The International Communist Party
is constituted on the basis of the following principles established at
Leghorn in 1921 at the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy (section
of the Communist International).
1. Under the present social regime of capital, the conflict between the
productive forces and the relations of production develops at an ever increasing
rate, giving rise to antithetical interests and to the class struggle between
the proletariat and the ruling bourgeoisie.
2. Production relations today are protected by the power of the bourgeois
State: whatever the form of representative system and employment of elective
democratic, the bourgeois State remains the organ for the defence of the
interests of the capitalist class.
3. The proletariat can neither smash nor modify the system of capitalist
relations of production which exploits it without violently overthrowing
the bourgeois power.
4. The indispensable organ of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat
is the class party. The Communist Party, which contains the most advanced
and resolute part of the proletariat, unifies the efforts of the labouring
masses and transforms their struggles for particular group interests and
immediate gains into the general struggle for the revolutionary emancipation
of the proletariat. The party is responsible for propagating the revolutionary
theory amongst the masses, for organising the material means of action,
and for leading the working class through the course of its struggles by
ensuring the historical continuity and the international unity of the movement.
5. After overthrowing the capitalist power, the proletariat must completely
destroy the old State apparatus in order to organise itself as dominant
class and install its own dictatorship: that is to say, it will deny all
rights to the bourgeois class and individuals within it for as long as
they socially survive, and will found the organs of the new regime on the
producing class alone. The Communist Party, having set itself this fundamental
aim as the distinctive feature of its program, at the same time represents,
organises and directs the proletarian dictatorship.
6. Only by means of force will the proletarian State be able to systematically
intervene in the social economy, and adopt those measures with which the
collective management of production and distribution will take the place
of the capitalist system.
7. This transformation of the economy and consequently of the whole of
social life will gradually eliminate the necessity for the political State,
whose machinery will gradually give way to the rational administration
of human activities.
* * *
With regard to the capitalist world and the workers’ movement in the
aftermath of the Second World War, the party’s position is based on the
following points:
8. During the first half of the twentieth century capitalist economy has
seen the introduction of monopolistic trusts amongst the employers. Attempts
have been made to control and manage production and exchange by centralised
planning, right up to State management of whole sectors of production.
In the political field, there has been an increase in the strength of the
police and military arms of the State and in government totalitarianism.
None of the latter are new types of social organization of a transitional
nature between capitalism and socialism, and neither are they revived forms
of pre-bourgeois political systems. They are instead particular forms of
a more and more direct and exclusive management of power and the State
by the most advanced forces of capital.
This process rules out the pacific, progressivist and evolutionist
interpretations of the bourgeois regime’s course, and confirms our forecasts
about the classes concentrating and marshalling their forces on opposite
sides. For the proletariat to match its enemy’s strength with rekindled
revolutionary energy, it must reject, either as a demand or as a means
of agitation, the illusory return to democratic liberalism and constitutional
guarantees; the class revolutionary party must take the historic step of
liquidating once and for all the practice of making alliances, even for
transitory issues, both with the bourgeois and middle class parties, and
with pseudo-workers’ parties who have adopted reformist programs.
9. The imperialist wars have shown that the crisis of capitalist disintegration
is inevitable by decisively inaugurating a phase in which its expansion
no longer signifies a continual growth in the productive forces, but rather
an alternation of accumulation and destruction. These wars have been the
cause of a series of profound crises in the workers’ international organizations,
with the dominant classes having managed to impose military and national
solidarity on them by getting them to line up on one or other of the war-fronts.
There is only one historically viable alternative that can be posed to
this situation and that is the rekindling of class struggle within nations,
leading to the civil war of the working masses to overthrow the power of
bourgeois States everywhere, along with all their international coalitions.
The indispensable condition for this lies in the reconstitution of the
International Communist Party as an autonomous force independent of any
existing political or military power.
10. The apparatus of the proletarian State, insofar as it is a means and
arm of struggle in a transitional period between two social systems, does
not derive its organizational strength from any existing constitutional
canons or schemas that aim to represent all classes. The most complete
historical example of a proletarian State up to the present is the Soviets
(workers’ councils) during the October revolution of 1917, when the working
class armed itself under the leadership of the Bolshevik party, when the
conquest of power was accomplished by totalitarian means and the Constituent
Assembly dispersed, and when the struggle took place to repel the attacks
by foreign bourgeois governments, and stamp out the internal rebellion
of the vanquished classes, of the middle classes and opportunist parties
– the inevitable allies of the counter-revolution at decisive moments.
11. The full accomplishment of socialism is inconceivable within the borders
of one country alone and the socialist transformation cannot be effected
without failures and momentary setbacks. The defence of the proletarian
regime against the ever present dangers of degeneration can be ensured
only if the running of the proletarian State is continually coordinated
with the international struggle of the working class of each country against
its own bourgeoisie, State and military apparatus; there can be no let
up in this struggle even in wartime. The necessary co-ordination can be
ensured only if the World Communist Party controls the politics and program
of the States where the working class has attained power.