The events of the past six months have once again laid bare the destructive and self-destructive nature of the capitalist mode of production, with its ruthless, unadaptable laws. Series upon series of crises, different in form but substantially identical, demonstrate that its long death throes cannot help producing increasing poverty, bloody wars, environmental devastation, health crises, desperation, anguish, existential pain and basic difficulty in merely surviving, all over the planet.
More than once we have shown that the economic crisis of 2008-9 was never solved, dragging on for a decade between peaks and troughs and preparing us for even more tremendous crashes. This is the very crisis (pre-pandemic, so to say), whose evolution, already a cause of concern to all bourgeois observers because of its evident social and political implications, was the ground on which the pandemic crisis took root – daughter of a mode of production incapable of solving its own « side effects », even scientifically and in terms of health care.
By means of its ruling tools (parliaments, governments, the forces of law and order, mass media), Capital has immediately grasped the opportunity to introduce a series of measures which, under the pretence of « containing the virus », are directed towards « containing and repressing » the social anger that the economic crisis could bring with it. In doing this, the ruling classes in all countries can count on centuries of experience in wielding power over the proletariat : i.e. of using any « anomalous » situation to make their repressive apparatus more efficient and all-pervasive on all planes – cultural, ideological, political and, above all, miltary. And so this isn’t a matter of conspiracy but of practice in the use of force and anti-proletarian violence.
At this point, the post-pandemic crisis comes along. With the effects it has had at all levels, the emergency has merely exasperated and pushed forward the crisis that was already underway before it broke out : using the labour force as beasts to the slaughter, increasingly acute precarity, wave after wave of layoffs, legal and illegal violence by bosses and by the State against struggling workers, the cunning use of the « war amongst paupers »… The cherry on the cake could have been none other than the emergency legislation with all its represssive measures, maintained and indeed made increasingly pervasive thanks precisely to the experience of the pandemic. But we have already written and spoken sufficiently about this in the immediate past, as in recent and far-off times.
In the months to come, it is possible that a situation this critical may result in sudden, more or less circumscribed outbreaks that may finally mutate into a true social crisis with dimensions that are not merely domestic. It will then be necessary for the militant proletarians filling the streets and the squares to keep well away from the dead-end of exasperation in itself, rebellion without prospects, disorganized anger incapable of withstanding State violence. They must therefore equip themselves with stable and solid militant grassroots organizations for defending their living and working conditions. They must prepare for a higher level of political battle.
This, of course, is not enough. Defence is only possible if it is orientated towards attack and the attack will not succeed unless it has an objective that is non-contingent, not limited or circumscribed by the current reality.
And so, with a self-evidence that can only prove mysterious or obscure to the blind and stubborn, last-ditch defenders of the current mode of production as the « best of all possible worlds », day by day, in daily events themselves, the dramatic need will grow to change to a different and superior mode of production : a classless society, to communism.
We are well aware that in saying this we encounter the rubber and steel wall of the ruling ideology, which fills people’s heads with the litany of the « death of communism ». This litany just makes us communists smile, because it is a demonstration of the impotence and ignorance of mainstream ideology. Communism isn’t dead for the simple reason that, as an established mode of production, it has never existed : this, too, we have proved over decades of struggle, in thousands and thousands of pages, in countless factual and material examples.
In the face of what is already being prepared, all over the world, for the proletarian class (blood and tears), faced with the increasingly catastrophic course of the capitalist economic crisis, which can only lead to a new world war and more inter-imperialist slaughter, it is necessary to insist on the need for communism and the political and revolutionary process for achieving it, for a classless society that snatches all aspects of community life from the rule of the law of profit, money, competition and production for production’s sake.
This is why we must fight, and this is what we must work on, urgently but clear-sightedly and above all without the haste of those who want at all costs to see « the results of their work » to satisfy their urge to be the centre of attention ; without the arrogance of those who think they’re inventing shortcuts on a path that is materialistically determined. The principles, the theory, the programme, the tactics, the organizaton have all existed as a single whole for almost two centuries : through the organization of our party and its participation in the struggles of the proletariat, we have defended them tooth and claw, through all the waves of counter-revolution (and the latest, in which we are still immersed, has been and continues to be the longest and most devastating), in order to hand them on – a keen weapon and not the occasion for useless intellectual debate – to the future generations of militant communists.
13/09/2020