The Party Does Not Arise From “Circles” (Pt. 1)

In the understanding of the Communist Left, the political party’s essential function is to not deviate from the “historical party”, from its program, from its tradition. The Party’s political organization is unique and opposed to all other parties because it embodies the communist program of the proletarian class. That being said, it follows that the history of the political Party is the history of the class conquest of communist consciousness.

Just as it would be absurd and anti-historical to believe that the proletariat should use barricades as a military option today, so it is absurd and anti-historical to consider that the political Party needs to go through the “circle phase” before turning into a “compact and powerful” party. This, in the theoretical field, would be like admitting that there was no historical activity of the class before now and that we ought to rewrite Das Kapital, that the class doesn’t have a historical memory.

The “circle phase” was typical of late nineteenth century Russia, and that is why Lenin took the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) as a model in order to unify the Russian socialist circles into one national political party. It has no equivalent in the contemporary industrially developed world.

Since the world proletariat now has a rich history behind it in all fields, it doesn’t need to start afresh every time it suffers a defeat. Besides which, this would be inconsistent with the centralization, development and concentration of productive forces, from which there arises almost automatically the need for a party which is a thousand times more centralized, not only in an organizational sense, but also in terms of its theoretical activity.

The narrowness of the “circle” is typical of the petty bourgeoisie, in which there is a prevailing incapacity to elaborate doctrine, an absence of principles or program, and whose maximum ambition is a federation of associations, just like the anarchists.

With the advent of the Communist Third International, with one world center, on its way to the International Communist Party, the working class acquired what Lenin called “organizational consciousness”, the programmatic content, the tactics, the world dimension, the pyramidal structure of its political organization.

The Communist Left, after the destruction of the Comintern, is the latter’s custodian. Since the end of the second imperialist war, embodied in the small International Communist Party, it has carried out the task of linking the prolific, heroic past to the revolutionary, victorious future in an unremitting effort to restore the doctrine and rebuild the political organization.

Tenacious and Coherent Party Activity

Lenin used the expression “embryonic party” and the Communist Left the term “small party” to signify that becoming a “big party” requires no distortion of the prerogatives and the forms of the Party as such.

To grow from an embryonic party to a mature party there is no need to “change direction”. But the political organization in embryo deserves the name Party if, and only if, it carries out its relevant functions with coherence and fidelity to the doctrine and program. From any other embryo there will emerge not a large party but an enemy party. The embryo, as we know from biology, contains the essential and fundamental functions of the mature adult organism, some of them potentially and others more or less defined.

Indeed, the proof of this contention is the work and activity of the “small party” over the past thirty years; work conducted not only in the realm of theory and doctrine but also in the trade union economic field, together with the activities of propaganda and enrolment of new members, organization and internal party life.

Our 1965-1966 Theses, binding on all those who profess to be revolutionary communists, confirm these assertions. They remind us that “the Party cannot but be affected by aspects of the real situation that surrounds it” (Theses on Organic Centralism, 1965), a situation that is clearly unfavorable, yet for all that “it mustn’t give up the fight, but must survive and pass on the torch along the historical filo del tempo. Clearly it will be a small party, not out of choice or because we want it that way, but due to ineluctable necessity”.

Regarding the structure of this small party, “we don’t want a party which is elitist or a secret sect, which turns its back on the world out of a mania for purity. We reject any ‘Workers Party’ or Laborite formula (…) We don’t want to turn the Party into some kind of cultural, intellectual or academic association (…) Nor do we believe, as some anarchists and Blanquists do, that a party of armed conspiratorial action and the weaver of plots is conceivable”.

The fact that over a long period we have had to invest most of our energy in taking action to combat “falsifications and the destruction of theory and sound doctrine”, “is no reason to erect a barrier between theory and practical action, since if taken too far we would end up destroying ourselves and all of the principles we base ourselves on”. “We lay claim, therefore, to all appropriate forms of activity at the propitious moment, to the extent they are allowed by the real balance of forces”. And not only do we lay claim to them, but, wherever material conditions permit, we put them into practice. “Everywhere and without exception Party life must be complemented by an unceasing effort to enter into the life of the masses, and even into those expressions of it influenced by initiatives opposed to ours (…) In many regions the Party now has behind it a notable activity,” in the economic-union field, “although [it is] always bound to encounter serious difficulties, and hostile forces which are greater than ours, at least in a statistical sense”.

Activity and Action

Our theses thus commit us to conspicuous activity and theoretical action. As long as the current unfavorable period endures (and for us passionate revolutionaries it seems interminable) the Party will be restricted, not out of choice, to political activity and theoretical action, propaganda, and polemics. The field of action is inevitably limited and the instruments of this action likewise inevitably limited to disseminating the revolutionary program.

In spite of this relative, temporal constraint the Party always strives to pass from activity to action, from propaganda to agitation and mobilization in order to influence the class. Beware, however, of thinking that willpower is enough to alter the respective proportions of the different aspects of our work, because, to use Lenin’s expression, “the greater the spontaneous pressure of the masses, the further the movement extends, the greater the need – in an incomparably more rapid manner – for consciousness in the organizational, political, and theoretical activity” of the Party.

The transition from activity to action is expected by the Party, is sought by its militants as the natural way in which finally to expend all the energy so long contained and repressed due to the greater pressure of the enemy forces. If it were not so, if the Party were to hear that the time for action had come by means of an official “announcement”, or following a sudden, unexpected decision, then the organization would be mortally traumatized.

All of the work carried out by the Party, externally and above all internally, is intended to prepare its small organization for the opportunity to translate its formidable historical program into precise and specific political acts, i.e. when the conditions are right. For as long as the material conditions remain unfavorable, the preparation of the Party consists in testing how open these conditions are to party action, not in resorting to simple subterfuges or dubious maneuvers, which in the end would only leave the Party itself open to penetration by the enemy’s subterfuges and maneuvers, contaminating the organization and destroying our programmatic basis whilst completely adhering to the traditional and programmatic roots.

History has demonstrated that the Party can easily be disorientated; it would be enough to confront it with an abrupt maneuver, to assail it with a last-minute “discovery”, for example of a “revolutionary milieu” outside the Party, and as a consequence a willingness to embrace the swarms of pseudo-revolutionary crackpots in student and academic circles, in the world of the spineless middle classes. This would be enough to demolish decades of hard work, or, at best (given that the error could be rectified) to delay or compromise the preparation of the Party and its growth.

The need for consciousness in the Party is a categorical imperative. The Party must be ready to make predictions, to be aware of what it is doing and what it is about to do, the consequences of every undertaking and transition, and the impact they might have on the organization.

The Party’s theoretical action is also political activity, in the sense that we have used theoretical elaboration as a weapon, whose organs of diffusion are the newspaper and the militants themselves, by means of which the Party puts itself in physical contact with the class and in direct conflict with the false ideologies, the false parties and trade unions. Our contact with the class and our confrontation with the enemy, as our theses show, extend by virtue of this constant action, and are aligned with the maturation of the crisis of capitalism.

The newspaper, our Party’s mouthpiece, has always showcased the activity and action of the Party. As the Party’s practice develops and grows, the political paper will also develop, filtering into and influencing the class. If it were not so, we would end up with a paper that went its own way with respect to the Party’s real activity; a paper that didn’t reflect the organization’s real situation. It would become merely an expression of wishful thinking, inevitably succumbing to voluntarism and empty activism. Conversely, if our newspaper refused to broaden its political activity and take political action where possible, it would relapse into academicism. But in the real Party this has never happened, and it will not happen so long as it doesn’t lose its bearings.

This is why no credence can be given to the theory of the “circle phase” which our Party is allegedly going through and hasn’t yet completed; a convenient theory for our detractors to justify their false steps, their twists and turns and sudden reversals, and their denials of an enviable organizational efficiency in the fields of activity and action. Our detractors have not hesitated to use these maneuvers to split the small party, with the aim of throwing it into incomprehension and perplexity.

Organization and Discipline

It is too easy to state: “Well it has happened and even if we were wrong we can’t turn back”. To theorize the “circle phase” and then act as if one were building the “great party” leads directly to the notion that the Party will expand and develop beyond its current perimeter not based on the strength of the activity proper to it, but by virtue of the “circles”, that is, through wheeling and dealing with the petty-bourgeois milieu, where the “circles” originate. Getting people to believe these false constructions serves to justify the organization’s bureaucratization and the use of coercion in the internal life of the Party, transforming discipline into control of the Party from on high, without which, in fact, the circles cannot be held together.

The real Party did not originate in circles and nor will it grow by passing through the “circle phase”. The whole history of the Communist Left proves and confirms this.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we admitted that the Party had gone through or is still going through the “circle phase”, it would still be wrong to maintain that the „circle phase“ can be overcome by means of organizational expedients, by resorting to discipline, by using innovations of “the political newspaper” variety: as if Lenin had operated in the fields of organization, activity and discipline without first concentrating his fire on all the falsifications of socialism spread by the “economists” and the other socialist groups of the time. If we were to believe this in 1980 [when this article was originally published – ed.], in the zone where revolution is unambiguously on the agenda, we would falsify Lenin, and end up distorting his powerful lessons. By aping the Russian experience in party-building one arrives at the opposite result to that arrived at by Bolshevism and the Italian Communist Left; we would end up as a party made up of “groups” or “circles”, whose life would be one of constant political bickering and the consequent rifts, with nothing to counter the intended “filtering” of micro-political organizations, who by their very nature are opposed to the real Party.