It is this ancient aspiration of ours, dictated by the revolutionary tasks of the international proletariat, which we find traced along the arc of centuries-long workers’ struggles and the cyclopean effort to organize, together with the workers’ movement, a political movement of the working class, for the attainment of victory in the war of emancipation from capitalist exploitation.

From the first manifestations of proletarian solidarity within nascent organizations for the defense of economic and material conditions against corporate tyranny, to the formation of the first professional guilds, from the birth of the first workers’ coalitions and mutual aid associations, up to the construction of the first great International Workingmen’s Association, known as the First International, followed by the Second and then the Third International, one witnesses an irresistible ascent, above successes and defeats, of the organized movement of the struggle of the workers on an international scale. Parallel to this movement of elementary physical social solidarity, with which the workers assert themselves as a class, especially every time the struggle places before them the question of power and the state, there unfolds the ideological, doctrinal, and political selection.

First, the mystical and childlike intuition of an “egalitarian communism,” a sound and powerful ideal construction of utopianism, then, in the heat of historical experience, marked by deep and bloody wounds in the young body of the proletariat, due to the deterministic imposition of overwhelming capitalist development and its social dictatorship, the systematic search for a method of combat and the discovery of the objective laws governing capitalist society, which the bourgeoisie itself was incapable of deciphering. Emerging alongside the class struggles of the proletariat was born scientific socialism, in the doctrine of Marxism.

With the 1848 Manifesto, the founding program of the universal Communist Party, Marxism penetrates into the workers’ movement to win its leadership, to imbue it with “correct revolutionary politics.”

In this centuries-long journey, during which capitalism conquers the world to its mode of production, its mode of exchange and its mode of life, the proletariat is dialectically forced to oppose to it its class action, its organization, its doctrine.

The first great historical achievement, crystallized by the birth of the First International, is the separate organization of the proletariat from bourgeois democracy, that is, the separation of the working class from the other classes, with which they had fought strenuously alongside with to overthrow the power of the old classes and then eliminate their remnants. This first great victory of the world proletariat over the bourgeoisie – we repeat, its separation from democracy – is the primary condition for the proletariat’s autonomous and independent establishment.

On this basis, two principles are affirmed and confirmed: centralism, that is, the unity of political leadership of the economic and political movement of the proletariat, and the international character of the movement. This is evident at every step of the party’s formation, from the continual struggles that Marx and Engels had to endure to overcome repeated attempts to break and devalue the authority of the General Council of the First Workers’ International, its leading center, to the contemporary and often poisonous attempts to imprison the proletarian movement within local “realities,” then as now tools of the petty bourgeoisie to suffocate the working class in the factory, in the category, in the nation.

With the dominance of Marxism in the proletarian movement, passing through the Second Socialist International and triumphant in the Third Communist International, the class political movement emerges from the state of aggregation of non-homogeneous forces and schools and becomes a single party: in doctrine, Marxism; in organization, organic centralism; in tactics, proletarian unity under party leadership; and worldwide, a single internationally organized network, with the world as its borders, with a single and centralized direction.

The report concluded by recalling that the Left is firmly anchored to these conquests of the proletariat, which it intends to defend from tampering and mystification, as a primary task, as Marx and Lenin had to do. This is a categorical mandate for all combatants of the working class, especially in the current gray phase of the domination of capitalist lordship over the entire world, a domination still unchallenged due to the traitorous parties’ deadly effect on the dispossessed and their weak and disfigured struggles.

On this line of battle, today’s party, limited in action and reduced in strength, calls all those who recognize its historical validity and class distinctiveness.

A century and a half since the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, with which the challenge to capitalism was launched with the battle cry “Proletarians of all countries unite!” and from which the building of the World Communist Party was initiated, it seems today that the ancient aspiration has collapsed.

At the time, Marx was discovering the characteristics that make the proletariat a historical class, although in those early days, proletarians were few in number, in a few Western European countries, but foreseeing that economic development would drag all countries into the infernal circle of modern capitalism and proletarianize the great mass of citizens across all continents.

The relentless march toward proletarianization has made great strides. With the Manifesto, Marx was revealing to the proletariat that it is not the people, but a class distinct from the other classes of the people, with historical interests of its own.

At such a great distance in time, today’s false workers’ parties would like to drive the working class back to where it came from and from where it distinguished itself, by enucleating its own general doctrine and structuring itself into a special revolutionary party. They would again like to confuse the proletariat within the formless and indecipherable people, imprison it in national and corporate ghettos, deprive it of liberating communism, and bend it to democratic mystification. The “moderns,” the “innovators,” propose to the workers to go back in history, to the starting point.

This will, contrary to the sense of history, is evident in all those who, tired of digging into the entrails of social and production relations with the tools of class science, chase after temporary and comfortable solutions to scrape by each day, preferring to destroy tools forged and refined by centuries of class struggles, rather than toil, anonymous unknowns, in the indispensable daily work of fighters for the communist revolution.

Thus one would again wish to bend the class political party to the contemptible practices of democracy, modestly rechristened “proletarian,” proposing its rebirth through the summation of hybrid grafts, held together by unstable mixes of false majoritarian and bureaucratic procedures, in a laughable orator’s pit of hierarchical choices of chatter and careerism. Whoever seeks salvation from the temporary collapse of the revolutionary wave in this cesspool of baseness and obscenity are not only outside the field of the Left, but also of the broader field of class.

It is in this field of petty bourgeois and labor-aristocratic nature that the class enemy sows with full force the most distorted theories, the most palatable prospects for careerists.

“I think that the next International – after Marx’s writings have had some years of influence – will be directly Communist and will openly proclaim our principles” (Engels’ letter to Sorge, September 12, 1874).

The International of which Engels speaks is the First, dissolved three years after the sacrifice of the Paris Commune. On March 6, 1895, Engels, in his introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, wrote, examining the history of the workers’ movement and with particular reference to 1848, that “At that time the many obscure gospels of the sects, with their panaceas; today the single generally recognised, crystal-clear theory of Marx, sharply formulating the ultimate aims of the struggle.”

Marxism’s battle in the field of theoretical selection began around 1840 with the well-known polemics against the “Young Hegelians” and continued up to the end of the decade against Proudhonism. During the 1860s, the critical analysis of the positions, which had manifested themselves in the revolutionary 1848, was accompanied by the colossal effort that Marx was making in the field of economic and general theory with Capital, which is not only a text on economics but a systematic treatment, although the original project was not completed, of economic questions in relation to social and political ones. During this period, and precisely in 1848 with the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the foundations of Marxist doctrine are laid, which not surprisingly take the form of a party program. Engels would say repeatedly even after Marx’s death, in the last decade of the century, that the Manifesto is always “topical.”

It is in this symbiosis between theory and program, between doctrine and party, that the principal peculiarity of Marxism lies. Theory crystallizes into a historical program of class action; it is placed as the foundation of the emancipatory struggle of the proletariat. It is in this welding that the proletariat emerges from the undifferentiated magma of the people and assumes the dignity of a class, with an original, exclusive program, doctrine and organization, separate from those of the other classes.

Hence begins the long process, during which, amid successes and defeats, the proletariat tends to recognize itself as a class in the Communist Party, and the Communists strive to lead the class through all the vicissitudes of history in the manner so well described by the Manifesto itself: “The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”

It is in this way that Marxism is recognized as the highest authority in the proletarian field. Thus it would be impossible to trace the history of class struggles without also tracing the battle against other theories waged by the Communist Party. This does not mean that Marxist communism is now at the forefront of the world proletariat and has conquered its consciousness. History does not proceed by harmonic evolution toward superior forms of social structure. Instead, glorious periods dense with historical meaning alternate with obscure and stagnant periods, in which all the progress of preceding periods seem to vanish into nothing.

Regarding the formation of the Marxist party, we find it appropriate to distinguish two distinct phases in time: one that runs from 1848 to 1890, and the second from 1890 to the present day. During the first period, Marxism must clash with theories which, though addressing the class struggle, neither provide a clear interpretation nor merge into a class political militia. In the second period, instead, Marxism must clash strenuously against theories that claim to interpret Marxism in ways that completely undermine its revolutionary content.

The first period is distinguished from the second by the emergence of the First Workers’ International, which was not Marxist, while in the second period Marxism affirms itself in the great German Social-Democratic Party, which inspires the Second International and to which all socialist parties look as to a sure guide, until the Third International arose with overt Marxist doctrine.

The first historical phase involves the emancipation of the proletariat from sects and the fallacious theories that sustained them, with the essential aim of giving itself an organization separate from the people and and from bourgeois democracy. Along this path, in which communists fight on the front lines of the proletarian barricades of June 1848 – which will earn them the trial in Cologne and the convictions – the separation of the proletarians from other parties is both reinforced and realized, and one arrives at the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association, that is, of the First International.

Engels comments, “It aimed to create a single great army of the fighting working class in Europe and America. It could not, therefore, take its starting point from the principles set forth in the Manifesto. It had to have a program that did not close the door to the English Trade Unions. It also had to remain open to the French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish Proudhonists, as well as the German Lassalleans. This program, which forms the premise of the Statutes of the International, was expertly sketched out by Marx. His expertise was recognized even by Bakunin and the anarchists. For the final victory of the theses enunciated in the Manifesto, Marx relied solely on the intellectual development of the working class. This development had to spring from common action and discussion. The events and challenges of the struggle against capital, and the defeats even more than the successes, demonstrated to the combatants the insufficiency of the solutions used up to that time. They also made the true conditions of workers’ emancipation clearer to them. And Marx was right” (from the Preface to the German edition of the Manifesto of May 1, 1890).

In the nine years of the International’s existence (1864-1874) Proudhonism and Lassalleanism were agonizing, anarchism lived on the fringes of the labor movement, and even the “arch-conservative” Trade Unions had to admit that “continental socialism has ceased to be a bogeyman for us.” Engels comments on the admissions of the English Trade Unions, “But this continental socialism already in 1887 was almost exclusively the theory proclaimed in the Manifesto.”

As early as a century ago, scientific socialism as doctrine, the Communist program of the Manifesto and the international party of the Workingmen’s Association characterize the process of class emancipation of the world proletariat. The guiding lines of the historical process for the victory of the proletariat are already drawn. The great ideal of the workers is no longer a utopia entrusted to prophets and heroes, but a scientific certainty, a historical clash between opposing classes, and an organized union of all the workers of the world.

To pursue this result, it was necessary to combat the unscientific theories of “reactionary,” “feudal,” “petty-bourgeois,” “conservative or bourgeois” socialism, according to the summary list we quote from the Manifesto. It was also, and above all, necessary to struggle against the practical consequences of these theories. Now memorable are the polemics, such as what apologists for capitalism call “Marx’s personal dictatorship” over the International, the despotic centralism of the General Council in London, the struggle against anarchist individualism and democratic federalism.

In the 1848 Manifesto, all the essentials of the program, tactics, principles, and aims of militant communism are outlined. From this basis, the connections for the later development of the class struggle and the practical direction of the communist party begin. In the third chapter, entitled Socialist and Communist Literature, the doctrines and practical actions of various “socialisms” are examined. There is a close analogy between the “socialisms” of that time and the “Marxisms” of today.

The various “socialisms” were not only erroneous theoretical conceptions but translated punctually into practical indications to the proletariat not to fight for itself or, at best, to struggle only for appearances. “Feudal socialism” pointed out to the workers the bourgeoisie as a new ruling class under whose power they would fall; but reproached the bourgeoisie “not so much [for creating] a proletariat [in general] as [for creating] a revolutionary proletariat.” “Petty-bourgeois socialism” presents a “party for the workers from the standpoint of the petty bourgeoisie.” To these variants of “reactionary socialism,” Marx adds “conservative or bourgeois socialism,” which, for the bourgeoisie, “redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.”

Marx cites Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty as an example of these theories. Let us reread what Marx says about “bourgeois socialism,” to feel its strong relevance: “The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.” And again with genial prescience: “A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labor, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government.”

Marx already knew today’s traitors, but perhaps he could not have imagined that they would betray the communist revolution in the name of... Marx!

Lenin, in Marxism and Revisionism of 1908, summarizes revisionism as follows: “In the sphere of philosophy revisionism followed in the wake of bourgeois professorial ‘science.’ The professors went ‘back to Kant’ (...) and the revisionists floundered after them into the swamp of philosophical vulgarisation of science, replacing ‘artful’ (and revolutionary) dialectics by ‘simple’ (and tranquil) ‘evolution’ (...) the revisionists drew close to them, trying to make religion a ‘private affair,’ not in relation to the modern state, but in relation to the party of the advanced class.”

The “Marxism” of today’s traitors rehashes these same old litanies as old as Kant, the neo-Kantians, the turn-of-the-century “revisionists”! Revision of Marxism with arguments borrowed from the ideologues of the most vulgar and tawdry idealism. What a fine novelty!

Lenin continues, “Passing to political economy (...) attempts were made to influence the public by ’new data on economic development’ (Today the mess of “new data on economic development” is called “neocapitalism”!).

“It was said,” Lenin says, “that concentration and the ousting of small-scale production by large-scale production do not occur in agriculture at all, while they proceed very slowly in commerce and industry. It was said that crises had now become rarer and weaker, and that cartels and trusts would probably enable capital to eliminate them altogether. It was said that the ‘theory of collapse’ to which capitalism is heading was unsound, owing to the tendency of class antagonisms to become milder and less acute. It was said, finally, that it would not be amiss to correct Marx’s theory of value, too, in accordance with Böhm-Bawerk.”

It does not seem that special comments are needed: after six years, in 1914, the first great world war breaks out; after another three years, the first great victorious socialist revolution; and after another three, another economic crisis arose so acute and profound that, through highs and lows, including the famous crisis of 1929-33, it will dissolve into another catastrophic world war, that of 1939-45. Forgive us, gentlemen revisionists of today, lest we overuse the more appropriate term of traitors, if this is not enough, and if the theoretical prediction is not more than confirmed by such irrefutable facts, that even today, in 1978, millions of war cripples and widows still circulate through the streets of the whole world.

“In the sphere of politics, revisionism did really try to revise the foundation of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the class struggle.” Take a breath, readers, crinkle your eyes: it’s Lenin from 1908, seventy years ago: “Political freedom, democracy and universal suffrage remove the basis for the class struggle – we were told (i.e., the revisionists say) – and render untrue the old proposition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party: that the working men have no country. For, they said, since the ‘will of the majority’ prevails in a democracy, one must neither regard the state as an organ of class rule, nor reject alliances with the progressive, social-reform bourgeoisie against the reactionaries.”

It is with these words that the Carrillos, Marchais, Berlinguers, and Co. of today justify their prostration before the international capitalist order. With words and opinions that already seventy years ago clashed against scientific socialism, against Marxism. With these old refrains, the false communist parties not only revise the doctrine they swear to uphold, but above all divert class energies into the field of proletarian submission to the capitalist regime.

The root of late 20th century revisionism is the same as that of the “socialisms” of the first period and of today’s “Marxisms”: the interests of the petty bourgeoisie. Thus Lenin summarizes, “Wherein lies [revisionism’s] inevitability in capitalist society? (...) Because in every capitalist country, side by side with the proletariat, there are always broad strata of the petty bourgeoisie, small proprietors. Capitalism arose and is constantly arising out of small production. A number of new ‘middle strata’ are inevitably brought into existence again and again by capitalism (appendages to the factory, work at home, small workshops scattered all over the country to meet the requirements of big industries, such as the bicycle and automobile industries, etc.). These new small producers are just as inevitably being cast again into the ranks of the proletariat. It is quite natural that this should be so and always will be so, right up to the changes of fortune that will take place in the proletarian revolution. For it would be a profound mistake to think that the ‘complete’ proletarianization of the majority of the population is essential for bringing about such a revolution.”

These “middle” strata delude themselves into reconciling the interests of big capital with those of the proletarians, so as to allow themselves not to be periodically crushed by the grip of the two main classes. Since the time of Proudhon, this has always been the highest aspiration of the petty bourgeoisie. Marx, in his text against the Philosophy of Poverty, notes this attitude of the intermediate strata and recognizes in Proudhon the philosopher and economist of the petty bourgeoisie.

German revisionism, followed closely by French and Italian revisionism, initiated this surgical operation of transplanting the philosophy, economics, and politics of the petty bourgeoisie, formulated in the name of the proletariat and socialism, into the doctrinal body of Marxism.

In sum, the whole work of revisionism starts from the “correction” of Marx’s doctrine in the field of theory, economics and tactics, to aim at the complete distortion of the practical conclusions, of the historical class content of Marxism, that is, its revolutionary character congenial to the proletarian class alone. Revisionism in the field of theory translates into opportunism in the field of party politics.

This operation was carried out during the period of the Second International, in which two wings, one reformist and one revolutionary, confronted each other. The reformist one was able to take advantage of the conditions of relative peaceful development of capitalism, during which there was a shift from prohibition of workers’ coalitions and parties to their tolerance. Capitalist governments realized that it would have been extremely dangerous for the safety of the bourgeois regime to confront the working class directly, especially since the German party, with wise policy, had known how to exploit legality to strengthen its organization and influence in the country. Without the aid of revisionism, the regime would not have been able to deflate the party’s revolutionary charge. Revisionism turned the struggle for reform into an end in itself, legality into legalitarianism, the unstable balance between classes into pacifism between classes. In short, it bent the party toward practices in the opposite direction to that assigned by Marx. Thus it was that the party was imbued with social democratic revision, adapted to the “reality” of capitalism, which went as far as joining the imperialist war.

The theoretical discussion, the doctrinal research, soon turned into a political orientation opposite to the original one. Orthodox Marxists had to descend onto the terrain of theory, of science, to fight this infection that was festering in the entire socialist movement in order to avert the collapse of the international party.

Lenin and the Bolshevik Party led this clash, with full awareness that “[t]he ideological struggle waged by revolutionary Marxism against revisionism at the end of the nineteenth century is but the prelude to the great revolutionary battles of the proletariat, which is marching forward to the complete victory of its cause despite all the waverings and weaknesses of the petty bourgeoisie” (Lenin, ib.).

Paraphrasing Lenin and shifting the clock of history from the end of the 19th century to the present day, one must affirm: the struggle of revolutionary Marxism against opportunism, revisionist of revolutionary theory and traitor to the communist program, characterizes the reconstruction of the single world party of the proletariat, a preliminary and irreplaceable condition for the resurgence of the revolutionary class struggle.

The distortions, the debasements of revolutionary Marxism have their “theoretical” roots in this historical period. It is for this reason we are so familiar with the fraudulent motives of present-day opportunism, which adds nothing to what it once claimed to theorize, even though today’s wave of treachery is by far more vicious and infamous than the reformism and social-patriotism of that time.

The thesis we want to confirm here is that of the necessary reconstruction of the political party of the proletariat on the foundations of revolutionary Marxism, in open rejection of the aberrant theses that emerged during the formation of the party according to the models of the First, Second, and Third Internationals. On this ground, we alone hold the positions defended by the Italian Communist Left within the Comintern. We clarify that, as stated above, this is not a matter of conducting a polemical critique of the manner in which the party was attempted to be built, but of examining the determining historical conditions in comparison with the political and programmatic positions that the communist movement had to adopt to bring the proletarian army onto ever more advanced positions, corresponding to the needs of the revolutionary struggle and the conquest of power.

Even Lenin – as we have reiterated several times – would have wanted an International all in one piece. But the onslaught of the revolutionary crisis and the outpouring of tens of millions of proletarians and exploited people determined, as in all truly revolutionary parties, the “audacity” of maneuver in order to deal the final blow, that seemed within reach at that time, against the international power of capitalism.

The First Congress of the Comintern in 1919 immediately gave Lenin and those of us on the Italian Left the measure that the political forces prepared to fight, i.e. the parties of the proletariat, were highly non-homogeneous, despite the enthusiasm aroused by the revolutionary victory in Russia. This Congress resulted in direct contact between the Bolsheviks and delegations from socialist parties and workerist groups in Europe, America and Australia.

It was with the Second Congress, the following year, that the fundamental foundations of the Comintern are established. The theses of the Congress duly systematized the principal questions of doctrine, program, and organization. In the subsequent Congresses, with the decline of the revolutionary wave, deep, and ever deeper, cracks emerged within the tactical framework, which also affected the rules of organization and the method of internal work, shaking even the foundations that had seemed to be permanently established. This is an arc, characteristic of the political party, which follows the revolutionary wave when victory fails.

Just as the C.I. arose in repudiation of reformism and social-patriotism, embodied by the social-democratic parties of the Second International, so the revolutionary Communist Party, the protagonist of the proletariat’s next revolutionary assault, will have to rise again in repudiation of the aberrant positions that upset the Comintern.

The gravity of the current historical situation is represented by the complete collapse of the old communist movement. The former communist parties have plummeted even lower than the parties of the Second International, originating anarchoid reactions more convoluted than those of anarcho-syndicalism, especially in the face of the party form, toward which distrust and even contempt is being nurtured.

It is well known, for those who wish to remember, that the Left held that the revolutionary wave, at its peak in the last months of 1919, began to decline with the defeat of the communist revolution in Germany in the first half of 1920. But this conviction reinforced the commitment to work diligently in the construction of the international Communist Party, and thus to the strenuous defense of the theoretical, programmatic, and tactical foundations of revolutionary Marxism.

In contrast, the former Social Democrats, who had descended in droves to swell the ranks of the C.I., were committed to breaking the international party line, and, ahead of Stalin’s theories, to building “national parties,” counterparts to “socialism in one country.” This opposing solution was inevitably adopted whenever the Moscow Executive sought to provide an adequate response to contingent problems, sacrificing correctness and intransigence. In this way, spurious forces nested within the Communist parties, taken on board to lend greater weight to revolutionary action, were reinvigorated, but instead continuously steered the course to divert the International.

Today a gang of scoundrels, paid by the capitalist state, smear miles of paper with ink to try to prove that “revolution” is the stuff of archaeologists, and that if communism has not prevailed it is because the party was suffocated by “dictatorship,” “intolerance,” “tyranny,” and the “lack of freedom.” The history of the C.I. proves exactly the opposite. The history written by the Communist Left, i.e., by revolutionary Marxism, has amply demonstrated that the revolution collapsed in Europe, in the world, and in Russia itself because the international party that was being built with the blood of the proletarians under Marxist guidance sinned by having too little dictatorship, too little intransigence, too little severity toward the half-conscious elements, who should have been treated with the red-hot iron of revolutionary communism.

The Italian Communist Left, along with the German Spartacists and the Bolsheviks, was fully aware that the world party was being built in Moscow. Even before it founded the PCI, a fraction of the old PSI, the Left participated in the Second Congress of the C.I. in 1920, and it was to its credit that the “Conditions of Admission,” the famous “21 Points of Moscow,” were made stricter and more stringent. The tightening of the barrier to entry into the C.I. was meant to contain the entry of forces not genuinely communist.

But already at that second Congress, July 1920, two fundamental issues came to light on which the member parties were divided or at least expressed conflicting positions. The first issue was that of revolutionary parliamentarianism, the second that of labor in reformist unions.

Lenin, in May 1920, on the eve of the Congress, had finished writing his famous pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. In it he particularly addresses the positions of the Dutch “Tribunists” and German Workers’ Party (KAPD) and of the Italian Left. Lenin, and the Congress immediately after, reject the refusal to work in the trade unions headed by the Social Democrats, defended by the Germans and the Dutch, and the refusal to work in bourgeois parliaments, shared by the Germans, Dutch and the Italian Left. The terms are well known. It was already a matter of giving a tactical framework to the action of the C.I., which was in the process of being built, based above all on the experience of the Bolshevik Party.

The Italian Left agreed with Lenin that work should be done in reformist and even “reactionary” trade unions to wrest the working masses from the influence of social democracy, allied with the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. It disagreed with Lenin on the parliamentary question and with the Dutch Tribunists and German workerists, with the latter for the way of formulating their refusal to work in bourgeois parliaments, of clear anarchist stamp.

For the Italian Left, but also for Lenin, the discriminant was not so much the parliamentary question, as the tactical means to be used to effect the shift of considerable proletarian forces from opportunist to revolutionary control. Lenin’s main argument centered on the Russian experience of the convening of the Constituent Assembly and its subsequent dissolution at gunpoint. That of the Italian Left consisted of the failed record of parliamentarianism in the industrialized countries, giving Lenin credit for the fact that parliamentary tactics had been possible in Russia because of the absence of a democratic-parliamentary tradition there.

The Left also recognized that in favor of its theses one could not invoke the choice of “less difficult” means, but neither could the particular character of the Communist Party compensate for the serious pitfalls hidden in parliamentary practice, and that especially at this stage of revolutionary crisis all the party’s efforts were to be directed to the preparation of the revolution whose epicenter – Lenin agreed – was outside parliament, in the streets, in the factories, in the illegal and armed struggle, in the mobilization of the masses.

The historical observatory of the Left was, as subsequent events would prove, most favorable for glimpsing that the communist deputies would end up like social-democratic ones, that they would be crushed by the bourgeois state apparatus and that the bourgeoisie itself would liquidate the parliaments, precisely in those countries where the revolutionary struggle had reached its most acute stages, Italy and Germany, while maintaining them instead where they had served to imprison class action, such as France, England, etc. The historical task of destroying parliament, which should have been a communist objective, had been fulfilled by the capitalist bourgeoisie. The Russian tactic applied to the “civilized” West had proven inadequate.

Completely different was the question of work in the reformist trade unions. Lenin and the Left agreed to work within them to gain leadership among the proletarians enrolled in them, using communist trade union fractions, tending not to split the social-democratic-directed unions but to win them over, and, only in the case of the impossibility of organizing communist cells and carrying out communist propaganda, to leave them. In any case, every effort was to be made to link up with proletarians enrolled in the official trade unions. The revolutionary syndicalists of the British and American representations opposed this directive, which, moreover, opposed the thesis of the supremacy of the party over the trade unions and other economic forces. These two issues, that of work in the “reactionary” trade unions and of the primacy of the party, remain stuck in the craw of “extremists” today.

The Congress also deliberated the constitution of an international trade union center, the Red Trade Union International, in which the trade unions won by the Communists were to be organized on the international scale in opposition to the yellow trade union center in Amsterdam, controlled by the Social Democrats.

The theses on the establishment of the Soviets also found opposition from French, Italian, excluding the Left who supported them, American and British representatives, who demanded that the Soviets be constituted immediately and not in the imminence of the revolutionary assault, as specific organs of the seizure of power and not permanent forms of proletarian organization.

Disagreement also arose on the national and colonial question, developed in Lenin’s, and the Indian Roy’s theses, partially corrected by the “supplementary” theses to mitigate the impression that it emphasized the colonial countries over the industrialized metropolises regarding the international revolution. Serrati and Graziadei abstained, as did the Spaniard Pestagna. The problem of the linkage of the revolution in the colonies with that in the civilized countries, something Lenin wanted resolved into a global revolutionary front against international capitalism, hinged on the network of communist parties autonomous and independent from the democratic and national liberation movements, but operating for the construction of workers’ and peasants’ Soviets in support of the bourgeois-democratic movements, was “rectified” with the clarification that communist support should go to national-revolutionary movements. The “compromise” aimed to prevent detaching the uprisings of the peoples of the East from the revolutionary struggles of the Western proletariat, rejecting attitudes of indifferentism assumed particularly by Serrati and Pestagna.

The theses “On the Role of the Communist Party,” those “On the Fundamental Tasks of the C.I.,” and the “Conditions of Admission” irrevocably chart, along with the other theses, the course of an international party and not that of a federation of parties.

In the subsequent international congresses, the construction of the world party stumbles, despite repeated proclamations of the Executive, on a series of obstacles, objectively placed by the real process of the revolutionary struggle, to which it did not know how to respond correctly and adequately. From the Third Congress in July 1921 onward, the detachment from the central theses of the Second Congress is witnessed, and gradually, it drags on further until the complete dismemberment of the C.I.

The Left has been the only one that has elaborated in these sixty years a timely and comprehensive analysis of the defeat of the revolution. An analysis centered exclusively on revolutionary Marxism, enshrined in theses and texts in perfect continuity with the communist tradition, from Marx to Lenin; because there is continuity of positions between the party of 1848 and that of 1978, inasmuch as that the proletariat is not a national class and the revolution is an international process.

Today’s small party qualifies as international not because of its current geographic extension, but to indicate the ancient aspiration to rebuild a world communist organization. This organization is based on the complex of positions elaborated by the Communist Left, which is also international and not just “Italian,” because Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky belong to the global proletariat of all times.

For these reasons, we have always rejected invitations to “unifications,” “convergences,” “alliances” in the organizational and political field, conscious that, based on historical experience, there is no increase in real influence in the class with the artificial expansion of the organization.

That of party organization is neither a secondary nor a formal problem. It was precisely the Left that had to oppose the Moscow Center, when the way in which they “hired” and “fired” – it was just like that! – party leaders depending on whether they were liked or disliked by the Executive had appeared in all its gravity. The making up and breaking down of the party was guided by the seesaw of positions that were being imparted by the International, until it came to the aberrant necessity for the center to create its own particular fractions in the national sections of the C.I. At that moment the C.I. ceased orienting itself in the direction of the single world party, to return backwards toward the federation of national parties. The inner workings of the C.I. opened itself up to opportunism, also by this path.

The way the party is structured influences its direction and vice versa. Every aspect of the party’s overall life is subject to mutual influences. There are no watertight compartments.

We deduce from this that to refer oneself to the Left implies recognition of the struggle that it has had to wage in every field up to the present and not only that which was engaged at Livorno 1921.

In dealing with the manifold issues that underlie the future international party of tomorrow, we do not pose the conditions of the Left peremptorily out of party arrogance, but because they are the only ones that mark the transition from the movement phase to that of the world party. The Left distinguishes itself from all “left extremisms” in this respect, not because it is part of a so-called “revolutionary communist movement,” but because communism being one and one alone, cannot conceive of the party as a florilegium of “dialectics,” as were the PCI and the C.I., engulfed by world counter-revolution. The PCI and the C.I. are dead forever, having distinctively marked a feature of the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle.

The One International Party will be reborn from the ashes of defeat as a powerful party on the foundations only of revolutionary Marxism, of which the Left is the embodiment.

The Left boasts a coherent and uninterrupted tradition from the Manifesto of 1848 to the present. It is the tradition of revolutionary Marxism, synonymous with communism. It is the continuity of program and principles along the more than century-long arc of class struggle, of victories and defeats of the proletariat. It is tactical coherence in the complex of historical conditions not always homogeneous and not always easy to interpret. It is an organizational structure jealously tied to the centralism of the party organ, both when in the First International the main task was to build for the first time in history an essentially proletarian fighting organization, emancipated from bourgeois democracy, and when in the Third International the function of centralized direction on a world scale of the communist movement aimed, in the revolutionary crisis that opened with the World War and October, at the unleashing of the international revolution.

Who can boast of these merits? Which group, party, political school can say as much, when it contrives to search the long history of communism for “errors” in order to put the Left on trial?

Have anarchism, or perhaps revolutionary syndicalism, achieved more solid successes with their eclecticism and visceral phobia for the party?

Have laborism or German “communist” workerism, Dutch councilism, and the other small outgrowths basically generated by workerism, translated proletarian defeats into victories with their inane attempt to break the historical march of revolutionary Marxism?

The “correctors” of communism have not only not obtained the slightest success, but not even the slightest increase in the theoretical and tactical elaboration of the revolutionary process of the proletariat.

It is a truly paltry thing to accuse the Left of sectarianism for its explicit refusal of botched compromises, old and new “four-leafs” or “three-leafs,” invoking, out of place and time, Livorno ‘21 and the C.I. as witnesses.

It is precisely the experience of the first post-war period, particularly of the C.I. and the PCI, that demonstrates that the single party of the proletariat will rise again only on the foundations of the Left, sculpted all around by the long and arduous work of revolutionary critique. This is the only way, the same as always. The other is the “third way,” more authoritative for its consistency of forces in today’s reactionary world, but it is that of the traitorous parties, which reinforce capitalist power and are counter-revolutionary in nature.

The choice of camp is inexorable: either with the Left for the Communist Party, to which discipline and dedication is owed, or with its enemies, however disguised as “critics,” “fractionists,” “realists” or anarchists, extremist workerists.

When and how was the formidable struggle of the revolutionary proletariat to constitute itself into an international party brutally interrupted? The timely and comprehensive answer lies in the history of the degeneration of the C.I. which the Left has experienced and fought, even heroically at the sacrifice of the lives of a great part of its devoted militants. The battles in the name of revolutionary intransigence, at a certain stage of the degeneration’s development, have assumed the aspects of a genuine class war, which had to be fought simultaneously outside the party against the white guards of the bourgeoisie and against its social-democratic fifth columns, and inside the party against aberrant positions, at first defended by unsuspecting “rightists” and “centrists,” and then imposed with the authority of arms by the “Stalinists.”

These battles have precise dates and objectives which we summarily recall even to those, old and young, who until yesterday were babbling about revolutionary communism, in the not yet dormant hope that they will answer the call of the Left, according to our old adage: the party is never left behind!
– 1921: against the “united front” between parties, for the trade union united front;
– 1922: against the “workers’ government,” a parliamentary combination of Communist and Social Democratic parties, for the only possible workers’ government, that of the Proletarian Dictatorship of the Communist Party alone;
– 1923: against the “workers’ and peasants’ government,” a degeneration of the “workers’” government;
– 1924-26: against electoral blocs and mergers with supposed left wings of social democracy; against ideological terrorism and organizational extortion; against the oscillating maneuvers of tactics and the subordination of the international party to the Russian state.

These are, summarily, the crucial issues on which the Left has waged battle, attempting to hold back the C.I. from falling into opportunism. Official historiography has laid a shroud of silence over the struggles of the Left, and the great “critical” contribution of the false communists is that of showing that revolutionary Marxism has failed and that other “formulas and “paths” must be followed.

One cannot seriously maintain that the Left has remained anchored to the cornerstones of revolutionary Marxism and at the same time accuse it of having remained deaf to the “new” impulses of history. More foolish still is the thesis that recognizes the correctness of the Left’s positions “back then,” only to consider them outdated today, as if an impenetrable diaphragm separates yesterday from today; and why not today from tomorrow?

We were not enthusiastic about the way the C.I. was being formed. We were rightly convinced that it had to be cut at the “right” and “center” of the old parties of the Second International, and on many vocations of last-minute “leftists” we had serious doubts. The confluence on the positions posed by the Bolshevik initiative of fractions of the socialist parties was an inevitable means of building the C.I. Under the impetus of world events, chief among them the recently ended imperialist war and the victorious October Revolution, which were turning the social and political economic structure of international capitalism upside down, there was not a minute to be delayed in attempting to organize an international party center capable of orienting the proletariat which was radicalizing itself.

With the Second Congress, a hinge was built to bar the way to the doctrines, principles, and practices of the enemy classes filtered through social democracy. It was a mighty achievement that marked the irreversible passage toward the single communist party, which only the frivolity of presumptuousness or the self-righteousness of traitors can deem outdated and fallacious. Only the Left has the credentials to subject to critique – even a severe one – the positions and tactics of the Executive of the C.I., not those who have shared its positions and tactics in order to corrupt and betray them by operating within the world party. Former communist parties have forever turned their backs on communism and its mighty historical vision. These rotten parties will not give rise to any “left” fractions capable of rejoining the new vanguards of revolutionary communism by breaking from them. These parties have now completely identified themselves in the capitalist political regime. Their revision is total. There is not a single communist proposition in their programs, in their texts, in their proclamations and directives, and in their actions. It must be said of these parties what was said of the Social Democratic parties: they are not the “right” of the workers’ movement, they are the left of the bourgeoisie.

The 1951 Characteristic Theses elaborated by the Left summarize the historical experience of the proletariat and assume the same historical importance as the theses of the Second Congress of the C.I. They constitute the insuperable line of demarcation between revolutionary Marxism and opportunism.

In this sense the Characteristic Theses, and those that followed, even in the absence of an international class motion, represent the cornerstones not of the “Italian” party, not only of today’s small and weak party, but of tomorrow’s strong and compact international communist party. In the same way that the work done by the Left within the C.I. was concerned not only with the Italian party, but also and above all with the world party.

In the theses of the second post-war period predominate, like an unbroken guiding thread, the fundamental motives that had characterized the limpid work in the PCI and the C.I. from their founding up to the last hour of the Left’s presence in the international communist movement and the opposition rendered necessary as the Executive abandoned its starting positions, pressed by the most devastating counter-revolutionary wave to ever strike the proletariat. In the defeat of the revolutionary assault and the communist movement, the positions of revolutionary Marxism that the Left defended, constitute the reference point for resuming the march toward the reconstruction of the world party. Among these positions, which reflect not ideological apriorisms but firm points in doctrines and praxis achieved in the course of physical battles, and often bloody, direct clashes, those that are the exact opposite of the positions of the traitorous parties stand out.

The first, the most distinctive and characteristic stance against opportunism, defines bourgeois democracy as the most mystifying regime of class relations and not the eternal permanent regime necessary for proletarian emancipation from capitalism; the second is defined by the rejection of every democratic-parliamentary practice; the third states that all organizational admixtures, alliances, and political agreements with so-called “left,” “kindred,” or “neighboring” parties, groups, or fractions should be rejected; the fourth characterizes the violent, non-peaceful, and non-legal overthrow of bourgeois power and the establishment of the dictatorial power of the proletariat, directed by the single International Communist Party; the fifth advocates for the reconstruction of the class political party on a world scale based on revolutionary Marxism, and thus on homogeneous ideological foundations developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, on tactical schemes rigidly delimited by principles and aims, and on an organically centralized organization, that is, with strict adherance to the programmatic postulates of both leaders and rank-and-file.

It appears evident, to anyone who sincerely and seriously wants to be inspired by revolutionary Marxism, that frontist, alliance-based, pacifist democratic positions, advocated by political groups for whom the revolution would be a question of forms rather than of forces, have come to an end. Positions which, applied to the organizational field, would prefer to expand and enhance the class political party’s influence through political combinations and organizational co-optations, rather than the correct and strict view of class interests, according to the now century-long revolutionary Marxist practice.

Today’s small and limited party strongly believes that it is the center of reference for all forces that intend to bring themselves under the banner of communist revolution, and that only with the spreading on an ever-widening scale of its influence in the proletariat lies the guarantee of the reconstruction of the future one world party.

In this deep conviction, matured through historical experience and grounded in the tablets of an ancient and ever-relevant doctrine, it postulates the convergence into class organization (red unions, proletarian economic associations etc.), which will be rebuilt with the return of the working class onto the historical stage as protagonist, of all workers, regardless of the party to which they belong, insofar as it maintains programmatic firmness, organizational rigidity, and tactical severity, which will enable it to fully embody its role as the exclusive party-organ of the proletariat and of its class combativeness.

With sincerity and frankness we say to those who have separated themselves from the party, under the illusion of beating out paths that would shorten or accelerate the course of events, that in so doing they contribute to dissipating energies, otherwise fertile for the revolutionary party militia, and to confusing the class, already dazed by opportunist domination. In this respect too, if one can think with serious determination of stimulating the historical process, the correct road, the only one, is that of revolutionary intransigence, to be traveled to the end, standing firm in one’s place as militant communists disciplined to the organization and program.

In this too, let the admonitions of the Left to the Executive of the C.I. be a lesson, when it was believed possible to counter, then to counterattack, the capitalist offensive during the phase of revolutionary reflux, oscillating with increasing frequency between one expedient and another. No expedient could stop the rout. No oscillatory tactic could reverse the unfavorable trend. Neither could the “workerists,” nor the “councilists,” nor the opponents. No organizational formula, such as that of “Bolshevization,” could reverse the balance of power that was settling against the proletariat.

Not even the Left, standing firm on correct positions, could construct a dam against the spread of opportunism, the difference being that the Left had a lucid awareness that the game was now lost and that every effort had to be made in defense of the program and doctrine, the indispensable and priority condition for the resumption of the revolutionary course, when a new favorable cycle might have opened. We were accused of being “doctrinaires,” and also “deserters,” because we refused to adhere to “left fractions,” to “transitional programs,” to “new” internationals.

It was an act of courage, of true revolutionary courage to renounce “counter-offensives” lacking a solid basis, to protect the powerful work carried out, from the adverse contingency and the contaminations that derived from it, in the same way that Marx preferred to disband the First International rather than leave it at the mercy of the scoundrels who would have discredited it, with the intention that a new International would continue the fruitful cycle, resuming the path from where the First had forcibly interrupted it.

Because of the body of work and the complex of battles of the Left that has embodied itself in the present small international party, we hold that here is where communist enlistment, restoration of doctrine, defense of the program, tactical elaboration, and preparation for the proletariat’s next revolutionary assault take place. It is here that the only real possibility exists for the binding-together of the sincerely revolutionary forces and for the dissolution of the contradictions that still hold the proletariat back from unbinding itself from the traitorous parties, and not in the ephemeral and fallacious conjoining of dissidences and prejudicials, proliferators of irreconcilable differences.

To a party which, in spite of ups and downs, is still very firm in doctrine, program, principles and aims, respect, dedication and discipline is due. The Left, therefore, is against blocs and mergers understood in the opportunist manner, but is for the bloc and fusion of wills and fighting forces, amalgamated by communism conceived as a unitary and homogeneous complex of principles and aims, program and tactics in which the individual members, having renounced this society forever, feel truly free and enfranchised to give their solidary contribution to the cause.

We are still in the full dominion of counter-revolution, and no international “council” will get us out of it. Nor will a revived “political united front” among non-existent “communist parties” nor among “extremist” groups without any tradition except that of hybridism, carry us out of the storm.

The first symptoms of a slowdown in production, the malaise that creeps among the proletariat today, harshly struck by the bourgeois economic and social offensive, the fall into the lumpenproletariat of the middle strata, are concretized in the increased popularity of some dissident factions of the opportunist area: diversions to retain and govern, within the legality of the regime, those proletarians who feel the pressure of the bourgeoisie advancing and swelling, and perceive with increasing clarity the betrayal of parties and unions that proclaim themselves workers.

This state of affairs is far from characterizing a shift in the power relations between classes. The political technique of the bourgeoisie of secreting oppositions loyal to the bourgeois regime under the sign of “dissidence,” which does not go beyond the bounds of legality, is now an old trick, which works more because of the extreme weakness of the working class than because of its intrinsic efficiency. We believe that the general crisis of the capitalist economic system is maturing and may produce deep social and political lacerations of such magnitude as to set the proletariat back in motion and recreate the natural terrain for the clash between programs and between parties.

In the absence of this objective condition, which justified the birth of the Third International, the thesis of the proponents of the “new” International by means of the “federation” of “communist” oppositions falls, and there remains only the voluntarism of the propagators who think they can make up for the lack of forces with labels and proclamations. Even a single handful of genuine communists today, committed for decades to the restoration of theory and program can be a determining factor. It would be demagogic, however, to believe that it can sic et simpliciter pass to the head of the proletariat without being backed by broad and effective support from the proletariat.

Eventually, if there can be a “confrontation” – a different thesis from that of the “federalists,” as it is for the rotten parties – it does not make sense on the terrain of the program, for the simple fact that the programs are not comparable, but on the terrain of action, where forces, arms, and practical directions collide and are measured, allowing the proletariat to orient itself and choose sides. The “confrontation” between programs is a pretext for “negotiation,” a method typical of diplomacy between bourgeois parties. However, negotiations, such as whether the general strike should be led through the class organization of the proletariat, will only be agreeable to us when there are objective conditions for it, which do not exist today.

In conclusion, we do not “confront” our program with anyone, let alone negotiate to mix it with the programs of other parties. When the time comes, we will study to treat the proletarian action in the ways and means that guarantee the party’s independence and autonomy and the achieving of a class advance toward the ultimate goal of the conquest of political power.

Experience to date teaches us that those who bend over backwards for political patch-ups, as a rule always miss the appointment of practical action.

With even stronger reason, it remains in the realm of unrealizable utopia, at least if one does not want to distort the party, the proposal to “negotiate” for the reconstitution of the party.

The Left has always fought against these aberrant practices. Nothing has changed for this position to be revised.