PART II – TWO CLARIFICATIONS OF IL SOVIET

Part II

TWO CLARIFICATIONS OF IL SOVIET

“Participation in elections to the representative organs of bourgeois democracy and participation in parliamentary activity, while always presenting a continuous danger of deviation, may be utilised for propaganda and education of the movement during the period in which there does not yet exist the possibility of overthrowing bourgeois rule and in which, as a consequence, the party’s task is restricted to criticism and opposition. In the present period, which began with the end of the world war, with the first communist revolutions and the creation of the Third International, communists pose, as the direct objective of the political action of the proletariat in every country, the revolutionary conquest of power, to which end all the energy and all the preparatory work of the party must be devoted.
    In this period, it is inadmissible to participate in these organs which function as a powerful defensive instrument of the bourgeoisie and which are designed to operate even within the ranks of the proletariat. It is precisely in opposition to these organs, to their structure as to their function, that communists call for the system of workers’ councils and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
    Because of the great importance which electoral activity assumes in practice, it is not possible to reconcile this activity with the assertion that it is not the means of achieving the principal objective of the party’s action, which is the conquest of power. It also is not possible to prevent it from absorbing all the activity of the movement and from diverting it from revolutionary preparation…”

From Theses of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction, May 1920

The Zinoviev circular did not appear in the socialist press until the early months of 1920; it was, on the other hand, crystal clear, in repeated hammering statements by leading Bolshevik exponents, that the tactical question of “revolutionary parliamentarism” took a back seat in the face of the crucial problems of party formation on the basis of the insurmountable demarcation line of the violent seizure of power, proletarian dictatorship, and centralization, which of all this represented, for Lenin, Trotsky and all true communists, the necessary premise: therefore, of principled anti-democracy.

For the abstentionists of the Communist Fraction of the P.S.I., it was of the utmost importance to make it clear that, on those points of doctrine, not only was there no hesitation for them, but that their proclamation and defense constituted the true center of gravity of the current represented, with a broad national base, by the “Il Soviet”. The Fraction was opposed to electoral maximalism, which in questions of principle swerved fearfully and made participation in elections, against the directives of the Bolsheviks, such an imperious prejudice as to force unity with the reformist right and the sacrifice of real and not rhetorical revolutionary preparation of the masses in the red-hot postwar period. But it also opposed anarchism, syndicalism-revolutionaryism and workerism, deniers in various ways and degrees of the party and dictatorship or, even, of political struggle. It mattered to reiterate – as precisely in the two texts we publish, preludes to the Second World Congress – how communist abstentionism descended not from theoretical principles diverging from the most orthodox Marxism, but, in the framework of the latter, reaffirmed in all its extension and power, from an assessment of the negative and even ruinous weight of the electoralist tradition in countries with advanced capitalism and secular democratic political structure.

In them, and only in them – where the prospect was pure proletarian revolution, unlike in Tsarist Russia, or in countries where bourgeois revolution was still waiting to take place – abstentionism constituted, in our view, an indispensable instrument of ideological preparation of the masses for the revolutionary battle, a decisive means of selection from the Right and the more equivocal Center within the old socialist parties, and a test of the seriousness of adherence to the Third International outside superficial enthusiasms and all too interested “fashions,” in short, a practical reagent in the prophylaxis against the Longuetism of the Longuets and the crypto-Longuetism of the Cachins, the Frossards, the Serratis or the Smerals.

Time has given bitter confirmations of that critical assessment – in frank and serene polemic with Moscow, but in perfect parallelism with the great theses of principle vigorously proclaimed by the Bolsheviks – and the texts we reproduce can rightly be considered anticipators of a future in which it will become not the subject of a debate, but one of the cornerstones of proletarian redemption and its world victory.