Marco Pappalardo | Party of Committees to Support Resistance―for Communism (Italy)
We thank the CPRF for organizing this International Anti-Fascist Forum and for inviting us. It is an honor for us to be in the land that was the first socialist country in history. The Soviet Union and the Communist International led by Lenin and Stalin raised the first wave of proletarian revolution throughout the world and changed the world.
During the First World War in Russia, communists took advantage of the revolutionary situation generated by the world war, seized power, and held on to it. This was despite the civil war waged by the reactionary classes of the Tsarist empire and the aggression of all the imperialist powers. Their success was mainly due an advanced understanding by Lenin and the Bolshevik Party of the conditions of the class struggle in the imperialist phase of bourgeois society. It was also due to the advanced understanding of the particular conditions of the class struggle in the Tsarist empire. All communists who want to advance, must start from the experience of the USSR and learn from its lessons, valuing every positive aspect and identifying and overcoming the limitations that every innovative phenomenon inevitably has at the beginning.
Lenin teaches us that “the imperialist epoch is the epoch of proletarian revolution and the decline of bourgeois society.” Today, the decline of bourgeois society means World War III in pieces, growing misery even in the imperialist countries, environmental devastation, and the reemergence of fascists from the sewers where we had thrown them. World War III and the advance of the proletarian revolution are the two currents which, in struggle with each other, are contesting the ground throughout the world, given the unification that took place in the imperialist epoch. Either we put an end to war by promoting the proletarian revolution, or we take advantage of the development of war to accelerate the proletarian revolution. “If socialism does not win, peace between capitalist States will mean only an armistice, a truce, the preparation for a new massacre of the peoples,” wrote Lenin in December 1917, two months after the victory of the Russian Revolution: all subsequent history up to the present day has confirmed this.
Lenin, and along with him Stalin, taught us that only the victory of socialist revolution in imperialist countries would guarantee that the victory in Russia would be irreversible. The first wave of the proletarian revolution (1917-1976) achieved great victories and successes, but failed to establish socialism in any imperialist country. As Italian communists, operating in an imperialist country, we say: the main reason for the exhaustion of the first wave of the proletarian revolution lies in the failure of the revolution in the imperialist countries. This was the main limit of the communists’ action during the first world wave of the proletarian revolution: this is the limit we must overcome today.
It is mainly because of this limit that, starting in the 1950s, the first revolutionary wave gradually lost momentum and modern revisionists, the representatives of bourgeois influence in the communist movement, took over the leadership of most communist parties. Therefore the communist movement declined until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp, and the imperialist bourgeoisie regained its domination of the world. But today, as yesterday, the deepening crisis of capitalism makes the establishment of socialism indispensable for the survival as well as any progress for humanity. The crisis is giving rise to an acceleration of the class struggle throughout the world, in which everything that the first wave of the proletarian revolution brought about is converging: from the heroic struggle of the working class of the Donbass against fascism, to the great mobilizations in solidarity with Palestine, from the BRICS and the front of States resisting US imperialism to the countries where communists have maintained political leadership like the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
In order to try to maintain its dominion, the imperialist bourgeoisie is now returning to fan the flames of reactionary mobilization and war: in Italy and other European countries, ‘either we have Europe or we die’ is becoming the banner of the reactionary mobilization of the popular masses. We can block the road to reactionary mobilization. Opposition to war, to war economy and arms race, resistance against the elimination of social welfare achieved when the communist movement was strong, is widespread among large sections of the masses in our country as in other imperialist countries and is increasingly translating into mobilizations, protests, and struggles. Leveraging opposition to war and its effects to bring the popular masses to participate in the socialist revolution is the general synthesis of the tasks of communists.
The CARC Party is active in Italy in the struggle against NATO and against our country’s participation in NATO’s proxy war against the Russian Federation in Ukraine. At its Sixth Congress in 2023, our party approved a clear resolution on the question of the war in Ukraine, rejecting any position of equidistance and any interpretation of the Russian Federation as an imperialist power. In December 2024 in Bologna, along with dozens of other organizations and associations, we promoted the establishment of a National Coordination for Italy’s exit from NATO. We are now working to create links between the Coordination and workers in logistics and war companies, to block the production and transport of weapons.
Participation in the International Anti-Fascist Forum is an important opportunity to strengthen our work aimed at establishing a government in Italy supported by a Popular Front that opposes war and our country’s complicity with fascist and pro-imperialist regimes around the world, for the full sovereignty of Italy in the interests of the popular masses, peace, respect and solidarity among peoples.
The establishment of socialism in an imperialist country such as Italy, even just a decisive leap forward in the socialist revolution such as the establishment of a Popular Bloc Government for which the CARC Party is fighting, is the main contribution that Italian communists can make to the struggle of oppressed peoples and to the cause of peace and socialism worldwide.
In this way the Russian communists, with the revolution that culminated in the October 1917 uprising, not only forced the imperialist powers to quickly end the First World War, but also launched the first world wave of proletarian revolution. The first imperialist country to break the chains of the International Community of US, Zionist, and European profiteers, speculators, and warmongers will start the new fire that will finally free the world from the capitalist system!
