The Function of the Center in the Tradition of the Left

We continue the series of reports on the function of the Center with a series of quotations from various texts, some of which make up the unified and invariant Body of Party Theses.

The Party and its method of work (Il Partito Comunista, 169/1988)

“The abandonment even for a moment of the method of internal life and of the conduct of the organizational structure induces, if it is not rectified as soon as possible and in the most energetic manner, a mortal spiral for the life of the Party itself, an increasingly unstoppable mechanism that destroys its structure and tragically causes the compass of the Revolution to go astray, because in truth organizational unhinging, perhaps disguised as imbecilic ‘strengthening,’ then goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the programmatic principles that have distinguished and set the Party apart from every other grouping that appeals to the working class and the social revolution.”

Communism and organic centralism (Comunismo, 13/1983)

“Even the party, in its internal organization, is already no longer a ‘party,’ but Gemeinwesen, or rather, according to a definition of the Left, ‘a human organ.’ The party is the anticipation of communist society, not as an exemplary testimony or aesthetic fact, but as an operating and discernible group in its mode of being. The party knows what communism is; it was born out of this awareness, which gave substance to the already mature need for a new society. So it can and should apply the corresponding communist method internally. Those methods which, after the conquest of political power, from being the patrimony of the party alone, would begin to be, in an ever-increasing expansion, proper to the new communist society. In case of the emergence of dissension within the party, preserving its method and organic unity are conditions to remedy the error and to bring it back to clarity, through the study of problems, using the mighty investigative tool of Marxist theory, condensed in the revolutionary tradition of which the party is the repository. To attribute the alleged ‘error’ to the whole party is to defend the intelligence of the species, which the party expresses in its universality and organic unity, founded on the monolithism of its doctrine. The moment it abandons this healthy proceeding for whatever reason, it becomes incapable of becoming a bearer of human science and is reduced to a sterile ephemeral organization.”

The party does not arise from circles (Il Partito Comunista, 71/1980)

“Let there be no mistake: the word ‘organic’ does not mean that each militant can arbitrarily interpret the Party’s instructions, or that the Party has no hierarchical structure, or that within this functional hierarchy, whoever is at the top, can just as arbitrarily issue orders, repress, and condemn..”

Resolution on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution (2nd Congress of the Communist International, 1920)

“13 – The Communist International is of the view that, especially in the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Communist Party must be built on the basis of unwavering proletarian centralization.
In order to effectively lead the working class in the long and bitter civil war that will have broken out, the Communist Party must establish strict, military discipline in its ranks as well.”

Points of the Left (late 1924 – early 1925)

“[…] the problem of discipline arises as the channeling and utilization of the forces that develop and that the organizational system must be capable of harmonizing. In that case the new experiences become the heritage of the Party that interprets them, assimilates them, and they do not become a gimmick of a few officials who impose them on the inert Party according to interpretations that are most often wrong.”

Cardinal Positions of the Communist Party (Il Partito Comunista, 17/1976)

“The foundations of this iron discipline: Lenin teaches us!

It is, first of all, a result, not a mechanical element, the product of a beautiful statutory plan.
The result is as follows:
1) The consciousness of the proletarian vanguard, devotion to the revolutionary cause, steadfastness, self-sacrifice, heroism.
2) The ability of this vanguard to connect with the great masses of the workers, the proletarians above all…
3) The soundness of the political direction carried out by this vanguard, and its justified strategy and political tactics…

So iron organizational discipline is the result of the party’s ability to move on the basis of theory and in full fidelity to it, of its ability to intervene in the physical struggles that the working masses undertake for their material needs, with the right strategy and tactics.”

Communist organisation and discipline: premises of the question (Prometeo, 5/1924)

“The orders which emanate from the central hierarchies are not the starting point, but the result of the functioning of the movement understood as a collectivity. This is not to be understood in a foolishly democratic or legalistic way but in a realistic and historical sense. We are not defending, by saying this, ‘the right’ of the communist masses to devise policies which the leaders must then follow: we are noting that the formation of a class party presents itself in these terms, and that an examination of the question must be based on these premises. The schematic conclusions we are getting to are thus outlined.

There is no mechanical discipline that can reliably ensure that orders and regulations from above ‘whatever they are’ will be put into effect. There is however a set of orders and regulations which respond to the real origins of the movement that can guarantee maximum discipline, that is, of unitary action by the entire organisation; and, conversely, there are other directives which, emanating from the centre could compromise discipline and organisational solidity.

It is, therefore, a matter of demarcating the duty of the leading organs. But who is supposed to do that? The whole party should do it, that’s who, the whole organisation, and not in the trite and parliamentary sense of a right to be consulted about the ‘mandate’ to be conferred on the elected leaders and how restricted it will be, but in a dialectical sense that takes into consideration the movement’s traditions, preparedness, and real continuity in its thinking and action. Precisely because we are antidemocratic, we believe that a minority may have views that correspond better to the interests of the revolutionary process than those of the majority. Certainly this only happens in exceptional cases and it is extremely serious when such a disciplinary inversion occurs, as happened in the old International and which we sincerely hope will not occur within our ranks again. But even if we omit to consider this extreme case, there are however other less critical situations when the contribution which groups make by calling on the leading centre to refine or modify its instructions is useful, in fact, indispensable”.

Notes for theses on the question of organization (Il Programma Comunista, 1964/22)

“7) Paragraph 2 of the theses (we believe due to Lenin) is directly titled: ‘Democratic centralism.’

Thesis 6 defines it thus: ‘Democratic centralism in the organization of the Communist Party must be a true synthesis, a fusion, of centralization and proletarian democracy. This fusion can only be achieved by a permanent common activity, by an equally common and permanent struggle of the entire party.’

The following passages already show what the dangers of the false interpretation of the formulas of democratic centralism and proletarian democracy might be. For example, the centralization of the Communist Party should not be formal or mechanical:

‘It must be a centralization of communist activity, that is, the formation of a powerful leadership ready to attack and at the same time capable of adaptation. A formal or mechanical centralization would only be the centralization of power in the hands of a bureaucracy, with the aim of dominating other party members or the masses of the revolutionary proletariat outside the party.’”

Lenin the Organic Centralist (Comunismo, 91, 2021)

“In short, the party must be a centralised structure, with the existence of different organs and of a central body capable of coordinating, directing and ordering the whole network; absolute discipline of all members of the organisation in executing orders placed by the centre; no autonomy for local sections or groups; no communication network diverging from the unitary one that connects the centre to the periphery and the periphery to the centre And the never-ending activity of study, of sculpting of the doctrine, which is peculiar to the party, does not only have a theoretical value, it is also, and above all, an organisational necessity, in order to be at any time able to express the ‘correct revolutionary politics’.”

Lessons from the counterrevolutions (PCInt. internal bulletin, 1951)

“The stance of the Left consists in the simultaneous struggle against two deviations:

1) The base, as long as it is democratically consulted (workerism, labourism, social-democratism), is entitled and sufficient to decide on what action the center takes.

2) The supreme center (political committee or party leader) is sufficient to decide on what action the party and the masses take (Stalinism, Cominformism), and has the right to discover ‘new forms’ and ‘new courses.’

Both deviations lead to the same result: The base is no longer the proletarian class, but the people or the nation. According to Marx and Lenin, this ensuing direction is in the interests of the bourgeois ruling class.”

The continuity of action of the Party in line with the tradition of the Left (Il Programma Comunista, 1967/5)

“We are centralists (and this is, if you will, our only organizing principle) not because we recognize centralism as valid in and of itself, not because we deduce it from an eternal idea or abstract scheme, but because unique is the end to which we tend and unique is the direction in which we move in space (internationally) and in time (above the generations ‘of the dead, the living, and the unborn’). We are centralists by virtue of the invariance of a doctrine that is in the power of neither individuals nor groups to change, and the continuity of our action in the ebb and flow of historical contingencies, in the face of all the obstacles with which the path of the working class is sown. Our centralism is the mode of being of a Party that is not an army even if it has rigorous discipline, just as it is not a school even if it teaches. It is a real historical force defined by its stable orientation in the long war between classes. It is around this inseparable and very hard core; doctrine—program—tactics, collective and impersonal possession of the movement, that our organization crystallizes, and what holds it together is not the knut of the ‘organizing center’ but the single and uniform thread that binds ‘leaders’ and ‘base,’ ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ committing them to the observance and defense of a system of ends and means none of which is separable from the other.

In this real life of the Communist Party—not of any party but solely and properly this one, as communist in fact and not in name—the puzzle that nags the bourgeois democrat, who decides: The ‘high’ or the ‘low,’ the most or the few? Who ‘commands’ and who ‘obeys’? It dissolves and definitively by itself: it is the unitary body of the Party that takes and follows its own path; and in it, as in the words of an obscure leveling soldier, “no one commands and everyone is commanded” which does not mean that there are no orders, but that these match the natural way of movement and action of the Party, whoever is giving them.

But break this unity of doctrine—program—tactics, and everything collapses, leaving nothing but a […] checkpoint and command post at one extreme, maneuvering the masses of militants as the general—supposed strategic ‘genius’—moves the supposedly poor dumb soldiers, perhaps by running them through arms and baggage into the enemy camp, or as the stationmaster maneuvers his trains, perhaps by running them into each other and a boundless parade ground for every possible maneuver at the other extreme. Break this unity, and Stalinism becomes logically and historically justified, just as the ruinous subordination of a party like ours, whose first task is to ensure ‘the historical continuity and international unity of the movement’ (point 4 of the Livorno Program, 1921), to the false and lying mechanism of ‘democratic consultation.’ Break it, and you will have destroyed the Class Party.

A real force operating in history with characteristics of strict continuity, the Party lives and acts (and here is the answer to the second deviation) not on the basis of possessing a statutory heritage of norms, precepts and constitutional forms, in the way hypocritically desired by bourgeois legalism or naively dreamed of by pre-Marxist utopianism, an architect of well-planned structures to be dropped ready-made into the reality of historical dynamics, but on the basis of its nature as an organism, formed, in an uninterrupted succession of theoretical and practical battles, in line of a direction of constant march:
As our 1945 ‘Platform’ wrote, ‘The rules of party organization are coherent with the dialectical conception of its function, they do not rest on juridical and regulatory recipes, they overcome the fetish of majority consultations.’ It is in the exercise of its functions, all of them and not one, that the Party creates its organs, gears, mechanisms; and it is in the course of this very exercise that it undoes and recreates them, not using metaphysical dictates or constitutional paradigms, but the real and precisely organic needs of its development. None of these gears are theorizable, either a priori, or a posteriori; nothing authorizes us to say, to give a very down-to-earth example, that the best fulfillment of the function for which any one of them was born is guaranteed by its handling by one or more militants; the only demand that can be made of it is that the three or the ten—if there are any—wield it as one will, consistent with the whole past and future course of the party, and that the one, if there is one, wield it insofar as in his arm or mind the impersonal and collective force of the party operates; and the judgment of the satisfaction of that demand is given by practice, by history, not by the articles of the code.
The revolution is a problem not of form but of strength; so is the Party in its real life, in its organization as in its doctrine. The same organizational criterion of territorial rather than ‘cellular’ type that we claim is neither deduced from abstract and timeless principles, nor elevated to the dignity of a perfect and timeless solution; we adopt it only because it is the other side of the primary synthesizing function (of groups, of categories, of elementary drives) that we assign to the Party.

The generous preoccupation of comrades that the Party operate in an organizationally secure, linear and homogeneous manner should therefore be directed—as Lenin himself warned in his ‘Letter to a Comrade’—not to the search for statutes, codes, and constitutions, or worse, for characters of ‘special’ temperament, but to the best way to contribute, each and every comrade, to the harmonious fulfillment of the functions without which the Party would cease to exist as a unifying force and as a leader and representative of the class—which is the only way to help it resolve day by day, ‘by itself’. As in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, the newspaper is spoken of as a ‘collective organizer’—its problems of life and action. Here is the key to ‘organic centralism,’ the sure weapon in the historic battle of the classes, not in the empty abstraction of the purported ‘norms’ of operation of the most perfect mechanisms or, worse, in the squalor of the trials of men who by organic selection find themselves handling them ‘at the bottom’ or ‘at the top’. The efficacy of these mechanisms and gears does not depend by virtue of personal qualities or absences of qualities, but rather on the path imposed upon them by the party as a whole. The path emerges from its dictatorial program, its invariable doctrine, its known and expected tactics, and from the reciprocal, internal relations between part and part of an organism whose members all live or die together as the same blood circulates or ceases to circulate in the central muscle and in the peripheral fibers—imposes on them to move.

Either on this path, or on the two seemingly diverging, in reality converging, tracks of chaotic and arbitrary democratism and blatant Stalinist authoritarianism: no other ‘choice’ leaves us with the theses of 1920, 1922, 1926, 1945, 1966, and, to say it all, ever.”

Supplementary theses on the historical task, action, and structure, of the world communist party (Il Programma Comunista, 7/1966)

“8. — By the very necessity of its organic action, and in order to succeed in having a collective function that overcomes and forgets all personalism and individualism, the party must distribute its members among the various functions and activities that make up its life. The turnover of comrades in such jobs is a natural occurrence that cannot be guided by rules similar to those of the careers of bourgeois bureaucracies. In the party, there are no contests in which one struggles to achieve more or less brilliant or more prominent positions, but one must strive to achieve organically what is not an aping of the bourgeois division of labor, but is a natural adaptation of the complex and articulated organ-party to its function.”

Theses Presented By The Left (“Lyon Theses”) (3rd Congress of the Communist Party of Italy, 1926)

“If only proletarian humanity, from which we are still a long way off, will be free and capable of a will that is not sentimental illusion, but capable of organizing and holding the economy in the broadest sense of the word; if today the proletarian class is still, though less than the other classes, determined in the limits of its action by influences external to it, the organ, on the other hand, in which precisely the maximum of volitional possibility and initiative in the whole field of its action is summed up is the political party:
certainly not just any party, but the party of the proletarian class, the Communist Party, linked, as it were, by an unbroken line to the ultimate goals of the future process. Such a volitional faculty in the party, as well as its consciousness and theoretical preparation, are exquisitely collective functions of the party, and the Marxist explanation of the task assigned in the party itself to its leaders lies in considering them as instruments and operators through which the capacities to understand and explain facts and direct and will actions are best manifested, always preserving in these capacities their origin in the existence and characters of the collective organ.”

VI Enlarged Executive of the Communist International. Report and interventions of the Left of the Communist Party of Italy (1926)

“[…] the question of leaders, which Comrade Trotsky raises in the preface to his book ‘1917,’ in his analysis of the causes of our defeats and with whose solution I fully sympathize. Trotsky does not speak of leaders in the sense that we need men delegated for this purpose from heaven. No, he poses the problem quite differently. Leaders are also a product of the party’s activity, the party’s working methods, and the trust the party has been able to attract. If the party, in spite of the variable and often unfavorable situation, follows the revolutionary line and fights opportunistic deviations, the selection of leaders, the formation of a general staff take place favorably, and in the period of the final struggle we will certainly not always succeed in having a Lenin, but a solid and courageous leadership […].”

Russia in the Great Revolution and Contemporary Society (Il Programma Comunista, 14/1956)

“Lenin—the quote has often recurred in recent debates—was for the norm of ‘democratic centralism.’
No Marxist can dispute in the slightest the need for centralism. The party cannot exist if it is allowed that various pieces can each operate on their own. No autonomy of local organizations in political methods. These are old struggles that were already being waged within the parties of the Second International, against, for example, the self-decision of the party’s parliamentary group in its maneuvers, against the case-by-case for local sections or federations in municipalities and provinces, against the case-by-case action of party members in the various economic organizations, and so on.

The adjective ‘democratic’ admits that it is decided in congresses, after grassroots organizations, by counting of votes. But is the counting of votes enough to establish that the center obeys the base and not vice versa? Does this, for those who know the nefariousness of bourgeois electoralism, make any sense?

We will just recall the guarantees we have proposed so many times and illustrated again in the Dialogue.

Doctrine: the center has no power to change it from the one established, from the very beginning, in the classic texts of the movement.

Organization: unique internationally, does not vary by aggregations or mergers but only by individual admissions; the organized cannot stay in any other movement.

Tactics: possibilities for maneuver and action should be provided by decisions of international congresses with a closed system.

At the base no actions can be initiated that are not arranged by the center: the center cannot invent new tactics and moves, under the guise of new facts.

The link between the party base and the center becomes a dialectical form. If the party exercises dictatorship of the class in the State, and against the classes against which the State acts, there is no dictatorship of the party center over the base. Dictatorship is not negated by formal internal mechanical democracy, but by respecting those dialectical ties.

At a certain time in the Communist International the relations were reversed: the Russian state commanded over the Russian party, the party over the International. The Left demanded that this pyramid be overturned.

We did not follow the Trotskyists and anarchists when they made the struggle against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution a matter of grassroots consultations, of worker or worker-peasant democracy, of party democracy. These formulas made the problem smaller.

On the question of the General Authority to which revolutionary communism must refer, we return to find the criteria in economic, social, and historical analysis. It is not possible to have dead, living, and unborn people vote. Whereas, in the original dialectic of the class party organ, such an operation becomes possible, real and fruitful, albeit on a hard, long road of trials and tremendous struggles.”

VI Enlarged Executive of the Communist International. Report and interventions of the Left of the Communist Party of Italy (1926)

“In our higher organs and congresses there is a lack of collective collaboration. The supreme organ seems like something foreign to the sections, debating with them and choosing from among each a fraction to which it gives its support. This center is, in every matter, supported by all the remaining sections, who thus hope to secure better treatment when their turn comes. Sometimes those who get on the plane of this ‘cattle market’ are even purely personal groups of leaders.”

General guiding rules on the basis of organization of the Class Party (Battaglia Comunista, 13/1949)

“The proper relationship in their function between the central and peripheral organs of the movement is not based on constitutional schemes but on the whole dialectical unfolding of the historical struggle of the working class against capitalism.

The fundamental basis of such relations is, on the one hand, the continuous, uninterrupted, and consistent realization of party theory as an evaluation of the development of present society and as defined tasks of the class fighting to overthrow it. On the other hand, these relations are the international bonding of revolutionary proletarians in all countries with unity of purpose and combat.

The peripheral forces of the party and all its adherents are bound in the practice of the movement not to take on their own local and contingent decisions of action that do not come from the central organs and not to give tactical problems solutions other than those supported by the whole party. Correspondingly, the directing and central organs cannot and should not in their decisions and communications, valid for the entire party, abandon theoretical principles or modify the means of tactical action even on the grounds that situations have presented unexpected or unforeseen facts in the party’s prospects. In the defect of these two reciprocal and complementary processes no statutory resources are worthwhile, but the crises of which the history of the proletarian movement offers many examples are determined.

Consequently while calling on all its members to participate in the continuous process of the analysis of social events and facts and in the definition of the most appropriate tasks and methods of action, and ensuring such participation in the most appropriate ways, both through specific organs and through regular general consultations at congresses, in no way does the party allow groups of adherents within it to come together in separate organizations and factions within the party to carry out their work of study and contribution according to networks of connection and correspondence and internal and external dissemination in any case different from the unitary party network.”

On the line of the Left (Il Partito Comunista, 3/1974)

“Point 8 (of the Supplementary Theses on the Historical Task…of 1966, ed.) states that the party ‘must distribute its members among the various functions and activities that make up its life.’
The turnover of comrades in such jobs ‘is a natural fact that cannot be guided by rules similar to those of the careers of bourgeois bureaucracies.’ Which means that the determining element of the selection of party members, is not formal, but organic, it is not a mechanism be it ‘election from below’ or ‘appointment from above’ that determines the selection, but it is the participation of all party members in the collective work and the course of this work in all fields of activity that chooses the most suitable men for the various functions, ‘it is not an aping of the bourgeois division of labor, but it is a natural adaptation of the complex and articulated organ-party to its function.’

The second part of the theses makes it clear that the party is not an army. ‘The historical dialectic leads each fighting organism to perfect its means of offense by employing the tactics possessed by the enemy. From this it can be deduced that in the phase of armed combat the communists will have a military framing with precise patterns of hierarchies to unit paths that will ensure the best success of joint action.’ So, the technique of military framing, which involves patterns of unit-path hierarchies (i.e., in which one goes from top to bottom, the top commands and the base executes without a peep, etc., ed.) is a technique of the enemy (of the bourgeoisie, ed.) that the communists will use, not always, but in the phase of armed combat. ‘This truth must not be unnecessarily mimicked in any of the party’s noncombatant activities.’ Because the use of this enemy technique is not only a danger of corruption and degeneration ‘even when adopted in the ranks of workers’ associations,’ but it does not correspond at all to the Marxist conception of party organization. In fact, ‘Party organicity by no means demands that every comrade see the personification of party strength in another comrade specifically designated to convey provisions that come from above.’ As is the case in the army, where the active role belongs only to the officer indicated ‘specifically’ by a uniform and rank, while the soldier’s only duty is to obey.

In the party it is different: ‘This transmission between the molecules that make up the party organ (between comrades to be clear, ed.) always simultaneously has the double direction (i.e. one is active as much from top to bottom as from bottom to top, ed.).’

Comrade Lenin never said anything different. He won a revolution by thinking exactly like us.

Consequently, the thesis ends, ‘Abusing the formalisms of organization without a vital reason (the armed combat phase, to be precise! ed.) has been, is, and always will be foolish (because it indicates the petty bourgeois’s predilection for the glitter of chevrons, uniforms, formal titles, ed.) and a suspicious flaw (because it indicates the presence of the opportunistic disease, ed.).”

Theses on the historical task, action and structure of the world communist party, according to the positions that have formed the heritage of the Communist Left for over half a century (Il Programma Comunista, 1965/14)

“10 – […] If the opposite happens, and worse if these disciplinary questions serve to save not sound and revolutionary principles but precisely the conscious or unconscious positions of a nascent opportunism, as happened in 1924, 1925, 1926, this only means that the function of the center has been conducted in a wrong way and has caused it to lose all real influence of grassroots discipline toward it, all the more so, the more a phony disciplinary rigor is loudly decried.”