From world crisis to communist revolution

Not a day goes by without the world press publishing alarming bulletins on the health of the economy.  In their upside-down universe, the bourgeois commentators, the “experts” and the “economists” perceive a clear slowdown in world economy: yet, they cannot, of course, trace it back to its original causes because this would mean them having to acknowledge the frailty of their own mode of production.  And so they turn to metaphysics.

In the first place, they continue to ask themselves if we are or are not in the midst of a complete recession (the word “crisis” is too strong for them, since it implies a break, a collapse;  the word “recession” is softer and evokes the gradual nature of the curve:  like saying, “after a slowdown, there’s always an acceleration”), on each occasion putting off until a threatening tomorrow, and yet only a short distance beyond, full recognition  of the bare facts – i.e. in Marxist terms, that from the mid-seventies onwards, in alternating phases, but above all with increasingly headlong crashes, capital has no longer succeeded (no longer succeeds) in realizing itself fast enough.

Secondly, they attribute the slowdown in the economy to what are really its effects:  the “evil-doers” of the moment are thus the dip in the real estate market, the case of the “subprimes”, the fibrillation on the financial markets, one bubble or another bursting, the increase in the price of raw materials and food products.And they ask themselves if all this might not risk having consequences on the real economy…when it is precisely the crisis of the real economy that sets off these processes.

Moreover, they believe it is possible for them to find a strategy for containing the crisis in the manoeuvres of the Federal Reserve, the ECB and other central bodies, when it is becoming clearer and clearer that it is a question of desperately trying to catch up with something that is already in full swing: and so the cut in interest rates (from which a “miraculous” trend reversal is expected) is none other than the effect of a situation that is already underway, where the constant rush to cut back is, if anything, the epiphenomenon – and this situation, which is already a reality, is precisely the increasingly feeble condition of the world economy.

Furthermore, while they are actually demonstrating in practical terms the error of liberalist ideological rhetoric (condemned for almost a century now by capitalism’s own development towards imperialism, yet always reviving to cloud the ideas of the current dunces) with increasingly frequent appeals for determined and “authoritative” centralized intervention, they can do no more than recognize the impotence of any prospects for real, feasible planning and management of the capitalist market, that might be able to attenuate and control instability and vulnerability.

This is not all: the concern of the bourgeois economists is accompanied on the one hand by the need to exorcize the phantom of catastrophe, “reassuring the markets” through mirages of “soft landings”, upturns, recoveries, etc. and banishing any suspicion that it might be the structure itself of the capitalist mode of production that is yielding drastically;  on the other hand, there is the need to “make the devil seem uglier than he is”, being “more catastrophic than necessary”, “using strong words”, all to bring about paralysis through concern and fear and thus demand more sacrifices “if we wish to get out of the tunnel” and clamour for tighter measures in regulating labour, increasing productivity, imposing social pacts with the use of truncheons, if extortion proves insufficient.

Faced with this dramatic inability of bourgeois economists, politicians and experts (and their reformist hangers-on of all descriptions) to deal with their own structural crisis, let us look at the details of what is happening and what the perspective of communists should be.

Twenty years ago

When the heads of the seven main world economies met in Venice in May 1987, their agenda foresaw a discussion of the gloomy picture that loomed before them.All the indicators were pointing downwards, dips on the Stock Exchange were leading to state intervention, statistical forecasts indicated alarming falls in growth rates in all countries, stopping at around 2.5% (a rate that many nowadays would find tempting!). The crisis and consequent crash on Wall Street, which lasted for weeks in autumn 1987, alarming the whole of the financial world, now seem just a small warning sign of what is about to unleash itself on world capitalism.

The long period preceding this had deluded the bourgeois economists into thinking that the stock markets would open up to massive injections of fresh money from small “popular” investors, in the name of more democratic markets: huge masses of dreamers rushed to play the stock exchange, attracted by the easy money to be earned in the world of false riches.  The transformation of production into financial assets thus became increasingly intense, as did the search for other large sources of financial capital. “Working-class share-holding”, which had already received the blessing of the trade unions in all industrialized countries back in the ‘60s, established that part of salary increases should be kept back and invested in the company.   Pension funds made their appearance, as well as investment funds, insurance funds, managed by big, transnational groups whose actions became practically uncontrollable. In the euphoria of the mass drugging of the economy in the ‘80s, speculation took over all sectors of finance and thus of production and commerce;  from here, it naturally passed on into politics, with the spectacular scandals that toppled governments and multinationals (Enron to name just one of them).

The fact that all this was mere speculation, with no kind of correspondence to real production, was demonstrated by the sudden crash on Wall Street and the desperate race to sell off shares that had become so much waste paper.

What had determined these upheavals, after the upward run of post-war decades?

Any capital, large or small, needs to realize itself. In prosperous times this is achieved by the increasing extraction of plus-value from the proletarian masses.In times of crisis, it is achieved wherever possible, even apparently “outside the process of production”:  financial investment, in the form of false capital created by speculation, is the form that capitals have most readily turned to over the past few decades.  The small economic “successes” that some States have managed to achieve here and there over short or very short periods have been piloted in this way, and only the blind could pretend not to notice that this frequent alternation of crises and phases of speculative euphoria  do none other than bring the catastrophe closer.

Everywhere speculation – which is based on credit, and increasingly on huge amounts of credit (that of States, companies, families) that has now become irreclaimable – endeavours to breathe new life into an enfeebled economy, supported by States that are up to their ears in debt and by their central banks:but in this situation the slightest obstacle can become the spark that sets off the explosion. Threatening clouds are gathering as China bursts onto the markets of commodities and  finance, and the only thing that the sick economies of western countries are clinging to now is merely the hope that the fresh young Chinese capital will not impose its predatory laws to the utmost, since the crash that followed would inevitably drag world capital down with it.  Naturally, there will be no possibility of choice, for either side. Dictating the moves in the field of economy, and thus in politics,  are the unavoidable needs of capitalist production, that is of the production of plus-value and the race to make a profit.

Is this anything new?  A surprise?

What Marx and Lenin had identified as a typical mechanism of the capitalist mode of production has actually come about:  i.e. the moment has come in which society possesses “too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them” (Marx-Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Chap.1: Bourgeois and Proletarians).

This is what has happened in the second post-war period. The Second World War (which was – it is as well to repeat this every time – an armed conflict between competing imperialist blocks) was an enormous bloodbath and a gigantic destruction of production forces and commodities, including that most precious of commodities for Capital that is constituted by the labour force:  it was inevitable that the post-war period of reconstruction involved an exceptional phase of accumulation of Capital, which lasted overwhelmingly for thirty years or so – the boom, the economic miracle, whatever we wish to call it, which was a feature of all the world economies that came out of the war, whether defeated or victorious. And which was paid for by proletarians from all over the world (including the impoverished masses in the colonies and ex-colonies) by massive exploitation in their workplaces and in society as a whole:  suffice it to remember the huge flows of migration which, since then, have unceasingly moved workforces from one corner of the globe to the other to have the utmost wrung out of them.

This post-war cycle of accumulation (which was accompanied in the east as in the west by an unprecedented operation to build consensus ideologically) lasted for around thirty years.  After this, as our Party had foreseen ever since the ‘50s on the basis of a careful study of the “course of world capitalism”, indicating the mid ‘70s as the turning point [1], it was to end by coming to a halt, precisely around 1975.  Since then, in alternate phases of advance and retreat, the economic crisis has dominated the world scenario, creating the conditions for future catastrophes: “And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented” (Marx-Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Chap.1: Bourgeois and Proletarians).

Today, the young innocents of the bourgeois economy speak of speculation as amoral element, abused by the sharks of high finance and the wolves of the Stock Exchange, the greedy and merciless representatives of a capitalism that has suddenly turned less than fatherly and not very protective towards the world of work.  This indicates either an unwillingness to understand even the basic facts of the historical process behind it all, or a desire to hide the facts.  It means wanting people to believe that financial capital is born out of nothing and that, once the accidental problems that have so mysteriously arisen have been solved, and one or the other “case theory” has been analyzed, any crisis will be overcome.  We, on the other hand, know that financial capital owes its existence and its exponential growth to the forced labour that millions upon millions of proletarians are condemned to during an entire cycle of accumulation;  and the more wide-ranging is the war damage that closed the previous cycle, the higher is the entity of the profit that will be produced in the next, the higher the rate of plus-value will be and thus the quantity of money in search of a collocation.  It is of little concern to capital if this immense monster that devours live labour is kept alive, as well as by actual money, by gigantic quotas of mere “promises to pay”, to be settled in who knows which year in the future.  The lives of future generations of proletarians have been mortgaged by the present credit mechanism, this powerful lever by which capital keeps salaried slaves, the middle classes and the whole of humanity bound to it.

This desperate race to increase production and the consequent surplus in the production of means of production (thus, first the difficulty and then the impossibility of investing capitals productively) are the source of all the financial crises that have characterized the XXth century, despite the more striking formal aspect that distinguishes them, i.e. the ruin of the banks and the crash of the stock exchanges – which lead bourgeois economists to treat them as financial crises.

In the youthful, liberalist phase of development of the capitalist mode of production, the crises ruined a certain number of capitalists, to a certain extent encouraging the concentration of capitals.  But for over a century now, the capitalist as an autonomous, independent figure has vanished and freedom belongs to Capital alone, as an impersonal force served by a bureaucracy into which national States organize themselves.  Financial capital thus becomes the ideal tool for enormously favouring transfers onto foreign markets.  Its constant aim is therefore the formation of an average rate of profit, obliging competing States to engage in wide-scale battle.

All this reveals the lies of the bourgeois pen-pushers who, over the past few decades, have filled our heads with their fantasies of  universal panaceas that would make any crisis impossible.  In turn there were Taylorism, Toyotism, thenjust in time: in short, anything that was supposed to conciliate forced rhythms of work with universal prosperity, in a world where the circulation of commodities was a clear and peaceful process.

It is thus a mere propagandistic lie (supported unfortunately by large masses of deluded no globals, pacifists, worshippers of the politics of reform and similar) that crises can be overcome by the politics of competition and the liberalization of markets: it is a lie “evades and obscures the very profound and fundamental contradictions of imperialism: the contradictions between monopoly and free competition which exists side by side with it, between the gigantic ‘operations’ (and gigantic profits) of finance capital and ‘honest’ trade in the free market, the contradiction between cartels and trusts, on the one hand, and non-cartelised industry, on the other” (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chap. IX: “Critique of Imperialism”).

The problems surface

Today, however, many of the unsolved problems are surfacing.  The increase in technical and production resources and in natural and artificial needs; the increasing gap between agricultural and industrial production; the upheavals on the network of markets at each crisis, everything goes to show that the laws of economy are there, claiming their due:  they are the historical condemnation of capitalism.

Precisely because of its unstoppable tendency towards development, the gigantic growth in the productivity of work and the enormous mass of means of production, capitalism must periodically destroy the excess of wealth it produces.  And the crises of the XXth century are marked by a scale quite unknown to the capitalism of the previous century.

The difference between the classical crises up to 1929 and those that followed is to be found in the New Deal, or the fascistizing of the economy, by which the bourgeois State makes the working class pay the entire costs of the crises, whilst in ‘29 it was industrial profits that crashed by over 60% in just one year.  Some features of that great crisis, which today disturbs the bourgeoisie in their sleep, were the halving of industrial production, the considerable increase in unemployment, the increase in buying power, the drop in the cost of living with prices falling heavily and finally the crash of stocks and shares.

The crises that came after 1929 seem to be marked by an increase in prices and in the demand for commodities: it is the States that purchase excess production, destroying them in imperialist wars (as well as the slaughter of the Second World War, hundreds of so-called “low-intensity” wars are to be found, sparked off in every continent in the second post-war period) thus encouraging the recovery of production worldwide.

Capitalist technological development allows the price of manufactured goods to be kept down, whilst the prices of food products and raw materials still remain high.This phenomenon was to be seen up to 2006:  since then prices have stampeded beyond all control.  In January 2006, thick steel laminates were sold at $525 a ton, today at $750; over the same period, a ton of aluminium has risen from $2000 to $2650;  in 2003 a ton of copper was sold at $1700, today at as much as $8600.  If the price of oil and its derivates are added to this list of prices, it is clear that the whole of the world’s production machinery is entering the most critical phase in the second post-war period.

After the mid ‘70s and from the ‘80s onwards, at the end of the post-war period of accumulation, there was a more or less general crisis in foreign trade, answered, in the ‘90s, by the tendency towards a large increase in the exportation of capital and direct investments abroad.  The curve of industrial production in the same period continued downwards in the countries of historical capitalism, whilst it soared even further in the “emerging” countries, headed by China and South Korea. [2]

It was on this scenario filled with tension and contradictions, with growing imperialist appetites and ferocious competitive battles on a worldwide scale, that the Russian collapse came about at the beginning of the ‘90s, followed by strong speculative pressure on the currency market.  Many currencies experienced wave after wave of sales to purchase Deutschmarks and, whilst the German currency gained strength, the downward trajectory of the dollar began.  In 1994 the USA increased the cost of money to try and contrast the fall of the dollar but this measure only determined the withdrawal of capital, particularly from Mexico, plunging the country into a crisis.  In 1997 the proud Asian “Tigers” fell, followed by Turkey, Albania, Argentina.  Old Europe, too, found itself involved, not inconsiderably, in the international tension. In some ways, the war in the Balkans was the continuation of the Gulf war:  it regarded an area of Europe where German capitalism had traditionally had its grazing grounds, an area that the USA was regarding with renewed interest and where Russian appetites had long since vanished, by necessity rather than desire.  The rearmament campaign, the re-launching of the arms trade, the longa manus extended towards the transport routes of hydrocarbons from the Caucasus towards the Mediterranean:  these, and not the principles of “the offence to democracy”, were the reasons at the basis of a war that was to change the picture of geopolitical balance in Balkan Europe.

This is the real context in which world economy has been moving in the past twenty years.  One that could not help but give rise to the two Gulf wars, the intervention in Afghanistan, the constant tension on the African continent, the clashes on the western boundaries of Russia, the turbulence in Latin America, not to mention the Balkans and the whole area of the Caucasus.  Gradually but inexorably, the world is turning into keg of dynamite, approached from several sides by sizzling fuses.

The crisis and the world proletariat

Thus, from the mid ‘70s onwards, following the appearance and aggravation of the world economic crisis step by step, Capital led an unprecedented attack against the proletariat, in order to dismantle the “welfare system” and win back the “social victories” secured by daily defensive battles in the previous decades.  As we wrote in the editorial to the last issue of the newspaper, “If the cycle of accumulation that began after the tremendous disasters of the Second World War   made it possible for crumbs, even large ones, to fall from the world feast of reconstruction (and in any case this was only possible because the world proletariat had shaken the banqueting tables violently on several occasions), now, faced with the crisis and in response to it, the ruling class in all countries is engaged in a violent attack to snatch back everything that had been previously obtained.  This goes for all sorts of “social victories”, whether they are to do with salaries and working hours or with measures for more “civilized communal living” or the frequently bandied “civil rights” [3].

This attack has proceeded step for step in all countries, independently of their specific influence on the world market, and it has meant: insecure employment, salary cuts, increase in work rhythms and in working hours, the progressive dismantling of the “welfare state” (pensions, healthcare etc.), moving production in order to reduce labour costs, exploiting cheaper workforces, exasperation of migration as a consequence of the social effects of the crisis in countries on the outskirts of the imperialist strongholds and the creation of vast “industrial reserve troops” of migrants, resulting in salaries being kept down, divisions being created within the working class, the offer of a poverty-stricken workforce that is easily blackmailed and therefore ready to accept any conditions;  and it has been accompanied by increasingly widespread measures of “social control” and open repression towards those workers who are more reluctant to accept any old living and working conditions – in a word the “fascistizing of democracy”, already quite evident at the end of the Second World War, has made giant strides forward, under the pressure of the world  economic crisis.All this has happened thanks to the active, theoretical and practical support of reformist political and union policies, which have offered the bourgeoisie of all countries their practical aid, deluding and disorientating proletarians, neutralizing their battles on several occasions, isolating and denouncing the more combative workers and, more in general, cordoning off any attempt at autonomous and spontaneous organization to avoid it spreading.

Nevertheless, at a national and worldwide level the responses of the proletariat have not been lacking and some, despite being defeated, have been resounding: we are thinking of the 40 days at the Fiat in Turin in 1980 and, again in 1980, the powerful proletarian movement in Poland, the American flight controllers’ strike in 1981, the wave of protests at Renault, Citröen and Talbot and in the coal mines of Lorraine in France in 1981, the great miners’ strikes in England in 1984, the violent strikes that broke out in South Korea in 1997 and, again in 1997, the long and aggressive strike at the American UPS, the explosive situation in the American ghettoes of the south-west, the epidemic of social instability in many Latin American countries (from Mexico to Argentina, including Brazil and Venezuela), the barrel of gunpowder that the Middle East has become, where false “national issues” mask and deviate open class conflict…

Moreover, in the last few years the progression of the world crisis has plunged increasing masses of people into the difficulty of dealing with today and the anguish over tomorrow:  streams of hypocrisy are poured out, first to deny the evidence, then to hide it with words of compassion and lastly to avoid the spark of revolt setting the whole planet on fire.  Never so much as in this second postwar period have impoverished conditions grown to the limit of tolerability, never has social tension spread so much, like oil on water, in all continents.  The phase of exasperated productivity, the enormous consumption of labour, the gigantic waste of energy, goods and services are now being followed by their accompaniment ofviolent destruction of the accumulated work and the systematic destruction of social wealth. It is not the crude realities of impoverishment, the insufficient salary that mark this age (in which, when there is not work for everyone, there is charity for everyone) but the fearful spread of uncertainty, the multiplication of destruction, the exaltation of chaos, the orgy of waste of everything that falls between the minimum necessary for survival and the maximum that is produced.

Now is the moment in which poverty is forcing masses of hungry people out into the streets to try and secure by force what their salaried status no longer allows them.  This reminds us of the crystal-clear position of Marxism on social misery – a social misery that consists in not possessing the means of production and thus not possessing the availability of the product.  This means that the producer, or the salaried worker, is defenceless when a crisis develops with a consequent reduction in the availability of commodities.  The dream of the nest egg, laboriously entrusted to the management of a bank, the 30-square-metre holiday apartment, the car bought on hire-purchase, which all delude the happy owner that he has attained prosperity – in short the few miserly possessions through which capital tries to shape the minds and wills of the proletariat to its own image – soon vanish and leave those who thought they had become “property owners” to reflect on their real condition as proletarians devoid of resources.  It is the laws of accumulation of capital and growing misery discovered by Marx that rule the destiny of the bourgeois system; it is the bourgeois tricks of democratic capitalism, of the worker-stakeholder, of social assistance, that prevent the planet’s billions of people without resources from getting rid of capitalism once and for all.  The recent revolts for bread in many African, Asian and American countries are reminiscent of others, characteristic of a past time that the bourgeoisie and, above all those who are passionate about “reform” and “progress”, considered dead and buried, and which announced the great proletarian battles in Europe a hundred or so years ago.  

Today, however, the situation is spreading into all geographical areas.  The recent clashes for bread on the streets of Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, Senegal, Cameroon, Ethiopia, the Caribbean, Pakistan, Thailand, often with the army intervening  to defend the shop owners, are none other than a prelude to what could happen in the main imperialist countries, too, in a not-too-distant future. The fakes of the great “humanitarian” organisations, the cops who control the movements of the world’s food and financial cartels, proclaim loudly that it is all an “anomaly”, that everything will get back to “normal”, that it is the fault of this “madman” or the other, who has raised the prices of food products.  We are glad to leave them to their empty proclamations, in the certainty that their charity will be of no use.

All the trends of the economy are turning in favour of the revolutionary communist movement.  The crisis of the economy reveals to the world proletariat their true nature, which is that of the world’s producer of plus-value.  By definition and out of necessity, they must be organized on an international scale, and it is this route that the national movements, still as yet unconnected, must learn to follow, recognizing that local interests are everyone’s interests and that these interests do not speak one language rather than another but the single language of the armed struggle for power.  Nevertheless, all this will be insufficient for accounts to be settled.  It was not sufficient for the Asian “Tigers” people, when the financial inebriation swept past like a cyclone.  It was not sufficient in Turkey, in Albania, in Italy, when the millions of dreamers who thought they would make money on the Stock Exchange were left with a handful of dust. It was not sufficient in Argentina, where the anger of the proletariat was unable to transform the workers’ pickets, determined as they were, into anything beyond the “saucepan protest”.  The just and sacrosanct hatred of the proletariat for capital will never be sufficient, without a common direction to its action, without a programme that refuses to make compromises with the enemy and which establishes the violent overthrow of bourgeois power as its uncompromising objective.  This direction, or programme cannot be drawn up in the heat of the struggle, when there are other elements that must be brought into play (the mode of the class conflict, the attack against one stronghold of capital or the other, immediate tactical demands).  Every time the most bitter struggles, fought by the most determined members of the proletariat, have had to look within their own ranks and in the heat of the moment, for a strategy and a programme, the only elements capable of transforming the battle into lasting victories, the siren of socialdemocracy, reform, opportunism allied with the bourgeoisie have inoculated their poison, separating, dismembering, creating false illusions and wrecking the most tenacious of battles,preparing the way for reaction and violence against the proletariat.

The communist perspective

The capitalist mode of production is heading towards the only outcome that the ruling class knows for solving its structural crisis:  a new inter-imperialist war.  The First World War saw the collapse of all the socialdemocratic parties which – with the sole exception of the small Serbian socialist party and the rather ambiguous position of the Italian socialist party (“Neither support nor sabotage”) – voted for war, siding with their respective bourgeoisies, instead of working to transform the imperialist war into a civil war: only rare groups of coherent communists maintained the correct class route, the pre-condition for the October Revolution and a post-war period illuminated everywhere by revolutionary uprisings.  The Second World War came after the violent defeat of the proletariat by democracy (which cradled the working class in the illusion of a pacific development of the capitalist mode of production), nazifascism (which gave the death blow to a proletariat already unarmed and disoriented by cowardly socialdemocratic pacificism) and Stalinism (which upended any communist prospect by theorizing the “building of socialism in a single country” and allying itself first with one imperialist block and then with the other, in the name of the “defence of the country and of democracy”).  We should come to the appointment with the Third World War, for which preparations are underway, having learned from all these experiences, both positive and negative ones, and, above all, armed with the theoretical and strategic-tactical clarity, the firm organization, and the international roots of the revolutionary party:   if this is not so, a new slaughter is on the way and it will be even more devastating than the previous two.

As materialists, we know that political class consciousness follows action and not vice-versa.  Under the growing pressure of this authentic attack by capital, which will merely spread and become stronger over the next few years, the world proletariat will be obliged to fight to defend its living and working conditions.  It will be obliged to find itself organizations independent of the State (which will increasingly reveal itself as its bitter enemy and the aggressive defender of bourgeois interests) and independent of political parties and trade unions that have done none other than cheat it over the last few years with promises of reform, containing its battles, boycotting them, disorganizing them and betraying them and openly denouncing the more combative and generous of the workers.  It will be obliged to overcome all the divisions and antagonism that the capitalist mode of production itself fuels within it (racism, localism, nationalism), realizing in the course of the battle that only a united proletarian front will be able to reply effectively to the attack by capital.  It will also be obliged to understand that the pure and simple (though necessary) defence of its own living and working conditions cannot be sufficient:  that it is necessary, if only to make this defensive battle effective, to proceed to a counter-attack:  from the daily economic guerrilla war to an authentic class war, which is the political war to win power.

The world organization of struggle requires world organization of the programme and this programme must necessarily be one that comes from a superior social form, i.e. communism.  All bourgeois economic categories long ago exhausted any positive function in social development, allowing only forms such as parasitism,waste and destruction to prosper.  Everything has been ready, for too long now, for the development of a society without a market, without money, without salaried work and without capital, in which the potential of individuals and society develop harmoniously.

This programme, conserved for so long in the memory of the great battles of the past, exists and has no need of being elaborated by experts in sociology (which it should, on the contrary, be extremely mistrustful of!). However, it can only be explained and introduced into the class by a specific organ, which does not pose the objectives of limited victories, particular claims, whether local or company-based. This specific organ is not called a union, a circle, a club or a study seminar.It is the class party and there is no combative proletarian who can fail to see that it has remained separated from class history for too long.

Uncompromisingly at the centre stand the reinforcement and international roots of the revolutionary party, solidly anchored to the tradition of the Communist Left, the only one that – for over almost a century now – has been able to resist and respond (theoretically, politically, organizationally and in practice) to the converging forces of the democratic, nazi-fascist and Stalinist counter-revolution, firmly maintaining the principles that have always distinguished communists from any other formation, group or party:  the relentless fight against a society based on profit and on capital, internationalism, the need for a violent revolutionary fracture, the seizing of power and establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the guide of the communist party.

At the Congress of Lyons in 1926, whilst the grave historical defeat of the international workers’ and communist movement by Stalinism was taking place, the Communist Left, after having been banned from the direction of the Italian Communist Party – Section of the Communist International – conducted its extreme battle, fixing in its Theses (as opposed to the ultra-opportunist ones of Gramsci and Togliatti) the necessary bases for the future rebirth of the communist movement.  In the latter, it is also possible to read the vital tasks of the revolutionary party in the long phase of counter-revolution that is still, unfortunately, making its weight felt heavily on the world proletariat:

“a) the defence and precise formulation, in relation to new groups of facts that may arise, of the basic programmatic postulates, or the theoretical consciousness of the working class movement;

b) ensuring the continuity of the party’s organizational structures and their efficiency and defending it from contamination by outside influences in contrast with the revolutionary interests of the proletariat;

c) active participation in all the battles of the working class even when arising out of partial and limited interests, in order to encourage their development, whilst constantly bringing out the link with ultimate revolutionary interests, presenting the victories of the class struggle as bridges towards the inevitable struggles to come and warning of the danger of resting content with partial achievements as though they were the final goal and bartering them for the conditions for action and class war by the proletariat, or the autonomy and independence of its ideology and organizations, first and foremost the party.

“The supreme aim of this complex work by the party is to prepare the subjectiveconditions of the proletariat’s formation, in the sense that they become capable of exploiting the objective revolutionary opportunities that history presents, as soon as these appear, so as to emerge from the struggle victorious and undefeated.”[4].

Thus, the defence of theory, political-organizational continuity, active intervention in the class struggle:  it is from here that we – the International Communist Party (Il programma comunista) – have recommenced, in the conviction that ours is the only path for successfully seizing power, setting up the dictatorship of the proletariat and finally, after centuries of bloody domination by capital, achieving a classless society, the society of the human species, communism.