Over the coming months there will be no lack of new episodes in the crisis of over-production of goods and capital that has for some time been shaking the capitalist mode of production. More bubbles are swelling and the amazing course of the “emerging countries” is already experiencing a slowdown. We’re in for some surprises and action by communistswill be of even greater and more fundamental importance in order to analyze the facts andintervene, organizing and directing the struggles that will inevitably and increasingly spring out of the social substrata.
The extent to which this action is so urgently necessary must be clear: despite its irremediable contradictions, the capitalist mode of production will not do us the favour of disappearing of its own accord in the explosion of a “definitive” or “final” economic crisis, as many fondly imagine will happen. Let us make it clear: economic crises offer the possibility of rendering more evident the contrast between the forces of production set in motion more than two centuries previously by Capital itself and the forms in which the bourgeoisie tends to organize them in order to maintain its undisputed dominion, democratic or fascist as it may be, activated by means of illusory reforms or aggressive “liberalization”. This contrast is irreparable: it is the ineradicable root of a ceaseless struggle between our class, the proletariat that provides the driving force of live labour employed in the general organization of capitalism to produce social wealth monopolized as plusvalue, and our historical enemy, the bourgeois class. The trend of this century-old fight is neither continuous, nor linear: it finds expression, and still does, in moments of great pressure and advance, of sudden and slow withdrawal due to defeat and degeneration, and long periods of waiting before resuming the battle.
In other words, the struggle between counter-revolution (the imperious dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) and the revolutionary assaults of the proletariat proceeds according to an almost rhythmical movement. These assaults which have pointed out the direction to take and the forces necessary to strike the final blow when the right conditions occur again: they have done so through the great, though transitory, victories of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the Red October in 1917 Russia. And recovery after defeat is long and difficult, all the longer and more difficult, the nearer victory has come to striking that final blow.
Today the winds roused by one of the most important economic crises of overproduction of goods and capitals are starting to blow more strongly; the crisis involves all capitalist states: those with the longest history of industrialization and the heaviest load of imperial carats and the younger ones born with all the genetic defects of this overbearing and parasitic phase (imperialist, just as Lenin taught on the basis of Marx’s and Engel’s analyses and doctrine) without being able to fully enjoy the impulse that only a century before nurtured the national revolutions.
On the one hand these winds are preparing the storm of widespread warfare amongst the as yet embryo imperialist coalitions – that destructive cyclone which, by eliminating the excess of capitals, goods and human beings that cannot be used in the process of valorising capital, will accelerate the conditions for a fake recovery of this valorisation, laying the bases for new, and increasingly more destructive crises. On the other hand, by consuming one by one the so-called reserves by means of which the multiform party of the bourgeoisie has been able, up to the present, to delude our class as to the eternity and inevitability of its subordinate condition, it will oblige it to take up the battle again, even if only to avoid dying out.
On the basis of these material facts and the experience of two centuries of modern class war, even in times of the worst dictatorships of counter-revolution, when it has been necessary to struggle “against the current and the tides”, when it seems that the proletarian class is no more than a crude economic fact, incapable of expressing its own antagonistic potential, it nonetheless lives on and, albeit in a concealed manner, almost invisible to most, expresses its own party, in opposition to all the parties in which bourgeois dominion takes form: the Communist Party.
The Communist Party is its organ, the tool that sums up, collects, conserves its century-long experience of life and battle, expansion and withdrawal. It is the weapon that the proletarian class historically expresses, conserves and perfects in order to be able, at the right moment, to strike the final blow; it is its organization and guide. It does not substitute for the class (as many fear, incapable of comprehending this dialectic relationship), but is the tool that allows it never to lose sight of the direction and objective towards which, unknown to it, the energies generated by the clash between the forces and forms of production are pointing, driving towards action.
Thus, it is not just any ordinary party, which like Plasticine adapts itself to represent the working class like a plasticine model at the conference table of an illusory mediation between interests, “in the name of the common good”; neither is it a sect of conspirators creating conditions and bending events to their own will. Communism is an objective to be achieved in terms of real movement, not the project or design for a utopia. The Party thus expresses, guides, accompanies the class, directly experiencing its battles, because ever since 1848 it has sustained and promoted its historical objectives.
What, then, are its tasks in the hard, long-lasting contact with the class and its battles? Nothing new and nothing different: the path is already mapped out by the political work carried out by our comrades who, in times of violent counter-revolution (first military, then political, with the latter all the more ferocious precisely because of its duration and the devastating effects that still weigh on our class) have been able to show us, both in theory and in practice, that there are no short-cuts or tricks in the work of restoring the party organ-weapon but only (and this is no small matter!) continuity and revolutionary determination.
Despite the limited number of our members, despite the isolation in which we continue to operate, we proceed in our work of preparing for revolution, as already indicated in the “Project of Theses for the III Congress of the Communist Party”, presented by the Left of the Partito Comunista d'Italia in 1926 – our “Tesi di Lione” (Lyons Theses):
a - defence and clarification, with regard to new groups of facts which arise, of the fundamental, programmatic postulates, i.e. of the theoretical conscience of the working-class movement: today this means insisting on the study of the course of capitalism in its imperialist phase and pointing out to the class the revolutionary process by which all the obstacles shackling communism are to be overthrown;
b - ensuring the continuity of the organizational unity of the party and its efficiency and defence against contamination by outside influences contrary to the revolutionary interests of the proletariat: today this means persisting in the constant political work that allows us to restore, strengthen and put down the roots of the World Communist Party;
c - active participation in all the battles of the working class, even when they arise out of partial and limited interests, encouraging their development, whilst constantly contributing the link to ultimate revolutionary objectives and presenting the victories of the class struggle as bridges to the essential battles to come, pointing out the danger of resting on the laurels of partial results or even in the position of arrival and thus bartering these results for the conditions for the proletariat’s action and class belligerence, or the independence of its ideology and organizations, first and foremost those of the party: today this means working in the rank and file of our class, alongside it in its struggles, to help it organize with increasing efficiency into a permanent, unifying structure in defence of living and working conditions.
Immediatists, spontaneists, propagators of movements of all sorts will consider these tasks of little importance. And yet they are gigantic, because they imply shaking off the deadly weight of ninety years of open, bourgeois counter-revolution, carried out with the prime contribution of the political and union organizations that have shamelessly continued in words to set themselves up as reference points, whilst in actual fact they are the accomplices of the ruling class and have never ceased to betray the proletariat and thus to oppress it.
Today our voice would seem to be feeble, our real possibility of making a difference limited and our contact with the class occasional. This does not intimidate us, even less so does it lead us to despair: the material reasons for this minority condition are well known to us and on many occasions we have already discussed and analysed them, and there is no need to do so once again here. With all our limits and inadequacies and the errors we may have made and will still make (which – whatever our many, vociferous critics may say – we always have and always will make an operational reckoning of, because only through such a reckoning can errors be positively overcome), despite all this, we are proud to confirm that only by binding oneselves once again to the red thread of the tradition of the Communist Left (from the ‘20s onwards), to its theoretical and practical battles, through ninety years now of multiform bourgeois counter-revolution (reformism, nazifascism, Stalinism, democracy), and thus only by approaching our party, contributing to strengthening it and putting down its international roots, is it possible to take the path leading to communist revolution.
