The author of this Report is at a big disadvantage: nothing, or almost nothing, in it can be treated in a light tone. The 20th century thinks otherwise, and it has its reasons. Our democracy, in which the expression of personal opinions is claimed by an infinity of brave people who don't have the time they used to have, requires everyone to speak with a frivolity that we, in our turn, are obliged to dispense with, considering the necessities of the time.
This first disadvantage, however, doesn't protect us from an opposing disadvantage; if we refuse a light tone, we don't any less refuse an academic or serious style, for the good reason that we don't intend to show in 50 pages what can be said in 5 lines. We wish that this double premise serves to excuse us, if not our trenchant [1] tone.
In these first lines, we want to thank a number of illustrious Italians whom we name as if they were dead, but whom, at this important moment, are occupied with the burdens of our economy and politics; on the contrary, we know that they are pleased with our discretion, given the undeniably delicate character of the subjects treated herein. All that we permit ourselves to do is offer these pages, which we have finally decided to publish under the aspect of the current Report, although, we must confess, we have secretly but vainly nourished the hope that someone else would take charge before we were compelled to act. On the one hand, because of the precipitation of the Italian crisis, and the resurgence of formerly adopted remedies, we have become resolved to trust our opinions to a printed edition, because the previous diffusion of these opinions in the form of confidential notes and private conversations do not seem to have reached all of our intended audience, in particular, "there where one does what one wants," [2] that is to say, at the summit of economic power.
It is appropriate to say right away that we don't intend to speak for all of the Italian bourgeois, which is increasingly debased by its own illusions of "openness," but only a part of it, in which one distinguishes a veritable elite[3]: it is to this elite that we address ourself, in an epoch in which the more or less critical discourses on current society are monopolized by those who oppose this society in a more or less efficacious manner, whereas on our side of the barricade one finds a sad silence and the most clumsy recourse to embarassed justifications. As for us, while we seek to break the monopoly, we are far from wanting the least appearance of "dialogue" with our real enemies: we speak to the interior of our class, to perpetuate our hegemony over this society.
In contrast to those who critique society in order to revolutionize its bases, we won't launch into a long-winded democratic or pedagogical discourse; and, rather than resort to radical critiques, we prefer to assume disgraced grace[4], the disagreeable honor of mercilessly criticizing that which in our management of economic and political power can be effectively criticized, with the goal of reinforcing efficiency and domination.
We won't try to prove that current society is desirable and even less to weigh the eventually modifiable nuances of its behavior. We will say, with the cold veracity that we have adopted for all other affirmations contained in this Report, that this society suits us because it is here, and that we want to maintain it in order to maintain our power over it. In order to speak the truth at the current moment, which is a difficult task, and because we can't hope to encounter exclusively impartial readers, we will be content to be ourselves while we write, even if it means being denounced by political men who, over the years, have defended our interests with more good will than good luck. It is necessary to stop being hypocrites in spite of ourselves, because we are on track to become the victims of our own hypocrisy.
Today, from the point of view of the defense of our society, there exists a peril to the world and it is the fact that the workers are succeeding in speaking about their conditions and aspirations without intermediaries; all the other perils are annexed or lead directly to the precarious situation in which we place, in its multiple respects, this primary problem, hidden and unacknowlegded.
Once one has defined the true peril, it is a question of conjuring it away and not putting a false one in its place. Nevertheless, our political men don't seem preoccupied with saving face and too often it is too late to try, whereas it is necessary at present that we occupy ourselves with saving our base, which, above all, is economic. For example, we denounce the stupidity that currently dominates the debate, engaged in for several months between the principal political leaders, under the name of "the communist question" -- as if it is a question of which problem is so embarassing that it will become "new"; as if we ourselves, and others certainly not less qualified than us, haven't already fixed the modalities, times and conditions that will make the official entry of the Italian Communist Party [Partie Communiste d'Italia or PCI] into the sphere of power beneficial for both sides; and as if the Communist leaders haven't already officially accepted the pact at the most recently held meetings, despite their self-imposed prudence, which they've used to get themselves accepted by the base of their party, which they believe to be the most radical. But this fictional political debate, which doesn't even assure the majority parties of the support of moderate voters, who in any case always vote the way they are told to vote, won't lead intelligent conservatives, either in Italy or abroad, into error: because, at the moment at which we find ourselves, we know that it is no longer a question of seeing if we need the PCI, whose utility during the last few difficult years, despite the fact that its leaders had the ability to hurt us (perhaps irremediably), no one can doubt; rather, it is a question -- once our alliance in the management of power has become official -- of us being in the position to offer the PCI sufficient guarantees against the risks that ipso facto it will share the responsibility and consequences of our eventual ruin, and that the PCI will lose its own base in the workers, who, unable to maintain any longer the least illusion that this alliance involved only the slightest change in its unenviable destiny, will react freely, outside of and against all control. This is the real question and the real peril.
One knows well that Communist parties have furnished proof of their aptitude in collaborating in the management of bourgeois societies several times, but one doesn't want to rely on such a general certainty, as if it conferred to our power a reserve of unlimited security, a recourse that in all cases would be sufficient on "the day and hour" of the supreme peril; as if this recourse wouldn't itself be one historical force among others, that is to say, as if this force wouldn't be suspectible to inaction or actions too maladroit or too late in their execution. The limit for us will be the discovery that we, and no one else, were the last dupes of the myth of Communism when we staged this phantasm of its total power, with which we have edified ourselves when it was advantageous for us to combat it. We have never forgotten that ours is the only effective power and that the Communists are nevertheless very menacing. It doesn't suffice to know that the Communist Party is ready to manage society to our profit; again it is necessary that we have a place to offer it in a capitalist society that merits being managed. Isn't it clear that, if the State and civil society, under pressure from the true irreconcilable enemies that we have in common with the Communists, continue to deteriorate at a dramatic rate, the Communists, trapped in the same disaster, won't be able to help us, as in Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Jerusalem? The fact that, at this moment, the Communists lament not being able to do more to maintain the existing order, is a subjective vicissitude that doesn't console us! It's true that, by giving arms to the counter-revolution, the Communists crushed an attempt at a classless society in Italy; that they have certainly merited the recognition of the proprietary classes in America and Russia, Europe and China; and that they want to be admittted more or less quickly into the United Nations, like the masters of our countries; but we, the truly dominant class in Italy -- in other words, the class that founded the universal bourgeoisie of modern times and the millennium that has effectively been imposed on the entire world -- have no future. We will endlessly find out "How much one has a taste for salt," the bread of exile from London or Madrid.[5]
What we want to save isn't capitalism in the sense of the commodity economy and salaried work, but capitalism in the historical form that suits us and that is difficult to showcase as the superior form of economic development. Even if we don't offer the ommunists a chance to save this particular form of capitalism, they limit themselves, as much as they can, to saving another form [of capitalism], the unhappy hardiness of which one has seen in Russia for the last 50 years. One knows well that the new class of proprietors produced by this inferior form don't allow us any local existence; and that, wherever its crude dictatorship has replaced what we don't fear to call our dictatorship, this new class has suppressed the totality of the superior values that give existence a meaning.
These are banalities, what's obvious. They are sleepwalkers, those who haven't reflected for an instant on the fact that we will lose all reason for managing a world in which our objective advantages have been suppressed, when it will no longer be possible for anyone to live in such conditions. The capitalists forget that they are men and that, as such, they can't allow the uncontrollable degradation of all men and the personal conditions of life that they enjoy in their own rights.
We would like to prevent an objection, indeed a reproach, that might be addressed to us, and that we judge to be, in the specific case of our Report, absolutely unfounded: that we unveil secrets we have come upon normally in the course of the last few years, that the State is a miser where secrets are concerned, and that we divulge secrets without worrying about the perilous eventual consequences of public opinion. And so, we try to reassure what nourishes this fear: if one takes account of the following often-neglected double presupposition that, on the one hand, he who always lies is never believed, and, on the other hand, the truth is destined to make its way with a force that prevails against even the strongest of lies, the destiny of which is, by contrast, to gradually lose all force as they are repeated, one will see that the small number of truths included in this pamphlet can only be kept secret if we take the risk that, at any time, someone else might put them to seditious purposes.
Moreover, our remarks will be quick, and we will never delay, well supposing that the readers to whom we address ourselves by special destination, and who are the same people with whom we have been doing business in the last few years, are sufficiently acquainted with a good part of the delicate details that we skim over and so will be able to pick up on the innuendos or allusions to facts or individuals that will completely escape the notice of those who live at a distance from our society's centers of power.
Instead of the famous It is forbidden for me to speak and I can't shut up [6] we prefer the honesty of I will not say everything, but all that I say will be true. [7]
Perhaps it wouldn't be useless, before ending this preface, to make precise the fact that it isn't our custom to write books, not because we don't love books, but simply because we love them more than this century seems to allow: this is why, personally, we are grateful to those who today do not write and why we execrate todays' amateur and professional writers, all the illiterate intellectuals who vainly pursue the remission of their ignorance by publishing proofs of it in multiples of unreadable volumes that our culture industry sets up as a sort of barricade against real culture, which has faded from fashion. If we ourselves have taken up the pen, this can be interpeted as our payment for a once only [8] tax levied by the Republic in difficulty. And if we have given this Report the literary form of the pamphlet, which hasn't been in fashion for two centuries, it is because the pamphlet presents the double advantage of being easy to write and quick to read. We address ourselves to the men for whom the time to read is shortened by the necessity to act. And if we adopt the procedure of saying promptly all that which appears important to us, without pretending to exhaustively treat each of the questions raised, perhaps we will write some monumental work that historians will one day use to illuminate the years that we consider here, but in this case the time will come when we materially lack the ability to do what we intend to do, which is confront and dominate the crucial problems that we herein limit ourselves to pointing out, because we aren't in the habit of believing that it is possible to resolve the real difficulties by writing. This pamphlet is to be read as it was written: in a flash, following, as one says, the mood of the moment, which, in this case, was well-suited for the gravity of the situation.
As for the fact that the present text is published under a pseudonym, this is done to respect the tradition of the pamphleteer, illustrated by the Fronde under Mazarin,[9] or Junius in 18th century England[10]; moreover, we are sure of being easily recognized by those who have had the occasion to meet us in the course of the last 30 years. Finally, for all the others, we prefer that not knowing our name will incite the most rigorous reflection but with the same gravity that we have evoked.
Notes and comments [in brackets] by NOT BORED! except where noted:
[1]. French in original.
[2]. Dante. Alternative translation by C.H. Sisson, Oxford University Press, 1993: "Where anything can be done." Dante, Inferno, Canto III, line 95.
[3]. French in original.
[4]. Greek in original.
[5]. Dante. Cf. Paradiso, Canto XVII, lines 58-60: "You will learn how salty is the taste/Of other people's bread, how hard the way/Going up and down other people's stairs."
[6]. Latin in original. Following Machiavelli, Censor/Sanguinetti uses latin expressions to create an atmosphere of mock solemnity.
[7]. Latin in original.
[8]. Latin in original.
[9]. Jules Mazarin was a French statesman and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church during the 1640s.
[10]. "Junius" was the pseudonym of an anonymous pamphleteer and satirist.