The Classic Marxist Perspective of the Party and the Trade‑Unions Pt.1

Opportunism has always accused revolutionary communism of being indifferent to if not scornful of contingent issues, in this case, of the economic issues of the working class. The charge of indifferentism, however, is typically formulated in those historical periods when revolution has, regrettably, been driven to the fringes of the social movement, and opportunism, in its myriad diverse versions and forms, completely dominates the political world of class relations. When, on the other hand, stirrings of opposition to the betrayal snake through the working class, and proletarians demonstrate they are no longer willing to blindly and supinely accept the opportunist-revisionist dictatorship of the trade union and political bureaucracies, and mass economic and political organizations of the proletariat tend to form which are inspired, even if unconsciously, by the communist program, then suddenly the accusation of indifferentism is replaced by an equivalent charge: of barricadierismo, a charge with echoes of… bomb‑throwing anarchism. This is nothing new and is as old as the revolutionary struggle of the working class.

The intention of the first opportunist formula, indifferentism, was always to create a psychological obstacle to revolutionary communist ideas penetrating the class. The intention of the second, anarchism, was to counter the Communist Party’s struggle to conquer the working masses. In both cases, the aim of the enemies of the revolution is to prevent communists from getting to the head of the workers’ movement, and leading it towards the final struggle for the conquest of power.

In contrast, the communists have left no stone unturned as regards getting organizing themselves, and organizing proletarians, within the trade unions and class organizations on the basis of their revolutionary program. The day the Communist Party of the proletariat voluntarily renounced carrying out this function, it would implicitly have renounced leading the wage‑earning masses towards the destruction of the present capitalist regime and have eliminated itself from the historic struggle for the victory of communism. What is certain is that our party will never listen to opportunist chimeras and, strong as it is in its now centuries‑old program and heroic tradition, just as it never gives up its struggle to defend Marxist theory, which it conducts permanently even in the heat of the street battles, so it never renounces the struggle to conquer the leadership of the mass trade union organizations of the proletariat, whatever its physical forces might be and whatever the objective possibilities. And if the enemies of the communist revolution think our party will make this unpardonable error, they can abandon all hope right now.

The Communist Left, even when it was constituted as a Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party, led the struggle in the trade unions from the front lines with its combatants, a real revolutionary vanguard, in a party which, as the revolutionary crisis in Italy approached, was breaking apart, ready to pass to the side of the counterrevolution.

When, at last, the Communist Fraction formed the Communist Party of Italy section of the Third International, in 1921, that stance was explicitly confirmed in the Programmatic Manifesto launched in Livorno to the workers of Italy.

The same demand is to be found in 1922 in the Trade Union Theses, at the Rome Congress, in which, among other things, in points 11 and 12 it states: “The activity of communists to unite the Italian proletariat’s trade union organization, which began with the appeal dispatched to all organizations immediately after the constitution of the Communist Party, must be carried out equally from within and without, by forming groups and carrying out incessant propaganda within other partial or locally autonomous organizations”. And in point 7: “the Communist Party has permanent representations of its own within the trade union and operates through it, that is with the maximum competence and maximum responsibility”.

Such a position, of communists entering the class economic organization with the tactic of conquering its leadership, never wavered, even when, due to the vicissitudes of the international struggle, the Communist Left was excluded from the leadership of the Communist Party of Italy, and its tenacious struggle, which was consistent and unyielding, would culminate in the General Programmatic Theses of the 1926 Lyon Congress, in which it reaffirmed the need for the party to work in the workers’ unions to import the revolutionary program into the class, and specified, countering accusations of indifferentism and purism, that: “the Marxist conception of the party and its activity, thus shuns fatalism, which would have us remain passive spectators of phenomena over which it was felt no direct influence could be exerted. Likewise, it shuns every voluntarist conception, as regards individuals, according to which the qualities of theoretical preparation, force of will, spirit of self‑sacrifice, in short a special type of moral figure, and a requisite level of ”purity” are to be required without distinction from every single party militant, reducing the latter to an elite, distinct from and superior to the rest of the elements that compose the working class, whereas the fatalist and passive error, though not necessarily negating the function and the utility of the party, at the very least would certainly involve adapting the party to a proletarian class understood merely in a statistical and economic sense”.

Recent party texts, from the Fundamental Points for Joining the Organization to the Naples Theses, confirm point by point the correct approach to the question of the relationship between party and trade unions enunciated since the Communist Manifesto of 1848.

We thus have nothing to add, much less to correct or remove, to what has been stated clearly for over a century.

It is not out of aesthetic or moral conviction that Communists have chosen to fight in the trade unions, that is, in the class organized on the terrain of production relations: they are compelled to do so by the aims of their revolutionary program, which, to be realized, presupposes that the revolutionary party of the proletariat leads the working masses in the conquest of power.

It is not out of aesthetic or moral conviction that Communists have chosen to fight in the trade unions, that is, in the class organized on the terrain of production relations: they are compelled to do so by the aims of their revolutionary program, which, to be realized, presupposes that the revolutionary party of the proletariat leads the working masses in the conquest of power.

It is in this struggle that the revolutionary communist party demonstrates its absolute loyalty to communism, to the communist revolution, and also defends the immediate interests of the workers, insofar as it does not conceal from the disenfranchised masses the precariousness of the partial achievements, of the wage and regulative improvements obtained, albeit at great cost, under capitalist rule. It is precisely through this struggle that the communists have the material possibility of demonstrating to the proletariat that only the struggle to conquer political power guarantees a real transformation of economic and social relations and therefore it is only under the new regime of the proletarian dictatorship that the living and working conditions of the working masses will really, noticeably and irreversibly improve.

By virtue of these considerations, the class party, our party, will continue its unceasing activity of struggle, propaganda and proselytizing in the heart of the class organized in the trade unions, as, logically speaking, it is the only party that can boast of having historically led and of leading still the proletariat towards the revolution.