International Communist Party The unitary and invariant Body of Party Theses International Communist Party THESES ON THE HISTORICAL DUTY, ACTION AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD COMMUNIST PARTY, ACCORDING TO THE POSITIONS THAT FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY FORM THE HISTORICAL HERITAGE OF THE COMMUNIST LEFT

(“Theses of Naples”, July, 1965)

1. The questions that were historically enunciated as referred to the party’s ideology and doctrine, to its action in the various historical situations, and therefore to its programme, its tactics and its organizational structure, are to be regarded as a single body; thus, in the course of the Left’s struggle, they have several times been set to order and enunciated without ever introducing changes. The party press will be committed to the reproduction of texts; for now, it is sufficient to recall some of them, cornerstones of our doctrine:

(a) Complete Theses of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party, of 1919;

(b) Rome Theses, i.e. of the II Congress of the Communist Party of Italy, March 1922;

(c) The positions taken by the Communist Left in the International Congresses of 1922 and 1924 and in the Enlarged Executive of 1926;

(d) Theses of the Left at the illegal Conference of the Communist Party of Italy, May 1924;

(e) Theses introduced by the Left at the III Congress of the Communist Party of Italy, Lyon 1926.

2. In the above and in many other texts that will be utilized, and which will be included, in a perfect continuity of positions, in the volumes of the "History of the Communist Left", are constantly vindicated and reaffirmed certain former results, considered as heritage of revolutionary Marxism; it is there also that its classic and programmatic texts, such as the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the Statutes of the I International of 1864, are set store

The programmatic cornerstones of the I and II Congresses of the III International founded in 1919 are likewise vindicated, as well as the fundamental and preceding theses of Lenin on the imperialist war and on the Russian revolution. At the same time the Left, having taken a clear stand, has as part of its heritage the historical and programmatic solutions that stemmed from the dénouement of great crises faced by the proletarian movement; in them the theory of counter-revolutions and the doctrine of the struggle against the ever reviving opportunist danger is summarized.

Among these historical cornerstones bound, both to the sound theoretical outlook and to the great battles of the masses, are, for example:

(a) The ridding, wanted by Marx, of petty-bourgeois and anarchist currents, which endangered the basic principles of centralization and discipline to the centre of the organization, and the condemnation of the harmful concepts of autonomy of local section and of federalism among the sections of the world party; in such deviations lies the cause of the shameful ruin of the II International, founded in 1889 and shattered in the 1914 war.

(b) The judgment of the glorious experience of the Paris Commune, given in the texts that Marx wrote on the International’s behalf, which confirmed the parliamentarist methods being obsolete, and applauded the insurrectional and terrorist vigour of the great Paris movement.

(c) The condemnation from the true revolutionary Marxist Left, on the verge of the first great war, not only of revisionist and evolutionist reformism, risen in the whole International with the aim of dismantling the vision of a revolutionary catastrophe, peculiar to Marxism; but also of the reaction to it – apparently proletarian in the "workerist" sense and in perfect agreement with far right Labourism – that was the revolutionary syndicalism of Sorel and others. Such a current, on the pretext of getting back to the violence of direct action, condemned the fundamental Marxist position on the need for a revolutionary, centralized party and of a dictatorial and terrorist proletarian State; which are instead the sole instruments able to lead the class insurrection to victory, and to strangle any attempt at revenge or corruption by the bourgeois counter-attack, thus laying the foundations of the classless and Stateless communist society which will crown the victory on an international scale.

(d) The criticism and the relentless demolition, made by Lenin and by the Left of all countries, of the ignoble betrayal of 1914; the most lethal and ruinous form of such betrayal not being so much the shift under the patriotic national flags, as the return to deviations – contemporary with the birth of Marxist communism itself – according to which both programme and action of the working class are to be framed within the limits of the bourgeois canons of freedom and of parliamentary democracy, boasted as eternal conquests of the early bourgeoisie.

3. As regards the subsequent period in the life of the new International the enduring heritage of the communist Left is the correct theoretical diagnosis and historical prediction of the new opportunistic dangers that emerged over the course of the first years of the International. Avoiding heavy intellectual theorizing, this point needs to be developed using the historical method. The first manifestations denounced and opposed by the Left occurred in the tactics regarding the relations to be established with the old socialist parties of the Second International, from which the communists had become organizationally separated as a result of splits; and consequently also in erroneous measures in the realm of organizational structure.

The third congress had correctly established that it wasn’t enough (already in 1921 one could see that the great revolutionary wave that came after the war in 1918 was petering out, and that capitalism would attempt a counter-offensive on both the economic and political fronts) to have formed communist parties strictly committed to the programme of violent action, to the proletarian dictatorship and to the communist state if a large part of the proletarian masses remained under the influence of opportunist parties, which all communists now considered the worst instruments of bourgeois counter-revolution, and whose hands were covered in the blood of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. At the same time, the communist Left did not accept the formula that made revolutionary action conditional (to be denounced when the Blanquist initiative of small parties) on the conquest of the “majority” of the proletariat (besides which one never knew if this meant the “majority” of the actual waged proletariat, or of the “people”, including propertied peasants and micro-capitalists, artisans and all other petty bourgeois layers). With its democratic allure, this formula of the “majority” triggered the first alarm bells, unfortunately confirmed by history, that opportunism could be reborn in the new International under the familiar banner of homage to the deadly concepts of democracy and electoral counts.

From the fourth congress, which took place at the end of 1922, the Left stood by its pessimistic prediction and its vigorous struggle to denounce dangerous tactics (united front between communist and socialist parties, the slogan of “workers’ government”) and organizational errors (attempts to increase the size of the parties not simply through an influx of those proletarians who had abandoned the other parties with a social democratic programme of action and structure, but by means of fusions that accepted entire parties and portions of parties after negotiations with their leadership, and also by admitting to the Comintern, as national sections, parties claiming to be “sympathizers”, which was clearly an error in its drift towards federalism. Taking the initiative on a third issue it was from this time that the Left denounced, and ever more vigorously in the years that followed, the growth of the opportunist danger: this third issue was the international’s method of internal working, whereby the centre, represented by the Moscow executive, resorted not only to the use of “ideological terror” in its dealings with the parties, or the parts of them that had made political errors, but above all to organizational pressure; which amounted to an erroneous application, and eventually a total falsification, of the correct principles of centralization and absolute discipline with no exceptions.

This method of working was tightened up in all countries, but especially in Italy after 1923 – when the Left, with the whole party behind it, displayed exemplary discipline by handing over the leadership to the comrades of the right and centre appointed by Moscow – where the spectre of “fractionalism” was being seriously abused, along with constant threats to expel a current artificially accused of preparing a split from the party, with the sole aim of allowing dangerous centrist errors to prevail in the party’s politics. This third vital point was discussed in depth at the international congresses and in Italy, and it is no less important than the condemnation of the opportunist tactics and the federalist type organizational formulas. In Italy for instance the centrist leadership, while accusing the Left leadership of 1921 and 1922 of dictatorship over the party (which instead several times demonstrated to be in total agreement with the Left), kept using the spectre of Moscow’s orders, even daring to exploit the formula of "international communist party"; as was done in 1925 during the pre-Lyon polemics by Palmiro Togliatti, real champion of the Communist International’s liquidationism.

4. It is worth showing how the demonstration of the correctness of such criticisms and diagnoses is to be found in historical events; although it was then easy to object to the Left, which denounced the warning signs of a mortal crisis, that it was merely based on doctrinal worries.

As for the tactical question, it is enough to recall that the united front was born as a method to "ruin" the socialist parties, and to leave their leaders and headquarters deprived of the masses which supported them; while such masses were supposed to come over to us. The evolution of such tactics demonstrated that it contained the danger of leading to a betrayal and to an abandonment of the classist and revolutionary bases of our programme. The historical sons of the united front of 1922 are today well known: the popular fronts, created in order to support the second war of democratic capitalism; the anti-fascist "liberation fronts", which led to the most open class collaboration, extended to declaredly bourgeois parties; and in the above is summarized the monstrous birth of the last opportunist wave, upon the corpse of the III International. The first organizational manoeuvres of the 1922 fusions laid the bases of the total confusion existing in the present parliamentary and democratic policy of all parties, including the communist party, which thus tore to pieces Lenin’s theses on parliament, of the II Congress. Since the Russian party’s XX Congress of 1956, while getting rid of the world organizational unity in order to admit the various socialist, workers, and even popular parties in this or that country, what the Left foresaw was done, that is the abandonment of the programme of proletarian dictatorship, reduced to a peculiarly Russian phenomenon; and the introduction of democratic and "national ways" to socialism, which only indicate a relapse into the same infamous opportunism of 1914; or rather, as it is operated in the name of Lenin, into a much more base and infamous one.

Finally, the accusation of the method of work in the International and of the wrongful pressures from above, while seeing in 1926 the misleading offer made by centrists of "a bit more democracy within both party and International" – which was rightly rejected by the Left, which remained on its opposition positions, though without threatening until then (1926) to leave the International or to split parties – is historically confirmed by the ferocious Stalinist terror, employed in order to devastate the party from the inside, by means of State forces; that is in order to crush, through tens of thousands of murders, a resistance which was led in the name of a return to revolutionary Marxism and to the great Leninist and Bolshevik traditions of the October revolution. All those positions outlined a correct prevision of the future course of events, although unfortunately the force relations were such as to allow the third infamous opportunist wave to overwhelm everything.

The Left indicated in time the right terms of the relations between parties and International, and between the Russian party and State. The reversal of such positions is to be historically related to the issue of the relations between Russian state policy and proletarian policy in all other countries. When, under Stalin, who in the Enlarged Executive of Autumn 1926 laid all his cards on the table, it was declared that the Russian State would give up the idea of making its future conditioned on a general class engagement, able to overthrow the power of capital in all other countries; and when it was stated that the watchword in internal social policy was that of "construction of socialism" – which in Lenin’s language only meant construction of capitalism – then the further course was a foregone conclusion; and it was confirmed by the bloody conflict through which the opposition, too late arisen in Russia and crushed just in time under the loathsome accusation of fractionist work, was exterminated.

The above is to be related to the delicate question that – once a suffocating apparatus was imposed, in the name of a falsified centralism, on all parties which had in their ranks fervent revolutionaries – it was relied, not so much on the influence of huge names like Bolshevism, Lenin, October, as on the common economic fact that Moscow’s State had the means by which the officials of the apparatus were paid. The Left saw all these shames in a remarkable silence, because it knew what other tremendous danger would have been the petty-bourgeois and anarchist deviation, with its chatterings: You may see that the end is always the same; where there is the State, where there is power, where there is a party there is corruption, and if the proletariat wants to free itself, it has to be done with no parties and with no authoritarian State. We knew that too well, though Stalin’s line meant, since 1926, the delivery of our victory to the bourgeois enemy, such aberrations of middle-class would-be intellectuals are always – we can now refer to an experience more than a century old – the best guarantee for the survival of hateful capitalism, by snatching from the hands of its executioners the only weapon able to kill it.

Along with the awkward influence of money, which will disappear in communist society, but only after a long chain of events in which the achievement of the communist dictatorship is but the first step, was added the wielding of an instrument of manoeuvre which we openly declared to be worthy of parliaments and bourgeois diplomacy, or of the extremely bourgeois League of Nations, that is, the encouragement or inculcation, according to the circumstances, of careerism and vain ambition amongst the swarming ranks of petty government officials, so that each of them would be faced with an inexorable choice between immediate and comfortable notoriety, after prostrate acceptance of the theses of the omnipotent central leadership, or else permanent obscurity and possible poverty if he wished to defend the correct revolutionary theses which the central leadership had deviated from.

Today, given the historical evidence, it is beyond dispute that those international and national central leaderships really were on the path of deviation and betrayal. According to the Left’s unchanging theory, this is the condition that must deprive them of any right to obtain, in the name of a hypocritical discipline, an unquestioning obedience from party members.

5. The work carried on to reconstitute everywhere the class party after the end of the Second World War, found an extremely unfavourable situation, with the international and social events of such a tremendous historical period in every possible way favouring the opportunist plan of wiping out the policy of conflict among classes; thus emphasizing before the blinded proletarians the need of supporting the restoration on the whole world of democratic-parliamentarian constitutionalisms.

In such a terrible position, worsened by the diving of big proletarian masses into the stinking practice of electionism – which was apologized by false revolutionaries in a much more shameless way than that of II International revisionists – our movement, though compelled to go against the stream, appealed to its whole heritage coming from the long and unfavourable historical event. Having adopted the old watchword "on the thread of time", our movement devoted itself to setting before the eyes and minds of the proletariat the meaning of the historical results inscribed along the route of a long and painful retreat. It was not a matter of restricting our role to cultural diffusion or the propagandising of petty doctrines, but of demonstrating that theory and action are dialectically inseparable fields, and that teachings are not book-learned or academic, but are derived from – not experiences exactly, a word we wish to avoid as now fallen prey to Philistines – but from the dynamic results of confrontations between real forces of considerable size and range, with use made also of those cases in which the final result was a defeat of the revolutionary forces. The latter is what we refer to, using the old classical Marxist criteria, as "the lessons of the counter revolutions".

6. Other difficulties, for the setting of our movement on its own bases, arose from overly optimistic prospects; according to which, having the end of the First World War bring a great revolutionary wave and the condemnation of the opportunist pest – thanks to the action of the Bolsheviks, of Lenin, and of the Russian victory – the end of the II war in 1945 would give rise to parallel historical phenomena, and make easy the constituting of a revolutionary party in conformity to the great traditions. Such a prospect might be judged generous, but it was greatly wrong because it did not take into account the "hunger for democracy" that had been instilled among proletarians, not so much by the more or less truculent exploits of Italian and German fascisms, as by the ruinous relapse into the false hope that with the recovery of democracy everything would in a natural way come back on the revolutionary lines; while the central position of the Left is the consciousness that the biggest danger lies in the populist and social-democratic illusions, which are not the basis for a new revolution, supposed to make the Kerensky-Lenin step, but of opportunism, the most powerful counter-revolutionary force.

For the Left opportunism is not a phenomenon of a moral nature, caused by the corruption of individuals; it is instead a phenomenon of a social and historical nature, owing to which the proletarian vanguard, in place of drawing up in the array that opposes the reactionary front of bourgeoisie and of petty-bourgeois strata – the latter much more conservative than the former – gives way to a policy welding the proletariat with the middle classes. In this sense the social phenomenon of opportunism does not differ from that of fascism, as it is in both cases a matter of subjection to the petty-bourgeoisie, of which the so-called intellectuals, the so-called political and bureaucratic-administrative class, form part – and which naturally are not classes able of historical vitality, but only base, marginal, and bootlicker strata, who are to be recognized, not as the deserters of the bourgeoisie of whom Marx describes the fatal passing to the ranks of the revolutionary class, but as the best servants and select knights of capitalist conservation, living on salaries that come from the extortion of surplus value from workers. The new movement showed even signs of falling into the illusion that there would be something to do within bourgeois parliaments, although with the aim of giving new life to the plan contained in the famous theses of Lenin; thus not taking into consideration the fact that an irrevocable historical result had demonstrated that such tactics could not end – however noble and grandiose they would be in 1920, when history seemed poised – with the perspectives of a revolutionary attack aiming to blow up parliaments from the inside; while instead all was reduced to the vulgar revenge against fascism of Modigliani’s cry "Long live parliament!".

7. It was a matter of a transition from one generation to another, of the generation which had lived through the glorious struggles of the first post-war period and the Livorno split handing over to the new proletarian generation, which needed to be delivered from the mad elation about the collapse of fascism in order to restore its awareness of the independent action of the revolutionary party, which was opposed to all other parties, and especially the social-democratic party, in order to re-establish forces committed to the prospect of the dictatorship and proletarian terror against the big bourgeoisie along with all its rapacious instruments. This being the case, the new movement, in an organic and spontaneous way, came up with a structural form for its activity which has been tried and tested over the last fifteen years. The party fulfilled aspirations which had been expressed within the Communist Left since the time of the Second International, and afterwards during the historic struggle against the first manifestations of opportunist danger within the Third. This long-standing aspiration is to struggle against democracy and prevent this vile bourgeois myth from gaining any influence; it has its roots in Marxist critique, in the fundamental texts and early documents of the proletarian organizations from the time of Communist Manifesto onwards.

If human history is not to be explained by the influence of exceptional individuals who have managed to excel through strength and physical valour, or by moral or intellectual force, if political struggle is seen, in a way which is wrong and diametrically opposed to ours, as a selecting of such exceptional personalities (whether believed to be the work of divinities or entrusted to social aristocracies, or – in the form most hostile to us of all – entrusted to the mechanism of vote-counting to which all elements in society are eventually admitted); when in fact history is a history of class struggles, which can only be read and applied to real battles, which are no longer ‘critiques’ but are violent and armed, by laying bare the economic relations that classes establish between themselves within given forms of production; if this fundamental theorem has been confirmed by the blood shed by countless fighters, whose generous efforts had been violated by democratic mystification; and if the heritage of the Communist Left has been erected on this balance sheet of oppression, exploitation, and betrayal, then the only road worth following was the one which over the course of history had freed us, more and more, from the lethal machinery of democracy, not only in society and the various bodies organised within it, but also within the revolutionary class itself, and above all in its political party.

This aspiration of the Left, which cannot be traced back to a miraculous intuition or rational enlightenment on the part of a great thinker, but which emerged under the impact of a chain of real, violent, bloody, and merciless struggles, even when it ended in the defeat of the revolutionary forces, has left its historic traces in a whole series of manifestations of the Left: from when it was struggling against electoral coalitions and the influence of Masonic ideologies, against the supporters firstly of the colonial wars and then the gigantic first European war (which triumphed over the proletarian aspiration to abandon their military uniforms and turn their arms against those who had forced them to take them up, mainly by agitating the lubricious phantom of a fight for liberty and democracy); from when finally in all the countries of Europe when finally in all the countries of Europe and under the leadership of the Russian revolutionary proletariat, the Left threw itself into the battle to bring down the main immediate enemy and target which protected the heart of the capitalist bourgeoisie, the social-democratic right-wing, and the even more ignoble centre which, defaming us just as it defamed bolshevism, Leninism, and the Russian Soviet dictatorship, did everything it could to place another trapdoor between the proletarian advance and the criminal idealisations of democracy. At the same time the aspiration to rid even the word "democracy" of any influence is evidenced in countless texts of the Left hurredly indicated at the start of these theses.

8. The working structure of the new movement, convinced of the importance, difficulty and historical duration of its task, which was bound to discourage dubious elements motivated by career considerations because it held no promise, indeed ruled out, any historical victories in the near future, was based on frequent meetings of envoys sent from the organized party sections. Here no debates or polemics between conflicting theses took place, or anything arising out of nostalgia for the malady of anti-fascism, and nothing needed to be voted on or deliberated over. There was simply the organic continuation of the serious historical work of handing on the fertile lessons of the past to present and future generations; to the new vanguards emerging from the ranks of the proletarian masses, beaten down, deceived, and disappointed over and over again but eventually destined to rebel against a capitalist society now in a state of purulent decomposition; they will at least feel in their living flesh how the extreme and most poisonous enemy are the ranks of populist opportunism, of bureaucrats of big unions and parties, and of the ridiculous pleiad of alleged cerebral intellectuals and artists, "committed" or "engaged" in earning some loaves for their harmful activity, by entering through the traitor parties the rich classes’ service like bootlickers, and by serving as well the bourgeois and capitalist soul of the middle classes posing as "people".

This work and this dynamic is inspired by the classic teachings of Marx and Lenin, who presented the great historical revolutionary truths in the form of theses; and these reports and theses of ours, faithfully grounded in the great Marxist tradition, now over a century old, were transmitted by all those present – thanks partly to our press communications – at the local and regional meetings, where this historic material was brought into contact with the party as a whole. It would be nonsense to claim they are perfect texts, irrevocable and unchangeable, because over the years the party has always said that it was material under continuous elaboration, destined to assume an ever better and more complete form; and in fact all ranks of the party, even the youngest elements have always, and with increasing frequency, made remarkable contributions that are in perfect keeping with the Left’s classical line.

It is only by developing our work along the lines indicated above that we expect to see that quantitative growth in our ranks and of the spontaneous adhesions to the party, which will one day make it a greater social force.

10. Returning to the early years of the Communist International, we will recall that its Russian leaders, who had behind them not only a thorough knowledge of Marxist doctrine and history, but also the outstanding outcome of the October revolutionary victory, conceived of theses such as Lenin’s as binding on all, although acknowledging that in the course of the international party’s life there was room for further elaboration. They never asked for them to be put to the vote because everything was accepted by unanimous agreement and spontaneously confirmed by everyone on the periphery of the organization; which in those glorious years was living in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and even of triumph.

The Left didn’t disagree with these generous ambitions, but held that, in order to achieve the outcomes all of us dreamt about, the communist party, sole and undivided, needed to have some of its organisational and constitutional measures tightened up and made more rigorous, and likewise its tactical norms clarified.

As soon as a certain relaxation in these vital areas started to emerge, denounced by us to the great Lenin himself, it started to produce harmful effects, and we were forced to meet reports with counter-reports, theses with counter-theses.

Unlike other opposition groups, even those formed in Russia and the Trotskyist current itself, we always carefully avoided having our work within the International take the form of calls for democratic, electoral consultations of the party membership as a whole, or for the election of steering committees.

The Left hoped to be able to save the International, and its vital core rich of traditions, without organizing scissionist movements, and always rejected the accusation of being organized, or of being about to organize itself, as a fraction, or as a party within the party. Nor did the Left encourage or approve the practice of individual resignations from the party or from the International, even when the dispalys of the rising opportunism were becoming more and more undeniable.

Nevertheless dozens of examples from previously cited texts evidence that the Left, in its underlying thinking, has always rejected elections, and voting for named comrades, or for general theses, as a means of determining choices, and believed that the road to the suppression of these means leads likewise to the abolition of another nasty aspect of politicians’ democraticism, that is, expulsions, removals, and dissolutions of local groups. On many occasions we have openly argued that such disciplinary procedures should be used less and less, until finally they disappear altogether.

If the opposite should occur or, worse still, if these disciplinary questions are wheeled out not to safeguard sound, revolutionary principles, but rather to protect the conscious or unconscious positions of nascent opportunism, as happened in 1924, 1925, 1926, this just means that the central function has been carried out in the wrong way, which determined its loss of any influence on the base, from a disciplinary point of view; and the more that is the case, the more is phoney disciplinary rigour shamelessly praised.

In the very early years the Left hoped the organizational and tactical concessions might be justified by the fecundity of the historical moment and have only temporary value, since Lenin’s prospect was one of major revolutions in central and maybe western Europe, and after these the line would return to the clear and all-encompassing one which was in keeping with the vital principles. But the more that such a hope came to be gradually replaced by the certainty we were heading for opportunistic ruin – which inevitably assumed its classic form of glorification and exaltation of democratic and electoral intrigue – the more the Left conducted its historical defence without undermining its mistrust of the democratic mechanism. Such a distrust was maintained even when we were forced, by electoral combines, within parties, to accept the game; and, while such tricks had to be welcomed when made by fascism, which thus enabled workers to reply to the provocation by taking up arms, they had to be repudiated when impudently perpetrated by the fathers of the new opportunism, on the point of reconquering both parties and International; though if in theory it could give ironic satisfaction hearing them say: We are ten and we want to submit you, who are a thousand; as we were far too sure they would end their shameful career by cheating workers’ votes by the million.

11. It has always been a firm and consistent position of the Left that if disciplinary crises multiply and become the rule, it signifies that something in the general running of the party is not right, and the problem merits study. Naturally we won’t repudiate ourselves by committing the infantile mistake of seeking salvation in a search for better people or in the choice of leaders and semi-leaders, all of which we hold to be part and parcel of the opportunist phenomenon, historical antagonist of the forward march of left revolutionary Marxism.

The Left staunchly defends another of Marx and Lenin’s fundamental theses, that is, that a remedy for the alternations and historical crises which will inevitably affect the party cannot be found in constitutional or organizational formulae magically endowed with the property of protecting the party against degeneration. Such a false hope is one amongst the many petty-bourgeois illusions dating back to Proudhon and which, via numerous connections, re-emerge in Italian Ordinovism, namely: that the social question can be resolved using a formula based on producers’ organizations. Over the course of party evolution the path followed by the formal parties will undoubtedly be marked by continuous U-turns and ups and downs, and also by ruinous precipices, and will clash with the ascending path of the historical party. Left Marxists direct their efforts towards realigning the broken curve of the contingent parties with the continuous and harmonious curve of the historical party. This is a position of principle, but it is childish to try to transform it into an organizational recipe. In accordance with the historical line, we utilize not only the knowledge of mankind’s, the capitalist class and the proletarian class’s past and present, but also a direct and certain knowledge of society’s and mankind’s future, as mapped out by our doctrine in the certainty that it will culminate in the classless and Stateless society, which could in a certain sense be considered a party-less society; unless one understands by ’party’ an organ which fights not against other parties, but which conducts the defence of mankind against the dangers of physical nature and its evolutionary and eventually catastrophic processes.

The Communist Left has always considered that its long battle against the sad contingencies of the proletariat’s succession of formal parties has been conducted by affirming positions that in a continuous and harmonious way are connected on the luminous trail of the historical party, which continues unbroken along the years and centuries, leading from the first declarations of the nascent proletarian doctrine to the society of the future, which we know very well, insofar as we have thoroughly identified the tissue and ganglia of the present avaricious society which the revolution must sweep away.

Engels’ proposal to adopt the good old German word Gemeinwesen (common being, i.e. social community) in place of the word State, was connected to Marx’s judgment on the Commune, which was no longer a State, just because it was no longer a democratic body. After Lenin, such a theoretical question does not require any further explanations, and there is no contradiction in his brilliant remark that, apparently, Marx was much more of a "champion of the state" than Engels, as the former better explained the revolutionary dictatorship being a true State, provided with armed forces and repressive police, and with a political and terroristic law, which does not tie its own hands with legal traps. The question is also to be referred to the two masters’ unanimous condemnation of the German socialists’ revisionist idealization, in the foolish formula of "free people’s State"; which not only sends out a stench of bourgeois democratism, but above all reverses the whole notion of inexorable conflict between classes, which involves the destruction of the bourgeoisie’s historical State and the erection on its ruins of the more unmerciful, eversive proletarian State, indifferent to eternal constitutions.

It was not therefore the matter of finding a "model" of the future state in constitutional or organizational features; which is just as stupid as the attempt to erect, in the first country won to dictatorship, a model for other countries’ socialist States and societies.

But equally futile, maybe more so, is the idea of constructing a model of the perfect party, an idea redolent of the decadent weaknesses of the bourgeoisie, which, unable to defend its power, to maintain its crumbling economic system, or even to exert control over its doctrinal thinking, takes refuge in distorted robotic technologisms, in order, through these stupid, formal, automatic models, to ensure its own survival, and to escape scientific certainty, which as far its epoch of history and civilization is concerned can be summed up in one word: Death!

12. Among the doctrinal processes, that we can for a moment name philosophical, included in the tasks of the Communist Left and of its international movement, is the development of the above mentioned thesis, that we supplied with quite a few contributions, by carrying out a research that demonstrates its consistency to the classic positions of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

The first truth that man will be able to gain is the notion of future communist society. Such a structure does not require any material coming from the present infamous society, with its capitalist, democratic, and paltry Christian features, and does not regard the alleged positive science, created by the bourgeois revolution, as a human heritage on which to be founded; as for us it is a class science, to be destroyed and replaced piece by piece, just as well as religions and scholastics, belonging to previous forms of production. In the field of the theory of economic transformations that from capitalism – the sturcture of which we well know, and official economists completely ignore – lead to communism, we do as well without the contributions of bourgeois science; the same contempt we have for its technology, which is highly praised, above all by the imbecile opportunist traitors, as on the path of great conquests. In a totally revolutionary way we set up the science of society’s life and future outlet. When such a work of human mind will be perfect – which won’t be possible before the killing of capitalism, of its civilization, of its schools, of its science, and of its technology worthy of thieves – man will, for the first time, be able to write also both science and history of physical nature, and to know the great problems of the universe’s life, to start with what is still called creation by the scientists won back to the dogma, till all its infinite and infinitesimal implications, in the so far undeciphered future.

13. The above and other problems are the field of action of the party we keep alive, not unworthy to get into the same line of the great historical party. But such concepts of high theory are not resources, able to solve petty disputes and small human doubts, which will unfortunately last as long as the presence of individuals – surrounded and dominated by the barbarian environment of capitalist civilization – among our ranks will last. Thence such developments cannot be used to explain how the opportunist-free party’s way of living takes place, as it lies in organic centralism and cannot arise from a "revelation".

Such an evident Marxist thesis can be found, as a heritage of the Left, in all polemics against the Moscow Centre’s degeneration. The party is at the same time a factor and a result of situations’ historical course, and can never be seen as an extraneous and abstract element and able to dominate the surrounding environment, without falling again into a new and faint utopianism.

The fact that within the party there may be an inclination to give life to a fiercely anti-bourgeois background, widely anticipating the character of communist society, is an old enunciation, made also, for instance, by the young Italian communists in 1912.

But such a worthy aspiration cannot lead us to consider the ideal party as a phalanstery, surrounded by insurmountable walls.

The screening of party members in the organic centralist scheme is carried out in a way we have always supported against the Moscow centrists. The party continues to hone and refine the distinctive features of its doctrine, of its action and tactics with a unique methodology that transcends spatial and temporal boundaries. Clearly all those who are uncomfortable with these delineations can just leave.

Not even after the seizure of power has taken place can we conceive of having forced membership in our ranks; which is why organic centralism excludes terroristic pressures in the disciplinary field, which can’t help but adopt even the very language of abused bourgeois constitutional forms, such as the power of the executive power to dissolve and reassemble elective formations – all forms that for a long time we have considered obsolete, not only for the proletarian party, but even for the revolutionary and temporary State of the victorious proletariat. The party does not have to display, to those who want to join it, any constitutional or legal plans for the future society, as such forms are only proper to class societies. Those who, seeing the party continuing on its clear way, that we attempted to summarize in the these theses to be set out at Naples’ general meeting (July, 1965), do not yet feel up to such a historical level, know very well that they can take any other direction turning away from ours. We do not have to take any other steps on the matter.