From the series Sixty years of Lotta Comunista in the Workers' Clubs
In recent weeks, we have been commemorating the newspaper’s 60th anniversary throughout Italy. We publish some excerpts from the conclusions of the event held in Genoa.
In 1959, Arrigo Cervetto wrote to Lorenzo Parodi, who was working at Ansaldo and developing the Genoa group: You too must study, with perseverance and method: a few hours a day, but study. It is what ultimately remains to us as most important: study and time
.
They were only in their early 30s and at the time were in the minority in the movement. Cervetto and Parodi are no longer with us, but that study
is the newspaper you hold in your hands, and that time
is also the same newspaper you hold in your hands; distributed by activists for years and decades, it has bound the second, third, and fourth generations to the party. It is study and time
that allowed Cervetto and Parodi to see the fourth generation, now fully assuming responsibility. And that today allows us to start working with the fifth generation.
Anchor yourselves to the newspaper
, we wrote — a strong statement. Many people — friends, colleagues, relatives — first saw so-called socialism
in Russia fail, then so-called socialisms
in the Third World disappear. Finally, they saw so-called socialism
in China become imperialism. They saw parliamentarism turn into a perpetual charade with ever-diminishing influence; they witnessed the disappearance of parties that considered themselves mass parties and the birth of improvised parties.
Our newspaper is a bulwark which can prevent the abandonment of political commitment caused by these repeated disappointments. We take political responsibility for saying that we were right and the others were wrong. This is not arrogance, it is political struggle and taking responsibility. We Leninists are here: let us discuss, let us debate, no energy must be wasted.
More on the difficult newspaper
Two months ago, in Lotta Comunista, we wrote that the difficulty
encountered when reading our newspaper does not depend on the way it is written, but on the Marxist method we use to observe and assess events. The newspaper's analysis is in stark contrast to the current ideas of the ruling classes — ideas that are transmitted as such even into the way the subordinate classes think, and that ultimately come to be regarded as unquestionable by them as well.
Precisely for this reason, we wrote, a Leninist newspaper is needed to overturn this way of seeing things, at least in a substantial minority of our class: a newspaper that is necessarily difficult
precisely because it must confront the discourses of the ruling classes, which are always easy
. Those discourses are deliberately designed to be easy
to grasp — the enemies
, the good and the bad
, the homeland
— in order to accustom young people to killing and dying, to convince everyone that it is right to send their children and grandchildren to the trenches. And to accustom everyone to drones and missiles raining down on their heads.
Some of our readers have interpreted these statements as an underestimation of the objections to the difficult newspaper
, an underestimation of the readers themselves who made such objections. This is not the case at all, as we have said, but perhaps that was not enough, and we need to return to the issue.
We try to contact precisely those who find our newspaper difficult
— those who want to tackle it, discuss it with us, and challenge it, but in terms of its content, not in terms of an isolated passage or an adjective. This is far from underestimating the objections. This is our battle, and those who raise objections are precisely the ones we are looking for.
Today, to those who reject politics
— many, too many, even in our class — we say that politics will seek them out. It will be the politics of others, however, which will threaten the security of their jobs, the roofs over their heads, and the lives of their children and grandchildren.
The distribution of the newspaper
Often among those who take a copy of this difficult newspaper
— the very people we are trying to reach — there are some who do not understand the importance we attach to the proposal that they take part in distributing Lotta Comunista; to them, it seems like a merely formal request.
Instead, distribution is a significant act in the moment we are living in, when all the myths of the left, and not only of the left — given that we encounter people from the most diverse backgrounds in the Workers’ Clubs — have failed. This is a time when the whole world is swept by the winds of war, by campaigns on law and order
led by both the right and the left in parliament; a time when we are faced with increasingly brutal racist laws against immigrants, with round-ups in cities and factories, with bullets fired into people's faces; and it is a time when those who still go to vote almost justify themselves to us, after the many controversies of the past about our strategic abstentionism. They go out of habit, they tell us, out of family tradition, or because a friend of theirs is on the list of candidates. This is a time when movements
are born and die at the whim of newspapers and television.
Well, at times like these, at this very moment, taking up the Leninist newspaper is a concrete, important act for those who look to us, but also, and even more importantly, for ourselves — for those of us who distribute it — in order to understand, and make others understand, which side we are on.
A training ground for internationalism
The Workers’ Club is also a training ground for internationalism. Those who enter one of our Clubs find the working class as it is today: the factory worker and the office employee, the dockworker and the nurse, the technician and the engineer, the young student and the pensioner, together with the immigrants who work and live with us, whose children play with ours — immigrants who struggle alongside us in the factories, in the neighbourhoods, and in the schools.
Those who come to a Workers’ Club find our class engaged in many different ways, but united by the newspaper, this newspaper read, discussed, and distributed, even by those who are still learning our language in order to read it.
The reaction of the world bourgeoisie to the October Revolution of 1917 pushed back the revolutionary drive: in Germany and elsewhere in Europe it used first social democracy and then Nazism and Fascism against the communists; in America, democracy; in Russia, Stalinism. The year 1926 is one of the reference points of that counter-revolution. In the 1950s, the original group, from which Lotta Comunista emerged, had to make up for a historic delay — now reaching a century — which had undermined political and organisational bonds, as well as bonds of shared ideals and even habits and ways of thinking, within our class.
Some progress has been made. The distributor of our newspaper in schools, factories, and neighbourhoods, who arrives half an hour late or stops half an hour early, may think this changes nothing. And even newspaper readers may think that nothing changes if they skip an issue, overlook an article, or do not attend a meeting.
But this is not the case, and it has never been the case, otherwise we would not have recorded 60 years of Lotta Comunista since December 1965. And in this decade of crisis in the world order of capitalism, it is even less the case. There are more young people, more workers and technicians, immigrants, pensioners, who ask us for explanations, and we cannot reach them all. So that extra half hour, before and after, that newspaper read with more attention, serves this purpose, the daily battle to concretely tackle that historic delay.
Another step forward
Every step in that direction is important. Our comrades in the Workers’ Clubs ask everyone to distribute the newspaper. And they must insist on asking, because things change quickly in the world, from day to day, and therefore they also change in everyone’s mind.
We must ask, but in reality, everyone already knows for themselves what extra step they could take. They know it, and they also know that it would not disrupt their personal lives. Each of us knows that we ourselves hold the decision in our hands — that extra half hour to commit to the Club, to study, to distribute, to contribute.
Therefore, committing to reading this newspaper, which must, by necessity, be difficult
, and committing to distribute that very type of newspaper are two sides of the same coin. Reading Lotta Comunista leads one to understand why it must be distributed among the masses.
While the choice of whether or not to do so is individual, everyone understands that otherwise the working class will always, as Engels said, continue to think what the bourgeoisie thinks
.
We propose distributing the newspaper — without delay — to workers and to young people. We also offer it to the immigrant who still has difficulty with our language. This is not an imposition, but the other side of the coin. Picking up the newspaper motivates the need and the effort to understand it, to make it a tool of struggle. Study and action are never separate for a revolutionary militant. They are intertwined, feeding off and into each other.
Build first
If we wish to synthesise Leninism to the utmost at the operational level (this is already present in Marx and Engels), it comes down to a single indication: the party must be built first — before any political battle, from the battles fought over 60 years to those accumulating now, and before the crises and wars that loom, even more widespread and disastrous, when the masses will be forced into motion simply to survive.
The party is built first by studying and acting to establish it in the class, to root it in the class, strengthening and selecting it in the struggles of every day. And this first concerns everyone. It unsettles everyone, because it means now, and because it requires a personal choice. And everyone knows already what personal choice they are capable of making, what step they can take, even before there is a request from our Clubs.
With the initiatives of recent months for the 60th anniversary of our newspaper, we talked to our militants, first in all our Workers’ Clubs and then in public halls, we held discussions with them, with our friends and sympathisers, and with those who were invited to these meetings but do not share our political positions; on these occasions they were perhaps able to get to know us better. And that is what matters.
In these initiatives, we took a big step forward, and we are satisfied and proud. It is a great collective step forward, but the ultimate question is: How many more steps, tomorrow, from each of us?