US
What Distinguishes Our Party, 1969
What Distinguishes Our Party, 1969
International Communist Party
What Distinguishes Our Party
Foreword
The
Programme
of the Party
(1921-1949)
Defense
of the Great Marxist Tradition
For the
Restoration
of Revolutionary Marxist Theory
Back to
Catastrophism
Return to Revolutionary
Totalitarianism
Back to
Internationalism
Back to the
Communist Programme
1) Phase of Transition
2) Lower Phase of Socialism (or Socialist Phase)
3) Higher Phase of Socialism (or Communist Phase)
Reconstruction of the Communist Party on a World Scale
Public Speech
, held in different cities in the U.S., December 2024 - February 2025
FOREWORD
In the few pages that follow are condensed
the positions of the Communist Left, which is organized as the International
Communist Party. Its press organs are listed
here
The doctrine and the programme that the party
embodies are products of historical selection and not the brainchildren
of useless geniuses. They have been fused together by History into one
steel block over the course of tempestuous and bloody class struggles;
which halfway through the 19th century introduced a new class, the proletariat.
The party is
a school of thought and a
method of action
. Doctrine, programme, tactics, and organization make
up the party. The working class exists as such only by virtue of its party;
without it the proletariat is a class only in a statistical sense.
The existence of the party does not depend on the
will of great chiefs, but rather on generations of its militants jealously
guarding and keenly observing its fundamental features, and enforcing them
in all their practical consequences; the party’s strength, meanwhile,
depends on the development of social contradictions. For this reason, at
certain points in history, it is reduced to a small number of resolute
militants, at others it grows, increases its membership, and becomes a
social force that can determine the outcome of the final clash with capital’s
regime.
For these reasons it is ruled out that the party
can once again put itself at the head of the fighting masses, as in the
glorious period between 1917-1926, by means of tactical expedients, diplomatic
devices, promiscuous associations with other left-wing political groups,
or innovations of sibylline significance in the field of the complex intertwining
of the party/class relationship.
It is also ruled out that the party can increase
its membership by official deployment of a senseless formal discipline,
the inevitable counterpart of the restoration of democratic practices,
which by now are forever banned not only from the heart of our organization,
but from the State and society as well. Such petty subterfuges as these
kill
the party as a class organ, even should its membership rise. They are low
tricks that betray the yearning of chiefs and semi-chiefs to effect a "break
through", in the false hope of escaping the ghetto in which the true party
is confined, not by its own will but by the pressure of the counterrevolution,
which has been victorious on a world scale for almost a century now precisely
by distorting the tasks and nature of the party.
The best evidence of the uselessness of such manoeuvring,
better than deriving it from the critique of ideas, comes from historical
experience. Although the relations of power between the social classes
have not changed at all various trotskist tendencies, and left wingers
of various hues, have preached everywhere that the party must adapt itself
to circumstances, i.e., adopt "realistic" policies, consisting of continuous
changes of direction.
If the size of the party today is minimal, and its
influence on the proletarian masses virtually non existent, the reason
is to be found in the class struggle, in historical events, and we must
be courageous enough to conclude that either Marxism should be discarded,
and with it the party, or that Marxism must be kept unchanged. After having
anticipated this lesson on the doctrinal level, the Left has also drawn
from this materialistic and historical verification a fundamental lesson:
nothing to add, nothing to change. Let us remain at our post!
This pamphlet is a text of the International Communist Party, and like all its other texts it confirms and reasserts the traditional positions of the Italian Left. Existing outside the contingent events of organic and historical selection of formal organizations.
Let us state again that we expect the revival of
the revolutionary class movement to follow a sharpening and radicalization
of social struggle, which will arise as a consequence of the acceleration
of contradictions within the capitalist system. The party will grow alongside
these developments if, based on its inviolable doctrine and invariant program
it knows how, in each proletarian struggle it participates in, to direct
them simultaneously against the treacherous opportunism of the false workers
parties, against
nationalistic and patriotic
trade unionism, and
against the capitalist State and the bourgeois political front.
In this struggle the Left is alone and knows
it will remain alone
, not through its own choice, but because this
is the fertile lesson derived from the past defeats of the proletariat.
In those defeats a pre-eminently counter-revolutionary role was played
by positions and organizations which, although pretending to be inspired
by the proletariat and even by Marxism and revolution, in fact represented
the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and the labour aristocracy; and
their action has always been that of first obstructing, then dividing,
and finally abandoning the proletarian front to the enemy.
It is some time since we settled accounts with all
the latter day union leaders, anarchists, and "left wingers" or rather
since History did, which has pitilessly shattered their deeds and doctrines.
* * *
We dedicate this short text above all to the
proletarian youth, so that, with its characteristic bravery, abnegation
and spirit, it may turn its back forever on the illusory temptations of
modern society, on the false myths of democracy and national solidarity,
of reformism and gradualism, in order to embrace a program of struggle,
of combat, on the anonymous and impersonal revolutionary communist front.
For it will be up to our youth to bring communism
to victory.
THE PROGRAMME OF THE PARTY
1921-1948
it is here
DEFENSE OF THE GREAT MARXIST TRADITION
On the basis of this program, outlined above, the International Communist
Party reclaims the fundamental doctrinal principles of Marxism in their
entirety: dialectical materialism as systematic conception of the world
and of human history; the fundamental economic doctrines contained in Marx’s
Capital
as the method of interpreting capitalist economy; and the programmatic
formulations of the
Communist Manifesto
as historical and political
plan for the emancipation of the World working class. We also reclaim the
entire system of principles and methods arising from the victory of the
Russian Revolution, namely: the theoretical and practical work of Lenin
and the Bolshevik Party during the crucial years of taking power and the
civil war, and the classic theses of the 2nd Congress of the Communist
International. These represent the confirmation, restoration, and subsequent
development of the aforesaid principles, which today are brought into even
more prominent relief by the lessons of the tragic revisionist wave which
originated around 1926-27 under the appellation "socialism in one country".
It is only as a matter of convention however that we link this calamity
to the name of Stalin, preferring instead to ascribe it to the pressure
of the objective social forces towering over Russia after the revolutionary
blaze of October 1917 had failed to spread worldwide. Too late was it seen
that a programmatic and tactical barrier was needed to resist this pressure,
a barrier which even if it had been unable to prevent defeat, might yet
have made the rebirth of the international communist movement less difficult
and tormented.
This latest of counter-revolutionary waves would be far more lethal
than the opportunist disease (anarchist deviations) that had troubled the
brief existence of the First International, and far more serious even than
the damage wrought by the Second International when it sunk into the mire
of adhesion to the
Union Sacrée
, and then to the 1914 imperialist
war (gradualism, parliamentarism, democratism). Today the situation of
the workers’ movement appears a thousand times worse than after the vertiginous
collapse of the Second International at the outbreak of the first World
War.
The Third International, formed in 1919, re-established the cardinal
points of Marxist doctrine with a program that made a definitive break
with the democratic, gradualist, parliamentary and pacifistic illusions
of the Second (shipwrecked by the most ignoble chauvinism and warmongering
during the war). The Third International was an enormous historical contribution
by Lenin, Trotski and the Bolshevik old guard, but, nevertheless, right
from its very inception the Third International was, in a certain sense,
on shaky ground, and this was due both to the hurried way it went about
forming communist parties, and because of the overly flexible tactics it
adopted to "conquer the masses".
But, at least as far as the creators of the Red October were concerned,
this approach and these tactics did not signify, nor should they be taken
as signifying, an abandonment of the basic principle of the violent conquest
of power, of the destruction of the bourgeois parliamentary and democratic
State apparatus, or then installation of the proletarian dictatorship directed
by the party. In fact, the application of the tactics of the Third International
might not have caused so much harm if the revolution, as was hoped, had
spread rapidly to the rest of the World; but, as the Left was to warn from
the 2nd Congress in 1920 onwards, there was a risk, if the revolutionary
wave subsided, of very negative consequences. This was because the collection
of parties adhering to the new International was highly unstable since
they had been assembled in a most random way and, as a result, were not
sufficiently immunised against the possibility of social democratic relapse
as soon as the revolutionary wave had receded. Unfortunately, precisely
that happened, bringing to the surface was not just the people, but rather
the cancerous illnesses of an all too recent past.
Between 1920 and 1926, the Left insisted on the necessity of establishing
one
single
platform and tactical plan to be adopted by all sections of
the International, and warned against the perils of applying "revolutionary
parliamentarism" in the West, where democracy had been established for
over a hundred years. More importantly still, it would oppose the tactic
of the "united political front", and then the tactics of the so-called
"Workers (and Worker-Peasant) Governments", since it held that these formulae
undermined the clearcut and unambiguous formula of the "proletarian dictatorship".
It deplored the policy of allowing the direct adhesion to the International
of organizations independent from the local communist party and of accepting
sympathiser parties.
It rejected the praxis of infiltrating pseudo-workers parties, and especially
bourgeois parties (like the Kuomintang). Likewise, it rejected the even
worse "blocs", even temporary ones, with alleged kindred parties or those
contingently aligned on positions which were only superficially "similar".
The criterion which had inspired the Left and given rise to these positions
was, and remains, the following: the strengthening of Communist parties
depends not on tactical maneuvering or on displays of subjective voluntarism,
but on the objective fact of the playing out of a revolutionary process
which has no reason to obey the canons of a continuous and linear process.
The seizure of power may be near or far, but in both cases, and above all
in the former, preparing for it (and preparing a more or less large stratum
of the proletariat for it) means heading off any action likely to cause
the communist organization to relapse into an opportunism analogous to
what occurred in the 2nd International, that is, a breaking of the inseparable
bond between means and ends, tactics and principles, and immediate and
ultimate objectives, leading inevitably back to electoralism and democratism
in politics, and to reformism in the social field.
From 1926 onwards, the conflict would be transferred directly onto the
political plane and end in a split between the International and the Left.
The two questions on the table were "Socialism in one country" and, shortly
after, "anti-fascism". "Socialism in one country" is in fact a double negation
of Leninism: firstly, it fraudulently passes off as socialism what Lenin
clearly defined as "capitalistic development in the European manner in
petty-bourgeois and mediaeval Russia", and secondly, it detaches the destinies
of the Russian Revolution from that of the World Proletarian Revolution.
It
is the doctrine of the counter-revolution
. Inside the U.S.S.R., it
would be used to justify the repression against the Marxist and Internationalist
old guard, starting with Trotski, whilst outside its borders it would favour
the crushing of the Left currents by centre fractions, often clearly descended
from social-democracy, and "in total submission to the bourgeoisie" (Trotski).
The principal manifestation of the abandonment of the cardinal programmatic
points of the World-wide communist struggle was the substitution of the
watchword of the revolutionary conquest of power for the defence of democracy
against fascism; as if both regimes would not always respond to their shared
objective of defending the capitalist regime when faced with the peril
of a new proletarian revolutionary wave, and alternate at the helm of the
State according to the pressing demands of the dynamics of class struggle.
This phenomenon, after the German bastion had fallen with Hitler’s victory
in 1933, found expression not only in the Third International, but also
amongst the "trotskist" opposition, which, even if it did talk of democracy
as a "stage" or "phase" which had to be traversed before the full demands
of the revolutionary proletariat could be acted on, was, nevertheless,
using the very same watchword of the defence of democracy against fascism
as the Stalinists. In both cases, it brought about the destruction of the
working class as a politically distinct force with objectives antithetical
to those of all other social strata; the workers of the various countries
would be mobilised first in defence of democratic institutions, and then
in defence of the "fatherland", prompting the rebirth and exasperation
of chauvinistic hatreds. Finally even the Communist International was formally
dissolved and any wish to reconstruct it temporarily annihilated.
Since the working class was now hitched to the bloody wagon of the Imperialist
war of 1939-45, the slender forces of international and internationalist
communism, if and where they had survived, were not able to influence the
situation in any way: and the call for the "transformation of the imperialist
war into civil war", which had first gone up in 1914, and foreshadowed
the Russian Revolution of 1917, now fell on deaf ears – scorned and despised.
In the post-war period, not only were the "naïve" hopes of an expansion
of revolutionary communism at the tips of Russian bayonets not fulfilled
but a neo-ministerialism even worse than that of the right-wing of the
Second International reigned supreme; worse because exercised in the more
difficult period of capitalistic reconstruction: a reconstruction, which
favoured State authority (disarming of the proletarians in partisan units),
saving the national economy (reconstruction loans, acceptance of austerity
measures in the name of the "higher interests" of the nation, etc, etc).
Later, in the "popular democracies", the re-establishment of an order which
would be passed off as "Soviet" (Berlin, Poznan, Budapest) would be favoured.
But once their
open
collaboration at the helm of the State was
no longer required however, the "communist" parties affiliated to the Kremlin
would be pushed to the margins of a merely parliamentary "opposition",
driven there by the allies of war and of "peace" in an increasingly steelbound
World of police States and fascism. But, far from rediscovering the
Via
maestra
of Lenin (something they couldn’t have done even supposing
they had wanted to) they sunk deeper and deeper into the pit of total revisionism,
finally reaching rock-bottom in recent years when they would neither predict
nor advocate an end to capitalism, now exalted under the form of international
commerce (globalization), or an end to bourgeois parliamentarism, which,
on the contrary, was now to be defended against the attacks of the bourgeoisie,
which needed reminding of the its "glorious" past. In the end, even the
pretence of a struggle between the "socialist" and "capitalist" camps,
the paltry level to which Stalinism had reduced the class struggle, was
dropped to make room for the watchword of "coexistence and peaceful competition!"
on an international scale.
Finally, no longer able to bear that word "communist", which had weighed
them down for so long; these parties changed their name.
The consequence of "coexistence" and economic confrontation could only
be the complete liquidation of Stalinism. For our party, therefore, the
complete abjuration of Stalinism by the countries of the Eastern bloc cames
as no surprise; indeed, we had foreseen it as the inevitable and definitive
step needed to overcome, at the economic level, their separation from the
world market; and to move beyond that autarchy necessary in backward countries
to develop their national capitalist industry to the point they can compete
with the industrial production of the old capitalist powers.
Russia now makes no pretence of being "socialist" and has become a fully
capitalist country, with all its producers proletarianised and with all
the economic, political, social and moral muck of a true capitalist democracy.
The Stalinist betrayal of communism and its ensuing collaboration with
rotten western capitalism ended up reducing the 1917 communist revolution
that shook the world from blazing splendour to cold ashes; but at the same
time it wrested Russia from its semi-feudal inertia by carrying out –
by fire and sword and all the inevitable atrocities that go with it –
its primitive capitalist accumulation. The Russian attempt at disguising
as socialism an out and out capitalism has failed. The prevailing of the
latter form of production in every corner of the country, far from being
evidence of the defeat of communism, is on the contrary the best condition
for its future triumph.
But from the depths of the abyss, in anticipation of a future proletarian
resurgence, the call goes up: "Workers of the World - Unite!" and "Dictatorship
of the Proletariat!". It is
our
call.
FOR THE RESTORATION OF REVOLUTIONARY
MARXIST THEORY
Back to “Catastrophism”
In terms of the general doctrine of historical and social revolution,
the old communist movement has now degenerated to such an extent that it
rejects the "catastrophic" vision of Marx: neither opposed class interests,
nor clashes between States will lead – they say – to violent struggle,
to armed conflicts. Basically, they subscribed to the prospect of an international
peace, baptised
peaceful co-existence
, along with
a social peace
guaranteed by the conservative and reactionary watchword of a "new democracy",
which would be based on "democratic planning", on "structural reforms",
and on the "struggle against monopolies". In reality, Stalinist, and especially
post-Stalinist "communism" was just an apologia for Progress in its glorification
of growth of production and productivity, and an apologia for Capitalism
in its glorification of the growth of trade.
Today, while "peaceful coexistence" has given way to a fluid international
situation, in which looks for new settlements are being sought in view
of the next world conflict, the opportunist, pseudo-worker parties are
no longer distinguishable, even in a formal sense, from then self-proclaimed
"right wing" parties.
In opposition to this kaleidoscope of positions, the marxist position
remains the same: under capitalism, the growth of production and productivity
involves increasing exploitation of labour by capital, a growth measured
in the part of work which is unpaid, of surplus-value. Workers’ consumption,
the "reserve fund" which the working class gives rise to in both an individual,
and social form (insurance against sickness and old-age, family legislation,
etc.) may increase, but at the same time the subjection of the producers
to capital increases also, and their conditions of life become even more
insecure due to the ups and downs of the market economy. Rather than class
antagonisms getting less, they are pushed, in fact, to their maximum extent.
Extension of trade signifies the extension of the dominion of the developed countries over the under-developed countries, plus increasing aggravation of the natural competition between developed countries. By drawing the different peoples and different continents together in the meshes of an increasingly global economy – a genuine, if unwitting conquest – international commerce presents, dialectically, a "negative" aspect which its apologists feign to ignore: that is, it prepares the ground for the commercial, and therefore financial and industrial crises whose only outcome can be, today as yesterday, an imperialist war. Moreover, an increasing part of the productive forces is nowadays wasted, not just in producing the goods and services, which "mutually beneficial" and "honest trade" (so dear to the hearts of opportunists of East and West) would bestow on the whole of humanity, but in the production of destructive weapons whose function is even more economic (sector of accumulation to absorb over-production) than military.
Capitalism is endless reproduction of capital; of capitalist production’s
purpose is capital itself. The increase of commodity production beyond
any natural limit, at a breakneck speed, does not generate better welfare
for mankind, but rather a series of catastrophic crises of overproduction
that ravage social life over the entire planet. Of such crises – denied
for decades by bourgeois theorists, and believed unavoidable by authentic
Marxism – the working class is the first victim, bearing the weight of
unemployment, reduction of wages, and intensification of work loads.
For capitalism war is the necessary consequence of its periodical overproduction
crises. Capitalist war is therefore unavoidable. Only the enormous destructions
provoked by the modern world wars allow capitalism to start anew its infernal
cycle of reconstruction-accumulation. Our era’s imperialist world wars
– although invariably hidden behind "humanitarian", "democratic", "pacifistic",
"defensive", "antiterrorist" screens – are badly needed by the various
capitalisms to share out the exhausted markets, to divide up the continents
among themselves. They are therefore wars for the conservation of capitalism;
both on the economic plane and insofar as they provide, during the crises,
for the elimination of the part of labor force that exceeds the reduced
capacity of the system of production to employ it. As a matter of fact,
they are immense slaughters of slaves that capital is not at that moment
able to support. It’s either war or revolution, there’s no alternative
route.
The revolutionary communist attitude towards war is to denounce the
idea of peace being compatible with capitalism as a tragic illusion, and
to affirm that only the overthrowing of bourgeois power and the destruction
of production relations founded on capital will free mankind from such
a recurrent tragedy. On the line of Marx and Lenin the party proclaims
the tactics of
class antimilitarism
, of
fraternization at the
fronts
, of
revolutionary defeatism
at the front and the rear;
which aim to turn the war among States into a war between classes.
Due to the fundamental contradiction that invalidates all legalitarian
and interclassist pacifist movements, which condemn war but within the
boundaries of the present regime, communism expects, owing to their bourgeois
origin, that whenever they are forced to choose between war and revolution
they will invariably opt for the former. With Lenin we consider them as
a factor of confusion, detrimental to the sound battle orientation of the
proletarian, and as an auxiliary instrument of militarism used to drag
workers into war. As a matter of fact it is the pacifists – after ascribing
to the "aggressor" of the hour those atrocities against civilians that
imperialist wars always and invariably cause – who end up going to the
bourgeois states and asking them "to put a stop to it by any means", and
who ask proletarians to slaughter each other in the name of the phoney
ideals of "peace", "democracy", "civilization", etc.
When dealing with the even more classically reformist arguments of post-stalinism,
the positions of revolutionary marxism remain as they were back in the
heyday of social-democracy: modern capitalism is not at all characterised
by "lack of planning" (Engels had already seen that!), and in any case
"planning" alone, of whatever sort, isn’t nearly adequate to characterise
socialism. Not even the disappearance (more or less true as the case may
be) of the social personality of the capitalist, which supposedly distinguished
Russian society, is sufficient to demonstrate that capitalism itself has
been abolished (and Marx had already seen that!). Capitalism is, after
all, nothing other than the reduction of the modern worker to the position
of wage-earner; and where you find wage-earners you find capitalism.
The combination of apologia of capitalism with reformism of the old-fashioned
social-democratic type, which distinguishes Russian and Chinese-type "communism"
(worse even than classical reformism), is linked to a defeatism that, insofar
as it is a psychological and ideological reflection of the disintegration
of the revolutionary strength of the proletariat, sterilizes even the revolt
which it itself has stirred up in certain workers’ strata. This new,
more dangerous reformism consists, in the first place, in denying that
the working class can overcome the heightened competition that divides
it in the present day; that it can rebel against the despotism of the needs
created by capitalist prosperity; that it can escape from the cretinisation
generated by the bourgeois organization of welfare, of leisure, of "culture";
that it can form its own revolutionary party. In the second place, it implies,
explicitly, or implicitly, that the new weapons possessed by the ruling
class have somehow rendered them more invincible than before. We, meanwhile,
are convinced that capitalism’s power is merely a transitory phase in
history; and therefore all these positions, which are tantamount to the
abdication of every revolutionary hope before an omnipotent capitalism,
are rejected by us.
The same defeatist positions we find in all epochs of political and
social reaction (i.e. superstitious respect for the military power of the
enemy, already combated by Engels back in the days of "conventional" guns
and cannons; philistine scorn and contempt for the "obtusity", "ignorance",
and "lack of idealism" of the workers, already combated by Lenin and by
all revolutionary militants); but each age creates its own pressing reasons
for believing them (the atom and hydrogen bombs or, as in Marcusian elucubrations,
the incurably corrupting power of "the consumer society"!).
A central instrument of this moral intimidation are today’s powerful
mass media, which obsessively repeat that the present society is the "lesser
evil".
The marxist positions, on these issues as well, remain the same as ever:
capitalism may divide, but at the same time it concentrates and organises
the proletariat – and in the end the concentration gains the upper hand
over the division. Capitalism may corrupt and weaken the proletariat, but
nevertheless, despite itself, it provides a revolutionary education whether
it likes it or not – and in the end such education gains the upper hand
on the corruption. Indeed, all the sophisticated products of the "pleasure
industries" are equally powerless to soothe the increasing malaise of social
life (whether rural or urban), as indeed are all the tranquillisers of
modern medicine when it comes to restoring to capitalist man harmonious
relations with himself, and with others, which "modern life" – capitalist
life – destroys.
Nevertheless, much more than in these kinds of corruption,
the strength of capital resides, today as yesterday, in crushing the producer
by the length of the working day, working week, working year, working life.
But capital
must
, by force of circumstances, historically limit
this length; it does so slowly, grudgingly, with continuous steps backward,
but
it can’t avoid doing so
, and the effects of this, as Marx
and Engels saw, will necessarily be revolutionary, especially considering
it is compelled at the same time
to instruct
(at the same time as
it stupifies) its future "gravediggers". There are two main outlooks for
the future: 1) another 1929 type crisis will break out and reduce today’s
"embourgeoisified worker" to a proletarian condition (for us the most likely),
and 2) a long historical phase of expansion and "prosperity"; and yet you
have to be an open practitioner of defeatism (as are Maoists, Castroists,
Guevarists etc, in their respective ways) to deduce, from the present disorganization
of the proletariat, a definitive historical condemnation, a sociologically
determined "inability" to reconstruct the party and the class International,
and, from that, the necessity of other social strata and sociological categories
(peasants, students and so on) to take its place as the vanguard of the
social revolution.
Even more absurd is this belief: that because of the greater social
power that the development of capitalism itself gives to the wage-earning
class, the latter is rendered impotent and unable to achieve the prior
duty of any historical social revolution: disarming the class enemy through
the
totalitarian
appropriation of its military potential.
Return to revolutionary “Totalitarianism”
On the social and political plane, the final victory of democratism
over the revolutionary doctrine of the old communist movement is reached
when “resistance to totalitarianism" is presented as the task of the
proletariat and of all social strata oppressed by capital.
This tendency, whose first historical manifestation was anti-fascism
(both the war and pre-war varieties) affected all of the parties linked
to Moscow (and ones like China which broke away) and ended up denying
the
one party
(a form indubitably Leninist and communist in origin) as
the necessary revolutionary guide and leader of the proletarian dictatorship.
In the "people’s democracies" of the so-called "socialist camp", power
lay in the hands of popular and national "fronts", or of parties or "leagues"
which explicitly embodied a bloc of several classes. Meanwhile, the "communist"
parties operating in the "bourgeois camp" have solemnly abjured the doctrine
that revolutionary class violence is the
sole way
of attaining power,
and denied the fact that the
sole means
of maintaining the class
dictatorship is through the communist party alone. Instead they flattered
other parties, socialists, catholics etc., by engaging in "dialogues" with
them, and promising a "socialism" which would be jointly managed by several
parties representing "the people". This tendency, which is warmly welcomed
by all enemies of the proletarian revolution (Stalinist "communism" rejects
anything that reminds them of the glories of the Red October) is not only
defeatist but it is an illusion.
Just as the proletariat stakes no claim
to any
liberty
for itself under the despotic regime of capital,
and therefore doesn’t rally around the banner of either "formal" or "genuine"
democracy, it will, on having established its own
despotic regime
proceed to
suppress all the liberties
of the social groups linked
to capital, and this will be an integral part of its programme. For the
bourgeoisie, struggles in the political arena take place not between classes,
but as "debates" between free and equal individuals; the struggle is one
of opinions rather than of physical and social forces divided by incurable
contradictions. But whilst the bourgeoisie disguises its own dictatorship
under the cloak of democracy, communists, who since the time of the Manifesto
have "disdained to conceal their views and aims", proclaim openly that
the revolutionary conquest of power, as necessary prelude to the social
palingenesis, signifies at the same time the totalitarian rule of the ex-oppressed
class, as embodied in its party, over the ex-dominant class.
Anti-totalitarianism is a rivendication of classes which are situated
on the same social basis as the capitalist class (private appropriation
of the means of production and the products themselves) but which are nevertheless
invariably crushed by it. It is the ideology – common to the multifarious
movements of "intellectuals" and "students" which infest the current political
scene – of the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie and middle classes,
a desperate attempt to cling to the historically condemned myths of small
production, of the sovereignty of the individual and "direct democracy".
It is therefore both bourgeois and anti-historical and thus doubly anti-proletarian.
The ruin of the petty-bourgeoisie under the hammer blows of big capital
is historically inevitable, and constitutes in a social sense – in the
capitalist manner, brutal and drawn-out at the same time – a step towards
the socialist revolution in that it brings about the one and only real
historical contribution of capitalism: centralization of production, and
socialization of productive activity.
For the proletariat, the return to less concentrated forms of production
(even were it possible) could only mean turning aside from its historical
aim of
achieving a completely social production and distribution
It therefore recognises as its duty neither the defence of the petty-bourgeoisie
against "big business" (both equally enemies of socialism) nor the adoption
of pluralism and "polycentrism" in politics, which it has no reason to
accept on either the
economic
or
social
level.
The slogan "struggle against the monopolies" in defence of small-scale
production is therefore reactionary, as is the erroneous petty-bourgeois
response to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution which is connected
to it. For us, the cause of the degeneration was the failure to spread
and extend the proletarian revolution, and the abandonment of communist
internationalism, whilst for the petty bourgeoisie, the revolution was
a failure from the start because it was anti-democratic, because it installed
a proletarian dictatorship. All the equally reactionary movements of the
middle-classes see the revolutionary process as consisting of the gradual
conquests of little islands of peripheral "power" by proletarian organisms
organised in the workplace (and condemned to it); this is the fantastical
"direct democracy" (as in the Gramscist and Ordinovist theory of the factory
councils). What these theories ignore is the central problem of the conquest
of political power, the destruction of the capitalist State, and the need
for the party as
centralising
organ of the working class. For others,
all that is needed to realize "socialism" is a network of "self-managed"
businesses, each with its own plan arrived at by "decisions from below"
(Yugoslavian theory of self-management). Thus the petty-bourgeois theoreticians
completely negate the possibility of the
"social production regulated
by social prevision"
which Marx showed to be "the political economy
of the labouring class", and which is made possible only by transcending
the basic productive cells of the capitalist economy and the "blind rule"
of the market in which they find the only, chaotic and unpredictable connective
element.
Before and after the taking of power, in politics as in economy, the
revolutionary proletariat does not and cannot make any concessions to anti-totalitarianism;
a new version of that idealistic and utopian anti-authoritarianism denounced
by Marx and Engels in their long polemic with the anarchists, and which
Lenin, in
State and Revolution
, showed to converge with gradualist
and democratic reformism. However,
the small producers
will receive
a very different treatment from the socialist proletariat than that meted
out to them under capitalism, which throughout its history has treated
this class with the utmost ferocity. But
towards small production itself,
and its political, ideological and religious reflex
, its action will
be infinitely more decisive, rapid and, in short, totalitarian. The proletarian
dictatorship will spare humanity the infinite amount of violence and misery
which under capitalism constitutes its "daily bread". This it will be able
to do precisely inasmuch as it doesn’t hesitate to use force, intimidation
and, if necessary, the most decided repression against any social group,
big or small, which seeks to obstruct the fulfillment of its historical
mission.
To conclude: whoever combines the notion
of
socialism
with any form of liberalism, democratism, factory councilism,
localism, pluripartyism, or worse, anti-partyism places himself outside
history, and off the road that leads to
the reconstitution of the party
and the International on a totalitarian communist basis
Back to Internationalism
Since the appearance of the Communist Party Manifesto in 1848, whose
title purposely omits national specifications, communism and the struggle
for the revolutionary transformation of society have been by definition
international and internationalist: "The workers have no country"; "United
action at least in the civilised countries, is one of the first conditions
of the emancipation of the proletariat".
From its very inception in 1864, the International Workingmen’s Association
inscribed in its "Provisional Rules of the Association" that "all efforts
aiming at that great end ["the economic emancipation of the working classes"]
have hitherto failed from the want of solidarity between the manifold divisions
of labour in each country, and from the absence of a fraternal bond of
union between the working classes of different countries", and it forcefully
proclaimed "That the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national,
but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists,
and depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical,
of the most advanced countries". In 1919, the Communist International was
born from the long struggle of the world-wide Internationalist Left to
transform the imperialist war into civil war; whether in the most democratic
of republics, in the most autocratic of empires, or in the most constitutional
and parliamentary of monarchies, it immediately made the rules of the 1st
International its own, and proclaimed that "the new workers international
is established to organise common action between the workers of different
countries, in order to bring down capitalism and install the proletarian
dictatorship and an international Soviet republic that will completely
eliminate classes and bring about socialism, the first stage of communist
society", and it added that "the organizational apparatus of the Communist
International must assure the workers of every country the chance of receiving
in any given moment the greatest possible help from organised proletarians
in other countries".
The thread of this great tradition was broken in the period between
the wars by a combination of the theory, and the praxis, of "Socialism
in one country", along with the replacing of Dictatorship of the Proletariat
by the struggle for democracy against fascism. The first policy broke the
link between the destinies of the victorious revolution in Russia and the
revolutionary proletarian movement in the rest of the world, and molded
the latter’s development around the interests of the Russian
State
The second, by dividing the World into Fascist and Democratic countries,
ordered proletarians living under totalitarian regimes to fight against
their own government, not for the revolutionary conquest of power, but
for the restoration of democratic and parliamentary institutions, meanwhile
proletarians living under democratic regimes were urged
to defend
their own governments and, if necessary, do so by fighting against their
brothers on the other side of the border; the result being that the destiny
of the working class was bound to their respective "fatherlands" and bourgeois
institutions.
The dissolution of the Communist International during the Second World
War was the inevitable upshot of this reversal of doctrine, strategy and
tactics. From the recent imperialist massacre there would emerge States
in eastern Europe which though calling themselves Socialist would proclaim,
and rabidly defend, their
national
"sovereignty"; even against their
allegedly "brother" States, against whom the
frontiers
would be
just as jealously guarded. Though defining themselves as members of the
"Socialist Camp", the economic conflicts and tensions still dividing them
would nevertheless reach a critical point such that nothing remained, apparently,
but to resolve them through the employment of brute force (Hungary, Czechoslovakia).
On the other hand, where military intervention was not possible, fundamental
splits would take place as with Yugoslavia and China. Thus it would happen
that parties yet to "achieve power" would end up demanding their own "national
road to Socialism" (which then became
a unique way
for everyone
to abjure the revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and to
completely adhere to democratic, parliamentary and reformist ideology).
Before long, we witness these "socialists" making a proud defence of their
autonomy from the other "brother" parties, thus demonstrating themselves
to be the heirs of the purest political and patriotic traditions of their
respective bourgeoisies, ready to pick up – to use Stalin’s expression
– the flag these have dropped.
Internationalism, in these circumstances, becomes a word that is even
more rhetorical and devoid of content than "international brotherhood of
peoples"; a slogan which in the
Critique of the Gotha Programme
Marx violently flung back in the faces of the German Workers’ Party as
"borrowed from the bourgeois League for Liberty and Peace". No real international
solidarity has taken place for a long time not even in highly tense moments
(such the miners’ strike in Belgium, the dockers’ strike in England,
revolts by black workers in the American car industry, the French General
Strike in 1968, etc) and no international solidarity is even possible as
long as it is declared that every proletarian and "communist" party has
to resolve its own
particular
problems on its own,
and that they
are the "only ones who can resolve them"
; in short, no international
solidarity is possible as long as each party, holed up in its own "private"
corner, poses as the champion of its own nation, its own national institutions
and traditions, its own national economy, and the defender of the sacred
national "boundaries". In any case, what use was a not just verbal but
"de facto" internationalism (Lenin), if the message of the "new parties"
to the World was peaceful co-existence and a competitive race between capitalism
and "socialism"?
A fully revived proletarian movement, with all its distinctive historical
features intact, will come about only on condition that it is recognised
that in all countries there is only one route to emancipation, and that
there can only be one party, whose doctrine, principles, programme and
practical norms of action must be likewise integrated and unique. The party,
rather than embodying a hybrid collection of confusing and conflicting
ideas represents "a clear and organic surpassing of all the particular
impulses that arise out of the interests of particular proletarian groups,
divided into professional categories and belonging to different nations,
into a
synthetic force working towards World revolution
" (Party
political Platform, 1945).
* * *
The renunciation by the communist movement of its international revolutionary
duties is reflected, just as starkly, in the complete and shameful abandonment
of the classic Marxist positions on the insurrectional struggles of the
colonial peoples against imperialist oppression. Whilst these struggles
assumed an increasingly violent character after the Second World War, the
proletariat of the imperial metropoles would be harnessed to the chariot
of bourgeois "reconstruction" in truly cowardly fashion. In 1920, faced
with the
armed
struggles of the colonial peoples, which were already
rocking Imperialism in the post-war period, the 2nd Congress of the Communist
International and the First Congress of Eastern Peoples outlined the great
perspective of one single World strategy, which would combine the defeatism
of the social insurrection in the capitalist metropoles with the national
revolt in the colonies and semi-colonies. The latter revolt, directed politically
by the young colonial bourgeoisie, would be in pursuit of the bourgeois
objective of national unity and independence, and yet the conjunction of
political forces nevertheless "put on the agenda the dictatorship of the
proletariat throughout the World": on the one hand the active intervention
of the young communist parties politically and organizationally independent
at the head of the huge masses of workers and peasants, and on the other
hand, the offensive of the metropolitan proletariat against the citadels
of colonialism, would create the possibility of by-passing the national-revolutionary
parties, and transforming the originally bourgeois revolutions into proletarian
revolutions. None of this contradicts the scheme of permanent revolution
outlined by Marx and put into effect by the Bolsheviks in the semi-feudal
Russia of 1917.
The pivotal point of this strategy could only be, and was,
the revolutionary proletariat of the "more civilised" countries, that is
to say, the more economically advanced, because their victory,
and that
alone
, would enable the countries which were more
economically
behind to overcome the historical handicap of their backwardness. Once
master of the means of production after taking power, the metropolitan
proletariat could then incorporate the economy of the ex-colonies into
a "World economic plan" which, though unitary like the one to which capitalism
tends already, would differ in that it would have no wish to oppress or
conquer, no wish to exterminate and exploit. The colonial peoples, therefore,
thanks to "the subordination of the immediate interests of the countries
where there had been victorious revolutions to the general interests of
the revolution throughout the World", would attain Socialism without having
to pass through the horrors of a capitalist phase; which would be all the
more terrible through having to cut corners in order attain a level comparable
with the most evolved countries.
From when the destiny of the Chinese Revolution was played out in 1926-27,
not a stone of this mighty edifice has been left standing by opportunism. In the colonies, especially after the Second World War, the so-called
Communist parties, far from "placing themselves at the head of the exploited
masses"
to accelerate the separation
from the shapeless bloc of
several classes grouped under the banner of national independence, instead
put themselves at the disposal of the indigenous bourgeoisies, and even
of "anti-imperialist" feudal classes and potentates; either that, or, on
taking power, they defended the political program of constitutional, parliamentary,
and multiparty democracy, and "forgot" to "give prominence to the question
of property"; or
at the very least
to the confiscation without
compensation of the immense landed estates (linked in a fundamental way
to industrial and commercial bourgeois property, and through that to imperialism).
As to the young, battle hardened and extremely concentrated local proletariat,
never once was it presented as the vanguard of the peasant and semi-proletarian
masses, who had lived for centuries in abject misery, in order to shake
off the yoke of capital
together
In the imperialist metropoles,
meanwhile, the Communist parties abjured the principles of violent revolution
and Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In France, during the latter part
of the Algerian War, and in America during the Vietnam War, they would
sink even lower than the reformists of the Second International by limiting
themselves to invoking "peace and negotiations" and calling for "formal
and merely official recognition of the equality and independence" of the
newly formed nations from their respective governments; an approach which
had been branded by the Third International as the hypocritical slogan
of the "democratic bourgeoisie camouflaged as Socialists".
The consequence of this complete loss of the Marxist perspective of
double revolutions is, and was, that the huge revolutionary potential contained
in the big and frequently bloody rebellions (the brunt of which have always
been borne by millions of proletarians and poor peasants) would be wasted:
in countries now become formally independent, corrupt, greedy and parasitic
bourgeoisies are in power, and, aware of the menace of the exploited masses
of city and country, they are more than willing to forge new alliances
with yesterday’s "enemy", imperialism. Meanwhile capital in the old imperial
centers, after having been ignominiously put to its heels, simply slips
back into the ex-colonies by the back door, and by means of "Aid", loans,
and trade in raw materials and manufactures, it emerges unscathed. At the
same time, the result of the paralysis of the proletarian and communist
revolutionary movement in the strongholds of imperialism is that an apparently
historical rationale is given to the degenerate Maoist, Castroist and Guevaran
theories, which indicate phantasmic peasants’, popular, and anarchic
revolutions as the only way of avoiding the global morass of legalitarian
and pacifist reformism. All this was brought about as the inevitable result
of abandoning the
via maestra
to internationalism.
But just as Internationalism (disowned by those parties connected to
Moscow or Peking) is destined to rise again through being rooted in
the
facts
of an increasingly
global
economy and system of exchange,
and the national mortgage (which in the colonies bolstered the united front
of all classes, and forced industrialization and rapid transformations
of political and social structures) expires, so Class War and the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat are inevitably and
everywhere
back on the agenda.
This serves to demonstrate that henceforth the duty of today’s International
Communist Party is to assist the emerging working classes of the so-called
Third World to separate their destinies from the social strata in power
by breaking away from them once and for all, thus enabling them to take
up their hard-won place in the World army of the Communist revolution.
Back
to the Communist Programme
On the programmatic level, our conception of socialism stands out from
all others in postulating the need for a preliminary violent revolution,
the destruction of all the institutions of the bourgeois State, and the
creation of a new State apparatus to be steered in an opposed direction
by a single party: that party which had prepared for, consolidated, and
led the proletarian attacks on the old regime to a victorious conclusion.
But, just as we reject the notion of a gradual and peaceful passage
from capitalism to Socialism without political revolution, that is, without
the destruction of democracy, so we also reject the anarchist conception
that restricts the tasks of the revolution to overthrowing the existing
State power. Orthodox Marxism holds that the political revolution marks
the initiation of a new social epoch, and it is therefore important to
redefine its main stages.
1) Phase of transition
Politically this phase is characterised by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat;
economically by a survival of forms specifically linked to capitalism,
i.e., a mercantile distribution of products, even if on large-scale industry,
and, in certain sectors, above all in agriculture, some small production.
The proletarian power can overcome these forms only by despotic measures,
i.e., the passing under its control of all sectors already of a social
and collective nature (large-scale industry, agriculture and trade, transport,
etc.,) and by setting up a vast distribution network independent from private
commerce, but still functioning, at least to begin with, according to mercantile
criteria. In this phase, however, the duties of the military struggle take
priority over social and economic reorganization, unless, against any reasonable
expectation, the class that has been overthrown internally and menaced
externally renounces armed resistance.
The duration of this phase depends, on the one hand, on the scale of
difficulties the capitalist class will create for the revolutionary proletariat,
and, on the other hand, on the amount of reorganizational work which will
be in inverse proportion to the economic and social level achieved in each
sector and in each country, and which is therefore easier in the more advanced
countries.
2)
Lower phase of Socialism (or Socialist phase)
This second stage is derived dialectically from the first, and displays
the following characteristics: the Proletarian State by now controls the
gross exchangeable product, though a small-production sector still exists.
These conditions make it possible to move on to a non-monetary distribution
which, nevertheless, is still mediated through exchange since the allocation
of products to the producers depends on how much work they have performed,
and is effected through the labour vouchers that attest to it. Such a system
is substantially different from capitalism where the earnings of wage-labourers
are linked to their labour-power, with an abyss dug between individual
lives and the wealth of society. This is because under Socialism no obstacles
will exist between needs and their satisfaction, excepting the obligation
for all competent individuals to work, and every progress, that in capitalist
society becomes a hostile power against the proletariat, will immediately
become a means of emancipation for the entire species. Nonetheless, forms
directly inherited from bourgeois society still have to be dealt with:
"The same amount of labour which the producer has given to society in one
form he receives back in another. Here obviously the same principle prevails
as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is
exchange of equal values (...) Hence,
equal right
here is still
in principle
bourgeois right
, although principle and practice are
no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity
exchange only exists
on the average
and not in the individual case.
In spite of this advance, this
equal right
is still constantly stigmatised
by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is
proportional
to the labour they supply". (Marx,
Critique of the Gotha Program
).
Above all, work still appears as a social constraint, and yet it becomes
less and less oppressive as working conditions generally improve.
On the other hand, the fact of the proletarian State having the means
of production at its disposal makes possible (after the draconian repression
of all useless or anti-social economic sectors, begun already in the transitory
phase) an accelerated development of those sectors neglected under capitalism,
above all housing and agriculture: moreover, it enables a geographical
reorganization of the apparatus of production, leading eventually to the
suppression of the antagonism between city and countryside, and to the
formation of large production units on a continental scale. The effective
monopoly of industrial production held by the proletarian State will also
make it in the best interests of the small producers to become ever more
integrated into the more evolved and concentrated forms of production.
Finally, all these advances imply the abolition of the general conditions
which, on the one hand confine the female sex to an unproductive and menial
housework, and, on the other, limit a large number of producers to manual
activities alone, making intellectual work, and scientific knowledge, a
social privilege for one class alone. Thus along with the abolition of
the different class relationships to the means of production, there is
the prospect of the disappearance of the fixed attributions of given social
duties to particular human groups.
3)
Phase of higher Socialism (or Communist phase)
Insofar as the State performs these tasks, to which it owes its existence,
it transcends its historical function of preventing and repressing attempts
at a capitalist restoration, and begins to cease to exist as a State, that
is as a rule over men, and starts to become a simple apparatus for administering
things. This withering away is bound up with the disappearance of distinct
social classes and is therefore achieved when the small producers, peasants
and artisans, have finally been transformed into out and out industrial
producers. And thus we arrive at the level of higher communism which Marx
characterised as follows: "In a higher phase of communist society, after
the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour,
and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has
vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s
prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round
development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth
flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois
right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From
each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!".
This great historical outcome involves not merely the destruction of
antagonisms between men, the cause of their restlessness and that "general,
particular, and perpetual" insecurity (Babeuf) which is the lot of humanity
under capitalist society, it is also the fundamental condition for the
real dominion of Society over Nature which Engels described as "the passage
from the reign of necessity to that of freedom", in which the development
of human powers as a human activity will become for the first time an end
in itself. It is then, also, that social praxis itself will provide the
solution to all the antinomies of traditional theoretical thought, "between
existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, liberty and
necessity, individual and species" (Marx), and communism will then finally
be deserving of the description applied to it by the founders of scientific
Socialism as an "enigma finally resolved by History".
RECONSTRUCTION
OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY ON A WORLD SCALE
The reconstruction on a national and international scale of a proletarian
political party, one that is genuinely capable of ensuring the continuity
of the political revolution, will be an established historical fact only
if the vanguard forces of the proletariat in the advanced and under-developed
countries have lined-up on the cardinal positions outlined above. Orthodox
communism stands out from all the various shades of more or less left-wing
extremism in denying that the evolution of modern society prevents the
proletariat from forming itself into a revolutionary party. It holds that
in the present substantially fascist phase of capitalist rule, the laws,
which have exhausted the political struggles among the bourgeois parties,
are not applicable to the proletariat. It asserts, on the contrary, that
precisely the disappearance of any real opposition between the old classical
Left and Right wings, between liberalism and authoritarianism, and between
Fascism and Democracy, provides the best historical basis for the development
of a resolutely communist and revolutionary party.
The realization of this
possibility depends not only on the inevitable outbreak of an open crisis,
more or less brief and of whatever form, but also on the objective intensification
of social conflicts even during phases of expansion and prosperity. Whoever
expresses the slightest doubt about this actually also doubts the historical
prospect of the Communist revolution. Such an attitude can be explained
by the depth of recoil caused by the degeneration of the 3rd International,
the 2nd Imperialist War, and the world-wide extension and consequent strengthening
of capitalism. It is merely a reflection of the temporary triumph of capital
in the minds of its "gravediggers". But far from granting eternal life
to this regime, its triumph in fact prepares, by having dammed it up, History’s
most violent revolutionary explosion.
* * *
In order for the party to develop, it can’t comply with the type of
formal rules that many anti-Stalinist opposition groups have defended in
the name of "democratic centralism". This is because such rules rely on
the belief that the correct orientation of the party depends on the free
expression of thought and the will of the proletarian "base", and a respect
for democratic rules and electoral criteria as a way of deciding who will
assume which responsibilities and at what level. Although we don’t deny
that the stifling of the opposition movements and procedural irregularities
indeed served to liquidate the revolutionary Communist tradition (in Russia
and elsewhere), our party has always defined this liquidation as essentially
the liquidation of
a program
and
a tactic
. An eventual return
to sound organizational norms, as hoped for by the trotskists, would have
done little to prevent this. In the same way, rather than relying on statutes
that involve widespread and regular use of the democratic mechanism, we
place our faith in an unequivocal and uncompromising
definition
of
the means and ends
of the revolutionary struggle.
The Party must
create its internal organs by selecting those which have given clear evidence
that they will enact its "catechism" without hesitation, if it doesn’t
do so it isn’t the Party. In any case, it is the process of selection
that is the important thing rather than some sort of model representation
of internal functioning. Such, then, is the content of the formula "organic
centralism", which our party has always set against the opposite formula
of democratic centralism. Organic centralism places the accent on the one
really essential element:
respect not for the majority but for the program;
respect not for individual opinions, but for the historical and ideological
tradition of the movement
. Corresponding to this conception, there
is an internal structure which inveterate supporters of individual and
collective freedom will brand as a dictatorship of committees, or even
individuals, but which substantially realises the
sine qua non
condition
of the existence of the Party as a revolutionary organisation: that is
the
dictatorship of principles
. With such conditions in force, the discipline
of the Base to the decisions of the Centre is obtained with the minimum
of friction, whilst an out and out dictatorship of individuals becomes
necessary only when the tactics of the party become divorced from the program,
giving rise to tension and clashes which can only be settled by means of
disciplinary measures; as precisely occurred in the International, even
before Stalin’s victory.
The historical development of the class party has always been characterised
by "the transfer of a proletarian vanguard from the terrain of spontaneous
movements, arising from partial and group interests, to that of generalised
proletarian action". This outcome is favoured not by denying these elementary
movements, but, on the contrary, by ensuring that the party organism, however
small it may be, actively participates in the physical struggles of the
proletariat. The work of ideological propaganda and proselytism, following
on naturally from the infra-uterine phase of ideological clarification,
cannot therefore be separated from participation in economic movements.
While trade-union "conquests" can never be seen as the ultimate aim, participation
in them is important for two reasons: 1) to make these movements into a
means for acquiring the indispensable experience and training needed for
real revolutionary preparation, by criticising unmercifully the predictions,
postulates and methods of the unions and the parties of class collaboration
that control them, and, 2) in a more advanced stage, to bring about their
unification and their revolutionary transcendence as a result of living
experience, by pushing them towards their full and complete realization.
Over the last decades the official trade unions have been increasingly
impervious to all attempts to unify and generalize the struggles, and resistant
to rank and file requests and needs. As a consequence, the best and most
effective struggles have been those set off and conducted out of the control
of the large trade union federations. The organisations born from such
struggles are a wealth of experience the Party has supported, and still
supports, with all means, are a valuable experience for proletarians. While
the possibility for the class to redirect official union policy on class
grounds (e.g., in moments of widespread workers’ unrest and large economic
movements) cannot be ruled out, at present those organizations appear more
as agencies of the bourgeois State within the working class, than as proletarian
organs of economic struggle.
* * *
At the present time, every problem relating to Party development exists
in the historical context of an unprecedented ideological and practical
crisis in the international socialist movement. Whilst this is certainly
the case, past experience is nevertheless sufficient to establish a law:
the reconstitution of the offensive power of the working class can’t
be brought about by a revision, by an updating, of Marxism, and certainly
not by the "creation" of an allegedly new doctrine. It can only be the
fruit of the restoration of the original program; a program which the Bolsheviks
held fast to when faced with the deviations of the Second International,
and whose continuity the Italian Marxist Left ensured when faced with deviations
in the Third. Wherever and whenever communism happens to rise again, and
at whatever time, whether sooner or later, the international movement of
the future will inevitably be the historical point of arrival of the battle
fought by this current, and the likelihood is that physically as well it
will carry out a key role. That is why in the present phase the reconstitution
of the embryonic international can only take one form: adhesion to the
program and activity of the International Communist Party and the creation
of such organizational links with it as correspond to the principles of
organic centralism, free of any form of democratism.
* * *
For the society of today, communism is an absolute and worldwide necessity.
Sooner or later, the proletarian masses will once again assault the fortresses
of capitalism in a huge revolutionary wave. The destruction of these fortresses
and the victory of the proletariat can happen only if the trend towards
the reconstitution of the class party deepens and spreads throughout the
entire World. The formation of the world party of the proletariat; this
is the aim of all those who want the victory of the communist revolution,
and already the united forces of the bourgeois international are fighting
against it.