5th May is the Bicentenary of Marx’s birth. In celebrating this most important anniversary, Marxist-Leninists in Italy and in the whole world rally around the figure, the work and the teachings of this giant of revolutionary thought and action, great teacher of the international proletariat and co-founder of scientific socialism. They celebrate him with proletarian revolutionary joy, and let the bourgeoisie and its lackeys fail in their futile attempts to convince the proletariat that Marx and Marxism-Leninism are a 18th-century ideology already surpassed by history. On the contrary, reading just a few passages of the huge philosophical, political and economic literature by Marx is enough to be impressed by the extraordinary contemporary character of his teachings and the power of analysis and foresight of his analyses on the capitalist system.

 

Marx’s extraordinary and exemplary biography, his entire life as a scholar, a theoretician, a politician, a fighter, a leader, a teacher and an organizer of the international workers movement, not to mention his immortal works, starting from “Capital” and the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” whose 151st and 170th anniversary occur this year, still lighten the way of Marxist-Leninists and the international proletariat towards political power and socialism. We perfectly know that Marx’s exceptional and exemplary life, as said by his best and most loyal student in Italy, Comrade Giovanni Scuderi, General Secretary of the PMLI, at the Sixth Plenary Session of the 5th Party Central Committee held in January, “should inspire our general political commitment as well as our particular commitment to solve the problems the Party is facing at the moment. Our revolutionary duties are different than those of Marx, but our commitment to fulfill them should not be inferior to his. As Marx did, we should never let any personal, family, professional and political problem overcome us, we should always put the interests of our cause above our personal interests, and give the best of ourselves to our dear Party.”

 

MARX’S LIFE AND WORK

 

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, a city in the then Prussia, in a land that saw the birth of Germany’s first factories, and, together with them, two new classes, the industrial bourgeoisie and the proletariat. His rebel nature against established oppressive order and his natural love for mankind and progress led him to distinction both in the Trier gymnasium he attended and in the faculties of law in Bonn and Berlin.

 

Forced to give up to his original idea of teaching at university because of the anti-democratic turn of the Prussian government, in 1842 Marx became first a journalist and then an editor of “The Renanian Gazette,” run in Cologne by the bourgeois-democratic opposition, from where he dealt unprecedentedly devastating blows at the regime, to the point that the government had to shut it down on 31 March 1843.

 

From that moment on, for him and his life-long partner, his wife Jenny, who did not hesitate to renounce to a life of material wellbeing in order to share with him their common political interests, a life of political exile and unspeakable sacrifices began. From Paris to Brussels, chased by police repression and censorship, until the forced exile in London, events in Marx’s life give us an idea of the harsh conditions under which he fought his struggle to give the proletariat its conscience as the most revolutionary class in human history as well as a party organization up to its historic role of overthrowing capitalism and the bourgeois state through socialist revolution, seizing political power to emancipate itself and the entire mankind from the millennia-old exploitation of man by man and classist society.

 

In February 1844 his articles and letters published on “The Franco-German Annals” marked his final turn from idealism to materialism and from revolutionary democracy to Communism. He formulated the general concept of the socialist revolution, i.e. mankind’s liberation from any social or political oppression. In his “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” published on that journal, Marx declared war on established order and pointed the proletariat as the social force capable of leading the socialist revolution.

 

In the same year in Paris he met Engels, starting their splendid life-long adventure and a personal and political relationship that, as Lenin said, was worth of “the most touching ancient legends on human friendship.” Without Engels’ financial support during the rest of their lives, Marx would have most certainly overcome by poverty. Together they wrote “The Holy Family” to expose the Young Hegelians and the whole set of idealism.

 

In the spring of 1845, Marx wrote his “Theses on Feuerbach,” described by Engels as “the first document in which the seed of genius of the new view of the world is set,” and together they wrote “The German Ideology” from 1845 to 1846, where they systematically expounded the fundamental principles of the materialist conception of history, the theory of social development, important principles of dialectical materialism and scientific Communism. In this period, Marx also fought a difficult struggle against the theories of utopian socialism by the German Weitling and of anarchism by the bourgeois socialist Proudhon, exposed in “The Poverty of Philosophy” in 1847.

 

When the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was published in London in February 1848, no-one would have imagined the irresistible revolutionary power generated by this book in human history. Written together with Engels, it breaks the mist benumbing the conscience of the exploited and the oppressed, as it re-reads human history from an absolutely new point of view. The new proletarian world outlook is taken against the ruling ideas of the bourgeois class. The “Manifesto” openly proclaims that Communists rallied in their own party are speaking, the most advanced part of the proletariat that wants to unify it, put forward its general interests as a class, overthrow capitalism and achieve socialism and finally communism. It is the act of foundation of the organized workers’ movement.

 

Acclaimed on the field as the leader of the Communist League, Marx returned to Paris in March 1848 to be at the heart of revolutionary events. He went to Cologne the following month, where he and Engles re-established “The New Renanian Gazette.” Most notably, the journal published “Wage Labour and Capital,” a collection of lectures held by Marx to German workers in Brussels to explain the essence of capitalist exploitation and the reasons of the irreconcilable antagonism between labour and capital. The bloody repression carried out by Prussian reactionaries successfully put down the flames of revolution in Germany and closed the journal.

 

In London, although sick and extremely poor, he re-established the Central Committee of the Communist League and turned his house into a center for organizing the defence of Communists in the Cologne trials, a show put on by the Prussian regime. In his work “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850” he described revolution as “the locomotive of history” and employed the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” for the first time as a synonym for political power held by the proletariat.

 

In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” he drew the lesson that as long as the bourgeoisie maintains its power, it is impossible for the working class to get rid of its exploitation, and therefore the proletariat cannot use the bourgeoisie state apparatus but must destroy it after the revolution.

 

In 1864 Marx wrote the Address and the Programme of the new International Workingmen’s Association, the glorious First International, to which he gave his all for many years, exposing and politically defeating anarchists, liberal socialists and utopian socialists. When, on 18 March 1871, the working class seized power for the first time in history in Paris, Marx warmly greeted the Commune and did everything he could to support and guide it. In “The Civil War in France,” written after the Commune’s defeat, Marx not only summed up its experience, but also developed his theory on the state, pointing out that the working class cannot simply take possession of an already-established state machinery, but rather destroy it.

 

Aware that the economic regime is at the basis of the political super-structure and the source of class division, class struggle and even the opposition between ideas and outlooks, Marx gave his all in the study of the relations of production in capitalist society. He wrote one of his most prestigious works, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in August-November 1858, where he further developed the manuscripts he had written over the preceding two years. One of these manuscripts formed the basis of “Capital.”

 

On the brink of poverty and not in a good health, Marx worked day and night with unprecedented perseverance and abnegation. After an almost twenty-years-long elaboration, the first volume of “Capital” was published in Hamburg on 14 September 1867. Here Marx created the scientific theory of value and money, the theory of plus-value at the basis of capitalist profit and workers’ exploitation. No previous or later age witnessed any other work of political economy capable of creating such a theoretical break between the era of the bourgeoisie and capitalism and the era of the proletariat and socialism. A gigantic work that was so complex and difficult that the second and third volumes could see the light only after his death, in 1885 and 1894, thanks to the sharp and loyal editing and completing work done by Engels on Marx’s manuscripts.

 

Although he also worked on Russia, France and Italy, Marx kept his closest bonds with the German workers’ movement. In his “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” named after the city were a reformist, counter-revolutionary compromise was reached between the Socialist and Social Democratic parties of Germany to form the United Workers’ Party of Germany in a congress held from 22 to 27 May 1875. In this work Marx explained why Communist society should go through two stages of development. Once the rule of the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, the proletariat, despite putting an end to the exploitation of man by man, still cannot meet all the needs of every single citizen. This is why distribution can only be carried out according to the principle of a work-based retribution. Only after the rapid growth of productive forces and the formation of the socialist conscience of men, new premises will be set to pass to the second stage of Communist society, with the principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

 

With his strong body weakened by his sickness, emotionally frail after the deaths of his wife and his first-born daughter shortly thereafter, with three children already dead when they were young because of their poverty, Marx passed in London on 14 March 1883.

 

MARX’S FUNDAMENTAL TEACHINGS

 

The life and work of Marx as we have shortly reviewed is full of teachings. They allow the proletarians, the revolutionaries, the youth aspiring to socialism who study them to understand history, capitalism, class struggle, ideological and cultural differences between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, to prevent the influence of the bourgeoisie and its lackeys, to expose and struggle against wrong and counter-revolutionary ideas and to change the world and themselves.

 

First of all, Marx, together with Engels, laid the foundation of the proletarian world outlook. Dialectical materialism and historical materialism are its essence. Dialectical materialism, the philosophical and theoretical basis of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Thought, has unearthed the laws of the development of movements, nature, phenomena, things and the universe. Historical materialism, the scientific and historical basis of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Thought, through the use of dialectics, has unearthed the laws of the historical development of the human society. Both are opposed to idealism and metaphysics, as they are part of the bourgeois world outlook. Marxism and its teachings do not come from the skies, rather they are born from practice, from the struggle on idealism, religion and any other conception above classes or proclaiming class cooperation, from the study of reality and what mankind had produced in philosophy, economics, politics and science until then. Lenin brilliantly said that Marxism “is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.” Its foundation, however, is social science, class struggle. There would be no Marxism without class struggle.

 

Marx’s teachings concern not only the mind, fundamental to lead practice, but also action, as they set the path for the liberation of the proletariat and the whole mankind through proletarian revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, socialism and communism under the leadership of the Communist Party. It was the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” to lay the foundation of the proletarian party, to teach us that the party is the most advanced part of the proletariat, that it is one with its interests and its historic mission to overthrow bourgeois rule, seize political power, achieve socialism and finally establish Communism abolishing classes. Its primary task is to educate the proletariat, helping it to become aware of its role as a general class bound to liberate the whole mankind, to pass from class-in-itself to a class-for-itself, independent, conscious of its historical opposition to the bourgeoisie, and aware that without political power it has nothing, with political power it has everything.

 

Marx taught Communists of the whole world that their goal is to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. Lenin, Stalin and Mao not only confirmed this teaching, developing its theses according to their national and international reality, but also put it into practice destroying capitalism and establishing socialism in their own countries. They constantly took inspiration from and based themselves on class struggle for socialism, on the need for a violent revolution and the destruction of the bourgeois state to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Failing to uphold just one of these essential elements of Marxism means betraying it and siding with the bourgeoisie, as they are the very revolutionary essence of Marxism, as pointed out by Marx himself in the famous letter of 5 March 1852: “My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

 

Immense are Marx’s teachings on the economic field. Through a number of preparatory writings and researches and with the biggest work of political economy ever given to mankind, “Capital”, Marx discovered the laws of the birth, the development and the ruin of capitalism, laid bare and explained the relation between capital and labour and the origin of the exploitation of the working class as a result, demonstrated on the economic field the central role of the proletariat in the inevitable revolutionary struggle for socialism.

 

Marxist economic doctrine, comprehensive of the developments made by Lenin in “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” is still valid and irrefutable. Without it, the proletariat would be unaware of the origins and mechanisms of capitalist exploitation, it would know nothing of the irremediable nature of the contradictions which are part of the capitalist economic system and it would not understand that only the socialist revolution can put an end to the opposition between the social character of the production process and the private capitalist form of the appropriation. This is why it has always been rejected and maligned by the bourgeoisie and phony Communists. The essence and foundation f Marx’s theory of value-labour is the discovery of the plus-value, produced by the part of the working day when workers give their manpower for free to the capitalist, the source of profit and the wealth for the capitalist class as well as of the exploitation of man by man.

 

Marx taught us proletarian internationalism, and dedicated his all, with touching passion and love, to the education, organization and guidance of the workers’ movement in Europe and in the whole world. From his exile in Brussels, after he was expelled from Paris, when he helped the imminent armed revolution of 1848 in Belgium, France and Germany also financially, until the rise of the Paris Commune; after its defeat, Marx’s own house became a refuge for survivors fleeing the bloody repression carried out by the reaction. He was the guiding force and the founder of the glorious First International, leading an endless stream of inner struggles against utopian socialists, liberal socialists, and finally anarchists led by Bakunin. This is why the world proletariat and genuine progressives loved him both as a theoretician and a fighter. As Comrade Giovanni Scuderi said in the Report of the Political Bureau to the 2nd National Congress of the PMLI back in 1982: “We are the pioneers of the socialist revolution in Italy just like Marx was the pioneer of the world socialist revolution.”

 

LET US APPLY MARX’S TEACHINGS

 

The PMLI is the only party that has not renegaded the cause of socialism. In its Programme, Marx’s teachings are present in full: giving a class consciousness to the proletariat, leading it towards the overthrow of bourgeois rule and the seizure of political power, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, destroying capitalism and establishing socialism. No bourgeois “Left-wing” party, no Five-Star Movement and no “Power to the People” coalition, wants or demands this. The bourgeoisie and the reaction know this really well, and in fact we have been suffering for years the same total repressive black out suffered by Marx himself when he was alive.

 

The example given by the exceptional life and the revolutionary teachings of Marx should inspire our own Marxist-Leninist life, our commitment to give the PMLI a body as a red giant and to awaken the proletariat to the revolutionary struggle. For us Marxist-Leninists, applying Marx’s teachings means absorbing the proletarian world outlook and passing it on to the masses, in order to fully and completely get rid of bourgeois ideology, culture, moral, politics and social practice, revolutionize our thought, conscience, way of thinking, living and acting, in order to give relevant and important contributions to open the gates to united, red and socialist Italy.

 

It also means carefully and deeply studying the problems we are dealing with both as Party members and as editors of our glorious press organ “Il Bolscevico,” or on the occasion of labour union and students’ rallies, or in mass movements, wherever we are present. We should do this by researching primary sources in order to make correct and irrefutable analyses. We should learn from Marx and his “greed” in devouring book after book, document after document, researches and analyses.

 

As far as our immediate tasks are concerned, we should learn from Marx and apply his teachings to put into practice the instruction given by Comrade Scuderi, endorsed and approved by the Sixth Plenary Session of the 5th CC of the PMLI, to sit around a table to think about the key words “study, concentrate on priority, expand” and to decide what to do regarding each of them, keeping in mind the concrete situation we are in, the forces we have available and the principle “more quality and less quantity.” We should employ the same strength and sacrifice, the same proletarian revolutionary spirit, the same use of the powerful weapon of criticism and self-criticism as Marx and Engels, who wrote their main works together sitting around a table, setting the line of the international workers’ movement. This is the only way to develop the party, get it new members, supporters and friends, involve the proletariat, the masses and the youth in the struggle against capitalism and for socialism. Although 50 years have passed since the first pioneers of the PMLI descended on the political arena, we are still at the beginning of our political and organizational long march, but we are on the right path, the one charted by Marx and Engels and followed by Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

 

Let us be reminded of the brilliant statement by Comrade Scuderi in his editorial on the 41st founding anniversary of the PMLI: “Change in Italy can come only if we change everything of it, in other words, if we go from capitalism to socialism, from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to the dictatorship of the proletariat, from the bourgeois institutional, judicial, cultural and moral superstructure to a proletarian one. This is the general instruction that Marx gave to the world proletariat and genuine Communists. On 5th May it will be the Bicentenary of his birth. May all the exploited and the oppressed, starting from conscious workers and the youth fighting for a new society, carve in their minds the following passage from Marx, written in March 1850, and act accordingly to make it real: ‘This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.’ ”

 

LONG LIVE MARX!

APPLY MARX’S TEACHINGS ON THE PROLETARIAT ACHIEVING SOCIALISM AND SEIZING POLITICAL POWER!

WITH MARX FOREVER!

 

The Central Committee of the Italian Marxist-Leninist Party

 

Florence, 9 April 2018