For the Constitution of Workers’ Councils in Italy, 1920

For the Constitution of Workers’ Councils in Italy, 1920
International Communist Party
The
Union Question
Italian Socialist Party
Communist Abstentionist Fraction
For the Constitution of Factory’ Councils in Italy
I.
Il Soviet
no. 1, January 4th, 1920
II.
Il Soviet
no. 2, January 11th, 1920
III.
Il Soviet
no. 4, February 1st, 1920
IV.
Il Soviet
no. 5, February 8th, 1920
V.
Il Soviet
no. 7, February 22nd, 1920
I. –
Il Soviet
, no. 1, January
4th, 1920
We’ve collected quite a bit of material around the proposals and
initiatives for the establishment of Soviets in Italy, and we reserve the
right to establish the terms of the topic neatly. We would now like to
introduce some general considerations to which we have already alluded in
our last issues.
The system of proletarian representation, as it was first introduced in
Russia, exercises a double order of functions: political and economic. The
political functions consist in the struggle against the bourgeoisie until
its total elimination. The economic in the creation of an entirely new
mechanism of communist production.
As the revolution unfolds, with the gradual elimination of the parasitic
classes, the political functions become less and less important in the
face of the economic ones: but at first,
and especially when it is
still a matter of struggling against bourgeois power
, political
activity is in the forefront.
The real instrument of the proletariat’s struggle for emancipation, and
first of all the conquest of political power, is the
communist class
party
. Workers’ councils, under bourgeois power, can only be
organisms within which the communist party, the engine of revolution,
works. To say that they are the organs of liberation of the proletariat,
without mentioning the function of the party, as in the program approved
by the Bologna Congress, appears to us as a mistake.
To claim, like the
Ordine Nuovo
comrades in Turin, that workers’
councils, even before the fall of the bourgeoisie, are already organs not
only of political struggle, but of the economic-technical preparation of
the communist system, is a pure and simple return to socialist gradualism:
This, whether called reformism or syndicalism, is defined by the error
that the proletariat can emancipate itself by gaining ground in economic
relations, while capitalism continues to detain, with the State, its
political power.
We will develop a critique of the two aforementioned views.
* * *
The system of proletarian representation must adhere to the whole
technical process of production.
This criterion is correct, but it corresponds to the stage at which the
proletariat, already in power, organizes the new economy. Transpose it
without modification to the bourgeois regime, and you accomplish nothing
revolutionary.
Even in the period in which Russia finds itself, Soviet political
representation – that is, the stage culminating in the rule of the
people’s commissars – does not originate from work crews or factory
departments, but from the local administrative Soviet, elected directly by
the workers (grouped, if possible, into labor communities).
The Moscow Soviet, as an example, is elected by the Moscow proletarians
in the proportion of 1,000 for each delegate. There’s no intermediate body
between this and the voters. From this first designation come the
subsequent ones, to the Soviet congress, to the executive committee, to
the government of commissars.
The
factory council
takes its place in a quite different
mechanism: in that of workers’
control
over production.
As a result, the factory council, consisting of one representative from
each department, doesn’t designate the factory representative in the
administrative-political municipal Soviet: this representative is elected
directly and independently.
In Russia, factory councils are the starting point – always subordinate
to the political network of the Soviets – of another system of
representation: that of workers’ control and the popular economy.
The
controlling
function of the factory shop has revolutionary
and expropriatory value only after central power has gone into the hands
of the proletariat. As long as the bourgeois state protection still
stands, the factory council controls nothing: the few functions it
achieves are the result of the traditional practice of: a) parliamentary
reformism; b) trade union resistance action that doesn’t stop to be
reformist gradualism.
We conclude: we don’t oppose the establishment of internal factory
councils if the workers themselves or their organizations demand them. But
we affirm that the activity of the Communist Party must be set on another
basis: on the struggle for the conquest of political power.
This struggle can find its proper field in the creation of workers’
representation: but this must consist of workers’ councils from city or
rural districts, directly elected by the masses to be ready to replace
city councils and local organs of State power at the moment of the
collapse of the bourgeois power.
Having thus affirmed our thesis, we promise to give ample documentation
and demonstration of it, as well as summarizing our work in a report to
the next convention of the communist fraction.
II. –
Il Soviet
, no. 2, January
11th, 1920
Before delving into the discussion of the practical problem of the
establishment of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Councils in Italy, and
after the general considerations contained in the article we published in
the last issue, we would like to continue examining the programmatic lines
of the Soviet system as found in the documents of the Russian Revolution,
and in the declarations of principle of some Italian maximalist currents,
such as the program approved at the Bologna Congress, the motion presented
at the same Congress by Leone and other comrades, the publications of
Ordine
Nuovo
, around the movement of factory councils in Turin.
The Councils and the Bolshevik program
In the documents of the Third International and the Communist Party of
Russia, in the masterly reports of those formidable doctrinaires who are
the leaders of the Russian revolutionary movement, Lenin, Zinoviev, Radek,
Bukharin, the notion that the Russian revolution didn’t
invent
new
and unforeseen forms but confirmed the predictions of Marxist theory about
the revolutionary process comes up time and time again
What’s substantial in the grand development of the Russian Revolution is
the conquest of political power by the working masses through actual class
warfare, and the establishment of their dictatorship.
The soviets – no need to be reminded that the word soviet simply means
council and can be used to refer to any representative body – the soviets
in their historical signification are the system of class representation
of the proletariat that has come to power. They are the organs that
replace bourgeois parliament and administrative assemblies, and are
gradually replacing all the other machinery of the State.
To put it in the words of the last Russian Communist Congress, quoted by
Comrade Zinoviev,
the Soviets are the State organizations of the
working class and poor peasants which effectuate the dictatorship of the
proletariat during the stage when all the old forms of the State
gradually disappear
The system of these State organizations tends to give representation to
all producers as members of the working class, but not as participants in
a professional category or branch of industry: according to the latest
manifesto of the Third International, the Soviets are
a new and broad
organization which embraces all the working masses independently of
trade or level of political development already attained
. The
administrative network of the Soviets has the city or rural district
councils as its primary organs, and culminates in the commissars’
government.
It is indeed true that alongside this system other organs arise in the
phase of economic transformation, such as the system of workers’ control
and of people’s economy; it’s also true as we’ve repeatedly stated that
this system will tend to absorb the political system into itself, when the
expropriation of the bourgeoisie is completed and the need for State power
ceases.
But in the revolutionary period the essential question, as is known from
all the Russian documents, is that of subordinating local and category
interests to the general interest of the revolutionary movement, both in
space and time.
When the fusion of the two bodies will have taken place, then the network
of production will be completely communist and then that criterion, which
seems to us to be over‑emphasized, of a perfect articulation of
representation with all the mechanisms of the production system will be
realized.
Before then, when the bourgeoisie is still resisting, above all then when
it’s still in power, the problem is to have a representation in which the
criterion of the general interest prevails; and when the economy is still
that of individualism and competition the only form in which that higher
collective interest can be made explicit is a form of political
representation in which the communist political party acts.
Getting back to the issue, we’ll show how wanting to concretize and
over‑technicize Soviet representation, especially where the bourgeoisie is
still in power, means putting the cart before the horse and falling back
into the old errors of syndicalism and reformism.
Let us quote for now Zinoviev’s unambiguous words:
The Communist Party brings together that vanguard of the
proletariat which struggles, consciously, for the practical carrying out
of the communist program. It strives especially to introduce its program
into the organizations of the State, the Soviets, and to obtain total rule
over them.
In conclusion, the Russian Soviet republic is led by the Soviets, which
gather ten million workers out of a population of about eighty million.
But essentially the nominations for the executive committees of the local
and central Soviets take place in the sections and congresses of the great
Communist Party, which rules the Soviets. This corresponds to the vibrant
defense made by Radek of the revolutionary functions of minorities. It’ll
be good to not make a fetish out of workerist-majoritarianist that only
benefits reformism and the bourgeoisie.
The party is at the forefront of the revolution insofar as it’s
potentially made up of people who think and act as members of the future
laboring humanity in which everyone will be a producer, harmoniously
embedded in a marvelous apparatus of functions and representation.
The Bologna Program and the Councils
It’s regrettable that in the current party program there’s no trace of
the Marxist notion that the class party is the instrument of proletarian
emancipation; and there is only the non‑contentious codicil: “resolves
(who does? Not even grammar was spared in this hurry to deliberate… on the
elections) to base the organization of the Italian Socialist Party on the
above principles”.
The paragraph denying the transformation of any State organ into an organ
for the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat is questionable,
but that’s for another discussion, after the indispensable terminological
clarification.
But we disagree even more with the program where it states that the new
proletarian organs will function also before, under bourgeois rule, as
instruments of the violent struggle for liberation, and then they will
become organs of social and economic transformation, and it specifies such
organs like the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils, but also the
councils of the public economy, organs inconceivable under bourgeois rule.
Rather, workers’ political councils can also be said to be organs within
which the action of communists for the liberation of the proletariat is
carried out.
But even recently Comrade Serrati has belittled, despite Marx and Lenin,
the task of the class party in the revolution.
“Together with the working masses”, Lenin says, “the political, Marxist,
centralized party, the vanguard of the proletariat, will lead the people
on the correct path, for the victory of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, for proletarian democracy instead of bourgeois democracy, for
the power of the councils, for the socialist order”.
The party’s current program suffers from libertarian scruples and a lack
of theoretical preparation.
The councils and the Leone motion
This motion was summed up in four points set out in the author’s
evocative style.
The first of these points is admirably inspired by the observation that
class struggle is the real engine of history and has broken
social-national unions.
But then the motion exalts the Soviets as the organs of revolutionary
synthesis, which they’re supposed to bring about almost by the very
mechanism of their constitution, and asserts that the Soviets alone can
lead the great historical initiatives to triumph above schools, parties,
and corporations.
This notion of Leone, and of the many comrades who signed his motion, is
quite different from ours, which we infer from Marxism and the directives
of the Russian Revolution. It’s a matter of over‑emphasizing a form over a
force, similar to what syndicalists do with the trade union, attributing
to its minimalist practice the miraculous ability of bringing about the
social revolution.
Just as syndicalism was demolished first by the critique of the true
Marxists, then by the experience of the labor movement, which everywhere
collaborated with the bourgeois world by providing it with conservative
elements, so Leone’s notion falls before the experience of
counter-revolutionary social-democratic workers’ councils, which are
precisely those in which there’s been no victorious penetration of the
communist political program. Only the party can gather unto itself the
dynamic revolutionary energies of the class.
It would be petty to object that even the socialist parties have
compromised, since we are not extolling the virtues of the party form, but
the dynamic content which resides in the communist party alone. Each party
defines itself by its program, and its functions can’t be compared with
other parties, while necessarily all trade unions and in a technical sense
even all workers’ councils, share functions with each other.
The harm of the social-reformist parties was not that they were parties,
but that they were not communist and revolutionary. These parties led the
counterrevolution, while the communist parties directed and nurtured
revolutionary action in struggle against them.
Thus, no body is revolutionary just by virtue of
form
; social
forces are only revolutionary by the direction in which they act, and
these forces are fulfilled into a party that goes into battle with a
program.
The councils and the
Ordine Nuovo
initiative in Turin
The
Ordine Nuovo
comrades go even further, in our opinion. They’re not
even happy with the wording of the Party’s program, for they claim that
the Soviets, including those of a technical-economic nature (the factory
councils), not only should exist and be organs of the proletarian struggle
of liberation under bourgeois rule, but that be already organs of the
construction of the communist economy. In fact, they write in their
newspaper the passage from the party program we quoted above, with the
omission of some words in order to transform its meaning in a way that
conforms to their point of view: “New proletarian organs (workers’,
peasants’ and soldiers’ councils, public economy councils, etc) will have
to be opposed… Bodies of social and economic transformation and
construction of the new communist order”.
But this article is already long, so we leave the exposition of our
profound disagreement with this criterion, which in our opinion risks the
danger of turning into a purely reformist experiment, with the
modification of certain functions of trade unions and perhaps promulgation
of bourgeois law about workers’ councils.
III. –
Il Soviet
, no. 4, February
1st, 1920
In closing the second article around the establishment of Soviets in
Italy we mentioned the Turin movement for the establishment of factory
councils.
We don’t share the point of view held by the
Ordine Nuovo
comrades, and
while we appreciate their tenacious work for a better knowledge of the
cornerstones of communism, we believe that they’ve made major mistakes in
both principle and tactics.
According to them, the essential matter of the communist revolution lies
precisely in the establishment of the new organs of proletarian
representation intended for the direct management of production, the
fundamental character of which is to adhere strictly to the production
process.
We’ve already explained that there seems to be a lot of exaggeration
around this concept of the formal coincidence between the representations
of the working class and the various aggregates of the techno-economic
system of production. This coincidence will occur only at a very advanced
stage of the communist revolution, when production will be socialized and
all the particular activities that constitute it will be harmoniously
subordinated to and inspired by general and collective interests.
Before then, and during the period of transition from the capitalist to
the communist economy, the aggregations of producers go through a period
of continuous transformation, and their particular interests may come to
clash with the general and collective interests of the revolutionary
movement of the proletariat.
This will find its real instrument in a representation of the proletarian
class in which each individual enters as a member of this class,
interested in a radical change of social relations, and not as a member of
this or that professional category, factory or any local group.
As long as political power still lies in the hands of the capitalist
class, a representation of the general revolutionary interests of the
proletariat can only be obtained on the political terrain, in a class
party that gathers the individual adherence of those who have overcome, in
order to devote themselves to the revolutionary cause, the narrow view of
self‑interest, categorical interest, and sometimes even class interest, in
the sense that the party admits even defectors from the bourgeois class
who are proponents of the communist program.
It’s a grave mistake to believe that by transposing within the present
proletarian environment, among the wage earners of capitalism, the formal
structures which are believed will be formed for the management of
communist production, forces will be determined, revolutionary by their
inherent virtue.
This was the mistake of the trade unionists and also of the overly
enthusiastic advocates of factory councils.
Appropriately, Comrade C. Niccolini in an article in
Comunismo
warns that
in Russia, even after the handover of power to the proletariat, factory
councils have often created obstacles to revolutionary measures, pitting
the pressures of narrow interests against the unfolding of the communist
process even more than the trade unions.
Nor are factory councils, in the machinery of the communist economy, the
main managers of production.
In the organs with that task (Councils of the People’s Economy) the
factory councils have less weighty representation than the trade unions,
and much less than the proletarian State power, which with its centralized
political apparatus serves as the instrument and essential factor of the
revolution, not only insofar as it wages a struggle against the political
resistance of the bourgeois class, but also insofar as it leads the
process of socializing wealth.
At the point where we are, that is, when the proletarian State is still a
programmatic aspiration, the fundamental question remains that of the
conquest of power by the proletariat, and more still by the communist
proletariat, that is, the workers organized into a class political party
and determined to implement the historical form of revolutionary power,
the dictatorship of the proletariat.
* * *
Comrade A. Tasca himself, in No. 22 of
Ordine Nuovo
, clearly sets out his
disagreement from the program of the maximalist majority of the Bologna
Congress, and even more so from us abstentionists, in the following
passage which is worth quoting:
Another point in the party’s new program deserves consideration: the
new proletarian organs (workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils,
public economy councils, etc) functioning from before (under bourgeois
rule) as instruments of the violent struggle for liberation, then become
organs of social and economic transformation, of reconstruction of the
new communist order.
We had insisted, in a committee session, that such a formulation was a
mistake, as it entrusts the new organs with different functions
according to a
before
and
after
, separated by the
conquest of power by the proletariat.
Gennari had promised to amend it with an “at first
predominantly
as instruments, etc”. but the idea has since clearly been abandoned, and
I, absent force majeure at the last session, could not get him to take
it up again.
There is, however, in this formulation a real point of disagreement
which, while it brings Gennari, Bombacci, etc closer to the
abstentionists, distances them from those who believe that the new
workers’ organs cannot be “instruments of the violent struggle for
emancipation” except insofar as they are immediately (not afterwards)
“organs of social and economic transformation”. The emancipation of the
proletariat is brought about precisely through the development of its
capacity to autonomously and originally manage the functions of the
society created by itself and for itself: emancipation lies in the
creation of such organs, which, if they’re living and functioning, by
that virtue alone bring about a conscious social and economic
transformation, which is their end.
This isn’t a question of form, but of substance and essential. In the
present formulation, we repeat, the drafters of the program come to
adhere to Bordiga’s conception, which gives more importance to the
conquest of power than to the formation of the Soviets, to which he
recognizes for the moment as having a more “political” function in the
strict sense of the word, rather than an organic one of “economic and
social transformation”.
Just as Bordiga believes that the integral Soviet will be created only
during the period of the proletarian dictatorship, so Gennari, Bombacci,
etc., believe that only the conquest of power (which then takes on a
political character, i.e., leads us back to the already outdated “public
powers”) can give the Soviets their true and accomplished functions.
It’s precisely here, in our opinion, the central point that must lead
us, sooner or later, to a new revision of the program we have just voted
for.
According to Tasca, the working class can thus build the stages of its
liberation, even before wresting political power from the bourgeoisie.
Further on, Tasca implies that this conquest can also take place without
violence, when the proletariat has completed the work of technical
preparation, and social education, which would constitute precisely the
concrete revolutionary method advocated by the comrades of the Ordine
Nuovo.
We won’t go on at length about how this concept tends toward that of
reformism, and departs from the cornerstones of revolutionary Marxism
according to which revolution is determined not by the education, culture,
and technical capacity of the proletariat, but by the intimate crises of
the capitalist system of production.
So like Henry Leone, Tasca and his friends overestimate the appearance of
a new form of social representation in the Russian revolution, the
Soviet
which by the virtues inherent in its formation would constitute an
original historical solution to the proletarian struggle against
capitalism.
But the Soviets – excellently defined by comrade Zinoviev as the State
organ of the working class – are nothing but the organs of proletarian
power exercising the revolutionary dictatorship of the working class, the
cornerstone of the Marxist system, whose first positive experiment was the
Paris Commune of 1871. The Soviets are the form, not the cause of the
revolution.
* * *
In addition to this disagreement, there’s another point that separates us
from the Turin comrades.
The Soviets, State organs of the victorious proletariat, are quite
different from the factory councils, nor do the latter constitute the
first degree, the first step of the Soviet political system. The
equivocation in reality is also contained in the statement of principle
voted at the first assembly of the Factory Commissioners of the Turin
factories, which begins just as follows:
The factory commissaries are the sole and true social (economic and
political) representatives of the proletariat, since they are elected by
universal suffrage by all the workers in the very workplace.
In the different degrees of their constitution the commissaries
represent the union of all workers as realized in the bodies of
production (processing team – department – shop – union of the shops of
a given factory – union of the production plants of the mechanical and
agricultural factories of a district, of a province, of a nation, of the
world), of which the councils and the council system represent the power
and social direction.
This statement is unacceptable, since proletarian power is formed
directly in urban or rural municipal soviets without going through the
factory councils and committees, as we have repeatedly said, and as
reflected in the clear expositions of the Russian Soviet system published
by
Ordine Nuovo
itself.
Factory councils are bodies designed to represent the interests of
agglomerations of workers in the period of the revolutionary
transformation of production, and they represent not only the aspiration
of that group to free itself by socializing the enterprise away from the
hands of the private capitalist, but also a concern for the way in which
the interests of the group will be enforced in the socialization process
itself, governed by the organized will of the entire working collective.
The workers’ interests during the period when the capitalist system
appears stable and thus it’s only a matter of fighting for the best pay
for work have hitherto been represented by the trade unions. These
continue to live on during the revolutionary period, and naturally they’d
contrast competences with the factory councils, which arise when the
abolition of private capitalism is announced to be imminent, as was also
the case in Turin.
However, it’s not a great question of revolutionary principle to know
whether or not unorganized workers should participate in the elections of
commissioners. While it’s logical that these should participate, given the
very nature of the factory council, we don’t think being logic, however,
that the mixing in Turin of organs and functions between councils and
trade unions by requiring the Turin Section of the Metallurgical
Federation to have its council elected by the assembly of departmental
commissaries.
In any case, the relations between councils and trade unions as exponents
of special interests of workers’ groups will continue to be very complex,
and can settle down and harmonize only at a very advanced stage of the
communist economy, when the possibility of contradiction between the
interests of one group of producers and the general interest of the
production course will be minimized.
* * *
The Russian system is arranged so that the municipal soviet of a city
consists of one delegate from each group of proletarians, who vote for
only one name.
The delegates, however, are proposed to the voters by the political
party, and so it is with the second- and third‑tier delegates to the
higher bodies of the State system.
It’s therefore always a political party – the communist party – that
demands and obtains from the voters the mandate to administer power. We
are certainly not saying that Russian schemes should for sure be adopted
everywhere, but we do think that there should be a tendency to approach,
even more than in Russia, the informing principle of revolutionary
representation: that is, the overcoming of selfish and particular
interests in the collective interest.
Is it appropriate for the revolutionary struggle of communists to
immediately set up an apparatus of political representation of the working
class? This is the question we’ll examine in the next article, discussing
also the project elaborated about this matter by the party leadership, and
with full understanding that (as this same project partially recognizes)
this representation would be quite different from the system of factory
councils and committees that has begun to form in Turin.
IV. –
Il Soviet
, no. 5, February
8th, 1920
We believe we’ve emphasized the difference between the Factory Council
and the Workers’ and Peasant’s’ Political-Administrative Council enough.
The Factory Council is a representation of workers’ interests, restricted
to a small group within a firm. Under the communist regime it’s the
starting point of the system of “workers’ control”, which has a certain
part in the system of “economic councils” intended for the technical and
economic direction of production.
But the factory council does not meddle in the system of political
soviets, the depositary of proletarian power.
In the bourgeois regime, therefore, one cannot see in the factory council
– just like the trade union – an organ for the conquest of political
power.
If one were then to see in it an organ for the emancipation of the
proletariat by other means than the revolutionary conquest of power, one
would fall back into the syndicalist mistake – and the
Ordine Nuovo
comrades aren’t correct in arguing, polemicizing with Guerra di classe,
that the factory council movement, as they theorize it, isn’t in a certain
sense syndicalism.
Marxism is characterized by the prescient partition of the struggle for
proletarian emancipation into major historical phases, in which political
and economic activity have very different weight: Struggle for
power–exercise of power (proletarian dictatorship) in the transformation
of the economy–classless society with no political State.
To bring about a coincidence, in the functions of the organs of
proletarian liberation, of the moments of the political process with those
of the economic process is to believe in that petty-bourgeois caricature
of Marxism which one might call economism, and is classified into
reformism and syndicalism – and the overestimation of the factory council
would be but another incarnation of this old mistake, which connects the
petty-bourgeois Proudhon to the many revisionists who have believed
they’re going beyond Marx.
Under bourgeois rule the Factory Council is therefore a representative of
the interests of the workers of a company, just as it will be under
communist rule. It arises when circumstances require it, through changes
in the methods of proletarian economic organization. But perhaps more than
the Trade Union it lends itself to reformist diversions
The old minimalist tendency to obligatory arbitration, to the co‑interest
of workers in the profits of capital, and thus to their intervention in
the management and administration of the factory, could find in the
factory council the basis for the elaboration of an anti‑revolutionary
social law.
This is taking place in Germany right now amid the opposition of the
Independents, who, however, don’t deny the principle but rather the
modalities of the law – differentiating themselves from the communists for
whom the democratic regime cannot give rise to any control of the
proletariat over capitalist functions.
Let it therefore remain clear that it’s nonsensical to speak of workers’
control until political power is in the hands of the proletarian State, in
whose name and by whose power alone such control can be exercised, the
prelude to the socialization of enterprises and their administration by
appropriate organs of the community.
The workers’ councils – workers, peasants and, on occasion, soldiers –
are, it’s well understood, the political organs of the proletariat, the
foundations of the proletarian State.
Local urban and rural councils replace the municipal councils of the
bourgeois regime. Provincial or regional soviets replace the current
provincial councils, with the difference that the former are designated
for 2nd degree elections by the local soviets.
The congress of soviets of a State and the central executive committee
replace the bourgeois parliament, but are elected by 3rd and sometimes 4th
degree suffrage, rather than directly.
There’s no need here to insist on other differences, principally among
which is the right of the voters to remove delegates at any time.
The need to have a quick mechanism for these revocations means that the
initial elections are not by lists, but by assigning a single delegate to
a group of voters who, if possible, live together by the conditions of
their work.
But the fundamental characteristic of the whole system doesn’t lie in
these arrangements, which are by no means miracle-making, but in the
criterion that establishes the electoral principle, active and passive,
reserved for the workers alone and denied to the bourgeoisie.
Two mistakes are commonly made on the formation of municipal soviets.
One is to think that their delegates are elected by the factory councils
or factory committees (executive committees of the councils of
departmental commissars) while instead the delegates are elected (we
repeat ourselves on certain points by choice) directly by the mass of
voters.
This error can be seen in the Bombacci draft for the establishment of
soviets in Italy in paragraph VI.
The other error is to think that the soviet is a body made up with
representatives directly designated by the Socialist Party, trade unions
and factory councils.
Into this error falls, for example, Comrade Ambrosini in his proposals.
Such a system may perhaps be of use to form, quickly and provisionally,
soviets when necessary, but it doesn’t correspond to their final
structure.
In Russia, a small percentage of delegates in a soviet is thus added to
those elected directly by the proletarian voters.
But in reality the communist party, and other parties, get their
representation by proposing proven members of their organization to the
voters and by showing their program to said voters.
A soviet, in our view, is revolutionary only when the majority of its
members are members of the Communist Party.
All this, as is well understood, refers to the period of the proletarian
dictatorship.
The great question now arises. What usefulness, what character can
workers’ councils have while the power of the bourgeoisie still lasts?
In Central Europe, workers’ councils and the bourgeois democratic State –
all the more counter-revolutionary in that it’s republican and
social-democratic – coexist at the moment. What value does this
representation of the proletariat have, if it’s not where power actually
lies, if it’s not the basis of the State? Does it at least act as an
effective organ of struggle for the implementation of the proletarian
dictatorship?
These questions are answered by an article by Austrian comrade Otto
Maschl that we read in the Geneva
Nouvelle Internationale
. He
states that in Austria the councils paralyzed themselves, abdicated power
into the hands of the bourgeois National Assembly.
In Germany, on the other hand, after the same thing happened, the
Majority and Independent SPD – according to Maschl – came out of the
Councils, and these became true centers of struggle for proletarian
emancipation, and Noske had to repress and crush them in order for
social-democracy to rule.
“In Austria, on the other hand,” Maschl concludes, “the existence of the
councils in bourgeois democracy, or rather the existence of bourgeois
democracy in spite of the councils proves that those workers’ councils are
far from being what in Russia are called soviets”. And he formulates the
doubt that, at the moment of revolution, other soviets may arise, truly
revolutionary, becoming the repositories of proletarian power, in place of
these tamed ones.
The party program approved in Bologna declares that soviets must be
established in Italy as organs of revolutionary struggle. The Bombacci
project tends to carry out this proposed constitution in a concrete way.
Before dealing with the particularities, we will discuss the general
concepts that Comrade Bombacci was inspired by.
First, we ask – and don’t call us pedantic – for a clarification of form.
In the sentence, “Only a national institution broader than the soviets
will be able to channel the present period toward the final revolutionary
struggle against the bourgeois regime and its false democratic illusion:
parliamentarism…” should it be understood that parliamentarism is that
broader institution, or this democratic illusion? We fear that it’s this
first interpretation, confirmed by the chapter on the action program of
the soviets, which is a strange mixture of the functions of the soviets
with the parliamentary activity of the party. If it is on this equivocal
ground that the constituent councils are to act, it’s certainly better to
do nothing about it. That the soviets should serve to draw up drafts of
socialist and revolutionary legislation to be proposed by the socialist
deputies to the bourgeois State, such a proposal only parallels those
relating to communal-electionist sovietism, so well demolished by our D.L.
For now we’ll merely remind our comrades who write such projects of one
of Lenin’s conclusions in the declaration approved at the Moscow Congress:
Separate from those who delude the proletariat by proclaiming the
possibility of its conquests in the bourgeois sphere and by advocating the
combination or collaboration of the apparatus of bourgeois rule with the
new proletarian organs. If the former are the Social Democrats – still
citizens of our Party! – must not the latter be discerned in the
electivist maximalists preoccupied with justifying parliamentary and
municipal activity with monstrous pseudo-soviet projects?
Don’t our comrades in the fraction that won in Bologna realize that these
people aren’t even in line with that communist electioneering which could
legitimately oppose – with the arguments of Lenin and certain German
communists – our irreducible principled abstentionism?
V. –
Il Soviet
, no. 7, February
22nd, 1920
We intend to conclude our exposition with this article, besides resuming
the discussion in controversy with those comrades in other newspapers who
have responded to our point of view.
The discussion has now become generalized throughout the socialist press.
The best we’ve read is C. Niccolini’s articles in
Avanti!
, written with
great clarity and in line with true communist notions, and with which we
fully agree.
The Soviets, the workers’, peasants and soldiers’ councils, are the form
taken by the representation of the proletariat when it exercises power,
after the overthrow of the capitalist State.
Before the seizure of power, when the bourgeoisie still politically
rules, it may happen that special historical conditions, probably
corresponding to serious convulsions in the institutional orders of the
State and society, bring about the emergence of soviets, and it may be
very appropriate for the communists to facilitate and propel the emergence
of these new bodies of the proletariat.
It must be very clear, however, that soviets being formed can’t be an
artificial action, or the application of some formula; and that in any
case, just because workers’ councils (which will be the form of the
proletarian revolution) have been formed, that doesn’t mean that the
problem of the revolution has been solved, nor even that infallible
conditions have been set for the revolution. This – and we’ve already
shown examples of this – may be lacking even where councils exist, when
the political and historical consciousness of the proletariat, condensed
we may say into the communist political party, is not transfused into
them.
The fundamental issue of the revolution thus lies in the tendency of the
proletariat to overthrow the bourgeois State and take power into its own
hands. This tendency in the broad masses of the working class exists as a
direct result of the economic relations of exploitation by capital, which
determine an intolerable situation for the proletariat and impel it to
break existing social forms
But the task of the communists is to lead this violent reaction of the
crowds in order to give it a superior efficiency. Communists – as the
Manifesto already said – know the conditions of the class struggle and the
emancipation of the proletariat better than the rest of the proletariat;
their critique of history and of the constitution of society puts them in
a position to make a fairly accurate forecast of the developments of the
revolutionary process. Thus, communists constitute the class political
party, which aims at the unification of all proletarian forces, the
organization of the proletariat into the ruling class, through the
revolutionary conquest of power.
When the revolution is imminent and its preconditions are ripe in the
reality of social life, a strong communist party must exist, and its
consciousness of the ongoing events must be particularly precise.
That’s why, if these organs are to arise, if the communists are to
concern themselves with their constitution at any given time, it mustn’t
be believed that this is a means of quickly outflanking the bourgeoisie
and almost automatically overcoming its resistance to the ceding of power.
Can the Soviets, State organs of the victorious proletariat, be organs of
revolutionary proletarian struggle while the capitalist State still rules?
Yes, in the sense, however, that they can be, at a certain stage, the
suitable ground for the revolutionary struggle that the
party
conducts. And at that certain stage the party tends to form such a
terrain, such a framing of forces.
Are we today, in Italy, at this stage of the struggle? We believe that
we’re very close to it, but that there’s an earlier stage still that we
haven’t gone through.
The Communist Party, which should take action in the soviets, doesn’t yet
exist. We aren’t saying that soviets, in order to come about, will wait
for it: it may be that events will go about another way. But if so, this
grave danger will emerge: the immaturity of the party will let these
bodies fall into the hands of the reformists, the accomplices of the
bourgeoisie, those who either openly crush or falsify the revolution.
And so, we think, the problem of having a real Communist Party in Italy
is much more urgent than that of forming soviets.
Studying both problems and setting the best conditions for dealing with
both without delay may also be acceptable, but without mechanistically
putting fixed dates on an almost official inauguration of soviets in
Italy.
Decisive for the formation of the truly communist party is selecting
communists from reformists and social-democrats.
Some comrades think that the very proposal to form soviets may offer the
ground for this selection. We disagree: exactly because the Soviet isn’t,
in our view, revolutionary by itself.
In any case, if the emergence of the Soviets is to be a source of
political clarification, we don’t see how it can be arrived at on the
basis of an understanding – as in the Bombacci project – between
reformists, maximalists, syndicalists and anarchists!
Instead, the creation of a healthy and efficient revolutionary movement
in Italy will never come about by over‑prioritizing new bodies anticipated
on future forms, such as factory councils or soviets – just as it was an
illusion to save the revolutionary spirit from reformism by considering
the trade unions as the nucleus of a future society.
We won’t achieve this selection with a new formula that won’t frighten
anyone, but with the final abandonment of old “formulas” of harmful
methods, sometimes fatally so. We – for well known reasons – think that
this is a method that should be abandoned, as well as the electoral
method, so that along with it non‑Communists can be rejected from our
ranks; and we see no other way for the emergence of a Communist Party
worthy of joining Moscow.
Let us work in this direction beginning – as Niccolini well put it – by
working out a consciousness, a political culture, in leaders, through a
more serious study of the questions of revolution, less dazed by spurious
electoral, parliamentary and minimalist activities. Let us work in this
direction – that is, let us make propaganda right now for the conquest of
power, for the consciousness of what the revolution will be, of what its
organs will be, of how the Soviets will really act – and we shall have
really worked to constitute the councils of the proletariat and conquer in
them the revolutionary dictatorship that will open the bright paths of
communism.