Solidarity with Battaglia Comunista (PCint) which has suffered provocations in Parma (Italy)

We publish the comment of the Fraction of the  International Communist Left and want to indicate our whole internationalist solidarity with comrades of the Pcint-Battaglia Communista.

Internationalist Communists - Klasbatalo

Solidarity with Battaglia Comunista (PCint) which has suffered provocations in Parma (Italy)

We publish here the "communique" that the comrades of the PCint-Battaglia Comunista (Internationalist Communist Tendency) have written after various and suspicious provocations recently held against them. We think highly important that all groups and militants claiming the Communist Left legacy express their solidarity with BC and the ICT. This expression of solidarity is obvious, by principle can we say, and must be expressed at any moment. But today, it seems to us that it is even more fundamental at the very moment the confrontation between the classes, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, takes a wider scale than the last decades because the deepness and the impasse of capitalism's economical crisis. Everywhere, the bourgeoisie is obliged to attack massively and roughly the working class. Everywhere, it knows that these attacks will provoke inescapably workers reactions – they have already begun - which will be massive and increasingly "radical". It does prepare itself to it. Economically of course, but above all politically, ideologically, and at the repressive level too.

In Italy, the bourgeoisie has a great experience of the confrontation and the repression with the proletariat. In the years 1970, in front of the social movements initiated by the 1969 Italian "May" [called "Mai rampant" in French since it occurred during various months in the 1969 spring a year after the French May 68, translator's note], one of its essential weapons for derailing the proletariat off its class ground and to defeat it, had been the utilization of the police provocations and the cynical and systematic use of terrorism - through murderous bombings of so-called anarchists and in which the secrete services and policemen were often implicated as well as they were not very far from the terrorist actions realized by the Red Brigades... It appears today that the Italian bourgeoisie takes out again from its drawers this arm and this tactic putting back at first plan alleged threats of "violent" groups and various bombings and murders, one day on behalf of the mafia, the other one of the anarchists (FAI), the third on a "madman". So, it creates a "climate of tension" that the BC comrades underline and denounce in their communique and which does not limit itself to national scale events but also to a lot of local "incidents"... as in Parma where some of them have been provoked but "fascist" elements. It is in this context of "tension" that the PCint office in Parma has been "visited".

This tactic of tension has only one aim : hampering the inescapable revival of the workers struggles and the indispensable workers fight-back to the attacks they suffer ; and, for that aim, also attacking the political groups and militants of the class' vanguard who call for the destruction of the bourgeois State and for the Dictatorship of the proletariat. The utilization of terrorism enables to create the suspicion of these ones, to take the workers away from them, and to prepare thus their repression, their prosecution and their banning. The communists, as their class, have nothing to do with terrorism and they firmly denounce its use and "minority" actions which substitute to the mass action of the proletariat. Following the communique of the ICT comrades, we reproduce an extract of the Resolution on terrorism, terror and class violence – that we had adopted in the ICC in 1978 – which recalls why terrorism can't be a proletariat's arm and why it can't be today but utilized, manipulated, and even directly created by the bourgeoisie and its State. In front of these provocations which will certainly multiply, we claim the conclusion of the PCint comrades : "that's why we will carry on our communist fight and will defend our capacity of political action without withdrawing for one step".

Solidarity with the comrades of Battaglia Comunista !

The FICL, May 30th, 2012.

Communique of Battaglia Comunista

Serious Event at the Parma PCint Office.

During the night of Wednesday 16 to Thursday 17, unknown persons have get into our office in Parma, at borgo San Giuseppe 5, and have taken tens of volumes of the Dimitri Papaioannoy library. The following Friday morning, one comrade passing to the office found the mailbox pulled out and thrown in front of the door.

Facts as well worrying had already occurred in the previous weeks : one day, we realized that one of the two banners that we run up at the office entrance when we open it, had disappeared ; some days later, we found the other banner on the ground with a footprint on it.

It is obvious that these unknown persons have been able to open the door without breaking. We can't know who are the authors of these provocations towards us but they fit in a climate of tension which have not stop growing in the city after the criminal attack that the fascists of the Casapound have led with strikes of iron bars and knives Saturday May 11th afternoon against comrades of the anti-fascist committee of the Montanara district.

In these cases, we need to have solid nerves and much determination. As far as we are concerned, we won't let us being intimidated by anyone - as communists, we know that the bourgeoisie's hand is behind these provocations -, and we won't fall in the trap of the physical fight-back - it is exactly what the enemy class looks for. That's why we will carry on our communist fight and will defend our capacity of political action without withdrawing for one step

Battaglia Comunista, section "Guido Torricelli" of Parma.

Sunday, May 27th 2012.

(Translated into English by the FICL)

Resolution on terror, terrorism and class violence

(extracts, ICC, 1978)

We reproduce here after an extract of a programmatic document of the ICC which presents the communists' position in regards with the question of terrorism and which we carry on still today to defend as ours.

(...)

4. Capitalism is the last society in history to be divided into classes. The capitalist class bases its rule on the economic exploitation of the working class. In order to ensure this exploitation and intensify it as far as it can, the capitalist class, like all exploiting classes in history, resorts to all the means of coercion, oppression and repression at its disposal. It does not hesitate to use the most inhuman, savage and bloody methods to guarantee and perpetuate exploitation. The more it is confronted with internal difficulties, the more the workers resist exploitation, the more bloodily the bourgeoisie exerts its repression. It has developed a whole arsenal of repressive methods: prisons, deportations, murder, concentration camps, genocidal wars, and the most refined forms of torture. It has also, of necessity, created various bodies specialized in carrying all this out: police; gendarmes, armies, juridical bodies, qualified torturers, commandos and paramilitary gangs. The capitalist class devotes an ever-growing part of the surplus value extracted from the exploitation of the working class in order to maintain this repressive apparatus; this has reached the point where this sector has become the most important and flourishing field of social activity. In order to defend its class rule, the capitalist class is in the process of leading society to ruin and threatening the whole of humanity with suffering and death.

We are not trying to paint an emotional picture of capitalist barbarism; it is a prosaic description of its actual practice.

This practice, which impregnates the whole of social life and all relations between human beings, which penetrates into the pores of society, this practice, this system of domination, we call -- terror. Terror is not this or that episodic, circumstantial act of violence. Terror is a particular mode of violence, inherent to exploiting classes. It is concentrated, organized, specialized violence, planned, developed and perfected with the aim of perpetuating exploitation.

Its principal characteristics are:

a. being the violence of a minority class against the great majority of society;

b. perpetuating and perfecting itself to the point of becoming its own raison d’être;

c. requiring a specialized body which always becomes more specialized, more detached from society, closed in upon itself, escaping all control, brutally imposing its iron grip on the whole population and stifling any hint of criticism with the silence of death.

5. The proletariat is not the only class to feel the rigors of state terror. Terror is also imposed upon all the petty bourgeois classes and strata: peasants, artisans, small producers and shopkeepers, intellectuals and the liberal professions, scientists and students; it even extends itself into the ranks of the bourgeois class itself. These strata and classes do not put forward any historical alternative to capitalism; worn out and exasperated by the barbarism of the system and its terror, they can only oppose it with acts of despair: terrorism.

Although it can also be used by certain sectors of the bourgeoisie, terrorism is essentially the mode of action, the practice of desperate classes and strata who have no future. This is why this practice, which tries to be ‘heroic and exemplary’, is in fact nothing but an act of suicide. It offers no way forward and only has the result of supplying victims to the terror of the state. It has no positive effect on the class struggle of the proletariat and often acts as an obstacle to it, inasmuch as it gives rise to illusions among the workers that there can be some other way forward than the class struggle. This is why terrorism, the practice of the petty bourgeoisie, can be and often is exploited judiciously by the state as a way of derailing the workers from the terrain of the class struggle and as a pretext for strengthening the terror of the state.

What characterizes terrorism as a practice of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that it is the action of small, isolated minorities which never raises itself to the level of mass action. It is conducted in the shadows of little conspiracies, thus providing a favorite hunting ground for the underhand activities of agents of the police and the state and for all sorts of manipulations and intrigues. (...)

In this sense we have to reject the idea of a ‘workers’ terrorism’ which is presented as the work of detachments of the proletariat, ‘specialists’ in armed action, or which is supposed to prepare the ground for future battles by giving an example of violent struggle to the rest of the class, or by ‘weakening’ the capitalist state by ‘preliminary attacks’. The proletariat can delegate certain detachments for this or that immediate action (pickets, patrols, etc) but these are under the control of the movement as a whole; within the framework of this movement the resolute actions of the most advanced elements can serve to catalyze the struggle of the broad masses, but this can never be done through the conspiratorial and individualistic methods that characterize terrorism. Terrorism even when practiced by workers or groups of workers, cannot take on a proletarian character, just as the fact that the unions are made up of workers does not make them organs of the working class. (...)

6) (...)

The struggle of the proletariat, like any social struggle, is necessarily violent, but the practice of its violence is as distinct from that of other classes as are its projects and its goals. Its practice, including the use of violence, is the action of huge masses, not of a minority; it is liberating, the midwife of a new harmonious society, not the perpetuation of a permanent state of war of one against all and all against one. Its practice does not aim to perfect and perpetuate violence, but to banish the crimes of the capitalist class and immobilize it. (...)

Its invincible force resides (...) in its capacity to mobilize the whole mass of the class and to integrate the majority of the non-proletarian laboring classes and strata into the struggle against capitalist barbarism. It resides in the development of its consciousness and its capacity to organize itself in a unified autonomous way, in the firmness of its convictions and the vigor of its decisions.

These are the fundamental weapons of the practice, the class violence of the proletariat.

ICC, International Review 15, 1978.