In the general election on 4 March 2018, as it always happens on these occasions, two lines are facing and struggling: the proletarian line and the bourgeois line. The first one wants to overthrow capitalism, establish socialism and give power to the proletariat. The second one suggests to improve capitalism and leave power to the bourgeoisie. The political, electoral choice is thus the following: either with the proletariat and socialism or with the bourgeoisie and capitalism. No other choice is possible.

 

Every party and movement taking part in the election with their lists, no excluded, stand with the bourgeoisie and capitalism because they recognize, despite minor differences, the current Constitution. Other than the original constitution approved in 1948 is de facto no longer in force, the Constitution is the supreme law of capitalism that prevents the proletariat and its party from seizing political power and establishing socialism in a pacific and parliamentarian way.

 

Only our party, the PMLI, stands with socialism and the proletariat, the working class producing all the country’s wealth, but receiving only crumbs of it. This is the reason why we will abstain at the election and we invite all supporters of socialism and those struggling for a new society to abstain. Abstention is the only anti-capitalist vote for socialism which is possible under the political and social conditions of class struggle in Italy.

 

157 have elapsed since the Italian Unifcation but capitalism has not been able to solve our country’s two main economic and social problems – social inequality and the South-North gap. It will never be able to do so as it is in its nature to focus on getting capitalists, stakeholders, bakers, managers, high officials of the judiciary, the military and the police, high-level state bureaucrats richer, and on developing areas with the highest strength and amount of economy, finance, industry, agriculture and services.

 

It has produces wars and fascism, regardless of the government attending to its interests and business, including Mussolini, De Gasperi, Berlusconi, up to Renzi and Gentiloni. The last two governments have approved Italy’s imperialist military adventures in 24 countries throughout three continents (Europe, Asia and Africa) with 35 missions, the latest in Niger, employing about 6,500 soldiers costing 1.5 billion euros every year. These governments were anti-fascist only in words, as they have not been bold enough to outlaw neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups that are romping about with their squads around Italy, permitted even to participate in elections. The new Duce Renzi also wants to get his payback on the defeat at the 4 December 2016 referendum in order to complete the neo-fascist regime according to the plan of Gelli’s P2 secret lodge, carried out by Craxi and Berlusconi’s governments.

 

Facts prove that no government, even if led by the Five-Star Movement, Free and Equal or Power to the People, can do things differently than what capitalism dictates, because it is the economic system and the ruling class that decide everything. Voting for parties of the regime, both Right- and “Left”-wing, is the same as voting for capitalism and the bourgeois ruling class, and leaving things as they are.

 

Our Party on the contrary wants to radically change Italy for what concerns its economy, institutions, judiciary, education, culture, arts, moral, life-style in order to give the Italian people a life without exploitation, oppression, unemployment, poverty, inequality and wars.

 

This is possible only if we overthrow capitalism with a proletarian revolution, if we establish socialism and give power to the proletariat. Socialism is our compass. We decided so at the Foundation Congress of the PMLI, on 9 April 1977, and wrote it in Chapter 11 of our Party General Programme: “Only socialism can save Italy from disaster, misery, fascism and war. Only socialism can make Italy a prosperous, advanced, free, independent and peaceful country.

 

Socialism is the most radical turn that our country has ever known in its history, it is a violent transfer of power from the minority of exploiters to the majority of the exploited, the turn from barbarity to civilization, from the old society based on private property and on the exploitation of man by man to a new society based on the collective ownership of the means of production, free of exploitation. Socialism is the proletariat organized as the ruling class; it is the reign of democracy, of freedom and of wellbeing for workers, the material and political preparation for communism. Socialism, subverting all the old values and worldviews, removing all the old institutions, the bourgeois, revisionist and pseudo-workers parties, and establishing a new economic, social and political organization, constitutes the most progressive, just and human society that history has ever known.

 

No ‘pluralism’ is admitted under socialism, be it philosophical, ideological, cultural and moral, or political, economic and for what concerns political parties; socialism can admit no freedom for the bourgeoisie and revisionism, as every space and all the power must be used and exercised only by the working class and its allies through proletarian dictatorship, under the leadership of the Party as the only leading force of the state and socialist society.

 

Socialism is not the state of the entire people, but the dictatorship of the proletariat, the class which has a direct interest in the suppression of any form of private propriety, the coherently revolutionary class that is aware of its tasks and is strong enough to fulfill them, the class that expresses the effective interests of workers.

 

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the absolute power of the working class, unbound by law and based on the violence used by the formerly exploited to repress, suppress and annihilate any resistance from the overthrown exploiters, and to transform society according to their worldview. Proletarian dictatorship is the highest form of democracy and its character and essence are directly opposed to bourgeois democracy, the masked form of the dictatorship of capital. While bourgeois democracy, behind the mask of formal equality, is based on economic and social inequality and represents the rule of a minority of the exploiters over the majority of the exploited, proletarian democracy is effective as it is based on the freedom from material exploitation and represents the rule of the majority of workers over the minority of the exploiters.

 

The dictatorship of the proletariat is faced with five tasks. The first task consists in completely overthrowing bourgeois exploiters, totally destroying their state machine, grabbing the instruments of economic, political and cultural power, suppressing their resistance and any attempt to restore capitalism, and establishing the socialist state and economy. The second task consists in entirely and permanently win to socialism all non-proletarian working masses and making them an active part in the building of the new society through their education, their organization and their liberation from the state of need, slavery, misery and ignorance and through their practical experience. The third task consists in neutralizing and render harmless small entrepreneurs, traders, small rural proprietors, the upper strata of the intellectuals and the employees, etc., who inevitably oscillate between bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship, winnable to socialism only after a long, capable and flexible political work. The fourth task consists in totally eliminating all the remains of capitalism and strengthening and developing further and further the socialist economic and political forms, carrying the revolution through to the end in all fields of structure and superstructure through the proletarian cultural revolution. The fifth task consists in defending and safeguarding the successes and the continuity of socialism against the danger of capitalist restoration and the threat of subversion and aggression from imperialism, because during the long historical period of socialism classes, class contradictions and class struggle, and the struggle between the socialist way and the capitalist way continue to exist. This task can be fulfilled by the Party only if it relies on the theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat and on the practice led by this theory.

 

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the only means to pass from capitalism to communism.”

 

Of course, given the objective and subjective conditions of our country, socialism is not behind the corner, but we can get nearer and nearer to it if the vanguards of the proletariat, the working masses, the masses of retired workers, of the unemployed, of the people, of the women and of the youth, and conscious voters accept this strategic proposal and join the PMLI. As for the election, they should abstain (not go to vote, invalidate the ballot, or leave the ballot blank) and create in all cities and districts the institutions of representatives of the masses supporting socialism, i.e. People’s Assemblies and People’s Committees based on direct democracy.

 

People’s Assemblies should be established in every city district by all local residents, including 14-year-old girls and boys, who proclaim themselves anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-racist and supporting socialism and are ready to politically and electorally fight bourgeois institutions, the central and local bourgeois governments and the capitalist system with its regime.

 

Every People’s Assembly elect its People’s Committee. The Assembly of People’s Committees elects through direct democracy the City People’s Committee. And so up to the election of Provincial, Regional and National People’s Committees.

 

People’s Committee should be made up of the most combative, bravest and conscious elements of the anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and socialism-supporting masses, elected through recorded vote and removable in any moment by local People’s Assemblies. Women and men – who may be elected since the age of 16 – should be equally represented.

 

District, City, Provincial and Regional People’s Committees as well as the National People’s Committee should represent the counterbalance, the alternative and antagonist headquarters against local administrations and regional and national governments.

 

The PMLI puts social rights on top of its demands. Social rights include: jobs, housing, healthcare, pensions, education. In this occasion we will only talk about the fundamental question of labor, on which the lives of the people, especially the youth, depend. Parties of the regime also talk about labor, but not as much as we do, nor with the same resolve.

 

Labor for us means permanent, full salary, full time jobs, with union protection, for all the unemployed, workers and migrants, for agricultural workers, including hired hands in large and medium companies, for all young women and men after their studies. We reject any form of basic income. Struggling for labor also means abolishing the balanced budget article in the Constitution, norms of the recent labor market reform, laws legalizing temporary jobs, the law limiting the right to strike in essential public services, as well as abolishing working precarity, any form of unpaid or low-paid labor, jobs on demand, temporary jobs, temporary contracts, part-time jobs, traineeships, piecework pay for delivery persons, illegal forms of direct hiring. We want for all temporary workers in the public administration to be given permanent jobs. Women and men should receive equal pay, as well as migrants. We demand a restoration of the sliding scale wage system, a permit to work for non-graduated teachers, a substantial increase in wages, teachers and school administration personnel’s wages to be raised to European standards. We struggle to reject the legalization of basic income, to defend the right to strike and the national contract against company-based welfare, individual contracts and the 2014 agreement limiting union representatives in companies. We demand a law allowing workers to freely choose their unions, to elect and to be elected as workers’ representatives without the need for their union to have signed agreements, and we demand the restoration of norms forbidding ungrounded layoffs, extending it to small-scale companies. Everyone should work less without any change in their wage, the working time should be reduced to 32 hours per week. Housekeepers with no income and unable to find a job should receive unemployment aid.

 

If you agree with this document, you are warmly asked to join Marxist-Leninists in the Marxist-Leninist Abstention Propaganda Teams to propagate it and help voters understand the correct political and electoral orientation to follow in order to change Italy, to improve the working and living conditions of the masses, to proceed on the path of the October towards united, red and socialist Italy. The more conscious voters will abstain, the harder and more devastating our blows will be to capitalism, to the neo-fascist regime and its parties, to fake and oppressive bourgeois representative institutions colluded with Mafia.

 

Unite for the triumph of Marxist-Leninist abstention against the parties of capitalism and the neo-fascist regime!

 

Unite to fight against every electoral, parliamentarian, governmental, constitutional, reformist and pacifist illusion!

 

Unite to delegitimize bourgeois institutions and to create the institutions of representatives of the masses supporting socialism!

 

Only socialism can save Italy and give power to the proletariat!

 

With the Teachers and the PMLI we shall win!

 

The Central Committee of the Italian Marxist-Leninist Party

 

Florence, 14 January 2018