Introduction to “The Italian Left: On the Line of Lenin and the First Two Congresses of the Third International”

Thirty four years ago, in the October issue of our Italian paper, Il Partito, we wrote: “If seventy years after the revolution we refer back to October, it is not to commemorate a past event, but to draw certainty in the future. Opportunist traitors believe that October is dead and buried, our bourgeois enemies think they have eliminated it; but the world proletariat, once they have reappropriated the lessons of October, will wipe the smiles off their faces.” (II Partito Comunista, no. 158/1987)

Today, as the logical consequence of more than ninety five years of counter-revolution, it might even appear, that the crown of theoretical victory should really belong to our class enemies, and that the doctrine of revolutionary Marxism should, at best, be stowed away in the attic of history once and for all.

Over this long arc of time, the bourgeois counter-revolution has obtained real, major victories, and all the while, they have been unconditionally sustained by social-democracy and traitors to communism. After the Russian Revolution broke out, it only took a few years before the international bourgeoisie was able to recover their class unity, and thereby halt the Red Sea which threatened to engulf the capitalist regimes of Central and Western Europe.

Even in proletarian Russia, the interpretation given to October by the western chauvinists began to make headway, and finally gained the upper hand. What had happened, according to then, was due exclusively to the “special” conditions found in Russia. With such a premise as its point of departure, Stalinism could claim to be able to construct a Russian socialist society, confined within the borders of the national territory, which both transcended and was able to do without an international proletarian revolution. It wouldn’t be long before Western workers, rather than being asked to support the October Revolution and free themselves from the oppressive yoke of capital, would find they were being asked to do exactly the opposite: to support capitalism and struggle to uphold democratic institutions. And as far as workers in the USSR was concerned, all that was required was that they just express their solidarity with the Russian State. The upshot of this would be that the bourgeoisie of every continent was allowed to marshal a proletariat deprived of revolutionary guidance, and hurl it from 1939 to 1945 into a generalized slaughter – the sole aim of which was to breathe life back into the capitalist system of production.

From the end of the Second Imperialist War onwards, every last trace of an international character has been definitively erased from the Russian State: no connexion remains, not even purely sentimental. No longer does it ask for the sympathy of the international proletariat and the people oppressed by imperialist domination, instead the “Socialist camp” now appears on the world stage with the crazy, though inevitable, ambition of competing on equal terms with the “Western World.”

In the Russia of today, one further step (the last) is being taken. Now things have sunk to the level where even the petty-bourgeois notion of “Socialism in one country” is giving way to the most vulgar bourgeois liberalism; a perspective which isn’t the least concerned with socialist questions, but restricts itself to simply pontificating about the necessity of profit and free initiative.

Even back in 1953, we predicted that the Stalinist counter-revolution would turn out in this way, so this latest travesty causes no vacillation on our part but serves rather to confirm long held convictions of ours. “In our party text Dialogue with Stalin we foresaw that eventually it would be confessed that two key links had been definitively broken: that between the Russian system of production and Socialism, and that between the politics of the Russian State and the struggle of the working class of all States against the world capitalist formation…A full confession will be made one day…the confessors will confess.” (Dialogue with the Dead)

The counter-revolution, therefore, managed to crush the Red October, made the ex-communist parties serve its interests, and reduced the proletariat of the entire world to a state of prostration like never before. The counter-revolution has done all that, and yet it hasn’t managed to prevent capitalism accumulating a large quantity of that explosive material that will give rise to a more potent rebirth of proletarian action in the future; and thereby putting on the agenda the question of the one possible solution: the communist revolution.

Capitalism will always be incapable of providing bread and peace to those it exploits; to those whose sweat and blood it absorbs with ever greater avidity in its thirst for surplus-value. With this being the material foundation, the class struggle must inevitably arise on a planetary scale; and when it does, the proletariat will accept that supreme challenge of combat or death.

Both the revolutionary class party and the proletariat must therefore treasure the teachings of October, derived both from its victory and its defeat, and also the incessant battle sustained by the Italian Left to safeguard the Marxist programme, doctrine and tactics against the degeneration which triumphed in the Comintern.

This work on the history of the Left and the Comintern, which we will be publishing over the next few issues, has precisely such an aim.