Contribution of the Communist Front of Italy

Dear Comrades,

Let me convey the greetings of the Communist Front of Italy to all the sister parties attending today's meeting, on a day that is at the same time a day of celebration for the defeat of the fascist monster, but also a day of respectful remembrance of those who gave their lives for this and a day of reaffirmation of our militant commitment to continue the anti-fascist struggle in today's conditions.

80 years ago, the Red Army and the Soviet people, led by the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and Comrade Stalin, crushed the Nazi-fascist monster in its lair. The red flag with the hammer, sickle, and star, the symbol of redemption and hope for the proletarians of the whole world, waved over the Reichstag. With this Victory against a coalition that gathered almost all of Europe together with Nazi Germany in a holy alliance against Bolshevism, socialism showed the whole world its superiority over capitalism in its most terrorist, chauvinist, and brutal expression. The effort of the Soviet Union, which suffered over 27 million deaths and enormous destruction, was
decisive in defeating fascism. The heroic struggle of the communist partisans, everywhere at the forefront of the armed anti-fascist resistance, helped to hasten the Great Victory. We remember with respect and grief those who sacrificed their lives in the struggle against Nazi-fascism. Our way of honoring the memory of the victims of fascism must be the strengthening of our struggle against the resurgence of fascism which, unfortunately, is manifesting itself in a worrying way today.

The EU, the bourgeois governments, the class enemy are using enormous resources on the ideological front to falsify history, denigrate the Soviet Union and the contribution of the communists to the liberation from fascism. Once again we condemn the despicable attempt of the bourgeois ideologists to equate fascism and communism, oppressors and liberators, executioners and victims. We also denounce the EU's intention to erase historical memory by changing the name of this day from Victory Day over Nazi-Fascism to Europe Day. By falsifying history, EU propaganda seeks to hide the responsibility of the capitalist bourgeoisie for the rise to power of fascism and Nazism and, conversely, the role of communists and the USSR in the Victory of the peoples over it. We strongly condemn the ban on celebrating the Great Victory in force in some EU member states, fascist Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other former Soviet republics, where the memory of those events is alive and sincerely heart-felt by the people.

We must restore historical truth and say clearly that Great Britain, France and the United States did not fight Nazi-fascism, but Germany, Italy and Japan as competing imperialist powers. Proof of this is their inaction during the Spanish Civil War and early Hitler's assaults, but above all the fact that after the war they reinstated officials and cadres of fascist regimes in their responsibility positions within bourgeois State with clear anti-Soviet and anti-communist aims.

For these reasons, we reject the rhetoric about the "defense of the democratic values of the West", always used by NATO and the EU to justify warmongering plans of robbery and aggression, but neither do we believe the "denazification" intentions of those who in their own country contributed to the counterrevolution, implemented "decommunization" by robbing the Soviet people through privatizations and today celebrate the Great Victory while hiding the symbols of Soviet power and the Mausoleum of its founder Lenin under the tricolor decorations that were the flag of the autocracy and the traitorous Nazis collaborator Vlasov.

As for our own country, we also reject the institutional and "politically correct" anti-fascism of a president who signed a Security Decree that is oppressive in substance, abusive in method, and dangerously similar to the so called "most fascist" laws of 1926. The supposed guarantor of the Republican Constitution allows the government to use emergency decrees without any actual emergency, even trampling on the prerogatives that bourgeois democracy itself confers on parliament. In doing so, he promulgates strongly restrictive content regarding political and trade union freedoms, which guarantees de facto impunity for secret services and police forces and on which the OSCE and the UN have expressed strong criticism due to the risks to democracy. More generally, the institutional anti-fascism of bourgeois power is not credible, since fascism is not an anomaly of capitalism, but its product and tool in certain historical circumstances.

Fascism in power is the openly terrorist and chauvinist dictatorship of financial capital. It is generated by capitalism in those historical moments in which the bourgeoisie is no longer able to exercise its dictatorship with the methods of traditional parliamentary democracy, when symptoms of revolutionary economic and political crisis appear and the working class frightens the bourgeoisie, but is not strong enough to take power into its own hands. What distinguishes fascism from other forms of capitalist dictatorship is its ability to politically—and sometimes paramilitarily—organize the petty bourgeoisie and even lumpen elements to support the reactionary policies carried out by bourgeois power against the labor movement. It is precisely this aspect that gives fascism the character of a
reactionary mass regime: the consensus and support of the conformist petty bourgeoisie that fears capital and its state, but is hostile to the proletariat and hates even more the very realistic prospect of becoming proletarians.

Today many aspects of the management of the capitalist crisis and the dangerous developments of conflicts between imperialist powers testify to a growing recourse by the dominant class to authoritarian methods akin to fascism. Unlike in the past, this is not happening in a phase of advancement of the labor movement, but of its retreat and weakness, as if it were a prophylaxis to ward off even the most remote possibility that the proletariat might raise its head again. A kind of "preventive counter-revolution".

Rabid and bestial anticommunism is the primary defining ideological feature of fascism, at the root of its persecutions and wars, which pervades all its political action and expresses its hate of the labor movement. Today, anticommunism became the official ideology of the EU. In some EU-member countries, this results in the banning of communist and workers' parties and their symbols, the repression and persecution of communist militants and leaders, labor union activists and -as in fascist Ukraine- any voice of dissent from the policies of the Nazi Zelensky and his coupist junta, the murderers of the Ukrainian people supported by the EU and NATO. A barbaric anti-communism that, through the desecration of the military cemeteries of the Red Army and the destruction of the monuments of the socialist period, tries to erase history and the memory of a glorious past.

The current EU leadership, in the grip of a real warmongering and sanctioning frenzy, intends to prolong the ongoing war in Ukraine as long as possible, regardless of the suffering of the peoples involved, including ours. The imperialist plans of EU and US financial capital, forestalled and defeated on the battlefield by capitalist Russia, envisaged not only the looting of Ukraine, but the illusion of being able to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, dismember it and ransack its natural and human riches. These plans are not dissimilar to those of Nazi-fascism.

Moreover, the tone of the EU's propaganda is identical to that used by Goebbels: a "crusade in the name of the values of European civilization". To pursue these unrealistic plans, the EU leadership has passed a EU rearmament plan worth 800 billion euros that will be added to those that each member state will autonomously allocate to its own defense budget. The Cohesion Fund can also be used for this same purpose, which would be a final requiem for environmental protection and natural disasters prevention programs. Needless to say, while public social spending (pensions, healthcare, education, etc.) is constrained by the Stability Pact, spending on armaments, which remains the responsibility of individual states and is charged to their budgets, can be funded with a budget shortfall up to 1.5% of GDP (!), to the delight of the monopolies of the military industry, first of all in the US and, to a less extent, also in the EU. The dreams of European capitalists will turn into nightmares for the workers, who will have to pay for all this in their capacity as taxpayers, but also as users of cut services, recipients of ever-lower incomes, and victims of the inflation that always characterizes war economy, provided that everything does not degenerate into a wider war and that they are not sent to die on the front or end up evaporated by nuclear explosions. It is clear that in order to impose these odious and reckless choices on a people, even if little inclined to mobilize, it is necessary to increase the authoritarian features of the State, repression and police spying control.

In fact, throughout the EU, liberticidal laws are being adopted that invent new types of offenses, aimed at criminalizing the class struggle and blocking the effectiveness of social protests, often divesting even the bourgeois parliaments themselves by using government decrees. On the political level, all over the EU electoral laws are in force or on the way to being passed that effectively thwart the working class' right to both active and passive political representation. Other laws impose forms of government through which majorities, established outside of bourgeois parliaments and sanctioned by fraudulent electoral mechanisms such as double round with ballot, majority bonuses, etc., insure the continuity of power of the dominant class through the supremacy of executive
bodies over representative ones. The perception of the insignificance of the popular voting results in a growing rate of abstention in all level elections.

Anti-communism, as well as repression, are not enough on their own to define a bourgeois state or government as fascist, since historically they have also been present in the liberal state and its governments. However, the abandonment by the dominant class of the principles and mechanisms of bourgeois parliamentary democracy itself, the disempowerment of its fundamental representative institutions in favor of executive bodies, the restriction of representation in the name of "governance", are dangerous symptoms of fascism. Whenever the bourgeoisie infringes on a rule of its own formal democracy, this is a substantial step towards fascism.

Beyond the odious character of the individuals and parties concerned, what went on with elections and individual candidates in Romania, France, Georgia, Moldova, Turkey and, more recently, in Germany is a fascist-type practice that is dangerously spreading throughout the capitalist world and in future will be used against communists for sure if we are not able to stop it. Moreover, this serious wound to the significance of elections themselves is inflicted not in consideration of the reactionary nature of the political subjects involved, but because of their position on the imperialist war and sanctions, that fill the vacuum left by the warmongering bourgeois left.

In summary, in the phase we are going through, crisis and war economy are pushing bourgeois states and their interstate imperialist alliances, such as the EU, to intensify authoritarianism and repression of the class struggle, adopting anticommunism as their ideological basis, supported by a systematic falsification of history and reality that alternates propagandistic manipulation with outright censorship. This is a context increasingly closer to fascism. It is also characterized by an electoral strengthening of those parties that, openly or surreptitiously, refer back to it. The European social democracy, old and new, with its policies of austerity, sacrifices, and indefinitely
lasting war that guarantee large profits to capitalists at the price of a growing impoverishment of the proletariat and the popular strata, is primarily responsible for their success. The behavior of the social democrats of Die Linke, members of the Party of the European Left, is extremely serious; with their abstention, they allowed the launch of Germany's rearmament program worth 1000 billion euros, at a time when the German proletariat is dramatically suffering the consequences of the capitalist crisis in terms of social welfare cuts. The political bankruptcy of the old and new social democracy and, more generally, of the bourgeois left, paves the way for fascism, today as in the past. The electoral advance of far-right parties in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Great Britain, and Scandinavian countries is a clear demonstration of this.

Fascism was defeated 80 years ago, thanks to the Red Army and the struggle of the communists, without forgetting the personal merits of Comrade Stalin. The reasons for that victorious struggle are more alive and relevant than ever today, in the face of the concrete danger of a reactionary involution and resurgence of fascism, because capitalism, which generates it under certain historical conditions, has not been eliminated. There can be no authentic anti-fascism without anti-capitalism; therefore, we must not fall into the trap of electoral collaborations with social democratic or bourgeois parties, disguised as "democratic anti-fascist fronts," which only aim at the
preservation of the dominance of capital.

The duty of communists is to develop the class struggle without compromise for the overthrow of capitalism and the bourgeois state. This means fighting with the utmost determination for our countries' exit from NATO and the EU, imperialist entities that drag us into misery and war, to take an important step towards socialism-communism, which alone can guarantee stable peace and prosperity for humankind. This is what those who crushed Nazi- fascism fought for; this is what we fight for today. This commitment is the best tribute we can pay to the memory of the heroes who fell for the Great Victory of the Peoples.

LONG LIVE THE GREAT VICTORY OF THE PEOPLES!

DEATH TO FASCISM! FREEDOM TO THE PEOPLE