On 8th February 2012 a trial opens in Bologna of 12 comrades of (n) PCI, CARC, ASP in an attempt to outlaw Communism and Communists in Italy

Let’s defend freedom of expression, organization and propaganda won by the victory of the Resistance against Nazi fascism!

With the resistance to repression, proletarian solidarity and fight against repression, let’s transform this operation of bourgeoisie’s mercenaries for defending its order of misery, destruction and war into an instrument for the new birth of the communist movement!

On 8^th February 2012 at the Assize Court of Bologna it opens the trial against 12 comrades who are (or were) part of the (new) Italian Communist Party ((n)PCI), the Party of CARC (P-CARC) and the Proletarian Solidarity Association (ASP).

 It is a process overtly political in the sense that the state sets aside specific crimes charged to the individual, but accuses them to belong to the (n)PCI and to the organizations that support it and cooperate with its plan to make Italy a new socialist country, the organizations we call the “caravan” of the (n)PCI . It aims to condemn and declare the (n)PCI a criminal organization and therefore to declare that belonging to it is a crime. The goal is to outlaw the (n)PCI and all the organizations of its caravan as subversive organizations according to 270 bis item of the Penal Code. A conviction would lead to the indictment of any other member and collaborator of the (n)PCI.

The fact that there are no handholds of “facts and specific crimes” had been certified and motivated with the nonsuit judgment because “there were no facts” issued on 1^st July 2008 by the Judge for Preliminary Hearings Rita Zaccariello of the Court of Bologna. That judgment temporarily stopped the crusade against the (n)PCI’s caravan that Public Prosecutor Paolo Giovagnoli was carrying out by more than 8 years, on behalf of Authorities of the Papal Republic.

On 20^th January 2011, the Supreme Court, upholding the action of the Public Prosecutor Giovagnoli and of the Prosecutor’s Office of Bologna, overturned Zaccariello’s judgment of 2008. The General Attorney Giovanni Salvi advocated the cancellation of the nonsuit judgment and the go-ahead for restarting the proceedings. He was the one who with two other magistrates opened two investigations against the (n)PCI’s caravan with the charge of subversive association. They were launched on 17^th October 1999 with a “big” police operation and a hundred raids in several cities of Italy and both dismissed one in 2001 and another in 2003 ... that is to say just when Giovagnoli opened the eighth judiciary proceeding!

On 21^st September 2011, with a sentence already decided, the Judge for Preliminary Hearing Alberto Gamberini ordered the beginning of the trial.

In Bologna, the ruling class is establishing a new kind of special court that operates on the basis of emergency legislation (although officially this legislation does not yet exist!). It is aimed to prosecute crimes that are not recognized as such by law and to prosecute defendants who would not be such if bourgeois Authorities were not fully violating the Constitution. The court of Bologna is a “prototype”: the bourgeoisie has concentrated here a special pool of magistrates to prosecute “political crimes”, magistrates who are real auxiliary of the political police, who get on for services rendered to the most reactionary and criminal part of the ruling class.

The significance and effects of the trial beginning on 8^th February go far beyond the individuals and organizations directly under attack. They are at stake the freedom of expression, organization and propaganda of Communists. Starting from here, it will be at stake the freedom of expression, organization and propaganda of anyone who is or may become center of organization and mobilization of the masses for “not paying for the crisis of the bosses”. This is the freedom of expression, organization and propaganda won by the victory of the Resistance against Nazi fascism and ratified (at least formally) by the Constitution and still (at least formally) in force. It is not a matter between us and the judges called upon to prosecute us, the police (regular and irregular) that haunt us for years and their political instigators. It is an aspect of the battle going on between the imperialist bourgeoisie and the popular masses on how to go out from the crisis of capitalism.

The bourgeoisie, the clergy and other rich do not have a positive solution for the masses to economic, environmental, cultural and moral decay that their system, the capitalism, has created. The source of the crisis is in capitalism itself. The ongoing crisis is a natural product of their system: it comes from the nature of the capitalist mode of production. Monti in Italy (and before him Berlusconi and Prodi) and its counterparts in other imperialists countries are trying to squeeze the popular masses even more, especially workers, pensioners, civil servants, self-employed workers (farmers, breeders, transporters , artisans, etc..). They eliminate the rights the popular masses conquered during the first wave of proletarian revolution. They take away the prospect of a future of young people, aggravate the discrimination and oppression of women, persecute immigrants. They are responsible for the destruction, marginalization and emigration of the population in the oppressed countries, in the emerging ones and in the former socialist countries, for the plundering of the planet’s resources, for pollution and environmental destruction, for the “humanitarian missions” that they multiply in the world. This is the way by which the international community of the capitalists, bankers, financiers, speculators and the rich tries to prolong the life of his system of social relations in spite of the general crisis of capitalism that now goes for more than thirty ‘years and since 2008 has entered its acute and terminal phase.

People like Monti, like the FIAT CEO Marchionne, their cronies and accomplices, however, can prolong and so aggravate their criminal work only if they manage to sow among the workers, other laborers and the rest of the people the conviction that there is nothing to do, that their measures of “tears and blood” are the only way to end the crisis. They can succeed only if they can disrupt and divide laborers.

To this end, on the one hand they bring up, subsidize and cover the “fascists of the Third Millennium” as Casseri, who killed two migrants from Senegal in Florence in latest December. On the other they try to “clean up” the factories of the unions representing the laborers, to isolate the most rebellious and combative laborers and workers. But above all they need to prevent the communist movement from reaching a critical mass, to prevent its “contagion” from spreading.

In fact, the measures against the crisis and the representatives of the international community of speculators, are creating a widespread resistance not only by the peoples oppressed by the world imperialist system, but also by the popular masses in the imperialist countries: the riots in the Arab countries, the movement Occupy together in the U.S., the indignados in Spain, the revolts in London, the rebellion of the Greek popular masses, the movement which today developed from FIAT factory of Pomigliano in our country.

It is a movement still largely spontaneous. It is stoked up mainly by the opposition to the growing oppression and exploitation that the bourgeoisie and the clergy exert on the masses, by the contrast between the hardships and privations of a growing proportion of the population and the luxury and splendor of a handful of rich, speculators, parasites, by the aspiration to “another world” that the means, the knowledge and ability existing in the world today make possible. It is not yet fertilized and animated by the communist conception of the world and made irresistible by the leadership of the communist movement.

The specific role of the Communists in it is to make the aspiration and the need for a new higher social order, nourished and fostered within the popular masses by the present state of things, a political objective pursued by a mobilization of the organized popular masses so wide to have the strength to wipe out the current rotten and murderess social order, with its institutions, its ideas and the feelings connected to it. The Communists are distinguished from other opponents to this bad present because they do not drive to go back to the past (that produced this bad present!). They instead drive to build the new world: the socialist society on the march towards Communism, the only way out of the crisis of capitalism because it puts an end to capitalism itself.

The communist movement that is being born is the embryo, the standard bearer of the future of dignity, civilization and progress that the masses can build.

That is why bourgeoisie’s spokesmen, intellectuals, hacks write reams and lavish words to denigrate Communism and Communists, the first socialist countries and the first wave of proletarian revolution: they proclaimed the end of Communism in all possible ways.

That is why bourgeois law-enforcement agencies selectively repressed Communists and tried to do scorched earth around them.

That is why television and parliamentary lounges exhibited in full trim people like Bertinotti, former leader of the Party of Communist Refoundation, willing to blather about “errors and horrors of Communism.”

Now it is no longer enough. The situation is such that it is back on the agenda who runs society and how he does it:

- Or workers organized with a system of relations based on public ownership and management of productive machinery and on a decent and useful work for every adult; a system of which the first socialist countries have been the dawn;

- Or the bosses with the elimination of the rights and conquests, the reactionary mobilization and “war between us and the rest of the world” that FIAT CEO Marchionne already openly declares and imposes on the workers.

It follows from this also the elimination of residual progressive aspects of bourgeois democracy. This includes also the impunity of those “agents ready to do anything” which in our country entered into action on a large scale at the G8 Summit with the killing of Carlo Giuliani and the wild beatings in police and Carabinieri barracks in Genoa in 2001 and few months before in Naples. This includes the operations of various kinds to thwart every initiative of “democratic supervision” to discourage those who collect and transmit in Internet (copwatching) photos and movies of agents responsible for abuses against demonstrators and others. One of these operations is the process that will take place in Bologna on 31^st January and 21^st February, 2012 against two members of CARC Party and of the Struggling Workers Union and another comrade for “violation of privacy” under accusation of having created the site “Cop Hunt” [http://cacciaallosbirro.awardspace.info/] in which there are shown the faces of law enforcement agents who spy, control, put down in police records, threaten, blackmail, orchestrate provocation, infiltrate, beat, massacre. Morena Plazzi, the same Public Prosecutor that conducts this investigation, has recently opened a case against “the policeman without a face” who on 12^th October 2011 clubbed a young girl student (causing the loss of four teeth and permanent injury to chew) who was demonstrating along with other “indignados” outside the offices of the Bank of Italy in Bologna.

The mobilization against the trial for “Cop Hunt” is an integral part of the fight against the abuses of law enforcement officials and of the campaigns for making Carabinieri, policemen and customs officers on service to carry a different serial number that distinguishes and identifies each one of them.

What happens in Italy is part of army manoeuvres to outlaw Communism and Communists. In the EU, after the approval of the Directive Lindblad in 2006 that equates Communism to Nazism, communist parties in various countries have been outlawed (Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) or are near to be outlawed (Czech Republic and Moldova). In Poland and Hungary communist symbols have been banned and, finally, in December 2010 it was presented the proposal to prosecute the defense of communism.

In this context, in what sense and why has the persecution of the caravan of (n)PCI a special place?

For about 30 years the Authorities seek to prevent and certainly hinder its work systematically.

The first judiciary proceeding dates back to 1981, it was followed by seven more with the same charge (subversive association with terrorist intent, 270 bis item) and often against the same persons. 


Proceedings were always accompanied by raids, arrests, seizure of material, stalking, intimidation against supporters and contributors, defamatory press campaigns. These proceedings ended so far with nonsuit judgments.

The only logical explanation of such painstaking “attention” is that an authoritative part of the bourgeoisie thinks that the caravan of (n)PCI is a threat to its power. That is to say, analysis, strategy and the plan it proposed are those required to make advance working class and masses’ struggle to “finish the work that first Italian Communist Party interrupted: to make Italy a socialist country, and so contribute to the world proletarian revolution “(Founding Declaration of (n)PCI - October 2004).

For several decades (n)PCI’s caravan has been the main driver of the new birth of the conscious and organized communist movement in our country. It has not merely proclaimed that we need to rebuild the Communist Party, that we need a perspective, an alternative to capitalism, a project, that we must take stock of the 70s and of the past experience of the communist movement. It did it. It rebuilt the Communist Party. It took stock of the successes achieved by the Italian and international communist movement in the last century, and pointed out the errors and limitations that prevented it from establishing socialism in any of the imperialist countries in the last century. Those errors and limitations led to the prevalence in it of the modern revisionists, to the reversal of the trend, the regression and degeneration, the weakening until the dissolution of most of the communist parties, the collapse of most of first socialist countries and the others, anyway, to abandon the role of the red base of the world proletarian revolution and change side. 


On this basis, (n) PCI, in its Manifesto Program,

- has exposed the communist world conception; in order to not tail events, to not undergo them, to not be surprised and thrown off by them, the Communists have to own and use the science of revolution (the communist world conception): “to get rid of the mentality instilled by the bourgeoisie and the clergy, to assimilate the communist world conception is an essential aspect of becoming Communists. The Communists are distinguished from others who are intolerant of the present course of things as Communists themselves are and that to some extent even fight against it as Communists themselves do, because they have a more advanced understanding of the conditions, forms and results of the ongoing struggle against the imperialist bourgeoisie to establish socialism“;

- it indicated the prospect, the alternative to the chaos of the crisis: to establish socialism. “It is not a task of little account, but it is possible. It is the only way to overcome the current agonizing and dangerous state in which the bourgeoisie has brought us. In order to be completely fulfilled, this task will require the whole of humanity to transform, to reach a level of civilization higher than the present. It will lead men and women to practice en masse those spiritual (intellectual and creative) activities and develop those moral characteristics (initiative, accountability, participation in social life) from which the ruling classes have always excluded the mass of the population (...) and so they do still today with thousand tricks and thousand means of corruption, escapism and coercion.“;

- it outlined the strategy for achieving this goal: the Protracted Revolutionary People’s War (PRPW) whose central aspect is the creation of the new people’s power, formed by the organized forces of the working class and of the other classes of the popular masses gathered around the communist party. It is a power that opposes imperialist bourgeoisie’s power and grows up to overtake and eliminate it. PRPW means then to build the communist party, to gather the revolutionary forces of society around the communist party, to raise their ideological, political and organizational level, to mobilize them according to a plan, to develop a series of initiatives that weaken imperialist bourgeoisie’s power and strengthen the new people’s power, to eliminate the state of the imperialist bourgeoisie and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat;

- it has developed a General Plan of Work (GPW) for the first phase of PRPW indicating four fronts of struggle in which to develop the organization and mobilization of the masses to build up the revolutionary forces.

First front: resistance to repression, fight against repression and the development of solidarity.

Second Front: mobilization of the masses to intervene in bourgeois political struggle.

Third Front: mobilization of the masses in union claims to defend without reservations and to extend the conquests wrested from the bourgeoisie.

Fourth Front: mobilization of the masses to build the economic, social and cultural means and organizations autonomous from the bourgeoisie (“people’s homes”, social centers, cooperatives, cultural clubs, mutual aid funds, sports and recreation associations, etc..) and directly useful to meet their needs.

ASP, P-CARC and SLL are organizations that seek to operate according to the line indicated by (n)PCI respectively in first, second and third of the four fronts of the GPW.

The general crisis worsened in autumn 2008, that is to say it entered its acute and terminal phase. The communist movement (and the communist party) had not yet achieved an adequate degree of consolidation and strengthening and the new situation has somewhat changed the conditions under which it takes place the first phase of the revolutionary people’s war. So, the (n)PCI launched the line of People’s Bloc Government (PBG): an emergency government formed by popular and workers organizations and composed of persons who already have their confidence and decided to transpose into law the measures that popular and workers organizations adopt in any particular occasion for facing the crisis, even if they go against the interests of bosses, bankers and the Vatican and the dictates of the international community. He also indicated the conditions that must be created to establish the GBP:
 1. To propagandize the need for an emergency people’s government, to convince workers and popular organizations that only constituting an emergency government each one of them can achieve his goal, 
2. to multiply the number of workers and popular organizations, encouraging their birth in every company, in every town, in every field, 
3. to drive workers and popular organizations to coordinate themselves on local, provincial, regional and national level, to form networks on a territorial basis and on the base of purpose and scope of operations, 4. to make the country ungovernable by the bosses and their Authorities with initiatives carried out by the popular masses.

In recent years the Italian authorities have opened one judiciary proceeding after another against the (n)PCI’s caravan. They have tried to do scorched earth around it, they pursued public organizations that are inspired by its conception and line, they involved the French authorities and those of other countries, they arrested its leaders and members.

They failed: the activity of (n)PCI has continued because Communists have resisted all forms of repression and organized themselves in order to continue their work: the most recent and important steps were the foundation of the (new) Italian Communist Party (October 2004), the publication of its Manifesto Program (Spring 2008), the celebration of its First Congress (early 2010).

Thanks to the continuity of its work, that is to say to its resistance to repression, the (n) PCI is able to use in its favor the same judiciary proceedings: 1. to promote proletarian solidarity; 2. to expose and mobilize against violations of the laws that, to some extent, protect the interests of the people against the arbitrariness of the bosses, the clergy and their Authorities and to defend the Constitution in what it states in defense and promotion of the rights and interests of the popular masses, statements coming  from the balance of power dictated by the victory of the communist movement against Nazism, 3. to enlarge the contradictions that these violations also create within the ruling class itself.

Now the Authorities aim to outlaw the (n)PCI and the organizations that recognize and cooperate with its plan to make Italy a socialist country, to make its judges declare them “terrorist organizations” and then automatically apply the procedures set by national and international “anti-terrorism” (detention of suspects without judicial proceedings, deprivation of liberty and civil rights by the decision of police several abuses and harassments).

This is the center around which they are rotating many other proceedings against members, associates and supporters of CARC Party, ASP and SLL. They are about 42, against 180 people (in many cases the same people are involved in multiple proceedings at once) and with charges ranging from seditious meeting to resisting a public officer, the “extortion of better job contracts” to “private violence “(as the courts call the pickets to prevent the closure and decommissioning of a hospital!). They are proceedings opened where CARC Party, ASP and SLL have become centers of organization and mobilization of the popular masses of people to nip in the bud the trials of fascism (Tuscany), to defend and build useful and decent jobs for all and to break into the theater of bourgeois politics (Naples).

This series of proceedings might suggest that the bourgeoisie and its Authorities are strong. It is actually a force only apparent. Their situation is precarious.

The methods they have so far used to contain the communist movement and ensure a degree of collaboration or at least of indifference of a significant part of the masses are collapsing. Under the pressure of the crisis, the economic concessions the popular masses tore from the bourgeoisie have disappeared; the participation in elections in the wake of the bourgeois parties and the mass organizations of the regime are upset by the measures pro-governance (threshold barrier, anti-union measures, etc..), by the lawlessness of the Authorities and the development of reactionary mobilization, diversion and poisoning are suspended, the selectivity of repression concentrated against the Communists is shaken by the spread of militarization (in the areas where people defends the environment, in the “red areas” systematically erected to defend the palaces of power, the ban on marches), the limitations of the freedoms and rights of persons (confinement, obligations, prohibitions imposed to football supporters), illegal detention of immigrants, special prison treatment (41 a item).

The Authority of the ruling class always operate more openly and frequently in violation of the spirit and often of the letter of the laws and of the Constitution in force (war missions, denial of political asylum and of the most basic civil rights to immigrants, freedom of political action for old and new fascists, creation of “strategic and military zones”, restrictions and bans on demonstrations, attempts to gag the non aligned press, limitation to the right to strike, increasing barriers to free organization of trade unions, refusal to implement the outcome of the referendum of last June against the privatization of the water, constitution of bourgeois governments without elections, expansion of activities covered by state secrecy, etc..). But they have not radically changed the laws and the Constitution. They are creating the conditions for doing it, everything pushes them in that direction, but they have not yet done it .

We can use each step in this direction, every single attack, arbitrariness and lawlessness. We must use it to weaken the already precarious direction of the ruling class on the popular masses, foster contradictions within itself, raise the class consciousness, mobilizing and strengthening the popular organization (it is also the most effective way to repel every single attack, abuse and illegality).

In these years, in order to face the legal repression and turn it in favor of the new birth of the communist movement, our three organizations have followed this line:

 1. to develop initiatives of mobilization and solidarity of the popular masses: information, complaint, call for solidarity, initiatives of political solidarity and economic support, with the aim of expanding ties with the masses, to develop a united front against the repression; initiatives of resistance and opposition to the repression and solidarity with all organizations, activists, workers and other members of the people hit by the forces of repression, regardless of the charges brought against them by the Authorities (judging by class and political and not by legalistic criteria );

2. promoting specific actions between genuine democrats (intellectuals, politicians and trade unions) to induce the largest possible number of them to speak out against the persecution of Communists and in general against repression and to express their solidarity;

3. not collaborating in the performance of the neutral justice, “the same for everyone,” but to transform the judiciary proceedings in a trial against the Authorities who violate their own laws and go against the interests of the masses.

The results obtained so far have confirmed that it is a correct line.

The process that opens on 8^th February will be an opportunity

1. to propagandize the popular emergency government and socialism and mobilize workers and the rest of the masses;

2. to assert the importance of organizations and individuals’ resistance to the repression of the bourgeoisie and its apparatus. This resistance is the basis for developing the fight against repression and promote solidarity with the organizations and comrades that repression hit: the resistance to repression firstly is established continuing the struggle, developing class solidarity, improving our understanding and our mobilization: the struggle pays! The fact that the activity of the (n) PCI and of the caravan has continued and developed in spite of the blows of repression has been the main cause of the failure of the attack of the Papal Republic Authorities and of the strengthening of the revolutionary forces;

3. to unmask the bourgeois legality (the legality of the rule of imperialist bourgeoisie’s ringleaders and their circle on the rest of the population) claiming that the basis of a law worthy of the name is the right of each person to work and live in dignity and to promote the only true law at this stage: to rebel against every sacrifice, enforcement and abuse;

4. to denounce the class character of bourgeois institutions and justice: powerless, tolerant or party with the rich and powerful and coward and bully with the popular masses and the weak;

5. to exploit every opportunity and every grip provided by laws in force, through the mobilization of lawyers and of all sincere democrats and progressives in order to denounce the violations of rights sanctioned by the Constitution and to prevent the condemnation;

6. to develop political solidarity and economic support of the masses, intellectuals, true democrats, politicians and administrators of public with organizations and comrades under attack;

7. to develop the fighting front against repression and bourgeois legalism with political, trade union and popular organizations and with individual comrades;

8. to denounce how the bourgeoisie and its institutions squander public money (taken from choking more and more workers and pensioners) to persecute political opponents: they do not have money for kindergartens, schools, health, transport but they find it immediately for subsidizing political police, judges and special anti-terrorist courts.

We call upon all communist anti-imperialist and progressive organizations,, genuine democrats, struggling organizations and movements, lawyers, journalists, politicians and trade unionists

- To reject the ongoing campaign of Communism criminalization and Communists’ persecution,

- To contribute (politically and economically) in the battle for the full acquittal of comrade tried!

We call democrats and intellectuals, journalists because they do not lend themselves to political-police plots and to the censorship imposed by the Authorities on the trial and on Communists’ persecution, and because they give voice to the defendants, lawyers, judges who have already issued nonsuit or dismissal judgments. The independent information is used to defend freedoms and values of the antifascist Constitution practicing them.

We call judges, prosecutors and democratic officers in the Court of Bologna and in other Courts to not become a party in the persecution, but to play their part to make it fail with public stands, interviews, etc... Its failure is in the interests of those who care about the values of the antifascist Constitution .

We call the mayors and other administrators of the new municipal government of Naples, Milan, Cagliari and others (which have established themselves at odds with the old government linked to the top managers of the Papal Republic and subordinate to their governments) to take a stand against this judicial persecution (with public stands, interviews, provision of public halls, etc..) as a concrete and consistent demonstration of the defense of the rights of civilization ratified by the Constitution and of workers and popular masses’ interests.

The victory of this battle will strengthen the rights of civilization conquered with the Resistance!

It will strengthen the people’s struggle against the government of the speculators, of the imperialist bourgeoisie and of the Vatican. It will strengthen the struggle to build a popular emergency government and it will make us advance in the struggle to make Italy a new socialist country!

No to the outlawing of the (n)PCI and of the organizations of the caravan!

Let’s raise the banner of solidarity and class struggle to get out from the wreckage and misery of this system and to build a new future for humanity!