Texts

“Not only does the party not include in its ranks all the individuals that constitute the proletarian class, but not even the majority of them. It includes the minority that acquires the collective preparation and maturity, in terms of both theory and militancy, corresponding to the general and final vision of the historical movement worldwide and over the whole course of time from the formation of the proletariat to its revolutionary victory. The issue of individual consciousness is not the basis for forming the party: not only is it impossible for every proletarian to be conscious or, even less, gain a cultural mastery of the class doctrine; it is even impossible for each individual militant and cannot even be guaranteed amongst the leaders.

Once again in the Middle East an enormous proletarian bloodbath is being prepared:  what we saw in mid-November 2012 was just a foretaste.  After a week of Israeli air- and sea-raids on the Gaza Strip, there have been 150 deaths, including women and children, amidst the destruction of houses and whole neighbourhoods.  A truce is agreed:  it may last, it may not.  They say that preparations are being made to intervene in Iran and for an attack in Syria.  Whatever happens, it is certain that fresh blood will be shed, so that Bourgeois Law and Order may make itself evident to a world shaken by unrest and proletarian struggles. Faced with the crisis of overproduction, which has been raging for five years now arousing as yet feeble responses from the proletariat, the imperialist States, terrorized by the merely remote possibility that the class war might explode and spread, are preparing the battleground, elaborating their strategies, taking the measure of their own strength and that of others involved.  Israel calls what is really an act of retaliation and the decimation of the civilian population “the right to self-defence”. It is not a question of Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims, but of proletarians used as a shield to defend a Bourgeois Dictatorship that is bound for destruction.

The endless massacre of proletarian and proletarianized Palestinian masses, the dead-end chaos in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, the total instability of Afghanistan and Pakistan and crucial areas of Central Africa, tens of thousands of deaths everywhere, hundreds of thousands of refugees travelling towards nothing, destruction and devastation: the hotbeds of war are multiplying, extending and deepening under the pressure of a world economic crisis that dictates the re-charting of the political and social geographies arising out of two twentieth-century world wars. It is no longer a question of sporadic local conflicts breaking out here and there: what we are now witnessing are points of no return in a new escalation whose necessary outlet, from the point of view of capital, is a new world bloodbath.

It is not the “specter that is haunting Europe” (that would demand much more) but everyone is talking about it.  The number of people who don’t turn out to vote is increasing, while the economic crisis, with its inevitable ups and downs, is deepening and spreading and everywhere (from Spain to Egypt, from France to Venezuela, from Hungary to Italy and so on, all around the world) election days, people’s consultations of all descriptions, democratic rituals of all types are proliferating – from the collection of signatures for one problem or another, right up to the huge, multi-million-dollar show of the U.S. Presidentials.  “Democratic mobilitation” is unceasing:  it echoes from country to country, amplified in all the media, creating a deafening noise and resorting to all sorts of brain conditioning, raising an immense cloud of dust that settles over everything, hiding reality from the eye.  At the same time, dazed by scandals large and small, revelations and disappointments, family quarrels and the rebounding of accusations and curses, faced with this huge World Festival of Democracy, the “people” turn out to vote in decreasing numbers, in line with a trend that was already evident in the “world’s greatest democracy”, the United States of America (save for the trend being suddenly reversed on one occasion or another, amidst general rejoicing).