The reconstruction of the working class Party in Italy, capable of taking up the continuation of the revolutionary politics in its international and national traditions, will only be able to constitute an event of actual historical content if the vanguard forces of the proletariat orient themselves quickly and decisively around a complete and coherent program of propaganda, organization and struggle.

The guidelines and cornerstones of such a program, perfectly in tune with the international needs of the movement and particularly applying to current situation of political struggle in Italy, are the following:

1) The theory of the party, which is to say, its own conception of the world and society, is that of Marxist scientific socialism, as it was restored against the revisionist tendencies with the reconstruction of a truly revolutionary International, which accompanied the victory of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

2) The historical conception of the Party is that of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels from 1848 and of the historical materialist conception of the history of class struggles explained in it: its economic theory is that of Marx’s "Capital" supplemented for the analysis of the most recent phase of capitalism by the fundamental assessments of Lenin’s "Imperialism"; its programmatic policy is that developed, consistently with the fundamental doctrine, in Lenin’s "State and Revolution" and in the constitutive texts of the Moscow International.

3) The Party’s historical evaluation of the main events of world history which occurred after the end of the First Imperialist War and the establishment of the Third International rests on the following principles:

a) Fascism is a world historical phenomenon, an expression of the policy of the ruling bourgeois class in the phase in which the capitalist economy assumes its monopolistic and imperialist characteristics. An essential characteristic of the fascist movement is the destructive offensive on the existence of independent working class movements and organizations. In this attack, fascism uses, in addition to the forces of this new bourgeois party it has created, those of the state and of all the other bourgeois parties, which connive with it in this counter-offensive task of preventive counter-revolution for the maintenance of class privileges. We reject as anti-historical the thesis that fascism consists of a feudalistic or absolutist medieval reaction, aimed at destroying the social and political achievements of the industrial capitalist bourgeoisie.

b) The Russian revolutionary regime, with the victory of October 1917, assumed a very clear proletarian character which historically surpassed the bourgeois content of the anti-Czarist Revolution of February and ruthlessly broke with all the lies of democratic liberalism and socialistoid opportunism. It began inseparably and simultaneously the battle to bring about the violent overthrow of the States in the already fully developed capitalist countries and the transformation of the Russian social economy into communism. These two objectives could only be achieved in a simultaneous manner: neither were achieved. The conservative forces of the bourgeois world, by defending and strengthening their power in the great developed countries, also sabotaged the construction of socialism in Russia. The Russian Regime, after the first socialist achievements, has undergone a progressive but decisive involution. The economy has fallen back into a character of class privilege, based on the exploitation of wage earners; in the social field the wealthy classes have regained influence; in the legal field bourgeois forms and norms have reappeared; in the internal political field the revolutionary current that continued the Bolshevik traditions of the October Revolution and Leninism has been overwhelmed and dispersed, and lost control of the Party and the State; in the international sphere the force of the Russian state became no longer an ally of all the exploited classes fighting on the ground of civil war for revolution in all countries, but a modern imperialist State of colossal military force, collaborating in the game of alliances and wars with the various aggregations of bourgeois military state units, at the service of historical needs which were no longer class-based, but national and imperial, that is, according to a foreign policy dictated not by the interests of the international working class, but by those of a privileged national ruling State.

c) The 3rd International did not settle coherently with the powerful theoretical and programmatic framework, in an equally revolutionary and definitive way, the questions of organization and tactics. Due to the acceptance of too many opportunistic groups and strata, and due to a practice based on hastily and suddenly engaging in disorientating tactical maneuvers, the prerequisite of arriving as soon as possible to the general control of the working masses in order to lead them to revolution has been reversed into a relapse into an opportunistic process, similar and more serious than that of the old International. The anti-proletarian development in the international situation and in the internal Russian situation has brought this erroneous approach of tactical maneuvering back to the much more serious terrain of a progressive abandonment of revolutionary principles, programs and politics. The present attitude of the communist parties, which, after the official liquidation of the 3rd International, still follow Moscow, is one of open solidarity with the bourgeois regimes, of effective collaboration and social preservation, and makes them the obvious instruments of social and political mobilization of the working classes at the service of the established order of property and capital.

4) The central political word of the international communist party in all countries (as during the war and during the apparent struggle of the bourgeois regimes that call themselves democratic against the fascist forms of capitalist government, as well as during the current post-war period in which the victorious states will inherit and adopt the exact same fascist policies after a more or less abrupt and more or less skillful conversion through propaganda) will not be to wait, to advocate and to agitate towards the reconstitution of the bourgeois order typical of the outdated period of transitory liberal and democratic equilibrium. Thus, the party rejects any policy of collaboration with groups of bourgeois and pseudo-proletarian parties that advocate the false and deceptive postulate of replacing fascism with regimes of "true" democracy. Such a policy, first of all, is illusory because the capitalist world will not be able to order itself in liberal forms for as long as it survives, but will be increasingly hinged on monstrous state units, ruthless expression of the economic concentration of capitalism, and armed with an increasingly repressive police for the defense of their class interests; second of all, it is defeatist, because in order to achieve this hypothesis, (even if for just a while longer in some secondary sector of the modern world it could somehow survive) it sacrifices the much more important vital characteristics of the Marxist movement, namely the political independence of the working class, which provide the only tactics capable of preparing and initiating the final revolutionary struggle, which is the essential aim of the party; thirdly, it is counter-revolutionary insofar as it validates in the eyes of the proletariat ideologies, social groups and parties which are extremely skeptical and impotent in defending the very democracy they claim allegiance to in the abstract, and whose only function and purpose, fully concomitant with those of the fascist movements, is to avert at any cost the independent march and the direct assault of the exploited masses on the economic and legal foundations of the bourgeois system.

5) The most important need in the present international situation is the getting-together in an international political organization of all the local and national movements who have no doubt and no hesitation in placing themselves outside the blocs for bourgeois freedom and for the general anti-fascist struggle, who are outside all the influence of the bourgeois war propaganda on both sides of the front, who decide to rebuild the independence of thought, of organization and of struggle of the international proletarian masses, who struggle for the unity of the proletariat and not the mixing together between groups of leaders that can only express disorderly and contradictory programs, but rather for the safe and organic overcoming of all the individual impulses aroused by the interest of distinct proletarian groups, separated by professional categories and by national affiliations, in a single force acting in common struggle towards world revolution.

6) The current Italian historical situation does not mean the closure of a period of bourgeois fascist government and the opening of a different period of bourgeois liberal politics which returns to the cycle and relations of the period before 1922. It means the collapse of the apparatus of government and power of the ruling class in Italy, brought about not by internal political crises and differences of method, nor by decisive social and political attacks from outside, but by the military defeat and the victory of the group of States which the Italian bourgeois state waged war against.

This situation doesn’t present the conquest, even partially, of political power by proletarian or petit-bourgeois strata. The reconstitution of the central apparatus of political control and police at the service of capitalist economic interests takes place by and under the strict direction of the great victorious States, in the form of a compromise accepted by the same national ruling class with the reduction of its privilege and sovereign autonomy of government in order to continue to exploit its own working classes by the bourgeoisie as a satellite state in the new world organization that resulted from the war. A system of counter-revolutionary forces is thus constituted which is even more efficient than the fascist forces it replaced.

7) The Italian working class has no interest, either particular or general, either immediate or historical, in supporting the policy of the groups and parties which take advantage not of their own strength but rather of the military ruin of the Fascist government and which today exercise the pretense of holding of power which the victorious States claim to be leaving to the Italian State machinery. The Party, the expression of proletarian interests, must refuse not only collaboration in the government with these groups, but refusing all the doctrine, historical and political proclamations which speak of national solidarity between classes, of a united struggle between the bourgeoisie and self-described proletarian parties on matters of freedom, democracy, and war against fascism and Nazism.

The refusal of the party to engage in any political collaboration does not concern only the organs of the government, but also the committees of national liberation, and any other similar body or combination of bodies, whether they have the same political basis or not.

The national liberation committees historically and politically serve aims and purposes contrary to proletarian politics and interests. In fact, they can’t even boast of overthrowing fascism. The actually effective elements of the clandestine action carried out against the Fascist regime was the spontaneous and shapeless reactions of proletarian groups and of a few disinterested intellectuals, as well as the action and organization that every State and army creates and nourishes behind the enemy’s back, and only to a small extent the influence of the political leaders, old drained politicians or new adventurers at the disposal of any force that seems launched to success, who come out like gadflies immediately after the arrival of the winners for the sole purpose of getting themselves nice privileged positions in the new order. In reality, the network that the bourgeois or pseudo-proletarian parties constituted in the clandestine period did not have as its aim the national and democratic partisan insurrection, but only the creation of an apparatus of immobilization of any actually revolutionary movement that could have arisen after the collapse of the fascist and German defense.

The fundamental impotence and lack of initiative of the Italian government remained the same, or rather worsened, in the liberation committees. Talks of transferring power to them are wholly illusory, and defeatist from the proletarian point of view; it constitutes an exquisite example of that vainglorious maximalism, which, impotent and defeatist in action, has learned nothing from the tragic lesson imparted by the Fascist victory.

8) The revolutionary proletarian party must reject even the slightest co-responsibility in the policy of these groups, which have adopted the whole ideological propaganda approach of the victorious group of States, which have staged a foolish ploy, not of an acknowledged disarmament of the State and military apparatus to eradicate them forever, but rather shifting into the field of bourgeois warfare which has not seriously damaged one of the groups, and has neither benefited nor deceived the other; it must reject the political responsibility of the armistice signed by the same old ruling class of the country for the sole purpose of continuing their privileges and exploitation of the laboring classes; it must abandon them to their fate, to whatever treatment the victor will reserve for them, in the game of the forces of a narrow social minority, which will dictate and settle the peace.

9) The question of liquidating fascism makes no sense, because fascism is the modern content of the bourgeois regime, and it can only be overcome historically and annihilated by the overthrow of capitalist class rule and its institutions, a task which cannot be accomplished by political coalitions which are as chimerical as they are impotent, and which have no intention of demolishing fascism, but rather by the revolutionary action of the proletariat. Consequently, the party discards and rejects all the weaponry of repression of fascism, staged by the current governments of Italy. The only serious struggle against fascism isn’t based in tracking down and persecuting the militants, the squadristas, the hierarchs of the fascist period, a great number of whom already lurk in the present hierarchies anyway, with unchanged method and style, but in discovering and striking the class interests and the social strata which carried out that mobilization, which are the same ones that are trying to retain control of the state today. These attacks can only be dealt by class-based forces; and when they’ll come to the fore, all the most diverse organizations and hierarchies that today speak of eradicating fascism (church, monarchy, civil and military bureaucracy, strata of professional politicians and journalists, etc.) will throw themselves squarely behind the counterrevolutionary side of the barricade.

The politically reorganized proletariat thus rejects the word of the day for purging the State apparatus, whose only interest is bourgeois conservation. The communists pursue the progressive disintegration of this apparatus, its demolition, and the burial of its remaining residue, in the sense of the Marxist phrase about capitalism creating its own ditchers.

This hypocritical remedy of the purge must therefore be abandoned to the reactionaries. It must also be rejected and derided the policy of anti-fascist sanctions which, in its juridical apparatus, opens in January 3, 1925 (accepting as historical one of the dates abused by Mussolini) and shows that fascism was welcomed and appreciated as long as it hit the revolutionary currents and the independent bodies of the extremist proletariat, and that it should only be called criminal for the blows that it was later able to dish out, with evident historical logic, to its necessary accomplices of the first phase, leaders and political hierarchs of the rancid bourgeois parliamentarism.

10) The first task of the proletarian class party, aimed at the historical goal of the conquest of political power in the most advanced countries of Europe and the world, must be, on the basis of its sure orientation in doctrine and program, the reconstitution of its organizational framework. In it it will have to converge: the intact forces of the old revolutionary militants who have not abandoned the proper line in the tradition of the class; the more mature and decisive elements of the workers of the cities and the countryside, who, because of recent hard times, feel the class antithesis with the bourgeoisie, who launched the reactionary counter-offensive and the gigantic political deception of the current anti-fascist masquerade, and feel an increasingly irremediable discomfort at remaining under the influence of the falsely proletarian parties of today; and finally (avoiding the narrow Labourist conception of the party which is rejected by Marxists) those class elements which are not purely proletarian, from whom, however, will be inexorably required to overcome any hesitation about the specific theoretical and political postulates of the movement.

11) The rules of party organization are coherent with the dialectical conception of its function, they do not rest on juridical and regulatory recipes, and overcome the fetish of majority consultations. Their close connection with the upheld theoretical clarity and with straightforward class tactics of political action must secure the party against the harmful influence of inadequate cadres, degenerated into opportunist hierarchies, similar to those of the parties of the 2nd and 3rd International in their phases of disintegration.

12) In the forefront of the party’s political tasks is the work in the trade unions for its development and strengthening. The criterion, by now common to both fascist and democratic union politics, of attracting the workers’ unions among state bodies, under the various forms of its regulation with juridical framework, must be fought against. The party aspires to the reconstruction of the trade union Confederation, fully independent from the direction of State Offices, acting with the methods of class struggle and direct action against the bosses, from local and category claims to whole class interests. Workers belonging to different parties or to no party at all can join the workers’ union; the communists neither propose nor provoke the division of the unions due to the fact that their governing bodies are wholly in the hands of other parties, but they fully openly proclaim that the purpose of the union is completed and integrated only when the political class party of the proletariat is at the head of the economic bodies. Any other influence on the proletariat’s union organizations not only takes away from them the fundamental character of revolutionary organizations demonstrated by all history of class struggle, but makes them sterile for those very purposes of immediate economic improvements, by making them passive instruments in service of the interests of the bosses.

The solution given in Italy to the formation of a central union with a compromise not between three mass proletarian parties, as such a thing does in fact not exist, but between three groups of hierarchies, of extra-proletarian cliques with pretensions to the succession of the fascist regime, must be fought by inciting the workers to overthrow this opportunistic apparatus of professional counter-revolutionaries. The Italian trade union movement must return to its traditions of open and close support of the proletarian class party, leveraging on the vital resurgence of its local bodies, the glorious Chambers of Labor, which both in the great industrial centers and in the proletarian rural areas were protagonists of great openly political and revolutionary struggles.

13) The Party policy on the agrarian question, consistent with its Marxist approach, must aim at creating allies of the industrial proletariat in the countryside, not forgetting that for some time now in Italy such allies have existed and are represented by those who directly work the land, temporary and wage laborers. The other groups of non-salaried land workers must be encouraged and urged to see the contradiction between their social interests with those of the urban and rural bourgeoisie, but this should not make the abolition of a supposedly surviving feudalism in certain regions of Italy a historical task, nor should it lead to an apology of the fragmentation of rural farms determined in certain areas by material and technical conditions, which cannot but be considered a counter-revolutionary element. The conquest of the land by the peasants is not a postulate that can be proposed and put into practice by a bourgeois, fascist or liberal regime, nor is it the correct expression of the economic task of a proletarian regime in the countryside, which, while breaking up all land privileges of a strictly parasitic character that weigh on small farms, will set its socio-economic measures and its policy on the track of removing, as quickly as possible, from the field worker the bourgeois character of ownership of the land and of its products.

14) The proletarian party denounces, in the period of reconstruction of the productive forces that have been obliterated by the war, in place of a need, even temporary, of a collaboration between employers and workers, as such a thing will only ensure the prevalence of an exacerbation of class contrasts and a doubled exploitation of the wage-earners in order to accumulate the wealth in the hands of the bosses and the state bureaucratic hierarchies that represent them. The economic policy of the State, taking up and developing the fascist social directives, will present as concessions to the working classes the formation of a state capitalism, the reaffirmed fortress of the dominant class and the bourgeois police, of which the senseless words of “socialization of monopolies” are but an accomplice disguise. Through this, the powerful organs of the industrial and banking monopolies will make the community, that is, their own employees, pay for the liabilities of the reconstruction of their plants and assets.

The claims of the official “communist”, socialist and catholic parties for the socialization of the land, financial and industrial monopolies, all mean the complete opposite of the expropriation of profits in order to give them back and distribute them among the exploited – a claim which fuels a not insignificant portion of socialist-led struggles – because all it means in a real practical sense is the socialization of the liabilities of the economy of the bosses’ economy (which has been exhausted by its military defeat), since its bankrupt debt will be paid by all the workers with a once again negative impact on their wages.

The proletarian party stands firmly against all sayings from the bourgeois State, which has nothing in common with the claims of a socialist economy, which can only be implemented by revolutionary force, by fighting against the private mercantile and monetary economy on which capitalist exploitation is based.

15) All the centrifugal forces which dissolve the centralism of the bourgeois state, such as separatist, autonomist and regionalist tendencies, can facilitate its revolutionary overthrow. But the abstract concepts of decentralization and peripheral autonomy are not accepted by the proletarian party, which, first of all, knows that currently the State tends towards totalitarian concentration of not only national but international administrative management; secondly, it predicts that as far as the bourgeois sphere is concerned, the local organs would have even worse weaknesses and fallimentary balances than those of the central organ, and would thus not result in any improvement, not even of a temporary character, for the treatment of the workers; finally, it proclaims that the new and superior proletarian economy will be founded on rational plans of interweaving and unitary connection of all productive activities, entrusted not to the monopoly bourgeoisie, nor to illusory governments of compromise, but to the dictatorship of the proletariat, established through the third class offensive, and protected from bureaucratic degeneration and privilege in its revolutionary worldwide outbreak.

16) The so-called institutional question, i.e. that of replacing the monarchy for the republic, does not represent in itself a contribution to new social solutions, any more than it did in the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. The revolutionary proletariat has an interest in nailing the Savoy dynasty to its historical responsibility in the bourgeois-fascist counteroffensive, just as it has an interest in nailing to the same responsibility all the social groups of the Italian privileged classes and all the hierarchies of the parties which today, in order to serve that ruling class, place themselves on the ground of collaboration and national unity.

The revolutionary proletariat, when it will be able to break up the bourgeois State apparatus, will reserve the same fate to its conventional juridical summit, be it king or president. The reactionary and defeatist character of the dynasty in Italy, precisely because they are evident to all conscious proletarian groups, make inadequate any political bloc tactic that wants to create a fracture between the parties that intend to save the monarchy and those who demand its abolition. In fact, this line is not exactly definable today; and just as the military course of the war has caused the line between fascists and anti-fascists to fluctuate, so the decisions of the victorious states will cause the separation between monarchists and republicans to fluctuate among opportunistic Italian politicians in the most unforeseeable ways, between opponents of the monarchy on principle, of the Savoy monarchy in particular, and those who will be reduced to the Byzantine choice between grandfather, father and son.

The proletarian party will warn the masses against the shrewd conservative policy of the Italian monarchical currents, which, continuing the interminable series of conversions between the right and the left, not only know how to present themselves as perfectly autonomous in the face of the inheritance of fascist frames, but realistically oppose to the false democratic rhetoric the antithesis between supposedly free and monarchical regimes like England and fascist and republican regimes like Germany.

17) Just as the substitution of the monarchy for the republic does not represent any step forwards towards the burning Italian social question, neither can any convocation of an elective representative assembly with constituent powers be accepted as such.

First of all this assembly will have a rather limited sphere of influence, due to the permanence, in the territory on which it should have full sovereignty, first of military occupation forces and then of those armed forces that will be defined and arranged by the peace organization that will follow the current conflict and will be in force in the satellite states. The future constitution of the Italian State will be dictated by the big winners and not by the consultation of the citizens. The electoral body will be established, from the very beginning, in the backstage of intrigue and political compromise. However, whatever the party’s tactics may be, they will have to be inspired not only by its programmatic principles, but also by the open proclamation that in no case can the use of elective mechanisms allow the exploited classes to give adequate expression to their needs and interests and even less to give them political power. The party will differentiate itself from all other Italian parties at the moment, not only because it will not sell itself in the market of electoral combinations and aggregations, but also for the fundamental position that, while all others will proclaim that the political program to be implemented and accepted without further resistance will be whatever one happens to prevail (in terms of numerical majority) in the assembly, the revolutionary party rejects straight away this resignation and, in the abstract hypothesis (but practical certainty) that an electoral victory confirms the constitutional survival of all basic capitalist institutions, even though it is a minority in the democratic sense, it will continue its struggle to bring them down from outside of its system. Only the historical situation and the value of the relations of force, and not the authority of constitutional majorities, will determine the extent of this struggle, which goes, according to the possibilities of class dynamics, from theoretical criticism to propaganda which must always place the Party in the opposition to the government, to incessant anti-establishment agitation, to revolutionary insurrection.

Above all, the party will expose as counter-revolutionary any movement which claims to be useful to fake, for the sake of easier agitation and electoral success, some sort of preliminary respect to the validity of the sovereignty of parliamentary consultation, claiming to be capable to pass from this ambivalent policy – whose multiple historical experiments have all resulted in the corruption and disarmament of revolutionary energies – to an attack against the established regime.

In the local elections the party cannot abstain, by prioritizing short-term interests, from separating the responsibilities and the approach of its proletarian forces from all others, and of continuing in full consistency with the continuity of its historical line, the agitation for its general historical claims.

In more mature phases of the situation, which predictably cannot unfold except according to close inter-European connections, the party prepares itself and the masses for the constitution of the Soviets, representative organs of a class character which are at the same time organs of combat, and for the destruction of all representative rights for the economically exploitative classes.

The Party, in the construction of proletarian organs of all kinds, pre- and post-revolutionary, makes no distinction between workers based on gender; the question of granting the vote to women in the present representative regime is for it a secondary question, since it cannot set itself apart from the critical ground that the exercise of the right to vote is a pure legal fiction in an environment in which economic inequality creates insuperable subjugation, including the subjugation of women, whose emancipation is conceivable only in an economy of a non-personal and non-family type.

18) The party rejects any appeal for national and war arming, it considers the Italian autonomous bourgeois State and its army as destroyed without appeal by defeat. The proletariat, saved from the bleeding to which it was led by the Fascist policy of war, refuses further sacrifices invoked by privileged classes and its politicians for the sole purpose of procuring slavish merits. The proletarian party must oppose participation in wars near and far, calls to arms and conscription. With regard to the partisan and patriotic struggle against the Germans and the fascists, the party denounces the maneuver by which the international and national bourgeoisie, with words that it knows to be empty of substance, aims to restore official life to state militarism, comes to dissolve and liquidate these voluntary organizations, which in many countries were then attacked by armed repression. These movements, lacking sufficient political orientation, expressed for the most part the tendency of local proletarian groups to organize and arm themselves in order to conquer and maintain control of local situations, and therefore of power, a tendency which was chained by a twofold illusion: the first, that the states at war with the Axis would ever keep their word regarding the promised free regime in which the popular masses retained the right not only to the ballot paper, but to directly arm themselves; the second that, after profiting in this sense from the technical aid of the official military organization, it was possible to force their hand and not to hand back to the supervening hierarchies and police the weapons of the dreamed liberation.

In the face of these tendencies, which, even taking into account the propagandistic exaggerations that come along as convenience demands it, constitute an important historical fact, is the task of the revolutionary party to clearly show the social and class postulates, and the central requirement of proletarian tactics that the most combative and resolute elements, after the long and bloody cycle of their offer to fight for other classes’ causes, finally find the political setting and framework that will allow them to fight only for their own cause, putting an end to their fearful strain in the service of more or less open class enemies.

19) The question of the territorial borders of the Italian state, as they will be established after peace at the will of the victors, and the manifestation of a neo-irredentism in the face of the threatened removal of provinces from the eastern border, cannot create claims that deserve the support of the proletariat and its party. At the stage when the ruling bourgeoisie will for the first time attempt internationalist accommodations for purely preservation purposes, the proletarian class will refuse even more rigorously than in 1914-15 to consider territorial accommodations on the basis of the nationality, ethnographic, linguistic principle as stages to be reached before laying the ultimate claim to internationalism in Europe and beyond.

Just as the European communist movement must disavow Italian irredentism, so on the other hand it must fight against Yugoslav irredentism, which is in the same way nothing but the propagandistic superstructural expression of imperialist brigandage. The Italian bourgeois dynasty and regime are well worthy of being passed over as the refuse of history; no less worthy are the dynasty and regime of the Yugoslav kingdom. If in Italy the monarchy and the State made use of one of the most socially advanced regions of the country, arriving at the complete failure of the assumed unitary mission, in Yugoslavia the regime even rested on the least advanced and most backwards part, Serbia. If the Savoys grew through deception and political fraud, the Karađorđevićs established themselves through political assassination. Both of these state militarisms aired democratic balderdash, in their contemporary editions; the one and the other were among the most vicious and oppressive in the phase following the First World War, while the eventual republic led by Tito is no better or worse than the possible conservative bourgeois republic of Italy.

The Italian revolutionary proletarians will collaborate on this problem not with their own bourgeoisie, but with their fellow Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian comrades for the overthrow of all nationalisms and for international revolutionary action.

20) The proletarian-communist party cannot make the colossal mistake of considering the powerful organization of the church as neutral in class conflicts, nor allow itself to be led to this by the historical fact that the church itself, the social and political fulcrum of the pre-bourgeois regimes, has today passed into total solidarity with the capitalist institutions which succeeded the democratic revolution. Indeed, precisely for this reason, the church must be considered as a factor of the first order in the preservation of capitalist institutions, all the more so when, as in Italy, it is reconciled with the state and inspires parties that have laid down their anti-democratic and anti-social approach in correspondence with the parallel renunciation of the bourgeois parties to Masonic anti-clericalism.

The class proletarian party, in the face of the unreserved collaboration between Catholics and the democratic left, certainly does not proclaim a return to the bourgeois anti-clericalism of the Masonic type, fiercely opposed by its best traditions, and does not oppose religion by an atheism of the old bourgeois type, inspired by the anti-Marxist formula according to which it is necessary first to free consciences from religious dogma in order to then have the right to want to free the lower classes from social exploitation.

The party, however, in its propaganda emphasizes the fundamental antithesis between its theory of the world and history and any transcendent, mystical, religious conception, and declares incompatible with belonging to the revolutionary ranks that of religious associations of any school. The proletarian regime, after the revolution, will programmatically exclude any religious association, believing that it cannot but present political characteristics, and will endeavor to progressively make every religious belief disappear, as the masses, freed from the extremes of economic depression, will be led more and more towards scientific knowledge and to the materialist conception peculiar to party doctrine.

The same campaign of political and theoretical clarification must aim at the criticism, together with religious conceptions, of those of an "immanentist" nature, that is to say, those which sustain as the guidelines of human activity immaterial forces and values placed in the sphere of a purely ideal activity, and which today cover the vapid, empty talk of the supreme values of personality and human dignity. As a coefficient of theoretical degeneration, these conceptions can be even more dangerous than the transcendental ones which, by admitting an incomprehensible world of the beyond, prevent the concrete knowledge of real relations; so that any atheism falling back into the bourgeois enlightenment type incredulity should not be considered as a step towards the doctrine of communism.

21) The proletarian party, in Italy as in the whole world, must distinguish itself from the mass of all the other political movements and, more importantly, pseudo-political parties of today, in its fundamental historical structuring, for the original evaluation of the antithesis between fascism and democracy as types of organization of the modern world. The communist movement at its origin (about 100 years ago) had to and could, in order to accelerate any movement against the existing social conditions, admit the alliance with the democratic parties, because they then had a revolutionary historical task. Today this task has been long since over, and those same parties have a counter-revolutionary function.

Communism, despite the defeats of the proletariat in decisive battles, has nonetheless taken gigantic steps forward as a movement. Its defining feature today is to have historically broken and denounced, ever since capitalism became imperialistic, ever since the First World War revealed the anti-revolutionary function of democrats and social-democrats, every policy of parallel action, even transitory, with democracies. In the situation succeeding this crisis, communism will either withdraw from history, swallowed up in the quicksands of gradualist democracy, or it will act and fight alone.

In its political tactics, the revolutionary proletarian party, in Italy as in the whole world, will rise again only insofar as it will distinguish itself from all the others and above all from false communist parties that refer back to the Moscow regime of today as it has pitilessly revealed the extent of the defeatism of all supposed moves of penetration and circumvention presented as a transitory adhesion to common objectives of other parties and movements, and justified by promising, in secret or in the inner circle of the adherents, that such a maneuver serves only to weaken and beguile the adversary in order to break the agreements and alliances with them at a certain moment, passing to the class offensive. Such a method has proved likely to lead to the disintegration of the revolutionary party, to the inability of the working class to fight for its own ends, to the dissipation of its best energies in securing results and achievements that benefit only its enemies.

As in the "Manifesto" of a century ago, the communists disdain to conceal their principles and their aims and openly declare that their end can only be achieved by the violent fall of all social orders that have existed up to now.

In the framework of contemporary world history, if, by chance, a residual function were to be up to democratic bourgeois groups for the partial and eventual survival of the demands for national liberation, for the liquidation of backward islets of feudalism and similar relics of history, such a task would be carried out in a more decisive and conclusive way in order to give rise to the further cycle of the bourgeois crisis, not by a passive and abdicating arrangement of the communist movement to those postulates which are not its own, but by virtue of an implacable lashing out of the communist proletarians against the incurable sluggishness and laziness of leftist petty-bourgeois groups and bourgeois parties.

With reference to these directives, which have complete validity throughout the world, a communist movement in Italy must mean, in the fearful situation of dissolution of all social frameworks and all doctrinal and practical orientations of classes and parties, a violent call for the ruthless clarification of the situation. Fascists and anti-fascists, monarchists and republicans, liberals and socialists, democrats and Catholics, who get increasingly sterilized in debates empty of any theoretical meaning, in despicable rivalries, in repugnant maneuvers, should receive a ruthless challenge, which would force everyone to denude the real positions of national and foreign class interests, which in fact they reflect, and to carry out, if by chance they had any, their historical task.

If, in the disintegration and fragmentation of all collective and group interests, a new crystallization of openly militant political forces is still possible in Italy, the resurgence of the revolutionary proletarian party will be able to determine a new situation.

When this movement, which will be the only one to proclaim its final class aims, its party totalitarianism, the size of the limits which separate it from the others, will have set its political compass in the direction of the revolutionary north, all the others will be challenged to confess their real direction.

The political battle will be able free itself from the influences of rhetorical and demagogic masquerades, freed from the infection of politicians’ business professionalism, which affected, in its history, the Italian ruling class.

If this pathological dissolution was denounced as acute during the Fascist period, today the proletarian masses note more and more every day that no one has stopped or reversed that process, that it continues inexorably despite the vaunted prophylaxis of the charlatans of democracy, and feel that it will be closed only by the radical surgery of the revolution.