TURIN, 2 & 3 OCTOBER, 1993 Another Highly Successful Party Reunion

On Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd October party militants gathered together in Turin for the periodic working meeting. Comrades from all sections attended although a few were unable to do so due to unforeseen difficulties.

It’s well known that the scope of these meetings is not to pass original and innovative resolutions, or to arrive at compromises between tendencies keen to «have a debate», rather their sole purpose is as instruments of synthesis and ripartition of a quietly methodical undertaking, which is non-democratic and impersonal because to do with party tasks. As the expression of a well-defined social class, the party is a current of thought and action which collectively sharpens its tools in view of an appointment with the revolution, which although not imminent is materially certain and eagerly awaited. Having banished the bourgeois craze for debates, opinions, interventions, objections and votes, it is a case of coherently interpretating the facts of the past, the key points of the emancipatory doctrine, and of correctly evaluating current social events in order to draw out their true significance. It is only through the extension of this activity, already wholly revolutionary and communist, that we can envisage the strengthening of the party within a time-frame which depends not on clever tactical manoeuvres but on the maturation of the class struggle.

After the planning meeting held on the Saturday morning, at which comrades responsible for editing the party press in various languages and those engaged in drawing up various reports could discuss their tasks, the main meeting commenced on Saturday afternoon, as usual with a co-ordinated set of reports.

First of all there was an update and explanation of the quantitative aspects of the present crisis, linked to the party’s classic work on the historic course of capitalism, with detailed charts and graphs affixed to the walls of the hall, for everyone to peruse.

Examination of the most expressive index, that of industrial production, even if limited to the three major imperial powers, was sufficient to confirm that the present crisis, not acute but prolonged, and within the context of a more extended time period, isn’t currently giving signs of ending. The tendency expressed in industrial production has ended up aligning with the other indicators traditionally described in graphic form: the cycles of crises, unemployment, foreign trade, exchange, interest rates, all conformed to the basic findings.

Capital discharges the costs of the crisis onto the world proletariat, hit by rising unemployment and the fall in real wages. The continuing crisis forces the workers to recognize the reality of their class condition and demystifies it.

There followed a brief communication from the two comrades studying Somalia’s history and its current conflicts. Reference was made to previous party studies, made between 1956 to 1991, and brief comments were made about the obvious difficulties imperialism is having heading off the various local crises, which are also due to imperialism’s numerous internal conflicts in which the Italian bourgeoisie distinguishes itself by its shameful duplicity: by day it is with the UN, by night with the factions. In conclusion the Somali national plan, which prefigures the fragmentation of seven ethnic groups into five states, was criticized too, its historical paucity evident.

The report on the crisis – now in its fourth year – in Russia recapped the stages of this «Russian 1929», economic crisis of overproduction which explodes catastrophically at a certain given level of late-capitalist maturation. The crisis, even more detrimental to institutions and society than a lost war, has seen the effective defensive mobilisation of the workers entrenched within the big enterprises. And yet there is still no sign of a general, political revival of the working class, stuck as it is between the innovators and the Stalinists, both quarrelling over who has the right to unfurl the threadbare banner of a democracy which is formally parliamentary and electoral in nature – a mere tool for fooling the oppressed class.

There followed a description of the main substance of the latest «reforms», among which the much vaunted «privatisation». We take as our premise the non-opposition of the concepts of private and public/state, inasmuch as state ownership, for the proletariat, is nothing other than the total form of private property, an absolute form within the regime of private property, and not yet its social negation, which will only come about under communism. In fact, the historical tendency to centralise production and depersonalise capital is irreversible. In Russia, what is being «split up» is what had already been split up, i.e., small businesses and housing property, not the big firms, even if these are now being mystified by becoming the legal subject of worker shareholder schemes. Different considerations apply to agriculture, with an «overdue agrarian reform» which claims to be subdividing the land by splitting up the kolkhoz and sovkhoz monopolies.

On the international level, clearly both western and eastern capitalism is incapable of unifying the European continent into a single society because of new and reinstated commercial barriers, which are ever more impenetrable for both proletarians and commodities.

The government vs. parliament conflict – amidst which Moscow’s proletarians unexpectedly exploded into revolt – is not a battle between classes or between different programmes, it is specifically merely a struggle to bolster the central state. As in the West, the protagonists of this struggle are merely Mafia-style capitalist gangs and not parties any more; the which, after years of bourgeois decadence, have been reduced to being mere demagogy and sales-talk machines.

The Russian crisis, like others around the world, is historically irresolvable and is heading towards even greater upheavals. This doesn’t exclude further fluctuations, or even an ephemeral revival. This isn’t a first wail of capitalism, finally free to be born, or to be born again after seventy years of enforced sleep; but the beginning of its senile phase where all it can hope for is a liberating deathblow from the proletariat.

In the last of the reports on Saturday, concluding our graphic series of economic-political-social models, an account was given of the Marxist approach to the notion of the state, which of course is opposed to the bourgeois and opportunist view. For Marx, the political question is central, but it derives from the necessity of economic emancipation of the working class; it is defined by economics, not aesthetics.

Marxism unmasks and repudiates the democratic forms of the bourgeois state, that aim to protect the civil rights and liberties of the individual and to guarantee the division of powers, and it prefigures a revolutionary state structured in a very different way, functional in relation not to an ideal but to its tasks. After all, the development of capitalism involved (and still involves) an evolution of the forms that its power takes.

The tasks of the proletarian dictatorship compel it to assume an anti-democratic and despotic nature which doesn’t restrict its action. It is not a «lawfully constituted» state. And yet its revolutionary provisionality is inherently part of it; its own extinction is in parallel with the weakening and dying out of the reactionary forces against which it fights on a worldwide scale. According to this perspective the revolutionary state is subordinate to the party of communism, which becomes neither a party-state, as under Stalinism, nor a state party such as exists under western democracy, both such forms being compatible with the Hegelian-bourgeois schema of the state as the «embodiment of consciousness».

We resumed again on the Sunday morning with a further chapter in the history of the Left. Continuing from the last general reunion, which covered the practical activity and internal organisation of the party in Italy in 1921/22, the report on this occasion covered the so-called ‘pacification pact’, which represented the final betrayal of the working class and the revolution by all the tendencies of opportunism. However, this pact also represented the definitive unmasking of the counter-revolutionary role not only of social democracy, but also, and above all, of so-called revolutionary maximalism, leaving the Communist Party as the one sure revolutionary reference point for a proletariat which, although defeated, was still inclined to put up a fight, still determined to respond, blow for blow, to the combined attacks of the bosses, fascists and the liberal democratic state.

The term opportunism, even if it is one still commonly used by our school, has too vague and benevolent a sense, and it is always preferable to use the word betrayal.

The signing of this notorious pact crowned the work of traitors old and new: Bonomi, expelled from the PSI by Mussolini in 1912, took part as the representative of the capitalist state; Mussolini, expelled in 1914 by the revolutionary wing of the party, took part as the head of the illegal organisation of counter-revolution; social democracy and maximalism, expelled from the Communist International in 1921, were there as guarantors of the disarmament of the working class. The one absentee, unshakeably opposed to any kind of bargaining with the class enemy, was the Communist Party of Italy.

The various contracting parties who adhered to the pacification pact were propelled by different motives, or so it appeared. The state was set on restoring normal civil competition based on class collaboration and harmony, and this it hoped to achieve by eliminating extremist illegality, whether by red or by black shirts. Fascism boasted that, by means of its direct action, it had conjured away the revolutionary danger and induced Italian socialism to abandon any dreams of insurrection forever. Socialism, for its part, trumpeted the signing of the Pacification Pact as a great Victory for gradualism and non-violence, a strategy allegedly capable of stopping the fascist hordes with moral force alone.

From a class point of view, however, all these interpretations coincided, since all were based on the hypothesis of the proletariat’s unconditional surrender. Only if such occurred, in fact, could the state resume its role of arbiter super partes, could opportunism definitively renounce extremist phraseology, and fascism dissolve its henceforth useless squads. This aspect of the problem was eminently clear to the bourgeoisie which immediately invited the Pact’s signatories to join in a united front against the Communist Party. In fact both legal and illegal repression was immediately unleashed against any classist activity, repression in which the socialist party participated with great gusto and enthusiasm. The General Confederation of Labour decreed the expulsion of communist representatives. The socialist party stood shoulder to shoulder with the fascists, acting as informers and legitimising the attacks of the squadristi «in response to awful communist violence».

Yet the socialist disarmament (certainly not applicable to the fascists) determined the rearmament of the Communist Party, stimulating a phase, without actually initiating it, of intense activity and mobilisation in all fields, an out and out offensive against conciliatory pacifism and of political and military organisation of the proletarian forces against the counterrevolutionary attack. In the same way that on the bourgeois side the bosses’ attack on working class living standards went hand-in-hand with the non-legal fascist offensive, on the communist side the party’s activity in the field of military organisation was accompanied by a vigorous campaign for a united front of trades unions. This involved an appeal to the entire working class, without distinctions of political faith, so that it form a compact front in opposition to the employers in a relentless struggle for bread and work; because the interest of every individual worker needed to become the interest of the working class as a whole.

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The result of the communist policy was the great struggles and generous battles into which the Italian proletariat entered with all of its faith, spirit of self-sacrifice and enthusiasm.

At least until August 1922 fascism remained tied to the provincial and agrarian periphery; to make a breach in the proletarian strongholds it had to rely on the assistance of the state power, but also, and above all, on the betrayal of social-democratic reformism and fake maximalist revolutionism.

There followed a brief note on the crisis in the middle-east. The Palestinian question is unresolvable and the recent peace pact confirms it. As much can be said of many of the quarrels which arise between nations or in order to reinforce national unity in Africa, same as in the Middle East. In fact no one questions the boundaries drawn up by colonialism: these constitute a real entangling net, causing division and impeding any political and economic progress. Gaza and Jericho are just extreme examples of it. The agreement only goes so far as to constitute a mixed Jewish-Palestinian police force, for the purpose of containing the revolt of the extremely desperate and poverty-stricken proletarians of Gaza and the territories.

Then, the comrade who is gathering material for the next publication in the party series «Texts of the Left», which will be dedicated to writings on the theme of the theory of knowledge, read out a summary of what will be included, justifying the criteria for the choice of texts, their order and the way they will be presented. As a matter of course this volume will include party texts written over a period which extends from 1949 through to more recent years.

The reunion drew to a close on Sunday afternoon, with the usual report on union activity. Set in the context of a continuity of positions and battle experience which extends over decades, these contributions to the store of party experience are clearly of importance. The watchword of rebuilding trade union organisations destined eventually to join together in a single red union of all categories corresponds not only to objective needs but is reciprocated in some tendencies expressed by the workers too. Without neglecting to take the party’s message wherever workers are gathered, it is into those settings (where the goal is contingent or even inspired by ideologies which are alien to us and referred to as «self-organisation”) that we bring leadership and the material contribution of commitment. In these situations we find ourselves facing the difficulties of a movement which seems to be starting almost from nothing again, and which will have to recover its class principles (even the most simple ones) by engaging in struggle and deriving the necessary experience. In such a «school of struggle», the blows dealt by the employers to past illusions are of great help. From amongst the many contenders who appear on this terrain, the genuine class party will be chosen. The choice will be made as the defensive actions continue to mount up, becoming ever wider and more co-ordinated, until the day of the supreme insurrectional offensive. That will be the moment when the class is at its most receptive, acting on the basis of the directives of its own party, and on the basis of those directives alone.