Texts

Only eight years ago we wrote: “The proletarian revolution no longer weaves its fabric within a single nation, its path does not open up inside one country alone, but in an international weft, because the class war to get free of the capitalist system is international (“Iran, the octopus of reformism”, Il programma comunista, n.1/2010). In the intervening years, a new war has hit the Middle East, a deadly war that has devastated the whole of Syrian territory, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, women and children, and the flight of millions of desperate people. From Damascus to Aleppo, from Mossul to Baghdad and San’a’, the whole of the Middle East has become a cemetery! The alliance between imperialist butchers headed by the Americans – super-armed, friends-cum-enemies, the real imperialist caliphate – has silenced a band of idiotic Islamists. The doves of so-called peace have settled on the banks of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, cooing at the victory of the Russian-Iranian-Syrian front. The other countries (Turkey, Iraq, Kurdistan) are left with the remains. By taking part in the war and taking its place at the centre of events, Iran played its own imperialist role together with the other armies, bands and plunderers. The imperialist bourgeoisie has re-evoked the monsters of nationalism, plunging the proletariat (our class) into the midst of fright and desperation.

To start with

In his text The Housing Question (originally published in the form of articles in 1872 and republished as a pamphlet in 1887), Friedrich Engels wrote: “Whence then comes the housing shortage? How did it arise? [… It] is a necessary product of the bourgeois social order; that it cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great masses of the workers are exclusively dependent upon wages, that is to say, on the sum of foodstuffs necessary for their existence and for the propagation of their kind; in which improvements of the existing machinery continually throw masses of workers out of employment; in which violent and regularly recurring industrial vacillations determine on the one hand the existence of a large reserve army of unemployed workers, and on the other hand drive large masses of the workers temporarily unemployed onto the streets; in which the workers are crowded together in masses in the big towns, at a quicker rate than dwellings come into existence for them under existing conditions; in which, therefore, there must always be tenants even for the most infamous pigsties; and in which finally the house owner in his capacity as capitalist has not only the right, but, in view of the competition, to a certain extent also the duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as he possibly can. In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and it can be abolished together with all its effects on health, etc., only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned. That, however, bourgeois socialism dare not know. It dare not explain the housing shortage from the existing conditions. And therefore nothing remains for it but to explain the housing shortage by means of moral phrases as the result of the baseness of human beings, as the result of original sin, so to speak” ¹.

“Humanitarian” intervention by the great powers in the many war zones of the Middle East and Africa, in the bordering areas where masses of migrants flee from one country to the next and where famine wipes out entire populations and environmental and social deterioration are growing, with sickness decimating children and the elderly, is the most shameless of lies ever to have been spread through the media.

“Humanitarian” intervention has brought military penetration into these regions – so they say – to “protect” human lives from poverty, health crises, environmental disaster, religious contrasts, mass exodus by migrants, to “remediate” the constant violation of “democratic rights” by terrorism and corrupt classes and, lastly, to “defend” local power’s various legitimate interests.

In celebrating the centenary of the October Revolution ¹, we have tried to extract the lessons to be learned from October 1917 (and suggest them again for the future, as this is what interests us). Now, a question spontaneously arises: is it really necessary to emphasize yet again the urgent need for communism? It would be sufficient to look around us to see the answer. The capitalist mode of production is becoming more and more like a blind, lame tightrope walker setting out along a tightrope fraying at both ends: on all sides the puppets of Capital are insisting that the crisis is coming to an end; on all sides there are more and more signs that the crisis exists, is showing its teeth and accumulating more explosive material, destined to blow up sooner or later. And we might even stop here. But this is impossible.