His position, at bottom, is still what it was formerly. Even today he is nothing but a theorist, if that is the word, and a stage-manager of coups de main . Blanquism, in its materiality, can be subversive today, reactionary tomorrow. However, it is always revolutionary and renovatory only in appearance, condemned to lack continuity and development, fated to be incapable of welding one coup de main to the next in a linear historical process. Today the bourgeois, half terrified and half stupefied, regard this man who has placed himself at their service as a kind of new monster, a revolutionizer of real situations and a creator of history.
Nothing is further from the truth.
The inability to weld together the links of a historical construction is as great in the Blanquism of this epileptic as it is in the Malthusian subversiveness of people like D'Aragona and Serrati. They are all members of the same family. They represent, the former and the latter alike, a common impotence. But it is no doubt significant, for the seriousness of Italian political life, that at the apex of a construction that is held together by a massive system of real forces, there should be found this man who amuses himself with trials of strength and verbal masturbation. The politicians of the bourgeoisie, who judge by their own impotence and their own fear, speak of Mussolini's reactionary subversiveness.