Texts

Let us start by reminding that the positions of communism have nothing to do with bourgeois anti-clericalism, whatever form this may have taken or may assume: liberal, anarchist, masonic, “socialist”. Communism links the fight against religion to the actual practice of the class movement, which tends to remove the social roots of religion forever, whatever they may be. When the revolutionary French bourgeoisie clashed with the old feudal régime, it had to fight religious ideology because, in order to let the capitalist mode of production progress, it had to promote its own science and thus do away with the ideologies that opposed it; by replacing religious faith with the Goddess of Reason and raising the banner (equally metaphysical in a society divided into classes) of Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood, the French Revolution is still the classical model of bourgeois revolutions, in this context too. Germany also had to attack the privileges of Catholicism, seizing many of the Church’s possessions and imposing a lay society. From Japan to Turkey, Iran to Egypt, Spain to Mexico, many other bourgeois revolutions have attacked religion. As to the countries of the Middle East, the attack on the Islamic religion was made primarily on the mosques and the Koranic schools. A different age…

(after the drowning of some 900 migrants – men, women, children – when the boat carrying them from Lybia to Sicily sank in the Mediterranean Sea)

In their hundreds of thousands they flee from all corners of the world in search of safety… safety which means merely sorry and uncertain survival and which for many ends in a horrific death, drowned, burned alive, beaten, killed by machine-gun fire. They flee from devastating theatres of war, from poverty that has been handed down for decades and centuries, from the oppression of régimes created and propped up first by colonialism and then by imperialism.

Following the umpteenth murder of a young black man by “the forces of law and order” in Baltimore (Maryland), the Afro-American community is back on the streets again to express its anger, as has already happened so many times in the past months. There have been demonstrations, clashes, fires, injuries and arrests. The National Guard has been called in, a state of emergency proclaimed, a night curfew imposed for a week.

The media, observers and institutions speak of “race riots”. But these rebellions sink their roots in a class condition. Together with the Latin American ones, black proletarians constitute the most exploited, oppressed and marginalized sector of the US proletariat. They are our class brothers. With great difficulty and in total political isolation, they react as best they can to the attack led against them at all levels (on the job, in the city ghettoes, on the borders at sea and on land) and byall available means (open daily police and military repression, the oppression of religious and non-religious ideologies, democratic-parliamentary fetishes, individual destruction and self-destruction, the cunningly fuelled “war of the poor against the poor”) – an attack that has always been moved against them by Capital, in times of peace and of war, in times of prosperity and of crisis. They have our complete solidarity.

Wherever they come from and whatever the colour of their skin, the keyword for proletarians all over the world is once again class unity against and beyond any barrier or division, a common battle to finally overthrow the capitalist mode of production, which starves, destroys and massacres. Most important of all, the urgent reinforcement of the revolutionary party and its rooting all over the world can no longer be delayed: without its guidance and organization, its programme and revolutionary perspective, even the most widespread and generous rebellions risk being transformed into yet one more proletarian bloodbath.

28 April 2015

Recent articles in our press: “USA: social (and not only financial) on the horizon”,The Internationalist, n.2/2015; “USA: la guerra in casa”, il programma comunista, n.2/2015.

National“Resistances”

The Greek situation has bounced back into the headlines following the election victory in December 2014 of Siryza, the “radical” left group which had no scruples about jointly forming the new government with an openly right-wing party: uniting these two spirits apparently so far removed from one another was their anti-European, or rather anti-German nationalism, which holds Germany responsible for starving the Greek people, victims of the harshest austerity measures. ‘Starving’ is to be taken quite literally for the percentage of Greeks below the poverty level (i.e. with an income lower than 60% of the national average), which has risen from 14% in 2009 to the present 30% due to policies of deficit correction which, when government passed from the centre-right to Papandreu’s Pasok (end of 2009), had touched on 13% of the GNP.