Thirty years ago, the fall of the “Berlin Wall” – the symbol for those who have never understood a single thing about capitalism and communism – once again launched, in the crudest and most vulgar of manners, the anti-communist polemics that had never ceased to bray (and we use the verb with the utmost respect for the noble and friendly animal): “This is the practical demonstration of what communism is!” The same polemics re-emerge today with idiotic obstinacy, not so much because of the thirtieth anniversary of that event, but because everything in the world of Capital is desperately screaming the need to put an end to a mode of production that at this stage has become purely destructive.
The series of uprisings that marked the last few months of 2019 (Chile, Lebanon, Iraq, Bolivia, etc.), the massacres, persecutions, infinite violence, awful migration and authentic pogroms of entire populations, the exponential rise in the collective and individual pain of living, the crude, cynical arrogance of power in all countries, and again, underneath all this joy, driving it and making it all inevitable, the crisis of Capital, the series of recessions, the reeling national economies openly fighting one another, the impossibility for Capital to resist the trend for the average profit rate to fall (which is in fact, dear, obtuse minstrels of the “best of all possible worlds”, unavoidable and undeniable in practice) – all this shows that endless, destructive and pitiless death throes are taking place. The ruling classes can feel this in their bones – bones forged (and made expert) over at least three centuries of dominion. Everywhere, politicians at all levels (and of all donkey dialects) are striving, thrashing around, in search of recipes “for exiting the crisis” and deep, deep down, they can feel that there are none: theirs is a long, long night of the living dead.
The anniversary of the fall of the “Berlin Wall” is a juicy occasion for those politicians and their well-paid hangers-on (philosophers, historians, economists, journalists, maîtres à penser of all descriptions and all shades of filth) to show off their total, arrogant ignorance, attributing to communism what has, instead, been a characteristic of capitalism: not for three decades but for centuries.
We didn’t have to wait for 1989 to demonstrate, loud and clear, that there, in the so-called “East Block countries” and elsewhere, there was not even a shadow of socialism – let alone communism! We have been doing this ever since that far-off 1926, when we clashed with those who maintained – against all evidence but with weapons to hand – that they wished to “create socialism in a single country” and, with this argument (and using any means to silence their opponents), threw out Marx, Engels, Lenin (not to name names): that is, dialectical materialism. We have no skeletons in the cupboard: since then – since that far-off 1926 – we have fought and continue to, using theory and practice, against the obscene mystification (which today everyone places on the bloody altar of capitalism’s human sacrifices) of “real socialism”, of “soviet communism” (whether it be Russian, Chinese, Albanian, Cuban!). We have demonstrated, by using the facts of economic reality, of economic and social structure, that capitalism and not socialism was being created there, because where there are money, salaries, goods, there is capitalism and entrepreneurial organization; that state management of the means of production (more or less extended, with large and significant imbalances between the various sectors) was no demonstration either of the dictatorship of the proletariat (obtuse minstrels! it is something quite different), or – even less so – of the attainment of socialism or even communism (obtuse minstrels! it isn’t the same thing!); and that that collapse, the dissolving of the “East Block régimes” was entirely contained in the structural crisis of world capitalism, which re-opened from the mid 1970s onwards [1]. Go on taking comfort in your ignorance and your arrogance. Screech on from every microphone, every page of every newspaper, every internet site, every parliamentary bench. Display it at every worldly or sporting or social occasion. You are, in any case, condemned to the scrapheap of History!
The living dead stink: and it’s a terrible stench that rises from capitalism’s slaughter. It is up to the world proletariat (which is continuing to grow and suffer increasingly) to launch the attack on this world immersed in mud, blood and the disgusting mess of three centuries of bourgeois dominion. It is up to us communists to organize and direct them in that attack. So that the winter of our discontent may become the glorious summer of our victory!
November 2019
[1] Just one reference, amongst the dozens and dozens of analyses we have carried out, data in hand, over the decades: “La Russia s’apre alla crisi mondiale” / “Russia Opened up to the World crisis”, Quaderni del Programma Comunista, n.2, 1977 (republished today in Perché la Russia non era socialista / Why Russia wasn’t socialist, Edizioni Il programma comunista, 2019). Yes, you hoarse and tuneless minstrels, you are not mistaken: 1977!
International Communist Party