[GM109] A Determined Party Meeting

Florence, 22 and 23rd January 2011

As previously agreed, the party general meeting convoked by the centre was held in Florence the 22nd and 23rd of January, with representatives from most of our groups managing to attend. As usual the Friday evening and Saturday morning were dedicated to the organisational side of the meeting, conducted, as is our wont, on the basis of an exhaustive and detailed agenda prepared by the centre in which every aspect of our activity is taken into account, and the best way of moving everything forward is indicated. The goal is to amalgamate our forces around the long tradition of left communism, ensuring we remain in perfect uniformity with it both in terms of what we say and how we say it.

We updated our schedule of publications in the various languages, and discussed planned interventions outside the party, particularly important being those within the trade union movement,where the party must present itself with clear and unequivocal directives.

On the Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning we moved on to the exposition of the reports of the working groups, which we provide short summaries of here. They are “explorations” into the past and the present by which we aim to discern the future, victorious, course of the world proletarian class.

The energy the party dedicates to studying Marxist theory and examining the ups and downs of the workers’ movement is not directed towards discovering new and unsuspected historical roads, or concocting new, original ways of interpreting history. On the contrary, we can say that our ambition, historic potential and maximum satisfaction is to attain a collective knowledge of what our movement has stated already, something far from banal or obvious, and to assimilate it to the point we can utilize it without making any serious mistakes. That is why the jitteriness of those who feel compelled to come up with something new all the time makes us smile. But if such a mania for the new were to become a general approach and were taken seriously, it would eventually disarm the party by destroying its faith in itself and in its formidable arsenal of distilled historical experience; it would be left confused and intimidated by such “ideological terrorism”. This is because we are a party fighting a difficult battle, and not a study centre, which is motivated by entirely different aims and objectives.

And yet the party has – indeed it has to have – a busy, vibrant and effective “study centre” of its own; one which requires both profound knowledge, and a capacity to use our irreverent, inexhaustable, informal, but highly resilient, communist dialectic.

Course of the Global Economy – The Revolt in Tunisia – The Military Question (the Crimean War) – The 3rd Volume of Capital – Trade Union Activity – Communism as the Historical Negation of Democracy