Their Politics and Ours

“Sometimes too little attention has been devoted to the fact that the events which stun and break some political tendencies can strengthen and temper others. It is a lesson of the materialist conception of politics.” (Arrigo Cervetto 1988).We believe this consideration expresses the spirit of this book in the best possible way. Like The Unprecedented Task, which included texts published between 1996 and 2006, this new volume collects articles from the last fourteen years, from 2007 to 2020, all referring to specific political battles and concrete moments in the life of our party. Whence its essential content: systematic attention paid to the practical translation of general political reflections and analyses.Two big crises open and close the whole collection of these writings: the one we have defined as the crisis in global relations – beginning in 2007 – and the present crisis of the pandemic of the century; within a timespan marked by tensions and partial conflicts among the powers, which characterise the “stormy times” of this new strategic phase. It is therefore not by chance that another leitmotiv of the volume consists in our organisational battle, which is the real battlefield on which every result can be ensured, preserved and therefore handed down. We must start, first of all, from the tenet of proletarian internationalism, which must be rebuilt and consolidated, as a vital necessity, within our world class. And this sends us to a final aspect, which is the attention being paid to a new generation, brought to politics precisely in the crises and upheavals of the last fifteen years. Other new energies will emerge in the years to come. They will contribute to facing the even more convulsive developments of the 2020s and 2030s, characterised as can already be glimpsed by the rearmament race between emerging China and Asia and the declining powers of the old order.The link in the chain of class organisation will need to be grasped more firmly than ever.