Translated from Battaglia Comunista #12, December 1998

In the June-September 1998 issue of the ICC’s Rivoluzione Internazionale, an article appeared entitled “The Proletarian Struggle Groups, an Unfinished Attempt to Achieve Revolutionary Coherence”. It was quickly translated and published in the ICC’s other international publications. It is fitting that we, as Party militants who work inside the Proletarian Struggle Groups, give a reply, seeing that the criticism was not only directed at the GLP, but also at the Party’s relationship with them.

We would like to begin by pointing out that reading the article caused a certain annoyance amongst the militants of the GLP, given that the assessment it made is based on a superficial reading, if not on outright prejudice. The article begins by placing the GLP

amongst the small groups of elements who are seeking to arrive at class positions - elements sitting on the fence between revolutionary coherence and the false illusory lure of leftism.

It goes on to sketch a brief history of the Groups which is already inaccurate when it states that the GLP,

in this way began a task of confrontation with some groups from the Communist Left; which ended when the majority of the members of the original group drew close to Battaglia Comunista’s positions, at least on the question of the party.

In fact it was several BC comrades who introduced the Communist Left tradition to the GLP and again it was thanks to those comrades that the GLP broke any links it had with the Autonomia camp (within which it was never integrated nor recognised) and the majority did not only “draw close” to BC, but joined BC as militants.

The article goes on to say:

However that conclusion did not lead those comrades to carry out a more precise task of confrontation in order to verify and consolidate their agreement with BC and fully integrate themselves with its activity.

This, as we have said, is false: it is in fact clear that the GLP members who joined BC consolidated and confirmed their “agreement with BC” on everything and continue to work in the GLP on behalf of the Party.

The article makes another mistake when it states that “a good proportion of the militants of the GLP originate from Autonomia”; whilst in fact only the old guard from Parma and part of the Trieste section come from that camp, and all the other comrades - an absolute majority - joined the groups only after they, thanks to BC, had definitively distanced themselves from the autonomists. The article then holds this presumed political origin to be a substantial cause of the “activism” which characterises the political activity of the GLP. An example of such activism, according to the article, is the GLP’s creation of Communist Student Groups, that is to say the organism which the GLP (alongside only one other in Parma) use in order to intervene in the schools.

The article in fact asks us,

What specifically have students got to do with a revolutionary struggle? The GLP call themselves Marxists, but Marxism has always warned that the students do not constitute a social class and politically they express a sort of petty-bourgeois rebellion.

If the writer had been better informed and studied the material produced by the GLP, s/he would probably know that the intervention they carry out in schools, through, but not only through, the Communist Student Groups, has always distinguished itself (and has therefore been fought by the “leftists”!) through its declared intent to split the contemporary student mini-movement along class lines, which also applies to the whole student world. This is because, as the GLP have always stated in the face of the dominant student-ism, the class division of society also cuts through the schools. Therefore communists should fight side by side with the children of the proletariat for the historical and immediate interests of the class they belong to after their school years, years which are preparation for their future exploitation.

We can thus ignore the criticism that students have “nothing specific to do with revolutionary struggles” and it is obvious that if the majority of the GLP’s militants, instead of being students, were workers, they would agitate in the factories rather than the schools. But we cannot manufacture the class struggle as we please.

Furthermore, this unfounded accusation perfectly corresponds to the ICC’s errors as regards teachers. Didn’t our comrades have to polemicise with the ICC at the time of the COBAS ⁽¹⁾ (1997) because while we worked to rupture the teaching sector - full of elegant bourgeois ladies - along class lines, the ICC elements labelled the whole teaching sector a proletarian category?

According to the ICC the fact that one of our comrades from Trieste was stabbed by a fascist is a product of our “leftist encrustation”, since “an important preoccupation for communists is not to get involved in this, the privileged terrain of bourgeois activity against proletarian groups”? This is rather disturbing: if the fascists of Trieste try to stop us carrying out our political activity with metal bars, “avoiding provocations” would mean stopping activity, leafleting, being present in the local areas etc. We are not interested in gang warfare, but in agitating amongst the proletariat.

The article goes on to give an absolutely distorted and arbitrary distortion of an excerpt from one of our documents on the social centres. It is obvious that our denunciation of the recent institutionalisation of many social centres does not apply to those which have not been institutionalised, and this is made clear in the rest of the document. As far as we are concerned the centres are not “liberated areas where one can carry out a communist style of social activity”, but simply places frequented by disoriented comrades attracted to the general terrain of the extra-parliamentary left, places where we can propagandise our positions.

The ICC critique goes on to point out how Battaglia’s intervention within the GLP was the cause of their lack of revolutionary coherence, because it “blocked their possible evolution”. Assertions of this type are at total variance with the real situation. The theoretical growth of the GLP occurred exclusively thanks to their very close relations with Battaglia, without which the GLP would still be floundering amongst the extra-parliamentary left in search of a class perspective. Therefore the accusation of “two or three faced militancy” directed at Battaglia militants who agitate within the GLP is completely devoid of any logical and historic foundation. Militants of the communist party, who carry out Party functions under the discipline of the Party, agitate wherever it is appropriate to do so, when it is in the interests of the Party, in terms of recruitment and putting down roots.

We leave it to our readers to make up their own minds about the confrontation between Battaglia, which sent a delegation of comrades to Trieste to be present at the trial against the fascists who had assaulted the comrades from the GLP, and the rather different

position of Bilan regarding the comrades who were killed, convinced they were fighting for communism in the Spanish War in 1936.

Besides being a ridiculous comparison, the ICC’s conclusion seems to be that when the GLP responded to the fascist aggression to defend their own political agitation, then - even if involuntarily - they were fighting for a democratic, not a communist cause.

In conclusion, it seems to us that the ICC’s own political axioms (more the result of formal logic than dialectical materialism) are unable to accommodate a political formation like the GLP which is neither a class economic organisation, nor part of the political organisation, that is to say, the Party. The fact is that the questions which Battaglia’s militants asked themselves as regards the GLP have not been very metaphysical.

• For example, are we succeeding in making these young comrades grow politically? Yes.
• Are we succeeding, via the GLP, in making ourselves known amongst young proletarians? Yes.
• Are we succeeding in using the GLP as steps for future militancy in the Party? Yes.
• Are we succeeding in doing all this by expressing our positions without compromises? Yes.

And this is what it means to concretely act for a strategic objective, about which others only dream.

(1) Committees of Base Organisations, expressions of the rank and file movement againt the official unions which are fertile ground for leftists peddling alternative unions etc. but where it is important for internationalists to intervene. See Internationalist Communist 7 for an analysis of our experience with the COBAS.