Letter of reply to the GIGC

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We are publishing our letter to the International Group of the Communist Left in response to a previous letter discussing our programmatic theses, which can be found here on their website. Following our letter, they have published a new text based on our response. This article has been translated by IGCL.

We believe this is an interesting debate for deepening the internationalist positions of today’s revolutionary minorities.

Dear comrades:

Thank you very much for your criticism, which as you say is useful for us to be able to return to our own programmatic text. All this in order to confront us with our theses and help in a process of clarification and more general decantation towards the class and proletarian positions of other comrades.

Throughout your text you follow the order of our text and you criticize it, as you point out the problem of this method is that it does not allow to go to the more general discussion and confrontation of positions, and in some cases what you point out is corrected with what is said later. We understand your reasons but we will try to go to the more general questions that you point out, because we believe that it facilitates the discussion and its possible continuation.

It seems to us a rigorous criticism, and that, unlike other criticisms we have received from other groups of the communist left (we are thinking of the criticisms that the ICC or the Bordigist group El Comunista have been making of us), it is directed at what we maintain in our text. And when he is not sure of something he points it out. Just a clarification that evidently is due to the fact that you do not understand the sense of that phrase, when in our commentary to thesis 3 you point out that:

“We believe it is a mistake to consider that nationalist forces, we imagine these are the ’extreme right’ forces, as well as international capital, can ’call into question’ the sovereignty of states.”

When we speak of nationalist forces, which within their borders question the sovereignty of the states, we are not referring to extreme right-wing forces but to nationalisms such as Catalan, Basque, Scottish, etc. which question the currently existing States. And which, obviously, want to build other bourgeois states as alternatives. Our criticism of any nationalist movement, as a bourgeois and counterrevolutionary current, is obviously implacable. And we have done so in numerous texts against the Catalan nationalist procès. And, obviously, there is no opposition between State and capital. The bourgeois State is always at the service of the interests of the reproduction of capital in general. There can be no capitalism without the State, as Milei is clearly showing right now in Argentina, in spite of his ’libertarian’ approaches.

Well, let’s move on to the more general questions of criticism, from those that seem less important to those that we believe constitute grounds for difference between our two groups.

Historical materialism

First of all, an introduction on the meaning of our theses. They are a first programmatic document that we have been working on collectively throughout the political year 2023-2024. Obviously it is a synthetic and less developed document than your Political Platform. One of the reasons for this is that throughout each of the Theses, in the digital version in Spanish, we refer to different articles for to deepen the reflection and clarification of what we mean. In the rest of the editions (at the moment in French, English and Catalan) a subsequent bibliography is indicated to deepen each of the topics. As you point out in the text, one of the meanings of these Theses is the integration of comrades to our group. But the integration process is obviously not limited to the discussion of the Theses. These set the general framework for the discussion. But it continues with the set of texts that are pointed out and that allow us to deepen the process of integration to our positions.

From here you point out several criticisms. The fact that we start from the individual in some of our references. It is really more a question of style, of expression of the Theses, than of content. Obviously you are right in what you point out in relation to the contents. As historical materialists we never start from individuals, but from the social relations of production in which people live, which implies an antagonistic division between social classes (since the birth of class societies and until they dissolve in communism, in what Bordiga called the historical arc of the species) to produce and reproduce their lives. These are aspects that, in a more systematic sense, we have developed in a text on the question and that we point out to you here. We believe that our position is well defined here, and how, beyond the equivocations of the wording, our position is clear.

Likewise in the face of references to the historical militants of the proletarian camp, we refer to them as outstanding militants of parties, organizations or fractions of our class. But without ever separating them from these organizations, as expressions always of those revolutionary minorities that express the communist sense of the movement of our class. In the same way that you do it in your Programmatic Platform when referring to Marx or Engels, to Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg. We claim for ourselves the political and programmatic combat that our historical comrades made from the League of Communists to the communist positions within the First International, to the development of the left fractions in the Second International that were the basis (the Bolsheviks in primis) for the foundation of the Third International, and to the minorities of the communist left that fought against opportunism first and the counterrevolutionary degeneration of the Third International later. And, on that plane, we claim first of all (although not exclusively like you) from the Italian left. And, above all, from the work of the comrades around Bilan in the 1930s, to many of Bordiga’s elaborations in the Postwar period or to the work of opposition to the self-proclamationist drift of Programma Comunista by comrades like Camatte or Dangeville in 1964-1966, the anti-union oppositions and against formal proclamationism that led important parts of the French sections of the Pcint and its Scandinavian groups in 1971, or, finally, the battle waged by Suzanne Voute and the Marseilles group, together with the comrades of the Turin section, which later gave rise to the group around the review n+1, against the ’Marxist-Leninist and third-internationalist’ drift of the Pcint before its outbreak in 1982 (l’eclatement). We have developed this explanation more clearly in this letter to a French comrade.

All this to point out that we place ourselves in the terrain of the communist left (not exclusively in the Italian one, since we vindicate the battles of other currents such as the German-Dutch left or of comrades and groups that broke with the counterrevolutionary drift of Trotskyism in the postwar period and gave an organized battle for it), mainly of the Italian one: of those groups that see the potentiality of the communist left as the necessary balance of the limits of the Third International, and of the need to go beyond, then, Third Internationalism. When you claim to be exclusively of the Italian left we see a problem, because you homogenize a current that lived discussions and polemics of clarification in its bosom on which it is necessary to take a position. In part, in the letter indicated, we do it briefly in relation to some of the main debates that have crossed the Italian left in its history.

Class boundaries

In the document, you point out that we do not indicate the positions we defend as class positions. One of the intentions of the Theses is precisely this. To define which we understand to be the indispensable positions, today, to maintain a class position and which are not. And which currents we consider integrally bourgeois and which have passed to the camp of the counterrevolution. In Thesis 3 this is, for example, what we intend to do with social democracy, Stalinism (which was born directly as a counterrevolutionary organization) and Trotskyism during World War II, a process which culminated in 1948. We consider that internationalism and class independence with respect to the bourgeoisie in all its forms (i.e. independence also with respect to the left of capital or to the so-called ’national liberation’ processes) is what implies that an organization be defined or not as part of a proletarian camp, in a class terrain. That does not coincide exactly with the set of our positions (regarding a question you ask us) or of your own positions. Otherwise, in addition to a reductive vision, what it would imply is pure self-proclamationism. We give you an example, we believe, for you to understand us that also, the different groups of the Bordigist diaspora, after 1982, are part of a proletarian camp. And that in spite of the syndicalism present in the two versions of Il partito de Florencia or of El Comunista based mainly in Spain. Or, for example, those groups that still grant a certain role to national liberation struggles (in the sense given by Bordiga to anti-colonial struggles) as in the case of Le Proletaire / Il Comunista. For us they are groups that are situated on a class terrain. Does this mean that the future world communist party will be born on those positions? Clearly not for us. The type of positions that we defend seem to us to be those, which in a more coherent way, can be instituted in the vector of convergence in the process of development of the world class party in the heat of the next world revolutionary wave.

Note [IGCL]: We say this because of what you also say in point 2 of your Political Platform [2]:

“The proletarian camp as a privileged place of combat for the party.

If the struggle for the political party of the proletariat is at the center of its activities and interventions, the IGCI is not the party. It is only one component among others of the proletarian camp within which the forces called to form it will be defined, will emerge and will be selected not according to their numerical growth in itself, but according to their programs, political positions and capacities for effective intervention in the proletarian struggles. Belong, in effect, to this camp, those forces and political currents which continue to claim the principles of proletarian internationalism – ’the workers have no fatherland’ – and of the dictatorship of the proletariat – ’overthrowing by violence the whole existing social order’ [- and which have not betrayed them in the past; which defend the independence and class opposition of the proletariat against capital and its political forces; that they reject any support to this or that bourgeois fraction – including the left -, any anti-fascist or other frentism, any form of nationalism, any supposedly socialist character of the former Stalinist USSR; and that they recognize that, much more than the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was the first real experience of the exercise of the dictatorship of the proletariat with universal value.

This proletarian political space is, in fact, the privileged place of confrontation and political clarification between the forces and political currents of the class, a prior and indispensable condition for the elaboration and adoption of the principles and positions, the program and platform, of the party. Formed by groups, circles and organizations with different political positions and traditions, its dynamics is defined mainly by the evolution of the relationship of forces, opposition and confrontation, between what Lenin defined as pro-party and anti-party forces. With the intervention in the workers’ struggles, the proletarian camp is the other privileged field of intervention and struggle that the IGCL develops with a view to the regroupment of militant forces and the formation of the party.”

We agree completely on what is defined in the first paragraph about what should define the organizations and groups fighting for the development of a world communist party. Although the position on nationalism is more equivocal because of the progressive character given by the Bordigists to the anti-colonial struggles (and which justly led to the éclatement in 1982 by the support to the PLO of their group around L’Oumani), or the positions we pointed out above of Le Proletaire / Il Comunista. These are positions that undoubtedly put pressure in a negative sense.

Now, it seems to us that one thing are the positions of the internationalist communists and others those that define a class camp. We refer above all to anarchism which you in one of your Theses (n. 13) situate integrally in the terrain of the left of capital and counterrevolution (as you rightly do with social democracy, Stalinism and Trotskyism):

“or anarchism – which, after having also participated in the Resistance during the Second World War, is today situated in the framework of the same political approach defending a certain number of positions of the socialist parties and communist parties, for example the anti-fascist alliances – belong to the same camp as that of capital. The fact that they have less influence or that they use a more radical language does not take away the bourgeois background of their program and their nature, but it makes them useful scouts or substitutes for these parties.”

Anarchist militants or currents opposed the Second World War (think for example of the group around Volin in France) or in Spain the inter-bourgeois war and the democratic and Stalinist counterrevolution (Los Amigos de Durruti). Today, the level of integration of anarchism in the State and in bourgeois capitalist currents is very broad. It is enough to see the support to the imperialist war in the Near East that many groups do (through Rojava or the support to the Palestinian side in the imperialist war). But there are still small groups that try to maintain internationalist positions, often in a confused and contradictory way. But it seems to us erroneous to consider all those who proclaim themselves anarchists as left of capital. Another thing is for traditional organizations like the CNT, the USI or the German FAUD. But there have existed anarchist organizations that on Palestine or Syria have clearly maintained internationalist positions as in the case of KRAS-AIT in Russia. Does that mean that those organizations are going to be able to be part of the world communist party that leads (together with the Councils as organs of insurrection and power) the dictatorship of the world proletariat? Obviously not. Anarchism as a current has shown all its limits to develop that road, a road that ultimately is that of the world proletariat for its emancipation. Our theoretical doctrine (historical materialism, critique of political economy, materialist dialectics…), positions such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the set of programmatic positions that have emerged from the struggle of our historical party are essential to put an end to class society.

Against intersectionality, feminism, anti-racism…

You yourselves have a good text on this subject that some of us read at the time. We clearly affirm that all these currents (feminism, anti-racism, ecologism…) are bourgeois currents by their very essence. This is what we have explained in our Theses and in a more developed and detailed way in this book and in numerous presentations that have revolved, not causally, in a defense of a revolutionary perspective against the inevitably bourgeois character of these positions. When we speak of the structurally racist and patriarchal character of capitalism we are not creating struggles parallel to the class struggle (we will return to this topic, that of class struggle, in our section on voluntarism). What we are affirming is that capitalism inherits and transforms, in its own image and likeness, a set of oppressions of other class modes of production. This is what we have developed in a more detailed way in the book and essays indicated. In this sense, the oppression of women is structural to all class societies and in this sense patriarchy. This term is also used by other organizations of the proletarian milieu such as Il Partito. It is structural because every class society takes care of the process of production and reproduction of society and, therefore, of the species (and of the foundations of class society). Capitalism does so in a specific way in relation to other class societies. For example, through a process of democratization and formal equalization of social relations that is intrinsic to the foundations of capitalism, as you point out. But, at the same time, this process cannot eliminate the need for capitalism, like all class societies, to control the reproduction of the species and the role of women enclosed in the family structure (even if it democratizes and changes forms). As we pointed out in one of the texts of the book already mentioned:

“And this is also how women begin to split. As a legal subject and an atomized worker, she is an abstract individual. The bases are thus established for the questioning of inequality between men and women, for the vindication of the right of women to develop all their human faculties independently of motherhood, for their incorporation into the rational and universal subject of capitalism. But as a woman, that specific part of the species with reproductive capacity, she is a mother, and a mother enclosed within the walls of a family structure increasingly atomized and separated from the whole of social production.”

Obviously the elimination of all these forms of oppression that are linked to the very development of capitalism, to the very reproduction of its own logic around value and the commodity, is only possible through the class struggle in a revolutionary sense, that is to say through the constitution of the proletariat as a class and a party. This is the essence of our critique. As you indicate in your own platform:

“It is in the proletarian struggle, in its extension, in its generalization, that is to say, in the struggle for its unity to make it as effective as possible, that the proletariat in struggle overcomes, and in fact tends to abolish, all divisions, be they of skin color, gender, sexual preference, etc. It is in the abolition of the exploitation of the human being by the human being, in the abolition of capitalism and of mercantile relations, in the abolition of the division of labor and in the disappearance of classes, only attainable through the exercise of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Decline of capitalism?

In the final part of your text, you indicate that the main differences you have with our Thesis can be summarized in two main differences. The first one would be:

“the absence or weakness of the historical approach to defining class positions and understanding of the communist program.”

In reality you do not focus well the reason of our difference with you and it is that we do not share the theory of the decadence of capitalism. This is something we have already explained in a first contribution which is also translated in French. It seems to us that it is a theory that suffers from important flaws that we can summarize in the following points:

• ’Capital always develops its productive forces, even if it does so in an increasingly catastrophic way. Capital is value swollen with value. The competition between capitals to accumulate more value pushes them to the development of the productive forces. To deny or undervalue this categorical fact implies not understanding the nature of the categories of capitalism, its DNA.

• This is not to say that capitalism does not find it increasingly difficult to valorize itself. In fact, value itself is being exhausted as a historical category, because the productive forces that cannot help but drive at the same time cancel the sense of measuring the product of human labor in terms of value, of socially necessary labor time, in mercantile terms, in short. But none of this implies a gradual loss of its essence; on the contrary, capitalism is much purer now, as it is approaching its inner limit, than it was in 1914.

• The idea of decadence entails a separation between the subjective and the objective of the class struggle. For us it is essential to unite the development of capitalism with the growth of the revolutionary proletariat, and it is then that communism becomes the immediate program of action for our epoch.

• This dualism of the notion of decadence between the objective and the subjective leads him to defend one program during the phase of the rise of capitalism and another during the phase of decadence. On the contrary, for us, the program does not change according to the phase in which a given mode of production finds itself, but we are witnessing a slow conformation of the proletariat as a revolutionary class, starting from its autonomy and class independence, and with it a clarification of its communist program, of its historical interests.

• Finally, in the case of the ICC this perspective becomes increasingly idealistic with decomposition theory. Since the communist revolution has not liberated humanity from a decaying capitalism, social relations are decomposing towards a war of all against all, a generalized social anomie. The consequence of this is obvious: the class struggle and therefore the revolution lose their material, historical meaning, and fade away in the face of an increasingly moral and enlightened notion of the struggle of the proletariat.”

Forgive the long quote but it seems useful to us. That is to say, we do not deny that capitalism has been undergoing transformations throughout its historical development. But these transformations do not imply a decadence of capitalism, but, on the contrary, capitalism is becoming purer and purer, more in accordance with its abstract categories that Marx analyzed in Capital and in his works of critique of political economy.

These transformations are driven since the twenties of the last century and imply a socialization of capital where the logic of value and commodity extends to all instances of social life. It is what, following the comrades of n+1, we call the socialization of capital: fascism, Stalinism and the New Deal in the United States were the political expression of this movement which, in effect, tends to integrate all economic, political and ideological instances in the unitary movement of the capitalist totality. We prefer the use of the term socialization of capital to that of State capitalism, which you use, because as Bordiga said to Damen, in his correspondence and in a Thread of Time, it is a bad concept since it can presuppose that the State is the motor of social dynamics and not the reverse: ’State capitalism is not the submission of capital to the State, but a firmer submission of the State to capital’. Indeed, it is the very dynamics of capital that is affirmed in this process of concentration and centralization of capital, which, by lessening the weight of individual entrepreneurs, affirms the impersonal character of the dynamics of capitalism embodied in the deployment of joint stock companies. Bordiga analyzed very well this process of capitalist development since the Postwar period. It is the same Italian Left that, through Bordiga, criticizes the idea of decadence in texts such as The Doctrine of the Devil in the Body and Theory and Action in Marxist Doctrine, and it is as he states in the latter text:

“Marx’s vision is not that of a rise of capitalism followed by a decline of capitalism but, on the contrary, that of the contemporary and dialectical exaltation of the mass of productive forces which capitalism controls, of the unlimited accumulation and concentration of them and, at the same time, of the antagonistic reaction constituted by that of the dominated forces which is the proletarian class. The general productive and economic potential always continues to grow until the equilibrium is broken, there then taking place an explosive revolutionary phase in which, in a very brief period of abrupt fall, with the rupture of the old forms of production, the forces of production relapse, to reorganize themselves later in a new form and resume a more powerful ascent.”

That is to say, capitalism always develops its productive forces (it cannot be otherwise since capital is value inflated with value), but it does so in an increasingly contradictory way, clashing more and more with its social relations of production. This tends to break the capitalist equilibrium in a more continuous way and with more and more force. The proletariat, organized in party, is the decisive element for the development of this inversion of praxis that allows the affirmation of communism. Affirmation that capitalism prepares with more and more force by its own development of the productive forces that it is incapable of measuring and balancing through the exchange value and the commodity. And it is that, as Bordiga rhetorically asked himself in the first text we pointed out, one cannot “call decadent the society that is ready for the intervention of the revolution-midwife, of the midwife who will make the new society come into the world.”

Does this mean that it is the same for us to participate in trade unions in the 19th century as it is today, to intervene in 19th century parliaments as it is in the parliamentary tribunes of the 20th or 21st century? Of course it is not. We agree that this type of questions live their Rubicon with the development of World War I, when the very development of capitalism makes increasingly clear the reactionary character of trade unionism, democracy, parliamentarism, the struggles of national liberation … Nor is it accidental that such positions are attacked with increasing force by the revolutionary minorities of the period, minorities from which we descend politically. Establishing, in this way, a clear division at the barricades of the class struggle between revolution and counterrevolution. In this sense, the debate of the Mass Strike, which has been going on since the beginning of the 20th century within international social democracy, is decisive, as you affirm. And, in reality, as Rosa Luxemburg affirmed, this debate supposes returning revolutionary theory to 1848 and 1871, to the combat of the barricades that the parliamentary and union struggle, impelled by the revisionist wing but also by the centrist wing of Kautsky, wanted to eliminate. Therefore, we do give importance to analyze historically the positions of our party. Precisely because of this, we see the progressive affirmation of class and revolutionary positions from the very experience arising from the class struggle and the development of capitalism. In fact, it is a question to which we are devoting much importance in our recent programmatic deepenings, as can be seen in the meeting we have dedicated to 1848 and the First International. And which will be followed by future ones on the Second International, Mass Strike, the theories of Imperialism, 1917, etc. It is, therefore, an inseparable part of the method that we want to affirm as communists. To understand that the positions of our class are given their historical combat and not in the pure world of ideas and desires, now affirming this does not go hand in hand with the theory of decadence. This is what we have wanted to explain in this part of our letter.

Party and class: neither voluntarism nor fatalism

Finally, in your letter you point out the second important difference in:

“The difficulty of grasping the party-class relationship in the tradition of the Communist Left in Italy, which is concretized in an underestimation of the role of the party as an organ of leadership or political vanguard in the proletarian struggle, in the dynamics of the mass strike leaving the door open to expressions – even a practice of intervention – of a councilist order.”

Your concern has to do with two aspects that you have detected as a danger in the proletarian milieu, as you point out in your Political Platform:

“Consequently, the IGCL makes the struggle against the expressions, direct or indirect, within the proletarian camp of this vision, namely economism and councilism, one of its priorities.”

We agree with both concerns. Economism and workerism are incapable of rising above localism and assuming, therefore, the necessary deepening and generalization that the struggle for communism implies. Councilism is an expression of all this which, in addition, opposes the development of the proletariat as a class to the party. When, in reality, the party is the organ of the class that embodies its historical program, there exists a dialectical unity, not identity, between class and party. To deny this unity in movement and in process is to disarm ourselves as revolutionaries for what are our essential tasks from a programmatic point of view.

So, we do not see the risk of councilism in what we hold. What we do observe is a difference in what you point out as the relation between class and party and which for us implies a defect of voluntarism on your part. Let us explain ourselves better.

Notes [IGCL]: As you point out in point 4 of your Platform:

“The particularity of the proletariat in comparison with all the other revolutionary classes of the past is that it is both a revolutionary class and an exploited class. Precisely because it is the class exploited by capitalism, and therefore the last exploited class in history, it is a revolutionary class. As an exploited class and without any power within capitalist society, except that of selling its labor power to capital, the proletariat is subjected to the ’ideas of the ruling class’, the bourgeois ideology, although it is also the class ’from which is born the consciousness that a radical revolution is necessary, the communist consciousness’ (K. Marx, The German Ideology) Only during the rare revolutionary periods in which the proletariat as a whole struggles en masse, ’engendering en masse this communist consciousness’ (idem) or class consciousness, tends – and only tends – to occur, that is, to spread more or less in the proletarian masses, through the experience of the class struggle itself and through the propaganda and active intervention of the party – failing that, of the communist groups.”

In this quote for us is essential what you affirm about the fact that only during the rare moments in which the proletariat fights en masse can this mass consciousness be engendered en masse. Consciousness which, obviously, implies the extension of this in the ranks of the proletariat and the generalization and deepening of its programmatic contents thanks to the work of the class party. That is why the analysis of the counterrevolution and the limits it posed for class action is so important. When we speak of self-organization of the struggles of the proletariat we are not reflecting an anti-party thesis or one that separates class action from that of the revolutionary minorities. What we are arguing is that the self-activity of the proletariat is fundamental which, extending its struggle through the mass strike, breaks the channeling towards the State and capital that parties and unions of the left of capital operate. That is to say that the constitution of the proletariat in class and party is the result of the very generalization and extension of the class struggle. This obviously does not imply any fatalistic vision on our part in the style of Kautsky. We are not waiting for day X when the revolution will arise for the class party to develop. Otherwise, it would not make any sense to show continuous work of development of revolutionary positions, of doctrinal recovery and linkage with our historical thread, of debates and struggle for centralization with other communist minorities, of intervention in the processes of class struggle that tend to extend and break, even if initially and with many contradictions, the chains of the social peace of capital. Now, this does not imply thinking of ourselves as strikers (Marc Chiric) or as motors of the class struggle (Suzanne Voute), this has been one of the great problems of the revolutionary minorities that have preceded us. That is, the attempt to force situations of class struggle, revolutionary situations through our intervention and immediate leadership in the struggles. This is what the Italian left denounced in real time in the face of the majority of the III International, the opportunist road to which the search for the majority in the working class led at all costs. Instead of knowing how to wait for the next wave of class struggle to develop through the slow but sure maturation of the proletariat. As the Left pointed out in 1925 this does not imply any fatalism:

“We can and must wait for the masses, but the party will not be able, if it does not want defeat, to make them wait: that is the way to pose the tremendous problem that weighs on all of us, while the bourgeoisie still remains standing in the midst of its crisis.” (Bordiga, The Trotsky Question, 1925).

Or it is what once again implied the polemic that Bordiga carried out in relation to the immediatism and activism present in Damen’s positions in the discussion that divided the Italian left in 1952. And that with Damen’s rightness in relation to the struggles for national liberation and, later, on syndicalism (positions that he did not initially defend and that in the debate Vercesi raised from the beginning), however, implied a profound defect of analysis of the situation on the part of the sectors that would remain since then with Battaglia’s publication. That is, the belief that a good tactic or policy was enough to reverse the political situation of the moment. This is the lesson we want to learn from the debates of the time, establishing the necessary continuity in this sense. That is why we think that when you affirm that:

“every communist nucleus must intervene where it is and where it can and fight for the political leadership of the local and immediate struggles” you repeat the vice that we denounced above.

Obviously, we should not wait passively for the class to develop. That is an impossible task that will never happen. It is fundamental to relate to the existing processes of class struggle, to participate in them, to influence and clarify the minorities that are awakened in those processes, to try to push the movement as far as possible (as stated in the Manifesto). Of course, we are not advisors of the class struggle in the councilist way, but that does not mean that in this still counterrevolutionary epoch (although undoubtedly eroded) we can propose as a task the leadership of the processes of class struggle. That task is being prepared by the very development of the class struggle, our tasks at the beginning have to be of combat, to fight to explain the communist perspective and against the false shortcuts that the left of capital always presents. The contrary, besides an inadequate understanding of the historical moment always entails the risk of opportunism and adaptation to the state of consciousness of the proletariat. Which is, today, inevitably limited. This position is the one we have tried to explain in this notebook (it is also in English) starting from the schema that Bordiga develops on the inversion of praxis.

To finish this already long letter, we want to end with what you mention about the class struggle, which is partly related to the previous note. Of course class struggle is fundamental as a communist doctrinal element. But as Marx already wrote in his letter to Weydemeyer in 1852:

“As far as I am concerned, it is not to my credit that I have discovered the existence of classes in modern society nor the struggle between them. Long before me, some bourgeois historians had already exposed the historical development of this class struggle and some bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I have contributed anew has been to demonstrate: 1) that the existence of classes is only linked to certain historical phases of development of production; 2) that the class struggle leads, necessarily, to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this same dictatorship is in itself only the transition towards the abolition of all classes and towards a classless society…”

That is to say, what is fundamental is the direction of the class struggle towards communism. Or to put it with the methodological reflections of the Italian left, the class struggle is the agent cause of a higher historical process that marks the succession between the forms of production, in this case between capitalism and communism as a real movement that overcomes the present state of things. It is in this context that we communists analyze and participate in the class struggle.

There would be other issues to address or to continue to address in more depth. But we do not want to extend too much because we hope to be able to continue the reflection and deepening with you. We understand that, beyond the differences that you have pointed out in your letter, from what we have tried to specify, to explain ourselves better, and the differences that we have also highlighted… what unites us is the essential: the struggle as communists, in a class terrain, for the development of the world communist party of tomorrow.

Barbaria, January 2025.

Notes [IGCL]:

[1] . This position is contrary to that defended by Marx: “In the formal subordination of labor to capital, (…) the compulsion to overwork (…) purifies the system of exploitation of all its patriarchal, political, and even religious elements.” Or again: “when relations of domination and subordination replace slavery, serfdom, vassalage, patriarchy…” (Matériaux pour l’économie, Marx in La Pléiade, vol. II, pp. 371-372, translated by us)

[2] http://www.igcl.org/+Political-Platform+