Nature Function and Tactics of the Rev. Party of the Working Class, 1945

Nature Function and Tactics of the Rev. Party of the Working Class, 1945
International Communist Party
The Unitary and Invariant Body of Party Theses
International Communist Party
Nature, Function and Tactics of the Revolutionary Party of the Working Class
(1945)
In: "Prometeo", n° 7, May-June 1947
The
question relating to the tactics of the party is of fundamental
importance and will be clarified in relation to the history of the
disagreements in tendency and direction which occurred in the II and
III Internationals.
We
must not regard the question as being secondary or derivative in
nature, in the sense that groups who are in agreement on the doctrine
and the program may, without affecting those basics, support and
apply different directions in action, albeit with respect to
transient episodes.
To
pose problems relating to the nature and action of the party
signifies moving from the field of critical interpretation of social
processes to that of the influence that these processes may exert on
a force that is actively engaged. The transition is the most
important and delicate point of the whole Marxist system and was
framed in the youthful sentences of Marx: “The philosophers have
only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is
to
change
it” and “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace
criticism by weapons”.
This
passage from pure knowledge to active intervention should be
understood according to the dialectical materialist method in a
manner totally different from that of followers of traditional
ideologies. All too often it has been useful to the opponents of
communism to exploit the Marxist theoretical background in order to
sabotage and disavow the consequences of action and battle, that is,
from the opposite perspective, to appear to adhere to the practice of
the proletarian party while challenging and rejecting its fundamental
principles. In all these cases the deviation was the consequence of
anti-classist and counter-revolutionary influences, and expressed
itself in crises as what we shall call, for the sake of brevity,
opportunism.
Principles
and doctrines do not exist in themselves as a foundation arisen and
established before action; both the former and the latter are formed
in a parallel process. It is their opposing material interests that
in practice impel social groups to fight, and it is out of the action
instigated by material interests that the theory which becomes the
party’s characteristic inheritance is born. If the balance of
interests, the incentives to act and the practical directives for
action are changed, then the doctrine of the party is likewise
modified and distorted.
To
think that this doctrine might have become sacred and inviolable due
to its codification in a programmatic text and through a strict
organizational and disciplinary arrangement of the party organism,
and that therefore one may adopt various policies and have recourse
to multiple maneuvers in the area of tactical activity, means having
failed to identify, using Marxist criteria, the real problem that
needs to be resolved in order to decide how the methods of tactical
action may be selected.
We
return to the determinist analysis. Do social events unfold through
uncontrollable forces, giving rise to diverse ideologies, theories
and opinions among men, or can they be modified according to the more
or less conscious wish of men themselves? This question is dealt with
by the proletarian party’s own method, with which it radically
brushes aside traditional thinking, which always refers to the
isolated individual, claiming to resolve the question for the
individual and then to deduce from this the solution for society as a
whole; whereas on the contrary, you must move the question from the
individual to the collectivity. The “collectivity” is always
understood by the other metaphysical abstraction to mean the society
of all men, whereas in the Marxist sense we must understand
collectivity as the concretely defined group of individuals who, in a
given historical situation have, through their social relations, that
is to say in relation to their position in production and in the
economy, parallel interests; groupings that are in fact called
classes.
For
the many social classes that human history presents, the problem of
their ability to understand exactly the process in which they live,
and to exercise a certain degree of influence over it, is not
resolved in one and the same generic way. Each historical class has
had its own party, its own system of opinions and of propaganda; each
one has claimed with the same insistence to interpret the meaning of
events precisely, and to be able to direct them towards a more or
less vaguely conceived objective. Marxism provides the critique and
the explanation for all of these approaches and points of view,
showing that the various ideological generalizations were the
reflection of the conditions and the interests of classes in
conflict, expressed through opinions.
In
this continuous change, whose engines are material interests, whose
protagonists are groupings in class parties and governmental
organisms, and whose outward appearances are political and
philosophical schools, the modern proletarian class, once the social
conditions for its formation have matured, presents itself with new
and superior capabilities, both in terms of its possession of a
non-superficial interpretation of historical movement in its
entirety, and in terms of the concrete efficacy of its action in
social and political struggle in influencing the general unfolding of
this movement.
This
other fundamental concept was set out by Marxists with the classic
and notable phrases: “With the proletarian revolution human society
emerges from its prehistory” and “The socialist revolution
constitutes the passage from the world of necessity to the world of
freedom”.
It
is not, therefore, a matter of asking, in banal traditional terms,
the question of whether man is free in his will or determined by the
external environment, if a class and its party are conscious of their
historic mission, and derived from this theoretical consciousness the
power to implement it with a view to bringing about a general
improvement, or are drawn into the struggle, into success or
disaster, by higher or unknown forces. You must first ask what
classes and what parties they are, what are their relations in the
field of productive forces and state powers, what is the historical
path already taken, and what is the path that, according to the
results of critical analysis, remains to be taken.
According
to the doctrine of religious schools, the cause of events lies
outside of man, in God the creator, who has decided everything and
who has also decided to concede a degree of liberty of action to the
individual, for which he must therefore answer in the afterlife. It
is well known that Marxist social analysis has completely abandoned
such a resolution of the problem of the will and determinism.
But
also the solution offered by bourgeois philosophy, with its claims to
enlightenment critique and its illusion of having eliminated all
arbitrary and revealed premises, remains equally misleading, because
the problem of action is always reduced to the relationship between
subject and object, and in the ancient and recent versions of the
various idealistic systems the point of departure is sought in the
individual subject, in the “I”, precisely in which resides the
mechanism of his thought and which then translates successively in
the interventions of this “I” upon the natural and social
environment. From this comes the political and legal lie of the
bourgeois system, according to which man is free and, as a citizen,
has the right to govern the commonweal according to the opinion born
inside his head and therefore also his own interests.
If
it has thus thrown out all transcendent influence and every divine
revelation, the Marxist interpretation of history and of human action
has with no less decisiveness capsized the bourgeois schema of
liberty and individual will, showing that it is the individual’s
needs and interests that explain his movement and action, and that
his opinions and beliefs and what is called his conscience are only
determined as the final effect of the most complicated influences.
Indeed,
it is when we pass from the metaphysical concept of conscience and
the will of the “I” to the real and scientific concept of
theoretical conscience and the historical and political action of the
class party, that the problem is posed clearly, and we can address
the solution.
This
solution has an original repercussion for the movement and the party
of the modern proletariat, in that for the first time a social class
appears which is not only driven to break up old systems and the old
political and legal forms that impede the development of productive
forces (a revolutionary task which preceding classes also had), but
for the first time carries out its struggle not in order to set up a
new dominant class, but to establish productive relations which allow
the elimination of economic pressure and the exploitation of one
class by another.
Therefore
the proletariat has at its disposal superior historical clarity, and
in directing society, exercises more direct influence over events
than the classes that preceded it could exercise.
This
historical attitude and new faculty of the class party of the
proletariat should be followed through the complex process of its
manifestation in the sequence of historical events that the
proletarian movement has encountered to date.
The
revisionism of the Second International, which gave room for
opportunism through the collaboration with bourgeois governments in
both war and peace, was the manifestation of the influence that the
peaceful and apparently progressive phase of the bourgeois world had
on the proletariat towards the end of the 19th Century. At the time
it seemed that the expansion of capitalism was not leading, as had
been set out in Marx’s classic schema, to the inexorable
aggravation of class antagonisms and of exploitation and proletarian
immiseration. It seemed, when the limits of the capitalist world
could still be extended without arousing violent crises, that the
standard of living of the working classes could gradually improve
within the bourgeois system itself. Theoretically, reformism
elaborated a scheme of evolution without clashes from a capitalist to
a proletarian economy without conflict; practically, and consistently
with the theory, it stated that the proletarian party could exert a
positive influence, winning partial advances through the day-to-day
trade union, cooperative, administrative and legislative activity,
which would in addition expand the number of nuclei of the future
socialist system within the body of the current one, which would
gradually transform it in its entirety.
The
idea of the task of the party was no longer that of a movement that
would make everything dependent on the preparation of a final effort
to attain the final goals, but was transformed into a substantially
voluntarist and pragmatic idea, in the sense that day-to-day work was
presented as a solid and definitive fulfillment, and counterposed
against the emptiness of the passive expectation of a great future
success that should arise from revolutionary struggle.
No
less voluntaristic, also for its declared adherence to more recent
bourgeois philosophies, was the syndicalist school of thought. Even
if it spoke of open class conflict and the removal and abolition of
the very bourgeois state mechanism that the reformists wanted to
permeate with socialism, in reality, by localizing the struggle and
social transformation to individual manufacturing companies,
syndicalism also believed that proletarians would be able to
successively establish lots of victorious positions within islands of
the capitalist world. The theory of factory councils put forward by
the Italian movement of
Ordine
Nuovo
in which the international and historical unity of the class movement
and of social transformation is fragmented in a series of positional
gains within elements of the productive economy, in the name of a
concrete and analytical preparation for action, was really a
derivation of the syndicalist concept.
Returning
to gradualist revisionism, it is clear that, as the maximum
programmatic realization of the party’s action was relegated to a
secondary role, while partial and daily conquests were accorded the
primary role, so the well-known tactic came to be publicly advocated
of alliances and coalitions with groups and political parties that
would from time to time consent to supporting the partial demands and
reforms put forward by the proletarian party.
Even
then, there was the substantial objection to this approach: that the
alliance of the party with others, in a front which the political
world divided into two on specific issues arising in the actuality of
the moment, consequently distorted the party, clouding its
theoretical clarity, weakening its organization and impairing its
ability to frame the struggle of the proletarian masses in the
revolutionary phase of the conquest of power.
The
nature of the political struggle is such that the alliance of forces
in two camps separated by opposing solutions to a unique contingent
problem, polarizing all the actions of groups around this passing
interest and this immediate purpose, and overwhelming any
programmatic propaganda and any coherence with traditional
principles, will determine orientations within militant groups that
directly reflect and translate the demand for which they are fighting
in an unrefined manner.
The
task of the party, which was apparently a peaceful one to the
socialists of the classical epoch, should have been to reconcile its
intervention on specific issues and contingent victories with the
conservation of its programmatic physiognomy and its ability to move
on the terrain of its own struggle towards the general and final goal
of the proletarian class. In effect, reformist practice not only made
proletarians forget their class and revolutionary preparation, but
led the very leaders and theoreticians of the movement to get rid of
it, proclaiming that there was now no longer the need to worry about
maximum objectives, that the final revolutionary crisis predicted by
Marxism was also itself reducing to utopia, and that what mattered
was daily conquests. The common currency of reformists and
syndicalists was: “the goal is nothing, the movement is
everything”.
The
crisis in this method presented itself powerfully with the war. This
destroyed the historical assumption of an increasing tolerability of
capitalist rule, since the accumulated collective resources of the
bourgeoisie, in small part handed over to the apparent improvement of
the standard of economic life of the masses, were thrown into the
furnace of war, so that not only all of the end-effects of reformist
improvements vanished in the economic crisis, but the very lives of
millions of proletarians were sacrificed. At the same time, while the
still healthy section of the socialist movement deceived itself into
thinking that such a violent representation of capitalist barbarism
would have elicited the return of proletarian groups from a position
of collaboration to one of open general struggle on the central
question of the destruction of the bourgeois system, on the contrary,
it was the crisis and failure of all, or nearly all, international
proletarian organization.
The
deferment of the agitational front and of immediate action that
occurred in the years of reformist practice revealed itself as a
fatal weakness, seeing as the class’s maximum objectives ended up
being forgotten and incomprehensible for proletarians. The tactical
method of accepting the array of parties in two opposing coalitions
according to country and contingency employing the most diverse
variety of slogans (for a greater freedom of organization, for the
extension of the right to vote, for the nationalization of some
economic sectors, etc. etc.) was amply exploited by the dominant
class to ill-fated effect, encouraging those political formations
within the leadership of the proletariat, which represented
social-patriotic degeneration.
Cleverly
using the popularity accorded to the non-classist propaganda
postulates of the Second International’s large parties with their
powerful mass organizations, it proved easy to throw their political
preparation off course, demonstrating that it was in the interest of
the proletariat, and even its road to socialism, to defend other
outcomes at the same time, such as German civilization against feudal
and theocratic Tsarism, or Western democracy against Teutonic
militarism.
The
labor movement’s riposte to the betrayal of the Second
International was the formation of the Third International, through
the Russian Revolution. It must be said, however, that if the new
International’s restoration of revolutionary values as regards
doctrinal principles, theoretical approach and the central question
of State power was magnificent and all-encompassing, its
organizational arrangements and its approach to its own tactics and
to those of its member parties were not so comprehensive.
Its
critique of the Second International opportunists was however
comprehensive and unambiguous, not only as regards the latter’s
complete abandonment of Marxist principles, but also their tactic of
coalition and collaboration with bourgeois governments and parties.
It
was made very clear that the particularistic and contingent line
adopted by the old socialist parties had not led to workers being
guaranteed minor benefits and material improvements in exchange for
them having renounced their preparations for a wholesale attack on
bourgeois institutions and power, but had led, by compromising both
the minimum as well as the maximum outcomes, to a situation which was
even worse, namely, one in which proletarian organizations, energy
and combativeness, and proletarian individuals and lives, were being
used not to achieve the political and social aims of their own class,
but to reinforce capitalist imperialism. By means of the war the
latter thus managed to overcome, for an entire historical period at
least, the innate menace of the contradictions within its productive
mechanism, and overcome the political crisis caused by the war and
its repercussions by bending the political and trade union formations
of its class adversary to its own will by embarking on a policy of
national coalitions.
This,
according to the Leninist critique, was tantamount to having
completely perverted the role and the function of the proletarian
class party, which isn’t to protect the bourgeois fatherland or
institutions of so-called bourgeois liberty from danger, but to keep
the workers’ forces drawn up on the movement’s general historical
line, the inevitable culminating point of which is the complete
conquest of political power by overthrowing the bourgeois state.
It
was a matter, in the immediate post-war period, when the so-called
subjective conditions for revolution seemed unfavorable (i.e., the
efficiency of the proletariat’s organizations and political
parties) but the objective conditions appeared favorable, due to the
manifestation of a full-blown crisis in the bourgeois world, of
redressing the main shortcoming with a speedy reorganization of the
revolutionary international.
The
process was dominated, and it could not have been otherwise, by the
magnificent historical accomplishment of the first workers’
revolutionary victory in Russia, which had allowed the great
communist directives to re-emerge back into the light once more. But
they wanted the tactics of the communist parties, which in other
countries were a fusion of the socialist groups opposed to war
opportunism, to be shaped in direct imitation of the tactics
victoriously applied in Russia by the Bolshevik party, during its
seizure of power in the historic struggle of February to November
1917.
Implementing
this policy immediately prompted important debates about the
International’s tactical methods, and especially about the one
known as the United Front, which consisted of frequently issued
invitations to other proletarian and socialist parties for joint
agitation and action with the aim of demonstrating the inadequacy of
those parties’ methods, in order to shift their traditional
influence among the masses to the advantage of the communists.
Yet,
despite the frank warnings of the Italian Left and other opposition
groups, the leaders of the International didn’t take account of the
fact that this tactic of the United Front, by forcing revolutionary
organizations alongside the very social-democratic, social-patriotic
and opportunistic ones from which they had just separated in
implacable opposition, would not only disorientate the masses by
making impossible the advantages this tactic was supposed to confer,
but also – more seriously still – it would contaminate the
revolutionary parties themselves. It is true that the revolutionary
party is history’s best and least restricted factor, but equally it
never ceases to be its product, being subjected to transformation and
change every time there is any modification of the social forces. The
question of tactics shouldn’t be thought of as being like the
deliberate wielding of a weapon, which, wherever you aim it, stays
the same; the party’s tactics influence and modify the party
itself. If it is true that no tactic should be condemned in the name
of a priori dogmas, equally every tactic should be analyzed and
discussed in the light of a question something like this: in possibly
gaining for the party greater influence over the masses, might it not
risk compromising the party’s character and its capacity to lead
these masses toward the final objective?
The
adoption of the tactic of the United Front by the Third International
showed, in fact, that the Communist International was also on the
same road to opportunism that had led the Second International to
liquidation and defeat. Characteristic of the tactics of opportunism
had been the sacrifice of the final, total victory to partial and
contingent successes; the United Front tactic revealed itself to be
opportunist too, precisely insofar as it also sacrificed the primary,
indispensable guarantee of final, total victory (the revolutionary
capacity of the class party) in favor of contingent actions which
would supposedly ensure the proletariat certain momentary and partial
advantages (growth of the party’s influence over the masses and
greater proletarian cohesion in the struggle to gradually improve its
material conditions and to maintain any advantages won).
In
the circumstances of the post-First World War period, which seemed
objectively revolutionary, the International’s leadership was
prompted by their concern – not entirely groundless – that they
might be caught unawares and with scant support among the masses when
a general European movement, with the potential to take power in some
of the great capitalist countries, broke out. So important was the
possibility of a rapid breakdown of the capitalist world to the
Leninist International that today we can understand how, in the hope
of leading ever greater masses into the struggle for the European
revolution, they relaxed the admission criteria to admit movements
which weren’t genuine communist parties; and how they tried, with
the flexible tactics of the United Front, to retain contact with the
masses who were behind the hierarchies of parties which were
oscillating between revolution and conservatism.
If
the favorable eventuality had actually occurred, its impact on the
politics and economy of the first proletarian power in Russia would
have been so great it would have allowed an extremely rapid recovery
of the communist movement’s national and international
organizations.
But
as it was the less favorable outcome which came about instead, that
of capitalism’s relative recovery, the revolutionary proletariat
had to take up the struggle again and go forward with a movement that
had sacrificed its clear political approach and structural and
organizational homogeneity, and was now exposed to new opportunistic
degenerations.
Yet
the error that opened the doors of the Third International to the
new, more deadly opportunist wave wasn’t just a miscalculation
about the likelihood of the proletariat becoming revolutionary; it
was an error of historical approach and interpretation consistent
with wanting to generalize the experiences and methods of Russian
Bolshevism, by applying them in countries where bourgeois, capitalist
civilization had progressed much, much further. Russia before
February 1917 was still a feudal country in which capitalist
productive forces were fettered by antiquated relations of
production. In this situation, analogous to France in 1789 and
Germany in 1848, it was obvious that the proletarian party needed to
fight against Tsarism, even if the establishment of a bourgeois
capitalist regime, once Tsarism had been overthrown, seemed
impossible to avoid; and it was consequently just as obvious that the
Bolshevik party needed to enter into contact with other political
groupings, contacts rendered necessary by the struggle against
Tsarism. Between February and October 1917 the Bolshevik party
encountered objective conditions which favored a much more ambitious
scheme: that of grafting onto the overthrow of Tsarism a subsequent
proletarian revolutionary victory. As a consequence, its tactical
positions became more rigid, and it adopted a stance of open and
ruthless struggle against all the other political formations, ranging
from the reactionary supporters of a Tsarist feudal restoration to
the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. And yet the fact that a
real possibility of a restoration of absolutist and theocratic
absolutism was still to be feared, and the fact that in an extremely
fluid and unstable situation the political and state formations
controlled or influenced by the bourgeoisie still lacked any solidity
or capacity to attract and absorb the autonomous proletarian forces;
this put the Bolshevik party in a position where it could accept the
need for provisional contacts and agreements with other organizations
which had a proletarian following, as happened during the Kornilov
episode.
By
realizing the united front against Kornilov, the Bolshevik party was
actually struggling against a feudal reactionary restoration; what is
more, the Bolsheviks didn’t have to worry about the Menshevik and
Socialist Revolutionary organizations being better organized, which
might have enabled them to exert influence on the party, nor was it
worried that the level of solidity and consistency of the state power
was such as to have allowed the latter to derive any advantage from
the contingent alliance with the Bolsheviks, by turning it against
them later on.
The
circumstances and relations of forces in countries where bourgeois
civilization was more advanced were, however, completely different.
In these countries there was no longer any prospect of a reactionary
restoration of feudalism (and even more so today!), and therefore the
raison d’être for possible joint actions with other parties was
entirely lacking. What is more, in these countries state power and
bourgeois groupings were so entrenched in power and so used to
wielding it that one could reasonably predict that the proletariat’s
autonomous organizations, if pushed into frequent and close contact
with them via the tactic of the United Front, would almost inevitably
be influenced and progressively absorbed by them.
Once
it had ignored this profound difference of circumstances, and chosen
to apply the Bolsheviks’ tactical methods to the advanced
countries, tactics which were adapted to the situation of the nascent
bourgeois regime in Russia, the Communist International would lurch
from one disaster to another, leading eventually to its inglorious
liquidation.
The
tactic of the United Front was extended to the point of launching
slogans which diverged from the party’s programmatic ones on the
question of the State by supporting the installation of workers’
governments, that is: governments composed of a mixture of communist
and social-democrat representatives, able to attain power by the
normal parliamentary means, without having to violently destroy the
bourgeois state machine. This “Workers’ Government” slogan
would be presented at the Fifth Congress of the Communist
International as the natural and logical corollary of the United
Front tactic; and it would go on to be applied in Germany, resulting
in a grave defeat for the German proletariat and its communist party.
With
the open and progressive degeneration of the International after the
Fourth Congress, the watchword of the United Front served to
introduce the perverse tactic of forming electoral blocs with parties
that were not only non-communist, but even non-proletarian, creating
popular fronts, supporting bourgeois governments, in other words –
and this is where the most recent issue arises – of proclaiming
that in situations where the bourgeois fascist counter-offensive had
obtained the monopoly of power, the workers’ party, suppressing the
struggle for its own specific ends, had to form the left wing of an
anti-fascist coalition no longer embracing proletarian parties alone,
but also bourgeois and liberal parties with the objective of
combating bourgeois totalitarian regimes and putting in place
coalition governments of all the bourgeois and proletarian parties
opposed to fascism. Starting with the United Front of the proletarian
class, we thus arrive at national unity of all the classes, bourgeois
and proletarian, dominant and dominated, exploiting and exploited.
That is to say, starting from a debatable and contingent tactical
movement, having the absolute autonomy of the communist and
revolutionary organizations as its declared precondition, we arrive
at the effective liquidation of this autonomy and the negation not
just of Bolshevik revolutionary intransigence, but also of Marxist
class concept itself.
This
progressive development on the one hand results in a gratuitous
contrast with the tactical theses of the first congresses of the
International themselves and the classical solutions supported by
Lenin in
Left-wing
Communism: An Infantile Disorder
and on the other hand, after the experience of 20-plus years of life
of the International, authorizes the assertion that the enormous
deviation from the first aim resulted, in parallel with the adverse
sequence of events of the anti-capitalist revolutionary struggle,
from the initially inadequate formulation of the tactical tasks of
the party.
Today
it is possible to conclude, without recalling the totality of the key
arguments from the texts of the contemporary discussions, that the
balance-sheet of over-elastic and over-manipulated tactics not only
had negative results; it was absolutely ruinous.
The
communist parties under the leadership of the Comintern tried
repeatedly and in all countries to use the situations in a
revolutionary way with United Front maneuvers, and then oppose the
so-called triumph of the bourgeois right with the tactic of left-wing
blocs. This tactic only provoked resounding defeats. From Germany to
France, to China and Spain, the attempted coalitions not only failed
to move the masses away from opportunist parties and from bourgeois
or petty-bourgeois influence to revolutionary and communist
influence, they favored the success of the inverse game, in the
interest of anti-communists. The communist parties either became the
object, when the coalitions broke down, of ruthless reactionary
attacks by their former allies, bringing them the heaviest defeats in
their attempt to struggle alone, or, absorbed into coalitions,
degenerated totally, to the extent that they became practically
indistinguishable from the opportunist parties.
It
is true that, between 1928 and 1934 a phase took place in which the
Comintern went back to the slogan of autonomous positions and
independent struggle, returning all of a sudden to the polemical and
oppositional front against bourgeois leftist and social-democratic
currents. But this brusque tactical volte face only produced the most
absolute disorientation in the communist parties, and did not offer a
single historical success in the annihilation of either the fascist
counter-offensive or the joint actions of bourgeois coalitions
against the proletariat.
The
cause of these failures must be traced back to the fact that
successive tactical slogans have rained down on the parties and their
structures appearing as unexpected surprises, with the communist
organization caught totally unprepared for the various eventualities.
The tactical plans of the party, on the contrary, even if they do
predict a variety of situations and conduct, cannot and must not
become the esoteric monopoly of leadership circles; they must be
strictly coordinated with and consistent with theory, with the
political consciousness of the militants, with the movement’s
traditions, and they must permeate the organization such that it is
always prepared in advance and able to predict how the party’s
unitary structure will respond towards favorable and unfavorable
events in the course of the struggle. To expect more, and different,
things from the party, and to believe that it won’t be wrecked by
unforeseen blows to its tactical rudder, does not amount to having a
fuller and more revolutionary concept of the party, but clearly
constitutes, as proven by historical facts, the classical process
defined by the term opportunism, which either leads the revolutionary
party to dissolution and ruin under the defeatist influence of
bourgeois politics, or to find itself more vulnerable and disarmed in
the face of repression.
When
the level of development in society and the course of events lead the
proletariat to serve ends that are not its own, consisting of the
false revolutions which the bourgeoisie now and again apparently
needs, it is opportunism that wins; the class party falls into
crisis, its direction passes over to bourgeois influences, and the
recovery of the proletarian path cannot happen except with the split
away from the old parties, the formation of new nuclei and the
national and international reconstruction of the proletarian
political organization.
In
conclusion, the tactic that the international proletarian party will
apply, attaining its reconstruction in all countries, will have to be
based on the following directives.
The
practical experience of opportunist crises and of the struggles led
by left-wing Marxists against the revisionists of the Second
International and against the progressive deviations of the Third
International has shown that you cannot keep the party’s program,
political tradition and solidity of organization intact if the party
applies a tactic which, even if only formally, entails attitudes and
slogans that are acceptable to opportunist political movements.
Similarly,
every uncertainty and ideological indulgence has its reflection in an
opportunist tactic and action.
The
party, therefore, differentiates itself from all the others, whether
declared enemies or alleged kindred spirits, and even from those who
claim to recruit their followers from the ranks of the working class,
because its political praxis rejects the maneuvers, alliances and
blocs that are traditionally formed on the basis of postulates and
slogans common to several parties.
This
party position has an essentially historical value, which
distinguishes it in the tactical domain from all the others, exactly
as does its original vision of the period that capitalist society is
currently going through.
The
revolutionary class party is the only one to understand that the
economic, social and political postulates of liberalism and democracy
are today anti-historical, illusory and reactionary, and that the
world is now in the phase in which, in the large countries, liberal
organization is disappearing and giving way to a more modern, fascist
system.
By
contrast, in the period in which the capitalist class had not yet
initiated its liberal cycle, had still to overthrow the old feudal
power, or even in some important countries had to go through notable
stages and phases of expansion, still laissez-faire as regards
economic processes and democratic as regards the State; in these
cases a transitory alliance of the communists with these parties was
comprehensible and acceptable: in the first case, with parties that
were openly revolutionary, anti-legalist and organized for the armed
struggle, and in the second, with parties that still played a role
assuring useful and genuinely “progressive” conditions, allowing
the capitalist regime to speed up the cycle which must lead to its
downfall.
This
change in communist tactics, which corresponds with the passage from
one historical period to another, cannot be reduced to a local and
national case study, nor become dissipated in the analysis of the
complex uncertainties which the historic evolution of capitalism
undoubtedly presents, without resulting in the practice deplored by
Lenin in
One
Step Forward, Two Steps Back
The
politics of the proletarian party has, above all, been international
(and this distinguishes it from all others) ever since its program
was formulated for the first time and since the historic need for its
effective organization first arose. As the
Manifesto
states, the communists, who support every revolutionary movement
everywhere against the existing social and political order, put
forward and assert, alongside the question of property, the common
interests of the entire proletariat, who are independent of any
nationality.
And
the revolutionary strategy of the communists, until it was corrupted
by Stalinism, has inspired an international tactic looking to achieve
the breakthrough in the bourgeois front in the country where the best
opportunities appear, mobilizing all of the resources of the movement
to this end.
Consequently
the tactic of insurrectionary alliances against the old regimes ends
historically with the great event of the Russian revolution, which
eliminated the last great state and military apparatus of a
non-capitalist character.
After
this phase, the possibility, even theoretical, of tactical blocs must
be formally and centrally denounced by the international
revolutionary movement.
The
excessive importance given, during the first years in the life of the
Third International, to the application of the Russian tactic in
countries with a stable bourgeois regime, as well as to
extra-European and colonial countries, was the first manifestation of
the re-emergence of the revisionist peril.
The
second imperialist war, and its already evident consequences, are
characterized by the preponderant influence, extended to all regions
of the world, even those where the most backward forms of indigenous
society survive, not so much of powerful capitalist economic forms as
the inexorable political and military control exercised by the great
imperial center of capitalism, for now brought together in a gigantic
coalition, which includes the Russian State.
Consequently
local tactics can only be aspects of the general revolutionary
strategy, which above all must be to restore the programmatic clarity
of the global proletarian party, and then to rebuild the network of
its organization in each country.
This
struggle unfolds within a framework in which the illusions and the
seductions of opportunism hold sway to the maximum extent: propaganda
in favor of the crusade for liberty against fascism in the
ideological domain, and in the practical politics of coalitions,
blocs, fusions and illusory demands presented in concert by the
leaderships of innumerable parties, groups and movements.
In
only one way will it be possible for the proletarian masses to
understand the need for the reconstruction of the revolutionary
party, substantially different from all others: that is, by
proclaiming the historically irrevocable repudiation of the practice
of agreements between parties not as a contingent reaction to the
opportunistic saturnalia and the acrobatic combinations of
politicians, but rather as a fundamental and central directive.
Even
in transitory phases, none of the movements that the party
participates alongside must be directed by a super-party or by a
higher movement standing above a group of affiliated parties.
In
the modern historical phase of global politics, the proletarian
masses will only be able to mobilize for revolutionary goals by
achieving their class unity around a single party that is solid in
its theory, in its action, in the preparation for the insurrectionary
assault, and in the management of power.
This
historical solution must, in any manifestation of the party, even
limited, appear to the masses as the only possible alternative to
oppose the consolidation of the international economic and political
domination of the bourgeoisie and its formidable capacity – not
definitive, but today growing ever stronger – to control the
contradictions and the convulsions that threaten the existence of its
regime.