A party is built on strategy. The group that founded Lotta Comunista came to this conclusion at the close of the 1950s. It was the central thesis of “Class Struggles and the Revolutionary Party”, the core text of our organisation, written in 1964. As “What Is to Be Done?” had been for Lenin’s party, so “Class Struggles” has been and is for Lotta Comunista.
For Marxism, ‘strategy’ is primarily an assessment of the time-scales and forces of class dynamics, from the objective driving force - capitalist development - to the subjective strength of the revolutionary party.
In the beginning, there was the war, and its consequences for Europe – the partitions agreed at Yalta and the myth of Stalin’s USSR as the bastion of world socialism. The Genoa Pontedecimo Convention, held in February 1951, was the deed of partnership of the group that became the original nucleus of Lotta Comunista in the early ‘60s. It was a little group of workers, most of whom had been won to politics while fighting as partisans. The world and Europe were shrouded in fog in 1951. The ‘Cold War’ ideology was predominant and the war in Korea made a global confrontation between the USA and the USSR credible. The idea of ‘unitary imperialism’, the banner raised by our internationalist struggle against both Washington and Moscow with its State capitalism was the choice that ensured the political independence of that ‘handpicked unit’. Theory and strategy would both be developed from there. There were not only the USA and the USSR; global capitalist development was seething with contradictions, starting with Asia. Washington and Moscow were capitals of unitary imperialism, but they were not the only ones: there were also London, Paris, Bonn and Tokyo… not to mention Rome.
Seeing things from a scientific point of view is a conquest. Welded to organisation, it is the only way to prevent the class forces from being influenced or won over by others. Our point of reference is that one ought to know with whom one is dealing: our autonomy from the forces of capital needs to be defended tooth and nail. This is the secret of our strategy-party.
