Philosophy of Action

Abstract

It seems clear then that, for Olivetti, Marxism is lacking in something in order for it to be defined as ‘scientific socialism’. ‘One realises how little it mattered—not in Karl Marx’s time, but today—after the revolution had already triumphed’, notes the entrepreneur, ‘to not know how, and not want to address the serious issue of the way in which communism passes from a dictatorship to a regime of freedom, and what this regime is, if the form in which it is expressed in bourgeois society is by now an outdated, incapable and inefficient instrument’. For this reason, Olivetti maintains that it is important to develop an innovative ‘theoretical contribution’, ‘outside of the main dogmas and outmoded and uncertain beliefs’, which attempt to resolve the problem: a concrete base of a socialist theory of the State needed to be laid down which, far from being the bridge towards a society without the State, would be the guarantee of organisation and freedom. Since the problem was identified as a current one, it seemed necessary to Olivetti that whoever had lived through it historically faced the challenging task of providing a response: to this precise end, in fact, searching for ‘guarantees of freedom in a socialist State’, he developed L’ordine politico delle Comunità, which represents, then, that ‘real and true alternative model of a socialist State’ whose very absence is, indeed, revealed.