



Presentation

The following text, The Communist Party in the Tradition of the Left, from June 1974, is the product of the party’s collective effort to prioritise and restate the fundamental issues; issues which get brought up whenever the organisation swerves off course and which generally, at least so far, have taken the form of more or less conspicuous and comprehensive splits, more or less useful in terms of strengthening of party action on the basis of continuity and unity of theory, programme, tactics and organisation. Written all in one go, under the impulse of the perpetual, pressing need to re-establish the fundamental principles on which the Party based its re-launch in 1952, no textual modifications are needed.

In the days before the appearance of the Party’s new press organ Il Partito Comunista, the work appeared originally as the first of a series of pamphlets. The circulation of the text was therefore inevitably limited, although a new edition in book form was brought out a few years later, first in Italian then in other languages. Now, at last, it is available in English speaking countries and to an international readership. It is hoped that comrades, readers of our press and proletarians who follow our struggle will find it both an aid to study, and an indispensable guide to how the Left resolved the complex and intertwined issues adequately summed up in the title of our classical text from 1945, Nature, Function and Tactics of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the Working Class.

Explained in that work, using our powerful and impersonal historical method, is the Marxist school’s perfectly consistent definition of the Communist Party; which, after the destruction of the Third International, has been uniquely represented by the Communist Left’s tradition of positions and struggles.

Drawing on a long party activity stretching over half a century, from 1920, a still revolutionary year in Europe, to the comparatively recent 1970, and covering a long cycle of counterrevolution (as opposed to the gossipy “new stages” discovered every six months by anti-Marxist immediatism), the quotations and the comments which introduce them, and nail down their meaning, describe the historically determined characteristics of the revolutionary party, «a projection into the present day of the human-society of tomorrow».

The text neither adds to, or modifies, any of the theses which the Left defended within the International against Stalinist corruption and then later against the degeneration represented by the non-Marxist anti-Stalinist currents. Taking that in combination with what was codified and objectively realized within a long international party tradition in the post 2nd World War period, it represents a synthetic and systematic document, and the confirmation of our programmatic theses on the so-called organizational questions. We thus bring to the attention of new generations of young proletarians, the revolutionaries of tomorrow, and to whoever is drawn into our orbit the theses defended by our party organization and by us alone.

The text was written immediately after the last laceration of party unity; the worst and most dramatic of the post-war period because desired and driven by the party Centre itself, and directed against comrades who maintained their full allegiance to its programmatic principles and organizational discipline. It is to be considered the continuation of a work, carried out according to our tradition and method, by which, amidst the frantic organizational “new courses”, the correct orientation was kept in accordance with the basic principles which regulate and discipline the life, action, and nature of the party; a work which was presented to the organization as a whole as a way of preventing it losing its revolutionary bearings.

The text was circulated at the time as an internal document, exclusively aimed at party comrades and the Centre. This was because the main thing was to get the administrative measure of expulsion repealed, channelling the forces of all comrades into reconfirming the homogeneous bases we held in common, the old method of work we had in common, the common principles which nobody was openly saying they wished to question; and, equally importantly, it wanted to reaffirm those characteristic and special aspects of party life which had characterized it since its reconstitution in the immediate post-war period.

So, a party text then, a party work rather than a polemical document or an indictment of secessionism against an alleged “other side”. In the Introduction of the time we read: «Rejected by the Centre as total and absolute rubbish, this work is a modest contribution which amplifies a proposal made some years ago. Maybe if the ’compass’ hadn’t spun out of control, it would have appeared in the columns of Programma Comunista, instead of all those dubious articles on ’organisation’».

We had to admit that the compass had spun out of control, and irreversibly so. Since then, the two organisations have pursued their own respective paths and we have no further demands or reproaches to put forward. We are, however, left with the precious lesson of the method we used to respond to the encroaching disaster of the split, and to the errors which would prompt, sustain and conclude it in such an ignominious way over the years which followed; errors which would reduce to vile, disgraceful tatters that allegedly iron organization which had arisen after the expulsion of ’the weaklings’; of those ’lacking in discipline’; of the ’anti-centralist’ fraction, as it was then called, who had opposed the new organizational courses and the impromptu disciplinary measures; not for fear of discipline and organizational power, but rather because they saw in those means, in those criteria, the road to disorganization, and hence a breach of programmatic unity.

The aim of this tenacious work wasn’t to arouse any sense of personal satisfaction about ’winners’ and the ’losers’ within the party, but rather to prompt a sound reaction, capable of bringing the party as a whole back onto correct positions, without rehabilitations, self-criticisms or anyone being put on trial.

Drawing on the whole, integrated tradition of the Communist Left, the text, therefore, merely sets out to restate postulates known to everyone in the party and accepted by all militants; postulates which past and present generations have ’sculpted’ and refined with the aim of fortifying and expanding the fighting party organization, which in its turn has been strengthened by this continuous, untiring work.

Faced with the dispersal and general retreat of the proletarian movement on all fronts, when even parties calling themselves communist would yield to those old bourgeois and idealist superstitions which entrust everything to the myth of the illustrious leader, or to the petty bourgeois deference to hierarchy, or, worse still, to simple arithmetical majorities, only the Left was capable of drawing the lesson of the counter-revolution, by recognising the Third International, in its first two congresses, as the anticipation of the world communist party; something which is an old aspiration of Marxist communism and a historical necessity. The Left would also denounce ephemeral forms, the survival of federalism and of doctrinal and programmatic heterogeneity within the party, and their degenerate consequences: the democratic mechanism and its complement, bureaucratism and abuse of organizational formalism.

Before in the International the Left was opposed to the view that the method of internal work, the study of social reality and the singling out of the appropriate tactics, should be the result of an internal political struggle, of the clash between different factions and of their changing relationships.

Within the party which re-emerged at the end of the war – the one world communist party in embryonic form – all the more strenuously did we rule out the possibility that its internal life could be based on a clash between several, ideologically opposed currents. Now, thanks to a process of historical revolutionary and class struggle maturation, doctrinal unity had finally been achieved once and for all, and a system of tactical norms codified.

Such an objective maturity of proletarian experience is crystallized in facts, texts and theses, and pulsates in the living party structure and in its univocal and scientific work of study and research. This makes possible – or rather requires – the adoption of an organic method for the realization of its tactics and its coherent action.

We maintain that the most efficient way of utilizing the party forces as a whole lies in unitary methods of work which rely on «fraternal solidarity and mutual consideration among comrades». We therefore finally relegate to the museum of prehistory, to that of proletarian organization as well, those nowadays destructive methods (which were only ever present in the movement due to historical immaturity) of “struggle” between comrades and fractions, where not only the weapons of democracy and numerical head counts are used, but exaggeration and polemical excess as well; to the point indeed that the Left fraction would have to put up with personal attacks, slanders, gossip, manoeuvres between prominent leaders, and manipulations of the much adulated rank and file.

Finally, we could rule out both the habit of “personifying the party”, and “personifying errors”, according to which it is only through the authoritativeness of a “leader” that the party can discern the correct political line, or, vice versa, ascribe errors to some “culprit’s” deviation. In the world revolutionary party, the hunt for the correct tactical line was at last possible without the need to waste an absurd amount of energy in factional struggles (the “sport of fractionism” within the Third International); the goal was no longer defeating, numerically overwhelming or expelling from the organizational leadership a given group of comrades, by using any means necessary; but rather convincing the whole party organism of the correctness of the tactical line, and thus reinforcing the movement’s unity.

We knew what the objection would be: the party, still subjected to the pressure of the bourgeois environment, should defend itself from spurious ideologies and lines which try to penetrate it. With our clear theses, and wishing to avoid all useless moralising or witch-hunts, we simply answered that experience had taught us that the opportunist involution of parties has always been manipulated from above, by artfully flaunting numerical majorities and invoking formal discipline. Introducing the practice of engaging in political struggle within the party thus meant handing it over to the very people it was supposed to be fighting against. The party can, and indeed must, defend itself from the terrible, permanent pressure of the external environment with the same methods it uses to govern its organic life. The latter is not an aesthetical luxury or a formal liturgy to be set aside whenever we move from the “stage of theoretical research” to that of “class struggle”. The one defence the party has is the extreme coherence of its organic method.

These themes have been further expounded in a recent report entitled, In the Party’s Organic Predisposition lies its Preparation for Revolution, which is included here as an appendix to the 1974 text.

In 1951, «in the depths of the counter-revolutionary depression», with the drifting of the Russian State onto the terrain of defence of bourgeois relations a fait accompli and the patriotic intoxication of the second imperialist war a thing of the past, the Internationalist Communist Party, constituting itself in a clear and homogeneous manner, formulated a body of characteristic theses. These theses had the purpose of defining our movement, and clearly delimiting it both from those forces which have abandoned the party and from those groups which though they appear to be close to us, have marched in step with the great machineries of official social democracy ever since.

In those theses, still a constant reference point for our present organization, the chapters entitled Theory; Tasks of the Communist Party; Historical Waves of Opportunist Degeneration; Party Action in Italy and in Other Countries in 1952, aren’t to do with philosophy, or with abstract professorial histories; rather they outline the party’s mode of being, a party not merely firmly founded on “the principles of historical materialism and of critical communism of Marx and Engels”; but one able, and willing to, bring that social science and those future predictions to life within an active organisation; within a party whose aim is to suppress the antagonism between consciousness and action, between the theory of revolution and revolutionary activity itself.

Although referring to a fairly small organisation, due to historical causes, the 4th thesis in part IV states:

1 - Characteristic Theses of the Party, 1951

IV. 4 – Today we are in the depths of the political depression, and although the possibilities of action are considerably reduced, the party, following revolutionary tradition, has no intention of breaking the historical line of preparation for a future large scale resurgence of the class struggle, which will integrate all the results of past experience. Restriction of practical activity does not imply the renunciation of revolutionary objectives. The party recognises that in certain sectors its activity is quantitatively reduced, but this does not mean that the multi-faceted totality of its activity is altered, and it does not renounce expressly to any of them.



The reduced militant forces which reorganized soon after the end of the war recognized that choosing the program of revolutionary emancipation of the working class from the capitalist class was by now historically incontrovertible. Not only were the theoretical principles of communist social and cognitive critique integral and essential parts of such a program, but also a complete system of tactical norms derived from centuries of proletarian warfare, and an organic method of work and internal relations relevant to the proletarian party. The maturity of our theoretical postulates, and their confirmation derived from the living verification of the class struggle, enabled the party at the time to state in Thesis 5, Part IV:

2 - Characteristic Theses of the Party, 1951

IV. 5. Today, the principal activity is the re-establishment of the theory of Marxist communism (...) That is why the party will present no new doctrines but will instead reaffirm the full validity of the fundamental theses of revolutionary Marxism, which are amply confirmed by facts (...) Because the proletariat is the last of the classes to be exploited, and consequently in its turn will exploit no one, the doctrine which arose alongside the class can neither be changed nor reformed. The development of capitalism, from its inception until now, has confirmed and continues to confirm the Marxist theorems set out in the fundamental texts. The alleged “innovations” and “teachings” of the last 30 years have only confirmed that capitalism is still alive and must be overthrown.



The consequence of our trust in science and the scientific method is the conviction that the programme isn’t something we invent, rediscover or update, especially nowadays. The revolutionary programme already exists in the awful reality of proletarian defeats and the putrefaction of the bourgeois universe. The revolutionary programme, in a doctrinal sense, has existed for a century and a half with the last refinements being added by the Marxist left, who codified the lessons derived from the culminating point of the proletarian advance, the Russian Revolution; and from that first, pulsing realization of the anticipated one, worldwide direction of the insurgent proletariat, the Third International. From then on, the party’s task has been to preserve this outlook, to keep the science of subversion alive. In the amorphous present, the party’s task is to seek the confirmation of its theorems in contemporary and past events rather than trying to find new exceptions to them.

Since the time of the Third International, the party, remaining true to its historical tradition, has devoted itself – within what the theses would refer to as “merely quantitative” limitations – to the impersonal and indispensable work of defending communist continuity.

We postulate the organized form of the party type, which since 1848 at least has been the appropriate form for a conscious, and unique, proletarian organization capable of accommodating the milizia comunista whenever there was the slightest chance of it existing. So a unitary party organization then: as unitary as our program, and as devoid of the clash of conflicting interests as the world we are fighting for. Centralism and discipline derive from monolithicity of programme. Rather than being construed as administrative or terrorist coercion, discipline in the party is, and can only be, spontaneous; the natural way of life of an organisational body which is entirely focused on one end, and well aware of the route and all the detours and dangers on the path to achieving that end. Discipline in the strongest sense, organic discipline, is only possible in the communist party; that is why – as opposed to within organisations of the dying class society – the call for discipline within the party doesn’t have recourse to coercion, since all that could be assumed, in any non-individual lack of discipline, was that it had to be something about the party’s work at a deeper level which was causing it to stray from its historical path. Since the birth of new schools or ideologies inside the communist movement is ruled out at a theoretical level, we take the position that internal political struggle, and fractions battling amongst themselves, can be banned inside the party. Whenever the party is divided into two groups, it leads to the death of that party and the birth of a new organization in reaction to the degeneration of the old. Events from the past, and recent, history of our movement show this only too clearly.

The concept of the communist party outlined in the Theses rejects all localism, and contingentism, in the work of defending the program or in the party’s external propaganda. They are stale residues of petty-bourgeois social strata, who, restricted by the narrow horizon of the club, or local “study” group, think they can “make their own way to the party”. But these winding and tortuous new paths, compared to the broad highway of the old, tried and tested and impersonal method of the party, are impassable and they lead precisely nowhere.

Within the party, and only within the party, we see the social relations typical of the future society realized. Firmly resisting the powerful influences of the external environment, it is only within the party that the bourgeois superstition of the “person” is rejected as a false abstraction of the ascendant bourgeoisie; and condemned along with its mercantile accessories of careers, rewards and competition.

In the belief that the consignment of the historical party, not as “revealed dogma”, but as the synthesis of past proletarian experience, confirmed by past and present events, constitutes the continuous furrow along which the militant organization has to channel its energies, in Thesis 7 of Part IV it is stressed that:

3 - Characteristic Theses of the Party, 1951

IV. 7... Consequently, party members are not granted personal freedom to elaborate and conjure up new schemes or explanations of the contemporary social world. They are not free as individuals to analyse, criticise and make forecasts, whatever their level of intellectual competence may be. The Party defends the integrity of a theory which is not the product of blind faith, but one whose content is the science of the proletarian class; developed from centuries of historical material, not by thinkers, but under the impulse of material events, and reflected in the historical consciousness of one revolutionary class and crystallized in its party. Material events have only confirmed the doctrine of revolutionary Marxism.



Another separation of party forces took place in 1966, and organizational continuity was maintained then by a decisive reconfirmation of the norms of internal party relations drawn from the balance sheet of the Third International’s degeneration, as specifically recalled by the Theses of 1965-66. As in 1951, another, separate organization was formed which distanced itself from the party and went off in a different direction to ourselves; where to we’ve never been particularly interested in finding out.

On this basis, the party which would be identified with its organ Il Programma Comunista would arise, and carry out its work, until 1973. Then another, ’dirty’ split as we would call it, would take place; dishonest because those who were betraying the party at the time didn’t have the nerve to proclaim their intention of abandoning the plotted course; or only after the event, once militants had already been deceived. On the contrary – and the history of formal parties has taught us this is the rule for all revisionisms – they did it while making a show of reverence, as formal as it was hypocritical, for the great names of illustrious men and for abstract principles kept on ice to be brandished at the right moment. Unlike former splits, the one in 1973 was particularly murky and deeply felt because, for the first time since 1951, crisis and fractionism involved the steering centre of the organization too.

In 1973, the material fact of the expulsion from Programma of a significant part of the organization in itself provoked the existence of two separate parties, each of them following their own path. The historical impossibility of the positions of the Left coexisting with any kind of opportunism explains why this irrevocable split was so clear cut. The new organization, publishers of the periodicals Il Partito Comunista, Comunismo, Communist Left, and periodicals in other languages, now had the chance to weigh up this latest crisis of the formal party; a crisis which, even though occurring at a very paltry level, we nevertheless deemed “rotten to the core”. We would proceed to brand the deviation as opportunist, and the result of voluntarism and impatience as regards practice. Describing our accusers as activist, we would turn against them the very label they had conjured up to describe our non existent fraction.

Since the possibility of the party’s existence is not something we make mechanically dependent on particular force relations between the classes, or the number of available militants; but rather on everyone’s absolute acceptance of the unique, unchanging and monolithic program, our party, small though it was, pressed on with the “serious work” it had embarked on in 1951: that of preventing defections and the impending pressure of the bourgeois world from breaking the “thread of time” which, continuous and intact, is passed on from one generation of militants to the other. In 1973 we weren’t just fighting over a couple of deviations, or just about some of the more vexed questions; above all we were defending our very concept of the communist party; and that was the ultimate test insofar as keeping the conscious proletarian organization alive is both the most important revolutionary action of all, and a scorching theoretical defeat for our enemy towering above us.

Therefore, from the moment of separation from the old organization we have had nothing more to do with it, and felt no obligation to pronounce judgement on how it has gradually distanced itself from the Left.

Over recent decades the party has «persevered» – in the Theses of Naples sense – «in ’sculpting’ the distinctive features of its doctrine, action, and tactics with the same unique method, over space and time», in the certainty that the present day work of the party, if it survives, will be in the future a very powerful factor in accelerating the reconstruction of the large scale party of the Revolution. And let us not rule out the possibility of a future rebirth of the proletarian party, in other countries or continents, anywhere, exclusively through a rediscovery and rereading of the texts and of history. We maintain however that this process, otherwise long and tortuous, can be made far shorter, and more direct, by the presence of a party, even a small one, capable of handing down the thread, and the norms and the formulae which are synthetic and conclusive in the historical sense, of our science.

The current state of society being no worse than in 1951, the party is proud to have been able to maintain, throughout the longest ever reflux of the world revolution, this “small continuance” of left wing Marxism, and not just as “theses and texts” but also as a living and active organ. Since our movement now lacks famous men, from whose now “useless” genius there is no further enlightenment to be drawn, impersonal and collective party work is the only way we can really get to grips with proletarian social science and hope to see beyond the mists of the present amorphous environment.

We don’t believe we need to change our theses or add to them. Away from a stupid “organizational arrogance” devoid of programmatic content (typical of all opportunism by the way, including recent examples) and not emotionally attached to any particular organization per se, we confirm our claim – alone against all the various updaters and re-considerers – to full and exclusive continuity with these theses; and with that party which had the revolutionary instinct, and dialectical strength, to proclaim itself as such in the face of the stammerings of spontaneistic rationalism and realpolitick scepticism.

* * *

The final part of the present work, the fifth, is dedicated to the crucial issue of tactics, the practical action of the party at various times and in different places; the knotty problem which needs unravelling in preparation for the revolutionary attack and which, conversely, of all the areas in which the party organization operates, is the most delicate and complex because conducted in the white heat of the social struggle.

As in the previous sections there is an introduction to the fifth part which provides a synthetic overview of the party’s general tactical plan. This is followed by an ample set of quotations, subdivided into six chapters, drawn from the fundamental texts of revolutionary communism and from our uncorrupted tradition of struggle against Stalinism and opportunism, which clearly demonstrate the invariance of the filo rosso, wending its way through generations of men and political formations.

The tactical sphere, like the organizational one dealt with in the preceding sections, has always been one of the points of ’major criticality’; the starting point for some of the party’s most dangerous deviations. Many party structures founded or re-founded on very solid doctrinarian and organizational bases, and even on the wave of a victorious revolution, have been distorted out of all recognition in the space of a couple of years because they thought that possession of “sound principles” made the use of any manoeuvre permissible, or worse still, that a “strong and disciplined” organization made any tactical about-face permissible. That the painful corollary of such a tactical ’dégringolade’ is that it is then inevitably accompanied by a degeneration of relations within the Party, by the appearance of fractionism from above, by methods of organizational coercion and by out and out political struggle; this is something the century old history of the class organ ’Party’ has taught us; and it is a definitive lesson.

Similarly having a rigid framework to contain the shortlist of tactical options bolsters and reinforces unity, compactness, and therefore discipline within the entire party collective; which no longer has to be subjected to the tactical inventions of the movement’s leadership because the latter in its turn is obliged to respect norms and cardinal rules as binding on the rank and file as on the leadership; norms and cardinal rules shared by all and known by all, and on whose basis the Party itself was formed. Therefore, it is not to consultative assemblies, battles between minorities and majorities, or to more or less brilliant leaders that the carrying out of tactical plans will be entrusted, but to an organ of anonymous appearance, substantiated by an anonymous, impersonal and collective work considered as a task of the entire party collective, all the more efficient inasmuch as it is firmly connected to that tradition, and that historical method, which the Party has understood and made its own.

The “group of statements” which are brought together in the first chapter cover a 40 year time-span, and within them, in the powerful dialectic and historical sense which we attribute to our doctrine, is combined the authority of the past, present and future revolutionary militants who are the cornerstone of the “tactics” which, one could almost say, supports the entire life of the party. The Party lives and “exists” for the outside world, for the class which it historically defines partly through its tactics; i.e., through its set of rules for action, which are necessarily the reflection, or rather the consequent accomplishment, of its being, of its program and of its historical principles; existing above and beyond changing historical circumstances or its more or less brilliant leaders.

Tactics cannot be improvised; tactics cannot be changed on the whim of some leader, or due to unforeseen circumstances. They must remain within the set parameters prescribed by the party’s historical experience, under pain of destruction of the party itself and the defeat of the revolutionary movement. What’s more, good tactics involves the party being ready and prepared to apply them, and turn them into weapons to fight the enemy.

We emphasize the fact that our thesis on the Party’s absolute autonomy (which we alone subscribe to) which is discussed in the second chapter, and in the third in reference to the Rome Theses, sums up the Party’s characteristics in the most complete and unmistakable way, distinguishing what makes it entirely distinctive and unique compared to every other organisation, not only of the proletariat, but every other organisation which humanity as a whole has so far expressed; to the extent in fact that in the living reality of today it represents the link between primitive communism and the advanced communism of the future.

The proletariat can do without the kind of party which is only capable of leading it to new defeats. The proletariat needs a Party which has learnt all it can from the past and is capable of leading it to the final victory against capitalism. The central question of tactics, therefore, is as follows: only the Party possesses the kind of tactics which enable it to tackle the questions of what action it should take in a conscious way, and that is why, in given historical conditions, it can deploy a greater force than the capitalist State itself. It is a well-known fact that we often express this distinctive feature, this defining characteristic of the party by the term “reversal of praxis”; by which the relationship between action and consciousness is turned on its head and the action of the Party organ can become conscious, something denied to any other organism, and especially the individual militant.

The thesis of the Party’s absolute autonomy from all other parties, even self-styled proletarian or “revolutionary” ones, is clearly contained in the above: if the Party were to mingle with other organisations its would inevitably dilute its strength, insofar as any numerical increase in its membership would limit its compactness and unitarity. Clearly absolute Party autonomy is an essential requirement, not just in the geo-historical areas of direct revolution, but also in those of double revolution; and the fact that in the latter case the possibility of revolutionary alliances remains, whilst in the former case it does not, is the only difference between them.

That conscious action is attributed to the Party is therefore at the heart of the communist conception of the Party; a Party whose action can be accurately predicted and coordinated with the required goals precisely because its action is collective rather than individual; and, moreover, it isn’t a simple sum total of individuals but rather a collectivity, which, by unitarily connecting itself, specifically by means of Party action, to the whole proletarian historical experience, expresses a power a hundred times stronger than its merely numerical strength. Consequently, this implies that Party action is characterized by an essential unity in the conduct of its members, which is only possible if the requirements for action are «summed up in clear rules of action», which the entire membership finds it possible to go along with, independently of their individual consciousness.

From this there follows two characteristics both of which are essential which define the nature of the Party:

- precision, clarity and the absolute autonomy of its tactical plan;

- prefiguration of the future communist society, already a living reality within the Party.

Such a Party cannot be improvised, it can only be the result of a long and difficult effort on every level: on the fundamental one of defence and continual appropriation of theory; in terms of coherent action and participation in all proletarian struggles, and in terms of fraternal consideration of all comrades. Therefore there is no way that its absolute autonomy towards any other party or movement can be compromised, as it would be tantamount to rejecting the only support the proletariat has in the revival of its revolutionary struggle and the only organ capable of leading it to victory over the capitalist monster.

In chapter 4 we take a small selection of quotations from our texts of the 1922-1945 period in order to re-propose this central thesis: the Party’s tactical plan entirely rules out the possibility of participating in the united front, i.e., we rule out any convergence of the party’s directives on communist proletarian action and activity of its militants with those of other parties, outside of a well defined sphere: that is, anything outside the sphere of proletarian direct action; where action is actual movement, not ideological statements and mere propaganda; where direct is according to the methods of class struggle – non-parliamentarian, non-pacifist, and not a matter of opinion; and where proletarian means proletarian objectives, and mobilizing the proletariat separate from other classes. This action, moreover, will not take shape outside the union organization. Since the united front between the communist Party and other parties is no longer possible, it can only be realised in practice within the union fractions present in the fighting organizations. Underlying this tactic is the materialist view that «the defence of immediate interests can only be achieved by going on the offensive, with all its revolutionary ramifications».

Outside this sphere of activity, which, although sharply defined will nevertheless be crucial on the road to the revolutionary recovery, «the party rejects the manoeuvres, combinations, alliances and coalitions which traditionally get formed on the basis of contingent postulates and slogans agreed on by a number of parties». Outside the realm of proletarian direct action and of union organization, the Party cannot join with other parties in issuing tactical directives «which involve attitudes and watchwords which can be accepted by opportunist political movements».

The theses then move on to condemn the misapplication of the united front tactic by the degenerated parties of the Third International, erroneously extended to include convergence of “proletarian” or “revolutionary” parties for openly governmental or parliamentarian purposes.

We do not judge parties by what they say about themselves, nor on the basis of the classes from which they recruit their members. Parties recruiting proletarians today which are not the communist party are bourgeois parties, and not only are they anti-revolutionary and anti-communist, but anti-proletarian too.

Although it may be true that not all governments are the same vis à vis their effects on the development of class struggle, it must nevertheless be taken into account that the accession of “left” governments has often had a more destructive effect on the revolutionary movement than openly bourgeois governments; and that if we believe it useful for proletarians to see the social-democrats for what they are when they take up the levers of governmental power in the first person, this will only be true if the Party hasn’t previously compromised itself in the operation and hasn’t confused proletarians by pushing them into fighting for it; if the Party has kept out of it and all the while issued counter-propaganda advocating struggle and organization.

Communist tactical positions as concerns the united front do not have any moral, ethical or aesthetic character but are adopted for essentially historical reasons. We maintained:

4 - Nature, Function and Tactics of the Revolutionary Party of the Working Class, 1947

At the time when the capitalist class had not yet initiated its liberal period, when it still had to destroy the old feudal power, or still had to run through considerable stages and phases of its own expansion in the major countries, and when it was still laissez-faire in terms of economic processes and democratic in terms of the functioning of the state, a transitory alliance between the communists and parties that were in the first instance openly revolutionary, outside the law and organized for armed struggle, and in the second instance carried out a task which assured useful and genuinely “progressive” conditions, was both understandable and acceptable – because the capitalist regime would accelerate the historical cycle that will lead to its downfall (...)

As a result, the tactic of insurrectionary alliances against the old regimes came to its historic end with the great fact of the Russian Revolution, which eliminated the final imposing military state apparatus of a non-capitalist character. After this historical phase, the still theoretical possibility of tactical blocs must be considered formally and centrally denounced by the international revolutionary movement.

5 - Platform of the International Communist Party, 1945

21 -... Within the framework of present world history, if by chance a residual role should still be retained by any bourgeois democratic group due to the partial or possible survival of the requirements of national liberation, or the need to liquidate backward islands of feudalism and similar historical relics, such tasks would not be carried out in a more resolute and conclusive way (with a view to clearing the way to the final cycle of bourgeois crisis) by having the communist movement relinquish its positions and passively accommodate itself with postulates that aren’t its own, but rather by an implacable, searing opposition of communist proletarians to the inevitable weakness and slothfulness of petty-bourgeois groups and bourgeois left wing parties.



Since 1945 we alone have defended the thesis (given ample treatment in our text Nature, Function and Tactics of the Revolutionary Party...) which states that the current phase of capitalist power presents peculiar economic and political features indicative of the final phase of the unitary and thoroughly rotten capitalist mode of production. This phase, which began at the end of the 19th century and peaked during World War I, does indeed display peculiar features, but they are not such as to modify the mode of production since they merely represent the development of certain aspects already present in the earlier, liberal-democratic, phase of capitalist power. As concerns economy, in the first phase free competition prevails, although due to its nature the development of free competition leads to monopoly, which instead characterizes the imperialist phase. Similarly in politics, allowing for a time lag due to the fact that the political-legal framework is slower to change than the economic structure, we have a transition from the multi-party, demo-liberal State to the totalitarian State, a transformation which is best exemplified by the World War One. Our thesis, which we will support here using quotations from chapter 5, is that «for as long as it survives the capitalist world will no longer be able to use liberal forms to order its affairs; rather it will organise itself as monstrous State units, the pitiless expression of economic concentration».

During the imperialist phase we have therefore the ordering along totalitarian lines of all States, both those which defend liberal State forms and the openly fascist ones. The return of the ex-fascist States to liberal forms after World War II was not a return to the liberal State of the first phase. Despite its much vaunted liberal appearance, many features of the post-fascist democratic State are of a totalitarian character, namely strict social control, unitary political leadership and a strongly centralized hierarchical structure.

The two phases (disregarding here the phase in which the revolutionary bourgeoisie fights against the feudal regime) are characterized by different attitudes of the bourgeoisie towards the proletariat: during the first, the bourgeoisie’s stance towards the revolutionary proletariat is defensive; during the second, the bourgeoisie takes the offensive because only by controlling the proletariat, both with economic concessions and political subjugation, is it able to hamper its revolutionary attempts.

Here is why, to the great surprise and disgust of all pseudo-revolutionary intellectuals, we certainly do not consider democracy as a “supreme value” to be defended against fascism (in fact if anything the latter is less of a threat to revolution insofar as it doesn’t conceal the use of direct violence): as a matter of fact, the sequence as we see it is not fascism, democracy, socialism; it is democracy, fascism, proletarian dictatorship.

One of the tactical issues which received most attention in the period immediately after the creation of the Communist International was that relating to the participation of Communist Parties in democratic elections, a subject we cover in chapter 6. As is well known, the matter was discussed at length at the C.I.’s Second Congress, and the Left, after having outlined the case for abstentionism, would apply Lenin’s Theses on so called “parliamentarianism”. The Left asserted at the time that the latter tactics, even if carried on with undeniable revolutionary intention (Lenin believed that it was the best instrument to destroy the bourgeois parliament), would on the contrary contaminate all the communist parties which had just been formed, or were about to be like the Italian one, and cause them to degenerate. Historical confirmation of this assertion still needed to be provided, as eventually it would be in great abundance. It was therefore possible, back then, for the Left to accept a tactic it considered – and which actually was – wrong, as it would always be possible to correct it after the inevitable historical verifications: the important and essential thing at that time was the formation of the revolutionary Party on the basis of unquestioned faithfulness to the Marxist doctrine; as in fact actually occurred at the International’s Second Congress.

All this abundantly proves that the only way to tackle the issue of tactics, and remain true to revolutionary principles, is that proposed by the Left in the early years of the International: since there is a close connection between tactical norms and programmatic guidelines, the former have to be anticipated and defined by deducing them from principles and from an examination of the historical situation.

The Left maintained that the tactics of “revolutionary parliamentarism” were ill-adapted to the new historical situation opened up by the First World War. The imperialist war had unmasked the bourgeoisie once and for all, demonstrating that their offensive stance towards the proletariat was now permanent and based exclusively on the open use of violence; hence any “parliamentarist” tactic, which in the past had been justified by the progressive function the most radical section of this same bourgeoisie still retained, had now become counterproductive, and would remain so for the rest of the historical cycle which will be completed by the world proletarian revolution.

In fact it was under the banner of the struggle for Parliament that the revolutionary bourgeoisie fought against absolutist and feudal States, a struggle in which the proletariat would prove its most resolute ally, despite the fact that parliament does not embody and never has embodied the form of proletarian power, as the Commune and the Soviet would later demonstrate.

In the period of peaceful capitalist development, from the end of the 19th century to the early 20th, the young socialist parties, using correct revolutionary tactics, participated in the democratic elections in order to attain greater influence within the proletarian class; in this respect, they did not disdain to use bourgeois legality. This was justifiable not only on the basis that improvements in proletarian economical conditions might be won, but also that certain political aims it shared with the most radical and progressive part of the bourgeoisie might also be achieved. Such tactics, nevertheless, as clearly stated by Engels at the founding of the Second International, attributed no intrinsic value to any such conquests (as would occur when the reformist degeneration had gathered pace); their sole objective was the strengthening of the revolutionary movement, in anticipation of the bourgeoisie itself moving onto revolutionary terrain by abandoning legality, forced to do so by ineluctable material necessity. The world bourgeoisie would finally enter onto that terrain in 1914, and the world proletariat would lose an important battle, but the historical class war is not over, and the proletariat can still prevail if it links up with its natural organ, the class Party.

The events of the 20th century, proletarian defeats included, have not been in vain, and today, «in the present situation and with the current balance of forces, the Party is not interested in democratic elections of any description or taking part in them».

And our position today, as it was when we explained it to Lenin, does not derive from anti-Marxist theoretical errors of the anarcho-syndicalist type, but rather from a practical, tactical and organizational necessity. We declare that any party, be it the most revolutionary one can possibly imagine, is nevertheless bound to degenerate if it practices electoralism (referring of course to political electoralism not to possible electoral mechanisms adopted by economic organizations composed of proletarians alone) and the reason for this is because at the present time, in the depths of the imperialist epoch, «electoralism is conceivable only as a promise of power; of scraps of power».



























Introduction, June 1974

Although we’ve had several requests for "texts" from ex-members and people we don’t know, the text which follows, like the letter-circulars leading up to it, is addressed exclusively to party members. Clearly we haven’t satisfied the curiosity which has been aroused over the last few months by the notorious ’communiqués’ in Programma Comunista, culminating in that ’frosty warning’ which should be consigned to some museum of monstrosities.

Rejected by the Centre as total and absolute rubbish, this work is a modest contribution which amplifies a proposal made some years ago. Maybe if the ’compass’ hadn’t spun out of control, it would have appeared in the columns of Programma Comunista, instead of all those dubious articles on ’organisation’.

Comrades will note that nine tenths of the work is composed of excerpts from our fundamental texts, arranged according to subject, covering a fifty year time span, and standing in confirmation of the continuity and invariance of the positions of the Communist Left, ever faithful to revolutionary Marxism.

But the task doesn’t stop there. Marx and Lenin need to be studied too. Indeed the work is already well underway, and will soon be the subject of a second pamphlet.

As the continuer of the tradition bearing the names of Marx and Lenin, referring to the Communist Left should suffice; but with things they way they are, when the next falsification, manipulation or arbitrary interpretation may occur at any time, and, moreover, be committed by those from whom you least expect it, we are forced to go back to the basics on all questions, grasping the ’thread of time’ as far back as we can. And that, in fact, is the classical method we have always subscribed to.

The text, then, merely proposes to correctly restate postulates we all know and we all once accepted, even if we didn’t always agree with them; postulates worked out by generations of past and present militants with the aim of strengthening and spreading the fighting party organisation; a party whose continuous development is assured by this continuous and unremitting work.

That, then, is the road we need to take. There is no other way. There are no ’new decisions’ to be taken, ’restructurings’ to be carried out, or ’modifications’ to be made under the specious and ever dubious pretext of impending ’new situations’. The party forges its organs through action, in the measure that the various forms of action require them, adapting or substituting them with more suitable ones out of organic necessity; it doesn’t claim that the perfection of these organs, their automatism, can be a surrogate for correct action; as though everything was to do with organisation – a typical error of the activist variety in the field of organisation. The party organisation does not arise in vitro, in the fallacious laboratory of the brain, independent from the class struggle’s actual development. That would mean creating a lovely little model of a party, but not a real "compact and powerful" party whose instruments of battle are forged in the furnace of social struggle.

The feverish pursuit of perfectionism and automatism entails an error which spreads from the organisational field to the tactical one and affects the nature and functioning of the party. Pointed out many times by the Left to the International, the error consisted in the belief that a strong organisation can achieve anything (with ’strong’ meaning subordinate to any centralism whatsoever and ready to lend itself to any manoeuvre). Give us a ’Bolshevik’ organisation and everything is permitted. Let’s build a disciplined, all-purpose party and victory will be assured.

With the Left we know for certain that the party alters under the impulse of its own action; we know that indiscriminate use of tactics corresponds to changes in the organisation. Inevitably, then, any ’model’ of the party gets shattered into a thousand pieces. For example, the recognition of electionism, even on a temporary basis, even every now and again, is no longer permissible; nor can we delude ourselves that it won’t corrupt the essential nature, function and anti-democratic structure of the party. And another example, of an ’internal’ nature: nowadays, you can’t launch ’political struggles’ with impunity inside the organisation, and claim not to know that that way of working is bound to become ’the norm’, a handy way of resolving every problem with periodic splits in the organisation as the consequence. You would descend into the famous ’fractionism from above’. Regarding that as ’Leninism’ would be to caricature Leninism.

The party’s correct functioning can neither be referred to special organisational structures nor to the use of political means within the organisation.

The party’s strength doesn’t depend on organisation per se. The correct formulation is that the organisation is strong and functional in the measure that it adheres strictly to the programme and consequently develops ’correct revolutionary policies’. The opposite of that, i.e., that ’correct revolutionary policies’ and a stricter adherence to the programme are established in the measure that the organisation is ’strong’ and ’functional’ is false. It’s Stalin. It’s one of the features of opportunism.

We see in the latter the phenomenon of ‘bolshevisation’ in reverse. Before, organisational distortions were the result of errors made in the tactical field; now these distortions make for tactical errors. And recalling the reciprocal influence between both orders of questions, we would witness the progressive collapse of the party in all fields.

But as long as this process of ’slippage’ prompts a robust response from the party which induces it to return to correct positions, we believe it shouldn’t be considered irreversible,. That is what we are striving for, and developing this approach should be considered the duty of comrades of the Left.

Such is the aim of the preambles which introduce each group of quotations; all of which are directly deduced from the texts, and from which, as comrades can establish at their leisure, no arbitrary conclusions or polemics have been drawn.

Everything is predictable and well-known. All the same, we are sure we can do better. It is a modest contribution of our time, effort and revolutionary passion.

In conclusion, to prepare itself for the revolution the party has no need of polemics or ’political struggle’ among comrades

Through its collective work, through an amalgamation of its forces under the ’dictatorship of the programme’, the party grows stronger, from top to bottom, and weaves together its various fibres tending towards an indispensable minimum of ’executive discipline’, and an optimum of ’conviction’.



























Introduction, September 1974

The following text uses quotations drawn from the most significant texts of the last fifty years (1920-1970) to re-propose the Marxist conception of the party and of the party’s tasks, functions and organic dynamics. Under the crushing blows of the Stalinist counter-revolution and no less fetid post-Stalinism, only the Communist Left of Italy managed to keep this conception in line with that of Marx, Lenin and the III International, by constantly defending and restoring it in the face of every deviation, and codifying it in theses and texts which constitute the objective result of the historic experience of the proletarian struggle and the world communist movement.

The text presents the quotations in chronological order and subdivided according to topic. In each chapter there is an introduction which serves to place them in their relevant context and highlight the implications and consequences of the thought they express. Since in fact the statements contained in each of the parts constitute an inseparable whole, a unity of positions running in perfect continuity along the thread of time, the subdivision into chapters and titles is of a purely technical and functional character.

For the most part the quotations are drawn from the following texts, to which we refer readers and militants who wish to read them in their entirety:



As the reader can see, it is all the historical patrimony of the Communist Left and of the International Communist Party which arose on the basis of Communist left’s positions in 1952, and it is here reclaimed and restated in its entirety.

The necessity for a comprehensive restating of this historic patrimony is linked to the troubling events which have affected the organisation of the International Communist Party over the past few years, prompting the need for a new party organ, Il Partito Comunista, to be set up as the organisational point of reference for all those wishing to militate on the Left’s positions. Only in total allegiance to these positions can the International Communist Party arise, develop and survive; that is, only on these genuinely Marxist foundations can the compact and powerful World Communist Party, indispensable organ of the proletarian revolution and the class dictatorship which will follow, be organised.





















PART I









Chapter 1

CENTRALISM AND DISCIPLINE, CORNERSTONES OF PARTY ORGANISATION



In order to tackle the problem of how to characterise the party organ, the following thesis, which sets out the only genuine and distinctly Marxist vision of the problem, must first be established: the class political party is the indispensable organ of the proletarian struggle, before, during and after the violent revolution and the conquest of power. The party is the sole organ that can wield the proletarian class dictatorship, which therefore, according to the correct Marxist vision, cannot be transferred to other forms of proletarian organisation even if composed solely of proletarians (trades unions, soviets or any other type of immediate proletarian organisation). The political party will therefore wield the dictatorship, exclusively and directly, and operate the levers of the dictatorial State of the proletariat, bringing under its control all other forms of proletarian organisation, which are able to carry out a revolutionary function only insofar as they follow and are influenced by the party. From as far back as the 1848 Manifesto, the Marxist conception has held that the proletariat only really becomes a class when its political party arises. Without the party the class is just a statistical entity incapable of taking unitary action to achieve revolutionary objectives, insofar as it is only due to the party that consciousness of the class’s general historic interests and consequent objectives can arise. The class’s consciousness resides in its party alone, not within proletarians taken individually or as a statistical mass. All these concepts can be found in Marx, Lenin and within the entire tradition of the revolutionary communist movement.

We wrote:

6 - Party and Class, 1921

We should perceive the concept of class as dynamic, not static. When we detect a social tendency, or a movement oriented towards a given end, the class exists in the true sense of the word; because then the class party must also exist, in a material if not yet in a formal way.

A living party goes hand in hand with a living doctrine and a method of action. A party is a school of political thought and consequently an organisation of struggle. The former is a factor of consciousness, the latter of will, or more precisely of a striving towards a final objective.

Without these two characteristics, we do not yet fulfil the definition of a class. We repeat, the cold recorder of facts may detect certain affinities in the living conditions of strata large or small, but it won’t leave its mark on historical developments.

Only within the class party do we find these two characteristics condensed and concretised.

... Including only a part of the class, it is still only the party which gives it unity of action and movement, because it amalgamates those elements who, by having overcome the limitations of locality and job category, are sensitive to the class and who represent it.

... However if it is only remembered that the remaining individuals who compose the great masses have neither class consciousness nor class will, and live just for themselves, their trade, their village, or their nation, then it will be realised that in order to secure the action of the class as a whole in the historical movement, it is necessary to have an organ which inspires, unites and leads it – in short which officers it; it will be realised that the party is actually the vital nucleus, without which there would be no reason to consider the remaining masses as a mobilisation of forces.

The class presupposes the party, because to exist and to act in history it must have both a critical doctrine of history and a historical purpose.

The only true revolutionary conception of class action is that which delegates its leadership to the party. Doctrinal analyses, along with an accumulation of historical experience, allow us to easily reduce any tendency that denies the necessity and predominance of the party’s function to the level of petty bourgeois and anti-revolutionary ideology.

There follow a number of quotes that clearly demonstrate how this has always been the thinking of the Communist Left and our party, in line with Marx and Lenin, in open opposition to the spontaneists, anarchists, and various types of autonomists who have infested the workers’ movement.







QUOTATIONS

7 - Theses on the Role of the Communist Party in The Proletarian Revolution, 2 nd Congress of the Communist International, 1920

13.... The Communist Party must be built on the basis of an iron proletarian centralism (...) The Communist Party must create an iron military order in its own ranks (...) Without the strictest discipline, complete centralism and full comradely confidence of all the party organizations in the leading party centre, the victory of the workers is impossible.

14.... The unconditional and indispensable binding authority of all directives from the higher bodies to the lower, and the existence of a strong party centre whose authority cannot be contested by anybody, are essential principles of centralisation.

15.... The Communist Party (...) is forced to give its leading centre the right whenever necessary to make important decisions which are binding on every party member.

16. The advocacy of widespread ’autonomy’ for the individual local party branches can only weaken the ranks of the Communist Party.

8 - Party and Class, 1921

... A living party goes hand in hand with a living doctrine and a method of action. A party is a school of political thought and consequently an organisation of struggle. The former is a factor of consciousness, the latter of will, or more precisely of a striving towards a final objective (...)

Revolution requires an ordering of the active and positive forces, bound together by one doctrine and one final purpose (...) The class sets out from an immediate homogeneity of economic conditions that appear to us to be the prime mover of the tendency to go beyond, and destroy, the present mode of production. But in order to assume this great task, the class must have its own thought, its own critical method, its own will bent to achieving ends defined by research and criticism, its own organisation of struggle which with the utmost efficiency channels and utilises every effort and sacrifice. All this is the Party.

9 - Party and Class Action, 1921

... The political party is the only organism which possesses on one hand a general historical vision of the revolutionary process and of its necessities and on the other hand a strict organisational discipline ensuring the complete subordination of all its particular functions to the final general aim of the class (...)

The indispensable task of the party is therefore presented in two ways, as factor of consciousness, and then as factor of will: the former translates into a theoretical conception of the revolutionary process which all members must share; the second into the acceptance of a precise discipline that ensures a co-ordinated effort and thus the success of the relevant action.

10 - The Democratic Principle, 1922

... Democracy cannot be a principle for us: centralism indisputably is, since the essential characteristics of party organisation must be unity of structure and action.

11 - Theses on Tactics at the 2 nd Congress of the P.C. d’I (Rome Theses), 1922

I, 2. The integration of all elemental thrusts into a unitary action occurs by virtue of two main factors: one of critical consciousness, from which the party draws its programme; the other of will, expressed in the instrument with which the party acts, its disciplined and centralized organization.

12 - Theses of the P.C. d’I on Tactics of the C.I. at the IVth Congress, 1922

... In order to carry out its task of unifying proletarian struggles in every country around the final objective of the world revolution, the Communist International has first of all the duty to ensure its own programmatic and organisational unity. In virtue of having adhered to the principles of the Communist International, every section and every militant must be committed to the common programme of the Communist International.

The International organisation, by eliminating every vestige of the old international’s federalism, has to ensure maximum centralisation and discipline.

13 - General Guiding Norms, 1949

... The forces on the periphery of the party and all party members are bound by the movement’s customary practice not to take local initiatives or contingent decisions that don’t originate from the central organs, nor to resolve tactical problems in a different way from the rest of the party. Similarly the leading central organs, when making decisions and issuing instructions on behalf of the entire party, mustn’t abandon their theoretical principles nor modify the means of tactical action, not even when a situation presents unexpected or unforeseen factors which affect the party’s outlook. The history of the proletarian movement is littered with examples showing that when these two reciprocal and complementary processes are lacking, statutory measures are not enough and a crisis results.

As a consequence of this, whereas the party requires all members to participate in the continual process of elaboration which consists in analysing events and social facts and clarifying the party’s tasks and the most appropriate methods of action; and whereas it aims to achieve such participation in the most appropriate way, whether via specific organs or via its general periodic consultations at congresses, it nevertheless absolutely does not allow groups of adherents to meet together as distinct organisations and fractions within the party in order to conduct their studies, and make their contribution, by means of networks of internal and external connections and correspondence and propaganda which are nevertheless different from the party’s unitary way.

14 - Marxism and Authority, 1956

29.... No Marxist can disparage the need for centralism. The party would cease to exist if it was admitted that its various parts could operate on their own account. No autonomy of the local organisations with regard to political procedure. These are old struggles conducted before within the parties of the 2 nd International, against for example self-determination of the party’s parliamentary group with regard to its tactical manoeuvring; against the local sections and federations operating on a case by case basis in the communes and the provinces, and against individual members of the party operating on a case by case basis in the various economic organisations, and so on and so forth.

15 - ‘Extremism’, Condemnation of the Renegades to Come, 1961

III. -... Before Lenin explains the vital necessity of the discipline factor, suspected and contested by so many, and defines as befits him the meaning of discipline within both party and class, we’ll jump ahead to quote a passage in which the fundamental communist concept of discipline is placed in parallel with the no less essential concept of centralisation, keystone of any Marxist construction.

“I repeat: the experience of the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia has clearly shown, even to those who are incapable of thinking or have had no occasion to give thought to the matter, that absolute centralisation and rigorous discipline in the proletariat are an essential condition of victory over the bourgeoisie”.

Lenin knew at the time that, even amongst those who described themselves as ‘left’, hesitations existed about those two particularly bitter-tasting formulae: “absolute centralisation” and “iron discipline”.

The resistance to these formulae derives from the bourgeois ideology diffused throughout the petty bourgeoisie and which dangerously overflows into proletariat; the real danger, in fact, that prompted this classic text.

16 - Notes for the Theses on the Question of Organisation, 1964

1 -... Such a current was strongly represented at the 2 nd Congress, especially by the English, Americans and Dutch, and also by the French syndicalists and even the Spanish anarchists. The Italian Communist Left considered it important to immediately differentiate itself from these currents which, as well as failing to understand the theses on the party, hadn’t assimilated correctly the ones on centralisation and strict discipline which even Zinoviev had vigorously defended at the time.

17 - Our Perception of the Theses, Then and Now, 1965

... According to the left’s conception of organic centralism, congresses shouldn’t pass judgement on the work of the centre or decide who does what, rather it should make decisions about questions of general orientation in a way that is consistent with the invariant historical doctrine of the world party.

Chapter 2

TOUT-COURT CENTRALISM



The formula used by Lenin to define the structure and dynamic of the party organ was ‘Democratic Centralism’. If such a term described the 2nd International parties very accurately, our current didn’t think it adequately defined how the communist parties that formed in the post 1st World War period, which were distinguished by the definitive separation of coherently Marxist revolutionaries from the reformists, were going about things, and we would counter it with the more appropriate term, ‘organic centralism’. But the quotations which follow show that Marxists have never understood the term ‘democratic centralism’ to indicate a praxis and dynamic by means of which the party would somehow mitigate absolute centralism (considered necessary for it to perform its functions and responding fully to the Marxist conception of historical progress) by applying a praxis of ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ inside the organisation. Nowadays there is not a single pseudo Marxist group which doesn’t interpret Lenin’s formula as ‘centralism mitigated by democracy’, whilst Lenin himself took it as meaning that the use of formal democratic mechanisms were required in order to obtain maximum centralism and organisational discipline in the party, which in the socialist and social-democratic parties of the 2nd International was the case.

We will cover this problem more fully, but meanwhile we affirm that, as far as authentic Marxists are concerned, the sole organisational principle is centralism and the application of democratic mechanisms has merely been an episode that was historically necessary to achieve maximum organisational centralisation. To show that we Marxists oppose all demands for ‘autonomy’ or ‘liberty’, and are in favour of unqualified centralism, let us line up the evidence. There’s the struggle of the ‘authoritarian’ Marxists against the ‘libertarians’ at the time of the 1st International; there’s Lenin’s battle to establish ‘bureaucratic centralism’ against the Mensheviks from 1903 onwards; and there’s our position: “Those who devote themselves to protesting against unqualified centralism are nothing other than aiders and abetters of the bourgeoisie”.









QUOTATIONS

18 - The Fundamentals of Marxist Revolutionary Communism, 1957

III - It’s the same old controversy (...) Their ultimate heart-felt cry is always "Bureaucratic centralism, or class autonomy?" If such indeed were the antithesis, instead of Marx and Lenin’s "capitalist dictatorship or proletarian dictatorship", we would have no hesitation about opting for bureaucratic centralism (oh, horror of horrors!), which at certain key historical junctures may be a necessary evil, and which would be easily controllable by a party which didn’t "haggle over principles" (Marx), which was free from organisational slackness and tactical acrobatics, and which was immune to the plague of autonomism and federalism. As to "class autonomy", all we can say is that it is complete and utter crap.

19 - Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today, 1957

114 -... It was then that Lenin, in the interests of the internal life of the International, presented his historic theses containing the expression ‘democratic centralism’. We in the Italian Left proposed – and yet again events have proved us right – replacing this term, which we considered dangerous, with ‘organic centralism’. We will explain this shortly, but you compel us to write as a matter of urgency that he who tries to get rid of centralism, unqualified centralism, violates Marx, Lenin and the revolutionary cause, and becomes just another aider and abetter of capitalist conservation.

Chapter 3

DIFFERENTIATION OF FUNCTIONS



Asserting the necessity of disciplined and centralised party organisation clearly implies, amongst other things, a hierarchical differentiation which sees individual militants assigned different roles of various levels of importance. The party needs leaders and persons to fulfil various functions. There need to be order givers and order takers and there must be appropriately differentiated organs to perform these functions. Our conception of the party organisation is of a many-faceted structure, which we define as pyramidal, in which all of the impulses deriving from the various points of the structure converge towards one central node, from which emerges the regulation and direction of the entire organised network. The natural and organic way in which the different organs are differentiated and militants placed in different roles and on different rungs of the hierarchical ladder, which bears no relation to the practice of bourgeois careerism or involves any attempt to mimic it, we will go on to explain. But if we want to talk about centralised organisation and show that this isn’t just the Communist Left’s vision, but also Marx and Lenin’s, it will suffice for now to set out the relevant quotations.









QUOTATIONS

20 - Lenin on the Path of Revolution, 1924

... The organisation as a party, which allows the class to truly be such and live as such, can be viewed as a unitary mechanism in which the various ‘brains’ (not just brains of course, but other individual organs as well) perform different tasks according to aptitude and capacity, all of them in the service of a common goal and interest which progressively unifies them ever more intimately ‘in time and space’ (...) Therefore, not every individual in the organisation occupies the same position or is at the same level. The gradual putting into practice of this division of tasks according to a rational plan (and what goes for today’s party-class will be the case for tomorrow’s society) completely excludes those higher up having privileges over the rest. Our revolutionary evolution isn’t heading towards disintegration, but towards an ever more scientific mutual connection between individuals.

21 - General Guiding Principles, 1949

... The party isn’t an inanimate lump composed of identical particles, but a real organism brought into being and determined by social and historical requirements, with networks, organs and centres differentiated to carry out its various tasks. Establishing a good relationship between such real requirements and the best way of working leads to good organisation, but not vice versa.

22 - Original Content of the Communist Program..., 1958

19 -... The party, which we are sure to see arise again in a more radiant future, will be composed of a vigorous minority of proletarians and anonymous revolutionaries who will carry out different functions as though organs of the same living being, but all will be linked, from the centre to the base, to inflexible party norms which are binding on all as regards theory, organisational rigour and continuity, and a precise method regarding strategic action, in which the range of allowable possibilities, and corresponding vetoed possibilities, is drawn from terrible historical lessons about the havoc which opportunism wreaks.

23 - Reunion of Milan: Supplementary Theses..., 1966

8 - Owing to its necessity of an organic action, and to be able to have a collective function, that goes beyond and leaves out all personalism and individualism, the party must distribute its members among the various functions and activities that constitute its life. The rotation of comrades in such functions is a natural fact, which cannot be regulated by rules similar to those concerning the careers within bourgeois bureaucracies. In the party there are not competitive examinations, in which people compete to reach more or less brilliant or in the public eye positions; we must instead aim at organically achieving our goal, which is not an aping of the bourgeois division of labour, but the natural adaptation of the complex and articulated organ (the party) to its function.

PART II









INTRODUCTION



We have described the form and the structure of the organ ‘Party’: centralized structure, existence of differentiated organs and a central organ capable of coordinating, directing, and issuing orders to the entire network; all members of the organization observing absolute discipline with respect to carrying out orders issued by the centre; non-autonomy of the sections and local groups; rejection of communication networks which diverge from the unitary one which connects the centre to the perimeter, and perimeter to centre.

This centralized structure is not a typical feature of the world communist party alone, but also of other organisations. The railways must operate in accordance with a similar centralized structure or else grind to a halt, and the same applies to the big capitalist factories. The strongly centralized structure which the revolutionary bourgeoisie laid claim to in its fight against feudal autonomy is a feature of both the bourgeois and proletarian States; the Stalinist parties are famous for their rigid centralization and the iron and terrorist discipline imposed on their militants; the fascist party has made the same boast of absolute centrality, as does the catholic church, etc. Hence, the recognition that a centralized organizational structure exists is not enough to set the class party apart from other parties and organisms. It is not the centralized organizational structure alone that characterizes the class party. Centralism is not an a priori category, a sort of metaphysical entity or principle that can be applied to various historical stages, to various classes and class organisms. If this were the case, we could conceive of historical development as a progressive affirmation of the principle of authority or, vice versa, as a constant, immanent struggle of the principle of authority with that of freedom and autonomy.

Such a view would mean substituting Marxist materialism with the most hackneyed idealism. According to Marxism there are no fixed and immanent principles regulating the real development of history; neither the authority principle, nor the democratic and libertarian principle.

From the materialist point of view it can be ascertained that, over the course of history, all economic, social or political organisms have always had an organized structure, the features of which depend on the functions they are required to fulfill. Hence it is correct to uphold, as Marxists do, that whereas both the bourgeois State and the proletarian State have a centralized, despotic and repressive structure, they are, nevertheless, in total opposition to one another. And this is due not only to the social strata on which they rest, and the functions they are required to carry out, but also, as a consequence of these factors, to the way these structures manifest themselves and perform their functions. If, from a structural point of view, the proletarian State were identical to the bourgeois State, just expelling the bourgeoisie from the management of the State machine and installing the proletarian party in its place – with possibly only proletarians allowed to vote – would suffice. But the fact of the matter is that the bourgeoisie realizes centralism with its own means, forms and features, just as in the future the proletariat will achieve State centralism with forms, methods, instruments that are characteristic of the proletarian class. This is true to the extent that Marxism does not only predict the violent conquest of the bourgeois State machine but its complete destruction and substitution with another, completely different, State machine; even if that too will be utilized for the purposes of dictatorship, violence and terror.

For the petty bourgeois, whose historical impotence prevents them from seeing beyond appearances, it is impossible to understand that the structure of the party machine set up by Mussolini or by Hitler was a very different thing to the equally centralized machine formed by the Bolshevik party in Russia in Lenin’s time; a difference due not just to the social basis and the objectives and principles to which the two organisms responded, and which were completely opposed to one another, but also, as a consequence, due to the methods, instruments, praxis and organic dynamics of the two organisms. Thus Mussolini and Lenin are associated in the mind of the democratic petty bourgeois with the terrifying, for them, spectre of dictatorship and terror.

For us Marxists there is a direct relationship between the social class of which a given movement is an expression, its principles, its objectives, and the means needed to achieve the latter, and the distinctive features, the means, and the methods it must use to achieve a centralized and unitary action and structure. Consequently, it is correct to say that the bourgeois State realizes its own centralism, inherent in its class nature, on the basis of the farce of the periodically consulted popular will, but in reality by creating an enormous bureaucratic and military machine, kept together not by consensus, but rather by coercion and money. The proletarian State will not realize its centralism with democratic elections, whether by involving the “people” as a whole, or just proletarians; rather it will achieve this through an ever increasing participation in the actual functioning of the State, and, as a consequence, through the progressive disappearance of the bureaucratic apparatus. We will therefore have repression, class violence and absolute centralization, but no bureaucracy or permanent army: this is the lesson of the Paris Commune, which Marx would reproach for not having been sufficiently terrorist and centralist, but which he also praised for managing to have leaders, leaderships with absolute power and class terrorism, but no bureaucrats or professional military bodies. The equation, centralism equals bureaucratism, is therefore false. What is historically true for the bourgeois State is not true for the proletarian State unless we wish to renounce Marxism altogether.

Primitive communities realized a very strict centralism and an absolute discipline of the single individual to the social group without the need for coercion or any specific mechanisms. This was because it was founded exclusively on an identity of interests, and the solidarity of all, in the struggle against the adverse natural environment and other social groups. The primitive community is an example of centralized and differentiated organization without coercion. In the future communist society it will be the same. Indeed a fundamental Marxist thesis holds that only when an irreconcilable conflict of interests arose among members of a social group was it necessary to have a special coercive structure in order to obtain the same centralization that in the primitive community was obtained in a natural, spontaneous and organic manner.

That the centralistic execution of functions and the existence of a bureaucratic and coercive apparatus are definitely not the same thing is a concept only the social-democrats, pilloried by Lenin in State and Revolution, are incapable of understanding; they, that is, who used to maintain that the need for a State machine was eternal, as otherwise individual interests would cause social breakdown, whereas, on the contrary, both a principle, and a goal, of communism is a stateless society in which there is no coercion of men; in which centralization will be total and far more complete than in present society, and founded on a natural and spontaneous solidarity among men.

But in communist society won’t everyone be the same? Won’t everyone be more or less a carbon copy of everyone else throughout the entire species? It is an old bourgeois refrain, similar to the one about production collectively grinding to a halt if people aren’t forced to work. There will be Individuals with different characteristics, more or less endowed with different physical and mental capacities; society will see a diversification of its various functions and the relevant organs to perform them, and will distribute the various individuals naturally and organically across these functions. What there will be no more of will be the social and technical division of work, and society will ensure that all men will be capable of carrying out all essential functions (Engels: Antidühring). The means of production and of life will be the property of society as a whole and, as a consequence, the possibility of more gifted individuals assuming privileges in relation to others will be forever excluded; on the contrary, anyone with “superior” capacities will be of benefit, and of service, to society.

If, then, these considerations are to remain in line with the Marxist tradition, it isn’t enough to perceive the party as a centralized organization, with all of its members responding as one man to impulses issuing from one central point. It is neither enough to say, as the anarchists were wont to do, that communists are “authoritarian” too, and that the “freedom” of the individual needs to be defended against them; nor is it enough to stupidly maintain that, vice versa, we are for subjection to the principle of authority, and that consequently any centralism is good for us as long as it is centralism, any discipline goes as long as it is discipline. All this is something we have denied a thousand times over in the course of our party’s history.

From a Marxist point of view, having once established that the party organ, in order to realize the tasks history requires of it, needs an absolutely centralized structure, it is still necessary to analyze how this structure can exist in a particular organism like the communist party. We therefore have to study the physiology of this organism, the dynamics of its development and activity, its diseases and degenerations, and discern what influence the historical events of class struggle have on it. Only then will we be able to give a less superficial description of the essence of the centralism and discipline typical of this particular historical organ: the organ that is the communist party. But not any old centralism or any old discipline, a trivial description of which could be summed up in one phrase: “there must be a centre which rules and a rank and file which obeys”; although we should add that, since we are antidemocratic, we don’t want head counts or leadership elections either, and that total rule by a small committee, or even by one man without the need for his power to be sanctioned by the democratically consulted majority of members, holds no fear for us. All these things we accept, but it doesn’t help explain the real dynamics by which the organ ’party’ realizes its maximum centralization or, vice versa, loses it and degenerates during less favourable phases of the revolutionary class struggle; nor does it help us understand how the organ ’party’ strengthens, grows and consolidates itself so as to be able to rid itself of the diseases that may affect it. All this needs to be explained if we are to reach an understanding of the essence of centralism and of communist discipline.

As is the case with all our theses, and the 1965 Naples theses in particular, it is not a matter of providing an organizational recipe (the ’recipe’ here being expressed by the very term ’centralism’), but rather of describing the communist party’s actual life, the ups and downs of its long history, the diseases that over and over again have afflicted it and the efficacy of the remedies we thought to apply on each occasion in order to effect a cure. We must study the party’s history from 1848 to the present, perceive it as moving through real historical events, traversing both the attacking and retreating phases of the revolution as it unfolds on the global scale. Only by doing this can we draw lessons which may, indeed must, be assimilated to good purpose by today’s party, making it stronger and better able to resist those material, negative events which destroyed three Internationals, and a proletarian revolutionary movement which seemed set to win a spectacular victory on a planet-wide scale in the post WW1 period.

Palming us off with the paltry doctrine that everything boils down to a lack of centralism, and claiming the only lesson to be drawn is the need for a structure even more centralized than the Bolshevik Party and the Third International, is tantamount to betraying the party and falsifying its entire tradition. How to obtain maximum centralization of the party? What diseases undermine absolute centralization and absolute discipline? Is it by having a cast of leaders who are even more rigid and totalitarian than, say, Lenin, Trotzky and Zinoviev? By having militants in the rank and file who are yet more disciplined, more devoted to the cause of communism, more obedient and heroic than the militants of the always under-centralized German party? Or is it by providing better instruction in historical Marxist doctrine to each of our militants, in the infernal sequence according to which a militant who has not properly studied all the party texts, who is not ’programmed’, cannot serve in the organization in a disciplined way?

These questions can be answered by analyzing party history and the lessons derived by the Left from it; lessons that are codified in texts and in theses that we cannot modify, update, or simply forget to quote as they are part of a continuous line that extends from 1912 to 1970. For over 50 years that is, and during that time the problem of the life, development and degeneration of the party organ has always been formulated and solved in the same way. Let us therefore start by examining the characteristics of this party organ. That is the only way we will come to understand the best ways of achieving a really centralized and disciplined party, or, vice versa, of how to disrupt and destroy it.











Chapter 1

HISTORICAL PARTY AND FORMAL PARTY



As recalled in our 1965 theses, it was Marx who first made use of the distinction between the party understood in the historical sense and the contingent or formal party, that is, the various organised formations of revolutionary combatants in which, over the course of history, the doctrine, the program and the principles of the communist party have been incarnated. It is, in other words, the entrenchment, the barricade established by history over a hundred years ago on which successive generations of revolutionary proletarians, with varying degrees of success, have taken their stand. It wasn’t today that the proletariat arose as a revolutionary class, it wasn’t today that it expressed its class party for the first time, expressed the political organ without which it is incapable of unitary action in pursuit of a common goal, without which it isn’t a class. The party was expressed by the proletariat at the dawn of capitalist society, in far-off 1848, when it was able, on the one hand, to launch the first armed insurrections, and on the other to embrace a theory brought to maturity by the development of the productive forces and human theoretical thinking; a theory which, by its very nature, was only useable by a revolutionary class which could see in the complete destruction of the capitalist regime its own road to emancipation. From then on the meeting of Marxist theory with the burning reality of the social struggle has brought into being the communist party as a phalanx of revolutionary militants, which, collectively endowed with the powerful weapon of the Marxist interpretation of history, is capable, as a consequence, of deriving useful experiences and lessons not only from proletarian victories, but also from its defeats. “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”: that is Lenin’s thesis. And the party exists insofar as a large or small nucleus of revolutionaries, impelled to fight against the present society by obscure social determinations, grasps the weapon of theory and uses it as a guide to action.

When we say that class consciousness exists in the party, and only in the party, we refer to the consciousness which consists of historical lessons, derived from proletarian struggles on a worldwide scale stretching back to the earliest times, interpreted with the key of the unique and invariant theory which present and future revolutionary formations have the duty to grasp and to respect it in its entirety, using this lengthy, global experience – which Marxism alone is able to interpret correctly, and which remains darkly obscure to all non-Marxist ideologies and doctrines – to illuminate action.

There have been times, due to various pressures and influences, when this historical inheritance – comprising theory, principles and final goals but also historical experience, derived from the relentless march of the revolution – has been abandoned. Every time this has happened the formal party, that is, the fighting organisation of a given epoch and given proletarian generation has inevitably abandoned the correct path and found itself, eventually, on the side of the class enemy. For us, then, the party exists, and grows, and marches towards victory only insofar as it is capable of remaining faithful to its base in the historical party. If this base is even so much as scratched then you have all those betrayals and desertions of which the history of the formal party is so full. Now the fact of the revolutionary organisation remaining faithful to the cardinal principles of the historical party from which it emanates isn’t guaranteed by factors of the cultural or didactic variety, according to which, once you’d learnt a couple of theses by heart, you’d have satisfied all the historical party’s requirements or some-such rubbish. The party’s historical heritage, even on a day-to-day basis and with regard to strictly limited actions, has to shape and permeate the entire activity of the formal party. And this continuous transfusion of historical experience into the current activity of the party is first of all something done collectively by the organisation, not on an individual basis by particularly enlightened or brainy people. What must become an absolutely essential part of our heritage is the notion of the existence of this strict connexion between the militant organisation’s action, between what they say and do today, and its theories, principles, and past historical experience; and that it is the latter (theory, principles, etc.), and not individual or even collective opinions which will always be the final arbiter as regards all party questions. Who gives the orders in the party? We have always maintained that the historical party, to which we owe unswerving obedience and loyalty, effectively gives the orders. And through what microphone does the historical party transmit its orders? It could be one man, or a million men; it could be the leadership of the organisation, or even the rank-and-file recalling the leadership to observance of that data without which the very organisation ceases to exist.

In the party – we quote a text from 1967 – no-one commands and everyone is commanded; no-one commands, because it is not in one individual’s head that the solution of the problem is sought; and everyone is commanded, because even the best of Centres mustn’t give orders that depart from the continuous line of the historical party.

Dictatorship of the principles, traditions and aims of communism over everybody, from rank-and-file to Centre; legitimate expectation of the Centre to be obeyed without opposition as long as its orders respond to this line – a line which must be evident in everything the party does; expectation of the rank-and-file not to be consulted about every order it is given, but to carry them out only if they follow the impersonal line of the historical party which everyone accepts. In the party there are therefore leaders and hierarchies; it is a case of technical instruments that the party cannot do without, because every action it takes must be unitary and centralised, must aspire to maximum efficiency and discipline. But the course of action is not decided by party organs on the basis of flashes of genius issuing from particular brains; they in their turn have to submit to decisions taken, above all, by history; decisions which have become the collective and impersonal inheritance of the organ ‘party’.









QUOTATIONS

24 - Marxism and Authority, 1956

29 -... Regarding the question of the general Authority on which revolutionary communism necessarily depends; we go back to finding the criteria in economic, social and historical analysis. It isn’t possible to get the dead and alive and the yet to be born to cast votes. And yet, in the original dialectic of the organ class party, such an operation becomes a genuine and fruitful possibility, even if it is a long, hard road, with tremendous struggles and challenges along the way.

25 - Considerations on the Organic Activity of the Party when the General Situation is Historically Unfavourable, 1965

12 -... When we infer from the invariant doctrine that the revolutionary victory of the working class can be achieved only by the class party and its dictatorship, and then go on to affirm, supported by Marx’s writings, that the pre revolutionary and communist party proletariat may be a class as far as bourgeois science is concerned, but isn’t by Marx or ourselves, then the conclusion to be deduced is that for victory to be achieved it will be necessary to have a party worthy of being described both as the historical and as the formal party, i.e., a party which has resolved within active historical reality the apparent contradiction – cause of so many problems in the past – between the historical party, and therefore as regards content (historical, invariant programme), and the contingent party, concerning its form, which acts as the force and physical praxis of a decisive part of the proletariat in struggle.

13 -... If the section arisen in Italy from the ruins of the old party of the Second International was particularly prone, not by virtue of particular persons certainly, but for his