Force, Violence, and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle Pt. 6

Postscript

The work Force, Violence, and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle, which we have published in five parts, dealt with the question of the use of force in social relationships and the characteristics of the revolutionary dictatorship according to the correct Marxist interpretation. It intentionally did not dwell on the issue of class and party organization. However, in the final part of the discussion on the causes of the degeneration of the dictatorship, we were led straight to this point since many people have attributed such degeneration to errors in internal organization and to the violation of a democratic and elective process within both the party and the other class organizations.

In refuting this thesis, however, we have neglected to mention an important polemic which took place in the Communist International in 1925‑26 on the subject of changing the organizational base of the Communist Party to factory cells or factory nuclei. The Italian Left was practically alone in resolutely opposing this change and in insisting that the organizational base must remain territorial.

This position was exhaustively expounded at the time, however the central point was this: the organic function of the party, a function which no other organization can fulfil, is to lead the struggle from the level of the individual economic struggle on the local and trade basis to the united, general proletarian class struggle which is social and political. Such a task, consequently, cannot be seriously undertaken by an organizational unit which includes only workers of the same trade or concern. This milieu will only be receptive to narrow trade interests, the central directives of the party will seem as something coming from above, something foreign, and the party officials will never meet with the rank and file on an equal footing and in a certain sense they will no longer belong to the party since they are not employed by a concern.

Territorial groups by nature, however, place workers of every trade and workers employed by different employers on the same level, as well as the other militants from social strata which are not strictly proletarian – and the party openly accepts the latter as rank and file members, and initially only as rank and file members, if necessary keeping them in quarantine for some time before calling them, if such a thing is warranted, to organizational positions.

It had been claimed that the factory cell would provide a closer link between the party organization and the great masses. However we demonstrated at the time that the concept of factory cells contained the same opportunist and demagogic defects as right‑wing workerism and Labourism and counterposed the party officials to the rank and file, in an out-and-out caricature of Lenin’s conception of professional revolutionaries.

The Left replaced the idiotic majoritary criterion, which is copied after bourgeois democracy, with a higher, dialectical criterion which hinges everything on the solid link of both the rank and file militants and the leadership to the strict and obligatory continuity of theory, program and tactics. It rejected any idea of demagogically wooing those wide layers of the masses which are so easily manoeuvrable. The Left’s conception of the organization of the party is, in reality, the only one which can provide protection against the bureaucratic degeneration of the leading strata of the party and against the overpowering of the party’s rank and file by such leadership, both of which lead to a situation where the enemy class gains a devastating influence.