Dear comrades,
It is with great pleasure that I bring greetings to this internationalist and anti-imperialist conference on the part of the Italian Communist Party and all its adherents and militants.
As all you can imagine, the world is heading towards a difficult period: strong tensions and wars that put together outline a world war in pieces are already among us, if not directly in our countries, however, at its neighboring or less close borders, however in the economies and in the lives of all citizens of every state.
We are witnessing the emergence of a new world order, the multipolar one, an order that we as Italian Communists firmly support and hope for; order that, also thanks to the cyclical actions of the countries adhering to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, sees the emergence of new decision-making centers no longer just the prerogative of the United States and the old European powers.
Cooperation between peoples and internationalism, which are the only possible ways of dialogue between different cultures and different popular traditions, have been severely tested by an opposing deadly pincer, knowingly constructed by the largest international capitalist and financial forces: on the one hand, bourgeois cosmopolitanism which has given the illusion of a globalization of civil rights without considering the intrinsic voracity of capital; On the other hand, the various nationalisms and bourgeois sovereignties that on the face criticize globalism, but in fact feed on the same dynamics of capitalist exploitation.
In Italy we have a complex situation from a political point of view, where a Communist diaspora has occurred which has dissipated energy, resources, trust and class coordination; Certainly as Communists we are paying for a great organizational confusion in the social bed, as the Democratic Party, today representing the interests of the financial bourgeoisie and an enriched middle class, has inherited the structure of the historic Italian Communist Party, benefiting from it and deliberately confusing the waters of the Italian political memory.
This does not justify the inadequacy of an entire ruling class of the communist left after the dissolution of the PCI in 1991, but the ruin of a personalistic and movementist drift of Italian communism today falls on those who, like us, still try to reconstruct a great history. In particular, we as Italian Communist Party, renewed and reconstituted in 2016, intend to fight certain ways of doing politics that have now contaminated Italian culture down to the sociological and anthropological roots: think of the Berlusconi phenomenon as the phenomenon of the person party, the media party, up to the comincia. Beppe Grillo and the 5 Star Movement that have handled the populist dissent in various chameleon-like phases. Through an unspecified democracy of the web.
Today the victory of the Brothers of Italy party, a post-fascist party but in reality sovereign only with the weak but certainly not with the Americans, places us in front of an unprecedented picture of our country’s constitutional democracy. The Republic Constitution born from the anti-fascist Resistance during the Second World War was debased from the inside by those social forces that set out to defend it: the transforming role of the Democratic Party was lethal for the credibility of the Constitution and its founding values among the younger generations, divided between purely liberal claims relating only to civil rights or engulfed by the convenient narrative of the strong man or woman who solves all problems.
This debasement of the Constitution, together with 10 years of messes in Parliament and technical governments, real political piles, from Mario Monti to Mario Draghi, was precisely the fertile ground for demagogic drifts that tried to give vent to social malaise but avoiding in all ways of bringing class conflict back to the center of public debate. These drifts have been numerous, some involved the Northern League, others the Democratic Party itself under the secretariat of Matteo Renzi which has definitively destroyed even that shred of social democratic culture that remained in that party, still others the 5 Star Movement, and finally we are arrived at Brothers of Italy which was a convenient opposition to the Draghi government, took the discontent of the petty bourgeoisie but also of the workers, and will lead it towards yet another normalization: already now Giorgia Meloni is looking for war in every way in Ukraine, on the economic action in the management of the PNRR, a continuity with the previous technical government of Mario Draghi.
What answers should a Communist Party in Italy give today? There is no model and there is no decision system that does not foresee a collective participation in the path to be taken.
We do not consider ourselves the only custodians of a truth and we do not believe that at present we are enough for ourselves: we intend to grow, take root and spread ourselves in as much of the Italian territory as possible, with a spirit of cooperation in order to create a common front of truly democratic and social forces, but we will never compromise on one thing, namely the dignity and history of the Italian Communist Party. For this reason, for two years now, for sure, we have no longer allowed on the question to obscure or hide our symbol, and mind you: it is not fetishism, but defense of a principle of democracy and values that more and more, starting from the cursed resolution of the Parliament European equation of Nazism and Communism, is questioned. The Communists in Italy were among the main promoters of the Constitution which bears the signature of the Communist Umberto Terracini.
The concept of making a party, respect for the governing bodies and at the same time the right flexibility and reasonableness in dealing with society and its various expressions must be reconstructed from the beginning, with seriousness. Leaderist shortcuts made of intransigent proclamations or, on the contrary, movementist failings will not lead to any kind of development either of a united, strong and popular communist party, or of any kind of common front with other democratic and social forces.
Only by completing a process of this type will we have the right dignity in order to honor our membership in this important anti-imperialist world platform, a platform that faces enormous challenges in a very dangerous time such as today, as well as the an ambitious goal of ensuring a just peace that respects the self-determination of peoples prevail, as the recent events of the oppression of the Ukrainian Nazis in Donbass and the war that NATO unfortunately brought to the borders of Russia teach.
We sincerely thank all the political forces who have spoken and who will speak, and the organizers of this important conference. Only united and cohesive will we win.
Comrades, go to work and fight united, for socialism!
