Paolo Babini | Party of Committees to Support Resistance―for Communism (Italy)
The Paris Declaration rightly points to the need to mobilize the popular masses and particularly workers in campaigns of active non-cooperation with the U.S.-NATO wars and the war economy.
In Italy, a significant example of workers’ mobilization to boycott war operations is the Genoa Autonomous Collective of Port Workers (CALP), which played a vanguard role in organizing the refusal to transport weapons destined for the imperialist war in Yemen inside ships transiting the port of Genoa. On February 25, 2023, and then again on June 25, 2024, CALP organized national demonstrations in Genoa against the war and they were joined by anti-imperialist committees and political forces from across the country.
In some cases, workers joined the mobilization of other sectors of the popular masses. Spring 2024 in Italy was marked by the mobilization, developed internationally, of university students against the genocide of the Palestinian people. Various student organizations promoted occupations with encampments for the termination of research and cooperation agreements that Italian universities have with Israeli universities and companies.
At the Bologna headquarters of FERCAM (a multinational transportation and logistics company), in solidarity with the student occupation and the Palestinian resistance, workers, many of them of Arab descent, incorporated refusing to sort Zionist goods into their contract renewal struggle.
On September 21, 2024, the No NATO Command Committee organized a demonstration against the installation in Florence of a NATO military command that would take control of the Atlantic Alliance’s land forces throughout Southern Europe. Alongside the committee, anti-war and anti-NATO base organizations from all over the country took to the streets (particularly No Muos from Sicily and A Foras from Sardinia, organizations that promote the struggle against U.S. and NATO installations in the two regions, where there are respectively 22 and 13 U.S.-NATO bases out of the more than 116 located in Italy) and workers’ collectives. In addition to the CALP from Genoa, workers from GKN (former FIAT) in Florence, the most important workers’ collective in the country in occupation of their factory for more than two years, and the Port Workers Autonomous Group (GAP) from Livorno, who are following CALP’s example, joined the demonstration. A number of grassroots unions have also taken to the streets, including CUB Rail, which recently organized a national assembly of railway workers to promote their struggle against the transport of arms by rail. USB, one of Italy’s main grassroots unions, organized a garrison on October 4 at Brescia’s Montichiari airport against the transport of weapons and all wars, mobilizing airport workers forced, even without their knowledge, to load and unload weapons.
The role of the popular masses is decisive to shape the forms of WW3. War is no longer the affair of a small group of military men. The collective character now achieved by the productive forces worldwide, the level of interconnectedness of the economy and the necessity, for the purposes of production, of the organized collaboration of millions of individuals, makes war (like any other relevant issue concerning the government of society) an operation whose main aspect is to win the active collaboration of the masses, starting with workers.
Since the role of the masses is decisive in WW3, it is the direction the mobilization of the masses will take that will ultimately decide the outcome of the war. In Donbass we have seen the role that the working class can play. As Comrade D. Patelis writes in “10 years since the heroic Donbass uprising”: “Soviet industrialization, […] made [Donbass] one of the most industrially developed parts of Europe in the 20th century. Thousands of workers of different ethnicities, and nationalities from all over the territory of the USSR flocked to Donbass to meet the needs of rapid socialist industrialization. It is here that the historical experience of the populous working class, the collectives of hundreds of thousands of workers in mining, heavy industry of various types and scales, and strategic technological processes has been concentrated for generations.” So, it is no coincidence, nor primarily an “ethnic” issue, that the region has played a vanguard role to fight the U.S.-NATO aggression against the Russian Federation since the 2014 Euromaidan coup.
In every country, mass mobilization will be transformed in a revolutionary sense as long as workers’ collectives take a vanguard role in organizing other workers and the rest of the popular masses, nationally and beyond. This is the class base of building the anti-imperialist front.
However, the experience of the popular fronts and national fronts during the first world wave of the proletarian revolution (1917-1976), has clearly shown that the Front achieves its goals the more the communists, in it, autonomously and consciously pursue the goal of building a new power, the power of the organized popular masses, which supplants that of the bourgeoisie and establishes socialism. In other words, the Front, which at its base is a front between different classes who must aggregate around the working class, advances the more the Communist Party, the conscious and organized vanguard of the working class, pursues the path of socialist revolution by conceiving of it in the terms of a Protracted Revolutionary People’s War (PRPW). This teaching, which we derive as a general law from the summation of the experience of the first world wave of proletarian revolution, is one of the specific contributions of Maoism to communist thinking.
With regard to the action of the communists in Italy in this phase, this implies developing in every sector of the population specific operations directed at:
1) denouncing military operations of the Italian Armed Forces in terms of supplying with men, means and resources the ongoing wars in Ukraine, East and West Asia and elsewhere, wars headed by the U.S. imperialists, the ultimate promoters of WW3;
2) denouncing and struggling against the multiplication of military facilities and the expansion of U.S.-NATO military bases in our country, which among other things brings about risks for health and safety of the population;
3) denouncing and sabotaging economic sanctions against countries resisting the imperialist aggression (starting with the Russian Federation) that turn against the Italian popular masses (rising cost of living, reduction of exports with dismantling of productive structures etcetera);
4) protesting against military and economic operations and rearmament that takes resources away from the “welfare state” (health service, school system, universities and other similar structures);
5) boycotting and sabotaging military operations by organizing and mobilizing workers against disguised and open attempts to send weapons, by supporting workers who refuse to cooperate in sending weapons, who organize strikes and blocks of ports and airports;
6) making both troops and officers participate in the anti-war struggle by leveraging the contradictions already existing in the Armed Forces.
This action, which combines the struggle against the external war (WW3) with struggle against the “internal war” (the undeclared war of extermination that the imperialist bourgeoisie is waging against the popular masses of our country), is synergistic with the ongoing action to extend mobilizations in support of the Palestinian resistance and against the crimes of the Zionist Entity. The anti-imperialist struggle is synergistic with the straggle to overthrow the Meloni government.
CARC Party is part of the Caravan of the (new) Italian Communist Party, the Party in Italy that has taken on the role of promoting and directing the PRPW. Consistently with this goal, the (n)ICP was founded (2004) and operates in the underground. The task that the CARC Party has taken on is to promote the multiplication, strengthening and coordination of workers’ and popular organizations and to direct these organizations and all the forces of the Front toward a goal of power, toward the establishment of a Popular Bloc Government: a democratic and sovereign government, imposed to the ruling class and its governments by making the country ungovernable. The Popular Bloc Government will be composed of trusted elements of workers’ and popular organizations and its agenda, supported by popular mobilization, will include political, economic and military measures to break the subjugation of the country to the U.S., Zionist and EU imperialist groups (measures such as the abolition of speculative public debt, nationalization of banks, re-establishment of the power of the Italian state over NATO and U.S. bases, breaking off political and military collaboration with the Zionists of Israel etcetera).
We are certain that the action of the People’s Bloc Government toward the institutions of the world imperialist system and the Vatican and its work to deal with the most serious effects of the crisis in our country will have important repercussions on the popular masses in other countries (who are also looking for a way out of the disaster of this crisis), on the international communist movement and on the anti-imperialist forces in oppressed countries.
We consider it useful for our purposes to promote at the international level coordinating bodies specifically aimed at promoting exchange of information, relations, mutual knowledge, solidarity and joint initiatives among workers’ groups around the subject of the struggle against war and the war economy, and we are willing, to the extent of our present capacity, to contribute to such work.
By promoting the anti-imperialist front and socialist revolution in our own country, an imperialist country, we make our highest contribution to the cause of the peoples in struggle throughout the world.
Long live proletarian internationalism!
