International Communist Party

Summaries of our General Meetings

Categories: Capitalist Crisis, Economic Works, General Meeting, German Revolution, Germany, History of the Modes of Production, Hungarian Revolution, Hungary, Immigration, Imperialism, India, Italy, Life of the Party, Military Question, UK, Union Activity, Union Question, USA, Venezuela, World War I

This article was published in:

GM122 – May 2015

GM123 – Sept 2015

GM124 – Jan 2016

GM125 – May 2016

GM126 – Sep 2016

[GM 122] A Highly Successful Party Meeting, Genoa, 16-17 May 2015

Our hyper-efficient comrades in Genoa put on another well organized General Meeting of the Party at our local office there.

At the meeting there was wide participation from our groups in Italy, France and Great Britain. Those unable to attend sent detailed reports on local efforts, and these were read out in full.

As party members know, our meetings are “working meetings” not “congresses”. This is because the historical maturity of our doctrine, and the tactical models which derive from it, effectively preclude that there is still “a line to identify” about which “decisions need to be made” within the communist movement. Nowadays there is nothing left for us “to decide”, apart from as concerns those measures of secondary importance required from time to time to ensure the normal functioning of internal activity, and of the organization, timing, etc, of external propaganda.

As usual we will only give a brief summary here of the many reports presented by the various party work and study groups and comrades engaged in union work, postponing publication of the texts in full to subsequent issues of our Italian language magazine “Comunismo”, and where possible translated into other languages.

[GM 123] Reports related to the General Meeting, Turin, 26-27 Sept 2015

Internationalist communists all, we convened in Turin over the period 26 and 27 September for the party’s working meeting.

Happily a hotel with an adjoining conference room had been booked for the sessions, which allowed us to maximize use of the available time; a fact also enhanced by the timely and active discipline of both speakers and listeners.

As usual we devoted Saturday morning to the coordination of the many tasks we have taken on and for which various comrades have taken responsibility, deciding which programs of study to continue and which new ones to start and also reporting on the results of our propaganda initiatives.

We strive to maintain the link between our past tradition of social science and revolutionary struggle with a difficult present, which, we are certain, only that very special and unique organization within today’s society that is the Communist Party is capable of deciphering, and consequently of predicting those necessary developments that will allow it to intervene as an active factor in the future.

Wherever and whenever we are placed on the terrain of class struggle, it is particularly important that our evaluations correspond with the directives we issue to workers and that this is continually verified: not so much in the opinion of the workers themselves as by careful study of the changing balance of power between the classes.

We provide here, for the information of those absent and as a reminder to those who attended, an initial summary of the reports which were presented. All of them, even when the result of the work of individual comrades, are to be understood as the impersonal and collective expression of our current militant team as a whole, as much as they are of a now long-established school; the expression of passion, science and communist method rolled into one.

[GM124] Reports made to the General Meeting, Parma, 22-23 Jan 2016

Comrades from Turin, Genoa, Lodi, Friuli, Cortona, Bari, Rome, Florence, Parma, Naples, and from outside Italy from Paris, England, Venezuela, Germany were all in attendance at the meeting in Parma. The hospitality and overall organization was impeccable. Brought forward to Friday afternoon, work commenced with the organizational meeting, which would be continued the following morning. As usual, we dedicated Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning to the presentation of reports.

Of those reports we will give a short summary straightaway, postponing the publication of the full texts to later editions of “Comunismo”.

The party aims to respond to the sometimes extremely serious questions of the day not by applying a particular prescribed form of internal reporting and consultation among its militants, but rather through the collective handling of its distinctive theory and critical knowledge of the historical precedents and past events of the class struggle. These impersonal instruments, of doctrine and program, suffice to guide it in its interpretation of new cases as they arise and settle on the correct revolutionary policy to adopt.

To maintain this vital and dynamic correspondence between its past and present entails a continuous labor of study and collective re-appropriation of the party’s distinctive program. Our regular general meetings, held three times a year, constitute the crucible in which contributions from all of our groups and from those on the fringes of the party are cast, in order to forge shared keys with which to unlock the present, and to attempt to cast light on the road ahead.

The party does not have militants of the exceptional energy and thinking skills of our past masters at its disposal today, but it knows it can manage without them if it remains faithful to their work by through its modest but disciplined concourse of contributions; so numerous in fact we are unable to fit them all in at the meetings, or find enough column space for them all in our press. Through this inconspicuous but convergent, tenacious and fraternal work we look to defend the great project of communism and the only clear line it is possible to give the working class, everywhere engaged in permanent war with the class enemy.

[RG 125] The Party’s General meeting, Cortona, 21-22 May 2016

The Cortona meeting was attended by comrades from Britain, Turin, Genoa, Veneto, France, Germany, Cortona, Rome, Florence, Parma and Bari. The sessions were held in the usual atmosphere of ordered, firm commitment, and without all the time-wasting controversies, debates and personalisms, etc. that characterize the democratic-congressional method, which is the exact opposite of ours.

Embarked on over seventy years ago and with much still much to do, we are aware of the seriousness and difficulty of the work required of our small party, dedicated as it is to putting back together a truly international political organ of the working class and to restoring communism.

To that end, we have always considered our regular general meetings as the best way of passing on a wealth of ideas, approaches and ways of going about things that are typical of our militant structure. Of all the many parties that have a following within the working class, our party is the only one that has managed, albeit on a quantitatively very reduced scale today, to conduct itself in a way that is consistent with its communist nature; something which our movement, in its complex and long-standing history, from Marx onwards, prefigured, and would have wanted to live on in the political organ of proletarian emancipation; even if the Third International was unable to fully understand the requirement for it and to put it into practice. Therefore it is a mode of being and functioning which is both old and the new, opposed to and incompatible even with those parties of the bourgeois class which in their day were revolutionary.

We give below summaries of some of the many reports which were presented.

[RG126] The Party General Meeting in Genoa, 24-25 Sept 2016

The party’s Autumn general meeting was held in our Genoa office from 23 to 25 September. We decided again this time to bring the start of the organizational meeting forward to the Friday afternoon to leave more time to hear the reports, of which there were several more than usual.

Work was carried out in our usual focused and orderly manner, and as ever it was gratifying to note how our small forces manage, by applying the party’s methodology in a sound and consistent setting, can address even the most difficult and complex aspects of Marxist revolutionary theory; the overall aim being to defend the original destructive program of communism in its entirety and to continue down the clear path established by our great teachers.

Our materialistic dialectic consoles us in its serene certainty that it is not the strength of Party that will determine when the class prepares for battle and attacks and destroys the strongholds of capital, but just that we must collectively know how to stick rigidly to our line as regards the future course, sketched out against its will by the overwhelming World gigantism of capital; a line which promotes and refines the strangulation of capital to the maximum, secure in the knowledge that only the living presence of the concentrated social energy of the Communist party, in contact with the movement of the wider masses, will render the victory of communism possible.

As the final version of a report is often only arrived at after further study and work on the part of the speakers, and since publishing them can sometimes be delayed due to lack of space, we will provide here a brief summary of the reports for comrades and for our readers, aiming as far as possible to capture the essentials.

 * * * 

The Ongoing Crisis in Production, Trade and Finance

Our careful study of the course of the economy includes in part a detailed and continuous quantitative survey of growth within some of the basic categories involved in the reproduction of capital. This work, which the party has always considered fundamental, has been carried out using a consistent methodology for at least fifty years. The data, necessarily obtained from bourgeois institutes of statistics, is evaluated for its trustworthiness, set in order and presented in a synthetic and expressive form at the party’s general meetings, bringing the listeners to verify empirically the economic laws discovered by Marx, and identify those of its patterns and rhythms which allow us to forecast future trends.

Since the mid 1980s we have witnessed a flow of capital from the major imperialist centres into the so-called BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa and, above all, to China. This has allowed a considerable growth of capitalism in these regions, above all in China, which has led to a temporary increase in capital’s average rate of profit on the global scale and to a considerable opening up of those markets. Only this has allowed global capitalism over the intervening years to avoid a 1929-type crisis.

Today we have come to the end of that cycle and a gigantic overproduction crisis, whose intensity will be far greater than 1929’s and is round the corner. If there is any recovery in Europe and Japan in 2016-17 it will be moderate and just a prelude to this next collapse.

At the following meeting we provided an update of the statistical surveys on trade as well. The United States were again in recession, in China industrial production continued to slow down (according to official figures),in line with a contraction in the production of electricity, steel and cement. Germany and the other European countries, apart from the UK, showed modest growth. Very restricted growth in exports, in constant value dollars, for all countries, China included.

The contradiction between the socialization of the productive forces and private appropriation leads to the cyclical crises of overproduction. Not all the overproduction crises are also social and political crises. Since the middle of the 19th century there have been three great historic crises which have posed the problem the taking of power by the proletariat: the great European crisis of 1848 when, after the bourgeois revolution in February, the French proletariat attempted to take power; the Paris Commune, a “storming of heaven” because the Parisian proletariat was immature on the theoretical and programmatic levels; and the years following the glorious revolution of 1917 in Russia, when all communists envisaged a communist revolution in Europe as possible. 

There was another major crisis of overproduction in the years after 1929, but the international proletariat was unable to take advantage of it because of the falling back of the revolution in the mid twenties, accompanied and favoured by the disastrous tactic of the political united front which had been launched by the International, and which, instead of strengthening the communist parties in the various countries, weakened and confused them. The bourgeois counter-revolution would then triumph in the formerly communist Russian State.

The Second World War allowed capitalism to emerge from the crisis of the thirties and recommence a whole new long cycle of accumulation, interrupted only by short, shallow recessions restricted to individual countries. 1973 marks the definitive end of this period and from then on capitalism will pass from one overproduction to another in cycles varying from 7 to 10 years.

It was the sheer scale of the development of capitalism in China over the last thirty years which allowed western and Japanese imperialism to avoid a historic crisis on the scale of the interwar period. But today all of the conditions for a grave crisis of overproduction are present precisely in China, where the early signs of a slowing up of production are already evident and in particular in heavy industry.

The overlapping of the overproduction in China, and in general in the other countries where there is strong growth such as Brazil and India, with the economic crisis of the old decrepit capitalisms of the United States, Europe and Japan will lead to uncontrollable inflation which along with a diminution of production will see a collapse of the global financial system.

As the crisis gets worse financial interventions will no longer be able to hold back deflation. Measures taken by the central banks will not only prove ineffective but will provoke new bank failures.

The depreciation of securities is already expressed today in rates of negative interest. Over 10,000 billion Euros of public debt are now exchanged at rates less than zero: the financial institutions pay for lending to States, thereby admitting that their money is actually undervalued, giving notice of the next big devaluation to hit securities of all types. 

The crisis, which will cause the bankruptcy of numerous States, and be far worse that the recent ones in Argentina, Greece and Ireland, cannot but weaken the ruling classes both morally and politically. 

The Marxist scientific dialectic is not a crystal ball in which you read the future, but of the future it knows certain of its laws and conditions. After having studied the long history of capitalism, and drawn conclusions from observing the length of its industrial cycles, we can predict that this great historic crisis will begin in the very near future.

Today that new historical turning point is approaching, which could create the conditions for the overthrow of the power of the bourgeois class by the revolutionary proletariat, paving the way to a transition from the mode of production based on capital to one based on communism.

The long counter-revolution has corrupted or destroyed all of the proletariat’s organizations, in practice replacing solidarity between workers with competition and instilling in their minds a horrible confusion. Virtually everything needs to be rebuilt, to be recovered. Only a tiny minority, amidst the general disorientation, has managed to hold to the programmatic and theoretical line which goes from the Communist Party Manifesto of 1848 to the Russian Revolution in October 1917 to the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy in Livorno in 1921 and on to our small international party today.

But the counter-revolution hasn’t prevented proletarians from pressing their ongoing daily fight against the exploitation of their employers, nor capitalism from spreading throughout the entire planet and giving rise to the bourgeois revolutions of the coloured peoples, allowing the productive forces of Africa and above all of Asia to expand on a massive scale. In the old imperialist countries the frenetic accumulation of capital since the Second World War has pushed the socialization of the productive forces to unprecedented levels. All are irreversible material developments which make possible, anticipate, and facilitate the transition to communist society. The peasantry, in countries like Italy and France, represented around a half of the active population in the 1920s whereas today it is around 3%. The communist revolution which will emerge from this historic crisis will be much more powerful, and much more international.

There are only two possibilities in the face of this latest, epoch-making crisis. One is the revolutionary social and political destruction of capitalism; the other an imperialist third world war, also involving destruction yet far more damaging, and serving only to regenerate capitalism.

The war would involve a clash between two monstrous blocs, with the United States at the head of one side and China the other, and Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas all drawn into the global conflagration. Kissinger predicted a death toll of 500 million in the case of a third world war, which was perhaps a conservative estimate.

At the moment one of the principal contenders, China, is not ready. Chinese imperialism finds itself today in the same relation to the United States as the latter was to England at the beginning of the 20th Century. As regards production in heavy industry – steel, cement, electricity – Chinese capitalism has caught up with and indeed has overtaken the United States, not only in terms of sheer volume but also per inhabitant; but it is still a long way behind on the military and technical plane, even if it is making every effort to bridge the gap.

But before the war it is highly likely a catastrophic political and economic crisis would have erupted and reignited the class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie.

The working class must form a vanguard that has rediscovered its program and the theory of Marxist communism, even if this process may not happen in parallel with a significant upsurge in the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie and its reorganization on the trade union level. This subjective condition, the existence of a communist party which had acquired a decisive influence within the working class, via a whole network of organizations formed by workers to defend their immediate interests, the trade unions, centralized under its leadership, is necessary in order to overthrow the bourgeoisie and take power by revolutionary means.

The existence of our small party is bound to favour and accelerate this process of constitution of the proletariat into a class – and consequently into a big global communist party – and also encourage and initiate the formation of class unions, which it will endeavour to unify and centralize on the national and the international scale.

Of course it will not be a linear process; there will be progress and setbacks and it will require the expenditure of a notable amount of energy on the part of this vanguard organized into party to win the great masses over to the communist cause; all the more so when bourgeois democracy, as is highly likely,will force a part of the party’s activity and propaganda to be conducted on a clandestine basis.

From capitalism’s crisis will then arise the emancipatory movement of communism, breathing new life into the whole of society and sweeping away the dark miasmas of the bourgeois corpse.

Currency Questions

The accumulation of capital sends the productive forces into a paroxyism, leading to the production of a huge mountain of commodities. This productive fervour comes into conflict with the relations of capitalist production. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall sets a limit on accumulation: the greater the productivity of labour, the more that the return on capital, the rate of profit, goes down.

Capital counters the fall in the rate of profit by raising the rate of productivity, which can only be accomplished within very large installations. The rate of profit goes down while the quantity produced goes up. This means that an ever-increasing quantity of commodities gets dumped on the market. The markets get bigger but they can’t keep up with production and there is no equilibrium between production and consumption.

The incessant accumulation of capital comes up against the bottleneck of the market. In order to force this limit and start up the productive cycle again even before his commodities have been consumed, the industrial capitalist sells them to the wholesaler, who pays for them on credit. We thus have here a deferred payment, and the risk of a crisis in the case of reduced consumption. This gigantic mass of credit, without which it is impossible to produce, constitutes the main part of the circulation of money and is the basis of the entire credit system.

When commodities are piling up because the markets are saturated and insolvencies follow one after the other, there is a commercial and financial crisis; a crash, and the whole house of cards runs the risk of collapsing. At this point money becomes scarce, that is, no-one wants to lend it. It is what happened in the financial crisis of 2008-9; the banks no longer trusted one another and no longer wanted to lend to one another: the savings banks no longer lent to the investment banks, who stopped lending to capitalists and private individuals. There was an impasse.

The central banks intervened to prevent a general collapse. Early on they lowered the rate of interest to zero, later they intervened on the financial markets with a view to taking the place of the banks and authorizing a new circulation of money capital.

Through their intervention the central banks have prevented the dissolution of financial capital and a massive devalorization of capital. But they have transferred the risk to their balance sheets, thus priming a time bomb.

At the meeting the monetary dynamics was discussed (inflation, stagflation and deflation) and we looked again at an interesting chart previously shown at the January meeting which correlated, from the year 1872 onwards, phases of inflation and deflation with political and military events.

The doctrine which we subscribe has indicated to us, and the correlation of monetary phases with political events confirms it, that in general it is the deflationary phase which expresses the state of the general crisis of capital, and the fact that its developmental phase is over.

We described a series of inflationary phases in the world economy, specifically the crises which followed the First World War, using as evidence the hyperinflation during the Weimar Republic and the intervention by international finance, mainly American (Dawes Plan), which allowed it to be overcome with a set of huge loans. Germany, its cycle of production (the real engine of economic recovery) recovered, due to the destruction of constant capital during the war, and the progressive clearing of the public debt; and supported by an expansive economic policy conducted by the State, returned a couple of decades later to re-propose itself as an aggressive and powerful imperialism on the world stage.

In the subsequent report the dynamics and the causes of inflation were taken up again, considered as State interventions in the political economy with the aim of keeping the public debt under control (we have dealt with the case of war costs), which the mechanism of the Gold Standard tried to remedy, before it was definitively abandoned in 1931 after the terrible deflationist crisis of 1929.

In general the inflationary process is an effect of the circulation of fictitious capital, as described in chapters 25,28 and 29 in Capital, Volume Three.

In the Second World War, capitalism learnt its lesson. in 1944, in anticipation of a new phase of post-war reconstruction, the Bretton Woods Agreement had already created a mechanism which provided for commercial deficits to be compensated with flows of capital from countries in a surplus. The dollar was rigidly anchored to the value of gold.

A different situation arose after the semi-crises of 1966 and 1969-70. In comparison with past crises, “stagflation” (a term that appeared after the 1973-4 oil crisis) was a new phenomenon. As capital accumulates, fictitious capital provokes a constant fluctuation in prices. Stagflation, on the other hand, announced itself with falling prices and reduced production: both appearing together didn’t seem to make sense.

Up until 1971, when the USA made the unilateral decision to abandon the parity between gold and the dollar, its expansionist fiscal policy had aggravated the dollar crisis by devaluing the currency, which in its turn provoked a significant increase in oil prices causing both a fall in production and an increase in prices.

From 1976 until the start of the new millennium the favourite remedy of the monetary authorities, Central banks in primis, was to contain the rate of inflation to a “healthy and acceptable” level, by avoiding sudden swings from high to low.

The report made to the subsequent General Meeting examined the financial evolution of China, which towards the end of the year prompted fear of an imminent financial and trade war with Europe and the USA. It was shown that the upheavals in the financial sector were serious but not decisive, and actually more or less on a par with the other global economies.

After the repeated falls in the Shanghai stock exchange in August 2015 the report, wanting to avoid the kind of overblown, knee-jerk analysis that appeared in the press, gave an overview of financial events in China stretching back over thirty years, from the creation in the early 1990s of the commercial banks, which after the outbreak of the Asiatic crisis in 1997 were already presenting a high percentage of worthless debt, and which were recapitalized by the government; on to the enormous influx of capital which took place at the beginning of the 21st Century, and finally to the unscrupulous “shadow banking system”, which extended the circulation of credit to the umpteenth degree by avoiding State restrictions, and which even the local governments draw on. The speaker drew attention to the mechanisms by which the Chinese shadow banking system resorts to the financial lever, which is on a par with crooked structures in the West, also thanks to the “off shore” financial market places, and in particular Hong Kong.

The global “hunger for profit” led in 2014 to an even bigger injection of capital, with the exposure of the Chinese banking sector abroad amounting to 1.1 trillion dollars.

Since the 2008 crisis Chinese capitalism has lost impetus, the crucial factor it has in common with every other financial system. The formation of speculative bubbles was the first reaction to the global crisis. In the absence of a genuine global upturn in terms of investments and profits, the over capacity and over production of Chinese capitalism is clear.

In 2015 the level of public investment was more than 40% of the GDP. This stimulus to the economy partly compensated for the changed international climate in the credit sector, though at the price of deterioration in the finance sector.

The apparent paradox of globalized finance has led to an imbalance in which on the one hand the American banks have subsidized the Chinese economy and the Asiatic countries in general, and on the other China has subsidized the American State by hovering up its bonds.

Throughout the 1990s China had maintained the rate of exchange between the yuan and the dollar, despite its exports to the USA implying a strengthening of its value. To prevent this, the Central Bank of China was selling yuan and buying dollars – prompting accusations from the American side of manipulation of the exchange rate – and building up a substantial foreign currency backup fund in case of need.

With the aid of some historical graphs, showing the yuan’s official exchange rate against the dollar, we saw that the devaluation, even if very sudden, barely interrupted a revaluation trend already decisively embarked upon back in 2010, and then maintained with slight oscillations only to finally fall back, with the August revaluations, to the level of three years ago.

At last January’s meeting the report set out instead to clarify certain aspects of the creation, localization, distribution and use of liquidity. It was made clear that with this term is meant not only cash in circulation, but the monetary total available for immediate use in all of its various forms.

The speaker presented a diagram of the course of interest rates over the last decade. In January 2016, after years of being set at zero per cent, the American Central Federal Bank decided to raise it from 0-0.25% to 0.25-50%.

The FED doesn’t “control the market” but is affected by its movement, in other words monetary policy is determined by the economy. This is an established fact, confirmed in years of crisis under its financial aspect, and no monetary device of the central banks has ever managed to change it. The economy cannot be “put back on the rails” by finance means. What has gone up has increased has been the price of shares and bonds, “virtual inflation” that is.

The amount of money present in the system is outside the control of the Central Bank, and it is actually generated in the banking system through the granting of credit: it is loans that that generate deposits not the opposite.

As far as we are concerned the theory and the practice of monetary management and circulation of liquidity plainly shows us that attempts to anticipate and resolve the crises of capitalism, purely on the basis of how they manifest in the field of finance, are doomed to failure.

History of India

Introducing a new chapter in our study of the history of India, our comrade described how the consequences of the Plague and of the economic crisis, which had affected key areas of the world, began to be overcome at the beginning of the 14th Century, in particular in Western Europe and in China.

Thanks to financial support from Genoan and German bankers, the tiny kingdom of Portugal started a systematic exploration of the African coast with a view to finding a direct route to the Moluccan Isles, the primary source of spices. In 1488 an expedition led by Bartholemew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The Spanish court financed a Genoan, Christopher Columbus, who claimed he could discover a shorter route to Asia by sailing west.

This was a period characterized by the spread of new inventions, in the military field firearms: States would expand their administrative apparatus and make taxation more efficient to meet the growing costs of their armies. The result was a progressive centralization of power which in Western Europe caused the emergence of the absolute monarchies; and similar processes were taking place in Tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Persian empire, in Japan of the Tukagawa, In Tang dynasty China and finally in the India of the Mogul Empire. 

Around the second half of the 16th Century the entire northern part of the sub-Indian continent was finally united under the Mogul Empire. Within the peculiar context of the Asiatic System the process of centralization was truly remarkable. Victorious generals were obliged to hand over all of their conquered booty to the State. The centralization process included the progressive re-appropriation by the imperial tax authorities of the lands and benefices enjoyed to various degrees by the aristocracy, especially of the religious kind. These lands would be placed under the direct administration of the emperor.

Over the course of the 17th Century, cotton and silk manufactured goods, of which India was the biggest producer in the world, gradually replaced spices as the main commodities acquired by the European companies; in particular by the Dutch and English ones who had broken the monopoly previously held by the Portuguese.

The Mogul State embarked on a new expansionist policy marked by the transfer of its capital to Delhi. The empire became Muslim. But in the decades between 1720 and 1760 a large part of the sub-continent passed under the control of one or another leaders in the Maratha war. The Mogul Empire was transformed into a monarchy over an ensemble of largely autonomous provinces.

In 1717 the English Company had managed to obtain substantial commercial privileges in exchange for an annual payment. As well as a series of commercial establishments, known as factories, in various parts of India, the East India Company gained possession of fortified bases on the island of Bombay, at Fort St George (Madras) and in the settlement in Calcutta. Between 1720 and 1740, the Compagnie francaise des Indes Orientales became an increasingly dangerous competitor. It too had a number of thriving factories and fortified bases at its disposal including Chandernagore in Bengal and Pondicherry on the Coromandel coast.

The outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) in Europe, and the appearance in the Indian Ocean of the war ships of her Britannic Majesty and the French navy, ended up with the French and English companies embroiled in a conflict.

At the subsequent meeting our comrade opened the new report with a description, illustrated with maps, of the delicate political situation that had been created in India by the mid 18th Century.

The conflict between the English and French in India continued until the end of the European Seven Years War (1756-1763). The decisive battle was fought in the Coromandel where the English routed the French troops. From that moment on any influence or direct possession of the French conquered in the Deccan passed to the English, who in 1757 conquered all of Bengal and two years later the important city of Surat.

Some years later in the Deccan the English made a treacherous attack on a combined army of Maratha princes. The power of the Marathas had been broken for ever and the new hegemonic power south of the Himalayas was now the English. For India this effectively marked the beginning of the colonial era.

Though maintaining its role as a large joint-stock company committed to trade, by around 1765 the English East India Company had been transformed into a major territorial power. Indeed its possessions in India were much larger and more populous than the United Kingdom itself.

But the military expenditure and restricted earnings caused a financial crisis and forced the Company to ask for economic assistance from the Crown; which was granted, but at the cost of a Board of Control being imposed from England, through which Her Majesty’s Government took over the management of Indian policy from the Company.

During this period there arose the question whether the right to property in land, formerly the King’s, should pass to the Company or to the Zamindari, who were the Indian equivalents of the European landed proprietors. It was the latter solution which prevailed. The landowner, whose land was cultivated by peasant farmers, had to pay a fixed amount of land tax. Barring a few exceptions, the Bengalese Zamindari did not transform themselves into rural entrepreneurs, given that it wasn’t usually them who cultivated the land but rather those groups of peasant families who were already running the individual villages, a feature very characteristic of the Asiatic model of production. The class of Zamindari would become a pillar of the nascent colonial order.

Between the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th Centuries, Europe and North America was hugely transformed as a result of a series of revolutionary changes both economic and political. The global economy was radically changed by the industrial revolution, already underway in England from the second half of the 18th Century but destined from the beginning of the 19th Century to influence the rest of the world.

European powers held sway over considerable areas of Asia both directly and indirectly, with their domination spreading over the course of the 19th Century to Mediterranean and then Sub-Saharan Africa. The balance of forces between States was also changed by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire – which from the 15th Century had been considered Europe’s most dangerous enemy – as it succumbed under the pressure of the Austrian and in particular the Russian Empires, despite these being only minimally influenced by the industrial revolution.

If the political and military superiority of Europe devastated large parts of Asia and Africa, the requirements of the new social system based on capital induced the European powers to export their ideological and organizational superstructures, and the technology that underpinned the new mode of production, into at least some of their colonies.

Marx, with his observations on India in the New York Daily Tribune (August 8, 1853), highlighted England’s progressive mission very clearly: “England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia”. But he had also warned the Indians that they “will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether”. 

The phase of social and economic transformation in India was dramatic and the colonial regime was responsible for a severe economic recession in the first half of the eighteen hundreds, marking a turnaround with respect to what had occurred in previous centuries.

During the same period the Crown decided to abolish the East India Company’s trading monopoly, adopting a policy of military expansion that continued until the Indian Mutiny in 1857. The aim of the English, equipped with a formidable military apparatus which was extremely costly but practically invincible, was to increase taxation on the land. But amidst the numerous wars of conquest, the first half of the century also saw an almost uninterrupted succession of rebellions.

As had happened during the Mogul Empire, the expansionist policies ended up by aggravating the financial problems they were designed to resolve. When the Company was abolished in1858 the Crown took over its substantial deficit, most of which was linked to the policy of conquest. The payment of this debt would be passed on to Indian tax-payers.

The entire Indian village system as shaken, and soon its traditional handicrafts would be hit by British exports. Marx, New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853: “It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning-wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then introduced twist into Hindustan, and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with cottons (…) This decline of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics was by no means the worst consequence. British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindustan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry”.

In addition, the very land property relations had been profoundly transformed by the zamindari system.

In the north of the sub-continent, from the Punjab to Bengal, a major revolt broke out among the Sepoys. This mutiny of the Indian troops soon drew in sizeable layers of the urban and rural population. Despite some initial success the failure of this Great Revolt was predictable from the start. Those who had anything to gain from the Company’s economic policy, namely merchants and financiers, and in particular many of the Zamindari, who had been transformed from Mogul officials charged with the collection of taxes into hereditary landed proprietors, sided with the English.

Another reason the revolt failed was the insurgents’ lack of a unified command structure. Between the 14th and 21st of September 1857 a British counter-offensive retook Delhi, and by the end of the year the other principle centres of insurrection, in particular the cities of Kampur and Lucknow, were also recaptured.

As well as paying a lot of attention to the great military mutiny Marx also discerned a principle of a national character in the fact that “Muslims and Hindus, renouncing their mutual antipathies, have combined against their common masters” [The Revolt in the Indian Army, New-York Daily Tribune, July 15, 1857].

The Company’s shares and debts were redeemed by the Crown and transformed into the initial basis of a debt, ‘owed’ by India to England, that would remain a constant factor in the economic relations between the two countries up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

“The British were the first conquerors superior, and therefore, inaccessible to Hindu civilization. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry (…) The historic pages of their rule in India report hardly anything beyond that destruction. The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins. Nevertheless it has begun”. (Marx, The Future Results of the British Rule in India, London, 22 July 1853).

The English had to be better organized if they were to prevent a repetition of the 1857 revolt, or the ‘Indian Mutiny’ as it has become known in the official histories. The main issues which would be identified were weaknesses in the repressive apparatus and a lack of diligence with regard to its commitments towards its indigenous collaborators. 

The Indian army was reorganized: composed of one British soldier to every eight sepoys the proportion would now become one to two. Changing the stance taken over the previous fifty years the British officers no longer resisted the observance of religious and caste rules by the Indian soldiers. English policy in India would be firmly orientated towards protecting and maintaining the privileges of all classes and groups which had traditionally held a predominant position in Indian society.

The second development was introducing, in particular in the Maharashtra and the Punjab, laws which forbade the urban merchant classes from lending money to the peasants and from acquiring their land. This arrangement strengthened the Zamindari and the class of well-to-do farmers who became the sole source of credit for the subordinate classes of the rural world, who still remained the essential foundation of Indian society.

The policy of the colonial government was directed toward maintaining an army and administration paid for by the Indian taxpayer, the so-called ‘Home charges’, and to implementing a policy which gave free rein to the sale of British industrial goods in India and turned the latter into an exporter of raw materials and agricultural products.

By the end of the seventies, despite the events of 1857 having persuaded the English that putting up taxes was dangerous, the Indian government had already been compelled to impose a revenue tax and to increase the land tax.

But two factors intervened. The first of these was a global decline in the value of silver compared to gold: since the Indian rupee was based on silver and British sterling on gold, this reduction entailed a sudden increase in the cost of the ‘home charges’, which were paid in sterling, due to the exchange rate against the rupee. The second factor was the cost involved in defending the imperial system in Asia and Africa. Indeed, over this same period Russia’s vigorous expansion into Asia continued to affect not only India but China as well, where, following the Opium Wars, England had considerable economic interests to defend. 

The colonial government commenced a survey into the social composition of its Indian subjects, officially dividing them up on the basis of categories such as religion and caste. This process culminated in 1871 with the introduction of a ten yearly census which classified Indians according to various criteria. From the 1901 census onwards the castes were arranged by law according to a criterion of precedence linked to the customary ranking. British imperialism justified this process as one designed to protect the weakest groups, but its aim was clearly to reinforce the caste divisions and infinite particularisms. 

During this period modern industry also started to develop. Localized to begin with in Calcutta, Bombay and Ahmedabad, it would then spread during the 20th Century into other northern regions. This entailed the appearance of the Indian working class and, in Bombay and Ahmedabad, a class of entrepreneurs. A modern industry that make only a partial impact on an economy and society which was still predominantly agrarian. The ruling classes would continue to be the large landed proprietors, the farmers castes, which were hegemonic at the local level, and in part the new class of traders in agricultural produce.

The English had pushed forward the expansion of the railway system, which was constructed mainly with military purposes in mind. On the one hand it supported English industry, which produced the rolling stock, on the other it facilitated the exportation of the goods with which the English manufacturers were paid. And the railway enabled the produce of the soil to be sold on the international market, and at considerably higher prices.

This traffic brought notable benefits to both the English and Indian ruling classes, but not to the impoverished peasantry, millions of whom would die in a series of famines.

Meanwhile public opinion was becoming politicized and swayed by ideals of a nationalist type. Two associations were especially active, namely the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, founded in 1870 at Poona, and the Indian Association, formed in Calcutta in 1876.

In 1883, due to the efforts of Surendranath Banejea, a National Conference was convoked in Calcutta. In the words of its organizers, it “could be considered the first step towards a national parliament” and it was meant to periodically reconvene: a second session was held at the end of 1885. But during the same period the Scotsman Allen Octavian Hume convoked an Indian National Congress. At the first session around eighty delegates, representing various different organizations, took part. The main party of the Indian bourgeoisie was born.

Proletarian Rebellion in Italy Following the First World War

The aim of this series of reports is to take a further look at the class struggles which took place in Italy after the First World War, which we may justifiably describe as an out and out civil war, and the Communist Party’s participation within it. 

After the First World War was over, the proletariat, having only recently escaped the ordeal of the trenches, was immediately subjected to economic attacks. The trade-union struggle, of which the Italian proletariat can boast a proud tradition, immediately flared up again. The movement was spontaneous and broke out simultaneously from one end of the country to the other, in both towns and rural areas, and the bourgeoisie shuddered at the proletariat’s advance. And their terror was fully justified, given the red tide sweeping through Europe.

It would be impossible to give a full account of all of the trade union struggles, or even decide which were most significant in terms of duration, number of participants or successful outcomes; or which were the most violently repressed by the liberal-democratic State. The atmosphere and setting was one of imminent Civil War. The proletariat was instinctively and potentially on the attack and even the Italian petty bourgeoisie was to a certain extent resigned to having to accept the revolution’s victory.

But not so the big bourgeoisie and its State. And all the more so considering that the Socialist Party, supposedly its main enemy, was doing nothing to prepare and organize the proletarian masses to take power.

The occupation of the factories, accompanied in many parts of Italy by invasions of the large landed estates by the poor peasantry, was one of those situations in which the capacity of the political parties, and the degree of revolutionary preparation of the different classes, was put to the test; and the proletariat would prove sadly lacking.

The Socialist Party, faced with the need to act, faced with a real battle on the streets, no longer one of words, of demagogic statements in meetings and newspapers, beat a hasty retreat. And while the proletariat, held up in the factories, were waiting for the order to take action, the trade union leaders were negotiating their surrender. 

The proletarian lack of action at this crucial juncture signalled the start of the bourgeois counter-attack.

While the Socialist Party was busy paralysing the working class struggles, the bourgeoisie was getting reorganized. The General Confederation of Industry and the General Confederation of Agriculture was formed. Industrialists and landowners knew they had to form a defensive united front and urgently needed both legal and extralegal armed organizations at their disposal if they were to take on the proletariat in a violent, head-on collision. Subsequently the Mussolinian organization would affasciare, ‘bundle together’, all these bourgeois extra-legal bodies.

The Police and the Carabinieri simply didn’t have enough personnel to maintain the social order, and the army, if put to the test, would probably have sided with the proletariat. The Nitti government therefore effected a rapid transformation of the public security apparatus by creating a shadow hand-picked miniature army, an army within the army, composed of troops of proven loyalty. In October 1919 the Royal Guard was formed, a body of 45,000 men. Also the Carabinieri contingent was increased to 65,000, customs officers to 35,000 and the spy service was provided with an additional12,000 agents. In addition 18 Mobile Carabinieri Divisions and 20 Mobile Royal Guard Battalions were formed.

The proletariat was organized by the Socialist Party, which was the biggest of the Italian parties in terms of members, organization and branches. As well as its huge representation in Parliament, with 156 deputies voted in with 2 million votes, it had 3,000 sections, ran 2,500 municipalities and organized millions of workers, labourers and peasants via the trade unions. But it was a party which wasn’t prepared to equip itself with a clandestine military structure.

As regards our left fraction within the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), a long quotation from the pages of Il Soviet (27/4/1919) was read out in which it was clarified, on the contrary, that on the proletarian and socialist side preparatory and organizational work had to be carried out with great discipline and above all without reacting to provocations and being lured into premature revolts. Armies cannot be improvised and revolutions do not happen at prearranged times. The party’s task was to prepare and organize its forces for the revolutionary attack and to pick the right moment to launch it, not to prematurely launch the proletariat into a fight it was bound to lose.

Commitment to this line on the part of the PSI’s youth organization was substantial and in earnest, and, as far it could, it attempted to set up an efficient illegal party apparatus on a national scale. Above all, it committed itself to undertaking the revolutionary work of dismantling the army from within.

The Communist Fraction was however very clear that the main revolutionary action that needed to be accomplished was freeing the party and the proletarian organizations from counter-revolutionary elements. But if we are to talk of a serious and disciplined revolutionary organization, we would have to wait until the split at Livorno and the birth of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I).

The PSI could never have formed a serious revolutionary military organization because it was infected by the worst of the illnesses that can infect the proletarian movement: electoralism. This is because electoralism requires you to think of the State not as bourgeois, but as somehow above classes; as a body to be called on to maintain legality and constitutional order. The two programmes, the social-democratic and fascist ones, might differ as to their means, but not their end: the preservation of bourgeois institutions. 

If before January 1921 the social-democrats had been revolutionary in words, after Livorno they no longer had any reason to mask their function of disarming and fragmenting the proletariat. Indeed by the 3rd August they had already signed the infamous “ceasefire agreement” (Patto di tregua) with the fascists. However the reason for the contacts between the socialists and the fascists was not just to restore “normal democratic life”, i.e., to preserve the capitalist regime, they were even considering sharing government. Through what was called “pacificazione degli animi” (pacification of minds), socialists, trade union leaders and fascists announced they would abandon any reciprocal animosity in order to unite against the country’s real enemies, i.e. finish off the communists.

The report then proceeded to examine the military structure of the Communist Party of Italy, which was already effectively up and running in the months before the party’s formal constitution.

The speaker started off with a summary of Marxism’s position on the use of violence in the class struggle. It is an issue that dialectical materialism approaches not in an abstract, moral way, but from a historical perspective. Social violence is not something to be judged but to be understood. It arises from the nature of capitalist social relations. Communism encourages it in the interests of the working class, and condemns its use by the bourgeois enemy. What is more, Communism sees proletarian violence as an unavoidable historical necessity, both against the defensive violence of the bosses and their State, and for the overthrowing of the power of the bourgeois class. This is a basic cornerstone of the party’s programme.

From which it follows we don’t get involved in the stupid game of identifying “who was the first” to break the law and to taint “normal, civilized political competitiveness” with violent methods. In the period under discussion, this system of buck-passing, which both socialist and fascists were party to, represented a real betrayal since it supposed that bourgeois reaction could somehow be avoided and that the proletariat just needed to defend itself from the anti-revolutionary reaction.

The communists supported instead the policy of the revolutionary attack, the putting into effect of which would be sabotaged by the pacifism of the other parties. Indeed it was precisely because of the intransigent position which was adopted by the party and its various organizations that they would become the preferred target of both the legal repression by the State, and of the extra-legal repression by the fascists. There were really only two options: an openly counter-revolutionary dictatorship, or the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

The clash between the proletariat and the white guard was unavoidable, not because the latter was engaging in subversive actions against the legally constituted order but because they represented that order’s last line of defence against the revolutionary advance. Rather than plaintive protests against so-called subverters of the civil, legal and democratic order, it is the proletariat, understood as a revolutionary class, which is the “aggressor”, “provocateur” and “perpetrator of violence”, pursuing its historical objective to subvert the present order, even if the bourgeoisie does choose to stick to its own democratic and constitutional laws.

The magnificent battles that broke out in many proletarian centres demonstrated both the willingness of the working class to fight, and its tendency to instantly accept the Communist Party as its natural leader and point of reference.

The speaker dwelt a while on the organization of the Party’s armed squads, a subject which will be amply covered when the final version of the report will be published. The centre of PCd’I would expressly instruct the military organization to avoid any publicity or ostentatious display in order to make it more difficult for the enemy to gauge its strength. This quiet discretion would convince our enemy that the PCd’I’s clandestine apparatus was almost non-existent, a view which the Stalinists, though knowing it to be untrue, would repeat.

“The issue of revolutionary preparation [was posed] on this basis: to gather together, assign, organize – militarily as well – the forces which aim to change the foundations of the State, but only those that conceive of the change as an antithesis between two possible historical outcomes: either the preservation of the bourgeois State, which is democratic and reactionary at the same time, or the building of the proletarian State founded on the class dictatorship” (Il Comunista, August 7, 1921). This tactic of intransigence and “isolation”, shunning any central or local alliances with other political entities, meant the communist party attracted the most combative part of the proletariat; the part which, even in retreat, would stand up to the enemy under the classist banners of the revolution.

From the winter of 1921/22 onwards the communist military organization took on an increasingly definite shape and efficient and well-armed divisions would be formed in Trieste, Turin, Milan, Novara, Genoa, Florence, Rome and Bari. Alongside activities specifically related to armed struggle, certain selected elements were tasked with duties involving research, intelligence gathering, penetration of the army, of the army stores, of the military offices of the State, on their resources, etc.

Continuing on with the report the speaker took up the issue of the Arditi del Popolo (People’s Fearless Troops). The Arditi were a special corps which had been set up in 1917. Since its entry into the war the Italian State had set itself the task of forming special divisions of soldiers who were dedicated and “fearless”. The Supreme Command laid down that membership of the Arditi battalions would be strictly voluntary. Their composition was miscellaneous in the extreme: within their ranks could be found the entire range of fanatical interventionists, from the most narrow-minded of reactionaries through to so-called revolutionaries who believed they were taking part in a “revolutionary war”. Many ex-offenders and common criminals would also join up.

However, with the war over, the “heroic” life of the Arditi would also come to an end. Peace represented a future full of uncertainty. This fomented a series of grudges against pretty much everybody. The main targets of their frustration were Bolshevism, which rejected the notion of countries, and the socialists, who were opposed to the “revolutionary war”, along with the clergy for the same reason; then they also hated draft-dodgers, ‘neutralists’, the democratic parties, war profiteers, the exploitative capitalist sharks, etc, etc.

On January 1st, 1919, the Associazione Arditi d’Italia was formed in Rome, and on the 19th the Milan section was born.

Immediately the State decided that an organization of this type might continue to serve it by protecting the social order from the menace of Bolshevism. General Caviglia, minister of war at the time, would write: “in the murky political period Italy was going through they constituted a useful weapon in the hands of the government because they were feared for their propensity to take prompt and violent action”.

This human mass, drawn from every class and underclass, oscillating between different watchwords, including “extremist” and pseudo-revolutionary ones, expressed a generalized, rancorous discontent but was unable to equip itself with a programme.

On November 10, 1918, during the victory celebrations, the first official meeting between the Arditi and Mussolini in Milan took place and both sides expressed common intentions. When on the March 23, 1919 Mussolini formed the Fasci di Combattimento, the rally in Piazza San Sepulcro was chaired by the captain of the Arditi, Ferruccio Vecchi. The first fascist squads in a number of Italian cities were all founded by Arditi.

On April 15, 1919, in Milan, the Arditi attacked and smashed up the Avanti! office. What is more, the military cordon which the State had put in place to defend it had given the aggressors free access, something which would often be repeated from that point on.

From the pages of Popolo d’Italia Mussolini praised the Arditi’s action and General Caviglia, the person in charge of the investigation into the Milan events, congratulated the organizers.

After April 15 violent acts by the Arditi increased significantly and spread throughout Italy. The industrialists had realized they could use them as a white guard against the proletariat and the Arditi knew, by doing jobs for the industrialists, there was a rich harvest to be reaped. As the prefect of Milan would say: it was “one long tapping of the bourgeoisie for money, who, hoping for sure-fire guarantees, continued to administer funds to the said organization”.

Thanks to this generous assistance the Associazione degli Arditi experienced extraordinary growth, counting 10,000 members a mere three months after it was formed.

At the same time it became increasingly obvious there was a split between the right and left of this disorderly and chaotic movement, which, although to all intents and purposes reactionary, nevertheless used revolutionary slogans. Mario Carli, the founder of the Association, published an article in which he explicitly called for collaboration with the Socialist Party in order to struggle “against the present miserly, incompetent and dishonest ruling classes, be they called bourgeoisie, plutocracy, war profiteers or parliamentarism”. There then followed other articles pressing for mutual understanding, and for “socialism” and Arditism to engage in a common struggle which wasn’t “anti-national”.

In the name of the “mutilated peace”, the campaign for the Croatian port of Fiume to become part of Italy was also in full swing. An attempt was made to imbue the Fiume adventure with a left-wing, or even a “sovietist” connotation. Both during and after the occupation the anarcho-syndicalist Alceste De Ambris was D’Annunzio’s right arm man and D’Annunzio himself had no qualms about declaring himself an anarchist. Another important factor that contributed to the creation of this legend was the strict solidarity and collaboration established between the “soldier poet” and the head of the Maritime Workers’ Union, Giulietti. The D’Annunzian project of making Fiume the starting point for the conquest of Rome was not only shared by Giulietti but also by important anarchist sectors, including Malatesta himself.

If fascism, having abandoned its pseudo-revolutionary phraseology, had openly placed itself at the service of reaction, the Arditi movement still seemed to want to adopt a “left” position, going so far as to make itself the champion of “legitimate” workers’ demands. However D’Annunzio would be nominated honorary head of the movement and Mussolini’s financial help was accepted, which resolved the disagreements between fascism and arditism. By the end of May 1920, at the 2nd fascist National Congress, the Arditi had aligned with the fascists. As for D’Annunzio, in January 1921 he founded the National Federation of Fiuman Legionaries, forbade its members from joining the fascist party, and presented himself as defender of the workers’ “legitimate” demands.

Our party wasn’t fooled by these fluctuating demands which were of more than doubtful sincerity. On February 20, 1921, in the party organ Il Comunista, it clarified: “We can see that the polemics between the legionaries and the fascists are solely concerned with tactics. Both of them share the same goal […] The communist proletariat will therefore find itself up against an enemy with two faces […] Together Fascism and Fiuminism constitute the cellular organization of the counter-revolution, despite the superficial and only apparent dissension between the two tendencies”.

On the March 13 and 14, 1921, the Arditi held their first national congress in Milan. An agenda was approved in which it was affirmed that Arditi actions would conform to “fascist postulates which in the new post-war line up of political parties are the ones most directly focused on reviving the Nation and consolidating it against the attacks of an internationalism of a clearly foreign stamp”.

Arditism oscillated between its fanciful left-wing “revolutionary” ambitions and its anti-proletarian reaction in practice.

In the next report we will discuss the Arditi in more detail, but suffice to say here that they merely represented a split, within a split, within the Associazione Arditi and that their confused ideology had nothing that was distinctive or new. Within the brief time it existed there is no doubt, even if many of its militants were unaware of it, that it was an instrument of bourgeois power.

The Recent Flow of Migrants Towards Europe

The migrant events have as a rule been considered progressive by marxism, since Engels 1845 “The situation of the working class in England”. Engels describes the phenomenon of the competition between native and migrant workers, with special reference to the Irish workers in England. In the mature stage of capitalism, imperialism, we can observe an accomplished division of labour on an international scale, with large migration events among continents. 

The role immigration plays on proletarian struggle and on its internationalism is stressed also by Lenin who, in “Capitalism and workers’ immigration”, of 1913, demonstrates how a necessity of capitalism, immigration, produces the conditions for workers’ struggles: it is capitalism itself, especially in its imperialist stage, to uproot the workers from their own country to use them in competition with native workers; an operation that in the end is counterproductive, since workers eventually fraternize and ally against the common foe. Capital itself, since its origins, has materially determined the international character of its mode of production, of the proletarian class and its movement, its party and historical programme.

We have therefore reported on the results of a study we conducted on the increasing fluxes of labour from African and Asian countries to Europe. Unlike the slave trade, today chains are not necessary: for “free” men economical need is more than sufficient, and the risks associated to trade and the terrible journey are all on the worker.

At the start the comrade gave a quantitative account of the phenomenon, then he described the forces and instruments employed by the States to detect and control the new arrivals. When the new migrants become too many, as has always happened in history, when they exceed too much Capital needs, then a system is devised to contain them or send them back. A third part then showed how bourgeoisie is able to make profits with misfortunes and emergencies, through creation and management of “refuge” structures for migrants and political asylum seekers.

Thus for capital handling emergencies is always business; it makes profits on their journey, and makes far greater profits when they will enter the labour market, in programmed competition with native workers: a mass of poors expanding the proletarian reserve army.

At the same time, the bourgeoisie’s professional commentariat plays on the emotions and fears raised towards the alien, thrive generic “humanitarians”, on the one hand, and national-populists who advocate the defence of the fatherland from the invasion threatening work, security, home, health, etc., on the other. Both feelings excluding class solidarity, thus ensuring a split between migrants and natives, and preventing an alliance of the exploited against the bourgeoisie and its State.

The second part of the work confirmed that the “regular” migration is planned in such a way that the ruling classes of both countries (departure and arrival) may benefit: cheap labour on one side, money transfer on the other. Regular migration is a traditional instrument to maintain an equilibrium in the labour market, to the advantage of bourgeoisie. The number of “regular” aliens who can be admitted is fixed according to the needs of the national capital, and rigidly established in State decrees. In Italy the migrants were 5.014.437 in 2015, up from 1.341.209 in 2002. This means that the taxes paid by these workers are enormous if compared to their costs in welfare.

Migrants are ready to accept any job, for less: the average salary of a migrant worker is 26% less than for an Italian; seasonal and short term jobs are more common for migrants.

International counterrevolution has silenced the proletariat for a long time; imperialism, already in its senile and rotten stage, seeks its survival among new wars and sleight of hand of fake capital. 

The force of the working class lies in its number. But numbers count if they are bound together by organisation, and enlightened by a coherent and historically adequate programme of social revolution.

The Military Question

a) The Libya war of 1911

The opening of the Suez Canal had brought back to the Mediterranean the eastward routes, controlled by the powerful British Navy with a series of military and commercial bases from Gibraltar to Aden.

Italian diplomacy manoeuvred to get the support of the other European powers to its occupation of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, both under ottoman occupation, taking advantage of the situation in Turkey after the Young Turks revolution of 1908. The support was granted in view of hindering the French and German expansion. 

The speaker made a chronology of the Italian armed intervention in Libya. Not only the manoeuvres of Italian capitalism were described, but also the action of the proletariat which, with strikes and occupations, opposed the war. The strikes found opposition within the socialist party and the unions leadership.

Without consulting the Parliament, on September 23, 1911, the war was declared. 

The Italian General Staff based its plans on two wrong assumptions: that the population would welcome the Italians to get rid of the turks, and that, after a rapid war, the Istanbul government would immediately offer a surrender. Instead tens of thousands of local irregular troops joined the ottoman army.

Although the Italian occupation was confined to a few isolated coastal sites, the Italian government declared the annexation of Libya. The campaign for the control of oases against a strong guerrilla warfare required two decades of fighting, and the result was never stable.

A turning point occurred when the countries of the Balkan League (Greece, Montenegro, Serbia and Bulgaria), seen the weakness of the ottoman army, declared war on Turkey on October 18, 1912, to seize its European territories. However the peace agreement was ambiguous: Turkey only granted autonomy to Libyans. 

The conclusions indicated the war as one of pure imperialist robbery, waged by a modern army, well equipped and supported by a good fleet, against a scarcely motivated Turkish army and far inferior fleet. Very important was the use of field radiotelegraph, the first motorized transports, the zeppelins and the first use od aircrafts for detection of enemy positions.

b) The Balkan Wars

The defeat of the Turkish army in Libya provided a chance for the Balkan countries to achieve their historical territorial aims, by attacking the weakened Ottoman Empire. This within the frame of a neverending Eastern Question, characterised by the Russian ambition to reach the Mediterranean and by the erosion of the still ottoman European territories.

Two blocs of alliances had been created among the great powers: the Triple Entente of France, United Kingdom and Russia, and the Triple Alliance of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy,

The two Moroccan crises of 1904 and 1911 between France and Germany showed that a direct clash between the two States was to be expected soon, which would involve the two blocs, also in view of the intense and rapid armament started by Germany,

Russia, after the defeat in the war with Japan of 1904/05, had the army still under modernisation.

The Balkan States made a number of bilateral military treaties, called Balkan League, but not an unique treaty. Serbia wanted an outlet on the Egean or Adriatic Sea, and to unite in a Great Serbia the Serbian populations dispersed in the various Balkan countries, in this opposed by Austria-Hungary. Bulgaria wanted to get rid of the Ottoman Empire, create a Great Bulgaria with an outlet also in the Egean, extend to Ottoman Thrace and in Macedonia, with the port of Thessaloniki; it relied on an alliance with the Russian tsar.

Greece aimed at annexing Crete, Southern Albania and Dodecanese.

The contended areas were many, characterized by ethnic mixes, a guarantee for future strife. On the issue were read quotes from Lenin.

The war broke out on October 8, 1912.

After 40 days of fierce fighting during which all Turkish European territories had benne seized, difficult peace talks started in London. But on December 23 a coup of the Young Turks, willing to continue the war, blew out the peace preliminaries, and all delegations left London. New negotiations were resumed on May 13, 1913, in London, under the pressure of all European powers. The borders were those reached by the different armies. 

The war did not solve the main contradictions and expectations. New alliances with European powers were designed, especially with Germany, which was looking for support for its policy of eastward expansion, “Drang nach Osten”, symbolised by the Berlin-Bagdad railway, as an outlet for its enormous industrial power.

c) Towards the First World War

The part on the First World War began with a list of the frictions that prepared the war:
– A graph on steel export showed that the share of Germany was far higher than the sum of the British and French ones;
– French imperialism was squeezed between the other 2,
– USA were already the first industrial power, with a thierd of all world production;
– Austria-Hungary was eager to settle with Serbia the issue over the control of Balkans;
– Italian imperialism aimed at controlling the Adriatic Sea, in competition with the ally Austria;
– Tsarist Russia, after the defeat by Japan, was looking for a revenge and for expansion towards the Mediterranean to the detriment of the Ottoman Empire;
– The movement of the Young Turks was looking for political and military achievements;
– The Balkan States were unhappy with the results obtained with the two Balkan wars;
– In the Far East Japan was an expanding regional power;
– The complex system of alliances, Triple Entente and Triple Alliance, although in theory defensive, was hiding the aggressive attitudes of the countries.

Germany started the production of modern warships, but couldn’t bridge the great gap with Britain. The German General Staff expected to defeat France first, and then Russia, being unable to support a contemporary attack on two fronts.

The French plan, for the reconquest of Alsace and Lorraine, in view of the great military inferiority, envisaged a transfer to north of most of the army, while waiting to know the enemy’s plans.

The British plan was to support the small Belgian Army with a small contingent on the terrain, while reinforcing its already strong control of the seas.

The Russian plan, in origin aimed at Austria-Hungary, due to an agreement with France envisaged the deployment of 800.000 men at the German border within 15 days from the declaration of war.

The Sarajevo assassination of June 28, 1914, started the usual diplomatic ballet. For the Germans it was important to act rapidly: “It’s now or never” said Wilhelm II; the initial favourable balance of forces would soon reverse and a decisive “blitz krieg” was necessary. On August 2, 1914 the German troops invaded Belgium.

While imperialisms mobilised, on our class front we could witness the cowardly collapse of the Second International, that delivered the European proletariat to the bourgeois militarism. After a quick mention of the birth of the Second International, of the hegemonic role of German Socialdemocracy and of the opposing currents within it, the speaker recalled the Basel Congress of 1912 and its positions on the expected and imminent war.

Already at the beginning the conflict appeared of large dimensions: 6.2 million soldiers of the Entente, against 3.6 of Germany and Austria-Hungary. It was called “of the six fronts” because it developed in several areas. The first was between Germany and France for the supremacy in Central Europe, the second between Germany and Britain for the control of the seas, the third between Austria and Russia for the Balkans, the fourth btween Italy and Austria for the supremacy over the Adriatic and Albania, the fifth between Russia and Turkey for the control of the Bosphorus., the sixth between Japan and Germany for the expansion of the Japanese empire in the Pacific region.

d) The Western Front

The report continued with the presentation of the most important developments on the west front, with the failure of the German plan which, after an initial rapid course, was obstacled by the unexpected Belgian reaction and by the British contingent. The advance slowed down in some points, or even halted.

The clash of the two armies involved the whole front; some battles in the first two months caused enormous losses without strategic gains. In Ypres alone, last “movement” battle, lasted 3 weeks, by which the Allies were able to avoid the German barging, the losses amounted to over 200.000 men.

After this first series of battles the war changed, turning into a “position” one; from the Belgian coast to neutral Switzerland was laid a double system of trenches, separated by only a few hundred metres. On this front alone were dug 25,000 kilometres of trenches and alleyways. The soldiers died there at the rate of 6,000 a day, also due to the terrible hygienic conditions.

The short distance between the trenches favoured fraternization between soldiers of opposed armies, as with the spontaneous “Christmas truce” of 1914.

e) The Austrian-Serbian Campaign

The Austrian-Serbian war, which developed in three consecutive campaigns between August and December 1914, revealed unexpected inefficiencies in the experienced Austro-Hungarian army, unable to settle the issue in a short time with the small but tenacious Serbian army.

The two armies were extremely different. The Austro-Hungarian army was modern, well equipped and trained to the large, Napoleonic-style campaigns; but also multi-ethnic, with a strong component of soldiers of Slavic origin who were easily made prisoners, especially officers, to pass eventually in the Serbian army.

The Serbian army was divided into three levels, the third of which did not even have the uniforms and a valid armament, but it consisted of tenacious highlanders with strong motivations for war, grouped in agile small formations.

The theatre chosen by the Austrian commander for the invasion of Serbia was the border area close to the Danube, the Sava and the Drina, characterized by rushing watercourses in steep gorges or thick forests, an area which was totally unsuitable for his army, which needed the possibility of rapid movements, while there were few roads in that area, and not a railway line.

The first campaign from 12 to 24 August 1914 began with the bombing of Belgrade. Fights lasted until August 19 when the Austrians were forced to retreat, leaving a large amount of material on the field. In just 12 days of war, the Austrians had 22,000 of dead and wounded and 25,000 prisoners, most of whom were slav, plus the loss of all war material. But the most damaging defeat for Austria was on a moral level, for an empire of over 50 million subjects.

The Serbian success was due to the knowledge of the territory, to the support of the population and to the best strategic lucidity of the commanders.

Russians asked Serbs for some offensive in order to delay the departure of Austrian contingents destined for Galicia, where the Russians were in trouble after having suffered two defeats in the battles of Kraśic and Komaróv.

The defensive success of the Serbs in their territory did not guarantee them at all for an offensive in an enemy territory, which they did not know as well, for lack of supplies, in a territory whose Croatian, Hungarian and Romanian populations would not be equally supportive.

The Serbs’ attack north of Belgrade was promptly neutralized, causing significant losses. The Austrians attacked from Bosnia, but the Serbian forces moved to the counter-offensive with the support of Montenegrin forces forced, with hard fights, the Austro-Hungarian army to step back.

Since October 4, due to the heavy rains, which made the few existing roads impassable and the rivers swollen, large scale operations ceased, and even on this front began the trench war.

In the third campaign, from October to December 1914, the Austro-Hungarian offensive resumed with the arrival of reinforcements and developed with particular hardness on the Valjevo plateau, from which Serbs were expelled only on 6 November.

But the Serbian situation soon became critical both for the scarcity of ammunition and the conduct of the trench war to which the soldiers had not been trained, and desertions began in their files. After retreating the troops to Belgrade’s defense and repressing the mutinies, a counter-offensive was launched on a 120-kilometer front, now possible with the arrival of French ammunition through Thessaloniki. After fierce clashes, the Serbs regained control of the Valjevo plateau and the Kolubara upper course.

The Austrian losses were very heavy in men and in material; in addition, about 20,000 soldiers of Czech, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene nationality of the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian army had gone into the ranks of the victorious Serbian army, perhaps counting on some help for their independence.

The second campaign was undertaken just as at Lvov, in a giant battle, was at stake the fate of the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire, while five of their armies were senselessly engaged in Serbia.

Serbs did no have sufficient means to get a brilliant victory; in the only final battle of Kolubara, 70,000 men fell due to injuries and the disease, more than 18,000 were wounded and 15,000 prisoners. In the early 1915s in Serbia a terrible typhus epidemic with 300,000 deaths will come out.

Vienna progressively withdrew troops to direct them to the front of the Eastern Alps just opened with Italy.

With the entry of Bulgaria to the side of the Central Empires at the end of 1915, a new offensive against Serbia will be launched, whose army, weakened and attacked by many fronts, will definitely be defeated.

e) On the Eastern Front

Two were here the political questions: the occupation or partition of Poland between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia and the Panslavist expansion of Serbia.

The enormous extension of the eastern front, from the coasts of Lithuania to the slopes of the Carpathians, in areas of different nature, forests, lakes, swamps and vast plains, conditioned the strategic plans on both sides, lacking men and means to saturate it, as it was the case on the western front. It resulted in a mixture of movements, with deep offensives, and trench warfare. The modern war now needs efficient rail lines for the rapid transport of large quantities of men and materials, and the scarcity of such lines in Russian territories was seriously hampering an in depth German invasion.

Russia was strongly pressed by France, with which it was bound by a military treaty, to open a broad eastern front in order to ease German pressure on the West. In addition, Moltke, the supreme German commander, who felt it was essential to avoid an invasion of Germany, organised the rapid deployment of entire divisions from one front to the other, according to needs, which was possible in Germany for the extensive and efficient rail network; for this it was also called the “train war”. The strategy adopted by the Austro-German command, after excluding an offensive in Russian territory, was to attract Russian forces to a chosen area and to block them with reduced forces, the priority being the victory on the Western front, to which the best and more consistent units were destined. 

Russia had to quickly intervene in a conflict to which it was unprepared on the strategic level, and for armaments, supplies and logistics. Its first objective was the front with Austria-Hungary, to which the best and largest units were destined, but soon had to set up new plans for both a southern attack on the Austrian front and north with the invasion of Eastern Prussia, where there were small German forces, mostly reservists and secondary groups. But the large amount of men at the disposal of the Russian command in Prussia was poorly armed, with poor artillery ammunition, the cavalry had no adequate supply of fodder; not having telegraph cables they often communicated unencrypted by radio, thus providing important information to the Germans.

The Russian offensive started on August 17, 1914 in the northern Prussian region with repeated bayonet assaults, which were blocked with significant losses by the small German forces, but which had precise artillery. Three days later the Russians advanced on two routes: to the north and south to Berlin.

The Russians on August 26 continued to advance in the southern Prussian sector, which was now considered easier. Moltke moved units from the western front including a cavalry division, here most important. The largest battle took place at Tannemberg, lasted almost three days and turned into a real catastrophe for the Russians. The Russian losses were enormous: of the 192,000 Russians, 50,000 died in combat, the prisoners were 92,000; over 500 of the 624 cannons of the II Russian Army were lost to the enemy.

After this unexpected success to the south, the Germans headed north to the Masuri lakes, where they thought they would repeat it. However, the attack was delayed by Russian defenses, which began a controlled 100-km deployment, abandoning Prussia and moving beyond the Lithuanian border of the Niemen River. The Russian offensive in Prussia was over, with a huge failure and huge losses: about a quarter of a million men were lost, with huge amounts of armaments.

Energetic and positive, instead, was the Russian action in Galicia against the Austro-Hungarians. A first Austrian advance was blocked, and on August 18, 1914, the first and powerful offensive was launched, while the Austrians were simultaneously engaged in the sluggish and losing campaign against Serbia. The 300km-long front, between August 23rd and September 11th, advanced to the Russian conquest of Leopoli and the siege of the Przemyśl fortress, a garrison of 120,000 men and an important weapon depot, inflicting heavy losses on Austro-Hungarians.

While the Germans were stopped and pursued by the French on the Marne, abandoning any hope of a quick victory, they could instead penetrate the Polish provinces annexed to Russia since the XVIII century. The Austrians, on the other hand, were driven back from Russian Poland where they had penetrated, and further south they were fighting for not being pushed beyond the Galician border: a strategic rather complex situation. In the sector, 1.2 million Russian soldiers were concentrated, which had 225,000 deaths, wounded, detained and missing, against 1 million Austro-Hungarians, who accused the loss of 300,000 men and 100,000 prisoners, many of whom were Slavic nationalities and in dozens of thousands gave themselves up to the Russians.

Hindenburg’s attacks in Silesia did not have the desired effect, but prevented the Russian invasion of Germany.

Great Britain made available to Russia, with adequate economic guarantees, the massive amount of war material needed in view of the spring recovery of the fights. In April 1915 the Russians reconquered Przemyśl fortress and turned the Austro-Hungarians out of the positions they had conquered.

The German command, in view of the precarious situation in Austria and the imminent entry into the war of Italy alongside the Entente, decided on a powerful offensive with all available forces, which began on 2 May 1915 in the Gorlice-Tarnow area of Galicia, concentrating in a hurry on a front of just 40 km and in secret 14 divisions against the Russian 6. The German maneuver was overwhelming, penetrating, after breaking in two of the Russian lines, for 150 km. Przemyśl and Lvov were recaptured, while a second northern offensive intended to close the Russians in a sack, advance to Brest-Litovsk, the most important stronghold of the western Russian front, and a third in July on the river Bug and Vistula, closing the whole game.

In order to avoid encirclement, the Russians had to retreat a lot, opposing disastrous counteroffensives, losing Brest-Litovsk and Warsaw. As the Germans to the north approached Riga, the Austrians, after Romania joined the war, came to the south to Tarnopol near the Russian border.

In this “Great Retreat” the Tsarist army lost nearly half of the officers, especially senior officers, abandoning about 500,000 sq. Km of territory; they adopted behind them the tactics of scorched-earth with forced evacuation of the entire resident population.

Supplies were difficult, so it took months to reorganize troops for a general counter-offensive. This employed 600,000 men in an attack that started on June 4th from the swampy areas of Bucovina. On a 350 km front, it reached the targets and in just 8 days were captured about 3,000 Austrian officers, 190,000 soldiers, hundreds of cannons, 700,000 machine guns: one third of the enemy forces; a few days later the Russians entered Czernowitz, the easternmost city of Austria-Hungary.

But the Russians could not exploit this success because they too suffered heavy losses and because they would have gone too far from the supply bases, badly connected due to the poor state of the railways. The Russian advance stopped at the Carpathian chain also for the continued massive desertions: since the beginning of the conflict, total Russian losses had been well over 5 million men.

Romania, sided with the Entente, was defeated and occupied in a short time by the Germans.

The war on the seas changes, whose priority, especially for the Germans, is to sink the supply convoys to the States of the Entente, mainly from the USA and Canada. The US, so far neutral, after the continual sinking by the German U-boats of their ships, declare war on Germany at the most opportune time.

f) The Revolution in Russia

In all belligerent countries the shortage of food is felt on civilians and the military, and rebellions and desertions increase, with thousands of executions and decimations, especially in 1917.

In Russia, the situation is more dramatic due to the shortage of food, due also to the reduction of male workforce in the countryside, and the lack of raw materials and spare parts in the industry. The number of strikes increases rapidly; at Petersburg on February 18, 1917, a great strike starts in Putilov militarized workshops, whose participants are attacked by police and army units.

On February 27, a soldiers unit refuses to shoot at the protesters, passes over their side and shoots the officers: it is the beginning of the revolution. On March 15, the Tsar resigns and Kerensky’s moderate bourgeois government is born; despite promises, the war continues and an offensive in Galicia is ordered.

This, after an initial success, turns into failure. The Russians are not pursued by the Austro-Hungarians, for fear that troops would learn the revolutionary spirit. The number of Russian units giving up fighting increases.

On November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks assume power and demande armistice to Germany; the preparations for the peace begin, and an armistice is signed in Brest-Litovsk only on March 3, 1918, with a significant Russian loss of territories, population and coal mines.

After closing the eastern front, Ludendorff can transfer those troops to the western and Italian fronts.

The Tsarist army is not defeated by the enemy but by the internal enemy of the Revolution.

Party activity in Venezuela

In 2016 the party continued its presence in Venezuela with the sections of Caracas and Valencia. These have held regular meetings and continued the activity of study and propaganda. The party’s press, albeit with modest circulation, has been punctually distributed both in Caracas and in the State of Carabobo.

In Carabobo (one of the 25 States in Venezuela, the one with the largest concentration of factories) we maintain contacts with groups of workers, proposing the unification of trade union struggles and the formation of the class union. In 2016, there were two union meetings in Moron, in April and May, in the Fuerza Laboral headquarters of the Eje Costero, with the participation of workers and trade union representatives from various manufacturing sectors and representatives of some trade unions and of political currents within them.

Manifestos were produced which appealed to the economic struggle, which, although in part with classical positions, will not necessarily be actually promoted, because the unions and the rank and file groups that participated are influenced by opportunistic and law abiding positions.

We maintained contact with court workers in the State of Carabobo through the distribution of party propaganda.

We have also maintained close contacts with workers from many large factories and we have been able to promote the unification of their claims in the face of dispute over new collective agreements.

We have criticized the political currents that contend for the control of the Federation of Oil Workers, as appeared in the article we published in El Partido Comunista No. 7.

Again on Irish history

The first chapter of the report summed up Marx and Engels’s assessments of the Irish question, the first colony in the modern sense of the term. The extended text appears on this same issue.

Thus summarized the essence of modern Irish history, the second chapter covered the period up to the 1907 Belfast strike.

Since the development of socialism in Ireland, until the war of independence, had been closely linked to the so-called “socialist awakening” of the 1880s in Great Britain, it was first presented a succinct panorama of the English movement, on the basis of quotations from Marx and Engels. At the time, roughly from the end of the 1870s onward, the workers had tried to express an independent class party and to separate their policy from that of liberalism.

The first attempt was the Democratic Federation, born in a vague alliance between radicals and socialists. This, during the Earth War in Ireland of the years 1879-1882, would oppose the Gladstone government by establishing tight ties with the Irish Land League.

Liberated by most of its bourgeois radical elements, in 1884 it changed its name into Social Democratic Federation. Within the same year it would split to form the Socialist League. But according to Engels no organization had reached a minimum of clarity.

The rapporteur therefore recalled the great stimulus to the economic and political organization come from the great dockers strike of 1889.

The Independent Labour Party would later fight for a law favourable to the working class and trade unions.

Finally we heard how sections of the British National Union of Dock Labourers were created in Ireland, and the main phases of the 1907 harbour strike. Particularly worthy of note was the great result of being able to unite the working class above sectarian-religious divisions.

On the other hand, a growing integration into the bourgeois government apparatus of the British trade unions became evident; the union leaderships already operated as divisive agents within the working class with their corporative and reformist approach. This corruption of union leaders eventually led, as a reaction, to the formation of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. The story of its subsequent developments will be dealt with in the third chapter.

Party Union Activity

Part of our meetings is always dedicated to the struggles of the working class. Greater space is dedicated to the most important ones on a global scale, and to those where we can intervene through our communist union fraction.

As with any other field of action, the party must be fully aware of its working methods and results and, to the possible extent, provide the support of all its forces.

We refer our comrades and readers to the detailed and fully commented documentation on our trade union press, interventions and distributed texts, which we always report in a timely fashion on the party’s website.

The report was in particular on three activities carried out in Italy: action in the Unione Sindacale di Base, that in the SI Cobas and the criticism of the conduct of FIOM in the dispute over the renewal of the metalworkers contract.

At the end of January 2016, the USB split was led by executives from Emilia Romagna, Veneto and Lombardy; it had been smoldering for at least a year, and it led to the birth of the Sindacato Generale di Base (SGB). This new small union then tightened a federative covenant with the CUB.

The Coordination for the Class Trade Union, an internal opposition group in which our comrades are participating, has expressed a negative opinion about the split.

Our intervention was not addressed to the leaders who for decades have been at the top of the grassroots organizations, with positions and methods opposed to ours, but it was an attempt to detach from them that large group of union delegates and militants who had joined the appeal of the Coordination for the Class Union. An essentially failed attempt since almost all the signatories to the appeal who belonged to the local structures led by the scissionist leaders followed them in the new organization, although some of them shared some of our complaints about their opportunism.

Following the split, the USB Coordination for the Class Union published two documents: an article explaining the position of the Coordination about the split and an appeal with which it was intended to verify whether the severe split had caused a reaction within of the union favouring a discussion on the points raised by the Coordination. It became clear that the split had damaged the small internal opposition body for the loss of militants who had gone over to the new organisation, and because the reaction inside the USB was to tighten the ranks to save the organisation and to not support the request for an extraordinary congress.

In view of the March 18, 2016 general strike, proclaimed by CUB, SI Cobas, USI and SGB, to which USB has not adhered to, the Coordination has published a document titled “Adhering and supporting the general strike” in which the need to abide by to the practical address of the unit of action of workers was reiterated. The strike was joined by USB: the FIOL-FCA factory group in Termoli, that at the Fondazione S. Maugeri of Varese, a group of tram operators from Naples ANM who had already left the union but remained in contact with the Coordination, and other scattered militants.

On Sunday, April 3, a so-called National Assembly of USB members was held in Milan. In fact, it was a conference prepared in detail, with various pre-arranged interventions, organized to give proof of union strength in one of the most affected cities. For the assembly an intervention was made on behalf of the Coordination, which one of our comrades should have read – which of course was not allowed – and that was published on the Facebook page of the Coordination.

The ratification of TUR membership, the February split, the lack of a call for an extraordinary congress, were all factors that weakened the Coordination, eventually leading some of its most active members to the decision to leave the USB to join the SI Cobas. This decision was not shared by our comrades.

A week after our general meeting in Parma, we participated in that same city, on Saturday, January 30, in the national event of SI Cobas – successful – in support of the struggle at Bormioli of Fidenza, handing out a leaflet specifically tailored and translated into French and Spanish: “Against the united front of the bourgeois State, bosses and regime unions – For the unity of labour struggles – For the Class Union”, which reads in Il Partito Comunista number 376.

We then participated in the preparatory assembly and the first strike at Tortona interport, which was also successful, on 9 February.

On March 18 we participated, with the leaflet “For the united and international struggle of the working class against the regime of capital”, also reproduced in number 376, in the general strike proclaimed by CUB, SI Cobas, USI and SGB, in the picket at dawn at the Tortona Interport, at the morning event in Milan, very successful, and in the afternoon in Bologna, which was also satisfactory.

Finally, we participated in Milan on 1 May, spreading our document, and on June 4th, in solidarity with the struggles in France, which, due to the current crisis, have marked a partial retreat in mobilization capacity compared to past.

We also participated in the general strike of metalworkers on Wednesday, April 20 proclaimed by Fiom, Fim and Uilm, with a leaflet titled “For the resumption of a real fight against the master. For the rebirth of a class union that unifies workers’ struggles. Out and Against Collaborationist Trade Unionism, “which is read in Issue 377 of Il Partito Comunista. The strike had been called for in support of the dispute over the renewal of the national contract. It was a unitary action of the three regime unions in this important category that seems to be closing an eight-year cycle marked by two “separate” contractual renewals, which were signed only by FIM and UILM and not by FIOM.

This rediscovered union unity is apparently a debacle for FIOM, which abandons the positions of these eight years, recognizing in fact the previous separate contracts as well as the conditions of the FCA-FIAT workers, subject to a contract other than that of mechanical engineering. 

For this eight-year cycle of the FIOM action we have reported in detail in a long article on our Italian press.

At the next general meeting, the rapporteur came back to the small trade unions splits that marked the scene of workers’ organizations in Italy: the USB split of January 2016, which led to the formation of SGB; the exit (not really a splitting) of a minority part of the “The Union Is Another Thing” area from CGIL to USB in May 2016; the one that hit the SI Cobas leading to the formation of the small SOL Cobas, the following June. Finally, the move of a group of union militants who had animated the USB Member Coordination for the Class Union to SI Cobas.

Although these are very different cases, they have in common a movement in the direction opposite to that wished for by the party with its union fraction since when, in the second half of the seventies, it indicated to the workers the road to the reconstruction of the class union outside and against CGIL, the road for its recapture being judged definitively closed.

This judgment was based on three legs: the evaluation of the thirty-year course of that union (since its rebuilding from above in 1944), although it went through periods of intense labour struggles; the experience in that time span of the battle our fraction waged within it; the necessity that large groups of workers were experimenting, in order to fight, to organize themselves out and against it, and which would provide ground for the formation of basic trade unionism in subsequent years.

Giving the direction of abandoning a trade union is not something the party can do lightly. This is occurred in view of an actual movement in this direction of the membership base. This perspective was indicated and explained in a clear, unambiguous manner, such that it was not sudden and unexpected when the need occurred.

The party described the CGIL as early as at the time of its rebuilding as a regime syndicate, and since then it indicated a twofold way for the rebirth of the class union: either its recapture with the physical expulsion of corrupt leaders or a rebirth out and against it. Nothing ambiguous or hidden: the immediate practical guide from 1945 to the second half of the seventies was the first; since then it has become the second.

This clarity was lacking in the split that has recently led to the formation of SGB. Even in “The union is another thing” those who fled did not face and prepare in a clear, serious and in-depth manner the issue. Behaviours that are the reflection of political opportunism of union leaders.

USB Member Coordination for the Class Union militants passed to SI Cobas, finally, acted contrary to the orientation of workers in their category and their workplace.

The Succession of Modes of Production

a) Ancient-Classical Variant – Greece

Exposure came to expose the ancient-classical variant of the secondary production form. It’s based on slavery. Wage slavery is a particular form of the most general exploitation of man over man, which connotes all modes of production divided into classes.

After referring to the essential geography and history of classical Greece, the report described the dawn of the new form of production. Mycenaean civilization is a social formation connecting the Asian and ancient variants. There are elements that characterize Asian societies: Templar and Palace Economy; large portions of the territory still in collective possession; rigid centralization in the use of labour. The novelty is represented by the exceptional development of exchange value; by the appearance of direct production aimed at the commodity market; use of money, etc.

Athens was the first to make a jump out of primitive communism. The other cities, still immersed in the “golden age”, could only adapt, carried by the progress of the production forces.

Former communist organicism had now been defeated. The germ of exchange value had broken natural relations. At this point, commodity trading exacerbates the rising division into classes and their struggle; the production of commodities, implying the separation of purchase and sale, causes the producer to be indifferent to the product of his work, the product being autonomous and dominating him. Production for the market allows a formerly unthinkable abundance of products. Each city begins to exploit intensively the natural resources of which it is rich, starting to modify the surrounding environment. The commodities become independent and causing extra work, they are produced for the purpose of creating a profit and not for their consumption.

Agricultural work in common, the foundation of the original communes, gives way to small farmers. The land lot will in the beginning be allocated temporarily and periodically redistributed; then individual private property has the upper hand, as opposed to the collective, public property.

The city is the place where the new form of production and class State power develops. Only the violence of the ruling class allows Solone and Cleisthenes to implement their institutional reforms. Old production relationships must be canceled, also by law, and local councils stripped of their powers, because they obstacle the ruling class in its drive to dominate the immediate producers.

The process of expropriation proceeds and already at Solon’s time it can be said that most land is in the hands of few families; the poor unable to pay the rents are reduced to slavery. Individual property is at odds with the collective and communal one.

Historically, the fragmentation of the clan’s possessions concerns movable goods in the beginning, while land ownership is still collective between families. Citizenship is linked to property and the non-owner is also not a citizen.

Like all social relationships, a person’s personal subjection of a producer to a non-producing owner assumes its meaning only within the specific mode of production.

Slavery in Primitive Communism begins with the defeat of an opposing tribe or clan that can not be absorbed by the victorious community. The situation changes with the passage to the form of secondary production; procuring slaves becomes an activity alongside the others and among the most profitable.

Alongside the contrast between city and country, the social division of labour develops and within it the distinction between intellectual workers and manual producers. The birth of State and politics favours the growth of a multitude of intellectuals to compose the praises of new production relationships and theoretically mark the boundary that separates the dominant class from the dominated class.

On the birth of the State, the rapporteur has read a quote from the “Factors of Race and Nation”. The contradictions between producers now explode; a complex mechanism is needed to prevent class struggle from turning into open rebellion, putting the power of exploiters at risk. Only the owners can be community members. The magistrates differ. Already at the time of Draco (620 BC) participation in the community government is done on a census basis. Democracy is the rule of a class society, and the Athenian Solone sanctions at the legal level what the underlying structure has already created. The population of Attica is divided into categories based on wealth and not on hereditary nobility, and wealth becomes the prerequisite for obtaining a public appointment.

The contrast is perfected when conflicts take place between parties representing the different classes and subclasses. The fight is open. Assemblies increase in power, but in the new accomplished class situation they become organs of the new class power. The State becomes the defender of wealth.

The division into classes of antiquity is also and above all division between free men and slaves; there isn’t yet the free wage worker. Producers still have many divisions within them, so the contrast is not yet between non-proprietor worker and non-worker proprietor.

The rapporteur concluded the series of reports devoted to classical Greece by addressing the analysis of the superstructures generated by the division into the classes of society. He described the legal framework characterizing in particular the city of Athens. The ruling class needs special tools, a specific machinery to maintain the submission of the lower classes.

For Engels of “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” contradictions are first generated within the blood ties, and then concern community relations. The passage from a matrilineal society to the patriarchate and to the monogamous family sanctions the subjection of women. Already in ancient Greece, the matrimonial institution is the act of buying a bride. The subjection of the female is also sanctioned by the new hereditary right and the lineage along the paternal line. The institute of primogeniture prevents the subdivision of the inheritance.

At this point the comrade made some considerations on the origins of ancient Greek and archaic philosophical thinking, in the beginning materialist and dialectical. A scientific thought in which the study of nature was accompanied by an investigation into man and society. Great scientists were the exponents of the so-called ionic school, outlining the two methods of approach that we would call today mathematical and physical.

There are concepts of the complex Platonic thinking that we can claim in the same spirit with which we claim primitive communism, or the first materialist and socialist reflections, or utopian socialism. Democracy is considered to be the worst form of constitution for the city, because it produces extreme wealth and poverty, and leads to the worst human leanings. Criticism attacks the two pillars of the society of the time, private property and the family, the terrain that nourishes the worst evils for the human community.

Plato meant the wished for government of philosophers as composed of men who intended to act in the city’s interest. And when philosophers have come to power, how will they convince others of the goodness of their constitution? In “The Republic” it is argued that this will happen “with persuasion and with force”: we want to understand it as a germ of the need for the party and the dictatorship of the party, of propaganda and revolutionary violence.

Aristotle is in fact the theorist of conservation, describing reality as it appears to the immediate perception, theorizing fixed logical structures, lacking in the living relation to the matter of which they are the reflection.

The report finally ended by referring to a possible Marxist study of the most ancient mythology and literature of all peoples, free from scientism prejudices that invalidate modern bourgeois historical research. Our doctrine traces from it the blurred remembrance of the original communistic life. Epic heroes and the new pantheon imposed by the winners are image of conflicts, clashes and battles between ethnic groups, peoples and classes, ending with the victory of civilization. That of the defeated Gods is the real blood of the original Communism. The winners will in turn be defeated by new winners in a grandiose millennia long cycle of re-appropriation of the species to itself.

b) Ancient-Classical Variant – Rome

The work then came to study the evolution in Rome of the ancient-classical variant. The rapporteur has drawn attention, rather than on the millennial Roman history, to the fundamental features that the slavery production mode has taken in its apogee and collapse.

Private property, originated by the dissolution of the original community, initially did not concern the main production means of pre-capitalist forms, land, but movable property, goods.

Caused by the original different geophysical conditions, the antique-classical variant, unlike the Asian “immobilism”, already at its beginnings is characterized by a strong dynamism; an intrinsic tension characterized by the constant attempt of private property to prevail over collective property. The social structure becomes twofold: on the one hand community members are workers-owners, on the other hand their mutual relationships are determined by being members of a community whose existence is based on the collective property of the land. With separation from the organic community, the parcel becomes private individual property while the remaining land remains collective property in the public domain.

Property contains its own negation, non-property, which will be generalized in capitalism by extending the concentration of wealth. The great owners gradually subdue parcel workers, and seize the State to use it as a weapon in defence of their particular class interests.

In order not to become a slave, the ruined citizen has to come under the protection of a rich man, who mediates his belonging to the community; citizenship evolves towards a patronage relationship, introducing the tertiary form.

This implies an impetuous development of the monetary economy, a domestic market and the beginning of an international market. For the producer, stripped-down of land and indebted, the depths open of slavery for debts.

At the conclusion of the report, once again is proved the classical Marxist thesis that seeks the causes of wars in the economic substrate; Roman wars cease to be caused by clashes among communities-tribe for demographic problems, and begin to become conquest endeavours for the extension of superior productive relations to backward peoples, thus subduing in a more stable way not only foreign peoples but even plebeians at home, in a progressive expropriation process.

Consequently also the figure of the fighter changes drastically; the introduction of the soldier’s pay (around 403 BC) makes the service a commodity. In classical modes of production, war is the biggest business for the ruling class: thanks to expropriations, it saves the cost of buying land; the effects of the confiscation of huge territories of many communities of Central Italy and their transformation into ager publicus, largely left to the free occupation by the richest among the Romans, were the reason of the most important economic and social problems occurred in the II century BC

The Concept of Dictatorship Before Marx

After the attempted escape of the king, in June 1791, Robespierre and most revolutionaries, until then advocates of a constitutional monarchy, become openly republican.

Being a follower of Rousseau and of the Law of Nature does not make of Robespierre a utopian unable to see reality: when the court, the constitutional monarchists of Lafayette and the republicans of Brissot pronounce for the war against the enemies of France, he argues, with scarce success, that the war is in reality a means to bring back the king on the throne, given the situation of the moment, and in particular the fact that the army of the new France was led by monarchist and treacherous generals. He is therefore for peace.

His position on the war somehow recalls that of Lenin on the 1918 peace of Brest-Litovsk, a peace our Vladimir achieved after serious difficulties, also within the party itself. What the two great revolutionaries have in common is the consciousness that the salvation of the revolution, which is struggle between classes, comes before anything else, no matter how hard, difficult and humiliating the peace conditions may be: there is no room for fanatical revolutionary enthusiasms, or for hurt pride.

The right to property is for robespierrists a “right of nature”, which must however take also into account the other “natural rights”, starting with that to existence. If property contrasts with freedom and existence of citizens the law can and must regulate and limit it. A concept that, although fully capitalist, is certainly distant from the full and undisputed bourgeois property that, as a God, sit on the throne built for it by the Napoleonic Code.

Montesquieu was admired by Jacobins as he was seen as a supporter of the Republic and of republican virtues, but his conception of division of powers was not accepted. In another speech of May 1793 Robespierre expresses himself decidedly against the balance of powers and on the model England represented: “It is a sort of monstrous government, where the ghost of freedom annihilates freedom itself, where law sanctifies despotism, where the rights of the people are the object of ordinary trade”.

On July 27 he is elected in the Committee of Public Safety. From a report to the December Convention: “The theory of the revolutionary government is new as the revolution that gave birth to it (…) The purpose of the constitutional government is to preserve the Republic: while that of the revolutionary government is to found it (…) The latter is subjected to less uniform and less rigorous rules, because the circumstances in which it operates are stormy and mobile”.

In a similar speech of February 1794: “Some have said that terror is the power of despotic government. So does your terror resemble despotism? Yes, but as the sword that shines in the hands of the heroes of freedom resembles that of the armies of tyranny. “

The Committee of Public Safety has certainly exerted the function of revolutionary dictatorship, even though it was preferably mentioned as revolutionary government. But the Convention remained the holder of legitimate power, and had to be conquered by the strength of the arguments, which Robespierre always did, also with the Committee of Public Safety.

The difference with Cromwell in England in the previous century is that the latter had the army command and therefore the real power in his hands. The Committee of Public Safety directs the State and the republican armies, and commands the Revolutionary Tribunal, but is re-elected every month by the Convention. We can talk about revolutionary dictatorship, but only partially.

To speak of dictatorship of Robespierre, as did the Thermidorians and then the anti-Robespierrist historians, is even less sustainable. The Committee was a collective steering organ. Robespierre was not president, he had not chosen the other members and had been the last to join it: his pre-eminent position was due solely to his prestige, that is to the rightness of his theses.

The necessity of a revolutionary government occurred to Robespierre in July 1793 when the armies of the monarchist coalition took over Mainz and Valenciennes, when Girondins and Monarchists roused the departments and delivered Toulon to the British.

He sought to curb the excesses of Terror and save the sincere republicans who had been hit, criticized and recalled several terrorists on mission such as Carrier in Nantes and Fouché in Lyon, become famous for their ferocity, often directed at revolutionaries. It was these members of Terror, along with some members of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security, the architects of Thermidor with the consequent death sentence of Robespierre, Saint-Just and other 90 Jacobins.

Robespierre was never of communist ideas. It is with Babeuf and Buonarroti that the ideas of “justice” of enlightenment and Jacobinism will come to the extreme and rational consequences in the heat of the revolution, finally attaining communism.

A Jacobin and Robespierre’s supporter to the end was Louis Antoine Leon De Saint-Just. On November 13, 1792, he spoke to the Convention to demand the execution of the king as a public enemy. In a speech to the same month’s convention, it supported freedom of trade. In February 1793 he supported the need to take the army from the control of the executive, in favour of the Convention, which expressed popular sovereignty.

From the “Report on Incarcerated Persons” of February 26, 1794, we read: “There are complaints of revolutionary measures! (…) In fact, the succession of events leads us perhaps to results we did not expect (…) Those who make half-revolutions only dig their grave. “

From an April report: “A revolution like ours is not a process, but a thunder on all perverts. It is no longer a matter of giving lessons to them: they must be repressed and destroyed. ” The organization of Terror is centralized and the Revolutionary Courts of the departments suppressed to the advantage of that of Paris.

If it is true that only Marat openly theorized the revolutionary dictatorship, it is undeniable that also Robespierre, Saint-Just and the other Jacobins conceived and above all practiced it. They saw it rising under their very eyes before even understanding it. Their theorization could only be partial and contradictory, since the subject of this dictatorship, that is, the revolutionary party, did not exist yet. The Jacobin club had only some of the aspects of a modern party, but surely we can not define it as such.

The limits of Jacobin ideology were the limits of the bourgeois class, of economic development, of the relations of production and of class relations in France and in the world of the time.

Russian historian Evgheni V. Tarlé in “Germinal and Prairial” writes: “In the Antoine and Marceau suburbs, in the Temple district, and in Rue Mouffetard there were masses ready for decisive revolutionary actions. But these leaders and these masses did not know each other, did not understand each other and did not meet. “

The hunger and famine afflicting the urban plebs were tremendous, and the countryside was in no better conditions. On the 12th Germinal common people went to the Convention to ask for “Bread, restoration of the Constitution of 1793 and release of the patriots arrested on the 9th Thermidor”. The same evening arrests and deportations began, even more than after the attempted uprising of 1st Prairial. While the Montagnards were arrested, “bad citizens”, i.e., non-owners, were disarmed, and “good citizens” were armed, that is, the rich. The Golden Youth, sort of death squads at the service of counter-revolution, went hunting for Jacobins and workers.

Jullian, head of the Golden Youth, will later say that if the insurgents had better leaders and if they had immediately arrested the members of the committees, “the government would be dispersed and Terror restored”. Levasseur de la Sarthe, member of the Convention, the 1st Prairial was in prison. In his memoirs he writes that the insurgents complained of insufficient armament and inexperience of the leaders, and speaks of rebellion of the working class against the bourgeois aristocracy. He believed in the existence of an embryonic organization that with the “dictatorship of some energetic patriots” would restore the 1793 Constitution.

Tarlé writes: “A battalion of one of the sections of the Antoine suburb approaches the the Convention with cannons; a battalion of the bourgeois section of the Champs Elisées takes a stand in front of it in defence of the Convention (…) Never before, during the entire course of the revolution, had they faced each other militarily (…) owners and non owners, bourgeoisie and plebeians, and never was that acknowledged so clearly and unequivocally by witnesses and protagonists. “

In Germinal and Prairial the Parisian common people, unlike the days of 1789, 1792 and 1793, did not have any allies among the middle bourgeoisie and very few among the small bourgeoisie.

François-Noël Babeuf in 1786 is for land exploitation in collective management. We are still in utopian communism, but to which he already reproaches to leave “a void as concerns the means”. A follower of Rousseau, Babeuf does not accepthis pessimism and believes in progress, like the encyclopaedists, thinking that dissemination of knowledge can lead to the emancipation of mankind. Unlike Rousseau, he declares himself a materialist and atheist, and in Year 2 he refuses the worship of the Supreme Being. He declares himself an advocate of the Agrarian Law, that is, of division and distribution of land.

In 1791 he criticizes Robespierre for considering political equality sufficient: the differences between the two, perceived as mild by the same protagonists, were due to class divergences.

After the 9th Thermidor Babeuf founds “Le Tribun du Peuple”. In the first writings, he pronounces against the dictatorship of Robespierre because the committees had destroyed the power of the Parisian Sections, harshly repressing the Sans-culottes.

In December 1794, Babeuf seems to share the Sans-culottes policy: to seek the support of the Members of the Convention and the spontaneous rebellion of the proletarian masses.

Babeuf’s communism was based on a claim of the right of nature: we can not expect from him the concept of historical necessity in establishing new relations in production and among social classes.

In February 1796 Babeuf in a letter firmly defends Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the revolutionary dictatorship exercised by the Committee of Public Safety: “I do not want to discuss whether Hébert and Chaumette were innocent (…) The salvation of 25 million men is not to be bartered with respect towards some equivocal individual (…) Scoundrels, or imbeciles, or presumptuous and ambitious, is the same, so much the worse for them. “

On October 26, 1795, power in France was taken over by the Directory. In December, the Panthéon Club was founded by anti-Thermidorian republicans, including Babeuf. On February 24, 1796, the Directorate decreed the dissolution of the Panthéon Club, performed by the young general Bonaparte, formerly Jacobin and robespierrist. The revolutionaries are imprisoned.

After the dissolution of the Panthéon Club, heavily influenced by the egalitarians, these think it is time to act and to create a clandestine insurgency organization whose purpose is the Constitution of 1793 first, and communism as the ultimate goal.

The historian Dommanget writes: “All small committees scattered over the capital (…) had to disappear, to make room for a single centralized structure. It was Babeuf and his companions who had to persuade the Democrats of the need for such a form of grouping. ” On the 10th Germinal is set up this “Public Secret Executive Secretariat of Public Safety”. The historian Mazauric writes: “The establishment of the” Secret Insurrectional Directory “(…) was in fact the first appearance in the history of an organized and disciplined party”.

This party in centralizing its directing body was inspired by the “dictator” depicted by Marat, as well as by the experience of the Committee of Public Safety of Robespierre and Saint-Just, and in attempting to influence the Sans-culotte plebs resumed the recent tradition of the sections.

The novelty is that this party, in addition to leading the insurrection, was preparing to undertake a provisional revolutionary dictatorship, necessary for the purpose of the coercion and education of the masses, a dictatorship of which it was not possible to establish the duration beforehand and which would finally lead to the founding of the communist society.

Levasseur and others realized the necessity of having a leadership centre for the revolution, and attributed the defeat to the absence of such organ. All this led, the following year, to the “Conspiracy of the Equals called of Babeuf”. In seven years, from 1789 to 1796, there was the passage from Rousseau to the first revolutionary communist party in history.

History of the Workers’ Movement in the USA

The report dealt with the years leading up to the First World War, and then the war itself, which for the USA was relatively short. This saw the completion of the process already initiated during Wilson’s first administration. The country was preparing for war quite openly. The North American bourgeoisie was not going to pass up the opportunity to demonstrate to the world who would be in control in the decades to follow, to flaunt its powerful productive capacity, to do a roaring trade in military commissions, or to settle a few accounts that it had postponed with the working class.

The creation of the Department of Labor, with the support of an ex-union bigwig, highlighted the line to be pursued by the President: centralized control of social conflicts, using the craft unions and the AFL, by now harnessed to the bourgeoisie and serving as its transmission belt to the working class. Some concessions were granted in exchange for acquiescence to the war effort, (the main one being the extension of the eight-hour working day), but at the same time union organizations that did not submit to arbitration, or which undertook pacifist propaganda, were persecuted. The labor unions of the AFL became increasingly integrated within the State apparatus, and met with its representatives at the top of various agencies set up to coordinate the war effort. In doing so they lost credit among the workers, while struggles intensified The State returned the favor, prosecuting the IWW and whatever struggle broke out outside the rules that had been provided for centrally, for example by rejecting arbitrators’ decisions.

The unions that had sold out did not always manage to control the class; in these cases, rather than deploying the forces of repression, something was occasionally conceded to the strikers, given the basic requirement for labor to meet the demands of the war effort. Some of the more forward-thinking companies worked towards the creation of company unions. This idea was taken up by the State, which favored the birth of the shop committees even in small firms, including those free from any kind of trade union presence (whether or not they had sold out) for the settlement of disputes; representatives of the bosses also participated in these, in a spirit that would, a few years later, assume the name “corporatism”. 

Meanwhile there was plenty of work but too few workers: immigration had almost stopped during the war, and the working class had more power to defend itself from the bosses’ attacks. Factories recruited women and above all a large internal migration took place, of black workers from the South, often ruined farmers. At the same time, immigrants from Europe were no longer available to undercut wages, or even as blacklegs, they had become more combative and at the center of the struggles in the large industrial districts.

At the same time, especially from the end of 1917, persecution of socialists and the IWW intensified, whether through laws that also suppressed freedom of expression and demonized anyone considered unpatriotic, the Espionage Act, the Criminal Syndicalism Act, or with violence directly financed by the capitalists.

With the war a cycle in American working class history came to its conclusion. The class would struggle in the difficult post-war years with blunted weapons, with unions tied to bourgeois power, with combative organizations reduced to minimum objectives, and above all without having managed to establish a genuine Marxist party.

Report on Current Armed Conflicts Among States

At every meeting the comrades who follow the conflicts among imperialisms give a synthetic account on the current military events. We can then get the general sense of the development of operations, represented on maps of war theatres, and listen to their repercussions on the behaviour of parties and classes of local societies.

A continuous attention is given to the situation in the Middle East, today to the Syrian-Iraqi region, devastated by the war. This, that made hundreds of thousands of victims, mostly civilians, and of evacuees, destroyed infrastructures and razed to the ground ancient and modern cities, caused endless chaos, without reason, without solution.

Behind these appearances is hiding the direction of imperialisms that, in defending their interests, to widen their spheres of influence, strangled by the economic crisis, are ready to sacrifice the lives of entire populations.

The design, provided there is a design behind the pressing economic need for warfare, seems to be to break the State units established after the First World War by Anglo-French imperialism, countries that had succeeded in achieving a certain degree of economic development and political autonomy, to create weaker, territorially limited entities, united on an ethnic or religious basis, under the imperial motto “divide and conquer”.

The Syria war, which began as a confrontation between the Syrian army and some paramilitary groups, of a secular or religious matrix, who militarily opposed Assad’s regime, saw the involvement, and increasingly the pressing, since the beginning,of various regional powers: on one side, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in support of armed groups opposed to Assad’s government, on the other Iran in its defence. The civil war since the early months has turned into a clash on the Syrian territory between regional powers.

But that conflict, in an area so important from a geostrategic point of view, can not be ignored by the action of the great imperialist powers, the United States, already engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia, intervening directly in Syria in September 2015, China, as well as various European States, from France to Great Britain to Germany and Italy. But even Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Qatar did not spare their active contribution to the slaughter.

Now, in the absence of a revolutionary communist prospect, any ideological, religious, national motivation aiming at legitimizing this war has demonstrated its instrumental nature in the service of the aims of the various opposing imperialisms. Even the militia of the Islamic State, the Sunni opposition radical Islamist mirage to the oppressing West, are merely mercenary troops hired by various regional powers and fully integrated in the imperialist war.

The Kurdish militia of the Rojava, at war against the Islamic State to carve out a micro-self-determination in Syrian territory, relying on the momentary and self-absorbed support of the United States and Russia, participate in one of the fronts of a counterrevolutionary war in all its aspects, whose consequences will only be tragic for the inhabitants of the area.

The whole Middle East has always been one of the first countries in the world for armaments spending; in recent years there have been further leaps in the purchase of the most sophisticated weapon systems for the benefit of the major exporters, the United States, Russia, France, Great Britain, China, Italy; is it a coincidence that the same are all more or less militarily involved in the region?

Despite the cease-fire agreements signed in Geneva, the war continues and promises to extend further.

The comrade tried to focus on the complex evolution of the clash. A series of maps were shown: the first, of March 2015, a few months before the Russian intervention, showed the main forces that at that time contended for the territory, which are divided into four groups: rebels, loyalists, Kurds, foreign forces. After some offensives, ending with poor results, the government underwent a series of heavy defeats.

The second map showed the situation on various fronts as of June 20, 2015. In mid-May, Isis managed to conquer the city of Palmyra; it also kept control of a large portion of territory at the border with Turkey. The Kurds with the support of US aviation had been able to unite the two regions under their control east of the Euphrates at the expense of Isis, and their advance threatened directly Raqqa, the capital of the Caliphate. Aleppo, the second city of Syria after Damascus, was object of fighting between government forces and rebels.

By the end of September, Russia decided to intervene directly at the request of the Syrian regime. The third map showed the situation in December 2015, after three months of Moscow’s intervention. To the west, the Kurds of JPG attacked the Isis heading for Manbij from the south, crossing the Euphrates, with the support of the US-led western coalition aviation. In the region south of Aleppo government troops were on the offensive; in the northwestern area, the Kurds led an offensive against anti-government rebels with the support of Russian aviation.

The comrade then gave a synthetic picture of the forces in the field before the invasion of northern Syria by the Turkish Army, which began in late August.

Damascus central government forces loyal to the Bashar al-Assad regime consist of Syrian regular units, backed by Hezbollah’s Lebanese Shiite militias, Iranian military advisers and the Russian armed forces. They controlled about a third of the country, in particular the western region near the coast, the north, and the border with Lebanon to the south.

The Russian forces are mainly located within the two historic Tartus and Latakia military bases, an aircraft component hosted at Bassel al-Assad airport. Armored infantry and Russian artillery units are also located in Damascus, Hama and Homs.

The northern border from the eastern border with Turkey and Iraq to the Mediterranean was in fact completely under the control of Syrian Kurdish militias, with the exception of the province of Aleppo under the Islamic State.

The Islamic State presents itself as a force distributed in the central and eastern regions of the country, controlling the road that from Aleppo reaches the Iraqi border and continues to Mosul. The area between Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor is the heart of Syria’s oil production system, where the Islamic State has managed to maintain some deposits working, subsequently selling oil through a secret land transport network.

Aleppo is also a strategic stronghold for the Islamic State, making it the only access to the north through Turkey for supplies and traffic managed by ISIS.

The United States is engaged in the search for a mediation that separates Jabhat al-Nusra’s interests from those of Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, among Al-Qaida’s jihadist forces, in order to incorporate the latter two among the “moderate” opposition forces, “interlocutors” of the Western international community.

After the coup attempt in mid-July 2016, Ankara’s government sought to re-align with Russia. It offered cessation of support for the rebels and the retention of Assad in power. In return, it got the green light to invading Syria in a strip of about twenty kilometers. At the end of August, the Turkish Army attacked without encountering resistance. Turkey ordered the Kurdish militia to abandon the territories east of the Euphrates as the Turkish-supported rebels advanced south and collided with the Kurdish forces.

Turkey’s priority therefore seems to have gone from deposing Assad to ward off the birth of a Kurdish autonomous entity.

The comrade finally pointed out that in mid-August a high-level Chinese military delegation had been received in Damascus, thus sanctioning a collaboration between the two States and the two armies.

Germany 1919-1923
Between Social‑Democracy and Communism

Since the revolutionary failure in Germany in the years 1919-1923 was the decisive factor behind the defeat of the entire Western proletariat and ended the possibility of extending the revolution from Russia to Europe, which was to be followed by a titanic victory of communism around the world, the party felt it was necessary to resume its study of the events and to draw the right lessons, from a partly negative experience, in such grave and difficult times. Such lessons will be an indispensable and sure guide for tomorrow’s revolutionaries.

The comrades who are in charge of this task have a solid basis in the many works of the party dedicated to the topic, even though we always consider them semi-finished. The intention is, on the one hand, to reiterate the conclusions reached by the party about the factors that led to the defeat, and on the other to deepen its particularly crucial aspects.

It was considered necessary first to describe how the modern bourgeois German State developed. Germany took an unusual path towards becoming one of the world’s top industrial powers, with the formation of a modern, well-organized working class. After 1848-9 the bourgeoisie, fearful of being overwhelmed by the revolutionary wave, renounced its goals. Then, in the period 1862-1871, the Prussian army and the artful politics of Bismarck created the national unitary State, the German Second Empire, with the bourgeoisie protected by the imperial bureaucracy and the Junker military caste. Under these conditions, the claim of Social Democrats and Independents in 1918 to create a bourgeois republic assumed a completely reactionary nature, unlike in Russia in February 1917.

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) grew rapidly in the fertile conditions of industrialization under the Second Empire and was properly considered the most important party within the Second International.

The failed revolution in Germany in the years 1919-1923 must above all be attributed to the counter-revolutionary character and function of the huge social-democratic movement, which was quite apparent since the vote of war credits of 1914. Two more factors should be added.

First of these was the absence until January 1919 of the Communist Party, due to the Spartacus League’s hesitation in detaching itself first from the SPD and then from the USPD (Independent SPD), in the mistaken attempt not to lose influence on the German proletariat and its large organizations, which remained under the control of social democracy.

Second, there was the serious programmatic error of believing that the working masses could rise up spontaneously without the need for party leadership. In the absence of the party and its clear political direction, the proletariat, left to the spontaneity of its anger, will inevitably be doomed to defeat and repression.

It is true that the split and the foundation of a new party cannot be decided and realized at any random moment, but it is equally true that the historical maturity that chooses the party’s programme and demands the split is not due to the contingent level of consciousness defused in the masses. Either the party is in a position to read the lesson of historical events and to draw from this the correct tactic, anticipating for itself and for the masses the future requirements of the struggle, or any spontaneous movement, however vast and well-disposed, is condemned to failure. 

In the years that followed tactical errors also contributed to the defeat, which seemed to transfer from those of the KPD to those of the Communist International, finally resulting in the degeneration of our worldwide movement. The KPD, always tied in some way to social democracy, remained convinced of the possibility of a peaceful and gradual transition to socialism and, while ready to call for strikes, was not ready to call for armed insurrection; it slipped, under the direction of the International, into the crazy tactical error of the United Front between parties and the subsequent error of the Workers’ Government. 

The extreme wings of the left are also a subject of the party’s study: drawing the negative lessons from the KAPD and the Unions, taken to extremes by Pannekoek and Gorter, is necessary for the complete renewal of revolutionary Marxism, the analysis and critique of immediatism, spontaneism, workerism, factoryism and councilism, which were cause and effect of the weakness of the proletariat in Germany. 

Thus, recalling our unfinished work, and also historical sources from the bourgeoisie and our adversaries, we will show how the position of the Italian Communist Left, immediately raised within the Third International against its erroneous tactics, with its most extreme example in Germany but repeated in situations elsewhere including in Italy – was confirmed by the events that followed. This confirmation is not historicist in intent, but is rather intended to point out false paths that must be avoided by tomorrow’s revolutionaries.

The Second Post-War Period in the United Kingdom and in Europe

The report has already been published in n. 6 of “The Communist Party“ as “The Decline of the United Kingdom, the End of its Empire in a European Context”.

The Hungarian Revolution

We started the exposition of our study on the Hungarian proletarian revolution of 1919. We began by listing the chapters: Introduction, Brief History of Hungary of the Period, The Collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Aster Revolution and the Partition of Hungary, the Soviet Republic, Betrayal by the HSDP, The Counter-revolution, and Causes of the Failure of the Hungarian Revolution.

The speaker introduced the discussion with our appeal appearing in Il Soviet of August 5, 1919, which proclaimed: “The bloody lesson of Hungary has taught the entire world proletariat that there can exist no coalition, no type of compromise with socialists so inclined to treason. The corruptable layer of opportunist leaders must be removed. New men must lead the movement. These will emerge from the working class. Because it is the latter, not its adversaries, who are destined for victory. Soviet Hungary has fallen. Long live Soviet Hungary! Long live the Hungarian Communist Party! Long live the workers’ revolution across the entire world! Long live communism!”

We then began by briefly describing what were the economic and social conditions of the Hungarians, with a proletariat, in large measure agricultural, compelled by the monarchy to live in a state of extreme poverty and slavery in the service of the landowners: aristocrats, nobles and priests, the latter possessing a good part of the land under cultivation. The ethnic minorities – Slovaks, Serbs, Germans, Ruthenians, Romanians – who comprised roughly half of the population, were subjected to an even greater oppression. 

In 1914 only 8% of the 20 million Hungarians had the right to vote; only 72% of children attended school, and of these more than 70% did not complete elementary education. The schools were mainly private and managed by the church: 80% of elementary schools and 65% of middle and higher schools. 

Industry was still under-developed but, thanks to major investment by the State and foreign capital, there was a significant increase in production over the course of a few years, even reaching 500% in some sectors. This development drew agricultural workers to the cities where they found higher wages. The number working in agriculture fell from 80% to 64.5% in the years 1870-1910, while the industrial proletariat more than doubled from 11.5% to 23.6%. On the eve of war industry was contributing 28% to national income, compared with 65% by agriculture. 

The speaker then described the development of the workers’ movement and the trade unions. These first appeared as mutual aid societies, in the framework of the law of 1872, amended in 1884, which viewed incitement to strikes as a crime and severely restricted the recognition of workers’ associations. This formally legal structure clearly served to cover the two purposes for which subscriptions were collected from members: supporting the factory movements and the financing of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party (HSDP). 

A Hungarian delegate, Kàroly Farkas, was present at the Congress of the International that took place at The Hague in 1872. He voted with the Marxist majority against the followers of Bakunin. 

The HSDP was founded in 1890. It at once embraced an alliance with the trade unions, forced as they were by the repressive laws into clandestine activity. 

From 1891 numerous uprisings burst out because of the miserable conditions under which proletarians lived in the country, peaking between 1896 and 1897. There were also many strikes in Budapest, met with bloody State repression and the deportation of some trade union leaders in the countryside, where they helped to organize the agitation by the rural proletariat. 

The Hungarian government always came down on the proletariat with a heavy hand, imprisoning the members of its young organizations and suppressing its newspapers. The development of the workers’ movement was therefore difficult and slow. At the end of the 19th century members of the various trade unions were a mere 3% of the entire industrial working class; by 1913 they totaled 110,000, representing 10 to 15% of the industrial labor force in employment.

In 1905, on the back of agrarian uprisings, three agrarian socialists were unexpectedly elected to parliament: Vòrkonyi, Mezöfi e Andios Achin. Achin was assassinated almost immediately afterwards. The HSDP, by contrast, did not succeed in getting a single delegate elected until 1914.

The speaker went on to cover a number of points, describing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the army’s defeats at the fronts; the complex events that followed the first global slaughter, with the partition of conquered territories between the victorious imperialisms; and the push towards independence of the numerous nationalities that formed the old Empire. The timid revolutionary moves of the bourgeoisie were then examined, but above all those of the urban proletariat and rural workers, brought to the point of exhaustion and starvation by the years of war and shortages. We then focused attention on the final period of the war and in particular on October 1918 and the armistice meetings at Villa Giusti, which signaled the end of the Empire.