Organic Centralism in Lenin, 2020

Organic Centralism in Lenin, 2020
International Communist Party
On Organic Centralism
Lenin, the Organic Centralist
Organic Centralism in Lenin, the Left and the Actual Life of the Party
pdf
] -
epub
] - [youtube:
part 1
part 2
Contents
Foreword
1.
Historical invariance of the Communist Party
26.
The reversal of praxis
2.
Reasserted confirmations from a great past
27.
The invariant tactical plan
3.
The formation of the Bolshevik Party
28.
Economic struggle and political struggle
4.
Against localism, for communist centralisation
29.
Workers’ organisms and the communist party
5.
The revolution is not a matter of forms of organisation
30.
Workers and intellectuals in the party
6.
Against economism - economic struggle and political struggle
31.
Conspiracy and terrorism
7.
Against "free criticism"
32.
The organic selection of leaders
8.
What Is to Be Done?
– a milestone of Marxism
33.
Complete and fraternal confidence among revolutionaries
9.
From circles to Party
34.
Do not love anyone, love everyone
10.
The crucial Paragraph 1
35.
Internal hierarchy and decision making
11.
Organisational steadfastness, tactical coherence, purity of principles
36.
The guarantees
12.
Professional revolutionaries
37.
An all-Russia political newspaper
13.
Knowledge and militancy – "proletarian consciousness"
38.
The good tactic and the good party
14.
Autonomy, democracy, free criticism
39.
Communist centralism versus class dispersion within bourgeois society
15.
The unavoidable executive discipline
40.
Organic centralism
16.
The alleged "Leninist creativity"
41.
"Democratic centralism"
17.
No "new type party"
42.
The Left’s centralism
18.
Dogmatic Marxism versus revisionism
43.
How is the party structured according to Lenin
19.
"A compact group"
44.
Joint and unanimous work to avoid splits
20.
Sectarianism
45.
How to guarantee discipline
21.
Where does consciousness come from?
46.
How to share duties
22.
Workers in the Party
47.
Impersonality and anonymity
23.
Mystique of adhesion to communism
48.
The false solution of expulsions
24.
Against bourgeois ideology and the law of minimum effort
49.
Party and fractions
25.
"Do-nothings"
50.
Anticipation of the future society
Foreword
The Communist Party was founded in 1848 on the basis of a theory of
history and fundamental outlines of tactics that had already been defined.
In the decades that followed Marx and Engels sculpted, with their powerful
and masterful labours, the fundamental theoretical corpus of communism, a
doctrine that we call, in its organic unity, Marxism. It is a task that
has never been finished by the great Marxist school and which indeed
continues today within our small but obstinate party formation.
Since then, the physical organisation of the revolutionaries, the
Communist
Party
, has passed through a series of organisational forms, in an
evolution interrupted several times by ruinous degenerations. Its very
name has been abandoned, then recovered by Bolshevism in 1918 and by the
Third International.
In 1973 the Party found itself in need of confronting its history, to
confirm itself fully in the tradition of the Communist Left (also known as
the Italian Left), the current which, having been founded in 1921 as the
Communist Party of Italy (Section of the Communist International) was
ousted and then expelled for its unwillingness to accept the methods and
policies of Stalinism that were triumphant in the International.
The resulting organic work was published with the title
The Communist
Party in the Tradition of the Left
, to which we refer those comrades
who intend to deepen their knowledge on the structure, functioning and
tactics of the party. It is also available in Italian, French and Spanish.
The text was compiled by drawing on the set of texts, articles and theses
that the Left had produced over the previous half century, a rich mass of
documents since the first post-war period. Recourse was also meant to be
made to Lenin’s texts, especially from the years of the Bolshevik Party’s
formation. But it was not possible at the time to support our affirmations
with the rich theoretical production of Comrade Lenin, who had dedicated
many of his energies to the construction of a true revolutionary party: an
approach that allowed the Bolshevik Party to lead the worker and peasant
masses to victory in the revolution that reached its climax in Russia in
October 1917.
Unfortunately, the need to testify in a reasonably short time to the
bewildered and deceived comrades within the organisation, including
ourselves, who had remained “on the same road as always”, in the tradition
of the Left, did not allow the inclusion in the publication of the texts
by Lenin as intended. Comrade Angelo, who had taken charge of the task and
had undertaken this second part of the study, unfortunately died while
still young in 1978, and what remained of his work were notes (and many
underlinings in the volumes of the Complete Works), which proved
invaluable for initiating the report we present here.
Nonetheless, in the hearts and minds of our comrades it has always been a
certainty that our party was the true and only continuer of all of Lenin’s
and the Bolsheviks’ work, also with regard to the way of understanding the
communist party and its internal life.
The study presented here is based on this conviction. Impersonal and
collective like all our works, it limits itself to ordering the writings
of Lenin and occasionally of other Marxists, on the one hand, and the
writings of the Left and the unwritten rules of conduct and work of the
party today, on the other. The result, as the comrades will be able to
see, if we keep in mind the differences related to the historical era and
the nature of the party to which Lenin’s writings were addressed, is
exactly what we set out to verify. Nor could it be otherwise. The
objectives are the same, the demands of work aligned to the correct
revolutionary policy are the same, and the passion that guided us then and
guides us today, and which guides revolutionaries of all geographies,
ethnic groups and languages, is also the same.
This work is especially dedicated to young comrades who have approached
the Party from countries where the tradition of communism has long been
forgotten, mystified, condemned. We wish these comrades well in their
work, as they tread in the uncorrupted footsteps of revolutionary Marxism,
as always.
1. Historical invariance of the Communist Party
This work aims to demonstrate what we have affirmed since the birth of
the party: alongside the claim of a doctrine that has remained unique and
intangible since the enunciation of its theoretical foundations with the
Manifesto
of the Communist Party
of 1848, we claim that just as the doctrine
has been transmitted intact to this day, the way of conceiving the party
of the communist revolution is also that of our teachers.
Already Marx and Engels, throughout their lives, had harshly and
disdainfully condemned, both in the party’s embryonic and undeveloped
forms at first, and then in the developed ones, any improper attitude with
respect to its nature, its tasks and the aims of communism. Well known are
their surprise and disgust at certain attitudes of some anarchists, for
example, and, in their hard work, they never descended to unworthy methods
of political struggle, contrary to the conviction and help to the
collective maturation of the world movement.
We anticipate here a central thesis: The Communist Party wages a
political struggle, but externally, against its many enemies; not
internally, except in the event of irreparable degeneration. Within the
party there are no polemics and no propaganda among comrades. Lenin was
eventually able to design and build a party that lived up to the task that
awaited it, not only, as is evident, from the point of view of theory,
but also from that of its organisational structure and organic
functioning, aspects nevertheless never addressed separately.
The belief that Lenin’s party was, in the substance of the guidelines and
of the way of conceiving the work, the same as that of the Left, before
and after the Second World War, taking into account the obvious
differences of time and place, has always been a deep-rooted belief in the
party, and an obvious consequence of doctrinaire homogeneity. A belief
that is confirmed by a letter circulated internally over 50 years ago,
written by the Party Centre at the time:
Our enemies have always wanted to oppose Lenin to the tradition of
the Left, not only in the field of organisational matters, but in all
fields. Our effort, however... has always been to discover the
permanent Lenin under the contingent Lenin, to show how the ‘new type’
party that he was able to create in antithesis to the social democracy
of the Second International already represents the Party as we
conceive it, and how a truly organic method already emerged behind the
formula of democratic centralism – which is to be seen not in the
individual solutions given by Lenin to individual contingent problems,
but in the continuity of his action. We must therefore deal with this
issue by giving greater importance to the historical method, and
bearing in mind how the transition from the second phase of the
maturation of the class party, in relation to the development of
capitalism, to the third phase, which is both that of imperialism and
of our party. Linked to this defect of a-historicity... there is that
of considering the organisational problems as stand-alone. Instead, it
must be demonstrated how the centralism of the Bolshevik party was
achieved through a struggle for the programme, principles and tactics
of communism, before and after the Second Congress of 1903”
(Letter from the Centre to the restricted network, 24/3/1967).
Our party therefore claims total continuity with the purest revolutionary
tradition of the working class, starting from the
Manifesto of the
Communist Party
of 1848, passing through the most orthodox (in the
Marxist sense) expressions of the three Internationals as to theory and
action; and proclaims itself to be the direct heir of the Communist Party
of Italy, founded in 1921 and with which it also boasts an uninterrupted
physical continuity, as concerns organisation and men, champions for over
a century of the uncorrupted tradition of revolutionary left communism.
2. Reasserted confirmations from a great past
While never losing contact with the working class and its daily struggle,
it is our tradition to devote a lot of energy, in times when conditions
are not favourable to direct revolutionary attack, to the study of the
theoretical bases of our way of existing and working, both to
reappropriate these continuously, and to persevere with the work of
“sculpting” our positions in doctrine and tactics; which does not mean
“enrichment”, “updating” or, worse, “revision”, but rather the
highlighting of increasingly clear and detailed confirmations of the
correctness of our way of interpreting the revolutionary process.
It is our firm belief that the doctrine of the revolution is not “built”
by subsequent contributions and additions, in a process that would never
be considered finished, and therefore susceptible to continuous
“improvements” and “updates”, in the light of alleged “new conditions”,
previously unpredictable. The doctrine of the revolution, which is formed
on the basis of historical, economic, scientific, philosophical data, and
also following utopian theorisations of future society, was born in a
single block in the first half of the nineteenth century, and sees the
light in the form of the
Communist Manifesto
. Nothing new has been
added in the more than 170 years following this theoretical body that
contradicts its assumptions, if not continuous “sculptures” made by true
Marxists, which make the instrument of theory more and more manageable and
effective. The party, therefore, to the shame of the hesitant and the
doubtful, is always ready to play its role, with all the tools it needs,
none excluded, to be applied to the disruptive and invincible force of the
proletariat.
Consequently, the party is at the same time the custodian of the doctrine
and the organ which, according to it, will have to carry out a leading
role for the revolutionary class. It is therefore important for us to pay
particular attention to this organ of the working class even when the
class, in the vast majority of its components, ignores it, as in the
present moment.
3. The formation of the Bolshevik Party
The International Communist Party is not only the heir of the Italian
Left; it is our firm belief that there are no substantial differences
between our way of understanding the party and that of Lenin, obviously
after having appropriately assessed the historical and environmental
differences between the situations in which the two organisations have
found themselves operating. This work intends to read the experience of
Lenin and his party, underlining the characteristics that are of general
value, the same characteristics of our small movement today.
To understand what the revolutionary party meant to Lenin, and to
interpret his position correctly, it is essential to have a clear
understanding of the context in which Lenin operated, especially in the
period of defining what the Bolshevik Party would be, before and after the
Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). A
brief historical preamble is therefore necessary to allow us to define the
characteristics of the various political actors, movements and ideologies
that circulated in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
Lenin gives us a description of the origins of the party in Russia both
in the conclusion of the
What Is to Be Done?
and in the preface to
the
Twelve Years
collection (1907).
It was in the 1880s that Marxism penetrated Russia, where the populist
movement had developed. The Emancipation of Labour group was established
abroad around Marxist theory and with correct propositions on the tactics
of the proletariat in the double revolution.
In
What Is to Be Done?
Lenin claims that that group possessed not
only theory but had also developed a tactical plan for the perspective of
the Russian revolution and the function of the proletariat in it.
In the first period, 1880-1898, the Marxists’ struggle was directed above
all against populism, a political movement that developed in Russia
between the last quarter of the 19
th
Century and the early 20
th
Century; its aim was to achieve, through the propaganda and proselytism
carried out by intellectuals among the people and with terrorist direct
action, an improvement of the living conditions of the lower classes, in
particular of the peasants and serfs, and the realisation of a kind of
rural socialism based on the Russian village community (the
mir
),
in contrast to western industrial society. To confront this doctrine it
was not only authentic Marxists who intervened, but also a whole series of
actors for whom the criticism of populism meant the need for a passage to
bourgeois democracy. This was the era of “legal Marxism”.
The struggle was therefore waged on two fronts: against populism and
against petty bourgeois Marxism, and the first socialist writings are
dedicated to this struggle, mainly by Lenin and Plekhanov. The year 1890,
Lenin’s debut in the political arena, simply coincides with this: the
appearance of the working class in Russia. In this era, Russian Marxists
were reduced to a small group; what Lenin writes in
What Is to Be
Done?
is important: this group of intellectuals had already worked
out everything; they did not wait for “the masses”.
The first notable workers’ unrest occurred in 1896, and the group of
intellectuals threw themselves into the struggle, indicating to the
movement not only its immediate tasks, but its entire perspective up to
socialism.
The effects of this and subsequent movements were as follows:
the established ties to the working-class masses;
the party separated itself clearly from legal Marxism;
the party organisation was formed (1898).
Lenin states in all his works, including
What Is to Be Done?
that from 1896 onwards the Russian proletariat was never static. The
situation was that the party organisation was inadequate to guide the
lively movement of the working masses. So the crucial question is posed in
What Is to Be Done?
precisely: what must a party fit for the
purpose of leading the workers’ movement be? It was in the face of this
exuberant workers’ movement that the economist deviation manifested
itself.
This is a first characteristic trait that must be noted if we truly
believe that the party is a product and a factor of class struggle. The
difficulties regarding the formation of a revolutionary party must be seen
in the particular situation of Russia compared to other industrialised
countries, or on the way to industrialisation. The workers were very few
in percentage, and concentrated in some industrial districts; the rest of
the vast country was a large countryside with small and medium-sized
farmers (in addition to large estates with wage laborers or former serfs),
from whose ranks came the generation which, at the turn of the century,
constituted the industrial proletariat. Trade union tradition was almost
non-existent, as was socialist propaganda. The revolutionaries therefore
had to speak to a predominantly illiterate and suspicious audience.
This was a situation, however, that could reveal positive aspects;
indeed, not even the opportunistic poison had penetrated that much into
the class, and it was easier to confront proletarians with the reality of
their conditions, and to help them to draw valuable indications from the
struggles as to who were their friends and who their enemies. On the other
hand, the bourgeois-oriented opportunism of a bourgeoisie that had to be
revolutionary towards absolutism did not have the weapons typical of
opportunism, or had little of it: propaganda, traditions, electoralism. It
was therefore at first an opportunism little equipped with theoretical
tools, although rapidly evolving, even within the socialist movement, and
also thanks to the development of opportunism in western Europe in those
years.
The second characteristic that must be taken into account: since
1894-1895 the Russian working class never lost contact with its party. Its
size can be deduced from Lenin’s data on members:
1894-1895 – several hundred workers
1906 – around 33,000 members attend the Stockholm congress
1907 – 150,000-170,000 members
1913 – 33,000-50,000.
Lenin provided these figures in 1913, while arguing with Vera Zasulic,
who claimed that Russian social democracy was composed of intellectual
currents. It is natural that this situation needs to be taken into account
when dealing with organisational problems. It was Lenin himself who
categorically stated this in the preface to the aforementioned
Twelve
Years
collection.
4.
Against localism, for communist centralisation
The 1898 congress created an underground organisation and tried to start
publishing an illegal newspaper, but the central leadership was almost
immediately broken up by the police, and the work could not continue. The
organisation was reduced to clubs, local groups without any structured
link among them and without any continuity of work.
Lenin rejected the argument, which still found a broad appreciation among
Russian socialists, according to which the greatest need would have been
to develop the network of local circles and to multiply and strengthen the
local press.
For Lenin, the most urgent issue for the movement no longer consisted in
the development of the old local and uncoordinated work, it was that “
of
uniting
of organisation. This is a step for which a programme is a
necessity. The programme must formulate our basic views; precisely
establish our immediate political tasks; point out the immediate demands
that must show the area of agitational activity; give unity to the
agitational work, expand and deepen it, thus raising it from fragmentary
partial agitation for petty, isolated demands to the status of agitation
for the sum total of Social-Democratic demands”
(Lenin, Collected
Works in 45 volumes, Lawrence and Wishart, London: IV, 230. In the rest of
the text the mere mention of a volume and pages will refer to this
collection).
5. The revolution is not a matter of forms of organisation
Even if, as we shall see, the organisational question was the main task
of the moment, however, a vulgar fable must be debunked: that the
particular form given to the Bolshevik Party, apart from its doctrine and
programme, has made it an instrument capable in itself, with its
discipline, of stirring up a revolution.
This does not detract from the importance of how the party organises
itself; and the history of the Bolshevik Party, in the specific situation
of Russia, shows this. Through questions of organisation all forms of
opportunism repeatedly try to penetrate into the party. Hence the party’s
tireless struggle for an organisation well connected to the theoretical
foundations of Marxism.
A period of dispersion and confusion started, which Lenin describes both
in
What Is to Be Done?
and in the aforementioned preface. The
characteristics of this period (1898-1903) are the following:
1. The workers are on the move;
2. Intellectual youth increasingly passes to Marxism and becomes infatuated with the workers’ movement;
3. Any centralised organisation, any continuous and unitary work is missing;
4. The workers’ movement, legal Marxist literature and revisionism take hold on young revolutionaries. It is the era of clubs: this is how Lenin describes it;
5. Terrorist and anarchist tendencies are revived as a reaction.
Abroad, the organisation of the RSDLP existed as the “Union of Russian
Social-Democrats”, of which Plekhanov’s “Emancipation of Labour Group” was
a part. The publication of a central party organ,
Rabociaia Gazieta
was attempted; Lenin wrote a few articles for it, but it was never
published. In Russia there were only local newspapers and other
publications.
6. Against economism – economic struggle and political
struggle
Economism was born, that is, the tendency to overestimate the importance
of the spontaneous economic struggle of the proletariat, and to
underestimate its political tasks.
Who were the Economists, and what was their programme, as summarised in
the Credo of 1899, but already presented in an article of
Rabociaia
Mysl
of October 1897? In the latter writing the Economists (who we
would rightly call today, with very few differences, Workerists) state
that the “
Economic struggle is the way towards further victories”;
“Let the workers fight for themselves, and not for future generations…”
Workers for workers”
. The party, the perspectives of the
revolution (not to mention Marxism and revolutionary theory), are not
mentioned.
The consequence of economism is the theoretical justification of the
system of local circles. Bernsteinism is closely linked to economism,
which also devalues the tasks of the proletariat in the bourgeois
revolution and supports the need for a “criticism” of Marxist theory in
the reformist sense. Economism permeates many Russian circles creating an
anti-party, anti-organisation, anti-theory, etc. mentality. Lenin
immediately opposed it with a meeting of seventeen militants deported to
Siberia, who spoke out for the condemnation of those positions. Lenin
demolished them in the “
A Protest by Russian Social-Democrats”
written in 1899 on behalf of the exiled social-democratic community in
Siberia:
It is not true to say that the working class in the West did not
take part in the struggle for political liberty and in political
revolutions. The history of the Chartist movement and the revolutions
of 1848 in France, Germany, and Austria prove the opposite. It is
absolutely untrue to say that ʻMarxism was the theoretical expression
of the prevailing practice: of the political struggle predominating
over the economic
. On the contrary, ʻMarxism
appeared at a time when
non-political socialism prevailed (ʻOwenism
, ʻFourierism
true
socialism
) and the
Communist Manifesto
took up the
cudgels at once against non-political socialism. Even when Marxism
came out fully armed with theory (
Capital
) and organised the
celebrated International Working Men’s Association, the political
struggle was by no means the prevailing practice (narrow
trade-unionism in England, anarchism and Proudhonism in the Romance
countries). In Germany the great historic service performed by
Lassalle was the transformation of the working class from an appendage
of the liberal bourgeoisie into an independent political party.
Marxism linked up the economic and the political struggle of the
working class into a single inseparable whole; and the effort of the
authors of the
Credo
to separate these forms of
struggle is one of their most clumsy and deplorable departures from
Marxism” … “Similarly, there can be no suggestion of a ‘radical change
in the practical activity’ of the West-European workers parties, in
spite of what the authors of the Credo say: the tremendous
importance of the economic struggle of the proletariat, and the
necessity for such a struggle, were recognised by Marxism from the
very outset. As early as the forties Marx and Engels conducted a
polemic against the utopian socialists who denied the importance of
this struggle”
(IV, 175-176).
7.
Against “free criticism”
In 1900 the Social Democratic organisation abroad split, a part of which
passed over to economism and freedom of criticism. The “Union of Russian
Social Democrats Abroad” published the
Rabocheye Delo
, which was
imbued with economism and Bernsteinism, but tried to conceal it. It was
for the reconstitution of the party’s organisational unity on the
theoretical basis of “freedom of criticism” and on the practical basis of
“broad democracy” in the organisation. Plekhanov broke away from the Union
and founded the organisation “Social Democrat”.
The need for organisational unification was clearly felt, because all
the work in Russia was falling apart, ruined by localism, by
approximation, by artisanal and generic methods.
Iskra
and its circle took to the field on the problem of the
reconstitution of the party at the end of 1900. Among the Social Democrats
there were the following positions:
The real economists, who did not even feel the need for the
organisation and devalued its importance; they were the theorisers of
what exists in the present moment.
The tendency of
Rabocheye Delo
tendency; a shapeless trend
that defended the legitimacy of revisionism and “freedom of criticism”,
on a theoretical level, a purely organisational unification guaranteed
by internal democracy, on a practical level.
Iskra
; which wanted to base the organisation on the net
clarification of theoretical, programmatic and tactical positions, and
wanted to break with economism.
Iskra
intended to reassert Marxist orthodoxy and make the
periodical the ideological headquarters that acted as a link among all
revolutionary Marxists; in its first issue of December 1900 its constant
concern was disclosed: to infuse the proletarian masses with
social-democratic ideas and consciousness, organise a strong and
disciplined party of full-time revolutionaries, and through them create
solid links with the spontaneous workers’ movement. This is to prevent
workers from slipping into reformism and the intelligentsia from remaining
at the superficial level of mere doctrinaire disputes.
In June 1901, the representatives of the organisations in exile met in
Geneva. The unity achieved at that conference proved to be short lived and
Iskra
consequently stiffened and became increasingly sceptical
about the possibilities of achieving unification. In October of the same
year, a new conference was held in Zurich which, after lively discussions,
ended with the complete breakdown by the left. Immediately after
Iskra
militants from the Social Democrat group and others joined together in a
new organisation, the League of Russian Revolutionary Social Democracy. In
their programmatic declaration they declared themselves proud to be called
“sectarians”.
8.
What Is to Be Done?
– a milestone of Marxism
The most complete expression of the Iskrist campaign is
What Is to
Be Done?
in which Lenin poses all questions from a coherently
Marxist point of view:
a. Theory, its importance and its invariance
b. Function of the proletariat in the double revolution: the necessity of
the autonomous party and of the proletarian political struggle.
c. Relations between party and class, between trade unionist politics and
social democratic politics, between spontaneity and consciousness.
Finally, an organisational plan. The following are needed:
1. a single political newspaper for all Russia;
2. a clandestine organisation of professional revolutionaries closely
anchored to principles, well delimited from the outside, uninterrupted
over time and connected in space, surrounded by a whole series of
legal and semi-legal organisations, specialised in practical work and
strictly centralised; and
3. a planned tactic, descending from the principles and that does not
change overnight.
As concerns theory, Lenin is categorical, and he didn’t hesitate to call
upon Engels to testify, by amply quoting him (V, 371-372), to demonstrate
how the German workers themselves, at that very moment in the vanguard in
Europe, had taken advantage of the theoretical conquests of the struggles
and of the consequent theoretical elaborations that took place in France
and England in the field of political and economic struggle.
The problem was represented by the defenders of the “freedom of
criticism”, which Lenin defined as “
freedom for an opportunist trend
in Social-Democracy, freedom to convert Social-Democracy into a
democratic party of reform, freedom to introduce bourgeois ideas and
bourgeois elements into socialism”
(V, 355).
What Is to Be Done?
is a text of ours in all respects.
Iskra
’s
organisational plan can be shared word for word.
We note that Lenin raises the question of the rigid delimitation of the
organisation of revolutionaries from other organisations, including
workers’. He also raises the question of the maximum specialisation in the
field of practical action, but not in the work of theoretical study. We
also note that Lenin raises the question of instruments, the operational
means that are really able to organise and are not mere organisational or
hierarchical formulas. Communal work for a communal newspaper; party
organisations that are accustomed by the work itself to react
simultaneously to events, up to the insurrection. The newspaper as a
collective organiser.
The same themes are taken up again in the
A Letter to a Comrade on
Our Organisational Tasks
, immediately following
What Is to Be
Done?
It would perhaps be possible to get along
without
Rules”. We are already at organic centralism.
9. From circles to Party
The Second Congress met in August 1903, which had to proceed with the
reunification of the Party, on the basis of
Iskra
’s
propositions. Everyone now accepted the Iskrist programme, but Lenin noted
and showed that acceptance of a programme in words is not enough if the
organisational discipline of the party is not accepted. This statement is
not mechanical, but rather historical and dialectical in meaning, even if
it is perfectly acceptable to us in the simple and literal sense. Think
about it: there was economism until yesterday, there were circles until
yesterday with their own vision, their own structure, their own tradition,
there was and still is Bernsteinism.
Iskra
had hammered its
propositions for three years and the situation of the material struggle
had slowly forced all militants either to take sides openly with
Iskra
or to admit the plan of
Iskra
as the only valid one.
Lenin did not mean the same thing as others with the word “unification”.
The meaning he gave it was this: unity of the presently autonomous local
circles of the Marxist movement in a party controlled by the centre and
ideologically homogeneous for all Russia. Unique discipline and
ideological homogeneity: that was “unification”. To reach it he was ready
to reject compromises and let go all those who would not have accepted a
centralised organisation: all newspapers unwilling to merge into one
national body, the Jewish Socialist Bund if it had not been ready to give
up its autonomy, the revisionists and the economists and all those who
were not ready to accept without discussion the “orthodox” Marxist
programme, which he, Plekhanov and the other editors of
Iskra
would have prepared for the next congress.
There were some who thought that the first requirement of the unborn
party was a prolonged, full and free discussion of fundamental principles.
But for Lenin, as for Plekhanov, all this had already been solved in
Western Europe by the works of Marx and Engels and again by those of
Kautsky and Plekhanov in their still heated controversy with Bernstein.
The congress was therefore convened, in view of the “acceptance” of the
Iskrist plan. “Well, gentlemen, words are not enough, facts are needed.
And we Iskrists put facts forth to you that show whether your acceptance
is real or just words. To you who until yesterday were defending the
legitimacy of what exists, let us put this touchstone: all circles must be
dissolved, and all newspapers suppressed, there are no imperative mandates
to the congress”.
10. The crucial Paragraph 1
And the test bears fruit.
To you who until yesterday defended the organisations for the economic
struggle and the party as the ideal superior instance, we propose a first
paragraph of the statute that sounds like this: “A member of the party is
not only the one who accepts the programme and supports it to the extent
of his forces, but he who also works in one of the party organisations.
Are you really for the distinction between party and class? Prove it by
accepting these conditions”.
The discussion on Paragraph 1 is important because it raises the wider
question of party organisation. Says Lenin:
The definition given in my draft was: ‘A
member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who accepts
its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by
personal participation in one of the Party organisations.’ In place of
the words I have underlined, Martov proposed: ’work under the control
and direction of one of the Party organisations’. My formulation was
supported by Plekhanov, Martov’s by the rest of the editorial board
(Axelrod was their spokesman at the Congress). We argued that the
concept Party member must be narrowed so as to separate those who worked
from those who merely talked, to eliminate organisational chaos, to
eliminate the monstrous and absurd possibility of there being
organisations which consisted of Party members but which were not Party
organisations, and so on. Martov stood for broadening the Party and
spoke of a broad class movement needing a broad – i.e., diffuse –
organisation, and so forth. It is amusing to note that in defence of
their views nearly all Martov’s supporters cited
What Is to Be
Done?
Plekhanov hotly opposed Martov, pointing out that his Jauresist
formulation would fling open the doors to the opportunists, who just
longed for such a position of being inside the Party but outside its
organisation. ‘Under the control and direction’, I said, would in
practice mean nothing more nor less than without any control or
direction”
(VII, 27-28).
Martov hoped for a mass party, but in doing so he opened the doors to all
sorts of opportunists, made the party’s limits indeterminate, vague. And
this was a serious danger, as it was not easy to distinguish the boundary
between the revolutionary and the idle chatterbox: Lenin says that a good
third of the participants at the Congress were schemers.
Why worry about those who don’t want to or can’t join one of the party
organisations, Plekhanov wondered.
Workers wishing to join the party will not be afraid to join one
of its organisations. Discipline doesn’t scare them. Intellectuals,
completely imbued with bourgeois individualism, will fear entering.
These bourgeois individualists are generally the representatives of
all sorts of opportunism. We have to get them away from us. The
project is a shield against their breaking into the party, and only
for this reason should all enemies of opportunism vote for Lenin’s
proposal”
(Proceedings of the Second Congress, session of August
2, #15; the minutes are from the website: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/index.htm).
Trotski spoke against Lenin’s proposal, considering it ineffective.
Lenin replied to him:
[Trotski] has failed to notice a basic question: does my
formulation narrow or expand the concept of a Party member? If
he had asked himself that question, he would easily have seen that my
formulation narrows this concept, while Martov’s expands it, for (to
use Martov’s own correct expression) what distinguishes his concept is
its ‘elasticity’. And in the period of Party life that we are now
passing through it is just this ‘elasticity’ that undoubtedly opens
the door to all elements of confusion, vacillation, and opportunism”
11. Organisational steadfastness, tactical coherence,
purity of principles
And the unstable elements are harbingers of uncertainties, deviations,
and little work. The danger can be great: “
The need to safeguard the
firmness of the Party’s line and the purity of its principles has now
become particularly urgent, for, with the restoration of its unity, the
Party will recruit into its ranks a great many unstable elements, whose
number will increase with the growth of the Party”
(VI, 499-500).
On the other hand, where is the danger of a rigorous delimitation of the
party, through specific limits to the definition of social democrat?
If hundreds and thousands of workers who were arrested for taking
part in strikes and demonstrations did not prove to be members of
Party organisations, it would only show that we have good
organisations, and that we are fulfilling our task of keeping a more
or less limited circle of leaders secret and of drawing the broadest
possible masses into the movement”.
But the party, a vanguard component of the working class, cannot
be confused with the whole class, as Axelrod did.
“It would be better if ten who do work should not call themselves
Party members (real workers don’t hunt after titles!) than that one
who only talks should have the right and opportunity to be a Party
member” … “The Central Committee will never be able to exercise real
control over all who do the work but do not belong to organisations.
It is our task to place actual control in the hands of the
Central Committee. It is our task to safeguard the firmness,
consistency, and purity of our Party. We must strive to raise the
title and the significance of a Party member higher, higher and still
higher”
(VI, 500-502).
12. Professional revolutionaries
Apparently Lenin seemed to distinguish between simple party
militants and “professional revolutionaries”, whose small groups
formed the backbone of the leadership. We have repeatedly shown that
this was the illegal network, not the overlapping of a bureaucratic
apparatus of paid people on the party. Professional does not
necessarily mean salaried, but rather dedicated to the struggle of the
party for voluntary choice, separated from any association for the
defence of collective interests, even if this remains the
deterministic basis for the very existence of the party. The whole
range of Marxist dialectics is in this double relationship. The worker
is revolutionary for class interest, the communist is revolutionary
for the same purpose, but elevated beyond the subjective interest”
(“Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory”, 1955, Part 2, § 37).
The right wing of the Russian party wanted to recruit the party
members from professional or factory groups of workers federated in
the party; the trade unions were called professional associations by
the Russians. For polemical purposes, Lenin expresses the famous
sentence that the party is above all an organisation of ‘professional
revolutionaries’. We don’t ask them: are you a wage worker? In which
profession? Mechanic, boilermaker, carpenter? They can be factory
workers as well as students or even sons of noblemen; their answer
will be: ‘
Revolutionary
’, this is my profession. Only
Stalinist stupidity could give to such sentence the meaning of
revolutionary by trade, of one salaried by the party. Such useless
formula: ‘Should the functionaries be found among the workers or
elsewhere?’ would not have made any progress, because it was about
something completely different”
(“The Croaking about Praxis”, Il
Programma Comunista, n. 11/1953).
13. Knowledge and militancy – “proletarian consciousness”
So for the Bolsheviks the revolutionary militant is he who accepts (and
does not necessarily
know
or
understand
in detail) the
programme and is willing to work under the orders of the party: abnegation
qualities, willingness to fight, that any proletarian can have, even if
illiterate. An acceptance of the programme that can be based on the
understanding of a few qualifying aspects, sometimes only of slogans, but
which coincide with his deep aspirations, with his needs. An adhesion
based more on passion than on intellect. Understanding will come over
time, but will never be complete; on the other hand, total understanding
of the doctrine can never be of the individual, but of the collective of
the party, and is expressed in its press, in its theses, in its
revolutionary tactics. “
Doctrinal knowledge is not an individual fact,
even by the most cultured follower or leader, nor is it a condition for
the mass in motion: it has as its subject its own organ, the party”
(“Russia and Revolution”, cit., § 32).
This concept is repeated in the
Theses
of 1952: “
The
question of individual conscience is not the basis of the formation of
the party: not only can’t each proletarian be conscious, and least of
all culturally master of the class doctrine, but not even an individual
militant, and this guarantee is not even given by the leaders. It only
exists in the organic unity of the party”
(“Characteristic
Theses of the Party”, 1952).
Beyond the influence of social democracy, there is no other
conscious activity of the workers,”
says Lenin at the Second
Congress; and we add:
It is heavy, but it is so. So the action of the proletarians is
spontaneous in that it arises from economic determinants, but does not
have ‘consciousness’ as a condition, neither in the individual nor in
the class. The physical class struggle is a spontaneous deed,
unconscious. The class reaches consciousness only when the
revolutionary party has formed within it, which possesses the
theoretical consciousness based on the real class relationship,
characteristic of all proletarians. These, however, will never be able
to possess its true knowledge – that is, theory – neither as
individuals, nor as a whole, nor as a majority, as long as the
proletariat is subject to bourgeois education and culture, that is, to
the bourgeois fabrication of its ideology and, in clear terms, until
the proletariat wins, and... ceases to exist. So, in exact terms,
proletarian consciousness will never be. There is doctrine, communist
knowledge, and this is in the party of the proletariat, not in the
class”
(Ibid., § 39).
14. Autonomy, democracy, free criticism
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks formed two organised fractions from 1903 to
1906.
The congress was to be an arena of struggle, and it really was. As the
Bolsheviks set their conditions, there were opposing positions. And where
necessarily? On the organisational question. All those who had previously
been opponents of
Iskra
theoretically, programmatically and
tactically, now shouted against centralism and discipline, were for the
autonomy and democracy of the organisation; they accused the revolutionary
wing of bureaucratism, of imposing a “state of siege”. But all of Lenin’s
bureaucratism was to impose a state of siege on opportunist positions. All
the alleged “manoeuvrism” of Lenin, who on the contrary never abandoned
sincere and fraternal, non-political behaviours towards all comrades,
including opponents.
He had been the champion of the involvement of the party in economic
struggles of the working class in the 1895-1897 years; still he had to
destroy the economists’ positions in the years preceding the Second
Congress. Now was the moment to defend bureaucratism, understood as the
denial of the craving for freedom of criticism, of autonomy within the
party: centralism as a primary necessity. This wasn’t understood then by
Trotski and Luxemburg.
Lenin is accused by the opposers, particularly Martov, to be guilty of
formalism and bureaucratism. Therefore Lenin is forced to defend the democratic
mechanism adopted at the congress; while Martov defends democracy from below:
Bureaucracy versus democracy is in fact centralism versus autonomism; it is the organisational principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy as opposed to the
organisational principle of opportunist Social-Democracy. The latter strives to
proceed from the bottom upward, and, therefore, wherever possible and as far as
possible, upholds autonomism and “democracy”, carried (by the overzealous) to
the point of anarchism. The former strives to proceed from the top downward, and
upholds an extension of the rights and powers of the centre in relation to the
parts” (VII, 394).
Lenin must get back to the issue of §1:
did my formulation, which was supported by Plekhanov, reflect a wrong, bureaucratic, formalistic, Jack-in-office, un-Social-Democratic conception of centralism? Opportunism and anarchism, or bureaucracy and formalism? – that is the way the question stands now, when the little difference has become a big one” (VII, 255).
“If the talk about bureaucracy contains any principle at all, if it is not just
an anarchistic denial of the duty of the part to submit to the whole, then what
we have here is the principle of opportunism, which seeks to lessen the
responsibility of individual intellectuals to the party of the proletariat, to
lessen the influence of the central institutions, to enlarge the autonomy of the
least steadfast elements in the Party, to reduce organisational relations to a
purely platonic and verbal acceptance of them“ (VII, 366).
What is the lesson we can draw from this experience of the Bolsheviks? It is
Lenin himself to instruct us:
It is highly interesting to note that these fundamental characteristics of
opportunism in matters of organisation (autonomism, aristocratic or
intellectualist anarchism, tail-ism, and Girondism) are, mutatis mutandis (with
appropriate modifications), to be observed in all the Social-Democratic parties
in the world, wherever there is a division into a revolutionary and an
opportunist wing (and where is there not?)” (VII, 395).
“Not only in Germany, but in France and Italy as well, the opportunists are all
staunch supporters of autonomism, of a slackening of Party discipline, of
reducing it to naught; everywhere their tendencies lead to disorganisation and
to perverting “the democratic principle” into anarchism“ (VII, 397-398).
Opportunism in matters of organization is the deviation that Lenin himself
denounces several times in his writings. “
the undoubted tendency to defend
autonomism against centralism, which is a fundamental characteristic of
opportunism in matters of organization
” (VII, 394). “
Opportunism in programme is naturally connected with opportunism in tactics and opportunism in organization
” (VII, 396).
Democratism is often invoked to support opportunism. We have
rejected democratic mechanisms, but democratism can appear in many, disguised
ways. Any breach in the organic way of working is a
door open to opportunism, which usually starts with deviation on organizational
matters. Hence our maniacal attention to the correct way to work and relate
among comrades.
Therefore the bureaucratism that Lenin defends in 1903-1904 is nothing but
centralism, and adherence to the correct Marxist principle, together with the
need of a strong efficient organization. In other places Lenin of course
denounces bureaucratism: “
Bureaucracy means subordinating the interests of the
work to the interests of one’s own career; it means focusing attention on places
and ignoring the work itself; it means wrangling over co-optation instead of
fighting for ideas. That bureaucracy of this kind is undesirable and detrimental
to the Party is unquestionably true
” (VII, 362). The same will the Left do in
the 1950s, speaking of the functioning of the Stalinist parties, which went as
far as exterminating the old guard of the party leadership of the October
Revolution, and which transformed the communist parties in servants of the
Russian State and persecutors of true revolutionaries, with violence as well as
with barefaced falsification.
Although party doctrine is always the same, in given moments and situations the
party may insist on certain issues more than on others.
All this Lenin narrates in 1904 in
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
where he notes the division into two wings of social democracy as a
positive fact. The division of the party into two warring wings, Lenin
notes, was characteristic of all the parties of the Second International.
The division has roots in the social situation of the proletariat. The
same was confirmed after the Fourth Congress of 1906 (X, 422). The
opportunist current (legal Marxism, economism, Menshevism) represented the
influence of the petty bourgeoisie on the proletariat. Here’s how Lenin
poses the question:
In all capitalist countries the proletariat is inevitably
connected by a thousand transitional links with its neighbour on the
right, the petty bourgeoisie. In all workers’ parties there inevitably
emerges a more or less clearly delineated Right wing which, in its
views, tactics, and organisational ‘line’, reflects the opportunist
tendencies of the petty bourgeoisie”
(XIII, 113).
The attitude the bolsheviks held prior to 1917 of tolerating within the party spurious or uncertain currents varies depending on the possibility to wait for the latter’s maturing in a radical Marxist direction in light of the movement’s experience. Otherwise a clear and intransigent differentiation and separation was mandatory when a lack of clarity, and uncertainty in tactics, would be disastrous for the fate of the revolution. Legitimate choices in a country with a weak immature proletariat, like Russia at the time. Lenin would be much more decisive after the outbreak of world war, as well as after the founding of the Third International, although for us insufficiently applied to the parties in the west.
15. The unavoidable executive discipline
After the Congress, a part of the
Iskra
group, which gathered
together all the discontents, refused to disband and sabotaged the normal
performance of all party work. The last part of Lenin’s pamphlet and the
epithet of “anarchy of great lords” is dedicated to this attitude, which
did not recognise the decisions of the Congress and the submission of the
minority to the majority. The formal rules that still governed the
confrontation of opinions within the party envisaged – according to
“democratic centralism” – the submission of the minority, which was
however guaranteed the possibility of freely expressing and arguing its
opinions before the whole party. This discussion between comrades from the
same party was governed by precise forms and customs, always careful to
avoid lacerations and damage to the organisation. The party is the general
staff of an army at war and under enemy fire: its unity of action and
executive discipline cannot be broken. That “ideal struggle”, the word is
Lenin’s, between a “majority” and a “minority”, in “democratic” forms, had
a role in the life of the party, of course, so long as, due to historical
immaturity, the confrontation between opposite approaches and conceptions
was inevitable.
However, this must never break the unity of action, the executive
discipline. For Lenin, and for us, belonging to the party means to work
with, and for, the party: “…this very fact of refusing to work together is
nothing but a split”. (VII, 165)
This “ideal struggle” in the RSDLP remained until 1906, with several
attempts by the Bolsheviks to bring the Mensheviks back to work. Of
course, practical work in Russia was greatly affected by this situation
and fell almost entirely to the Bolsheviks.
In May 1905, on the initiative of the Bolshevik committees, the Third
Congress was held in London, in which the tactics for the next revolution
were defined. The Mensheviks simultaneously convened a conference in
Geneva, where they adopted completely opposite tactical resolutions. In
Two
Tactics of Social-democracy
, written in July 1905, Lenin still
proposes the unification of tactics as the basis for the future
unification of the party. The thesis is still that “the revolution
instructs”, that is, it is still possible that the Mensheviks, as a
current having a basis in the workers’ movement, abandon their
propositions, driven by the facts. The pamphlet is clearly designed with
this purpose in mind.
From October to December 1905 there were great revolutionary events.
Under the pressure of these and their effective working-class base, the
Mensheviks supported the proletariat even if in an uncertain and hesitant
manner. The possibility of an organisational reunification arises.
The two fractions went to the Fourth Congress (April 1906). The congress
was in the majority for the Mensheviks. Lenin set out the conditions of
unification, but it is significant that he reaffirmed the importance of
theory:
“In view of the coming formidable, decisive events in the people’s
struggle, it is all the more essential to attain the practical unity
of the class-conscious proletariat of the whole of Russia, and of all
her nationalities. In a revolutionary epoch like the present, all
theoretical errors and tactical deviations of the Party are most
ruthlessly criticised by experience itself, which enlightens and
educates the working class with unprecedented rapidity. At such a
time, the duty of every Social-Democrat is to strive to ensure that
the ideological struggle within the Party on questions of theory and
tactics is conducted as openly, widely and freely as possible, but
that on no account does it disturb or hamper the unity of
revolutionary action of the Social-Democratic proletariat”
(X,
310-311).
This is important, because it poses the question of discipline in the
situation in which the revolutionary wing is in the minority, although
defending the clearest and unambiguous distinction between the two wings,
and allowing ample space for freedom of internal criticism, etc.
The Central Committee’s resolution is essentially wrong and runs
counter to the Party Rules. The principle of democratic centralism and
autonomy for local Party organisations implies universal and full
freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a
definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes
difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party”
(X,
443).
At the same Congress an
a posteriori
theoretical victory of
Lenin took place: the famous Paragraph 1, which in the Second Congress had
been included in the party programme in the Menshevik formulation, was
adopted in Lenin’s wording.
In this period (first part of 1906) the Bolsheviks were for the boycott
of the Duma (a theoretical boycott though, because Witte’s Duma was never
convened, and a period of reaction followed). The Mensheviks instead
proposed support for a Cadet minister; Lenin then appealed to the right of
party organisations and party proletarians to discuss Central Committee
decisions, especially if they contradicted Congress resolutions. In short,
in today’s language, the Centre has no right to act or even theorise in
contradiction with the party’s programme.
16. The alleged "Leninist creativity"
Lenin’s
What Is to Be Done?
is, as we all know, a fundamental
text for us left wing revolutionary Marxists, who are heirs of the
Communist Left, but nevertheless not separated from Lenin’s Marxism. We
acknowledge his theoretical work in full, for it is grounded on the same
foundations on which the Left had grown; and the Left had achieved the
same theoretical conclusions even before getting to know Lenin’s works,
which for the most part would only reach Italy several years after their
publication in Russia (the first edition of
What Is to Be Done?
in Italian is from 1946, although the text was already known in the first
post-war period by the Italian communists in other languages).
There remains the obligation to demonstrate the continuity of positions,
often up to an identity in the formulations between us and the Bolsheviks,
to shut down those who, imagining a theoretical “creativity” in Lenin,
make his doctrine something new in the Marxist panorama, to be associated
with the many others that have plagued the revolutionary movement of the
proletariat over the decades.
The legend of innovations, of tactical and theoretical inventions, of
shrewd manoeuvrings by Lenin, is one that does not stand up to an honest
reading of his writings, which we will try to do here, at least in
relation to a key period of the formation of the RSDLP (Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party), the period around the second party congress
(1901-1904).
The falsification of Lenin’s thought – which is nothing other than
consistent Marxism, always better defined and, as we say, “sculpted” – is
a work that has allowed hordes of intellectuals orbiting in the areas more
or less on the “left” of the workers’ movement from declared bourgeois
liberals to anarchists and Stalinists to earn a definitely deserved
salary, given the damage caused to the same movement. In Italy the most
important sphere for this purpose of the left was, as long as it existed,
that of the Italian Communist Party, to which many historians,
philosophers, sociologists, etc., made reference; these, for over 50
years, gave of their best to refute Marxism by pretending to exalt it. The
technique is always the same: we start by recognizing the historical
significance of given theses and positions, then to insert almost in
passing a poisonous word that effectively nullifies their revolutionary
force. It is the technique of Stalinism, which not by chance coined the
disgraceful term of “Leninism”.
It was not yet “opportune” to speak ill of Lenin outright, so the
difficult job required a skilled craftsman, a good intellectual.
For Lenin, as for us, the theory of revolution was born in a single
block from the
Manifesto
of 1848, and is then defined,
clarified, deepened in the subsequent writings of Marx and Engels, and
also in those of Lenin, never in contradiction with those of the two great
maestros; on the contrary, by citing them often, whenever he had to defend
assumptions that were hard to accept by the less well equipped comrades.
The “process of elaboration” that takes place in the party must be
understood in our and Lenin’s sense, of confirmation of the doctrine, not
of continuous revision, adaptation to presumed unforeseen conditions in
which the workers’ movement would find itself.
When Lenin affirmed in 1899 that
“We think that an
independent
elaboration of Marx’s theory is especially essential for Russian
socialists”
(IV, 213) he meant a “concrete analysis of the concrete
situation”, not an innovation so much in tactics as in revolutionary
theory. The article from which the quote is taken, “Our Programme”, lashes
out precisely against the innovators like Bernstein (who was further “to
the left” than the PCI leaders of the second post-war period), while
defending himself, as we must continually do as well, from accusations of
“dogmatism”. In that same article our Vladimir reminds us that
“Marx’s
theory … has only laid the foundation stone of the science which
socialists
must
develop in all directions”
. This is the
meaning of the “
independent elaboration”
of which Lenin speaks, and
not that of dismantling Marxism, including cornerstones and foundations.
Other Stalinists have evoked an elusive “
new Marxist theory of
revolution”
by Lenin. In this they are in good company, with
trotskists: Mandel, for example, who writes of an alleged “
original
development”
of the Marxist theory by Lenin, or others of the “far”
left, for whom no parts of Marxism “
can be dogmatically fixed, they
require a continual re-elaboration and development”
, and a hundred
others, of greater or lesser political calibre, all however eager to find
substantial innovations in what they call “Leninism”, to legitimise their
discoveries, their innovations, their ideological filth. The technique of
extrapolating sentences from the context and then using them to affirm the
opposite of what the original work defends goes back to Stalin, but many
students have gone beyond the master in the technique of falsification and
have filled millions of pages of anti-communist and anti-proletarian
trash. In reaffirming the foundations of Marxism in Lenin we are therefore
forced to employ not very brief quotations, and to place them in the true
historical and political context in which the texts of Lenin himself were
expressed.
17. No “new type party
But what was the party for our two founding maestros? It is worth
reminding the Philistines who fill their mouths with Marx and Engels’ at
every turn, what the working-class party was for them, and from what
fountains Lenin drank deep in his efforts to build the revolutionary
party. The
Manifesto
reads:
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The
real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in
the ever-expanding union of the workers”
This organisation of proletarians into a class, and consequently
into a political party, is continually being upset again by the
competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up
again, stronger, firmer, mightier”
. (M-E, Collected Works, VI
494-495)
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class
parties by this only: In the national struggles of the proletarians of
the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the
common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all
nationality.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the
most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of
every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the
other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the
proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march,
the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian
movement. The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of
all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a
class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political
power by the proletariat. The theoretical conclusions of the
Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been
invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from
an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under
our very eyes”
(M-E, VI, 498-499).
In its struggle against the collective power of the propertied
classes, the working class cannot act as a class except by
constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed
to all old parties formed by the propertied classes. This constitution
of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order
to insure the triumph of the social revolution, and of its ultimate
end, the abolition of classes”
(M-E, XXIII, 243).
We agree that the proletariat cannot conquer political power, the
only way to achieve the new society, without a violent revolution. In
order for the proletariat to be strong enough to win on the decisive
day it is necessary – and this Marx and I have supported it since 1847
– that a specific party be formed, separate from all the others and
opposed to them, a class party conscious of itself. ”… “Like all other
parties, the proletariat learns first of all from the consequences of
its mistakes, and nobody can spare them these mistakes altogether”
(Engels to Gerson Trier, December 18, 1889).
Our views as to the points of difference between a future,
non-capitalistic society and that of today, are strict conclusions
from existing historical facts and developments, and of no value –
theoretical or practical – unless presented in connection with these
facts and developments”
(M-E, XLVII, 392).
…every reverse suffered was a necessary consequence of mistaken
theoretical views in the original programme”
(M-E, XLVII, 541).
These few and meagre extracts from the immense theoretical corpus that
we inherited from our teachers are nevertheless sufficient to establish
firm points to understand the nature and role of the proletarian party,
and to knock down in advance the criticisms that were directed at the time
against Lenin, and subsequently also against us:
The need for the party to be able to win in the final struggle
against the opposing classes, a struggle that will necessarily and
inevitably be violent;
The class is such only if organised in the party, otherwise it exists
only for statistics, but not for itself;
Class consciousness resides only in the party, and not in individuals,
proletarians or not; and
The theory of revolution is scientific, and cannot ignore past,
present and future; it is embodied in the programme, which can be
continuously improved in the light of errors and experiences, but
precisely because it is scientific cannot be contradicted by new events.
Lenin’s greatness did not therefore consist in the elaboration of a new
type of party, as the “Leninists” would have us believe, because
“everything changes”, hence the need for discoveries, new ways, “original”
elaborations. Lenin drew from his profound knowledge of Marxist science
the project of a party that was, from an organisational point of view, of
course, but in the end also theoretically, capable of winning the double
confrontation in Russia with Tsarism and with incumbent capitalism. Its
formula, born for the birth of a true revolutionary Marxist party suited
to the conditions of Russia, is in its main outline equally valid for all
the parties that were at that time socialist, then communist. It is in the
light of the foregoing that it is necessary to evaluate what Lenin defends
in his writings from the birth period of the Russian Social Democratic
Labour Party, the main objective of this work.
18. Dogmatic Marxism versus revisionism
Lenin starts off by reminding us of the questions posed in the article,
“Where to Begin?” – “
the character and main content of our political
agitation; our organisational tasks; and the plan for building,
simultaneously and from various sides, a militant, all-Russia
organisation”
. (V, 349)
The discussion certainly focuses on the criticism of economism but
provides the opportunity to shed light on many other central issues of the
movement. The first chapter is entitled “Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of
Criticism’”. Lenin is quick to clarify the point that is most important to
him, that of the so-called “dogmatic Marxism”, of which he admits to being
a messenger, internationally threatened by the new wave of “critics”,
through the revisionism of Bernstein and others. In this fundamental
chapter Lenin denounces revisionism, and in general the attempt to erase
the scientific basis of socialism; with “new” arguments one gets to deny
or question all the cornerstones of Marxism, including the theory of class
struggle. For him, this is only a new variety of opportunism, dressed up
as an expression of freedom, freedom of criticism:
‘Freedom’ is a grand word, but under the banner of freedom for
industry the most predatory wars were waged, under the banner of
freedom of labour, the working people were robbed. The modern use of
the term ‘freedom of criticism’ contains the same inherent falsehood”
(V, 355).
Since then we know how many times this word, which does not belong in
the bourgeois sense in the vocabulary of Marxism, has been used to commit
the most atrocious crimes. No freedom has arisen from the wars that cost
tens of millions of deaths, but rather the enslavement of entire
continents to the interests of international capital.
19. "A compact group"
Lenin concludes the chapter with a passage that is among the most famous
of his literature:
We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and
difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are
surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost
constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted
decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating
into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very
outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an
exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of
the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let
us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort:
What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the
liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You
are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you
will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your
proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to
get there. Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us and don’t
besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are ‘free’ to go where we
please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against
those who are turning towards the marsh!”
(Ibid.)
Of course, the pamphlet, and the controversy, mainly concern the
representatives of opportunism present in the Russian socialist movement,
who assert that “
For a durable unity, there must be freedom of
criticism”
… “
against the ossification of thought”
. Lenin
recalls that Engels himself, on several occasions, inveighed against those
who wanted to interpret the theory of socialism in the most imaginative,
and above all unscientific, ways; and that the defenders of critical
freedom in Russia are neither free nor critical of Bernsteinism.
Opportunism is one of the greatest dangers for the party: the enemy of
theory, when it devotes itself to theory, it does so to bend it to its
objectives, often dressed as “common sense”, which are always those of
curbing revolutionary tasks to favour contingent, irrelevant and often
bogus purposes. The opportunists are led to slavishly follow the
prejudices spread among the workers, to “religiously contemplate their
backsides”, to use Plekhanov’s expression. If the worker is mainly
concerned with internal issues in the factory, the opportunist becomes a
“workerist”: “The masses are always right”.
Having explained in what terms we can and must be allied with bourgeois
democratic movements (that is, maintaining the freedom to reveal to the
working class that its interests and those of the bourgeoisie are
opposed), the text goes on to explain how to fight opportunism. “
First,
they should have made efforts to resume the theoretical work that had
barely begun in the period of legal Marxism and that fell anew on the
shoulders of the comrades working underground. Without such work the
successful growth of the movement was impossible”
(V, 365) … “
before
we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw
firm and definite lines of demarcation”
. (V, 367) Therefore, it’s
nice to get together, but only if you share the essential cornerstones of
Marxism; ban the fetish of union as an end in itself.
A short chapter follows, whose title is sufficient to underline its
significance, “
Engels on the Importance of the Theoretical Struggle”
The economists quote, against the “dogmatists”, a sentence of Marx: “
Every
step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes”
But Lenin is quick to throw back at them the attempt to diminish the
importance of theory, quoting Marx, from the same document:
To repeat these words in a period of theoretical disorder is like
wishing mourners at a funeral many happy returns of the day. Moreover,
these words of Marx are taken from his letter on the Gotha Programme,
in which he sharply condemns eclecticism in the formulation of
principles. If you must unite, Marx wrote to the party leaders, then
enter into agreements to satisfy the practical aims of the movement,
but do not allow any bargaining over principles, do not make
theoretical ‘concessions’”
. (V, 369)
Lenin quotes a long passage from Engels about the importance of theory
and adds: “
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary
movement … the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party
that is guided by the most advanced theory”
(V, 369-370). And what
is this most advanced theory? This was already quite clear for Lenin as
far back as in 1899: “
Only the theory of revolutionary Marxism can be
the banner of the class movement of the workers, and Russian
Social-Democracy must concern itself with the further development and
implementation of this theory and must safeguard it against the
distortions and vulgarisations to which ‘fashionable theories’ are so
often subjected”
. (IV, 180) Lenin reminds us of this in very clear
words in 1920 in Left-wing Communism: “
…Bolshevism arose in 1903 on a
very firm foundation of Marxist theory … Bolshevism, which had arisen on
this granite foundation of theory”
(XXXI, 25-26).
We would later write,
If there was no proletarian utopianism in Russia, it is because,
when the movement developed up to the preconditions for a party, the
theory of this party was already done internationally, and came from
outside. (...) The party was right to ‘import’ the already available
instrument and weapon which is party theory. There is nothing in this
of idealism. Marxism could not be formed, the discoveries that
constitute it could not be reached, before the bourgeois mode of
production had spread and the proletarian class had formed within it,
in large and developed national societies; but, once formed, it is
valid for the zones, the fields, which arrive late, and it is suitable
to establish what will be the process that awaits them and that
develops in the same way”
(“Russia and Revolution” cit., Part 2,
§ 32).
In essence, Lenin starts from the long quotation by Engels to reaffirm
the primacy of theory and programme in the indissoluble entwining of all
the fundamental aspects of the party’s struggle: theoretical, political
and practical-economic.
Lenin is always very explicit in referring to the founders of modern
socialism, in the years preceding the Congress: in 1899 (
Our Programme
he writes:
It [Marxist theory] made clear the real task of a revolutionary
socialist party: not to draw up plans for refashioning society, not to
preach to the capitalists and their hangers-on about improving the lot
of the workers, not to hatch conspiracies, but to organise the class
struggle of the proletariat and to lead this struggle, the ultimate
aim of which is the conquest of political power by the proletariat and
the organisation of a socialist society”
(IV, 210-211).
And to those who accuse him of overlooking the economic struggle he
replies:
All Social- Democrats are agreed that it is necessary to organise
the economic struggle of the working class, that it is necessary to
carry on agitation among the workers on this basis, i.e., to help the
workers in their day-to-day struggle against the employers, to draw
their attention to every form and every case of oppression and in this
way to make clear to them the necessity for combination. But to forget
the political struggle for the economic would mean to depart from the
basic principle of international Social-Democracy, it would mean to
forget what the entire history of the labour movement teaches us”
(IV, 212).
The following year he again feels the need to affirm his Marxist faith,
in “Declaration of the Editorial Board of Iskra”:
Before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first
of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation. Otherwise, our
unity will be purely fictitious, it will conceal the prevailing
confusion and binder its radical elimination. It is understandable,
therefore, that we do not intend to make our publication a mere
storehouse of various views. On the contrary, we shall conduct it in
the spirit of a strictly defined tendency. This tendency
can be expressed by the word Marxism, and there is hardly
need to add that we stand for the consistent development of the ideas
of Marx and Engels and emphatically reject the equivocating, vague,
and opportunist “corrections” for which Eduard Bernstein, P. Struve,
and many others have set the fashion”
(IV, 354-355).
Therefore, in all his literature, Lenin never hesitates to draw
liberally on Marx and Engels in support of the positions he defends inside
and outside the party, and this not only in the birth stage of the
organisation, but throughout all his life; just read
The State and
Revolution
. Since the Samara period he used to say that he had to “
consult
with Marx”
(the expression is his, quoted by Trotski: The Young
Lenin) when some critical argument was presented. Another testimony is
from Krisov (Lénine tel qu’il fut, Souvenirs de Contemporains, 1958):
In general, the debates did not last long, because the issues had
been studied previously. But if, nevertheless, a discussion broke out,
Lenin did not impose his point of view, tried to weigh all the pros
and cons, and sometimes declared: ‘We must postpone the decision to
the next meeting to ask for Marx’s opinion’”
Then as today the communists were reproached for living in the past, for
not being able to renew themselves, for not paying attention to the new.
In “Some Reflections on the Letter from 7 Ts. 6 F” (VI, 289, 292). Lenin
writes:
’This is old stuff!’ you wail. Yes. All parties that have good
popular literature have been distributing
old stuff … for decades
… And the
only
popular literature that is good,the only popular literature that is suitable is that which can serve for decades … And all you have is just
one
Iskra
; after all, it gets monotonous! Thirty-one
issues and all
Iskra
, while with the captivating people
every two issues of one title (of trash) are immediately followed by
three issues of another title (of trash). Now, this is energy, this is
jolly, this is new!”
(VI, 289, 292)
This is not a novelty for us who, today, remain jealously attached to
“hitting old nails”.
20. Sectarianism
Nor is it a novelty to dedicate our attacks and our criticism more to
our “neighbours”, and alleged “kindred spirits” than to the declared
enemies of the working class, from which the proletariat does not need to
be helped to defend itself; in this we find an illustrious precedent in Neue
Rheinische Zeitung no.4, 1850): “
Our task is unreserved
criticism, more towards the supposed friends than the declared enemies;
and, affirming our position, we gladly give up cheap democratic
popularity”
. Are we the only ones to perceive in Marx a badly
disguised contempt for democracy? On this our verbally transmitted
tradition states: the closest to us are the worst.
This attitude of ours, which has also been demonstrated to be that of
the great Lenin, has often earned us the title, considered offensive, of
“sectarians”. Well, it is a title that we do not reject, if this signifies
the opposite of the situationist, the opportunist, the one who seeks new
ways, not so much for the sake of the revolution, as for exalting his ego,
to be able to say that he made a “personal” contribution, if not to
perpetrate the most miserable of betrayals. We treated the subject in 1959
thus:
Well known is the flavour that every lousy petty-bourgeois spirit
gives to the objections and criticisms of our research to return to
the original construction of Marxism. We would take, according to
those kobolds, Marx’s writing as a revelation which we must blindly
believe in, that we would follow as a dogma that it is not permissible
to discuss but to accept a priori. We would renounce the precious
light of free individual criticism of our intellect and of those who
follow us. We would deny that the unfolding of historical facts for
over a century has been able to disprove or at least modify those
positions deduced using only the data of human history, prior to that
period around 1850. Well, fools born of degenerate bourgeois culture,
this is precisely what we claim and propose! And we have the right to
do so because our discovery, the first use of the formidable key that
solved the antitheses and enigmas that weighed on humanity, already
contained the scientific and critical conquest according to which your
claims are empty and inconsistent lies”
(“The Economic and
Social Structure of Russia Today”, Il Programma Comunista n.
18, 1959).
Then again why not accuse Lenin himself of sectarianism (as the
economists actually did in 1902), if with all his alleged manoeuvring
(always invoked by the lowlife who aspires to place the miserable himself
on some page of history) he never hesitated to cut, to condemn, even to
mock all those who pretended to adulterate the fundamental tenets of
Marxism? An anecdote of Tatiana Lyudvinskaya (in
Lénine tel qu’il fut
1958) relates:
In Paris, Lenin directed all our activity... Lenin’s harshness
and intransigence against opportunists troubled some comrades. One of
them said to Lenin: ‘Why should we expel everyone from the section?
With whom will we work?’ Lenin replied with a smile: ‘It matters
little if we are not very numerous today, because, on the other hand,
we will be united in our action, and the conscious workers will
support us, since we are on the right path’”
21. Where does consciousness come from?
The next chapter, “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness
of the Social-Democrats” does not abandon the theme of the importance of
theory. Where does consciousness reside? Can the workers acquire it by
virtue of their experiences in struggle? History has shown us that this is
not so; socialist revolutionary consciousness can reach proletarians only
from the outside, outside the economic struggles, and Lenin strongly
reaffirms this, as already confirmed by our great teachers:
The ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas in every age;
that is, the class which is the dominant material power of society is
at the same time its dominant spiritual power. The class that disposes
of the means of material production thus has at the same time the
means of intellectual production, so that as a whole the ideas of
those who lack the means of intellectual production are subject to
it”. (M-E, V, 44) Hence: “[for the production of the communist
conscience]... revolution is not necessary only because the ruling
class cannot be brought down in any other way, but also because the
class that overthrows it can only succeed in a revolution to rise off
all the old filth and to become capable of founding society on new
foundations”
. (M-E, V, 38)
The doctrine of socialism derives from the acquisitions of science,
history, economics, philosophy, which are the prerogative of the
property-owning classes, which produce intellectuals. The proletarians can
arrive at a trade unionist consciousness, that is, understand that they
must organise themselves into unions, that they must conduct struggles in
a certain way, that they can and must make requests to the government for
better legislation, and perhaps organise themselves in this sense, but
they do not have the tools to proceed further.
Lenin does not underestimate the importance of spontaneity, on the
contrary. He writes, “
There is spontaneity and spontaneity. [Compared
with the struggles of earlier years, also of the Luddite type] the
strikes of the nineties might even be described as ‘conscious’, to such
an extent do they mark the progress which the working-class movement
made in that period. This shows that the ‘spontaneous element’, in
essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an
embryonic form”
(V, 375).
But to expect more from spontaneous struggles is a submission to
spontaneity, which has the sole consequence of reinforcing bourgeois
influence on the class, and this is the consequence of spontaneists, not
only the economists of the Russian polemic of the time, but also the
anarchists, and generally those who disdain theory in favour of the
worship of blue overalls. There is no middle ground: “
Since there can
be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses
themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is – either
bourgeois or socialist ideology”
(V, 384). Therefore “
…all
worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling
of the role of ‘the conscious element’, of the role of Social-Democracy,
means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires
it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon
the workers”
(V, 382-383)
22. Workers in the Party
In a note Lenin clarifies, to disprove easy and dishonest criticisms of
this blunt thesis, that workers are not excluded from the study and
sculpting of party doctrine, or indeed from positions of responsibility in
the party itself (and there are many examples of this), but these are
workers who operate as communists in the party, not as workers; as men who
have risen to revolutionary Marxist consciousness, and have erased from
their minds the place in which the regime of bourgeois exploitation had
locked them up. This regardless of the acquired cultural level, whether or
not they became “intellectuals”. The party does not require academic
qualifications, which on the contrary push it to greater caution in
accepting memberships; the party asks for the determination to work for
the revolution, with the tools one has. The worker who enters the party
ceases to be a worker, he becomes a militant communist, thus wrenching “
from
his heart and his mind the classification under which he has been
inscribed in the registry of this putrefying society”
(“Considerations on the Organic Activity of the Party When the General
Situation is Generally Unfavourable” #11, 1965)
The school of the proletarians will be the victorious revolution,
which for now asks them for their armed hands, but cannot ask them for
a political degree; even those who are enrolled in the party are not
asked to undergo a ‘cultural exam’. Since the struggles in the Second
International the Left has mocked the thesis of the ‘cultured’ party”
(“The Theory of the Primary Function of the Political Party, Only
Guardian and Salvation of the Historical Energy of the Proletariat”, Il
Programma Comunista n. 21-22, 1958).
23. Mystique of adhesion to Communism
We have already seen that characteristics are required for joining the
party other than “Marxist” culture and individual knowledge of our
doctrine; skills are required that Lenin called those of courage,
self-denial, heroism, spirit of sacrifice; it is in order to verify these
qualities that discrimination is made between the sympathiser or candidate
and the militant, the active soldier of the revolutionary army; certainly
not because the sympathiser does not “know” yet, while the militant has
consciousness. If this were not the case, the whole Marxist conception
would fall, because the Communist Party is that body which must, in the
moments of revolutionary recovery, organise millions of men, who will have
neither the time nor the need to take even fast-track courses in Marxism,
and they will adhere to the party not because they know, but because they
feel “
instinctively and spontaneously and without the slightest course
of study that can mimic school qualifications”
. And also because
they are capable of dreaming, like the “cold organiser”, the “rational”
Lenin hopes in the same
What Is to Be Done?
(V, 510). So,
joining responds first of all to a push that goes beyond rationality,
total understanding, cold reasoning: a choice that we, distant pupils of
Lenin, have not hesitated to call also mystical.
The problem of knowledge that tormented the many currents of
thought over the centuries is solved for us, as future universal
science today has access to a party, which alone gives its name to the
class that anticipates tomorrow. Just as the party is still halfway
between the fiction of the individual and the marvellous ’human’
conquest of universality, so in history the ideological cement that
distinguishes it lies beyond the ancient errors that poured out the
amount of truth for which they arose and had to fall; it leads with a
system of principles that can still be called a mystique, the last of
the mystiques, whereby many will struggle and fall not only in the
supreme sacrifice of life, but also in the greater sacrifice of the
joy of checking everything before believing, a joy that will only be
achieved after victory; the surviving generation will be given this
gift by the last one that had the war-winning mission, in the war of
men against men”
(“The Economic and Social Structure of Russia
Today”, Il Programma Comunista n. 18, 1959).
An anecdote from 1905 is interesting, when Lenin, faced with the
question of whether a priest – a non-Marxist – can be admitted to the
Social Democratic Party, responded in the affirmative, placing the
acceptance of the party’s political programme as a condition for joining
the party, even when this is not accompanied by adherence to the general
conception of history underlying the programme. “
… A political
organisation cannot put its members through an examination to see if
there is no contradiction between their views and the Party programme”
(XV, 408). Therefore, belonging to the party is verified in the course of
party activity, not in an impossible examination of the level of
consciousness.
We must draw the attention of party members to a general question: that of the situation existing in the POSDR. Like any revolutionary party, ours can exist and develop on the sole condition that there is the primary
desire
of revolutionaries to help each other in the fulfillment of
common
work
” (“The Situation in the Party”, Dec. 23, 1910).
24. Against bourgeois ideology and the law of minimum effort
Returning to the theme of the dominant culture, interesting in this
regard is a further passage of
What Is to Be Done?
: “
But
why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement
along the line of least resistance, lead to the domination of bourgeois
ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in
origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and
that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination”
(V, 386).
At this point we can’t avoid recalling an unwritten rule which is being
passed down within the party of the Left since its beginnings: the correct
path to have the correct results in our theoretical work is not the path
of minimum effort, but rather the longest one, the one which requires most
work; we do not adopt the bourgeois method, of maximum profit with minimum
investment; we are not in a hurry, we are not looking for the result at
all costs.
A fundamental feature of the phenomenon that Lenin named,
branding it with a red-hot iron, with a term that is also in Marx and
Engels, opportunism, is a preference for a shorter, more comfortable
and less arduous path, rather than the longer, uncomfortable one
fraught with difficulties; on which alone the matching of the
assertion of our principles and programmes, i.e. of our supreme
purposes, with the development of the immediate and direct practical
action, in the real current situation, may take place”
(“Supplementary Theses on the Historical Task, the Action and the
Structure of the World Communist Party”, #5, Il Programma Comunista n.
7, 1966).
Now it is worthwhile to quote a curious sentence, from a 1902 written
for internal circulation (VI, 70):
If the Lord God has chosen to punish us for our sins by obliging us
to come out with a ‘mongrel’ draft, we should at least do everything
in our power to reduce the unhappy consequences. Therefore, those who
are above all guided by a desire to ‘get through with it as quickly as
possible’ are quite wrong. It may be taken for granted that now, given
such a constellation, nothing but evil will come of haste, and our
editorial draft will be unsatisfactory. It is not absolutely necessary
to publish it in No. 4 of Zarya: we can publish it in No. 5... If we
do this, a delay of a month or so will do no harm at all to the Party”
25. “Do-nothings
It is part of our tradition that the young comrade who approaches the
party is initially educated with a few blunt mottos. One of these is “do
nothings”, i.e. people who keep their arses firmly rooted to their chairs
rather than going out on the street, which imputes a certain habit,
attitude and state of mind to the communist militant, especially in an era
that does not foresee, in the short term, major upturns in the
revolutionary class movement. The party’s activity for many decades has in
fact been mainly devoted to the study and defence of its theory and
tactical norms. The recommendation was particularly necessary in the
post-1968 period when any generic youth rebellion was channelled by
organisations that treacherously referred to Marxism into the dead ends of
activism with no future.
That desire not to miss the “train of history” also affected our party,
in which many began to wonder if they had made strategic mistakes that
would have excluded them from the feast of a revolution that they saw
slipping from their grasp. Suddenly they wanted new tactical directions to
pass into the party, aimed at winning over those young petty bourgeois
souls that the “old” positions of the Left rejected. It wasn’t difficult
to predict how it would turn out. To the disciplined call of us
“do-nothings” to return to the traditional communist attitudes that we all
shared, the “hasty” responded with isolation, calumny, vulgar and
dishonest lies, and finally with expulsion.
26. The reversal of Praxis
Returning to Lenin, at this point it is worthwhile to dwell on the
relationship between the spontaneous movement of the proletariat, and the
party; between material drives that arise spontaneously within society and
revolutionary theoretical elaboration; between spontaneity and
consciousness. It is obvious that there would be no revolutionary theory
if there had not been a contradiction between the mode of production and
the demands of the workers, generating a broad class movement. But the
whole pamphlet tends to demonstrate the need for a conscious guide for
even a broad movement to bring that theory to the class, to bring about a
revolutionary change of society. And at one point, Lenin recalls that the
conscious component of the class, the component that can be termed
ideological, the party, can play an active role in the development of the
revolutionary struggle, and not just a fatalistic expectation of the “good
moment”.
They fail to understand that the ‘ideologist’ is worthy of the
name only when he precedes the spontaneous movement, points
out the road, and is able ahead of all others to solve all the
theoretical, political, tactical, and organisational questions which
the ‘material elements’ of the movement spontaneously encounter. … To
say, however, that ideologists (i.e., politically conscious leaders
[read:
the Party]
) cannot divert the movement from the path determined by
the interaction of environment and elements is to ignore the simple
truth that the conscious element participates in this
interaction and in the determination of the path”
(V, 316).
In our “Reversal of Praxis” concept, that the party enunciated at its
inception, according to which the class party receives all stimuli and
impulses emanating from the class and its immediate organisations; it
draws from this the raw material for the elaboration of its doctrine and
then reflects these back to the class and to the individual worker: within
certain limits, according to the situations and the balance of class
relationships, the party may take decisions and initiatives and influence
the development of the struggle. The dialectical relationship lies in the
fact that inasmuch as the revolutionary party is a conscious and voluntary
factor of events, it is also a result of the same, and of the conflict
they represent between old and new modes of production. This is a function
that would disappear if material ties with the social environment and the
class struggle were interrupted.
27. The invariant tactical plan
The party has reiterated this perspective, for example in 1967: “The
Continuity of Action of the Party, on the Thread of the Left’s Tradition”,
Il Programma Comunista
n. 3-5, 1967: “
… it is striking how
for us not only are the problems of organisation and functioning of the
Marxist revolutionary party intertwined with the fundamental questions
of doctrine, programme and tactics, but also that the correct solution
of the former is prejudicial to the correct setting and solution of the
latter”
Obviously, that the party is a product of the environment in which it
operates does not mean that the theory should be subjected to ups and
downs according to the external situation:
It is obvious that, while our party is a factor in events, it is
at the same time a product of them; this is also the case if we
succeed in creating a really revolutionary world party. Now, in which
sense are events reflected in this party? In the sense that the number
of our members increases, and our influence on the masses grows, when
the crisis of capitalism engenders a situation favourable to us. If,
on the contrary, at a given moment the situation becomes unfavourable,
it may well be that our forces get reduced in number; but when that
occurs we must not allow our ideology to suffer from it; not just our
tradition, and our organisation, but also our political line must
remain intact”
(Third - Communist - International, Sixth Enlarged
Executive, Report by the Left of the C.P. of Italy; Fifth Session,
23/2/1926).
Continuing to point out how the party must work, and starting from the
observations of the economists, Lenin shows that there is no contradiction
between the two statements made about
Iskra
… Social-Democracy does not tie its hands, it does not restrict
its activities to some one preconceived plan or method of political
struggle; it recognises all methods of struggle, provided they
correspond to the forces at the disposal of the Party and facilitate
the achievement of the best results possible under the given
conditions” (IV, 371) and: “without a strong organisation
skilled in waging political struggle under all circumstances and at
all times, there can be no question of that systematic plan of action,
illumined by firm principles and steadfastly carried out, which alone
is worthy of the name of tactics”
(V, 18).
Thus, a tactical plan is nothing more than describing what the party’s
attitude must be in given situations. The party must work, and this is the
fundamental theoretical work of the party, to foresee the most varied
scenarios in which it may find itself operating; not only the party as a
whole, but also the individual militant, who may have to make important
operational decisions in conditions where connection with the Centre has
been broken.
…the fundamental error committed by the ‘new trend’ in Russian
Social-Democracy is its bowing to spontaneity and its failure to
understand that the spontaneity of the masses demands a high degree of
consciousness from us Social-Democrats. The greater the spontaneous
upsurge of the masses and the more widespread the movement, the more
rapid, incomparably so, the demand for greater consciousness in the
theoretical, political and organisational work of Social-Democracy”
(V, 396).
“Consciousness” means “knowledge”, and it is exactly in this sense that
Lenin means the term. Knowledge of the bourgeois world, in its politics,
in its economy, in its culture, to be able to foresee the situations in
which the party will find itself, to give indications of struggle to the
working class. We, his humble students, have learned from him the need to
work on the sculpting of theory and on the prediction of tactics to be
adopted in the most varied, possible situations. This is the purpose of
the work of comrades, which periodically, at our General Meetings, is
presented to the whole of the Party; a job that serves not only to know,
to know what to do in certain circumstances. Its importance is above all
in sharing with all the comrades, who will know how to use it in a
revolutionary sense. And in a continuous formation of the new militants,
who get to acquire our doctrine in a natural way, rather than in
ridiculous party schools.
“It would be nonsense to claim they are
perfect texts, irrevocable and unchangeable”
, as we wrote in the
1966 Naples Theses: “
because over the years the party has always said
that it was material under continuous elaboration, destined to assume an
ever better and more complete form”
. However, these texts return
periodically, with new data and new clarifications, to the principles that
are the basis of our doctrine, without ever contradicting them in the
slightest. In this way militants, through participation in periodic
meetings, local and general, are always in contact with our positions, and
are comfortable making them their own.
It is an ancient conviction of ours that a strong party is one whose
militants, in a given situation, all behave in the same way, even if they
have no possibility of communicating with each other and with the Centre.
Such is, however, the tradition of Marxism:
The General Council feels proud of the prominent part the Paris
branches of the International have taken in the glorious revolution of
Paris. Not, as the imbeciles fancy, as if the Paris, or any other
branch of the International received its mot d’ordre from a centre.
But the flower of the working class in all civilised countries
belonging to the International, and being imbued with its ideas, they
are sure everywhere in the working-class movement to take the lead”
(Second draft of The Civil War in France, M-E, XXII, 545).
Theory is a single block, as we have already written, which does not
change, but is sculpted, is always better defined. The tactic, on the
other hand, is the provision of scenarios in which the party’s response
may have different implications, in the presence of events that are
difficult to predict in detail; obviously the tactical choices depend on
knowledge of the data related to the various situations. Over time, and
with the accumulation of knowledge on the basis of an ever-increasing
record of struggle experiences, the space for tactical choices is reduced,
and there are behaviours that from the tactical level, which offers
choices, border on general theory, which is “dogmatic” and untouchable.
This is the case often cited of participation in political elections in
countries with mature capitalism: the choice was legitimately posed until
the 1920s (even if for the Left sufficient experience already existed to
reject it); today our doctrine excludes it as a position on which there
can be no doubt, a position that is part of our general theory.
Lenin did not believe that he had exhausted the spontaneity/consciousness
argument, as the misunderstanding is very rooted in the socialist
movement, not only in Russia and, we add, not only in 1902. So the third
chapter, “Trade-Unionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics”, is
still dedicated to the controversy with the economists, a subject that
actually allows the establishment of precise boundaries to the activity of
revolutionaries, clarifying their role in a situation of double
revolution, when the bourgeois democratic revolution is still to be done.
28. Economic struggle and political struggle
The defence of the economic conditions of the working class is a
necessary task. But it cannot be considered, as the economists did, the
exclusive one. It is
its school of warfare
The danger, then as now, is that by focusing on sacrosanct activities,
but in an exclusive way, one forgets the fundamental political tasks of
the revolutionary socialist struggle:
Social-Democracy leads the struggle of the working class, not only
for better terms for the sale of labour-power, but for the abolition
of the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves
to the rich. Social-Democracy represents the working class, not in its
relation to a given group of employers alone, but in its relation to
all classes of modern society and to the state as an organised
political force. Hence, it follows that not only must Social-Democrats
not confine themselves exclusively to the economic struggle, but that
they must not allow the organisation of economic exposures to become
the predominant part of their activities. We must take up actively the
political education of the working class and the development of its
political consciousness”
(V, 400).
A consciousness that must include, in Russia, the struggle to bring down
the autocratic regime. The struggle for social reforms, quite important
for the working class, is one of the duties of Social-Democracy, which
however “
…subordinates the struggle for reforms, as the part to the
whole, to the revolutionary struggle for freedom and for socialism”
(V, 406).
The party therefore not only elaborates a programme and a tactics to
bring it to fruition, but it also evaluates, depending on the historical
moment, what is the main activity on which to commit its resources and
those of the class. Lenin always reminded proletarians in the factory that
without a political change of state power, their conditions would not
improve significantly and that this improvement would only be consolidated
by the political victory of their party, which would manage power in their
name, up to a classless society.
Lenin never tired of insisting on support for a broader political
agitation, to avoid a relapse into economic rearguardism:
Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only
from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from
outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers …To
bring political knowledge to the workers the Social-Democrats must go
among all classes of the population; they must dispatch units of their
army in all directions.…the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the
trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people”
(V,
422-423).
What counts in hammering home the point that takes up most of the
pamphlet is not so much the contingent polemic, a polemic which in any
case might need to be resurrected even today, when within rank and file
movements economist-type attitudes continue to resurface. What is
important to note here is that Lenin, the supposed tactician, the
allegedly astute navigator between congresses and currents, does not use
half-words, does not rely on politicians’ subtle words, but brands as
bourgeois in no uncertain terms all that is not socialist and
revolutionary: “
Trade-unionist politics of the working class is
precisely bourgeois politics of the working class”
(V, 426).
He then goes on to describe the tasks of the Social Democrats in Russia,
in that historical period, tasks that also include democratic objectives;
but always calling them such, always distinguishing the activity of the
party from that of other organisations, always, finally, clearly recalling
what the party’s ultimate goals are, even when it speaks to the other
classes and social strata (peasants, students, clergy, artisans).
29. Workers’ organisms and the communist party
In the fourth chapter, “The Primitiveness of the Economists and the
Organisation of the Revolutionaries”, Lenin starts off by trying to
explain the meaning of the term primitivism, retracing the recent history
of social-democratic circles, and demonstrating how these have always been
persecuted, and therefore destroyed, by the police, precisely because of a
primitive, amateurish approach to the work; and does not hesitate to
associate the economists with this typology, who are primitive in that
they underestimate the political and organisational tasks of the social
democratic movement. Therefore, it is necessary to refer to the
theoretical and organisational cornerstones of a revolutionary party based
on the working class.
First, we need to distinguish between workers’ organisation and the
organisation of revolutionaries:
The workers’ organisations for the economic struggle should be
trade union organisations. Every Social-Democratic worker should as
far as possible assist and actively work in these organisations. But,
while this is true, it is certainly not in our interest to demand that
only Social-Democrats should be eligible for membership in the “trade”
unions, since that would only narrow the scope of our influence upon
the masses. Let every worker who understands the need to unite for the
struggle against the employers and the government join the trade
unions. The very aim of the trade unions would be impossible of
achievement, if they did not unite all who have attained at least this
elementary degree of understanding, if they were not very broad
organisations. The broader these organisations, the broader will be
our influence over them – an influence due, not only to the
“spontaneous” development of the economic struggle, but to the direct
and conscious effort of the socialist trade union members to influence
their comrades”
(V, 454).
So the trade union, because it is nothing else when it comes to
corporative associations, must be composed only of workers; the
Social-Democratic workers must work there, but it is not to be expected
that there will be political unanimity within it; this sacrosanct
principle, which as Lenin explains allows for very large and strong
unions, then creates a particularly favourable environment for the
revolutionary worker to carry out his propaganda. Those were years in
which the mirage of revolutionary syndicalism was arising, in France
(Sorel), in Italy, in South America, in the U.S.A. (I.W.W.), an experiment
that after a couple of decades would reveal its failure, but one that
plagued the labour movement, preventing or making difficult the
development of revolutionary parties of Marxist faith. Lenin predicted
this degeneration of the movement, which could arise precisely from the
economists. As for the regime unions, like the ones famously promoted by
Sergei Zubatov, he was not worried:
Keep at it, gentlemen, do your best! Whenever you place a trap in
the path of the workers (either by way of direct provocation, or by
the ‘honest’ demoralisation of the workers with the aid of ‘Struvism’)
we will see to it that you are exposed. But whenever you take a real
step forward, though it be the most ‘timid zigzag’, we will say:
Please continue! And the only step that can be a real step forward is
a real, if small, extension of the workers’ field of action. Every
such extension will be to our advantage and will help to hasten the
advent of legal societies of the kind in which it will not be agents
provocateurs who are detecting socialists, but socialists who are
gaining adherents”
(V, 456).
Therefore, if these governmental, regime unions want some following
among the workers, they will have to show that they deserve it, although
they must do this within the law;; but in doing so they create favourable
conditions for the revolutionary and union activity of the Social
Democrats. Moreover, workers who constitute secret trade unions will also
have to be helped, because the true struggle, even in trade unions,
requires clandestine activity; this too is a fundamental task of the
revolutionaries.
The important thing is not to talk to the workers in a generic,
unrealistic, or improvised way; it would be demagogy, says Lenin, and in
the long run this would alienate us from proletarian esteem. The speaker
must know what he’s talking about.
Both the trade union and the political struggle require organisation,
but the two spheres are very different, and so are the methods of
organisation, and not just in a police regime like that at the beginning
of the twentieth century in Russia. The party must rely on professional
revolutionaries, not amateur politicians, and in this way, it will be
better defended against police persecutions, and its propaganda and
agitation will be truly effective. The necessity of illegality leads to
the centralisation of clandestine work, but this “
by no means implies
centralisation of all the functions of the movement”
. (V, 465) The
party in this sense does not give itself fixed schematic rules but adapts
its organisation to the conditions in which it operates.
30. Workers and intellectuals in the party
It is therefore a question of forming revolutionaries, but we must also
be able to draw from the ranks of the class, and not only from the
intellectuals:
… our very first and most pressing duty is to help to train
working-class revolutionaries who will be on the same level in regard
to Party activity as the revolutionaries from amongst the
intellectuals (we emphasise the words ‘in regard to Party activity’,
for, although necessary, it is neither so easy nor so pressingly
necessary to bring the workers up to the level of intellectuals in
other respects). Attention, therefore, must be devoted principally to
raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all
our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’ as the
Economists wish to do”
(V, 470).
Lenin always recognised that, from an organisational point of view, the
role of the living working class is decisive, a class that, for objective
economic reasons, distinguishes itself from the others in capitalist
society through its aptitude for organisation.
What Is to Be Done?
stresses that without the contact with the working class the organisation
of revolutionaries would have been a toy, an adventure, an empty symbol,
and that only when there is a “
truly revolutionary class that
spontaneously rises to the struggle”
does the organisation that the
party advocates for the moment of proletarian assault make sense.
But to do this we need real persons who are dedicated to creating this
organisation.
Revolutionaries by profession, true militants, disciplined and not
blowhards, a vanguard rooted in the class and able to direct it: these are
the members of the party for Lenin. Beyond the contingent situations,
Lenin fights against opportunism in organisational matters: party members
must not be talkative, i.e., revolutionary in words, but rather militants
who do not just participate in the movement from time to time, when they
have the desire, “
to go to meetings on free evenings”
31. Conspiracy and Terrorism
Even terrorism, which was still gaining support, was associated with the
spontaneist swamp:
The Economists and the present-day terrorists have one common
root, namely, subservience to spontaneity. … The road to hell is paved
with good intentions, and, in this case, good intentions cannot save
one from being spontaneously drawn ‘along the line of least
resistance’” [here again the concept we always shared] “… calls for
terror and calls to lend the economic struggle itself a political
character are merely two different forms of evading the most pressing
duty now resting upon Russian revolutionaries, namely, the
organisation of comprehensive political agitation”
(V, 418, 420).
Against the apostles of conspiracy Lenin is explicit:
We have always protested, and will, of course, continue to protest
against confining the political struggle to conspiracy. But this does
not, of course, mean that we deny the need for a strong revolutionary
organisation”
(V, 475).
Only a centralised, militant organisation that consistently
carries out a Social-Democratic policy, that satisfies, so to speak,
all revolutionary instincts and strivings, can safeguard the movement
against making thoughtless attacks and prepare attacks that hold out
the promise of success”
(V, 477).
32. The organic selection of Leaders
To the accusations of lack of internal democracy, the reply is simple:
you ask for a large democracy in a situation of clandestine activity,
instead of a strict secret and a rigorous selection!
However, it is also clear that Lenin does not refer to an absolute
democratic
principle
but to the banal
mechanism
by which comrades in
the party are elected to the various functions. Electing does not only
mean voting, but choosing, selecting. And Lenin’s words, properly
understood, refer not to the defence of the
mechanism
but of the
substance
of the party’s organic functioning.
Lenin here addresses the Russians, for whom the European parties must
also be an example of organisation. He tells them that in a country that
is not feudal but bourgeois and democratic, where freedom of speech
exists, the party can function according to its own forms, where those who
run for office are known to all. We would like to underline here:
… consequently,
all
party members,
knowing all the facts
, can elect or refuse to elect this person to a particular party office. The general control (in the literal sense of the term) exercised over
every act of a party man
in the political field brings into existence
an automatically operating mechanism
which produces what in biology is called the ‘survival of the fittest’. ‘Natural selection’ by full publicity, election, and general control provides the assurance that, in the last analysis, every political figure will be ‘in his proper place’, do the work for which he is best fitted by his powers and abilities, feel the effects of his mistakes on himself, and prove before all the world his ability to recognise mistakes and to avoid them …”
Lenin goes on to refer to a non-democratic regime, such as the Russian
one at the time. But history would soon confirm that very little
“democracy” will be enjoyed by revolutionary communists in Germany, in
Italy... His words, correctly understood, surpass and deny even the
adoption of the democratic mechanism within the party.
But in a regime such as the Russian, a “broad democracy” “
… is
nothing more than a useless and harmful toy. It is a useless toy
because, in point of fact, no revolutionary organisation has ever
practiced, or could practice, broad democracy, however much it may have
desired to do so. It is a harmful toy because any attempt to practise
‘the broad democratic principle’ will simply facilitate the work of the
police in carrying out large-scale raids, will perpetuate the prevailing
primitiveness, and will divert the thoughts of the practical workers
from the serious and pressing task of training themselves to become
professional revolutionaries to that of drawing up detailed ‘paper’
rules for election systems. Only abroad, where very often people with no
opportunity for conducting really active work gather, could this
‘playing at democracy’ develop here and there, especially in small
groups”
33. Complete and fraternal confidence among
revolutionaries
The only serious organisational principle for the active workers
of our movement should he the strictest secrecy, the strictest
selection of members, and the training of professional
revolutionaries. Given these qualities, something even more than
‘democratism’ would be guaranteed to us, namely, complete, comradely,
mutual confidence among revolutionaries. This is absolutely essential
for us, because there can be no question of replacing it by general
democratic control in Russia.
It would be a great mistake to believe that the impossibility of
establishing real ‘democratic’
[inverted commas are Lenin’s]
control renders the members of the revolutionary organisation beyond
control altogether. They have not the time to think about toy forms of
democratism (democratism within a close and compact body of comrades
in which complete, mutual confidence prevails), but they have a lively
sense of their responsibility, knowing as they do from experience that
an organisation of real revolutionaries will stop at nothing to rid
itself of an unworthy member. Moreover, there is a fairly
well-developed public opinion in Russian (and international)
revolutionary circles which has a long history behind it, and which
sternly and ruthlessly punishes every departure from the duties of
comradeship (and ‘democratism’, real and not toy democratism,
certainly forms a component part of the conception of comradeship).
Take all this into consideration and you will realise that this talk
and these resolutions about ‘anti-democratic tendencies’ have the
musty odour of the playing at generals which is indulged in abroad”
(V, 479-481).
It is evident here that with “real democratism” Lenin means nothing but
the organic unity of the party.
Not very different is what the Party writes in 1922, in the Rome Theses,
I, 4:
The announcement of these programmatic declarations, and the
appointment of the men to whom are entrusted the various positions in
the party organisation, is formally carried out by means of a
consultation, democratic in form, of the party’s representative
assemblies, but in reality they must be understood as a product of the
real process which accumulates elements of experience and realises the
preparation and selection of leaders, thus shaping both the
programmatic content and the hierarchical constitution of the party”
The organicity that must orient the party when it comes to choose the
comrades to whom to entrust party responsibilities is also visible in the
comment Lenin makes about the choice of the components of the Iskra
editorial board, i.e., of the comrades who were to constitute the party
“centre”:
The old board of six was so ineffectual that never once in all its
three years did it meet in full force. That may seem incredible, but
it is a fact. Not one of the forty-five issues of
Iskra
was
made up (in the editorial and technical sense) by anyone but Martov or
Lenin. And never once was any major theoretical issue raised by anyone
but Plekhanov. Axelrod did no work at all (he contributed literally
nothing to Zarya and only three or four articles to all the forty-five
issues of
Iskra
). Zasulich and Starover only contributed and
advised, they never did any actual editorial work. Who ought to be
elected to the political leadership, to the c e n t r e, was as clear
as daylight to every delegate at the Congress, after the month it had
been in session”
(VII, 31).
These quotations clarify Lenin’s thought, which is entirely in common
with the way of existing of the current party. First of all, the contempt
for democracy, a “toy” of “general burlesque”. Secondly, the functioning
of the party is presented as that of a team in which the comrade finds
himself in the function that is organically most suited to him: what the
Left called “organic centralism” from its inception and which our party
still practices. The comrades have their organic place in the party;
“fraternal consideration” and “trust” between comrades; equally organic
processes of identifying shortcomings or real betrayals. It is the problem
of “guarantees”, which we have faced many times in our texts. Democratism
invoked as a cure-all is “a form of primitivism”, and therefore by now
(already in 1902!) of opportunism.
Also in his “Letter to a Comrade on Our Organisational Tasks” of 1902,
Lenin did not invoke statutes or organisational norms of a democratic
type, but identified the solution to problems of efficiency and
operational capacity in fraternal relations between comrades, and as a
last resort in the appeal to the central organ, which for him obviously
represented the doctrine of the party, the corpus of the theory of
revolution, the only decisive instrument for settling all questions that
may arise.
34. Do not love anyone, love everyone
Immediately after the Second Congress, instead of railing against Martov
for leaving the editorial office, and prefiguring a split (which there
would be), Lenin concluded his “Account of the Second Congress of the
R.S.D.L.P.” with a reminder to all comrades of the true values of party
work, far more than bureaucratic and democratic formalisms:
The Russian Social-Democratic movement is in the throes of the
last difficult transition from the circles to a Party, from
philistinism to a realisation of revolutionary duty, from acting by
means of scandal-mongering and circle pressure to discipline. Anyone
who values Party work and action in the interests of the
Social-Democratic labour movement will refuse to tolerate such
wretched sophistries as a ‘legitimate’ and ‘loyal’ boycott of the
central bodies; he will not allow the cause to suffer and the work to
be brought to a standstill because a dozen or so individuals are
displeased that they and their friends were not elected to the central
bodies; he will not allow Party officials to be subjected to private
and secret pressure through threats of non-collaboration, through
boycotts, through cutting off of funds, through scandal-mongering and
lying tales”
(VII, 34).
This does not mean, however, that relations between comrades should be
guided by “sentimentalism”, an aspect on which he dwells in recounting the
experience of his first encounter with Plekhanov (IV, 342), from which he
emerged disappointed by the person, but strengthened in his determination
to go ahead anyway. In “Politique d’abord” of 1952 the party drew the same
conclusions:
A long and tragic experience should therefore have taught that in
party activity we must utilise each militant according to his
particular attitudes and possibilities, but that ‘we must not love
anyone’, and be ready to throw away anyone, even if he had done eleven
months in prison each year of his life. We must be able to take the
decision on the options for action in front of momentous events
outside the personal ‘authority’ of masters, leaders and executives,
and based on the pre-established norms of principle and action of our
movement: an extremely difficult endeavour, as we all know, but
without which one cannot see how a powerful movement may reappear”
35. Internal Hierarchy and Decision making
Proof of Lenin’s consideration for internal democracy can be found in
what Trotski reports in My Life; it was at the onset of the II Congress:
… one of the important points in the scheme of organisation was
the relationship to be established between the central organ (the
Iskra) and the Central Committee which was to function in Russia. I
arrived abroad with the belief that the editorial board should be made
subordinate to the Central Committee. This was the prevailing attitude
of the majority of the Iskra followers. ‘It can’t be done,’ objected
Lenin. ‘The correlation of forces is different. How can they guide us
from Russia? No, it can’t be done. We are the stable centre, we are
stronger in ideas, and we must exercise the guidance from here.’ ‘Then
this will mean a complete dictatorship of the editorial board?’ I
asked. ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ retorted Lenin. ‘In the present
situation it must be so’”
It is not respect for democratic rules that keeps the party on the right
track, but complete and stubborn adherence to Marxist doctrine! And Lenin,
alone, personified this at that time. The doctrine was in the central
organ, that is, in the historic party; how can the best revolutionary work
result from a democratic consultation, or worse, from a mediation between
different currents, which unfortunately existed in Lenin’s Party?
Lenin is very clear on this again in 1920, when the Workers’ Opposition
demanded that decisions be taken on the basis of proportional
representation in the Central Committee and in the various city
committees. And that democracy should be utilised to solve operational
problems:
…proportional representation is essential in calling a Party
conference as a directing body, or a Party congress. When, however, it
is a question of setting up an executive body charged with the conduct
of practical work, proportional representation has never been applied,
and can hardly be considered justified … the decisive consideration
must be that you, members of this Conference, should have a personal
knowledge of each candidate, and give preference to that group which
may be expected to work harmoniously, and not the principle of
proportionality in the election of an executive body, a principle that
has never been applied, and to apply which would hardly be right at
present”
(XXXI, 428).
We have already seen that for Lenin internal democracy was inevitable,
but also that when it comes to operational decisions, and even when it
comes to stating the founding positions of the party, democracy is a
useless, and even harmful, piece of tinsel, which the great Vladimir was
willing to do without.
We, thanks to the experience of further decades of counter-revolution and
betrayal by so-called Leninists, got rid of democracy completely, in all
its forms. In the party it is customary to state the paradox that
democracy could have meaning if at the same time the living, the dead and
the children of future generations could vote!
36. The Guarantees
Since the party body is formed on the basis of voluntary adhesion, the
“guarantee” that the strictest discipline is obtained must therefore be
sought in the clear definition of the unique, and binding for all,
tactical rules, in the continuity of the methods of struggle and in the
clarity of the organisational rules. In “Marxism and Authority” (1956) we
wrote:
We will just remind the guarantees that we have so often proposed
and illustrated, also in the
Dialogue with the Dead
Doctrine: The Centre has no faculty to change it from that
established, from the beginning, in the classic texts of the movement.
Organisation: unique internationally, it does not vary for
aggregations or mergers, but only for individual admissions; the
organised members cannot join other movements. Tactics: the
possibilities of manoeuvre and action must be foreseen by decisions of
international congresses with a closed system. At the base you cannot
start actions not arranged by the Centre: The Centre cannot invent new
tactics and moves, under the pretext of new facts. The link between
the Party base and the Centre becomes a dialectical form. If the Party
exercises the dictatorship of the class in the state, and against the
classes against which the state acts, there is no dictatorship of the
Centre of the Party on the base. The dictatorship is not denied with a
formal internal mechanical democracy, but with respect for those
dialectical ties”
37. An all-Russia Political Newspaper
Also counterposing local work with national work indicates, in those who
defend the former, a form of primitivism. Local work also languishes
because there is no national activity plan, an aspect that Lenin would
clarify better in the fifth and last chapter, although in reality he
spends many pages demonstrating with historical data what he argues.
Rather than supporting the local press, there is a need for a nationwide
organ, “specialised” on union work and agitation.
Proposing a "plan for a political newspaper for all of Russia" was a response to the criticism of the primitivists. It was an organ that would collect point by point the contributions of all committees and circles (they were not yet sections of a single party). For Lenin, a newspaper for the whole of Russia comes very close to his idea of the party center; in the structure of the press organ, including its distribution, its reading by comrades, its propaganda, Lenin paints an embryo of the party, especially in the police regime of the time. The fundamental and urgent need is that of a Marxist and revolutionary party, with a solid theoretical basis, shared by the whole organization, through precisely an organ around which the work of all militants is coagulated and takes shape.
So nothing to do with debates and parades of opinions, but a newspaper
worthy of the communist party; after a reminder of the need to define
oneself before joining, in “Declaration of the Editorial Board of Iskra”
Lenin clarifies without possibility of misunderstanding:
We do not intend to make our publication a mere storehouse of
various views. On the contrary, we shall conduct it in the spirit of a
strictly defined tendency. This tendency can be expressed by the word
Marxism, and there is hardly need to add that we stand for the
consistent development of the ideas of Marx and Engels [our
‘sculpting’!] and emphatically reject the equivocating, vague, and
opportunist ‘corrections’ for which Eduard Bernstein, P. Struve, and
many others have set the fashion”
(IV, 354-355).
Once this was made clear, what should the newspaper be for?
We should not only be clear on the nature of the organisation that
is needed and its precise purpose, but we must elaborate a definite
plan for an organisation, so that its formation may be undertaken from
all aspects” … “A newspaper is what we most of all need; without it
we cannot conduct that systematic, all-round propaganda and agitation,
consistent in principle, which is the chief and permanent task of
Social-Democracy in general and, in particular, the pressing task of
the moment, when interest in politics and in questions of socialism
has been aroused among the broadest strata of the population” … “It
may be said without exaggeration that the frequency and regularity
with which a newspaper is printed (and distributed) can serve as a
precise criterion of how well this cardinal and most essential sector
of our militant activities is built up”
The role of a newspaper, however, is not limited solely to the
dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment
of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist
and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser” … “With the aid of the newspaper,
and through it, a permanent organisation will naturally take shape
that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general
work, and will train its members to follow political events carefully,
appraise their significance and their effect on the various strata of
the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary
party to influence these events. The mere technical task of regularly
supplying the newspaper with copy and of promoting regular
distribution will necessitate a network of local agents of the united
party, who will maintain constant contact with one another, know the
general state of affairs, get accustomed to performing regularly their
detailed functions in the All-Russian work, and test their strength in
the organisation of various revolutionary actions. This network of
agents will form the skeleton of precisely the kind of organisation we
need”
(V, 20-23).
The whole point is that there is no other way of training
strong political organisations except through the medium of an
all-Russia newspaper” … “All without exception now talk of the
importance of unity, of the necessity for ‘gathering and organising’;
but in the majority of cases what is lacking is a definite idea of
where to begin and how to bring about this unity” … “I continue to
insist that we can start establishing real contacts only with the aid
of a common newspaper, as the only regular, all-Russia enterprise, one
which will summarise the results of the most diverse forms of activity
and thereby stimulate people to march forward untiringly along all the
innumerable paths leading to revolution, in the same way as all roads
lead to Rome. If we do not want unity in name only, we must arrange
for all local study circles immediately to assign, say, a fourth of
their forces to active work for the common cause” … “In a great many
cases these forces are now being bled white on restricted local work,
but under the circumstances we are discussing it would be possible to
transfer a capable agitator or organiser from one end of the country
to the other, and the occasion for doing this would constantly arise.
Beginning with short journeys on Party business at the Party’s
expense, the comrades would become accustomed to being maintained by
the Party, to becoming professional revolutionaries, and to training
themselves as real political leaders” … “Around what is in itself
still a very innocuous and very small, but regular and common, effort,
in the full sense of the word, a regular army of tried fighters would
systematically gather and receive their training. [to rouse the whole
people]… That is what we should dream of!”
(V, 499-509).
38. The good Tactic and the good Party
Which are the characteristic features of this organisation? The ability
to foretell in its main lines the course of events:
Those who make nation-wide political agitation the cornerstone of
their programme, their tactics, and their organisational work, as
Iskra does, stand the least risk of missing the revolution. The people
who are now engaged throughout Russia in weaving the network of
connections that spread from the all-Russia newspaper not only did not
miss the spring events, but, on the contrary, gave us an opportunity
to foretell them. … And if they live they will not miss the
revolution, which, first and foremost, will demand of us experience in
agitation, ability to support (in a Social-Democratic manner) every
protest, as well as direct the spontaneous movement, while
safeguarding it from the mistakes of friends and the traps of enemies”
Flexibility:
Only such organisation will ensure the flexibility required of a
militant Social-Democratic organisation, viz., the ability to adapt
itself immediately to the most diverse and rapidly changing conditions
of struggle”
Contempt for haste, impatience, typical of the bourgeois society (see
also above):
Unless we are able to devise political tactics and an
organisational plan for work over a very long period, while ensuring,
in the very process of this work, our Party’s readiness to be at its
post and fulfil its duty in every contingency whenever the march of
events is accelerated – unless we succeed in doing this, we shall
prove to be but miserable political adventurers. Only Nadezhdin, who
began but yesterday to describe himself as a Social-Democrat, can
forget that the aim of Social-Democracy is to transform radically the
conditions of life of the whole of mankind and that for this reason it
is not permissible for a Social-Democrat to be ‘perturbed’ by the
question of the duration of the work”
Carrying out all party duties:
…the revolution must be regarded…as a series of more or less
powerful outbreaks rapidly alternating with periods of more or less
complete calm. For that reason, the principal content of the activity
of our Party organisation, the focus of this activity, should be work
that is both possible and essential in the period of a most powerful
outbreak as well as in the period of complete calm” … “Our wiseacre
fails to see that it is precisely during the revolution that we shall
stand in need of the results of our theoretical battles with the
Critics in order to be able resolutely to combat their practical
positions!”
Organic structuring of work:
But a network of agents that would form in the course of
establishing and distributing the common newspaper would not have to
“sit about and wait” for the call for an uprising, but could carry on
the regular activity that would guarantee the highest probability of
success in the event of an uprising. Such activity would strengthen
our contacts with the broadest strata of the working masses and with
all social strata that are discontented with the autocracy”
Therefore:
In a word, the ‘plan for an all-Russia political newspaper’, far
from representing the fruits of the labour of armchair workers,
infected with dogmatism and bookishness … is the most practical plan
for immediate and all-round preparation of the uprising, with, at the
same time, no loss of sight for a moment of the pressing day-to-day
work”
(V, 513-516).
The mere technical task of guarding, disseminating and delivering, etc.
the newspaper needs frameworks at central level that guarantee the correct
organisation of this body and trustees in local groups.
39. Communist Centralism versus Class dispersion within
bourgeois Society
Ultimately it is a question of creating an organisation as a premise and
not as a result of the revolutionary process; or, if you will, as a result
of an already advanced revolutionary process that began with the birth and
opposition of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat many centuries ago.
The Mensheviks did not understand this in 1903, when they separated from
the majority group that referred to Lenin. A letter from Axelrod to
Kautsky, of June 6, 1904, is quite explicit on the matter. In short,
Axelrod believed that the situation in Russia was not mature for the birth
of an organised party, structured with a view to seizing power. He
ridiculed Lenin’s organisational perspective as “
…trivial and pitiable
caricature of the autocratic-bureaucratic system of our Ministry of the
Interiors”
. “
Organisational fetishism
,” which would cause
the “
misunderstanding”
that led to the split. But on one point he
saw clearly, although interpreting wrongly: “
The divergences among us
on organisational problems arose for the first time in a clear and
concrete way only with reference to the methods and procedures utilised
by Lenin and his supporters to practically enforce ‘centralism’, which
we all admit …”
Those very methods and procedures are the only real
guarantee of both the party’s correct functioning, and of the maintenance
of its orthodoxy.
The pamphlet ends with a brief summary of the three stages of social
democracy in Russia, and with the hope that there will be a fourth, with
the exit from the crisis and with the strengthening of militant Marxism.
Lenin hoped so, and we know that this would be the case thanks above all
to his powerful and tireless work, which is mainly aimed at creating an
organisation worthy of the name. Thus, he concludes
One Step Forward,
Two Steps Back
In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but
organisation. Disunited by the rule of anarchic competition in the
bourgeois world, ground down by forced labour for capital, constantly
thrust back to the ’lower depths’ of utter destitution, savagery, and
degeneration, the proletariat can, and inevitably will, become an
invincible force only through its ideological unification on the
principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of
organisation, which welds millions of toilers into an army of the
working class. Neither the senile rule of the Russian autocracy nor
the senescent rule of international capital will be able to withstand
this army. It will more and more firmly close its ranks, in spite of
all zigzags and backward steps, in spite of the opportunist
phrase-mongering of the Girondists of present-day Social-Democracy, in
spite of the self-satisfied exaltation of the retrograde circle
spirit, and in spite of the tinsel and fuss of intellectualist
anarchism”
(VII, 412-413).
40. Organic Centralism
Although he operated in an age and in an environment in which the
democratic method had not yet clearly demonstrated to the party how
unsuitable it was for its functioning, what we have seen so far
demonstrates, to those who want to understand, that Lenin, based on his
critical observation of the working mechanisms of the socialist parties,
took sides with a way of being of the party that we can now define as
“organic” and “centralistic”. If centralism and organisational discipline
are the conditions for the existence of the communist party as such, such
a condition cannot be obtained with the same mechanisms of the bourgeois
parties. Even in its functioning, the working-class party is forced to be
revolutionary.
The way of being of the party will be formulated by the comrades of the
Left since the birth of the Communist Party of Italy, Section of the Third
International.
In the years that followed, the experience of the Stalinist
counter-revolution was the clear proof that organic centralism was the
only method to give the party a chance to survive, even organisationally,
in periods of revolutionary reflux. Enunciated again in 1926, at the Third
Congress of P.C.d’I. (Lyon), organic centralism was reaffirmed at all the
party’s turning points: in the post-war period, in 1952, in 1965, in 1973.
It is only thanks to a close, almost fanatical adherence to our way of
working that the party is still active and in good health 68 years after
its reconstitution in 1952, where “in good health” means being secured on
the doctrinal cornerstones of Marx, Engels, Lenin and the Left.
What, then, is organic centralism? We will certainly not deny ourselves
here by giving a series of rules, a code, a regulation or, worse, a
statute. Rather, we will recall some of the cornerstones of our way of
working, already partly outlined in the preceding text, citing the party
at various times of its existence. Without forgetting that our history
teaches us that the acquisition of our method cannot derive from bookish
descriptions, however detailed they may be; the comrade masters the
working method of the party by working inside it, in its “ferociously
anti-bourgeois” setting, which puts together all types of comrades and of
generations, with the additional difficulty that in our case he must get
rid of a mass of cultural-ideological dead weight, soaked with the myth of
the individual, of the fatherland and of divinity, with which the
boundless means of bourgeois society have poisoned the depth of his soul.
However, it must first be clarified that the internal forms of behaviour
of the Communist Party do not respond to commandments, aesthetic canons or
abstract moral norms, but are the teachings of a painful past that has
seen in their denial the poison administered to the party to accompany its
degeneration to the point of its passage to the enemy. Moreover, a
coherent internal organic life, among comrades who “hold hands closely” is
a coefficient of strength, a material fact, that comes before conscience
and affection, a discipline that in social warfare gives the Party that
effective unity of intent and movement that is denied to every bourgeois
organism and institution.
41. “Democratic Centralism
What would be the formal “sacred” rules – which for Lenin were not as
such – that would guarantee the functioning of democratic centralism,
which all leftists oppose to organic centralism? The differences present
within the party can only be resolved in a relationship of forces, with
the consequence of political struggle; the proclaimed right to organise
into trends and fractions; formation of pressure groups in view of the
elections of managers and congresses, regularly convened; election of
governing bodies with the counting of votes; periodic verification of the
political line of the party through the possibility granted to minorities
to become a majority.
Democratic centralism, raised as a principle against Lenin, sanctions the
non-Marxist principle of the continuous reconstruction of theory and
tactics, in periodic congresses, on the basis of purported changes in the
social, economic and political conditions of society, conditions that
would of course vary from country to country, if not actually modulated
for particular areas within individual countries. The “choices” are not
determined on the basis of an invariant programme, nor on the basis of
historical and scientific evidence, but on the basis of the majority
gathered around a given solution.
Lenin, while he could not avoid some of these rules, and even put them
forward as a first instrument against the dispersion and indiscipline of
circles, was continually accused of hindering, with his excessive
centralism, the development of internal party democracy.
In 1972, we compared the two centralisms in this way (Introduction to the
Theses after 1945, from
In Defence of the Continuity of the Communist
Programme
, p. 130):
“In truth, the question of organic centralism as opposed to democratic
centralism is far from being... terminological. In its contradictory
nature, the second formula reflects, in the noun, the aspiration to the
single world party as we have always hoped for, but reflects in the
adjective the reality of parties still heterogeneous in historical
formation and doctrinal basis (…)
“In our view, on the other hand, the party presents itself with
characters of organic centrality because it is not a ‘part’, albeit the
most advanced, of the proletarian class, but its organ, synthesiser of
all its elementary thrusts as of all its militants, whichever direction
they come from, and this is due to the possession of a theory, a set of
principles, a programme, which bypass the time limits of today to
express the historical trend, the final goal and the way of working of
the proletarian and communist generations of the past, present and
future, and who go beyond the boundaries of nationality and state to
embody the interests of revolutionary workers of the whole world; such
is, we add, also by virtue of a forecast, at least in broad terms, of
the unfolding of historical situations, and therefore of the ability to
establish a body of directives and tactical rules that are mandatory for
everyone (obviously, not without considering the times and areas of
‘double revolution’ or, instead, of ‘pure proletarian revolution’, also
foreseen and implying a very precise, even if different, tactical
behaviour). If the party is in possession of such theoretical and
practical homogeneity (possession that is not guaranteed forever, but a
reality to be defended tooth and nail and, if necessary, to reconquer
every time), its organisation, which is at the same time its discipline,
is born and develops organically on the unitary line of the programme
and of practical action, and expresses in its different forms of
realisation, in the hierarchy of its organs, the perfect adherence of
the party to the complex of its functions, none excluded”.
42. The Left’s Centralism
We have a first enunciation in 1922 (“The Democratic Principle”):
Democracy cannot be a principle for us: centralism indisputably
is, since the essential characteristics of party organisation must be
unity of structure and action. In order to express the continuity of
party structure in space, the term centralism is sufficient, but in
order to introduce the essential idea of continuity in time – the
historical continuity of the struggle which, surmounting successive
obstacles, always advances towards the same goal – we will propose
saying, linking these two essential ideas of unity together, that the
communist party bases its organisation on ‘organic centralism’”
In 1926, in a situation of retreat and loss of the revolutionary compass
by the international party, of which we were perfectly aware, the Left
reiterated the importance of the correct management of the party:
II.5 -…. The communist parties must achieve an organic centralism,
which, whilst including as much consultation with the base as
possible, ensures the spontaneous elimination of any grouping which
starts to differentiate itself. This cannot be achieved by means of
the formal and mechanical prescriptions of a hierarchy, but, as Lenin
says [
in
Left-wing Communism,
ed.
], by means of
correct revolutionary politics”
(Draft Theses presented by the
Left at the Third Congress of P.C.d’I., Lyon 1926).
In short, the party must be a centralised structure, with the existence
of different organs and of a central body capable of coordinating,
directing and ordering the whole network; absolute discipline of all
members of the organisation in executing orders placed by the centre; no
autonomy for local sections or groups; no communication network diverging
from the unitary one that connects the centre to the periphery and the
periphery to the centre And the never-ending activity of study, of
sculpting of the doctrine, which is peculiar to the party, does not only
have a theoretical value, it is also, and above all, an organisational
necessity, in order to be at any time able to express the “correct
revolutionary politics”.
43. How the Party is structured according to Lenin
Not very different is what Lenin advocates in “Letter to a Comrade on
Our Organisational Tasks” (VI, 234, 249-250):
… the newspaper can and should be the ideological leader of the
Party, evolving theoretical truths, tactical principles, general
organisational ideas, and the general tasks of the whole Party at any
given moment”
(...)
And it is not merely because revolutionary work does not always
lend itself to definite organisational form that Rules are useless.
No, definite organisational form is necessary, and we must endeavour
to give such form to all our work as far as possible. That is
permissible to a much greater extent than is generally thought, and
achievable not through Rules but solely and exclusively (we must keep
on reiterating this) through transmitting exact information to the
Party centre; it is only then that we shall have real organisational
form connected with real responsibility and (inner-Party) publicity”
As we saw in
What Is to Be Done?
we recall that, when Lenin
says newspaper, magazine, Iskra (when he is in it), he means the centre of
the party, which in 1902 was above all the ideological, doctrinal centre
of the party. Every reference to the central organ means a reference to
orthodox Marxism, as presented to the various circles by the theoretical
work of Lenin himself and of the other members of
Iskra
. So he
was already speaking of the dictatorship of the programme, and not of men,
even though we know that at that moment the true revolutionary doctrine
resided in the work of an individual; incidentally, a negative aspect, as
an index of party’s vulnerability, and it would be manifest after the
premature death of the great Vladimir, when a clear military defeat would
have been historically more desirable, rather than a triumph of the
counter-revolution that came about through a degeneration of the Russian
party, of the International and of all the national sections.
44. Joint and unanimous Work to avoid Splits
We gather another testimony of Lenin, which as we will see coincides
with the Left’s way of working:
To the question – ‘what should not be done?’ (what should not be
done in general, and what, in particular, should not be done so as to
avoid a split), my reply is, first of all: do not conceal from the
Party the appearance and growth of potential causes of a split, do not
conceal any of the circumstances and events that constitute such
causes; and, what is more, do not conceal them not only from the
Party, but, as far as possible, from the outside public either… Broad
publicity – that is the surest, the only reliable means of avoiding
such splits as can be avoided, and of reducing to a minimum the harm
of splits that are no longer avoidable”
(“Letter to Iskra”, VII,
115-116).
Again in 1920, at a party conference, while still fighting against the
armies of whites, faced with the difficulties posed by the Workers
Opposition, Lenin, while conceding that those comrades made some good
points, insisted above all that the whole party be involved in solving the
problem; but at the same time he recalled that there is a programme, which
must be respected at all costs, if we don’t want to succumb to the enemy.
The opposition … no doubt contains a sound element, but when it
turns into an opposition for the sake of opposition, we should
certainly put an end to it. We have wasted a great deal of time on
altercations, quarrels and recrimination and we must put an end to all
that, and try to come to some agreement to work more effectively. We
must make certain concessions … but we must succeed in making our work
harmonious, for otherwise we cannot exist when we are surrounded by
enemies at home and abroad”
(XXXI, 424).
Therefore, strict adherence to the programmatic cornerstones, with
well-known criteria, always repeated to all, not only in section meetings,
but also in the press; to solve problems collectively, after which total
executive discipline, without complaints about lack of democracy.
It is around this inseparable and very hard core,
doctrine-programme-tactic, a collective and impersonal heritage of the
movement, that our organisation is crystallised, and what holds it
together is not the knout of the ‘organizing centre’ but the unique
and uniform thread linking ‘leaders’ and ‘base’, ‘centre’ and
‘periphery’, committing them to the observance and defence of a system
of ends and means, none of which is separable from the other. In this
real life of the communist party – not of any party but only of it as
it is communist in deeds and not in name – the puzzle that haunts the
bourgeois democrat; who decides: the ‘top’ or the ‘bottom’, the most
or the few? Who ‘commands’ and who ‘obeys’? (...)
The generous concern of the comrades that the party should
operate in an organisational, safe, linear and homogeneous manner,
should therefore address – as Lenin himself admonished in the ‘Letter
to a Comrade on Our Organisational Tasks’ – not a search for statutes,
codes and constitutions, or worse, for personalities of ‘special’
temperament, but rather the best way to contribute, each and every
one, to the harmonious performance of the functions without which the
party would cease to exist as a unifying force and as guide and
representation of the class, which is the only way to help it to
solve, day by day, ‘by itself’, - as in What Is to Be Done?, where the
newspaper is referred to as a ‘collective organiser’ – its problems of
life and action. Here is the key to ‘organic centralism’, here is the
sure weapon in the historic battle of the classes, not in the empty
abstraction of the alleged ‘norms’ of the functioning of the most
perfect mechanisms or, worse, in the squalor of trials of men who by
organic selection found themselves handling them”
(“The
Continuity of Party Action on the Thread of the Left’s Tradition”, Il
Programma Comunista, n. 3-5/1967).
45. How to guarantee Discipline
The party functions thanks to the work of men; what are the guarantees
that these men will not betray, or make mistakes? The objection of the
petty bourgeois is evident: who will prevent individuals from doing
whatever they like, from disobeying, because in every individual, even
militant in the party, there is the germ of individualism,
self-exaltation, anarchism, etc.? Who will prevent individuals from
raising problems just for the sake of doing it, or from making criticisms?
The Left has already answered more than 50 years ago to objections of this
kind and the answer sounds like this: in an organism, like the party,
which is formed on the basis of voluntary participation in combat and
sacrifice, together in a common trench, these individual manifestations
must remain rare exceptions and can be easily resolved.
Different is the case of dissensions and episodes of indiscipline that
arise, multiply and grow instead of shrinking and tending to disappear; if
only for the fact that instead of attracting healthy individuals who are
willing to get rid of their individualistic itches, it begins to attract
loud mouths and fools. And this too is resolved not only in chasing out
the chatterboxes, but in looking for the reasons the organic party
attracts them, and the remedy lies in making the party’s appearance so
sharp and clear in all its theoretical and practical manifestations as to
discourage any adhesion other than those who are willing to become a true
militant of the revolution.
The solution never lies, neither for Lenin nor for the Left, in
intensifying bureaucratic networks and organisational repressions, which
we have always declared that we can very well do without, in the same way
that we do without the count of individual heads.
The art of predicting how the party will react to orders, and
which orders will obtain a good response, is the art of revolutionary
tactics: this can only be entrusted to the collective use of the
experience gained from past action, summarised in clear rules of
action… Given that the party is perfectible and not perfect, we do not
hesitate to say that much has to be sacrificed to the clarity and to
the power of persuasion of the tactical guidelines, even if this
involves a certain schematisation… It is not just the good party that
makes good tactics, but good tactics that make the good party, and
good tactics can only be those understood and chosen by everyone in
their fundamentals”
(“Draft Theses Presented by the Left at the
Third Congress of P.C.d’I”., Lyon 1926).
The guarantee of obedience to central orders by the base is no longer
given by the observance of the articles of a statute or a code, but
because they are those expected, since they belong to the common heritage
of the party. The party hierarchy no longer needs to be elected by the
base, nor to be nominated from above, because the only selection criterion
remains that of being able to carry out the various functions of the party
organ. That at the centre there is a certain comrade rather than another
cannot change anything in the political direction of the party, nor in its
tactics; it can influence the greater or lesser central efficiency, but
the designation of the most suitable militants in the various functions
becomes a “natural and spontaneous” fact that does not need any particular
sanction.
The party is a “voluntary” organisation, not in the sense that it is
adhered to by free rational choice, which we deny, but in the sense that
every militant “is materially free to leave us when he wants” and that “
not
even after the revolution do we conceive forced access in our ranks”
When you are in the organisation you are required to observe the strictest
discipline in the execution of central orders, but the transgression of
this rule cannot be eliminated by the centre except through the expulsion
of the offenders. The centre does not have available, in order to be
obeyed, any other material sanctions.
What can keep the militant on the front line and make him loyal and
obedient to the orders he receives? Certainly not the articles of a penal
code, but the acknowledgement that those orders belong to a common ground,
are consistent with the principles, aims, programme, and action plan to
which he adhered. Inasmuch as the party organ knows how to move on this
historical basis, how to acquire it, how to permeate all of its
organisation and its activity with it, that the real conditions for the
most absolute discipline can be set. To the extent that this occurs the
cases of indiscipline, not attributable to individual issues, become less
frequent and the party acquires a univocal behaviour in action. The work
to create a truly centralised organisation, capable of responding at all
times to unitary provisions, therefore consists essentially in the
continuous clarification and sculpting of the cornerstones of theory,
programme, tactics, and in the continuous conforming to them of the
party’s action, of its methods of struggle.
… we must have an absolutely homogeneous communist party,
without
differences of opinion and different groupings
within it. But this
statement is not a dogma, it isn’t an a priori principle; it is an end
for which we can and must fight, in the course of development, which
will lead to the formation of the true communist party, on condition,
that is, that all ideological, tactical and organisational questions
have been correctly posed and resolved… Discipline then is a point of
arrival,
not a point of departure
, not a platform that is
somehow
indestructible
. Moreover, this corresponds to the
voluntary nature of entry into our organisation. So, the remedy for
the frequent cases of lack of discipline cannot be sought in some kind
of party penal code”
(“Report of the Left at the Fifth Session
of the Sixth Enlarged Executive of the Communist International”,
23/2/1926).
Nor do measures of ideological and organisational terror, which recall
the dismal practices of party-destroying Stalinism, make sense. Our
supplementary theses on the historical task, action and structure of the
world communist party affirm, in
Il Programma Comunista
“Another lesson we can draw from events in the life of the Third
International … is that of the vanity of ‘ideological terror’, a
horrible method in which it was attempted to substitute the natural
process of diffusing our doctrines via contact with harsh reality in a
social setting, with forced indoctrination of recalcitrant and
confused elements, either for reasons more powerful than party and men
or due to a faulty evolution of the party itself, by humiliating them
and mortifying them in public congresses open even to the enemy, even
if they had been leaders and exponents of party action during
important political and historical episodes … Within the revolutionary
party, as it moves inexorably towards victory, obeying orders is
spontaneous and complete but not blind or compulsory. In fact,
centralised discipline, as illustrated in our theses and associated
supporting documentation, is equivalent to a perfect harmony of the
duties and actions of the rank-and-file with those of the centre, and
the bureaucratic practices of an anti-Marxist voluntarism are no
substitute for this”
(“Supplementary Theses on the Historical
Task, the Action and the Structure of the World Communist Party”, 1966).
The party that we are sure to see resurrected in a bright future
will be constituted by a vigorous minority of anonymous proletarians
and revolutionaries, who may have different functions such as the
organs of the same living being, but all will be linked, at the centre
and at the base, to the norm that is above all members, inflexible, of
respect of theory; of continuity and rigor in organisation; of a
precise method of strategic action whose range of allowed
eventualities is drawn, in its inviolable vetoes, from the terrible
historical lesson of the ravages of opportunism. In such a party, at
last impersonal, no one will be able to abuse power, precisely because
of its inimitable characteristic, which distinguishes it in the
uninterrupted thread that originated in 1848”
(“The Theory of
the Primary Function of the Political Party, Only Safekeeping and
Salvation of the Historical Energy of the Proletariat”), Il
Programma Comunista n. 21-22, 1958).
46. How to share Duties
Already in 1924, in “Lenin on the Path of Revolution” at a conference
held to commemorate his death, we had pinpointed the role of the
individual in the party:
The organisation in the party, which allows the class to be truly
such and live as such, presents itself as a unitary mechanism in which
the various ‘brains’ (certainly not only the brains, but also other
individual organs) perform different tasks according to their
attitudes and potential, all at the service of a purpose and an
interest that progressively unites itself more and more intimately ‘in
time and space’ (this convenient expression has an empirical and not
transcendent meaning).
Not all individuals therefore have the same place and the same
weight in the organisation: as this division of tasks is implemented
according to a more rational plan (and what is the case today for the
party-class will be the case tomorrow for society) which rules out
that those who find themselves higher up are considered privileged
over others. Our revolutionary evolution does not go towards
disintegration, but towards the increasingly scientific connection of
individuals to each other.
It is anti-individualist since it is materialist; it does not
believe in the soul or in a metaphysical and transcendent content of
the individual, but includes the functions of the individual in a
collective framework, creating a hierarchy that develops in the sense
of increasingly eliminating coercion and replacing it with technical
rationality. The party is already an example of a collective body
without coercion.
These general elements of the question show that no one better
than us is beyond the banal meaning of egalitarianism and ‘numerical’
democracy... In conclusion, if man, the exceptional ‘instrument’
exists, the movement uses him: but the movement still lives anyway
when such an eminent personality is not found”
Assuming that doctrine is not to be discussed, that the programme is not
discussed, that there is no discussion on the fundamental aspects of the
tactical plan, internal relations take the form of jointly responsible
work in common by all members of the party, aimed at finding, on the basis
of a heritage common to all, the most appropriate solutions to the various
problems.
From all this ensues the importance of common work; all comrades must
work, this is obvious, but as far as possible comrades should work in all
areas; there must be no specialisations, separations between those who do
a certain job and those who do another, even if it is obvious that we are
not identical, as we will not be even in full communism.
The whole art of running a secret organisation should consist in
making use of everything possible, in ‘giving everyone something to
do,’ at the same time retaining leadership of the whole movement, not
by virtue of having the power, of course, but by virtue of authority,
energy, greater experience, greater versatility, and greater talent”
(VI, 240).
47. Impersonality and Anonymity
Joint work is the fulcrum of the organic nature of work in the party;
comrades approach their work free of any personalism or careerism. In
Lenin’s time it was not possible, but since 1952 we have never published
the names of the comrades who write reports, articles, theses. This is not
a moral or aesthetical choice, it corresponds to the undeniable fact that
our work is no longer individual, if only because any study cannot ignore
what is in our doctrine, what was previously written by other comrades,
nor their past activity, whether these are the great Marx and Lenin or
obscure comrades who have contributed for a day, a year or an entire
lifetime; even comrades who eventually abandoned the party and Marxism, to
whom some of the quotations we have listed belong. The revolution, we
wrote, will rise again, but anonymously. On the fact that our mission is
above any individual, Lenin allows Comrade Rusov to speak:
“‘We are hearing strange speeches from the lips of
revolutionaries,’ Comrade Rusov justly remarked, ‘speeches that are in
marked disharmony with the concepts Party work, Party ethics. The
principal argument on which the opponents of electing trios take their
stand amounts to a purely philistine view of Party affairs’ [my
emphases throughout]... ‘If we adopt this standpoint, which is a
philistine and not a Party standpoint, we shall at every election have
to consider: will not Petrov be offended if Ivanov is elected and not
he, will not some member of the Organising Committee be offended if
another member, and not he, is elected to the Central Committee? Where
is this going to land us, comrades? If we have gathered here for the
purpose of creating a Party, and not of indulging in mutual
compliments and philistine sentimentality, then we can never agree to
such a view. We are about to elect officials, and there can be no talk
of lack of confidence in any person not elected; our only
consideration should be the interests of the work and a person’s
suitability for the post to which he is being elected.’”
(VII,
312-313)
Although, as mentioned above, it was not possible for Lenin to write
anonymously at a time when he himself embodied Marxist doctrine, and his
party was not entirely homogeneous in theory, he nevertheless shied away
from any cult of his person, as can be seen from various testimonies, such
as Andreev’s (
Lénine comme il fut
, 1958):
Neither at meetings, nor at conferences, nor in the press, did
Lenin tolerate any praise, no exaltation of his personal merits; he
opposed the cult of personality, alien to Marxists, and was always
sincerely indignant at its minimal manifestations. The party and the
masses always placed themselves in the foreground when analysing
historical events or tasks to be performed. Lenin’s extreme modesty
manifested itself in everything and always”
Here it is easy to draw the parallel with our greatest masters.
48. The false Solution of Expulsions
Organic centralism excludes the birth of fractions. By now the activity
of a healthy party does not require, and therefore does not justify, the
constitution of fractions that compete for its direction. Just as it is a
symptom of a serious malaise that on the periphery fractions are formed
for the conquest of party leadership, so is the fact that the centre
conceives itself as a fraction, among whose functions there would be the
maintenance of its office.
The birth of fractions, which in the old socialist parties could be a
necessary and often useful fact when generated by movements in defence of
Marxism, and therefore progressive in the evolution of the historic party,
is, when it occurs in today’s Party, a pathological phenomenon.
This is especially the case when the fraction that moves away from just
revolutionary politics is the one that belongs to the Centre, as happened
in 1972-1973. Following that event, a group of comrades, who then
continued “on the same path as always” and who are now part of the
International Communist Party, were expelled in 1973 from the then
organization. But in fact it was the Centre fraction that left the party,
the historical party, while the formal one was facing an inevitable
degeneration.
In 1972 the comrades of the Florence section wrote a letter to the
Centre, relating to the expulsion of an entire foreign section, which we
report because it provides further important clarifications on what
organic centralism is:
It doesn’t matter which comrade or group of comrades is at a given
time, or on a given problem, on this or that of the two sides. It’s
the two sides that must never exist within the party. It is the way of
life of the party that is based precisely on the absolute denial that
sides exist and that one must fight against the other. If a single
comrade or a group of comrades do not realise a situation or a problem
or persist in an error, the whole party is committed to clarifying,
sculpting, reiterating an impersonal line as the weakness of a party
point is the weakness of the whole party, the lack of clarity of the
whole organisation. And we have always said that if a comrade does not
have clear ideas, it means that the party has not worked hard enough
to clarify them, that more work is needed by the whole party. This is
the only way the party can live and function... This is the organic
method that is ours and that we claim, because it is the only method
that allows us to live as an organisation where there are neither
comrades who understand, nor others who do not understand, neither
comrades who make mistakes, nor others who do not make mistakes, but
there are only comrades who, for better or worse, bring their
contribution to the common battle against the class enemy and give
this battle all their strength.
“For this reason, we do not share the triumphalist tone and
statements of the last circular in which it is stated that the last
general meeting ended the battle against the onset of anti-Marxist
ideologies, etc. The anti-Marxist tendencies have been there, it is
clear, but the emphasis should be placed not so much on the victory
achieved when we managed to eliminate them from the party, but on the
defeat we suffered when they managed to penetrate our interior,
destroying precious energies and demolishing a part of our
organisation. We must certainly not congratulate ourselves on having
expelled them, we should rather reflect on why they managed to
penetrate our interior, and work to make the party stronger and more
impervious to these destructive influences. We must judge that our
defences were too weak to prevent the enemy from dismantling them and
work to strengthen and enhance these defences. This is the lesson we
must learn from the crisis that the party has suffered”
Yet the party’s attitude towards the fractions was clear since 1926, and
continually reaffirmed in the theses:
To raise the problem of fractions as a moral problem, from the
point of view of a penal code is not the correct line of action. Is
there any example in history of a comrade forming a fraction for his
own amusement? Such a thing has never happened. Is there a historical
example of opportunism insinuating itself into the party through a
fraction, of the organisation of fractions serving as the basis for a
defeatist mobilisation of the working class and of the revolutionary
party being saved thanks to the intervention of the fraction-killers?
No. Experience has shown that opportunism always infiltrates our ranks
under the guise of unity. It is in its interest to influence the
largest possible mass, and it is therefore behind the screen of unity
that it puts forward its most deceitful proposals. Moreover, the
history of fractions goes to show that if fractions do no honour to
the parties in which they have been formed, they do honour to those
who formed them … The birth of a fraction shows that something has
gone wrong in the party. To remedy the ill, it is necessary to seek
out the historical causes which gave rise to it, that gave rise to the
fraction and that prompted it to take shape. The causes lie in the
ideological and political errors of the party. The fractions are not
the sickness, but merely the symptom, and if you want to treat a sick
organism, you have to try to discover the causes of the sickness, not
combat the symptoms”
(“Report of the Left at the Fifth Session
of the Sixth Enlarged Executive of the Communist International”, 23
February 1926).
The lessons of defeats caused by the degeneration of the centre are those
that have strengthened us most, in the application of organic centralism.
And those are the most painful, most disastrous defeats for the party.
From the defeat of the parties of the Second International to that of the
Moscow centre, which would destroy the international revolutionary thrust
in order to shackle the workers’ movements to the interests of the Russian
state.
49. Party and Fractions
The Left never hesitated to expound with the utmost frankness the
objections that the behaviour of the centre caused. It was so in the
Italian Socialist Party; it was so in the International and even before
Stalin himself. When the comrades of the Left were forced in 1925 to
dissolve the Intesa Committee, they obeyed, but declared:
In the face of a material imposition, we remember above all to
stay at our post as soldiers of the Communist Party and of the
International, which we will maintain with an iron will, without ever
renouncing opposition, through tireless criticism, of those methods
that we consider to be in conflict with the interest and the future of
our cause”
(“Un documento indegno di comunisti” L’Unità,
18 July 1925).
In “The Opportunist Danger and the International” (Stato Operaio, July
1925) we wrote, without diplomacy:
“We believe in the possibility that the International will fall
into opportunism … The most glorious and brilliant historical
precedents cannot guarantee a movement, even and above all a
revolutionary vanguard movement, against the possibility of internal
revisionism. The guarantees against opportunism cannot consist in the
past but must be present and timely at all times.
“We do not see serious inconveniences in an exaggerated concern
for the opportunist danger. Of course the criticism and alarmism made
for fun are very regrettable, but... it is certain that they will
have no means to weaken the movement in any way and will be easily
overcome. While the danger is very serious if, on the contrary, as
unfortunately happened in so many precedents, the opportunist disease
is growing before one has dared somewhere to vigorously give the
alarm. Criticism without error does not cause even one thousandth of
the harm caused by error without criticism.
“Comrade Girone puts the question in a simple and clear way when he
says that everything the leaders of the International say and do is a
matter for which we claim the right to discuss, and to discuss means
being able to doubt that something has been said and done wrong,
regardless of any prerogative attributed to groups, men and parties.
Is it a question of repeating the holy apologia of freedom of thought
and criticism as the right of the individual? No, of course, it is a
question of establishing the physiological way of functioning and
working of a revolutionary party, which must conquer, not preserve
achievements of the past, invade the territories of the enemy, not
close off its own with trenches and cordons sanitaires”.
Therefore, to avoid splits and fractions, and even the mere loss of
individual militants, the party has at its disposal the only instrument of
the right revolutionary policy, the only physiological activity to prevent
degeneration. And then back to the work of study, sculpting, clarification
and demonstration of the rightness of the programmatic bases.
Incidentally, nothing prevents the comrades who are the bearers of
misunderstandings of our doctrine from participating in the work of
clarification, of sculpting those aspects that require greater clarity. A
process that also holds the secret to obtaining a correct response to
orders, and also to the lack of orders, when the comrade must act without
being able to discuss these with the party organs.
50. Anticipation of Future Society
A party therefore exists in that it defends not just the perspective of
a communist future, but also a doctrine (theorisation and systematisation
of the peculiar characteristics, collective interests and historical and
immediate tasks of the class) and a method of operating (i.e., political
activity and organisation of the struggle). For us, the party has always
been a synthesis of a school of thought and a method of action.
All this is irrespective of the size the party has at a given historical
moment, be it as number of members or geographical extent.
Even accepting the party’s restricted dimensions, we must realise
that we are preparing the true party, sound and efficient at the same
time, for the momentous period in which the infamies of the
contemporary social fabric will compel the insurgent masses to return
to the vanguard of history; a resurgence that could once again fail if
there is no party; a party that is compact and powerful, rather than
inflated in numbers, the indispensable organ of the revolution.
Painful as the contradictions of this period are, they can be overcome
by drawing the dialectical lessons from the bitter disappointments of
times past, and by courageously signalling the dangers that the Left
warned about, and denounced as they appeared, along with all the
insidious forms in which the ominous opportunist infection reveals
itself time and time again”
(“Supplementary Theses on the
Historical task, the Action and the Structure of the World Communist
Party”, 1966).
As a conclusion, one should not think that the party looks like a
traditional army unit, in which every behaviour and statement is looked
upon with suspicion and subjected to stringent controls. Nor is the party
a phalanstery surrounded by impassable walls”
, suspicious of
external contamination, which in reality cannot be avoided, if for no
other reason than the succession of comrades of a thousand origins, and of
generations with different backgrounds and experiences. In reality the
common work, and the common goal, make comrades linked by “fraternal
consideration”; in the party there is a tendency to give life to a
strongly anti-bourgeois environment, which, despite the conditioning due
to the immersion in this inhuman society, determines an anticipation of
the characteristics of the future communist society. The party as “
anticipation
of the future society”
is the synthesis of what a militant feels
and lives, while he offers his life to that great upheaval of human
history that will make humanity leap, in Engels’ meaning, from the kingdom
of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.