Contents "The internationalist proletarian" n.12
LIFE OF THE PARTY
In August a general meeting of the Party was held for two weeks with the international participation of the militants of its different sections and an appreciable number of sympathizers.
The main focus of the meeting was the study of the degeneration of the Communist International through a selection of texts which, although obviously not including many equally important texts, illustrates:
- The previous experiences of the Left in its struggle within the PSI: For the intransigence of thought (1913), Socialist Party and workers' organization (1913), From the principle to the method (1913), For the theoretical conception of socialism (1913), Meridional socialism and moral questions (1912), Organization and party (1913), Democracy and socialism (1914) and Humanitas (1917).
- The international platform of rupture with opportunism defended by the Left: Theses of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the PSI (1920).
- The adherence and deepening of the Left regarding the theses of the II congress: Party and class (1921) and Party and class action (1921).
- The first complete position against the beginning of the series of tactical errors: Theses on the tactics of the Communist Party of Italy, of Rome (1922).
- The internal and external manifestations of the degeneration of the International: The opportunist danger and the International (1925) and The politics of the International (1925).
- The balance of this degeneration at the moment of its culmination: letter to Korsch (1926) and the Speech in the VI Enlarged Executive (1926).
- The defense of the lessons of this balance forty years later: The organic structure of the party is the other face of its unity of doctrine and program (1965) and The continuity of action of the Party on the thread of the tradition of the Left (1966).
For the part of the study of Marxist economic theory, the following parts of Capital were faced:
- A general introduction to the three volumes and their structure of sections and chapters, as well as the reading of the prefaces.
- A detailed study of the first chapter of Volume I, dedicated to the commodity.
- Study of Section III of Volume III, dedicated to the decreasing tendency of the rate of profit.
In the part of the study of the course of capitalism, the exposition of the monitoring of the bourgeois press and the main economic data was carried out, whose entire process involves the whole network of the Party as part of the international work of collective study and reading, translation of fundamental texts and their republication, preparation and publication of the review, intervention in the immediate struggle of the working class assuming its organization and coordination, etc. forming the network whose function of collective organizer Lenin assigned to the newspaper: "The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely,
to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer. In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organized labor. With the aid of the newspaper, and through it, a permanent organization will naturally lake shape that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work, and will train its members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on the various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence these events. The mere technical task of regularly supplying the newspaper with copy and of promoting regular distribution will necessitate a network of local agents of the united party, who will maintain constant contact with one another, know the general state of affairs, get accustomed to performing regularly their detailed functions in the All-Russian work, and test their strength in the organization of various revolutionary actions. This network of agents will form the skeleton of precisely the kind of organization we need (…)". (Lenin, Where to begin?, 1901).
During the meeting experiences of intervention in the immediate struggle of the working class were exchanged, with an analysis of the strikes organized - not in words but in deeds - by Party militants in Europe and America.
The meeting concluded with a balance and plan of the activity of the Party, with an exposition of the activity of the different sections of the Party, establishing a program of work and coordination until the next general meeting.
During the course of the meeting, the participants kept with “(…) the more and more firm formation of the method of work that, through an effort neither brief nor easy, aims – with the irrevocable liquidation of every residue of manias for the maneuvers, the intrigues and the alternate alignments of false political groupings that divorce and pact in chain and that in no circumstance will find us in their way – to reconcile the convinced work of all, none excluded, with the absolute homogeneity of direction and of ideological and political position and the maximum uniformity of terminology, having put for anyone, known and unknown, the sepulchral stone on the old unhealthy right to throw incautiously to the circulation without control, improvised nonsense, fished in disorders of nervous association, when not in the bottom of the bottle.
Our work is an organic construction and reconstruction with materials taken from tested and ancient verifications, subjected to the hard test of continuity and cohesion.” (Report of the Florence Meeting, January 25-26, 1958).