Within the traditional distribution of social functions in primitive Indo-european communities (ministers, warriors, producers), several eminent anthropological studies report the constant sense of danger of warriors. Unlike ministers and producers, warriors’ life was marked by mortal risks and sacrifices. As a matter of fact, as highlighted by archaeological discoveries about primitive communist communities (Mohenio Daro and Harappa), defensive needs have always required high sacrifices to the communities’ defenders (as nowadays they require high sacrifice to workers in fight against capitalist regime).
If we could report everything happening in workplaces in our current capitalistic society, we would probably need many more pages than the ones used by Dante in drafting his Inferno. Indeed, Inferno is a fitting definition for what is happening to workers in modern “capitalistic business cages”. ‘‘A state machine of unprecedented proportions and repressive capacity keeps the masses chained to exploitation, worse than a body to a torturing wheel. The chaos and the pain of the working class are so high and intense that it has been transformed into a unconsciously squirming bloody stump: its brain is clouded and intoxicated, its awareness is narcotised, the eyes turned blind, the hands twist themselves. Rather than the class struggle, there is a horrifying internal struggle as castaways on a raft at the mercy of waves. Espionage, informing, resentment, petty and rude revenge, the most stolid and bestial opportunism, arrogance, neurasthenic abuse rule in factories. The masses, oppressed by the consequences of thirty years of terrible defeats, are not even able to feel authentic nausea as this is expressed in the miasmatic exhalations of corporatism and, on the political level, of social conciliationism and enveloping pacifism (Dizionarietto dei chiodi revisionistici: Attivismo”, essay from the 50s).
However, we are aware that, beyond the current conditions and what the proletariat sees as its day-by-day goal, what actually matters is what the proletariat will be historically forced to do concerning its socio-economic condition. The working class’ vanguard that refuses to bend to despotism and capitalist parasitism, sometimes suffers the hostility and ingratitude of their colleagues (resigned to their condition) and the reprisals of the company management (anxious to punish every sign of insubordination).
And yet, despite everything, this vanguard, along with the formal Marxist forces that embody its political sublimation, keeps fighting the capitalist regime inside and outside the factory, in the name of the common good, just as communist warriors of Mohenio Daro and Harappa have done thousands of years ago.
Capitalist society has always been marked by class struggle between labour and capital. The shocks of the productive forces against the production relations have always been there, even in the “dead” phases like the current one. Only at a certain point they become so strong (transitioning from quantity to quality) so to generate the ionizing electric discharge, whereby “the individual molecule-man runs in his array and flies along his line of force”.
Only then the proletarian class find its program and, together with the party, fights for its realization, as happened in 1917 in Russia. “Marxism is a theory of human action and a theory of the production of consciousness, but it is for this very reason that this action, this practice, is its conscience, it is this consciousness produced; therefore, it is his absolute truth. Therefore we can say that it is a guide for action (the party, as an organized action of the proletariat, is the subject of history), a guide to human action, a guide that leads towards the liberation of man, towards the his awareness, towards the communist society: it is the guide to human emancipation” from ‘Origine e funzione della forma partito’, 1962.