Elements of Marxist Orientation
(«communist program»; Nr. 11; April 2026)
Introduction
In order for a new historical cycle of the proletarian movement to emerge from the abyss of the counter-revolution, it must be characterized by the vigorous efforts of even a small communist vanguard to retie the thread joining theory, principles and program wherever the counter-revolution has severed it. This must happen before material pressures compel the working-class movement to align itself on a single battlefront.
This point can be illustrated historically. Rather than in the victory achieved in the course of the crisis unleashed in St. Petersburg by the effects of the imperialist war, the real, lasting significance of the April Theses lies in the complete restoration of the revolutionary, anti-democratic, anti-pacifist, authoritarian principles of Marxism which Lenin accomplished not on the basis of an inspired “revelation” or “discovery”, but through the confirmations and merciless lessons of the counter-revolution had given to the theory. When he admonished the party to put on a “clean shirt”, Lenin was not urging the party to adapt itself to the times, but exhorting it to return to its origins and resume the fight the Bolsheviks had relinquished when they succumbed to the temptation of an almost Menshevik adaptation to the fact of the February Revolution. Also on the basis of the re-assertion of the revolutionary essence of Marxist theory, during the world war Lenin had waged his gigantic solitary fight under the slogan “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war” against both overt social-chauvinism and, especially, a denatured, pale conception of the party’s principal tasks, i.e., the centrist conception. This theoretical and practical victory led to the successful “storming of heaven” by the Russian proletariat in October – even though this success later turned out not to be durable as it slipped into the swamp of opportunism and counter-revolution - and, transcending all contingent temporal and spatial problems, the rallying of the world proletariat to the instrument of its invariant doctrine.
Similarly, The State and Revolution restored all the elements of Marxist theory and swept away the distortions and attenuations that had accumulated during the so-called peaceful period of capitalism, which had brought with it a gradual and almost imperceptible adaptation of the proletariat to the laws of the capitalist system and its ideological justifications. On the basis of an empirical distillation of colossal struggles between classes and an understanding of their world historical significance, Marxists discern an immutable, ineluctable necessity behind the apparently chaotic ebb and flow of immediate, phenomenal forms. If this were not the case, then the revolutionary theory without which there can be no revolutionary action would be completely open to falsification. This historical necessity manifests itself in the unbroken thread of a general theory of the historical trajectory, the final goal and obligatory struggle the last class in history must wage to emancipate itself and humanity, as well as the instruments it must wield to overthrow the last strongholds of bourgeois society. This necessity thus appears in the invariant edifice of principles, goals, programmatic demands and central tactical positions the party must hold to in the course of the class struggle and implement in the heat of battle without attempting to modernize or revise theory. To the extent the theory is embodied in the political party, the party assumes its historical character as the organ and instrument of the class. The historical party fights an unrelenting battle to become the formal party. Without this fight the party can never materialize.
During and after the second imperialist war the Communist Left worked to reconstitute the revolutionary proletarian world party – which cannot be arbitrarily “created”, but must be reconstituted with the cornerstones of the fully restored theory – on the basis of these doctrinal points. It would have been impossible to rebuild the party after its most terrible defeat had the brutal rupture of its doctrinal, organizational and tactical structure, the destruction of the class and its decay into a molecular aggregate, remained complicated by a confused groping about in search of an unknown direction or an unfamiliar reference point.
The most serious aspect of the worst counter-revolution in the history of the modern class struggle – the Stalinist counter-revolution – is the theoretical and programmatic disarming of the propertyless class, its total collapse into impotence in organizational and practical terms. This signifies its submission to both the physical yoke of the democratic dictatorship of capital and the only apparently immaterial weight of ideologies that constitute the indispensable support and complement of this dictatorship, a submission that is demonstrated by the fact that the proletariat as a whole sees no other way out of its enslavement than to demand more democracy, or, what amounts to the same thing, an “other” democracy. Under such conditions the reconstitution of the proletarian world party is only possible when the doctrine, principles and program of orthodox Marxism have been re-established in their totality. This requires a comprehensive, unswerving application of the dialectical materialist conception of history in an analysis of the most recent historical phase the capitalist economy and the class rule of the bourgeoisie are traversing (i.e., imperialism, which Lenin called the “highest phase of capitalism”), in order to deduce from this investigation (precisely because it is no scholastic exercise, but political work in the context of the revolutionary party) the guidelines for action, the strategical and tactical apparatus that are indispensable to the only class capable of eradicating imperialism. It can only accomplish this task when it fights for itself, for its unmistakable historical interests with the weapons it can only receive from its party, from its invariant program. And like its program, these weapons are anti-democratic, revolutionary and dictatorial.
The text published below appeared in 1946 under the name : Tracciato d’Impostazione. It was originally published in Italian in our theoretical organ at the time, Prometeo, with a view to the reconstitution of the world communist party. This can only be a single party, unified in the homogeneity of its doctrine, objectives, principles, program and tactics. Precisely for this reason the party must openly proclaim and defend Marxist theory with all its strength.
The Traciatto presents a comprehensive restoration of the Marxist conception of the succession of historical modes of production and the corresponding forms of social organization, including the forms that determine the transition from one form to the next, up to the parabolic course of the capitalist mode of production through its explosive rise to its reformist reinforcement and on to its overthrow in the catastrophe of war between states and between classes.
It is based on the essential conclusions that constitute some of the characteristic features that differentiate our party from all the groups that fallaciously lay claim to Marxism. These characteristic positions may be summarized as follows:
a) The phase opened by the second world war is nothing other than the continuation of the historical phase Lenin referred to as imperialism and Marx, especially in the third volume of Capital (Engels in Anti-Duhring), had already fore seen in its essentials.
b) In this phase, after the ruling class had defeated and crushed the oppressed in the test of strength following the First World War, and after it had dragged the working class defenseless into the second world butchery, the bourgeoisie has been striving for increasingly centralized and totalitarian forms of economic, social, ideological and political organization. In relation to the fact of centralization, the continued existence of a superstructure of democratic voting and decision-making mechanisms can only serve to delude the proletariat with the illusion that it can advance its solutions to the social questions through a peaceful exercise of universal suffrage.
The fascist apparatus, which the bourgeois class needed to prevent the re-emergence of the communist movement after it had been suppressed by the blows of democracy and, especially, social-democracy, was only dissolved in order to preserve and strengthen the basic structures of capitalism and its political, financial, military and police control over the entire globe.
c) Our assertion that the world war resulted in a defeat of the fascists but a victory for fascism concurs with our analysis of “totalitarism”, which is characteristic of the present phase and is rooted in the irreversible process of capitalist concentration. In reality, fascism is capitalism’s ultimate attempt to limit and control itself in order to overcome the contradictory, incurable tendencies of economic phenomena through centralized discipline, and in order to oppose the inflammatory class forces threatening it from the social subsoil with its own unified political and military formation to this end the bourgeoisie must subdue its original psychology and ideology of unlimited autonomy and individualism and create a collective class consciousness for itself.
d) The third phase of the bourgeois economic and political cycle, which, even when superficially democratic, is essentially fascist, by no means constitutes a reversion to a reactionary, semi-feudal past; it is, on the contrary, the natural, unavoidable denouement of capitalism as a consequence of the absence of a victorious proletarian offensive in several countries: it is the critical point in capitalist development, not its death throes.
e) It is impossible to turn back from these strict forms of control over elemental, centrifugal forces, the continual reappearance of which can be postponed but not prevented by capitalism. It is therefore illusory to pursue the dream of a restoration of democracy, and it is anti-historical and reactionary to try to turn the clock back. Once it has emerged from its lethargy to resume and win the life and death struggle, the working class must not combat the capitalism that has evolved in this phase with the aim of defending the immortal principles of human and civil rights of 1789 (even when these are embellished with social reforms and a purported progressive character), but in order to conquer power by force, institute the dictatorship led by its world communist party and utilize the red terror in the unavoidable civil war and no less difficult and painstaking task of transforming the economy.
This absolutely anti-democratic, authoritarian demand can be found explicitly formulated in the Manifesto of 1848, and today more than ever it must be the single, immutable slogan of the world Marxist revolutionary party. The revolutionary movement has nothing to hide, just as the class it represents has nothing to lose but its chains.
f) These lessons of the present counter-revolution confirm and reinforce the tactical theses the Italian Communist Left defended during its long fight inside the International. These theses are today of principled character and cannot be separated from the program. In the nerve centers of the imperialist metropolises the proletariat must necessarily forge ahead alone, expose the shameful populist, democratic, legalistic and national temptations, and forever exclude the perspective of even a temporary collaboration with other classes or semi-classes. Also excluded, definitively, is any tactical application, for revolutionary purposes, of the parliamentary and electoral mechanism; the political united front; any common political action; the use of transitional slogans such as “workers’ government” or “workers’ and peasants’ government” (which were put forward as synonyms or substitutes for the proletarian dictatorship led by the party); any support, even “critical” or from outside, for alleged left regimes put forward as “better” alternatives to so-called center or right governments; any unconditional or – worse yet – conditional participation in resistance movements, either on a political or, in the perspective of a third world war, military basis.
The renunciation of the maneuvers the International, cramped by a rapidly deteriorating world revolutionary situation, believed it could implement, to the point that it lost sight of both appropriate means and the goals themselves, is a striking confirmation of the fact there is an indissoluble connection between tactics and principles, and that all tactical slogans must be in agreement with the final aim in order to work toward it and contribute to their realization, thereby strengthening rather than denaturing the party. The United Front led irresistibly first to the Popular Front, and then to the National Liberation Front. The party simultaneously fell from the heights of revolutionary, authoritarian, dictatorial Marxism back down into the desolate swamp of a pre-Marxist, petty-bourgeois democratism.
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The re-emerging world communist party must therefore take up the challenge of totalitarian capitalism, whether it is dressed in national colors or fascist brown. The equivalent anti-communist temptation of an American or Russian pax socialis – in the form of a western Jesuit, corporatist prosperity-cum-welfare-state or of a Russian “progressive” democracy supposedly defending the peoples’s or national interest – must be opposed by a tenacious revolutionary preparation with the single perspective and objective of the conquest of political power and the exercise of the proletarian dictatorship under the banner of class struggle and communism. Either the working class will find the thread of the Manifesto and tie the knot of “revolution in permanence” after years of struggle, or it will once again be crushed.
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Elements of Marxist Orientation
Marxism is not a choice between different opinions
For obvious reasons, this text does not prove what it asserts. Its object is to establish the principles of the revolutionary Marxist movement as clearly as possible. It only sets out the fundamental points in order to avoid any deliberate or inadvertent confusion or ambiguity.
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Before the reader can be convinced, it is necessary to explain clearly the position one is putting forward. Persuasion, propaganda and proselytism follow afterward. In our conception, opinions are not the product of the work of prophets, apostles or thinkers whose brains generate new truths to attract growing numbers of followers.
The process is completely different. It is the impersonal work of a social vanguard that concentrates and expounds the theoretical positions to which their common living conditions lead the individuals long before they become aware of them. The method is thus anti-scholastic, anti-cultural and anti-illuminist. In the current theoretical void, which is a reflection of practical disorganization, it should be no surprise or shock if the exposition of our positions at first repel rather than attracts followers.
In what sense Marxists connect with a historical tradition
Every political movement that presents its theses lays claim to historical precedents and traditions remote or recent, whether of recent or distant past, whether national or international.
The movement of which this journal is the theoretical organ also claims to have clearly defined origins. But unlike other movements, its point of departure is not a revelation of divine origin, and it does not recognize the authority of immutable texts, nor does it admit juridical rules as points of reference for the study of each question, asserting in some way that they might be innate or immanent in the thought or nature of all humans.
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This orientation may be called Marxism, socialism, communism or the political movement of the working class. Unfortunately, all these terms have been subjected to misuse. In 1917 Lenin considered that changing the name of the Party and returning to the term “communist” used in the 1848 Manifesto was a fundamental issue.
Today, the enormous abuse to which the name communist is subjected by parties that are outside any revolutionary or class tradition creates even greater confusion: movements that openly defend bourgeois institutions still dare to call themselves parties of the proletariat; the term Marxist is used to designate the most absurd conglomerations of parties, including even Spanish anti-Francoism.
The historical line we claim is as follows: the Communist Manifesto of 1848 (precise title: Manifesto of the Communist Party, without mention of nationality); the fundamental texts of Marx and Engels; the classic restoration of revolutionary Marxism against all opportunist revisionists in conjunction with the revolutionary victory in Russia and the fundamental Leninist texts; the founding declarations of the Moscow International at the first and second congresses; the positions defended by the Left in the following congresses from 1922 on.
In Italy, the historical line is connected to the left of the Socialist Party during the 1914-1918 war, the formation of the Communist Party of Italy at Livorno in January 1921, its Rome congress in 1922, the manifestations of its left current, which led the party until the Lyon congress in 1926, and survived in exile outside the party and the Komintern.
This line does not correspond to that of the Trotskyist movement of the 4th International. Trotsky reacted late (and Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and other Russian groups in the Bolshevik tradition even later) to the erroneous tactic applied until 1924, and finally recognized that the deviation became exacerbated and destroyed the fundamental political principles of the movement. Today’s Trotskyists claim to have restored these principles, but they have not clearly rejected the dissolving elements of the “maneuvrist” tactics that they incorrectly define as Bolshevik and Leninist.
Basis of the Marxist dialectical method
All research must be based upon a consideration of the overall historical process up to the present and an objective examination of current social phenomena. This method is claimed by many, but its application most often goes astray. The analysis is based upon an examination of the material means by which human groups satisfy their needs, i.e., the technology of production, and, in conjunction with its evolution, economic relationships. Through the various epochs, these factors determine the superstructure comprising legal, political or military institutions and ruling ideologies.
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This method is defined by the expressions of historical materialism, dialectical materialism, economic determinism, scientific socialism, critical communism.
It is essential always to employ positive results supported by facts to expound and explain human phenomena, and not to postulate the intervention of myths or divinities, or principles of natural rights or “ethics” such as Justice, Equality, Fraternity and other abstractions devoid of meaning. It is even more important not to yield to the pressure of the ruling ideology by invoking these illusory postulates or others like them without noticing or admitting it, or by appealing to them precisely at the most crucial moments and in decisive conclusions.
The dialectical method is the only tant overcomes the current contradiction between rigorous theoretical continuity and cohesiveness, on the one hand, and the ability to critically confrot old conclusions based on formal terms and rules. Acceptance of the method is not a matter of faith or an impassioned position of a school or party.
The contradiction between the productive forces and social forms
The productive forces, comprising primarily of human beings fit for production, their combinations and the tools and mechanical means they employ, operate within the framework of forms of production. By forms we understand the organization and relations of dependence within which productive and social activity evolves. Within these forms are contained all the established hierarchies (familial, military, theocratic, political), the state and all its bodies, the law and the courts that apply it, the economic and legal rules and regulations that resist transgression.
A society is of a given kind as long as the productive forces are maintained within their productive forms. At a certain juncture in history, this equilibrium tends to be broken. Various factors, including technological progress, population growth, expanded communications, etc., increase the productive forces. These then enter into conflict with the traditional forms and tend to break out of them; when they succeed, a revolution occurs. The community then organizes itself according to new economic, social and legal relations, and new forms replace the old ones.
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The dialectical method discovers, applies and verifies its solutions on the scale of major collective phenomena in a scientific, experimental manner (the method the thinkers of the bourgeois epoch applied to the natural world in a struggle that was the reflection of the revolutionary social struggle of their class against the theocratic and absolutist regimes, but which they were unable to extend to the social domain). From the results thereby obten, it deduces solutions to problems of individual behavior, in contrast to the method employed by all opposed religious, legal, philosophical or economic schools, which construct norms for collective behavior on the inconsistent basis of the myth of the Individual, presented either as an individual and immortal soul, or as a juridical and civil subject, or as the immutable monad of economic praxis, etc. But today science has gone beyond the fertile hypotheses regarding indivisible material individuals, i.e., atoms; these are now defined as rich complexes and rather than reduce them to incorruptible monads, they are regarded as meeting points of lines of force radiating from an external energy field. It could even be said that the cosmos is not a function of its units, but that each unit is a function of the cosmos.
Anyone who beleive in the individual and speakc of personality, dignity, freedom, and the responsibility of Man or Citizen have nothing to do with Marxist thought. Men are not set in motion by opinions, beliefs, or any phenomena of so-called thought that might inspire their will and action. They are compelled to act by their needs, which assume the form of interests when the same material impulses motivate whole groups at the same time. They are confronted with the limitations that the social environment and structure raise against the satisfaction of their needs. And they react individually and collectively in a direction which, on average, is necessarily determined before the action of stimuli and reactions can give rise in their brains to what are called feelings, thoughts or judgments.
This phenomenon is naturally very complex, and in certain cases may run against the general rule, which nonetheless remains intact.
In any case, anyone who invokes individual consciousness, moral principles, the opinions and decisions of individuals or citizens as the motive causes in the interplay of social and historical development has no right to call himself a Marxist.
Class, class struggle, party
The conflict between the productive forces and social forms manifests itself as a struggle between classes with opposed economic interests: in its final phases, this struggle becomes an armed struggle for the conquest of political power.
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For Marxism, the class is not a cold statistical data, but an acting organic force. It manifests itself when the mere concordance of economic conditions and interests expands into a common action and struggle.
The movement is consequently guided by vanguard groups and bodies whose modern, and evolved form is the political class party. The collectivity, whose action culminates in the action of a party, acts in history with an effectiveness and a real dynamic that cannot be achieved at the limited scale of the individual.
The party is able to arrive to a theoretical consciousness of the development of events and thus has an influence on their outcome, in the direction determined by the productive forces and their relations.
Conformism, reformism, antiformism
Despite the difficulty and complexity of the issue, one cannot expound principles and guidelines without resorting to simplifying schemata. We therefore distinguish three types of political movement that enab le a characterization of all of them.
Movements that fight to preserve in their entirety the forms and institutions in place, preventing any transformation and basing themselves on immutable principles, whether religious, philosophical or juridical, are conformist.
Movements which, not desiring a sudden and violent overthrow of traditional institutions, take note of the pressure exerted by the productive forces and advocate gradual and partial modifications to the existing order, are reformist.
Movements that defend and put into practice the assault on old forms, and, even before being able to theorize the features of the new regime, strive to smash the old one, bringing about the irresistible birth of new forms, are revolutionary (we shall provisionally adopt the term antiformist).
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Every schematism contains the danger of errors. One might ask whether the Marxist dialectic could also lead to constructing a general, artificial model of historical events by reducing their entire development to a series of ruling classes that are born revolutionary, become reformist and end up conservative. The advent of a classless society through the revolutionary victory of the proletarian class suggests an end to this development, which Marx called the end of the “prehistory of humanity”.
But this conclusion might appear to be another metaphysical construction, like that of the fallacious ideologies of the past. As Marx already showed, Hegel reduced his dialectical system to an absolute construction, thereby falling unconsciously into the metaphysics he had transcended in the destructive part of his critique, which was a philosophical reflection of the bourgeois revolutionary struggle.
As the culmination of the classical philosophy of German idealism and bourgeois thought, Hegel thus asserted the absurd thesis that the history of action and thought must finally be crystallized in a perfect system, in the conquest of the Absolute. The Marxist dialectic eliminates such a static conclusion.
In his classic exposition of scientific socialism (as a theory opposed to Utopianism, which entrusted the renewal of society to propaganda for the adoption of a better social project proposed by an author or a sect), Engels might seem to admit a general rule or law of historical motion when he uses expressions such as “the forward march”, “the world advances”.
These vigorous propaganda formulae should not lead one to believe that a recipe has been discovered in which it is possible to encompass the infinite world of possible evolutions of human society, i.e., a recipe that would be the equivalent of the commonplace bourgeois abstractions of evolution, civilization, progress, etc.
The great advantage of the dialectical mode of research is itself also a revolutionary one: it appears in the relentless destruction of the innumerable theoretical systems which clothe the rule of successive privileged classes. We must replace this cemetery of broken idols not with a new myth, a new creed, or a new word, but with a realistic expression of actual conditions and the optimum development that can be predicted for them.
For example, the correct Marxist formulation is not “one day the proletariat will seize political power, destroy the capitalist social system and build the communist economy”, but, inversely, “only by organizing itself as a class, and consequently as a political party, and by erecting its armed dictatorship will the proletariat be able to destroy the capitalist power and economy and make possible a non-capitalist and non-mercantile economy”. From the scientific point of view, we cannot exclude a different fate for capitalist society, such as a return to barbarism, a world catastrophe due to modern weapons leading, for example, to a pathological degeneration of the species (a forewarning is offered by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims who were blinded or condemned to a radioactive disintegration of their tissue) or other forms that cannot be predicted today.
Interpretation of the features of the contemporary historical period Dialectical criteria for evaluating past and present social institutions and solutions
In this period of convulsions the revolutionary communist movement must be characterized not only by the theoretical destruction of all conformism and reformism in the modern world, but also by the practical and, generally speaking, tactical position that there is no longer any common path with any conformist or reformist movement even in limited sectors or for limited periods. It must be founded on the irrevocable historical fact that bourgeois capitalism has definitively exhausted its antiformist momentum and has no further general historical function in destroying precapitalist forms of resistance or threats of precapitalist restoration.
This is not to deny that as long as the powerful forces of capitalist growth, which accelerated the transformation of the world to an unprecedented tempo, continued to develop under such conditions the proletarian class movement could and had to dialectically condemn it from the point of view of doctrine while supporting it in action.
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This is precisely one of the essential differences between the metaphysical method and the dialectical method. A given type of social and political institution and organization is not good or bad in itself, nor is it to be accepted or rejected after an examination of its characteristics on the basis of general rules or principles.
According to the dialectical interpretation of history, each institution has had, in turn, at first a revolutionary, then a progressive and finally a conservative role and effect. For each aspect of the problem, it is thus necessary to place the productive forces and social factors in the proper place in order to deduce the meaning of the political conflict that expresses their relationship...
It is metaphysical to pronounce oneself authoritarian or libertarian, royalist or republican, aristocratic or democratic on principle, and in polemics to refer to rules situated outside the historical context. In the first systematic attempt at a political science, Plato already surpassed the mystical absolutism of principles, and Aristotle followed him by distinguishing good and bad forms within the three types of power: power of an individual, of the few, of many – i.e., monarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, democracy and demagogy.
Modern analysis, especially since Marx, goes much deeper into the problem.
In the present historical phase almost all political propaganda forms utilize the worst traditional arguments culled from all sorts of religious, juridical and philosophical superstitions.
This chaos of ideas, a reflection of the chaos of interests of a decomposing society, must be opposed with a dialectical analysis of the current relationship of real forces.
To introduce this analysis, it is necessary to undertake an analogous evaluation concerning the well-known relationships of earlier historical epochs.
Dialectical evaluation of historical forms :
• Economic example : market economy
In general there is no sense in declaring oneself a partisan of a community or private, liberal or monopolistic, individual or collective economy, and to praise the merits of each system for the common good welfare: doing so would lead to a utopia that is the diametrical opposite of the Marxist dialectic.
The classic example of Engels’ “negation of the negation” is well known as a definition of communism. The first forms of human production were communist, and private property, a much more complex and efficient system, appeared later. Human society then returns to communism, but this modern communism could not be realized if primitive communism had not been transcended, defeated and destroyed by the system of private property. Marxists consider this initial transformation to be an advantage. What is said of communism can also be applied to all other economic forms, such as slavery, serfdom, manufacturing, industrial and monopolist capitalism, etc.
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The market economy, in which objects aimed at satisfying human needs cease, with the dissolution of barbarism, to be directly acquired and consumed by the primitive producer and become objects of exchange, first through barter, then by means of a monetary equivalent, represented a great social revolution.
It made possible the assignment of various individuals to different productive functions, expanding and differentiating the features of social life enormously. These changes can be acknowledged even though we state that after a series of types of economic organization based upon the monetary principle, we are today tending toward a non-market economy. In other words, it is possible to simultaneously recognize the revolutionary character of the market economy and reject as currently conformist and reactionary the thesis that production would be impossible in the absence of the monetary exchange of commodities.
The abolition of the market economy can be defended today - and only today - because of the development of associated labor and the concentration of the productive forces. By bringing about this concentration and development, capitalism, the last of the market economies, makes it possible to burst the limits within which all use values circulate as commodities and human labor itself is treated as a commodity.
A century before this stage, a critique of the market system based upon general philosophical, juridical or moral arguments would have been pure madness.
• Social example : the family
The various types of social aggregate that have appeared in history and through which collective life has been differentiated from primitive individualism, traversing an immense cycle in which the relationships within which the individual lives and acts have become increasingly complex cannot, taken individually, be judged favorable or unfavorable. They must be considered in relation to the historical development which has assigned them one role or another in different transformations and revolutions.
Each such institution emerges as a revolutionary conquest, develops and is reformed through long historical cycles, and finally becomes a reactionary and conformist obstacle.
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The institution of the family appears as the first social form once, in the human species, the bond between parents and their offspring is extended much longer than is physiologically necessary. The first form of authority thus arises, exercised by the mother, then by the father, over their descendants, even though these may be physically developed and strong. This is nonetheless a revolutionary step, given that the first possibility of an organized collective existence appears and the basis is laid for a development that will result in the first form of organized society and state.
As social life becomes increasingly complex in further phases of this development, the authority of one person over another extends far beyond the boundaries of kinship and consanguinity. The new, broader social aggregate contains and disciplines the institution of the family, as is the case in the first cities, states and aristocratic regimes, and then in the bourgeois regime, though all are based upon the fetish of inheritance.
When the necessity of an economy that goes beyond the interplay of individual interests appears, the institution of the family, with its narrow limits, becomes an obstacle and a reactionary element in society.
Without denying the historical function of the family, modern communists, noting that the capitalist system has already deformed and desecrated this “holy” institution, openly combat it and intend to replace it.
• Political example : monarchy and republic
Various state forms, such as monarchy and republic, have followed in a complex succession throughout history, each representing, in different historical situations, either revolutionary, progressive or conservative energies. In general it can be admitted that, before disappearing, capitalism will succeed in liquidating the now obsolete dynastic regimes, but in this regard it is necessary not to proceed via absolute judgments situated outside space and time.
The first monarchies appeared as the political expression of the division of material tasks: certain elements of the primitive family or tribal aggregate undertook defense or pillage by arms against other groups or peoples; others devoted themselves to hunting, fishing, agricultural work or nascent crafts. The first warriors and kings thus based the principle of power on major risks. Here again, we see the emergence of more developed and complex social forms that were previously impossible, thus representing the path toward a revolution in social relations.
In subsequent epochs, the institution of monarchy enabled the establishment and development of vast national state organizations against satraps’ and small nobility’s federalism, and played an innovative and reforming role. Dante was the great monarchist reformer of the early Modern Times.
More recently, and in many countries, monarchy, but no less so republic, has taken the form of the strictest class power of the bourgeoisie.
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There may have been republican movements and parties that were revolutionary, others that were reformist, and others that were openly conservative.
To give some accessible, simplified examples: Brutus, “who kicked out Tarquinius”, was a revolutionary; the Gracchi, who tried to give the aristocratic republic a content in conformity with the interests of the plebs, were reformists; traditional republicans like Cato and Cicero, who fought against the great historical revolution represented by the expansion of the Roman empire and its juridical and social forms throughout the ancient world, were conformists and reactionaries. The question is completely distorted when one has recourse to commonplaces about Caesarism and tyranny or, conversely, to the principles of republican liberty and other rhetorical-literary themes.
Among more modern examples, the three French republics of 1793, 1848 and 1871 were respectively antiformist, reformist and conformist.
• Ideological example : the Christian religion
Crises occurring in economic forms are reflected not only in political and social institutions, but also in religious beliefs and philosophical opinions.
Juridical, confessional or philosophical positions must be considered in relation to historical situations and social crises. Each appears in turn as a revolutionary, progressive and conformist banner.
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The movement that bears the name of Christ was at first antiformist and revolutionary.
The assertion that men possess a soul of divine origin and endowed with immortality, no matter what the individual’s social or caste position, is equivalent to a revolutionary revolt against the oppressive slavery of the ancient Orient. As long as the law admitted that a human being may be a commodity, the object of transactions much like an animal, the equality of believers was a battle-cry that relentlessly tested the resistance of the theocratic organization of judges, aristocrats and the military of the states of antiquity.
After a long historical period and the abolition of slavery, Christianity became an official religion and a pillar of the state. It ran its reformist cycle in Europe of the modern era by fighting against the excessive tie between the church and the most privileged and oppressive social strata.
Today there can be no more conformist ideology than Christianity which, by the time of the French revolution, had become, in organization and doctrine, the most powerful weapon of the resistance of the old regimes.
The powerful network of the church and religious persuasion are nowadays reconciled and in full agreement with the capitalist regime and are used as a fundamental element of defense against the threat of the proletarian revolution.
It has long been established that in modern social relationships, each private individual represents an economic enterprise theoretically reducible to commercial assets and liabilities. The superstition that encloses each individual within the circle of the moral balance sheet of his actions and within the illusion of a life beyond the tomb determined by this reckoning is only the reflection in the minds of men of the very character of present bourgeois society based on private economy.
It is therefore impossible to wage the struggle to burst the limits of an economy of private enterprises and individual balance sheets without openly adopting an anti-religious and anti-Christian position.
The capitalist cycle :
• Revolutionary phase
In the main countries the modern bourgeoisie has already exhibited three characteristic historical phases.
The bourgeoisie appeared as an openly revolutionary class and waged an armed struggle to break the chains with which feudal and clerical absolutism bound the productive forces of the peasants to the land and the artisans to mediaeval corporatism.
The need to be freed from these chains coincided with the development of the productive forces which, with the resources of modern technology, tended to concentrate the workers in large masses.
To allow these productive forces free development, the traditional regimes had to be overthrown by force. The bourgeois class both waged an insurrectional struggle and, after its first victory, instituted an iron dictatorship to prevent monarchs, feudal lords and ecclesiastical dignitaries to counter-attack.
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The bourgeois class appeared in history as an antiformist force, and its imposing power helped it to break all material and ideological obstacles. Its thinkers overthrew the ancient canons and old beliefs in the most radical fashion.
They replaced the theories of divine authority and divine right with popular sovereignty, political equality and liberty, and proclaimed the necessity of representative institutions, claiming that through them power would be the expression of a freely exercised popular will.
The liberal, democratic principle appears as clearly revolutionary and antiformist in this phase, especially since it was not applied through peaceful and legalitarian means, but through revolutionary violence and terror, and since the victorious class victorious class defends it against reactionary restorations through dictatorship.
• Evolutionist and democratic phase
In its second phase, with the capitalist system now stabilized, the bourgeoisie proclaims itself the representative of the best development and the well-being of the entire social community and goes through a relatively peaceful phase of developing productive forces, subjecting the whole inhabited world to its own system, and intensifying the overall economic pace. This is the progressive and reformist phase of the capitalist cycle.
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In this phase, because the ruling class wanted its own organization to appear capable of representing and reflecting the interests and demands of the working classes, the democratic parliamentary mechanism worked in harmony with its reformist orientation. Its governments claimed to be able to satisfy these demands by means of economic and legislative measures, while leaving the juridical pillars of the bourgeois system intact. Parliamentarism and democracy no longer have the character of a revolutionary slogan, and instead assume a reformist content that ensures the development of the capitalist system by softening the violent clashes and explosions of the class struggle.
• Imperialist and fascist phase
The third phase, modern imperialism, is characterized by monopolist concentration of the economy, the formation of capitalist syndicates and trusts and major state planning.
The bourgeois economy is transformed and loses the features of classic liberalism in which each business owner was independent in his economic decisions and trading relationships. An increasingly strict discipline is imposed on production and distribution; economic indicators no longer result from the free play of competition, but from the influence of capitalist associations, in the first instance, secondly from bodies of financial and banking concentration, and finally, directly from the state. The political state, which in the Marxist definition was the executive committee of the bourgeois class and which, in both government and police functions, protected the interests of that class, now asserts itself more and more as an organ of economic control and even management.
This concentration of economic responsibilities in the hands of the state cannot be interpreted as an evolution of private economy toward collective economy. This would amount to ignoring the fact that the contemporary state expresses the interests of a minority only and that all nationalizations undertaken in the framework of mercantile forms of exchange lead to a concentration that strengthens the capitalist nature of the economy instead of weakening it. The political development of the parties of the capitalist class in the contemporary phase leads, as Lenin clearly showed in his critique of modern imperialism, to more rigid forms of oppression; this has been manifested in the advent of totalitarian and fascist regimes. These regimes constitute the most modern type of bourgeois society and they are currently developing, as will become increasingly evident, to spread over the globe. A parallel aspect of this political concentration resides in the absolute predominance of a few large states at the expense of small and middle-size states.
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The emergence of this third capitalist phase cannot be confused with the return of precapitalist institutions and forms, since it is accompanied by a truly vertiginous growth of industrial and financial dynamic which was both qualitatively and quantitatively unknown to the pre-bourgeois world.
Capitalism effectively rejects the democratic and representative system and establishes centers of government that are absolutely despotic. In a few countries it has already theorized and proclaimed the formation of the totalitarian single party and hierarchical centralization, and in others it continues to use democratic slogans now devoid of content, while marching inexorably in the same direction.
The following position is essential for a correct appreciation of the contemporary historical process: the epoch of liberalism and democracy is closed, and the democratic demands that once had a revolutionary, then progressive and reformist character, are today anachronistic and clearly conformist.
The proletarian strategy in the phase of the bourgeois revolution
The cycle of the proletarian movement corresponds to that of the capitalist world.
With the appearance of the large industrial proletariat, a critique of the economic, juridical and political formulations of the bourgeoisie begins to appear; it is discovered that the bourgeois class neither liberates nor emancipates mankind, but substitutes its own class rule and exploitation for those of previous classes, and this discovery is expressed as a theory.
However, the workers of all countries are compelled to fight alongside the bourgeoisie for the overthrow of feudal institutions, and they do not succumb to the temptation of a reactionary socialism which, holding up the specter of a new, merciless capitalist master, urges the workers into an alliance with the monarchical and agrarian ruling classes.
Even in the battles waged by young capitalist regimes to prevent reactionary restorations, the proletariat cannot refuse its support to the bourgeoisie.
The class strategy of the nascent proletariat called for the realization of anti-bourgeois movements on the impetus of the insurrectionary struggle waged alongside the bourgeoisie so as to arrive immediately at a simultaneous liberation from feudal oppression and capitalist exploitation.
An embryonic manifestation of this fact is represented by Babeuf’s League of Equals at the time of the great French revolution. Theoretically the movement was by no means ripe, but the Jacobin bourgeoisie provided a rich historical lesson by bringing down a fierce repression on the workers that had fought for it and for its interests, after its victory. On the eve of the bourgeois national revolutionary wave of 1848, the theory of the class struggle had already been fully developed, and relations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had become clear on the European and world scale.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx projects an alliance with the bourgeoisie against the parties of monarchic restoration in France and of Prussian conservatism, coupled with immediate development toward a revolution in which the working class would conquer power. In this historical phase as well, the workers’ revolts are suppressed mercilessly, but the class doctrine and strategy corresponding to this phase remain firmly in the historical line of the Marxist method. The heroic offensive of the Paris Commune occurred in the same situation and is subject to the same historical evaluation. After overthrowing Bonaparte and ensuring the victory of the bourgeois republic, the French proletariat once again attempted to conquer power and offered the first historical example – even if only for a few months – of its class government.
What is most significant and instructive in this episode is the unconditional anti-proletarian alliance of bourgeois democrats with conservatives, and even with the victorious Prussian army to crush the first attempt at the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Tendencies of the socialist movement in the democratic, pacifist phase
In the second phase, when reforms to the framework of the bourgeois economy were accompanied by expanded use of the representative and parliamentary systems, the proletariat was faced with an alternative of historic significance. There arose the theoretical question of how to interpret the revolutionary doctrine as the critique of bourgeois institutions and all the ideologies that defended them.
Would the fall of capitalist rule and its replacement by a new economic order come about through a violent conflict, or will it be possible to achieve this through gradual change and the use of parliamentary legalism?
The practical question was posed concerning whether the party should ally itself, no longer with the bourgeoisie against pre-capitalist regime forces (these had disappeared), but at least with an advanced and progressive part of the bourgeoisie that was more inclined to reform its order.
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The revisionist currents of Marxism developed during the idyllic interlude of the capitalist world between 1871 and 1914. By falsifying the fundamental texts of the doctrine, they propounded a new strategy in which large economic and political organizations of the proletariat would prepare a gradual transformation of the entire capitalist machine by means of a penetration and legal conquest of political institutions.
The polemics that characterized this phase divided the proletarian movement into opposed tendencies. Even though in general the question of the insurrectional assault to smash bourgeois power was not posed, left Marxists vigorously resisted the excesses of the tactic of trade union and parliamentary collaboration, and the proposals to support bourgeois governments as well as participation by socialist parties in ministerial coalitions.
The serious crisis of the world socialist movement thus broke out in response to the imperialist war of 1914 and the passage of a majority of union and parliamentary leaders into the camp of national collaboration and support for the war effort.
Proletarian tactics in the phase of imperialist capitalism and fascism
In the third phase, capitalism is faced with the double problem of continuing to develop the productive forces and preventing them from disrupting the equilibrium of its organization. It is thus obliged to renounce liberal and democratic methods, concentrating both economic life and its political rule in powerful state organs. In this phase also the workers’ movement is faced with two alternatives.
From the point of view of theory, these stricter forms of capitalist class rule constitute a necessary, more evolved and more modern phase that capitalism will have to traverse to reach the end of its cycle and exhaust its historical possibilities. By no means do they constitute a transitory worsening of political and police methods, after which forms of so-called liberal tolerance can or must return.
From the point of view of tactics, it is false and illusory to imagine that the proletariat must undertake a fight to induce capitalism to return to liberal and democratic concessions, since the climate of political democracy is no longer necessary for the further development of capitalist productive energies, the indispensable foundation of the socialist economy.
In the first bourgeois revolutionary phase, history both posed and answered this question in a parallel struggle of the third and fourth estates, because an alliance between the two classes was an indispensable step on the road to socialism.
In the second phase, it was possible to pose legitimately the question of a parallel action between reformist democracy and socialist workers’ parties. If history has justified the negative reply of the revolutionary Marxist left, the revisionist, reformist right cannot be considered a conformist movement before the fatal degeneration of 1914-1918 Though it believed it to be plausible that the wheel of history turned slowly, it did not yet attempt to make it turn backwards. This at least must be said in favor of Bebel, Jaures and Turati.
In the modern phase of greedy imperialism and vicious world wars, the question of a parallel action between the proletarian class and bourgeois democracy is no longer posed historically. Those who maintain the opposite no longer constitute an alternative, a version or a tendency of the workers’ movement: they only attempt to disguise their total defection to conservative conformism.
The only alternative posed today – and which must be resolved – is completely different. The capitalist world and regime evolve and develop in a centralist, totalitarian and “fascist” direction: should the proletarian movement ally its forces to this movement, now the only reformist aspect of the rule of the bourgeois system? Can one hope to insert the birth of socialism in this inexorable advance of capitalist statism by helping to disperse the last traditional resistance, of free-traders and liberals, bourgeois conformists of the first order?
Or, on the other hand, should the workers’ movement, severely shaken and dislocated because it was unable to establish its independence with class collaboration in the phase of two world wars, rebuild itself by rejecting such a method and the illusion that it might expect the historical appearance of a peaceful bourgeois organization susceptible to legal penetration, or at least more vulnerable to the assault of the masses (two equally dangerous forms of defeatism in relation to any revolutionary movement) ?
The dialectical method of Marxism points to a negative answer to the question of an alliance with new modern bourgeois form, for the same reasons that yesterday compelled it to combat any alliance with reformism in the democratic, peaceful phase.
Capitalism, the dialectical precondition of socialism, no longer has to be helped into being (by strengthening its revolutionary dictatorship) or to grow (in its liberal, democratic organization).
In the modern phase, it must inevitably concentrate its economic heritage and political form in a monstrous unity
Its transformism and reformism ensure both its development and its preservation.
The working-class movement can only avoid succumbing to its rule by leaving behind the terrain of assistance to even necessary phases of capitalist development, reorganizing its forces outside this obsolete perspective, ridding itself of the weight of old traditions and denouncing tactical agreements with any kind of reformism, even though it is already an entire historical epoch overdue.
The Russian revolution; errors and deviations of the 3rd International; regression of the Russian proletarian regime
The most urgent historical problem at the end of the first world war was the crisis of the Czarist regime, that feudal state organization that remained intact in the epoch of Europe’s full capitalist development.
The Marxist left (Lenin and the Bolsheviks) had established its position decades before with the strategic perspective of waging the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat alongside the struggle of anti-absolutist forces for the overthrow of the feudal empire.
The war made it possible to realize this grand plan, and to concentrate the passage of power from the hands of the dynasty, the aristocracy and the clergy to the proletariat into the short space of nine months, separated by a brief period of government by bourgeois democratic parties.
This great event provided illuminating answers to questions relating to the class struggle, the struggle for power and the strategy of the workers’ revolution and gave an enormous impulse to the regrouping of revolutionaries the world over.
In this brief period, the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary party traversed all its phases: struggle alongside the bourgeoisie against the old regime; struggle against this same bourgeoisie when it tried to form its own state on the ruins of the old feudal state; rupture with and struggle against the reformist and gradualist parties of the workers’ movement, up to the exclusive monopoly of power in the hands of the working class and the communist party.
The historical repercussion of these events on the workers’ movement was a crushing defeat for the revisionist and collaborationist tendencies. Proletarian parties in all countries were impelled onto the terrain of armed struggle for power.
But misinterpretations led to the application of Russian tactics and strategy in other countries, where it was believed that a tactic of coalition would promote the establishment of a Kerensky-style regime, which would then be dealt with a fatal blow by the help of a bold political turn.
It was thus forgotten that the successive phases of the movement were intimately connected with the late formation of a capitalist state as such, whereas in the other countries, this state had been stabilized for a century, or at least for a few decades, and was stronger because its juridical structure was more definitively democratic and parliamentary.
It was not understood that the alliance between the Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks in insurrectionary battles and even at times in the struggle to put down attempts at feudal restoration were the last historical example of a specific relationship between political forces. For example, if the proletarian revolution had broken out in Germany after the crisis of 1848, as Marx expected, it would have followed the same tactical path as the Russian revolution; but in 1918, it could have won only if the revolutionary communist party had had sufficient strenght to overcome the bloc of supporters of the Kaiser, the bourgeoisie, and the Social Democrats in power in the Weimar Republic
The international communist movement proved to have deviated completely from the correct revolutionary strategy when, with the first example of a totalitarian bourgeois government in Italy, it gave the proletariat the order to fight for liberty and constitutional guarantees in an anti-fascist coalition, a fundamentally incorrect strategical position.
Confusing Hitler and Mussolini, reformers of the capitalist regime in the most modern sense, with Kornilov or the forces of restoration in the Holy Alliance of 1815, was the International’s greatest and worst error of appreciation, and it signaled a total abandonment of the revolutionary method.
Because the imperialist phase is economically mature in all modern countries, the fascist political form corresponding to it must appear in various countries of the world, though with a temporal order depending on contingent relationships of forces between states and between classes.
This development could be considered as a new opportunity for the proletarian revolutionary assault, but this opportunity would not authorize us to align and waste the forces of the communist vanguard for the illusory goal of preventing the bourgeoisie from abandoning legal forms, or of demanding a restoration of the constitutional guarantees of the parliamentary system. On the contrary, it was necessary to accept the historical end of this instrument of bourgeois oppression and the invitation to fight outside the law in an attempt to break all the other apparatus—police, military, bureaucratic, and legal—of capitalist power and the state.
The problem of proletarian strategy today
The passage of communist parties to the strategy of the great anti-fascist bloc that led to slogans of national collaboration in the anti-German war of 1939, to the national Resistance, to the committees of national liberation, and even to the disgrace of ministerial collaboration – all this marks the second disastrous defeat of the world revolutionary movement.
This movement cannot reconstitute its theory and organization and undertake independent activity, unless it fights from outside against this policy, which is today common to the socialist parties and communist parties allied to Moscow. The new movement must be based on directives that are the exact opposite of the slogans propagated by these opportunist movements. In fact, if their propagandistic positions are presented as the standard of the world movement that identifies with anti-fascism, a dialectical critique reveals clearly that they are in fact fully in line with the fascist evolution of social organization.
The new revolutionary movement of the proletariat in the imperialist and fascist epoch bases itself on the following positions:
1) Rejection of the perspective that the defeat of Italy, Germany and Japan opened a phase of general return to democracy; on the contrary, the end of the war has been accompanied by a transformation in the direction and with the methods of fascism among the bourgeois governments in the victorious countries, even and above all when reformist and labor parties participate in it. Refusal to present the illusory return to liberal forms as a demand that should interest the working class.
2) Affirmation that the present Russian regime lost its proletarian character, along with the abandonment of revolutionary positions by the 3rd International. A gradual regression led economic, social and political forms in Russia to assume a bourgeois character. This evolution must not be regarded as a return to the praetorian forms of autocratic or pre-bourgeois tyranny, but as the advent, by a different historical path, of the same type of evolved social organization presented by state capitalism in countries with totalitarian regimes in which large-scale plans pave the way to rapid development and give these countries a higher imperialist potential.
Consequently, we must not demand the return of Russia to the forms of parliamentary democracy that are undergoing dissolution in all modern countries; instead, we demand the re-constitution, in Russia also, of the revolutionary and totalitarian communist party.
3) Refusal of any invitation to the national solidarity of classes and parties that was recently advocated to overthrow so-called totalitarian regimes and to combat the Axis countries, and which is now advocated to rebuild the war-ravaged capitalist world through respect for law and order.
4) Refusal of the united front manoeuvre and tactic, i.e., the refusal to invite so-called socialist and communist parties – which have long since ceased to be proletarian parties – to leave government coalitions and create an alleged proletarian unity.
5) Relentless struggle against all ideological campaigns designed to mobilize the working class of various countries on patriotic fronts for a possible third imperialist war by asking them to fight for a red Russia against Anglo-Saxon capitalism, or to support Western democracy against Stalinist totalitarianism in a war presented as anti-fascist.
International Communist Party
Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program
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