The turmoil, destruction, and instability created by the capitalist mode of production in its agonic efforts to survive is under everybody’s eyes. The economic recession – which started in the mid-1970s, and since then has been deepening amidst ups and downs – is producing short- and long-term effects. The working class is under attack in all countries: lay-offs, unemployment, longer working hours, flexibility, lower wages, factory discipline, uncertainty about the future. Imperialist competition and confrontations have become more diffuse, leading to an intensification of war efforts, mainly in certain areas which are strategically and economically of the greatest importance on the world checker-board – a foreshadowing of the distant but inevitable outcome: a new imperialist slaughter. Chauvinistic reactions follow everywhere, be they armed ones or political and economic ones – the expressions of national bourgeoisies (or of factions of national bourgeoisies) which so react to the imperialist disorder, to the economic, social and political putrefaction typical of imperialism: and in so doing, they often enlist in their ranks (and thus further strangle) impoverished masses, led to massacre each other for aims and perspectives which are not theirs. Last but not least, the destruction of the environment and glamorous examples of ineptitude on part of capital to face its more and more deathly side-effects are only too apparent.
This issue of Internationalist Papers – which due to technical reasons comes out with some delay, and regrettably without the usual Spanish Supplement – is devoted to all this, and to other issues as well: the 2005 London and Sharm-El-Sheik bombings, the recent Palestinian elections, the riots in the French banlieues, the paling myth of a united Europe. And they are accompanied by a long-due text on “Marxism and the National Issue”, which gives a final treatment to a difficult and thorny subject, too often, in this eighty year’s counterrevolutionary phase, resulting in dramatic mistakes; by a critical recollection of the Industrial Workers of the World, the wobblies, who were born a century ago, led vigorous class struggles, but never realized (and even opposed) the primary necessity of the revolutionary party; and by such an important document as the “Rome Theses” prepared in 1922 by the Communist Party of Italy, then still led by our current – a pivotal text especially as far as communist tactics are concerned.
The economic recession is deepening everywhere. Signs of social unrest are becoming more visible, here and there, while the capitalist world is heading towards a new world bloodshed. It is important and urgent to rally around the Communist Party world wide.
International Communist Party
(International Papers - Cahiers Internationalistes - Il Programma Comunista)