The Party Does Not Arise From “Circles” (Pt. 2)
Viewing organization and discipline as a magic formula, the “open sesame” to the question of building the political party, is based on military and bureaucratic automatism. The Party’s conception of organization, structure and ways of regulating discipline to directives from the center is opposed to that of the bourgeoisie.
Only in the field of military organization does the Party require mechanical discipline from the general party organization, but, as Lenin also maintained, the more conscious it is the better. This presupposes preparation by the Party so that nothing appears improvised or unexpected. It is no coincidence that the famous “political commissars” of the Red Army were nothing other than the voice of the Party, senior, in both hierarchical and political rank, to the military commanders. Through them the Party not only controlled the class structure and the class military apparatus, but above all instilled the proletarian fighters with communist passion and consciousness.
In organizational matters, the Left’s position has never been to divide militants into “specialists” or “experts” dedicated to particular functions within the Party’s complex activity. One way to combat the negative consequences of party routine is to encourage comrades to take on different roles and engage in different tasks, because even now, in the present party, we strive in practice to combat the technical division of labor. The Party must be capable of forging comrades capable of taking on any role, of discouraging individuals from any personal “vocation” beyond that of simply working for the Party, within the Party and at the Party’s command.
The history of the Communist Left reminds us how all comrades, whatever the place assigned to them by the Party in the organizational structure, have got involved in the proletariat’s trade union and economic struggles, never thinking for one moment they were invading some other comrade’s fields of “competence”, or were not “up to a task” due to a lack of “specialization” on their part. Our bitter and longstanding polemic against the “renegades to come”, around organizing the Party on the basis of workplace cells, as specialized organizational structures rather than on a territorial basis, reasserted the necessary aspiration to work and progress by breaking down specializations, technicalities, limitations, narrow-mindedness, the baggage of the “iron” hierarchies of the time, with which opportunism was crushing the Party, by passing off stupid hierarchical and bureaucratic exercises as “Bolshevism”, rather than by supporting the Party with the organic use of all of its militant forces.
In transposing Lenin’s powerful lessons on the building of the political organization to today, one cannot disregard the historical processes that have occurred since the October Revolution and the Third International, the high points of the global revolutionary proletariat’s historical experience. If, in order to rebuild the Party, we did not use the best materials available from history, but instead took what is outdated and obsolete, we wouldn’t be working to build the International Communist Party as a powerful social force; rather, we would be building an abortion of a party, a political organization that would hinder the rebirth of the Party. Transferring the question to the field of tactics would be like applying the operational models of party action that were appropriate to the phase of double revolution to the single revolution phase.
In line with this correct principle of historical and dialectical determinism, we have been fighting for more than 56 years to build a single world Communist Party, not a new version of the Communist League or the International Workers Association; revolutionary class organs in 1848 and in 1866, utopias – if not actually reactionary, at least of dubious origin – in 1980.
The falsifiers of the Left argue that if the “circle phase” is not completed, a phase during which (by the way!) the program and theory would be restored, you would not be able to rebuild the political Party. A nice discovery this, that you can rebuild the program and theory without at the same time, day by day, rebuilding the organization! As if the restoration of the programmatic and theoretical fundamentals was not the activity, struggle and action of an organization, small maybe, but still a political organization.
One of our more significant pamphlets is entitled In Defense of the Continuity of the Communist Program. In it are contained the theses of the Left, from those of the “Communist Abstentionist Fraction” in 1920, to the body of theses from 1965-66 known as the “Theses on Organic Centralism”. The theses crystallize our basic positions over a period of 46 years in a perfect uninterrupted succession. They cover the salient phases in the struggle of revolutionary communists to build, rebuild and defend the worldwide Party; the most vital organ for a new “storming of heaven”.
It is precisely in the Theses of July 1965, directed at those who wanted to deny the status of Party to our small organization and portray us as a sect of Marxologists, that we read explicitly stated: “Before quitting the subject of the Party’s formation after the Second World War, it is worth reaffirming some results which are today considered characteristic party positions insofar as they are substantial historical results, despite the limited quantitative extension of the movement, and not discoveries by useless geniuses or solemn resolutions made by sovereign congresses”. And here is the list of “substantial historical results” achieved by the “small party”, the most important one being not “conceiving the movement as merely an activity of propaganda and political proselytism”, but as engaged “in an unceasing effort to merge its own life with the life of the masses”; and thus, “the position in which the small party is reduced to being a set of narrow circles, with no connection with the outside world, must be rejected”.
Finally, there is the peremptory reminder not to split the organization, not to “subdivide the Party or its local groupings into watertight compartments that are only active in one field, whether theory, study, historical research, propaganda, proselytism or trade union activity. This is because the very essence of our theory and our history is that these various fields are totally inseparable, and in principle accessible to each and every comrade”.
The comprehensive positions, set out in the form of theses, that is in a positive way, do not constitute a nice, elegantly bound book to stick in a library, but are rules of practical life, which, as the small organization takes shape and gets stronger, the more it fights to assert, implement and defend them against enemies and false friends.
Who Benefits?
The Party’s political organization, therefore, is structured and forged by means of the perfect agreement of its functions and its specific and general duties with the program and traditions of revolutionary Marxism. Organizational and disciplinary expedients cannot replace this.
For seven years now denigrators of the Left have been repeating that hitherto the Party has been going through a “circle phase”, and that in order to emerge from it organizational and disciplinary measures are required.
For 35 years no one had noticed they were living in and among circles. Only the theorists of the “circle phase” have had this powerful flash of enlightenment. Thus these latest doctrinaires with their false theory have accredited the lie that the political Party arises after having completed the “circle phase”, in which the Party is supposedly incubated. Thus we witness a new historical sequence: first “circles”, then, after organizational and disciplinary action, the true Party.
In reality “circles” are an invention by the detractors of the Left to justify their false political theorems, their eccentric interpretations, and their insane organizational and disciplinary measures for “mastering” the organization’s “circle phase”.
With the same purpose “fractions” were invented by the degenerating Executive of the Third International in Moscow to destroy the Left. Over and over again, and with incomparably greater force than us, past generations of left communists repeated these same considerations in the national and international conferences to the greater and lesser leaders of the communist movement. Over and over again we have heard it repeated that they were the fancy notions of visionaries, that we were “fractionists”, and that this was enough to warrant our expulsion from the party under a cloud of treason.
It is easy enough today to establish what the ignoble aim of the “Iron Bolsheviks” was, but it is much more difficult to fully understand the way the usurpers of the revolution betrayed communism, and destroyed the Party. Even back then we heard repeated the bourgeois doctrine, falsely attributed to Lenin, of “the ends justify the means”, as though the means were independent of the ends, as though there was not instead a close dialectical relationship between the means employed and the ends attained. When we treated these central themes (Rome theses, Lyon theses, etc.) we were accused of being “doctrinaire”, “academic”, or of wanting a “disembodied” party.
The most shameful aspect of this false doctrine is that it attempts to cast a veil of pious silence over the 35 years of work and struggle during which a small organization was forged; as though one had been slogging away for a third of a century not to prepare the Party but a bunch of “circles” instead.
To reinforce this view the work of rebuilding the doctrine was artificially separated from rebuilding the political Party, attributing the former not to party forces, but to “the genius” of Lenin, to whom treacherous reverence was made by publishing his “works” post mortem, making much of his name, spelled out in full.
A Harsh Lesson for All
The conservation of our forces, especially in this negative phase, which has gone on for 54 years, is a primary organizational concern for our small party. It is a commitment dating back to the time of Marx and Engels and has allowed the transmission of the doctrine intact from one generation of communist revolutionaries to another. And woe betide the Party if this handing over is interrupted by specious “stages” and “turns”. We are in the Party not as a result of formal membership, nor to observe some kind of discipline, but because of our unwavering faith in the program and in the organization that expresses, practices and defends it.
This is no formal “unitarism”, which is just as harmful as fractionism, but neither is it the foolish and base conceit of being “the elect”, a nucleus blessed by history who are allowed to do what they like, including denying today what was said the day before.
The boasted “selection of forces” is not a prerequisite but a consequence of the revolutionary struggle. But when it is invoked to suppress forces within the Party who are “uncomfortable” when faced with the difficult task of opposing the general trend, we must admit we are in the presence of a fatal degeneration process, not a practice that helps strengthen the organization.
These are not moral or aesthetic considerations, but the patrimony of the Left. To argue that “conditions” are not ripe enough to apply them is equivalent to rejecting them, and consequently to paving the way, in the long run, for the defeat of revolution.
Never to allow anyone to attack the Party’s programmatic and organizational integrity is the other injunction handed down to us, derived from the first. Anyone who dares as much, whether high up in the Party or in “the ranks”, must be cast adrift. It shouldn’t be thought that the Party just consists of its leaders and that the “followers” are just the executors of their irrefutable orders. Often, very often in fact, the correct revolutionary policy hasn’t been handed down from above, as proved by the Left’s formidable struggle, against which the majority consensus was opposed as proof of revolutionary veracity, rather than the doctrinal solidity of the arguments, aligned with the program and the tradition. That the democratic form of consensus, as was customary in the International, has now been discarded, is not a useful vindication, but an attempt to browbeat the Party. Dirty tricks are still dirty tricks with or without the feather duster of counting votes.
For the same reason that we are custodians of our theory and program, we are also the guardians of our organization. The supporters of the false doctrine of the “circle phase” have no such scruples, since it is not about the Party, according to them, but “circles”.
To stop someone in the Party from pontificating, in true Pharisaic fashion, by serving up solutions selected at random, in crass ignorance of our history and the history of our class, you ignore the fact that central questions never reappear in exactly the same guise; this is to prevent the Party from being “periodically subjected to hot and cold showers” and having to adapt to the whims of random passers-by.
The Party must be able to control every aspect of its life, carry out each of its organizational roles in such a way that nothing strikes it as unexpected, incomprehensible or mysterious. Passing off as positions of the Left that terrorism is a “gleam of light” for the proletariat; that the folksy political traditions of extremist factions, with their lumpen-intellectual student base, represent a “revolutionary camp”; that the idea of “workers committees” is fanciful and that working within them is “activism” or “economism”, and then immediately to state exactly the opposite, not because anything has actually changed but due to impatience and disappointment that no immediate gains have been made;that such oscillations represent the “tactics” of the Left only disorientates militants, sows discord in the Party, erodes the organization, and compromises decades of hard-earned, consistent work.
The theorists of the “circles” are not afflicted with any such preoccupations, because their remedy for everything is “discipline” and organizational formulas.
Of one thing we can be certain: the International Communist Party did not arise from circles.