From La Voce n. 43 of the (new)Italian
Communist Party;
March 2013
Socialist
revolution in Italy has the form of the Protracted Revolutionary People’s War
against the Papal Republic
In Italy the
core of the Protracted Revolutionary People’s War consists
in constituting underground the Communist
Party as center of the New People’s Power of the working class
in the growing mobilization and aggregation
of all the revolutionary forces of the society around the communist party
in raising the level of the revolutionary
forces
in their utilization according to a plan
for developing a sequence of initiatives
putting the class fight at the centre of country’s political life in order to
recruit new forces,
for weakening imperialist bourgeoisie’s power,
breaking up or paralyzing its institutions and strengthening the New Power,
for succeeding in constituting the armed
forces of the revolution,
for leading them in the war against the
bourgeoisie until overturning the relations of forces,
for eliminating imperialist bourgeoisie’s
State and establish the State of proletariat’s dictatorship.
Socialist
revolution is not a popular insurrection (a revolt, an uprising, turning tables
or something like this) that sooner or later will break out, that the Party
hastens with its propaganda and fostering the popular struggles, preparing
itself to head it. Socialist revolution is a war that the Party promotes and
during which it builds the New Power.
Socialist revolution
is not and cannot be a popular uprising as they were other kinds of revolution
that preceded it and as they are the revolutions going along with it.
These ones are tumults that shake the entire society suddenly. A
whole of circumstances in a given moment concur so that there converge and
combine the will of a new class of rising exploiters and the uneasiness, the
intolerance, the indignation and the rage of the masses of the exploited that
are the bulk of the fighters of the uprising that breaks down the subsiding old
classes of exploiters.
On the contrary, by its nature, (because of its content) socialist
revolution eliminates any class of exploiters: Therefore its form is new.
Its form is new because it is a protracted war during which the
popular masses organize themselves till they constitute a network of
organizations thicker and thicker and growing in strength. During this war the
popular masses gather around their vanguards exponents (who are mostly members
of the Communist Party and in the collective of the Party form and get the
spiritual and material means that make them able to play their role), they
launch thousand attacks on ruling classes’ forces and institutions, with
growing intensity and involving them in incessant and repeated clashes until
they paralyze them or break them out, they organize autonomously their social
life and production, taking possession of more and more parts of the productive
apparatus of the country and building new parts of it.
So doing they create in the country the New Power that counters
old ruling classes’ power, limits it, erodes and breaks it out until this New
Power upsets the relations of strength and eliminate the old one.
In the Introduction of Marx’s pamphlet Class Struggles in France from 1848 to
1850 edited in 1895, Engels openly admits
that he and Marx (who died in 1883) had been wrong about this matter. They
believed that socialist revolution would come about so as bourgeois revolutions
did. The Communist Party would have hasten and work up to the insurrection
propagandizing the coming system of social relations (the socialism, the
objective), denouncing oppression, exploitation and misery (the bad present
time), promoting the creation of any kind of organizations (union
organizations, political organizations for the participation in going political
struggles of the bourgeois democratic society, generally organizations for
claims, cooperative or cultural organizations), organizing protests and
pressures of the popular masses and particularly of the proletariat addressed
against authorities and capitalists. So doing the Communist Party would have
prepared itself to head and lead the uprising popular masses when the uprising
will break out, and to constitute the future revolutionary government that
would sanction the victory of the popular insurrection and begin to carry out
the measures the popular masses fought for. As a matter of fact, as Lenin well
showed in his writing War and Revolution of 27th May 1917 bourgeois
revolutions in European countries before the Russian revolution in 1905 brought
new governments into being but did not create a durable network of popular
organizations minutely widespread as soviet (councils) were in Russia.
On the basis of Paris Commune experience (1871) and of the
following developments of the communist movement, in 1895 Engels admitted that
history denied the conceptions he and Marx had. Socialist revolution would not
have the same form of any previous revolution in human history. It would have
the form of a war that workers and the rest of the popular masses following
them would fight within the bourgeois society, that is to say they would
accumulate the spiritual (moral and intellectual) and material resources
needed, until they will become able to take the place of the bourgeoisie and
the clergy eliminating their power. As a matter of fact it was no more a
revolution in which the old exploiting class was replaced by a new exploiting
class that was going to establish on his turn its power on the mass of the
population (that stayed relegated to its work and excluded by the specifically
human activities for managing society, culture, knowledge and art). It was a revolution
in which for the first time in history the mass of the population (of the
workers) was going to organize itself and to constitute itself as State, a new
State that was taking the place of ruling class’ one principally in order to
repress the latter.
The social democrats of the imperialist countries (the countries
where the objective conditions of socialist revolution were ripe) not only do
not elaborate themselves (and much less they put into practice) such
reflections, but they even firstly misrepresented (Vorwärts, the daily
newspaper of German Social Democracy, on 1st April 1895 published an edition
sweetened in a legalistic way of Engels’ Introduction),
then concealed or anyway neglected what Engels published in 1895.
Basically Lenin openly criticized Social Democrats during the
First World War for their lack of strategy for making revolution. As an example
confirming what I say, see what Lenin wrote in Principles Involved in the War Issue on
December 1916 about the conduct of the Swiss Social Democratic Party which
Lenin belonged to in 1916-1917, until he went back in Russia in April (in
www.marxist.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/dec/00b.htm ).
The communist parties of the imperialist countries created
within the Communist International (founded in 1919 and formally dissolved in
1943, effectively dissolved in 1956) never elaborated a line corresponding with
the conceptions that Engels expressed. This thesis is explained in detail in
the article (in Italian language) Il ruolo dell’Internazionale Cpmunista – conquiste e limiti in La Voce n,
2, July 1999 (www.nuovopci.it/voce/voce2/rstoric.htm) and L’attività della prima Internazionale
Comunista in Europa e il maoismo in La Voce n.
10, March 2002 (www.nuovopci.it/voce/voce10/aticeu.htm).
Lenin and Stalin applied in Russia Engels’ conceptions but in the
forms suitable for Russian social (economical, cultural and political)
condition, that were very different from those of European and Americans
imperialist countries. Applications corresponding to Engels’ observations were
done in the specific conditions for the respective countries but always in the
ambit of the first Communist International by Ho Chi Minh and particularly by
Mao Tse-tung. This one drew lessons from the experience of revolution in China
but also from the experience of the Popular Front in France and particularly
from that of the Popular Front in Spain and of the Spanish Civil War
(1936-1939), and became able to elaborate an organic theory of the Protracted
Revolutionary People’s War, referred anyway to revolution in China, and not
exposing it as an universal strategy. On the contrary the communist parties of
the European imperialist countries kept an ambiguous conduct about the matter:
on one side they adopted measures and lines waiting for and preparing an
insurrection that was not breaking out (fence-sitting); on the other side
driven by the first Communist International they adopted lines and measures
corresponding to Engels’ considerations: the line of the Popular Front and the
Resistance against Nazi Fascism are part of this second part of their conduct.
When the Communist International ceased to drive them those parties completely
abandoned any line and measure corresponding to Engels’ observations about the forms
of socialist revolution.
Nevertheless just the vicissitudes of the class struggle in the
imperialist countries during the first wave of proletarian revolution (that
spans over the first part of the 20th century) confirmed Engels’ conclusions.
No socialist revolution broke out in Europe nor in USA, despite the
derangements and destructions caused by the general crisis of capitalism, by
the reactionary mobilization of Fascism and Nazism, by the two World Wars. But
the only one who drew lessons from those vicissitudes and who thought over the
form of socialist revolution in the imperialist countries was Antonio Gramsci.
He elaborated (see Prison Notebooks 7, paragraph 16, 10,
paragraph 9, 13, paragraph 7, and others) the theory of “war of position”
which, freeing ourselves from the language of the censorship imposed by the
fascist prison, we now call protracted revolutionary people’s war. The “war of
position” of Gramsci is essentially a paraphrase of the most explicit
expression protracted revolutionary people’s war that we use, taking it from
Mao.
Why the elaboration by the communist parties of the imperialist
countries about the form of the socialist revolution in their own countries has
been so backward? In the imperialist countries of Europe and in the U.S. the
communist movement set in motion by Marx and Engels has been grafted on claims,
trade union, reformist framework of bourgeois democracy, cooperative and even
anarchist (Proudhonian) of the proletarian masses already existing and was adapted
to it, instead of transforming and making use of it. Even after what the
betrayal of the leaders of the socialist parties in the First World War had
revealed, after the October Revolution and the founding of the first Communist
International, the leaders of the communist parties were mostly the leaders of
the old socialist parties that conformed to Communist International guidelines
and line to not be separated from the proletarian and popular mass enthusiastic
about the October Revolution and anxious to “do as in Russia.” In confirmation
of this see the writings of Lenin Letter to the German and French workers (25th
September 1920) and On the Struggle of the Italian Socialist Party(4thNovember
and 11th December 11, 1920) (www.marxist.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/04.htm)
, the Response
by a Unitarian Communist to Comrade Lenin (December
16, 1920, open letter by GM Serrati) and Lenin’s Report to the Fourth Congress
of the Communist International (13th November, 1922)
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