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Each issue of our periodicals carries the following words on the cover:

«What distinguishes our Party is the political continuity which goes from Marx to Lenin, to the foundation of the Communist International and the Communist Party of Italy (Livorno, 1921); the struggle of the Communist Left against the degeneration of the International, the struggle against the theory of «socialism in one country» and the Stalinist counter-revolution; the rejection of the Popular Fronts and the Resistance blocs; the difficult task of restoring the revolutionary doctrine and organisation in close interrelationship with the working class, against personal and electoral politics.»

The purpose of these few words is to give a brief and general indication of what characterises our Party. Although it was not intended to be a detailed explanation (synthetic formulas mark a trace, do not claim to illustrate it), a distinctive feature of our movement is immediately made clear to the reader: for us, contrary to the whole myriad of «modernisers» of Marxism, there exists a continuous, unchanged, unalterable line which defines the revolutionary Communist Party. This is so precisely because its line rises above the ups and downs, the setbacks and advances, the rare but glorious victories and the numerous and catastrophic defeats of the working class, on the difficult path of its struggle for emancipation. It is in fact only thanks to the uninterrupted permanence of this line that the proletariat exists as a class; indeed this line does not reflect the temporary and often contradictory position of the proletariat at this or that stage of its path, in space and time, but the direction that it must necessarily take, starting from its situation of exploited class), to become the ruling class and then achieve, throughout the world, the abolition of all classes and communism. While the material conditions for this path were created by the capitalist mode of production itself, this path does not fall from the sky and it can be travelled to the end only by struggling. And only the Marxist doctrine knows its necessary phases, its indispensable means, as well as its ultimate aims. 

This is why Lenin, paraphrasing a famous text of Marx, said that he is not a Marxist who does not extend the recognition of the class struggle up to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary product of that struggle and as an obligatory stage on the path «towards the abolition of all classes and a classless society».

To recognise the class struggle and the conflict of interests between capital and labour is merely to acknowledge a bare fact – the situation of the proletariat in bourgeois society. To limit oneself to this however is to exclude what historical determinism itself compels the proletariat to become in order to free itself from capitalist exploitation: the weapon for violently destroying the bourgeois state power which protects and defends the capitalist relations of production, and the weapon for establishing its own dictatorship, the «political phase of transition» (according to Marx) in the process of the «revolutionary transformation of capitalist society into communist society». Otherwise, it would means to accept the state of subjection which is the lot of the proletariat in bourgeois society even when it struggles for the defence of its immediate interests against the yoke of capital. It would means to deny the proletariat the historical task of emancipating humanity while emancipating itself, which alone makes it into a class, the class which will «give birth to a new society». 

This line which unites the past and the present of the working class with its future is nothing other than the theory, the program, and the principles of revolutionary communism and it is kept unchanged above the vicissitudes of the class struggle in as much as it is embodied in a party which unreservedly makes it its own, in an organisation which defends it, fights for it, and translates it into action. This is why Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that «Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement».

Since the proletariat «has no country» and as a class pursues aims which go beyond all the limitations of trade, locality, factory, shop, etc., that which distinguishes Communists, Marx adds, is:

«1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, [Communists] point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.»

These are the fundamental characteristics which distinguish Communists. These prohibit the name Communist from being applied to those who deny the international character of the aim towards which the proletarian movement is directed and the international character of the struggle for attaining this aim; who deny that this aim and this struggle coincide with the interests of the movement in its totality and of its future; who deny the necessity of the violent revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the obligatory path towards socialism; and who deny that the party, armed with the science of Marxism, is indispensable as an organ of this gigantic struggle. No link in this chain can be broken without the whole chain breaking and without the proletariat falling into a resigned acceptance of its position as an exploited class for eternity. 

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