On the first issue of "El Comunista" (nueva edición), May 1983, with which we resumed the publication of the Party magazine in Spanish, we published some modest but sufficient notes with the title “La degeneración de 'programma comunista' y nuestra batalla” (the degeneration of 'programma comunista' and our battle) that summarize the historical causes of that degeneration, the main external manifestations of the process and the decision to break (in January 1982, in the case of the Spanish section) with the formal discipline of an organization that no longer represented the historical thread of the Party. These notes were not a "local" elaboration of the Spanish section but had been published by the comrades of the Schio section in February 1983 as part of the international effort to maintain the continuity of the Party outside the degenerated formal organization.

We had been expelled first substantially – as had been expelled the positions of the Left in general by the so-called new course – and, because of this, we decided to break the formal discipline that for Marxists means nothing if it is not linked to the continuity of the line and to the unity of doctrine-program-tactics.

The subsequent confirmation that the direction of this formal organization no longer represented the historical thread of the Party was not long in coming. That direction against whose degeneration we had fought our battle successively exploded into fragments a few months later: in October 1982 (when El-Oumami, Proletarier and the Parisian center, broke away on an ever more activist basis); in June 1983 when the openly democratic "internal debate" is given free rein and a part of the editors steps aside; in January 1984 when the latter part recovered the publication through the court and the other part began to publish "Combat"; in 1985 when "il Comunista" detaches from "Combat" and merges with "le Prolétaire".

It is important to note that our No. 1 of May 1983 was issued prior to the quarrel for the control of "il programma comunista" starting in June 1983 between the different variants of the new course that had not openly declared themselves liquidationist of the formal wrapping of the Party and describes them all.

THE DEGENERATION OF PROGRAMMA COMUNISTA AND OUR BATTLE

[El Comunista nº1 - may 1983]

With these modest notes we will try to explain to all those who knew us as a section of the Communist Party International why the rupture came about, between the organization Programma Comunista and us.  They are mainly addressed to those who followed our activities and saw us intervene in area struggles with continuity without superficiality and ephemeral enthusiasm; Who may have criticized us for what might have seemed to be an supposed sectarianism of our political and labor positions (but from the current state of "Communist Program" we can see where we can get to with even the slightest concession to positions which for us cannot be renounced), but have never been able to impute to us a lack of coherence in our work always linked to the red thread that goes from Marx to Lenin to the positions of the Italian Left.

Such a rupture was not improvised, but the inevitable conclusion of a laborious process, of at least two years, which has not seen us passive, enclosed in the ivory tower of a presumed political integrity (it would have been an anti-Marxist position), on the contrary, it has seen us lead in the front line a battle both inside and outside the organization to try revert, even with our limited forces, the lines of tendency that were moving further and further away from the classist course that had always been patrimony of our organization. On the other hand, we were aware, both of the infeasibility of making the whole Party achieve this reversion, as these tendencies had already taken deep roots (except perhaps in the remote case of a drastic change in the external situation with a generalized resumption of the class struggle), and of the need nevertheless to "rivet the nails" and to establish the bases so that the forces opposed to the "new course" would not be dispersed.

The degeneration of "Programma Comunista" did not happen suddenly (as, indeed, no communist party has ever degenerated from today to tomorrow; the war credits voted in 1914 by the German Social Democracy were not only the betrayal of a nucleus of corrupt leaders, but the product of material forces operating for years, which had succeeded in emptying, in a situation of relative social peace, the party of all will and possibility of struggle, integrating it into the bourgeois parliamentary system, even if on paper there remained high-sounding declarations of principle). The degeneration of "Programma" has not therefore been the work of a phantasmatic "gang of four" but of the tremendous process of a counterrevolution that has lasted more than 50 years and has allowed the infiltration in our organization, which was the only one that had managed, since 1945 until today, to preserve intact the programmatic and tactical heritage of Marxism, of fickle and empirical tendencies (although initially only tendencies and additionally masked under the guise of a formal discipline towards the principles).

Only few "islands" have been saved from this process, where there has been mostly the possibility of carrying out a constant work inside the working class, the existence of a network of sympathizers linked to the party on precise programmatic positions and on the unsurpassable tactical limits deriving from those positions, and above all the fusion between the old guard of the left and the new generations; there have been no jumps in the thread of time: the young have learned from the old, not only the ABC of Marxism, but a method and the sense of militancy have not existed at the moment when the first discordant indications reached the center of the party, nor a diaspora of comrades, aware of the change of course, nor the resolution, then mistaken (because a priori the albeit remote possibility of a reversal of the trend could not be excluded), to leave the organization. The question, moreover, had been sculpted in the Lyon theses of 1926.

"Being absurd and sterile as well as extremely dangerous, to pretend that the P. and the International are mysteriously ensured against any relapse into opportunism, which may depend on mutations of the situation as on the play of the residues of social-democratic betrayals, in the resolution of our problems, it must be admitted that any differentiation of opinion not reducible to cases of conscience or personal defeatism can be developed into a useful function of preservation of the Party, and of the proletariat in general from serious dangers. If these were accentuated, the differentiation would inevitably but usefully take the factional form, and this could lead to splits not for the childish reason of a lack of repressive energy on the part of the leaders, but only in the damned hypothesis of the failure of the Party, and of its submission to counterrevolutionary influences (...) In the present situation in the COMINTERN the constitution of an Left international opposition is not delineated, but if the development of the unfavorable factors here indicated were to be continued, the formation of such an opposition will be at the same time a revolutionary necessity and a spontaneous reflection of the situation".

On such occasions we therefore expressed, without "subterranean" work that does not belong to our tradition, all our doubts regarding the innovative tendencies circulating either in the center or in the periphery of the party, denouncing the state of crisis.

Indeed, since the beginning of the 70's the party has been going through a state of intermittent crisis. What are the causes? The crisis of the capitalist system is getting worse every year, unemployment is growing, layoffs are increasing, wages are decreasing, the living conditions of the proletarians are worsening and focusses of war are sprouting in every part of the globe while the commercial war is becoming more and more acute. However, this economic crisis does not correspond to a resumption of the class struggle and even if sporadically flames of workers' rage break out, the proletariat of the large metropolises shows very few signs of a resumption.

Opportunism, which has disarmed both materially and ideologically the proletariat in the first post-war period, still retains its disintegrating and demoralizing influence on the working class.

There are two elements to take into consideration: ECONOMIC CURVE: capitalist crisis on the rise and SOCIAL CURVE: (or of resumption of the class movement) flattened or directly in decline.

It was therefore a matter, and it was certainly not easy, not to get caught up in the anxiety of bridging the delay (subjectively unbridgeable!!! ) between these two curves, nor all the more reason to impute this delay to subjective causes, but rather to be even more firm in the face of this unfavorable situation in hammering back the nails of all time, in sharpening the weapons of critique, in reiterating the imperative limits of the rose of tactical eventualities already outlined in broad strokes for this historical cycle; work undoubtedly burdensome as the prodromes of the great revolutionary wave were not yet even in sight, but necessary and imperative in order to arrive with a party, albeit small but revolutionary, at the historic appointment of the coincidence of the two curves.

Within "Programma Comunista" one hears more and more often talk of phase delay, of old and inveterate habits to be forgotten, of a new historical cycle that has caught the party insufficiently prepared and consequently of the need to bridge the "delay" (that is, to voluntaristically bridge the delay between the economic curve and the social curve).

Since the working class is "amorphous," preferential sectors of intervention are identified such as students, the unemployed, tenants, women, youth, and the subproletariat (who may in fact be those most affected by the crisis, but certainly possess no class homogeneity precisely because they are not classes) by identifying them as the most sensitive strata of the proletariat from where the struggle can extend out to involve the working class (while if anything the process occurs in precisely the opposite way, that is, it is the semi-classes that are eventually dragged by the working class into the struggle). In the same vein, there is a tendency to overestimate the struggles of the proletariat and the left wing of the third-world bourgeoisie, and it is considered that the great jolt against the capitalist system can start from the periphery. Simultaneously and consequently, the rose of tactical eventualities of the party's intervention in the proletariat begins to dilate dangerously, in order to make up for the supposed delay. In 1951 the "Characteristic Theses" of the party said: "In order to accelerate the class resumption there are no ready-made recipes. To make the proletarians hear the class voice there are no maneuvers or expedients, which as such would not make the party appear as it really is, but as a disfigurement of its function, to the detriment and prejudice of the effective resumption of the revolutionary movement, which is based on the real maturity of the facts and the corresponding adaptation of the party, enabled in this only for its doctrinaire and political inflexibility."

In fact, the possibility of the "united front" is raised in a stasis and the agreement between political groups with limited influence on very limited workers' groups is dispatched as such (see C.N.C.L.[1]). A possible class patent is given to sectors of the pacifist movement (which represent one of the expressions of the bourgeois and counterrevolutionary ideology tending to the disarmament of the proletariat).

It starts with breaking with the method of organic centralism by using the weapon of expulsion to eliminate the critical positions that are increasingly being raised against deviationist tendencies. It finally goes so far as to not only support but even seek a link with an organization that has always been denounced as bourgeois, such as the P.L.O., at the international level.

Facing this "escalation", where in the end the eclecticism in tactical matters has been translated into the reneging of positions of principle, where it was no longer possible, unless risking falling behind, to remain in such an organization, we have refused the acceptance of formal discipline, because another discipline, not caporalesque, has always guided us. We have maintained links with other comrades (Spain, Italy in particular, but not only) who, like us, were opposed to the "degringolade" (somersault) of the party. In the activity for the rupture we have claimed, once again, the method always adopted by the communists to reach a split that was organic and not voluntarist, clear and not the fruit of suggestions of the moment, in a battle that has always been open and not clandestine.

We have always been guided by the claim to our tradition, to our principles, to our method, the adherence to the work that was reaffirmed in the party since 1952.

We will continue on this path of the Left with all those comrades who work for the integral reaffirmation of the communist program.

[1] “Comitato Nazionale Contro i Licenziamenti” (National Committee Against Dismissals)