The 80th anniversary of the Liberation comes at a historical moment in which, perhaps more than ever, the partisan struggle is being betrayed by an Italy that is light-years away from what our partisans fought for.
The situation in the world is rapidly deteriorating. The risk of a generalized imperialist war is becoming more and more concrete. The competition between monopolies, financial oligarchies, and capitalists of all countries is intensifying – as the ongoing “trade war” with the USA clearly shows – and threatens to drag the peoples of the world into the abyss. The arms race is back, with the EU announcing an 800-billion-euro rearmament plan.
The war in Ukraine between Russia and the US-EU-NATO bloc, the ongoing massacre in the Middle East, and all the other armed conflicts around the world show that the competition between capitalist powers for control of markets, market shares, energy and mineral resources, trade and supply routes, territories and spheres of influence is increasingly shifting from the economic and political arena to the military one. “War is the continuation of politics by other means”, and today, for the first time in decades, governments and supranational institutions are openly declaring that this is once again an option on the table, and that its costs will be offloaded onto the people and workers in the name of the so-called “war economy” – a term now used openly.
In recent years, we began promoting the slogan “Partisans for Peace” during the April 25th demonstrations, drawing inspiration from the mass movement of the same name which, between the 1940s and 1950s, saw partisans and resistance fighters from Italy and across Europe mobilize against the birth of NATO and against imperialism, together with communists from over 70 countries and involving millions of people. A history that has been deliberately ignored, yet it would be the best answer to the sermons about the need to become “Europe’s warriors”.
Faced with today’s war-mongering winds, the relevance of that choice is once again confirmed. We call on everyone to take to the streets under this slogan, to make it their own, to promote it and oppose the attempts to hijack April 25th and twist its meaning to serve the strategies of big capital and warmongers. These attempts have been ongoing for years: the distortion of the “European partisans” with EU flags, the hypocritical appeals to “anti-fascism” coming from the center-left, which for decades has ruled while carrying out right-wing policies, or the attempts to instrumentalize the story of the “Jewish Brigade” – a unit of the British army that had nothing to do with the Italian Resistance, in which hundreds of Jewish fighters really did participate – to support the genocidal policies of the State of Israel. The partisans would turn in their graves seeing an Italy ruled by the heirs of the MSI, and a center-left that uses the memory of the Resistance to support the imperialist plans of big capital, singing “Bella Ciao” while defending the interests of industrialists, bosses, and high finance.
We will bring this slogan and our communist contingents into the April 25th demonstrations in every city, in the firm belief that the best gift we could give today to the warmongers and our political enemies would be to abandon the streets – as, unfortunately, some on the left have chosen to do in recent years – handing our enemies the chance to use April 25th as they please, even though this date still holds deep meaning for the popular masses of our country. The conditions exist to take to the streets on April 25th with heads held high, defending and honoring the partisan resistance, its ideals, its banners.
AGAINST REARMAMENT AND IMPERIALIST WAR – PARTISANS FOR PEACE
COMMUNIST FRONT – Political Bureau of the Central Committee
COMMUNIST YOUTH FRONT – National Secretariat
