Amongst the many aspects that the economic crisis highlights with increasing (and more dramatic) clarity is the fact that without the revolutionary party, organized, selected and founded on solid theory and on a programme confirmed by long historical experience, honed by the balance of eighty years of counter-revolution, without this party, the world proletariat is alone and abandoned to itself, faced with the attack unleashed against it by the world of production, which is getting increasingly violent in its anti-proletarian manifestations.
At the same time, whilst this political solitude becomes so widely and keenly felt throughout the world in all kinds of different ways, there is an increase in the number of people who (like ticks clinging to a body, parasites coming from a variety of origins, most of which can be traced back to the evil emanations of the “half classes”) belittle, minimize, neglect or postpone until a vaguely defined tomorrow – in practice deny – the central (organizational and guiding) role of the revolutionary party.
Naturally, the history of the workers’ and communist movement is full of those who frankly refuse the party: the anarchists, first and foremost, against whom the communists have always had to struggle, defending the central role of the party against any metaphysical vision of power, of the proletariat, of a classless society. There follow, making the appropriate distinctions which cannot be gone into here[1], the anarcho-socialists, the U.S. wobblies and the Italian and French revolutionary syndicalists, vigorous social fighters but closed in their concept of local, factory-bound, revolutionary spontaneity, which is also, substantially, anarchical; and finally, the workerists of various natures and derivations, from the whole range of the communist movement’s vicissitudes in the last century. None of them have hidden their refusal of the party’s organization, insisting, due to their profoundly mistaken reading of the history of the communist movement, on drawing the conclusion that any party organization is no more than a tool of “bureaucratization” and “oppression of the will of the grassroots”. However, the revolutionary party and its organizational and guiding role on behalf of the class can even be denied by conceiving of it in a substantially distorted manner (amongst the historical examples of this, we might think of the story of the German KAPD): the “party of the masses and not of the leaders”, the “party that must limit itself to communist propaganda so as not to substitute for the class itself”, the “party whose grassroots must be workers only,” and so on [2].
The misery of the phase of history we are condemned to live through today seems to reproduce a vulgar, Lilliputian version of these deniers of the party: workerism, spontaneism, “movementism” spout them constantly, in- and outside the Indian reservations of the social centres, amongst the “pissed-off” half classes, amongst the wan heirs of Gramsci, amongst the “rebels” and the “subjectivists” of the “revolution here and now” who snob any revolutionary preparation, amongst the students that don’t want to “be tied down”, amongst all those who, after decades of polluting democracy, cannot conceive of the need for organization and hard work in contact with the class.
This ballast weighs hard on a proletariat experiencing acute suffering and attempting to fight back as well as it can to make its voice heard, struggling for survival with the strength of desperation – at times with sudden flare-ups extinguished in bloodbaths (to confine ourselves to recent history: in South Africa, in Vietnam, in Cambodia), at times with widespread uprisings soon channelled into the tracks of petit-bourgeois demands for the replacement of one régime or another and thus castrated and suffocated (the movements of purely proletarian origins that originally inflamed North Africa). Without going any further into the analysis of these events (to which we have devoted many pages in our press over the past few years), it is clear that the lack of a revolutionary party worldwide has resulted in the proletarian class moving in total solitude under the pressure of material events, as well as with the limited (but necessary) horizon of defending their living and working conditions with scattered ranks and inevitably remaining the victim of democratic and reformist illusions and phantoms.
However, as previously stated, there are many ways of “refusing the party”. Today there are a great deal of “improvisers”, who do believe that the revolutionary party is necessary but … tomorrow, at another time, in the phase when an imminent revolution demands it (or in other words: when it does us the honour of informing us that the party is needed!). Then indeed, the avant-garde will roll up its sleeves and, in the heat of revolutionary fervour, will pull the party out of a hat and suggest it to the class – which in turn, amazed by its beauty, will fall in love on the spot (there are no end of bolts from the blue at times of revolution!), ready to follow it to the ends of the Earth. Today, as we are nowhere near this sublime moment, let's devote ourselves to exchanging information, arguing about who is best, yelling and quarrelling online and over the social networks, on Facebook and Twitter, where everyone has a strategy ready and waiting, is perfectly aware of the right answer, has formed the right opinion abut revolution and counter-revolution, about the dynamics of the crisis and the nature of communist society. The party? No need for it today: better to collect a large number of followers, of “chosen friends”; better to argue and demonstrate who knows best; better to exchange pompous theses and documents that are an end in themselves; better to create a milieu of groups online. In this way we are safe from defeat and above all, we are finally protagonists on a daily basis. The class? Let it continue with its struggles! Working in contact with it? Who cares! The guiding and organizational role of the party? If it really is necessary, we can talk about it later!
Instead, the party cannot be improvised and neither can its (dialectic) connection to the class and the class struggle. It cannot be improvised because party means principally the theoretical and practical continuity of an organization and, if continuity is not worked at, if it is not defended tooth and nail, if it is not safeguarded for the next generations, not just as a “study group”, as “intellectuals”, as “word spinners”, this continuity is broken, fades, is no use any more – what remains is merely the dictatorship of the ruling ideology and bourgeois state oppression. The party cannot be improvised, because the only guarantee of its being able to guide the class towards seizing power and managing the dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary bridge to a classless society lies precisely in its training militants, in its taking part in proletarian struggles with a tendency towards a critical, directional and organizational function, in the constant and profound analysis of economic and social facts (and not for intellectual satisfaction, to let off steam or acquire personal gain). The party cannot be improvised, because the class will not be able to recognize it and acknowledge its guidance (thus making itself acknowledged as a historical element and no longer just as an oppressed class) unless it has had it alongside in its own burning defeats and victories, unless it has been able to draw from it the lessons deriving from those struggles, those defeats and those victories, unless it has been able to identify in its militants those best suited to act as guides, in the situation of the moment and in a future perspective. Tomorrow it will be too late: and historical experience, with all the tragedies linked to the absence or delays of the revolutionary party, has taught us this in an all too dramatic manner.
There is another group of people that, at first glance, would seem to stand apart from this depressing scenario: that of the “builders” of the revolutionary party. The latter “feel” that this party is a necessity but believe that its (relative) absence on the present historical panorama can be remedied by “building” it, as though it were a Lego construction: by meeting periodically around a table with other groups and formations, elaborating “platforms” and “conference documents” on which “convergences” can be pronounced, coordinating with one party or mini-party or the other in a new edition of the political-unionist “intergroups” of the past, creating phantomatic (popular?) fronts or bureaux or coordination offices, reviving old names or inventing new ones, believing and persuading others that the party can arise from and within the struggles, from grassroots organisms on which a … political-educational function is conferred. To sum up, a DIY party to which everyone contributes what they can: all with a profound disdain for homogeneity of theory, principles, programme and, above all, totally indifferent to the merciless balance sheet of the past century’s history of the working class and communist movement – which is the one true basis to start out from in order to begin posing the question of a party, just as the Communist Left did in 1926, at the dawn of the most violent wave of counter-revolution, when it handed down to future generations, in the “Lyons Theses” [3], the balance sheet of a past made up of struggles, triumphs and defeats – the necessary bridge laid towards the future. The party is not “built”, just as socialism is not “built”. All that can be done is to enter a tradition that is already present in the communist movement and continue its battle, obstinately and inconveniently against the current – and that tradition is our tradition. But, as everyone knows, these are mere trifles! The crisis is gathering momentum, things are urgent: let’s build the party without worrying about what happened before! Forget the past! And what emerges is … Frankenstein’s monster-party.
Increasingly, in the frantic times approaching, we communists will have to fight all these mobs of deniers, improvisers, builders of the revolutionary party. We shall have to do so by continuing our century-old battle, now decidedly a minority but essential for preparing tomorrow: defending theory, strengthening the organization, putting down international roots, taking part in the struggles of our class with the objective of guiding and directing it, training cadres and militants, constantly and incessantly analysing the facts in the light of dialectic materialism. This is the party and to those who deny it, those who wish to improvise it or “build” it, we must have the courage to say that they are on the other side of the fence. “Those who are not with us are against us”.
[1] See the pages devoted to them in volume II of our Storia della sinistra comunista. 1919-1920, Edizioni Il programma comunista, Milano 1972, Chapters VI and VIII.
[2] On these positions, see the work quoted above.
[3] See them, with a long introduction and commentary, in our Internationalist Papers, n.14, Spring-Summer 2009. Also on our website: www.internationalcommunistparty.org.
International Communist Party