It’s a daily massacre of shocking proportions. Just let’s stop and think. How many proletarians die every day, in factories, building yards, in the “sweat shops”, on the streets and on the seas, in the countryside, in all the countless workplaces of a mode of production that has now become reduced to nothing more than an infernal death machine, an insatiable vampire sucking proletarian blood, as had already been described and decried by Marx and Engels? And how many begin and continue to die day after day, poisoned, gassed, silently corroded on all sides by cancer-inducing agents or exhausted by the physical and psychological pressure of years and decades of an ever-faster pace of work, anguish and desperation? We have the figures for Italy and they are monstrous and eloquent: only the revolting cynicism of ignorance or indifference can prevent a chill to the spine before this slaughter, these mass murders, for which there is no other name. But what might the figures be for the rest of Europe? And the Americas? And Asia and Africa? The numbers can’t help but be devastating: ten, a hundred, a thousand holocausts! The mass media of disinformation do not give us these figures: they limit themselves to telling the story, using all the adjectives of sensationalism and pious journalism, of a factory exploding, a mine collapsing, a bridge falling, a workshop or building going up in flames – ten, a hundred, a thousand proletarian deaths in one and then, yes, the event is newsworthy. But they are silent about the daily accounts of slaughter – which instead, on reflection, assume horrendously gigantic proportions.
Let us go further, back a little in time over the years and the decades…through the three centuries dominated by the capitalist mode of production. And here the very thought is truly devastating: from the Industrial Revolution, with its “factory deaths”, men who – if they were lucky – reached the age of thirty, and mangled women and children, right down to today, through the whole epic march of “capitalist progress”. The proletarian-scrunching machinery has never ceased to work, grinding and destroying lives, families, aspirations, illusions – transforming the living flesh of human beings into profits to be tossed into the impersonal mechanism of production for production’s sake, competition, greater accumulation, the law of value. As though this were not enough, there have been, and continue to be, the wars. And how many proletarian victims have there been (are there) of economic, strategic and political appetites, of States that are the instruments of capital, of nations that obey the law of “kill or be killed”? Victims at the battlefront and victims in the rear-guard, more cannon fodder sent off to the trenches to bayonette or gas one another or shut up like mice in the metropolises as a target for all the most advanced tools of warfare? And the miserable survivors that attempt to escape, wandering from one place to another, at the mercy of hunger, wounds, illness, the most absolute desperation, on tens of thousands of “journeys of hope”? leaving behind the bombed ruins or famine produced by centuries of colonial and imperialist domination, who, if they don’t drown or freeze to death first, are unable to find a place where they can at least survive, chased from here to there like mangy dogs by political scoundrels doing their best to encourage the obtuse savagery of the petit-bourgeoisie, whose sole reason for living remains their hatred for “the foreigner”? And what is to be said of the proletarians killed in the picket lines, in demonstrations, in the rebellions sparked off by hunger and exasperation, in the streets of the ghettos, in the countryside of the black market gang-leaders, on the ironclad national borders, victims of the legal or illegal gangs belonging to the State, the defender of capital, or of sub-human individuals emerging from the gutters of a decaying society? Or the sixty thousand Communards massacred in Paris at the end of May 1871 by their ferocious class enemy, or the other thousands and tens of thousands of proletarians eliminated by the counter-revolutionary fury that one time after another strikes those generous attempts to “scale the heavens”?
This mode of production exhausted its positive drive at least a century and a half ago, the drive that allowed – by means of a violent rupture – the definitive outstripping of the previous mode of production, that of feudalism. And for over a century and a half it has become a deadly killing machine: the vampire which, day after day, sucks the blood of the proletariat in order to remain alive. Against this vampire the crucifix and the garlic are of no use. It has to be killed once and for all, driving a well-sharpened stake deep into its heart: violence against violence. Taking up the fight, increasing it, extending it, radicalizing it, rejecting any illusion of reform and any nationalist divisions, starting out from the slogan “An attack on one is an attack on us all!” Transforming the proletarian numbers (growing constantly, at every economic crisis, at every opening towards war) into deadly strength and power. Organizing in order to learn to defend, defend ourselves and then turn to the attack. Finding our indispensible guide for the struggles of today and tomorrow – the revolutionary party, the international communist party.
August 2018
International Communist Party