The Party Does Not Arise From “Circles” (Pt. 3)

The points developed up to now have aimed at demonstrating that the political Party arises not from organizational “shifts” or disciplinary “cures”, but from conscientiously working to restore the program. On this basis, the political Party has always arisen, and then arisen again. The forces that coalesce around all the various activities through which the Party’s life objectifies itself take up their battle stations and discover their commitment in a natural way, by respecting, also in a natural way, the fundamental principles of the organization, i.e., centralism and discipline. These principles are common to all political parties, even bourgeois parties, the major difference being that in the Communist Party they are applied in a way that the Left defines as organic.

Let there be no mistake: the word “organic” does not mean that each militant can arbitrarily interpret the Party’s instructions, or that the Party has no hierarchical structure, or that within this functional hierarchy, whoever is at the top, can just as arbitrarily issue orders, repress, and condemn. The history of the Left has shown that rather than breaking the basic rules of party political organization it preferred to “suffer” often in “heroic silence”. The example of the so called “retractions” of the Bolshevik old guard, brought before the State tribunals of Stalin, confirms the formidable willingness of Communists to renege on their personal convictions should these conflict with the principle of principles: the primary requirement of the class political Oarty. Anything to avoid offering the enemy, capitalism, the chance to blackmail the working class, with an example of its own Party being repudiated by the revolutionaries. The lesson of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, etc. was precisely not to offer the capitalist world the spectacle of insubordination to the Party.

Organic means that the Party is not bound by any a priori form and that it wants to be able to assume any form that is serviceable in the deadly all-out war of the revolutionary proletariat against capitalist society. In this sense, it does not exclude from its arsenal – tactical ideological, political or organizational – any means it deems effective in defeating the enemy. A party with a flexible organization, able to pass from one stage of the class struggle to the other without going off its programmatic rails. This is what Lenin always stood for as well.

The Principles of Organization

A political party can exist without an ideology, a doctrine, or a historic program of its own, but it must have an organization. The fascist party is a prime example. The anarchist party had to renege on all its sophistry to survive as a political force.

The advantage the Communist Party has is that its organization is not based on organizational principles of centralism and discipline that are disconnected from its program. In this the communist organization finds continuity, it can periodically die off and arise again because it draws its strength from the unique and indivisible program from which it arose. If on the one hand we take the “historical party” as said, i.e. the party-program that won’t die until class divided society dies, the political Party, which in Marx’s words is ephemeral, is on the other hand susceptible to fluctuations in the class struggle, and operates and sets itself in motion by organizing its forces on the basis of centralism and discipline.

Certainly the Party does not arise from circles, but it may dissolve into circles if it fails to stick to its program, tactics and organizational principles.

Another aspect that characterizes the application of organizational principles in the Communist Party is that the discipline is spontaneous, even when, due to force majeure, the Party has to equip itself with a military organization. Here too it should be emphasized that spontaneous does not mean acceptance or rejection of discipline depending on whether or not one got up on the wrong side of the bed in the morning.

One of the principal arguments which the Left used in its fight against Moscow’s degeneration and against Stalinism was and still is that it is fatal for the Party to think it can correct deviations by means of organizational and disciplinary proceedings.

The Party establishes rules of operation that may change in the various phases of the class struggle, corresponding to the actions and activities it needs to carry out. These rules must also respond to specific requirements and organizational principles in order not to disrupt the underlying party structure. Ensuring optimum development of the Party’s internal life and work is not a secondary matter, nor is it a “moral” issue in the pejorative sense of the term. The tormented history of the International also had to undergo the opportunist contamination in these ways as well, which the Left, though it persistently denounced opportunism in the strongest terms, was unable to prevent. The small party cannot neglect these aspects or consider them secondary as compared to the bigger tasks that need attending to. The proper functioning of the Party not only derives from a strict adherence to its program, tactics and organization, but also from combining its internal with its external functions.

In this respect the Left gave precise guidelines, in the form of precepts that relate in their literary expression more to feeling than to reason, and were bound to provoke a sarcastic response from the iron neo-Bolsheviks, steadfastly opposed to any moto dell’animo, any stirrings of the heart. The definition of socialism as “sentiment” is not Tolstoy’s but Marx’s and the Left’s; and we fail to see how this sentiment is supposed to permeate tomorrow’s humanity if the “fighting community”, that is today’s Party, isn’t also permeated by it. The “fraternal consideration for other comrades” which so scandalizes imbeciles and offers a pretext to hypocrites for their diplomatic maneuvers, is one of the precepts of party life. It signifies solidarity of comrades among themselves, not condescension. Solidarity is a material force, not a weakness. It is said that Lenin, the internationalist, gave to Stalin – the ultimate “romantic”, “iron Bolshevik” or “man of steel” – a serious tongue lashing after the latter had showed disrespect towards his partner Krupskaya, who was also a party militant.

Another precept of party life, which seems to contradict the first, is that “you should love nobody”. The hysterics, who can’t appreciate the profound truth within the paradox, interpret this to mean that affectionate feelings between comrades are forbidden, that comrades should be regarded as mere instruments, to be used or cast aside, of a party viewed as a metaphysical Moloch, to whom everything must be sacrificed, forgetting that the political Party cannot exist without militants. The meaning of the precept is, on the contrary, that “you should love all comrades”, not favor some and exclude others.

The idea that the Party is just a cold social organ, all rationality and militant science, as though it were a machine, is wrong. Even in the Party rationality and science are not derived from individuals, but from the body of the class as a whole, interpreted by Marxists and condensed into texts and theses which are transmitted over the centuries and successive generations. And there would be no science and rationality without the decisive impulse which passion and feeling provide. Without faith, instinct and sentiment there is no “reversal of praxis”. There is no such thing as science for science’s sake, Marxism for Marxism’s sake, or party for the party’s sake. Marxism and Party are weapon and organ of the last of history’s revolutionary classes, the proletariat. We reasserted these concepts in particular during the final years of the International, when we were forced to witness poisonous infighting tearing the glorious body of the international Party apart when still in its formative stage: when fratricidal groups and factions formed and engaged in a no-holds-barred struggle, of which the macabre synthesis was Stalin.

The split in our small party in November 1973 did not happen because “Stalinist” discipline was imposed on the Party, according to the version of the splitters, whose balance sheet, however, is just as serious as the arrogance with which the Party was muzzled in those turbid and asphyxiating years. The reasons for the split lie in a tactical plan, which it was hoped would move the Party onto the terrain of engaging with the petty-bourgeois extremist camp, rebaptized “area rivoluzionaria”, with the “circles” and the swinish denizens of the perpetual “protest movement” of students and lumpenproletarians; brain and brawn of the sterile and reactionary semi-classes. The maneuver was backed up with the false idea that “they might become Soviets” and replace unions, absorbing a principle actually derived from the reactionary “extremism” of politics first, in which proletarian economic struggle, the rebuilding of the indispensable class organization, is downgraded.

The organizational and disciplinary measures that were taken to force through this maneuver served to break the resistance within the Party and were supported by a campaign of denigration and lies worthy of the darkest years of the Moscow International.

Thus in the internal life of the Party there arose the false principle that you could switch with impunity from one maneuver to another simply by resorting to organizational and disciplinary instruments, and to ideological – or in some cases even non-ideological – terrorism. Increasingly relations between comrades came to be dominated by mistrust, diplomacy, and even hatred justified by the new slogan of the necessity, for the good of the Party, of “political struggle” within the Party.

We didn’t complain, at the time, about the sudden tightening of disciplinary measures, nor about the police-like conduct of the Center’s emissaries, because it is a non-negotiable fact that Communists do not complain about discipline; we complained because these means, when used unexpectedly, make Communists feel that some indefinable change is happening in the Party, which they are understandably suspicious about. Despite all this, we remained steadfast in our duty to submit to the Party leadership, without relinquishing the necessary function of any comrade to act as a check on the actions of the leadership.

We relate these painful and lamentable facts, so unworthy of the Communist Left tradition, to the serious, young comrades of yesterday, and those of today, who never got to hear the truth or only a distorted version of it, so they can arrive at the objective realization that the ways in which the Party may be destroyed are many and various, yet all can be traced back to historical experience which the true Party possesses, and which genuine comrades have a duty to research and to defend, cost what it may.

From Party to “Circles”

One of the ways the Party can degenerate is by fragmenting into circles; by far the worst way because it is entirely unproductive, whereas fractions, as history has shown, can be the basis on which rebuilding the Party can start again. This danger is one that affects not just big parties but above all any party in which the precious legacy of revolutionary Marxism has been dissipated. The way to disperse this legacy into thousands of separate streams is precisely by allowing to form, crystallize and eventually to operate, within the same political party organization, tendencies which diverge from those on which the Party is based; thereby cultivating the illusion that the Party, thus transformed into a party of opinions, can still respond to the highly challenging demands of the class struggle.

History has shown that when the launching of the revolutionary offensive seems imminent, it is wrong to make naive claims around attracting non-homogeneous forces, hoping the struggle will somehow amalgamate them, until victory is achieved at least, and with the firm yet even more naive intention of casting them adrift after the victory if they get in the way of maintaining political power. Our bitter conclusion, after the attack failed and there was no victory, was that these non-homogeneous forces strongly contributed to the demise ofthe Party. If the small party were to take this path, which history has shown to have failed, it would die long before it became a big party.

Even more so when the opposite process occurs, that is, when, as a result of organizational discontinuity, tactical fluctuations, conflicting policies and an ambivalent attitude towards its tradition, the Party, nominally one, in fact is a composite organization composed of unequal parts, held together by disciplinary rules, which hold sway in the absence of real conflicts due to the persistent flaccidity of social relations.

The positions we are expressing are those of the Left, those of the old Party, of 1921, as crystallized in the Rome theses of 1922, the Lyon theses of 1926, in the firm consistent positions adopted at the Congresses of the Communist International, in the characteristic “basics” of 1952 through to those contained in the 1965-1966 theses.

We have also bluntly reminded the so-called “international” and “internationalist circles” about this, prompted by them inviting us to proto-constituent “Party” conferences, which elaborated, and probably still do elaborate, the argument that the Party arises from an “entente”, a compromise agreement between various circles (or groups as they call them) to reunite the “scattered limbs” of the communists. That they might come to some “arrangement” we don’t deny. What we rule out though is that this could generate the class political Party, the “compact and powerful” Party.

It should be recognized that these “constituents” are at least consistent, because they put their words into action. Not so those who preach the false doctrine that the “party arises from circles”, and practice it only behind closed doors, whether out of shyness, opportunism, or both, we don’t know.

The Left’s positions do not lie somewhere in the middle, between brazen “constituents” and shy “constituents”, but clash with both, since both denigrate the Left and the true Party.

The Party grows and develops in ways that are already known, that is on the foundation of the Left’s heritage, and not through an accumulation of self-proclaimed revolutionary circles or groups, towards which we can pursue a policy of emptying them out to liberate the genuinely proletarian forces within. Put another way, the circles would enter the Party and the damage caused would be the worst imaginable. The Party might experience a surge in its membership, but only by transforming itself into a collection of fratricidal tribes and clans, until complete degeneration sets in.