Victory will go to those who know how to create disorder without loving it.

(Guy Debord, Internationale Situationniste #1, 1958)

Intelligence is perhaps the most widely shared thing in our country: each person thinks that he or she is so well provided with it that the very ones who are ordinarily the least likely to find contentment in any other thing, like our leaders, are not in the habit of desiring to have more of it than they already do. And since it is not likely that everyone is deceived about this subject, we must wonder how and by what necessity or mysterious interest this intelligence, allegedly possessed by such a large number of people, appears so infrequently in our country and not at all, not even on exceptional occasions, among those who, either in power or seeking to gain access to it, continually tell us that, if they are incapable, it is our fault and that, if Italy comes to ruin, the fault won’t be theirs.

The fact is that this country, which proclaims itself to be free and democratic, is in fact led by several hundred heroic imbeciles who fear the consequences of the intelligence of all the others much more than they fear the consequences of their own stupidity, who curb that intelligence by all available means to better give free rein to their stupidity, and who can get away with it because their stupidity does not risk being publicly sanctioned by our sporadic electoral circuses, while they nevertheless make daily use of it according to their whims. In such a social and political organization, which these gentlemen have so opportunely fashioned in their own image, it seems completely normal to me that any voice that distinguishes itself from the dominant mediocrity and makes no compromises with it is naturally reduced to silence by a multitude of quasi-automatic mechanisms that perhaps remain the only relatively efficient things amidst the general lack of efficiency.

For my part, I have never presumed to be more perfect than anyone else. On the contrary, I have often desired to have the quick and lively intelligence and imagination of someone else. I have only had the chance to be engaged, from a young age, in a voyage down a road along which I have encountered a few people of the highest intelligence that this era has produced, despite itself, and I have no fear of admitting that this has already permitted me to harm this world, that is to say, its owners, not as much as I would have desired, but certainly more than the modesty of my forces, on their own, would have allowed me to hope.

Naturally, I do not exaggerate those first results because I have not been contented with them, just as I know that no one would be so unjust as to attribute to a single person, or to several people, the fault or the merit of having thrown our class society into a war in which the multi-colored forces of preservation have found themselves on the defensive and in an always-more precarious way. Those who first contributed to this, apart from the fact that the historical circumstances were favorable, were innumerable young proletarians who – although they are not known by name – remain the principal protagonists.

Without fear of being contradicted, I can even affirm that the last 10 years of class struggle have already allowed us to harvest such results and have showed so clearly the incapacity and abjection of our enemies – both bourgeois and Stalinist – that we cannot fail to consider the recent progress of the subversion of the dominant order with extreme satisfaction. Indeed, we can expect so many further encouragements in the future that, if this subversion (among the occupations of men) is the one that is serious and has a solid future, I dare to believe that it is the very one that I chose in an era in which certain choices were less propitious than they are now.

Working against this world by obtaining tangible results, that is to say, by not being contented with the principal ideological compensation of being part of an impotent “opposition,” is a long-term task that also involves some inconveniences. But to work for this world is not much easier and more than often becomes, both objectively and subjectively, quasi impossible, and here I am not only thinking of the new selective unemployment into which our bankrupt capitalism has thrown an entire generation of young proletarians, which is an action that testifies to an imprudence and a lack of foresight whose consequences have still not been fully measured. In reality, the question surpasses our frontiers as much as the crude errors of our politicians and economists do. All the allegedly “very serious problems of our times” derive from a single, very simple fact; for each and for all, it is time to resolve all the problems and to resolve them directly, by oneself and also collectively.

That this is in fact possible is demonstrated by the terror that this blunt perspective is capable of provoking among all the current bosses of alienation and their political and labor-union servants. That this is now necessary and urgent, as well, has, on the contrary, no need of particular demonstration because our class society, which is already essentially uninhabitable, has now visibly become so. Those who cannot understand this must also give up the idea of understanding the rest.

The politicians, economists, psychologists, sociologists, semioticians, intellectuals, specialists in public opinion and all the other imbeciles who whore around with power ceaselessly evoke those “very serious problems” and yet keep to themselves what they really designate. Those who drool and quiver with delight each time that their bosses ask them to sniff out a new phenomenon in which the crisis manifests itself – that is, those who love definitions and labels – today find a thousand pretexts for never naming what their science can never resolve but which they do not want to see resolved by other people. In reality, their trade principally consists in showing that they are necessary to their employers, and this is precisely their dominant preoccupation in this period, when the proletariat thinks that neither these experts nor their bosses are necessary. If such a phenomenon seems curious, we can certainly not say that this is what determines the novelty of this era, because it is only a consequence and not even the most interesting one, and if there is something surprising in the phenomenon of general disarray, it is only the extravagant credit that such specialists continue to benefit from among those who continue to employ them in the hope of . . . we don’t even know what. Here, as elsewhere, they confirm the old adage: the servant takes after his master.

Faced with such a tableau of the decomposition of the old world, the false consciousness that still reigns but no longer governs shamelessly accuses the young proletarian generation – which has re-launched the offensive against the society of the spectacle – of not being in a position to resolve the questions that are at the origin of its revolt and at the root of the crisis about which all the constituted powers are now debating. The contrary is what is true, because, in reality, the young proletarians are accused of posing questions that power cannot resolve from the moment that power itself is put into question.

And what do these famous “problems,” neutralized or falsified by all the enslaved thinkers, really consist of? What are they precisely? Society divided into classes, work, property, the very conditions in which we are forced to survive and produce (as well as all that we are forced to produce and consume), the lies of bourgeois “democracy” and “liberty” (as well as the bureaucratic lies of “communism” and “equality”) – in sum, the society of the spectacle in its entirety – no longer functions at the very moment that its reality has been universally put into question and attacked by a refusal that is not momentary and partial, but permanent and total.

All proletarians have been able to determine, at their own expense, that working for this world simply means exchanging one’s life and time for a miserable salary that only guarantees survival and a perpetually precarious situation. And it is precisely salaried work that is being put into question and ultimately refused in a thousand different ways and on a thousand different occasions. More of a dialectician than his boss, the Italian worker is rediscovering a truth that old Hegel candidly expressed, but without really weighing the consequences or foreseeing the results: “Working means annihilating the world or cursing it.”

Until now, the workers have limited themselves to cursing this world; today it is a question of annihilating it.

Ten years ago, “Never Work!” was written on the walls of Paris during the May revolution, and, in February 1977, this same command reappeared on the walls of Rome, greatly reinforced by the simple fact that, in the meantime, it had been translated into Polish by the workers in Stettin, Gdansk, Ursus and Radom in 1970 and then again in 1976, and also into Portuguese by the workers in Lisbon in 1974.

Surpassing the economy is the agenda everywhere, and proletarians, by refusing to work, show that they know perfectly well that work is principally a pretext that continually keeps them under control by forcing all of them to always be occupied with something other than their true interests. “On their banner, they must erase the conservative slogan ‘A fair salary for a fair day of work’ and write the revolutionary one ‘Abolish salaried work!’” (Marx). Furthermore, even Lord Keynes, writing in his famous Treatise on Money, had to agree that “for anyone looking towards the future, the economic problem is not the permanent problem of the human species” – and in this he showed himself to be less obtuse than his current epigones and fervent out-of-season zealots. The fundamental fact is not so much that all the material means exist for the construction of free life in a classless society, as is the case today; it is, rather, that “the blind underemployment of class society’s means can neither be interrupted nor go much further. Never has such a conjunction existed in the history of the world” (Debord).

I know several workers who are much more seriously occupied with [the reality of] political economy than unfortunate Franco Modigliani, and with more effectiveness than inept Giorgio Napolitano, but from the opposite perspective: that of the destruction of political economy. They put their theoretical discoveries into practice, and their critique of the economic system surpasses and invalidates the critique that unjustly famous Piero Sraffa believes that he has made. And, inversely, these workers are beginning to theorize the first practical results of their direct experiments on the fragility of the economy. They read Paul Lafarge’s pamphlet The Right to be Lazy, in which – although it was written at the end of the 19th century and has been ignored by our ignorant economists – assuredly remains the most important and most modern work of pure critique of political economy to be appear after Marx. Well in advance and with great lucidity, Lafarge foresaw the reasons that capitalism would be led to [inaugurate] modern consumption, as well as the salient characteristics of what he calls “the era of falsification,” which we are living in today. He also indicates the irremediable contradictions in such consumption and, finally, that which summarizes and resolves them: the refusal of work and the surpassing of the economy.

The workers have finally been forced to see that the colors in which the dominant spectacle arrays itself to camouflage its monstrous traits are the very same fatal colors produced by the cancer factory in Cirié – a factory that, as everyone knows, destroys the workers at the same time that it produces dyes. This factory can be justly cited as the admirable quintessence of all the others; the only difference between them is that the destructive cycle of its productive forces is slightly more rapid and radical than elsewhere. But all factories have a close relationship with the cancer factory.

As was said of Louis XVI, capitalism must reign or disappear. But to reign it must know how to constantly foresee and seek to avoid the breaking point of the unstable equilibrium that exists between everything that capitalism must impose and inflict on everyone – renunciation, sacrifice, constraint, boredom, pollution, et. al – and that which everyone can objectively support and is subjectively disposed to tolerate. Today, the very development of capitalism is such that, while the threshold of toleration tends to fall – as much for historical reasons as for simple biological ones – the quantity of all that this type of society must impose on us for its own particular necessities for survival tends, on the contrary, to rise without limits or wisdom, that is to say, due to its own movement, which is absolutely autonomous and independent from the real needs of men and women, and even from their most basic and irreducible requirements for survival. The spectacular-commodity society – that immense immobile motor – must constrain every person to sustain it and defend its anti-historical immobility. Nevertheless, the Herculean Columns of alienation, the limits that no one must ever cross, are no longer far away, or at the antipodes of the world or human knowledge, but are close to everyone, wherever they are. And every person must be capable of surpassing them if we do not want “to deny [the] experience, following the course of the sun, of that world that has no inhabitants” (Dante), that is to say, the experience of the negative at work, which is already the practical negation of all the limits that are arbitrarily imposed on the vast majority of humanity, on the proletariat, forced to live in a mindless state without ever giving any reality to its talents, its mutilated capacities or its unrecognized desires.

Descartes said: “My third maxim is to always seek (…) to change my desires rather than the order of the world.” Today, since the times have changed – and, with them, men and women, and their aspirations and desires – we must abandon all uncertainty and scruples. And thus our first maxim reverses that of the philosopher: Always seek to change the order of the world instead of changing your desires. And the proletariat must now seek to conquer, not fail, because only a violent desire for victory can assure the victory of the most authentic desires, which are also the least confessed.

All of the developed industrial world now presents itself as a sinister and endless suburb, of which Cirié, Seveso and their surroundings are both the anti-historical center and the image of its future, that is, if this world remains any longer under the direction of those who proclaim themselves “responsible” for politics and the economy. And modern spectacular capitalism can already contemplate itself – as if it were looking into a magical mirror that reveals the near future – in the generally censored images of the monstrous children recently born in Seveso.

Our bourgeois philanthropists might regret that this is so, but soon they will regret even more that things are no longer this way, because the quantity of all that this society imposes and inflicts on us has already surpassed the threshold beyond which any barely maintained equilibrium has been violently broken and can only be violently reestablished, but always more provisionally than before.

In such conditions, where the development of class society in all its bourgeois and bureaucratic variants is opposed, not only to the interests of the vast majority but also to the most elementary and fundamental conditions for the simple survival of the species and individuals (as well as their will to live), it is not a question of the proletariat delaying or avoiding a social war that has already begun, nor is it a question of the proletariat exhausting itself in a multitude of small skirmishes that are ceaselessly renewed because they are ceaselessly condemned to failure and fought “for the defense” of some nonsense (“Salaries, Jobs, the Country,” as the unionized and Stalinist scoundrels like to bark). On the contrary, it is a question of the workers counter-attacking by going on the offensive and winning the war in the entire theatre of operations, which is global, as is the current crisis of all the powers. Because what is in play today is nothing other than the destiny of the world. Nevertheless, it is not at all in the name of some so-called “historical mission” (more or less unavoidable and prophesized) that the proletariat is called to become the class of historical consciousness, but because it is only from the position of fundamental superiority that the proletariat can successfully attack and combat all the forces of unconsciousness that are represented “democratically” (and they are the only ones that are represented) in contemporary capitalism. Henceforth, these forces will principally manifest themselves through their failures, disasters and infamies.

Since its beginnings, capitalism has been combative, and for a long time it has fought against all the other retrograde forms of power and social organization that have been opposed to its expansion. It has imposed itself and come out victorious from the wars that it has fought because (and only to the extent that) its development and conquest have corresponded to historically determined necessities and possibilities, of which none of its ideologues have ever been truly aware, just as today none of its contemporary ideologues are aware of the fact that the historical task of capitalism has ended. Today, now that it has conquered the world, become exhausted by its very successes, and been managed in an insane way by the half-witted heirs of the conquerors of the past, capitalism must once again and above all confront precisely that which has permitted it to attain such power: the proletariat. The social peace that capitalism has enjoyed for so long – since the failure of the social revolution in Russia and all of Europe – has almost made it forget the existence of its old enemy and this at the same time that there is no doubt that, today, capitalism has completely lost its former combativeness. All of its efforts now aim at preventing a social war for which it is not prepared, which it is already desperate to win, but for which its preceding development – so exalted until recently – has created all of the presuppositions.

On the contrary, the proletariat always finds itself at the center of a daily and permanent conflict, which is sometimes open, most often hidden, but always violent, and has lasted for a century and a half. Today, the class that has been continually at war against the conditions of its own oppression must necessarily perish or gain the upper hand over all the other classes that – sometimes at war, sometimes at peace – are never as ready to attack, nor as prepared to defend themselves. On the other hand, it is in the very nature of this war that the property-owning classes can never annihilate their enemy, that is to say, abolish the proletariat, which would mean abolishing the very conditions for their own supremacy. They need the proletariat; the proletariat has no need of them. This is the heart of the matter.

As if all this wasn’t sufficient, we must note that the logic of such a conflict also includes the fact that, while the property-owning classes are constrained to consider each of their victories as provisional, and each respite that the proletariat concedes to them as uncertain, the proletariat, for its part, is obligated by its very condition to never accept any peace if it is not the peace of the victor. And it is precisely this fact that makes the proletarians always increase their immense pretentions as they go along and despite their past defeats, which were also provisional. Thus, the workers of the entire world continually plunge into the most profound despair and, in a rhythm that always quickens, the same forces that are opposed to them just barely win their victories. It is precisely in this manner that the proletarians impose on themselves the higher necessity of winning, not only this or that particular battle, but the entire war.

Marx said that human beings only pose the problems that they can resolve, and I would add that, today, we have precisely arrived at the point where it is no longer possible to resolve any of them without resolving all of them. This is why this pamphlet is called Remedy for Everything.

Our strength exactly resides in the facts that we are faced with all the problems and that we also have the necessity, as well as the possibility, of resolving them all. By contrast, the weakness of our enemies – bureaucrats and bourgeois – lies in the fact that they, in addition to being confronted by all the problems, have the imperative necessity of not resolving them all, that is to say, they are in a situation in which they truly cannot resolve any of them. Thus, this is exactly the nature of their situation today: they do not have the strength to resolve any problem and yet they are not in a position to prevent others from resolving them, nor can they coexist with these problems for very long. Thus, we must not be surprised by the fear and confusion that will henceforth reign in their ranks.

Until 10 years ago, it seemed impossible to the greatest number of people that anything could be changed; today it seems impossible to everyone that anything can continue as it did before. And yet, 10 years ago, the resigned thinkers of the impotent Left pompously decreed that the world had reached its definitive order, and that there was no other “choice” than the one between the Russian, Chinese and Cuban lies that their dishonest controversies weakly nourished. [Herbert] Marcuse, full of illusions, still claimed to demonstrate to us the disappearance of the proletariat, which was supposedly cheerfully dissolved into the bourgeoisie, and Henri Lefebvre, disillusioned, was already chattering on about “the end of history.” By confessing so maladroitly that the reality of the period was all that they dreamed, they were only taking their poor dreams for reality. But after 1968, they had to come to sad terms with the stupidity from which they suffered. Marcuse became resigned to keeping quiet, and Lefebvre returned to the fold by speaking on behalf of the French Stalinists.

Today, when the time of disorder once again begins to disturb the sleep of the dominant classes, all the pathetic ideologues who are short on ideas have lost their audiences, but they have found unexpected jobs as defense attorneys for the old world. In Italy, where the crisis is the most serious, they have lost all restraint and – one step ahead of subversion – pop up here to hastily don the togas of the fatherland and appear over there like old cuckoo clocks to ceaselessly strike our ears with the same banalities about the defense of the republican order and the customary trivialities in favor of the democratic institutions with the same feigned and self-important conviction of the priests of a church that lacks a loyal congregation because faith is lacking in the miracles that they promise: namely, that history will stop, as if by enchantment, due to their magical formulae.

Every time that they show up on television or in one of the newspapers that imprudently invites us to appreciate the delights of the democracy that – fuck! – was born from the Resistance, just as they were born from the estimable cunts of their mothers, people like Valiani, Amendola, Asor Rosa, Moravia, Bobbio, Bocca et. al demonstrate that they do not want to understand that the violent and contradictory events that feed the columns of the newspapers only prove that their era is over and that a new world is here. These old caryatids that hope to support the desecrated and crumbling temple of the dominant lies and abuses for a little while longer – these extremists of consensus and fanatics of legality – do not know that their laws do not control the future or that, before judging the new men, one should judge the old laws. And, furthermore, the “democracy” and “liberty” with which these gentlemen gargle and assault our ears are, for them, what colors are to someone who is blind from birth. The proof of this is simple. If they knew the real meanings of these words, they would not make use of them so casually when speaking of our miserable republic. But when real democracy imposes itself – that is to say, when all decision-making and executive powers belong to the revolutionary workers’ councils, from which every delegate is revocable by the base at every instant – well! then we will see all these gentlemen who today speak nonsense about democracy either combat it or, more probably, flee from it, as is their habit. But faced with the peremptory and insolent appeals with which these gentlemen gratify us today, the young proletarians are obligated to conclude that, if these respected hoaxers are solid in their courageous defense of all the current lies and abuses, it isn’t by chance, but is in fact because they collect large payments for doing so. How many millions does honest Leo Valiani receive each month, or each week, to write what he writes? And what would he write if he had the salary and life of a worker? And Bocca? And all the others?

Lichtenberg said that he didn’t know a man in the world who, having transformed himself into a blackguard for a thousand thalers [silver coins], would not prefer to remain honest for half that sum.

Disappear, grotesque masquerade, charlatans of incurable diseases: you fear too many things to be feared and respect too many things to be respected! You judge everything wrongly, while people are beginning to judge you rightly. Do you not know that half of the country is laughing at you and the other half ignores you? You should at least know that, faced with the tragic-comic farce that constitutes your very existence, the court martial of our critique will soon celebrate its saturnalia! And one should not reproach me for having recourse to invective. Ever since Dante, all those who have regarded the powerful and their servants with disabused eyes have always been constrained to have recourse to invective. Because it is not enough to judge the acts and speeches of men; one must also judge men according to their acts and speeches.

Until now, the entirety of the country has remained spectators of its governmental ministers and all those who deceive it and speak in its name. Today the country must begin to judge them and to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s: twenty-three thrusts of the sword.

In the eras in which intelligence reigns, one can judge men and women according to the use they make of it; in the centuries of decadence, which nevertheless include skillful people, one must judge men and women according to their interests and merits; and in those periods when extreme mediocrity collides with great difficulties, which is the case today, one must consider the general conditions in which men and women live, the pretentions, fears and particular interests of those in power, and make our judgments based upon this mix. Thus, if today we witness the edifying spectacle that is offered to us daily by all the defense attorneys for the old world, who take the floor with ardor and haste to ejaculate their pleas in turn or all at the same time, this is because they fear that each time might be their last and because they all feel – with confusion, but not without good reason – that the tribunal of history is at the point of handing down a sentence that only comes too late. And if in their vain oratories these mercenary defenders of all the abuses sometimes seem reckless, this is only because, when fear has passed a certain limit, courage and cowardice can temporarily produce the same effects.

If the politicians and intellectuals are temporarily agitated by the word courage, it is principally to ask each other what it is exactly. And if, after the clamoring has ceased, they have not been able to give a response, we need not look very far to find the reason. As a general rule, men and women always speak the most of what they lack the most, and particularly in the situations in which they have the greatest need of it. Thus, while a poor person speaks of money, Franco Rodano speaks of courage. Lama, Moravia, Arpino, Calvino, Vasco Pratolini, Elio Petri and a hundred others try to outdo each other in their discussions of it. It isn’t only Antonello Trombadori who has spoken of it – and, at least on this occasion, he showed himself to be reckless by speaking of rope in the house of the hanged man. And almost all of them have spoken of courage to accuse Montale and Sciascia of cowardice, even though these last two have at least had the minimum courage to express publicly the disinterest and disgust that this State inspires in them, while the Stalinist Amendola fears to see the State collapse before the Christian Democrats have been able to share it with him.

All this demonstrates that one can say of courage what Marx said of consciousness. It is certainly not the courage of men and women that determines their social condition, but, on the contrary, it is their social condition that determines their courage and cowardice; and it suffices to consider the provisional character and current fragility of the social positions that these usurpers occupy in a society as uncertainly divided into classes as ours is to be sufficiently informed of their alleged “courage.” Moreover, it goes without saying that no one has asked them to be [truly] courageous.

Cowardice has always existed, even if every age has not had the chance to see it in power. In our age, cowardice would like to be in the majority, but it already is the majority of the government, it has its heroes, and it publicly awards itself the dignities and honors that were, in other times, reserved for courage. All of the political-intellectual controversies about courage have only made obvious the profound cowardice of all those who have participated in them, since, if one cannot give oneself courage, one cannot take away one’s cowardice. Indeed, one cannot even hide it, because I have never known a coward who at least has had the simple courage to recognize his cowardice and thus hide it better.

These periodic, weak and boring “polemics,” which constitute the principal pastime of all the eunuchs of power – that is to say, the intellectuals – once again demonstrate the incurable weakness of those who participate in them. The weapons of their “critiques” do not fire because they are, as Camoens would say, “covered with the rust of the social peace” that they have enjoyed for too long, but only until recently. And we know that weakness is perhaps the only fault that one cannot correct, precisely because its effects are unimaginable and even more prodigious than the effects of the most vivid passions.

These courageous gentlemen defend the archaism of society’s institutions only to avoid the misfortune of having to defend themselves. Nevertheless, they no longer even know how to get these institutions to function, and their archaic nature cannot get these men respected or venerated. Quite the contrary, these institutions discredit themselves every day, and they age even more rapidly than their coryphées. And, as their decadence becomes ever more obvious, they inspire a contempt that becomes so universal that they are less and less in a position to do harm. Thus, the political world has fallen into a disastrous imbecility at the very moment when society as a whole has become more intelligent. Today, this imbecility and this intelligence harm power to an equal extent, and power finds itself constantly eaten away from the inside and attacked from without.

The social war that is coming has already put into motion all the individuals and all the classes of society because, by putting the interests of everyone back into play, it confers on everyone an interest in the [outcome of the] battle and it calls upon each person to choose his or her camp: on the one side, all those who fear a war that they can no longer prevent (the capitalists and the bureaucrats of the so-called Communist Party); and, on the other side, all those who have no power over their own lives and know it.

In the following chapters, I will write against the order of existing things, but I will do so in relative disorder. If I were to deal with this order in an orderly way, I would be according too much honor to my subject, because I want to show that it is incapable of it. As Saint-Just already said, “the present order is disorder put into laws.” Before concluding this preface, there is hardly no need of saying that Remedy for Everything does not want nor can it be a remedy for everyone. Indeed, it proposes to harm many and hopes to be useful to an even larger number. The utility of such a pamphlet will thus be measurable according to the damage it is capable of causing, directly or indirectly, immediately or in a little while, to the owners of alienation, because everything that is harmful [to them] is not useless for this purpose. Only that which is useless is harmful [to us]. I hope to be clear, but if someone persists in not understanding, I will preoccupy myself less with this than he or she will be. It is said that this era can no longer be unconcerned about what it produces and, if it produces certain books, this means that it also produces those who know how to read them.

The owners of this world, as well as its salaried “critics,” will be exasperated and vexed by seeing that only their most irreducible enemies are in a position to really understand it, and the dominant class will see with a justified inquietude that its real problems are only exposed by those who work at its subversion. Our government ministers and all the politicians will be justly disturbed by having to read our writings to finally be able to contemplate themselves with realism, but in the perspective of the destruction of all their powers. The heads of the bourgeoisie’s secret services – for a dozen years predisposed to provocations, assassinations and State terrorism – will justly be made furious by seeing their maneuvers constantly unmasked by the very people against whom these crimes were conceived, and even the death of Moro will finally appear in its true and sinister light. The great decomposing bourgeoisie certainly will not want to pardon me, either for this pamphlet or any of the rest, and some among them – like Indro Montanelli, who has already cried about it for the last two years or so – wants to accuse me of being a traitor to my class, because I have turned all of my weapons against the aforementioned high bourgeoisie, from which I have come. Well, I am honored to receive such an accusation, because there is no humiliation (nor anything else) that this bourgeoisie has not amply merited, and the working class, which has been subjected to the largest number of class betrayals on the part of its alleged representatives, will have reason to congratulate itself because for once [Latin in original] their class adversary has been struck by the same fate.

Thus, Remedy for Everything will also be a settling of accounts with the entire underworld that the dominant class democratically imposes on the dominated classes, and also a settling of accounts with this or that precise person who has, until now, abused with too much impunity the patience of the exploited classes or, rather, the silence to which they are reduced. As in Hell, here one will find various graves and many damned souls – bourgeois and Stalinist, professional liars and labor-union bureaucrats, politicians and intellectuals, among others – with the result that, at the end, I, too, will be able to say to the reader:

You can now judge these people,
Whom I have accused here, and their faults,
Which are the cause of all your misfortunes.[1]

[1] Dante, Paradiso, VI, 97-99.