The Expelled and the Expellers

The article that we republish below appeared in issue 100 (December 1982) of Il Partito Comunista; it referred to the split organized a few years earlier in a dirty manner, the result of a bad period of factionalism from above and political struggle within the Party.

We rightly called it a “dirty split,” because false accusations were being hurled at a group of comrades, while hiding the true intentions of what the then Center had decided to undertake: a new road, completely different from the one outlined by our doctrine and tradition.

We are republishing this article not to revisit what happened more than half a century ago; those who took responsibility for expelling a limited group of comrades caused irreparable damage, which soon led to the disintegration of a Party with a good organizational structure, one with numerous local branches and a consolidated tradition of class-based labor union action.

So, we will never feel like forgiving those who took on this responsibility, and neither shall we return to this topic.

On the other hand it is quite striking to reread this old article and realize that—with just a few words replaced—it could very well refer to the events from last year, 2024.

This is the case not only because the Party has its own continuity, but also because deviationism and opportunism are always subject to the same laws.

The main one is that the deviations that kill the Party invariably occur as a result of factionalism-from-above and political struggle.

So it is not a confrontation between openly declared positions, but an underground effort to find “trusted comrades” to rely on and use to marginalize and denigrate others.

But why do all of this?

Because of the false conviction that we could, by voluntaristic acts, force the nature of things and be able to, out of the blue, expand the Party to a world scale. A party where “the sun never sets,” like the empire of Charles V (circular dated 04/27/2023).

The simplest method to achieve this is to widen and loosen those barriers that the Party has built to protect itself from the penetration of ideologies foreign to it. This way it will become increasingly easier to enter it while bringing methods of action and behavior as well as ideological positions foreign to our tradition.

This, however, is at odds with the resistance of those comrades who oppose this slow, inexorable, and sometimes almost imperceptible departure from an established tradition.

These might be small things that, in themselves, do not represent a real deviation, but nonetheless mark a road that increasingly tends to stray from the tradition of the Communist Left.

Hence the need to undertake the same action to defeat those comrades presented as adversaries (defined, from time to time, as “factionalists,” “splitters,” “putschists,” “mutineers”): political struggle on all fronts, by any means, none excluded.

And above all, what is the issue on which the real factionalists-from-above have always imposed their claimed supremacy?

The call for discipline. Not discipline toward the Party—toward its theoretical and tactical positions—but “unconditional discipline” to the Sole International Commissioner, as the one we had always called the Center had wanted to be defined’ (party circulars of 03/04/2024; 07/03/2024).

On several occasions, some comrades—who became tired of being constantly accused of expressing mere “personal opinions”—had reminded the then-Center what discipline can be required of comrades and in what terms.

“Leader” in fact means driver.

The party leader does not have a steering wheel in their hands and the freedom to choose the angle of direction in front of them; the center is the driver of a train or a tram.

Their power lies in knowing that the track is fixed, although certainly not straight all the way; the centre knows the stations through which it passes and the destination toward which they is driving, the curves and the slopes.

(The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today, 1956)

“There is no mechanical discipline that can reliably ensure that orders and instructions from above will be put into effect ‘whatever they are’. 

There is however a set of orders and instructions which respond to the real origins of the movement that can guarantee maximum discipline, that is, of unitary action by the entire organization; and, conversely, there are other directives which, emanating from the Center, could compromise discipline and organizational solidity.”

(Communist Organization and Discipline, 1924)

“We do not see any serious problems in being exaggeratedly worried about the danger of opportunism.

Of course, criticism and alarmism for the sake of sport are highly regrettable; but even if they were, the pure product of the ruminations of a few militants rather than the precise reflection of ‘something that is not going well’ and the intuition of serious deviations in the making, it is certain that they will not be able to weaken the movement in the slightest, and will be easily overcome.

On the other hand, the danger is extremely serious if, as has unfortunately happened in many previous cases, the disease of opportunism spreads rapidly before anyone dares to sound the alarm.

Criticism without error does not cause even a thousandth of the harm caused by error without criticism.

[…]

Comrade Girone puts the question simply and clearly when he says that everything the leaders of the International say and do is a matter on which we claim the right to discuss, and to discuss means being able to question whether what has been said and done is wrong, regardless of any prerogatives attributed to groups, individuals, or parties […]”

(“The Opportunist Danger and the International” – L’Unità, September 30, 1925).

A breach of discipline—which was never disavowed by the comrades in the party’s terms of executive action—was invoked by the center. In defiance of the characteristic principles of “organic centralism,” our exclusive conception of the centralization of the party organ, those who had dared to criticize the work of the center were expelled from the party ranks.

But these are issues that the Center, having abandoned the Party tradition, can easily ignore and proceed with the final solution to any opposition: expulsion, the supposed magic cure to save the Party

So two comrades, accused of a very serious act of indiscipline, were expelled without the possibility of appeal

What was their crime?

Disobeying a central ukase [decree] by taking part in a meeting… of the Party (our Party, their Party).

Then the action did not stop, but the “cleansing” continued against all those comrades who had not shown solidarity with this disastrous decision.

The Party was violently broken up, and several comrades were lost along the way

This was the result of the actions of a Center that had long shown signs of losing its balance, but above all of the sloth of a group of comrades who, in the name of a false discipline toward a leader, whoever he may be, accepted the disintegration of the Party.

And the fact that they may not even have realized the damage they have done does not exonerate them or mitigate their guilt

* * *

Several years have passed since an article entitled “Sulla strada di sempre” (On the Same Road as Always) appeared in the first issue of the first year of this newspaper, pointing to yet another painful break in the organizational thread of the formal postwar party.

At that point, the split between the two factions that had formed within the Programma Comunista organization became definitive. One faction had been expelled, by means of a procedure never previously employed, by the other—the one conscious of having stripped the party of its honor, according to the splendid definition of the Left at the Livorno Congress of 1921. In doing so the expelling faction made use of its misunderstood and falsely applied central authority, which most of the party came to submissively accept. However, with tenacious determination and revolutionary optimism, the expelled faction stayed the course and resumed on the road it had always followed, for the reconstruction of the organ of the social revolution.

It matters little now who and why. The Party as a whole had lost its bearings, its revolutionary awareness of the right course. It was no longer able to grasp the correct stimuli that were coming, with resounding perseverance, from a minority—certainly not a faction until then!—for the purpose of the whole Party returning to the ABCs of doctrine in order to regain the energy and clarity to get back on “our” track.

The disarray had grown so vast that even those same voices shrieking about a return to the old ways had become an obstacle to the lust for political noyautage, to the wild, unrestrained frenzy of tactical scheming with the aim, or so they claimed, of finally building the “real party”—strong and unified—and breaking out of the cramped little perimeter of the organizational circle the past generation of revolutionaries had left behind.

And so hammering home our basic theses became more than a theoretical luxury. It became an annoying academic exercise which, it was said, made us lose sight of the urgency of the present and compromised the possibility of “seizing the favorable opportunity,” but was just a foolish waste of time. Under the guise of total and absolute discipline—a requirement that the faction that was later expelled had never questioned—and the hideous theorizing of political struggle within the party, the leadership was strong-arming the entire party apparatus into the abyss. However, the rest of the organization did not understand this.

From “Supplementary Theses,” April 1966:

“The historical dialectic leads each fighting organism to perfect its means of offense by employing the tactics possessed by the enemy.

From this it can be deduced that in the phase of armed combat the communists will have a military framing with precise patterns of hierarchies to unit paths that will ensure the best success of joint action.

This truth must not be unnecessarily mimicked in any of the party’s noncombatant activities. 

The transmission of directions must be unambiguous, but this lesson of the bourgeois bureaucracy cannot make us forget how it can be corrupted and degenerated, even when adopted within workers’ organisms.

Party organicity by no means demands that every comrade see the personification of party strength in another comrade specifically designated to convey provisions that come from above, the personification of the party form. 

This transmission between the molecules that make up the party organ always simultaneously has the double direction; and the dynamics of each single unit is integrated in the historical dynamics of the whole.

Abuse of organizational formalisms without a vital reason has been and will always be a defect and a suspicious and stupid danger.”

We resisted the prevailing ramshackle state of affairs with all our might. We were anxious above all not to stray an inch from the constraints of discipline, tradition, and the functional hierarchy of the party, not to mimic the feeble democratic criteria of majority and minority. We strived to remain always on the ground of organic centralism, the fundamental structure of our party organism, its way of existing, developing, and living.

Despite the declared willingness to adhere fully to the Party’s historical program, organizational constraints, the “politics first” approach within the organization, the myriad of intrigues and backroom deals, and accusations of everything and its opposite, succeeded in the villainous task of expulsion, carried out in the most trivial style of the abhorred democracy.

We were forced to accept the path that the old organization had decided to follow. They wanted a party disciplined to move with every contortion fetid, everyday life would impose a party united in following the whims of the “leaders,” with a military hierarchy, with trustees and underlings. We were an obstacle to the achievement of this supreme goal, and they managed to drive us out.

Even our theses, the living experience of revolutionary generations crystallized in definitive form—the very essence of the Party organ—clearly warn of the danger of degeneration, its causes, and its symptoms, even if they obviously do not provide any “practical” recipe for defense and cure.

From “Theses on the Historical Task,” July 1965:

“The Left hoped to be able to save the International, and its vital core rich of traditions, without organizing […] itself, as a fraction, or as a party within the party.

Nor did the Left encourage or approve the practice of individual resignations from the party or from the International, even when the displays of the rising opportunism were becoming more and more undeniable.

Nevertheless dozens of examples from previously cited texts evidence that the Left, in its underlying thinking, has always rejected elections, and voting for named comrades, or for general theses, as a means of determining choices, and believed that the road to the suppression of these means leads likewise to the abolition of another nasty aspect of politicians’ democraticism, that is, expulsions, removals, and dissolutions of local groups.

On many occasions we have openly argued that such disciplinary procedures should be used less and less, until finally they disappear altogether.

If the opposite should occur or, worse still, if these disciplinary questions are wheeled out not to safeguard sound, revolutionary principles, but rather to protect the conscious or unconscious positions of nascent opportunism, as happened in 1924, 1925, 1926, this just means that the central function has been carried out in the wrong way, which determined its loss of any influence on the base, from a disciplinary point of view; and the more that is the case, the more is phoney disciplinary rigour shamelessly praised.

It has always been a firm and consistent position of the Left that if disciplinary crises multiply and become the rule, it signifies that something in the general running of the party is not right, and the problem merits study.

Naturally we won’t repudiate ourselves by committing the infantile mistake of seeking salvation in a search for better people or in the choice of leaders and semi-leaders, all of which we hold to be part and parcel of the opportunist phenomenon, historical antagonist of the forward march of left revolutionary Marxism.

The Left staunchly defends another of Marx and Lenin’s fundamental theses, that is, a remedy for the alternations and historical crises which will inevitably effect the party that cannot be found in constitutional or organizational formulae magically endowed with the property of protecting the party against degeneration

Such a false hope is one amongst the many petty-bourgeois illusions dating back to Proudhon and which, via numerous connections, re-emerge in Italian Ordinovism, namely: that the social question can be resolved using a formula based on producers’ organizations.

Over the course of party evolution the path followed by the formal parties will undoubtedly be marked by continuous U-turns and ups and downs, and also by ruinous precipices, and will clash with the ascending path of the historical party.

Left Marxists direct their efforts towards realigning the broken curve of the contingent parties with the continuous and harmonious curve of the historical party.

This is a position of principle, but it is childish to try to transform it into an organizational recipe.

The screening of party members in the organic centralist scheme is carried out in a way we have always supported against the Moscow centrists.

The party continues to hone and refine the distinctive features of its doctrine, of its action and tactics with a unique methodology that transcends spatial and temporal boundaries

Clearly all those who are uncomfortable with these delineations can just leave.

Not even after the seizure of power has taken place can we conceive of having forced membership in our ranks; which is why organic centralism excludes terroristic pressures in the disciplinary field, which can’t help but adopt even the very language of abused bourgeois constitutional forms, such as the power of the executive power to dissolve and reassemble elective formations – all forms that for a long time we have considered obsolete, not only for the proletarian party, but even for the revolutionary and temporary State of the victorious proletariat.

The party does not have to display, to those who want to join it, any constitutional or legal plans for the future society, as such forms are only proper to class societies.

Those who, seeing the party continuing on its clear way, that we attempted to summarize in the these theses to be set out at Naples’ general meeting (July, 1965), do not yet feel up to such a historical level, know very well that they can take any other direction turning away from ours.

We do not have to take any other steps on the matter.”

These are a few scattered lines, taken for illustrative purposes from a formidable body of work providing a historical summary and guideline for action—a body of work which characterized our party in a completely original way compared to any other group or party, “close,” or “distant.” These lines already give a clear indication of the future of the formal organization when the evil plant of opportunism begins to take root, and the correct method for eradicating it becomes lost. They predict the future in case the “updaters”—even if they pay lip service to the program—grow and strengthen within the organization, taking, as it is said, “any other direction that diverges from ours.”

The secessionists of 1973 claimed that they still had in their hands the party that supported those ideas, and this was still believed by the majority of militants. They understood little of the fierce battle that was being fought on one side in order to save tradition and principles from disaster, and meekly accepted the nefarious expulsion, or worse, applauded it.

That organization believed it had strengthened itself by cutting off the part that refused to bow to intrigue, political infighting, and the tactical and programmatic compromises that were being employed to—supposedly—“maintain and increase the ranks of comrades.” That organization did not yet dare to throw away the last shred of formal loyalty to the tradition of the Left.

But the ideological and organizational compression, the political struggle between comrades, the misunderstood centralism that labels any discussion of the order or directives that seem wrong or contradictory to the theses as undisciplined and anti-centralism, were all complementary aspects to the democratic mechanism; of congresses, majorities and minorities, opposing theses according to groups and factions. They were the legacy of bourgeois structures that we wanted to have expelled forever from our organization, structured at a much higher organic level.

The expellers wanted a party that was “united by force.” They deluded themselves thinking that—with the pretense of discipline for discipline’s sake—they could maneuver their organization in the face of the effects of all the tactical expedients they had employed, dishonestly asking of the latter to break the deadlock in the class movement and expanding the party’s ranks.

They lacked the courage to go all the way and formally renounce all the theses of the Left, thus adopting an openly democratic centralist structure with room for the play of majorities and minorities. Perhaps  this would have further broadened their boundaries, only at the cost of removing that useless front-page headline referring to the Left and its anti-opportunist and anti-democratic struggle.

Not doing so, while maintaining the formal top-down structure, led to further widespread splits. It led to the tragicomic point where they had the courage to publish a sort of summary of the positions of the last splinter, whom they defined as “comrades who left the party.”

As a final destination for iron-fisted centralists, it’s not bad: and the fact is that, in this case, the members of the “splinter group” were not even expelled for their positions!

But then the former expellers would have rediscovered the correct method—which we have always advocated for—namely that “those who disagree with us have no choice but to leave”!

Certainly, in a healthy party (as the Left has clearly defined) the process of eliminating foreign bodies, of those who do not feel they are “following the party on its clear path” outlined in the Theses, takes place or should take place in this organic, natural way. However the organization that the expellers of that time claimed to build has certainly not developed that kind of healthy reaction.

Instead, it is decomposing into the different factions that constituted it, now incapable of coexisting. That is because they absolutely lack a unifying programmatic cement nor are they organized in a truly democratic structure—one that has now disappeared even in the bourgeois state parties, with the possible exception of the PCI (Italian Communist Party).

The original nature on which the party was founded was completely overturned, with the most tragic symptom being the expulsion of 1973.  Perhaps sooner than those expelled at the time had expected; the “strong and centralized party” had come apart, and more or less belated and ambiguous attempts at re-foundation by the various formerly united groups were waiting.

But the mock-heroic exploits of their former neighbors mean nothing to those who have remained anchored in the same old positions of the Left—except as a formidable confirmation, a living lesson for those of us who have emerged from these miseries.

Once again, the historical experience of the Party and its theoretical corpus have clearly indicated which are the causes and the consequences. Once again, it has been demonstrated that breaking with these theoretical cornerstones in practice does not lead to better organization, but corrupts and destroys the organization itself.

Beyond the daily triviality of a divisive split of a party in the “left” area, as some imbeciles might see it, what remains for us communists is the valuable confirmation of the validity of our method and the awareness of the solidity of the base on which we have rebuilt.

We settled accounts with the “expellers” once and for all in that first issue of Il Partito Comunista, and we now have nothing to do with that organization.

“The party that we are sure will rise again in a bright future will be made up of a vigorous minority of proletarians and anonymous revolutionaries. They may have different functions like the organs of a single living being, but all will be linked—at the center or at the base—in the overriding and inflexible respect of the theory; of continuity and rigor in organization; of a precise method of strategic action whose range of acceptable possibilities, inviolable by all, is drawn from the terrible historical lesson of the devastation wrought by opportunism.

In such a party—one that is truly impersonal at last—no one will be able to abuse power, precisely because of its inimitable characteristic distinguishing it in the unbroken thread that has its origin in 1848”

(from ”Original Content of the Communist Program,” September 1958).