The lyon theses (1926)

Introduction

The Lyons Theses are situated at such a crucial moment of the his­tory of the communist and worker movement that they constitute both a culmination and a point of depar­ture in the laborious process of the formation of the world proletarian class party.

Drawn up by the left current of the Communist Party of Italy to be counter posed to the theses of the half-Stalinized leadership, they were pre­sented at the 3rd congress of the party at Lyons in January of 1926.[1] They appeared just a few months after the 14th congress of the Russian party at which almost the entire Bolshevik Old Guard, headed by Kamenev and Zinoviev, in an about-face almost as violent as it was unforeseen, rose in opposition to the extension of the NEP and the "Peasants, enrich yourselves!" slogan of Bukharin and the "red professors", and the suffocating internal party regime set up by Stalin. They also appeared one month before the 6th Enlarged Executive of the Communist International (February 1926), at which a battalion of paid lawyers fired red bullets at the only international force - the "Italian" Left, to be precise - that had dared to denounce the Komintern crisis. When it was finally eliminated, the terrain was prepared for the imminent condemnation of the Russian Opposition, which would ensue in November and December.

The international communist movement had reached a crossroads. At the 14th congress Kamenev, Zinoviev and Krupskaya, who until then had shared the political responsibility of the leadership, became aware they were expressing the revolt of social and material forceswithin the Soviet state in their struggle against other objective social and material forces a thousand times stronger than the individuals lined up at the podium. (Did not they share with the leadership of the Party, just until few months and few days before, the responsibility of a common political line?). Similarly, in the international arena, the Left knew that by drawing up its theses, which as usual were not confined to the narrow "Italian question", but dealt with communist tactics on a world scale, it was expressing a historical course that in a few months would assume the name of China and, in a rare and even unique convergence, England, i.e., a semi-colonial country on the one hand, and the archetype imperialist power on the other.

It was the year of the supreme test. The destiny of Soviet Russia and the International depended, in the last analysis, on the outcome of the struggle of the Chinese workers and peasants and British proletarians. As the year progressed, the Russian opposition would find out what a terrible situation had been brewing for some time. Rising above old disagreements, Trotsky and Zinoviev, to mention only two, would form a desperate bloc against the tide of counter-revolutionary forces. Throughout 1927, the former would wage a magnificent battle and finally go down in defeat. The Russian Opposition was defeated so also the Chinese revolution, and the English general strike as well. The entire international communist movement was destroyed. In the course of these two years, proletarian internationalism had tried, for the last time, to break the encirclement of "socialism in one country" in Moscow. This battle will remain inscribed in indelible characters on pages that will inspire future generations of the Marxist revolutionary vanguard. However, the Russian Opposition remains unable to transmit to these generations a general lesson of a historical course that began long before 1926, since its final collapse was, at least in part, a product of that period. It was able to denounce the evil, but not attack its roots: this it could not do so because it shared in the responsibility for this historical period, and Stalin and Bukharin were able to paralyze it by reminding it of this fact in their odious polemics, knowing well that their worst enemy was already imprisoned in the net they had all shared in weaving.

Such was not the case with the Italian Left. Weak as it may have been in the international arena, it was the only force that had the right and the ability to draw an overall lesson from the five previous years, given the stern warnings it had issued year after year regarding the tactical eclecticism of the Komintern, which was increasingly enforced by organizational manipulation, ideological terror and the crushing weight of the state. It drew this lesson at the beginning, not the end of the decisive year (even before: in Italy, the discussion prior to the 3rd congress, during 1925, concentrated on this topic), recognizing it the fait accompliwhat it had predicted long before hand. Alone against everyone (foremost Zinoviev) at the 6th Enlarged Executive, it was also alone in demanding that the "Russian question" (i.e., the question of "socialism in one country" and the bureaucratic disciplinary regime set up by Stalinism and imposed on all parties in the Komintern) be placed on the agenda of an emergency international congress and thereby removed from the Bolshevik party's monopoly on discussion and decisions. The request was transmitted to the Praesidium, which put it off until the especially orchestrated Enlarged Executive in November-December, effectively shelving the problem. The congress wasn't held until two years later, on the ruins of the revolutionary opposition, and no mention was made of the question. Moreover, when it presented its corpus of theses to the international movement as the basis for a complete,organic solution to tactical problems, one tied to just as firm a conception of the program, the Left inserted the Russian question as one link in the chain connecting all the vital questions of the International, and it thus created the conditions for the return of the international movement to its original program on even more solid foundations. At the 7th Enlarged Executive (November-December 1926), Trotsky was altogether correct in stating that if the Bolshevik party placed its stakes on the world revolution it could remain firmly in power not one year, but fifty: but could this stupefying bet be maintained without - as the Left put it - inverting the pyramid[2] of the Komintern, now resting in an unstable balance on its summit (i.e., on the crisis-ridden Russian party), without a total change in its internal regime, and above all, without a complete, vigorous revision of the practice of sudden, unpredictable tactical reversals that had produced so many disasters? Trotsky was never able to answer this question; or rather, he answered it only indirectly by resorting to the tortuous, fateful road of elastic maneuvers he vainly sought to illuminate with a resounding appeal to the revolution in permanence.

This overall answer is to be found in the general section of the Lyons Theses (and in its international corollaries), and precisely because it is a general solution it can only be accepted or rejected en bloc. Holding to this position, the Left might certainly be crushed under the weight of the unfavourable relationship of forces that developed, as it was in the end; but it is just as certain that it could only rise again on the basis of this position, and that an international resurgence of the revolutionary proletariat and its party would only be possible on that basis, i.e., of a complete system fusing together tactical and programmatic questions and implying, by a process of deduction, the mode of organization of the movement.

For this reason the Lyons Theses are a point of departure for the present and the future, just as they were a culmination of the history of the decisive years between 1919 and 1926. They are not the product of a few heads, but a dynamic balance sheet of the clash of real forces in the arena of class struggle in a period in which the revolutionary battles of an entire century were condensed, putting to the test of fire the ability of communist parties to remain faithful to their teachings, without deviating. Marxism would be worth nothing if it were unable, in the tradition of Marx and Lenin, to convert even defeats into the elements of victory. This is the profound and timeless significance of our 1926 theses.

It is thus important to show that all the thrusts in the long battle waged by the Left in the International converge on and fuse in the Lyons Theses, from which it is possible to work back to 1920 to trace the continuity between the episodes of this battle and the series of historical events synthesized in the prophetic analysis of the theses.

As can be seen in the first two volumes of the History of the Communist Left[3], the Left was incontestably the only current that responded to the world war by adopting the sameprincipled positions as those defended by Lenin and the tiny vanguard of the Zimmerwald Left. With the outbreak of the October revolution, and during the two following years, it wasalso alone in remaining firmly attached to the aims and methods of the Bolshevik dictatorship and its leading organ, the Russian party. It was clearly alien to that formal, vague allegiance inspired by the whim of the moment which induced the sudden conversion of the majority of the French Socialist Party, or elicited the sudden support of the international centrism, both of which remained demagogic and confused, even though, in the most optimistic hypothesis, it may be admitted that their leaders were sincere. It was also alone in stating, at the end of 1918, that a definitive break with the socialist right and especially the even more perfidious centre, and the formation of the communist party on the foundations that would be laid by the 2nd congress of the Communist International in 1920, were indispensable conditions for a revolutionary outcome to the post-war crisis.

It is thus not surprising that the Left, intervening in the 2nd congress without an official mandate, as a current in the Italian Socialist Party, did not share any of the objections raised (or temporarily silenced, only to be dragged out back in Italy or in later international congresses) by the official delegation with respect to the Theses on the role of the communist party in the proletarian revolution, the conditions for the formation of Soviets, the national, colonial, peasant and trade union questions, etc. Instead, it made a direct and even decisive contribution to the vitally important formulation of the Conditions of admission to the Communist International, insisting that they be made even more severe and that they leave no possibility of adaptation to "local situations."

However, in the context of this common struggle to raise "insurmountable obstacles" to reformism around the Communist International, the directives the Left proposed for thewhole movement regarding program and organizational procedures already possessed the comprehensive, "closed" character of the formulations the Lyons Theses would defend later with clarity and precision. This character was not the product of one person’s brain. It was made necessary by the accumulation of experiences fighting under a fully democratic regime with its inevitable bouts of reformism and centrism. And the fact that it was reinforced by vigorous polemics against the leadership of the International could never have been a result, as some later claimed, of "theoretical ostentation" or concern for moral integrity or esthetic perfection; it was exclusively for eminently practical (in the Marxist sense, of course, wherein theory and action are two dialectically indissociable elements) reasons. The Left's attitude was dictated by a healthy concern not so much for the present - i.e., with an historical phase that was far from having exhausted its revolutionary resources - as for the future. Western and central Europe were at the centre of these concerns, since this area was rightly considered the keystone of world communist strategy. However, the maturation of the subjective conditions of the revolution - and above all the party - was lagging behind the development of the objective conditions there, while the historical circumstances were such as to engender theoretical confusion and organizational heterogeneity and ineffectualness. It was therefore necessary to give the rising proletarian movement a centralized world leadership. Under the firm leadership of the party of Lenin and Trotsky, the relatively open and elastic formulae used to this end already involved some risks. But what would happen later, if the gigantic revolutionary wave subsided and, with prospects for a revolution fading, the danger of a "social-democratic switch" - to borrow an expression from Trotsky - a danger that is always more real in phases of retreat than on the eve of an insurrection, were to threaten again, bringing to the surface the debris of reformism that excessively vague formulations had not been able to distance or eliminate? With the war over and revolution apparently nigh, people like Cachin and Crispien accepted the theses of the Communist International, soviet power, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the red terror with the same ease with which, six years earlier, they had entered the camp of national defense and the imperialist was. But the objective pressures that had impelled them, unconsciously and involuntarily toward the International would someday be lacking, and the rift separating them from real communists would become an abyss. In this case, how could the International, itself "a factor, but also a product of history" (as the party always and necessarily is) escape from the external pressure of an unfavourable situation as well as from what the Lyons Theses called "the repercussions that the means it employs in its action have on the party, through a dialectical interplay of cause and effect"?

An unbroken thread thus connects 1920 and 1926, and this explains why the Lyons Theses, reworking, developing and giving a complete, definitive structure to the problems of 1920, have been instrumental in transmitting them, now complemented by the real judgment of practical confirmation, to new generations.

To begin with, the links in our dialectical chain were well delimited. If the doctrine, the program and the system of tactical rules are unambiguous and known to all, binding on all members, the organization will be unified, disciplined and effective. Because it has mastered these conditions of its existence, the party will be able to prepare itself and prepare the proletariat for revolutionary solution to the crises of capitalist society, without, in phases of reaction, ever compromising the possibilities for a revolutionary revival of the party and the class. But if one begins by relaxing the links in the chain, and then proceeds to build a theory on that basis, all is lost, including both the possibility of victory in a period of revolutionary advance and the possibilities of a revival after periods of retreat. The party is destroyed, since it is only the organ of the revolution to the extent that it uses a solid theoretical and practical continuity to predict "how a certain process will come about whencertain conditions have been fulfilled"[4] and "what must be done in the various possible hypotheses on the evolution of objective situations."[5]

The history of the 3rd International is unfortunately also the history of the gradual abandoning of this path. It subsequently became the history of how to kill the party without even wanting to, or even with the best intentions of saving it. 1926 was the year of "socialism in one country" and its inevitable retinue - Bolshevisation, the crushing of the Left Opposition under the steamroller of discipline-for-the-sake-of-discipline - and this cursed formula means nothing other than the assassination of the world party. The Komintern was definitively dead in 1926. What followed was only a dance of death around its coffin.

For purpose of the presentation we distinguish three aspects to the collapse, though they are in fact intermingled and finally converge in the destruction of the real unity of the international communist movement, reduced in 1926-7 to a superficial unity based on military discipline, and serving to mask or justify in advance the freedom of the leadership to betray the program down to the last shred. Finally, when the external pressure of the “apparati” of the Russian party and state power had relented, this "unity" gave full rein to the thousand "national roads" of an unrecognizable "socialism." The stages in this process were, briefly, as follows.

We had demanded insistently that communist parties (or better, the International itself, as a single communist party) be formed on a theoretical and programmatic platform valid for all times, to be accepted or rejected - something similar to the synthetic proclamation in the first point of the Lyons Theses (General questions). This theoretical and programmatic barricade would definitively block not only the doctrines of the ruling class (be they spiritualist, religious and idealist in philosophy and reactionary in politics, or positivist, Voltairian and free-thinking in philosophy and Masonic, anticlerical and democratic in politics), but also the schools of thought having an influence on the working class: from social-democratic, pacifist and gradualist reformism to "syndicalism", which depreciates the political action of the working class and the necessity of the party as the supreme revolutionary organ; and from anarchism, which repudiates on principle the historical necessity of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat as means for transforming society and suppressing the division of society into classes, to "centrism", a bastard, ambiguous formula, synthesizing and condensing deviations of the same kind behind a disguise of pseudo-revolutionary phraseology.

This barricade was not raised. The French party, infected to the core by the parliamentary, democratic virus, chauvinistic if need be (Ruhr!, Algeria, etc.), always deaf to the needs of the trade union struggle, constantly contesting any centralized leadership in the name of “its country's special conditions”, soon inserted its Masonic Jacobinism (Frossard!) and populism (Cachin!) through the gaping hole that had been left. In the Scandinavian parties the theory of "religion considered as a private matter" took hold and a whole Enlarged Executive had to be devoted to this unlikely question in 1923, barely a few months away from the last revolutionary upsurge in Germany, just when all energies should have been concentrated on finding a revolutionary solution to a crisis whose consequences, positive or negative, would necessarily weigh on the entire world movement. The syndicalism dormant within the French party and the workerism of the German party came to life, in reaction to the gradualist and parliamentarist, minimalist and democratic atmosphere. Later on, that mixture of Sorelism and Crocean idealism contained in the “Ordine Nuovo” current”[6], whose adherents had been kept in line while the International remained firmly on its original positions and as long as the Left led the party, once again had free rein. In the end, in conjunction with a skillfully orchestrated advertising campaign in the same way to the launch of the most original products of the bourgeois industry, the theory of "socialism in one country", that supreme insult to Marx, Engels and Lenin, and to a century of proletarian internationalism, was hatched and spread. Now anything was admissible, since nothing had been prohibited by a limpid, invariable definition of the doctrine and program. By dealing exhaustively with the question of the relationship between economic determinism and political will, between theory and action and class and of the movement free from the double scourge of inert passivity on the one hand, and unbridled voluntarism on the other, of which the orgy of so-called "Bolshevisation" and the cannibalistic Saturnalia of the “building socialism” in isolation - i.e., in one country - were only the latest variants.

As for the second aspect of the party's decline, the Left had requested the drafting, even in a somewhat schematic form, if need be, of a single, obligatory system of tactical rules, solidly rooted in principles and a prognosis, derived from these principles, of a range of possible alternatives in the dynamic of the class conflict. This request was regarded as abstract, and some spoke of a "metaphysical formula". But the tragic events of these past decades proved how terrible concrete this request actually was. It was obvious to us with the formula for the "conquest of the majority", then the "political united front", and finally the "workers' government" formula, and we followed the overall effects on the organizationof the laborious maneuvers to incorporate groups of reformists and centrists, and even whole wings of parties. Slogans have their own destiny. The 4th congress of the International lay at the point of contact between a year of bitter defeats (1922) and another extremely tormented year during which the glorious Russian party was shaken by a serious international crisis that could only have been overcome by the steely firmness of a Lenin (the Letters to the Congress in 1923 demonstrate that the great revolutionary, without hesitation or remorse, would have administered a vigorous thrashing if he had been able to take his place at the head of the central committee), but also a year that witnessed a revival of class struggles in Germany, Bulgaria and Estonia and the first sparks of a conflagration in the East. In this intermittent darkness, the glowing fibre of inextinguishable principles was gradually lost, and tactical eclecticism definitively aborted the last opportunities of the period, aggravating the confusion in the Bolshevik party and the International. These events show with utmost clarity the extent to which tactical wavering reacts upon the principles and causes chain reactions in all areas. The Lyons Theses explain this in the second part (International Questions). It is nonetheless important to follow the details of the inexorable process, beginning with the 4th congress, that dragged the International into total ruin.

While fascism, in power in Italy, launched its offensive on the communist movement and arrested the left leaders of the Communist Party of Italy, preventing them from making themselves heard during the crucial year that had just begun, in Germany the occupation of the Ruhr, the collapse of the Mark, the agitation of all strata of the population and the appearance on the political scene of the first nuclei of the Nazi party (NSDAP) confronted the communist party (KPD) - after the defeat or fruitless common action by the parties on both sides of the Rhine - with the thankless task of choosing one of the many interpretations of the united front and "workers' government" which would best conform to the theses of the 4th congress and the German situation. Faced with this dilemma, the "two spirits" that had co existed in the party since the beginning gave two different answers to the two questions: united front from above, as the leadership wanted, or united front from below, as an unsure, vacillating "left" wanted; and a "workers' government" in the sense of parliamentary support for a social democratic government, in the sense of participation in a coalition with the social democrats, or even a benevolent neutrality toward the bourgeois government in power to promote passive resistance to the allied aggression (as the leadership of the party envisioned), or "workers' government" in the sense of a "general" mobilization of the masses with a view to the revolutionary seizure of power" (as the "left" minority expressed it, without giving more detail)?

The disagreements were not limited to these two questions of relatively recent origin. In a situation in which, especially in the Rhineland and the Ruhr, the working masses were in motion, often armed, both against the occupation force and against the bourgeois national government, spectres of the 1921 "march action" began to take shape' should one disassociate oneself from these generous outbursts because they are manifestations of infantile adventurism - the leadership opted for this attitude, invoking the lack of preparation of the masses and the party and the excessively optimistic analysis of the relationship of forces made by the "left" current, to take refuge in a growing “legalitarianism” that came out in full bloom toward the middle of the year? Or should one strive to channel these thrusts, direct them toward a goal, discipline them, as the left wing wanted to - correctly, from the point of view of principles, but in reality with much more rhetorical and activist notions than realistic, considered ones? This tangle of contradictory orientations engendered such confusion and disarray in the party at a time when the political and social situation had reached a critical point, that a "conciliation conference", called by the Executive of the Komintern in April 1923, was needed to arrive at something of a remedy for the problem (if indeed a remedy at all). This conference condemned the leadership of the German party because it tended to "adapt the communist party to the reformist leaders", and at the same time applies the brakes to the impatience and immediatist exclamations of the minority. But negotiations, especially "conciliation negotiations, could not heal the wounds, now festering and always ready to reopen in the confusion of pronouncements emanating from Moscow. But the worst was yet to come.

In fact, what soon began to emerge, at first timidly and then in an increasingly explicit form in the leading circles of the party, was the idea the occupation of the Ruhr would provide the ideal opportunity for the "conquest of the majority" in its most elastic interpretation, i.e., the conquest not just of broad strata of proletarians, but of the "people" in general, if appeals were made to attract fluctuating segments of the petty-bourgeoisie, victims of the devaluation of the Mark and strongly influenced by the nationalist revival. If the operation was to succeed it was necessary to try to show them that, as the party leadership proclaimed on May 17, 1923, "they could only defend themselves and defend the future of Germany by allying with the communists for a fight against the real (?) bourgeoisie", thereby making the party the defender of German "national values". An expression that had been condemned energetically in 1921 when a small workerist group from Hamburg had used it now entered the picture without any reaction from the International, the phrase "national Bolshevism", both the fruit and source of two monumental deviations from Marxism: 1) the more or less explicit lumping together of the national question in the colonies and semi-colonies and in a highly developed capitalist country (the Enlarged Executive of June 12 1923, had no scruples about stating that "the fact of strongly insisting on the national element in Germany is revolutionary in the SAME  sense that the fact of insisting on the national element in the colonies is", and stooping even lower in his famous Schlageter speech, Radek declared that "what we call German nationalism is not just nationalism; it is a broad national movement with a great revolutionary significance". Zinoviev himself, winding up the Executive, was pleased to note that a bourgeois newspaper had recognized the "national Bolshevik" character of the KPD as proof that the party had finally acquired a mass psychology")[7]; 2) the more or less open recognition of the autonomous revolutionary potential of the petty-bourgeoisie (Radek once again: the KPD must show that it is not only (!!) "the party of the struggle of the industrial proletarians for a piece of bread, but also the party of those proletarianised elements who are fighting for their own freedom, a freedom that coincides with the freedom of the whole people, with the freedom of all those who work and suffer in Germany"), and therefore also the interpretation of fascism as the self-mobilization of the petty-bourgeoisie against big capital, whereas in fact it was the mobilization of the petty-bourgeoisie at the instigation and for the exclusive benefit of big capital, and consequently against the proletariat.[8]

Inexorably, the links in the chain came apart. The Enlarged Executive of June 1923 did not discuss the German situation in detail, even though it was becoming quite explosive. Its attention was monopolized by other problems Norwegian federalism, the Swedish party's neutralism on the religion question, the latest attempt to sell a merger between the CP of Italy and the socialist party in spite of the very high price demanded by the latter for not merging. Though it made no firm decisions, the Executive endorsed the leadership thesis that the KPD should become a rallying point for the proletarianised petty-bourgeois masses by encompassing their dreams of national revival. But the 1923 German question was exclusively an international problem; a "nationalist program for the proletarian revolution" in Germany was the worst possible solution, because it would increase the conservative and counter-revolutionary weight of the petty-bourgeoisie in France and England, thereby nullifying the hypothetical advantages of a hybrid Weimar republic. There is no trace of this idea in any of the resolutions of the Executive. At the same time, the Executive quite logically decided to expand the "workers' government" slogan and, fascinated by the proliferation of peasant parties both in the Balkans and in North America (La Follette!), it transformed the slogan into "workers' and peasants' government" for all countries, including Germany! The theses[9] do warn against a parliamentary and social-revolutionary interpretation of the new tactical recipe, but as we have seen, the first interpretation was authorized by the vagueness and desultory work of the 4th congress, and the second by a mechanical, vulgar transposition of the "workers' and peasants' government" slogan from countries on the eve of a double revolution to countries of hyperdeveloped capitalism. Yet another element of what had always unequivocally been the exclusive mark of the Marxist revolutionary party disappeared.

Fast losing its grip on principles, the International let itself be blinded once again by the appeal of easy gains and the fear of being outstripped by the social-democracy in the conquest of the masses; and the undoubtedly vital problem of action directed toward the poor peasants was approached as a maneuver which, within a few years, opened the way to a theory of the autonomous world role of the peasant class without regard for the variety and contradictory character of its many components, and removed from any precise definition of its relationship to the industrial and agricultural proletariat, both in highly developed capitalist countries and in the immense colonial and semi-colonial regions, in particular Asia.[10]

But Germany remained the sensitive point in the crucial year 1923. Even more than in Estonia and Bulgaria, which we will leave aside for the moment, it was in Germany that tactical vacillations and eclecticism on the part of the Komintern, in the second half of the year, produced the disaster whose immediate and long term consequences prepared the defeats in China and England and the fatal crisis of the Russian party and the International itself in the ensuing years. Suddenly in July 1923 the International, for a long time indifferent to developments in the German situation - perhaps due to its awareness that the KPD lacked any cohesiveness and homogeneity - became alarmed by the fascist danger, and also stated its conviction (perhaps well-founded) that a pre-revolutionary cycle was about to begin. Its directives nonetheless remained vague and cautious for a long time. The cancellation of the big "anti-fascist day" after it was prohibited by the government (July 23) received approval from Moscow and succeeded in reviving disagreements between the KPD leadership and left wing, between red Berlin and the lukewarm provinces, between a proletariat already in action and a "workers' aristocracy" that lagged behind.

In early August, with the Cuno government obviously foundering, the KPD leadership decided that the moment to mobilize the masses behind the "workers' and peasants' government" slogan was at hand, while the "left" proclaimed from its Berlin stronghold that "the interim phase of a workers' government is practically more and more improbable". Just when new massive strikes were breaking out, and in the confusion produced by this exchange of contradictory slogans, big capital, now determined to liquidate the failing campaign of "passive resistance" to the Ruhr occupation and ingratiate itself to the Entente - particularly England - placed Streseman in power.

The by now usual reaction of Moscow was a sharp turn form a fundamentally pessimistic wait-and-see attitude to a frenzied optimism. "The revolution is at Germany's door," wrote the Profintern organ in September, "It's just a matter of months." In Moscow, in the presence of the entire KPD general staff, against protests from right and left, it was decided that the assault on power had to be prepared immediately and the date set. On what grounds? Because the 4th congress had given the signal and the 3rd Enlarged Executive had confirmed it. On October 1, in the teeth of the economic and social crisis, Zinoviev declared to Brandler, the secretary of the German party, that he could foresee the "decisive moment four, five, six weeks away". It was therefore necessary "to pose concretely the problem of our participation in the Saxony government (dominated by social-democrats) on the condition that the followers of Zeigner (the reformist president of the council) are really ready to defend Saxony against Bavaria and the fascists." Thus in spite of 1918, 1919 and 1921 the plan was to trust the will of the social-democrats to cease being themselves! In the pamphlet Probleme der deutschen Revolution, written at precisely that time by the president of the International, Zinoviev, it is correctly stated, on the one hand, that "the next German revolution will be a classic proletarian revolution", i.e., a “pure” proletarian revolution; but, while drawing excessively optimistic conclusions from the German proletariat's high degree of organization and spirit of discipline (this faculty and fascination for organization in which Rosa Luxemburg in 1918 and Trotsky in 1920 had seen one of the causes of failure in the crucial test of the war, in the absence of the firm leadership of the party) as well as from its "culture" (the concomitant of a large worker aristocracy), on the other hand a revolutionary role is attributed "to the petty-bourgeois urban masses, to lower and middle officials, small merchants, etc.", from which is deduced the hypothesis that "the role played in the Russian revolution by the war-weary peasantry will be filled to a certain extent in the German revolution by the broad petty-bourgeois urban masses, pushed by the development of capitalism to the brink of economic ruin"!!

There was, however, one small problem with this astounding analysis. The united front had undeniably achieved the desired result in Germany, drawing into the struggle even "the most backward strata of the working class, and uniting them with the revolutionary vanguard"; "the moment is approaching when the enormous majority of German workers, which still places some hope in the social-democracy, will be finally convinced that the decisive struggle must be waged without and against the right and left wings of the SDP"; but this moment has not yet arrived, and before it does a new round of experiences, not only in political united fronts, but also in "workers'" coalition governments, will be necessary. The entry of communists into the Saxony government was thus proposed in order to: "1) help the revolutionary vanguard in Saxony to implant itself, to occupy a definite terrain and make its province a springboard for future battles; 2) offer left social-democrats the possibility of unmasking themselves by their deeds, thereby enabling social-democratic proletarians to rid themselves of their last illusions"! Moreover, the experience of government (which is only permissible "with the Komintern's consent") has no meaning "unless it offers every guarantee that the state apparatus will really begin to serve the interests of the working class, that hundreds of thousands of workers will be armed for the fight against Bavarian fascism and German fascism in general, and that one really begins to expel bourgeois civil servants en masse from the state apparatus, while no longer being content with verbal promises... and economic measures of a revolutionary nature are taken without delay so as to strike a decisive blow against the bourgeoisie". In other words it was necessary, according to the famous telegram from Zinoviev to Brandler on October 1, 1923, "to immediately arm 50,000 to 60,000 men in Saxony, and the same number in Thuringia".

This is all quite contradictory: a revolutionary situation, supposedly favoured by the subversive intervention of the broad petty-bourgeois masses, is announced, and its outcome is defined as a parliamentary governmental coalition; the success achieved by means of the united front in assembling the vast majority of the working class around the party is exalted, and the party submits to a coalition with the most discredited social-democracy in the world; a classic revolutionary "conquest of power" is advocated, and the arming of the proletariat, expulsion of bourgeois civil servants and introduction of dictatorial anti-bourgeois measures are designated as measures to be taken by a social-democratic majority government; this is supposed to help "unmask" the SPD, while in fact it only effaces the distinctive features of ourown party; in this way the KPD will supposedly "convince, by its deeds, the majority of the German working class that it is no longer just the vanguard, as during the years 1919-1921, but that it has millions of workers behind it", and it presents these workers with the humiliating and shameful "fact" of a government coalition in which three communist ministers (including the party secretary, Brandler) are entirely at the mercy of social-democratic ministers, the assassins of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and with these millions of proletarians behind them, the workers are told not to take power by storm, but to patiently and confidently await a few rifles from their reformist associates! A coalition on the eve of the insurrection! Trotsky's contempt in hisLessons of October for this relapse into the capitulationist hesitations of the Bolshevik minority on the eve of the seizure of power in 1917 - this time even worse - was more than justified even though, avoiding the fundamental question, he could not perceive that this "social-democratic relapse" was the necessary culmination of the "elastic" united front and workers' government tactics, which he himself had supported and defended before and after 1925[11]. The date of the insurrection was set on the basis of the platform for the creation of a social-democratic/ communist government, and then it was postponed at the suggestion of the German leadership. Everything is done as if the revolution were atechnical feat, not the product of a specific objective situation and an adequate subjective preparation of the party, whereas for months the party had been advocating the semi-legal path of overtures to various groups and governmental or para-governmental solutions. The party is put on alert so that "in today's seething, tumultuous Germany, where today or tomorrow the vanguard will embark on the decisive battle, bring with it the heavy infantry of the proletariat, the correct united front tactic is not transformed into its opposite", but everything is done to bring this about, by hitching the party - in one or two regional provinces at most, isolated in the vast German territory and caught in a vice between a central power entirely in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the more or less regular troops of Bavaria, the traditional reservoir of the German counter-revolution - to the chariot of a social-democracy whose capacity for betrayal has been amply proven. It is then proclaimed that "in today's Germany, now on the threshold of revolution, the general formula of "workers' and peasants' government" is already insufficient... and we must, both in our propaganda and in our mass agitation, show and make it clearly understood that we stand for nothing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the dictatorship of the workers of the cities and villages", and it is claimed that this objective can be attained by entering and remaining in a government with a social-democracy which, in its explicit programmatic statements and factually confirmed tradition, excludes the use of the dictatorship and terror.

It was not necessary to wait long for the epilogue. A few days later, on October 20, 1923, the central Reich government sent the Saxony government an ultimatum calling for the immediate dissolution of the workers' militias, even though these were numerically quite weak, and in the event of refusal, threatened to mobilize the Reichswehr. The party decided to launch a general strike throughout Germany, but, lacking self-confidence and unsure of having the support of a proletarian now disoriented by the merry-go-round of contradictory slogans and objectives, Brandler thought that it was first necessary to "consult" the masses, represented by an assembly or workers and political and union officials that met at Chemnitz. After being convinced that the favourable moment had passed, he canceled the order for the work stoppage. One Reichswehr detachment was all that was required to depose the Saxony government. But because of a delay in the transmission of the order canceling the strike, the Hamburg proletariat revolted in isolation and was brought to heel within twenty-four hours by the army, under the leadership of the Kaiser's generals left in their posts by Ebert and Schneidemann. A few pockets of resistance were quickly wiped up, and the 1923 German episode was over.

In the ensuing months, especially at the Enlarged Executive of the International on January 8-12, 1924, it was too easy to assign responsibility for the disaster to the inadequacies, errors and weaknesses of the leadership of the German party. But the party found it just as easy to answer that, except for a few minor mistakes, it had only applied the Komintern's directives, which in turn conformed to the results of the 4th congress. In order to save the furniture (i.e. the unity of a party now more divided than ever), the leadership was shaken up and "guilty parties" were condemned, even though they were kept on as a dubious minority in the new "left" leadership - which, barely a year later, was declared worse than the previous one.[12] But worst of all was the fact that alongside this, yet another tactical turn was announced on the world scale: no more united fronts from above as, on the basis of an “incorrect interpretation” of the resolutions of the 4th congress, certain parties, and in the first instance the German party, had been practicing it; from now on, united fronts from below: “The time has come to proclaim openly that we reject any negotiations with the central leadership of the German unions. Our slogan is unity at the base. The united front at the base, already partly realized, can now be made against these gentlemen". No moresubtle distinctions between left and right social-democrats. "The right social democrats are acknowledged traitors; the left, on the other hand, only mask the counter-revolutionary action of Ebert, Noske and Schneidemann with their demagogy. The KPD rejects negotiation both with the leadership of the SPD and the left; leaders, at least until..." (a small door is left open for them after the main gate is closed) "...these heroes have the courage to break openly with the band of counter-revolutionaries that leads the social-democratic party." The interpretation to the effect that the workers' and peasants' government is "a government within the framework of bourgeois democracy, a political alliance with the social-democracy" is no longer possible; "the workers' and peasants' government means, in the language of the revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat... and never, in any case, a tactic of agreement and parliamentary transaction with the social-democrats. On the contrary the parliamentary activity of communists must also be aimed at unmasking of the counter-revolutionary role of the social-democracy and demonstrating to the workers that the 'workers' governments it has set up are only a trick and a hoax, if they are not in fact liberal, bourgeois governments". From now on the "best" and "worst" governments are the same: "fascism and social-democracy are the right and left hands of contemporary capitalism".

The 5th congress of the Communist International (June 17 to July 8, 1924) reflects the profound disarray among parties after the catastrophic results of two years of sudden tactical turns and equivocal orders. Togliatti himself asked someone to tell him once and for all what was to be done exactly! While the leaders of the national sections once again immolated themselves on the altar of the Executive's infallibility, the only severe, but serene voice, free from any personal or local embellishment, was again that of the Left. If it had ever been the Left's habit to rejoice at seeing its predictions confirmed forcefully by the terrible test of proletarian blood spilled for nothing, or to demand in its turn that the heads of those "guilty" or "corrupt" individuals should roll to make way for more innocent and incorruptible heads, this would have been the time to do so. But this was not what the Left wanted or sought: it wanted a courageous break with the deviations of principle of which these "errors" were the inevitable product, whereas the heads were only their momentary expression. "United front from below"? So be it! On the condition that no door be left open to any exceptions in the opposite direction (as was done in the new proposal), and on the condition that it be unequivocally stated that "the basis of the united front can never be a bloc among political parties. This basis can be established in other working class organizations, provided their structure would enable a communist leadership to conquer them". Thus no invitations to organizations such as the social-democratic left or right wingwhich cannot "fight on the final path of the world communist revolution" or even "support the immediate interests of the working class" and to which it would be criminal for us "to deliver, with our work, a certificate of revolutionary aptitude, thereby contradicting all our principled, work, all our work to prepare the working class". A struggle against the social-democracy, "the third bourgeois party"? Agreed, but how does one justify the latest bombshell namely the proposal to merge the Red International of Labour Unions with the Amsterdam International Federation of Trade Unions? The workers' government a "synonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat"? We have paid dearly for the use of an ambiguousphrase' we demand a "third class burial both for the tactic and for the very expression - workers' government". We do so because "dictatorship of the proletariat means to us that proletarian power will be exercised without allowing the bourgeoisie any political representation. It also means that proletarian power can only be conquered through revolutionary action, mass armed insurrection. If one wants, workers' government can mean all of this; but one can also take it to mean something entirely different (Germany! Germany!): another type of government which would not exclude the bourgeoisie from organs of political representation or the possibility of a legal conquest of power". But the workers' government formula is easier for the masses to understand, you say? We reply "How is a simple worker or peasant to understand what workers' government means when after three years we leaders of the workers' movement have not yet succeeded in understanding and defining satisfactorily what such a government really is?"

But the problem was even more serious. The fact that the International moved "to the left" in 1925 could have given us cause for relief, if we were to pose the problem in terms of petty revenge. This was not, however, our method: "what we criticized in the way the International worked was precisely its tendency to move to the right and to the left in response to the situation or to the interpretations one thought could be made of it. As long as the problem of elasticity and eclecticism has not been thoroughly discussed..., as long as this elasticity continues, new vacillations must necessarily emerge and a new left turn will bring with it the threat of another turn, one even more accentuated, to the right (isn’t this precisely what happened in the ensuing years?). We do not seek a left deviation in the present circumstances, but a general rectification of the International's orientation: it does not matter to us that this rectification may not be as we demand... but it must be carried out clearly. We must know where we are going."

More than anyone else, the Left wanted world centralization and discipline, but it recognized that one could not depend "on the good intentions of such and such a comrade who, after twenty sessions, signs an agreement the terms of which finally unite the right and the left"; it is "in reality, in action, in the leadership of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat that strives for world unity" that this unity must be realized; to accomplish we need "a clear tactical orientation and a continuity in the formation of our organizations within the limits that separate us from other parties." It is therefore necessary to lay the foundations of discipline by establishing it on the bedrock of clarity, firmness and invariance of principles and tactical directives. In a more exciting era that now seems quite distant, discipline resulted from an organic process that plunged its roots into the Bolshevik party's granite theoretical and practical strength. Today, either one rebuilds it on the collective foundations of the world movement, conscientiously and with a fraternal understanding of the gravity of the times, or else one is lost. At this congress that barely touched on the Russian question, which was considered a taboo, the Left dated to proclaim that the guarantee against falling into opportunism could not come from the Russian party alone, because the Russian party urgently needed us, because it sought from us the guarantee we asked it for in vain.

"The time has come for the international of the world proletariat to render the Russian CP a part of the innumerable services it has received from that party. From the point of view of a revisionist danger the situation of the Russian party is the most perilous, and the other parties must support it against this danger. It must obtain most of the strength it needs to overcome the extremely difficult situation in which working from the International"[13].

A great battle, but a battle lost! The internal crisis of the Bolshevik party was accentuated by the October debacle in Germany. From the ebb of the revolution in the West and the opportunist explanation emerged the monster of "socialism in one country". The united front "from below" was abandoned in favour of enthusiasm for the united front from above, and even in Germany, for flirtations with bourgeois radicalism[14]; during the Matteotti crisis in Italy, Gramsci's disastrous proposal to the "oppositions" to form an Anti-Parliament, which he based once again on the attribution of an independent role to the petty-bourgeoisie, and which prefigured future "popular fronts" against fascism; and the worthless theory that "whoever wishes the end must also want the means", a justification for which was sought in a "Marxism-Leninism" emptied of its substance and reduced to the rank of a vulgar Machiavellian formula, and so on. The general part of the Lyons Theses answers each of these deviations, and their "history" is summarized in the International and Italian section, which we will not dwell on here. The outcome is known to all: the castrated International is reduced to a docile instrument of the Russian state's foreign policy; all principles are abandoned; finally, the Komintern is dissolved because of Russia's was alliance with the "democracies" and the way is opened to all the desecrations of the post war period.

We come to the third aspect of the collapse. We have seen how, alongside and even slightly ahead of the tactical maneuvers, and always in the illusion of obtaining a greater concentration of proletarian forces around the party, there began a gradual abandoning of the rigour in organizational criteria that the twenty-one conditions had defended as a necessary precondition for the formation of the International on foundations that were neither artificial nor fluctuating. Against our advice, a margin of possible maneuver was soon tolerated in the draconian conditions of admission in order to allow for "national particularities". In recognition of these the International accepted almost full membership of the former French socialist party, and was rewarded with the realization, at each new session of the Executive, that what one faced was the clumsily made-up spectre of the old parliamentarist and chauvinist social-democracy. It had previously given its endorsement to the fusion of the kpd with the "left wing" of the independents: here again the only result was to see them leave again after having contaminated the party and accentuated its original defects. In the notable example of relations with the Italian Socialist Party, it practiced the kind of "federalism from above", that in 1923 we threw back at the Norwegian and Danish parties, and it did this every time a vague possibility of recruiting new numericalforces seemed to manifest itself in one country or another. So-called sympathizing parties were welcomed into the ranks of the revolutionary International alongside the communist parties, sometimes on an almost equal basis.

The excursion through the lexicon of tactical innovations continued to give strength to the centrifugal currents lying dormant in all the parties, and the sudden turns being dictated only sowed confusion and caused rifts between even the most solid militants. The problem of "discipline" also emerged irresistibly, not as a natural and organic product of a prior theoretical homogeneity and a healthy convergence on practical activity, but as a morbid manifestation of a discontinuity in action and a heterogeneity in doctrinal patrimony. The“iron fist” was brought into play whenever mistakes, deviations or weaknesses were detected, a remedy for which was attempted with shake-ups of central committees and executives and it was even idealized as the method and internal rule of the Komintern and its sections and as the sovereign antidote not against adversaries and quislings, but against comrades. The infernal cycle of self-accusations and trials, the period the Left, at the 6th Enlarged Executive, called "the sport of humiliation and ideological terrorism" (often exercised by "humiliation and ideological terrorism" (often exercised by "humiliated ex-opponents"), had begun: and there are no trials without jailers.

Discipline to the original clear, trenchant program had been ruptured. To prevent this indiscipline from causing a collapse, people tried to manufacture "real Bolshevik parties" in vitro. It is well known what became of these caricatures of Lenin's party under Stalin's heel. We issued a warning at the 4th congress: "The guarantee of discipline can only be found in a definition of the limits within which we must apply our methods, in the precise formulation of our program and fundamental tactical resolutions and of our organizational measures". At the 5th congress we repeated that it would be illusory to pursue the dream of an iron discipline if clarity and precision were lacking in what is the prerequisite of any discipline and homogeneity in organization, and that it would be in vain to lull oneself to sleep with the illusion of a single world party if the continuity and prestige of the international organization were continually being destroyed by a "freedom of choice" granted both to the base and to the summit in regard to the principles that determine practical action and to action itself, i.e., that it was hypocritical to invoke a "Bolshevization" that did not mean intransigence in objectives and congruity between means and ends.

Since military style discipline was not enough a specific organizational recipe was decided upon: the parties would be rebuilt (five years after they were founded!) on the basis of factory cells, which were regarded as an ideal model inherited from the history of Bolshevism, and this form was to provide the solution to the revolutionary problem of force. We answered that this formula, which was suitable for Russia before 1917 and had neverbeen raised to the level of an immutable dogma by Lenin, could not be transposed as such to the West, and that moreover, a mechanical application implied a veritable rupture with the founding principles and the real process of genesis and development of the revolutionary party, a relapse into "workerism" (6th Enlarged Executive): in reality, the Marxist party is not defined by its overall social composition, but by the goal toward which it strives, and it is all the more vibrant to the extent it is not imprisoned within the narrow, corporatist confines of the factory.

We showed that this "revision", celebrated as an antidote for bureaucratism, since this would provide the only link between cells and factories alike.

We further addressed the much broader problem toward which all the questions that were to become acute in the struggle within the Russian party in 1925-1926 were converging. We denounced, before it was too late, the mad rage of the "fight against factionism", the witch hunt that celebrated its victory during the disgusting 1926-1928 campaign against the Russian left and then against the right, whereas in the glorious years of the Bolshevik party, it had not even been used against avowed enemies - who were destroyed if necessary, but never slandered - a campaign which, extending if necessary, but never slandered - a campaign which, extending beyond the borders of the Russian state, first gave birth to the repulsive figure of the public prosecutor, then the professional informer, and finally the executioner. The counter-revolution is as cannibalistic as the revolution is generous (Marx). The first sign that the "star" of the counter-revolution was rising - N.B. sign not cause - was the ferocious, slimy cannibalism hypocritically disguised in "Leninist" phraseology, and nobody practiced it with greater zeal than the last-minute recruits, the "converted" Mensheviks, social-patriots who covered their heads with ashes, “yes-men” who moved in a gradually thickening gloom, people who had always said "no" or at least "yes, but..." in the bright daylight we had thought would never dim.

We expanded this problem to the even more urgent question of saving the Russian October Revolution in the crucial year of 1926. In spite of an in opposition to all the more than metaphorical prohibitions and threats of sanctions, we issued a final appeal for the crisis in the Russian Party to be discussed in all parties and in world meetings, "because the Russian revolution is the first great step of the world revolution, it is also our revolution, its problems are our problems and every member of the International has the right and duty to collaborate in solving them" (6th Enlarged Executive), because we knew that this crisis was none other than the crisis of the Communist International.

Taking up an argument that modern historians can only understand in reverse (this is their job, after all), we recalled that the greatness of the Russian party lay in having applied the strategy and tactics prescribed for fully developed capitalist countries to a backward country within the framework of the world vision of the October Revolution and that, in order to raise a solid barrier against a resurgence of opportunism, the International would have to "find solutions that go beyond the framework of the Russian experience for strategical questions"[15], especially questions of relations between the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia and the militant world proletariat, between state and party, and particularly between the state and the Communist International, as well as for questions of the immense arc of revolutionary strategy on a world scale, and corresponding tactical problems. We did not want to simply apply palliatives; we wanted a radical change in the methods of the International. There are no pure parties, and in the case of the Russian party in 1926, the "subjective" guarantee against corruption - which is always uncertain and relative - ceased to be operative. The magnificent organ of theoretical and practical battle that had been the party of Red October was now divided by central problems of principle, not merely secondary ones. In order to save the formidable citadel of the world revolution in the fiery years after the first world war, it was necessary for proletarian internationalism to regain its original verve. This was the only way to save communism from the slide to the right and sure death embodied in "socialism in one country" or, later, "the national roads to socialism", and it had to be done at that precise moment or never again!

As the Left had demanded in vain at each congress, the communist movement had to be rebuilt from top to bottom on the basis of the lessons of October and a frank, exhaustive appraisal of the Communist International's activity. The Lyons Theses and the accompanying commentary made to the Enlarged Executive in February-March 1926 were intended to make this necessary contribution to the international movement and the imperiled Russian revolution. We were muzzled and dispersed then, but although our contribution was denied to that generation, it is still valid for present and future generations!

It would be anti-Marxist to seek the cause of a catastrophe that still crushes us today in the Komintern's deviations from 1922-1926 alone. Many factors combined their action to bring about the historical course that finally and unavoidable prevailed. The party's activity is, however, one of the elements in the objective situation; in certain circumstances, it is a fundamental element. Recognizing the historical origins of opportunism (as we stated at the Enlarged Executive) has never meant accepting opportunism as a necessary, historically inevitable fact: "even if the current situation and future perspectives are unfavourable or relatively unfavourable for us, we must not resign ourselves to opportunist deviations or justify them on the pretext that their causes lie in the objective situation. And if, nevertheless, an internal crisis were to break out, the causes and the means to overcome it must be sought elsewhere, i.e., in the party's work and politics." This is admittedly a curious deduction for an International whose congresses had ended up becoming tribunals for proceeding initiated against groups or individuals considered responsible for the tragic miscarriages of communism in Europe and the rest of the world: everything now became the necessary product of "unfavourable objective situations".

What was really needed was not a trial but a radical critical review based on impersonal data, showing how infinitely complex is the interplay of objective and subjective factors, and demonstrating that if the party's influence on the objective factors - considered for a moment in themselves, independent of our collective action - is limited, it is nonetheless within our power (though perhaps at the price of momentary isolation or failure) to salvage the conditions which alone will enable the subjective factor to act upon history and fecundate it.

The party would be nothing it is were not, objectively and subjectively, for its militants and for the undifferentiated working class, the unbroken transmission line that the ebb and flow of situations can never destroy, even if they succeed in damaging it, but not modifying it.  The fight to keep this line intact, to restore it after years of counter-revolutionary depression, and the fight to rebuild the world party of the proletariat - this is the focus of all our revolutionary energies.

DRAFT THESES PRESENTED BY THE LEFT AT THE 3RD CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF ITALY
(LYON 1926)

In a document such as this it is difficult to avoid a certain disproportion between the different parts, because the debate has given certain points and certain themes greater actuality, and relegated other points, which are nonetheless of equal importance, to a secondary position. To obtain a fuller impression of the thinking of the comrades who drew up these theses, the reader should refer to other already familiar texts, which, unfortunately it is not easy to consult today. We therefore feel that it would be helpful to preface this text with a few references to documents that adopt the same orientation as that set out and defended in these theses.Rome Theses. Adopted at the 2nd Congress of the Communist Party of Italy on March 26, 1922. The text presented at the Congress was published in Il Comunista, No. 67, December 31, 1921; Ordine Nuovo, No. 2, January 3, 1922; Il Lavoratore, No. 4960, February 5, 1922; and Rassegna Comunista, No. 17, January 30, 1922. The modifications made to the original text at the Congress were published in: Il Comunista, No. 95, April 4, 1922; Il Lavoratore, No. 5014, April 5, 1922;Ordine Nuovo, No. 96, April 6, 1922; and Rassegna Comunista, No. 26, July 31, 1922.Theses on the Tactics of the Communist International. Presented at the 4th Congress of the Communist International. Published in No. 17 of Stato Operaio, March 6, 1924.Program of Action of the Italian Communist Party. Presented at the 4th Congress of the Communist International. Published in Stato Operaio, same issue as above.Motion and Theses. Approved by the national (consultative) conference of the Italian Communist Party in May 1924, published in Stato Operaio, No. 16, March 18, 1924.Theses on the Tactics of the Communist International. Presented at the 5th World Congress. Published (in French and German) in the Congress Bulletin, No. 20, July 8, 1924.

I.GENERAL QUESTIONS

1.Principles of Communism

The theoretical principles of the Communist Party are those of Marxism, which have been restored through the fight against opportunist deviations and which form the foundation of the 3rd International. They include: dialectical materialism as the conception of the world and human history; the basic economic theory of Marx's Capital as the method for interpreting modern capitalist economy; the programmatic formulations of the Communist Manifesto as the historical and political framework of the emancipation of the world working class. The tremendous experience of the victorious working class. The tremendous experience of the victorious Russian revolution and the work of its leader, Lenin, the "dean" of international communism, constitute the confirmation, restoration and consistent development of this system of principles and methods. Anyone who rejects even part of it is not a communist and therefore cannot be a militant in the International.The party therefore rejects and condemns the doctrines of the ruling class, the spiritualist and religious theories - idealist in philosophy and reactionary in politics - such as the Voltarian positivist and free-thought theories - which are Masonic, anti-clerical and democratic in politics.It also condemns other political schools that have a certain following among the working class: social-democratic reformism, which envisions a peaceful evolution, without armed struggle, from capitalist power to workers; power, and advocates class collaboration; syndicalism, which belittles political action by the working class and rejects the necessity of the party as the supreme revolutionary organ; anarchism, which denies the historical necessity of the State and, the proletarian dictatorship to transform social organization and abolish the division of society into classes. The communist party also combats the many manifestations of bastardized revolutionism which is now designated by the well-known term "centrism", and which attempt to ensure the survival of these erroneous positions by combining them with apparently communist theses.

2.Nature of the Party

The historical process by which the proletariat emancipates itself and establishes a new social order follows from the existence of the class struggle. Every class struggle is a political struggle, i.e., it tends to transform itself, into a struggle for the conquest of political power and the leadership of a new state organism. Consequently, the organ that leads the class struggle to its final victory is the political class party, the only possible instrument first of a revolutionary insurrection, and second of government. These elementary, brilliant formulations from Marx, which Lenin reaffirmed, lead to a definition of the party as an organization of all those who adhere to the system of opinions which summarizes the historical task of the revolutionary class and who are determined to work for its victory. In the party, the working class becomes conscious of the path it must take and obtains the will to do so; historically, the party thus represents the class in all the successive phases of the struggle, even though it may only contain a more or less small fraction of the class at any given time. This is the essence of the definition Lenin gave for the party at the 2nd World Congress.This conception, shared by Marx and Lenin, is opposed to the typically opportunist conception of the workerist party to which all individuals with the status of proletarians belong by right. Such a party would be numerically stronger, but it is obvious that the counter-revolutionary influences of the ruling class may and even must prevail in certain situations since this class would be represented in it by the dictatorship of organizers and leaders who, individually, may come from the proletariat as well as from other classes. For this reason, Marx and Lenin combated this fatal error, and in practice did not hesitate to rupture false proletarian unity even during periods of intense social activity by the proletariat, and even through small political groups adhering to the revolutionary program, in order to ensure the continuity of the party's political function, i.e., to prepare the proletariat or its successive tasks. This is the only possible way to achieve the future concentration of the largest possible number of workers under the leadership and the banner of a communist party capable of fighting and winning.An immediate organization of all those who, economically speaking, are workers, cannot fulfill political, and therefore, revolutionary tasks, because various professional or local groups are only compelled to action in a limited way to satisfy partial needs determined by the direct consequences of capitalist exploitation. The synthesis of these individual impulses in a common vision and action which enable individuals and groups to go beyond any particularism by accepting difficulties and sacrifices for the general, final triumph of the cause of the working class can only be achieved through the intervention of a political party, defined by the politicalconvictions of its members, at the head of the working class. For Marx and Lenin, the definition of the party as the party of the working class does not have a crudely statistical or constitutional meaning: on the contrary, it is linked to the historical objectives of the proletariat.Any conception of internal organization problems that falls into the workerist vision of the party reveals a serious theoretical deviation in that it replaces the revolutionary point of view with a democratic point of view and gives more importance to utopian organizational schemes than to the dialectical reality of the conflict between two opposed classes. It contains the danger of a relapse into opportunism. The dangers of degeneration of the revolutionary movement cannot be eliminated by any organizational formula because there is no such formula that can ensure the necessary continuity in the political orientation of leaders and simple militants. The formula to the effect that only an authentic worker can be a communist is also unable to avert degeneration, since it is contradicted by the immense majority of examples of individuals and parties provided by history. The guarantee against degeneration must be sought elsewhere if one does not wish to contradict the basic Marxist postulate which summarizes the conquest won by scientific socialism over the initial stammerings of utopian socialism: the revolution is not a question of forms of organization.We can only resolve the present questions of internal organization of the International and the party on the basis of this conception of the nature of the class party.

3.Action and tactics of the Party

The way the party brings its influence to bear on other groups, organizations and institutions of the society in which it operates constitutes its tactics. The general elements of this question must be defined in connection with the whole of our principles. Only after this will it be possible to specify concrete procedures responding to various kinds of practical problems and successive phases of historical development.By assigning the revolutionary arty its place and role in the genesis of a new society, Marxist theory provides the most brilliant of solutions to the problems of freedom and determinism in human activity. So long as it is posed in terms of the abstract "individual", this problem will be a matter for the metaphysical pedantry of the philosophers of the decadent ruling class. Marxism, on the other hand, poses the question in the light of an objective, scientific conception of society and history. The idea that the individual and one individual - can act on the outside world, deforming and modeling it at will be virtue of a power of initiative conferred upon him by qualities of divine character, is the antipode to our conception; we also condemn the voluntarist conception of the party according to which, having forged a profession of faith, a small group of individuals can impose this on the world by spreading it through a gigantic effort of activity, will and heroism. Moreover, it would be an aberrant and stupid conception of Marxism to believe that history and the revolution obey fixed laws, and that we have nothing more to do than discover these laws through objective research and to try to formulate forecasts about the future without doing anything in terms of action: this fatalistic conception amounts to denying the necessity and function of the party. The powerful originality of Marxist determinism places it not mid-way between these two conceptions, but above both of them. Because it is dialectical and historical, it refuses all apriorism and does not claim to apply the same abstract solution to all problems regardless of the epoch and human group under consideration. If the present development of the sciences does not allow a complete account of the causes that compel the individual to act, beginning with physical and biological data and culminating in a science of psychological activities, it is nonetheless possible to resolve the problem in the area of sociology by applying to the latter, as Marx did, methods of research characteristic of modern positive, experimental science, whose heritage socialism claims in its entirety and which are distinct from the so-called materialist and positivist philosophy that the bourgeoisie adopted during its historical ascension. By giving rational consideration to the reciprocal influences individuals exert on one another, through a critical study of economy and history after having cleared the ground of all traditional ideology, it is possible, in a certain sense to remove the indeterminism of the process that unfolds in each individual. From this point of departure, Marxism has been able to set up a system of notions which is not an immutable gospel, but a living instrument for the study and discovery of the laws of the historical process. This system is based upon economic determinism, discovered by Marx, which sees in the study of economic relations and the development of the technical means of production the objective platform upon which to build a solid understanding of the laws of social life and, to a certain extent, to forecast its further evolution. With this in mind, it should be noted that the final solution does not consist in saying that, one we have found this universal key, it would be sufficient to allow economic phenomena to follow their intrinsic law and result in a given series of foreseen political facts.To be sure, our critique completely and definitively dismisses both the action of individuals even when they appear as the principal actors in historical events, and the intentions and perspectives from which they imagine this action results. But this by no means signifies that a collective organism like the class party cannot and must not have neither initiative nor will. The solution to which Marxism leads has been formulated on numerous occasions in our fundamental texts.Men and their organizations, even the most powerful classes, parties, states) have up to now been play things of economic laws the essentials of which they do not know. Lacking theoretical knowledge of the economic process, they have been incapable of mastering and directing it. But the problem is changed for the class that has appeared in the modern historical epoch, the proletariat, and for the political organizations - party and state - which must arise from it. This is the first class that is not impelled to base its accession to power on the consolidation of social privileges and a division of society into classes, which would imply the enslavement and exploitation of a new class. And it is also the first class that succeeds in forging its own doctrine of economic, historical and social development - Marxist communism.This is therefore the first time that a class struggles for the general abolition of classes, the general abolition of private property in the means of production, and not simply for the transformation of the social forms of this property.The program of the proletariat is both its emancipation from the yoke of the modern ruling, privileged class, and the emancipation of the entire human collectivity from the tyranny of economic laws which, once, they are understood, can be mastered in a rational and scientific economy enabling direct intervention by man. For this reason and with this in mind, Engels wrote that the proletarian revolution marks the leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom.It is not our intention to revive the illusory myth of individualism, which would liberate the Ego from external influences, whereas the individuals dependence is expanded by being diversified, and individual life is more and more difficult to distinguish from a collective life. On the contrary, the problem is posed on another terrain: freedom and will are attributed to a class destined to realize the unity of the human species, which is finally left to cope only with the adverse forces of the outside physical world.While proletarian humanity, which is still a long way off, may be free and possess a will that is not a sentimental illusion, but the capacity to organize and master the economy in the broadest sense of the term, and while today the proletarian class is still determined within the limits of its own action by factors external to itself, although to a lesser extent than other classes, the political party is the organ that concentrates in itself the maximum will and initiative in all areas of its action - not just any party, but the party of the proletarian class, the communist party, which is tied, so to speak, to its final aim by a continuous thread. The party's will, as well as its theoretical consciousness and preparation, are collective functions par excellence. From the Marxist point of view, the task assigned by the party to its own leaders makes them the instruments and operators through which it can best manifest its ability to understand and explain facts, to plan and lead actions - but these abilities always conserve their origin in the existence and characteristics of the collective organ. As we stated, the Marxist conception of the party and its action is therefore as far from passive fatalism, which is content to wait for the advent of phenomena which it feels it can influence directly, as it is from and voluntarist (in the individualist sense) conception for which the qualities of theoretical training the force of will, spirit of sacrifice, in short a special kind of moral figure and a certain degree of "purity" must be required of every party militant without distinction, which would reduce the party to an elite superior to the rest of the social elements making up the working class, whereas the error of passive fatalism would lead, if not to denying the party any function and usefulness, at least to equating it directly with the working class in the economic, statistical sense. We insist on the conclusions already given in the previous thesis, which condemn at the same time the workerist conception of the party and that of the party viewed as an intellectual and “moral” elite: these two conceptions, both equally alien to Marxism, are destined to meet on the path of opportunism.By defining the party's general tactics in conformity with the nature of the party, Marxism is distinguished from both the abstract pedantry of doctrinaires who  turn their backs on the reality of the class struggle and neglect concrete activity, and from sentimental estheticism, which would like to create new situations and new historical movements through brash or heroic deeds by tiny minorities. It distinguishes itself from opportunism which forgets the link with principles, i.e., with the general objectives of the movement, and which, aiming only for immediate and apparent success, only mobilizes for limited and isolated demands, without attempting to determine whether they enter into contradiction with the necessities of preparing the working class for its supreme conquests. Anarchist politics combine theoretical sterility, the inability to understand the dialectical stages of real historical evolution, with the voluntarist illusion that imagines it can speed up social processes by virtue of the example and sacrifice of one or more individuals. Social-democratic politics juxtapose a false, fatalist interpretation of Marxism with voluntarist pragmatism. On the one hand, it is stated that the revolution will mature slowly, on its own, without the voluntary intervention of a proletarian revolution being necessary; on the other hand, for want of being able to renounce the immediate effects of their daily efforts, social-democrats appear only to interest certain groups of the working class, but which, once satisfied only serve social preservation instead of assisting the preparation of the proletarian victory: i.e., such things as reforms, concessions, partial economic and political advantages obtained from the bosses and the bourgeois state.The artificial introduction into the class movement of the theoretical postulates of "modern" voluntarist and pragmatist, basically idealist philosophy (Bergson, Gentile, Croce) only prepares the opportunist guarantee of new reformist phases, an in any case would not pass for a reaction against reformism on the pretext that the latter shows a certain external sympathy for bourgeois positivism.The party's activity cannot and must not be limited to maintaining the purity of theoretical and organizational principles, nor to obtaining immediate success or a great popularity at any price. Always and in all situations it must develop simultaneously in these three directions:

• Defend the basic elements of the program, and refine them in relation to new events, i.e. develop the theoretical consciousness of the working class movement;
• Ensure the continuity and effectiveness of the party organization and protect it against outside influences opposed to the revolutionary interest of the proletariat;
• Participate actively in all the working class struggles, even those for partial and limited interests to encourage their growth, but always relating them to their revolutionary final goals by showing that the conquests of the class struggle are paths leading to indispensable future battles and denouncing the danger of stopping at partial successes as if they were ends in themselves and of sacrificing to these the conditions of the proletarian class activity and combativeness, i.e. the autonomy and independence of its ideology and organizations, first and foremost, the party.

The supreme goal of the party's complex activities is to achieve the subjective conditions of the proletariat's preparation: to enable it to take advantage of the objective revolutionary possibilities provided by history when they appear, in order to be victorious instead of being defeated.All this is the point of departure for resolving the problems posed by relations between the party and the proletarian masses, between the party and other political parties, between the proletariat and other social classes. The following tactic must be regarded as false: a real communist party must be a mass party in any and all situations, i.e. it must always have a numerous organization and a very broad influence on the proletariat, at least numerous and broad enough to exceed that of other so-called workers' parties. This formulation only caricatures Lenin, who, in 1921, issued the entirely correct practical, contingent slogan: to conquer power it is not sufficient to have formed “real” communist parties and launch an insurrectional offensive; it is also necessary to have numerically strong parties that have acquired a predominant influence over the proletariat. This means that in the phase preceding the conquest of power the party must have the masses behind it - above all it must conquer the masses. In such a formulation the only thing that is, in a certain sense, dangerous, is the expression majority of the masses, because it exposes and has exposed “literal Leninists” to the danger of social-democratic theoretical and tactical interpretations. Instead of specifying whether this majority is to be sought in parties, trade unions or other organizations, this opens the way - while expressing a perfectly correct idea, necessary to avoid initiating “desperate” actions with insufficient forces in unfavourable situations - to procrastination in periods when action is possible and necessary, when it is necessary to have a truly “Leninist” determination and initiative. But the formula that the party must have the masses behind it on the eve of the struggle for power has become, in the grotesque interpretation of modern-day pseudo-Leninists who state that the party, must be a mass party "in any and every situation", a typically opportunist formula. There are objective situations in which the relationship of forces is unfavourable to the revolution, even though they may be more separated in time than others, since history progresses at varying speeds, as Marxism teaches. In such situations, to attempt to be a mass party at any price, to be a majority party, to attempt with all one's strength to have a predominant political influence, can only lead to renunciation communist principles and methods in favour of social-democratic petty-bourgeois politics. It is necessary to state clearly that in certain past, present and future situations, the proletariat has been, is and will necessarily be for the most part on a non-revolutionary position - a position of inertia or collaboration with the enemy, depending on circumstances - but in spite of this, the proletariat everywhere and always remains the potentially revolutionary class and the repository of insurrectional possibilities, to the extent that within it the communist party exists and that without ever renouncing any possibility of strengthening itself and showing itself coherently this party can avoid the paths that seems to lead to an easier conquest of an immediate popularity, but which would divert it from its task, depriving the proletariat of the indispensable lever of its revolutionary rebirth. It is from this Marxist, dialectical point of view, and never from an esthetic and sentimental point of view, that one should reject stupid opportunist formula that a communist party is free to accept all means and methods. By ensuring that it is precisely because it is communist, i.e. healthy in its principles and organization, that the party can allow itself the most acrobatic maneuvers one forgets that for us the party is both a factor and a product of historical development, and that in the face of the forces of history, the proletariat behaves like an even more plastic piece of material. It is not influenced by the tortuous justifications that party leaders advance, but real effects, which must be foreseen using above all the experience of past errors. Only correct action in tactical matters and rejection of short-cuts, aided by precise and observed tactical norms will enable the party to preserve itself against degeneration: this cannot be achieved through theoretical credos and organizational sanctions.In the general question of tactics there is another error that coincides precisely with the classic opportunist position refuted by Marx and Lenin. This involves claiming that in the event struggles between classes and political organizations are not yet situated on the party's specific terrain, the party must choose whichever of the two forces is most favourable to general historical evolution and support or ally with it more or less openly, on the pretext that the conditions of the total proletarian revolution that will occur afterward (and in which the party will be a factor, when the time comes) will only mature as a result of an evolution of social and political forms.In particular, the very foundations of such politics are doomed to fail: the typical schema, laid out in the most minute detail, of a social and political revolution, which at best prepares the final advent of communism, belongs to the "Marxist" of the opportunists and is the foundation of the defamation of the Russian revolution and the present communist movement by the various Kautskies. It cannot even be established that in general the most advantageous conditions for fertile work by the communist party are realized by certain kinds of bourgeois regime e.g. the most democratic. While it is true that reactionary "rightist" measures have often halted the advance of the proletariat, it is just as true, and much more frequently the case that liberal,leftist policies of bourgeois governments have often strangled the class struggle and diverted the working class from decisive actions. A more precise evaluation, really in conformity with Marxism's rupture from the spells of democracy, evolutionism and progressivism, only shows that the bourgeoisie attempts to alternate methods and governing parties in accordance with its counter-revolutionary interests, and that it is often successful in this. Moreover, all our experience shows that whenever bourgeois politics, opportunism has always triumphed.In the second place, even if it were true that certain changes of government within the framework of the present regime do facilitate the further development of the proletariat's action, experience shows unequivocally that this is subject to an explicitly condition: the existence of a party that has forewarned the masses against the disillusionment that will inevitably follow what was presented as an immediate success, and not only the mere existence of this party, but its ability to act, even before the outbreak of the struggle we are talking about with an autonomy that is obvious to the proletariat, which will only follow it is long as its attitude is correct, not on the basis of schemes that is would be convenient to adopt officially. Faced with struggles that cannot lead to a victory of the proletariat, the party will not make itself the manager of transformations and achievements that do not directly interest the class it represents, and it will not renounce either its specific character or its autonomous action to participate in a kind of insurance company for all the so-called “new” political movements or for all the political systems and governments threatened by a supposedly "worse" government.Against the requirements of this line of action people often quote Marx' formula that “communists support every movement directed against the existing social conditions” or Lenin's argument against “the infantile disorder of communism”. The way these are being used inside our movement is not fundamentally different from the constant attempts of Bernstein revisionists and Nenni centrists to hold Marxists up to ridicule in the name of Marx and Lenin.Two observations must be made. First of all, these positions taken by Marx and Lenin have a contingent historical meaning, since they refer to a not yet bourgeois Germany in the case of Marx, and to Czarist Russia for the Bolshevik case illustrated by Lenin in his work. But the solution to the problem of tactics under classic conditions proletariat fighting against a fully developed capitalist bourgeoisie - must not be based on this criterion alone. In the second place, the support Marx is talking about (the same holds for the “compromises” referred to by Lenin, who preferred this term only because he was a magnificent Marxist dialectician, while he continued to champion a not merely formal intransigence, but a genuine one aimed at an immutable goal) is a support for movements still constrained to advance by means of insurrection against the forms of the past, even if this is in contradiction to the ideologies and possible designs of their leaders. The communist party therefore intervenes on the terrain of civil war, as demonstrated by Lenin's positions on the peasant and nationality questions, in the Kornilov episode and in a hundred others. Finally, even beyond these two essential observations, the meaning of Lenin's critique of "the infantile disorder" and of all Marxist texts on the flexibility of revolutionary politics is by no means in contradiction to the fact that they have voluntarily raised a barrier to opportunism, defined by Engels and Lenin as "lack of principles" or forgetfulness of the final objective.To work out communist tactics following a non-dialectical, formalist method would be a renunciation of Lenin and Marx. It would be a foolish mistake to imagine that, in order to correspond with their ends, means must stand in an ethical, psychological and esthetic relation to them, whereas in fact the real correspondence is historical and dialectical. In tactics, one must not commit the same mistake anarchists and reformists commit in regard to principles when they reject the use of class rule and dictatorial. State of the proletariat to suppress classes and state power, or of offensive violence designed to destroy the existing power, and defensive violence aimed at maintaining proletarian power, to abolish all social violence. It would also be wrong to imagine that a revolutionary party must be for struggle at all times, no matter what the correlation of favourable and hostile forces, that in the case of a strike, for example, communists could advocate no more than that it be given unlimited development, or that a communist must abjure certain methods such as dissimulation, ruse, espionage, etc, because they lack nobility or are unattractive. The critique by Marxism and Lenin of this superficial revolutionism that poisons the proletarian movement is an attempt to solve tactical problems without resorting to stupid, sentimental criteria, and this is now an integral part of the experience of the communist movement.Among the tactical errors this critique avoids is advocacy of splits in trade unions led by class traitors, on the pretext that communists must carry out political splits with opportunists. For some time now a polemic has been waged in bad faith against the Italian Left, claiming that it draws its conclusions from arguments to the effect that it would be dishonourable to meet personally with opportunist leaders, and others of the same ilk.The critique of the "infantile disorder" does not mean that indefiniteness, chaos and arbitrariness should reign in tactics, and that in short "all methods are good" to achieve our aims. It is stated that the link between methods employed and the objective to be attained is guaranteed by the revolutionary character of the party and by the contributions made to its decisions by remarkable men or groups with a brilliant tradition behind them. This is begging the question and is alien to Marxism, because it disregards the dialectical interplay of causes and effects and the fact that the methods of action the party uses have repercussions on it. Moreover, it forgets that Marxism denies any value to the "intentions" that dictate individuals' or groups' initiatives, not to mention the fact that on the evidence of past bloody experiences, these intentions might inspire suspicion, in the injurious sense of the word.In his book Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin says that tactical means must be chosen in advance in accordance with the final revolutionary goal and on the basis of a clear vision of the historical struggle of the proletariat and its outcome. He shows that it would be absurd to reject one or another tactical means on the pretext that is "ugly" or that it merits the name "compromise", and that on the contrary, it is necessary to determine whether or not this means is in accordance with this goal. Their collective activity poses and will always pose this question to the party and the International, whose formidable task it is to resolve it. We can say that Marx and Lenin have left us a solid heritage of theoretical principles, but we would not assert that communism has no more new theoretical research to carry out. However, the same cannot be said with regard to tactics, even after the Russian revolution and the experience of the first years of the new International, which was prematurely deprived of Lenin's presence. The problem of tactics is too broad to be solved with the help of the simplistic and sentimental answers of "infantile" communists. It must be approached with the contribution of the entire communist movement and in the light of its entire earlier and recent experience. We do not contradict Marx or Lenin when we state that the solution to this problem must result in the establishing of rules of action which, though not as vital and fundamental as principles, will nonetheless be obligatory for both militants and leading bodies of the movement, and which will envision the various possible developments of the situation in order to trace out, as precisely as possible, the party's line of action, no matter what the outcome may be.Study and understanding of various situations are necessary in making tactical decisions, because they make it possible to indicate to the movement that the hour has come or such and such an action, which has been prescribed as closely as possible, but they by no means authorize leaders to propose "improvisations" which would be "surprises" for the movement. It is not possible to predict with absolute certainty how objective situations will develop, but we can foresee what we will have to do in different instances, i.e., we can set down a general outline of tactics. To deny this possibility means renouncing the party's task and, at the same time, renouncing the only guarantee we have that in all circumstances the party's militants and the masses will respond to the orders of the leading centre. In this sense, the party is neither an army nor some other kind of state organ, since in these organs the role of hierarchical authority is preponderant and voluntary membership counts for nothing. But the party member always has the possibility of not executing orders without risk of incurring material sanctions: he can leave the party. The best tactic is the one that does not result in any unexpected repercussions, either in the party or among the masses, even when, at a given turn in the situation, the leading centre does not have time to consult either the former or, naturally the latter. The art of revolutionary tactics is precisely to predict how the party will react to orders and which orders will elicit the correct reaction. This art requires a collective application of past experience and actions summed up in clear, precise rules of action. By leaving leaders exclusively the task of enforcing these rules, militants ensure that they will not betray their mandate, and in turn undertake, not just formally, but really, to execute the orders of the movement with initiative and determination. Since the party itself is not perfect, although perfectible, we do not hesitate to say that it is necessary to ensure the greatest clarity and persuasiveness in tactical rules, even at the risk of a certain schematism. In the event the real situation should contradict the tactical schema we have prepared, it cannot be repaired by recourse to opportunism and eclecticism, but through fresh efforts to adapt the party's line to its tasks. Not only does the good party make the correct tactic, but the correct tactic also makes the good party, and the correct tactic can only be one of the ones that we have all understood and chosen in general outline.What we deny is essentially that we can reduce the party's collective effort and work to define its own tactical rules, and demand of it a pure and simple obedience to a man, a committee or to a single party of the International and its traditional leading apparatus.The party's action assumes the form of astrategy at crucial moments of the fight for power during which this action assumes an essentially military character. In the preceding phases, the party's action is, however, not reduced to mere ideology, propaganda and organization, but it consists, as we have already stated, in participating in the various struggles the proletariat is forced to engage. Codification of the party's tactical rules is therefore intended to establish upon what conditions its intervention and activity in these movements and its agitation in the fire of proletarian struggles will be in harmony with its revolutionary final goal and enable its theoretical preparation, organization and tactical preparation to progress simultaneously.In the following paragraphs we will examine the various problems we now face to show how we should work out the various norms of communist action in the present stage of development of the revolutionary movement.

II.  International Questions

1. The Formation of the Third International

From the point of view of restoring the revolutionary doctrine, the formation of the Communist International has provided a complete and definitive solution to the crisis of the 2nd International caused by the world war. But if the formation of the Komintern constitutes an immense historical conquest in terms of organization and tactics, it cannot be said that it has provided such a complete solution to the crisis of the proletarian movement.

The Russian revolution, the glorious first victory of the world proletariat, was a decisive factor in the formation of the new Internationalism. However, because of the prevailing social conditions in that country, the Russian revolution did not provide the general historical model of tactics applicable to revolutions in other countries. Between the era of autocratic feudal power and that of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it experienced no real political rule of the bourgeoisie organized in a stable state belonging to it alone.

This is precisely why the historical confirmation of the Marxist program by the Russian revolution is of the greatest significance, and also shy this revolution has made such a powerful contribution to the defeat of social-democratic revisionism on the terrain of principles. But in terms of organization, the fight against the 2nd  International, an integral part of the fight against would imperialism, has not had the same decisive success and the many errors that have been committed have prevented communist parties from having all the effectiveness objective conditions allowed them to claim.

With regard to tactics, many problems have not been resolved satisfactorily enough, and remain unresolved today: these problems are the bourgeoisie, the modern bourgeois parliamentary state with a historically stable apparatus, and the proletariat.

The communist parties have therefore not always obtained possible successes in the proletarian offensive against capitalism and in the liquidation of the social-democratic parties, political organs of the bourgeois counter-revolution.

2. The World Economic and Political Situation (1926)

The international situation today appears less favorable to the proletariat than in the first few years after the war. There has been partial economic stabilization of capitalism, which is to be understood as a lull in the disturbances suffered by certain parts of the economic structure, and not as a state of affairs excluding a imminent return of new disturbances.

The crisis of capitalism remains open, and a definitive aggravation is inevitable. In the area of politics, there has been a weakening of the revolutionary workers' movement in almost all the most advanced countries, which is fortunately counterbalanced by the consolidation of Soviet Russia and the struggle of the colonial peoples against the capitalist powers.

Such a situation presents a double danger: first, if the erroneous method of situationism continues to be used, a tendency to pose problems of proletarian action from a Menshevik point of view threatens to arise, even in outline. Secondly, if authentic proletarian action loses momentum, the conditions that Lenin had advocated for a correct application of communist tactics in the national and peasant questions may be lacking in the Komintern's general policy.

The post-war proletarian offensive was followed by a bosses' offensive against proletarian positions, and the Komintern responded with the united front slogan. The next problem to appear was the passage of many countries to democratic-pacifist situations, which comrade Trotsky correctly denounced as a danger of degeneration for our movement. It is necessary to avoid any interpretation presenting as vital for the proletariat the out come of the conflict between two factions of the bourgeoisie, the right and the left, identified too closely with distinct social groups.

The correct analysis is that the ruling class has several methods for ruling and defending itself, which can be reduced essentially to two: the reactionary, fascist method, and the liberal democratic method.

Beginning with the economic analysis, Lenin's these, have already established that the most modern strata of the bourgeoisie tend to unify both the production mechanism and their political defense, resorting to the most energetic methods.

It is therefore false to state that in general the road to socialism must pass through a stage of left bourgeois government. However, if this were to occur in a particular case, the condition for a proletarian victory would reside in a party tactic which concentrated the illusions engendered by the arrival of this left government, and which never weakened, even in periods of reaction, the party's opposition to democratic political forms.

3. The International's Working Methods

One of the most important tasks of the Communist International has been to dissipate the distrust of the proletariat toward the political action that had caused the parliamentary degeneration of opportunism.

Marxism does not take politics to mean an art or technique of parliamentary or diplomatic intrigue common to all parties, which each would use for its own ends. Proletarian politics is opposed to the methods of bourgeois politics. It anticipates higher forms of relations, culminating in the art of revolutionary insurrection. This opposition, which we will not study further here, is a vital condition for the link between the revolutionary proletariat and its communist general staff or a good selection of the latter.

The International's practice and work are in contradiction with this revolutionary necessity. In relation with this revolutionary necessity. In relations between the various organs of the communist movement there often prevail two-faced politics, a subordination of theoretical motivations to chance motives and a system of agreements and negotiations between individuals, none of which succeeds in building positive relations between parties and masses, and which have consequently led to very disappointing results.

Improvisation, surprise and dramatics enter too often into the major decisions of the International, and this disorients militants and proletarians. All this happens, for example, in most if the internal problems of parties, which international bodies and congresses resolve by means of a series of laborious arrangements which various groups of leaders are forced to accept, but which do not have a useful role in the real development of parties.

4. Organization Questions

The urgent need for a broad concentration of revolutionary forces had a great weight in the decision to found the Komintern, because at that time a much more rapid development of the objective situation was predicted than actually took place. Since then it has become obvious that organizational criteria should have been established with greater vigour. The formation of parties and the conquest of the masses have not been provoked either by the concessions made to syndicalist and anarchist groups, or by petty deals with centrists permitted by the 21 conditions, or by organic fissions with other parties or factions of parties achieved through political "infiltration", or by the toleration of two communist organizations in certain countries with sympathizing parties. The slogan issued by the 5th Congress - organize the party on the basis of factory cells - does not achieve its objective, which was to eliminate the defects observed unanimously in the sections of the International.

Through its generalization, particularly in the interpretation and given by the leadership of the Italian party, this slogan leads to serious mistakes, particularly a deviation with regard to the Marxist postulate that the revolution is not a question of forms of organization, or the Leninist thesis that an organic solution cannot be valid for all times and all places.

Organization on the basis of factory cells is less suitable for the parties now operating in bourgeois countries with stable parliamentary regimes than is territorial organization. Besides, it is a theoretical error to state that the territorially based party is a social-democratic party, while the party based on cells is a true communist party. In practice, this second type of organization blocks the party's work in unifying proletarian groups from different categories and industries, work which is all the more vital given the more unfavourable situation and more restricted possibilities for the proletariat to organize. Many practical problems arise from the organization of the party on an exclusively cell basis. In Czarist Russia, the question was posed in other terms: relations between the bosses, industrialists and the state were different and the imminence of the struggle for power rendered the corporatist danger less acute.

The factory cell system does not increase the influence of workers in the party, since at every juncture in the network are non-worker or ex-worker elements that form an apparatus of functionaries. Given the defects of the International's working methods the Bolshevization slogan appears, in terms of organization, as a servile and inappropriate application of the Russian experience, and in a number of countries it already tends to cause a paralysis, perhaps involuntary, of spontaneous initiatives and proletarian and class energies by an apparatus whose selection and functioning which obey criteria that are to a great extent artificial. To keep the territorial organization of the party does not mean we have to renounce having party bodies in factories, only that these must be communist groups linked to the party, led by it and forming its trade union wing. This system will enable us to establish better contact with the masses and makes the party's basic organization less vulnerable to discovery.

5. Discipline and factions

Another aspect of Bolshevization is that it considers complete disciplinary centralization and the strict prohibition of factionism to be assure guarantee of the party's effectiveness.

The highest authority called upon to decide all controversial questions is the international central organ, in which the Russian Communist Party is acquiring a political, if not hierarchical hegemony.

In reality, this guarantee does not exist, and the whole problem is posed in an inadequate manner. In fact, a flood of factionism was not avoided in the international; disguised and hypocritical forms were encouraged instead. Moreover, from the historical point of view, the overcoming of fractions in the Russian party was never an expedient or a magic recipe applied as a statute, but the result and expression of a correct method of posing problems of doctrine and political action.

Disciplinary sanctions are one of the elements that guarantee against degenerations, but on the condition that their application remain within the limits of exceptional cases and not become the norm or a sort of ideal of party functioning.

The solution does not reside in the constant, hollow invocation of the authoritarianism of the hierarchy, whose credentials are inadequate, either because Russian historical experience is incomplete, even though spectacular, or because within the old guard itself, the guardian of Bolshevik tradition, dissension does in fact arise and the given solution cannot a priori be considered the best. In the same way, this solution also cannot be given by a systematic application of the principles of formal democracy, which Marxism regards only as an occasionally convenient organizational practice.

The communist parties must create an organic centralism which, through maximum consultation of the rank and file, ensures the spontaneous elimination of any grouping that tends to differentiate itself. This cannot be achieved through formal and mechanical hierarchical decrees, but, as Lenin stated, only through correct revolutionary politics. Prevention of factionism, not suppression of fractions, is a fundamental aspect of the party's development. It is absurd, sterile and extremely dangerous to claim that the party and the International are mysteriously assured against any lapse into opportunism or any tendency to deviate. Because these effects can, on the contrary, arise from changes in the general situation or from the action of residual social-democratic traditions, in order to solve our problems, we must admit that any difference of opinion not reducible to cases of individual consciousness or defeatism may turn out to be useful in preserving the party and the proletariat in general from serious dangers.

If these dangers were to crystallize, the differentiation would inevitably, but positively, assume the form of factionism. This could lead to splits, not for the infantile reason that the leaders were not energetic enough at repression, but because the fear of possibility of a collapse of the party or its submission to counter-revolutionary influences was confirmed.

An example of the incorrect method can be seen in the artificial solutions given for the situation of the German party after the opportunist crisis of 1923 which without succeeding in eliminating factionism, prevented a correct revolutionary class reaction against the degeneration of the party from being worked out spontaneously in the ranks of a proletariat as advanced as the German proletariat.

The danger of bourgeois influences in the class party is not manifested historically by the organization of factions, but rather by a shrewd penetration using an appeal to unity and operating like a dictatorship from above, the effect of which is to paralyze the initiatives of the proletarian vanguard.

This factor of defeat is not identified and eliminated by posing the question of discipline to raise an obstacle to factions. This can only be done by succeeding in alerting the party and the proletariat to this pitfall when it manifests itself, not only as a revision of doctrine, but as a positive proposal in favour of a major political maneuver with anti-proletarian consequences.

One of the negative aspects of what is called Bolshevization is the replacement of full and conscious political elaboration within the party - which corresponds to real progress toward a more compact centralism - by noisy, superficial agitation of mechanical formulae on unity for unity and discipline for discipline.

The results of this method are harmful for the party and the proletariat, and obstruct the formation of a "real" communist party. It is applied in many sections of the International, and is itself a serious symptom of latent opportunism. In the present state of the International, the formation of an international left opposition is not yet required, but if the unfavourable factors described above continue to develop, the formation of such an opposition would be both a revolutionary necessity and a spontaneous result of the situation.

6. Questions of Tactics up to the 5th Congress

Errors in general analogous to the organizational errors have been committed in resolving the tactical problems posed by the situations referred to above in an international context, errors which result from an attempt to  make general deductions from the problems that the Russian Communist Party faced in the past.

The united front tactic must not be understood as a political coalition with other  ostensibly workers' parties, but as the utilization of the immediate claims arisen by the situations in order to broaden the Communist Party’s influence on the masses, without compromising its autonomy.

The basis for the united front is therefore to be found in the proletarian organizations to which proletarians belong as a result of their social position independent of their political convictions or their membership in an organized party. The aim is not to exclude the possibility in practice, of a communist critique of the other political parties and of a continuous organization in communist bodies of new elements derived from these parties: next it is necessary to ensure the masses understanding of the party's direct orders to mobilize then on its program and under its exclusive leadership.

Experience has shown a thousand times that the only way to ensure a revolutionary application of the united front was to reject the method of permanent or transitory political coalitions, committees of struggle compose of representatives of various political parties, and negotiations between the communist party and other parties, invitations to joint action and open letters.

Practice has proven the sterility of this method and even discredited the initial effect as a result of the way it has been abused.

The "worker's government" tactic is the political united front applied to a central demand relating to the problem of the state. This is not simply a wrong tactic, but openly in contradiction with the principles of communism. If the party issues a slogan that means the seizure of power by the proletariat using the specific representative organs of the bourgeois state apparatus, or which even does not explicitly exclude such a possibility, then this is abandoning and renouncing the communist program, not only with regard to proletarian ideology, with all the inevitable negative repercussions, but in the ideological formulation that this party itself has established and adhered to. The revision of this tactic at the 5th Congress, after the defeat in Germany, was not satisfactory, and further development and tactical experiences have justified abandoning even the expression "workers' government".

The latter slogan can only facilitate a lapse into opportunism, i.e. support for or even participation in governments of the bourgeois class allegedly favorable for the workers.

This is by no means in contradiction with the slogan "all power to the Soviets" or to Soviet-type organizations (elected exclusively by workers), even when opportunist parties dominate them. These parties are in effect against the seizure of power by proletarian organizations, which precisely constitutes the dictatorship of the proletariat (exclusion of non-workers from elected organs and power) which only the communist party can lead.

It is not necessary, and we have no reason to replace the formula "dictatorship of the proletariat" with its only synonym: "government of the communist party."

7. Questions of the "New Tactics"

Yesterday the united front and workers' government slogans were justified by the contention that in order to be victorious it would not be sufficient to have communist parties, but it was necessary to conquer the masses and therefore erode the influence of the social-democrats on the terrain of demands understandable to all workers.

Today a further step is taken and a dangerous question is posed: in order to be able to win, it is said, it is necessary to have the bourgeoisie govern in a more tolerant and flexible manner, which will allow us to prepare ourselves, or it is necessary for the classes intermediate between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat to rule. This latter position, which admits the possibility of an original government of the middle classes, constitutes a revision of Marxist theory and is equivalent to the counter-revolutionary platform of reformism.

The first position would only define the most favorable objective conditions for propaganda, agitation and organization. It is no less dangerous than the other, as we have already shown with regard to the analysis of situations.

Everything points to the fact that liberalism and bourgeois democracy, in opposition to or in conjunction with the "fascist" method, will evolve toward an exclusion of the communist party from their juridical guarantees (which are worth nothing anything): communism denies them in its program, and therefore excludes itself from them, or so they say. Moreover, this is not incompatible with the principles of bourgeois democracy, and in any case there is no lack of historical precedent in the feats of so-called left governments such as the program of the Italian Aventin for example. The "freedom" offered to the proletariat will be essentially a greater liberty for counter-revolutionary agents to act within it. The only freedom for the proletariat is its own dictatorship.

We have already shown that within the limits of a left government's ability to create useful conditions, these can only be exploited if the party has continuously held an autonomous position. There is no need to attribute diabolical powers to the bourgeoisie. But there is one certainty, a certainty without which one can no longer call oneself a communist: the final struggle will pit the conquests of the proletariat against the united front of bourgeois forces, whether they are personified by Hindenburg, MacDonald, Mussolini or Noske.

To accustom the proletariat to distinguish the elements in this front which will be involuntarily favorable to it is to introduce a factor of defeat, even if every internal weakness of this front constitutes an obvious factor of victory.

In Germany, after Hindenburg's election, there were electoral alliances with social democrats and other "republican" parties, (i.e. "bourgeois") and a parliamentary alliance in the Prussian Landtag to avoid the formation of a right government. In France there was support for the leftist Cartel in the recent municipal and canton elections (the Clichy tactic). For reasons we have just explained, such tactical methods must be declared unacceptable. The theses of the 2nd Congress of the CI on revolutionary parliamentarism stipulate that the communist party may only present itself on the electoral and parliamentary terrain with vigorously independent positions.

The recent tactics mentioned above present an obvious, perhaps complete, analogy with the traditional methods of the 2nd International-electoral blocs, collaborationism-which were supposedly also justified by a Marxist interpretation.

They represent a real danger for the principles and organizations of the International. Moreover, they have not been authorized by any deliberations of international congresses; much less by the theses on tactics from the 5th Congress.

8. Trade-Union Question

On several occasions the International has changed its conception of relations between political and economic organizations on the world scale. This is a remarkable example of the method which, instead of deriving particular actions from principles, improvises new theories and variables to justify actions which in reality are undertaken because they appear to be easy to carry out and promise immediate success.

First, the admission of trade unions into the Communist International was advocated; next a Red Trade Union International was formed. Each communist party was to fight for trade union unity, which would enable the broadest contact with the masses, and therefore to reject creating its own trade unions by splitting those led by the yellows; on an international scale, however, the Amsterdam Bureau of the International was not to be considered an organization of the working masses, but a counter-revolutionary political organ of the League of Nations.

Next, for reasons that are certainly important, but still limited (plan to use the left trade union movement in England), it was proposed that the Red Trade Union International be abandoned in favor of an organizational unity, on the world scale, with the Amsterdam Bureau.

No consideration regarding the changing situation can justify such serious zigzags, because the question of relations between international political and trade union organizations is a question of principle which can be reduced to the question of relations between party and class for the revolutionary mobilization.

It should be added that internal statutory guarantees were not even observed, and the international organs involved were confronted with a fait accompli.

Retention of the slogan "Moscow against Amsterdam" did not exclude and fight for trade union unity in every country. In fact, it was only possible to liquidate tendencies toward splitting trade unions (Italy, Germany) by removing any foundation for the argument that we were preventing the proletariat from breaking free of the influence of the Amsterdam international.

On the other hand, the apparently enthusiastic adherence of our party in France to the proposal of world trade union unity does not prevent it from manifesting an absolute inability to deal with its national trade union problem without resorting to splits.

However, we must not exclude the usefulness of a united front tactic on a world scale, even with the trade unions belonging to Amsterdam.

The left of the Italian party has always fought for proletarian unity in the trade unions, which distinguishes it from the syndicalist and voluntarist pseudo-leftists combated by Lenin. Besides, in Italy the Left represents the exact Leninist conception of the problem of relations between trade unions and factory councils. On the basis of the Russian experience and the theses of the 2nd Congress on that subject, it rejects the serious deviation from principles that consists in denying any revolutionary significance to voluntary membership in trade unions, and replacing it with the utopian and reactionary idea of an institutional apparatus corresponding organically to the entire extent of the capitalist system of production, an error which in practice translates into an overestimation of factory councils and a de facto boycott of trade unions.

9.  Agrarian Question

The agrarian question was defined in the theses of the 2nd Congress of the International in which Lenin applied himself to give the problem of agricultural production its historical place in the Marxist system, showing that in an epoch when the preconditions for the socialization of factories are already mature in the industrial economy, they are still absent  in the agricultural economy.

Instead of delaying the proletarian revolution (which alone will enable these preconditions to be achieved), this situation makes the general problems of the poor peasantry impossible to solve within the framework of industrial economy and bourgeois power, and this allows the proletariat to associate its own fight with the emancipation of the poor peasant from the exploitation to which he is submitted by the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, even if this emancipation does not coincide with a general transformation of the rural productive system.

In the case of domains that are juridically large landed estates but which technically are composed of very small productive units, the destruction of the legal superstructure appears as a division of land among the peasants, while in fact it is only the liberation of these small businesses, which were already separate, from the common exploitation weighing down on all of them. This can only come about through a revolutionary destruction of the property relations by the industrial proletariat alone, since unlike the peasant, the proletariat is not only a victim of the bourgeois system of relations of production, but also the historical product of their maturation, condemning them to give way to a system of new and different relations. The proletariat will therefore receive precious help from the fight of the poor peasant, but in Lenin's tactical conclusions the essential thing is first, the fundamental difference they establish between the proletariat's relations with the peasant class, and ,also its relations with reactionary middle strata of the urban economy represented in particular by the social-democratic parties; secondly, the principle of the intangible pre-eminence and hegemony of the working class in the conduct of the revolution.

At the time of the conquest of power, the peasant therefore appeared as a revolutionary factor. But if, during the revolution, his ideology changes with respect to the old forms of authority and legality, it does not change much with respect to the relations of production, which remain the traditional relations of isolated family production in competition with others. The peasant therefore remains a serious danger to the construction of the socialist economy, in which he can only become interested through a major development of agricultural productive forces and technology.

According to Lenin, for tactical and organizational purposes, the agricultural proletariat which owns no land (day laborer) must be given the same consideration and importance as the rest of the proletariat. An alliance should be concluded with the poor peasant, either because he cultivates his plot himself or because this plot is insufficient while it is necessary to neutralize the middle peasant pure and simple, since he is both the victim of certain capitalist relations and an exploiter of labour-power. Finally, the rich peasant, predominantly is characteristically a direct enemy of the revolution.

In applying its agrarian tactics the International must avoid the errors that have already manifested themselves (as in the French party), which consist in believing that the peasants can make an original revolution which would be ranked alongside the workers' revolution, or even that the revolutionary mobilization of the workers could be determined by an insurrection originating in the countryside, whereas the real relationship is the opposite.

The peasant who has been won to the communist program, and is therefore eligible to become a political militant must be a member of the communist party. This is the only way to combat the formation of exclusively peasant parties that inevitably fall under the influence of the counter-revolution.

The peasant International (Krestintern) must comprise peasant organizations from all countries which, as in the case of workers unions, are characterized by the fact that they contain all individuals who have the same immediate economic interests. Here too the tactic of political negotiations, political united front or internal fractions in peasant parties, even to undermine them from within, must be rejected.

This tactical rule is not in contradiction with the relations that were established between the Bolsheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries during the civil war, since the new worker and peasant representative institutions already existed.

10. National Question

Lenin also gave a thorough exposition of the theory of popular movements in the colonial countries and certain exceptionally backward countries. While internal economic development or the expansion of foreign capitalism have not yet provided the foundations of the modern class struggle in these countries, the satisfaction of demands that are posed there requires an insurrectionary struggle and the defeat of world imperialism.

In the epoch of the struggle for the proletarian revolution in the metropolises the complete realization of these two conditions allows a fight to develop in these countries which however, locally assumes the form of a conflict between races and nationalities, not classes.

The fundamental ideas of the Leninist conception remain that the world struggle must be led by organs of the revolutionary proletariat, and that the class struggle in colonial areas as well as the formation and independent development of local communist parties, must be encouraged, and never held back or suffocated.

The abusive extension of these considerations to countries where the capitalist regime and bourgeois state apparatus have existed for a long time constitutes a danger. In fact, the national question and patriotic ideology in such cases play a directly counter-revolutionary role by turning the proletarian away from its class struggle. Such deviations have appeared, e.g. in the concessions made by Radek to German nationalists fighting against the allied occupation.

Moreover, in Czechoslovakia, the International's task is to erase every reflection of national dualism in the proletarian organization since the two races are at the same historical level and their common economic milieu is fully evolved.

To raise the struggles of national minorities, taken in themselves, to the level of a principle, is therefore a deformation of the communist conception, since in order to determine whether such a struggle offers revolutionary possibilities or whether it will develop in a reactionary direction, completely different criteria are required.

11. Russian Questions (1926)

In the Communist International, the importance of the new economic policy of the Russian state, particularly as given in Lenin's speech in 1921 on the tax in kind and Trotsky's report to the 4th world Congress, is quite obvious. Given the condition of the Russian economy and the fact that the bourgeoisie remains in power in the other countries, Marxists could not pose the question of the perspective for the development of the world revolution and the construction of the socialist economy [16]  otherwise.

The serious political difficulties caused to the Russian state by social relations within the country by the problems of production technology and by foreign relations have given rise to a series of divergences within the Russian Communist Party. With regard to these divergences, it is above all deplorable that the international communist movement has not been in a position to pronounce itself with more information and authority.

In the first discussion, Trotsky's considerations on internal party life and on its "new course" were undoubtedly correct, and his observations on the development of the state's economic policy were on the whole correctly proletarian and revolutionary. In the second discussion, Trotsky's considerations on the errors of the International were no less justified, and he showed clearly that the best Bolshevik tradition did not militate in favor of the way the Komintern was being  led.

Within the party this debate had a deformed and artificial echo because, in accordance with a well-known method, anti-factionism, occupied the foreground, as well as-and even worse-an anti-Bonapartism without any foundation at all. As for the most recent discussion, it deals with international questions. The fact that the majority of the Russian Communist Party has already pronounced itself cannot serve as an argument to prevent the International from debating it and giving its own opinion, even if the defeated Russian revolution has declined to request it, which does not change the problem.[17]

As in other cases, questions of procedure and discipline are being used to smother basic questions. What is at issue here is not the violation of the rights of a minority, with the leaders, if not the rank and file, sharing responsibility for numerous errors committed in the international domain, but questions that are vital for the world communist movement.

The Russian question must be placed before the International for a full study. The elements of the question are as follows: according to Lenin, in the present Russian economy there is a mixture of pre-bourgeois and bourgeois elements, state capitalism and socialism.

Statalised big industry is socialist to the extent that it obeys the productive imperatives of the state, which is a politically proletarian state. The distribution of its products is nonetheless accomplished in a capitalist form, i.e. through the mechanism of the competitive free market.

In principle it cannot be denied that this system maintains the workers in a less that excellent economic situation which they accept out of revolutionary consciousness, because this is in fact the case. Furthermore, it cannot be excluded that this situation may evolve in the direction of extorting more and more surplus value through the price paid by workers for foodstuffs and the price paid by the state in its purchases, as well as the conditions obtained by it in concessions, trade and all relations with foreign capitalism. This is the way to pose the question of whether the socialist elements of the Russian economy are progressing or retreating, a question which also includes the technical performance and sound organization of state industry [18].

The construction of full socialism, extended to both production and distribution, industry and agriculture, is impossible in a single country. A progressive development of the socialist elements in the Russian economy, assuming the failure of counter-revolutionary plans based on internal factors (rich peasants, new bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie) and external factors (imperialist powers), is nonetheless still possible. Whether these plans assume the form of internal of external aggression, or a progressive sabotage and deflection of Russian social life and the state which will lead them on a slow involution ending in a complete loss of all their proletarian features-whatever may be the case, close collaboration and the contribution of all the parties of the International is a fundamental condition of success.

Above all it is necessary to ensure proletarian Russia and the Russian Communist Party the active and energetic support of the proletarian vanguard, particularly in the imperialist countries. Not only must any aggression be prevented and pressure brought to bear on the bourgeois states as regards their relations with Russia, but it is especially necessary that the Russian party be assisted by its sister parties in resolving its problems. It is true that these parties have no direct experience in the problems of government, but in spite of this they will make a contribution to the solution of such problems by adding a revolutionary class coefficient deriving directly form the real class struggle as it unfolds in their respective countries.

As we showed above, relations now established within the Communist International do not lend themselves to this task. A change is urgently needed to react in particular to the excesses caused by "Bolshevization" in the areas of organization, tactics and political positions.

III.  ITALIAN QUESTIONS

1. The Italian Situation (1926)

Appreciations of the Italian situation that accord a decisive value to the insufficient development of industrial capitalism are erroneous.Its limited quantitative extension and the relative historical delay of its emergence were counterbalanced by a series of other circumstances which enabled the bourgeoisie to completely and solidly seize political power at the time of the Risorgimento, such that it possesses a very rich and complex tradition of government.It is not possible to relate the political divergences that historically characterize the parties in the struggle-right and left, clericalism, freemasonry, democracy and fascism-systematically to the social differences existing between landed aristocrats and capitalists and between big and petty bourgeoisies.The fascist movement must be understood as an attempt to unify the diverging interests of various bourgeois groups for counter-revolutionary purposes. Created and nourished by all the ruling classes, landed aristocrats, industrialists, merchants, bankers, and supported by the traditional state apparatus, the crown, the Church and freemasonry, fascism has pursued its goal by mobilizing social elements from the intermediate classes, in total confusion, which it has succeeded in directing against the proletariat, in a close alliance with all bourgeois elements.What has happened in Italy must not be explained either as the accession to power of a new social stratum nor as the formation of a new state apparatus with an original ideology and program, nor as the defeat of a part of the bourgeoisie whose interests better coincided with liberal and parliamentary methods. The liberals and democrats, Giolitti and Nitti, are protagonists of a phase of the counter revolutionary struggle directly linked to the fascist phase and decisive for the defeat of the proletariat. Their policy of concessions, carried out with the complicity of the reformists and maximalists in fact allowed the bourgeoisie to deflect the proletariat's pressure and hold out in the period that followed the war and the demobilization when the ruling class and all its organs were not prepared to resist frontally.Helped directly in this period by the governments, bureaucracy, police, magistrature, army, etc., fascism then completely replaced the bourgeoisie's old political personnel. This must not lead us into error, or much less serve as a basis for a rehabilitation of parties and groups which have been ousted because the anti-proletarian function they had fulfilled for an entire period was completed, and not because that offered better conditions to the working class.

2. Political orientation of the Communist Left

Throughout the development of the situations mentioned above, the group that formed the communist party obeyed the following criteria: rejection of the illusory antagonisms of the bourgeois, parliamentary scene and affirmation of the proletariat's revolutionary opposition to the bourgeoisie, propaganda within the proletariat to destroy the illusion that the middle classes are capable of producing a political general staff seizing power and clearing the was for the proletariat's conquests, inspire the working class with confidence in its own historical task through propaganda for original autonomous critical, political and tactical positions solidly connected throughout successive situations.The tradition of this political current goes back to the left of the socialist party which existed before the war. While a majority capable of fighting against both the reformist and syndicalist errors (which had characterized the Left up to then) had formed following the congresses of Reggio Emilia (1912) and Ancona (1914), an extreme left aspiring to more and more radical class positions had also differentiated itself within the majority. Important problems posed to the working class could then be resolved, such as that of electoral tactics, relations with trade unions, the colonial war or freemasonry.During the war, while almost the whole party opposed the policy of a union sacrée, its extreme left, apart from the rest, defended Leninist directives in successive meetings and congresses (Bologna, May 1915; Rome, February 1917; Florence, November 1917; Rome, 1918): refusal of national defense and defeatism; exploitation of military defeat to pose the problem of power, incessant struggle against the trade union bureaucrats and parliamentary opportunists whose expulsion the party demanded.After the end of the war, the extreme Left expressed itself through the newspaper Il Soviet, which, as a first, expounded and defended the Russian revolution fighting against anti-Marxist, opportunist, syndicalist and anarchist interpretations, and correctly posed the essential problems of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the role of the party, from the beginning defending the necessity of a split in the socialist party.This same group defended electoral abstentionism, but its conclusions were rejected by the 2nd Congress of the International. However, this abstentionism did not derive from anarcho-syndicalist anti-Marxist theoretical errors, as the severe polemics conducted against the anarchist press prove. The abstentionist tactic was advocated especially the political conditions of full parliamentary democracy, which creates particular difficulties for the conquest of the masses and the correct understanding of the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat, difficulties which, we believe the International continues tounderestimate.On the other hand, abstentionism was proposed in terms of the imminence of great struggles putting the broadest masses of the proletariat into motion (a possibility that has unfortunately disappeared today), and not as a tactic valid every where and always.With the 1919 elections, Nitti's bourgeois government opened an immense value to revolutionary pressure, and deflected the proletariat's impulses and the party's attention by exploiting its traditions of unbridled electoralism. Il Soviet's abstentionism was, at the time, the only correct reaction to this, the real cause of the disaster that followed for the proletariat. At the Bologna Congress (1919) the abstentionist minority was alone in correctly posing the problem of the split with the reformists. It tried in vain to come to an agreement on this point with a part of the maximalists, even offering to renounce abstentionism as a precondition. After the defeat of this attempt and up to the 2nd Congress, the abstentionist faction was alone in working on the national scale for the creation of the communist party.This group therefore represented spontaneous adherence based on its own experience and traditions, by the left of the Italian proletariat to Lenin's directives and Bolshevism, which were then victorious in the Russian revolution.

3. The Left's Work in the Party Leadership

Once the Communist Party had been founded at Livorno in January 1921, the abstentionists did everything within their power to establish a solid bond with other party groups. If for certain of these the need for the split with the opportunists derived only from international relations for the abstentionists, who had expressly renounced their positions on the elections in favor of discipline, and for many other elements as well there existed a complete agreement between the theses of the International and the lessons of the political struggles they had conducted previously.In its work, the party leadership was inspired by the interpretation of the Italian situation and the party tasks are outlined above. Consequently it is obvious that the delay experienced in forming the revolutionary party, for with all the other groups bore responsibility, made a further retreat of the proletariat inevitable, and ineluctably determined it.To put the proletariat in the best possible position throughout its various struggles, the leadership based its action on the need to make a maximum effort to use the traditional apparatus of red organizations, while striving to convince the proletariat that it should not count on the maximalists and reformists, who went so far as to accept the pacification pact with fascism.”[19]From the very beginning, the party declared itself in favor of trade union unity, and proposed the creation of a united front to be expressed through the formation of the "Labour Alliance". No matter what the opinions on the political united front, it is a fact that it was irresistible in Italy in 1921-22, for secondary reasons: The communist party moreover never received invitations to meetings intended to establish an alliance of parties. The party did not intervene in the alliance called by the railway workers to form the trade union alliance in order not to give credence to maneuvers aimed at compromising the founding of the alliance itself, while ascribing responsibility for the defeat to the alliance. But it confirmed in advance that it approved of this initiative, by stating that communists would observe discipline with respect to this new organization. Certain contacts then took place between political parties. The communist party did not refuse to participate, but they amounted to nothing at the same time demonstrating the impossibility of an agreement on the basis of political action and the defeatism of all the other groups. During this retreat, the leadership was able to maintain the confidence of the working class and to raise the consciousness of its vanguard by cutting short all traditional maneuvers in the leadership of the proletariat as practiced by pseudo-revolutionary groups and parties. In spite of the party's efforts, it was only later, in August 1922, that a general action was possible. But the defeat of the proletariat was inevitable and from then on fascism, openly supported in its violent struggle by the forces of the State governed by the liberal democracy, was master of the country, while the "march on Rome" was only an a posteriori legal and formal sanction of its predominance.At that time, in spite of the ebbing of proletarian action, the party's influence exceeded that of the maximalists and reformists, and its advances had already been marked by the results of the 1921 elections and the great debates that unfolded afterward within the Federation of Labour.

4. Relations Between the Italian Left and the Communist International

The Rome Congress (1922) demonstrated the theoretical divergence between the Italian Left and the majority of the International. Our delegations to the 3rd world Congress and the Enlarged Executive of February 1922 expressed this openly committing, particularly in the first case, "Leftist" errors. The Rome Theses constituted the correct theoretical and political liquidation of any danger of left opportunism in the Italian party.In practice, the only divergence between the party and the International was manifested with regard to the tactic to be followed vis a vis the maximalists but the victory of the unity current at the socialist congress in October 1921 seemed to have settled this.The Rome Theses were adopted as a party contribution to the decisions of the International, and not as an immediate line of action. The party leadership confirmed this to the Enlarged Executive in 1922. If its discussion was not opened then, this was the result of a decision of the International which the leadership observed out of discipline.However, in August 1922, the International did not interpret the situation in accordance with the indications of the party leadership, but concluded that the Italian situation was unstable because of the weakening of the State's resistance. It therefore hoped to strengthen the party through a merger with the maximalists, considering the split between the maximalists and the unity group as a decisive factor, while the party leadership on the contrary gave priority to the lessons of the broad strike maneuver of August.From this time on the two political lines diverged definitely. At the 4th World Congress (December 1922) the left leadership opposed the thesis that won out. When its delegates returned to Italy, it unanimously declined responsibility for the merger, which was entrusted to a Commission, while the left naturally retained its administrative functions. Next came the arrests in February 1923, and the major offensive against the party. Finally the Enlarged Executive of the CI in June 1923 deposed the old executive and replaced it with another completely different one,[20] a situation in which the resignations of some members of the leadership were only a logical consequence. In May 1924 a consultative conference of the party again gave the Left an overwhelming majority over the Centre and the Right, and this is how things stood at the 5th World Congress.

5. The Ordinovist Tradition of the Present Leadership

The Ordine Nuovo group was formed in Turin by a few intellectuals who made contact with the proletarian masses in industry when the abstentionist fraction already had a large audience in Turin itself. The ideology of this group was dominated by idealist, bourgeois philosophical conceptions inherited in part from Benedetto Croce and which naturally underwent subsequent evolution. This group's interpretation of Marxist directives was quite slow, and it always held on to some of its original errors. It did not understand the Russian revolution soon enough to be able to apply its lessons to the struggle of the Italian proletariat. In November 1917 comrade Gramsci published an article in Avanti! declaring that the Russian revolution had refuted Marx historical materialism and the theory ofCapital, instead giving an essentially idealist explanation. The extreme left of the party, to which the Youth Federation also belonged, attacked this article.As the publication of Ordine Nuovo demonstrates, this group evolved further toward a non-Marxist, non-Leninist theory of the workers' movement. In this theory the problems of the functioning of unions and the party, questions of armed struggle, the conquest of power and the building of socialism were posed incorrectly. Instead it developed the conception that the systematic organization of the working class was not "voluntary" but "necessary", and copied directly from the capitalist industrial production mechanism.This system was built on shop committees and factory councils, to culminate at the same time in the proletarian international, the Communist International, Soviets and the workers' state, which was to exist even before the fall of capitalist power.Moreover, even in the bourgeois era this system was supposed to serve to build the new economy through its demands and the exercise of control over production.Later this current apparently abandoned all the non-Marxist positions of its ideology, its utopianism, Proudhonist syndicalism, its economic gradualism prior to the conquest of power, i.e. its reformism, only to replace them little by little with theories quite different from Leninism. But this substitution might not have been so artificial if the Ordinovist group had not detached itself from and finally aligned itself against the group whose traditions, as we have shown, converged spontaneously with Bolshevism, thereby making a serious contribution based on the experience of the proletarian class, not on academic, library exercises inspired by bourgeois texts. This certainly does not preclude that Ordine Nuovo might learn and improve itself through close collaboration with the Left, but this was interrupted too soon. It is consequently ironic that the Ordine Nuovo leaders should claim to Bolshevize precisely those who had brought them onto the path of Bolshevism, not through mechanical bureaucratic maneuvers, but in the serious, Marxist sense.Shortly before the World Congress in 1921 Ordine Nuovo was against splitting the old party, and posed all trade union questions incorrectly. The International's representative in Italy had to argue with the group over the factory council question and on the premature formation of Soviets.In April 1920 the Turin section approved the Ordine Nuovo these drawn up by comrade Gramsci, which were adopted by the committee made up of Ordine Nuovo members and abstentionists. Apart from the disagreement on abstentionists. Apart from the disagreement on abstentionism, these theses, which were quoted in the resolution of the 2nd Congress, in reality expressed the common thought of the formative communist faction, and their content was not defined by the particular constructions of the Ordine Nuovo group, but by the positions that had been clearly accepted long before by the left wing of the party.The Ordine Nuovo group adhered to the Left's position on the International for a while, but in reality its thinking differed from that expressed in the Rome Theses, even though it decided to vote for them.The real precursor of the Ordine Nuovo group's adoption of the International's tactics and general line was comrade Tasca's defense of a position against the Left at the Rome Congress.Given, on the one hand, the characteristics of the Ordine Nuovo group, its particularism and concretism inherited from idealist bourgeois ideology, and on the other, the latitude allowed by the methods of the present leadership of the International for superficial and incomplete recruitment, it must be concluded that, despite declarations of orthodoxy, the theoretical adherence of Ordine Nuovo to Leninism-and this is of decisive importance for imminent very real political developments-is worth little more than its former acceptance of the Rome Theses.

6. The political work of the present leadership of the party

From 1923 to today the party Centre's work, which, it must be acknowledged, has been carried out in a difficult situation, has given rise to errors which, in substance, are related to those pointed out by us with regard to international problems, but which in part have become much more serious owing to the original deviations characteristic of Ordine Nuovo's conceptions.Participation in the 1924 elections was an excellent political act, but the same cannot be said of the proposal for common action made to the socialist parties, nor of the "proletarian unity" label this assumed. The excessive tolerance toward certain electoral maneuvers by the "Terzini" was just as deplorable, but the most serious problems were posed by the crisis that opened with the assassination of Matteotti.The Centre's policy was based on the absurd idea that the weakening of fascism had set first the middle classes, then the proletariat, in motion. This means, on the one hand, lack of confidence in the proletariat's class capacities, even though it had remained vigilant under the crushing apparatus of fascism, and, on the other hand, an overestimation of the initiative of the middle classes. However, in addition to the clarity of Marxist theoretical positions on the subject, the central lesson of Italian experience shows that the intermediate strata tend to be drawn back and forth and to passively follow the strongest side: the proletariat in 1919-20, fascism in 1921-22-23, and, after a period of frenzied agitation in 1924-25, fascism once again today.The Centre was mistaken in abandoning parliament and in participating in the first meetings of the Aventin [21] whereas they should have remained in parliament, declared a political attack against the government, and also immediately taken a position against the constitutional and moral stipulations of the Aventin, which determined that the crisis would be resolved in favor of fascism. It cannot be excluded that the communists might have been able to abandon parliament, but they should have done so maintaining their own physiognomy and only when the situation would have allowed them to call the masses to direct action. This was one of those moments when the further developments of a situation are determined; the error was therefore fundamental and decisive for a judgment of the abilities of a leading group. It resulted in the working class being unable to take advantage either of the weakening of fascism or of the resounding collapse of the Aventin.The return to parliament in 1924 and the Repossi’s declaration were beneficial, as the wave of approval from the proletariat showed, but they came too late. The Centre vacillated for a long time and only reached a decision when pressured by the party and the Left. The party's preparation was based on colorless instructions and a fantastically incorrect appreciation of the immediate prospects (Gramsci's report to the Central Committee, August 1924). The preparation of the masses, oriented not toward the defeat of the Aventin, but toward its victory, was the worst possible, being linked to the party's proposal to the opposition to form an anti-parliament. In particular, such as tactic was alien to the decisions of the International, which never contemplated proposals to openly bourgeois parties; furthermore, it was such as to lead us out of the domain of communist principles and politics, as well as that of the Marxist conception of history. Independently of any explanation the Centre might have tried to give of the goals and intentions that inspired the proposal-explanations, which would only ever have had very limited repercussions, the Centre certainly gave the masses the illusion of an Anti-State opposed to and actively fighting the traditional state apparatus, whereas in the historical perspective of our program, the only basis for an Anti-State is the representative form of the producing class, the Soviet.The slogan for an anti-parliament based on workers' and peasants' committees, was equivalent to handing over the proletariat's general staff to representatives of capitalist social groups, people like Amendola, Agnelli, Albertini, etc.Apart from the certainty that such a state of affairs could never come about, and which can only be called a betrayal, the very fact of presenting this as a communist perspective and proposal is equivalent to a violation of our principles and a weakening of the revolutionary preparation of the proletariat. The Centre's actions are open to other criticisms. We have seen a veritable parade of slogans which corresponded to nothing that could have been attained, nor even to any appreciable agitation outside the party apparatus. The central slogan on the workers' and peasants' committees, which was given only contradictory and twisted explanations, has been neither understood nor followed.

7. The party's trade union activity

Another serious error was committed around the metallurgical strike in March 1925. The leadership did not understand that the delusion caused within the proletariat by the Aventin experience would lead to a general impulse of class action in the form of a strike wave. If it had understood this, it would have been able to guide the FIOM (Italian Federation of Metallurgical Workers) in an entirely different direction (just as we succeeded in inducing it to intervene in the strike initiated by the fascists) toward a general strike, by forming an agitation committee within the union based on local organizations which were entirely in favor of a national strike.The Centre's trade union orientation did not clearly correspond to the slogan for trade union unity in the confederation, even in spite of the organizational disintegration of the latter. The party's union directives reflected Ordine Nuovo errors with regard to action inside the factories: not only did it create or propose multiple contradictory bodies, but often it issued slogans that downgraded the trade union and the understanding that it is a necessary organ of proletarian struggle.This resulted in the disgraceful agreement at FIAT in Turin, as well as the confused directives on factory elections, in which the criterion of choice between the tactics of the class candidates and party candidates was not posed correctly,  i.e. on a class terrain.

8. The party's activity on the agrarian and national questions

In the agrarian question, the slogan for peasants' defense associations was justified, but the work was conducted too much from above, by a party bureau.In spite of the difficult situation, in this context we must denounce the danger of a bureaucratic conception of our tasks, which is also present in other party activities.Correct relations between peasants' associations and workers' unions must be clearly stabilized in the sense that agricultural wage laborers must form a  federation belnging to the Confederation of Labour, while between this and the defense associations a close alliance should be built centrally and locally.A regionalist or "southern" conception, tendencies toward which have already become manifest, should be avoided in the agrarian question. This also applies to positions of regional autonomy defended by some new parties, which should openly be combated as reactionary, instead of holding fallacious negotiations with them.The tactic of seeking an alliance with the left of the popular party (Miglioli) and the peasant party has yielded unfavorable results.[22]Once again concessions have been made to politicians foreign to all class tradition without leading to the desired mass movement, often disorienting parts of our party organization. It is also a mistake to overestimate peasant maneuvers aimed at a hypothetical political campaign against the Vatican's influence, a problem which is certainly posed, but which is now being resolved in a totally inadequate way.

9. The Centre's organizational work

The work toward reorganizing the party after the fascist devastation undoubtedly yielded many good results. However, it retained an excessively technical character rather than assuring centralization through the implementation of clear, uniform statuary norms applicable to all comrades or local committees, and it relied entirely on the intervention of the central apparatus. Major steps could have been taken by restoring elections to committees in rank and file organizations, particularly in the more favorable periods of the situation.Given the increase and subsequent decrease in party membership, and given the ease with which elements who were recruited with comparable ease during the Matteotti crisis are now departing, it is obvious that such facts depend on the development of the situation, not the hypothetical blessings of a change in general orientation.The results and benefits of the one-month recruitment campaign[23] have been exaggerated. As for the cell organization, the Centre obviously had to act on the general directives of the Komintern, of which we have already spoken. But this was done without uniform directives, haphazardly and with many contradictions, and only repeated pressuring from the rank and file brought about a certain systematization.It would be desirable to replace the system of inter-regional secretaries with a team of inspectors, establishing a direct political, if not technical, link between the leadership and the party's traditional rank and file organizations the provincial federations. The inspectors principal task should be to intervene actively wherever the basic party organization has to be rebuilt, following and assisting it until it becomes capable of functioning normally.

10. The Centre and the question of factionalism

The campaign which culminated in the preparations for our 3rd Congress was deliberately initiated after the 5th World Congress, not in the form of an involvement of the whole party in propagandizing and elaborating the International's directives, in order to create a more advanced real collective consciousness, but in the form of agitation, utilizing the most expeditious methods requiring a minimum of error, designed to induce comrades to renounce the positions of the Left. There was no thought as to whether this method was useful or possibly harmful to the party and its effectiveness against external enemies, but no effort was spared to achieve this internal objective.Elsewhere we have given a historical and theoretical critique of the illusory method of suppressing factionalism from above. In the Italian case, the 5th Congress had accepted the Left's request that pressures from above be stopped, while it agreed to participate in all party activity, excluding political leadership. The party leadership broke this agreement through a campaign conducted not on ideological or tactical positions, but on the basis of accusations of indiscipline directed at isolated comrades, and developed unilaterally at federal congresses.The formation of a "Committee of Entente" [24] when the Congress was announced was a spontaneous act designed to avoid individual and group acts that might have led to a disintegration, and to channel the action of all comrades of the Left along a common, responsible line within the strict limits of discipline, while the respect of their rights was guaranteed by general party consultation. The Centre seized upon this fact and used it in its agitational plan, presenting comrades of the Left as factionists and splitters who could not defend themselves and who were voted down in federal committees through pressures applied from above.This agitational scheme was continued with a factionist revision of the party apparatus and local cadres, in the way texts for discussion were presented, though the refusal to allow the Left's representatives to intervene in federal Congresses. The whole thing was crowned by unheard of voting methods: anyone who was absent was automatically considered to have voted for the leadership theses.No matter what the result of such actions in terms of the simple numerical majority, rather than advancing the party's ideological consciousness and its influence over the masses, they have instead seriously harmed both. The worst consequences have only been avoided through the moderation of the comrades of the Left, who have accepted such punishment not because they thought it could be justified, but only because of their devotion to the party.

11. Outline of a working program for the party

The preceding points contain the premises from which, in the opinion of the Left, the party's general and specific tasks should flow. But it is first of all obvious that such a problem can only be solved on the basis of international decisions. The Left can therefore only indicate an outline of an action program to present to the International in order to accomplish the tasks of the Italian section.The party must prepare the proletariat to resume its class activity and the fight against fascism, making use of the severe experiences it has had lately. At the same time it must destroy all the proletariat's illusions in changes of bourgeois policies, and in the possibility of receiving any help from the urban middle classes, using the experiences of the liberal-democratic period to avoid any repetition of pacifist illusions.The party will not make proposals for common action to parties of the anti-fascist opposition, and by no means will pursue a policy aimed at detaching any alleged left wing from that opposition or influencing such parties to move left.In order to mobilize the masses around its program, the party will adopt a tactic of united front from below, and attentively follow developments in the economic situation to formulate immediate demands. The party will abstain from making a central political demand out of the accession of a government that will offer guarantees of freedom; it will not present "freedom for all" as an objective for the working class, and instead will put forward positions that show clearly that freedom for the workers means crushing the freedom of the exploiters and bourgeoisie.Faced today with the serious problem whereby the class unions and other immediate organs of the proletariat have been decimated, the party must above all agitate the slogan of defense of the traditional red unions and the need for their renaissance. Work in factories will avoid creating organs that could diminish the effectiveness of slogans on rebuilding trade unions. Considering the present situation, the party will work toward union activity within the framework of the "factory union sections" which, because they represent a strong union tradition, are the appropriate organs to lead the workers' struggles which can be conducted today precisely in the factories. We will try to have the illegal internal commissions [25] by the trade union section of  the factory, but, as soon as possible, the internal commission should again be elected by all personnel in the factory.As for organization in the countryside, the remarks on the agrarian question remain valid.Because all organizational possibilities of proletarian groups are now being used to the maximum, we must exploit the slogan for Workers' and Peasants' Committees, while observing the following criteria:

• the slogan to form Workers' and Peasants' Committees will not be used from time to time, coincidentally, but must be imposed by a vigorous campaign at a time in the situation which clearly gives a directive for proletarian action, which is to say not merely as a purely organizational order;
• the nucleus of these Committees must be formed from  representatives of organizations traditionally known to the masses, even if they have been mutilated by the reaction,  such as trade unions and analogous bodies, but not from meetings of political delegates;
• we may then give the slogan for Committee elections but from the very first it must be clear that these are not Soviets, i.e. organs of the proletarian government, but only the expression of a local and national alliance of all the exploited for common defense.

Concerning relations with the fascist unions, which today no longer appear even formally as voluntary mass organizations, but are true official organs of the alliance between the bosses and fascism, it is necessary in general to reject slogan of penetrating them in order to destroy them from within. The slogan for the reconstruction of the red unions must be accompanied by a denunciation of the fascist unions.

The organization of measures to adopt within the party have already been indicated in part. With regard to the present situation these must satisfy certain needs that must be dealt with elsewhere (clandestinity, underground work). It is nonetheless urgent that these be formalized systematically in clear statutory norms binding on everyone in order to avoid confusion between a healthy centralism and blind obeisance to arbitrary, heterogeneous directives that imperil the real solidity of the party.

12. Perspectives for the party’s inner situation

The political and organizational situation within our party cannot be definitively resolved within a national framework, because the solution depends on the development of the internal situation and policy of the whole International. It would be a serious mistake and a real betrayal if the national and international leadership continued to subject the Left to the foolish method of pressure from above and reduction of the complex problem of the party's theory and politics to considerations of militants personal behavior.Because the Left is standing firm on its positions comrades who do not intend to renounce these positions must be able to fulfill the loyal engagement they have accepted in an atmosphere free from maneuvers and reciprocal accusation, i.e. they must be able to execute the decisions of party organs while renouncing all oppositional work, but without being required to participate in the leadership. This proposition obviously proves that the situation is far from perfect, but it would be dangerous to have the party believe that these difficulties can be eliminated though a purely organizational mechanism and through personal positions. Whoever should spread this illusion would be committing a serious crime against the party.If we really wish to prevent the party atmosphere from becoming poisoned and if we want to move toward a solution of all the difficulties being faced by the party today, we must do away with the petty method of understanding the problem, and pose it in all its aspects in the Party and the International.