Il Programma Comunista 1965/2

15. Stalinism never wished to consider the defeat in 1927 as anything other than a “stage” of the bourgeois revolution in China and a “temporary” setback in the workers’ movement. We reject this interpretation. The class struggles of this period were anything but “partial”, so much so that they were transformed into a struggle for power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and defeat was accompanied by the physical and long-lasting elimination of the entire Communist vanguard. By then, as Trotski said, the “democratic revolution” in China had taken on the character not of bourgeois revolution, but of bourgeois counter-revolution. Finally, the failure in 1927 marked the complete rejection on the part of the Moscow International of the Bolshevik tradition in all countries in the East. The April Theses of 1917, in which Lenin announced the approaching victory of the Russian revolution, are contradicted word for word by the theses of April 1927 in which Stalin justifies Jiang Kai-shek’s coup d’etat by the theory of revolutionary “stages”. In opposition to bourgeois and national historiography, Marxism must re-establish its proletarian and international concept of the historical course of the bourgeois revolutionary movements:

• 1789 – 1871: bourgeois democratic movements in Western Europe (as well as in North America and Japan);
• 1905 – 1950 (roughly): national revolutionary movements in Eastern Europe and in the entire Afro-Asian area; just one proletarian victory: in Russia;
• 1917 – 1927: world strategy of the permanent revolution, with defeat in Europe (1918-1923) and in Asia (1924-1927) as the conditions for the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia and in the rest of the world.

Peasant “Socialism” and the “New” Democracy

16. Marxism has not only denounced the theory of the “democratic stage”, it has also rejected, during the “agrarian stage”, the use by Stalin of the slogan “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” to cover up the governmental alliance with the left of the Guomindang. In its completed form this theory has become the theory of the “new” democracy, signalling the complete abandonment of those Marxist conceptions on the class nature of each and every State.

“Thus the numerous forms of State systems in the world can be reduced to these three basic types: 1) republics under bourgeois dictatorship; 2) republics under the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) republics under the joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes (…) During a specific historical period, the only applicable form of State organisation is the third, the one which we call the new-democratic republic” (Mao Zedong, On New Democracy, 1940).

Lenin’s International never called upon the proletarians of the colonies to establish such “intermediary” States between the dictatorship of the proletariat and that of the bourgeoisie, and we also deny that there exists, or ever has existed, a single example of such a State after over 40 years of “anti-imperialist fronts”. The experience of duality of power during the Russian revolution showed that the “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” is inevitably transformed, in a short period, into either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Trotski extended this lesson to the Chinese revolution, and we can see its confirmation today in the bourgeois outcome of every anti-colonial movement.

“While the Russian Narodniks, together with the Mensheviks, lent to their short-lived ‘dictatorship’ the form of an open dual power, the Chinese ‘revolutionary democracy’ did not even attain that stage. And inasmuch as history in general does not work to order, there only remains for us to understand that there is not and will not be any other ‘democratic dictatorship’ except the dictatorship exercised by the Guomindang since 1925” (Trotski, The Communist International After Lenin).

17. After having long ignored the agrarian movement and the arming of the peasants, the Stalinists became so infatuated with it that they came to consider it the “defining trait of the Chinese revolution and the basis of the new democracy”.

“In essence, the national question is a peasant question”, Stalin declared. And Mao commented:

“This means that the Chinese revolution is essentially a peasant revolution, and that the resistance to Japan now going on is essentially peasant resistance. Essentially, the politics of New Democracy means giving power to peasants” (Mao Zedong, On New Democracy, 1940)

It is not in this, as far as we are concerned, that the originality of the bourgeois revolutions in the imperialist epoch lies. In the past, all of them have all used the peasants in different ways, including the armed organization, and they have all, to varying degrees, brought along profound changes in agriculture. Yet Marxism has always stressed the incapacity of the peasant class to define a policy of its own. It has shown that agrarian insurrections, which are an integral part of bourgeois revolutions, have only succeeded under the leadership of the cities and by ceding power to them. The Communist Manifesto already insisted back in 1848 on the dual character of the peasantry and why it cannot act as an independent class. The peasant is nothing but the social representative of bourgeois relations; he always leaves his political representation to others.

To all those champions of peasant “socialism” who, both in Russia and China, have reproached us for “underestimating” the peasantry, we answer that we have always stressed the lessons of Marxism and that the originality of the Eastern revolutions lies not in the armed intervention of the peasant masses, but in the prospect of a proletarian course towards not inevitably bourgeois goals.

18. The defeat of the Chinese proletariat explains why the revolution had to recede to the countryside. But it does not provide justification for communists to exchange their class conceptions for the theories of peasant “socialism”. In 1848-9 the failure of the German revolution had left the proletariat in the same politically disorganised situation; it had put it in the same danger of being submerged by petit-bourgeois democracy. This was the danger confronted by Marx and Engels in their famous Address to the Communist League.

Against the petit-bourgeois radicals, who “seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail, while their particular interests are kept hidden”, the Address stresses the necessity of an independent class party.

Against every type of petit-bourgeois democratic power, this is how the Address introduced the slogan of the proletarian revolution:

“Alongside the new official governments the workers must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers” (Marx, The Revolutions of 1848).

This is the classical answer of Marxism to the reactionary formulas of “workers’ and peasants’ parties”, “workers’ and peasants’ governments” and of the “new” democracy. The Address of 1850 is directed entirely against them. If Marx and Engels do not speak of “democratic dictatorship” here, it is because they didn’t consider it a fitting slogan for the proletariat to use against the agitation of the petit-bourgeois democrats. The opinions of Stalin and Mao cannot even be based on the absence in Germany of the “original” particularity they claimed to have discovered in China, and indeed even in Russia: the agrarian revolution. On the contrary, Marx and Engels more than once allowed for a ‘re-run’ of the peasant war of the 16^th century under the political guidance of the proletariat.

19. The Russian revolution, no more than the German bourgeois revolution, doesn’t reveal the secret of a stable “popular” power representing a block of classes. Long before 1917 Lenin explained the formula of the “revolutionary and democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” as a power of the proletariat “relying upon the peasants” or “drawing the peasants along behind it”; a formula which was neither frontist nor “democratic”. This is how, in perfect continuity with Marx and Engels, he interprets the slogan in April 1917:

“The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has already become a reality in the Russian revolution, for this ‘formula’ envisages only a class correlation and not a concrete political institution implementing this correlation, this cooperation. ‘The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’ – there you have the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ already accomplished in reality” (Lenin, “Letters On Tactics”, Coll. Works, Vol. 24, 44-5).

“We have side by side, existing together, simultaneously, both the rule of the bourgeoisie (the government of Lvov and Guchov) and a revolutionary-dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, which is voluntarily ceding power to the bourgeoisie, voluntarily making itself an appendage of the bourgeoisie” (ibid., p.46).

“A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, ‘communist’ elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petit-bourgeois elements” (ibid., p. 45).

Between February and October the populists and Mensheviks were rabid supporters of the “democratic dictatorship”, reproaching Lenin for “underestimating” the peasantry and for wanting to “jump over” the stage of bourgeois social reforms. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, pointed out that it was not a question of “introducing socialism” into Russia, but of seizing political power; after which they would show how the proletarian dictatorship would realise the economic reforms of the petit-bourgeois democracy.

20. After the capitulation before the Chinese liberal bourgeoisie, the “struggle against trotskism” aimed to ensure the triumph, within the defeated proletariat, of positions which had previously been defended by the bloc of populists and Mensheviks at the time of the Russian revolution. And it was Mao Zedong, one time member of the Central Committee of the Guomindang and recent agitator of the peasantry, who executed this task.

In our view he neither “saved” nor “reconstructed” the party of the proletariat by leading it “into the mountains” and pushing it into peasant guerrilla warfare: he simply drowned it in the confused petit-bourgeois mass. In contrast, Lenin in April 1917, and Marx in March 1850, were able to prevent Communists from getting bogged down in this way. And as regards the question of power in the Chinese revolution, Mao Zedong has not even shaken off the petit-bourgeois illusions which allowed Jiang Kai-shek’s repression to go unchecked in 1927. The theory of the “new democracy” is nothing but the development of these same illusions in a period and in a country in which the weakness of the “national” bourgeoisie left no other prospect for constituting the bourgeois power than by the action of the “popular” and peasant masses, so inept and slow to get themselves organised.

The petit-bourgeois democrats love to blame ‘reaction’ for the difficulties they have in achieving ‘effective’ unity, for their lack of character and their innate instability. Marxism, on the other hand, sees it as a reflection of their unstable economic situation. To appeal to the political initiative of these masses in order to found a national State, to combat imperialism or to realise the socialist programme, this not only repudiates Marx and Lenin, but compromises the entire revolutionary movement. Proof enough is provided, in our view, by the interminable fluctuations of the Chinese revolution and, today, by the blood-stained anarchy contorting the major part of black Africa.

This is why in 1917 Lenin set aside the “old formula” of the “revolutionary and democratic dictatorship”, which the populists and Mensheviks wanted to “realise” by means of… the constituent assembly. In the same way the Bolsheviks consigned the name “social-democratic party” to the archives of the 2^nd International.

Because, and this also goes for the “new democracy”:

“‘Democracy’ expresses in reality one moment the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, next the impotent reformism of the petit-bourgeoisie that submits to this dictatorship” (Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky).

Impotent Petit-Bourgeois Reformism

21. In their 1850 Address, Marx and Engels warned German proletarians that petit-bourgeois democracy would play the same treacherous role as the liberal bourgeoisie in the revolutionary transformation of the old social and political structures. The confirmation of these predictions in Russia would be the social-revolutionaries. The Chinese example gives us absolute confirmation on the scale of an entire historical period and of an entire country.

“The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole of society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible. They therefore demand above all else a reduction in government spending through a restriction of the bureaucracy and the transference of the major tax burden onto the large landowners and bourgeoisie. They further demand the removal of the pressure exerted by big capital on small capital through the establishment of public credit institutions and the passing of laws against usury, whereby it would be possible for themselves and the peasants to receive advances on favourable terms from the State instead of from capitalists; also, the introduction of bourgeois property relationships on the land through the complete abolition of feudalism…

“As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of State employment and by welfare measures… But these demands can in no way satisfy the party of the proletariat. While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered State power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one” (Address…, ibid. pp. 323-4).

22. With regard to the agrarian question, Mao’s party had done nothing to combat the petit-bourgeois tendencies which were anxious to emphasise the break with the old relations with a juridical consecration of the sacred rights of peasant property. And none of the reforms so noisily proclaimed since the creation of the People’s Republic have contemplated a greater concentration of agriculture than that based on the development of small production, the “interests” of the small-holding peasant and State “aid” for the latter. When they wished to overcome these limitations, which are those of bourgeois relations of production, the social catastrophe which occurred was no less serious than that which followed the false Stalinist collectivisation in Russia.

In brief, the famous “agrarian revolution” is reduced to a harsh accumulation of capital in the Chinese rural areas in accordance with the two classical phases of the development of capitalist agriculture: firstly the establishment of peasant property, then a slow process of expropriation and concentration under the impulse of the bourgeois productive forces and a growing market economy.

“If no special obstacle arises, we are prepared to continue this policy after the war, first extending rent and interest reduction to the whole country and then taking proper measures for the gradual achievement of ‘land to the tiller’” (Mao Zedong, On Coalition Government, 1945, op.cit., p. 248).

“Then, as the peasants are helped to organize farming and other production co-operatives step by step on a voluntary basis, the productive forces will grow” (ibid., p.251).

It has taken a quarter of a century (1927-1952) to achieve the first phase: confiscation and division. But before China has a “modern”, concentrated, i.e., fully capitalist agriculture, we can only hope that the Communist proletariat of the world will have got the better of national, peasant and petit-bourgeois “socialism”.

23. In the weary historical development of Chinese agriculture we can see one fact confirmed: its bourgeois character. But our criticism of the agrarian policy of the CCP is to do with a matter of principle: all it has done is mirror the molecular processes of this development without trying to anticipate its social consequences, particularly as regards the overthrow of bourgeois property relations. Let us quote again from the 1850 Address:

“The first point over which the bourgeois democrats will come into conflict with the workers will be the abolition of feudalism; as in the first French revolution, the petty bourgeoisie will want to give the feudal lands to the peasants as free property; that is, they will try to perpetuate the existence of the rural proletariat, and to form a petty-bourgeois peasant class which will be subject to the same cycle of impoverishment and debt which still afflicts the French peasant. The workers must oppose this plan both in the interest of the rural proletariat and in their own interest. They must demand the confiscated feudal property remain State property and be used for workers’ colonies, cultivated collectively by the rural proletariat with all the advantages of large-scale farming and where the principle of common property will immediately achieve a sound basis in the midst of the shaky system of bourgeois property relations” (op. cit., pp. 327-8).

For Communists, it was not a matter of determining whether China or petit-bourgeois Russia was “ripe” for this transformation: the overthrow of bourgeois domination is conceivable only on an international scale. Neither was it a matter of inventing, in a given country, “collectivist” recipes in order to accelerate its economic development. “We write a decree and not a programme”, Lenin said commenting on the “Decree on the Land”, which some reproached for being the programme of the social-revolutionaries. And yet on one point this “decree” differed from their “programme”: it did not include the aspirations of the peasantry in fixed juridical forms (division of land, nationalization). In this resides the whole of the difference between the programmes of national “socialism” and internationalist Communism.

24. The petit-bourgeois policy of Mao’s party appears in a still clearer light in the “question of the workers”. Far from writing “abolition of the wages system” on its banner, the CCP proclaims the association of capital and labour and does not neglect any “measure of charity” in the tradition of the “socialists” â la Louis Blanc:

“The task of the Chinese working class is to struggle not only for the establishment of a new-democratic State but also for China’s industrialization and modernization of her agriculture. The policy of adjusting the interests of labour and capital will be adopted under the new-democratic State system. On the one hand, it will protect the interests of the workers, institute an eight to ten hour working day according to circumstance, provide suitable unemployment relief and social insurance and safeguard trade union rights; on the other hand, it will guarantee legitimate profits to properly managed State, private and co-operative enterprises – so that both the public and private sectors and both labour and capital will work together to develop industrial production” (Mao Zedong, On Coalition Government, 1945, op. cit., p. 254).

Such a programme, such a practice, does not differ at all from the old reformism of the advanced capitalist countries, from the election speeches of any “progressive” deputy or any “reactionary” minister of the West. By calling this “socialism” and vindicating its exclusivity as compared with Moscow, Mao has elevated himself to the “ideological” level of the bourgeois conservative forces of the world. He has lost his halo as a peasant agitator.

In China the petit-bourgeois democracy ceased to be revolutionary in 1927; even before it took State power it had become reformist; today it has become reactionary, presenting its illusions, and especially its economico-social practice, under the label of “socialist construction”. That is the only political significance that we attach to its conflict with Moscow.

25. Thus the historical destiny of Chinese “populism” has been brought to a close. Since the first bourgeois revolution in 1911 Lenin stressed the double aspect of Sun Yat-sen’s ideology. Utopian was the idea of realising “socialism” through a nationalisation of the land, the “limitation” of big capital and the “honest” application of a plan for industrial development agreed upon by the Great Powers. But this programme had a bourgeois revolutionary substance that the Bolsheviks could recognise in China, as in Russia. In adopting it, and realising it, Mao’s party conferred on it the only “original development” that was reserved for it: the Utopian idea of peasant “socialism” has become the reactionary ideology of the “socialist construction” in China; and its revolutionary substance has been squandered in the ocean of petty-bourgeois reforms.

Thus did the political ideology of a class degenerate long after history had condemned it to death. At the other extreme, as early as 1894, as the Russian proletariat was taking its first faltering steps, Lenin could announce the ideological bankruptcy of the “Friends of the People” several decades before their “popular” power saw the light of day:

“The rural countryside is indeed splitting up. Nay more, the countryside long ago split up completely. And the old Russian peasant socialism split up with it, making for workers’ socialism, on the one hand, and degenerating into vulgar petit-bourgeois radicalism, on the other hand. This change cannot be described as anything but degeneration. From the doctrine that peasant life is a special order and that our country has taken an exceptional path of development, there has emerged a sort of diluted eclecticism, which can no more deny that commodity economy has become the basis of economic development and has grown into capitalism, but which refuses to see the necessity of the class struggle under this system. From a political programme, calculated to arouse the peasantry for the socialist revolution against the foundations of modern society, there has emerged a programme calculated to patch up, to”improve” the conditions of the peasantry while preserving the foundations of modern society” (Lenin, “What the Friends of the People Are”, Part III, 1894, Coll. Works, Vol. 1, pp. 264-5).

Rivalries in the Bourgeois East

26. Unlike India and other colonial countries, China entered modern history as “everybody’s colony”. Very soon the export of capital prevailed over the export of industrial products from the old English metropolis. To protect their investments the Great Powers “agreed” on the division of the country into spheres of influence. In Beijing the diplomatic corps had the State finances at their disposal. This situation was a reflection, as Lenin pointed out, of the transition of capitalism to its highest stage: imperialism. Wilson’s programme for “the internationalisation of the colonies”, Kautsky’s “ultra-imperialist” version of it, and the project, laid down by Sun Yat-sen, for the creation of a consortium of the Great Powers for the development of an “independent” China had no other objective basis.

“Let us assume – said Lenin – that all the imperialist countries conclude an alliance for the ‘peaceful’ division of those parts of Asia; this alliance would be an alliance of ‘internationally united finance capital’. There are actual examples of alliance of this kind in the history of the 20^th century – the attitude of the powers to China for instance. We ask, is it ‘conceivable’, assuming that the capitalist system remains intact – and this is the assumption that Kautsky does make – that such alliance would be more than temporary, that they would eliminate friction, conflicts and struggle in every possible form?” (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916).

The example of China has shown that it was inconceivable. The country which at the beginning of the century seemed to offer the greatest promise of a capitalist development and the surest guarantees of profits has become the closed battlefield of civil wars and imperialist rivalry. Or rather, faced with the outbreak of these antagonisms world imperialism had to renounce all its economic “plans” in China, transferring the unbridled competition between Capitals to the old colonies or semi-colonies: India, Africa, South America. Here “overseas development” and the stale pacifisms of the Russo-American Wilsons and Kautskys reappeared: but the groundwork was also laid for future revolutionary explosions on an even larger scale.

27. Mao’s party did all it could to ensure its victory wasn’t characterised by a violent rupture of the imperialist chain in Asia. The CCP, adhering even more completely to the world war than Sun Yat-sen, acquired the illusions of the liberal Chinese bourgeoisie about a “society of nations”, and an “international co-operation”, which would benefit China.

“The CCP agrees with the Atlantic Charter and with the decisions of the international conferences of Moscow, Teheran and Yalta (…) The fundamental principles of the CCP’s foreign policy are as follows: to establish and develop diplomatic relations with all countries, to resolve all questions of mutual relations (…) setting out from the need to crush the fascist aggressors, to maintain international peace, to mutually respect independence and equality in the rights of States, to cooperate with each other in the interests of States and peoples” (Mao Zedong, On the Coalition Government, 1945).

Sun Yat-sen recognised the bankruptcy of this programme back in 1924! Mao not only remained faithful to it but passed it off as “socialism”:

“The socialist countries, great and small, whether economically developed or not, must establish their relations on the basis of the principles of complete equality, of respect for territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence, of non-interference in internal affairs, as well as reciprocal support and assistance” (Letter in 25 points, 14/6/63).

In opposition to the petty-bourgeois utopia of a ‘socialism’ of the countries realising a ‘harmonious’ development towards ‘equal’ trade, we call for the destruction of the bourgeois countries and the establishment of non-mercantile, not merely ‘equal’, relations between countries in which tomorrow the dictatorship of the proletariat will be established!

28. Far from reflecting ‘ideological differences’, the Sino-Soviet conflict exists on the same terrain as bourgeois national interests. It is incontestable that the compromises which the USSR made with the indigenous bourgeoisie and with foreign imperialism delayed the constitution of national bourgeois States in the East until after the 2^nd World War. Just as the Russian Revolution was re-awakening the anti-colonial movements in Asia, the Stalinist counter-revolution halted their development. But Mao’s party taking its stand against Moscow today never denounced this betrayal: neither in 1937, when the CPP timidly executed the turn towards “popular fronts” by renewing the alliance with Jiang Kai-shek, nor in 1945, when Stalin signed a treaty of peace and friendship, again with Jiang, which was supposed to last… thirty years.

It isn’t therefore consciousness of the interests of the anti-colonial movement, less still a critique of Russian ‘socialism’, which lies behind the Sino-soviet conflict. Rather it is the contradictions between the interests of Chinese capitalism and Russian imperialism:

“It is yet more absurd to transpose into relations between the socialist countries the praxis consistent with realising profits at the expense of others – a praxis which characterises relations between capitalist countries – and arrive at stating that the”economic integration” and “common market” introduced by monopolist groups in order to corner markets and divide up profits could serve as an example to the socialist countries in their mutual assistance and economic collaboration” (Letter in 25 points).

29. The ‘programme’ which Stalin pushed through at the 6^th Comintern Congress excluded China and the other backward countries from ‘building socialism’ within their national borders: a privilege which Russia had so recently arrogated to itself. Just at the moment when the interests of Russian capitalism became integrated into those of the world market, China took up this old Stalinist slogan to use on its own behalf. And about it we will repeat what Trotski said about “Russian socialism”:

“The world division of labour, the dependence of soviet industry upon foreign technology, the dependence of the productive forces of the advanced countries of Europe upon Asiatic raw materials, etc., etc., make the construction of an independent socialist society in any single country in the world impossible” (Theses on the Permanent Revolution).

The “construction of Socialism” in China can signify only the accumulation of capital and the extension of a market economy. But this theory hasn’t managed to mask much more acute antagonisms. The Sino-soviet conflict, the entire history of the national bourgeois movements in Asia and Africa, and every conference on world trade has anxiously underlined the growing backwardness of the ‘under-developed’ countries, be they ‘independent’ or ‘socialist’, compared to the handful of great imperial powers which detain all military, economic and political power in today’s world.

30. To avert the destiny awaiting it, the bourgeoisie of the backward countries strives by all means to pass off its political and national emancipation as social and human emancipation of the exploited masses. The proletarians of the ex-colonies, who are victims both of their own bourgeoisies and the contradictions accumulated within world imperialism, will find ever more reason to break with democratic and reformist ideology. They will then recall that Marxism, and Lenin’s International, never expected political democracy and national independence to free the colonial peoples from exploitation:

“Finance capital, in its drive to expand, can ‘freely’ buy or bribe the freest democratic or republican government and the elective officials of any, even an ‘independent’, country. The domination of finance capital and of capital in general is not to be abolished by any reforms in the sphere of political democracy; and self-determination belongs wholly and exclusively to this sphere. This domination of finance capital, however, does not in the least nullify the significance of political democracy as a freer, wider and clearer form of class oppression and class struggle” (The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-determination, Lenin, 1916).

It is against this more open, broader, and freer form of class oppression that the proletariat of ‘popular’ China, and of Russo-American India, will have to conduct their struggle.

[Questa seconda parte è comparso con un titolo differente su Programma Comunista n.2 del 1965: «Materiali per le tesi definitive sull’organizzazione interna». Ma trattandosi di una continuazione, ne conserviamo il primo titolo per facilitare il lettore. NdR ]

Marx aveva fiuto per gli arrivisti

Togliamo i brani che seguono da una pubblicazione recente su tutto il materiale relativo alla I Internazionale operaia. «Le tesi redatte da Marx, che però non era presente, sono discusse e adottate all’unanimità del congresso che si tiene a Ginevra dal 3 all’8 settembre 1866. Nella seduta dell’8 la persona di Marx è evocata da Cremer, Carter e Tolain, nella discussione dell’art. 11 del regolamento dell’Associazione Internazionale degli Operai: «Ogni membro della A.I.O. ha diritto di partecipare al voto e di essere eletto». Mentre Tolain e Perrechon si oppongono a che dei non lavoratori possano rappresentare gli operai, Cremer ricorda che “il Comitato Centrale comprende cittadini che non esercitano mestieri manuali e che non hanno dato alcun motivo di sospetto; all’opposto è probabile che senza la loro collaborazione l’A.I.O non avrebbe potuto impiantarsi in Inghilterra in una maniera così completa. Fra questi membri ne citerò uno solo, il cittadino Marx, che ha consacrato tutta la sua vita al trionfo della classe operaia». Dopo una discussione sull’argomento, l’emendamento di Tolain alle tesi di Marx è respinto da 25 voti contro 20. (Il testo non dice quanti di quelli che votavano erano operai e quanti no).

Marx scrive ad Engels il 26 settembre: «Ieri tutti gli inglesi mi hanno proposto come presidente del Consiglio generale, a guisa di dimostrazioni contro i signori francesi che vorrebbero impedire a tutti quelli che non sono lavoratori manuali di essere membri dell’A.I.O., o perlomeno di essere delegati al Congresso. Io ho dichiarato di non poter accettare in alcun caso e ho proposto a mia volta Odger, che fu quindi rieletto. [Si tratta qui della riunione del Consiglio generale seguita al congresso]. Dupont mi ha d’altra parte fornito la chiave dell’operazione di Tolain e Fribourg: essi volevano presentarsi nel 1869 come candidati come candidati operai alle elezioni del Corpo Legislativo adottando il «principio» che solo dei lavoratori potrebbero rappresentare dei lavoratori. Era dunque di un’estrema importanza per questi signori di vedere il congresso di Ginevra proclamare questo principio.

Il marxismo non segue nella lettura della storia la mania dell’“ultima moda”

Potrebbe svolgere questo spunto generale geniale di Marx chi avesse a disposizione le otto ore ed il fiato di un leone: esso dice tutto. Il nostro odio verso la forma capitalista non ci condurrà mai ad ammirare da stolti le sue modernissime manifestazioni rispetto alle antiche. Non ci deve nemmeno condurre a sognare il ritorno alle forme feudali come un romanticismo di cui altrove accusammo Stalin. Non abbiamo infatti da ammirare né il corporativismo né una società di produttori autonomi. A noi non serve né un mito né un ideale né un modello che vogliamo far copiare dal futuro. Ma, se ne avessimo bisogno, non lo cercheremmo andando avanti, ma tornando più di tutti indietro, nella generosa nobile gloriosa umanità delle primitive tribù. (Marx ad Engels, 25 marzo 1868):

Le cose vanno nella storia umana come nella paleontologia. Alcune cose che si hanno sotto il naso anche i più eminenti cervelli non le scorgono, dapprincipio, per effetto di un certo accecamento di giudizio. Più tardi, quando i tempi hanno evoluto, ci si stupisce tuttavia di trovare dappertutto delle tracce di quello che non si era visto. La prima reazione contro la Rivoluzione francese e la filosofia illuminista che ad essa era collegata fu di vedere tutto sotto l’angolo medioevalista, romantico; ed anche uomini come Grimm non ne andarono esenti. La seconda reazione – e questa corrisponde all’orientamento socialista, sebbene quegli scienziati non sospettino affatto di essere legati ad esso – consiste nel tuffarsi, al di sopra del Medio Evo, nell’epoca primitiva di ciascun popolo. E si resta tutti sorpresi di trovare nel più antico il più moderno, e di trovarci perfino degli egualitari ad un grado tale che spaventerebbe lo stesso Proudhon.

Ancora Marx contro le sètte e il federalismo, per l’unico partito di classe internazionale: Marx a Bolte, 23 novembre 1871

L’Internazionale è stata fondata per sostituire alle sètte socialiste o semisocialiste la vera organizzazione di lotta della classe operaia. Gli statuti originali e l’“Indirizzo inaugurale“ lo mostrano a prima vista. D’altra parte l’Internazionale non avrebbe potuto affermarsi se il corso della storia non avesse già polverizzato il mondo delle sètte. L’evoluzione del settarismo socialista e quella del vero movimento operaio vanno costantemente in senso inverso. Finché le sètte si giustificano (storicamente) la classe operaia non è ancora matura per un movimento storico indipendente. Appena questa è giunta a tale maturità, tutte le sètte sono essenzialmente reazionarie. Tuttavia si è prodotto nella storia dell’Internazionale ciò che la storia mostra dappertutto. Ciò che è superato cerca sempre di ricostituirsi e mantenersi in seno alla forma finalmente acquisita. E la storia dell’Internazionale è stata una lotta continua del Consiglio Generale contro le sètte e i tentativi di dilettanti che cercavano di affermarsi in seno alla stessa Internazionale contro il movimento reale della classe operaia (…)

Il movimento politico ha naturalmente per scopo finale la conquista del potere politico per sé, e a tal fine è naturalmente necessaria un’organizzazione preventiva dalla classe operaia, ad un certo punto del suo sviluppo, derivante essa stessa dalle sue lotte economiche. Ma d’altra parte, ogni movimento nel quale la classe operaia si oppone alle classi dominanti in quanto classe e cerca di costringerla mediante una pressione dall’esterno è un movimento politico. Per esempio, il tentativo per conquistare, in questa o quella fase o in questo o quel laboratorio, mediante scioperi ecc., una riduzione del tempo di lavoro da parte di singoli capitalisti, è un movimento puramente economico; invece il movimento tendente a conquistare una legge delle otto ore, ecc. è un movimento politico. È così che dovunque i movimenti economici isolati degli operai danno origine a un movimento politico, cioè un movimento della classe per realizzare i suoi interessi sotto una forma generale, una forma che possiede una forza generale, una forza socialmente vincolante. Se questi movimenti presuppongono una certa organizzazione preventiva, sono allo stesso grado a loro volta dei mezzi per sviluppare tale organizzazione.

Là dove la classe operaia non è ancora andata abbastanza avanti, e la sua organizzazione è insufficiente per intraprendere una campagna decisiva contro la forza collettiva, cioè la forza politica, delle classi dominanti, essa deve almeno essere educata mediante una costante agitazione contro le politica delle classi dominanti (e l’atteggiamento ostile alla politica). Altrimenti essa resta una palla di gioco nelle mani delle classi dominanti, come ha mostrato la rivoluzione di settembre in Francia e come mostra in una certa misura il gioco che riesce ancora in Inghilterra fino da oggi ai signori Gladstone e Co.».

La buffonata democratica delle espulsioni: Marx a Bolte, 12 febbraio 1873

Secondo me il Consiglio Generale di New York ha commesso un grande errore nel sospendere la Federazione del Giura. Costoro si sono già ritirati dall’Internazionale dichiarando non esistenti per essi il suo Congresso e i suoi Statuti (…)

Ogni individuo e ogni gruppo ha il diritto di ritirarsi dall’Internazionale, e quando ciò avviene il Consiglio Generale deve semplicemente constatare ufficialmente questa defezione, e non sospendere. E fin quando dei gruppi (sezioni o federazioni) si limitano a contestare i poteri del Consiglio Generale o anche a violare in tale o tale punto gli Statuti o articoli del regolamento, che la sospensione è prevista. Per contro gli Statuti non hanno alcun articolo relativo a gruppi che buttano a mare la organizzazione nel suo insieme, e ciò per la semplice ragione che si capisce da sé che gruppi come questi non appartengono più all’Internazionale (…)

Il grande risultato del Congresso dell’Aia è stato di spingere gli elementi guasti ad escludersi da sé, cioè a ritirarsi. Il procedimento del Consiglio Generale minaccia di annullare questo risultato. Nell’opposizione aperta all’Internazionale, costoro non nuocciono, anzi sono utili, ma elementi ostili nel suo seno, rovinano il movimento in tutti i paesi in cui han messo piede.

Marx sapeva che il partito rinasce da ogni sconfitta

Dopo la caduta della Comune di Parigi, ogni organizzazione della classe operaia in Francia era naturalmente rovinata, ma essa comincia ora a svilupparsi di nuovo (…) Così, invece di morire, l’Internazionale è uscita dalla sua prima fase di incubazione per entrare in una fase superiore in cui i suoi sforzi e le sue tendenze originarie sono già in parte divenuti realtà. Nel corso di questo sviluppo crescente essa dovrà ancora passare attraverso numerosi cambiamenti prima che possa essere scritto l’ultimo capitolo della sua storia (Marx, La storia dell’Associazione Internazionale dei lavoratori del sig. George Howell, 1878).

Vaticinio di Engels che Mosca ha tradito: Engels a Sorge, 12 settembre 1874

Con la tua partenza la vecchia Internazionale è completamente finita. Ed è buona cosa. Essa apparteneva al periodo del Secondo Impero in cui la pressione che si esercitava in tutta Europa prescriveva al movimento operaio, da poco risvegliatosi, di unirsi ed astenersi da ogni polemica interna (…) Il primo grande successo doveva interrompere questo ingenuo viaggio in comune di tutte le frazioni. Tale successo fu la Comune, che intellettualmente era senza dubbio la figlia dell’Internazionale, sebbene questa non avesse mosso un dito per produrla, e per la quale l’Internazionale è stata resa responsabile in questa misura, e a buon diritto. Quando, grazie alla Comune, l’Internazionale divenne una potenza morale in Europa, la discordia cominciò immediatamente. Ogni tendenza voleva sfruttare per sé il successo (…) L’Internazionale ha dominato dieci anni di storia europea verso un lato, quello dell’avvenire; può guardare con fierezza al lavoro compiuto. Ma nella sua forma antica essa ha fatto il suo tempo. Per produrre una nuova Internazionale simile all’antica, una alleanza di tutti i partiti proletari di tutti i Paesi, occorrerebbe uno schiacciamento generale del movimento operaio come quello prodottosi dal 1849 al 1864. E per questo il mondo proletario è diventato troppo grande.

Credo che la prossima Internazionale sarà direttamente comunista e inalbererà di colpo i nostri principî quando gli scritti di Marx avranno prodotto il loro effetto durante un certo numero di anni.