The attempt by American imperialism to both mire Russia in a brutal military clash in Ukraine and bend it economically with sanctions has clashed with the harsh reality of a war that Russia is winning on the ground. This has led to a prevailing conviction in Washington of the need to scale back military and financial commitments on the Ukrainian front, in order to shift focus—and resources—towards the Asian front against Chinese imperialism.
A potential agreement between the Americans and Russians is being obstructed—albeit with varying degrees—by the Europeans, who remain aligned with the earlier strategy dictated by the old Biden administration. That is, to continue the war until Russia’s defeat.
This strategy took root in Europe even if against the interests of European states themselves. That was the case for Germany in particular, which had seen its powerful industry thrive partly thanks to access to low-cost energy resources from Russia.
European bourgeois are now facing the prospect of an agreement with Moscow that, given Russia’s military dominance in Ukraine, would resemble an outright “surrender”. As such, the former—already economically defeated since they had to renounce the cheap Russian energy in favor of other, more expensive sources—have no other option but to press on with the war against Russia. The illusion they chase in an old one: militarily defeat Russia in order to plunder its wealth and invade the Eastern markets.
The First “Radiant Days”
In the current phase of the Russia-Ukraine war, after the Americans have started to pull out of the conflict, it has mainly been the Europeans pushing Ukrainians to die on the battlefield. Zelensky’s attitude reflects nothing more than the Europeans’ opposition to a deal with Russia.
Ukraine—which has thus far been used and allowed itself to be used in this war—now stands on the verge of being abandoned by the Americans, clinging desperately to the fragile hand extended by the Europeans.
The risk facing Kyiv and other European capitals is significant, given the real possibility of a collapse of Ukraine’s internal front.
This clearly illustrates that, in imperialist wars, the true enemy of any bourgeois state is not so much the army of the opposing country, but its own proletariat—just as in October 1917, during the height of World War I, when the war between states was turned into the class war that lead to the overthrow of bourgeois power.
The Ukrainian state apparatus is therefore forced to use brutal methods to subdue its own proletarians and drag them to the front. Likewise, European bourgeois find themselves fighting the internal battle against their own proletariat, asking for sacrifices to halt the “Russian aggression.”
It is no surprise then that in Europe, in support of the continuation of the war, we have already witnessed the first “radiant days,” with initial interventionist demonstrations such as the one in Rome on March 15th.
The bellicism of European states relies on the mass of petty-bourgeois parasites sustained by the spoils of imperialist plunder. For them, “less Europe” simply means a reduced capacity for European imperialisms’ to loot the rest of the world and provide for their parasitic upkeep.
The warmongering stance of the ruling classes of various European countries thus finds its foot soldiers in these petty-bourgeois, parasitic strata, who increasingly sense the decline of their social standing. They express this through “Europeanism,” the pious wish for “more Europe,” for greater political unity among EU member states—advocating different versions of the same petty-bourgeois, reactionary ideology. Moved by the fear of falling into the ranks of the proletariat, they cling to their own imperialism, revealing their inherently reactionary nature.
As demonstrated by the participation of the CGIL (Italian General Confederation of Labour) in the March 15 demonstration, opportunism also adopts the reactionary Europeanist ideology, further confirming our classical positions on imperialism, masterfully outlined by Lenin:
“Imperialism, which means the partitioning of the world, and the exploitation of other countries besides China, which means high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries, makes it economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and thereby fosters, gives shape to, and strengthens opportunism.”
The Meaning of European Rearmament
Europeanist propaganda—with its nauseating debate on a “common defense”—and the anti-Marxist position of the self-proclaimed communists who blather about a supposed common European imperialism, are once again contradicted by the reality of the European rearmament issue. After all, such rearmament can only be the rearmament of individual nation-states.
The European rearmament project was announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on March 4 and soon after accepted by the European Parliament.
This plan consists of five key points, the most important being the ability for EU member states to exclude defense spending from the deficit rules of the Stability and Growth Pact, up to 1.5% of GDP.
According to analysts, this exemption could result in €200-250 billion per year in defense investments, potentially reaching €650 billion over four years, plus €150 billion in EU funding. Military spending as a percentage of GDP would rise from the current 1.9% to 3% by 2028.
It is clear that this EU-conceived rearmament plan remains confined within the national borders of a politically divided Europe.
That is, the European states will rearm themselves, but each on its own.
Germany will lead the way, having immediately seized this as an opportunity to remove defense spending from the public deficit. Setting aside its much-vaunted fiscal austerity, it has outlined a rearmament plan that would allow the conversion of its crisis-hit industry to military production.
As early as March 18th, the German parliament approved a massive investment plan, including constitutional budget rule changes to facilitate rearmament and investment in defense and infrastructure.
Estimates suggest Germany could invest €1–1.5 trillion over the next decade.
This German rearmament marks the end of the post-World War II Europe as we have come to know it, as no other country could match Germany’s spending power.
A critical point must be clarified, against both Europeanist propaganda and the anti-Marxist positions of self-styled communists. The enemy the European proletariat will face—one that may wave the blue-starred EU flag today—will ultimately be the national bourgeoisies of each European country. While they may occasionally align due to coinciding interests, they may just as well turn on each other, as happened in the past century.
Nothing new for the Party, just a confirmation of our traditional assessments:
“Europe (and the world) will not truly be united until the proletarian revolution has overthrown the national states and established an international proletarian power.
Until then, all the reformist and megalomaniac propaganda for a United Europe will collide with the objective limitations and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. The solemn signatures of ambassadors and ministers will not be enough to overcome them.”
(Il Programma Comunista, no. 11 and 12, 1962)
Limits of European Militarism
The European rearmament plans will inevitably not only concern weapons but also the need for soldiers to wield them—or more bluntly, cannon fodder to send to the front.
The war in Ukraine has dispelled all theories about future wars being hyper-technological and requiring minimal manpower.
From the frontlines in Ukraine comes the clear lesson: modern war needs mass armies.
This makes the European rearmament plans look like “paper tigers”—threatening due to the massive resources allocated to weapons spending but fragile due to the lack of large numbers of men to send into battle.
A case in point is the saga of the so-called “willing”. This is the group of European countries—led by Britain and France—that want to send troops to Ukraine but cannot. That is due to the hesitancy of the rest of the EU, the predictable internal opposition that would build up as coffins return from the front, and especially the lack of preparedness to face Russia’s war machine.
European armies are small, often only tens of thousands strong, and there is no realistic prospect of significantly increasing those numbers.
Even analysts serving the bourgeoisie acknowledge the dire outlook of having to fight wars like Ukraine’s with insufficient personnel.
The threatening scenario for European imperialisms is worsened by purely demographic factors—Europe’s aging population and low birth rates—as well as moral factors, given the lack of ideological fervor to build an interventionist internal front capable of mobilizing masses of men.
Expedients seen in the Ukraine war—female conscription, recruiting prisoners and mercenaries—are unlikely to solve the issue of mass army building.
Soon, the question will arise: who will be sent to die?
The bourgeoisie and its lackeys know what’s at stake.
On one hand, the risk of becoming entangled in protracted wars without sufficient manpower; on the other, the danger of internal social upheaval in the attempt to mobilize the required forces.
Lessons from the Ukraine War
As European bourgeoisies embark on massive arms spending —costs that will be shouldered by the proletariat, worsening its living conditions— we can already see the future in the fate reserved to the Ukrainian and Russian workers sent to the slaughter in the imperialist war.
Reports from an anti-militarist group in Kharkiv noted that in late 2024, the Ukrainian army was heading toward total collapse.
This was exacerbated by the shift in U.S. policy toward halting military aid.
However, during winter, a crackdown on discipline brought the situation back under control.
The economic conditions, due to the lack of job opportunities for those who leave the army, also work against the disintegration of the Ukrainian army, forcing many of those who had left to return.
For now, the Ukrainian state manages to control the front through a combination of repression and economic pressure: on one hand, the death penalty for deserters, and on the other, hunger forcing fugitives to rejoin the army due to lack of employment.
The disobedience of entire military units in Ukraine is now a distant memory, from those early months of the war when numerous videos had circulated—recorded by those very soldiers refusing to follow orders from military commanders. And there is currently no serious threat to the regime from discontented civilians.
However, episodes of opposition to the ongoing war are not lacking. These go beyond the pattern of individual rebellion and constitute an embryonic form of organized struggle.
For example, at the end of May, in the Khmelnytskyi region, the local population opposed forced conscription by attacking and surrounding the vehicle of the recruiters who had captured a man to send him to the front.
It was the very authorities in charge of recruitment in the region who issued an unusual statement regarding the incident:
“According to available information, the vehicle was damaged, and the actions of the citizens showed signs of organized resistance to the exercise of official functions by representatives of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”
Therefore, although the Ukrainian army is in a grave situation, the state apparatus —through its organs of repression— has at least for the moment, prevented a collapse at the front. However, forcibly sending men to the front and detaining all those deemed unreliable could have far more negative repercussions than letting a few soldiers escape, potentially triggering military and civilian revolts.
Revolutionary Defeatism
From a class perspective the current situation seems to offer no concrete revolutionary way out. However, the Party of the proletariat is well aware—from the lessons learned in the fire of past class struggles—that the true limit of the current, predominant militarism lies within itself. That is the necessity of militarily organizing millions of proletarians for war aims. Yet, if organized and led by the Party, these same proletarians could turn their weapons against their own state.
Already in Anti-Dühring, Engels, analyzing the Franco-Prussian war, had impeccably formulated how militarism itself gives rise to the possibility of revolution:
“The army has become the main purpose of the state, and an end in itself; the peoples are there only to provide soldiers and feed them. Militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe. But this militarism also bears within itself the seed of its own destruction. Competition among the individual states forces them, on the one hand, to spend more money each year on the army and navy, artillery, etc., thus more and more hastening their financial collapse; and, on the other hand, to resort to universal compulsory military service more and more extensively, thus in the long run making the whole people familiar with the use of arms, and therefore enabling them at a given moment to make their will prevail against the warlords in command. And this moment will arrive as soon as the mass of the people—town and country workers and peasants—will have a will. At this point the armies of the princes become transformed into armies of the people; the machine refuses to work and militarism collapses by the dialectics of its own evolution. What the bourgeois democracy of 1848 could not accomplish, just because it was bourgeois and not proletarian, namely, to give the labouring masses a will whose content would be in accord with their class position—socialism will infallibly secure. And this will mean the bursting asunder from within of militarism and with it of all standing armies.”
We are not in the realm of the brilliant theories of our teachers here. This was the real experience of the proletariat in its struggle against the class enemy, as the events of the Franco-Prussian war—and the crushing of the Paris Commune—marked a historical lesson of fundamental importance. One that Lenin and his Party would doctrinally restore and put into practice in October.
In the fire of imperialist war, the call for defeatism was the action of all those currents in Europe that remained firmly anchored to Marxism. It found fertile ground in Russia, where desertion and organized rebellion against military commanders formed the base from which the revolutionary struggle erupted and led to the seizure of power.
While the rearmament plans of the European states define the present and future of the European proletariat, today just as in the last century, proletarians face the prospect of becoming cannon fodder in the war looming ever closer.
“The enemy is in our own country!” was the cry of the internationalists against the first world slaughter. As then, so now, that enemy is the bourgeoisie of one’s own country. Through the brutal state apparatus firmly in its hands, it keeps the proletariat subjugated, waiting to send millions of workers into the already much-foretold war.
These days, Gaza—where millions of proletarians are confined—appears before the world as a huge extermination camp. One that was conceived by American imperialism and its armed wing in the Middle East, the State of Israel—but also by Palestine’s so-called “sibling” Arab countries—to solve the so-called “Palestinian question.
Hundreds of thousands of residents are now left to starve, surviving in the rubble of destroyed cities, having lost their homes and family members. Hospitals and aid centers are nearly razed to the ground.
They move from one side of the Strip to the other, tailed by the occupying army, in search of a place of refuge and food to feed themselves.
The scarce food supplies that have been brought in from the border are being rationed and distributed under Israeli control.
However, these distribution centers have also become traps into which Palestinians are lured just to then face the army’s fire.
We have reports of dozens and dozens of desperate people being slaughtered in this way every day.
We can once again see that the massacres of civilians—planned and executed in Ukraine as well—are a natural consequence of the ongoing imperialist war. Though still fragmented today into scattered conflicts around the world, imperialist war carries the prospect of expanding in the future, involving the regions of the world’s most industrialized countries, whose population will not be spared from the massacres.
Starvation, death and destruction are looming all over Gaza—and also Ukraine. This is just a preview of what capitalism, in its imperialist phase, envisions in order to survive its crisis and then return to a new phase of accumulation, rejuvenated after the apocalypse.
Only the proletarian revolution will be able to break from this perverse cycle. Only the proletarian revolution will carry out the sentencing of this society and mode of production, which history has long since decreed.
The article that we republish below appeared in issue 100 (December 1982) of Il Partito Comunista; it referred to the split organized a few years earlier in a dirty manner, the result of a bad period of factionalism from above and political struggle within the Party.
We rightly called it a “dirty split,” because false accusations were being hurled at a group of comrades, while hiding the true intentions of what the then Center had decided to undertake: a new road, completely different from the one outlined by our doctrine and tradition.
We are republishing this article not to revisit what happened more than half a century ago; those who took responsibility for expelling a limited group of comrades caused irreparable damage, which soon led to the disintegration of a Party with a good organizational structure, one with numerous local branches and a consolidated tradition of class-based labor union action.
So, we will never feel like forgiving those who took on this responsibility, and neither shall we return to this topic.
On the other hand it is quite striking to reread this old article and realize that—with just a few words replaced—it could very well refer to the events from last year, 2024.
This is the case not only because the Party has its own continuity, but also because deviationism and opportunism are always subject to the same laws.
The main one is that the deviations that kill the Party invariably occur as a result of factionalism-from-above and political struggle.
So it is not a confrontation between openly declared positions, but an underground effort to find “trusted comrades” to rely on and use to marginalize and denigrate others.
But why do all of this?
Because of the false conviction that we could, by voluntaristic acts, force the nature of things and be able to, out of the blue, expand the Party to a world scale. A party where “the sun never sets,” like the empire of Charles V (circular dated 04/27/2023).
The simplest method to achieve this is to widen and loosen those barriers that the Party has built to protect itself from the penetration of ideologies foreign to it. This way it will become increasingly easier to enter it while bringing methods of action and behavior as well as ideological positions foreign to our tradition.
This, however, is at odds with the resistance of those comrades who oppose this slow, inexorable, and sometimes almost imperceptible departure from an established tradition.
These might be small things that, in themselves, do not represent a real deviation, but nonetheless mark a road that increasingly tends to stray from the tradition of the Communist Left.
Hence the need to undertake the same action to defeat those comrades presented as adversaries (defined, from time to time, as “factionalists,” “splitters,” “putschists,” “mutineers”): political struggle on all fronts, by any means, none excluded.
And above all, what is the issue on which the real factionalists-from-above have always imposed their claimed supremacy?
The call for discipline. Not discipline toward the Party—toward its theoretical and tactical positions—but “unconditional discipline” to the Sole International Commissioner, as the one we had always called the Center had wanted to be defined’ (party circulars of 03/04/2024; 07/03/2024).
On several occasions, some comrades—who became tired of being constantly accused of expressing mere “personal opinions”—had reminded the then-Center what discipline can be required of comrades and in what terms.
“Leader” in fact means driver.
The party leader does not have a steering wheel in their hands and the freedom to choose the angle of direction in front of them; the center is the driver of a train or a tram.
Their power lies in knowing that the track is fixed, although certainly not straight all the way; the centre knows the stations through which it passes and the destination toward which they is driving, the curves and the slopes.
“And he is certainly not the only one who knows it.
The historically plotted course does not belong to just one thinking head, but belongs to an organization which transcends individuals, above all in time, forged by living history and by a doctrine, which is (for you a tough word) codified.”
“There is no mechanical discipline that can reliably ensure that orders and instructions from above will be put into effect ‘whatever they are’.
There is however a set of orders and instructions which respond to the real origins of the movement that can guarantee maximum discipline, that is, of unitary action by the entire organization; and, conversely, there are other directives which, emanating from the Center, could compromise discipline and organizational solidity.”
“We do not see any serious problems in being exaggeratedly worried about the danger of opportunism.
Of course, criticism and alarmism for the sake of sport are highly regrettable; but even if they were, the pure product of the ruminations of a few militants rather than the precise reflection of ‘something that is not going well’ and the intuition of serious deviations in the making, it is certain that they will not be able to weaken the movement in the slightest, and will be easily overcome.
On the other hand, the danger is extremely serious if, as has unfortunately happened in many previous cases, the disease of opportunism spreads rapidly before anyone dares to sound the alarm.
Criticism without error does not cause even a thousandth of the harm caused by error without criticism.
[…]
Comrade Girone puts the question simply and clearly when he says that everything the leaders of the International say and do is a matter on which we claim the right to discuss, and to discuss means being able to question whether what has been said and done is wrong, regardless of any prerogatives attributed to groups, individuals, or parties […]”
(“The Opportunist Danger and the International” – L’Unità, September 30, 1925).
A breach of discipline—which was never disavowed by the comrades in the party’s terms of executive action—was invoked by the center. In defiance of the characteristic principles of “organic centralism,” our exclusive conception of the centralization of the party organ, those who had dared to criticize the work of the center were expelled from the party ranks.
But these are issues that the Center, having abandoned the Party tradition, can easily ignore and proceed with the final solution to any opposition: expulsion, the supposed magic cure to save the Party
So two comrades, accused of a very serious act of indiscipline, were expelled without the possibility of appeal
What was their crime?
Disobeying a central ukase [decree] by taking part in a meeting… of the Party (our Party, their Party).
Then the action did not stop, but the “cleansing” continued against all those comrades who had not shown solidarity with this disastrous decision.
The Party was violently broken up, and several comrades were lost along the way
This was the result of the actions of a Center that had long shown signs of losing its balance, but above all of the sloth of a group of comrades who, in the name of a false discipline toward a leader, whoever he may be, accepted the disintegration of the Party.
And the fact that they may not even have realized the damage they have done does not exonerate them or mitigate their guilt
* * *
Several years have passed since an article entitled “Sulla strada di sempre” (On the Same Road as Always) appeared in the first issue of the first year of this newspaper, pointing to yet another painful break in the organizational thread of the formal postwar party.
At that point, the split between the two factions that had formed within the Programma Comunista organization became definitive. One faction had been expelled, by means of a procedure never previously employed, by the other—the one conscious of having stripped the party of its honor, according to the splendid definition of the Left at the Livorno Congress of 1921. In doing so the expelling faction made use of its misunderstood and falsely applied central authority, which most of the party came to submissively accept. However, with tenacious determination and revolutionary optimism, the expelled faction stayed the course and resumed on the road it had always followed, for the reconstruction of the organ of the social revolution.
It matters little now who and why. The Party as a whole had lost its bearings, its revolutionary awareness of the right course. It was no longer able to grasp the correct stimuli that were coming, with resounding perseverance, from a minority—certainly not a faction until then!—for the purpose of the whole Party returning to the ABCs of doctrine in order to regain the energy and clarity to get back on “our” track.
The disarray had grown so vast that even those same voices shrieking about a return to the old ways had become an obstacle to the lust for political noyautage, to the wild, unrestrained frenzy of tactical scheming with the aim, or so they claimed, of finally building the “real party”—strong and unified—and breaking out of the cramped little perimeter of the organizational circle the past generation of revolutionaries had left behind.
And so hammering home our basic theses became more than a theoretical luxury. It became an annoying academic exercise which, it was said, made us lose sight of the urgency of the present and compromised the possibility of “seizing the favorable opportunity,” but was just a foolish waste of time. Under the guise of total and absolute discipline—a requirement that the faction that was later expelled had never questioned—and the hideous theorizing of political struggle within the party, the leadership was strong-arming the entire party apparatus into the abyss. However, the rest of the organization did not understand this.
“The historical dialectic leads each fighting organism to perfect its means of offense by employing the tactics possessed by the enemy.
From this it can be deduced that in the phase of armed combat the communists will have a military framing with precise patterns of hierarchies to unit paths that will ensure the best success of joint action.
This truth must not be unnecessarily mimicked in any of the party’s noncombatant activities.
The transmission of directions must be unambiguous, but this lesson of the bourgeois bureaucracy cannot make us forget how it can be corrupted and degenerated, even when adopted within workers’ organisms.
Party organicity by no means demands that every comrade see the personification of party strength in another comrade specifically designated to convey provisions that come from above, the personification of the party form.
This transmission between the molecules that make up the party organ always simultaneously has the double direction; and the dynamics of each single unit is integrated in the historical dynamics of the whole.
Abuse of organizational formalisms without a vital reason has been and will always be a defect and a suspicious and stupid danger.”
We resisted the prevailing ramshackle state of affairs with all our might. We were anxious above all not to stray an inch from the constraints of discipline, tradition, and the functional hierarchy of the party, not to mimic the feeble democratic criteria of majority and minority. We strived to remain always on the ground of organic centralism, the fundamental structure of our party organism, its way of existing, developing, and living.
Despite the declared willingness to adhere fully to the Party’s historical program, organizational constraints, the “politics first” approach within the organization, the myriad of intrigues and backroom deals, and accusations of everything and its opposite, succeeded in the villainous task of expulsion, carried out in the most trivial style of the abhorred democracy.
We were forced to accept the path that the old organization had decided to follow. They wanted a party disciplined to move with every contortion fetid, everyday life would impose a party united in following the whims of the “leaders,” with a military hierarchy, with trustees and underlings. We were an obstacle to the achievement of this supreme goal, and they managed to drive us out.
Even our theses, the living experience of revolutionary generations crystallized in definitive form—the very essence of the Party organ—clearly warn of the danger of degeneration, its causes, and its symptoms, even if they obviously do not provide any “practical” recipe for defense and cure.
“The Left hoped to be able to save the International, and its vital core rich of traditions, without organizing […] itself, as a fraction, or as a party within the party.
Nor did the Left encourage or approve the practice of individual resignations from the party or from the International, even when the displays of the rising opportunism were becoming more and more undeniable.
Nevertheless dozens of examples from previously cited texts evidence that the Left, in its underlying thinking, has always rejected elections, and voting for named comrades, or for general theses, as a means of determining choices, and believed that the road to the suppression of these means leads likewise to the abolition of another nasty aspect of politicians’ democraticism, that is, expulsions, removals, and dissolutions of local groups.
On many occasions we have openly argued that such disciplinary procedures should be used less and less, until finally they disappear altogether.
If the opposite should occur or, worse still, if these disciplinary questions are wheeled out not to safeguard sound, revolutionary principles, but rather to protect the conscious or unconscious positions of nascent opportunism, as happened in 1924, 1925, 1926, this just means that the central function has been carried out in the wrong way, which determined its loss of any influence on the base, from a disciplinary point of view; and the more that is the case, the more is phoney disciplinary rigour shamelessly praised.
It has always been a firm and consistent position of the Left that if disciplinary crises multiply and become the rule, it signifies that something in the general running of the party is not right, and the problem merits study.
Naturally we won’t repudiate ourselves by committing the infantile mistake of seeking salvation in a search for better people or in the choice of leaders and semi-leaders, all of which we hold to be part and parcel of the opportunist phenomenon, historical antagonist of the forward march of left revolutionary Marxism.
The Left staunchly defends another of Marx and Lenin’s fundamental theses, that is, a remedy for the alternations and historical crises which will inevitably effect the party that cannot be found in constitutional or organizational formulae magically endowed with the property of protecting the party against degeneration
Such a false hope is one amongst the many petty-bourgeois illusions dating back to Proudhon and which, via numerous connections, re-emerge in Italian Ordinovism, namely: that the social question can be resolved using a formula based on producers’ organizations.
Over the course of party evolution the path followed by the formal parties will undoubtedly be marked by continuous U-turns and ups and downs, and also by ruinous precipices, and will clash with the ascending path of the historical party.
Left Marxists direct their efforts towards realigning the broken curve of the contingent parties with the continuous and harmonious curve of the historical party.
This is a position of principle, but it is childish to try to transform it into an organizational recipe.
The screening of party members in the organic centralist scheme is carried out in a way we have always supported against the Moscow centrists.
The party continues to hone and refine the distinctive features of its doctrine, of its action and tactics with a unique methodology that transcends spatial and temporal boundaries
Clearly all those who are uncomfortable with these delineations can just leave.
Not even after the seizure of power has taken place can we conceive of having forced membership in our ranks; which is why organic centralism excludes terroristic pressures in the disciplinary field, which can’t help but adopt even the very language of abused bourgeois constitutional forms, such as the power of the executive power to dissolve and reassemble elective formations – all forms that for a long time we have considered obsolete, not only for the proletarian party, but even for the revolutionary and temporary State of the victorious proletariat.
The party does not have to display, to those who want to join it, any constitutional or legal plans for the future society, as such forms are only proper to class societies.
Those who, seeing the party continuing on its clear way, that we attempted to summarize in the these theses to be set out at Naples’ general meeting (July, 1965), do not yet feel up to such a historical level, know very well that they can take any other direction turning away from ours.
We do not have to take any other steps on the matter.”
These are a few scattered lines, taken for illustrative purposes from a formidable body of work providing a historical summary and guideline for action—a body of work which characterized our party in a completely original way compared to any other group or party, “close,” or “distant.” These lines already give a clear indication of the future of the formal organization when the evil plant of opportunism begins to take root, and the correct method for eradicating it becomes lost. They predict the future in case the “updaters”—even if they pay lip service to the program—grow and strengthen within the organization, taking, as it is said, “any other direction that diverges from ours.”
The secessionists of 1973 claimed that they still had in their hands the party that supported those ideas, and this was still believed by the majority of militants. They understood little of the fierce battle that was being fought on one side in order to save tradition and principles from disaster, and meekly accepted the nefarious expulsion, or worse, applauded it.
That organization believed it had strengthened itself by cutting off the part that refused to bow to intrigue, political infighting, and the tactical and programmatic compromises that were being employed to—supposedly—“maintain and increase the ranks of comrades.” That organization did not yet dare to throw away the last shred of formal loyalty to the tradition of the Left.
But the ideological and organizational compression, the political struggle between comrades, the misunderstood centralism that labels any discussion of the order or directives that seem wrong or contradictory to the theses as undisciplined and anti-centralism, were all complementary aspects to the democratic mechanism; of congresses, majorities and minorities, opposing theses according to groups and factions. They were the legacy of bourgeois structures that we wanted to have expelled forever from our organization, structured at a much higher organic level.
The expellers wanted a party that was “united by force.” They deluded themselves thinking that—with the pretense of discipline for discipline’s sake—they could maneuver their organization in the face of the effects of all the tactical expedients they had employed, dishonestly asking of the latter to break the deadlock in the class movement and expanding the party’s ranks.
They lacked the courage to go all the way and formally renounce all the theses of the Left, thus adopting an openly democratic centralist structure with room for the play of majorities and minorities. Perhaps this would have further broadened their boundaries, only at the cost of removing that useless front-page headline referring to the Left and its anti-opportunist and anti-democratic struggle.
Not doing so, while maintaining the formal top-down structure, led to further widespread splits. It led to the tragicomic point where they had the courage to publish a sort of summary of the positions of the last splinter, whom they defined as “comrades who left the party.”
As a final destination for iron-fisted centralists, it’s not bad: and the fact is that, in this case, the members of the “splinter group” were not even expelled for their positions!
But then the former expellers would have rediscovered the correct method—which we have always advocated for—namely that “those who disagree with us have no choice but to leave”!
Certainly, in a healthy party (as the Left has clearly defined) the process of eliminating foreign bodies, of those who do not feel they are “following the party on its clear path” outlined in the Theses, takes place or should take place in this organic, natural way. However the organization that the expellers of that time claimed to build has certainly not developed that kind of healthy reaction.
Instead, it is decomposing into the different factions that constituted it, now incapable of coexisting. That is because they absolutely lack a unifying programmatic cement nor are they organized in a truly democratic structure—one that has now disappeared even in the bourgeois state parties, with the possible exception of the PCI (Italian Communist Party).
The original nature on which the party was founded was completely overturned, with the most tragic symptom being the expulsion of 1973. Perhaps sooner than those expelled at the time had expected; the “strong and centralized party” had come apart, and more or less belated and ambiguous attempts at re-foundation by the various formerly united groups were waiting.
But the mock-heroic exploits of their former neighbors mean nothing to those who have remained anchored in the same old positions of the Left—except as a formidable confirmation, a living lesson for those of us who have emerged from these miseries.
Once again, the historical experience of the Party and its theoretical corpus have clearly indicated which are the causes and the consequences. Once again, it has been demonstrated that breaking with these theoretical cornerstones in practice does not lead to better organization, but corrupts and destroys the organization itself.
Beyond the daily triviality of a divisive split of a party in the “left” area, as some imbeciles might see it, what remains for us communists is the valuable confirmation of the validity of our method and the awareness of the solidity of the base on which we have rebuilt.
We settled accounts with the “expellers” once and for all in that first issue of Il Partito Comunista, and we now have nothing to do with that organization.
“The party that we are sure will rise again in a bright future will be made up of a vigorous minority of proletarians and anonymous revolutionaries. They may have different functions like the organs of a single living being, but all will be linked—at the center or at the base—in the overriding and inflexible respect of the theory; of continuity and rigor in organization; of a precise method of strategic action whose range of acceptable possibilities, inviolable by all, is drawn from the terrible historical lesson of the devastation wrought by opportunism.
In such a party—one that is truly impersonal at last—no one will be able to abuse power, precisely because of its inimitable characteristic distinguishing it in the unbroken thread that has its origin in 1848”
Capitalist overproduction is unleashing an increasingly fierce conflict among the world’s economic powers. These economic powers vie for control of markets around the world, backed by their militaries.
The United States has always based its commercial power on its imperial power, which is backed by the most powerful military in the world. However, it is more and more falling behind in its own domestic market, due to competition with goods produced elsewhere at lower costs.
They are thus forced to even formally deny the principles of vaunted “free competition” as they raise protectionist barriers through customs duties. Other powers, from China to Europe, are raising their own in response.
The trade war between states is the prelude to the outbreak of a war waged on battlefields. In these wars, powerful armies and armaments have already brought destruction and death in some regions of the world. In the Middle East: Gaza is reduced to a pile of rubble. In the very heart of Europe: Ukraine has been a battlefield and field of death for years.
Capital wouldn’t stop there in order to try to solve this impending crisis.
Even in the most industrialized world centers, Capital needs a far more extensive destruction of the productive forces it has generated, of goods and producers.
As in Ukraine and Gaza, cities and factories must be razed to the ground in the heart of the most developed countries, and the mass of proletarians must be decimated to start a new cycle of accumulation that will give capitalism new oxygen, allowing it once again to survive itself.
In all countries, the aim is to thus increase military spending. From individual outbreaks already in progress, the war will come to spread and generalize into a third world imperialist conflict.
In parallel, the trade war is fought around the world, worsening the conditions of the working classes to reduce production costs and make market goods more competitive.
This is the case for the dispossessed masses in the less developed countries, forced there to live and work in inhumane conditions. Oftentimes, they must risk their own lives and undertake the journey to join the mass of proletarians in the more industrialized countries.
These are millions of migrants, often forced to live in illegality, who are constantly threatened. When their number is considered excessive, they are hunted down, imprisoned, and deported. This is already happening in the United States, but it also looms in “civilized” and democratic Europe.
These are campaigns of terrorism against proletarians already living in wealthier countries. Thanks in part to the acquiescence and collaboration of trade unions and regime parties, these proletarians end up suffering increasingly harsh conditions of exploitation without reacting.
Workers on all sides suffer the prospect of later ending up as cannon fodder on the war fronts.
Proletarians, Comrades!
This abyss in front of us is the perspective offered by capitalist society!
This is a destiny the working class can escape from only if it finally manages to raise its head, return to the path of the all-out defense of living and working conditions, and pitting the war between states against the war between classes—all in order to achieve the revolutionary conquest of political power.
The proletariat will only be able to travel on this road if it can rebuild its economic defense bodies and regain its political leadership:
On May 16th, a strike began by train drivers of New Jersey Transit, a transportation company which operates in New Jersey and in some counties of New York and Pennsylvania. The company provides rail service for commuters in these areas.
Joining the strike for the first time in the region since 1983 were 450 workers, all members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainment (BLET)—one of the oldest trade unions in the American railway industry.
The striking train drivers sought a new collective bargaining agreement for wage equalization with drivers employed by other companies in New York City.
This demand is not new. It has been raised by NJ Transit workers since at least 2019, and it has only intensified over the past five years in response to the continued decline in real wages.
The renewal negotiations involved BLET and 14 other trade unions.
The strike ended on May 8th, following the conclusion of negotiations between union leaders and the state-owned company–much to the satisfaction of both parties and the governor of New Jersey, who had been alarmed by the “disruption” the strike had caused to the community.
Indeed, the NJ Transit President Kolluri stated:
“The deal, as the governor correctly said, was fair and fiscally responsible…”
BLET secretary Haas agreeing:
“It was definitely a feeling of success that we were able to come to terms on something that I think we both can accept…”
We communists are fully aware that compromises may arise, and at times are outright inevitable, at the end of a struggle. But they mustn’t be disguised as victories for the proletariat in struggle.
On the one hand, we applaud the class solidarity shown by the railway workers and train drivers of the Tri-State area, who from Amtrak and the Long Island Rail Road supported the NJ Transit workers. On the other, we move for the union to once again become the transmission belt between the revolutionary Party and the working class in struggle. Ceasing to be, mere “institutionalized” intermediaries between the bourgeois and proletarian classes, acting in a collaborationist manner, pursuing nothing more than the “common good,” or worse still, the “national interest.”
May the proletariat one day consign the proclamations of union bureaucrats like Haas to their rightfully miserable corner of History.
In the 1970s, the further rapprochement between all kinds of Italian trade union leaderships and the institutions—and the needs of both the capitalist companies and the state that administers their interests—continued. On the contrary, with the season of struggles being over, this process continued with the definitive consolidation of
“the dues checkoffs arrangement; the strengthening of the bureaucratic apparatus of professional trade unionists—now considering themselves officials at the service of the State receiving a regular paycheck; the implementation of police-like strike regulations; the well-established practice of all sorts of contractual or corporate dispute coming to a close only under the supervision of state ministers (in perfect fascist style); the co-optation, inside the union, of police representatives; […] accusations of terrorism and pro-terrorism against all militant workers; the formal (already a de-facto) acceptance of classic capitalist postulates such as tying the workers’ conditions to the profits of the companies; the necessity of cutting labor-power down in the factories; the increase in the plants’ runtime and the increase of the productivity of labour of which the union itself has become the guarantor; openly organizing scabs against the spontaneous strikes of the groups of workers acting outside of rigid union control.
The union structure has become increasingly rigid: closed off to workers, it is increasingly in the hands of careerist civil servants. This has made the road towards the unions’ eventual reconquest—on a class-based line—impracticable[…].
It’s more and more obvious to workers the contrast between their own vital needs—that is, defending their wages and employment—and the openly renunciatory and collaborationist attitude of the official trade unions of all colors. […] From the situation that has emerged in recent years, it is now clear—not only to us, but also to an ever wider array of workers—that no serious defense of the most basic life and work needs is possible under the protection of the current trade union centers. No action of struggle carried out consistently on the class level is possible except outside of their organizational framework. In recent years—in some sectors—the most exploited groups of workers have struggled for the first time in open contrast with the directives of the union piecards. They even managed to give rise to significant strikes and to form organisms in open contrast with the organizational structures of the unions (railway workers in 1975, hospital workers in 1978).”
It became clear that the defense of the workers’ condition could only be fulfilled outside and against the current union structures. The transition from widespread apathy to mobilization on the class struggle terrain took place in opposition to the regime union, albeit in a non-linear and even contradictory way. Steps both forward and backward were taken, and the involvement, at the local level, of even the rank and file sectors of the confederal structure was not ruled out a priori.
The hospital workers’ struggle was emblematic in this respect. The 35-day struggle at FIAT in the fall of 1980, crushed by the confederal union just as it was finally taking on the classic characteristics of a real class struggle, was certainly no less significant.
In the hospital workers’ case—a struggle that started in Tuscany and spread throughout Italy—the latter struggled on a class-based line in opposition to the confederal union organization, which took a frontal stance against the strikes. Eventually, the union managed to retake the reins of the movement, and then crushed it in the end. After negotiating and reaching an agreement with state representatives, the official unions—in the spirit of true regime unions—were falsely recognized by the bosses as representatives of the struggling workers. That was in spite of the fact that its officials were chased away and rejected by the workers every time they tried to contain the ongoing mobilization.
FIAT’s struggle, despite its spontaneous and decisive nature, did not take on an organizational form opposing the piecards, as was the case of the hospital workers or flight attendants’ struggle. The CGIL, participating in the struggle committee, managed to “ride the tiger” until the strike threatened to turn into an open clash with the police—who, on the judges’ orders, were determined to break up the picket lines by force. At that point, with the struggle confined to just one company (the unions had formed a cordon sanitaire around the struggle), the union negotiated a surrender by signing a draconian agreement. One that would pave the way for future layoffs and that was, either way, strongly contested in the factories (see the workers’ assault on the company union headquarters).
“From an immediate point of view, this points out to the proletariat the necessity of organizing independently from the present trade unions, in the perspective of reconstituting a class-based organizational network. We are aware that this is a process that can only be done by the proletariat itself. Therefore, as long as the proletariat does not take part in class struggle in a generalized and non-episodic way—and as long as the Party has but a marginal influence on it—no call for the sabotage of the current struggles can be made in the immediate future. This no matter how much these struggles are directed towards increasingly anti-worker objectives, unless we are faced with the explicit will on the part of vast strata of workers to actively rebel against such a direction. Nor can the explicit call to leave the “tricolor” (nationalistic, patriotic) unions can be made, since there is no alternative, organized “agent” today capable of catalyzing the workers’ will to struggle.
What does it mean to ‘immediately start working towards the perspective of the ex-novo rebirth of a class-based economic organization’? It certainly cannot mean passively waiting for spontaneous proletarian movements. […] Proletarian militants must therefore work to direct and, when objective conditions are met, organize workers on class-based terrain. In other words, as we have pointed out on other occasions, the Party has the task of helping concretely—by making its proletarian forces available—the workers’ tendency to organize themselves for the defense of their class interests. It has the task, during action and on the organizational level, of making available the ability of its militants to provide a direction, one that comes from having possession—which the Party and the Party only can have—of the historical background of the past experiences of proletarian struggles. At the same time, it has the task to bring consciousness to the workers about the precariousness of the struggles that are fought for exclusively economic defensive purposes, and the necessity of embracing the perspective of the revolutionary communist program as the definitive, historical solution to their condition of exploited class.
Another point to consider is union membership. In relation to—and as a consequence of—the above mentioned situation, we communists are inclined not to join the tricolor unions. This attitude does not come from reasons of principle, nor from union splitting tendencies—which have always been denied and fought by the Communist Left. It comes from a simple, practical observation. The tricolor union apparatus—in its vertical organizational structure—is now, at the top as well as at the rank-and-file level, a bureaucratized organism impervious to the internal action of a working class fraction that is autonomously organized on a class-based terrain while still adhering to the official union structures. This is because there is no longer that internal union life allowing even minimal work—of entering and influencing the rank and file—to be carried out, as the officials’ apparatus and the basic structures of the union are becoming increasingly distant from rank and file members. Under these conditions, union membership—regardless of the issue of union checkoffs—is no longer useful, as the means available for organizing the rank-and-file members become no greater than those available for organizing non-members. Thus, applying for union membership would simply amount to the financing of bodies completely subservient to the capitalist regime. However, precisely because this attitude is not motivated by reasons of principle, in some possible and specific situations—most likely at the small business level where non-membership would compromise the work of our militants in the struggle from which a positive result could follow—the question of whether applying for union membership or not will be addressed by the Party. After all, only the Party and not the individual militant is entitled to a final decision in such situations.
When it comes to factory bodies directly elected by the workers—the factory councils and the likes—the issue takes on a different character. These bodies are almost entirely controlled by the unions. Indeed, these bodies are almost entirely controlled by the unions. In large factories, they often serve as the true backbone of the union, managed jointly by the external organization. Their internal life is frequently sclerotic and apathetic, and their activity reduced to the tired ratification of decisions made by executive bodies that are themselves offshoots of the local union apparatus. Nevertheless, these structures are composed of delegates elected by the workers and keep in direct contact with them. As such, they are still susceptible to the influence of events that lead to stronger agitations and an increase of the workers’ willingness to fight. Moreover, in small and medium-sized companies—where the grip of trade union opportunism tends to be weaker—Works Councils often enjoy a degree of autonomy and are more readily permeable to class-based positions. For all these reasons, we cannot a priori exclude the possibility of engaging in propaganda and agitation within these bodies. In general—and without ruling out exceptions in particular cases—we support internal work, provided that we are elected by workers who recognize in our militant a combative figure. One prepared to fight uncompromisingly against the bosses and, as such, against the formidable barrier posed by union opportunism and collaborationism. Of course, we cannot provide a definitive list of ready-made responses for every situation on this issue. The case of militant workers elected as delegates must be rigorously assessed by the Party, and any decision must take into careful account the specific circumstances surrounding the election.
In any case, the conduct of our militant must be characterized by consistent and public disaffiliation—before the workers—from any decision taken by the Factory Council that diverges from a genuine defense of class interests. The same goes for any collaborationist, pro-company initiative framed in terms of the “proper functioning of the factory” or any acknowledgment of its productivity needs. The militant’s activity must also involve the unwavering and unambiguous denunciation of the actions and draconian agreements brokered by Factory Councils under opportunist control.”
Text No. 10 ends by indicating the future perspective in which the Party’s action will take place:
“In the imperialist phase of capitalism, the existence of ‘free’ trade unionism is no longer possible. That is, trade union organizations which—though not guided by a revolutionary line and led instead by reformist or petty-bourgeois parties—might nonetheless consistently carry out struggles on the economic front. In the imperialist era, economic struggles transform—far more rapidly than in the past—into political ones, as their very development and generalization come into direct conflict with the foundations of the capitalist regime. As a result, any trade union organization is immediately confronted with the question regarding its relation to the State. It must either accept to limit proletarian struggle within the bounds of legality—thus restricting and stifling it for the sake of preserving the existing order—or it must break through the limits of bourgeois legality and enter the revolutionary field. That entails extending, intensifying, and generalizing the workers’ struggle in defense of their living conditions.
This reality implies that all political parties and tendencies committed to the preservation of the capitalist regime are necessarily opposed to a broad and consistent emergence of the proletarian economic struggle. Only the revolutionary class Party stands as its most unwavering advocate. According to our Political Platform of 1945 the trade union function is only complete and integrated when the class political party leads the trade union organizations. There is, in fact, no other path.
The conclusion to be drawn, therefore, is not that trade unions are no longer necessary or that the trade union struggle can no longer exist. On the contrary: the proletariat will return to the struggle to defend its economic conditions, and in doing so will rebuild the forms of organization adequate to this task—the class unions. Due to the situation, these unions—by definition open to all proletarians, organizing them not on the basis of consciousness but of material necessity—will have to face two alternatives. Either to fall once again under the control and influence of the state—which is to say, under the control of opportunist, bourgeois, and petty-bourgeois parties—or to shift their action onto the terrain of illegality, submitting themselves to the only, truly illegal political direction: that of the revolutionary class party.
In our view, the existence of class unions in the imperialist era is even more vital than it may have been in earlier phases of capitalism. In the past, it was possible to divert the economic struggle of the proletariat from the goal of the ultimate revolutionary conquest—to the point of using economic struggles as an obstacle against it. In the imperialist era, this diversion is no longer possible and the transition from a class union to a red union—one influenced and led by the Party—is far more immediate. This transition must happen even at the risk of proletarian economic organizations losing their class connotations, effectively abandoning the elementary function for which they came into being.
Within the economic organizations that the working class will be compelled to recreate in its return to battle, a struggle will emerge between those seeking to confine—and therefore stifle—the action within the bounds of bourgeois legality and the directive of the Party, which, by working to extend and generalize the proletarian struggle, will pull these very organizations onto the revolutionary path.”
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.
* * *
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
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.
The conflict between India and Pakistan has its roots in the imperialist partition of the subcontinent, formalized in 1947 under retreating British imperialism.
Colonial India, unified under British rule, was broken up according to confessional criteria imposed from above, creating bourgeois states on religious lines: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.
Within this partition, the principalities recognized by the British Empire were given the “freedom” to choose which state to join.
In the case of Kashmir – with a Muslim majority but a Hindu ruler – the decision was forced: India sent troops, sanctioning annexation by military force.
Pakistan responded with war.
Since then, the region has been the epicenter of armed tensions and repression, with the civilian population crushed between two competing national bourgeoisies.
The so-called Line of Control (LoC), which emerged from the 1947-48 war, remains a de facto military frontier, unrecognized by either side.
Bourgeois nationalism was not limited to a single territory.
In 1965, Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar, attempting to foment a Muslim uprising in Kashmir.
In 1971, with the Bangladesh War, a new front opened: India supported the secession of East Pakistan, contributing to Pakistan’s defeat and the birth of a new state.
The Durand Line, drawn in 1893 by British imperialists between India and Afghanistan, represents a border that was not based on ethnic or historical grounds, but rather on the reach of British military power, dividing the Pashtun people into two entities.
The Pashtun city of Peshawar was incorporated into colonial territory, while Afghanistan lost a traditional demographic base.
Today, the Pashtun population in Pakistan exceeds that of Afghanistan, generating irredentism that claims Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan; no Afghan government, whether monarchist, republican, or Taliban, has ever accepted the Durand Line as a definitive border.
Pashtuns, Baluchis and regional complexities
Therefore, the current balance between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran is based on a temporary equilibrium, the legacy of artificial colonial borders and bourgeois states incapable of organically unifying their masses.
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province, is a hotbed of ongoing conflict.
With approximately 35 million inhabitants, mainly Pashtuns, and a poverty rate of 39%, it acts as a strategic buffer between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The socioeconomic indicators are alarming: female literacy stands at 27%, and less than half of the population has access to drinking water.
The Taliban, who returned to power after the collapse of the US occupation, represent a form of Pashtun nationalism in religious guise.
While avoiding explicit statements on ethnic unification, they maintain a structural link with the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, TTP), aimed at destabilizing Pakistani authority in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Since 2008, the latter have been classified as “terrorists” by Islamabad, but repression has not stopped the attacks.
India has historically exploited these tensions to weaken Pakistan, its strategic rival.
Since 2002, Delhi has invested more than $3 billion in Afghanistan: the Salma dam in Herat, the parliament in Kabul, and numerous roads connecting Afghanistan directly to Iran, without passing through Pakistan.
Islamabad interpreted these operations as an attempt at “strategic encirclement.”
Delhi also maintained relations with Baloch separatist groups, offering diplomatic and financial support and, according to Pakistani sources, military support as well.
China has introduced further complexity with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), part of the Belt and Road Initiative, with planned investments of $62 billion.
The port of Gwadar in Balochistan, operated by China Overseas Port Holding Company, has become the hub of the project.
For China, Pakistan’s stability is now a priority; for India, the CPEC represents a threat to its regional sovereignty.
Added to this picture is the issue of the Baloch.
Like the Pashtuns, they are a divided people: the majority live in Pakistan, a minority in Iran, and a marginal group in Afghanistan.
Pakistani Balochistan, the largest and poorest region of the country, is rife with contradictions: it has enormous mineral resources, but 63% of the population lives below the poverty line.
The main Baloch formations include the BLF (Balochistan Liberation Front), the BLA (Balochistan Liberation Army) and Jaish al-Adl on the Iranian front.
In Pakistan, Balochist militants systematically attack Chinese infrastructure and projects: since 2018, they have targeted the Chinese consulate in Karachi, the stock exchange, and convoys of Chinese technicians, forcing Beijing to review the CPEC timetable.
The nuclear threat and the balance of annihilation
The possession of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan has qualitatively changed the nature of crises in the region, introducing a deterrent factor that transforms the risk of war without eliminating it.
The nuclear tests of 1998 formalized this reality, and since then every military crisis has developed under the shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust.
India has adopted a doctrine of no first use, committing itself to using nuclear weapons only in response to an attack of the same type.
Pakistan, on the other hand, rejects this commitment in order to compensate for its conventional inferiority, keeping open the possibility of preventive use even on the battlefield.
Pakistan’s nuclear program, developed with material support from China, is based on a doctrine of all-out deterrence that includes the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, designed as weapons of war for use in limited operations.
This approach aims to neutralize India’s Cold Start strategy, which relies on rapid military intervention before international diplomacy can intervene.
The illusion of deterrence as a factor of “stability” is an aberration of imperialist propaganda.
In reality, armed capitalism knows no stability, only an unstable equilibrium based on the threat of total destruction.
The evolution of terrorist networks
Recent military operations against jihadist infrastructure in Pakistan have highlighted that the Islamic terrorist apparatus is a stable part of the Pakistani state’s economy and repressive system.
Organizations such as Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) operate in a similar way to mafias, combining legal and illegal activities.
Command is in the hands of the Azhar family.
Masood Azhar, released in 1999 after hijacking an Indian civilian aircraft, founded JeM in 2000, establishing links with the Afghan Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and sectors of Pakistani intelligence (ISI).
The group does not operate entirely underground.
It owns madrasas, training centers, real estate, front companies, newspapers, and a “humanitarian” network with Al Rahmat Trust, which is formally banned but active.
The Markaz Subhan Allah complex in Bahawalpur is an example: formally a religious school, it is in fact a JeM operational center, which doubled in size after 2022, when Pakistan was removed from the Financial Action Task Force’s gray list.
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), founded in 1990 with the support of Osama bin Laden, follows a similar pattern.
Under the cover of the charitable organization Jamaat-ud-Dawa, it runs a network of schools, clinics, and assistance centers, strengthening its social roots and continuous recruitment.
Counterinsurgency in India: privatization of repression
While analyses focus on armed groups supported by Pakistan, India has developed its own parastatal apparatus of repression, particularly evident in the fight against Maoist movements in rural and tribal areas.
The “red corridor”—a strip of territory stretching across Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh—has become a testing ground for the sophisticated and brutal privatization of state violence carried out by private militias.
Since 2005, with “Operation Green Hunt,” the Indian state has mobilised not only regular units such as the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), but has also created and financed “civilian” militias such as the Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh.
Recruited from among members of the same tribal communities, often under coercion or in exchange for economic privileges, these groups have carried out “scorched earth” operations in villages suspected of supporting the guerrillas.
Salwa Judum, declared illegal by the Supreme Court in 2011, has been replaced by new formations such as the District Reserve Group (DRG) and Battalion 241.
According to reports from human rights organizations, more than 500 villages have been forcibly evacuated and at least 50,000 Adivasis (tribal peoples) displaced.
In Chhattisgarh alone, more than 600 extrajudicial killings were documented between 2018 and 2023.
The operation aims to free up resource-rich territories for multinational mining companies, countering resistance from local peasant movements.
In recent months, there has been an intensification of the armed conflict, which has now been going on for 60 years.
This escalation has manifested itself in a large-scale military operation, which has led to the killing of the secretary general of the Maoist CPI, Nambala Keshav Rao, more than 400 rebels and the surrender of more than 700.
Internationalization of jihadism
In the context of state disintegration and imperialist realignment in Asia, the recent convergence between jihadist groups in the Indian subcontinent and global terrorist organizations reveals the construction of a transnational armed network.
In April 2025, a few days before the attack in Pahalgam, a Hamas delegation was hosted at the Markaz Subhan Allah complex in Bahawalpur, the operational center of Jaish-e-Mohammed.
The meeting was attended by members of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the head of the Pakistani government in Kashmir.
Two months earlier, in Rawalkot, a “Conference on Solidarity with Kashmir and Operation Al-Aqsa” had been attended by representatives of Hamas, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hizbul Mujahideen, and JeM.
The return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan has given new impetus to cross-border jihadism.
At least three training camps in the provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar are jointly run by Afghan Taliban and Pakistani jihadist groups, welcoming recruits of various nationalities in a sort of Islamist “reactionary international.”
BRICS and the myth of the “multipolar” alternative
The conflict between India and Pakistan exposes the internal contradictions within the BRICS+ bloc, demonstrating the limits of its claim to represent a “multipolar” alternative to the Western imperialist order.
BRICS is not an anti-imperialist front, but an inter-state cartel of imperialist powers with diverging interests.
India, a founding member of BRICS, is in a state of open war with Pakistan, a strategic ally of China, another pillar of the bloc.
This rift paralyzes any possibility of military cooperation within BRICS.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) crosses territories disputed between India and Pakistan, and any escalation puts Chinese investments at risk.
Iran has attempted to act as a mediator, but its position is weakened by China’s loyalty to Pakistan.
Russia, closer to India, maintains an ambiguous stance, calling for “restraint” and denouncing “external forces.”
The BRICS claim to represent more than 40% of the world’s population, but these figures mask the fact that demographic strength does not translate into strategic cohesion.
The Pahalgam attack and escalation
On April 22, 2025, in the tourist town of Pahalgam, in Indian Kashmir, an armed group killed 26 people—25 Indian tourists and one Nepalese citizen—in an operation planned to maximize political and psychological impact.
The attackers demanded that their victims recite the shahada or prove they were circumcised, killing those who refused.
The attack was claimed by The Resistance Front (TRF), a group that emerged in 2019 after the repeal of Article 370, which revoked Kashmir’s autonomy.
According to Indian and American sources, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is behind the TRF, supported by the Pakistani military apparatus through the ISI.
The attack showed remarkable sophistication: NATO standard weapons, synchronized movements, and encrypted communications, indicative of advanced military training.
The objective was also economic: to hit tourism, the engine of Kashmir’s capitalist normalization, given that in 2024, more than 1.8 million tourists had visited the region.
After the attack, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the army “carte blanche,” expelled Pakistani diplomats, closed the Attari border, and unilaterally suspended the Indus Water Treaty.
Pakistan responded with symmetrical measures, convening the National Command Authority, which oversees the nuclear arsenal.
Operation Sindoor and the air battle
On May 7, 2025, India launched “Operation Sindoor”—a series of air and missile strikes against nine sites in Pakistani territory identified as “terrorist infrastructure.”
The name, taken from the red powder used by married Hindu women, aims to sanctify war by merging it with religion and “national honor.”
The targets included the Sawai Nala and Syedna Belal (Muzaffarabad) camps, Gulpur and Abbas (Kotli), Barnala (Bhimber), and the strategic centers Markaz Taiba (Muridke) and Markaz Subhan (Bahawalpur).
According to official sources, the operation resulted in approximately 70 deaths among the “terrorists” and lasted less than half an hour.
Pakistan responded with Operation Bunyan Al Marsoos (“Impenetrable Wall”), claiming to have shot down five Indian fighter jets.
This was followed by the largest air battle in South Asia since the 1971 war, involving approximately 50-60 aircraft.
The Pakistani Air Force used J-10C and F-16 aircraft equipped with PL-15E missiles, capable of striking targets at a range of 145 km.
Debris from an Indian Dassault Rafale was found near Bathinda: this is the first combat loss of a Rafale in history.
The clash highlighted the dominance of Beyond Visual Range (BVR) combat and the extensive use of electronic warfare, creating what one Pakistani source described as “an electromagnetic fog of war.”
Truce and misinformation
On May 10, 2025, a ceasefire was announced with US mediation.
Donald Trump claimed credit, while Secretary of State Rubio confirmed Washington’s direct involvement, citing “credible information” about an imminent escalation.
The conflict has triggered an unprecedented disinformation war.
Footage from video games such as Arma 3 has been circulated as evidence of attacks.
Pakistan has recycled images from military exercises; India has used videos of bombings in Syria, passing them off as operations in Pakistan.
On social media, millions of users have shared manipulated content, making it impossible to distinguish fact from fiction.
Current outlook
The ceasefire has halted the acute phase of the conflict, but the underlying contradictions remain unresolved.
Kashmir, strategic corridors, ethnic-religious tensions, and regional instability continue to fuel the potential for war.
The area remains a complex theater, where jihadist militias, separatism, and arms trafficking intertwine with competing states.
The BRICS, unable to stop the conflict between two of its leading members and paralyzed by internal contradictions, has not offered a concrete alternative.
The American intervention has provided a useful pause to reorganize forces.
The proletariat, in India as in Pakistan, has no interest in these wars between national bourgeoisies.
The enemy is not the people across the border, but the ruling class at home.
The international class struggle remains the only alternative to the spiral of war and domination.
In the introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx states that “the weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” The entire Marxist theory of knowledge is contained in this single sentence.
“Indeed, no one, we think, has until now doubted that the strength of the present day movement lies in the awakening of the masses (principally, the industrial proletariat) and that its weakness lies in the lack of consciousness and initiative of the revolutionary leaders.”
For Marxists, it’s not ideas that make history. We have our own way of looking at society.
There’s a given way of managing the production and reproduction of daily life, dividing individuals into classes.
The concept of class is already an abstraction, which Marx fully defined in Capital (Vol. 3), and which we have further clarified with our texts Party and Class and Party and Class Action.
These classes, however, don’t decide to do particular things; they don’t have to be collectively conscious; they don’t have to “wake up.”
In reality, even during a revolution, the majority of revolutionary workers won’t be theoretically conscious but will instead follow the party by instinct.
In the Marxist conception, theory, historically, follows action, and action is motivated by necessity.
Every class has certain economic interests, the realization of which is incompatible and irreconcilable with those of other classes. Not only that, a class can have many competing interests within itself, and often the immediate and long-term interests of the class are in conflict.
Furthermore, a class may not be aware of its objective situation or what its economic interest truly is; and it might not conceive of a more adequate way to achieve the goal it has set for itself.
As time passes, the difference in interests and objectives between classes will inevitably lead to conflicts. This succession of conflicts does not occur individually between people, but is understood within the broader conflict between two or more classes, some more organized than others.
In these cases, classes are forced to enter into conflict with each other.
At these moments, when conflict reaches its peak, “we see consciousness in embryonic form” (What Is To Be Done?). Here, the will of a class must be exercised, and decisions must be made.
Insist or retreat? Play it safe and compromise, or risk it all and go for broke? Should one proceed with immediate interests or have the foresight to see what would be best in the long term? Does the class have the capacity to make this choice?
As Engels said in The Peasant War in Germany:
“The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over the government at a time when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the realization of the measures which that domination would imply.”
Then, and only then, can theory be a factor in the struggle; thus the existence of the party appears in its decisive importance. Real empirical evidence has shown what results stem from specific decisions and actions. This is our laboratory—real life. Here, real results can be derived from the world.
“All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”
(Theses on Feuerbach)
At the same time, it is only practical experience that guides us toward what we need to study. A real need drives us to seek a solution. An unexpected fact tells us that we need to thoroughly investigate a system. This applies to industry, mathematics, art, and above all, politics.
This theory can then be crystallized into a class party. By transmitting these lessons, the class party is able to recall events and lessons from previous centuries. But it’s not just a collection of facts, because the class party isn’t a neutral observer. The Communist Party has also crystallized the interests of its class—the ultimate interest that will end class society; it therefore represents the interests of all humanity. It develops a theory not because it’s capable of being objective, but because it’s motivated not only to identify the ultimate goal, but to realize it.
The class party is therefore able to use this theoretical knowledge to make decisions. Then, it can decide on certain actions based on the realization of these decisions. In this case, theory becomes a material force.
“We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia. In the period under discussion, the middle nineties, this doctrine not only represented the completely formulated programme of the Emancipation of Labour group, but had already won over to its side the majority of the revolutionary youth in Russia.”
Here Lenin simultaneously makes two considerations: one historical, the other practical. Historically, the proletariat could not have obtained theory from its struggle. The working class alone is not capable of discovering or elaborating communist theory. Because the very formation of the workers’ party already foreshadows a communist theory. From where could this communist theory come if not from the communist party?
Apparently from Marx and Engels. But in reality, the doctrine of the emancipation of the working class arose from a mass of historical, philosophical, and economic data, which were only waiting to be logically assembled. This was the fundamental work of Marx and Engels, a work of historical value. But Engels reminds us that others had approached modern communism, like Dietzgen, and that it was therefore a product that could not but emerge in the period when the capitalist system of production was expanding worldwide. Marx added something to the doctrine thus born, but this is not the place to discuss it.
The doctrine had to emerge from the bourgeois philosophical tradition and from intellectuals, those who possessed science—the only one, the bourgeois one. But once this theory was formed, there was no longer any need to go back and start from scratch. We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel, because we had inherited it. And from that moment on, it was simply a matter of exporting the political party to workers in other countries.
From that moment on, and subsequently, once the foundations have been laid, workers have the opportunity to acquire class consciousness, and the working class can simply experience the living doctrine of Marxism. We would never say that a proletarian lacks the tools to be a Marxist, nor do we think Lenin ever intended for the working class to remain outside its party. Anyone who dares to call us (and, by extension, Lenin) “educationists” is not worthy of being a disciple of Marxism.
But this is not just a comment on how Marxism develops in a particular place, although this was certainly a very practical matter for Lenin. It’s a statement that also applies to us in practice today. The working class can achieve trade union consciousness on its own. The proletariat can learn to fight for its immediate interests, and experience tells them they need to be united. But the working class as a whole will never develop a theoretical doctrine. Without the political party, trade union consciousness will never allow workers to achieve their ultimate goal, communism.
At the same time, the bourgeoisie develops its own ideology. They twist with half-truths. They push for compromise, deceive workers, lie, cheat, steal, slander. Even when they give crumbs (however grudgingly), they lead workers to draw the wrong lesson.
So, in this case, trade union consciousness can simply lead to better workers, but within a better capitalism.
In our text, The Tactical Question in the Texts and Teachings of the Left, published in 1975-1976, we stated, concerning the American workers’ movement:
“What this means is that we cannot even speak of laborism or trade unionism in the historical sense of the term, but of trade unions that are more like ‘employment risk insurance agencies’ than real workers’ associations, at a very low level of trade union maturity.”
In this case, therefore, trade union consciousness lacks much of its bite without a strong communist party. Workers only follow their immediate interests, but in a more attenuated way. Strikes are not an organized resistance demanding more. Rather, they are demanding the same wage, adjusted for inflation. The same regularly anticipated increase that the bourgeoisie, in its blind pursuit of immediate profits, neglected to give them. They are simply asking for their fair share. Workers are happy to see bourgeois politicians participate in their strike.
Because for us, the struggle for immediate interests is based on two objectives: higher wages and more leisure time, which are simply better ways of living, even if we’re not entirely satisfied with them.
But most importantly, the struggle for immediate interests is a preparation for the struggle for final interests. We don’t think every strike is a mini-revolution, but a strike is a training ground for worker solidarity and for practical experience, not only against the boss, but also for overcoming racial, gender, and political divides; not to mention the testing and unmasking of collaborationist leaders. Therefore, not struggles in court with stamped papers, but genuine class activity that demonstrates what needs to be done. In practice, it will be demonstrated to workers what the best way is to achieve their goals, and that the pursuit of immediate interests is not enough.
But this can only happen through close contact with the class communist party, which applies a rigorous communist doctrine.
In The Mass Strike, Chapter VIII, Rosa Luxemburg writes:
“As a matter-of-fact the separation of the political, and the economic struggle and the independence of each, is nothing but an artificial product of the parliamentarian period, even if historically determined. On the one hand in the peaceful, ‘normal’ course of bourgeois society, the economic struggle is split into a multitude of individual struggles in every undertaking and dissolved in every branch of production. On the other hand the political struggle is not directed by the masses themselves in a direct action, but in correspondence with the form of the bourgeois state, in a representative fashion, by the presence of legislative representation. As soon as a period of revolutionary struggle commences, that is, as soon as the masses appear on the scene of conflict, the breaking up the economic struggle into many parts, as well as the indirect parliamentary form of the political struggle ceases; in a revolutionary mass action the political struggle ceases; in a revolutionary mass action the political and economic struggle are one, and the artificial boundary between trade union and social democracy as two separate, wholly independent forms of the labour movement, is simply swept away. But what finds concrete expression in the revolutionary mass movement finds expression also in the parliamentary period as an actual state of affairs. There are not two different class struggles of the working class, an economic and a political one, but only one class struggle, which aims at one and the same time at the limitation of capitalist exploitation within bourgeois society, and at the abolition of exploitation together with bourgeois society itself.
[…]
Second, the German trade-unions are a product of social democracy also in the sense that social democratic teaching in the soul of trade-union practice, as the trade-unions owe their superiority over all bourgeois and denominational trade-unions to the idea of the class struggle; their practical success, their power, is a result of the circumstance that their practice is illuminated by the theory of scientific socialism and they are thereby raised above the level of a narrow-minded socialism. The strength of the ‘practical policy’ of the German trade-unions lies in their insight into the deeper social and economic connections of the capitalist system; but they owe this insight entirely to the theory of scientific socialism upon which their practice is based. Viewed in this way, any attempt to emancipate the trade-unions from the social democratic theory in favour of some other ‘trade-union theory’ opposed to social democracy, is, from the standpoint of the trade-unions themselves and of their future, nothing but an attempt to commit suicide. The separation of trade-union practice from the theory of scientific socialism would mean to the German trade-unions the immediate loss of all their superiority over all kinds of bourgeois trade-unions, and their fall from their present height to the level of unsteady groping and mere dull empiricism.
Thirdly and finally, the trade-unions are, although their leaders have gradually lost sight of the fact, even as regards their numerical strength, a direct product of the social democratic movement and the social democratic agitation.
[…]
The immediate interests of his economic struggle which are conditioned by the nature of the struggle itself cannot be advanced in any other way than by membership of a trade-union organisation. The contribution which he pays, often amidst considerable sacrifice of his standard of living, bring him immediate, visible results. His social democratic inclinations, however, enable him to participate in various kinds of work without belonging to a special party organisation; by voting at parliamentary elections, by attendance at social democratic public meetings, by following the reports of social democratic speeches in representatives bodies, and by reading the party press.”
We continue the series of reports on the function of the Center with a series of quotations from various texts, some of which make up the unified and invariant Body of Party Theses.
The Party and its method of work (Il Partito Comunista, 169/1988)
“The abandonment even for a moment of the method of internal life and of the conduct of the organizational structure induces, if it is not rectified as soon as possible and in the most energetic manner, a mortal spiral for the life of the Party itself, an increasingly unstoppable mechanism that destroys its structure and tragically causes the compass of the Revolution to go astray, because in truth organizational unhinging, perhaps disguised as imbecilic ‘strengthening,’ then goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the programmatic principles that have distinguished and set the Party apart from every other grouping that appeals to the working class and the social revolution.”
“Even the party, in its internal organization, is already no longer a ‘party,’ but Gemeinwesen, or rather, according to a definition of the Left, ‘a human organ.’ The party is the anticipation of communist society, not as an exemplary testimony or aesthetic fact, but as an operating and discernible group in its mode of being. The party knows what communism is; it was born out of this awareness, which gave substance to the already mature need for a new society. So it can and should apply the corresponding communist method internally. Those methods which, after the conquest of political power, from being the patrimony of the party alone, would begin to be, in an ever-increasing expansion, proper to the new communist society. In case of the emergence of dissension within the party, preserving its method and organic unity are conditions to remedy the error and to bring it back to clarity, through the study of problems, using the mighty investigative tool of Marxist theory, condensed in the revolutionary tradition of which the party is the repository. To attribute the alleged ‘error’ to the whole party is to defend the intelligence of the species, which the party expresses in its universality and organic unity, founded on the monolithism of its doctrine. The moment it abandons this healthy proceeding for whatever reason, it becomes incapable of becoming a bearer of human science and is reduced to a sterile ephemeral organization.”
“Let there be no mistake: the word ‘organic’ does not mean that each militant can arbitrarily interpret the Party’s instructions, or that the Party has no hierarchical structure, or that within this functional hierarchy, whoever is at the top, can just as arbitrarily issue orders, repress, and condemn..”
“13 – The Communist International is of the view that, especially in the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Communist Party must be built on the basis of unwavering proletarian centralization. In order to effectively lead the working class in the long and bitter civil war that will have broken out, the Communist Party must establish strict, military discipline in its ranks as well.”
Points of the Left (late 1924 – early 1925)
“[…] the problem of discipline arises as the channeling and utilization of the forces that develop and that the organizational system must be capable of harmonizing. In that case the new experiences become the heritage of the Party that interprets them, assimilates them, and they do not become a gimmick of a few officials who impose them on the inert Party according to interpretations that are most often wrong.”
Cardinal Positions of the Communist Party (Il Partito Comunista, 17/1976)
“The foundations of this iron discipline: Lenin teaches us!
It is, first of all, a result, not a mechanical element, the product of a beautiful statutory plan. The result is as follows: 1) The consciousness of the proletarian vanguard, devotion to the revolutionary cause, steadfastness, self-sacrifice, heroism. 2) The ability of this vanguard to connect with the great masses of the workers, the proletarians above all… 3) The soundness of the political direction carried out by this vanguard, and its justified strategy and political tactics…
So iron organizational discipline is the result of the party’s ability to move on the basis of theory and in full fidelity to it, of its ability to intervene in the physical struggles that the working masses undertake for their material needs, with the right strategy and tactics.”
“The orders which emanate from the central hierarchies are not the starting point, but the result of the functioning of the movement understood as a collectivity. This is not to be understood in a foolishly democratic or legalistic way but in a realistic and historical sense. We are not defending, by saying this, ‘the right’ of the communist masses to devise policies which the leaders must then follow: we are noting that the formation of a class party presents itself in these terms, and that an examination of the question must be based on these premises. The schematic conclusions we are getting to are thus outlined.
There is no mechanical discipline that can reliably ensure that orders and regulations from above ‘whatever they are’ will be put into effect. There is however a set of orders and regulations which respond to the real origins of the movement that can guarantee maximum discipline, that is, of unitary action by the entire organisation; and, conversely, there are other directives which, emanating from the centre could compromise discipline and organisational solidity.
It is, therefore, a matter of demarcating the duty of the leading organs. But who is supposed to do that? The whole party should do it, that’s who, the whole organisation, and not in the trite and parliamentary sense of a right to be consulted about the ‘mandate’ to be conferred on the elected leaders and how restricted it will be, but in a dialectical sense that takes into consideration the movement’s traditions, preparedness, and real continuity in its thinking and action. Precisely because we are antidemocratic, we believe that a minority may have views that correspond better to the interests of the revolutionary process than those of the majority. Certainly this only happens in exceptional cases and it is extremely serious when such a disciplinary inversion occurs, as happened in the old International and which we sincerely hope will not occur within our ranks again. But even if we omit to consider this extreme case, there are however other less critical situations when the contribution which groups make by calling on the leading centre to refine or modify its instructions is useful, in fact, indispensable”.
“7) Paragraph 2 of the theses (we believe due to Lenin) is directly titled: ‘Democratic centralism.’
Thesis 6 defines it thus: ‘Democratic centralism in the organization of the Communist Party must be a true synthesis, a fusion, of centralization and proletarian democracy. This fusion can only be achieved by a permanent common activity, by an equally common and permanent struggle of the entire party.’
The following passages already show what the dangers of the false interpretation of the formulas of democratic centralism and proletarian democracy might be. For example, the centralization of the Communist Party should not be formal or mechanical:
‘It must be a centralization of communist activity, that is, the formation of a powerful leadership ready to attack and at the same time capable of adaptation. A formal or mechanical centralization would only be the centralization of power in the hands of a bureaucracy, with the aim of dominating other party members or the masses of the revolutionary proletariat outside the party.’”
“In short, the party must be a centralised structure, with the existence of different organs and of a central body capable of coordinating, directing and ordering the whole network; absolute discipline of all members of the organisation in executing orders placed by the centre; no autonomy for local sections or groups; no communication network diverging from the unitary one that connects the centre to the periphery and the periphery to the centre And the never-ending activity of study, of sculpting of the doctrine, which is peculiar to the party, does not only have a theoretical value, it is also, and above all, an organisational necessity, in order to be at any time able to express the ‘correct revolutionary politics’.”
“The stance of the Left consists in the simultaneous struggle against two deviations:
1) The base, as long as it is democratically consulted (workerism, labourism, social-democratism), is entitled and sufficient to decide on what action the center takes.
2) The supreme center (political committee or party leader) is sufficient to decide on what action the party and the masses take (Stalinism, Cominformism), and has the right to discover ‘new forms’ and ‘new courses.’
Both deviations lead to the same result: The base is no longer the proletarian class, but the people or the nation. According to Marx and Lenin, this ensuing direction is in the interests of the bourgeois ruling class.”
The continuity of action of the Party in line with the tradition of the Left (Il Programma Comunista, 1967/5)
“We are centralists (and this is, if you will, our only organizing principle) not because we recognize centralism as valid in and of itself, not because we deduce it from an eternal idea or abstract scheme, but because unique is the end to which we tend and unique is the direction in which we move in space (internationally) and in time (above the generations ‘of the dead, the living, and the unborn’). We are centralists by virtue of the invariance of a doctrine that is in the power of neither individuals nor groups to change, and the continuity of our action in the ebb and flow of historical contingencies, in the face of all the obstacles with which the path of the working class is sown. Our centralism is the mode of being of a Party that is not an army even if it has rigorous discipline, just as it is not a school even if it teaches. It is a real historical force defined by its stable orientation in the long war between classes. It is around this inseparable and very hard core; doctrine—program—tactics, collective and impersonal possession of the movement, that our organization crystallizes, and what holds it together is not the knut of the ‘organizing center’ but the single and uniform thread that binds ‘leaders’ and ‘base,’ ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ committing them to the observance and defense of a system of ends and means none of which is separable from the other.
In this real life of the Communist Party—not of any party but solely and properly this one, as communist in fact and not in name—the puzzle that nags the bourgeois democrat, who decides: The ‘high’ or the ‘low,’ the most or the few? Who ‘commands’ and who ‘obeys’? It dissolves and definitively by itself: it is the unitary body of the Party that takes and follows its own path; and in it, as in the words of an obscure leveling soldier, “no one commands and everyone is commanded” which does not mean that there are no orders, but that these match the natural way of movement and action of the Party, whoever is giving them.
But break this unity of doctrine—program—tactics, and everything collapses, leaving nothing but a […] checkpoint and command post at one extreme, maneuvering the masses of militants as the general—supposed strategic ‘genius’—moves the supposedly poor dumb soldiers, perhaps by running them through arms and baggage into the enemy camp, or as the stationmaster maneuvers his trains, perhaps by running them into each other and a boundless parade ground for every possible maneuver at the other extreme. Break this unity, and Stalinism becomes logically and historically justified, just as the ruinous subordination of a party like ours, whose first task is to ensure ‘the historical continuity and international unity of the movement’ (point 4 of the Livorno Program, 1921), to the false and lying mechanism of ‘democratic consultation.’ Break it, and you will have destroyed the Class Party.
A real force operating in history with characteristics of strict continuity, the Party lives and acts (and here is the answer to the second deviation) not on the basis of possessing a statutory heritage of norms, precepts and constitutional forms, in the way hypocritically desired by bourgeois legalism or naively dreamed of by pre-Marxist utopianism, an architect of well-planned structures to be dropped ready-made into the reality of historical dynamics, but on the basis of its nature as an organism, formed, in an uninterrupted succession of theoretical and practical battles, in line of a direction of constant march: As our 1945 ‘Platform’ wrote, ‘The rules of party organization are coherent with the dialectical conception of its function, they do not rest on juridical and regulatory recipes, they overcome the fetish of majority consultations.’ It is in the exercise of its functions, all of them and not one, that the Party creates its organs, gears, mechanisms; and it is in the course of this very exercise that it undoes and recreates them, not using metaphysical dictates or constitutional paradigms, but the real and precisely organic needs of its development. None of these gears are theorizable, either a priori, or a posteriori; nothing authorizes us to say, to give a very down-to-earth example, that the best fulfillment of the function for which any one of them was born is guaranteed by its handling by one or more militants; the only demand that can be made of it is that the three or the ten—if there are any—wield it as one will, consistent with the whole past and future course of the party, and that the one, if there is one, wield it insofar as in his arm or mind the impersonal and collective force of the party operates; and the judgment of the satisfaction of that demand is given by practice, by history, not by the articles of the code. The revolution is a problem not of form but of strength; so is the Party in its real life, in its organization as in its doctrine. The same organizational criterion of territorial rather than ‘cellular’ type that we claim is neither deduced from abstract and timeless principles, nor elevated to the dignity of a perfect and timeless solution; we adopt it only because it is the other side of the primary synthesizing function (of groups, of categories, of elementary drives) that we assign to the Party.
The generous preoccupation of comrades that the Party operate in an organizationally secure, linear and homogeneous manner should therefore be directed—as Lenin himself warned in his ‘Letter to a Comrade’—not to the search for statutes, codes, and constitutions, or worse, for characters of ‘special’ temperament, but to the best way to contribute, each and every comrade, to the harmonious fulfillment of the functions without which the Party would cease to exist as a unifying force and as a leader and representative of the class—which is the only way to help it resolve day by day, ‘by itself’. As in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, the newspaper is spoken of as a ‘collective organizer’—its problems of life and action. Here is the key to ‘organic centralism,’ the sure weapon in the historic battle of the classes, not in the empty abstraction of the purported ‘norms’ of operation of the most perfect mechanisms or, worse, in the squalor of the trials of men who by organic selection find themselves handling them ‘at the bottom’ or ‘at the top’. The efficacy of these mechanisms and gears does not depend by virtue of personal qualities or absences of qualities, but rather on the path imposed upon them by the party as a whole. The path emerges from its dictatorial program, its invariable doctrine, its known and expected tactics, and from the reciprocal, internal relations between part and part of an organism whose members all live or die together as the same blood circulates or ceases to circulate in the central muscle and in the peripheral fibers—imposes on them to move.
Either on this path, or on the two seemingly diverging, in reality converging, tracks of chaotic and arbitrary democratism and blatant Stalinist authoritarianism: no other ‘choice’ leaves us with the theses of 1920, 1922, 1926, 1945, 1966, and, to say it all, ever.”
“8. — By the very necessity of its organic action, and in order to succeed in having a collective function that overcomes and forgets all personalism and individualism, the party must distribute its members among the various functions and activities that make up its life. The turnover of comrades in such jobs is a natural occurrence that cannot be guided by rules similar to those of the careers of bourgeois bureaucracies. In the party, there are no contests in which one struggles to achieve more or less brilliant or more prominent positions, but one must strive to achieve organically what is not an aping of the bourgeois division of labor, but is a natural adaptation of the complex and articulated organ-party to its function.”
“If only proletarian humanity, from which we are still a long way off, will be free and capable of a will that is not sentimental illusion, but capable of organizing and holding the economy in the broadest sense of the word; if today the proletarian class is still, though less than the other classes, determined in the limits of its action by influences external to it, the organ, on the other hand, in which precisely the maximum of volitional possibility and initiative in the whole field of its action is summed up is the political party: certainly not just any party, but the party of the proletarian class, the Communist Party, linked, as it were, by an unbroken line to the ultimate goals of the future process. Such a volitional faculty in the party, as well as its consciousness and theoretical preparation, are exquisitely collective functions of the party, and the Marxist explanation of the task assigned in the party itself to its leaders lies in considering them as instruments and operators through which the capacities to understand and explain facts and direct and will actions are best manifested, always preserving in these capacities their origin in the existence and characters of the collective organ.”
VI Enlarged Executive of the Communist International. Report and interventions of the Left of the Communist Party of Italy (1926)
“[…] the question of leaders, which Comrade Trotsky raises in the preface to his book ‘1917,’ in his analysis of the causes of our defeats and with whose solution I fully sympathize. Trotsky does not speak of leaders in the sense that we need men delegated for this purpose from heaven. No, he poses the problem quite differently. Leaders are also a product of the party’s activity, the party’s working methods, and the trust the party has been able to attract. If the party, in spite of the variable and often unfavorable situation, follows the revolutionary line and fights opportunistic deviations, the selection of leaders, the formation of a general staff take place favorably, and in the period of the final struggle we will certainly not always succeed in having a Lenin, but a solid and courageous leadership […].”
Russia in the Great Revolution and Contemporary Society (Il Programma Comunista, 14/1956)
“Lenin—the quote has often recurred in recent debates—was for the norm of ‘democratic centralism.’ No Marxist can dispute in the slightest the need for centralism. The party cannot exist if it is allowed that various pieces can each operate on their own. No autonomy of local organizations in political methods. These are old struggles that were already being waged within the parties of the Second International, against, for example, the self-decision of the party’s parliamentary group in its maneuvers, against the case-by-case for local sections or federations in municipalities and provinces, against the case-by-case action of party members in the various economic organizations, and so on.
The adjective ‘democratic’ admits that it is decided in congresses, after grassroots organizations, by counting of votes. But is the counting of votes enough to establish that the center obeys the base and not vice versa? Does this, for those who know the nefariousness of bourgeois electoralism, make any sense?
We will just recall the guarantees we have proposed so many times and illustrated again in the Dialogue.
Doctrine: the center has no power to change it from the one established, from the very beginning, in the classic texts of the movement.
Organization: unique internationally, does not vary by aggregations or mergers but only by individual admissions; the organized cannot stay in any other movement.
Tactics: possibilities for maneuver and action should be provided by decisions of international congresses with a closed system.
At the base no actions can be initiated that are not arranged by the center: the center cannot invent new tactics and moves, under the guise of new facts.
The link between the party base and the center becomes a dialectical form. If the party exercises dictatorship of the class in the State, and against the classes against which the State acts, there is no dictatorship of the party center over the base. Dictatorship is not negated by formal internal mechanical democracy, but by respecting those dialectical ties.
At a certain time in the Communist International the relations were reversed: the Russian state commanded over the Russian party, the party over the International. The Left demanded that this pyramid be overturned.
We did not follow the Trotskyists and anarchists when they made the struggle against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution a matter of grassroots consultations, of worker or worker-peasant democracy, of party democracy. These formulas made the problem smaller.
On the question of the General Authority to which revolutionary communism must refer, we return to find the criteria in economic, social, and historical analysis. It is not possible to have dead, living, and unborn people vote. Whereas, in the original dialectic of the class party organ, such an operation becomes possible, real and fruitful, albeit on a hard, long road of trials and tremendous struggles.”
VI Enlarged Executive of the Communist International. Report and interventions of the Left of the Communist Party of Italy (1926)
“In our higher organs and congresses there is a lack of collective collaboration. The supreme organ seems like something foreign to the sections, debating with them and choosing from among each a fraction to which it gives its support. This center is, in every matter, supported by all the remaining sections, who thus hope to secure better treatment when their turn comes. Sometimes those who get on the plane of this ‘cattle market’ are even purely personal groups of leaders.”
“The proper relationship in their function between the central and peripheral organs of the movement is not based on constitutional schemes but on the whole dialectical unfolding of the historical struggle of the working class against capitalism.
The fundamental basis of such relations is, on the one hand, the continuous, uninterrupted, and consistent realization of party theory as an evaluation of the development of present society and as defined tasks of the class fighting to overthrow it. On the other hand, these relations are the international bonding of revolutionary proletarians in all countries with unity of purpose and combat.
The peripheral forces of the party and all its adherents are bound in the practice of the movement not to take on their own local and contingent decisions of action that do not come from the central organs and not to give tactical problems solutions other than those supported by the whole party. Correspondingly, the directing and central organs cannot and should not in their decisions and communications, valid for the entire party, abandon theoretical principles or modify the means of tactical action even on the grounds that situations have presented unexpected or unforeseen facts in the party’s prospects. In the defect of these two reciprocal and complementary processes no statutory resources are worthwhile, but the crises of which the history of the proletarian movement offers many examples are determined.
Consequently while calling on all its members to participate in the continuous process of the analysis of social events and facts and in the definition of the most appropriate tasks and methods of action, and ensuring such participation in the most appropriate ways, both through specific organs and through regular general consultations at congresses, in no way does the party allow groups of adherents within it to come together in separate organizations and factions within the party to carry out their work of study and contribution according to networks of connection and correspondence and internal and external dissemination in any case different from the unitary party network.”
On the line of the Left (Il Partito Comunista, 3/1974)
“Point 8 (of the Supplementary Theses on the Historical Task…of 1966, ed.) states that the party ‘must distribute its members among the various functions and activities that make up its life.’ The turnover of comrades in such jobs ‘is a natural fact that cannot be guided by rules similar to those of the careers of bourgeois bureaucracies.’ Which means that the determining element of the selection of party members, is not formal, but organic, it is not a mechanism be it ‘election from below’ or ‘appointment from above’ that determines the selection, but it is the participation of all party members in the collective work and the course of this work in all fields of activity that chooses the most suitable men for the various functions, ‘it is not an aping of the bourgeois division of labor, but it is a natural adaptation of the complex and articulated organ-party to its function.’
The second part of the theses makes it clear that the party is not an army. ‘The historical dialectic leads each fighting organism to perfect its means of offense by employing the tactics possessed by the enemy. From this it can be deduced that in the phase of armed combat the communists will have a military framing with precise patterns of hierarchies to unit paths that will ensure the best success of joint action.’ So, the technique of military framing, which involves patterns of unit-path hierarchies (i.e., in which one goes from top to bottom, the top commands and the base executes without a peep, etc., ed.) is a technique of the enemy (of the bourgeoisie, ed.) that the communists will use, not always, but in the phase of armed combat. ‘This truth must not be unnecessarily mimicked in any of the party’s noncombatant activities.’ Because the use of this enemy technique is not only a danger of corruption and degeneration ‘even when adopted in the ranks of workers’ associations,’ but it does not correspond at all to the Marxist conception of party organization. In fact, ‘Party organicity by no means demands that every comrade see the personification of party strength in another comrade specifically designated to convey provisions that come from above.’ As is the case in the army, where the active role belongs only to the officer indicated ‘specifically’ by a uniform and rank, while the soldier’s only duty is to obey.
In the party it is different: ‘This transmission between the molecules that make up the party organ (between comrades to be clear, ed.) always simultaneously has the double direction (i.e. one is active as much from top to bottom as from bottom to top, ed.).’
Comrade Lenin never said anything different. He won a revolution by thinking exactly like us.
Consequently, the thesis ends, ‘Abusing the formalisms of organization without a vital reason (the armed combat phase, to be precise! ed.) has been, is, and always will be foolish (because it indicates the petty bourgeois’s predilection for the glitter of chevrons, uniforms, formal titles, ed.) and a suspicious flaw (because it indicates the presence of the opportunistic disease, ed.).”
“10 – […] If the opposite happens, and worse if these disciplinary questions serve to save not sound and revolutionary principles but precisely the conscious or unconscious positions of a nascent opportunism, as happened in 1924, 1925, 1926, this only means that the function of the center has been conducted in a wrong way and has caused it to lose all real influence of grassroots discipline toward it, all the more so, the more a phony disciplinary rigor is loudly decried.”
Report delivered to the general meeting of May 24th-25th, 2025.
Everything seems to be accelerating. The crisis of global capitalism is leading not only to general imbalance, but to disorder and chaos, before pushing the various imperialist states towards a deadly confrontation in a third world war.
The dominance of the dollar in financial markets and the international payment system constitutes a really tough predicament for the US economy. On the one hand, the security provided by a dominant monetary system, backed by a really strong military, has allowed the US to impose its debt on the rest of the world. On the other hand however, the constant demand for dollars—which accounts for 90% of foreign exchange transactions, 75% of foreign currency-denominated bonds, and three-fifths of international bank loans—drives its value up, making US industry less competitive on the international market.
Hence the US government’s desire to weaken the dollar to make its industry more competitive.
This upheaval comes on top of many others, not least the heavy tariffs—either threatened or actually imposed by the Trump administration—which prompted the French newspaper Les Echos to write that “Trump is demolishing the historical foundations of world trade.”
The US has been running record trade deficits for years, the latest of which, in 2024, amounts to $900 billion.
An absolute record, compounded by a huge budget deficit of $1.8 trillion.
While in the 1970s the United States was the world’s largest creditor, today it is the world’s largest debtor. Similarly, while in the past the largest currency reserves were held by the United States and its European allies—Great Britain, France, Germany, etc.—today they are held by Japan, China, and other Asian countries.
Today, the ten largest holders are, in descending order: China, Japan, Switzerland, India, Russia, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Mexico.
In this ranking, the old imperialist states are in the background.
Foreign investors hold almost 20% of US shares—an all-time high—and 30% of US debt, compared to a third less in 1971.
To counteract the downward trend in the rate of profit, entire branches of industrial production have been transferred to low-cost countries, where workers are forced to accept any working conditions.
This has made the fortune of European, Japanese, and American multinationals. Furthermore, this is what has allowed global capitalism to enjoy thirty years of respite, at the cost of the growing impoverishment and precariousness of an entire section of the American, European, and Japanese proletariat.
The result has been a shift in the economic center of gravity from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
The tumultuous economic development of Southeast Asia, based on the fierce exploitation of cheap labor, has nevertheless had a positive effect because it has led to the improvement of the living conditions of the working masses, laying down the economic foundations for communist society – regardless if this has happened, as always, in a despicable manner.
At the same time, new imperialist states have emerged, while the old ones have experienced relative decline.
A new superpower has also emerged: China, which aims to replace the United States on the world stage.
The globalization touted by the European and American bourgeoisie, which has been a source of extraordinary profits, is turning against them.
The new US government, aware of this danger, is calling into question the free trade that has so far allowed its multinationals to make extraordinary superprofits.
By trying to force its foreign competitors to rebalance trade, the new US government could provoke a serious trade and financial crisis, worse than that of 1929.
Every year, the US government is forced to issue an ever-increasing amount of debt, and, with the progressive weakening of the international financial system, this will call into question the role of the dollar. That will cause mistrust in its role as an international currency of payment and thus leading to a further serious financial crisis.
Similarly, the closure of the US market will result in a serious crisis of overproduction on a global scale, given the importance of this market.
Moreover, forcing American multinationals, such as Apple, to resume production in the United States can only lead to a decline in their profits.
We do not know how far the US president and the American financial sector that supports him will go, but there is no doubt that the crisis of overproduction of world capitalism and the new inter-imperialist balance of power can only lead to a trade war. This will aggravate the crisis itself, before the world heads towards a third world war. Unless, in the meantime, the proletariat returns to the glorious path of class struggle and communism.
Let us now consider some aspects of the current worldwide situation.
Inflation
After reaching an all-time high of 9.1% in the United States in June 2022 and 10.6% in Europe in October of the same year, inflation fell to 2.4% in the United States and 2.2% in Europe in March 2025.
China, which experienced deflation from April 2023 to April 2024, saw inflation pick up again, peaking at 4.4% in October 2024 before falling to 3% in March 2025.
In Europe, inflation in the Eurozone ranges from 0.8% in France to just over 2% in Germany.
The UK stands out with relatively high inflation at 3.4%.
Low inflation in the Eurozone will allow the ECB to continue lowering interest rates to stimulate the economy, particularly the construction branch, which is still in recession.
Industrial production
Despite the vigorous financial incentives provided by the Biden administration, US industrial production stagnated during 2023 ( + .2%), slightly falling in 2024 (- .3 %).
Now, the trade war unleashed by the Trump administration will put a stop to any resumption of capital accumulation in the industries.
On the contrary, we should expect a decline, especially if these policies are pushed to the limit.
US industrial production is driven by shale gas and oil, of which the United States has become the world’s leading producer.
But in 2023, American manufacturing output was -7.5% compared to 2007, while its overall industrial output, thanks to oil and gas, was 1% higher.
To provide a global outlook, we have reported (see below) industrial production trends (from 2019 to 2024) for the most significant countries.
We do not have such data for China and Russia.
What emerges is that the old imperialist states were in recession or near stagnation in 2019. Some more data in retrospect: figures range from Germany’s -3.3% to Spain’s +0.5%. Belgium’s +4.9% stands out as an exception, thanks to its industries in the Flanders.
Poland experienced a very significant growth, recording an increase of 4.1%.
Türkiye, on the other hand, recorded a negative growth of 0.6%.
The recession obviously worsened in 2020 with the international downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Apart from Türkiye (+ 2.2%), all other countries were in the red.
What followed was a strong recovery in 2021, with increases ranging from +25.6% in Belgium to 3.9% in Portugal and Brazil.
On the contrary, after a 7.8% decline in 2020, the UK saw its production continue to fall, in 2021 (-0.7%).
Then, in 2022, recovery slowed down significantly, recording negative increments for some countries.
Other countries fared better: a 10.3% increase for Poland, +5% for Türkiye, +3.4% for the United States, and +2.3% for Spain.
For the rest, increments ranged from the UK’s -6.4% to France’s -0.3%.
Japan stayed at 0%.
By 2023, almost all countries resided in negative territory, with numbers ranging from Belgium’s -7.5% (surprisingly) to the UK’s -0.9%.
Countries in positive territory were Türkiye (+1.6%), France (+0.4%), the United States (+0.2%) and Brazil (+0.1%).
However, those last three are practically at a standstill.
In 2024, almost all countries recorded increments in the red, especially the old imperialist countries. Others will experience near stagnation.
The only exceptions are South Korea (+4.1%) and Brazil (+3.1%).
The last two columns compare 2024 industrial production figures with 2018’s and 2007’s, respectively.
Comparing 2024’s industrial production with that of 2018, we notice that all the old imperialist countries are in negative territory, with declines ranging from -17.3% in the United Kingdom to -0.3% in the United States, thanks to gas and oil.
The exception is Belgium, with an impressive +15%, thanks to Flanders.
Among those in the green, however, Poland stands out with a 29.3% increase in production, followed by Türkiye with +26.7%, then Korea (right behind Belgium) with +11.2%, and finally Brazil, with a slight increase of 0.7%.
If we look at the last column, which compares 2024’s industrial production with the peak reached in 2007, the situation of the old imperialist countries worsens further.
Portugal, Spain, and Italy are almost at -23%, followed by the UK and Japan (-21%) . France sits at -12.3%—although in reality it is probably worse—Brazil (which has been in recession for some time) at -8.3%. Finally Germany and its -9.1%. The latter, which in 2018 had exceeded its 2008 peak by 8.5 percentage points, has taken a massive fall and is also experiencing a deep crisis of overproduction.
The United States is managing to get by thanks to hydrocarbons, with a slight 1.1% increase.
However, manufacturing output is expected to be 10% lower than its 2007 peak.
Among those who have managed to make the most of the processes of production relocation are Türkiye (+111%), Poland (+97.3%) and Belgium (+30.3%).
However South Korea is outperforming Belgium, scoring an incredible 53.5%.
The bourgeois essence of the referendum campaign currently underway in Italy was best expressed by CGIL secretary Maurizio Landini, who proclaimed:
“It is a battle for a better country, for a modern country, a new country. It is a struggle of hope, a struggle for the future, against those who still want an old, conservative, backward country.”
The piecard’s appeal lies in the eternal bourgeois logic of the country’s, nation’s, or homeland’s welfare, which is essentially the logic of defending the existing social relations of domination and maintaining the exploitation of the working class.
This is how we commented on the referendum’s value for the proletarian class in issue no. 379 (September-October 2016) of our newspaper Il Partito Comunista in the article “The FIOM’s outward opposition backs the corporatism of the CGIL: eight years of betrayal of workers’ interests,” in the chapter “Democratic traps”:
“Resorting to the method of the popular referendum and the legislative method is eyewash. What the CGIL has not wanted to defend on the level of class struggle, it will certainly not achieve by these means, full of tricks and traps, in which the strength of the workers is replaced by the counting of the opinions of citizens, of members of all classes, or by the votes of parliamentarians. When members of all classes and social strata, who live all the better the more the working class is exploited, are called upon to vote on issues affecting workers, the victory of the bosses is guaranteed […]
Any popular bill must of course be approved, and it is not clear how the same parliament which—beyond governments and legislatures—carries out the orders of the national and international bourgeoisie by producing the most harmful anti-worker laws, could pass a bill without first changing it to make it favorable to the interests of the bosses. The same applies to referendums aiming at abrogating laws: they cancel articles of a law, but the void they leave must then be filled by the legislative work of bourgeois governments and parliaments. Therefore, even if a sufficient number of signatures are collected, using energy that should be used to organize the class struggle; even if the bourgeois Constitutional Court and the bourgeois Supreme Court approve the referendum questions; even if the so-called quorum is reached; even if, finally, we succeed in overcoming the influence that the powerful bourgeois media have on the brainwashed public opinion, directing it to vote against the interests of the ruling class, even in this remote hypothesis it is not possible to achieve the goal favorable to the working class.
In the quagmire of these exhausting procedures, they would like to sink the class struggle, the strike, which is all the stronger the more widespread and lasting it is, the only method by which workers can truly defend their living conditions.
The referendum is already a harmful tool for the class struggle when it concerns only the workers of a single company or category: the vote of a worker who sacrifices his time and energy for the union, risking reprisals from the bosses, and who has experience of previous struggles, is worth as much as that of an inexperienced, fearful, individualistic, or even scab worker. When anger grows but is not yet at the point of exploding into a strike, having workers vote individually in a referendum is the best way to buy time, dampen determination and, often, allow the undecided to prevail over the most combative. Strikes unite the energies of workers; referendums divide them”.
The essence of the referendum revolves around the bourgeois lie of “popular sovereignty” and “parliamentary representation.” It’s a tool that is most suited to the so-called direct democracy so dear to the bourgeois left because it (supposedly) faithfully reflects the will of the people, which, in liberal ideology, opposed to ours, should choose the men of government and impose its political agenda on them. But the concept of popular sovereignty is nothing but a fiction that masks reality, namely that there is an irreconcilable opposition of class interests that so disgusts the guarantors of “conciliation.”
Whatever the results of the referendum may be, nothing will change in substance, and the attack on the working class will continue in parallel with the worsening of the crisis of capital.
The resolution of issues that concern workers alone through the interclassist instrument of the referendum is left to the indistinct judgment of all voters, most of whom are not proletarians: the referendum is therefore the exact opposite of class struggle, as we are witnessing the undue intrusion of regime populism and its constructed “majority” into a terrain of struggle that is exclusively between the proletariat and the bosses. Members of all social classes are called upon to vote on issues affecting the working class, thereby affirming and confirming the principle of interclassism, i.e., the subjugation of the working class to other classes.
It is, of course, only the bosses who have an interest in allowing the undifferentiated “people,” composed in no small part of the clique on which the bourgeois regime rests, all materially interested in the maximum exploitation of the working class, to “democratically express” themselves. We therefore place no trust in the democratic instruments of parliamentary elections and referendums, which are nothing more than a charade designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the proletariat.
The laws are made by the bosses, and relations between the classes cannot really be regulated by “law,” so dear to the bourgeoisie, except insofar as it serves to preserve these relations. Therefore, the “rights” of workers cannot be defended through electoral consultations but by working to mobilize and organize their class forces. The democratic principle is at odds with the class struggle, which is based on a balance of forces and not on a tally of opinions. The abstract democratic principle of justice, when applied to the real world of capitalism, becomes a formidable weapon for perpetuating the injustice of the privileged class against the workers.
Any random improvements gained through referendums, so dear to collaborationist trade unionism, disengage workers from struggle, exacerbate their current passivity, and at the same time guarantee the bosses continuation of the conditions of social peace that have allowed them years to worsen the living conditions of the working class. The regime unions do nothing but serve the interests of the bosses and the national economy, while the so-called “militant” unions, also rotten with democratism, are careful not to reveal this deception to the working class: for this reason, a reorganization of the working class is necessary, the rebirth of the authentic class union and, under the leadership of the International Communist Party, the continuation of the political struggle for the seizure of proletarian power.