It is 20 years since the death of our much loved comrade Mauro Stefanini (2 May 2005), a loss as premature as it was dramatic for the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) that held him among its best prepared and esteemed members, as it was for all the comrades of the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) who knew him.

Our memory of him has not diminished in all that time. We will never forget his tireless militancy, his accessibility, generosity and solidarity not only towards his comrades but towards everyone who approached him and with whom he never refused to debate, with patience but firmness in supporting the theoretical and political positions of revolutionary and internationalist communism. Positions which, from a very young age, he never failed to help develop, yet without neglecting the wider interests in his life, even in the last dramatic years of the illness that tormented him and that he knew how to lucidly accept and endure, until his dying day.

Mauro began his militant activity in the ranks of the PCInt, when he was not yet sixteen. We remember his first articles for Battaglia Comunista and then from 1970 for Prometeo. He became the editor and faithful collaborator of both the newspaper and the magazine.

He began by criticising the student movement from a constant and serious class basis. These were the years when many protests took place especially within the State University of Milan, where Mauro carried out his first political activity. He then dedicated himself to contacts with factory workers on Milan’s industrial periphery. Always present and tirelessly committed, Mauro was soon elected (at 22 years old, at the IV Congress of the Party in 1970) to the Central Committee and then to the National Executive Committee. He soon became the main animator of the party's international contacts, thanks also to his knowledge of foreign languages (French and English in particular), and he was at the forefront in the organisation of the international conferences promoted by our party (1977-80). In 1983 the birth of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) – from which the ICT was born – was also the result of his participation, assiduity and tenacity, in the overall work carried out by the party in the international field. Unfortunately, he died in Milan when he still had so much more to give to the cause of communism, as he had done uninterruptedly for over forty years.

By way of commemorating his contribution we reprint excerpts from a debate with some young comrades who were approaching the party in the second half of the 90s of the last century. We have chosen this document, among the many he wrote, because it addresses the question of revolutionary defeatism, which at the time might have seemed, in a certain sense, only a theoretical possibility, even if the first Gulf War, the fragmentation of the Soviet empire, and the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia had already occurred whilst other wars were in the offing. These wars were the dramatic results of the crisis brought about by the fall in the average rate of profit towards the end of the cycle of accumulation which had begun after the Second World War.

Today, unfortunately, the possibility of a generalised war is no longer a hypothesis posed by Marx's critique of capital, but is materialising as a tragic prospect that the international bourgeoisie is imposing on humanity. As has already happened in the past, one of the effects of imperialist war is the flushing out of false internationalism: the separation of those who, in words, refer to proletarian internationalism, when in fact they side with one of the imperialist fronts, in the name of slogans that are well out of date. Among these, the most in vogue among supposed internationalists, are "national liberation struggles", "the self-determination of peoples", and so on. In reality, behind them are the interests of local representatives of the international bourgeoisie, who would like to have exclusive control of the surplus value extorted from the working class, from the dispossessed masses of new national-state entities, without sharing it, or sharing it as little as possible, with others.

It has to be said therefore that Mauro's considerations here are even more relevant today than they were then. His call for the scattered internationalist forces to denounce war from a class perspective to the wider working class; for the construction of the international revolutionary party as an indispensable instrument of the class struggle, are in the very DNA of the ICT.

Mauro on Revolutionary Defeatism and the International Party

Ever since 1943 we of the Italian Left (Battaglia Comunista and Prometeo) have always made the issues of imperialism and war central to our analyses and theoretical/political development.

It is fundamental for us, as it was for Lenin, that war is the inevitable consequence of the phases of development of the capitalist economy. National wars (which characterised capitalism during the early period of accumulation) long since brought an end to the epoch of individual economies; colonial wars concluded the period of the conquest of markets (commercial outlets and sources of raw materials). Finally, the First World War opened the epoch of repeated imperialist wars.

Capitalism means imperialism; imperialism means war. Imperialism is driven to war not by political choices, but by the need to survive the irreconcilable contradictions that shake its economic structure, starting with the decline in the rate of profit.

The logic of imperialism imposes certain strategies on the major powers, to which – with the application of military force when other “peaceful pressures” are no longer sufficient – the weaker states must submit. And for all of them, the only hope of starting a new cycle of capitalist accumulation is through military conflict involving colossal destruction of means of production and labour power.

Therefore, the question of war must be considered exclusively within precise class limits. Revolutionary defeatism risks becoming an idealistic absolute, inextricably linked to the – equally idealistic – assumption that imperialist war will inevitably be transformed into civil war, where the victory of the communist revolution in some of the important capitalist states in the world will lead a world revolutionary war for communism. Such an event has occurred only once in a century of imperialist wars, and in very specific conditions.

In reality – and always assuming the active presence of the party as a vital condition – the illusions of pacifism, of the disarmament of nations or of personal desertion, can and must be fought against.

As regards the party, when war occurs, there are two possibilities: a) the party exists with a certain amount of influence within the proletariat; or b) the party is reduced to the bare minimum without any connection with the proletariat. Of course, in both cases the revolutionaries do not abandon (in words) the tactic of defeatism, but it is clear that in case (b) there is little to… console oneself beyond the “conviction” that the war will inevitably be followed by a social crisis, offering the party a more favourable ground to carry out its activity.

Yes, but here we are still dealing with an abstract vision of a party that is and is not, or in any case, that inevitably must appear at the right time…

With our feet firmly planted on the ground, there is no doubt that the tactic of revolutionary defeatism is the only one that can be adopted in the face of imperialist war. Yet, having said this, or rather “written and rewritten” this, it is not enough in itself for the revolutionary to be able to sleep soundly, at peace with their own conscience…

The substance of our revolutionary defeatism is not to be confused with a generally antimilitarist or banal pacifist approach. Together with Lenin, we believe that “the only policy of breaking – and not just in words – civil peace (and we also would add in the period preceding or immediately following the declaration of war) and of recognising the class struggle, is the policy by which the proletariat takes advantage of the difficulties of its own government and its own bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them”. “Difficulties”, so to speak, that are “natural”, but, where possible, also “provoked”.

We would not be Marxists if we rejected this tactical approach, just as it is un-Marxist to oppose it with a tactic which appears to offer no other option than to wait for the fallout, in every sense, caused by the unfolding of the war itself…

What kind of tactic would it be to “cheerfully” watch the accumulation of blood and tears in an increasingly stunned, and in turn, barbarised proletariat? Why not stand at the window and wait for the economic crisis of capitalism and the political crisis of the bourgeoisie to spontaneously shatter this beautiful world to pieces, thus opening the doors to the advent of socialism?

… The work for the construction of the World Communist Party remains fundamental: a party that does not limit itself to theorising but is also able to operate concretely. And, above all it needs to be in time to remove the best part of the proletariat from the devastating influence of war ideologies. So far the bourgeoisie has managed to drag millions of proletarians to the slaughter, even when they are passive and not even convinced participants. In reality, once war has begun, the proletariat always appears defeated on the level of the class struggle. Further, the true face of war — in all its crudeness, bestiality and uselessness — is only recognised by the masses at the end of the conflict and in the defeated states. And even then, as has already happened, the relaunch of the revolutionary struggle is not a given.

To conclude: transforming the imperialist war into a social war means being able to lead the proletariat back to genuine class struggle, possibly before the monstrous war machine of death and destruction has started. It means being able to shift the activity of the best forces of the proletariat into whatever situation may be favourable to it, certainly even during the war itself.

For this reason, the historical order of the day for us revolutionaries is the work of rebuilding the political organisation of the class around the revolutionary programme of communism. A difficult, hard and not very rewarding job in the current state of things. It is something that most of those who call themselves communists and internationalists prefer to leave to others or, at most, cultivate in the privacy of their own little garden. Here, they generally dedicate themselves to the most comfortable drafting of personal, and perhaps not always original, assessments and lessons from the past. Of course these are also welcome (except for those where the precise punctuation of some sacred text has been studied for decades). But a good roll-up of the sleeves and a bit more heaving of the shovel would not hurt. On the contrary.