[GM9] Bases of Party Action in the Field of Proletarian Economic Struggles Pt. 5

8. – ECONOMIC ORGANISMS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

Our previous lengthy discussion led us, by analyzing the historical class experience, to the following conclusion inscribed black and white in the party’s theses: the resurgence of class economic organisms is an indispensable factor in the resumption of the revolutionary process and constitutes the real, tangible sign that the proletariat, driven by capitalist economic contradictions, has resumed its struggle. In front of these organisms, which material contradictions irresistibly produce, must stand a revolutionary party endowed with a firm and invariant program, which has been able to maintain its revolutionary course even in the most negative times and historical circumstances and to which the events of the rising struggle of the proletariat give the possibility of putting itself at the head of the spontaneous proletarian organisms, of prevailing there over any other political orientation and tendency, worse if falsely revolutionary, and of making these organisms the “transmission belt” of its own directions.

On this general thesis, in the course of this writing, we have grafted other theses, no less ours, ever: first of all, that the spontaneous emergence of these class organisms is not understood by the party in a passive sense, as if it were merely waiting for it or wishing for it in words. On the contrary, the party favors, wherever possible, the emergence of these organisms, directs the even sporadic and limited motions of proletarian groups toward this end, supports and defends their attempts, becomes, in certain situations, unfavorable from the point of view of proletarian combativity, one of the few or the only factor of support and strength to those few workers who set themselves on the right path, the only guarantor of the perseverance of these bodies on their natural ground of defense of proletarian material conditions, battling against all the forces and influences aiming at taking the workers out of it.

Does this battling attitude of the party alongside even minimal attempts by proletarians to return to class-based ground contradict the fundamental Marxist thesis that the objective conditions of revolution are not created by anyone’s will? We answer: the party does not claim it creates the objective conditions, which depend neither on its action nor on its will, but its task is to interact with the even minimal efforts that workers undertake, to be for them an effective coefficient of strength and expansion on a consistent basis, while all the material and ideological forces of the class enemy tend to demoralize and divert them.

Whether or not small groups of workers (actual workers!) opposing the “policy of sacrifices” arise today depends not on the will of the party, but on the weight of the world economic crisis; whether they stand and proliferate or degenerate will ultimately depend only on a series of objective causes independent of anyone’s will. But between their emergence and their survival or degeneration there is a battle, an array of forces in which the party is not a mere onlooker and cold analyzer of the results, but an active agent and defender of proletarian efforts with its own precise direction of action, the enemy and opponent of all directions that would like to stifle these energies.

The fact that economic trade union bodies may arise spontaneously out of the class struggle and are not a creation of the party has never meant, in the history of the proletarian movement, that communists have not been the most active among the founders and militants of workers’ unions, which, many times, have been able to survive only because of the activity and toil of communist militants, agents on the front lines as organizers of trade union workers’ movement. Who does not see that the party with its word, its clear vision, its organized forces, its men is also a factor in the objective situation and at some point, indeed, the only factor that guarantees its revolutionary outcome?

The Marxist conception of the party and its activity,

«thus shuns fatalism, which would have us remain passive spectators of phenomena into which no direct intervention is felt possible. Likewise, it rejects every voluntarist conception, as regards individuals, according to which the qualities of theoretical preparation, force of will, and the spirit of sacrifice – in short, a special type of moral figure and a requisite level of “purity” – set the required standards for every single party militant without exception, reducing the latter to an elite, distinct and superior to the rest of the elements that compose the working class. The fatalist and passivistic error, though it might not necessarily lead to negating the function and the utility of the party, at the very least would certainly involve adapting the party to a proletarian class that is understood merely in a statistical and economic sense» (Lyon Theses, 1926).

Another thesis of ours, which we have long demonstrated, is that spontaneous workers’ bodies don’t derive their function and value, with respect to the effects of class mobilization, from a general consciousness or set of homogeneous ideas about the course and aims of the struggle, but from the very struggle they are compelled to undertake in defense of the material conditions of proletarians, independently of and sometimes against the very ideas that predominate in them. Their value lies and will always lie in their very existence, which expresses the will of proletarians to oppose the capitalist attack on their living conditions, that is, a material existence of the proletariat independently of the consciousness of the causes, methods and aims attributed to it. It’s their action of practical defense of material conditions, not their idea of this action, that justifies their existence.