The military class, increasingly distanced from its bourgeois partner, abandons the street, the highway, those outmoded vectors, to the small and middle-sized business of the protection rackets. The city unions in New York are starting to replace their members' productive activity with simple crisis management, by becoming administrators and bankers.
In Italy, assassinations, abductions, crimes and incidents are on the rise. Financial interests are becoming inseparable from those of a multitude of little, so-called "revolutionary, " groups. Justice is in a quandary. They talk about "liberating the people" and extort millions from them. Public opinion is in an uproar about the mix, but this criminal power rising from the masses is really only a political demand returning to an uncontrolled condition because the old national ethology-social ideals-has become secondary and no longer mobilizes.
We can thus interpret the unexpected visits of political leaders such as Messrs. Marchais and Chevenement to the workers in their offices and factories not as a challenge to the bosses or- the government, but as unavowed attempts by the representatives of the devalued revolutionary ideologies to take the grass roots back in hand. While the Communist Party in Portugal completely failed in its opportunistic attempts with the military masters, the French Communist Party, once hesitant, seemed to approach the courageous
The End of the Proletariat
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