Federalism Means Denying the International Communist Party

The 3rd International

Since its birth, the Left has said that “the party would cease to exist if its various parts were allowed to operate on their own account. No autonomy of local organizations with regard to political procedure.” (Marxism and Authority, 1956) Already at the time of the Third International, the Left’s aspirations and actions within it were already pointed towards this centralist direction. Again in Marxism and Authority, the Left went on to recall that these were “old struggles that were already being waged within the parties of the Second International […] against organizing the work of local sections or federations ‘on a case by case basis’ in the municipalities and provinces, against party members acting ‘on a case by case basis’ in the various economic organizations, and so on.” 

The Left continued its critique of the federalist tendencies typical of the Second International, which means purely local and national forms of doctrinal homogeneity and organization. It affirmed, from the outset, that the new International needed to constitute itself as a “true International Communist Party.” By doing so, it would establish a true centralism on a global scale, ensuring the monolithic nature of the directives and actions of the international proletarian movement. Thus, the representatives of the Left said this regarding the “Zinoviev Report” at the Fourth Moscow Congress, in November-December 1922:

“Every tradition of federalism must be eliminated, in order to ensure centralization and unitary discipline. But this historical problem is not to be solved by mechanical expedients. Even the new International, to avoid opportunist dangers and internal disciplinary crises, must base centralization on clarity not only of program, but also of tactics and method of work. […] This choice [in measures of organization and tactical means] must remain, we affirm, with the center and not with the national organizations according to the judgments they claim to give of their special conditions. If the extent of this choice remains too wide and sometimes even unpredictable, it will fatally result in the frequency of cases of indiscipline which break the continuity and prestige of the world revolutionary organization. We believe that the international organization must be less federative in its central organs; these must not be founded on the representation of national sections, but must emanate from the Congress of the International.” The Left has never abdicated these positions.

Less than two years later, the Left reiterated this point at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, with the Theses on the Question of Tactics, in June-July 1924. The Left reiterated that the process of centralization could only be the fruit of “a real unity of method, which places in the foreground the common features of the action of the proletarian vanguard in all countries.” 

The text goes on to say that it it such a unity of method is only possible at the expense of all the old and new federalist tendencies: “These considerations rest on the rich experience gained during the transitional phase of the International, when it went from an organization of Communist Parties to being a single World Communist Party. These considerations categorically demand the unification of organizational and disciplinary normas, as well as the elimination of abnormal organizational methods. These abnormal methods include the merging of a section of the CI with other political organizations, the fact that certain sections are not founded on the basis of personal membership but in the collective membership of worker’s bodies, the existence of organized fraction and groups of certain tendencies within the Party, and the noyautage and systematic infiltration into organization of a political (and especially military) character. As long as the CI employs these and other such methods, federalism and indiscipline will manifest themselves.”

In 1925, the Left wrote against the “new” federalist “tendencies” in Platform of the Entente Committee. In line with its activity in the CI the Left, and only the Left, offered the international revolutionary movement an open critique of the cell system of organization. This was an organization based on factory groups, imposed by an International which embarked on the path of degeneration. “For us the cell system is equivalent to a federative system which is the negation of the centralization of the Communist Parties, meaning by centralization the maximum strengthening of the revolutionary energies of the periphery coordinated and reflected in the leading apparatus.”

In our 1986 Presentation to the Communist Party in the Tradition of the Left, we wrote “[O]nly the Left was capable of drawing the lesson of the counter-revolution, by recognising the Third International, in its first two congresses, as the anticipation of the world communist party; something which is an old aspiration of Marxist communism and a historical necessity. The Left would also denounce ephemeral forms, the survival of federalism and of doctrinal and programmatic heterogeneity within the party, and their degenerate consequences: the democratic mechanism and its complement, bureaucratism and abuse of organizational formalism.”

The CI’s irreversible degeneration was caused by real and objective obstacles to the revolutionary process. This ultimately led to the defeat of the proletariat’s vanguard in their attempt to storm heaven, as well as the CI’s eventual fall into the hands of opportunism. On an organizational basis, this process first manifested itself precisely by normalizing discontinuities and national-federalist tendencies which the Left always opposed. Indeed, in 1986, we wrote in The One World Party: “The composing and decomposing of the party was guided by the seesaw of positions imparted by the International until it came to the aberrant necessity for the center to create its own particular fractions in the national sections of the CI. At that moment the CI ceased to orient itself in the direction of the one, world party, and went backwards toward the federation of national parties. The inner workings of the CI were opening up to opportunism, even by this route.”

The Postwar Period

We wrote in The Name of the Party, a work contained in Materials for the Final Theses on Internal Organization from 1965: “Justified by the decisions of the Second World Congress of 1920, the Party took the name ‘Communist Party of Italy (section of the Communist International).’ When the International dissolved, at the end of a degeneration, long foreseen by the Left, its present monstrous remnant took the name ‘Italian Communist Party,’ while actually carrying out a national policy. And so in 1943, even while reconstituting ourselves for Italian territory alone, we chose the name ‘Internationalist Communist Party’ to distinguish us from such shame. Today, due to the reality of dialectical unfolding, our organization is the same inside and outside the borders of Italy, and it is nothing new to note that it acts as an international body, albeit with great quantitative limits.”

The same formation, in full continuity with the past, constitutes the Communist Party today. Today it is organized even outside the limits of national borders, unique and worldwide. Unique because it rests on a single and indivisible “programmatically monolithic and unmodifiable doctrinaire structure, centered on the gigantic tradition of the Left,” and worldwide because it is a network organized on an international scale with a single, centralized direction and that “rejects any federalist weakness.” (Foreword to Comunismo #13)

We wrote in our Characteristic Theses, and in those that followed, that in our ceaseless activity of defending and sculpting theory, we were laying “the cornerstones not of an ‘Italian’ party, not only of today’s small and weak party, but of tomorrow’s strong and compact international communist party.” (The One World Party) In our past, it was to the same extent that “[the Left’s] work carried out within the CI was concerned not only with the Italian party, but also and above all with the world party.” (The One World Party) To this party, history has entrusted the grand task of directing the international proletariat toward its victorious revolution on a global scale.