The hollowest construction is the one that wants to confront this infamous world (whose potential, however, is exceptionally high) of capitalist civilisation (and also the majority of the proletarians, who are now being used as a result of major historical mistakes) with the alternative of the phantom of barbarism: It may be that there will be no creative revolution of a new world, that it will be strangled, but there will still be a crisis of collapse in today’s society: instead of passing to socialism, will it be a fall from civilisation to barbarism? This threat, of purely cerebral calibre, will not frighten any bourgeois and will not encourage any proletarian to fight. No society disintegrates because of its internal laws, its internal necessity, if these laws and this necessity do not lead to the uprising of a human mass organised with the weapons in hand – something we know and expect. There is no death without trauma for any “class civilisation”, no matter how corrupt and disgusting it may be.
As far as the barbarism is concerned, which is supposed to arise spontaneously after the death of capitalism as a result of its disintegration: If we regard its disappearance as a necessary condition for further development, which then had to lead inevitably through the swamp of the subsequent civilisation, then there is nothing so terrible about its characteristics as a human form of coexistence that an unexpected return could frighten us.
Just as against Rome the wild hordes were needed – so that so many and great useful contributions to the organisation of people and things would not be lost – which were unconscious contributors to a much bigger revolution still far away in time, we want the gates of this bourgeois world of profiteers, oppressors and butchers to be struck by a powerful barbaric wave capable of burying this world among itself.
But just as there are borders, walls and curtains in this world, all forces, even though they compete against each other, are gathering around the tradition of this very civilisation.
When the revolutionary movement of the working class becomes strong again, organises and arms itself, and when formations emerge that do not adhere to the civilisation of an Acheson or Malik[14], then these will be the barbaric forces that will not disdain the ripe fruit of modern industrial potential, but will snatch it from the throat of the exploiters by breaking their still sharp teeth.