We are certain that this 2017, the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution, will be marked by the most irate and revolting anti-communism. There will be a revival (a ridiculously banal version, as it is suited to a ruling ideology that is inevitably the expression of the progressive putrefaction of the capitalist mode of production and all its social relations) of the campaign of slander, attacks, mystification and distortion, manipulation and misrepresentation through which, ever since the conquest of the Winter Palace, the ideologists of the ruling capitalist class have attempted to deny the need – tragically urgent – for the classless society of communism. Though never succeeding: the same rancour and the same perversion revealed in the ideological and practical mobilization of the ruling class against Red October are all too clear a proof that the terror of communism is ever-present, all the more so, since the dead end in which capitalism is struggling, with no idea how to disentangle itself, is fuelling its worst fears. But there will also, above all (another aspect of anti-communism, even though it may not seem so to the uninformed) be the rhetorical embalming of Red October by all those who, having inherited and carried forward the democratic, social-democratic and Stalinist tradition, have abandoned themselves to exercises in rhetoric in the hope of recovering some last remnants of identity, and naturally they do so using all the necessary shades of distinction, all the acrobatic moves to distance themselves, all the hypocrisy typical of penitents and traitors, all the balancing acts and somersaults that their infamous history has accustomed them to over the arc of a hundred years. Both sides are fluid, superimposable and interchangeable, taking turns to alternate and dissimulate. Above all, they are ready to merge into a single, compact anti-proletarian front the moment it becomes necessary, when our class demonstrates that it no longer intends passively accepting the oppression it is subjected to day by day and threatens to take the path of a class-driven and revolutionary response.

For us, returning to Red October, as we shall be doing in the course of the year, with articles and public initiatives wherever our forces make it possible, is no pathetic “how we were”, the umpteenth example of “frozen memory”. The experience of 1917 (as of the Paris Commune of 1871), the point of arrival of long work by the party beginning in 1848 and pre-supposing the extension of the revolutionary process in time and space (something that the bourgeois counter-revolution in all its democratic, social-democratic, Nazi-fascist and Stalinist forms, has impeded for these terrible, long decades) is living material for us, from which precious and vital lessons can be learned for a future which, in material terms, is inevitably being prepared. For us “Red October” is not a nostalgic slogan, an inoffensive icon: it is a battle cry that we have been spreading with bared teeth and claws ever since, to pass on to the younger generations, who will have to face with a militant spirit the devastating death throes of a mode of production that has reached all the historical limits of its own existence. And which must therefore be destroyed, on pain of unspeakable suffering (by means of exploitation, poverty, famine, devastation, war) for our species, which only in communism can define itself human.

A year ago in the pages of this newspaper (and later in our English-language publication, The Internationalist), we called attention to the serious social situation in Great Britain, particularly with regard to the “housing issue” and the anti-proletarian measures being passed or planned 1. This was well before the “Brexit” case hit the scene in Europe. In addition, in the editorial to issue 4/2016 of this same newspaper 2, we stressed the fact that the predictable decline in the living and working conditions of British proletarians (whether natives or immigrants) should not be attributed to Great Britain leaving Europe (i.e. to Brexit as such) but to the complex of measures that every national capital is obliged to adopt to deal with its own crisis – measures amongst which “Brexit” itself can be counted. What has actually changed since then? Not much really, apart from social contradictions becoming even more acute: even the mere insistence with which some local institutions in London (such as, to quote one example, the local library of Tower Hamlets, one of London’s traditionally proletarian areas most affected by the relentless march of property and financial speculation – so-called gentrification) are returning to the burning issue of housing, with ample documentation on the squat movements, which were particularly widespread and combative in the 1920s and ‘30s, but also later in the 1960s and 1970s.