Thirty years ago, the fall of the “Berlin Wall” – the symbol for those who have never understood a single thing about capitalism and communism – once again launched, in the crudest and most vulgar of manners, the anti-communist polemics that had never ceased to bray (and we use the verb with the utmost respect for the noble and friendly animal): “This is the practical demonstration of what communism is!” The same polemics re-emerge today with idiotic obstinacy, not so much because of the thirtieth anniversary of that event, but because everything in the world of Capital is desperately screaming the need to put an end to a mode of production that at this stage has become purely destructive.

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.