The Tendencies Within the 3rd International

“Avanti” issue 16 summarily reports a resolution adopted by the Moscow Executive Committee of the Communist International whose importance is easy to see, even through the incongruities of the article.

The Moscow Committee, after having discussed a few controversial points of the tactics of communists, has decided, taking a position on this issue, to cancel the term of office formed a few months ago in Amsterdam for Western Europe and America. The reason for that was that this office defends all those positions opposed to that of the Committee.

The fundamental criterion for centralization of revolutionary action certainly allows the central organ of the International, in the interval separating the regular international Congresses, to decide the direction that must be followed in action. However, the Executive Committee itself, while charging Zinoviev, Radek, and Bukharin to prepare theses which contain its point of view on controversial issues, postpones the final decision to the next International Communist Congress, which promises a really extraordinary importance.

It is however interesting to establish clearly – at least when it is possible on the basis of information and communications which we have – the terms of the controversy, because it is foreseeable that Moscow’s resolution will be exploited for justifying equivocal and possibilist electoralism that the Italian Socialist Party practices in the shadow of the Soviet flag.

The issues that have led to the intervention of the Moscow comrades reflect in substance the position of the opposing tendencies of the communist movement in Germany.

It is to them that we must therefore refer to understand Moscow’s resolution, according to which communists must not renounce using parliamentary weapons nor conquering the economic organizations that, today, are in the hands of the social democrats.

It is precisely the position of the German tendencies that has put on the same level these two issues of a different nature and weight.

This is what we recalled in an another article published in issue 11 of “Il Soviet” entitled “The German Communist Party”.

On the same subject, there exists an article by a comrade from the German opposition published in an Amsterdam column, and reproduced in issue 43 (year 1) of “L’Ordine Nuovo” and an article by Boris Souvarine in issue 1, year 2, of the same newspaper. In addition, “Avanti”, in the issue cited above, announced that the German opposition formed in the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany, independent of the Communist Party which, in its conference in Heidelberg in 1919, expelled the minority from its fold.

So remember the point of view of these two tendencies, or rather these two parties, not without having added that the tendencies of the German movement are, in reality, much larger, and that it would be very difficult, for someone who is not in the same movement, to define with precision.

The opposition hurls accusations of hesitation and weakness against the Central Party that are not really unjustified. In the latest issues, we have dealt with the attitude of communists during the recent attempted military coup, and we have also reported severe criticisms of Bela Kun’s attitude toward the leadership with regard to the Independents. The accusation of connivance with the Independents, stated by the opposition, consequently appears to be plausible. As for the accusation of lack of revolutionary fervor, we have many reservations, for it is often proffered by impatient people that have a very simplistic idea of revolution that brings them to continually protest against the leaders who would delay. In this case, however, it seems the leadership of the KPD was not up to the job of the events.

When we turn to the examination of the programme and the directives, we have to consider contrariwise how well-founded the reproach of syndicalist heterodoxy is made to the opposition.

It is in reality moving further from sound Marxist conceptions and follows a utopian and petty-bourgeois method.

The political party, says the opposition, does not have preponderant importance to the revolutionary struggle. It has to be developed on the economic field without centralized leadership.

There must arise, against the old unions fallen into the hands of the opportunists, new organizations, based on factory councils. It is enough that the workers act in this new type of organization for their action to be communist and revolutionary.

This tendency’s electoral abstentionism comes from the fact that it refuses any importance to political action and the party in general, that is to say the negation of the political party as an instrument central to the revolutionary struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat; this abstentionism is bound up with a syndicalist critique – for which action would have to be concentrated on the economic field – and a libertarian critique – which brings up the usual horror of “leaders”.

We will not repeat our criticisms of these conceptions that are a little like those of Turin’s “Ordine Nuovo”.

Proof that such conceptions are the result of a petty-bourgeois degeneration of Marxism is given by the fact that they have given rise to the famous “national bolshevism” of Laufenberg and Wolffheim, according to which it envisages an alliance between the revolutionary proletariat and the militarist bourgeoisie for… a holy war against the Entente. This strange conception is so pathological that it does not merit for an instant a longer critique.

It is true that this absurd idea of “national bolshevism” is encountering resistance within the opposition.

We have explained in the article mentioned that we adhere to the theses from the leadership of the Communist Party of Germany which timely condemns all these deviations and reaffirms the political character of the communist Revolution, the importance of the task of the class party, and the necessity of fighting off syndicalism and all federalism. However, we remain in disagreement on the parliamentary question.

Our abstentionism – we repeat – derives precisely from the great importance that we place on the political task that falls to the Communist Party in the present historical period: insurrectionary conquest of political power, establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the soviet system.

As the bigger obstacle to this struggle are the traditions and the parties of the bourgeois democracy and the ramifications that it connects to the working masses through “2nd International”-type socialism, we affirm that it is indispensable to break off all contact between the revolutionary movement and the bourgeois representative organs and that it is necessary to separate ourselves from the putrefying corpse of parliamentary democracy.

So what is the meaning of the resolutions of the Executive Committee of the 3rd International?

They denounce, with reason, the directives to boycott present unions in order to give birth to new economic organizations. By its nature, the economic union is always a proletarian organization, and it can and must be penetrated by communist propaganda in the direction very well indicated by Zinoviev’s circular note on communist action in the unions.

Of course, in some cases, the reformist leaders’ corruption can reach such a degree and take such a form that it becomes necessary to abandon such a totally rotten corpse to itself.

Moscow has condemned this pretension to consider as a revolutionary method the constitution ex novo of other economic organs like the industrial unions, the factory councils (Turin), the Shop Stewards (England), in affirming to have resolved the problem of leading the proletariat to communism, an error reminiscent of the syndicalists (surviving in the organs that want to adhere to Moscow, like the I.W.W. of America, the Spanish C.N.T., and the Italian Syndicalist Union). On the other hand, it claimed the revolutionary function of political action of the “Marxist, strong, centralized” party as said by Lenin, who said the proletarian revolution is, in the acute phase, less a process of economic transformation than a struggle for power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which culminates in the constitution of a new form of state conditioned on the existence of proletarian councils as political organs of the class and on the predominance of the communist party in these councils.

Secondly, the Moscow Committee has condemned electoral abstentionism. In this regard, it is necessary to make a clear distinction. Abstentionism derived from the errors of conception indicated above – and that is above all an apoliticism called to fall back into the arms of its twin: laborist and reformist apoliticism – leans on false premises.

But abstentionism supported on the grounds of Marxist doctrine, that we defend as well as other currents in the International, has nothing to do with the previous and demands its own place, and even orthodoxy, in the Communist International. It will be supported in the International Congress, possibly against the theses of the Moscow Committee, with the arguments that have been fully developed in our newspaper and in our other foreign communist newspapers.

Our fraction’s C.C. has received in Florence the charge to establish closer links between the currents, the newspapers, and the militants of this tendency, and it is putting itself to work in this direction.

As for the disavowal of the Amsterdam Office, entrusted to excellent comrades whose activity we have often commented on, we can advance no judgement. It does not seem accurate to say the opinions of this office and of the conference are in all points opposed to those of Moscow. The respective theses (see “Comunismo” issue 13 and “L’Ordine Nuovo” issue 43) demonstrate it.

The theses on syndicalism contradict themselves somewhat (maybe it is the result of a hasty collaboration), but from point 12 on, they are correctly attached to condemn neo-syndicalism.

On one point, the Amsterdam resolution is unacceptable: it acted to admit the factory councils to the International. It is evident that the International is a political organ and can only understand political parties. The economic organs will be able to form the Union International, which is already on the way to being built, and which will adhere and will submit to the politics of the International.

However, we would not want that Amsterdam is condemned for its just attitude, energetic and intransigent, towards opportunists, independents, and reconstructors. We do not believe that Moscow abandons its positions of fierce criticism against the renegades of Kautsky’s kind. But we will deal with these delicate points when we get better information.

A last consideration. Moscow’s decision and theses that follow may well be opposed to our tendency’s positions, hostile in general to any use of bourgeois democracy. But they may, in no way, be invoked to justify Italian electoralist maximalism, shaky in doctrine, and equivocal in practice since the collaboration with Nitti.

As we have stated many times, Italian electoralism is not practiced by communists, but by a conglomeration of communists (at least nominally) and social democrats. That is why it is worse than openly reformist and legalitarian parliamentarism, practiced by those that, in other countries, are out of the Moscow International and are against it, are condemning revolutionary action and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Penetration in parliament and in the towns are carried out here by means of extremist demagogues, but with a character and a content that resembles, not their revolutionary negation, but reformist routine.

As for the P.S.I., they are not in line with Moscow. We hunt the slanderers of Soviet Russia and those who speculate on “electoral bolshevism”, and we will finally have the right to debate the big questions of principle and of communist tactics!

It is on this terrain that, moving to abandon the old party, our current, small but resolute, wants a place to finally be able to have its say on vital issues of the communist International.