The Twenty Theses of the Collective of Communist Prisoners of the Red Brigades-December 1980

DISARTICULATE THE STATE!

CONSTRUCT THE COMBATANT COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE REVOLUTIONARY MASS ORGANIZATIONS!

WIN THE MASSES TO THE ARMED STRUGGLE FOR COMMUNISM!

“We are the leaders and organizers of the revolutionary war and the leaders and organizers of the life of the masses: we have two responsibilities: to organize revolutionary war and to alleviate the living conditions of the masses.”

-Mao

1: The current political conjuncture falls between two phases: we are no longer in the phase of armed propaganda, although we are not yet in the phase of civil war. This means we are in a transitional conjuncture.

We must pay close attention to the specificities and to the contradictions which distinguish this conjuncture and not underestimate the fact that the transition from the one to the other phase may well occupy a prolonged period.

This transitional conjuncture depends in fact on both the structural evolution of the capitalist/imperialist crisis and the subjective capacity of the metropolitan proletariat to construct a Combatant Party and to condense its antagonism into a Revolutionary Power System, autonomous, articulated and diffused within all sectors of the class and within all its centers.

The central problem of the current conjuncture is winning the masses to the armed struggle which primarily poses the question of the revolutionary mass organisms.

2: The revolutionary mass organisms have emerged as a result of the objective development of the crisis-restructuration-internationalization of capitalism, which alters the composition of the class and drives certain sectors of the metropolitan proletariat to a a way of life which is an increasingly intense relation of antagonism to the mode of production and the state.

On the other hand, entwined with this objective movement, there is the initiative of armed propaganda which the Combatant Communist Organizations have continually developed over the past decade, in order to anchor within the proletariat a consciousness of the necessity and the possibility of communist revolution in the imperialist metropole.

Currently, this initiative is not adequate to the new objective and subjective conditions, and the politico-military vanguard, in order to fulfill its function, must be able to organize and lead entire sectors and strata of the class on the terrain of armed struggle.

The qualitative leap from Combatant Communist Organization to Party is confirmed by this test and not so much in direct debate between organizations. Or, more precisely, this clash of political lines, must in the first place live internal to the revolutionary mass organisms in which the metropolitan proletariat expresses its interests, its needs, its aspirations, its power.

It must be understood, that if our organization has not currently actualized the leap to the Party, this is not on account of our not having built unity with the other guerrilla groups via a direct debate; a confrontation which is always occurring in diverse and contradictory forms. The root cause is actually to be found in the embryonic further development of the objective and subjective conditions of the revolutionary process, which don’t allow the “leap” of the politico-military vanguard, essentially stabilized in a relation of “propaganda” with the masses, towards a organic politico-military vanguard, which leads and organizes the political and military struggle of strata of the class.

To force this situation would be pure voluntarism. The possibilities are given by the current phase of the transition. Indeed, the construction of the Combatant Communist Party develops together with and interpenetrates, with the process of organization of the masses on the terrain of armed struggle, and the one is not possible without the other.

3: the Mass Work of our Organization, however, must not be exclusively internal to the revolutionary mass organisms.

The complexity of the metropolitan proletariat, demands that our initiative occur in multiple political, organizational, military, ideological, and theoretical forms, in order to reach and connect all the communist elements, to consolidate a vanguard presence in all areas, strengthen its structures, and extend its complex ramifications in every sector of the metropolitan proletariat.

4: In the past few years there has emerged an area of antagonistic practices which we have designated the Proletarian Movement of Offensive Resistance. These practices while not limited to them, have assumed various organized politico-military forms, and a tentative dialectic links them around the older Combatant Communist Organizations. In the current conjuncture, we cannot limit ourselves to taking note of this magmetic heterogeneity, but we must redouble our efforts to grasp the trends destined to grow and those condemned to perish.

The criteria which allow us to produce this balance sheet of experience are the ones we have always employed throughout our history: everything which expresses the real movement of the class, even if partial, everything generated by profound objective causes, is the new which will expand and grow stronger; to the contrary, the initiatives of rootless groups, whatever form they assume, because they are voluntarist and subjective, will under no circumstances be able to adapt and resist under new conditions.

The mass work of the Organization must not overlook this dialectic, unless we want to flatten the Proletarian Movement of Offensive Resistance into a homogeneous totality, free of contradictions, movement and life.

It should help the new to grow and the old to die.

5: What should be the goal of the mass work of the Organization internal to the revolutionary mass organisms which even if partial, express the real class movement, or, more generally within those proletarian strata which incubate a degree of revolutionary consciousness or already display antagonistic practices but still at an embryonic stage?

First of all it should be clarified that the revolutionary mass organisms must not be understood as “party organisms” or “transmission belts” but as instruments of mass power within which the Party operates together with other revolutionary militants and the most advanced and combative elements of the class.

We must always keep in mind that the civil war is the war which the revolutionary proletariat launches in order to conquer power and establish its dictatorship. It is not a “communist war” or a “communist dictatorship”. The communists are not fighting in order to establish themselves as a “Party” but in order to assert the interests of the proletariat and its dictatorship.

Lenin says:

“The idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone is a very serious and dangerous error for communists. A vanguard fulfills its role only through its capacity to avoid separation from the masses it leads and when its able to lead the whole of the masses forward.”

In other words, the revolutionary mass organisms are organisms of politico-military combat which the proletariat generates for itself on the basis of its immediate needs. Their politico-military character finds its origin in the fact that the political and economic crisis of our social formation has reached the point where the struggle for immediate objectives comes into open contradiction with the process of restructuring which the imperialist bourgeois attempts to impose by all means.

The struggles waged by proletarians for their immediate needs find themselves immediately opposed by the resistance of the State, which intervenes with all of its apparatuses, unionist, political, manipulative and police..,to neutralize and smash.

Hence the necessity, for every proletarian struggle which intends to assert the vital needs of the masses to become a struggle for power, which is to say the realization of a synthesis between economic objectives and the politico-military conditions for their actualization.

Certainly, this tendency manifests itself in a contradictory form, but is precisely this real contradictoriness which the Organization must rest within to begin to “exist as a Party” growing and continuing to exercise its function as a politico-military vanguard.

Besides the work of organization of the masses within the revolutionary mass organisms, the Party also carries out a “real” work directly with the masses, aimed at embedding and consolidating itself among them.

This work is with the most advanced and combative elements of the proletariat, who share the program, for the construction of the “mass” organizations of the Party, of networks which carry out different tasks: from propaganda, to logistical support, to infiltration of the enemy, to recruitment.

The “leap” to the Party is defined today by the practical capacity to make the general emerge from the particular and to make the general live within the particular. The construction of the combatant communist Party and the permanent organization of mass power, are not two separate processes in space or time, but two aspects of the same problem: the consolidation of the System of Red Power.

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6: This introduces another question: the Mass Line of the Organization, that is to say the question of the Program of Transition to Communism, in its Conjunctural Form and in its Immediate Form.

Without a Program of Transition to Communism which explains the social objectives of the war it is not possible to identify all the proletarian sectors with an objective interest in it.

This program, on the other hand, is not born out of nowhere, but from ten years of proletarian struggle, of practical and radical critique of the factory and of the capitalist social formation, they have already sketched the broad outline, in its essential content, which we can summarize as follows:

-Reduction of labor time: work for all, less work; massive liberation of social time and construction of the social conditions for its advanced utilization.

-Recomposition of manual and intellectual labor, of work and study, in every individual and throughout the course of their life.

-Overthrow of the exercise of power and of the flow of planning of collective tasks, in all levels of social life.

-Requalification of production, and of the human-nature relationship, on the basis of collectively defined and historically possible use values.

-Redeployment of our social formation in accordance with the principles of an effective proletarian internationalism.

The condition of this program is the transcendence of capitalist relations of production, production based on exchange value.

This has nothing to do with utopia. This is a program which as Marx would say “does not leave the pilers of the house standing”, because its foundation is already fully mature. It is a matter of a program continually alluded to in the struggles of the most conscious proletarian subjects which violently break with the immanent and conservative tendencies of capitalist development and clash with the state in a antagonistic form.

This is, however, an incomplete program which seeks its most developed identity in the revolutionary struggle. The growth of proletarian power coincides with this search and it concerns all leading revolutionary organizations. This is the decisive task of acting as a Party in the current conjuncture!

It is a difficult task, because while recomposing the metropolitan proletariat within a unitary schema of social transformation, one must keep in mind the multiplicity of figures which comprise it and which have historically built separate trajectories or even “identities”.

It must also, ultimately, manifest in a General Political Program of the Conjuncture within which there can develop the subjective conditions and level of organization necessary, for the perspective of transition to Protracted Anti-Imperialist Civil War.

The revolutionary struggle is in fact simultaneously against the imperialist State and the mode of production which it defends and for communism.

A Political Program which summarizes the fundamental aspirations and articulates the various sectors of the metropolitan proletariat is therefore a program of destruction and construction.

As Mao says:

“There is no construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation; it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which is construction. Put destruction first, and in the process you have construction.”

The development of a general political program of the conjuncture for the transition to civil war, is indispensable in order to make possible a initiative “for the Party” in every specific sector of the metropolitan proletariat for their homogeneous articulation in immediate political programs and thus unifying the masses within a unitary strategic schema, within a common project of construction of Red Power.

The general political program, must synthesize, with clear and effective slogans, the principle contradiction in this conjuncture, against which the total concentrated force of the Party, the revolutionary mass organisms and the revolutionary mass movements must be deployed.

The immediate political programs must instead identify the specific, particular aspects which the principle contradiction assumes for each sector of the metropolitan proletariat.

The relation between the General Program and the Immediate Program is not a relation of separation but lives within a precise dialectic. Which is to say that, juncture after juncture, the first lives in its realization and its concretization through the second, not to mention, naturally in the direct practice of the Party, the revolutionary mass organisms and the revolutionary mass movements.

The immediate program is not, as deemed by the spontaneists, the immediate representation of the most urgent among the interests which each proletarian sector has the need to resolve. Instead it expresses those real, strategic, interests, which the balance of forces accomplished, make it possible to put on the agenda.

It is even less, as it is regarded by the economists, a platform of rivindicative demands. In other words, the immediate program does not privilege the economic struggle, the resistance to the capitalists in the words of Engels, in relation to the political struggle, struggle which has political power, state power as its specific objective.

Marx and Lenin have been very clear in this regard:

“The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.”

And Lenin adds:

“It is not enough that the class struggle becomes real, consistent and developed only when it embraces the sphere of politics…..Marxism recognises a class struggle as fully developed, “nation-wide”, only if it does not merely embrace politics but takes in the most significant thing in politics—the organisation of state power.”

Another matter which it is important to make clear: the relation between the economic struggle and the political struggle. All the economists have always gone a long way into confusion in this respect, deriving the politics of the class directly from the economy. But political struggle is not simply “the most developed, broadest and most active form of the economic struggle” as Lenin pointed out.

It has a specific object: the State.

Marx again:

“…every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.[…….]”

the immediate political program should therefore be understood as a Program for Power, that expresses a relation of power, which has state power as its objective. Therefore, they constitute the revolutionary spirit which gives life to the organization of class power, the Revolutionary Mass Organisms, which beyond contingency, beyond the immediate and the partial, situates them within the decisive dialectic between revolution and counter-revolution.

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7: The dominant characteristic of the general political program in this transitional conjuncture is winning the masses to the armed struggle and their organization on that terrain, both essential conditions for the passage to widespread civil war.

This passage does not seem to be objectively possible without the patient assembly of all the organizational instruments which the situation demands. Which is say without the metropolitan proletariat having acquired the politico-military capacity to deploy force as a unitary agent, even though its multiplicity of forms demands a complicated structure.

The System of Proletarian Power is exactly the organized, autonomous and offensive manifestation of this unity of multiplicity. The growth of red power in the imperialist metropole hinges upon three decisive points which simultaneously define its historical originality with relation to, for example, the Soviet and Chinese experiences.

A: It is consolidated in the sites of maximum density of enemy power, as its organized antagonistic negation. It lacks actual liberated territory, therefore it combats the enemy within his own territory, and within his institutions: the capitalist factory, the neighborhood, the prison, the school.

It is not “legal” but draws its legitimacy from the consensus which its action receives among the proletarian masses.

B: It manifests in the form of invisible red bases the clandestine networks of the masses, which operate within the vital centers of the capitalist social formation, assuming the totality of the tasks required by a proletarian revolution, which aspires to be social, which means to involve the totality of social relations, starting from production which is fundamental.

As they attack, degrade, disarticulate, and shatter the existing state apparatus, they construct the stable institutions of proletarian dictatorship, the proletarian State, and exercise this dictatorship in ever more decisive and extensive theoretical, political and coercive forms.

C: Red power is therefore process, relation and system.

Process, because it produces and strengthens itself through the destruction of the enemy power.

Relation, because it lives only insofar as there is negation/destruction of the imperialist state and the mode of production it defends.

System, because it is internally stratified in a complex and articulated dialectic, of multiple levels of consciousness and organization, an expression of the diverse figures which comprise the metropolitan proletariat and their history.

The system of red power, is precisely the organized, autonomous, articulated and offensive expression of this “unity in multiplicity”, and cannot tolerate a unilateral reduction to one or the other of its essential components, which are: the combatant communist Party in formation, the revolutionary mass organisms, the revolutionary mass movements.

Furthermore, it cannot accept separation between the “political” and the “military” in any of its forms of existence, that is because in the protracted proletarian class war for communism form and content coincide.

The defense of this essential principle, in every phase of the revolutionary struggle, and in each organ of the system of red power, constitutes an essential condition for the victory of the class.

It necessary to criticize the thesis which asserts that the system of red power is constructed in itself and not in relation to the enemy power, bourgeois power.

Essentially this thesis negates that the foundation of the power of both camps is the practices of the classes in struggle. It does not understand that power is a relation of force between classes, or rather,

an assemblage of relations which dialectically connect, on all levels of the capitalist social formation, the social classes in their antagonistic interests.

A proletarian power “separate” and “independent” of bourgeois power, is not given on any level, not the economic, not the ideological, and certainly not the political. The power of a class is in fact its capacity to realize its own specific interests internal to the relations of domination and subordination which it determines and from which it is determined. Class power, therefore, is the totality of organized practices which it develops in relation to the other class, in order to assert and impose its own interests.

Organized practices, for the purpose of realizing economic, political and ideological interests.

Organized practices against the organized practices of the other, for the purpose of negating those interests and imposing those of the other.

This is the essence of class war, that is why it is defined as its subjects, on the one hand the State, which is the “center of the exercise of power”, political, military, and increasingly ideological and economic, of the imperialist bourgeois; on the other hand the System of Red Power.

Construction of proletarian power, means struggle against the power of the opposed class. Outside of this relation, in metropolitan capitalist society, there is no practice of power, which can effectively bring liberation for the proletariat.

It is in the attack on the heart of the State that the horizon of its class interests broadens, more and more fully relying on its general political program, strengthening and extending its autonomy.

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8: The revolutionary mass organisms, because they are manifestations of proletarian power, have their own legality which is directly opposed to “democratic legality”.

This being the case, the “defense of bourgeois legality” comes to be definitively excluded from the perspective of the metropolitan proletariat.

In other words, the revolutionary mass organisms practice self-legalization, and impose their organized force.

The concept of “mass clandestinity” should therefore be related to all the mediating forces which express this proletarian legality.

On the one hand, the revolutionary mass organisms, in fact must be clandestine, in order to protect themselves from the attacks of the State, and in order to secure the best conditions for [their own] attack, on the other, they impose with their own politico-military offensive a relation of power and therefore their own revolutionary legality, also constraining the enemy at levels of clandestinity proportionate to their force.

9: In its mass work within the revolutionary mass organisms, the organization must avoid two ever present deviations, these are:

-not grasping the dynamic character of these organisms, namely not seeing that the direction of their development is that defined by the next phase, which is to say the widespread anti-imperialist civil war (the economist deviation).

-Confusing this transitional conjuncture with the not yet mature phase of civil war, which involves an underestimation of the dominant characteristic of the current General Political Program (winning the masses to the armed struggle) and a subjectivist and adventurist interpretation of the current revolutionary mass organisms as already operating units of the Red Army ( the militarist deviation).

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10: The definition of our current tasks, however, must not be considered separately from the definition of the dominant characteristic of the next phase, because we are in a transitional conjuncture. In the anti-imperialist civil war the dominant characteristic of the General Political Program will be the annihilation of the politico-military forces of the enemy and the conquest of political power.

That is why the dominant function of the revolutionary mass organisms in the phase of anti-imperialist civil war will be that of a Red Army.

Defining the revolutionary mass organisms in the current conjuncture of transition as units of the Red Army in formation emphasizes the dynamic character of these politico-military organisms of proletarian power and the objective tendency which characterizes the political movement of the class in our epoch, which is to say, the transition to civil war.

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11: Disarticulate the Imperialist State

The Resolution of the Strategic Directorate of the Red Brigades from February 1978 asserts:

“The primary tactic of the guerrilla in this conjuncture is the disarticulation of the forces of the enemy.

Disarticulation of the enemy forces means carrying out an attack whose principle objective remains that of propagandizing for armed struggle and its necessity, but in it already beginning to operate with the tactical principles of the next phase-the destruction of the forces of the enemy. This attack must propagandize the political line of the politico-military vanguard and at the same time disarticulate the new forms being assumed by the imperialist state.”

The new tasks demand a deepening of this thesis.

The assertion that the principle aspect of guerrilla initiative in this transitional conjuncture is still that of armed propaganda, does not mean setting limits to the intensity and the form of armed attacks. It means to say that the targets of these attacks-by the objective function which they perform in the apparatus of the imperialist counter-revolution, by the accuracy and precision of their selection, by their symbolic content, by their resonance with the aspirations of broad proletarian strata-must lend themselves to a clarification, with the maximum lucidity of the General Political Program.

But that is not the only aspect of the problem.

There are actually two essential determinations of armed propaganda in the current phase.

–The efficiency of disarticulation with relation to the central mechanisms of transmission of power, and namely with relation to those key points, those vital nerve centers which enable the imperialist bourgeois to elaborate its economic and political projects, to control the social, and to translate them into counter-revolutionary practice.

-The efficiency of unification with relation to the Proletarian Movement of Offensive Resistance, namely their capacity to promote the work of the party towards an increasingly broad accumulation of organized revolutionary forces and their mobilization around the slogans of the General Political Program and the Immediate Political Program with the objective of disarticulating the conjunction of the peripheries of all the instruments which transmit-impose bourgeois power.

12: The disarticulation of the “central mechanisms” and the “peripheral conjunctions”, by means of which the imperialist bourgeois elaborates, transmits and imposes its projects of domination, and develops its counter-revolutionary practices, is not via a sum of military actions, but an extremely difficult art which demands Specific Strategies for each particular field of the exercise of power.

Our experience has taught us the importance of carrying out each of these specific strategies of disarticulation by means of Campaigns.

In general by Campaign we mean a diversified offensive action, which strikes the chain of power on multiple levels, which is spatially extensive and temporally prolonged, which is centered on a fundamental target, and which is bound up with profound tensions, latent or manifest, which boil within the metropolitan proletariat.

Transcending the phase of more or less disconnected actions, and Moving towards Campaigns responds to a precise necessity of this particular conjuncture and is a essential achievement of the guerrilla in the metropole.

Moving towards Campaigns means certain specific things, which can be summarized:

-Locating the initiative of the party itself internal to and at the highest point of the Proletarian Movement of Offensive Resistance.

-Translating the revolutionary potential dispersed within the working class and the diverse sectors of the metropolitan proletariat into a organized and continual practice of offensive combat.

-Giving continuity to the initiative of the vanguard, in order to allow an accumulation which broadens the effects of disarticulation, and propels to maximum intensity the process of attrition, scission and disintegration of the enemy power.

In our experience we have learned that Continuity is a decisive factor. Opening a Combat Front with some actions or a Campaign in fact means issuing a directive, inspiring aspirations, promoting within the molecular fabric of the class intense discussion on the strategic and tactical significance of the strikes carried out, and therefore the discourse takes on the function of a political self criticism.

As if they said: we have been following a mistaken line of combat, and that’s why we dropped it.

Continuity in action is not conversely “one blow after another”. It is rather giving the campaign a wave pattern, so that the effects of propaganda, the effects of disarticulation, and the effects of attrition accumulate in successive surges.

Getting more specific, we want to say, that once opened, a front of combat should no longer be abandoned, and our action as a Party must consist of promoting, leading and organizing offensive Campaigns in successive waves, in order to concentrate all the accumulated force at the various levels of the system of proletarian power, and propelling it, within an appropriate and specific strategy against the human-targets, dens, facilities and structures, which materialize the contradictions that attack their combined interests.

13: Selective attack and annihilation

In this transitional conjuncture, each specific strategy of disarticulation necessarily implies a Selective Logic in attacks, a “surgeons hand”, and this for the simple reason that this is the way to the maximization of political results.

It is easy to understand, that not all its personal or hideouts have the same strategic importance for the imperialist State, that not all the conceivable-possible attacks, deepen and extend the internal contradictions of the enemy in the same way.

Opening up contradictions within the enemy, preventing their recomposition, deepening them with relentless offensive action, continual, exhausting, are essential objectives which can only be accomplished with selective attacks.

It is necessary now to dismiss a misunderstanding which has emerged regarding the concept of Annihilation. The concept of annihilation, in itself, in its pure military determination, emphasizes only the form of action, and does not define either the phase of armed propaganda or that of civil war, although in the later, it becomes the predominant content. Actually, we have always asserted that there is no contradiction between armed propaganda and annihilation operations, as there is no contradiction between widespread civil war and annihilation. The fact that there is no contradiction, does not mean however that recourse to this form of military action follows the same laws in the two phases. In the phase of armed propaganda, annihilation operations are inscribed within a strategy of disarticulation whose dominant tactical principle is Selectivity. It is involved in relation to the targets who concentrate the maximum flood of proletarian hate, or in any case that the objective function of the target on the terrain of the counter-revolution, is evident to such a degree, that it enables immediate and unambiguous comprehension by the masses. In this phases “excesses” constitute downright serious political errors, as they allow the psychological counter-guerrilla to disguise the primary message which we intend to promote, and thus confuse and suppress the objective we pursue. This discourse, in its broad outline, remains valid, also for the current transitional conjuncture, which nonetheless evolves rapidly towards a new phase.

Operations of annihilation fit completely within campaigns of disarticulation, which must be conduced in this conjuncture, and are also inscribed within a strategy characterized by the tactical principle of selectivity. In distinction to the previous phase, however, here it is the Objective Function which prevails over the Subjective Role (and the symbolic dimension), played by this or that functionary of the imperialist counter-revolution, because the guerrilla, without having exhausted the tasks of propaganda, is already preparing the demolition of the Strategic Connections which enable the imperialist State to impose its domination. This requires that recourse to this form of military action is combined with the maximum of political rigor in the determination of targets, and with the minimum of “excesses”, in order to put a rock in the mouth of every interested speculation which the opportunists of all kinds make at every opportunity.

Every annihilation action is a communicative action, therefore, in the imperialist metropole, the more audacious and profound the annihilation action is, the more transparent must be the political message which accompanies it. In fact, in the imperialist metropole, where the mass media and the centers of the psychological counter-guerrilla vivisect every revolutionary operation to find its “use” of every flaw, political rigor in the definition of a campaign is an extensive, incessant, capillary, instrumental action of mass clarification, which is determined through combative propaganda and agitation.

The rifle, alone, does not speak a sufficiently clear language to the proletarian masses!

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14: The rapidity with which the process of crisis-restructuring-internationalization and the offensive resistance and tenacity of the metropolitan proletariat develops, forces the bourgeois to launch in this conjuncture an attack on a vast scale on the life of the masses at all levels.

In that context even the struggle for the defense of Immediate Interests becomes increasingly antagonistic with capital’s need for valorization and therefore increasingly assumes the character of a struggle for power. The main thread of the general offensive of the imperialist bourgeois is the content of the “Triennial Plan”, and the more precise, ambitious plan for the regulation of economic and social movements which it advocates, and the institutional conditions which it demands.

Internal to the axis economy-State, and with relation to it, there emerges a redefinition, of the function of the state, together with on one hand, the relations of force between the parties and on the other between the classes. An experience already diffused throughout the proletariat is that there is a total state apparatus which descends into the field against every single struggle, when the latter goes beyond the outlined confines of the “Plan”.

The unanimity of the political universe, with the unions, and of both with the police and the carabinieri, is an everyday story which does not have to be retold.

From the proletarian side, the sabotage of the restructuring plan, the politico-military struggle against the government which imposes it, the attack on the coercive institutions which mandate the militarization of the class confrontation on all levels are more and more inextricable.

This forms the basis for a single line of combat which proposes the organization of entire strata on the terrain of anti-imperialist civil war without implementing a separation mechanico-economist/militarist between the so called immediate needs and the strategic need for communism.

The articulation of this line in each specific movement of the class, leads to the determination of the Immediate Program which assembles the most radical political tensions and therefore even more immediately antagonistic to the State. It is not difficult to understand that the struggle against the constraints imposed by the “Triennial Plan” for immediate needs, other then the need for communism, allows us to articulate a politico-military intervention, which from the factories, the services, the neighborhoods and the prisons, goes back to the heights of the State.

This allows us to connect the action of disarticulation of the central mechanisms with that of the peripheral conjunctions.

15. SMASH THE DC, GOVERNMENT PARTY, BACKBONE OF THE IMPERIALIST COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN OUR COUNTRY

The DC in power for over thirty years, has been constituted as a System of Power, capable of regenerating and consolidating, beyond any ideology, its own economic and social base.

The DC is not only the political expression of a class, the bourgeois, in all of its stratifications, but also the Contractor Party, and the State Party, It’s these characteristics which make a distinct party: the Government Party.

There are no vital nerve centers of our socio-economic formation which escape the command and control of the DC hydra. Its tentacles penetrate all the key positions of the economy, the state administration and bureaucracy, the mass media.

THE DISARTICULATION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE DC IS A ESSENTIAL MOMENT OF THE DISARTICULATION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE STATE

The initiative of the revolutionary forces must be characterized as a genuine Line of Combat, stable and with a precise continuity. However, in order to ensure that this attack is really effective, able to produce strategic contradictions, it must be centered on the men and structures of the party which:

-which are an expression of the cliques of the private and State imperialist bourgeoisie, namely its dominant faction.

-which play the central role and function of command, management and political elaboration, in both the party and the State.

The link between the DC and the “Triennial Plan” is obvious. The DC is the political spirit of this “Plan”. It provided the brain power for its elaboration, the technicians for its design, the bureaucrats for its dissemination. It gives a blank check to the coercive apparatuses for the repression of anyone who opposes it.

The interconnections between the “Plan”-DC-State currently constitutes the central target

If this is the basic line, which must articulate revolutionary intervention, that does not mean that our initiative does not have to contend also with aspects of the principle contradiction, where the general plan is not entirely dominant, which have acquired a dominant character in the specific reality of the movement.

The capacity to articulate our intervention at every level and within every site where the class lives its relation of oppression and exploitation with the bourgeois and its defenders, is the decisive element in the birth, organization and development of a strong revolutionary mass movement.

The construction of Red Power depends on this!

16. ANNIHILATE THE ECONOMIC APPARATUSES OF THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION!

BREAK THE LINKS OF BOSS COMMAND!

DISMANTLE THE POWER OF THE NEO-CORPORATIVE UNIONS!

The anti-proletarian strategy condensed in the “Triennial Plan” is being drawn up and directed in very specific hideouts and is transmitted through a specific articulated chain which penetrates the factories and invests every other sphere of proletarian life.

These dens, real vital nerve centers of executive power must become the privileged objects of revolutionary initiative.

Attacking their leaders, wiping out the micro-units of “brainpower” which finalize the anti-worker line, harshly discouraging the collaborators who here and there blend into the universities of the peninsula is the way to amplify to the maximum the internal contradictions of the bourgeois front, and disrupt one of the most delicate instruments of imperialist domination.

The Ministry of the Treasury and the Bank of Italy, are on the economic terrain, the beating heart of the counter-revolutionary initiative against the working class and the struggles of all sectors of the metropolitan proletariat. To no longer be beaten by them is the task of the moment.

A stone ass and a lead heart!

That is the slogan of all combatant communists!

The anti-proletarian content of the “Triennial Plan” will be transmitted through an articulated chain till it ends up in the factories. Its principle links are:

Confindustria-Intersind-Unons

Confindustria-Intersind has the task of implementation of mediation between particular interests and the economic policies of the Executive: mediation which affects the chain of enterprise command imposed in the factory.

The dens from which emanate the boss’s guidelines, around the Executive, against the working class, constitute an essential cornerstone of the economic counter-revolution and, therefore, should be attacked with the maximum energy, as much by the Combatant Communist Organizations as by the revolutionary mass organizations.

This attack must also extend to the enterprise command structure which transmits the dictates of command to the most remote points, thus facilitating the pumping of surplus value from proletarians throughout their lives.

BREAK THE CHAINS OF BOSS COMMAND!

This is the slogan of the entire proletarian vanguard.

The Unions are called upon to shove the “Triennial Plan” and the related policies of the employer’s federation down the throats of the working class. The “pipe smokers”, in the short term have the task of managing the restructuring of the labor force: which is to say wage reform, mobility, lay-offs, ..the neo-corporative pact has thus reached its logical conclusion; the unions become and are used as transmission belts of the State.

This incorporation is an essential condition for the implementation of the main economic policies, but not without major contradictions, due to the accumulated force of the working class.

Calling into question, in practice, the “limits of compatibility of the system”, and the legitimacy of the unions, the autonomous worker’s struggles constitute their spontaneous antagonism in a political dimension.

Every autonomous class movement assumes the character of an attack on the state, and therefore must be crushed.

Progressively abandoning the real interests of the most exploited strata of workers, relying on the sectors of managers, technicians and the factory aristocracy, as well as upon their apparatus of new bureaucrats, the unions directly assume the functions of strike breaking and snitching, in close coordination with the factory management and the anti-guerrilla forces.

Therefore, right now, close to the direct production of surplus value, in the large urban factories, can be found the weakest link in the domination the imperialist bourgeoisie exercises over the working class by means of the State and its unionist articulation.

And this account must be settled!

The construction of proletarian power runs through the unmasking, the isolation, and the driving out of these vile traps!

DISMANTLE THE POWER OF THE NEO-CORPORATIVE UNIONS AS A CONDITION FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF RED POWER!

The struggle against the command and control apparatus means-in addition to all the lines of combat already consolidated in the heritage of class consciousness-: SABOTAGE.

Sabotage not as an existential and subjective form of struggle, but as organized mass struggle, as an articulation of the armed struggle within the factory. Individual sabotage has gone on continually, for as long as labor and its exploitation, as a spontaneous form of resistance and defense against capitalist labor.

But if it does not become directed and organized, it cannot affect the relation of force between the classes.

The sabotage of the worker guerrillas must be tactically appropriate, for organizing, in order to deploy its power.

It must be able to homogenize and group together the most advanced elements of the class, to involve all or most of the workers in a factory.

The sabotage of the worker guerrillas must be scientific, it must be directed against everything which signifies isolation and blocks struggle, it must be directed against the machinery of command, against the structures of control, against the sites and things which congeal and concertize counter-revolutionary activity.

The sabotage of the worker guerrillas must construct within the attack, the mass organization of Red Power.

The slogan is that which has already been launched by the most advanced of the working class, the working class of FIAT and ALFA ROMERO:

BRING AND SPREAD THE GUERRILLA IN THE FACTORY

17. DISARTICULATE AND DESTROY THE APPARATUS OF TOTAL SOCIAL CONTROL!

In this transitional phase, the disarticulation and sabotage of the process of integration within a coherent, totalitarian system, and the totalization of control between the techno-political leadership of the Executive and the related differentiated systems of special networks, requires a line of march articulated on four essential levels.

Firstly: Politics and reliance on the masses.

This means uniting the masses by joining them together within Revolutionary Mass Organisms which take up the struggle against the totalitarian organization of social control everywhere. Uniting the masses by raising awareness within the metropolitan proletariat, stimulating a consciousness of the transformation in action and of strategy, of technique, of the instruments and of personnel, which are its mechanisms.

Secondly: “Strike the center”.

Annihilate the entire criminal network which forms the “organisms of permanent consultation”. Lobotomize the Executive systematically, without exceptions.

Thirdly: disarticulate and sabotage the special networks of the carabinieri, primarily, the judiciary, the prison system, the media.

Action against the personal and the apparatuses of these networks must be relentless, continual, repeating and be defined in diverse conjunctures in relation to the questions posed by the growth of the revolutionary movement.

Lastly: Strike at all levels the analysts and programmers of the computer centers, the “essential technicians” as military jargon puts it.

Bombard with bazooka strikes, the computer systems, the databases, and the computational networks which form the material, “technical” base for total information and total control. Wherever possible, carry out red infiltration of their specialized personal.

While it is true that information technology cannot achieve the “unthinkable” objectives, which the lust of the imperialist bourgeois assigns it (which is politically, not to mention technically impossible, not even including the “mathematical reduction” of reality which requires throwing the entire system down a blind alley), it is also the case that it constitutes a powerful weapon of war which serves an immediately repressive function.

In addition to the machines…are the personal who must become objects of intense interest for the revolutionary movement.

18. STRIKE THE REVISIONISTS AROUSE THE PROLETARIAN MASSES AGAINST THEM PROVOKE DIFFERENTIATION IN THEIR RANKS ISOLATE THEM TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT

In the development of the imperialist state, the party system has been transformed in its specific articulation to the Executive.

The State carries out a innovative configuration of the parties, cutting out the social classes, in order to mediate and impose the interests of the imperialist bourgeois, and to formulate, on this basis, effective control of struggles and tensions.

In this metamorphosis, even the party considered “historically” to be that of the Worker’s Movement, has abandoned any class line, facing the same inescapable destiny and, and irrespective of their consciousness,  “the representatives of the working class”, have become instruments of multinational capital.

From the party of the working class within the State the PCI has become the party of the State within the working class!

The complicity of the revisionists, however, is not an exchange for collaboration without contradictions, which puts the PCI and the DC on the same level. In the party system, the DC, because it is the government party, plays a dominant role, and the PCI is left to play a complimentary role which places it in a subordinate position and a conflictuality within the imperialist state.

Which is not to say, however, that it is not an enemy.

Because, in fact, it is a subaltern articulation of the principle aspect of the contradiction which opposes the bourgeois to the proletariat, it is perfectly entitled to be within the cross hairs of the revolutionary forces.

The revisionists make a fundamental contribution to the assertion of counter-revolutionary initiative with their own specific function.

Their task is to organize the preventative social counter-revolution which is to say the formation of a social bloc in support of the imperialist State, which is counter-posed to the advance of the revolutionary process.

For this purpose, they, on the one hand, take up themselves the management of restructuring in the factories, and they become production police, in order to discipline, control, and attack every emergence of worker antagonism; on the other hand they act as paladins of “democratic order”, which means mass reporting, and profiling, shop by shop, apartment block by apartment block, against the entire revolutionary vanguard.

In order to play this filthy role, the revisionists must develop and consolidate their penetration within the social strata of the medium-petty bourgeois, the technicians, the labor aristocrats, factory bureaucrats.., mobilizing organisms of linkage between the party and the masses, like the neighborhood and factory Councils.

But this “service”, although it is necessary for the imperialist bourgeois is also a source of contradiction, because the revisionist sycophants intend to use the rewards of their democratic snitching, to form their own direct links with sectors of the state apparatus, in order to shift the relations of force within the party system to their own benefit, making themselves even more “indispensable”, and slowly eroding the power of the DC.

From the side of the proletariat, the preventative social counter-revolution organized by the PCI must be neutralized with maximum decisiveness and attacked in accordance with an appropriate politico-military strategy.

This must be based in a distinction between the hinges of connection between the State institutions and the PCI and the channels of connection between the PCI and the masses.

The first have a strategic character extending the presuppositions and the scope of the second. Through them the hyenas [iene-cerniera], actually, the revisionists who have infiltrated the basements of the Palace, have the pathetic hope of ascending to the banquets on the upper levels!

However, this is not only a miserable affair of the Berlinguerian group, and the proletarian vanguard pays a hard price for this sleazy operation, it is up to the guerrilla to frustrate all their hopes, to attack and annihilate these hyenas.

They are the judges, the cops, high functionaries of the State, managers, “experts”, journalist-consultants, and similar garbage. Acknowledged enemies and politically indefensible from the proletarian viewpoint, their plot is exposed.

THEIR MILITARY ANNIHILATION IS ALSO IMMEDIATELY THEIR POLITICAL ANNIHILATION!

And we can be certain that not even one proletarian will cry over their corpses!

With regards to the “channels of connection” between the PCI and the masses the problem is more complex. We should bear in mind that these revisionist agents live amidst the proletariat and sometimes enjoy an undeserved loyalty. Therefore the priority for the guerrilla is political clarification in the struggles, isolating, shaming, putting them in the pillory, by exposing their schemes and their complicity, in a word, the the political defeat is before the military.

It goes without saying, that the dialectic between the two levels of action is decisive, in the sense that the first terrain of attack is a essential political condition of the second; therefore it is fundamental, even though both are necessary.

Striking the revisionists and their project of preventative social counter-revolution is a necessary condition for winning the masses on the terrain of armed struggle and for the construction of Red Power.

The battle cannot be delayed!

19. STRIKE THE CENTER! ENCIRCLE THE ENCIRCLEMENT!

It is necessary to confront the process of militarization of the factory, the territory and of all social life, linked to the anti-proletarian restructuring of the economy and of the State, as well as to dismantle the perverse image, diffused by government propaganda, which gives “terrorism” the function of a cause.

The attack on the apparatuses of militarization is not in fact a problem separate from the social struggles, and therefore exclusively relating to the combatant vanguards. It is a essential dimension of every partial movement, from the worker’s struggles to those in the service sector, from the neighborhoods to the prisons.

The leading role of the Party, consists in connecting and organizing the systematic action of disarticulation of the central and peripheral apparatuses with the equally systematic action of the revolutionary mass organisms. In this phase, in which the crisis, due to the level of intensity it has reached, develops into a extremely critical situation for the imperialist system, the tendency to war takes on a central character, both in the development of imperialist contradictions, and in terms of the growth of class contradictions.

The revolutionary forces, should therefore situate their practice of disarticulation of the central counter-revolutionary apparatus within that perspective.

One premise is necessary: dispelling the illusion which exists within the international revolutionary movement, which considers the “socialist camp” as the hinterland of the revolutionary army which emerges in the imperialist metropole, and subordinates the strategy of the latter to that of the “socialist camp” on a global scale.

It is a fact that the mythical “socialist camp” has had its roots for many years in a material reality which is by no means socialist: the capitalism of the Soviet state and its allies, in its social imperialist phase.

We want to be very specific on this point: imperialism and social-imperialism are two specific variants of the capitalist mode of production in this phase-private capitalism and state capitalism.

They form an imperialist system within which there is a contradictory unity: unity of the capitalist mode of production, contradiction between its historically determined forms.

If the revolutionary forces, then, can and should, exploit the spaces opened by the development of inter-imperialist struggle, from the contradictions between imperialism and social imperialism, they nevertheless, must under no circumstances transform this into collusion with one to fight the other.

The disarticulation of the central apparatus in this phase must strike the beating heart of the imperialist counter-revolution: NATO.

NATO means internal and external war.

And in this dimension it needs to reorganize its army, in a manner adequate to the new characteristics of inter-imperialist and class war. The formation of the task force within the Italian armed forces responds to this double need.

An increasing quantity of units of the army, the marines, the air force and the financial police, are being transformed into Anti-guerrilla Special Units and forming the backbone of a real professional army on its way to being combined with the Special Units of the Carabinieri, who form the core.

We must begin to sabotage this machinery of death for the metropolitan proletariat, which in this phase means the preventative counter-revolution. We must disarticulate and attack the people and hideouts who determine national restructuring to carry out the counter-guerrilla function.

We must develop the broadest possible political mobilization around the slogans:

NATO IS IMPERIALIST WAR AND PREVENTATIVE COUNTER-REVOLUTION!

WAR ON NATO!

WAR ON THE COUNTER-GUERRILLA SPECIAL UNITS!

We must construct internationalist unity around these slogans with all the people and revolutionary forces fighting imperialism.

The revolutionary mass organisms, each on its own terrain of combat, and the structures of the Party, must carry out forward a relentless offensive encirclement of the peripheral articulations-personal, locations, mechanisms-of the apparatuses of militarization and social control.

It is in fact through this offensive, that the Immediate Program lives in the masses, contributing to the consolidation of Red Power.

No one central action, separate from the initiative which the vanguard carries out even within the revolutionary mass organisms, is able to construct and expand those spaces of power which the class war seeks. The growing militarization is a weakness of the enemy.

This display of strength, completely terrorist in its intentions, also illustrates the extent to which the enemy is bogged down.

Indeed, the more militarization extends and pervades every nook and cranny of society, the more the enemy is divided and undermined.

Forcing everyone and everything under control creates ever more favorable conditions for the unification and mobilization of the masses against the government.

In the encirclement of the units of the State and of the agents of the government, in every neighborhood, in every factory, in every prison, the organisms of Red Power are constructed.

The encirclement of the encirclement must assume the form of thousands of small encirclements.

This is built up everywhere there are significant concentrations of proletarians, starting with the largest and most rebellious, an invisible red base, a armed proletarian detachment, a revolutionary mass organism, an articulation of Red Power, in order to “take hostage” encircling the agents of the enemy in their hideouts and their homes, however they may be disguised:

We are talking about the organization of the encirclement as a stable siege. We are talking about not allowing the enemy a breath, to grip them with the profound hostility of the proletarian masses, surrounding them with class hatred.

They must feel more cornered everyday, attacked from all sides, even from their own rear. They must be systematically disarmed. They must feel watched, by those they watch, imprisoned by those they imprison, attacked by those they attack, annihilated by those they annihilate.

Their communications and their connections must be sabotaged. There must be a curfew for them. The most deadly traps must be ready to spring on them, whenever they venture out of their hideouts into the metropolitan jungle. The most terrifying ambushes must interrupt their days.

Taking control of the large factories and the proletarian suburbs of the major urban centers is a necessary step on the way towards civil war. An essential stage on the road to the construction of Red Power which cannot be delayed. The more this control is strengthened, the more space and capacity for maneuver we have. The more the space and capacity for maneuver of the guerrilla is strengthened, the harder and more decisively it will be able to strike the heart of the State!

STRIKE THE CENTER WITH MORE RAPID, HARD AND SUDDEN BLOWS!

FORCE THE ENEMY TO DIVIDE ACROSS THE ENTIRE TERRITORY!

ENCIRCLE, EXHAUST AND DEMORALIZE EVERYONE OF THE ENEMIES PERIPHERAL DETACHMENTS AND SWALLOW THEM BITE AFTER BITE!

…….

20. DISCONNECT THE ITALIAN LINK FROM THE IMPERIALIST CHAIN!

TAKE UP A POSITION OF NON ALIGNMENT!

WORK IN COLLABORATION WITH ALL PEOPLES ON A EQUAL BASIS!

DEVELOP PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM!

Between the evermore divided “great powers”, in the Mediterranean area, there is a vast and contested space: the space of non-alignment. We are not interested, here, in the full spectrum of political complexities and contradictions, since its essential character relates to the breakup of the division of the world sanctified at Yalta caused by the action of the emerging countries.

Also even our country can and must find its own place in reconstruction within the framework of an effective proletarian internationalism, a different kind of process of growth of the productive forces and a radical, for a long time now unavoidable, transformation of the relations of production in the direction of a communist society.

Indeed, the same structure of the Italian productive apparatus which is so incompatible with the development of the crisis of imperialism, is compatible with the economies of the emerging countries.

Many of its aspects, which form insurmountable handicaps for development in the “western” orbit, are valuable from the perspective of collaboration with all of the most exploited countries (those referred to as the Third World), from the perspective of non-alignment and of proletarian internationalist practice.

We have a vast amount of intermediate technology, and that is something which is needed right now in these countries: we also have a great deal of potential and capacity for even more advanced development, from micro-processors up to satellites-potential and capacity which imperialism has neutered -, and which we already have produced.

And this allows the perspective of a long period of development.

Furthermore, we have in our possession a quantity of general know-how to put at the disposal of all these peoples, so as to ensure a significant surge in their growth.

To the contrary, currently, imperialism (in both its variants American and Soviet) strictly measures out this flow of knowledge, in order to impose and maintain its own power and privilege.

The emerging countries have something just as valuable: raw materials (energy resources and otherwise), which we lack, and which are indispensable to ensure a gradual and not excessively traumatic passage, of our socio-economic formation from the final phase of capitalism towards socialist transition.

It is the maintenance of the same productive base, the development of the productive forces, the new latent relations of production, which push us to exit from the imperialist camp in order to place ourselves alongside the emerging countries in a common anti-imperialist and anti-social imperialist project.

To do this, it is necessary to break the noose which is becoming everyday tighter and heavier.

DISCONNECT THE ITALIAN LINK FROM THE IMPERIALIST CHAIN!

TAKE UP A POSITION OF NON ALIGNMENT!

WORK IN COLLABORATION WITH ALL PEOPLES ON A EQUAL BASIS!

DEVELOP PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM!

TODAY THIS IS POSSIBLE!

IT IS OUR TASK!