La Izquierda Comunista 1

Produced at a Party meeting held in Florence, 8-9 December, 1951

I. THEORY

The doctrine of the Party is founded on the principles of the historical materialism of the critical communism set out by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, in the Capital and their other fundamental works and which formed the basis of the Communist International constituted in 1919 and of the Italian Communist Party founded at Leghorn in 1921 (section of the Communist International).

1. In the present capitalist social regime an ever increasing contrast between productive forces and production relations is developing. This contrast reveals itself in the opposing interests and the class struggle between the proletariat and the ruling bourgeoisie.

2. The present production relations are protected by the bourgeois State. Even when democratic elections are used and whatever the form of the representative system may be, it is always the exclusive organ of the capitalist class.

3. The proletariat cannot crush or modify the mechanism of capitalist production relations, source of its exploitation, without wrecking the bourgeois power through violence.

4. The class Party is the indispensable organ for the proletarian revolutionary struggle. The Communist Party consists of the most advanced and resolute part of the proletariat, unites the efforts of the working masses transforming their struggles for group interests and contingent issues into the general struggle for the revolutionary emancipation of the proletariat. Propagating the revolutionary theory among the masses, organising the material means of action, leading the working class all along its struggle, by securing the historical continuity and the international unity of the movement, are duties of the Party.

5. After it has knocked down the power of the capitalist State, the proletariat must completely destroy the old State apparatus in order to organise itself as ruling class and set up its own dictatorship. It will deny all functions and political rights to any individual of the bourgeois class as long as they survive socially, founding the organs of the new regime exclusively on the productive class. Such is the programme which the Communist Party sets itself and which is characteristic of it. It is the Party alone which therefore represents, organises and directs the proletarian dictatorship. The necessary defence of the proletarian State against all counter-revolutionary attempts can only be secured by taking from the bourgeoisie and from all the parties, enemies of proletarian dictatorship, any means of agitation and political propaganda, and by the proletariat’s armed organisation, able to repulse all internal and external attacks.

6. Only the force of the proletarian State will be able to put systematically into effect the necessary measures for intervening in the relations of the social economy, by means of which the collective management of production and distribution will take the place of the capitalist system.

7. This transformation of the economy and consequently of the whole social life will lead to the gradual elimination of the necessity for the political State which will progressively become an apparatus for the rational administration of human activities.

In the face of the capitalist world and the workers’ movement following the second World War the position of the Party is founded on the following points:

8. In the course of the first half of the twentieth century the capitalist social system has been developing, in the economic field, by creating monopolistic trusts among the employers, and by trying to control and to manage production and exchanges according to control plans with State management of whole sectors of production. In the political field, there has been an increase of the police and army potential of the State, all governments adopting a more totalitarian form. All these are neither new sorts of social organisations as a transition from capitalism to socialism, nor revivals of pre-bourgeois political regimes. On the contrary, they are definite forms of a more and more direct and exclusive management of power and State by the most developed forces of capital.
This course excludes the progressive, pacifist and evolutionist interpretations of the becoming of the bourgeois regime, and confirms the prevision of the concentration and of the antagonistic arraying of the class forces. The proletariat in order to confront its enemies’ growing potential with strengthened revolutionary energy, must repel the illusory revival of democratic liberalism and constitutional guarantees. The Party must not even accept this as a means of agitation: it must historically get rid once and for all, of the practice of alliances, even for transitory issues, with the middle class as well as with the pseudo-proletarian and reformist parties.

9. The world imperialistic wars show that the crisis of disgregation of capitalism is inevitable as it has entered the phase when its expansion, instead of signifying a continual increment of the productive forces, is conditioned by repeated and ever-growing destructions. These wars have caused repeated deep crises in the workers’ world organisation because the dominant classes could impose on them military and national solidarity with one or another of the belligerents. The only historical alternative to be set against such a situation is the awakening of the internal class struggle, until the civil war of the working masses to overthrow the power of all bourgeois states and of world coalitions, with the reconstitution of the International Communist Party as an autonomous force, independent of any organised political or military power.

10. The proletarian State, being its apparatus an instrument and a weapon for the struggle in a transition historical period, does not draw its force from constitutional canons and representative systems. The most complete historical example of such a State is up to the present that of the Soviets (workers’ councils) which were created during the October 1917 Russian revolution, when the working class armed itself under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party alone; during the totalitarian seizure of power, the wiping out of the Constituent Assembly, the struggle to repulse the external attacks of bourgeois governments and to crush the internal rebellion of defeated classes, of middle and petty-bourgeois strata and of opportunist parties, inevitable allies of the counter-revolution at the decisive moment.

11. The integral realisation of socialism within the limits of one country is inconceivable and the socialist transformation cannot be carried out without failure and momentary set-backs. The defence of the proletarian regime against the ever-present dangers of degeneration is possible only if the proletarian State is always co-ordinate with the international struggle of the working class of each country against its own bourgeoisie, its State and its army; this struggle permits of no respite even in wartime. This co-ordination can only be secured if the world communist Party controls the politics and programme of the States where the working class has vanquished.

II. TASKS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY

1. The proletariat can only free itself from the capitalist exploitation if it fights under a revolutionary political organ: the Communist Party.

2. The chief aspect of the political struggle in the Marxist sense is the civil war and the armed uprising by which a class overthrows the power of the opposed dominant class and sets up its own power. Such a struggle can only succeed if it is led by the Party organisation.

3. Neither the struggle against the power of the exploiting class nor the successive uprooting of the capitalist economic structures can be achieved without the political revolutionary party: the proletarian dictatorship is indispensable all along the historical period where such tremendous changes will take place and will be exercised openly by the Party.

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.

5. The Party is not made up of all members of the proletariat or even of its majority. It is the organisation of the minority which has, collectively, reached and mastered revolutionary tactics in theory and in practice; in other words, which sees clearly the general objectives of the historic movement of the proletariat in the whole world and for the whole of the historical course which separates the period of its formation from that of its final victory.
The Party is not formed on the basis of individual consciousness: not only is it not possible for each proletarian to become conscious and still less to master the class doctrine in a cultural way, but neither is it possible for each individual militant, not even for the leaders of the Party. Consciousness consists in the organic unity of the Party alone.
In the same way, therefore, that we reject notions based on individual acts or even on mass action when not linked to the party framework, so we must reject any conception of the party as a group of enlightened scholars or conscious individuals. On the contrary, the Party is the organic tissue whose function inside the working class is to carry out its revolutionary task in all its aspects and in all its complex stages. 

6. Marxism has always energetically rejected the theory which proposes to the proletariat only trade, industrial or factory associations, theory which considers that these associations can, by themselves, lead the class struggle to its historical end: the conquest of power and the transformation of society. Incapable of facing the immense task of the social revolution on its own, the union is however indispensable to mobilise the proletariat on a political and revolutionary level. This however is possible only if the Communist Party is present and its influence inside the union grows. The party can only work inside entirely proletarian unions where membership is voluntary and where no given political, religious or social opinions are forced on members. This is not the case with confessional unions, with those where membership is compulsory and with those which have become an integrant part of the State system.

7. The Party will never set up economic associations which exclude those workers who do not accept its principles and leadership. But the Party recognises without any reserve that not only the situation which precedes insurrectional struggle but also all phases of substantial growth of Party influence amongst the masses cannot arise without the expansion between the Party and the working class of a series of organisations with short term economic objectives with a large number of participants. Within such organisations the party will set a network of communist cells and groups, as well as a communist fraction in the union.
In periods when the working class is passive, the Party must anticipate the forms and promote the constitution of organisations with immediate economic aims. These may be unions grouped according to trade, industry, factory committees or any other known grouping or even quite new organisations. The Party always encourages organisations which favour Contact between workers at different localities and different trades and their common action. It rejects all forms of closed organisations.

8. In any Situation, the Party refuses at the same time the idealist and utopian outlook which makes social transformation dependent on a circle of ”elected“ apostles and heroes; the libertarian outlook which makes it dependent on the revolt of individuals or unorganised masses; the trade union or economists’ outlook which entrusts it to apolitical organisations, whether they preach the use of violence or not; the voluntaristic and sectarian outlook which does not recognise that class rebellion rises out of a series of collective actions well prior to a clear theoretical consciousness and even to resolute will action, and which, as a result, recommends the forming of a small ”elite“ isolated from working class trade unions or, which comes to the same, leaning on trade unions which exclude non communists. This last mistake, which has historically characterised the German K.A.P.D. and Dutch Tribunists [The members of Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (KAPD) in Germany and of the Dutch group of ”Tribune“ review, lead by Gorter and Pannekoek, that definitely abandoned the C.I. in 1921], has always been fought against by the Marxist Italian Left.
The differences for reasons of strategy and tactics which led our current to break away from the III International cannot be discussed without reference to the different historical phases of the proletarian movement.

III. HISTORICAL WAVES OF OPPORTUNIST DEGENERATION

1. It is impossible, unless we want to give way to idealism or to mystical, ethical or aesthetical considerations which are in complete opposition to Marxism, to assert that in all historical phases of the proletarian movement the same intransigence is necessary, that any alliance, any united front, all compromise is to be refused on principle. Quite on the contrary, it is only on a historical basis that questions of class and party strategy and tactics can be solved. For this reason, it is the development of the proletarian class throughout the world between the bourgeois and the socialist revolutions which must be considered, and not particularities of time and place that nourish casuistry politics and which leave practical questions to the whim of groups or steering committees.

2. The proletariat itself is above all the product of capitalist economy and industrialisation; like communism it cannot be born of the inspiration of individuals, brotherhoods or political clubs, but only of the struggle of the proletarians themselves. In the same way, the irrevocable victory of capitalism over those forms which have preceded it historically, that is the victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal and land-owning aristocracy and over the other classes characteristic of the old regime, be it Asiatic or European or of other continents, is a condition for communism.
      At the time of the Communist Manifesto, modern industrial development was still at its beginnings and present only in a very few countries. In order to speed up the explosion of modern class struggle, the proletariat had to be encouraged to struggle, armed, at the sides of the revolutionary bourgeoisies during the antifeudal insurrections or those of national liberation. In this way the workers’ participation in the great French revolution and its defence against the European coalitions right up to napoleonic times, is part of the history of the workers’ struggle and this in spite of the fact that from the very beginning the bourgeois dictatorship ferociously quelled the first communist inspired social struggles.
Because of the defeat of the bourgeois revolutions of 1848, this strategy of alliance between proletariat and bourgeoisie against the classes of the old regime valid, in the eyes of Marxists, until 1871, in view of the fact that this feudal regime still persists in Russia, in Austria and in Germany and that the national unity of Italy, Germany and the east European countries is a necessary condition of Europe’s industrial development.

3. 1871 is a clear turning-point in history. The struggle against Napoleon III and his dictatorship is in fact directed against a capitalistic and not a feudal form; it is at the same time the product and proof of the mobilisation of the two fundamental and enemy classes of modern society. Although it sees in Napoleon an obstacle to the bourgeois development of Germany, revolutionary Marxism goes immediately on the side of the anti-bourgeois struggle which will be that of all parties of the Commune, first workers’ dictatorship in history. After this date, the proletariat can no longer choose between contending parties or national armies in so far as any restoration of pre-bourgeois forms has become socially impossible in two big areas: Europe to the confines of the Ottoman and tsarist empires on the one hand, and England and North America on the other.

a. Opportunism at the end of the 19th Century

4. If we disregard Bakuninism during the first, International and Sorelism during the second, as they have nothing to do with Marxism, the social-democratic revisionism represents the first opportunist wave within the proletarian Marxist movement. Its vision was the following: once victory by the bourgeoisie over the old regime was universally secured, a historical phase without insurrections and without wars opens up before humanity; socialism becomes possible by gradual evolution and without violence, on the basis of the extension of modern industry and due to the numerical increase of workers armed with universal suffrage. In this way it was tried (Bernstein) to empty Marxism of its revolutionary contents, pretending that its rebellious spirit was inherited from the revolutionary bourgeoisie and not belonging to the proletarian class in itself. At this time, the tactical question of alliance between advanced bourgeois parties and the proletarian party takes on a different aspect to that of the preceding phase; it is no longer a question of helping capitalism to win, but to make socialism derive from it with the help of laws and reform, no longer to fight on the barricades of the towns and in the country against menaces of restoration; but only to vote together in parliamentary assemblies. That is why the proposal of alliances and coalition and even the acceptance of ministerial posts by workers’ representatives is from then on a deviation from the revolutionary path. That is also why radical Marxists reprove all electoral coalition.

b) Opportunism in 1914

5. The second tremendous opportunist wave hits the proletarian movement when war breaks out in 1914. Most of the parliamentary and trade-union leaders as well as strong militant groups, and in some countries whole parties present the conflict between national States as a struggle which might bring back the absolutism of the feudal system and which might lead to the destruction of the conquests of the bourgeois civilisation and even of modern productive system. They preach solidarity with the national State at war, the result of which is an alliance between Tsarist Russia and the advanced bourgeoisies of France and England.
The majority of the Second International therefore falls into the war opportunism from which very few parties, one of which is the Italian socialist party, escape. Worse, only advanced groups and fractions accept the position of Lenin who, having defined the war as being a product of capitalism and not a conflict between the latter and less advanced politic-social forms, draws the conclusion that the ”holy union“ must be condemned and that the proletarian party should practise a defeatist revolutionary policy within each country against the belligerent State and army.

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.

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.

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.

9. The effect of this formidable event is to be found in irrevocable historical results. In the last European country placed outside of the geo-political area of the West, an uninterrupted fight leads a proletariat, whose social development is far from being complete, to power. Liberal-democratic forms of the western type, set up during the first phase of the revolutions are brushed aside and the proletarian dictatorship faces the immense task of accelerating economic development. This means that the still present feudal forms must be overthrown and that the recent capitalistic forms must be overcome. The realisation of this task calls above all for victory over the gangs of counter-revolutionary insurgents and the intervention of foreign capitalism. It calls not only for the mobilisation of the world proletariat for the defence of soviet power and to direct the assault on the western, bourgeois powers, but for the extension of the revolutionary struggle to continents inhabited by coloured people, in short the mobilisation of all forces able to carry on an armed fight against white capitalist metropolis.

10. In Europe and America strategical alliance with left bourgeois movements against feudal forms of power is no longer possible and has given way to direct struggle by the proletariat for power. But in underdeveloped countries the rising proletarian and communist parties will not disdain to participate to insurrections of other anti-feudal classes, either against local despotic dominations or against the white colonisers.
In Lenin’s time, there are two historical alternatives: either the world struggle ends in victory, that is by the downfall of capitalistic power at least in a large advanced part of Europe, and this would permit Russian economy to be transformed at a fast rhythm, ”jumping“ the capitalistic stage and quickly catching up with Western industry, already ripe for socialism, or the big imperialist centres stay put, and in this case the Russian revolutionary power is forced to restrain itself to the economic task of the bourgeois revolution, making the effort of immense productive development, but of a capitalistic, not a socialist character.

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“.

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.

13. The left of the International (to which the great majority of the Communist Party of Italy belonged before it was more or less destroyed by the fascist counter-revolution which was favoured chiefly by the mistake of historical strategy) upheld that in the West all alliances or proposals of alliances with socialist or petit-bourgeois parties should be refused at all costs; in other words that there should be no united political front. It admitted that the communists should widen their influence within the masses by taking part in all local and economic struggles, calling on the workers of all organisations and of all faiths to develop them to the maximum, but it refused that the party’s action should be subordinated to that of political committees of fronts, coalitions or alliances even if this subordination was to restrict itself to public declarations and be compensated by internal instructions to militants or the party and by the subjective intentions of the leaders. Even more strongly it rejected the so-called ”Bolshevik“ tactics when it took the shape of ”workers’ government“, i.e. the launching of the slogan (become in some instances a practical experiment, with ruinous consequences) of coming into the parliamentary power with mixed majorities of communists and socialists of the various shapes. If the Bolshevik party could draw up with no danger the plan of provisional governments of several parties in the revolutionary phase, and if that allowed it to go to the firmest autonomy of action and even to outlaw the former allies, all that was made possible only by the diversity of situation of the historical forces: urgent need of two revolutions, and destructive attitude, by the State in force, towards any coming to power through a parliamentary way. It would have been absurd to transpose such a strategy to a situation in which the bourgeois State has a half a century hold democratic tradition, and parties that accept its constitutionalism.

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.

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.
The overthrow of the structure of the parties under the pretext of ”bolshevisation“ was another reason for the Left to differ from the leadership of the International. The territorial organisation of the party was changed for a network of factory cells. This narrowed the political horizon of the members who had the same trade and therefore the same immediate economic interests. In this way, the natural synthesis of the different social impulsions which would have helped to make the struggle a general one, common to all categories, was not achieved. As this synthesis was lacking, the only factor of unity was represented by the top executives whose members became in this way officials with all the negative characteristics of the old socialist party system.
The criticism which the Italian Marxist Left made of this organisation must not be mistaken as claiming the return to ”internal democracy“ and to ”free election“ of the party leaders. It is neither internal democracy nor free elections which give the Party its nature of being the most conscious fraction of the proletariat and its function of revolutionary guide. It is instead the matter of a deep discrepancy of conceptions about the deterministic organicity of the party as a historical body, living in the reality of the class struggle; it is a fundamental deviation in principles, that made the parties unable to foresee and face the opportunist danger.

16. Analogous deviations took place in Russia where, for the first time in history, the difficult problem of organisation and internal discipline of the communist party which had come to power and whose membership had enormously increased, arose. The difficulties met in the internal social-struggle for a new economy and revolutionary political struggle outside of Russia provoked contrasting opinions between Bolsheviks of the Old Guard and new members.
The Party’s leading group had in its hands not only the party apparatus but also the whole State apparatus. Its opinions or those of the majority within it were made good not by means of party doctrine and its national and international tradition of struggle, but by repression of the opposition by means of the State apparatus and by strangling the party in a police like manner. All disobedience towards the central organ of the party was judged as a counter-revolutionary act warranting, besides expulsion, punitive sanctions. The relationship between Party and State was thus completely distorted and the group which controlled both was thus able to enforce a series of surrenders of principles and of the historical line of the party and world revolutionary movement. In reality the party is a unitary organism in its doctrine and its action. To join the party imposes peremptory obligations on Leaders and followers. But joining and leaving is voluntary without any kind of physical compulsion and shall be so before, during and after the conquest of power. The party directs alone and in an autonomous way the struggle of the exploited class to destroy the capitalist State. In the same way, the Party, alone and autonomous, leads the revolutionary proletarian State, and just because the State is, historically, a transitory organ, legal intervention against party members or groups is a pointer to a serious crisis. As soon as such intervention became a practice in Russia, the party became crowded with opportunistic members who sought nothing more than to procure advantages for themselves or at least to benefit from the protection of the Party. Yet they were accepted without hesitation and instead of a weakening of the State there was a dangerous inflation of the Party in power.
This reversal of influences resulted in the opportunists getting the upper hand on the orthodox; the betrayers of revolutionary principles paralysed, immobilised, accused and finally condemned those who defended them in a coherent way, some of whom had understood too late that the party would never again become a revolutionary one.
In fact, it was the government, at grips with the hard reality of internal and external affairs, which solved questions, and imposed its solutions on the Party. The latter, in turn, had an easy time in international congresses to impose these solutions on the other parties which it dominated and handled as it liked. In this way the directive of the Comintern lines became more and more eclectic and conciliatory with respect to world capitalism.
The Italian Left never questioned the revolutionary merits of the party which had lead the first proletarian revolution to victory, but it maintained that the contributions of the parties still openly struggling against their bourgeois regime, were indispensable. The hierarchy which could solve the problems of revolutionary action in the world and in Russia must therefore be the following: the International of the World communist parties – its various sections, including the Russian one – finally the communist government for internal Russian politics but exclusively along party lines. Otherwise the internationalist character of the movement and its revolutionary efficiency could not but be compromised.
Only by respecting this rule could a divergence of interests and objectives between the Russian State and the World revolution be avoided. Lenin himself had many times admitted that if the revolution broke out in Europe or the world, the Russian party would take not second but at least fourth place in the general political and social leadership of the communist revolution.

17. We cannot say exactly when the opportunistic wave which was to bear away the Communist International, originated. This was the third wave, the first having paralysed the International founded by Marx and the second which had shamefully brought about the fall of the Second International. The deviations and political errors discussed in paragraphs 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 above, threw the world communist movement into total opportunism which could be seen from its attitude towards fascism and totalitarian governments. These forms appeared after the period of the great proletarian attacks which, in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bavaria and in the Balkan States, followed the end of the First World War. The communist International defined them as employers’ offensives with a tendency to lower the standard of living of the working classes economically, and politically as initiatives aiming at the suppression of democratic liberalism, which it presented, in a turn of phrase doubtful to Marxists, as being a favourable milieu for a proletarian offensive, whereas communism has always considered it as the worst possible atmosphere of revolutionary corruption on the political level. In reality, fascism was the complete proof of the Marxist vision of history: the economic concentration was not only evidence of the social and international character of capitalist production, but it urged the latter to unite and the bourgeoisie to declare Social war on the proletariat, whose pressure was as yet much weaker than the defence capacity of the capitalist State.
The leaders of the International on the other hand created serious historical confusion with the Kerensky period in Russia, leading not only to a serious mistake in theoretical interpretation, but to an inevitable overthrow of tactics. A strategy for the defence and conservation of existing conditions was outlined for the proletariat and communist Parties, advising them to form a united front with all those bourgeois groups which upheld that certain immediate advantages should be granted to the workers and that the people should not be deprived of their democratic rights. The groups were in this way much less decided and perspicacious than the fascists and thus very feeble allies.
The International did not understand that Fascism or National Socialism had nothing to do with an attempt to return to despotic and feudal forms of government, nor with the victory of the so-called right-wing bourgeois sections in opposition with the more advanced capitalist class from the big industries, nor an attempt to form an autonomous government of the intermediate classes between employers and proletariat. It did not understand either that freeing itself from a hypocritical parliamentarism, fascism inherited on the other hand wholly the pseudo-Marxist reformism, securing for the least fortunate classes not only a living wage but a series of improvements of their welfare by means of a certain number of measures and state interventions taken, of course, in the interest of the State. The Communist International thus launched the slogan ”struggle for freedom“ which was forced upon the Communist Party of Italy by the president of the International from 1926 onwards. Yet nearly all the militants of the party had wanted for four years to lead as autonomous class policy against fascism refusing coalition with all democratic, monarchist and catholic parties in favour of constitutional and parliamentary guarantees. And it was in vain that the Italian Left warned the leaders of the International that the path it had chosen (and which ended finally with the Committees for National Liberation !) would lead to the loss of all revolutionary energies, and demanded that the real meaning of the antifascism of all the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois parties as well as the pseudo-proletarian ones should be openly denounced.
The line of the communist party is by its nature an offensive one and in no case may it struggle for the illusory preservation of conditions peculiar to capitalism. If, before 1871, the working class had to fight side by side with bourgeois forces, this was not in order to hold on to certain advantages, nor to avoid an impossible return to old times but in order to help in the total destruction of all out-grown political and social forms. In everyday economic policy, just as in general politics, the working class had nothing to lose and therefore nothing to defend. Attack and conquest, those are its only tasks.
Consequently, the revolutionary party shall interpret the coming of totalitarian forms of capitalism as the confirmation of its doctrine and therefore its complete ideological victory. It shall take an interest in the effective strength of the proletarian class in relationship to its oppressor in order to get ready for the revolutionary civil war. This relationship has ever been made unfavourable only by opportunism and gradualism. The revolutionary party shall do all in its power to stir up the final attack, and where this is impossible, face up without ever slating a ”Vade retro Satana“, as defeatist as stupid because it comes to begging foolishly for tolerance and pardon from the enemy class.
 

c. Opportunism after 1926

18. In the Second International, opportunism took on the form of humanitarianism, philanthropy and pacifism culminating in the repudiation of armed struggle and insurrection and, what is more, finding justification for legal violence between States at war.
During the third opportunist wave deviation and treason of the revolutionary line went as far as armed fighting and civil war. But even when opportunism wants to impose a given government against another in one country by means of an armed struggle aiming at territorial conquests and strategical positions, the revolutionary criticism remains the same as when it organises fronts, blocks and alliances with purely electoral and parliamentary designs. For instance the alliance of the Spanish Civil War and the partisan movement against the Germans or the fascists during the Second World War was without doubt betrayal of the working class and a form of collaboration with capitalism, in spite of the violence which was made use of. In such cases, the communist party’s refusal to subordinate itself to committees made up of heterogeneous parties should be even firmer: when action passes from legal agitation to conspiracy and fighting it is still more criminal to have anything what so ever in common with non proletarian movements. We need not recall that in the case of defeat, such collusions were concluded by the concentration of all the enemy’s forces on the communists, whereas in the case of apparent success, the revolutionary wing was completely disarmed and bourgeois order was consolidated.

19. All demonstrations of opportunism in the tactics imposed on European parties and carried on inside Russia were crowned during the Second World War by the attitude of the Soviet State towards the other belligerent States and by the instructions which Moscow gave to the communist parties. The latter did not deny their assent to the war, nor did they try to exploit it in order to organise class action aiming at the destruction of the capitalist State. On the contrary, in a first stage Russia concluded an agreement with Germany: then while it provided that the German section should do nothing against the hitlerite power, it dared to dictate self-styled ”Marxist“ tactics to French communists who were to declare the war of the French and English bourgeoisie as being an imperialistic aggressive one, and made these parties lead illegal action against their State and army; However, as soon as the Russian State came into military conflict with Germany and its interest lay in the strength of those opposed to the Russian state, the French, English and other parties concerned received the opposite political instruction and the order to move to the front of national defence just like the socialists, denounced by Lenin, in 1914. Much more, all theoretical and historical positions of communism were falsified when it was declared that the war between the western powers and Germany was not an imperialistic one but a crusade for liberty and democracy and that it had been so from the start, from 1939 on, when the pseudo-communist propaganda was entirely directed against the French and English.
Thus it is clear that the Communist International, which at one time had been formally wiped out in order to give extra guarantees to the imperialist powers, was at no time used to provoke the fall of any capitalist power and not even to speed on the appearance of conditions necessary for the taking over of power by the proletariat. Its only use was to collaborate openly with the German imperialist bloc, the opposite bloc having preferred to do without its help when Russia came over on its side.
It is therefore not a simple question of opportunism but rather a total abandonment of communism, proved by the haste with which the definition of the class structure of the bourgeois powers changed at the same time as did Russia’s allies. Imperialist and plutocrat in 1939-40, France, England and America later became representative of progress, freedom and civilisation, having a common programme with Russia for the reorganisation of the world. This extraordinary turning did not prevent Russia from the moment of the first disagreements in 1946 and from the start of the cold war, to heap the most fiery accusations on the very same States.
It is no wonder therefore that, beginning by simple contacts with the social-betrayers and social-patriots rejected the day before, continuing with united fronts, workers’ governments (renouncing to class dictatorship) and even blocs with petit-bourgeois parties, the Moscow movement fell, during the war, into total enslavement of the policy of the ”democratic powers“. Later it had to admit that these powers were not only imperialist but just as fascist as Germany and Italy had been before. It is therefore no wonder either that the revolutionary parties which had met in Moscow in 1919-1920 had lost any remainder of their communist and proletarian nature.

20. The Third historical wave of opportunism unites all the characteristics of the two preceding ones in the same measure as present capitalism includes all forms of its different stages of development.
After the second imperialist war, the opportunist parties, united with all the bourgeois parties in the Committees of National Liberation take a part in government with them. In Italy, they even partake in monarchist cabinets, postponing the question of the Republic to more ”suitable“ times. Thus they repudiate the use of the revolutionary method for the conquest of political powers by the proletariat, sanctioning a purely legal and parliamentary struggle to which all proletarian pressure is to be sacrificed in view of the conquest of public power by pacific means. In the same way as during the first year of the conflict they did not sabotage fascist governments, nourishing their military strength the supply of first necessity, they postulate the participation in national defence governments sparing all trouble to the governments at war.
Opportunism continues its fatal evolution, sacrificing, even formally, the Third International to the enemy of the working class, to subsequent imperialism, in favour of the subsequent ”reinforcement of the United Front of the allies and other United Nations“. Thus the historical anticipation of the Italian Left made in the first years of the Third International came true. It was ineluctable that the gigantic opportunism which had gained the workers’ movement would lead to the liquidation of all revolutionary instances. Consequently the reconstitution of the class strength of the world proletariat has been very much delayed, made more difficult and will require a greater effort.

21. In the same way as Russia, supported by the opportunist communist parties of other countries, had fought on the side of the imperialists, she joined them in the occupation of the vanquished countries to prevent the exploited masses from rising, and this without losing the parties’ support. On the contrary, this occupation with counter-revolutionary purpose was fully justified by all the so-called socialists and communists during the Yalta and Teheran conferences. Any possibility of a revolutionary attack of the bourgeois powers was reduced to nothing in the countries that had won the war as in those that had lost. This confirms the position of the Italian Left which regarded the second War as imperialist and the occupation of the vanquished countries as counter-revolutionary, and foresaw that the second war could not be followed by a revolutionary revival.

22. In accordance with the counter-revolutionary past the Russian and affiliated parties have modernised the theory of the permanent collaboration between classes proclaiming the peaceful co-existence and competition between capitalist and socialist States. This position, after the former which reduced the class struggle to a so-called struggle between socialist and capitalist States, is their final insult to revolutionary Marxism. If a socialist State does not declare a holy war on capitalist States, it at least declares and maintains the class war inside the bourgeois countries, whose proletariat prepares theoretically and practically for the insurrection. This is the only position which conforms with the programme of the communist parties who do not disdain to show their opinions and their intentions (Manifesto of 1848) and openly urge on the violent destruction of the bourgeois power.
     Hence, States and parties which admit or even assume hypothetically peaceful coexistence and competition between States instead of propagandising the absolute incompatibility among the classes and armed struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat, are capitalist States and counter-revolutionary parties, and their phraseology only masks their non-proletarian character.
The Persistence of such ideologies within the working class movement is a tragical holdback of any class revival and the proletariat must pass beyond them before the class struggle can take place.

23. Another aspect which made the political opportunism of the third wave still more shameful than the preceding ones was its shameful attitude towards pacifism, defence of guerrilla warfare; pacifism again, but spiced with the anti-capitalist phraseology of the cold war and finally the insipid total pacifism of coexistence. All these turnings went side by side with the most scandalous variation in the definition of the English and American powers: imperialist in 1939, democratically ”liberating“ the European proletariat in 1942, imperialist again after the war, pacifist rivals in the competition between capitalism and ”socialism“ today. True Marxists know, that the American imperialism has taken up since the first World War from the English ”despot“ the role of principal white guard of the world, as Lenin and the Third International many times emphasised during the glorious period of revolutionary struggle.
Inseparable from social pacifism, pacifism taken on its own makes the most of the workers’ hatred of imperialist wars. Defence of peace which is a common propaganda of all parties and all States, bourgeois or pseudo-proletarian is however as opportunist as is the defence of the fatherland. Revolutionaries should leave one as the other to U.N.O. who is horror struck at the mention of class struggle, but is itself, like the League of Nations, a league of Robbers.
In putting pacifism higher than any other demand, today’s opportunists show not only that they are outside the revolutionary process and have fallen into total utopia, but that they do not come within reach of the utopists Saint Simon, Owen, Fourier and even Proudhon.
Revolutionary Marxism rejects pacifism as a theory and means of propaganda and subordinates peace to the violent destruction of world imperialism; there will be no peace as long as the proletariat of the world is not free from bourgeois exploitation. It also denounces pacifism as a weapon of the class enemy to disarm the proletariat and withhold them from revolutionary influence.

24. Throwing bridges to the imperialist parties to set up governments of ”national union“ has now become a customary praxis of the opportunists who carry it out on an international scale in a gigantic superstate organism, U.N.O. The great lie consists in making believe that provided that the war between States is avoided, class collaboration can not only become reality but bring its mawkish fruits to the working class, the imperialist and class State becoming a democratic instrument for the public wealth.
Thus in the Peoples’ Democracies, the opportunists have set up national systems in which all social classes are represented, with the pretence that in this way their opposing interests can be harmonised. In China for instance where the four class block is in power, the proletariat, far from having assumed political power, is subjected to the incessant pressure of the young industrial capitalism, having born the cost of ”National Reconstruction“ just like the proletariats of the other countries. The disarmament of the revolutionary forces, which was offered to the bourgeoisie by the social-patriots of 1914 and the ministerialists such as Millerand, Bissolati, Vandervelde, MacDonald and Company who were fustigated and eliminated by Lenin and the Communist International, grows blurred in the face of the scandalous and impudent collaboration of the present social patriots and ministerialists. The Italian Left which already in 1922 was opposed to the ”workers’ and peasant government“ (password which was given the meaning of ”dictatorship of the proletariat“ but which fostered a fatal ambiguity or worse meant something quite different) rejects all the more the open class collaboration which present day opportunists do not hesitate to advocate; the Italian Left claims for the proletariat and its party the unconditional monopoly of the State, the unitary and undivided dictatorship of the proletarian class.

IV. PARTY ACTION

1. Since its birth, capitalism has had an irregular historical development, with alternating periods of crisis and intense economic expansion.
Crises are inseparable from capitalism which will not however cease to grow and to expand so long as the revolutionary forces will not deal it the final blow. In a parallel way, the history of the proletarian movement presents phases of impetuous bounds and phases of withdrawal provoked by brutal defeats or slow degeneracy during which the renewal of revolutionary activity may be decades away. The Paris Commune was violently put down and its defeat opened a period of relatively pacific development of capitalism which gave birth to revisionist or opportunistic theories whose very existence proved the falling back of the revolution. The October revolution was slowly defeated over a period of regression, culminating in the violent suppression of those who had fought for it and survived. Since 1917, the revolution is very much absent and today it does not look as though we are on the threshold of the renewal of revolutionary revival.

2. In spite of such recurrences, the capitalist mode of production expands and prevails in all countries, under its technical and social aspects, in a more or less continuous way. The alternatives of the clashing class forces are instead connected to the events of the general historical struggle, to the contrast that already existed when bourgeoisie begun its rule on the feudal and precapitalist classes, and to the evolutive political process of the two historical rival classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat; being such a process marked by victories and defeats, by errors of tactical and strategical method. The first clashes go back to 1789, arriving, through 1848, 1871, 1905 and 1917, to the present day; they gave the bourgeoisie a chance to furbish its arms against the proletariat in the same measure as its economy developed.
On the contrary, the proletariat, in the face of the gigantic extension of capitalism, has not always known how to use its class energy with success, falling back, after each defeat, into the net of opportunism and treason, and staying back from the revolution for an ever lengthening period.

3. The cycle of victorious struggles and of defeats, even the most drastic ones, and the opportunistic waves during which the revolutionary movement is submitted to the influence of the enemy class constitute a vast field of positive experiences where the revolution matures.
After the defeats, the revolutionary comeback is long and difficult; but the movement, although it is not visible on the surface, is not interrupted, it maintains, crystallised in a restricted vanguard, the revolutionary class demands.
The periods of political depression of the revolutionary movement are numerous. From 1848 to 1867, from the Second Paris revolution to the eve of the franco-prussian war, the revolutionary movement is nearly exclusively incarnated in Marx, Engels and a small circle of comrades; from 1872 to 1879, from the defeat of the Commune to the beginning of the colonial wars and the return of the capitalist crisis which leads to the Russian-Japanese war of 1905, and then to the 1914 war, the conscience of the revolution is represented by Marx and Engels. From 1914 to 1918 during the first World War during which the Second International crumbles, it is Lenin with some comrades of few other countries, who represent the continuity and victorious progression of the movement.
1926 introduced a new unfavourable period for the revolution which saw the liquidation of the October victory. Only the Italian Left communist movement has maintained intact the theory of revolutionary Marxism and the promise of a revolutionary come-back can have crystallised in this movement alone. During the second World War the conditions became still worse, the whole proletariat adhering to the imperialist war and the false Stalinist socialism.
Today we are at the bottom of the depression and a come-back of the revolutionary movement cannot be envisaged in the near future. The length of the period of depression which we are experiencing corresponds to the seriousness of the degeneration as well as to the greater concentration of the capitalist forces. The third opportunistic wave unites the worst characteristics of the two preceding ones at the same time as the process of capitalist concentration in which the enemies strength lies is much stronger than after the first World War.

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.

5. Today, the principal activity is the re-establishment of the theory of Marxist communism. At present, our arm is still that of criticism: that is why the party will present no new doctrines but will instead reaffirm the full validity of the fundamental theses of revolutionary Marxism, which are amply confirmed by facts and falsified and betrayed by opportunism to cover up retreats and defeats. The Marxist Left denounces and combats the Stalinists as revisionists and opportunists just as it has always condemned all forms of bourgeois influence on the proletariat. The Party bases its action on anti-revisionist positions. From the very moment of its appearance on the political scene, Lenin fought against Bernstein’s revisionism and restored the original line, demolishing the factors of the two revisions – social democratic and social patriotic.
The Italian Left denounced from the very start the first tactical deviations inside the Third International as being the first symptoms of a third revision, which has been fully accomplished today, uniting the errors of the first two.
Because the proletariat is the last of the classes to be exploited, and consequently in its turn will exploit no one, the doctrine which arose alongside the class can neither be changed nor reformed. The development of capitalism, from its inception until now, has confirmed and continues to confirm the Marxist theorems set out in the fundamental texts. The alleged “innovations” and “teachings” of the last 30 years have only confirmed that capitalism is still alive and must be overthrown. The central focus point of the actual doctrinal position of our movement is therefore the following: no revision whatsoever of the primary principles of the proletarian revolution.

6. Today, the party registers social phenomena scientifically in order to confirm the fundamental theses of Marxism. It analyses, confronts and comments on recent and contemporary facts, repudiating the doctrinal elaboration tending to found new theories or to indicate the insufficiency of Marxism as an explanation of the phenomena.
The same work, demolition of opportunism and deviationism as accomplished by Lenin (and defined in What is to be done) is still at the basis of our party activity thus following the example of militants of past periods of setback of the proletarian movement and of reinforcement of opportunist theories, that found in Marx, Engels, Lenin and in the Italian Left, violent and inflexible enemies.

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. 
No movement can triumph in the historical reality without theoretical continuity, which is the condensation of the experience of past struggles. Consequently, party members are not granted personal freedom to elaborate and conjure up new schemes or explanations of the contemporary social world. They are not free as individuals to analyse, criticise and make forecasts, whatever their level of intellectual competence may be. The Party defends the integrity of a theory which is not the product of blind faith, but one whose content is the science of the proletarian class; developed from centuries of historical material, not by thinkers, but under the impulse of material events, and reflected in the historical consciousness of one revolutionary class and crystallized in its party. Material events have only confirmed the doctrine of revolutionary Marxism.

8. In spite of the small number of members which corresponds to the counter-revolutionary conditions, the Party continues its work of proselytism and of oral and written propaganda, it considers the writing and the distribution of its press as its principal activity in the actual phase, being one of the most effective means (in a situation where there are few and far between) to show the masses the political line they are to follow and diffuse systematically and more widely the principles of the revolutionary movement.

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.

10. The acceleration of the process depends not only on the profound social causes of historical crises, but also on the proselytism and propaganda of the party, even with the reduced means at its disposal. The party totally rules out the possibility of stimulating this process by means of devices, stratagems and manoeuvres aimed at groups, leaders or parties who have usurped the name “proletarian”, “socialist” or “communist”. These manoeuvres, which permeated the tactics of the Third International as soon as Lenin withdrew from political life, only resulted in the disintegration of the Comintern as the theoretical and organizational force of the movement, ever ready to shed fragments of the party on the road of “tactical expediency”. These methods were recalled and re-evaluated by the trotskist movement of the Fourth International, which wrongly considered them to be communist methods.
There are no ready-made recipes that will accelerate the resurgence of the class struggle. No manoeuvres and expedients exist that will get proletarians to listen to the voice of the class; such manoeuvres and expedients would not make the party appear to be what it truly is, but would be a misrepresentation of its function, to the detriment and prejudice of the effective resurgence of the revolutionary movement, which is based on the situation having really matured and the corresponding ability of the party to respond, being fit for this purpose only because of its doctrinaire and political inflexibility.
The Italian Left has always fought against resorting to expedients as a way of keeping its head above water, denouncing this as a deviation from principle which in no way adheres to Marxist determinism.
Along the lines of past experiences, the Party therefore withholds from making and accepting invitations, open letters or agitation slogans aiming to form committees, fronts or agreements with other political organisations whatever their nature.

11. The Party does not hide the fact that when things start moving again this will not only be felt by its own autonomous development, but by the starting up again of mass organisations. Although it could never be free of all enemy influence and has often acted as the vehicle of deep deviations; although it is not specifically a revolutionary instrument, the union cannot remain indifferent to the party which never gives up willingly to work there, which distinguishes it clearly from all other political groups who claim to be of the “opposition.” The Party acknowledges that today, its work in the unions can be done but sporadically; it does not renounce however to enter into the economic organisations, and even to gain leadership as soon as the numerical relationship between its members and sympathisers on the one hand, the union members or a given branch on the other is suitable, so long as the union in question does not exclude all possibility of autonomous class action.

12. The international current to which we belong cannot be characterised by its abstaining from voting, although the ”abstentionist fraction“ of the Italian socialist party played a preponderant part in the foundation of the Italian section of the III International, whose struggle and opposition to the Communist International on much more fundamental issues we vindicate.
The capitalist State taking on a constantly more evident form of class dictatorship which Marxism has denounced since the beginning, parliamentarism loses necessarily all importance. The elected organs and the parliament of the old bourgeois tradition are no more than survivals. They have no content any longer, only the democratic phraseology subsists and this cannot hide the fact that at the moment of social crises, the State dictatorship is the ultimate resource or capitalism, and that the proletarian revolutionary violence must be directed against this State. In these conditions the Party discards all interest in elections of all kinds and develops no activity in this direction.

13. The cult of the individual is a very dangerous aspect of opportunism; it is natural that leaders who have grown old, may go over to the enemy and become conformists, and there have been but few exceptions to the rule. Experience has shown that revolutionary generations succeed each other rapidly. That is why the Party accords maximum attention to the young people and makes the greatest possible effort to recruit young militants and to prepare them for political activity, without any personal ambition or personality cult. In the present historical moment, deeply counter-revolutionary, the forming of young leaders capable of upholding the continuity and revolutionary tradition over a long period is necessary. Without the help of a new revolutionary generation the starting up of the movement is impossible.

Marxism is not a choice between opinions

This writing, for obvious reasons, doesn’t contain within itself the proof of what it asserts. It sets itself the task of establishing, as clearly as possible, the political tendency of the publication within which it appears. It is a declaration of cardinal principles which aims to prevent confusion and misunderstandings, whether involuntary or intentional.

Before convincing the reader, it is matter of getting him to understand our basic positions first. Persuasion, propaganda and proselytising come later.

According to the method we keep to here, opinions do not become established as a result of the deeds of prophets, apostles and thinkers whose brains have given birth to new truths and earned them hordes of followers.

The process is very different. It is the impersonal work of a social vanguard explaining and clarifying the theoretical positions towards which they are drawn as individuals – well before becoming conscious of them – by the real shared conditions under which they live. The method is therefore anti-scholastic, anti-cultural and anti-enlightenment.

In the present phase of theoretical confusion – a reflection of the existing practical disorganisation – it is not really surprising if potential adherents are alienated, rather than attracted, by the presentation of our distinctive approach, and nor should we complain about it.

How Marxists are connected with a historic tradition

When presenting their programmes, all political movements stake a claim to historical precedents, and in a certain sense to traditions; whether of the recent or distant past, national or international.

The movement of which this magazine is the theoretical organ stakes its claim to clearly defined origins, too. However, as opposed to other movements, it does not set out from a revealed word which is attributed to super-human sources; it does not recognise the authority of unchangeable texts, and nor does it recognise that, in order to understand an issue, one needs resort to moral, philosophical, or legal canons since it rejects the notion that these are somehow innate or immanent in the way man thinks and feels.

It is acceptable to denominate this orientation with the terms Marxism, socialism, communism or the political movement of the working class; the problem is that these terms are abused. In 1917, Lenin thought changing the name of party, going back to the ’Communist’ of the 1848 Manifesto, was a fundamental requirement. Today, the immense abuse of the word ’Communist’, by parties which are way off any revolutionary class line, still creates major confusion. Movements which are open defenders of bourgeois institutions have the nerve to call themselves proletarian parties, and the term ’Marxist’ is used to define the most absurd agglomerations of parties, such as those collected under the banner of Spanish anti-Francoism.

The historic line to which we are here making reference is the following: the Communist Manifesto of 1848 (also more properly named Manifesto of the Communist Party, without the addition of any country name); the fundamental works of Marx and Engels; the classic restoration of revolutionary Marxism against all opportunist revisionisms which accompanied the revolutionary victory in Russia, 1917, and the fundamental works of Lenin; the founding declarations of the Third International made at the First and Second Congresses; the positions held by the Left at successive Congresses from 1922 onwards.

This historic line is connected In Italy with the Left current of the Socialist Party during the 1914-1918 war; with the founding of the Communist Party of Italy at Leghorn (Livorno) in January 1921; its Rome Congress in 1922; the activity of its left-wing which predominated in the party until the 1926 Congress, and since then, outside the Party and the Comintern organising abroad instead.

This line does not coincide with the line of the Trotskyist movement of the Fourth International. Only very belatedly did Trotsky, and even more belatedly Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and the other Russian groups of the Bolshevik tradition, revolt against the wrong tactics which up to 1924 they had supported; only very belatedly would they recognise that the deviation had reached the stage of corrupting the fundamental political principles of the movement. Today’s Trotskyists are for the restoration of these principles, but they cling on to the destructive tactic of “manoeuvring”, incorrectly defined as Bolshevik and Leninist.

Setting out the dialectical method of Marxism

Any investigation must be based on a consideration of the entire historical process up to the present and on an objective examination of contemporary social phenomena.

It is a method which although stated often, has been corrupted often in the course of its application.

The basis of the investigation must be the material means by which human groupings satisfy their needs, their productive technique, therefore, and in the course of its development the economic relations that arise.

These factors determine the superstructure of the legal, political and military institutions of the different historical periods and the characteristics of the dominant ideologies.

This method is aptly defined by the expressions: historical materialism, dialectical materialism, economic determinism, scientific socialism and critical communism.

The important thing is always to rely on real, factual outcomes: myths and divinities are not required to portray and explain human activity, and neither are principles based on “rights”, or natural “morality”, such as Justice, Equality, Fraternity and similar empty abstractions. Given the irresistible influence which the dominant ideology exerts, it is most important not to give in to such illusory postulates inadvertently, or without admitting it, especially at those crucial moments when decisive action is required.

The dialectic method is the only method capable of overcoming, on the one hand, the current contradiction between rigorous continuity and theoretical coherence, and on the other the ability to tackle critically any of the old conclusions which have been established in formal terms.

Accepting it isn’t like adopting a faith, or becoming a fanatical adherent of a school or party.

The contradiction between the productive forces and social forms

The productive forces, which consist principally of the men assigned to production and the way in which they are grouped together, as well as the tools and mechanical means they are able to utilise, operate within the framework of forms of production.

By forms we mean the arrangement, the relationships of dependence within which is developed productive and social activity. Such forms include all the established hierarchies (family, military, theocratical, political), the State and all its organisms, the law and the courts which apply the law, and all the rules and dispositions – of an economic and legal character – which are in place to counter any transgression.

A given type of society survives as long as the productive forces maintain themselves within the framework of its forms of production. At a given moment in history, this equilibrium tends to be broken. For various reasons, amongst which advances in technology, population growth and improved communications, the productive forces expand. These forces come into conflict with the traditional forms, try and break down the barriers, and when successful, you have a revolution: the community organises itself into new economic, social and legal relationships. New forms take the place of old.

The Marxist dialectical method discovers and applies its solutions, and sees them confirmed, on the level of large-scale collective phenomena using the scientific and experimental method (the very same method, that is, which the thinkers of the bourgeois epoch applied to the natural world, in the course of an ideological struggle which was a reflection of the revolutionary social struggle of their class against the theocratic and absolutist regimes, but which they could not dare to extend into the social domain). From the results it acquires on this collective plane it deduces solutions to the question of individual conduct, whereas all the rival religious, legal, philosophic and economic schools instead proceed in exactly the opposite direction: building, that is, their standards of collective conduct on the inconsistent basis of this myth of the individual, whether portrayed as an individual immortal spirit, a citizen subject to the rule of law, or conceived of as an immutable unit of economic policy, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, science has gone beyond its various hypotheses about indivisible, material individuals: rather than defining atoms as incorruptible, monad-type units, they define them instead as rich complexes, as meeting points of the radiant dynamics issuing from the external energy field; thus today one can schematically say that the cosmos is not the function of units, but every unit is the function of the cosmos.

Whoever believes in the individual, and talks of personality, dignity, liberty, and of ones duties as a man and a citizen, is not employing Marxist thinking. People are not set in motion by opinions or beliefs or faiths. It is not any wondrous quality of so-called thought which inspires their will or their actions. What prompts them to act is their needs, which when the same material requirements simultaneously affect entire groups take on the character of interests. They clash with the limitations which the surrounding social structure opposes on the satisfaction of these needs. And they react individually, and collectively, in a way which, on average, is necessarily determined before the play of stimuli and reactions cause sentiments, thoughts and judgements to arise in their brains.

The phenomenon is obviously of extreme complexity and can, in individual cases, contradict the general law, which nevertheless it is still justifiable to consider as established.

Be that as it may, whoever maintains that the motor cause of social and historic events is individual consciousness, moral principles, and the opinions and decisions of the individual or citizen, has no right to be called a Marxist.

Class, class struggle, party

The contradiction between productive forces and social forms is manifested as a struggle between classes defending opposed economic interests. In the final stages, this struggle becomes the armed struggle for the conquest of power.

Class is not seen by Marxism as cold, statistical data, but as an active organic force, and it appears when the mere combination of economic conditions and interests leads on to action and to a common struggle.

In these situations the movement is driven by groupings and organisations of the vanguard, whose modern and developed form is the class political party. The collectivity, whose action culminates in the action of a party, operates in history with an efficiency and a real dynamic which cannot be obtained on the limited scale of individual action.

It is the party which arrives at a theoretical consciousness of the development of events, and a consequent influence on how they turn out, in a way determined by the productive forces and by the relations among them.

In spite of the great difficulty and complexity of the issues, one cannot clarify principles and directives without simplification. With this in mind, we draw attention to three historical types of political movement into which they can all be classified.

Conformist: movements which fight to preserve the existing forms and institutions, prohibiting all change, and appealing to immutable principles; be they presented in religious, philosophic or legal guises.

Reformist: though not calling for a sharp and violent overthrow of traditional institutions, these movements realise that the productive forces are exerting strong pressure. They therefore propose gradual and partial changes of the existing order.

Revolutionary: (here we adopt the provisional term Antiformist); movements which proclaim, and put into practice, the attack on old forms, and which, even before knowing how to theorise about the character of the new regime, tend to crush the old, provoking the irresistible birth of new forms.

Conformism – Reformism – Antiformism.

Any schematisation involves the risk of errors. One could ask whether the Marxist dialectic doesn’t also lead to the construction of an artificial and generalised model of historical events, by reducing all development to a succession of class dominations which start off revolutionary, become reformist, and end up conservative. The evocative conclusion to this sequence of events, achieved by the revolutionary victory of the proletariat and with the advent of the classless society (which Marx referred to as, “the end of human pre-history”) might seem to be a finalistic construct, and therefore metaphysical like those false philosophies of the past. Hegel was denounced by Marx for reducing his dialectic system to an absolute construction, for falling unconsciously into a metaphysic which he had managed to overcome in the destructive part of his critique (philosophical reflection of the bourgeois revolutionary struggle).

As a culmination of the classic philosophy of German idealism, and of bourgeois thought, Hegel put forward the absurd thesis that the history of action, and of thought, must finally crystallise into his perfect system, in the conquest of the Absolute. Such a static conclusion is ruled out by the Marxist dialectic.

Nevertheless, in his classic exposition of scientific socialism, (as contrasted with Utopianism, which believed that social renewal could be accomplished simply by campaigning for the adoption of a projected better society as conceived by a writer or a sect) Engels seems to be allowing that there is a general rule or law of historic movement when he uses expressions like “there is progression forward”, “the world progresses”. However, the use of such vigorous slogans for propaganda purposes should not lead one to believe that a recipe has been discovered which encompasses all the infinite possible directions in which human society may develop, that is, a recipe which could just as easily replace the familiar bourgeois abstractions of evolution, civilisation, progress, and the like.

The marvellous advantage of the dialectic method of investigation is that it is revolutionary in its very essence: it is expressed in the implacable destruction of innumerable theoretical systems which time after time conceal the domination of the privileged classes. For this cemetery of broken idols we need not substitute a new myth, a new sentiment, nor a new credo, but just the realistic expression of a series of relationships which exist between factual conditions and their most foreseeable developments.

For example, the correct Marxist formulation is not, “one day the proletariat will take political power, destroy the capitalist system and construct the communist economy”; instead it is: “only by its organisation as a class, and therefore in a political party, and by the armed installation of its dictatorship, will the proletariat be able to destroy the power of the capitalist economy and render possible a non-capitalist, non-commercial economy”.

From the scientific point of view, one cannot exclude capitalism ending in a different way, such as a return to barbarism, a world catastrophe due to weapons of war having for example the character of a pathological degeneration of the human race (those blinded and condemned to a disintegration of their radio-active tissue at Hiroshima and Nagasaki serve as a warning) or other forms of destruction that cannot be foreseen at present.

Interpreting the present historical period

The revolutionary Communist movement of this convulsive period must be characterised not only by its theoretical destruction of every conformism with, and reformism of, the present world, but also by its practical and tactical position: by the fact that it can have no common road with any movement whatsoever, whether conformist or reformist, not even for limited periods in particular sectors.

It must be based, above all, on the historically acquired and irrevocable knowledge that capitalism has exhausted its initial antiformism, that is to say, it no longer has the historic task of destroying pre-capitalist forms and resisting the threat of their possible restoration.

This means that we do not deny that, for as long as the powerful forces of capitalist development, which have accelerated the transformation of the world to an unprecedented degree, were acting on such production relations, the proletarian class could, and should, dialectically, condemn it from a doctrinal viewpoint whilst supporting it in practice.

An essential difference between the metaphysical method and the dialectical method in its application to History lies in this latter point.

Any given type of political and social institution or organisation is not good or bad in itself; it cannot be accepted or rejected on the basis of an examination of its characteristics according to a set of general principles or rules.

Every institution, according to the dialectical interpretation of history, has, in successive situations, had a role and influence which is revolutionary to begin with, then progressive, and finally conservative.

For each problem which arises, it is a matter of putting the productive forces and the social factors in their right context and deducing the meaning of the political conflict which they express.

It is being metaphysical to declare oneself, on principle, as authoritarian or libertarian, royalist or republican, aristocrat or democrat, and to refer in the arguments to canons outside their historic context. Even Plato, in later life, in the first systematic attempt at political science, went beyond the mystical absolutism of principles, and Aristotle followed him in distinguishing three political types – the power of one, of the few, and of the many – the good forms and the bad: monarchy and tyranny – aristocracy and oligarchy – democracy and demagogy.

The modern analysis, mainly dating from Marx, goes much further.

In the present historical phase, nearly every political enunciation and propaganda statement is reliant on the very worst traditional motifs derived from religious, legal, and philosophical superstitions of every kind.

What has to be opposed to this chaos of ideas – the reflection in the minds of men of the chaos of interest relations in a decaying society – is the dialectical analysis of the actual, real forces in play.

In order to introduce this analysis, it is necessary to proceed to an analogous evaluation of the well-known relationships which existed in earlier historical epochs.

Dialectical evaluation of historic forms

Economic example: mercantilism

Starting with economic forms, it makes no sense to declare general support for an economy which is communist or private, liberal or monopolist, individual or collective, or to judge the merits of each system according to the general well-being: doing so one falls into Utopianism, which is the exact reverse of the Marxist dialectic.

We know Engels’ classic description of communism as “the negation of the negation”. The first forms of human production were communist, thence arose private property, a system which was much more complex and efficient. From there, human society returns to Communism.

This modern communism would be unrealisable if primitive communism had not been superseded, conquered and destroyed by the system of private property. The Marxist considers as an advantage, and not as a misfortune, this initial transformation. What we say of communism applies as well to all other economic forms such as slavery, serfdom, manufacturing, industrial and monopolist capitalism, and so on.

The mercantile economy, in which objects satisfying human needs ceased, at the end of the period of barbarism, to be directly acquired and consumed by the occupying force or the primitive producer, and became objects of exchange, initially through barter, and later by means of a common monetary equivalent; this economy represented a great social revolution.

It made possible the assignment of different individuals to different types of productive work (division of labour), enlarging and differentiating enormously the character of social life. One can at the same time recognise that there has been a transition, and assert that, following a series of types of economic organisation all based on the common principle of mercantilism (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) the trend, today, is towards a non-mercantile economy. Furthermore, one can state that the thesis which maintains that production is impossible outside the mechanism of the monetary exchange of merchandise is nowadays a principle which is conformist and reactionary.

The abolition of mercantilism is a viable argument today, and only today, because the development of associated labour and the concentration of productive forces, which capitalism, last of the mercantile economies, has achieved, makes it possible to break down those boundaries within which all use-values circulate as commodities, and within which human work itself is treated as such.

A century before this stage it would have been sheer folly to criticise the mercantile system based on general arguments of a philosophical, legal or moral nature.

Social example: the family

The various types of social aggregations which have succeeded one another have been the means whereby collective life has differentiated itself from primitive, animal individualism: passing through an immense cycle, which has made the relations within which the individual lives and moves increasingly complicated, these forms of society cannot, taken individually, be judged as favourable or unfavourable; they must be considered in relation to historical development, which has given them a changing role within a succession of transformations and revolutions.

Each of these institutions arises as a revolutionary conquest, develops and reforms in long historic cycles, until finally it becomes a reactionary and conformist obstacle.

The institution of the family appears as primal social form when, within the human species, the bond between parents and offspring prolongs itself well beyond the period that is physiologically necessary. The first form of authority is born, which the mother, then the father, exerts over their descendants even when the latter are strong and physically mature individuals. We are witnessing a revolution also at this stage, since there appears the first possibility of a collectively organised life, establishing the basis for those further developments which lead ultimately to the first forms of organised society and the State.

Over the course of vast periods of time social life becomes ever more complex, and the mutual involvement of men, and the authority of one over another, increasingly extends beyond the bounds of kinship and blood. The new, broader, social aggregation contains and disciplines the institution of the family. This occurs in the first cities, States, and aristocratic regimes, and later under the bourgeois regime. All are based on the fetish/institution of inheritance.

There then appears the necessity of an economy which supersedes the play of individual interests. The institution of the family, far too restricted, becomes an obstacle and a reactionary element in society.

Without denying its historic role, the modern communist, after observing that the capitalist system has already deformed and dissolved the alleged “sanctity” of the family institution, fights it openly and acts to supplant it.

Political Example: monarchy and republic

The different forms of the State, such as monarchy and republic, alternate in the course of history in a complex manner, and can represent a revolutionary, progressive, or conservative force, depending on the historic situation. Although we may admit in a general sense that the capitalist regime will probably manage, before its collapse, to liquidate any remaining dynastic regimes, still, even on this question, one must not proceed according to absolute criteria situated outside of time and space.

The first monarchies appeared as the political expression of a division of material tasks: whilst certain elements within the family unit or the primitive tribe took to hunting, fishing, agriculture or the first handicrafts, others were assigned to armed defence, or indeed to the armed plundering of other groups and peoples; and so the first warriors and kings attained the privilege of power at major risk to themselves. Yet there still appeared social forms, of a most developed and complex nature, which would previously have been impossible, and which therefore represented the road toward a revolution in social relationships.

The institution of monarchy would mean that in later phases the establishment and development of vast national State organisations was made possible which could be directed against the federations of principalities and small nobility. It had an innovatory and reformist function. Dante is the great monarchical reformist of early Modern Times.

More recently, the monarchy (and indeed the republic) has served in many countries to cloak the stricter forms of class power of the bourgeoisie.

In the past it has been possible for Republican movements or parties to be revolutionary, reformist, or even markedly conservative.

If we just refer to a few accessible and simplified examples: the Brutus “who expelled Tarquin” was revolutionary; the Gracchi, who sought to give to the aristocratic republic a content conforming to the interests of the plebeians, were reformists; the traditional republicans, such as Cato and Cicero, who struggled against the grandiose historic evolution represented by the expansion of the Roman Empire, along with its legal and social forms, throughout the ancient world, were reactionary and conformist. However the question is completely falsified when one resorts to platitudes about Caesarism, tyranny, or, at the other extreme, sacred principles of republican liberty and other such rhetorical–literary motifs.

Among modern examples, it suffices to point out as being respectively antiformist, reformist and conformist, the three French republics of 1793, 1848, and 1871.

Ideological example: Christian religion

Crises within economic forms are reflected not only in political and social institutions, but also in religious beliefs and philosophical opinions. Every legal, religious and philosophical stance must be considered in relation to historic situations and social crises, since each appears, in its turn, under the revolutionary, the reformist, and the conformist banners.

The movement which bears Christ’s name was once the antiformist and revolutionary movement par excellence.

To declare that in all men there exists a soul of divine origin which is destined to immortality, irrespective of social position or caste, was tantamount to a revolutionary rebellion against the oppression and slavery of the ancient Orient. As long as the law allowed the human person to be considered as a commodity, to be bought and sold like an animal, with all legal prerogatives of free men and citizens thus becoming the monopoly of only one class, the affirmation that all believers were equal was a call to battle against the implacable resistance of the theocratic organisation of the Jews, and the aristocratic and military hierarchies which existed in the ancient world.

Long historical phases follow, and after the abolition of slavery, Christianity becomes official religion and pillar of the State.

It goes through its reformist period in Modern Europe, expressing a struggle against the excessive loyalty of the Church to the most privileged and oppressive layers of society.

Today, there is no ideology more conformist than Christianity, and already at the time of the bourgeois revolution it was the most powerful doctrinal and organisational arm of resistance used by the old regimes.

Today, the Church’s powerful network and its religious influence, entirely reconciled and harmonised with the Capitalist Regime, is employed as a fundamental bulwark against the danger of proletarian revolution.

In regard to social relationships today – which, building on old bourgeois conquests, have long since seen each individual turned into an economic enterprise, each theoretically susceptible of assets and liabilities – the superstition which sees each individual enclosed within the circle of a moral reckoning of his acts, with this reckoning projected into the illusion of a life after death, is nothing but the reflection in the brain of man of the present bourgeois society founded on private economy.

It is impossible to lead a struggle, which aims to break through the framework of an economy based on private enterprise and individual balance sheets, without taking up a position which is openly anti-religious and anti-Christian.

The capitalist cycle

Revolutionary phase

In the major countries, the modern capitalist bourgeoisie has already gone through three characteristic historical stages.

The bourgeoisie comes into view as an openly revolutionary class and leads an armed struggle to break the chains of feudal and clerical absolutism, which tie the productive forces of peasants to the land and the artisans to medieval corporations (guilds).

The requirement of liberation from these chains coincides with the development of the productive forces which, with the resources of modern technology, tends to concentrate the workers into great masses.
In order that these new economic forms may develop freely, the traditional regimes need to be forcibly overthrown.

The bourgeois class not only leads the insurrectionary struggle, but after its initial victory installs an iron dictatorship to prevent any counter-attack on the part of the monarchies, feudal lords, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.

The capitalist class appears in history as an antiformist force using its immense repressed energy to destroy all material and ideological obstacles lying in its path. Old beliefs and old canons are overturned by its thinkers in the most radical manner.

The theories of authority as a divine right are substituted by those of equality and political liberty, of popular sovereignty. The necessity of representative institutions is proclaimed, and thanks to the latter, it is said, power will be the expression of a freely manifested collective will.

The liberal and democratic principle is clearly revolutionary and antiformist in this phase, all the more so since it is achieved not by pacifist or legal methods but by means of violence and revolutionary terror, and is defended against any attempts at reactionary restorations by the dictatorship of the conquering class.

Evolutionary and democratic phase

In the second phase, after the capitalist regime has become established, the bourgeoisie declares itself the representative of the higher development and welfare of the social collectivity as a whole, and goes through a relatively tranquil phase in which there is a development of the productive forces, integration of the entire inhabited world into its system, and intensification of the economic rhythm as a whole. This is the progressive and reformist phase of the capitalist cycle.

In this second bourgeois phase, the mechanism of parliamentary democracy runs parallel to the reformist trend. The dominant class is interested in making its system appear susceptible to representing and reflecting the interests and demands of the working class. Its government claims to satisfy them with economic and legislative measures which nevertheless allow the legal norms of the bourgeois system to be maintained. Parliamentarism and democracy no longer feature as revolutionary slogans but rather take on a reformist content, guaranteeing the development of the capitalist system by warding off the violent clashes and explosions of the class struggle.

Fascist and imperialist phase

The third phase is that of modern imperialism, characterised by the monopolist concentration of the economy, by the formation of capitalist trusts and syndicates, and by large-scale State planning. The bourgeois economy is transformed and loses those characteristics of classic liberalism, in which each business enterprise was autonomous in relation to its economic decisions and relations of exchange. An increasingly strict discipline is imposed on production and distribution. The economic indices of production and distribution no longer the result of the free play of competition but due to the influence of associations of capitalists, then to the concentration brought about by banking and financial organs, and finally directly to the State. Their political State, which in Marxist parlance is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, guards the latter’s interests as government organ and police protector and asserts itself more and more as the organ of control, and even of administration, of the economy.

This concentration of economic power in the hands of the State is not to be interpreted as a step from private economy to a collective economy. Indeed, it can only be passed off as such by ignoring the fact that the contemporary State merely expresses the interests of a minority, and that all nationalisation realised within the framework of commodity exchange leads to a capitalist concentration which strengthens, rather than weakens, the capitalist character of the economy. The political development of the parties of the bourgeoisie in this contemporary phase (as Lenin clearly proved in his critique of modern imperialism) lends itself to the most narrow forms of oppression, and this has been manifested by the advent of regimes defined as totalitarian and fascist. These regimes constitute the most modern political type of bourgeois society, as they spread throughout the entire world the process by which this happens will become abundantly clear. A concomitant aspect of this political concentration resides in the absolute predominance of a few great States at the expense of the autonomy of the intermediate and smaller States.

Since this phase is accompanied by an absolutely astronomical increase in the pace of industry and finance, previously ignored both in terms of quality and quantity in the pre-bourgeois world, the appearance of this third capitalist phase is not to be confused with the return of pre-capitalist institutions and forms. Capitalism thus effectively repudiates the democratic and representative apparatus and establishes centres of government which are absolutely despotic.

It has already theorised and proclaimed the formation of the one, totalitarian party, and hierarchical centralisation in some countries. In other countries it continues to employ democratic slogans which are henceforth without content. Everywhere it is proceeding inexorably in the same direction.

For a correct evaluation of the contemporary historical process, the correct position is as follows: the period of liberalism and democracy is over, and the democratic demands which were formerly revolutionary, and later on of a progressive and reformist character, are today anachronistic and clearly conformist.

Proletarian strategy during the period of bourgeois revolutions

Corresponding to the cycle of the capitalist world we have the cycle of the proletarian movement.
Right from its inception, the great industrial proletariat starts to construct a critique of the economic, juridical and political formulations of the bourgeoisie. It is discovered, and the discovery is theorised, that the bourgeois class neither liberates nor emancipates humanity, but substitutes its own class domination, and its own system of exploitation, to that of the classes which preceded it.

Nevertheless, the workers of all countries cannot avoid fighting side by side with the bourgeoisie in order to overthrow feudal institutions. It also cannot avoid falling under the influence of reactionary socialism, which, brandishing the spectre of a new, merciless capitalist master, calls upon the workers to ally themselves with the leading monarchical and agrarian classes.

Even in the struggles led by the young capitalist regimes to prevent reactionary restorations, the proletariat cannot refuse support to the bourgeoisie.

The first outline of a class strategy by the nascent proletariat involves the prospect of realizing anti-bourgeois movements under the impetus of the very insurrectional struggle it is fighting alongside the bourgeoisie, arriving immediately at a simultaneous liberation from feudal oppression and capitalist exploitation.

An embryonic manifestation of this is to be found during the great French Revolution with Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of the Equals”. In a theoretical sense the movement is completely immature, but the implacable repression which the victorious bourgeoisie brings down on the very workers who had fought alongside them, and for their interests, remains a significant historic lesson.

On the eve of the bourgeois and national revolutionary wave of 1848, the theory of the class struggle is already completely elaborated: the true relations existing between bourgeois and proletarians, on the European and world scale, have by this time become very clear.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx projects at the same time an alliance with the bourgeoisie against the parties of monarchical restoration in France and against Prussian conservatism, and an immediate move towards a revolution which aims for a conquest of power on the part of the working class. In this historical phase any attempt at workers’ revolt is still mercilessly repressed, but the doctrine and strategy of the class corresponding to this phase confirms itself as on the historic road of the Marxist method.

The same circumstances and same evaluations are associated with the Paris Commune; that great bid for power, in which the French proletariat, after having overthrown Napoleon III and assured the victory of the Bourgeois Republic, attempted to conquer power again, giving us, even if only for a few months, the first historic example of class government.

What is most significant and suggestive in this episode is the unconditional anti-proletarian alliance of the democratic bourgeoisie with the conservatives, and even with the victorious Prussian Army, in order to crush the first attempt at the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Socialist tendencies during the democratic-pacifist stage

In the second phase, in which reformism within the framework of the bourgeois economy is associated with the widest use of representative and parliamentary systems, the proletariat is confronted with alternatives of epoch-making significance.

On the theoretical side, a question of interpretation arises as regards the revolutionary doctrine, considered, that is, as a critique of bourgeois institutions and the ideologies which defend it: the collapse of capitalist domination and the substitution of a new economic order, will it come about by means of a violent conflict, or can it be achieved with gradual changes and using the legalitarian mechanism of parliament?

On the practical side, the question is no longer whether the party of the working class should join with the bourgeoisie against the forces of pre-capitalist regimes, by now disappeared, but whether it should ally itself with an advanced and progressive section of the bourgeoisie which is better disposed to reform capitalism.

The idyllic, intermediate phase of capitalism (1871-1914) witnesses the growth of the revisionist currents of Marxism. The Marxist approach is distorted and the fundamental texts falsified. A new strategy is established, according to which vast economic and political organisations of the working class penetrate and conquer the political institutions by using legal means, preparing for a gradual transformation of the entire capitalist economic machine.

The polemics which characterise this phase split the proletarian movement into opposing tendencies. Although in general the programme of insurrectionary assault to break the bourgeois power is not posed, the left Marxists vigorously resist the excesses of the collaborationist tactic on the trade-union and Parliamentary plane, and the intent of supporting bourgeois governments and having socialist parties participate in ministerial coalitions.

At this point the acute crisis in the world socialist movement begins. The cause of it is the outbreak of the 1914 war and the passing of the greater part of the trade-union and parliamentary leaders to the politics of national collaboration and war.

Proletarian tactics in the imperialist capitalist and fascist phase

In its third phase – due to capitalism’s need to continue developing the mass of productive forces whilst at the same time keeping them from destroying the equilibrium of its organisation – it is compelled to abandon liberal and democratic methods, leading to concentration not only of the political sphere in the hands of powerful State organs, but of economic life as well which is subjected to strict controls. In this phase the workers’ movement is again confronted with two alternatives.

On the theoretical side, it is necessary to affirm that these narrower, stricter forms of domination by the capitalist class constitute the necessary, most developed, and modern phase that capitalism can achieve, in order to finally arrive at the end of its cycle having exhausted its historical possibilities. They do not, therefore, represent a merely temporary worsening of political and policing methodology, after which a return to an alleged liberal tolerance is to be expected.

On the tactical side, it is wrong to ask the proletariat to fight for a capitalism able to make liberal and democratic concessions since the climate of democratic politics is no longer required to further the growth of capitalist productive energies; an indispensable premise for the socialist economy.

Such a question, in the first, revolutionary, bourgeois phase, was not only posed by history, but found a solution in the joint struggle of the Third and Fourth Estates, and the alliance between the two classes was an indispensable step on the road toward socialism.

In the second phase, the question is legitimately posed of a concomitant action between democratic reformism and the proletarian socialist parties. If History has since agreed with the rejection of this solution, a rejection defended by the revolutionary Marxist left against the revisionist and reformist right wing, the latter cannot be considered conformist before the fatal degeneration of 1914-1918. They might have believed that the wheels of history turned at a slow rhythm, they didn’t attempt (not yet) to turn the wheels back. It is necessary to render this justice to Bebel, Jaures and Turati.

In the present phase of rapacious Imperialism and savage world wars, the possibility of a parallel action between the proletariat and the democratic bourgeoisie is no longer posed in a historical sense. Those who have adopted the opposite view no longer represent an alternative version, or tendency, of the workers’ movement, but have gone over totally to conservative conformism.

The only alternative to be posed, and resolved, today is altogether different. Given that the world capitalist regime is developing in a centralist, totalitarian, and “fascist” direction, should not the working class join forces with this movement since it is the only reformist aspect of the bourgeois order which now remains? Can there be a dawning of Socialism installed within this inexorable advance of State Capitalism, helping it to disperse the last traditional resistance of the free-enterprisers, liberals, and bourgeois conformists of the first period?

Or, should not the proletarian movement, lacking in unity and badly affected by its inability during the two world wars to break with the practice of class-collaboration, reconstruct itself by rejecting such a method, by rejecting the illusion that pacifist forms of bourgeois organisation will reappear and be susceptible of legal penetration, or at any rate vulnerable to pressure from the masses (two forms, these, equally dangerous due to their defeatism to any revolutionary movement)?

The Marxist dialectical method replies in the negative to the question about whether there should be an alliance with the new, modern bourgeois forms, and the reasons are the same as the ones used previously against the alliance with reformism during the democratic and pacifist phase.

Capitalism, dialectical premise of socialism, no longer needs to be assisted during its birth pangs (affirming its revolutionary dictatorship) nor to develop (in its liberal and democratic phase).

In the modern phase it must inevitably concentrate its economic and political forms into monstrous units.

Its transformism and its reformism assure its development at the same time as its conservatism is defended.

The movement of the working class will only avoid succumbing to bourgeois domination if it refuses to offer assistance to capitalism during its latter stages of development, even if these stages are inevitable. If it is to reorganise its forces, the working class must reject these antiquated perspectives. It must free itself from the burden of old traditions and denounce – already a whole historical stage late – any tactical settlement with any form of reformism.

The Russian Revolution; errors and deviations of the Third International; retrogression of the proletarian regime in Russia

At the end of the 1st world war, the most burning issue of contemporary history crosses over into the present period – the crisis of the Tsarist regime; a feudal State structure surviving alongside a rapidly developing capitalism. For some decades, the position of the Marxist Left (Lenin, Bolsheviks) had been settled upon the strategic perspective of fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat at the same time as the entire forces of anti-absolutism were fighting to overthrow the feudal empire.

The war permitted the realisation of this great goal, and in the brief span of nine months there was concentrated the passage of power from the dynasty, from the aristocracy, and from the clergy, via an interlude of government by the bourgeois democratic parties, to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Questions about, and the realignment of forces, relative to the class struggle, the war for power and the strategy of proletarian revolution were given an enormous boost by this great event.

In this brief period, the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary party passes through each one of its phases: struggle by the side of the bourgeoisie against the old regime; struggle against the bourgeoisie who on the downfall of the old feudal State immediately tries to set up its own regime; split with, and struggle against, the reformist and gradualist parties within the workers’ movement, arriving finally at an exclusive monopoly of power in the hands of the working class and the Communist Party. The effect of the latter on the workers’ movement took the form of a crushing defeat for the revisionist and collaborationist tendencies, and in every country the proletarian parties were propelled onto the terrain of the armed struggle for power.

But there would be many erroneous interpretations when it came to applying Russian tactics and strategy to other countries, where the installation of Kerensky-type regimes was seen as desirable, to be achieved by applying a politics of coalition in order to deal the death blow at the decisive moment.

Thus it was forgotten that in Russia that succession of events was strictly related to the late formation of a characteristically capitalist political State, whereas such a State had become firmly rooted in the other European countries for decades, or even centuries, and was much stronger insofar as its legal structure was democratic and parliamentary.

It wasn’t seen that the alliances in the insurrectionary battles between the Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks, and also on those occasions when an attempted feudal restoration needed to be prevented, represented historically the last possible examples of such a relation of political forces. For example, in Germany, the proletarian revolution would have followed the same tactical line as in the Russian Revolution, if it had emerged, as Marx hoped, from the crisis of 1848. However, in 1918-1919, the revolution could only have been successful if the revolutionary communist party had had sufficient forces to sweep away the coalition of Kaiserists, bourgeoisie, and social-democrats which held power in the Weimar Republic.

When, with fascism, we had the first example of the totalitarian type of bourgeois government appearing in Italy, the International Communist movement adopted a fundamentally wrong approach and showed that it had completely moved away from the correct revolutionary strategy when it consigned the proletariat to struggling for liberty and constitutional guarantees within an anti-fascist coalition.

To confuse Hitler and Mussolini, reformers of the capitalist regime in the most modern sense, with Kornilov, or with the forces of the restoration and the Holy Alliance of 1815, was the greatest and most ruinous error of judgement and it signified the total abandonment of the revolutionary method.

The imperialist phase, economically mature in every modern country, is installed in its fascist political form in a way determined by the contingent relations of forces between State and State, and class and class, in the various countries of the world.

This phase could have been considered as a new opportunity for a revolutionary assault by the proletariat; not, however, in the sense of deploying the forces of the communist vanguard merely to waste them in pursuit of the illusory objective of stopping the bourgeoisie from abandoning its legality, by demanding the restoration of constitutional guarantees and the parliamentary system. On the contrary, the proletariat could, and should, have accepted the historic end of this instrument of bourgeois oppression and accepted the challenge to struggle outside legality; in order to attempt to smash the rest of the apparatus – police, military, bureaucracy, and juridical – attached to the capitalist power and its State.

The current approach to the problem of proletarian strategy

The adoption by the Communist Parties of the strategy of the great anti-fascist bloc – exasperated by the slogans of national collaboration in the anti-German war of 1939, the partisan movements, the committees of national liberation, and most shamefully of all by the collaboration in ministerial coalitions – marks the second disastrous defeat of the world revolutionary movement.

The proletarian revolutionary movement can only be rebuilt, in a theoretical and organisational sense, and in terms of what action it takes, if it rids itself of, and struggles against, politics of this kind; a politics which today unites the socialist and communist parties inspired by Moscow. The new movement must base itself on a political line which completely opposes the slogans spread about by these opportunist movements, whose anti-fascism – as a dialectical approach clearly reveals – places them completely in line – in deeds if not in words – with the fascist evolution of social organisation.

The new revolutionary movement of the proletariat, characteristic of the imperialist and fascist stage, bases itself on the following general positions:

1) Rejection of the view that, after the defeat of Italy, Germany and Japan, a phase has begun in which there is a general return to democracy; assertion of the opposite view, according to which the end of the war is accompanied by a conversion, on the part of the bourgeois governments in the victor countries, to the methods and programmes of fascism, even, and indeed particularly, when reformist and labourite parties participate in government. Refusal to take up the cause of a return to liberal forms – an illusory demand which is not in the interests of the proletariat.

2) Declaration that the present Russian regime has lost its proletarian character, and that this occurred in parallel with the abandonment of revolutionary politics by the Third International. A progressive involution has led the political, economic and social forms in Russia to take on bourgeois characteristics once again. This process should not be seen as a return to praetorian forms of autocratic tyranny, or pre-bourgeois forms, but as the advent, by a different historic road, of the same type of advanced social organisation presented by the State Capitalisms of those countries with a totalitarian regime: regimes in which State planning opens the way to imposing developments and provides an enhanced potential to pursue an imperialist line. Faced with such a situation, we do not call on Russia to return to parliamentary democratic forms, which is in decay in all modern States in any case; instead we work for the reestablishment, in Russia too, of the totalitarian revolutionary communist party.

3) Rejection of all invitations to participate in any kind of national solidarity of classes and parties; a solidarity evoked not long ago in order to over-throw the so-called totalitarian regimes and to fight the Axis States, whilst now it is required in order to reconstruct, by way of legal methods, the war-damaged capitalist world.

4) Rejection of manoeuvre and tactic of the united front, that is, of inviting the so-called socialist and Communist parties, which by now have nothing proletarian about them, to abandon their government coalitions and create a so-called proletarian unity.

5) Determined struggle against all ideological crusades which attempt to mobilise the working classes of the various countries onto patriotic fronts for a new Imperialist War; whether they are called on to fight for ’Red’ Russia against Anglo-Saxon Imperialism or, in a war presented as anti-fascist, to support Western democracy against Stalinist totalitarianism.