[GM9] Bases of Party Action in the Field of Proletarian Economic Struggles Pt. 6

9. – PROLETARIAT AND POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The only class organ which collectively possesses a clear and complete vision of the revolutionary process and consequently a finalistic will, and which aggregates its members on the basis of adherence to this vision is the class political party, the Marxist communist party; while the workers trade union organ, to which proletarians have always adhered bound by a single and elementary common idea, that of the defense of bread, is thus the theater in which the most diverse political orientations and positions having influence on the masses of proletarians clash.

The party address was thus founded on this perfectly Marxist observation: that never can class economic bodies, not even in their maximum extent and even at the maximum degree of violence of the struggle waged by them, express class consciousness or a coherent and unitary idea of the process of class struggle. Correctly Lenin and our whole school said that the proletariat organized on the trade union level does not come to confront the problem of State power in a revolutionary manner, but confronts it in a “trade-unionist” manner, which does not necessarily mean peaceful, but, as in the historical examples of Italy in 1920, Germany in 1919, Russia in 1917, Spain and France in 1936, in order to “participate”, i.e., so that the working class can influence the bourgeois State, perhaps by armed violence, perhaps expressed in the armed confrontation of proletarian and bourgeois bodies, between which, however, irreconcilability is not envisaged.

The situation of “dual power” in Russia could have lasted forever for the Soviets (certainly not for the bourgeois State preparing an offensive against them) if the Bolshevik Party had not won power for them and in their name. In 1919 Germany, having eliminated the Spartacist uprising, the soviets bowed to become institutions, of course eventually eliminated, of the Weimar bourgeois republic. In Italy, from 1918 to 1920, a vast and profound general and violent movement of demands could be channeled on the cursed road of elections and appeasement with bourgeois power; in Spain and France 1936 this even occurred with the “popular front”, that is, of appeasement with its own democratic State, making the proletarian masses, organized in the trade unions and even fully armed, the cannon fodder of an alleged war of democracy against fascism.

The proletarian class as a whole is thus capable of expressing an action and an organization of the defensive struggle to which its material economic conditions compel it; in this defensive struggle it can go so far as to use armed violence and threaten the bourgeois State; but the transition from this defensive struggle to the attack against the capitalist State, is only possible thanks to the existence of a special and particular organ of the class, namely the political party that succeeds in establishing its influence over the proletarian bodies.

The fundamental distinction that we Marxists draw between workers’ organs and the political party, denying absolutely the possibility of the former possessing a complete consciousness of the revolutionary process, and even of their own action, has nothing to do with some metaphysical axiom that would define the worker as such as incapable of acquiring political consciousness, attributing this capacity instead to the so-called intellectuals. First of all, for us, political consciousness is not the patrimony of any individual, even if he knows all of Marxism by heart, but of a collective organ, the party; secondly, this organ is not an assembly of intellectuals and “learned individuals”, of connoisseurs and experts in Marxism, but an organism of action and combat prepared and trained in all its manifestations for the offensive attack against the bourgeois State.

It’s not at all the matter for us to deny the ability to understand the global class vision to the worker because he is a worker, and to attribute it to “those who know”. Our conception is inverse to the aberrant and anti-Marxist conception of the party as the “collective intellectual” of the class.

We will say, and we have written this in our theses, that if such a question were to be set, we would define the intellectual as a defector of his own class, the petty bourgeoisie, who can be useful to the party with due caution and on condition that he leaves all his “fine skills” at home and simply adheres humbly to the set of positions that historically represent the party. And the party requires the same thing of the worker, namely, that in joining the class party he should abandon his own label of factory, category, profession and nationality and become a soldier and militant of a single address which represents the historical experience of the class as a whole. It is therefore not to a sociological distinction that we trace the possibility or otherwise of possessing the global class consciousness: workers do not possess it by virtue of being workers and intellectuals do not possess it by virtue of “knowledge”: the party organ possesses it, which indifferently organizes all those who accept a monolithic and intangible set of positions and who discipline themselves to act on the basis of them as a single body aimed at the revolutionary conquest of political power and the exercise of dictatorship.

10. – DIFFERENT ORGANS FOR DIFFERENT FUNCTIONS

The question is of a different nature. In order for the proletarian class to move from the defensive struggle against capitalist oppression to the offensive struggle for the destruction of the class regime, it needs a special organ that is predisposed to this function.

This organ, whoever it is composed of and whatever its extent, must be trained to possess a revolutionary vision, that is, to consider the present social order as transitory and destructible, and the possibility of a future social order opposite to this, the future communist society. It must be trained to consider the means and stages of the transition in the political, economic and social spheres and to see the struggles and results that the class achieves in its daily battle of defense against the effects of capitalist domination as partial and transitory struggles and results, as “conquests”, which only the final overthrow of the regime can secure. It therefore sees the working class and its struggles as a preparation and “school of war” for a more general and unique struggle of the whole class for a single purpose: no longer the defense of material conditions within the present regime, but the destruction of it and the establishment of the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the means of the transition to a new way of life and production of the human species.

The party sums up in itself the class in a general sense, sees it as a unity beyond the contingent distinctions of factory, category, locality or nation. It sees the class and its movement as a unity in time and considers the class as a historical entity whose movement is endowed with a continuity summarizable in the consciousness of general and global interests; it’s predisposed to draw on the experiences of proletarian struggles, to evaluate their limits and weaknesses, victories and defeats, and to select on this basis methods and tools of action increasingly suited to the end it proposes: the destruction of the bourgeois State, the revolutionary dictatorship.

We’ve left for last the assertion that this ability to consider the class in its unity of time and space, and thus to draw experiences from the class struggle, is given to the party by the handling of a formidable weapon which is the product of the modern development of scientific thought: Marxist theory considered as the only one capable of explaining social phenomena and historical events. We have left it for last as we wish to state that this need to consider the thousand battles and the thousand episodes of the proletarian struggle as unique in time and space was proper to all attempts of the proletariat to organize itself into a political party, even when it did not have Marxism at its disposal. Not having the adequate theory at its disposal, mistakes and approximations were made and formidable blunders were taken, but the notion that the proletarian party is that organ capable of considering the class as a whole and in its totality was never lost: the First International may have not been Marxist, but it was an International, that is, it tried to represent the unifying element of all the scattered members of the proletariat and its everyday battles beyond space and time.

The proletarian class thus needs, in order to be able to move as a single army, an organ that is capable of drawing from the struggles it wages and has waged the unifying elements, their common class denominator, beyond ups and downs, beyond contingent situations, beyond advances and retreats. And this ability means not only knowledge of the enemy, of the behavior of the other classes, of the historical variations that take place; it means not only experience of how the class moves, of the factors that enhance or depress its movement, of the means used by the adversary and those that the class must adopt in order to win; it means also and at the same time selection of those elements of the class whose combativeness transcends contingent goals and motives and is exalted in the party organization; it means also search for, and enhancing, within the more limited and partial movement of the workers, of those elements that are likely to form the connection and the basis of future broader battles.

11. – PETTY-BOURGEOIS ADVENTURISM

We don’t deviate too much from our argument if we try to carry out another distinction, useful in increasing the healthy contempt of the working class against the endless myriad of groups and grouplets that today dare to call for revolution, and can only do so because the revolution isn’t here and the proletarian class is willing for everything to be played out on its skin seemingly without striking a blow.

In thousands of our articles we have enunciated the thesis that we don’t despise the attachment that the working class shows (unfortunately) to the degenerate opportunist parties while refusing to cling to the bandwagon of a thousand debauched student cliques. For that matter, it escapes no one that in all our work we treat the opportunist parties as a mortal enemy, while we mock these groups without rhyme or reason. We don’t call the oceanic gatherings with which the damned Spanish CP deploys the proletarians of Spain on the bourgeois front “carnivalesque”, but we maintain our contemptuous “Carnival in Bologna”.

In this view of ours, the “leftist” grouplets are more despicable than the Italian Communist Party itself and its brethren, not any closer to us on the ground of revolution, and a thousand miles further from our conception of the necessity of the party. The ICP is a party, it is the bourgeois party in the workers’ camp, the party that for fifty years has kept the working class aligned under the bourgeois flags, but at least it is a party.

Those, on the other hand, who pretend to descend into the arena of revolution and do so without even bothering to represent the proletarian class from a unique and global point of view in time and space, those who, having seen no major proletarian strikes and having seen four student goliardic events in France or Italy, presumed to be facing a “new experience” that ended Marxism and babbled on about “neo-capitalism”, the “new role” of studentism, the “new phase” of revolution, etc, they are not a party, not even bourgeois, they are schizophrenic outgrowths of the petty bourgeoisie.

Those who fell in love with “Cuban socialism” and then “Chinese socialism” and praised Fidel Castro or Mao because they were “characteristic” without even bothering to attempt a general analysis of the Chinese or Cuban phenomenon; those who claim to deduce a “revolutionary experience” from the four semi-pacifist manifestations of Italian studentism and propose to dispense with Marx and Lenin because after them there was, as it happens, “the experience of the French ’68 and the Italian Hot Autumn”; they are not a party, they are political adventurers. They shamelessly renew the old Bernsteinian adage “the end is nothing, the movement is everything”, but they renew it in the manner of Mussolini: no history, no theory, no general lessons; action is everything, success is everything.

And with this miserable baggage of lucubrations, of artifices, of truths that last one day and cease being true the next they claim to represent a “revolutionary camp” while denying in its essence the fundamental organ of revolution, the party.

The working class rejects them and does well, even if, unfortunately, some combative workers disgusted by opportunism and its deeds also fall into this mess: the class doesn’t need “carnivals”, it needs its revolutionary political organ. And the party is the only one that can give the present generation of struggling workers the general explanation of the whole field of social struggle at the world level and as an experience deduced from more than a century of proletarian battles, the only one that, as a result, is able to set the plan of the future battle that the proletariat will have to undertake at the world level to destroy the international domination of capital and establish its, equally international, class dictatorship.