Each publication of our international press carries, under the headline, a box which says: “What distinguishes our party is: the political continuity which goes from Marx to Lenin, to the foundation of the Communist International and the Communist Party of Italy (Livorno, 1921); the struggle of the Communist Left against the degeneration of the International, the strugge against the theory of “socialism in one country” and the Stalinist counter-revolution; the rejection of the Popular Fronts and the Resistance Blocs; the difficult task of restoring the revolutionary doctrine and organization in close interrelationship with the working class, against personal and electoral politics.” What do you mean with this brief and thumbnail presentation of our Party?
Internationalism, revolution, class dictatorship in accordance with invariant Marxism
Thumbnail formulas provide outline sketches – their object is never to illustrate in full. But whosoever reads this cannot but be struck by a distinguishing trait of our movement: unlike the myriad “updaters” of Marxism, we hold to a line which iscontinuous, unchanged and unchangeable. It is a line which defines the Communist Party precisely because it outruns and overcomes all highs and lows, the advances and retreats, the few – albeit glorious – victories and the many – devastating – defeats of the working class during its obstacle-filled journey towards emancipation. In actual fact, it is solely as a result of the uninterrupted continuity of this line that the proletariat exists as a class as such. Indeed, the line does not reflect the proletariat’s temporary and occasionally contradictory position regarding this or that stage of its journey through space and time; but rather, it reflects the direction in which the proletariat must necessarily move, beginningwith its condition as an oppressed and exploited class, before its achievement of ruling class status and, from there (and in all countries), to the suppression of all classes and to communism. The selfsame capitalist mode of production creates the material conditions for this journey: it is hardly something that falls from the sky, and necessarily implies struggle from beginning to end. And Marxist doctrine knows all there is to know about the necessary crossings and indispensable means involved in this journey, as well as the final destination.
Hence Lenin, in a well known paraphrase of Marx, states that those who do not press recognition of the class struggle into recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat as its necessary product and obligatory transition point “for the suppression of all classes and the establishment of a classless society,” are not Marxist.
By recognizing solely the class struggle and the antagonism of interests between capital and labour, one simply takes note of the brute fact of what the proletariat is in bourgeois society, but excludes what history itself imposes deterministically on the proletariat to become, in order to free itself from the exploitation to which it is condemned by the relations of capitalist production: to become, that is, the weapon of violent destruction of the bourgeois state power which polices and defends that system of relations, and the means consequently the weapon by which it sets up its own dictatorship (“a political phase of transition” according to Marx, along the road to the “revolutionary transformation of capitalist society into a communist society”). It means accepting the conditions of subjection which the proletariat forever suffers within bourgeois society, even when struggling to defend its immediate interests from the yoke of capital, and it means denying the proletariat its historical task to emancipate both itself and, simultaneously, humanity – precisely and solely that which makes it a class: its being “the mid-wife of a new society.”
This line unites past and present of the working class to its future, and is no less than the theory, programme and principles of revolutionary communism. And it remains unchanging, regardless of the alternating vicissitudes of the struggle between the classes, in so much as it is embodied in a party that makes itunreservedly its own, in an organization that defends it, fights for it and translates it into action. It is for this reason that Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto: “The communists fight to achieve the immediate aims and interests of the working class, but in the present day movement they at the same time represent the future of the movement itself.”
And, since the proletariat “has no country” and, as a class, pursues objectives which go beyond the limitations of category, locality, firm, section, etc., they add: “What distinguishes the communists is the fact that, on the one hand, in the various national struggles, they emphasise (and exert) those interests common to the entire proletariat, regardless of nationality; on the other hand, in the various stages of development of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, they always represent the interest of the movement as a whole.”
It is this body of postulates that distinguishes the communists. It is this that rules out the possibility of calling communists all those who disavow the international character of both the end towards which the proletariat aims and of the struggle involved in achieving such an end; who repudiate the identity of this end and of this struggle with the interests of the movement as a whole and its future; who disown the necessity of violent revolution and the proletarian dictatorship as afixed course towards socialism; who reject the necessity of the party, armed with that unique science which goes under the name of Marxism, as the organ of this Cyclopean struggle. No link in this chain can be broken without shattering the entire chain and without the proletariat fall down on its back in resigned acceptance of its status as a class destined to be exploited in eternity.
This is the doctrine cut from a single block one hundred and fifty years ago and codified by Marx and Engels in texts which require no additions or changes. It was established anew in its entirety by Lenin to counter the betrayal of social-democracy, against any surrender of the proletarian movement to the “present” or renouncement of the “future”; against any subordination of the movement’s aims and overall interests to presumptive aims and immediate, national interests;against any abandonment of the principles underlying the revolutionary conquest of power and its dictatorial exercise in favour of the would-be safer and less troublesome ways of legalistic, democratic and parliamentary gradualism.
Communist internationalism, militant and centralized organization of the worldwide proletariat
The struggle to not only maintain this line intact in the face of the material, political and ideological pressures of bourgeois society, but also to hone its essential characteristics with ever greater efficacy through the terrible yet salubrious corroborations of history, to organize the fighting avant-gardes of the working class around that fil rouge (tying it up again when it was broken), and to lay siege to the capitalist state strongholds, was a struggle of an inseparably doctrinaire, programmatic, political, tactical and organizational nature, insofar as the communists are not apostles of a new “creed” or ascetics awaiting the arrival of the Messiah, but the militants of a gigantic social war.
It was Marx and Engels who fought to destroy, at the very heart of the First International, the Proudhonist virus which negated economic struggles, strikes and, more in general, the economic organization of the proletariat; the Bakhuninism which negated the party and its centrally exercised dictatorship in the name and interests of class; and the “parliamentary cretinism” which had artfully wormed its way into the rank and file of the proletariat by way of the prevailing social environment. It was Lenin who fought in Russia against populism, economism, legalism, Menshevism and, internationally, first against Bersteinian revisionism and, later, the capitulation enacted as a result of the imperialist war; a fight not only for the refusal of war credits and the social truce during the conflict, but also for revolutionary defeatism and the transformation of the imperialist war into civil war. It was a fight to win over all hesitations, the inertia of fence-sitters and legalists, the shilly-shallying of those who abode by the “rules of democracy”; and it was a fight to conquer power dictatorially under the resplendent light of October 1917, whilst at the same time laying down the foundations of the at long last reconstituted Communist International.
“The Communist International intends to fight by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State.” Thus solemnly spoke the communists who had come to Moscow in July 1920 from all over the world, taking up and confirming anew the line that “goes from Marx to Lenin”: “The Communist International sees the dictatorship of the proletariat as the sole means by which humanity can be liberated from the horrors of capitalism. The imperialist war has united the destiny of the proletariat in one country with that of the proletariat in all the others. The imperialist war has confirmed what was stated in the general Statutes of the First International: the liberation of the workers is neither a local nor a national problem, but an international problem […] The Communist International understands that for the workers’ association to achieve victory most rapidly in their struggle for the suppression of capitalism and the creation of communism they must possess a rigidly centralised organization. This organization must truly represent an organic communist party on a worldwide scale. The parties operating in different countries are merely sections of this body. The organizational apparatus of the Communist International must ensure that the workers of any given country receive as much help as possible from the organized proletariats of other countries at all times.”
This is the line which goes from Marx to Lenin to the foundation of the Communist International. It is a line that rejects all those who refuse to recognize the proletarian dictatorship as the only path towards socialism, as well as those who advocate paths of a national nature to the emancipation of the working class.
The Communist Party of Italy (1921) on the line of Lenin’s Communist International
In January 1921 the Communist Party of Italy was founded according to this line. Its programme contains a synthesis of the theoretical, programmatic and tactical patrimony of communism. Let’s read it:
“1. Under the present social regime of capital, the conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production develops at an ever increasing rate, giving rise to antithetical interests and to the class struggle between the proletariat and the ruling bourgeoisie.
“2. Present-day relations of production are protected and defended by the power of the bourgeois state: based on the representative system of democracy, the bourgeois state represents the organ for the defence of the interests of the capitalist class.
“3. The proletariat can neither crush nor modify the system of capitalist relations of production, from which its exploitation derives, without violently overthrowing the bourgeois power.
“4. The indispensable organ of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat is the political class party. The Communist Party gathers the most advanced, resolute and aware part of the proletariat and as such unifies the efforts of the labouring masses and transforms their struggles for particular group interests and immediate gains into the general struggle for the revolutionary emancipation of the proletariat. The party’s task is that of propagating the revolutionary consciousness amongst the masses, organizing the material means of action, and leading the working class in the course of its struggles.
“5. The World War, brought about by the internal and incurable contradictions of the capitalist system which led to modern imperialism, triggered off the crisis of capitalist disintegration, and in this situation the class struggle can only end up in an armed conflict between the labouring masses and the power of bourgeois states.
“6. After overthrowing the capitalist power, the proletariat must completely destroy the old state apparatus and install its own dictatorship in order to organize itself as ruling class: it will found the organs of the new regime on the producing class alone and it will deny all political rights to the bourgeois class.
“7. The form of political representation of the proletarian State is the system of workers’ (wage labourers and peasants) councils, already in force in the Russian revolution, which is the beginning of the world proletarian revolution and the first stable realization of the proletarian dictatorship.
“8. The necessary defence of the proletarian State against all counter-revolutionary attacks can only be guaranteed by depriving the bourgeoisie and all the parties that are against the proletarian dictatorship of all means of agitation and political propaganda, and by the armed organization of the proletariat to drive back all internal and external attacks.
“9. Only the proletarian state will be able to systematically intervene in the social economy, and adopt those measures with which the collective management of production and distribution will take the place of the capitalist system.
“10. This transformation of the economy, and consequently of the whole of activities of social life, will gradually eliminate the division of society into classes and the necessity for the political State, whose machinery will gradually give way to one of rational administration of human activities.”
The theoretical, political and organizational struggle waged by the Communist Left against the degeneration of the Communist International and the Stalinist counterrevolution
At once the stalwart bastion and assault unit of the worldwide proletarian revolution, Bolshevik power in Russia nonetheless rested upon a frighteningly backward and largely pre-capitalist economic base. The communist strategy thus consisted in working to arrange for the establishment in all countries of that indispensable instrument of proletarian revolution: the class party.
And around this party it sought to muster the all-important proletarian avant-garde whose awe-inspiring will to fight and indomitable spirit of self-sacrifice had emerged intact from a period of military slaughter and post-war chaos and made its presence felt all over the world – especially in central Europe and in those areas where capitalism was at its most advanced. This avant-garde knew full well that the revolution would have to triumph in the developed countries (first and foremost in Germany), if Bolshevik Russia – safe in the knowledge that its grasp on political power was unshakable – was to continue its economic advance towards socialism. In so doing it would steal a march on the laborious process implicit in the transit from a pre-bourgeois and predominantly peasant-based economy to the extreme limit of state capitalism.
Armed with the Marxist doctrine restored by Lenin’s party, and clinging unswervingly to international discipline and its stringent centralization, these parties should have derived their strategy and their selfsame raison d'être from their recognition of the fact that the reformist parties (Lenin’s so called “wage labourer-bourgeois parties”, like social democracy in all its various get-ups) were, by virtue of the aims they had set themselves after divorcing from fundamental Marxism (and thereby ensuring their more or less direct integration within the bourgeois states), forced to play out an irreversible counter-revolutionary role in the social dynamic.
The Bolsheviks made huge efforts to control and overpower the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois forces taking root in the economic and social subsoil in Russia and to spread the revolutionary flames worldwide. Tragically, these efforts were not complemented by a process of organic and stringently monitored formation of communist parties in the crucial, highly capitalized area of Central Europe.
Traditions of a democratic, parliamentary, legalistic and pacifist nature weighed heavily on the western working-class movement. And neither was the leadership of the International – which our current was ever the last to blame for a historical course whose origins lay in the putrid world of the bourgeois West – always fully aware of the fact that the stubbornness and intransigence with which Lenin and his party had fought against opportunism for some twenty years, and the decisiveness with which they had conquered power (to the exclusion not only of explicitly bourgeois parties, but also of working-class parties of a more conciliatory nature), should have been even more radically and consistently applied in those places where the bourgeois revolution had been an accomplished fact for more than half a century.
A rigorous selection was needed from the old socialist parties: but admissions turned out to be a free and easy affair, too many being confident that the relics of the past could be burned on the bonfires in Petersburg and Moscow – a confidence which was big-hearted but turned out to be misplaced. There was also urgent need for new and well-defined tactics which would gather proletarians up around the Marxist revolutionary party on the ground of the defence of living and working conditions within bourgeois society and, by so doing, would not only tear them away from the influence of reformism but also open their eyes to the illusion that those who turned their backs on the line which “runs from Marx to Lenin and the Communist International” could ever be regained to the cause of proletarian revolution. Thus would the working class have also been enabled to defend itself successfully against the bourgeois counter-revolution in its fascist get-up and, possibly, go on the counter-attack. Instead, marching orders were issued which – especially when appropriated and even put into practice by old reformist, or even social-chauvinist fraudsters, hurriedly accepted beneath the flag of the Communist International – were blurred ones and, over and beyond the intentions of the Bolsheviks, admitted belief in that very illusion: a “united front” open to interpretations of a wide, oscillating and even contradictory nature; a “working-class government” – at times presented as “synonymous with the proletarian dictatorship”, at others as a different and even parliamentary vehicle towards power – , all the way down to a “bolshevisation” whose disfigurement of the parties risked turning them into something akin to labour parties, cancelling out their demarcation (so clear cut at the beginning) from peasant movements and parties in the same capitalist countries, and national-revolutionary parties in the colonies, and heralding a second, wretched edition of the Menshevik theory of the “stage-by-stage revolution” in China.
This progressive loosening-up trend in the field of organization and tactics alsomeant that, instead of controlling and directing the process of purification of the communist parties from the bedrock of traditional socialism, the International ended up being conditioned by parties which were only nominally communist in the West. The disastrous twofold result of this was that worldwide revolution now became a distant prospect and, by the same measure, the social bourgeois forces pressing on the Bolshevik dictatorship from within and, more importantly, from without Russia, grew so strong that even what had once been the magnificent guiding body of the October revolution and the civil war was overwhelmed by them. Stalinism was nothing if not the expression of this worldwide overturning in power relations among the classes. As such, it had to massacre the Old Guard so that it might proceed trouble-free on its way to capitalistic accumulation; and before this, it had to disguise its counter-revolutionary role behind the flag of “Socialism in one country” – the progenitor of all the “national, pacific and democratic ways to socialism”, lined up to succeed social-democracy in its summoning of proletarians the world over to partake in reciprocal massacre during the second imperialistic conflict. The line running from Marx to Lenin, which brought about the formation of the Third International and its springtime splendours, thus continues for us in the fight of the “Italian” Communist Left against all early instances of opportunistic danger (at the beginning, a mere danger; later, a nasty shot of materially determined reality) at the heart of the Communist International. And is also present in the fight waged in parallel with the Russian Opposition in 1926 against Stalinism and its taking over of the Soviet state and what was once Lenin’s International.
In the years 1928-1932, beneath a cynical veneer of seeming leftishness, Stalinism resulted in the political and organizational disarmament of the proletariat in the wake of the Nazi-fascist offensive; immediately afterwards, it went about further proletarian disarmament with the “popular fronts” in France, but especially in Spain, where the newly gathering flames of the class struggle were quickly doused in the name of the defence of the republican regime and by means of the government coalition with bourgeois and opportunistic parties. Stalinism in this period also meant buying into second world war carnage under the flag of patriotism and freedom, the admission of “communist” parties to fronts which were no longer simply popular, but also resistance-oriented and national, and their participation in the national post-war governments of reconstruction. The final, coherent corollary of all this was their repudiation – formal as well – of the proletarian dictatorship and of internationalism, and their explicit candidacy for the rescue of coma-bound democratic institutions and a crisis-stricken national economy.
Thus the line that runs from Marx and Engels to Lenin, to the foundation of the Communist International, to the Communist Left’s fight first against the degeneration of the same International and, later, against the Stalinist counter-revolution cannot, in our view, be separated from the historic struggle against popular, war-prone, national fronts and all their various derivations. And that includes the latest instances of opportunism which, in terms of their virulence, are more than a match for even the most nefarious of bloody actions on the part of the old German social-democracy. Neither can the line be divorced from condemnation of both the essentially fascist (albeit democratically cloaked) capitalist imperialism based in Washington and the false socialism which reigned in Moscow until 1989 (and which still calls the shots in Peking today), based on the production of goods, on wage-labour and on all the other bourgeois economic categories.
In defence of the continuity of communist programme, through the theoretical and doctrinal restoration, for the reconstruction of the communist party, organ of worldwide revolution
Gathering up anew the fil rouge of doctrine, of the programme, the principles, the tactics and the organizational methods of revolutionary communism, necessarily requires us to go back to the world vision of the Communist International at the time of its foundation, completed in its organizational and tactical part by a weighing up of the history of the last eighty years (and thereby confirming the resoluteness of the struggle of the Communist Left). In the years since WWII our party has never wavered in this task, and especially since 1952 with a long series of theses which have now been collected in the volume In difesa della continuità del programma communista (In defense of the continuity of the communist programme).
There is no point of convergence between democracy and communism. The path towards proletarian emancipation can be no different from those which preparealready in the present, outside of and against official institutions, be they bourgeois, democratic or fascist in nature, the proletarian revolution. Such a preparation rejects, even as a means of agitation, any electoral and (even worse) parliamentary activity. It is accomplished, on the one hand, by constant participation in the immediate working-class struggles to defend its working and living conditions: struggles which are to be extended, strengthened and developed along the lines of and through classist means. On the other hand, it is accomplished through the untiring propaganda of the proletarian movement’s ultimate objective, with reference to which economic struggles are a school – and only a school – of war as long as they are carried out coherently and without ever forgetting or seeking to disguise their limits. It is accomplished by organizing around the party those proletarians who have become aware, through struggle, of the ways by which final victory can be achieved and the inextinguishable premisesof such a victory; by the strengthening of immediate organizations that are born out of the defensive economic struggle, as a result of the reaction to the absence of the main trade unions and their betrayal; and, lastly, by waging battle at the heart of these trade unions with a view to recovering them (although nothing can be taken for granted here), in situations of extremely high social tension that today are a long way away not only from the red tradition but also from the communist direction.
There is no room along this road for the spontaneously-driven and thoroughly misplaced never-say-die illusion of a revolution and proletarian dictatorship that has not been prepared and directed by the Party. Neither is there room for the Trotskyite illusion of a crippling crisis of a capitalism awaiting solely to be shaken by an organized avant-garde for it to go over the edge after passing through the intermediate stage of “working-class governments” consisting of parties that have moved lock, stock and barrel over to the counter-revolution but which are thought to be regenerable thanks to the impetus of the masses in a state of unrest and the skilful manoeuvring of the communists (in the same way that the “degenerated working-class states” like China, Cuba and others of their ilk, would be won over to the cause of proletarian revolution). Where a century-old adversary of Marxism rears its head again in the midst of working-class “spontaneism” (“workerism”), through Trotskyite (an adjective Trotsky himself would blush at today, notwithstanding his errors) illusionism tactical disorientation (now greatlyworsened) of the decadent International presents itself again and, on its stump, those principled deviations from the healthy Marxist doctrine which alone can explain the confusion of nationalisations in industry and economic planning, taken as they are, with socialism.
More than ever before, the proletariat today requires clarity with regard to the aims of its emancipation and the ways and methods by which it is to be accomplished. We pledge that we shall work hard to provide this clarity, without arrogance but also without hesitations: “a small, compact group making its way along a steep and difficult road”, stubborn in its decision, and faithful to Lenin’s teachings, to fight against, “not only the quagmire, but also those who walk in its direction”.
This is required, today as yesterday and as tomorrow, by the tough job of restoring the doctrine and the revolutionary organ: arm-in-arm with the working class, and outside and against all kind of personalistic and electioneering politics.
International Communist Party
(Internationalist Papers - Cahiers Internationalistes - Il Programma Comunista)