HAMMER AND SICKLE

Obviously it is not a matter of principle: we certainly cannot exclude a-priori any form of expression. Banners, standards and insignia are weapons, tools of war. A horn, a tam-tam, a totem, to comfort friends and threaten enemies, in given circumstances, are indeed useful.

But now we are not at war. We are at war, but with words, with printed paper, where theses, interpretations and lessons of past wars are compared. For this war of today, symbols do more harm than good. To the point of being able to turn against us. Symbols, images, can be even more lying and deceitful than words.

The Second International hid its betrayal behind sweet images of radiant dawns, over ears of corn and anvils. Many proletarians were deceived by that rhetoric and, believing that they were going towards the rising red sun of socialism, found themselves slaughtered in the trenches of the First World War.
Stalinism, too, drowned communism in a flood of red paint, with scythes and hammers wielded by muscular workers, against the backdrop of the founding saints, from Marx to… Enver Hoxha. Today we would find ourselves contending for those symbols in one of the greatest States of world capitalism.
When the party reorganized in the last years of the Second World War, there was a widespread illusion that the second post-war period would be as fertile for revolution as the first. Many comrades acted accordingly, preparing for it in every way. Among them they showed themselves to the class adorned with the traditional symbols that had been of communism and the Third International.

All this was the result of a too optimistic evaluation of that historical situation. The Party was fully convinced only in 1952. Those who did not want to accept that the revolution had been postponed for the moment abandoned the party.

They gave in, we said, to “activism”. This does not mean doing activity, an intense propaganda activity of penetration into the workers’ ranks, but the pretension of changing the course of history through organizational tools and, lacking principles, going to school of the “movement”.
Since then we have – temporarily – put aside even any iconography. Not because we want to distance the party from the living working class and make it a circle of study and publications. But to present ourselves behind a symbol – that the first to be seen – would have only made confusion, would have to some extent brought us closer to others and made the task of defining doctrine more difficult.

The titles of our periodicals were The Soviet, the form of proletarian power in Russia, Prometeo, the man who stole fire from the gods, and Spartaco, the rebel slave. But we wanted to call them then, without a doubt, Il Programma Comunista, then Comunismo and Il Partito Comunista.
After many decades of Stalinist and post-Stalinist counter-revolution, it is necessary that the program of the Party be identified in the most precise way through its original ancient tactical and principled positions.

The revolution will be the product of the return to the social scene of real historical forces, not of a particularly willing and visible form of organization. The organizational fact, which does have its importance, must not overpower or overshadow the disruptive content of our program. We want to be recognized as the party of communism, not only and not so much as an organization, in competition with the others. It is necessary not to distract the attention of comrades from a rigorous programmatic delimitation, before that of organization.

The party has an organization but it is not an organization.

The case of the trade union is different; first of all, it is an organization: in it, a fundamental element is the numerical strength, of workers only. An army wearing red shirts seems more numerous than it is. The working class organizes itself to go out of the factories, to seen itself and to be seen, and to occupy the squares, with every useful tool: flags, shouts, slogans, music, anthems, t-shirts, badges, etc. etc.
 
How do communists recognize themselves?

We call ourselves “International Communist Party”. Three words which say almost everything. And for the moment it’s a bigger name than we are! We have nothing to invent. Tomorrow, when the need arises, symbols and flags will come into their own.

And today our comrades are not afraid, in any situation, to declare themselves, simply, “internationalists”, individually and as groups.

How in the crowd do we recognize ourselves among communists? We answer that the communists must be so well framed (even in the demonstrations in the squares), supportive and trained, in attitudes, in language, in the battle and in common work, that they know each other very well for a long time, or that they can “smell” each other even at the first meeting. It is too naive to rely on an easily falsifiable little mark on a hat or jacket lapel.
But how will the ignorant masses, who know nothing about Marxism and history and have no time to read the communist press, recognize us?
The time will come when they will follow our flags. But this will happen when, through the development of the practical struggle between classes, they will have been able to recognize them, to associate them with a given battle direction, which they have searched for, experimented and accepted.
For the moment, in the media abuse of symbols and images, we can only be recognized by our words and our characteristic attitude of seriousness and consistency.

Clothes, in class societies, are important, because those are seen. It is no accident that priests wear cassocks and judges wear ermines. We communists, who are not idealists, know this. Communists, on the other hand, have never worn uniforms.

But the revolution is not the product of a well-organized advertising campaign, better than that of the bourgeoisie. Otherwise we would be lost! It will be the practical experience of the working class, in social warfare against the bourgeoisie and its State, during which it will have been able to prove the rightness of the party’s direction, that will make possible the reunion of the party with the class.