What distinguishes our party
(«communist program»; Nr. 11; April 2026)
1926–1952: DISTINGUISHING ONESELF FROM STALINISM, FIRST OF ALL
The text Distingue il nostro partito (What distinguishes our party) was written for the first time after the crisis of the Internationalist communist party (Partito comunista internazionalista, PCInt) in 1951–1952, which resulted in a split between a faction that continued its activities with the old newspaper Battaglia comunista and another that gave birth to a new organisation (also called Internationalist communist party) with a new newspaper, Il programma comunista; this text was placed permanently beside the title of the party newspaper in order to better characterise its political position not only in relation to the other newspaper, but in general. From then on, the "What distinguishes us" was thus an integral part of the party’s official presentation which, through its press organs – the newspaper first of all, and then the other periodicals and magazines – openly declared its historical position, its origins and characteristic positions.
That text, originally more condensed, stated that what distinguishes our party was "the political continuity which goes back from Marx to Lenin, to the foundation of the Third International, to Leghorn 1921, to the struggle of the Communist Left against the degeneration of Moscow, to the rejection of the popular fronts and the partisan blocs; the hard work of restoration of the doctrine and the revolutionary organ, in contact with the working class, outside of personal and electoral politicking". It was published for the first time in Battaglia comunista, no. 5, 6–20 March 1952, after a meeting of the then central organ of the party (which was still called the Central Committee), had decided to publish in the newspaper a communiqué and the text "Base per l’organizzazione 1952" (1).
At that time, those who were involved in political activity generally knew that claiming "Leghorn of 1921" meant claiming the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy (section of the Communist International; PCd’I) in this town, and its intransigent line led by the Communist Left (Amadeo Bordiga, Umberto Terracini, Bruno Fortichiari, Ruggero Grieco, to name but a few well-known comrades), and not by Gramsci who made no substantial contribution to the founding theses of the PCd’I. On the contrary, when someone was referring to Gramsci, it intended without doubt to refer to the Italian Communist Party (Partito comunista italiano; PCI) to which Gramsci made his decisive contribution, especially in the theses presented at the 1926 Congress of the PCd’I held in Lyon (theses completely in line with Stalinism and opposed to those presented by the Left), a party led afterwards by Togliatti completely dependent on Moscow, i.e. on the now stalinized Bolshevik party; he was referring to the party that had embraced the theses of democracy (as if the bourgeoisie had not at that time forever abandoned the method of democratic government in favour of the fascist one, and the task of the proletariat would first of all to be to "lift up from the mud" the flag of democracy discarded by the bourgeoisie); he was referring to the party that had promoted the Popular Fronts, the national blocs in the partisan resistance struggle against Nazi-Fascism so that democracy could be re-established (which, for the authentic Marxists was never "neutral", but only "bourgeois"). When the official historiography was dealing of the origins of the Communist Party of Italy, in the rare cases in which it spoke of the Communist Left (Bordiga, etc.) it was with the aim to condemn it as an "extremist" and "sectarian" current that "fortunately" had been beaten by the Gramsci’s current and Stalinism, falsely presented as the "continuers of Leninism".
At the time, when someone spoke of "degeneration of Moscow", it was clear that he was referring to the Third International, which had its headquarters in Moscow, and to what the Communist Left considered a political degeneration started with a series of tactical and political concessions that got through formulae believed to be "more receptive" by the great masses of the international and above all European proletariat, such as the "workers’ government" (instead of "dictatorship of the proletariat", a formula considered too dry and harsh for workers accustomed to democracy), the "political" United Front in the illusion of being able to drag on the revolutionary front reformist currents and parties which had amply demonstrated by their positions and actions to be congenitally anti-revolutionary, with transient tactical lines to satisfy the supposedly different "situations" in different countries, etc. up to the anti-marxist theory of "socialism in one country".
The class battles of the Communist Left, especially in Italy and in European countries where Italian militants of the Communist Left had taken refuge to escape fascist repression, despite the fierce and more than twenty years of Stalinist propaganda against them, were still alive in the memory and in the ranks of the proletariat in the 1950s and 1960s. It was well known that the left communists, the "Bordigists", as the those who defended and followed the founding theses of the Communist International and the PCd’I were already then called, had constantly waged a theoretical and political uncompromising fight against all yielding to the principle and practice of democracy, against any yield to workers’ spontaneity or intellectual sectarianism, and therefore against any degeneration of the party, and even more so of the International, both on the tactical level (political fronts, parliamentarianism, etc.), on the political level (workers’ government, democratic anti-fascism, etc.), on the organisational level ("sympathizing" parties, etc.) and on the theoretical level (socialism in one country, offensive theory, etc.).
In 1925–1926, the Italian Communist Left was practically alone in claiming that in Russia it was not socialism which was built, but capitalism; and that the theory of "socialism in one country" was nothing but the fruit of the bourgeois counter-revolutionary offensive which saw in Stalinism the deadly third opportunistic wave that would destroy the Bolshevik party of Lenin, the Communist International and any possible revolutionary revival of the international workers’ movement for a long time. Which then happened. We were known for those who affirmed that "Russia isn’t socialist"; and as those who affirmed that Stalin, with the complicity of the theoretical yielding of the greatest representatives of the Bolshevik old guard, but above all on the basis of the defeat of the class and revolutionary movement in Western Europe, of which the history of the German party is emblematic, had distorted Marxist theory by twisting its concepts and terminology to the needs of capitalist development in Russia and to the reasons of its state by mystifying the dictatorship of capital in Russia as the dictatorship of the "proletariat". All that Stalinist propaganda passed off as "Marxism-Leninism" was nothing but the distortion of Marxist theory in an attempt to pass Stalin off as the only true continuer of Lenin. Nothing could be further from the truth, and time has shown that the Stalinist counter-revolution was nothing but the most far-reaching and profound bourgeois counter-revolution at the international level, and in its fierce repression of the whole Bolshevik old guard in Russia and outside Russia (even to the point of getting rid of the indomitable Trotsky for fear that he might to somehow put a spoke in the wheel of the war alliances that Stalin was drawing up in view of the Second World Imperialist War) more cannibalistic than that of Thiers against the defeated Parisian communards of 1871.
The Communist Left, Italian in particular, after having launched multiple warnings in the international arena against the danger of degeneration of the International itself, and of the Bolshevik party in particular, both on the tactical level – through equivocal and fundamentally wrong formulas such as that of the United Political Front, the acceptance of "national" ways of revolution – and on the organisational level – through the acceptance of membership of "sympathizing parties" to the Communist International, and above all through the organisational and ideological terrorism imposed by Stalinism in defence of Russian "reasons of State" – brought its main battle against the theory of "socialism in one country" which in 1926 historically marked the complete break of Stalinism with Marxism, with the theory of the proletarian and communist revolution; and the break between the Communist Left and the Gramscian leadership of the Communist Party of Italy.
Since then, the Communists adhering to the Left current, and sheltered abroad to escape fascist repression, reorganised themselves in the so-called "Frazione all’estero" (Frazione del Partito comunista italiano; Fraction abroad, Fraction of the Italian Communist Party) with which they made every effort to remain closely connected to the Leghorn 1921 programme and to the texts of the Left coherently coincident until the 1926 Lyon Congress, and to the constitutive theses of the Communist International of 1919 and 1920. The second imperialist slaughterhouse blew up every potential inter-imperialist equilibrium, and faced anew the few remaining revolutionary forces still connected with the struggles of the Russian October revolutionary cycle, and the formation of the Communist International, with the drama and at the same time the political need to regain the theoretical heritage of Marxism, distorted and torn by the forces of the counter-revolution.
In the work of theoretical restoration of Marxism and in the effort to reconstitute the class party, after the end of the deepest counter-revolutionary cycle with the participation in national and partisan blocs of the ex-communist parties in the second world imperialist slaughter and in the post-war economic reconstruction, as early as 1943 and then especially in the first period after the Second World War, the Italian Communist Left, was the only one current remaining anchored to revolutionary Marxism and being capable, in fact, to draw up a general balance sheet of the revolutions and counter-revolutions; it resumed its activities, organising itself into a party (at the time, the "Internationalist communist party") and, in 1952, reappeared on the historical scene on clear, definite theoretical and programmatic bases, in perfect continuity with the line that goes from Marx-Engels to Lenin, to the foundation of the Communist International and the Communist Party of Italy.
Stalinism was, and would be for a long time to come, the main enemy that the proletarian and communist movement has ever encountered in its historical path, because of its double role: as a major opportunist force coming from the degeneration of the revolutionary communist parties and in continuity with social democracy, and as a bourgeois, state force, based on the accelerated capitalist development of Russia. Distinguishing oneself from Stalinism, i.e. from the national-communist interpretation of Marxism, and the consequent interclassist complicity, and fighting against it was not only indispensable for any coherently Marxist communist, but vital.
Among the various efforts of political reorganization, immediately after the end of the war, there is also the "Appello per la riorganizzazione internazionale del movimento rivoluzionario marxista" (Appeal for the international reorganization of the revolutionary Marxist movement) (2), written in French in 1949 as a draft of programmatic manifesto for international dissemination and addressed to all forces claiming to be revolutionary Marxist and willing "to accept and make their own the hard lessons of long decades of degeneration of the world communist movement first, then of the falling into the abyss of the ‘Stalinist’ counter-revolution".
Indeed, the criticism of Stalinism, coming from various groups at that time, and often artfully encouraged and directed by democratic bourgeois forces linked to the Western imperialist powers, was not sufficient for the Communist Left. It was necessary to draw out all the lessons of the counter-revolutions and to regain the correct theoretical and programmatic bases of unadulterated revolutionary Marxism. To this end, the Appeal, after clarifying the tremendous crisis of the international proletarian movement, and taking into account the first symptoms of a reaction to Stalinism, insisted to firmly establish some key points: claiming of the weapons of revolution – violence, dictatorship, terror; complete rupture with the tradition of war alliances, partisan and national Liberation Fronts; historical negation of defencism ["defencism" consists in the claim that the proletariat, while remaining a subordinate class in the present social system, nevertheless runs the risk of seeing its conditions worsen if certain institutions of the present social order, e.g. representative system, parliamentarism, etc.], pacifism and federalism between states; condemnation of common social programmes and political fronts with the non-salaried classes; proclamation of the capitalist character of the Russian social structure; negation of all support for Russian imperial militarism, open defeatism against the American one.
We are in 1949, four years after the end of the second imperialist slaughter, at the height of Stalinism and anti-fascist resistantialism, at a time when all the "communist" parties linked to and subsidised by Moscow, had sworn eternal loyalty to the ideological, political and social framework of the Stalinist counter-revolution, each carving out for itself their own "national path to socialism" in accordance with the degenerate theoretical thesis of socialism in one country. The lessons of the counter-revolutions were drawn only by the genuine forces of the Communist Left, particularly in its Italian component; neither Trotskyism, certainly anti-Stalinist, nor the thousand varieties of spontaneist and immediatist groups were able to draw decisive lessons: they were unable to do it given their theoretical and ideological baggage. All of them, in one way or another, were linked to the ideology of democratic and anti-fascist resistance, even though they used terminology and concepts that could recall Marxism, and were prisoners of the myth of democracy: some wanted it "direct" and not "parliamentary", some wanted it "proletarian" and not "bourgeois", some wanted it "progressive" and not "conservative", some wanted it "popular" and not "class", some wanted it "new" and not "old", some wanted it "economic" in addition to "political", others wanted it "national" and not "imperialist"; but always, irretrievably they wanted democracy.
DEMOCRACY: THE BASIS OF PRINCIPLE AND PRACTICE OF OPPORTUNISM
Another important point to distinguish the line of the party from that of all the other "left-wing" and "extreme left-wing" parties has always been, for the Communist Left, that of democracy in general, elections, parliamentarianism.
In 1919 the question of parliamentarism in the international arena had been posed by Zinoviev, and then by Lenin (who with Bucharin drew up the theses on the question, presented, argued and defended at the 2nd Congress of the Communist International, 1920) in the form of the tactic of revolutionary parliamentarism. The aim of that tactic was common to all communists of the time: to destroy the bourgeois parliament, and thus parliamentarism with all its corollary of parties representing the various interest groups in the country, from the bourgeois to the monarchists to the social democrats. Parliamentary democracy is not a method of government that facilitates the assertion of the interests of the majority of the population (which is proletarian, peasant and underclass), but it is a method of bourgeois government that deludes the majority of the population in the field of rights and interests while, in reality, it only covers up the strenuous defence of the interests of the bourgeois industrial, commercial and financial groups that from time to time – in their unstoppable motion of competition – secure the leadership of governments and the state. As Lenin puts it bluntly in "State and Revolution", bourgeois democracy gives the majority of the population of a country the opportunity, from time to time, to elect those who will oppress them until the next election.
The contrast between the abstentionism of the Italian Communist Left and the revolutionary parliamentarianism of Lenin and Bucharin was never a contraposition of principle, but of tactics. In principle, Bordiga and Lenin were perfectly consistent in destroying the bourgeois State and all its institutions (including parliament) by replacing it with the proletarian State, thus contrasting the dictatorship of the proletariat exercised by the communist party alone with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie exercised by its various parties (and the spectrum of parties at the service of the defence of capitalism and the ruling bourgeois class has always been broad, from liberal parties to monarchical constitutional parties, to opportunist parties – bourgeois workers, Lenin defines them – to fascist parties).
The different tactical evaluation of the use of elections and parliamentarism, especially in Western Europe, consisted of this. According to the Italian Communist Left, in Western Europe bourgeois democracy had already amply demonstrated its very high degree of intoxication of the workers’ parties and its deviating force from the sure revolutionary course. The abstentionism of the Italian Communist Left was not a passive tactic, waiting for the proletarian movement in its imagined progressive development to impose new forms of representation and government on society, nor was it determined by a phobia of "power", of the use of the state as a coercive force, a phobia characteristic of anarchism. It was an active tactic, in other words: instead of continuing to nurture in the proletarian ranks the illusion that through the means of electoralism and parliamentarianism one could actually achieve not only improvements in the social field but even the complete change of society, and instead of devoting the bulk of the forces of the revolutionary party, and wasting them, in the field of parliamentarianism, one had to fight not only ideologically but also practically against the illusions of bourgeois democracy, hence outside the democratic institutions of which parliament is the highest expression. It was necessary to nurture in the proletarian ranks the idea that the means and methods of the revolution, in order to be consistent with the objectives of the revolution (violent overthrow of the bourgeois state, conquest of central political power, establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, prohibition of the organisation of the bourgeois forces which had been defeated in both the political and economic spheres, etc.), were completely at odds with the means and methods of bourgeois democracy; that the means and methods of the proletarian revolution were based on the organisation of proletarian forces completely independent of any other social, and especially bourgeois, force; and that, instead of wasting in the bourgeois parliament precious energies and forces for revolutionary preparation, all the forces of the Communist Party should be dedicated, precisely, to the revolutionary preparation of both the party and the proletariat, intervening on all occasions of proletarian struggle in exclusive defence not only of living and working conditions but also of the proletarian struggle organisations themselves (trade unions, labour chambers, peasant leagues, cooperatives, etc.), of their newspapers, party headquarters. The party also had to devote its energies and forces to military training (as the Bolshevik party did, and as the Communist party of Italy did) in order to defend itself with weapons in hand against the attacks of the various legal and illegal forces of the bourgeoisie and to be able, in the future, to organise the insurrection and the conquest of political power in an appropriate way (3).
The very experience of the left-wing current of the PSI first and then of the Communist Party of Italy in its early years, against the anti-proletarian offensive, first democratic and then fascist, proves that this is what was the decisive field in the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and certainly not parliament. History has also shown that Bordiga’s warning at the congress of the Communist International regarding the question of "revolutionary parliamentarianism" was more than well-founded: the tactic of parliamentarianism did not facilitate the progress of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat in Western Europe, but was an increasingly heavy hindrance, contributing to the political degeneration of the international movement itself.
Opportunism, beaten by Lenin even on the terrain of bourgeois democracy in Russia – where, given the tasks of the double revolution, the use of democratic means and methods was historically more justified, at least for a first stage of the revolution – did not have such a difficult life in the bourgeois and democratic West as in Russia in the years of the October revolution; it could continue to rely on the grip of bourgeois propaganda and its democratic ideology, continuing to delude the proletarian masses that the "conquest" of the municipalities and seats in the national parliament would facilitate the revolutionary task of conquering power. Bourgeois democracy, according to the opportunists in the style of Turati and Kautsky, could be used to achieve socialism gradually, little by little, a bit at a time, without armed confrontation; they nurtured the idea that it was the best social and political environment in which the proletariat could fulfil its aims; they nurtured the idea that it was a method of government and a general practice so useful to every social class, and therefore also to the proletariat, that they had to defend it against every violent attack inside or outside their country.
The opportunism of the traditional reformist currents (in the style of Turati, to be clear) had already taken root in the new Stalinist opportunist wave: for each country "its" national socialism, for each proletariat its fight ’against dictatorship’ – as if dictatorship were synonymous with a step backwards in history –, for each people its "popular democracy".
The reference in the "what distinguishes us" to the rejection of partisan and national blocs, to the rejection of popular fronts, and to party work outside of personal and electoral politicking, is a fundamental, indispensable reference. The history of the degeneration of the international communist movement passes through a cursed series of slips into the field of bourgeois democracy, of interclassism; the more the boundaries between the clear and uncompromising revolutionary course and bourgeois democracy blur, the more bourgeois democracy swallows into its quagmire the tactics, methods, means, practices, organisations of the proletariat, transforming everything into weapons of social conservation, into weapons of defence of the bourgeois order. Democratic anti-fascism is the most obvious example. With the victory of democracy over fascism, no progress was make towards socialism, far from it: on the contrary, the political and social power of the bourgeois ruling classes was strengthened, paving them the way – unhindered – for a real fascisation of society.
CONTINUITY OF THE COMMUNIST LEFT IN TIME
For the generations of the 1960s and 1970s, amid the continuing efforts of mystification of Marxism and the history of the international communist movement under the domination of the democratic (and naturally "anti-fascist") bourgeoisie, and thus with the full ideological and political domination of Stalinist-type opportunism (and its variants such as Maoism) and the thousand different forms of spontaneism over the proletariat, the references outlined in our complementary commentary alongside the title of the party press could no longer be so clear and distinct. It was necessary to make them clear so that in the uncontrollable dances of extra-parliamentary and "left-wing" groups that were born and died out in the space of a few years, if not a few months, the younger ones could have a less impenetrable insight into the historical and political position of our current. Thus, there was the first intervention in the text of the "what distinguishes us", announced at the general party meeting, which replaced the previous one starting with issue 16 of 28 August 1975 of "Il programma comunista", but not yet definitively. From issue no. 1 of 9 January 1976, we began to publish the text that until now we use in our press. In the following issue no. 8 of 23 April 1976, an article was published which explained the reason for the new formulation (but with same substance) of our newspaper manchette and emphasised the constant reaffirmation of the theses and political positions which were the basis of these formulations (4).
The Communist Left, particularly in Italy, has analysed and given the only accurate and coherently Marxist historical and political assessment of the Stalinist counter-revolution: and this was only possible thanks of a combination of several indispensable factors:
• no theoretical abandonment of Marxism, and no alleged "updating";
• coherence and intransigence in the programmatic and political theses of the foundation of the Communist International and the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy;
• continuity in the time (5) with the class struggles of the international communist Left, and therefore not only the "Italian" one;
• the strenuous and intransigent defense of Marxist theory throughout the historical period in which the Stalinist counterrevolution took place (right up to the participation from the imperialist standpoint in the second imperialist war and in the subsequent new imperialist partitioning of the world);
• the restoration of party political work on the basis of the founding programme of the Communist Party of Italy (the only communist party in Western Europe founded "Bolshevik-style") and in close connection with the class struggles of the Communist Left on the most diverse fronts, from theoretical questions about the state the dictatorship of the proletariat, the economy, the party and its relations to the class, to the most pressing political questions such as democracy, anti-fascism, multiple revolutions, workers’ economic and trade union associationism, etc.
All this made possible the "hard work of restoration of the doctrine and of the revolutionary organ", which was precisely the task that the forces that had reorganised themselves in the Internationalist communist party since 1943 considered a priority and which, since 1952, after the great split with the "Battaglia comunista" (6), those organised themselves around the "Il programma comunista" took it as vital, which led them to take decisive steps without which we would not have today, and would not have in the future, the indispensable foundations for bringing this objective to fruition. If Lenin, between 1895 and 1924, was the great restorer of Marxism and fought in particular against the second wave of opportunism represented by the Second International and especially Kautskyism, then Amadeo Bordiga, between 1926 and 1970, when he died, was the same restorer and fought in particular against the third historical wave of opportunism represented by Stalinism and its variants.
A lot of work that the party carried out in this perspective, these "semi-finished works" – as Amadeo Bordiga used to call them – then found their place in texts and volumes that put them together according to themes and arguments. Among them, a text that can be considered as a balance-sheet of the Stalinist counterrevolution – "Struttura economica e sociale della Russia d’oggi" (The Economic and social structure of Russia today), and others that we consider as basic texts, such as: "Elements of Marxist Orientation – Fundamental Theses of the Party – The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism", "Party and Class", "La sinistra comunista in Italia sulla linea marxista di Lenin (Lenin nel cammino della rivoluzione; „La sinistra comunista in Italia sulla linea marxista di Lenin: Lenin nel cammino della rivoluzione; L’Estremismo, condanna dei futuri rinnegati" (The Communist Left in Italy on the Marxist line of Lenin: Lenin on the path of the revolution; Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder – condemnation of the renegades to come), "Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle", "Dialogato con Stalin" (Dialogue with Stalin; on the alleged socialism in Russia), "Dialogato coi Morti" (Dialog with the Dead; on XX congress of the CPSU), "In difesa della continuità del programma comunista" (In defence of the continuity of the communist programme; the theses of the Communist Left, from the Theses of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of 1920 to the 1965–1966 theses of the International Communist Party–Il programma comunista).
A great deal of other work – for example, a very long series of articles entitled "Sul filo del tempo" and published regularly in the party newspapers, from 1949 until the split in 1952, in Battaglia comunista and then until 1954 in Il programma comunista, material published in the magazine Prometeo from 1946 to 1950, the written reports of the presentations made at the numerous general party meetings – through which the party put back on its feet all the various theoretical questions (Marxist economics, the agrarian question, the question of imperialism, the national and colonial question, the trade union question, the military question, the party question, the question of revolution and dictatorship, the question of the state, etc.) through the method of reconnecting historical questions, doctrine and programme with the dynamics of the historical cycles of the proletarian class movement and opportunism. This enormous work has not always been published into useful and easy to find booklets and volumes (which still remains the party’s task), but it remains accessible, either as party texts or as texts published in their day by Edizioni Iskra or Edizioni sociali, or as articles in party newspapers and magazines.
As for the structure of Russia, from an economic point of view, once it was established that in Russia there was not socialism but capitalism – and more precisely, given the dictatorial political centralisation and the need to overcome the century-long delay of the bourgeois revolution, state industrialism (7) – it was declared that there had been enormous progress compared to Asian despotism, feudalism, and even subsistence economy that characterised much of the Russian economy in the 1920s. From a social point of view, it was impossible not to welcome the necessary transformation of a large part of the Russian peasantry into a factory proletariat, the future social force of the resumption of class and revolutionary struggle on a world scale. From the theoretical point of view, as has already been said, the struggle against the mystification of socialism in one country and the bourgeois degeneration of the international communist movement has always been unapologetic, open, unyielding, total. From the political point of view, therefore, the struggle against the degeneration of the Communist International and its member parties has never wavered, not even when the blows of the murderous Stalinist repression went hand in hand with the blows of bourgeois repression both in its fascist and then Nazi form in Europe and in their democratic form in the United States and after the end of the war in Europe.
Although the current of the Communist Left was reduced to a minimum, persecuted politically and physically, slandered and accused of the worst betrayal (like Trotsky and many other communist militants loyal to Lenin’s International), such as selling out to fascism, it continued its political and theoretical struggle even in exile, even though it was an extremely difficult effort of Marxist reorientation. The "Frazione di sinistra del PCI all’estero" (Left fraction of the PCI abroad), constituted in Paris in 1928, (8) attempted an extraordinary defense of Marxism and of the theoretical and programmatic premises indispensable for the reconstitution of the class party, fighting in a resistance, even physical, so that an organised nucleus of militants, which strictly adhered to the revolutionary tradition of October 1917 and the first years of the existence of the International and the Communist Party of Italy, could live on and await the resumption of the class struggle and the historical possibility of reconstituting the class party on those theoretical, programmatic, political, tactical and organisational foundations which had previously make possible the formation of Lenin’s Bolshevik party and the Communist Party of Italy.
The party, which in 1952 took a homogeneous and coherent form, was strongly linked to the balance sheet of the counterrevolution, and although it recognised the tenacious resistance to Stalinism of the comrades fleeing abroad after 1921 and organising their work and their resistance against the Stalinist degeneration of the International and its parties in the "Frazione del PCI", it never recognised itself as the "continuator" of the Frazione all’estero, which, moreover, had many theoretical ambiguities; just as it never recognised itself as the "continuator" of the exclusive "Italian" current of the Left in the international communist movement. Just as Marxist theory is a universal whole that cannot be trapped in a national framework, so the Communist Left to which we refer, and to which the party of the past has always referred, is in principle and in fact international. In fact, the theoretical, programmatic, and political continuity of the Communist Left goes from Marx–Engels to Lenin to Bordiga – to use the names of the great revolutionaries that the international class movement of the proletariat has produced throughout history and who have summed up the historical outcome of the struggle between classes better that others – and it is along this line of continuity that we find contributions, given to the struggle for communism by all those who have even been, if only for part of their individual lives, possessed by the Marxian "demon of revolution", from the non "Kautskyist" Kautsky of the "Agrarian Question" to the non "Trotskyist" Trotsky of the "Terrorism and Communism".
THE STALINIST COUNTERREVOLUTION IS BOURGEOIS COUNTERREVOLUTION
As in previous historical events characterized by great defeats of the proletarian class movement, the revival of the class movement, and in particular the recovery of forces capable of constituting the class party on a coherently Marxist basis, could not have been so rapid and straightforward. The counterrevolutionary cycle, which we have called Stalinist because Stalin – the victorious leader of the Bolshevik party and of the International in the struggle for power in Russia – led the bourgeois counterrevolutionary movement in Russia and the world, had to take its course historically; in other words, it had to arrive at the ultimate necessary material consequences, this as the result of the distortion of revolutionary politics, and therefore of revolutionary theory which made possible the victory in Russia in October 1917, the establishment of the first complete dictatorship of the proletariat in the world, the establishment of the Communist International and the revolutionary victory in the long civil war in Russia against the Russian White Army, organized, sponsored and supported by all the imperialist countries of the world. The material consequences which, because of the strength of the proletarian revolution, manifest themselves as the defeat of the revolution not on the field of war but as a slow but inexorable degeneration of the revolutionary forces, starting with the parties which led them, and which drove the theoretically and politically strongest class party (the Bolshevik party) to an ever greater deviation, to the point of abandoning its own original positions and revolutionary Marxist traditions. The same fate befell the Communist Party of Italy and all the parties belonging to the Communist International.
The lack of revolutionary victory in Western Europe, and in particular in the countries where the proletariat was most advanced in terms of the class movement (Germany, Italy; just remember Lenin’s famous image of "two unconnected halves of socialism": Russia with the established dictatorship of the proletariat but with a very backward economy; Germany, with a very advanced economy and a proletariat that demonstrated unbridled militancy during and after World War I; and the class movement in Italy, which produced the only "Bolshevik" Communist Party in Western Europe, i.e. founded on theoretical and political intransigence and Marxist coherence, and which was the first to measure itself up with fascism, which subsequently became the bourgeois method of government par excellence), placed the young proletarian Bolshevik dictatorship in the most critical situation as regards the maintenance of power in Russia and the firm and strong leadership of the Communist International.
The material conditions of the Russia’s economic and social backwardness and the parallel difficulties – from a political and theoretical point of view – of the class proletarian movement in the countries of Western Europe forced the Bolshevik party to bear the full weight of power in Russia and of the revolutionary tasks of the International. And, regrettably, at the same time they facilitated the adoption of the indecisive, uncertain, zigzagging and ultimately opportunist positions of the Western Communist Parties, especially the German party, which decisively influenced the policy of the International and, through it, the policy of the Bolshevik party, to the point of completely destroying its Marxist roots. The tactical and organisational failures of the Communist International, especially in the years from 1922 to 1926, inexorably produced disastrous errors in the programmatic and theoretical field, up to the elaboration of the theory of socialism in one country, the real and definitive renunciation of Marxist theory (9).
The political struggle against any deviation from the revolutionary programme that had been at the birth of the International, launched by the currents of the Left of the various member parties (including the Bolsheviks) in the decisive years of 1923–1926, did not win out in the end; the currents of the Left were overwhelmed by the currents of the right, and above all by the so-called "centrists", who, with Stalin, managed to break the political, tactical, theoretical, and therefore organisational, continuity of the original leading groups. The "degeneration of Moscow" simultaneously affected Soviet Russia and all the countries of the world, and was characterised by a general retreat into the national borders of Russia (a great push for the development of national capitalism, passed off as the "construction of socialism in one country") and a general abandonment of the revolutionary and internationalist tasks of the Communist International. A symptomatic example is the case of the great revolutionary movement in China in 1927, which, at the same time that the biggest strike of the British dockers was taking place, once again provided the world class and revolutionary movement another historic opportunity for revolutionary revival, and which was instead directed by the Stalinist leadership of the International into the clutches of the Chinese nationalism of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, which enabled the latter to massacre the proletarians in Shanghai and Canton, after incorporating the Communist Party of China into Kuomintang, effectively forcing it to disappear, while in England the strike movement was defeated and crushed in the most hideous isolation, virtually wiping out the young and fragile English Communist Party.
In the political struggle that broke out between the various currents into which Russian Bolshevism had divided, the right and centre currents once again supported each other, until they stifled the Left current, in which Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and many others found themselves for a short time, and which together opposed what had already in 1923–1924 (see e.g. the "Georgian affair") could be labelled "Stalinism", that is, a political current which more than the others embodied the historical, as well as the immediate, interests of the rising great Russian capitalism, hence the political current which, with respect to pre-capitalist Russia, was revolutionary but bourgeois and therefore anti-proletarian and anti-communist.
After the defeat of the class movement in Germany and Italy (1918–1924), the counterrevolutionary currents in Russia gained even more vigour, yet their mystified "proletarian and revolutionary" guise found greater appeal thanks to the appearance on the historical scene of fascism, i.e. that new method of government developed by the bourgeoisie to destroy the proletarian class movement, which was not giving up and which – despite the defeats it suffered during and after the first imperialist war – could subsequently regain strength by challenging bourgeois domination over society. Fascism is the open dictatorship of capital, proclaimed by counter-revolution on the part of the ruling bourgeoisie; but in order to have maximum effectiveness both in the immediate future and in the course of time, it had to confront a proletariat that was already subjugated, half-defeated, disorganised, and politically disoriented. This specific task of subjugating, disorienting and disorganising the proletariat was carried out by the forces of democracy, both in the form of reformist workers’ parties (known at the time as Social Democrats) and popular bourgeois parties.
The Stalinist counter-revolution in the Western European countries has historically performed on a double task: to divert the international communist movement from the revolutionary and Marxist path, thereby placing it in conditions in which it will certainly be defeated, and to channel the proletarian movement, not only Russian but also the international one, into the confines of the defence of the national bourgeois order, in Russia it was a historic revolutionary task, given the Asian and feudal backwardness of the great country (but counterrevolutionary given the revolutionary movement of October 1917), but in the other European countries, where the proletarian revolution no longer had any bourgeois tasks historically to solve, this was its primary counterrevolutionary task. In this way Stalinism inherited the social and political function of social democracy which, had already caused enormous ideological and political devastation in the proletarian ranks in the context of the first great imperialist war in the previous opportunist wave, and had subordinated the proletariat of the countries concerned to the warlike and imperialist demands to the respective national bourgeoisies.
In fact, Stalinism not only inherited the social and political function of the old social democracy, but amplified its effects of deviation and paralysis on the proletariat throughout the world, causing the proletarian class struggle to retreat for many decades.
FASCISM AND DEMOCRATIC ANTI-FASCISM, DIFFERENT SIDES OF THE SAME IMPERIALIST BOURGEOIS COIN
The struggle for democracy against fascism, as if the return to the methods of democratic governments were the most fruitful way to "facilitate" the development of a class and revolutionary proletarian movement, that is, the "anti-fascist democratic" struggle was – as Bordiga continually affirmed (10) – the worst and most insidious product of fascism itself. The proletarian movement, defeated, in the mid-1920s, on the class front in the revolutionary period that opened with the outbreak of the first world imperialist war and the extraordinary revolutionary victory in Russia, was subjugated by social democracy and Stalinism to the needs of national defence of the various capitalist states, "under a foreign flag", that is, under the flag of democracy, and handed over to bourgeois repression in a state of the greatest weakness.
From the ideological point of view, this violent submission to the demands of capital was carried out in Russia through the most gigantic mystification that opportunism has historically been able to build (the development of capitalism passed off as "building socialism"); in Germany and Japan it was through the participation in the imperialist development of German and Japanese capitalism based on their respective wounded national prides and their irrepressible industrial and financial urge to transcend the limits of their own national borders; in the United States through the democratic "New Deal"; in France, England, and other European countries through the democratic inter-class cooperation within the popular fronts: in Spain in the civil war of 1936–1939 it constituted the deadliest proletarian defeat and the further demonstration of the definitive passage of the Stalinist parties into the camp of the imperialist democracies; and particularly in Italy and France it paved the way for the passage of the Stalinist parties into the Allied imperialist war camp – so much for the revolutionary defeatism of Lenin’s legacy! – justifying the second imperialist slaughter with the theory of democratic anti-fascism and of the "partisan resistance".
From the economic point of view, and from the point of view of the need for the bourgeois powers to obtain lasting complicity of the proletariat (after having duly slaughtered it in the imperialist war and in the repression of its revolutionary attempts), the fascist ruling bourgeoisies showed to all the democratic ruling bourgeoisies that the iron fist of the open dictatorship of capital nevertheless had an ace up its sleeve: the implementation of part of the social reforms that the trade unions and workers’ reformist parties had long been calling for. Thus were born the social shock absorbers (sickness insurance, severance pay, pensions, etc.), which the post-fascist democracies of the most industrialised countries of the world adopted after the fall of fascism as an excellent instrument of social control, in order to continue to keep their respective proletariat shackled to the fate of national capitalism through the activity of the bourgeois workers’ parties and the class-collaborationist trade unions that were born at the end of the Second World War (fascism had already done the favour of destroying the existing class unions).
From the political point of view, the Stalinist parties, indispensable for getting the proletariat to be massacred in the war without attempting to revolt against the established bourgeois order, and the class-collaborationist trade unions, were the fundamental instruments for keeping the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries firmly tied to the machinery of the ruling bourgeoisies; and they proved to be even more vital for the preservation of the bourgeois during and especially after the end of the war, as indispensable to keep the proletariat bound to their respective national bourgeoisies, "no matter what happened to them during the war", and ready to slaughter themselves with fatigue in the period of post-war reconstruction.
The struggle against the "degeneration of Moscow", against the theory and practice of Stalinism and therefore against any theorisation of the participation of the various classes, including the proletariat, in the defence of the immediate and future interests of the ruling bourgeoisie – that is, against all democratic, electoral and parliamentary illusions – was not an ideological bias of the "purists" of the Communist Left, it was not a "sectarian" attitude of their intransigent leaders, and it was certainly not an "incapacity to do politics" of our current (which some latter-day movementists wanted to describe as a "congenital malformation" of the Italian Left). It was the raison d’être of the proletarian and revolutionary class movement; it was – and still is – the indispensable theoretical and political basis for the orientation the class party, and therefore the workers’ movement itself, towards revolutionary goals and objectives.
Any deviation from the Marxist line has always been justified by opportunists as an "easier" way to get to power and to socialism. We saw how that turned out! "The fundamental characteristic of the phenomenon which Lenin called and branded with the term adopted from Marx and Engels, opportunism, is the preference for a shorter, more comfortable and less arduous path over a longer, more difficult and harsh one, on which alone can be attained the full conjunction of the affirmation of our principal points and programmes, i.e. of our highest aims, and the carrying out of immediate and direct practical action in the concrete situation of the moment", so reads the 1966 Party Theses (11). The history of the various historical waves of opportunism and its myriad variants demonstrates exactly what Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bordiga, in short what unadulterated Marxism has always advocated: insofar as the proletarian party, the communist party, adopts in its programme, in its objectives, in its means and methods of activity, in its practice, principles and praxis characteristic of the bourgeois ruling classes and of the defence of their class interests, that party is destined to degenerate, to destroy its own class bases and pass over to the adversary.
Democracy as a principle and as a practice represented and still represents the most effective intoxication of the proletariat by the bourgeois ruling classes. On the basis of a formal false "equality" (in the style of "the law is the same for all", every individual is "equal" with others with respect to democratic institutions, and if individual differences of opinion are existent, then it is granted that "the majority wins", etc.), which in fact covers up real social inequality and contradictions, democracy bases its ideological and practical success on material bases, which Marxism has well expounded from its origins. The economic domination with which the capitalist mode of production imposed itself on every previous mode of production (feudal, Asiatic, natural economy, etc. ), destroying the very basis of the survival of the human communities that had based their social organisation on these modes of production, "liberated" Man from the medieval and backward shackles of servitude and feudal isolation, but at the same time made him, especially the majority of the peasantry, completely dependent on the new mode of production and the market by depriving him of his means of existence. At this point, the majority of the population, harassed and repressed by the aristocratic classes, which was the master of its only "labour power", could not but accept democracy as the only political means that profoundly undermined the power of the "few" and replaced it with the power of the "many". Manufacturers, artisans, merchants and intellectuals, relying on the uprisings of the peasant masses in the countryside and the proletarian masses in the cities, violently overthrew the power of the kings, the clergy and the nobility and reorganized the whole of society according to the demands of the new capitalist mode of production and its development.
Liberty, equality, fraternity, those magic words of the Great French bourgeois revolution, under whose cry the monarchy was overthrown, until the beheading of the king. But even then they contained the characteristic contradiction of capitalism: liberty for what class, equality with respect to what, fraternity between what classes? That is because the bourgeois revolution definitively subverted previous modes of production and pre-capitalist social organisations, but it did not resolve the division of human society into opposing classes. The bourgeois class, certainly more numerous than the aristocratic classes and the clergy, and certainly more industrious than those, took power, simplified social relations by virtue of a mode of production that made all men equally dependent on the market, created the laws that in the first place defend the new bourgeois power against the previous ones, and placed private property at the centre of everything. Democracy allows every man, no one excluded in principle, to be the "owner" of something, even if only of his own labour power and his own misery, into which bourgeois society itself plunges him. From a political point of view, democracy allows the subordinate classes, the classes that have no other source of livelihood but their own arms, to elect from time to time those who would systematically exploit them (Lenin). There was a period when democracy played a positive role vis-à-vis the peasant and proletarian classes, despite the intentions and interests of the ruling bourgeois classes: it opened the way for them to social struggle, to armed struggle, to education, to even very elementary knowledge, to politics. The bourgeois revolutionary cycle could not take place without involving all classes of society, and it had to put the peasant and proletarian classes in a position that made it possible to fight against and defeat the armies of the aristocracy. The democratic participation of all classes subordinated to the old feudal society under the banner of the revolutionary bourgeoisie was a highly revolutionary act; the bourgeoisie would never have succeeded alone.
However, once the revolutionary phase and the iron revolutionary dictatorship of the bourgeois class had passed and the bourgeois mode of production had sufficiently developed in the countries of Europe and America and freed itself from the constraints of the enclosed feudal and pre-capitalist society, the historical course of capitalism passed into a reformist phase, towards the "stabilisation" of the national market and the conquest of the international market under the banner of the widest and "freest" competition. But it was precisely because of the economic development of capitalism worldwide that the bourgeois democracies of the big capitalist countries began, for reasons of market and competition, to impede democratic and capitalist development in all the other countries of the world, which instead became "economic territories" to conquest (raw materials and sales markets).The uneven development of capitalism conditions the uneven development of democracy (i.e. the civil and social freedoms and rights that are enshrined in the letter of democracy); the democracy of "free competition" increasingly becomes the democracy of monopolies, of imperialism. With intensifying competition between the large capitalist countries and, in parallel, between the large industrial and financial groups (trusts), the gap separating the economic and social – and therefore political – development of the capitalist backward countries from that of the industrial countries is widening more and more, and is destined to become ever wider, forcing most of the countries of the world to depend on the economic fortunes and competitive struggles of a small group of large imperialist states.
Bourgeois democracy, from the reformist phase to the imperialist phase of the development of capitalism, thus proves to be incapable of stimulating and assisting the economic and social progress of the vast majority of the countries of the world. On the other hand, imperialism, i. e. the most developed stage of capitalism possible, is the representation of the power of a small number of trusts ( multinationals, as they are called today) and of the states of their respective countries of origin, which impose their interests on the rest of the world, i. e. on the vast majority of peoples and countries, and which, in order to defend these interests, unscrupulously plunge entire populations and vast territories into famine, misery, destruction, pollution, environmental degradation and war.
The historical phase of modern imperialism is characterized by the monopolistic concentration of the economy, the birth of capitalist trusts, the predominance of financial capital over industrial and commercial capital, and large-scale economic planning directed by the state headquarters ( albeit such planning was given the name "Five-Year Plan" as in the Stalinist tradition). "The bourgeois economy is being transformed and is losing the characteristics of classical liberalism whereby each enterprise owner was autonomous in his economic choices and in his exchange relations" – states our basic text of 1946, entitled "Tracciato d’impostazione" (Elements of Marxist Orientation) (12) – "An ever stricter regulation of production and distribution is being introduced; economic indicators are no longer the result of free competition, but of the influence of the associations among capitalists in the first place, then of the subjects of concentration of banking and finance, and finally of the State itself. The political state, which in the Marxist sense was the committee of the interests of the bourgeois class and protected them as an organ of government and police, became more and more the organ of control and even management of the economy. This concentration of economic powers in the hands of the state can only be mistaken for a transition from a private to a collective economy if one deliberately ignores the fact that the contemporary state expresses exclusively the interests of a minority and that any nationalization carried out within the framework of mercantile forms leads to a capitalist concentration that reinforces, not weakens, the capitalist character of the economy."
To this historical phase of economic progress corresponds a historical phase of the life of the parties of the bourgeois class. Proceeding from the "Tracciato" just quoted, we repeat that "The political course of the parties of the bourgeois class in this contemporary phase, as Lenin clearly stated in his critique of modern imperialism, leads to forms of intensified oppression and their manifestations have surfaced in the rise of regimes which are called totalitarian and fascist. These regimes constitute the most modern political type of bourgeois society, and the process of their spread will become increasingly evident throughout the world. A concomitant aspect of this political concentration is the absolute predominance of a few very big states to the detriment of the autonomy of medium-sized and smaller states".
On the part of the opportunists, fascism has always been presented as a "step backwards" in history, and therefore as a regime to be fought against in order to "reconquer" democracy, which is then presented as a progressive social and political environment most favourable to the advancement of proletarian demands and to the class struggle. The bourgeois phase of totalitarianism (of which fascism and Nazism were undoubtedly manifestations) has always been presented by opportunist forces – and by the bourgeois democratic forces themselves – as a phase in which class oppression and repression is greatest, and in which the violence of the ruling class is most and most extensively exercised.
The theses of the Communist Left, based unreservedly on Marxism, maintain that the totalitarian phase of capitalist development (hence the phase in which Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s Nazism manifested themselves) is not a "step backwards" in history, but a step forward, the logical consequence of the imperialist development of capitalism at the level of the political power of the bourgeois ruling class, which in this way fully reveals the true class and totalitarian nature of political power. "Fascism undoubtedly unleashes a greater mass of police and repressive violence, including bloody repression" – as may be read in another of our basic party texts – "but this aspect of kinetic energy primarily and gravely affects the very few authentic leaders and revolutionary militants of the working class movement, together with a stratum of middle bourgeois professional politicians who pretend to be progressive and friends of the working class, but who are nothing but the militia specially trained by the capitalists for use in the periods of the parliamentary comedy. Those who do not change their style and their costume in time are ousted with a kick in the ass – which is the main reason for their outcries" (13). For Marxism, the totalitarian phase of the bourgeois regime is not a surprise, far from it: it is a phase foreseen and expected. Capitalism will not die without going through all its possible variants: "To fight to postpone this unmasking of the energies of the antagonistic social classes," – we reiterate from the text just quoted – "to carry out a vain and rhetorical propaganda inspired by a stupid horror of dictatorship in principle, all this work can only favor the survival of the capitalist regime and the prolonged subjection and oppression of the working class." (14)
One aspect of the effectiveness of the totalitarian method of bourgeois rule lies in the maximum concentration of the economic forces of society, thanks to which the bourgeois regime is able to intervene in all spheres of social life, and especially in the economic sphere, by adopting methods of planning that are more suited for containing the conflicts between the classes and at the same time for intensely nurturing collaboration between them. Let us look at another passage from the quoted text: "The new method introducing planning in the management of capitalist economy – which in relation to the antiquated unlimited classical liberalism of the past constitutes a form of self-limitation of capitalism – leads to a levelling of the extortion of surplus value around an average. The reformist measures which the right-wing socialists had advocated for many decades are adopted. In such a way the sharpest and extreme edges of capitalist exploitation are eased, while forms of public assistance develop. All this aims at delaying the crises of class conflicts and the contradictions of the capitalist method of production. But undoubtedly it would be impossible to reach this aim without having succeeded in reconciling, to a certain degree, the open repression against the revolutionary vanguards with a relief of the most pressing economic needs of the great masses. (…) Therefore, even though bourgeois class oppression, in the totalitarian phase, increases the proportion of the kinetic use of violence with respect to the potential one, the total pressure on the proletariat does not increase but diminishes." Hence the materialist deduction: "It is precisely for this reason that the final crisis of the class struggle historically undergoes a delay." (15)
It cannot but be concluded: democracy is class collaboration in talk, fascism is class collaboration in fact; either way, the death of the revolutionary forces lies in the collaboration between the classes. (16)
Bourgeois democracy in an imperialist and, if you like, "post-fascist" epoch does not prevent mankind from ever more acute inequalities, fratricidal struggles, wars and devastation; apart from the chatter about the "common" interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie – on which the propaganda construction of class collaboration is erected – democracy works for the benefit of whom? A handful of mammoth trusts and state behemoths that suck the blood and sweat out of nine-tenths of the world’s population for the exclusive benefit of capitalist profit. To believe still today that the principle and method of democracy are the "only" political solution to the deadly contradictions that tear the bourgeois world apart is to be in thrall to an electoral and parliamentary cretinism that facilitates only a primitive subservience to the economic interests and privileges of the 500 trusts that govern the world.
In this sense, post-fascist democracy has actually become fascized, its repressive apparatus has become more and more monstrous, less and less liberal even for many petty-bourgeois and bourgeois stratas. "Another world is possible", sing the new choristers of class conciliation, who believe that they can mitigate the bloodiest and most brutal aspects of capitalism by giving more space to goods from industrially backward countries, by giving more space in the market to supposedly organic, biodynamic and non-GMO production. In fact, it is the market itself that exposes this deception: a commodity is a commodity, whether it is a concentrate of poisons or an expression of traditional cultivation, whether it is the product of "Chinese-style" brutal slave exploitation or the product of a milder exploitation, as in certain areas of Kyrgyzstan or Nepal. The laws of the market leave no way out: the mineral resources of Kyrgyzstan or certain Nepalese mountain passes are destined to become the object of interest for neighbouring countries, trusts and imperialist powers, and then the exploitation of wage labour, which today is still mild compared to that of China, will undergo the inevitable process of "Chineseisation".
PARTY AND CLASS
The class party is the revolutionary organ par excellence; it represents in the present the future of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, it represents the class consciousness of the proletariat as historical class, and therefore only the party possesses the theory of the proletarian revolution, the theory of communism, and therefore the general perspective of the class revolution up to the final historical outcome, which is the communist society. The communist party is therefore the international guide of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, and since it knows the historical path that the struggling classes are materialistically forced to take, it knows in advance the development of the struggle between the classes. On the basis of this knowledge, the party knows that the class struggle, if it is to develop its revolutionary potential to the maximum, must transcend the terrain of economic, social and political demands compatible with the bourgeois and capitalist society and move on to the terrain of more general and political objectives which go beyond the limits of compatibility with capitalism and which represent the political, economic and social solution of all the contradictions of capitalism.
The communist party is a purely political organ whose aim is the consistent and uncompromising struggle for the pursuit of the general interests of the proletarian class against the general interests of the bourgeois classes, both on the immediate terrain of struggles of economic nature and on the wider and more general terrain of struggles of political nature. The communist party differs from any other proletarian organization (economic associations, trade unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, soviets, parties, or others) in that its priority and historical tasks derive directly from the ends associated with communist society, the achievement of which requires bringing the anti-capitalist revolutionary struggle to its end (the proletarian revolution, the insurrection and overthrow of bourgeois political power and its state, the installation of a proletarian state and class dictatorship, the world revolution, the transformation of the capitalist economy into socialist economy). These tasks define the communist party as the indispensable organ of the proletarian revolution and dictate attitudes, behaviour, practices, tactics and actions that are consistent with them. This is further specified in one of the basic texts of our current: "The indispensable task of the party therefore is presented in two ways, that is first as a factor of consciousness and then as a factor of will. The first results in the theoretical conception of the revolutionary process that must be shared by all its adherents; the second brings a precise discipline which secures the co-ordination and thus the success of the action" (17).
Every other proletarian organization, independent of the apparatuses and politics of inter-class collaborationism, has tasks inherent in the defence of proletarian conditions of life, work and struggle, which concern all proletarians regardless of their ideological, political or religious affiliation; the communist party, on the other hand, is adhered to by only a minority of the proletarian class, the most advanced, the most conscious, the most sensitive to the ultimate cause of the proletariat, and it can only be a minority of the class, since the party – having a general vision of the path which the proletariat must take in order to be effectively liberated from wage-slavery – defends at all times and in every partial workers’ struggle the interests of the whole proletarian class. The communist party is adhered individually by members not only from the proletarian class but also from other social classes, by these famous defectors, as Lenin called them, who accept the goal of communism from a more intellectual point of view and in the course of time transform it – though not many succeed in doing so – into an adherence to the proletariat materially based on proletarian living and working conditions.
The communist party is not an organizer of unions, of independent and classist immediate proletarian organizations of struggle; but it supports the rebirth of economic and immediate classist associations, and through its militants collaborates in their formation and classist orientation, always defending their nature as immediate proletarian organizations, independent of the bourgeois and opportunist apparatus, able to organize the greatest possible mass of workers. It sets itself the task of influencing them and directing their actions to correspond as closely as possible to the development of the class struggle, with a view to influencing the majority of the proletariat in its struggle for emancipation; however, it does not impede itself from working through its militants also in the unions or similar immediate organizations of the proletariat which even have reactionary characteristics – in so far as their completely independent intervention is possible – because the objective is to influence the proletarians towards the correct and coherent class struggle, and not to make a "career" in the trade union apparatus.
Point 4 of the party programme (which we regularly publish in every issue of our papers and reviews) states unequivocally: "The indispensable organ of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat is the class party. The Communist Party consists of the most advanced and resolute part of the proletariat; it unites the efforts of the working masses transforming their struggles for group interests and contingent issues into the general struggle for the revolutionary emancipation of the proletariat. It is up to the Party to propagate revolutionary theory among the masses, to organize the material means of action, to lead the working class during its struggle, securing the historical continuity and the international unity of the movement" (18).
On the basis of the lessons of the history of the international communist movement, we know that without a decisive influence on the proletariat and its immediate organizations of struggle, the Communist Party will have no chance to effectively and victoriously lead the workers’ movement to the revolutionary outcome; and we also know that shortcuts and tricks (such as the constitution of special-purpose "communist" or "revolutionary" unions) are not the way to achieve this result, but the constant, patient and tenacious work of intervention in the workers’ struggles in close contact with the exigencies, problems and contradictions of these struggles, without ever losing the classist and revolutionary perspective.
At a party meeting in 1951 (19), the basic concepts of the relationship between the party and economical action were reaffirmed in the form of thesis; there have been no such major changes in the general situation since 1951 as to make it necessary to "rewrite" the factors which formed the basis for setting down these points, which we now recall; point 8 reads:
"Apart from the problem of time of whether participating or not to the work of given types of unions for the revolutionary communist party, the elements of the question so far resumed lead to the conclusion that in every perspective of every general revolutionary movement must be present these fundamental factors: 1 ) a numerous and widespread proletariat of pure wage-earners; 2 ) a big movement of associations with an economical content, involving a large part of the proletariat; 3 ) a strong, revolutionary class party in which militates a minority of workers, but which in the course of the struggle has had the chance to set against that of the bourgeois power, his own influence on the union movement.
The factors which led to establish the need of each and every one of these three conditions that usefully combining themselves will determine the outcome of the struggle were settled: a ) by the right statement of the theory of historical materialism which links the elemental economic need of the individual to the dynamics of great social revolutions; b ) by the correct perspective of the proletarian revolution with reference to the problems of the economy, of the politics and the State; c ) by the lessons of the history of all organised movements of the working class, either in their greatness and their victory, or in their corruptions and defeats. The general line of prospective we have developed does not deny that the most varied circumstances can occur in the course of the modifying, the dissolving and the reforming of workers’ unions; that is to say, those associations which in various countries appear either tied to the traditional organisations which declared to base themselves on the method of class struggle or more or less tied to the most various social methods and tendencies, even conservative."
The tasks of the class party, on the other hand, cannot be "delegated" to the economic and immediate associations of the proletariat even in a favourable revolutionary situation, because the fields of action of these workers’ associations are historically limited by the existence of the capitalist mode of production, i.e. by the existence of the working class as class for capital, class belonging to capitalist society. These classist associations of the proletariat base their actions and the reasons for their existence on the fact that the proletarians – as wage-earners – are generally organized via homogeneous professional groups, and must defend their interests as wage-earners, as individuals and as groups, against the bosses and employers’ organizations and against the apparatuses and institutions of public administration, as these defend both the partial and the general interests of the bosses and capitalists.
On the contrary, the Communist Party, precisely because it represents in the present the future of the class movement (the general interests of the working class, the general interests of the proletarian revolution, and the historical movement which, by overthrowing capitalist power, opens the way to the transformation of society into society no longer divided into classes, and thus to the extinction of every class, including the proletariat), defines its historical tasks in the historical dialectic of a struggle, which is class struggle insofar as the proletarian class fights as class against the other classes in this society, but which historically aims at overcoming the limits of antagonisms between classes as the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat is victorious internationally and is thus able – under the leadership of the communist party – to intervene in the economy and transform it from mercantile and capitalist economy into socialist and ultimately communist economy. Throughout this entire period of history, which moves from the class struggle for the overthrow of bourgeois power and the establishment of proletarian power to the struggle for the transformation of the capitalist economy into socialist economy, the Communist Party performs the task of international leadership of the anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois revolution, that is, the task of advancing the general interests of the wage-earning working classes against the general and specific interests of all other existing social classes, modern or remnants of previous societies. And already in this respect the Communist Party is clearly distinguished from the unions and every other immediate proletarian organization which are known from historical experience or which will be known in the future.
But there’s more. The Communist Party, given that the Marxist theory of which it is the guardian represents the historical leap between the class-divided society and the classless society, between capitalism and communism, is destined not only to carry out the role of being the guide of the international proletarian revolution and the exercise of the proletarian dictatorship, but also to subsequently transform itself into the administrative organ of the communist society, in which – after the disappearance of all traces of division into classes and coercive apparatuses of power – it will be necessary to administer in centrally appropriate forms the production and distribution for the whole of human society, which will finally be devoted to a joyful life, knowledge and art and will no longer be determined by the exigencies of the "market", "valorisation of capital" and "competition", but by the real needs of the human life of the present and future generations. Moreover, a party text from 1953 (20) states that in a sense the party "never ceases to exist, even after the extinction of the classes, because it becomes the organ for studying and organizing the struggle between the human species and natural conditions." It is clear that the party, as formal organization of revolutionary militants, faces and fulfils different tasks at different historical stages: it is one thing to lead the proletarian insurrection to seize power, to exercise the class dictatorship and wage revolutionary war against the bourgeois armies united in counter-revolution, and another to administer production and distribution in the society in which the social classes will no longer exist.
CLASS : MOVEMENT AND COMBAT
The proletarian class, the class of wage-laborers, comprises all those individuals who, in capitalist society, are without reserves and are therefore forced to sell their labour power for livelihood to other individuals who in capitalist society are owners, who possess a certain amount of wealth in goods, means of production, capital, wealth which enables them to exploit for their own and private benefit the labour power provided by those without reserves. The mass of proletarians which the very development of capitalism creates, insofar as it survives under the yoke of capitalist exploitation of wage labor, constitutes what we have called class for capital, i.e. that part of capitalist society which is not only subjugated to the domination of capital and the class which represents it – the bourgeoisie – but which contributes decisively by its labor to the production of the social wealth that capitalists appropriate to themselves in the form of private property.
With Marxism, which is a social science and a theory of revolution, the word "class" takes on a completely different meaning from the one generally given to it by sociology. "As a socio historical entity, it was originally introduced by Marxism, although it had been used before. The word is of Latin origin, but it should be noted that classis was for the Romans the fleet, the war naval squadron: the concept thus represents a set of units acting together, going in the same direction, facing the same enemy. The essence of the concept is therefore movement and combat, not… classification, which later took on a static sense." (21)
Thus, for the communists to speak of proletarian class, of class party, of class dictatorship, is to apply to their own political positions the essential concept of movement and combat: movement unifying the proletarians of every country or nationality, acting in the same direction, facing the same enemy and for a common purpose; combat of the units of the proletariat as a whole, acting both on the level of defense against the attacks of the class enemies and on the level of attack on the positions and status of the class enemies. The class is not the total sum of all proletarians existing in the world and it is not the total sum of the interests of each individual proletarian; the proletarian class is a movement moving in the same direction in historical reality and is driven by unifying, general interests in which it recognizes itself beyond any specific and immediate differences between individual proletariats and between individual proletarians. But the proletariat, for the purpose of struggle in defense of its living and working conditions, organizes itself, organizes its forces, unites them; and in the struggle the fact emerges that the real fruit of the workers’ struggle is the unification of the workers and its extension, because the ups and downs in the balance of forces between the classes mean that victories in the struggle in defense of living and working conditions are entirely transitory. This organization of the proletarians into class and thus into political party (the Manifesto of 1848) is a historical fact, determined by the movement of the proletariat in struggle against the other social classes; it is a historical, impersonal, international result that transcends the boundaries of space and time. The political party referred to in the Manifesto of 1848 is the communist party –, without national adjectives – in which the historical experience of class struggles, revolutions and counterrevolutions is condensed. The class is class insofar as it has its party, states our texts (22), which affirm that the proletariat is represented in its general and historical interests by a well defined organ, which is precisely the class party, the international communist party, and by no other.
The class struggle is therefore the struggle which the proletariat wages on the terrain of confrontation with the bourgeois classes and through which it objectively poses the question of political power. The proletariat arrives at this level of struggle not by its own will, or even by its own "consciousness", but by the objective impulse of its economic and immediate interests, for the sake of which it unites in organizations capable of defending those interests. The "political" level of the struggle is determined by the emergence of the antagonism which pits the proletariat against all other classes in society, and the consequences which the clash between the classes produces on both sides. Insofar as the class party influences and directs the struggle of the proletariat on openly anti capitalist terrain, the "political" level of the struggle becomes more and more determinative until it takes over from the "immediate" level of the struggle over wages; in this process of development, by no means linear and gradual, but teeming with advances and retreats, the struggle in defense of proletarian living and working conditions is overcome and transforms itself into the general struggle of the proletarian class against the bourgeois class, into the revolutionary struggle. Every class struggle is a political struggle, states again the Manifesto of 1848; more precisely, if it is class in character, i.e., if it has as its objective the general interests of the proletariat, it can only be political, since the general interests of the proletariat cannot be represented by any but the political class party, i.e., the Communist Party. In the absence of the intervention and influence of the Communist Party on the proletariat in its anti-capitalist struggle, the proletarian class objectively loses the unifying perspective of its struggle against the bourgeois classes and inevitably succumbs to the influence of the bourgeoisie and retreats to the confines of possibilism, of collaboration between the classes.
The party’s intervention in the ranks of the proletariat and on the terrain of the immediate defense of its living and working conditions is aimed at influencing, orienting and leading the proletarian movement on class basis. But this does not detract from the fact that on the immediate terrain the party, through its militants, must also contribute to the classist organization of the proletariat, without ever renouncing the importation of Marxist theory into the proletarian ranks, of the objectives for which the struggle of the proletariat must develop, of the defense of the general interests of the class, of the revolutionary critique of every opportunist tendency, of every collaborationist practice and politics. Developing and entrenching the classist attitudes in the proletariat, even in the elementary forms that are produced in the partial struggles, is the task of the vanguards, and therefore of the communists, because it is through these attitudes, these experiences, these classist practices – that is, those that put before everything else the exclusive defense of the immediate interests of the wage workers, whether employed or unemployed – the most militant and "conscious" elements of the proletariat are pushed with greater strength and conviction to break not only "ideologically" but also practically with patriotic trade unionism, with collaboration between the classes, and to give life to workers’ associations which are finally class based and suitable for the defense of exclusively proletarian interests.
The party’s constant intervention on the terrain of proletarian struggle also serves to make the party known to the proletariat – especially its most advanced elements and strata – so that they can appreciate and hence follow it. The party appeals to all proletarians in general, but it is well aware that only the most advanced proletarians can perceive and make its instructions, its watchwords, their own, because these instructions, these watchwords require to a certain extent a qualitatively higher level of class sensitivity than is common in the proletariat – a level conditioned by the daily struggle for survival and the pressure of both the bosses and opportunism –; the party therefore cannot expect all proletarians to react in the same way, with the same class orientation and with the same energy at certain moments of high social tension; it cannot expect the proletarian masses to move to the party spontaneously. This means that the work of the party does not only consist in giving the proletariat correct class instructions, but must be carried out by putting these class instructions into life in the struggle, alongside the struggling proletarians, and struggling together on the immediate terrain. Without ever succumbing, that’s clear, to the temptation to abandon the typically political and theoretical terrain – because it is "harder to digest" and harder to get through to the ranks of the proletarians – in favor of the immediate economic terrain. The main task of the party, as Lenin recalls, is to import revolutionary theory into the class of the proletariat, not to "represent", better than others, the immediate demands of the proletariat or its "majority".
How do consistent communists distinguish themselves in the activity of intervention on the terrain of immediate struggles? In the fact that acceptance of the class instructions which the party propounds to the proletarians "does not imply adherence to the particular political theses of the Communist Party, but corresponds only to the demands of the common action of the entire proletariat, drawn up in such a way that neither communists, nor socialists, nor anarchists, nor, in general, workers of any political creed can be prejudiced against them", as is well expressed in Communiqué of the Executive Committee and the Central Trade Union Committee of the Communist Party of Italy in March 1922, at the time when the "Alleanza del Lavoro" ("Alliance of Labor", coalition of the three main Italian unions) was constituted on the initiative of the Railway men’s Union (23). The class party in fact acts for the unification of the proletariat on the terrain of the class struggle, it acts so that the proletariat actually takes in hand, directly, as protagonist, its own struggle and its own development, and so that those famous sparks of class consciousness – of which Lenin speaks in his "What is to be done?" –, which arise from the resistance struggles of the proletariat against the pressure and oppression of the bosses and the bourgeoisie, meet the party in its multifaceted activity and thus make possible the merging of the proletarian needs of immediate defense with the general interests of the class struggle and of these general interests with the ultimate revolutionary objectives.
* * *
Although the Communist Left has been forgotten, falsified, slandered, its thesis, its program, its class battles document the intransigent continuity and theoretical coherence that has historically characterized it, and demonstrate the material effort in different situations to sustain organizational continuity – even if in given periods it was or is, as today, very few in number –, in order to hand over to the resumption of the class struggle of the proletariat the "revolutionary organ" based on solid theoretical and programmatic foundations.
In this spirit, and in continuing to work towards this objective, our organization believes that it must return to these arguments in order to draw all the necessary lessons from the balance sheet of the crises and defeats of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary party itself, so that it will always be possible to subsequently re establish the theoretical and programmatic continuity of Marxism through "a work of party character", for if the defeat of the proletariat would be ever so dramatic that even the small physical core of revolutionary communists consistently and intransigently linked to Marxist orthodoxy disappeared, the rebirth of the class and revolutionary movement would be even more distant in time.
A MORE SOLID DEPICTION OF WHAT DISTINGUISHES US
In 1976, the party returned to the content of our complementary commentary alongside the title of the party press ("What Distinguishes Our Party" ["Distingue il nostro partito"]) and tried to formulate it in a more comprehensible way for those who made closer contact with the party, especially in countries where the Italian Communist Left was not so well known (referring to "Leghorn 1921", in Italy, France, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, for example, it was known at the time that this was a reference to the founding of the Communist Party of Italy by the Communist Left) and for whom some of the condensed references might not say much or might be misunderstood; we limited ourselves to making these references clearer while keeping them very concise (24). In fact, our complementary commentary alongside the title of the party press confirmed what distinguishes us: the political continuity which goes from Marx to Lenin, to the foundations of the Communist International and the Communist Party of Italy; the struggle of the Communist Left against the degeneration of the International, the struggle against the theory of "socialism in one country" and the Stalinist counter-revolution; the rejection of all popular fronts and national resistance blocs; the difficult task of restoring the revolutionary doctrine and organ, closely linked with the working class, outside personal and electoral politics.
There is nothing wrong with this text even today. The only thing is that in the period following the great capitalist crisis of 1974–1975 and in the course of the development of the party itself, the various partial crises that led to our general crisis of 1982–1984 revolved around questions of great relevance both in terms of tactics and organization (closure of the cycle of multiple revolutions, systematic attack on the union and social conquests of previous workers’ struggles, formation and constant transformation of far-left and extra-parliamentary political groups, formation of armed struggle groups such as the Red Brigades (BR) in Italy, massacres committed by fascists, state repression in the form of increasingly repressive democracy, etc.). And for the umpteenth time, the great mishap of history called democracy has hovered over everything. The question of "transitional demands" intersected with "anti-fascist" mobilization, the question of the evaluation of extra-parliamentary groups intersected with the question of workers’ distrust of class-collaborationist trade union confederations, the question of violence and terrorism intersected with the defense on the proletarian terrain against repressive attacks by the state and, at the level of party organization, with the need to preserve organizational continuity against possible police repression.
If it has always been necessary to make a balance sheet of every crisis of the party (whether it was a crisis of "growth" or a degenerative crisis) – the contributions of the Communist Left prove this, starting with its theses on the constitution of the Communist Party of Italy, through its theses on international tactics, the contributions on the evaluation of fascism and the theses of 1926, to the balance sheet of the Stalinist counter-revolution and the degeneration of the Communist International – it was even more true with regard to the internal crises of the reconstituted class party after the Second World War, to the explosive crisis of 1982–1984 which shattered our party of that time.
Balancing the party’s crises: on this issue, we clashed not only with the liquidators of the first and second waves (the movementists of 1982 and the "combatists" of 1983), but also with a group of comrades who had fallen into the opposite liquidationism of the party (the model of wait-and-see), which was characterized by a combination of equally defeatist attitudes, since they were linked to organizational and personal formalism, which was inevitably reflected in the search for formal and bureaucratic expedients (such as demanding the presence of the comrades who had previously formed the centre of the party in the new governing body called the "Central Committee", the "right" of the "proprietor" to express in writing and publicly his disagreement with the new line adopted by the Central Committee, the "right" to publish articles that contradicted the new line of the Central Committee, etc. ). And the most odious expedient could not have been missed, the legal action taken by the "proprietor" of the party newspaper ("Il programma comunista") to regain control of the newspaper, a legal action in which the court could not but "give justice" to this "proprietor" by restoring to him the exclusive use of the newspaper. "Tactical" and organizational expedients, as opposed to political struggle, were the only things that could be done for those with a wait-and-see position. Meanwhile, the claimed ideological and organizational "continuity" of the party was entrusted to the bourgeois justice. Moreover, the same group of liquidators theoretically formulated two facts which were of extreme gravity for those who claimed to be "continuators of the Communist Left": 1) there was no need to make a balance sheet of the party’s crisis, and certainly not of the last one, since they considered it a crisis caused by the incursion of a "clique" that wanted to ruin the party, so it was enough to regain control of the party newspaper, get rid of that "clique" and… "to continue on the course"; 2) to reorganize as a party first and foremost in Italy, where they could count on a certain number of adherents, while comrades in other countries would be left to their fate and contacts with abroad would be postponed until the core in Italy was strengthened. Thus, in addition to assessing the crisis of the party as an unfortunate incident (sooner or later there is always a "clique" that works "against"), this group closed itself within the "sacred borders" of Italy, in contradiction to internationalism and the history of the current of the Communist Left, which it claimed – and still claims – to be its "true continuator".
The need for a thorough analysis of the issues at the heart of this crisis characterized our approach and work during the crisis itself. In principle, the party does not have to face – except in historical situations of great social and political upheaval – "new", "unknown" questions. The social and political situation changes, the power relations between the classes change, but in principle the central questions of the programme of revolutionary communism do not change, and therefore there is no need to constantly re-argue and "update" the communist party programme. In general, the questions where the factors of a possible crisis of the Party are at work always relate to the two main areas of its activity: the area of tactics and the area of organization. The evaluation of situations, the consideration of the forces at work, the prospects of lesser or greater success in the short or immediate term: these are aspects of the general approach to tactics to be followed, and the corresponding adaptation of the organization of the party’s forces. Well, if these evaluations, these considerations, these perspectives are wrong, the tactics pursued and the organizational models applied are inevitably completely wrong. The problem of activity and action in the union field, and on the immediate terrain in general, has always been a hard nut to crack, and has always brought many headaches at some point in the development of party activity. The problem of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles has also been a difficult and indigestible problem for many good comrades. The problem of the use of democratic mechanisms inside and/or outside the party resurfaces from time to time, as if it were the problem of all problems, once solved, everything would then run more smoothly.
In the period between 1979 and 1982, a series of crises took place in the party, culminating finally in the break-up in October 1982, with subsequent aftershocks until 1984, when the comrades gathered around the papers "Il comunista" and "Le prolétaire" reunited their forces and reconstituted the core of the party that we still represent to this day. It was evident that it was necessary and urgent to work on the balance sheet of the party’s crises and to tackle openly the tactical and organizational problems that were the detonators of these crises; on the other hand, we knew that every tactical problem and every organizational problem inevitably leads to theoretical and programmatic points. It was necessary and indispensable to draw up a balance sheet precisely because the outbreak of an internal crisis, and one as virulent as the 1982 crisis, put on the table not "marginal" and peripheral questions – not affecting the theoretical and programmatic points on which everyone could show that they were in agreement and on the same side – but central questions such as the conception of the party, the relationship between the party and the class, the question of the party’s political and organizational independence from all other political formations, etc.
The forty years that separate us from that crisis have not diminished the value and weight of that balance sheet, on the contrary. The situation in which the proletariat finds itself, especially in the advanced capitalist countries, where its dependence on reformism and interclass collaborationism is still very strong, to the point of paralysing it even on the elementary terrain of the defence of living and working conditions, does not give us the possibility, to demonstrate to the proletarian masses, with the help of important actual facts, that we are on the right path, that we have waged a legitimate political struggle against the various lapses which have characterized and still characterize the political groups which, like us, refer to the Communist Left. We cannot refer to the important facts of the class struggle to prove to the proletariat, and especially to its most militant and most sensitive to the cause of the class struggle sectors, that we represent the class party in its theoretical, programmatic, political, tactical and organizational continuity. These facts are not there, except in such episodic forms that the great mass of proletarians perceive them only as facts concerning someone else, other categories, other proletarians, far from common feeling. We are forced to refer to the examples brought about by the class struggle in the past, because the permanent and large-scale resumption of the class struggle in these more than seventy years of bourgeois counter-revolution is not yet on the horizon.
But the party is aware that it can go through a period, even a very long one, when the proletarians don’t perceive the rightness of its valuations, its instructions, the necessity of its action. But this is no reason to lock itself up in its "ivory tower"; it is no reason to evade the effort to carry out its activity in close link with the working class and with the problems of its classist struggle. The time will come when this work will prove important and vital, when the proletariat, having once again raised its head, will take the fate of its struggle back into its own hands.
We know, therefore, that the "monotonous" and, for most, "unknown" work we do in an effort to remain firmly connected to the Marxist and revolutionary "thread that weaves through history" is indispensable work for the future. The history of class movements has taught us that "objectively revolutionary" situations can occur even at a very accelerated pace, as if they happened "out of the blue" – in the sense that the proletariat can be, in a rush of social tension, in a very short time, pushed onto the terrain of class confrontation with the ruling classes by accepting a life-and-death clash – but it also taught us that the victory of the proletarian revolution will never be possible without the presence of a solid, strong, prepared, influential class party at the head of the revolutionary proletarian movement. And this party cannot be created without prior preparation; it must be prepared at length, especially in terms of theory and its correct application, even inevitably in a period of deep counter-revolution such as the present one.
Working on the formation of the party as the leading organ of the proletarian and communist revolution of tomorrow, in the light of all the historical events that have marked the life and death of formal party organizations in the more than 150-year history of the international proletarian and communist movement, would be without effect – and in fact impossible – if we were to detach ourselves from the theoretical, programmatic and political continuity of the international communist movement. For the Communist Left, and therefore for us, the theoretical, programmatic and political continuity constitutes the fundamental core of the class party’s existence. We reject the notion that Marxist theory needs to be updated and that we should take new and different paths from the revolutionary course already historically set out by the international communist movement, which reached its peak with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 and the founding of the Communist International. We also reject the idea that we should separate the sphere of the party’s theory and political programme from the sphere of its practical activity on the pretext that the objective situation places the party in a situation where new tactical and organizational solutions must be sought. We affirm that only the theoretical, programmatic and political continuity of the class party can enable the party itself to change tactics if necessary, even within 24 hours (as Trotsky recalls in the context of the Bolshevik Party during the civil war in Russia in 1918-1921), because only this continuity gives the party the possibility to intervene in changing situations in order to transform them in its favour, and not to be carried away by these situations and thus transform itself.
This continuity can be found in the classical texts of Marxism, in the founding theses of the Communist International and in the theses of the Communist Left before and after the Second World War. But in order for this continuity to become a weapon of the Marxist critique – waiting to serve as a real basis for the critique of weapons in the revolutionary period – a work of party character is needed, and in particular a work of re-acquiring the theoretical and programmatic, political and tactical heritage of revolutionary Marxism. Without a thorough historical and political balance sheet of the crises and defeats of the revolutionary movement, without drawing lessons from the counter-revolutions and lessons from the history of the revolutionary party itself, the party organization will never be able to effectively adopt Marxist critique, will never be able to deal with Marxist theory with confidence and calm; therefore, it will never be able to successfully lead the proletarian movement on the path of anti-capitalist revolution. The great historical balance sheet of revolutions and counter-revolutions has been made by our former party, and this is illustrated by the texts and theses of the Communist Left which we have mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. However, it is not automatic that the militant forces that make up the party will always be able to consistently realize all the instructions and tasks that result from the program and balance sheet of revolutions and counter-revolutions. In the party, precisely because it is not an entity detached from the social reality in which it operates, the effort to act in perfect coherence with its program is constantly unfolding, and this effort turns in different situations into a struggle for coherence, a struggle against opportunist attitudes, positions and theses, a struggle against deviations or degenerations.
That is why, in the face of the explosive party crisis of 1982–1984, we stubbornly insisted on the work of balancing the party crisis. It was a matter of following exactly the same method that the party had previously followed in the face of the internal crises that marked its development, the same method that the Communist Party of Italy had followed in relation to the PSI and the currents of gradualist and maximalist opportunism, which in the 1920s obstructed the path of the class and revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, the same method followed by Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in relation to the crises of the Russian and international revolutionary political movement. We did not invent new "ways" to reconstitute the class party; we did not adopt a different method and standard for evaluating internal crises than those handed down to us by the history of the Communist Left itself. The balance sheet of proletarian and communist defeats – because the explosive crisis of the former party is a defeat not only of the communists but also of the international proletarian movement – is carried out by returning to the theoretical and programmatic foundations of revolutionary communism, which history has confirmed and which we therefore define as immutable, invariant; foundations summarized in the classical texts of Marxism and in the theses we mentioned above.
The explosive party crisis of 1982–1984 took on different and contradictory characteristics. The strong activist and movementist impetus provoked an academic, wait-and-see, essentially indifferentist reaction; the wall that went up between theory and practice pushed to the extreme tendencies that had always existed in the history of the proletarian and communist movement and against which the Communist Left always had to fight and will always have to fight, identifying them from time to time under the various masks taken on at different periods in the history of the struggles between the classes. Activist and indifferentist tendencies have always stood in the way of the proletarian movement; in order to gain a foothold in the proletarian class parties, opportunist tendencies have used – and use – a very efficient anti-communist vector: the vector of democracy. Democracy conceived in a thousand and one different versions, but always inexorably and dramatically lethal to the Communist Party. Democracy, defeated by Marxism on the level of theory and principles, can re-enter through the window by means of tactics and organizational practice, thus for the umpteenth time erecting a wall between theory and practice and thus bringing the party to disintegration.
BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY : OUR MOST INSIDIOUS ENEMY
There is an endless series of tactical and organizational patterns tied to the democratic principle, which the party has considered throughout its history whether or not to adopt, with what limitations, in what area and at what time, and in a way that would not contradict its set out principles and political program. There were times when bourgeois democracy also represented an important political advantage also for the proletariat because it trained it to participate in the political life of the country. It was the time when bourgeois democracy corresponded to the revolutionary phase of the new society which was about to revolutionize the old feudal society. But as the representation of the economic, social and political freedoms of the bourgeoisie and all its layers and factions, bourgeois democracy could not, beyond a certain point, respond to the economic, social and political needs of the working class, because of the social antagonism that existed in bourgeois society and which became increasingly acute with the development of capitalism itself. First the Paris Commune of 1871 and later the First World War of 1914–1918 demonstrate historically how in the advanced capitalist countries democracy – both in principle and in political and tactical aspects – became an obstacle to the proletariat in its revolutionary class struggle; what is more, it has become a bourgeois weapon to turn the proletariat away from the course which the class struggle historically takes, when carried to its extreme, to the violent conquest of political power and the establishment of the proletarian and communist dictatorship. But the matter was different in the case of the underdeveloped capitalist countries, where the agenda was not the "simple", anti-capitalist revolution, but the "double" revolution, the revolution containing two historical tasks: the overthrow of pre-capitalist power and at the same time the accomplishment of tasks of a capitalist character, but under the iron and dictatorial power of the proletariat in connection with the international revolutionary proletarian movement and in anticipation of the economic contribution of the proletarian dictatorships established in one or more advanced capitalist countries. This "double" revolution was precisely the revolutionary programme of the Bolsheviks in Russia and of the Communist International for all colonial and semi-colonial countries subjected to the fierce subjugation of the imperialist states. In the developed West, history put on the agenda the "simple" anti-capitalist proletarian revolution to destroy bourgeois political power, its state and all its institutions even in the most democratic republics. In the backward East and in all the countries of the world where capitalism was not yet firmly established economically and politically, the directive was: "double" (or, to borrow a term close to Trotsky and used by Marx, "permanent") revolution, i.e., revolution with bourgeois economic tasks, but directed and led politically and militarily by the revolutionary proletariat and its class party within the framework of the international proletarian revolution.
However, the Western European proletariat proved to be still very much influenced by the ideology and practice of bourgeois, representative and parliamentary democracy. And it proved to be very difficult to fight and win against this real social disease; and this is still true today.
One of the fundamental concepts of bourgeois democracy is that of numerical majority and minority; it is a democratic concept due to the fact that bourgeois ideology assigns to every single element of the numerical total considered, and existing at a given moment, a value "x" which equals every other element of that numerical total. The dynamic expression of this value results – in accordance with the democratic principle – in the vote of single individuals, to whom bourgeois ideology ascribes an individual specific "consciousness", separate and distinct from the "consciousness" of every other individual, due to which each individual makes a "choice". At the end of the voting cycle, the "choices" made by each individual element of the numerical total considered and existing at that moment are numerically counted, and a numerical result emerges: there is a majority, a minority, whose numerical distances from each other may be slight or very significant, or may be completely absent, leading to a tie. However, the democratic principle is based on the "victory" of one side over the other, of the majority over the minority, and establishes arbitrarily that the majority is to be considered such by virtue of the result of a vote with 50% of the voters + 1 single vote. In this way, according to the bourgeois principle of democracy, quantity is transformed into quality: the majority wins and the minority submits and adapts to the decisions of the majority.
The glaring contradiction lies not only in the fact that the "vote" should involve all the components of society concerned, thus including the dead and the unborn, and not only those living of a certain age and existing at a specific moment – bourgeois democracy does not even solve this problem quantitatively, nor qualitatively – but above all in the fact that it is held up as a general theory, according to which the needle of the scale depends on the +1 vote which ultimately decides which of the two sides wins over the other. The "majority" of bourgeois democracy is thus at the mercy of this 1+ or 1". And since bourgeois society is based on the most unbridled mercantilism, it is natural that this +1 is worth much more than the individual components of the 50%; hence the lie about the equality of every vote, a lie that is accompanied by haggling over each vote, with the characteristic that this +1 will be "paid" much more dearly than each vote that is part of the 50%. Just as in a market where the most sought-after commodity costs more than the others; it is not known who will buy it and when, and at what final price, but it is known that it costs more. Bourgeois democracy cannot apply any other system for its decision-making structures than the one it knows and on which it actually depends: the system of exchange, of exchange value, in short, the market. How many times have we heard model democrats proclaim that the outcome of elections depends on whether undecided people will opt for one side or the other? The undecided thus become the part of the likely voters in the electoral market on which more resources are spent to influence: in short, they cost much more than votes that are "assured"!
What duration and what value can the "decisions" taken by the "majority" in the places deputed by the bourgeois society for this particular market of votes have? Whether it is a parliament, a municipal, provincial or regional council, a company board, a neighbourhood committee or any other institution responsible for "applying" bourgeois democratic rules, the democratic method cannot avoid its inherent contradictions. Not only is it not a perfect method, and not only is it incapable of taking into account the needs of each "voter", but it systematically obscures a reality that is anything but egalitarian.
Society is divided into classes, the ruling class and the subordinate classes; into a class that appropriates the entire wealth produced by society – the bourgeois capitalist class – and classes from whose labour the bourgeoisie extracts social wealth and appropriates it. The numerical majority, understood as the sum of individuals, is not of the bourgeois capitalist class, but of the working classes: if the concept of majority were to be truly applied, it would not be the dominant classes but the dominated ones that would rule. But this is not the case. What makes the disparity is not the method, not the number, but the social position and function: those who wield political, economic and therefore military power dictate the rules. Who has the power wins. Bourgeois democracy obscures more or less well the reality of social relations between classes and of the balance of power between classes. And as long as this mode of government ensures that the ruling bourgeoisie retains political power (with the attendant participation and consensus of society, which are useful to ease the most acute tensions), it has no need to change it. However, as time goes on, the mechanisms of democracy also wear out, so that they need to be "innovated", changed, replaced or simply jettisoned when they prove too much of an obstacle to bourgeois business.
That democracy does not respond to the real life needs of people is evident today, as the "majority" of people living on this planet live in abject poverty or on the edge of survival. But this does not detract from the fact that it continues to exert a decisive influence on the proletariat, even though it is systematically subordinated not to the interests of the majority of people who make up the working classes, but to the interests of the minority of people who form the ruling classes. It is thus the interest groups (economic and/or political interests) that act so that the democratic "majority" will give them formal "consent", so that their advantages, their privileges will be preserved, extended, guaranteed; hence their greatest efforts tend to be concentrated on that +1 of the 50 %. In this way, the structure of contradictions and deceits constituted by democracy applying it to politics, economy and society can continue to play its true role, which is not that it "guarantees justice", that it "allows everyone" to have their "choice" taken into account, but that it conceals the real interests that govern the decisions of the ruling classes, the power groups.
On the other hand, the "secret" voting rule contributes both to feeding the illusion that each individual "chooses" who or what to vote for, without directly facing the possible consequences from "opponents" that a non-secret vote might provoke, and to the mystification of so-called privacy, which can only make sense in a society in which every aspect of each person’s life can be used by others to their advantage.
But a completely different function is played by voting in the immediate independent organs of the proletariat, such as the soviets in the revolutionary period in Russia or the workers’ assemblies and factory councils in the era of class unions. In these proletarian organs of struggle, the voting on motions was a practical demonstration in a completely open and direct manner that there are no ulterior motives in the use of the ballot, and that the will to struggle against the class enemies is not called into question if the ballot favours this or that motion, this or that demand. All proletarians could – because no one had anything to hide – directly verify, face to face, not only how many were in favour of this or that solution, but also who was in favour of which solution and with what motivation. Only in this way could democratic participation achieve the maximum real involvement of the proletarians in the struggle; and it will be able to do so in the future when the proletarian organs of immediate struggle independent of trade union and political collaborationism are reborn. But this can only happen, without in itself constituting a deviation in the opportunist sense, only on the terrain of the immediate struggle, only in the presence of organisms that are genuinely of class, and in the presence of the real activity of the class party within them in order to constantly orient them towards class objectives and the use of class means and methods, and to maintain their classist orientation.
In a society in which everything is commodity, everything is market, everything is traded, and everyone’s life depends on the economic – and therefore political and social – power of a very specific ruling class, the bourgeoisie, it is logical that the self-proclaimed "sovereign people", to whom bourgeois democracy entrusts what seems to be the "last word", the "final judgment", should feel that at least once in a while – for example, through elections – they "decide" how to regulate social life. The history of bourgeois society is imbued with democracy subordinated to the particular interests, and in any case wholly inherent to the privileges of the propertied classes; but it is at the same time characterized by the struggle between the classes, in which the fate of this struggle is decided not by an abstract "right", nor by a "vote" cast in the ballot box, but by the real, material, kinetic power that the antagonistic classes use to advance their interests. If the means of struggle used by the proletarian classes are exclusively for the preservation of bourgeois society – and the means of democracy are such – these means lose the semblance of struggle which is artificially attributed to them, and show their uselessness and, what is more, their anti-proletarian function. The maximum result which the bourgeoisie can achieve in its daily struggle against the proletariat is that it is the proletariat itself which damages its own interests, believing that it uses effective means and methods to defend them. The practice of democracy, promoted and supported by opportunists of all stripes, leads to precisely this result. And one can understand why the bourgeois ruling classes, especially in the advanced capitalist countries, spend colossal sums of money to maintain an endless tangle of organs, institutions and mechanisms for the promotion, practice and bureaucratic machinery of democracy. As long as the proletariat largely brings itself to its knees on the way to struggle for the defense of its immediate and future class interests, the bourgeois ruling class will use this enormous advantage against the proletariat itself, both in peace and in war, both in terms of the ever-increasing exploitation of labour power and in terms of the growing insecurity of life for the proletarian classes; and both in terms of competition with rivals on the world market, and in terms of competition between proletarians over wages and jobs. More democracy means for the proletarian more intense subjugation to the interests of capital.
To be communist is not only to stand on the side of the interests of the wage-earning classes and to fight for their advancement against the ruling classes, but also to reveal the reality of the antagonistic relations that characterize all class-divided societies, and bourgeois society in particular. Combating the mystification of bourgeois democracy is therefore the consistent position of communists in every time and place, all the more so in view of the fact that the democratic myth (every man has the same "rights" as others, e.g. to live decently and in peace) – like religious superstition – has a very strong influence on the working classes, diverting their material drive to open and direct confrontation with the ruling classes towards conciliation, negotiation leading to the acceptance of solutions that are only apparently egalitarian but only advantageous to the classes that actually hold the power, the force. If the wage-earning classes have achieved that the ruling classes or the bosses have finally accepted and implemented some of their demands, they have achieved this only after the systematic application of forceful actions, and not through the application of "voting". The ten-hour law in the time of Marx and Engels in England, and later the eight-hour law, are examples for all. But is it not true that the existential exigencies of the majority of proletarians and poor peasants force them to work much longer hours than the eight-hour law? And this is due to the very simple relationship of social forces, whereby the bourgeois classes, by their economic and social pressure on society, tend to reduce the "price of labour" – the wage – in order to maximize the share of unpaid labour – surplus value – that goes to the benefit of their profits. However, everything happens according to the laws of the "labour market", agreed upon and accepted by all classes through parliamentary votes. It is no coincidence that Lenin, in his work The State and Revolution, in agreement with Marx, reiterates what bourgeois democracy consists of: "To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament–this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics" (25).
The Communist Party, from its first appearance in history through Marx and Engels’ 1848 Manifesto, has well identified the contradictions and lies contained in bourgeois democracy. And a fundamental historical lesson came out of the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, as Marx and with him Lenin recall. In the course of its development, the international communist movement has developed the thesis that bourgeois democracy is the method of government that is best able to deceive the proletariat and to instill in it the illusion that it is the best method of government not only for the bourgeois class but also for the proletarian class.
But the deception lies not only in the method, in the practice of democracy, but in the economic and political foundations of bourgeois society. In fact, in periods of deep crisis of the bourgeois state, and therefore of all democratic institutions, and in the presence of consistent upsurge of the proletarian movement on the path of class struggle towards direct confrontation with the political power of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois ruling class tends to abandon the parliamentary democratic method and to act quite openly, showing even on the political level the face of its effective dictatorship over the whole of society.
The social situation within a country and the international political situation did not always "demand" the destruction of democracy through the restoration of pre-capitalist powers; after 1789 in France and 1848 in Europe, the victory of capitalism, not only economically but also politically in Western Europe, definitively paved the way; the pre-capitalist classes definitively lost the possibility of their own "restoration". The subsequent suppression of liberal democracy as a method of government was not due to the comeback of pre-capitalist forces (as in the imaginations of Gramscism and Stalinism, which regarded fascism as a step backwards in history), but to the imperative demands of the political and economic centralization of advanced capitalism, of imperialism. The implementation of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 1930s corresponded to the needs of the bourgeois ruling classes faced with the real revolutionary danger: in those years, the proletariat triumphed in Russia, in Western Europe it struggled to seize power in Hungary, Poland, Germany, also in Italy, and all over the world the peasant and proletarian masses were in a great ferment to revolutionize the existing social orders. The fear of the bourgeois ruling classes, especially in the advanced capitalist countries, was such that in order to save themselves from the rising red tide they had to come up with a new method of government, given that the democratic method had failed to deter the proletarian masses from their revolutionary path. This new method of government turned out to be fascism, avowedly anti-proletarian, and not before letting the rogue "workers’" Social-Democracy finish its work of disarming, repressing and disorganizing the proletariat, which it was still influencing and directing.
Fascism was a posteriori (after-the-fact) reaction of the bourgeoisie and the imperialists vis-à-vis the proletarian classes, which had already demonstrated during the First World War that they had the vigour, combativity, energy and leadership capable of seriously threatening the bourgeois powers. What lessons did the bourgeois classes draw from that fear? That they would do everything in their power not to find themselves again in a similar situation with a proletariat so socially and politically strong as to pose a real danger of a definitive demise for the bourgeoisie and capitalism.
The bourgeois, confronted with social situations of great tension that could have opened the way to the resumption of the class and revolutionary struggle, arrived at the thesis that their reaction must no longer be a posteriori, but preventive; and it must concern all levels, whether political, economic and social, ideological and cultural, or military. Therefore, where economic resources existed and where the proletariat was more connected to the class and revolutionary tradition, "anti-fascist" democracy had to marry with the social consensus obtained through the application of reforms and economic "guarantees" (those famous social shock absorbers), without neglecting the repressive armed intervention of the state (in the case of Italy, from the Portella delle Ginestre massacre to the farm workers killed in the strikes in Avolio, Battipaglia, the demonstrators killed in June and July 1960 to the young people murdered in Rome and Milan in 1969–1970) and massacres, commanded by illegal bourgeois forces (in Italy, the bombing of the Piazza Fontana in Milan, the Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, to the attack on the Bologna train station in 1980). Where economic resources were not so abundant and the proletariat did not have a long tradition of class and revolutionary struggle or was dramatically diverted from it by Stalinism, then "anti-fascist" and "popular" democracy, when faced with a socially very tense situation, had to make way for open military repression (in Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956, and then the colonels’ junta in Greece, the generals’ junta in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile, the Sukarno regime in Indonesia, etc. ) Military dictatorship thus became a preventive response to proletarian mobilization, while "anti-fascist" democracy became increasingly fascized.
The degeneration of liberal democracy, after fascism and the Second World Imperialist War, inevitably makes way for imperialist democracy, that is, fascized, armed, in short, "more modern" democracy. It shows increasingly more evident signs of being deceitful towards the oppressed population and the proletariat itself. In spite of this, in spite of the thousands of demonstrations in which it has acted decisively against the "general" interests of the people – while declaring itself the best way of representing their interests and demands vis-à-vis them – democracy still has a strong appeal for the proletariat: it is a superstition that will die hard. All the more reason why communists worthy of the name should fight against it at all levels, from the theoretical, programmatic and ideological to the political and tactical.
THE CLASS PARTY, EVEN FOR ITS INTERNAL LIFE, DRAWS A LESSON FROM HISTORY: IT EXCLUDES THE USE OF THE DEMOCRATIC MECHANISM.
Why should the revolutionary communist party, after the countless demonstrations provided by the history of proletarian struggles and revolutionary struggle, use the democratic mechanism, even if only from the organizational point of view?
It is well known that the parties that joined the Communist International adopted the organizational formula of democratic centralism. This basically meant that the members of the Communist Party were bound to be governed by the directives issued by the central organs and to apply them in all foreseen situations using the methods defined centrally, but these directives were based on the positions, programs, resolutions, theses which were discussed at appropriate congresses and on which the participants (delegates of all the adhering parties) were called to vote. The majority formally passed to adopt such a position, such a thesis, such a resolution, etc., and nothing was to be changed until the next congress. Democratic centralism was undoubtedly a step forward compared to the previously existing "separation of powers" where, for example, the parliamentary group had its autonomy over the decisions of the central organs of the socialist party, as did the socialist leaders in the trade unions. By placing emphasis on the substantive centralism, the autonomous mode of action of the different parts of the party, that is, autonomy which in fact represented opportunist attitudes, positions and practices, was decisively cut off. Bourgeois democracy had become the axis around which the decisions and powers of the socialist parties revolved, to the extent that it was often the parliamentary group that dictated the line to be followed by the party. What remained was the adjective democratic, derived from the earlier history of the proletarian and socialist movement, by which was meant to emphasize the practice of the involvement and participation of all party comrades in all party activities, including the drafting of resolutions, theses, etc., and ultimately the voting on them. However, the ambiguity of the term "democratic" did not disappear, even though the meaning that the communists attributed to it at the time was not to mystify about the fictitious equality between leaders and rank-and-file, between governing bodies and the basic organizations, but precisely to emphasize that no party comrade was prevented, in principle or by the statutes, from carrying out any activity within the party. Through democratic functioning, however, the tendency to set thesis against thesis, proposal against proposal, opinion against opinion, was constantly returning to the communist party, instilling a practice which proved to be fundamentally anti-centralist, through which the directives issued by the central organs could be constantly questioned to such an extent that a "personally justified" reason for not applying them was found; from this point of view, that democratic "participation", that democratic "involvement", instead of helping to unify and make the party structure united in thought and action, was a fictitious, ridiculous imitation of it. In this way the party inevitably lost the unity of its action and unified vision and opened itself up to the formation of factions, currents, "parties" within the party. Instead of constituting a firm, decisive, unambiguous, compact, reliable, secure leadership of the revolutionary proletarian movement, aimed at the main historical goal of revolutionary preparation and management, it could be transformed – imperceptibly at first and then more and more evidently – into a "bourgeois" party, at the service not of the proletarian revolution but of democracy, thus at the service of the ruling bourgeoisie.
Just as we attribute no intrinsic virtue to the forms of organization and representation of the immediate and mass proletarian organizations, so we attribute no intrinsic virtue to certain forms of party organization. If the Marxist thesis that the revolution is not a problem of forms of organization, but a problem of content ("the movement and action of revolutionary forces in an unending process", as we can read in A. Bordiga’s 1922 essay The Democratic Principle) is valid, this is also true for the communist party, whose historical aim is to prepare, to lead the proletarian revolution to the final and international victory over capitalism and bourgeois classes. Even for the class political party, the problem is primarily one of content, that is, the theory and program from which the political, tactical and organizational lines are derived. "The party may or may not be suited to its task of leading the revolutionary action of a class; it is not any political party but a precise one, namely the communist party, that can assume this task, and not even the communist party is immune to the numerous dangers of degeneration and dissolution" – wrote Bordiga in the article now referred to, taking care, however, to clarify at once that "what makes the party equal to its task is not its statutes or mere internal organizational measures. It is the positive characteristics which develop within the party because it participates in the struggle as an organization possessing a single orientation which derives from its conception of the historical process, from a fundamental program which has been translated into a collective consciousness and at the same time from a secure organizational discipline" (26). It is decisively reiterated that the criteria of organization – all the more so the criteria of internal organization – are not valid in themselves but insofar as they are brought into line with the objectives of the party’s revolutionary struggle. The aims of the communist party’s revolutionary struggle do not include the defense, preservation or eventual improvement (assuming, without admitting, that this can be achieved) of the methods and mechanisms of democracy; on the contrary, they include the destruction of bourgeois democracy with all its apparatuses and its replacement not by the so-called proletarian democracy, but by the declared and open formation of the proletarian state, i.e., a class state that organizes the proletarian class against all other classes that must be stripped of their economic, political and social privileges. The proletarian state is a real historical force which adapts itself to the goal it pursues, that is, to the necessities which gave birth to it (cf. The Democratic Principle, op. cit.), and for this reason, in the long process of proletarian dictatorship, revolutionary struggle and war against the bourgeois classes worldwide, "at certain moments its impulses may come from either broad mass consultations or from the action of very restricted executive organs endowed with full powers. What is essential is to give this organization of proletarian power the means and weapons to destroy bourgeois economic privilege and the political and military resistance of the bourgeoisie, in a way that prepares for the subsequent disappearance of classes themselves, and for the more and more profound modifications of the tasks and structure of the proletarian state".
The proletarian state, as the Russian experience demonstrates in a wealth of edifying details, continues the text now cited, "imposes on the proletarian state constitutional characteristics which are in open contradiction to the canons of bourgeois democracy. Supporters of bourgeois democracy howl about the violation of liberties, whereas it is only a matter of unmasking the philistine prejudices which have always allowed demagogues to ensure power to the privileged". In the revolutionary perspective of Marxism, the proletarian state will wither away and make way for the organs of administration and organization of society that will no longer be divided into antagonistic classes but will be of the human species. And the communist party, which is the sole and exclusive guide of the proletarian dictatorship, and therefore of the proletarian state, will have to be the factor most in accord with the revolutionary ends of the struggle between the classes, which, taken to its very end, can only place before history the decisive denouement: either capitalism or communism, either capitalist and bourgeois dictatorship or proletarian and communist dictatorship. But the accordance with the revolutionary ends does not lie in bourgeois democracy, neither in its principles nor in its practical and organizational mechanisms: it lies in the continuity of the revolutionary struggle until the world and final victory over capitalism and all the privileged classes who derive privileges and benefits from capitalism and bourgeois regimes to the detriment of the proletarian and unprivileged classes of the world.
The Italian Communist Left, from its beginnings, has fought a consistent Marxist battle against democracy "in general" and against democratic functioning in particular, thus finding itself in complete agreement with Lenin, who – in What is to be done? in 1903 – stated that the bourgeois regime, even the most democratic one, does neither overcome nor abrogate the regime of the wage-exploitation of the proletariat, but confirms it, mystifying it under the guise of the "participation" of the people, and therefore of the proletariat that constitutes its majority, through regularly held democratic elections.
The development of the workers’ movement and its class struggle, especially in the advanced capitalist countries, has shown that bourgeois democracy and its practice have neither resolved the social contradictions of capitalism nor overcome the class antagonisms between the ruling bourgeoisie and the dominated proletariat. The rate of exploitation of wage labor has increased over time, the gap between the accumulation of wealth on the one hand and sinking into poverty on the other has widened more and more, inexorably confirming the Marxist theory of growing misery. The democratic system is therefore ineffective with respect to the ruthless economic laws of capitalism: the law of value cannot be tamed by civil codes or texts of constitutions, even the most democratic ones. Democracy masks, as a cloak, the true face of capitalism, its actual economic and social dictatorship. And there is perhaps nothing better to demonstrate that this economic and social dictatorship determines its own development and tends towards ever greater concentration and centralization of capital than the emergence of economic crises into which the capitalist mode of production inevitably and periodically plunges; tendency that obviously conditions the whole of society and the social relations between the classes, and hence the political administration of bourgeois society, leading it towards an authoritarian as well as centralist regime. Fascism is the most obvious example of this tendency, which in fact, precisely because it expresses the profound economic tendencies of capitalism at the political level, constitutes a phase in the political development of the bourgeois class from which the latter can no longer retreat. At the formal level, the series of obligations and imposed alternatives can also be represented by a series of so-called democratic "rights" – as was the case with the military collapse of the fascist regimes during the Second World War – but at the substantive level the centralist, authoritarian, "fascist" phase has not changed; on the contrary, it has become increasingly accentuated, as evidenced by inter-state relations, for example, between the United States and its European "allies" with respect to the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The democratic mechanism was re-established after the fall of fascism, but in a society which had already developed its imperialism to a large extent economically, and in which, therefore, a strong contradiction between the external facade of unrealized and unrealizable democracy and the internal imperialist and dictatorial content of its economy was increasingly apparent. The network of interests that characterizes the bourgeois ruling classes is merely the representation of the movements of capitals at the level of the economy, especially in its financial sphere. In such movements, stronger capital devours weaker capital, the concentration of capitals defeats the fragmentation of capitals in the competitive struggle, large trusts dominate the international market and condition the "life" of smaller capitals. At the political level, such movements are expressed by parties and states whose aim is to defend the interests of these extremely concentrated capitals, to facilitate their penetration into the most diverse markets, to extend their reach and to enlarge their size. The clash of interests on the world market is natural for capital, and this clash takes place at all levels, although not necessarily simultaneously: at the economic and financial level, at the diplomatic level, at the political and military level. The more intense the clash, the more the concentration of forces is necessary; the greater the representation on the world market, the more the states prepare, including by breaking old alliances and forging new ones, ready to be broken again when the balance of power changes between the big trusts and the big states, to defend the network of interests of which they are the expression.
The democratic mechanism becomes a hindrance at this level of competitive struggle. It is not at all a coincidence that for decades, fundamental decisions in both economics and politics have been taken not in parliaments but in the boardrooms of the so-called "strong powers". Democracy, were it not for the problem of the bourgeoisie to influence, direct and organize the social forces of the proletariat according to its ruling class interests, would be of no use, and the bourgeoisie itself would quietly throw it in the rubbish.
The bourgeois ruling class, however, cannot lose sight of the proletariat, because the proletariat has shown in its long class history that it is capable of opposing the bourgeois classes throughout the world, not only with brute force, the force of the social mass in movement, which tends to explode when a certain degree of pressure is exceeded, but also with the force of a political program derived from a scientific theory – Marxism – capable of interpreting the social reality of the human organizations, and to foresee the historical course of the development of bourgeois society by positioning the proletariat as the modern social class at the centre of the historical movement of social classes fighting among themselves for a completely different social organization from those that had assumed the characteristics of class societies, in which progress, further development, could only be a society divided into classes with an increasingly modern, simplified, economically more powerful and socially more universal mode of production.
In fact, the power of the revolutionary theory of Marxism lies not only in its materialist, historical and dialectical interpretation of the history of human societies: at the same time it is a revolutionary guidance for general and fundamental change of society. It is precisely this force that the bourgeois classes have had to confront in various historical situations, but essentially as part of one great historical passage from capitalist and bourgeois society as the last class-divided society to communist society as the community of the human species, and somehow to become familiar with it. From 1848 and 1871 in Europe to 1905 in Russia and 1917–1921 worldwide, the bourgeois classes were able to test – scared to death – what historical revolutionary force the proletarian class is endowed with. Naturally they resorted to defense, using all their economic and military strength, their class acumen and all their experience of social and political domination to prevent the revolutionary proletariat from completing the revolutionary process it had begun. And up to now they have recorded triumphs, as in the case of the old aristocratic and feudal ruling classes, in the struggles against the revolutionary bourgeois classes that began their historical march in 1640 with Cromwell, to be definitively ended more than two hundred years later in Europe in 1871.
We do not know whether even the final revolutionary victory over the old and decaying capitalist society will take more than two hundred years from 1848, the year in which history first confronted modern society with its inevitable revolutionary outcome: the proletariat against the bourgeoisie; after the proletariat made a decisive contribution to the revolutionary victory of the bourgeois classes over the old feudal classes, and in which the historical unfolding suddenly gave birth to the Marxist theory of the proletarian revolution as the only revolution capable of moving social organization from the last class-divided society (bourgeois society) to the classless society (communist society), from the prehistory of human society to the actual history of human society. We know that capitalist society has sealed its historical fate, for it has already long been unable to ensure that social organization moves forward. From an economic point of view, capitalism no longer has any chance of developing the social life except under the conditions of sharpening the difference between the minority groups of capitalists, who concentrate in their hands the vast majority of economic, financial and natural resources, and the vast majority of people who instead live in poverty, starvation, in the daily uncertainty of life; a difference which only intensifies the class antagonism between the ruling bourgeois classes and the dominated classes, especially the proletariat. From a political point of view, capitalism has created an endless series of governmental "solutions", alliances, counter-maneuvers, in order to reconcile the interests of the accumulation and valorization of capital with the interests of the survival of the majority of the human population; these "solutions" are always inexorably directed towards the preservation and defense of the political and social domination of the bourgeois classes. The bourgeoisie has been and is capable of spawning political parties of all kinds, ready to represent the interests of even very small groups, thereby responding to the law of competition that dominates social life under capitalism; but as the development of capitalist competition has demonstrated, the economic tendency towards concentration and centralization has repercussions on the political level as well, compelling the bourgeoisie to form centralist, "single", authoritarian parties, while having to retain the symbols, practices and apparatuses of democracy almost exclusively for the purpose of deceiving the broad masses.
As for the proletarian and communist party, representing in bourgeois society the revolutionary struggle for the definitive overthrow of bourgeois political power and the economic and social transformation of the whole of society, it corresponds in a certain sense to a kind of general staff of the proletarian revolution, and for that very reason it cannot be organized otherwise but with a pyramidal, centralist structure, whose efficiency is given by the coherence of its actions and its organization with the ends of the revolutionary communist program. Unlike the army, of course, the "general staff-party" is not only an effective instrument of the proletarian revolution, but it is at the same time the guide and the representation of the historical ends, as well as an organization which presupposes the voluntary and conscious adherence of its militants. In this perspective, historically, the proletarian party, even in its formal organization, could not but tend towards the most organic centralization, since its objectives are not conditioned by competing and conflicting interest groups, but by the sole classist outcome, which is the overthrow of bourgeois power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is as much authoritarian, centralist and strictly disciplined as it can be. Can such a party with these tasks depend in its decisions, in its actions, in its daily practice, on technical mechanisms such as democratic consultations? No, since technical mechanisms do not determine the rightness or wrongness of the party’s political program, but are used and applicable in accordance with the content of the political program and the ends of party activity. When, in 1921, the Italian Communist Left, through Amadeo Bordiga, developed its critique of the model of democratic centralism – which was the organizing principle of the communist parties at the time – it focused as the focal point of the issue not the problem of organization, but the problem of the content, and thus of the continuity of party activity in space and time. In the article, which we have already quoted many times, we indeed read the following: "The democratic criterion has been for us so far a material and incidental factor in the construction of our internal organization and the formulation of our party statutes; it is not an indispensable platform for them. Therefore we will not raise the organizational formula known as ‘democratic centralism’ to the level of a principle. Democracy cannot be a principle for us. Centralism is indisputably one, since the essential characteristics of party organization must be unity of structure and action. The term centralism is sufficient to express the continuity of party structure in space; in order to introduce the essential idea of continuity in time, the historical continuity of the struggle which, surmounting successive obstacles, always advances towards the same goal, and in order to combine these two essential ideas of unity in the same formula, we would propose that the communist party base its organization on ‘organic centralism’." The fact that this theme had already been raised in 1921, thus in the most intense period of the revolutionary struggle, which at that time could count on the victorious proletarian and communist power in Russia and the foundation of the Communist International, demonstrates that lessons, which the class party is bound to draw from history and from the course of the struggle between the classes are much more fruitful and stable in the long run if their foundations lie in the most fertile terrain of the living revolutionary struggle, in the period of the peak of historical development. It has never been a question of terminology, and it has never been a question of finding a liking for a formula: no party of that time, and no force that declared itself communist later on, has been able to achieve such dialectical clarity up to the present day as the Italian Communist Left has. The goal towards which the party aims, the direction in which it proceeds, the unity of structure and actions, these are the basic elements for deriving the political formulas that shape the action and activity of the class party in a compact way.
The democratic mechanism was justified at that time not only with respect to the need to involve the entire membership of the party down to the last militant in all different situations, but also with respect to the emergence of divergences, of different points of view, and thus of its organized formation. In reality, as it happens in the political life of all bourgeois parties, democratic mechanisms are ineffective in preventing possible divergences: they merely register them and set up their expression, their debate and their "management" in an attempt to prevent the disintegration of the party organization whenever divergent points of view arise within it. In the Theses of the Left at the Third Congress of the Communist Party of Italy, in Lyon in 1926, the Left responded to the problem of factionalism and opportunist danger within the party with the statement: "The communist parties must achieve an organic centralism, which, whilst including as much consultation with the base as possible, ensures the spontaneous elimination of any grouping which starts to differentiate itself. This cannot be achieved by means of the formal and mechanical prescriptions of a hierarchy, but, as Lenin says, by means of correct revolutionary politics. The repression of factionalism isn’t a fundamental aspect of the evolution of the party, although preventing it is. Since it is fruitless and absurd, not to say extremely dangerous, to claim that the party and the International are somehow mysteriously ensured against any relapse or tendency to relapse into opportunism, which could just as well depend on changing circumstances or on the playing out of residual social-democratic traditions, then we must admit that every difference of opinion not reducible to cases of conscience or personal defeatism could well develop a useful function in the resolution of our problems and serve to protect the party, and the proletariat in general, from the risk of serious danger. If these dangers accentuate then differentiation will inevitably, but usefully, take on the factionist form, and this could lead to schisms; not however for the childish reason of a lack of repressive energy on the part of the leaders, but only in the awful hypothesis that the party fails and becomes subject to counter-revolutionary influences." (27)
In the balance-sheet which we have made of the crises of our yesterday’s party, we have pointed out that all the different tendencies which clashed in the various internal party crises had one common characteristic, that of an exaggeration of certain formalisms or a denial of their function and usefulness. Another mistake here would be to believe that the correct position is "in the middle", when on the contrary the problem is again primarily political. Formal discipline arises in respect of the party’s central directives not because they come into the internal party network from a central body, but because they are politically consistent with the program and the political and tactical line that the party has given itself and that, by joining the party, every militant accepts and shares. The fact that directives need to be issued by the party centre responds first and foremost to the political need for unity of action and movement of the party; and unity of action and movement is better ensured by a central body than by many territorially dispersed and "independent" diverse bodies. However, since we do not ascribe to certain party mechanisms or structures a kind of "intrinsic virtue", we can declare without fear of being accused of centralism in words and anti-centralism in deeds that for us not even the central organ of the party as such is endowed with intrinsic virtue, and that the discipline which arises towards it is in any case always derived from a conscious and voluntary political acceptance of the party’s strategies-guidance. The exaggeration of formalisms denotes the presence of a tendency to use organizational and disciplinary means in an attempt to solve political problems. There are formalisms that are never adopted in the party, and the very fact of their adoption automatically puts those who use them out of the party. One example: the recourse to the courts made by the leaders of the new Il Programma Comunista in order to regain control of the party newspaper was a technical expedient by which they purposed to be recognized once again as the "true" and "authentic" political heirs of the Italian Communist Left; an expedient that in any case should never – not even exceptionally – be used, even in the absence of an unresolved debate and political struggle over the party’s political and tactical lines. There are formalisms whose overuse demonstrates that there is a disruption in the party of the organizational methods that allow for a consistent and correct party activity at different levels and in different areas. The method of disciplinary sanctions, striking off from membership and expulsion – adopted on a few occasions in the yesterday’s party, particularly after the death of Amadeo Bordiga – is itself an exceptional method, but "if disciplinary crises multiply to the point that they become the rule", as has happened in the years from 1923 onwards in the parties and in the International, and as it happened with due historical proportions in our yesterday’s party from 1979 to 1982, "this means that something is not right in the general running of the party, and that the problem has to be studied" (28). And this very way of posing the problem already shows that there are no constitutive norms or statutes in the party whose application will "solve" the internal crises; the prevention of deviations and degenerations cannot be other than political, based on the constant recall of the theoretical and programmatic points on which the class party is founded, and on the historical and political balance sheet that the party has made of revolutions and counter-revolutions. There are no other guarantees, let alone those that are often demanded under the influence of opportunism with the aim of spreading internal democracy in the party whereby the decision on whether to follow one path or another is shifted to the opinion of rank-and-file militants (and their numerical representation).
We do not attribute "the degeneration which took place in the Communist Party to the fact that the assemblies and congresses of the militants had little voice with respect to the initiatives taken by the center", although we recognize that "at many historical turning points we have seen the rank and file smothered by the center for counter-revolutionary purposes. To this end even the instruments of the state machine, including the most brutal, have been employed" (29), as was the case, for example, during the Stalin era. "But all this" – the quoted party text continues – "is not the origin of the degeneration of the party but an inevitable manifestation of it, a sign that the party has yielded to counter-revolutionary influences". Militants affiliate themselves to the party individually, and thus express their will to throw their energies and abilities into the service of the overall activity of the party. With this commitment, discipline towards the central organs of the party is expected, a discipline that is not exclusively formal but inherently political, hence with full consciousness. In the quoted text we can again read another interesting passage: "At the base of the relationship between the militant and the party there is an obligation which, in order to rid ourselves of the undesirable adjective ‘contractual’, we can simply call a dialectical obligation. The relationship is double and flows in two directions: from the center to the base and from the base to the center. If the action of the center goes in accordance with the good functioning of the dialectical relationship, it is met by healthy responses from the base."
On the other hand, organizational discipline is not a secondary cause, not least because each militant, whether or not he has central responsibilities, does not have the right to decide on his own whether, when and in what form he will apply the party’s directives. Let us proceed again with the quoted text: "The celebrated problem of discipline thus consists in establishing a system of limits for the base which is the proper reflection of the limits set for the action of the leadership. Consequently we have always maintained that the leadership must not have the right, in the great turning points in the political situation, to discover, invent and impose pretended new principles, new formulations and new guidelines for the action of the party. These sudden shifts make up the history of opportunism. When such a crisis occurs (and this can happen precisely because the party is not an immediate and automatic organization) it is followed by an internal struggle, the formation of tendencies, and splits. In such a case these are useful developments, just as a fever, for freeing an organism of disease. Nevertheless, ‘constitutionally’ they cannot be accepted, encouraged or tolerated."
The party, on the other hand, has every interest in preparing itself in advance against possible deviations and degenerations, and if it cannot do so by constitutive norms or statutes, by specific regulations or rules, then how?
As usual, there are political conditions deriving from the balance sheet of the experiences of the proletarian and revolutionary struggle of so many decades, of which "the research, the defense and the realization must be the constant task for our movement". The main political conditions, proceeding again from some of our basic texts, can be summarized as follows (30):
1) The party must defend and affirm the utmost clarity and continuity in the communist doctrine as it has been gradually unfolded in the course of its application to historical development, and must not allow proclamations of principles which are even partially at variance with its theoretical foundations. The party therefore prohibits personal freedom to develop and elaborate new schemes and interpretations of the contemporary social world, prohibits personal freedom to produce analyses, critiques, and perspectives even for the most intellectually prepared of its adherents, and defends the immutability of theory, which is not a phenomenon of blind faith, but the content of the science of the proletarian class, constructed on the basis of centuries of material, not on the basis of the ideas of men, but on the basis of the force of material facts which are reflected in the historical consciousness of a revolutionary class and crystallized in its party.
2) The party must, in every historical situation, openly proclaim the full content of its program as regards the economic, social and political aspects of its implementation, and especially as regards the question of power, its conquest by armed force and its exercise by dictatorship.
3) The party must implement a strict organizational rigor in the sense that it would not allow itself to grow through compromises with groups or clusters, or worse still, would engage in wheeling and dealing through concessions to supposed leaders and leading figures to win new rank-and-file members.
4) The party must strive for a clear historical understanding of the antagonistic direction of the struggle. Communists claim to initiate an attack on the whole world of established orders and traditions, they know that they constitute a danger to all the privileged, and they call on the masses to fight offensively, not defensively, against the alleged danger of losing vaunted advantages and progress won in the capitalist world. Communists do not cede and put their party at the service of defending causes that are foreign to them and non-proletarian goals such as freedom, homeland, democracy and other such lies.
5) The communists are renouncing the whole range of tactical expedients which tend to be resorted to under the pretext of accelerating the process of ideological adhesion of broad layers of the masses around the revolutionary program. Such expedient means are political compromises, alliances with other parties, united front, all sorts of verbal turns of phrase about the state used as a substitute for the dictatorship of the proletariat – e.g., workers’ and peasants’ government, peoples’ government, progressive democracy. Communists have historically seen the application of such tactical means as one of the main conditions for the dissolution of the proletarian movement and the Soviet communist regime, and regard those who deplore the opportunist character of the Stalinist movement and at the same time advocate these tactical means as more dangerous enemies than the Stalinists themselves.
6) The organizational base of the communist party is territorial units, not enterprise-based cells, groups or similar sectoral bodies. In the territorial grouping, workers of all professions and employees of all kinds of bosses are equated from the beginning, and with them all other militants from social groups which are not strictly proletarian and which the party openly recognizes as its adherents, and as such it must in any case accept them and, if necessary, keep them in greater "quarantine" than it eventually charges them with organizational functions.
7) The Communist Left’s conception of party organization replaces the silly majority criterion mimicking bourgeois democracy with a dialectical criterion at a much higher level that makes everything depend on the militants’ and leaders’ solid link to the commitment to strict continuity of theory, program and tactics.
8) The party considers the unions, or rather the economic associations of the proletariat, as an indispensable organ for the mobilization of the class at the political and revolutionary level, which is carried out with the presence and penetration of the Communist Party in the class economic organizations. In these difficult stages which the formation of economic associations entails, the associations which prove to be suitable for the work of the party are those which comprise only proletarians and which join them spontaneously, without being obliged to profess given religious and social political views. This character is lost in those organizations that are strictly ideologically profiled and compulsory or those that have become an integral part of the state apparatus (as, in fact, today’s class-collaborationist trade unions).
9) The party will never adopt the method of forming partial economic organizations comprising only those workers who accept the principles and direction of the Communist Party. However, the party is unreservedly conscious that not only the situation prior to the insurrectionary struggle, but also any phase of decisive growth of the party’s influence among the masses cannot take shape without the formation of a layer of organizations between it and the class which have immediate economic objectives and in which a large number of people participate, and within which there is a network emanating from the party (communist union nuclei, groups and fractions).
10) The task of the party in unfavorable periods and in periods of passivity of the proletarian class is to foresee for the immediate struggle the forms and to encourage the formation of organizations with economic purpose, which in the future may take on completely new aspects, following such well-known examples as the trade league, industrial union, works council, etc. The party always encourages forms of organization that facilitate contact and common action between workers of different localities and professions and rejects closed forms.
11) Since the character of the degeneration of society as a whole has had and has its greatest manifestation in the falsification and destruction of the theory and the correct doctrine, it is obvious that for the present small party the restoration and defense of the meaning of the doctrine’s principles is still of the highest priority; unfortunately, the generally favorable situation in which Lenin did so after the catastrophe of the First World War is lacking. But even so, for this reason we do not erect a barrier between theory and practical action, for to do so would at a certain level destroy ourselves and all our principled foundations. We therefore claim all the forms of activity characteristic of the favorable periods, in so far as the real relations of forces permit, and the party therefore loses no opportunity to enter every rift, every breach, in the full knowledge that there will be no resumption of the class until this sector of society has greatly strengthened and become dominant.
12) Parliamentarism is gradually losing its significance in the wake of the development of the capitalist state, which is manifestly assuming the form of dictatorship that Marxism pointed out from the very beginning. Even the apparent survivals of the elective parliamentary institutions of the traditional bourgeoisie are increasingly fading away, remaining mere phraseology and, in moments of social crisis, underlining the dictatorial form of the state as the capitalism’s last resort against which the violence of the revolutionary proletariat must be exercised. Thus, under the prevailing state of affairs and the current power relations, the party disregards democratic elections of all kinds and does not carry out its activity in this field. In the face of democratic elections, therefore, the party manifests this non-activity in the electoral and parliamentary field in the form of revolutionary abstentionism, i.e., it devotes its energies to the general activity of study, propaganda, agitation and proselytism in the context of the anti-capitalist struggle, and hence against democracy and its mechanisms of deception and delusion of proletarian minds, and for the classist orientation of the proletariat.
13) There are no ready-made recipes to accelerate the resumption of the class struggle. There are no maneuvers and stratagems to make the proletarians listen to the voice of the class; such maneuvers and stratagems would, in fact, make the party appear not as it really is, but would mean a distortion of its function, to the detriment and prejudice of the effective resumption of the revolutionary movement, which is based on real maturity of facts and the correspondingly adequate setting up of the party, for which it can only be equipped by the intransigence of its doctrine and politics.
* * *
Many more interesting points could still be made, but also for reasons of length we will postpone them for later occasions to revisit the issues that the new text in the header of our press refers to.
It is necessary, and we point this out, even though it is evidently self-evident, to refer to the work of balancing the crises that we have carried out over all these years, and in particular to certain texts, such as the following articles, published in 1981–1982 in Il Programma Comunista: "La capacità del partito di interrogarsi sulla strada percorsa, presupposto per andare avanti sulla strada della rivoluzione proletaria" (General Meeting November 1981, n. 10, 11 a 12 from 1981), "Le questioni poste dalla crisi del nostro partito" (GM October 1982, n. 20 from 1982); and published in the years 1985–1987 in Il Comunista: "Propaganda comunista, fattore essenziale della preparazione rivoluzionaria" and "In difesa del programma comunista" (n. 2, April 1985), "Punti sulla questione della lotta immediata e degli organismi proletari indipendenti" (n. 3–4, 5 and 6, July–December 1985), "Che cosa significa fare il bilancio della crisi di partito?" (n. 6, November 1986), "La riconquista del patrimonio teorico e politico della Sinistra comunista passa anche attraverso la riacquisizione della corretta prassi di partito" (n. 8, 9–10, August–December 1987), "Rapport du centre international à la Réunion général du parti", July 1982 (in Programme Communiste, n. 89, 1987); further: "La critica senza l’errore non nuoce nemmeno la millesima parte di quanto nuoce l’errore senza la critica" ("Il Comunista", n. 45, April 1995) and "Sulla questione della formazione del partito dopo la crisi esplosiva del 1982–84 del ‘partito comunista internazionale-programma comunista’, in Italia e in altri paesi" (Il Comunista, n. 56, 1997; 57–58, 1998; and 62, 1998).
(1) Following the Florence Meeting of December 1951, a text entitled "Base per l’Organizzazione 1952" was presented and circulated. In issue no. 5, 6–20 March 1952 of Battaglia comunista, after many acts of indiscipline and fractionism had occurred in the party, three texts were published simultaneously :
- Distingue il nostro partito (What distinguishes our party)
- Communicato del Comitato Centrale (Communiqué from the Central Committee)
- Base per l’organizzazione 1952 (Basis for organization 1952)
The texts are as follows:
"WHAT DISTINGUISHES OUR PARTY: The line from Marx, to Lenin, to Leghorn of 1921, to the struggle of the Left against the degeneration of Moscow, to the rejection of the partisan blocs; the hard work of restoration of the doctrine and the revolutionary organ, in contact with the working class, outside of personal and electoral politicking."
"COMMUNIQUÉ from the Central Committee. This decision, taken unanimously by the CC on 24-02-1952, fulfils the need to put the Party’s organisation and activities in order at the end of a period of repeated and serious acts of indiscipline and open disintegration, which must absolutely be considered over.
The decision was adopted by the CC also as a result of a series of contacts, meetings and consultations with many comrades and groups in the organisation, who agreed to it without the slightest exception or reservation.
The adherence of all comrades is regarded as having been achieved through their membership for the year 1952, which is already in course in accordance with the cornerstones and the elaborations referred to here.
The Party with all its organs and adherents undertakes to work on the basis of the results of the study meetings that took place in 1951 in Rome, Naples and Florence, as well as on the basis of the Statute-Programme and the political platforms previously drawn up and published.
With special reference to the practical tasks and actions in the current harsh and difficult period for the proletarian movement, the party’s activity hinges on the text presented in Florence in December 1951 and already circulated within its ranks as the "Base per l’Organizzazione 1952", which has the character (after recalling the fundamental principles of the movement) of delimiting the scope and extension in the current situation of the party.
The points of this elaboration state that, without passing over in silence or forgetting any aspect of the integral task of the class party, today the tasks of the theoretical rearrangement, of organizational reconstitution with the greatest possible development, of proselytism and propaganda, are pre-eminent, in conviction that the never-abandoned agitation among the masses and with the masses will in the not too distant future reach its ampleness and potency.
The Party never loses contact with the concrete and physical manifestations of the class struggle; it prevents from being confused with movements of a coldly intellectual and sectarian character; it continues its activity and its work according to the points of Part IV of the quoted text which is going to be published in the Party press (Battaglia Comunista, no. 5, 1952).
The central organs of the Party remain in Milan and their functioning is remitted by the C.C. to the executive office entrusted to comrade Bruno Maffi who, for the distribution of the work of the various sectors (organisation, press – Battaglia comunista and Prometeo, administration) will make use of the work of other comrades of the C.C. or, for specific tasks, of other people in the organisation.
Every manifestation, activity and publication carried out outside these precise guidelines and this organizational framework must be considered extraneous to the Party.
The CC, 24 February 1952"
With regard to the "Base per l’organizzazione 1952", in no. 5 of Battaglia comunista only points "III. Tattica ed azione del Partito" and "IV. Azione del Partito in Italia e altri Paesi al 1952" were published in full, while points "I. Dottrina" and "II. Compito generale del Partito di classe" were only summarised. The full publication of these "Basic points for joining the Party" was made in Il programma comunista ten years later, in 1962.
(2) L’Appello per la riorganizzazione internazionale del movimento rivoluzionario marxista (Appeal for the International Reorganisation of the Revolutionary Marxist Movement), written in 1949 in French, was republished in Italian in the Il programma comunista no. 18 of 1957. The preface to this republication stated that «it served as a basis for the work to restore links between the groups of the Marxist communist left in various countries. But above all, it was useful within our small party in Italy to determine clearer programmatic orientations and a better organisational selection of elements that were misguided or hesitant on basic points. (…) It is clear that what is said in the ‘Appeal’ about Stalinism is all the more valid for that inferior by-product which is so-called post-Stalinism; in turn, the criticism of the small groups of the false left and their inevitable indecisive hesitancy has had a series of evident confirmations in this seven-year period, in Italy and abroad, and in the painful events of the Hungarian movement of 1956". This text was later included in a publication entitled The Party’s Programme, also available on our website www.pcint.org.
(3) On the specific issue of parliamentarianism, see in particular the party pamphlet entitled O preparazione rivoluzionaria, o preparazione elettorale (Either revolutionary preparation or electoral preparation), which contains articles and speeches by Lenin, Bordiga, Trotsky, Repossi, etc... See also the party pamphlet of 1976 entitled Le ragioni del nostro astensionismo (The reasons for our abstentionism), long out of print and which we republished in issues 92, 96 and 99 of Il comunista.
(4) From no. 16 to no. 24 of 1975 of Il programma comunista, the content of this newspaper manchette is as follows: "What distinguishes our party: the political continuity from Marx to Lenin, to the Leghorn 1921 programme, to the foundation of the Communist International and its defense against degeneration, to the struggle against the theory of socialism in one country and the Stalinist counterrevolution; to the rejection of the popular fronts and the partisan and national blocs; the hard work of the restoration of the doctrine and of the revolutionary organ, in contact with the working class, outside of personal and electoral politicking". In no. 8 of 1976, a text explaining "What distinguishes us" is published under the title: "Distingue il nostro partito", later separately reproduced in a pamphlet.
(5) Temporal continuity, temporal continuous (ital. filotempismo, filotempista), terms coined from scratch by our party to denote the continuity in time and space of authentic Marxist positions, outside of any supposed updating, revision, adaptation of programmatic and theoretical theses to supposedly new and unforeseen situations. "Sul filo del tempo" was the title of a series of articles written by Amadeo Bordiga between 1949 and 1953, published until the split in 1952 on Battaglia comunista and then in Il programma comunista, with which he intended to link the historical facts and programmatic and political theses of the Marxist movement between past and the present and to demonstrate the validity of the theoretical and political continuity of the Communist left; articles whose aim was above all to combat the opportunism of the past, today and tomorrow.
(6) We have dealt with the split that occurred in the Internationalist Communist Party in 1952 several times, especially in our work on the crisis of the party. For example, in "Bollettino interno no. 3" of February 1975, which we took up in our balance-sheet work carried out from 1982 onwards, and which was published in Il comunista no. 25–26, 27 and 28 of 1991; and in the article "La portée de la scissione de 1952 dans le Partito Comunista Internazionalista" (The significance of the 1952 split in the Partito Comunista Internazionalista) published in no. 93 (May 1993) of our journal Programme Communiste.
(7) On state industrialism, see the polemic between Bordiga and Damen on "state capitalism" in Russia during the years of the end of World War II and after. In this polemic, Bordiga contrasts Damen’s simple and superficial formulation of the Russian economy as already "state capitalism" with a more complex and dialectical formulation: In Russia, the economy is moving towards capitalism, and the state functions as an accelerator given the power it concentrates in its hands, while what is spreading in Russia, is industrialism, the very process that accelerates the spread of the capitalist economy by virtue of the existing capitalist potential that historically has not yet been fully developed. It is moving towards capitalism from two sides: the first – historically progressive – from a subsistence and pre-capitalist economy, especially in agriculture, towards capitalism; the second – historically reactionary – from the sectors of lower phase of socialism imposed by virtue of the revolutionary victory (free urban transport, train passes, etc.) towards a pure system based on commodities and money (everything is paid for with money). "State capitalism" is to be understood as meaning that all economic activities (in industry, agriculture, services, i.e., both production and distribution) are so developed that they can be centralized in the hands of the state and directed by it (as in fascism); this does not mean that private enterprise no longer exists, but that the state (the ultimate expression of the defense of the general interests of capitalism, not the sum of the interests of individual capitalists), is able to directly control the economy of the country even in the function as an entrepreneur.
(8) On the "Frazione all’estero" see the report given at the general party meeting of November 1980 and published in the first series of Il comunista in no. 7, 8, 9 and 10 in 1984 as "Storia della Frazione comunista all’estero" and in Programme Communiste no. 97 and 98.
(9) To the year 1926 was devoted a special study of the Party, the result of which was fourth issue of the Quaderni del Programma Comunista published in April 1980, entitled "La crisi del 1926 nel partito e nell’Internazionale" (The 1926 Crisis in the Party and the International), which is still available.
(10) Amadeo Bordiga, in his famous interview of 1970, shortly before his death, gave a written answer to one of the questions put to him by his interviewers: "In contrast to the theories developed by Gramsci and the centrists of the Italian party, we contested that fascism could be explained as a conflict between the agrarian, landowning bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie profiting in the field of real estate and the newer industrial and commercial bourgeoisie. The agrarian bourgeoisie can undoubtedly be identified with Italian right-wing movements such as the Catholics or the clerical political centre, while the industrial bourgeoisie can be considered closer to the parties of the political left, which we have come to call secular. The fascist movement was certainly not oriented against either of these two polarities, but aimed to prevent the revival of the revolutionary proletariat through the struggle for the preservation of all social forms of private economy. Many years ago we declared without any hesitation that the arch-enemy and the greatest danger would not be fascism, or even worse the person of Mussolini, but that the greatest evil would be the "anti-fascism" which fascism itself, with its infamies and inquities, provokes; an "anti-fascism" which would give the historical existence of a toxic monster in the form of a broad bloc comprising all shades of capitalist exploitation and its beneficiaries, from the influential members of the wealthy ruling class, all the way down to the ridiculous ranks of the semi-bourgeoisie, intellectuals and ordinary people", see "Comunismo e fascismo", edizioni Quaderni Internazionalisti, Torino 1994, pp. 320.
(11) See "Tesi supplementari sul compito storico, l’azione e la struttura del partito comunista mondiale" (Supplementary Theses on the Historical Task, Action and Structure of the World Communist Party), April 1966. These theses are also known as the "Tesi di Milano" (Milan Theses) because they were presented at the general party meeting held in Milan on April 2–3 of the same year; they were published in Il programma comunista No. 7 of 1966. Later collected and published in a volume entitled "In difesa della continuità del programma comunista", vol. 2 in the series "I testi del partito comunista internazionale", Florence, June 1970. The quotation is from point 5, page 184.
(12) Cf. "Tracciato d’impostazione" (Elements of Marxist Orientation), published in No. 1 of July 1946 of Prometeo, the theoretical journal of the Partito comunista internazionale, later included in a small volume published by the Party in November 1974 as No. 1 in the series "I testi del Partito comunista internazionale". The quotation is found on pp. 17–18 of the latter publication.
(13) Cf. the text "Forza violenza dittatura nella lotta di classe" (Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle), originally published in five instalments in the magazine Prometeo between 1946 and 1948. The quotation is from the English translation of the text, from its third part in Communist Program, No. 3, 1977.
(14) Ibid.
(15) Ibid.
(16) On the subject of democracy and fascism, see also "Rapporto Bordiga sul Fascsismo" (Bordiga Report on Fascism) at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922, in Il comunista, no. 42 (1994); A. Bordiga’s article of 1921 entitled "Che cosa è il fascismo" (What is Fascism) in Il comunista, nos. 43–44 (1995); the report of the party’s general meeting of 1994 entitled "Democrazia e fascismo: quale lotta per il proletariato?" (Democracy and fascism: what fight for the proletariat?) published in Il comunista, no. 48, 49–50, 56; we also recommend reading some of the texts such as "Communisme et fascisme" (Communism and fascism), published by the party in 1970 and republished in 2002 containing a series of articles by A. Bordiga from 1921–1923, the Bordiga’ s report on fascism at the 1922 and 1924 CI congresses, and Gramsci’s 1924 report to the PCI Central Committee; "Relazione del partito comunista d’Italia al IV congresso dell’IC , novembre 1922", Edizioni Iskra, 1976, and a small volume "Comunismo e fascismo" containing a number of texts by the Communist Left on fascism from 1921-1926, published by the Quaderni internazionalisti, Turin, 1994.
(17) See "Party and Class Action" (Partito e azione di classe), A. Bordiga, originally in Rassegna Comunista vol. I, No. 4, 31 May 1921; published in English in Communist Program, No. 2, 1976; the quotation is on p. 33.
(18) See the program of the International Communist Party in any issue of our papers.
(19) See the report of the Rome meeting of the Party of April 1, 1951, published in "Bolletino interno", No. 1, September 10, 1951, which contained two texts: "Il rovesciamento della prassi nella teoria marxista" (The Reversal of Praxis in Marxist Theory) and "Revolutionary Party and Economical Action" (Partito rivoluzionario e azione economica). The latter was published together with "The Programme of the Party", "On the Track of the Great Marxist Tradition", "For the Restoration of the Revolutionary Marxist Theory", "Reconstruction of the Communist Party on a Worldwide Scale" and "Appeal for the International Reorganisation of the Revolutionary Marxist Movement" in the Party’s English-language publication "The Party’s Programme"; the publication is available on our website www.pcint.org.
(20) See the article in the "Sul filo del tempo" series entitled "Gracidamento della prassi" (The Croaking about Praxis), published in No. 11 of Il programma comunista of 1953, then included with other "Sul filo del tempo" articles and other material in the pamphlet "Classe, partito, Stato nella teoria marxista" (Class, Party, State in Marxist Theory), published by the Party in 1972, from which the quotation is taken (pp. 45-46).
(21) See other article in the series "Sul filo del tempo" compiled in the booklet "Classe, partito, stato nella teoria marxista" (Class, party, state in Marxist theory); the quotation is from the article "Danza di fantocci: dalla coscienza alla cultura" (Dance of Puppets: From Consciousness to Culture), originally published in Il programma comunista, No. 12 of 1953; the quotation is from page 55 of that booklet.
(22) See "Gracidamento della prassi" (The Croaking about Praxis); quoted from the booklet "Classe, partito, stato nella teoria marxista", from p. 54.
(23) The above mentioned communiqué was published in Il comunista of 19 March 1922 and later became part of the article "Il senso della nostra azione ‘esterna’/ " (The meaning of our ‘external’ action) published in Il programma comunista, Nos. 2 and 3 of 1976.
(24) The text of the new version of our complementary commentary alongside the title of the party press has been published since the first issue of Il programma comunista of 1976.
(25) See Lenin, State and Revolutio, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 25, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p. 427–428.
(26) Cf. the text "The Democratic Principle", by A. Bordiga, originally published in Rassegna Comunista, n. 18, 28 February 1922, later published in a set in volume 4 entitled "Partito e classe" of the series "I testi del partito comunista internazionale"; the quotations are from Communist Program, n. 7, 1981, page 58.
(27) Cf. "Theses Project Presented by the Left to the Third Congress of the Communist Party of Italy – Lyon Theses", 1926, in Communist Program, n. 9, February 2022, point 5 (Discipline and Fractions) of the second chapter "International Questions", p. 35–36.
(28) Cf. the "Theses on the Historical Task, Action and Structure of the World Communist Party, according to the positions that have been the historical patrimony of the Communist Left for over half a century", also called "Theses of Naples", delivered at the General Meeting of the Party in Naples on 17–18 July 1965, in Communist Program n.10, September 2024.
(29) Cf. the text "Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle" by Amadeo Bordiga, originally published in the review Prometeo in 1946–1948, then in English in the party press Communist Program, n. 1, 3–5, 1975, 1977–1979; the passages quoted are on p. 49 from n. 5 of Communist Program.
(30) The texts from which we have taken some passages are as follows: "Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle", "Revolutionary Party and Economical Action", "Considerations on the Party’s Organic Activity When the General Situation is Historically Unfavorable", all already quoted in this article.
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