by Giovanni Scuderi *

In celebrating the 43rd anniversary of the foundation of the PMLI, which falls on April 9, our thoughts go first of all to the dead, infected and hospitalized of the coronavirus epidemie; doctors, nurses, health workers and volunteers; workers who assure us of food, medicines, essential public services, transport and information; to the comrades and fellow members and active sympathizers of the PMLI who give their soul to help the proletariat and the popular masses to solve their immediate material problems and to convince them to join the revolutionary struggle for the conquest of socialism and the political power of the proletariat.

This painful human massacre taking place in Italy and in the world was caused by an unknown virus, possibly transmitted to a man by a bat or wild animal, which started from social-imperialist China, and has rapidly expanded to all countries of the world by human contagion. It is the bitter fruit of the devastation of nature, the loss of biodiversity and species, the destruction of the habitat of wild species, deforestation, pollution of the environment, seas and air, of climate change caused by capitalism and imperialism.

Nonetheless, the rulers of capitalism and imperialism in the various countries have done nothing to prevent and deal with health emergencies. The "center-right" and "center-left" Italians, including the Conte II Cabinet, even destroyed the national health system, dividing it, among other things, into twenty autonomous realms, in favor of private health. So much so that in the last thirty years the beds in hospitals have been halved and the smaller garrisons distributed throughout the territory closed. And despite knowing, as of January 5, of the arrival of the coronavirus, the government has

not moved up to patient 1 to start the institutional machine to protect the health of the Italian people.

Even now the government is struggling to buy enough personal protective equipment, starting with masks, respirators and oxygen cylinders, to find new health workers and open new intensive care and intensive care units. While in the meeting of February 17, when discussing the plan against coronavirus, the Minister of Health Roberto Speranza, leader of LeU, boasted that “the National Health Service is equipped with professionalism, skills and experience adequate to face any eventuality.”

The facts instead show not only that the National Health System, except for the excellence of the health workers, was absolutely not prepared to face an epidemic of this magnitude, but also that the government took too long to close non-essential companies so as not to displease Confindustria, and to safeguard the bosses’ profits. He closed it, but not sufficiently, only when the workers went on strike to obtain the protection of their health.

Apart from the indispensable measures, such as staying at home, social distancing, sanitation rules, the behaviors to keep in mind in case of semi-flu symptoms, we do not agree at all on the other measures taken by the government. Above all those policies which, by centralizing the powers of the government and the president of the council, through the decrees of the law and the decrees of the president of the council which constitute a dangerous precedent, and in fact by suspending fundamental constitutional rights, have determined the dictatorship of the government and personally of Conte and the emptying of bourgeois democracy and parliament.

 

We are not in the same boat, as Conte and the government parties insist, to which the Pope has now added. The boats are two, that of the forces of capitalism and that of the anti-capitalist forces. Both have different rowers and opposite destinations.

The health emergency has not canceled neither the social and territorial inequalities, which have actually increased, as demonstrated by the first rebellions of the unemployed and the

penniless of Southern Italy, nor the classes and the class struggle. At no time in social life, even when there is an emergency, even if it is an imperialist war, should the class struggle be put aside. Indeed, it is precisely in these moments that a clear dividing line be drawn between the proletariat and the popular masses on the one hand and the bourgeoisie and its government on the other. Because the interests and needs of the former are opposed to those of the latter. Without ever forgetting that the tricolor and the anthem of Mameli represent only the bourgeois ruling class, not the working class and all the exploited and oppressed by the bourgeois dictatorship and capitalism.

The class struggle cannot fail to continue, thinking of a future Italy. What the government has in mind will be worse than the current one. The dominance of the bourgeoisie and capitalism will persist, social and territorial inequalities, the living and working conditions of the masses, unemployment and poverty will worsen, and it is probable that social isolation, with some adjustments, will become permanent. Social control, teleworking, distance learning, the restriction of bourgeois freedoms and democracy, marginalization, the militarization of the country, of parliament, and patriotic and fascist nationalism. In essence, the neo-fascist capitalist regime will be strengthened.

The future Italy that we Marxist-Leninists have in mind sees instead the domination of the proletariat and socialism, the cancellation of any type of inequality and the beginning of the suppression of classes that will take place in communism, the end of unemployment and poverty, work for all, the well-being of the people, full freedom and democracy for the people. In essence, a new economy and a new state modeled according to the interests of the proletariat and the working masses and able to face any emergency, starting from the health one.

Alone the PMLI, even when it has a Red Giant body, will never be able to do it, therefore we invite all social, political, party forces, starting with those with the red flag and the hammer and sickle, trade union, cultural and anti-capitalist religious to unite and fight together to achieve the socialist Italy of the future. By acquiring the

culture, strategy, tactics and experience that allowed socialism to win in Lenin and Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China.

All of this can be learned easily, taking advantage of the curfew underway, by reading Marx and Engels’s "Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Lenin’s "State and Revolution,” the "Principles of Leninism" and "Questions of Leninism" by Stalin and Mao’s work “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.”

The sooner we acquire this culture and this social practice, the sooner we free ourselves from the bourgeois reformist, electoralist, parliamentarian, constitutional, governmental and pacifist influence, which also afflicts the so-called "21st century socialism" based on the reformist and revisionist thought of Gramsci, much sooner we will succeed in giving a revolutionary turn to the class struggle in Italy.

Socialism is not around the corner, also because the proletariat has yet to become aware of being a class in itself, but this does not prevent us from thinking about it now and working hard to create all the subjective conditions needed to conquer it through proletarian revolution. In this context, dealing with immediate problems, the anti-capitalist forces have the duty to fight together to immediately get € 1,200 a month for those who are without income and without social safety nets as long as the coronavirus emergency lasts; for the strengthening and development of the national health system and the abolition of private healthcare; for the repeal of Title V of the Constitution and the relative differentiated autonomy of the regions; for the repeal of Article 81 of the Constitution which imposes a budget balance, the Fornero law, the Jobs Act and the safety decrees; for the exit of Italy from the imperialist European Union, considering also that it has done nothing to help us in the fight against the coronavirus.

In our capitalist country, as the masses are exploited and oppressed by direct experience we know very well, there is neither freedom nor equality. Lenin, whose 150th Birth Anniversary we celebrate with an important document from the Political Bureau of the PMLI, in a 1920 paper entitled "False Talk on Freedom", reviving Engels’ words on "Anti-Duhring", according to which is said "the idea of equality being a prejudice or an absurdity, if it does not mean the abolition of classes ”, he too noted that “It is inevitable that the slogans of our era are and must be: the abolition of classes; the dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of achieving that aim; the ruthless exposure of petty-bourgeois democratic prejudices concerning freedom and equality and ruthless war on these prejudices .” And he added: “Until classes are abolished, all talk about freedom and equality in general is self-deception, or else deception of the workers and of all who toil and are exploited by capital; in any case, it is a defence of the interests of the bourgeoisie. ”

We Italian Marxist-Leninists fully agree with the aim proposed by Lenin, ever since we began to prepare the conditions for the foundation of the PMLI in September 1967. Believing that there is nothing more beautiful, more useful, more revolutionary, more satisfying than serving the people wholeheartedly and working for the triumph of the noble cause of socialism. Whatever the costs, we will go all the way on the October Road towards united, red and socialist Italy. Surely in the end with the Masters and the PMLI we will win!

 

Florence, March 31, 2020

 

* General-Secretary of The PMLI