[GM7] Bases of Party Action in the Field of Proletarian Economic Struggles Pt. 1

1. – THE 1926-1945 HISTORICAL PERIOD

1926 represents for the world proletariat a crucial year that concludes the defeat of the revolutionary movement after World War I: in this year the Sixth Enlarged Executive of the Communist International is held in Moscow in which the Italian Left and the Russian Opposition led by Trotsky fight their last battle against the counterrevolutionary forces of Stalinism now reigning in Russia and master of the International. Held in the same year is the Lyon Congress of the Communist Party of Italy in which the Left will be artificially outnumbered by the Ordinovist and Centrist current subject to Stalin.

Two terrible defeats of the world proletariat also mark this year: the defeat of the general strike in England, which would be followed with the massacre of the Chinese proletariat in Shanghai by the nationalist forces of the Kuomintang the following year. Both of these defeats were the result of the “nationalist” policy of Stalinism, which sacrificed the revolutionary possibilities of the world proletariat to the State interests of Russia and its diplomatic needs. From 1926 onward the Communist International became an agency of Russian State interests and the counter-revolutionary policy of Stalinism.

The revolutionary Communist Party no longer exists, and the forces that had fought against the prevalence of Stalinist opportunism in the International either hold to consistently Marxist positions, trying to draw the balance of the disastrous defeat, but shrinking more and more organizationally as the Italian Left, or they abandon the very terrain of Marxism by falling back into anarcho-syndicalism on the one hand, and on the other, like Trotsky’s current, into a truly opportunist practice aimed at swimming up the unfavorable current by all means and by all expedients and, as a result, self-destructing as revolutionary forces.

The interwar events are well known. If in 1928, on Moscow’s orders, there’s an improvised upsurge in the struggle against the opportunism of the socialist and social-democratic parties, which are equated with fascism (the theory of “social-fascism”), in 1933 we are at the “Pact of unity of action” between the Communist Party of Italy and the Italian Socialist Party in an anti-fascist function, and the same alliance, between the new Stalinist opportunism and the old social-democratic, is implemented in all the countries of Europe: in Spain and France in 1936, under the name of “Popular Front”.

But alliance between old and new opportunism necessarily means alliance with one’s respective bourgeoisie and its interests in all countries. In fact, from 1933 onward, all so-called “workers’” parties agree to instill in the proletariat the idea that the defense of their own living and working conditions must be subordinated to the defense of national interests, to the alliance between all classes of the population “in order for fascism to not advance”.

More, depending on the contingent interests of the Russian State, Stalinist parties indicate the campaign of “popular alliance” with fascism itself, as it was in 1935 in Italy. The fronts of World War II are prepared and the proletariat is deployed there, leading it to forget even its most basic interests in the name of defending the “higher interests” of “the people”, the “nation”, the “fatherland”.

This betrayal of the parties of the Third International enabled capitalism to easily overcome the world crisis, 1929-1933. In the U.S., as in all European states, all “political forces” took sides on the need not to weaken “the national economy” and therefore not only did not direct in a revolutionary sense the defense actions for bread and work that the proletariat spontaneously undertook, but openly sided against them.

This allowed the capitalist State to undertake the “welfare” and corruption measures of the working class that the American New Deal had adopted from fascism, but which had their equivalent in all the states of Europe. The proletariat was gradually being accustomed to see itself no longer as a class with interests opposed to the other classes in society and organically linked on an international scale, but as a “component” of the nation, of the people, to whose “general” interests it had to sacrifice its own needs. On either side of the future war fronts the exact same flag was waved: national class solidarity, national defense, people instead of class.

It was the flag, as we have shown, raised by fascism and its pseudo-unions against the traditional red and class unions. It’s thus clear that while in the countries under open dictatorship (Italy and Germany) no work was undertaken to validly oppose the regime’s State unions and to resurrect class unions, proletarian energies were directed to the popular struggle against fascism on the thesis that it didn’t defend the interests of the whole nation well; in countries where dictatorship masked in democratic forms remained, the tradition was established within the proletariat of a trade unionism willing to sacrifice everything to the defense of the State and the regime, willing to sabotage any strike on the grounds that it weakened the national economy, willing to sign, as in Switzerland, eternal pacts between labor and capital on the basis of the national interests common to all classes. In Spain, France, England, Switzerland, and even in Italy the process of formation of this new trade unionism, which the party rightly called “tricolored”, nationalist, is particularly visible.

The difference between fascist trade unionism and tricolored trade unionism is thus not in their respective policies: both subordinate the defense of workers’ immediate economic interests to the needs of the fatherland and the national economy. The fundamental difference is in the organizational form whereby in some capitalist countries, in the strongest and in those where the class struggle has not reached critical limits, just as it has been possible for the capitalist State to maintain democratic forms, it has been possible to maintain formally “independent” trade union bodies, formally with workers’ voluntary membership even though they are essentially tied to the fate of the capitalist regime and its preservation.

This formal difference is not without significance being the result of historical events whereby the capitalist State has been able to submit the proletariat without having to resort to the supreme test of strength that occurs when the State is forced to present itself before the masses openly and at gunpoint as the expression of the interests of the ruling classes, attempting to beat back proletarian struggles by direct violence and encapsulating the proletariat by necessity in bodies of a forced and coercive character, i.e., compulsory trade unions openly dependent on the State and part of its apparatus.

2. – FASCISM AND DEMOCRACY

The party has always maintained that the form of capitalism’s dictatorial rule expressed in parliamentary and democratic form is not only not the most conducive to the unleashing of the class struggle, so that it should be defended and kept up at all costs as the opportunists propagandize, but it’s the most unfavorable in that it indicates that the proletariat is unable to engage in any action likely to be dangerous for the class enemy, and that the bourgeoisie is able to resist it without needing to come to the supreme confrontation on the level of open violence.

The work of opportunist parties and ideologies, the corruption achieved by the handouts that the bourgeoisie rains on the proletariat, and the weakness of the class revolutionary party mean that the capitalist State can dominate while maintaining the democratic mask without being forced to unmask itself in an attempt to crush the proletariat by open violence. Accordingly, in 1921 and 1922, the Communist Party of Italy, far from weeping over fascist and State violence, saw in it the demonstration that capitalism had no other means of maintaining power and proclaimed to the proletariat that not only must it not yield, but it was necessary to meet the adversary’s challenge by descending on its own ground, that of armed violence for the destruction of the bourgeois State and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship. Even when the challenge was lost for the proletariat, the party judged the experience it had been able to acquire in the course of the long struggle as positive, and its main task was in keeping to the proletariat this valuable experience and in preventing the resurgence in the bosom of the class of the democratoid, pacifist and populist illusions which then prevailed again under the accursed name of “anti- fascism”.

The same problem arises with regard to trade union bodies. The fact that the capitalist State has succeeded in subjugating workers’ bodies to the defense of its interests, de facto and through a thousand ties, but that it has been able to achieve this result by keeping their organization formally free and voluntary is a negative fact of the greatest importance. It indicates that the bourgeoisie succeeded in corrupting the proletariat and that it did not need to destroy its class organizations, but that they “voluntarily” submitted to the demands of the State and Capital, through their own opportunist leaders, through the influence of privileged working-class categories; it indicates that the proletarian class did not have the strength to prevent its own organized structures from falling into the hands of the class enemies, and that the organized proletariat accepted the submission of its economic interests to the “higher interests” of the nation.

This result, essential for its own preservation, capitalism was able to achieve in the aftermath of the defeat of the great revolutionary wave after World War I, but not because it had discovered new and unknown recipes for its survival, as generations of anti-Marxists have pretended to believe, but because the balance of power on the world scale had become favorable to it, both because of the demoralization that took over in the class after the great defeats and, above all, because of the destruction of the revolutionary class party resulting from the Stalinist victory in Russia and the turn, guns and baggage in hand, of the parties of the Third International into the opportunist camp.

These parties, having made common cause with the old social-democratic parties in all countries, have worked constantly by their side by all means to dismantle any hope of liberation in the oppressed masses, to reaffirm in the minds of the proletarians the idea of a necessary link, one to be safeguarded between their interests and those of the economy, the nation, the fatherland. It’s the combined effect of these negative events that allowed the capitalist State to rain down its “reformist and welfare” measures on the working class in the various countries, to guarantee through them a minimum of survival for the proletarian masses and the industrial countries, and to concretize in them the illusion, harshly and bloodily paid for by the crushing of colonial and underdeveloped peoples, that class economic interests could be defended by submitting them to the general interests of the nation and the State.

Today, in the face of the first beginnings of the world capitalist crisis this illusion shatters into pieces, but the proletarians of Europe are faced with the crisis while lacking their class economic organisms, which have passed in fifty years over to the enemy, and need to recapture or reconstitute them if they do not want their material conditions of existence to be crushed by capitalist pressure.

The European and world working class in this effort it must undertake has to its credit only, on the one hand, the thrust of its material conditions, which will become stronger and stronger, and on the other hand the consistent direction of the revolutionary class party. It has against it all the forces of the bourgeoisie and of opportunism, including in the front rank that which expresses itself in the thousand pseudo-revolutionary grouplets which infest the present panorama and which threaten to deflect the first thrusts of even narrow nuclei of the proletariat from the correct direction in which the efforts of the workers must go: reconstitution of class economic bodies, rebirth of class trade unions on the basis of the all-out and unremitting defense of living and working conditions.

3. – ADDRESSES AND PERSPECTIVES CHARACTERISTIC OF THE CLASS PARTY

If speaking of Marxism and revolutionary theory is of any purpose it consists in the fact that the use of theory enables the party to read the events and the historical path that the class has taken, thus succeeding in drawing from it experiences and lessons that neither each worker individually nor each proletarian generation can draw from it and yet which are vital for establishing the terms in which the working class will have to engage in its future battles.

The primordial characteristic that distinguishes the class party from all others is thus the ability to explain the situation in which the working class finds itself today as a result of its past events and vicissitudes. The class party is nothing other than that body which can consistently demonstrate to proletarians that the revolution is the result of a process of material vicissitudes and point out precisely in today’s negative situation the symptoms and paths of tomorrow’s recovery.

This is why we insist on presenting the world’s transition from the class unions of the early post- WW1 period to the “tricolored” unions of today as the effect of real events and of the power relations between classes, relations which in the last half-century have been consistently unfavorable to the world working class. Power relations that the incipient crisis of capitalism will overturn by exploding the uncontrollable contradictions of the mode of production and allowing the proletarian class to attempt again its “assault on heaven”.

Thus, faced with the situation that saw world capitalism overcoming with impunity and without serious consequences such massive crises as that of 1929-33 and World War II, and still traversing a quarter century of “peaceful development”, all the operetta revolutionaries set about “patching up” and “modernizing” Marxist doctrine, which they said was no longer adequate to express the reality of a supposed “neo-capitalism” that Marx couldn’t have known. Myriads of alleged revolutionaries spoke of capitalism’s “now acquired ability to overcome crises, to have no more crises, etc”.

Faced with the situation, which saw the European working class immobilized in subordination to the interests of their respective fatherlands and nations and a participant in the profits of their own bourgeoisie, every pseudo-revolutionary felt obliged to theorize the “now accomplished integration of the working class into the system”, to go in search of the “structural changes that have occurred in the working class” and to attribute the role of protagonist of the revolution, wrested from the now “integrated” proletariat, to the spurious and petty student classes or at best to the generous, but doomed to defeat, democratic and national movements of the so-called “third world”.

Thus, faced with the realization that workers’ trade union struggles were now taking place, at least in capitalistically developed countries, in the forms and within the limits permitted by “bourgeois legality” and capitalist economic interests, any and all wordsmiths of the revolution felt compelled to declare that “the struggle for wages is now congenial and even favorable to capitalist development”, that “there’s no longer any point in economic strikes and economic organization”, that the proletariat must now, leaving aside the battle for the defense of daily bread that had become “absorbable” by capitalism, move on to that for “revolutionary ideals”, which, of course, everyone then pointed to in his or her own way taking from time to time as a model the most fashionable figure in the public square or the latest “novelty” from bourgeois universities.

This truly opportunist and defeatist attitude is enough to show that the current self-described revolutionary grouptlets express nothing but the despair and disorientation typical of the petty-bourgeoisie in the face of the overwhelming power of counterrevolution. Their political position can be defined en bloc and incontestably: it’s the position of those who, when things start to go wrong, throw down the rifle and make off with the excuse that they’ve discovered a more effective fighting front.

The class party distinguished itself from this whole chorus of defectors by reaffirming from the outset of the unfavorable cycle in 1926 and making this thesis the basis of all its action:

«There are objective situations when the balance of forces are unfavourable to revolution (although perhaps closer to the revolution in time than others – marxism teaches us that historical evolution takes place at very different rates), in these situations, the wish to be the majority party of the masses and enjoy an overriding political influence at all costs, can only at such times be achieved by renouncing communist principles and methods and engaging in social-democratic and petty-bourgeois politics instead. It must be clearly stated that in certain situations, past, present and future, the majority of the proletariat has adopted, does, and inevitably will adopt a non-revolutionary stance, either through inertia or collaboration with the enemy as the case may be. Nevertheless, despite everything, the proletariat everywhere and always remains the potentially revolutionary class entrusted with the revolutionary counter-attack; but only insofar as within it there exists the communist party and where, without ever renouncing coherent interventions when appropriate, this party knows how to avoid taking paths, which although apparently the easiest way to instant popularity, would divert it from its task and thereby remove the essential point of support for ensuring the proletariat’s recovery» (Lyon Theses, 1926).

The same position was reaffirmed in the 1951 Characteristic Theses:

«The party will present no new doctrines but will instead reaffirm the full validity of the fundamental theses of revolutionary Marxism, which are amply confirmed by facts and falsified and betrayed by opportunism to cover up retreats and defeats (…) Because the proletariat is the last of the classes to be exploited, and consequently in its turn will exploit no one, the doctrine which arose alongside the class can neither be changed nor reformed. The development of capitalism, from its inception until now, has confirmed and continues to confirm the Marxist theorems set out in the fundamental texts. The alleged “innovations” and “teachings” of the last 30 years have only confirmed that capitalism is still alive and must be overthrown. The central focus point of the actual doctrinal position of our movement is therefore the following: no revision whatsoever of the primary principles of the proletarian revolution (…)

«No movement can triumph in the historical reality without theoretical continuity, which is the condensation of the experience of past struggles. Consequently, party members are not granted personal freedom to elaborate and conjure up new schemes or explanations of the contemporary social world. They are not free as individuals to analyse, criticise and make forecasts, whatever their level of intellectual competence may be. The Party defends the integrity of a theory which is not the product of blind faith, but one whose content is the science of the proletarian class; developed from centuries of historical material, not by thinkers, but under the impulse of material events, and reflected in the historical consciousness of one revolutionary class and crystallized in its party. Material events have only confirmed the doctrine of revolutionary Marxism».