Our editorial initiative: Revolutionary preparation or electoral preparation

Our editorial initiative: Revolutionary preparation or electoral preparation

Until the Second Congress of the Communist International (Moscow, July-August 1920), it had not yet been clearly established whether or not the sections of the new International, while denouncing deception, and pointing out to proletarians the need to overthrow the institutions of parliamentary democracy, should inscribe among their tactical means, for purely revolutionary and therefore anti-democratic propaganda purposes, participation in the elections and parliaments of the capitalist West. 
The question had had, depending on the country, different developments. No one doubted either that the new organization of the revolutionary proletariat should accommodate only those movements that had fought against the imperialist war, breaking with the socialtraitors who had supported it, or that sections of the Third International should act on the terrain of armed insurrection to overthrow bourgeois power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, as in Russia in October 1917. 
But the theses and resolutions, however very explicit, of the first congress in March 1919 did not seem to exclude, in the spirit of the Russian Bolsheviks themselves, that certain movements of anarchist or syndicalist-revolutionary orientation would come to swell the great revolutionary wave: suffice it to mention the Spanish National Confederation of Labor, of libertarian tendency, the extreme left of the French General Confederation of Labor (C.G.T.), the American I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World), the Scottish and English Shop Stewards Committees. 
These movements did not hesitate to condemn social patriotism and reformism, did not doubt the necessity of insurrection, but did not have a clear position on those problems of revolutionary power and terror, the state and the political party, which the Bolsheviks had for their part fully resolved. Almost everyone, whether by ideological tradition or by reaction to opportunism, opposed the use of parliament. 
In Italy, the question was posed very clearly as early as the last months of the world conflict. The Socialist Party, which had split from the anarchist current in 1892 and from the anarcho-syndicalist current in 1907 (in the following year there had also been a trade union split with the birth of the Unione Sindacale Italiana, which later split when faced with the problem of war), had hesitated but to fall into the deception of the union sacrèe, but the action of its parliamentary group, dominated by the right, ran counter to any prospect of a revolutionary solution to the postwar crisis. The intransigent revolutionary fraction, although it had triumphed in the party even in the prewar period, had not dared to break except with the ultra-right extreme of Bissolati and consorts, expelled in 1912. Thus the more decisive elements on the left of the party – who during the World War had advocated the open defeatism of national defense – began to feel the need for a split from the old party and came to the historical conclusion that, if the proletariat was to be prepared and led to the revolutionary assault, it had to end with the electoral and parliamentary method by which the “intransigent” leadership itself was hampered (See volumes I and 1a of our History of the Left and the extensive documentation therein). 
This position, defended in the newspaper “Il Soviet,” founded in Naples in 1918 as the organ of the Abstentionist Communist fraction, was rejected by the party majority at the Bologna congress in 1919. But the partisans of participation in elections and parliament, while making their case for Lenin’s approval, had the immense wrong in maintaining the unity of the great electoral party, thus openly opposing Lenin and the fundamental directives of the Third International and not hesitating to reject the abstentionists’ offer to renounce their antiparliamentary bias, provided the split was made. 

The situation in Germany was different. Here the anarchist movement was negligible, Sorelian syndicalism did not exist, and no split had divided the trade unions. At the outbreak of war in 1914 the entire political and trade union movement at first followed the social-patriotic orientation. The split began in the political field with the formation in 1915 of the glorious “Spartacus League” and the 1916 breakaway of the Independent Socialist Party from the old Social Democracy, until at the end of 1918 the Spartacists formed themselves into the Communist Party of Germany (K.P.D.). Two trends emerged there, not only on parliamentary tactics, but on the much more important and principled issue of union splitting. The left wing of the Spartacists, which went so far as to split to form the K.A.P.D. (Communist Labor Party of Germany), argued that, given the betrayal of the trade unions linked to social democracy, it was necessary to advocate a boycott and the creation of a new, left-oriented, revolutionary trade union organization. 

The problem was a serious one: the K.A.P.D. current was, in fact, suffering from syndicalist errors which, in addition to being widespread in the Latin countries, were also finding a certain following in the Dutch movement through the newspaper “De Tribune,” directed by theorists Gorter and Pannekoek. It tended to downplay the importance of the political party and the necessary centralization and discipline, and betrayed the same hesitations on the question of the state, thus showing that it did not share the Russian conception of the political party in charge of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is well known, moreover, that the K.P.D. itself, while remaining linked to Moscow, did not clearly understand at the outset that the revolutionary political party must take power directly into its own hands. 

It goes without saying that the Russian Bolsheviks and the leadership of the new International attached the utmost importance to the German problem; Lenin placed it at the center of his famous pamphlet on “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”, the essential purpose of which was to prevent the infiltration into the Communist movement of anarchically motivated tendencies, incapable of understanding the question of authority within the party and the state. Lenin’s critique, dominated by the attention with which he follows the development of the German movement of fundamental historical importance, deals with this problem in parallel with that of parliamentary tactics, and it is indisputable that he condemns both the trade union split and electoral abstentionism. 
Meanwhile, the Italian abstentionist fraction had endeavored to make it clear in two letters to the Executive Committee of the International that in Italy these two issues did not interfere with each other; that the left fraction of the Socialist Party fully shared Marxist positions on the party and the state, and that it not only had no sympathy for the anarchist and syndicalist movement, but had long been conducting an open polemic against it. While these letters had to overcome many obstacles to reach Moscow, it is a fact that Lenin intervened in person so that a representative of the abstentionist Communist fraction would attend the Second World Congress. 
It is not inappropriate to add that in the preparatory meetings for the Congress, when it came to the admission of representatives from the different countries, the Italian abstentionists argued that organizations without a decided political character, such as the Spanish, French, Scottish and English movements we mentioned above, should not have a deliberative vote, and in the sessions devoted to the vital point of the conditions of admission to the C.I. they were the most energetic advocates of theoretical and programmatic homogeneity and organizational centralization of the new world organization of the revolutionary proletariat. 

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During the sessions of the congress, of which we shall reproduce some of the most important documents, the discussion immediately highlighted the sharp difference between the opposition to electoral participation that the Italian Left defended, and that conducted by syndicalists and semi-syndicalists in other countries. 
The speaker on the question of revolutionary parliamentarism was Bukharin, who spoke at the session of August 2, 1920, presenting the theses he had drafted with Lenin, and to which Trotski had prefaced an introduction entitled, “The New Epoch and the New Parliamentarism,” and announced a counter-report by the representative of the Italian abstentionists, who had also submitted a body of theses to the congress. He added that Comrade Wolfstein would report on the work of the Commission, and polemicized at length against the opponents of parliamentary tactics while distinguishing between the two groups of different theoretical orientation. This was followed by a counter-report from the representative of the Italian Left who, also taking into consideration the arguments carried out by Lenin in “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”, illustrated the concepts contained in his theses. Against parliamentarianism then took the floor the Scotsman Gallacher, later refuted by the Englishman Murphy; in favor was the Bulgarian Shablin; against, the Swiss Herzog and the German Suchi, the latter, however, antiparliamentarian in the anarcho-syndicalist manner. 
Lenin then took the floor, and his speech was, as always, of extreme importance. As the discussion had already gone on for a long time, the speaker on the abstentionist theses answered him very briefly, expressing the grave concern caused by the very arguments, of a tactical nature, used by Lenin to argue that not only could but should be acted upon in parliament for the purpose of destroying it from within. Brief statements were made by Murphy, Shablin, Goldenberg (who proposed an amendment in favor of boycotting elections in the insurrectionary phase); the representative of the Italian youth, Polano, while voting in favor of the theses on revolutionary parliamentarism, acknowledged that the youth movement in Italy was largely abstentionist; Serrati cleared, amid the clamors of the assembly, the PSI parliamentary group; Herzog responded to protests from Bulgarians for his criticism of their party’s parliamentary action; and finally Bukharin closed the debate by briefly responding to the anti-parliamentarianists and concluding with a call to go to parliament to the cry of “Down with parliament.” Put to a vote, the Bukharin-Lenin theses were approved by a large majority against just seven “no” votes. Of the seven votes against, at the express request of the abstentionist rapporteur, anxious to avoid any confusion with the arguments of the syndicalist-revolutionaries, only three went to the theses he presented: those of the Swiss Communist Party, the Belgian Communist Party and a fraction of the Danish Communist Party. As for the speaker he did not have a deliberative vote, only an advisory one. 

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The very nature of the documents we are publishing facilitates their presentation. It can be said that, in examining the historical function of the bourgeois parliament, Trotski’s introduction, Bukharin-Lenin’s theses and those of the abstentionist Marxists, present no difference. From the point of view of principles, all three establish that bourgeois state power must be brought down by violent action and its machine destroyed to its last cog; that parliament is one of the most counter-revolutionary elements of the bourgeois state apparatus, and must therefore be eliminated by force. This is what the Bolsheviks had done with the Constituent Assembly, although they had participated in its election. So Marx had suggested doing in 1871, when he hoped the Communards would march on Versailles and disperse the ignoble National Assembly from whose womb the Third Republic emerged. After its victory, the proletariat must then build a new state, the state of its dictatorship, founded on workers’ councils, and thus mark the historic end of bourgeois power, the capitalist state and parliament. 
Many years have passed since the Second Congress of the Communist International. But a legitimate observation imposes itself: the parliamentary praxis to which the false communist parties, that have the supreme impudence to cover themselves with the arguments of Bukharin, Lenin and Trotsky, have resorted to, has completely disavowed those fundamental principles, in order to identify with the old parliamentarianism of the Second International. Parliament is now undrapedly presented as an eternal organism, in the same way that the bourgeois state is regarded as a structure that can accommodate genuine representation of proletarian class forces. In the face of this, one cannot but recall the easy prediction of the abstentionist representative at the end of his reply to Bukharin: “I hope that the next congress of the Communist International will not have to discuss the results of parliamentary action, but rather to record the victories of the communist revolution in a large number of countries. If this is not possible, I wish Comrade Bukharin to be able to present us with a less dismal balance sheet of parliamentarianism than the one with which he had to begin his report today.” 
We have already discussed Lenin’s speech. It clearly shows how the great revolutionary was firmly convinced of the possibility of sending into the bourgeois parliament groups of communist deputies capable of attacking capitalist institutions not only with theoretical speeches, but with offensive, sabotage, violently destructive action, and supplemented by armed action of the masses (today, we have the right to think that this prediction could not have been realized even if the revolution had broken out in the short space of a few years, as Lenin and all communists were convinced at the time). But the formulations contained in Lenin’s speech, with all its dialectical power, were enough to arouse serious apprehensions, not so much about what the International he led might do, but about the interpretations that would not fail to exploit in an ignoble way his too broad authorizations for tactical elasticity.
Lenin said, “Do you ignore the fact that every revolutionary crisis is accompanied by a parliamentary crisis?” And he insisted on the need to take into account the facts, which dictated that parliament should be regarded as an arena in which class struggles are forcibly reflected and through which we can influence the development of situations in a direction favorable to us. Dismayed by these and other statements, the representative of the abstentionists dared to ask his great contradictor whether such dialectical audacity did not introduce the risk of one day renouncing that condemnation of all participation of proletarian deputies in bourgeois ministries, which radical Marxists had always pronounced. 

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For us, it is clear that Lenin’s thought was a thousand miles away from the developments that neo-opportunism has given to this formula, distorting it completely. Today we are told that every class struggle is not only not reflected in parliament, but can actually develop and find its solution in parliamentary diatribes. One step further, and all the fundamental theses, those of Lenin himself, are repudiated, and with them the fundamental thesis that the transfer of power from one class party to another cannot historically be realized through democracy, but only through revolution. Only the most brazen traitors can insinuate that Lenin’s thought is reconciled with the ignoble claim that it was, in essence, by accident that the Bolsheviks won power in Russia through civil war, and that therefore, in other countries, or even in all of them, it will suffice to take that parliamentary and democratic path of which the texts of Lenin, Bukharin and Trotski pronounced the irrevocable historical condemnation, even when they admitted for the communist parties, expressly constituted with a view to insurrection, the possibility of action within parliaments. 
In subsequent congresses, the desire to reconcile obvious theoretical contradictions with an immense force of political will developed dangerously, especially when Lenin was no longer there to resolve them; and thus the foundations were laid for the catastrophic precipice into opportunism, the multiple phases of which we have experienced over the past decades. 
It is today clear that it is no longer a matter of theoretical prediction, but of ascertaining actual historical facts; and our perspective finds easy confirmation in an in-depth reading of the historic discussion of 1920.