Force, Violence, and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle Pt. 5

Russian Degeneration and Dictatorship

The difficult problem of the degeneration of the proletarian power can be summarized briefly. In a large country the working class has conquered power following the program which called for armed insurrection and the annihilation of all influence of the defeated class through pressure of the proletarian class dictatorship. In the other countries of the world, however, the working class either did not have the strength to initiate the revolutionary attack or else was defeated in the attempt. In these countries, power remained in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and production and exchange continued according to the laws of capitalism which dominated all the relationships of the world market.

In the country where the revolution triumphed, the dictatorship held firm politically and militarily against every counter-attack. It brought the civil war to a close in a few short and victorious years, and foreign capitalism did not engage in a general action to crush it.

A process of internal degeneration of the new political and administrative apparatus began to develop however. A privileged circle began to form, monopolizing the advantages and posts in the bureaucratic hierarchy while continuing to claim to represent the interests of the great labouring masses.

In the other countries, the revolutionary working class movement, which was intimately linked to this same political hierarchy, not only did not succeed in the victorious overthrow of the bourgeois States, but progressively lost and distorted the whole sense of its own action by pursuing other non‑revolutionary objectives.

This terrible problem in the history of the class struggle gives rise to a crucial question: how can such a double catastrophe be prevented? The question actually is badly posed. For those who follow the determinist method the question actually is one of determining the true characteristics and laws of this degenerative process, in order to establish when and how we can recognize the conditions which would allow us to expect and pursue a revolutionary course free from this pathological reversion.

Here we will not concern ourselves with refuting those who deny the existence of such a degeneration and who maintain that in Russia there is a true revolutionary working class power, an actual evolution of the economic forms towards communism, and a coordination with the other proletarian parties of the world which will actually lead to the overthrow of world capitalism.

Nor will we concern ourselves here with a study of the socio-economic aspects of the problem, for this would necessitate a detailed and careful analysis of the mechanism of production and distribution in Russia and of the actual relationships which Russia has with foreign capitalist economies.

Instead, at the end of this historical exposition on the question of violence and force, we will reply to those critical objections which claim that such an oppressive and bureaucratic degeneration is a direct consequence of infringing and violating the canons and principles of elective democracy.

This objection has two aspects, with the less radical being in fact the more insidious. The first aspect is overtly bourgeois and is directly linked to the entire world campaign to defame the Russian Revolution. This campaign, which has been going on since 1917, has been led by all the liberals, democrats and social democrats of the world who have been terrorized as much by the magnificent and courageous theoretical proclamation of the method of the proletarian dictatorship as by its practical application.

In view of what we have recalled in this work, we consider this first aspect of the democratic lamentation to have been refuted. The struggle against it, however, still remains of primary importance today since the conformist demand of what Lenin called “democracy in general” (and which in the basic communist works represents the dialectical opposite, the antithesis and negation of the revolutionary position) is still disgustingly paraded by the very parties who claim to be linked to the present regime in Russia. This very regime, although making dangerous and condemnable concessions to the bourgeois democratic mechanism at home in the area of formal right, not only continues to be but becomes increasingly a strictly totalitarian and police State.

We will never insist enough, then, in our critique of democracy in all the historical forms in which it has appeared until now. Democracy has always been an internal method of organization of the oppressor class, whether this class is old or new. It has always been a technique, whether old or new, that is utilized in the internal relations among the elements and groups of the exploiting class. In the bourgeois revolutions it was also the necessary and vital environment for the blooming of capitalism.

The old democracies were based on electoral principles, assemblies, parliaments or councils. While deceitfully pretending that their aim was to realize a well‑being for all and the extension of the spiritual or material conquests to all of society, their actual function was to enforce and maintain the exploitation of a mass of fanatics, slaves and helots, of whole peoples who had been submitted because they were less advanced or less war‑like, of a whole mass of people excluded from the temple, the senate, the city and the assemblies.

We can read the truth within the multitude of banal theories referring to egalitarianism: it is the compromise, covenant, and conspiracy among the members of the privileged minority to the detriment of the lower classes. Our appraisal of the modern democratic form, which is based on the holy charters of the British, French, and American revolutions, is no different. Modern democracy is a technique which provides the best political conditions for the capitalist oppression and exploitation of the workers. It replaces the old network of feudal oppressors by which capitalism itself was suffocated, but only to exploit in a way which is new and different, but no less intense or extensive.

Our interpretation of the present totalitarian phase of the bourgeois epoch is fundamental in regard to this point. In this phase the parliamentary forms, having played out their role, tend to disappear and the atmosphere of modern capitalism becomes anti‑liberal and anti‑democratic. The tactical consequence of this correct evaluation is that any call to return to the old bourgeois democracy characteristic of rising capitalism is anti‑classist, reactionary, and even “anti‑progressive”.

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We will now take up the second aspect of the democratic critique. This aspect is not inspired by the dogmas of an inter-class and above class democracy, but instead says basically the following: it is well and good to establish the proletarian dictatorship and to do away with any scruples in the repression of the rights of the defeated bourgeois minority; however once the bourgeoisie in Russia was deprived of all rights, the degeneration of the proletarian State occurred because the rules of representation were violated “within” the working class. If an elective system truly functioning according to the majority principle had been established and respected in the base organizations of the proletariat (the soviets, the unions and the political party), with every decision made on the basis of the numerical outcome of a “truly free” vote, then the true revolutionary path would have been automatically maintained and it would have been possible to ward off any degeneration and any danger of the abusive, suffocating domination by the ignoble “Stalinist clique”.

At the heart of this widely accepted viewpoint is the idea that each individual, solely due to the fact that he or she belongs to an economic class (i.e., that he finds himself in particular relationships in common with many others with respect to production) is consequently predisposed to acquire a clear class “consciousness”; in other words to acquire that body of opinions and intentions which reflect the interests, the historical path and the future of his class. This is a false way of understanding Marxist determinism because the formation of consciousness is something which, although certainly linked to the basic economic conditions, lags behind them at a great distance in time and has a field of action that is much more restricted. For example, many centuries before the development of the historical consciousness of the bourgeois class, the bourgeois, the tradesman, the banker, and the small manufacturer existed and fulfilled essential economic functions, but had the mentality of servants and accomplices of the feudal lords. A revolutionary tendency and ideology slowly formed among them however and an audacious minority began to organize itself in order to attempt to conquer power.

Just as it is true that some members of the aristocracy fought for the bourgeois revolution, it is also true that there were many members of the bourgeoisie who, after the conquest of power in the great democratic revolutions, not only retained a way of thinking but also a course of action contrary to the general interests of their own class, and militated and fought with the counter-revolutionary party.

Similarly, while the opinions and consciousness of the worker are formed under the influence of his or her working and material living conditions, they are also formed in the environment of the whole traditional conservative ideology in which the capitalist world envelopes the worker.

This conservative influence is becoming increasingly stronger in the present period. It is not necessary to list again the resources which are available not only for the systematic organization of propaganda through modern techniques, but also for the actual centralized intervention in the economic life through the adoption of numerous reformist measures and State intervention which are intended to satisfy certain secondary needs of the workers and which in fact often have a concrete effect on their economic situation.

For the crude and uneducated masses, the old aristocratic and feudal regimes needed only the church to fabricate servile ideologies. They acted on the rising bourgeoisie, however, primarily through their monopoly over the school and culture. The young bourgeoisie was consequently compelled to sustain a great and complex ideological struggle which the literature presents as a struggle for the freedom of thought but which in fact represented the superstructure of a fierce conflict between two forces which were organized to defeat one another.

Today world capitalism, in addition to the church and schools, commands an endless number of other forms of ideological manipulation and countless methods for forming a so‑called “consciousness”. It has surpassed the old regimes, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the fabrication of falsehoods and deceits. This is true not only in that it broadcasts the most absurd doctrines and superstitions, but also in that it informs the masses in a totally false way about the countless events of the complex modern life.

In spite of this tremendous arsenal of our class enemy we have always maintained that within the oppressed class an antagonistic ideology and doctrine would form and would achieve a greater and greater clarity as the economic development itself sharpens the conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production, and as the fierce struggle between different class interests spreads. This perspective is not founded on the argument that given the fact that the proletarians outnumber the bourgeois, the sum total of their individual views and conceptions would prevail over that of the enemy due to their greater numerical weight.

We have always maintained that this clarity and consciousness is not realized in an amorphous mass of isolated individuals. It is realized instead in organizations which emerge from the undifferentiated mass, in resolute minorities who join together beyond national boundaries following the line of the general historical continuity of the movement. These minorities assume the function of leading the struggle of the masses; the greater part of the masses on the other hand are pushed into this struggle by economic factors well before they develop the same strength and clarity of ideas that is crystallized in the guiding party.

This is why a count of the votes cast by the entire working class mass (supposing such a thing were possible) would not exclude an outcome favourable to the counter-revolution even in a situation which would be conducive to a forward advance and a struggle under the leadership of the vanguard minority. Even a general and widespread political struggle which ends with the victorious conquest of power is not sufficient for the immediate elimination of the whole complex of traditional influences of bourgeois ideology. The latter not only continues to survive throughout the whole social structure within the country of the victorious revolution itself, but continues to act from outside with a massive deployment of all the modern means of propaganda of which we have spoken before.

It is, of course, of great advantage to break the State machinery, to destroy all the old structures for the systematic fabrication of bourgeois ideology (such as the church, the school and other countless associations) and to take control over all the major means of diffusing ideas, such as the press, the radio, the theatres, etc. However all this is not enough. It must be completed by a socio-economic condition: the rapid and successful eradication of the bourgeois form of production. Lenin was well aware that the necessity of permitting the continued existence (and in a certain sense the flourishing) of the family management of the small peasant farms meant that a whole area would be left open to the influence of the selfish and mercantile bourgeois psychology, to the anti‑revolutionary propaganda of the priest, and in short to the play of countless counter-revolutionary superstitions. The unfavourable relationship of forces, however, left no other choice. Only in conserving the force, strength and firmness of the armed power of the industrial proletariat was it possible to make use of the revolutionary impetus of the peasant allies against the shackles of the agrarian feudal regime and at the same time guard against the danger of a possible revolt by the middle peasants, such as occurred during the civil war against Denikin and Kolchak.

The erroneous position of those who want to see the application of arithmetic democracy within the working class, or within certain class organizations, can thus be traced back to a false appreciation of the Marxist determinism.

We have already shown that it is incorrect to believe that in each historical period each of the opposing classes has corresponding groups which profess theories opposed to the other classes. Instead the correct thesis is that in each historical epoch the doctrinal system based on the interests of the ruling class tends to be professed by the oppressed class, much to the advantage of the former. He who is a slave in the body is also a slave in the mind. The old bourgeois lie is precisely to pretend that we must begin with the liberation of the intellect (a method which leads to nothing and costs nothing for the privileged class), while instead we must start with the physical liberation of the body.

It is also erroneous to establish the following determinist progression, with respect to the famous problem of consciousness: influence of economic factors, class consciousness, class action. The progression instead is the reverse: determining economic factors, class action, class consciousness. Consciousness comes at the end and, as a rule, after the decisive victory. Economic necessity unites and binds the pressure and energy of all those who are oppressed and suffocated by the forms of a given productive system. The oppressed react, they fight, they hurl themselves against these limits. In the course of this clash and this battle they increasingly develop an understanding of the general conditions of the struggle as well as its laws and principles, and a clear comprehension of the program of the struggling class develops.

For decades we have been reproached for wanting a revolution carried out by those who are unconscious.

We could answer that provided that the revolution sweeps away the mass of horrors created by the bourgeois regime, and provided that the terrible encirclement of the productive masses by bourgeois institutions which oppress and suffocate them is broken, then it would not bother us in the least if the decisive blows were delivered even by those who are not yet conscious of the aim of the struggle.

Instead, we left Marxists have always clearly and emphatically insisted on the importance of the theoretical side of the working class movement, and we consequently have constantly denounced the absence of principles and the betrayal of these by the right wing opportunists. We have always maintained the validity of the Marxist conception which considers the proletariat even as the true inheritor of modern classical philosophy. Let us explain. The struggle of the bourgeois usurers, colonial settlers and merchants was paralleled by an attack by the critical method against the dogmas of the church and the ideology of the authority of divine right; there was a revolution which appeared to be completed in natural philosophy before it was completed in society. This resulted from the fact that, of those forms which had to be destroyed in order for the capitalist productive forces to develop, the scholastic and theocratic ideological system of the middle ages was a relevant one. However, after its political and social victory, the bourgeoisie became conservative. It had no interest in directing the weapon of the critique, which it had used against the lies of Christian cosmology, to the area of the much more pressing and human problem of the social structure. This second task in the evolution of the theoretical consciousness of society fell to a new class which was pushed by its own interests to lay bare the lies of bourgeois civilization. This new class, in the powerful dialectical vision of Marx, was the class of the “wretched artisans”, excluded from culture in the middle ages and supposedly elevated to a position of legal equality by the liberal revolution; it was the class of manual labourers of big industry, uneducated and all but illiterate.

The key to our conception lies precisely in the fact that we do not consider the seat of consciousness to be the narrow area of the individual person and that we well know that, generally speaking, the elements of the mass who are pushed into struggle cannot possess in their minds the general theoretical outlook. To require such a condition would be purely illusory and counter-revolutionary. Neither does this task of possessing the theoretical consciousness fall to a band or group of superior individuals whose mission is to help humanity. It falls instead to an organism, to a mechanism differentiated within the mass, utilizing the individual elements as cells that compose the tissue and elevating them to a function made possible only by this complex of relationships. This organism, this system, this complex of elements each with its own function, (analogous to the animal organism with its extremely complicated systems of tissues, networks, vessels, etc.) is the class organism, the party, which in a certain way defines the class before itself and gives it the capacity to make its own history.
 

This whole process is reflected in the most diverse ways on the different individuals who statistically belong to the class. To be more specific, we would not be surprised to find side by side in a given situation the revolutionary and conscious worker, the worker who is still a total victim of the conservative political influences and who perhaps even marches in the ranks of the enemy, the worker who follows the opportunist currents of the movement, etc.

And we would have no conclusions to automatically draw from a vote among the working class, that would indicate how the members of the class are numerically distributed on these various positions – assuming that such a vote was actually possible.

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It is only too well established that the class party, both before and after the conquest of power, is susceptible of degeneration in its function as a revolutionary instrument. It is necessary to search both for the causes of this serious phenomenon of social pathology and for the means to fight it. However it only follows from what has been said above that the method of voting cannot guarantee in any way the correctness of the Party’s orientation and directives, regardless of whether this voting is done by militants of the party or by a much wider circle encompassing the workers who belong to the unions, the factory organizations or even the representative organs of a political nature, such as the soviets or workers councils.

The history of the working class movement shows concretely that such a method has never led to any good and has never prevented the disastrous victories of opportunism. In all the conflicts between tendencies within the traditional socialist parties before World War I, the right‑wing revisionists always argued against the radical Marxists of the left that they (the right wing) were much more closely tied to the wide strata of the working class than the narrow circles of the leadership of the political party.

The opportunist currents had their main support in the parliamentary leaders of the party who disobeyed the party’s political directives and demanded a free hand to collaborate with the bourgeois parties. They did so under the pretext that they had been elected by the mass of proletarian voters who far outnumbered the proletarians who belonged to the party and elected the party’s political leadership. The union leaders who belonged to the party practised the same collaboration on the union level as the parliamentary leaders did on the political level. They refused the discipline of the class party, using the justification that they represented all the unionized workers who greatly outnumbered the party’s militants. In their haste to ally with capitalism (something which culminated in their support for the first imperialist war) neither the parliamentary possibilists nor the union bonzes hesitated, in the name of the workerism and labourism they proudly flaunted, to deride those group who brought forwards the true class politics within the party and to brand these groups as intellectuals and sometimes even as non‑proletarians.

The history of Sorelian syndicalism also shows that the method of direct representation of the rank and file worker does not have leftist results and does not lead to the preservation of a truly revolutionary orientation. At a certain period this school of anarcho-syndicalism had seemed to some to be a true alternative to the degeneration of the social-democratic party which had taken the road of renouncing direct action and class violence. The Marxist groups which later converged in the Leninist reconstruction of the Third International rightly criticized and condemned this seemingly radical orientation. They denounced it for abandoning the only unifying class method which could surmount the narrowness of the individual trade and of the everyday conflicts limited to economic demands. Even if physically violent means of struggle were used, this orientation led to the denial of the position of revolutionary Marxism, because for Marxism every class struggle is a political struggle and the indispensable instrument of this struggle is the party.

The justness of this theoretical polemic was confirmed by the fact that even revolutionary syndicalism sank in the crisis of the war and passed into the ranks of social patriotism in the various countries.

As concerns the lesson we can draw from party action immediately after the revolutionary victory, the major episodes of the Russian Revolution are those able to shed the greatest light on the issue we’re dealing with.

We reject the critique which claims that the disastrous degeneration of Leninist revolutionary politics into the present Stalinist policies was brought about in the beginning by the excessive predominance of the party and its central committee over the other working class organizations. We reject the illusory viewpoint that the whole degenerative process could have been contained if a vote among the various base organizations had been used as the means to decide both the make‑up of the hierarchy and the major changes in the politics of the proletarian State. The problem of the degeneration cannot be approached without connecting it to the question of the socio-economic role of the various organisms in the process of destruction of the old economy and of construction of the new one.

Unions undoubtedly constitute and for a long period have constituted a fundamental struggle ground in the development of the revolutionary energies of the proletariat. But this has been possible with success only when the class party has carried on a serious work within the unions in order to shift the concentration of energy from narrow intermediate objectives to general class aims. The trade union, even as it evolved into the industrial union, finds limits to its dynamics because within it there exist different interests between the various categories and groups of workers. There are even greater limits to its action as capitalist society and the capitalist State pass through the three successive historical phases: the prohibition of trade organizations and strikes; the toleration of autonomous trade organizations; and finally the conquest of the trade unions and their imprisonment in the bourgeois system.

Even under a solidly established proletarian dictatorship, the union cannot be considered as an organ which represents the workers in a fundamental and stable way. In this social period conflicts between the various trades in the working class can still exist. The basic point is that the workers only have reason to make use of the union as long as the working class power is compelled to tolerate, in certain sections, the temporary presence of employers; with the disappearance of the latter due to the advance of socialist development, all content of union action is lost. Our conception of socialism is not the substitution of the State boss for the private boss. However if the relationship were such in the transition period, then in the supreme interests of revolutionary politics it could not be admitted as a principle that the employer State must always give in to the economic pressure of the workers’ unions.

We won’t go further in this important analysis, for at this point we have already sufficiently explained why we left Communists do not admit that the unionized mass would be allowed to exert an influence on revolutionary politics through a majority vote.

Now let us consider the factory councils. We must remember that this form of economic organization, which at first appeared to be much more radical than the union, is increasingly losing its pretence of revolutionary dynamism; today the idea of factory councils is common to all political currents, even the fascists. The conception of factory councils as an organization which participates first in the supervising and later the management of production, and in the end which is capable of taking over, factory by factory, the management of production in its totality, has proven to be totally collaborationist. It has proven to be another way, no less effective than the old syndicalism, of preventing the masses from being channelled in the direction of the great united and centralized struggle for power. The polemic over this question caused a great stir in the young Communist parties when the Russian Bolsheviks were compelled to take firm and even drastic measures to combat the workers’ tendency towards autonomous technical and economic management of the factories in which they worked. Such an autonomous management not only impeded the onset of a true socialist plan, but also threatened of seriously harming the efficiency of the production apparatus – something the counter-revolutionaries were counting on. As a matter of fact the factory council, even more so than the union, can act as a representative of very narrow interests which can come into conflict with the general class interests.

Consequently the factory councils also cannot be considered as a basic and definitive organ of the working class State. When a true communist economy is established in certain sectors of production and circulation – that is to say when we have gone far beyond the simple expulsion of the capitalist owner from industry and the management of the enterprise by the State – then it will be precisely the enterprise economy that will disappear. Once we have gone beyond the mercantilist form of production, the local plant will only be a technical node in the great network, rationally managed by a unitary plan. The firm will no longer have a balance sheet of income and expenditures; consequently it will no longer be a firm at all and the producer will no longer be a wage labourer. Thus the factory council, like the union, has natural limits of functioning which prevent it from being, until the end of the revolutionary process, the real field for class preparation, to make the proletarians able and willing to struggle until the complete achievement of their final goal. This is the reason why these economic organizations cannot be a body which oversees the party holding State power and which judges whether or not the party has strayed from its fundamental historical line.

It remains for us to examine the new organism which was brought to life by the Russian Revolution. This was the workers, peasants and, at the beginning, soldiers soviet.

Some claimed that this system represented a new proletarian constitutional form counterposed to the traditional constitutional forms of the bourgeois State. The soviet system reached from the smallest village to the highest bodies of the State through successive horizontal strata. Furthermore it had the two following characteristics: 1) it excluded all elements of the old propertied classes, in other words it was the organizational manifestation of the proletarian dictatorship, and 2) it concentrated all representative, executive and, in theory, even judicial powers in its nerve centres. It has been said that because of these characteristics the soviet system is a perfect mechanism of internal class democracy which, once discovered, would eclipse the traditional parliaments of bourgeois liberalism.

However, since the emergence of socialism from its utopian phase, every Marxist has known that the invention of a constitutional form is not enough to distinguish the great social forms and the great historical epochs. The constitutional structures are transitory reflections of the relationship of forces; they are not derived from universal principles from which we could deduce an inherent mode of State organization.

Soviets in their essence are actual class organizations and are not, as some believed, conglomerations of trade or craft organizations. Consequently they do not suffer from the narrowness of the purely economic organization. For us their importance lies above all in the fact that they are organs of struggle. We do not try to view them in terms of ideal structural models but in terms of the history of their real development.

Thus it was a decisive moment in the Russian Revolution when, shortly after the election of the democratic‑type Constituent Assembly, the soviets rose up against the latter as its dialectical opposite and Bolshevik power dissolved the parliamentary assembly by force. This was the realization of the brilliant historical watchword “All Power to the Soviets”. However, all this was not sufficient for us to accept the idea that once such a form of class representation is born (and leaving aside here the fluctuations, in every sense, of its representative composition, which we are not able to examine here), a majority vote, at whatever moment and turn in the difficult struggle waged by the revolution both domestically and externally, is a reliable and easy method for solving every question and even avoiding the counter-revolutionary degeneration.

We must admit that the soviet system, due to the very complexity of its historical evolutionary cycle (which incidentally must end, in the most optimistic hypothesis, with the disappearance of the soviets along with the withering away of the State), is susceptible of falling under counter-revolutionary influence just as it is susceptible of being a revolutionary instrument. In conclusion, we do not believe that there is any constitutional form which can immunize us against such a danger – the only guarantee, if any, lies in the development of the domestic and international relations of social forces.

Since we want to establish the supremacy of the party, which includes only a minority of the class, over the other forms of organization, it could be possible for someone to object that we seem to think that the party is eternal, in other words that it will survive the withering away of the State of which Engels spoke.

Here we do not want to go into a discussion on the future transformation of the party. Just as the State, in the Marxist definition, withers away and is transformed, from a political apparatus of coercion, into a large and always more rational technical administration, so the party evolves into a simple organization for social research and study corresponding to large institutions for scientific research in the new society.

The distinctive characteristic of the party follows from its organic nature. One does not join the party because one has a particular position in the economic or social structure. No one is automatically a party militant because he is a proletarian, a voter, a citizen, etc.

Jurists would say that one joins the party by free individual initiative. We Marxists say otherwise: one joins the party always due to factors born out of relationships of social environment; but these factors can be linked in a more general way to the characteristics of the class party, to its presence in all parts of the inhabited world, to the fact that it is made up of workers of all trades and enterprises and, in principle, even of those who are not workers, and to the continuity of its work through the successive stages of propaganda, organization, physical combat, seizure of power, and the construction of a new order. Out of all the proletarian organizations, it is consequently the political party which least suffers from those structural and functional limits which enable the anti‑proletarian influences – the germs which cause the disease of opportunism – to force their way in. We have said many times, though, that this danger also exists for the party. The conclusion that we draw is not that it can be warded off by subordinating the party to the other organizations of that class which the party represents – a subordination which is often demanded under false pretexts, other times simply out of naivety with the reason that a greater number of workers belong to other class organizations.

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Our way to interpret this question also concerns the supposed necessity of internal party democracy. We do not deny that there unfortunately have been numerous and disastrous examples of errors committed by the central leadership of the communist parties. However can these errors be avoided through computing the opinions of the rank and file militants?

We do not attribute the degeneration which took place in the Communist Party to the fact that the assemblies and congresses of the militants had little voice with respect to the initiatives taken by the centre.

At many historical turning points we have seen the rank and file smothered by the centre for counter-revolutionary purposes. To this end even the instruments of the State machine, including the most brutal, have been employed. But all this is not the origin of the degeneration of the party but an inevitable manifestation of it, a sign that the party has yielded to counter-revolutionary influences.

The position of the Italian Communist Left on what we could call “the question of revolutionary guarantees” is first of all that no constitutional or contractual provision can protect the party against degeneration even though the party, as opposed to the other organizations we have studied, has the characteristics of a contractual organization (and we use the term not as it is used in jurisprudence nor even as it was used by J.J. Rousseau). The relationship between the militant and the party is based on a commitment, and our conception of this commitment, which avoids the undesirable adjective ‘contractual’, we may define simply as dialectical. It is a dual relationship which flows both ways: from the centre to the base and from the base to the centre. If the action of the centre goes in accordance with the good functioning of the dialectical relationship, it is met by healthy responses from the base.

The celebrated problem of discipline thus consists in setting a system of limitations on rank-and-file militants which is a proper reflection of the limitations set on the action of the leadership. Consequently we have always maintained that the leadership must not have the right, in the great turning points in the political situation, to discover, invent and impose pretendedly new principles, new formulations and new guidelines for the action of the party. These sudden shifts make up the shameful history of opportunist betrayals. When such a crisis occurs, precisely because the party is not a short term, reactive organisation, an internal struggle ensues, tendencies form, splits occur, and in such cases these serve a useful purpose, like the fever which frees an organism of disease but which nevertheless “constitutionally” one cannot admit, encourage or tolerate.

     Thus, there are no rules or recipes that can be applied to prevent the party from succumbing to crises of opportunism, or necessarily having to react to them with fractionalism. There is, however, the experience of the proletarian struggle over many decades, which allows us to identify certain conditions, the study, defence and realization of which must be the indefatigable task of our movement. We indicate in conclusion the main ones:

 1) The party must defend and affirm the maximum clarity and continuity of the communist doctrine, which has been extrapolated in its successive applications to historical developments, and must not consent to proclamations of principle that run counter, even partially, to its fundamental theoretical principles.

 2) The party must in each historical situation openly proclaim the entire content of its programme with regards to how to realize it economically, socially and politically, and above all as regards the question of power: its conquest by armed force, and its exercise through the dictatorship.

Dictatorships that degenerate to the benefit of a limited circle of bureaucrats and praetorians have always been preceded by ideological proclamations that are hypocritically masked under formulas of a populist nature, whether democratic or national, and under the pretext of having the broad popular masses behind them. The revolutionary party, on the other hand, does not hesitate to declare its intention to attack the state and its institutions and to hold the defeated class under the despotic weight of the dictatorship, even when it admits that only an advanced minority of the oppressed class has been able to understand this requirement of the struggle.

“The communists – says the Manifesto – disdain to conceal their views and aims.” Only renegades from communism boast of achieving them while keeping them cunningly disguised.

 3) The party must effect a strict organizational rigour in the sense that it does not accept self‑enlargement by means of compromises with other groups, large or small, or worse still through bargaining over concessions with alleged bosses and leaders in order to win rank-and-file members.

 4) The party must struggle for a clear historical comprehension of the basic antagonism that underlies the struggle. Communists claim the initiative in leading the assault against an entire world of structures and traditions; they know they constitute a danger for the privileged as a whole, and call on the masses to embark on an offensive struggle, and not a defensive one against the alleged dangers of losing so‑called benefits and advancements, conquered within the capitalist world. Communists do not rent out nor lend out their party to take remedial actions in defence of causes that are not their own, and of non‑proletarian objectives such as freedom, the fatherland, democracy and other such lies. “The workers know they have nothing to lose in the struggle except their chains”.

 5) Communists renounce the entire spectrum of tactical expedients which have been invoked on the back of demands to accelerate the adherence of broad layers of the masses to the revolutionary programme. These expedients are: the political compromise, alliances with other parties, the united front, and the various formulas regarding the state used as a substitute for the proletarian dictatorship – workers’ and peasants’ government, popular government, progressive democracy.
Communists recognize that historically one of the main conditions for the dissolution of the proletarian movement and of the soviet communist regime lay precisely in the use of these tactical methods, and they consider those who deplore the opportunist plague of the Stalinist movement, yet at the same time advocate this tactical paraphernalia, to be more dangerous enemies than the selfsame Stalinists.