35th Founding Anniversary of the Italian Marxist-Leninist Party
Let us unite against capitalism, for socialism

By Giovanni Scuderi*

It’s been 35 years now, in other words since when we founded the PMLI on 9 April 1977, let alone the previous 10 years of its gestation, that we have been hammering and hammering on the same point: the struggle against capitalism, for socialism. This is not because we are obsessed, of course, but because history and facts, including today’s facts, fully and irrefutably prove that it is the only way to get rid of exploitation of man by man, misery, unemployment, social injustices, social, territorial and sex inequalities, classes, imperialist wars, in order to realise a new social system where power belongs to the proletariat, the only class that can guarantee democracy, freedom and well-being for the whole people.
The current economic and financial crisis of capitalism, even more destructive than the one back in 1929, that has been dropping all its problems on the shoulders of the people’s and youth masses for four years, proves the correctness of the strategy of socialism and the necessity to put it into practice.
This is not due to a "bad system maintenance", as Monti said at the central school of the Chinese revisionist party, but to contradictions incidental to capitalism as well as to national and international market, that periodically explode, more or less heavily and hardly, causing the ruin of weaker and less efficient economic sectors, changing the relations of power within capitalism, taking workers to the cleaners, squeezing the masses with taxes and tariffs, and bringing the government more and more Right-wing. Thus capitalism recovers, resettles and reorganises to continue the exploitation and oppression of the masses, and to allow winning capitalists and financiers to further fatten and expand in their own country as well as abroad.
Currently it is financial capitalism the one dominating the stage, setting the agenda, imposing, even openly and shamelessly, the governments of capitalist countries. This is the case of bourgeois liberalist technocrat Monti’s government, direct fruit of the big finance and the EU, with the complicity of the new Victor Emmanuel III, Giorgio Napolitano.
An unprecedented white putsch that has trampled over the 1948 bourgeois Constitution and bourgeois parliamentarism. Balanced budget in Constitution and the counter-reforms of pensions and job, supported by the PDL, PD and Third Pole [Silvio Berlusconi’s People’s of Freedom party, "centre-left" Democratic Party and an alliance comprising Centre and Right-wing parties, Translator’s Note] are putschist acts as well, totally out of the State’s supreme law and bourgeois democracy, the same goes for the projects of constitutional "reform" and electoral law "reform". These are the last pieces to complete the neo-fascist second republic as it was envisaged by the P2 and pursued by neo-Duce Berlusconi.
Compared with the first Republic, everything has changed on institutional, economic, trade union and democracy fields. In fact, ruling are presidentialism, perfectly interpreted by Napolitano, alongside Mussolinian industrial relations, introduced by Marchionne in Fiat and then embraced by Monti, true heir to Berlusconi, and Elsa Fornero, the cabinet’s Marchionne.
All this has forced workers to open their eyes. They have already started, even spontaneously, to take to the streets, particularly in defence of Article 18 [Before Fornero’s work "reform", article 18 of the Statute of Workers stipulated that an unjustly fired worker had to be reinstated to his or her job, Translator’s Note]. Anti-capitalists, as showed by recent national demonstrations launched respectively by the FIOM [Metal workers’ union, Translator’s Note] and Occupy Piazza Affari, are continually rising in number and their fighting spirit is constantly growing, but sadly they have not yet understood that getting rid of capitalism is possible only by overthrowing it and establishing socialism. Misled as they are by Left-wing reformists, including some Trotskyite trends, always designing "new" formulas, organisations and movements (commons, participatory democracy, new development model, audit on public debt, civil lists, new political subject, etc.) in order to keep them inside the cage of capitalism, bourgeois institutions, parliamentarism and electoralism. They go side by side with wily old political foxes who have suddenly put on a red dress, even singing the praises of Stalin, proletarian dictatorship and socialist revolution.
It is therefore necessary for anti-capitalists to make a jump in quality, breaking with reformists and bourgeois electoralism, starting from the next administrative elections in May, by not abandoning abstensionism and opening a debate with the PMLI. Regardless what Left-wing reformists go on saying, the "Twentieth century model of party" is still alive. Every other model, as shown by practice, cannot be but a bourgeois model. Reading a few fundamental works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao is enough in order to understand that the only proletarian path is the path of the October, and that the only Italian party that has always walked that path is the PMLI. The design of socialism approved by the 3rd National Congress of the PMLI held in December 1985, and re-published on this very paper, clearly proves this.
Let us not make illusions that, after Monti, bourgeois-democratic "normality" will be restored and that wind will change in favour of the people. By now, the road that the bourgeois ruling class has taken is irreversible. No matter who will seize the government, they will have no choice but to bend to the wishes, needs and interests of Italian capitalism and imperialist EU.
The proletariat and the political forces defending its interests and needs cannot but stand at the opposition, outside the parliament. This will surely be the stand and position of the PMLI. Unfortunately, the voice of the PMLI is still too weak, and since it is deliberately ignored by the Right-wing as well as the bourgeois "Left-wing" media, it cannot be heard from all the exploited and oppressed of our country, by the younger generations and by intellectuals more sensitive to the problems of the proletariat and to social change. But this must not discourage us, on the contrary we must redouble our efforts with even more strength than in the past in order to propagate our revolutionary anti-capitalist message. Trusting that, sooner or later, it will spread like wildfire until it will be able to awaken political consciousness and draw inside the PMLI, or at its side, all the anti-capitalist social, labour, cultural and religious forces.
Just as one swallow does not a summer make, one shout of the slogan Let us unite against capitalism, for socialism is not capable of moving the political consciousness of the proletariat, the masses and the youth. We have to insist, insist, insist, be able to correctly explain, motivate and argument it in our places of work, study and living, in addition to mass organisations we are part of, especially openly anti-capitalist ones.
While we fight to defend the masses’ immediate interests (job, salary, pensions, housing, public and free healthcare and education), to repel the counter-reform of job and to kick out the Monti government, we persevere on hammering and hammering again the red point. It is our identity, it is out mission.
The Party Central Committee and General Secretary offer their heartfelt thanks to all the comrades, militant or active sympathizers of the PMLI, for their irreplaceable contribution to the triumph of the cause of socialism in Italy.
To all anti-capitalists, above all the workers and the youth, we make this warm call: Let us unite against capitalism, for socialism! Let us fight side by side to open the gates to a bright socialist future!

* General Secretary of the PMLI

April 4, 2012