The unprecedented task

The book we here present to the English-language reader is a collection of articles published in our monthly Lotta Comunista over the span of a decade. It is not necessary to add much to the full and exhaustive preface, which takes up the fondamental thread of formulations driven by the political struggle and by the problems posed for the party and its Workers' Clubs in its work among the masses. Running parallel to the scientific analysis of class struggle, political and social events demand constant in-depth study and clarification : a precise work directed towards the activist core of the organisation and its sphere of influence.

What does not seem superfluous is to stress here the need to avoid being led astray by the contingent or the particular. this is a book that continually calls our attention to the general theoretical, political and organisational aspects of the battle, now decades old, for the establishment of an organised, intemationalist Leninist force in a mature imperialist society, and to the relationship between the long times of the party's development and its immediate tasks.

In The Unprecedented Task we find the Marxist concept as a whole : a concept in which theory must of necessity have a practical meaning. The strategie base, the political battle, propaganda and action, work within the trade unions, organisational development, the relationship between the party and the working class in all its stratifications, the establishment of the party within its spheres of influence - all this is systematically subjected to the test of practical experience, becoming the tangible stuff of each day's militant action.