FOREWORD

In the few pages that follow are condensed the positions of the Communist Left, which is organized as the International Communist Party, and whose press organ in English speaking countries is "Communist Left".
Both the doctrine and the program that the party embodies are a product of history's selection, not the "child of a useless genius". History cast them into the same steel block in the course of the storm of bloody class struggles, which in the middle of the 19th century brought to the forefront a new class, the proletariat.
The party is a school of thought and a method of action. Doctrine, program, tactics, and organization make up the party. The working class exists as such only by virtue of its party; without it the proletariat is a class only for statistical purposes, not as an actor of history.
The existence of the party does not depend on the will of great chiefs, but rather on the scrupulous and keen conservation of its fundamental features carried on by countless militants, who also enforce them in all their practical consequences; the party's strength depends instead on the development of social contradictions. For this reason, in some historical moments the party is confined to a small number of resolute militants, in other moments the party develops, increases its membership, becomes a social force that can determine the outcome of the final clash with capital's regime.
These characteristics of the party rule out the possibility that it can get back at the head of the fighting masses, as in the glorious period of 1917-1926, by means of tactical expedients, diplomatic devices, unacceptable associations with other left-wing political groups, or innovations of unfathomable meaning in the field of the complex entwining of the party/class relationship.
They also exclude any membership growth obtained by means of fostering senseless formal discipline, which always comes with the enhancement of democratic practices, which are forever banned by our organization, as well as from "State and society". Petty subterfuges, that kill the party as a class organ, even should its membership rise. Low tricks betraying the yearning of chiefs and semi-chiefs to "break through", in the false hope that the party may abandon the ghetto in which it is confined by distorting its tasks and nature; a ghetto in which the party is forced to stay not by its own will, but by the pressure of the counterrevolution, victorious on a world scale for three quarters of a century.
The best evidence of the uselessness of such maneuvering, better than from the critique of ideas, comes from the historical experience. Force relationships among social classes have not changed at all, although Trotskyists of all tendencies and left wingers of a thousand colors have preached everywhere that the party must adapt to situations, i.e., a "realistic" politics, which consists of a continuous change of direction.
If the party size is today minimal, and its influence on the proletarian masses almost non existent, the reason is to be found in the class struggle, in the historical events, and one must be honest enough to deduce from it one of the two conclusions: either that Marxism should be thrown away, and the party with it, or that Marxism must stay invariant. After anticipating this lesson in its doctrine, the Left has drawn from this materialistic and historical verification the fundamental lesson: nothing to add, nothing to change. Steady at our post!
This pamphlet is a text of the International Communist Party, which, as in all its other texts, confirms and reasserts the traditional positions of the Italian Left, beyond the contingent events of organic and historical selection of formal organizations. This unitary body of doctrine and praxis is today vindicated in full by only one organization, whose press organ is Communist Left in english, La Gauche Communiste in french, Il Partito Comunista in italian, La Izquierda Comunista in spanish.
We reaffirm that we expect the recovery of the revolutionary class movement to come from the embittering and radicalizing of social clashes, which will follow the acceleration of contradictions within the capitalist system; the party can grow together with these developments if, based on its untouchable doctrine and its invariant program, it is able to participate to all proletarian struggles, to direct them at the same time against the treacherous opportunism of false workers parties, the sullen nationalistic unionism, the capitalist State, and the bourgeois political front.
The Left knows that in this struggle it is and will remain alone, not out of its own choice, but because this is the fertile lesson of the past defeats of the proletariat. In those defeats an eminently counterrevolutionary role was played by positions and organizations which, although pretending to be inspired by the proletariat and even by Marxism and revolution, represent the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy; their action has always been that of obstructing first, then dividing, and finally abandoning the proletarian front to enemy.
We have settled the accounts with present day imitations of union leaders, anarchists, and "left wingers" in due time, but above all that was done by history, which pitilessly crushed their deeds and doctrines.

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We dedicate this short text above all to the proletarian youth, so that, with its characteristic bravery, abnegation and force, it may turn its back forever on the illusory temptations of modern society, on the false myths of democracy and national solidarity, of reformism and gradualism, to embrace a program of struggle, of combat, on the anonymous and impersonal revolutionary communist front.
For it is the duty of our youth to bring communism to victory.

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