Book excerpt: This text is the written report of a meeting on the topic that took place on August 29-30, 1953, in Trieste, and which appeared in issues 16-20 of Il programma comunista ("the communist programme"). At that time the destiny of the "Free Territory" was still uncertain, one of the many political and economic monstrosities of the post-war "settlement" in Europe and the world. The Trieste drama was a small event in the world picture, but nevertheless enormous for those who had to endure it. During the war, Istrian Italians had suffered ethnic cleansing at the hands of Tito's partisans, but this was kept out of mainstream information channels by the Italian Stalinists, who did not want "communism" to be associated with the persecution of ethnic Italians. These sordid contemporary events gave the International Communist Party the opportunity to present fundamental and classical Marxist theses, in a trenchant way, directly antithetical to the deformation operated on them by opportunism; deformations coming either from the Stalinist counter-revolution or from false left groups; all of them unable to appreciate factors such as those of race and nation which, although not belonging to the totality of direct objectives of the communist revolution, are historically present on the path that dialectically leads to it. In this quality, such factors draw the revolution closer and at the same time compete against it in an interplay that Marxism has never ignored; in given times and in definite historical contexts they have their say within the framework of the proletarian strategy of double revolutions. This powerful party text is within the great Marxist tradition of "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" and of "Anti-Dühring", and possesses the same dialectical vigour and sharp sarcasm.