PART V – FINAL BALANCE

PART V

FINAL BALANCE

“The capitalist State taking on a constantly more evident form of class dictatorship which Marxism has denounced since the beginning, parliamentarianism  loses necessarily all importance. The elected organs and the parliament of the old bourgeois tradition are no more than survivals. They have no content any longer, only the democratic phraseology subsists and this cannot hide the fact that at the moment of social crises, the State dictatorship is the ultimate resource or capitalism, and that the proletarian revolutionary violence must be directed against this State.”

Characteristic Theses of the Party, 1952, Part IV, 12

If, in 1926, shortly after the Lyon Congress, at the February-March Enlarged Executive of the Communist International, Bukharin, then busy unloading all his batteries against “Bordighism” in anticipation of being able to turn them against “Trotskyism,” could have done, in the spirit of the Second Congress, the balance sheet of five years of “revolutionary parliamentarianism ” in the major Communist parties of the West, the picture would have been no less grim than the one he drew in 1920 in reference to parties still harboring within their bosoms large reformist wings.

The German Party had indeed achieved great electoral successes, but, to the same extent, it had lost in combativeness and bite on the terrain of class clashes–the only one that was taken as a criterion of judgment in 1920: it would continue to reap votes even on the eve of Hitler’s bloodless rise to power! As for his parliamentary activity, not only could he boast of no example of “exploitation” of the Reichstag tribune for propaganda and revolutionary battle, but he had fully justified the Left’s alarm at the Second Congress, going in 1923 to the government with the Social Democrats in Saxony and Thuringia (paranymph the Executive of the International) and, after Hindenburg’s election to the Reich presidency, launching proposals for a single electoral and parliamentary front not just to Social Democracy, but to the bourgeois “left.”

The C.P. of France had attracted, at each new meeting in Moscow, the International’s thunderbolts for its chronic, parliamentary recidivism, for its missing or inadequate “use of parliament” during the occupation of the Ruhr and, worse, during the Riff colonial war, while on the level of local elections he returned to his old traditions of supporting “leftist cartels” (Clichy tactics), and still in 1927 scandalized none other than Palmiro Togliatti for its incurable “parliamentary cretinism.”

The Italian Party had risked throwing itself body and soul into the arms of Aventinism in 1924, and in 1936 – rid of the uncomfortable Left – matured the evolution that, in the name of “freedom” to be saved, was to lead it to be the vanguard of revisionism.

Kicked out the door in 1920, parliamentarianism was re-entering, albeit still timidly, through the window. It was what, unheeded, we had warned against. Beyond the initial dèfaillances of a tactical method, we can now see how the failure to adopt Marxist abstentionism in 1920 weighed – which is far more serious – on the developments of the revolutionary workers’ movement in the years 1925-1927 in which the fate of Lenin’s International was being played out.

At the Second Congress, the Left had pointed out how the insistence on parliamentary practice in the delicate period of the formation of Communist Parties, especially in countries with overripe capitalism, threatened to delay or weaken the necessary process of selecting healthy communist and proletarian forces from the entrenched democraticism and reformism of the right and center. The refusal to apply at once to the fledgling parties this which was for us a salutary reagent, a bolt a thousand times more effective than any condition of admission to repel from us the reformist assault on the young parties of the International, was severely paid for in those dramatic years, when to the courageous, however belated battle of the Russian Opposition against rampant Stalinism, from the sister parties of the West did not come that support which the Left had urgently demanded. It could not come, because they were born almost all plethoric, bloated with reformists hiding behind the screen of only formal acceptance of Moscow’s 21 points, and substantial adherence to the only point that would assure them a chance of returning to parliament anyway. They were chock-full of parliamentarists in disguise, momentarily silent but ready to return to the forefront – as – precisely happened in 1925-27 – as the star of “socialism in one country,” that is, of the newest opportunist, revisionist, counterrevolutionary wave, rose on the horizon. The warning had been given in 1920: 1926, unhappily, showed how realistic it had been. It was too late.

That, since then, of the 1920 construction of “revolutionary parliamentarianism” nothing has remained standing in the parties that still call themselves communists, we do not even need to spend time to prove: in parliament they are and remain – nor do they hide it – not to destroy it, but to keep it standing should it ever collapse. “Parliamentary cretinism” has taken its revenge: our warning in 1920 about the tenacity of this disease in countries that have accomplished the bourgeois democratic revolution for a hundred years or more might have appeared then to be dictated by ‘pure theoretical considerations’; today, it is the flesh and blood of history.

But something more has happened, and it constitutes another victory of ours, theoretical once again, but precisely therefore extraordinarily practical. To the same extent that the parties of the erstwhile Communist International imbibed parliamentarianism  to a degree unknown to the Turati and Kautsky – respectable still, in the face of today’s disciples – the democratic bourgeoisie took off that last fig leaf, to let it subsist only as a soporific drug to be administered to the proletarians. Victorious in war over fascism, democracy survives today solely by virtue of not only an integral but a hundredfold adoption of the fascist method, which is then the other side of the totalitarian domination of the great imperialist powers at the scale of the world. This is noted by the ruling class “ideologues” themselves, they who first groan — groaning is their function, while history takes its inexorable course — about the divorce between “real country” and “legal country,” about the overwhelming pre-eminence of the executive, on the suffocating “dictatorship” of the “political class” and its parties, on the reduction of the very honorable deputies and senators to salaried bureaucrats, to managers of state enterprise, to shadows — laboriously greened by television screens — of what is supposed to be their “historic” function. In this framework, the parliamentary “tribune” is no longer anything, not even a microphone, and the “halls” ha long ceased to be the theater of great battles, let us not say of principle, but even merely oratory: it is the realm of ordinary administration, and to restore its pale luster there remain — inane toil — only the columns of any ‘Unità’…

“The corpse still walks,” yes, but only as a mirror for proletarian larks. If these, by absurd hypothesis, were to disappear of the stormy sky of bourgeois society, it too would disappear without anyone noticing its disappearance, because the state machine runs on its own account and the maintenance costs of Montecitorio and Palazzo Madama do not enter its budget other than as faux frais of social preservation. Its “socialist” and “communist” props no longer even have the justification that from there “we speak to the masses”: the voice, in there, dies out before it even leaves the lips (delicate lips, for that matter) of those who articulate it. The fair booth has the sole task of making an act of presence: its function is reduced to “being there,” a corpse cluttering the road to proletarian class revival.

Stalin said — it was regime preservation needs that made him say this — that it was up to the communist parties to raise the flags mocked and trampled by the bourgeoisie. No other task the ruling class assigns to traitors; no other is the trade for which, handsomely, it pays them.

The class party, the Marxist revolutionary party, has only to take note of this. We did so, as can be seen in the article that follows, on the eve of the general elections called for May 1952 – not for one year of the second half of the century, but for the entire span of time that separates us from the revolution. In 1920, we said that the adoption of “revolutionary parliamentarianism ,” especially in countries of advanced capitalism, was dangerous. Today, the balance sheet of long decades authorizes us to say that, regardless of good intentions, to attempt it again would be defeatist: it would be tantamount, consciously or not, to restoring the semblance of life to what history itself, to our great joy, has killed off; it would mean restoring oxygen to what the bourgeoisie – denying itself and agreeing with us – has shown to be only a ghost.

Let the proletariat turn its back forever to the ignoble string puppet theatre, and seek oxygen of the great battles past and future – as Trotsky put it – there where it is only possible to breathe it: outside those walls, in the squares.