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Statement of CC 2/2021 - January 21, 2021

On the centenary of the foundation of the first ICP - the teachings of his experience applied by the (new) ICP
Let’s celebrate the centenary of the founding of the first ICP by consolidating and strengthening the new ICP and advancing the revolution that will make Italy a new socialist country!


One hundred years ago, on 21 January 1921, the first Italian Communist Party (ICP) was formed in Italy on the initiative of the Communist International. For seventy years it was a protagonist of the political and social life of our country: so great was its role among the popular masses that even the ruling class could not ignore it. It formally dissolved in the Rimini Congress which began on January 31, 1991, which gave birth to the PRC and the PDS (Democratic Party of the Left). However, the turning point that transformed it from the leader of the antagonist power to the power of the imperialist bourgeoisie into an essential component of the Papal Republic had its prodromes in the line adopted in 1944 by the ICP led by Palmiro Togliatti (the "turning point of Salerno"); it developed at the end of the 1940s (after the victory of the Resistance on 25 April 1945 and the beginning of the reconstruction); it was officially consecrated by its VIII Congress (December 1956) following the turning point taken by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) with his XX Congress (February 1956). So decisive was the role of the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin in making the movement founded in 1848 by Marx and Engels with the publication of the
Communist Manifesto the first world movement in history of humanity (with the first wave of the proletarian revolution 1917-1976), that a large part of the international communist movement adapted to the current of modern revisionists that had taken over the CPSU.

Not even the struggle promoted by the Party of Labor of Albania (led by Enver Hoxha) and with much more abundance of means and depth of theory by the Chinese Communist Party (CPP, led by Mao Tse-tung) succeeds in deflect the international communist movement from the ruinous course taken by the CPSU.


There are many and varied initiatives that will bring together members and sympathizers of parties and organizations declaring themselves communists to proudly claim the 100
th anniversary of the foundation of the first PCI, to celebrate its heroic pages and the achievements made by the workers and the rest of the popular masses under his direction, to denounce those responsible for its drift and then for its dissolution, to discuss and reason about the causes of its failure to make Italy a socialist country and about the current tasks of the communists. These initiatives positively demonstrate that in our country, despite the exhaustion of the first wave of proletarian revolutions (1917-1976) and the decline of the old conscious and organized communist movement, there are thousands of men and women, young people, working class, other workers, retirees who aspire to organize themselves into a party and revive the communist movement.

There are thousands of comrades who aspire to take back the banner of the struggle for socialist Italy hoisted by Antonio Gramsci, lowered by the modern revisionists Togliatti and Longo, thrown into the mud by Berlinguer and the conscription of bourgeois left representatives (Occhetto, Veltroni, D'Alema, etc.) who in 1991 decided to dissolve the first ICP.

To realize these aspirations, we urge to promote initiatives on the Centenary of the first ICP throughout 2021and to make them as many occasions:

- to draw lessons from experience for today, therefore to link the past to the present and not limit oneself to the exaltation or narration of the events of which the first ICP was the promoter;

- to develop honest and open confrontation among the communists of our country about the balance of the first world revolutionary wave (on the reasons for our defeat), on the analysis of the phase and on the strategy of the communists;
- to lead the fight against those limits of the communist movement of the imperialist countries already highlighted by Lenin, Stalin and more recently by Mao (
Again on the differences between comrade Togliatti and us) (in particular electoralism and economism) and against the wait-and-see policy in which today those defects are translated.
The serious and clear confrontation on these issues and the struggle against these defects will advance both the unity of the communists invoked by many and the action of the communist movement to direct the workers and other classes of the popular masses to seize the ownship of means of production, to abolish the exploitation of man by man and thus to emancipate themselves from political oppression and cultural backwardness.


In this regard, two trends emerge from the initiatives in progress that hinder the development of a balance of the experience of the first ICP as herald of lessons on what to do today.

The first trend unites those nostalgic and admirers of the first ICP who argue that the ICP did not establish socialism because the bourgeoisie was able to change the system of social relations it heads and the ICP of Togliatti and Berlinguer found itself with a different world than the one he was struggling with. "The crisis and the inglorious end of the ICP depended on epochal and historical transformations of the capitalist mode of production. There was a lack of intellectual and practical responses to the challenges to be faced then and today." proclaims for example Roberto Fineschi from the pages of n. 317 (January 8, 2021) of La Città Futura. In summary, the bourgeoisie would gradually develop its system of social relations and the ICP, which before would have been up to its task even if it had not established socialism, would no longer be able to keep up with it. More briefly: the ICP did not establish socialism in Italy due to the strength of the bourgeoisie. A thesis that condemns to inaction today, in the present, since every comrade who makes it his own will end up arguing that if in Italy the bourgeoisie was stronger than the communists yesterday (when the communist movement was a world power), today that the communist movement is very weak there is no hope and all that remains is to pull the oars in the boat.

The second trend unites those nostalgics and admirers of the first PCI who identify the main cause of the party's drift in the corruption of its leadership group. An exponent of this trend is Alberto Lombardo (ideological education responsible of the PC whose Marco Rizzo is general secretary). In the article Un dramma in tre atti. Dalla svolta di Salerno alla via italiana al socialismo (A drama in three acts. From the Salerno turning point to the Italian way to socialism) published in Cumpanis (December 2020), after a systematic examination of the negative role played by Togliatti and the right of the ICP between the turning point of Salerno in 1944 and the VIII Congress of 1956, Lombardo concludes by exalting the positions of Pietro Secchia, an exponent of the ICP’s left, without pointing out (or even wondering) why it was unable to prevent the takeover of Togliatti and the right in the leadership of the party. Another exponent is Michele Franco (Rete dei Comunisti, Communists’ Network). In the annex to the article A 100 anni da Livorno ’21: problemi e potenzialità per una rinnovata opzione comunista agente (100 years after Livorno 1921: problems and potential for a renewed communist option) Franco denounces the intellectual corruption and the abandonment of Marxism by the old communist movement, speaking of the "oblivion and mystification of a strong thought which, far from being out of time, still works today, namely Marxism ”, but does not dare to indicate what the denounced drift consisted of.

What do Lombardo and Franco have in common? Both denounce a ruinous course but, in the end, they don’t draw lessons for today. They do not indicate precisely what were the aspects of reality, whose the left of the first ICP did not have an understanding advanced enough to prevail over the right and lead the masses to victory. Lombardo exalts Secchia rather than making the balance of the work of Secchia and the left of the old ICP. Franco is careful not to identify on which issues of conception of the world or analysis of the course of things the abandonment of the Marxism he denounced has occurred. Both conclusions prevent learning from the history of the old ICP and lead those who adopt them to oscillate between the dogmatic re-proposition, as it is, of the left of the first ICP (continuity) and the denial of all its wealth of experience (rupture) and, beyond the intentions of those who spread these conclusions, they feed mistrust: assuming that the underlying cause of the defeat of the first ICP was "the betrayal of the leaders", what to do since no one guarantees us that today's leaders will not betray?


We need leaders, but the certainty of victory comes from the science leading the party.

We must have and feed the confidence that transforming the world depends on us, that the material conditions already exist to produce, without devastating the environment but rather preserving and improving it, all that is necessary for billions of men and women who populate the Earth, that the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and its desperate management in the last few months are effects of the survival of capitalism historically outdated for about 150 years, that we are able to establish socialism: that is, 1. to establish the power of workers organized in the ranks of the communist movement instead of the power of the imperialist bourgeoisie and its agents, 2. to manage according to a plan the companies made public so that they produce what is necessary for the popular masses of our country and useful in relations with the popular masses of other countries, 3 . to promote the increasing access of the masses to political, cultural, sporting and recreational activities, specifically human activities from which the bourgeoisie and the clergy exclude the mass of the population.


The confidence to be able to do it is the prerequisite for doing so. The lack of this confidence is today the worst result of the defeats we have suffered, of the exhaustion of the first world wave of proletarian revolutions (socialist and new democracy) raised in the world by the victory of October 1917 in Russia, by the construction of the Soviet Union, from the victory of the Twenties of the last century against the aggressions promoted by the European, US imperialist groups and by the Vatican, until the victory of 1945 against the Nazi-fascist hordes (Mussolini, Hitler and their emulators) and the foundation of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, the founding of the People's Republic of China, the victory of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea against US aggression in 1953, the constitution of socialist Cuba and its resistance to US aggression, the victory of the heroic Vietnamese people against French and US imperialists, the glorious anticolonial struggles from South Africa to Sandinist Nicaragua, from an end to another of Asia.
The ICP founded in 1921 in Livorno was one of the protagonists of this story.


We the communists are mainly interested in the lessons we draw from the history of the first ICP: they are indispensable for the purposes of the struggle we wage to establish socialism in our country and contribute to the rebirth of the communist movement in the world, especially in the imperialist countries. The first imperialist country that will break the chains of the International Community of EU, US and Zionist imperialist groups, will show the way and open the way also to the popular masses of other imperialist and neocolonial countries!

The main lesson we get from the historical process that took place in Italy and in the other imperialist countries is that here the communist movement and the parties that were at its head during the first wave of the proletarian revolution (1917-1976) never had an understanding of the course of things up to their task: for this reason they did not lead the popular masses to take advantage of the first generalized crisis of the capitalist system, which they interpreted as a succession of cyclical crises, to the point of establishing socialism. Although, already in the early 1920s Lenin had made it clear that the communist parties of the European countries that bornt from the old socialist parties had only "a nuance of revolutionary color" and that (final part of his speech at the IV Congress of the Communist International) their transformation into genuinely revolutionary parties would have required a special effort from their leaders.
Even Antonio Gramsci in 1923, when the Executive Committee of the Communist International entrusted him with the direction of its Italian section (the ICP which under the direction of Amadeo Bordiga had undergone the combination of the Savoy Monarchy with the Fascism of Benito Mussolini materialized in the March on Rome - October 1922),
had very clear the reasons why they suffered the defeat: the leadership of the Party was not based on the science of the activities with which men make their history, then Marxism-Leninism. Assimilating the lesson that Gramsci continued to apply even in the years of the prison in which he wrote his Prison Notebooks, the (new) ICP places the Intellectual and Moral Reform, the learning and assimilation of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, as an indispensable condition for those who candidate to become a member of the Party.

The reasons why the first ICP did not succeed in its role - mobilizing and organizing the Italian popular masses to make Italy a socialist country - are a precious legacy that we receive from the first ICP: it is up to us to discover and learn them, assimilate and apply them with initiative, creativity and dedication to the cause. Already the defeat suffered with the imprisonment in 1926 of its top leader, Antonio Gramsci, following which the leadership of the ICP passed into the hands of the future modern revisionists (Togliatti and his similars), was not a fatality: it derived from the limits of the first ICP in understanding the conditions, forms and results of the class struggle which had prevented the attack of Mussolini's fascism and the Savoy monarchy. From this lesson we derived the clandestinity of the Party we founded on October 4, 2004. The surrender to the Anglo-American imperialists, the Vatican and De Gasperi's DC (Christian Democracy) after the 1945 Resistance victory was the result of limits in understanding the nature of the crisis for the absolute overproduction of capital, of the regime of preventive counter-revolution and the form that the socialist revolution must take in the imperialist countries, the protracted revolutionary people's war: the struggle to create the conditions for the establishment of the People's Bloc Government that we have been leading since 2008 it is the result of the lessons we learned from the collapse of the years 1945-1948, from the exhaustion of the movement of the Workers Councils and from the defeat of the Fighting Communist Organizations (in particular the Red Brigades) of the 70s.


In the celebrations of the Centenary we must remember and illustrate the miracles of heroism that millions of men and women of the popular masses mobilized in the ICP and moved by the example of the Soviets have unleashed during decades, in particular against fascism and during the glorious and victorious Resistance (1943-1945); the great achievements of civilization and well-being that they snatched from the capitalists and the clergy in the years of "capitalism with a human face" (1945-1975); the great intellectual and moral advances of which they have been protagonists, the trust and hope they have feed in so many of their oppressed and exploited comrades who have not become communists but, to some extent, came out of the brutalization to which capitalists and priests relegated them. We must reject and fight the ideas and sentiments advocated by those who argue that our predecessors, the members of the first ICP, did not establish socialism because the bourgeoisie was strong: they are the same as in some manner argue that the bourgeoisie is still strong today and push to resignation, to wait for miracles or pity from the rich and the clergy, to despair, to blind protest. The communists mobilized and organized in the ICP have shown on a large scale the power of the workers, women and youth of the popular masses. We the communists must understand and make it understood that they did not establish the socialism they dreamed mainly because they failed to overcome the dominant ideas, common sense, the ideas of the ruling class, to rise intellectually and morally to the necessary level.


The pandemic raging in the world is an effect of the continuation of the imperialist phase of capitalism, a mode of production historically outdated for about 150 years. The exhaustion of the first world wave (1917-1976) of the proletarian revolutions (socialist and new democracy) and the second generalized crisis (economic, environmental, social and cultural) - due to the absolute overproduction of capital which began in the 70s of the last century - are at the origin of the era of black reaction from which we suffer the extreme effects.

To lead the resistance that the popular masses spontaneously and in no particular order oppose to the most serious and immediate effects of the survival of capitalism and its extension in the world (globalization) and to develop this resistance until it becomes the revolutionary force that puts an end to the leadership of the imperialist bourgeoisie: this is the task of the conscious and organized communist movement and of the communist parties which are the most advanced part of it.

This is the task that the (new) ICP must carry out and carries out actually in Italy. Raising our ability to do it is the aim we give to the celebration of the centenary of the first ICP.


Understanding the real reasons why the first ICP did not establish socialism during the first generalized crisis of capitalism makes the history of the first ICP a source of security for our victory!

It is not the popular masses that don’t fight and are unable to win: we the communists must learn and play our role better!

Establish Party Committees in every company, school, public institution and in every territory!

Get in touch with the Party Center!

The revival of the popular masses is possible! Everyone can and must make his contribution!
The Communist Party is the decisive factor of victory!