"Victory will be for those who will have been able to create disorder without loving it." -- Guy Debord, Internationale Situationniste, no. 1, 1958
Intelligence is perhaps the best-shared thing in our country: everybody believes themselves to be so well provided with it that the very people who are usually the hardest to please in other matters (our leaders, for example), are not accustomed to wish for more than they already have. And since it is not likely that everyone is deceived in this matter, it must then be asked how, and by what necessity, or by what mysterious interests, this intelligence possessed by so many people is so little in evidence in our country -- so little in evidence among those who, either because they are in power or else because they seek to be in power, continually tell us that if they are incapable, it is our fault, and that if Italy goes to ruin, it is not their fault.
The fact is that this country, which proclaims itself free and democratic, is in reality directed by a few hundred heroic imbeciles who fear more the consequences of intelligence in others than the consequences of their own stupidity, and who, moreover, put the brake on the former by all possible means so as to give free rein to the latter. Moreover, these imbeciles' stupidity does not even run the risk of being publicly sanctioned in our sporadic electoral fairgrounds, although they make ample use of their stupidity daily and according to their own sweet will. In such a social and political organization, which these gentlemen have so opportunely shaped in their own image, it seems to me quite normal that any voice that stands outside the dominant mediocrity, and that will not compromise in any way with it, should naturally be reduced to silence with the aid of quasi-automatic mechanisms, which perhaps remain the only things still relatively efficient amidst the general inefficiency.
For my part, I have never claimed to be more perfect than anyone else: on the contrary, I have often wished that I had the prompt and keen intelligence and imagination possessed by others. I have only had the chance to set myself, from my earliest years, on a road along which I have encountered some of the best minds that this era has produced, in spite of itself; and I am not afraid to admit that this state of affairs has allowed me to harm this world, that is to say, to harm its owners -- not as much as I have wished, but certainly much more than my own modest forces, if employed in isolation, would have permitted.
I naturally do not exaggerate these first results, since I do not content myself with them, just as I know that nobody could be sufficiently unjust to attribute to just one person, or to a few persons, the failings or the merits of the efforts to throw our class society into a war, one in which the multicolored forces of conservatism henceforth are on the defensive and in an ever-more precarious situation. Numerous young proletarians, despite the fact that they might not be known by their surnames or forenames -- as well as favorable historical circumstances -- have been the principle protagonists.
Furthermore, I can confirm, without being contradicted, that these last ten years of class struggle have already permitted us to reap some rewards, and have so clearly revealed the abjection and incapability of our enemies (bourgeois and Stalinist) that we can consider with extreme satisfaction the recent progress in the subversion of the entire dominant social order. Consequently, we might be permitted to await such positive developments in the future as the following one: the development, amidst the various occupations of mankind, of the one that coincides with that which I have chosen for myself in a time less propitious for certain choices than the present.
To work against this world, to obtain tangible results -- that is to say, to not content oneself with the ideological compensation so much liked by the impotent "opposition" -- is a long and exacting task, one that contains some drawbacks. But to work for this world is not much easier, and, whether objectively or subjectively, becomes more and more often almost impossible; and here I am not only thinking of the new selective unemployment into which our bankrupt capitalist system has thrown an entire generation of young proletarians (thus testifying to an imprudence and lack of foresight of which capitalism has not yet measured all the consequences). In reality, the question isn't limited to Italy's border, nor to the crass errors of our politicians and economists. All of the "very serious problems of our time" actually derive from one simple fact: that for one and all it is time to resolve all of the problems, and to resolve them directly, by oneself, as well as collectively.
What is demonstrated by the terror that this raw prospect provokes in all the bosses of alienation and their political and trade-union flunkies is the fact that the resolution of all problems is effectively possible, hereafter necessary, and urgent. No special demonstration of these facts are required, for our class society, which was already essentially uninhabitable, has now become visibly so. Anyone who cannot understand this has no hope of understanding the rest.
The politicians, economists, psychologists, sociologists, semiologists, intellectuals, specialists in public opinion and all the other imbeciles who whore around with power, unceasingly evoke these "very serious problems" without actually naming them. Those who drool and jump for joy every time their boss asks them to take in the smell of a new phenomenon by which the same crisis manifests itself -- those who have such affection for definitions and etiquettes -- now find a thousand pretexts for never mentioning what their sciences cannot resolve, the problems that they do not wish to see resolved by anybody else. In reality, their respective occupations henceforth consist in the main of showing that they themselves are necessary to their employers, and this is in fact their primary occupation in a period such as this one, in which the proletariat thinks that neither the imbecilic specialists nor their bosses are necessary. If such a phenomenon may seem strange, it certainly cannot be said that this phenomenon determines the true novelty of our epoch, for it is merely a consequence of it, and not even the most interesting one. If there is anything surprising in the phenomenon of general rout, it is only the lavish prestige that these specialists continue to enjoy among those who employ them, hoping for heaven-knows-what. In this, as in all the rest, they confirm the old saying: Like master, like servant.
Amidst the decomposition of the old world, false consciousness -- which still reigns but no longer governs -- has the nerve to take to task a whole generation of young proletarians, who have re-launched the offensive against the society of the spectacle, for not being able to resolve all the questions at the origin of both their revolt and the crisis in which all the appointed powers are floundering. The real situation is very different: what the young proletarians are in fact being taken to task for is posing questions that power cannot resolve, for it is power itself that is being questioned.
And these famous "serious problems," which have been silenced or falsified by the enslaved thinkers -- precisely what are they? Societies divided into classes, work, property, the very conditions in which one is forced to survive and produce, and to produce and consume the lies of bourgeois "democracy" and "freedom" and the bureaucratic lies about "communism" and "equality" -- in a phrase, the society of the spectacle as a whole -- stops functioning from the very moment that its reality is universally debated and is attacked by refusals that are not momentary or partial, but permanent and total.
All proletarians have been able to testify, at their own expense, that working for this world simply means exchanging one's life and time for a miserable wage that nevertheless guarantees both survival and its perpetual precariousness. And it is precisely wage labor that is today questioned and finally refused in a thousand different ways and on a thousand different occasions. The Italian worker, still more of a dialectician than his or her boss when it comes to these matters, today is rediscovering a truth that old Hegel had candidly expressed, without really pondering the consequences or foreseeing the outcome: "To work means to destroy the world or to curse it."
Up until now, workers have been restricted to cursing this world; now it is a matter of destroying it.
"Never work!" was inscribed on the walls of Paris ten years ago, during the May revolution; and in February these same watch-words reappeared on the walls of Rome, greatly enhanced by the simple fact of having been translated into Polish by the workers of Stettin, Gdansk, Ursus and Radom in 1970 and 1976, and into Portuguese by the workers of Lisbon in 1974.
The supersession of the economy is everywhere the order of the day, and proletarians, in refusing work, are demonstrating that they know very well that work is chiefly a pretext for keeping them continually under control by compelling them to perpetually occupy themselves with things other than their real interests. "The conservative slogan 'A fair pay for a fair day's work' should be replaced with the revolutionary counter-slogan 'Abolish wage labor!'" (Marx). Furthermore, even Lord Keynes had to admit, in his famous A Treatise on Money, that "for those with an eye to the future, the economic problem is not the permanent problem of the human species" and in this he has proved himself to be less obtuse than his contemporary epigones and fervent out-of-season zealots. The fundamental fact is not so much that, today, the material means for the construction of a free life in a classless society exist, but that "the blind under-employment of these means by class society can neither be interrupted nor go any further. Never before in the history of the world has such a conjunction existed" (Debord, Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time).
I know several workers who preoccupy themselves with political economy far more seriously than the wretched economist Franco Modigliani, and far more effectively than the inept Stalinist reactionary Giorgio Napolitano, but in the opposite perspective, that of the destruction of political economy. These workers put their theoretical discoveries into practice and their critique of the economic system supersedes and invalidates the unjustly famous critique that the economist Piero Sraffa thought he had made. And, inversely, these workers are beginning to theorize the first practical results of their direct experience with the fragility of the economy. They read Paul Lafargue's pamphlet The Right to be Lazy, which -- although it was written at the end of the last century and is thus ignored by our ignorant economists -- assuredly remains the most important and most modern work of pure critique of political economy to have appeared since Marx's time. Lafargue [who was related to Marx] foresees well in advance, and with great lucidity, the reasons that were to lead capitalism into modern consumerism, as well as the salient characteristics of what he calls the "era of falsification," which has not yet ended. Lafargue points out the irremediable contradictions of this era, which are summarized and resolved by the refusal of work and the supersession of the economy.
Workers have finally been compelled to realize that the colors with which the dominant spectacle adorns itself in order to camouflage its monstrous features, are the same colors produced by the cancer factory at Cirie, a factory that, as everyone knows, was destroying the lives of workers with the same regularity that it was producing dyes. This factory can rightly be singled out as the admirable quintessence of all the others, the only difference being that the destructive cycle of the dye-factory's productive forces was faster and more radical than in enterprises elsewhere. But all factories bear a close resemblance to the cancer factory.
Capitalism must reign or disappear, as was said of Louis XIV. But in order to reign, it must henceforth be able to constantly foresee the exact way to maintain, and constantly seek to avoid the rupturing of, the unstable equilibrium that exists between everything that it must impose and inflict on everybody -- such as renunciations, sacrifices, restraints, boredom and nuisances -- and the limits of what people can subjectively and objectively tolerate. Today, the very development of capitalism is such that, while people's tolerance threshold tends to fall (as much for historical as for purely biological reasons), the quantity of everything that this type of society must impose on us (for its own particular necessities of survival) tends, on the contrary, to increase without limits and without discernment -- that is to say, by its own movement, which is absolutely autonomous and independent of people's real needs and even of the most primordial and irreducible exigencies of survival. The society of the spectacle-commodity -- this immense immobile motor -- must henceforth compel everyone to move in order to sustain it and defend its very anti-historical immobility. However, the Herculean Pillars of Alienation -- the boundary that none should ever cross -- are no longer far away, no longer at the far end of the world and human knowledge, but are now near to everyone, no matter where they are. And everyone should be capable of going beyond the Pillars, if one does not wish to negare l'esperienza di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente [deny the experience, from behind the sun, of the world without people] -- that is to say, the experience of the negative at work, which is already the practical negation of all the limits arbitrarily imposed on the majority of humanity, on the proletariat compelled to live in degradation, without ever giving any reality whatsoever to the proletariat's talents, mutilated capacities or unrecognized desires.
Descartes used to say that "my third maxim is always to seek . . . to change my desires, rather than change the order of the world." Now that times have changed, changing along with them people and their desires and aspirations, all certainty and all scruples must be abandoned. Our first maxim will thus be the reversal of the philosopher's, namely, to always seek to change the order of the world, rather than change our desires. And the proletariat must this time seek not to fail, but to win -- for only a violent desire for victory can ensure the victory of the proletariat's most authentic (and also the least admitted) desires.
The entire industrial developed world hereafter presents itself as a never-ending sinister suburb in which Cirie, Seveso and their outskirts are simultaneously the anti-historical center and the image of its becoming so that this world can remain for a little while longer under the direction of those who declare themselves to be the politically and economically "accountable ones." And modern spectacular capitalism can already contemplate its image -- as if in a magic mirror that reveals the near future -- in the (usually censored) pictures of the monstrous children born in Seveso.
Our bourgeois philanthropists may regret that this is so, but soon they will regret even more that it may not be so, because the quality of everything that this society imposes and inflicts upon us has already exceeded the threshold beyond which the painfully-maintained "equilibrium" is broken violently, and can only be re-established by further violence, but always more provisionally.
In such conditions, in which the development of class society in all its bourgeois and bureaucratic variants is in opposition to, not only the interests of the majority, but also the most simple and elementary conditions for biological survival of the species and individuals, as well as people's very will to live. The proletariat cannot delay, not to mention, avoid a social war that has already begun. It will not be a matter of expending of all one's forces in a multitude of little skirmishes, endlessly renewed and endlessly doomed to fail, skirmishes in the name of "the defense" of one doesn't quite know what -- "for wages, for work, for the country," as the trade-unions and Stalinist scum bark. It will be a matter for workers to counter-attack by passing from the defensive to the offensive, and to win through-out the entire theatre of war, which is wide-world, as is the current crisis of power. For what is at stake today is nothing other than the destiny of the world. However, it is not at all in the name of some old, imagined, more or less "inevitable" and prophesied "historic mission" that the proletariat is called upon to become the class of historical consciousness, but because it is only from this fundamentally superior position that the proletariat can attack and successfully combat all the forces of unconsciousness, all of which are (the only things) represented "democratically" in present-day capitalism. These forces of unconsciousness nowadays manifest themselves in their failure, disasters and infamies.
Since its origins, capitalism has been fighting against every retrograde form of power and social organization that is opposed to its expansion, and has been doing so for a long time. Capitalism imposed itself and emerged victorious from the wars it waged because its activity (development and conquest) corresponded to historically determined necessities and possibilities, of which none of its ideologues were ever truly conscious, just as today none of the ideologues are conscious of the fact that the task of capitalism is historically finished. Now that it has conquered the world, become worn out by its very success, and become managed in a deranged way by the dull-witted heirs of past conquerors, capitalism must again confront no less than that which permitted it to attain such power: the proletariat. Social peace -- which capitalism had so long enjoyed since the failure of the social revolution in Russia and the rest of Europe -- had almost made it forget the existence of its old enemy (and this at a time when there is no doubt that capitalism has completely lost the combativeness it had in years past). And all of capitalism's efforts hereafter will be geared toward preventing a social war for which it is not prepared and which it already despairs that it will lose, despite the fact that the presuppositions for this defeat have been created by its development (much praised until a short while ago).
The proletariat, by contrast, has always found itself at the center of a daily and permanent conflict that is sometimes overt, most often muffled and always violent, and that has lasted for a century and a half. Now the class that has continually been at war against the conditions of its own suppression must necessary perish or take the upper hand with respect to all the other classes, which are sometimes at war, sometimes at peace, but never so ready to attack or defend themselves as they are today. On the other hand, the very nature of this war requires that the propertied classes never destroy (that is to say, abolish) their enemy; otherwise they would abolish the very conditions of their own supremacy. The propertied classes need the proletariat, while the proletariat does not need them. This is the essential feature of the question. . . .
As if all this was insufficient, it must be noted that the logic of this conflict also contains the fact that, while the propertied classes are compelled to consider each of their victories as provisional and each truce with the proletariat as uncertain, the proletariat is for its part obliged by its conditions not to ever accept any peace if it is not the peace of the victor. It is precisely this fact that today impels proletarians to increase still further their immense demands in proportion to -- and in spite of -- their past defeats, which were also provisional. And so the workers of the entire world are continually plunging into the deepest despair and are, with an ever-quickening rhythm, being attacked by the forces that have narrowly eluded defeat. It is precisely in this way that proletarians are imposing on themselves the superior necessity of winning not a particular battle but the whole war.
Marx said that men [sic] only set themselves problems that they can solve; and I may add that today we have reached precisely the point at which it is no longer possible to solve any one of them without solving them all. That is why this pamphlet is entitled Remedy to Everything.
Our strength lies precisely in the facts that we have in front of us all the problems, and it is both necessary and possible that we solve them all. In contrast, the weakness of our (bureaucratic and bourgeois) enemies consists in the facts that they, too, have all the problems facing them, but that they experience the imperative necessity of not solving them all. In other words, they are in a position from which they are not really able to remedy any problem. This is precisely what the position of our enemies is today: they do not have the strength to solve any problem. They are not able any longer to even prevent others from solving these problems; nor can our enemies co-exist any more with all these problems. So we should not be surprised at the dismay and confusion that reigns hereafter in the ranks of our enemies.
Until ten years ago, it seemed impossible to a great number of people that anything could be changed; now it seems impossible to everybody that anything can continue as it was before. Two lustra have not gone by since the resigned thinkers of the impotent Left pompously decreed that this world had attained its definitive order and that there was no other "choice" than between the Russian, Chinese and Cuban lies that indolently nourished these thinkers' dishonest controversies. The deluded [Herbert] Marcuse still claimed to prove the disappearance of the proletariat, which was supposed to have joyfully dissolved into the bourgeoisie, and [Henri] Lefebvre was already prattling about "the end of history." In confessing so clumsily that the reality of that time was all that they had dreamed about, these two were simply mistaking their poor dreams for reality. But, from 1968 onwards, they have had to take their lumps for their stupidity: Marcuse resigned himself to keeping silent, while Lefebvre resigned himself to returning to speaking on behalf of the French Stalinists.
Now that the time of disorders is beginning to disturb again the sleep of ruling classes everywhere, these pathetic ideologues (badly in need of ideas) have lost even their respective publics -- but they have also found undreamed of employment as defense lawyers for the old world. In Italy, where the crisis of power is greater than elsewhere, the ideologues have lost their retainers as a result. With each step forward that subversion takes, the ideologues hastily don again the toga of the elders of the Fatherland and begin rewinding their cuckoo-clock mechanisms so that they can -- with the same affected and complacent conviction of priests in a church without faithful believers, because faith is lacking in the miracle they promise (history, enchanted, will stop when faced with their magic formulae) -- bludgeon us unceasingly with the same old banalities about the defense of the republican order and the same old customary trivialities about democratic institutions.
Every time they display themselves on television or on the front-page of the newspapers, the ideologues impudently invite us to appreciate the delights of this "democracy," which was born -- goddamn it! -- of the Resistance, just as they themselves were born from the estimable wombs of their mothers. These ideologues -- all the Valianis, Amendolas, Asor Rosas, Moravias, Bobbios, Boccas et al -- do not want to understand that the violent and contradictory outbursts that feed the chronicles of the press only prove that their epoch is finished and that a new world is being born. These old caryatids, who hope to protect the desanctified temple (crumbling under the pressure of lies and abuses) for a little while longer! These extremists of consensus and fanatics of legality do not know that their laws do not command the future and that, before judging the new men [sic], they should judge the old laws! The "democracy" and "freedom" in which these gentlemen revel and with which they wear out our ears and our patience: they are like colors for people who are blind from birth. The proof is simple. If they only knew the true sense of these words, the ideologues would not use them with such casualness when they speak about our miserable Republic. But when true democracy imposes itself -- that is to say, when all powers of decision and execution will belong to the revolutionary workers' councils, in which each delegate is revocable at any time by the base -- then we shall see that the ideologue who today speak of "democracy" without rhyme or reason will fight against it or, more probably, will flee from it. Faced with the pre-emptory and insolent appeals that are bestowed upon us these days, young proletarians are forced to conclude that, if these venerated mystifiers are in such strong solidarity with the brave defense of all current falsehoods and abuses, then it is not at all by chance: the ideologues are well remunerated. How many millions does the honest Leo Valiani receive each month or each week for writing what he does? And what would he write about, if he had the life and wages of a worker? And Bocca? What about him? And the others?
Lichtenberg used to say that he did not know anyone in the world who, having transformed himself [sic] into a scoundrel for a thousand dollars, would not have remained an honest man for half of that amount.
Get thee gone, gross masquerade and charlatans of incurable evils! You fear too many things to be feared and respect too many things to be respected! You judge everything incorrectly, while people are beginning to judge you correctly! Haven't you noticed that half the country laughs at you and the other half simply ignores you? Know, at least, that in view of the tragic-comic farce that constitutes your very existence, the court martial of our critique is going to celebrate its Saturnalia! And let no one reproach me for having to resort to invective. Ever since Dante, all those who have regarded powerful men and their servants with disabused eyes have always been compelled to resort to invectives. For it is not enough to judge the actions and discourses of men [sic]; one must also judge men [sic] from their discourses and from their actions.
Up until now, the entire country has remained the mere spectator of its ministers and of all those who deceive it and speak to it in its very name. However, it is now time for the country to begin to judge them, to, as it were, render to Caesar that which is Caesar's -- twenty-three blows of the dagger.
In epochs in which intelligence reigns, one can judge people from the use they make of intelligence. In centuries of decadence, which may include many intelligent people, people must be judged according to their interests and their merit. In those periods, such as ours, in which people of extreme mediocrity are the ones who confront the period's major problems, one must consider the conditions in which people live, the pretensions of those who are in power, their fears and particular interests -- and make from this mixture the measuring-rod of our judgment. If we watch the edifying spectacle that is offered daily by all the defense lawyers for the old world, who take the floor with ardor and haste in order to ejaculate their pleadings (either one at a time, or all-at-once), we notice that these defense lawyers are afraid that the last time 'round might have been their last, and that they all confusedly feel (not without reason) that the tribunal of history is about to execute a sentence that has been delayed for far too long. If these mercenary defenders of all abuses sometimes appear bold in the course of their vain orations, it is simply because fear, when it has exceeded a certain limit, blurs the boundaries between courage and cowardice and makes them produce similar effects for a few moments.
If the politicians and intellectuals became so agitated about the word "courage," it was mainly to ask each other what is it exactly? If, after such an outcry, they were unable to give themselves an adequate answer, one doesn't have to look very far for the reason. As a general rule, people always speak most about that which they lack most; this is especially the case in situations in which the lack is severe. So where a poor person might speak about money, Franco Rodano speaks about courage. Lama, Moravia, Arpino, Calvino, Vasco Pratolini, Elio Petri and a hundred others -- each trying to out-do the others -- have discussed it. Even the vile Antonello Trombadori has held forth on the subject, and, on at least one occasion, has recklessly spoken of rope in the hanged man's house. Nearly all of these cowardly blow-hards have spoken of "courage" simply to accuse Montale and Sciascia of cowardice -- simply because they had the minimal courage to express publicly the disinterest in and disgust with the Italian State, which the Stalinist Amendola is afraid will collapse before he has had a chance to share it with the Christian Democrats.
All of this shows that one could say about courage what Marx used to say about consciousness: it is surely not people's consciousness that determines their social condition, but, on the contrary, their social condition that determines their courage and their cowardice. To become sufficiently instructed about our leaders' supposed "courage," it is enough to remember that, in this class society, the temporariness and fragility of the social position occupied by the usurpers is as insecure as ours. For the rest, it goes without saying that nobody is asking them to be courageous.
Cowardice has existed in all times, even if not all times have had the chance to witness cowardice in power. In our time, cowardice would like to be in the majority, but it already is the majority of the government. Cowardice has its heroes and publicly bestows upon itself the very dignities and honors that had in other times been reserved for courage. The entire political-intellectual controversy about "courage" has only and perfectly brought to light the great cowardice of all those who participated in the controversy, for if one cannot give oneself courage, one cannot rid oneself of cowardice, nor even hide it. I have never known a coward who had the simple courage to recognize himself, even if it was only to hide himself better.
These recurring soft and boring "polemics," which constitute the main pastime of all the eunuchs of power (the intellectuals), make manifest the incurable weakness of the participants in them. The arms of their "critique" have no cutting edge, because they are (as Camoens would say) "coveted by the rust of the peace" that they have for too long enjoyed. It is well-known that weakness is precisely the only defect that cannot be corrected, precisely because its effects are unforeseeable and even more prodigious than the effects caused by those with the keenest passions.
The archaism of the institutions that these courageous gentlemen wish to defend (if only to avoid the misfortune of having to defend themselves on their own) -- these archaic institutions, which they do not even know how to work any more -- doesn't serve to make these cowards venerable or better respected. Quite the opposite: they discredit themselves daily; they age even more quickly than their coryphaei. And as the decadence of these ideologues becomes all the more obvious, and as their ability to do harm decreases, they inspire a scorn that is all the more universal. The political world has thus fallen into a disastrous imbecility, and this at the very time when society as a whole has become more intelligent. Perhaps ironically, the intelligence of society as a whole and the imbecility of the political class do an equal amount of harm to power, which finds itself constantly attacked from the outside and undermined from within.
The imminence of social war has already set into motion all individuals and all classes in society, because the social war, in bringing the interests of all into play, confers an interest in it upon everyone, and calls upon each and all to chose a side. On one side: all those (the capitalists and the bureaucrats of the so-called Communist Party) who today fear a war that they can no longer succeed in preventing. And on the other side: all those who have no power over their own lives, and know it.
In the following chapters, I shall be writing against the existing order of things, but I shall do so in relative disorder. It would be bestowing too much honor on my subject to treat it in an orderly fashion, because I wish to show that it is incapable of any. Saint-Just said, "The present order is disorder made into law." And before ending this preface, it is doubtless scarcely necessary to say that Remedy to Everything neither seeks to be, nor can be, a remedy for everyone. It proposes, in fact, to be injurious to many, and it hopes to be useful to an even greater number. The usefulness of such a pamphlet will thus be measurable beginning with the damage it is likely to cause, directly or indirectly, immediately or in a little while, to the proprietors of alienation. All that is harmful is, thus, not necessarily useless; but all that is useless is always harmful. I hope I am being clear. But if someone were to persist in not understanding, I would be less concerned about this than he himself [sic] should be. It has been said that this period can no longer be insensitive to anything it produces; and, if it produces certain books, this indicates that it has also produced people who are able to read them.
Both the owners and the salaried critics of this world will be exasperated and vexed when they note that only their indomitable enemies have the ability to really understand this book. The ruling class will see, with justifiable anxiety, that its true problems have been exposed and precisely by those who work consciously toward the subversion of class society. Our ministers and our politicians will be disturbed, not without reason, by having to read our writings if they wish to contemplate themselves as they really are, and by contemplating themselves in the perspective of the destruction of all their power. The heads of the bourgeoisie's secret services, appointed in the last ten years or so to commit provocations, assassinations and State terrorism, will be understandably by infuriated at seeing their maneuvers unmasked by the very people against whom these political crimes were conceived -- even the death of Moro will finally appear in its true and sinister light. The decomposing upper classes are certainly not going to forgive me either for this particular pamphlet or for the rest. Some of them -- like Indro Montanelli, the right-wing editor and journalist, who two years ago already had the pleasure of doing so -- will wish to accuse me of being a traitor to my class, since I have turned all of my inherited weapons back against the above-mentioned upper class, from which I came. Indeed, I am honored at being accused of such a thing, as there is no humiliation or anything else, for that matter, that this bourgeoisie has not amply deserved. The working class, which has been betrayed the most often by its pretended representatives, will have some reason to congratulate itself in taking into account that, una tantum, the opposing class is afflicted by the same fate as it is.
Remedy to Everything will thus be a settling of accounts with all the malavita that the ruling class imposes "democratically" on the ruled class, and it will be a settling of accounts with those particular personages who have, until now, abused the patience of the exploited class (or, rather, the silence to which it has been reduced) with impunity. As in hell, here, too, shall be found different ditches, into which the damned -- bourgeois and Stalinist, professional liars and trade-union bureaucrats, politicians and intellectuals -- have been thrown. At the end, I would like to be able to say to the reader, following Dante: "You can henceforth judge these people/whom I have accused above, and their faults,/which are the cause of all your misfortunes."
Note: translated from the French by Michel Prigent and Lucy Forsyth, 1981, and thoroughly copyedited and proofread by NOT BORED!.