Theses on the Historical
Task, Action and Structure of the World Communist Party, according to the
positions that have been the historical patrimony of the Communist Left for
over half a century (Theses of Naples, 1965)
( «Il
Programma Comunista», N° 14, 1965. Theses presented at the General Meeting of
July 17-18 at Naples. Published in French in the brochure
«Défense de la continuité du programme communiste», 1973)
Back Proletarian Sumary
Back Texts and Thesis
1. The historically
formulated positions regarding the party's ideology and theory, its action in
successive historical situations, and hence its program, tactics and
organizational structure, must be considered as a unified whole. On many
occasions in the course of its struggle the Left has reorganized and reiterated
these positions without ever changing them. The party's press will reproduce
the texts on these questions, the more fundamental ones being:
a) All the theses
of the Italian Communist Abstentionist Fraction from 1919;
b) Rome Theses,
i.e. the theses of the 2nd Congress of the Communist Party of Italy in 1922;
c) Positions
defended by the Communist Left at the International's congresses in 1922 to
1924 and at the 1926 Enlarged Executive;
d) Theses of the
Left at the illegal conference of the Communist Party of Italy in May, 1924;
e) Theses presented
by the Left at the 3rd congress of the Communist Party of Italy, Lyon,
1926.2.
2. In these texts, as
well as in numerous other texts we will be using, and which will be published
in volumes of our History of the Communist Left, we have defended and
reaffirmed, with perfect continuity, certain historical results which form the
patrimony of revolutionary Marxism, basing ourselves on classic programmatic
texts such as the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Statutes of the 1st
International from 1864.
We also lay
claim to the programmatic foundations of the 1st and 2nd congresses of the 3rd
International, founded in 1919, as well as Lenin's earlier theses on the
imperialist war and Russian revolution. At the same time, taking a clear
position on the major crises faced by the proletarian movement, the Left claims
the historical and programmatic lessons drawn from these, including the theory
of counter-revolutions and the theory of the struggle against the ever
recurring danger of opportunism. Among these historical lessons, products both
of a healthy theoretical vision and of great mass struggles, should be noted:
a) The liquidation
of petty-bourgeois and anarchist currents, sought by Marx to restore the
fundamental principle of centralization and discipline toward the center of the
organization, and to definitively condemn harmful conceptions such as autonomy
of local sections and federalism for different sections of the world party;
these conceptions lay at the root of the ignoble collapse of the 2nd
International, which had been founded in 1889 and wrecked on the advent of the
war in 1914.
b) The lessons of
the heroic experience of the Paris Commune in texts written by Marx for the
International, sanctioning the surpassing of parliamentary methods and
applauding the insurrectional, terrorist vigor of the great Parisian movement.
c) The condemnation
issued by the true revolutionary Marxist Left on the eve of the First World
War, of both revisionist, evolutionist reformism, which had contaminated the
whole International and sought to dismantle the Marxist perspective of
revolutionary catastrophe, and of “revolutionary syndicalism” of Sorel
and others which might pass for a proletarian reaction to reformism, though it
was actually only a "workerist" reaction and consequently converged
with extreme right "Labourism"; on the pretext of returning to
direct, violent action, “revolutionary syndicalism” in fact rejected the
fundamental position of Marxism which affirms the necessity of a centralized
revolutionary party and a dictatorial, terrorist proletarian state, the only
instruments capable of leading the class insurrection to victory and smashing
the bourgeois counter-offensive's attempts at reaction and corruption, and
laying the foundations of the classless, stateless communist society, which
will crown the proletarian victory in the whole world.
d) The merciless
critique and demolition, by Lenin and the Left in all countries, of the
shameless betrayal of 1914, the most mortal and ruinous aspect of which was not
just the rallying to the banners of state and nation, but a relapse into
deviations that were born at the same time as Marxist communism, and which
claim to imprison the program and action of the working class within bourgeois
principles of freedom and parliamentary democracy, celebrating them as the
eternal conquests of the young bourgeoisie.
3. During the period
of the new International the unforgettable heritage of the Communist Left is
its correct historical diagnosis of the opportunist dangers that took shape in
the first years of the International. The historical method enables us to
explain this point without an unwieldy theoretical development. The first
manifestations of opportunism denounced and combated by the Left appeared in
tactics involving relations with the old socialist parties of the 2nd
International, from which communists had separated organizationally by means of
splits; these tendencies subsequently also appeared in the form of incorrect
organizational measures.
From 1921 it was
apparent that the great post-war revolutionary wave was weakening, and that
capitalism would attempt an economic and political counter-offensive. The 3rd
congress correctly observed that it was not enough to have formed communist
parties firmly oriented on the program of violent action, the proletarian
dictatorship and the communist state, if a large fraction of the proletarian
masses remained accessible to the influence of opportunist parties, which all
communists then considered to be the most lethal instruments of bourgeois
counter-revolution, and which had the blood of Karl Liebkneckt and Rosa
Luxemburg on their hands. But the Communist Left did not accept the formula
according to which the condition for revolutionary action (blameworthy
when it was the Blanquist initiatives of small parties) was the conquest of the
"majority" of the proletariat (it was never possible to say whether
this meant a majority of the real proletarian wage-earners or of the “people”,
including small landowners farmers, petty capitalists, craftsmen and all sorts
of other petty-bourgeois strata).This majority formula, with its democratic
allure, raised a new danger which was unfortunately confirmed by history: that
opportunism could be reborn in the new International in the usual form of a
worship of the deadly notions of democracy and electoral consultation.
The 4th congress
(held at the end of 1922) and subsequent congresses confirmed the Left's
pessimistic forecasts. The Left continued its vigorous fight and denunciation
of dangerous tactics (united front between communist and socialist parties, the
"workers government" slogan) and organizational mistakes (attempts to
increase membership in the communist parties, not only by integrating
proletarians who streamed towards them having abandoned other parties with
social-democratic programs, action and structures, but through fusions with
entire parties or fractions of parties after negotiations with their leadership
or, worse yet, through admitting so-called "sympathizing" parties as
national sections of the Comintern, which obviously amounted to a federalist
error).
The third point, at
which the Left's criticism was directed involved working methods within the
International. Very early it began to denounce – and continued to do so more
strenuously in subsequent years – the growing danger of opportunism implied by
the Centre’s (i.e., the Moscow Executive's) use of not only "ideological
terror" but above all of organizational pressure on parties or even
sections of parties that might have made political mistakes. This method
represented an incorrect application and subsequently, a total falsification –
of the correct principles of centralization and discipline without exception.
This method was used increasingly in all countries, and especially after 1923
in Italy, where the Left, followed by the whole party gave an exemplary
demonstration of discipline by relinquishing its leadership to right and center
comrades designated by Moscow. For the sole purpose of perpetuating dangerous
centrist errors in the party's practice, the spectre of
"factionalism" was continuously paraded out, and the left current was
threatened with expulsion on the deceitful pretext that it was preparing a
split. This third vital point was thoroughly discussed in the International
congresses and in Italy, and it is just as important as the condemnation of
opportunist tactics and federalist organizational formulae. In Italy, for
example, the centrist leadership, while accusing the Left leadership of 1921-22
of having imposed a dictatorship on the party (although it has showed its total
agreement with the Left on many occasions), brandished the threat of orders
from Moscow, and even dared to exploit the formula "international
communist party" as Palmiro Togliatti, a true champion of the liquidation
of the Communist International, did in 1925 in the polemics that preceded the
Lyon congress.
4. When the Left
spoke out against the signals that prefigured a mortal crisis, it was at that
time only too easy to accuse it of having purely doctrinal concerns. It is thus
important to show that history has provided confirmations of its criticisms and
diagnosis.
With regard to
tactical questions, it is enough to recall that the united front was originally
proposed as a means for "ruining" the socialist parties and depriving
their leaderships of a mass following, which was supposed to come over to our
side. The history of this tactic confirmed that it involved a danger of
betrayal and an abandoning of our revolutionary class foundations and program.
The historical heirs of the 1922 united front are well known to everyone
today: they are the popular fronts set up to support the Second World War of
democratic capitalism, the anti-fascist "liberation fronts" which led
to the broadest class collaboration, extended to overtly bourgeois parties;
they were the monstrous fruit of the last wave of opportunism that unfurled
over the corpse of the 3rd International. The first organizational maneuvers –
the 1922 mergers – laid the foundations for today's total confusion, in which
parliamentarism and democratism are the common ground of all parties including
the communist party, which has completely renounced Lenin's 2nd congress thesis
on parliamentarism. Sacrificing the unity of the world organization to admit
various socialist, workers’ and even populist parties in a number of countries,
the 20th congress of the Russian party in 1956 finally did exactly what the
Left had predicted it would: it also abandoned the program of the dictatorship
of the proletariat, presenting it as an exclusively Russian phenomenon and
introducing "national" and "democratic" roads to socialism.
This can only signify a relapse into the same despicable opportunism of 1914 –
or rather, into an even viler and more disgusting opportunism as it dares to
hide behind Lenin's name.
The third point
concerns the fierce Stalinist terror which has given historical confirmation
that the Left was correct to speak out against the International's working
methods and the harmful pressures brought to bear from above. In fact, the
object of the Stalinist terror was to demolish the party from within, by using
state power to carry out tens of thousands of assassinations and smash a
resistance waged in the name of a return to revolutionary Marxism and the great
Leninist and Bolshevik traditions of the October revolution. The Left, which
had correctly rejected a fallacious offer by the “centrists” of "a bit
more democracy in the party and the International" in 1926, and remained
in opposition (though right up until that time – 1926 –never talking of leaving
the International or bringing about a split), had predicted the further course
of events precisely in all respects: the relationship of forces unfortunately
did not allow it to prevent the disgraceful third opportunist wave from
engulfing everything.
The Left had
indicated in good time the correct path to follow in relations between the
parties and the International, on the one hand, and between the Russian party
and state, on the other hand. Historically, the inversion of these positions is
connected to the question of relations between the policy of the Russian state
and the policy of the proletariat in other countries. At the Enlarged Executive
of the International in the fall of 1926, when Stalin showed his hand, it was
declared that the Russian state would no longer subordinate its future to a
general class confrontation capable of overthrowing capitalist power in all
other countries, and that from then on, its internal social economy would be
aimed at "building socialism" – which for Lenin could only mean
building capitalism. Thereafter it was easy to predict the sequence of events,
marked by the bloody conflict in which the opposition, which appeared too late
in Russia, was quickly crushed under the disgusting accusation of factionalism,
and finally exterminated.
This question leads
to a delicate problem: in the name of a fraudulent centralism, a suffocating
apparatus was imposed on all parties in which ardent revolutionaries were active,
by resorting less to the prestige of Bolshevism, Lenin and Red October than to
a vulgar economic relationship – the state in Moscow possessed the means with
which to pay the officials of the International.
The Left faced this
disgrace with a heroic silence, because it knew there was another terrible
danger of a petty-bourgeois, anarchist deviation from which it risked eliciting
the usual lamentations: "You see, this is what always happens; whenever
there is a state, whenever there is a power, whenever there is a party, there
is corruption, and if the proletariat wants to emancipate itself it will have
to do so without authoritarian parties or states". We were too well aware
that if Stalin's orientation after 1926 amounted to yielding the victory to the
bourgeois enemy, these aberrations of petty-bourgeois intellectuals are always
(and have for a century) provided the best guarantee of the survival of odious
capitalism, since they deprive its grave diggers of the only weapon that can
defeat it.
Combined with the
degrading influence of money – which will disappear in communist society, but
only after a series of events of which the creation of the proletarian
dictatorship is only the first act – was the use within the International of a
weapon which the Left openly denounced as worthy of parliaments and bourgeois
diplomacy, or of the very bourgeois League of Nations: the careerism and vain
personal ambitions of the little chieftains that abounded in the ranks of the
movement were encouraged and flaunted such that each individual found himself
faced with the alternative of immediate and comfortable notoriety if he quietly
accepted the theses of the omnipotent Center, or an irremediable anonymity and
possible poverty if he wished to defend the correct revolutionary theses from
which the Center had deviated.
Today it is an
obvious historical fact that the international and national Centers were on the
road to deviation and betrayal; according to what the Left has always asserted,
this is why they have no right to demand the blind obedience of the
rank-and-file in the name of a hypocritical discipline.
5. The work done to
rebuild the class party after the end of the Second World War has come up
against an extremely unfavorable situation. The international social events of
this terrible epoch have enabled opportunism to obscure all the terms of the
class conflict and to convince a blinded proletariat of the need to help in
rebuilding parliamentary and democratic constitutional regimes all over the
world.
Our movement, which
inevitably found itself going against the stream, especially when the broad
proletarian masses had hurled themselves body and soul into the mortal practice
of electoralism (for which fake revolutionaries were pronouncing apologies a
thousand times more shameless than those of the revisionists fifty years
earlier), could only answer by basing itself on the entire heritage that it had
defended during this long unfavorable period. Applying the classic Marxist
method, which seeks to retie the "thread of time", our movement
worked to remind the proletariat of the value of the historical lessons learned
throughout its painful retreat. This did not mean limiting ourselves to a
function of disseminating culture or propaganda of petty doctrines of sects; it
meant demonstrating that theory and action are dialectically inseparable
elements and that the lessons of history are not pedantry or merely academic,
but result from (to avoid the expression "experiences", which to-day
is the predilection of all philistines) the dynamic balance sheets we have
drawn from confrontations that have taken place between enormous real forces on
a large scale, using even cases in which revolutionary forces were finally
defeated. This is what we have called the "lessons of counter-revolutions",
according to a classic Marxist criterion.
6. In its efforts to
organize itself on its own foundations, our movement encountered other
difficulties resulting from excessively optimistic forecasts. Some felt that,
just as the end of the First World War had engendered an immense revolutionary
wave and the condemnation of the opportunist plague thanks to the action of the
Bolsheviks, Lenin and the revolutionary victory in Russia, so the end of the
Second World War in 1945 would also produce a rapid constituting of the
revolutionary party in line with the great traditions.
This perspective
may have been generous, but it nonetheless represented a serious mistake,
because it did not take into account the "hunger for democracy" that
had been created in the proletariat not so much by the more or less ferocious
exploits of Italian and German fascism, as by the disgusting illusion that with
the recovery of democracy, everything would return quite naturally on the revolutionary
lines.
On the contrary,
what constitutes one of the fundamental points of the Left’s patrimony is the
consciousness that the greatest dangers are populist and social-democratic
illusions, which cannot be the basis of a revolution once again making the leap
from Kerensky to Lenin, but instead are at the root of opportunism, which is
the most powerful counter-revolutionary force.
For the Left,
opportunism is not a moral phenomenon caused by the corruption of individuals,
but a social and historical phenomenon which leads to the fact that, instead of
combating the reactionary front of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois
strata (the latter more conservative than the former) the proletarian vanguard
tends to establish a weld between the proletariat and the middle classes. In
this the social phenomenon of opportunism is no different from fascism, since
the proletariat is subordinated in both cases to petty-bourgeois strata (the
"intellectuals", the so-called "political class" and the
bureaucratic administrative class) which in reality are not classes endowed
with their own historical vitality, but entirely contemptible marginal and
parasitic strata. These are not the deserters from the bourgeoisie whose fatal
passage to the camp of the revolution Marx describes, but, on the contrary, the
best servants and defenders of capitalist preservation who live off surplus
value extorted from proletarians.
The new movement
almost succumbed to the illusion that there was still something to be done in
bourgeois parliaments, trying to implement anew the perspective of Lenin's
famous theses, without understanding that an irrevocable historical balance
sheet has shown that this tactic was of no use, no matter how great and noble
the revolutionary perspectives for the overthrow of parliaments from within
might have been in 1920, at a time when all of history seemed on the verge of
an eruption: the whole thing was instead reduced to a trivial revenge against
fascism as in Modigliani's exclamation: "Long live parliament!".
7. The problem was to
transmit the historical experience of the generation that had lived through the
glorious struggles of the first post-war period and the Livorno split, to the
new generation of proletarians who had to be freed from the senseless enthusiasm
generated by the fall of fascism and brought back to the understanding of the
need for an autonomous action by the revolutionary party against all other
parties, particularly against the social-democratic party, in order to
reconstitute forces determined to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat
and proletarian terror against the big bourgeoisie and all its disgusting
lackeys. To accomplish this task, the new movement organically and
spontaneously found a structural form of activity which has proved itself in
the past fifteen years. The party has accomplished aspirations which were
already present in the Communist Left at the time of the 2nd International, and
subsequently during its theoretical struggle against the first manifestations
of opportunist danger in the 3rd International. This age-old aspiration is the
struggle against democracy and any influence by this repugnant bourgeois myth;
its roots are in the Marxist critique, in the fundamental texts and documents
of the first proletarian organizations, starting from the Manifesto of the
Communist Party.
The history of
mankind cannot be explained by the influence of exceptional individuals, by
their strength and physical or even intellectual and moral value. It would be
incorrect and anti-Marxist to consider the political struggle as a process of
selection of such exceptional personalities, and democratism, which claims to
accomplish this selection by counting the votes of all members of society, is
even more alien to us than the ancient doctrines that reduce it to the work of
the divinity or the prerogative of a social aristocracy. History is rather the
history of the class struggles. It can only be deciphered and its lessons
applied to battles that are not just theoretical and critical but also violent
and armed, between different opposing classes, if one lays bare the economic
relationships which, in given forms of production, are established between
classes. This fundamental theorem had been confirmed by the sacrifices of
innumerable militants who have fallen under the blows of Capital, and whose
generous efforts had been broken by the democratic mystification. The communist
Left elaborated its revolutionary patrimony on this balance sheet of
oppression, exploitation and treason. It was therefore clear that the only path
to follow was the one that would free us even more from the fatal democratic
mechanism, not only in society and its various institutions, but in the
revolutionary class itself, and especially in its political party. This Left's
aspiration is not due to a miraculous intuition or to the illumination of some
thinkers, but results directly from a series of real, violent, bloody merciless
struggles, even when they ended with the defeat of the revolutionary forces.
There are historical traces of this in all the manifestations of the Left,
whether at the time it fought against electoral blocs and the influence of
Masonic ideology, against colonial wars and the monstrous first European war,
which triumphed over the proletarian aspiration to desert from the army and to
turn one’s weapons against one's own bourgeoisie, primarily by means of a vile
propaganda about the conquest of freedom and democracy; or at the time when, in
all the countries of Europe and under the leadership of the Russian
revolutionary proletariat the Left hurled itself into the struggle to destroy
its first and direct target, the enemy which defended the very center of the
capitalist bourgeoisie, the social-democratic right-wing, and the even more
despicable centrism, which, slandering us as it had slandered Bolshevism,
Leninism and the Russian soviet dictatorship, made every effort to rebuild a
bridge – for us it was a trap – between the proletariat in motion and criminal
democratic illusions. Alongside this, the desire to rid ourselves of all
influence from democracy even in our vocabulary, can be found in
countless texts of the Left, some of which were enumerated at the beginning of
these theses.
8. The scope,
difficulty and historical duration of the work to be done by the new movement
could never attract doubtful elements desirous of rapidly achieving a career,
because rather than promise short-term historical success, they exclude such a
possibility. Work has been organized on the basis of frequent meetings between
delegates of the entire organization, in which there have been neither
polemical debts nor disputes between opposed theses, nor for that matter the
slightest sporadic manifestation of nostalgia for the sickness of democratic
anti-fascism. In these meetings, there has been nothing to vote on or to
deliberate, since their goal was only to organically pursue the important task
of transmitting the fertile lessons of the past through history to the present
and future generations, to new vanguards who will emerge from the proletarian
masses. Beaten, tricked and deceived a hundred times, the masses will rise in
insurrection against the suffering imposed on them by the purulent
decomposition of capitalist society, and will sense in their very quick how the
most extreme and most poisonous enemy are the ranks of populist opportunism, of
the bureaucrats of big unions and parties, and of the ridiculous coteries
of allegedly "engaged" intellectuals and artists, hired
as lackeys earning a living through their harmful activity, prostituting
themselves to the rich classes by the intermediary of the traitor parties and
who are animated by the worst bourgeois and capitalist spirit, that of the
intermediate and so-called "popular" classes.
This work and this
dynamic are inspired by the classic teachings of Marx and Lenin, who gave the
form of theses to their exposition of the great historical revolutionary
truths. These reports and theses faithful to the great Marxist tradition, now
over a century old, were transmitted by all those present – and also by the
reports of our press – at the local and regional peripheral meetings, where
this historic material was communicated to the whole party. It would be
nonsense to say that they are perfect texts, irrevocable and unchangeable,
because over the years we have always said that it was material under
continuous elaboration, destined to assume an ever-better and more complete
form; moreover, we have always noted increasingly frequent and excellent
contributions, in perfect agreement with the classic positions of the Left,
coming from the whole party and even from very young comrades.
It’s only by
developing our work in this direction, that we expect the quantitative growth
in our membership and the spontaneous adhesions to the party, who one day will
make it into a more important social force
9. Before we leave
the question of the formation of the party after the Second World War, it’s
worth reasserting some results which today constitute characteristic theses for
the party because, since they are historical results, despite the small numbers
of our movement, and not inventions by fruitless geniuses or solemn resolutions
by "sovereign" congresses.
The party very
quickly recognized that, even in an extremely unfavorable situation and even in
the countries where it is the worst, we must avoid the mistake of regarding the
movement as a pure activity of press propaganda and political proselytism.
Everywhere, always and without exception, the life of the party must be
integrated into an incessant effort to insert itself into the life of the
masses, even when its manifestations are influenced by directives opposed to
ours. It is an old thesis of left Marxism that we must accept working in
right-wing unions in which the workers are to be found; the party rejects the
individualist attitude of those who disdain to set foot in them and even end up
theorizing sabotage of the rare and timid strikes the present unions may risk.
In many regions, the party has already conducted a noticeable activity in this
direction, even though it always comes up against serious difficulties and
opposed forces that are superior to its own, at least numerically. It is
important to specify that even where this work has not already shown
significant results, we must reject the conception that would reduce the small
party to closed circles without any link to the outside, or limiting itself to
seeking new members in the world of opinions alone, which, in the eyes of
Marxists is a false world as long as it is not treated as a superstructure of
the world of economic conflicts. It would equally be wrong to subdivide the
party or its local sections into watertight compartments, each one devoting
itself exclusively to theory, study, historical research, propaganda,
proselytism or union activity: in the spirit of our theory and our history
these domains are absolutely inseparable and, in principle, accessible to any
and all militants.
Another point that
constitutes an historical gain the party can never renounce is the absolute
refusal of any proposal to increase membership and enlarge its basis by
convening constitutive congresses together with the numerous circles and
grouplets that have been springing up everywhere since the end of the war,
which elaborate incoherent and absurd theses, or have no other basis than the
condemnation of Russian Stalinism and all its local derivatives.
10. Returning to the
history of the first years of the Communist International, we will recall that
the Russian leaders, who had behind them not only a profound knowledge of the
doctrine and history of Marxism, but also the grandiose result of the October
revolutionary victory, conceived the theses, such as Lenin's, as material that
all militants had to accept, while acknowledging that in the life of the
international party, they would be further elaborated. They never asked for
them to be put to vote, because all the theses had to be accepted by unanimous
consent, spontaneously confirmed by the entire periphery of the organization
which, in those glorious years, lived in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and even
of triumph.
The Left shared
these generous aspirations, but it believed that, in order to achieve the
results we all sought, some measures for the organization and formation of the
unique communist party would have to be made more rigorous and more rigid, and
all tactical norms would have to be made more precise in the same sense.
When it appeared
that a certain laxity – which we had denounced to Lenin himself – in these
fundamental areas was beginning to have harmful effects, we were obliged to
oppose our counter-reports to those of the Executive, and our counter-theses to
its theses.
Unlike other
opposition groups, including groups that had formed in Russia, including the
Trotskyist current, we always carefully avoided giving our work in the
International the form of a demand for democratic and electoral consultations
of the whole rank-and-file, or demanding general elections for leadership
committees.
The Left hoped to
save the International and its healthy and vital trunk of great traditions
without initiating splits, and it always rejected the accusation that it had
organized or wanted to organize a faction or party within the party. Even when
manifestations of a growing opportunism became increasingly obvious, it neither
encouraged nor approved the practice of individual resignations from the party
or the International.
However, a hundred
passages from the above-mentioned texts show that the fundamental thinking of
the Left always was that the path leading to the suppression of elections of
comrades or votes on general theses would also lead to the abolition of
suspensions, expulsions and the dissolving of local groups, another shameless
practice of careerist democratism. On many occasions we spelled out the thesis
that such disciplinary procedures would have to become more and more
exceptional and gradually disappear.
If the opposite
comes about, and, worse yet, if these disciplinary questions serve to impose
the conscious or unconscious positions of a nascent opportunism – as was the
case in 1924, 1925 and 1926 – rather than help to save healthy revolutionary
positions, this only means that the Center has not fulfilled its duties
correctly, that this has caused it to lose all real influence over the
rank-and-file, and that it is less able to achieve discipline the louder it
sings the praises of a perfectly artificial disciplinary rigor.
In the early years,
the Left hoped that the concessions being made with regard to organization and
tactics might be explained by the potential of that historical moment, and that
they would only be temporary, since they were tied to Lenin's perspective of
major revolutions in Central and, perhaps, Western Europe, and that we would
return to a clear line of conduct in total conformity with our central
principles. But this hope gradually gave way to a certainty that the
International was going to ruin, and that the new opportunism could not fail to
assume the classic form of a glorification and exultation of democratic and
electoral intrigue. The Left thus continued its historical fight in defense of
communism, without ever relinquishing its contempt for the democratic
mechanism, even when some people might have believed it would be forced to do
so against its will by veritable operations of electoral trickery within
parties. When fascism falsified elections, it was correct to welcome this fact
since it gave the proletariat the understanding of the need to meet the
challenge arms in hand. But when these practices were adopted within communist
parties, impudently perpetrated by the fathers of the new opportunism that was
doing its utmost to reconquer the parties and the International, it was necessary
to denounce them openly. Even though we could theoretically feel a certain
ironic satisfaction at hearing them say "we are ten and we want you who
are thousand to submit", we were only too sure that they would perfect
their repugnant course by stealing votes from workers by the million.
11.The Left's position
has nonetheless always been firm and consistent: if disciplinary crises
multiply to the point that they become the rule, this means that something is
not right in the general running of the party, and that the problem has to be
studied. Naturally, we will not renounce our own principles by committing the
folly of believing that salvation lies in a search for more capable individuals
and a replacement of leaders and party cadres, because this is nothing other
than the typical positions of the historical antagonist of revolutionary left
Marxism, opportunism.
Another of Marx's
and Lenin's theses on which the Left is extremely firm is that the remedy for
the problems and historical crises to which the proletarian party is
necessarily exposed is not to be found in a constitutional or organizational
formula that has the magic virtue of being able to prevent it from
degenerating. This illusion originates in petty-bourgeois conceptions that go
back to Proudhon and, through a long development, culminate in Italian
Ordinovism, i.e., the conception that the social problem can be solved by a
formula of the organization of the producers. Undeniably in the evolution of
parties, it is possible to oppose the ascending curve of the historical
party and the tormented line of formal parties with its zig zags, its
ups and downs, and even its brutal descents. Left Marxists, in fact, endeavor
to act on the broken line of contingent parties to bring it back onto the continuous,
harmonious curve of the historical party. This is a principled position,
but it would be puerile to try to transform it into an organizational recipe.
According to our historical line, we utilize not only the knowledge of
humanity's past and present, but also a direct and sure knowledge of the future
of society and humanity, as our doctrine predicts it with certainty, viz. the
classless and stateless society, which in a sense may be a party-less society,
unless one understands a party to be an organ that does not struggle against
other parties, but ensures the defense of the human species against the dangers
of physical nature and its evolutionary and undoubtedly also catastrophic
processes.
The Communist Left
has always considered that it waged its long struggle against the unfortunate
contingent vicissitudes of the formal parties of the proletariat by stating
positions that flow continuously and harmoniously in the luminous stream of the
historical party, which stretches across years and centuries without
interruption, from the first formulations of the nascent proletarian doctrine
to the future society, which we know well, to the extent we have learned well
how to recognize the tissues and the nerve centers of this odious society,
which the revolution will have to destroy.
Engels’
proposal to adopt the excellent old German word Gemeinwesen (common
being, i.e., social community) instead of the word State, was connected to
Marx's analysis that the Paris Commune was no longer a State precisely because
it was no longer a democratic corporation. Since Lenin, this question has
needed no further theoretical clarification, and there is no contradiction in
the inspired observation that, in appearance, Marx was much more statist
than Engels, insofar as it was Marx who noted more clearly that the
dictatorship is a real State endowed with armed forces, a repressive police and
political judiciary applying the terror without letting itself be hemmed in by
legal scruples. The question is also related to Marx's and Engels' condemnation
of the revisionist idealization that characterizes the German socialists'
stupid formula of "free people’s State": this formula reeks not only
of bourgeois democratism, but it also destroys the whole notion of the
irresistible struggle between classes with the destruction of the historical
State of the bourgeoisie and the erecting on its ruins of the destructive and
more merciless proletarian State, although it does not lay claim to eternal
constitutions.
The point was not
to find a "model" of the future State in constitutional or
organizational provisions, which is as stupid as trying to build a model for
socialist states and societies for other countries in the first country
conquered by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But the idea of
constructing a model of a perfect party would be just as vain, and perhaps even
more so. Such an idea reflects the weaknesses of the decadent bourgeoisie
which, powerless to defend its power, to preserve its economic system as it
goes to pieces, and even to master its doctrinal thought, takes refuge in
absurd robotized technologies, seeking a guarantee of survival in these stupid
automatic formal models in order to escape from the scientific certainty which
enabled us to pronounce an infallible sentence on the bourgeois epoch and its
"civilization": death!
12. Among the
doctrinal formulations that we will provisionally call
"philosophical", and which are part of the tasks of the Communist
Left and its international movement, we should mention a thesis on which we
have already made numerous clarifications, showing that it is entirely in
conformity with the classical positions of Marx, Engels and Lenin.
The first truth
that man can master is the notion of the future communist society. This notion
makes no borrowings from this repugnant capitalist democratic or Christian
society, and it absolutely does not seek a human heritage on which to base
itself in the so-called positive science elaborated by the bourgeois
revolution: for us it is a class science which has to be destroyed and replaced
in its entirety, like the religions and scholastic creeds of previous
production forms. With regard to the theory of economic transformations
enabling us to go from capitalism – the structure of which we know quite well,
whereas the official economists are incapable of understanding it – to
communism, we can also do without the contributions of bourgeois science, and
we have a similar contempt for bourgeois technique and technology, which
everyone, driveling opportunist traitors foremost, proclaims to be headed for
great discoveries. We have built the science of society, its current existence
and future development, in an absolutely revolutionary way. When this work of
the human mind is complete – and it cannot be until after the demise of
capitalism, of its civilization, its useless schools, science and its gangster
technology – man will also, for the first time, write the science and history
of physical nature and solve the great problems of the life of the Universe
from its origins (which scientists reconciled with teleological dogma continue
to call "creation") to its developments on the infinitely large and
infinitely small scales in the most distant and today undecipherable future.
13. These, and still
other problems are a domain of the party's action which we maintain physically
alive and which are not unworthy of being included in the line of the great
historical party. But these elevated theoretical notions are not expedients
allowing us to resolve the petty human quarrels and uncertainties which,
unfortunately, will persist as long as there are among us individuals
surrounded and dominated by the barbaric milieu of capitalist civilization.
Therefore these developments cannot serve to define the mode of existence characteristic
of a party free from opportunism: contained in the notion of organic
centralism, this mode of existence asserts itself gradually, and cannot arise
from a "revelation".
This obvious
Marxist thesis belongs to the patrimony of the Left, and it can be found in all
the polemics it directed against the degenerating Moscow Center. The party is
both a factor and a product of the historical development of situations and,
barring a relapse into a new utopianism even more lamentable then the previous
one, it can never be considered an external, abstract element capable of
dominating the world around it.
That it is possible
to work in the party to create a fiercely anti-bourgeois milieu which – to a
great extent anticipates the features of communist society – was stated long
ago, for example by the young Italian communists in 1912.
But this just
aspiration must not induce us to regard the ideal party as a monastic
"phalanastery" surrounded by impenetrable walls.
In our conception
of organic centralism, we have always stated, in opposition to the Moscow
centrists, that there is only one guarantee in the selection of party members.
The party must tirelessly continue to express more clearly the guiding
principles of its doctrine, its action and its tactics on the basis of a method
unified in space and in time. Anyone who feels uneasy with these positions has
the obvious option of leaving the party. Even after the conquest of power it is
not possible to conceive of forced membership in the party. This is why
disciplinary terrorism is alien to the correct understanding of organic
centralism: such measures only copy (even in their vocabulary) the
constitutional practices the bourgeoisie has already used to excess, such as
the ability of the executive power to dissolve and reconstitute elected
assemblies – forms that have long been considered obsolete not only for the
proletarian party but even for the historically transitory revolutionary State
of the victorious proletariat. For anyone who wants to join the party does not
have to work out constitutional and legal blueprints of the future society,
since such forms are characteristic only of class societies. Anyone who, seeing
the party advance along this clear, definite path which we have attempted to summarize
in these theses for the Naples general meeting in July 1965, does not yet feel
able to rise to this historical task, knows perfectly well he can adopt any
other path different from ours. We have no other measure to take in the matter.
International Communist Party