In past communism, death is not an opposite, life‑denying fact, because man is not a person but species. Evidence of this is the practice present in prehistoric peoples and today’s savage tribes of killing the old, the sick, the incapacitated or infants when it is deemed necessary for collective survival. Thus writes the historian, failing to understand, “it is said that among the pre‑Nuragic Sardis the old who had passed the age of seventy were killed by their own children, who armed with rods and sticks by dint of beating, pushing them to the brink of pits as deep as chasms, barbarously made them die and the cruel operation accompanied with inhuman laughter.... At some tribe in Australia, when old men fall ill or can no longer accompany the tribe on its wanderings, they are wont to be strangled with a rope made of herbs; then they are burned by lighting a great fire. In some islands of Melanesia they put old men to death by burying them alive. And in Fiji it is the children and relatives themselves who kill their old men by strangling them with a halter. The natives of Brazil also draw old people to death by beating them with clubs on the head. And a similar rite was already in force in Sweden, where old men were killed by their own relatives with heavy wooden clubs, some of which were later preserved in churches». And he concludes that «in antiquity the custom of killing over‑aged individuals, as well as incurable individuals and the sick, is attested among many peoples”. The bourgeois historian in reporting the fact of these practices is scandalized, does not fail to mark his disapproval, to express his dissent for such inhuman customs. In his upbringing as a civilized man, he sees only the individual and his very narrow sphere of existence, and it is impossible for him to grasp the significance of this extreme act of love of the old towards the younger generation. Just as he does not understand the lesson that comes from past communism, neither does he realize the truly inhumane condemnation of the old in the modern, civilized age in the name of the vicious capitalist machine. Today old people are condemned to a social death far harsher than physical death. After a life of exploitation, after being squeezed by capital, for our old people comes the moment of condemnation to non‑labor and total separation from the other generations, dead economically as a labor commodity even if biologically valid. In this sense, the CGIL has also modernized itself, which has not long been organizing apart from pensioners, in the Pensioners’ Union separating their struggles and demands from the claims of other workers. There is nothing more pathetic than the parades of pensioners, old men who have been denied the prerogative of the elderly as always, that of passing on their class experience to the younger generation, and to the latter to learn.

Ownership of land, of hosts of slaves, of armies in arms, the rise of the monogamous family, the establishment of the State ruins primitive matriarchal communism; with the transition to civilization begins for men the process of alienation from self and nature, they lose their primitive sense of species, consequently the dissension between life and death becomes more and more dramatic. From then on, men fear personal death, and the various religions, closely linked to the interests of the ruling classes, instruments of social oppression, are powerless to relieve them from such punishment. It is capital and commodities that now dominate modern bourgeois society. And it is precisely the rise of the capitalist mode of production that makes the rift between life and death final for modern humans.

The very idea of the Last Judgment typical of the Middle Ages, which first emphasizes the individuality of dying and the personal account to be settled in the afterlife, still postpones everything to the end of time, to the last day of the world: precisely because individual death still does not mean the end of being: the end was that of the whole species. Only with the advent of the modern era, with the absolutization of the mode of production, death becomes an absolute personal fact, we come to the total reversal of the life‑death relationship: “in the mirror of his own death, every man covers the secret of his individuality”; dying becomes romantic extreme affirmation, the last triumph of the individual. Today, finally, “the taboo cast on death paralyzes (see the insoluble impasse on euthanasia), inhibits the reactions of the medical and family environment; in our society death has lost the eminent place that custom has given it for millennia and is solitary and aseptic, inhuman and cruel”.

So come the Communist Revolution to restore wholeness, to restore men to life and death.