Dear comrades,
the Political Bureau of the CC of the Communist Front (Italy) sends the warm and fraternal greeting of the Central Committee and of our entire Party to the leaders and militants of the Communist Party of Belgium (PCB-CPB) on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the United Communist Party, Belgian Section of the Communist International, the historical core which your Party originates from.
These 100 years were full of glorious and dramatic events, of which the PCB has been an active protagonist, consistent with its role as the vanguard of the Belgian proletariat, from the workers’ struggles of the early 1930s, the internationalist commitment in support of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War with the sending of fighters and material aid to the Spanish people, the organization of resistance against the Nazi-fascist occupation, up to the great struggles of the post-war period till today. Although the Eurocommunist deviation of the 1970s for some time led the PCB, as well as many other communist parties, to reformist, regionalist and revisionist positions, causing enormous damage to the Party and its prestige among the workers, you have been able to defeat it and restore the revolutionary and Marxist-Leninist character of the PCB in your 36th Congress.
The internationalist commitment that the PCB has shown on several occasions during its centenary history is exemplary. In addition to the militancy of the Belgian Communists in the International Brigades in Spain, among those many examples we would like to recall here the PCB help to the numerous Italian communists and antifascists who in the 1930s found asylum in Belgium, the political work among and in favor of the Italian proletarians who emigrated to your country and the support for the liberation struggles. In particular, we consider your struggle for the emancipation of the Congolese people from the Belgian colonial yoke to be an expression of the most authentic proletarian internationalism in the Leninist sense of the term, as a direct struggle against the imperialist interests of your own national bourgeoisie, without any social-chauvinist drift. Today, your solidarity and attention to the developments of the class struggle in Italy, which we greatly appreciate and are grateful for, are further confirmation of the internationalist spirit of the PCB.
The definitive ripening of the unrecoverable contradictions that are objective and intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production, results in increasingly frequent, longer and more destructive cyclical crises, the intensification of inter-imperialist competition for the control of markets, trade routes and the planet’s natural and energetic resources, which we know to be limited and not reproducible. This rivalry between imperialist powers for a new division of the world results in a growing number of military adventures disguised as “peace missions” or “humanitarian missions” that export “democracy” of capital through bombs and massacres of civilians and generate migratory exodus of millions of people fleeing the imperialist war. There is an increased risk that mankind will be dragged into a generalized war with devastating consequences, while the savage exploitation of natural resources poses a serious threat to the very survival of humankind and the planet.
Everywhere we are witnessing a worsening of the living and working conditions of the proletariat and the popular strata: increased exploitation, starvation wages and pensions, privatizations and cuts to essential public services, job insecurity, mass layoffs, unemployment, trampling of the most basic human rights, such as the right to work, health, education, housing, culture, a dignified old age, sacrificed on the altar of competitiveness and capitalist profit. The bourgeoisie responds to the outbreaks of social resistance with authoritarianism, police repression, legal and administrative persecution of the class vanguards, and the limitation by law of the right to strike and free labor union association, in an atmosphere of hatred and anticommunist persecution, fed in a systematic way especially by the European Union.
The labor movement and the communists are facing these new challenges from a position of extreme weakness. Especially after the disappearance of the world socialist system and the restoration of capitalism
in the countries that were part of it, we are witnessing an alarming loss of appeal of the communist prospect among the popular strata and in the most backward sectors of the same working class, within which antiMarxist, conservative and sometimes even reactionary conceptions and positions have spread, that are in any case derivatives of the dominant bourgeois ideology. Along with other contributing causes, more closely related to the capitalist restructuring of the productive system, this fact has brought about a haze, sometimes even a real loss of class consciousness, at least where the revolutionary action of the communist parties and the function of class-oriented labor unions have ceased, as in Italy, and were replaced by a parliamentarist and opportunistic practice on the political level, by theoretical disarmament and eclecticism on the ideological level, by class collaboration and the pursuit of social peace on the labor union level.
Therefore, in order to strengthen the Party and re-establish its hegemonic ability we must act simultaneously on different levels. The recovery of an organic tie with the working class that fosters its unity also on the labor union level and restores its consciousness can only pass through the physical presence of the communists in any concrete display of the class struggle, in order to transform spontaneousness into organization, the struggle for immediate claims into the revolutionary political struggle, for the proletariat to be empirically convinced, as Lenin and Gramsci taught, that the communist party is an instrument of defense of their rights and, above all, of fulfillment of their historical destiny as the class which, by freeing itself, frees the whole of society from capitalist exploitation. In this sense, the propaganda of scientific socialism within the working class and the ideological struggle against opportunism, reformism, revisionism, as well as against extremism, Trotskyism and the other deviations from the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, without which there can be no revolutionary practice, are of central importance to restore credibility and appeal to the communist prospect.
It is also necessary to act in order to lift the proletarian struggles from a merely local range and give them a broader international scope and coordination, in close connection with the WFTU and the International Communist Movement. We must counterpose the internationalization of the class struggle to the internationalization of capital.
As for the International Communist Movement, we cannot fail to note its condition of weakness, both theoretical and organizational. Opportunist positions of support for and participation in “left” bourgeois governments or the misrepresentation of inter-imperialist relations are today widely spread within it, as the result of deviations that do not take into account either the Leninist analysis of imperialism and the state, or the Leninist conception of the party. In our Party’s opinion, acting with the aim to strengthen the International Communist Movement means fighting these harmful tendencies and promoting the gathering of the most coherent parties in a revolutionary pole capable of restoring the ideological, political and organizational unity of the movement on an authentically Marxist- Leninist basis.
We have no doubts, dear comrades, that the PCB-CPB and the Communist Front (Italy) will stand together on the same barricades to overthrow capitalist barbarism. With the sincere hope of strengthening the ties, the exchange of analyzes and experiences and the collaboration between our two parties, we wish you new successes in our common struggle for Socialism-Communism.
PROLETARIANS ALL OVER THE WORLD, UNITE!
Rome, November 28, 2021.
COMMUNIST FRONT (ITALY)
The Political Bureau of the Central Committee
