The proletarian class is under attack in all countries. The measures taken by the various national bourgeoisies in the attempt to “exit the crisis” (a vain attempt, since these same measures merely favour the approach of new, even more catastrophic ones) are dealing the class a hard blow. Unemployment is high everywhere and destined to grow, apart from momentary, illusory dips. Working conditions are getting worse day after day due to more intense exploitation, the race towards even greater productivity, the high pace of work, causing stress, illness, fatal accidents. Living conditions are deteriorating, as all types of welfare (in any case paid for dearly by proletarians at the times of economic boom) are dismantled. Growing and increasingly vulnerable sectors of the proletarian population (young people, the elderly, women) feel the whiplash effect of the crisis more keenly day by day. Precarious employment and the uncertainty of the present and future weigh on them like tons of bricks, suffocating lives and legitimate desires and needs. Political parties and official trade unions compete to come up with increasingly binding and limiting measures towards all forms of working-class struggle, real or potential. The executives that the ruling class comes up with, in the vacuum of the parliamentary game, to manage difficult social situations, both present or future, are becoming ever stronger and more authoritarian, a clear example of the “iron-clad democracy” that emerged the day after the second world war. The militarization of social life by a State which increasingly reveals its true nature (the armed wing of capitalism), mows down victim after victim, whilst progressive alienation seems to be claiming young people devoid of all hope. The war between imperialisms for the control of energy sources and routes and geo-strategic zones is devastating whole areas of the globe and multiplying the ranks of landless and resourceless people, chasing them from one place to another and exposing them to the misery of suffering, deprivation, hunger and illness, bodies and minds marked by mortal wounds. Social and economic divides grow wider, poverty increases and the gap between the “rich” and the “poor” gets even bigger. Meanwhile, deep within bourgeois society, the objective conditions are being created for a new world bloodbath.
Faced with all this, the responses of the proletariat, generous as they are, still remain fragile, dispersed and episodic. After decades of open counter-revolution and reformist mirages, the world proletariat is alone and defenceless in the face of its historical enemy, Capital, and is not yet capable of reconnecting to the glorious tradition of struggle and organization which belongs to it and has offered so many magnificent examples of courage and abnegation, the will to fight for better living and working conditions and, at peak moments, to “storm the heavens” and put an end once and for all to a mode of production that has now become merely destructive.
As materialists, we know that the proletarian class will be obliged, due precisely to the miserable conditions in which it is forced to live and work (or not live and work!), to resume the path of acute and extended struggle. It is in this perspective, near or far as it may be, that the urgent need arises for class organization, on the two planes that go with it and are distinct but equally indispensible: the plan for defending its living and working conditions and the plan for preparing the revolution to destroy bourgeois power.
Class organization therefore means creating new territorial organisms that reach beyond contingencies, compartmentalization and segmentation into categories (or, worse still, regional and national ones), open to all proletarians, employed or unemployed, young or old, precarious or pensioners, without any differences of origin, language, culture, age, gender; organisms that will take responsibility for all aspects of the proletarian condition - in the workplace (hours, salary, pace of work, health risks, contracts) as in everyday life (housing, transport, bills), striking hard where Capital is the most sensitive (profit), recovering the use of the classic weapons of the class war (pickets, embargoes, unannounced strikes without time limits) and forming a real class front against the State, the bosses and their legal or illegal armed bands… Organisms determined to put into practice the old battle cry of “Attack one and you attack us all” and able to retaliate blow for blow. The new emergence of these territorial organisms, as the basis for a future class union, is urgent and necessary, in order to give back to the class the sense of its own power, its solidity and decision to return to the battle ground.
But (and this is the other level of this necessary and urgently needed class organization), however urgently needed and necessary it is, the re-emergence of these organisms is not sufficient, unless it is accompanied by the internationally rooted revolutionary party – the party which, over the high and low points of over a century and a half of history of the working class communist movement, punctuated by extraordinary episodes and bloody defeats, has proved capable of maintaining the path of communism, despite all the furious attacks made on it, both by the ruling class in all its various manifestations (democratic and fascist, liberal and socialdemocratic) and by all kinds of counter-revolutionary revisionism, which have done all they can to suffocate it, without ever succeeding. The science of revolution is concentrated in this party, as the fruit of theory and practice, of the historical experience of generations and generations of revolutionaries – a science of revolution that cannot possibly belong to the individual proletarian as such, or to his or her immediate organisms of defence, combative as they may be. This is the political organization that is so urgently needed today by the proletariat, because, as the struggle develops, in its advances and retreats, in close contact with the class within the limits of its own forces, this organization is what knows and can point to the path to follow in order to find the way out of the abyss.
The two levels - that of immediate defence and that of revolutionary political organization - are not the same and do not overlap. Any organism of immediate defence that also wished to act “as a party” or take on a specific political orientation, would have to give up its primary task, which is to organize the largest possible number of proletarians, with no political, ideological, cultural or religious distinctions. Any revolutionary political organism that fell into line with the struggling class movement, modelling its theory, tactics and organization on it and making it into a kind of “water bearer” would, for its own part, give up its own specific task of political direction, which reaches far beyond today’s contingencies, whilst still remaining rooted in this today and not separated from it.
We communists work to establish the international roots of the revolutionary party, in the conviction – the fruit of our theory and our now century-old experience – that the establishment of these roots cannot be put off to some vague future time or – worse still – to the “eve of the revolution” (when it will already be too late, as experience teaches us!). And we do this, to the extent our forces allow, in close contact with the class in all aspects of its life, the darkest and the most luminous, and in all its efforts to equip itself with the defence organisms that it so desperately needs, today more than ever.
We communists do not have the task of sitting down to create immediate defence organisms (or of applying empty labels to one organism or the other): it will be the real experiences of the struggling proletarian class to exert pressure in this direction, whilst our task will be to accompany these experiences with the aim of guiding and directing them – if possible leading them. What is certain is that it is up to us to work today for the united and powerful party of tomorrow.