The most remarkable parts of Althusser’s articles are those which unveil and denounce the internal structure and functioning of the French Communist Party. Althusser doesn’t call it by its real name, a name that we know all too well and that we must proclaim out loud: It is called bureaucratic centralism, antipode of democratic centralism. In a biting style, Althusser dismantles its mechanisms: an organization of full-time officials, virtually cut off from the working class and from civil society and incapable of subsisting outside of the party apparatus; a leadership which manipulates the rank and file and ensures its own survival through the automatic cooptation of the apparatus; a freedom of “discussion” among a rank and file that is strictly compartmentalized into cells or local sections, and powerfully reinforced by the principle of unanimity (of “collegial solidarity”) which the leadership observes in its relations with the base; the myth that “the party is always right” or that “ the central committee never makes mistakes,” a myth which is the ideological correlative of a bureaucratic structure; a manipulative and exhortatory relationship between the party and the working class, in which the former educates the latter but never learns from it, thereby sanctioning, theoretically, the hierarchical and quasi-military relationship between the leadership and the base.

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Against this evil, two kinds of remedies may be used. The first is proposed by Althusser and is essentially political in character. It claims for itself a political theory and practice diametrically opposed to that of the Stalinist and reformist bureaucracies which is founded upon a distrust and fear of the large masses of working people.

The emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves. The revolutionary vanguard party is an indispensable instrument in achieving this task but can in no way substitute itself for the working class. A party wielding a correct revolutionary programme has a decisive advantage in the class struggle as that programme is the synthesis of all the lessons learned from past working class struggles. Its correct implementation is a function of numerous concrete factors peculiar to each situation. Moreover, new phenomena periodically arise which are unresolved at the programmatic level.

This is why the relationship of the vanguard party to the class is far more complex that the relationship between educator and educated. The educator himself constantly needs to be educated. He can only become so by correct practice within the class and in the class struggle. The only practical proof of his capacity to fulfill his role of vanguard is given by his ability to establish his political influence over ever wider layer of the working class and, ultimately, to acquire political hegemony over the majority of workers.

We assume that in the course of this long political struggle he will have learned as much from the spontaneity of the masses and of their class struggle as he will have taught them wider political conceptions. This obviously does not mean an opportunist adaptation to whatever the great majority of workers happen to believe at any given moment, something which, incidentally, can change very rapidly. But it does mean lending an attentive ear to what they have to say and doing so honestly and faithfully. No long lasting and effective antidote to the evil of bureaucracy is possible without these political and theoretical elements, reinforced by a whole series of safeguards (statutory, constitutional, material). We will not dwell on them. They have been for the most part enumerated by Marx and Lenin. We will mention only one additional principle: the obligatory presence, in all legislative and executive organs of workers, organizations and of future worker’s state, of an absolute majority of workers remaining in production, that is to say, of non-officials.

The second kind of remedy against the bureaucratic evil is more narrowly organizational in character. It has to do with modus-operandi of working class organizations, i.e. the preservation of workers’ democracy.

In this regard the most we can do is note Louis Althusser’s timidity. Having denounced a deep-seated and institutionalized evil, he concludes with two very modest proposals: 1) opening up the pages of the communist press to debate, and 2) securing the right to obtain information horizontally in order to guarantee a truly democratic debate. We are, of course, in favor of these proposals. However, even if they are necessary to insure a minimum of workers’ democracy, they are still inadequate as a solid, lasting foundation. What distinguishes democratic from bureaucratic centralism is the right, in theory and in practice, to form tendencies.

Indeed, in any really centralized organization the leadership unavoidably enjoys the advantages accorded by centralization. It obtains information, centralizes the practical experiences of the party as a whole and transmits unitary instructions to all party organs. Draft resolutions or theses circulate in the party before congresses or national conferences. These constitute the foundation for all debates.

This is not in itself an evil. It is even an advantage, an indispensable feature of any functioning organic structure. To understand the objective role of this centralization is to understand that it is not merely an “organizational” or even administrative phenomenon, but represents a social and political necessity. What this centralization expresses is the attempt of Marxists, of communists, to overcome the fragmentation of the experience of the proletariat lived in isolation, factory by factory, industry by industry, region by region. The interest of the class as a whole is different from that of its individual sectors or components and is brought out only through centralization of the practice and the experience of the class struggle. However, the mechanisms of centralization can not be made to work solely in favor of the leadership and at the same time preserve their functional objectivity and effectiveness from a class struggle perspective, unless one adopts the absurd Stalinist thesis that the leadership is infallible.

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This is the meaning of Lenin’s thesis developed in State and Revolution, that the workers’ state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is the first state in the history of humanity that must begin to whither away as soon as it is born. This withering away is precisely the spectacular broadening of direct democracy at the rank and file level. This becomes realizable only under definite material and political conditions: a reduction in the length of the working day, plurality of political parties and tendencies, unhindered access to the mass media, the right to exercise all fundamental democratic liberties. These desiderata are indispensable for the real, and not formal and largely bogus operation of workers’ councils.

We will be told that we have skirted the more modest issue, raised by Althusser, of “popular committees.” We do not believe so. There is an organic link, an internal coherence between a communist political orientation systematically favoring mass initiatives at the rank and file level and their self-organization in day to day struggles. There is an organic link between the conception, shared by Marx and Lenin, of the seizure of power by the proletariat, and the model of the Workers’ State of tomorrow, of socialist democracy and of socialist construction as an immediate task that we defend in the working class. Whoever does not see this coherence and seeks to sidestep it can only expect terrible disappointments not only among the masses but in the vanguard as well. It serves as a lodestar in proletarian and popular struggles even in the absence of revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations. The masses must learn how to organize independently, and how can they if not through the experience of self-organization acquired in the course of struggle. Only through multiplying and generalizing the practice of holding general assemblies at the work place (and in the community, among students, etc.): only by multiplying and generalizing the practice of democratically elected strike committees by general assemblies of strikers; only by multiplying and generalizing the practice of the united rank and file committees to which Althusser refers, can this training be obtained. Workers’ councils will spring up only through the accumulation of such experiences acquired bit by bit, yesterday and today.

To this unified and coherent conception of the self-organization of the masses in the course of partial struggles, of the socialist revolution and socialist construction, corresponds an equally well defined conception of what a genuine communist party is and what a genuine communist politics is. This conception can be summed up as:The Party aids the class’s self-organization and self-rule without ever substituting itself for it. The Party argues for its (correct) political line within the committees and councils. It can hope to win over the majority of workers to this only if conditions are favorable and if the line is correct! If it does not win them over or if it loses influence among them, then the class struggle, revolution, and the construction of socialism will enter into severe crises. These will be either partially overcome or not overcome at all. But the party must struggle in the class by political means only and never by administrative or repressive means. All power to councils and committees not all power to the party: such is the conclusion.

This does not at all diminish the decisive importance of the revolutionary party in the class struggle, in the overthrow of capitalism and in the construction of socialism. On the contrary, it underlines even more its vital importance. The spontaneity of the masses by itself does not and cannot solve the key problems facing the future of humanity. But a genuine communist party is nothing other than the vanguard of the working class on the road to its self-organization and self-emancipation and not the substitute or manipulator of the class. This is the essence of the question.