Dear comrades of the Democratic Socialists of America,

It was a pleasant surprise to read the article in your online magazine describing the activities in one of our internationalist workers’ clubs, the San Lorenzo club in Rome.

First of all, we were surprised by your attention towards us. Even more so by the serious, respectful, and informed approach taken by your report. In its honesty and its refusal of simple banalities, it appeared to us very different from the articles the bourgeois press dedicates to Lotta Comunista.

In fact, the goings-on within parliamentary halls so completely absorb mass media in Italy and Europe to such an extent that they completely forget what happens outside. Therefore, when they decide to turn their attention, not even to Lotta Comunista in particular, but to the workers’ movement as a whole, their incursions into this lively reality don’t go beyond caricatured descriptions of the decline of the working class, or on the fact that workers vote to the right and are predominantly racist. These two kinds of “fake news,” the first no less than the second, are not only in open contradiction to each other (how could the vote of a disappearing class determine the victory of Trump or of the Alternative for Germany [AFD]) but they, above all, also only demonstrate the distance of mass media from the social facts they would like to portray.

Your report, instead, distinguishes itself thanks to the attention it demonstrates in describing and observing from within the life of one of our internationalist workers’ clubs – a well-informed and careful description.

We appreciated the sincerity with which, in describing the large mass work that our party performs among all the social stratifications of the proletariat and the youth, you put forward what you see as the critical features of our political-organisational model, which obviously appear much different from the classical way to structure a social democratic parliamentary party.

You sharply observe our political-organisational structure and understand one of its key points when, in accurately highlighting the differences between us and yourselves, you write that we are rooted in the Leninist party model.

Correctly, you note that:

• On the one hand, our party has been organized around the principles of revolutionary Marxism since the 1950s. It’s also true that our party still has a clear political line. In addition, this distinct Marxist theoretical base and this clear political line are not a secret. Instead, they are expressed through all of our Italian and European newspapers and in the hundreds of publications of our Europe-wide publishing houses. Therefore, everyone who enters a workers’ club has all the necessary tools to inform themselves, to understand who they are dealing with, and what our party wants, easily at their disposal
• On the other hand, it is also true that we engage in activities that mobilise a truly large number of activists on a daily basis. This tireless work, that – as you point out – aims at the “radicamento” (ed: literally rooting, with the implication of settling and spreading) of this theory and this political line among the vast masses of workers and young people. Many buy our newspaper and support it every month, a small part of these people go from supporting the newspaper to activism, and an even smaller portion of this minority firmly enters the ranks of our party as cadre. Your description is more than correct, no doubt. What strikes you in particular about this Leninist model of party structuring? It was primarily (though not only) young people who initially connected with our mass work through activism, and they were involved in mobilizing actions first, without learning theory or clearly understanding our political line. Or as you write: “the dialectical style of centralism subscribed to by Lotta Comunista believes that the party can become centralized by focusing on its practical tasks at hand rather than attempting to first homogenize internal thought.”

On this point, in our opinion, your review misses the mark. We believe, instead, that the party can be centralized only and exclusively on theory. Our party, as a Leninist party, built itself precisely on the necessity of “attempting to first homogenize internal thought.” We have always kept ourselves to the Marxist point of view supported by Lenin: “without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement.” Because of this, we have always defined ourselves as a “science-party,” a “strategy-party.” It is thanks to this science-strategy, to this painstakingly achieved theoretical homogeneity and the organizational choices that inevitably result from it, that our party has “been able to overcome the same organizational flaws that sank so many other Marxist parties during its lifetime.”

Only thanks to our fidelity to science and strategy—two precious acquisitions of a multigenerational elaboration that goes back to Marx and Engels—have we achieved notable success in our radicamento, although it is never enough. To emphasize: the secret to our successes in struggle isn’t activism without theoretical comprehension, rather it is theory that produces activism. The practical tasks that, as you note, we entrust prematurely to young people and workers interested in the party are not an end in themselves. They are a practice ring of practical-political problems that encourage further study of theory and strategy. A young person in charge of directing other young people needs to study to explain the practical tasks (which always originate from political tasks) to their less experienced comrades. And the more complicated practical tasks become, the more necessary an in-depth study of Marxist theory and the internationalist strategy of the party becomes. It’s from this decades-old practice ring that the new cadre of our party emerges. Because ours is a cadre party that needs to be rooted within the masses, immune to the trends (or more precisely, the ideologies) that the bourgeoisie spreads through its mass media to the working class.

As such, you can begin to understand why, as a party organization, we do not define ourselves by the concepts of bourgeois democracy.. In the German Ideology (1845-46), Marx and Engels explain that a communist party cannot and should not accept these democratic principles as an organization because it is simply a fact that the ideas of the dominated class are always the ideas of the dominant class. So we use our propaganda and agitation to struggle against these ideas of the dominant class that have permeated the proletariat, ideas which are spontaneously reflected in the consciousness of the youth and the workers.

On 12th September 1882, Engels wrote to Karl Kautsky: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as what they think about politics in general: the same as what the bourgeoisie thinks.”

Thus, why does a young person or a worker in Europe gravitate towards Lotta Comunista?

Because they feel that the primary struggle in the world is between exploiters and the exploited, and so they choose to be on the side of the exploited. This is the instinctive choice that brings people to our clubs. But, is it enough? No.

People who frequent our clubs acquire a specific style of work and mentality. The exploiters have strong organizations (such as states, financial capital institutions…), while the exploited are completely disarmed. Thus, they need to be organized, and they need to be organized with discipline. They need to take on responsibilities and learning how to manage them. You rightfully write of a “culture of accountability.” But, is organization enough? No.

It is not enough, because the organization of the exploited needs to be independent from the political, economic, and financial power of the exploiters. This result can only be reached by self-financing. The exploited masses need to guarantee the independence of their party. Every other path is an illusion.

This is the path that the Bolsheviks followed with the mass circulation of the Iskra, the model revolutionary newspaper. When Lenin spoke of the workers’ newspaper as a “collective organizer,” he not only saw it as a source of self-financing but also as a link that ties activists and cadres together. It fosters unity around a shared vision of the political and strategic tasks of the party. A unity that multiplies the effectiveness of our organizational structure. We follow this path with the distribution of our newspaper Lotta Comunista in factories, working-class neighbourhoods, and schools and universities. Every euro collected is a guarantee of independence; at the same time, every newspaper in circulation extends the network of communist consciousness that gathers around the party. But is it enough? No.

The next step that our activists take is a long apprenticeship where they learn to begin to understand that an organization without a clear revolutionary theory and without a strategy on “What is to be done?” remains an organization on sale on the political market. Sooner or later, the exploiters will conquer such an organization and use it for their own goals. It happened with European social democracy in 1914 and repeated with Stalinism in the 1930s.

What connects a young person or worker to Lotta Comunista after entering a workers’ club, then? The science-strategy, which explains the international struggles of our time. In learning the science-strategy, an occasional activist transforms into a lifelong cadre.

What is unitary imperialism? What prospects open up the decline of the Atlantic and the rise of the great continental powers of the Pacific? How can an internationalist party, established in the heart of old European imperialism, play a role in the hollow and violent clash that is opening up new partitions of the world between the old and new continental powers? These are the decisive issues we discuss and provide in the Marxist analyses that we regularly publish in our newspaper and in the regular debates held at our clubs. These are all issues that can hardly be resolved with a democratic majority of 50%+1.

And here we reach another of your observations concerning the “absence of democratic procedures.” In fact, it’s pointed out that “the heavy emphasis on party work leaves little space for the formulation of the party’s political line by the activist base.”

Here, we also want to compare two forms of party struggle. Can a revolutionary party, a party struggling against the concentrated and imposing force of the imperialistic bourgeoisie, organize itself along the lines of internal democracy?

This obstacle separated Bolshevism from social democracy.

However, you legitimately identify a contradiction between the clear definition of a theory and its resulting political line, and the “absence of democratic procedures.” Lenin confronted this issue in 1902, when he made it clear that the party is the vanguard of the proletariat and that its structure needs to be founded on a firm core of “professional revolutionaries,” using science and the strategies that follow from it.

Besides, did “democratic procedures” stop German social democracy from supporting the imperialist war in 1914? No. Did the admission of an indistinctive mass in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) prevent the rise of Stalin to power? Did it prevent Great Russian chauvinism from taking over the party that was once Lenin’s? Did they prevent Stalin’s party from throwing itself into the Second Imperialist World War? No. And the “democratic procedures” that play such a big part in the internal life of the Democratic Party of the USA, have they prevented it from being an expression of significant fractions of the financial bourgeoisie of your country? No. As you can see, the problem is more complicated, far more complicated.

We would like to highlight one last aspect.

Bourgeois democracy, the current state form of class oppression, is undoubtedly founded on “democratic procedures”, but this does not prevent a handful of oppressors from overturning them in the interests of the exploitation of one by another. Marxism also has its scientific point of view on this subject. Friedrich Engels wrote that in the bourgeois democratic republic: “wealth exerts its power indirectly, but all the more surely. On the one hand, in the form of the direct corruption of officials, of which America provides the classical example; on the other hand, in the form of an alliance between government and Stock Exchange, which become easier to achieve the more public debt increases and the more joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transportation but also production itself, using the Stock Exchange as their center.”

Nonetheless, even if the internal life of the revolutionary party cannot conform to democratic principles, we Marxists should uphold the model of the Commune of Paris. The emancipation of the masses requires all posts to be open to election and swift recall, and any post that serves a public function for the exploited masses deserves a worker’s wage. This will ensure that democratic procedures will allow, for the first time, the majority to hold power and, also for the first time, use it for emancipation and not oppression.

We communists have always believed in the great potential of the workers’ movement in America, with its endemic internationalist character, as a de facto union of workers originating from all areas of the world. Not surprisingly, it is in your country that the International Labor Day has its origins, a day that we continue to celebrate in all the cities where we are present. Not surprisingly, America is the home country of internationalists such as Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, and John Reed. The history of American socialism is part of our history as an international class.

In the new international context of crisis of the world order, of the rising threat of ever more destructive imperialist wars, and even the possibility of a new imperialist worldwide massacre, we firmly believe that the glorious internationalist tradition in America can bring a decisive contribution to the struggle against imperialism and war.

Fraternal greetings,

The youth cell of the Internationalist Workers’ Club of San Lorenzo in Rome