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“The
International Communist Party?”, someone will blurt out
with a mixture of irony and incredulity. “Are you kidding?
Those parties have shown their bankruptcy! Communism is dead!
The era of nationalism has returned! and they call themselves
the International Communist Party! In what world do they live?”
Our skeptic should calm himself or herself: we know very well
in what era we live, and for that reason we so call ourselves.
First of all, let’s clear the air of some uncertainties.
Party?
Yes, we call ourselves a “party,” and we insist
on the necessity of a party. The dominant ideology-the way
of thinking of capital and of those who keep it on its feet:
politicians, economists, trade unionists, the police and writers
of all stripes-would like to reduce us to so many isolated
individuals unable to see beyond the limits of the “I,”
who is paralyzed by the fears pullulating in the world, stupefied
by a trivial, empty, and obscene mass media, and resigned
to an acceptance of what is, literally drugged by the myth
that “the individual can do everything if only there
is the will or the knowledge, if s/he reads or is informed.”
Whereas, in reality, under the reign of capital the individual
is more vulnerable than one can imagine, the prey of forces
whose operation cannot be fathomed.
On
the other hand, the dominant class has its political parties,
each corresponding to the many competing interests that characterize
capitalism. And when need dictates, that class is capable
of generating the “totalitarian party,” an explicit
and direct instrument of class rule, able to regiment within
its ranks individuals otherwise abandoned to themselves and
reduced to impotent molecules. Hence, why should the proletariat
not have its own party? Why should we aid the ruling class
in its work of disintegration, abandonment and subjugation,
by accepting the notion that “the parties have had their
day”? Doing so would be criminal idiocy.
Instead,
we say loudly that the working class has need of its own party
to react to the disintegrative influence emanating from the
ruling class, to respond to the parties of “law and order,”
the “fatherland,” “status quo,” and war.
But it requires a party that encapsulates its historical interests,
that will help the working class regain that unity and self-identity
which is needed in order to defend itself today and to counterattack
tomorrow; a party that remains a stable and recognizable point
of reference founded on a solid theoretical understanding,
with a program clear to everyone. It must stand for a multigenerational
experience and an internal discipline free of any dumb, unfounded
fear of punishment or of blind faith; that rests on the understanding
by every member of the obligation to give to a common cause
without heeding the motivating rewards of public recognition,
personal gain, and positions of honor.
It
is a truism that in these times parties do not fare well.
There are those that have disappeared from the scene and those
that “re-baptize” themselves; that go down with
their leader or that change their political vestments. But
it is not the party-form per se that has gone belly up as
allege so many of the so-called “alliances,” movements,
clubs, “leagues,” which in the final analysis either
end up behaving as parties in the traditional sense, or, not
wishing to do so, simply evince their inability to carry on.
What went bankrupt were the parties whose political programs
relied on one or the other of the two imperialist blocs as
models to follow: the one in the West under the hegemonic
leadership of the US or the one in the East with the USSR
as guide (or in the various other models: Chinese, Albanian,
Cuban, etc.). Looking to these models, they had aligned totally
their politics, strategies, and tactics.
The
economic crisis opening in 1975 with its tragic aftermath
of social instability, unemployment, racism, ethnic hatreds,
and war has minced the old guarantees, certainties, stability
of occupation, the self-assurance in the present, and faith
in the future. The whole world is undergoing upheavals with
old reference points no longer serving as guides; the habits
that have served to rectify and condition the modes of living
of at least two generations have been shaken to their foundation,
and all commentators agree that there reigns today the greatest
uncertainty. In this ever more dramatic situation, there are
those who would bring on greater disorientation and a deepening
of the morass with the proclamation, “The time for parties
is over!”
Communist?
Yes, we call ourselves communist, and we insist most emphatically
on the necessity of communism. A cardinal dictum of Marxism
states that all societies divided into classes reach a point
wherein the further development of productive forces comes
into violent contradiction with the social life associated
with the system. The result is perennial instability, an acute
disintegration of social living conditions in all their aspects-delinquency,
drugs, unhappiness, environmental destruction, violence between
individuals and social groups-with cycles of economic crises
becoming ever more frequent, deeper and longer, and endless
wars that converge from the periphery to the center and explode
into devastating world conflicts. The system rotates about
itself clogged with goods it cannot dispose of, no longer
able to reabsorb the millions of unemployed raised up by its
development, and seeks to escape from the impasse through
the only method it knows-by the over-all destruction of all
that exists in superabundance. After which the endless cycle
begins all over again with renewed aggressivity and an enhanced
ability to destroy.
For
a time now capitalism has reached the level that from the
standpoint of human progress its history is destined to remain
negative. For some time, then, there has existed the necessity-objectively,
not subjectively, materially, not morally-to replace it by
an alternative economic and social system, one that rests
on the very high level reached by the productive forces but
liberates them from those bonds that render them destructive,
redirecting those productive forces to ends that have nothing
to do with the race for profits, the competition of all against
all, and market imperatives that are structurally and genetically
mad!
“Really,
the beautiful accomplishments of Soviet communism!” our
skeptic will sneer. That observation leaves us neither hot
nor cold for the simple reason that we never took for “communism”
that which existed in the USSR (or China, Albania, Yugoslavia,
or Cuba, the lands of so-called “really existing socialism”).
“It’s easy to say that now!” s/he interjects.
No, not from now. We have been saying that from the middle
1920s, when our political current first clashed with the neo-nascent
Stalinism declaring it to be a negation of communism. To make
it clearer: we saw in Stalinism a modern form of counterrevolution.
In the USSR and in the countries of the self-proclaimed “real
socialism” there was not an ounce of socialism or communism.
All of them were possessed by more or less developed structures
of state capitalism. Of capitalism, therefore, not of socialism
or communism, which was reflected internationally in the programs
of the pseudo-communist parties of Stalinist origin, all echoing
the myth of popular democracy and identifying with some sort
of progressivism, their eyes fixed on reforms, parliaments,
and always advancing some scheme for governmental collaboration.
As regards our counter-current analyses, based on decades
of labor, study, and struggle, we carried on alone and by
ourselves. At a time when to affirm the above meant to be
labeled “fascists,” “agents of the Gestapo,”
“paid representatives of the CIA,” our current closed
ranks and learned to reject the infamous deceptions of Stalinism
whose horrific, tragic, and disastrous legacy is visible to
all in every corner of the earth, the fate of former Yugoslavia
occupying first place at the moment.
For
this reason we have no difficulty-in fact, it’s a point
of pride-calling ourselves communist today, yesterday, and
tomorrow. Who has not understood this, who is convinced that
“the era of communism is over,” is, like it or not,
no less than ...the last Stalinist on this earth for insisting
on calling communism what was the (largely) state capitalism
of Eastern countries that, having finished with its primitive,
primary accumulation, now sought to update itself, a response
in part to the world economic crisis initiated in the mid-1970s.
In fact, the necessity for communism is felt ever greater
in former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, in Los Angeles as well
as Moscow or Paris, in Afghanistan as much as Italy; in the
world megalopolis swollen with abject poverty, pollution,
and violence, as well as in the countryside poisoned by an
overuse of pesticides; in the research institutes of medicine,
chemistry, and physics that are driven by the imperatives
of profit rather than need, not to mention the secretive arms-developing
laboratories devoted to the goal of creating ever more diabolical
and destructive weapons to defend the system of private profit.
The necessity is felt in the so-called First, Second, and
Third World, sites of ever greater extraction of surplus value;
in the Amazonian forest devastated by the fires of advancing
capitalism, and no less so on African plains exhausted by
the needs of monoculture and abandoned in the scramble for
cheap petroleum and other scarcer forms of extractive wealth.
International? Yes, we call ourselves “internationalists,”
and we underscore the need for internationalism and for an
international organization and strategy. Not only because
from birth communism has been international and internationalist-and
could not be otherwise. But also because once again reality
itself has indicated the way. In the course of a century,
we have witnessed the impressive spread of capitalism to every
corner of the earth. As Marx had accurately foreseen, capitalism
has subordinated and drawn into its very efficient web of
economic, political, cultural, and informative relations the
most distant area of the planet. The process so presciently
described in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 has leaped out
of the confines of Europe and North America to involve Asia,
Latin America and Africa, subjecting them to its iron laws
and pitiless development. Capital is a worldwide economic
system; it has itself created the basis for a worldwide interactional
collective of human life.
At
the same time the competition amongst the various bourgeois
nations has become very acute, and prefigures the line up
of a future world war. A commercial war between the US on
the one side and Germany and Japan on the other has been on
the order of the day for years, with the other highly developed
industrial nations having to find a place within the parameters
of that confrontation. The “warring” competition
to control natural resources and dominant trade routes in
the environs and periphery of the highly developed areas is
a fact of the day, and this provides an explanation for the
Gulf War, Somalia, Rwanda, the widespread instability in Africa,
Asia, and Kosovo, often assuming the form (but only the form!)
of ethnic and religious conflict. This situation is rendered
even more chaotic and dramatic by the collapse of the Eastern
bloc and the outbreak of local conflicts of unparalleled viciousness.
The world of bourgeois relations oscillates ever more between
the worldwide dimension of this market as an expression of
the imperialist phase of capitalism and the outbreak of localism
and nationalism as reflection of competition in the quest
for profits, characteristics particular to the era of acute
crisis such as the one unfolding in the last fifteen years
with its highs and lows, the phases of vertical fall, and
moments of timid but deceptive reprise.
It
is clear that the only way to escape from the wasteland of
patriotic rhetoric, nearsighted localism, the barbarism of
narrow nationalism, the blind confines of ethnicity-the escape
from the darkness of these ever-spreading conflicts lies in
the restoration of a vigorous international perspective. A
perspective that as a starting point recognizes the positive
historic accomplishment achieved by the productive forces
in laying the very basis of communism; that goes beyond narrowness
and envy, beyond the clearly irrational fears and idiotic
theories nurtured by democratic and bourgeois ideology even
when loudly and rhetorically proclaiming “liberty, equality,
and fraternity.” A perspective able to respond to and
resist every sort of chauvinism however masked; able to stand
opposed to its own bourgeoisie, yet sure in the knowledge
that the struggle is international. A perspective that faces
up to the problems posed by huge human migrations, the destruction
of large areas of the planet, the increasing impoverishment
of the outer peripheries of the developed world with more
than hypocritical and empty, beneficient gestures. One that
responds by embracing in one worldwide brotherhood the working
classes of all nations, forced by the very expansion of capitalism
to undergo the daily experience of hunger, disease, nomadism,
and death.
In
summary, an internationalism that is the obligatory anticipation
(in reality and not on the level of ideas) of the concept
of humankind on which communism must rest, thus going well
beyond the embarrassing limitations to which bourgeois society
has habituated us, with its exploitation and competition for
personal gain. And lastly, an internationalism decidedly against
the stew of ideas so characteristic of that society-the “sovereignty
of the individual,” “the supremacy of the nation,”
and the servile toadying to “elected leaders.”
The
International Communist Party thus stands for a program, a
strategy, a tactic, and an organization that are so structured
as to overcome the contingencies of time and space; able to
assure a continuity through the generations, to integrate
and extol in one organization the best of revolutionary energies
while eliminating personal egoism and envy; able to unite
the workers of the world not withstanding political, ideological
and geographical barriers, to organize, lead, and guide them
in the struggle against capital, for communism, for a classless
society.
Where
We Come From
At
this point our imaginary skeptic will ask if per chance we
are not one of the grouplets or groupies born in ‘68
or so, and somehow survived the internal squabbling and the
years of terrorism characteristic of the era of student movements.
And again we have to disabuse him/her.
The
fact is the International Communist Party comes down from
afar and has nothing to do with ‘68, the youth movements,
the infantile reaction to Stalinism that calls itself “extremist,”
“spontaneist,” “movement-oriented,” “worker-centered,”
etc. Let us add that this is a matter of radical, even genetic,
difference. No matter how small today, with little influence
and of limited membership, our party represented and represents,
through the highs and lows of a tremendously counterrevolutionary
period, the uninterrupted continuation of the grand tradition
of the international communist movement dating from the beginning
of the century. It’s comparable-if our skeptic will allow
us a bit of proud rhetoric-to an underground stream that had
(or was able) to course below the rocks and sand and through
the mire and landslides. Let us retrace this long march by
means of a simplified outline.
1892
- The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) was born. Arising from
the conjoining of various currents, not all revolutionary
and internationalist, the party was led by reformists (although,
in contrast to those who followed in the so-called “Left”
particularly after the Second World War, the former were,
so to speak, at the very least...possessed of dignity!). Those
turn-of-the-century years witnessed huge workingclass struggles
in Italy, Central Europe, and in the U. S., and the reformist
leaderships of the PSI and of the large labor confederations
often found themselves in conflict with the more militant
masses.
1910
- A clearly left current, the Sinistra, emerged at the PSI’s
Congress of Milan in opposition to the reformist leadership
of the party and the trade unions, and soon took a leading
position in labor struggles. This Left, the Sinistra, made
clear its internationalism by strongly opposing the Libyan
War (1911), and organized itself nationally as the Intransigent
Revolutionary Faction at the Reggio Emilia Congress of 1912.
A similar conflict broke out in the Socialist Youth Federation
against those who wanted the body to become largely a culture-dispensing
organization. By the Sinistra, both party and Young Federation
were seen as organs of struggle. The militant youth were to
receive their revolutionary inspiration and stamina from the
whole life and experience of the party as it guided the working
class on the road to revolution, and not from some banal “party
school” education. Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970) and the
“Revolutionary Socialist Club Carlo Marx” of Naples
were decisive influences amongst the Intransigent Revolutionaries,
and have remained fundamental references points in the history
of the Sinistra.
1914
- With World War I the Sinistra proclaimed the need for revolutionary
defeatism, which was in full agreement with Lenin’s theses,
hardly known at the time in Italy. With a background tragically
highlighted by the failure to oppose the war when most Socialist
parties voted war credits and solidified with their respective
national bourgeoisie, the PSI, notwithstanding the efforts
by the Sinistra, approved an ambiguous slogan, “neither
support nor sabotage,” which meant no support for the
war, but no fight against it either. With Mussolini at their
head, the interventionists had earlier abandoned the party.
1917
- At the outbreak of the October Revolution, the Sinistra
aligned itself unhesitatingly with Lenin and Trotsky, greeting
the event as the opening phase of an international revolution.
“Bolshevism, A Plant for Every Clime” was the piece
written by Bordiga which warmly greeted the revolution. Antonio
Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, who would form the group publishing
L’Ordine Nuovo in 1919, were initially under the influence
of a non-Marxist idealism and displayed a somewhat confused
and ambiguous understanding of the event. In the article “The
Revolution Against ‘Capital’,” Gramsci erroneously
asserted that the October Revolution negated Marxist materialism.
In Italy, the Sinistra, the only faction in the PSI with a
national network, was able to convoke the party to a meeting
in Florence in 1917 that led to the reaffirmation of intransigent
opposition to the war. Beginning in 1918, with the nation
seized by mounting social tensions resulting from the war
and indicated by the increasing strikes and malcontent, the
Sinistra, in possession of its own organ, Il Soviet, from
December of that year, took the lead in getting the PSI to
support revolutionary Russia and openly recognize the international
significance of Lenin’s strategy.
1919
- This was the crucial year for all of Europe: the year of
the great strikes in Italy and revolutionary attempts in Germany
and Hungary, the year Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknicht were
massacred, and the year of the birth of the Third International
as the party of the world revolution. In Italy, a polemic
broke out between the Sinistra-pressing for the creation of
an authentic communist party able to apply the experience
of the Russian Revolution to the West and stressing the social
and political novelty of the soviet as an organ of sovereign
power in the revolutionary process-and Gramsci’s L’Ordine
Nuovo, that insisted in identifying the factory council as
the equivalent of the soviet, portraying the council-normatively
a subsidiary organ operating within the social and political
functions of capitalism-as “the embryo of the future
society.” Still in 1919, thanks to the theoretical and
practical actions of the Sinistra, a Communist Abstentionist
Faction was founded in the PSI, the nucleus of the future
Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d’Italia).
One of the views characterizing the faction was the belief
that in the nations of established democratic rule-Western/Central
Europe and the US-the parliament was no longer the site where
important political and economic decisions were taken, an
axiom drawn from the classical texts of Marxism. It had ceased
to be a usable tribune from which to make known communist
views, and for the longest period served to lead astray and
dissipate revolutionary forces. Hence the parliament was to
be opposed: with a democratic government, opposition to the
bourgeois system was rendered most dramatically by boycotting
political elections. A second tactic advanced by the Sinistra
was the concept of “united front from below”: this
meant avoiding the confusing political convergence of parties
and organizations having disparate if not conflicting programs,
while drawing all workers of whatever political, ideological
or religious conviction into a common struggle for clear economic
and social objectives and in defense of their conditions of
life and work.
1920
- At the Second Congress of the Third international, the Sinistra
played a determinant role in stiffening the conditions of
admission. In so doing, at a time of continued and considerable
social ferment, it hoped to bar admission to groups and parties
whose acceptance of a revolutionary program and discipline
would prove rhetorical and their actions detrimental, particularly
if the postwar verve and revolutionary conditions receded,
as was soon the case. In seeing the International as a true,
authentic world party rather than a formal arithmetic summation
of national parties, which later would be free to go on and
“make politics” as each saw fit, of all the European
communist groups the Sinistra was the clearest on the question
of internationalism. Even as it was involved in founding a
communist party in Italy, the Sinistra in the International
stood for the reaffirmation of Marxism’s integrity and
for an internationalism strategically and tactically binding
the working classes of the West with the rebellious people
of the East. It believed that a revolutionary communist party
must seek the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie leading
to the establishment of the class dictatorship as a bridge
to a classless society. Strongly favoring internal discipline,
it maintained that, within both the national parties and the
International, obedience must rest on the voluntary acceptance
and understanding of the revolutionary program by each and
every adherent, and not on bossy compulsion.
1921
- At the PSI’s 1921 Congress of Leighorn (Livorno), the
Communist Sinistra broke away from the old reformist party
and founded the Communist Party of Italy (CPI), a Section
of the Communist International. Regardless of the subsequent
assertions of a Stalinist historiography, the leading offices
of the party were staffed entirely by Sinistra representatives
and by Bordiga. At this time, Gramsci and Togliatti were in
total agreement with this leadership. For two years, in a
Western Europe where revolutionary elements were seeking a
road to revolution to provide decisive aid to the USSR, the
Sinistra-led CPI was the foremost edge of the politics of
“Bolshevism, A Plant for Every Clime.” Amongst the
trade unions, it carried out a strenuous campaign to construct
a real united front-not of parties-of the working masses whatever
their political loyalties; it fought no less strenuously against
social-democratic reformism that misled the workers with its
illusory pacifism and legalism; it openly confronted fascism,
which it described as the reaction of industrial and agrarian
capital to a worldwide economic crisis and the militancy of
the proletariat, and not a feudal phenomenon as would be averred
later by Stalinists; it built a defensive military apparatus
against reaction and did not have to rely on such organizations
as the “Arditi del Popolo,” a formation of spurious
and uncertain nature; and during all those years marked by
the reflux of the postwar revolutionary wave, the party maintained
an international and internationalist stance, criticizing
from the outset the rise of localism or autonomous actions
and, above all else, the moves subordinating the International
itself to Russian national needs.
1923-24
- After the arrest of Bordiga and a good many of the party’s
leaders in early 1923-although they would be released by year’s
end following a successful defense leading to acquittal-leadership
passed to a secondary group more open to manipulation by the
International. Despite a national conference of the party
held in Como in May, 1924, at which the delegates voted overwhelmingly
for the Sinistra, the party leadership was given by Moscow
to a new Centrist grouping formed under Gramsci and Togliatti.
The Sinistra was thus barred from leadership. Employing means,
methods and language correctly identified with Stalinism,
in the course of the next two years the Sinistra was crushed
and its influence eradicated: Prometeo, a journal speaking
for the Sinistra, was suppressed after a few issues, party
sections with Sinistra majorities were dissolved, Sinistra
spokesmen were removed, their articles and views censured
or not published, and the party put under a regimen of intimidation,
suspicion, and discipline that was ever bossier and bureaucratic.
1926
- Archival evidence has shown that the III Party Congress
held outside Italy at Lyons, France, met before an assembly
stacked by the Centrist leadership; two examples of the methods
used will suffice here: 1) in the pre-congressional congresses,
the votes of absentee Sinistra followers were automatically
given to the Gramscian Center; 2) at a final meeting in Milan,
delegates to Lyons were winnowed to eliminate Sinistra representation.
At that congress, the Sinistra was completely marginalized
and no longer able to act or have its views known. At the
VII meeting of the Enlarged Executive Committee of the Communist
International held in Moscow between February-March of that
year, Bordiga opposed “Bolshevization,” that is,
the reorganization of the party on the basis of the factory
cell that, under the pretense of increasing the workers’
influence, had the effect of enclosing the base within the
narrowness of the factory or shop, to which the person of
the functionary-bureaucrat became an indispensable source
of “the line to be followed” and the embodiment
of leadership. At that incandescently dramatic session of
the VII Enlarged Executive Committee, Bordiga, who openly
confronted and questioned Stalin, was the only delegate amongst
all present to ask that the grave internal crisis extant within
the Bolshevik Party-the prelude to the emergence of the faux
and lying theory of “socialism in one country”-
be posted as the order of the day for the next world congress.
To quote his words: “the Russian Revolution is our revolution
also, its problems our problems, and [therefore] every member
of the revolutionary International has not only the right
but also the duty to labor in its resolution.” Meanwhile,
the Fascist authorities saw to it that Bordiga and the entire
Italian Communist leadership were arrested long before the
next world congress. In the USSR, Stalin isolated the United
Opposition. Between 1926 and 1930, the Sinistra followers
were expelled from the party, and thus given over to Fascist
repression or forced to emigrate. The campaign against the
Sinistra was undertaken in parallel with the persecution of
Trotsky and his supporters, although between the two currents
there were dissimilarities of views-which did not prevent
the Sinistra from defending Trotsky in the crucial years of1927-1928.
Bordiga himself was expelled in 1930 on the charge of “Trotskyism.”
Meanwhile, first with the betrayal of the English General
Strike in 1926 and then with the subordination of the Chinese
Communist Party to the Kwomingtang during the Chinese revolutionary
year of 1927 resulting in the massacre of the Canton and Shangai
Communards by the Nationalists, Stalinism, a degenerative
manifestation indicative of the rise of a bourgeois force
within a USSR isolated by the absence of supportive workingclass
revolution in the West, undertook the complete reversal of
the principles of the communist program.
1930-1940
- With Bordiga under continuous police surveillance and isolated
in Naples, the Sinistra suppressed and hounded by Fascism
and Stalinism, its members dispersed through emigration to
the West where they had also to fight and oppose the growing
illusions cast by bourgeois democracy, there began a phase
of our history best described as heroic. The Sinistra reorganized
in France and Belgium under the name of the Faction Abroad
(Frazione all’Estero) and published the periodicals Prometeo
and Bilan, thus returning to the political battle. The situation
was very difficult for this handful of scattered comrades.
Theirs was a battle waged on three fronts: against Fascism,
Stalinism, and bourgeois democracy. They continued the criticism
of Moscow’s policies-the “united fronts,” the
illusion about the efficacy of democracy, the continuous political
somersaults that bewildered the working class, the Nazi-Soviet
Pact, and Togliatti’s appeal to “the brothers in
black shirts.” They worked vainly during the Spanish
War to get the uncertain left groups to orient themselves
on a class basis. They carried on the struggle against Fascists
and Nazis in occupied France, even spreading defeatism amongst
German troops. With the myths of democracy penetrating ever
deeper in the international workers movement, the Sinistra
responded with critical analyses. At the onset of war in 1939,
they pointed out its imperialistic character. It was already
clear to them that Stalinism represented the worst of counterrevolutionary
waves. With insufficient forces due to their isolation, they
began the analysis of what happened in the USSR. It was this
tenacious resistance, this determination to not allow a break
in the “red thread” that led to the rebirth of the
party in 1943.
1943-1952
- Thanks to the repatriation to Italy of a number of comrades,
the work to reweave a real and viable organization was begun.
At the end of 1943, the first issue of Prometeo appeared clandestinely.
Contacts were made with Bordiga; the first political work
was undertaken among proletarian elements deluded by the resistance
movement. The effort was made to give a class basis to the
strike wave in the last years of the war. By working in contact
with the proletarians, significant gains were made in the
North, and often internationalists were elected shop stewards
in the factories. At last, the Internationalist Communist
Party was born having as its journal Battaglia Comunista.
The clash with the Stalinists emerged into the open. While
Togliatti as Minister of Justice decreed a general amnesty
of fascist leaders and rank-and-file members amidst paeans
to “the new man” and “the reborn democracy,”
his party denounced the Internationalists as “fascists,”
inciting a policy calling for their physical elimination.
The culmination of this defamatory campaign was the assassination
of two comrades, Mario Acquaviva and Fausto Atti, and others
massacred by Stalinists but whose fate has remained shrouded
in anonymity. In this initial period, party life was still
characterized by theoretical uncertainties and doubts brought
home by repatriates from the Faction Abroad. Matters came
to a head in 1952 with the need to reestablish the party solidly
on the corpus of a Marxism cleansed of all Stalinist distortions
and freed from the imperative of an immediate activism. This
led to a first split. The periodical Il programma comunista
began publication in 1952. Until his death in 1970, Bordiga
devoted himself to the enormous task of reconstructing the
theoretical and political basis of the party, which became
truly international in fact as well as name in the 1960s.
The “Fundamental Theses of the Party” (1951), “Considerations
on the Organic Activity of the Party in a Situation which
is Generally and Historically Unfavorable” (1965), “Theses
on the Historic Duty, the Action and Structure of the World
Communist Party” (1965), and “Supplementary Theses”
(1966) gave the party its theoretical, political, and organizational
structure.
Historic
Party and Formal Party
“OK,”
answers our somewhat puzzled skeptic, “I concede you
have a long and glorious history. Still you remain a handful
of nuts rattling in an empty bag.”
Of
course, we are few and our real influence is almost nothing.
The fact neither astonishes nor frightens us. Such observations
do not take into consideration that, as indicated earlier,
Stalinism was the most ferocious counterrevolution ever to
have overwhelmed the international communist movement. Its
devastating influences were felt for over seventy years; they
are felt today. In all of this time, thanks to the destruction
of the world communist movement and the obliteration of the
movement’s theory and practice, the working class of
Western capitalism has been harnessed to the illusion of a
democratic order, defined by principle as that idyllic world
in which all contradictions can be overcome and eliminated.
The working class was subjected to the massacre of another
world war. It went through the postwar reconstruction creating
an imposing mass of surplus value-the boom period to the 1960s-,
the minimal offerings of which bred the delusion that this
is “the best of all possible worlds.” It turned
its back on the people of color who rebelled against the rule
of imperialism and were beginning to experience the delights
of capitalist penetration. Every time the class attempted
to defend its interests as a class, it was told... “national
interests would be endangered” or “there is the
danger of helping the right wing,” and so on and on.
It
is abundantly clear that under the conditions existing in
the Euro-American scene for the last half century and more,
revolutionary communism has had a difficult time developing.There
is a virtual composite wall that must be broken through: ways
of thinking, habits, ideological influences, traditions, apathy,
illusions, the fact even that for long periods jobs and salaries
appear to be guaranteed... All things that for us materialists
are more than understandable. Not only that: communists already
experienced such situations. After the failure of the revolutions
of 1848, the Communist League counted on only a few members
scattered throughout Europe; but this very solitude was the
prelude for the emergence of the First International in 1864.
After the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx and Engels remained
substantially alone in drawing the lessons from that revolutionary
attempt drowned in blood; but those very “lessons”
pondered “in solitude” permitted the communist movement
to revive within a few years on a more solid basis. Something
similar happened with Lenin and the Russian Marxists after
the failure of the Revolution of 1905, the crucible for the
confirmation of Bolshevism leading to the 1917 revolution
and the birth of the Third International. The same befell
the Sinistra and our party after 1926, its direct heir.
That
amidst this counterrevolutionary wave-and this last, as we
have said, was the most destructive of all, even erasing the
ABCs of Marxism-this party was reduced to a few in numbers
and remains unknown to the many is perfectly comprehensible.
It is part and parcel of historical development. The party
does not change an unfavorable situation with a magic wand,
does not conjure up the revolution with an act of will. The
revolutionary process matures over decades pari passu with
the accumulation of contradictions that the capitalistic system
unavoidably generates. The party must favor this process,
organize, direct, and guide it theoretically and practically
to the degree it can. It may appear paradoxical, but history
demonstrates it to be so: the revolution matures during the
counterrevolutionary phases, when revolution is not anywhere
on the order of the day. We prepare for it by reconstructing
the party, defending its theoretical and practical inheritance,
reattaching the red thread that all would cut, and spreading
its program even at the cost of swimming against the current.
If one does not prepare beforehand in this manner, the revolution
will never come: when favorable conditions present themselves,
the party, the necessary instrument acting as guide, will
be missing and again the bus will be missed.
That
is an important primary consideration, but not enough. There
exist two parties: the “historic party” and the
“formal party,” and here, too, we deal with a key
concept of Marxism. The historic party is the sum total of
theory, program, theses, and historical experience of communism.
It dates from 1848, when the Communist Manifesto was published,
and includes in a monolithic bloc all parts that integrate
with each other: the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the
political battles of the First, Second, and Third Internationals,
the lessons of the Commune of Paris and of the Russian Revolutions
of 1905 and October 1917, the experiences of the great battles
in the capitalistic West and the Orient between 1917 and 1927,
the theoretical-political doings of the communist Sinistra
over the span of a half century, and the lessons it has drawn
from the counterrevolution. It is, therefore, all in one a
means of interpreting the history of social development, a
political doctrine and an experience of struggle combined
with a theory, a program, tactics and strategy, all of which
constitute the fundamentals of communism to which subsequent
generations must have recourse to.
And
then there exists the formal party. That is to say, the translation
of this totality-theory, program, strategy, tactics-into an
organizational structure, a living organism made up of people
of flesh and blood working in specific circumstances and undertaking
to spread the influence of communism. This is the organization
that by retying the red thread of communism materially fuses
the diverse generations into one prospective struggle. And
this body is inevitably affected by the highs and lows of
class struggle, by favorable and unfavorable moments, and
by victories and defeats.
There
does not exist, let us note this well, a separation between
the historical and formal party. We are not dealing with two
separate and successive stages or experiences. Let’s
put it this way: the historic party has to “turn itself”
into the formal party without which communism will remain
a dead letter; the formal party has to identify itself with
the historic party for otherwise it would be deprived of communist
theory, program, strategy, and tactics, its true substance.
The whole history of the international communist movement
is, in the end, no more than the account of the passionate
and difficult process by which the historic party becomes
the formal party, theory becomes praxis, producing a living
and fighting entity. In certain periods the formal party may
be reduced to a few individuals deprived of or having reduced
influence in the historic process. It remains paramount that
these few elements defend the historic party with all their
might, seeking to give it life, whatever the derision or indifference
of the great majority, while projecting to the limits of their
ability the party’s influence nationally and internationally.
This is the precondition, so that at the first appearance
of more favorable circumstances-and the capitalist cycle cannot
but continuously create these circumstances, given the internal
contradictions inherent in its nature-communism will find
again a more numerous following.
In
the course of the second postwar period, our party found itself
having to defend the historic party, without ever ceasing
to struggle to keep alive a formal party in the society of
capital, no matter how isolated we remained. We know that
this struggle of ours, which stands for a literal turning
upside down of the present mode of seeing and interpreting
reality, is basic, if we are to grow from two to four, eight,
sixteen, thirty-two, and so on, tomorrow. Our party had to
go through the more difficult and unfavorable periods of all,
and this also is the reason why its history has been so labored.
A deeply counterrevolutionary period as the one we are still
experincing is short on the oxygen of class struggle, and
this factor weighs on the party like a ton of lead, helping
to give rise from time to time to illusions and delusions.
Thus the small party must guard against becoming a small sect
of academics caught up in a continuous internal debate and
at the same time it must be on the alert against the easy
illusion that, regardless of the period, it is enough to multiply
our activities a thousand fold in order to amplify our influence
in the working class.
Why
the Working Class
“All
this talk about the working class! But the working class does
not exist anymore... with the telecommunication revolution,
it disappeared! Possible that you are unaware of it?”
We
beg our interlocutor to study better reality before shooting
off his mouth, and thus avoid having to parrot and repeat
the latest sound byte pronounced by an “expert”
in a 40 second news report on last night’s television.
This
genuine blast of hot-air discovery about the “disappearance
of the working class” or its “integration”
into the “middle class” is not of recent vintage.
It was circulated and popularized by certain US sociologists
in the ‘40s; it was taken up by “thinkers”
associated with Herbert Marcuse in the ‘60s; it was “confirmed”
and became the daily bread of some ultra-left grouplets in
the ‘70s. In fact, one can trace the idea back to the
very origins of bourgeois ideology: from the beginning the
latter claimed to have eliminated the class division so typical
and representative of feudalism. It is no surprise to find
anew the theory underfoot today. Let us look at matters as
they stand a bit more closely.
If
we maintain that the notion of the disappearance of the working
class is a fat tale, we do so on the basis both of theory
and of actual reality. Theoretically-and laying it out in
the most simplistic fashion-the making of profit is at the
heart of capitalist production; without profit capitalism
would shrivel and fall away. (In fact, it was Marx’s
discovery of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall that
exposed the Achille’s heel of the system: that which
will lead inevitably to its death.)
Now,
this profit is created by the extraction of live surplus value;
that is to say, making the worker labor for a number of hours
but paying him for only a part. (Again, we must caution that
the problem is rather complex, and the inquirer seeking to
learn more can deepen his/her understanding of the Marxist
view by reading some texts-Wage Labor and Capital, Salaries,
Price, and Profit, or Capital itself.) This means that capital
can never give up the employment of human labor, precisely
because it cannot extract surplus value from a machine. Herein
lies the great contradiction of capital: it must introduce
machines in order to increase production, but it cannot introduce
them beyond a certain limit, otherwise it would reduce drastically
the source of its profit.
Hence
the tendency to mechanization is constant in the history of
capital (a propos see Capital, Book I, Section IV, Chapter
XIII) but this cannot alter or substitute for the central
mechanism that allows the system to function: the extraction
of surplus value from living labor that remains essential
to capital. And this holds true either for the traditional
working class, the so-called blue collar, or for the new technical
strata, the white collars, who also contribute to surplus
labor through the non-payment of work done. That an individual
may work amidst the fiery light and the resounding crash of
a steel foundry or in the aseptic brilliance of a laboratory
producing chips and fiber optics in no way modifies the rapport
between labor and capital. And from its point of need, capital
cannot eliminate labor to which it is attached like a hanged
man to his noose.
So
much for theory. If we then turn to actual reality, we have
additional confirmation. It is enough to open one’s eyes
to become aware of the enormous growth of the working class
in all corners of the world. Media speak of “the globalization
of the market,” and what is this globalization if not
the penetration and settling of capitalism in every nook and
corner of the earth, leading to ultra-exploitation and massive
uprooting in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? We are fed a
constant stream of news announcing tragic factory fires in
China, Taiwan, and Thailand; of the violent suppression of
strikes in Korea, Zaire, and South Africa; of the establishing
of new sweatshops in Latin America with the factories surrounded
by barbed wire, like the military bunkers of old, to keep
the trade unions out and underpaid labor in. What is all this,
if not the dramatic proof that the working class, far from
disappearing, is instead born and multiplying in areas that
until a few decades ago were untouched by the presence of
goods and modern capital? Finally, what are these huge flows
of migratory human streams that cause so many headaches to
our good bourgeois and petty bourgeois, again, if not the
evidence, on a world scale, of the swelling ranks of a population
of pure proletarians, that is, of arms that must count on
the work of future children (in Latin, prole) to hope to survive
at least less poorly? At this point, we could even open a
sideline consideration on “overpopulation,” another
nightmare for our good bourgeois and petty bourgeois, but
for us further proof at hand of the insuperable contradictions
of a capitalism that must stimulate the birth of a labor force
destined historically to defeat it.
And
again: what is the drama of an increasing unemployment everywhere
but the proof of the presence of a very real, very palpable
working class in the very metropolis of old capitalism, the
US, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and now Japan,
the very nation where until recently bourgeois ideology blared
to the four winds the happy tale about the disappearance of
the working class?
In
reality, in the last half century we have witnessed on the
one side to a comprehensive and awing growth of destitute
workers and authentic proletarians and on the other to a sharp
process of proletarianization particularly in the citadels
of advanced capitalism-the ghettoes, the banlieus, the bidonvilles,
the favelas. Far from sliming down, the ranks of the world’s
working class have multiplied.
“However,
you cannot deny that a rapid de-industrialization is in process!”
Certainly, but beware: the de-industrialization of certain
areas-we stress certain areas!-has nothing to do with the
kooky ideas of post-industrialism or post-capitalism. This
is a phenomenon that can only be analyzed by grasping the
totality; that is to say, by understanding that we are dealing
most simply with capital’s imperative to find the most
advantageous conditions for the utmost exploitation of manpower,
and hence for the extraction of surplus value. Putting it
clearly: if factories disappear from Detroit, it is only to
reappear along the US border in the maquiladora zone of Mexico;
if the “big factory” is dismantled, it is only because
dozens of smaller factories or sweatshops arise in some peripheral
area... Faced with its economic crisis, capital must restructure
in order to 1) avoid scenarios of great conflict due to a
concentration of a large, seasoned labor force, 2) have at
its disposition a younger labor force, less expert, hungrier,
and more amenable. But we always end up with a cyclical phenomenon:
the dispersion must end with a new concentration because capital
is “genetically” compelled to move in that direction.
There
is no question, and in so saying we anticipate the immediate
objection of our skeptic, that faced with this macroscopic
dispersion of the world’s proletariat there is an absence
of understanding amongst its members that they are a class,
that they have common interests both immediate and historic.
But, nota bene, if Marxism identifies the proletariat as the
revolutionary class that will bury capitalism and open the
way to a classless society, it does not signify that the proletariat
is automatically always and everywhere revolutionary. This
is another fat tale that we leave to Stalinists and “workerists,”
both being equally demagogic.
The
designation of the proletariat as a “revolutionary class”
follows from its placement in the center of the process of
production. It is at the heart of the extraction of surplus
value and below it there are no classes that it can exploit.
By rebelling, it puts into question the whole structure of
the society based on capital. Liberating itself, it liberates
all humanity. In all previous revolutions that have marked
the passage from one mode of production to another, against
slavery and against feudalism, the leading protagonist class
had behind it other classes destined, once the revolutionary
change was carried out and the leap to the new productive
order completed, to become the oppressed and exploited classes.
With the bourgeoisie and the proletariat we come to the end
of the long arch across the span of time associated with the
division of society into classes. Once victorious, today’s
exploited working class has no class over which to exercise
its own exploitation. The new society that will be born-that
has already reached the maturity of birth, and the very delay
of this act induces a travail which so resembles an agony-will
not know class divisions and, therefore, will not have exploited
classes.
Certainly,
there is a subjective problem. In its great majority this
class, both the older part to be found in the aging metropolises
and still enjoying long-won social guarantees and the newer
one undergoing dramatic exploitation in the countries of more
recent capitalist development, does not perceive itself as
a class and does not move in the direction of its historic
tasks. As a matter of fact, we can say that for the most part
it does not move at all. It undergoes exploitation without
rebellion. This does not disconcert us. We stand before a
political problem that has much to do with Stalinism and bourgeois
democracy, that is to repeat, with the effects of the most
profound counterrevolution in the history of the workers’
and communist movement. It is a political problem that has
to do with the destruction on a world level of the revolutionary
party: the destruction of those factors of consciousness and
will, of theory and action that from the beginning have been
identified by Marxism as the indispensable conditions for
a revolutionary development and necessarily served as guide
to all past revolutionary classes.
Without its revolutionary party, which means without its revolutionary
political program and the class’s understanding of itself
as a class, the working class is a nothing! It remains a statistical
conglomeration of individuals unable in their majority to
raise themselves to the heights of their historic mission.
The present as history demonstrates this in an unforgettable
fashion.
For
that reason the path that leads to communism necessarily goes
through the fixed course of the reconstruction of the revolutionary
party.
What
Is Communism?
“Certainly
after the experience of the countries in the East, today it’s
difficult to talk about communism,” notes our somewhat
disconsolate skeptic.
We
understand that. To speak of “communism” today is
like turning inside out something that had been the object
of intense Stalinist propaganda, of abuse by opportunistic
social-democratic misrepresentation and bourgeois misconception,
all three the work of decades. It means lifting the mask off
“socialism in one country,” the total lie of “really
existing socialism.” We must restate basic concepts.
Communism
did not die with the USSR or elsewhere, if only for the simple
reason that economically it was never born. Communism stands
for the abolition of wage labor, commodities, money, profit,
economic competition, social classes, and finally of the state
itself. In the USSR and its derivatives, there existed: wage
labor-workers received wages; money-as a means of exchange;
profit-industries and cooperatives tried to close with a positive
balance sheet; economic competition-there was an internal
market and a gradual opening to the world market; distinct
social classes; and a well-established state.
If
before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the ensuing
dramatic consequences our skeptic had looked with Marxist
eyes at the two “opposite worlds” of capitalism
and non-capitalism, she/he would have noted a fundamental
similarity between the workings and outcomes of two systems
depicted in propaganda as opposites. In both, the urban concentration
continued unabated (there comes to mind in particular the
megalopolis of the so-called “Third World,” economically
and politically connected to the advanced capitalist West)
and the misuse of the surrounding countryside, the wasteful
overproduction of missiles and armaments at the expense of
the social needs of the majority, the competition for work
amongst workers and the alienation and despotism of the factory
regime, the periodic domestic crises, the gargantuan needs
of the state and the wars of plunder and imperialist control
abroad, the galloping trend to the concentration of wealth
in the hands of a few as opposed to the misery of the majority,
the immeasurable growth of the power of the state and the
concentration of decision making in the hands of a political,
corporate, and military elite exclusively responsive to the
needs and voices of the ruling class. Any communism there?
Let us not be fools!
What
was then the USSR? For us Internationalist Communists, the
answer was always very clear. Under Stalin and his successors
what passed for communism was in large measure a centrally
controlled state capitalism, although in some sectors, largely
agricultural, there remained forms of small production, even
of a pre-capitalist kind. Thus in the USSR there occurred
what happens in every budding bourgeois regime: under state
aegis, a state-coerced primitive accumulation lay the basis
for the subsequent formation of a large-scale capitalist development.
To Lenin and us communists, all this was very clear: after
the revolution of 1917, the politically victorious proletariat
had to undertake the gigantic historical task of raising the
country out of economic backwardness to set the basis for
communism. This necessarily entailed a fully developed capitalist
economy: growth of large industry, a sufficient network of
railroads, large-scale cooperative agriculture, electrification,
and so on, while awaiting the outburst of the victorious revolution
in the economically developed West (Germany in primis). Those
were the conditions for a victorious communism on an international
basis.
But
revolution never came in the West because the parties there
- and from a certain point in time, the very Third International
itself - proved unable to align themselves on a verily revolutionary
front, and the October Revolution crushed between the absence
of Western support and the necessary re-emergence of economic
capitalism in Russia turned in on itself. The Stalinist counterrevolution,
appropriate expression of the young Russian capitalism, destroyed
the compelling initial strategic vision, liquidated Lenin’s
party both physically and theoretically, proclaimed as “socialism”
what was no more than the “capitalist accumulation”
referred to above, and theorized the possibility of “socialism
in one country.” Such was the enormous and tragic deception
which cost the blood of millions of victims, and up to their
necks in this deception one could find (still finds!) convinced
Stalinists, democrats, and fascists who extended Stalinism
their benediction by calling it communism.
“Then,
what happened from 1989 to today?” It happened that the
form of capitalism that reigned in the USSR and its satellites
reached the point in its development when it could not continue
in its old form. State ownership had become an obstacle, particularly
under the impetus of the crisis that developed in the ‘70s
and reached into the USSR by the end of that decade. It was
necessary to give vent to the new forces and energies developed
in the “hot house” atmosphere of state protection
and free it up to autonomous development outside centralized
restraints and shackles. Hence the break with the earlier
phases-a “break” common to all bourgeois nations
at some point in their history: from centralized state controls
to the so-called free market, only to return again to state
“dirigisme” or reliance when the socio-economic
situation deteriorates. To recall this process in action one
need only think of the Keynesian policies of the New Deal
and the state controls behind European fascism.
Well, then, what do we really intend by communism? Marx did
not discover the characteristics of a communist society. Even
before his time communism stood for the “the communion
of goods,” the placing of all social riches in common
and the rational administration in a society that did not
know the market,wage labor, capital and social classes. In
addition, a whole era of the human experience had unfolded
under a form of “primitive communism,” a stage conditioned
and circumscribed by a very low level of development of productive
means: work in common on land held in common and the consumption
in common of the products of this work such as happened at
the beginning of human prehistory before the appearance of
classes, the division of labor, and private property.
Marxism
freed communism from the limitations of utopianism and presented
it as an outcome unrelated to the realm of wishes or dreams-the
schemes of a Fourier, Saint Simon or Robert Owen-but as a
necessary stage, a conquest leading to the actual achievement
of real society. Capitalism drives the division of labor to
the nth degree and separates the worker from any ownership
of the means of production (machines and equipment) and from
the means of subsistence (food, housing). Having entered this
productive process without reserves-think of the enormous
numbers of pauperized Africans, Asians and Latin Americans
in the areas which are being drawn into the capitalist vortex-the
worker must pass into the market to buy his means of subsistence.
He must now sell his labor power to the capitalist who has
amassed the means of production, and who may appear in the
form of an individual, an anonymous society, or the state.
With the finished products of labor in his possession, the
owner is entitled to keep the lion’s share of the wealth
created by those workers, riches that are legally dispossessed
from the workers’ ownership. Moreover, the workers can
feed their families only to the degree that their labor is
useful to capital, and here one might recall the authentic
social sores that accompany the process: under-age labor,
exploited immigrant labor, and prostitution.
This
social rapport can sink the masses into an ever greater misery.
But by greatly increasing the productivity of labor and tying
all the sectors of production into a vast concentration raised
to a worldwide scale, the means were created -but only the
means- to satisfy human needs through the central and international
administration of the riches produced. One does not have to
“construct” socialism as if it were a Lego toy,
but to correspond the (today private) mode of appropriation
of wealth to the social (collective, communal) character of
its production.
Most
important above all, while utopians sought to introduce communism
by preaching its goodness in tales of wonderment and appealing
to the better side of governments or enlightened entrepreneurs,
Marxism demonstrated that capitalism itself produces its own
gravediggers. It creates the modern proletariat, a class that
capital tends to concentrate, unify, and compel to struggle,
if it is to survive. It is the only class that in the history
of class formations has no underling class that it might exploit
in turn. Liberating itself, this class, the step-creature
of capital, liberates all of humanity. It is endowed with
the power to assure the birth, painful and traumatic as it
may be, of the new society.
To
arrive there, the struggle of the modern working class conducted
under the guide of the communist party in possession of a
doctrine and a worldwide strategy must push itself to the
total conquest of political power. The proletariat must impose
its own class dictatorship for as long as is necessary to
crush with terror any opposition by the dispossessed classes,
while concentrating in its own hands control of production
and exchange and thereby breaking the old productive relations
and abolishing the inertia and attitudes of centuries.
Naturally, the communist transformation of society will occur
only after the international power of the working class will
have consolidated itself through a decisive victory in the
great imperialist fortresses, the actual centers of the world
economy and the true gendarmes of the planet. And equally
true, time will be needed for a new human generation to arise
from the wreckage of the old society now born in the conditions
of communism.
This
is the goal of the movement that calls itself communism, and
it does not base itself on notions of “one of many opinions,”
or a “cultural project,” or an “ethical intent.”
What is involved is not some philistine banality having to
do with “more social justice,” or a “better
quality of life, or a “more equitable distribution of
wealth”-all rhetorical expressions that leave matters
where they are since they do not touch the fundamental nature
of capitalism. What is involved is the historical transition
from one productive system to another, as happened in the
step from slavery to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism.
With this additive: with the abolition of class division,
communism will allow humanity to escape at last from the pre-history
of exploitation, oppression, and destruction.
In
the society that will emerge from this transformation-a transformation
that, we repeat, is radical, total, and not a yellowing photocopy
of what came before-any form of dictatorship, any form of
state power, will be of no value, since the economic basis
underlying differentiation of social classes will be gone.
But while the revolutionary crisis, the seizure of power,
and the proletarian dictatorship are clear-cut, dramatic events,
the socio-economic changes will of necessity take more time,
if one is to deal with the a whole number of particular situations,
e.g., the disparity in the stages of economic developments.
Hence in lower communism, largely referred to as socialism,
social constraints will remain in place and are best illustrated
by the rule: “To each according to his/her work.”
The false “really existing socialism” of the past
pretended to have achieved this goal by relying on...wage
labor that was in actuality an exchange of goods (commodities)
for goods (commodities). Lower communism (socialism) foresees
the introduction of a work chit, a script that entitles one
to articles of consumption in proportion to one’s contribution,
with a deduction to provide for the general social needs of
society. The script is not money and, unlike money, cannot
circulate and cannot be saved or accumulated.
Only with the achievement of production in abundance will
social constraints disappear and society enter into a full
communism, illustrated by the precept: “From each according
to his/her capacity, to each according to need.” No longer
subject to the blind economic laws attendant on the anarchy
of the market humanity will have done not only with economic
crises, genocidal wars, ethnic and national wars; emancipated
from the oppression of producing for profit, competing for
resources and markets, and producing for the sake of production,
humanity will be able to organize production worldwide in
a conscious manner following a rational plan that will regulate
the rapports now turned harmonious amongst production, consumption
and population, where today there is rampant disequilibrium
due to the distended growth of capitalism.
Mankind
will have time to dedicate itself effectively to solving the
problem of agriculture and food production, and again look
to areas that have been scanted by capitalism for the simple
reason that the margins of profit are limited. To succeed,
the “advanced countries” whose industries and know-how
were constructed out of the blood and sweat of generations
on all continents will undoubtedly lend themselves to a gratuitous
modernization of the agriculture of the “less developed,”
something unthinkable under capitalism. This will help mightily
in closing the abyss opened by imperialism between races and
nationalities and will favor the free formation of an international
union, the crucible from which there will emerge a united
humanity.
No
longer menaced by the external and unfriendly power of capital,
now master of its own destiny, the communist society will
be able on the one hand to master and apply to human use the
formidable new forces found in nature (not turn them into
a menace to human survival, as has capitalism with the splitting
and fusion of the atom), and on the other put to rest fear,
obscurantism, and religiosity.
Rationalizing
production will put to an end the contemporary ravaging of
nature and the division between city and country through a
gradual and more equitable distribution of economic activity
across the entire terrestrial surface, that will also begin
to end, thanks to these two changes, the menace of pollution.
An end will be put to the waste and rape of natural resources:
humanity will no longer be in harness to labor for profit,
but for the satisfaction of human need. With the end of capital
and the wage system, and therefore the end of man’s exploitation
of man, not only the dramatic alternative of submitting to
brutish labor or of growing unemployed will be crushed. Under
communism, all will participate in social labor to the degree
of the ability of each, which presupposes a different labor
force indexed by age, with the exclusion of children and the
disabled. Thanks to the application of the most modern techniques
lifted and liberated from the control of monopoly and private
property, society will be in a position to eliminate all perilous
and useless activities from the manufacture of armaments to
the training of police and the use of double accounting, thus
radically shortening the hours of work to the baseline of
need. Given the state of technology, perhaps a two-hour day
would suffice on a worldwide scale.
To
the degree that the proletarian dictatorship emphasizes these
measures at the center of its program, there will be the elimination
of an antithesis between school and production, and an end
will be put to the chatter that passes today for the non plus
ultra of culture. Domestic work from cleaning to infant training
and raising will be socialized, thus freeing women forever
from a millenarian slavery and a social inferiority of which
they have been victims.
These
revolutionary changes of the conditions of work and life will
do much to remove the antagonism between the sexes and between
the generations, so contentious a point under capitalism.
At the same time, they will completely transform the rapport
between collective life and “privacy,” (the latter
existing today only to be ever abused or to degenerate into
a solitudinous and miserable loneliness). Even the relationship
between play and work and the very conditions of the environment
would undergo massive change. Generations born free from the
yoke of capitalism would be able to devote themselves to other
important matters having at hand the means to deal with them.
The drastic reduction of work time especially would not only
free mankind from the labor and the maladies resulting from
the frenetic quest for profits, for all the producers would
be free now to plunge into intellectual areas; the natural
sciences, the complex aspects of social life, literature and
the arts-all would reacquire that collective dimension characteristic
of those activities at the beginning of the prehistory of
man. At last, the material conditions will have been set to
overcome finally the divarcation between physical and intellectual
labor, earlier so essential to the formation of social classes.
No longer will men and women be condemned to brutish and repetitive
labor: on the contrary, they would be freed from reliance
on an exclusive “specialization,” “craft,”
“career,” or vocation so highly lauded in bourgeois
thought. Each of society’s members will face the need
for some undertaking in the most diverse areas of social activity,
obligatory but necessary.
With
the disappearance of the division of labor, the administration
of things, already reduced and simplified by the disappearance
of capitalism’s market and exchange values, can be divided
amongst all members of society. Administrative machinery,
the foundation of the modern state, will have lost significance.
In such a society, in the absence of the struggle of all against
all, individualism will have vanished. Gone will be the basis
for the opposition of the individual to society or society
against the individual. In a society of the human species,
participation in the collective effort will emerge as the
underlying basis of vital need, and the free development of
each “the condition for the free development of all.”
Whole
generations have fought for this future, with millions of
anonymous proletarians having given their blood in a struggle
that has spread already to all continents. This is communism!
“No,
it is utopia!” exclaims our irritated disbeliever. Stop!
Utopia is an ideal society imagined without taking into account
the material conditions from which it might arise, and without
tracing the path of development that these very conditions
suggest. It’s trying for the moon with a pedaled airship.
Historically speaking, every problem may be raised in a real
manner only when the possibilities and conditions for a solution
exist. The possibility and the objective conditions for communism
already exist within capitalist societies themselves: the
high level-even too high!-of production, the globalization
of the economic system, and the presence on a world level
of a class without reserves. One must work to create the subjective
condition for the change: the party that will guide the revolutionary
process. But be the conditions objective or subjective, they
are already obvious to communists, and we do not mean something
inexplicable or an article of faith!
On
the other hand, are our views utopian when we indicate the
objective and the means to reach them: formation of the revolutionary
party, its implantation amongst the masses on a worldwide
scale, the continued growth of economic and social contradictions,
the reawakening of the class struggle, the outbreak of the
revolution led by the party, the seizure of power, the installment
of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the forcible intervention
in the economy to introduce a radically different economic
order? Or aren’t truly utopian those who leave unchanged
the present system of capital, the market, profits, merchandise,
competition, and bewitch themselves with talk of “sustainable
economic development” or “equitable and responsible
business”; who appeal to the conscience of “men
of good will” to end the ever more frequent and bloody
wars, donate balm to ease the suffering created by the incessant
dramas of want and illness in the far reaches of the planet,
and propose the incremental development of underdeveloped
countries to eliminate the tragic sore of emigration, when
it is precisely the sweeping introduction of capitalism to
those countries-the demands it makes on an international level
and the recurrent crises that accompany it-that is responsible
for this tragic phenomena? That truly is utopian, and of the
most painful sort, because it is not innocuous: it deceives
millions and in so doing contributes to the strengthening
of the system that gave rise to the ills listed above.
“Very
well, but this ‘communism’ of which you speak exists
nowhere, as you yourself note!” Sad is the mode of thinking
that believes possible only that which exists and refuses
to fight for what is not yet, though it is possible and even
necessary. It’s a bit as if the Wright brothers had not
set themselves to create a flying machine given that... no
such machine had ever existed earlier. What is to be born
does not exist yet; that’s elementary. Even bourgeois
society did not exist when the first revolutionary burghers
set out to oppose the feudal system. So what? As with the
one above, such an observation is tantamount to implying total
passivity, the deadening of one’s mental faculties: it
is the result from a way of thinking that at all times insists
“this is the best of all possible worlds.”
And
then, as we have said, it is a false observation. There existed
a “primitve communism” that given its low productive
forces had to give way to a society based on class-based production.
There was the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, that
showed how it was possible to reorganize social life and what
errors to avoid in so doing. There was the experience of the
first years after the October Revolution that indicated the
long road to be taken and, again, the errors to avoid in terms
of international strategy.
“Yes,
OK, still you have behind you one hundred and fifty years
of failure!” And so? To establish itself as a world order
and defeat feudalism, the bourgeoisie took five hundred years:
from the first stirring of the Italian communes in the late
Middle Ages to the French Revolution of 1789, and even longer
in some regions of the planet. Five hundred years of glorious
battles and bloody defeats, long periods of uncertainty and
proud advances, and finally total victory. Anyone finding
this view objectionable would do best to abandon the notion
that all affairs must be concluded in the fretful haste so
typical of bourgeois conduct associated with the closing of
a deal, remembering that communists work for the future of
human kind. There is written in one of our texts from 1965:
“S/He is a militant revolutionary and communist who has
been able to forget, denounce and tear out of his/her mind
and heart the status assigned by this putrefying society,
and sees and confounds him/herself with the entire millanerian
span that ties the ancestral tribal predecessor in the struggle
against the wilderness to the member of the future fraternal
community, glorious in its social harmony.” (From: “Considerations
on the Organic Activity of the Party in a Period when the
General Situation is Historically Unfavorable”)
And
What Does It Mean To Be Communists?
If
dealt with in detail, this would be a subject that would take
up a lot of space. In effect, for a reader truly interested
in understanding and anxious to find anew the road to revolution,
it would entail the summing-up of the communist program and
taking the reader back to all our texts, traditions, experiences,
and party activities. This cannot be done in this space, but
we can try to define the unmistakable stances that distinguish
the revolutionary communists.
To
be communists means being antidemocratic! Democracy expresses
the outcome of the bourgeois revolution and the structure
of its power. The claim of equality for all was a powerful
weapon in the struggle against the rigidity and closed hierarchy
typical of feudal society. Still, the new society that emerged
from the bourgeois revolution never knew equality for the
simple reason that class divisions remained, now shaped by
the imperatives arising from the economic laws of capitalism.
Equality was for the bourgeois, leaving to the proletariat
dire necessity.
Centuries
have gone by, but matters remain the same. Democracy actually
continues to be the best cover for exercising bourgeois control-the
best means of deluding the individual into believing that
s/he is free and master of one’s own destiny, whereas
enormous material forces crush people into obedience to laws,
rhythms, and push them into the maw of unforeseen and uncontrolled
developments. Moreover, from the time world capitalism entered
the imperialist phase dominated by financial capital and the
power blocs of the great powers, this democracy has become
ever more emptied of substance, a rhetorical front that conceals
a substantial movement toward centralization, authoritarianism
and fascism.
In
reality, democracy and fascism do not stand as polar opposites,
but enter into a reciprocal relationship that assures the
continued dominion of capital in the final analysis. Obviously,
communists have no use for democracy, a term which has from
its first coining shown to be fundamentally hypocritical.
In Greek, democracy stands for “the rule of the people,
the rule of all”; yet the democracy of classical Greece
excluded from “the rule of all” foreigners, helots,
and slaves. Communism has nothing to do with democracy: by
abolishing all classes communism will introduce the first
true equality, not for a few but for the entire human race.
Communists
have no use for democracy not even as a means for internal
party practice, nor as a way of increasing the party’s
influence, nor as a means of exercising power after the overthrow
of the bourgeoisie. The communist party is a disciplined party,
founded on an organic centralism-a process much like that
of a living organism by which center and periphery, directing
and operating organs are tightly and dialectically connected
in order to operate on the basis of an integrated understanding
of the party’s program, theory, strategy, and tactics.
They have no need for internal democratic measures to establish
the order of things or the party’s organization, which
are the result of a veritable natural selection arising from
comrades working for a common goals without privileges, personal
ambitions, formal recognition or material gain.
On
the other hand, communists openly declare their intents. They
don’t hide from anyone that once in power they will exercise
authority in a dictatorial fashion because it is the only
way to carry out that surgical cut if one is to put an end
once and for all to the old society-an operation that will
be long, painful, and complex: the heritage of centuries and
centuries of class rule will not disappear in the blinking
of an eye. Ferocious will be the resistance of the beaten
class, and the very habits and mentalities, the whole tradition
of bourgeois individualism and ways of doing things, the heredity
of capital’s competition and oppression will exercise
an enormous inertia. Only with a party based on a sound program,
one closely connected with the working masses and the most
deprived proletarians, who for the first time will have been
awakened to the real significance of politics found in the
dictatorship of the proletariat-the historical transitory
phase to a new history for the human species, sans privileged
or exploiting groups-would communism be victorious.
The
discussion on the significance of democracy raises unavoidable
conclusions. To be communist is to be antiparliamentarian.
For an entire early phase of bourgeois society, the parliament
was a place for communists to wage political battles. To be
sure, it was not the most important forum. From the very beginning
it was clear to communists-consult the “These on Parliamentarism”
prepared by the Third International in 1920-that the parliament
was above all a theatre of democratic illusions, whereas the
commanding decisions affecting social and economic life were
made outside parliament. And to believe that the ruling class,
which is ever ready to suppress with force any workingclass
manifestation, is so naive as to trust its survival to a ballot
box outcome is both ingenuous and a case of accepting voluntary
political suicide.
This
does not take away the fact that in the early years communists
used the parliament, although exclusively as a tribune from
which to have their message heard, emphasizing the antithesis
between class struggle and the nature of bourgeois power,
however democratic. It was a useful tactic, but only if it
was kept in mind that the real sites of struggle between the
worker and the bourgeois are in the factory, on the street,
and in the public areas.
It
was of great usefulness in the young democracies and in those
countries moving out of feudalism and into capitalism, but
the tactic turned useless and harmful in the countries of
old democracy where the representative bodies had become a
powerful drug by which to drain from the masses the will to
fight. The arrival of modern imperialism completed the process:
the real decisions concerning economic and social matter were
taken from the representatives and moved elsewhere-to the
banks, the organizations of industrialists, the International
Monetary Fund, etc. These are the true organs of bourgeois
domination, representing the general and international interests
of capital, capable of extending control over nations, governments,
national parliaments, local representative bodies, and so
on.
Most
emphatically at this point, the pass word for communists can
only be against the parliamentary system and against the electoral
system! And then, the very modality of elections-their obsessive
frequency, the enormous costs, the debauchery of television,
the play-acting of candidates ever hungry for dollars from
corporate interests, and the paralysis of any other social
and political activity that they imply-is the best proof that
their function is to dissipate workingclass demands, move
them away from the class struggle and delude them into thinking
they can sometimes count. Instead, we call for an end to these
illusions and a return to a meaningful vision of political
struggle, away with these frustrating rituals useless to workers
and very useful to the ruling class!
To
be communist is to be against federalism and local controls.
Federalism and “localism” are two exquisitely bourgeois
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