“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. This is Karl Marx, a century and a half ago, but since then the reality of a capitalism that has grown senile — in the late maturity of imperialist society — has imbued those words with a disconcerting and practical truth. Through globalisation, capital runs the markets at all latitudes, seeking out, from two billion wage-earners, the surplus value that keeps it alive. Moreover, in the old powers where capitalism was first born, before spreading to the whole world and feeding new aspirant powers - eager to redefine the partition, the whole scaffolding of the social system could not stand without a growing share of migrants in the labour force. Described by Lenin, the analyses of parasitic degeneration and the putrefaction of a capitalism in its imperialist phase, are science, like that of Marx, and not simple moralistic invective. In Europe, America, Japan,

The Fourth Congress From the special series 1919-2019. One hundred years from the foundation of the Communist International The historian Branko Lazitch wrote that the IV Congress, compared to the first three, placed itself in a regressive line : while the I Congress held the perspective of working in anticipation of an imminent future world revolution, the IV Congress acknowledged that such an objective had fallen out of reach and they had to learn to conduct political activity over much longer timeframes. Arrigo Cervetto comments: In a way it is true. After having tried the revolution with a communist party, Lenin wants to prepare the revolution with a Leninist party. His job is to prepare this party . Italian fascism Karl Radek was commissioned to give a report focused on “The Capital Offensive”: the Italian events represented the most serious defeat that socialism and communism have suffered since the beginning of the world revolution . But the speaker denied that a parallel

The new strategic phase in the world balance, with its new corresponding political cycles within powers, requires attention to the materialistic, historical and dialectical method of political analysis itself. The changing forces and basic trends need to be identified; we can make conjectures about the developments in single political battles, but the outcome of these battles will always require us to contemplate a plurality of solutions: some more probable. others less. but never Just a mechanical consequence of long-term economic movements. Many fixed points of the method of political analysis are usual tools in our Marxist elaboration, but this does not mean they must be taken for granted: it is of use to recall them, in relation to the new unknowns of the political battle. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from th