GM 152: The Convergence of the Party’s Collective Work in the Periodical International Meeting

The Party’s 152nd General Meeting (since 1973), was held in Florence on May 24th and 25th.

Comrades from various European countries, the U.S., and Australia participated in the meeting. It was the most international meeting held to date.

Many other comrades and sympathizers from various other countries joined online.

The meeting was therefore very successful, both in camaraderie that permeated it and for the quality of the reports presented.

Below are the summaries of the works, which will be duly published through our press organs in full.

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The Course of Global Capitalism

The course of capitalism is necessarily chaotic and catastrophic.

As the crisis of overproduction deepens, precarity grows. This escalation makes a trade war inevitable, which will then spill over into another great conflict. This can only be avoided when the proletariat overthrows this process through international revolution.

In this latest report, we highlight these increasingly evident and catastrophic imbalances. On the one hand we record trade surpluses, on the other, enormous deficits. In the same way, entire regions, once prosperous, are turning into industrial deserts, leaving the population impoverished and insecure.

Simultaneously, corporate and national debt -even household debt- is growing more and more, so much so the situation is no longer sustainable. As the old imperialist states decline, new ones emerge, altering inter-imperialist relations and exacerbating tensions between states.

This is the path of capital that we have tried to illustrate in the report presented at the General Meeting, with extensive documentation of statistical data.

The Function of the Center in the Tradition of the Left

The series of reports on the function of the Center continues. We once again draw from various texts and the Unitary and Invariant Body of Party Theses.

Let us briefly clarify. In all our works, we constantly emphasize the importance of never abandoning, even for a moment, the internal way of life and the structural management of organization (even under the risk of triggering a deadly spiral).

Our admittedly small nucleus of fighters is the anticipation of communist society. Not as a paragon or aesthetic fact, but as an operative and recognizable entity in its way of being.

The Party knows what communism is, so it must apply the corresponding communist method within itself.

As is well known, the Communist International adopted democratic centralism as the criterion for the functioning of its national sections. Our current countered with organic centralism. An adjective that does not mean that each militant can arbitrarily interpret the party’s provisions; or that the party is structured without a hierarchy and that, in this hierarchy, those at the top can just as arbitrarily issue orders, suppress, and condemn.

The problem of discipline, on the other hand, should not be posed as the starting point, as the product of a beautiful statutory plan. Rather as the result of the consciousness of the proletarian vanguard, its ability to connect with the great masses of workers, the correctness of its strategy, and its political tactics.

Thus, organizational discipline is the result of the Party’s ability to move based on theory and in full fidelity to it, of its capacity to intervene in the real struggle of the working masses for their material needs, in with the right strategy and tactics.

Who decides?

Who «commands»?

Here is the «decisive» question that we have been hearing from the now parched democratic throats for a century.

The riddle resolves itself precisely by immersing oneself in the real life of the Communist Party, and this party alone: It is the unified body of the Party that sets and follows its path; and in it «no one commands and everyone is commanded.» It isn’t to say there are no orders. Rather they coincide with the natural way of moving and acting of the party, regardless who gives them.

But if the unity of doctrine, program, and tactics is broken, then everything collapses, and Stalinism becomes logically and historically inevitable. Evident in the ruinous subordination to the false and deceitful mechanism of democratic consultation becomes logically and historically justified.

The link between the Party base and the center therefore has a dialectical form.

If the Party exercises the dictatorship of the class in the State, and against the classes which the State is belligerent, there is no dictatorship of the center of the party over the base.

The Labor Movement in France

After emphasizing the importance of the party’s union activities, the first part of the presentation focuses on the general characteristics of particular European unionisms.

Firstly, a distinction was made between the economic organizations, aimed to defend the living and working conditions of the 19th century proletariat: The first concerns mutual aid organizations for workers (illness, accidents, death) which the bourgeoisie wanted to control and which also included the creation of cooperatives. The second being the struggle and negotiation of worker organizations.

The report then examined the economic and social situation of the main European countries. Covering the importance of developed and centralized industry, as in Great Britain and Germany. Whereas in France, the persistence of a large craft sector led to the prevalence of anarchic concepts. Revolutionary syndicalism is one of them, that, inherently hostile to cooperativism, we consider a form of bourgeois collaboration.

The presentation concludes with the distinction of four types of labor unionism:

British trade unionism, which was born and remained collaborative; German trade unionism, which was born socialist but evolved towards reformism from the end of the 19th century; French trade unionism, which was marked from the beginning by the anarchist movement and diverged from Marxism, where the party-union relationship was confrontational; and finally communist trade unionism, which emerged from the Russian Revolution of 1917 and was characterized by an organic link between trade unions and the revolutionary party.

The History of the Party

The Italians are not, as someone once defined them, the «people of heroes, saints, poets, navigators». The Italians are a people of emigrants.

In one hundred years, more than 26 million Italians had left the «homeland,» forced by poverty, hunger, and driven by the hope of a better future.

With the Fascism coming to power, this economic migratory wave was joined and intertwined with a policy that concerned those masses of proletarians, especially communists, who had distinguished themselves in the open struggle against the reaction.

From a legal standpoint, Mussolini’s government had not issued any provisions that would prevent the Communist Party from existing and functioning.

However, the expression that the communists would be left with only one alternative, «either all in jail or all in Russia,» was soon widely put into practice.

In fact, already in early 1923, searches and arrests of communists began to become more frequent.

The arrest of the party leaders, like that of thousands of communists throughout Italy, was motivated by the publication of a Manifesto against fascism signed by the two internationals in Moscow.

The truly curious fact was that, on February 6th, the entire Italian press, including «Popolo d’Italia,» the official voice of fascism, reproduced the incriminating manifesto in full, giving it such widespread distribution that no other document from the I.C. would have ever had.

We said in a party report to the International:

«The government neither disarms nor mitigates its offensive.

There are more than 5,000 communists in Italian prisons, in addition to thousands of other subversives and partyless workers.

The mass arrests continue without respite.

Fascism aims to spread despair and distrust in the Communist Party by making evident its inability to materially assist those who are members and fight for it.”

(February 13th, 1923)

The letter continued by appealing for international solidarity to address the party’s difficulties, especially financial ones, to provide at least some assistance to the arrested comrades and their families.

More than natural, therefore, given the described situation, thousands of communists fled Italy to escape repression and to save their lives.

Consequently, our party faced the immediate problem of saving the organization from its dissolution and ensuring that the comrades who had to leave Italy did not abandon the party, and finally keeping the inevitable opportunists at bay.

In letters sent to the sibling parties of Europe, they were asked «to promote the application of the rules we have given and will give regarding the organization of refugee communists and the stateless.»

Most of the political emigrants headed towards France since there was already a large and established Italian emigration there due to migratory flows that had begun even in previous centuries.

Abroad, Italian proletarians had to work hard to earn a minimum to live, mostly leading a life as illegal immigrants, harassed by employers, persecuted by the police.

In the land of France, the Italian proletarians distinguished themselves for their political and trade union activities.

Over 5,000 were PCF members. We must highlight that they were comrades adhering to the Italian Left’s approach.

In previous reports, we have seen how the Italian Stalinists exerted constant pressure on the International to identify and immediately expel members of the Communist Left.

The Left’s position is that one does not leave the party, but stays to fight against every type of opportunistic deviation.

The report then examined what was the first attempt to establish, within Italian emigration, an autonomous communist organization, the «Réveil Communiste» group.

The lack of theoretical clarity and the desire to «do something» led that small group to quickly slide from a generic appeal to the Communist Left to the confusion and immediatism of both Korsch and the KAPD.

The work will continue following the course of that «Faction» which, amidst the storm of counter-revolution, still managed to never lower the flag of revolutionary communism.

We will continue in the next issue.