Ludovica Mancini and Conrad Hamilton present their translation of Italian communist Palmiro Togliatti’s prominent introduction to The Communist Manifesto.

*Leader of the Italian Communist Party Palmiro Togliatti meditating in front of a chessboard (1963)*

Introduction

In December 1948, a special volume of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI) review Rinascita (Reborn) was published to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the European Spring and the appearance of The Communist Manifesto. Titled “1848: A Collection of Essays and Testimonals,” it included notable contributions by Franco Cagnetta (“The Italian Translations of the Communist Party Manifesto”) and Emma Cantimori Mezzomonti (“Origin of the Manifesto”). But its centerpiece, and the essay which led it off, was by the then-PCI leader and Rinascita founder Palmiro Togliatti. Initially labeled “The Centenary of The Communist Manifesto,” Togliatti’s piece was later appended as an introduction to versions of his Italian translation of The Communist Manifesto issued by Edizioni Rinascita and, after 1953, Editori Riuniti. With the full permissions of Riuniti, it appears here for the first time in full in English, as translated from a 1980 edition of the Manifesto published in conjunction with Edizioni Progress.

“The Centenary of the Communist Manifesto” is as significant for its historical context as its content. In April 1948, the PCI—in political alliance with the Italian Socialist Party—suffered a decisive electoral loss to the right-wing Christian Democracy, who received extensive support from the United States and the Catholic church in the campaign. Brought to the brink of civil war by an election that threatened to overturn the delegation of Italy to the Anglo-American bloc agreed upon at Yalta, as well as to re-activate the partisan militias, the PCI’s April 18 defeat assured its entry to NATO the following year (while unhappy with the result, Togliatti contended himself with the knowledge that a potentially violent conflict the USSR did not want had been averted).¹ Three months later, on July 14, Togliatti narrowly survived an assassination attempt by a young Sicilian of the extreme right, Antonio Pallante. While Pallante plausibly claimed to have acted of his own initiative, the attack caused immediate political convulsions throughout Italy – namely, a brief but explosive general strike that featured gun battles between police and strikers, and that was called off by the PCI on July 16. The calamitous nature of these events is cited by the editors of Rinascita as the cause of the special volume’s relatively late appearance in the year – December, whereas the publication of The Communist Manifesto and the major revolutionary successes of 1848 occurred in the first half of that year.

In the years after its foundation in 1944, Rinascita earned a significant intellectual reputation both for its polemics against Italy’s liberal intellectual class – with Benedetto Croce in particular being singled out for scrutiny – as well as its championing of the innovative Marxism of Antonio Gramsci. Both these elements are in evidence in “The Centenary,” even if the names of Croce and Gramsci are not. The piece functions as an homage of sorts to Antonio Labriola’s slightly premature 1895 semi-centennial essay, “In Memory of the Communist Manifesto.” Whereas Labriola sought to expound an anti-positivistic and anti-evolutionary interpretation of Marxism from within the Second International, for Togliatti the Russian Revolution, as well as the sagacious leadership of Lenin and Stalin, have definitively proven that Marxism proceeds from the side of method rather than from the side of prophecy (though Togliatti would later nuance his views on Stalin in the 1950s, as his legacy began to be questioned within the USSR). The Manifesto could not have “foreseen everything that would follow the advent of capitalism as a global hegemonic force.” But by bestowing the workers with a scientific outline of reality in the making, it was able to—if not predict events with unerring accuracy—furnish them with a weapon with which to transform the world. It is the political victories of the workers, then, that put the lie to the fashionable claim that the “moralistic” content of the Manifesto is at odds with its scientific character. And discernible beneath all of this is a justification of Togliatti’s own adaptive political program, according to which the “war of maneuver” fought by the partisans must give way to a Gramscian “war of position” aimed at internally subverting the Italian state.

That Togliatti should—if we read between the lines—attempt to rationalize parliamentarism by appealing to the unforeseen nature of the Russian Revolution certainly speaks to his intellectual nimbleness. It also risks a serious contradiction. For how can Togliatti denounce social democrats old and new as “traitors” and “revisionists” when the PCI was itself seeking to squelch open class conflict? This is the charge made against the “Centenary” in one of the only texts that deals with it available in English, Giorgi Galli’s 1966 “An Essay on Revisionism in the Italian Communist Party” (while the Galli text is unique in that it discusses the work at hand, the charge of revisionism was increasingly leveled at the PCI in the ‘60s due to the Sino-Soviet split, instability in the “people’s democracies” in the Soviet bloc, and the wave of wildcat strikes that gripped Italy in the ‘60s). For Galli, the “Centenary” is self-serving and illogical in so far as it proclaims fidelity to the Manifesto while glossing over the differences between 1917 and 1848. It also finds Togliatti criticizing “revisionist” capitulationism – of, for instance, the German SDP – just as he was in the throes of accepting it. There is certainly much to be said for Galli’s arguments. At the same time though it is worth pointing out that while Togliatti’s vision of “progressive democracy” may have been similar to the approach of the German Social Democrats, the setting in which it transpired was decidedly different. The German SDP’s embrace of reformism occurred at a time when it was the most powerful socialist party in the world, and wielded considerable influence over the working-class of a state that was beholden to no one except its own bourgeoisie. After World War II, by contrast, Italy had been relegated to the status of an American satellite. In this context Togliatti sought to avoid the transformation of Italy into a “second Greece,”² staving off an armed conflict that—in the words of Molotov – the PCI was “in no position”³ to win.

Togliatti’s strategy then, considered with respect to its place and time, is more defensible than it is often made out to be. Yet we should also delimit its efficacy. Seeing no other feasible option, Togliatti hitched the fortunes of the PCI to those of the Soviet Union, biding time until the strengthening of the socialist camp would deliver Italian communists from their conundrum. The PCI’s failure is as such also the failure of the USSR, as well as that of global socialism in the twentieth century (leaving aside the question of China). In the past few years though Togliatti has had the mixed blessing of having come ‘into fashion’ in the English-speaking world. The reason for this is clear: because his construction of a ‘mass party’ is looked upon by American democratic socialists as a model worth emulating, or at least one that offers instructive lessons for their electoralism. It is not clear that this comparison really holds up. The American socialist left is not the German SDP of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—it is not anywhere near as powerful, or as theoretically productive. But nor is it confronted by the same dual-power dynamic that obstructed communist victory in post-war Italy. It is thus necessary to exercise caution before trotting out Togliatti’s war of position as an implicit justification for political compromises made today. Instead, we should read his work, deeply, as well as try to understand the conjuncture which informed it. Having this text available in English will hopefully make this easier.

Believe me,

Dear citizen,

Your devoted,

Conrad Hamilton and Ludovica Mancini

The Centenary of the Communist Manifesto

Translated by Ludovica Mancini and Conrad Hamilton

As significant excerpts from this text appear in English in Giorgi Galli’s “An Essay on Revisionism in the Italian Communist Party,” this translation at times reflects the influence of the work he’d already completed. Note also that certain changes to punctuation have been made to cited passages to bring them into conformance with Togliatti’s citations.

If it is true that books have their own destiny, none had a more singular destiny than this pamphlet of not even fifty pages, written one hundred years ago with the intention of giving order to the ideas and political activity of a few dozens or hundreds of advanced democrats and militant workers, and which became the starting point of the most profound upheaval of thought and the greatest social movement that history has ever known. When Antonio Labriola extolled its virtues in 1895, he evinced awareness of this destiny from the first to the last word of his famous essay. This awareness however presented itself for the most part as a new intellectual foray and forecast of future historical developments. The goals it aspired to were fated, but distant. Labriola’s nearly fifty-year celebration closes with the picture of a world in the process of revolutionary transformation. But this picture is still qualitatively the same as the one that Marx and Engels had drawn when describing the coming to power of the bourgeois class and the function it fulfilled as the driving force of social progress.

“When, fifty years ago, the Manifesto made of the proletarians, of the unfortunates who excited pity, the predestined grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie, the circumference of this burial place must have appeared very small to the imagination of the writers who scarcely concealed in the gravity of their style the idealism of their intellectual passion. The probable circumference in their imagination then embraced only France and England, and it would scarcely have touched the frontiers of other countries, for instance, Germany. To-day the circumference appears to us immense by reason of the rapid and colossal extension of the bourgeois form of production which by inevitable reaction enlarges, makes universal and multiplies the movement of the proletariat and immensely expands the scene upon which is projected the picture of the coming communism. The burial place extends as far as the eye can reach. The more productive forces this magician calls forth, the more he excites and prepares forces that must rebel against himself”.⁴

A few lines later, pointing to Japan as the definitive concrete example of the veracity of the new historical doctrine, he concludes: “The earth will not be won over to communism tomorrow”.⁵

We do not need to investigate now to what extent it is evident, in the quoted passage, how the way of understanding Marxism characteristic of Labriola–in which his clear vision of the dialectical progress of history was not always integrated with an equally complete vision of reality and the needs of the conscious movement of workers–led this new conception of history to be veiled by a shadow of objective fatalism. Today, fifty years after the end of Labriola’s epoch, it is the very reality of the life of peoples and classes, as it has developed over the past century, that gives our celebration of this document a different tone and content. If in 1848 socialism passed from utopia to science, in 1917 the scientific prediction, the distant goal of the conquest of power by the working class, became a concrete reality. The construction and consolidation of the workers’ newfangled power, the economic transformations that were initiated and victoriously carried out by it, and the transformation of the socialist State itself into a great and victorious world power, have dissipated even the last trace of inconclusive messianism and have replaced confidence with certainty, expectation with realization. In front of the eyes of everyone – not only the experts and initiated – they have integrated the dialectic of thought into the far fuller and more convincing dialectic of the historical reality of our times.

Is it for this reason that when we speak of the Manifesto today the mask of objectivity that in the past permitted even a non-socialist to speak of it as a classic work which should be read in schools falls away? Today the Jesuit and the liberal are united in speaking of a ‘worn out and fusty document’, lacking ‘originality,’ which even in its own time had no real effect – and if it did, its result was failure. These two are echoed by the pedantic and turncoat Social Democrat, for whom none of the Marxist theses of 1848 are valid and for whom all must be ‘revised’. The most benevolent of critics will speak of a political and social mythos which contrasts with the reality of rigorous historical research.⁶ But why don’t these gentlemen dare to consider the objective reality of a century of development of the workers’ movement, which is birthed in the Manifesto and to which it continuously returns in order to confirm its pronunciations and postulates, the proof of the facts, as they have unfolded up to now and as they mature in the whole world before our eyes?

The unparalleled greatness of the Manifesto lies in the inseparable unity of facts and thought that a century of history has confirmed step by step. For this reason it is truly the first document of that thinking which not only interprets the world, but also transforms it. By tracing for the first time the fundamental laws of development of human society, it renews the science of this society. By scientifically indicating the historical function of the proletariat as a force called by the very course of things to renew the world, it opens a new period in the development of its class consciousness and thereby forges the weapon destined to shape the new history of humanity. While announcing the entry onto the scene of a new force whose struggle for self-liberation resolves the contradictions of the bourgeois capitalist world, it gives this force the self-awareness it needs to organize and triumph.

There is a particular criticism of Marxism circulating in our country today, consisting in finding or constructing an internal contradiction between the realism of its historical analysis of society and its laws of development, and its aspiration to a new, ideal, perfect society. Here there would be a co-contamination of contrasting elements: on the one hand, of the rigorous affirmation of a dialectical, objective process; on the other, of the utopian aspiration to implement humanitarian principles deduced not according to the dialectic of things, but according to the abstract reasoning of the eighteenth-century natural law school. The strangest of positions is that of those who–following this critique–after having accused Karl Marx⁷ of having constructed his economic doctrines with a “moralistic intent,”⁸ then change sides and align themselves with the Jesuits, while blaming him for showing “blindness to ideal values”; for having thoroughly debased and denied “all mental, moral and aesthetic values”.⁹ This proves once again what bizarre contradictions a critique that springs not from an objective search for truth but from the practical need to defend a class position can lead to. One might as well burn the documents of our doctrine as Hitler and Mussolini did, instead of claiming to have refuted them with arguments of this nature.

The social utopianism of the end of the XVIII century and the beginning of the XIX century is the highest point reached by the rationalistic thought which the bourgeoisie used to give to its revolution the breadth and grandeur of a fight fought in the name of ‘eternal truths’, not revealed by God but deduced this time according to the laws of nature and reason. There is no doubt that the bourgeoisie, in its struggle against the feudal nobility, had a “certain right”¹⁰ (Engels) to consider itself as the representative of all the oppressed classes of society. In this struggle, however, it couldn’t liberate anything but itself, since it constructed a social order in which class differences remained and the exploitation of the majority of men by a minority continued in other forms. Thus the bourgeoisie, despite the undeniable progress made by those thinkers who had already come to recognize the weight of ‘interests’ as the driving force of human progress and history, could not justify its revolution historically. It had to stop at rationalistic justification, which is what the utopians take to extreme lengths, beating a path that had already been opened by the Jacobins albeit more coherently. The first revolutionary attempts of the proletarian nuclei forged in the petit-bourgeois and plebeian masses that had supported the Jacobin dictatorship arose from the dissatisfaction for the lack of social achievements of this dictatorship. It tended to, without jettisoning its idealism, continue the revolutionary movement by taking it to its apotheosis–until happiness will be given to all people, not only to a small group of the newly privileged. Babeuf simply draws “the final consequences of the democracy of ‘93”.¹¹ He does not, therefore, cross the frontiers of a rationalistic conception. And even though the social utopians who chronologically succeeded him had an increasingly clear notion of the historical development of society and the clash of classes, none of them succeeded in crossing these frontiers. In one way or another, they all return to a greater or lesser extent to the ‘eternal truths’, to natural rights, to the necessity of eliminating the class contradictions that tear society apart by appealing to human reason–even that of the most conservative and reactionary among the governments and rulers of the bourgeoisie–to put an end to an ‘irrational’ order. “For the basic plan of the new edifice they could only appeal to reason, just because they could not as yet appeal to contemporary history.”¹² (Engels)

The new conception of the world and history begins precisely with the final overcoming of rationalism and natural law. The social upheaval to which the working class tends is no longer justified by the need to implement the principles of reason, but by the need for the objective process of history. Certainly neither the old science nor the old philosophy could achieve this, although the work of the most advanced historians of the early nineteenth century presaged this new achievement of human thought. What was needed was a doctrine that, after having liquidated the metaphysical content of eighteenth-century rationalism, could at the same time overcome the new metaphysics of idealism, by establishing a strictly realistic (materialistic) and historicist (dialectical) conception of the world. Such is the conception that guides the historical analysis of the Manifesto and which directly leads to the concrete revolutionary tasks of the proletariat. “Economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles.”¹³ What is in here that resembles the abstract ideals of the rationalists and social utopians? The ‘ideal’, if you want to call it that, to which the class struggle of the proletariat tends, is the very end of the class struggle. But it is an ‘ideal’ which necessarily springs from the objective course of history. The Manifesto gives the working class for the first time the consciousness of this necessity. It makes it a class ‘in and for itself’; it opens up a path which it must follow by gradually adapting its concrete objectives and its action to the situation it faces, and of which its struggle itself becomes the main element. For the first time, it actually unites the working class and socialism, forever destroying the very possibility of a rationalistic or naturalistic utopianism, replacing the proclamation of the abstract principles of truth, right and good, with the concrete search and construction of the path by which the revolution develops and celebrates its triumph.

In the past year Victor Considérant’s Manifesto of Democracy, from which the founders of scientific socialism supposedly borrowed their doctrine, has been regularly dusted off once again. This is a text that no one has read for decades and decades, which was already ignored by everyone a few years after its publication. It was so quickly dropped from history precisely because of the banal and abstract humanitarianism that inspires it, because of the profoundly mistaken view of the social structure of capitalism which serves as its foundation. “What was V. Considérant? What was Karl Marx?” – wrote Stalin in 1906-1907. – Considérant… a disciple of the utopian Fourier… remained an incorrigible utopian, who placed his hopes for the “salvation of France” on the conciliation of classes.. Karl Marx… materialist, an enemy of the utopian. He regarded the development of the productive forces and the struggle between classes as the guarantee of the liberation of mankind. Is there anything in common between them?”¹⁴

And what can be said about the Social Encyclicals, which people try to counterpose with the Manifesto, as if they contained a superior doctrine and had more profoundly exercised their influence in the last decades of contemporary history? They lack, first of all, any demonstrative force. Both because of the absence of an exact vision of the problems and tensions of the modern world, which are neither those of the Jewish world nor of early Christianity nor of the Middle Ages, nor, to put it briefly, of charity in general, and because of the abused Jesuitical way of distorting and counterfeiting the thought of others in order to engage in facile polemics. Of the two parts on which they are all built,¹⁵ the second, which very carefully calls for provisions in favor of workers in the name of the principles of Catholic morality, poorly conceals the narrow class content of the first, where the most spiteful assessments of the ascendance of workers’ organizations and of socialism are badly hidden under a cloak of pedantic haughtiness. The Rerum novarum strenuously trammels up sad memories. It judges strikes a “grave disgrace”,¹⁶ and it portrays the already great organizations of the workers at that time as led by “secret leaders”¹⁷ who govern in a manner contrary to the public good. All in all, these are documents in which the ruling hierarchy of the Catholic Church too obviously attempts its last defense of the economic, political and social order to which it is still tied today. This is revealed by the very moment in which they were brought out. Not when capitalism, in order to open up and conquer the world, engendered misery, infamy, and the massacre of adults and minors alike. But when the proletarians, awakened and organized, had become for the bourgeois order an imminent threat.

It is clear, then, why the Manifesto appeared precisely during the great European crisis of 1848. Europe was at that time essentially the whole civilized world, and the revolution of ‘48, by destroying the theocratic and feudal vestige that was the Holy Alliance, definitively affirmed the bourgeois capitalist order in the decisive centers of European economic and political life. After 1848, capitalism dominated Europe. But because it had reached this stage of its development, its antagonist, the proletariat, asserted itself as an autonomous force. The Manifesto is its first battle cry, launched with full self-awareness and confidence in the future. It is not for nothing that it is with a splendid description of the universal fear of communism that its immortal pages open. It is not for nothing that this fear was decisive to the politics of the bourgeois class even in those countries, like Italy, where from the bosom of the petit bourgeoisie and the rural and city plebs a true and proper proletariat had not yet emerged.

The content of the great document itself is defined by the radically new approach it takes to the question of social revolution and the new method it follows in determining the tasks of the working class. The polemic that addresses the other current of socialist thought at the time is reduced to the last ten pages, and its exceptional vigor stems not so much from a detailed examination of the doctrines criticized as from the fact that each of them is traced, as a whole, to a determinate class position and its interweaving with ideological motives. Those who still insist that the Marxist conception of the world and of history precludes comprehension of intellectual movements should re-read these pages, which are more valuable for their understanding, their qualification, their sharp analysis of social doctrines that in the last century and still today are locked in competition, than entire treatises comprised of new ‘sociology’ or of traditional political doctrines. The actors of the modern social struggle are here stripped of their guises and shown in their true character:¹⁸ the aristocrats who wave the proletarian alms-bag for a banner; the priest who, with his “clerical socialism,”¹⁹ consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat; the petty bourgeois who wants to cramp the modern means of production within the old property relations at all costs; the preachers of fantastic social plans, hostile, however, to any political movement of the workers; the bourgeois philanthropists who seek to preserve capitalist society “for the benefit of the working class”;²⁰ the “true socialists” who nourish the petty bourgeoisie with pompous phrases. In this framework the criticism derives from the very movement of things. The triumph of scientific socialism springs from a clash of real forces, which brings about the collapse of the old ideologies.

The actual program consists of just ten points, valid however in their entirety for a whole historical period. So much so that every revolutionary movement of our time can still be traced back to them, in order to judge its influence and social and economic efficacy.

But of greater import than the polemic and the ten planks is the fundamental doctrine of the Manifesto, which is that of class struggle. Of its formation in the period of capitalism; of its inevitable, objective development up to the seizure of power by the proletariat and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship as a means of governing and transforming society in the interest of the great majority of men. That is as a true democracy, which suppresses all class differences and all forms of exploitation of men. “My own contribution was:

1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”²¹

With the acquisition of these decisive principles, the workers’ movement emerges from the infancy of pure and simple support for the progressive movements of the bourgeoisie, breaks the narrow limits of trade unionism, acquires a precise consciousness of its objectives and becomes a revolutionary political movement.

After this comes the cherry on top–the first strategic and tactical guidelines for the party of the proletariat. They are condensed into a few propositions and are closely linked to the situation in each European country, from France to Germany, from Switzerland to Poland. But they are held together like a common thread by a few essential principles which, like lighthouses, will illuminate the way for the entire future movement: the communists “fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement”;²² they “everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things”;²³ they “labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.”²⁴

The most convincing, concrete proof of the greatness of the Manifesto, of the undisputed veracity of the new doctrine it proclaims, lies in the hundred years of history that have passed since 1848. What political and social doctrine formulated at the same time, or before, or after it has so stood the test of time? And where is the criticism leveled against the doctrine of Marx and Engels that has not been undone by the sum of the facts? Who would dare to admit that the history of the entire XIX century and of the XX century so far have been anything other than a succession, a widening, an interweaving of class struggles to different degrees and in different moments of their development? The Marxist doctrine is the only one that allows us to grasp the internal logic of these hundred years of history and to have a coherent vision of them. From the triumph of the capitalist system over the feudal one to the extension of the domination of the bourgeoisie over the entire world, from the foundation of national markets to the foundation of a world market; from the formation of the proletariat through the development of bourgeois production itself to the development of the political consciousness of this new class in all countries and the growth of its organization; from the first unsuccessful attempts at proletarian revolt to the great revolutionary mass movements and the conquest of power; from the creation of the national states as the form of government of the bourgeoisie to the struggle of the individual national bourgeoisies, driven by the very laws of capitalist production, for economic expansion and for European and world domination; from the national wars of the first half of the nineteenth century to the colonial wars that prevailed in the second half. And finally to the two subsequent, tremendous world wars; from the feverish, fitful evolution of the capitalist economies that entered the imperialist period–an evolution determined by nothing other than the objective law of profit formation–to the breaking of the imperialist chain at several points and thus the beginning of a new period in human history. In the vision and description of the historians and thinkers who criticize and reject the Marxist conception, this succession of events takes on the appearance of a disordered and chaotic jumble, the contemplation of which induces an ultramodern strain of deep irrationalism, the denial of the efficacy of our reason and actions, and–finally–the desperation of those who’ve lost all sense of the coherence of reality. Clerical obscurantism, of course, profits from this catastrophic liquidation of the heroic and proud impulses of eighteenth-century rationalism. The most astute thinkers of the decadent bourgeoisie try to escape this catastrophe by carving out of the history of a century of political and social struggles an account specifically chosen to demonstrate the triumph of abstract ‘freedom.’ In fact it is their goal to thwart the concrete freedom of a class fighting for political predominance so as to give all human freedoms tangible content. They can no longer fit reality into their ideological schemes.

Not even the Manifesto could have foreseen everything that would follow the advent of capitalism as a global hegemonic force and the spread and progressive sharpening of the class struggle of the proletariat. It is an outmoded game played by those who, in vain, try to falsify and discredit our doctrine by reducing it to a naive prophecy of immediate upheaval and of the immediate coming of the ideal kingdom of justice and freedom. Nobody has ever been, and no one is today, more prudent than Marxists in making forecasts about the future, and this is precisely because Marxists–unlike ideologists and false prophets–have a dialectical view of reality, which means that they strive to understand reality in all of its various aspects and as a complete whole. They know how its different elements act and react to each other, and above all they know how to investigate thoroughly the objective process of things, which can only be understood by means of dialectical materialism. It is true that at the end of ‘48 and in ‘49 Marx and Engels might have expected that an immediate economic crisis would soon bring about a revolutionary crisis. But a few months later–guided by their scientific zeal and clear-cut knowledge of the situation–they left that overhasty prediction to the dullards. In the Manifesto, in their subsequent historical works, in their letters and in their political treatises what dominates is not superficiality, but the tireless search for knowledge; an awareness of the complex intertwining of the paths of capitalism and class struggle as well as of capitalist states and the differences between them. When the Manifesto was written and set loose upon the world, capitalism had not yet reached the apex of its development. This makes the general conclusion it arrives at all the more valuable, as it fixes the goal of the proletarian struggle as the raising of the “proletariat to the position of ruling class and the conquest of democracy.”²⁵ The conquest, that is, of the political supremacy the proletariat will use “to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.”²⁴ Also of great importance are the other indications given periodically in the works of these pioneers about the problems that would be faced by the proletariat once it became the ruling class and how they would be solved, such as Engels’ prediction about the “privations”²⁶ of the period of transition from capitalism to socialism and its moral usefulness. With the development of the capitalist system, it was necessary that our doctrine, the class consciousness of the proletariat and its political action, be adapted to it. We can confidently say today that three crucially important things took place through travails and clashes, theoretical and practical struggles, which furnished proof that the Marxist doctrine of 1848 is the only one that can provide the thought and action of men with the possibility of understanding and transforming the modern world.

With the massacre of June 1848 and the reactionary epilogue to the upheavals of that period, the bourgeoisie believed it had put an end to the political movement of the workers on the Continent. After several years, in a show of how the vitality of this movement derives from the strengthening of capitalism itself, the “International Workingmen’s Association” was formed, and the new Marxist doctrine prevailed over the husks of the old non-Marxist social sermonizing. “All doctrines of non-class socialism and non-class politics proved to be sheer nonsense.”²⁷ (Lenin). In 1871, immediately after Bonapartism had led one of the principal European capitalist nations to catastrophe, the proletariat–confronted with a vacuum of power–filled it by following the path indicated in the Manifesto. The Commune was the first time the working class became the ruling class, it is the archetypal proletarian democracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat’s trial run as a new class governance. “Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained”²⁸ (Marx). Then a wave of white panic strikes the European bourgeoisie; Paris suffers a bloodbath. The “International Workers’ Association” vaporizes, but Marxism emerges victorious: the great mass of workers’ parties formed in the ensuing twenty years occupy the terrain staked out by the Manifesto and devote themselves to the political struggle and organizational work required to conserve within the proletariat consciousness of their revolutionary tasks and to repel the influences of the opposing classes that–especially in countries in which capitalism was experiencing a period of prosperity–are exercised in the bosom of the workers’ organizations. For more than twenty years, first Marx and Engels, then Engels alone, led this activity and this struggle in one of the periods of their lives that has been studied the least but which contains, either fully developed or at least in nuclei, all the principal aspects of the theoretical and political struggle which was to be waged by Lenin, Stalin, the Russian Bolshevik Party, and the Third International. Of course, this period tends to be forgotten by all the deserters and traitors to the working class, who after bowing rhetorically to the Manifesto then go on to reject all its contents with the pretext that a new historical situation has arisen and this means that ‘revision’ is necessary. The document of 1848 is to be completed, by developing it–it is not to be ‘revised.’ After the period from the 1850s to the 1870s its authors, having explicated the resistance of the peasantry to the workers’ advance, had already better defined how to go about constructing an alliance with the rural masses against big capital. The experience of the Commune however required a deeper elaboration of the structure of the bourgeois state and of the proletariat’s task of destroying it in order to build its own fully democratic alternative. The experience of the legal, parliamentary, and Trade Union activity carried out by the German Social Democrats, the British Labor Party, and the French Socialists made it essential, after the final breach with the petty-bourgeois anarchism of Bakunin, to open fire against opportunism, which is the main danger for the Socialist movement in the period when the objective and subjective conditions for revolution are maturing. The first documents in this struggle, in the new conditions of the last decades of the XIX century, come from the same minds as those that conceived and wrote the Manifesto. The Social Democratic traitors were forced, in order to justify their revisionist pretenses, to falsify the famous Preface Engels wrote to the Class Struggles in France in 1895; and to hide from the public the vigorous protests made by the two old Masters against ‘the work of shoring-up capitalist society’ to which the future German Social traitors were already dedicating themselves. The denunciation made by Lenin and the Bolsheviks of social democracy as the party of the bourgeoisie within the working class, and the main support of capitalism, is already contained in germ in these positions.

The decisive, indispensable step forward by Marxist thought to adapt itself entirely to the new reality of developing capitalism was taken by Lenin when he formulated the doctrine of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism. Once again, Marxism understands and explains the objective necessity of an economic evolution which does not depend upon the will of individuals, and that remains a mysterious aberration for the uninitiated. And once again Marxism unites thought, instruction and concrete activity. The doctrine of imperialism is inseparably linked with that of the proletarian revolution in the imperialist period, and of the leading role of the party of the working class in this revolution. In the Leninist doctrine of imperialism there is the same element of general prediction that we found in the Manifesto, and the two predictions were completely fulfilled when the working class, profiting from a profound crisis in the bourgeois world and from the very conflict that divided it into two warring camps, snapped the chain of the bourgeoisie’s world domination and opened a new era, the era of the end of this domination and of the construction of a socialist society.

Besides the doctrine of imperialism, the arsenal of Marxism has been enriched with many other weapons. Across three revolutions and through the great work of building Socialism, Lenin and Stalin, at the head of the Bolshevik Party, have developed our whole doctrine in all fields. The way in which relations between the imperialist states were configured has made clear the possibility of building socialism in only one country. The relations between the proletariat and the peasantry before and after the revolution; the way to direct the building of socialism and prepare for the transition to communism; the character of the new socialist state and the conditions of its extinction–these and other problems of great importance have been addressed and resolved. The ensemble of the forces driving world revolution has been enlarged and has come to include, as indispensable allies, the colonial peoples in revolt against their oppression and exploitation. Each of these new achievements not only does not contradict or ‘revise’ the Manifesto, but can be traced back in embryonic form to that document. Revision begins when, instead of heeding the development of the class struggle in the conditions of a new world, one renounces it in order to adopt a policy of capitulation towards the opposing class, with which one collaborates in order to allow it to keep the capitalist regime in place and to repel the forward march of the proletariat.

The First World War has already taught an important lesson. Opportunist social democracy completely failed in its task. By siding with the war-mongering bourgeois parties, it placed itself in the service of imperialism. Between the two wars, the chasm separating the traitors and the forces that remained faithful to Marxist teaching became deeper and deeper; parties of the Social-Democratic International sank lower and lower, to the point of becoming accomplices of all sorts of reactionary regimes and even of fascism. The Second World War has seen the chain of imperialism undergo new breakages, and the forces of the proletariat, after first recognizing and fulfilling the task of aligning themselves in the front rank of the struggle to destroy the most reactionary aspects of the imperialist bourgeois regime, have had to fight against their old enemies in new conditions. The people who have been capable of leading the working class and the vanguard of workers in these new conditions, have been the parties which have remained faithful to the teaching of Marx and Engels in the most scrupulous fashion, and the Country of the proletarian dictatorship. Since the Second World War, new paths toward the acquisition of power have been opened up for the working class in some countries, because of the help given by the nation of triumphant socialism. But the fundamental political teaching of Marxism has not been contradicted, according to which the conquest of democracy for all workers and the transition from capitalism to socialism demand that the working class should become the ruling class and as such should exercise power.

The front of the allied forces²⁹ fighting for social progress has become wider and better organized. But the historical and political truth of Marx and Engels has not been contradicted. The confidence of the proletarians and oppressed peoples of the whole world has become a hundred, a thousand times more solid, as a consequence of the radical emancipatory upheaval that the Manifesto announced.

Imperialism has lost part of its strength and most of its prestige. Its efforts to rebuild a system of world domination have so far been in vain and will continue to be so. History marches inexorably on the path traced one hundred years ago by the titanic thought of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The vanguard consciousness and action of the new proletarian ruling class go hand in hand with it. The incomprehension, the hatred, the sometimes unrestrained anger of opponents and enemies cannot prevail. One hundred years of thought, action, sacrifices, struggles and victories are a sufficient pledge of inevitable triumph.

Palmiro Togliatti, 1948

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Supposedly Togliatti stated to Franco Rodano after the elections that these “are the best results we could have obtained. This is fine.” [Agosti, Aldo. Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography, trans. Vanna Derosas and Jane Ennis. 1996. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 195.]
Agosti, Aldo. Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography, trans. Vanna Derosas and Jane Ennis. 1996. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 189.
Ibid., p. 194.
Labriola, Antonio. “In Memory of the Communist Manifesto.” Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, trans. Charles H. Kerr. 1903. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966, p. 90.
Ibid., p. 91.
See: Quaderni della “Critica”, La civiltà cattolica, La critica sociale and Belfagor.
Translator’s Note: Throughout his introduction to the Manifesto, Togliatto Italianizes Marx and Engels’ names, referring to them as “Carlo” Marx and “Federico” Engels. As there is no equivalent practice in English, and as Joe Strummer is perhaps the only notable individual to have referred to Marx as “Carlo” in the English-language tradition, the original German first names are used here.
Translator’s Note: While Togliatti places the words “moralistic intent” (“intento moralistico”) in quotation marks alongside several direct quotes from the Quaderni della Critica no. 8, the sixteenth page of no. 9 he cites says as much without ever using these exact words (in the essay titled, should we translate the Italian, “The Imaginary Passage of Marxist Communism From Utopia to Science”).
cf. “Quaderni della Critica”, n. 8, pp. 6-7, and n. 9, p. 16.
Translator’s Note: While Togliatti seems to imply that “certain right” (“certo diritto” in the original) is a direct quote from Engels, the closest thing to it in his work appears in the third part of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: “But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification.”[Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 24: Marx and Engels 1845-1848. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 322.]
Engels, Frederick. “The Festival of Nations in London.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 6: Marx and Engels 1845-1848. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 5.
Engels, Frederick. “Anti-Duhring, Part III: Socialism.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 25: Engels. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 253.
Engels, Frederick. “Preface to the 1883 German edition of The Manifesto of The Communist Party.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 26: Engels 1882-89. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 118.
Stalin, J.V. “Anarchism or Socialism?” J. Stalin, Works 1: 1901-1907. Moscow, 1954: Foreign Languages Publishing House, p. 353.
Translator’s Note: This is a strange and vexing passage, since Togliatti describes the specific structure of the Rerum novarum while imputing it to all (“tutte”) of the social encyclicals.
Translator’s Note: Though in the 1891 Rerum novarum of Pope Leo XIII strikes are criticized in so far as they upset the “peace and good order” of the “community,” the Italian phrase “grave disgrace” is translated from— “sconcio grave”—never appears directly (Togliatti here may have been thinking of “disordine grave,” a term which does appear in the Italian version).
Pope Leo XIII. “Rerum novarum: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labor.” La Santa Sede, para. 54, http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html.
Translator’s Note: In the following sentences, Togliatti quotes several phrases from The Communist Manifesto only some of which are placed in quotation marks; accordingly, this translation follows suit in applying using the English equivalents available in the version of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in the sixth volume of Lawrence & Wishart’s Marx & Engels Collected Works.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 6: Marx and Engels 1845-48. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 508.
Ibid., p. 514.
Marx, Karl. “Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 39: Letters 1852-55. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 62, p. 65.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 6: Marx and Engels 1845-48. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 518.
Ibid., p. 519.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 504. Translator’s Note: the English translation cited here has been modified slightly to bring it in greater conformance with the Italian citation used by Togliatti. “proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy” has accordingly been changed to “proletariat to the position of ruling class and the conquest of democracy,” reflecting the Italian “conquista.”
Engels, Frederick. “Introduction to K. Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 27: Engels 1890-95. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 201. Translator’s Note: The term “privations” has been lifted here from the Introduction by Engels Togliatti refers to in this passage even when the term Togliatti places in quotation marks, “strettezze,” does not appear to have been used in Italian translations to represent the German (in the original version in Rinascita, the term “angustie” is used).
Lenin, V.I. “The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx.” Lenin Collected Works: Volume 18, April 1912-March 1913. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968, p. 583.
Marx, Karl. “Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 17 April 1871.” Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 44: Letters 1870-73. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010, p. 137.
Translator’s Note: “forze alleate” is an interesting choice of words, given its association with the Allied Forces of World War II of which both the Italian partisans and the fascists and liberals of Marshall Badoglio’s government were a part.