Manifesto

The spectre of communist revolution has returned to haunt the world. For more than fifty years the ruling class has believed that the demons which disturbed the proletariat last century and at the beginning of this century had been exorcised forever. In fact, the workers’ movement has never known a defeat as terrible and as long lasting as that of the last fifty years. The counter-revolution which overwhelmed the working class after its struggles in 1948, after its desperately heroic effort to create the Paris Commune in 1871, and following the demoralisation which finished off the defeat of the 1905 struggles in Russia, were nothing compared to the lead blanket which has smothered every manifestation of class struggle over the last half century. The scope of the counter-revolution reflected the terror the bourgeoisie felt in the face of the great revolutionary upsurge which followed the First World War. That was the only revolutionary wave, so far, which has really succeeded in shaking the foundations of the capitalist system. After having risen to such heights, never has the proletariat known such disaster, such despair, such discredit. And never has the bourgeoisie manifested such arrogance towards the proletariat, to the point of presenting its greatest defeats of the class as its ‘victories’ and even making the revolution seem to be an out-dated idea, a myth coming from a bygone age. But today, the proletarian flame is again alight throughout the world. In an often confused and hesitant way, but with jolts which sometimes even astonish revolutionaries, the proletarian giant has raised its head and returned to make the aged capitalist structure shake. From Paris to Cordoba, from Turin to Gdansk, from Lisbon to Shanghai, from Cairo to Barcelona; workers’ struggles have again become a nightmare for the capitalists.[1] Simultaneously, as part of the general resurgence of the class, revolutionary groups and currents have reappeared burdened with the enormous task of remaking, both theoretically and practically, one of the most important tools of the proletariat: its class party. Therefore, the time has come for revolutionaries to announce to their class the perspectives for the struggles that they are even now engaged in. To remind them of the lessons of the past so that the class can forge its future. The time has also come for revolutionaries to understand the tasks which await them as products of and active factors in the renewed struggles of the proletariat. This is why this manifesto has been written. THE WORKING CLASS: SUBJECT OF THE REVOLUTION In our epoch the proletariat is the only revolutionary class. It alone has the capacity, by seizing political power on a world scale and radically transforming the conditions and goals of production, to raise humanity out of the barbarism into which it has sunk. The idea that the working class is the class which can establish communism, that its place in capitalism makes it the only class able to overthrow the capitalist system, was already understood more than a century ago. It was forcefully stated in the first rigorous programme of the proletarian movement: the Communist Manifesto of 1848. It was brilliantly expressed in the following way by the First International: “The emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves”. Since that time generations of proletarians have kept this as their standard in their successive battles against capital. But the terrible silence in which the class was enveloped for half a century permitted the blossoming of all sorts of theories about the ‘final integration of the working class’, or of the proletariat as a ‘class-for-capital’, about the ‘universal class’ or marginal social groups as the subjects of revolution, and other outworn ideas dressed up as ‘novelties’. These ideas were combined with all the other lies of the bourgeoisie in order to continue to demoralise the workers and make them unthinkingly submit to capital. What the International Communist Current forcefully reaffirms today, therefore, is the revolutionary nature of the working class – and no other class – in the present period. But the fact is that this class, unlike the revolutionary classes of the past, does not have any economic power within the society that it must transform. This fact imposes on the working class the task of conquering political power as a precondition for its transformation of capitalism. So, unlike the revolutions of the bourgeoisie which went from success to success, the proletarian revolution necessarily must be the crowning point of a whole series of partial but tragic defeats. And the more powerful the struggles of the class, the more terrible are its defeats. The great revolutionary wave which not only put an end to World War I but continued on for a decade, is a striking confirmation that the working class is the only subject of the communist revolution and that defeat is an aspect of its struggle up until its definitive victory. The immense revolutionary movement which overthrew the bourgeois state in Russia, and made the other states in Europe tremble, even caused a muffled echo in China. It announced that the proletariat was getting ready to give the coup de grace to a system in its death throes. The proletariat was prepared to execute the death sentence pronounced by history against capitalism. Because the working class was incapable of extending its first successes of 1917 across the world, it was finally defeated and crushed. Since then, the proletariat’s revolutionary nature has been confirmed in the negative: because the working class failed in its revolution and because no other social class can make the revolution in its place, society has continued to sink inexorably into greater and greater barbarism. THE DECADENCE OF CAPITALISM The decadence of capitalism has continued since World War I, and ? in the absence of the proletarian revolution ? society cannot escape it. Capitalist decadence already appears as the worst period in the history of humanity. In the past, humanity has known periods of decadence in which there were many calamities