Who We Are and What We Want
(«communist program»; Nr. 10; September 2024)
This text was first published with this title in French, in the first issue of “Le Prolétaire” in July 1963; an Italian translation of large extracts was published in various issues of “Il programma comunista” from October 1963 onwards. In 1969 it was published with a few modifications and the addition of other articles in the form of booklets in Italian and French; an English version was published later under the title: “the party’s programme”. We have taken this translation and corrected it according to the original.
On the Track of the Great Marxist Tradition
Based on its programme (see on the cover), the International Communist Party claims in their integrity the fundamental doctrinal principles of Marxism : the dialectical materialism as a system of conception of the world and of human history, the fundamental economic doctrines contained in Marx’s Capital as a method of interpretation of the capitalist economy, the programmatic formulations of the Manifesto of the Communist Party as an historical and political lay-out for the emancipation of the world’s working class, the whole system of principles and methods shown by the victorious experience of the Russian revolution, the theoretical and practical work of Lenin and of the Bolshevik party in the crucial years of the rise to power and the civil war; the classic theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International, represented the confirmation, the restoration and the consequent development, of these principles which are today still more emphasised by the lessons of the tragic revisionist wave which began in 1926-27 under the name of « socialism in one country ». This wave, that only conventionally we tie up with the name of the individual Stalin, because it originated from the pressure of objective social forces towering above Russia, owing to the failed extension in the whole world of the revolutionary fire of October 1917 – pressure on which it wasn’t believed to oppose in time a programmatical and tactical barrier, that, even if unable to avoid the defeat, would have made less difficult and tormenting the rebirth of the International Communist Movement, – had much more lethal effects than the opportunist disease that troubled the brief existence of the First International (anarchist deviations), than the one that threw down the Second in the abyss of the adhesion to the Union Sacrée and then to the 1914 imperialistic war (gradualism, parliamentarism, democratism). Thus today, 30 years after the Second World War, the situation of the workers’ movement appears a thousand times more critical than in the days of the vertiginous collapse of the Second International at the outbreak of the First War.
The Third International was born in 1919 with a programme that, re-establishing the basis of the Marxist doctrine, was breaking irrevocably with the democratic, gradualist, parliamentary and pacifistic illusions of the Second (wrecked moreover in the more ignoble chauvinism and warmongering during the war) ; and the fact that, in a certain measure, the danger of an involution of the Communist International outlined itself since the very beginning both with a too hurried way of constituting the communist Party especially in Western Europe, and with very elastic tactics adopted to « conquer the masses », doesn’t diminish at all the immense historical contribution of Lenin, Trotsky and of the old Bolshevik guard. This method and these tactics for the creators of the Red October, were not signifying and should not signify, in any case, the neglect of the basic principle of the violent conquest of power, of the destruction of the bourgeois parliamentary and democratic state apparatus, of the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship directed by the Party, and their application could avoid disastrous effects if the revolution, as it was hoped, would rapidly flare up in the whole world; but, as the Left warned, since the Second Congress in 1920 there was the risk of having the most negative consequences on the insecure body of parties often collected at random, not sufficiently immunised against the possibility of social democratic relapse as soon as the wave had flown back, and unfortunately, it did flow back, bringing to the surface not only and not so much the men, but above all the cancerous illnesses of a too recent past.
The criterion which made us oppose the tactics of the « united political front », first, and the tactics of the « worker-peasant governments » (equivocal reserve formula in place of the unmistakable « proletarian dictatorship »), after ; the criterion which made us deplore the method of the direct adhesion to the International of organisations independent from the local Communist Party and of the acceptance of sympathiser parties, like in rejecting the praxis of infiltration of pseudo-workers or even bourgeois parties (like the Kuomintang), and, worse still, of the « blocks , even if temporary, with parties apparently related or contingently aligned on « similar » positions, was and remains the following: the reinforcement of the communist parties depends not on tactical manoeuvres or on displays of subjective voluntarism, but on the objective revolutionary course that hasn’t any reason to obey the canons of a continuous and linear progress . The rise to power can be far or near, and in both cases, but above all in the first, preparing for it means repelling any action likely to give rise in the communist organisation to an opportunism similar to that of the Second International, namely to a break of the inseparable bond between means and ends, tactics and principles, immediate and ultimate objectives, which result can only be the return to electoralism and to democratism in politics and to reformism in the social fields.
Since 1926, the contrast transferred directly on the political level and terminated in the break between the International and the Left. The two questions on the carpet were « socialism in one country » and, soon after, « antifascism ». « Socialism in one country » is a double negation of Leninism, firstly because it contrabands as socialism what Lenin used to call « capitalistic development in the European manner in the petty-bourgeois and semi-medieval Russia », and secondly because detaches the destinies of the Russian revolution from those of the worldwide proletarian revolution. It is the doctrine of the counter-revolution: to the inside it justified the repression against the old Marxist and international guard, starting with Trotsky; outside the borders of the U.S.S.R. it favoured the crushing of the left currents by the centre fractions, often direct social-democratic survivals, « totalling surrendering to the bourgeoisie », (Trotsky).
The principal manifestation of this neglect of the programmatical supports of the worldwide communist struggle was precisely the substitution of the watchword of the revolutionary conquest of power, with that of the defence of democracy against fascism almost as if the two regimes would not both be defenders of the capitalist regime in front of the danger of a new proletarian revolutionary wave, alternating themselves at the helm of the State, according to the imperious demands of the dynamics of the class struggle. The phenomenon expressed itself not only in the Third International after the fall of the German bastion, owing to the victory of Hitler in 1933, but also in the « Trotskyist » opposition which used the Stalinist watchword in the defence of democracy against fascism, even if showing it as a « phase » or « stage » to go through before being able to ask for the maximum demands of the revolutionary proletariat. In both cases it brought to the destruction of the working class as a political distinctive force; with objectives antithetical to those of any other social strata, to the mobilization of the workers of different countries for the defence, first of the democratic institutions, then of the « fatherland », to the rebirth and to the exasperation of the chauvinistic hatreds ; at last to the dissolution, also formal of the Communist International and to the temporary annihilation of any yearning for its reconstruction.
The working class being joined to the bloody wagon of the imperialist war, 1939-1945, the slender forces of communism, international and internationalist, if and where they had survived, were not therefore able to do anything to influence the situation in any way : the cry of « transformation of the imperialist war into civil war », first announcement in 1914 of the Russian revolution of 1917, fell in the vacuum – and in contempt. Not only did the post-war period maintain the naive « hopes » of an expansion of revolutionary communism at the tips of the Russian bayonets, but saw the triumph of a neo-ministerialism even worse than that of the Second International right-wings, because exercised in the more difficult period of the capitalistic reconstruction in favour of the restoration of the State authority, of the rescue of the national economy (reconstruction loans, austerity acceptance in the name of the superior interests of the nation, etcetera) and, later, in the « popular democracies, in favour of the re-establishment of an order passed for « Soviet » (Berlin, Poznañ, Budapest). At the helm of the State, the « communist » parties affiliated at the Kremlin were driven out again to the margins of an « opposition » merely parliamentary, by the allies of war and of « peace », in a world increasingly more fascist ; but far from finding again Lenin’s master way (a thing that on the other hand they would not have been able to do, not even supposing they would have wanted it). They fell still more in the abyss of a complete revision of the Marxist doctrine, until touching the bottom of these years, in which it is not foreseen or any more predicted the end, either of capitalism or of bourgeois parliamentarism, instead it is supposed to be defended « against » the attacks of the bourgeoisie itself, which would have forgotten its glorious past ; and it is not even foreseen or predicted, the development of that so-called struggle between « socialist field » and « capitalist field » to which Stalinism has arrived to reduce the class struggle, as on an international scale the watchword has become « co-existence and peaceable competition ».
It is from the bottom of this precipice, anticipating the proletarian revolt that comes the cry « Working men of all countries unite! » and « Proletarian dictatorship ». It is our cry.
For the Restoration of the Revolutionary Marxist Theory
Back to « Catastrophism »
On the level of the general doctrine of historical and social revolution, the political degeneration, at this point complete of the old communist movement, brought to the denial of Marx’s catastrophic vision ; neither the class contrasts, nor the conflicts among States, will end up – they say – in the violent struggle, in armed conflicts. Fundamentally the prospective is at the same time that of an international peace, named pacific co-existence and that of a social peace guaranteed by the conservative and reactionary watchword of a « new democracy » based on the « democratic planning », on the structural reforms, and on the « struggle against the monopolies ». In reality, « Stalinist » communism (and still more « post-Stalinist ») is only an apology of Progress, to the extent in which it exalts the increase of production and productivity ; it is only an apology of Capitalism, to the extent in which it exalts the growth of trade.
Opposing these positions, which are the pure and simple reproduction of the ones of the « progressive » bourgeoisie of the second half of the 19th century, the Marxist positions remain unchanged : under capitalism, increase of production and of productivity signifies growing exploitation of work by the capital, an enormous increase of the unpaid part of work, of surplus value. The workers consumption, – the « reserve » of the surplus value that the working class constitutes whether in individual or social form (assistance against illness and old age ; family legislation etc.) can grow ; at the same rate increase the subjection of the producer to the capital and the insecurity of its condition, tied to the ups and downs of the market economy. The class antagonism is not at all subdued ; in fact it is driven to its maximum.
Extension of trade signifies extension of rule of the underdeveloped countries by developed countries, and progressive embittering of the naturel concurrence between civilised countries. Connecting the different peoples, the different continents in the meshes of a still more worldwide economy which is a real, even if involuntary, conquest – it shows dialectically a ‘negative’ aspect that all its apologisers pretend to ignore : the preparation of commercial and therefore financial and industrial crises, the outlet of which, today like yesterday, can only be the imperialistic war. Moreover, an increasing part of the productive forces is today wasted, not just in the production of the « goods and services » that the « honest trade » and « at mutual interests » dear to the opportunists of the West and of the East « would lavish » to all « humanity », but in the production of destructive weapons which function is much more economical than military.
In front of more classically reformist arguments of post-Stalinism, the positions of revolutionary Marxism are those that were at the time of social-democracy : modern capitalism is not at all characterised (Engels already verified it!) by « absence of a plan » ; but the « planning » alone, whichever it is, cannot at all characterise socialism. Not even the disappearance (more or less real) of the social figure of the capitalist, that is supposed to distinguish the Russian society of today, is enough to prove the abolition of capitalism itself (Marx already verified it!), since capitalism is nothing but the reduction of the modern worker to the wage-earning conditions and where this survives, that continues to survive.
The apology of capitalism and the reformism of the old-fashioned social-democrat style, which fusion is characteristic of the « communism » of Russian or Chinese mark, even worse than the classic reformism, ally themselves to a defeatism that, as psychological and ideological reflection of the disintegration of the revolutionary force of the proletariat, sterilizes even the revolt that this apology and this reformism stirs up in certain workers’ strata ; it consists, first of all, in denying the working class every possibility of surpassing the exasperated concurrence that divides it today, of rebelling itself against the despotism of the needs created by the capitalistic prosperity, of escaping from the stunness generated by the stupidity of the organisation of welfare, of amusements, or « culture », to rally itself in a revolutionary party ; and secondly consists in admitting, implicitly or explicitly, that the armaments possessed today by the ruling class are invincible. All these positions are equivalent to the abdication of every revolutionary hope in face of the actual, but for us historically transitory, omnipotence of capital.
Also in this, the Marxist positions are those of always ; capitalism divides but at the same time concentrates and organises the proletariat ; and at the end the concentration has the upper hand on the division. Capitalism corrupts and weakens but unwillingly revolutionarily educates the proletariat, and in the end such education has the upper hand on the corruption. In effect, all the sophisticated products of the « pleasure industries » are just as impotent in soothing the increasing disposition of social life (either urban or rural) as the tranquillizers of modern medicine are impotent in restoring to the man of the capitalistic society the harmony in relations with himself and others, that the « modern life » namely, « capitalistic », destroys. Much more than in these kinds of corruptions, the strength of capital lies, today like yesterday, in the crushing of the producer with the length of the working day, of the working week, of the working year and of the working life. But capitalism must, by force of circumstances, historically limit this length ; it does so in a slow, miserable way, with continuous steps back, but cannot avoid doing it, and the consequence of that, like Marx and Engels foresaw, will necessarily be revolutionary, if we think that on the other hand it is similarly obligated to instruct (dulling them at the same time ; why not ?) those that will become its « gravediggers ». Therefore, there are two main prospectives : 1) the explosion of a crisis as in 1929 (for us the most likely) and 2) a long historical phase of expansion and « prosperity » ; but only those who openly practise defeatism can deduce (as on different points of view Maoists, Castroists, Guevarists, etc., are doing) from the disorganization of the working class a definite historical condemnation, « sociologically determined » impotence to the reconstruction of the Party and of the Class International, and then deduce the need that other social strata or sociological categories (peasants, students and so on) would take its place at the vanguard of the social revolution.
It is all the more absurd to believe that, with the superior social power that the same development of capitalism gives to the wage-earning class this has become impotent to carry out the first duty of any social revolution in history : the disarmament of the class enemy, the totalitarian appropriation of its military potential.
Back to Revolutionary « Totalitarianism »
On the political and social level, the final victory of democratism on the proletarian revolutionary doctrine in the old communist movement succeeded in presenting the « resistance to totalitarianism », as the task both of the proletariat and of all the social strata oppressed by capital.
This orientation, whose first historical manifestation was war and pre-war anti-fascism, didn’t spare any of the parties bound to Moscow leading to the negation of the sole party, undoubtedly communist and Leninist form at the beginning, as a necessary guide to the revolution and to the proletarian dictatorship. Whilst in the « popular democracies » of the so-called « socialist camp » the power is in the hands of popular or national « fronts », that is, of parties or « leagues » that explicitly incarnate a block of several classes, the « communist » parties operating in the « bourgeois camp» have solemnly abjured the doctrine of the class revolutionary violence as the only way to power, and of the dictatorship exerted by the class through solely the Communist Party as the only way to maintain it ; they promise to the courted interlocutors of other parties (Socialist, Catholic and others) a « socialism » jointly managed by more parties representing the « people ».Welcomed favourably by all the enemies of the proletarian revolution, who in the « communism » of Stalinist inspiration, repelled everything that reminded them of the striking Red October, this orientation is not only defeatist, but illusive. As the proletariat does not claim any liberty in the picture of capital’s despotic regime and therefore doesn’t accept the flag of democracy, neither « formal » nor « real » thus as an integral part of his programme, the suppression of all the liberties for social groups bound to the capital, in the pattern of the despotic regime that, once in power, he will impose on the defeated class. If the bourgeoisie masks his own dictatorship behind the democratic fiction, the communists, who, since the time of the Manifesto « disdain to conceal their views and aims », proclaim openly that the revolutionary conquest of power, as an unnecessary prelude to the social palingenesis, signifies at the same time the totalitarian rule of the former oppressed class, through its party, on the former dominant class.
Anti-totalitarianism is a demand of those classes that move on the same social basis as that of the capitalist class (private appropriation of production means and products, but they are invariably crushed by it) ; it is the ideology – common to the multi-coloured movements of « intellectuals », « students », etc., which infest today’s political scene – of the urban and petty bourgeoisie, grasped at the myths of small production, of the sovereignty of the individual and of « direct democracy ». It is therefore bourgeois and anti-historical at the same time and for these these motives anti-proletarian. The ruin of the petty bourgeoisie under the hammer blows of big capital is historically inevitable, and socially constitutes a step forward towards the socialist revolution as it makes effective the true and only historical contribution of capitalism: the production centralization, the socialization of productive activity.
The proletariat, for whom returning (even if possible) to less concentrated forms of production would mean deserting his own historical task of a completely social production and disposal of products, doesn’t recognise as his own duty neither the defence of the petty bourgeoisies against big business (equally both enemies of socialism) nor the adoption in politics of that pluralism which it does not have any reason to accept on an economic and social level.
How reactionary is the watchword of the « struggle against the monopolies » in defence of the small production, in the same way are reactionary all those movements that consider the revolutionary course as a gradual conquest of peripheric « power » islands made by undifferentiated proletarian organisms on a factory basis (expressing so-called « direct democracy »), thus ignoring the central problem of the conquest of political power, of the destruction of the capitalistic state, and then of the Party as centralising organ the class ; by the same token are reactionary those movements which present as an already achieved socialism, a system based on « self-managed » firms, thus destroying the possibility of that « social production regulated by the social prevision » in which Marx indicated the « political economy of the working class », and that can be achieved only by getting over the basic productive cells of the capitalist economy and the « blind rule » of the market in which they find the only, chaotic and unforeseeable connective element.
Before and after the rise to power, in politics or in economy, the revolutionary proletariat doesn’t and cannot make any concession to anti-totalitarianism, a new version of that idealistic and utopian anti-authoritarianism that Marx and Engels denounced in the long polemic with the anarchists and that Lenin in State and Revolution demonstrated, being convergent with the democratic and gradualist reformism. For what concerns the small producers, the socialist proletariat will not use the cruelty with capitalism has shown in all its history ; but, for what concerns the small production and its political, ideological and religious reflexes, its action will be infinitely more decided, rapid and, in short, totalitarian. The proletarian dictatorship will spare mankind the infinite amount of violence and misery that under capitalism constitutes its « daily bread », but will be able to do it precisely in as much as it will not hesitate to use the force, the intimidation and, if necessary, the most decided repression against any social group, small or large, which would obstruct the fulfilment of its historical mission.
Concluding, whoever joins the notion of socialism to any form of liberalism, democratism, localism, multipartitism, or worse, anti-partitism, places himself outside the history, outside the track that leads to the reconstitution of the Party and of the International, both totalitarianly communist.
Back to Internationalism
Since 1848, that is to say since the appearance of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, communism and the fight for the revolutionary, transformation of the society are for definition international and internationalists: « The Workers have no fatherland » ; « The united action at least in the civilised countries is one of the first conditions of the emancipation of the proletariat ».
At the moment of its constitution in 1864, the International Association of Workers inscribed in its general statutes the recognition that « all the efforts to reach the great end of the economic emancipation of the working class are up till now unsuccessful for the lack of solidarity among the various categories of workers in every country and for the absence of a fraternal union among the working classes of different countries », and proclaimed with force « that the emancipation of the workers is neither a local nor national problem, but a social problem, that embraces all the countries in which exists the modern society and which solution depends on the practical and theoretical collaboration of the more progressive countries ». In 1920 the Communist International born from the long struggle of the worldwide internationalist Left for the transformation of the imperialist war into civil war whether in the more democratic of the republics or in the more autocratic of the empires, or the most constitutional and parliamentary of monarchies, repossessed the statutes of the First International and proclaimed that « the new Workers’ International is created for the organisation of common actions of the workers of different countries, aiming for the sole end of the knocking-down of capitalism, the foundation of the proletarian dictatorship and of an International Soviet Republic for the complete elimination of all the classes for the achievement of socialism, the first stage of the communist society », adding that « the organisational apparatus of the Communist International must assure the workers of every country the chance of receiving in every given moment the biggest possible aid by the organised proletarians of ether countries. » The thread of this great tradition has been broken during the first post-war period by the joint action of the theory and praxis of « socialism in one country » and by the substitution of this struggle for democracy against fascism in place of the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship. The first direction released the destinies of Russia’s victorious revolution from the ones of the worldwide proletarian revolutionary movement conditioning the growth of this to the fickle diplomatic interests of the Soviet State ; the second, by dividing the world into fascist and democratic countries, but ordering the proletarians living in totalitarian regime to fight against their own governments not for the revolutionary conquest of power, but for the restoration of the democratic and parliamentary institutions, and by ordering the proletarians living in the democratic regimes to defend their own governments and, if needed, to fight for them against their brothers on the other side of the border, has tied the destiny of the working class to that of the respective « fatherlands » and of their bourgeois institutions.
The dissolution of the Communist International in the course of the Second World War was the unavoidable result of this overturning of doctrine, strategy and tactics. From the new imperialistic massacre appeared states in Eastern Europe which call themselves socialists but which proclaim and furiously defend their own « national sovereignty » ; calling themselves brothers, while isolated by jealously kept borders ; calling themselves members of a « socialist camp» while divided by economic contrasts to solve which, when they reach a point of extreme tension, only remains the use of brute force (Hungary Czechoslovakia) or where the military intervention is not possible, give away to deep lacerations as in the cases of China and Yugoslavia. In their turn the parties not yet in « power » defend the possession of their own particular national way to socialism (which is for them all the same way of abjuring the revolution and the proletarian dictatorship and of a complete adhesion to the democratic, parliamentary and reformist ideology) and present themselves, in a proud defence of their autonomy from the other « brother » parties, as the heirs of the purest political and patriotic traditions of the respective bourgeoisies, ready to pick up – to use Stalin’s phrase – the flag that these have dropped.
In such a situation, internationalism has become a word still more empty and rhetoric than the phrase of the « international peoples brotherhood », that Marx in « Critique of the Gotha programme » violently flung in the face of the German workers’ Party as « borrowed » by the bourgeois league for freedom and « peace ». No international solidarity is possible – and no actual international solidarity has further taken place, as a matter of fact, not even in moment of hard social tension (miners’ strikes in Belgium, dockers’ strikes in England, revolts of black proletarians of the American car industry, general strike in France in 1968, etc.) – since it is proclaimed that every proletariat and every « communist » party have to resolve, and are the only ones able to resolve, their own particular problems, and each one of them sets up as defender of the fatherland’s institutions and traditions, of the national economy, and even of the sacred « borders ». What for, besides, an internationalism not with words but « with facts » (Lenin) if the message to the world of the « new parties » is that of pacific co-existence and of emulative competition between capitalism and « socialism »?
The proletarian movement will revive in the fullness of its historical features only on the condition of acknowledging that in any country there is one unique way towards its emancipation, and similarly unique must be its Party – unique in doctrine, unique in principles, programme and practical rules of action – and not a hybrid whole of confusedly conflicting programmes, « but an organic and secure overcoming of all the particular pushes of proletarian groups, in a synthetic force acting in the sense of the world revolution » (Party’s. Political platform 1945).
* * *
The abdication of the communist movement to its international revolutionary duties mirrors, in a similarly crude way, in the complete and shameful desertion of the classic Marxist position in front of the insurrectional struggles of the colonial peoples against the imperialist oppression, struggles that in the second post-war period have assumed forms of extreme violence while the proletariat of the imperialistic metropolis was cowardly subdued to the yoke of the bourgeois « reconstruction ». In front of the armed struggles of the colonial peoples which already in the first post-war period were shaking the imperialism, in 1920 the 2nd Congress of the Communist International and the 1st Congress of Eastern Peoples outlined the grand perspective of a unique world strategy which welded the defeatism of the social insurrection in the capitalist metropolis with the national revolt in the colonies and semi-colonies. This revolt, politically led by the young colonial bourgeoisies, pursued the bourgeois aims of unity and national independence, but, at a juncture which « puts on the agenda on a worldwide scale the proletarian dictatorship » (Lenin), on the one hand the active intervention in the struggle of the young communist parties (politically and organisationally independent) at the head of gigantic workers’ and peasant masses, and on the other hand the hand the attack of the metropolitan proletariat against the citadel of colonialism, would have made possible the stepping over of the national-revolutionary parties and the transformation of originally bourgeois revolutions into proletarian revolutions, according to the scheme of the revolution in permanence traced by Marx and carried out by the Bolsheviks in the semi-feudal Russia of 1917. The axis of this strategy was and could only be, the revolutionary proletariat of the « more civilised » countries, that is, more economically advanced, because their victory and only that would have allowed the economically retrograde countries colonial world to overcome the historical handicap of their backwardness : once master in the West of power and of the means of production, the metropolitan proletariat would have acquainted with it the economy of the former colonies through a « world economic plan » which, unitary like the one towards which capitalism leans, wouldn’t, as opposed to this, have wanted any oppression or conquest, any extermination or exploitation ; and the colonial peoples, thanks to the « subordination of the immediate interests of the revolutionarily victorious countries to the general interests of the world revolution », would have achieved socialism without having to get through the horrors of a capitalistic phase, more ferocious, because more compelled to rocket to the top to bring itself up to the le level of the more advanced economies. No part of this powerful edifice has been left standing by the opportunism, since the years 1926-27 when the destinies of the Chinese revolution were decided. In the colonies the so-called communist parties, above all after the Second World War (far from « placing themselves at the head of the exploited masses » to speed up the separation of them from the shapeless block of more classes established under the flag of national independence), placed themselves at the tow of the indigenous bourgeoisie and even of « anti-imperialistic » feudal classes and powers, or when they have risen to power they have defended the political programme of constitutional parliamentary and multiparty democracy, « forgetting » to « put in the foreground the question of property » and at least to start confiscating, with no indemnity, the immense properties of landlords (vitally tied to the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, and through it, to the imperialism), without ever placing the young, battle hardened and concentrated, local proletariat at the vanguard of the semi-proletarian and peasant masses in order that they can shake off altogether the yoke of capital. On the other hand, in the imperialistic metropolis, they have abjured the principles of the violent revolution and of the proletarian dictatorship and, falling still lower than the Second International reformists, they limited themselves, in France during the last part of the Algerian War of Independence and in America during the course of the Vietnamese war, to invoke « place and negotiations » and to demand to the respective governments that « formal and merely official recognition of equality and independence » for the young nations, branded by the Third International as a hypocritical watchword of the « bourgeois democrats that camouflage themselves as socialists ».
The consequence of this complete loss of the Marxist prospect of double revolutions has been and is that the gigantic revolutionary potentialities contained in grand and often bloody riots, the burden of which having always and only been borne by millions of proletarian and poor peasants, have been wasted : in the countries formerly independent, the corrupt, greedy and parasitic bourgeoisies are today in power, the more willing to re-ally themselves with yesterday’s « enemy », the imperialism, the more they are conscious of the threat that comes up from the urban and rural exploited masses ; while capital, untouched in its countries, re-enters in the territories from which it was ignominiously forced to take to its heels, thanks to the « aids », the loans and the commerce of raw materials and manufactures. At the same time the paralysis of the proletarian and communist movement could historically justify the degenerate Maoist, Castroist and Guevarist theories, which point out phantom peasants, popular or anarchic revolutions as the sole way to get out of the world marsh or constitutional and pacifistic reformism. Such a point was reached (unavoidably) by the abandonment of the right road of Internationalism.
But how, renegated by the parties which refer to Moscow or Peking, internationalism is ingrained in the facts of an always more worldwide economy and regime of exchanges, thus the end of the nationalistic task which in colonies strengthened the united front of all classes, their forced industrialisation, the rapid transformation of their political and social structures, can only put everywhere on the agenda the question of the class war and of the proletarian dictatorship and from now on point out to the International Communist Party the duty of helping the young, native working class of the so-called Third World to definitively share its own destiny with that of the social strata in power, and to take the place that it harshly conquered for itself in the world army of the communist revolution.
Back to the Communist Programme
On the programmatic level, our conception of socialism stands out from all the others in that it postulates the need of a preliminary violent revolution, the destruction of all the institutions of the bourgeois State, and the creation of a new State apparatus directed in an opposite way by a sole party : this party being the one which will have prepared, unified and led to the victory the proletarian assaults on the old regime.
But, as we reject the conception of a gradual and pacific transition from capitalism to socialism without political revolution, namely, without destruction of democracy, so we reject the anarchical conception that limits the duties of the revolution to the knocking-down of the existing State power. The political revolution opens, for orthodox Marxism, a new social epoch of which is important to redefine the main phases.
1) Phase of Transition
Politically, it is characterised by the proletarian dictatorship ; economically, by survival of forms specifically tied to capitalism : a mercantile distribution of products, even if those of big industry and, in certain sectors, particularly agricultural, a little private production. These forms can only be surpassed by virtue of despotic measures of the proletarian power : the passing under its management of all the sectors, already with a social and collective nature (large scale industry, agriculture and trade, transport, etc.) ; the setting to work of a vast distribution apparatus, independent from private trade, but still functioning at least in the beginning on mercantile rules. In this phase, however, the duty of the military struggle takes priority on the one of social and economic reorganisation, unless, against any reasonable prevision, the class overthrown on the inside and threatened on the outside would renounce to any armed resistance.
The duration of this phase depends, on the one hand, on the importance of the difficulties that the capitalist class will go forth to create to the revolutionary proletariat, and on the other hand, on the width of the organizational work which is in inverse ratio with the economic and social stage reached in each sector and in cash country, and which is therefore easier in the more advanced countries.
2) Phase of Inferior Socialism (or Socialist Phase)
It dialectically derives from the first phase. Its characteristics are the following : the proletarian State controls at this point all the exchangeable product, even if a sector of small production still exists; this is the condition to pass to a distribution that is no longer monetary, but still keeps an exchange character, as the assignment of products to the producers depends on their work performance and it is executed through the works coupons which vouch for it. Such a system differs substantially from that of the wage-labourer which ties the workers’ earnings to the value of his labour-force, digs an abyss between the life of individuals and the social richness ; because in socialism there will not be any obstacles between the needs and their satisfaction, except the obligation for all the valid individuals to work, and every progress, (which under the capitalist society’s regime transforms into an enemy of the producing class, the proletariat) becomes immediately a means of emancipation of the whole species. Nevertheless we still have dealings with forms directly inherited from the. bourgeois society : – « The same amount of labour which the producer has given to society in one form he receives back in another. Here obviously the same principle prevails as that which regulate the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values… Hence, equal right here is still in principle bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange only exist on the average and net in the individual case. In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatised by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply » (Marx : Critique of the Gotha Programme). Above all, work still appears as a social constriction yet always less oppressing by the way in which the general conditions of work improve.
On the other hand, the proletarian state having the means of production at its disposal, it is possible (after the severe suppression of all the useless or anti-social economic sectors, which has already begun in the transitory phase) to have an accelerated development of the sectors neglected by capitalism, above all housing and agriculture : moreover, it is possible to have a geographical reorganisation of the apparatus of production, leading to the suppression of the antagonism between city and country and to the constitution of a production unit on a continental scale.
Finally, all these advances imply the abolition of the general conditions which on the one hand confine the female sex to an unproductive and menial housework and on the other hand limit a large number of producers to merely manual activities, making the intellectual work, and the scientific knowledges a social privilege for one class alone. Thus it is outlined together with the abolition of classes in their own relations with the means of production, the disappearance of the fixed attribution of given social duties to given human groups.
3) Phase of Superior Socialism (or communist phase)
The more it performs these tasks, for which it was born, and that go beyond its historical function of prevention and repression of the attempts of capitalist restoration, the State tends to disappear as a State, that is as a rule on men, to become a simple apparatus for the administration of things. This decay is bound to the disappearance of classes, distinct and opposed in the bosom of society and then it is realised, with the transformation of the peasant (or artisan) into an out and out industrial producer. Thus we arrive at the stage of the superior communism which Marx characterised in this way : « In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished ; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want ; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development on the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners : From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! ».
This great historical result goes beyond the destruction of antagonisms among the men, the effects of which were the restlessness, the « general », particular, everlasting « insecurity » (Babeuf), man’s destiny in the capitalist society ; it is the condition of a real dominion of society upon nature, what Engels used to call « the transition from the kingdom of need to that of freedom », where the same development of the human forces becomes for the first time an aim of man’s activity. It is then, also, that in the social praxis, the solution of all the antinomies of all traditional theoretical thought comes to an end, « between existence and essence, objectivation and affirmation of itself, liberty and necessity, individual and genus (Marx), so that communism merits the attribute that founders of scientific socialism gave to it, of « enigma finally resolved by the history ».
Reconstitution of the Communist Party on a Worldwide Scale
The reconstitution on a national and international scale of a proletarian political party, able to assure the continuity of the revolutionary policy, will historically take place on the sole condition that the vanguard forces of the proletariat of the advanced and under-developed countries will concentrate on the above-mentioned fundamental positions. Orthodox communism stands out from all the varieties of more or less left-wing extremism, in that it denies that the laws which cause in the present –substantially fascist– phase of capitalist rule, the exhaustion of the political struggles among the bourgeois parties, render the proletariat for the same reason unable to constitute itself as a revolutionary party. It declares, on the contrary, that precisely the disappearance of oppositions between classic right and left wings, between liberalism and authoritarianism, between fascism and democracy, gives the best historical base to the development of a resolutely communist and revolutionary party. The realisation of this possibility is bound not only to the inevitable explosion of an open crisis, whatever be its term or form, but also to the objective deterioration of social contrasts in the phases of expansion and prosperity. Whoever expresses the minimum doubt on this point, in actual fact doubts the historical prospect of the communist revolution.
The development of the Party cannot obey formal rules such as the ones that many anti-Stalinist oppositions have claimed under the name of « democratic socialism » and which consist of believing that the right orientation depends on the free expression of thought and the will of the proletarian « base », and, on respecting democratic rules and electoral canons in designating the persons in charge at different levels. Even though the suffocation of oppositions and irregularities in procedure have indeed helped, in Russia and id the world, to get rid of the revolutionary communist tradition, our Party defines and has always defined this liquidation as the liquidation of a program and tactics, and any return to the sound organisational norms, as wanted by Trotskyists, wouldn’t have prevented it at all. For the same reason we rely not just on the statute involving a large and regular use of the democratic mechanism, but on a definition, without misunderstandings and concessions of the means of the revolutionary struggle. The Party must be able to generate in its bosom organisms suitable for the enforcement, with no hesitations, of its « catechism », or it is not the Party. In any case, it is the selection that has to be made and not some sort of model of international functioning: This is the content of the formula of « organic centralism »; that our current before, and the Party, have always opposed and oppose to the one of democratic centralism. It stresses the only really essential element, that is, the respect not of the majority but of the programme ; not of the individual opinion, but of the historical and ideological tradition of the movement. To this conception corresponds an internal structure that puts into effect the sine qua non condition of the existence of the Party as a revolutionary organism : the dictatorship of principles. Once this condition is achieved, the discipline of the base to the decisions of the centre, is obtained with the minimum of friction while an out and out dictatorship becomes necessary when the Party’s tactics are no longer under the programme’s authority, giving rise to tension and clashes which can be settled only by virtue of disciplinary measures as happened in the International even before Stalin’s victory.
The historical development of the class party displays, whenever it occurs, the « transfer of a proletarian vanguard from the fields of spontaneous movements stirred up by partial and group interests, to the one of a proletarian action ». This result is favoured not by a denial of these elementary movements, but on the contrary by participation to the physical struggles of the proletariat of the work of ideological propaganda and of proselytism which naturally follows the infra-uterine phase of ideological clarification cannot therefore be separated from the participation in the economic movements that while never considering the trade union « conquests » as the ultimate aim, is important for two reasons : to make these movements an instrument in order to acquire the experience and training, indispensable for an effective revolutionary preparation, through an unmerciful criticism of forecasts, postulates and methods of the Trade Unions and of the collaborationist parties which control them and, on a more advanced level, to realise their unification and their revolutionary overcoming in living experience, pushing them towards their whole and complete realization.
If it is true that, today, all the problems relative to the Party’s development show themselves in the historical picture of an unprecedented, ideological and practical crisis of the international socialist movement; nevertheless the past experience is enough to establish a law : the reconstitution of the offensive power of the working class can’t be the result of a revision, of a modernization of Marxism, and let alone, of the « creation » of an alleged new doctrine, but can only be the fruit of that restoration of the original programme which, in front of the deviations of the Second International, had been assured by the Bolshevik Party and which, in front of those of the Third, was assured by the Italian Marxist Left, in still worse general conditions. Whatever will be the sectors in which the struggle for communism is destined to revive; whenever it will be, the future international movement is the historical stage of arrival of the struggle maintained by this current and it is likely that also physically it will have to bear a decisive role in it. That’s why in the present phase the reconstitution of an embryo of International can take only one form : the adhesion to the programme and to the action of the International Communist Party and to the creation of such organisational ties with it, that would meet the principle of organic centralism and would be exempt from any form of democratism.
Communism is an absolute world necessity of the present society. Sooner or later, the proletarian masses will return to the assault of the fortresses of capitalism in an immense revolutionary wave. The destruction of these fortresses, the victory of the proletariat, can happen only if the trend towards the reconstitution of the class party deepens and extends itself to the entire world. The constitution of the world party of the proletariat : here is the end of all those who want the victory of the communist revolution against which the allied forces of the bourgeois International are already fighting.
International Communist Party
Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program
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