The sequence of events that has marked the first half of 2023 should be considered and understood as a whole for what it has to tell us, without isolating individual components.
After the great flare of rebellion from Iran’s young proletarians in autumn 2022, which showed just how hard it is for the State – the armed extension of the ruling class – to contain the anger of the exploited, in the opening months of the new year a wave of unrest swept Great Britain, affecting many sectors in the world of work. After only a short time, in France widely supported demonstrations against pension reform spread for several weeks. In the meantime, strong protests shook the world of work in Germany. And for the moment we can pause here.
In all these cases, those who came out onto the streets were mainly (but not only) workers who were in some way “protected”, but still threatened by the loss of some of the miserable “guarantees” that had been hard won over time. And there were fragile attempts to set up, in the field and not around a table, grass-roots organisms to get round the control (always massive and in the end decisive in diluting the protests and bringing them to heel) of the powerful union structures so widely integrated into the State: fragile attempts such as those of the “Angry Workers of the World” in Great Britain, the “sans papiers committees” or the refuse collectors in France, the “Network of Militant Unions” in Germany – organized, with all their various limits, by the most exploited workers who thus made their voice and their militancy heard.
At this point, in July, the revolt of the French banlieues exploded: a spontaneous uprising, more individual than collective, which invested numerous towns and cities well beyond Paris and was a revealing symptom of the profound frustration and oppression of a young and marginalized proletariat.
Compared to all this, in Italy, apart from the generous battles of ultra-exploited sectors, the great majority of whom immigrant proletarians (battles often fought in desperate isolation and exposed to lurid persecution by magistrates and the forces of “law and order”), everything seems to be stagnating in the false, ultra-democratic contraposition of fascism/anti-fascism. In the meantime, the nation’s ruling class proceeds to dismantle “guarantees” and the scarce remains of welfare surviving from the “glorious” years of an economy in full swing – a process which, together with the reinforcement of systems of strict control and open anti-proletarian repression, involves all countries, perhaps at varying speeds and levels of intensity but always oriented towards safeguarding the status quo that has been in crisis for decades with no way out other than the preparation of a new world war to burn and destroy excess production, also destroying a large quota of surplus proletarian population.
Yes, war - indeed wars: don’t let’s forget them. In Ukraine we witness Russia’s progressively more chronic and festering Special Military Operation (sic!), without this arousing real and significant defeatist class reactions in either country. Meanwhile, in sub-Saharan Africa, tormented for years by imperialist predators, the clash over the decomposing corpse of old French colonialism grows more acute (after Mali, Niger and perhaps to a less striking degree Senegal, and more recently Gabon), aided and abetted by the process of Russian and Chinese penetration – another episode, the one affecting Niger and Gabon, which cannot be interpreted through the lens of a “rebellion” against an assumed “neo-colonialism” (as many hasten to declare) but which is a new chapter in the inter-imperialist clash that in this case, too, has been going on for decades. In South-East Asia the “Taiwan issue” and, more in general, that of a military control over the Southern China Sea remain critically open, whilst closer, in the Middle East, already hosting the … Peace Missions (sic!) “made in the USA”, the merciless slaughter of Palestinian proletarians by the State of Israel continues with the patently obvious complicity of the Arab bourgeoisies in the region, including their Palestinian component. In the meantime, in a not-so-underground manner, the economic and financial contrast between the United States and China becomes more and more evident and we see attempts, though not always successful, by the “younger” imperialisms (the so-called Brics) to draw up real alternatives to the balances of power that have ruled the long post-war decades. As to Europe… well, it has once more become evident that it doesn’t exist as a united political subject: all the more so with Germany, once the driving force behind it, now entering recession…
All this (and more: we limit ourselves here to a quick summary, with due respect to the “geo-politicians” who overwhelm us with analyses so that we fail to understand anything) is happening on a planet that is suffering visibly from the devastating effects of only three centuries of production for profit, what with “natural” disasters, massive pollution, erosion and dilapidation of resources, boundless cementification and all the other delights we are familiar with but regarding which there is no desire to understand (better: anything and everything is said and written in order to hide it) the direct link with the modus operandi of Capital, with the result that widespread and impotent existential Angst is fuelled, particularly amongst young people.
All in all, the picture is of a world capitalism in a destructive and self-destructive state of panic faced with a crisis of over-production which has been dragging on since the mid 1970s; of a ruling class, in its various different national sections, engaged in cutting away (as it always has done in recurring periods of crisis) as many “dried up and unproductive branches” as possible, strengthening in all possible ways the structures of control over its historical arch-enemy and preparing for a new world war between imperialisms; and a proletariat still largely suffocated beneath the weight of the decades of counter-revolution that have deprived it not only of the sense of its own potential power and the memory of its proud and battlesome past, but also of the hope in a “new world”, the longing for a classless society.
Faced with this picture, which could experience further, dramatic developments and accelerations at an increasing pace and in headlong succession in the coming months, the need for a stronger and internationally rooted revolutionary party becomes increasingly clear; that is, a stable political organization founded on solid theoretical-political and tactical-strategic positions which are the fruit of thorough analysis and a long experience of militancy and which can bring together all these elements and trace them back to their deepest roots (the survival of a mode of production that has for a long time had a historical sentence hanging over its head) and, in this way, propose once again the real prospect of the seizing of power and dictatorship of the proletariat, indicating both the substance and the path for achieving it, long and complex as it may be.
The problems that the long, disastrous and bloody agony of capitalism cannot fail to struggle with urgently need to be solved. What is communism, against all the ideological mystification and manipulation the counter-revolution has fed upon to the point of intoxication for a century, at all levels. What are the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary party’s role in it and what do they consist in. What is the dialectic relationship that should unite the revolutionary party and the proletarian class on the rocky road of its struggles, consisting in advances and retreats. What features, what political-organizational structure and what theoretical-practical tasks should the revolutionary party have as the proletariat’s militant avant-garde. What has happened to the workers’ and communist movement over the course of the past century, above and beyond the convenient narratives dished out by mainstream ideology through its opportunistic aiders and abetters. How to work realistically towards revolutionary defeatism against current wars and above all those that are being prepared. What do “democracy” and “fascism” really mean in capitalism’s imperialist phase, and how to fight against both. From the point of view of revolutionary strategy, what is implied by the final closure of the cycle of national and anti-colonial revolutions in the mid 1970s...
These problems and many others have found answers from us, despite our being a minority and counter-current, over decades and decades of struggle without quarter against the multiform bourgeois enemy: not as a sterile intellectual exercise but in contact with our class, its fights and its experiences, both positive and negative, to prepare it for revolution, no matter how far away this may appear. And we shall continue to do this because it is only around these answers that new generations of revolutionaries can gather with the real intention, and not just words and lengthy rhetorical acrobatics, to put an end to this vampire called Capitalism, once and for all. But this requires long and thorough work: the proof is the inertia that continues to hold back our class and its sudden explosions which, however, in this situation without clear and precise political objectives indicated by the presence and widespread action of the revolutionary Party, leave little or nothing to show for them – and, unfortunately, more frustration than actual positive experience.
Only in this way will it be possible for our own programme (the historical objectives of a proletariat that is finally revolutionary, verified and confirmed in the light of the lessons received from the longest counter-revolution the proletarian and communist movement has ever had to suffer) to counter both the stupid arrogance of mainstream ideology and the grim role played by a reformism which, although unable to count as it once did on the crumbs handed out by expanding capitalism to delude the proletarians, continues to play its own paralyzing and castrating role; and to free ourselves from the ragged embrace of the half classes which, in their search for an impossible social and cultural identity, act as vehicles for all the foul vapours emitted by the decomposing corpse of a mode of production that has come to its own historical terminal and, by acting this way, keep it alive.
September 2023
