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.

We are not surprised by the dispatch of the one hundred missiles launched by the “coalition” of USA-Great Britain-France (after notifying Russia), to bomb the Syrian chemical plants. Our anger grows at the unceasing massacre of proletarians sacrificed in a war without end.

There is no “humanitarian intervention” today, just as there never has been in the past: this is merely a further step in the assumption of positions by the various competitors (from the USA to Russia, from France to Turkey, from Israel to Iran: and we should not marvel, if the “allies” of yesterday become the “adversaries” of today), with a view to more serious, future, inter-imperialist clashes.

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.

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!

Each issue of our periodicals carries the following words on the cover:

«What distinguishes our Party is the political continuity which goes from Marx to Lenin, to the foundation of the Communist International and the Communist Party of Italy (Livorno, 1921); the struggle of the Communist Left against the degeneration of the International, the struggle against the theory of «socialism in one country» and the Stalinist counter-revolution; the rejection of the Popular Fronts and the Resistance blocs; the difficult task of restoring the revolutionary doctrine and organisation in close interrelationship with the working class, against personal and electoral politics.»

The purpose of these few words is to give a brief and general indication of what characterises our Party. Although it was not intended to be a detailed explanation (synthetic formulas mark a trace, do not claim to illustrate it), a distinctive feature of our movement is immediately made clear to the reader: for us, contrary to the whole myriad of «modernisers» of Marxism, there exists a continuous, unchanged, unalterable line which defines the revolutionary Communist Party. This is so precisely because its line rises above the ups and downs, the setbacks and advances, the rare but glorious victories and the numerous and catastrophic defeats of the working class, on the difficult path of its struggle for emancipation. It is in fact only thanks to the uninterrupted permanence of this line that the proletariat exists as a class; indeed this line does not reflect the temporary and often contradictory position of the proletariat at this or that stage of its path, in space and time, but the direction that it must necessarily take, starting from its situation of exploited class), to become the ruling class and then achieve, throughout the world, the abolition of all classes and communism. While the material conditions for this path were created by the capitalist mode of production itself, this path does not fall from the sky and it can be travelled to the end only by struggling. And only the Marxist doctrine knows its necessary phases, its indispensable means, as well as its ultimate aims.

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.

There’s no need for a lot of words: only the pathetically deluded can fail to see that deep within the capitalist economy, which has been in a critical state for decades now with all its ups and downs, a new, generalized conflict is being prepared, even more devastating than the two past world wars and the infinite “minor wars” that have preceded and followed them.

The conflict is not the will of Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un (or other future puppets), even if they’re growling and flexing their muscles at the moment. Imperialist wars are not the result of the “will for power” or “homicidal folly” of one “dictator” or the other (or – worse still – of one “people” or another). They are the product of capital’s own dynamics, obliged as it is to resort to them in the attempt to get the jammed mechanism of accumulation moving again, by destroying what has been produced in excess (work-force included).

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.

And now what will the convenient idiots do on both sides of the ocean (whatever ocean), still convinced as they are that what decides politics (domestic, foreign, economic, social, etc. etc.) is the Man (Woman) sent by Providence, elected every few years or so to the beating of drums and showers of streamers, fireworks and sequins, flag-waving, thirty-four-tooth smiles and handfuls of all sorts of promises, like sweets?

What will the prostrate do, now that the only programme that remains to them is a whining “vote the least objectionable, but vote”, thrashing about in a tormented dilemma of “what have (haven’t) we done? What should (shouldn’t) we have done?” Barely concealing a touch of rancour towards Democracy, so highly praised, by Whom they have been punished (“Ah, how ungrateful! After all we’ve done for you!”)?