100 years after Lenin’s death, reconstitute communism!

“There is no room for any more illusions of peace”, “war is not impossible”, straightforwardly warns Ursula von der Leyen, representing the leaders of the Western bourgeoisie. Gone are the halcyon days when the European garden could hypocritically afford pacifism, for which wars always seem far away, like something that belongs in the uncivilized world. “Rearm, rearm!”, chant in unison the representatives of the imperialist bourgeoisie, regardless of their political colors. The triumphalism of the liberal international order after the defeat of the communist historical enemy has completely faded away, showing that its hegemony can only be preserved the exact same way as it was won: with a Total War, over millions of dead bodies. “Democracy needs you!”, will soon read the billboards of every European capital. The proletariat will, as always, offer its labor power as a sacrifice in the altar of the interests of capital. This situation might seem identical to the years leading to 1914, when the first great carnage for the distribution of the world among imperialist hawks broke out; there is, however, a forgotten, missing actor. Where is that independent proletariat that could provide an alternative—the only possible one—to the grim future that awaited the exploited in the imperialist trenches? Or rather, where are the communists who can make such possibility even thinkable once again?

One hundred years ago, a certain revolutionary left us after committing his life to opening the real alternative that existed for the oppressed, proving that we could confront the imperialist war with the revolutionary civil war. Today, in the middle of this era of historical defeat of communism, which leaves it unable to represent any sort of immediate way out of capitalist barbarism, the best method of paying homage to Lenin is reviving this suggestion of his: “The best way to celebrate the anniversary of a great revolution is to concentrate attention on its unsolved problems.” If we are communists, commemorating Lenin cannot be separated from recovering his revolutionary spirit, or from asking ourselves how we can prepare the proletarian revolution today in the Spanish state, as a base area for the reactivation of the World Proletarian Revolution. Today, this preparation inevitably requires, in the first place, the restoration of the independent stance of the revolutionary proletariat in the face of the imperialist war: proletarian internationalism applied as revolutionary defeatism.

Adding to the war between two imperialist blocs that has already been roaring for over two years in Ukraine—a chance for social disciplining and closing ranks around its imperialist program that “our” ruling class has not missed—, marked by the attempts to inflict a humiliating defeat on a Russian imperialism that ponders its reservations about resorting to the nuclear response, a new front for the Euro-Atlantic bloc has opened in the Middle East. The Palestinian people have once more displayed an example of its heroic fortitude, waging a genuine war of national resistance against the Zionist state—an irreplaceable pillar for the interests of Western imperialism in the region. Nonetheless, their struggle is still led by the radical petty bourgeoisie, distrustful of mass war and therefore condemning the majority of Palestinians to be no more than suffering beings—the only way they are acceptable for the Western bourgeoisie, including all breeds of revisionism and nationalism—in a televised genocide, one that is actively supported by the West and against which the timid statements and pacifist demands from revisionism are useless. After all, the communist movement stubbornly holds on to the belief that resistance struggles are the seed of revolution, as if the global crisis that keeps worsening around it did not provide enough evidence of the impotence of its unchanging mantras and clichés. Like putting lipstick on a pig, no matter how many pro-worker buzzwords are used, it is still reformism. Meanwhile, the unmuzzled social-chauvinism continues to conquer the vacuum left in the labor movement by the sterility of more politically correct forms of revisionism. What are now cries against immigration, will soon become calls for the defense of the fatherland in the imperialist war, siding with “their own” bourgeoisie and against any actor who dares to oppose it. Both defend, each in their own way, the imperialist program of the bourgeoisie. Lenin already showed us that, in fact, opportunism and social-chauvinism have the same “political content”, that they are two sides of the same rotten coin of imperialism. And, above all else, that social-chauvinism is the ripest form of opportunism, its “direct continuation and consummation.”

In this context, all communists must wield the spirit of the defeat of “our” own government, of “our” own imperialist bloc. Only in this way can we link our frontal opposition to the imperialist slaughter with the horizon of emancipation that is the proletarian revolution, as the first step towards restoring the possibility of the latter. This, which is unrealizable in an immediate manner, requires the previous fulfillment of the conditions that will allow Marxism to become a vanguard theory again, contesting the referentiality of revisionism amongst the most advanced sectors of our class. Once this phase of ideological reconstitution is completed, we will be able to proceed towards the conquest of the sector leading the struggles of our class, or in other words, towards the fusion between scientific socialism and the working-class movement that is the Communist Party, i.e., towards the political reconstitution of communism. And then, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks did amidst the Great War, the proletariat will be able to turn its weapons against “its” governments, unleashing the People’s War against the imperialist war and opening the second cycle of the World Proletarian Revolution.