PART III – AT THE SECOND CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL

Part III

AT THE SECOND CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL

“The revolutionary epoch demands that the proletariat use methods of struggle capable of focusing its militancy – namely, methods of mass struggle which lead logically to direct confrontation and open battle with the bourgeois state machine. All other methods, including the revolutionary utilization of the bourgeois parliament, must be subordinated to this aim”.

The Platform of the Communist International, approved at the First Congress of the C.I., 1919.

“Our abstentionism derives from the great importance we attach to the political task that in the present historical period falls to the Communist Parties: insurrectional conquest of political power, establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet system. Since the greatest obstacle to this struggle are the traditions and political parties of bourgeois democracy and the offshoots that through socialism of the II International type bind this to the working masses, we maintain that it is indispensable to severe all contacts between the revolutionary movement and the bourgeois representative organs: isolation from the rotting carrion of parliamentary democracy”.

Trends in the Third International, in “Il Soviet,” May 23, 1920. 

The Second Congress of the Communist International had been convened for objectives that went far beyond the question of whether or not to participate in parliament with an antiparliamentary purpose, which was recognized by the Bolsheviks as being of secondary importance compared to the great tasks posed to the revolutionary proletariat by the First Imperialist War and the period of violent social upheavals it inaugurated. 

It was a question of giving a sure and homogeneous direction to the parties that had either already joined the International in the year since its founding, or were disposed to enter under the suggestion of the great Russian revolutionary experience and under the irresistible impetus of the masses everywhere that had descended in struggle against a capitalism that had asked of them the sacrifice of life on the battlefields and now rewarded them with misery, unemployment, and violence. As is said in the preamble to the “conditions of admission,” the danger for the young world organization of the proletariat was not that it could not be the pole of attraction for the revolutionary masses, who looked on it and on Moscow everywhere with enthusiasm and hope, but that it would “become, in a sense, fashionable,” drawing into its ranks parties and organizations that a long parliamentary, reformist, democratic tradition made impervious to the ends and means sculpturally summarized in the preamble to its Statutes: “The Communist International gives itself for its end the armed struggle for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of the international republic of Soviets, the first stage on the road to the complete suppression of every governmental regime. ..; regards the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only available means of wresting humanity from the horrors of capitalism … and the power of the Soviets as the form of dictatorship of the proletariat that history dictates”; draws from the imperialist war the renewed confirmation that “the emancipation of the workers is not a local, nor a national, but a social and international task…; it breaks forever with the tradition of the Second International for which in reality there was only the peoples of the white race,” proposing to ensure by its organizing mechanism “the workers of every country the possibility of receiving at all times, from the organized workers of other countries, all possible help.” 

At a time when the Longuets and the Dittmanns, the Macdonalds and the Serratis, were paying verbal homage to these luminous objectives, showing in the act, by their stubborn reluctance to break with the Right, that they considered them a book closed with seven seals (nor, moreover, could it be supposed that, like Paul on the road to Damascus, they had suddenly converted to it, and as penitents anxious to redeem themselves were now knocking at the doors of the Communist International), there was an urgent need to raise an insuperable dike both against the infiltration of opportunism into the ranks of an army that had come into the field to overthrow it, and against its possible return in force, in less ardent situations, for we had not from the outset drawn with sufficient clarity the insurmountable boundary, carved out by history within the workers’ movement, between gradualism and communism, between reform and revolution, between democracy and class dictatorship. In short, there was an urgent need to re-establish the cornerstones of integral Marxist doctrine, beating the treacherous right and the devious center and, a thousand times lighter task, hammering these fundamental principles, these indispensable weapons of revolutionary victory into the young and healthy proletarian forces which, in reaction to them, harbored serious preconceptions about the question of power, the party, the dictatorship. 

All the theses of the Second Congress were aimed at such work of clearing the ground from the bad grass of reformism, from its long devastating action, and in parallel from the diseases generated in the opposite direction – anarcho-syndicalism, workerism, anti-partyism; the theses on the role of the Communist Party in the proletarian revolution, on parliamentarianism, on the national and colonial question, on the work in the proletarian economical organizations, on the conditions to establish soviets, on the fundamental tasks of the C. I., the Statutes and the famous 21 Points. It is well known that to it the abstentionist Communist fraction gave not only enthusiastic adherence, but a major contribution, fighting (largely successfully) for the conditions of admission to be not softened – as it seemed at times to be intended – but made much more binding and categorical. It was able to do so because, as the texts published in volumes I and I bis of our History of the Left document, it had made those cornerstone principles its banner far before 1920, and the theses it adopted in May in Florence reaffirmed them without possibility of equivocation, in a parallel, that no international current could yet boast of, with the fundamental theses consigned in those years to history – to mention no more – in Lenin’s State and Revolution and The Renegade Kautsky, and in Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism. 

Dissent persisted on the question of “revolutionary parliamentarism,” but no one – least of all the superopportunist PCI leaders who claim to refer to communism – has the right to turn this tactical dissent into an antithesis of principle, or – which is the height of impudence – to set themselves up as champions of Leninist orthodoxy by entrenching themselves behind a false allegiance to the directives advocated in the parliamentary field by Lenin. A parallel reading of the two theses – parliamentarist-revolutionary and Marxist abstentionist – is enough to see that identical is the judgment on the counterrevolutionary function of the parliamentary institution, identical the rejection of it as a way to socialism and as a form of class dictatorship, identical the goal: to overthrow it. The disagreement revolves around whether or not to use the electoral and parliamentary tribune-no more than a tribune! – as a subsidiary tool of agitation and propaganda for its destruction. The negative judgment of the Marxist abstentionist Left, supported by arguments that have nothing in common with those of anarchism, syndicalism or workerism, rests on the non-academic or metaphysical balance sheet of long decades of proletarian struggles in the advanced West, where the parliamentary and democratic disease has deeper roots and the proletarian revolution gestating in the bowels of capitalist economy and society no longer has to graft itself in, as in Russia, on the trunk of a lingering bourgeois revolution; where, therefore, an even more direct tactic is imposed than the, albeit very rigid, tactic used by the Bolsheviks in their preparation for the seizure of power. The teaching of the Russian Communists had been that, stupendously, of the integral application of the Marxist program in a situation which, isolated from its world context, would have justified – for the pedantry of the Kautskys or Plekhanovs 1917 – less “toughness,” a less radical use of the anti-democratic, anti-parliamentary broom. In the West – the Left reasoned – more drastic remedies were imposed on festering disease, and one of these – the refusal to “use” the electoral and parliamentary mechanism for any purpose, however avowedly subversive – would have the additional merit of fostering a rapid and perhaps immediate selection of communists from the many variants of cryptoreformism.

It is no irreverence on the part of those who, like us, tooth and nail defend Lenin – that is, Marxism – against the innumerable falsifications of the bigots shamelessly invoking his name, to say that to this crucial argument the Marxist abstentionists did not then receive an answer, either from him or, much less, from Bucharin, as can be clearly seen from the speeches we reproduce below. These are vitiated by the concern – sacrosanct in itself – that from right premises (the phrase is Lenin’s) wrong conclusions can be drawn in the sense of anarchist, syndicalist and workerist infantilism, and, while acknowledging that such an accusation cannot be levelled at the starting point of the theses of Marxist abstentionists, they avoid going into the basic issue of tactical deductions in the Western world, in order to strike yet another, very fair blow against the arguments not ours, but those of others.

The polemic against the childish abstractionism of those who preach the rejection on principle of “any compromise” is sacrosanct: but the call did not strike us. Commemorating Lenin in February 1924, the Left itself will say (Lenin on the Path of Revolution, No. 3, 1924, of “Prometeo”): “What is Lenin’s essential criticism of the ‘Left’ errors? He condemns every tactical evaluation which, instead of referring to the positive realism of our historical dialectic and the effective value of tactical attitudes and expedients, becomes a prisoner of naive, abstract, moralistic, mystical, aesthetic formulas, from which suddenly spring results that are completely foreign to our method. The whole rebuke to the pseudo-revolutionary phraseology which often arbitrarily takes the place of the real Marxist arguments is not only just, but is perfectly in tune with the whole framework of the grandiose work of restoring revolutionary values ‘in earnest’, due to Lenin, and which we here vaguely try to trace in its synthetic outline. All tactical arguments based on the phobia of certain words, of certain gestures, of certain contacts, on a pretended purity and uncontaminability of communists in action, are laughable stuff, and constitute the foolish infantilism against which Lenin fights, the child of bourgeois theoretical prejudices with an anti-materialist flavour. To substitute a moral doctrine for Marxist tactics is balderdash.” 

Anxious that we – recognized as not identifiable with the anarchist-backed anti-parliamentarists – would fall into the idealistic unrealism of these, the speakers used polemical arguments that we knew were only such but that risked recreating darkness where light had just been shed. 

Sacrosanct was the battle against “trade union abstentionism,” but to invoke the vital necessity for communists to be present and active in workers’ unions, even if headed by reformists and led by them to tend to insert themselves into the bourgeois state mechanism, as an argument in favor of revolutionary participation in parliament, meant – or rather could make one believe, against the very intentions of those who made use of this polemical weapon – that it was permissible to place on the same plane an organization of pure proletarians and an institution of bourgeois government; the latter, among other things, to be destroyed in order to raise over it the proletarian dictatorship, the former destined to remain, albeit with a different function, after the conquest of power. And it meant equating the action of agitation and propaganda carried out within the trade union, that is, in the ranks of one’s own class and on the terrain from which the first fundamental thrusts of the conflict between capital and labor arise – the terrain of economic interests and material determinations – with the action to be carried out within a bourgeois political body, and in an interclass environment and structure, organically destined to nurture in the proletarians the illusion that there can be a common ground between classes, and that “people’s sovereignity” is not a myth. 

Sacrosanct was the polemic against those who recognized only the formula: “either revolution or nothing”; but it didn’t touch the current which was to direct the party in 1921-22, and which, in the Theses of Rome 1922 and Lyon 1926, was to try to give organic accommodation to all problems of international Communist tactics, even and especially those relating to non-revolutionary situations. More than fair was the appeal to the wordy extremism of those who were going to “build” the Soviets on paper (and against which we had long been fighting), but dangerous – not for the deductions we knew very well Lenin would not draw from them, but for those that the false small Lenins would be ready to draw from them – was to say that the Soviets are not always at hand, the parliament for now is; as if the former were not organs of proletarian battle and power and the latter an organ of bourgeois domination, and as if, in that vein, one could not by the opportunists invoke (as the representative of the abstentionist Communist fraction observed in amazement and concern) the going one fine day to government under bourgeois rule.

As for the doubt that our abstentionism expressed a childish and, from the revolutionary point of view, criminal fear of responsibility, let it be worthwhile to dispel it – if it is necessary – the pages which we quote below (Speech of the Representative of Abstentionist Communists), and from which, if ever Bukharin had in later years taken critical stock of the parliamentary activity of the Communist parties, he should have concluded that the only ones from whom there was evidence of serious and consistent application of revolutionary parliamentarianism were . … the abstentionists because the only ones who did not carry with them into the election campaigns or to the House (when they went there out of discipline, without disowning anything of their own point of view) the ballast of democratic nostalgia, because the only ones ready, there as in the direct clash between the classes, to fight openly. FIN QUI

History has tragically proved that our bitter forebodings about the possibility that from questionable tactical conclusions (then, for us and for Lenin, not such as to justify a split), and from a polemical audacity in Lenin never divorced from the most “sectarian” and “dogmatic” loyalty to principles, were more than legitimate; so that wrong premises and conclusions were deduced and finally all of Marxism, theory and praxis, was lost. We shouted in six years of struggle within the International that Lenin’s “realism” should not serve as a pretext for the progressive abandonment of principles. We said again in the 1924 speech cited above, “We refuse to have Lenin’s Marxist realism translated into the formula that every tactical expedient is good for our purposes. Tactics in turn affect those who employ them, and it cannot be said that a true communist, with the mandate of the true International and a true communist party, can go anywhere with confidence that he will not err … Doesn’t ‘stretching’ the extent of tactical projects beyond all limits come up against our own theoretical and programmatic conclusions, the culmination of a true realistic examination controlled by continuous and extensive experience? We consider illusory and contrary to our principles a tactic which dreams that it can substitute the overthrow and demolition of the bourgeois state machine, a cornerstone so vigorously demonstrated by Lenin, with the penetration of who knows what Trojan horse into the machine itself, the illusion – truly pseudo-revolutionary and petty-bourgeois – of blowing it up with the traditional stone. The situation, ended in ridicule, of the Saxon communist ministers [1923] shows this: that one cannot take the capitalist state fortress with stratagems that spare the revolutionary masses a frontal assault. It is a grave mistake to make the proletariat believe that one possesses such expedients to ease the hard way, to ‘economise’ on its effort and sacrifice … In Lenin, we affirm, the tactical evaluation, even daring if you want in the sense that he less than anyone else allowed himself to be guided by extemporaneous sentimental suggestions and formalistic stubbornness, never abandoned the revolutionary platform: that is to say, its co-ordination to the supreme and integral aim of the universal revolution”. 

The Communist International certainly did not degenerate because Lenin believed in 1920 in the favorable potentialities of revolutionary parliamentarianism in the “democratic” countries of Western Europe; but in the course of the long degeneration in which men, parties and programs had to undergo the relentless test of counterrevolution, history has irretrievably judged this distant tactical dispute, for the confusion of the renegades of communism.