[GM19] The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism in the Doctrine and History of the International Proletarian Struggle (Pt. 1)

I. THE PARTY AND THE CLASS STATE AS ESSENTIAL FORMS OF THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION

THE CENTRAL QUESTION OF POWER

In spite of the preventive counter-measures taken by the 20th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, the number of critics of the Moscow degeneration has continued to grow after the events in Hungary, Poland and Eastern Germany, and they are even to be found on the margins of the official Stalinist parties in the West, and include people like Sartre and Picasso who are highly dubious and petty-bourgeois in our opinion. Their not entirely unsuccessful condemnation of Moscow sounds something like this: abuse of dictatorship, abuse of the centrally-disciplined political party, abuse of the State power in its dictatorial form. All of them put forward similar remedies: more liberty, more democracy, socialism to be brought into the ideological and political atmosphere of liberal and electoral legality, and the use of State power in relation to different political proposals and opinions should be renounced. As usual, the main targets of our criticism are not those who hold this point of view because they openly advocate the bourgeois mode of production (sanctified by just such an ideological, juridical and political framework), but those who wish to graft such nonsense onto the trunk of Marxist doctrine.

We hold exactly the opposite point of view, so let’s set the record straight immediately. The revolutionary movement, freed from servile admiration of the American „free World”, freed from subjection to a corrupt Moscow and immune from the syphilitic putridity of opportunism, can only re‑emerge by recovering its original radical Marxist platform, and by declaring that the content of socialism surpasses and negates such concepts as Liberty, Democracy, and Parliamentarism and reveals them to be means of defending and propping up Capitalism. But perhaps the supreme lie and main plank of counter-revolutionary thought is the notion of the State as neutral arbiter of class and party interests, and therefore also of a farcical freedom of opinion. Such a State, and such a freedom, are monstrous inventions that history has never known nor ever shall know.

Not only is it indisputable that Marxism established and declared all this right from its inception, but it must also be emphasised that the concept of the use of physical force against an enemy minority – or majority – presupposes the intervention of two essential forms contained within the Marxist historical scheme: Party and State.

A „Marxist historical scheme” exists, in other words, insofar as the Marxist doctrine is based upon the possibility of mapping out a pattern within history. If that pattern cannot be found, or is wrong, then Marxism will fall apart and its deniers will be right. As for the falsifiers and „modernisers” of Marxism, they would be highly unlikely to capitulate even if provided with evidence that their views were mistaken!

Those who oppose our thesis that Party and State are main, rather than merely accessory, elements within the Marxist scheme, and who prefer to insist that Class is the principal element, with party and State as accessory features of class history and class struggles (and as easy to change as the tyres on a car) are directly contradicted by Marx himself. In a letter to Weydemeyer (March 5, 1852) quoted by Lenin in State and Revolution, Marx wrote that the existence of classes wasn’t discovered by him but by bourgeois economists and historians. It was other people who discovered Class struggles as well, which doesn’t mean they were communist or revolutionary. The content of his doctrine, he said, resides in the historical concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary stage in the transition from capitalism to socialism. Thus speaks Marx, and it is one of the rare times when he speaks about himself.

We are, therefore, not particularly interested in a working class which is statistically defined, and neither are we particularly interested in attempts to work out where the interests of the working class diverge from other classes (there are always more than two). What interests us is the class which has set up its dictatorship, i.e. which has taken power, destroyed the bourgeois State, and set up its own State: that is how Lenin put it, shaming those in the 2nd International who had „forgotten” Marxism. How is it that Class can form the basis of a dictatorial and totalitarian State power, of a new State machine opposed to the old like a victorious army occupying the positions of the defeated enemy? Through what organ? The philistine’s immediate answer is: a man, and in Russia Lenin was that man (whom they have the nerve to lump together with the wretched Stalin, denied today and maybe murdered yesterday by his worshippers). Our answer is quite different.

The organ of the dictatorship and operator of the State-weapon is the political class party; the party which, through its doctrine and its continuous historical action, has been potentially granted the task, proper to the proletarian class, of transforming society. We not only say that the struggle and the historical task of the class cannot be achieved without the two forms: dictatorial State, (i.e. the exclusion, as long as they exist, of the other classes which are henceforth defeated and subdued) and political party, we also say – in our customary dialectical and revolutionary language – that one can only begin to speak of class – of establishing a dynamic link between a repressed class in today’s society and a future revolutionised social form, and taking into consideration the struggle between the class which holds the State and the class which is to overthrow it – only when the class is no longer a cold statistical term at the miserable level of bourgeois thought, but a reality, made manifest in its organ, the Party, without which it has neither life nor the strength to fight.

One cannot therefore detach party from class as though class were the main element and the party merely accessory to it. By putting forward the idea of a proletariat without a party, a party which is sterilized and impotent party, or by looking for substitutes for it, the latest corrupters of Marxism have actually annihilated the class by depriving it of any possibility of fighting for socialism, or even, come to that, fighting for a miserable crust of bread.
 

AN ERROR UNMASKED 100 YEARS AGO

As a result of their confused critique, today’s „enrichers” of Marxism have made similar blunders, and have inadvertently ended up adopting the same bourgeois and petty-bourgeois insinuations which were made when the Russian Revolution was still following the classic Marxist line – admired even by the „enrichers” – in which Class, State, Party and Party members stood together on the same revolutionary plane, precisely because on these essential points there were no hesitations of any kind.

They fail to realize that in diluting the party and its function as the main revolutionary organ they declass the proletariat; which having been deprived of the ability to overthrow the ruling class, or even to mitigate its effects in restricted fields of activity, ends up helplessly shackled to it. They really think they have improved Marxism by having learnt from history a banal commonplace of the „don’t push things too far”! variety, worthy of the pettiest shop-keeper. What they don’t see is that it isn’t a correction we’re dealing with here but a liquidation; or rather, an inferiority complex born out of an impotent lack of understanding.

The Party form and the State form are key elements in the earliest Marxist texts; and are two fundamental stages in the epic development which the Communist Manifesto describes.

There are two revolutionary stages referred to in the chapter ’Proletarians and Communists’. The first stage (already touched on before in the first chapter ’Bourgeois and Proletarians’) is the organisation of the proletariat into a political party. This follows on from another very famous statement: every class struggle is a political struggle, but it is much clearer, and tallies with our thesis which states: the proletariat is a class in a historical sense when it has started to struggle politically as a party. In fact, the Manifesto states: ’This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party’.

The second revolutionary stage is the organisation of the proletariat into a ruling class. Here the question of power and the State arises. ’As we have seen above, the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class’.

A little further on we find Marx’s blunt definition of the Class State: ’The proletariat organised as the ruling class’.

Perhaps we needn’t point out here that another of the essential theses reinstated by Lenin, the eventual disappearance of the State, is also included in this famous early text. The general definition: ’Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another’ underscores the classic assertions: the public power will lose its political character, classes and all class domination will disappear, even that of the proletariat.

Therefore Party and State are at the heart of the Marxist viewpoint. You either accept or reject it. Searching for the class outside of its Party and its State is a waste of energy, and depriving the class of them means turning your back on communism and the revolution.

But this foolish attempt, which the „modernizers” consider an original discovery of the post 2nd World War, had already been made before the Manifest, when it had been routed by Marx in his formidable polemical pamphlet against Proudhon: The Poverty of Philosophy. This pivotal work destroyed the notion (which in fact was very ahead of its time) that the social transformation and abolition of private property might be achieved without the need to engage in a struggle for political power. Finally there is the famous sentence: «Do not say that the social movement excludes the political movement», which leads on to our unequivocal thesis: by Politics we don’t mean a peaceful ideological contest, or worse still, a constitutional debate; we mean „hand to hand conflict”, „total revolution”, and finally, as the poetess George Sand put it: „Le Combat où la mort„.

Proudhon rejects the idea of political conflict because his view of the way societies change is fundamentally flawed: it doesn’t involve the complete overthrow of capitalist relations of production; it is competition orientated, localised and co‑operativist, and is trapped within a bourgeois vision of business enterprise and market. He might have proclaimed that property was theft, but his system, remaining a mercantile system, remains one which is property orientated and bourgeois. Proudhon’s myopia about economic revolution is the same as today’s „factory socialists”, who duplicate in less vigorous form the old Utopia of Robert Owen; who wanted to liberate the workers by handing over to them the management of the factories, right in the middle of bourgeois society. Whether these people label themselves Ordinovists in Italy, or Barbarists in France, they are in the end, all of them, chips off the same Proudhonian block and deserve the same invective as Stalin: Oh Poverty of the Enrichers!
 

RESURRECTED AND TENACIOUS PROUDHONISM

In Proudhon’s system we find individual exchange, the market, and the free will of the buyer and seller exalted above all else. It is asserted that in order to eliminate social injustice, all that is required is to relate every commodity’s exchange value to the value of the labour contained within it. Marx shows – and will show later, pitting himself against Bakunin, against Lassalle, against Duhring, against Sorel and against all the latter‑day pygmies mentioned above – that what lies beneath all this is nothing other than the apologia, and the preservation, of bourgeois economy; incidentally, there is nothing different in the Stalinist claim that in a Socialist society, which Russia claims to be, the law of exchange of equivalent values will continue to exist.

In The Poverty of Philosophy, in a few succinct lines, Marx points out the abyss which lies between these by‑products of the capitalist system and the tremendous vision of the communist society of the future. It is his reply to the society „built” by Proudhon, where unlimited competition and a balance of supply and demand achieve the miracle of ensuring that everyone gets the most useful and essential goods at „minimum cost”, eternal petty-bourgeois dream of the idiotic servants of capital. Marx easily disposes of such sophistry and ridicules it by comparing it to the claim, given that when the weather is fine everybody goes for a walk, Proudhonian people go out for a walk to ensure fine weather.

«In a future society, in which class antagonism would have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the social time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility».

This extract, one of the many gems that can be found in the classic writings of our great school, shows how shallow it is to maintain that Marx loved to describe capitalism and its laws, but never described socialist society for fear of lapsing into… utopianism. A view shared by Stalin and second‑rate anti‑Stalinists alike.

In fact, in their wish to emancipate the proletariat whilst preserving mercantile exchange, it is the Proudhons and Stalins who are the utopians; and the latest version of such attempts is Kruschev’s reform of Russian industry.

The free, individual exchange, on which Proudhon’s metaphysic is based leads to exchange between factories, workshops, and firms managed by workers, and results in the rancid banality which locates the content of socialism in the conquest of the factory by the local workers.

In his crusade to defend competition, old Proudhon was the precursor of that modern superstition – productive ’emulation’. Back in his day, the orthodox thinkers (unaware of being less reactionary that today’s Krushchevs) used to say that progress arises from healthy ’emulation’. But Proudhon identifies productive ’industrial’ emulation with competition itself. Rivals for the same object, such as ’the woman for the lover’, tend to emulate one another. With a note of sarcasm, Marx observes: if the lover’s immediate object is the woman, then the immediate object of industrial rivalry should be the product, not the profit. But since in the bourgeois world profit is the name of the game (and this is true a hundred years on) the alleged productive emulation ends up as commercial competition. And beneath the seductive smiles the Americans and Muscovites are currently casting in each other’s direction, profit is still what they are both after.

Along with his defective view of the revolutionary society, Proudhon is the precursor of the worst aspects of today’s fashionable „factory socialists”: the rejection of Party and State because they create leaders, chiefs and power-brokers, who, due to the weakness of human nature, will inevitably be transformed into a privileged group; into a new dominant class (or caste?) to live off the backs of the proletariat.

These superstitions about „human nature” were ridiculed by Marx a long time ago when he wrote in a short, pithy sentence: Monsieur Proudhon ignores that all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature. Under this massive tombstone can be laid to rest countless throngs of past, present and future anti‑Marxist idiots.

In support of our declaration that not even the most minor restrictions can be placed on the full and unqualified use of the weapons of Party and State weapons in the workers’ revolution, and in order to get rid of these hypocritical scruples, we should add that in order to deal with the inevitable individual manifestations of the psychological pathology which proletarians and communists have inherited, not from human nature, but from capitalist society, with its horrible ideology and its individualistic mythology of the „dignity of the human person”, there is only one organisation capable of providing an effective and radical remedy. That organisation is specifically the communist political party, both during the revolutionary struggle, and after it, when it assumes its most definitive function – that of the wielding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Other types of organisations which think they can replace it must be rejected not only because of their revolutionary impotence, but because they are a hundred times more susceptible to the degenerating influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. And yet the criticism of these organisations, which they have been subjected to from all sides since time immemorial, should adopt a historical rather than a „philosophical” approach. And yet, it is still of prime importance to make a Marxist analysis of the justifications put forward by the proponents of these schemes, and clearly demonstrate that are influenced by an ideology which is essentially bourgeois in outlook, or even less than bourgeois, such as the views proposed by the pseudo-intellectuals who so dangerously infest the margins of the working-class movement.

The Party, which at an organisational level sets the non‑proletarian at the same level as the proletarian, is the only form of organisation which can allow non‑proletarians to arrive at the theoretical and historical position which is based on the revolutionary interests of the labouring class; finally, though only after much anguish and torment, these renegades from other classes will serve as revolutionary mines rather than as bourgeois booby-traps in our own ranks.

The party’s superiority lies precisely in its overcoming of the disease of labourism and workerism. You join the party as a consequence of your own position in the hand to hand struggle between historical forces for a revolutionary social form; and your position as party member and militant is not merely a servile copy of your position „in respect to the productive mechanism”, i.e. that mechanism which is created by bourgeois society and related „physiologically” to that society and to its ruling class.
 
 

II. THE PROLETARIAT’S ECONOMIC ORGANISATIONS: PALE SUBSTITUTES FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY

A HISTORY OF IMPOTENT SYSTEMS

In our fight against the Stalinist betrayal, we have always considered its distortions of economic theory as a thousand times more serious than the „abuse of power” which so scandalised trotskists and Khruschevians, or the famous ’crimes’ which world philistinism keeps on harking on about. In order to combat these distortions, we always have recourse to Marx’s classical thesis against Proudhon which appears in the first volume of Capital, chapter XXIV, note: «We may well, therefore, be astonished at the cleverness of Proudhon, who would abolish capitalistic property by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based on commodity production».

Every criticism and ’improved’ programme put out by all the various so‑called anti‑Stalinist groups relies on the ridiculous notion that there needs to be a detoxification – sterilisation as far as the revolution is concerned – of the Party and the State, forms (according to the extremely hackneyed thesis of ’the tyrant and his cronies’) which were supposedly abused by Stalin because of his „insatiable lust for power”. It is important show that all those who nurture this bigoted preoccupation (and who probably want to be leaders, and crave personal success, themselves) have succumbed, as far as economic and social matters are concerned, to the same reactionary illusion as Proudhon: they are blind to the fact that the historical opposition between communism and capitalism means that communism and socialism are opposed to mercantilism.

First of all we need to consider the historical evidence. This shows us that every interpretation which has attempted to repel the monsters of Party and political State, by putting forward new types of organisation to marshal the proletarian class in its struggle against capital and to establish a post‑capitalist society, has been a miserable failure.

In the third part of this report, we will deal with economics, or rather we shall demonstrate that the goal, the programme, which all these „non‑party” and „non‑State” movements set themselves is not a socialist and communist society, but rather a petty-bourgeois economic pipedream, which has resulted in them all ending up bogged down in modern capitalism’s game of Parties and States.

First of all, it must be recognised that all these attempts based on formulas or „recipes” for organisational miracle cures are clearly not Marxist. They echo the stale banalities of the political hucksters of fifty years ago, who used to treat the events of historical struggle as though they’d been selected from a trendy fashion magazine. According to these gossiping pedants the political club was the motive force of the French Revolution (Girondins, Jacobins), then along came the electoral parties, followed by the locally based organisations advocated by the anarchists. Then (let’s say, around 1900) the fashionable thing becomes workers’ occupational trade unions, with an inherent tendency to replace all the other organisational forms and use their revolutionary potential to set themselves up in opposition to Party and State (Georges Sorel). A very hackneyed refrain. Today (1957), another „self‑sufficient” form – the factory council – is given pride of place under various guises by the Dutch „tribunists”, Italian Gramscists, Jugoslavian Titoists, the so‑called trotskists, and a number of other batrachomyomachian „left‑wing” groups.

Just one of Marx, Engels and Lenin’s theses is enough to bury all this empty talk: «Revolution is not a question of forms of organisation».

The real issue is the clash of historical forces and the new social programme which will replace capitalism when its long cycle is over. Instead of discovering the goal scientifically, in determining factors of past and present, the old pre‑Marxist utopianism invented it instead. The new post‑Marxist utopianism eliminates the goal, and replaces it with the frantically active organisation (or in the words of Bernstein, chief social-democratic revisionist: «The aim is nothing: the movement is everything»).

We shall briefly record the „proposals” of these fashion designers, who want to parade the battle-weary proletariat up the political catwalk with a new set of chains yoking it to capital.
 

THE SUPERSTITION OF THE LOCAL „COMMUNE”

Anarchist doctrines are the expression of the following thesis: centralised power is evil; and they assume that the entire question of the liberation of the oppressed class can be resolved by getting rid of it. But for the anarchist, class is only an accessory concept. He wishes to liberate the individual, the person, and thereby conforms with the programme of the liberal and bourgeois revolution. He only reproaches the latter for having installed a new form of power, failing to see that this is merely the necessary consequence of the fact that it didn’t have as its content and motive-force the liberation of the person or the citizen, but the achieving of dominion of a new social class over the means of production. Anarchism, libertarianism – and even Stalinism, in its Westernised guise – is nothing other than classical revolutionary bourgeois liberalism plus something else (which they call local autonomy, administrative State, and entry of the working class into the constitutional powers). When such petty-bourgeois peccadilloes are grafted on to it, bourgeois liberalism, which in its time was a real and serious matter, becomes just an illusion with which to castrate the workers’ revolution.

Marxism, on the other hand, is the dialectic negation of capitalist liberalism. It doesn’t wish to keep part of capitalism in order to improve it here and there, but to crush it with the class institutions it has produced at the local, and especially centralised, level. Such a task can’t be achieved by encouraging complete autonomy and independence, but only by the formation of a centralised and destructivist power, whose essential and specific forms are the Party and the State, and these forms alone.

The idea of freeing the individual, the person, and making him autonomous, boils down to the ridiculous formula of the subjective refractory individual, who shuts his eyes to society and its oppressive structure because he is convinced that he can’t change it, or else he dreams about one day planting a bomb somewhere; the end result is contemporary existentialism which is unable to effect Society in the slightest.

This petty-bourgeois demand, which arises out of the anger of the small autonomous producer expropriated by big capital and therefore from the defence of property (which Stirner and other individualists consider an inviolable „extension of the individual”) adapted itself to the great historic advance of the working masses, and over the course of time acknowledged some forms of organisation. At the time of the crisis in the 1st International (after 1870) there was a split between the Marxists and anarchists over the latter’s refusal to recognise economic organisations, or even strikes. Engels established that economic trade-unions and strikes weren’t enough to resolve the question of revolution, but that the revolutionary party should support them, inasmuch as their value (as already stated in the Communist Manifesto) lies in the extension of proletarian organisation towards a single, centralised form, which is political.

During this phase, the libertarians would propose an ill‑defined local, revolutionary „commune”, sometimes described as a force which struggles against the constituted power and asserts its autonomy by breaking all links with the central State, and sometimes as a form which manages a new economy. This idea wasn’t new but harked back to the first capitalist forms which appeared at the end of the Middle‑Ages: the autonomous communes, which existed in Italy and in German Flanders where a young bourgeoisie was fighting against the Empire. As always in such cases, events which were then revolutionary, in terms of economic development, have today become an empty repetition disguised as false extremism.

For the anarchists, during over fifty years of commemorations, the model for this local organ was the Paris Commune of 1871. In Marx and Lenin’s far more powerful and irrevocable analysis it is, on the contrary, history’s first great example of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, of a centralised, though here only territorial, proletarian State.

The French capitalist State, as embodied in Thier’s 3rd Republic, moved to crush proletarian Paris and eject it from its capital city, having prepared its assault from behind the Prussian army lines. After the desperate resistance and horrifying massacre, Marx was able to write that from that day onwards all the bourgeois national armies were in league against the proletariat.

It wasn’t a question of reducing the historical conflict from a national to the communal level (just think of the inanity of a poor defenceless provincial town!) but of extending it onto an international scale. At the time of the 2nd International there even emerged a new version of socialism (impressing the restless mind of the young Mussolini) called „communalism”, which aimed to create cells of the future society by conquering municipal administrations: not – alas – with dynamite like the anarchists, but by winning local elections. Since then, the relentless forces of economic development, well known to Marxists, have ensured that every local structure has become tangled in an ever more inextricable web of economic, administrative, and political ties with the central government: just think of the ridiculousness of each little rebel town council setting up its own radio and TV stations to annoy the hated central State!

The idea of organisations forming confederations of workers in each town, and each town declaring itself politically independent, is therefore now defunct. Bourgeois illusions about self‑government still survive, however, and will continue to befuddle the minds, and paralyse the hands, of working class militants for a long time to come.

The other forms of workers’ „immediate” organisation would have a longer and more complex history, with a tendency to get caught up in the craft and professional trade unions, industrial unions, and the factory councils. Insofar as such forms are proposed as alternatives to the revolutionary political party, the history of these movements and the doctrines which are more or less confusedly based upon them, coincide with the history of opportunism during the 2nd and 3rd Internationals. As we have covered the subject on numerous occasions elsewhere, we will give only a brief summary here, but we will remark that the European masses are still largely ignorant of their class’s history, and they will really need to learn from the immense sacrifices which have been made one day, and treasure them,

The history of localism, and of so‑called anarchist and libertarian communism, is the story of opportunism within the 1st International. Marx fought to free the International of these tendencies by means of both theoretical criticism, and hard organisational struggle against Bakunin and his intractable supporters in France, Switzerland, Spain and Italy.

Despite being able to draw on the rich historical experience of the Russian Revolution, many „left‑wingers”, and declared enemies of Stalinism, nevertheless still look to the anarchists for potential support. We therefore need to reiterate that libertarianism was the first of the diseases to infect the proletarian movement, and was the precursor to all later opportunisms (including Stalinism) in that it falsified politics and history in order to attract the petty and middle bourgeois strata of society onto the proletarian side – despite the fact that these classes have always ruined everything, and been the source of every kind of calamity and error. What resulted from this approach wasn’t proletarian leadership over the „popular masses”, but destruction of any proletarian features of the general movement, and a reinforced enslavement of the proletariat to capital.

This danger has been denounced by Marxism since its earliest days, and it is extremely sad to hear people say that it can be dealt with more effectively now than in Marx’s day because there are more facts available, whilst they meanwhile misinterpret what was already clear over a century ago. The „popular” version of working-class revolution used to horrify Engels, and he condemned it often. In the preface to „The Class Struggles in France”, for instance, he wrote: «After the defeats of 1849 we in no way shared the illusions of the vulgar democracy (…) This vulgar democracy reckoned on a speedy and finally decisive victory of the „people” over the „tyrants”; we looked to a long struggle after the removal of the „tyrants”, among the antagonistic elements concealed within this „people” itself».

As far as Marxist doctrine is concerned, from that time on it was equipped with the basic concepts and principles needed to criticise all of today’s popular variants of opportunism; including the models put forward by groups such as the Barbarists who in their lengthy palinodes dedicated to the Hungarian events have presented a „popular” movement as a class movement.

Those who substitute „people” for class, by prioritising the proletarian class above the party, believe they are rendering it a supreme homage whilst in fact they are declassing it, drowning it in „popular” confusion, and sacrificing it on the altar of counter-revolution.