Il Programma Comunista 1965/2

15. Stalinism never wished to consider the defeat in 1927 as anything other than a “stage” of the bourgeois revolution in China and a “temporary” setback in the workers’ movement. We reject this interpretation. The class struggles of this period were anything but “partial”, so much so that they were transformed into a struggle for power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and defeat was accompanied by the physical and long-lasting elimination of the entire Communist vanguard. By then, as Trotski said, the “democratic revolution” in China had taken on the character not of bourgeois revolution, but of bourgeois counter-revolution. Finally, the failure in 1927 marked the complete rejection on the part of the Moscow International of the Bolshevik tradition in all countries in the East. The April Theses of 1917, in which Lenin announced the approaching victory of the Russian revolution, are contradicted word for word by the theses of April 1927 in which Stalin justifies Jiang Kai-shek’s coup d’etat by the theory of revolutionary “stages”. In opposition to bourgeois and national historiography, Marxism must re-establish its proletarian and international concept of the historical course of the bourgeois revolutionary movements:

• 1789 – 1871: bourgeois democratic movements in Western Europe (as well as in North America and Japan);
• 1905 – 1950 (roughly): national revolutionary movements in Eastern Europe and in the entire Afro-Asian area; just one proletarian victory: in Russia;
• 1917 – 1927: world strategy of the permanent revolution, with defeat in Europe (1918-1923) and in Asia (1924-1927) as the conditions for the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia and in the rest of the world.

Peasant “Socialism” and the “New” Democracy

16. Marxism has not only denounced the theory of the “democratic stage”, it has also rejected, during the “agrarian stage”, the use by Stalin of the slogan “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” to cover up the governmental alliance with the left of the Guomindang. In its completed form this theory has become the theory of the “new” democracy, signalling the complete abandonment of those Marxist conceptions on the class nature of each and every State.

“Thus the numerous forms of State systems in the world can be reduced to these three basic types: 1) republics under bourgeois dictatorship; 2) republics under the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) republics under the joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes (…) During a specific historical period, the only applicable form of State organisation is the third, the one which we call the new-democratic republic” (Mao Zedong, On New Democracy, 1940).

Lenin’s International never called upon the proletarians of the colonies to establish such “intermediary” States between the dictatorship of the proletariat and that of the bourgeoisie, and we also deny that there exists, or ever has existed, a single example of such a State after over 40 years of “anti-imperialist fronts”. The experience of duality of power during the Russian revolution showed that the “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” is inevitably transformed, in a short period, into either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Trotski extended this lesson to the Chinese revolution, and we can see its confirmation today in the bourgeois outcome of every anti-colonial movement.

“While the Russian Narodniks, together with the Mensheviks, lent to their short-lived ‘dictatorship’ the form of an open dual power, the Chinese ‘revolutionary democracy’ did not even attain that stage. And inasmuch as history in general does not work to order, there only remains for us to understand that there is not and will not be any other ‘democratic dictatorship’ except the dictatorship exercised by the Guomindang since 1925” (Trotski, The Communist International After Lenin).

17. After having long ignored the agrarian movement and the arming of the peasants, the Stalinists became so infatuated with it that they came to consider it the “defining trait of the Chinese revolution and the basis of the new democracy”.

“In essence, the national question is a peasant question”, Stalin declared. And Mao commented:

“This means that the Chinese revolution is essentially a peasant revolution, and that the resistance to Japan now going on is essentially peasant resistance. Essentially, the politics of New Democracy means giving power to peasants” (Mao Zedong, On New Democracy, 1940)

It is not in this, as far as we are concerned, that the originality of the bourgeois revolutions in the imperialist epoch lies. In the past, all of them have all used the peasants in different ways, including the armed organization, and they have all, to varying degrees, brought along profound changes in agriculture. Yet Marxism has always stressed the incapacity of the peasant class to define a policy of its own. It has shown that agrarian insurrections, which are an integral part of bourgeois revolutions, have only succeeded under the leadership of the cities and by ceding power to them. The Communist Manifesto already insisted back in 1848 on the dual character of the peasantry and why it cannot act as an independent class. The peasant is nothing but the social representative of bourgeois relations; he always leaves his political representation to others.

To all those champions of peasant “socialism” who, both in Russia and China, have reproached us for “underestimating” the peasantry, we answer that we have always stressed the lessons of Marxism and that the originality of the Eastern revolutions lies not in the armed intervention of the peasant masses, but in the prospect of a proletarian course towards not inevitably bourgeois goals.

18. The defeat of the Chinese proletariat explains why the revolution had to recede to the countryside. But it does not provide justification for communists to exchange their class conceptions for the theories of peasant “socialism”. In 1848-9 the failure of the German revolution had left the proletariat in the same politically disorganised situation; it had put it in the same danger of being submerged by petit-bourgeois democracy. This was the danger confronted by Marx and Engels in their famous Address to the Communist League.

Against the petit-bourgeois radicals, who “seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail, while their particular interests are kept hidden”, the Address stresses the necessity of an independent class party.

Against every type of petit-bourgeois democratic power, this is how the Address introduced the slogan of the proletarian revolution:

“Alongside the new official governments the workers must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lose the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers” (Marx, The Revolutions of 1848).

This is the classical answer of Marxism to the reactionary formulas of “workers’ and peasants’ parties”, “workers’ and peasants’ governments” and of the “new” democracy. The Address of 1850 is directed entirely against them. If Marx and Engels do not speak of “democratic dictatorship” here, it is because they didn’t consider it a fitting slogan for the proletariat to use against the agitation of the petit-bourgeois democrats. The opinions of Stalin and Mao cannot even be based on the absence in Germany of the “original” particularity they claimed to have discovered in China, and indeed even in Russia: the agrarian revolution. On the contrary, Marx and Engels more than once allowed for a ‘re-run’ of the peasant war of the 16^th century under the political guidance of the proletariat.

19. The Russian revolution, no more than the German bourgeois revolution, doesn’t reveal the secret of a stable “popular” power representing a block of classes. Long before 1917 Lenin explained the formula of the “revolutionary and democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” as a power of the proletariat “relying upon the peasants” or “drawing the peasants along behind it”; a formula which was neither frontist nor “democratic”. This is how, in perfect continuity with Marx and Engels, he interprets the slogan in April 1917:

“The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has already become a reality in the Russian revolution, for this ‘formula’ envisages only a class correlation and not a concrete political institution implementing this correlation, this cooperation. ‘The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’ – there you have the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ already accomplished in reality” (Lenin, “Letters On Tactics”, Coll. Works, Vol. 24, 44-5).

“We have side by side, existing together, simultaneously, both the rule of the bourgeoisie (the government of Lvov and Guchov) and a revolutionary-dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, which is voluntarily ceding power to the bourgeoisie, voluntarily making itself an appendage of the bourgeoisie” (ibid., p.46).

“A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, ‘communist’ elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petit-bourgeois elements” (ibid., p. 45).

Between February and October the populists and Mensheviks were rabid supporters of the “democratic dictatorship”, reproaching Lenin for “underestimating” the peasantry and for wanting to “jump over” the stage of bourgeois social reforms. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, pointed out that it was not a question of “introducing socialism” into Russia, but of seizing political power; after which they would show how the proletarian dictatorship would realise the economic reforms of the petit-bourgeois democracy.

20. After the capitulation before the Chinese liberal bourgeoisie, the “struggle against trotskism” aimed to ensure the triumph, within the defeated proletariat, of positions which had previously been defended by the bloc of populists and Mensheviks at the time of the Russian revolution. And it was Mao Zedong, one time member of the Central Committee of the Guomindang and recent agitator of the peasantry, who executed this task.

In our view he neither “saved” nor “reconstructed” the party of the proletariat by leading it “into the mountains” and pushing it into peasant guerrilla warfare: he simply drowned it in the confused petit-bourgeois mass. In contrast, Lenin in April 1917, and Marx in March 1850, were able to prevent Communists from getting bogged down in this way. And as regards the question of power in the Chinese revolution, Mao Zedong has not even shaken off the petit-bourgeois illusions which allowed Jiang Kai-shek’s repression to go unchecked in 1927. The theory of the “new democracy” is nothing but the development of these same illusions in a period and in a country in which the weakness of the “national” bourgeoisie left no other prospect for constituting the bourgeois power than by the action of the “popular” and peasant masses, so inept and slow to get themselves organised.

The petit-bourgeois democrats love to blame ‘reaction’ for the difficulties they have in achieving ‘effective’ unity, for their lack of character and their innate instability. Marxism, on the other hand, sees it as a reflection of their unstable economic situation. To appeal to the political initiative of these masses in order to found a national State, to combat imperialism or to realise the socialist programme, this not only repudiates Marx and Lenin, but compromises the entire revolutionary movement. Proof enough is provided, in our view, by the interminable fluctuations of the Chinese revolution and, today, by the blood-stained anarchy contorting the major part of black Africa.

This is why in 1917 Lenin set aside the “old formula” of the “revolutionary and democratic dictatorship”, which the populists and Mensheviks wanted to “realise” by means of… the constituent assembly. In the same way the Bolsheviks consigned the name “social-democratic party” to the archives of the 2^nd International.

Because, and this also goes for the “new democracy”:

“‘Democracy’ expresses in reality one moment the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, next the impotent reformism of the petit-bourgeoisie that submits to this dictatorship” (Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky).

Impotent Petit-Bourgeois Reformism

21. In their 1850 Address, Marx and Engels warned German proletarians that petit-bourgeois democracy would play the same treacherous role as the liberal bourgeoisie in the revolutionary transformation of the old social and political structures. The confirmation of these predictions in Russia would be the social-revolutionaries. The Chinese example gives us absolute confirmation on the scale of an entire historical period and of an entire country.

“The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole of society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible. They therefore demand above all else a reduction in government spending through a restriction of the bureaucracy and the transference of the major tax burden onto the large landowners and bourgeoisie. They further demand the removal of the pressure exerted by big capital on small capital through the establishment of public credit institutions and the passing of laws against usury, whereby it would be possible for themselves and the peasants to receive advances on favourable terms from the State instead of from capitalists; also, the introduction of bourgeois property relationships on the land through the complete abolition of feudalism…

“As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of State employment and by welfare measures… But these demands can in no way satisfy the party of the proletariat. While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered State power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one” (Address…, ibid. pp. 323-4).

22. With regard to the agrarian question, Mao’s party had done nothing to combat the petit-bourgeois tendencies which were anxious to emphasise the break with the old relations with a juridical consecration of the sacred rights of peasant property. And none of the reforms so noisily proclaimed since the creation of the People’s Republic have contemplated a greater concentration of agriculture than that based on the development of small production, the “interests” of the small-holding peasant and State “aid” for the latter. When they wished to overcome these limitations, which are those of bourgeois relations of production, the social catastrophe which occurred was no less serious than that which followed the false Stalinist collectivisation in Russia.

In brief, the famous “agrarian revolution” is reduced to a harsh accumulation of capital in the Chinese rural areas in accordance with the two classical phases of the development of capitalist agriculture: firstly the establishment of peasant property, then a slow process of expropriation and concentration under the impulse of the bourgeois productive forces and a growing market economy.

“If no special obstacle arises, we are prepared to continue this policy after the war, first extending rent and interest reduction to the whole country and then taking proper measures for the gradual achievement of ‘land to the tiller’” (Mao Zedong, On Coalition Government, 1945, op.cit., p. 248).

“Then, as the peasants are helped to organize farming and other production co-operatives step by step on a voluntary basis, the productive forces will grow” (ibid., p.251).

It has taken a quarter of a century (1927-1952) to achieve the first phase: confiscation and division. But before China has a “modern”, concentrated, i.e., fully capitalist agriculture, we can only hope that the Communist proletariat of the world will have got the better of national, peasant and petit-bourgeois “socialism”.

23. In the weary historical development of Chinese agriculture we can see one fact confirmed: its bourgeois character. But our criticism of the agrarian policy of the CCP is to do with a matter of principle: all it has done is mirror the molecular processes of this development without trying to anticipate its social consequences, particularly as regards the overthrow of bourgeois property relations. Let us quote again from the 1850 Address:

“The first point over which the bourgeois democrats will come into conflict with the workers will be the abolition of feudalism; as in the first French revolution, the petty bourgeoisie will want to give the feudal lands to the peasants as free property; that is, they will try to perpetuate the existence of the rural proletariat, and to form a petty-bourgeois peasant class which will be subject to the same cycle of impoverishment and debt which still afflicts the French peasant. The workers must oppose this plan both in the interest of the rural proletariat and in their own interest. They must demand the confiscated feudal property remain State property and be used for workers’ colonies, cultivated collectively by the rural proletariat with all the advantages of large-scale farming and where the principle of common property will immediately achieve a sound basis in the midst of the shaky system of bourgeois property relations” (op. cit., pp. 327-8).

For Communists, it was not a matter of determining whether China or petit-bourgeois Russia was “ripe” for this transformation: the overthrow of bourgeois domination is conceivable only on an international scale. Neither was it a matter of inventing, in a given country, “collectivist” recipes in order to accelerate its economic development. “We write a decree and not a programme”, Lenin said commenting on the “Decree on the Land”, which some reproached for being the programme of the social-revolutionaries. And yet on one point this “decree” differed from their “programme”: it did not include the aspirations of the peasantry in fixed juridical forms (division of land, nationalization). In this resides the whole of the difference between the programmes of national “socialism” and internationalist Communism.

24. The petit-bourgeois policy of Mao’s party appears in a still clearer light in the “question of the workers”. Far from writing “abolition of the wages system” on its banner, the CCP proclaims the association of capital and labour and does not neglect any “measure of charity” in the tradition of the “socialists” â la Louis Blanc:

“The task of the Chinese working class is to struggle not only for the establishment of a new-democratic State but also for China’s industrialization and modernization of her agriculture. The policy of adjusting the interests of labour and capital will be adopted under the new-democratic State system. On the one hand, it will protect the interests of the workers, institute an eight to ten hour working day according to circumstance, provide suitable unemployment relief and social insurance and safeguard trade union rights; on the other hand, it will guarantee legitimate profits to properly managed State, private and co-operative enterprises – so that both the public and private sectors and both labour and capital will work together to develop industrial production” (Mao Zedong, On Coalition Government, 1945, op. cit., p. 254).

Such a programme, such a practice, does not differ at all from the old reformism of the advanced capitalist countries, from the election speeches of any “progressive” deputy or any “reactionary” minister of the West. By calling this “socialism” and vindicating its exclusivity as compared with Moscow, Mao has elevated himself to the “ideological” level of the bourgeois conservative forces of the world. He has lost his halo as a peasant agitator.

In China the petit-bourgeois democracy ceased to be revolutionary in 1927; even before it took State power it had become reformist; today it has become reactionary, presenting its illusions, and especially its economico-social practice, under the label of “socialist construction”. That is the only political significance that we attach to its conflict with Moscow.

25. Thus the historical destiny of Chinese “populism” has been brought to a close. Since the first bourgeois revolution in 1911 Lenin stressed the double aspect of Sun Yat-sen’s ideology. Utopian was the idea of realising “socialism” through a nationalisation of the land, the “limitation” of big capital and the “honest” application of a plan for industrial development agreed upon by the Great Powers. But this programme had a bourgeois revolutionary substance that the Bolsheviks could recognise in China, as in Russia. In adopting it, and realising it, Mao’s party conferred on it the only “original development” that was reserved for it: the Utopian idea of peasant “socialism” has become the reactionary ideology of the “socialist construction” in China; and its revolutionary substance has been squandered in the ocean of petty-bourgeois reforms.

Thus did the political ideology of a class degenerate long after history had condemned it to death. At the other extreme, as early as 1894, as the Russian proletariat was taking its first faltering steps, Lenin could announce the ideological bankruptcy of the “Friends of the People” several decades before their “popular” power saw the light of day:

“The rural countryside is indeed splitting up. Nay more, the countryside long ago split up completely. And the old Russian peasant socialism split up with it, making for workers’ socialism, on the one hand, and degenerating into vulgar petit-bourgeois radicalism, on the other hand. This change cannot be described as anything but degeneration. From the doctrine that peasant life is a special order and that our country has taken an exceptional path of development, there has emerged a sort of diluted eclecticism, which can no more deny that commodity economy has become the basis of economic development and has grown into capitalism, but which refuses to see the necessity of the class struggle under this system. From a political programme, calculated to arouse the peasantry for the socialist revolution against the foundations of modern society, there has emerged a programme calculated to patch up, to”improve” the conditions of the peasantry while preserving the foundations of modern society” (Lenin, “What the Friends of the People Are”, Part III, 1894, Coll. Works, Vol. 1, pp. 264-5).

Rivalries in the Bourgeois East

26. Unlike India and other colonial countries, China entered modern history as “everybody’s colony”. Very soon the export of capital prevailed over the export of industrial products from the old English metropolis. To protect their investments the Great Powers “agreed” on the division of the country into spheres of influence. In Beijing the diplomatic corps had the State finances at their disposal. This situation was a reflection, as Lenin pointed out, of the transition of capitalism to its highest stage: imperialism. Wilson’s programme for “the internationalisation of the colonies”, Kautsky’s “ultra-imperialist” version of it, and the project, laid down by Sun Yat-sen, for the creation of a consortium of the Great Powers for the development of an “independent” China had no other objective basis.

“Let us assume – said Lenin – that all the imperialist countries conclude an alliance for the ‘peaceful’ division of those parts of Asia; this alliance would be an alliance of ‘internationally united finance capital’. There are actual examples of alliance of this kind in the history of the 20^th century – the attitude of the powers to China for instance. We ask, is it ‘conceivable’, assuming that the capitalist system remains intact – and this is the assumption that Kautsky does make – that such alliance would be more than temporary, that they would eliminate friction, conflicts and struggle in every possible form?” (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916).

The example of China has shown that it was inconceivable. The country which at the beginning of the century seemed to offer the greatest promise of a capitalist development and the surest guarantees of profits has become the closed battlefield of civil wars and imperialist rivalry. Or rather, faced with the outbreak of these antagonisms world imperialism had to renounce all its economic “plans” in China, transferring the unbridled competition between Capitals to the old colonies or semi-colonies: India, Africa, South America. Here “overseas development” and the stale pacifisms of the Russo-American Wilsons and Kautskys reappeared: but the groundwork was also laid for future revolutionary explosions on an even larger scale.

27. Mao’s party did all it could to ensure its victory wasn’t characterised by a violent rupture of the imperialist chain in Asia. The CCP, adhering even more completely to the world war than Sun Yat-sen, acquired the illusions of the liberal Chinese bourgeoisie about a “society of nations”, and an “international co-operation”, which would benefit China.

“The CCP agrees with the Atlantic Charter and with the decisions of the international conferences of Moscow, Teheran and Yalta (…) The fundamental principles of the CCP’s foreign policy are as follows: to establish and develop diplomatic relations with all countries, to resolve all questions of mutual relations (…) setting out from the need to crush the fascist aggressors, to maintain international peace, to mutually respect independence and equality in the rights of States, to cooperate with each other in the interests of States and peoples” (Mao Zedong, On the Coalition Government, 1945).

Sun Yat-sen recognised the bankruptcy of this programme back in 1924! Mao not only remained faithful to it but passed it off as “socialism”:

“The socialist countries, great and small, whether economically developed or not, must establish their relations on the basis of the principles of complete equality, of respect for territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence, of non-interference in internal affairs, as well as reciprocal support and assistance” (Letter in 25 points, 14/6/63).

In opposition to the petty-bourgeois utopia of a ‘socialism’ of the countries realising a ‘harmonious’ development towards ‘equal’ trade, we call for the destruction of the bourgeois countries and the establishment of non-mercantile, not merely ‘equal’, relations between countries in which tomorrow the dictatorship of the proletariat will be established!

28. Far from reflecting ‘ideological differences’, the Sino-Soviet conflict exists on the same terrain as bourgeois national interests. It is incontestable that the compromises which the USSR made with the indigenous bourgeoisie and with foreign imperialism delayed the constitution of national bourgeois States in the East until after the 2^nd World War. Just as the Russian Revolution was re-awakening the anti-colonial movements in Asia, the Stalinist counter-revolution halted their development. But Mao’s party taking its stand against Moscow today never denounced this betrayal: neither in 1937, when the CPP timidly executed the turn towards “popular fronts” by renewing the alliance with Jiang Kai-shek, nor in 1945, when Stalin signed a treaty of peace and friendship, again with Jiang, which was supposed to last… thirty years.

It isn’t therefore consciousness of the interests of the anti-colonial movement, less still a critique of Russian ‘socialism’, which lies behind the Sino-soviet conflict. Rather it is the contradictions between the interests of Chinese capitalism and Russian imperialism:

“It is yet more absurd to transpose into relations between the socialist countries the praxis consistent with realising profits at the expense of others – a praxis which characterises relations between capitalist countries – and arrive at stating that the”economic integration” and “common market” introduced by monopolist groups in order to corner markets and divide up profits could serve as an example to the socialist countries in their mutual assistance and economic collaboration” (Letter in 25 points).

29. The ‘programme’ which Stalin pushed through at the 6^th Comintern Congress excluded China and the other backward countries from ‘building socialism’ within their national borders: a privilege which Russia had so recently arrogated to itself. Just at the moment when the interests of Russian capitalism became integrated into those of the world market, China took up this old Stalinist slogan to use on its own behalf. And about it we will repeat what Trotski said about “Russian socialism”:

“The world division of labour, the dependence of soviet industry upon foreign technology, the dependence of the productive forces of the advanced countries of Europe upon Asiatic raw materials, etc., etc., make the construction of an independent socialist society in any single country in the world impossible” (Theses on the Permanent Revolution).

The “construction of Socialism” in China can signify only the accumulation of capital and the extension of a market economy. But this theory hasn’t managed to mask much more acute antagonisms. The Sino-soviet conflict, the entire history of the national bourgeois movements in Asia and Africa, and every conference on world trade has anxiously underlined the growing backwardness of the ‘under-developed’ countries, be they ‘independent’ or ‘socialist’, compared to the handful of great imperial powers which detain all military, economic and political power in today’s world.

30. To avert the destiny awaiting it, the bourgeoisie of the backward countries strives by all means to pass off its political and national emancipation as social and human emancipation of the exploited masses. The proletarians of the ex-colonies, who are victims both of their own bourgeoisies and the contradictions accumulated within world imperialism, will find ever more reason to break with democratic and reformist ideology. They will then recall that Marxism, and Lenin’s International, never expected political democracy and national independence to free the colonial peoples from exploitation:

“Finance capital, in its drive to expand, can ‘freely’ buy or bribe the freest democratic or republican government and the elective officials of any, even an ‘independent’, country. The domination of finance capital and of capital in general is not to be abolished by any reforms in the sphere of political democracy; and self-determination belongs wholly and exclusively to this sphere. This domination of finance capital, however, does not in the least nullify the significance of political democracy as a freer, wider and clearer form of class oppression and class struggle” (The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-determination, Lenin, 1916).

It is against this more open, broader, and freer form of class oppression that the proletariat of ‘popular’ China, and of Russo-American India, will have to conduct their struggle.

[Questa seconda parte è comparso con un titolo differente su Programma Comunista n.2 del 1965: «Materiali per le tesi definitive sull’organizzazione interna». Ma trattandosi di una continuazione, ne conserviamo il primo titolo per facilitare il lettore. NdR ]

Marx aveva fiuto per gli arrivisti

Togliamo i brani che seguono da una pubblicazione recente su tutto il materiale relativo alla I Internazionale operaia. «Le tesi redatte da Marx, che però non era presente, sono discusse e adottate all’unanimità del congresso che si tiene a Ginevra dal 3 all’8 settembre 1866. Nella seduta dell’8 la persona di Marx è evocata da Cremer, Carter e Tolain, nella discussione dell’art. 11 del regolamento dell’Associazione Internazionale degli Operai: «Ogni membro della A.I.O. ha diritto di partecipare al voto e di essere eletto». Mentre Tolain e Perrechon si oppongono a che dei non lavoratori possano rappresentare gli operai, Cremer ricorda che “il Comitato Centrale comprende cittadini che non esercitano mestieri manuali e che non hanno dato alcun motivo di sospetto; all’opposto è probabile che senza la loro collaborazione l’A.I.O non avrebbe potuto impiantarsi in Inghilterra in una maniera così completa. Fra questi membri ne citerò uno solo, il cittadino Marx, che ha consacrato tutta la sua vita al trionfo della classe operaia». Dopo una discussione sull’argomento, l’emendamento di Tolain alle tesi di Marx è respinto da 25 voti contro 20. (Il testo non dice quanti di quelli che votavano erano operai e quanti no).

Marx scrive ad Engels il 26 settembre: «Ieri tutti gli inglesi mi hanno proposto come presidente del Consiglio generale, a guisa di dimostrazioni contro i signori francesi che vorrebbero impedire a tutti quelli che non sono lavoratori manuali di essere membri dell’A.I.O., o perlomeno di essere delegati al Congresso. Io ho dichiarato di non poter accettare in alcun caso e ho proposto a mia volta Odger, che fu quindi rieletto. [Si tratta qui della riunione del Consiglio generale seguita al congresso]. Dupont mi ha d’altra parte fornito la chiave dell’operazione di Tolain e Fribourg: essi volevano presentarsi nel 1869 come candidati come candidati operai alle elezioni del Corpo Legislativo adottando il «principio» che solo dei lavoratori potrebbero rappresentare dei lavoratori. Era dunque di un’estrema importanza per questi signori di vedere il congresso di Ginevra proclamare questo principio.

Il marxismo non segue nella lettura della storia la mania dell’“ultima moda”

Potrebbe svolgere questo spunto generale geniale di Marx chi avesse a disposizione le otto ore ed il fiato di un leone: esso dice tutto. Il nostro odio verso la forma capitalista non ci condurrà mai ad ammirare da stolti le sue modernissime manifestazioni rispetto alle antiche. Non ci deve nemmeno condurre a sognare il ritorno alle forme feudali come un romanticismo di cui altrove accusammo Stalin. Non abbiamo infatti da ammirare né il corporativismo né una società di produttori autonomi. A noi non serve né un mito né un ideale né un modello che vogliamo far copiare dal futuro. Ma, se ne avessimo bisogno, non lo cercheremmo andando avanti, ma tornando più di tutti indietro, nella generosa nobile gloriosa umanità delle primitive tribù. (Marx ad Engels, 25 marzo 1868):

Le cose vanno nella storia umana come nella paleontologia. Alcune cose che si hanno sotto il naso anche i più eminenti cervelli non le scorgono, dapprincipio, per effetto di un certo accecamento di giudizio. Più tardi, quando i tempi hanno evoluto, ci si stupisce tuttavia di trovare dappertutto delle tracce di quello che non si era visto. La prima reazione contro la Rivoluzione francese e la filosofia illuminista che ad essa era collegata fu di vedere tutto sotto l’angolo medioevalista, romantico; ed anche uomini come Grimm non ne andarono esenti. La seconda reazione – e questa corrisponde all’orientamento socialista, sebbene quegli scienziati non sospettino affatto di essere legati ad esso – consiste nel tuffarsi, al di sopra del Medio Evo, nell’epoca primitiva di ciascun popolo. E si resta tutti sorpresi di trovare nel più antico il più moderno, e di trovarci perfino degli egualitari ad un grado tale che spaventerebbe lo stesso Proudhon.

Ancora Marx contro le sètte e il federalismo, per l’unico partito di classe internazionale: Marx a Bolte, 23 novembre 1871

L’Internazionale è stata fondata per sostituire alle sètte socialiste o semisocialiste la vera organizzazione di lotta della classe operaia. Gli statuti originali e l’”Indirizzo inaugurale” lo mostrano a prima vista. D’altra parte l’Internazionale non avrebbe potuto affermarsi se il corso della storia non avesse già polverizzato il mondo delle sètte. L’evoluzione del settarismo socialista e quella del vero movimento operaio vanno costantemente in senso inverso. Finché le sètte si giustificano (storicamente) la classe operaia non è ancora matura per un movimento storico indipendente. Appena questa è giunta a tale maturità, tutte le sètte sono essenzialmente reazionarie. Tuttavia si è prodotto nella storia dell’Internazionale ciò che la storia mostra dappertutto. Ciò che è superato cerca sempre di ricostituirsi e mantenersi in seno alla forma finalmente acquisita. E la storia dell’Internazionale è stata una lotta continua del Consiglio Generale contro le sètte e i tentativi di dilettanti che cercavano di affermarsi in seno alla stessa Internazionale contro il movimento reale della classe operaia (…)

Il movimento politico ha naturalmente per scopo finale la conquista del potere politico per sé, e a tal fine è naturalmente necessaria un’organizzazione preventiva dalla classe operaia, ad un certo punto del suo sviluppo, derivante essa stessa dalle sue lotte economiche. Ma d’altra parte, ogni movimento nel quale la classe operaia si oppone alle classi dominanti in quanto classe e cerca di costringerla mediante una pressione dall’esterno è un movimento politico. Per esempio, il tentativo per conquistare, in questa o quella fase o in questo o quel laboratorio, mediante scioperi ecc., una riduzione del tempo di lavoro da parte di singoli capitalisti, è un movimento puramente economico; invece il movimento tendente a conquistare una legge delle otto ore, ecc. è un movimento politico. È così che dovunque i movimenti economici isolati degli operai danno origine a un movimento politico, cioè un movimento della classe per realizzare i suoi interessi sotto una forma generale, una forma che possiede una forza generale, una forza socialmente vincolante. Se questi movimenti presuppongono una certa organizzazione preventiva, sono allo stesso grado a loro volta dei mezzi per sviluppare tale organizzazione.

Là dove la classe operaia non è ancora andata abbastanza avanti, e la sua organizzazione è insufficiente per intraprendere una campagna decisiva contro la forza collettiva, cioè la forza politica, delle classi dominanti, essa deve almeno essere educata mediante una costante agitazione contro le politica delle classi dominanti (e l’atteggiamento ostile alla politica). Altrimenti essa resta una palla di gioco nelle mani delle classi dominanti, come ha mostrato la rivoluzione di settembre in Francia e come mostra in una certa misura il gioco che riesce ancora in Inghilterra fino da oggi ai signori Gladstone e Co.».

La buffonata democratica delle espulsioni: Marx a Bolte, 12 febbraio 1873

Secondo me il Consiglio Generale di New York ha commesso un grande errore nel sospendere la Federazione del Giura. Costoro si sono già ritirati dall’Internazionale dichiarando non esistenti per essi il suo Congresso e i suoi Statuti (…)

Ogni individuo e ogni gruppo ha il diritto di ritirarsi dall’Internazionale, e quando ciò avviene il Consiglio Generale deve semplicemente constatare ufficialmente questa defezione, e non sospendere. E fin quando dei gruppi (sezioni o federazioni) si limitano a contestare i poteri del Consiglio Generale o anche a violare in tale o tale punto gli Statuti o articoli del regolamento, che la sospensione è prevista. Per contro gli Statuti non hanno alcun articolo relativo a gruppi che buttano a mare la organizzazione nel suo insieme, e ciò per la semplice ragione che si capisce da sé che gruppi come questi non appartengono più all’Internazionale (…)

Il grande risultato del Congresso dell’Aia è stato di spingere gli elementi guasti ad escludersi da sé, cioè a ritirarsi. Il procedimento del Consiglio Generale minaccia di annullare questo risultato. Nell’opposizione aperta all’Internazionale, costoro non nuocciono, anzi sono utili, ma elementi ostili nel suo seno, rovinano il movimento in tutti i paesi in cui han messo piede.

Marx sapeva che il partito rinasce da ogni sconfitta

Dopo la caduta della Comune di Parigi, ogni organizzazione della classe operaia in Francia era naturalmente rovinata, ma essa comincia ora a svilupparsi di nuovo (…) Così, invece di morire, l’Internazionale è uscita dalla sua prima fase di incubazione per entrare in una fase superiore in cui i suoi sforzi e le sue tendenze originarie sono già in parte divenuti realtà. Nel corso di questo sviluppo crescente essa dovrà ancora passare attraverso numerosi cambiamenti prima che possa essere scritto l’ultimo capitolo della sua storia (Marx, La storia dell’Associazione Internazionale dei lavoratori del sig. George Howell, 1878).

Vaticinio di Engels che Mosca ha tradito: Engels a Sorge, 12 settembre 1874

Con la tua partenza la vecchia Internazionale è completamente finita. Ed è buona cosa. Essa apparteneva al periodo del Secondo Impero in cui la pressione che si esercitava in tutta Europa prescriveva al movimento operaio, da poco risvegliatosi, di unirsi ed astenersi da ogni polemica interna (…) Il primo grande successo doveva interrompere questo ingenuo viaggio in comune di tutte le frazioni. Tale successo fu la Comune, che intellettualmente era senza dubbio la figlia dell’Internazionale, sebbene questa non avesse mosso un dito per produrla, e per la quale l’Internazionale è stata resa responsabile in questa misura, e a buon diritto. Quando, grazie alla Comune, l’Internazionale divenne una potenza morale in Europa, la discordia cominciò immediatamente. Ogni tendenza voleva sfruttare per sé il successo (…) L’Internazionale ha dominato dieci anni di storia europea verso un lato, quello dell’avvenire; può guardare con fierezza al lavoro compiuto. Ma nella sua forma antica essa ha fatto il suo tempo. Per produrre una nuova Internazionale simile all’antica, una alleanza di tutti i partiti proletari di tutti i Paesi, occorrerebbe uno schiacciamento generale del movimento operaio come quello prodottosi dal 1849 al 1864. E per questo il mondo proletario è diventato troppo grande.

Credo che la prossima Internazionale sarà direttamente comunista e inalbererà di colpo i nostri principî quando gli scritti di Marx avranno prodotto il loro effetto durante un certo numero di anni.

1. The so-called question of the party’s internal organisation has always been a subject in the positions of traditional Marxists and of the present Communist Left, born as opposition to the errors of the Moscow International. Naturally, such a topic is not to be isolated in a watertight compartment, but it is instead inseparable from the general framework of our positions.

2. What is part of the doctrine, of the party’s general theory, can be found in the classical texts; it is also exhaustively summarised in more recent works, in Italian texts such as the Rome and Lyon theses, and in many others with which the Left made known its prediction on the Third International’s ruin; as the phenomena the latter showed, were not smaller in gravity in respect to those of the Second. Such literature is partly being used still now, in the study on organisation (meant in its narrow sense as party organisation and not in the broad sense of proletarian organisation, in its varying historical and social forms) and we are not trying to summarise it here, referring the reader to the above mentioned texts and to the vast work in progress of the Storia della Sinistra, of which the second volume is being prepared.

3. Anything concerning the party’s ideology and nature, being common to us all and beyond dispute, is left to the pure theory; and the same is for the relations between the party and its own proletarian class, that can be condensed in the obvious inference that only with the party and with the party action the proletariat becomes class for itself and for the revolution.

4. We are used to call questions of tactics – though we repeat that autonomous chapters or sections do not exist – those historically arising and going on in the relations between proletariat and other classes; between proletarian party and other proletarian organisations; and between the party and other bourgeois and non-proletarian parties.

5. The relation that exists between tactical solutions, such as not to be condemned by doctrinal and theoretical principles, and the multi-faceted development of objective situations, which are, in a certain sense, external to the party, is undoubtedly very mutable; but the Left has asserted that the party must master and anticipate such relations in advance, as developed in the Rome Theses on tactics, which was intended as a proposal for tactics at the international level.

There are, synthesizing to the extreme, periods of objective favourable conditions, together with unfavourable conditions of the party as subject; there may be the opposite case; and there have been rare but suggestive examples of a well prepared party and of a social situation with the masses thrown towards the revolution; and towards the party which foresaw and described it in advance, as Lenin vindicated for Russia’s Bolsheviks.

6. By avoiding pedantic distinctions, we may wonder in which objective situation is today’s society. Certainly the answer is that it is the worst possible situation, and that a large part of proletariat is controlled by parties – hired by bourgeoisie – that prevent the proletariat itself from any class revolutionary movement; which is even worse than the crushing directly operated by bourgeoisie. It is not therefore possible to foresee how long it will take before – in this dead and shapeless situation – what we already termed as “polarisation” or “ionisation” of social molecules, takes place, preceding the outburst of the great class antagonism.

7. What are, in this unfavourable period, the consequences on the party’s internal organic dynamics? We always said, in all above mentioned texts, that the party cannot avoid being influenced by the characters of the real situation surrounding it. Therefore the big existing proletarian parties are – necessarily and avowedly – opportunist.

It is a fundamental thesis of the Left, that our party must not abstain from resisting in such a situation; it must instead survive and hand down the flame, along the historical thread of time. It will be a small party, not owing to our will or choice, but to ineluctable necessity. While thinking of the structure of this party, even in the Third International’s epoch of decadence, and in countless polemics, we rejected – with arguments that is now unnecessary recalling – several accusations. We don’t want a secret sect or élite party, refusing any contact with the outside, owing to a purity mania. We reject any formula of workerist or labour party excluding all non-proletarians; as it is a formula belonging to all historical opportunists. We don’t want to reduce the party to an organisation of a cultural, intellectual and scholastic type, as from polemics more than half a century old; neither do we believe, as certain anarchists and blanquists do, being imaginable a party involved in conspirative armed action and in hatching plots.

8. Given that the degenerating social complex is focused on falsifying and destroying theory and sound doctrine, clearly the predominant task of today’s small party is the restoration of principles with doctrinal value, although unfortunately the favourable setting in which Lenin worked after the disaster of the First World War is lacking. But this does not mean we should erect a barrier between theory and practical action; beyond a certain limit that would destroy us along with our basic principles. We thus lay claim to all forms of activity peculiar to the favourable periods insofar as the real balance of forces render them possible.

9. We should go into all this in a lot more depth, but we can still reach a conclusion about the party’s organizational structure during such a difficult transition. It would be a fatal error to consider the party as divisible into two groups, one dedicated to study and the other to action, because such a distinction is deadly not only for the party as a whole, but for the individual militant too. The underlying meaning of unitarism and of organic centralism is that the party develops within itself the organs suited to its various functions, called by us propaganda, proselytism, proletarian organization, union work, etc., until, in the future, there is the need for the armed organization; but nothing can be inferred from the number of comrades assigned to each function, since no comrade, as a matter of principle, should be uninvolved with any of them.

The fact that in the current phase the amount of comrades devoted to theory and the movement’s history may seem too many, and those ready for action too few, is historically fortuitous. It would be totally pointless to investigate how many are dedicated to each of these manifestations of energy. As we all know, when the situation becomes radicalized huge numbers of people, acting instinctively and unencumbered by the need to ape academia and get qualifications, will immediately take our side.

10. We know very well that the opportunist danger, ever since Marx fought against Bakunin, Proudhon, Lassalle, and during all the further phases of the opportunist disease, has always been tied to the influence on the proletariat of petty-bourgeois false allies.

Our infinite diffidence towards the contribution of these social strata cannot, and must not, prevent us from utilising – according to history’s mighty lessons – exceptional elements coming from them; the party will destine such elements to the work of setting the theory to order; the lack of such a work would only mean death, while in the future its plan of propagation will have to identify it with the immense extension of revolutionary masses.

11. The violent sparks flashing between the rheophores of our dialectics have taught us that a revolutionary and militant communist comrade is one who has managed to forget, to renounce, to wrench from his heart and his mind the classification under which he has been inscribed in the registry of this putrefying society; one who can see and immerse himself in the entire millenary trajectory linking the ancestral tribal man, struggling with wild beasts, to the member of the future community, fraternal in the joyous harmony of the social man.

12. Historical party and formal party. This distinction is in Marx and Engels and they had the right to deduce from it that, being with their work on the line of the historical party, they disdained to be members of any formal party. But no one of today’s militants can infer from it he has the right to a choice: that is of being in the clear with the “historical party”, and to care nothing about the formal party. Thus it is, owing to the sound intelligence of that proposition of Marx and Engels, which has a dialectical and historical sense – and not because they were supermen of a very special type of race.

Marx says: party in its historical meaning, in the historical sense, and formal, or ephemeral, party. In the first concept lies the continuity, and from it we derived our characteristic thesis of the invariance of doctrine since its formulation made by Marx; not as invention of a genius, but as discovery of a result of human evolution. But the two concepts are not metaphysically opposite, and it would be silly to express them by the poor doctrine: I turn my back on the formal party, as I go towards the historical one.

When we infer from the invariant doctrine that the revolutionary victory of the working class can be achieved only by the class party and its dictatorship, and then go on to affirm, supported by Marx’s writings, that the pre revolutionary and communist party proletariat may be a class as far as bourgeois science is concerned, but isn’t by Marx or ourselves, then the conclusion to be deduced is that for victory to be achieved it will be necessary to have a party worthy of being described both as the historical and as the formal party, i.e., a party which has resolved within active historical reality the apparent contradiction – cause of so many problems in the past – between the historical party, and therefore as regards content (historical, invariant programme), and the contingent party, concerning its form, which acts as the force and physical praxis of a decisive part of the proletariat in struggle.

This synthetic clarification of the doctrinal question must also be quickly related to the historical transitions lying behind us.

13. The first transition from a body of small groups and leagues – through which the workers’ struggle came out – to the International party foreseen by doctrine, takes place when the First International is founded in 1864. There is no point now in reconstructing the process leading to the crisis of such organisation, that under Marx’s direction was defended to the last from infiltration of petty-bourgeois programmes such as those of libertarians.

In 1889 the Second International is built, after Marx’s death, but under Engels’s control, though his directions are not followed. For a moment there is the tendency to have again in the formal party the continuation of the historical one, but all that is broken up in the following years by the federalist and non-centralist type of party; by the influences of parliamentary practice and by the cult of democracy; by the nationalist outlook on individual sections, no longer conceived as armies at war against their own state, as wanted by the 1848 Manifesto; rises the open revisionism disparaging the historical end and exalting the contingent and formal movement.

The rising of Third International, after the 1914 disastrous failure of almost all sections into pure democratism and nationalism, was seen by us – in the first years after 1919 – as the complete reconnection of historical party and formal party. The new International rose declaredly centralist and anti-democratic, but the historical praxis of the entrance into it of the sections federate to the failed International was particularly difficult, and made too hurried by the expectation that the transition, from the seizure of power in Russia to that in other European countries, would be immediate.

If the section arisen in Italy from the ruins of the old party of the Second International was particularly prone, not by virtue of particular persons certainly, but for historical reasons, to feeling the necessity of welding the historical movement to its present form, this was due to the hard struggles it had waged against degenerated forms and its consequent refusal to tolerate infiltrations; which were attempted not only by forces dominated by nationalist, parliamentary and democratic type positions, but also by those (in Italy, maximalism) influenced by anarcho-syndicalist, petty-bourgeois revolutionism. This left-wing current fought in particular to establish more rigid membership conditions (construction of the new formal structure), and it applied them fully in Italy; and when they gave imperfect results in France, Germany etc., it was the first to sense the danger to the International as a whole.

The historical situation, in which the proletarian State had only been formed in one country, whilst the conquest of power had not been achieved in any of the others, rendered the clear organic solution, that of leaving the helm of the world organisation in the hands of the Russian section, highly problematic.

The Left was the first to notice that whenever there were deviations in the conduct of the Russian State, both in relation to domestic economy and international relations, a discrepancy would arise between the policies of the historical party, i.e. of all revolutionary communists throughout the world, and those of the formal party, which was defending the interests of the contingent Russian State.

14. Since then the abyss has deepened to the extent that the “apparent” sections, which are dependent on the Russian leader-party, are now involved, in the ephemeral sense, in a vulgar policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie that is no better than the traditional collaboration of the corrupted parties of the Second International.

This has produced a situation in which the groups derived from the struggle of the Italian Left against Moscow’s degeneration have been given the chance (we don’t say the right) to better understand the road which the real, active (and therefore formal) party must follow in order to remain faithful to those features which distinguish the revolutionary, historical party; a party which has existed, at least in a potential sense, since 1847, whilst from a practical point of view it has established itself in key historical events as a participant in the tragic series of revolutionary defeats.

The transmission of this un-deformed tradition into efforts to form a new international party organisation without any historic breaks, may not, in an organisational sense, be based on men chosen because they would be best at it or most knowledgeable about the historical doctrine, and yet, in an organic sense, such a transmission nevertheless has to remain totally faithful to the line connecting the actions of the group which first gave expression to it forty years ago to the line as is exists today. The new movement should expect neither supermen nor messiahs, but must be based on a rekindling of as much as it has been possible to preserve over the long intervening period, and the preservation cannot be restricted to just theses and documents but must also include the living instruments who constitute the old guard, entrusted with the task of handing on the uncorrupted and powerful party tradition to the young guard. The latter rushes off towards new revolutions, that might have to wait not more than a decade from now the action on the foreground of historical scene; the party and the revolution having no concern at all for the names of the former and the latter.

The correct transmission of that tradition beyond generations – and also for this beyond names of dead or living men – cannot be restricted to that of critical texts, nor only to the method of utilising the communist party’s doctrine by being close and faithful to classical texts; it must be related to the class battle that the Marxist Left – we don’t want to limit the revival only to the Italian region – set out and carried out in the most inflamed real struggle during the years after 1919, and that was broken, more than by the force relations with respect to the enemy class, by the dependence on the centre, degenerating from centre of the historical world party to that of an ephemeral party, destroyed by opportunist pathology, until such dependence was, historically and de facto, broken.

The Left actually tried, without breaking from the principle of globally centralised discipline, to wage a revolutionary defensive war by keeping the vanguard proletariat immunised against the collusion of the middle classes, their parties and their doomed-to-defeat ideologies. Since this historic chance of saving if not the revolution at least the core of its historical party was also missed, today it has started again in a situation which is objectively torpid and indifferent, in the midst of a proletariat riddled with petty-bourgeois democratism; but the nascent organisation, using its entire doctrinal tradition and praxis, verified historically by its timely predictions, also applies it in its everyday activity too, through its efforts to re-establish ever wider contact with the exploited masses; and it also eliminates from its own structure one of the parting errors of the Moscow International, by getting rid of the thesis of democratic centralism and the application of any voting mechanism, just as it has eliminated from the thought processes of every last one of its members any concession to democratic, pacifist, autonomist or libertarian tendencies.

It is in this sense that we attempt to take further steps, by using the many long years of bitter experience to head off further attacks on the historical party’s political line, by obliterating all the misery and pettiness we have seen in the comings and goings of the many, unfortunate, formal parties. By doing so, we are also heeding the warnings of the first, great masters about the difficulties of combating those influences emanating from the bourgeois commercial environment, such as personal adulation, and a vulgar chasing after supremacy and a dunce’s popularity, which so often bring to mind those who, with serene indignation, Marx and Engels budged aside to stop them fouling their path.