Texts

We are certain that this 2017, the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution, will be marked by the most irate and revolting anti-communism. There will be a revival (a ridiculously banal version, as it is suited to a ruling ideology that is inevitably the expression of the progressive putrefaction of the capitalist mode of production and all its social relations) of the campaign of slander, attacks, mystification and distortion, manipulation and misrepresentation through which, ever since the conquest of the Winter Palace, the ideologists of the ruling capitalist class have attempted to deny the need – tragically urgent – for the classless society of communism. Though never succeeding: the same rancour and the same perversion revealed in the ideological and practical mobilization of the ruling class against Red October are all too clear a proof that the terror of communism is ever-present, all the more so, since the dead end in which capitalism is struggling, with no idea how to disentangle itself, is fuelling its worst fears. But there will also, above all (another aspect of anti-communism, even though it may not seem so to the uninformed) be the rhetorical embalming of Red October by all those who, having inherited and carried forward the democratic, social-democratic and Stalinist tradition, have abandoned themselves to exercises in rhetoric in the hope of recovering some last remnants of identity, and naturally they do so using all the necessary shades of distinction, all the acrobatic moves to distance themselves, all the hypocrisy typical of penitents and traitors, all the balancing acts and somersaults that their infamous history has accustomed them to over the arc of a hundred years. Both sides are fluid, superimposable and interchangeable, taking turns to alternate and dissimulate. Above all, they are ready to merge into a single, compact anti-proletarian front the moment it becomes necessary, when our class demonstrates that it no longer intends passively accepting the oppression it is subjected to day by day and threatens to take the path of a class-driven and revolutionary response.

For us, returning to Red October, as we shall be doing in the course of the year, with articles and public initiatives wherever our forces make it possible, is no pathetic “how we were”, the umpteenth example of “frozen memory”. The experience of 1917 (as of the Paris Commune of 1871), the point of arrival of long work by the party beginning in 1848 and pre-supposing the extension of the revolutionary process in time and space (something that the bourgeois counter-revolution in all its democratic, social-democratic, Nazi-fascist and Stalinist forms, has impeded for these terrible, long decades) is living material for us, from which precious and vital lessons can be learned for a future which, in material terms, is inevitably being prepared. For us “Red October” is not a nostalgic slogan, an inoffensive icon: it is a battle cry that we have been spreading with bared teeth and claws ever since, to pass on to the younger generations, who will have to face with a militant spirit the devastating death throes of a mode of production that has reached all the historical limits of its own existence. And which must therefore be destroyed, on pain of unspeakable suffering (by means of exploitation, poverty, famine, devastation, war) for our species, which only in communism can define itself human.

A year ago in the pages of this newspaper (and later in our English-language publication, The Internationalist), we called attention to the serious social situation in Great Britain, particularly with regard to the “housing issue” and the anti-proletarian measures being passed or planned 1. This was well before the “Brexit” case hit the scene in Europe. In addition, in the editorial to issue 4/2016 of this same newspaper 2, we stressed the fact that the predictable decline in the living and working conditions of British proletarians (whether natives or immigrants) should not be attributed to Great Britain leaving Europe (i.e. to Brexit as such) but to the complex of measures that every national capital is obliged to adopt to deal with its own crisis – measures amongst which “Brexit” itself can be counted. What has actually changed since then? Not much really, apart from social contradictions becoming even more acute: even the mere insistence with which some local institutions in London (such as, to quote one example, the local library of Tower Hamlets, one of London’s traditionally proletarian areas most affected by the relentless march of property and financial speculation – so-called gentrification) are returning to the burning issue of housing, with ample documentation on the squat movements, which were particularly widespread and combative in the 1920s and ‘30s, but also later in the 1960s and 1970s.

Fifty years ago, in mid-October 1966, some young, black people from Oakland (California), exasperated by constant police violence, started to patrol the streets of the ghetto, literally applying the state law on arms, which authorized pistols and guns to be carried on condition they were in full view and not aimed at anyone. This is how the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense came into being. These were the years of the civil rights movement and the repeated rebellions in US ghettoes and the Black Panthers took up the teachings of Malcolm X (who had been killed a little over a year previously), radicalising the positions that were the embryo of Black Power and combining Maoism, third-worldism and black nationalism. Very soon, the party grew to a national level with strong roots in the ghettoes of the main cities (as well as in the country’s prisons) and a project for organizing and creating political awareness in the lower layers of the black population, as well as for direct assistance to the community. State repression was not long in coming and proved ferocious: from infiltration by spies and ‘agents provocateurs’ to trials with prefabricated accusations, right up to the cold-blooded murder of many of the organization’s militants. The effective lifespan of the Black Panther Party was relatively short – ten years or so – and its decline was caused partly by state repression and partly by its original frailty and theoretical ambiguity and the attempt to offset this by an organization in which militarism prevailed over political content. In view of the renewed talk of the Black Panther Party [1] since the summer 2016 “Dallas shootings” (when a black sharpshooter shot and killed some white policemen), we believe it may be useful to re-publish the article that appeared in issue n. 5, 1971, of our Italian newspaper “Il programma comunista”, clearly establishing the reality and limits of the movement.

It is a historical fact that in certain phases, after long periods of apparent inertia, the economic and

social dynamics produced by capitalism itself in its most aggressive and destructive phase (that of imperialism) suddenly accelerate, with violent repercussions and unexpected breaks, coming closer and closer to the time of reckoning in the world of capitalist production and involving the world proletariat. It is too soon to tell whether we are now in one of these phases and in fact our task (theoretical and practical, political and organizational) must be to follow and analyse step by step the evolution of the world economic crisis, in terms of its reflections on society and the way classes (and groups and factions within them) move, operate and start to align. The fact is, and we cannot help but dwell on this, that the world economic crisis is constantly at work deep down, wearing away certainties and conventions (and, above all, those fictitious economic reserves – savings, pensions, homes – as well as the social – pensions, healthcare, education – which constituted the real illusion of all reformism), breaking down what was supposed to be solid and provoking a situation of growing uncertainty and instability in terms of hard economic facts and daily life. Observers and opinion-makers of limited intelligence fall back on medical-psychiatric terminology to define the “human condition” today: they speak of the “onset of global anxiety”, “globalization and crises of rejection”. This is a sorry demonstration of the depths to which the caste of power ideologists has sunk! Behind this demonstration of historical, theoretical and conceptual ignorance loom deep tension and lacerations, which affect and cause harm to our proletarian class itself.