Class War with No Class, Notes on Anti-War United Fronts, Activism, Recruitment and the United Front

There is no shortage of political groupings anticipating a progression of world capitalism into an imminent world war. The problem, as always, isn’t interpreting what’s happening, but what to do about it.

Usually big umbrella activist groups are formed to front for political organizations. Because of their “big tent” structure, these groupings are unable to sum up their problems of, often, decades of similar anti-war activity. They exist primarily to identify and draw in isolated activists while the mother organization prepares them as its own cannon fodder.

The Marxist thesis states: it isn’t possible, first of all, for consciousness of the historical road to appear, in advance, within a single human brain. This is for two reasons: firstly, consciousness follows, rather than precedes, being, that is, the material conditions which surround the subject of consciousness itself; secondly, all forms of social consciousness – with a given delay allowing them time to get generally established – emerge out of circumstances which are analogous and parallel to the economic relations in which masses of individuals find themselves, thereby forming a social class. Historically the latter are then led to “act together” long before they can “think together”. The theory of this relationship between class conditions, and class action and its future point of arrival, isn’t required of persons, in the sense it isn’t required of a particular author or leader; nor is it asked of “the class as whole”, in the sense of a fleeting lump sum of individuals in existence at a certain time or place; and much less can it be deduced from an extremely bourgeois “consultation” of the class. (The False Resource Of Activism, ICP General Meeting n. 6, Milan, September 7, 1952)

The activist group puts the cart of consciousness before the horse. It sees in these small isolated groups the first attempts at revolutions, leading, acting, as in the failure of the anarchist’s propaganda of the deed. Anti-war work requires international centralism, otherwise all efforts become centrifugal, laden as they are by the weight of local demands and imagined local group specificities.

The Party must be able to control every aspect of its life, carry out each of its organizational roles in such a way that nothing strikes it as unexpected, incomprehensible or mysterious. Passing off as positions of the Left that terrorism is a “gleam of light” for the proletariat; that the folksy political traditions of extremist factions, with their lumpen-intellectual student base, represent a “revolutionary camp”; that the idea of “workers committees” is fanciful and that working within them is “activism” or “economism”, and then immediately to state exactly the opposite, not because anything has actually changed but due to impatience and disappointment that no immediate gains have been made; that such oscillations represent the “tactics” of the Left only disorientates militants, sows discord in the Party, erodes the organization, and compromises decades of hard-earned, consistent work. (The Party Does not Arise from “Circles”, 1980)

The small activist circle is the practical equivalent of the united front seeking to include wide swathes of individuals, not into a cohesive and thought-out party, but into an action for action’s sake scheme. The activist circle aims to draw in numbers to make up for its political incoherence.

From the Fourth Congress, which took place at the end of 1922, the Left stood by its pessimistic prediction and its vigorous struggle to denounce dangerous tactics (united front between communist and socialist parties, the slogan of “workers’ government”) and organizational errors (attempts to increase the size of the parties not simply through an influx of those proletarians who had abandoned the other parties with a social democratic programme of action and structure, but by means of fusions that accepted entire parties and portions of parties after negotiations with their leadership, and also by admitting to the Comintern, as national sections, parties claiming to be “sympathizers”, which was clearly an error in its drift towards federalism). Taking the initiative on a third issue, it was from this time that the Left denounced, and ever more vigorously in the years that followed, the growth of the opportunist danger: this third issue was the international’s method of internal working, whereby the centre, represented by the Moscow executive, resorted not only to the use of “ideological terror” in its dealings with the parties, or the parts of them that had made political errors, but above all to organizational pressure; which amounted to an erroneous application, and eventually a total falsification, of the correct principles of centralization and absolute discipline with no exceptions. (Theses on the Historical Duty, Action and the Structure of the World Communist Party, According to the Positions that for more than Half a Century Form the Historical Heritage of the Communist Left (“Theses of Naples”), July 1965)