Proletarians! Comrades!
Thirty years ago, at the first signs of a world economic crisis destined to close the cycle of expansion following the Second World War, the bourgeoisie all over the world, usefully supported by opportunist parties and collaborationist trade unions, launched the “politics of sacrifice”.  In the name of the national economy and for the good of it, proletarians had to give up the “victories” wrested by their struggles during the decades when “the economy was plain sailing”:  i. e., they had to tighten their belts and roll up their sleeves, work harder and bring home less, retire later and on a true pittance … All this whilst waiting for the storm to pass.
Thirty years have gone by and the storm has never passed.  On the contrary:  the world economies continue to become increasingly embroiled in a profound crisis where there is no respite even in the temporary pauses, the illusions of recovery in years x or y, the promises of one government or the other.  The instability of the capitalist mode of production has reached levels that hopeful-thinking suckers believed were relegated to a distant past and long forgotten.  The increasingly wide-ranging and profound fibrillation and upheavals express themselves in local wars for the control of strategic areas or those rich in raw materials or destined to convoy the latter to the vital ganglia of the leading economic powers – wars that bring us closer and closer to a new world conflagration, just as revolutionary communists have always maintained since the end of the Second World War.  Thus on the one hand the “politics of sacrifice” have violently struck proletarians in all countries, making their living and working conditions worse;  on the other hand, they have merely aggravated the crisis further and anticipate the moment for the military showdown – an inevitable one for the capitalist mode of production, founded on competition, on the extraction of plus-value, on the war of all against all.  But this anti-proletarian attack is increasingly conducted on the terrain of policing and ideology, too.  From historical experience, the bourgeoisie knows only too well that, no matter what efforts it makes to eliminate or forget this, its great enemy is still there facing it and is called “communism”.  The “politics of sacrifice” have thus accompanied an operation of open terrorism and violent intimidation, to isolate and strike down anyone who moves (or even tends to move) outside the democratic-bourgeois frame of reference.  In Italy, the bus and tram drivers who strike spontaneously are charged, tried and fined;  the railway workers who report the impossible conditions in which they work are laid off; other categories of workers who raise their voices (as at the FIAT in Melfi) are relegated to the sidelines and penalized, expelled from the unions or fired;  and there is no shortage of other examples, in Italy as in the whole world.  The militarization of social life is a fact that belies all the rosy illusions of the democrats or reformists, who have never been able to grasp that the “democracy victorious over totalitarianism” after the massacre of the Second World War has inherited the substance of Nazi-Fascist totalitarianism, as a political-financial expression  of capitalism’s imperialist phase.  It should be added that any opportunity is seized for the bourgeoisie, its state, its “opinion-makers” (with the valid assistance of opportunists of all kinds, right-wing or “left”), to attack the very concept, history and tradition of communism – using the most vulgar and ignorant of mystifications.

Proletarians! Comrades!
The need for communism lies in the objective facts, which are the manifestation of the capitalist mode of production.  The need for communism is confirmed dramatically by the increasing difficulties for the great majority of the world’s population to survive decently in a rotten and dying society (not to mention all the rest: the growing and widespread degree of unhappiness, violence and neurosis is another undeniable fact, just like the inexorable increase in the  murder of proletarians in their places of work, an authentic daily massacre, directly linked to the laws that regulate the extraction of plus-value).   The need for communism will make itself clearer and clearer as the crisis deepens, eliminating any illusion of “guarantees”, any “victory” obtained from years of struggle, as living and working conditions become increasingly intolerable, as the next world war draws closer – even more devastating than the two previous ones.  This is why proletarians who do not want to give in and resign themselves, who do not want to become the victims singled out for peace-time massacres, whilst waiting to become those of wartime, must rediscover the path of open class struggle, the only one that will allow them to find in their collective class identity the capacity for resisting the attacks of capital today and, tomorrow, when objective and subjective conditions make it possible and require it, to finally set themselves the objective of seizing power.
Taking up the path of open class struggle means once again fighting for objectives and with methods that have been those of the proletariat for a hundred and fifty years now:

• big wage increases, bigger for those who are paid worse
• drastic reduction of working hours for the same pay
• full pay to the unemployed and under-employed
• organized refusal of any form of precarious or “off-the-books” work
• organized refusal of any discrimination in terms of age, gender, locality or nationality
• the fight against any form of orchestration, compatibility, sacrifice, in the name of the national economy
• general strike, with no forewarning and no limits of time or extension
• refusal to break the fight down into stages
• re-birth of stable organisms of struggle and economic and social defence

Today, First of May 2007, communists do not only ritually celebrate a past occasion.  They strongly reaffirm what the very history of the capitalist mode of production has unceasingly confirmed over the past one hundred and fifty years:   the need for communism;  therefore the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat; therefore the need for revolution and the taking of power; therefore the need for the world revolutionary party, the science and guide of the revolution, both in today’s fight to defend and in tomorrow’s fight to attack.