There are two attitudes that can be assumed to the devastating crisis of the capitalist mode of production. One consists in look backwards, in having – as it has been put – “your eyes in the back of your neck”. This means considering the present state of affairs eternal and untouchable, the institutions that sustain it as the only points of reference, the practices that have for decades been dominating (and castrating) the workers’ movement as the only ones possible. And so we put ourselves in the hands of the official trade unions (active protagonists of the most disgusting betrayals to damage the proletarian class for the whole of the second post-war war period), delegating to them every strategy, all the action thatconcerns us; we entrust any decisions regarding our living and working conditions to the “negotiating tables”; we lean on one party or one parliamentary group or the other in the hope that (pausing for a moment in their sole activity: the decade-long sharing out of the cake) “they take up the cause” of our needs; we regard the government and the State (the direct expressions of the ruling class and its political, military and ideological tools) as so many impartial bodies that we can turn to, so that they do us the favour of stepping in to moderate the ruthlessness of one insensitive (or perhaps “foreign”) boss or the other; and more often than not we end up becoming the more or less unwitting pawns in far wider-reaching strategies played out at the expense of others (commercial wars, sectorial competition, the buying and selling of more or less seriously lossmaking companies, applications for European funding, etc. etc.). “Eyes in the back of your neck” are worse than complete blindness. “Looking backwards” delivers proletarians, bound hand and foot, to the superior interests of domestic and international capital: it shuts them into the pen allotted to animals for slaughter.
The other attitude consists in looking forwards, well beyond the miserable horizon of our present conditions. It means understanding, even if only at a basic and instinctive level, the need to get out of the cul de sac, to make our presence felt by refusing to delegate practice and decisions to others and instead impose them through a process of organization, extension, centralization of the struggles: i.e. bringing onto the field a strength deriving from our numbers and our central position, as proletarians, in the work processes. This means above all rejecting self-destructive desperation which, helped along by the unions, encourages us to slash wrists, climb up towers, plunge into the depths of the earth, under the illusion that the media impact (this added tool of collective imbecility) is sufficient to solve a dramatic situation; in fact it condemns those who fall into the trap to solitude, isolation, impotence and frustration.
The proletarian class, attacked by the world crisis of the capitalist mode of production, needs something quite different: it needs to bring its collective strength into play. It is a question of power: however, not only in the sense evident to us communists that power is won by force and once acquired it must be forcibly directed against any attempt to regain it by the old ruling class, in order to reorganize the economy, breaking down the ties and barriers implicit in the capitalist mode of production and clear the ground (of course not in any brief period of time) of habits and inertia acquired over centuries of capitalist dictatorship. We know that this science of revolution, this science of communism, is not “genetically” part of the proletarian class, as so many immediatists and workerists would have us believe: it lies with the revolutionary party, which is based on theory verified over a time span of two centuries, on a tradition and continuity of political struggle, on a solid international organization, and it is only through the intervention of this party, in contact with the class through its battles and its defeats, that this science of revolution, this class consciousness, can be introduced into the proletariat from the outside.
But it is also a question of power from the point of view of the daily battle of resistance to capital: either our class resumes the fight with an even vague awareness that it can count on its own forces alone, on its own organization alone and sees the institutions and the parties that support them, the official unions, as just as many class enemies, thus setting itself objectives and methods of combat that step outside the régime of compatibility, consultation, delegation and democratic practice, or else it will remain inside that pen allotted to animals for slaughter, walking off in line, head hanging (or with the remaining freedom to … scream), resigned and desperate, to the massacre – at its place of work or in the ghetto of no-work and finally in the collective bloodbath of the next world war towards which the course of capitalist economy is heading.
It is not by closing ourselves inside the factory or the mine or in the fields that we shall rediscover our strength: it is in the real and close ties, not formal and rhetorical, with the proletariat in other factories, other mines and fields, from other areas and nations; it is in the re-founding of combative territorial organisms, open to everyone, the employed and the unemployed, men and women, pensioners and precarious workers, “natives” and “foreigners”, indifferent both to “union procedures” and to the “higher needs of the national economy”; it is by coming out onto the streets and into the squares, organized and determined – not in a goliardic or ritualistic way as, instead, we have been used to in decades of opportunist and petit-bourgeois practices; it is in the determined paralysis of vital economic and political lymph glands every time a sector is threatened, every time a contingent from our army is under attack, it is in the obstinate defence of our living and working conditions.
“The attack on one is an attack on us all!”: this slogan must once again become the flesh and blood of the proletarian struggle on all fronts. During the summer that has now come to an end (2012), the Spanish miners marching on the capital, Madrid, were met by the truncheons and rubber bullets of the capital’s cops; in South Africa other miners fighting for the classical demands of the proletariat were cut down and massacred by the same breed of cops: now, there wasn’t a single initiative in support of these class brothers of ours, not, of course, by unions that sold out to the State and the bosses decades ago, but not even by grassroots organisms always ready to declare improbable “general strikes”, waving flags and playing music at full volume. What must start to make inroads in a disorientated proletarian class is the idea of the need to fight on all levels, to extend the social conflict, to organize and direct it, the idea of its international dimension: only in this way will the class once more make its strength felt and be capable of responding blow by blow to every attack. Only in this way will it be possible, in avant-garde sectors and thanks to constant intervention by the revolutionary party, for the perception (fruit of direct experience) to advance that this strength expressed on the streets and in the squares, in daily battles, isnot sufficient: that the issue of power exists on a much higher, political and revolutionary plane – the winning of it and the dictatorial exercise of it.
International Communist Party
