It is a Communist party loyal to the teachings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong.
[5][6] On 14 December 1969, Scuderi, Pasca, Paoletti, and Pierattini, alongside the provincial committee of Florence, left the PCd'I (ml) and established the OCBIml.
To achieve its goal, the OCBIml immediately launched itself in the student and workers revolts of the 1960s and 1970s, carrying out an abstentionist propaganda and denouncing those who they term false communists and Marxists–Leninists,[9] including the PCI, which the PMLI considers to have been a reformist party since what came to be known as the Salerno turning point of 1944.
Subsequently we rented a foul building of Florence of four rooms inhabited by mouses, cockroaches, and spiders that we restored during the summer holidays of 1968.
[12] Unlike the PCd'I (ml) and alongside the Communist Party of Italy (Marxist–Leninist) of Osvaldo Pesce, it was among the few Italian Marxist–Leninist groups that did not break with the new Chinese leadership of Hua Guofeng.
[20] Since its establishment, the PMLI began a complex political work; it wanted to gain more and more workers and students, and to pursue its abstaining electoral campaign.
[35][36] The fourth congress was held on 26–28 December 1998, and its document was named Costruiamo un grande, forte e radicato PMLI per combattere la seconda repubblica neofascista, presidenzialista e federalista e realizzare l'Italia unita, rossa e socialista ("Let's Build a Large, Strong, and Rooted PMLI to Fight the Neo-Fascist, Presidentialist, and Federalist Second Republic and Create a United, Red, and Socialist Italy").
[32] The party's fifth congress was held on 6–8 December 2008 under the name Avanti con forza e fiducia verso l'Italia unita, rossa e socialista ("Forward with Strength and Confidence Towards a United, Red, and Socialist Italy").
[78] The PMLI is a Marxist–Leninist party that aims to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in Italy,[79][80] which is considered an intermediate stage for the realization of communist society.
[83] Following the model of the October Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Communist Revolution,[84][85] it aims at revolutionary action to overthrow the Italian government, which is defined as "capitalist, neo-fascist, presidentialist, federalist, interventionist, expression of the parties of the right and left of the regime",[86][87] to create a "united, red, and socialist" Italy;[54] to achieve this, the PMLI resolutely excludes any form of terrorism,[88] and condemned the Red Brigades as a "provocateur and counter-revolutionary strategy".
[92][93] On a historical-ideological level, the PMLI sees the Soviet Constitution of 1936 as entailing the development of socialism in the Soviet Union,[94] and rejects Trotskyism,[4] which is considered a bourgeois and anti-communist deviation,[95] as well as revisions of Marxism, such as reformist socialism and social democracy,[96][97][98] and those of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev,[99] that of Deng Xiaoping and post-Mao China, which is defined by the PMLI as "a black capitalist and fascist dictatorship",[100] and that of Italy by the PCI since the time of Antonio Gramsci,[101] whose influence the PMLI argues is used by what it describes as revisionists and false communists.
[102] The party considers the October Revolution "a historical event that demonstrated that the proletariat is capable of conquering political power and building socialism.
"[103][104] The PMLI judges negatively the figures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as non-Leninists,[105] and does not consider Cuba and North Korea to be socialist countries.
[118] The PMLI had close contacts with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) until 1981, when the CCP repudied the Cultural Revolution, and denounced Deng Xiaoping's Chinese economic reform and broke the relationship; the party considers China under Mao to have been the last socialist country,[119] and describes it as a capitalist state after Mao,[120] and as fascist under Xi Jinping.
[137] At the fifth plenary session of the party's central committee on 11 October 2015, the PMLI took a stance of backing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) against what it describes as the "holy imperialist alliance" fighting it,[138][139][140] while maintaining that "between us and the Islamic state there is an unbridgeable abyss";[141] the PMLI also condemned terrorist attacks linked to ISIL in Europe and elsewhere.
[142][143] The party's position caused dismay among other communist forces, and the PMLI denounced that they were attacked in Rome and Naples during two deonstrations, one in solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada and the other against the NATO military exercise Trident Juncture.
[153] In response to charges of being pro-Atlanticist or NATO, the party wrote: "We are not Atlanticists, our more than fifty-year development demonstrates this, but we are firm supporters of the heroic Ukrainian Resistance fighting against the Russian imperialist aggressor.
"[154] The PMLI supports a peace that is "true, just, lasting, and definitive [which] can only exist if the aggressor is driven back within its borders and Ukraine returns to being, among its thousand class contradictions, a free, independent, sovereign, and integral country.
For this reason, before any negotiation, unless expressly requested by Ukraine, the entire progressive, pacifist world, which loves peace and brotherhood among peoples, cannot fail to make the withdrawal of Russian troops by its own borders.
We also had to counter the growing and dangerous initiatives of false pacifists such as Michele Santoro and Ugo Mattei aimed at making the Italian people share the positions of the Russian aggressor.
In response to objections from the party readership, the PMLI's political office resolution argued: "It is not the first time in history that Marxist–Leninists find themselves fighting a common battle together with imperialists.
[162][163] Every year in Florence, the PMLI holds a commemoration in memory of Mao, who died on 9 September 1976,[4] in which party militants and sympathizers participate.
[168] Subsequently, Pasca took part in the broadcast Otto e mezzo hosted by Giuliano Ferrara and attacked Communist Refoundation Party member Rina Gagliardi [it] as Trotskyist.
[185] On 17 September 1970, Scuderi, then general secretary of the OCBIml and political director of Il Bolshevico, was tried by the court of Florence for having published the electoral position in the newspaper of the OCBIml entitled "Il potere politico nasce dalla canna del fucile" ("Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.").
[185] On 17 December 1970, Scuderi was sentenced by Francesco Fleury, the then magistrate of Florence, to pay a fine of 40,000 lire for "violation of the provisions on continuous printing".
[185] On 14 June 1974, Scuderi was tried for having published the electoral document of the OCBIml in Il Bolshevico, which was titled "Abbandonate le illusioni parlamentari, il potere politico nasce dalla canna del fucile" ("Having Abandoned Parliamentary Illusions, Political Power Grows Out of the Barrel of a Gun"), and was sentenced to another 2 months of suspended prison, which were added to other convictions suffered in his capacity as general secretary of the OCBIml.
The conviction became definitive on 9 May 1975 with the sentence issued by the Florence Court of Appeal, which brought together three criminal proceedings opened between February 1973 and April 1974 that concerned the documents "La strage di Milano ha fallito il suo scopo" ("The Milan Massacre Failed Its Purpose") and "Abbasso il governo clerico-fascista Andreotti" ("Down with the Clerical-Fascist Andreotti Government").
[185] On 10 October 1987 and 5 January 1988, the investigating judge of Bologna and the Court of Appeal of Bologna issued sentences dismissing the criminal proceedings in the preliminary phase, which included the Pierattini as former editor-in-chief of Il Bolscevico and judge Domenico Gallo under investigation for the crime of "contempt of the judiciary" and "incitement to disobey the laws" in reference to a statement written by Gallo on the Scuderi–Il Bolshevico trial of 1986 and published on Il Bolscevico.
On 13 November 1991, the Second Criminal Section of Florence acquitted Scuderi, Pasca, and Martenghi and two other grassroots militants of the crime of "incitement to desertion and military disobedience" during the Gulf War regarding the slogan "Disertare, non sparare, rivoltarsi" ("Defect, Don't Shoot, Revolt") reported in the issues of 28 December 1990 and 25 January 1991 of Il Bolshevico, respectively, because "the fact does not exist".
[185] In November 2002, the PMLI denounced three articles by Dimitri Buffa for Libero, La Padania, and L'Opinione della libertà [it], in which he accused the party of having participated in a plot with Islamic fundamentalism and neo-Nazis to overthrow the leadership of the anti-globalization movement and cause disorder at the demonstration in Florence.