PART IV

Ch. 1 THE PARTY STRUCTURE

Re-establishing itself on its classical foundations in 1952, our party differed not only in possessing a store of valid doctrine and theory and a correct programme and tactics, derived from applying the invariant and unbroken Marxist doctrine to the lessons of fifty years of counter-revolution, differed not only in its preparedness to fight whenever there was “the least glimmer of hope” of strengthening its connection with the proletarian masses – without ever compromising its vital principles – wherever these were compelled to struggle, even if only for partial and immediate objectives; but also, and as a consequence of the above, it differed because it had forged an organisational framework, with a centralised method of working, which was suited to the party’s tasks. This working structure is broadly defined in the quotations which follow. Since 1952 it has been based on the existence of a centre which issues instructions to the whole of the network in the form of “organisational circulars”; on frequent liaison between the centre and the various parts of the organisation engaged in various aspects of party work; on feedback from the territorial sections, groups and individual militants to the centre; and on periodic meetings of the whole of the organisation in order to take stock, via detailed reports, of the party work carried out, in both the theoretical and the practical fields, over a given period of time. The extensive material from these periodic meetings is published in the party press and forms an object of study and of further elaboration in the local and regional meetings. This structure has allowed the party to regularly publish its press organs for which contributors and distributors are required; and allowed it to continuously “fine-sculpt” the movement’s theoretical, programmatic and tactical features and make constant interventions in the thick of the workers’ struggles. In 1962, we felt it necessary to publish a specific trade union organ to enable us to co-ordinate and to get to the head of these struggles, and in 1968 we created a co-ordinating organ called “the central trade union office”.

It is indeed a possibility that this framework hasn’t been functioning properly, and consequently we support all attempts to bolster it and strengthen it by intensifying the contact between the centre and the sections and vice versa and by expecting greater regularity and precision in this two way flow by deploying at the relevant points in the party machine as much manpower as is required. Evidently as the party’s tasks intensify, and become more complicated, further instruments of co-ordination and centralisation will be required. As the number of party members increases along with the complexity of the tasks, militants will need to be screened more and more; there will have to be an ever greater specification of functions, of the appropriate organs to carry out those functions, and of the men who are allocated to those various organs. But this is something that happens organically, not voluntaristically; it is determined not by anyone’s volition but by the extent to which the party’s tasks have developed. The differentiated organs that the party possesses at any time should be the result of functional necessities arising from the party’s activity, not derived from an organisational scheme plucked from thin air, and considered necessary merely because it corresponds to an idea of a perfect party or perfect mechanism that exists in somebody’s head.

In What is to be Done, Lenin argued that, while it is true that the party’s increasingly complex organisation results from the party’s own developing tasks, it is likewise true that the forms of organisation can in their turn either favour, or restrict, the development of these tasks. That is to say, the party must at all times structure all its activities in such a way as to favour their development rather than bogging them down. So then, are the forms of organisation adopted by the party between 1952 and 1970 perhaps not adequate to contain the rapid increase in its activities, or, does the existence of these forms prevent the party from carrying out its tasks as fully as it should, or from carrying them out better? The question deserves attention and rational investigation. But on that plane alone, not on others, i.e., which are the fruit of fevered imaginations.

You may say the centralised structure of the 1952-1970 period needs to be strengthened and improved so it can better respond to the more far-reaching tasks the party now faces, but you can’t say “our existence has been that of a small circle up to now”; “we are struggling to give the party an organised form” etc. Statements of this kind not only falsify the real history of the party, which «in 1952 gave itself, in an organic and spontaneous way, a structural framework for its activity that has been put to the test over the last fifteen years» (Theses…, 1965), but can also have deadly consequences as far as the Marxist conception of the party is concerned. The first consequence might be that it can be alleged that the latter organisation never existed, because in fact the party never existed, and that it was actually a group of apprentice theoreticians, or a Marxist circle. And from this it follows that the transformation of this group, or circle, into a party was just an organisational matter and, as a consequence, the party is yet to arise, and will only do so to the extent it can forge an organisation of such and such a type. This would mean relapsing into an idealistic “organisational model” of what characterises the party, in opposition to the thinking of Marx, Lenin and the Left. But an even worse deviation would be to define whether or not a centralised organisational structure exists on the basis of organisational formalities such as statutes, rules, special types of bureaucratic machinery, etc., and State that one can only talk of an organised structure when these exist. Statements of this kind lead directly to an idealistic view of the party. Marxism has stated that there existed in the past, and will exist again, a society which, although with distinct organs and absolute centralism, did not and will not need to maintain its structural integrity by means of statutes, laws, or a specialized machinery distinct from the social body itself, which is something in fact which characterise societies divided into classes. This society will instead rely on a hierarchy of technical functions, with individuals selected to carry them out in an organic way according to their fitness for the tasks; and who will be “as necessary as they are dispensable”, knowing that they, as individuals, serve the technical functions, and not vice versa. Elsewhere we have made it clear that it is in this sense that the party prefigures future society.

In 1952, the party abandoned all internal statutory codifications and renounced all use of internal democratic mechanisms, including the convocation of “Sovereign congresses”. This was not because it was a scholarly sect or a “circle” with no organisation, but because it concluded it could give a structure to the party organisation without resorting to these mechanisms. But it didn’t renounce them with a view to eventually returning to them once the “circle” phase was over, it renounced them for good.

We will leave it to our corrected tradition to demonstrate this:

1) in 1967 (Il Programma Comunista, no 5/1967) we wrote:

     «The unstinting concern of comrades that the party organisation functions in a steady, consistent and uniform way, is focused therefore – as advised by Lenin in his Letter to a comrade – not on finding statutes, rules and constitutions, or, worse still, “specially talented” people, but rather the best way each and every comrade can contribute to the harmonious performance of those functions without which the party would cease to exist as a unifying force and guide and representative of the class. This is the only way the party can be helped – as outlined by Lenin in What is to be Done, where the newspaper is referred to as a “collective organiser” – to resolve, “on its own”, its day to day problems, and helped to decide what actions it should take. It is here we find the key to “organic centralism”; it is here we find the weapon we can rely on in the historic battle between classes, not in the empty abstraction of alleged “rules” about how perfect mechanisms should work or, even worse, sordid trials of the men, “high” and “low”, who through a process of organic selection were give the job of operating these mechanisms».

And, a bit earlier on:

     «As a real force operating in History, identifiable by its rigorous continuity, the party lives and acts (and here is our response to the second deviation) not on the basis of a set of inherited statutory norms, precepts and constitutional forms, in the way that bourgeois legalism hypocritically aspires to, or as is naively dreamed about by pre-Marxist utopianism (architect of highly elaborate structures which were plonked, fully formed, into the middle of living historical reality), but on the basis of its nature as an organism, shaped by an incessant succession of theoretical and practical battles on an unchanging line of march. As written in our 1945 Platform: “the party’s organisational norms are in keeping with the dialectical concept of its function; they do not rely on prescribed or legalistic recipes and they transcend the fetish of having to gain the approval of the majority”. It is through the discharging of its functions, all of them, not just one of them, that the party creates its organs, apparatuses and mechanisms; and in the course of this same discharging of these functions that it dismantles and recreates them too, and not by obeying metaphysical dictates or constitutional paradigms, but in response to the real and genuinely organic requirements of its development. None of these mechanisms is “theorisable”, either beforehand or in hindsight».

2) And in 1970, in confirmation of what is written above as in line with the party’s unchanging doctrine (from “In Defense of the Continuity of the Communist Program”, p.131):

«Organisation, like discipline, is not a point of departure but a point of arrival. It does not require statutory codifications or disciplinary regulations (…) Consultations, constitutions and statutes are typical of societies divided into classes, and characteristic of the parties which express, in their turn, not the historical path of one class but rather an intersection of paths, where the divergent or not fully convergent paths of several classes meet. Internal democracy and “bureaucratism”; respect for “freedom of expression” of individuals or groups, and “ideological terrorism”, are not antithetical aims; they are dialectically connected».

We draw the following conclusion. Since 1945, our party claims to have equipped itself with a centralised structure which is differentiated into a hierarchy of technical functions (“In Defense…”, p.131), and to have done it without statutes, democratic mechanisms, bureaucratic apparatuses, disciplinary procedures, expulsions, or selection of “especially talented” men. Anyone who sees in this an absence of structure is organically outside of our party because the party sees in it instead, as evidenced by all the quotations which follow: «the achievement of aspirations expressed by the Communist Left since the time of the 2^nd International» (Naples Theses) and «the elimination from our own structure of one of the initial errors of the Moscow International» (“Considerations…”).

QUOTATIONS

117 – Theses on the Historical Duty, Action and Structure of the World Communist Party… (’Theses of Naples’), 1965
     7. Since it was a case of a transition, a hand over, from a generation which had lived through the glorious struggles of the first post-war period and the Livorno split to the proletarian generation which needed to be freed from the mad elation which followed the collapse of fascism, and to have its consciousness restored of the autonomous action of the revolutionary party against all other parties, and especially against the social-democratic party; since this transition had to take place in order to reconstitute a force which was committed to the prospect of the proletarian dictatorship and terror against the big bourgeoisie and all of its obnoxious consequences, the new movement, in an organic and spontaneous way, came up with a structural form for its activity which has been subjected to a fifteen-year-long test (…)
     8. The working structure of the new movement, convinced of the importance, difficulty and historical duration of its task, which was bound to discourage dubious elements motivated by career considerations because it held no promise, indeed ruled out, any historical victories in the near future, was based on frequent meetings of envoys sent from the organized party sections. Here no debates or polemics between conflicting theses took place, or anything arising out of nostalgia for the malady of anti-fascism, and nothing needed to be voted on or deliberated over. There was simply the organic continuation of the serious historical work of handing on the fertile lessons of the past to present and future generations; to the new vanguards emerging from the ranks of the proletarian masses, beaten down, deceived, and disappointed over and over again but eventually destined to rebel against a capitalist society now in a state of purulent decomposition (…)
     This work and this dynamic is inspired by the classic teachings of Marx and Lenin, who presented the great historical revolutionary truths in the form of theses; and these reports and theses of ours, faithfully grounded in the great Marxist tradition, now over a century old, were transmitted by all those present – thanks partly to our press communications – at the local and regional meetings, where this historic material was brought into contact with the party as a whole. It would be nonsense to claim they are perfect texts, irrevocable and unchangeable, 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; and in fact all ranks of the party, even the youngest elements have always, and with increasing frequency, made remarkable contributions that are in perfect keeping with the Left’s classical line.
     It is only by developing our work along the lines indicated above that we expect to see that quantitative growth in our ranks and of the spontaneous adhesions to the party, which will one day make it a greater social force.
     9. Before moving on from the topic of the party’s formation after the Second World War, it is worth reaffirming a few outcomes which are today enshrined as characteristic party positions; insofar as they are de facto historical results, despite the limited quantitative extension of the movement, and neither discoveries of useless geniuses nor solemn resolutions made by “sovereign” congresses.
     The party soon realized that, even in an extremely unfavourable situation, even in places in which the situation was absolutely sterile, restricting the movement’s activity merely to propaganda and political proselytism is dangerous and must be avoided. At all times in all places and with no exceptions, the party must make an unceasing effort to integrate its own life with the life of the masses, and participate in its protests as well, even when these are influenced by directives in conflict with our own. It is an old thesis of left-wing Marxism that we must work in reactionary trade unions in which workers are present, and the party abhors the individualistic positions of those who disdain to set foot in them, and who go so far as to theorize the failure of the few, feeble strikes that today’s unions dare to call. In many regions the party already has a remarkable record of activity in the trade unions, although it always faces serious difficulties, and opposing forces which are greater than ours from a statistical point of view. It is important to establish that, even where such work has not really got off the ground, we must reject the position in which the small party is reduced to being a set of closed circles with no connection with the outside world, or limits itself just to recruiting members in the world of opinion, which for the Marxist is a false world if not treated as a superstructure of the world of economic conflicts. Similarly it would be wrong to divide the party or its local groupings into watertight compartments that are only active in one field, whether theory, study, historical research, propaganda, proselytism or trade union activity. This is because the very essence of our theory and of our history is that these various fields are totally inseparable, and in principle accessible to each and every comrade.
     Another position which marks a historical conquest for the party, and one which it will never relinquish, is the clear-cut rejection of all proposals to increase its membership through the calling of congresses to bring together the countless other circles and grouplets, which since the end of the war have popped up everywhere elaborating distorted and disjointed theories, or whose condemnation of Russian Stalinism and all of its local variations is the only positive thing they have to offer.

118 – Supplementary Theses… (Milan Theses) – 1966
     8 – (…) Well do we know that historical dialectics leads all fighting organisms to improve their offensive capacity by using the techniques of their enemy. From this we deduce that in the phase of armed struggle communists will have a military organization with a definite hierarchy, moving forward as one to ensure the success of the actions of the party as a whole. That is true, but simply imitating this across all areas of party activity, including the non-military ones, is pointless. The way operational directives are transmitted must be clear, but this lesson derived from bourgeois bureaucracy mustn’t make us forget how the latter can also become corrupt and degenerate, even when adopted by workers’ organisms. The organic unity of the party does not require that a comrade specifically appointed to pass on instructions from above be seen by other comrades as the personification of the party form. At the same time, this transference between the molecules which compose the party is always a two-way process; and the dynamics of each unit are integrated into the historical dynamics of the whole. The abuse of organizational formalities for no good reason has been and always will be a defect; one which is stupid, dangerous and highly suspect.

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Ch. 2 THE “PHASES” OF PARTY DEVELOPMENT

From the quotes that follow, starting with the Rome Theses of 1922 and ending with excerpts from the preface to “In Defence” published in 1970, the model of political party development typical of the revolutionary Marxist school is clearly described. Marxist theory has dissolved humanity’s old dilemma – the separation between thought and action, between theory and practice – demonstrating that these terms are in fact closely and inextricably linked. In human society it is action that determines consciousness and this is also true for the working class, whose action is determined by facts and material needs. In the class party, consciousness and action are inextricably linked and cannot exist without each other. The only difference is that the party organ is susceptible, unlike all others, to conscious action, that is, consciousness preceding action in the theatre of social struggles.

We are in the presence of the class party when, in the dynamics of a given group, the three factors already described in the Rome Theses are present: defence and definition of theory and of historical analysis; physical organisation of a militant core; intervention and activity in the actual proletarian struggle. These three tasks are contained simultaneously in every instance of party activity, because they are the tasks that define the party. The proportion of energy taken up by each of these tasks may vary according to the historical period and the objective situations in which the party acts, but none of them are ever neglected, and it remains the inclination of the party even when totally negative circumstances have reduced it to virtually nothing. In a counter-revolutionary situation like now, 95 percent of the party’s energies are devoted to the restoration of correct doctrine and only 5 percent to organizational work and intervention in labour conflicts. In a situation of revolutionary upsurge and attack on the bourgeois power, the ratio of energy will necessarily be reversed, with 95 percent of it devoted to organization and interventions in the struggle. But this depends solely and exclusively on the situation outside the party, which affects not only the more or less limited operational reach of the organization, but also imposes a particular distribution of energy within the party. This is determined by historical circumstances but never at any point in its life does the party renounce action in any of its vital fields of activity. The relationship between the various forms of energy is quantitative, determined by the external situation rather than by the Party. But from the qualitative point of view, the party’s functions remain the same throughout every moment of its existence. At certain points in history the practical work carried out among the proletarian masses may appear, from an immediate perspective, to be non-existent, but the party’s predisposition to carry out this work, by taking advantage of every slightest chance, must remain at all times. The same goes for armed organization and illegal work, the need for which must be ever present in the party, even when, in practice, it is not carrying out any of this type of activity.

From the distribution of the party’s energy across various activities – theoretical work, propaganda, proselytising, industrial action, armed action, etc. – nothing can be inferred, and nothing can be concluded about the nature of the party, because nothing changes qualitatively. If one hundred percent of the membership were dedicated to theoretical work – something solely dependant on objective external conditions – to deduce that the party is in the ’stage’ of theoretical preparation, and that the practical work of organization and class penetration is useless or secondary, is anti-Marxist rubbish, in that it destroys the party by reducing it to a group of thinkers who wouldn’t even be capable of learning the theory, because part of the nature of our theory is that it can only be the patrimony of a fighting organ, and cannot be learned intellectually by a group of “professors”. So, as stated in our theses, whoever conceives of the Party’s activity, and that of single militants, as divided into separate temporal “phases” (first you learn the theory and principles of the movement, read and study all the Marxist texts to attain full intellectual mastery, then you set to work to provide an organizational structure for those who have “learnt”, to turn the “Marxist professors” into “an organisation’s militants”, until at last the organization, equipped with the newly learnt theory, is launched into the field of external action) places himself outside the entire conception of Marxism.

It is a Marxist thesis that the three manifestations of energy either go together or do not exist. It is a tried and tested Marxist theory that theory can be “learned” only by an organized nucleus immersed in practical work. Otherwise there is no learning, no clarification, no ‘sculpting’ of theory, because learning about the theory of Marxism, a weapon of the party, cannot happen on an individual or cultural basis, but only collectively within the Party organ, where it happens as part of the co-ordinated process of carrying out the party’s various tasks.

This is why our small group has had, since the time of its reconstruction, the right to call itself the Communist Party. It was and is very small in numerical terms, but it has never ceased to perform its organic functions: although the range of its external activities has been quantitatively limited, it hasn’t been reduced to a group of thinkers or scholars; it hasn’t relapsed into the activism and immediatism which characterises every leftist faction. It has been able to link an absolute faith in, and strict defence of, the theory, principles and historical experience of the proletariat, to the undertaking of as much practical action as possible in these counter-revolutionary times, never missing an opportunity to intervene in even the smallest workers’ struggle in an organized manner, and in a way clearly distinct from any other group or grouping. It is by this coherent line, this theoretical and practical battle, that the Party can be recognised. And it is on this firm foundation that the progress of the capitalist crisis and the return of the proletariat to the struggle, at least on economic grounds, will bring into the ranks of our small group the young revolutionary guards who are seeking the vital weapon they need to fight the social war. Given, that is, that the party has managed to maintain this organic continuity of program and action.

Outside of this conception of the Party there lies nothing but death. It is completely absurd to think that there is the historical Party – a programme defended by a nucleus of intellectuals and scholars; then there is the “propaganda machine”; and then, on the proviso it has equipped itself with a suitable organization, there is the core of the Party. It is very debilitating that such mechanistic and idealistic constructs, which can only be obtained by falsifying Lenin and the Left tradition, still find ways of contaminating the labour movement.

If the party maintains this continuity, this dialectical connection between the various tasks and functions that make up its organic life, the organization develops, diversifies, and gives itself a structure not because someone wills it, but due to the needs which arise from the carrying out, the extension, and the ever increasing complexity of Party activity. New organs are created because the party’s functions become increasingly complicated and require an appropriate structure for their needs; because the activity of the party requires the right tools to help it operate as best it can in all fields. They are not created for the childish reason that one day someone thinks it’s time to finally give an organised structure to the Party and decides, in his little head, to come up with a model of organization, maybe by copying out the last writings of Lenin who, although little read and little understood, is constantly being quoted indiscriminately even to resolve petty little problems like going to the lavatory.

The Party, as opposed to the propaganda machine or “club”, was formed once and for all in 1952 when it specified in a definitive manner its doctrinal, tactical and programmatic cornerstones (Nature, Function and Tactics, Characteristic Theses, etc.) and started to carry out all of its activities on that basis, bar none. Since 1952 it has endowed itself with an organizational structure appropriate to its numerical size and the carrying out of its activities, to the degree the external social temperature permits. This structure is described extensively in the 1965-1966 Theses. It is a structure which will certainly change, becoming more complex, more compact, more differentiated and with clearer and more distinct characteristics. This process will be driven by the extension of the network of organised members, by how our work develops and by the party’s growing influence over the working class and not by the beautiful discovery of some “useless genius” or some “sovereign congress”, which discovers that we cannot call ourselves a Party unless we have the same apparatus they reckon to have found described in Lenin.

QUOTATIONS

119 – Characteristic Theses of the Party (Florence Theses) – 1951
     II, 4 – The Party defends and propagates the theory of the movement for the socialist revolution; it defends and strengthens its inner organization by propagating the communist theory and programme and by being constantly active in the ranks of the proletariat wherever the latter is forced to fight for its economic interests; such are its tasks before, during and after the struggle of the armed proletariat for State power.
     IV, 4 – Today we are in the depths of the political depression, and although the possibilities of action are considerably reduced, the party, following revolutionary tradition, has no intention of breaking the historical line of preparation for a future large scale resurgence of the class struggle, which will integrate all the results of past experience. Restriction of practical activity does not imply the renunciation of revolutionary objectives. The party recognizes that in certain sectors its activity is quantitatively reduced, but this does not mean that the multi-faceted totality of its activity is altered, and it does not expressly renounce any of them.
     IV, 7 – Although small in number and having but few links with the proletarian masses, the party is nevertheless jealously attached to its theoretical tasks which are of prime importance, and because of this true appreciation of its revolutionary duties in the present period, it absolutely refuses to be considered either as a circle of thinkers in search of new truths, or as “renovators” who consider past truths insufficient (…)
     IV, 9 – It is events, and not the desire or the decision of militants, which determine the depth of the Party’s penetration amongst the masses, limiting it today to a small part of its activity. Nevertheless, the Party loses no occasion to intervene in the clashes and vicissitudes of the class struggle, well aware that there can be no revival until this intervention has developed much further and become the main area of Party activity.
     IV, 10 – The acceleration of the process depends not only on profound social causes, that is to say historical crises, but also on the proselytism and propaganda of the party, even with the reduced means at its disposal.

120 – Considerations on the Organic Activity of the Party when the General Situation is Historically Unfavourable – 1965
     8 – Given that the degenerating social complex is focused on falsifying and destroying theory and sound doctrine, clearly the predominant task of today’s small party is the restoration of principles with doctrinal value, although unfortunately the favourable setting in which Lenin worked after the disaster of the First World War is lacking. But this does not mean we should erect a barrier between theory and practical action; beyond a certain limit that would destroy us along with our basic principles. We thus lay claim to all forms of activity peculiar to the favourable periods insofar as the real balance of forces render them possible.
     9 – We should go into all this in a lot more depth, but we can still reach a conclusion about the party’s organizational structure during such a difficult transition. It would be a fatal error to consider the party as divisible into two groups, one dedicated to study and the other to action, because such a distinction is deadly not only for the party as a whole, but for the individual militant too. The underlying meaning of unitarism and of organic centralism is that the party develops within itself the organs suited to its various functions, called by us propaganda, proselytism, proletarian organization, union work, etc., until, in the future, there is the need for the armed organization; but nothing can be inferred from the number of comrades assigned to each function, since no comrade, as a matter of principle, should be uninvolved with any of them.
     The fact that in the current phase the amount of comrades devoted to theory and the movement’s history may seem too many, and those ready for action too few, is historically fortuitous. It would be totally pointless to investigate how many are dedicated to each of these manifestations of energy. As we all know, when the situation becomes radicalized huge numbers of people, acting instinctively and unencumbered by the need to ape academia and get qualifications, will immediately take our side.

121 – Theses on the Historical Duty, Action and Structure of the World Communist Party… (’Theses of Naples’), 1965
     5 – (…) Having adopted the old watchword “on the thread of time”, our movement devoted itself to setting before the eyes and minds of the proletariat the meaning of the historical results inscribed along the route of a long and painful retreat. It was not a matter of restricting our role to cultural diffusion or the propagandising of petty doctrines, but of demonstrating that theory and action are dialectically inseparable fields, and that teachings are not book-learned or academic, but are derived from – not experiences exactly, a word we wish to avoid as now fallen prey to Philistines – but from the dynamic results of confrontations between real forces of considerable size and range, with use made also of those cases in which the final result was a defeat of the revolutionary forces. The latter is what we refer to, using the old classical Marxist criteria, as “the lessons of the counter revolutions”.

122 – Introduction to “Theses after 1945” – 1970
     We can say that only in the second half of 1951, and particularly from 1952, the party assumed a clear, homogeneous orientation, based on its reconnection with the basic theses of the 1920-1926 period and the dynamic balance sheet of the subsequent quarter of a century, which rendered those theses even more clear and unmistakable; and it gave itself a structure corresponding to this theoretical achievement around the new fortnightly organ “Il Programma Comunista”.
     The central problem was undoubtedly the integral re-presentation of the Marxist doctrine, a thousand times trampled underfoot and defaced by the Stalinist counter-revolution. But, in theory and practice, this task could not be separated, and never was, from the constant effort not only to propagandize our theoretical and programmatic positions, but also to “import” them, according to Lenin’s classical definition, into the working class; with the latter achieved by participating, according to our capacity, in the class struggles for immediate and contingent goals; never turning the party, however small it might be, into an academy of thinkers, an illuminati club, or a sect of armed conspirators equipped with inestimable baggage, known only to the acolytes.

Ch. 3 THE PARTY AND THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL

 
The following quotations show the Left’s position on the 3^rd international, and the lessons the party derived from its degeneration and destruction at the hand of the Stalinist counter-revolution. In terms of identifying the cause of this degenerative process, the downturn in the international revolutionary movement was certainly a decisive factor, due to the negative influence it inevitably had on the party, affected as it always is by external social developments insofar as the party is the product of ongoing situations and these situations naturally influence it, and either impede or favour it. It will be seen, however, that we never viewed this as the only cause: we also attributed the International’s degeneration to weaknesses in the way the new organisation was formed; weaknesses which, when the revolutionary downturn actually occurred, inevitably had an adverse effect on the organisation’s capacity to react to the unfavourable circumstances.

These organic ‘weaknesses’ in the organisation of the 3^rd International are equated by the left with the following facts:

     «It must be said that if the restoration of revolutionary values was impressive and complete as far as doctrinal principals, theoretical training and the central question of state power were concerned, the systematic organization of the new International and training in its tactics and that of its member parties was, on the contrary, not similarly complete».
     «In the situation after the First World War, which appeared objectively revolutionary, the leadership of the International became guided by the concern – which was not unfounded – of finding itself unprepared and poorly followed within the masses at the outbreak of a general European movement that could lead to the conquest of power in some of the large capitalist countries. The possibility of a rapid collapse of the capitalist world was so important for the Leninist International, which today we understand as the hope of being able to direct vaster masses in the struggle for the European revolution, that it was too free in the acceptance of the adherence of movements that were not true communist parties and it searched, in the elastic tactic of the united front, to maintain contact with the masses who were outside the hierarchy of parties oscillating between conservatism and revolution.
     «If the favorable outcome has occurred, the consequences for the politics and the economy of the first proletarian power in Russia would have been sufficiently powerful to allow the very rapid restoration of the national and international organizations of the communist parties».
     «Given that the less favorable outcome had occurred, i.e. the re-establishment of capitalism, instead of this the revolutionary proletariat had to resume the struggle and the course with a movement which, having sacrificed its own clear political preparation and its own homogeneity of composition and organization, was exposed to new opportunist degenerations.
     «But the mistake that opened the Third International’s doors to the new and more serious opportunist wave was not just a mistake in calculating the future likelihood of the proletariat becoming revolutionary; it was a mistake of preparation and of historical interpretation consisting in the desire to generalize the experiences and methods of Russian bolshevism, applying them to countries with a much more advanced bourgeois and capitalist civilization» (from Nature, Function and Tactics…, 1947).
    «Internal organisation was subjected to similar confusion, and the difficult task of sorting out revolutionary members from opportunist ones in the various parties and countries would be compromised. It was believed that new party members, more amenable to co-operating with the centre, could be procured by wresting away entire left wings of the old social democratic parties; whereas in fact, once the new International had gone through its initial period of formation, it needed to function permanently as the world party and only have new converts joining its national sections on an individual basis. Wanting to win over large groups of workers, deals were struck instead with the leaders and the movement’s cadres were thrown into disorder, and dissolved and recombined during periods of active struggle. Recognising Fractions and groups within the opportunist parties as ‘communist’, they would be absorbed by means of organisational mergers; thus almost all of the parties, instead of preparing for the struggle, were kept in a state of permanent crisis. Lacking continuity of action and with no clear boundaries set between friend and foe, they would register one failure after another, and on an international scale. The Left lays claim to organisational unicity and continuity» (from Characteristic Theses of the Party, 1951).

On these four points, therefore, the International exhibited weaknesses which made it possible for opportunism to recapture it; weaknesses which only the Italian Left identified, as far back as 1920. It was the Italian Left which insisted on making the Conditions of Admission (1920) more rigid and which succeeded in getting some essential clarifications inserted into the 21 points; although it didn’t manage to have excluded the clause on “national peculiarities”, to which the Italian Maximalists would later have recourse to in their game of false support, which the leadership of the International accepted as sincere from 1921 when it proposed a possible review of the P.C.d ‘I’s irrevocable split from the Socialist Party that same year (see “Moscow and the Italian Question” in Rassegna Comunista, 1921).

Thus, throughout the 2^nd Congress still, the Left would express its doubts about notions of the “party as class fraction” and “democratic centralism” not out of any mania for literary purity, but because of the dangers that the inadequacy of these formulations expressed. At the same 2^nd Congress the Left would also oppose the tactic of revolutionary parliamentarism not just on the grounds that it was the wrong tactic for Western Europe, but also because it made it impossible to draw a definitive line of demarcation with the so-called “electionist communists”, i.e., the maximalists.

At the 3^rd Congress, the Left opposes the dubious formulation of “the conquest of the majority”, which, even if Trotski and Lenin’s interpretation of it was precise and correct, posed immense dangers for the young communist parties in the West. After 1921 the Left is opposed to the practice of mergers, of uniting parts of other parties with the communist party, holding that there can only be one party and that this can only be joined on an individual basis. The Left is thus also opposed to the practice of infiltrating communist fractions into other parties and calls for the organisational rules to be tightened up. In December 1921 the Theses on the United Front are adopted and the Left puts forward its well known reservations about them, even if it was actually the Left which first adopted the tactic of the united front from below in Italy. At the Rome Congress in 1922, the Left votes through the famous theses on tactics, in which is asserted the necessity for the International to predict and delimit tactical means, at least in its general outlines and as applicable over long timescales and large areas, with a view to preventing the bad practice, which would eventually become entrenched in the International, of fluctuating tactics and diktats based exclusively on knee-jerk reactions to changing situations.

The Rome Theses, which were proposed as a project for the International as a whole, would be criticised and rejected by the latter, and accused of “abstractionism” “schematism” and “formalism”, etc. It would therefore be absurd to say that the differences between the Left and the International were just secondary ones of a tactical nature. There were profound differences between the Left and the International on the overall question of how to formulate tactical problems in general. And the subsequent collapse of the International confirmed that, while it had managed to resolve the questions of principle and theory in a definitive manner, it hadn’t managed to set out the question of tactics in nearly as definitive and appropriate a way and through this open breech the new opportunism was able to pass. The material and historical reasons why this necessary systematisation of the tactical question wasn’t possible is clearly explained in our theses. The fact remains, however, that there was no systematisation despite the Left continually calling for it; and the Left would be accused of doctrinarism and abstractionism by the International precisely because it did call for it. Thus it would be just as inaccurate to maintain that the Bolshevik party in Russia continued to make every effort to formulate the International’s problems in a consistently Marxist manner, but found itself having to deal in the West with human material which, with the exception of the Left, refused to accept this correct formulation. On the contrary, it is clear that the Bolshevik party’s own situation, forced to fight on as an isolated power, influenced the way it formulated and resolved the International’s problems, dominated as it was by the pressing need for a revolutionary victory in the West at any cost. Thus the Bolshevik Party became more relaxed about accepting groups and fractions which weren’t absolutely Marxist; and having already opened a breach with the twenty one points and with the tactics of revolutionary parliamentarism, it widened it with its tactical wavering and wrong organisational practice, thus making it much more difficult in turn to form true communist parties in the West.

The Western communist parties, and the German and French ones in particular, remained full of reformists not for the stupid reason that the latter were hiding within the organisation and the Moscow centre lacked the repressive energy to expel them en masse, but because the boundaries of the organisation were becoming increasingly vague not in the sphere of disciplinary regulations and the screening of new recruits, but in the vital field of tactics and organisational norms; and such they would remain, in fact becoming even more vague, because the leadership of the International was betting everything on victory in neighbouring Germany and, in order to have a party capable of leading the insurgent proletariat, it widened the mesh of its organisational net even more. It widened its net not by forgetting to enforce checks on individual recruits, or by omitting to have individual militants undergo a rigid curriculum consisting of a progression from reader, listener, sympathiser to comrade (the way in which organisational rigidity might be best understood by “Lotta Comunista” type groups) but by neglecting the rule that people should only join the party as individuals; by making allowances for national differences; by bargaining over fusions and filterings of other groups; by throwing open the door to notorious right-wingers and centrists merely because they had some influence over the proletarian masses, and finally, by leaving tactical norms as a blank page. This practice ensured that, once the revolutionary movement had run out of steam, it found itself having to get to grips with parties which hadn’t progressed towards communism but were still imbued with a social democratic or even parliamentary mentality.

Let us then return to our correct formulation of the organisational questions. Our theses at no point say that the International’s weakness was in anyway due to a failure to launch a successful witch hunt against social democrats lurking in the communist parties. The social-democrats were able to ‘hide’ inside the communist parties because the International hadn’t made a clean break with parliamentary praxis; because it had endorsed fusions and blocs; because it denied that tactical norms should have set limits and not because there weren’t enough ‘inspectors’ to ‘supervise’ the sections. If the organisational and tactical physiognomy of the communist parties had been rendered sharper and clearer, the social democrats hiding in the organisation would have leapt out ‘organically’ of their own accord. If this adjustment, not in the field of discipline but in that of organisation and tactics, wasn’t possible, it was vain to seek a remedy for the lack of it in a tightening of disciplinary rules, a stiffening of penalties, and in expulsions. This is the Left’s battle.

QUOTATIONS

 123 – Draft Theses Presented by the Left at the 3^rd Congress of the Communist Party of Italy (Lyon Theses) – 1926
     II, 1 – The crisis in the 2^nd International caused by the world war has, with the constitution of the Communist International, been completely and definitively resolved as far as the restoration of revolutionary doctrine is concerned, whereas, from the organisational and tactical point of view, despite the formation of the Comintern certainly constituting an immense historical victory, the crisis in the proletarian movement has not been resolved to the same extent.
     A fundamental factor in the formation of the new International was the Russian Revolution, first glorious victory of the world proletariat. However, owing to the social conditions in Russia, the Russian revolution hasn’t provided the general historical model for revolutions in other countries on the tactical side. In it, in the transition from feudal autocratic power to the proletarian dictatorship, there was no epoch of political dominion by the bourgeois class, organised in its own exclusive and stable State apparatus.
     It is precisely for this reason that the historical confirmation of the conceptions of the Marxist programme in the Russian revolution has been of such enormous significance, and of such great use in routing social democratic revisionism in the realm of principles. In the organisational field, however, the struggle against the 2^nd International – an integral part of the struggle against global capitalism – hasn’t met with the same decisive success, and a multitude of errors has been committed which have resulted in the Communist parties not being as effective as objective conditions would have allowed.
     The same has to be said as regards the field of tactics, where many problems have not been resolved, and still haven’t been properly resolved today, in the sector where figure: bourgeoisie, modern bourgeois parliamentary state with a historically stable apparatus, proletariat; and the communist parties have not always derived all they could have from the proletarian offensive against capitalism and from the liquidation of the social democratic parties, i.e. the political organs of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.

     II, 4 – During the founding of the Comintern, the view that it was necessary to establish a vast concentration of revolutionary forces carried a lot of weight because it was predicted at the time that objective conditions would develop much more rapidly than they did. Nevertheless, in retrospect we can see that it would have been preferable to establish organisational criteria which were more rigorous. The formation of parties and the conquest of the masses has been favoured neither by making concessions to anarchist and syndicalist groups, nor by the small compromises made with the centrists allowed for in the 21 conditions; neither by organic fusions with parties or fractions of parties as a result of political ‘infiltration’, nor by tolerating in some countries a dual communist organisation alongside sympathiser parties. The watchword of organising the party on the basis of factory cells, launched after the 5^th congress, hasn’t achieved its aim of remedying the glaring defects concordantly observed in the various sections of the International.

     III, 4 – The Rome Congress, held in March 1922, crystallized a theoretical divergence between the Italian Left and the majority of the International. It was a divergence which had been expressed before, rather badly, by our delegations to the 3^rd World Congress and the Enlarged Executive of February 1922, where, especially on the first occasion, some errors of the infantilist variety were certainly committed. The Rome Theses would constitute the happy theoretical and political liquidation of any peril of left-wing opportunism in the Italian Party.
     As far as Party practice was concerned the only divergence with the international was over what tactic to adopt towards the maximalists, but such divergences appeared resolved by the unitary results which emerged from the socialist Congress in October 1921.
     The Rome Theses were adopted as a contribution by the party to the International’s decision-making and not as an immediate line of action; this was confirmed by the party directorate at the Enlarged Executive of 1922, and we didn’t embark on a theoretical debate precisely out of discipline to the International and its ruling against it.
     In August 1922, however, the International didn’t interpret the various factors in the same way as the Party directorate, but reckoned that the Italian situation was unstable in the sense of the State’s weakened resistance and thought of reinforcing the party on the basis of a fusion with the maximalists considering as the decisive factor not the lessons learnt during the vast strike manoeuvre in August, but the split between the maximalists and the Unitarians.
     It is from this moment that the two political lines diverge in a definitive way. At the 4^th World Congress in December 1922, the old Directorate opposed the majority thesis and, on their return to Italy, the delegates would pass the matter over to the merger Commission, unanimously declining to take any responsibility for the decision, though of course retaining their administrative functions.
     Then came the arrests in February 1923 and the big offensive against the party; finally during the Enlarged Executive meeting in June 1923 the old executive was deposed and completely replaced and several party leaders would simply resign as a logical consequence. In May 1924, a party consultative conference would still give the Left an overwhelming majority over the Centre and the Right and thus it would attend the 5^th World Congress in 1924.

124 – Nature, Function and Tactics of the Working Class Revolutionary Party – 1947
     As a result of the Russian Revolution, the Third International responded to this disastrous direction for the workers’ movement. It must however be said, that if the restoration of revolutionary values was impressive and complete as far as doctrinal principals, theoretical training and the central question of state power were concerned, the systematic organization of the new International and training in its tactics and that of its member parties was, on the contrary, not similarly complete.
     The critique of the opportunists of the Second International was nevertheless absolute and decisive, not only with regard to their total abandonment of Marxist principles, but also with regard to their tactic of coalition and collaboration with bourgeois governments and parties.
     It was made abundantly clear that the particularist and temporary direction given to the old socialist parties had not led in the slightest to assuring the workers of small benefits and material improvements in exchange for the renunciation of preparing and carrying out the total attack on bourgeois institutions and power. Instead, by compromising both the minimum and maximum programs it led to an even worse situation, i.e. the use of proletarians’ organizations, forces, combativity, personnel and lives to achieve goals that were not the political and historical goals of their class, but led instead to the strengthening of capitalist imperialism. During the war capitalist imperialism had thus overcome, for at least an entire historical phase, the intrinsic threat posed by the contradictions of its productive mechanism, and had also overcome the political crisis wrought by the war and its repercussions by means of the subjugation to itself of the trade union and political formations of the opposing class, by means of the politics of national coalitions.
     This amounted, according to Leninist critique, to a complete distortion of the role and function of the proletarian party, which is not there to save the bourgeois fatherland or the institutions of so-called bourgeois freedom from declared dangers, but to keep the workers’ forces deployed on the movement’s own general line of direction, which must culminate in the total conquest of political power, breaking the bourgeois State.
     In the war’s immediate aftermath, when the so-called subjective conditions for the revolution (i.e. the effectiveness of the organization and parties of the proletariat) seemed unfavorable, but the objective conditions appeared to be favorable, as the crisis of the bourgeois world was fully exposed, the task was to improve the subjective conditions through the prompt reorganization of the revolutionary International.
     The process was dominated, as it must be, by the great historical reality of the first working class revolutionary victory in Russia, which had made it possible to bring broad communist aims into the clear light of day. But it would draw the tactics of communist parties, which in other countries brought together groups of socialists opposed to the wartime opportunism, into direct imitation of the tactics victoriously applied in Russia by the Bolshevik party in its conquest of power through the historic struggle from February to November 1917.
     From the outset this approach gave rise to important debates about the tactical methods of the International, and especially the one called the “united front”, consisting of frequent invitations to other proletarian and socialist parties to joint agitation and action, with the goal of highlighting the inadequacy of the method of those parties and moving their traditional influence over the masses to the advantage of the communists.
     In fact, despite the open warnings of the Italian Left and other oppositionist groups, the leaders of the International did not realize that this tactic of the united front, by pushing revolutionary organizations alongside social-democratic, social-patriotic and opportunist organizations, from which they were hardly distinguishable as an inflexible opposition, not only would disorient the masses, rendering the advantages that they were expecting from this tactic impossible, but would – which was even more serious – pollute the revolutionary parties themselves. It is true that the revolutionary party is the best and the least constrained factor in history, but it does not cease to be at the same time a product of history, and undergoes mutations and repositionings with every modification of social forces. We cannot think of the tactical problem as the handling of a weapon, which, pointed in whatever direction, stays the same; the tactics of the party influence and change the party itself. If no tactic can be condemned in the name of a priori dogmas, as a precondition every tactic must be analyzed and discussed in the light of a question such as this: in earning an eventual greater influence of the party over the masses, won’t the character of the party be compromised, together with its ability to lead these masses to the final objective?
     The adoption of the united front tactic on the part of the Third International meant, in reality, that also the Communist International entered on the path of opportunism that had led the Second International to defeat and liquidation. Characteristic of the opportunist tactic had been the sacrifice of the final and total victory to partial and contingent successes; the tactic of the united front revealed itself as opportunistic, as in reality it sacrificed the primary and irreplaceable guarantee of the total and final victory (the revolutionary potential of the class party) to contingent action that should have assured momentary and partial advantages to the proletariat (increasing the influence of the party over the masses and greater compactness of the proletariat in the struggle for the gradual improvement of its material conditions and for the maintenance of any actual achievements).
     In the situation after the First World War, which appeared objectively revolutionary, the leadership of the International became guided by the concern – which was not unfounded – of finding itself unprepared and poorly followed within the masses at the outbreak of a general European movement that could lead to the conquest of power in some of the large capitalist countries. The possibility of a rapid collapse of the capitalist world was so important for the Leninist International, which today we understand as the hope of being able to direct vaster masses in the struggle for the European revolution, that it was too free in the acceptance of the adherence of movements that were not true communist parties and it searched, in the elastic tactic of the united front, to maintain contact with the masses who were outside the hierarchy of parties oscillating between conservatism and revolution.
     If the favorable outcome has occurred, the consequences for the politics and the economy of the first proletarian power in Russia would have been sufficiently powerful to allow the very rapid restoration of the national and international organizations of the communist parties.
     Given that the less favorable outcome had occurred, i.e. the re-establishment of capitalism, instead of this the revolutionary proletariat had to resume the struggle and the course with a movement which, having sacrificed its own clear political preparation and its own homogeneity of composition and organization, was exposed to new opportunist degenerations.
     But the mistake that opened the Third International’s doors to the new and more serious opportunist wave was not just a mistake in calculating the future likelihood of the proletariat becoming revolutionary; it was a mistake of preparation and of historical interpretation consisting in the desire to generalize the experiences and methods of Russian bolshevism, applying them to countries with a much more advanced bourgeois and capitalist civilization. The Russia that existed before February 1917 was still a feudal Russia in which the capitalist productive forces were held back under the weight of old relations of production: it was obvious that in this situation, similar to that of France in 1789 and Germany in 1848, the proletarian party had to fight against Tsarism even if it seemed impossible to avoid the consequence that after its overthrow, a bourgeois capitalist regime would establish itself; and as a consequence it was likewise obvious that the Bolshevik party could accept contacts with other political groupings, contacts made necessary by the struggle against Tsarism. Between February and October 1917, the Bolshevik party observed that the objective conditions were favorable for a much more ambitious project: that of grafting the revolutionary conquest of power by the proletariat on the destruction of Tsarism. It therefore hardened its tactical positions, adopting open and ruthless positions against all the other political formations, from the reactionary advocates of a return to Tsarism and feudalism, to the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. But the fact that an effective return of reactionary absolutist and theocratic feudalism could be feared, and the fact that the state and political formations in the hands of, or influenced by, the bourgeoisie no longer had the strength and capacity to attract and absorb autonomous proletarian forces in the extremely fluid and unstable situation, put the Bolshevik Party in a position to be able to accept contacts and provisional accords with other organizations having a proletarian following, as happened during the Kornilov episode.
     The Bolshevik Party, in building the united front against Kornilov, was in reality struggling against a return of reactionary feudalism and, moreover, it had nothing to fear in terms of succumbing to the influence of the greater strength of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary organizations, nor in terms of a solid state power benefiting from the contingent alliance with the Bolsheviks in order to then turn against them.
     The situation and the balance of forces were completely different in the countries with an advanced bourgeois culture. In these countries one could no longer imagine (and all the more so today) the prospect of a reactionary return to feudalism, and therefore every possible objective of common action with other parties is absent. Moreover, in these countries state power and bourgeois groupings were consolidated in their success and the tradition of dominion to such an extent that you could well predict that the autonomous organizations of the proletariat, if pushed towards frequent and close contacts for the united front tactic, would be exposed to an almost inevitable influence and absorption by those bourgeois forces.
     Ignoring this profound difference between the situations, and wanting to apply the Bolsheviks’ tactical methods in the advanced countries, which were adapted to the situation of the nascent bourgeois regime in Russia, led the Communist International into a series of ever greater disasters, and finally to its inglorious liquidation.
     The tactic of the united front was driven into making commitments that were different from the party’s program on the problem of the state, supporting the demand for, and realization of, workers’ governments, and therefore of governments formed from mixed delegations of communists and social democrats, who came together in power via the normal parliamentary routes, without violently breaking the bourgeois state apparatus. Such talk of workers’ government was presented at the 5th Congress of the Communist International as the logical and natural corollary of the united front; and it was applied in Germany, resulting in a serious defeat for the German proletariat and its communist party.

125 – Characteristic Theses of the Party (Florence Theses) – 1951

     lll.6 – The Third International arises on a basis that is both anti-social democratic and anti-social patriotic.
     Not only throughout the whole of the proletarian International are no alliances entered into with other parties to wield parliamentary power; more than that, it is denied that power can be conquered, even in an “intransigent” way, just by the proletarian party through legal means, and the need is reasserted, amidst the ruins of capitalism’s peaceful phase, for armed violence and dictatorship.
     Not only are no alliances entered into with governments at war even in the case of “defensive“ wars, and class opposition kept up even during war; more than that, every effort is made, by means of defeatist propaganda at the front, to turn the imperialistic war between States into a civil war between classes.

     III. 7 – The response to the first wave of opportunism was the formula: no electoral, parliamentary or ministerial alliances to obtain reforms.
     The response to the second wave was another tactical formula: no war alliances (since 1871) with the State and bourgeoisie.
     Delayed reactions would prevent the critical turning point of 1914-18 being turned to advantage by engaging in a wide-scale struggle for defeatism in war and for the destruction of the bourgeois State.

     III.8 – One great exception is the victory in Russia in October 1917. Russia was the only major European State still ruled by a feudal power where penetration by capitalist forms of production was weak. In Russia there was a party, not large but with a tradition firmly anchored in Marxism, which had not only opposed the two consecutive waves of opportunism in the Second International, but which at the same time, after the great trials of 1905, was up to posing the problems of how to graft two revolutions, the bourgeois and the proletarian, together.
     In February 1917 this party struggles alongside others against Tsarism, then immediately afterwards not only against the bourgeois liberal parties but also against the opportunist proletarian parties, and it defeats them all. What is more, it then becomes the centre of the reconstitution of the revolutionary International.

     III.11 – Evidence of the pressing need to accelerate the taking of power in Europe, to prevent the violent collapse of the Soviet State or else its involution into a capitalistic state in a few years at the very most, appeared as soon as bourgeois society consolidated after the serious shock of the First World War. But the communist parties didn’t manage to take power, except in a few attempts which were rapidly crushed, and this led them to ask themselves what they could do to counter the fact that large sections of the proletariat were still prey to social democratic and opportunistic influences.
     There were two conflicting methods: the one which considered the parties of the Second International, which were openly conducting an unremitting struggle both against the communist programme and against revolutionary Russia, as open enemies, and struggled against them as the most dangerous part of the bourgeois front – and the other which relied on expedients to reduce the influence of the social democratic parties over the masses to the advantage of the communist party, using strategic and tactical ”manoeuvres“.

     III.12 – To justify the latter method the experiences of the Bolshevik policy in Russia were misapplied, departing from the correct historical line. The offer of alliances with petit-bourgeois and even bourgeois parties was justified historically by the fact that the Tsarist power, by banning all of these movements, forced them to engage in insurrectional struggle. In Europe, on the other hand, the only common actions which were proposed, even as a manoeuvre, were ones respectful of legality, whether within the trade-unions or within parliament. In Russia, the phase of liberal parliamentarism had been very short (in 1905 and a few months in 1917) and it was the same as far as legal recognition of the trade union movement was concerned. In the rest of Europe, meanwhile, half a century of degeneration of the proletarian movement had made these two fields of action propitious terrain on which to dull revolutionary energies and corrupt the workers’ leaders. The guarantee which lay in the Bolshevik Party’s solidity of organisation and principle was not the same as the guarantee offered by the existence of the state power in Moscow, which due to social conditions and international relations was more liable, as history has showed, to succumb to a renunciation of revolutionary principles and policy.

     III.14 – Between 1921 and 1926, increasingly opportunistic versions of the International’s tactical method were imposed at its congresses (third, fourth, fifth and at the Enlarged Executive Committee in 1926). At the root of the method was the simple formula: alter the tactics to fit the circumstances. By means of so-called analyses, every six months or so new stages of capitalism were identified and new manoeuvres proposed to address them. This is essentially revisionism, which has always been ‘voluntarist’; in other words, when it realised its predictions about the advent of socialism hadn’t come true, it decided to force the pace of history with a new praxis; but in so doing it also ceased to struggle for the proletarian and socialist objectives of our maximum programme. Back in 1900 the reformists said that the circumstances ruled out all possibility of insurrection. We shouldn’t expect the impossible, they said, let us work instead to win elections and to change the law, and to make economic gains via the trades unions. And when this method failed it provoked a reaction from the essentially voluntarist anarcho-syndicalist current, who blamed party politics and politics in general, predicting that change would come through the effort of bold minorities in a general strike, led by the trade unions alone. Similarly, the Communist International, once it saw the West-European proletariat wasn’t going to fight for the dictatorship, preferred to rely on substitutes as a way of getting through the impasse. And what came of all this, once capitalist equilibrium had been restored, was that it neither modified the objective situation nor the balance of power, but did weaken and corrupt the workers’ movement; just as had happened when the impatient revisionists of right and left ended up in the service of the bourgeoisie in the war coalitions. All the theoretical preparation and the restoration of revolutionary principles was sabotaged by confusing the communist programme of taking power by revolutionary means with the accession of so-called ‘kindred’ governments by means of support and participation in parliament and bourgeois cabinets by communists; in Saxony and Thuringia it would end in farce, where two policemen were enough to overthrow the government’s communist leader.

     III.15 – Internal organisation was subjected to similar confusion, and the difficult task of sorting out revolutionary members from opportunist ones in the various parties and countries would be compromised. It was believed that new party members, more amenable to co-operating with the centre, could be procured by wresting away entire left wings of the old social democratic parties (whereas in fact, once the new International had gone through its initial period of formation, it needed to function permanently as the world party and only have new converts joining its national sections on an individual basis). Wanting to win over large groups of workers, deals were struck instead with the leaders and the movement’s cadres were thrown into disorder, and dissolved and recombined during periods of active struggle. Recognising Fractions and groups within the opportunist parties as ‘communist’, they would be absorbed by means of organisational mergers; thus almost all of the parties, instead of preparing for the struggle, were kept in a state of permanent crisis. Lacking continuity of action and with no clear boundaries set between friend and foe, they would register one failure after another, and on an international scale. The Left lays claim to organisational unicity and continuity.

126 – Considerations on the Organic Activity of the Party when the General Situation is Historically Unfavourable – 1965
     14 – (…) Having also missed this historic chance to save, if not the revolution, at least the core of its historical party, today we are starting from scratch in a situation which is objectively torpid and indifferent, among a proletariat infected to the marrow by petty-bourgeois democraticism. But the nascent organisation, which utilizes all of the traditional doctrine and praxis established over the years as history proves its timely forecasts to be correct, also applies it in its day to day practice, seeking to re-establish ever wider contacts with the exploited masses, and it eliminates from its own structure one of the parting errors of the Moscow International, by getting rid of democratic centralism and the application of any voting mechanism, just as it has eliminated from the ideology of every last one of its members any concession to democratic, pacifist, autonomist or libertarian trends.

127 – Theses on the Historical Duty, Action and Structure of the World Communist Party… (’Theses of Naples’), 1965

     3 – As regards the subsequent period in the life of the new International, the correct theoretical diagnosis and historical prediction of new opportunist dangers slowly emerging during the early years of the new International form an enduring heritage of the Communist Left. The point will be developed with the historical method, avoiding any heavy theorising. The first manifestations denounced and opposed by the Left appeared in the tactical sphere apropos of the relations to be established with the old parties of the Second International, from which the communists had been separated organizationally by means of splits; and consequently also in wrong measures in the realm of organizational structure.
     By 1921 it could already be seen that the great revolutionary surge which followed the end of the war in 1918 was petering out, and that capitalism would attempt to counter-attack on both the economic and the political fronts. Faced with this prospect, the 3^rd Congress had correctly noted that it was not enough to have formed communist parties firmly committed to the programme of violent action, proletarian dictatorship and the communist State if a large part of the proletarian masses were still amenable to the influence of the opportunist parties; who were considered by all of us at the time as the worst instruments of bourgeois counter-revolution, their hands stained with Karl and Rosa’s blood. And yet the Communist Left, while continuing to deplore Blanquist initiatives by small parties, didn’t accept that the winning over of the “majority” of the proletariat was the condition for revolutionary action either (besides which one never quite knew whether it was the true wage-earning proletariat being referred to or the “people”, understood to include property owning peasants, micro-capitalists, artisans, and the rest of the petty-bourgeois). This formula of the “majority” with its democratic aroma would trigger a first warning, later proved to be fully justified, that opportunism could arise again, introduced under the familiar banner of homage to the deadly concepts of democracy and electoral balance sheets.
     From the time of the 4^th Congress at the end of 1922 onwards, the Left would stand by its pessimistic forecast as and continue its vigorous struggle against dangerous tactics (united front of communist and socialist parties, the “workers’ government” slogan) and organisational errors (by which the International attempted to increase the size of the parties not just with the proletarians flocking to join them after abandoning the parties whose programme, activity and structure were social-democratic, but by means of fusions which admitted entire parties or portions of parties following negotiations with their headquarters, and even by allowing the so-called “sympathizer” parties to join the Comintern as national sections, a clear error due to its federalistic slant. In a third direction, the Left denounces, and ever more vigorously as the years go by, the looming danger of opportunism. This third issue concerns the internal functioning of the International, and the methods used by the centre, represented by the Moscow Executive, against parties or sections of parties which had made errors of political judgement; methods involving not only “ideological terror” but above all organizational pressure which constitutes a misapplication of, and leads to a total falsification of, the correct principles of centralization and of discipline admitting of no exceptions (…)

     10 – Returning to the early years of the Communist International, we will recall that its Russian leaders, who had behind them not only a thorough knowledge of Marxist doctrine and history, but also the outstanding outcome of the October revolutionary victory, conceived of theses such as Lenin’s as binding on all, although acknowledging that in the course of the international party’s life there was room for further elaboration. They never asked for them to be put to the vote because everything was accepted by unanimous agreement and spontaneously confirmed by everyone on the periphery of the organization; which in those glorious years was living in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and even of triumph.
     The Left didn’t disagree with these generous ambitions, but held that, in order to achieve the outcomes all of us dreamt about, the communist party, sole and undivided, needed to have some of its organisational and constitutional measures tightened up and made more rigorous, and likewise its tactical norms clarified.
     As soon as a certain relaxation in these vital areas started to emerge, denounced by us to the great Lenin himself, it started to produce harmful effects, and we were forced to meet reports with counter-reports, theses with counter-theses.
     Unlike other opposition groups, even those formed in Russia and the trotskist current itself, we always carefully avoided having our work within the International take the form of calls for democratic, electoral consultations of the party membership as a whole, or for the election of steering committees (…)
     In the very early years the Left hoped the organizational and tactical concessions might be justified by the fecundity of the historical moment and have only temporary value, since Lenin’s prospect was one of major revolutions in central and maybe western Europe, and after these the line would return to the clear and all-encompassing one which was in keeping with the vital principles. But the more that such a hope came to be gradually replaced by the certainty we were heading for opportunistic ruin – which inevitably assumed its classic form of glorification and exaltation of democratic and electoral intrigue – the more the Left conducted its historical defence without undermining its mistrust of the democratic mechanism.

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Ch. 4 DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM AND ORGANIC CENTRALISM

The quotations we have cited provide evidence that the difference between democratic centralism and organic centralism is not merely “terminological”. Today it is customary to declare that, in the party, “democratic centralism and organic centralism is the same thing”, that we “suggested calling centralism organic in order to define the term more precisely”, and that everything, in the end, can be reduced to the call for “unqualified centralism”. Organic centralism is just taken to mean, surrounded as we are by a putrescent capitalism, that we need a centralism which is yet more rigid than the Bolshevik Party’s. And the need for a “more rigid” centralism is said to have dictated our position on the elimination of democratic processes as a means of internal consultation. This may be summed up as follows: democratic centralism implies a less complete centralism, because it is invalidated by the need for periodic consultation of the rank-and-file; organic centralism implies ‘absolute centralism’ insofar as no longer is anyone consulted and all decisions are referred to the leading centre whose power is absolute and whose decision is final. In short: democratic centralism, minus democratic processes, equals organic centralism. It remains to be explained why we were capable of doing this subtraction sum whereas the parties of the 2^nd International used the mechanisms of internal democracy. It is obvious that the parties of the 2^nd International must have a different dynamic, a different way of proceeding, of existing, of developing to us, and indeed to the 3^rd International; but whereas the Bolsheviks, let’s say in 1903 or 1905, had to theorise the formula ‘democratic centralism’ and adopt within their organisation the machinery of elective democracy, we can say today that in our party we have rid ourselves of the latter for ever, after having advised the Communist International that they could do without it as well.

An initial distinction, embedded within all of our theses, should be made between democratic mechanisms posed as a ‘matter of principle’, and their necessary use by the party in a particular historical period. We have already established that Lenin attributed no inherent value to democracy either inside or outside the party; in fact whenever he could, and whenever necessary, he didn’t hesitate to transgress it and stamp it underfoot; but in order to build the party organisation, he was obliged to use it as an ‘circumstantial mechanism’ with all its statutory, formalistic and bureaucratic baggage. As for us, we not only never attributed any value to it ‘as a principle’, but we have rid ourselves of it for good, along with all the attendant rubbish about its use as an instrument for building the party. In 1920 we proposed that we no longer say we subscribed to the principle of “democratic centralism” since democracy is not a principle we can ever uphold, while centralism is one we surely can.

The correct formulation should have been: a centralism which may also use democratic procedures as a useful practical mechanism. In 1965 we established that not only we don’t want the principle of democracy, but that we don’t consider its machinery to be of any use either, and we jettisoned the lot for good. It is not a case of countering a very strict centralism to one that is less strict, thereby arriving at the aberrant conclusion that, organic or not, we are pro-centralism, of whatever sort. Democratic centralism, in fact, was not less strict at all, but was rather centralisation of party action obtained through the use of democratic processes. And organic centralism is not centralism which is ‘stricter’, but is centralisation obtained without the use of democratic processes. Informed as we are today not only by our theses but also by Lenin’s (What is to be Done? One Step Forward, Two Steps Back), when we talk about democratic processes we are obliged to refer not only to periodic consultations of the rank-and-file but also the whole of the paraphernalia connected with it, i.e., sovereign deliberative congresses, statutes, rules, bureaucratic machinery, expulsions, repression of a legalistic nature as the party’s mode of existence, choice or election of particular comrades, etc, etc.

Bureaucracy and democracy are not antithetical terms but are dialectically and intimately connected. This is clearly spelled out in all our writings. The consequence of expelling democracy from our organisation is therefore that bureaucracy has been expelled from it as well. If we had kept bureaucracy, then sooner or later internal democracy would have crept back in.

The practice of democratic centralism was both appropriate and necessary for the parties of the 2^nd International insofar as they effectively proceeded on a basis which was not completely homogeneous, through a clash of opposed currents and fractions who frequently disagreed not only over tactics but about the programme as well. It was a case of different currents, expressing different class interests, converging within the party organisation, and despite finding some points of agreement in common still disagreeing on others, with no real possibility of reconciliation. At the beginning of the century it was clear to Lenin and to every revolutionary that the revisionists and the Mensheviks were expressing the influence of the reformist worker-aristocracy and the petty bourgeoisie inside the proletarian party. The party was thus the product of the convergence of various strata and hence of various tactics, even if a common goal was supposedly recognised by all. The party organisation would thus end up divided into divergent currents not just occasionally, but physiologically, as a general rule. Internal political struggle therefore became a way of life for these parties, in fact the way of life. Mensheviks and Bolsheviks engage in a struggle to gain control of the party because there are two tactical lines which stand in opposition to each other: the revolutionary and the reformist wing, which are to be found within all of the socialist and social-democratic parties. But in order to prevent the internal struggle from immobilising the party’s practical struggle, the party had to be regulated by a legal mechanism which was accepted and recognised by all; the duties and rights of the ‘majority’ and the ‘minority’ had to be defined. Since unity of the practical movement is always a consequence of unity at a tactical level and since the tactical lines the party follows are always at least two, the only way of getting the party to follow a single line in practice is through the predomination of one line over the other through the convocation of democratic congresses which are “arenas of struggle” for one current to triumph over the other. The hierarchy which emerges from these congresses, in which a ‘majority’ and a ‘minority’ are formed, inevitably takes on a bureaucratic character because it does not represent the whole of the party, but the victory of one part of the party over the other.

The party centre, to gain respect for its orders, is unable to refer to a patrimony of tactical norms which are shared by the party as a whole, are publicly available, and are accepted by all militants but necessarily has to refer to resolutions having legal value insofar as they are the expression of the opinion of the majority; he must refer back to statutes, congressional resolutions, etc. Through democratic resolutions at the congresses is thus created a bureaucratic hierarchy, which derives its power from the congress’s decisions and from statutes which nobody can break under pain of incurring sanctions, up to and including expulsion. The men who lead the party and fill the various offices are chosen at congress, but not on the basis of whether they are capable or not of filling a particular role, but according to whether or not they subscribe to a particular political line. And thus they must be well-known, named individuals; they must in a certain sense wear a special badge to identify themselves. All militants, belonging to both the victorious and defeated wings at the congress, must observe absolute discipline to the orders of that particular man, with that particular badge.

The Communist International, founded on the homogeneous basis of the Marxist doctrine and programme, of clearly stated unitary principles and of unique aims, would have no further need this praxis and these mechanisms to the extent it progressed towards a delimitation of tactical means and regularised the organisational measures it took. The International began to overcome democratic praxis and replace it with an ‘organic’ one in many sectors, as is clearly explained in our Notes on the Question of Organisation. But it didn’t manage to overcome it completely because the communist parties had not been formed and were still not being formed on a completely homogeneous basis, to the extent that one single tactic for the International as a whole was never established and ‘national particularities’ and organisational mergers would be allowed. The way the International had been formed was influenced by the Bolshevik’s view that a European revolution was imminent, and that in order to lead this revolution what was needed was not an organisation which was completely homogeneous but one capable of leading the proletarian attack. The Left, while it yielded to this perspective considered valid by all, urged that the residual democratic praxis inside the parties and the International should not to be elevated to the level of principle, but be considered merely as a ‘circumstantial mechanism’, whereas the real building of the party would come about by following an organic method founded on the achievement of ever greater homogeneity in the tactical and organisational fields. If the International had taken this path, the effect in the organisational sphere would have been the elimination of what democratic machinery and internal bureaucracy still remained.

As a consequence the party resurrected during the Second World War did no more than draw conclusions from a process which had been initiated back in 1919 and which the collapse of the International had interrupted and reversed. In the world communist party, based on a theory which is unique and recognised as valid and unchanging all of its members, on principles and goals that are unique, and on a single programme and a set of tactical norms deduced from principles and rendered the patrimony of all militants; in the communist party which rejects the practice of fusions, infiltrations of other parties, and ‘national and local exceptions’, but which admits members solely and exclusively as individuals, there is no longer a place for either democracy or bureaucracy; no longer a place for ‘choosing from lists of comrades and voting on general theses’; no longer a place for the struggle between currents and fractions, that is, for internal political struggle.

The rank-and-file’s obedience to the centre’s orders is no longer guaranteed by observing the articles of a statute or a code, but by making sure the orders are in line with the party’s common patrimony. The party hierarchy no longer has to be elected by the rank-and-file, nor nominated from above, because the sole criterion for selection remains that of capacity to carry out the party organ’s various functions. The fact that one individual happens to be at the centre rather than another won’t change the party’s political line or its tactics: it may affect the centre’s effectiveness to a greater or lesser degree, but the appointment of the comrades most suited to the various roles still remains something that is ‘natural and spontaneous’, with no need for a particular form of ratification. The party hierarchy thus becomes an organic rather than a political hierarchy. The party is composed of various organs and roles, which in order to function require actual people; but these people are no longer asked whether they are Mensheviks or Bolsheviks, whether they belong to the right or left of the party. They are asked only if they are able to fill the role required of them by the party, however high or low it may figure in the hierarchical order. And, as a consequence, it is no longer crucial to know which individual is giving the orders, but only to insist that the orders don’t conflict with the party’s traditional line upheld by all of its members, that they don’t depart from it, and that the orders are timely and relevant. That is to say, the requirement is that whoever carries out the ‘central’ function performs it to the best of their ability in conformity with the party line. And the internal life of the party no longer manifests as a constant battle between divergent currents, that is, as a political struggle to dominate the organisation’s central power and impose a particular tactical line on it. Given that we don’t argue about our doctrine, programme or core tactics, it means that internal relations assume the form of a joint, shared work which all party members participate in, the common aim being, on the basis of their shared patrimony, to seek the best solutions to the various problems that arise.

The movement’s theoretical cornerstones have to be made clearer and clearer, its tactical lines have to be honed more and more and, in the light of the common principals, common tactics and examination of the situations in which the Party finds it has to act, complex problems regarding practical action have to be resolved and the most efficient organisational tools to co-ordinate the party’s activity as a whole have to be found. What is more, we have to work towards acquiring the entire practical and theoretical patrimony of the movement and transmit it to new generations of militants. None of this takes place by means of confrontations and congresses or consultations to solicit opinions; it occurs as a result of a rational and scientific search for solutions, it being clearly understood that whatever they are they mustn’t transgress the boundaries the party has set itself in all fields.

On this basis, even the mistakes which a particular party organ, including the ‘central’ organ, may make in the course of providing a solution to a given problem doesn’t entail that the individuals concerned have to be condemned or replaced, but rather a common search for what caused the mistake, in the light of our doctrine and our tactical norms. Certainly there may be more than one answer to a given tactical problem. In this case there may be temporary and localised disagreement between groups of militants over the issue. But even in this case it is not a situation of political struggle which is thereby created, because the fundamental requirement is always that, whichever of the two solutions is adopted, it will not conflict with the principles and main tactical lines established by the party. That the party adopts the most appropriate solution to the problems it faces is entrusted not to a consultation of the majority, or an assumed infallibility on the part of the central organ or leader, but rather to the developing and deepening of the party’s work and hence of its experience in every field of theory as much as in its practical activity.

The party’s tactical, programmatic and theoretical homogeneity is certainly not something that is given once and for all; it has to be maintained and defended in everything the party does. If at a given moment the party’s action were to contradict this homogeneous patrimony (which may happen under the weight of unfavourable external situations or because the party was unable to meet the demands of the situation and carry out its task) then the effect at the organisational level will necessarily be the creation of internal dissension, currents, and even fractions. As a classic thesis of ours states, such a state of malaise in the party must indicate that “something has gone wrong in the work and the general running of the party”, “that some aspect of the party’s activity is wrong or misaligned with the foundations on which the party rests”, and a remedy should be sought not through ‘bureaucratic’ repression of the dissension, not through invoking “discipline for discipline’s sake” which only represents a temporary and partial solution of the problem, but through the clarification of what the cornerstones of the party are, through objective research and by the reproposal to the organisation as a whole of those nodal points of theory and praxis which dictate the party’s action. The line of continuity which links the party’s past to its present and to its future will need to be identified and the directives regarding action adjusted to fit in with this line and militants called upon to accept discipline on this basis.

The petty bourgeoisie will, of course, make the following objection: who can stop individuals from doing what they want, who disobey because in every individual, including party militants, there lurks the germ of individualism, of self-celebration, of anarchism, etc? Who can stop people from raising problems just for sake of raising them or being critical? 50 years ago the Left had already replied to objections of this type, and it goes something like this: in an organized body such as the party, which is formed on the basis of a voluntary commitment to take a shared stand which involves long-term combativeness and sacrifice, such manifestations of individuality have to remain rare exceptions, and as such may even be repressed by bureaucratic means; but if these manifestations develop and multiply instead of dwindling and gradually disappearing it means that something about the party’s complex activity and the way it is run by the centre isn’t right; if only because, instead of attracting sound individuals prepared to relinquish their own individualist itches, it begins to attract fops and windbags. And the solution to this, too, is found not just in chasing out the windbags, but rather in finding out why the party organ is attracting them in the first place; and the remedy lies in rendering the physiognomy of the party even clearer and more precise in all its practical and theoretical manifestations, such that it serves to discourage any adherence except from those who are disposed to become genuine revolutionary militants.

As far as the Left is concerned, the solution can never be to have more bureaucratic barbed wire and organisational repression, which, as we have always said, we can very well do without, for the same reason we can do without headcounts.

QUOTATIONS

128 – The Democratic Principle – 1922
     (…) The democratic criterion so far has been for us an incidental material factor in the construction of our internal organization and in the formulation of our party statutes; it is not their indispensable platform. We will not, therefore, raise the organizational formula known as “democratic centralism” to the level of a principle. Democracy cannot be a principle for us: centralism indisputably is, since the essential characteristics of party organization 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 organization on “organic centralism“. Thus, while preserving as much of the incidental democratic mechanism as may be of use to us, we will eliminate the use of the term “democracy”, so dear to the worst demagogues but tainted with irony for the exploited, oppressed and cheated, abandoning it to the exclusive usage of the bourgeoisie and the champions of liberalism, who appear in various guises, sometimes extremist.

129 – Theses on Tactics at the 2^nd Congress of the P.C.d’I (Rome Theses) – 1922
     3. – The precise definition of the theoretical and critical consciousness of the communist movement, contained in the programmatic declarations of individual parties and of the Communist International, as well as the organization of the one and the other, was and still is being arrived at through the examination and study of the history of human society and its structure in the present capitalist epoch, carried out on the basis of facts, experience and through active participation in the actual proletarian struggle.
     4. The announcement of these programmatic declarations, and the appointment of the men to whom are entrusted the various positions in the party organization, 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 realizes the preparation and selection of leaders, thus shaping both the programmatic content and the hierarchical constitution of the party.

130 –  Theses of the Left at the III Congress del P.C.d’I. (Lyon Theses) – 1926
     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, by means of correct revolutionary politics.

131 – Notes for the Theses on the Question of Organisation – 1964
     2. – The formula quoted above is in Point 14 of Zinoviev’s theses, and is formulated thus: “The Communist Party has to be based on a democratic centralisation. The constitution by means of elections of secondary Committees, the obligatory submission of all committees to the committee above them, and the existence of a Centre equipped with full powers, whose authority, in the interval between Congresses, may be contested by no-one; such are the principles of democratic centralisation”.
     These theses don’t go into greater detail and, as regards the concept of subordination of the periphery to the Centre, the Left had no reason not to accept them. The doubts arose over the manner of nominating the Committees from the periphery to the Centre and the use of the electoral mechanism of vote counting, to which the adjective democratic evidently makes reference, as opposed to the noun centralism (…)
     12. – When the Communist Left developed its critique of the 3^rd International’s deviations on the question of tactics further, it also made a critique of the organizational criteria, and subsequent historical events have shown how those deviations led to the fatal abandonment of key programmatic and theoretical positions (…)
     What our formula organic centralism really wanted to express was not just that the party is a particular organ of the class, but also that it is only when the party exists that the class acts as a historical organized body, and not as a statistical section that any bourgeois would be quite prepared to accept. Marx, in Lenin’s historically fundamental and irrevocable reconstruction, not only said that he didn’t discover classes, but that he didn’t discover class struggle either, indicating as the identifying feature of his original theory the dictatorship of the proletariat: that is to say that only by means of the communist party can the proletariat achieve its dictatorship. The two notions of party and class therefore do not stand opposed to each other in a numerical sense, the party being small and the class large, but historically and organically; because only when on class terrain there has formed the energizing organ that is the party does the class actually become such, and start to complete the task which our doctrine of history assigns to it.
     13. – Replacing the adjective democratic with the adjective organic isn’t merely justified by the greater exactness of a biological image compared to a lifeless arithmetical one, but also because for a political struggle to be really effective it needs to be freed from the notion of democracy, and having once disposed of it we were able, with Lenin, to rebuild the revolutionary international.
     14. – (…) On the other hand, the Left’s criticisms of the International’s organizational work was consistent with its claim that the concept of organicity in the distribution of roles within the movement shouldn’t be confused with the demand for freedom of thought, much less with respect for elective and numeric democracy (…)
     These historical precedents confirm that the mechanism of vote counting is always and everywhere fraudulent and misleading, whether in society, in the class, or in the party; but the best resistance to it was offered by the Italian Party, precisely insofar as its deep-rooted political tradition refused to pay any homage at all to democracy’s historical exploits, its mechanisms or to its vote-counting.

132 – Considerations on the Organic Activity of the Party when the Situation is Historically Unfavourable – 1965
     14. – (…) The Left actually tried, without breaking from the principle of globally centralised discipline, to wage a revolutionary defensive war by keeping the vanguard proletariat immunised against the collusion of the middle classes, their parties and their doomed-to-defeat ideologies. Since this historic chance of saving if not the revolution at least the core of its historical party was also missed, today it has started again in a situation which is objectively torpid and indifferent, in the midst of a proletariat riddled with petty-bourgeois democratism; but the nascent organisation, using its entire doctrinal tradition and praxis, verified historically by its timely predictions, also applies it in its everyday activity too, through its efforts to re-establish ever wider contact with the exploited masses; and it also eliminates from its own structure one of the parting errors of the Moscow International, by getting rid of the thesis of democratic centralism and the application of any voting mechanism, just as it has eliminated from the thought processes of every last one of its members any concession to democratic, pacifist, autonomist or libertarian tendencies.

133 – Theses on the Historical Duty, Action and Structure of the World Communist Party… (’Theses of Naples’), 1965
     7. – It was a matter of a transition from one generation to another, of the generation which had lived through the glorious struggles of the first post-war period and the Livorno split handing over to the new proletarian generation, which needed to be delivered from the mad elation about the collapse of fascism in order to restore its awareness of the independent action of the revolutionary party, which was opposed to all other parties, and especially the social-democratic party, in order to re-establish forces committed to the prospect of the dictatorship and proletarian terror against the big bourgeoisie along with all its rapacious instruments. This being the case, the new movement, in an organic and spontaneous way, came up with a structural form for its activity which has been tried and tested over the last fifteen years. The party fulfilled aspirations which had been expressed within the Communist Left since the time of the Second International, and afterwards during the historic struggle against the first manifestations of opportunist danger within the Third. This long-standing aspiration is to struggle against democracy and prevent this vile bourgeois myth from gaining any influence; it has its roots in Marxist critique, in the fundamental texts and early documents of the proletarian organizations from the time of Communist Manifesto onwards.
     If human history is not to be explained by the influence of exceptional individuals who have managed to excel through strength and physical valour, or by moral or intellectual force, if political struggle is seen, in a way which is wrong and diametrically opposed to ours, as a selecting of such exceptional personalities (whether believed to be the work of divinities or entrusted to social aristocracies, or – in the form most hostile to us of all – entrusted to the mechanism of vote-counting to which all elements in society are eventually admitted); when in fact history is a history of class struggles, which can only be read and applied to real battles, which are no longer ‘critiques’ but are violent and armed, by laying bare the economic relations that classes establish between themselves within given forms of production; if this fundamental theorem has been confirmed by the blood shed by countless fighters, whose generous efforts had been violated by democratic mystification; and if the heritage of the Communist Left has been erected on this balance sheet of oppression, exploitation, and betrayal, then the only road worth following was the one which over the course of history had freed us, more and more, from the lethal machinery of democracy, not only in society and the various bodies organised within it, but also within the revolutionary class itself, and above all in its political party.
     This aspiration of the Left, which cannot be traced back to a miraculous intuition or rational enlightenment on the part of a great thinker, but which emerged under the impact of a chain of real, violent, bloody, and merciless struggles, even when it ended in the defeat of the revolutionary forces, has left its historic traces in a whole series of manifestations of the Left: from when it was struggling against electoral coalitions and the influence of Masonic ideologies, against the supporters firstly of the colonial wars and then the gigantic first European war (which triumphed over the proletarian aspiration to abandon their military uniforms and turn their arms against those who had forced them to take them up, mainly by agitating the lubricious phantom of a fight for liberty and democracy); from when finally in all the countries of Europe when finally in all the countries of Europe and under the leadership of the Russian revolutionary proletariat, the Left threw itself into the battle to bring down the main immediate enemy and target which protected the heart of the capitalist bourgeoisie, the social-democratic right-wing, and the even more ignoble centre which, defaming us just as it defamed bolshevism, Leninism, and the Russian Soviet dictatorship, did everything it could to place another trapdoor between the proletarian advance and the criminal idealisations of democracy. At the same time the aspiration to rid even the word “democracy” of any influence is evidenced in countless texts of the Left hurredly indicated at the start of these theses.
     13. – (…) The screening of party members in the organic centralist scheme is carried out in a way we have always supported against the Moscow centrists. The party continues to hone and refine the distinctive features of its doctrine, of its action and tactics with a unique methodology that transcends spatial and temporal boundaries. Clearly all those who are uncomfortable with these delineations can just leave.
     Not even after the seizure of power has taken place can we conceive of having forced membership in our ranks; which is why organic centralism excludes terroristic pressures in the disciplinary field, which can’t help but adopt even the very language of abused bourgeois constitutional forms, such as the power of the executive power to dissolve and reassemble elective formations – all forms that for a long time we have considered obsolete, not only for the proletarian party, but even for the revolutionary and temporary State of the victorious proletariat.

134 – Our Perception of the Theses, Then and Now – 1965
     (…) The fourteenth thesis defines democratic centralism thus: election of secondary committees by primary ones – obligatory subordination of every committee to the one above it – centre with full powers, non-incontestable from one congress to the next. We will merely note that, in the Left’s conception of organic centralism, even congresses shouldn’t sit in judgement on the Centre’s work and who is chosen to fill particular roles, but rather decide on questions of policy, in a way that is consistent with the invariant historical doctrine of the world party.

135 – Introduction to the ‘Post 1945 Theses’ – 1970
     (…) It is precisely to these ever present requirements, which the militant must find clearly and definitely satisfied in the programmatic basis of the party, that the ‘Considerations’ respond. Written at the end of 1964, and published at the beginning of 1965, they arrive at a synthesis which is so pithy, so clear, that, amongst other things, they give the lie, once and for all, to the ridiculous, oft-repeated accusation against the Left that they dreamed of an ‘elite’ of ‘pure’ revolutionaries, leading a perfect existence within their ‘ivory tower’. The ‘Considerations’ conclude by defending that same ‘organic centralism’ which was counter posed to the ‘democratic centralism’ of the 3^rd International. This has been a constant postulate of the Left since 1921, but one which only today can be fully put into effect with no possibility of going back, with the exclusion of any recourse to democratic mechanisms, also inside the party organisation (…)
     In fact organic centralism, insofar as it stands opposed to democratic centralism, is far from being just a question of… terminology. In its contradictoriness it is as if the noun within the second formulation reflects the aspiration to the one world party which we have always wanted, whereas the adjective reflects the reality of parties which are still heterogeneous in terms of their historical formation and doctrinal base, among whom there sits as supreme arbiter (rather than as apex of a pyramid, united to the base by a single homogeneous thread continuously reeled out from one to the other and vice versa) an Executive Committee or a homonymous entity, the which, not being in its turn linked to that single thread but free to take decisions which vary and fluctuate ‘according to circumstances’ and the highs and lows of the social conflict, periodically resorts – as in the far from contradictory tradition of democracy – one minute to the farce of ‘consulting’ the periphery (secure as it is in its capacity to ensure unanimous, or almost unanimous, support), and the next minute to the weapon of intimidation and ‘ideological terror’, which in the case of the Communist International is backed up with physical force and the ‘secular arm’ of the State.
     Within our vision, on the other hand, the party has organic centrality as one of its characteristics, because it isn’t a ‘part’, however advanced, of the proletarian class, but rather its organ, the synthesiser of all its elementary thrusts, as well as all of its militants, from whatever source they may come, and it is such on the strength of its possession of a theory, a set of principles, and a programme, which oversteps the limitations of the present day in order to express the historical tendency, final objective and the mode of operating of the proletarian and communist generations of past, present and future, and which transcends the borders of nationality and of State so as to incarnate the interests of the revolutionary wage-earners of the entire world; and it is such, we may add, also on the strength of its forecast, or rough outline at least, of how historical situations are likely to unfold, and therefore of its capacity to fix a body of directives and obligatory tactical norms binding on all (although obviously taking into account that “double revolutions” and “pure proletarian revolutions” also need to be forecast, involving well defined, although different, tactical approaches). If the party is in possession of such theoretical and practical homogeneity (although such possession is not guaranteed for all time, but is rather a reality to be defended tooth and claw, and if necessary won back as many time as it takes), then its organisation, which is simultaneously its discipline, arises and develops organically on the unitary rootstock of program and practical action, and expresses in its diverse forms of explication, in the hierarchy of its organs, a perfect connectedness of the party with the sum of all of its functions, bar none.
     Organisation, same as discipline, isn’t a point of departure but a point of arrival; it has no need of statutory codification and disciplinary regulation; it recognises no contradiction between the ‘base’ and the ‘summit’; it excludes the rigid barriers of a division of labour inherited from the capitalist regime not because leaders’ and ‘experts’ in specific areas aren’t needed, but because these are, and necessarily have to be, committed (in the same way as the most ‘lowly’ of its militants, only more so) to a program, a doctrine and to a clear and unequivocal definition of tactical norms shared by the entire party, known to each of its members, publicly affirmed and above all expressed in practice in full view of the class as whole. And just as leaders and experts are necessary, they are likewise dispensable as soon as they cease to fulfil the role which, via natural selection rather than by phony head counts, the party had entrusted to them; or when, worse still, they deviate from the path marked out for all to follow. A party of this type (as ours tends to be and tries to become, without however making any anti-historical claim to ‘purity’ or ‘perfection’) doesn’t adapt its entire internal life, its development, its – let’s just say it – hierarchy of technical functions to fit in with whimsical decisions made on the spur of the moment or decreed by a majority; it grows and is strengthened by the dynamics of the class struggle in general, and by its own interventions within it in particular; it creates, without prefiguring them, its instruments of battle, its ‘organs’, at all levels; it doesn’t need – except in pathological cases – to expel after ‘due process’ those who no longer feel like following the common, unchanging road, because it must be capable of getting rid of them in the same way a healthy organism spontaneously eliminates its waste matter.
     ‘Revolution isn’t a question of forms of organisation’. On the contrary, organisation, in all its various forms, arises in response to the various demands of the revolution, not only the outcome of which has been predicted, but also how to get there. Consultations, constitutions and statutes are typical of societies divided into classes, and of the parties which express in their turn not the historic trajectory of a class, but the criss-crossing of the divergent or not fully convergent trajectories of several classes. Internal democracy and ‘bureaucratism’, the worship of individual or group ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘ideological terrorism’, all are terms that are not so much antithetical as dialectically connected. Similarly, unity of doctrine and tactical action, and the organic character of organisational centralism are equally two sides of the same coin.

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Ch. 5 THE REAL LIFE OF THE PARTY  

We would like to conclude this part of the work by republishing the entire final part of a report that was presented at our General Meeting and published in Programma Comunista Number 5 in 1967. The conclusion to this report is entitled “The Real Life of the Party” and we stand by everything stated therein, adding nothing and removing nothing.

QUOTATIONS

136 – The Party’s Continuity of Action in the Line of the Left Tradition – 1967

 The lengthy passages just quoted already make abundantly clear that we not only consider the problems of organisation and functioning of the revolutionary party to be linked to the fundamental questions of doctrine, programme and tactics, but also believe that a correct resolution of the latter is prejudicial to the correct formulation and resolution of the former. Here as well, in 1926, the Left completed the cycle of a battle it had been waging, year on year, without ever allowing itself to be deflected, inside the International. And it is something we would like commemorated in the conclusion to this already too lengthy report, referring readers to the Rome Theses, and the Naples and Milan Theses for a more detailed account.

By this time, there had been a complete maturation of that process, promptly and “stubbornly” denounced by ourselves in its later stages, by which the Comintern, to the same degree and for the same reason it adopted tactics which were heterogeneous, eclectic and unplanned, and carried out sudden and disorientating zig-zags and about-turns, to arrive eventually at the theorisation that any means could be used to achieve the end; to the same degree and for the same reason that, acting in such a way, it caused irreparable damage to the unitary fabric of the political action of the world party, it claimed to be imposing on it a formal unity very similar, in fact identical, to that of an army, thanks to which it would supposedly recover its lost political homogeneity; laying the basis on which Stalinism would build its edifice of “unity” based on bullying and intimidation, first by using against both right and left the weapon of disciplinary intervention and ‘ideological terror’, then by applying physical pressure, supported by the “secular arm” of State power. However, we never criticised this formal, barrack-like centralisation because it ‘trampled upon freedom’ but on the contrary because it gave the leading centre total freedom to trample on the one, invariable and impersonal programme. And rather than contradicting this false centralism the designation ‘democratic’ fit it like a glove, since for Marxism democracy isn’t a means of expressing the so-called “general” or “majority will”, but a means of manipulating the majority into sanctioning decisions which have already been taken behind its back: a means of bullying. But in order to be free to violate the programme over and over again, without giving a damn about how the famous and much courted “base” would react, in fact to prevent their reaction before it happened, it would be necessary to impose an empty shell of centralisation, modelled on the General Staffs which all armies have (not for nothing the International was full of ex-Mensheviks and ex-social democrats at this time, awarded senior positions in the hierarchy; the Martinovs, the Smerals, etc, who Trotski described as always ready to live down their past in a present which rehabilitated their political traditions, to “stand to attention” like so many quarter masters) theorising discipline for discipline’s sake, obedience for obedience sake, whatever the orders coming down from above, or rather, from the Almighty.

Side by side with this, and for the same reason, an “organisational model”, a type of constitutional charter defined once and for all, would be held up as the guarantee of the compactness and efficiency of the Party (in this case, the cell organisation) and it would be called, with bestial impudence, “bolshevisation”. Faced with these two momentous deviations, harbingers of all the muck and blood of the next thirty years, our response – which largely constituted the courageous battle fought within the Enlarged Executive of February-March 1926 – was clear and definitive. To begin with, we replied that the unity and the real centralisation of the party organisation and its activity – something we have always been the first to defend – is the product, the point of arrival and not the cause and the point of departure of unity and centrality of doctrine, programme, and of the system of tactical norms: pointless it was to seek the former if the latter was lacking; worse than pointless, it was destructive, in fact lethal. We are centralists (and this, if you like, is our one organisational principle) not because we see centralism as valid per se, not because we have deduced it from an eternal idea or an abstract plan, but because there is only one objective towards which we strive, and only one way to reach it in space (internationally) and in time (across the generations “of the dead, the living and the yet to be born”); we are centralists on the strength of the invariance of a doctrine which it isn’t within the power of either individuals or groups to change, and of the continuity of our action within the ebb and flow of historical circumstances, faced with all the obstacles that are strewn across the path of the working class. Our centralism is the mode of being of a party, which is not an army even if it does observe a rigorous discipline, not a school even if it has lessons to teach. Rather it is a real historical force defined by its stable orientation within the long battle between the classes.

It is around this indivisible and rock-hard kernel of doctrine-programme-tactics, the collective and impersonal possession of the movement, that our organisation crystallises; and what keeps it united is not the “kernel” of the “organizing centre”, but the unique and uniform thread which links “leaders” and “base”, “centre” and “periphery”, binding them in observance and defence of a system of ends and means which are mutually inseparable. In this real life of the communist party – not of any party but specifically the one that not only calls itself communist but actually is communist – the conundrum which so torments the bourgeois democrat, the question of “who makes the decisions?”, is it the top or the bottom, the many or the few? – melts away forever, of its own accord: it is the body of the party as a whole, which has embarked on and continues to go its own way; and within it, in the words of an obscure Leveller soldier “no-one commands and all are commanded”; which is not to say there are no orders but that, whoever happens to be giving them, they will coincide with the party’s natural mode of proceeding. But once you break this unity of doctrine-programme-tactics, everything comes crashing down; all that is left, at one extreme, is… a road block, a command post marshalling the mass of militants (like the General – allegedly a strategic “genius” – deploys his poor supposedly stupid recruits, even if this means sending them over the top into a wall of fire, or like the stationmaster marshals his trains, even if they end up colliding with one another) and at the other extreme, a boundless parade ground for all possible kinds of manoeuvring. Once you break this unity, Stalinism becomes logical and historically justified. Likewise, the ruinous subordination of a party like ours, whose first duty is ensuring “the historical continuity and international unity of the movement” (Point 4 of the Livorno programme of 1921), to the false and deceitful mechanism of “constitutional democracy”, also becomes logical and historically justified. Break this unity and you destroy the class party.

A real force operating in history and characterised by its rigorous continuity, the party lives and acts (and this is our response to the second deviation) not on the basis of a set of inherited statutory norms, precepts and constitutional forms, in the way hypocritically desired by bourgeois legalism, or naively dreamt up by pre-Marxist utopianism, with its carefully planned structures which quickly succumb to history’s dynamic reality; rather, the party’s life and activity is founded on its nature as an organisation which takes shape, during an uninterrupted succession of theoretical and practical battles, in the course of its constant forward march: as we wrote in our 1945 “Platform”: “the party’s organisational norms are consistent with the dialectical conception of its function; they don’t rely on legal formulations and regulations and have transcended the fetish of majority consultation”. It is in the execution of its duties, all of them, not just one of them, that the party creates its own specific organs, systems and mechanisms; and in the course of exercising them it also dismantles and recreates them, obeying neither metaphysical precepts nor constitutional precedents but the real and exquisitely organic requirements of its own development. None of these mechanisms can be theorised either a priori or a posteriori; nothing authorises us to say – to give a very down-to-earth example – that the best way of ensuring that any of them conforms to the purpose for which it was created is for it to be managed by one or more militants, when all one can really demand is that the militants, however many there are, manage it as though with one will, consistent with the entire past and future trajectory of the party. And if there is just one militant, that he manage it as though in his own arms and his own brain the impersonal and collective force of the party was at work, with the final verdict on how far such a demand had been satisfied given not by articles of law, but by praxis, by history. The revolution is a question of force, not form; and the same goes for the party in its real life, in its organisation and in its doctrine. Even the organisational criterion which we defend, of a territorial rather than a ‘cellular’ type, is not deduced from abstract principles that are unrelated to time and place, or considered to be a perfect and eternal solution; we adopt it merely because it is the other side of the primary synthesising function (of groups, trade categories, elementary pressures) which we assign to the party.

The generous concern of comrades that the party organisation should function securely and in a linear and homogeneous way therefore turns – as Lenin himself warned in his ‘Letter to a comrade’ – not on finding statutes, rules and constitutions or, worse still, ‘especially talented’ people, but on finding the best way that each and every one of us can contribute towards the harmonious execution of the functions without which the party would cease to exist as the unifying force and guide, and representative, of the class; this is the only way to help it resolve the challenges of its daily existence and activity “on its own”, on a day-to-day basis – as described in Lenin’s What is to be Done?, in which the newspaper is referred to as a “collective organiser”. Herein lies the key to “organic centralism”, herein lies the reliable weapon in the historic battle of the classes, not in the empty abstraction of so-called operational “rules” for managing perfect systems or, worse, in the squalid processes for the organic selection of men who get together to manage them, “at the top” or “from below”: these are also mechanisms and systems and they are efficient or inefficient not in themselves, or by virtue of the presence or lack of personal qualities, but to the extent that the entire party sets them in motion – its dictatorial programme, its invariable doctrine, its tactics anticipated in advance, the reciprocal relations within the party between the different parts of an organism whose members, whose “limbs”, live and die together insofar as the same blood circulates or ceases to circulate in the central muscle and the peripheral fibres.

The theses of 1920, 1922, 1926, 1945, 1966, in fact, forever, leave us no other “choice”: either we proceed on this track or on two apparently separate, but in reality convergent tracks, one of them chaotic and arbitrary democratism and the other menacing Stalinist authoritarianism.