This work is entrusted neither to individuals nor committees and still less to bureaus; it is one moment and one area of a unitary operation which has been carried out for over a century, going well beyond the birth and death of generations. It is not inscribed in anyone's curriculum vitae, not even of those who have spent an extremely long time coherently elaborating and mulling over the results. The movement bans, and always will ban, extempore, personal and contingent initiatives being taken in this work of elaboration of key texts and even with regard to those studies which interpret the historical process around us.

It is babyish to think that with a pen, an inkwell and an hour or so, some good lad can coolly set out to write texts, or even that it can be done by the long-suffering "base" at the invitation of a circular; or by an ephemeral academic meeting, whether it be noisily public or clandestine. The results of such efforts can be disqualified from the start; especially when a set of norms of this sort is the work of those who madly over-estimate the effect of human influence, and human intervention, on history. Is it men in general, particular men, or one particular Man with a capital M who intervenes? It's an old question. Men make history, it's just that they have very little idea how and why they make it. In contrast, all the "fans" of human action, and those who mock what they allege to be fatalist automatism, are generally the very people who privately nurture the idea that their own wee bodies contain that predestined Man. And they are precisely the ones who have understood and can understand nothing: not even that history does not gain or lose one tenth of a second, whether they sleep like logs or realize their generous dream of thrashing about like men possessed.

With icy cynicism, and without the least pity for any super-activist specimens more or less convinced of their own importance, and for every assembly of innovators and would-be helmsmen, we repeat: "Go back to sleep!" you couldn't even set the alarm clock.

The task of setting theses in order and straightening dogs legs that are going astray all over the place – a task which always arises when least expected – requires much more than a short speech, or half an hour in some little congress or other. It isn't easy to compile an index of the places where it is necessary to plug up the holes, a work evidently seen as inglorious by those destined to "pass into history"; who are more inclined to knock the structure down than stop up the holes. Still, we think it might be useful to have just such a little index, which obviously won't be perfect and will contain repetitions and inversions. We point out correct theses and contrast them with the erroneous ones: though we don't call the latter anti-theses since such a term is easily confused with antithesis, which suggests two different theses side by side in opposition. We prefer to use the term counter-theses.

Battaglia Comunista, 1952