WHAT DISTINGUISHES OUR PARTY: The political continuity which goes from Marx and Engels to Lenin, to the foundation of the Communist International and the Communist Party of Italy; the class struggle of the Communist Left against the degeneration of the International, the struggle against the theory of socialism in one country and the Stalinist counter-revolution; the rejection of all popular fronts and national resistance blocs; the struggle against the principles and practice of bourgeois democracy, against interclassism and political and trade-union class collaboration, against any form of opportunism and nationalism; the difficult task of restoring the Marxist doctrine and the revolutionary organ par excellence - the class party, closely linked with the working class and its daily struggle in opposition to capitalism and bourgeois oppression; the struggle against personal and electoral politics, against any form of indifferentism, of tailism, of movementism or the adventurist practice of armed struggle ; the support of any proletarian struggle which breaks with social peace and rejects the discipline of interclassist collaborationism; the support of all efforts towards proletarian class reorganisation on the basis of economic associationism, with the perspective of a large scale resumption of the class struggle, proletarian internationalism and the revolutionary anticapitalist struggle.
The Internet Website of the International Communist Party
The opening of The Internet Website of the International Communist Party contributes towards gathering numerous party materials in a – virtual – location easily accessible to all those who have access to a computer and to the web. In practice, it acts as a library, a bookshop, a post office box with a unique address, that of the party.
There is information on our catalogue of publications in various languages; contents of leaflets and the position of the party in response to topical events; texts and works of the party classified under broad topics (in the style of an thematic index), and the indication of the theses and basic texts which we consider to be fundamental on the theoretical, programmatic, political, tactical and organizational level. There are also articles which explain the history and the particular characteristics of the party such as «What distinguishes our party», «What we are and what we want», «The program of the ICP».
The purpose of the opening and regular updating of this site is to facilitate the availability of texts in various languages, especially for those who cannot make direct and physical contact with us for geographic or linguistic reasons – or by reason of political uncertainty. Thanks to this site they will be able to have a clear idea of our positions, of our history (and, beyond this, of the history of the Communist Left); they will be able to orient themselves in the magma of groups and parties which more or less claim to represent Marxism and in particular the Communist Left.
We are conscious that an internet site can give the impression of providing everything necessary to compare the products of one with the others, as in a market where one chooses goods which are in competition. We reject the system based on the law of the market; this is why we do not open debates, confrontations or discussions with other movements or political parties; this is why we do not organize forums where everyone expresses one’s personal «opinion». Our political positions do not depend on individual consciousness, intellectual debates, majority votes or opinion polls.
Bourgeois society tends to disaggregate, to fragment, and reduce any human being to a petty and impotent individualism. «Alone against all», such is the hidden but quite real mechanism of bourgeois ideology. The techniques of the modern means of communication, from television to the internet, while giving the illusion of promoting bonds between people and of making them a part of the community, in reality actually increase their isolation into a miserable, individual «world». While accelerating, rendering ever faster and in a certain sense easier, the communication between individuals, these powerful means of communication increasingly distance and place people into greater opposition between each other: just as all commodities are on the market in competition, the human commodity is on the market of the relations and the communication between individuals, in competition with all the other human commodities. Relying on «individual consciousness», on the «freedom of thought», on the freedom to choose, of each, means being captive to bourgeois ideology according to which each citizen is born free to think and to act as they wish. In reality, the life and the death of each individual are determined by the existing relations of production, by the interests of the ruling class: the bourgeoisie which, by force of its economic, political and military apparatuses, appropriates all social wealth, commencing with human labor.
Against this vast, solid and multiform economic, political and military oppression – social oppression; therefore class oppression, there is another social force historically in opposition: the proletariat, placed by the relations of production themselves in an antagonistic position to the bourgeoisie, the class of the owners and the private appropriators of social wealth. It is not a question of individual «choice», of personal consciousness, but a social question, i.e. of class.
Those who do approach Marxism, of the theory of the class struggle and the revolution, don’t do it under the impulse of an intellectual illumination or by pure individual reflection. In reality they do it on the basis of social pressure provoked by the struggle of the proletariat against the living and working conditions which are imposed on it by capitalism. It is the class struggle, and the revolutionary struggle in particular, which produces the sparks of classist consciousness which, in gathering themselves together, historically form the class party; sparks, which are destined to endure as a function of the evolution of the social contradictions of capitalism.
The work of the party, which addresses itself to the proletariat and to society in its entirety, can only be perceived as a vital activity by the great masses when the revolutionary period begins, i.e. when the extreme aggravation of social contradictions leads to the inexorable alternative: bourgeois war or proletarian revolution. But the gigantic confrontation between the determining classes of society – bourgeoisie and proletariat – becomes inevitable and necessary with a certain degree of social tension, when the living and working conditions of the proletarians become intolerable. Then the class party – representing the historical program of the communist revolution – will be recognized by the most advanced layers of the proletarian party, in the course of the process of development of the class struggle, as their leadership and their class consciousness,.
Just as we reject the method of tactical and organizational expedients to artificially increase the number of our partisans, in the same way we do not fashion our means of propaganda, of diffusion of the positions of the party, as master keys in order to obtain immediate successes. According to Lenin, the party newspaper is a «collective organizer» insofar as all militants and sympathizers of the organization take part in its existence through contributing articles, aiding in its distribution, and by supporting it financially. It passes from hand to hand, it is saved and read again; it can be diffused in millions of copies or written by hand, according to the conditions of the proletarian struggle. It is not the organizer of a virtual network for the exchange of opinions, but the organizer of a material network of a militant organization.
Our Internet site is not the party in electronic form nor the electronic version of our press; it is a complement to our activity of propaganda and diffusion by which we place at the disposal of all, friends or enemies, sympathizers or priests and police, basic information on our political activity: Communists do not hide their goals – but they do not put them under discussion with anybody.
September 2008
International Communist Party
Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program
www.pcint.org