Reunion Report – Genoa, 26-27 May 2001

We held our regular party reunion in Genoa during 26 and 27 May attended by an ample representation of our sections.

As always the Saturday morning session was dedicated to a unitary outline of the work that tied in different contributions of the work of the party, in a continual process of recapitulation of the programmatic work. This involves both maintenance of and training in the use of these doctrinal weapons, along with their verification in their interpretation of current events.

This of necessity takes place in a fraternal party environment that embraces the entire capabilities of each in a continuous process that is above individuals and generations of militants.

Here we give a first concise version of these reports, which develops in different directions from our bastion of the original Marxist science.

The complete text of these reports will be published in the next issue of Comunismo.
 

The Complex Dialectic between Party and Class

The first report presented an extended examination of how Marxism approaches the dialectical relationship between party and class, with extensive references to theses and writings of the Left spanning the period from the 1920s right through to the theses of 1965.

The distinction between party and class movement goes back to the beginnings of the communist Marxist movement. The party is the consciousness of the class, it understands for it as well as foreseeing the future. In the party, which spans generations, a wealth of doctrine has accumulated, which it would be impossible to find in individual members of the class.

The class movement instead is determined by material, economic necessity, by being constantly forced to defend itself. This uneliminatable anti-bosses movement arises from the sufferings of individual workers, and of the class as a whole, hence their organising into trade unions.

The function of the party is that of opposing the influence of the parties of the enemy class, on individual members of the class and on its organizations. This intervention of the party is not confined to an educational role regarding the masses, as we are aware that the party will stay a minority of the class up to and including the fight for, and winning, the revolution.

The party develops its difficult doctrinal propaganda towards individual workers with the goal of recruitment of militants, but it understands that the class as a whole will be forced to go on to the ground of the revolution, not for having itself knowing why, but for the pressing necessities of its immediate struggles.

The revolution will take place, from the point of view of the workers, not out of belief of necessity for the final goal, but as a coherent continuation of the defensive actions, with the methods indicated by the communists.

The reporter then introduced a chart that represents this process, known as the reversal of the praxis.

On the vertical towards the top there is the action of material determinations that move in the sequence, both for individuals and the class: physiological needs – immediate interests – will – action – consciousness.

On the horizontal from the right to the left is the intervention, first on individuals then in due course on the class, of the influence of conservation, which is realized on all planes, of consciousness, of will and of active forces.

Also for the counter-revolutionary parties come first action, then will, finally science.

On the oblique plane lies the mechanics of the historical formation of the party, the synthesis of centuries-old as well as of present-day interests, of struggles, and of class will.

Finally, on the horizontal from left to right, the intervention of the revolutionary party, turned to the class and its individual members, that equally develops on the three planes of the propaganda of the doctrine, of the tactical choices, and of the direction of the action.

For the party only praxis is reverted, as activity and will derive from the doctrine.
 

Genetic Manipulation

The second report examined the conflict over the techniques of the manipulation of the living, object of big expectations on the part of the bourgeoisie, with an expectation of profits in mind, naturally, and not really for the benefit of humanity.

Apart from the impressive publicity campaign they all involve themselves in, from the media to politicians, from governmental institutions to researchers, all of them on the payroll of the big pharmaceutical, chemicals and seed-production multinationals, the report confirmed that the hypocritical enthusiasm for the anticipated miracles of science has been aroused from none other than the expectation of lucrative business.

The advantages for humans, if there are any, are incidental while modern biotechnology involves, beyond some already ascertained damages, notable risks for the six billion beings of our kind. But for the gentlemen of profit we are only a market place in which to get rich.

The report described the principal of these innovative techniques, and their effects on the environment, on health, and on agriculture.

The result is that the manufacturing firms don’t have any scruples of any kind (and none is expected) when they launch and market any new products, without being in the least interested in any negative consequences.

This is made possible through obliging, toothless legislation, as well as barely legal activities, through which they seek to impose their commodities.

By now there are many examples of the cynical deeds of the multinationals.

An organic society, which is communist, would recommend a moratorium of many decades in the use of almost all these new techniques, waiting instead for reliable results and information for such experimentation.

But for the bourgeoisie this is a struggle that it conducts against all mankind, in its desperate attempt at survival by maintaining acceptable profit levels.

Which, despite one infamy after another, cannot but fatally decline, thus announcing the death of this system of production.

In the sacred name of profit, at any cost, overcoming all obstacles that present themselves,

The left-wing intelligentsia, well aware of these dangers, as a rule keeps silent, happy with the handouts they get in various ways from the bourgeoisie.

Those who do speak denounce dangers, but as the sole remedy they ask for the slowing down of its pace, as if the economically anarchical bourgeois were able to control themselves in front of perspectives of rich profits. Or they suggest Arcadian alternatives, visionary and cowardly, easily crushed by even superficial criticisms.

The report ended recalling that the revolutionary proletariat, and therefore its party, is not against science and progress; we have at the centre of our programme the attainment of a harmonious relationship among men, and between men and nature.

For this purpose we won’t hesitate to build and to destroy. We will know how to, according to human needs, “progress” (and “regress”) technology. We will know how to protect or alter nature, insofar as it will be necessary or wise to do so.

The modern myth of “development” will have no purpose, as this only means exponential accumulation of profit; the very word of “profit” will not be needed in a society which will base its options on the results they will have, not on business dividends, but on the life of the people who will live in the centuries and millennia to come.
 

Characteristics of the Proletarian State

A third report by a young comrade illustrated by a robust outline a study of the formulation of the characteristics of the future proletarian State, which won’t be a national state.

The report began with the birth, evolution and fall of the political superstructure of the precapitalist systems, and then passed to the French revolution and on to the birth of the modern national State, which is bourgeois.

In the revolts of the 1848 the proletariat, once constituted as a separate class against Capital, and constituted into a party and which tried to accomplish the crushing of bourgeois order, but without a precise plan and a theoretical outlook.

The Paris Commune of the 1871 was the first example of a proletarian state in its embryonic form, but only with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was the first vast proletarian state constituted.

The future socialist revolution will use the instrument of the proletarian State, with its definite characteristics and for its purposes, which will result in its of withering away as a political organism, that is when communist society is established.
 

Union Activity

For the last session on Saturday an account of the union activity of the party was given, particularly among the train drivers organized in the CoMU and the public sector workers in the RdB.

About the first, whose congress at Rimini had just ended, the character of a craft union was confirmed.

Although subjected to heavy pressure by the quite unfavourable external environment, this union keeps its autonomy from both the bosses and the State, and does not betray the resoluteness of its members (the base) to fight.

Among the public sector workers the force is instead notably small, and “rank and file” unions lack such a “base”; they at times have difficulty in merely giving themselves an out and out union type perspective.

In the absence of a push from the workers (the base) to which to respond, the leadership, of all kinds of political affiliations from Rifondazione to Autonomia, however not proletarian, only succeed in not just averting struggles, but even to prevent combines at the base being created and sustained.

An indicative example of this attitude is the calling, absurd due to the present force relationships, of a “general strike” on July 20, for the adhesion to the interclassist demonstration of the Genoa Global Forum. The particular attitudes of this mob are therefore imposed on the workers movement. To characterize it politically, they say, is to impose an ideological “left wing” conditioning to the newborn unions, transforming them into mere appendages of the parties which control them.

It is not by chance that the workers were invited to strike and are sent to demonstrate in Genoa without any of its own platform of demands, but with the sole watchword of an incomprehensible, but certainly reactionary, anti-globalisation”.
 

“New Economy” and class Perspectives

We started the Sunday morning session with a report on the present-day myths of the “new economy”.

If anxiety is the feeling, which overwhelms the middle class (which has been described as “the anxious class”), then patience can characterize the proletariat, the last class in history, which has the task of putting an end to class society.

The so-called new economy tries to reinvent itself, but it can’t ever demolish the law of the tendency of declining rate of profit; the middle class therefore gets excited and run amok in all directions, proposing various alliances, as always, oscillating obscenely between populism and liberalism.

We prophesied a long time ago that the economic carnage of the middle classes will open the road for the seizure of the power on the part of the proletariat. But this is on the condition that the workers won’t believe that they will only have to watch, or go along with these middle classes; above all they can’t avoid forming economic organisms for the defense of wages, as an elementary condition for reuniting with its historic and formal Party.

They all like to rely on the great possibilities of the economy based on information technology, communications and other virtual “means”; but when it comes to big figures they must admit that it is not sufficient to subdue the spectre of “communism”, even after they have talked big about wiping it out of history.

Certainly, fake socialism, which opportunists have presented as “real”, has now collapsed, as also has the “Russia myth” collapsed, an event we foresaw as far back as 70 years ago.

Capital can’t do without the labour of workers, even when, statistically speaking, it appears that office workers are displacing shop floor workers.

This is the situation in the metropolitan countries, extensively deceived by crumbs and by “superfluous” commodities; but meanwhile for the proletarians, on the world scale, the situation is increasingly bad.

They speak (and it sounds like a threat) of two billion outcasts, condemned to poverty, by the unfair conditions of globalization development.

Not a word, of course, about the imperialism of the East and of the West, according to Lenin’s teachings, which is for them an obsolete concept, that they would like to erase forever.

But we, being patient, develop our work.
 

The Proletariat in Germany under the Nazis

The last report recalled how the Marxist party always considered the central European area, and especially Germany and its proletariat, as the strategic hinge of the revolutionary struggle for world power, and its commitment for the defense of the integrity of this section of the world working class.

After having been betrayed by its leaders, both social-democratic and stalinist, massacred first by the hitlerites, then by allied “liberators”, the German proletarians have since then suffered the constantly repeated accusation of complicity with its Nazi executioners.

The work aims at corroborating three theorems of the party’s theoretical analysis, already expressed before and during the Second World War, and fully confirmed from the following historic development:

1. The imperialisms that defeated Nazism have eventually realized their plans on a world scale;
2. Such plans could only have been realized thanks to the physical extermination of the German and Russian working classes in the course of the war, a plan of real “final solution” towards the communist Revolution, which in those two countries had dared to “assault the Heavens”;
3. The German working class was the first victim of Nazi violence, a work of antiproletarian repression that continued with the military occupation, both from the west and from the east.

The speaker then made reference to, and read excerpts from, party texts on the German question from 1918 to 1993.