The article concerns the international communist movement because of many reasons:
1. It indicates important elements for the construction and the strengthening of the Communist party universally valid.
2. It gives elements of history of the international communist movement that are matter of discussion in order to overcome its limits.
3. It is an important contribution of the Italian communist movement both as regard the past, because of the important tradition the communist movement has in Italy, and as regards the future, because Italy is an imperialist country and the advancement towards socialist revolution in an imperialist country is a matter essential for the international communist movement
4. It gives contributions useful for the process of coordination and aggregation of the communist forces on the international level.
In particular, as regards the point 4, we quote what is written in the last note: â€œIn general in nature it is the simple, the indistinct that diversifies, not the many that come together and fuse.â€ This statement criticizes Rousseauâ€™s conception, according to which society forms by the association of different individuals. This is the bourgeois conception, according to which in its original stage humanity was formed by isolate individuals. History denies this conception: as a matter of fact individuals form distinguishing themselves within a community. The law is valid also for the other animal species.
In Italy, the conception according to which Communists and revolutionaries unites themselves getting together and fusing is very popular. In particular, there are groups who keep on trying to unite themselves and build again the communist party by uniting communists. We saw above that it derives by the bourgeois conception. According to Dialectical Materialism, the party forms by distinctions within the communist movement, and the means of distinction are the two lines struggle, the open and frank debate among the various forces, the process of criticism-self criticism-transformation.
The law is valid for the international communist movement as well. It is relatively easy to unite ourselves against something (against imperialism, against revisionism) and so build international aggregations. When the matter is to advance towards revolution, as it is today, the unity among the various forces on the ideological and political necessarily advances by its contrary, that is the development of the differences by the means above indicated (the two lines struggle, the open and frank debate among the various forces, the process of criticism-self criticism-transformation). The communist parties in the single countries and the new aggregations and coordination rise so.
The fact that unity rises from difference may seem illogical to the common sense, but it is an important law of dialectic, that besides explains important natural phenomena, as that of the force springing from the opposition of negative and positive in electricity.
So, we thank the comrade of the (n)PCI for her contribution, that we send to our interlocutors on international level.
CARC Party â€“ International Department
Letâ€™s become communist, letâ€™s form the leading group of the Communist Party!
Letâ€™s be morally tenacious, intellectually sharp!
The protracted revolutionary peopleâ€™s war is the strategy of socialist revolution that we were able to individualize thanks to the balance of the first wave of socialist revolution and to Maoâ€™s teachings. We are gradually determining its particular laws for the imperialist countries and for our country (see Manifesto Program of the (new) Italian Communist Party, Chapter III, 3.3. Our strategy: the revolutionary protracted peopleâ€™s war, in the website www.lavoce.samizdat.net). This war develops through three phases. We are carrying out the first phase, that of the strategic defensive. The accumulation of the revolutionary forces is the synthesis of our duties in this phase. Many times and for a long time we have told that the new birth of the communist movement is a determining factor of the accumulation of the revolutionary forces. We also clearly told which the new birth of the communist movement consist of. It consists of creating again that network of workersâ€™ and peopleâ€™s organizations we already create twice in Italy and twice it did not succeed in crossing a threshold and therefore twice the bourgeoisie broke it off, the first time with violence (with fascism), and the second time with corruption (with the modern revisionism).
This direction for working is clear enough. The story at our back shows us which is the matter, gives us examples and teachings about the matter and how to build it. Surely, we have to take in account that mentalities, usages, customs, political regime and culture are partly changed. We have to take in account that the working class and peopleâ€™s masses of our country have at their back their history, that formed their usages, customs and mentalities and determines laws and contradiction of their own transformation.
We have to be creative: in particular we have to find the ways for involving workers and peopleâ€™s masses in building again an organizational network, in overcoming mistrust and suspicion created and fed by past defeats, social conditions and bourgeois and clerical propaganda. They are wrong the comrades who wait for the things to be done by themselves, because of the crisis or of something else. They are wrong as well the comrades who moan about the mistrust, the suspicion, the desegregation, the individualism and the rage around us.
Somebody is driven to be discouraged by the present difficulties. We tell him that the material, spiritual and social conditions in which the communist movement was born a little more than a hundred years ago were quite more backward. Even if we did not get our goal, we lifted our head twice. We shall lift it the third time as well, and it will be the right one, because we have understood the reason of the defeat and the world situation is more advanced. Whatever be the difficulties to overcome, anyway we have to build again something that we have already built. The crisis upsets massesâ€™ habitual conditions and obliges them to find new ways.
Everybody knows that world is changing and that it have to change. We have to teach that it can change in many directions and that everybody contributes to make it change: in which direction does he/she wants to make it change? In which direction is he/she making it change?
New birth of the communist movement is an indication that allows every Party organism and every communist that promotes, orients or directs a mass organization, to get down to work. From our practice we shall further elaborate aspects of the work and duties which we do not deal with here. We have to carry out the process 1. concrete analysis of the concrete situation (use of Dialectical Materialism as method of knowledge), 2. elaboration of lines of action and execution (use of Dialectical Materialism as method of action), 3. balance and repetition of the process at a higher level. What we want to do here instead is what follows from this, that is to say the core of the new birth.
According to the former doctrine, in the communist movement it was told that the subjective conditions of socialist revolution were two.
1. A certain level of organization of the working class and of the other peopleâ€™s masses, that made them able of understanding and action, that made them an organized ensemble, whose members were able to take action together and realize common goals.
2. A certain level of consciousness that from top to down differently involved the communist party, the mass organizations, the vanguard people, the working class, the other classes of peopleâ€™s masses: a level of consciousness that was making them able to share common goals.
The experience of the first wave or proletarian revolution taught us that these two condition are not enough. This experience showed us that, in order to succeed in establishing socialism the working class must have a communist party with particular characteristics (â€¦).
During the first wave of proletarian revolution we were not able to establish socialism in any imperialist country. Why? Because in no imperialist country the Communist Party has been equal to its task. It has not been so as regard its leading organsâ€™ capacity to sufficiently understand conditions, forms and results of class struggle (general crisis of overproduction absolute capital, regime of preventive counterrevolution, revolutionary and reactionary peopleâ€™s mobilization, strategy of the socialist revolution). It has not been so as well as regards dedication and commitment to the cause of its revolutionary leadership.
They were not starting conditions, it was not expected that we should know we have to create them, it was not expected that we should be able to create them, Today we know that they are indispensable and what is the kind of work.
The communist party develops and acts in a bourgeois society. The Communists are born in bourgeois society and breathe its air. Bourgeoisieâ€™s influence within our ranks over all our history is unavoidable: we are able to keep it in, but not to prevent it. Besides, we influence the bourgeoisie as well.
Every Communist is born and grows in bourgeois society, and is formed by it. When he joins the conscious and organized communist movement, he finds himself with a personality, a mentality and a consciousness marked by the own social relation of this society (1).
In every organization of peopleâ€™s masses bourgeoisieâ€™s influence shows itself also in the upside down selection that spontaneously comes true within its ranks. Spontaneously, that is the more as more freely bourgeois societyâ€™s own relations and gears are let act within the party. The more we go up to the summit the more bourgeoisieâ€™s influence increases.
In the first socialist countries we see that just in the ruling class of the new society the new bourgeoisie formed: they were those leaders who gave bourgeois solutions to the problems of the socialist countries. In the first socialist countries it was here that dictatorship was felt: socialist societies were liberating below (for peopleâ€™s masses), while on the top the individuals (the leaders) felt themselves subject to constraints, controls, purges: the ones who did not understand the reason for it, becoming promoters of it for themselves and their comrades, felt envy and admiration towards their homologues in bourgeois countries who were all lording and having good time.
Communists are the most advanced and precious part of peopleâ€™s masses, and particularly of the working class. The leaders are the most precious part of the party, the most difficult to build, the most exposed to enemyâ€™s threats and blandishments, the one which the masses must more watch over.
In some respects, that Lenin well explained in Extremism, infantile illness of Communism, (1920), the leaders of the party are â€œsimilarâ€ to bourgeois leaders. For directing you have to master and get means and procedures of direction ready. Humanity is getting ready socialismâ€™s own means of direction in this phase and the experience of the communist movement and of the first socialist countries has shown great possibilities and difficulties. Spontaneously, bourgeois means of direction, nice and ready, already done, assert themselves. In some respects bourgeois societies seem better than those of the first socialist countries: it is the swan-song.
On the other side the party is equal to its task only if its leading group is the most ideologically advanced part of the party: it does not only rules and says what has to be done, but opens the way, inspires, forms, directs, helps to grow in the right way (2).
In order to build a communist party equal to its task, with a directing group who is the most advanced part of the party, we have to go upstream, to contrast the pressure coming from the society surrounding us. It is not the matter of constituting a group of self perfection. For us dialectical materialists perfection does not exist. It is a concept belonging to the metaphysical conception of the world. The matter is to become more and more able to fulfil the concrete tasks of socialist revolution, to the tasks of the ongoing phase so as it could change in the next phase.
To build a party equal to this role, especially in imperialist countries, means to pay attention to this task: to form the Communists, and particularly to form the leading group. In the imperialist countries, no one of the parties that preceded the first wave of proletarian revolution paid a just attention to this aspect of the revolution. This is perfectly understandable, as in the communist movement it was prevailing the conception that socialist revolution would have had the form of a popular insurrection during which the Communists, the most advanced part of the revolutionaries, would have seized the power. It is the conception that Engels criticizes in the famous introduction of 1985 to the pamphlet Class struggles in France from 1848 to 1850, by Karl Marx. Consequently, in no imperialist country there was a party equal to its task. The only exception was Russia. Here, because of reasons due to the particular history of the country and to its position in the system of international relations (that Stalin explains in Principle of Leninism, 1924), it was formed a party able to lead with success the working class to seize the power.
This is the main reason why only in Russia during the revolutionary situation determined by the First World War the communist movement succeeded in passing from the first to the second phase of revolutionary peopleâ€™s war and then went further till it seized the power.
Thanks to the teachings of Lenin and Stalinâ€™s Bolshevik party, the first Communist International (CI)(1919-1943) asked the old socialist parties to change themselves in communist parties. On 5th August 1920 the CI Congress established the 21 conditions for being admitted in the International The CI paid much attention to the composition of the communist parties and of their leading groups. In the following years the CI carries out the campaign for the bolshevization in all the communist parties, constituted as national departments of one Party. From the end of 1923 (when on behalf of the CI he took the direction of the Party) to the end of 1926 (when he was arrested), in the Italian Communist Party Gramsci carried out a hard and open battle against Bordiga and his followers who were opposing the bolshevization (the documents of this battle are issued in the collection La costruzione del partito comunista, Einaudi, 1974, of articles from lâ€™UnitÃ , Lâ€™Ordine Nuovo, Lo Stato operaio, and of internal documents, and they may be found in the collection â€œClassici del marxismoâ€ in the website of the (new) Italian Communist Party in Italian language).
We saw the outcomes of CI work in the glorious pages written by the European communist parties in the struggle against Fascism and in the Resistance. As regards Italy they are illustrated in the pamphlet Il punto piÃ¹ alto raggiunto finora nel nostro paese dalla classe operaia nella sua lotta per il potere issued by the Rapporti Sociali publishing house, 1995 [The higher point the working class reached in our country until today in its struggle for the power, Note of Translator]
The bolshevization, however, was not enough. In the Cominform Conference held from 22 to 27 September 1947 the great leader of Soviet Union Communist Party A. Zdanov clearly and strongly denounced the evident mistakes of opportunism did by the two greatest European communist parties, the Italian and the French ones, a little more than 25 years before their establishment. During the first wave of proletarian revolution they were not able to lead, in their own countries, the working class to seize power, even if the working class had done a wide mobilization within itself and with the Resistance conquered a wide direction over the other peopleâ€™s masses. Why did any communist party of the imperialist countries not develop until being equal to the task it have to carry out?
Obviously in the society of the imperialist countries there were many obstacles and restraints to such development. The bourgeoisie was opposing it with economical, moral and intellectual force, repression and corruption. Anyway, such development was not prevented by these factors. If it were so, the problem would have no solution, and there would be no use in talking of it. The metaphysical people, and particularly the empiricists, think so: â€œIt did not happened, so it could not happen. What happened was the only possible movement.â€ We dialectical materialists see the contradiction in each thing, the one that divided in two, the opposed possibilities of development, we try to understand what favours one kind of development, what favours other developments, how a trend can be strengthened and another weakened. The decisive factors that prevented the parties from carrying out the development we needed were two.
1. The limits of consciousness of the CI. We can systematically and efficaciously teach other our experience as far as we are conscious of it. Practice is always richer that theory. We always do something which we are not conscious of. The Russian Communist Party was not able to teach everything it was doing. Even if its internationalist spirit was great, the Russian communist party could not take the place of the parties of the various countries. Not only it could not do it for doing, but neither for thinking, for understanding conditions, forms and outcomes of class struggle in the country and for elaborating the line of socialist revolution.
2. The simplistic tendency in the Communists of the imperialist countries â€œto do as the Russiansâ€. It seemed so easy! â€œThe Russian Communists won and so, if we did like them, we shall win as wellâ€. And they imitate them also in aspect that were particular, peculiar of Russian tradition, history and formation. From the foundation of the CI Lenin warned of this danger. On 13th November 1922, in his intervention at the IV CI Congress, he even stated that the resolution approved by the III CI Congress on 12th July 1921, On the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on Method and Contents of their Work, was completely right, but it was of no use, because â€œit was almost entirely Russian, that is almost entirely related to Russian conditionsâ€. The strangers, who even approved it, would not read it. Who read it, would not understand it. If exceptionally some stranger understood it, he could not apply it. â€œAll what the resolution says remained a dead letterâ€¦I am under the impression that we did a big mistake with that resolution, that is to say we ourselves cut out the way towards further successesâ€. Many times during the following 30 years Stalin warned the European communist parties that â€œlearning from Russian does not mean doing like Russiansâ€. Towards the end of the Thirties Mao resolutely and openly gave to the communist Party the task to â€œrender Marxism-Leninism Chineseâ€, and criticized those leaders who formed in Moscow and came back to China determined to transfer in Chinese communist party what they learned and saw in Russia.
Each communist party has the task of doing revolution in a determinate social economic formation, and it is also its task to understand its particular laws of development and apply them.
The central and decisive of socialist revolution consists of the construction of the party and, within it, in the construction of its leading group. The assimilation of dialectical materialism by Party members as conception of the world, as method for knowing reality and method of action for changing it, sums up the task of construction. This assimilation means intellectually and morally change themselves in order to become protagonists, promoters and leaders of the transformation of society. We have to change ourselves in order to change the world. A comrade who believes to be a Communist, who does not undertake the task to change himself or even believes he does not need to change is backward or astray. Each comrade has to deepen self knowledge (positive and negative sides) for changing himself, for becoming communist. Every leader has to know the comrades and the organisms he leads (positive and negative sides) for leading them and improve in becoming more able promoters of socialist revolution. We have to dedicate time and energies to these tasks, find solutions, prove and criticize them. We have to change ourselves, our comrades, Party organisms and the whole Party in more and more able protagonists, promoters and leaders of the revolutionary protracted peopleâ€™s war.
Socialist revolution is a war (the protracted revolutionary peopleâ€™s war) that the Party carries out against the field of the imperialist field mobilizing the working class and, in a different way, the other peopleâ€™s masses. Some are simultaneous (but well determining which is the main and which are the second). Some other are subsequent (the ones develop on the base of outcomes and teachings of the previous). Every campaign is made of battles: some are contemporary ((but well determining which is the main one and which are the second), and some other are subsequent. Every battle is made of tactical operations, every tactical operation is characterized by the unity among its various aspects and protagonists. Every tactical operation has only one objective that has to be well determined (unity of objective). In every tactical operation there is unity of time; a tactical operation does not provide for interruptions of undetermined duration before getting the objective.
Every campaign, battle, tactical operation is elaborated, decided and carried out on the base of the concrete situation, of the concrete relations of strength and of the forces we really dispose: it is not a desire, it does not relies on irresolute forces: the adventitious forces, that may be or not, mobilize themselves or not, must not have a decisive role, for execution and success. Anyway, in any campaign and battle (and sometimes also in tactical operations), we have to consider carefully which and how many forces we can mobilize in the progress of the work, how u to use them and how to consolidate (to recruit) at least a part of them.
In conclusion, we have almost to be founded on our forces and through these, managing these in tactical operations, in battles and campaigns corresponding to the concrete condition, to mobilizing, to valorise, to recruit, to consolidate new forces. It is the contrary of â€œwaiting and seeing what happens and follow the eventsâ€.
1. The classes and the formation of the Communist Party
An aspect of the art of socialist revolution consists of building a ruling class starting from individuals that the present ruling class (both the imperialist bourgeoisie, and the clergy, though in a different way, through the various lines of preventive counter revolution â€“ see Manifesto Program, Chapter I, 1.3.3. The preventive counter-revolution, in the website: www. lavoce.samizdat.net) teaches (deviously, with kindness, or harshly, if it is necessary) that they must not think and most of all that they must not think as a collective, that they must not think to society but to â€œtheir own businessâ€. Still less they must deal with the transformation of society (â€œhere we do not deal with politicsâ€). They must not take on the task to change the world and, in the world, themselves. The world and its course are competency of others: of God, of the pope, the clergy and nobles, according to the Middle Age â€“ clerical conception of the world, or of the great individuals and personalities, according to the bourgeois conception of the world.
That is why in the Party there are assigned tasks to the comrades even if they do them with difficulties: they are the best comrades the party has at that moment.
That is why the transformation, the process Criticism-Self Criticism- and Transformation is the bearing process of Partyâ€™s development. The great part of the processes that constitute Partyâ€™s life are understandable and we can lead them to success only understanding the class relations in which the Party forms.
2. Womenâ€™s emancipation.
Another particular and important aspects of the art of socialist devolution consists in transforming proletarian women in communist leaders. Also in bourgeois society (as in former societies divided in classes), they continue to form (to form their conception, mentality and personality; Simone de Beauvoir rightly said: â€œwomen are made, not bornâ€ in The Second Sex, 1949) mainly on the ground of family relations. In womenâ€™s formation the other social relations enter mainly through family relations, while men form on the ground of social relations of which family relations are a part and an aspect. (3)
The contradiction family-society is a practical contradiction and it is very important in social relations. It is also a contradiction within the people, but it has class character. (Manifesto Program, Note 76, in the website: www. lavoce.samizdat.net) Today we have little power (little authority and even less means) for leading the practical development of the contradiction at the level of the entire society, but we can understand it (considering also the contradiction developed in this field in Italy between bourgeoisie and clergy) and so partly deal with it. The practical work and on a wide scale, on level of the entire society, on this contradiction implies determinate practical social conditions and because of it it will be essentially fulfilled in socialist era (it belongs to the transformations of the socialist era â€“ see Manifesto Program, Introduction) Anyway, dealing with it at a certain level, already today is â€œto make each struggle a school of Communismâ€ (MP, note 30).
In the party we can deal better with it already today. To form communist leading women is particularly difficult (doubly difficult) It requests a specific work: Because of it the communist movement constantly created specific organizations of women (as it creates, because of a similar reason, organizations of youth people, of oppressed nations, and so on). Anyway, despite this it did not get decisive outcomes: the number of women among the great leaders of the communist movement has not been high.
Today women emancipate themselves in the Communist Party (as regards the women members of the party and in the class struggle (as far as they join it). Talking about emancipation out of these contexts means to babble, to elude the problem, to make diversion or confusion. When class struggle has grown, also womenâ€™s emancipation sooner or later grew. When class struggle went down, womenâ€™s emancipation closely followed the same fate. This confirms that womenâ€™s emancipation is an aspect of socialist revolution (Manifesto Program, note 76)
3. Class, gender, individual:
In the transformation of an individual, once you take in account class and gender problems womenâ€™s double oppression), there are the individual characteristics: the concrete history of the formation of conception, mentality, personality and social relations whose concrete combination constitutes the concrete individual.
4. What is an individual?
Everyone is a specific physical and spiritual formation (here, the term formation is used in the sense in which it is used in geology, in sociology, etc.).. In every human individual, when we study him, we distinguish different aspects. We study and transform some aspects by the methods and procedures of chemistry, physics, gymnastics, biology, labour and other natural sciences. We study and change some other aspects by the methods and procedures of psychology, philosophy, education, mental exercise, moral exercise, mnemonic learning, logical exercise, and so on.
Every individual is a physical and spiritual formation emerged at some point in a given context, distinct from others. In it a conception of the world (awareness), a mentality, a sensitivity and social relations are combined to form a single concrete (in the sense that Marx shows in The method of political economy).
These different aspects develop (change themselves) in time, from conception to death, because of internal and external factors. Individuals have the fate that every geological formation, every economic and social training, and other kind of formation have.
Metaphysical idealists explain individualâ€™s activities and existence using the concept of "human nature", "soul", "divine spirit". The metaphysical materialists reduce the individual to what of him is subject of biology and chemistry. "Man is what he eats", Feuerbach said.
They both are experimentally refuted by individualâ€™s different dynamics of conception, mentality, personality and relations, either as regards the dynamics of â€œhuman natureâ€ (according the Catholic Church, substantially human nature is fixed), or as regard the dynamics of the objects of biology and chemistry.
As a matter of fact, every individual changes, whether he knows it or not, whether he wants it or not, arises from the context in which he is born, makes his course of transformation and action (he changes himself by making) and disappears: what remains of him has become source and patrimony of other individuals.
Every communist must change in a particular way and sense dictated by his role (â€¦). He does it better the more he is conscious he must transform himself, the more he takes the direction of the process, the more he is within a collective that encourages and helps him, the more he understands the laws of its own transformation.
This is valid for everyone of us. Everyone of us must apply it for himself and for the other comrades. He must do it more if he directs.
5. The conception of the world.
There are different conceptions of world. A first division, which covers the entire history we know until now, is that between idealists and materialists.
Idealists state that there are things with such nature that men are not able to know them, and even less to act on them, that is to say things that because of their nature are out of menâ€™s knowledge and action, out of menâ€™s range of action and knowledge, transcendental things
At first sight, this statement seems absurd: how may some people (the idealists) say anything (firstly the existence) about things no man can know? Actually, it is a logical paradox (like "I do not ever tell the truth", etc..). But the logic absurdity has a practical explication, as to the other logical paradoxes.
So, idealists say that that there are things (a world) that elude the knowledge and activities. Where did their idea grew out of?
In every moment of their history, men were (and are) in the condition in which they know a lot of some things which seem all simple and without problems for them. Other things put problems to which they are not able to answer, and show aspects that they do not master. Every man finds in everything a certain unknown and no controlled amount. The limit of the series of things with increasing number of unknown and no controlled, is the unknowable and no governable: what transcends the field of menâ€™s knowledge and action. At the same time men, considering the things that start more and more far away from today, developed the concept of something that did not started. Considering things that last more than others they developed the concept of eternal, of something that will never end. The concept of limit is applied in many fields of human experience. In mathematical analysis there is a theory of limits and many fields of mathematical analysis are based on the science of limits: even the limit can be understood by us. The paradox of Achilles and the tortoise is resolved by the science of limits.
The materialists have always mocked idealistsâ€™ theses. They state that not only it is not worthwhile to talk about things which for principle (for their nature) we cannot act on and we cannot either know, but anyway nobody can say anything about them, neither that they exist. On the contrary, in principle we can know all what concerns us. In principle we can act on it as well. Actually, during their history men have continuously increased their knowledge and ability to act on everything around them and about themselves, they have expanded their range of knowledge and their range of act.
The vulgar materialists say that only what we perceive by senses exists: by sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. Of course, it is an extreme. A man have senses with power different than another. There are many things that donâ€™t directly come in the range of action of no sense of ours.
Dialectical materialists have also explained that the theory of idealists is doggedly defended and even imposed by the ruling classes and their spokesmen to the rest of humanity. Indeed because of the division into classes of exploited and exploiters, the vast majority of humanity is systematically excluded from knowing some things and from acting on them. They are the things that belong to the activities which the ruling classes reserve to themselves and from which it excludes the dominated classes. To imagine the existence of things unchangeable and unknowable by men, is made easy by the fact that men extend the field of their activities and knowledge step by step, that men create new things. Today we know things that yesterday we did not know, we act on things on which yesterday we did not act, and there are things that yesterday neither existed. Tomorrow we will know things that today we do not know, we will act on things on which we do not act now and we will make things that do not yet exist today. The world around us changes also independently from our action. We create new professions, cities, ideas, relationships, social institutions, etc.. At the same time volcanoes erupt, the mountains reduce in height, new stars are forming, etc.
Idealistsâ€™ thesis is the attempt by ruling classes to perpetuate their power, privileges and role. To believe that there are things that transcend mankindâ€™s knowledge and activity, means to legitimize the power that clergy and the other ruling classes pretend to have had by transcendence. Idealistsâ€™ theses constitute a conception that they defend and impose to convince the oppressed classes to accept the division into classes. Pope Benedict XVI goes around the world whipping the cult of knowledge, the cult of money, the cult of power. He insults, blames and intimidates his sheep because they have an excessive desire of knowledge, money, and power. They must not do so. They have to leave knowledge, money and power to those who have it. Knowledge, money, power make not people happy, on the contrary todayâ€™s unhappiness and world disorder is due to excessive desire and search of them. All the power comes from God and God gives it to whom he wants, according to his inscrutable plans. These are speeches that the pope, clergy, teocons, teodems, the other spokesmen of the bourgeoisie, all notables of the present society diffuse and incise on the behaviour of who resigns and obeys, obstruct the path of the others towards knowledge and emancipation.
What the notables of present society say has no scientific value, and does not help to understand. They say it to mystify, intoxicate, deviate, distract, confuse. It is important to know and understand what they are doing. In fact, what they are doing is unacceptable and criminal for the vast majority of men, bearer of death and suffering for men and of devastation of the planet. They have conducted us in a bog and every day founder us a little more in it.
The only power we accept is the one that mobilizes peopleâ€™s masses to create a new world, that organizes peopleâ€™s masses because they get the strength for doing it, that elevates the knowledge of peopleâ€™s masses for making them knowing what and how to do, that elevates the moral of peopleâ€™s masses for making them doing it. It is the Communist Party. Today, the oppressed classes need it. Its role and its existence will expire as the division of humanity in social classes will cancel, when everyone will be able to do what now only Partyâ€™s members do.
Till now, men have changed the kind of class division. Several kinds followed each other in history: slavery, serfdom, paid work are the most studied and commonly known ones. Proletariat must eliminate and will eliminate at all class division and each kind of it. By this time men have created conditions to do it. The conditions that led people to establish and accept the class division into classes are failed. The perpetuation of class division would lead to the extinction of human kind.
1. A. Gramsci, Punti preliminari di riferimento per una introduzione e un avviamento allo studio della filosofia e della storia della cultura in Quaderni del carcere, Einaudi 2001, vol. II page 1375. Also in A. Gramsci Sulla filosofia e i suoi argomenti, Edizioni Rapporti Sociali 2007, pag. 8 [in Italian language].
2. German Communist movementâ€™s history shows this aspect in a particularly clear way. Already at the beginning of last century Rosa Luxemburg perceived in a very clear way that the leadership of the Social Democratic Party was not ideologically at forefront of the Party. Making concessions to the anarchist tendencies, R. L. held that the remedy was the independence of periphery from the leadership. The ruling group was not carrying the Party forward. It was repressing the revolutionary trends in the Party, and it was stifling the left instead of strengthening it and being its spokesman. The peripheral organizations could then bestride and overpass the leadership. Hence it comes the determined opposition of R. L. to democratic centralism and to the conception of the party promoted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The failure of Novemberâ€™s Revolution (1918) in Germany has clearly shown its mistake. For winning, workers need a firm party, with a leadership at its vanguard.
3. The Catholic Church and its followers, Fascists and other reactionaries, say that the family is the foundation of society, the cell of society. The society would be a superstructure of the family, complement of the family. But it is false: the anthropologists demonstrated that the family was formed at a certain level of development of human society - see also Engels The birth of the family, private property and the state. In the medieval - clerical conception of the world they do about family-society relationship the same reversal of genetic role (who has generated whom) that J. J. Rousseau, exponent of the bourgeois conception of the world, makes about individual-society relationship. Rousseau says that society is produced by individuals who associated themselves. Historians show instead that individuals have become socially relevant subjects (holders of own and inalienable rights in the society, capable of an own independent life from this or that community) only at a certain level of development of society: with the mercantile production. In general in nature it is the simple, the indistinct that diversifies, not the many that come together and fuse. Even in this field Communism will be an innovation: the individual workers created by capitalism will form the workersâ€™ association.