Foreword of the 1953 to the Dialogue with Stalin

FOREWORD (1953)

The following pages are taken from the Internationalist Communist Party’s periodical, Il Progamma Comunista, which for years, under the title “Il Filo del Tempo”, has been publishing a series of studies on the essence of revolutionary Marxism and its reconfirmation through the events of the current historical period.

Some recent instalments of these writings have been devoted to Stalin’s article released last November, on the problems of the present Russian economy, under the title “Dialogue with Stalin”, and subsequent ones have reiterated and clarified the subject.

This is the consequent development of the attitude of criticism and contestation that in three successive phases, from 1919 to the present, was held by the communist left, strong especially in Italy where it constituted the prevailing majority of the communist party, founded in Livorno in 1921.

The forces of this current of ours have been diminishing, and today consist of a few groups in some countries, and a small but homogeneous and clear movement in Italy. As historical events pushed the militants and the masses in the opposite direction (for reasons that our criticism has evidenced and explained) and above all with the systematic work carried out from the end of the war to the present, the content of the protest formulated against the great movement that had the 1917 revolution in Russia as its fulcrum and is still headed by Moscow, has become more profound. We recall here its three main aspects. The current opinion, and also that of the largest layers of the working class, considers the movement “from Lenin to Stalin” as a continuous one, and therefore also the current, theoretical, organised and militant expression of the radical and revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist world, as a development of the vision of Marx and Engels, as it was vindicated against revisionist and opportunist degenerations by Lenin, and by the magnificent revolutionary group and party that with him won the October, and rebuilt the International.

In the beginning, this great historical movement had among its most resolute and ardent groups the left wing of Italian socialism, which after the First World War ruthlessly broke with the reformists and pro-reformists, although these were not to blame for supporting the 1914-18 imperialist war in Italy. This was followed by the three stages of criticism and increasingly serious rupture, which correspond to the three stages of the involution of the movement that still wants to call itself communist and Soviet, the three stages of the new, and post-Leninist, opportunism, worse than the old.

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First disagreement: in the tactical field. The most difficult problem of Marxist determinism is that of the Party’s active intervention, of the methods it adopts to hasten the path of class revolution. Then, in full agreement on the general theory and the need to purge the organisation of all non-communists, in agreement also on the fact that tactics, the Party’s praxis, are resolved differently in different major and principal historical phases, the left contested the tactics of “conquering the masses” based on calls for joint action with the social-democratic and opportunist parties, which had a following in the proletariat, but political activity that was evidently counter-revolutionary. The left denied the methods of the “political united front”, and worse still of “workers’ government” into which those parties and ours were to bind themselves: it foresaw that such a method would lead to the weakening of the working class and the degeneration of the revolutionary communist parties in the west; even though it was clear that in the still non-capitalist east the tactics, provided they were co-ordinated with the unique aim of world revolution, could and should be formally different. This early dissent provoked famous debates between 1919 and 1926, and ended in organisational separation.

Second disagreement: in the political and historical field. What the contradictors of our current declared impossible and ruinous in the first phase took place on the historical scale: namely the return to collaboration between the opposing classes in developed bourgeois society, identical to that which had brought about the disaster and betrayal  of the Second International. In the countries of “fascist” bourgeois totalitarianism, the communist parties and the international centre in Moscow were led not only to propose but to implement political alliances, no longer with “socialist” parties alone, but with all bourgeois-democratic parties. The purpose of this new type of alliance was not to lead these parties onto revolutionary and class terrain, which was clearly untenable, but to employ the proletarian communist party for the – reactionary – purpose of restoring life to bourgeois liberty, bourgeois parliamentarianism, and bourgeois constitutionalism. It was clear that, if the communist parties in the previous phase had not turned into revolutionaries the following of the pseudo-proletarian parties, in this one they had descended below them and turned into anti-revolutionary parties themselves. At the same time the Russian state and all the parties of the International – which later came to formal self-liquidation – at the outbreak of the Second World War made alliance pacts, first with the capitalist states of the very fascist countries against which the “freedom bloc” had been launched, then with the countries of the western capitalist democracies, again with that rotten ideological baggage.

Third disagreement: in the economic and social field. After the end of the world war with the military victory of the “democrats”, a conflict between the allies has not been long in coming; and in the prospect of the possible third imperialist war, the Moscow-inspired movement, despite the said indelible historical precedents, claims to gain the support of the world working class by claiming to be always faithful to the communist doctrines and to prepare a new anti-capitalist policy, without compromises. A war between the former allies, and in any case the defence of Russia with arms, or with partisan insurrections, or with a pacifist campaign against its aggressors, is supposed to be communist policy, since a socialist economy would have been built in Russia. The proof that, come tomorrow’s imperialist war sooner or later, divide the fronts of it as you will, that policy is neither communist nor revolutionary, lies in the assumption that a proletarian and socialist economy exists in the Russian country alone is false. The following pages provide such proof, according to the Marxist doctrine, and to the factual data confirmed by Stalin.

At this point the opposition is one of doctrine and principle, and thus it is clear that the attitudes held by the “Communist” parties outside Russia – no less than in Russia – with a varied series of ideological renunciations in economic, social, administrative, political, legal philosophical and religious matters, in the position of classist antitheses, are not – and vain it was to think so – mere expedients, attitudes, stratagems, with the aim of cleverly concentrating greater forces, which at the right moment would reveal themselves as red, extremist, revolutionary.

In accordance with the historical aim pursued for social organisation in Russia – which here is shown to be, as an inevitable effect of the failed European communist revolution, not the construction of socialism, but of pure capitalism, spread in a Eurasian environment until yesterday backward in comparison to the Euramerican West – the aim pursued by the “communist” parties remains closed in the field of constitutional, conservative and conformist principles, in fictitious and empty alternatives of internal capitalist directions often opposite to the turn of “the wheel of history”. All their political action results in the preservation in life of capitalism itself, which had taught all it could and was well prepared to die, hence in the delay even of “socialism in Russia”.

No less representative of this monstrous and fatal shift in the plans of class warfare are, both in Russia and in the satellite movement, the attitudes of science, literature and art, aping without taste or grandeur the old behaviours with which the modern bourgeoisie, then young and revolutionary as in the vision of the Manifesto, presented itself with overbearing audacity on the scenes of history.

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Since it is a century-long tradition that the struggle of the forces wishing to stem the tide of proletarian, socialist and Marxist movement cover themselves with workerist flags and usurp the words of socialism and Marxism, it is no wonder that the name of communism has undergone the same destiny, and the October Bolshevik–Leninist and “Cominternist” traditions have served and continue to serve for the same confusion of names, terms, movements and parties. Nor does it matter anymore that there are few groups fighting to restore authentic communism against the “official” communism that boasts millions of followers.

Since it is no longer a matter of divergence of methods of manoeuvre and historical paths tending towards the same and highest point of arrival (the cycle of the deep contrast being completely developed); since it is now a matter of divergence on the aims and ends of the movement, which is the same as the divergence on fundamental doctrine and principles, the number of followers, the fame and notoriety of the more-or-less illustrious and valiant leaders no longer matter. It is the typical forms of social production and organisation of capitalism and socialism that are opposed and contend, it is the integral historical socialist and revolutionary claim defined again in all its dazzling light that matters, as opposed to a faded dishwater of stupid and vain social rehash.

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This way of posing today’s great historical question, all based on the definition of the aims, and not at all on the ethical or aesthetic nature of the means, or on purported recipes for reversing at once the effects of the tremendous landslide suffered by the revolutionary movement of the modern proletariat, serves to clearly distinguish us not only from the turbid Stalinist tide, but also from a varied series of small groups and self-styled “politicians” prey to that bewilderment and dispersion which is inevitable in hurricane-force headwinds.

The methods of repression, of crushing that Stalinism applied to those who resisted it on all sides, finding ample explanation in all the criticism of its development that has just been recalled, must not give any foothold to any kind of condemnation that would in the least air repentance with respect to our theses on violence, dictatorship and terror as historical weapons of proclaimed use: that would remotely be the first step towards the hypocritical propaganda of the currents of the “free world” and their lying claim to tolerance and sacred respect for the human person. Marxists, unable to be protagonists in history today, can wish for nothing better than the catastrophe, social, political and military, of American dominion over the capitalist world. We therefore have nothing to do with the call for more liberal or democratic methods, flaunted by ultra-equivocal political groups and proclaimed by states that in reality had the most ferocious origins, such as Tito’s.

Since the starting point of the whole degeneration was a talent in tactics and manoeuvres, and its nefarious influence, our current gave an exact critique, reaffirmed by the history of over thirty years; we can have nothing in common with the badly defined parties of the Fourth International, or Trotskyists, who would like to reapply that method in order to win over the masses from the control of the Stalinist parties, making to the latter unheeded demands for common fronts, which by necessity arrive at the same point, in substituting empty, rhetorical and demagogic claims for communist and revolutionary ends. In addition, this movement has an absolutely non-Marxist conception of the stage of development of the forms of production in Russia, contradictory to the thesis shared by Trotsky himself, that without proletarian political revolution in Europe there can be no proletarian economy in Russia.

Even less can we approach other scattered circles in which they try to attribute the unfavourable situation to errors in the general doctrine of the movement, and allow each adept to elaborate his own projects of updating and correcting Marxism in laughable “free discussions”, giving a false solution to the problem of theoretical consciousness, which does not rest on geniuses, nor on consulted majorities of large and small bases, but is a datum whichoverrides generations and continents in its invariant unity. No less falsely do they solve the problem of the resumption of action, thinking that all consists in giving the masses a new revolutionary leadership, each one foolishly dreaming of joining this general staff and carrying the marshal’s baton in his backpack, since too many half-men have succeeded in doing so.

The battle has come on the terrain of the end, and not the means, on which, on the other hand, we have an abundance of lively and powerful material suited to favourable times. The time has come to place before the blindfolded eyes of the revolutionary class the essence of what it will have to conquer, not to parade it and harangue it in dramatic tones worthy of momentous days.

The Marxist knows that when the hour of the great deployment and the great clash rings, it is history itself, stirred from the volcanic underground of class contrast, that kicks the decorative people of heroes and leaders onto the scene, and that it will never fail to find them.

Knowing full well that we are not in the decade of the revolutionary kick, we happily dispense with illustrious names, and with binding ourselves to their scientifically proven uselessness.