In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Proletarians and Communists.
Sintesis is a communist working group based in the Philippines dedicated to reintroducing and contextualizing the theories and principles of the Communist Left within the archipelago. It operates against the dominant falsifying currents that shape the present political horizon of the working class, particularly left-nationalism, National Democracy, Marxism–Leninism, social democracy, and all their variants, which subordinate proletarian struggle to bourgeois frameworks. In contrast, Sintesis affirms the independence of the working class and the continuity of communist principles as they have emerged through the total historical experience of the international proletariat.
Our work is oriented towards the reconstruction of communist clarity under present conditions in the Philippines. This includes sustained research and collective study, translation of key texts into local languages, the production of original theoretical and political writings, and correspondence with internationalist and Left communist groups abroad. Sintesis also functions as a point of contact, seeking to connect scattered communist elements within the archipelago and overcome their isolation through principled unity.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Proletarians and Communists.
The name Sintesis draws from multiple determinations. It echoes Sinistra, the designation of the Communist Left in Italy during its period of majority influence in the Communist Party of Italy, and Tesis, referencing the 1952 Milan Congress where the theses on the historical invariance of Marxism were further elaborated. At the same time, sintesis in Tagalog denotes “synthesis,” often associated with simplified interpretations of dialectics associated with Fichte’s triadic schema. This project rejects that vulgarization. The term is instead used in its Hegelian sense, pointing toward the movement of Becoming—the process through which determinate content emerges through contradiction and historical development.
Sintesis does not propose a “new” leftism, nor does it seek to fuse Marxism with contemporary academic or political trends such as postcolonial theory or national liberation ideology. It holds that the essential content of the communist program has already been produced through the real movement of the working class and clarified through its victories and defeats. The task today is not invention, but the recovery, verification, and application of the original content of Marxist communism.
The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.
Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Proletarians and Communists.
“Sintesis”, then, is not a shiny new trend in the ideology shop of bourgeois leftism representing an eclectic mixture of ideas, but a shorthand for the program of the Communist Left: a historically grounded, theoretically coherent, and practically oriented body of knowledge that, inseparable from its historical and practical movement, expresses the general interests of the proletariat.