concern the proletariat for as long as it itself has no power over the mass of social surplus-value, that is until the victorious revolution.

As a further clarification of what has been said, we will reproduce some crucial quotations from Marx:

Productive labour, in its meaning for capitalist production, is wage-labour which, exchanged against the variable part of capital (the part of the capital that is spent on wages), reproduces not only this part of the capital (or the value of its own labour-power) but in addition produces surplus-value for the capitalist. It is only thereby that commodity or money is transformed into capital, is produced as capital. Only that wage-labour is productive which produces capital. (This is the same as saying that it reproduces on an enlarged scale the sum of value expended on it, or that it gives in return more labour than it receives in the form of wages. Consequently, only that labour-power is productive which produces a value greater than its own.) […]

This also establishes absolutely what unproductive labour is. It is labour which is not exchanged with capital, but directly with revenue […]. These definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realized. An actor, for example, or even a clown, according to this definition, is a productive labourer if he works in the service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labour than he receives from him in the form of wages […].

Productive and unproductive labour is here throughout conceived from the standpoint of the possessor of money, from the standpoint of the capitalist, not from that of the workman […].⁴

From the foregoing it is evident that for labour to be designated productive, qualities are required which are utterly unconnected with the specific content of the labour, with its particular utility or the use-value in which it is objectified.

Hence, labour with the same content can be either productive or unproductive. […]

A schoolmaster who instructs others is not a productive worker. But a schoolmaster who works for wages in an institution along with others, using his own labour to increase the money of the entrepreneur who owns the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker. […]

A large part of the annual product which is consumed as revenue and hence does not re-enter production as its means, consists of the most tawdry products (use-values) designed to gratify the most impoverished appetites and fancies. As far as the question of productive labour is concerned, however, the nature of these objects is quite immaterial […].⁵

Further, the division of the class of wage-earners into productive and unproductive workers is not at all some kind of curse for capital, but it perfectly meets its valorization needs. In order to understand capital’s necessity of separating the available labour-power into productive and unproductive, it is first necessary to point out that the labour-power employed in unproductive labour is not exclusively a consumer of surplus-value, but that its cost directly enters the production costs of the commodity that produces all values, i.e. labour-power itself. It suffices, once again, to read Marx:

But it may be the case that this surplus labour time, although present in the product, is not exchangeable. For the worker himself—compared with the other wageworkers—it is surplus labour. For the employer, it is labour which, while it has a use-value for him, like e.g. his cook, has no exchange-value, hence the entire distinction between necessary and surplus labour time does not exist. Labour may be necessary without being productive. All general, communal conditions of production—so long as their production cannot yet be accomplished by capital as such and under its conditions—are therefore paid for out of a part of the country’s revenue—out of the government’s treasury—and the workers do not appear as productive workers, even though they increase the productive force of capital.⁶

The whole world of “commodities” can be divided into two great parts. First, labour-power; second, commodities as distinct from labour-power itself. As to the purchase of such services as those which train labour-power, maintain or modify it, etc., in a word, give it a specialized form or even only maintain it […]—these are services which yield in return […] labour-power itself, into whose costs of production or reproduction these services enter. […] It is therefore clear that the labour of the doctor and the schoolmaster does not directly create the fund out of which they are paid, although their labours enter into the production costs of the fund which creates all values whatsoever—namely, the production costs of labour-power.⁷

From this, it follows that a negative judgement on the class characteristics of unproductive workers, as “deranged” consumers or spendthrifts, is completely out of place. It is, at best, obsolete moralism, diametrically opposed to the criteria of judgement typical of Marxism. The key issue is that, with the expansion of the sector of services produced using unproductive labour, the rate of surplus-value of productive workers grows enormously, since a considerable share of the value of their wages is paid for with unproductive labour, i.e. with revenue, capable, among other things, of expanding global consumption and facilitating the realization of the entire surplus-value socially produced.

It is not in this direction that the lethal disease of the capitalist mode of production must be sought. We only need to remember that it is the law of the tendential fall of the average rate of profit that inevitably condemns capitalism to its final collapse, although, as is very well known, the same causes that generate this law manage to secrete antitoxins capable of delaying the final disintegration, which will be all the more violent, the more the deferral will have been bogus and artificial. The law states that the average rate of profit tends to decrease due to the frightening swelling of capital (and in particular of its constant part) with its need to be continuously valorized in productive activity, i.e. through its conversion into commodities containing surplus-value and reconversion into capital augmented by this surplus-value.

This means that, just as the inhuman growth of the rate of surplus-value, i.e. of the intensity of the exploitation of labour-power, has been and still is an efficient counter-tendency, no less has been and still is such a counter-tendency that of subtracting a considerable part of capital, used as revenue, through the providential intervention of the state, from the distribution of socially produced surplus-value. This is the source of the irresistible tendency in all capitalist states to inflate public services, which both allows to increase the rate of surplus-value and, inasmuch as labour-power is hired not directly against variable capital but against revenue, functions (as it has at least functioned so far) as a means of absorbing, with its unproductive consumption, the commodities produced in productive sectors, which can thus be sold, allowing capital to realize profit.

It is evident that this is not, nor will it be, the panacea at last discovered by capitalism, which will allow it to live forever: the disease discovered in it by Marxism is, in the long run, incurable and will overcome every possible counter-tendency. Capital’s hunger for surplus-value is as a matter of fact insatiable. It is true that the significant part of capital spent as revenue does not participate in the distribution of the social surplus-value, but it is also true that thereby significant part of the labour-power potentially productive of surplus-value does not produce it: it is precisely unproductive. The current polemics on the excessive public expenditure and on the necessity of its reduction, also with the aim of containing inflation, have exactly this meaning: they demonstrate the necessity that world capital has in this historical phase of increasing the mass of surplus-value produced. But this will not happen without a crisis: our wish for capital under all heavens is that it yields once and for all!

The class of those without reserves

It is then beyond doubt that the categories of “productive labour” and “unproductive labour” cannot be used to delimit the proletarian class. It is likewise absolutely certain that both species of detractors of Marxism—the moralists, who see the proletarian uniquely in the productive worker, and the prattlers, who see in the unproductive worker the immediate (!) incarnator of labour whose content is already anti-capitalist and therefore “communistic”—express a profound lack of understanding of the characteristics distinguishing the very economic preconditions that delimit the proletarian class.

Does not belong to this class one who, whether engaged in productive labour or not, has the possibility of living not exclusively on wages. He is no longer the proletarian who has nothing to lose but his chains, as Marx has put it, but has something to defend of this mode of production. In an era which did not admit subtle “differentiations”, but required above all taking one of the two sides, we have written the following:

Especially in times of social convulsion, man asserts through his political action his interests not as a member of a category of producers, but of a social class.

The class must be considered not as a simple aggregate of productive categories, but as a homogeneous group of men whose conditions of economic life present fundamental analogies.

The proletarian is not the producer who exercises certain trades, but the individual characterized by not possessing any means of production and by the need to sell his labour in order to live. We could also have a worker regularly organized within his category, who is at the same time a small owner of land or capital; and he would no longer be a member of the proletarian class. Such a case is more frequent than one would believe.⁸

If the case was frequent back then, what about today! Many people know this, but they are afraid to draw the necessary conclusions. To ascertain that wageworkers with the characteristics of small landowners or capitalists are very numerous, at least in the countries of mature capitalism, is to explain the reality of the flood of opportunism, which has its social and economic basis precisely in this. Having put these questions back on their material basis, we can affirm as the criterion of delimitation of the proletarian class the following: to the class belong all those who, carrying out wage labour of whatever nature (productive or not), live solely on the proceeds of this labour and have no possibility of making savings, from which they could obtain a supplementary income. We are not discovering anything new but simply reaffirming what is already contained in the Manifesto:

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.⁹

Such are the conditions that must necessarily reproduce themselves on the scale of society so that the proletarian class can manifest under the leadership of the party all its revolutionary might.

Labour aristocracy and opportunism

The phenomenon of the existence of wageworkers with reserves in rents and interests and who therefore become interested in the smooth functioning of the national capitalist economy instead of being, as they are supposed to, its grave-diggers, is the phenomenon of the labour aristocracy and hence of opportunism, which is particularly prevalent in the age of imperialism. It is not a moral phenomenon, but an essentially material one, which finds its raison d’être in the de facto alliance between the imperialist bourgeoisies of the West and numerous strata of workers. This alliance constitutes the true basis on which stands the undisputed dominance of a handful of imperialist states over the entire world, and thus, ultimately, the persistence of the capitalist mode of production, in its imperialist phase. This phenomenon appeared at the very beginning of the workers’ movement and was cemented by two world wars waged under the banner of maintaining imperialist privileges.

In this regard too, the set of quotations that we collate shows that the phenomenon in question, far from being one of the usual “genius inventions” of Lenin, has been clearly understood from the beginnings of Marxism, and that, if anything, it was history that brought it more and more to the foreground. Its peculiar characteristics have therefore been constantly sharpening, but only those who were able to place themselves on the very trend line of revolutionary Marxism—Lenin and the Left—knew how to detect and frame them correctly.

In a letter to Marx dated October 7th 1858 Engels writes on the subject of the policy of alliance with the radical democrats proposed by Jones for the Chartist Party:

The Jones business is most distasteful. He held a meeting here and the speech he made was entirely in the spirit of the new alliance. After that affair one might almost believe that the English proletarian movement in its old traditional Chartist form must perish utterly before it can evolve in a new and viable form. And yet it is not possible to foresee what the new form will look like. It seems to me, by the way, that there is in fact a connection between Jones’ new move, seen in conjunction with previous more or less successful attempts at such an alliance, and the fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat. In the case of a nation which exploits the entire world this is, of course, justified to some extent.¹⁰

The next passage by Engels is taken from The Condition of the Working Class in England and is quoted¹¹ by Lenin in his preparatory work for the text Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which, as is known, contemptuously condemns the function of support for imperialism fulfilled by labour aristocracies and on their behalf by the opportunist parties. Engels’s affirmations are important because already back then, even though the phenomenon was limited to England, he identified the essential characteristic of opportunism in the partaking of large proletarian masses in privileges. Thus Engels:

[D]uring the period of England’s industrial monopoly the English working class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very unequally parcelled out amongst them; the privileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had, at least, a temporary share now and then. And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no socialism in England. With the breakdown of that monopoly, the English working class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally—the privileged and leading minority not excepted—on a level with its fellow-workers abroad. And that is the reason why there will be socialism again in England.¹²

The following quotation from Lenin is taken from Imperialism and the Split in Socialism written in October 1916 and is particularly important for the reason that it underlines the need for separation, above all organizational, of the new revolutionary proletarian parties from the old ones, by then irremediably opportunist, the cause of which was not accidental, but “economically substantiated”. The rebirth of class organizations also in the economic field is truly decisive for the revival of the revolutionary movement. Here are Lenin’s crucial affirmations:

The bourgeoisie of an imperialist “Great” Power can economically bribe the upper strata of “its” workers by spending on this a hundred million or so francs a year, for its superprofits most likely amount to about a thousand million. And how this little sop is divided among the labour ministers, labour representatives […], labour members of War Industries Committees, labour officials, workers belonging to the narrow craft unions, office employees, etc., etc., is a secondary question. […]

The last third of the 19th century saw the transition to the new, imperialist era. […] The monopoly of modern finance capital is being frantically challenged; the era of imperialist wars has begun. It was possible in those days to bribe and corrupt the working class of one country for decades. This is now improbable, if not impossible. […] Formerly a “bourgeois labour party”, to use Engels’s remarkably profound expression, could arise only in one country, because it alone enjoyed a monopoly, but, on the other hand, it could exist for a long time. Now a “bourgeois labour party” is inevitable and typical in all imperialist countries […].

On the one hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into “eternal” parasites […]. On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before […]. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labour movement will now inevitably develop. For the first tendency is not accidental; it is “substantiated” economically.¹³

Of the countless quotations from the party texts of the period following the second world war that reaffirm the same positions, the following one, taken from Revolutionary Party and Economic Action, is particularly significant, as it also reaffirms the full validity of the law of increasing misery of the proletariat. From the 1951 text:

[W]herever industrial production flourishes, a whole range of reformist assistance and providential measures exist for the employed worker. These constitute a new type of economic reserve representing a small stake in wealth, and this makes the position of the worker in those areas in a certain sense analogous to the artisan and small peasant. The wage-labourer thus has something to lose, and this makes him hesitant, and even opportunist when union struggles break out and worse still when there are strikes and rebellions. This was a phenomenon remarked on by Marx, Engels and Lenin with regard to the so-called labour aristocracy.¹⁴

The law of increasing relative misery

From the undeniable reality of the so-called “crumbs” granted to Western workers by imperialism, some of the worst falsifiers of Marxism have drawn the conclusion that Western workers have therefore become thoroughly “bourgeoisified” and that they are forever lost for the revolution! Other classes, social strata, or—in today’s preferred phrase—other “revolutionary political subjects” would have replaced the Western proletariat in its historical mission of burying the regime of capital. The natural corollary of such rubbish is the negation of one of the fundamental laws of Marxism: that of increasing relative misery of the proletariat. Not being able to reason dialectically, they cannot see that the phenomenon of the labour aristocracy, even more generalized today (in Western countries) than at the beginning of the capitalist era, does not scratch this law in the slightest.

In fact, for “the august professors” it is extremely difficult to follow reasoning so simple as to appear banal: a handful of imperialist states have been able to corrupt with their gigantic superprofits a considerable part of the proletariat of their respective countries; however, this possibility of corruption will be destined to dwindle with the dwindling of the very possibility of making those superprofits; hence, the Western proletariat will once again act as a revolutionary class.

Let us see how the law is presented by Marx:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. […] This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. […]

The fact that the means of production and the productivity of labour increase more rapidly than the productive population expresses itself, therefore, under capitalism, in the inverse form that the working population always increases more rapidly than the valorization requirements of capital. […]

It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. Finally, the law which always holds the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.¹⁵

Therefore, firstly, the law does not regard the individual worker, nor the rate of his wage, but the entire working-class population, whose living conditions are constantly worsening in relation to the swelling of the productive forces of capital. Today, more than ever before, production, and thus capital, have become internationalized, and so the proletariat too as a class de facto knows no national boundaries. Now, it is no mystery to anyone that millions upon millions of people are forced to live in destitution and in the most inhuman conditions, and the number of deaths from hunger grows every year, enough to move the usual devout bourgeois and romantic radicals. The following straightforward official data provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is more than exhaustive: between 1950 and 1970 the population of under-developed countries increased by one billion, while that of rich countries only by 200 million, and it is expected that around the year 2000, 80% of the world’s population will live in under-developed countries. In contrast, participation in world trade of the same countries in the same period has decreased from 32% to 17%. This simply means that the relationship between the living conditions of the world proletariat and those of the rich classes has deteriorated over the 20-year period from 1950 to 1970 at least tenfold!

Moreover, it should not be forgotten that another essential aspect of the law of increasing misery is the relativity of the misery of the proletariat vis-à-vis the power of capital. We will recall this characteristic using one of the innumerable passages from Marx:

Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker […]. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature. […]

Relative wages may fall, although real wages rise simultaneously with nominal wages, with the money value of labour […].¹⁶

In Marxism and Misery, our Thread of Time published in 1949 in Battaglia Comunista, we summarized the law in question as follows: “Misery in the economic Marxist dictionary does not mean ‘low remuneration of labour time’. […] Misery, on the contrary, means ‘a lack of any economic reserve which could be used for consumption in a case of emergency.’”¹⁷

If we consider that the economic privileges granted by imperialism to the Western working class (privileges, naturally, relative to the impoverished masses of the under-developed countries) are, certainly, powerful enough that they turn this working class even into an ally of its imperialist bourgeoisies against the peoples of other countries—but that they are also of such an ephemeral nature that it would only take for them to cease for a few weeks or months to deprive the overwhelming majority of workers of every reserve, then we must conclude that it is inevitable that the very same workers who are now super-opportunist will once again embrace the revolutionary programme. It must remain clear, however, that in all cases, for such a metamorphosis to take place, all reserves must become exhausted beforehand. The conditions of the existence of the proletariat must reproduce themselves also in Western countries, as has been foreseen since the time of the Manifesto.

This issue has very important political and organizational implications. It should in fact not be forgotten that the process by which the return of new class union organizations to the historical scene will be realized, on the one hand, presupposes the collapse of the giant imperialist superprofits, and, on the other hand, will only be possible through a struggle beyond borders against the existing ex-proletarian parties, which are a powerful factor of social stability and which embody the above-mentioned objective alliance between imperialism and the working class.

Even if the number of the pure proletarians described in the Manifesto were to increase, it is not at all certain that they would immediately find the revolutionary path. Of course, this is the most favourable prospect for the revolution, but we must also take into account another prospect, the most unfavourable one, which consists in the predictable ability of the imperialist states to mobilize those same workers to confirm their own privileges in the face of a real threat of their disappearance and consequently to tie them to the prospect of the continuation, perhaps by means of a new war, of the alliance between the Western working class and imperialism. In a similar prospect, despite the fact that the economic preconditions in the form of the existence of a new, vast, and powerful proletarian class would unequivocally obtain, this class would not be able to express its own strength socially and organizationally unless it decisively opposed new class organizations to the old ones, now permanently prey to opportunism.

Also in this regard, we are not discovering anything new but repeating, if anything less firmly, what revolutionary Marxism has clearly stated before. The following Lenin’s passage from June 1915, now that the prospects of new wars are more imminent, is more topical than ever:

The idea of class collaboration is opportunism’s main feature. The war has brought this idea to its logical conclusion, and has augmented its usual factors and stimuli with a number of extraordinary ones; through the operation of special threats and coercion it has compelled the philistine and disunited masses to collaborate with the bourgeoisie. This circumstance has naturally multiplied adherents of opportunism and fully explains why many radicals of yesterday have deserted to that camp.

Opportunism means sacrificing the fundamental interests of the masses to the temporary interests of an insignificant minority of the workers or, in other words, an alliance between a section of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat. The war has made such an alliance particularly conspicuous and inescapable. Opportunism was engendered in the course of decades by the special features in the period of the development of capitalism, when the comparatively peaceful and cultured life of a stratum of privileged workingmen “bourgeoisified” them, gave them crumbs from the table of their national capitalists, and isolated them from the suffering, misery and revolutionary temper of the impoverished and ruined masses. The imperialist war is the direct continuation and culmination of this state of affairs, because this is a war for the privileges of the Great-Power nations, for the repartition of colonies, and domination over other nations. To defend and strengthen their privileged position as a petty-bourgeois “upper stratum” or aristocracy (and bureaucracy) of the working class—such is the natural wartime continuation of petty-bourgeois opportunist hopes and the corresponding tactics, such is the economic foundation of present-day social imperialism.¹⁸

The proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing

We have stated that the preconditions of belonging to the proletarian class are not given by the content of the labour carried out, but by living conditions characterized by a lack of reserves of any kind. This must not lead to the erroneous thesis that every sector of wageworkers and every productive category has the same value from the revolutionary point of view. First, from the proletariat must be excluded in principle those categories that, even though they collect wages, perform functions exclusively tied to class oppression: priests and policemen, though wage labourers, will never belong to the proletarian class. Intellectuals themselves must be considered with circumspection. Indeed, whereas some of them carry out work that is socially useful and functional for the productive activity itself, others — even if forced to live in purely proletarian conditions (and this is today truer than it was in the past, at least potentially) — fulfil a function of surveillance of the proletariat with the aim of facilitating its exploitation by capital. The former will have to be drawn into the proletarian camp by leveraging their real and material living conditions; the latter will have to be treated as allies of the capitalist enemy.

This very subject was extensively discussed in 1925 and not by chance, since it is then that the theses on fascism as an autonomous movement of the middle classes were first being expressed by future fully-fledged traitors. In a public discourse held in Turin on March 22nd 1925, we resolved the question of the consideration of “intellectual workers” in the following terms, and we have not got the slightest reason to change anything. These are the crucial fragments:

Another objection regarding the socialist conception must be rejected, namely the antithesis between manual and intellectual activity, which intersect, complement each other in production; the exaltation of the former in contrast with the contempt for the latter, the exaltation of physical and mechanical work in contrast with the other. In rejecting this thesis, however, we certainly cannot arrive at the identification of the situation of intellectual workers with that of workers in big industry and large workshops. For one part of the class, it is a necessary, highly useful function, which will have to be exceedingly valued by a further organization that will strengthen the productive forces. As far as this part goes, the intellectuals will undoubtedly identify with the proletariat in a different and socialist organization of production, where the importance of manual labour will be put on a par with that of intellectual labour, as the latter fuses ever more into the great harmony of human activity.

This, however, does not detract from the fact that the class of intelligentsia, especially in certain of its strata, will gradually come to have interests that identify with those of the ruling class. Climbing slowly, we continue to find intellectuals who are still pure workers, even if they are paid better; proceeding further, we begin to find those who share in the profit of capital; their role […] assumes the form of guarding capitalism, of surveilling the proletariat so that it does not violate the bonds of the bourgeois system. This […] function must be rejected and combated […]. The class of intellectuals in its part of a strictly technical function is not destined to disappear, but to merge with the great ranks of the proletariat […].¹⁹

We have repeatedly affirmed that the outlined characteristics of economic-social nature are necessary for delimiting the proletarian class but represent merely the preconditions of its real existence and are therefore not yet sufficient to fully define it. The very concept of class, in Marxist language, is in fact a dynamic and not a static concept; beyond the contingencies, it identifies a historical-social programme capable of overturning the existing relations of production and replacing them with another mode of production. It is still not sufficient that a vast number of pure proletarians organize themselves in total autonomy from capitalist interests, for such a movement to fully embody the original Marxist conception of class. It is also necessary that such organizations be subject to the political leadership of the Communist Party: only then is the class for itself, and it can only be so in a revolutionary way. This is a point of principle which, if this is possible, more than any other characterizes the entire historical experience of the proletariat, condensed in the positions of the Left. It is the flesh and blood of the entire struggle for the foundation of the Party, of the defence against degeneration, of the arduous work of reconstituting the militant organization.

Whoever reduces Marxism to an analysis of society based on cataloguing according to economic interests [we wrote in 1953] comes off really amusingly dressed in the garb of a modern completer of Marxism, because he has not even assimilated its first fundamental statement. Marx would have only “begun” the analysis of modern society and would have merely laid the foundations of a socialist programme; and it is those gentlemen who have taken upon themselves “the continuation of this analysis today (how many modernizers of Marxism did we have and still have to hold off!) with an infinitely richer material [etc., etc.].” To dismiss similar pleasantries the dialectic need not be bothered—it is enough to blow a raspberry.

Without therefore taking those things seriously, we nevertheless find it useful to tread our path in this subject, reconstructing the organic presentation of Marxism, a building that already stands from the cellar to the roof, so that we are not interested in buying any new materials from anyone. […]

The class is then not a page in a census, but a historical movement, a struggle, a historical programme. The class that still has to find its programme is a meaningless concept. The programme determines the class.²⁰

The fundamental truth that the class does not exist as a historical force without the programme and therefore without the party means that in the era of the revolution and revolutionary victory the revolutionary proletariat will be recognizable more by the programme that it makes its own and defends than by its economic-productive position. However, all this must not make us forget the preconditions of precisely economic and—as a text of ours says—physical nature, which are indispensable for the working class so that it can act and fight for its own ends.

The correct Marxist praxis asserts that the consciousness of both the individual and the mass follow action; and that action follows the thrust of economic interest. Only within the class party does consciousness, and, in given circumstances, the decision to act, precede class conflict. But such a prospect is organically inseparable from the molecular interplay of the initial physical and economic impulses.²¹

This is why we must emphatically reaffirm the exactness of the weight that the party gives to the first attempts, even if confused and contradictory, of reconstituting the economic organization of the proletarian class, keeping in mind also that the velocity with which the existing social relations can evolve and even topple over is unpredictable, provided that, on the one hand, the recovery of the movement is based firmly upon the elementary physical and economic thrusts deriving from purely proletarian living conditions and, that, on the other hand, and above all, the party has been able to keep intact all the points of its immutable programme. This is the perspective already clearly outlined in our Lyons Theses:

There are situations when the balance of forces is objectively unfavourable to the revolution […]. It must be unequivocally stated that in certain situations, past, present and future, the proletariat has, does, and inevitably will in its majority adopt a non-revolutionary position—either a position of inertia or of collaboration with the enemy, as the case may be—but that despite everything, the proletariat everywhere and always remains the potentially revolutionary class entrusted with the revolutionary counter-attack; but this is only insofar as within it the communist party, without ever renouncing coherent interventions when appropriate, avoids taking paths that, despite appearing as the easiest routes to instant popularity, would divert it from its task and thereby remove the essential point of support for ensuring the proletariat’s recovery.²²