In hobnail boots the crisis pursues its onward march, crushing millions of proletarian lives everywhere in the world. It is a crisis ofoverproduction of goods and capitals, astructural crisis, i.e. implicit in the very nature of capitalist production. It is not an anomaly or some sort of pathology due to “bad management”, “obscure plotting”, the “egoism” of individuals or institutions, as many give us to understand: it isthe norm, the very physiology of capitalism, whose iron rule is to go on producingmore and more with the objective of ceaselessly accumulating profits, income, interest.
To this structural crisis, the ruling class in all countries reacts the only way it knows: squeezing more and more out of the proletariat and creating (not out of free will or spitefulness but precisely because of the laws of capitalist production) the premises for new world slaughter, to destroy what has been produced to excess, as well as proletarian overpopulation (let us not forget: First World War, at least 17 million deaths; Second World War, at least 71 million deaths). From this “regenerating bloodbath”, the capitalist mode of production will emerge to impose on the new generations a further, immense effort in production, as already happened in the first and second post-war periods. Until…the cycle begins again.
The proletariat has not passively submitted to exploitation in the course of the crises that have followed on one another’s heels over the past forty years – since the cycle of expansion of the world economy started to falter. Particularly in the so-called “emergent countries”, which have recently reached capitalist maturity, proletarians have fought against the attack on their living and working conditions (Egypt, Tunisia, the Far East, China), even though their struggles were promptly blocked and channelled towards miserly democratic and petit-bourgeois, nationalist and religious claims. In the so-called “advanced western world”, proletarians have instead found it hard (and still do) to shake off the straitjacket of illusions and promises spread copiously by all the range of constitutional parties, in war as in peace, over these eighty years of the longest reign of violence that the working-class and communist movement has ever known; illusions and promises accompanied by very material crumbs – always wrested by means of battles and never generously given, and destined to disappear as the crises start to follow on one another’s heels.
But despite themselves, the hobnail boots are even starting to shake these walls, put up around the proletarians to keep them in their cage and oblige them to bend their heads without complaining too much. Over the last few months, carried along by the wave of struggles generously fought, unfortunately in isolation, by immigrant workers from various countries (pure proletarians who have nothing to lose except their chains), we have seen – and followed with interest and attention, making our voices heard wherever possible – small signs of an awakening, in Italy as in France, Great Britain, Spain, even in the United States and Germany. Small signs, we repeat: but practical, material proof that it is impossible to suffer and accept forever – that the pressure, when it reaches a critical level, can only produce an explosion.
The ruling class has been preparing for this explosion for some time. It does so by using the arms (ideological, political, religious) of rhetoric, referring to “innovation”: the crisis (economic and social) is said to be caused by backwardness that must be overcome by means of a “new qualitative leap forward”, “new structural reforms”, “new investments”, “new policies” – the same old hot air, as we communists have always pointed out and demonstrated. But, proletarians, beware! The word “innovation” rhymes with another word that is destined to take on an increasingly aggressive resonance in the workplaces, the streets and the squares, in the mass media, in the hoarse braying of the politicians and the pen-pushers, the priests and above all the police: the word repression.
The bourgeois ruling class knows its enemy well, even when it seems to be sleeping. It ranges its armies in the field, the “forces of law and order”, its own institutions: parliamentary political parties, unions that have for some time now become the supporting structure of the capitalist world order, intellectuals ready to hire themselves out to the highest bidder, the magistrates’ courts that are part of this structure … and the State, in fact, with its legal and illegal gangs of repression. We have already seen the first signs, in Italy and elsewhere: proletarians beaten, imprisoned, persecuted, because they react against the massacre of their lives and those of their families – proletarians born in the country and proletarian immigrants, unhappily still divided under the police truncheons and not yet united in a battlefront.
Proletarians, beware!
This repression must be met with courage and without hesitation. Anger and awareness, the keywords of the workers’ movement, must once again start to resound with renewed vigour: the relentless defence of living and working conditions, refusal of any kind of blackmailing that may attempt to subordinate these conditions to the higher needs of the national economy (and, above all, in a maybe not-so-distant future, a war effort), complete and active solidarity with the most exploited outcasts (immigrants, women, the temporarily employed, the unemployed, retired pensioners), the extension of the battlefronts to provide defence against the legal and illegal gangs of the State (which is the armed wing of the ruling class)…
In order to be successful, however, this defensive response must not be circumscribed or an end in itself. It must be the necessary training for attack. It is not merely a matter of “two phases”: defence today and attack tomorrow. If carried out and organized according to the right perspective (that of preparing the conditions for a renewal of the class struggle with revolutionary aims), this defensive struggle is already a first step towards attack, because it starts to question the balance of power between the exploited and the exploiters.
We shall never tire of repeating (and working to make it possible) that in all this the militant presence of the revolutionary party is fundamental and essential, just as is it is fundamental and essential to reinforce it and put down international roots for it. The proletarian avant-gardes, which in the course of their struggles (to which our militants contribute and will continue to contribute), have seen their enemies distinctly ranged, will not be late in recognizing this urgent need and in turning towards our party, the international communist party, which for over eighty years has managed to resist all the convergent forces of the bourgeois counter-revolution and keep the thread of the communist tradition safe and strong.
International Communist Party
