Comrades, it is a pleasure for us to participate in this international meeting and we warmly thank the comrades of KKE(m-l) for the invitation.
Today the world sees an extension of more and more wars and conflicts in many countries. On two fronts, Ukraine and Palestine and the so-called Middle East, imperialism's attention is particularly concentrated because of the strategic implication that the outcome of both conflicts will have.
In Ukraine there is an inter-imperialist clash between Yankee imperialism and some European countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland) on one side, and Russian imperialism (economically supported by Chinese imperialism) on the other. The Ukrainian state and the Zelensky regime acted as a detonator for the outbreak of the conflict, therefore it is not an “oppressed country” but an integral part of the Western pole, consequently it does not represent the interests of the Ukrainian proletariat.
The Middle East region and in particular Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Kurdistan and Iraq is currently “in the center of the storm”, in which Yankee and Western imperialism actively support the Nazi-Zionist state of Israel mainly against the Palestinian people and against all the peoples of that geographical area.
There are countless war scenarios that assume a “regional dimension” but which in reality are fomented by imperialism, just to name a few, the wars in Sudan, Congo, Mali, Chad, Somalia etc.
The rise of Chinese imperialism in competition with the Yankee one, potentially contains in itself the direct clash between the first and second imperialist power in the world today and therefore the outbreak of a devastating war in Taiwan that could lead to the Third World War.
This brief exposition represents a simple photograph of the current state of affairs. The central point, however, is now a full understanding of the origin and nature of such wars and finally understanding how communists place themselves in the face of such concrete reality.
As we know, as long as capitalism/imperialism exists, war is inevitable, it is an intrinsic and necessary product of the system of production itself, as Lenin, after having developed Marx's analysis of the capitalist system of production, explains well analysing the imperialist system.
We must therefore start from this analytical basis.
We still live in the imperialist phase, even if we would be obviously dogmatic if we thought that the imperialist system today is the same to the one analyzed a century ago by Lenin or 60 years ago by Mao. Marx himself teaches us that the capitalist system cannot exist without continually revolutionizing itself, from which we deduce that the tactics and strategy of the proletariat and the peoples of the world must take this into account. As Mao said, it is necessary to make a concrete analysis of the concrete situation.
Reproposing the same formulas that allowed the victory in Russia and China would be a pure dogmatism since the context has changed, furthermore Lenin had already warned us about this in the aftermath of October in "Leftwing" Communsm: An Infantile Disorder.
About the contradictions
All revolutionary experiences must be analyzed with a balance in which must be drawn conclusions from both the particular and general aspects, the latter must be systematized in the revolutionary ideology of the proletariat, Marxism, today Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Marx defines capitalism as a contradiction in process, in continuous change, today in the world there are three main contradictions: the contradiction between capital and wage labor, the inter-imperialist contradiction (that is, the interests of different imperialist States and imperialist bourgeoisies that are opposed to each other and fluctuate between phases of compromise and open conflict), the contradiction between imperialism and oppressed peoples in semi-colonial countries, that are formally independent and in colonies such as Palestine, Kurdistan, Kanaky, Greenland and others.
Until 1976 there was also the contradiction between capitalist countries and socialist countries that will re-emerge when we see the next victorious New Democracy and Socialist revolutions.
These three contradictions develop simultaneously in the world, one of them becoming the main one in certain phases and the others secondary and vice versa. Furthermore, each country has its own main contradiction that determines the revolutionary strategy to develop.
So to stick to the theme of our meeting we would say that all three contradictions shake the world and produce war.
We think that today the main contradiction in the world is the one between capital and labor. In fact, we are in the face of an unprecedented concentration of capital and at the same time the expansion of manufacturing production in more and more countries, starting from the new imperialist country: China with 1 billion and 430 million people; but also in many oppressed countries such as Bangladesh, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Iran, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico etc., the global capitalist-imperialist system in its general organization of the international division of labor, comes to extract unprecedented levels of surplus value in many countries of the world.
In the current phase, the imperialist system does not dominate the semi-colonial countries simply by plundering them of raw materials or importing cheap labor force to the former "mother countries", but also exploits such labor force directly on site, by setting up production plants in oppressed countries under the command of companies from imperialist countries.
In the imperialist and capitalist countries the main contradiction is that of wage labor and capital, while in the semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries the main contradiction is that of imperialism and oppressed peoples.
In many oppressed countries, bureaucratic and comprador capitalism has become "industrialized", despite always remaining of the same nature, given that it is a "dependent" industrial sector, there is an increase in the working class and urban proletarians in these countries, which on one hand contributes to the increase of the working class worldwide and on the other, in these countries, the first contradiction and the third contradiction are becoming related each others.
On the specific question of war
Mao says, there are just wars and unjust wars: the first ones are revolutionary while the second ones are reactionary. The first ones are revolutions and national liberation struggles while the second ones are those of aggression and robbery against the peoples of the world and which make proletarians massacre each other against other proletarians.
The communists can and must be an active part within this contradiction.
As the glorious experience of the October Revolution led by Lenin's party teaches us, the point is not to be "against the war" but precisely how to act, how to counter the plans of imperialism or if war breaks out, how to stay within it, precisely how to stay within this contradiction to advance the plan of the Revolution.
In the face of the outbreak of war in Ukraine and after the start of the Al Aqsa Flood operation by the Palestinian Resistance, the positioning and action of many so called communist organizations and parties was, we would say, enlightening and created a watershed.
In Italy, for example, the lack of understanding of the inter-imperialist character of the Ukrainian war has brought some groups and parties to the same ground as the one of Italian imperialist bourgeoisie (which sent and continues to send money and weapons to the Zelensky government) assuming the position of "supporting Ukraine against Russian imperialist aggression". Then there are the positions that openly support Russian imperialism by identifying American imperialism and NATO not only as the “main enemy” but as the only enemy. These so called communists are actually at the service of another imperialisms, the Russian and Chinese ones.
The communists are against imperialism and, having made Lenin's analysis their own, later developed by Mao, they understand that in reality imperialism has never been unipolar or “an empire” as Toni Negri claimed, hence the existence of inter-imperialist contradictions.
In the war in Ukraine the contradiction is therefore not between imperialism and the oppressed people. The Ukrainian proletarians and working classes as well as the Russian ones should turn their weapons against their governments and fraternize by implementing revolutionary defeatism.
A contribution that communists can make against this war in their own country and in our case in Italy, is to fight their own government that acts as a co-belligerent in the field of Western imperialism against the Russian one, to hinder the plans of the Italian imperialist bourgeoisie to send weapons and money, in this the most advanced actions were those of the dockers of Livorno and Genoa who blocked some ships headed to Ukraine as well as on some occasions they blocked ships of weapons headed to Israel.
After October 7th, some communist parties and organisations, especially in the imperialist countries, has lost sight of the decisive contradiction of the question, that is, between imperialism and oppressed peoples. They have not considered that in Palestine a colonial system is in force, the Leninist lesson and that of the third international of the alliance between the proletarian movement and the oppressed peoples have been forgotten.
In Palestine, unlike Ukraine, the contradiction is between an entire people (as Mao says except for a handful of traitors to whom we can give the name of Abbas and National Palestinian Authority) and the colonial state.
In this sense, the support that the communists must give to the factions of the Resistance that fight for national liberation must be unconditional, on the contrary, we have seen someone making distinctions in the mobilizations, especially towards Hamas, due to its non-Marxist or 'leftist' political-ideological background. These distinctions are absent among Arab masses in the West.
Our slogan is instead “stop the Zionist genocide, victory for the Palestinian Resistance, for a Palestinian State from the river to the sea”. Again, our main political action is directed against the Meloni government and the Italian imperialist State that supports Zionism in Italy and in the world. This must be denounced and hindered in our daily work of agitation and propaganda.
We communists must therefore support all just wars, that is, national liberation struggles such as the Palestinian and Kurdish ones and revolutionary wars such as the ongoing People's Wars in India and the Philippines led respectively by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Today it is important to support the People's Wars because they represent the most advanced struggles of the communists with the aim of seizing political power, and they take place in a context in which the International Communist Mouvement is divided into numerous streams, when there is no socialist country that serves as a red base for the World Proletarian Revolution, and the People's Wars themselves and the armed struggles led by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communist parties in India, the Philippines, Turkey and Northern Kurdistan are in the strategic defensive phase.
Finally, in the imperialist and capitalist countries we are still struggling to get out of the reflux phase that began in the 1980s.
On the need of the Communist movement today and in imperialist countries in particular
As Antonio Gramsci says: "when everything is or seems lost, we must calmly get back to work, starting from the beginning".
This beginning is actually a "new beginning", we do not start from zero but we must treasure the positive and negative aspects of the entire experience of the proletariat and the peoples starting from the victories (the Commune of Paris, October Revolution, Chinese Revolution).
We believe that today for the communists the first step is to found revolutionary Communist Parties of a new type, that is with a construction process that takes place in the fire of the class struggle and in close connection with the masses, because it is only in the class struggle that party cadres are forged. The masses produce the vanguards of the struggles that can become potential communist cadres and furthermore the process is dialectical, as Mao says, "from the masses to the masses", the experience of the masses in the class struggle is an objective and continuous fact, it is up to the communist vanguards to first go to "school from the masses" and then rework this experience at higher and theoretical levels to return it to the masses as an invincible weapon to fight the imperialist system.
In the imperialist countries this process takes place in a context of reactionarization of the democratic-bourgeois State on the road to a "modern fascism".
The ongoing process towards modern fascism is not a simple and ordinary reactionarization, but represents the way of the imperialist bourgeoisie of the 21st century to establish a regime, fascist in the essence, but with a modern face that formally maintains a facade of bourgeois democracy.
In the current phase, therefore, imperialist countries governments, incorporate into the State the workers' aristocracy and the official unions that become an operational and sometimes armed arm both to channel the workers' vanguards into union strategies, aimed at downward concertation, and to suffocate the workers' protagonism even with force when it manifests itself outside the tracks of official unionism.
In the same way, political reformism is no longer just a support for the imperialist bourgeoisie as in the times of the Second and Third Internationals, but has become a direct representative of the imperialist bourgeoisie itself. It has even no longer a reformist objective but converge with the right in the reactionarization of anti-worker and anti-popular policies, developing "reforms" and policies that affect and exacerbate the living and working conditions of the popular masses by directly attacking the rights won by the working class. This pass through increasing layoffs and unemployment accompanied by more intensive exploitation of the workforce and the use of a reserve wage army increasingly composed of more blackmailable migrant workers, attacks on the right to health, social services and an increase in the cost of living.
Faced with all of this, the popular masses and the proletariat more or less spontaneously conduct the class struggle first and foremost as an existential and defensive battle, therefore committees of the unemployed fighting for work, movements for the right to housing and against the cost of living develop in the imperialist countries; the working class, even without a class-based union, goes on strike in the face of company restructuring plans, as recently happened in Germany, the USA, but also in Italy in the Stlellantis group, to counter the attack on the welfare state, for about a year the workers took to the streets in France last year, finally the proletarian neighborhoods rise up in response to the infamous murders of the police as cyclically happens in the French banlieues or more recently in Milan.
The new type of communist parties to be built, guided by the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology, are first and foremost vanguard parties of the working class and can undertake this process of construction only if they organize and lead these proletarian and popular struggles, true breeding ground for the necessary social revolt to fight the governments of war and modern Nazi-fascism, such as the Meloni government rather than the Trump or Orban government.
Our party in this long and tortuous process is conducting this practice in Italy starting from the main places of industrial production such as in the steel factories of Ilva in Taranto (the third largest steel plant in Europe), and at Dalmine near Milan and at the Stellantis group ex Fiat, in Southern Italy, we also deal with precarious workers and the unemployed. Mainly among the ranks of the working class we carry out an activity of revolutionary agitation and propaganda and in particular in recent months we have denounced the role of the fascist Meloni government in general and in the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine, in the genocide of the Palestinian people, in the support of American imperialism and the neocolonial and imperialist role in Africa in countries such as Tunisia and Algeria.
We believe that the unity of communists throughout Europe can be built on these solid strategic bases linked to concrete and material revolutionary practice that has nothing to do with parties led by revisionism, economism and right-wing opportunism nor with sectarian and self-referential groups that compete in the world of ideas to be "ultra-Maoist" or "mainly Maoist" while in the reality of the class struggle they are disconnected from the working class.
Long live proletarian internationalism!
Let's People's Wars!
Forward with the reconstruction of new type communist parties in the heat of class struggle and in close connection with the masses!
Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!
