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Rete dei Comunisti
The Forum will take place at the Cinema Aquila (via L’Aquila 66) Rome
Timetable of the working days
Friday 4.10 beginning 3.30 p.m. end 7 p.m.
Saturday 5.10 a.m. start time 90.30 a.m. end time 2 p.m.
Sunday 6.10 start time 90.30 pm end time 14 pm
Introductions
Mauro Casadio, Giacomo Marchetti, Sergio Cararo, Valter Lorenzi, Franco Michele.
Speakers:
Salvatore Tinè – Vladimiro Giacchè – Joan Tafalla – Andrea Catone – Giorgio Gattei – Gianmaria Brunazzi – Franco Russo – Giorgio Cremaschi – Vijay Prashad – Paolo Ferrero – Leonardo Bargigli – Carlo Formenti – George Mavrikos – Luciano Vasapollo – Federico Scirchio (Ex opg occupied) – Paolo Favilli – Said Boumama – Alessandra Kersevan – Ada Donno – Giorgio Casacchia – Atilio Boron – Alexandre Hobel – PCI – Alessandro Pascale.
Was 20th century Socialism and the international communist movement a failure or just a defeat? In the light of the overall regression and the war that the capitalist mode of production is once again unleashing on humanity, can the instances of emancipation and civilisation represented by the socialist experiences of the last century once again represent an antidote and an alternative?
This is what we intend to discuss in a Forum that we as the Rete dei Comunisti are working on for next autumn and to which we ask you to contribute.
We have lived through these three decades with the incompleteness of a reflection – often more removed than begun – on twentieth-century Communism, but as the Rete dei Comunisti we have never lost sight of it. Particularly today, when the conditions and contradictions of the Capitalist Mode of Production allow and in some way impose to resume that path and attempt an interpretation of it, advancing some hypotheses and a minimum of synthesis to be put back into the contradiction between socialism and barbarism.
We must point out that we have never been fascinated by attempts to make mere communist identitarianism survive but, in our opinion, a reflection on the potential and achievements of the communist movement in and of the 20th century, today finds a political and ideological function, indispensable to redefine a perspective for communists in the epochal transformations that are disrupting the world in which we live.
A defeat, not a failure
The thesis on which we intend to discuss is that the labour and communist movement in the 20th century was a powerful force that, as never before in history, changed the world with the emancipation of billions of exploited people, peoples and nations by undermining a social order established over hundreds of years.
The 20th century for communists was a defeat but not a failure. There is a profound difference that must be grasped, deepened, claimed and relaunched.
The first experiments in the material construction of a socialist society alternative to capitalism – what we have called ‘possible Socialism’ in the given conditions – had to come to terms with unprecedented difficulties and problems, which led them to suffer at the end of the 20th century a defeat right in the heart of the capitalist West and in Europe, that is, where the workers’ movement was born and with it Marxist revolutionary thought and the first Socialist and Communist Parties.
But already in countries and realities other than Europe – from Asia to Latin America – things, as we have seen, have been different.
The defeat of Socialism therefore took place there where capitalism was more advanced and pervasive and Socialism more structured, but it was not a failure as one would have us believe, since the backwardness that resulted did not at all prevent a resurgence of the contradictions of the capitalist system and a blatant international clash that concretely re-proposes, albeit in different historical and political forms, the overcoming of capitalism and imperialism.
In reconstructing the path that began with 1917, we cannot fail to remember that that revolution, as Gramsci said, was made against ‘Capital’, to be understood as Marx’s text, because the revolution in the Europe of the most advanced capitalism and workers’ movement failed, while the Soviet Union had to build its own socialism from primitive accumulation in order to develop productive forces appropriate to internal growth and the climate of war that existed in the first half of the 20th century.
This was true for the USSR, but also for China, Cuba, Vietnam and all countries that measured themselves with structural change and not just a socialist perspective. In other words, the Communist movement had to achieve in a handful of decades – and succeeded in doing so – what capitalist society had produced over centuries, namely a general development of society, knowledge, and the productive forces.
It is from this condition, produced by the unequal development proper to capitalism, i.e. by the contradictions inherent in this social formation, that a revolutionary rupture so powerful that it has no precedent in human history could arise.
A rupture that certainly did not occur in conditions of peace but within a long period of wars that took resources away from the construction of socialism and also deviated from the original potential inherent in the social revolutions produced.
Socialism and the communists of the 20th century. Not only Europe
The international class struggle in the 20th century forced capitalism into a mutation that then allowed it to set off a reaction at the beginning of the 1980s that, in little more than ten years, led to the collapse of the USSR and the disappearance/diminishing of communist organisations in Europe, but it did not erase from the world and from history the reality of revolutionary and anti-imperialist forces and countries outside Europe, forces and countries that today have found their own relevant function in the growing international confrontation taking place.
They were by no means indifferent to the outcome of the clash between Socialism and capitalism in the 20th century – on the contrary, both the process of theoretical and political impoverishment of the USSR and the communist parties throughout Europe, and the contradictions that opened up in the clash between China and the USSR in the communist camp, and thus the end of an international relationship between parties, weakened it ideologically, theoretically and politically.
For almost thirty years, the supremacy of capitalism has not encountered the shadow of a real enemy, except the invented one of the Islamists. Certainly there have been some points of resistance such as Cuba and North Korea for example, while others have adapted to the economic system, such as China, Vietnam and the former Third World countries, but the dominant narrative has basically extolled the ultimate victory of capital and the end of history.
At some point, however, the toy was broken and those who were considered the victors began to falter.
Are the contradictions for a systemic alternative resurfacing?
It is precisely the victory of imperialism that has caused all the monsters already generated in the past to re-emerge. In the same forms but with much more limited possibilities of recovery for capitalism and with manifest objective limits to development, a scenario that we have already tried to explain with the Forums on the “Tilted Plan of Capital” in 2003 and with the more recent one on “The Garden and the Jungle” ( 2023) on the fragmentation of the world market now admitted and recognised by many.
Against this backdrop, the narrative of a capitalism producing infinite growth and progress breaks down and, on the contrary, its regressive features for the future of humanity become apparent.
An unexpected phenomenon is taking place before our eyes, even for many of us: the world rupture taking place on the one hand sees the historical imperialisms recompose themselves in the Euro-Atlantic bloc to defend their own hegemonic condition in crisis, and on the other hand other state, political and social subjects – practically the same ones born from the revolutions of the 20th century outside Europe – that are acquiring an antagonistic function, however spurious from various points of view.
‘Well dug old mole‘, we can affirm today, all the more so since this factor acquires more intelligible forms in the current world conflict and confirms the topicality of the progressive thrust of the October revolution and subsequent ones, opening a new era.
This is why we intend to organise a forum on ‘The Eulogy of 20th Century Communism’ by autumn, precisely because that history is by no means over, it has been defeated but not failed. On the contrary, it was transformed, and in part it deviated, but that class, revolutionary, communist movement re-emerges today in different forms and puts the current imperialist set-up into crisis.
We certainly do not believe that the political forms of the past century can be reproduced, nor can we know precisely how the situation will develop in the future. In analysis as in investigation we can only proceed by hypothesis and verification.
However, we have to admit that, for those who have been through ‘the big chill’ of the decades at the turn of the 20th century, today we can glimpse the possibility of a resurgence of the international class struggle, even with spurious political forms, starting with the role of states born out of the 20th century conflict or political and social movements other than those of the 20th century.
This means coming to terms with ourselves and figuring out what role we can play as communists and class movement in a society that shows increasingly reactionary, regressive and warmongering features at the heart of advanced capitalism, in the USA as in the EU.
In organising the discussion of the Forum on October 4-5-6th 2024, we have outlined a few points on which to articulate the four sessions of work. Obviously we do not consider them to be exhaustive, on the contrary they can be integrated by and in the contributions that will come in the discussion.
It is an outline from which each contributor can develop the point(s) they prefer to bring into the forum discussion.
We have only taken it upon ourselves to highlight what we consider and claim as the junctures of the emancipatory character of the communist movement in the 20th century and its contradictions.
The Forum we are proposing will consist of four half-day sessions in which, in addition to our introductions for sessions as RdC, we will include interventions and contributions from other speakers to be defined and organised for early September at the latest.
The sessions propose a series of questions that have been part of the debate and confrontation in the communist movement of the 20th century, and others can be proposed, but which must be discussed in the light of the current phase of crisis of the Capitalist Mode of Production.
- Before World War II: the assault to the sky
- After World War II. New revolutions, workers’ conquests and liberation movements in developing countries
- The regression of the communist movement and the capitalist counter-offensive
- The contradictions accumulated by the supremacy of capitalism re-emerge
