International Communist Party

WHAT DISTINGUISHES OUR PARTY: The political continuity which goes from Marx to Lenin, to the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy (Livorno, 1921); the struggle of the Communist Left against the degeneration of the Communist International, against the theory of „socialism in one country“, against the Stalinist counter-revolution; the rejection of the Popular Fronts and the Resistance Blocs; the difficult task of restoring the revolutionary doctrine and organization in close interrelationship with the working class, against all personal and electoral politics.

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.

We do not know if, when this article appears, the big, U.S. election circus will still be on, and whether the puppet of Capital will still be the same or whether another will be pulled out of the demo-electoral magician’s hat. It matters little. The real questions remain on the table in a country in deep crisis, like the whole universe of Capital but with an intensity and visibility in proportion to its specific (economic, social, political, military) weight as the strongest imperialism. Once the umpteenth electoral intoxication is over, it is useful to return to some of these real questions, since they actually regard the world proletariat and not only that of the USA.

The measures adopted (or not adopted) by all governments in the face of the spreading Covid-19 pandemic have unmasked for the umpteenth time the true reality of the capitalist mode of production. This pandemic, just like those that have preceded it over time, has its origins in a class structure, with all the imbalances, devastation and tragedies that this involves and continues to produce and reproduce – in the economy, the environment, in relations between individuals and in social and everyday life. Faced with such events, produced by the society of capital and profit itself, this same society then proves incapable of managing them, of guaranteeing health and security to populations who pay the price, first and foremost the proletarian population, already exploited and massacred in so many ways: in all countries, obvious and eloquent is the case of national health services at tipping point because of violent cuts to what are unproductive expenses for capital, already in deep trouble. Lastly, it is evident that the way “emergency" measures are, and will continue to be, applied responds to precise class interests: production and profit above all!

As we have emphasized more than once, the virus spread through an organism already sick and in serious trouble. There were many warning signs of the production and financial system collapsing and it was just a matter of time before the dramatic social consequences of the latest global crack made themselves felt. If the big 2009/09 crisis was stemmed with difficulty without re-launching the mechanism of accumulation, the latest one on the horizon could have been lethal. Debts too high, average profit rate too low, underlying social inequalities too great to imagine much leeway for any pacific management of the new scenario within the limits of the system’s more or less democratic order.

In a series of articles in our press during the 1950s [1], parallel to the long study on the “Course of Capitalism”, we demonstrated, with the classical texts of communism to hand, how the “murderous and sinister dramas of modern social decadence” (floods and hydro-geological upheavals, cementification, collapsing dams, sinking liners and so on) must all be attributed to the capitalist mode of production. Those were the years of post-war reconstruction and an unbridled economic boom: after the unspeakable destruction of the second inter-imperialist world massacre (and precisely thanks to it!), the capitalist production machinery had started to function again full speed ahead – indeed, at a previously unheard of pace. And we could already see, before our very eyes, just as we see even more clearly today, the results of that unbridled hyper-production that has lasted at least three decades and, from the mid-seventies onwards, has foundered on the systemic crisis we are still immersed in.

The brutality of the Minneapolis cop is not an isolated example of a fanatical, psychopathic pig running amok… It is a “spontaneous” expression of the main “institutional” function of the contemporary bourgeois and imperialist State: surveillance, punishment, repression, control of any “suspicious” behavior, at first individual (the violation or even mere intention to violate private property in its mean form of possessing goods to be sold), but potentially and in perspective, collective and social (the overthrowing of forms of production that will abolish the private appropriation of wealth produced by the collective work of wage workers all over the world). This is a well-known fact to the workers who struggle every day for their wage, for their living and working conditions, against and outside the rules established by bourgeois “law”, just as it is well-known to the proletarian and proletarianized masses in areas where war breaks out and rages, where imperialist exploitation steals and destroys mercilessly.

From Libya to Iran, through Syria and Iraq, the winds of war are blowing with increasing violence. While the slaughter of civilians continues in Syria and Yemen (though the latter, it appears, is less newsworthy at the moment) and in Libya increasing chaos reigns due to a war at least partly fought by proxy with the military and diplomatic involvement of the main imperialist players, the recent episodes on Iraqi and Iranian soil (the tactical killing of General Soleimani by the USA, the military reaction from Teheran, the “incident” of the Ukrainian aircraft shot down “by mistake”) are all signals of aggravation in the clashes between imperialisms, independently of foreseeable future turns of events or those already going on, or of any temporary relaxation of tension, or the constant work of diplomacy going on behind the scenes.

For us May Day has never been a mere memory, a yearly ritual or a “holiday”. On the contrary, it has always been a battle call that sums up the history and experience of the world proletariat, projecting it towards the future: a future that has to be won by fighting tooth and nail, because it is not going to fall into our hands like a ripe pear.

Today, 2020, May Day is even less of a “holiday”. Events connected to the Covid-10 pandemic have revealed yet again the savagery of a class society, the society of Capital. In hundreds and hundreds of thousands of workplaces all over the world, which have remained open despite lacking even the most elementary means of protection, whilst all the rest closed down “in everyone’s interests”, workers have been treated like butcher’s meat. The facts show that this mode of production, upheld by the laws of profit, competition and exploitation, is not merely incapable of solving the contradictions that it, itself, produces: the use that has been made everywhere of the pandemic and the emergency, of illness and medicine, over the past few weeks clearly proclaims it isn’t true that “we are all in the same boat”.

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.