Party of Committees to Support Resistance―for Communism (Italy)
On the 80th anniversary of the victory over Nazi-fascism, it is particularly important to develop the discussion on revolutionary strategy within the international communist movement.
We are not only in the imperialist epoch, we are also in a revolutionary situation, one of war and revolution, similar to the situation of the first half of the last century. The imperialist epoch, which began at the end of the 19th century, has a character common to the whole epoch. It is the epoch of the proletarian revolution, that is, of the first steps of the transition for the masses from capitalism to communism under the leadership of the working class, and it is the epoch of the decline of bourgeois society. This common character is objective: it manifests itself in the structural and superstructural transformations of societies weather they are still dominated by the imperialist bourgeoisie (with the development of institutions and organizations needed to preserve capitalism in the context of collective productive forces and the production process) or led by the working class (with socialism building).
The imperialist epoch, however, is divided into three main phases.
• The first phase, which lasted from the end of the 19th century until the end of World War II. This was the phase of the first general crisis due to absolute overproduction of capital, the consequent general crisis of political regimes in single countries and in the relations between States at world level, and the long revolutionary situation during which the proletarian revolution triumphed in a series of countries and Marxism reached a new, higher stage: Leninism.
• The second phase, which runs from the end of World War II to about the mid-1970s, is characterized by: a) the temporary resumption of capital accumulation at the international level; b) “capitalism with a human face” or welfare State in imperialist countries with modern revisionism as its political corollary; c) the struggles for the transition from capitalism to communism in socialist countries, centered on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the Chinese people, and the attempt at a gradual and peaceful restoration of capitalism led by the modern revisionists.
• The third phase, which began in the mid-1970s and is still ongoing. The second general crisis of absolute overproduction of capital led to a new crisis of political regimes in single countries and in the relations between States, and to a new revolutionary situation. All this at a higher level than in the first phase, because the contrast between the collective character of the productive forces and their individual ownership has become more acute and more universal, because the forces of the socialist revolution have accumulated great experience, because Marxism has reached a third and higher stage: Maoism.
The Second World War ended in 1945,
• on one hand, with the formation in Eastern Europe of the socialist camp, which also included part of Germany (the German Democratic Republic) in addition to the other seven People’s Democracies, the formation of new socialist countries in Asia (the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and the strengthening of New Democratic Revolutions (the most important of which was that of Vietnam) and large anti-imperialist revolutionary movements in many colonies, semi-colonies, and politically independent countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America;
• on the other hand, with the supremacy of US imperialist groups not only over the popular masses of the US but also over other imperialist States and their colonies and semi-colonies (the creation, with the Bretton Woods Agreements of 1944, of the dollar-based world monetary system was the official expression of their supremacy, which was also consolidated in 1949 with the creation of NATO);
• thirdly, with great achievements in civilization and well-being that the popular masses of most imperialist countries wrested from the bourgeoisie, led by their respective communist parties. For these parties, these achievements were an alternative to the struggle to seize power and establish socialism, while for the bourgeoisie they were concessions that had to be made in order to make the right wing (the modern revisionists) prevail over the left wing in the communist parties of their respective countries. In imperialist countries, when modern revisionists definitively prevailed over the left wing, the bourgeoisie began to eliminate the communist parties. This happened also because the decline of socialism in the Soviet Union and in the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe, promoted by modern revisionists starting with the 20th Congress of the CPSU (1956) and carried out with the reforms of the Brezhnev period (1964-1982), had reached a certain level.
In the context of World War II, the communist movement defeated Nazism and fascism, but failed to establish socialism in any of the imperialist countries. Failure to establish socialism in imperialist countries, where the decisive clash between the bourgeoisie and the working class takes place, is the main reason for the exhaustion of the first wave of the proletarian revolution sparked throughout the world by the victory of the October Revolution and the work of the USSR and the Communist International. Failure to establish socialism in imperialist countries was the main limitation of communists’ action in the last century: it is the limitation we must overcome today. It is mainly because of this that, starting from the 1950s, the first revolutionary wave gradually lost momentum, modern revisionists (the exponents of bourgeois influence in the communist movement) took over the leadership of most communist parties, the communist movement as a whole declined until the dissolution of the USSR and part of the socialist camp, and the imperialist bourgeoisie regained world domination. The ongoing World War III, environmental devastation, global warming, and growing misery even in imperialist countries are the result of this domination. But the disaster into which the imperialist bourgeoisie is dragging the popular masses of the whole world makes the establishment of socialism indispensable not only for the progress of humanity, but also for its survival, and is giving rise to an acceleration of class struggle throughout the world. Everything that the first wave of the proletarian revolution brought about is converging into this struggle: from the countries where communists have maintained political leadership (the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Republic of Cuba) to the BRICS and the front of states resisting US imperialism, from the struggle of the working class in Donbass against fascism to the heroic Palestinian Resistance.
All the objective conditions exist for a decisive step forward in the socialist revolution. To this end, communists must identify and overcome the limitations that prevented us from establishing socialism in any imperialist country during the long revolutionary situation of the last century. The main limitation is the lack of a correct understanding—that is, one based on the experience of the first wave of the proletarian revolution and on the analysis of the ongoing class struggle—of the strategy for socialist revolution in imperialist countries: of the path to establish socialism, of the way in which the communist movement prepares and carries out the conquest of power.
On this issue, there is not only disagreement among communists today, but first and foremost there is not even any discussion, even though strategy is an essential component of communist science. This is especially true for communists in European countries and the US. Here, the communist movement has not sufficiently freed from the historical legacy linked to its origins. Participation in elections and bourgeois democratic institutions, as well as supporting trade union and political demands for better living and working conditions, played an important role in the birth and development of a mass communist movement. However, since the conditions for socialist revolution have matured, reducing class struggle to these two activities has produced two deviations—electoralism and economism—and has become an obstacle that has prevented communist parties from fulfilling their historical task.
Every time the communist movement has gained some strength in imperialist countries, it has in fact
• focused on improving the living conditions of workers and the rest of the popular masses rather than leading them to take power, to take control of their own lives and of society as a whole;
• sought to broaden the participation of the masses in the institutions of bourgeois democracy (parties, elections, representative assemblies), to win support, consensus, cultural and opinion hegemony, votes and therefore strength in bourgeois institutions, as a means of influencing the actions of the government and the State apparatus in a direction favorable to the masses, rather than focusing on the conquest of power by the working class and the organized popular masses, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and, through it, proletarian democracy.
Defining the strategy of the revolution means providing an answer, based on the experience of the first wave of the proletarian revolution and the ongoing class struggle studied using dialectical materialism, to the question: are struggles for demands and participation in bourgeois political struggle, along with propaganda for socialism, of the history of the communist movement and its achievements, sufficient to put an end to the catastrophic course of events imposed by the imperialist bourgeoisie? Or is a special kind of war necessary?
The experience of the first wave of the world proletarian revolution shows that the Protracted Revolutionary People’s War (PRPW) is the objective form of the revolution and that it develops in three stages:
• strategic defense, in which the main objective is to gather revolutionary forces among the masses, extend the influence and leadership of the communist party, and raise the quality of revolutionary forces;
• strategic equilibrium, in which the main objective is to form armed forces and ensure that they continue to exist, that the enemy cannot destroy them;
• strategic offensive, in which the main objective is the establishment of new power throughout the country.
1. PRPW is the strategy for revolution both for imperialist countries and for oppressed countries.
This thesis is confirmed by the experience of the first wave of proletarian revolution, both where it was consciously adopted as a strategy and where it was not, both in victorious revolutions and in defeated revolutions.
This is the lesson that comes from the Soviet experience: the phase of accumulation of revolutionary forces (led by the underground party, therefore under conditions of an independent power system and in opposition to tsarist power) led in 1917 to the second phase (that of strategic equilibrium, of “dual power”), which in turn gave rise to the phase of strategic offensive. Lenin did not elaborate the strategy of the PRPW, but his constant struggle for a dialectical conception of reality was a struggle for the party to adhere, in gaining leadership of the masses, to the laws of the objective course of the revolution.
This is the lesson that comes from the history of the struggles of the parties of the Communist International in imperialist countries, from their foundation until the end of the 1940s. For Italian communists, this is a particularly important lesson, because in European countries, only in Albania and Yugoslavia the communist parties managed to establish people’s republics without the help of the Soviet Red Army.
2. The conception of revolution as PRPW is the antithesis of a) the conception of communists as promoters of struggles for demands and/or of the participation of the popular masses in bourgeois political struggle, b) the conception of revolution as a coup d’état by an enlightened minority or as a popular uprising (these in point b. were the conceptions between which the Communist International wavered).
3. Two other fundamental issues about the strategy for socialist revolution.
3.1 The type of communist party needed to promote and lead the war of the popular masses against the bourgeoisie and the clergy to victory.
In order to fight victoriously against the bourgeoisie, the working class must have a leadership, the communist party, which does not base its existence on the margin of political freedom that the imperialist bourgeoisie allows for the popular masses, but on its ability to exist and operate despite the bourgeoisie’s attempts to eliminate it. The communist party must therefore be clandestine and, from clandestinity, intervene in the public (legal) movements that are necessary and useful to the working class, the proletariat, and the masses, assign a part of its members to lead tasks in the public political struggle and in the public work of mobilizing the masses, and create all the public structures that the situation allows to create.
This is true not only in countries where the bourgeoisie has restricted the legal activity, but in every country and before the bourgeoisie imposes emergency laws: clandestinity is the rule, not an exception for times of emergency.
That the communist party must be clandestine is taught to us in negative terms by Gramsci (Italy) arrest in 1926, Thälmann (Germany) arrest in 1933, Zachariadis (Greece) arrest in 1936, Cunhal (Portugal) arrest in 1949, and the history of many other heroic leaders of communist parties in imperialist countries, among whom Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, assassinated in 1919. In positive terms, Lenin teaches us this too, when he strenuously struggled against Mensheviks to practice clandestinity even when the Tsarist empire, after the 1905 revolution, adopted policies inspired by bourgeois democracy.
The line of clandestinity of the (new) Italian Communist Party and the link between two brother communist parties—the clandestine (n)ICP and the public P. CARC—which the Caravan of the (n)ICP practices, is linked to the conception of the form of the socialist revolution and to the summation of the experience of the communist movement.
3.2 The war plan that communists must adopt: the plan for approaching the establishment of socialism.
Just like an army going to war, communists must adopt a plan that starts from the concrete situation of organization and consciousness of the popular masses, the balance of forces between them and the imperialist bourgeoisie, and the level reached by the revival of the communist movement, and indicates the sequence of steps to create a new system of power that, as it grows, undermines that of the bourgeoisie until it replaces it. This is how communists direct toward a political goal, the government of the country, the organizations that the resistance to the effects of the crisis spontaneously creates among workers and the rest of the popular masses.
The war plan that the Caravan of the (n)ICP is implementing is the line of the People’s Bloc Government (PBG), a sovereign and democratic government composed of trusted members of workers’ and popular organizations, whose program, supported by popular mobilization, shall include measures to break with the US, Zionist, and EU imperialist groups in the political, economic, and military fields (with measures such as the abolition of public debt except the savings of the popular masses, the nationalization of main banks, the reestablishment of Italian State power over NATO and US bases, the break with political and military collaboration with the Zionists of Israel, etc.). The conditions to be created to establish such a government are: 1. to multiply and strengthen workers’ and popular organizations, 2. to promote their coordination at every level, 3. to propagate the goal of the PBG, showing that its establishment is the prerequisite for achieving the goals for which the workers’ organizations are fighting, 4. to make the country ungovernable for bourgeois authorities.
This is a plan designed to advance the socialist revolution in a context such as that of Italy, characterized by the precipitation of the general crisis of capitalism in its acute and terminal phase, by the weakness of the conscious and organized communist movement, by the fact that the popular masses tend to trust the exponents of the bourgeois left (non-communist opponents of the imperialist bourgeoisie) and which takes into account the role assumed by the State in the economy (State monopoly capitalism) in imperialist countries.
With the line of the PBG, the Caravan of the (n)ICP aims 1. to prevent the reactionary mobilization of the masses and 2. to unite the working class and the rest of the popular masses around the communist party. We do not aim to create either an alternative to socialism or a social system intermediate between capitalism and socialism. The establishment of the PBG is a stage in the socialist revolution, in the PRPW against the imperialist bourgeoisie, which will end with the establishment of socialism.
In the conscious and organized communist movement, some reduce the strategy of PRPW to armed struggle. It is a distortion to think that PRPW always and only means armed struggle and that communists who adopt it as a strategy would always and only devote themselves to forming military organizations and preparing insurrections. The Russian Revolution was not always armed struggle: the October 1917 insurrection was preceded by the accumulation of forces directed by the party since 1903 and by more targeted work done between February and October 1917. PRPW does not begin with armed struggle, but with the existence of the clandestine communist party, organized in such a way as to exist and operate continuously with the aim of seizing power.
According to others, PRPW was fine for countries such as China, Korea, and Vietnam in the last century, and probably works for countries currently oppressed by imperialism, but not for imperialist countries. Their objection does not distinguish between universal laws of people’s war and particular laws valid in single countries or groups of countries. The universal law of people’s war shows that the popular masses, mobilized by the working class led by its communist party, can build a new power system and eliminate the power system of the ruling class—therefore, the accumulation of revolutionary forces around the communist party is a universal law of people’s war. In Russia, for communists, this meant the soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers, and in China, the liberated zones. Today in Italy, we are not promoting soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers, nor are we creating liberated zones, but by applying the same law, we are promoting the multiplication, strengthening, and coordination of workers’ collectives in capitalist and public companies and of territorial and thematic popular organizations (against war, environmental devastation, etc.). For every communist party, this means:
1. to identify the stages leading to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to discover for each stage the correct objectives and lines (i.e., those in accordance with the objective development of the contradictions of the world and of the specific country) and to organize adequately to achieve them;
2. to lead the working class to act in accordance with the lines and objectives indicated by the party and to take the leadership of the rest of the popular masses;
3. to mobilize every class and group of the popular masses to defend, with the greatest effectiveness possible, their particular interests against the imperialist bourgeoisie and to exploit in every possible way the chronic struggles of interests that divides the bourgeoisie and their institutions;
4. to mobilize the advanced sections of the masses in all circumstances so that they can engage also the non-politically active sections, based on the common practical experience of oppression and exploitation;
5. to build and direct, directly or indirectly, from outside bourgeois political relations—therefore the party is necessarily clandestine—the broadest possible front of classes and political forces to achieve the objectives of each stage, promoting the maximum possible organizational level of the masses, in organisms public and clandestine, legal and illegal, peaceful and combative;
6. to prepare in every way the development of revolutionary armed forces directed by the party because, ultimately, armed struggle has a decisive and conclusive task in realizing the aspirations of the masses and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat (“power comes from the barrel of a gun”).
In short, it is a question of developing the full potential of PRPW, building a broad front of revolutionary forces and classes.